Retro Warriors • The Unfortunate Case of the Data East All-Star...

The Unfortunate Case of the Data East All-Star Collection By: Justin Baker Developer: Data East Publisher: Retro-Bit Out of a sense of curiosity (and anticipation of their upcoming Holy Diver release), I finally picked up one of Retro-Bit’s new reproduction cartridges. I’ll admit that I was a bit excited to check out their Data East All-Star Collection, if for no other reason than my unreasonable love for Bad Dudes. The game came in along with an SNES cartridge I also ordered from them (Joe & Mac), and my excitement grew at the prospect of opening a new NES cartridge in 2018. Cellophane off, the box revealed an interestingly designed black and red cartridge, a bare bones manual, some stickers, and some buttons. Fun inclusions to say the least, especially considering the game was significantly less than the standard $50 price tag for most NES reproductions. I let Saturn test the game first on his NES, and we were immediately disappointed to learn the the red-and-black cartridge doesn’t fit all the way in to a front loader NES. Still not deterred, we proceeded to boot the game up and it loaded just fine. Hell, the Game Genie sticks out too but works fine, right? The games looks sub-par stretched across his LCD television over composite and his Framemeister wasn’t handy, so we quickly turned the game off for me to test at home. At home with my PVM and NES at the ready I loaded the oddly shaped cartridge and…nothing. The game wouldn’t load on my system at all. Granted, my NES still has the original 72-pin adapter, which sometimes resists making proper contact. I ended up having to push a PlayStation memory card in the slot between the cartridge and top shell just to boot the game. Needless to say I wasn’t happy. My system may be all original hardware, but I would assume that most people purchasing reproduction NES cartridges are using their original systems as well. I wasn’t happy about having to jam extra bits into my game console, nor was I happy that Retro-Bit didn’t see fit to shorten the cartridge length by the necessary half of an inch for it to fit normally. It’s hard to imagine how oversights like this even happen. The cartridge would undoubtedly fit fin in a top loading NES, but cutting out what was the far more popular model with such a tiny amount of plastic seems like a massive oversight. But, I was still undeterred. I’ve had to rig game consoles before and I wasn’t about to stop after coming so far. After fighting, wiggling, jamming, and cleaning the game loaded to a sluggish menu. I fired up Bad Dudes and, well, it’s Bad Dudes. The games, once loaded, seem to work fine. However, the question I’m forced to ask myself is whether or not it’s worth the hassle for a $30 collection cartridge of games that can easily be had for between $5 and $9 individually. In fact, judging by current prices, four games of the collection can be purchased for about $20 all together with Buggy Popper being the exception. Never released outside of Japan, purchasing Buggy Popper (about $10) necessitates the a converter to play Famicom games on a US system (between $10 and $15). This means that the entire collection and an adapter would potentially run you about $40, about $10 more than this Retro-Bit cartridge. If the Retro-Bit version actually fit in my NES then it would be an easy recommendation for anyone looking for copies of these five games. As it stands, my recommendation depends on multiple factors. If you have a top loader NES and are looking for a space-saving way to add a few arcade classics to your collection, then this is an easy and cost-effective way to go about it. However, if you’re the proud owner of a front-loading NES then it’s a hard sell. For just a few dollars more you don’t have to jam stuff into your NES (unless you can confirm that you have a particularly robust 72-pin connector) and you have the added benefit of a Famicom adapter for use on other Famicom games. It’s disappointing that poor design has made a niche product even more niche, and I hope Retro-Bit remedies this in future reproduction NES cartridges. That said, if you have the ability to get the games running then they are the real deal. Swapping in my original copy of Bad Dudes, I was unable to tell the difference between it and the Retro-Bit version. Fans of these games will likely be delighted, but it’s a hard sell to anyone with a front-loader. It’s hard not to feel like this was just a test run with intentionally cheap games so that Retro-Bit could test the market without breaking the bank on licensing.