Destined to become a MobyGames description paragraph very soon: In Garfield’s Mad About Cats, Jon expresses displeasure with Garfield the Cat’s lack of motivation towards performing traditional rodent control duties. Still, Garfield is sympathetic to the mouse problem and assumes his alter-ego of Dr. Frankencat and, along with his assistant Eager (Odie), descends into the mad scientist lab in house dungeon. The mission: Create the perfect cat. To that end, Dr. Frankencat uses his computer to identify the most perfect traits of various cats from around the planet and assemble the features into a perfect cat.
The game is pretty slow moving at first and about 10 minutes in, I get a little worried that this might not be an actual game. The game allows you to select an attribute, such as tail and roar, and investigate a variety of cats from around the globe. When you do, Eager/Odie fetches a dish from the region where the cat hails from, as well as a bag of the specified attribute. Odie goes to work with the attribute while the big computer plays a brief video factoid about the selected feline species.
My non-gaming fears are assuaged when the the game asks me if I would like to play Disco Jon. This turns out to be the first in a series of 12 random minigames/activities. The goal of this one is to memorize and replay the sequence of buttons to make Jon boogie down:
I like the metaphor present in this minigame: You only get 3 chances to get it right. Each time you screw up, one of the babe silhouettes loses interest and slips away.
Other games include a Whack-A-Mole clone (Whack-A-Rat); a Breakout clone (Burp Game) where Garfield uses his own belches to keep a mouse up in the air to hit all the cheese bricks; and a Space Invaders clone (Hack Attack) where a fleet of Nermals are descending upon Garfield and he must beat them back by coughing up hairballs. I was fairly disconcerted to see a sliding tile puzzle (Odie Maze)– I hate these, I hate these, I hate these! But this was the most messed up minigame by far– Fowl Shot:
Plant some poultry in the spring-loaded recliner, twist the chair to aim for the moving target, and fire. Even if you miss, as I did every time, it’s still great fun.
I’ll have you know I was on the ball this evening. As soon as I got home from work, I went straight to my new second job playing old games that no one has heard of. I had already picked out this evening’s game in advance. A fat lot of good my planning did me tonight. I investigated a title called Total Racing Cars which is not quite as generic as simply slapping “Pinball” on your CD-ROM, but it comes close. I’m always in the mood for a good racing game but I’m less enthusiastic when I realize that the game is merely a repackaging of the shareware versions of commercial racing games such as Need For Speed III and Daytona USA.
Okay, so that doesn’t count. Let’s move swiftly on to Spy Kids Learning Adventures: The Underground Affair. This is one in a series of three educational games based around the Spy Kids franchise. This particular version of The Underground Affair was yet another in a series of PC Treasures titles/AOL delivery vehicles purchased for a dollar each at Super Target. And someone screwed up when licensing this game for budget distribution. I’ll expound in a moment.
The story of this game explains that there is a mine in South America where anti-gravity ore is extracted and then stored in a special, air-free silo. This material apparently has application in the spy field. And it seems that a bunch of it has gone missing. The story colorfully unfolds in a panel-by-panel, comic book-style manner. It’s a nice effect.
This is where the Spy Kids are called in to investigate. From their treehouse base of operations, they are instructed to hop into the DragonSpy craft to travel to South America and find clues about the missing ore. Here’s the learning opportunity, and the catch: In order to activate the DragonSpy’s navigation system, you must solve a puzzle in the book in order to find a code to enter into the ship’s system:
Umm, where’s the book? PC Treasures only licensed and re-distributed the CD-ROM, not the accompanying 32-page puzzle book. That brings the game to a screeching halt, unless I care to start reverse engineering the game. Which I don’t care to do.
For trivia, the other two games in the series are named Man in the Moon and The Candy Conspiracy(oops, and another game: The Nightmare Machine).
Instead of looking at a new game today, I decided to revisit Creatures Adventures since I certainly didn’t get a good feel for the game the first time around and I didn’t discover the on-disk manual until after I had written the blog post. In order to create a quality MobyGames entry, I would like to gather a little more first-hand experience with the game. Plus, after reading the manual and gaining a mild understanding of what’s going on, the game actually sounds interesting. Further, I think the graphics are nothing short of phenomenal and a sheer joy to watch.
On my first play, I got the distinct impression that the objective of the game was to observe little baby monsters called norns and manually interact with their surroundings using the mouse. There is so much more. The game’s manual claims that the game engine models actual biological processes and that the norns come with their own biochemistry, brains and “Digital DNATM” (which is a trademark that I thought Motorola claimed). In fact, reading through the complexity described in the manual makes it hard to believe that this game is designed with children in mind. But the parents’ control dialog described in the previous post remains substantial evidence of the target audience. The manual must be intended for the parents so that they might be able to explain everything to the young ones.
To review, you begin the game in the nestery where you can hatch an egg by placing it in the cradle. You can accept the default name or enter a different one.
From there, the game becomes an exercise in caring for your your norn by feeding it, clothing it, and keeping it out of obvious danger. There is training and discipline involved. Remember the jet horn and mosquito icons discussed in the last post? It turns out that those are for punishment and reward, respectively. The mosquito is actually a stickler that tickles the norn, which the norn likes. Contrast this with a blast of water to the face via the jet. The norns are supposed to learn the right lessons from this treatment but the manual warns you not to overdo either.
So the norns walk around and explore the world as they see fit, unless you grab their hand using the mouse and drag them in the opposite direction. They partake of the plentiful bounty that abounds from the land. Thankfully, it appears that the norns metabolize everything they take into their bodies. Wait, I may be wrong– the norns are consistently seen squatting, an action which sometimes results in brown spots which can then be picked up. I can’t imagine what I would do with these in the context of the game if I were correct about what they are.
I decided that an interesting test of any simulation game would be to see what happens if you don’t offer any input for an extended period of time; just leave the critters to their own devices in this case. With that in mind, I leave the game running and go off to watch some old Amiga demos from MindCandy Volume 2. Here’s what happens: They get sick! The manual warned that norns can get sick but I didn’t realize that the attention-hungry little monkey creatures would actually fall ill if ignored. Talk about Attention Deficit Disorder!
So I’m trying to to watch the Demo DVD and eat lunch but that turns out to be difficult because I can still see my computer monitor out of the corner of my eye which shows me the above scene. The green-faced norn keeps bending over in a virtual heave. Fine, I’ll go do something about it. Apply the stethoscope and thermometer to the norn standing at the medical carriage to validate that there is something very wrong with her. Then take her hand and drag her into the magic doctor booth. That’s really all it takes. Until they get sick again a few minutes later after I have returned to my lunch.
Notice that the norns are all grown up now. The manual says that you will get to witness the whole norn life cycle and that the repugnant creatures will pair off, mate, and procreate. Then they will die. Not a violent death. There comes a point in the game when a norn is apparently just sleeping for a really long time. When you click on their overhead bubble icon you will be transported to the garden where there will be a new tombstone.
Winter comes for the norns. They lived full lives busy with exploration of the 1/2 kilometer immediately surrounding their birthplace. May they rest in peace. Following this, there are new eggs in the hatchery. It is unknown whether they are eggs from Chloe, matriarch of the previous round.
Artrageous! is a game that has held my curiosity since I first inventoried it from an eBay lot of 50 cheap CD-ROMs. The first order of business is to determine whether or not the disc actually qualifies as a game and can be entered into MobyGames. Flipping through the manual that accompanied the game reveals that there are a few little activities that specifically contain ‘game’ in the title. This fact unequivocally entitles the disc a spot in the MobyGames database. Let’s go.
