Title: Technos Arcade 1
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Late 2021
Prelude
This was the first Arcade cartridge! Also now a Legacy cart, sadly. Still, this is a decent assortment of Technos Arcade games, including a bunch never released on consoles via Arcade Archives. A bunch of these are on the Technos Super Pocket, but not all of them!
Presentation
Another Arcade Cart, another batch of games with differing specs and capabilities. Luckily, Blaze emulated all of these pretty well, outside of one which is notorious for being bad even on bigger emulators, but we’ll get to that game later. Otherwise the games look crisp, sound great, and scale nicely. The TATE games here look good on an EXP’s Tate mode, even if one of em will wreck your hands if you try to play it that way. Still, two of the Tate games are pretty casual on the fingers, so you don’t have to worry about discomfort with those.
Gameplay
We know the drill, on with the games!
Minky Monkey– You have this very bizarre looking guy going between poles to get fruit and match it with the appropriate box, trying to outrace a Monkey before they can drop the fruit and ruin your problem solving skills. Seems pretty simple, but the game gets incredibly nasty real quick and sometimes the Monkey can be right next to the fruit as it spawns, making it outright impossible to not lose a life depending on where things spawn. If you run into the monkey or he messes up your matching by ruining the fruit, you die, so this game has a pretty brutal loop to it.
Despite the difficulty though, I oddly enjoyed this? Yeah, it’s outright unfair by stage 3, but you at least have infinite continues, and there are occasional items to nab that can turn the tides for a little while. If you get a good scoring session in, you may feel satisfied with this one, though that doesn’t mean you’ll be playing this one for too terribly long. At the very least, I can at least feel like I’m doing something, unlike a certain game up ahead.
Mysterious Stones– This is a very fun one! You are a professor, exploring some ruins to find mysterious stones. In this game, you just go in and knock things over, trying to get chain reactions as you find your way out of each room while racking up enough points from treasure as possible. Each stage is an assortment of rooms, and the game is surprisingly addictive, with a trial and error loop and a great system of score bonuses that make riskier plays very rewarding.
See, each room has an assortment of containers, usually eggs or something you can kick around. If you kick the eggs into each other, there’s a chance they can drop some really high-value point items. However, enemies are relentless, and the eggs can just roll back into you and leave you open for an attack. Thus, do you take it safe and slow to avoid getting hit, or do you go for the risky kicks and rack up those points? Not to mention the time limit you’re on before the room implodes and every item in it is gone, so you’ve gotta just stay on a good pace if you hope to make it out OK. And that was the big factor in why this game was a big surprise to me! I’m used to games with good point bonuses, but seldom any from 84 or before, and certain not any from any Non-Namco/Konami games. Technos really made an addictive little formula here, and I find the more relaxed nature of this game the perfect fit for the EXP tate mode. Hardly any button presses, just moving and kicking for some plain old treasure collecting fun!
Battle Lane Vol 5– This game is just bad to play. I don’t think it has much to do with the DIP switch settings either, since I’m pretty convinced even if you had everything on the easiest options, this game would be vicious. Here’s the deal, you go forward and shoot everything in your way on your bike, right? Sorta like a vertical shooter. Problem is, this game just pummels you with split-second reactions right off the bat, and it never gets any easier. Shooting enemies will net you points and help a bit, but even plugging in a rapid fire controller into my VS didn’t get me too far in this one.
After twenty minutes of consecutive attempts, I only barely missed clearing the first level, and I didn’t have any fun with the memorization I learned along the way. Just the wrong kind of Arcade brutality that I’m glad we learned to move past.
Mania Challenge– A wrestling game! And honestly for an early one, this ended up being decent. You fight foes, wrestle them on the mat, then hope to pin them down after weakening them enough. Of course, they can weaken you too, and eventually you’ll not be able to survive their pin. A very simple two button game that there really isn’t much else to besides just being an early wrestling game with a bit of a high learning curve. This ain’t Fire Pro, but it probably helped set some seeds in motion for stuff like that to later take off.
Block Out– The game of the cart, hands down. Think Tetris, but with a whole square layer needing to be filled out VS a line, along with being able to get bigger points by having the stack rise and clearing out multiple layers at once. The 3D perspective and many rotation buttons can be a bit of a struggle point at first, but as soon as it clicks this one really, really shines, and I’ve gladly spent two hours just pumping new high scores into this one.
