Who Shot Johnny Rock?

Posted on March 11, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

This is my first exposure to this curious genre of American Laser Games interactive movie shooters, a genre mashup that came about before anyone was likely aware of the concept of a genre mashup. Allegedly, Who Shot Johnny Rock? was wildly popular along with other games from the same group, the most famous of which was Mad Dog McCree. Maybe these games worked better in the arcade where players got to use a gun instead of a mouse. I do remember seeing such games in the arcade and they certainly were novel, which is great for an arcade run.

Unfortunately, I think novelty was probably the one and only thing this game and others like it had going. At first, I thought that maybe this would be an I-movie type game. But as I started it up, I remembered that this was from the Mad Dog McCree folks and that shooting would somehow figure prominently. So a lounge act by the name Johnny Rock has been brutally riddled with bullets. His now-former fiancee enlists the help of you, a private investigator, in order to find who killed him in this quasi-noir 20s-style detective comic story. The whole affair begins in a surreal enough manner. She wanders into your office but there is a thug close behind. You have to plug him fast before he can do you first.

Who Shot Johnny Rock? -- client oblivious to shooter

The woman continues as if nothing is wrong, even as goon after nameless goon files through the door, or crashes through windows to put this P.I. on ice before you have a chance to accept the case. Shoot or be shot.

The mechanics of each possible encounter are as such: The encounter is a FMV scene that has a slight window of opportunity to react after the character actually brandishes a weapon. If they don’t show a weapon, no matter how suspicious or overtly threatening they appear, you are treated to a funeral scene where someone patiently and condescendingly tutors you on how not to screw up. If you don’t shoot within the proper window of opportunity, then it’s off to a hospital cutscene where a wisecracking doctor removes the foreign material from your body, but only if you have $400; otherwise, he leaves you for dead and it’s off to the morgue for a sly comment courtesy of the undertaker. If you happen to hit the hostile presence within the window of opportunity, you get to continue the quest/case.

There is a minor adventure element at work here in that you have an overhead city map that allows you to select where you would like to visit next. You must visit the hangouts of the “Four Diseases” — big time gangsters in the city — to learn what they know. But not without a major shootout first, one for each locale. The game is primarily trial and error, mostly error on my part. But what it lacks in playability, it makes up for in comedy relief. When you take out this random henchman during the pool hall shootout, he actually leaps forward onto the table to die:

Who Shot Johnny Rock? -- pool hall shootout

This game was also available on the Philips CD-i and Sega CD systems. I can’t imagine having to play this on a system with no mouse! To have to react to the characters using only a control pad — ouch.

See Also:

Mad Dog McCree for the Sega CD — I was right, it’s a nightmare to control

At MobyGames:

Who Shot Johnny Rock?

Flash Traffic: City of Angels

Posted on March 2, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Flash Traffic: City of Angels is an interactive movie that has held my curiosity ever since I spotted its MPEG trailer on an ATI installation CD quite a few years ago. At first, I thought the content of the trailer was supposed to be a joke, what with a vaguely Jerry Seinfeld-looking DEA agent kicking off the affair followed soon after by a somewhat goofy gunfight. Don’t believe me? Watch the trailer yourself:

Thanks to this gaming experiment, it occurred to me to go searching for the game, even though the corresponding MobyGames entry is fairly complete, I still wanted to experience this game. In fact, I have been using this method to scavenge for a number of old games that aren’t yet in MobyGames– think of an old game I’ve heard of and would like to play, search for an eBay store that has it, and find other obscure titles they have in stock. I managed to procure a copy of this game, still wrapped and with a “Review copy — not for resale” sticker on it (as well as a copy of Deer Avenger 4 from the same seller; I only need #3D and the quadrilogy will be complete!). It’s interesting to note that this game comes with an advertisement for Rise of the Robots, a famously sub-par game, to be charitable. Not a good sign.

