Garfield’s Mad About Cats

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Destined to become a MobyGames description paragraph very soon: In Garfield’s Mad About Cats, Jon expresses displeasure with Garfield the Cat’s lack of motivation towards performing traditional rodent control duties. Still, Garfield is sympathetic to the mouse problem and assumes his alter-ego of Dr. Frankencat and, along with his assistant Eager (Odie), descends into the mad scientist lab in house dungeon. The mission: Create the perfect cat. To that end, Dr. Frankencat uses his computer to identify the most perfect traits of various cats from around the planet and assemble the features into a perfect cat.

The game is pretty slow moving at first and about 10 minutes in, I get a little worried that this might not be an actual game. The game allows you to select an attribute, such as tail and roar, and investigate a variety of cats from around the globe. When you do, Eager/Odie fetches a dish from the region where the cat hails from, as well as a bag of the specified attribute. Odie goes to work with the attribute while the big computer plays a brief video factoid about the selected feline species.

Garfield's Mad About Cats -- Brief Educational Video

My non-gaming fears are assuaged when the the game asks me if I would like to play Disco Jon. This turns out to be the first in a series of 12 random minigames/activities. The goal of this one is to memorize and replay the sequence of buttons to make Jon boogie down:

I like the metaphor present in this minigame: You only get 3 chances to get it right. Each time you screw up, one of the babe silhouettes loses interest and slips away.

Other games include a Whack-A-Mole clone (Whack-A-Rat); a Breakout clone (Burp Game) where Garfield uses his own belches to keep a mouse up in the air to hit all the cheese bricks; and a Space Invaders clone (Hack Attack) where a fleet of Nermals are descending upon Garfield and he must beat them back by coughing up hairballs. I was fairly disconcerted to see a sliding tile puzzle (Odie Maze)– I hate these, I hate these, I hate these! But this was the most messed up minigame by far– Fowl Shot:

Plant some poultry in the spring-loaded recliner, twist the chair to aim for the moving target, and fire. Even if you miss, as I did every time, it’s still great fun.

Spy Kids And Total Racing Cars

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I’ll have you know I was on the ball this evening. As soon as I got home from work, I went straight to my new second job playing old games that no one has heard of. I had already picked out this evening’s game in advance. A fat lot of good my planning did me tonight. I investigated a title called Total Racing Cars which is not quite as generic as simply slapping “Pinball” on your CD-ROM, but it comes close. I’m always in the mood for a good racing game but I’m less enthusiastic when I realize that the game is merely a repackaging of the shareware versions of commercial racing games such as Need For Speed III and Daytona USA.

Okay, so that doesn’t count. Let’s move swiftly on to Spy Kids Learning Adventures: The Underground Affair. This is one in a series of three educational games based around the Spy Kids franchise. This particular version of The Underground Affair was yet another in a series of PC Treasures titles/AOL delivery vehicles purchased for a dollar each at Super Target. And someone screwed up when licensing this game for budget distribution. I’ll expound in a moment.

The story of this game explains that there is a mine in South America where anti-gravity ore is extracted and then stored in a special, air-free silo. This material apparently has application in the spy field. And it seems that a bunch of it has gone missing. The story colorfully unfolds in a panel-by-panel, comic book-style manner. It’s a nice effect.

Sky Kids Learning Adventures -- Storyline

This is where the Spy Kids are called in to investigate. From their treehouse base of operations, they are instructed to hop into the DragonSpy craft to travel to South America and find clues about the missing ore. Here’s the learning opportunity, and the catch: In order to activate the DragonSpy’s navigation system, you must solve a puzzle in the book in order to find a code to enter into the ship’s system:

Spy Kids Learning Adventures -- Enter Code

Umm, where’s the book? PC Treasures only licensed and re-distributed the CD-ROM, not the accompanying 32-page puzzle book. That brings the game to a screeching halt, unless I care to start reverse engineering the game. Which I don’t care to do.

For trivia, the other two games in the series are named Man in the Moon and The Candy Conspiracy (oops, and another game: The Nightmare Machine).

New Favorite Pinball

Posted on February 18, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I didn’t mean to overachieve tonight by playing two games vs. my obligatory one game. But I realized I had one more eGames title in my pile that was apparently not in MobyGames. A more careful dig into the database reveals that, in fact, eGames’ Pinball is already there. It’s just really difficult to find when it’s named something as generic as “pinball”. Memo to game companies: Try to distinguish your pinball titles a little better; same goes for typical sporting activities like football, baseball, etc.

This pinball game is not, I hasten to add, a Visual Basic game. The Conducent TimeSink tsad.dll spyware is back; who’s surprised? Also, this installation dialog strikes me as suspicious on several levels:

eGames Pinball -- Would You Like To Be Able To Surf The Internet

All of that nonsense notwithstanding, I think I might actually have a new favorite computer pinball game. This game has 3 unique table designs to choose from: Jungle Warrior, Curse of the Pharoah, and Viking’s Life. The game can run in 1024×768 mode with all manner of cool graphical effects. Further, the player can select from 5 different camera views which, unlike in Hot Wired, are all actually practical for gameplay. This is my favorite:

So, I guess what I’m trying to say here is that eGames can indeed attach their name to a decent, working game if they really try, even if they can’t unbundle the spyware without intervention from state attorneys general.

Speedy Eggbert

Posted on February 18, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Speedy Eggbert is a title missing from MobyGames that caught my eye while perusing my big list recently. So I pull it out and, much to my chagrin, realize that it’s another accursed eGames title. Maybe today’s gaming excursion will be quick since I have such a dismal record with eGames titles thus far. Will I be 0 for 3, with a generous helping of spyware to show for it? Let’s find out.

I ran my spyware checker, installed the game, and then ran my spyware checker immediately afterwards. That same Conducent TimeSink tsad.dll file somehow found its way onto my machine between the two spyware check runs. I’m not exactly endeared when I see splash dialogs like this (read the small print carefully and note the relative sizes of the buttons):

eGames software -- Would you like to install our spyware?

I did some Googling for “egames spyware” and found that the state of Michigan actually did go after eGames for their spyware-related activities. Sometime in 2001, they said they would stop. This game predates said agreement. But I need to keep the DLL installed long enough to play the game. I take small comfort in the knowledge that the spyware was developed long before my web browser (Firefox) and hopefully doesn’t know how to investigate its information. Then again, Firefox’s on-disk data structures and file locations might be similar to earlier Netscape versions.

I next delve into the manual since I reason that this might be the only exposure I get to the game. It’s is allegedly a side-scrolling action game. These eGames titles always sound like such delightful, simplistic little romps that I actually would like to experience. Much to my surprise, this eGames game actually runs!

I can attest that we have an actual game here, and quite a lot of game, I should add. Speedy Eggbert is a side scrolling game, and parallax no less, which I always love — takes me back to the old SNES/Genesis days. It’s incredibly simplistic as far as these types of games go, and that fits right into my plan. Our hero — who, indeed, happens to be egg-shaped — wanders through countless colorful stages. He can walk left or right in well-animated motions, though the transition between the 2 directions is the slowest I have yet seen in any such game. He can duck and look down at the same time, or look up. Being able to scan up and down is remarkably useful in this game for locating unseen threats. But his real power is his vertical leap. There are two control buttons: one for short jump and the other for high jump. The challenge comes in knowing when to use which, and where, and keeping the two buttons straight.

There is a brief tutorial stage in a forest. After this, you unlock most of the areas in the game via a macro-level map. There are dozens of total levels and you don’t need to explore them in sequence. This is the first level that you can choose from– I call it “Housing Projects”:

Notice the presence of Lego-influenced trees. Playing this game made me realize something about game plots. While the backstory of a computer game is often the subject of ridicule, it’s somehow strangely necessary. All throughout Speedy Eggbert I found myself wondering what was going on and why our protaganist was doing this. I have no idea what the houses in the above level are for, why the surrounding area is mined, or what Eggbert hopes to achieve. I just know that the above screenshot depicts where I got stuck on that particular level since he can’t jump quite that high. No matter; there are plenty more to choose from.

