Shazam's Unlicensed Video Game Blog: June 2013

A little break between the scans I'm getting up at the pace of a narcoleptic snail. So this is rather interesting; Sachen has had several different labels on the back of many of their Famicom cartridges. Sometimes it's the blue warning label like on their NES carts, but most of the time it's something far more interesting...In this case, advertisements of their other products. Joy Van (before the merge with Sachen) primarily did this with their games, but Sachen did do it themselves on occasion, and as I've been browsing and collecting these games on Taiwanese sites I've been finding more and more variations of these labels. Here are the ones I've found thus far, starting with scans of the ones I do have.

First off we have some later Sachen labels. I did post a lot of these in an older blog post, but they were crappy camera pictures. The shooting series covers games involving, well, shooting rather than actual shoot-em-up games. The white and blue label just basically covers the most recent (at the time) Sachen games in Chiense, though I notice that certain games weren't given their proper Chinese names yet (such as Olympic I.Q. which was later given the title "I.Q. 奧運") The adventure series covers action games and platformers (don't ask me why Locksmith would fit in this category rather than the other two.) Notice Puff Kid (what Q-Boy was originally known as) being listed there as well as some games being labelled with a different TC/SA number (yes, I'm aware I'm repeating old information; consider it a refresher.) And the "Lntellectual" series lists their puzzle and board games, and features the mysterious and unreleased Bridge game.

And here we have two Joy Van adverts, an early Sachen game list, and an advert for Jurassic Boy! Each of the Joy Van games (to my knowledge) all got advertisements on the back of original print Joy Van carts. The two at the top cover TC-007 and TC-009, Master Chu and Galactic Crusader/Incantation. The Sachen game list has a mixture of Joy Van and Sachen games, probably done shortly after the company merge. The last one's pretty self-explanatory, but it's one of the rare cases where they did this late in the company's NES/FC library.

And two more Joy Van adverts consisting of TC-008 and TC-010, Joyvan Kid/Metal Fighter and Mahjong Trap. Mahjong Trap (a really hard mahjong solitaire game, sorta a precursor to Happy Pairs) was the last Joy Van game before Sachen bought them out, and boy what a game to end their legacy on. Their very next game (TC-011, Challenge of the Dragon/Chinese Kungfu) and all later TC-### games feature the other labels previously shown.

This image is actually from another fellow MLX, but I figured it's be interesting to put up. First one is the aforementioned early Sachen game listing but in Chinese, and the other two are different revisions of their later Chinese game list.

Now let's move on to the Joy Van adverts I've found images of over time. This one is of TC-001, Jovial Race. This was taken from a Ruten auction for a Joyvan Kid cart (that I didn't grab, sadly.) For some reason I love Jovial Race; maybe it's the sorta old-America feel and that it's a pretty damn fine (if a tad campy) clone of a fun arcade game.

This one is of TC-002, Hidden Chinese Chess. This was taken from a complete scan of Jovial Race on the old Project Sachen website. The game itself is a Banqi game (an odd variant of Xiangqi, or Chinese Chess) with a game-breaking glitch in it. Just try to do a perfect match with save states and you'll see what I mean by that.

Next is this low-res image of TC-004, Little Red Hood. This one came from the now-dead er.quam.net place that had a bunch of images of different unlicensed NES stuff. It was featured on the back of a Silent Assault/Raid cartridge.

And speaking of Silent Assault, here's an advert of the game (TC-005) taken from an auction for a loose Little Red Hood cart. Seems like the latter half of Joy Van's games set up their ads in the same mold (such as the earlier four from my collection.) Kinda a shame that they didn't continue this or that other companies didn't do this sort of thing as well.

And that concludes this post! Sadly I haven't come across any ads for Twin Eagle (TC-006) or Sidewinder (TC-003) yet. I don't think the Galactic Crusader variation, Papillion Gals (or Padillion Gais according to its cart) got an advert since it was a later revision probably made after the merge. More scans (including some more Famicom Sachen stuff) soon to come...Hopefully!