The game runs great in DOSBox — no surprise there. Let me tell you, interactive movies don’t get much more pure than this. This game plays an FMV clip and then presents you with 3 lines of dialogue to choose from. Repeat, often in circles. That’s it. Most I-movies at least try to throw a few puzzles your way. Tsunami obviously must have thought their story was all they needed to make this “game” compelling.

Flash Traffic: City of Angels -- Intro Briefing

Unfortunately, Flash Traffic doesn’t trust your reading comprehension ability and sees fit to read each dialogue option to you as your roll over the line. Your character has an obnoxious, quasi-Texan drawl. So much for the you-are-there effect. Even though your character is never seen, the creators saw fit to make sure that your character is most certainly heard. I think it’s possible to shut off these line readings but I couldn’t figure out how to click that radio button (seriously, the dialog box wouldn’t let me).

Flash Traffic: City of Angels -- Interrogation

So the DEA raids a suspected drug lab only to find a nuke factory instead. The game is a race by the FBI to track down the bomb before it incinerates Los Angeles. The game copy boasts about being filmed in locations throughout L.A. More specifically, parking garages and empty office buildings throughout L.A., as you will ascertain from the foregoing game trailer. The beginning of the game has you and your partner/underling Dave interrogating 2 guys nabbed from the lab. The interrogations go around in circles until I eventually stumble on a way out of what is no doubt a virtual maze underneath the game’s covers. I don’t even clearly understand what happens next, or really, why the game took this next path, but the protaganists decide to go find “the Korean”. The Korean who has a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher in his car trunk and takes out the FBI van (huh? the FBI tools around in a non-descript white van?).

Flash Traffic: City of Angels -- Korean Rocket Launcher

So that’s my first game over. I have the opportunity to replay, but that only plays from the beginning of the van scene, where there is no other path but certain detonation. I could restore from a saved game, if I had saved up to this point, or I can restart. So I restart and make different decisions but still wind up at the same rocket-propelled dead end.

I searched and found a FAQ/walkthrough for this game. It confirms for me that the game is on par with standard side scrolling action games when it comes to sheer trial & error tedium and that it’s common to follow a path that doesn’t make any sense, such as the Korean situation above. Though on the second play, I actually received the exposition about who the Korean was and why we were off to meet doom at his hands. Naturally, I still couldn’t avoid it.

About multimedia, this game renders its FMV in the standard DOS VGA 320x200x256 video mode using a custom video format named BFI. However, there was a special version of this game and several other Tsunami games that used MPEG video. How to decode in real time on a 486? Using the bundled RealMagic hardware decoding card. A rare artifact in this day and age, but I will continue the search.

Total Carnage

Posted on March 1, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

There are already several versions of Total Carnage in MobyGames (including SNES, Amiga, Amiga CD32, and a Jaguar version published only 2 years ago). But there is not a PC version, as my CD-ROM for the eBay 50-lot grab bag advertises, so let’s dive in.

This game seems so darn familiar. Where have I heard of it before? When I start playing, it becomes all too clear: Total Carnage was an old arcade game that was ostensibly based on the same engine and gameplay concept as another popular arcade game at the time called Smash TV.

If you’re not familiar with either game, they are set apart by their control scheme. In the arcade version, the player controlled the on-screen character’s actions with 2 joysticks– 1 joystick controlled the character’s movements while the other joystick controlled the direction of fire. This meant that the directions of movement and fire were completely independent. This works great when you actually have 2 joysticks at your disposal. However, most home conversions have had to make due with the control facilities at the disposal of the nominal PC or console. This makes the game significantly tougher. To be sure, there are many, many ways to configure the game:

Total Carnage -- control scheme configuration

If you actually have 2 joysticks, you can certainly use them. If you have enough dexterity, you can recreate the free form control scheme using lots of keyboard keys. Or a combination of keys and a joystick/joypad. The easiest configuration (for me) is to simply accept the crippled ability and have one firing button on the gamepad so that I can only fire in the direction I am moving. I didn’t get very far with the any control scheme and I tried all kinds of combos. It’s probably just as well. I remember playing the game’s Smash TV predecessor on free play at a vintage arcade. Was that ever a tedious exercise. “Is this game over yet?” was all that my gaming companion and I could say.

