Bratz: Rock Angelz

Posted on November 26, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Perhaps I need a “girlie games” category for this blog since I clearly have 2 games for such a category in as many days. If you’re unfamiliar with the Bratz franchise, good for you! To fill you in, they’re sort of a band of junior skanks marketed towards young girls. They seem to be universally reviled and condemned by parents yet wildly successful nonetheless. Naturally, they have a game or 3 in their massive merchandising repertoire.

Bratz: Rock Angelz — The main characters: Jade, Sasha, Chloe, and Yasmin

What kind of game is on offer in Bratz: Rock Angelz? I think you could qualify it as a team-based RPG with an assortment of innovative minigames, not unlike an entry into the blockbuster Final Fantasy franchise… or perhaps I’m just trying to make lemonade here. The story goes like this– one of the Bratz girlz gets a dream internship at a fashion magazine working for a demonic editor-in-chief (umm, The Devil Wears Prada, anyone? except that this character was not quite as restrained in her delivery as Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley). The internship is predictably a nightmare as the character faces her two arch-nemeses — who have also been hired on in higher ranking positions — and has to perform menial chores unrelated to the core of her fashion interest. She eventually gets fired — the details are a bit fuzzy but I think it’s because the girl failed to properly screen out the editor’s junk mail — and the rest of the girlz get the bright idea to start their own fashion rag. So they rent an office that turns out to be a rat hole. So the next adventure is to go shopping in order to properly decorate the office space…

And that’s really all I could handle, seriously. I got to chapter 4 (out of 9 chapters). Some of the chapters are adventures where you guide the girlz around rendered sets and interact with characters and surroundings. There is a little exploration element here, but mostly the goals are pretty cut and dried. There is generally one over-arching quest for a particular chapter, but with a number of sub-quests within. These often involve helping other people. For example, the salesgirl at a clothing store is depressed because she can’t get up the nerve to talk to Eitan, the totally hot guy who works at the smoothie stand. So one of the girlz plays match-maker between the 2, and then the salesgirl finally has the spirit to help the Bratz girl in her quest. The game did not offer a “complain to manager” icon.

Wow, I can’t believe I explained that shy-girl scenario in such detail. It should be noted that, in contrast to typical adventure games, the conversations in this game are almost uniformly good-natured, even when the other character has nothing of note to mention. Typical games will be all like, “What do you want? I thought I told you I’m busy!” Where this game is totally like, “Hey, what’s up? Nothin’ much? That’s cool.”

Interspersed between and throughout the chapters are assorted minigames. Things like blending fruit smoothies to spec or picking out the editor’s clothes for a trip. Here is a minigame pertaining to doing a layout for the fashion magazine:

Bratz: Rock Angelz — Magazine layout minigame

I didn’t really try, and I don’t think it was possible to lose. Success at the minigames is rewarded with an upgraded wardrobe that can be changed out at anytime during the 3D adventure portions.

Think that’s a ridiculous detail? To be fair, it’s difficult to criticize Bratz for this outfit selection feature. More serious games have been doing this for years, notably in the Resident Evil series. Certain of these games have special unlockable outfits for the characters while other franchise games allow the player to customize the outfit at the very start (as seen in this screenshot).

Soleil Moon Frye serves as voice talent on this game. Turns out there is life after Punky Brewster. Checking her IMDb credits reveals that there is another Bratz franchise game — Forever Diamondz. Ugh, it just doesn’t end. I get the impression that everything having to do with Bratz must have some plural word in the title so that the pluralization can be spelled with ‘z’.

G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I played G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor a little bit tonight. I long had an aversion to the original G.I. Joe NES title from Taxan– I remember it being somewhat difficult, or perhaps I just was not up to the challenge. The graphics and gameplay were up to par, though. Capcom snared the license for this second title and I had high hopes.

The storyline involves the Cobra organization raising the lost continent of Atlantis. The G.I. Joe team has to infiltrate the place and put a stop to whatever is the bad guys are going. At first, General Hawk goes it alone but collects more team members as the game proceeds.

This is the first miniboss, a giant with an equally large cinder block sledge hammer. He may or may not have been a canon G.I. Joe franchise character with his own action figure; I never kept up with G.I. Joe as much as I did with Transformers.

G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor -- Boss with cinder block sledge hammer

There is no strategy at play here. Just hope you have powered up your primary gun enough, haven’t taken too much damage yet, and give him everything you’ve got, head on.

Another notable feature of this game is the wackiest password system I have ever encountered in any NES game:

G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor -- Huge password

I am ecstatic that I never rented this game and, therefore, never had to copy down a single password for this game.

Sega CD Mini-Extravaganza

Posted on March 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I went off the deep end with Sega CD games tonight. This is due to the fact that I got around to writing a Python utility that rips entire Sega CDs in a format suitable to play from the hard disk using the Gens emulator. You can find the Sega CD ripping script on my more technical blog. So I spent a bunch of time ripping games to the hard drive and concentrating on collecting screenshots for Sega CD games that are already in the database.

As best that I could, anyway. In the most ambitious evening yet of this project, I tried 7 different games. Only 3 worked. Among the ones that didn’t work:

Sol-Feace: Space shoot-em-up with a large redbook audio soundtrack. I am listening to the energetic soundtrack ripped to MP3 right now and I am disappointed that I don’t get to try the game. It wouldn’t run in Gens. But at least it sounds like fun.
Masked Rider: Kamen Rider ZO: I’m pretty sure this is based on the Power Rangers franchise. It, too, would not run in Gens.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Severely multi-platform game based on the Coppola film, this game started to run but has trouble making it past the company logo movies; if it does, it never gets past the title screen movie. The problem is always the same: When the movie ends, the last second or so of audio gets stuck in an infinite loop. At least I got the title screenshot:
Slam City with Scottie Pippen: This is actually a Sega CD/32X game. I’m not sure how well Gens is supposed to support the 32X hardware. The game does have a redbook audio track with the theme song which is performed by Pippen himself, according to the game’s credits. It’s a rap about respect that’s only 1.5 minutes long but feels much, much longer. I would post it for posterity but it’s not so much funny or embarrassing as it is dull. Definitely early-90s style, though.

Now it’s time to cover the games that actually did work. The first 2 are cut from the same cloth: Mad Dog McCree and Ground Zero Texas. While produced by different companies, they are both interactive movie-based shooters. McCree happens to be a little more straightforward in concept than Texas, but they’re both phenomenally obnoxious in their own ways. When I tried playing the DOS version of Who Shot Johnny Rock? with a mouse, I noted how difficult and tedious that was and I predicted how much harder it would be to play the same game with a control pad. I was right. McCree is from American Laser Games, same people behind Johnny (also for the Sega CD). What a chore! It’s less a game of skill than a game of memorization. You had better remember exactly where each goon emerges or be doomed to repeat the same level:

Actually, scratch that. It doesn’t matter if you know the precise coordinates of each crony. If you don’t hit precisely the right hot spot, your bullets have no effect. I routinely emptied my revolver squarely on the bad guy only to get plugged when my chamber was empty. I just played long enough to collect a diverse sample of screenshots and I was out. I often hear that this game was a huge hit in its day. I would like to hear more than second-hand testimonials to that effect.

Ground Zero Texas was a little more promising. The premise is that there is a covert alien invasion occurring in Podunkville, Texas, U.S.A. The military has sent out a minor military detachment to deal with this pressing end-of-the-world-type scenario and you are the new tactical ops specialist brought in. Your 3 predecessors mysteriously disappeared and the brass has thrown up its hands in frustration and declared, “If you can’t handle this, we’re nuking this Texan hamlet”. So there’s a sense of urgency. Your task is to sit at a console that is connected to four camera/gun combos in 4 locations in this tiny town. Watch for suspicious humans who are probably inhabited by alien invaders– they will spring up and shoot at the heavily armored gun.

Sci-fi fans will of course recognize the alien-host-inhabiting-human-bodies theme as a convenient plot device for avoiding having to create expensive alien costumes or effects. Anyway, the game was mildly promising until I found I was unable to switch to any other camera when I was done with a particular area. The A button was supposed to enable me to switch but that didn’t work. The A button responds fine in other games played in this emulator. So I got just enough screenshots to make this play time worthwhile.

Finally, it’s on to Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective which represents the rarest of rarities: a halfway decent interactive movie! It even has the distinction of being one of the very first I-movies. Checking my master list of Sega CD titles, I would also have to qualify it as the best Sega CD game I’ve experienced thus far (admittedly, the competition is not especially stiff). The game boasts something like 90 minutes of FMV, and it’s reasonably well done (even if it’s necessarily tiny and grainy).

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective -- Holmes delivers orientation

The aspect of this early genre game that struck me the most during my brief gameplay is the level of extraneous detail. For example, there is an extensive newspaper archive to which Holmes may refer. Each newspaper has marriages, deaths, classified ads, all in addition to actual news. There is a sizable directory of London citizens that Holmes may opt to visit. Granted, not all of them have corresponding FMV clips, rather just Watson informing Holmes that the person didn’t have anything to say. Still, the game is not on rails as you would expect from an interactive movie. This is truly just an adventure/mystery game supplemented with competent use of FMV.

See Also:

More Sega CD Insanity — plowing through more Sega CD backlog

At MobyGames:

Disney’s Hades Challenge

Posted on February 23, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I don’t mind telling you that I’m excited about tonight’s game, Disney’s Hades Challenge, and for two main reasons: because Disney’s 1997 Hercules movie remains my all-time favorite animated Disney movie, and because their first Hercules-based computer game was also very good. That title was a pure action game featuring the hero himself. This game takes a different approach and bills itself as an adventure/strategy game and the star is you. It seems that Hades and other monsters are menacing the lands again and Hercules is busy with some other stuff. So Zeus enlists your help and sends you over to Philoctetes, a.k.a. Phil, who was voiced by Danny DeVito in the movie. It sounds like DeVito in this game as well but his name does not show up in the credits (though James Woods lends his original voice talent as Hades).

Phil gets you going on your first quest: To do something about the Minotaur that is ravaging the island of Crete. So I get in the boat I am issued — which is none other than the legendary Argo, you know, the one from Jason and the Argonauts — and head over to Crete to scope out the situation. Things are weird over there. When you first get to the island, you can see that the Minotaur is indeed causing chaos with impunity. So you need to go visit Daedalus. Thing is, the king is holding out on you and won’t let you see him until you bring him the gift of a new centerpiece for his table:

So you return to the dock in search of a statue that would make a suitable centerpiece for such a snobbish, slothful monarch. Where am I supposed to find a statue? Fortuitously, a statue peddler appears with a set of four statues and says that they’re all free today and that the king would love them. One by one, I bring them to the king with the peddler’s highest recommendation.

Every time, King Minos rejects the statue. I thought it was exceptionally odd and convenient that this statue hustler showed up when he did, and that his free merchandise didn’t seem to do the trick. Somehow, he reminded me of Pain and Panic, Hades’ pair of sniveling little hench-demons. I was warned to watch out for these two and that they would be working to thwart me. If that was their mission, they did a remarkable job the first time out since when I ran out of statues, the game threw this assertion dialog:

A lot of information there. For a lesser game, I would have called it quits at this point. But this game has piqued my interest. Besides, I wanted to see if the bug was reproducible. It was not. However, going in and out of the king’s chambers, I couldn’t help but notice that he has a certain infatuation with bulls. Eventually, I noticed the little bull statue to the right of the peddler. He was trying to distract me and when I took the statue to Minos, Hades showed up to adminstratively reprimand his underlings as Hades is wont to do. Turns out I was right about the statue guy.

So the king grants me the honor of speaking with Daedalus, the ostensible Greek with a thick French accent. He is making progress on the maze which will trap the man-bull but needs some supplies, including bricks, wood, straw, and stone. These are scattered about the various isles. The closest item, wood, is stored in a boat docked right here in Crete. Let’s review the heroic acts thus far:

delivering a horned statue to a royal prick
breaking & entering
grand theft lumber

To get at the wood, you have to solve this puzzle:

It’s a good thing I have a working knowledge of Greek letters; I wouldn’t have had any clue on this one otherwise. Can you see the solution?

I was bracing myself for more puzzles — and probably even a sliding tile puzzle — on the other islands before procuring the other needed materials. But no, the junk was just laying around on the shores when I sailed in. Though that wasn’t a surprise in war-ravaged Troy where I simply had to scavenge some bricks.

So you take these pieces back to Daedalus and he is able to construct a number of walls. However, when it comes time to trap the Minotaur, Daedalus enlists your help once more to rotate various walls in order to trap the creature. It’s an interesting puzzle:

Other notes I made during the course of my brief playing:

The ‘wait’ mouse icon when the program is busy with an animation (such an icon is traditionally represented as a watch or hourglass) is a sundial.
Hades appears after a quest with some Olympian god quiz and other mythological trivia. Statues of various gods and goddesses are littered across the land. Click on them to hear what they specialize in. It’s useful knowledge for these situations.
Appears to be a Smacker-assisted game. Smacker is used for pure audio in many cases.
Hot spots are very hard to find sometimes. You wind up just methodically scanning the screen (a.k.a. pixel hunting) waiting for the mouse cursor to change. It makes you long for another puzzle with a concrete goal.
The credits are extremely long for what doesn’t appear to be a very involved game, but perhaps I oversimplify. Maybe there are a lot of people to validate that everything about the game conforms to official Disney standards.

BTW, this game definitely goes on the list of games to revisit one day. Much fun, silly though it may be.

Saturn Myst

Posted on January 11, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Okay, the mission is simple: MobyGames is missing screenshots for the Sega Saturn port of the in/famous seminal CD-ROM game Myst (and every other of the 9 ports besides Windows 3.1 and Atari Jaguar). So get in, get the Saturn screenshots, and get out. Nothing fancy; don’t try to understand anything about the island– I want this done by the books.

Myst seems to get a pretty bad rap these days. Hardcore adventure gamers blame it, at least partially, for the downfall of the adventure genre (I would refer those people to Old Man Murray’s article, “Death of Adventure Games”). Really, I don’t see how this game deserves any worse of a reputation than E.T. for the Atari 2600 does– both were quite reasonable games in their own times.

To be clear, I was never all that excited about this game, but I can see how others might enjoy it. I have heard it described as a pretty, clickable slide show and I think that about sums it up. The last time I played it was in the summer of 1995 when I borrowed the Windows 3.1 version from a friend. I didn’t have much idea what was going on then and it doesn’t make much more sense now. Though I do know someone who claimed he could finish the game in a minute and a half flat from start to finish. Somehow, I still don’t think I would find the speed run very compelling.

Playing this game reminds me of assorted physics and electronics labs that I had to use in the course of the undergraduate studies– it’s hard to find functional equipment. Every other screen in this game has a switch but almost all of them do nothing. And there’s never anyone around to help you out. And certain books in the library don’t offer assistance, like this one that’s on the fritz when you try to read it… or watch it or something:

I suppose it could be that no one truly enjoyed this game. Everyone was just so captivated by the well-rendered graphics and the occasional, primitive FMV — courtesy of the fresh, shiny CD-ROM technology — that they never realized that this was not a particularly fun game.

Still, I have to give it credit for being pretty and all. That has to count for something.

Lost Eden Redux

Posted on January 8, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I’m glad to know that Gaming Pathology readers are as interested in this project as I am and shared in my disappointment that I couldn’t run Lost Eden. VAG came through with a suggestion to downgrade DOSBox. Unfortunately, even DOSBox 0.63 begs for mercy. I came up with the brilliant idea to actually run the game natively through Windows XP. I was hesitant to do this the first time since I remembered the instructions advising against running under Windows. The game actually does run in the WinXP Command Prompt, but without sound, and only in fullscreen mode. I can’t capture screenshots from any of my utilities and I can’t get the Command Prompt to operate in a window and still play the game.

Mans R. proposed and implemented another solution: A VMware image running FreeDOS. This turns out to work, though, again, without sound. No matter– the game has subtitles which are likely far superior to the voice acting (though the MobyGames entry mentions that some people thought the soundtrack was good enough to release separately).

So I can get screenshots using the VMware image. They come with VMware frames but I have a process to remove those automatically later before I submit them to MobyGames. This is Eloi, a character in Lost Eden, and he is old:

Remember, this is a game about a land of intelligent dinosaurs and the humans who coexist with them. So now I am able to view the intro FMV in all of its silent, subtitled glory. Given the length of the sequences between subtitles, the designers sure were proud of the FMV. It’s actually quite beautiful by 1995 standards. It speaks of a crumbled alliance between the dinosaurs and the humans. Then I am thrust into the first part of the game where I, Adam, the Prince of Mo, must wander around the Citadel of Mo — which is not nearly as large as it sounds, thankfully — searching for the long lost secret of what makes the citadel so impenetrable by T-rex’s. It’s also my birthday, or “coming of age” day, and everyone in the joint has a Coming Of Age Day present for me.

Here is a sample gameplay screen:

On the bottom, there are items that you have accumulated. On the top is your location and the number of characters presently in your party. Characters will come and go during the game, according to the manual. It looks like there are enough slots to hold at least 4 and perhaps up to 5 characters. Clicking on the characters, or right-clicking the mouse, takes you to the status screen where you can pan to individual characters, talk to them, or ask them questions regarding your items. Clicking on your character in this sub-screen will take you to game information (save/exit/settings/etc.). In the primary gameplay screen is a constantly rotating cube as a mouse cursor. You can point to where you want to travel to next, or perhaps whom you would like to talk to next. At first, I was a little annoyed that, unlike Of Light And Darkness, this didn’t appear to have hotspots to indicate where you could move. But, somewhat cleverly, the rotating cube forms arrows as it rotates to indicate possible directions of movements, and transforms into a scaling eyeball icon to indicate that something can be examined.

So far, this is just typical adventure fare. Allow me to spoil the game all the way up until you learn the secret for building T-rex-proof citadels: Wander around the citadel, familiarize yourself with places you can travel, including the citadel foyer, the main hallway, the king’s chambers, your bedroom, the mummy crypt, and the execution chamber. Eloi, the advisor is talking to your dad, the king. Pop says you can’t leave the citadel because it’s dangerous out there. Eloi meets you in your room to tell you to sneak out the side door with Eloi’s sister, Dina, to go visit Grandpa Tau, who’s dying. You stealthily cross the snow-covered plains with Dina to watch their old pterodactyl die. He gives you some items before croaking. You trek back to the citadel and visit the cryptkeeper. This is when he gives you your present of a courage amulet. You give this to Dina to give her courage to enter the executioner’s chamber to talk to the executioner because she has the ability to translate his gibberish. He then gives you your present– the tooth of the guy who designed the citadel. A clue! …

Bored yet? I sure was. I got a little further and figured out the secret to building the uncrackable citadels. Then I got a prism. I didn’t have the motivation to jump through the next hoop and figure out what to do with it. What I’m getting at here is that the proceedings are — at least the beginning of the game — rote adventure game tedium. Alas, I never got to see the strategy or RPG game elements.

Do you still care about the unbreakable citadel secret? There’s a giant lizard underneath the place blowing on a giant horn that apparently scares off the T-rex’s. I think that has something to do with it. Then there is the matter of keeping the citadels safe while they are still under construction. It turns out the secret here is harmonious collaboration between the non-T-rex dinosaurs and the humans. The dinosaurs are on construction detail while the humans fight any T-rex’s who drop by. Or the duties might be reversed. Either way, it didn’t seem that ~~earth~~Eden-shattering. But apparently, it would have been necessary to coordinate that kind of effort later in the game to construct more citadels in order to protect more humans, and probably to re-energize strained dino-human relations.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Adventure Games