My excuse for not gaming tonight is that I’m installing a new computer. Because, you know, I need a brand new computer… to play… all of these old Windows games on… yeah, that’s it.
I hope to be back on my regular gaming schedule by tomorrow night.
Update: Though I did play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night whilst I was waiting for Windows XP to format the drive. But since I don’t need to enter any information for that game into the database, it seems like it hardly counts.
I had dinner this evening with several high-ranking members of the MobyGames crew. That pretty much depleted all of tonight’s discretionary gaming time. But I figure that meeting with a bunch of MobyGamers and talking about nothing but games for hours on end is pretty close to actually playing a game, in the spirit of this project, anyway.
I knew there had to be better gambling games out there than the only one that has come up in this experiment thus far. Tonight’s game is Vegas Fever Winner Takes All which makes a sincere effort to simulate the Las Vegas gambling atmosphere (or so I suspect; it’s not like I’ve ever been).
This game features a much richer diversity of gaming options than the earlier gambling game written in Visual Basic by one person. This one has detailed graphics, animations which make games like Roulette less confusing, and you-are-there ambient sounds of a casino.
My heart isn’t really into this gaming thing tonight which has a lot to do with why I selected this game for this evening. I figure all I need to do is enter each of the games, grab a screenshot, and I’m good to go as far as MobyGames data is concerned. To that end, I’ll just enumerate the various gaming options that I spotted on this game:
Video Keno
Money Wheel
Slots
Video Slots
Poker
Video Poker
Sic Bo
PaiGow Poker
Baccarat
Mini-Baccarat
Red Dog
Let It Ride
American Roulette
European Roulette
Craps
Blackjack
There is also a Sports Book component which is supposed to connect to an external server and allow you to place make-believe wagers on actual sporting events occurring in real life.
See? I told you that the Roulette game was pretty in this particular gaming title:
I wonder what the difference is between the European and American variations of Roulette, besides the red vs. green table? I’m certain I could easily find out since each game features a concise online help dialog for each game. Maybe Vegas Fever will actually help dissolve the mystique around so many gambling games. Then again, it’s probably safer for me to retain that general misgiving about ever setting foot near a casino.
I’m that much closer to collecting the entire Deer Avenger quadrilogy. Apparently, the joke hadn’t completely worn out with the first 3 Deer Avenger games and Hypnotix went ahead with the fourth game in 2001. One day, I will probably see the transition from #2 to this game, Deer Avenger 3D. Without that game as an intermediary, #4 is the biggest technological leap I have ever seen for a video game franchise since the jump from 8-bit Metal Gear to PlayStation Metal Gear Solid. This time, the game is a full-fledged first-person shooter. I concede that the graphics are quite amazing, but don’t forget the kinds of games I’m used to. In fact, this game is capable of running at any supported resolution from 320×200 all the way up to 1920×1440 on my machine. So I run it at that highest resolution and it takes a proportionately long time to capture a screenshot. This is the only game I have ever run at 1920×1440 aside from the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo.
The game starts off in Bambo’s cave dwelling which has a remarkable home theater setup complete with a cave-mounted flatscreen television.
From here, Bambo has the option of watching any of the opening animations from any of the 4 Deer Avenger games. There is ample space for a trophy case and then four different passageways to differents states, 3 of which are boarded up at the outset. So I go with Idaho, my only choice. This thrusts me into a wide open wilderness that appears to go on and on at first glance. Closer inspection, however, reveals that it’s actually a large arena walled off by slightly higher hills than you can ordinarily run over.
The game makes effective use of 3D sound and I hear someone singing and strumming a guitar. I follow the sound until I happen upon a hippie specimen. I sneak up on him and open fire. Predictably, he freaks out and starts running around the woods. He’s easy to catch and I keep plugging him with my side arm but he just won’t stay down. I would eventually realize that he is in tune with nature and is actually here to help me, despite my cursory efforts to treat him as I would any other human in the game. This assistance comes in the form of food powerups which are actually used for actuating 4 different types of farts.
Deer Avenger 4 action screenshot
I quickly establish a gameplay routine that works like this:
Run around the arena landscape collecting any powerups I can find; these seem to be most abundant along the perimeter.
Activate the magnet fart (broccoli) whenever available since that is alleged to attract hunters. This strikes me as being as ineffective as calls were in the first game for the same purpose.
After a few minutes of tooling around the forest, a hunter inevitably appears. You know that they are on the map when the country twang music kicks in. You can also hear them somewhere in the distance. You can try to follow the sound of their voice or you can make use of your Taco Hut-powered compass fart which will blow in the direction of the hunter. Magical.
