After last week’s disappointing foray into Hand Held Consoles That Were Not Game Boys, that is to say, the Supervision, I thought I’d have a look into another Hand Held Console That Was Not A Game Boy – the Mega Duck.
Released around the same time as the Watara Supervision, and available for sale in the same local shop as the Supervision I briefly coveted, it was almost as bad but twice the price. I’ve never actually owned one, or even seen one outside a display cabinet, but supposedly the hardware is almost identical but the Mega Duck (also known, dubiously, as the “Cougar Boy” in some regions) had a smaller but less blurry screen. I’d not realised that internally that not only were both machines very similar, but they were also almost hardware clones of the Game Boy itself, featuring a similar CPU, display, and so on.
In looking into the Mega Duck, I came across a game which isn’t terrible. I know! I was as surprised as you! Magical Tower doesn’t have any magic or towers in it, but instead is a sort of platform game vaguely like Mappy, only you and your foes are all hands. Each hand is one of the three standard Scissors, Paper, Stone types, and you defeat foes by walking into them as the “winning” hand – Paper wraps Stone, for example – whereupon you turn into a different hand and chase after a baddie you can defeat with it. There’s a few power-ups that make you move faster or instantly change you into a specific hand, but it’s otherwise very simple and surprisingly good fun.
Oh, and no. I don’t know why it’s called the Mega Duck.
Controls are: 1 (Start), left CTRL (jump), arrow keys (move).
Mega Duck emulator provided is MESS via archive.org.
