Braindead Batman Game

Posted on January 18, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I’m still feeling fairly braindead today and I require an equally braindead game. Let’s check the big list… a-ha! Batman Forever: The Arcade Game for the Sega Saturn sounds like it would fit the bill. An arcade game, by definition, doesn’t ask for much thought investment. And how do we know that this is a certified arcade game? Observe the following card:

Yes, it’s the classic FBI anti-drug warning that was omnipresent in all arcade games, at least in the early 1990s. It’s the reason why any arcade devotee of the era knew exactly who was in charge of the FBI at the time. I’m hard-pressed to recall any home console game that used the same screen.

Structurally, the game is similar to brawlers like Double Dragon and Final Fight, so I should enjoy this. At first, it’s quite challenging even though the default difficulty setting is ‘easy’. Of course, I need to account for the input lag in my Saturn setup. Still, the game does not disappoint in the braindead department. You choose from either Batman or Robin (or both in 2-player mode) and walk from left to right while punching, kicking, and jumping while kicking.

Dispatching just about any enemy rewards the player with a powerup and you had better collect them all. Many are health powerups, and the health runs out rapidly. Other powerups include a variety of special weapons like batarangs; a bat grappling hook that allows you to swing around the screen and knock out all the enemies; and a rather curious offensive option where you levitate and release a huge amount of raw power to flatten the enemies on the screen. The players can also pick up and throw various items on screen (like large, non-descript, grey blocks).

Overall, Batman Forever is a quite challenging game. But then, I must keep in mind that it is an arcade game at its heart. As such, it retains that same token-eater gameplay quality. I might hook my Saturn up to my real TV one day in order to play the game properly, and without delay. You don’t get infinite continues in this game (that number is configurable between 3 and 7).

Snow Day Bonus Games

Posted on January 10, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

We’re not through with that Gap Game yet. I found this article that revealed the codes for the 2 bonus games on Snow Day: The GapKids Quest The 2 6-digit codes were, in fact, in plain ASCII text in the game executable file. I was sort of expecting something a little more Gap-related.

The first of the bonus games is Skate Race (code: 894367). When I first saw the Pac-Man clone, Snowed In, I fully expected to find this type of game elsewhere on the disc. You’ve surely seen this countless times– one of the most famous incarnations is Nibbles. You have a character that moves in straight lines collecting items and avoiding obstacles. Each time you collect an item, you leave a longer trail behind you which only becomes one more obstacle. The first time I ever played a game like this was on the Intellivision (I remember now! It was Snafu).

Now for Snowball Frenzy (code: 426985). Finally! Overt kid-on-kid violence. This is a first-person snowball shooter. Snow or be snowed. All of the kids in the neighborhood have playfully decided to gang up on you. Fortunately, it seems to be a fair fight since you are apparently the best snowball slinger in town. The goal is to knock out every kid that pops out from behind every tree, fence, snowdrift and snowman. You have a limited amount of snowball ammunition but you seem to get automatic refills when you run out. You also have a power meter in this game. Sustain a snowball strike and lose health. Fortunately, you can parry snowballs with your own.

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowball Frenzy

It’s worth noting that the children squeal with glee when you take them down. More FPS games need that kind of positive spirit.

So I won a game! I won Snow Day: The GapKids Quest! Sing it from the rooftops! That means I went back and finished all 4 of those Snowed In mazes. It’s not so hard once you get a little strategy down. I must contend that those children armed with shovels could take a snowman. But I didn’t make the game so I didn’t make the rules. The ending shows the group of GapKids enjoying hot chocolate indoors. Wearing their Gap apparel, naturally.

What now? I guess I could try to win the game with the other 3 characters. But I don’t think there are any more secrets in this game. When I exit the game after winning it, the game no longer claims that there are more secret codes to wait for.

See Also:

My first post on this game
Taco Bell Tek Kids — better than you might expect
The Lost Island of Alanna — Cherry Coke tries its hand at a promotional game

At MobyGames:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest
Advertising/Product tie-ins game group — you won’t believe some of the products that have received their own games

Favorite Pellet-Muncher?

Posted on January 9, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s Gap-themed Snow Day game — with it’s Pac-Man, umm, homage — got me thinking about other Pac-Man clones. Surely, countless clones have come and gone through the years. This one, that I discovered through a bulletin board back around 1992 or so, is CD-Man by Creative Dimensions and is my favorite clone:

It had detailed, high-resolution, and colorful graphics, smooth animation, spider enemies, and new features such as a gated community for which your character needs a key to enter in order to complete the maze. The second maze of the game is water-themed with sharks as enemies.

Around the same time I discovered this game I also downloaded a 3D first-person perspective Pac-Man style game, which was not the first of its kind (I seem to recall an arcade game with the same theme as early as 1989). It was novel in the way that 3D graphics were always novel back then. But when I think back on it now, I don’t know if it was really an idea that worked.

How about you? What is your favorite member of the official Pac-Man family (whose franchise thrives to this day), or perhaps favorite Pac-Man clone?

The Gap Game

Posted on January 9, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

(Hi! If you came here from Google in search of the forbidden Gap game knowledge, the codes you seek are 894367 for Skate Race and 426985 for Snowball Frenzy.)

I’ve been looking forward to tonight’s game for some time: Snow Day: The GapKids Quest. That’s right: it’s an actual Gap-based video game, or GapKids to be more precise. The sleeve copy states that the CD-ROM contains 3 games ready to play and 2 more that are unlockable via secret code. Oh dear, I hope it’s not another deal like the Taco Bell Tek Kids Flash Ops where I’m expected to collect a number of different discs. No, in fact there is a different system which will be explained (maybe) later.

Indeed, the game holds true to its title– this is a game about a snow day. Finally! A game that I can relate to on a deeply personal level. Actually, where I grew up, if a snow day were to be called, it would happen early in the morning; rarely, if ever would school let out when it was already in session, as is colorfully depicted in the setup for this game. So school is let out early and our group of carefully multicultural GapKids is free to engage in a variety of fun, frolicky, frivolous games that kids play in such inclement weather. Or not. Maybe I should just show you the specifics of the games.

The first — and perhaps most disturbing — game in the repertoire is innocuously entitled Snowed In. The object is simple: shovel all the snow. You wouldn’t expect a simulation of such a laborious chore to be much fun, and the designers shared your sentiment, so they added killer snowmen to the proceedings:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Terrified Snowmen

The above screenshot actually depicts what happens when your GapKid obtains the snowblower powerup in the game– the hunted becomes the hunter and the look of unbridled terror on the snowmens’ faces is priceless. As you can plainly see, this game is a thinly-veiled ripoff of the venerable Pac-Man concept. One key difference is that the 4 snowmen spawn from 4 different places. And if a snowman touches you, your GapKid is depicted as shivering frantically, but not necessarily dying. He does have to start over, but with the same area of snow already cleared.

Next up is Snowman Match. Unlike the previous game which exploits our most profound childhood fears of snow-spawned demons, this is a memory game that briefly shows you a glimpse of a snowman fashionably dressed in Gap apparel. The snowman melts away and 4 new snowmen rise up. You have to match the snowman you just saw, and you have to perform 8 correct matches within a given time limit. It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Sometimes the game throws 4 fairly similar snowmen at you:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowman Match

The last game that is, per default, unlocked is Snowboard Slalom, a fairly benign downhill snowboarding game where you must dodge trees, logs, rocks, and ice patches but, thankfully, no killer snowmen. Your X-treme snowboarder dude is quite resilient:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowboard Wipeout

Obstacles are merely temporary setbacks and he bounces right back to continue on his downhill trek. The goal is to reach the finish line at the bottom of the hill under a certain time constraint.

There are still 2 locked games. How to unlock the games? That’s unclear, but here is the intelligence that the installation program lends: “Sometime soon, a secret timer inside your Snow Day CD-ROM will ring and your computer will tell you how to unlock 2 secret games! Be sure to check your computer every week so you can find out how to get the secret code.” This is further reiterated when you quit the game:

I want my secret games unlocked NOW! (which, BTW, are Skate Race and Snowball Frenzy and the codes are 6 characters long, or at most 6 characters long). Maybe someone else out there on the vast internet has looked at this first. A quick Google search brings up a brief mention on another of my blogs as well as my master games spreadsheet. I guess I’m the only person out there who has ever thought that this game is interesting enough to write anything about. So now I’m investigating the game a little deeper.

See Also:

Followup blog post on this same game — I located the secret codes!
Taco Bell Tek Kids — a shining star among promotional video games
The Lost Island of Alanna — Cherry Coke’s Myst knock-off

At MobyGames:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest
Advertising/Product tie-ins game group — you won’t believe some of the products that have received their own games

The rest of this post is just me thinking out loud about how to recover the codes, which turned out to be superfluous.

Let’s talk technical: Snow Day is a Smacker-based video game. My first clue to this effect was when I watched the installer program copy over nothing but Smacker files, WAV files, and an EXE file. All of the cutscenes are Smacker files. Further, the backgrounds, character animations, and UI widgets are all Smacker files as well. I am able to see from the directory structure and filenames that there are, in fact, 4 mazes in the Shoveled In Pac-Man clone. I only made it to the 3rd maze. I wonder if formally completing the 3 unlocked games would expedite the unlocking of the other 2 games? My secret gaming shame is that I have never been very good at Pac-Man or derivatives thereof.

Now we get into my favorite computer-related pasttimes: Reverse engineering! There is only one executable file and one support file, the Smacker decoding DLL. I disassembled the executable and looked for interesting strings. The first fascinating string is “Hypnotix”. I recognize that name. I recognize it from a 1995 demo CD-ROM of a Smacker-heavy game called Wetlands. This game bears the name of BrandGames, which is also known to be responsible for Taco Bell: Tasty Temple Challenge which, from the MobyGames screenshots, has nothing in common with this game’s engine. The context in which the “Hypnotix” string appears in the binary is for manipulating Windows registry keys. The registry does have entries in “Software\Hypnotix\GapSnowDay”, but only for CD drive letter and game directory. Thus, I suspect that BrandGames may have licensed the engine from Hypnotix. It also appears that there is a CD check in the game as evidenced by the string “Please insert the Gap Snow Day CD-Rom and then press OK”. But the game still runs fine after installation without the CD-ROM in the tray. A CD check doesn’t make much sense for a promotional game with 35 MB of game data that is copied completely onto the HD during game installation.

I have followed a number of theories to recover the codes:

I found the Smacker file that notifies the user about the wrong code being entered. I looked up the string in the binary, hoping that it would lead me somewhere interesting. I found the filename, but the logic around it was not immediately obvious.
The game has to grab characters entered by the user, but I’m not sure which of the standard imported Windows functions does the trick.
Under the assumption that the string that the user enters is maintained as a string, it would be compared against the correct code string. I see that CompareStringW() and CompareStringA() are being called. Googling these functions brings up Wine references, first and foremost. The usage is quite odd; if I understand this program correctly, it is passing the same string as string1 and string2 into these functions.

So I’m not getting anywhere with this tonight, and I don’t have any good, live analysis tools installed on this machine (i.e., no breakpoints or memory inspection). Perhaps I will get around to installing my old copy of Visual Studio. That could take up to 2 weeks, if memory serves, so it might be easier to just wait out the estimated 2 weeks it will take for the codes to somehow manifest themselves.

I’m still curious about exactly how the game is going to spring new codes on me on a weekly basis. SpyBot doesn’t report any new known spyware, and I don’t think the game installed any special background service (the level of technical ingenuity that went into building the game is certainly not on the same level as writing such daemons). I suspect that when I start the game again at certain times, it will let me know about certain codes. This might imply that the game knows when it was installed (perhaps by checking certain key file timestamps) and checking if the current clock is 1 or 2 weeks later. This could be corroborated by the usage of FileTimeToLocalFileTime() and FileTimeToSystemTime(). I suppose I could set the clock ahead, but I get nervous about doing that for some reason. Perhaps in a VMware session, though?

Check back in 1 and 2 weeks.

Update: Things just got easier when I found this old article that mentions the 2 codes: “For Skate Race, enter 894367; for Snowball Frenzy it’s 426985.” According to the article, the game would periodically tell you to visit your local Gap store to get the codes for the other games. I should try that just to see if they know the codes for this 6 or 7-year old game.

Update 2: See also Snow Day Bonus Games.

