Dragon

Overview #

Gaming is a funny thing. Sometimes you end up not playing a game not because you can’t enjoy things anymore - you very much can enjoy things! but the idea of sitting down and focusing on something becomes daunting for whatever reason. Happens to me a lot because I get my focus taken away by noises. Well not today! As a team member of the 351ELEC project, I’ve been playing around with new systems to emulate, and having current MAME (0.237 at this time) running on these little devices opens up a brand new world of obscure systems nobody really asked for or cares about. So of course I gotta try this out, I gotta look into how .cmd files can be used to attach files to a system’s media slots rather than just using the core to emulate arcade games, because another team member was unsure how to do it so I had to “win”. I took that as a challenge for no reason, and it’s there. So now that I can play a GameKing game, why not play a GameKing game, just to prove a point that it works? And then next thing I know, I’m playing a whole entire game.

This isn’t a story where the moral is about how being distracted can let you do things for hours on end, the moral is that this is just a really short game. They’re all short. All of these GameKing games are short, all of them are… well, you have a 48x32 screen and no I didn’t mistype and leave out any digits there, so I mean you can imagine how detailed they are, and that screen is in black and white, and they’re basically all clones of basic games or basic archetypes like shmups and platformers. You review one of these games, you’ve reviewed them all, and especially because some of them are effectively reskins of each other… Oh yeah I suppose that’s the kind of thing I talk about when I’m actually reviewing the game, not in the prologue to my review. Sorry, I didn’t sleep last night, I’ve been awake since 5pm yesterday when I woke up. My sleep cycle is a mess and this review is going to show that. Uhh… anyway.

What sucks and what doesn’t #

The first thing that stood out to me when I tried out GameKing on the RG351M was just how functional the games were. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, and I guess it is, but for context I was playing around with Gamate earlier (one of the other systems that runs at full speed in MAME on RK3326 with working controls that isn’t otherwise emulated by something else) and that’s a system where none of the games even work at all because the system is too slow to process any of them and they’re all horribly sluggish. So that’s something I can say about this game, and Dragon, which I just picked out of a list because it’s a game about a dragon presumably and it might be interesting (or it might have been just a scrolling shooter where you play as a dragon (but it wasn’t)). It’s uhh… well, on a technical level, it’s functional, the controls respond and the screen scrolls and the game runs at a reasonable speed and that is the bar that gets set when you are dealing with the field of “obscure game consoles that never made it out of East Asia and were just invented seemingly to have a joke that they were competing with a Nintendo console, but they were never really going to” (I need to think of a better name for that category of handheld game console).

I mean yeah, like what else am I supposed to say about it? I’ll try, dammit… it really is just a generic platformer that functions as a platformer. The very bare minimum of a playable sidescrolling 2D platformer, in such a way that you didn’t think this was the bare minimum, but it is. And that’s it. The only other positive, if you can call this a positive, is that this game (or maybe Carlo Adventure Legend, or Dino Adventure) is something that should be played for the experience. It’s unintentionally hilarious. Just how barebones it is. Just how gosh darn silly it is.

If you’re playing with MAME 0.224 or newer, then you will have sound emulation, and then you’ll notice that the music is just like, a 3 second loop. Because fuck it, right? Who said that music needs to have more than just a small handful of notes in it? You didn’t think that there should need to be someone to tell you that? Oh yeah, fair enough. I think I might just be delirious from lack of sleep but it just cracks me up. Everything about this game cracks me up. Where do I begin, other than that I’ve already began with the music? The fact that your character sprite looks more like a dinosaur than a dragon, except in the ending when it looks completely different all of a sudden? Attempting recognizeable graphics at all on a 48x32 screen instead of just accepting the limitations and going for more of an Atari 2600 look? The background being some kind of cityscape, as though you’re Godzilla, but then at the end you go into a cave? The sheer minimalism of it all?

That’s just the presentation, the physics are just hilarious. You gamers ever accused a platformer of being “floaty” when you really meant that the character jumps kinda weird? Get on my level. This is floaty. This dinosaur just jumps like it’s on the goddamn moon for absolutely no reason, except only in terms of jump height actually, not in terms of gravity. You just go all the way up from the very bottom to the screen almost to the top. Almost. And then just go plonk back down, with the same vertical speed as you would get from any other platform game. It’s kind of weird. But like I said, it’s still functional, you can still control it quite well actually. Maybe the extra height just gives you a bit of leeway, but it’s not actually fiendishly difficult at all, I mean like… I managed to beat it, and I probably didn’t even need to use rewinding to be quite honest (I can use the excuse that I was testing that worked (the libretro current MAME core has a bug where you literally need to turn the rewind support off and on again, but yeah it does otherwise)).

The lack of animations, enemies just vanish when you land on them… it’s like the kind of vibes you get when you play a really amateurishly made homebrew game or Flash game that was just someone’s first foray into game development and they were just making a proof of concept among the lines of “yeah I can make a game and that was something I just decided to do for a while”. Takes me back to the days of AlbinoBlackSheep, kinda. Except for the graphics, which takes me back to the days of like… well you know, I’m not that old, every single technology I’ve ever had that used a grid of pixels has had more resolution from this. Maybe like a digital watch, or something like that. I don’t know. If it wasn’t for the fact that the GameKing is not that at all, the GameKing would almost seem like one of those hipster consoles that are deliberately limited and weird and janky and market themselves as being intended for learning to make games (like the Arduboy and such) when a normal computer would be perfectly adequate for that task. Was that the reason the GameKing was made? I don’t know, someone go hunt down the people from TimeTop and ask them what was up.

Gotchas #

Yeah well I mean like… I dunno, I feel obliged to put this section in every review as a matter of good practice, but there’s not much to say in terms of accessibility here. Is there such thing as colour blindness where you can’t tell the difference between shades of gray? Guess that wouldn’t really be called colour blindness, or would it? I guess regular blindness, but then a game that works for blind people would be the exception rather than the norm. Sorry, I really am a bit delirious and going into weird tangents and topics… there is basically no text, other than the screen that tells you at the end of each level how many coins and lives you have left. That kind of sucks that they couldn’t just put that in the pause screen, because clearly they do have space to put that information on the screen (because the end of level screen has that information), instead they just put a cup of coffee in the top left corner of the screen. I guess that’s to show that you’re taking a break from the game. A coffee break. No other reason to pause it? Just an icon they felt best reprsented the concept of pause? || not good enough for them? Maybe not visible enough? Yeah look I don’t know what they were thinking okay I’m just kinda making fun of it

So yeah it is pretty easy, and it would actually be feasible to beat this game while holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a controller in the other, but please be careful not to spill anything okay? Please promise me that you aren’t going to do that unless you can ensure that if you spill that coffee it won’t get on any electronics. Sorry it would just upset me if someone spilled coffee on things that aren’t the ground or a table or something that can be harmlessly cleaned up like that. So no. It does not have a save feature. Unless you count the level select as a save feature, because if you stop playing the game, you can just select the level you were playing on, and many “normal” games would resume you at the start of the level you were on if they had a “real” save feature.

Select one of three levels. But Megan, you ask! Are they really long levels? No. I guess they’re a bit longer than level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros? But I mean it took me 11 minutes to beat the whole game, and they were about the same length, and that’s not evenly divisible by 3 so that’s annoying. Okay so let’s say 3 and a half minutes because that’s rounded-ish to the nearest half-minute. So that’s the game. Basically what I’m saying is that you might as well not use the level select, if you die that much that you get a game over (I presume that could be a thing that potentially happens) then you might as well just play the whole thing again. Not like you have anything better to do, because then you wouldn’t even be concerned about whether to use the level select in Dragon for the GameKing right now. You would have other things on your mind.

Is the low difficulty potentially an accessibility issue? If you are someone who requires being challenged a significant amount to be stimulated/entertained, would that be possible for you? I don’t know, maybe you could speedrun it just for the sake of inventing your own challenge. Play all the different versions of this game that seem to at least use the same engine but nobody’s looked closely enough to see if the levels are the same! Marathon them one by one! Do what you want!

I’m happy that I’ve proven the emulation isn’t really an issue though, as long as you can source the GameKing BIOS (for MAME gameking to work) and the ROMs (via TOSEC or MAME software list I guess), you’re good to go! Well as long as you have the knowledge of what you need to do to run the game, but I’m taking care of that. That’s my job now, and I’ll probably be putting that in 351ELEC shortly, as well as Gamate and all the other silly things. Sorry, no CD-i, that runs at like 30% speed on the RK3326 chipset. But like I’ve proven that even a low-power ARM SoC running a single-purpose OS with no display server or window system or anything funny like that, and with no keyboard/mouse can play this game, as well as other GameKing games. That’s what got me into contributing to 351ELEC in the first place, it’s not just about what games are fun (the stock OS already plays GBA games, that’s already satisfactory), it’s about pushing the limits of what can be done. Because why not? Everything that can be emulated should be emulated, and you can decide for yourself if a game is worth playing (something that curates full sets of games to automatically only show popular games or games commonly considered good would be another project entirely).

…Wait, maybe this system was aimed at small children? I can’t find info on how the GameKing was marketed or how much it cost (I’m also not looking very hard, to avoid getting sucked into doing that for too long), but if that’s what this is all about, I’m gonna feel like such an asshole…

Conclusion #

Ah fuck, I gotta give this a score I suppose, do I? Yeah, nothing really requires me to, but then my submission for HowLongToBeat will have an un-dropped-down dropdown box if I don’t have a rating, and I feel bad enough about leaving the platform as “Emulated” because it required a platform and they understandably don’t have GameKing in the database.

But like for real, what do I even rate it? If I was being completely serious, which would be very out of character for me, all I could say about this game is that it is indeed a game. This would be like if you were a food reviewer, but your kids want you to stop by Maccas on the way home and get an ice cream cone, and then you decided to review that ice cream cone and give it a score. Is that what I’m doing already? With all these? With writing this in the first place?

The main purpose of me reviewing this is because I gotta. I am reviewing this game in the same way that if you were crossing the street and you got hit by a car, you would need to tell everyone you talked to later that day that you got hit by a car.

Tell ya what. I will give this game a 5 out of 10, because 5 is the number that is exactly between 0 and 10. Fun mathematics fact for you. 0 is the lower bound of games I review (in theory 1 is, but 0 is reserved for games I believe shouldn’t even count as games or should not have been published, which I have yet to review (I give My Name is Mayo that score but I don’t consider it worth the effort of trying to write about it because it’s just not interesting)), 10 being of course the higher bound because I’ve decided that’s what my rating scale is instead of out of 5 (I guess it’s because I was rating games on HowLongToBeat anyway and that’s on a scale of 0-10).

Anyway, sorry for the style of this review, it really is just a game that I ended up playing for slightly under 12 minutes and just happened to complete it and it was just silly and I’m in a mood to laugh at things. Not the kind of thing I try to do often, but I dunno, gave me a bit of procrastination of all the other things I was supposed to do today.