Video Casino Games

Posted on January 16, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

A friend of mine who is more familiar than I with the gambling biz was IM’ing me today and we were sorting out the winning odds of certain card games. I decided to check the big list of unprocessed games in my care and found one “maybe” game that perhaps qualifies for inclusion into the MobyGames database: Video Casino Games. I think it was probably some kind of commercial game. The CD lists a lot of instructions, and even a phone number for support. Put it in and see what happens. Just like last night’s game, I’m moving out of my comfort zone, genre-wise. Further, I suspect that this will serve as my baseline for gambling games.

The game CD lists the supported OSes as Windows 3.1 and 95. During installation, I can see Visual Basic runtime files being copied over. Okay, no big deal– I’m sure it’s possible to write a halfway decent game in VB. I have yet to play such a game, but I’m not ruling it out. The game seems to think I am running Windows 3.95, which is interesting. ‘ver’ from the Windows command prompt reports 5.1.2600, but as long as the game deems the revision high enough to run, no matter.

First impressions: This takes me back… to when I had roughly 2.5 days of Visual Basic experience under my belt. Cursory set of nitpicks on the UI:

The custom dialog boxes are not modal (but the stock system alert-style dialogs are).
Windows aren’t sized properly when you enter a particular game, leaving you quite confused if you have less than a passing familiarity with the most basic gambling setups.
Quitting the app does not prompt for verification.
The help button doesn’t always work. Though, by the time this happened, the program was in an incredibly weird state in which I probably could have broken the bank.

So let’s start with Blackjack, the only game I understand, partially.

It’s pretty straightforward, as long as you are cognizant to stretch the window out sideways to get the whole table in view. I appreciate that the game counts on my behalf, further lessening the amount of brainpower I have to expend.

Let’s proceed to Roulette. Now, the roulette wheel on the title screen is drawn reflecting the aspect ratio of the window area it is allotted. This can lead to properly round wheels under the right circumstances. I figured the same would hold true for the main wheel, but no. You get the weird shape no matter what. I think it’s supposed to be some crude 3D simulation. So, the thrust of Roulette, per my limited understanding, is to bet money on the odds that the ball with land on a particular number. You can wager more generally on, say, black or red, but the payoff isn’t as high. In this video representation, you raise or lower the number on your chip icon, then click where you would like to bet. Click on the wheel to affect an instantaneous spin. There isn’t any satisfying feedback here, just a summary result. I figured this was all pretty silly until I won $1750 on a $50 bet after a few tries. I’m primed for Vegas now!

However, I think the Roulette game might be the buggiest game in the casino. Observe the following arrangement:

I was trying to deplete all of my money. I was down to $5 so I placed a $5 bet. But I still had $5. So I placed another. By now, my available cash meter read $15. I placed $5 everywhere on the board to drive the total up to $225. I fully expected the program to have a catastropic meltdown when I “spun” the wheel, but nothing really happened. I was able to back out to the main screen with my $225.

I’m so unclear on gambling games that the above scenario might actually be what happens at a typical roulette table when a gambler is down on his luck. But let’s move swiftly over the the Craps table. This table uses the same circular pictorial representation for chips, with a number drawn on top for amount. In may interest you to know that $99 is the maximum wager when these chips are involved. Why? Because the program is only set up to draw 2 digits on a chip. The instructions state as much.

The craps board is just as confusing to me. I just keep clicking in places until something happens. It turns out that I can place bets in a number of the delineated areas, with similar types of risk/reward payoff ratios present at the Roulette table. Click on the dice to generate an instant gratification roll.

Here’s another odd characteristic of this game that I am not confident reflects reality: While I would normally lose money if the dice roll did not have something to do with my selected wager, in the above screenshot, I placed a $50 bet on “big 8”. Then I continually rolled the dice until I got an 8. I never lost money through all these dice rolls, but would win $50 more every time 8 came up. I tend to doubt that’s how it works in the real world. If I’m wrong, do please tell me as I would like to speedily exploit this heretofore unknown get-rich-quick scheme. For further weirdness (bugginess?), when I placed a $95 bet in the same situation, the payoff would be $105 each time.

Okay, hang on, only one more video casino game to plod through: Video Poker. This is not too difficult to figure out and, from what I could tell, worked as advertised:

This game could have used some visual cue to indicate when a round was over. Audio cues would have been even better. But this is such an early game that it was probably unreasonable to expect sound cards as standard issue yet.

Final analysis: I think this game has made me an even worse liability to myself if I were to actually enter a casino.

Update: The gambler has confirmed for me that the Craps quirks actually have some basis in reality, though I don’t pretend to understand all the rules.

Skateboard Park Tycoon

Posted on January 15, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

No one said that this Gaming Pathology project was going to be easy, or that I would enjoy even a small percentage of the games involved. In fact, due to the obscure nature of many of these games that haven’t even earned a spot in the MobyGames database yet, I recognize that the “hit-and-miss” ratio would be heavily weighted towards the “miss” end of the spectrum. Call me sentimental but I just realized that, according to my records, I purchased Skateboard Park Tycoon 4 years ago this very evening. And I actually wish I had tried playing it back then as well.

I admit that it was a big step to try this game out. I’m really moving outside of my comfort zone since managerial simulation games often seem complex from a distance and that doesn’t mix well with my simple-minded nature. In fact, the last such simulation game I can remember playing was an early 1990’s DOS-based game called Moonbase and I wasn’t very good at it. Plus, this game is supposed to feature skateboarding elements a la the Tony Hawk franchise and I have yet to play such a game. And we’ll just disregard the fact that the game revolves around a certain clique at which most of the other cliques in my high school were inherently opposed to.

But I’ve made the commitment to clear out this queue of games needing residence in MobyGames. So press forth I must. Some tech/trivia notes: Skateboard Park Tycoon is published by Activision Value, Inc., a company that screams “cheap!” for some reason. No matter; the game is among the most fun I’ve experienced in this experiment. I was a bit surprised, though, when the game announced that I had 2 video cards installed on my system and asked me to select between them (when I thought I only had one). However, the game is able to run smoothly in 1024×768 mode making it the most visually sharp game so far in the experiment. That’s a lot of fine detail, so please accept this cropped and scaled screenshot to get some brief idea of the management screen:

There’s a lot to say about this game, and I took pages of notes. I’ll try to distill my stream of consciousness into list form:

I thought that perhaps I should approach this game with some sort of concrete goal. How about: Cause as much misery among skater patrons as possible. Nothing like a good simulation game to awaken the dormant sadist in all of us, or so I’ve heard.
I use the above goal as a jumping-off point to focus my reading as I learn about the features of the game through the in-game tutorial.
There are tons of features as can be expected from a modern simulation video game. You start with an empty property and must build artificial structures conducive to skating; support facilities such as food and beverage dispensaries, restrooms, and first-aid stations; other commercial ventures such as a skateboard shop.
A-ha! Immediately, I zero in on those support facilities: If I can eliminate first aid and restrooms, the skaters will have a wretched time!
In the grand scheme of running a commercially viable skateboard park, however, such a scheme would seem to undermine the end goal.
I am thrust into the “Instant Action”, selecting the small parking lot property on the easy setting.
Now, granted, the only exposure I have ever had to the notion of a skateboard park was this rather minor, public park back where I came from. So I’m not sure what to expect or, more precisely, what my skater patrons will expect.
I don’t really understand all of the stuff I can build from — and I have an incredible array of options — half-pipes, quarter-pipes, rails, street surface, curbs, pools, and on it goes, all interlockable like a set of skater Lego blocks. I felt it was a major breakthrough when I figured out how to rotate a piece that has been placed down.
I’ve only put up one or two of these things called half-pipes when I see something scurrying around my pristine vacant parking lot. It looks like a rodent of some sort. I move one of the half-pipes to try to squash it. Oh! That’s not a mouse! In fact, that’s my first patron. And they can’t be offed that easily. Resilient, just like I remember the skater breed.
So I have my first skater and that’s with just one or two things to skate on. Skaters have lower expectations than I remember. But a transformation occurs– I suddenly wonder what I can do to attract more patrons.
I try building a few more skating attractions and then I decide to build some support facilities. I put up a snack machine, wholly expecting it to be vandalized. In fact, it is patronized immediately by the 4 faithful skaters, and is now generating profit.
I placed a bench, which I thought had to do with — you know — sitting. It’s actually for skating, in the eyes of the skaters. Anyway, some business is actually willing to pony up $100 per day to buy ad space on that bench which will be seen by all 7 of my current patrons.
Next, it occurs to me that I can right-click on a skater to display the menu seen above. You have creepy surveillance and psychic powers over each of your individual patrons. One pane shows the skater’s stats, the second has a log of all his attempted and succeeded tricks, and the final pane shows the skaters’ current thoughts (“I’m hungry”, “I’m thirsty”, “I’m going to rest a bit”, “The restroom lines are too long”).
So you have at your disposal unprecedented mechanisms for evaluating customer feedback. It seems reasonable that you should proceed according to that feedback. The number one complaint observed was that the restroom lines are too long. This surprised me because when I first considered restrooms, I skipped right past the porta-potties and small restroom facilities and went straight to the large restroom facilities. Hey, this stuff would be important to me in real life. But there are only 8 skaters in the park at this point. How could the restroom lines possibly be too long? Face it– customers always suck, even simulated customers.
In addition to right-clicking the patrons, you can also right-click on support facilities and micro-manage them. You can learn how much business they’re doing (this is when I find out that the restrooms cost $1 to use– and they’re doing good business). You can monkey with the retail price of the services or sell (get rid of) the facility altogether. Also, from this menu, you can select one of the game’s coolest features: The skate cam! From whatever facility you chose, you can view a 360 degree real-time panorama from that point:

I keep coming back to the restroom issue. I watch the skaters go in and out. They only seem to go in one side, presumably because there are no skater chicks. This makes me wonder if I should make both sides of the large restroom facility male-only. Alternatively, perhaps it would help to just have a phalanx of porta-potties and forget about the independent restroom facilities that would be more accommodating to the fairer sex. I know my customer base.
This is about the time that I decide that this game is rather infectious. Even the nonstop skater music starts to grow on me after the 127th repetition. The music is made by a group called “Formula 1”. The game reports that I can check them out at www.slimpickinsonbass.com, after the name of the full length album from which the 3 featured songs originate (“312”, “Lucky”, and “the Kids”). Sadly, the original website is no longer in service but is now the site of a squatter. I expect this blog post may very well take over as the top Google hit for the likely-defunct group.
These skaters are an awfully thirsty bunch. One of the top complaints is that the beverage lines are long. No problem; more beverage machines are cheap, and highly profitable. Skater thirst seems almost unquenchable, though.
Every time the game starts to feel a little repetitive, I notice some more icon options. For instance, there are icons to rotate, zoom, and tilt the simulation environment.
There are also options to assess the macro-level view of the park’s operations. When I first find these icons, I learn that the default park admission is $40! I don’t remember members of my high school’s skater clique having that much disposable allowance. I lowered it slightly and garnered some more patrons.
One of your status measurements is a park rating. The only goal here, as far as I am concerned, is to make sure the number is larger than it was a minute ago. When I hit 400, I got a new sponsorship, just for being popular with 15 skaters, I suppose.
Getting back to the actual skating structures which are supposed to be the primary attractions, they remind me a lot of the old Habitrail modular pet rodent cages. There’s a metaphor there, I’m sure of it.
Based on what I remember of the skater sub-culture, I can’t help but think that my skateboard park could profit mightily from a few cigarette vending machines strategically placed in unmonitored areas. I wonder if this game is mod-able?

I didn’t get to try out the exhibition mode, which is where you actually skateboard. Maybe another night. This is a game I can easily stretch out to multiple evenings.

See also:

Skateboard Park Tycoon, Part 2

Great Moments In AI

Posted on January 14, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I was replaying Criticom this evening in order to gather a diverse selection of screenshots for the MobyGames database. I just wanted to give special notice to the game’s AI which — at least in the first few levels — can be pushed off the edge of the arena by rapid, repeated jabs or kicks.

Still, they worked hard to flesh out a superfluous sci-fi storyline.

Virtual Chess

Posted on January 14, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

The last chess game, Combat Chess, was totally extreme and placed heavy emphasis on the blood that is shed, metaphorically, during an intense chess match. Today’s game, Virtual Chess, comes from a slightly earlier epoch (1995, if the copyright date is to be believed) and is rather pleased to show off its rotating chess board.

First thing’s first: Installation. The first question that this game’s installer throws my way (after inserting the CD-ROM) is something that I feel unqualified to answer, even though I hold a degree in computer science and distinctly remember learning about something called “hash” in school:

Virtual Chess Hash Table Installation Question

After that, there’s a minor bout of DLL Hell when I need to copy some DLL from windows\system -> windows\system32 (or maybe it was vice versa). Anyway, installation was mostly painless, with the right level of knowledge and patience.

What have I gathered from the 2 chess games over the last few days? That I’m still so bad at chess that I should be barred from participating in the game, for my own good:

The above shot demonstrates the look and feel of the game. By default, the window is large enough to accommodate the basic 2D chess board and the 3D virtual chess board. There are icon buttons above each board but they could use tooltip text. The forward/back arrows allow you to rewind and replay moves. The extra buttons above the “virtual” board are used for rotating the perspective. The creators were awfully proud of this feature, obviously, and felt that it’s how they could innovate in the chess sim genre. If you rotate at certain angles, you will even see some attempt at lighting on the board squares. Still, I appreciate that they have normal-looking chess pieces and allow you to select between several common sets.

Putting aside the gimmicky virtual feature, the remainder of the game is quite feature rich. I especially appreciate that the UI does not block when the computer is contemplating its next move, unlike certain other chess sims I could name. I could list the interesting features I found in the game. However, I suspect that — much like my (not very) revolutionary discovery that pinball games have a “nudge table” feature — these chess games all have these same features at a bare minimum. In fact, the first chess game that I ever played, Chessmaster for the original NES, had dozens of features I couldn’t make sense of. I was too busy trying to beat the computer on setting “beginner 2” (the machine was a pushover on “beginner 1”).

The game disc contains a number (5, to be exact) of AVI animations. The first one is played when you start the game. It consists of several overblown logo animations for the various parties credited with production. Then it goes into a seemingly endless sequence of rotating chess boards and pieces, interspersed with the title “Virtual Chess”. This goes on for 3 minutes. I would upload the intro animation to YouTube but I don’t feel like competing for the least-watched video award on the service. However, I did upload this much shorter, and much stranger animation. It depicts the chess pieces melting onto the board and draining off into a container that is then covered up with a lid reading “Virtua Chess” (alternate title or typo?):

Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge

Posted on January 13, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Perhaps I’m a slow learner, maybe I enjoy pain, or it could be that I’m simply quick to both forgive and forget. I’ve already disregarded the not entirely pleasant experience of playing one fighting game on the Sega Saturn. No reason that I should allow that to stop me from trying more of the same genre on the same platform. Plus, there’s that ever-present goal of getting all of this data — good or bad — into MobyGames. With that, let’s delve into Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge.

This game is one in a franchise of Darkstalkers titles from Capcom. Actually, one of the arcade versions of this series, available circa 1995, remains my second favorite fighting game of all time (second only to the original Fatal Fury, but only on the Neo-Geo; accept no cheap SNES substitutes). I always enjoyed the premise of this game– a bunch of mythological creatures and monsters battling it out. This allows for legendary match-ups such as Dracula vs. Frankenstein:

Darkstalkers' Revenge: Demitri vs. Victor

Of course, that’s not actually Dracula or Frankenstein. It’s the Capcom characters, Demitri and Victor. (And of course, purists know that the monster in the Frankenstein tale is not named Frankenstein, rather he was named Dr. Frankenstein’s monster; ironically, the good doctor’s first name was Victor; I first learned that in 10th grade world history class of all places). I found myself wondering this evening why Capcom chose to invent one-off properties instead of using the real deals. I realized that having their own set of slightly unique characters is eminently more copyrightable than stock folklore characters already in the public domain. Further, they don’t have to contend with horror genre fanboys complaining about glaring incongruencies when contrasted with popular legend, such as the fact that the vampire shown above looks less like a sophisticated count and more like a rather sinister Superman with a dinner napkin tucked into his shirt for the sloppy feast.

Whatever. I still find the Darkstalkers characters very interesting. Thanks to the magic of Wikipedia, it’s easy to research the characters and what the characters are supposed to be based on. Some are easy enough to guess, like the vampire, the werewolf, and the Frankenstein monster. But what about the skinny zombie whose body produces any number of sharp edges and also bears a Union Jack? Or the ghostly samurai warrior? (As an aside, I have never understood why some characters in these fighting games get weapons and others don’t; then again, they all seem to be able to fire magical projectiles so maybe it all evens out.)

