Matta Blatta

If you are delving into the murky depths of the Watara Supervision library, you are bound to stumble across some truly perplexing titles. Matta Blatta, released for the handheld in 1992, is exactly the sort of curious obscurity that defined the system. Interestingly, the game did not actually originate on the Supervision; it began its life in the late 1980s as a budget title for Atari 8-bit home computers, published by Firebird. When B.I.T.S. and Watara decided to resurrect it for their cut-price, monochromatic Game Boy rival, they essentially ported a rudimentary arcade experience onto a piece of hardware that was actively hostile to fast-paced action.

Mechanically speaking, the game is a straightforward, horizontal side-scrolling shoot-'em-up. You are placed at the helm of a solitary spacecraft, tasked with manoeuvring your way down a seemingly endless, futuristic corridor. There is no sweeping narrative or complex level design to speak of here. Instead, the gameplay revolves around pure arcade endurance, throwing sequential waves of alien enemies your way. Each wave introduces a new adversary with its own distinct, and often highly erratic, flight path and firing pattern. Once you clear one swarm, the next immediately begins to close in, forcing you to constantly adapt your positioning and timing.

If you want to survive the onslaught, you have to rely on a modest arsenal of defensive and offensive upgrades. As you blast your way through the enemy squadrons, you can collect power-ups that temporarily enhance your ship's capabilities. Some capsules will boost your overall movement speed and the ferocity of your forward firepower, while others provide a much-needed temporary shield. Because the combat arena is essentially a flat, featureless tunnel, successfully collecting these power-ups and managing your shield duration becomes the sole strategic element in an otherwise entirely reflex-driven exercise.

However, the true adversary in Matta Blatta is not the alien armada, but the Watara Supervision’s infamous LCD screen. Shoot-'em-ups require crisp visuals and precise hitboxes so players can weave through curtains of enemy fire. Unfortunately, the Supervision suffers from such severe screen ghosting that any fast movement turns the display into a smeared, blurry mess of four-shade greyscale. As your ship darts around the screen and enemy projectiles flood the corridor, it becomes genuinely difficult to distinguish a lethal bullet from the ghostly trail of a dying enemy. It turns the simple act of dodging into a frustrating test of eyesight and guesswork.

The audio presentation does little to soothe the headache, offering the standard array of abrasive, metallic crunches and shrill blips that characterise the console's internal speaker. It is a harsh, repetitive soundscape that perfectly matches the punishing nature of the gameplay. Matta Blatta on the Supervision is a fascinating, if entirely flawed, piece of gaming history. It is a budget port of a budget computer game, squeezed onto a handheld system that simply could not handle the speed required to make it enjoyable. Yet, for collectors of obscure nineties technology, it remains a brilliant example of developers stubbornly trying to force arcade-style action onto the most unaccommodating hardware imaginable.