JTS18: Clock Work Aquario/Where's Wally

Clock Work Aquario

A new arcade game - yet from the past!? Clockwork Aquario was developed by Westone in 1991 on Sega’s System 18 hardware, and even went through multiple location tests in 1993. However, its release was cancelled, as the industry was then in the middle of the massive fighting-game boom. The protagonists are a boy, a girl, and a robot, brought to life with rich animation, warm pixel art, and impressively large sprites. One of the game’s unique highlights is its combat system: you can punch enemies to stun them, grab them, and then throw them at others—an inventive “grab-and-throw” style of attack. Thanks to the German publisher Strictly Limited Games, dedicated to the preservation and rediscovery of video games, this title has finally returned after more than 28 years! It even holds a Guinness World Record as the game with the longest time between the start of development and its official release.

What we bring today is the MRA file required to play it on the JTS18 core. The core has not been modified in any way to support this game. The scene member terminator2k2 originally wrote manually an MRA file for it and based on it we have added it to MAME (a local build) and from it we have exported the data in the format we need to our MRA generation workflow. We do not have the game fully working on MAME yet, but we will post our edits to the MAME team so they can complete them. The YT channel VideoGameEsoterica has also helped with this work and published a video about it I recommend watching.

Known issues: Playing it on the core has the sound balance problem we have seen on Moonwalker too. This is still an open issue on this core. There are a couple of scenes where graphics layers have priority problems.

Where's Wally?

In 1992, Sega released an arcade game based on the American picture book Where’s Wally? Unlike the books, Wally doesn’t just stand still—he runs around and hides on the screen! The game even includes “spot-the-difference” stages. Back then, the controls were just a trackball and a single button—simple on the surface, but with the short time limits and Wally’s tricky hiding spots, the challenge is tougher than you might expect.

Sound balance is imperfect on this System 18 title too, so some voices are a bit low. Work in progress!

Other Updates

• Laser gun games such as Laser Ghost, Bronx and N.Y.Captor are now playable on Analog Pocket directly, without the dock

• Fixed graphic problem and sound problem in tmnt2