Off-Brand Hunchback

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I have been trying to play some games recently but I have been discouraged by the creeping, non-fun sensation I get when I realize that I’m duty-bound to do a bunch of writing afterwards. That’s right, I seem to have finally hit that wall where playing these games is no longer any fun. Still, I have a goal of hitting 10K MobyGames contribution points before the year is out. And at this point in the experiment, you had better believe I understand the most efficient way to get mucho points off of a single game — by exploiting any given Macromedia Director-based game. Why? For these reasons:

They are often spec’d to run on 2, sometimes 3 platforms (Windows 95, Mac, and sometimes Windows 3.x).
I usually have a full cover art set of 3-5 scans.
The games are easy to blow through in a 1/2 hour and I can get a complete description of the game and a diverse set of unique screenshots, usually 20-30.
These games nearly always neatly roll their credits. Enter them for one platform. Once approved, easily copy & paste them for the other platforms.
These games are often produced by obscure, one-hit wonder-type companies that only ever produced a game or 2 before learning the hard way that the road to riches isn’t paved with cheap CD-ROM entertainment. The companies often aren’t in the database yet for this reason.

For all of these reasons, Babes in Toyland recently netted me well in excess of 100 contribution points.

With that, allow me to present the Director-based game, Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Quasimodo in a page from the interactive storybook

Published in 1996, this title is not based on Disney’s movie from that same year. Indeed, today’s specimen might be termed in some circles as a knock-off, but is it really? Disney does not actually have exclusive rights to the Hunchback story, only certain characteristics unique to their telling.

Anyway, this game consists of 4 minigames — rather abysmal minigames, I should note — based around the artwork shown in the story. The main attraction is the interactive storybook. Pages are shown as above. A text overlay is shown onscreen with part of the story. A narrator reads the text while segments are highlighted so that the user (presumably a young child who is disappointed that this game is not based on the real deal from Disney) can follow along. There is also a produced song that the user can opt to listen to. It comes off as something from an easy-listening radio station. I suppose it could very well have been the lead radio single from the Disney Hunchback.

This is one of the minigames, Make-A-Match:

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Make-A-Match memory game

You recognize the concept– the card-matching memory game. This variation is unique in that it gives the player as much time as desired to study the board before covering it up with rocks. Another game called Ring The Bell is yet another memory game where the player must remember and replay and sequence of bell tones.

This was the worst game for play control reasons:

It is called Rat Maze and what makes it so bad is that you have to click on the arrows on the left in order to move the cheese. The problem is that the underlying input mechanism wasn’t programmed in a very future-proof manner and even the speediest mouse click will send the cheese bolting to the opposite end of the maze.

This last item counts more as an ‘activity’ than a ‘game’ — Gargoyle Builder. Build your very own gargoyle from various colored body, arm, and head styles. Then you can press the ‘dance’ button to make him, well, spasm uncontrollably:

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Gargoyle Builder game

I admit that I have not read the original Hunchback tale (I didn’t even sit through all the pages in this animated storybook), though I did see Disney’s 1996 film (which, as an unabashed fan of 1990s animated Disney fare, I thought was an extraordinarily mediocre effort, save for the soundtrack). I did a text search for the word ‘gargoyle’ in Wikipedia’s entry for the story and came up empty-handed. Could it be that this game was brazenly ripping off that aspect of Disney’s creative license? Perhaps the people who developed this game didn’t read the original story either, but just saw the Friday premiere of the 1996 film and worked all through the weekend on this treatment.

This all reminds me of an old Suck.com essay called Faux Film Festival:

It’s a familiar, horrifying scenario. An exhausted parent in a video store or supermarket sees a videotape packaged for sale. The tape boasts a familiar title — Aladdin or The Hunchback of Notre Dame — and an attractive sticker price. Upon arriving home, the tape is proffered to media-savvy children, who immediately proclaim, in loud, whiny voices, “This isn’t the real Aladdin.”

The article notes that Disney lost a lawsuit to try to block such knock-offs. This might help to explain why, in recent years, they seem to have moved away from adapting traditional (read: public domain) stories (the last I can recall is 1999’s Tarzan) and more towards new properties (like The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo & Stitch).

