March 15, 1986
Game Giant Magazine
Review of Gamewagon: Play
This issue of Game Giant is actually our first mass-published issue. All prior copies were printed on standard consumer paper by a PC printer in black-and-white, and were only sold at small game stores in our hometown of Waycross, Georgia (USA).
So on to the content! First up is our review of Gamewagon: Play. We neglected to review this back in January of LAST year, since it was included with the Gamewagon itself. But we’ve got 30 pages to fill and not a lot of unreviewed games, so here we go!
Gamewagon: Play is a collection of 8 games on a single proprietary cartridge that was included with all Gamewagon consoles. The “game” will be broken down into the different games on the disk.
Turbo Tennis
Turbo Tennis is a pretty blatant Pong clone, but it has a plus in that it keeps score in actual tennis format. Instead of 1:4 or 2:7 (I’m bad at this game), the score will have figures like 15:30, 30:40 and 40:LOVE (I got lucky!). Once someone scores with 40 points, they win. But if you have 40, your opponent has 30, and THEY score, you are down to thirty again and the next person to score gets the 40 position.
The game can be played two-player or against the AI.
Kart Dash
This is actually a pretty good game. You have a race course, depicted using sprite tiles. Two karts are each in one of these tiles at any given time. Turning consists of you moving the joystick or pressing the arrow keys in the direction you want the kart to go, relative to your overhead view. Due to the grid of sprites used, you turn at 90 degree angles only. The green grass off the race course cannot be traversed by the karts and act as walls.
Only one course exists, and the game ends after 3 laps and then brings you to a high score screen. If your time was fast enough, you can enter it in the high score table.
Kart Dash can be played two player or against the AI.
Super Trivia Time
This is a trivia game where the first person to correctly answer the question scores a point. The game does not seem to have an end, requiring the console to be reset to play a new game. You select answers from a list of 4 different “possibilities”.
The problem is that there are only about 30 questions, and only the correct answers for all of them are in the system, to be chosen at random for wrong answers. So when a question pops up, you get something like this:
“The Greatest Show on Earth” was?
A) Pancakes
B) Dracula
C) John F. Kennedy
D) Barnum & Bailey Brother’s Circus
The game can be played against another player, or an “AI” that selects answers at random.
Gamewagon Hoops
This was supposed to be a basketball game, but we couldn’t get it to load on our copy of the game. Supposedly it could be played by two people, or one person against an AI.
I Can Decorate
A secret gem, this game has a highly complex system to design your own house and populate it with furniture. Up to three floors can be included, and there are 100 different objects to place. Though grid-based, objects can take up multiple squares, like the 2x3 large bed.
Gamewagon Antfarm
For some reason this game crashed after pressing start at the title screen. At least we got to see demos of gameplay, but it looked from the demo replay like the hardware had unfairly limited what they could do with the game.
Gamewagon Fishtank
This is just a virtual aquarium. You can place up to 6 fish from a selection of 20 different types into a tank of water, and watch them move around at random. Unfortunately fish tend to get stuck in the lower corners.
Gamewagon Skeeball
Another game which crashed.
It appears the developers may have bit off more than they could chew with three of the games, as we couldn’t find any screenshots of Hoops, Antfarm or Skeeball anywhere in the game manual, and a call to Horse-Drawn’s tech support ended with them apologizing and admitting the game was released incomplete. Furthermore, I just can’t imagine how they could do skeeball or basketball with today’s technology. Sorry guys, better luck next time.
But despite all this, the games they did complete are not bad (except for that horrible quiz game), and it did come free with the console, so you get a lot for what you pay (nothing).
Final Score: 6.75
(NOTE: The “final score” is IDENTICAL to the score assigned by MacDon between the 3rd and 5th of April 1985 in-universe. If you decide to write a review of someone else’s game, and it has a score, you must use that score. If it has no score yet, be as ambiguous as you can.)