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

A Taco Bell Game! Tek Kids Flash Ops– Mission: Polar Challenge

Posted on December 28, 2006 by Multimedia Mike

I started out this evening playing some more Hot Wired and actually finished 3 of the 10 tracks. I think I’m well on my way to being able to write the authoritative strategy guide for the game. But duty requires that I soldier on!

Tonight’s game is a Taco Bell promotional game, Tek Kids Flash Ops– Mission: Polar Challenge. You might be surprised enough to learn that there is a Taco Bell promotional game, but wait until you find out that this is actually number 2 in a series. This is actually the first of a great many promotional tie-in games that I have in my possession and look forward to playing. This title is not very well-known: A Google search brings up an entry I wrote about it on another of my blogs.

Based on the CD sleeve packaging, this Tek Kids promotion must have run from August 3 through September 6 of this year (the sleeve says that you can call for technical assistance between those dates).

The primary game enables the player to select from one of four Tek Kids to carry out a special mission to stop a particularly insane villain, Dr. Havok, from inflicting his namesake effect upon the world. How insane is he? Insane enough that he saw Al Gore’s global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and decided that the best way to blackmail the world’s governments would be to accelerate the warming process by manually melting the polar ice caps with what the game describes verbally as a giant radar attached to a tank.

I was eager to jump right into the gameplay and see exactly how they managed to tie tasty tacos and burritos into what was sure to be a fast-paced action game. I am happy to report that Polar Challenge delivers, at least for a brief, free, promotional tie-in game. The principal action has your character piloting a little hoverjet over the ice, on your way to take out the problematic tank device. On the way, there are skiing robots that will try to trip you with their ski poles, spiked mines and some other exploding weirdness. On the plus side, there are 2 different types of weapons to pick up, as well as 2 types of powerups– fuel tanks to keep your jet craft moving, and spinning Taco Bell insignias to keep your life meter up. So that’s the tie-in! Taco Bell = life!

You have to maintain both your life meter (getting hit drains it) and your fuel meter (just moving drains it) or it’s game over. A frustrating aspect at the outset was that the game would abruptly end with Dr. Havok laughing himself silly– it would have been nice for some indication about exactly why the game was over. There are 2 different weapons — a green ring weapon and a pink cube weapon — but neither seems to be more powerful than the other. Also, there are copious warps on the mission that give you a major speed bump and make you bump into enemies much faster.

The game features 3 segments, each with progressively more obstacles. While the game has 4 characters to choose from, that doesn’t necessarily give it any particular replay value– the 4 different characters are apparently in place to fulfill certain demographic diversity goals, though someone put in a lot of effort to define different profiles for each Tek Kid.

After completing the game, you get a 4-character code. If you get the codes for all 4 games, you can unlock a bonus game. This implies to me that all 4 games carry the bonus game. The code at the end of this game is PXM6. Searching for the string in the binary is fruitless. I can’t imagine the developers put a lot of effort into an difficult-to-hack code system. However, only one character from each of the 4 4-character codes is used to unlock the bonus game, so it’s reasonable that the PXM6 string would not occur in any binaries (and the screen where it is presented is graphical).

From the code screen, I learn that the other 3 missions are titled Data Island, Aqua Zone, and Sky Fortress. I may make some trips to area Taco Bell restaurants and inquire about any CDs they might have in the back. Yeah, I’m just that lame.

One last feature of the actual game is that it allows you to create desktop wallpapers featuring the various Tek Kids on top of polar locale backdrops, with a “Think Outside The Bun” logo, and even that’s customizable.

The CD sleeve also contains a number of different puzzles including a connect-the-dot puzzle and a secret decoding message puzzle. The code is to drop the first and last letters of each word. Fiendish. The funniest puzzle is a picture of the Havok global-warming-accelerator tank, and the viewer needs to find the items that don’t belong in the picture, items like pliers, wrench, and snowshoe. I take this as a tacit acknowledgement that there’s nothing wrong with the tank being in the picture.

The game is the product of a firm named Maxx Marketing. Apparently, there is a long-running campaign based around Spy-Tek that they created for Taco Bell.

For multimedia trivia, underneath the covers, the game uses a lot of FLV files for full motion video. Flash-based game? That would certainly ease time to market.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Action Games

Braindead Batman Game

Favorite Pellet-Muncher?

Clockwork Knight

A Taco Bell Game! Tek Kids Flash Ops– Mission: Polar Challenge