Cereal Clue

Posted on June 24, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Today’s game is another Hasbro board game transposed into a computer game, along the same line as Operation. This is Clue, and unlike Operation, it is the classic game directly transposed into a computer game with no added value. Like Operation, however, this game came in a box of General Mills cereal and the disc implores us to collect “them” all. I’m not entirely sure how many there are but a little googling on the topic of “general mills hasbro cd-rom promotion” reveals that The Clue and Operation titles must have run as parts of separate promotions.

My first task is to determine whether this game is the same as the Clue title that is already in MobyGames, which bears the full title of Clue: Murder at Boddy Mansion. The extended title is not featured anywhere in this game. But based on some screenshots I found on some other sites, this appears to be the same game (it was difficult to determine since there is an assortment of graphical quality levels).

The game comes in quite a few languages including US & UK English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish. Various bits of the localization point to the Clue/Cluedo dichotomy, the latter being the game’s name in Britain and perhaps elsewhere in Europe. I would like to know if it’s pronounced as “cloo-doo” or “cloo-doh”.

As previously indicated, the game is simply a direct adaptation of the classic board game onto the computer screen. At least 3 characters need to play. It can be just you against 2-5 computer players. It can even be 3-6 computer players, if you’re simply the voyeuristic type. There is TCP/IP-based multiplayer with other human players, if you’re really willing to go through that much trouble. At the highest detail levels, the graphics are beautifully rendered but terribly confusing with all the translucent walls. Regrettably, the game actually looks much better, or is less madness-inducing, if you play with all the graphical gimmicks shut off.

All in all, this game hearkens back to an era where anything digital was greeted with uncritical, wide-eyed wonderment. Those were the days. These days, the schtick wears thin really quick and you’re much better off with the original board game which is still quite common to come by.

The game features a number of Cinepak/PCM AVI files that depict the 6 differents characters committing a ghastly murder with each of 6 possible weapons (thankfully, the designers felt it unnecessary to also show each scene in each of the 6 possible rooms). The weirdest movie is how they handle the initial card shuffle. Remember that at the beginning of a Clue game, you randomly select the guilty party, the weapon, and the room where the crime was committed. The other cards are shuffled and dealt to the player. How to handle it in this game? With special ghost hands whose hands deal fate. Observe:

One more fascinating bit of trivia about this particular CD-ROM: iTunes thinks that the disc is Kelly Clarkson’s Thankful album. The CD hashing algorithm experienced a collision and it mapped to Kelly’s album. However, there are 4 very nice redbook audio tracks on the disc, ripe for the rip.

1997 In 1 Travel Game

Posted on June 16, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

So I was flying internationally and there was an onboard duty-free shop. Since I wouldn’t be doing much with this blog during my absence, I just knew I just had to buy this thing and write it up when I returned: Travel Game 1997 In 1 from Premier Portfolio.

The feature list is a tad sparse. To wit:

1997 in 1
Folding design
Sound on/off button
Batteries included
12 month int. guarantee

Understandably, you might be a wee bit suspicious of the claim that this wondrous little device actually contains one thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven unique games. My first guess was that it had one game and 1997 different levels for that one game. At best, I figured that it would have several different games and hundreds of levels for each.

This latter assumption turns out to be correct. There are, in fact, 14 unique games listed on the tri-lingual instruction manual– err, instruction scrap-of-paper. Several of them, however, are the same concept repeated over and over again.

On a technical level, the game screen has a tall rectangle drawn around the left 3/4. This is the area that contains 200 individually-addressed picture elements arranged in a 10×20 grid. The right quarter has a few other hardwired elements such as the score. There is a speaker that sounds like one synthesized channel which can still produce a useful array of sound effects. The controls allow you to select among the 14 games, play them, force a hard reset to select a new game, and toggle the sound. Further, when starting the system, “MIRADA” scrolls across the screen. Developer, perhaps? I didn’t have time to disassemble the unit to learn more, though the screws are straightforward enough.

Among the 14 games, 3 of them are racing games– “Car Racing”, “2-line Car Racing”, and “3-line Car Racing”. The 3-line car racing game is depicted below (it’s notoriously difficult to obtain quality screenshots on this system):

The mechanics of all 3 games are the same. You can move to the left or right or speed up (since the car moves pretty slow by default). The car racing game just has the player maneuvering on a narrow race track. The 2- and 3-line car racing games have cars in 2 or 3 lanes that you must dodge.

There is a “Tank Fighting” game where you navigate your tank around the field and shoot other tanks will avoiding obstacles. The tanks each occupy 3×3 grid blocks so it’s a pretty crowded game.

A game called “Shooting” simply has a bunch of blocks gradually but relentlessly descending. Shoot them before they reach you.

There is “Single Pinball” and “Double Pinball”. They are both Breakout/Arkanoid-type games. They also strike me as somewhat flawed. It can probably be proven mathematically given the constraints of the system, but I was able to show empirically that it was easy to get the game into a state where the ball followed the same pattern and could not clear a screen until you let the ball drop. The double pinball game differs from the single variant in that there is a paddle at the top of the screen that you are controlling simultaneously with the one on the bottom. I.e., there is no hard border at the top.

I assumed that the game “Shooting Space” would be a Space Invaders clone. In fact, I have never seen anything quite like it. One row of random blocks descends one level, followed slowly by another. You have to shoot more blocks upwards in order to complete lines and keep the blocks from reaching the lower level. It’s sort of like an inverted Tetris.

Speaking of Tetris, this type of hardware lends itself quite naturally to a Tetris-type game. However, it is simply called “Block Game” in this incarnation. This is what it looks like:

So I can understand why they would shy away from using the name Tetris. But that doesn’t square with the fact that they openly call their Galaxian clone “Galaxian”.

“Cross The Fire Line” is a Frogger clone when it comes right down to it while “Dragon Pearl” is a variation of the common Nibbles theme.

The unit also has a game called “Crazy Ball” which I think is supposed to be a Pong-type game. I’ve never played the original Pong so I don’t know if Pong is supposed to be this naive. The computer player simply moves back and forth in a constant manner. It’s still hard to beat the computer since the paddle is 1/3 the width of the screen.

One last game– It’s called “Block Matching” and it struck me as the strangest. There would be 3 blocks at the bottom of the screen, e.g.:

  XX  X  X
  XX  X  XX

3 blocks slowly descend from the top of the screen, Tetris-style. They do not initially match the blocks in the same position on the bottom of the screen. It is your job to alter the blocks within the group in order to make them match the bottom blocks before the group reaches the bottom. The left arrow rotates through block types for the first block, up or down controls the second block, and right manages the third.

I bought this odd item on my way back to the U.S. and my first stop was to visit some relatives. My young nephew seemed far more impressed with this device than I was. So I just collected enough notes for this post and let him have it. I’m glad it will get some use.

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.

Garfield’s Mad About Cats

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Destined to become a MobyGames description paragraph very soon: In Garfield’s Mad About Cats, Jon expresses displeasure with Garfield the Cat’s lack of motivation towards performing traditional rodent control duties. Still, Garfield is sympathetic to the mouse problem and assumes his alter-ego of Dr. Frankencat and, along with his assistant Eager (Odie), descends into the mad scientist lab in house dungeon. The mission: Create the perfect cat. To that end, Dr. Frankencat uses his computer to identify the most perfect traits of various cats from around the planet and assemble the features into a perfect cat.

The game is pretty slow moving at first and about 10 minutes in, I get a little worried that this might not be an actual game. The game allows you to select an attribute, such as tail and roar, and investigate a variety of cats from around the globe. When you do, Eager/Odie fetches a dish from the region where the cat hails from, as well as a bag of the specified attribute. Odie goes to work with the attribute while the big computer plays a brief video factoid about the selected feline species.

