2018.12.04
"Super Duck vs ‘chicken’"
Magic Purple, a game by Unico featuring duck like characters punching their
way to glory. This is one I’ve been curious about now for probably almost 15
years ago, since we missed out on one that was for sale back then. In the end
a copy turned up in a PCB collection in Spain having gone unnoticed for all
these years.
It’s your usual ‘Tumble Pop’ style affair on hardware that clearly evolved
from clones of Tumble Pop, and plays very similar to Unico’s other offering
from the same period ‘Fancy World’ although here you have scrolling stages.
There’s not really much to be said about the game play, you punch enemies to
stun them then punch them a few more times to kill them. Spikes kill you, and
there’s a power-up system beyond the obvious pick-ups that I don’t really
understand (it might really just be a slot-reel like lottery) Different
enemies have slightly different behaviors, but there’s not a huge amount of
variety or real depth.
The item names suggest that the item graphics were changed at some point in
development, but the text not updated. The initials N.G.S appear in various
places, including on the flag of the first boss, I’m guessing this might be
the actual developer, with Unico being the publisher? Either way, Unico was
one of those interesting Korean companies, so I’m glad this one was found.
Noteworthy things, it remaps RAM at 0, and the ROM at a higher address space,
which is very unusual for 68k based hardware, given that everything else is
basically the same as Fancy World I suspect this was done as a way to stop
people from easily converting one PCB to the other.
Emulation didn’t take long to work out since it’s the same as Fancy World,
a driver I did many years ago.
Thanks to Jose IBI, Arcade Vintage, Recreativas.org, and The Dumping Union
for finding / dumping this one.
(while there are certainly thematic similarities with the characters here,
for example the main character being a purple duck in both, I don’t really
think this was meant as a sequel to Comand’s Super Duck, or as it was
originally called ‘Hell Out’ even if the top high score entry is HL2)
https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2018/magic_purple_1.png
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https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/