Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables

Posted on July 24, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

By way of an article in The Hater’s blog over at The Onion’s A.V. Club (Video Gamez For Ladiez), I learned of yet another article about trying to make video games appeal to the fairer sex. These pieces are a dime a dozen and every time I read one, I wonder how come I never read articles about what the movie industry is doing to make chick flicks more palatable to men. Anyway, just for this occasion, I’m finally creating a “Girlie Games” category for this blog and covering another horse riding game, just to further illustrate that there is a niche catering to perceived female gaming tastes. (Other girlie games revolve around fashion and gossip as well as wedding planning.)

Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Introductions

Tonight’s game is Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables. Long time readers may recall my last riding game was Let’s Ride: Corral Club. The first essential thing to recognize about this title is the title itself: It’s Time to Ride, whereas, the other title was Let’s Ride. That means that these are 2 different franchises. This means, or at least implies, that the horseback riding genre is successful enough to merit 2 competing franchises with multiple entries. Perhaps that’s as reasonable an indicator as any that there already is some viable market for girlie games.

Saddles & Stables is a pretty game; let’s get that out of the way since I always like to see that no matter what the game:

Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Taking the scenic route

The game centers around Amanda who moves from the city to the country to live with her father. Daddy promised her a horse but Amanda has to care for it and train it. The game starts with you taking the ponies out for test rides and deciding which to use. Afterwards, you get on with your teenage life, walking around town, talking to people, solving mysteries (yes, the manual hints at the game having a mystery that you may wish to solve). You could make the case that this game borrows elements from the popular Metal Gear Solid series:

Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Metal Gear-style exclamation

Thankfully, the characters are not interested in killing you when that exclamation symbol appears. That only means that the have something plot-advancing to say to you.

All the while this happens, you are expected to be grooming and training your horse. You have access to a variety of status meters to monitor the horse’s current behavior, running skill, and jumping skill, as well as to track the horse’s current needs for food, grooming, or clean living quarters.

Multimedia nerd note: I was ecstatic to see that this game actually uses a video codec called VP3 for its FMV. I wrote the (incomplete) book on VP3. This is really the first time I have seen VP3 files “in the wild”.

See also:

New Girlie Games blog category, games characterized as being specifically targeted for girls in that no male in his right mind (outside of a few, ahem, video game historians) would want to be caught in the same store selling them.
My second look at this game
Let’s Ride: Friends Forever, an entry from a competing equestrian gaming franchise

At MobyGames:

Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables

Dog Odyssey And Fisher-Price Wild West

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

As always, I have a huge stockpile of educational games that are conspicuously absent from MobyGames. DJP Mom and I continue to answer the call. Tonight, I attacked 2 different, early Macromedia Director games. In both of them, I felt that something was missing. Like, animations. Both games wanted archaic versions of Apple QuickTime that I was unwilling to install. Some games fail to run if they don’t get their desired versions of QuickTime. Tonight’s pair just silently refuse to play animations which makes certain junctures a bit confusing.

The first of the pair is Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey. Wishbone — apparently the canine star of a late-1990’s, PBS-produced TV show — finds himself washed up on an island where a city is burning in the background (turns out to be Troy). Pieces start falling into place and he figures out that he seems to have taken on the role of Odysseus in Homer’s classic epic.

Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey — Wishbone wonders

This could have proved to be quite an educational experience (I don’t know much about the literature). However, the game kept throwing this error:

Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey — Script error

That’s “Script error: Handler not defined … #FileIO” (reproduced textually for the benefit of search engines). That prohibited me from getting too far into the tale. Too bad, too, because the credits go on for pages. A lot of people really wanted to make this game successful.

The second game is Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town. It’s by Davidson & Associates, which strikes me as familiar. Ah yes: They were responsible for another Fisher-Price licensed title: Learning in Toyland. The first thing to understand about this game is that the game assumes that you might not know how to read. Also, the installation process offers an fascinating bit of nostalgia:

Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town -- Modem registration

Ah, modems; remember those? Anyway, you’re a deputy, the bad guy goes by the name of Bandit Bob and his dastardly crime is hiding gold bars all over town. Your job is to find the gold.

Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town — Finding gold bars

Along the way, there are a number of minigames and other activities, as is customary. This one is the Barrel Boot:

Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town — The Barrel Boot activity

You get to drop barrels into this automatic boot device and launch them at random citizens — and you’re the deputy lawman, remember. Hitting a target always has comical, good-natured results in this kids’ game. I didn’t get the full effect with a number of the targets. The screen would temporarily blank and I could tell that the game was trying to invoke the QuickTime Player to handle a more detailed animation.

See also:

Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland

At MobyGames:

Ohio Distinctive Software

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

This weekend’s trip to the thrift shop yielded not 1, but 2 separate CD-ROMs from an outfit known as Ohio Distinctive Software.

I assumed it was just another in a long line of defunct software outfits. But as you can plainly see from the link, they’re still quite operational. And they have a huge catalog of titles for me to scavenge from various spent sources at bargain basement prices (certainly not for the prices they expect on their site).

These are educational software titles through and through. True to form, the manuals contained on the CD-ROMs present a classical academic conundrum — how to turn in source material as your own work. In this case, the manual perfectly, neutrally describes its game in a manner ready for inclusion into MobyGames. My difficulty will be coming up with my own rewording.

Not a big problem, though; the manuals are far more detailed than is absolutely necessary and I think I can express the games in simpler terms. The first game is GeoRunner. It revolves around a trademark ODS character named Blit (memo to game companies: don’t task your programmers with creative endeavors such as mascot naming or else you end up with something like ‘Blit’). This is a little alien dude whose only raison d’être is to get captured. He’s basically a serial captive. He gets captured so much that there is a governmental agency named the Blit Rescue and Tracking Squad (BRATS, I guess) devoted to getting him out of binds (motto: “U Findum Freeum”).

Your method for freeing him? You have to track down keys in different countries. Collect enough keys and unlock Blit’s current cage. Then he skateboards right into another cage. Don’t think about the setup; it’ll only frustrate you. In order to find the countries that hold the keys, follow the clues that the game gives. In the easier levels, these clues are very straightforward (“Go to El Salvador”). In the more advanced levels, they become trivia about the country (“Go to the country that used to be called Abyssinia“).

I must confess I was learning some interesting geographical trivia. If only there were some way to achieve the same effect without the grating Blit.

The second title is Superheroes Math Challenge. Tech support time: This game reports the message: “This program requires at least 3MB of free virtual memory to run”. My 2 GB of physical RAM must not be enough. I can only guess at the logic the game (or the underlying Macromedia Director engine) must be using to make its determination. Fortunately, ODS addresses this precise issue on their website. Unfortunately, it’s incorrect. They advise the user to manually dial down their amount of virtual memory to the range of 200-400. But that’s 200 MB – 400 MB. Following their example, I set the range from 2 MB – 4 MB and the game ran fine. Just a tech note for the inevitable Googler stumbling upon this blog post. Be sure to reset the virtual memory when you are done with the game.

Once again, the manual severely over-explains the game. Basically, you choose one of 3 “heroes” (Blit makes an appearance again, but as hero instead of victim) and take them flying. The game gives you a math formula to solve. You have to fly toward the correct solution. This was the level 1 challenge:

$Superheroes Math Challenge - Adding oranges$

Honestly, all of the problems were either adding 2 oranges or 2 apples. And, umm, I still only got 4 correct on the first round. Hey, leave me alone! The controls aren’t all that responsive and there are other objects to run into. I decided to see how hard things could get and cranked it up to level 50. This covers square roots and negative numbers:

$Superheroes Math Challenge - Tougher problems$

It’s a one-trick game but it was suprisingly fun while forcing me to fly and do math at the same time.

At MobyGames:

Orphen Redux

Posted on July 21, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I would liken the Orphen PlayStation 2 game to this item that can be collected throughout the course of the game…

…but let’s face it– that would be entirely too easy. I gave it another chance since I finally have a platform for capturing video. To review, Orphen is a dippy anime-based game with an odd action-RPG style of gameplay which likely serves to underscore my inexperience in the role playing game genre since the original Final Fantasy game on the 8-bit NES.

First of all, the game thrusts you into the middle of an anime tale with established characters and no introduction; viewer is assumed to understand all backstory. The title character and his two young charges are walking through a seaside town and meet up with 2 little thieves that they apparently know. For reasons that are somewhat unclear, the 5 board a ship that immediately strays off course and hits rough waters. All of the passengers are suddenly obsessed with “getting out”, though what that entails is never really discussed.

Eventually, some interactive action occurs. Orphen squares off with a giant crab monster and takes turns exchanging fireballs. Do you remember when Ken and Ryu used to announce every fireball they launched in Street Figher II? “Hadouken!”. This is a tad more annoying since every move is announced, not just special moves. “The Hand of Pyro!” “The Bite of Lightning!” “The Shield of Immunity!”

Since I captured all this footage for screenshots that I would hate to delete right away, drink in this gameplay sample in all of its YouTube-quality glory:

Orphen faces off with the giant crab who, when almost defeated, turns into many little crabs. Fortunately, by that time, I had remembered that I could summon one powerful attack to dispatch them all. After the attack, Orphen is seen gaining a new spell.

See Also:

My first attempt at comprehending Orphen

Beauty OR the Beast

Posted on July 20, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I moved states some time ago and while I had a good stable of retail shops dealing in spent video games in my old town, I have not found much in my current locale. That changed recently when I found a thrift store that I have occasion to visit on a near-weekly basis. Each time, I score 5-8 new CD-ROMs that I have never heard of before; many of them are unheard-of by MobyGames as well. The balance tips heavily in favor of forgotten educational titles or other Macromedia Director-based games, which fits right into my plan. It’s possible that there are other scavengers who visit the shop with more frequency and are snatching up titles with wider appeal. But I enjoy the more obscure stuff anyway.

Unfortunately, these titles are so obscure and lacking in supporting, superficial literature that it’s a gamble — but only a dollar gamble or so. Such was the case with Alien Racers which sounded like an awesome racing game. I was a tad suspicious that the CD-ROM prominently displayed Macromedia Director and QuickTime logos.

Alas, it’s just an interactive comic book.

So let’s move on with one that I sincerely hoped was not a mere storybook in CD-ROM form: Beauty or The Beast. That’s right– not a typo; it’s an ‘OR’, not an ‘AND’. The game does bear the markings of Emme, which gives me chills. This company was involved in the accursed Mr. Men and Little Miss series. But to be fair, they were only involved in the distribution, not the development.

So this game is loosely based on the classic Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. It is most assuredly not based on the popular 1991 Disney variation. According to Wikipedia, the game’s story is not strictly based on any other known variation.

Beauty or The Beast - Character selection

Your choice at the start of the game is to, as the title implies, choose to play as either Beauty or the Beast. This sets you on one of 2 adventure paths with 2 different back stories. In the Beauty version, Belle’s father is wandering through the forest, gets lost, finds the Beast’s castle, ambles inside and is summarily imprisoned. Back at the dinner table, the clock strikes 22:00, the stew is getting cold, and Belle decides to form a one-fairy-tale-character search party.

Beauty or The Beast - Waiting for dinner company

She instinctively heads straight to the castle and this is where the adventure begins. It’s a point and click adventure where she moves from room to well-illustrated room and generally finds a puzzle or minigame in each one. This was the first one I found:

In the spirit of Frogger, the player must guide all of the curiously hydrophobic amphibians from the middle to the outer edges of the fountain. Do this by clicking on a frog to make it jump. It is necessary to make the frog jump through 3 rings of lily pads moving at different speeds. Miss a pad and the frog promptly swims back to the safety of the middle. Also, they won’t stay on a pad forever before jumping on their own accord.

This minigame stopped me dead in my tracks for the “Beauty” half of the adventure:

Beauty or The Beast - Spider and moth game

The moth is suspected to want to tell you something. But it gets caught in a massive, cooperative spider web. It is necessary to continually click on the individual spiders to knock them down to the bottom of the screen while the moth slowly makes it down to the hole near you. If the spiders reach the moth, they simply push it back to the top right corner of the screen where it has to reset its journey.

Beauty or The Beast - The Beast’s backstory

So there is also the “Beast” half of the game. The backstory here, told in a sepia tone, is that a princely figure was at his castle, minding his own horse, when a witch came along and put a curse on the whole place. My adventure with the Beast — the first task is to investigate this female interloper who has recently come knocking — didn’t last long since his very first minigame is to light 6 torches in a foyer by clicking on each. The catch is that the last must be lit before the first goes out or you have to start over again. Basically, it takes the same lightning mousing speed as the spider/moth game described above.

The game shares some major annoyances with those other games mentioned published under the Emme umbrella. Primarily, meandering, unskippable dialogue. There was also a serious flaw present in the torch minigame where it was impossible to properly quit the activity through normal means. The in-game menu is inaccessible during minigames and the escape button usually present during minigames was missing. I had to use more “out of band” Windows methods to quit the game. Poor form.

Pretty game, though. Much credit for that.

See Also:

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (SNES)

At MobyGames:

Beauty or the Beast

Adventure In Toledo

Posted on July 18, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I can already tell this business of collecting screenshots from console games is going to hurt. This is because I have to experience the game at least twice. The process is to play the game for whatever length of time, capturing footage on my computer. Then, I get to watch the game again to capture the actual screenshots. And in some cases, I have already been exposed to the wretchedness months before, as in my inaugural PlayStation 2 gaming session.

So I delved into Evergrace once more. For some reason, I really do want to like this game. But the screeching opening music insists on scratching at my delicate ears. This time, the story didn’t grate on me like it did last time. I admit, it was starting to draw me in, just a little, at least until I saw the name of the land where the adventure begins for one of our protagonists:

I was willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt in the hope that perhaps Toledo has some mythical, mystical meaning. Wikipedia says no dice, that the Ohio town is the most prominent use.

The last time I played Evergrace, I could not figure out how to arm my hero– all I could do was punch for offense which seemed to only irritate monsters. The first time I replayed, I still couldn’t find an offensive tool. It wasn’t until I reviewed the captured game footage that I noticed that the game was trying to drop subtle hints about weapon possibilities during the opening exposition with a character named Krisalis.

Wait… in the background there: see it? Could it be? A sword!

A notable facet of this game is that it features perhaps the creepiest old man in the history of video gaming:

His name is Morpheus and he bobs his head and rubs the top of his staff in rhythm with his excited speech.

Now that I actually figured out how to effectively fight enemies in this game, I actually feel some motivation to play it. Unfortunately, such motivation is dashed by the delayed response when I play through my video capture bridge. Common problem, but I must keep it in mind when evaluating console game quality.

See also:

My initial experience with Evergrace

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike

Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables

Dog Odyssey And Fisher-Price Wild West

Ohio Distinctive Software

Orphen Redux

Beauty OR the Beast

Adventure In Toledo