Make a bee line for the showdown with the hunter, using a rocket fart-powered assist from a hot dog powerup if you are in a serious hurry.
When the hunter is in view, things degenerate into a serious dogfight. Take cover and get in a shot whenever possible. You can’t take much damage so be extra careful or risk playing through the above steps again and again.
The hunters seem to have better weapons and aim, at least at the outset of the game. At least you have infinite ammo, though you do have to reload occasionally from your infinite stock. If you can get close enough to a hunter, unleash the chili-powered nuclear fart for a quick resolution to the hunter conundrum.
Yeah, vulgar and disgusting, just like the rest of the Deer Avenger series. But undoubtedly an effective use of fog effects available on advanced video cards.
Flash Traffic: City of Angels is an interactive movie that has held my curiosity ever since I spotted its MPEG trailer on an ATI installation CD quite a few years ago. At first, I thought the content of the trailer was supposed to be a joke, what with a vaguely Jerry Seinfeld-looking DEA agent kicking off the affair followed soon after by a somewhat goofy gunfight. Don’t believe me? Watch the trailer yourself:
Thanks to this gaming experiment, it occurred to me to go searching for the game, even though the corresponding MobyGames entry is fairly complete, I still wanted to experience this game. In fact, I have been using this method to scavenge for a number of old games that aren’t yet in MobyGames– think of an old game I’ve heard of and would like to play, search for an eBay store that has it, and find other obscure titles they have in stock. I managed to procure a copy of this game, still wrapped and with a “Review copy — not for resale” sticker on it (as well as a copy of Deer Avenger 4 from the same seller; I only need #3D and the quadrilogy will be complete!). It’s interesting to note that this game comes with an advertisement for Rise of the Robots, a famously sub-par game, to be charitable. Not a good sign.
The game runs great in DOSBox — no surprise there. Let me tell you, interactive movies don’t get much more pure than this. This game plays an FMV clip and then presents you with 3 lines of dialogue to choose from. Repeat, often in circles. That’s it. Most I-movies at least try to throw a few puzzles your way. Tsunami obviously must have thought their story was all they needed to make this “game” compelling.
Unfortunately, Flash Traffic doesn’t trust your reading comprehension ability and sees fit to read each dialogue option to you as your roll over the line. Your character has an obnoxious, quasi-Texan drawl. So much for the you-are-there effect. Even though your character is never seen, the creators saw fit to make sure that your character is most certainly heard. I think it’s possible to shut off these line readings but I couldn’t figure out how to click that radio button (seriously, the dialog box wouldn’t let me).
So the DEA raids a suspected drug lab only to find a nuke factory instead. The game is a race by the FBI to track down the bomb before it incinerates Los Angeles. The game copy boasts about being filmed in locations throughout L.A. More specifically, parking garages and empty office buildings throughout L.A., as you will ascertain from the foregoing game trailer. The beginning of the game has you and your partner/underling Dave interrogating 2 guys nabbed from the lab. The interrogations go around in circles until I eventually stumble on a way out of what is no doubt a virtual maze underneath the game’s covers. I don’t even clearly understand what happens next, or really, why the game took this next path, but the protaganists decide to go find “the Korean”. The Korean who has a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher in his car trunk and takes out the FBI van (huh? the FBI tools around in a non-descript white van?).
So that’s my first game over. I have the opportunity to replay, but that only plays from the beginning of the van scene, where there is no other path but certain detonation. I could restore from a saved game, if I had saved up to this point, or I can restart. So I restart and make different decisions but still wind up at the same rocket-propelled dead end.
I searched and found a FAQ/walkthrough for this game. It confirms for me that the game is on par with standard side scrolling action games when it comes to sheer trial & error tedium and that it’s common to follow a path that doesn’t make any sense, such as the Korean situation above. Though on the second play, I actually received the exposition about who the Korean was and why we were off to meet doom at his hands. Naturally, I still couldn’t avoid it.
About multimedia, this game renders its FMV in the standard DOS VGA 320x200x256 video mode using a custom video format named BFI. However, there was a special version of this game and several other Tsunami games that used MPEG video. How to decode in real time on a 486? Using the bundled RealMagic hardware decoding card. A rare artifact in this day and age, but I will continue the search.
The things you can learn by auditing your website’s log files. For example, I learned from this web page — that was hotlinking one of this blog’s images — that there was apparently a Sega Saturn version of the obnoxious I-movie Quantum Gate, at least in Japan. The page is hosted in Finland so I presume the language is Finnish, and I gather that the game is for sale.