Of Light And Darkness

Posted on January 7, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Here’s another game that falls into my “always wanted to try playing” category: Of Light And Darkness, a 3-CD game from 1998. It is most notable for the voice talent of James Woods as some character named Gar-Hob.

Immediately after installation, the game exhibited a trailer for some Interplay-published Star Trek game or another. Who can keep them all straight? I just didn’t appreciate the fact that I couldn’t find a way to easily skip it once I realized the media wasn’t related to the immediate task at hand– Of Light And Darkness.

If I were to have to explain what this game is about, which I suppose I have to, I would claim that it’s about the coming apocalypse. You know, end of the world. I am a little unclear about what exactly is bringing about armageddon. There are intonations throughout the game that manmade pollution brought about by manmade greed are to blame. Spiritually, it has something to do with a bunch of apparitions appearing. Perhaps the manmade bad stuff is causing the apparitions to arise, which in turn are bringing about the end of the world. In order to avert this apocalypse, your job is to redeem the apparitions.

Enough storyline. Of Light And Darkness is, in fact, a game in a strict technical sense, complete with actual gameplay and goals. If I didn’t understand much about graphic technology and played this game in 1998, I would be absolutely stunned by the imagery on display– extremely smooth and detailed 3D graphics. However, I know better, and I know that this is purely a pre-rendered, FMV-based interactive movie. That said, I can honestly tell you that the graphics are exceptionally sharp and the game is well-produced, even if it is a bit difficult to wrap your head around.

Technically, the game is a bunch of individual pre-rendered FMV files strung together with some control logic and a few item objects superimposed on the proceedings. The FMV files are all MVE files, the sort used in many games published under the Interplay umbrella at the time. Your player is stuffed in a dazzling location. You then move the mouse around. Moving it to the extreme left or right of the screen affects a rotation around the current location. Sometimes you can look up (probably down in certain locales as well). When the mouse pointer icon is moved over certain hotspots it transforms into a pair of walking feet indicating that you have hit upon one of the pre-ordained paths and may move there. When you move to a new location and scan around, sometimes there will be apparition artifacts, or sometimes videos that attempt to explain more of the story, as seen in the screenshot below. Or, more likely, there will be one or more colored orbs, of which a blue example is also seen in the screenshot below:

Apparitions will occasionally appear. They don’t really hurt you directly (you don’t have a power meter in the game). But occasionally you will be accosted by an apparition and the game will notify you that you have 1 minute to dispatch the apparition or armageddon will begin. And you thought you had deadline pressure at work? The way to do away with apparitions is to combine a red orb, a green orb, and a blue orb to create a white orb, and then flash the white orb as a Ghost-B-Gone apparition exterminator. They’ll be back. Good thing that orbs are littered around the landscape and keep regenerating.

The decor and color of the game are really madness-inducing, so I think the designers reached their goal in that department. You really get the feeling that the weight of all the world’s sins are weighing down on your shoulders, but in a quasi-humorous manner. Like the pride place: There is a theater that represents pride. A pleasant, disembodied, female voice explains in a dispassionate, informational tone what pride is and why it’s bad. This sin room will come into play later on in the game, presumably. There are certain junctures where a cacophony of voices is heard snidely reciting financial terms or words associated with money: “Stock market! Dow Jones! Mercedes!” I think this is supposed to have something to do with greed and the badness thereof.

It’s a pretty game and I want to like it. But it’s tough since I have so little concept of what’s going on and exceptionally low regard for the interactive movie genre. It may look like an expansive 3D world but it’s actually exceedingly constrained. If there’s one feature I can appreciate about the game, it’s the fact that moving from one spot to another is very quick, particularly through long tunnels, an exercise that would be tedious in normal 3D games. This type of game makes me wonder how hard it would be to make a replacement game engine on the basic assumption that the engine could not possibly be that complicated. It primarily plays some FMV files, the format of which is well-known and fairly well supported in existing open source software.

One thing I enjoy about this game, and have enjoyed ever since I studied the multimedia files on the discs a few years ago, is a few odd musical numbers from the game, one during the opening credits and one during the ending. This is the intro movie, featuring “Mondo Apocalypso”:

The lyrics for that song sound fairly straightforward. I’m more interested to try to figure out what on earth they’re saying on the rap during the credits, “F-Death” (starting with understanding what “F-Death” even means):

The first time I heard the song I thought it sounded like Lil’ Kim. Of course it’s not. Some of the lyrics I’m able to make out include “Everything you know is incorrect, Eugene… you can’t collect your underwear, and you stare at your abductors, when they hook you up to electrical conductors and they pull the switch… this could be Roswell…” The chorus sounds like, “F-Death! Party in the ruins!” over and over again. It’s all there for your listening pleasure.

Lost Eden: Bug Report

Posted on January 6, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I knew this project would not be without its hitches. Tonight’s game is Lost Eden by Cryo. It is already in MobyGames but needs screenshots. I decided it would be useful to focus on games that just need screenshots vs. totally new games since I have a mounting backlog of games to insert into MobyGames (also working on that this weekend). It did not go well. Trying to run the game under DOSBox 0.65 has bad results. It brings Windows XP to its knees in a way that makes it nearly impossible to even bring up the task manager in order to forcibly terminate the emulator. I decided to try my luck in an OS that has a better reputation for stability — Linux — and things went worse. DOSBox freaked out in much the same way but was also capturing all input events. I was left with no choice but to assassinate the X server with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.

I was able to capture the installation screen, though. Enjoy:

So, no Lost Eden unless, perhaps, I pull an actual DOS-based box out of the storage closet. But I don’t see why not playing it should stop me from reviewing it. I was sort of looking forward to this one since the manual includes a foreword by an old-school D&D fanboy who actually states, “These days the quest is on for the ultimate Adventure Game – the Interactive Movie.” This game was released is 1995 and with retrospect, that passage is absolutely hilarious. According to the MobyGames entry, the game was also released for the CD-i and 3DO systems, 2 other systems known for this type of FMV fare. MobyGames’ description also claims that Lost Eden is comprised wholly of pre-rendered FMV. Sure enough, the MultimediaWiki lists this game as using Cryo’s HNM multimedia files.

However, the manual makes it sound as if there are some other elements to the game, some kind of adventure/strategy angle. The story, in a nutshell, is that in this land called Eden, there’s an evil dude who commands T-rex dinosaurs to attack humans. You are a prince who lives in a fortress impervious to dinosaurs. Now that you have come of age, you are going to lead a quest to discover why it is that your fortress is so tough (the secret was lost) and work to build more such fortresses in different valleys so that other humans can also be safe. And, if you have time, you’ll also go after the main bad guy.

I would have loved to see how the game allowed the player to accomplish all of these goals using only pre-rendered FMV.

See also:

Lost Eden Redux

Further Pinball Madness: Soccer Themes

Posted on January 5, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

The final 2 games/tables from that 5-game Arcade Pinball compilation package covered in the last post are both soccer-themed games (that’s ‘football’ to you non-American foreigners). Here’s the first table, Soccer 98:

That’s an awesome level of detail and creativity on display. The grassy board, the soccer ball-colored pinball, the goal at the bottom of the table which symbolizes where you need to keep the ball out of. The opposite end of the table has a goal guarded by a goalie and 4 players. One purpose of the table is to knock down all 4 players and then you can go for the goal. Another cute detail is that there is a cameraman on the left side of the table that follows the ball everywhere it rolls. Novel though it may seem, I eventually realized this table was a little dull since there simply wasn’t much happening on much of the real estate. That’s when the game pulled through and raised up that giant, mutant, spinning soccer ball you see in the middle of the table field.

It’s interesting to note that in the intro animation for this table, the camera swoops down over a soccer stadium with 2 ads plainly visible: Judge Dredd and Zorro. That tells me that Pin-Ball Games Ltd. probably has a latter-themed pinball game in addition to a former-themed table.

This game and the next game, Team 98, appear to be based on a slightly different engine than the 3 tables described in the last post. Specifically this engine is more prone to crashing on my machine. But if you try running it enough times, you will eventually make it to the table. One of the new features I noticed is that shaking the board actually produces a visual effect (unlike the bubble level meter from the old engine).

The next game is easily the most interesting of the 5 in this collection: Team 98. It’s a 2-player competitive soccer-themed pinball game. That’s right– somehow, 2 players compete head-to-head against each other in a pinball-based soccer metaphor. Fraps had trouble capturing the main game screen but here is a shot of the table from the gallery:

It works like this: There are 3 15-minute rounds (where the time goes really fast, not real-time) and the game puts out a soccer pinball on each side. If the ball falls through your flippers (where the goal is), that counts as a goal for the other player. Then it gets pushed back out through the flippers. There is a similar player/goalie challenge at the other end of the board where you can score additional goals against the other player.

So it’s not very interesting in single-player mode. In fact, it gets downright annoying when, since there is no second player activating the other set of flippers, a British voice is heard to exclaim in disbelief, “He put it in his own net” every time player 2’s ball drops between the flippers. However, it occurred to me that this could very well prove to be the ultimate single-player pinball challenge. Imagine one player working to keep both balls on both tables in play!

I’m not sure where the title “Team 98” comes from since it is clearly a 2-person competition. I would like to point out that there is some random chaos built into the game since you can leave the flippers on both sides alone at the start of the game and despite the game’s symmetry, the balls will take different paths.

This is easily the most I’ve ever enjoyed a game of soccer.

Sheer Pinball Madness

Posted on January 4, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I had a pretty negative experience the other night with Pro Pinball on the Sega Saturn. To be fair, not entirely the game’s fault. I think a lot of it had to do with the difficulty of getting the game to run on the Saturn, and the video darkness and delay problems that result from sending the Saturn A/V through my computer. But then I remembered that I have at least 2 more pinball games in the queue, both of which were slim boxes purchased at the dollar section of a Super Target store, along with 5 other games yet to process; none of the 7 are in MobyGames yet.

So I broke out a title called Arcade Pinball. Since it was so cheap, and it has so many company logos on the box, in addition to AOL offers, I was eager to see who was actually, originally responsible for the actual game. When I go to install the game, I find out that it is not one game, but five! This is what MobyGames affectionately refers to as Compilation/Shovelware. It seems that a company appropriately called Pin-Ball Games Ltd. specialized in these games. Do you know what this means for this Gaming Pathology project? That having played all 5 of these games tonight, I have taken care of my gaming obligation through Monday! But I won’t do that. But I will split this up into 2 entries and cover the first 3 pinball games today. The other 2 games group well for tomorrow’s entry.

The first of the 3 pinball games is The Avengers Pinball. Fans of the old show (as I once was, before the dreadful 1998 movie) will recognize this intro clip lifted wholesale, but with the word “pinball” stuck in just the right places:

I haven’t even checked what format the video happened to be in. I just let YouTube worry about it! Magical! But I digress. About the actual pinball game, here’s the Avengers table:

You’ll notice it’s very crowded and busy. But what a refreshing change from the bland pinball board from the other day! And Robert was right when he said that many pinball games have the nudging feature; this game has it too. It does not actually show the table moving. However, if you look on the right side of the board, there is a little green bubble level meter — the same used as a construction tool — to indicate that the table has moved.

One of the unique features of this table is that the ball will go into the revolver seen in the lower left part of the screen which then cocks and shoots it back out into the table. See? That’s the kind of outlandish novelty I look for in a computer pinball simulation. There is a bonus round between ball launches where the letters AVENGERS light up in sequence and the player has to capture it when all the letters are lit.

Here is the next table, an adaptation of the comic book eventually turned into a movie, Judge Dredd:

All 3 of these pinball games (unlike the 2 which will be discussed tomorrow) look like they’re built on the same engine. On that note, here are some notes I jotted down that cover all 3 boards:

The title screens for the games have a slideshow. Pro Pinball had this as well. Perhaps this is a standard feature of modern pinball simulators. Unlike Pro Pinball, these boards are actually interesting enough to examine up close.
The flippers were awfully far apart, more so than any reasonable pinball game I have ever seen. However, this is the first time I have ever successfully leveraged the nudging feature to compensate.
I had trouble running the games. Lots of crashes on “winpin.exe”. There are also bizarre visual glitches: Lots of flickering, but mostly that is restricted to intro and setup screens.
Those numbers in the upper-left corner are artifacts from Fraps screen capture. It is supposed to be configured to not capture its own framerate count along with the screenshot, and that feature usually works. I think this is another artifact of the visual glitching.
There are apparently 5 languages supported as the first screen allows you to choose among 5 flags (when I make a game, I’m going to do the same thing, but with a U.S. flag, a U.K. flag, an Aussie flag, you get the idea),
Each pinball game has a setup screen which, apparently, allows you to select among “640”, “800”, and “1024”. I suspect that refers to video modes. But “1024” is always disabled. Same for 24-bit mode (I can only select 8- and 16-bit). Same for 11 KHz over 22 KHz. Despite that, the video and audio are still amazing.
I’m not entirely convinced the physics are as accurate as they could be, but I still like the games. One of the more curious manfestations of quirky physics was when the ball bounces furiously between the forward bouncers, the ones just above the flippers (I’m not up on pinball technical terminology).
There is a high score count that allows you to enter your name when you make the cut. The board is pre-populated with the same name (e.g., “THE AVENGERS” on Judge Dredd). However, the field does not allow you to enter more than 7 characters.

The final game/table is an alien-themed Roswell:

This has a great, cheesy, 3D pre-rendered intro video. I wish I could find the right file and upload it to YouTube. This one has an alien ray gun that comes out of the lower-left corner and fires onto the table. I’m not sure what triggers that or what the net effect is, but it’s still cool.

Clockwork Knight

Posted on January 3, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I’m working on a few other things right now so I wanted another easy game tonight. According to my master spreadsheet, Clockwork Knight still needs screenshots, and could use a much more thorough description to boot.

This game was published by Sega for the Sega Saturn in 1995. You may recall that late in 1994, a little-known company named Pixar burst onto the scene and revolutionized children’s movies forever with their movie Toy Story. Now, I’m not charging that Clockwork Knight is a brazen rip-off of Toy Story, but someone has some explaining to do. This game, like that movie, features a roomful of toys that come to life and have magical adventures when the kid leaves.

But let’s not dwell on the plagiaristic aspects. Instead, let’s dwell on the game’s lavish musical numbers (a hallmark of the game, apparently). The 3+ minute intro sequence sets up the conflict. It appears that there is a toy princess and a number of — as the game title indicates — clockwork knights competing for the fair, plastic lady’s affection. The princess is snatched away somehow and it’s up to one of the knights (probably the one they call Pepperouchou since his name is in the game’s subtitle) to rescue her from renegade toys. At least, I assume that’s what’s going on; I haven’t had the time or patience to sit through the whole thing yet. Fortunately, someone else has already posted the entire intro video on YouTube:

This game reminds me of the stories that Sega intended the Saturn to be the ultimate 2D gaming system but then some 3D capability was nailed on the side as an afterthought when Sega heard that Sony’s impending PlayStation would place more emphasis on 3D. As far as side-scrolling action games go, Clockwork Knight is absolutely supreme. It has everything such a game really needs — a jump and an attack button — and lots of pleasing eye candy. This is an incredibly detailed game that rewards the sharp-eyed gamer. Observe the following gameplay screenshot:

This is the first level, which takes place in Betsy’s room. Some random notes I took down, which may help you get a feel for the game.

Not only does Betsy really like her doll Chelsea, she even has a poster of Chelsea in the background.
To be fair about the plagiarism aspect, at least the theme of this game seems to be toy vs. toy instead of toy vs. humans (I think that was the thrust of certain Toy Story movies).
Your power meter is represented by a network of gears. There are 3 gears to start with and perhaps more gears are possible later.
Your knight wields a key sword (reminds me of the Capcom/Disney crossover game Kingdom Hearts which would come years later).
You use your key sword to open toy boxes around the room which function as warps.
The animation is fantastic.
This side scroller has a quasi-3D effect as you run past objects.
Enemies jump at you from the background. Heavy objects such as dollhouses fall down at you from the background.
There is a time limit, but unlike many time limit games, you can grab clock powerups to extend your deadline.
No special attacks, apparently; only sword swipe, crouch and swipe, jump and swipe, and an implicit kick when you approach an enemy that is already stunned.
Betsy exhibits some extraordinary ingenuity with the network of pulleys and platforms she has set up in her room by which the knight is able to turn her room into a standard side-scrolling jumping action arena.
The screenshot above depicts invincibility mode, so the game has that powerup. Check.
You can push stacks of blocks around.
Crayons in pits fill in as deadly spikes.

All in all, not a bad game. I think I would like to play this game a little more to get some deeper screenshots for the database.

Bonus! Here’s another musical number that I lifted from a Sega Saturn sampler CD. It depicts the toy characters of Clockwork Knight performing a spicy salsa number:

See Also:

Another try at Clockwork Knight

At MobyGames:

Clockwork Knight

Video Courtesy Of YouTube

Posted on January 3, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Today, I finally went through the bother of uploading a video to YouTube. Here is the first video, with hopefully many more to come– the entire intro video of I.M. Meen (assuming you have Adobe Flash Player installed):

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Author: Multimedia Mike