June 28, 2009
Yes! Barbie’s back! It seems that the initial outing for Team Barbie Detective in Barbie Detective (which I will probably eventually acquire so it can be entered into the database) was popular enough to warrant a sequel. So Barbie, Ken, and their wheelchair-bound friend — together comprising a formidable crime-solving force — take off on a much-needed vacation only to find themselves toe to toe with another tantalizing mystery at their resort destination.
So how bad could this really be, right? I’ve suffered through quite a lot, Barbie-wise, for the sake of this blog and MobyGames. What could this game possibly serve up to push me to the brink? How about this Barbie Detective theme song which forcibly plays during installation? Listen to it; listen to it all! Share in my pain…
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
It’s darn creepy, mind you, the male singer crooning inappropriately that, “there’s just one girl you need to call / and she will … ease … your … mind.”
I’m not afraid, though, so I pressed forth. And I’m glad I did because this is the kind of game I live for in this Gaming Pathology project. Games that elicit just the right combination of awe, bewilderment, and outright guffaws. Really, I haven’t laughed so hard at a game while being simultaneously stunned since… I don’t know, maybe Secret Agent Barbie.
Remember that one music trivia game I played, Radio Active, the one that stored a database of 761 possible player names so it could personally address you? Before I found the fixed database, I wondered if it might actually sound out the name you input. Detective Barbie 2 actually does just that:
Yeah, it’s a little weird when you first study the list. You can click on any of the selections and the game will cheerfully sound it out, though many of the adjacent selections sound the same. Throughout the game, Barbie will specifically address you by this name, although the pronunciation tends to sound a tad inconsistent with her normal speech patterns.
So, about the story: Team Barbie Detective arrives at the Inn at Lighthouse Cove for a little R&R. The Inn, it must be noted, was built by an eccentric inventor and is known to be loaded with puzzles. Before they even get a chance to check in and bring their bags in from the car, the team learns from the innkeeper that some long-forgotten antique jewelry has been stolen. This makes me wonder how they knew it had been stolen if it was already long forgotten. But that’s just what the manual indicated. The in-game narrative is a little fuzzier on the details. I just know I’m supposed to wander around the Inn and surrounding grounds in search of “clues,” ones that usually hang out in plain sight, as we’ll see a bit later. Some are only visible with the help of the magnifying glass that Barbie finds and takes a shine to:
When hovering the magnifying glass over the globe, a handprint glows green. I suspect I was supposed to care, but I couldn’t find a way to act on it.
Detective Barbie 2 was developed by Gorilla Systems Corporation. They were also responsible for Barbie as Sleeping Beauty as well as Barbie Magic Genie Bottle (and presumably the custom accessory that came with it). This game is based on a marginal 3D engine, perhaps similar to that found in Magic Genie Bottle. You guide Barbie left, right, forward, and back against a backdrop that scales in and out when going forward or back on the plane. It started to make me wonder if these were just straight bitmaps that were scaled in and out. However, Barbie can go behind and in front of objects. Further, she casts quasi-accurate shadows, so there might be some actual 3D work going on here.
When using the magnifying glass over a region, all the pixels are just made bigger and blockier.
Along the way, the player talks to a colorful cast of characters, each of whom is naturally a suspect. Take the chef above, for example. Personally, I found her most suspect characteristic to be her accent, which seemed to shift between French, German, and Russian. I would like to include a sample here but I can’t figure out the coding format the speech samples are stored in.
Here’s another nitpicky detail I got hung up on:
So teammate Kelly is wheelchair-bound. Fine, not a big deal. I’m just wondering how they managed to transport Kelly’s motorized wheelchair in Barbie’s pink convertible roadster:
And what kind of car is that, anyway? At first, it looked a bit like a Porsche. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a spacious Porsche convertible.
So, like I said, Barbie has to walk around the place and be spoon-fed clues and cues to advance the plot. Further, there are a few, more action-oriented activities, such as boat racing and hang gliding. I found the latter activity during my brief play. There wasn’t really any point (goal) to it that I could find; just a brief diversion. This is supposed to be a vacation after all.
