Macaw

May 17 2013, 12:58:50 PM

Holy moly postman you sure are crazy, you should have waited till the the guy had put the price down to at least 200 or something cause no one else is willing to spend nearly that much, I should know cause up until this point I was always the highest bidder on gamate crap hahaha.

The info is much appreciated, I wonder if #70 was the last. I finished game #69 and I think the date in the staff roll was mid-late 1994. The slightly earlier Robin Hood was dated January 1994. If #70 was the last then it probably would have been very early 1995. If you finish it the staff roll will most likely have a month along with the year, like seemingly all the late-era UMC gmes have.

Did you manage to snag that recent BIN auction of the Incantational Couple btw? I'm still curious as to what genre of game it is so I can update my now almost complete Gamate list.[/quote]Hi Macaw, I would have waited but the Canadian bidder was buying all the good stuff up quick. I offered $125 for the Incantational with a $165 counter-offer, but the Canadian buyer bought it before I could think it over. $400 is a lot of money, but if this copy of Insect War is the only one that's ever surfaced (boxed and complete no less) I wanted it before it would be gone forever (It's been 18 years and nobody even knew it existed at all, and being from 1995 and possibly the final Gamate title is the icing on the cake). In the big picture, a one of a kind vintage official game for the price I paid is a complete steal IMO, whether or not the Gamate has been appreciated yet by the masses.

I'm hoping that there will be a way to emulate these games soon, as I'm utterly sick of the blurry Gamate screen that renders these games almost unplayable. I just received an MSX SoftCard adaptor, but the Gamate cards have thicker plastic and won't fit perfectly (but the pinout is near identical). The Amiga and Commodore also had SoftCard adapters, but I'd like to make the MSX one work since it would be so easy to dump. I'll wire up the MSX adapter to a genesis pinout and see if I can dump with the Retrode. I can only hope that Bit Corp was too lazy to alter the SoftCard pinout for their Gamate console. To answer a possible follow up question, SoftCard MSX games don't boot on the gamate.

As for Insect War, it's like Cave's Mushihime-Sama meets Konami's Gradius. It has 6 levels, and is quite difficult. You will die if you come in contact with stage backgrounds/obstacles. There's front/reverse basic fire functions, and a hefty slew of power-ups & shot types. Your ship's speed is painfully slow before you acquire a first speed-up power up, and if you die you must restart at the very beginning of the stage just like Gradius. There's a moderately extensive option menu (with the Gamate in mind), and each of the 6 stages have different layouts with their own unique bosses.