Beyond Time (And Patience)

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s interactive movie (shudder) seemed a bit ahead of its time in its use of Adobe PDF technology. At least I had never seen this particular use scenario before: The CD-ROM for Beyond Time contains a directory called answers/ with a locked PDF document. Back in 1997, you could call the toll-free number for DreamCatcher Interactive, the publisher, and pay $10 to retrieve the password. Enterprising, though it could be that they knew no one else would create a strategy guide.

It’s not uncommon for games to ask you to install extra support software such as DirectX, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Windows Media, or Apple QuickTime. All of these examples tend to be fully backwards compatible with previous versions. That’s not good enough for Beyond Time which demands QuickTime v2.1.2; the latest version 7.x won’t qualify. I do what I must:

QuickTime v2.1.2 still works famously on Windows XP. I was a bit worried whether the existing QuickTime v7 would still work. The operation seemed to cause problems with the file associations. But otherwise, v7 still works. And so does Beyond Time.

As some readers may know, I have zero love for the I-movie genre. I hope to spend as little time with this game as possible. Fortunately, the game is sympathetic to my disposition and helps me along by not tractably allowing me to proceed very far in the game. The setup is that valuable relics are mysteriously vanishing from museums. A particular curator has enlisted your help to go snoop around an archaeological dig in Egypt and see what you can find. I may be missing a few connecting details in there but darned if I’m going to watch it all again.

So I find myself at the dig site. The gameplay is Myst-like in the point-and-click slideshow fashion. It moves much quicker than Myst, which I appreciate. I walk up and down the dig site and eventually find and turn towards this statue:

It flashes light at me. Apparently, the flash blinds me to the point that I can’t see the mouse cursor anymore which pretty much makes the game unplayable. Restarting the game yields this same problem at the same point. I’m not too heartbroken.

I will give credit where credit is due– the ambient sounds are beautifully presented and the acting (what little I saw of it) was not entirely atrocious. However, the video all looked a little too home video cam-ish which is an amateurish blemish that typically mars these I-movies.

BHunter

Posted on January 28, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s game presents a bold and daring vision of a dystopian future with flying cars buzzing around a bustling megalopolis, where law and order hangs by a thread, and where you are a special breed of quasi-vigilante charged with using deadly force to bring down what is tenuously identified as the criminal element (hard to say since everyone is corrupt in this future). Presumably, the ‘B’ in BHunter stands for “bounty”, though that’s never actually specified in the game. For that matter, the title ‘BHunter’ never appears in the actual game, not even on the main menu. It could be that ‘bounty’ does not translate well across Castilian Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and U.S. English, which are the 5 languages I have to choose from on installation.

Cutting straight to the action, BHunter strikes me as being a Descent clone. You float around in your little ship, rotate about your axes with the cursor keys or mouse, and go forward/backward with A/Z. I know there must be lots of other controls but darned if I can find the manual at the moment.

On the tutorial mission (the only one you have access to at the start) the mayor welcomes you to town and assigns an officer to tutor you on the first mission. The officer instructs you to use your radar to track down your first target. Should be an easy mission and sure enough, when the car is in view, it is highlighted as the “TARGET”, so there’s no confusion. It didn’t really seem fair, though. Seems like his only crime was being a leisurely driver. Well, apparently, I serve as neither judge nor jury in this game; only execution duties, thanks, and I earn 5000 credits for my trouble.

I don’t get much farther in the game, however. I’m apprehensive about whether I am getting the full experience without the benefit of the manual. More importantly, though, the game has a lot of trouble running on my system. Visually, the graphics are quite detailed and fluid, but only with 3D hardware acceleration. I disabled acceleration in an effort to make the game run better. The graphics look atrocious without hardware help and my program problems didn’t go away.

I liked what I heard, however. The developers did a great job with the 3D sound effects when other cars whiz past. The game also features an appropriate techno soundtrack which turns out to be a continuous 22-minute red book CD audio track. A track that keeps playing even after the game crashes (fix: eject the CD).

It didn’t take long before I started pushing the limits of this immersive 3D world. First, I wanted to see how high I could fly. Answer: Not very. There’s a magic force field that hovers at right about the height that all of the buildings are constructed. That’s some strict building code enforcement! Here’s a curious quirk related to the magic ceiling force field:

Check out the first screenshot depicting city hall. Notice the slanted roof. I tried going over that portion of the building only to bounce furiously between the roof and force field which resulted in the above situation. I was stuck, but I don’t think I was actually destroyed. Thankfully, the game didn’t crash at that juncture.