What floors me the most about this game is that the guilty parties still seem to be in business: Peter Pan Industries, the publisher, is still around and is still ripping off everything Disney does. Amazing. Check out their catalog. They have, not one, but three episodes of The Little Cars (see Disney’s Cars). There is also Ratatoing, which I strongly suspect is influenced by Disney’s Ratatouille.

The game was developed by Right Angle, Inc. who has a portfolio to show for their 14 years in operation. This game, however, is not showcased.

At MobyGames:

Hunchback of Notre Dame

See Also:

Hunchback of Notre Dame Archived at Internet Archive

Babes In Toyland

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I became aware of tonight’s game — Babes In Toyland — somewhat by chance. On a lark, I started Googling some of the credits that I entered for Little Caesar’s Fractions Pizza to see if, in particular, any of the voice actors had done anything else. This is how I found the website of one aspiring young actress named Ashley Fox Linton who lists this game as well as the pizza game on her video game credits (humorously, her website claims that Fractions Pizza was published for Domino’s). This is just one way I find out about more obscure games to search for on eBay. According to my records, I got this game in a load that also included the wacky-sexy daredevil romp, Bikini Beach Stunt Racer.

Babes In Toyland turns out to be based on a 1997 animated film. The movie and the game both seriously violate accepted Santa Claus canon by asserting a storyline in which Santa Claus actually outsources the production of Christmas toys to a location known as Toyland. Toyland has just completed an order for the jolly old elf when the villain Barnaby swipes the toys and scatters them around Toyland. It’s up to our young hero and heroine to recover the toys before St. Nick arrives for pickup, lest they be placed on the permanent “naughty” list.

It’s another Macromedia Director-based, kids’ game. It also has the most phenomenally simple installer of any Windows game I have seen yet. The setup.exe game just places a shortcut on your hard drive that can launch the game from the CD-ROM. It’s done in a flash.

Since it’s a kids’ game, I know darn well what that entails: minigames! 9 of them in this case. One deals with the famed Humpty Dumpty. The villain’s cat startles the egg-man who falls from his famous wall and shatters.

Babes in Toyland -- Humpty Dumpty after his notorious fall

Despite the fact that the traditional Humpty mythos clearly explains the difficulty faced by all the king’s horses as well as the king’s men in attempting to reassemble this monstrosity, the game still sees fit to task 2 children with that very endeavor.

One of the toys must be recovered from the shoe house, the one where the old lady lives inside with many children. You must help her locate all of them in what shapes up to be a pixel hunting game. Another game which involves descending pairs of red eyes in a haunted forest is more or less a glorified shoot-em-up game using a flashlight to expose the goblins. Then there is this well from which you have to save ducks, but not fish, using the bucket:

Babes in Toyland -- Dog-looking ducks in a well

I have never seen such dog-looking ducks before. The game was starting to wear thin when I earned this unexpected, but not wholly unwelcome, reprieve:

Babes in Toyland -- Macromedia Director error

But I still like collecting full screenshot sets for these types of simple, colorful games, so it was back to play for me. It doesn’t take long to clear all 9 puzzles. When Santa arrives, he is pleased with Toyland’s commitment to quality and no doubt ecstatic about the money he is saving by not having to rely on domestic elf labor, or deal with the elf labor unions. Upon successful completion, I earn this certificate:

Babes in Toyland -- Certificate from Santa

I am not quite sure what to make of this, particularly the date. The game probably came out in 1997, the same year as the film. I checked my system clock and it correctly reports that today is a day in the year 2007. I wonder if the game saw the date greater than 1999 and filled in 2010+ automatically.

Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest

Posted on March 18, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Remember how I mentioned that interior decoration in the form of choosing and arranging furniture was not my proverbial cup of tea in the game of Restaurant Empire? This Gaming Pathology experiment has reached new lows in emasculating gameplay. Check this out– a minigame that revolves around measuring and cutting drapes:

Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest -- Drape measuring and cutting game

This comes from today’s game, Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest, ostensibly based on a PBS-produced educational TV series (and it shows in the opening animations that were poorly transcoded from television source material). This follows the same general formula as countless other educational kids’ games: A series of odd minigames strung together by a tenuous storyline. In this one, our 3 young protagonists visit the town of Castleblanca, a village run by horrid but civil monsters. The 3 kids also have a mutant bird in tow who sounds like he’s voiced by the ever-grating Gilbert Gottfried, but alas, the credits indicate otherwise. And even though the unholy undead are supposed to be the comically frightening aspect of this town, this no-eyed skeleton can’t hold a candle to the unnaturally glassy-eyed stares of these young ones:

Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest -- D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs

Regarding the actual gaming content, there are 8 minigames/puzzles to play through. All have practice modes that are significantly easier than the actual games in the adventure mode. Each game teaches something to do with mathematics or spatial reasoning. Most are a little difficult to wrap one’s head around at first. But after some practice, the purpose usually clicks. For example, in the Monster Dive game, there is a tank with a low volume of water. The scoreboard tells you how much depth is required for the current diver, plus a custom adjustment for that diver. You must do the math to decide the water level and drop more monsters into the tub to displace water and raise the level.

All in all, this was my favorite minigame:

Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest -- Disco mirrors

Your task in this Disco Deflector game is to adjust the mirrors so that when you throw the switch, the light beam finds its way to the mirror ball without hitting any of the monsters. Then they can boogie like they were meant to.

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.

Curious George Learns Phonics

Posted on February 24, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I’m still going full speed with the educational games, which is good because I feel that one should never stop learning. I wanted to see what that mischevious monkey Curious George had to teach, and how he would go about it. Somehow, I always feel a little bit of relief when I’m able to solve these kindergarten puzzles, even if I make a few mistakes along the way (as I did today).

The game, as you might be able to guess by now since it’s a common pattern in educational games, is comprised of a series of activities and minigames. The action takes place in a circus and the player chooses from among the activities in the big tent. At least one of the activities takes place outside the big tent and pertains to custodial duty and business discipline. It’s also likely to be the most familiar to gamers since it somewhat resembles a traditional Pac-Man game. It’s called Peanut Pickup:

The setup for this minigame is that the peanut vendors are being sloppy with their merchandise. George and his elephant patrol the grounds and pick up the loose nuts. Further, there is a letter on the big tent. Each vendor is carrying a picture as they walk the circus. Capture the vendor that is carrying a picture whose word starts with the same letter as on the big tent. In the above example, that would be the one toting the box picture. This minigame is actually a marginal departure from the usual Pac-Man paradigm in that, of the moving objects that are also on the board (the metaphorical ghosts), two are the hunters and one is the hunted. At least, you’re dinged for catching up to a vendor whose picture does not match up right.

And so it goes with many of the other five activities. I learned from writing up the MobyGames description that these simple activities seem to take a lot of words to describe precisely. For example, another minigame called Animal Acrobats has 3 animals trot out carrying pictures. Then a banner with a picture slides overhead. You must click on the animal who is carrying the picture whose word rhymes with the word represented by the picture on the banner. Like nail and sail. Or, in another variation, you have to select the animal carrying the picture whose word begins with the same sound as the word whose pictures is represented on the overhead banner. If you get it right, the animal (bear, giraffe, elephant, etc.) jumps on a trampoline and somersaults forward; otherwise, they do a backflip. When you have completed several of these, you get to watch a sequence of the animals perfoming for the big crowd.

When it’s time to exit the game, you are awarded a certificate itemizing your academic performance:

Curious George -- My Certificate of Achievement

I didn’t print this out, though I had the option. Perhaps I can do better if I tried a little harder.

