Brainstorm shows up on my master spreadsheet close to yesterday’s game, and probably came in the same batch, which is why it caught my eye today. That, and it sounds like a rather simple documentation romp for a Saturday afternoon, possibly leaving room for some other simple games.
Brainstorm: The Game Show works to capture the spirit of a nominal game show with its cartoon characters and its comically flippant host. In single player mode, where I race to answer as many questions as possible in 3 minutes, I remember that I am not especially adept at trivia. It does not help that I know next to nothing about literature, the category that was randomly selected for me. My score resembles a sine wave, bouncing in increments of 1000 points from -3000…3000, but mostly staying around 0. Eventually, I hit my stride with — of all topics — geography:
The game boasts over 6500 questions, so it could be awhile before you see the same one again. It also features configurable taunts. I guess some people would just find those too frustrating.
I became aware of tonight’s game — Babes In Toyland — somewhat by chance. On a lark, I started Googling some of the credits that I entered for Little Caesar’s Fractions Pizza to see if, in particular, any of the voice actors had done anything else. This is how I found the website of one aspiring young actress named Ashley Fox Linton who lists this game as well as the pizza game on her video game credits (humorously, her website claims that Fractions Pizza was published for Domino’s). This is just one way I find out about more obscure games to search for on eBay. According to my records, I got this game in a load that also included the wacky-sexy daredevil romp, Bikini Beach Stunt Racer.
Babes In Toyland turns out to be based on a 1997 animated film. The movie and the game both seriously violate accepted Santa Claus canon by asserting a storyline in which Santa Claus actually outsources the production of Christmas toys to a location known as Toyland. Toyland has just completed an order for the jolly old elf when the villain Barnaby swipes the toys and scatters them around Toyland. It’s up to our young hero and heroine to recover the toys before St. Nick arrives for pickup, lest they be placed on the permanent “naughty” list.
It’s another Macromedia Director-based, kids’ game. It also has the most phenomenally simple installer of any Windows game I have seen yet. The setup.exe game just places a shortcut on your hard drive that can launch the game from the CD-ROM. It’s done in a flash.
Since it’s a kids’ game, I know darn well what that entails: minigames! 9 of them in this case. One deals with the famed Humpty Dumpty. The villain’s cat startles the egg-man who falls from his famous wall and shatters.
Despite the fact that the traditional Humpty mythos clearly explains the difficulty faced by all the king’s horses as well as the king’s men in attempting to reassemble this monstrosity, the game still sees fit to task 2 children with that very endeavor.
One of the toys must be recovered from the shoe house, the one where the old lady lives inside with many children. You must help her locate all of them in what shapes up to be a pixel hunting game. Another game which involves descending pairs of red eyes in a haunted forest is more or less a glorified shoot-em-up game using a flashlight to expose the goblins. Then there is this well from which you have to save ducks, but not fish, using the bucket:
I have never seen such dog-looking ducks before. The game was starting to wear thin when I earned this unexpected, but not wholly unwelcome, reprieve:
But I still like collecting full screenshot sets for these types of simple, colorful games, so it was back to play for me. It doesn’t take long to clear all 9 puzzles. When Santa arrives, he is pleased with Toyland’s commitment to quality and no doubt ecstatic about the money he is saving by not having to rely on domestic elf labor, or deal with the elf labor unions. Upon successful completion, I earn this certificate:
I am not quite sure what to make of this, particularly the date. The game probably came out in 1997, the same year as the film. I checked my system clock and it correctly reports that today is a day in the year 2007. I wonder if the game saw the date greater than 1999 and filled in 2010+ automatically.
Time for another intensely lightweight, kid-targeted video game romp– let’s face it, these games ain’t gonna enter themselves into MobyGames. And I even located a pile of stuff procured from eBay back in March that I forgot to log into the master spreadsheet. It just doesn’t end!
Tonight’s fluff-fest is Clue Finders: Mystery Mansion Arcade. It comes from a franchise of Clue Finders games which generally appear to be educational. This title is actually a collection of 4 games, only one of which could conceivably be loosely tagged as having content remotely academic. The setup is that an all-star team of villains who debuted in previous Clue Finders franchise games has been assembled by a new mystery villain. This collaboration plots to lure the team of protagonist children into their home. These villains hold serious grudges towards the Clue Finders based on their previous encounters. The game contains a Rogue Gallery menu option where you can view dossiers of each villain. Cleverly, the dossier also includes a mention of the franchise game where the antagonist premiered. This is the dossier for one Pericles Lear:
So, the guy lives and works in San Francisco and has an affinity for chemistry. On closer examination, I just noticed that the above data does not really paint a menacing portrait of a criminal mastermind.
Anyway, there are 4 Clue Finders, 4 villains, and 4 traps/games. Each villain designed one trap to ensnare one of the children. Fiendishly, each trap is tailored for each child’s specialty. I suppose I shouldn’t try to understand why diabolical crime geniuses would give their victims a fighting chance in this manner. The first game has Owen, the team’s skateboarding nutrition specialist and pizza enthusiast, skateboarding on giant pizzas using a giant sub sandwich as a skateboard. Given Owen’s passion, I can understand that he might be a natural at this task. But if his task were switched with Leslie’s book task, both of these young go-getters might just meet with their early demise as intended.
Speaking of Leslie, her task is to jump on books. This takes a few sentences to explain, but it was my favorite of the four games on offer:
The back of the library has a topic; in this case, it’s capital cities. The demons on the bookshelves are tossing books into the room. Leslie must only jump on books whose titles contain capital cities. When she jumps on a qualifying book, that book becomes permanent. If she jumps on a book with a non-matching subject, she crushes it. The idea is to stack permanent books in order to climb to the exit. When she has stacked enough books, a rope ladder extends down so she can climb up. Sometimes I would disregard the ladder since I was having too much fun hopping on books. Leslie can jump 1, 2, or 3 books horizontally, 1 or 2 books vertically, and 1 book diagonally. It takes a little practice to master the jump control but is quite fun.
Leslie’s is the only one of the four games that struck me as even marginally educational. And even that was questionable since the game seemed to feature an embarrassingly limited dictionary of terms related to each category.
Santiago’s task is to play a series of pinball boards where he is the pinball. Actually, he is in the cockpit of a rocket-powered pinball. He can turn and thrust and somewhat control his destiny but is still at the mercy of the various actuators on the board. He must solve various puzzles on the board in order to escape.
The final game deals Joni along with whichever other members have escaped from their respective traps. It’s actually a fairly competent little parallax side-scroller.
Choice quote: The kids’ timid talking laptop, LapTrap, says of the probably-forged email that lured the gang to the game’s eponymous dangerous abode: “Why don’t email servers ever crash when you want them to?”
I thought I would shift my attention back to a kids game this evening, especially since an upstart contributor is rocketing up the MobyGames charts by entering dozens of largely overlooked children-oriented entertainment software titles (hi DJP Mom! Keep up the good work). Tonight’s game is The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain which is but one title in a series called “Mr. Men and Little Miss” games. Collect ’em all — and you know I probably will, eventually (I already have another one in the queue). If this opening card is any indicator, there are at least 10 of these titles:
I fear that this game is going to be juvenile, even by the standards of this blog, and my suspicions are quickly confirmed. Akin in animation style and target audience to Cheerios Play Time, I similarly hesitate to classify this game as “educational”. Your guide through this excursion is one Mojo the Mosquito. I keep thinking that he is speaking with an exaggerated stereotypical Italian accent until I realize that the creators were trying to conceptualize what an anthropomorphized talking mosquito would sound like (lots of buzzing and slurring of words). First, he asks you to click on an animal, advising you that the larger the animal, the tougher the game. I’m not so sure about that. The games seem to be the same whether I click the duck or the cow; the other three animals are cat, pig, and sheep. Then you are launched into the main town map:
The story goes like this: It’s morning time, but the sun is nowhere to be seen. Miss Magic calls up Miss Scatterbrain and expresses alarm at this development. Miss Magic would be able to rectify the solar situation except that her magic book was absent-mindedly swiped by Scatterbrain. It’s up to you to help her scour her kitchen cupboards in the dark in order to find the book strictly by the sound it makes when touched. That’s the first minigame.
When you retrieve the book and bring it to the town square where Miss Magic is waiting, the realization dawns that there isn’t enough light to read the book. So Miss Somersault — also present at the meeting — goes off to capture fireflies in a jar, thus commencing the second minigame. It’s essentially a point & click game of Whack-A-Mole where you try to click as many popping fireflies as possible before the moon waxes from a first quarter position to a full disc. I’m not sure how much sense that makes, but that’s what the creators used for a timer. My record was 49 fireflies in the allotted time period, though I later figured out that it is impossible to lose this game. Even on the “cow” setting — presumably the toughest — 0 fireflies was enough to succeed.
