Flash Traffic: City of Angels

Posted on March 2, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Flash Traffic: City of Angels is an interactive movie that has held my curiosity ever since I spotted its MPEG trailer on an ATI installation CD quite a few years ago. At first, I thought the content of the trailer was supposed to be a joke, what with a vaguely Jerry Seinfeld-looking DEA agent kicking off the affair followed soon after by a somewhat goofy gunfight. Don’t believe me? Watch the trailer yourself:

Thanks to this gaming experiment, it occurred to me to go searching for the game, even though the corresponding MobyGames entry is fairly complete, I still wanted to experience this game. In fact, I have been using this method to scavenge for a number of old games that aren’t yet in MobyGames– think of an old game I’ve heard of and would like to play, search for an eBay store that has it, and find other obscure titles they have in stock. I managed to procure a copy of this game, still wrapped and with a “Review copy — not for resale” sticker on it (as well as a copy of Deer Avenger 4 from the same seller; I only need #3D and the quadrilogy will be complete!). It’s interesting to note that this game comes with an advertisement for Rise of the Robots, a famously sub-par game, to be charitable. Not a good sign.

The game runs great in DOSBox — no surprise there. Let me tell you, interactive movies don’t get much more pure than this. This game plays an FMV clip and then presents you with 3 lines of dialogue to choose from. Repeat, often in circles. That’s it. Most I-movies at least try to throw a few puzzles your way. Tsunami obviously must have thought their story was all they needed to make this “game” compelling.

Flash Traffic: City of Angels -- Intro Briefing

Unfortunately, Flash Traffic doesn’t trust your reading comprehension ability and sees fit to read each dialogue option to you as your roll over the line. Your character has an obnoxious, quasi-Texan drawl. So much for the you-are-there effect. Even though your character is never seen, the creators saw fit to make sure that your character is most certainly heard. I think it’s possible to shut off these line readings but I couldn’t figure out how to click that radio button (seriously, the dialog box wouldn’t let me).

Flash Traffic: City of Angels -- Interrogation

So the DEA raids a suspected drug lab only to find a nuke factory instead. The game is a race by the FBI to track down the bomb before it incinerates Los Angeles. The game copy boasts about being filmed in locations throughout L.A. More specifically, parking garages and empty office buildings throughout L.A., as you will ascertain from the foregoing game trailer. The beginning of the game has you and your partner/underling Dave interrogating 2 guys nabbed from the lab. The interrogations go around in circles until I eventually stumble on a way out of what is no doubt a virtual maze underneath the game’s covers. I don’t even clearly understand what happens next, or really, why the game took this next path, but the protaganists decide to go find “the Korean”. The Korean who has a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher in his car trunk and takes out the FBI van (huh? the FBI tools around in a non-descript white van?).

Flash Traffic: City of Angels -- Korean Rocket Launcher

So that’s my first game over. I have the opportunity to replay, but that only plays from the beginning of the van scene, where there is no other path but certain detonation. I could restore from a saved game, if I had saved up to this point, or I can restart. So I restart and make different decisions but still wind up at the same rocket-propelled dead end.

I searched and found a FAQ/walkthrough for this game. It confirms for me that the game is on par with standard side scrolling action games when it comes to sheer trial & error tedium and that it’s common to follow a path that doesn’t make any sense, such as the Korean situation above. Though on the second play, I actually received the exposition about who the Korean was and why we were off to meet doom at his hands. Naturally, I still couldn’t avoid it.

About multimedia, this game renders its FMV in the standard DOS VGA 320x200x256 video mode using a custom video format named BFI. However, there was a special version of this game and several other Tsunami games that used MPEG video. How to decode in real time on a 486? Using the bundled RealMagic hardware decoding card. A rare artifact in this day and age, but I will continue the search.

