25 October 2018

Cartridges Overview #2: 94年強片 4-in-1 (CK-020) [Famicom]

We continue our topic of "Cartridges Overview" with the following cartridge:


It's titled as 94年強片 4-in-1, with CK-020 ID.
年強片 - Strong film (?)

There were several multicarts, under the CK-xxx ID, one of which I already covered on my channel, and it will be posted on this blog as well.
I am not sure what that logo is that you see below "CK-020". I suppose it's a logo that belongs to some random bootleg company that created there multicarts and distributed them later on. I saw it not only on these 4-in-1 multicarts, but also on those "9999-in-1" types of carts.
I hope sooner or later, we'll find out what it's all about.


Anyway, this cartridge contains 4 games:
- Darkwing Duck
- Chip'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2
- Super Contra
- Toxic Crusaders

I am sure that some of these games don't need much of an introduction, like Darkwing Duck or Chip'n Dale Rescue Rangers. Classic Disney Capcom games, that you can find on many multicarts from 1990s.


One thing to mention though is that Chip'n Dale 2 is the Japanese version, which is the usual version of the game to be found on any Famicom pirate cart. There might be US version somewhere, but I think that it's extremely rare to find.



Super Contra is, yet again, just like on the previous cart, separated into 20 modes. So this is essentially a 20-in-1 Super Contra. You can choose whatever weapon to start with, which level to start on, and activate 30 lives.

Interesting thing is that it has the F weapon upgraded. I showed you here only one of the versions of that upgraded weapon, but we'll certainly come back to this multicart version later on.
As you can see, it shoots significantly faster than the original one, and it puts more damage to the enemies and bosses. You can clearly see, how fast I managed to defeat the boss on stage 6. So mindblowing. :D


Toxic Crusaders is the hacked version with infinite health bar. This is mostly the only version that you can find on older bootleg carts. There is a little chance that you can get a version with proper health meter.
At first, it might seem easier to play and beat the game... until you get to the point on stage 2, if I believe... where you basically get stuck and the door doesn't open to progress to the next area. I will re-play this cartridge and show it off. I heard that this is a major problem of the hacked Toxic Crusaders game, where your character is immortal.  

And basically, that's it about this multicart.
Pretty good one, and it definitely is worth getting into collection. :)
Two Disney Capcom games, Super Contra with a few interesting variations and Toxic Crusaders.

(C) AlexSRMD Productions (2018)

Cartridges Overview #1: Super 4-in-1 (YH468) [Famicom]

After more than a year of silence, we are back with new matrial to this blog!
In order to keep this blog up-to-date somehow, I decided that I will make few text reviews of certain pirate cartridges that I upload on my YouTube.

Not to be confused with another topic here, called "Reviews", even though technically they are the same. Here I will be giving mostly a brief description of game cartridges, and not in-depth ones, like I did with 400-in-1 Real Game, 150-in-1 PocketGames, etc..

So, here we go.


This is a "Super 4-in-1" multicart with the code YH468 on the menu.
It contains three Angry Birds games, and one other random one.
In fact, if you look at other cartridges that would contain Angry Birds on them, and they are titled as 4-in-1 - there are many different variations of this cart.

Here are just a few examples of such multicarts that I could find on the net:
3 Angry Birds games + TMNT: Tournament Fighters

3 Angry Birds games + Double Dragon III

3 Angry Birds games + Mortal Kombat 4 (HummerTeam?)

3 Angry Birds games + Contra 8 (Pirate)

3 Angry Birds games + Snow Bros.

3 Angry Birds games + Double Dragon III (another variation)

3 Angry Birds games + Spiderman

3 Angry Birds games + Batman



3 Angry Birds games + TMNT1

3 Angry Birds games + Spiderman (another variation)

And basically that's it. There may be a few more releases of 4-in-1 with 3 Angry Birds games that I might have missed.
Unfortunately, since my cartridge didn't have any label, and it was a bare PCB, I can't tell you what the original label looked like! So, for the preview of the video and the intro, I had to split the title screens of each included games into one.


I couldn't even find the cartrigde label by the ID that you see in the title here (which comes from the menu screen).
So... why pirates decided to make these Angry Birds games for Famicom? Well... if we look back at the time, when, for example, Super Mario Bros series was popular, pirates thought that making sequels was a good idea to raise sales and make money. They decided to hack random games, and put Mario in them, and then put these "sequels" for sale.
They did the same thing with Pokemon games, when they were hitting the scene. Partly the same situation was also with Digimon.
So, Angry Birds, the popular mobile devices game, where you throw angry birds at green pigs that stole their eggs, was no exception.

