INTERLUDE!

(what the hell is) XIAO MALI

Would like to review the past touched by it? Hours after each person must have a small box on the Taiwan machine, has a special emotion, that's right! It is a few years ago in the small Mary popular, than the times of its unique mechanism allows players to redouble their bonuses, the function of record scores, players can not interrupt their luck, playing simple is a major feature of it. ~ google translate vs gamtec. 200X

Xiao Mali (小瑪莉), as featured in 777 Casino - and yes that's the only reason this bit is here - is an amusement/ gambling game somewhat popular in taiwan; basically its a bit like a cross between roulette and a slot machine, probably intended as an inexpensive electronic substitute for one or both of those games. although its fairly likely that i am wrong. you can see some videos of one of these machines being played courtesy of "CHANGYUdotCOM", actually an exporter of various taiwanese game machines and cute pandas; if you poke around their website you can find a few more of these. all i'm going to say is if you like pikachu, and you like the vengaboys (and who the hell doesn't?), you'll find the machine of your dreams in there.

i have no idea if Xiao Mali exists under another name elsewhere in the world, although the existence of machines with spanish text on them (and the spanish text on related pages of changyu's site) does somewhat point to some kind of presence in spain or latin america. as for its taiwanese name, "xiao" straightforwardly means "small", and the characters used for "ma" and "li" appear to be mostly used for approximation of foreign words rather than their evidently obscure literal meanings referring to gemstones. together they can represent "mary" or "marie" among other names, but perhaps the commonest is "mario" (as in "super", not just any old mario) - it was the unofficial chinese name for the character most frequently used in taiwan, hence the many pirate famicom carts that refer to "mari", "mary", "mali", "malee" or other variants. many xiao mali machines exist with presumably unofficial mario artwork adorning them (or sometimes non-copyrighted characters that bear a certain resemblance) so i'd suppose they became known as "small mario" after this fact. The most common image by far is the one of Mario humiliating a turtle, but stuff like leopards and trains also seem to be used fairly often, and some exist with updated Mario imagery based on SMB3 or even Gamecube-era art.

Somewhat inevitably this game was brought to the Famicom (under the name, erm, "Xiao Ma Li") by a company called 内湖電子 "Nei-Hu Electronics" and later re-released by both Idea-Tek and Micro Genius (who called it "Bingo"). judging from certain similarities, Nei-Hu also had a hand in some other IT/MG games, but i'm totally not investigating all that. yet. there was also another version called "Dian Shi Ma Li" or "Big TV Mary Bar" as the cart label has it (which you can see on this page of the excellent japanese site Famicom no Tobira), credited to "Namco Corporation" (uhm) and that one actually features Mario. or some kind of rendition thereof. you may have ascertained that Namco most likey did not actually develop that game; it shows many similarities to Bit Corp's "Jackpot" (which is more a straight slot machine sim rather than a xiao ma li game) so it may be their work. but in the ROM graphics there's some kind of "Fortran" logo, which also appears in Jackpot (and Sheng Hen Pao aka Strip Poker) so i guess it's possible "Fortran" was a company developed all three games for Bit, or maybe it was just a pseudonym Bit intended to use before they hit on the genius idea of pretending to be Namco. Or maybe the games were all programmed in Fortran, just because someone bloody well felt like it. But it certainly explains the F on "Mario"'s cap. Regardless of who made them, though, both versions are fairly simplistic but reasonable simulations of the game, although I kinda prefer Dian Shi for its jovial bootleg Mario and its willingness to wander into the brighter ends of the NES' palette that Xiao entirely shies away from for some reason. and thats pretty much that.

But were these machines used for gambling, or not? To quote this article, "The Criminal Code, promulgated in 1935, prohibits public gambling and providing a place for gamblers to assemble for profit.". So if they were gambling machines, that would make them illegal to operate publicly, and indeed some of the pictures I've seen of machines cleverly concealed inside a briefcase or chest of drawers would indicate a need to hide them; then again, other machines are full-sized affairs and clearly too big for any of those kinds of shenanigans. and while some have coin trays, others appear to have ticket slots; indeed its possible the "coin" machines only operated on tokens. so i suppose there are a few possibilities here - either they operated legally like medal games (win tokens that can only be used to play the game again) or redemption games (exchange your tickets/tokens for a crap prize), OR semi-legally whereby you would exchange your tokens for cash after playing (similar to the way japanese pachinko halls operate), or just entirely illegally with the machines dispensing cash. it may well be the case that all of these things happened at one point or another; the last one above even appears to dispense prizes directly, but it's the only one i've seen with this capacity. anyway! that's all the speculation i'm going to engage in for now; if anyone actually knows about this stuff, an email or something would be much appreciated.

note ~ most of the images in this section were taken from the auctions of yahoo taiwan seller tracam0315, who is awesome.

INTERLUDE!

(what the hell is) KING TEC

Of these games' "publishers", Sun Green, Super Chip and Ming can all be fairly easily connected to one another; City Man's style is similar enough to Sun Green's before it that I wouldn't particularly hesitate to chuck them in too. Whether these are just related companies or all pseudonyms for one outfit, I'm not sure, but I suspect the latter.

King Tec, on the other hand, the "publisher" of Super Big 2, always struck me as different for some reason; it seemed that my suspicions were confirmed when a google search returned this page, evidence that a company called "King Tec Information" genuinely existed at one point, although the linked website was down. Archived versions of said site, though, revealed a DVR company evidently calling itself "Kin Tec", so I wrote it off as a typo/coincidence (after all, "King Tec" isn't a particularly unusual name) and probably just another pseudonym.

BUT it doesn't end there. Oh no. I thought it did, until I happened upon this post from Japanese Sega-related blog picopico i FEEL ALRIGHT!. There you will see photos of various unlicensed Mega Drive games, including the somewhat critically acclaimed and ass-rare beat 'em up Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan by Never Ending Soft Team. The currently available dump of this game has a 1999 copyright (whether this is a licensed reissue or a pirate, i dunno; it looks slightly dodgy but if a bootlegger went to the trouble to change the year they'd usually remove or change the company name as well), but a 1996 version exists too, and presumably that is the version pictured. Pictured, that is, with a bloody Kin Tec logo on its spine, the exact same logo used (with an extra G) for Super Big 2, just in case there was any doubt. Checking the earliest archived version of Kin Tec's website (the only version I can get to work properly) reveals a logo which, while not identical, does incorporate a star and a swooshy thing and could easily be an updated version of the one seen on the games. So it would appear that the company I found is indeed the same one involved with Super Big 2, and that same company published Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan as well, which I certainly did not see coming. i dunno if that game is related in any other way - it doesn't have any credits Shui Hu DOES actually have credits which you can see in this ending video, and shares staff with other games in this series, particularly Super Big 2. The sound engine also resembles that used in quite a few other unlicensed games, including Chuanpu RPGs, which happens to be stolen from Capt'n Havoc by Data East. it's also used in the MD version of Pokemon Stadium, the SNES version of which shares its own sound engine with that of the SNES Super Big 2. so! connections. definitely. thanks to codeman38 for pointing that out.

So here's a question. what the hell does all this mean for the rest of this page? King/Kin Tec was a real company, and they published at least two games; one developed by Chuanpu and one by Never Ending Soft. The former received a release under this GM-95 series, a series consisting (to my knowledge) entirely of games by Gamtec or Chuanpu, two developers which shared more than a few staff members and must have been quite closely related. So was the numbering system organised by Gamtec and Chuanpu, but the games released through multiple publishers? Or was King Tec the real company behind the whole series, operating under various pseudonyms? Or was it someone else entirely? Everything I find out about this just raises more bloody questions.