Earlier today, I asked the MobyGames admins to completely obliterate an entry that I entered a long time ago when I was new to the database. I realized there were a bunch of things wrong with it and it was easier to perform a summary “do-over” than submit a series of corrections. The game was entitled Space Racers, or I thought it was. In-game, the title was Rocky Racers. This game is another one of those credit card form factor mini-CDs published by Selectsoft as “Pocketware”. Now that I realize that they like to gratuitously rename games, I need to change the title, the publisher, the description, the release date, everything.

I played Rocky Racers again tonight. And since that was quick enough, I picked out another random game from the pile: Kombat Kars. The company name on this one sounded familiar: Positech, same company that did Rocky Racers. Guess what? Kombat Kars is essentially the same game with slightly different art and music! In fact, the brief credits screens for each game are exactly the same (one guy doing programming and graphics, outsourced music, and 3 playtesters; I pity that trio, more on why in a moment).

Rocky Racers, a.k.a. Space Racers, involves 4 outer space ships racing around an asteroid-delimited 2D race course. Multiplayer is possible via TCP/IP or IPX, or the balance of ships is controlled, rather ruthlessly, by the computer. Any of the ships has the capacity to fire on other ships or activate a tractor beam in an effort to slow their progress. It’s also possible to work your way outside of the asteroid boundaries. However, there are a number of waypoints that you are expected to cross and if you miss any, the game will complain and presumably disqualify you from winning.

Not that I would know for sure. The controls are very difficult to use. Or maybe the ships are too quick, or the track is too confined. I found it all very difficult. The other ships fought ahead of me in short order and got way out ahead of me while I was still constantly bouncing off the game’s eponymous rocks. I didn’t get far. Those 3 playtesters must have been a patient bunch.

Kombat Kars has cars instead of spaceships and, while apparently published a bit later than Rocky Racers, isn’t quite as involved. There is one less track (8 vs. 9), no multiplayer support, and no tractor beam, though that last feature might not make as much sense in context. I found it just as frustrating to play. These 2 are such pretty games and should make for awesome casual distractions. I really wish they had joystick support as that probably would have made gameplay easier.

This is the person to blame for these 2 games. He still appears to be gainfully employed in the same field.

At MobyGames:

• Rocky Racers
• Kombat Kars

It was a difficult night with the games. But I was determined to play a new game and it finally paid off, in a manner of speaking. I’ll chronicle the brief adventure:

The first game I tried was Eraser Turnabout, apparently based on the 1996 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vanessa Williams. I wanted to give it the standard fair shake but the game wouldn’t let me:

“The OS is not Win 95. Eraser Turnabout only runs under Windows 95.” — retyped for the benefit of hapless would-be gamers googling for tech support. The game comes from Imagination Pilots who have all of 2 other games to their record in the database, and one is an interactive movie.

I want to point out a few other technical aspects of this game before I assign it to the “couldn’t make work” section of the Master Play List. The game material I have (2 CDs and back CD cover; no art or instructions or adornment) prominently boasts Intel MMX technology used in the game. MMX chips first hit the market in 1997, per my understanding; this game lists a copyright date of 1996. Early adopter, I guess. The game has lots and lots of Indeo 4/AVI files and Smacker files. There are also miscellaneous temp files and directories left around the filesystem structure. Seems a bit sloppy.

So that was a bust. Let’s look at one of several Pocketware games. What happens here is that a company called Selectsoft licenses a bunch of fairly simple yet graphically pleasing computer games for redistribution on these adorable credit card form factor mini-CDs. Here is Star Scrambler, which contains ~40 MB of data:

Sounds exciting. Let’s try it out… noooooo! How can this be?!

It’s a repackaging of Astro Assembler. Who knows? Maybe there will be some further intelligence provided in this version that will indicate who actually developed and who published this game. I need to know because that’s hanging up my MobyGames submission on this game right now. Nope; everything looks the same as before– manual, game, and everything. If I were to do a byte-wise comparison of all files involved, they would likely be identical.

Let’s move swiftly on to another Pocketware mini-CD. This one is called Trax: The Robot Wars. It has ~80 MB of data on its surface, ~70 MB of which belong to one big WAV background music track. It works, so it’s my game for tonight. To sum it up, it’s a life and death game of bumper cars.

The title makes the game sound a lot more epic than it really is. There are several modes in the game. The first is Ascent, where you battle one other computer-controlled car at a time to rise up through the ranks. You defeat the other car either by pushing it out of the ring and hitting it enough times so that it blows up. The other two modes are Battle and Tournament where you can configure up to 4 cars, either human or computer-controlled, to have an all-out war in various arenas. You can win money with which to customize and your vehicle to gain a bigger edge.

So you can select to play against 3 other CPU opponents. That makes things marginally interesting. I settled on a strategy of staying out of the way and avoiding the other 3 cars until there was only one other car. Then I rolled around the arena as nimbly as I could and hoped that the CPU car would fall off the edge.

Another mildly amusing feature is that all 4 cars in these battles royale can be configured as CPU players. This is great for the really lazy gamer, such as yours truly.