Hello Kitty Dream Carnival

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Remember when I wrote about that South Park episode that featured World of Warcraft and I said that I would likely be analogous to the Butters character playing a Hello Kitty franchise game? Did you think I was joking?

I present Hello Kitty Dream Carnival. I was buying a new office chair at the same office supply store where I procured My Fantasy Wedding and Bratz: Rock Angelz some months back. They’re firmly equal opportunity in their game selection and had 2 different Hello Kitty titles. The other one is Cutie World, but that has already been entered into MobyGames by — who else? — kiddie game-playing comrade DJP Mom.

So there are 8 games/activities, par for the course for this type of game. I just knew there would be a memory/matching game. To its credit, this game’s matching activity is better engineered than most — Ferris Wheel Friends:

Hello Kitty Dream Carnival — Ferris Wheel Friends

This is the first time I have encountered a word search in computer game form. I have to admit that this actually challenged me, if only because I was up against a timer that resets when you find a word.

Hello Kitty Dream Carnival — Pen Pal Word Find

I can’t believe I actually developed a strategy for beating this kid’s game: find a word in the list and put off circling it until the timer is almost up while searching for another word in order to maximize the time.

This was my favorite game: Penguin Plunge. Adjust the drop height and the angle of deflection of the trampoline and try to land the penguin in the tube. Sometimes there are other goals, such as a hoop to jump through or airborne treats to collect on the way.

Hello Kitty Dream Carnival — Penguin Plunge

Not a bad little 1/2 hour screenshot recon.

Original Spacewar!

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

You started out playing the Atari 2600? That’s nothing. Oh, you started even earlier, perhaps with an Odyssey² or even the original Odyssey? Get out of here. Today, I had the privilege of playing what is sometimes considered to be the very first video game ever— Spacewar!. The experience took place during a live demo of a restored, 45 year old, DEC PDP-1 computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, USA.

I had always heard the tales of this program but never paid them much mind. How good could such a game possibly be? I was roundly impressed when I saw it in action. I was one volunteer who got to demo the game for the crowd. The other player and I had makeshift controller boxes with 5 buttons– one for rotating left, one for rotating right, one for activating the thrusters, one for firing, and one for an emergency hyperspace jump. The goal is to take out the other ship. However, there is more to the game. There is a gravity center (sun) in the middle of the screen and both ships must take that into account and not get sucked in. Further, you will eventually run out of fuel and ammunition. Be advised.

I read now that there are many modern incarnations of that same game, following the exact same thread. However, as I type this, it occurred to me that one of my favorite NES games was somewhat inspired by this same concept, or at least the control scheme — Solar Jetman.

In Solar Jetman, you pilot a pod around different planets, collecting necessities and goodies. You rotate the ship and thrust while taking gravity into account. It’s all very unintuitive when you have a gamepad at your disposal. Maybe my Solar Jetman experience had something to do with why I got the hang of Spacewar! so quickly.

The first video game ever? Arguably. However, Google for the “story of mel” to read an epic tale about one Mel Kaye. According to that story, Mel had programmed blackjack on a few different business-oriented computers. The story seems to take place in the late 1950s. Spacewar! originated in 1962.

But who’s counting? Anyway, I think I’ll propose to MobyGames that PDP-1 be added as a platform.

Another Taco Bell Promo

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Taco Bell is running another 4-CD-ROM promotion– the Comics Constructor series. Unfortunately, these discs are not actually games. I know; I checked. I picked up all 4 tonight (hey, they’re only a dollar each). I was holding out hope that these would have some kind of gaming elements, but alas, it’s just a comic creator. I gave it a quick whirl on the first disc: Neptune Quest:

Taco Bell Comic Constructor — Neptune Quest

No MobyGames immortality for these titles. However, for Google posterity, the other 3 “issues” are Amazon Raiders, Hero Adventures, Super Snoopers. Actually, I’m thinking that this could provide an interesting framework for those among us who have more talent with the keyboard and text editor instead of the mouse and drawing program. I’ll be keeping these discs around.

This Taco Bell promotion was put together by the fine folks at Maxx Marketing, the masterminds behind the Tek Kids series. The promotion runs through June, in case you’re interested.

More NES Racing

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Some fellow MobyGamers are steadily whittling away at my list of missing NES games. I thought tonight would be a good night to attack a few more NES titles that looked interesting before they all get snatched up for entry. And I thought I had already purged the NES list of all racing titles. But I found 2 more to play tonight, one that even has “race” in the title.

That race-named title is Race America. The most notable aspect of this game is the opponents– a colorful gallery of 8 brazen stereotypes, such as Mike Linguini here:

Race America — Mike Linguini, Italian stereotype

I suspect Google will soon pick that up as its top image search for “italian stereotype”. Other competitors include Ito Speedo, Pierce Sedan, and Hans Von Brakemann.

Other interesting aspects of this racer include its diversity of perspectives and its control scheme. Depending on the phase of the race, the action might be third-person, side-scrolling, or top-down. You are either allotted 1/2 or 1/4 of the screen depending on whether you are in the lead. And the screen shift can be quite disorienting when you gain or lose that lead.

