Children’s Spaces, or Why You Should Play Obscure Games for Yourself

Who doesn’t long for a third space

I’m about to tell a story that I’ve long wanted to write about but always kept postponing. Finally, the current political climate has made it somewhat topical, so I guess there’s my excuse to dust off this blog.

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about age verification and tightening control over what minors can and cannot see online, regardless of what they seek. Much is being said about how the Internet is rotting young people’s brains by allowing them access to inherently damaging things, like pornography and political narratives disapproved by the Western establishment. Good were the days of growing up before the Internet! Children would go out with friends after school, teens would hang out in malls, and it was super duper impossible to expose their sensible brains to content grandma wouldn’t approve! Without the Internet, teenagers didn’t even know what sex was until they turned 18! As we all know, on the night of their eighteenth birthday, Satan would crawl to people’s beds in their sleep and sully their pure souls with the hitherto unknown feelings of horniness and lust.

And what a magical era were the early 90s! Not only was the Internet still a niche thing only for weird stinky degenerate nerds, but we also had good games. You know, the Super Nintendo was out! And the Game Boy! And the Mega Drive! Children’s spaces were strictly enforced, and all was well. No pornography, no serious topics, no LGBTQ accep— uuuhh let’s not talk about that last one. Look! Child safety!

Today’s story is, naturally, about the Mega Duck.

Fisher-Price logo not included.

🦆

During the Game Boy’s undisputed reign over the handheld gaming market, many a company tried their luck at having their own slice of that pie, from established brands like Sega and SNK to nondescript Chinese companies like Bon Treasure and Bit Corp. The Mega Duck was one of those attempts at eking out some handheld market share, specifically out of the people who, for one reason or another, were looking for an even cheaper option to the Game Boy.

This ugly little duckling was the brainchild of Welback Holdings, who released the console under their Creatronic brand and delegated the development of the pack-in game, The Brick Wall, to their subsidiary Timlex International. For the twenty-three other released carts, though, they made the wise decision of commissioning an outside studio with rather extensive experience: Sachen.

Ein paar Sachen über Sachen

Sachen was a Taiwanese video game developer particularly known for their prolific output of unlicensed Famicom games. Unusually for grey market developers, their games were largely pretty decent when not rushed into semicompletion by the publisher, some even reaching the point of being pretty great in my opinion. Their games were a far cry from Nintendo or Konami, but they absolutely could compete with the bulk of licensed Famicom developers, is what I’m saying. I’m not going to waffle on too much about them because taizou already wrote a great blogpost on their history you should be reading instead, but suffice to say, if you were a Chinese businessman looking for a studio to churn out an entire game library with a modicum of quality for your newest game console, Sachen was undoubtedly the best fit for the job.

And make games they did. There were 23 released carts, numbered 002 to 037 with multiple gaps (game 001 naturally being Timlex’s The Brick Wall), probably hinting at at least 14 more planned games that didn’t come to fruition. Since they were effectively the only people making games for the Mega Duck, they had to make a lot of the mandatories: the Tetris clone, the Snake clone, the Frogger clone, the Bomberman clone, the mahjongg game, the Amidar clone… Wait. Amidar?

An odd stage of Amidar.

I promise I am going somewhere with this

First released in 1981, Amidar was part of the first crop of maze games that weren’t straight Pac-Man clones. Its name is a corruption of Amida, the Japanese name of Amitābha, one of the main Buddhas from Zen Buddhism. It isn’t, however, named directly after Amitābha, but rather Amitābha lottery, the Japanese name for ghost leg.

In case you’re unfamiliar, ghost leg is a simple way of creating pairing between a number of people and an equal or lower number of things, popular in East Asia. Parallel vertical lines are drawn, one per person, and then a multitude of horizontal segments connecting two adjacent lines are drawn at random. People then pick a line and follow its path, turning every time that it’s possible. The oddly religious name in Japanese is due to people originally drawing the parallel lines as radii of a circle, in a similar way to how Amitābha’s halo is usually represented. I swear I am going somewhere with this.

A ghost leg drawing, as eloquently explained
by a later revision of the game.

