Crisp Game Lib (Vircon32)

About the game

Crisp Game Lib is not one game but a shelf of them. Kenta Cho, who works as ABA Games, wrote a small library for making one-button arcade games quickly, and then used it to make hundreds of them: each is a single idea with chunky pixels, a score and a high score, and a few seconds is enough to understand what it wants from you. The titles give a taste of the range: Accel B, Block Stacker, Fish Grill, Kite, Pin Climb, Sky Golf, T Hanoi, Vine Climber, Window Washer, Zoom IO and more than 250 others.

This cartridge holds 266 of them, ported to the Vircon32 fantasy console by joyrider3774 (Willems Davy). A list at the start shows the games in alphabetical order, nineteen pages of them, and each game starts with a two-line description of its controls. A few of the games were designed for the mouse; on the console a cursor moves with the arrows instead. The port's author warns that some games ask a lot of the console, and that the sound may stutter in R Wheel, Ladder Drop and B Blast.

Part of these games is also on this site as separate pages, played with the mouse or the finger. Here you get the whole collection, with a game pad.

Playing it here

Vircon32 is an open fantasy console, a 32-bit machine designed from scratch with a 640×360 screen, and this cartridge runs in its official emulator compiled for the browser. Click Play and use Up, Down, Left and Right to move through the list. Press X to start a game and Enter (the Start button) to open the game list again. F2 saves the emulator state and F4 loads it.

Controls

Key	Vircon32 button	Action
Up / Down	D-pad	move through the game list; move in the games that need it
Left / Right	D-pad	turn the page in the list; move in the games
X	A	start the highlighted game; main action in the games
Z	B	second action button; in the list it also moves down
Enter	Start	open the game list again
F2 / F4	—	save / load the emulator state

On a phone or tablet the console buttons appear on screen, around the picture.

Tips

Read the description first. Each game shows a two-line description before it starts, such as "[Tap] Fire, [Hold] Accel", and that is the whole manual.

Try each one a few times. The first run is usually spent learning the rule, and the score only starts to make sense on the second.

Use the pages. The list has nineteen pages, so Left and Right get you to the other end quickly.

Credits and licence

The games and the engine are by Kenta Cho (ABA Games), under the MIT License. The port to the Vircon32, with its own sound generator and menu, is by Davy (joyrider3774), who built it with the help of an AI assistant, as its repository says, and the MIT License of ABA Games was kept for it. We build the cartridge ourselves from the port's source with the official Vircon32 tools; the licence text and the exact source are linked from this page.