Disney’s Hades Challenge

Posted on February 23, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I don’t mind telling you that I’m excited about tonight’s game, Disney’s Hades Challenge, and for two main reasons: because Disney’s 1997 Hercules movie remains my all-time favorite animated Disney movie, and because their first Hercules-based computer game was also very good. That title was a pure action game featuring the hero himself. This game takes a different approach and bills itself as an adventure/strategy game and the star is you. It seems that Hades and other monsters are menacing the lands again and Hercules is busy with some other stuff. So Zeus enlists your help and sends you over to Philoctetes, a.k.a. Phil, who was voiced by Danny DeVito in the movie. It sounds like DeVito in this game as well but his name does not show up in the credits (though James Woods lends his original voice talent as Hades).

Phil gets you going on your first quest: To do something about the Minotaur that is ravaging the island of Crete. So I get in the boat I am issued — which is none other than the legendary Argo, you know, the one from Jason and the Argonauts — and head over to Crete to scope out the situation. Things are weird over there. When you first get to the island, you can see that the Minotaur is indeed causing chaos with impunity. So you need to go visit Daedalus. Thing is, the king is holding out on you and won’t let you see him until you bring him the gift of a new centerpiece for his table:

So you return to the dock in search of a statue that would make a suitable centerpiece for such a snobbish, slothful monarch. Where am I supposed to find a statue? Fortuitously, a statue peddler appears with a set of four statues and says that they’re all free today and that the king would love them. One by one, I bring them to the king with the peddler’s highest recommendation.

Every time, King Minos rejects the statue. I thought it was exceptionally odd and convenient that this statue hustler showed up when he did, and that his free merchandise didn’t seem to do the trick. Somehow, he reminded me of Pain and Panic, Hades’ pair of sniveling little hench-demons. I was warned to watch out for these two and that they would be working to thwart me. If that was their mission, they did a remarkable job the first time out since when I ran out of statues, the game threw this assertion dialog:

A lot of information there. For a lesser game, I would have called it quits at this point. But this game has piqued my interest. Besides, I wanted to see if the bug was reproducible. It was not. However, going in and out of the king’s chambers, I couldn’t help but notice that he has a certain infatuation with bulls. Eventually, I noticed the little bull statue to the right of the peddler. He was trying to distract me and when I took the statue to Minos, Hades showed up to adminstratively reprimand his underlings as Hades is wont to do. Turns out I was right about the statue guy.

So the king grants me the honor of speaking with Daedalus, the ostensible Greek with a thick French accent. He is making progress on the maze which will trap the man-bull but needs some supplies, including bricks, wood, straw, and stone. These are scattered about the various isles. The closest item, wood, is stored in a boat docked right here in Crete. Let’s review the heroic acts thus far:

delivering a horned statue to a royal prick
breaking & entering
grand theft lumber

To get at the wood, you have to solve this puzzle:

It’s a good thing I have a working knowledge of Greek letters; I wouldn’t have had any clue on this one otherwise. Can you see the solution?

I was bracing myself for more puzzles — and probably even a sliding tile puzzle — on the other islands before procuring the other needed materials. But no, the junk was just laying around on the shores when I sailed in. Though that wasn’t a surprise in war-ravaged Troy where I simply had to scavenge some bricks.

So you take these pieces back to Daedalus and he is able to construct a number of walls. However, when it comes time to trap the Minotaur, Daedalus enlists your help once more to rotate various walls in order to trap the creature. It’s an interesting puzzle:

Other notes I made during the course of my brief playing:

The ‘wait’ mouse icon when the program is busy with an animation (such an icon is traditionally represented as a watch or hourglass) is a sundial.
Hades appears after a quest with some Olympian god quiz and other mythological trivia. Statues of various gods and goddesses are littered across the land. Click on them to hear what they specialize in. It’s useful knowledge for these situations.
Appears to be a Smacker-assisted game. Smacker is used for pure audio in many cases.
Hot spots are very hard to find sometimes. You wind up just methodically scanning the screen (a.k.a. pixel hunting) waiting for the mouse cursor to change. It makes you long for another puzzle with a concrete goal.
The credits are extremely long for what doesn’t appear to be a very involved game, but perhaps I oversimplify. Maybe there are a lot of people to validate that everything about the game conforms to official Disney standards.

BTW, this game definitely goes on the list of games to revisit one day. Much fun, silly though it may be.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Mac Games