As some may have heard, the electronics chain CompUSA gets the axe soon. Because of this, they are allegedly blowing out all of their merchandise. But they are not trying very hard, at least not yet. I checked a local store a few days and found their budget/casual gaming section. The titles were $10 normally but were now advertised as 10% off. Not good enough. I am wondering when or if they will slash the prices far more significantly to make it worthwhile to pick up a bunch of these titles.
Category: The Big Picture
Missing Games — The Incomplete Lists
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
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
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
Today, I briefly revisited Dirty Harry for the NES. Here’s a screenshot of the start of level 3:
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:
- Beetlejuice
- Cliffhanger
- Conan
- Disney’s Chip ‘N Dale Rescue Rangers 2
- Dirty Harry
- The Terminator
- The Untouchables
See Also:
Hello Kitty Island Adventure
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?