LCD Games of the 80s: Part III (Game & Watch DSiWare)

INDIE GAMER CHICK’S LCD GUIDE: PART I – PART II  – PART IV – PART V – PART VI – PART VII – PART VIII

Well, I don’t want to be accused of creating cost-free content OR pirating games. So I bought all nine DSiWare Game & Watch titles. All of which have a nifty feature where, if you lack the patience to build up to a certain speed of the game, you can set the starting score to a certain point and begin the gameplay from there. Cool idea but it would sort of undermine the point of getting high scores I would think. Of the nine available games, I had only covered one previously: Donkey Kong Jr. The DSiWare version plays smoother than the simulated version I played. Well, duh. Official releases are like that. These each cost me $1.99 each, and between the time I bought them on Sunday and doing the write-up today, I suddenly can’t look them up on the official Nintendo website anymore. There’s a chance they might get pulled from the market soon, so if these boring pieces of shit are something you genuinely want, act now. Finally, I have no means to get pictures off my 3DS so I had to use pics of the UK versions.

Poor guy has monkey wrenches for hands.

BALL!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1980)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate/Juggler

Ball was the first Game & Watch game. And, if you were a platinum Nintendo Club member, you might have gotten a replica of the original LCD handheld of one. It’s a simple juggling game where you shift your hands left and right to keep the balls in motion. In Game A, there’s two balls, while Game B adds a third. Weirdly, Game A scores in increments of one point while B scores by the 10. That makes no sense. It also occurred to me that some games that I’ve labeled “spinning plate games” could be called “jugglers” or “ball-likes” instead. I’ll try to note that in the future. Anyway, Ball was probably incredible in 1980. I mean, look, it’s a game that looks sort of like a video game. Take that, Electronic Football! Today? Pretty dull.

FLAGMAN!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1980)
Gameplay Type: Memory Tester

Fun story related to Simon: Nolan Bushnell and Ralph Baer got caught up in a lawsuit over Pong, because Magnavox (producers of Baer’s Odyssey console) could prove that Nolan attended a conference that showed off Baer’s version of video table tennis right before he came out with Pong. Baer’s tennis didn’t resemble Pong at all. You have to use a second knob to control the angles of the ball, whereas Pong used a segmented paddle that angled the ball based on where on the paddle it hit. Atari settled anyway. They ended up taking a license on the technology becaues they were in start-up while Baer’s backers had the means to trounce them in court, even though the suit really wouldn’t have held up in court today. Years later, Baer played Bushnell’s Touch Me game and copied it to make Simon, justifying it by saying Nolan didn’t have a patent and Simon’s buttons made distinct noises. We owe Baer a lot, but he wasn’t the kindly grandfather type we picture him to be. He worked for a defense contractor, was quite litigious, would pursue lawsuits on people who he perceived to have ripped him off while simultaneously copying ideas from others.

It’s Simon. Dude holds up a set of flags. You memorize the order. Keep going until you miss three times. This shit has been done a million times. Next.

VERMIN!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1980)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

If a lot of these animations look familiar to you, that’s because I think Nintendo selected the DSiWare releases based on graphics adapted to Mr. Game & Watch for Smash Bros.

Of every game that I’ve covered in the LCD features, this is the one I was most familiar with by virtue of it being a microgame in WarioWare for Game Boy Advance that I, one day when I was younger, got caught up playing for hours unable to die while I was trying to unlock all the extras. Then again, a lot of Game & Watch titles are part of the WarioWare franchise, the original of which everyone knows is my favorite game of all-time. I don’t know if that’s why I found the actual Game & Watch to be so easy, but I scored over 500 points before dying in Mode A and 400 in Mode B. Frankly, Vermin’s take on whack-a-mole is too easy. There’s too much leeway in how long a mole can be out of a hole before you lose a life. This would have probably been a great game for really young kids because it’s incredibly easy, so much so that I couldn’t get into it.

JUDGE!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1980)
Gameplay Type: Quick Draw

See what I mean? This is probably the most famous Mr. Game & Watch attack. As a game though, Judge is awful.

Well, at least this one tries something completely different. Here, you and the AI (or a second player in mode B) hold up a random number between 1 and 9. If your opponent is holding up a higher number than you, you dodge. If they’re holding up a lower number, you attack. The first player to press the correct action scores. First to 99 wins. I beat the AI 99 to 27 and then beat my father 99 to 27. So I’m consistent. Three cheers to me, or actually make it 27 just because that’s what I apparently deserve. They were really stretching for game ideas here. It’s weird that it took them so long to figure out the right way to make compelling, addictive games using the limited technology. It doesn’t seem like rocket science, but then again, this is before they had a hit in Donkey Kong.

HELMET!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1981)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

Maybe this was the end result of a Decepticon being blown up by Bumblebee.

This is more like it. A cross-the-road game where you dodge falling tools as you make your way from one shed to the other, which visually for some reason reminded me of The Prestige teleporting man trick. The shed doors open and close in random intervals and you might get stuck in the playfield, where I’m almost certain there’s scenarios that are unsurvivable. And, once again, it’s too hard to judge the speed of the falling objects without motion. They were on the right track here, though. I still hated Helmet, mostly because this was the game that fucked me over playing 9-Volt’s stage in WarioWare the most.

CHEF!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate/Juggler

I don’t think this would be considered sanitary.

