It's Christmas in the most god-forsaken year since World War II, so what could be more appropriate than a gargantuan onslaught of grotesque new mini-games for the most wretched of plug'n play consoles?



First, we have the second edition of NES ports of various Intellivision games. Techno Source, seemingly unhappy with Nice Code's NES ports of games such as Night Stalker and Astrosmash, commissioned a different developer -- whose name is known but to God and to manufacturers of cheap dance mats -- to re-port some and newly-port other Intellivision games for their "Intellivision 2nd Edition" and two-players-supporting "Intellivision X2" consoles. Their effort bestows unto us a total of fourteen new NES versions of Intellivision originals. There would be even more titles bestowed unto us if the current "Intellivision X2" ROM image were complete; we have to work with what we have.



Next, we join in spirit the ranks of cartoon enthusiasts who rejoice any time a long-lost original title card of a Blue Ribbon Merry Melody is recovered from a dusty 16mm film can, thanks to a slew of Jungletac UM6578 and VT03 games with newly-found title screens. Did you know that "Push the Box" was originally called "Big Workload"? Did you know that "Gobang" was really called "Gobang" even inside the game? Did you know that Jungletac originally had a "Speed Racer" license? It's all true! And, you can now play "Snood" and "Snood Towers" in their "original" VT03 versions before they became "Magic Bubble" and "Bubble Factory", respectively. If that does not excite you, I don't know what will.



But wait, there is more! Jungletac (a.k.a. D.J. Jungle, a.k.a. Junglesoft) did not rest on their laurels after having blessed the world with their VT03 games. When V.R. Technology of Taiwan unleashed their next enhanced famiclone model, the VT369 with 256-color eight-bits-per-plane graphics, the "D.J." rose to the challenge and gave many of Jungle's games a much-needed facelift. All this in addition to entirely new titles, such as something that pretends to be a Golf game, something that pretends to be a Mini-Golf game, and something that pretends to be a Fishing game. The first impression is all that counts, they say, and accordingly, the games end or repeat after the first impression, or about three holes in Golf. Jungletac's business partner Lexibook seemingly had more luck than brains and for some inscrutable reason managed to obtain a license to publish Disney-themed variants of various Jungletac mini-games. So don't get suspicious when you see a Star-Wars themed "One Day of Mr. Potato", or Huang Xinwei's "Columns" port -- a game that Jungletac had originally hacked into "Jewel Master" -- with Minnie Mouse in it.



Project Plug'n Play had previously omitted one of the most prolific developers of plug'n play material: Cube Tech. Our exhibition of their handiwork will begin with an overview of their graphics hacks of regular NES games. Cube Tech's VT03 hacks can easily be recognized by their over-use of garish rainbow colors, and by some of them crashing after the first level, such as "Eat Beans" (Pac-Man). These early hacks were originally included as bonus material on various Macro Winners "Game Sporz" consoles whose main attraction, such as it were, was a single original Cube Tech sports game.



Cube Tech later created many, many hacks of NES games for the VT369, featuring all-enhanced tasteless 256-color graphics and completely-replaced audio comprised of 8 kHz samples of stolen Italo Disco and public domain tracks. Many of these VT369 hacks even exist in high-resolution (512x480) variants, but we only have the NES-resolution editions so far.




Slightly more exciting are Cube Tech's originals. You have seen many of their VT03 games without realizing that they were originally from Cube Tech: Waixing games such as Cat vs. Dog, Get Lost, Helli-Mission or Water Fire were all made by Cube Tech. Having an aversion to the NES APU, Cube Tech instead made use of a custom ADPCM sound chip to deliver low-fidelity smashing music on the title screens, and appropriate sound effects in-game. Waixing had no time for such extravagant nonsense, and in a jiffy replaced all audio with a single nerve-wrecking NES APU muzak track per game that never stops, and no sound effects whatsoever. With the original ADPCM audio, games such as Get Lost are actually somewhat fun to play. Some of the restored VT03 titles come from a VT369 source for the time being, so don't be surprised that it does not say "VT03" in the emulator's Debug window.



Another batch of Cube Tech originals are the aforementioned Boxing/Ping Pong/Tennis games from the Game Sporz consoles, plus ten soccer-themed sports offerings from a Taikee plug'n play controller. The term "soccer-themed" should be taken with a grain of salt though in light of such gems as "Soccer Arkanoid". The remainder of Cube Tech titles are all-original VT369 games, "original" in the sense that Cube Tech programmed them by themselves, though obviously "inspired" by the game ideas of more capable game authors.




Last, but certainly least, we have a few entirely original games from Shenzhen Wellminds. The most outstanding feature of these are the samples recorded at the ultra-low rate of 4 kHz. "Baba qu Naer" is a game based on some Chinese reality television show. The others are native games for a 160x128 handheld display, and will therefore look like thumbnails on a normal computer screen.

That concludes our fantastic journey into the cave of monsters for today. Be sure to download the latest NintendulatorNRS build from the left-hand panel of this blog, or you won't see much of many of the new exhibits. Refer to the WHATSNEW.TXT file for a complete list of changes since the last release, and LIST.TXT to search for any particular title in the archive. Download the current archive here. Merry Christmas!

Credits to bunnyboy, Tim Schuerewegen and MAME for dumps of the various consoles from which these extracts were taken.