I have to admit, the Inn was constructed beautifully enough that I rather enjoyed exploring the grounds, though I often had to fight with the awkward control scheme to do so (push the mouse cursor to extreme edges of the screen to make Barbie move). It’s just too bad I couldn’t bring myself to care too deeply about the mystery at hand. However, I got one last giant laugh from this scene and then decided I had reached my Barbie limit for the evening:
I must have tripped a plot point by visiting some other location because when I returned to this room, what do I find, but a phantom teacup just sort of floating there. This game isn’t supposed to have supernatural elements to it so I can only assume that this is merely an idiosyncrasy of the 3D engine. Anyway, I photograph it and feed the data into the portable crime computer. Kelly then notifies me via videoconference that it appears to be a teacup, most likely used for a garden party. She says this seriously as though it’s some kind of critical clue.
This game is just ridiculous enough that I’m tempted to play it again some time to see what other kinds of amusement might await.
See Also:
At MobyGames:
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Adventure Games,Barbie Games,Girlie Games,Puzzle Games | Comments (8)
June 27, 2009
What is a casual game? Generally, it’s a game that has a fairly simple central concept — say, rotating falling blocks in order to form solid lines as in Tetris — which is easy to comprehend yet can keep a player occupied for hours, days, or however much free time happens to be available. There are a number of popular casual game concepts that float about and any halfway talented programmer can slam together their own version of one (I understand that the iPhone is seeing a lot of this very phenomenon right now).
But what makes a premium casual game? My first brush with the concept came from Magic Match last year which specifically bills itself as such. I liked the game so much, as did a close friend of mine, that I sought out more games under MumboJumbo’s “Casual Premium Games” brand. I found a 6-pack of such games for $20 on Amazon which arrived in the following, decidedly shipping-unfriendly packaging:
Click for a larger image
In fact, I hesitated to touch any of the games for a good while because I was still debating how best to scan the whole package for MobyGames. I finally settled on a solution and was free to start playing, which I did, and that was several months ago. Why haven’t I gotten around to writing them up yet? Because I have enjoyed playing them so much that I would rather play them than write things about them.
So, again, what defines a premium casual game above and beyond a standard casual game? The premium flavor takes the simple concept and spruces it up in the graphics, animation, sound, music, storyline, and gameplay dynamic departments. The first 4 items of that list, pertaining to video and audio, should be pretty straightforward to comprehend. As for storyline, most of these games attempt to have some sort of plot to justify the progression of levels, even though each level is the same basic game over and over again. The game tries to give the player a feeling of progression. Finally, these premium titles usually throw in assorted value-adds to the gameplay — and typically hold the player’s hand while introducing them — in order to give the player a few more characteristics about the game to master.
The first game I’d like to discuss is called 7 Wonders of the Ancient World and it’s easily mine and my friend’s very favorite of the lot. For the past few months, I have been telling everyone who will listen how awesome this game is and how often I’ve been playing it. Then I describe the gameplay and they shrug, wondering what’s so remarkable about the game — the concept has been around for years.
I guess you just have to be there…
According to MobyGames, 7 Wonders is categorized as a tile matching (creation) puzzle game and it presently lists 138 games of the type. It’s simple enough– you swap adjacent pairs of symbols in order to complete strings of 3 symbols. In this variation, there are 7 stages corresponding to the 7 wonders of the ancient world, and each has 7 levels. Your job is to build them by supplying enough bricks for the cheerful, driven workers down below. The value-adds, gameplay-wise, are that destroying strings of symbols also destroys blocks that they are sitting on, which is the raw building material for the wonders. After enough blocks are destroyed, the game drops a cornerstone piece into the puzzle that the player must navigate down to the bottom where the workers can use it. And of course, the hourglass is ticking through all of this.
Naturally, there are a number of powerups (horizontal and horizontal/vertical fireballs which destroy all symbols on their rows/columns; stars that randomly destroy symbols) to keep the gameplay a little more varied. It’s amazing how much strategy you can develop for even the simplest games. In the level shown above, for example, I would identify the top 4 rows as the “pain points”, the areas that would be the toughest to clear. I made sure to focus on those at the start of each turn and worry about the remainder of the puzzle as a secondary concern. After all, fireball powerups would naturally descend, and those often serve as wildcards during the endgame.
The second game I tried from the 6-pack was Jewel Quest. It’s strange to think that if I had tried this game before I had played 7 Wonders, I might have been gushing about this one instead. As it stands, this one struck me as unremarkable since it was the same type of game as the first. Not a knock; I just enjoyed 7 Wonders a bit more.
Then there was Luxor which was confusingly packaged as Luxor 2 (Luxor 2 on the outside, but a CD-ROM plainly marked Luxor on the inside). I don’t know which it was supposed to be, but I hardly suspect it makes a big difference. These both fall into a casual game category called Puzz Loop variants. The idea here is that some force is pushing a bunch of multi-colored jewels/marbles/stones towards an end destination. The player must fire colored orbs into the chain in order to create chains of 3 or more of the same color and destroy them before any balls reach the end destination.
So Luxor is the second game of the 6-pack that I fell in love with. I didn’t think I would get so involved until I played for 4+ hours straight one night, only retiring at 2am. Of course, there are tons of powerups to help you destroy the balls, and the game throws some fiendish courses right back at you to ramp up the difficulty. Oh, the strategies you will assess.
I hit a real slump with Mystery Solitaire: Secret Island. I had to give it the old college try for the sake of a MobyGames entry but I just don’t have any interest in solitaire card games. In fact, this might be the first computer solitaire card game I have ever played. I remember playing solitaire card games as a kid and I seem to recall that I didn’t enjoy it very much. Maybe that helps to explain my quest at a young age to find computer games — any computer games — to play.
It seems that all I’m doing is matching pairs of cards until all the pairs are matched. Then the game allows me to progress to another island (trying to keep some kind of tenuous story arc). To it’s credit, the game lives up to its premium casual game branding in terms of audio, graphics, story progression, and gameplay. But this is still the most pointless of all the games in this pack.
Having said that about card solitaire, it’s odd that I should enjoy Mah Jong Quest. I remember playing Mahjongg — real, physical, multiplayer Mahjongg — when I was growing up, and I remember seeing many people playing solitaire Mahjongg games on various computer systems as far back as the DOS days. But I have never played a solitaire Mahjongg computer game. It doesn’t sound like it would be too interesting — just matching pairs of tiles.
But danged if it didn’t keep me coming back for more, night after night.
Now this game has a real storyline. Young Kwazi is peacefully playing with his Mahjongg tiles when his village is ravaged by demons. Kwazi must embark on a quest throughout the lands to defeat the demons while meeting and helping a lot of people along the way. And he accomplishes everything by… playing with his Mahjongg tiles. That’s powerful stuff.
So how is this so different than card solitaire if they’re both pair matching games? I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps it’s the fact that I can see all (or many) of the tiles up front. That can help me plan moves. Plus, I can’t just take any tiles; there are certain constraints (a tile can’t be paired if both sides are touching other tiles, or if another tile is stacked on top of it). Somehow, I can imagine an upgraded version of this concept being the first casual game created for the emerging 3D monitors. Depth perception helps.
There’s one more game in the pack and it’s probably the least intuitive of the bunch — Slingo Quest. Slingo, it turns out, is a combination of slot machines and Bingo. You spin the slots that occur below each column of a Bingo card and mark off numbers as they come up. I’ll be the first to admit that it sounded totally uninteresting.
And I’ll also be the first to admit that it had me playing for hours on end the first time I booted it up for a review.
Again, I can’t believe how much I obsessed over optimal strategy when I played this game, or how far I managed to get (and wanted to get).
See Also:
At MobyGames:
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Puzzle Games,Windows Games | Comments (3)
June 26, 2009
I recently started maintaining a collaborative Google spreadsheet with several other MobyGames contributors in order to track games that are not yet listed in the MobyGames database. As part of the first pass, I made sure that all known Barbie games were either in the database or in the missing games spreadsheet by researching through Amazon.com.
Unfortunately, now I can’t go to Amazon without seeing stuff like this:
The things I’m willing to do for MobyGames.
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Barbie Games,The Big Picture | Comments (2)
June 25, 2009
I wanted to see how racing games played on the iPhone and iPod Touch. To that end, I downloaded and tried out 2 different 99-cent racing titles. The first is Concrete Combat Racing and it loads a curious warning:
Intense gameplay. I’m sure that’s it; not bugs or anything. Anyway, let me see what my notes mention from my earlier encounter with this game… ah, here it is: “don’t like this game at all.”
The point of this game is to select a car for yourself and one for your computer opponent and then the 2 of you roll around the parking lot of infinity. You tilt the unit in different directions to steer the car but it’s very difficult to get used to, especially with another car firing bullets and missiles at you. I eventually gunned it in one direction to try to escape. But this parking lot just went on forever. The UI is also sort of mess with all of its buttons (gas and brake on left; 3 buttons on right; pause button at top). It makes me think that this is where the iPhone’s input limitations are revealed.
According to my other notes, the sound effects are crackly and otherwise unclean, the developers didn’t bother with their own soundtrack at all (probably assuming the player could just pick their own soundtrack from thousands of songs already on the unit), the control buttons don’t always seem to do what they say, and why are they driving on concrete anyway? It’s probably best not to ponder that last question too much but rather to move on to a much better iPhone racing game which is similarly bold enough to name the racing surface in the title…
Asphalt 4: Elite Racer is one in a series of Asphalt racing games that are exclusively developed for assorted handheld systems. It’s really quite fun even if I couldn’t get past the first race, held in Los Angeles:
You can tell it’s L.A. because the car is cruising along the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Err, make that the “Avenue of Fame,” as the game calls it. I suspect Hollywood has some potent intellectual property claims on the real thing. Just as well, though; the walk doesn’t look anything like the real deal.
This game has 3 control schemes to choose from and I experimented with each. The first is to touch the tall screen on either side in order to affect direction. The second is to tilt the screen side to side for steering. The third option has a little steering wheel on the bottom of the touch screen. I thought I would like the accelerometer tilting option the best but I had trouble keeping the car moving in a straight line. Control scheme 1 worked the best for me.
Elite Racer seems to come from that “illegal drag race” sub-genre of racing. You’re trying to force other players to crash while the fuzz is in hot pursuit. In fact, you can actually take down the heat, as I demonstrated here, quite by accident:
Another feature of Elite Racer — which I understand is not especially uncommon in these underground-type racers — is the ability to unlock new female companionship as the levels progress.
It’s a tad disturbing, I realize, but it’s apparently a mainstay of the genre, based on this game and some other game trailers I’ve seen. It’s a curious concept — unlocking better women as you gain more skill.
Another facet of the game is automobile customization. I know that this game allows you to change the body color and rims. From what I’ve seen of more powerful underground racers on modern systems, customization is a serious part of the game. And I just realized that male gamers who put any serious effort into virtual automobile customization probably have little cause to ridicule female (or male, for that matter) gamers who get a kick out of dressing up characters in their favorite game franchises.
At the App Store:
At MobyGames:
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Racing Games,iPhone Games | Comments (0)
June 24, 2009
I’m on a real kick with these iPhone games. They’re irresistible for my purposes — inexpensive (I’ve been going for the 99-cent ones), simple, fun, casual games that are easy to write up for entry into MobyGames for cheap contribution points. The iPhone and iPod Touch make it effortless to capture, download, and organize a wide range of representative screenshots; the original cover artwork is trivial to separate from the main application; and the creators typically list their credits somewhere accessible (and there aren’t too many of them, which means that MobyGames gets to have credits for the game record but without too much effort on my part).