A standard juggler/spinning plate game, with the twist being that a cat will occasionally show up to stop the momentum of one of the food pieces you’re having to juggle. It’s yet another game where motion is almost essential for what they were aiming for, though they were getting a little closer to getting the idea right without it. Fire, which is not included in this set but is part of a few of the Game & Watch Gallery releases, was the first to get it right without needing to actually see the objects move. Chef has tons of issues with figuring out which food item is the next you need to save and I’m not really willing to put the time in needed to figure it out, because it’s not fun either way.

MANHOLE!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

A spinning-plate game where you have to replace manholes so that runners don’t fall into sewers. It’s one of the simplest Game & Watch concepts and it’s actually probably the best of the early lineup. It’s easier to get a feel for the timing of the runners, negating the need to see actual motion. This so far is the only one of the games that I tried the Game & Watch Gallery remake of, where the manholes stay in place and only collapse if Toad, Donkey Kong Jr, or Mario run over there without Yoshi having its tongue attached to them. The remake works, but the original was (mostly) not that bad. It’s boring, don’t get me wrong, but if there had been online leaderboards I might have been more invested. Come to think of it, why wouldn’t they include leaderboards? With so many cheap options on 3DS, who would want these unless there were online leaderboards or if you were an indie critic on a journey into gaming’s past that wanted to spend actual money so as to avoid feeling like a pirate?

In 2019, gamers would expect this to be the opposite: removing the manhole covers in order to kill bystanders. YOU KNOW I’M RIGHT!

The most notable thing I have to say about Manhole is I was quickly able to deduce that Game & Watch Gallery, while not being an emulated game but rather a recreation, actually retains the same sluggish response time that the DSiWare version (that looks like a near-perfect recreation of the handheld) features. The issue is sometimes the game would straight-up not respond to me pressing the button to go from one corner to the other. In order to be able to cover ground more quickly, you can press a button to take you from the upper left to the bottom right, or the upper right to the bottom left, and so forth. But, sometimes I’d press the button and Mr. Game & Watch would stay in place for no reason. It’s a laginess/response issue that is bizarrely universe no matter which version of the LCD-based game you play. This doesn’t happen in the modern remake version in Gallery. Which made me wonder if these really were recreations or if some form of emulation was used. Either way, Manhole is so much more frustrating than it needed to be. Game & Watch’s modern version was fun though. Stay tuned for the full reviews of those.

MARIO’S CEMENT FACTORY!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1983)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

If you let the cement overflow, there’s a hilarious death animation of Luigi (I think it’s Luigi) being crushed to death by cement. Okay, maybe only I found it funny. I have issues.

By far the game people wanted me to play the most (besides the Tiger Electronics Full House game, seriously you sadistic fucks?), Mario’s Cement Factory is a legendary Game & Watch on the grounds that it’s an original Mario game designed specifically for the LCD line. And it’s certainly an ambitious title. It combines plate-spinning mechanics, road-crossing/platforming, and a bit of “transport object from point A to point B” gameplay into one giant smorgasbord of an LCD. A lot of my fans insisted this is the only “really good Game & Watch” but I honestly though it was too complex. There’s two cement mixers that you have to travel up and down a pair of moving platforms to release to the accumulated cement from. The layers of cement fall down to the next level, eventually reaching the truck that you score points from. If the cement overflows, you die. If you fall off a platform, you die. If you get squashed while riding the platforms, you die. When the action speeds up, there’s just too much shit to keep track of.

I imagine someone at Nintendo had seen the famous I Love Lucy chocolate factory episode and decided to make a Mario game based on it. Because, like the show, things get out of hand too quickly and the speed of which you can move and release the cement is too limited. If this weren’t a Mario game, nobody would give a shit about it today. Being part of the Mario mythos shouldn’t override the fact that Cement Factory is boring at best, while an aggravating exercise in futility at worse.

Vermin (pictured), Helmet, Ball, Octopus, Manhole, and Oil Panic (not featured yet) were parts of the WarioWare series. Ball and Oil Panic were part of Touched! while Helmet and Vermin were in the original. Octopus was in Smooth Moves. Manhole is part of 5-Volt’s stage in Gold on 3DS. WarioWare actually did the impossible: making Game & Watch part of something fun. Of course, it did this by limiting the gameplay to two-second chunks. Hey, whatever works!

None of the DSiWare titles are worth $2 on their own, especially considering that I bought Game & Watch Gallery 1 for $2.99 on 3DS along with Game & Watch Gallery 2 & 3 for $3.99 each. Combined, the trilogy ran me $10.47. Throw in another $6.99 if you want Game & Watch Gallery 4 for the Game Boy Advance and still own a Wii U. Those titles all have multiple recreations of the original LCD screens with very accurate-to-the-original gameplay PLUS superior minigame remakes. Comparatively, the nine DSiWare Game & Watch titles ran me $17.91, had NO features besides local-only leaderboards and the ability to start a game at any score, and skipped the modern remakes. Besides the infamous Mario’s Cement Factory, it’s not like the nine games chosen were exactly all-stars in the Game & Watch lineup to begin with. Ball, Judge, and Flag are so primitive that they have no reason to be re-released on their own ever again. This re-release series had to be among the most soulless cash-grabs Nintendo ever did. You know what I could get behind? Making these free to Switch Online subscribers, with online leaderboards. What I can’t get behind is charging $2 a pop for old games that have no gameplay value today. So I’m now 0 for 24 in looking for an LCD that I can say without qualification is worth checking out.