Another area looks like you’re infiltrating a techno-fortress in outer space. This is sort of a make-your-own-backstory game. The first section has you jumping from platform to platform. I found myself wondering what would happen if you fell off a platform in space– fall forever? No, it turns out that there is space lava just beneath the platforms which hard boils our hero. Another stage is yet another techno-fortress which happens to be substantially bluer than the previous. Then we get into some real eye candy– I named this level “The Happy Fun Candyland of Suffering”:

Speedy Eggbert -- The Happy Fun Candyland of Suffering

Bright, colorful, playful, and full of unspeakable danger. In the above screenshot, Eggbert has eaten a lollipop powerup. The simple sugars give him a temporary rush which increases his jumping ability, enabling him to reach this platform with a selection of skateboards. A skateboard allows the player to cruise through a narrow hallway lined with bombs. The skateboard will detonate the bombs without hurting Eggbert. This application further serves to highlight defects in the game’s internal logic, but oh well.

I’m not sure if I like this next level or not. I call it “Glyphland” and I could assert that either A) it’s highly creative; or B) that the designers were getting extremely tired and/or lazy and just threw something together to meet some artificial deadline or goal.

That’s not all, though! The game features networked multiplayer via modem, serial cable, IPX, or TCP/IP. I have no idea what the multiplayer mode entails since the manual did not go into details, and it’s extraordinarily unlikely that I could convince someone else to try this game. Another interesting value add is that the game comes with a complete level designer, likely the same one that the creators used to build the game. Create your own mission by selecting background, scroll type, and music (10 tunes to choose from), and get to work laying down the level. This menu gives you a good idea of the various items and threats that are possible in the game if you didn’t get too far into any particular level.

Technically, Speedy Eggbert is written in Visual Basic, just as all eGames titles appear to be (at least the 3 I have seen so far). All of its data files have the extension .blp. Inside, they are actually a mixture of WAV files for sound, BMP files for graphics, and MIDI files for music (I actually sort of dig the music and can save these before I blow away the spyware-laden game). Then, there is a custom, constant-sized data format, about 50 KB each, which defines a level layout. An interested hacker could probably figure out the data format pretty easily using the level designer.

Creatures Adventures Revisited

Posted on February 17, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Instead of looking at a new game today, I decided to revisit Creatures Adventures since I certainly didn’t get a good feel for the game the first time around and I didn’t discover the on-disk manual until after I had written the blog post. In order to create a quality MobyGames entry, I would like to gather a little more first-hand experience with the game. Plus, after reading the manual and gaining a mild understanding of what’s going on, the game actually sounds interesting. Further, I think the graphics are nothing short of phenomenal and a sheer joy to watch.

On my first play, I got the distinct impression that the objective of the game was to observe little baby monsters called norns and manually interact with their surroundings using the mouse. There is so much more. The game’s manual claims that the game engine models actual biological processes and that the norns come with their own biochemistry, brains and “Digital DNA^TM” (which is a trademark that I thought Motorola claimed). In fact, reading through the complexity described in the manual makes it hard to believe that this game is designed with children in mind. But the parents’ control dialog described in the previous post remains substantial evidence of the target audience. The manual must be intended for the parents so that they might be able to explain everything to the young ones.

To review, you begin the game in the nestery where you can hatch an egg by placing it in the cradle. You can accept the default name or enter a different one.

Creatures Adventures -- Hatching In The Nestery

From there, the game becomes an exercise in caring for your your norn by feeding it, clothing it, and keeping it out of obvious danger. There is training and discipline involved. Remember the jet horn and mosquito icons discussed in the last post? It turns out that those are for punishment and reward, respectively. The mosquito is actually a stickler that tickles the norn, which the norn likes. Contrast this with a blast of water to the face via the jet. The norns are supposed to learn the right lessons from this treatment but the manual warns you not to overdo either.

So the norns walk around and explore the world as they see fit, unless you grab their hand using the mouse and drag them in the opposite direction. They partake of the plentiful bounty that abounds from the land. Thankfully, it appears that the norns metabolize everything they take into their bodies. Wait, I may be wrong– the norns are consistently seen squatting, an action which sometimes results in brown spots which can then be picked up. I can’t imagine what I would do with these in the context of the game if I were correct about what they are.

