Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 (Switch)

 In real life, coin pushers are a hated scourge, the disease that has overrun and essentially killed off everything fun and interesting in the UK's seaside arcades. But when I noticed there was a series of videogame adaptations of the concept, my curiosity was piqued: how would you turn such a simple concept, that's so reliant on physicality and prizes into a videogame that is inherently unable to offer either? The price was a mere pittance, so I gave the newest one a look.

 

Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 does it by having a simple board game happening at the top of the screen, with the coin pushing happening at the bottom. In the board game part, there's a guy journeying to visit the 52 stations of the Tokaido, and he moves according to dice that you win from the coin pusher game below. There's special spaces along the way, like a palanquin that'll carry the guy an extra distance, baskets of coins that rain into the pusher, enemy spaces, and more.

 

Enemies stop the journey while you fight them. You see, you don't drop coins into a slot to get them into the coin pusher, you shoot them from a gun! So when there's an enemy, you point the game upwards and try to kill the enemy before time runs out and they leave on their own. Beat them, and a bunch of treasures will drop into the pusher. There's two different upgrade shops in the game: one where you buy upgrades with your coin supply, and another where you buy upgrades with magatama. When you reach one of the stations, all the treasures you collected since the last one get turn into magatama at a rate of one for every four treasures.

 

As well as coins, dice, and treasures, there's also koban (you know, those oval-shaped gold coins, like what Meowth has on its head). Because while you're playing, there's a jackpot counter that increases for every coin you shoot. Get seven koban, and jackpot mode activates, during which coins and treasures will constantly rain down from the 'bove, until the number of coins that's fallen has reduced the jackpot counter to zero. If you're smart (and lucky), you'll eventually be playing in an almost constant state of jackpot mode, which is nice.

 

Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 is an odd little game. It's cheap, and I think it'll take about thirty to forty hours to complete. Furthermore, despite being an adaptation of a (low level) gambling machine conceptually, there's not much in the way of dark patterns in its design: it actually has an end, there's no real money shop or any extra stuff to buy after you have the game at all, in fact, and there's no imperative to check in every day. There's unlockables, both the aforementioned upgrades as well as a few optional cosmetics, but you'll have unlocked them all after a few stages. If the game sounds interesting to you, pick it up. It's not anything spectacular, but it's a decent enough way to semi-mindlessly occupy your hans while watching TV or whatever.

The Great Waldo Search (Mega Drive)

 Under normal circumstances, I'm a defender of short games. One of my most-loved games is the Mega Drive port of Altered Beast, and with a bit of practice, you can reliably get through it in under ten minutes. Something a little different, however, is The Great Waldo Search: the first time I loaded it up, I'd seen the ending in a similarly short time. I didn't measure it, but I was sure it was under twenty minutes. Then a few days later, I did it again to take screenshots, and the time stamps in the file names of those screenshots revealed my completion time: eight minutes from title screen to ending!

 

Thanks to the American obsession with pointlessly changing the names of things, it might not be immediately obvious from the title that this is a game based on the Where's Wally books (or possibly, the TV cartoon that was also based on them, since there's a beepy-boop over of that show's theme song. Rather than just put Wally into a generic platform game, I can say that they at least tried something a bit more interesting in attempting to turn the "finding stuff in a busy picture" gimmick of the books into a videogame. Unfortunately, I think the developers were a little ahead of their time on this.

 

The problem is that the technology isn't really up to the task. It's not just the Mega Drive's fault, but I think this kind of game is one of very few that really needs to have a HD display to work. Remember all those hidden object games that old women were playing about ten to fifteen years ago? They wouldn't have worked on an old standard definition TV, either. So, there's a few stages, in which you're tasked to find Wally himself and a scroll belonging to his friend Wizard Whitebeard. There's also points items and clocks, to give you extra time (as the time limit is your only foe). Wally's dog Woof is also there, taking you to a magic carpet flying, bone-collecting bonus stage (bone-us stage) when you find him. Come to think of it, you could eschew Woof and finish the game even more quickly if you don't care about points.

 

All except the final stage are fantasy-themed, and somewhat oddly, most are also battle-themed. There's a war between two factions of wizards/monks/cultists, people fighting against dragons in a cave system, an arabian nights-type stage, and a village defending themselves against giants. The final stage is a "trick" one, similar to one seen in the books, where there's many Wallies, and you have to find the real one, identified by his striped socks. There's little bits of looping animation in the stages, but nothing actually moves around, which might have made things more interesting/frustrating. I assume it would have been difficult to have that many sprites moving around the screen at once, though, and presumably everything that isn't a findable item is part of the background.

 

The Great Waldo Search isn't a game I can recommend. It's absurdly easy, it's not interesting or exciting in any way, and the best thing that can really be said about it is that at least it won't bore you for a long time. I'm curious as to how many copies it sold, I can't imagine there were many happy customers paying probably £40 for this. The closest I can find to a release date is December 1992, which adds even more absurdity: Sonic 2 had been released just the previous month!