So the family got its first 8088-based PC in 1984. It had the CPU unit with dual 5-1/4″ floppy drives and no hard drive, keyboard, CGA monitor, and dot matrix printer. Quite the luxury for the timeframe. Aside from typing up the occasional book report, I wanted to play games! But those were sparse and the ones I had access to were played heavily.
For some reason, all PCs at the time were equipped with GW-BASIC. I had in my possession a whole floppy disk full of games for this primitive language. I think there was more than one Pac-Man clone, but I can only remember one right now that must have been the least obnoxious of the bunch. Looking back on it, the game must have run in an 80×25 cell text mode. I just remember it was very difficult.
Another game that I distinctly recall is Outpost. In this game, you are stationed in a lonely outpost trying to hold down the fort against numerous ruthless advancing enemies. You have limited supplies but reinforcements randomly made it through. An overhead radar map was refreshed for every turn which updated the enemies’ positions (as well as your resupply unit’s position). If the resupply unit crossed paths with an enemy, well, you would have to spread your current stash a bit thinner. I believe there were various weapons that worked at different ranges and had different levels of effectiveness towards different enemies, whom I believe were identified by their toughness levels (1-5) on the overhead map.
But the GW-BASIC game that I remember the most dealt with being on an island full of monsters. It was Escape From Monster Island, or perhaps just Monster Island. I remember the basic thrust: It was a text adventure where you moved from location to location and fought monsters of varying difficulty for numerous treasures. Some of the treasures were just unusual and for some reason, the only one that I can clearly remember is “XYZ monster is guarding a WANTON NAKED WOMAN”. The name of the treasure was always capitalized.
Does anyone out there have any recollection of these games? Google sure doesn’t.
A new shipment of 9 games arrived today from another eBay seller. None of the games are in MobyGames yet (or so I thought). It may be awhile before I have time to process all of them but I wanted to do my traditional hasty processing of at least one title that really grabs me. To that end, I selected one called Galactic Swarm. A lot of games in this pile come from PC Treasures and were originally developed by companies that I’m beginning to readily recognize. I’m eventually going to be an inadvertent expert on budget-type PC game titles.
Judging from the copy on the back of the sleeve that carried the game CD-ROM, I pegged this as an advanced Asteroids clone. When I checked the readme on the disk, I found out that the game is actually called Swarm, and it already exists in the database. Why is there this need to rename games like this? There must be a good reason, probably a legal reason. Anyway, the MG entry is from the very early days of the database and was so sparse that I pretended it didn’t exist and made it a goal to redo the entire thing.
The sparse, one-line description on the game’s entry confirms that it is, in fact, an Asteroids clone. However, it’s one that has very pretty graphics and also attempts to have a story. Each level begins with a voiceover from the character Saul who gradually explains how he got mixed up in all of this.
Here is Saul in his T-77 taking on an asteroid:
To get back to the story, mining a substance called EZT is big business and Saul is getting in on the action. It’s dirty, dangerous work, but it’s all he has ever known, or so he intones. However, he also indicates that he is indentured to a big, evil corporation for mining this stuff.
Anyway, there are reportedly over 100 levels in this game and the enemies only get meaner. But there are also plenty of weapons to pick up along the way to gain an edge.
Hi! Did you come here from Google looking for troubleshooting information about the PC game Jungle Legend? If so, I just wanted to let you know that I am also getting crashes from the main menu reporting that final.exe had a problem. At least you know you’re not alone on this vast internet.
…Moving right along, tonight’s game is Jungle Legend. It came in a new batch of obscure games from an eBay seller. Whenever a new shipment comes, I always feel like delving right into at least one of them. Unfortunately, this is the one I chose. Unfortunate because it did not work. The game had IncaGold on the packaging which made me feel good because they were responsible for Hot Wired. It looks like an outfit named Flair Software licensed IncaGold’s 3D engine for this title.
The game’s installer shows a graphic for 3D Real Hunting. That threw me off somewhat– was it an ad or an oversight on the part of the installation engineer?