Let's take a look at this multicart, shall we?


Once we start it up, we are greeted with the music, that's supposedly taken from New Zealand Story. On the background, we see yellow birdies on the left, and green pigs with eggs on the right. And also YH468 ID in the middle.
We have four games here, three of which are Angry Birds ones, and the forth one is Super Contra II 30P.



1. Angry Birds
Not a bad looking title screen, we get a main character and the title. However, once we start the game, we'll see that this is just a hacked version of another game - and it is Moai Kun from Konami!
Moai Kun is replaced with red angry bird, enemies are now green pigs, and the thingies that we need to same are apparently blue birds now.
Moai Kun is a pretty good game, where you need to collect your friends in a limited time, and get to the door. Sounds like an easy concept, but that's until you reach later levels, where you'll also need to figure out the way, how to dodge all sorts of enemies. Also, in case you fail and you don't wanna wait until the timer goes to 0, there is a suicide button. In this hack, they left it.
I don't know about the ending, if it remained the same as it used to be before, or it was actually slightly changed. I suppose that like with many other bootleg hacks, they gave up on ending, and didn't do anything with it.

2. Angry Birds II
For some reason, it's called just "Angry Birds", and there is no "II" in the title. Odd.
The title screen is half decent. And once we start the game, we can already guess that this is nothing more than a hack of New Zealand Story, the European version of Kiwikraze.
Why is it a European version? Well... you can clearly hear that the music sounds sped up, and that's because I am playing it on NTSC machine, and this version is definitely meant for PAL machines, which run slower.

I find this hack incredibly hilarious, because, here apparently the red birdy is walking in shoes, and somehow shoots the green pigs. I know that in Kiwikraze / New Zealand Story that actually was meant to be like that, that yellow birdie is walking around, shooting at enemies and rescuing it friends, captured in the cages. But here... just thinking on how everything looks absurd, that makes me laugh.
I don't think the ending was changed at all here. But I could be wrong on that.

So, we see that the first two games are actually hacked versions of real games, nothing much to say here. But how about...

3. Angry Birds III
Holy moly... This is actually that pirate original game, by NiceCode, that was actually released on singlecarts as well!
Right at the beginning, we can hear the awful and repetitive music that will be playing throughout the whole game. And this is one of the problems with the games from these bootleggers - they tend to compose some of the most annoying and bad music, that would repeat every 10 or so seconds, and you'd have to listen to it during gameplay.
Also on the title, "A" looks more like "H", and with that, the title is spelled "HNGRY BIRDS", implying that these are Hungry Birds, and not Angry Birds? Heh...
The title screen is acceptable, I suppose. The menu graphics too...
But when it comes to the gameplay... it's so bad. You can aim your birds only at certain angles, which might lead to some serious problems, trying to defeat green pigs.
You can clearly see that in some stages, it took me more than one attempt to actually get any far.
Plus, the bricks don't always break where pigs are, so this kindly adds to the crappiness of this pirate original in general.

Overall, you'd be better off just playing the regular Angry Birds on your phone, it's more fun there. This Famicom pirate original isn't worth it.
And yeah, as I mentioned earlier about the bad music... notice that I beat a few stages, and went to the winter scenery - the music just keeps going and doesn't stop at all.

Yeah... here you have it. Three Angry Birds games on one cartridge. I don't really think it's worth grabbing these multicarts, even if they unclude a good 4th game in them, like Super Contra...
Speaking of which...


We get a 24-in-1 Super Contra version, where there are 24 variations of it to choose from! :)
You can start a regular game, or you coud choose whatever gun to want to start with. As well as, if you want to start with 30 lives, and what stage to start from.
I actually have this game in a separate cartridge form - yes, that 24-in-1 version. We might take a look at it later on this blog, and on my YouTube channel.
I always loved Super Contra - it's a great sequel to the original Contra game, with more fun stages, challenges.
But, yeah... getting these 4-in-1 multicarts with Angry Birds on them - meh... they don't really worth your money, in my opinion. You'd be better off just get another multicart, which would rather include original games on them, even if these are slightly hacked to have more lifes, or infinite continues, or which would allow you to start on any stage.

So, yeah, that's about it.
I hope I can bring on more posts about the cartridges that I cover on my channel.
One thing I want to mention is that: don't be surprised if some cartridge descriptions clearly repeat what was already in the YouTube video description. ;)
The fact is that not many people read the descriptions of video, and since I have my blog, it wouldn't be a bad idea to use it for describing the game carts.

(C) AlexSRMD Productions (2018)