Artrageous!

Posted on February 10, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Artrageous! is a game that has held my curiosity since I first inventoried it from an eBay lot of 50 cheap CD-ROMs. The first order of business is to determine whether or not the disc actually qualifies as a game and can be entered into MobyGames. Flipping through the manual that accompanied the game reveals that there are a few little activities that specifically contain ‘game’ in the title. This fact unequivocally entitles the disc a spot in the MobyGames database. Let’s go.

The game launches into a little pre-rendered virtual reality plaza where your guide, Pim, explains all about Artrageous!. He makes the case that the CD-ROM offers incredible value over a physical museum visit because you are encouraged to touch and play with the art. There is a database hall with a huge cross-referenced database of artists and their works (as well as the museums that presently hold the works; BTW, the credits for this title are looooooong). For learning activities, there are areas branching from the plaza that discuss color, light, perspective, composition, and the life of art.

Color! I know color from all of my years of working with computer multimedia technology, or I thought I did. I strike out in search of some game that will make this title worthy of entry into the great gaming database.

Here is a color mixing game where you have to mix various levels of primary colors to produce the specified color. What colorspace? Blue-red-yellow, apparently, which I am unfamiliar with. So many colorspaces. I know RGB and YUV best, with a little CMYK. The game explains that this is the famous hue/saturation a.k.a. HSV/HSB colorspace that I have heard of, so I feel a little more grounded. To that end, the game is quite interesting in its challenge of building an HSV color wheel, piece by piece.

There’s another color-related game about color and music. You are shown Composition VII by Kardinsky which is supposed to represent a cacophony of sounds via its use of color. You can click on any part of the painting to hear what sounds stand in for colors. Deep blue represents a hit from Bach’s Tocatta. White is a heavenly sound. Black has nothingness associated with it. Yellow stands for birds chirping. There is no real goal so this falls more into the category of interactive learning activity vs. game.

Another color-related activity shows a world map with color pointers set up at various locations. Clicking on one reveals what special meanings that different cultures have traditionally attached to different colors (e.g., Washington D.C., USA values green, China mourns in white).

The Mona Lisa seems to figure prominently in the lighting category of activities. The narrator starts by explaining that it “has been used to bludgeon generations of art students.” Hey, the rest of us ordinary, non-art-appreciating mortals haven’t exactly been spared the beating either. Another art minigame, Creating Light, shows a canvas with a mish-mash of shapes (including the Mona Lisa). Your task is to click on one of the icons on the left sidebar which brings up the outline of some shape on the canvas. Drag the outline and place it on its appropriate shape. Alternatively, gaze at the image and figure out how many objects are hidden inside.

If you complete the game, you can go another round with the same objects on a different canvas.

The perspective section contained an interesting minigame. A bunch of objects floated around a room drawn with a 3D vanishing perspective. You have a certain time limit under which you must drag each object into more appropriate places in the room based on their relative perspectives. The game also allowed you to display a vanishing perspective grid to help you along if necessary.

There was an odd game about the golden proportion. I think it belonged to the composition section. This was the first time I had heard of the Greek notion that the perfect artistic ratio is 1:1.6. There was a minigame that has you identifiying as many golden proportioned pieces of a picture as you could within a certain time limit.

Finally, in the life of art section, there is a game which is essentially a basic jigsaw puzzle, only with all square pieces:

There are 3 difficulty levels which configure how many seconds you get to put all the pieces in the right places — easiest is 70 seconds, hardest is 30.

There was a lot of information and activities on offer in Artrageous!. I’m glad I chose to tackle this title on a Saturday as I enjoyed being able to devote a reasonable amount of time to exploring the various activities.

Creatures Adventures

Posted on February 9, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I’m laying off the interactive movies until such time that I feel motivated to work on a non-PC system. So now for something completely different. How about a kids’ game called Creatures Adventures? All I had to go on for this game was a bare CD-ROM, received in a large CD-ROM lot, with pictures of some fairly creepy little creatures. These little guys are just goofy enough that I have to assume that the game is for kids.

I have little to work with so I jump right in and see what’s going on. The game installs without incident and has a movie you can play from the install dialog. I would upload it to YouTube but it’s a Bink file which is not yet supported by the service. The movie is an overly long sequence showing the creatures tediously spelling out the word “creatures” using a variety of weird methods and coincidences. I think this approach would work fine if the word in question was at most 4 letters long, but no longer. The final letter is launched via a special letter-launching weapon using a makeshift sniper scope, always a nice touch for a kids’ game:

There’s really no exposition when I begin playing the game. I start off in a baby’s cradle room where there are a few eggs on the floor, a cradle, and about a hundred other things to interact with. I click on one of the eggs and drag it to the cradle. A few moments later the egg hatches to reveal one of the little beasts who immediately toddles out of the room. I hatch the second egg as well. That’s when I realize I’m expected to take care of these little demonspawn.

I did a little googling and it seems that the eponymous creatures are members of a debatably adorable race called norns. The educational opportunities afforded by this game are listed as “taking care of others”, according to Amazon.com’s entry. Somehow, I don’t think playing this game would qualify you as a nanny.

Oh my, there’s a lot going on here. Where to start? There are up to four wee norns and you can quickly switch between them using the four bubbles on top. You micromanage their affairs and presumably try to keep them out of trouble (though I couldn’t find any immediate threats to their health and, yeah, I looked). You can dress them, feed them, advise them where to enthusiastically wander next, and even drag them around as you see fit. While the norn brat is exploring the world, you can click on nearly anything you see in order to interact with it. I rather enjoyed the above magical forest, dark and foreboding though it was, since most everything was a musical instrument of some sort. Groovy. Unfortunately, the purple norn pictured wandered into a castle (or maybe I told her to go there, I’m not sure) and was immediately presented with the most hated (by me) tile-based puzzle:

I despise these so much. It’s probably just me (in fact, I know it is), but I have never been able to solve one of these. The very same puzzle stopped me dead in my tracks while playing Resident Evil 4 in a way that no mutant zombie boss monster possibly could. So I pretty much left the purple norn to her own devices, who eventually dozed off, and went to monitor the green norn who, though young, was smart enough not to wander into forests where there are dragons quite visible in the background.

There are two omnipresent… things… floating wherever you go in this game. First is the horn with a firecracker strapped to it in the upper left quadrant of the screen. Clicking on this seems to swoop down a quickly shower the current norn. The mosquito-looking creature in the upper right quadrant swoops in and apparently entertains the norn briefly. Easily amused.

The game is quite the visual treat though I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, nor what the end goal was. One of the more interesting areas I meandered into had a wooden ramp up to a platform. On top of the platform was a bell. When rung, the bell summons a horse-drawn emergency medical center. Maybe this would have been useful if I could have hurt my norn somehow, likely inadvertently. There are also night-day transitions and weather. Norns don’t seem to like getting wet.

Lastly, I noticed that the game has extensive parental controls available. Parents can actually set per-child playing limits and bedtime. Just imagine that someone had to test this stuff.

Hmm, I just noticed that there is a help file installed along with this game; might have been useful an hour ago.

See also:

Creatures Adventures Revisited, where I played this game after reading the manual

At MobyGames:

Creatures Adventures

Interactivemovies.org

Posted on February 8, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Check this out: Interactivemovies.org, a catalog of interactive movies by an unabashed fan of the genre. Like water to my oil. Like matter to my anti-matter.

Taco Bell Goes To Data Island

Posted on February 8, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

It was a late night at work and I don’t have much time for a game tonight. No matter– I have some games reserved for just such situations. I started and completed Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Data Island while capturing a complete set of screenshots, all in the span of about 10 minutes.

I was partially correct in my hypothesis from the last Tek Kids entry when I guessed that Data Island was some kind of virtual island. The intro explains that Data Island is a giant mainframe that is as big as an island. While the intro explains that it’s on the water somewhere, the action seems to take place in some cyber-looking virtual location. And while there is no explicit environmental theme, Data Island’s purpose is to take control of all the world’s computers to world domineering ends.

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Data Island

The action is more similar to Polar Mission than Aqua Zone as movement principly occurs in two dimensions. The craft on which the Tek Kid travels can move up in short bursts but I’m not sure if this has any practical application in the game. I just checked and the craft in Polar Mission can do the same thing. But flying high or low makes no difference for touching objects.

Here is an action shot, with Data Island looming hauntingly in the background:

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Data Island gameplay

I made it through all 3 segments on the first try. Let’s hear it for me. I must observe that the segments seemed longer than in the previous two games. The code for this game is AR93, if anyone is keeping score.

Burn: Cycle: Less Than Resilient

Posted on February 7, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

According to my interactive movie list, Burn: Cycle is the last known I-movie left in the experiment, for the PC. There could be other games whose I-movie-ness I am unaware of. Plus, I have at least one more I-movie for each the Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and Mac systems. I’m seeing that precious light at the end of this cold, dark, interactive tunnel.

Burn: Cycle didn’t work for me. I’m not sure how I should feel about that, necessarily. When I popped in the first of the 2 game discs, it offered to let me play right away, off the CD-ROM:

So far so good, and I appreciate the no-nonsense, no-install-hassle, cut-straight-to-the-chase attitude of this game. Pressing the Play button is rewarded by this dialog:

This is one of the worst kind of cryptic error messages you can possibly receive. Generally, it means that your machine is just too advanced to run this ancient software. The dialog reads: “Application Error: BURNCYCL caused a General Protection Fault in module 0417 1DE7BURNCYCL will close.” The only reason I typed out that text was so that Google could pick it up and hapless googlers can find this site and learn that, although someone else shares their pain, there is still no hope.

Next, I tried my Windows 95 VMware image. It didn’t GPF but it also didn’t play due to this error:

This must be a hardcore I-movie, without even subtitles. This is when I finally recognize that this Win95 install isn’t set up to recognize VMware’s virtual ENS1371 audio hardware. I have no idea how to set it up, either, or maybe it’s more trouble than I care to bother with. That brings tonight’s experiment to a screeching halt.

There is hope, however. This game is for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Mac. I am trying to get an emulated Mac environment running for another Mac-only I-movie in my pile. Failing that, there’s always — groan — an actual Win3.1 or Win95 machine.

Law & Order: Dead On The Money

Posted on February 6, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s game is Law & Order: Dead On The Money, based on the popular television show. I somewhat expect this to be a better version of In The First Degree, especially when I see that the game was created by Legacy Interactive. I remember being impressed when I perused the multimedia for their emergency room simulation Code Blue.

The game is 2 CDs large. The installer wants to copy the first CD in its entirety to the hard drive. When you start the game, all of the intro and tutorial segments run from the hard drive. Then you are prompted for the second disc when it’s time to dive into the main course. That’s when you see this dialog:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Java Dialog

Eagle-eyed geeks will notice that the dialog’s icon indicates Java. I have seen quite a few interactive movie games based on Microsoft Visual Basic, as evidenced by the presence of VBRUN?00.DLL files (Critical Path, The Daedalus Encounter, and Quantum Gate all spring to mind). But this is the first commercial game I have encountered that runs on Java. Why, in theory, that should mean that it’s portable across any platform that can run a Java app… which pretty much means it can run on Windows. No, that’s not necessarily true– it seems that there is a Mac port of the game as well.

Law & Order: Dead On The Money follows you, a detective paired with Jerry Orbach’s character (whom I know best from an old episode of Tales From The Darkside where his deranged pal fell in love with a mannequin) investigating a woman’s early morning murder in the park. Before jumping into the action, the game has tutorials for both the detective and trial portions of the games, delivered by computer-generated, pre-rendered versions of the actors from the TV show. I edited the tutorial bookend animations together into this YouTube video so you can get an idea of the decent animation quality:

You begin the game by investigating the crime scene. This entails interviewing the man who first reported the body and checking the surrounding area for garbage that might double as a clue. This game has red herrings in quantity unlike many games which follow the Law of Conservation of Game Resources, where there are never any extraneous objects. Fortunately, partner Jerry gives helpful clues about what may prove useful. After you are satisfied you have gathered enough information, you proceed to some other place available to you on the map:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Travel Map

Next, I head to the medical examiner’s office to get her analysis of the situation. Each of the locales you can travel to allow you to pan 360° from the point where you’re standing, and perhaps travel to another office, or look at assorted objects. Since the remainder of the video files rely on QuickTime files, I suspect that the panorama effect might be achieved with QuickTime’s QTVR technology, but I’m not sure.

Next, I bring up the case file and decide that I should submit the blood and hair samples (hair found under the victim’s fingernails, not matching her own) to the crime lab for study. Here is the master case file screen which has a stupendous amount of information:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Case File

One of the key components of this game is time. You have 7 days to solve this case, or perhaps bring it to trial. I can’t remember where that time limit comes from, precisely. However, time flies in this game. Moving a few meters from one location to another in the park and leaning over to pick up a used ketchup packet can take up to 15 minutes. Yet traveling from Manhattan’s upper east side to Long Island takes about the same time. I’ve never been to the the Big Apple, but I hear that the latter feat is not supposed to be possible. I could be mistaken.

I was starting to get into this game. Unfortunately, it seemed to freeze up on me the first time I got a message on my in-game cell phone.

One more video, since they’re so well done– here’s the intro for the game This appears to be a clone of the opening credits except that the computer-generated doppelgängers fill in for the actual actors.

I see from MobyGames’ entry on the game that the “Dead On The Money” idiom (which means to be precisely correct) didn’t translate well into French (La Mort Dans l’Arme => The Death By Weapon [?]) or Italian (Omicidio a Central Park => Murder In Central Park, I’m guessing), and probably not Russian either, though someone else will need to verify.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike