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

Hello Kitty Dream Carnival

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Remember when I wrote about that South Park episode that featured World of Warcraft and I said that I would likely be analogous to the Butters character playing a Hello Kitty franchise game? Did you think I was joking?

I present Hello Kitty Dream Carnival. I was buying a new office chair at the same office supply store where I procured My Fantasy Wedding and Bratz: Rock Angelz some months back. They’re firmly equal opportunity in their game selection and had 2 different Hello Kitty titles. The other one is Cutie World, but that has already been entered into MobyGames by — who else? — kiddie game-playing comrade DJP Mom.

So there are 8 games/activities, par for the course for this type of game. I just knew there would be a memory/matching game. To its credit, this game’s matching activity is better engineered than most — Ferris Wheel Friends:

Hello Kitty Dream Carnival — Ferris Wheel Friends

This is the first time I have encountered a word search in computer game form. I have to admit that this actually challenged me, if only because I was up against a timer that resets when you find a word.

Hello Kitty Dream Carnival — Pen Pal Word Find

I can’t believe I actually developed a strategy for beating this kid’s game: find a word in the list and put off circling it until the timer is almost up while searching for another word in order to maximize the time.

This was my favorite game: Penguin Plunge. Adjust the drop height and the angle of deflection of the trampoline and try to land the penguin in the tube. Sometimes there are other goals, such as a hoop to jump through or airborne treats to collect on the way.

Hello Kitty Dream Carnival — Penguin Plunge

Not a bad little 1/2 hour screenshot recon.

Educational Sprint

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I worked through a bunch of educational/kids games in this final push towards 10K points (not sure if I’ll actually hit that goal by January 1st, but it won’t be because I don’t have enough material stuffed in the MobyGames submission queue; as of this writing, I have 13 new games waiting for approval which might be a personal record).

Let the record show that I gave Pecos Bill my best shot to no avail. The game wants 640x480x256, and I just couldn’t get my system into that mode, not even with all the compatibility settings. But I do have a rogue version of Apple QuickTime 2.0 running around my system now, thinking that it’s in charge of viewing QuickTime, JPEG images, MPEG movies, and assorted other file types.

I then dove into Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland, a series of games & activities that, while simple, can be described in a complicated manner. For example, I described Fliptrack Mountain to MobyGames as dealing with transport logistics at a level that a child can understand. The game presents you with a transport task (like delivering a present from the top of a mountain to a house elsewhere on the mountain) and challenges you with deciding what transport option would be most appropriate– car, train, boat, or helicopter.

Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland– Fliptrack Mountain

Another activity revolves around following a cookie recipe:

Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland– Cookie baking game

Ahem, I know cookie recipes and at first I was ready to call nonsense on the ratios represented in this recipe. But then I noticed that it just seems to be a matter of making rolled butter cookies, and the proportions look a little better.

I subjected myself — however briefly — to another Mister Men and Little Miss title (you may recall The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain). This game dealt with one Mr. Tickle. These games are perhaps more insufferable than the Make My Video games, though I concede that at least these have an excuse since they are directed at a less serious market.

That does it– I refuse to actively seek out any more of the titles in this particular series, and I know there are a bunch. MobyGames is going to get a really lackluster description for this title since I simply could not handle it for very long.

But then I tracked down an awesome little game based on The Flintstones called Bedrock Bowling; perhaps not strictly educational but definitely kid-targeted, so grant me some reprieve today. Curiously, it comes from a developer named Adrenalin Entertainment which, if you examine their record, already has a few bowling-themed games to their record. This makes me wonder if they went out of their way to come up with a bowling angle when tasked with creating a casual game for the Flintstones franchise.

The Flintstones: Bedrock Bowling– Fred, Barney, and The Great Gazoo

Fred Flintstone is ready to clock out of work and practice for the bowling tournament but his boss threatens him with summary termination if he doesn’t finish a series of trenches by the next morning. A little green, floating, omnipotent alien named The Great Gazoo shows up and saves the day. Gazoo strikes me as a highly insecure Q-like being, who really just wants people to like him. Anyway, he uses his powers to create a series of trenches for Fred. Then he helps him practice bowling by giving him some giant bowling ball half shells that he can use to race through 8 trenches. The levels are highly detailed and animated and quite fun to play.

The Flintstones: Bedrock Bowling– Flooded lane

Each lane has 2 segments and you have to do “well enough” by the checkpoint in order to continue with the second segment. I could never quite figure out what “well enough” was, though. It didn’t matter, though, since nothing ever prohibited you from progressing to the next of the 8 lanes.

Finally, I played a Disney Lilo & Stitch title and ultimately decided I had had enough. I spent much of the game time staring at this minigame, such as it is:

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch Hawaiian Adventure — Hula lesson

You basically get to interact with things on or around the stage, and you can poke the young girls to make them dance for you. You can pull down the screen to watch an FMV of an actual hula dance lesson. The title is supposed to consist of 9 minigames of which this is the first. I eventually learned that clicking on the shell carries me to minigame #2 in which I am expected to help an otherworldly monstrosity by the name of Stitch bumble his way around his spaceship’s crash site picking up junk.

I guess if I’ve learned anything from educational games this year, it’s that there’s a threshold to what level of educational game I can tolerate– the preschool/toddler games are right out. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the Spy Kids Learning Adventures series, which were geared for ages 7-10. Take from that what you will.

Spy Kids Wrap-Up

Posted on December 9, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Hey! Do you need the PDF for Underground Affair? I mirrored it here after rescuing it via the Internet Archive: Spy Kids: Underground Affair. Regrettably, I can’t find a copy of the PDF for The Candy Conspiracy.

It’s time to put this Spy Kids Learning Adventures series to rest and eat up the free MobyGames contribution points that are basically guaranteed by 2 more Macromedia Director-based games: The Nightmare Machine and The Candy Conspiracy.

Or not. To review, these Spy Kids games are animated comic book/educational games that each have 8 minigames as well as a supplementary puzzle book whose puzzles must be solved and the corresponding codes entered at certain junctures in the storyline (for example, in order to gain entry into the enemy’s base; now why does the spy service’s computer control the codes for the enemy’s base?). Each puzzle book has 14 puzzles which remain largely the same from episode to episode. But there is consistently 1 or 2 that trip me up, usually the word unscramble. There is also the word search, which is not difficult, just tedious; most of the puzzles can be solved in under 30 seconds, but the word search requires finding about 30 words in a letter grid, then using the uncircled letters to yield a code phrase, key letters of which yield the final 4-letter code word.

And if the weird puzzles didn’t stop me, the baffling minigames sometimes would. The previous minigame is Penguin Path from The Nightmare Machine. You need to toss fish into unoccupied squares in order to goad the flightless birds into moving. There’s a pattern to how the penguins move, and how to determine which will occupy the square after several penguins rush to it. I never figured out the pattern, but I still got through by focusing on moving one bird at a time.

All the series games seem to have a pair-matching minigame, so I got lucky there. Well, notwithstanding that the games have 20 pairs to match on the medium difficulty level. As in previous games in the series, I often chanced my way through certain minigames, never really figuring out what was going on. Such was the case with Epidemiological Excitement!, my pet name for Incident Reports from The Candy Conspiracy.

The thrust of this game is to study incident reports to find the center of an outbreak of odd behavior wherein young people are eschewing playtime in order to focus on studies and chores. Unfortunately, while I bumbled through this puzzle once and made it past the next 2 minigames, I soon faced the third obstacle — random game crashes. And when I restarted, I had gotten over my beginner’s luck with this game.

Again, if anyone should need the solutions for any of the puzzles, see below in the entry. (Extra credit: Download the PDFs and solve the ones that I have — ahem — been too lazy to solve. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Too lazy, or else I would solve them. Or to just check my work, if you’re up to it. The games ask for codes randomly, so I have not been able to verify each one by entering it.)

Spy Kids: Man In The Moon

Posted on November 20, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Hey! Do you need the PDF for this game? I mirrored it here after rescuing it via the Internet Archive: Spy Kids: Man on the Moon.

There are still 3 more games in the Spy Kids Learning Adventures series, whose surface I merely scratched in The Underground Affair. That was a short investigation because the game was supposed to have a supplemental puzzle book, whose solutions would yield codes that you were expected to constantly enter into the game in order to get anywhere. Fortunately, a reader pointed me to the Brighter Child website where the necessary documents are mirrored.

This Learning Adventure is Man In The Moon. It seems that we have established a presence on the moon, or perhaps just a secret spy base. As the story intro unfolds in the narrated comic book style, a rocket crashed near the moonbase and contact is lost with the remote location soon after. The spy organization decides that the best course of action would be to task our 2 Spy Kid siblings — Carmen and Juni — with investigating the situation on the natural satellite. It seems that their dragonfly spy craft has been retrofit to deal with the rigors of space travel anyway, so why not?

Spy Kids Learning Adventure: Man In The Moon — Story intro

Before I jumped into this game, I downloaded the puzzle PDF (which also happened to be included on the game disc this time) and worked through all the puzzles. Well, I worked through as many as I could that did not require a physical printout, like a logic puzzle that was based on a large word search. I actually quite enjoyed plodding through all of the puzzles. They reminded me heavily of the puzzles from various puzzle-a-day calendars I’ve had over the years, only simpler and much more solvable. So when I begin the game, the story soon prompts me for a code, which I can come through with.

However, if the only part of the game that actually involves me is offline puzzles, then I’m honestly unimpressed. Plus, I am confused as to why there are 3 difficulty levels at the main menu. I soon learn that there are 8 different minigames as part of the story. Some of the minigames are quite interesting. The first one deals with navigating through an asteroid using math.

But my favorite minigame — this had me hooked for hours — was this moon worm invasion. Nope, it’s not a Space Invaders clone. It’s a clone of something, to be sure, but I don’t know what. I know I’ve seen the style of gameplay before.

Spy Kids Learning Adventure: Man In The Moon — Moon worms game

You launch these light grenades at the moon worms. When a grenade connects with 2 or more worms of the same color, that worm goes away, or if 2 grenades connect with one worm, or if 3 grenades connect — poof. Wipe out all the worms and residual grenades, before they breach the perimeter. I guess they’re enforcing lunar litter laws pretty stringently. Seriously, after I took out the final worm, the game was still going on. I thought it was a bug until I managed to wipe out all of the leftover grenades as well.

I would like to take this opportunity to address a subject that has dogged me since the glory days of Tetris: cheating puzzle games. I don’t buy for a moment that these types of games choose the next piece or color on a purely random or even pseudo-random number generator. I know how trivial it is to evaluate the map and algorithmically decide which piece or color would be absolutely useless to the user, and keep throwing those pieces fast and furious. I know your game, puzzle game.

The next minigame occurs when the Spy Kids knock over a shelf of security tapes and have to put them in the right order again. Honestly, I didn’t understand anything about how this puzzle was supposed to work. But I clicked about 3 times on different spots in the puzzle and the game congratulated me. This led to my capture by the primary villain of the game, a fellow who is only the #2 most wanted villain on earth and resents the fact that he’s not #1. In typical villain fashion, he expounds on how he should have known that the powers that be would send the Spy Kids after him. For my part, I think I would be fairly insulted if the government sent a ragtag team of bumbling, bickering, underage siblings to thwart my diabolical plot for world domination. No respect; no respect at all.

Anyway, he restrains the Spy Kids in magneto-chairs. The next minigame is to reverse the magnetic polarity on your watch so that you can repel the magneto-chair and escape. The explanation doesn’t make much sense, nor does the puzzle. The designers must have figured the same and actually made a hint button for this one that illustrated how to solve it. I took the easy way out. Rest assured that it’s not just a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

Spy Kids Learning Adventure: Man In The Moon — Polarity game

This is the final game I got to (before I tried to do something the game wasn’t designed to handle and caused an infinite loop of dialog boxes). You got to guess 15 letters of the word in order to move the crane to the far right side of the machine so that you can recover the villain’s evil device. All those years of faithful Wheel of Fortune viewership finally paid off as I knew to choose the most common English language letters first.

Spy Kids Learning Adventure: Man In The Moon — Crane game

Since the official answer site seems to have gone away, I thought I would post the answers to the puzzles (missions) if anyone Googles them, or just wants to compare notes…

Off-Brand Hunchback

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I have been trying to play some games recently but I have been discouraged by the creeping, non-fun sensation I get when I realize that I’m duty-bound to do a bunch of writing afterwards. That’s right, I seem to have finally hit that wall where playing these games is no longer any fun. Still, I have a goal of hitting 10K MobyGames contribution points before the year is out. And at this point in the experiment, you had better believe I understand the most efficient way to get mucho points off of a single game — by exploiting any given Macromedia Director-based game. Why? For these reasons:

They are often spec’d to run on 2, sometimes 3 platforms (Windows 95, Mac, and sometimes Windows 3.x).
I usually have a full cover art set of 3-5 scans.
The games are easy to blow through in a 1/2 hour and I can get a complete description of the game and a diverse set of unique screenshots, usually 20-30.
These games nearly always neatly roll their credits. Enter them for one platform. Once approved, easily copy & paste them for the other platforms.
These games are often produced by obscure, one-hit wonder-type companies that only ever produced a game or 2 before learning the hard way that the road to riches isn’t paved with cheap CD-ROM entertainment. The companies often aren’t in the database yet for this reason.

For all of these reasons, Babes in Toyland recently netted me well in excess of 100 contribution points.

With that, allow me to present the Director-based game, Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Quasimodo in a page from the interactive storybook

Published in 1996, this title is not based on Disney’s movie from that same year. Indeed, today’s specimen might be termed in some circles as a knock-off, but is it really? Disney does not actually have exclusive rights to the Hunchback story, only certain characteristics unique to their telling.

Anyway, this game consists of 4 minigames — rather abysmal minigames, I should note — based around the artwork shown in the story. The main attraction is the interactive storybook. Pages are shown as above. A text overlay is shown onscreen with part of the story. A narrator reads the text while segments are highlighted so that the user (presumably a young child who is disappointed that this game is not based on the real deal from Disney) can follow along. There is also a produced song that the user can opt to listen to. It comes off as something from an easy-listening radio station. I suppose it could very well have been the lead radio single from the Disney Hunchback.

This is one of the minigames, Make-A-Match:

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Make-A-Match memory game

You recognize the concept– the card-matching memory game. This variation is unique in that it gives the player as much time as desired to study the board before covering it up with rocks. Another game called Ring The Bell is yet another memory game where the player must remember and replay and sequence of bell tones.

This was the worst game for play control reasons:

It is called Rat Maze and what makes it so bad is that you have to click on the arrows on the left in order to move the cheese. The problem is that the underlying input mechanism wasn’t programmed in a very future-proof manner and even the speediest mouse click will send the cheese bolting to the opposite end of the maze.

This last item counts more as an ‘activity’ than a ‘game’ — Gargoyle Builder. Build your very own gargoyle from various colored body, arm, and head styles. Then you can press the ‘dance’ button to make him, well, spasm uncontrollably:

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Gargoyle Builder game

I admit that I have not read the original Hunchback tale (I didn’t even sit through all the pages in this animated storybook), though I did see Disney’s 1996 film (which, as an unabashed fan of 1990s animated Disney fare, I thought was an extraordinarily mediocre effort, save for the soundtrack). I did a text search for the word ‘gargoyle’ in Wikipedia’s entry for the story and came up empty-handed. Could it be that this game was brazenly ripping off that aspect of Disney’s creative license? Perhaps the people who developed this game didn’t read the original story either, but just saw the Friday premiere of the 1996 film and worked all through the weekend on this treatment.

This all reminds me of an old Suck.com essay called Faux Film Festival:

It’s a familiar, horrifying scenario. An exhausted parent in a video store or supermarket sees a videotape packaged for sale. The tape boasts a familiar title — Aladdin or The Hunchback of Notre Dame — and an attractive sticker price. Upon arriving home, the tape is proffered to media-savvy children, who immediately proclaim, in loud, whiny voices, “This isn’t the real Aladdin.”

The article notes that Disney lost a lawsuit to try to block such knock-offs. This might help to explain why, in recent years, they seem to have moved away from adapting traditional (read: public domain) stories (the last I can recall is 1999’s Tarzan) and more towards new properties (like The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo & Stitch).

What floors me the most about this game is that the guilty parties still seem to be in business: Peter Pan Industries, the publisher, is still around and is still ripping off everything Disney does. Amazing. Check out their catalog. They have, not one, but three episodes of The Little Cars (see Disney’s Cars). There is also Ratatoing, which I strongly suspect is influenced by Disney’s Ratatouille.

The game was developed by Right Angle, Inc. who has a portfolio to show for their 14 years in operation. This game, however, is not showcased.

At MobyGames:

Hunchback of Notre Dame

See Also:

Hunchback of Notre Dame Archived at Internet Archive

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Childrens Games