The control system took a little figuring out. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to move. Then I managed to move but ever so slowly. It was like a race car stuck in 1st — only literally! Eventually, I reasoned out how the control system works (for anyone scouring the internet for help on this forgotten title): Up and down on the control pad upshift and downshift, respectively. However, these only work if you are not pressing the gas button (A).

Oh, and there is more than one way to lose, and the game spells out your failures in a very public manner. This is me losing because I ran out of gas:

The second game tonight was Stunt Kids. I don’t have much to say about this one except that I suspect it’s an Excitebike clone. I can’t be certain at this time because I have never played Excitebike.

I wasn’t very good at this game. I spent most of the game flying off my bike. The computer beat me handily but I think I was only racing against the clock.

Barrier Breached

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

And so it came to pass last night — no joke:

Look at that, it took me almost exactly 3 years to reach 10,000 points. As of yesterday, all I needed was 7.5 screenshots to put me over the limit. I submitted 8 new screenshots for Wrath of the Demon. Quite ironically, the last one of the set — the one that technically put me over the limit — was a “game over” screen:

I’d like to thank all my friends at MobyGames who never gave up on me, who kept encouraging me no matter how bad the game quality was or how ridiculous the interactive movies got. I guess I’m proof that dreams can come true and hard work really pays off.

Hey, quit laughing.

10K Push

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I would hate for March to transpire without a single entry (when I sat down to write this, I had honestly forgotten that I had already logged one post this month, but I am sort of committed to this evening’s gaming now). So here I am, again, at the very last minute. Hey, I think I’ll even resolve to springboard over the 10K mark on MobyGames tonight. May as well since I’m only 15 points away from the symbolic marker. That’s only 7 1/2 screenshots. I think the reason I have been putting this off for so long is because I haven’t had time to prepare my 10K acceptance speech.

It’s a good day to play a game because I just got a new shipment in from an eBay seller. That’s right! I’m still accumulating games from eBay sellers. That’s not as strange as the fact that I found a seller from whom I was able to order over a dozen games, many of which were not in the database yet. Many of these are old DOS games from the early-mid 1990s, some were later re-released on CD-ROM.

Here’s one that is already in the database but only had 2 screenshots: Wrath of the Demon. The reason it interested me is that the person who submitted the 2 screenshots claimed that he couldn’t get far enough into the game to gather anymore screenshots. I’m pleased to report that I was able to collect a few more, but mostly because I remembered to capture things like story screens, game over screens, etc.

I think this is actually a darn good game by 1990-1991 PC action game standards. At least, it excels in the audio/video departments with its parallax side scrolling and MT-32 soundtrack, both beautifully emulated via DosBox. Indeed, the jewel case copy gushes about the features: “Over 3 megabytes of graphics data; over 600 screens of actions! Smooth 15-level parallax scrolling…; Over 100 monsters, some larger than half the screen.” It makes me feel a bit short-changed since I couldn’t get much farther than the original screenshot poster.

The first level, seen above, has you riding horseback, jumping obstacles, and dodging birds. I guessed that last part. I later realized that I could hit the birds using the space bar even though I was pressing up on the gamepad to jump. With a little persistence, I eventually managed to clear this stage. Afterwards, a pair of monsters ambushes your campfire. You go into a sword battle with one while his friend chucks blades at you from a distance. I couldn’t come up with a strategy for besting them. So I had to sit through their victory dance:

No reason to stop there for tonight since I have plenty of new games that pique my curiosity. Try this title, for example: Forced Alliance: The Glarius Mandate. The game comes on 3 CD-ROMs, features a lot of Smacker animation files, and was published in 1997. It prominently features that bizarre animation style that came to characterize mid-90s 3D animation technology. There must be a name for it, but this is a perfect representation:

Force Alliance: The Glarius Mandate — Animation style

The game opens competently enough, with some good looking (for 1997) animations depicting a spaceship prospecting for minerals in an asteroid belt when a new alien threat attacks him. Some humans murmur ominously about this event and the game fast forwards by 10 years. This shows some recruits about to suit up for some space combat training. Unfortunately, this is when the game exhibits another characteristic that I recall was prevalent from the same gaming epoch: instability.

Force Alliance: The Glarius Mandate — Error dialog

So there is no getting past the intro of this game. I’ll try one more game that gives me no clues from the copy– a Mindscape-published game known only as MagnaFlux Runner. It turns out to be a fairly pointless little overhead racing game:

What can I say about it? Well, at least the MIDI music was nice. And it also allowed me an encounter with one of the strangest bugs ever:

Okay, so what happened is that I put the computer on auto-pilot, playing against itself. I was writing up the game’s description in TextPad. When the game got to level 2, I switched back to the game window. However, part of my text editor remained in the game’s window. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that the cars seemed to be treating the text editor window as an impassable boundary! I think the behavior occurred as a result of the game window being obscured during a level change.

Anyway, watch for 10K points soon.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike