Babes In Toyland

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I became aware of tonight’s game — Babes In Toyland — somewhat by chance. On a lark, I started Googling some of the credits that I entered for Little Caesar’s Fractions Pizza to see if, in particular, any of the voice actors had done anything else. This is how I found the website of one aspiring young actress named Ashley Fox Linton who lists this game as well as the pizza game on her video game credits (humorously, her website claims that Fractions Pizza was published for Domino’s). This is just one way I find out about more obscure games to search for on eBay. According to my records, I got this game in a load that also included the wacky-sexy daredevil romp, Bikini Beach Stunt Racer.

Babes In Toyland turns out to be based on a 1997 animated film. The movie and the game both seriously violate accepted Santa Claus canon by asserting a storyline in which Santa Claus actually outsources the production of Christmas toys to a location known as Toyland. Toyland has just completed an order for the jolly old elf when the villain Barnaby swipes the toys and scatters them around Toyland. It’s up to our young hero and heroine to recover the toys before St. Nick arrives for pickup, lest they be placed on the permanent “naughty” list.

It’s another Macromedia Director-based, kids’ game. It also has the most phenomenally simple installer of any Windows game I have seen yet. The setup.exe game just places a shortcut on your hard drive that can launch the game from the CD-ROM. It’s done in a flash.

Since it’s a kids’ game, I know darn well what that entails: minigames! 9 of them in this case. One deals with the famed Humpty Dumpty. The villain’s cat startles the egg-man who falls from his famous wall and shatters.

Babes in Toyland -- Humpty Dumpty after his notorious fall

Despite the fact that the traditional Humpty mythos clearly explains the difficulty faced by all the king’s horses as well as the king’s men in attempting to reassemble this monstrosity, the game still sees fit to task 2 children with that very endeavor.

One of the toys must be recovered from the shoe house, the one where the old lady lives inside with many children. You must help her locate all of them in what shapes up to be a pixel hunting game. Another game which involves descending pairs of red eyes in a haunted forest is more or less a glorified shoot-em-up game using a flashlight to expose the goblins. Then there is this well from which you have to save ducks, but not fish, using the bucket:

Babes in Toyland -- Dog-looking ducks in a well

I have never seen such dog-looking ducks before. The game was starting to wear thin when I earned this unexpected, but not wholly unwelcome, reprieve:

Babes in Toyland -- Macromedia Director error

But I still like collecting full screenshot sets for these types of simple, colorful games, so it was back to play for me. It doesn’t take long to clear all 9 puzzles. When Santa arrives, he is pleased with Toyland’s commitment to quality and no doubt ecstatic about the money he is saving by not having to rely on domestic elf labor, or deal with the elf labor unions. Upon successful completion, I earn this certificate:

Babes in Toyland -- Certificate from Santa

I am not quite sure what to make of this, particularly the date. The game probably came out in 1997, the same year as the film. I checked my system clock and it correctly reports that today is a day in the year 2007. I wonder if the game saw the date greater than 1999 and filled in 2010+ automatically.

Everything I Need To Know I Learned From NES Games

Posted on August 12, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s goal was to shove as many educational NES games into MobyGames as I could possibly tolerate in one night. These games tend to be a nice source of database points, at least for myself and DJP Mom. It’s easy to blow through them in 10-30 minutes, depending on how involved you want to get, and write a perfect database entry with very complete information and a thorough screenshot set.

There is a series of Fisher-Price-licensed titles for the NES that somehow have not made it into the database yet (couldn’t be that I’m the only person obsessive enough to want the database to have all American NES games ever). The first one that I played of the set is kind of fun: Fisher-Price: Firehouse Rescue. You navigate your Fisher-Price firetruck around the dangerously convoluted streets that comprise your fire protection district:

Fisher-Price: Firehouse Rescue-- Poorly planned neighborhood

Who planned these neighborhoods?! Lives could hang in the balance depending on my response time. Perhaps I’m overreacting, though, since no houses ever actually seem to be on fire. When you arrive at a residence, you merely extend your engine’s ladder to each of the smiling house inhabitants in turn who calmly evacuate for no good reason when you position the ladder correctly.

