Missing Games — The Incomplete Lists

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

This blog has been a bit stagnant lately, but that’s not because of a lack of material yet to be entered into MobyGames. Indeed, the more data I enter into the database, the more data I somehow come across that yet needs to be entered. In fact, over the course of this experiment, I have created a number of lists of all the games that I personally know of that are not in the database.

Thus, I present to you the lists of missing games. My personal specialty is 8-bit NES games. As of this writing, there are still about 85 NES games missing from the database. Not bad, considering that the number was over 250 when I first started contributing a few years ago. For certain lists like the NES and Dreamcast lists, I sought out official or unofficial game list compilations and carefully reconciled them against MobyGames. For lists such as Windows and Sony PlayStation, I have not done a formal reconciliation process yet and have only been compiling lists as I become aware of games that are not in the database. This usually occurs when I am browsing eBay stores that stock lots of obscure gaming software.

I have been working a lot on my primary technical blog recently (which sometimes involves some game hacking). But I would still like to return to this effort because I want to score 10,000 MobyGames contribution points before the year is out. Right now, I have a little over 8700 points. It should be a doable goal.

More Pizza Hits

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Rejoice! Someone else has actually played this game! Karen came along and made a request for another smash hit track from the Little Caesar’s Fractions Pizza, and I’m only too happy to indulge her nostalgia. This one deals with how whole numbers can be divided and united.

Little Caesars Fractions Pizza — The Whole Can Be Divided Or United, 1.31 MB, MPEG-4 AAC (.m4a) file

Who knows? Maybe I will start posting much more music from forgotten video games — until an IP owner complains about it — just to make effective use of my web hosting plan.

Odyssey 2

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

It recently dawned on me to scour the local Craigslist listings to search for people who want to get rid of a pile of ancient video games. My first search paid off with an Odyssey² unit plus 12 games (with one duplicate). Tell me truthfully– this doesn’t look too much like a Pac-Man ripoff, does it?

K.C. Munchkin

I was taking it for granted that MobyGames probably already has a full library of all Odyssey² games. I don’t know what made me think so. 6 of these games are still not in the database. This journey just doesn’t end.

I received the games in great condition, all with their original boxes more or less intact. An interesting bit of trivia regarding these games is that many of them, if not all, were procured at a store known as Joske’s, which was apparently local to Texas and Arizona, and was bought out as of 1987. There are still remnants of price tags on several of the games but it is hard to make out the original prices. I could be very mistaken, but I think the prices read in the neighborhood of $12-$16.

Plaintext

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Today, I briefly revisited Dirty Harry for the NES. Here’s a screenshot of the start of level 3:

Dirty Harry (NES) -- Jumping around Alcatraz in view of the Golden Gate Bridge

Unless I miss my guess, Dirty Harry is on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay (though I have not seen the movie, I know that Dirty Harry is supposed to be set in San Francisco). That would be the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, not to mention a little of Sausalito to the right of the bridge. Quite accurate. I really should make a category for games featuring San Francisco in some way.

And look! I even figured out how to jump (A+B). I reasoned that it must be possible to jump since there are some spots early in this stage where jumping is an absolute necessity lest you fall into the bay. And since there aren’t that many NES input options, that pretty much leaves the (A+B) combo.

The reason I made it all the way to level 3 is that I thought to open the ROM file and scan for plaintext strings. WildKard pointed out that this yields useful company data for certain games. I was dubious since, in my limited explorations, there is not a great deal of plaintext to be gleaned from NES ROMs (English strings can be encoded much more efficiently with fewer than a full 8 bits per character). However, for certain games — Dirty Harry included — there is some plain ASCII text, passwords in this case. Level 2 = ‘misty’, level 3 = ‘bird ‘ (with a space at the end). ‘clyde’ gives infinite lives. There seems to be a fourth password, ‘gunny’, but I’m not sure what it does. It’s not infinite ammo.

New games:

See Also:

My first look at Dirty Harry, along with 6 other movie-based NES games

Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

The South Park Season 10 DVD set came out yesterday. I finally got to watch the now-famous Make Love, Not Warcraft episode based on World of Warcraft. Strangely, the key point upon which I fixated was when Butters said he wasn’t playing WoW, but rather Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

In the real world, everyone else would be playing the former while I would be stuck with the latter, if only to get the record into MobyGames. In fact there are at least a few Hello Kitty-themed games, but no Island Adventure.

Still, this DVD set came with a free 14-day trial WoW disc. I wonder if I should devote the 2 full weeks to experiencing the modern marvel that is the MMORPG?

QA Discrepancy

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I finally have time to play games again, sometimes multiple games per night if they’re really simple and/or bad games. I’ve still got a bunch of loose ends up on my big whiteboard next to my computer. I want to clean it off completely before proceeding. That means entering a few games that I have heretofore been stalling on, and making sure all outstanding credits are entered.

To that end, I was entering the credits for the Saturn version of Black Dawn when I came across this curious block of names:

What are we to conclude from the number of Saturn QA staff vs. PlayStation QA staff? Perhaps:

The Black Dawn programmers were much better at programming the Saturn than the PlayStation and the Saturn port did not need as much testing.
The Saturn port simply didn’t receive as much love as the PlayStation port and I should not expect Black Dawn on the Saturn to be especially bug-free.

New games in the database thanks to the renewed efforts of this blog:

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: The Big Picture