The story continues like this, leading into many more insipid, un-lose-able minigames. I wanted to be more thorough and explore the different animal options to validate whether there were any differences. However, the story sequences have no fast forward feature and I could only sit through the exposition so many times. The voice acting is tolerable, but clearly done in kids’ puppet show-style voices. I can’t say that I’m necessarily looking forward to logging the remaining items in this series.
I decided to try to conquer my severe phobia of real time strategy (RTS) games. Plus, tonight’s game looked genuinely interesting, and its MobyGames entry needs screenshots besides. My first exposure to the game Star Wars: Force Commander — an RTS set in the Star Wars universe — was through a trailer scavenged from some other LucasArts title. I have uploaded the trailer to YouTube for your review. The thing that will strike most Star Wars fans right away is the curious re-imagining of the standard Imperial March theme with a decidedly edgier arrangement:
The game opens with a cinematic of a fleet of Imperial star destroyers descending on a planet for an invasion. Inside a troop transport bound for the surface, the game establishes two characters by showing two stormtroopers without their helmets. One is telling the other to be careful out there. Wouldn’t you know, when the invasion is winding down, one of the characters gets shot. He recovers while the other character gets promoted to a command position. This is your character.
Star Wars geek note: The opening intro depicts TIE Bombers flying in an atmosphere, something I don’t remember ever seeing in a movie. In fact, I think I read somewhere that TIE starcraft can’t fly in atmosphere.
The game proceeds to tutorial mode where a senior officer instructs you on how to control a unit of soldiers from the safety of your command console high up in an orbiting starship. Your team starts off small — just a few sandtroopers, some riding dewback, and also Dellis– the dude who was shot in the intro. This is where you get to learn the camera controls and there are a lot of them. My used copy of the game still includes the cheat sheet for mouse and keyboard commands. It’s quite detailed and intimidating, naturally. But the senior officer patiently walks me through the essentials. After I bumble my way through these basic exercises satisfactorily, the officer actually states that he has never seen anyone learn as fast as me.
Star Wars geek note: The preceding praise explains so much about Imperial management.
The above screenshot shows your command console as well as your unit getting dropped off on a certain desert planet in the Star Wars universe for the training exercise. The story cleverly intertwines with the primary SW arc as the senior officer advises you to check out an escape pod that is known to have landed close by. The cargo? 2 droids carrying stolen, top secret Imperial data. I was a little confused about how to proceed at this point. So I just started marching my guys around the big sandbox. Sometimes, some Tusken Raiders would appear and — rather foolishly — try to start something with my crew. This was good practice for how to react in a battle situation. The rest of the time was spent getting used to controlling a bunch of soldiers at the same time.
Doing anything in this game gets annoying pretty quick since the troopers feel it necessary to give obsequious auditory feedback in response to every order received. What they lack in brainpower and initiative, they compensate for with loyalty, enthusiasm, and boundless positive morale:
Me: “Move 10 meters in that direction.”
Sandtrooper: “For the empire!!”
But I’m being unfair. True, the guys can get stuck near trivial obstacles on occasion. But they’re smart enough to stay out of the Sarlacc-looking pit even if you direct them to walk in that general direction.
So after wandering around for a half hour in a game engine-designated patch of desert that probably measures less than a square kilometer, I eventually trip over a giant crate that the game labels as “escape pod”. When the finely-tuned soldiers touch it the mission is finally over. Next, I am told to… I don’t even remember now; something about finding the droids. The instructions are delivered verbally and whiz right past my mind that’s still reeling over the magnitude of the keyboard guide. The game does give the player an option to review the current objectives. However, when consulted, they just inform me to A) follow the captain’s orders (yeah, and what were those again?) and B) keep Dellis (your buddy) alive. I can’t shake the feeling that this game is going to be the Star Wars variant of Saving Private Ryan.
Out of desperation, I tried out some other buttons. I pressed ‘J’ for “open builder shuttle inventory screen”. I have no idea what that is, but the ‘J’ key might as well be a BIG RED button since the senior officer sternly scolded me, “Don’t do that.”
That ends tonight’s RTS endeavor, but I just might try this game again some night. I have at least one other RTS title in the queue, plus I might be inspired to give Gender Wars another shot.
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.
