Taco Bell Aqua Zone Game

Posted on January 22, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Remember that Taco Bell Tek-Kids Flash-Ops game? There were 3 more games in the series. Thanks ever so much to Maxx Marketing, the publisher, as well as their distributor, Yum! Brands, Inc. for graciously furnishing me with the remaining 3 games. It’s a heavy responsibility but I shall fulfill my duty to play through them and preserve their essential statistics for all time via MobyGames. Plus, I want to see that bonus game.

This episode of Tek-Kids Flash-Ops is titled Mission: Aqua Zone. It seems Dr. Havok is back to his old tricks (to be fair, since this is #1 in the quartet, this would be Dr. Havok’s inaugural outing). This time he has an underwater sub that doubles as a weapons factory catering to rogue nations. However, the mortal sin being perpetrated by this leviathan is that it is polluting hundreds of square miles of pristine ocean blue (nautical miles? The difference is undoubtedly important).

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Aqua Zone submarine

I can just tell that all of these games are going to have some kind of environmental message. This somewhat reminds me of some really cheesy Star Wars stories I read some years ago. Each of 6 stories between 2 books was a flagrant allegory for some environmental cause here on earth. I made it a game to figure out as soon as I could in each story what the message was going to be: Save the whales, save the rainforests, etc. Along those same lines, I will try to guess the environmental terror Dr. Havok plans to spread in the remaining 2 missions, Data Island and Sky Fortress. My wager is that the latter is pumping raw pollution into the atmosphere but I’m a little fuzzier on the former. When I think of an island, I think of water, but he’s already polluting the ocean in this adventure. The “data” part of the title may indicate that he’s polluting the internet somehow from some virtual island.

I digress. When I see the instruction screen it looks precisely the same as the one for Polar Mission, thus, I expect it to feature precisely the same gameplay. Wrong. It’s actually considerably tougher:

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Aqua Zone gameplay

In addition to only moving left and right, you can also move up and down. However, there are essentially two things you’re controlling with the same set of cursor keys: Your swimmer and the target. They move in opposite directions and it’s quite difficult to keep them straight. It’s a good thing this all takes place in shallow water– that makes things more graphically interesting.

Snow Day Bonus Games

Posted on January 10, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

We’re not through with that Gap Game yet. I found this article that revealed the codes for the 2 bonus games on Snow Day: The GapKids Quest The 2 6-digit codes were, in fact, in plain ASCII text in the game executable file. I was sort of expecting something a little more Gap-related.

The first of the bonus games is Skate Race (code: 894367). When I first saw the Pac-Man clone, Snowed In, I fully expected to find this type of game elsewhere on the disc. You’ve surely seen this countless times– one of the most famous incarnations is Nibbles. You have a character that moves in straight lines collecting items and avoiding obstacles. Each time you collect an item, you leave a longer trail behind you which only becomes one more obstacle. The first time I ever played a game like this was on the Intellivision (I remember now! It was Snafu).

Now for Snowball Frenzy (code: 426985). Finally! Overt kid-on-kid violence. This is a first-person snowball shooter. Snow or be snowed. All of the kids in the neighborhood have playfully decided to gang up on you. Fortunately, it seems to be a fair fight since you are apparently the best snowball slinger in town. The goal is to knock out every kid that pops out from behind every tree, fence, snowdrift and snowman. You have a limited amount of snowball ammunition but you seem to get automatic refills when you run out. You also have a power meter in this game. Sustain a snowball strike and lose health. Fortunately, you can parry snowballs with your own.

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowball Frenzy

It’s worth noting that the children squeal with glee when you take them down. More FPS games need that kind of positive spirit.

So I won a game! I won Snow Day: The GapKids Quest! Sing it from the rooftops! That means I went back and finished all 4 of those Snowed In mazes. It’s not so hard once you get a little strategy down. I must contend that those children armed with shovels could take a snowman. But I didn’t make the game so I didn’t make the rules. The ending shows the group of GapKids enjoying hot chocolate indoors. Wearing their Gap apparel, naturally.

What now? I guess I could try to win the game with the other 3 characters. But I don’t think there are any more secrets in this game. When I exit the game after winning it, the game no longer claims that there are more secret codes to wait for.

See Also:

My first post on this game
Taco Bell Tek Kids — better than you might expect
The Lost Island of Alanna — Cherry Coke tries its hand at a promotional game

At MobyGames:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest
Advertising/Product tie-ins game group — you won’t believe some of the products that have received their own games

The Gap Game

Posted on January 9, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

(Hi! If you came here from Google in search of the forbidden Gap game knowledge, the codes you seek are 894367 for Skate Race and 426985 for Snowball Frenzy.)

I’ve been looking forward to tonight’s game for some time: Snow Day: The GapKids Quest. That’s right: it’s an actual Gap-based video game, or GapKids to be more precise. The sleeve copy states that the CD-ROM contains 3 games ready to play and 2 more that are unlockable via secret code. Oh dear, I hope it’s not another deal like the Taco Bell Tek Kids Flash Ops where I’m expected to collect a number of different discs. No, in fact there is a different system which will be explained (maybe) later.

Indeed, the game holds true to its title– this is a game about a snow day. Finally! A game that I can relate to on a deeply personal level. Actually, where I grew up, if a snow day were to be called, it would happen early in the morning; rarely, if ever would school let out when it was already in session, as is colorfully depicted in the setup for this game. So school is let out early and our group of carefully multicultural GapKids is free to engage in a variety of fun, frolicky, frivolous games that kids play in such inclement weather. Or not. Maybe I should just show you the specifics of the games.

The first — and perhaps most disturbing — game in the repertoire is innocuously entitled Snowed In. The object is simple: shovel all the snow. You wouldn’t expect a simulation of such a laborious chore to be much fun, and the designers shared your sentiment, so they added killer snowmen to the proceedings:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Terrified Snowmen

The above screenshot actually depicts what happens when your GapKid obtains the snowblower powerup in the game– the hunted becomes the hunter and the look of unbridled terror on the snowmens’ faces is priceless. As you can plainly see, this game is a thinly-veiled ripoff of the venerable Pac-Man concept. One key difference is that the 4 snowmen spawn from 4 different places. And if a snowman touches you, your GapKid is depicted as shivering frantically, but not necessarily dying. He does have to start over, but with the same area of snow already cleared.

Next up is Snowman Match. Unlike the previous game which exploits our most profound childhood fears of snow-spawned demons, this is a memory game that briefly shows you a glimpse of a snowman fashionably dressed in Gap apparel. The snowman melts away and 4 new snowmen rise up. You have to match the snowman you just saw, and you have to perform 8 correct matches within a given time limit. It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Sometimes the game throws 4 fairly similar snowmen at you:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowman Match

The last game that is, per default, unlocked is Snowboard Slalom, a fairly benign downhill snowboarding game where you must dodge trees, logs, rocks, and ice patches but, thankfully, no killer snowmen. Your X-treme snowboarder dude is quite resilient:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowboard Wipeout

Obstacles are merely temporary setbacks and he bounces right back to continue on his downhill trek. The goal is to reach the finish line at the bottom of the hill under a certain time constraint.

There are still 2 locked games. How to unlock the games? That’s unclear, but here is the intelligence that the installation program lends: “Sometime soon, a secret timer inside your Snow Day CD-ROM will ring and your computer will tell you how to unlock 2 secret games! Be sure to check your computer every week so you can find out how to get the secret code.” This is further reiterated when you quit the game:

I want my secret games unlocked NOW! (which, BTW, are Skate Race and Snowball Frenzy and the codes are 6 characters long, or at most 6 characters long). Maybe someone else out there on the vast internet has looked at this first. A quick Google search brings up a brief mention on another of my blogs as well as my master games spreadsheet. I guess I’m the only person out there who has ever thought that this game is interesting enough to write anything about. So now I’m investigating the game a little deeper.

See Also:

Followup blog post on this same game — I located the secret codes!
Taco Bell Tek Kids — a shining star among promotional video games
The Lost Island of Alanna — Cherry Coke’s Myst knock-off

At MobyGames:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest
Advertising/Product tie-ins game group — you won’t believe some of the products that have received their own games

The rest of this post is just me thinking out loud about how to recover the codes, which turned out to be superfluous.

Let’s talk technical: Snow Day is a Smacker-based video game. My first clue to this effect was when I watched the installer program copy over nothing but Smacker files, WAV files, and an EXE file. All of the cutscenes are Smacker files. Further, the backgrounds, character animations, and UI widgets are all Smacker files as well. I am able to see from the directory structure and filenames that there are, in fact, 4 mazes in the Shoveled In Pac-Man clone. I only made it to the 3rd maze. I wonder if formally completing the 3 unlocked games would expedite the unlocking of the other 2 games? My secret gaming shame is that I have never been very good at Pac-Man or derivatives thereof.

Now we get into my favorite computer-related pasttimes: Reverse engineering! There is only one executable file and one support file, the Smacker decoding DLL. I disassembled the executable and looked for interesting strings. The first fascinating string is “Hypnotix”. I recognize that name. I recognize it from a 1995 demo CD-ROM of a Smacker-heavy game called Wetlands. This game bears the name of BrandGames, which is also known to be responsible for Taco Bell: Tasty Temple Challenge which, from the MobyGames screenshots, has nothing in common with this game’s engine. The context in which the “Hypnotix” string appears in the binary is for manipulating Windows registry keys. The registry does have entries in “Software\Hypnotix\GapSnowDay”, but only for CD drive letter and game directory. Thus, I suspect that BrandGames may have licensed the engine from Hypnotix. It also appears that there is a CD check in the game as evidenced by the string “Please insert the Gap Snow Day CD-Rom and then press OK”. But the game still runs fine after installation without the CD-ROM in the tray. A CD check doesn’t make much sense for a promotional game with 35 MB of game data that is copied completely onto the HD during game installation.

I have followed a number of theories to recover the codes:

I found the Smacker file that notifies the user about the wrong code being entered. I looked up the string in the binary, hoping that it would lead me somewhere interesting. I found the filename, but the logic around it was not immediately obvious.
The game has to grab characters entered by the user, but I’m not sure which of the standard imported Windows functions does the trick.
Under the assumption that the string that the user enters is maintained as a string, it would be compared against the correct code string. I see that CompareStringW() and CompareStringA() are being called. Googling these functions brings up Wine references, first and foremost. The usage is quite odd; if I understand this program correctly, it is passing the same string as string1 and string2 into these functions.

So I’m not getting anywhere with this tonight, and I don’t have any good, live analysis tools installed on this machine (i.e., no breakpoints or memory inspection). Perhaps I will get around to installing my old copy of Visual Studio. That could take up to 2 weeks, if memory serves, so it might be easier to just wait out the estimated 2 weeks it will take for the codes to somehow manifest themselves.

I’m still curious about exactly how the game is going to spring new codes on me on a weekly basis. SpyBot doesn’t report any new known spyware, and I don’t think the game installed any special background service (the level of technical ingenuity that went into building the game is certainly not on the same level as writing such daemons). I suspect that when I start the game again at certain times, it will let me know about certain codes. This might imply that the game knows when it was installed (perhaps by checking certain key file timestamps) and checking if the current clock is 1 or 2 weeks later. This could be corroborated by the usage of FileTimeToLocalFileTime() and FileTimeToSystemTime(). I suppose I could set the clock ahead, but I get nervous about doing that for some reason. Perhaps in a VMware session, though?

Check back in 1 and 2 weeks.

Update: Things just got easier when I found this old article that mentions the 2 codes: “For Skate Race, enter 894367; for Snowball Frenzy it’s 426985.” According to the article, the game would periodically tell you to visit your local Gap store to get the codes for the other games. I should try that just to see if they know the codes for this 6 or 7-year old game.

Update 2: See also Snow Day Bonus Games.

Sheer Pinball Madness

Posted on January 4, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I had a pretty negative experience the other night with Pro Pinball on the Sega Saturn. To be fair, not entirely the game’s fault. I think a lot of it had to do with the difficulty of getting the game to run on the Saturn, and the video darkness and delay problems that result from sending the Saturn A/V through my computer. But then I remembered that I have at least 2 more pinball games in the queue, both of which were slim boxes purchased at the dollar section of a Super Target store, along with 5 other games yet to process; none of the 7 are in MobyGames yet.

So I broke out a title called Arcade Pinball. Since it was so cheap, and it has so many company logos on the box, in addition to AOL offers, I was eager to see who was actually, originally responsible for the actual game. When I go to install the game, I find out that it is not one game, but five! This is what MobyGames affectionately refers to as Compilation/Shovelware. It seems that a company appropriately called Pin-Ball Games Ltd. specialized in these games. Do you know what this means for this Gaming Pathology project? That having played all 5 of these games tonight, I have taken care of my gaming obligation through Monday! But I won’t do that. But I will split this up into 2 entries and cover the first 3 pinball games today. The other 2 games group well for tomorrow’s entry.

The first of the 3 pinball games is The Avengers Pinball. Fans of the old show (as I once was, before the dreadful 1998 movie) will recognize this intro clip lifted wholesale, but with the word “pinball” stuck in just the right places:

I haven’t even checked what format the video happened to be in. I just let YouTube worry about it! Magical! But I digress. About the actual pinball game, here’s the Avengers table:

You’ll notice it’s very crowded and busy. But what a refreshing change from the bland pinball board from the other day! And Robert was right when he said that many pinball games have the nudging feature; this game has it too. It does not actually show the table moving. However, if you look on the right side of the board, there is a little green bubble level meter — the same used as a construction tool — to indicate that the table has moved.

One of the unique features of this table is that the ball will go into the revolver seen in the lower left part of the screen which then cocks and shoots it back out into the table. See? That’s the kind of outlandish novelty I look for in a computer pinball simulation. There is a bonus round between ball launches where the letters AVENGERS light up in sequence and the player has to capture it when all the letters are lit.

Here is the next table, an adaptation of the comic book eventually turned into a movie, Judge Dredd:

All 3 of these pinball games (unlike the 2 which will be discussed tomorrow) look like they’re built on the same engine. On that note, here are some notes I jotted down that cover all 3 boards:

The title screens for the games have a slideshow. Pro Pinball had this as well. Perhaps this is a standard feature of modern pinball simulators. Unlike Pro Pinball, these boards are actually interesting enough to examine up close.
The flippers were awfully far apart, more so than any reasonable pinball game I have ever seen. However, this is the first time I have ever successfully leveraged the nudging feature to compensate.
I had trouble running the games. Lots of crashes on “winpin.exe”. There are also bizarre visual glitches: Lots of flickering, but mostly that is restricted to intro and setup screens.
Those numbers in the upper-left corner are artifacts from Fraps screen capture. It is supposed to be configured to not capture its own framerate count along with the screenshot, and that feature usually works. I think this is another artifact of the visual glitching.
There are apparently 5 languages supported as the first screen allows you to choose among 5 flags (when I make a game, I’m going to do the same thing, but with a U.S. flag, a U.K. flag, an Aussie flag, you get the idea),
Each pinball game has a setup screen which, apparently, allows you to select among “640”, “800”, and “1024”. I suspect that refers to video modes. But “1024” is always disabled. Same for 24-bit mode (I can only select 8- and 16-bit). Same for 11 KHz over 22 KHz. Despite that, the video and audio are still amazing.
I’m not entirely convinced the physics are as accurate as they could be, but I still like the games. One of the more curious manfestations of quirky physics was when the ball bounces furiously between the forward bouncers, the ones just above the flippers (I’m not up on pinball technical terminology).
There is a high score count that allows you to enter your name when you make the cut. The board is pre-populated with the same name (e.g., “THE AVENGERS” on Judge Dredd). However, the field does not allow you to enter more than 7 characters.

The final game/table is an alien-themed Roswell:

This has a great, cheesy, 3D pre-rendered intro video. I wish I could find the right file and upload it to YouTube. This one has an alien ray gun that comes out of the lower-left corner and fires onto the table. I’m not sure what triggers that or what the net effect is, but it’s still cool.

Forbes Corporate Warrior

Posted on December 30, 2006 by Multimedia Mike

If your reaction upon reading the title of today’s game, Forbes Corporate Warrior, instills a deep sense on confusion and even apprehension, don’t worry– that’s perfectly natural. Succinctly, the game uses the first person shooter (FPS) genre as a metaphor for the world of business. “Business is war! Cash is ammo!” is the tag line. I think this qualifies as some kind of gaming mash-up.

If you’re like me, your knowledge and understanding of economic theory does not extend much farther than hoping the ATM keeps spewing the green stuff. Personally, I found Corporate Warrior a bit difficult to wrap my head around. And the manual, which reads like an Econ 101 cheat sheet, doesn’t help much. Perhaps a direct plagiarism of the keyboard controls section will help you, the reader, to understand a bit better what goes on in this game:

*****************************************************************
3. Game Control:
*****************************************************************
Keyboard Commands

move                          arrow keys
fire weapon                   CTRL (hold down for rapid fire)
choose weapon                 number keys (1 through 9)
rotate thru weapons           TAB
change speed                  hold down SHIFT and arrow key
strafe                        hold down ALT and arrow key
increase Thrifty orientation  Z or DELete
increase Luxury orientation   A or INSert
sell stock/equity             END
buy back stock/equity         HOME
increase debt                 PG UP
decrease debt                 PG DN
scan competitor               C
answer the video phone        SPACE BAR
advanced Radar Mode           R
radar zoom in / zoom out      +/- (press several times)
shield On/Off                 S
exit to main menu             ESC

After awhile of trying to digest this mini-econ refresher course, I decided I should just dive into the game. It ought to just be a FPS dressed up in business-y sounding terms. The backstory is that a brilliant scientist developed a virtual reality helmet called the Direct Stimulus Market Interface (DSMI, which I believe would be pronounced “diss-me”). Some global illuminati organization got to her but she managed to get the helmet to you in order that you may be able to use it as a tool for good, or something like that. Her communications to you are highly reminiscent of Nigerian scammers.

So you start out in an exceptionally ratty little closet of an office equipped with the DSMI VR helmet. The game has you at the helm of a business with a certain amount of cash on hand. You are in a metaphorical business arena with different types of enemies (“competitors”, technically) bearing disparate characteristics. Your primary weapon for disabling competitors is the Price Slicer. That uses cash when it’s fired. You also spend cash to move, even more to run. Heck, it even costs money when you stand still, though not as much. I think the game is trying to convey the notion that it costs money to run a business.

The preceding screenshot depicts gameplay. The competitor in this case is a piranha, something that stalks you in packs and can’t be outrun. They can’t be destroyed by the Price Slicer; you have to upgrade to the Ad Blaster. The bottom of the screen depicts your stock performance through the quarter. Don’t let it dip too low or a disembodied female voice will torment you endlessly with, “Stock price dangerously low!” The same voice helpfully notifies you when your cash reserves are below a 1/2 million dollars.

I somehow managed to make it to the second stage by shooting enemies and collecting items (including weapons like the Ad Blaster and little blue boxes representing market share) until it was the end of the first fiscal quarter. The first thing I noticed was a slightly upgraded office.

The last FPS that I was even remotely good at was Doom. I seem to recall that affair being a matter of moving, shooting monsters, picking up items, and making sure that your health and ammo meters never went to zero. Pretty simple. I like simple. By that standard, Corporate Warrior is a very complex game. Your health and ammo meters are unified, represented as a cash reserve; there are equity, marketshare, debt and luxury/thriftiness trade-off levels to worry about and, in some cases, manipulate in real time. And on top of all that, remember to keep an eye on the radar and select between up to 9 different weapons depending on the enemy you’re facing off with. Stock price is apparently is paramount importance in the game but I could not quite figure out what factors were supposed to affect it. Indeed, out of all the keyboard instructions listed above, the function of which I had the best comprehension was “strafe”.

But if you’re any aspiring CEO with a penchant for FPS games, I definitely encourage you to check this one out.

A Taco Bell Game! Tek Kids Flash Ops– Mission: Polar Challenge

Posted on December 28, 2006 by Multimedia Mike

I started out this evening playing some more Hot Wired and actually finished 3 of the 10 tracks. I think I’m well on my way to being able to write the authoritative strategy guide for the game. But duty requires that I soldier on!

Tonight’s game is a Taco Bell promotional game, Tek Kids Flash Ops– Mission: Polar Challenge. You might be surprised enough to learn that there is a Taco Bell promotional game, but wait until you find out that this is actually number 2 in a series. This is actually the first of a great many promotional tie-in games that I have in my possession and look forward to playing. This title is not very well-known: A Google search brings up an entry I wrote about it on another of my blogs.

Based on the CD sleeve packaging, this Tek Kids promotion must have run from August 3 through September 6 of this year (the sleeve says that you can call for technical assistance between those dates).

The primary game enables the player to select from one of four Tek Kids to carry out a special mission to stop a particularly insane villain, Dr. Havok, from inflicting his namesake effect upon the world. How insane is he? Insane enough that he saw Al Gore’s global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and decided that the best way to blackmail the world’s governments would be to accelerate the warming process by manually melting the polar ice caps with what the game describes verbally as a giant radar attached to a tank.

I was eager to jump right into the gameplay and see exactly how they managed to tie tasty tacos and burritos into what was sure to be a fast-paced action game. I am happy to report that Polar Challenge delivers, at least for a brief, free, promotional tie-in game. The principal action has your character piloting a little hoverjet over the ice, on your way to take out the problematic tank device. On the way, there are skiing robots that will try to trip you with their ski poles, spiked mines and some other exploding weirdness. On the plus side, there are 2 different types of weapons to pick up, as well as 2 types of powerups– fuel tanks to keep your jet craft moving, and spinning Taco Bell insignias to keep your life meter up. So that’s the tie-in! Taco Bell = life!

You have to maintain both your life meter (getting hit drains it) and your fuel meter (just moving drains it) or it’s game over. A frustrating aspect at the outset was that the game would abruptly end with Dr. Havok laughing himself silly– it would have been nice for some indication about exactly why the game was over. There are 2 different weapons — a green ring weapon and a pink cube weapon — but neither seems to be more powerful than the other. Also, there are copious warps on the mission that give you a major speed bump and make you bump into enemies much faster.

The game features 3 segments, each with progressively more obstacles. While the game has 4 characters to choose from, that doesn’t necessarily give it any particular replay value– the 4 different characters are apparently in place to fulfill certain demographic diversity goals, though someone put in a lot of effort to define different profiles for each Tek Kid.

After completing the game, you get a 4-character code. If you get the codes for all 4 games, you can unlock a bonus game. This implies to me that all 4 games carry the bonus game. The code at the end of this game is PXM6. Searching for the string in the binary is fruitless. I can’t imagine the developers put a lot of effort into an difficult-to-hack code system. However, only one character from each of the 4 4-character codes is used to unlock the bonus game, so it’s reasonable that the PXM6 string would not occur in any binaries (and the screen where it is presented is graphical).

From the code screen, I learn that the other 3 missions are titled Data Island, Aqua Zone, and Sky Fortress. I may make some trips to area Taco Bell restaurants and inquire about any CDs they might have in the back. Yeah, I’m just that lame.

One last feature of the actual game is that it allows you to create desktop wallpapers featuring the various Tek Kids on top of polar locale backdrops, with a “Think Outside The Bun” logo, and even that’s customizable.

The CD sleeve also contains a number of different puzzles including a connect-the-dot puzzle and a secret decoding message puzzle. The code is to drop the first and last letters of each word. Fiendish. The funniest puzzle is a picture of the Havok global-warming-accelerator tank, and the viewer needs to find the items that don’t belong in the picture, items like pliers, wrench, and snowshoe. I take this as a tacit acknowledgement that there’s nothing wrong with the tank being in the picture.

The game is the product of a firm named Maxx Marketing. Apparently, there is a long-running campaign based around Spy-Tek that they created for Taco Bell.

For multimedia trivia, underneath the covers, the game uses a lot of FLV files for full motion video. Flash-based game? That would certainly ease time to market.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Licensed Schlock

Taco Bell Aqua Zone Game

Sheer Pinball Madness

Forbes Corporate Warrior

A Taco Bell Game! Tek Kids Flash Ops– Mission: Polar Challenge