Here's something interesting for fans of Timetop's curious little device.

I recently discovered that, in Greece, the system was given a revamp with entirely different packaging and, much as happened with the Watara Supervision, was marketed under a slightly different brand name in that territory.

In this case, a company called MG Games appears to have slapped their logo all over the Gameking 2 as well as putting out the cartridges under a much more uniform style of box "art", removing all of the gloriously stolen imagery so beloved of Timetop.  They've even gone as far as to remove the Chinese text from the cartridges and airbrush away any reference to the original parent company.

I picked up a whole bundle of multicarts from ebay recently and you can see them in the pictures below. Note that they are also marketed as 'Gameking II' cartridges despite them being exactly the same cartridges that work on all other variants of the Gameking. It's certainly interesting to see a company try to rebrand something as obscure as the Gameking and try to give it a more blandly western design. Thankfully, the wonderful instructions remain the exact same hodge-podge of gobbledegook as their Taiwanese counterparts and it's allowed me to fill in a few blanks in the review section!

I also expanded my collection of Gameking 1 variants, picking up a semi boxed, dark green clear model and this beautiful boxed crystal model.

I paid rather more than I normally would for this latter item, because it happened to come with a game I've been trying to track down for some time, one of the more elusive 4-in-1 carts, that takes us closer to a complete Gameking collection!

Confusingly, the game listed as 'Nagual' on the box here, is not the same 'Nagual' found on another multicart! That game is actually, Blaster from this cart (although with a differently named title screen), a Blaster Master type clone, whereas this Nagual turned out to be a Kung Fu Master clone! I'll try to get some reviews up early in the new year.

Why both games were given the same title is another part of the ineffable mysteries of this system.

Anyway, with only 2 multicarts left to find now, here's hoping we can complete the Gameking collection in 2019. Happy New Year to you all!

Well it turns out that it is possible to move over 100 handhelds to a new continent in a suitcase. Even if it does mean that the trauma of doing so leaves one unable to blog for almost six months!

Sorry about that.

Anyway, having relocated from SE Asia to Europe, I can report that surprisingly little attention was paid to my suitcases stuffed with obscure handhelds. I can also report that Bucharest airport is not a place you ever want to try and bring handhelds through in your carry-on luggage.

While most reasonable airports ask you to remove your laptop for inspection, the surly neanderthals who joylessly operate Bucharest airport's x-ray machines require you to remove every single piece of electronic equipment from your hand luggage and, when done asking you "Why do you have all these things?", then proceed to toss them about all over the place leaving you with a Gameking II that looks like this!

This is a bit of a bummer, since I previously used this Gameking to take screenshots for the site. Fortunately everything else survived the border control brutality.
Thankfully I have since been able to secure a number of interesting Gameking related devices including the beautiful purple Gameking II replacement below. Of course the first thing I did was remove the idiotic transparency and now I have an even better machine for future reviews (along with another missing multicart for a collection that is now just 3 carts short of complete!).

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The Timetop goodness didn't stop there though, as I also finally completed the Gameking set by tracking down what is essentially the 2DS of the lineup, the GM-222.

This somewhat pointless device was released after the Gameking III, but is in effect just an original Gameking, oddly branded as a Gameking 2 (with a different, wibbly font). It has no backlight (although thankfully no colour transparency in need of removal) and completes the devolution of Timetop's dpad and control buttons into something resembling a badly sliced pizza and fragmented discuss.
Nothing much else to note about this anachronism of anachronisms other than that (on this model at least) it seems to have visibly worse contrast than the Gameking 1 & 2.

I'll hopefully have some further Gameking joy to share in the coming weeks as well as the lowdown on the fleamarket scene in my new part of the world, which has already unearthed some obscure and interesting treasures.

Hopefully it won't be another 6 months before you get to read about them!