I have had Jungle Legend on my big board for a few months, meaning that it still needs to be entered into the database. I was working on some nonsense for a description at the time since the manual gave me all the data I thought I needed. However, I felt there was one crucial detail missing– what the game actually looks like. 2D scoller? 3D in any way? RTS jungle adventure, commanding your tribe? Google searches generally just yield a few sparse game listing pages with the same regurgitated description and no screenshots. Worse, my own page is one of the top hits now. Not helpful.
But then I found some generic game listing site that happened to link to the developer’s original website… which happens to be defunct. Enter archive.org, and behold: the last recorded valid page for the game. If the screenshots are to be believed, it’s an FPS-type adventure.
I’m glad I investigated because there are several other games from the same company that aren’t in MobyGames yet. That seems to often be the case with these value publishers that have proliferated in the last decade.
Time for another intensely lightweight, kid-targeted video game romp– let’s face it, these games ain’t gonna enter themselves into MobyGames. And I even located a pile of stuff procured from eBay back in March that I forgot to log into the master spreadsheet. It just doesn’t end!
Tonight’s fluff-fest is Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade. It comes from a franchise of Clue Finders games which generally appear to be educational. This title is actually a collection of 4 games, only one of which could conceivably be loosely tagged as having content remotely academic. The setup is that an all-star team of villains who debuted in previous Clue Finders franchise games has been assembled by a new mystery villain. This collaboration plots to lure the team of protagonist children into their home. These villains hold serious grudges towards the Clue Finders based on their previous encounters. The game contains a Rogue Gallery menu option where you can view dossiers of each villain. Cleverly, the dossier also includes a mention of the franchise game where the antagonist premiered. This is the dossier for one Pericles Lear:
So, the guy lives and works in San Francisco and has an affinity for chemistry. On closer examination, I just noticed that the above data does not really paint a menacing portrait of a criminal mastermind.
Anyway, there are 4 Clue Finders, 4 villains, and 4 traps/games. Each villain designed one trap to ensnare one of the children. Fiendishly, each trap is tailored for each child’s specialty. I suppose I shouldn’t try to understand why diabolical crime geniuses would give their victims a fighting chance in this manner. The first game has Owen, the team’s skateboarding nutrition specialist and pizza enthusiast, skateboarding on giant pizzas using a giant sub sandwich as a skateboard. Given Owen’s passion, I can understand that he might be a natural at this task. But if his task were switched with Leslie’s book task, both of these young go-getters might just meet with their early demise as intended.
Speaking of Leslie, her task is to jump on books. This takes a few sentences to explain, but it was my favorite of the four games on offer:
The back of the library has a topic; in this case, it’s capital cities. The demons on the bookshelves are tossing books into the room. Leslie must only jump on books whose titles contain capital cities. When she jumps on a qualifying book, that book becomes permanent. If she jumps on a book with a non-matching subject, she crushes it. The idea is to stack permanent books in order to climb to the exit. When she has stacked enough books, a rope ladder extends down so she can climb up. Sometimes I would disregard the ladder since I was having too much fun hopping on books. Leslie can jump 1, 2, or 3 books horizontally, 1 or 2 books vertically, and 1 book diagonally. It takes a little practice to master the jump control but is quite fun.
Leslie’s is the only one of the four games that struck me as even marginally educational. And even that was questionable since the game seemed to feature an embarrassingly limited dictionary of terms related to each category.
Santiago’s task is to play a series of pinball boards where he is the pinball. Actually, he is in the cockpit of a rocket-powered pinball. He can turn and thrust and somewhat control his destiny but is still at the mercy of the various actuators on the board. He must solve various puzzles on the board in order to escape.
The final game deals Joni along with whichever other members have escaped from their respective traps. It’s actually a fairly competent little parallax side-scroller.
Choice quote: The kids’ timid talking laptop, LapTrap, says of the probably-forged email that lured the gang to the game’s eponymous dangerous abode: “Why don’t email servers ever crash when you want them to?”
I spent the day playing catch-up by finally entering into MobyGames a bunch of the games that I reviewed in the past few months (all the way back to April). Have fun, MG approvers!
