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Gaming Pathology

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Adventure Games

Time To Ride Volvos

Posted on August 10, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I replayed that Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables girlie game today in order to collect a few more screenshots for MobyGames. I found the nearby town and checked out the commerce center. When I took a good look around the virtual parking lot, I noticed something a little odd:


Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Time to ride Volvos!

That’s right: 2 out of 3 patrons drive Volvos, and the exact same model. That’s the correct shield on the grill and everything. I wonder if the developers had to license the model?

Anyway, I honestly want to like this game. It’s a good effort, but the play control is so awkward and the camera scheme leaves much to be desired. For example, when I happen to wander behind the storefront:


Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Stuck behind trash cans

I actually got stuck when the camera ducked down behind the trash cans and I could not figure out where I was. Hey, is that box measuring in liters? Well, this game was developed by a Scandinavian outfit. That might explain both the measurement units and the bias in automobiles.

So you know, there is more to this girlie game than just horseback riding– there’s also the brave quest to stand tall in the face of gossip. These kids stand around behind the store and chastise you for the way you dress and the people with whom you choose to consort:


Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Ward off gossip teens

Our city girl Amanda heroically faces down each verbal onslaught. We salute you, Amanda, with a vociferous, “you go, girl!” And if, for whatever reason, Amanda acquiesces to the derision, she can always buy new clothes in the game.

See Also:

  • My first examination of this title
  • Bratz: Rock Angelz, another girlie game dealing with challenges of gossip and fashion

At MobyGames:

  • Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables
Posted in Adventure Games Girlie Games Windows Games | Tagged horse volvo | 1 Comment

Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables

Posted on July 24, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

By way of an article in The Hater’s blog over at The Onion’s A.V. Club (Video Gamez For Ladiez), I learned of yet another article about trying to make video games appeal to the fairer sex. These pieces are a dime a dozen and every time I read one, I wonder how come I never read articles about what the movie industry is doing to make chick flicks more palatable to men. Anyway, just for this occasion, I’m finally creating a “Girlie Games” category for this blog and covering another horse riding game, just to further illustrate that there is a niche catering to perceived female gaming tastes. (Other girlie games revolve around fashion and gossip as well as wedding planning.)


Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Introductions

Tonight’s game is Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables. Long time readers may recall my last riding game was Let’s Ride: Corral Club. The first essential thing to recognize about this title is the title itself: It’s Time to Ride, whereas, the other title was Let’s Ride. That means that these are 2 different franchises. This means, or at least implies, that the horseback riding genre is successful enough to merit 2 competing franchises with multiple entries. Perhaps that’s as reasonable an indicator as any that there already is some viable market for girlie games.

Saddles & Stables is a pretty game; let’s get that out of the way since I always like to see that no matter what the game:


Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Taking the scenic route

The game centers around Amanda who moves from the city to the country to live with her father. Daddy promised her a horse but Amanda has to care for it and train it. The game starts with you taking the ponies out for test rides and deciding which to use. Afterwards, you get on with your teenage life, walking around town, talking to people, solving mysteries (yes, the manual hints at the game having a mystery that you may wish to solve). You could make the case that this game borrows elements from the popular Metal Gear Solid series:


Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables — Metal Gear-style exclamation

Thankfully, the characters are not interested in killing you when that exclamation symbol appears. That only means that the have something plot-advancing to say to you.

All the while this happens, you are expected to be grooming and training your horse. You have access to a variety of status meters to monitor the horse’s current behavior, running skill, and jumping skill, as well as to track the horse’s current needs for food, grooming, or clean living quarters.

Multimedia nerd note: I was ecstatic to see that this game actually uses a video codec called VP3 for its FMV. I wrote the (incomplete) book on VP3. This is really the first time I have seen VP3 files “in the wild”.

See also:

  • New Girlie Games blog category, games characterized as being specifically targeted for girls in that no male in his right mind (outside of a few, ahem, video game historians) would want to be caught in the same store selling them.
  • My second look at this game
  • Let’s Ride: Friends Forever, an entry from a competing equestrian gaming franchise

At MobyGames:

  • Time To Ride: Saddles & Stables
Posted in Action Games Adventure Games Girlie Games Windows Games | Tagged horse | 10 Comments

Dog Odyssey And Fisher-Price Wild West

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

As always, I have a huge stockpile of educational games that are conspicuously absent from MobyGames. DJP Mom and I continue to answer the call. Tonight, I attacked 2 different, early Macromedia Director games. In both of them, I felt that something was missing. Like, animations. Both games wanted archaic versions of Apple QuickTime that I was unwilling to install. Some games fail to run if they don’t get their desired versions of QuickTime. Tonight’s pair just silently refuse to play animations which makes certain junctures a bit confusing.

The first of the pair is Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey. Wishbone — apparently the canine star of a late-1990’s, PBS-produced TV show — finds himself washed up on an island where a city is burning in the background (turns out to be Troy). Pieces start falling into place and he figures out that he seems to have taken on the role of Odysseus in Homer’s classic epic.


Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey — Wishbone wonders

This could have proved to be quite an educational experience (I don’t know much about the literature). However, the game kept throwing this error:


Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey — Script error

That’s “Script error: Handler not defined … #FileIO” (reproduced textually for the benefit of search engines). That prohibited me from getting too far into the tale. Too bad, too, because the credits go on for pages. A lot of people really wanted to make this game successful.

The second game is Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town. It’s by Davidson & Associates, which strikes me as familiar. Ah yes: They were responsible for another Fisher-Price licensed title: Learning in Toyland. The first thing to understand about this game is that the game assumes that you might not know how to read. Also, the installation process offers an fascinating bit of nostalgia:


Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town -- Modem registration

Ah, modems; remember those? Anyway, you’re a deputy, the bad guy goes by the name of Bandit Bob and his dastardly crime is hiding gold bars all over town. Your job is to find the gold.


Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town — Finding gold bars

Along the way, there are a number of minigames and other activities, as is customary. This one is the Barrel Boot:


Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town — The Barrel Boot activity

You get to drop barrels into this automatic boot device and launch them at random citizens — and you’re the deputy lawman, remember. Hitting a target always has comical, good-natured results in this kids’ game. I didn’t get the full effect with a number of the targets. The screen would temporarily blank and I could tell that the game was trying to invoke the QuickTime Player to handle a more detailed animation.

See also:

  • Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland

At MobyGames:

  • Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey
  • Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town
Posted in Adventure Games Childrens Games Educational Games Mac Games Windows Games | Tagged dog fisher-price history odyssey | 2 Comments

Beauty OR the Beast

Posted on July 20, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I moved states some time ago and while I had a good stable of retail shops dealing in spent video games in my old town, I have not found much in my current locale. That changed recently when I found a thrift store that I have occasion to visit on a near-weekly basis. Each time, I score 5-8 new CD-ROMs that I have never heard of before; many of them are unheard-of by MobyGames as well. The balance tips heavily in favor of forgotten educational titles or other Macromedia Director-based games, which fits right into my plan. It’s possible that there are other scavengers who visit the shop with more frequency and are snatching up titles with wider appeal. But I enjoy the more obscure stuff anyway.

Unfortunately, these titles are so obscure and lacking in supporting, superficial literature that it’s a gamble — but only a dollar gamble or so. Such was the case with Alien Racers which sounded like an awesome racing game. I was a tad suspicious that the CD-ROM prominently displayed Macromedia Director and QuickTime logos.


Alien Racers - Intro

Alas, it’s just an interactive comic book.

So let’s move on with one that I sincerely hoped was not a mere storybook in CD-ROM form: Beauty or The Beast. That’s right– not a typo; it’s an ‘OR’, not an ‘AND’. The game does bear the markings of Emme, which gives me chills. This company was involved in the accursed Mr. Men and Little Miss series. But to be fair, they were only involved in the distribution, not the development.

So this game is loosely based on the classic Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. It is most assuredly not based on the popular 1991 Disney variation. According to Wikipedia, the game’s story is not strictly based on any other known variation.


Beauty or The Beast - Character selection

Your choice at the start of the game is to, as the title implies, choose to play as either Beauty or the Beast. This sets you on one of 2 adventure paths with 2 different back stories. In the Beauty version, Belle’s father is wandering through the forest, gets lost, finds the Beast’s castle, ambles inside and is summarily imprisoned. Back at the dinner table, the clock strikes 22:00, the stew is getting cold, and Belle decides to form a one-fairy-tale-character search party.


Beauty or The Beast - Waiting for dinner company

She instinctively heads straight to the castle and this is where the adventure begins. It’s a point and click adventure where she moves from room to well-illustrated room and generally finds a puzzle or minigame in each one. This was the first one I found:


Beauty or The Beast - Frog game

In the spirit of Frogger, the player must guide all of the curiously hydrophobic amphibians from the middle to the outer edges of the fountain. Do this by clicking on a frog to make it jump. It is necessary to make the frog jump through 3 rings of lily pads moving at different speeds. Miss a pad and the frog promptly swims back to the safety of the middle. Also, they won’t stay on a pad forever before jumping on their own accord.

This minigame stopped me dead in my tracks for the “Beauty” half of the adventure:


Beauty or The Beast - Spider and moth game

The moth is suspected to want to tell you something. But it gets caught in a massive, cooperative spider web. It is necessary to continually click on the individual spiders to knock them down to the bottom of the screen while the moth slowly makes it down to the hole near you. If the spiders reach the moth, they simply push it back to the top right corner of the screen where it has to reset its journey.


Beauty or The Beast - The Beast’s backstory

So there is also the “Beast” half of the game. The backstory here, told in a sepia tone, is that a princely figure was at his castle, minding his own horse, when a witch came along and put a curse on the whole place. My adventure with the Beast — the first task is to investigate this female interloper who has recently come knocking — didn’t last long since his very first minigame is to light 6 torches in a foyer by clicking on each. The catch is that the last must be lit before the first goes out or you have to start over again. Basically, it takes the same lightning mousing speed as the spider/moth game described above.

The game shares some major annoyances with those other games mentioned published under the Emme umbrella. Primarily, meandering, unskippable dialogue. There was also a serious flaw present in the torch minigame where it was impossible to properly quit the activity through normal means. The in-game menu is inaccessible during minigames and the escape button usually present during minigames was missing. I had to use more “out of band” Windows methods to quit the game. Poor form.

Pretty game, though. Much credit for that.

See Also:

  • Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (SNES)

At MobyGames:

  • Beauty or the Beast
Posted in Adventure Games Mac Games Windows Games | Tagged beauty and the beast | Leave a comment

Something New

Posted on June 3, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I’m trying something new– I’m trying to be a bit more normal in my game-playing habits, at least for a while. I.e., instead of working this like a second job and forcing myself to choke down another unheard-of game that has maybe a 1 in 10 chance of being marginally tolerable and then writing up both an eloquent blog entry and a complete MobyGames entry, I decided to game a bit more “normally” and unwind with some known quantity-type games when I come home from work.

Both games already have complete MobyGames entries and there’s no need for me to even gather more screenshots for either. One is the GameCube remake of the original Resident Evil game. I think I actually picked up this game on release day — even though I didn’t even own a GameCube yet! (I had every intention of purchasing one, and I eventually got around to it, perhaps 6 months later.) I have always appreciated the succinct pre-title scene in a morgue of some sort. It highlights perhaps the smartest action ever taken in a horror movie-type situation:



The other game is a 2003 title that I just picked up used– F-Zero GX, also for the GameCube. I just started playing this and the first thing that confuses me is why the game bothers to present so much on-screen information– I can’t possibly afford to avert my gaze from the insane action to actually study what any of it says. I look forward to improving to the point where that’s possible.

See Also:

  • I actually got bored of this Resident Evil game fairly quickly
  • I had more fun playing Resident Evil 4 once again

At MobyGames:

  • Resident Evil (GameCube)
  • F-Zero GX
Posted in Action Games Adventure Games GameCube Games Racing Games | Tagged f-zero resident evil | Leave a comment

The Wild Thornberrys Movie

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I didn’t want to go into this one cold so I hit up Wikipedia for the requisite background info on the Nickelodeon franchise called The Wild Thornberrys. It seems that they’re a family of nature videographers who make the rounds in the African wilderness. Somewhere along the line, the cartoon was deemed successful enough to warrant a feature-length film on the subject matter. Based on my reading of the Wikipedia synopsis, The Wild Thornberrys Movie video game works to follow the plot of the movie more or less faithfully.


The Wild Thornberrys Movie — Swimming with the dolphins

I thought that this was just going to be a series of disconnected minigames. In fact, there are 3 distinct types of activities present: minigames (7), multiplayer games (3), and the main story game. The minigames include a jigsaw puzzle, a painting activity, and a sliding tile puzzle (nooooooooo!). There is the enjoyable and eye-pleasing Swimming with the Dolphins minigame seen above, where you compete against the computer-controlled dolphins to dodge sharks and collect starfish. But there is also the baffling strategy card game called Feed The Animals:


The Wild Thornberrys Movie — Feed the animals before the poachers do

The goal of Feeding the Animals is to feed said animals before the poachers do. I’m not sure if I see the logic in that. But I understand that the poachers are supposed to be the antagonists in this tale. I came to my own conclusion, however, that any animal dumb enough to be snared by these tactless poachers probably deserves to be turned into a trinket. You know, Darwinism and all (in fact, a supporting primate character is named Darwin). To illustrate what I mean, the first challenge presented to you when playing in story mode is to save the cheetah cubs from the poachers– the poachers who are trying to swoop down using a helicopter in order to swipe the young cats.


The Wild Thornberrys Movie — Save the cheetah cubs

But then the main character, Eliza, gets carried away by the helicopter and must be rescued in a separate game. Eventually, Eliza winds up in a private British school along with her monkey and endeavors to escape. This is the section that put an end to my adventures, though I gave it a good shot. The first phase of the school game has Eliza wandering throughout her mostly vacant school dodging the occasional guard and trying to find Darwin the monkey. I actually had to draw a logical map on paper to keep this part straight since everywhere looks pretty similar; mercifully, the developers threw in numbers on the hallways and doors. The guards in this stage are beyond stupid– they pace back and forth in a straight line and only “catch” you if you happen to be standing directly in their line of pacing. Then you get sent back to the start of the level.


The Wild Thornberrys Movie — Procession of guards

Things get tougher when you find the monkey and try to escape via the garden maze where the guards are a tad more diligent. This part is segmented into several areas that must be unlocked with gate keys. The most humorous aspect is that the guards exercise strict jurisdiction over their segment and will not cross outside of their boundaries. I eventually developed some strategies, like trying to get all the guards to follow me in a strict procession as I searched for the area key, which changes position each time. The aptly-named Darwin monkey would get stuck sometimes but not to worry– he couldn’t be captured and would eventually catch up.

I couldn’t get past the segment where I had to hop on a bicycle and hightail it out. It’s not easy to pilot the bike and I never got much opportunity to practice before getting caught and sent back to the start of the stage.

Through it all, I have to give this 2002 title proper credit– it’s very well engineered, very colorful, very well-animated, and reasonably fun. In fact, I may even revisit it someday to play through to the end, since I didn’t even get through half the levels of the story mode.

At MobyGames:

  • The Wild Thornberrys Movie
Posted in Action Games Adventure Games Childrens Games Puzzle Games Windows Games | Tagged environment thornberrys | Leave a comment

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