Technical: The game has two FLIC files for FMV. Fun. It’s also interesting to note that when DOSBox (v0.65) saved the PNG screenshots, it saw fit to save them as 320×196 instead of 320×200. I have no idea why. Is there an undocumented VGA mode I don’t know about?

Psychotron And Co.

Posted on February 15, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

There’s one more Windows-based interactive movie on my list that I have neglected up to this point: Psychotron. To be fair, it’s actually just a demo that came on a disc with several other demos and 2 full games published by the same company (Merit Software). I vividly remember when I first picked up this title along with 19 others. I perused the multimedia on the CD-ROM, as is my custom. This demo had a number of Cinepak-encoded AVI videos. Videos that are pretty much on the bottom rung of all FMV I have experienced. Seriously, watching this junk almost made me snap and scrap this entire multimedia hobby if it meant I wouldn’t have to watch this kind of nonsense ever again.

How bad is it? First, the tracking lines. Yes, tracking lines. If I were to piece together their game-making process, I would have to assume that they filmed their actors with a tape-based videocamera and then replayed the video in a VCR hooked up to digital capture equipment. They most likely cued the tape in the right place, paused, started the capture gear, and unpaused the VCR. Thus, most videos seem to start with tracking bars.

Then there’s the actual content of the videos. The demo included scenes where you’re trying to get information from a mega-geek in a cemetary and from some mobsters at their poker game. Now, I have to admit that I’m an extremely poor judge of the acting craft. Generally, I can only spot bad acting if it’s really bad, especially wooden acting. These people play their characters as the most extreme stereotypes imaginable for nerds and Italian gangsters. I have edited together 7 videos (first 2 are the geek, last 5 are at the mobsters’ poker table) for your review:

Good acting? Bad acting? Overacting? Like I say, I’m no expert. But I’m not sure if I believe certain whiplash transitions like when the head mobster’s frustration turns to a calm resolve to cap you.

The Psychotron demo is a Windows app (MobyGames reports a DOS version but this demo is for Windows). It doesn’t work in native XP or Windows 95/VMware. Color me surprised. It looks like I will need to find a way to install Windows 3.1 (either on a real machine, via VMware, or through DOSBox) sooner or later to handle a number of games. I would still like to get a glimpse of how this game actually plays. I think this would be a great candidate for my I-movie engine re-implementation brainstorm, especially when I studied the directory structure and found dozens of straight text files that are shown in the game. Simple data structure; that’s what I’m guessing. From a spot check of some of the text files, I learned that the president of the United States in this game’s universe is Richard Marx.

I want to play some new game this evening. There is plenty to choose from on the disc. Here’s the menu:

Selection Menu for a bunch of Merit-published titles

I think I’ll check out that DOS-based full Blade Warrior game. Err, no I won’t. It crashes DOSBox (0.65). For giggles, I tried it in the WinXP command prompt. “Program too big to fit in memory.”

Let’s check out the demo for Isle Of The Dead. This works quite a bit better. The game is from 1993 and is sort of a one-off of Wolfenstein 3D. Your plane crash-landed on an island that happens to be infested with zombies. Explore around the island’s perimeter which is quite safe. Pick up your basic items (health, shotgun & shells, coconuts). You’ll get stuck pretty quick if you don’t use your machete to find just the right spot on the wall of vegetation in order to break through to where the real action is. The deadly action. The deadly, undead action. The nearly impossible-to-get-2-meters-into-the-jungle deadly undead action. One moment, you’re looking at this:

Isle Of The Dead -- Facing off with a zombie

The next moment, the zombie gang is tearing you to pieces (FMV! Flic files):

Okay, I’m pleased to say that I actually played a game today. So this is just the demo of Isle Of The Dead. According to this old review of the game, the full version cost $70! That’s not Canadian dollars, either– 214 is in Texas.