The game launches into a little pre-rendered virtual reality plaza where your guide, Pim, explains all about Artrageous!. He makes the case that the CD-ROM offers incredible value over a physical museum visit because you are encouraged to touch and play with the art. There is a database hall with a huge cross-referenced database of artists and their works (as well as the museums that presently hold the works; BTW, the credits for this title are looooooong). For learning activities, there are areas branching from the plaza that discuss color, light, perspective, composition, and the life of art.
Color! I know color from all of my years of working with computer multimedia technology, or I thought I did. I strike out in search of some game that will make this title worthy of entry into the great gaming database.
Here is a color mixing game where you have to mix various levels of primary colors to produce the specified color. What colorspace? Blue-red-yellow, apparently, which I am unfamiliar with. So many colorspaces. I know RGB and YUV best, with a little CMYK. The game explains that this is the famous hue/saturation a.k.a. HSV/HSB colorspace that I have heard of, so I feel a little more grounded. To that end, the game is quite interesting in its challenge of building an HSV color wheel, piece by piece.
There’s another color-related game about color and music. You are shown Composition VII by Kardinsky which is supposed to represent a cacophony of sounds via its use of color. You can click on any part of the painting to hear what sounds stand in for colors. Deep blue represents a hit from Bach’s Tocatta. White is a heavenly sound. Black has nothingness associated with it. Yellow stands for birds chirping. There is no real goal so this falls more into the category of interactive learning activity vs. game.
Another color-related activity shows a world map with color pointers set up at various locations. Clicking on one reveals what special meanings that different cultures have traditionally attached to different colors (e.g., Washington D.C., USA values green, China mourns in white).
The Mona Lisa seems to figure prominently in the lighting category of activities. The narrator starts by explaining that it “has been used to bludgeon generations of art students.” Hey, the rest of us ordinary, non-art-appreciating mortals haven’t exactly been spared the beating either. Another art minigame, Creating Light, shows a canvas with a mish-mash of shapes (including the Mona Lisa). Your task is to click on one of the icons on the left sidebar which brings up the outline of some shape on the canvas. Drag the outline and place it on its appropriate shape. Alternatively, gaze at the image and figure out how many objects are hidden inside.
If you complete the game, you can go another round with the same objects on a different canvas.
The perspective section contained an interesting minigame. A bunch of objects floated around a room drawn with a 3D vanishing perspective. You have a certain time limit under which you must drag each object into more appropriate places in the room based on their relative perspectives. The game also allowed you to display a vanishing perspective grid to help you along if necessary.
There was an odd game about the golden proportion. I think it belonged to the composition section. This was the first time I had heard of the Greek notion that the perfect artistic ratio is 1:1.6. There was a minigame that has you identifiying as many golden proportioned pieces of a picture as you could within a certain time limit.
Finally, in the life of art section, there is a game which is essentially a basic jigsaw puzzle, only with all square pieces:
There are 3 difficulty levels which configure how many seconds you get to put all the pieces in the right places — easiest is 70 seconds, hardest is 30.
There was a lot of information and activities on offer in Artrageous!. I’m glad I chose to tackle this title on a Saturday as I enjoyed being able to devote a reasonable amount of time to exploring the various activities.
Here’s another game that I picked up in the dollar section of a Super Target store (along with one of every other software title on offer since, hey, they were only a dollar each and none of them are in MobyGames– thus, they shall all be highlighted here eventually). The box copy promises “A wild rainforest adventure that builds real-life skills” and proceeds to name those skills. I could plagiarize the list here, or I could let you figure them out as this review continues. The title seemed somewhat familiar and indeed, the game is the spiritual successor of The Oregon Trail. I remember being enthralled by that game when I had the brief opportunity to watch some friend’s brother play it on that family’s Apple ][ computer. Though I think my fascination was borne more out of a longing to experience some video game — any video game — at my young age vs. any particular gameplay strengths along that game’s eponymous trail.
Enough of the past, let’s see what’s on tap for the future, where future is roughly circa 1998, which I believe is when this game was first published. When Amazon Trail kicks off, there is a rapid FMV sequence where you enter into a museum and some Amazon artifact with a jaguar head comes to life. The jaguar head implores you to go explore the Amazon, its regional flora and fauna, as well as its indigenous peoples — both good and evil. During a nicely-rendered flyover of the river, the jag also mentions that I will seek out the ancient people and that they will have a message for me to deliver to the world about the Amazon. 100-to-1 says that it’s a message about rainforest preservation. Here’s the intro video:
So after this museum-induced trip, you wind up in Belém, port city at the mouth of the Amazon river. I find myself looking at a storekeeper and a ragtag selection of 4 Amazon guides. Why do I need a guide at all? Because I don’t even know how I made it to Belém in the first place. And, as each guide is quick to point out, the storekeeper will refuse to sell me supplies unless I have taken on a guide. I smell some shady business dealings here but the game doesn’t allow me to lodge a complaint with the Belém Better Business Bureau, so I proceed along the expected path and interview each candidate. It’s painful to watch and listen to any of them act as if they belong here. But I am convinced that they are supposed to emphasize unique characteristics within the game and I select the guy who looks like he could actually survive in the Amazon. Now the storekeeper will give me the time of day. Fortunately, there’s not much picking to do– there are 4 supply package deals that, if I were a guessing man, appear to be tailored to the advice of each of the 4 guides. I take my guide’s advice on the matter and I’m off.
The above screenshot showcases the main canoe screen, where you might spend entirely too much time if you don’t find other diversions. One such diversion is the book icon. That leads to a mini multimedia encyclopedia of Amazon-related knowledge. Birds, bugs, beasts, plants, people, first aid tips– each with pictures and pronunciation tips. I immediately develop more interest in this vs. the actual game — or most games in this experiment, for that matter. There is also a journal for writing. Ugh. This all makes it sound a little too academic even though I already know it’s supposed to be an educational game. I hope there won’t be a test on this stuff later.
Here’s another activity you can select from the canoe– exploring:
You are thrust into a patch of rainforest. Creatures prance back and forth (including a jaguar– should that be cause for concern?) and there are plants that just sort of hang there. You can take pictures and the game asks if you would like to file them in your photo gallery. Before it will do so, you must first correctly identify what you just snapped. A-ha! So there will be a test! It’s a good thing I just read that a banana is also called a plantain as the game allowed me to pick the bunch and add them to my fruit storage. Though it turns out this can also be gamed– you are always presented the correct answer along with 3 random wrong choices, so on the second chance try to remember which option you also saw on the previous round.
Back in the canoe, things are pretty slow-going. I keep checking the micro- and macro-level maps and it doesn’t seem like we’re even moving. Ostensibly, though, we are, and I even manually up the pace. Nothing much seems to be happening. I ask for a status report from the guide. What?! We’ve been at this for 20 days? We’ve already burned through half of our 100 lbs of fish? I don’t even like fish that much. And why are they measuring using lbs in Brazil, anyway? Well, let’s check out this fishing screen:
This is probably the most action-oriented segment that I saw. You use a harpoon from the supply lot to spear one of those aquatic silhouettes. Caught me a 2.7-pounder, I did. 2.7 lbs of fish-based nourishment for the expedition’s supply pile, that is.
So, I’m not sure exactly where the game is supposed to proceed from here. There is something about proceeding down the river, learning more about the culture and environment, avoiding snakebites, and also trading for more supplies. I wondered exactly what I’m supposed to trade with. My food for more food? Actually, it seems that one of the items in the general supply package was a quantity of something called “trading packets”. Novel.
I set the game on the easiest level available as is my custom for this experiment. I’m not doing this for challenge. I am doing it for a quick investigation and to gather data suitable for MobyGames, however, and to that end, I captured screenshots of all the credit screens. This sequence perhaps inadvertantly outlines the entire game as it credits the actors, their characters and at which junctures they appear in the game. Teddy Roosevelt shows up along the Madeira River.
Major spoiler: Yep, I called it. I found the ending FMV sequence and the spirits of the ancients descend to tell you to tell everyone else to, pretty please, not cut down the rainforests.
Tonight’s descent into gaming madness is I.M. Meen, another title from Simon & Schuster Interactive, who also brought us the business-as-war FPS Forbes Corporate Warrior. The cover of the CD-ROM bills it as an “action-packed 3D learning adventure for ages 9 and up”. That’s all I have to go on.
When I examine the contents of the CD-ROM, I realize that this must be a DOS-based game (also, the game’s copyright date is 1995). This gives me the opportunity to properly configure DOSBox for this experiment. I had forgotten just how slick DOSBox is as I do not often have occasion to use it. The game’s audio configuration has no trouble detecting DOSBox’s Sound Blaster emulation facilities and I’m off and running.
This eponymous villain has the most curious pet peeve: He can’t stand the thought of goody-goody children studying. He’s a proactive wizard/mad scientist/librarian/whatever so he creates a special book that can trap children in a labyrinth. In the intro animation, Meen manages to trap two more children — a boy and a girl — in the maze-book.
When you begin the game, you select between playing either the boy or the girl (with no notable difference between their in-game abilities) and you can also configure the play and reading levels. You are then cast into a Wolfenstein 3D-style maze where you immediately run into Meen’s traitorous Gnome lackey, Gnick, imploring you to rescue the children imprisoned in this dungeon by solving some kind of reading puzzles. Offensively, either child can throw a right hook using the space bar. This turns out to be enough to dispatch the giant blue spiders that infest the labyrinth. The trolls shown below, wielding spiked clubs, can usually sustain 2-3 blows from an elementary school student.
The red meter under the boy’s face is the boy’s health. I have not yet figured out if there is any way to replenish this health. And facing off with the numerous trolls in the dungeon tends to hurt an awful lot. Fortunately, there are some other limited-use offensive range weapons to be found in the game, including a fire wand and explod-o-fruit. These are picked up using a right mouse click and dragged into one of the squares underneath the power meter. To equip a weapon, drag it into the hand icon at the bottom of the screen. As for the other icons, the Meen icon brings up the game menu, the compass icon is informational, and map icon shows the auto-cartography feature which is incredibly useful in a dungeon crawl like this where everything looks the same.
An interesting item about this FPS-influenced game is that it appears to be controllable completely by a mouse if the player so chooses. Granted, that would be a bit tricky. You can move the mouse to various sections of the field and the mouse cursor indicates which direction the player will move when pressing the left mouse button. Further, the right mouse button throws a left punch. This is a fairly violent game by educational entertainment standards. Still, I think the game could have benefited from a strafe-punch option.
So where does the educational aspect come into play? When you see a scroll on the wall, approach it, press the space bar, and find yourself confronted with such a puzzle:
Correct the punctuation errors to free a fellow child. It’s interesting to note that the screen resolution changes from 320×200 to 640×480 for the text editor, and that the text editor is quite decent in that it actually supports word jumping with Ctrl-left/right.
I know that video games, just like any other form of entertainment, necessitate some suspension of disbelief, and that I should not think too hard about any aspect of them, particularly the storyline. However, I have the worst time understanding what Meen could possibly have against studious children. Has he had to deal with one too many know-it-all, smarmy little brats in whatever his day-to-day dealings happen to entail? Was he pushed over the edge by all those “My child is an honor student at…” bumper stickers? If you examine the above note screenshot that needs its punctuation fixed, you will see that it is written by Meen’s paranoid gnome henchman, Gnick. Gnick’s paranoid disposition in the game is inconsistent with the insolent tone of the note. However, his level of English composition skill could be in keeping with the low levels of education that Meen desires in those around him.
It could be that Meen is insecure about his own intellectual prowess and seeks to incapacitate the learning process for young children so they can’t possibly grow up to expose him for the fraud he is. I think I know people like that in real life.
But if you wish to peer a little more deeply into his mind to understand Meen’s motivations, here is the entire intro video for the game:
