Diminishing Returns

Posted on October 19, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I recently returned to my old state where I was able to visit my favorite spent shops for both console games and PC games. I returned home with 25 new games procured for about $75, easily averaging less than $5 per game which is my soft limit. Thing is, I had no way of knowing if these games would be valuable for entry into MobyGames since I am not equipped with, e.g., a cellphone that has web access. Wouldn’t you know, almost all of the games are already in the database, though there are some odds and ends for me to fill in regarding cover art scans, screenshots, and credits. But overall, good coverage.

So it seems that I’m getting to the point that I can’t just pick up random games and expect to find something that is not yet in the database. However, that doesn’t really square with the fact that every single time I visit my new favorite local thrift shop, I find random games that are almost certainly not entered yet.

All Hail The Moon Deity

Posted on October 18, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s game is Rockett’s Camp Adventures. It comes from Purple Moon, a company that I remember from the late 1990s for the press they received about creating games for girls. I was sure the company would already be in MobyGames, but nope. That means I have yet another forgotten franchise to track down and enter.

Purple Moon published a series of these games that revolved around a girl named Rockett. In this title, she packs her bag for camp and steps into some cliched teen drama the moment she steps off the bus.

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — Welcome to Camp Luna

The intro of the game exhibits the campers chanting songs of worship to the camp’s namesake, namely the earth’s natural satellite. I figured that they may as well be singing to a lunar deity, but then I noticed that Luna is already the Roman god of the moon. This, as well as he ensuing drama may all be part and parcel of the summer camp experience; personally, I have no frame of reference.

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — Nicole balloon

The teen conflict comes in the form on Nicole, ostensibly the spoiled rich girl archetype and anointed leader of “The 1’s”, the elite clique. It seems that most of the kids also attend the same school since many of them are already familiar with each other (and as I typed that, I shivered from the realization that I would probably learn their backstories when I inevitably procure the other Rockett games). Having left high school well over a decade ago, I finally understand how cliched and unrealistic these portrayals of teen social caste can be. The Nicole character is an over-the-top snob and it doesn’t really work. In order for this to reflect teen life as I remember it, she would need to inspire awe and fear in those around her. Much of that fear involves exploiting typical insecurities inherent in other teens. The other teens do not fear her; quite the contrary, they openly mock her to her face, as depicted in the fantasy in the above screenshot.

Forgive the digression into thematic criticism. I will return to the gaming elements now. What there is, anyway. The game is primarily an overblown interactive storybook: Colorful backgrounds with mostly static characters that rarely move. The story proceeds in a linear fashion until there is a pressing realtime decision that the character must make. Well, maybe not realtime. And it’s not that pressing, either. It doesn’t drive the story in any direction. One such decision is when first encountering the Nicole character– Rockett essentially has the choice to throw her support behind Nicole and her gang of 1’s or hang out with her lame friends. No matter how many chances I was offered to snub the uncool kids, the game would not let me choose that path.

There are a number of activities. The first is the canoe race which is not terribly exciting, save for whales, cephalopods and submarines that inhabit this little river. There are no real threats or competition on the river and the only goal is to beat your own time.

I thought the Crystal Caverns game was mildly interesting:

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — Crystal Caverns

In this activity, the player must navigate through a cavern in 7 stages. At each stage, there is a puzzle to solve that reveals the correct door. The puzzles are pretty much at the level Capcom’s Resident Evil series as illustrated by the screenshot above (hint: where does the stick dude’s longest arm point?). Some of the puzzles rely on auditory clues. I solved all the puzzles correctly on the first try but there are no real consequences for guessing wrong– the 3D rendered tunnel simply backs up to the same junction.

There are 2 more activities: An arts & crafts activity of making friendship bracelets, and the DJ Mix Maker:

It’s a 4-track studio application and reminds me a lot of 4-channel Amiga tracker modules (MODs). That made me happy. I often observed that many MOD composers used the 4 channels for beat, bass, chords, and melody. This application basically enforces that same structure, though the budding composer has 10 sound effects to choose from as well.

Rockett also has a little PDA along for the trip (which would have been quite special in 1999 when this game was published). This thing provides help, a private journal, email from the game, progress status, as well as a callout to a web browser to bring up Purple Moon’s website which, surprisingly, is not being squatted upon, though it has been absorbed into a larger Mattel site by now. There is also this research tab which delivers up educational nuggets in certain activities. It provides and describes compass functionality when in the Crystal Caverns (not especially useful, mind you):

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — Compass pronunciation

The part that I was fixated upon was the pronunciation: ‘k&m-p&s’. Did they mean for the ampersand to stand in for pronunciation characters because they were restricted to a 7-bit ASCII encoding? Or are there font issues? I work on multi-lingual user application software so I’m naturally sensitive to these issues.