It was pretty straightforward in some cases, particularly for the 4 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures promotional discs from Taco Bell. The only tricky part is doing the first entry; the remaining 3 are patterned after the first. Here’s a screenshot of the Prairie Dogs course in the wild west theme CD-ROM. There is also an exceptionally large scorpion right at your feet. You would think that would be cause for concern:
And for completeness, here’s a screenshot for the Carnival adventure, the Loop da Loop course. It took me quite a few strokes to get the ball through that thing the first time I encountered it:
I thought I would shift my attention back to a kids game this evening, especially since an upstart contributor is rocketing up the MobyGames charts by entering dozens of largely overlooked children-oriented entertainment software titles (hi DJP Mom! Keep up the good work). Tonight’s game is The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain which is but one title in a series called “Mr. Men and Little Miss” games. Collect ’em all — and you know I probably will, eventually (I already have another one in the queue). If this opening card is any indicator, there are at least 10 of these titles:
I fear that this game is going to be juvenile, even by the standards of this blog, and my suspicions are quickly confirmed. Akin in animation style and target audience to Cheerios Play Time, I similarly hesitate to classify this game as “educational”. Your guide through this excursion is one Mojo the Mosquito. I keep thinking that he is speaking with an exaggerated stereotypical Italian accent until I realize that the creators were trying to conceptualize what an anthropomorphized talking mosquito would sound like (lots of buzzing and slurring of words). First, he asks you to click on an animal, advising you that the larger the animal, the tougher the game. I’m not so sure about that. The games seem to be the same whether I click the duck or the cow; the other three animals are cat, pig, and sheep. Then you are launched into the main town map:
The story goes like this: It’s morning time, but the sun is nowhere to be seen. Miss Magic calls up Miss Scatterbrain and expresses alarm at this development. Miss Magic would be able to rectify the solar situation except that her magic book was absent-mindedly swiped by Scatterbrain. It’s up to you to help her scour her kitchen cupboards in the dark in order to find the book strictly by the sound it makes when touched. That’s the first minigame.
When you retrieve the book and bring it to the town square where Miss Magic is waiting, the realization dawns that there isn’t enough light to read the book. So Miss Somersault — also present at the meeting — goes off to capture fireflies in a jar, thus commencing the second minigame. It’s essentially a point & click game of Whack-A-Mole where you try to click as many popping fireflies as possible before the moon waxes from a first quarter position to a full disc. I’m not sure how much sense that makes, but that’s what the creators used for a timer. My record was 49 fireflies in the allotted time period, though I later figured out that it is impossible to lose this game. Even on the “cow” setting — presumably the toughest — 0 fireflies was enough to succeed.
The story continues like this, leading into many more insipid, un-lose-able minigames. I wanted to be more thorough and explore the different animal options to validate whether there were any differences. However, the story sequences have no fast forward feature and I could only sit through the exposition so many times. The voice acting is tolerable, but clearly done in kids’ puppet show-style voices. I can’t say that I’m necessarily looking forward to logging the remaining items in this series.
I decided to try to conquer my severe phobia of real time strategy (RTS) games. Plus, tonight’s game looked genuinely interesting, and its MobyGames entry needs screenshots besides. My first exposure to the game Star Wars: Force Commander — an RTS set in the Star Wars universe — was through a trailer scavenged from some other LucasArts title. I have uploaded the trailer to YouTube for your review. The thing that will strike most Star Wars fans right away is the curious re-imagining of the standard Imperial March theme with a decidedly edgier arrangement:
The game opens with a cinematic of a fleet of Imperial star destroyers descending on a planet for an invasion. Inside a troop transport bound for the surface, the game establishes two characters by showing two stormtroopers without their helmets. One is telling the other to be careful out there. Wouldn’t you know, when the invasion is winding down, one of the characters gets shot. He recovers while the other character gets promoted to a command position. This is your character.
Star Wars geek note: The opening intro depicts TIE Bombers flying in an atmosphere, something I don’t remember ever seeing in a movie. In fact, I think I read somewhere that TIE starcraft can’t fly in atmosphere.
The game proceeds to tutorial mode where a senior officer instructs you on how to control a unit of soldiers from the safety of your command console high up in an orbiting starship. Your team starts off small — just a few sandtroopers, some riding dewback, and also Dellis– the dude who was shot in the intro. This is where you get to learn the camera controls and there are a lot of them. My used copy of the game still includes the cheat sheet for mouse and keyboard commands. It’s quite detailed and intimidating, naturally. But the senior officer patiently walks me through the essentials. After I bumble my way through these basic exercises satisfactorily, the officer actually states that he has never seen anyone learn as fast as me.
Star Wars geek note: The preceding praise explains so much about Imperial management.
The above screenshot shows your command console as well as your unit getting dropped off on a certain desert planet in the Star Wars universe for the training exercise. The story cleverly intertwines with the primary SW arc as the senior officer advises you to check out an escape pod that is known to have landed close by. The cargo? 2 droids carrying stolen, top secret Imperial data. I was a little confused about how to proceed at this point. So I just started marching my guys around the big sandbox. Sometimes, some Tusken Raiders would appear and — rather foolishly — try to start something with my crew. This was good practice for how to react in a battle situation. The rest of the time was spent getting used to controlling a bunch of soldiers at the same time.