D: The Game

Posted on January 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Actually, this game is merely entitled D (Sega Saturn version). No subtitle. I just added that to the post title in an effort to make it less confusing. You might think it’s the same as one of the sponsors of Sesame Street, but the content of the game is actually quite orthogonal to that of a kids’ television show. Let’s dive right in with a representative screenshot:

Admittedly, the foregoing screenshot has been significantly brightened so you have a fighting chance of making it out. But I suppose such effect does undercut the dark nightmare scenario portrayed throughout the story. The screenshot depicts Laura, our protaganist who is also attending art school in San Francisco, discovering a skeleton long ago impaled upon a wall of spikes, a surprisingly common facet of the decoration in the area she is exploring. Thing is, her dad runs a mental institution in Los Angeles, but went nuts himself and started killing everyone. The police don’t feel like tackling the situation. So Laura makes her way from San Francisco to Los Angeles to figure things out. That’s pretty much all the backstory you get. Remember, Laura came all the way from San Francisco for this family reunion. The only reason I point that out is that the game thought it was pretty interesting. Literary criticism is a bit out of my league, but that’s okay since proper literature is probably beyond the reach of whoever wrote this story. They tried to set up this taut thriller of a storyline but threw in some completely superfluous details, to say nothing of the breaks in pacing during the intro sequence when the cinematic editing repeatedly cuts to Laura’s automobile speeding along the freeway. To get from S.F. to L.A., in case that wasn’t clear before.

If it seems like I’m harping on the cinematic and story elements pretty hard, that’s because that’s really all there is to this game. It’s another entry into that wretched genre called the interactive movie, published in 1995 during the rise of such games. Perhaps I’m somewhat prejudiced at this point but my stomach churned at the thought of playing this game. But I suck it up for the sake of the experiment.

The game is somewhat like a horror version of Myst in that you are given very little backstory or context; you’re just plunged into some alternate universe where you’re forced to bumble around, look at stuff, touch things, and just try to figure out what’s going on. Sure, the game allegedly starts in a hospital. But as soon as you set foot inside, you touch an amorphous blob and are whisked off to… well, you don’t know. Your dad’s head appears and urges you to return home. And here comes an interesting facet of the game: You have 2 hours to finish:

Check that out! How many programmers have written analog clock programs? How many of them have actually had occasion to use them in a commercial application? Hats off to the developers in that regard. Getting back to the gameplay, if you don’t finish in 2 hours, it’s game over. The game consists of moving from pre-defined location to pre-defined location where the movement is all pre-rendered FMV. There are occasional items to pick up and use. There are likely opportunities to die a horrible death. I came close to one, but the game was merciful. This time. Laura also has a compact case that she can look at to gather clues. I get the impression that you can only use it 2-3 times per game before it shatters.

BTW, no pausing. You could claim that D is similar to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! in that respect. I suppose you could technically qualify this game as a real-time interactive movie since it enforces that 2-hour deadline at all times. Not only can you not pause but you can’t fast forward through any animations, not even drawn-out ones that you accidentally triggered a second time, like trying to open a locked door.

I gave this game a fair shake and played until I got hopelessly stuck and the compact wouldn’t surrender anymore clues. Based on what I saw, I think Laura is going to be another character like Claire from Resident Evil: Code Veronica due to the fact that, no matter how many gruesome sights and impaled corpses she witnesses, she will never grow desensitized to the horror. You might think Laura might come to expect disconcerting things in this place.

Widget

Posted on January 26, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I still have a few ultra-obscure NES games that I picked up used at various junctures that neither I nor MobyGames know anything about. To judge the Widget cartridge by its cover, the game deals with a cheerful purple alien by the same name who gains guidance from a being with a big brain (I would later learn his name is Mega Brain) with whom Widget communicates via his watch.

So I feel I’m pretty much on my own to figure this out. Let’s see, it looks like a gang of aliens are invading earth (or an incredible facsimile thereof) and the high elder aliens of your race are tasking you with thwarting this development. The first locale that I must liberate is Australia, land of cactus and pyramids (according to this game). At least the level also features crocodiles, although they might have screwed up and made them alligators; I’m not the type that can discern the difference.

Widget in the land of pyramids (Australia)

It’s your standard NES side-scrolling shooter. Widget has a weapon that can fire horizontally and diagonal-up. He can jump. He can cower on the ground in abject terror. He can do it all while never breaking that winning smile. But the value-add to this game is the various widgets into which he can transform. This is done via a subscreen, the same one that Widget can use to contact the brain from the cartridge art which offers erudite nuggets such as “make sure to collect all items”.

So from the beginning of the game, I have the ability to transform into a purple, immovable cannon for about 3 seconds that fires more powerful shots (probably, it’s tough to measure). As the game progresses, Widget can also transform into a mouse, rock-man, bird-man, and dolphin. Neat. I wish I could have seen some of that action. Unfortunately, this game reminds me of why I spent so much of my game-playing childhood angry at my television. Widget embodies the worst annoyances of the classic side-scrolling genre, including, but not limited to:

limited rate of fire: only one fired round on screen at once, and you’re a sitting duck until such time the round makes its way off the screen
enemy respawn quirks: back up slightly and move forward, enemy respawns or effectively re-energizes if not already destroyed
jump precision: there are a bunch of chasms where you have to begin the jump halfway off the edge or you won’t make it to the other side
sheer tedium of rote gameplay: play, memorize, die, repeat

It’s a password game (6 digits), so the designers must have thought it was challenging enough that a player would need more than one sitting.

I don’t think our protaganist is an especially capable hero. I didn’t catch much of the story, but I don’t think the elders who assigned him this mission thought very highly of his skills either and just wanted to get rid of him. Maybe they don’t trust his smile either. In what was probably a running gag in the game, the elders couldn’t even get his name right. No respect.

I can recall a time when I would have dutifully played through this game, and I even have fond memories of those days and determination. I’ll tell you about it someday. However, in today’s fast-paced world, we no longer need the patience to sit through an entire game, not with the advent of tool-assisted game movies. Someone actually made a quick run of this game that takes less than 6 minutes. One of the speed run attributes is listed as “Abuses programming errors in the game”. No joke. This appears to be an extraordinarily glitchy game. This is my favorite bug manifestation:

Deer Avenger 2: Deer In The City

Posted on January 25, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I already had the momentum from last night’s Deer Avenger so I thought I would keep going and gather screenshots for the sequel, Deer Avenger 2: Deer In The City. That’s right, there was a sequel. After all, the cover copy claims that the first game was a best-selling parody. A sequel is pretty much mandatory. In fact, a little Googling reveals that there was also Deer Avenger 3-D and Deer Avenger 4: The Rednecks Strike Back.

As the title implies, Bambo takes the battle to the humans in this episode. His specific mission is to take revenge for his would-be doe lover who was caught in the headlights of a truck piloted by 3 particularly ruthless and drunk rednecks. The game revolves around going after each of the 3 offenders on their respective home turfs: the Armpit Estates (suburban setting), the Business District (office setting), and the Swamp Ass Grill (redneck bar locale). The game takes great pains to explain, as humorously as it can, that no metaphorical humans are being killed in this game. You have 3 high-powered tranquilizer-launching firearms to choose from– a Snuzi, a R.E.M.-16 and a Dream Weaver. Each has its own characteristics. Personally, I was partial to the limited automatic capability of the R.E.M.-16 because it allowed for strafing moving targets.

The above screenshot depicts the Armpit Estates stage. You have unlimited ammo and are rewarded for shooting anything that can be destroyed– Windows, trash cans, and of course people. Sometimes you have do shoot doors or garage doors to get to the people. When you get rid of the rest of the humans in the area, you are able to take on the stage boss, one of the 3 hunters responsible for the death of your loved one. As for gameplay, you have your primary weapon and can also duck to dodge return fire. You can not use your weapon in the ducked state but you always have your limited capacity fart offensive capability to fall back on. Find salt shakers for extra health.

It’s interesting to note that when a game really is popular enough to warrant a sequel, the designers don’t usually mess with the formula too much. The people behind this game decided to speed things up significantly vs. the previous game, which I appreciate greatly. What I really enjoyed about this game is the diversity of enemies. Each of the three areas has its own unique set of characters, and each character has its own unique patterns and challenges. I should mention at this point that all the enemies are well-armed, and not with tranquilizer darts. Here is the office environment:

That’s the boss’s son. He’s exceptionally weak and when you take him down, Bambo puts him over the knee for a harsh spanking. I’m not sure what brought that on, exactly.

The most grotesque part of the game was when I was dutifully viewing the credits movie which showcases the most farts accompanied by the most deer anuses. The things I do for MobyGames.

The Games So Far

Posted on January 24, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I was taking stock today of how much I have enjoyed the games thus far in this Gaming Pathology experiment. Out of all the games thus far, I can think of about 4 that have really stood out, that I have really enjoyed playing, and that I look forward to playing again when I get the time (these include Hot Wired, Clockwork Knight, Snow Day (really!), and Skateboard Park Tycoon). And the others? There haven’t been too many games that I have intensely disliked (I’m looking at you, Criticom) — I’m the type of person who can find a positive aspect about anything. I feel fairly ambivalent towards a number of the games — don’t love ’em, don’t hate ’em, but also don’t feel any desire to play them again at a future date.

So how many games have I played so far in this experiment? I have started keeping a static page in this blog that lists all the games played: Master Play List. Note that this page also shows up under the page list on the side bar. I will eventually spruce it up with some links, e.g., to the MobyGames entries when they become available.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike