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:

1. The Black Dawn programmers were much better at programming the Saturn than the PlayStation and the Saturn port did not need as much testing.
2. 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:

• Alien³
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• Fisher-Price: I Can Remember
• Fisher-Price: Perfect Fit

I have been clogging up MobyGames’ game entry queue for a week now, but the approvers have managed to work through some of the backlog:

• The Last Starfighter
• Mickey’s Safari In Letterland
• Fisher-Price: Firehouse Rescue
• Ninja Crusaders
• Ninja Kid

A few months ago, I picked up a CD-ROM at a spent video shop that contained various Ubisoft marketing materials for upcoming games, where “upcoming” was defined as anytime from a few months to a year after the middle of 2004. I wrote about this more in this entry. The disc contained a bunch of Powerpoint presentations that were marked as not being meant for public consumption. I thought about uploading them at the time, but PPTs aren’t very friendly to the web.

Last month, however, I learned of a service called slideshare, which can be described succinctly as the YouTube of Powerpoint presentations. I have uploaded all 14 PPT files for your perusal:

• Advanced Guardian Heroes
• Alexander
• Brothers In Arms
• Chessmaster
• Far Cry – Instincts
• Myst IV Revelation
• Pacific Fighters
• Prince of Persia 2 (later named Warrior Within)
• Rocky Legends
• Secret of the Silver Earring
• Silent Hunter III
• Star Wars Trilogy – Apprentice of the Force
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

Now that the slides are out there, perhaps someone can answer this burning question: Who are these slides made for? My best guess is that they are targeted towards retailers, trying to sell them on devoting shelf space to Ubisoft titles by describing how strong their various brands are based on a variety of factors. E.g., the Rocky Legends Product Presentation describes the target demographic of the game, and what other things that demographic is statistically known to like (South Park, The Dave Chappelle Show, and ESPN Sports Center).

I’m no expert on game retailing. That’s why I ask.

See Also:

• This CD-ROM archived at the Internet Archive

I’ve been working on my credits backlog that’s directly to related to the nearly-cleared backlog of games to be entered. More new games in MobyGames:

• Bikini Beach Stunt Racer
• Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade
• Sabrina The Teenage Witch: Spellbound

I’ve been realizing the importance of metadata recently. The situation is that text is easy for search engines to gather, index, and search. Multimedia data such as images, audio, and video can not be indexed the same way. The efficacy of indexing such multimedia data is largely dependent upon the textual data surrounding the multimedia. I have always made a careful habit of clearly describing my images in their metadata tags. This is probably why so many searches are driven to my various blogs by Google’s image search facility. This applies to some extremely common search terms, such as the popular (American) term for the game that was the theme of these pinball games.

I was auditing my web logs today and saw that the entry for Bikini Beach Stunt Racer actually got hits for that ‘b’-word search term related to ladies’ swimwear. Even more interesting is that the user agent string included the data “Windows CE; PPC; 240×320” and the referral string indicated a start index of 95. This means that a rather patient individual was searching through many, many bikini pictures on a portable device of some sort, with a tall vs. wide screen.

That reminds me that I have been meaning to produce a series for this blog called, “The Ladies Of Obscure Games.”

I’m starting to get back into it; here are the newest entries I am responsible for:

• 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures: Carnival
• 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures: Lost Island
• 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures: Space
• 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures: Wild West
• The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain

I have had Jungle Legend on my big board for a few months, meaning that it still needs to be entered into the database. I was working on some nonsense for a description at the time since the manual gave me all the data I thought I needed. However, I felt there was one crucial detail missing– what the game actually looks like. 2D scoller? 3D in any way? RTS jungle adventure, commanding your tribe? Google searches generally just yield a few sparse game listing pages with the same regurgitated description and no screenshots. Worse, my own page is one of the top hits now. Not helpful.

But then I found some generic game listing site that happened to link to the developer’s original website… which happens to be defunct. Enter archive.org, and behold: the last recorded valid page for the game. If the screenshots are to be believed, it’s an FPS-type adventure.

I’m glad I investigated because there are several other games from the same company that aren’t in MobyGames yet. That seems to often be the case with these value publishers that have proliferated in the last decade.