Log File Intelligence

Posted on March 1, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

The things you can learn by auditing your website’s log files. For example, I learned from this web page — that was hotlinking one of this blog’s images — that there was apparently a Sega Saturn version of the obnoxious I-movie Quantum Gate, at least in Japan. The page is hosted in Finland so I presume the language is Finnish, and I gather that the game is for sale.

Total Carnage

Posted on March 1, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

There are already several versions of Total Carnage in MobyGames (including SNES, Amiga, Amiga CD32, and a Jaguar version published only 2 years ago). But there is not a PC version, as my CD-ROM for the eBay 50-lot grab bag advertises, so let’s dive in.

This game seems so darn familiar. Where have I heard of it before? When I start playing, it becomes all too clear: Total Carnage was an old arcade game that was ostensibly based on the same engine and gameplay concept as another popular arcade game at the time called Smash TV.

If you’re not familiar with either game, they are set apart by their control scheme. In the arcade version, the player controlled the on-screen character’s actions with 2 joysticks– 1 joystick controlled the character’s movements while the other joystick controlled the direction of fire. This meant that the directions of movement and fire were completely independent. This works great when you actually have 2 joysticks at your disposal. However, most home conversions have had to make due with the control facilities at the disposal of the nominal PC or console. This makes the game significantly tougher. To be sure, there are many, many ways to configure the game:

Total Carnage -- control scheme configuration

If you actually have 2 joysticks, you can certainly use them. If you have enough dexterity, you can recreate the free form control scheme using lots of keyboard keys. Or a combination of keys and a joystick/joypad. The easiest configuration (for me) is to simply accept the crippled ability and have one firing button on the gamepad so that I can only fire in the direction I am moving. I didn’t get very far with the any control scheme and I tried all kinds of combos. It’s probably just as well. I remember playing the game’s Smash TV predecessor on free play at a vintage arcade. Was that ever a tedious exercise. “Is this game over yet?” was all that my gaming companion and I could say.

Technical: The game has two FLIC files for FMV. Fun. It’s also interesting to note that when DOSBox (v0.65) saved the PNG screenshots, it saw fit to save them as 320×196 instead of 320×200. I have no idea why. Is there an undocumented VGA mode I don’t know about?

February Status Report

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Another month has flown by, which seems to happen regularly thanks to this new mission. Here are the latest games to make it into the MobyGames database thanks to this blog:

And it may interest — or frighten — some of you to learn that this blog is starting to infect others. WildKard, a major MobyGames contributor, is embarking on a similar new-game-a-day effort. His first review is of a fascinating little indie game called Galcon.

I’ve actually managed to keep this nonsense going for a solid 2 months now. I keep wondering if I should back off a bit. Trouble is, I’m on a roll now and I’m getting so good at selecting, installing, playing, capturing, noting, blogging, and documenting these games, and all in a single evening, that I would hate to lose the momentum. Besides, the better I get at it all, the more fun it is. Still, I may declare one night a week as a break night to do other stuff that needs doing (tax season is upon us in the U.S.!).

However, I just ordered 20 more cheap, obscure, absent-from-MobyGames titles from eBay. The madness! The pathology.

Radio Active

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

All I know about Radio Active is what it says on the CD-ROM: “The Music Trivia Game Show.” I really hope that covers pop music from the 1980s and 1990s or I’m sunk. I eventually learned that the game covers trivia on music from 1961 to 1985, so I might have a fighting chance on the later part of the period.

The game allows up to four players to compete in this music trivia game show scenario. Each player selects an avatar to represent them. The avatars are a selection of brazen stereotypes reliably overacting. It works. You have the rebel, the cheerleader, the pirate, the cover girl, and 12 others. Name your player and move on to answering trivia.

The gameplay consists of spinning a wheel, hitting a category, and answering a trivia question. The categories generally define musical time periods, e.g., 61-64. This game is not Y2K compliant. Usually, it’s a textual trivia question with one answer you must select out of 16, which makes guessing quite difficult as you can well imagine. I don’t fare too well at 60s or 70s music question but then luck out with an 80s question when “Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” sounds familiar:

You get one chance to mess up, too. If you answer a textual question correctly, you get a trivia round with a musical melody you must identify. Sometimes, you hit the video category on the big wheel. This is when the game shows you a video of someone who worked closely with a musician and tells you clues about who the musician is. Further, every third round is an extended round where each question has 3 possible answers instead of just the 1. Bonus points galore.

Call me lame, but I can actually envision this game being fun in the right company. However, don’t spoil the game for yourself by poking around in the CD-ROM. The filenames of the QuickTime files sort of give away the answers (e.g., “MCHAMMER”). And this was the avatar I chose, the Rebel:

Radio Active -- My contestant: Mike The Rebel

Enough music trivia, let’s talk about multimedia tech trivia. This game uses (or used) QuickTime v1.1.1. Talk about vintage! Thankfully, I didn’t have to downgrade QuickTime like I had to do with certain other games. What kind of codecs were in use in the first version of QuickTime? According to the files on this disc, Apple Graphics (SMC) and Cinepak.

See Also:

Brainstorm: The Game Show, another pure trivia game
Something strange about the credits in this game

At MobyGames:

Radio Active

Here’s a curious feature of the game: I tried to type in my usual gaming name, “Multimedia Mike”; that was a bit long so I shortened it to my backup of “MultiMike”. The game complained that it didn’t know how to pronounce that. So I backed it off to just “Mike” which is pretty well guaranteed to be recognized, and indeed it was. The game proceeded to verbally address me as Mike. As I played the game I became curious about the mechanism it used to judge the validity of the names. Did it perform some kind of complicated character or phonetic analysis on the names to be able to sound them out? That sounds awfully hard. But the only alternative would be to have a dictionary of common names and prerecorded samples vocalizing each. I was going to start poking at the game to see what kind of names it would accept. But instead, I just opened up the main game data file and went hunting for text strings containing my name.

It turns out there are 761 valid names. I counted them by using a text editor to sum the number of quote characters and then divided by 2. I extracted them all and have listed them in the remainder of this post. Did your name make the cut?

Operation

Posted on February 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I played through tonight’s game thinking that it was a fresh new game that MobyGames had never heard of. Turns out I was wrong. I figured it out after I had written a new game description and tried to enter the game. It’s an easy mistake to make when MobyGames returns 181 game matches for ‘operation’; I didn’t find the game until I manually typed in the URL based on the site’s friendly URL scheme. I still submitted my new, lengthier description for Operation anyway. Good thing I’m good enough at writing these by now that the authoring didn’t take me that long.

Operation is a computer game adaptation of the classic board game. You remember the one– use a pair of tweezers to remove any number of objects from an unfortunate patient. If you touched anything other than the object, the buzzer would go off. This game offers 5 different hospitals in 5 different locales catering to the needs of 5 different types of patients — Haunted Hospital (monsters), Rainforest (be a vet doc), Space Hospital (operate on aliens), Main Hospital (boring humans), and Dinosaur Hospital (help dinosaurs, perhaps to survive extinction). Each hospital is more or less a conveyor belt of patients. You can treat each patient either via the classical Operation extraction game technique or with a game unique to that level. The classical Operation mode (seen in the screenshots below) allows you to guide a pair of tweezers into the patient and remove the foreign object, while dodging everything else. There are 4 objects per patient (as seen in Disco Wolfman above).

Alternatively, you can cure the patient using the special game for that level. For example, the special game in the Rainforest level is Musical Melodies. I guess your doctor colleague in this level is kind of a new age hippie. The healing process works by her first playing the melodies of a various body parts on the patient, and then you need to replay the sequence; i.e., game of memory.

Operation -- Rainforest Musical Melodies

Other special games include an Asteroids clone where you have to descend into a dinosaur’s upset stomach to break up the rising burp bubbles; and a game where you must guide a frog up and out of a patient’s throat while your doctor colleague for the level inexplicably tosses food down the chute in an effort to thwart the amphibian.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike