I had the real Nu Pogodi as a kid, and once invited half of my class and served them lemonade while they were taking turns to play it. It was a big thing to have in Bulgaria, and the rest of the eastern block in the 80's.
When growing up in Warszawa, I played some great and complex fantasy/science fiction games. Just as with Stanisław Lem I figured they were part the unique Polish grass-roots creativity (they were pure paper, i.e no expensive molded plastic, and sold cheaply; in comparison all the cool Western stuff like the fancy ZX Spectrum was sold in special "dollar shops" that only took USD)
The Polish original -- http://i.imgur.com/w7Q9aw1.jpg (a great game of space trading with a supply/demand system, space combat and a unique feature where you could predict future events and act upon them). Many years later I found all those cheap games were translations of American cheap games, published in the "Ares" magazine: http://i.imgur.com/islQ8gW.png
Nintendo went to great lengths to acquire publishing rights for this game. Tetris basically established the whole handheld gaming market, it was the Game Boy's killer app.
Ah, Nu Pogodi. The handheld everyone played in rural Poland around 1990. This one mimics the look-and-feel of the original rather well, but, sadly, I have yet to see a clone that faithfully implements the gameplay of the original.
From memory (remember that I was only 6 back then, so I might have screwed up some things):
* There were two levels of difficulty, denoted "игра А" and "игра B" ("game A" and "game B"). The A version was easier: in it, the bottom-left roost was disabled and eggs would never fall off of it. In game B, all four roosts were in use.
* There were multiple stages of the game:
- Score 0 to 5: only one egg falling at any given time, the next egg appears only when you catch the previous one
- Score 6 to 20 (?): two eggs active at any given time
- Score 21 to 50 (?): three eggs active at any given time
And so on, up to a limit of, I think, six or so at a time, at certain thresholds. Also, at certain score thresholds the game speed would accelerate. I think this didn't start to be noticeable until the score of 200 or so; by the time you got to score 500 falling eggs would become moderately fast, by score 700 quite fast, and getting past 800 or even 900 would require your fingers to be extremely snappy.
* If I remember correctly, getting past 999 would cause the score to wrap back to 0 and the speed to wrap back to as slow as at the start, but you wouldn't get three lives back and you would still have six eggs to catch at a time. I managed to do this only a few times ever; I think my high score ever was approximately 1050-1100, and average score might have been around 700-750. This was in game A, which I mostly played.
* Also if I remember correctly, the order of falling eggs, at least in the beginning phase of the game, was deterministic (top-left roost, then top-right roost, then bottom-left roost (skipped in version A), then bottom-right roost, and so on). The order of subsequent eggs was probably deterministic as well, but this wasn't noticeable anymore. The initial roost might have been chosen randomly.
Yep we had the same thing here in Romania (ex communist) in the 90's. From what i can remember it was a clone of this but the implementation was the same as you said.
That was way too much fun. At the beginning I thought to myself "gee, this is a simple and boring game." And then I played it to a score of 208, haha.
One thing I found interesting while playing was that the game never deals you a losing hand. It got faster, sure, but only one egg is added per step so you always have time to move.
Yeah. There's never a kill screen, just increasing speed until there are multiple eggs per second.
First attempt: 484. In a way, it almost gets easier at higher speeds. And it's always obvious which egg is next, or you can just watch what order they appear in and collect them in that order.
Of course! I've been watching it for an hour now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko6UEwT9i20). I wanted to find something about Nu Pogodi and found the hand-held game I played ~20 years ago.
Interestingly, Wikipedia translates "Nu, pogodi" as "Well, you just wait".
Actually, this phrase is a threat and should be translated something like "I will get you".
Holy smokes, another Электроника game I played 20 years ago. http://www.pica-pic.com/#/space_bridge/ I'll definitely ask my parents to look for this game, maybe it's still somewhere there.
It's actually a brand name. A while lot of different consumer- and professional-grade products were sold under that brand (follow the link to Russian Wikipedia to see the full list)
Cool game. If anyone else is as confused as I was, you have to use up/down as well as left/right. I only figured this out after trying to use the console buttons.
This brings back so many memories of sitting on the steps playing those old hand-held LCD Tiger games. I was absolutely addicted to the batman one: http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Tiger/Batman.htm
Others already mentioned, this game bears a lot of sweet memories, since it was one of few hanheld games foreign USSR made (OK, a few years ago I found them being much more than a few) and other countries cloned. Having one ot those was friend-magnet, mastering and exploiting bugs in them was regarded as being geekish in best of ways.
Also, it came as no shock that each and every Elektronika brand game was a copy of sorts from similar or identical Nintendo products.
As this is very approximate clone of original handheld, sound was closest to version everybody remembers. It triggered nostalgic feeling all around the room.
