Naughty Mouse

Naughty Mouse
Also known as: Naughty (title screen), Snatcher (cabinet), Woodpecker Developer: Amenip Publishers: Nova Games, Palcom Queen River Platform: Arcade (Namco Pac-Man) Released internationally: 1981 This game has unused graphics. This game has revisional differences.

Naughty Mouse is a platformer in which the titular mouse must climb ladders to move between the different floors of the maze and uncover the eggs which have been placed over top of his numerous houses, all while evading the deadly enemy birds. The naughtiness of our hero is subjective and up to personal interpretation.

The game was produced on a specific iteration of bootleg Pac-Man hardware silkscreened with "GDP-01" on the logic board. This logic board was also used with several other bootleg Pac-Man derivatives, such as Piranha and Titan.

Title Discrepancies

The actual title for Naughty Mouse is mostly unknown. As listed in the MAME driver notes:

Incidentally we don't know the actual name of this game.  Other than the word naughty at
the top of the playfield there's no name.

(Source: MAME Pac-Man Driver - Naughty Mouse Title Note)

Official Canadian arcade cabinets for the game, manufactured by Amenip themselves, use "Snatcher" on the marquee and sideart but "Naughty" on the dip switch setting sheet included inside the machine. Although undocumented in the MAME driver itself, implications exist that Set 2 of Naughty Mouse was in fact dumped from either a board or machine identified as Snatcher - the ROM files unique to Set 2 are prefixed with "snatch" in the ROMset used by MAME.

(Source: MAME Pac-Man Driver - Naughty Mouse Set 2 ROM Info)

Version Differences

Naughty Mouse was released in two different sets: Set 1 in MAME (the parent ROM) is the version licensed for distribution by Palcom Queen River, and Set 2 is the version published by Amenip themselves (and would most likely be the version used in actual dedicated Snatcher arcade machines considering the in-game copyright text matches the text printed on the cabinet artwork). There are several differences between the sets, the most notable being the completely different level arrangements.

Version	Set 2	Set 1
Level Arrangements	Original	Modified
Copyright String	© AMENIP NOVA GAMES LTD.	© PALCOM QUEEN RIVER

Likely due to the level arrangements being modified, the attract mode demo is broken in Set 1 - the Mouse moves to the right immediately and then pauses at the end of the platform, standing there until a vulture eventually reaches and kills him. In Set 2, the attract mode demo plays correctly and the Mouse "plays" the level until eventually being caught by the vultures.

Set 2	Set 1

The birds were revised in Set 1. A bit of blue miscoloring and a missing pixel on the second frame of the upward {-moving animation were fixed, and the pupils were adjusted for three of the frames.

Woodpecker

An altered (and overall more polished) version with revised gameplay, also released by Amenip. Differences between Naughty Mouse and Woodpecker include:

• Altered graphics and sound.
• Levels now begin with the titular Woodpecker appearing and destroying parts of the terrain, therefore modifying the structure of the level.
• The game controls have now expanded to include a single button. Pressing this button causes nearby enemy birds to flee from the player temporarily.
• Two meters have been added to the center of the screen: one meter displays the energy for the player's "attack", which operates on a cooldown, and the other meter displays the remaining time for the invincibility effect after the player collects the piece of cheese.

Like Naughty Mouse, Woodpecker released two sets - Set 1 in MAME is the Palcom Queen River-licensed version, and Set 2 is the Amenip-published original. Other than the different copyright strings on the title, there are no known changes to the gameplay.

Titan Leftovers

Graphics from Titan, another game developed for the same bootleg Pac-Man hardware as Naughty Mouse. This includes two bonus objects and four frames of the enemy spaceman. These graphics were overwritten in Woodpecker.

This may imply that Naughty Mouse was either developed using a repurposed Titan board or was developed by the same team as Titan. The only currently-dumped ROMset for Titan lacks any copyright info but is otherwise a modification of Piranha, another Pac-Man derivative stated earlier to run on the same unique bootleg hardware. Piranha is credited to "GL", a company with no other documented credits.

Although this is pure speculation, it's possible that "GL" was another name used by Nova Games Ltd. To further add to this theory, Amenip's first arcade release, Mariner, was licensed and distributed in the United States by US Billiards, the same company that would later license and distribute Piranha from "GL". This implies a professional relationship already existed between Amenip and US Billiards, potentially increasing the likelihood of the two companies collaborating on further releases.