Garfield's Mad About Cats -- Brief Educational Video

My non-gaming fears are assuaged when the the game asks me if I would like to play Disco Jon. This turns out to be the first in a series of 12 random minigames/activities. The goal of this one is to memorize and replay the sequence of buttons to make Jon boogie down:

I like the metaphor present in this minigame: You only get 3 chances to get it right. Each time you screw up, one of the babe silhouettes loses interest and slips away.

Other games include a Whack-A-Mole clone (Whack-A-Rat); a Breakout clone (Burp Game) where Garfield uses his own belches to keep a mouse up in the air to hit all the cheese bricks; and a Space Invaders clone (Hack Attack) where a fleet of Nermals are descending upon Garfield and he must beat them back by coughing up hairballs. I was fairly disconcerted to see a sliding tile puzzle (Odie Maze)– I hate these, I hate these, I hate these! But this was the most messed up minigame by far– Fowl Shot:

Plant some poultry in the spring-loaded recliner, twist the chair to aim for the moving target, and fire. Even if you miss, as I did every time, it’s still great fun.

Law & Order: Dead On The Money

Posted on February 6, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s game is Law & Order: Dead On The Money, based on the popular television show. I somewhat expect this to be a better version of In The First Degree, especially when I see that the game was created by Legacy Interactive. I remember being impressed when I perused the multimedia for their emergency room simulation Code Blue.

The game is 2 CDs large. The installer wants to copy the first CD in its entirety to the hard drive. When you start the game, all of the intro and tutorial segments run from the hard drive. Then you are prompted for the second disc when it’s time to dive into the main course. That’s when you see this dialog:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Java Dialog

Eagle-eyed geeks will notice that the dialog’s icon indicates Java. I have seen quite a few interactive movie games based on Microsoft Visual Basic, as evidenced by the presence of VBRUN?00.DLL files (Critical Path, The Daedalus Encounter, and Quantum Gate all spring to mind). But this is the first commercial game I have encountered that runs on Java. Why, in theory, that should mean that it’s portable across any platform that can run a Java app… which pretty much means it can run on Windows. No, that’s not necessarily true– it seems that there is a Mac port of the game as well.

Law & Order: Dead On The Money follows you, a detective paired with Jerry Orbach’s character (whom I know best from an old episode of Tales From The Darkside where his deranged pal fell in love with a mannequin) investigating a woman’s early morning murder in the park. Before jumping into the action, the game has tutorials for both the detective and trial portions of the games, delivered by computer-generated, pre-rendered versions of the actors from the TV show. I edited the tutorial bookend animations together into this YouTube video so you can get an idea of the decent animation quality:

You begin the game by investigating the crime scene. This entails interviewing the man who first reported the body and checking the surrounding area for garbage that might double as a clue. This game has red herrings in quantity unlike many games which follow the Law of Conservation of Game Resources, where there are never any extraneous objects. Fortunately, partner Jerry gives helpful clues about what may prove useful. After you are satisfied you have gathered enough information, you proceed to some other place available to you on the map:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Travel Map

Next, I head to the medical examiner’s office to get her analysis of the situation. Each of the locales you can travel to allow you to pan 360° from the point where you’re standing, and perhaps travel to another office, or look at assorted objects. Since the remainder of the video files rely on QuickTime files, I suspect that the panorama effect might be achieved with QuickTime’s QTVR technology, but I’m not sure.

Next, I bring up the case file and decide that I should submit the blood and hair samples (hair found under the victim’s fingernails, not matching her own) to the crime lab for study. Here is the master case file screen which has a stupendous amount of information:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Case File

One of the key components of this game is time. You have 7 days to solve this case, or perhaps bring it to trial. I can’t remember where that time limit comes from, precisely. However, time flies in this game. Moving a few meters from one location to another in the park and leaning over to pick up a used ketchup packet can take up to 15 minutes. Yet traveling from Manhattan’s upper east side to Long Island takes about the same time. I’ve never been to the the Big Apple, but I hear that the latter feat is not supposed to be possible. I could be mistaken.

I was starting to get into this game. Unfortunately, it seemed to freeze up on me the first time I got a message on my in-game cell phone.

