This is a momentous occasion in the evolution of the MobyGames database– The Deer Avenger and Tek-Kids Flash-Ops tetralogies (I just love that new word I just learned– means a series of 4) are now fully logged, along with another schlocky licensed title:

• Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest
• Deer Avenger 3D
• Deer Avenger 4: The Rednecks Strike Back
• Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Sky Fortress

A recent thread of the MobyGames forums discussed controversial or shocking moments in games. This arose when the original poster had read a review of Activision’s Spycraft: The Great Game that happened to mention the game’s torture minigame. Since hearing about a “torture minigame” undoubtedly piques your curiousity, disturbing though the concept may seem, I did what comes naturally and posted the relevant clips on YouTube.

To review, Spycraft is a 1996 CD-ROM game where you play a CIA agent leading a team to avert an international crisis between the U.S. and former Soviet Union. Gameplay consists largely of a series of highly unique sub-games and none is more unusual than the torture minigame.

After capturing this agent, you have two methods of extracting information from her. The first is to strap her into the Bullpen, the agency-sanctioned torture device. You have controls at your disposal to administer various levels of electrical shocks. Too much will kill her. This movie file from the game depicts the various reactions she has to shocks and questions:

It can be a tad stomach churning to view. It helps if you imagine that she invented interactive movie computer games, though.

The game acknowledges up front that this sequence might be too much for some gamers to handle and includes explicit warnings in the manual. Plus, at the very start of the game, the player has the option to disable the path of physical coercion entirely. In that case, or if the player chooses this route in the game, there is a minigame in which the player has to use special CIA equipment to doctor some photographs. The photographs are then used during the interrogation minigame to lean on the captured agent, by duping her into believing the agency has captured another agent for whom she has feelings. This movie has the scenes that comprise the interrogation:

Imagine what innovation could come of Nintendo’s Wii-mote for the Big N’s next party game… Wii O’ nine tails.

It pains me to have to take a break from the game-a-day routine. The fact is I have lots of other things I either need to do or want to do. Thus, I’m going to take at least a few days off from doing new games and blog posts of each. The good news is that maintaining this blog for the last 2+ months has helped me to develop an amazing amount of discipline. Hopefully, I can channel that discipline to do what I need to get done. Hopefully, I will still find time to write up some little posts here and there and perhaps re-play some of the games covered so far.

I still have around 1/2 dozen games to get into the database. Plus, here are the most recent entries thanks to this blog:

• Little Caesars Fractions Pizza
• Radio Active

My excuse for not gaming tonight is that I’m installing a new computer. Because, you know, I need a brand new computer… to play… all of these old Windows games on… yeah, that’s it.

I hope to be back on my regular gaming schedule by tomorrow night.

Update: Though I did play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night whilst I was waiting for Windows XP to format the drive. But since I don’t need to enter any information for that game into the database, it seems like it hardly counts.

I had dinner this evening with several high-ranking members of the MobyGames crew. That pretty much depleted all of tonight’s discretionary gaming time. But I figure that meeting with a bunch of MobyGamers and talking about nothing but games for hours on end is pretty close to actually playing a game, in the spirit of this project, anyway.

The things you can learn by auditing your website’s log files. For example, I learned from this web page — that was hotlinking one of this blog’s images — that there was apparently a Sega Saturn version of the obnoxious I-movie Quantum Gate, at least in Japan. The page is hosted in Finland so I presume the language is Finnish, and I gather that the game is for sale.