Puzzle

Oh, slide-puzzles. No one in the world likes you. No one in the world ever liked you. You belong at the bottom of a child’s party favor bag, there simply to add weight and anticipation with the rest of your dollar store kind like the Chinese finger trap. Yet, here I am, with a prototype of an NES slide-puzzle game. It is not a new acquisition for me; this Puzzle prototype has been sitting on the shelf untouched for years. Previously lost and forgotten, the pitiful thing reached out to me when I was walking by this week, and I blew off the dust. Gave it new life.

This was my first proto. The only one I could afford in my formidable high school years. I can’t remember exactly how much currency was exchanged, and to whom, but if it were over $20, I’d never publicly admit it. I must have thought that the prototype was broken or something because I don’t ever remember playing it before writing this article.

Puzzle is, technically, a Famicom prototype. You may remember from our exhaustive FAQ, Famicom-to-NES adapters were used for early NES game releases, such as Gyromite, as there were plenty of Famicom boards to go around at the time and not as many of the NES. So, what you have here in this Puzzle prototype is a 60-pin Famicom board hooked to a 72-pin adapter, because NES consoles can only take 72-pin games. For publisher AVE, things were a little screwier – this NINA NES adapter is one of AVE’s own patented devices that they used to circumvent the NES lockout chip.

Why would this American Video Entertainment prototype use a Famicom board? Like all great American companies, AVE barely produced anything new themselves – they simply got others to do the work, like the Asians! Quick and easy AVE, as an unlicensed game company, made a habit of rebranding games from the Orient. That’s putting it delicately. Another way of saying it: dudes jacked Sachen and those terrible multi-title games and stamped their company logo on top. Puzzle was developed by Idea-Tek, a Hong Kong company, which probably explains the use of a 60-pin Famicom board. AVE simply jammed this board into an adapter to make this NES prototype work.

I am no expert on Puzzle or its history of versions and revisions. I can say for certain, though, that the following puzzles that are not featured on this prototype:

If you go through the many various ROM dumps of the game, it’s easy to see that Puzzle has had a number of variations. This prototype is no different.

Level 1 : 1