I had not seen this character, Donovan, in the arcade incarnation I once frequently patronized. This guy has a little girl that follows him around on the sidelines. It’s all very weird. More notably, if you mash enough buttons, you can invariably summon this attack:

Darkstalkers' Revenge: Donovan vs. Victor

Just like the chandelier attack prominently featured in any number of castle movies, the preceding attack works best if the opponent is conveniently located underneath the foot.

I’m pleased to report that this is a great Saturn game. Despite the inherent A/V lag I experience due to my capture setup, the controls are very responsive (thus further evidencing that perhaps Criticom was just bad). My only gripe with this game is load times. I’m so glad I missed this the first time around since I was out of gaming during the original PlayStation/Saturn days.

Combat Chess

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I love patterns. I enjoy finding common properties of particular genres of media and entertainment. To that end, I adore humorous compilations of cliches. For example, the chess category of this classic movie cliches list mentions, “Great Chess players are always honored to play on some rich guy’s fancy Philipino Art Set. (In reality, better players are almost always adament about playing on a plain, unadorned wood or plastic ‘Staunton’ set. No red or blue pieces, no ceramic or metal, no elephants for rooks.)” Thanks to today’s game, Combat Chess, I think I finally understand why this is the case– because chess is supposed to require concentration on the part of a human player. Sore video game losers often accuse video games of ‘cheating’ by somehow manipulating data factors under the cover of the running program. This game’s cheating is more flagrant: It just assaults your audio and visual senses constantly. It’s hard enough for me to remember the basics of chess and to think one move ahead without this level of sensory onslaught.

Combat Chess is easily the most X-treme variation of the timeless strategy game that I have personally experienced. As intimated above, I don’t necessarily consider that to be of benefit to a chess sim. The game’s intro kicks off with a splashy series of sharply rendered chess pieces slashing the guts out of each other before dropping the player into the above screen. Actually, the first game screen you see is not quite as pictured above. There are a whole bunch of windows open on the little 640×480 fullscreen canvas. One window shows the chess board with classic-style representations, another shows algebraic chess movement history, and there are 2 others whose functions escape me. The UI is, frankly, a mess. Fortunately, the windows can all be minimized as you can see in the screenshot, which still shapes up to be a distraction.

So it’s a basic chess game, only with gorgeously animated (by 1997 standards) characters who make a big production out of moving from square to square. Special notice goes to the knights who, despite their full armor, can perform a somersault from a standing position to their target squares. The characters make an even bigger deal out of knocking down a piece from the opposing side. For the squeamish, the game does allow you to configure for no gore. The above screenshot appears to have one of my dragon-pawns facing off against the computer’s mohawked, spike-bra-clad, punk dominatrix queen. It’s not pretty, not on any level.

The game can be viewed from any of 4 angles. The above screenshot is the south view. North, east, and west are also available. I think that perhaps a diagonal/isometric view would have been useful as none of the conventional views made it easy to see all of the overlapping pieces. Combat Chess offers networked human-human play and also has a mode for letting the computer play against itself. I did this when I got tired of trying to focus and just wanted to see if the computer could come up with anymore interesting animations. This is when another obnoxious characteristic of the game hit home in a big way: The UI seems to block whenever the computer is contemplating its next move. This can be problematic when the computer is playing against itself and you want to monkey with the assorted menus. There’s a little-known programming technique called multithreading– learn it!

One final nuisance that the game employs to divert your attention from the task at hand: The soundtrack. It consists of a neverending combination of drum beats, wind noises, and the occasional screaming, or creaky door, or other ambient sounds one might hear in a nominal medieval dungeon. Fortunately, all of these sounds are configurable via this dialog:

Until I saw the above dialog, I never knew that the word “bloody” could be considered inappropriate. This is actually my first clue that perhaps this game was not developed for the U.S. market. The disc is somewhat mysterious– I received it in a lot of 50 CD-ROMs I got off eBay and it was a plain CD-ROM that basically just had the words “Combat Chess” and “ValueSoft” (http://www.valuesoft.net/, which I believe may now be an unrelated company, or one that shifted focus).

To dig into the technical details, all of the animations are stored in a file format with the extension .seq. It’s interesting to note that the installer gives you 3 installation size options– small (~5 MB), medium (~25 MB), or large (~125 MB). Maybe it’s just coincidence that those quantities are 5¹, 5², and 5³ MB, respectively. But, hey, some of us are always on the lookout for whatever patterns we can find.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike