Gran Turismo: NES

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I would like to start tonight’s entry with a neo-cubist geographical interpretation of the United States:

Formula One: Born To Win -- neo-cubism and the United States

Continuing with the high-speed theme from last night’s post, I made a push tonight to get more old NES racing games into MobyGames. I came to realize I was quite spoiled with the types of racing games I played on the NES and SNES. Games like The Adventures of Bayou Billy, The Mafat Conspiracy, Rad Racer II, RoadBlasters and F-Zero come to mind. These were pretty much “on-rails” where not much could go wrong. These games often involved munitions of some sort, too. So it was somewhat a shock to discover that the NES was capable of hosting more considerate and faithful racing games. In particular, I played 3 separate formula one racing games.

The first game is Formula One: Born To Win and it was the source of the above odd screenshot. The F-1 racing aspect is apparently something you have to earn your way up to. The game is more of a career racer in the vein of (what I make of) the popular Gran Turismo series. You begin the game with a Mini Cooper (well before their resurgent popularity!), compete in low-grade races, earn money to upgrade the vehicle to be more competitive, claw your way up the racing circuit, and eventually earn the opportunity to race Vector, Ferrari, and F-1 vehicles. I was a bit intimidated when I saw the stat screen:

Formula One: Born To Win -- Mini Cooper car check

Fortunately, when you screw up, the nice lady in the race official’s office advises you about what part of your car to upgrade to do better next time. For example, upgrade the chassis if bumping into another car causes you to spin out of control.

2 celebrity-licensed games I played were Michael Andretti’s World GP and Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Challenge. They each have 16 international courses for F-1 racing. However, Andretti’s title was easily the most intense racing experience I had yet seen on the NES. First, there was head-to-head, 2-player, split-screen racing which impressed me greatly. The racing action requires you to worry about shifting and if you corner too hard, you can easily spin out. This is a racer that takes some serious practice.

Split-screen 2-player starting line sequence in Michael Andretti’s World GP

Another racing game (I assumed it was such due the the word ‘race’ in its title) I played today was Death Race. After playing, and by sheer coincidence, I happened upon this review which alerted me to the fact that Death Race 2000 was a Sly Stallone movie made in 1975. This is the bad game of today’s bunch, hardly surprising considering it was an adaptation of a B-movie made 15 years prior and was further an unlicensed NES game published by an extraordinarily generic-sounding company named American Game Cartridges (proving that the only thing worse than licensed schlock is unlicensed schlock). Even stranger is that there was actually an arcade game based on the movie that made its way to video arcades in 1976. It was perhaps the first truly controversial video game if Wikipedia is to be believed on the matter. The thrust of the game is to soup up your car to run down pedestrians and win races by capturing flags and finding exit doors.

One final observation: Isn’t it oddly convenient that cars in 8-bit racers can never go faster than 255 distance units/hour?

NES Racing Grab Bag

Posted on March 30, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I continued to forestall the inevitable this evening by further delaying playing some of the most bizarre Sega CD games in existence. Instead, I finally collected a full set of quality screenshots for Vegas Fever Winner Takes All. You start this game with $1000 and I was consistently, cluelessly losing money at each game I played for screenshot purposes. Wouldn’t you know– on the last game I played, Texas Hold ’em Poker, I actually won a sizable pot and ended up with over $1000, even though I really had no idea what I was doing.

Vegas Fever Winner Takes All -- I won it all!

I’m so strategically-impaired that stubbornly calling bets and refusing to fold is probably the best strategy I could hope to employ in an actual Poker game. Through it all, though, I must say that if I were partial to gambling-type games, this would be my casino simulation game of choice. Beautiful, authentic, diverse, and it claims to be highly accurate to boot.

Otherwise, I spent the evening playing through a bunch of old NES games. The reason for this is that, vast as it is, MobyGames is still missing over 150 NES games (American NES games; that I know of). I’m hoping to fill some gaps. Among the NES games were 2 racing games, one good and one not so good. The good one is a title of which I have fond memories playing and winning back when my interest in the system was waning: Eliminator Boat Duel.

