Educational Sprint

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I worked through a bunch of educational/kids games in this final push towards 10K points (not sure if I’ll actually hit that goal by January 1st, but it won’t be because I don’t have enough material stuffed in the MobyGames submission queue; as of this writing, I have 13 new games waiting for approval which might be a personal record).

Let the record show that I gave Pecos Bill my best shot to no avail. The game wants 640x480x256, and I just couldn’t get my system into that mode, not even with all the compatibility settings. But I do have a rogue version of Apple QuickTime 2.0 running around my system now, thinking that it’s in charge of viewing QuickTime, JPEG images, MPEG movies, and assorted other file types.

I then dove into Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland, a series of games & activities that, while simple, can be described in a complicated manner. For example, I described Fliptrack Mountain to MobyGames as dealing with transport logistics at a level that a child can understand. The game presents you with a transport task (like delivering a present from the top of a mountain to a house elsewhere on the mountain) and challenges you with deciding what transport option would be most appropriate– car, train, boat, or helicopter.

Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland– Fliptrack Mountain

Another activity revolves around following a cookie recipe:

Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland– Cookie baking game

Ahem, I know cookie recipes and at first I was ready to call nonsense on the ratios represented in this recipe. But then I noticed that it just seems to be a matter of making rolled butter cookies, and the proportions look a little better.

I subjected myself — however briefly — to another Mister Men and Little Miss title (you may recall The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain). This game dealt with one Mr. Tickle. These games are perhaps more insufferable than the Make My Video games, though I concede that at least these have an excuse since they are directed at a less serious market.

That does it– I refuse to actively seek out any more of the titles in this particular series, and I know there are a bunch. MobyGames is going to get a really lackluster description for this title since I simply could not handle it for very long.

But then I tracked down an awesome little game based on The Flintstones called Bedrock Bowling; perhaps not strictly educational but definitely kid-targeted, so grant me some reprieve today. Curiously, it comes from a developer named Adrenalin Entertainment which, if you examine their record, already has a few bowling-themed games to their record. This makes me wonder if they went out of their way to come up with a bowling angle when tasked with creating a casual game for the Flintstones franchise.

The Flintstones: Bedrock Bowling– Fred, Barney, and The Great Gazoo

Fred Flintstone is ready to clock out of work and practice for the bowling tournament but his boss threatens him with summary termination if he doesn’t finish a series of trenches by the next morning. A little green, floating, omnipotent alien named The Great Gazoo shows up and saves the day. Gazoo strikes me as a highly insecure Q-like being, who really just wants people to like him. Anyway, he uses his powers to create a series of trenches for Fred. Then he helps him practice bowling by giving him some giant bowling ball half shells that he can use to race through 8 trenches. The levels are highly detailed and animated and quite fun to play.

The Flintstones: Bedrock Bowling– Flooded lane

Each lane has 2 segments and you have to do “well enough” by the checkpoint in order to continue with the second segment. I could never quite figure out what “well enough” was, though. It didn’t matter, though, since nothing ever prohibited you from progressing to the next of the 8 lanes.

Finally, I played a Disney Lilo & Stitch title and ultimately decided I had had enough. I spent much of the game time staring at this minigame, such as it is:

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch Hawaiian Adventure — Hula lesson

You basically get to interact with things on or around the stage, and you can poke the young girls to make them dance for you. You can pull down the screen to watch an FMV of an actual hula dance lesson. The title is supposed to consist of 9 minigames of which this is the first. I eventually learned that clicking on the shell carries me to minigame #2 in which I am expected to help an otherworldly monstrosity by the name of Stitch bumble his way around his spaceship’s crash site picking up junk.

I guess if I’ve learned anything from educational games this year, it’s that there’s a threshold to what level of educational game I can tolerate– the preschool/toddler games are right out. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the Spy Kids Learning Adventures series, which were geared for ages 7-10. Take from that what you will.

CompUSA Deathwatch

Posted on December 26, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

As some may have heard, the electronics chain CompUSA gets the axe soon. Because of this, they are allegedly blowing out all of their merchandise. But they are not trying very hard, at least not yet. I checked a local store a few days and found their budget/casual gaming section. The titles were $10 normally but were now advertised as 10% off. Not good enough. I am wondering when or if they will slash the prices far more significantly to make it worthwhile to pick up a bunch of these titles.

Actual Video Games

Posted on December 25, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I put my iPod on random play recently and out of the thousands of songs loaded, “Jump” by Kris Kross came up. I construe this as a supernatural sign that I can no longer avoid my duty of playing the notorious Kris Kross Sega CD game and entering it into MobyGames. This is something I have been putting off since I first started in with the Sega CD titles for this experiment last March.

Kris Kross Gonna Make Ya Wanna… Jump! Jump!

I have long dreaded this day. But I recognize that if I can nail down just one of the games, the other ones should be fairly simple to write up and enter in the database. I can’t quite articulate why these games give me such pause. I mean, I’ve suffered through some real stinkers this year. But perhaps it’s the fact that I once tried to wrap my head around these so-called Make My Video games well before this experiment began, and I knew what was in store, trying to articulate this game for the sake of the database.

It’s not uncommon to hear jaded game geeks clamor for new, innovative types of gameplay. Be careful what you wish for. When CD-based games first hit the market, developers weren’t quite sure how best to use the capacity (I wager that there are similar growing pains right now surrounding the new Nintendo Wii controller scheme).

Maybe I should just get to the point. There was a series of 4 games called “Make My Video” released for the Sega CD system. Each one starred a different musical act popular at the time (circa 1992). The gameplay revolved around intense, real-time video editing. The four different games technically do qualify as games since there are goals to achieve. The goal takes the shape of editing together a video according to varying specifications.

The four acts in the different games are Kris Kross, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, INXS, and C+C Music Factory. That latter one went by a slightly different title than the rest, Power Factory Featuring C+C Music Factory, which has thankfully already been entered into the database. I thought it was an unrelated title until I did a deeper investigation today and recognized that it’s part of the same series.

Seth Green stars in Marky Mark’s Make My Video

I started with the Marky Mark title since I actually have the manual for that title. It doesn’t matter. The game, or rather the gameplay, makes so little sense that I would find it a wonder if any player ever succeeded in any of these video editing missions. Each game has some setup, some raison d’être for the task at hand. In this episode, teenage siblings (the brother played by Seth Green) argue about the ideal contents of a Marky Mark video. After much heated debate, they enlist the help of a boxer and his trainer, a trio of airheaded teenage girls, a garage band, and their own parents, all for advice on a perfect Marky Mark video.

Marky Mark Make My Video — Video editing

Once you select a song from among 3 Marky Mark smash hits and have solicited specifications, you are thrust into the editing screen seen above. There are 3 video channels playing– one is the original music video and the other is random footage that, as Seanbaby hypothesized, is most likely public domain stock footage. You switch between the 3 channels using the A, B, and C controller buttons. The control pad allows you to select among various effects, such as color filters, blocking filters, strobes, freezes, lyric subtitles, and others.

Marky Mark Make My Video — Final product

The “level”, such as it is, lasts as long as the video does (4 1/2 minutes for “Good Vibrations”). When finished, the game torments you with the fruits of your own labor by playing the final product back for you. At the end, the girls have the audacity to criticize me, almost as if they’re forgetting that they’re the ones who custom-ordered a Marky Mark music video.

One down and 2 to go, but oooooooowwwwwwwwww, does this hurt! Christmas Day was not meant for this kind of misery. The setup in the Kris Kross game is that a radio disc jockey is hosting a radio program in which callers are helpfully offering advice about their ideal Kris Kross video. One woman essentially wants a version of their video for “I Missed The Bus” but without all the shots of alarm clocks because she disapproves of the devices. I must concede that this title offered a marginal improvement over the last since if I fail to deliver a video up to spec, the DJ refuses to play it back for me.

Kris Kross Make My Video — Playback denied

Is that supposed to be a punishment for me? Okay, getting close. I just need to listen to Michael Hutchence of INXS crooning about how he needs me tonight and I’ll be done. The setup for the INXS one is that 2 obnoxious women in a bar are monopolizing the pool table. Alternately slack-jawed and nerdy guys are trying to pick them up and some tough, leather-clad chicks are trying to earn the privilege to play their Megadeth videos on the bar’s TV (their Megadeth VHS tape looks so quaint these days). So the pool ladies do what comes naturally and challenge all comers to create superior INXS videos.

And as a point of fact, “Need You Tonight” is not one of the three videos available for editing here. For reference:

Make My Video: Marky Mark: “Good Vibrations”, “I Need Money”, “You Gotta Believe”
Make My Video: Kris Kross: “Jump”, “Warm It Up”, “I Missed The Bus”
Make My Video: INXS: “Heaven Sent”, “Not Enough Time”, “Baby Don’t Cry”
Power Factory Featuring C+C Music Factory: “Gonna Make You Sweat”, “Here We Go”, “Things That Make You Go Hmmm”

The INXS selections make sense in light of the fact that the game was published in 1992, and the songs come from the 1992 album Welcome To Wherever You Are. In fact, that album’s cover art graces an early screen of the game.

Note that you don’t have to play in the competitive mode — called EditChallenge — where you create videos to spec (of course, you don’t have to play the games at all, ever, or even acknowledge that they even existed). There is also the U-Direct mode where you can just flex your editing skills as you see fit. Otherwise, the EditChallenges usually seem to consist of around 5 specifications — either types of footage to either include or omit, or different filter requests.

All in all, I have to give the game programmer credit (it appears to just be one programmer who wrote the engine that drives all 4 titles) for the types of effects he was able to pull off on such limited video hardware.

Kudos also to one Mark Wahlberg who exhibited the humility to actually shoot special scenes for his title:

None of the other artists made special appearances for their games. Of the subjects of all 4 games, I ask you: Who has the biggest career to this day?