As one can clearly see, Amidar’s maze is based on the general shape of a ghost leg board. The game’s default enemy, curiously also called Amidar, always takes a corner as if they were drawing a ghost leg, making them easy to dodge with a little bit of strategy and attention despite their speed. If push comes to shove, you can also use a limited amount of jumps per life: at the push of a button, the whole stage rumbles and the Amidars jump in fright, letting you walk under them if you move quickly. The game also brings quite a bit of variety, with even stages playing under completely different rules to odd stages, and bonus stages being literally just a ghost leg drawing, but most of that isn’t relevant to this story and this post is already unnecessarily long, so I’ll spare you the extra words. You should just go and play Amidar by yourself anyway, it’s a pretty fun game.

But I digress, and a lot. What matters to us here are the odd stages. Like in Pac-Man, the goal is to eat all the pellets that dot the maze, but there’s a slight twist: cells give out extra points when their perimeter is cleared, and there’s a nice bonus if you clear two adjacent cells at the same time. And, dear reader, it is Amidar’s odd stages that Sachen decided to clone when they were making the Mega Duck library.

Hi there, cutie :3

Now we get relevant

Sometime in 1993, Creatronic released 2nd Space for the Mega Duck, in which you play Amidar as a legally distinct Pooka from Dig Dug instead of a gorilla. Despite being very clearly heavily inspired by Amidar’s odd stages, it does have some differences in gameplay. For one, the jump button is entirely gone: if you find yourself inescapably trapped, well, tough tits. In its place, there are now temporary powerups that randomly appear around the maze and may help you extend your lives a little longer. The game also features a timer, although it should be less of a concern than the enemies out to get you.

And to speak of the enemies… they no longer move in a ghost leg pattern. Most of 2nd Space’s unnamed enemies float around the maze with no regard for paths or walls at all. While this makes them much harder to dodge, it also gives them a weakness the Amidars lack, as they can be killed if the player clears the cell they are hovering. The enemies’ general æsthetics and mechanics hint to a second source of inspiration for Sachen in the making of this game: Kaneko’s Gals Panic.

Panic sure is a topical word, too

2nd Space, like everything Mega Duck as clearly evidenced by the console’s disgustingly Playskool design, was ostensibly marketed at children. Gals Panic, if you ever heard of it, was very much the opposite. For those unaware, it’s a massively successful series of Qix clones (with a multitude of clones of its own right) whose entire concept revolves around someone looking at Qix and realising that the concept of clearing out rectangles would lend itself nicely to revealing a hidden image behind the game board. In Gals Panic, said images were questionably drawn softcore porn. When they were making 2nd Space, Sachen clearly borrowed concepts from Gals Panic — not only in the form of its abstract-looking enemies that bounce around the screen and can be killed by tracing a rectangle around them, but also in the concept of using Amidar’s cell-clearing mechanic to slowly reveal a picture under the board.

The first level’s hidden drawing

And boy, did someone have fun drawing stuff for this game! Someone who went by HJJ, more specifically, as per the game’s credits. Perhaps accidentally harkening back at Amidar’s religious name, the first level reveals a drawing of the Temple of Heaven, a Confucian temple in Beijing. If you can’t be arsed to play the game for yourself but are still curious to see what else HJJ drew, as fate would have it, someone on MobyGames’s screenshots page already saved you the effort. If their account is to be believed, there’s a total of four images in the game: the Temple of Heaven, two women dressed in traditional Chinese clothes, the three little piggies from the fairy tale in a comical bad boy style and a motocross pilot. Four drawings for twenty levels! Seems a bit… uh, stingy, doesn’t it? Not to say boring — you keep revealing the same image over and over five levels at a time! But wait… If you look closer at this screenshot gallery, there’s something odd about it. These are listed as Game Boy screenshots. That’s right… 2nd Space has a Game Boy version.

The cover of the first Game Boy multicart
to contain 2nd Space.

Boy Duck

As I mentioned last time I talked about one of its games, designwise, the Mega Duck was on the lazier side of the Game Boy wannabes, bordering (if not trespassing) on patent infringement. Inside, its architecture is literally a Game Boy clone, only with different memory mappings to make the consoles mutually incompatible. This presented to Sachen a golden opportunity: once the whole ducky ordeal was over, they found themselves with 23 games they could port over to the world’s most successful handheld console with very little effort.

And port them they did, publishing them over and over again in multicarts throughout the 1990s. 2nd Space was no exception, which explains how MobyGames user Rik Hideto got their screenshots. However, there’s a catch: when presented with the opportunity of revisiting their Mega Duck games, Sachen didn’t miss the chance to tinker with them a second time. Not only did they lazily colourise their games once the Game Boy Color became a thing, they made little adjustments and revisions ever since the first batch of ports hit the door. For instance, Ant Soldiers, their pretty great Lemmings clone, gained new animations and effects and generally an overall coat of polish that was missing in its Mega Duck incarnation. Could 2nd Space have version differences of its own…? Well, there’s only one way to find out!

Let’s play

We already know that the first level’s drawing matches the Game Boy version — it’s the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Let’s play the second level and see what it brings us!

We’re off to a promising start! On the Game Boy, this was the Temple of Heaven again. The ladies wouldn’t appear until stage six! Would this mean that we will have surprises down the road? Onto stage three!

There’s the funny three little pigs drawing from the Game Boy stages 11–15!! Is stage four going to be the motocross pilot??

Why, yes indeed!! What now?? What could come next?? We’re off navigating uncharted territory, braving paths only braved before by Sachen developers and 90s children who couldn’t afford a Game Boy… Are we going to get repeats?? Are there new drawings?? What else could HJJ have liked to draw??

A new drawing!!! An infatuated girl lost in thought… Her cleavage seems, um, quite detailedly rendered, but let’s gloss over that. This is what we’re here for, isn’t it? Mega Duck-exclusive content! Onwards to stage six! We just might have fifteen more original drawings only a select few have ever seen!

Now that’s something you don’t see every day: 90s fanart. Clearly our friend HJJ liked Alien. What else could they like?

Tokusatsu, of course! And questionable English, as usual for Chinese games of this era. I don’t know if this is their OC or if it’s fanart because I don’t know my tokusatsu, but it’s cool to see nonetheless. Why the hell was this cut from the Game Boy release is beyond me, though. Maybe there wasn’t enough space left after the game got crammed with three other Mega Duck conversions in the multicart? We’re left pondering as we march onwards to stage eight…

Well, one thing about HJJ is very clear: they like bikes. They’re also pretty good at drawing them. What a nice little gallery! What else did they draw?

A scenic view of an European castle… I am dead serious when I say that this drawing gives me a dose of wanderlust. What else will the next drawings make us feel?

A cute anime girl posing for a picture as the memory of a woman lingers on the background… Clearly fanart of an anime or manga I do not recognise. I’m not sure if grandma would approve the length of her dress, but let’s not think about that. Onto the next stage!

Another scenic view of the European countryside… I wonder if HJJ used a reference or if they drew it entirely out of their imagination. Regardless of that, they sure are good at drawing landscapes. And bikes. And anime girls. What’s next?

Okay, we get it, you like bike races. I don’t, but I can still appreciate the drawing. What else awaits our eyes?

A futuristic spaceship gets ready to take flight at a hangar… I think this might be my favourite out of the lot. I like the untextured polygonal feel of the landscape, it’s quite vaporwave. You know, looking at all these drawings, I can’t help but wonder about HJJ… where would they be now? Do they still like their motocross? Did they watch Prometheus? Did they manage to remain an Alien fan after that film?

Maybe the answer to that question is “playing War Thunder”. Apparently the M1A1 was an American battle tank made by Chrysler in the 1980s and 1990s. I didn’t know that, and I’d never learn that if it weren’t for 2nd Space.

We’re onto the final stretch now: only six more pictures until the game ends! How many more bikes are we going to see? What other interests of HJJ’s are going to be revealed through their drawings? Only one way to find out!

…

Uh… what is that?

Oh.

………………oh.

I think we’ve found another of HJJ’s interests.

Would you look at that, more fanart! Playboy fanart. Does that count?

I see their grasp on perspective for landscapes is perhaps not very transferrable to portraits. Or at least to portraits of people who aren’t riding motorbikes.

Our wise friend HJJ says no to fandom wars. They’re a Playboy fan AND a Penthouse fan! Or maybe a Penthoose fan. What part of Taiwan speaks Scots?

We’re now down to the very last stage… The hardest of them all. Not only because there are so many enemies, but also because 2nd Space only has unlimited continues up to stage 19. That’s right, if you run out of lives here, it’s game over and back to the title screen! If you plan on experiencing this game for yourself, I recommend you savescum like I did. Anyway, enough waffling about nothing, we have one final pair of duckies to quack at.

To all two of you who stuck to the end, I think the takeaway should be obvious. I hope you had fun, like the lucky schoolboys who got a Mega Duck for Christmas certainly did. See you in three years!