I decided that an interesting test of any simulation game would be to see what happens if you don’t offer any input for an extended period of time; just leave the critters to their own devices in this case. With that in mind, I leave the game running and go off to watch some old Amiga demos from MindCandy Volume 2. Here’s what happens: They get sick! The manual warned that norns can get sick but I didn’t realize that the attention-hungry little monkey creatures would actually fall ill if ignored. Talk about Attention Deficit Disorder!

Creatures Adventures -- Sick Norn (Attention Deficit Disorder)

So I’m trying to to watch the Demo DVD and eat lunch but that turns out to be difficult because I can still see my computer monitor out of the corner of my eye which shows me the above scene. The green-faced norn keeps bending over in a virtual heave. Fine, I’ll go do something about it. Apply the stethoscope and thermometer to the norn standing at the medical carriage to validate that there is something very wrong with her. Then take her hand and drag her into the magic doctor booth. That’s really all it takes. Until they get sick again a few minutes later after I have returned to my lunch.

Notice that the norns are all grown up now. The manual says that you will get to witness the whole norn life cycle and that the repugnant creatures will pair off, mate, and procreate. Then they will die. Not a violent death. There comes a point in the game when a norn is apparently just sleeping for a really long time. When you click on their overhead bubble icon you will be transported to the garden where there will be a new tombstone.

Creatures Adventures -- Death Comes For The Norns

Winter comes for the norns. They lived full lives busy with exploration of the 1/2 kilometer immediately surrounding their birthplace. May they rest in peace. Following this, there are new eggs in the hatchery. It is unknown whether they are eggs from Chloe, matriarch of the previous round.

See also:

My first attempt at understanding this game

At MobyGames:

Creatures Adventures

Cheerios Play Time

Posted on February 16, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

This is not a good game to play before breakfast — and I should know — Cheerios Play Time. Or maybe it’s the perfect game to play, I don’t know. I do know that I was starving while playing through this breakfast cereal-themed kids game. The MobyGames entry for this game lists this as an educational title. I’m hesitant to categorize it as such. It teaches a child how to pour cereal and milk into a bowl and that’s about the extent of the knowledge imparted.

This is the main activity selection menu for the game, highlighting the 5 activities to choose from. There is absolutely no text in the game save for “Cheerios” so the game chats incessantly at you, telling you what to do next. I tell you, this game treats me like I’m about 4 years old. Oh, wait…

One activity is the Cheerios factory. This is a magical journey through the cereal engineering process. The whole operation reminds me of one of those silly Bugs Bunny/Looney Toons wacky machine sequences. These two machines are responsible for lovingly sealing and efficiently painting cereal the box after the Cheerios have been mixed, formed, baked, and inserted. All very educational, as you can imagine. The interactivity pertains to clicking on levers to actuate the various machines.

Another activity is painting. You can choose between a bunch of the scenes from the game. Then you match items from the sidebar and choose a color to paint it. I guess you could claim that this item exercises shape-matching skills. And I always wanted a green cat.

The game won’t let me into the area where I can play with farm animals. Off limits. It locks up every time. Probably just as well. Another farm-related activity is tending to a field. First plow it, then plant it, water it and watch oats grow, then harvest and bundle the oats. But you’re not done yet. You have to transport the oats to the factory. But the truck is broken down, and filthy to boot. Wash the car, soap it up, dry it, inflate the tires, and use the crane to pack the oats on the truck bed.

The final activity places you in the kitchen. There’s no real goal here that I could find. Rather, you just interact with the scene by pouring cereal and milk into a bowl, toasting bread, squeezing oranges into fresh juice, peering in the silverware drawers, opening the fridge, turning on the faucet, and of course, poking at the cat to cause him to eat from his bowl.

Cheerios Play Time was developed by a now-defunct group called Hyperspace Cowgirls. Yeehaw, and far out. What I like best about this group is their logo animation which shall be preserved for all time thanks to YouTube:

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Windows Games