Doing anything in this game gets annoying pretty quick since the troopers feel it necessary to give obsequious auditory feedback in response to every order received. What they lack in brainpower and initiative, they compensate for with loyalty, enthusiasm, and boundless positive morale:
Me: “Move 10 meters in that direction.”
Sandtrooper: “For the empire!!”
But I’m being unfair. True, the guys can get stuck near trivial obstacles on occasion. But they’re smart enough to stay out of the Sarlacc-looking pit even if you direct them to walk in that general direction.
So after wandering around for a half hour in a game engine-designated patch of desert that probably measures less than a square kilometer, I eventually trip over a giant crate that the game labels as “escape pod”. When the finely-tuned soldiers touch it the mission is finally over. Next, I am told to… I don’t even remember now; something about finding the droids. The instructions are delivered verbally and whiz right past my mind that’s still reeling over the magnitude of the keyboard guide. The game does give the player an option to review the current objectives. However, when consulted, they just inform me to A) follow the captain’s orders (yeah, and what were those again?) and B) keep Dellis (your buddy) alive. I can’t shake the feeling that this game is going to be the Star Wars variant of Saving Private Ryan.
Out of desperation, I tried out some other buttons. I pressed ‘J’ for “open builder shuttle inventory screen”. I have no idea what that is, but the ‘J’ key might as well be a BIG RED button since the senior officer sternly scolded me, “Don’t do that.”
That ends tonight’s RTS endeavor, but I just might try this game again some night. I have at least one other RTS title in the queue, plus I might be inspired to give Gender Wars another shot.
It’s Independence Day here in the U.S.A. and I thought it would be apropos to play the Sega Saturn version of Independence Day (having already covered the Windows version on this blog). However, my Saturn console disagreed. But since the unit was already hooked up, and since I have more than enough Saturn games yet to play, I’ll try a recent acquisition– Defcon 5.
Regrettably, this post will be done entirely without the help of visual aids. I don’t have the capacity to capture from my Sega Saturn on my new PC. I did take the time today to finally crack my new DV capture bridge, purchased some months ago along with the new PC. However, it does not capture from the Saturn. I’m still working on solving that problem (GameCube/Dreamcast/PS2/VCR, no problem). The disc also has FILM files for FMV. Regrettably, none are anywhere near interesting enough to commit to YouTube.
Moving on to the actual game, the affair starts off with an overwrought intro FMV characteristic of the early days of CD-ROM games. I fear that this is a prelude to interactive movie-style gameplay. The story has something like — let’s see if I can synopsize this correctly — a mega-corporation that does interplanetary mining has a bunch of space stations to protect their mining operations from alien threats. Thing is, no aliens have ever been encountered in the history of human endeavor, so these stations are really just a paranoid measure whose continued operational costs are increasingly difficult to justify to the beancounters. Budget cuts demand that these stations will go unstaffed in 60 days and will need to have their software upgraded so that they can operate autonomously. The lead engineer — excuse me, cyberneer — on the project got killed upgrading the second to last station. Your job is to upgrade that last station’s software.
Great, so this game simulates the menial, trained-monkey action items performed by futuristic IT peons. However, wouldn’t you know, just as you are trying to carry out your upgrade mission, unidentified spaceships start closing in on this last space station. Could they be the fabled aliens whose appearance might have justified the space stations’ operating budget?
Personally, I tend to think the so-called alien threat really consists of disgruntled, laid-off space station employees in disguise, Scooby-Doo-style.
Anyway, the gameplay consists of Wolfenstein 3D-type gameplay as you wander around this station while a digitized voice implores you to find the control center to upgrade the software. The graphics are primitive by 1995 3D standards but I’m relieved that it’s not a pre-rendered FMV maze. That relief trend sharply reverses as I begin to navigate the corridors. Either my character is a stereotypically, grotesquely obese IT knowledge worker, or there is horrible hit detection in this game– it’s almost impossible to walk between 2 support posts that are more than a meter apart from each other. Plus, you bounce backwards slightly but sharply when you contact an object which makes walking a tedious exercise.
I had a weapon and I know I was supposed to encounter aliens in short order because that’s what the nice lady computer voice kept foreshadowing. But I just didn’t stick around long enough. I later examined the instruction manual that saw fit to publish a 12-step walkthrough for how to complete the first tedious task in the game.
This is what happens when IT employees carry their professional experience over to game development.
