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.

Sabrina Joan Hart

Posted on April 3, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Yeah, it’s been a bit slow the last few days on this blog. I’ve been working on a few non-gaming commitments recently. Plus, I thought I would give the MobyGames approvers a chance to catch up on submissions. My most recently approved entries are:

And as if I didn’t have enough games to work through, some of those eBay-ordered games referenced last week arrived tonight. I’ll have you know that I did sit down and play that Sabrina: The Teenage Witch game briefly. Though it sounded characteristically lame and therefore well-suited for this blog, it seems that a bunch of my IM buddies have fond memories of the show on which the game is based, or at least were infatuated with the show’s star, one Melissa Joan Hart. Apparently, I’m the only one completely ignorant of this show’s premise, stars, and characters.

Sabrina The Teenage Witch -- with Salem the Cat

I didn’t say I spent a whole lot of time on the game. Maybe 10 minutes total. It’s another Macromedia-driven, kid-targeted game. I hate to admit it, but even these are starting to wear on me, or I might just not be in the mood tonight. The disc didn’t come with any instructions, nor was there a manual on-disc. I knew that didn’t matter– these games always verbally explain the game as you go along. The game chronicles your quest to become a witch like Sabrina. You start out with your witchcraft learner’s permit as a stepping stone to your full-fledged license. You have to successfully complete 7 spells to earn that distinction. Your first opportunity to do this is when Sabrina’s treacherous black cat, Salem (aside: why would the pet be named after the town synonymous with burning witches?), tricks Sabrina into turning herself into a pumpkin. Undo this spell by looking up the spell recipe and searching her room for the ingredients.

And, well, I suspect the game continues along that same formula for some time afterwards. And I’m afraid I will find out sooner or later.

Tek Kids Closure

Posted on March 9, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight was the night that I set out to achieve closure on the whole Taco Bell Tek Kids Flash-Ops series. To pump me up for the occasion, I purchased a representative selection of fine Taco Bell cuisine, including nachos, burrito, taco (chalupa, to be technical), and that curious Mexican/Italian crossover fare, the Mexican pizza. All are pictured here next to the 4 Tek Kids games destined to become merchandising classics:

Click for larger image

Fortified with the foregoing food powerup items (as in the game), I was ready to load up the Aqua Zone and Sky Fortress episodes again, ironically attacking them with the pacifist strategy I had worked out. Don’t shoot anything, just maintain power levels by picking up fuel tanks, plus the occasional Taco Bell powerup if I accidentally bump any bad guys. It takes a little while and some practice but I finally make it to the end of the Aqua Zone where the Tek Kid takes out this aquatic structure:

This is strange because I thought the target was an underwater sub. Then again, the sub shown in the intro might have just been your ride to the scene. Similarly, the X-perimental aerial aircraft carrier Albatross is not seen at the start of Sky Fortress, only a large, civilian-style jet presumably to launch you into your mission. Here is the assault on the airborne aircraft carrier:

Sky Fortress -- Taking Out The X-perimental Aerial Aircraft Carrier Albatross

This is even stranger since I distinctly recall from the intro of Sky Fortress that they were supposed to recover the XAA Albatross on behalf of the U.S. Air Force. Someone up the chain of command is going to give these Tek Kids a time out. But I now have all the codes:

Aqua Zone: 4GH7
Polar Challenge: PXM6
Data Island: AR93
Sky Fortress: 8E3H

Selecting a specific letter from each code yields the final secret code of AGMH. This triggers the final sequence where the 4 Tek Kids take their spaceship up to Havok’s orbiting satellite, where he probably, and foolishly, believes that he would be safe from spying minors.

The preceding screenshot captures the Tek Kids’ abject astonishment when they find Dr. Havok and realize that he has totally ripped off Doctor Octopus.

Our young heroes defeat the madman by moving around so quickly that the tentacles become tangled and then they maneuver behind to press some auto-destruct button on the suit, which destroys the suit but not the human. A suit from the bureau comes up to the spaceship to apprehend Dr. Havok and congratulate you, thus ending the south of the border odyssey.

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Sky Fortress

Posted on March 8, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

It was another late work-related night. You know what that means: Another Taco Bell Tek-Kids game! Actually, this is the last one that I have in reserve: Mission: Sky Fortress.

Wouldn’t you know it, that wily Dr. Havok is up to his old dirty deeds again when he steals a technological device capable of great destruction. The game acknowledges the passé nature of the good doctor’s exploits by stating that the device will be used for his usual evil purposes, implying that even the game engine is getting tired of this schtick. Conspicuously absent is any overriding environmental theme. Get this, though: the device in question is eXperimental Aerial Aircraft Carrier, the XAA Carrier “Albatross”. I wonder if our brilliant mastermind is aware that that’s not exactly a revered bird of prey?

The gameplay features the same dual-maneuvering gameplay mechanic as seen is Mission: Aqua Zone. Using the cursor keys maneuvers your craft in the same direction as the key pressed while aiming the target zone in roughly the opposite direction, making it extremely difficult to collect items and line up shots at the same time. Oh, and the primary enemy in this episode is the flying monkey drone; that’s worth mention.

I plan to replay both Aqua Zone and Sky Fortress soon so I can complete both missions and unlock the secret mission using codes from all 4 regular games. The strategy will be a pacifist approach: just concentrate on collecting fuel tanks and dodging enemies until the end of the mission.

Operation

Posted on February 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

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

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

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

Operation -- Rainforest Musical Melodies

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

Little Caesars Fractions Pizza

Posted on February 25, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

You might think that fast food marketing tie-in video games couldn’t get anymore absurd than the Taco Bell Tek Kids Flash-Ops games, or perhaps the Burger King Xbox/360 trio of games. But try this on for size: A Little Caesars Pizza-based game for the purpose of teaching fractions. Perhaps even stranger, though, is the fact that the sleeve in which Little Caesars Fractions Pizza is packaged actually labels it as a demo disc. My suspicion is that this demo was given away free with pizzas during some promotional period and the full version was available from Panasonic’s PanaKids division. The only record of the full version that I can find is this cover art picture.

Little Caesars Fractions Pizza -- Main Menu

The above depicts the main menu of the game. It’s sort of a futuristic pizza service operated by dinosaurs. Just work with it. You are enlisted as a new hire after a brief screening process where you demonstrate that you can identify which pizza out of a selection of four represents 5/8 of a pizza. The staff informs you that you have a lot of pizza to deliver to various time periods. However, in this demo, you only have access to the Triassic Park period. So you accept this assignment. When you arrive in your time machine to deliver the Hot-N-Ready food items (Little Caesars trademark marketing campaign), the cavepeople see fit to give you a brief education about fractional equivalence. You would be content to just collect your tip and move on to the next time period, but no. The cavepeople spell it out for you with rap.

And just for that, I have finally seen fit to post actual music on this blog:

Little Caesars Fractions Pizza — Caveman Pizza Fractions Rap, 1.23 MB, MPEG-4 AAC (.m4a) file

In fact, there are many fully-produced songs on this CD in redbook CD audio format.

After the rap, many of the cavemen disband, presumably to enjoy pizza. One early specimen of a woman remains behind to school me, man from the future, about fractions. In the process, she makes me work for my tip. In the following game, she gives you a goal such as “less than 3 and 5/6”. Then, a number of creatures walk, crawl, and fly through the screen holding fractions. You must use your slingshot to hit the fractions that match up with the given spec. The things a pizza delivery boy will do for a living.

Little Caesars Fractions Pizza -- Triassic Park Fractions Game

Back at base, there is also an arcade game that you can play using your tip money. It’s called Tails and it’s a Nibbles-type game. The game gives you a mission to collect the fractions that are equal, less than, or greater than a given fraction. Hit a fraction that doesn’t match up, or a barrier, or your tail, and lose a snake. When you consume a qualified fraction, your tail grows.

Little Caesars Fractions Pizza -- Tails Game

A curious facet of this variation is the addition of the scissors icon. I haven’t seen anything similar in other Nibbles-type games. The scissors cut your tail in half.

Here are some of the pizzas I was assigned to deliver in the game:

cheese, cheese, and extra cheese pizza
pineapple and mosquito pizza
popcorn and jellybeans pizza

Did Little Caesars sign off on this game? I can’t say I was exactly hungry for pizza, especially after the mosquito mention. Or maybe that’s actually part of their menu; I don’t know. The last time I remember having Little Caesars was in 1996 which predates the copyright on this game by 2 years.

Another curious feature is the janitor’s closet off the main menu which leads to the parents’ and teachers’ access control. It’s password protected. No worries since one of the dinosaurs pops up to tell you that the password is ‘access’. The control panel allows configuration of certain gameplay options and allows account management. I’m surprised it didn’t also allow changing the password. Perhaps that’s in the full version.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Licensed Schlock