Enough about my motivations, let’s check out the games. First, there’s Bloons, a relentlessly colorful game in which a monkey sits atop a floating platform and uses darts to pop balloons. You use the touch screen to configure the velocity vector of the throw in order to pop as many balloons as possible. Sounds easy enough, but there are all kinds of catches, though not in the first level:
The first catch is that you have limited darts. Certain levels have special balloons that give you more darts. Then there are lots of other types of special balloons, such as the one filled with tacks– popping it will pop all of the surrounding balloons. Each level has a minimum number of balloons that must be popped before you are allowed to progress to the next stage.
Most levels beyond the first level have other obstacles, such as walls whose segments will disappear if you sacrifice a dart, walls whose sections are impenetrable by darts, and walls whose segments bounce the darts. This is the level that did me in during my first play sessions:
I like this game; it has the same trajectory/velocity gameplay that I have seen in many other places but with a twist I had not seen before. The only thing that really annoyed me (apart from the confusing difficulty met at only level 9) was that the screen orientation was opposite what I was used to for most landscape uses of the iPod Touch. However, the game was published by an outfit named Ninja Kiwi, a name that implies that they are in the southern hemisphere. Perhaps screen orientations are opposite down there, just like toilet flushes (or not).
Next up is Parachute Panic which features a rather distinctive art style made to look like crude pencil and crayon artwork on a sheet of notebook paper. The game also makes industrious use of the unit’s tall screen.
The parachuters need to land safely on the ships below, which may or may not be stationary. Tap on the ‘chuter to open their chute and swipe the screen in their vicinity in order to manipulate the weather to blow them in one direction or the other. Watch out for the varied threats such as sharks, helicopters, and UFOs.
Parachute Panic also features a curious a capella title song about falling. Why these people are parachuting in such deadly conditions is never really explained, though it could just be that the sharks need to be fed, as evidenced in the game over screen:
The last game is StickWars. Like today’s other 2 games, it is designed expressly for the iPhone’s unique control capabilities (unlike, say, Zenonia which had a console-style control schema overlaid on the screen). StickWars has the player defending a fortress wall from invading hoards using magic, apparently. When the stick figure invaders (those poor stick figures take a lot of abuse in today’s games) come on screen, touch them on the screen and fling them high into the air. That would have to be demoralizing to any advancing army and I’m frankly surprised that they have the courage to keep up the assault, level after level.
This flinging shtick gets old in a hurry so the game designer(s) made the act of flinging the barbarians rather lucrative (I think you know the expression: “Step 1) fling invaders; step 2) ???; step 3: PROFIT!“). With this money in the bank (and earning interest during each round), the player can fix walls, fortify walls, build prisons to hold prisoners rather than killing them outright, and lots of other stuff that I have yet to fully explore.
At the App Store:
At MobyGames:
Posted by Multimedia Mike under Action Games,iPhone Games | Comments (0)
June 20, 2009
After my positive experience with my first-ever iPhone application for my iPod Touch, I started wondering what else was available. I don’t know why, but I wondered if there were actually any role playing games for the iPhone. A tiny bit of searching produced a title named Zenonia.
Not only am I having my first experience with iPhone games, I also recognize that I am really having my first genuine experience with handheld games. I’ve never owned any kind of Nintendo handheld device or any other type of portable gaming device (to be fair, there was that brief affair with the contraption I bought on a plane). I’ve always wondered about the gameplay model for a handheld game– are they strictly meant to be distractions when people are traveling or otherwise on the go? Or do people buy involved games and sit down in their homes to experience them? I guess it’s both, given the success of the form factor and the breadth of games available throughout the years. As for involved RPG games, the Final Fantasy series certainly seems to have thrived on the handheld systems.
So how does this game stack up against other games in the genre? I’m probably not qualified to answer that since I’m not really an connoisseur of the genre. I can tell you that Zenonia seems incredibly story-driven and linear, at least at the outset. It’s busy, yet highly simplistic. There are lots of things happening, but the game always tries to keep you on a single track. It’s almost as though the game is designed to grant the illusion of depth that a full console RPG would provide, yet still allow for abbreviated play sessions throughout a series of boring corporate meetings over several weeks, all without the player necessarily forgetting what has happened so far in the game.
