All Hail The Moon Deity

Posted on October 18, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s game is Rockett’s Camp Adventures. It comes from Purple Moon, a company that I remember from the late 1990s for the press they received about creating games for girls. I was sure the company would already be in MobyGames, but nope. That means I have yet another forgotten franchise to track down and enter.

Purple Moon published a series of these games that revolved around a girl named Rockett. In this title, she packs her bag for camp and steps into some cliched teen drama the moment she steps off the bus.

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — Welcome to Camp Luna

The intro of the game exhibits the campers chanting songs of worship to the camp’s namesake, namely the earth’s natural satellite. I figured that they may as well be singing to a lunar deity, but then I noticed that Luna is already the Roman god of the moon. This, as well as he ensuing drama may all be part and parcel of the summer camp experience; personally, I have no frame of reference.

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — Nicole balloon

The teen conflict comes in the form on Nicole, ostensibly the spoiled rich girl archetype and anointed leader of “The 1’s”, the elite clique. It seems that most of the kids also attend the same school since many of them are already familiar with each other (and as I typed that, I shivered from the realization that I would probably learn their backstories when I inevitably procure the other Rockett games). Having left high school well over a decade ago, I finally understand how cliched and unrealistic these portrayals of teen social caste can be. The Nicole character is an over-the-top snob and it doesn’t really work. In order for this to reflect teen life as I remember it, she would need to inspire awe and fear in those around her. Much of that fear involves exploiting typical insecurities inherent in other teens. The other teens do not fear her; quite the contrary, they openly mock her to her face, as depicted in the fantasy in the above screenshot.

Forgive the digression into thematic criticism. I will return to the gaming elements now. What there is, anyway. The game is primarily an overblown interactive storybook: Colorful backgrounds with mostly static characters that rarely move. The story proceeds in a linear fashion until there is a pressing realtime decision that the character must make. Well, maybe not realtime. And it’s not that pressing, either. It doesn’t drive the story in any direction. One such decision is when first encountering the Nicole character– Rockett essentially has the choice to throw her support behind Nicole and her gang of 1’s or hang out with her lame friends. No matter how many chances I was offered to snub the uncool kids, the game would not let me choose that path.

There are a number of activities. The first is the canoe race which is not terribly exciting, save for whales, cephalopods and submarines that inhabit this little river. There are no real threats or competition on the river and the only goal is to beat your own time.

I thought the Crystal Caverns game was mildly interesting:

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — Crystal Caverns

In this activity, the player must navigate through a cavern in 7 stages. At each stage, there is a puzzle to solve that reveals the correct door. The puzzles are pretty much at the level Capcom’s Resident Evil series as illustrated by the screenshot above (hint: where does the stick dude’s longest arm point?). Some of the puzzles rely on auditory clues. I solved all the puzzles correctly on the first try but there are no real consequences for guessing wrong– the 3D rendered tunnel simply backs up to the same junction.

There are 2 more activities: An arts & crafts activity of making friendship bracelets, and the DJ Mix Maker:

It’s a 4-track studio application and reminds me a lot of 4-channel Amiga tracker modules (MODs). That made me happy. I often observed that many MOD composers used the 4 channels for beat, bass, chords, and melody. This application basically enforces that same structure, though the budding composer has 10 sound effects to choose from as well.

Rockett also has a little PDA along for the trip (which would have been quite special in 1999 when this game was published). This thing provides help, a private journal, email from the game, progress status, as well as a callout to a web browser to bring up Purple Moon’s website which, surprisingly, is not being squatted upon, though it has been absorbed into a larger Mattel site by now. There is also this research tab which delivers up educational nuggets in certain activities. It provides and describes compass functionality when in the Crystal Caverns (not especially useful, mind you):

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — Compass pronunciation

The part that I was fixated upon was the pronunciation: ‘k&m-p&s’. Did they mean for the ampersand to stand in for pronunciation characters because they were restricted to a 7-bit ASCII encoding? Or are there font issues? I work on multi-lingual user application software so I’m naturally sensitive to these issues.

I think I’ve picked on this game’s content enough. Tech support time. I would be remiss in my duties as a video game historian if I did not publish notes about problems I encountered, complete with retyped error text for the benefit of Google crawlers, as well as the resolutions I found. The first one involves “Xpat Runtime Engine”:

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — xpat runtime engine error

And the second problem I encountered was “Out of memory. can’t create message box While executing: MESSAGEBOX – FILEDLG.DLL”:

Rockett’s Camp Adventure — fildlg.dll error

I made both of these problems go away by setting the compatibility mode for the program to Windows 95.

