July 19, 2007
I’ve been working on my credits backlog that’s directly to related to the nearly-cleared backlog of games to be entered. More new games in MobyGames:
I’ve been realizing the importance of metadata recently. The situation is that text is easy for search engines to gather, index, and search. Multimedia data such as images, audio, and video can not be indexed the same way. The efficacy of indexing such multimedia data is largely dependent upon the textual data surrounding the multimedia. I have always made a careful habit of clearly describing my images in their metadata tags. This is probably why so many searches are driven to my various blogs by Google’s image search facility. This applies to some extremely common search terms, such as the popular (American) term for the game that was the theme of these pinball games.
I was auditing my web logs today and saw that the entry for Bikini Beach Stunt Racer actually got hits for that ‘b’-word search term related to ladies’ swimwear. Even more interesting is that the user agent string included the data “Windows CE; PPC; 240×320″ and the referral string indicated a start index of 95. This means that a rather patient individual was searching through many, many bikini pictures on a portable device of some sort, with a tall vs. wide screen.
That reminds me that I have been meaning to produce a series for this blog called, “The Ladies Of Obscure Games.”
Posted by Multimedia Mike under The Big Picture | Comments (2)
July 17, 2007
I have had a lot of trouble capturing Sega Saturn screenshots via DV hardware. Actually, that’s an understatement– I have had absolutely no luck capturing thus far. That was with the standard composite cables that came with the unit. My last ditch effort was to procure an S-video Saturn cable, which arrived today. Works beautifully:
I’m in business now. This is great news since I currently have 26 Saturn titles on my master spreadsheet that are missing screenshots in the database.
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Sega Saturn Games,The Big Picture | Comments (1)
July 16, 2007
I’m starting to get back into it; here are the newest entries I am responsible for:
I have had Jungle Legend on my big board for a few months, meaning that it still needs to be entered into the database. I was working on some nonsense for a description at the time since the manual gave me all the data I thought I needed. However, I felt there was one crucial detail missing– what the game actually looks like. 2D scoller? 3D in any way? RTS jungle adventure, commanding your tribe? Google searches generally just yield a few sparse game listing pages with the same regurgitated description and no screenshots. Worse, my own page is one of the top hits now. Not helpful.
But then I found some generic game listing site that happened to link to the developer’s original website… which happens to be defunct. Enter archive.org, and behold: the last recorded valid page for the game. If the screenshots are to be believed, it’s an FPS-type adventure.
I’m glad I investigated because there are several other games from the same company that aren’t in MobyGames yet. That seems to often be the case with these value publishers that have proliferated in the last decade.
Posted by Multimedia Mike under The Big Picture | Comments (2)
July 15, 2007
Time for another intensely lightweight, kid-targeted video game romp– let’s face it, these games ain’t gonna enter themselves into MobyGames. And I even located a pile of stuff procured from eBay back in March that I forgot to log into the master spreadsheet. It just doesn’t end!
Tonight’s fluff-fest is Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade. It comes from a franchise of Clue Finders games which generally appear to be educational. This title is actually a collection of 4 games, only one of which could conceivably be loosely tagged as having content remotely academic. The setup is that an all-star team of villains who debuted in previous Clue Finders franchise games has been assembled by a new mystery villain. This collaboration plots to lure the team of protagonist children into their home. These villains hold serious grudges towards the Clue Finders based on their previous encounters. The game contains a Rogue Gallery menu option where you can view dossiers of each villain. Cleverly, the dossier also includes a mention of the franchise game where the antagonist premiered. This is the dossier for one Pericles Lear:
So, the guy lives and works in San Francisco and has an affinity for chemistry. On closer examination, I just noticed that the above data does not really paint a menacing portrait of a criminal mastermind.
Anyway, there are 4 Clue Finders, 4 villains, and 4 traps/games. Each villain designed one trap to ensnare one of the children. Fiendishly, each trap is tailored for each child’s specialty. I suppose I shouldn’t try to understand why diabolical crime geniuses would give their victims a fighting chance in this manner. The first game has Owen, the team’s skateboarding nutrition specialist and pizza enthusiast, skateboarding on giant pizzas using a giant sub sandwich as a skateboard. Given Owen’s passion, I can understand that he might be a natural at this task. But if his task were switched with Leslie’s book task, both of these young go-getters might just meet with their early demise as intended.
Speaking of Leslie, her task is to jump on books. This takes a few sentences to explain, but it was my favorite of the four games on offer:
The back of the library has a topic; in this case, it’s capital cities. The demons on the bookshelves are tossing books into the room. Leslie must only jump on books whose titles contain capital cities. When she jumps on a qualifying book, that book becomes permanent. If she jumps on a book with a non-matching subject, she crushes it. The idea is to stack permanent books in order to climb to the exit. When she has stacked enough books, a rope ladder extends down so she can climb up. Sometimes I would disregard the ladder since I was having too much fun hopping on books. Leslie can jump 1, 2, or 3 books horizontally, 1 or 2 books vertically, and 1 book diagonally. It takes a little practice to master the jump control but is quite fun.
Leslie’s is the only one of the four games that struck me as even marginally educational. And even that was questionable since the game seemed to feature an embarrassingly limited dictionary of terms related to each category.
Santiago’s task is to play a series of pinball boards where he is the pinball. Actually, he is in the cockpit of a rocket-powered pinball. He can turn and thrust and somewhat control his destiny but is still at the mercy of the various actuators on the board. He must solve various puzzles on the board in order to escape.
The final game deals Joni along with whichever other members have escaped from their respective traps. It’s actually a fairly competent little parallax side-scroller.
Choice quote: The kids’ timid talking laptop, LapTrap, says of the probably-forged email that lured the gang to the game’s eponymous dangerous abode: “Why don’t email servers ever crash when you want them to?”
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Action Games,Childrens Games,Educational Games,Windows Games | Comments (1)
July 14, 2007
I spent the day playing catch-up by finally entering into MobyGames a bunch of the games that I reviewed in the past few months (all the way back to April). Have fun, MG approvers!
It was pretty straightforward in some cases, particularly for the 4 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures promotional discs from Taco Bell. The only tricky part is doing the first entry; the remaining 3 are patterned after the first. Here’s a screenshot of the Prairie Dogs course in the wild west theme CD-ROM. There is also an exceptionally large scorpion right at your feet. You would think that would be cause for concern:
And for completeness, here’s a screenshot for the Carnival adventure, the Loop da Loop course. It took me quite a few strokes to get the ball through that thing the first time I encountered it:
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Golf Games,The Big Picture | Comments (0)
July 13, 2007
I thought I would shift my attention back to a kids game this evening, especially since an upstart contributor is rocketing up the MobyGames charts by entering dozens of largely overlooked children-oriented entertainment software titles (hi DJP Mom! Keep up the good work). Tonight’s game is The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain which is but one title in a series called “Mr. Men and Little Miss” games. Collect ‘em all — and you know I probably will, eventually (I already have another one in the queue). If this opening card is any indicator, there are at least 10 of these titles:
I fear that this game is going to be juvenile, even by the standards of this blog, and my suspicions are quickly confirmed. Akin in animation style and target audience to Cheerios Play Time, I similarly hesitate to classify this game as “educational”. Your guide through this excursion is one Mojo the Mosquito. I keep thinking that he is speaking with an exaggerated stereotypical Italian accent until I realize that the creators were trying to conceptualize what an anthropomorphized talking mosquito would sound like (lots of buzzing and slurring of words). First, he asks you to click on an animal, advising you that the larger the animal, the tougher the game. I’m not so sure about that. The games seem to be the same whether I click the duck or the cow; the other three animals are cat, pig, and sheep. Then you are launched into the main town map:
The story goes like this: It’s morning time, but the sun is nowhere to be seen. Miss Magic calls up Miss Scatterbrain and expresses alarm at this development. Miss Magic would be able to rectify the solar situation except that her magic book was absent-mindedly swiped by Scatterbrain. It’s up to you to help her scour her kitchen cupboards in the dark in order to find the book strictly by the sound it makes when touched. That’s the first minigame.
When you retrieve the book and bring it to the town square where Miss Magic is waiting, the realization dawns that there isn’t enough light to read the book. So Miss Somersault — also present at the meeting — goes off to capture fireflies in a jar, thus commencing the second minigame. It’s essentially a point & click game of Whack-A-Mole where you try to click as many popping fireflies as possible before the moon waxes from a first quarter position to a full disc. I’m not sure how much sense that makes, but that’s what the creators used for a timer. My record was 49 fireflies in the allotted time period, though I later figured out that it is impossible to lose this game. Even on the “cow” setting — presumably the toughest — 0 fireflies was enough to succeed.
The story continues like this, leading into many more insipid, un-lose-able minigames. I wanted to be more thorough and explore the different animal options to validate whether there were any differences. However, the story sequences have no fast forward feature and I could only sit through the exposition so many times. The voice acting is tolerable, but clearly done in kids’ puppet show-style voices. I can’t say that I’m necessarily looking forward to logging the remaining items in this series.
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Childrens Games,Windows Games | Comments (2)
