Month: April 2017

Hey, every game designer has to make a Monopoly clone at some point, right? This was mine. Not much else to say about it, except that at least in Vlooi Spel, you played as a flea and paid in MILLIONS, not THOUSANDS. Monopoly is for pussies.

Strategy! Agility! This game claimed to have it all. But its ambition became the downfall of the K-Gof platform. After the worldwide success of Bafse Fighter II and Bafse Fighter III, K-Gof went all out and released Generator Defect, a 4-player game that was so complex and deep that no one could play it at all. While one player was playing a screwdriver trying to repair a broken generator, the other players tried to sabotage the plan by moving cogs around and stopping other cogs from rotating.

Anticipation for this title was enormous and millions of copies were produced even before release. When the negative reviews came in, people stopped buying, and K-Gof sales dropped rapidly. This event lead directly to the North American Video Game Crash of 1993, and the K-Gof platform never recovered. Despite early successes and several classic releases, the K-Gof platform fell into decline and was quickly forgotten.

Serpent Game was the launch title for the K-Gof platform. Much like Snake would do many years later for the Nokia 3310, Serpent Game helped kickstart the budding Game Boy-competitor. Its simplistic gameplay, about a Snake trying to avoid getting hit by spikes controller by a second player, was enjoyed by young and old alike.

Later, its success was eclipsed by the vastly superior Bafse Fighter series, which would come to dominate the K-Gof platform. However, many K-Gof fanatics still hold a special place in their heart for Serpent Game, because it will always remain their first true K-Love.

Bafse Fighter III further refined the gameplay introduced by Bafse Fighter I and Bafse Fighter II, but also boldly introduced a completely new roster of fighters, only keeping fan-favourite Batsher from previous installments. It also refined the third-player mechanic from Bafse Fighter II by reducing the overpowered gun to a more balanced fist fighter.

Bafse Fighter III also contained one of gaming’s most enigmatic and enduring secrets: the mysterious “Fighter 1”. As you can see from the picture below, Bafse Fighter III only allowed you to play with 3 of the 4 playable characters from the start: Spider Blubber, Flying Demon and of course Batsher. The numbering of the characters however implies a mysterious first fighter that was never found – not even 20 years after it was first released!

This mysterious character, dubbed “Fighter Wan” by fans of the series in reference to the legendary game Super Kip Wan, remains a mystery to this day.

A fourth installment in the Bafse Fighter series was later cancelled because of the catastrophic failure of flagship title Generator Defect.

Bafse Fighter II for K-Gof greatly expanded the roster of Bafse Fighter I to four playable characters.  It replaced the unpopular Spider Demon character (arachnophobes rejoice!) by Eye Killer and Slower. However, it also introduced another gameplay feature in that a third player could also take control of a gun mounted on top of the K-Gof, allowing for even more frantic multiplayer action. Crazy!

Bafse Fighter I was the first K-Gof game in the Bafse Fighter series. It featured 3 baddies that could meet each other behind a muddy A6 plastic window for glorious glorious combat.

Here’s the full roster of Bafse Fighter I, which left Street Fighter crying for its mother back in the days:

K-Gof was not really a game handheld so much as an ideology. The ideology being that if you stuck a bunch of cardboard cards in a very small space and put handles everywhere, gameplay would suddenly emerge. And truly, for children, it did. The K-Gof platform was released as a bundle with the launch title Serpent Game I, but only really reached full maturity with the release of Bafse Fighter I.

If you’ve never played the classic card game Milles Bornes or 1000km, you’re not really missing out, but you’re also not in pole position to understand the rules of this super-hardcore variant of the Milles Bornes.

Featuring different road types, multiple ways to block other players, combat, war, hundreds of cards and no rulebook at all, this game is basically impossible to grasp for everyone, including me.

Here’s a sneak peak. I’d stick with Conquest, to be honest.

In an ill-fated attempt to replicate the success of Super Kip Sega 28-bit, Maan Studio went back to its hit franchise and made a sequel. Even though the graphics got a much-needed next-gen treatment, the game never managed to quite reach the heights of its predecessor. Maybe if it was released in another century, it would have had a shot at THAT century’s “Game of the Century” award, but Super Kip 28-bit already received the award for the 20th century and had no plans of giving it over.

The game did feature a bunch of really really cool bosses though. Take a look:

If you’re still up for more epic platformer action, you could take a look at Prins or Sega Sonic The Hetgehog.

Once again I used an external artist (in this case, my cousin Peter) to hide the fact that I couldn’t draw. I don’t think we ever made any actual rules for this game, but the cards sure looked fun to play with. They looked so fun that we didn’t even bother cutting them from the paper.