Still, I was reasonably impressed with the level of graphical detail present in this game. This should not be a big surprise because, seriously, what else would they have spent their ROM budget on? It’s not a very complicated game, though the mazes get a little more challenging as the levels progress.

The other 2 Fisher-Price games are I Can Remember, a card memory game, and Perfect Fit, where you must match shapes into silhouettes:

As you can see, in later levels, it becomes necessary to flip shapes to make them match. You can play either of these 2 games against another human or the computer (codenamed: Electro). It’s difficult to articulate how painful it is to watch the computer attempt to perform the above exercise at the level the programmers perceived a preschooler would do it. I don’t think preschoolers necessarily play games the same way drunks would.

The most interesting educational game of the evening was Mickey’s Safari In Letterland. Mickey Mouse must venture to exotic locales spanning the globe — or at least, some globe, not exactly the one we’re used to — and collect diamonds that have letters in order to spell out three-letter words. If you complete a stage after collecting the 3 letters and spelling a proper word, Mickey will show you a picture of what that word represents, he will spell it out, and he will say it, all with digitized voice samples. This is probably the most extensive use of speech I have seen yet in a NES cartridge.

I especially liked this detail in the ‘Pyramid’ location:

Mickey's Safari In Letterland -- Mouse sarcophagus in the pyramid level

A mouse sarcophagus. Mickey faces all manner of ferocious creatures in this game, including, but not limited to, hippos, snakes, alligators, porcupines, and perhaps most terrifying of all, seals (in the high, snowy Yukon). However, it’s absolutely impossible to fail in this game. The enemies are all essentially rubber off of which Mickey bounces. Long falls daze him a bit, but he gets right back up on his adventure.

4 games down tonight, and there are still a few more educational NES titles to go.

Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade

Posted on July 15, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Time for another intensely lightweight, kid-targeted video game romp– let’s face it, these games ain’t gonna enter themselves into MobyGames. And I even located a pile of stuff procured from eBay back in March that I forgot to log into the master spreadsheet. It just doesn’t end!

Tonight’s fluff-fest is Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade. It comes from a franchise of Clue Finders games which generally appear to be educational. This title is actually a collection of 4 games, only one of which could conceivably be loosely tagged as having content remotely academic. The setup is that an all-star team of villains who debuted in previous Clue Finders franchise games has been assembled by a new mystery villain. This collaboration plots to lure the team of protagonist children into their home. These villains hold serious grudges towards the Clue Finders based on their previous encounters. The game contains a Rogue Gallery menu option where you can view dossiers of each villain. Cleverly, the dossier also includes a mention of the franchise game where the antagonist premiered. This is the dossier for one Pericles Lear:

Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade -- Pericles Lear's Criminal Dossier

So, the guy lives and works in San Francisco and has an affinity for chemistry. On closer examination, I just noticed that the above data does not really paint a menacing portrait of a criminal mastermind.

Anyway, there are 4 Clue Finders, 4 villains, and 4 traps/games. Each villain designed one trap to ensnare one of the children. Fiendishly, each trap is tailored for each child’s specialty. I suppose I shouldn’t try to understand why diabolical crime geniuses would give their victims a fighting chance in this manner. The first game has Owen, the team’s skateboarding nutrition specialist and pizza enthusiast, skateboarding on giant pizzas using a giant sub sandwich as a skateboard. Given Owen’s passion, I can understand that he might be a natural at this task. But if his task were switched with Leslie’s book task, both of these young go-getters might just meet with their early demise as intended.