See Also:

Time to Ride: Saddles & Stables — another game dealing with the struggles of being accepted

At MobyGames:

Rockett’s Camp Adventures

The Intersection Of Automatons and Breakfast Pastries

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

In last night’s post, I alluded to breakfast cereal promotions. I decided to tackle that this evening. First up was a disc procured at a garage sale many years ago called 13 Days Of Halloween: Rhythm & Boos. It pertains to Count Chokula cereal. Imagine my disappointment to learn that it is not a game, but an audio CD. I had a similar experience once when investigating a Scooby-Doo disc only to learn it was a video DVD rather than a game. On the plus side, the Rhythm & Boos CD does have a nice 17-minute track of Halloween-type sounds.

No matter, because I still have two representative specimens of a trilogy of promotional discs for the movie Robots from 2005. These games were distributed in specially marked boxes of Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts. I never saw the movie but I claim that this robot is considerably more terrifying than any model of Terminator robot:

Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone

The title Sweeper Zone implied to me that this would be a Minesweeper clone. Actually, no. Your robot’s job is to maneuver into traffic and clean up scrap metal. He can only collect one piece at a time and then return it to the salvage point. It’s not especially difficult and it gets boring very, very quickly. Fortunately, Pop-Tarts cross-promotion shows up so that I can claim that this is a breakfast food tie-in game:

Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone — gameplay

Confusingly, each disc has 2 distinct games (along with a robot building factory activity, and Robots movie promotional material). The second game, which does not receive billing on the CD-ROM, is Chop Shop:

Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone — Chop Shop

Ratchet must catch the falling junk in his box. Catching the Pop-Tarts logo makes the box wider. It feels like something from an Atari 2600 game and frankly gives a bad name to promotional tie-in games.

The second disc is Rescue The Rusties. Again, this disc actually has 2 games. The one that gets mentioned in the title is quite challenging. The object is to navigate the maze and, well, rescue the Rusties, as well as any imperiled Pop-Tarts logos:

There are malicious robots out to get you but you can slow their pursuit by secreting oil slicks.

The second game is Pick-A-Part, a match-3 game! Yes! I’ll have you know that I am well on my way to becoming a grandmaster at this type of game thanks to my continuing practice at Magic Match. The goal of this game is to keep the gears away from he roving robot at the bottom of the screen.

Pop-Tarts Presents Rescue The Rusties — Pick-A-Part game

Even with my considerable skill, I couldn’t complete the second level at this game. Back to Magic Match, I suppose. It should be noted that Pop-Tarts logos were absent from this last game.

The other game in the series is Rodney Copperbottom And The Robot City Heroes. And I think you know that I am willing to expend considerable effort (well, I’ll frequent thrift shops and eBay anyway) in order to obtain it, along with the other prized Gap Kids game.

See Also:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest — a promo game done well
Taco Bell Tek Kids games — promo games done reasonably well

At MobyGames:

Magic Match

Posted on October 5, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Casual games are big business these days. It’s important to differentiate your casual game from all the other thrown-together dreck out there. To that end, Magic Match specifically bills itself as a “Premium Casual Game”. I must admit that it lives up to that lofty claim.

Magic Match is primarily a “match 3” game. I suspect that there are many games just like this out there (though this is the first one I have ever played). There are a bunch of pieces scattered about a puzzle board and you have to link chains of 3 or more pieces in order to make them vanish.

This game is remarkably elaborate for a simple puzzle game. The graphics, the animation, the music, the soundtrack (using Ogg Vorbis files! alert the Xiph wiki!) that sings the game’s instructions and story to you– oh yeah, and the story. There is one. Something about you questing through 6 stages with many, many puzzle-stops along the way. The game copy lists that there are 126 puzzles among the 6 stages.

There is an assistant imp who helps you along the way. There are dozens of powerups and other items that appear along the way which he kindly explains as they become available. He also describes new obstacles on the board, which would be plain confusing and tedious if the player were to have to consult a manual. Periodically, the imp helper (Giggles) gets to participate in a bonus game which is just a Pac-Man knock-off but with a pair of really unmotivated ghosts for adversaries:

Bottom line: the game works. I.e., I would rather be playing it than writing up this entry about it (which, you should know by now, does not happen often). Back to it…

At MobyGames:

Magic Match: Journey to the Lands of Arcane

The Wild Thornberrys Movie

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I didn’t want to go into this one cold so I hit up Wikipedia for the requisite background info on the Nickelodeon franchise called The Wild Thornberrys. It seems that they’re a family of nature videographers who make the rounds in the African wilderness. Somewhere along the line, the cartoon was deemed successful enough to warrant a feature-length film on the subject matter. Based on my reading of the Wikipedia synopsis, The Wild Thornberrys Movie video game works to follow the plot of the movie more or less faithfully.

