I still remember that summer, holding on to the pocket money I had saved for a month, I sneaked into the alley at the back door of the school. The boss opened the carton, and inside there were densely packed piles of colorful GBA cassettes. Mario on the cover always had his neck crooked, and the title of The Legend of Zelda was printed as "The Legend of Zelda"😅. At that time, we didn't care about genuine and pirated games. Those games that could be plugged into the machine were good games. But it was this kind of "wild way" that accompanied me throughout my youth.
Now I occasionally play "Only One Door" on my mobile phone, and suddenly I feel like, isn't this the feeling those pirated cards gave me back then? The extremely simple 2D style is very similar to those classic platform jumping games on GBA - no 3D dizziness, no complicated operations, everything can be done with one finger. The colors are so bright that they are reminiscent of those candy-colored levels in "Wario Land", warm and clean. Click to jump, the action is crisp and smooth, there is no delay, just like the smooth "click" when the cassette was plugged into the GBA.
What I miss most is the word "fragmented time". I secretly clicked twice on the way to school, passed a level in ten minutes after class, and then lay on the bed during lunch break to hit a few more props. Now that I have "Only One Door" installed on my phone, I have regained that familiar feeling. It's free to download, with no in-app purchase traps. It's as pure as the pirated cassettes you bought for five yuan back in the day—although it's rough, it never tricks you into spending money to buy resurrection coins.
The developer Hainan Star Jump may not know that this small game they made reminds me of the days when "there was sincerity in pirated cassettes". At that time, we didn't know what genuine authorization meant, we only knew which cassette could make me laugh out loud. What this door opens is not a new world, but a gate of memory 🕹️. Youth is back, just at the touch of a fingertip.