Speaking of Leslie, her task is to jump on books. This takes a few sentences to explain, but it was my favorite of the four games on offer:

Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade -- Leslie's Bookerang Library

The back of the library has a topic; in this case, it’s capital cities. The demons on the bookshelves are tossing books into the room. Leslie must only jump on books whose titles contain capital cities. When she jumps on a qualifying book, that book becomes permanent. If she jumps on a book with a non-matching subject, she crushes it. The idea is to stack permanent books in order to climb to the exit. When she has stacked enough books, a rope ladder extends down so she can climb up. Sometimes I would disregard the ladder since I was having too much fun hopping on books. Leslie can jump 1, 2, or 3 books horizontally, 1 or 2 books vertically, and 1 book diagonally. It takes a little practice to master the jump control but is quite fun.

Leslie’s is the only one of the four games that struck me as even marginally educational. And even that was questionable since the game seemed to feature an embarrassingly limited dictionary of terms related to each category.

Santiago’s task is to play a series of pinball boards where he is the pinball. Actually, he is in the cockpit of a rocket-powered pinball. He can turn and thrust and somewhat control his destiny but is still at the mercy of the various actuators on the board. He must solve various puzzles on the board in order to escape.

The final game deals Joni along with whichever other members have escaped from their respective traps. It’s actually a fairly competent little parallax side-scroller.

Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade -- Joni's Last-Chance Labyrinth

Choice quote: The kids’ timid talking laptop, LapTrap, says of the probably-forged email that lured the gang to the game’s eponymous dangerous abode: “Why don’t email servers ever crash when you want them to?”

Little Miss Scatterbrain

Posted on July 13, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I thought I would shift my attention back to a kids game this evening, especially since an upstart contributor is rocketing up the MobyGames charts by entering dozens of largely overlooked children-oriented entertainment software titles (hi DJP Mom! Keep up the good work). Tonight’s game is The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain which is but one title in a series called “Mr. Men and Little Miss” games. Collect ’em all — and you know I probably will, eventually (I already have another one in the queue). If this opening card is any indicator, there are at least 10 of these titles:

I fear that this game is going to be juvenile, even by the standards of this blog, and my suspicions are quickly confirmed. Akin in animation style and target audience to Cheerios Play Time, I similarly hesitate to classify this game as “educational”. Your guide through this excursion is one Mojo the Mosquito. I keep thinking that he is speaking with an exaggerated stereotypical Italian accent until I realize that the creators were trying to conceptualize what an anthropomorphized talking mosquito would sound like (lots of buzzing and slurring of words). First, he asks you to click on an animal, advising you that the larger the animal, the tougher the game. I’m not so sure about that. The games seem to be the same whether I click the duck or the cow; the other three animals are cat, pig, and sheep. Then you are launched into the main town map:

The story goes like this: It’s morning time, but the sun is nowhere to be seen. Miss Magic calls up Miss Scatterbrain and expresses alarm at this development. Miss Magic would be able to rectify the solar situation except that her magic book was absent-mindedly swiped by Scatterbrain. It’s up to you to help her scour her kitchen cupboards in the dark in order to find the book strictly by the sound it makes when touched. That’s the first minigame.

Little Miss Scatterbrain explores her cupboards

When you retrieve the book and bring it to the town square where Miss Magic is waiting, the realization dawns that there isn’t enough light to read the book. So Miss Somersault — also present at the meeting — goes off to capture fireflies in a jar, thus commencing the second minigame. It’s essentially a point & click game of Whack-A-Mole where you try to click as many popping fireflies as possible before the moon waxes from a first quarter position to a full disc. I’m not sure how much sense that makes, but that’s what the creators used for a timer. My record was 49 fireflies in the allotted time period, though I later figured out that it is impossible to lose this game. Even on the “cow” setting — presumably the toughest — 0 fireflies was enough to succeed.

The story continues like this, leading into many more insipid, un-lose-able minigames. I wanted to be more thorough and explore the different animal options to validate whether there were any differences. However, the story sequences have no fast forward feature and I could only sit through the exposition so many times. The voice acting is tolerable, but clearly done in kids’ puppet show-style voices. I can’t say that I’m necessarily looking forward to logging the remaining items in this series.

At MobyGames:

The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain

See Also:

The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain Archived at Internet Archive

Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest

Posted on March 18, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Remember how I mentioned that interior decoration in the form of choosing and arranging furniture was not my proverbial cup of tea in the game of Restaurant Empire? This Gaming Pathology experiment has reached new lows in emasculating gameplay. Check this out– a minigame that revolves around measuring and cutting drapes:

Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest -- Drape measuring and cutting game

This comes from today’s game, Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest, ostensibly based on a PBS-produced educational TV series (and it shows in the opening animations that were poorly transcoded from television source material). This follows the same general formula as countless other educational kids’ games: A series of odd minigames strung together by a tenuous storyline. In this one, our 3 young protagonists visit the town of Castleblanca, a village run by horrid but civil monsters. The 3 kids also have a mutant bird in tow who sounds like he’s voiced by the ever-grating Gilbert Gottfried, but alas, the credits indicate otherwise. And even though the unholy undead are supposed to be the comically frightening aspect of this town, this no-eyed skeleton can’t hold a candle to the unnaturally glassy-eyed stares of these young ones:

Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest -- D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs

Regarding the actual gaming content, there are 8 minigames/puzzles to play through. All have practice modes that are significantly easier than the actual games in the adventure mode. Each game teaches something to do with mathematics or spatial reasoning. Most are a little difficult to wrap one’s head around at first. But after some practice, the purpose usually clicks. For example, in the Monster Dive game, there is a tank with a low volume of water. The scoreboard tells you how much depth is required for the current diver, plus a custom adjustment for that diver. You must do the math to decide the water level and drop more monsters into the tub to displace water and raise the level.

All in all, this was my favorite minigame:

Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest -- Disco mirrors

Your task in this Disco Deflector game is to adjust the mirrors so that when you throw the switch, the light beam finds its way to the mirror ball without hitting any of the monsters. Then they can boogie like they were meant to.

Operation

Posted on February 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I played through tonight’s game thinking that it was a fresh new game that MobyGames had never heard of. Turns out I was wrong. I figured it out after I had written a new game description and tried to enter the game. It’s an easy mistake to make when MobyGames returns 181 game matches for ‘operation’; I didn’t find the game until I manually typed in the URL based on the site’s friendly URL scheme. I still submitted my new, lengthier description for Operation anyway. Good thing I’m good enough at writing these by now that the authoring didn’t take me that long.

Operation is a computer game adaptation of the classic board game. You remember the one– use a pair of tweezers to remove any number of objects from an unfortunate patient. If you touched anything other than the object, the buzzer would go off. This game offers 5 different hospitals in 5 different locales catering to the needs of 5 different types of patients — Haunted Hospital (monsters), Rainforest (be a vet doc), Space Hospital (operate on aliens), Main Hospital (boring humans), and Dinosaur Hospital (help dinosaurs, perhaps to survive extinction). Each hospital is more or less a conveyor belt of patients. You can treat each patient either via the classical Operation extraction game technique or with a game unique to that level. The classical Operation mode (seen in the screenshots below) allows you to guide a pair of tweezers into the patient and remove the foreign object, while dodging everything else. There are 4 objects per patient (as seen in Disco Wolfman above).

Alternatively, you can cure the patient using the special game for that level. For example, the special game in the Rainforest level is Musical Melodies. I guess your doctor colleague in this level is kind of a new age hippie. The healing process works by her first playing the melodies of a various body parts on the patient, and then you need to replay the sequence; i.e., game of memory.

Operation -- Rainforest Musical Melodies

Other special games include an Asteroids clone where you have to descend into a dinosaur’s upset stomach to break up the rising burp bubbles; and a game where you must guide a frog up and out of a patient’s throat while your doctor colleague for the level inexplicably tosses food down the chute in an effort to thwart the amphibian.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Childrens Games