I think I’ve picked on this game’s content enough. Tech support time. I would be remiss in my duties as a video game historian if I did not publish notes about problems I encountered, complete with retyped error text for the benefit of Google crawlers, as well as the resolutions I found. The first one involves “Xpat Runtime Engine”:

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — xpat runtime engine error

And the second problem I encountered was “Out of memory. can’t create message box While executing: MESSAGEBOX – FILEDLG.DLL”:

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — fildlg.dll error

I made both of these problems go away by setting the compatibility mode for the program to Windows 95.

See Also:

Time to Ride: Saddles & Stables — another game dealing with the struggles of being accepted

At MobyGames:

Rockett’s Camp Adventures

Speaking Of Pop-Tarts

Posted on October 17, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Speaking of Pop-Tarts…

Years ago, a fellow named Claude Knobler used to publish capsule movie reviews on a site called Hollywoodhollywood.com. One day, all of his reviews vanished and someone else’s review appeared. However, I was browsing through his old reviews courtesy of the Internet Archive and found this brilliant analysis of the 2002 movie The Count of Monte Cristo:

This thing’s like a Pop-Tart: it’s not good for you, it’s not well made and if you give me a thousand of them, I’ll love every single one.

If only I could fashion review rhetoric like that. I think that sentiment pretty much sums up every guilty pleasure ever and might describe how many of us regard video games.

(I have also long cherished Claude’s review of the 2001 movie Rat Race, where watching it “is like being tickled by sweaty guy with halitosis. I laughed, but I was never really happy about it.” I often apply that same analysis to the American Pie series.)

See Also:

The Intersection Of Automatons and Breakfast Pastries: Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts – Robots Movie tie-in games

Confusing Game Of Trivial Soup

Posted on October 16, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s title is extremely confusing. I was trying to keep with the theme of commercial tie-ins. I remembered picking up a Campbell’s Soup CD-ROM. The confusion alluded to in the title derives from these facts:

There are 4 software titles on the CD-ROM and on the sleeve
The titles imply that all 4 will be available on the CD-ROM (3 educational games and a calendar creation app)
The CD-ROM displays a volume label of TMUNCHER; the closest any of the listed titles come to this title is Knowledge Munchers Deluxe
There is clearly only 1 game on the CD-ROM — not 4 — and it has something to do with munching

So out of the 3 games that could have been on this disc, I fortuitously came to own the disc with the one game that presently has no entry in MobyGames — Knowledge Munchers Deluxe, which the title screen explicitly notes used to be known as Trivia Munchers Deluxe. So I guess when I get around to adding this game, I will have to list it as that latter title with the former title as an alias. And I will have to add this cover art set as a 1999 Campbell’s Soup re-release.

Trivia/Knowledge Munchers Deluxe — Mixed title screen

I am glad that my curiosity is finally satisfied pertaining to the ultimate payoff when saving Campbell’s Soup labels for education, something that many of us did as children (oh, please don’t tell me I was alone in this).

It occurred to me to search for ‘muncher’ titles. Turns out that there is a whole series revolving around a protagonist named Muncher. Muncher is literally hungry for knowledge. It is your job to guide him to the correct answers so that the little green glutton can gleefully gorge on them.

Trivia/Knowledge Munchers Deluxe — In-game action

And that’s really all there is to the game. Our hero has 2 weaknesses– wrong answers (apparently poison) and adversaries, collectively known as Troggles, such as the overgrown slug pictured. The creators were obviously quite pleased with the various Troggles as they meticulously named and animated each one.

The trivia on offer is incredibly configurable and features levels 1-4 and ultimate. Within each category of trivia, the player can select sub-categories of trivia to be asked (or not).

One more interesting detail: this game has an original copyright date of 1996. What month was it released? Maybe this computer chip, embedded in the game over screen, serves as an Easter egg for video game historians?

Trivia/Knowledge Munchers Deluxe — Possible release date

See Also:

GeoRunner and Superheroes Math Challenge — another company’s take on annoying characters in educational games

At MobyGames:

Trivia/Knowledge Munchers Deluxe

The Intersection Of Automatons and Breakfast Pastries

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

In last night’s post, I alluded to breakfast cereal promotions. I decided to tackle that this evening. First up was a disc procured at a garage sale many years ago called 13 Days Of Halloween: Rhythm & Boos. It pertains to Count Chokula cereal. Imagine my disappointment to learn that it is not a game, but an audio CD. I had a similar experience once when investigating a Scooby-Doo disc only to learn it was a video DVD rather than a game. On the plus side, the Rhythm & Boos CD does have a nice 17-minute track of Halloween-type sounds.

