During the holiday break I used my Anbernic RG40XXV to play and finish 3 games I had played during my childhood, each one for a different console. It was a little weird playing them on a crisp LED screen, without the CRT TV blurring - they almost felt like different games than the ones I remembered 😂.

Elemental Master

Elemental Master is a vertical running shmup for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis released in 1993. You control a knight (I think?) fighting against your brother, who was possessed by the evil entity Gyra and became the dark lord or something. The story is completely irrelevant, and I suspect the English translation is not the best.

The gameplay is nice though. It’s a vertical shmup, but you are running on the ground. You can choose between 4 different stages from the start, like Megaman or Silver Surfer, each one with a different thematic and boss. When you defeat a boss, you gain a new weapon. The different weapons are varied and interesting, but I found myself using the 3 way fire shot most of the time. One nice touch is that the weapons can be charged, bringing more variety to the game.

It’s a challenging but short game with 7 stages. After a few tries you can finish it without much problem. I remember I had cleared it when I was a child and rented it for a weekend.

Rating: 6/10. It’s very short and kind of cheap sometimes due to really short invincibility frames, but the different weapons add nice variety.

Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse

This is the Master System version, not the Mega Drive/Genesis one. This is one of the earliest games I have memories of playing. I remember I played it with my cousins and my sister a long time ago.

Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse is a classic platformer released in 1990 and definitely a challenging one. It took me some time to get used to the slightly slippery controls again, and Mickey feels kind of heavy. You can feel the inertia when moving the titular mouse around the stages.

The plot is Minnie was kidnapped by the evil witch Mizrabel. To rescue her, you need to gather 7 gems from the witch’s minions, spread across 5 different stages. The platforming is tight and hard in places, with some one tile jumps on moving platforms with enemies on them, but it never feels cheap or unfair. Bosses are interesting too, every one is big and detailed with its own attack pattern.

The graphics and music are the highlight of this game. The Master System’s power shines here, with colorful scenarios, varied enemies with big sprites. Also, Mickey’s animations are superb. It’s a challenging game, but it can be beat with persistence.

Rating: 7.5/10. It has kind of stiff controls, the challenge is kind of uneven between stages, but it’s good fun with great graphics.

Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland

I had the Japanese Famicom version of this one for some reason. I guess it was bought by my parents in Paraguay, which back in the 90s was a great place to buy electronics more cheaply than in Brazil. At the time, I didn’t know any Japanese (or English, for that matter) so I didn’t understand anything that was said, but that wasn’t necessary.

In Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland, you have access to 5 attractions in the Wackyland theme park, 4 readily available and the last one after you beat the first 4. In each one you take control of a different Tiny Toon character and face different platforming stages: a roller coaster with Babs, a log ride in a river with Furrball, a train ride with Hampton, a bumper cart (the only non-platforming one) with Plucky and the last stage is a mystery house labyrinth with Buster.

The graphics and music are superb, even considering it was a late release in 1992 in Japan, when the Super Nintendo had already been released for a while. All characters are instantly recognizable, and every one of them has many frames of animation.

This is a challenging game but I remember beating it when I was a kid, around 1996. It demands a lot of memorization, especially the roller coaster, so it doesn’t always feel fair. You have to retry some stages many times, but after a while it’s not so bad. The bumper cart ride feels like luck sometimes though, it’s hard to control and send the enemies into the holes. I remember that in my childhood the last stage was readily available if you tried to access it enough times, but I might be misremembering 😄 or maybe I had a hacked version of the game.

Rating: 7/10. Some stages rely too much on memorization, the bumper cart is weird to control, but overall gameplay is really solid and graphics are great.

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