Disney’s Hades Challenge

Posted on February 23, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I don’t mind telling you that I’m excited about tonight’s game, Disney’s Hades Challenge, and for two main reasons: because Disney’s 1997 Hercules movie remains my all-time favorite animated Disney movie, and because their first Hercules-based computer game was also very good. That title was a pure action game featuring the hero himself. This game takes a different approach and bills itself as an adventure/strategy game and the star is you. It seems that Hades and other monsters are menacing the lands again and Hercules is busy with some other stuff. So Zeus enlists your help and sends you over to Philoctetes, a.k.a. Phil, who was voiced by Danny DeVito in the movie. It sounds like DeVito in this game as well but his name does not show up in the credits (though James Woods lends his original voice talent as Hades).

Phil gets you going on your first quest: To do something about the Minotaur that is ravaging the island of Crete. So I get in the boat I am issued — which is none other than the legendary Argo, you know, the one from Jason and the Argonauts — and head over to Crete to scope out the situation. Things are weird over there. When you first get to the island, you can see that the Minotaur is indeed causing chaos with impunity. So you need to go visit Daedalus. Thing is, the king is holding out on you and won’t let you see him until you bring him the gift of a new centerpiece for his table:

So you return to the dock in search of a statue that would make a suitable centerpiece for such a snobbish, slothful monarch. Where am I supposed to find a statue? Fortuitously, a statue peddler appears with a set of four statues and says that they’re all free today and that the king would love them. One by one, I bring them to the king with the peddler’s highest recommendation.

Every time, King Minos rejects the statue. I thought it was exceptionally odd and convenient that this statue hustler showed up when he did, and that his free merchandise didn’t seem to do the trick. Somehow, he reminded me of Pain and Panic, Hades’ pair of sniveling little hench-demons. I was warned to watch out for these two and that they would be working to thwart me. If that was their mission, they did a remarkable job the first time out since when I ran out of statues, the game threw this assertion dialog:

A lot of information there. For a lesser game, I would have called it quits at this point. But this game has piqued my interest. Besides, I wanted to see if the bug was reproducible. It was not. However, going in and out of the king’s chambers, I couldn’t help but notice that he has a certain infatuation with bulls. Eventually, I noticed the little bull statue to the right of the peddler. He was trying to distract me and when I took the statue to Minos, Hades showed up to adminstratively reprimand his underlings as Hades is wont to do. Turns out I was right about the statue guy.

So the king grants me the honor of speaking with Daedalus, the ostensible Greek with a thick French accent. He is making progress on the maze which will trap the man-bull but needs some supplies, including bricks, wood, straw, and stone. These are scattered about the various isles. The closest item, wood, is stored in a boat docked right here in Crete. Let’s review the heroic acts thus far:

delivering a horned statue to a royal prick
breaking & entering
grand theft lumber

To get at the wood, you have to solve this puzzle:

It’s a good thing I have a working knowledge of Greek letters; I wouldn’t have had any clue on this one otherwise. Can you see the solution?

I was bracing myself for more puzzles — and probably even a sliding tile puzzle — on the other islands before procuring the other needed materials. But no, the junk was just laying around on the shores when I sailed in. Though that wasn’t a surprise in war-ravaged Troy where I simply had to scavenge some bricks.

So you take these pieces back to Daedalus and he is able to construct a number of walls. However, when it comes time to trap the Minotaur, Daedalus enlists your help once more to rotate various walls in order to trap the creature. It’s an interesting puzzle:

Other notes I made during the course of my brief playing:

The ‘wait’ mouse icon when the program is busy with an animation (such an icon is traditionally represented as a watch or hourglass) is a sundial.
Hades appears after a quest with some Olympian god quiz and other mythological trivia. Statues of various gods and goddesses are littered across the land. Click on them to hear what they specialize in. It’s useful knowledge for these situations.
Appears to be a Smacker-assisted game. Smacker is used for pure audio in many cases.
Hot spots are very hard to find sometimes. You wind up just methodically scanning the screen (a.k.a. pixel hunting) waiting for the mouse cursor to change. It makes you long for another puzzle with a concrete goal.
The credits are extremely long for what doesn’t appear to be a very involved game, but perhaps I oversimplify. Maybe there are a lot of people to validate that everything about the game conforms to official Disney standards.

BTW, this game definitely goes on the list of games to revisit one day. Much fun, silly though it may be.

Moving Quickly

Posted on February 22, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

MobyGames is approving my new entries almost as quickly as I can submit them. Here are the latest 5 entries:

Creatures Adventures
Garfield’s Mad About Cats
Safari Kongo (that’s right! you don’t actually have to be able to play a game to get it submitted)
Speedy Eggbert
Spy Kids Learning Adventures: Mission: The Underground Affair

Madeline’s Rainy Day Activities

Posted on February 22, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

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:

Madeline's Rainy Day Activities -- vandalism

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”:

Madeline's Rainy Day Activities -- Purple Dog

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:

Madeline's Rainy Day Activities -- Brainteaser

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.

Robodemons

Posted on February 21, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

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.

Latest New Games

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

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:

ArtRageous! (lots of interesting, colorful screenshots here)
Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Data Island

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.

Garfield’s Mad About Cats

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

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.

Garfield's Mad About Cats -- Brief Educational Video

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.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike