RC Daredevil

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I was justifiably nervous about RC Daredevil— it’s another eGames title. Fortunately, it appears to come from after their reformation period, when they started publishing games that A) worked; and B) were not bundled with spyware. I also spied the file VBRUN300.DLL (Visual Basic 3.0 runtime) on the CD-ROM and groaned.

Mercifully, the game works, did not infect my system, and may not even be written in VB. It’s also the most sophisticated flight game I have played since Pilotwings on the SNES. This game has the player flying one of 5 radio-controlled planes against computer-controlled radio-controlled planes in a variety of different competition modes, such as dogfighting, aerial racing, and paint balloon bombing campaigns.

Take a look at this screenshot:

RC Daredevil -- Handicap parking and strange architecture

It highlights two interesting details about the game. First is the kooky, jagged residential architecture. The second is the fact that every parking lot has handicap parking spaces. Very conscientious. The artists paid a lot of attention to details in this game. However, here’s one detail that they probably hoped no one would notice:

I only noticed these cardboard cutout trees because the game can be hard to get the hang of and I was trying to get back down closer to the earth.

On balance, RC Daredevil is a decent casual game, stipulating that I don’t expect much from eGames in the first place. There is nice visual detail, and I think the developer did a good job with the ambient sounds such as the faithful recreation of downtown traffic cacophony during the air race through the downtown skyscrapers. In fact, it’s the rare game that was good enough for me to start up and play again even after I had collected enough data for a MobyGames submission. That said, it’s still a casual game that won’t keep you entertained for very long after the novelty of all 4 game modes wears off.

Odyssey 2

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

It recently dawned on me to scour the local Craigslist listings to search for people who want to get rid of a pile of ancient video games. My first search paid off with an Odyssey² unit plus 12 games (with one duplicate). Tell me truthfully– this doesn’t look too much like a Pac-Man ripoff, does it?

K.C. Munchkin

I was taking it for granted that MobyGames probably already has a full library of all Odyssey² games. I don’t know what made me think so. 6 of these games are still not in the database. This journey just doesn’t end.

I received the games in great condition, all with their original boxes more or less intact. An interesting bit of trivia regarding these games is that many of them, if not all, were procured at a store known as Joske’s, which was apparently local to Texas and Arizona, and was bought out as of 1987. There are still remnants of price tags on several of the games but it is hard to make out the original prices. I could be very mistaken, but I think the prices read in the neighborhood of $12-$16.

Brainstorm: The Game Show

Posted on September 15, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Brainstorm shows up on my master spreadsheet close to yesterday’s game, and probably came in the same batch, which is why it caught my eye today. That, and it sounds like a rather simple documentation romp for a Saturday afternoon, possibly leaving room for some other simple games.

Brainstorm: The Game Show works to capture the spirit of a nominal game show with its cartoon characters and its comically flippant host. In single player mode, where I race to answer as many questions as possible in 3 minutes, I remember that I am not especially adept at trivia. It does not help that I know next to nothing about literature, the category that was randomly selected for me. My score resembles a sine wave, bouncing in increments of 1000 points from -3000…3000, but mostly staying around 0. Eventually, I hit my stride with — of all topics — geography:

The game boasts over 6500 questions, so it could be awhile before you see the same one again. It also features configurable taunts. I guess some people would just find those too frustrating.

Babes In Toyland

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I became aware of tonight’s game — Babes In Toyland — somewhat by chance. On a lark, I started Googling some of the credits that I entered for Little Caesar’s Fractions Pizza to see if, in particular, any of the voice actors had done anything else. This is how I found the website of one aspiring young actress named Ashley Fox Linton who lists this game as well as the pizza game on her video game credits (humorously, her website claims that Fractions Pizza was published for Domino’s). This is just one way I find out about more obscure games to search for on eBay. According to my records, I got this game in a load that also included the wacky-sexy daredevil romp, Bikini Beach Stunt Racer.

Babes In Toyland turns out to be based on a 1997 animated film. The movie and the game both seriously violate accepted Santa Claus canon by asserting a storyline in which Santa Claus actually outsources the production of Christmas toys to a location known as Toyland. Toyland has just completed an order for the jolly old elf when the villain Barnaby swipes the toys and scatters them around Toyland. It’s up to our young hero and heroine to recover the toys before St. Nick arrives for pickup, lest they be placed on the permanent “naughty” list.

