Acquisition Log: Strategic Acquisition

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Multimedia Mike

I came across someone who wanted to get rid of a bunch of old Windows games, someone who was apparently a fan of real time strategy games. Most of the games are already in the database, but I acquired them anyway because they were basically free and many of the specific covers were not yet in the database.

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Random observation: Check out the back of Lords of Midnight — one of the screenshots has a caption that purports that the game is comprised of an immense world that is the equivalent of 8 CD-ROMs. I’m hoping that the single CD-ROM that I have corresponds to this box copy.

Anyway, out of this lot, Crusades: Quest for Power is the only title that is definitively absent from the database. There is also Superbike World Championship– this is the kind of game that’s difficult to tell whether it’s in the database already. As of this writing, there is a whole category of Superbike World Championship titles but none that just name the basic title, which is all the CD-ROM states. The disc lists copyright dates of 1999,2000, which is a bit earlier than the ones of record, so this probably warrants a new entry.

The other games are:

Conquest of the New World: Deluxe Edition
Cyclemania
Gex (Smart Saver release)
Highland Warriors
Hocus Pocus (WizardWorks release)
Lords of Midnight
Patrician II: Quest for Power
Renegade: Battle for Jacob’s Star (Sun Moon Star release)
Shadow Watch
Shadows of Cairn
Sinistar Unleashed
XIII (distributed through the U.K. newspaper The Sun)
XS

Acquisition Log: Tycoon Game Tycoon

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Multimedia Mike

The genre of “Tycoon” simulation games is ridiculously vast. Here are some of my acquisitions from the previous year in this field:

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So we have:

Fairy Godmother Tycoon (I actually remember seeing this when it was first released in 2007 and keeping my eye on it, knowing that I would collect it some day)
Prison Tycoon 4: Supermax (first 3 games in the series are already in MobyGames)
Deep Sea Tycoon: Diver’s Paradise (already in MobyGames)
Mall of America Tycoon (apparently a “special edition” of the overarching Mall Tycoon series, the first 3 of which are already in the database)
TV Tycoon (I just realized this is already in the database as TV Manager)
Tycoon Collection (shovelware collection not documented in database yet, though some of the constituent games are):

Moon Tycoon (in database)
Marine Life Tycoon
Ocean Explorer Tycoon
Coffee Tycoon (in database)

I actually look forward to these playing these games sometime since I had such a good time during my all-too-brief time allotted to Skateboard Park Tycoon.

Acquisition Log: 2011-06-18

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Multimedia Mike

A thrift store haul

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Frog Frenzy 2 (with Frog Frenzy 1 on the same disc), from Cosmi
Sammy’s Science House, from Edmark
Carmen Sandiego’s ThinkQuick Challenge, from The Learning Company
Intel Video Phone Software (multimedia software that will be useful on my other blog)

Recent Auction Acquisitions

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Grandia II (Dreamcast), from Ubisoft
Championship Snow Boarding 2004, from Activision
Cabbage Patch Kids: Where’s My Pony, from D3Publisher
NHL ’99 (PC), from EA Sports

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Rune, apparently published through Global Star Software as part of a CD-ROM shovelware set, perhaps titled Pack 5; this is presumably disc 3 of a multi-disc set and encompasses action games
KAR Racing, from Cosmi
Nascar 2000, from EA Sports

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I thought that this would be “Fantasy Pack 6”, as in, there were 5 other packs before this one. Some Googling reveals that the proper title for the set is “Fantasy 6 Pack”, which means that my set is incomplete since I only got 4 unique games. But deeper searching and squinting at the box image available on Amazon reveals that I do, in fact, have a complete set since one of the games actually counts as 3:

Disciples II (2 discs) — this is the one that counts as 3 games since this includes Dark Prophecy, Servants of the Dark, and Guardians of the Light
Prince of Qin (3 discs)
Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood
Dragon Throne: Battle of Red Cliffs

The MAME Fix

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Multimedia Mike

Every few years I find myself coming back to MAME. For the uninitiated (or just forgetful), MAME is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, a remarkable piece of software that emulates considerably more arcade games than you even knew existed.

Unfortunately, my experience always goes like this:

Download and build MAME (I’m often on Linux and building from source works best for me); this step usually works pretty smoothly, if a bit slowly as the MAME code base consists of many thousands of files
Find some ROM images I downloaded years ago
Re-familiarize myself with the documentation; the trade-off you make with such a marvelously super-flexible program is that the setup can be painful
Finally figure out how to launch the emulator with a particular ROM
Find that the ROM package is corrupted and MAME can’t run it (no quality control with underground contraband, I tell ya)
If it does work, then read some more documentation until I can make a gamepad work and achieve the optimal graphics and audio settings

Then I can finally enjoy a classic arcade game or 2… until I remember the final insult:

Pure arcade games are not terribly engaging when played by yourself in free-play mode. When playing any arcade game in free-play mode, it becomes painfully obvious in short order that — for the vast majority of such games — the only challenge is to keep your character alive and the only motivation for doing so is to not have to feed more currency into the machine in order to keep playing. When you’re effectively on free-play, getting through an arcade game just feels like a rote chore. Conventional emulators don’t suffer from this same issue since, generally, one emulator only emulates one system while MAME emulates thousands. Further, other emulators tend to emulate systems that are built around gameplay principles other than pure token-eating.

Still, I have come back every so often and get that MAME fix.

Acquisition Log: Dreamcast Haul

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Multimedia Mike

I was on a Dreamcast kick a few months back and one result is that I went in search of a bunch of Dreamcast stuff on eBay. Here are the results of a few different hauls.

First, I collected some games, mostly disposable sports games:

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Games included:

NFL 2K
NFL 2K1
NHL 2K
Sonic Adventure 2
Spider-Man
Sydney 2000
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
Virtua Tennis

Further, I procured a collection of 9 different volumes of Sega Dreamcast magazine. I seem to be missing 2 volumes and I’m not sure sure if there were more than 11 issues as the last volume was issued on February, 2001.

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November, 1999 — this doesn’t list a volume number but I think this is volume 2
January, 2000 — volume 3
May, 2000 — volume 5
July, 2000 — volume 6
September, 2000 — volume 7
November, 2000 — volume 8
December, 2000 — volume 9
January, 2001 — volume 10
February, 2001 — volume 11

That last issue was published around the time that the Dreamcast was being discontinued in North America.

Neo Geo: Bigger Badder Better Ad

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Multimedia Mike

Here’s a curious artifact from my archives– a large advertisement for the Neo Geo game system entitled “Neo Geo: Bigger Badder Better”. I have seen the cover image around the internet but I can’t find all the scans. So I guess it falls to me to make sure that the specimen is preserved for all time online. Here is the document in convenient PDF form:

Neo Geo: Bigger Better Badder advertisement in PDF format (~15MB)

This advertisement takes the form of a small magazine. I’m not sure how it was originally distributed. I remember receiving it from this weird kid at the local video arcade (PlayAmerica video arcade in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA; I know I have some readers who remember it). This would have been circa 1993-1994. The kid in question actually owned a Neo Geo. I was a real tech spec fiend back in those days, always quoting the MHz speed of the CPUs and the total palette each console was capable. This kid produced this Neo Geo ad which was right up my ally. He let me keep it and now here we are.

The advertising material is far more aggressive than anything Sega ever produced. But selling a $650 video game console (this was the early 1990s) was the toughest of sells. The magazine purports to be written by an entity known as The Game Lord who is here to school you on why all other consoles suck compared to the Neo Geo. Actually, I doubt that even the most ardent Sega or Nintendo fanboy from the period would even attempt to argue that their favorite consoles were technically superior to the Neo Geo. But there was the issue of initial capital investment for the console, plus $200 video games.

I did, however, like the copy’s tackling of the CD-ROM issue, citing that gamers should be worried about the time it takes to develop a game to fill a 650 MB optical disc when it already takes a long time to develop one that just fits on a few megabytes worth of ROM. It’s a curious assumption, to be sure, that development time is linearly proportional to the size of the end product deliverable. Of course, they were 100% correct about early CD-ROM games; see my interactive games category for more hard data on this matter.

Here are the individual page scans; click for larger images:

Front cover with the pit bull — I think this might have been the closest the Neo Geo came to having a mascot
Hardware overview

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike

Acquisition Log: Strategic Acquisition

Acquisition Log: Tycoon Game Tycoon

Acquisition Log: 2011-06-18

The MAME Fix

Acquisition Log: Dreamcast Haul

Neo Geo: Bigger Badder Better Ad