Concentration Room

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Overview

A team of biochemists at Hombon Pharma were perfecting a truth serum when a lab accident created a mildly neurotoxic substance. To make things worse, it had to happen on Bring Your Child to Work Day. The assistants and their children were put in quarantine until their bodies eliminated the toxin, and one of the children brought out a deck of Concentration cards. It worked: the more intensely they thought, the more the side effects subsided.

The table is littered with 10, 20, 36, 52, or 72 face-down cards. Flip two cards, and if they show the same emblem, you keep them. If they don't, flip them back.

In 1 Player Story you play solitaire to start to work the toxin out of your system, then defeat other contaminated technicians and children one on one. 1 Player Solitaire lets you pick a difficulty level and clear the table alone. In 2 Players, two players take turns turning over cards, passing one controller back and forth or using one each, and the first player to take half the pairs wins. Vs. CPU is like 2 Players, except the second player is controlled by the NES.

Damian Yerrick made it because the earlier Concentration games on the NES had clunky controls and neither of them featured a full 72-card deck.

Made by: Damian Yerrick
Released: 2010

Controls guide

Menus

Button and key	Action
Up/Down	Choose a mode or a difficulty
A`X`/Start`Enter`	Confirm
B`Z`	Back from the difficulty menu
Select`Shift`	Show the copyright and credits screen

Story text

Button and key	Action
Down	Scroll the text faster
Up	Hold the text still
A`X`/Start`Enter`	Finish and move on

At the table

Button and key	Action
D-pad`Arrows`	Move the pointer; hold to keep moving
A`X`	Turn the card under the pointer face up
B`Z`	Jump the pointer to a random card
A`X`+B`Z`	Take over the turn when the controller is passed to you in a 2-player game

Cheatsheet

Difficulty levels

Preschool: 10 cards, 20 misses allowed in solitaire
Elementary: 20 cards, 40 misses
Junior High: 36 cards, 60 misses
High School: 52 cards, 80 misses; the deck includes the card suits
Lab Technician: 72 cards, 100 misses; the deck includes the card suits

Story mode ladder

Preschool solitaire: Then Lillie, a preschooler
Elementary solitaire: Then Ethan, Lillie's big brother
Junior High solitaire: Then Venny
High School solitaire: Then Snowy and her random challenge
Lab Technician solitaire: Then Susan, the last opponent

Scoring

Solitaire: The counter starts at the miss allowance and drops by one on each miss; at zero the game is over
Versus: One point per pair; the first to half the pairs wins
Story loss: Losing to an opponent sends you back to the solitaire table before them; running out of misses ends the story

Tips

In solitaire every miss costs a point, so on a big table spend your early flips turning over cards you have never seen rather than guessing at ones you half remember. The author finished a 72-card Lab Technician game with 35 misses to spare.
Versus games end as soon as someone reaches half the pairs, because the last pair takes no skill. Matches made early, when few cards are known, decide most games.
The CPU opponents play with deliberate artificial idiocy and forget cards they have seen. Lillie is the most forgetful; the later opponents remember a good deal more, so expect them to cash in pairs you have revealed.
In the High School and Lab Technician decks the card suits appear among the emblems each in its own colour, with purple hearts and orange diamonds, so check colour as well as shape before you flip the second card.
B is the quickest way across a 72-card table: it throws the pointer onto a random card, and the D-pad can fine-tune from there.

Secrets

Slow motion

Hold Select while playing at the table. The game runs at about a fifteenth of its normal speed for as long as you hold it, which makes the card-flip and collecting animations easy to watch.