At MobyGames:

The entire “Make My Video” series

Hunt Or Be Hunted

Posted on December 24, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Actually, the title of this game is merely Hunt, which will make it annoying to search for when it gets into MobyGames soon. It’s of the “casual game” genre, or must be, because not only did I pick it up in the budget software section where I found My Fantasy Wedding and Bratz: Rock Angelz, but also because it was on clearance. It’s a curious genre cross between a first person shooter and a hunting game.

First, there is the section where you go out into the haunted or perhaps radioactive forest, armed with 4 different weapons, and mow down aggressive animals like bears and boars (later levels apparently have rabbits too):

When you reach the flagstaff, you have the opportunity to switch to a more traditional hunting scene in a more serene setting.

There’s a bear in that picture, but it’s a little far off. It’s easier when the random bear encounter occurs closer to you.

And that’s all I really feel like writing on Christmas Eve.

Blackhole Assault

Posted on December 23, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Blackhole Assault for the Sega CD is another in a long line of games that I would have liked to like. I’m just a sucker for good looking graphics of the 16-bit console era, such as this space station against the backdrop of a Jovian moon:

In the next scene, the camera angle changes and moves slowly up the station, giving a feeling of depth to the lunar backdrop:

Unfortunately, the graphic style of the story scenes is perhaps the only redeeming quality of the experience. I had no idea what kind of game to expect going into this. It turns out that it’s a pure 1-on-1 fighting game. It seems that in the 22nd century, earthlings are trying to excavate resources from the rest of the solar system. Exploratory missions are disappearing “one bye [sic] one”, however, and at least one military commander is calling it like he sees it. “How can those fools say these are accidents when they’re obviously alien attacks?” I can relate– I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said the same thing in the course of my daily affairs. But earth has a powerful weapon to deal with these alleged alien attacks: Cybernetic Anthropomorphic Machines or C.A.M.s for short. And these C.A.M.s have to take on powerful alien robots one-on-one at scenic locations throughout the solar system.

Above is the Phobos level. Like I said, the game is pretty. I just can’t abide the poor, clunky gameplay, even if we are just dealing with giant robots. Fortunately, the game features an exhibition mode which allows players to customize matchups with any of the available robots and any of the game’s 10 backdrops. Further, this mode can be configured for computer vs. computer, which allowed me to cycle through all 10 backdrops for screenshot purposes.

One more pretty screenshot– this one is called ‘Asteroid’. The backdrops really do work better in motion, though.

At MobyGames:

Blackhole Assault

The Vanna White Edition

Posted on December 23, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Let’s begin with an 8-bit representation of the inimitable Vanna White, if only to needlessly gain a bunch of unrelated Google image search traffic:

There were 4 different NES games based on the Wheel of Fortune game show license and 4 more based on the Jeopardy! license. At the time of this writing, MobyGames has 3 of the Jeopardy! games (Jeopardy!, Jeopardy! Junior Edition, Jeopardy! 25th Anniversary Edition) and only 1 of the Wheel of Fortune games. So I made it a goal to slog through the remaining games for the sake of completeness.

So what’s up with all the different versions of these games? There were 4 different WoF games: the standard one, Junior Edition, Family Edition, and the version featuring Vanna White. Perhaps a table is in order:

	Standard Edition	Junior Edition	Family Edition	Vanna White Edition
Release Date	September, 1988	October, 1989	March, 1990	January, 1992
Player characters	None	None	None	Yes, stupid-looking
Wheel animation	Decent	Decent	Decent	Regressed, lame
Letter-flipping sprite

As an elitist gamer — or even a passive, casual gamer — you might be snorting at the fact that there were so many of these games. Frankly, those release dates tell me something — that this license moved cartridges. My first impression upon playing through the series was that the first 3 were developed concurrently and published at the same time (after all, the only changes were the specific puzzles as well as the palette of Vanna’s dress). But, no — the games’ releases were spaced out quite a bit.

The first 3 games are more or less clones of each other. Here’s a representative screenshot:

The player basically gets to look at that same game screen the entire time, broken only by the wheel animation. The games can be played against human players or against computer opponents, and at three different difficulty levels. I selected the ‘hard’ level, which I’m pretty sure is the “No Mercy” level– if the computer gets a turn, it doesn’t lose.

What’s special about the Vanna White edition? Well, it’s the first edition that specifically mentions her by name. Presumably, the earlier 3 games didn’t actually use her likeness (can you tell?). Further, the V.W. edition offers actual player graphics. Stupid player graphics, but player graphics, nonetheless.

The tradeoff here is that the wheel animation is not as interesting as in the previous games.

As mentioned, Jeopardy! has a much better representation in the database thus far. Only Super Jeopardy! is missing. The progression of the Jeopardy titles seems to parallel that of the WoF titles. The Super title was the final one. There can be up to four players participating (unlike standard Jeopardy! where there are but 3 players). All 4 of the games have player avatars, but the ones featured in this game were a departure from the previous ones seen in the series, but bore an eerie similarity to another game I played today:

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Month: December 2007