The Wild Thornberrys Movie — Swimming with the dolphins

I thought that this was just going to be a series of disconnected minigames. In fact, there are 3 distinct types of activities present: minigames (7), multiplayer games (3), and the main story game. The minigames include a jigsaw puzzle, a painting activity, and a sliding tile puzzle (nooooooooo!). There is the enjoyable and eye-pleasing Swimming with the Dolphins minigame seen above, where you compete against the computer-controlled dolphins to dodge sharks and collect starfish. But there is also the baffling strategy card game called Feed The Animals:

The Wild Thornberrys Movie — Feed the animals before the poachers do

The goal of Feeding the Animals is to feed said animals before the poachers do. I’m not sure if I see the logic in that. But I understand that the poachers are supposed to be the antagonists in this tale. I came to my own conclusion, however, that any animal dumb enough to be snared by these tactless poachers probably deserves to be turned into a trinket. You know, Darwinism and all (in fact, a supporting primate character is named Darwin). To illustrate what I mean, the first challenge presented to you when playing in story mode is to save the cheetah cubs from the poachers– the poachers who are trying to swoop down using a helicopter in order to swipe the young cats.

The Wild Thornberrys Movie — Save the cheetah cubs

But then the main character, Eliza, gets carried away by the helicopter and must be rescued in a separate game. Eventually, Eliza winds up in a private British school along with her monkey and endeavors to escape. This is the section that put an end to my adventures, though I gave it a good shot. The first phase of the school game has Eliza wandering throughout her mostly vacant school dodging the occasional guard and trying to find Darwin the monkey. I actually had to draw a logical map on paper to keep this part straight since everywhere looks pretty similar; mercifully, the developers threw in numbers on the hallways and doors. The guards in this stage are beyond stupid– they pace back and forth in a straight line and only “catch” you if you happen to be standing directly in their line of pacing. Then you get sent back to the start of the level.

The Wild Thornberrys Movie — Procession of guards

Things get tougher when you find the monkey and try to escape via the garden maze where the guards are a tad more diligent. This part is segmented into several areas that must be unlocked with gate keys. The most humorous aspect is that the guards exercise strict jurisdiction over their segment and will not cross outside of their boundaries. I eventually developed some strategies, like trying to get all the guards to follow me in a strict procession as I searched for the area key, which changes position each time. The aptly-named Darwin monkey would get stuck sometimes but not to worry– he couldn’t be captured and would eventually catch up.

I couldn’t get past the segment where I had to hop on a bicycle and hightail it out. It’s not easy to pilot the bike and I never got much opportunity to practice before getting caught and sent back to the start of the stage.

Through it all, I have to give this 2002 title proper credit– it’s very well engineered, very colorful, very well-animated, and reasonably fun. In fact, I may even revisit it someday to play through to the end, since I didn’t even get through half the levels of the story mode.

At MobyGames:

The Wild Thornberrys Movie

WildSnake

Posted on May 4, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I wrote up Xardion and I am still trying to gather the motivation to properly write up Quattro Arcade from last fall. But I just want to play a new SNES game. By chance, the one I chose at random happened to be a casual puzzle game that will not take much thought investment: WildSnake. Yes, it’s quite understandable and natural that you will have the song Wild Thing with slightly altered lyrics running through your head as you read this review.

WildSnake is a puzzle game inspired by the Tetris legacy. In this game, the player contends with snakes of varying colors and lengths falling from the top of the screen and slithering to the bottom. Obviously, the goal must be to clear out snakes but how was not immediately clear. It turns out that the key is for one snake to touch another snake of the same pattern using its head.

WildSnake — Grass background and flask grid with iron snake

There are 4 backgrounds and 7 grid types to choose from. Pictured above is the grass background with the flask grid type. Also seen in the picture is the rare iron snake or barrel snake (lacking a manual, I had to make up my own name for him)– he comes barreling down the screen on a fixed path over which you exercise no control, eliminating all snakes in his path. Thus, he is helpful.

This is the 2-player mode:

WildSnake — 2 player mode with random obstacles

The screenshot shows some random obstacles in the first player’s game grid. That occurs as a result of the second player scoring multiple snake eliminations on one snake drop, which is a nice competitive touch.

My all-time favorite puzzle game is Dr. Mario for the NES. I was able to work up a lot of strategy for that game because the game screen remained relatively static. It’s considerably tougher to devise any kind of real time strategy for this game. The snakes keep slithering until their heads touch an obstacle. When a snake is eliminated, the entire pile of snakes is often jostled into new positions. Still, it was enjoyable to collect a diverse set of screenshots and I gave it my best shot every time. Not the finest SNES game I have ever played, but substantially better than last night’s ordeal.

At MobyGames:

WildSnake

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…

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Puzzle Games

All Hail The Moon Deity

Magic Match

The Wild Thornberrys Movie

WildSnake

Spy Kids: Man In The Moon