The game’s documentation is quite thorough and straightforward about the storyline– skimming… African rainforests… tribes, ancient race… 4 magic stones, correspond to earth elements like fire and water. Okay, I gather I’m supposed to collect the 4 rocks. It occurs to me I almost have enough to write a MobyGames description, except that I don’t exactly know what the gameplay is like. I assume it’s a 3D game, and an action one at that. But I don’t know if it’s 1st or 3rd-person or perhaps side-scrolling.
I was reading recently about stealth aircraft including the F-117A Nighthawk when I remembered there was a NES game with that particular fighter craft in the title role. Sure enough: F-117A Stealth Fighter, and it’s not in the database yet. The title screen bears a 1992 copyright date. What I’m trying to figure out is whether the game is a NES platform port of the game Night Hawk: F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 that was released for DOS in 1991, Amiga in 1993, and Mac in 1994. Same company: MicroProse.
In fact, MicroProse published the first combat flight sim I ever played: F-15 Strike Eagle. It was also the first game my family bought for our brand new 8088-based PC right before Christmas in 1984. Therefore, the game would have to have been released in 1984, contrary to MobyGames’ release date of 1985 for the PC booter version. Regrettably, the discs and box are long gone so I have no evidence to back this up. I only bring it up as it is remains a longstanding point of friendly contention between myself and one of MobyGames’ founding fathers, Trixter (I’ll never let it go!).
But I digress in a major way… I was curious to see exactly how one might pull off a flight simulator on the NES. Flight sims are among the more complicated — and therefore feared, by me — games that one can undertake. That old F-15 Strike Eagle game used quite a bit of the keyboard and I was curious to see how MicroProse could execute a combat flight sim with only 8 input buttons (up, down, left, right, select, start, B, and of course, A). The answer turns out to be combinations of buttons (e.g., B+select to switch from map to radar view) and unintuitive navigation through option menus.
I found the actual gameplay very frustrating, much more so than the F-15 from 8 years prior (that’s right! Eight years, not seven! I’ll never drop the issue!). The controls were much less responsive and the graphics much worse than that old PC booter game. Both graphics systems had severe weaknesses to overcome. The PC had its 4-color 320×200 bit-plane raster display. The NES had its tile-addressed 256×224 display capable of a few more colors. It was hard to make anything out in either game. Now that I think about it, this game did have better enemy plane representations. F-15 basically had wire mosquitos. This had sprite drawings at different sizes. Though I found it suspicious that there were never any clouds in the sky at the same time enemy planes were in your sights.
It didn’t take long before I got so frustrated that I wanted to kill myself. I sure couldn’t count on death-by-combat since no matter how many missile strikes I sustained, my craft still remained airworthy. Time to take a bath. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to plunge straight down into the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and Libya. Long enough to write plenty of notes detailing why this game probably won’t make my list of games to replay sometime.
Perhaps the most notable feature of this game is its use of digitized voices, longer than I have heard in any other game yet (not very long, but still).
I can already tell that April is going to be a fairly busy month and that this blog will go neglected for days at a time. That said, I just got 4 more fresh games from another eBay seller yesterday. And one of the titles was just too good to delay playing.
A.k.a. Beach King Stunt Racer (probably the European title as the manual comes in 4 languages), Bikini Beach Stunt Racer is the story of a courageous beach enthusiast’s quest to gather diamonds and perform dune buggy stunts in order to win bikini-clad feminine approval. The goal is to select one of three beach boys (stereotypical surfer jock, stereotypical food-obsessed party animal, or stereotypical drunken lush) and one of three tropical locales (St. Tropez, Bali, or Rio), and then drive your indestructible dune buggy around performing totally extreme stunts in order to earn the affection of the locale’s mascot lady. You might think risking your life performing silly stunts would be enough, but oh my goodness, no! She wants diamonds, too. Along the course, find 7 diamonds that complete her ring.
Examine the in-game screenshot:
In the upper left hand corner, you will observe the Babe-O-meter. This is the babe (Ms. St. Tropez in this example) you are currently trying to impress. She sits inside her ring which will show the diamonds as they are collected.
That screenshot showcases a rather serious but altogether enjoyable bug in the game. Sometimes when I would start the course, the dune buggy would jump 100 meters in the air and show incredible views of the modeled landscape while allowing me to twist and turn and get incredible scores, thus throwing the babe into throes of wild ecstacy, even if I didn’t survive after hitting the ground (the character doesn’t die, he just has to restart the level and with the same bug manifesting). We’ll chalk that up to a bug in the 3D engine. Here’s a slightly less severe bug in the same engine, though still disorienting:
It seems that the light source in this case is the sand, hence the shadow on the wall.
At first, this game is just obnoxious. But with a little practice, it actually becomes somewhat enjoyable after I start understanding how some of the stunts are supposed to play. Maybe with this, I’ll finally have the courage to try the stunt modes in Skateboard Park Tycoon. There is apparently a rich variety of outlandish stunts to perform in this game. Check out the intro video for the game which showcases all manner of physics-defying dune buggy stunts (my favorite is when the surfer dude surfs on some rocks that his ride is flying next to):
Everything in this game comes in groups of 3 with an unlockable fourth: 3 beach racers (with an unlockable fourth, an Elvis impersonator character, perhaps a cliche of a typical beach if I were ever to visit one), 3 locales (with an unlockable fourth, Daytona), and 3 bikini babes (with an unlockable fourth corresponding to Daytona).
And if you can’t play the game, I’m sure the next best thing will be to view the gallery of eponymous bikini babes on offer. The CD-ROM has 16 ending videos (AVI/MS MPEG-4v2/PCM), depicting the outcome of completing the various courses with the available characters. Ms. St. Tropez here will be depicted as washing the winner’s dune buggy while the man does something clumsy while gawking at her.
This is Ms. Bali, who will come running at the winner in romantic slow motion, her arms spread for the embrace, while the man always ruins the moment somehow and Ms. Bali is reduced to shaking her head in disbelief.
During her ending, Ms. Rio is depicted as dancing provocatively on a floating platform while the winner comes up to her dressed as that character’s stereotypical passion (surf board, ice cream cone, or bottle). Invariably, the character falls flat in the oversized costume while Ms. Rio keeps on dancing.
Those ending descriptions cover what happens for the first 3 unlocked characters. The same sequences ensue for the unlockable Elvis impersonator but always end up with him performing some dance that makes the woman faint. It’s all very abstract. Either that, or I simply don’t get it.
Yeah, it’s been a bit slow the last few days on this blog. I’ve been working on a few non-gaming commitments recently. Plus, I thought I would give the MobyGames approvers a chance to catch up on submissions. My most recently approved entries are:
And as if I didn’t have enough games to work through, some of those eBay-ordered games referenced last week arrived tonight. I’ll have you know that I did sit down and play that Sabrina: The Teenage Witch game briefly. Though it sounded characteristically lame and therefore well-suited for this blog, it seems that a bunch of my IM buddies have fond memories of the show on which the game is based, or at least were infatuated with the show’s star, one Melissa Joan Hart. Apparently, I’m the only one completely ignorant of this show’s premise, stars, and characters.
I didn’t say I spent a whole lot of time on the game. Maybe 10 minutes total. It’s another Macromedia-driven, kid-targeted game. I hate to admit it, but even these are starting to wear on me, or I might just not be in the mood tonight. The disc didn’t come with any instructions, nor was there a manual on-disc. I knew that didn’t matter– these games always verbally explain the game as you go along. The game chronicles your quest to become a witch like Sabrina. You start out with your witchcraft learner’s permit as a stepping stone to your full-fledged license. You have to successfully complete 7 spells to earn that distinction. Your first opportunity to do this is when Sabrina’s treacherous black cat, Salem (aside: why would the pet be named after the town synonymous with burning witches?), tricks Sabrina into turning herself into a pumpkin. Undo this spell by looking up the spell recipe and searching her room for the ingredients.
And, well, I suspect the game continues along that same formula for some time afterwards. And I’m afraid I will find out sooner or later.