It’s another Macromedia Director-based, kids’ game. It also has the most phenomenally simple installer of any Windows game I have seen yet. The setup.exe game just places a shortcut on your hard drive that can launch the game from the CD-ROM. It’s done in a flash.

Since it’s a kids’ game, I know darn well what that entails: minigames! 9 of them in this case. One deals with the famed Humpty Dumpty. The villain’s cat startles the egg-man who falls from his famous wall and shatters.

Babes in Toyland -- Humpty Dumpty after his notorious fall

Despite the fact that the traditional Humpty mythos clearly explains the difficulty faced by all the king’s horses as well as the king’s men in attempting to reassemble this monstrosity, the game still sees fit to task 2 children with that very endeavor.

One of the toys must be recovered from the shoe house, the one where the old lady lives inside with many children. You must help her locate all of them in what shapes up to be a pixel hunting game. Another game which involves descending pairs of red eyes in a haunted forest is more or less a glorified shoot-em-up game using a flashlight to expose the goblins. Then there is this well from which you have to save ducks, but not fish, using the bucket:

Babes in Toyland -- Dog-looking ducks in a well

I have never seen such dog-looking ducks before. The game was starting to wear thin when I earned this unexpected, but not wholly unwelcome, reprieve:

Babes in Toyland -- Macromedia Director error

But I still like collecting full screenshot sets for these types of simple, colorful games, so it was back to play for me. It doesn’t take long to clear all 9 puzzles. When Santa arrives, he is pleased with Toyland’s commitment to quality and no doubt ecstatic about the money he is saving by not having to rely on domestic elf labor, or deal with the elf labor unions. Upon successful completion, I earn this certificate:

Babes in Toyland -- Certificate from Santa

I am not quite sure what to make of this, particularly the date. The game probably came out in 1997, the same year as the film. I checked my system clock and it correctly reports that today is a day in the year 2007. I wonder if the game saw the date greater than 1999 and filled in 2010+ automatically.

Advergaming

Posted on August 31, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Remember Snow Day: The GapKids Quest (blog post #1, blog post #2)? Let the record show that there was also a chapter called School Rules: The GapKids Quest. I learned that through the blog of one Troy W. Finamore, who also helped with yet another series of Taco Bell promotional titles. It follows a familiar model: 4 different games revolving around a certain theme. They represented a tie-in with ESPN’s X-Games with the sports: Moto X, BMX, Inline Skating, and Skateboarding.

Plaintext

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Today, I briefly revisited Dirty Harry for the NES. Here’s a screenshot of the start of level 3:

Dirty Harry (NES) -- Jumping around Alcatraz in view of the Golden Gate Bridge

Unless I miss my guess, Dirty Harry is on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay (though I have not seen the movie, I know that Dirty Harry is supposed to be set in San Francisco). That would be the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, not to mention a little of Sausalito to the right of the bridge. Quite accurate. I really should make a category for games featuring San Francisco in some way.

And look! I even figured out how to jump (A+B). I reasoned that it must be possible to jump since there are some spots early in this stage where jumping is an absolute necessity lest you fall into the bay. And since there aren’t that many NES input options, that pretty much leaves the (A+B) combo.

The reason I made it all the way to level 3 is that I thought to open the ROM file and scan for plaintext strings. WildKard pointed out that this yields useful company data for certain games. I was dubious since, in my limited explorations, there is not a great deal of plaintext to be gleaned from NES ROMs (English strings can be encoded much more efficiently with fewer than a full 8 bits per character). However, for certain games — Dirty Harry included — there is some plain ASCII text, passwords in this case. Level 2 = ‘misty’, level 3 = ‘bird ‘ (with a space at the end). ‘clyde’ gives infinite lives. There seems to be a fourth password, ‘gunny’, but I’m not sure what it does. It’s not infinite ammo.

New games:

See Also:

My first look at Dirty Harry, along with 6 other movie-based NES games

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike