heres a few impressions of the Wiii3 games from the Nice Code cart now i've spent a bit more time with the thing (i'll leave the 198 in 1 games for later, because theyre mostly boring). videos will be forthcoming i think.
1. Pop Cricket - the big selling point of this console, but it seems kinda rushed. the players on screen are always the same colours no matter who's playing (would it have been that hard to palette swap them?), practice mode doesnt work at all, and .. one other mode (i don't actually have the console on at the moment, can you tell?) seems to give you control of the opposite team at some points if you field first. apart from those issues it's just a fairly standard wii-clone sports game, press A (sorry, swing the remote) at the right time to set all the various meters and then stuff happens.
2. Kungfu - kind of in the same vein as the boxing games you get on these things, only you don't need two controllers. you just punch with A and kick with B, you dont seem to be able to control the different types of punches and kicks with the D-pad or anything, they just happen randomly. theres a meter at the bottom of the screen that gradually fills up and sometimes the screen will flash red and either you or the opponent will be able to attack unopposed for a while before launching a special attack. not sure exactly what controls this, maybe its timing or maybe its just random. you can choose different opponents off a little map who'll appear in little badly rendered intro scenes saying something threatening in engrish. its kind of amusing for a while but gets boring before long, unless theres a whole strategic element to it that i'm missing.
3. Flush Ball - I like this one. its a pretty simple single-screen arcade-style game kind of like Pang or something like that, you control a little dinosaur at the bottom who'll flick out his tail in front of him when you press A, and you have to bounce balls off it to make them change colour a certain number of times before they fly off into the sky and you move to the next level (with one extra ball). If you let them bounce on the floor too many times they switch back to the previous colour, or if they hit the dinosaur on the head they turn grey and just roll along the floor (and become deadly). Its kind of like Nice Code took the "shit falling from above" idea they used with so many of their famicom games and actually thought about how to make a fun game out of it.
4. Crazy Karts (Kart Crazy) - Sort of a poor man's Mario Kart. All the characters are palette swaps but it has a decent number of tracks with different graphics and you can pick up items and stuff (even if theres only, like, three of them). Kinda fun, kinda annoying (because if one of the CPU characters hits you with a missile - and they will - it takes so long to accelerate again that youll probably end up in last place) and a bit rough around the edges but probably better than most Wii-clone racing games. Maybe.
5. 3-Point Shot (3-Point Shootout) - Basketball thingy. Another pretty standard "shake/hit A to stop the meter" sports game, albeit based on a sport that doesnt often appear on these things. Not too bad, anyway.
6. Freekick (Battle of Freekick) - oh you know. another sports game. Better than the usual mostly luck-based penalty shootout games though, you set direction, curve and power, which IMO makes it feel like you have much more control over where the ball ends up. plus with it being a free kick game rather than a penalty one you have the dudes lined up in front of the goal which adds an extra bit of strategy to proceedings. Also its kinda interesting because the team you're playing as has Nice Code's logo and some/all? of the players seem to be named after Nice Code staff, so youre basically playing *as* Nice Code.
7. Flying Dream - Well this one's weird. it basically controls like one of the sports games again, but the theme is very much non-sporting. There's an animal of some kind(?) on a ledge on the left, you have to press A/shake to set position and power to make it jump such that itll bounce off both the wolves floating in the middle and land on the platform on the right. After you do that a certain number of times you switch to a flying, differently-coloured version of said animal, and I dunno. This one definitely needs further investigation. On Nice Code's site theres a screenshot of a version called "Flying Pig" where the animal looks more piglike (though the screenshot is too small to tell really), and it does look like an *edited* pig in-game, so I guess they changed it for some reason? from a pig to a "dream". maybe this is what Nice Code's dreams look like.
and thats that. I was pleasantly surprised by this cart really. yknow, its nothing fantastic, but the games are way better than their NES stuff, more fun & more interesting than the 198 cart, more original than the Wow - theyre the sorts of games I'd like to see more of on Wii clones in the future, if they can just avoid any major Pop Cricket-style. Nice Code have gone up quite a bit in my estimation with this thing, anyway.
QSL's catalogue (
this page) lists a 77 in 1 and a 70 in 1 console that both seem to be full of 16-bit Nice Code games, I .. sort of want one. But theyre not listed anywhere on QSL's alibaba page or their main website, and they dont seem to be for sale from any distributors anywhere. not yet, anyway. O:
well, well, well. i think i found the name of the 198 devs. i was searching the chinese copyright database, the mistake i made was searching for individual game names. but it hit me when i tried searching on Qi Sheng Long and noticed they'd registered their 121 in 1 and 101 in 1 consoles - why register each game separately when you could just register the entire compilation? so i searched for 198, and here it is.
2009SR00036 - SPG289 16 位红外互动游戏软件(198inl) V1.0 [简称: SPG289互动游戏198inl] by 深圳市纽泰科技发展有限公司
registered to Shenzhen Niutai Technology Development Co. the company also has copyrights on two 18 in 1s and a 20 in 1 also for the SPG289, and a 32-bit 48 in 1 for the SPG293 (presumably the same 48 games from QSL's 32 bit console). unfortunately they seem to have 0 internet presence so I can't verify anything (they might just be another hardware manufacturer - Qi Sheng Long and Waixing have both registered Nice Code's games, after all)
in the process i also found the Family Sport series are registered to 深圳市森佳科技有限公司 Shenzhen Senjia Technology Co., or Senca Technology in English. found their website @
http://www.sencatech.com despite most pages pointing to
http://www.senca.com.cn (what was i saying about chinese companies never being able to hold onto a domain name) & theres a bit more info in Chinese if you google around.
oh yeah, and theres a "Mini 15 in 1" registered to Nanjing, possibly a reference to the 15 in 1 minigames from that variation on my Wow .. maybe Nanjing really did have something to do with development? all the blatant thievery going on in those games is far more Nanjing's style than Nice Code's.
