Magincross

If you are familiar with the wild west of early nineties handheld gaming, you already know that the Watara Supervision was notorious for borrowing heavily from established franchises. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Magincross, a 1992 release developed by Thin Chen Enterprise (also known under their Sachen label). Even the title itself is a dead giveaway; it is a thinly veiled attempt to cash in on the popularity of the legendary Macross series. Rather than trying to innovate, the developers essentially created a direct, heavily compromised clone of the Famicom’s Choujikuu Yousai Macross, squeezing a fast-paced horizontal shoot-em-up onto a budget console that was fundamentally ill-equipped to handle it.

Despite being a rather barebones arcade-style blaster, the game comes packaged with a surprisingly elaborate, albeit completely derivative, sci-fi plotline. According to the manual, the year is 2400 AD, and the alien Saya Empire has begun infiltrating Earth by secretly replacing military personnel with Extra Intelligent Beings, or EIBs. To combat this silent invasion, human scientists have developed the Biochemical Defender - a massive, transforming robotic combat suit that you must pilot through several stages of side-scrolling alien onslaught. It is classic space opera fluff, designed to give some dramatic weight to what is otherwise a standard exercise in manoeuvring to the right and holding down the fire button.

The core gameplay is where Magincross truly clashes with the hardware it is running on. Shoot-em-ups rely entirely on precision, fast reflexes, and clear visibility to dodge incoming enemy fire. Unfortunately, the Supervision’s famously sluggish four-shade greyscale LCD turns the whole affair into a blurry, headache-inducing ordeal. As your ship scrolls forward and enemy sprites flood the screen, severe ghosting and sprite flicker make it incredibly difficult to track the action. Interestingly, just like the Macross game it mimics, your craft actually has the ability to transform between different vehicular and mech modes mid-flight. However, players quickly realise that triggering this transformation makes your sprite substantially larger, effectively doubling your hitbox and making you an easy target in a game where you already cannot properly see the bullets heading your way.

Adding to the somewhat disjointed feel of the experience is the developer’s curious approach to the audio. Rather than providing satisfying crunching or blasting sound effects when you destroy an enemy vessel, the game opts entirely for continuous background music. While the looping chiptune is reasonably catchy and makes good use of the Supervision's metallic audio chip, navigating a frantic space battle in total silence - save for the soundtrack - robs the combat of any real impact or feedback. Magincross is ultimately a fascinating historical oddity; it is a game that tries its hardest to deliver a blockbuster arcade experience on a piece of technology that was best suited for static puzzle games. It remains a testament to the sheer ambition, and perhaps the misguided optimism, of budget developers in the 8-bit era.