One more video, since they’re so well done– here’s the intro for the game This appears to be a clone of the opening credits except that the computer-generated doppelgängers fill in for the actual actors.

I see from MobyGames’ entry on the game that the “Dead On The Money” idiom (which means to be precisely correct) didn’t translate well into French (La Mort Dans l’Arme => The Death By Weapon [?]) or Italian (Omicidio a Central Park => Murder In Central Park, I’m guessing), and probably not Russian either, though someone else will need to verify.

Spycraft: The Great Game

Posted on February 5, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Some readers have recommended that I lay off the interactive movies, for the sake of my own sanity. I thought about it. But I see this list of known, unprocessed I-movies staring back at me from the surface of my gaming command center and I just can’t bring myself to abandon, or even postpone, the mission at this point, no matter how much it might be wearing on my psychological and emotional well-being. That, my friends, is commitment.

Besides, the next game on the I-movie roster — Spycraft: The Great Game — is one whose movie sequences I have perused before using a video decoder I helped reverse engineer and re-implement. Thus, I know it’s not all bad. In fact, the movie sequences are very good. Further, when I actually played the game this evening, I realized that it’s not pure I-movie but actually places heavy emphasis on some very unique puzzles. For that, I have placed this game in the puzzle games category in addition to the I-movie category, and I think even the I-movie category is iffy.

You play some CIA guy. There’s a big international event brewing. You are summoned into the director’s office to be on a team to investigate a new international crisis. But first, there is training. Generally, these are unique puzzles with a little faux FPS-type action thrown in for good measure. For example, the first training exercise is to use an image enhancement device to make out the license plate on the following picture:

The game features a lot of convenient little gadgets. Between two of the training puzzles, your tutor shows you a camera that operates on film but explains that it has backup, low-resolution images stored in a digital chip. What’ll they think of next? (This game was published in 1996.) Actually, now that I think about it, that device would work better for espionage applications (or would have worked better before film cameras were more or less crushed by digital counterparts) if it operated on more of a steganographic principle and allowed a knowledgable operator to snap innocuous photos on the film and secret photos on the digital chip.

The game is filled with tools that are so sophisticated that it’s a wonder why they need human intervention at all. But there wouldn’t be much of a game in that case. Here’s another interesting puzzle:

Spycraft -- Kennedy Assassination Tools (K.A.T.)

This is the K.A.T.– Kennedy Assassination Tools. This program uses a camera panorama to reconstruct a 3D wireframe model of an assassination site. You need to find two places on the scene where the bullets impacted. Then, use the tool to draw a trajectory to figure out where the round was fired from. Use the panorama camera view to find the suspect and then use the suspect ID computer to put together a computer sketch of the suspect. Finally, you can ask the computer to perform a search for possible matches based on the sketch.

There are lots of information resources in this game, including your PDA and your computer which both have access to impressive databases. Among other things, you have an org chart of your immediate superiors and reports. Here’s the dossier for one your subordinates:

I thought the game designers were taking things pretty seriously until I saw where she lived. Chevy Chase, Maryland. Come on, Spycraft, what do you take me for? But on a whim, I googled. Well, I’ll be– town of Chevy Chase, dot org. In fact, there does exist a Chevy Chase Blvd. in Chevy Chase, MD (though no Chevy Chase Road). I can go to bed knowing I learned something new tonight.

The answers to the puzzles always seem to be multiple choice. This is fortunate in most cases, such as the license plate puzzle. Rather than actually having to make out the grainy characters on the plate, the solution is obvious out of the three given. However, the choices grow more bountiful later in the game. And don’t you dare guess. If you get the wrong answer too many times, the director reassigns you to the CIA World Factbook division, which I’m guessing isn’t thought of very highly inside the Agency, or at least not in this game’s story arc. Here’s that particular game over video:

You know, I should start listing the games from this experiment that I have really enjoyed and that I want to revisit someday when this experiment is over, or when I simply need a break. This game definitely makes the cut.

See also:

Interrogation Minigames

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Puzzle Games