No matter, because I still have two representative specimens of a trilogy of promotional discs for the movie Robots from 2005. These games were distributed in specially marked boxes of Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts. I never saw the movie but I claim that this robot is considerably more terrifying than any model of Terminator robot:

Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone

The title Sweeper Zone implied to me that this would be a Minesweeper clone. Actually, no. Your robot’s job is to maneuver into traffic and clean up scrap metal. He can only collect one piece at a time and then return it to the salvage point. It’s not especially difficult and it gets boring very, very quickly. Fortunately, Pop-Tarts cross-promotion shows up so that I can claim that this is a breakfast food tie-in game:

Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone — gameplay

Confusingly, each disc has 2 distinct games (along with a robot building factory activity, and Robots movie promotional material). The second game, which does not receive billing on the CD-ROM, is Chop Shop:

Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone — Chop Shop

Ratchet must catch the falling junk in his box. Catching the Pop-Tarts logo makes the box wider. It feels like something from an Atari 2600 game and frankly gives a bad name to promotional tie-in games.

The second disc is Rescue The Rusties. Again, this disc actually has 2 games. The one that gets mentioned in the title is quite challenging. The object is to navigate the maze and, well, rescue the Rusties, as well as any imperiled Pop-Tarts logos:

There are malicious robots out to get you but you can slow their pursuit by secreting oil slicks.

The second game is Pick-A-Part, a match-3 game! Yes! I’ll have you know that I am well on my way to becoming a grandmaster at this type of game thanks to my continuing practice at Magic Match. The goal of this game is to keep the gears away from he roving robot at the bottom of the screen.

Pop-Tarts Presents Rescue The Rusties — Pick-A-Part game

Even with my considerable skill, I couldn’t complete the second level at this game. Back to Magic Match, I suppose. It should be noted that Pop-Tarts logos were absent from this last game.

The other game in the series is Rodney Copperbottom And The Robot City Heroes. And I think you know that I am willing to expend considerable effort (well, I’ll frequent thrift shops and eBay anyway) in order to obtain it, along with the other prized Gap Kids game.

See Also:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest — a promo game done well
Taco Bell Tek Kids games — promo games done reasonably well

At MobyGames:

Wendy’s Arthur

Posted on October 13, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I picked up Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue at my favorite thrift shop, still shrink-wrapped. While originally published in 2000, this was distributed as part of a nutritious Wendy’s kids meal earlier this year. I really need a better way to keep on top of these fast food/video game promotions. I honestly don’t want to be eating at all the popular fast food restaurants on a regular monthly rotation just to be able to catch these. And don’t even get me started on the breakfast cereal promotions.

Moving right along, this is my first experience with the Arthur series, of which I already have several other titles. Only 2 Arthur games are presently in MobyGames, so guess who gets to fill in the rest of the series? This, like the insufferable Mr. Men and Little Miss series, are aimed at a very young set. Ordinarily, that would bother me. Thankfully, this game can be made to move along a little more quickly with extra mouse clicks.

Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue — teacher breaks a leg

So Arthur’s teacher, Mr. Ratburn, takes Arthur and his various anthropomorphic classmates on an educational camping trip to scenic Mt. Rockslide. The hands-on learning begins in earnest when old man Ratburn trips over a log and becomes incapacitated. Arthur is the one in the big glasses. You might be tormented as I was at the question of what animal Arthur was supposed to be– sort of a Goofy-type conundrum. In turns out he is supposed to be an aardvark.

Anyway, the schoolchildren, perhaps not fully understanding the peril of their situation, nonchalantly put their heads together and come up with 3 separate ideas for how they might possibly alert the outside world of their predicament. The player gets to select one of the ideas and then carry it out, exploring the wilderness to try to piece together the plan and accomplish a number of secondary goals along the way.

Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue — wild berries are obviously safe

Meanwhile, there is learning afoot. The above screenshot depicts Arthur and his bunny pal Buster finding a bush of wild berries. Apparently, it’s quite safe to eat wild berries, and delicious to boot (for the record, not where I grew up). For our next lesson, we’re going to go over the cliff clearly marked with a rockslide warning sign:

Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue — rockslides are a blast!

Whee! Such fun, remark the children at the bottom. Later, Arthur and Buster find a shack that has a fallen tree in front of it. After procuring a saw that happened to be laying about in the wilderness, they remove the tree, enter the shack and practice the time-honored “finders-keepers” ethos:

Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue — breaking, entering, and theft

Do breaking, entering, and theft count as separate merit badges, or are they combined into one? It’s interesting to note that you don’t actually need all the junk on offer. I surmise that if I try to approach the game using another solution, other items in the shack would be applicable.

Irresponsible wilderness lessons aside, I have to give the game credit for its marvelous art style. Look carefully– all of the scenery is crafted to appear as watercolor paintings. There is also a trove of information to be unearthed as you photograph the sundry flora and fauna. After doing so, the game regales the player with trivia regarding the subject of the photograph.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike

Diminishing Returns

All Hail The Moon Deity

Speaking Of Pop-Tarts

Confusing Game Of Trivial Soup

Wendy’s Arthur