The storyline on offer revolves around the protagonist Regret. Yes, Regret. Everyone in this game has strange names. Lord Virulent is another. I think he is one of the bad guys. According to my screenshots, there is a Lady Charity, Vicious, Sun, Tender, and Billy. A tricky thing about playing these iPhone games is that it doesn’t really lend itself to my usual Gaming Pathology workflow, where I take copious notes in the process of playing. Since I end up playing these games wherever I happen to find myself with my iPod Touch and a few minutes to spare, I don’t often have my note pad with me.
Here is what I remember from the storyline: There was an epic battle between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. The Bad Guys lost and accidentally dropped a baby near the front lines. The general from the Good army adopts the baby and leaves the army to raise the baby. This baby is you, Regret. Years later, a demon comes and kills the adoptive father. Regret, now 17, sets out on a quest to learn why his father was killed, and whether it was a demon. I don’t think anyone actually saw the murder take place because everyone keeps whispering about whether a demon was involved.
But as with any good RPG, Zenonia involves lots of insipid quests. I’ve learned that these are sometimes called FedEx quests since they usually take the form of someone asking you to go fetch them something before they agree to help you advance the storyline to its ultimate conclusion. Quests like reclaiming 5 carrot cakes that some slime monsters just outside of town stole (sounds yummy– do you suppose that the person wants the cakes back just as a matter of principle?). At least it’s good, low-impact practice for combat.
Something that people invariably wonder about an iPhone game: What is the control scheme like? For Zenonia, there is a digital gamepad on the lower left of the screen and a general action button on the lower right. The action button attacks when near a monster and talks when near a person. The combat system consists of repeatedly hitting the action button in the general vicinity of a monster, hitting it most of the time, and occasionally missing; the success or failure of the swing is updated in a status window, as are the creature’s return blows.
There is also the status screen button which takes you to a tabbed window to manage a lot of extra information.
I stipulate that Zenonia has a great challenge to cope with– it needs to provide a lot of functionality, playability and control using a very limited input mechanism (relative to even a classic Gameboy which had a built-in gamepad and 4 other buttons) and everything needs to be very intuitive. It does a pretty good job, though the player probably needs to be familiar with RPGs in general to really get up to speed on this. For the first hour I played this, I was just trying to find an opportunity to save, knowing that if I backed out of the game, I would lose my progress and have to suffer through the story setup again. Eventually, I recognized that I could save absolutely anytime from the status screen.
There is also a good/evil aspect at play, which you can see via the status screen above. It begins at 50/50. I witnessed a battle between a Good character and a Bad character and was given the choice to intervene by helping out the Bad character. I took it and saw my alignment tip severely toward the evil end. Day and night also transpire in this game. These 2 features alone make this the single most advanced RPG I have ever played.
So will I keep playing this game after this MobyGames recon session? Most likely. I mean, it comes with me everywhere and it’s never to difficult too remember where I left off. The status screen helps in this respect since it defines what your current mini-quests are and the map screen lays out the world quite well. For now, I need to figure out how to present all the aspects of this game in a concise MobyGames entry.
A brief tech note about this game: the download weighs in at just under 10 MB and decompressed (did you know that iPhone apps are just standard ZIP files with the extension .ipa? It’s true– just run ‘unzip’ against one), it comes in at 15 MB. I merely point this out as evidence that small, efficient, lightweight programming seems to be making a comeback (notwithstanding the Myst remake for the iPhone which allegedly decompresses to 1.5 GB on the phone, phenomenal considering that all the original versions fit on single CD-ROMs, and that the multimedia compression technology that the game extensively relied upon has significantly improved in the intervening years).
Apple App Store link for Zenonia.
At MobyGames:
Posted by Multimedia Mike under RPG Games,iPhone Games | Comments (0)