This is a fierce one on one boat racing game where you claw your way up through the ranks of pro boat racers, winning prize money, upgrading your boat and generally earning respect among the boat racing community. Your first opponent is a curiously aggressive hippie. I seem to recall that the final opponent in the game is a high-class lady who comes on to you after you defeat her in nitro-fueled boating fury. Another curious feature of the game is that sometimes the races will finish too close to call, visually. That’s when the eye candy on the sidelines requests a slo-mo replay:

Consistently tanned, they are. I’m sure that’s attributable to their disciplined bikini team tanning regimen and not due to any NES palette limitations.

The not so good (but not entirely bad) racing game was Galaxy 5000.

Race against 3 computer-controlled spaceships. There are 2 control schemes to choose from, both of which require some adaptation. The first is to press the gamepad in the direction you want to go and the craft rotates to point in that direction and thrust. The second control scheme uses left and right to rotate and up to thrust. I had trouble getting used to either and couldn’t get past the first Mercury race. That meant that the race course disintegrated out from under me and I fell — in space — apparently into some water.

Another interesting facet of the game is high-pitched, comical, digital voices exclaiming “Hey!” and “Watch it!” when you bump into other cars.

Break Night

Posted on March 29, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I decided to take a break considering the mental toll I’ve sustained due to the sheer absence of quality in all the Sega CD games over the past few days. The break should do me well while I psyche myself up mentally for the final push of Sega CD games (until I procure more). I will try to catch up on some game entry chores that have been stacking up. I still haven’t collected all the screenshots necessary for Vegas Fever Winner Takes All. The thing has a bunch of games. I start it up and try to play through them to get representative screenshots for each game but I find myself bored to tears after 2 or 3. They’re pretty but I just don’t care about these gambling games. I don’t know how I’m going to handle it when it’s time to tackle sporting games.

2 new games in MobyGames:

Please enjoy this demo video I scraped off of a LEGO CD-ROM game. Apparently, it comes from a title called LEGO Alpha Team. This seems to be LEGO’s answer to Konami’s Metal Gear Solid series:

More Sega CD Insanity

Posted on March 28, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I plugged away at a few more Sega CD titles this evening. I don’t think I meant to process so many of these flat, circular, bastard stepchildren that gaming forgot. But I did know that there is only perhaps a 50% chance of a Sega CD game working in Gens. Further, I realize that even if a game does boot up, there is an exceptionally slim probability that the game will hold my interest for longer than the minimum amount of time required for me to collect at least a small sampling of representative screenshots and write a marginally comprehensible MobyGames description.

Let’s start off once more with the games that I tried to make work but could not. First was The Adventures of Batman and Robin. This appears to be based on the early-mid 1990s Batman animated series. I can boot the game. I can start the game. I can watch the opening movie. But I can go no further. Still, with these few screenshots, a complete set of cover art, and the power of Google, I should be able to throw together some nonsense for a description. I’ve done it before.

The Adventures of Batman and Robin -- Sega CD

The next failure of the evening was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I can only hope that this game is widely divergent from the previous Frankenstein-themed game covered in this experiment. I won’t find out tonight. I only have the disc for this game, a disc that does not like to be read. I am not entirely convinced that I have all the data correct to begin with. When I mount the ISO rip under Linux, I see some suspicious file entries such as:

[...]
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 12288 Oct 11  1994 men_sub.ovl
?????????? ? ?    ?        ?            ? menu
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 38912 Oct 11  1994 muf_main.ovl
[...]

Moving along to stuff that worked even if it wasn’t very good: Powermonger. I somehow missed this last night when I was going through games already present in the database that only needed screenshots. Or maybe I blocked it out from my mind. I have the DOS version of this game (purchased as part of an Electronic Arts/Gravis collaboration for preording the Gravis Ultrasound sound card). I really enjoyed Powermonger’s predecessor, Populous. But I could never quite wrap my head around this one.

Powermonger is a realtime strategy game where you play an outcast warlord on a quest of world domination. You start out with a small following and start ravaging the countryside, territory by territory, taking what resources you can until everything belongs to you. I usually had the worst time controlling my armies who always seemed to be ambling off to pick flowers in the field or something other than marching off to battle like I thought I was ordering them to do. That’s why I took to calling this game the virtual cat herding simulation.

