Indiana Jetson

Posted on December 23, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I scanned the big list of missing NES games and found 2 licensed titles that came later in the NES’ lifetime (i.e., after the release of the SNES). Titles from this era were generally quite well done by NES standards, even if they were overshadowed by the SNES.

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles — First boss

The first is The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, based on the TV show that aired in the early- to mid-1990s. As the title implies, a young Indy travels the globe, collects treasures, fights for what’s right, and rescues hot babes. Actually, I’m just guessing on that last one– the opening for stage 1 implies that there’s a damsel, but the trial and error tedium of the first level became too much for me before I finish off the boss. It’s side-scrolling action where Indy actually has a fairly realistically brief jump — a feature that always makes a gamer curse the times they have called for more realistic games. You don’t have much power in this game, but you can collect trademark Indy hats. If you get hit, you lose the hat, but that’s better than losing your weapon, which is what happens if you get hit without a hat. Back to the fist until you can find another weapon. If you get hit without a weapon or a hat, then you die.

Speaking of weapons, this game has an impressive range– whips, pistols, rifles, grenades, throwing knives, little bouncing rocks. Unfortunately, you can only pick up one weapon at a time and you lose it you sustain a hit.

Throughout the adventure, Indy collects gold. I am not sure what this achieves– it probably has some significance at the end of a level, where I never got to. The gold counter never seems to reset, even after a continue. And the strangest thing about the gold counter is that it wraps around after 99:

Before collecting the icon worth 3 gold points…
Young Indiana Jones Chronicles — Gold counter, before

After collecting the icon…
Young Indiana Jones Chronicles — Gold counter, after

Still, it is likely that Young Indy makes for a better gameplay experience than the Temple of Doom for the NES.

Next up is a Jetsons property– The Jetsons: Cogswell’s Caper, to be specific. Take a look at this screenshot and tell me what’s wrong:

The Jetsons: Cogswell’s Caper– Non-canon Astro

Come on– you all watched The Jetsons sometime in your life, you know exactly what’s wrong with that screenshot: there is no way that Astro the Dog is that articulate. It’s well known that Astro pronounced George as “Reorge”.

Putting aside such blatant cartoon canon violations, this game features a curious premise– George Jetson’s employer, Mr. Spacely, has learned that his corporate rival, Cogswell, is oppressing alien workers in order to get ahead in the industry. What’s the best course of action to compete with this threat? How about tasking his laziest and most incompetent employee, one George Jetson, with committing acts of corporate sabotage? Sounds like we have a premise for a game.

So George bumbles through multiple levels of side-scrolling action to achieve this goal, lest he be dinged on his annual performance review. I hesitate to call this a run and jump game because George is too lazy to jump. Instead, he uses a jet pack in short bursts to elevate himself. The offensive action reminds me mightily of Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers in that George picks up the copious boxes and other items that litter the landscape and tosses them at enemies.

The Jetsons: Cogswell’s Caper– Botannical gardens

There are also lots of switches in this futuristic game, switches that activate all kinds of machinery (and Rosie the Robot is on hand to tutor you in how to use the switch). A common switch is the gravity reversal switch that causes you to walk on the ceiling for a brief period. I must give the game credit for its internal consistency here:

The Jetsons: Cogswell’s Caper– Gravity consistency

George is walking along the ceiling. If George walks off the edge, it will have the same effect as walking into a pit.

The Rocketeer

Posted on December 10, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Let’s try some free association. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when viewing this NES screenshot?

The Rocketeer is one more movie-based NES game that somehow escaped notice during my previous efforts to flush all such titles from the list of unentered NES titles. It wasn’t until I read this Cracked.com article about 5 awesome sci-fi inventions that would actually suck, which happens to illustrate jet packs with a still from the 1991 Rocketeer movie, that I recalled seeing an adaptation in Nintendo Power.

Strangely, this Disney license was sold to Bandai rather than Capcom, the usual Disney partner in video gaming during that period.

All I remember about the movie is that I don’t remember anything about it. According to plot synopses on the internet — which the game follows faithfully in the intro — a crazy inventor develops a jet pack and a benevolent guy uses it to become a hero and save the world, or at least keep the technology out of the hands of Nazis.

The game starts off as a standard run and jump affair as I try to figure out if I’m supposed to be able to fly. I quickly comprehend that I have 6 offensive options at my disposal — fist, pistol, tommygun, spread gun, grenade, and bazooka — all from the get-go, provided that I have enough ammo points collected. The fist is free, the bazooka requires 20 ammo points. Everything else takes some amount in between. This is a nifty feature, save for the fact that it can be cumbersome to constantly cycle through all 6 options during the action (no cycling when paused).

Finally, I stumble upon a gas can powerup that extends a new power meter. This finally allows me to fly in wildly uncontrolled bursts. The game’s flight capability is a bit oversold. I’m guessing that it’s necessary to use both the jet pack and some fierce firepower to take down the first boss, which I was unable to do.

Here’s a curious feature about the game. Above is the opening shot (apparently, some of the movie’s story takes place against a movie industry backdrop). Note that the sign reads “Hollywoodland”. Next, look at some of the exposition text:

The text reads plain “Hollywood”. Do you know why that is? The answer comes courtesy of a Taco Bell placemat that I read some years ago during one of their many contests. The busy disposable placemat showed the Hollywood logo, probably to showcase a trip to Hollywood as a grand prize. Reading the fine print of the placemat revealed that the famed Hollywood logo in the hills is a registered trademark of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

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…

Advergaming

Posted on August 31, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Remember Snow Day: The GapKids Quest (blog post #1, blog post #2)? Let the record show that there was also a chapter called School Rules: The GapKids Quest. I learned that through the blog of one Troy W. Finamore, who also helped with yet another series of Taco Bell promotional titles. It follows a familiar model: 4 different games revolving around a certain theme. They represented a tie-in with ESPN’s X-Games with the sports: Moto X, BMX, Inline Skating, and Skateboarding.

NES At The Movies

Posted on August 19, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Okay, brace yourself. Remember when I mentioned that I knew of 10 movie-licensed NES games not yet in MobyGames? Today, I made it a goal to clear all of those out of the queue. I played 2 of the 10 in the last entry and another one was, upon closer inspection, already in the database (NES version of Home Alone 2: Lost In New York). So here come whirlwind reviews of 7 movie-licensed NES games which — surprisingly — are not uniformly reprehensible.

The first game of the lot, however, is dreadful: Beetlejuice. The only thing I recall about the movie is that it obviously did not make a lasting impression on me. The NES adaptation shall forever be seared into my brain as another rock-bottom movie license.

As I gave it my best shot, I was haunted by the knowledge that, had I rented this game back in my prime NES-playing days, I would have dutifully plugged away at it for the entire rental period as opposed to just one half of a very frustrated hour. But it likely would never have come to that since I never seemed to rent games based on movies that I either had not seen or didn’t like.

Next was Cliffhanger, the first of 2 Sylvester Stallone-influenced games in today’s entry. There is already a Genesis/SNES/Sega CD port of this game in the database. The NES version, however, appears to be substantially different, and simpler. It was still quite promising, jumping and running across slanted mountainscapes, beating up wolves and birds. Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to reach the plane in the first level in order to advance the game:

I think there might have been some controls I did not know about for climbing on cliffs. I don’t have the instructions handy and could not find them on the internet.

Conan: The Mysteries of Time (the official Nintendo NES PDF has that full title; the title screen does not)… let’s see, my notes from earlier today succinctly state, “this is bad.” I could not get very far in this game, only as far as the fire-breathing lion boss:

Fortunately, someone actually posted a YouTube video showcasing Conan’s gameplay. Unfortunately, the player got no further than I could. Same goes for this reviewer. There is really little evidence that any game content exists beyond the above screenshot.

It’s interesting to note that, according to Wikipedia’s Conan page, this game was a port of an unrelated (to the Conan brand) title called Myth: History in the Making. This is not surprising. This just feels like an old PC action game. And it dawns on me as I write this that I probably made a mistake by entering Conan as a new entry as opposed to a new platform port/alternate title for Myth. Actually, closer examination reveals that this game already exists as Myth for the NES. All it needs is screenshots.

Next up is Dirty Harry: The War Against Drugs (again, the full title is only seen on the official Nintendo NES release PDF). The game begins with a digitized sample of Dirty Harry’s catchphase, “Go ahead… make my day.” I hear more digitized voice samples in perusing these obscure games than I ever did when I used to play NES games.

This game isn’t too bad, and I want to like it more. It’s a bit smarter than the typical NES side-scroller, yet dumber in other ways. E.g., I can’t hop over a simple hole in the ground (falling through doesn’t kill me, I just descend into the sewer where I have to climb back out). Again, I get the feeling that I’m missing out on certain controls. The game features side-scrolling action on the outside of buildings; plus, you can enter buildings and explore rooms and hallways:

Dirty Harry (NES) -- looks like Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal

This guy in the hallway appears to be heavily influenced by Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal. But he seems harmless enough. Unlike the snakes (?!) that inhabit many of the individual apartments that I can’t figure out how to destroy or dodge.

Next up is Rambo, the second Sly Stallone-based game today. While there are, at the time of this writing, 15 titles mentioning Rambo, none appear to be the same as this game. So I plunge right in, only to find myself completely clueless. My Rambo character is dropped off at a military base somewhere. There are two guys walking around and you can talk to either. One is Ericson, and he is pleased that he will be working with you. The other is Col. Trautman, who tells you to quit wasting time and get to the hangar. By the looks of the air-worthy vehicles in the background, I would guess that I am already at the hangar.

Before all of this riveting action, Trautman visits you in military prison and asks you if you would care to take on this mission, or continue to rot in jail. You know how some games ask you yes/no questions but keep asking you if you answer the wrong way? (“Oh, but you must!” followed by question, repeated.) This game is strangely self-aware of the situation:

Rambo (NES) with Sylvester Stallone -- strangely self-aware game

Interesting rendition of Sly, too. I wonder if his agent had to sign off on that? Still, I can’t figure out how to do anything with this game and I can’t find instructions on the internet. I wonder if it’s an action/RPG combo? You dialog with other characters and have an experience point meter. Weirder things have been published, like Rambo-licensed interactive fiction. Unfortunately, I have nowhere near enough information to enter into the database for this title.

Next on my alphabetical list is The Terminator… wait a minute– I thought this game never actually made it to market. A curious bit of NES trivia is that Sunsoft’s Journey To Silius started life as a Terminator license, but something went wrong. So Sunsoft retooled the game somewhat with new storyline and characters, but left the final boss looking suspiciously like a certain killer robot from a blockbuster movie franchise.

Lo and behold, the official Nintendo release PDF does list The Terminator, eventually published by Mindscape in December, 1992. It is worthy of mention that this release date is after the release date for Terminator 2 for the NES.

The game begins with the movie hero, Kyle Reese, battling through the future post-apocalyptic landscape littered with Terminator droids in order to go back in time. Terminator robots, it turns out, are ridiculous pushovers. The game, however, is balanced out by the fact that the player gets 3 lives and no continues. I think I dodged a bullet by not renting this game as a child which only would have greatly increased the necessity for anger management therapy later in my life.

So is this better or worse than Journey To Silius? Based on this walkthrough, the game tries to parallel the movie’s plot faithfully and also mix up the gameplay types. The graphics were also quite reasonable. I always thought that Silius was a mediocre effort, at least by Sunsoft’s standards from whom I had come to expect top-notch fare. Notwithstanding the limited chances available to the player, this game just might have been a better movie license than what I make of Silius.

All right, one more to go, and it’s The Untouchables. For once, I actually could find the (very thorough) manual. The manual makes the game sound quite interesting due to divergent gameplay styles. Unfortunately, while the first level has a very unique gameplay idea, it’s poorly executed and seemingly impossible to beat:

The Untouchables (NES) -- Alley shootout

Your lawman starts out around the corner from the alley. Press the control pad to confront the alley. Blast the gangsters who pop through the windows. Your shotgun only has 2 rounds. When you run out, the character will automatically hide around the corner and reload. Repeat. You need to ice a certain number of baddies within the allotted time (always seems to be 25 seconds). First 3, then 5, then 7 baddies. I couldn’t make it past the section with 7. The gangsters only pop out for about 2 seconds and you have to use the gamepad to move the gun’s sights. And it’s slow. My best strategy was to focus on 2 windows on one side and hope that, statistically, I would bag my limit before time ran out. It could be that they pop out in a repeatable pattern, though.

After today’s playtime, it finally dawned on me that if I really care about getting to level 2 on some of these games, I should investigate the emulator’s savestate features. However, I am dubious if savestates would actually help with this shootout. They might, but it would be tedious.

Update; Anachronism alert: Those look like discarded beverage cans littering the alley of 1920s-era Chicago. I have been doing some cursory internet research and, while the details are a bit sketchy, the earliest records of beverage cans point to the time just after Prohibition.

See Also:

A followup for Dirty Harry where I actually figured out how to jump
A look at a few more NES movie licenses

At MobyGames:

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Licensed Schlock