Concentration Room

Concentration Room is a homebrew NES game.

Story
A lie tic is a change in behavior when someone is telling lies, analogous to a tell in the game of poker. Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Foundation at the University of Illinois confirmed 23 identifiable lie tics, including loss of eye contact and touching the nose. A collection of infographics by AuntieMeme of Cracked.com, titled 24 Scientific Ways to Influence People Without Saying a Word, opens with a few signs of interest that people can't or don't bother to fake, such as the pupils and feet. But occasionally it can become difficult to filter out lying from general stress. And thus the story begins.

A drug company was working on a compound that would make the lie tics of a person of interest being questioned easier to discern. Until something went horribly wrong... ____________________________ Once upon a time in the Third Realm from the Sun, a team of biochemists were perfecting a truth serum. Codenamed Pinenut, the serum was intended to make it more difficult for a detainee to keep a secret from police and to make the physical tells of deception more obvious.

But a lab accident at Hombon Pharma led to the creation of a mildly neurotoxic substance. Lab assistants were exposed to this "bad batch" before it could be properly cleaned up. 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. It caused painful seizures until they started thinking of other things to get their mind off the pain. One of the children in quarantine was carrying a deck of Concentration cards. It worked.

The more intensely they thought, the more the side effects subsided. Concentrating heavily would reduce the concentration of the toxin in brain fluid, as it bound to waste products from metabolism in the brain.

Flip two cards, and if they match, you keep them. If they don't, flip them back. Good luck; you'll need it! ____________________________

Concentration Room originally had a plot involving the internment of an ethnic minority (as depicted in Life Is Beautiful) who could win their freedom by defeating other inmates in a competition (as depicted in Undisputed and Felon, in turn based on guard-managed prison fight clubs in California, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Thailand). After a rewrite suggested by fellow NES game developer Shiru, it ended up becoming a lab accident on Bring Your Child to Work Day, a concept that Valve would work into Chell's backstory in Portal 2. It also parallels Dr. Josef Mengele's experiments with scopolamine.

Levels
Five levels of the game are "solitaire" boards with 10, 20, 36, 52, and 72 cards. The player has a limited number of misses to complete each. After a successful clear, another person in quarantine challenges the player to a match on the same size board. Lose, and the player repeats the same solitaire board; win, and the player goes go on to the next board.


 * Preschool
 * 🍎 Apple, 🍒 Cherries, Orange, 🍑 Peach, 🍐 Pear


 * Elementary
 * Preschool + Shovel, Axe, 🎣 Fishing rod, Net, Watering can


 * Junior High
 * 🐟 Fish, 🐞 Bug, △ Triangle, ○ Circle, ✕ Cross, □ Square, 👦 Boy, 👧 Girl, Ⓑ Coin, ☮ Peace, ☀ Sun, ☁ Cloud, ☂ Umbrella, ☃ Snowman, ★ Star, 🍍 Pineapple, 🐘 Elephant, Ⓓ Donkey


 * High School
 * Junior High + ♥ Hearts, ♦ Diamonds, ♠ Spades, ♣ Clubs, 💣 Bomb, ⛭ Gear, Splotch, Spring


 * Lab Technician
 * Elementary + High School

Specs
room lite: room deluxe (on indefinite hiatus):
 * 16+8 KiB NROM
 * Plain-looking intro
 * 36 predefined emblems on cards
 * No save
 * 128 KiB SNROM
 * Photos in intro
 * 160 predefined emblems on cards
 * Emblem editor with space for 80 emblems
 * Save eight players' campaigns

If you plan on including this in a CHR RAM based multicart, beware of the CHR RAM corruption bug in version 0.02 due to incorrect shuffle markup. To fix it, open  and scroll to the subroutine. One of the  of this subroutine begins with the following lines: lda #VBLANK_NMI sta PPUCTRL Move these to the start of the subroutine, above the first  directive. Thanks to 3GenGames for reporting it.