Arcade Talk 2 - Fake Trax

WARNING: FOR EDUCATIONAL AND MILDLY HUMOROUS PURPOSES. I DON'T MEAN ANY BAD THINGS, THIS IS FOR FUN. ALL CREDIT TO THE ONES WHOSE REAL GAMES AND BOOTLEGS SHOW UP ON HERE.

 HellllOOOOOOO and welcome back to Arcade Talk, the article where I blab on about stuff no one cares about. That is, only people who care about early 80s bootlegs will care. Anyhoo, today's topic is a bootleg hack of 1981's Crush Roller, or Make Trax. This bootleg was released, or at least made, 3 years after the original game. Today's topic is Painter, released in 1984 by Monshine!

Ooohhh, did I say Painter? I think I meant Paintei. Yeah, MAME has issues with the graphics (this'll be real important soon, hopefully this will make people aware of this thing to wanna get a better version with correct graphics. Also, sorry about the border, credit to the original artist of course, I didn't realize it was there.)

So I pop in a coin and this is what I get. Weirdly enough this is credited to an "Elsys Software", also in 1984. I can only assume this is made by Elsys Software, and Monshine released it to the world. At least this spells the game title correctly.

The game, ladies and gents. Crush Roller combined with Pac-Man is a very strange choice (and drags the game down a bit in my opinion because I don't really like Pac-Man as much as I used to), but hey, someone thought it was a good idea. The original Roller is replaced with an.. octopus thing, running away from ladybugs.

Let's talk about the scenery for a bit. We go from the animals that run amok gleefully in the original, to a blue frog, a badly drawn horse, an even more poorly drawn Fred Flintstone, and some.. thing, on a tree. I mean, hey, to each their own, but it's a little silly.

Things do show up like the original to hinder your progress of painting all the maze, but of course there was no connection between the art and the things actually going after the octopus. Game design, we call it!

The big red squares take a bite out of Pac-Man's gameplay by turning the octopus yellow and allowing it to defeat the ladybugs (the original had paint rollers that allowed you to defeat the enemies). You really have to save these though for the other things coming out of the art.

Did you catch all that? Great! Now do that for two more rounds while items with wildly inaccurate scores pop up and the music which is so poorly programmed a sound channel notably cuts out when you play the game constantly blares at you! At least it's a catchy tune. 

The gameplay here barely shakes it up, and it barely did in the original too. Level 2. the enemies get a little faster, level 3, YOU get faster, the little dingdongs coming out of the art become more annoying..

Alright, what's Level 4 got in terms of difficulty?

Oh neat! A bonus round! That's something the original didn't do!

O-ohh.. oh sweet lord.

Yeah, this is what I meant by the graphics not being 100% perfect. 

From what I could gather, our octopus friend has decided he's tired of being a paintei and goes after the aforementioned indescribable block of miscellaneous graphics. He drops assorted goodies on its head, causing the mess of graphics to turn into a bigger octopus with a frown on its face. From there, the round goes on, dropping stuff onto a pile of graphical issues while a phantom clock decides when the round is up.

And ladies and gents, that was 1984's Painter--or Paintei, sorry, by Monshine and Elsys Software: a mess of graphical and aural issues while still being a fairly decent bootleg.

See you all next time on.. uh.. this.. site. Sure, why not.