Seriously, this is the absolute best score chasing puzzle game on Evercade, and is a must play if you have a Tetris void in your heart for the system. This is a really good alternative and I’d argue a great reason to buy the Technos Super Pocket; Block Out is that good, and if you can get to grips with the depth and perspective, you’ll have an equal amount of fun.
Double Dragon II: The Revenge– Wait, where’s the first game? Well the first game was notorious for bad slowdown and I guess Blaze didn’t want to put it out like that, so they skipped to the sequel that looks almost the god damn same. Seriously, for 1988 I’m actually bewildered at how much this sequel looks like a copypasta of the original. But no, this is still a unique game, even if it follows a lot of the same tropes and similar aspects of the original arcade game.
Now you go to a Renegade style attack system, with one button attacking ahead of you, and the other attacking behind you. It feels a little weird coming from the other two arcade games, but you quickly get used to it, and how it really doesn’t do much to impact your moves at all. They aren’t really stronger or easier to pull off with this directional system, but rather more annoying, and arguably nerfed; bye bye, overpowered elbow smash!
Otherwise, you have a set of brawler stages to go through, with some new locales not featured in the original game, and some that look very similar to the point they might as well be a recolor. The final boss gets incredibly weird, and the two player co-op returns and makes for pretty decent fun, but otherwise you have yourselves a pretty average brawler. A lot of the early Double Dragon games weren’t particularly outstanding, but there’s a reason most people prefer the NES version that actually introduced unique environments over this very safe arcade sequel.
Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone– So take the ideas from the first two Double Dragon games, and completely dump them out the window, as we now have this weird sequel that is very different from the prior games! Maybe a bit too different, since while you’re back to normal attacks, the game is incredibly laggy with the controls, and that is not an emulation fault. Double Dragon 3 really is a mess of a game to control, and while it definitely has superior music to the previous installments, better Arcade music does not equal a better game.
Co-Op returns yet again, along with the weird ability to buy in-game upgrades with real world money. Luckily, that also means you can credit feed to enhance your health and make the earlier part of the game trivially easy, so if you want to just breeze through this clunky romp with a friend that is still a very viable option. Trying to 1CC Double Dragon 3 however, is a nightmare, and the game absolutely wants you dead with no mercy. The level design is a mess, the enemy spawns are a mess, everything under the sun feels like a mess, and outside of its unique presentation, this really has no benefit to being played at all outside of for completion sake.
Oh yeah, I mentioned earlier there was a game notorious for being bad on Emulators, and that was referring to this title. Not in terms of the playability or any of the problems I mentioned above, but a very bizarre anti-piracy flag that is very hard to crack. Randomly, the game can just jump to a screen yelling at you about it! This is incredibly rare and I didn’t have it happen to me, but someone I know in the Evercade community streaming this from his VS did have it happen. Nothing Blaze can really do about it, and it is such a rare feat you don’t need to worry about it especially if you rely on save states, but boy does that add a cherry on top of the mess that is Double Dragon 3.
The Combatribes– This is the brawler to play on the cart. You wanted something more liken Double Dragon, but with polish and fun combos? Well, Combatribes is still rather simplistic, but it feels just like how a Double Dragon 3 should have been. Three player co-op, fun combos and techniques, and stages that are just the right length. Not much else you need besides that and a desire to go beat up people.
This really is just a lot of fun to play, and even has an interesting twist with the end boss that makes it worth playing through even through credit feeding. Of course, it still manages to be a great time to try and 1CC on your own, play through with a friend or two, or just pop in long enough to get your mind off stressful, real world anxieties. This one is more focused on the combat, and it just plays really darn well, easily being the best brawler on the entire cartridge. Seriously, swinging a big foe around in a circle never felt so good!
Conclusion
Ultimately, Technos Arcade 1 is a fine assortment of classic Technos games. A bunch of em were never reissued before this cartridge, and for some like Minky Monkey or Battle Lane, I can absolutely see why. Still, the true gems like Blockout, Mysterious Stones and Combatribes all really shine here, and several of the titles also provide an excellent excuse for some Evercade VS action.
With that said, I definitely do not recommend seeking out this one at aftermarket prices; like the Technos Console cart, this was mostly made redundant by the Technos Super Pocket, although a few gems I like here didn’t make the cut. Still, Blockout and Mysterious Stones did, and since those are easily the best games on the cart, that’s a very viable and recommended option for playing one of Evercade’s best puzzle games and a fun obscure vertical scorechaser. If you get lucky with the cart prices though, definitely nab this if you’re a co-op player.
I give Technos Arcade 1 a 7 out of 10.
