My Super A'Can just arrived from Taiwan. This powerful (comparable to Super Nintendo) console system looked very interesting, so I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. This sort of excitement brewed within me even while I knew deep in my mind that the origin of the box was Taiwan... land of bad videogames. After setting everything up I took a moment to check out the system. Its overall construction is rather cheap; everytime I remove a game cartridge I expect the port to break, and everytime I play a game I fear my one lonely controller pad will malfunction. The Super A'Can has support for some nice 3d effects, unfortunately the only decent use of these that I've seen so far seems to come from the system's A'Can logo sequence during initialization. In fact none of the games I own take any real advantages of the system into play; I suspect a great power is sleeping within the A'Can, quietly waiting to be exposed, but never given the chance. Panda Entertainment somehow licensed their PC gem Sango Fighter over to Funtech for production on the A'Can. Unfortunately the once exquisite fighter uses a very poor fight engine, meaning control, hit reactions, etc. are laughable, and the character voices, taken from Sango Fighter 2, have been misused in so many places it isn't even funny. I've played Sango Fighter on PC (DOS) since its release in 1993; I'm shamed to see such a horrible job done on the only legitimate console release of the game. Panda either had nothing to do with the programming (most likely) or they were pressured into making a cr@ppy version so Funtech could meet their release deadlines. Our friends (and I use the term very loosely) over at AV Artisan serve us some drek in the form of a blatant Sonic the Hedgehog ripoff which stars a baseball-bat wielding man running around swatting flying creatures dropping rocks on him, eagles, pipes that shoot balls, etc. Or, -trying- to swat them as the collision detection for our hero's attack is terrible whereas the enemy just has to breathe and they've got you knocked to hell. Collect baseballs while you run about, because much like in Sonic if you get hit you lose baseballs and are more vulnerable. For some reason you lose 10 baseballs whenever hit, which is just about every 2 seconds, and you can even be hit while doing your "fast dash" (i.e. spindash) move or while trying to power it up. Neat! There's a Puyo Puyo clone by AV Artisan also, which features some humorous folks battling it out for the purpose of keeping chickens out of the rain. Or, so I've gathered. This game actually isn't bad, or wouldn't be if the computer AI wasn't freaking impossible. I'm no master of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, but I can at least kick SOME butt. This game, I can't pass the second guy without an agonizing run of continues. I've never beat the third guy. Phooey. One game, Dragon Force, is an RPG similar to Shining Force. Downsides (eh) are the poor music... and the really bad (and needlessly large) fight sequence graphics... and the fact that your characters MISS the enemy about 75% of the time while the enemy very rarely MISSes... and ... and ... oh, forget it... I really won't review more games now. I have a headache. I paid a fair price for the system + the games I received, and everything was in extremely great shape and complete, so I'm happy. It just sucks to see what could be a very nice and enjoyable game system have a stupid, bland library of games from companies that don't care... and what they did to Sango Fighter is inexcusable. Funtech, you lot of dunces!
Thanks for the review How many games in total did you get? Also could you possibly make a video of them ? Yakumo
"This powerful (comparable to Super Nintendo) console system looked very interesting" Are you joking? "Super A'can is 16Bit console with 2 CPU 68000 10.6Mhz & 6502 3.58Mhz" You imagine, a 68000 is at least 30% faster than Snes cpu at same frequency . Or maybe the stats here are wrong : http://www.vanillaicemedia.com/acan/acan.htm
Great review! It's nice to have somebody finnaly give us the low down on A'Can. Nobody seemed to have much information, and that site fonzie linked to didn't tell much about the games.
... I received my A'Can through a friend in Taiwan. The systems are very hard to get ahold of, even in their country of origin. There's a rumored 20 games produced for the A'Can, of which I currently own 6. I am attempting to acquire more, but many game shop owners in the country know less about the system than I do. Unfortunately, I cannot take videos of the games as I don't have a way to do this. I could take photographs, but I'm running this system off of a Commodore 1702 monitor so the colors are a bit overdone (via front A/V leads). More game reviews, eh? Eehhh... There's "REBEL", similar in gameplay to the old Starship Troopers board game (turn-based gameplay, grid-based map movement). It features digitized photos of real people as the characters, and stagnant gameplay. Would be nicer if the robot suits you control had some actual movement to them instead of being stiff, and if the sounds and music weren't drab. Funtech's RPG "Son of Evil" (?) is a Final Fantasy clone with very, very nice music from what I've heard so far, but sub-par graphics and lowly animation. I haven't played it very far, y'know, because of the language barrier. I will do my best to acquire more games, if only in the vain attempt to locate one that actually does this system justice. Wish me luck, ok?
"His point was that it was more powerful than the Super Famicom." Haha, I forgot to add some smileys, sorry if it was a bit agressive without =P I just wondered if there were any kind of expansion bay on the acan system... Any idea?
The capabilities of this system are especially interesting, as I am a huge fan of the Sega Genesis (it's my favorite console). Having yet another capable, cartridge-based system in my hands is very nice, I'm just upset that the game library doesn't do much to highlight these capabilities. Yes, there is. On the right side of the system is an expansion bay for what the system's manual refers to as a CD-ROM unit. It is my guess they expected to release CD-ROM games for A'Can also. I've no proof of any games existing in this format. Damn! Now I have to do more research about this probably non-existant CD-ROM drive attachment. Fonzie, you rascal!
