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Witty Apee
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©2006-2009 taizou.
not affiliated with or endorsed by bit corporation, UMC, gamtec or whoever (if anyone) owns the gamate rights these days
*note: the screenshots on this page are in greyscale for a reason that isn't worth explaining. i'm certainly not in possession of a Gamate with a non-green screen, anyway.

I dunno, Apee doesn't strike me as particularly witty. Maybe you have to know him.

The game, anyway? It's a Lode Runner clone. And it has fruit in it, instead of gold. I have to admit I'm not overly familiar with Lode Runner - I know roughly how it works, but unlike Cube-Up I don't know if this version is ruined by some massive oversight. I'm going to say it isn't, though. So you just run around collecting fruit and digging holes, until you collect all the fruit, at which point you have to pick up a diamond for some reason.

This menu is worth mentioning just because of the absolutely bizarre way it's controlled. You have to press Select to cycle through the menu items,and use A and B to switch between options. The D-pad isn't used at all. And you start the game by pressing Start, logically enough, but it only works when you're on the "Music" option. Pain in the arse, it is.

So it's a clone of Lode Runner, basically. But it's interesting! Sort of. Because, while the music, level design, controls and enemies are pretty much what you'd expect from a low-quality early Gameboy game, the main character seems to be straight off the Atari 2600. His sprite is composed of "pixels" that take up a block of four actual Gamate pixels, and he makes a sort of crude beeping noise as he walks along. I have to wonder if Bit were intentionally going for a retro aesthetic on the main character in contrast to the rest of the world, maybe in reference to their history as an Atari 2600 developer... or maybe they just really couldn't be arsed animating a proper 16x16 sprite. Ah, the mysteries of the Gamate.

Scans

(click for hi-res versions)