Ohio Distinctive Software

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

This weekend’s trip to the thrift shop yielded not 1, but 2 separate CD-ROMs from an outfit known as Ohio Distinctive Software.

I assumed it was just another in a long line of defunct software outfits. But as you can plainly see from the link, they’re still quite operational. And they have a huge catalog of titles for me to scavenge from various spent sources at bargain basement prices (certainly not for the prices they expect on their site).

These are educational software titles through and through. True to form, the manuals contained on the CD-ROMs present a classical academic conundrum — how to turn in source material as your own work. In this case, the manual perfectly, neutrally describes its game in a manner ready for inclusion into MobyGames. My difficulty will be coming up with my own rewording.

Not a big problem, though; the manuals are far more detailed than is absolutely necessary and I think I can express the games in simpler terms. The first game is GeoRunner. It revolves around a trademark ODS character named Blit (memo to game companies: don’t task your programmers with creative endeavors such as mascot naming or else you end up with something like ‘Blit’). This is a little alien dude whose only raison d’être is to get captured. He’s basically a serial captive. He gets captured so much that there is a governmental agency named the Blit Rescue and Tracking Squad (BRATS, I guess) devoted to getting him out of binds (motto: “U Findum Freeum”).

Your method for freeing him? You have to track down keys in different countries. Collect enough keys and unlock Blit’s current cage. Then he skateboards right into another cage. Don’t think about the setup; it’ll only frustrate you. In order to find the countries that hold the keys, follow the clues that the game gives. In the easier levels, these clues are very straightforward (“Go to El Salvador”). In the more advanced levels, they become trivia about the country (“Go to the country that used to be called Abyssinia“).

I must confess I was learning some interesting geographical trivia. If only there were some way to achieve the same effect without the grating Blit.

The second title is Superheroes Math Challenge. Tech support time: This game reports the message: “This program requires at least 3MB of free virtual memory to run”. My 2 GB of physical RAM must not be enough. I can only guess at the logic the game (or the underlying Macromedia Director engine) must be using to make its determination. Fortunately, ODS addresses this precise issue on their website. Unfortunately, it’s incorrect. They advise the user to manually dial down their amount of virtual memory to the range of 200-400. But that’s 200 MB – 400 MB. Following their example, I set the range from 2 MB – 4 MB and the game ran fine. Just a tech note for the inevitable Googler stumbling upon this blog post. Be sure to reset the virtual memory when you are done with the game.

Once again, the manual severely over-explains the game. Basically, you choose one of 3 “heroes” (Blit makes an appearance again, but as hero instead of victim) and take them flying. The game gives you a math formula to solve. You have to fly toward the correct solution. This was the level 1 challenge:

$Superheroes Math Challenge - Adding oranges$

Honestly, all of the problems were either adding 2 oranges or 2 apples. And, umm, I still only got 4 correct on the first round. Hey, leave me alone! The controls aren’t all that responsive and there are other objects to run into. I decided to see how hard things could get and cranked it up to level 50. This covers square roots and negative numbers:

$Superheroes Math Challenge - Tougher problems$

It’s a one-trick game but it was suprisingly fun while forcing me to fly and do math at the same time.

At MobyGames:

Totally Spies! Swamp Monster Blues

Posted on February 27, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I couldn’t stand the thought of finishing out the month of February without a single substantive entry on the old Gaming Pathology blog. Plus, odd as it may sound, I happen to know that there are people out there who game vicariously through me and this blog. So I’m back for a limited engagement here. And I thought I would start with a game from a cheap batch I scored from an eBay seller over a month ago (slacking!).

Totally Spies! is a cartoon as I understand it. Swamp Monster Blues is an adaptation to video game form by Brighter Minds Media. You may recall that this company is responsible for the 4 Spy Kids Learning Adventure games that I worked through last year. So it would seem that Brighter Minds, and their development house Finite Monkeys, has a corner on video game licenses based on underage espionage agents.

Does Swamp Monster Blues follow the same formula as the Spy Kids games, with a comic book-style story punctuated with minigames but most notably with a supplementary puzzle book that’s key to gameplay? I didn’t see any PDF on the disc at first. But it looks like Brighter Minds learned something thanks to their distribution misadventures with the Spy Kids titles and, indeed, a workbook is installed. The main menu even asks if you want to print it at the main menu.

As was my custom with this style of game, I worked through as many puzzles in my head as I could. I didn’t really want to spend much time on this game tonight. The puzzles were of largely the same style as seen in the earlier franchise, but with a few changes. And the designers also decided to refine the style somewhat– all answers are strictly numeric this time. Even answers that are alphabetic get transformed to numbers using a substitution key. I guess this simplifies the underlying game logic. The first puzzle I tried to solve worked out to ‘0 3 5 19’. Oops. I think I was only supposed to resolve single digits. Any letters that substitute for double digits are probably wrong. Fortunately, when the game challenged me for the answer to puzzle #1, I was able to feasibly brute-force that last digit.

So the Totally Spies! girl trio is engaged in athletic training when they are abruptly called on a mission to search for an abducted courier down in the Louisiana bayou. The story is told in the same comic book style as Spy Kids but with quite a bit more action. So the developers splurged on that aspect. Then come the minigames, initiated by this brain twister:

Yes, it really was that easy, and that was on medium difficulty level. Here’s the 3rd game, which I found rather novel– sort of a concentric Frogger game. I wonder if this has been tried before?

Hop from the middle raft onto the gators and out to one of the 4 exits. The gators will regularly submerge. And I suppose you could consider this game an homage to one of the James Bond films where 007 faced a similar snafu (I fail to recall which of the films; I’m not a huge fan).

See also:

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…

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.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Educational Games