Given the technical capabilities of the Sega CD — or lack thereof — I’m rather impressed that the programmers were able to achieve Powermonger’s 3D effects on the console. How did they do it? Slowly, but they did it. It’s interesting to note that while my DOS version of Powermonger was delivered via a pair of 1.2-megabyte 5.25″ floppy discs, the Sega CD version expanded to fill the available capacity. The main data track is 320 MB large and there are 9 redbook audio tracks to boot. What to do with all that space? Why, FMV, of course. This is a different kind of FMV, though– it’s silent film FMV. Seriously, you sort of have to interpret what’s going on– no speech or subtitles:

Next game is Stellar Fire, apparently one in a long-running series of games under the Stellar 7 banner (I have yet another such game for the 3DO — Draxon’s Revenge — that’s not yet in the database). This game started out as a treat since the FMV on offer was actually very good. You’re humanity’s last hope, piloting a starship, yadda yadda, invading the Draxons’ homeworld and orbiting moons, blah blah. It’s a little more compelling when you’re actually watching the intro, of course.

You pilot something called a hovermorph. It’s supposed to be decked out with enough firepower to destroy a small solar system. That may or may not be hyperbole; the intro depicts this ship blowing up a Draxon capital ship. Too bad the ship’s pilot (you, I guess) hesitates until the Draxons had iced his 2 wingmates, a.k.a., the second- and third-to-last hopes for humanity, respectively.

Moving right along to the gameplay, the action takes place on a polygonally-rendered, first-person battlefield. The game’s box copy prides itself that it’s not an on-rails shooter but is instead real-time 3D. Hover around and shoot stuff with your lasers and missiles. There are flying creatures that are essentially drawn as 2 long arcs, similar to the way you used to draw seagulls as elongated McDonald’s arches when you were younger. The first fortified moon was teeming with the large beasts that I believe were called Xarz Voor. The disparity between the intro art and the in-game art reminded me mightily of the difference between Atari game cover art and the actual in-game character representations.

this is the artwork from the mission briefing

I think that polygon creature on the right is the in-game representation of the creature in the picture above
Stellar Fire -- Xarz voor in-game

I can’t exactly figure out what the goal is in this arena, nor can I even find a way to die; I’m constantly knocked around but I don’t see any health meters diminishing. Indeed, if this ship really is tough enough to take out a star cruiser, it shouldn’t have a problem with these negligible opponents.

The final game tonight is Surgical Strike, one in a proud tradition of “FMV backdrop” shooters. I have a terrible, sinking feeling that this is going to suck notably. For the uninitiated, this type of game features an FMV clip playing, simulating intense 3D action, while you navigate a little target around the screen and shoot at opportune moments. One of the most in/famous examples of this sub-genre is Sewer Shark. (Aside: I know we’re supposed to reflect on these games now and cut them some slack because they seemed so novel and innovative at the time but I’m not playing along this time. I distinctly remember seeing Sewer Shark on display at a toy store when it was brand new and being wholly unimpressed.) Quick rundown: Middle-eastern madman launching rockets at civilians, U.N. secretary-general steps in to discourage this practice. You are assigned to pilot a heavily armored, advanced military hovercraft (built by a carpenter, according to the game credits) through war-ravaged cityscapes and hit highlighted hotspots at opportune times.

Fail and your commanding officer chews you out, while your teammates continue to cheer you up by offering some fairly generic advice. Fail too many times and even your peers abandon you, call you a bonehead and throw you in the slammer!

I admit: this game sucked harder than I was prepared to handle. Still, the most bizarre Sega CD titles are yet to come.

See Also:

Sega CD Mini-Extravaganza — my first big exploration into Sega CD games
Actual Video Games — Working through the Make My Video series, the most notorious Sega CD titles (the bizarre titles alluded to above)

At MobyGames:

Hot Genesis On Genesis Action

Posted on March 28, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

This comes from Revengers of Vengeance:

I’m trying to figure out the right adjectives to describe this. Self-referential, certainly. Not quite in the realm of absurd. ‘Kitsch’ might come close, but I don’t think it’s quite the right word.

A game geek has to love the picture nonetheless.

Sega CD Mini-Extravaganza

Posted on March 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I went off the deep end with Sega CD games tonight. This is due to the fact that I got around to writing a Python utility that rips entire Sega CDs in a format suitable to play from the hard disk using the Gens emulator. You can find the Sega CD ripping script on my more technical blog. So I spent a bunch of time ripping games to the hard drive and concentrating on collecting screenshots for Sega CD games that are already in the database.

As best that I could, anyway. In the most ambitious evening yet of this project, I tried 7 different games. Only 3 worked. Among the ones that didn’t work:

Sol-Feace: Space shoot-em-up with a large redbook audio soundtrack. I am listening to the energetic soundtrack ripped to MP3 right now and I am disappointed that I don’t get to try the game. It wouldn’t run in Gens. But at least it sounds like fun.
Masked Rider: Kamen Rider ZO: I’m pretty sure this is based on the Power Rangers franchise. It, too, would not run in Gens.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Severely multi-platform game based on the Coppola film, this game started to run but has trouble making it past the company logo movies; if it does, it never gets past the title screen movie. The problem is always the same: When the movie ends, the last second or so of audio gets stuck in an infinite loop. At least I got the title screenshot:
Slam City with Scottie Pippen: This is actually a Sega CD/32X game. I’m not sure how well Gens is supposed to support the 32X hardware. The game does have a redbook audio track with the theme song which is performed by Pippen himself, according to the game’s credits. It’s a rap about respect that’s only 1.5 minutes long but feels much, much longer. I would post it for posterity but it’s not so much funny or embarrassing as it is dull. Definitely early-90s style, though.

Now it’s time to cover the games that actually did work. The first 2 are cut from the same cloth: Mad Dog McCree and Ground Zero Texas. While produced by different companies, they are both interactive movie-based shooters. McCree happens to be a little more straightforward in concept than Texas, but they’re both phenomenally obnoxious in their own ways. When I tried playing the DOS version of Who Shot Johnny Rock? with a mouse, I noted how difficult and tedious that was and I predicted how much harder it would be to play the same game with a control pad. I was right. McCree is from American Laser Games, same people behind Johnny (also for the Sega CD). What a chore! It’s less a game of skill than a game of memorization. You had better remember exactly where each goon emerges or be doomed to repeat the same level:

Actually, scratch that. It doesn’t matter if you know the precise coordinates of each crony. If you don’t hit precisely the right hot spot, your bullets have no effect. I routinely emptied my revolver squarely on the bad guy only to get plugged when my chamber was empty. I just played long enough to collect a diverse sample of screenshots and I was out. I often hear that this game was a huge hit in its day. I would like to hear more than second-hand testimonials to that effect.

Ground Zero Texas was a little more promising. The premise is that there is a covert alien invasion occurring in Podunkville, Texas, U.S.A. The military has sent out a minor military detachment to deal with this pressing end-of-the-world-type scenario and you are the new tactical ops specialist brought in. Your 3 predecessors mysteriously disappeared and the brass has thrown up its hands in frustration and declared, “If you can’t handle this, we’re nuking this Texan hamlet”. So there’s a sense of urgency. Your task is to sit at a console that is connected to four camera/gun combos in 4 locations in this tiny town. Watch for suspicious humans who are probably inhabited by alien invaders– they will spring up and shoot at the heavily armored gun.

Sci-fi fans will of course recognize the alien-host-inhabiting-human-bodies theme as a convenient plot device for avoiding having to create expensive alien costumes or effects. Anyway, the game was mildly promising until I found I was unable to switch to any other camera when I was done with a particular area. The A button was supposed to enable me to switch but that didn’t work. The A button responds fine in other games played in this emulator. So I got just enough screenshots to make this play time worthwhile.

Finally, it’s on to Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective which represents the rarest of rarities: a halfway decent interactive movie! It even has the distinction of being one of the very first I-movies. Checking my master list of Sega CD titles, I would also have to qualify it as the best Sega CD game I’ve experienced thus far (admittedly, the competition is not especially stiff). The game boasts something like 90 minutes of FMV, and it’s reasonably well done (even if it’s necessarily tiny and grainy).

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective -- Holmes delivers orientation

The aspect of this early genre game that struck me the most during my brief gameplay is the level of extraneous detail. For example, there is an extensive newspaper archive to which Holmes may refer. Each newspaper has marriages, deaths, classified ads, all in addition to actual news. There is a sizable directory of London citizens that Holmes may opt to visit. Granted, not all of them have corresponding FMV clips, rather just Watson informing Holmes that the person didn’t have anything to say. Still, the game is not on rails as you would expect from an interactive movie. This is truly just an adventure/mystery game supplemented with competent use of FMV.