Gender Wars

Posted on February 14, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Gender Wars is another game that doesn’t strictly need any MobyGames data from me. But it’s a game I haven’t yet experienced. And what game could be more appropriate on Valentine’s Day? This is another game from the eBay 50-lot grab bag and came with no manual when I received it.

Executing the game launches into what is intended to be an academic point/counterpoint historical discussion about how the great Gender War flared. It quickly devolves into escalating barbs between the male and female historians. Drink it all in:

At its core, Gender Wars is an isometric perspective strategy action game. Your mission is to assemble a team of suitable soldiers for a variety of missions, sometimes bloody, sometimes sneaky. You have a selection of team leaders and soldiers from which to build your team of 4. Various soldiers are rated differently in 4 different attributes which is supposed to make some soldiers more suited for certain missions than others.

Mostly, the game is an excuse to exchange ruthless, equally sexist barbs at both genders. Here is a shot from the FMV sequence when the men approach their drop point. One is drunk and can’t offer much-needed assistance in landing the craft:

Here is the first mission briefing for the mens’ side. I retyped it because the screenshot was tiny and indecipherable:

Right lads, Coach (The Patriarch unless you’d forgotten who THAT was) has got in mind a little mission for us. It’s our job to stealthily infiltrate the female city and cause as much destruction and mayhem as is manly possible.

This will be the start of a cunning scheme to once and for all overthrow the Matriarch and her evil harlots.

Our target is their egg-shed. They reckon it’s well guarded but one of our lads could get through wearing only a pair of boxer shorts and armed with a can of beer. Once you’re inside grab the storage tubes and kill any women you see. The supplies you need are in repro-tower B but if you accidentally go to the wrong one and lots of women should accidentally die because you accidentally riddled them with laser bolts, I’m sure the Coach will understand that you were confused and misguided by the emotional effects of war. Our Boss knows the score. Remember, body count up, female population down.

As you might be able to guess, I’m just trying to fill up space here. I didn’t play the game too long. I had trouble figuring it out. Plus, real time strategy is another genre that I have never gotten into. I’m pretty sure that’s what this game is. It’s hard to gauge since I don’t have much of a reference point. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Here’s an action screenshot depicting the manly men invading a female lounge area:

You lead your team around the base, through series of elevators and corridors and lounge areas on your way to the mission goal. Kill any women you see. A lot of games where I control just one entity confuse me. These games where I am expected to control multiple entities in real time are always beyond my grasp. You can issue orders such as “fire at will” or “wait for my signal”. Plus, the character you are presently controlling only fires when you indicate; the others are operated on some limited AI. When I enter a new room, the other soldiers may or may not follow. This game reminds me a lot of Powermonger — the virtual cat herding simulator — in this regard.

I’m just thankful that there was an instructional text file on the CD-ROM. This isn’t exactly a point & click interactive movie (though I do like the FMV on offer). I didn’t quite understand this segment of the keyboard quick reference. Is there a range of keys between PgUp and PgDn on some keyboards?

 PAGE UP  - Fire at Will - soldiers fire at anything that moves
            On my Signal - soldiers only start shooting when you do
            Defence Only - soldiers shoot when they are attacked
 PAGE DN  - Fall Back    - soldiers retreat and `fall-in' behind you

What kind of fun do the ladies have in Gender Wars? I’ll end with the briefing for the first female-on-male mission:

As the Matriarch lays down her plans to annihilate the Patriarch’s interbred forces, we have been blessed with the task of gathering information about their so-called Military Corps.

The Communications Sector is the backbone of all the city’s information exchange. If we access their computer terminals we can insert listening programs that will send copies of all their communications to our base. The squad should be kept small for this mission, to minimise the chance of alerting the enemy to your presence.

You will be given four encrypted cards, each of which must be placed in a different terminal. You only need to insert one card to complete the mission, but if you insert others our listening system will be more secure. Some of the messages that we will receive are certain to be encrypted so try to get your hands on a decoding card. Unfortunately you will have to kill one of the senior staff to get one. Oh dear, what a pity.

Once the mission is complete return to the pickup point for your triumphant return home.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you and yours.

See Also:

The Lawnmower Man, also developed by SCi

At MobyGames:

Gender Wars

Spycraft: The Great Game

Posted on February 5, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Some readers have recommended that I lay off the interactive movies, for the sake of my own sanity. I thought about it. But I see this list of known, unprocessed I-movies staring back at me from the surface of my gaming command center and I just can’t bring myself to abandon, or even postpone, the mission at this point, no matter how much it might be wearing on my psychological and emotional well-being. That, my friends, is commitment.

Besides, the next game on the I-movie roster — Spycraft: The Great Game — is one whose movie sequences I have perused before using a video decoder I helped reverse engineer and re-implement. Thus, I know it’s not all bad. In fact, the movie sequences are very good. Further, when I actually played the game this evening, I realized that it’s not pure I-movie but actually places heavy emphasis on some very unique puzzles. For that, I have placed this game in the puzzle games category in addition to the I-movie category, and I think even the I-movie category is iffy.

You play some CIA guy. There’s a big international event brewing. You are summoned into the director’s office to be on a team to investigate a new international crisis. But first, there is training. Generally, these are unique puzzles with a little faux FPS-type action thrown in for good measure. For example, the first training exercise is to use an image enhancement device to make out the license plate on the following picture:

The game features a lot of convenient little gadgets. Between two of the training puzzles, your tutor shows you a camera that operates on film but explains that it has backup, low-resolution images stored in a digital chip. What’ll they think of next? (This game was published in 1996.) Actually, now that I think about it, that device would work better for espionage applications (or would have worked better before film cameras were more or less crushed by digital counterparts) if it operated on more of a steganographic principle and allowed a knowledgable operator to snap innocuous photos on the film and secret photos on the digital chip.

The game is filled with tools that are so sophisticated that it’s a wonder why they need human intervention at all. But there wouldn’t be much of a game in that case. Here’s another interesting puzzle:

Spycraft -- Kennedy Assassination Tools (K.A.T.)

This is the K.A.T.– Kennedy Assassination Tools. This program uses a camera panorama to reconstruct a 3D wireframe model of an assassination site. You need to find two places on the scene where the bullets impacted. Then, use the tool to draw a trajectory to figure out where the round was fired from. Use the panorama camera view to find the suspect and then use the suspect ID computer to put together a computer sketch of the suspect. Finally, you can ask the computer to perform a search for possible matches based on the sketch.

There are lots of information resources in this game, including your PDA and your computer which both have access to impressive databases. Among other things, you have an org chart of your immediate superiors and reports. Here’s the dossier for one your subordinates:

I thought the game designers were taking things pretty seriously until I saw where she lived. Chevy Chase, Maryland. Come on, Spycraft, what do you take me for? But on a whim, I googled. Well, I’ll be– town of Chevy Chase, dot org. In fact, there does exist a Chevy Chase Blvd. in Chevy Chase, MD (though no Chevy Chase Road). I can go to bed knowing I learned something new tonight.

The answers to the puzzles always seem to be multiple choice. This is fortunate in most cases, such as the license plate puzzle. Rather than actually having to make out the grainy characters on the plate, the solution is obvious out of the three given. However, the choices grow more bountiful later in the game. And don’t you dare guess. If you get the wrong answer too many times, the director reassigns you to the CIA World Factbook division, which I’m guessing isn’t thought of very highly inside the Agency, or at least not in this game’s story arc. Here’s that particular game over video:

You know, I should start listing the games from this experiment that I have really enjoyed and that I want to revisit someday when this experiment is over, or when I simply need a break. This game definitely makes the cut.

See also:

Interrogation Minigames

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: DOS Games