MobyGames is approving my new entries almost as quickly as I can submit them. Here are the latest 5 entries:
Today, it rained where I live. I thought it would be apropos to play Madeline’s Rainy Day Activities. I’m going to have to play it eventually, anyway. It seems that I have been hitting the kids’ games pretty diligently recently. I can’t complain. Frankly, they tend to be just fine. Bright, colorful, cheerful, simple. Maybe they just fit my intellect, who knows?. Whatever the reason, it’s a welcome release vs. the seemlingly interminable string of interactive movies I suffered through not long ago.
In this game, as in my real world today, it’s raining. Lively Madeline has a roomful of activities you can choose from. They’re not all unique. In fact, many of them can be classified as fill-in-the-blank customizable stories or coloring activities. The customizable stories take the form of brief stories with several missing nouns and adjectives. You can choose from a list of each for completing the story. For the drawing activities, of which there are four, the player is thrust into a primitive drawing tool and is able to select from among several pictures centered around a particular theme; e.g., for the Masks activity, there are different masks to color. The drawing tool allows the user to paint using 2 different types of brushes and 8 colors. There are also solid fills and various fill patterns to choose from. There is an eraser, a 1-level undo, a picture reset, and an option to print your work.
So, I think you can guess what’s coming:
Another drawing activity is “Finish The Picture”. The pictures in this set focus on unfinished scenes. An obvious one is a large picture canvas hanging in a museum. I call this piece “Purple Dog Sniffing”:
This title needs to demonstrate itself to be — however marginally — a game in order to earn an entry in the prestigious MobyGames database. And, so help me, one of those activities had better not be a sliding tile puzzle game! Fortunately, there are some activities that have clear goals which would technically categorize them as games. One such activity is a selection of connect-the-dot puzzles. This is surprisingly free-form and you can indeed deviate from the pattern. At your own peril, but still. There is a typical memory card game with a curious twist: One card has an animal and its match hidden elsewhere on the table has an audio icon which plays the sound the animal makes.
This was probably my favorite game:
The goal here is to recreate the pattern above on the canvas below using the selection of shapes lined at the bottom. Rotate the shapes as necessary.
Some other features in the overall title: Almost anything can be printed (notice the printer icons on the above screenshots). Further, there are two “Print Activities” hotspots in Madeline’s rooms that allow you to print out a number of offline activities in different categories including games & puzzles, paper dolls, cards & stickers, science, word games, and arts & crafts.
So, I’m not too elitist to admit that I had a fine time exploring these games. This title has two reviews on Amazon.com that were, well, not kind, to say the least. I think this person was expecting entirely too much from dear Madeline:
“This product is HORRIBLE! First of all, there is no goal except to have some “Rainy day fun!” Second of all, the games aren’t that fun anyways. Just some cheesy games such as one where Madeline asks some way too easy fairy tale questions, a puzzle game that dosen’t tell you when you’re finnished, and some make-a-story games that are ethier boring or don’t make sence.”
For my part, I’m just ecstatic that I didn’t see another sliding tile puzzle.
Here’s another obscure NES game that hasn’t yet made the MobyGames cut. It’s an unlicensed title from Color Dreams, the company with the baby blue NES cartridges. I’m pretty sure that this will be the first time I have actually played a Color Dreams title, and don’t think I’m happy about that. Since they were unlicensed, Nintendo never mentioned word one about titles like this in Nintendo Power, my chief source for all things Nintendo when I was into the 8-bit. Due to the WWW, I have since read dozens of overwhelmingly negative reviews for unlicensed games. And so it is with much apprehension that I dutifully dive into Robodemons.
The title screen is severely lackluster but showcases what is likely to be the game’s most notable feature– scratchy digitized voices using the NES’ exceptionally limited PCM capability. When I got into the actual gameplay, I quickly hypothesized that the game probably spent most of its ROM budget on these effects.
Press the start button and jump into the story exposition. I would include a screenshot but it’s written in the same font you see in those boxes above. The only way to make it out is to get a screen capture and magnify it several times. Here is the text:
In darker times the demon Kull, king of the nether world of Hades, created a machine to transplant the souls of demons into the body of robots. With this army of robodemons Kull became the unchallenged master of the earth. One day a great warrior decided to descend the seven gates of Hades and destory [sic] Kull forever…
So I think this electronic game is trying to make the ironic case that technology is satanic. Of course, Color Dreams might be an authority regarding matters of video games and spirituality since they later re-invented themselves as Wisdom Tree, makers of religious, unlicensed titles rather than just plain old unlicensed titles.
The game starts out with some fly-through shooting action:
Our hero has a boomerang for offense. It shoots straight out in front, angles upward a bit, and then returns on a slightly higher plane. Oh, and it’s even less useful than it sounds, especially against a bunch of nimble enemies who can fire in any direction. After much trial and error with this level, I decided that pacifism is the best policy and just concentrated on avoiding threats, especially since destroying an enemy requires being lined up with it on a horizontal plane which puts the protagonist at great risk. There is also the strategy of using the boomerang’s return path to hurt enemies but that’s extremely tricky.
It’s a short flight to the skeleton demon boss who, if you still have enough health, will succumb if you just hit him head on with enough boomerangs. Then, it’s down to Hades, if I’m not mistaken. It resembles a run-of-the-mill graveyard:
So now, I have both a shoot and a jump action available to me (except that the buttons are swapped from the usual orientation provided by these games). There are skeletons, flying creatures, little rolling objects that are starkly reminiscent of Phantom of the Opera masks, and giant, disembodied fangs as seen in the preceding screenshot. When I first encountered it, I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be jumping platform or a threat. I guessed wrong the first time. Also, the little red puddles in the ground result in your immediate death, should you step in.
I got to the boss of this level. It was a skeleton demon dog. I couldn’t beat it. I really didn’t care.
Okay, MobyGames is about to be one game closer to having a complete collection of NES titles. And I can put this unpleasantness behind me.
For awhile there, I was only playing interactive movies and other games that were already in the MobyGames database. Still, here are 2 of the latest games that I have found time to enter:
From here on out, I am hoping to work hard on games that are absent from the database until I have cleared that section of the queue, especially since I am getting proficient at playing a game, writing a blog entry about it, and submitting a complete MobyGames entry, all in the same evening.
Destined to become a MobyGames description paragraph very soon: In Garfield’s Mad About Cats, Jon expresses displeasure with Garfield the Cat’s lack of motivation towards performing traditional rodent control duties. Still, Garfield is sympathetic to the mouse problem and assumes his alter-ego of Dr. Frankencat and, along with his assistant Eager (Odie), descends into the mad scientist lab in house dungeon. The mission: Create the perfect cat. To that end, Dr. Frankencat uses his computer to identify the most perfect traits of various cats from around the planet and assemble the features into a perfect cat.
The game is pretty slow moving at first and about 10 minutes in, I get a little worried that this might not be an actual game. The game allows you to select an attribute, such as tail and roar, and investigate a variety of cats from around the globe. When you do, Eager/Odie fetches a dish from the region where the cat hails from, as well as a bag of the specified attribute. Odie goes to work with the attribute while the big computer plays a brief video factoid about the selected feline species.
My non-gaming fears are assuaged when the the game asks me if I would like to play Disco Jon. This turns out to be the first in a series of 12 random minigames/activities. The goal of this one is to memorize and replay the sequence of buttons to make Jon boogie down:
I like the metaphor present in this minigame: You only get 3 chances to get it right. Each time you screw up, one of the babe silhouettes loses interest and slips away.
Other games include a Whack-A-Mole clone (Whack-A-Rat); a Breakout clone (Burp Game) where Garfield uses his own belches to keep a mouse up in the air to hit all the cheese bricks; and a Space Invaders clone (Hack Attack) where a fleet of Nermals are descending upon Garfield and he must beat them back by coughing up hairballs. I was fairly disconcerted to see a sliding tile puzzle (Odie Maze)– I hate these, I hate these, I hate these! But this was the most messed up minigame by far– Fowl Shot:
Plant some poultry in the spring-loaded recliner, twist the chair to aim for the moving target, and fire. Even if you miss, as I did every time, it’s still great fun.
I’ll have you know I was on the ball this evening. As soon as I got home from work, I went straight to my new second job playing old games that no one has heard of. I had already picked out this evening’s game in advance. A fat lot of good my planning did me tonight. I investigated a title called Total Racing Cars which is not quite as generic as simply slapping “Pinball” on your CD-ROM, but it comes close. I’m always in the mood for a good racing game but I’m less enthusiastic when I realize that the game is merely a repackaging of the shareware versions of commercial racing games such as Need For Speed III and Daytona USA.
Okay, so that doesn’t count. Let’s move swiftly on to Spy Kids Learning Adventures: The Underground Affair. This is one in a series of three educational games based around the Spy Kids franchise. This particular version of The Underground Affair was yet another in a series of PC Treasures titles/AOL delivery vehicles purchased for a dollar each at Super Target. And someone screwed up when licensing this game for budget distribution. I’ll expound in a moment.
The story of this game explains that there is a mine in South America where anti-gravity ore is extracted and then stored in a special, air-free silo. This material apparently has application in the spy field. And it seems that a bunch of it has gone missing. The story colorfully unfolds in a panel-by-panel, comic book-style manner. It’s a nice effect.
This is where the Spy Kids are called in to investigate. From their treehouse base of operations, they are instructed to hop into the DragonSpy craft to travel to South America and find clues about the missing ore. Here’s the learning opportunity, and the catch: In order to activate the DragonSpy’s navigation system, you must solve a puzzle in the book in order to find a code to enter into the ship’s system:
Umm, where’s the book? PC Treasures only licensed and re-distributed the CD-ROM, not the accompanying 32-page puzzle book. That brings the game to a screeching halt, unless I care to start reverse engineering the game. Which I don’t care to do.
For trivia, the other two games in the series are named Man in the Moon and The Candy Conspiracy (oops, and another game: The Nightmare Machine).