Taco Bell Goes To Data Island

Posted on February 8, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

It was a late night at work and I don’t have much time for a game tonight. No matter– I have some games reserved for just such situations. I started and completed Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Data Island while capturing a complete set of screenshots, all in the span of about 10 minutes.

I was partially correct in my hypothesis from the last Tek Kids entry when I guessed that Data Island was some kind of virtual island. The intro explains that Data Island is a giant mainframe that is as big as an island. While the intro explains that it’s on the water somewhere, the action seems to take place in some cyber-looking virtual location. And while there is no explicit environmental theme, Data Island’s purpose is to take control of all the world’s computers to world domineering ends.

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Data Island

The action is more similar to Polar Mission than Aqua Zone as movement principly occurs in two dimensions. The craft on which the Tek Kid travels can move up in short bursts but I’m not sure if this has any practical application in the game. I just checked and the craft in Polar Mission can do the same thing. But flying high or low makes no difference for touching objects.

Here is an action shot, with Data Island looming hauntingly in the background:

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Data Island gameplay

I made it through all 3 segments on the first try. Let’s hear it for me. I must observe that the segments seemed longer than in the previous two games. The code for this game is AR93, if anyone is keeping score.

Burn: Cycle: Less Than Resilient

Posted on February 7, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

According to my interactive movie list, Burn: Cycle is the last known I-movie left in the experiment, for the PC. There could be other games whose I-movie-ness I am unaware of. Plus, I have at least one more I-movie for each the Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and Mac systems. I’m seeing that precious light at the end of this cold, dark, interactive tunnel.

Burn: Cycle didn’t work for me. I’m not sure how I should feel about that, necessarily. When I popped in the first of the 2 game discs, it offered to let me play right away, off the CD-ROM:

So far so good, and I appreciate the no-nonsense, no-install-hassle, cut-straight-to-the-chase attitude of this game. Pressing the Play button is rewarded by this dialog:

This is one of the worst kind of cryptic error messages you can possibly receive. Generally, it means that your machine is just too advanced to run this ancient software. The dialog reads: “Application Error: BURNCYCL caused a General Protection Fault in module 0417 1DE7BURNCYCL will close.” The only reason I typed out that text was so that Google could pick it up and hapless googlers can find this site and learn that, although someone else shares their pain, there is still no hope.

Next, I tried my Windows 95 VMware image. It didn’t GPF but it also didn’t play due to this error:

This must be a hardcore I-movie, without even subtitles. This is when I finally recognize that this Win95 install isn’t set up to recognize VMware’s virtual ENS1371 audio hardware. I have no idea how to set it up, either, or maybe it’s more trouble than I care to bother with. That brings tonight’s experiment to a screeching halt.

There is hope, however. This game is for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Mac. I am trying to get an emulated Mac environment running for another Mac-only I-movie in my pile. Failing that, there’s always — groan — an actual Win3.1 or Win95 machine.

Law & Order: Dead On The Money

Posted on February 6, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s game is Law & Order: Dead On The Money, based on the popular television show. I somewhat expect this to be a better version of In The First Degree, especially when I see that the game was created by Legacy Interactive. I remember being impressed when I perused the multimedia for their emergency room simulation Code Blue.

The game is 2 CDs large. The installer wants to copy the first CD in its entirety to the hard drive. When you start the game, all of the intro and tutorial segments run from the hard drive. Then you are prompted for the second disc when it’s time to dive into the main course. That’s when you see this dialog:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Java Dialog

Eagle-eyed geeks will notice that the dialog’s icon indicates Java. I have seen quite a few interactive movie games based on Microsoft Visual Basic, as evidenced by the presence of VBRUN?00.DLL files (Critical Path, The Daedalus Encounter, and Quantum Gate all spring to mind). But this is the first commercial game I have encountered that runs on Java. Why, in theory, that should mean that it’s portable across any platform that can run a Java app… which pretty much means it can run on Windows. No, that’s not necessarily true– it seems that there is a Mac port of the game as well.

Law & Order: Dead On The Money follows you, a detective paired with Jerry Orbach’s character (whom I know best from an old episode of Tales From The Darkside where his deranged pal fell in love with a mannequin) investigating a woman’s early morning murder in the park. Before jumping into the action, the game has tutorials for both the detective and trial portions of the games, delivered by computer-generated, pre-rendered versions of the actors from the TV show. I edited the tutorial bookend animations together into this YouTube video so you can get an idea of the decent animation quality:

You begin the game by investigating the crime scene. This entails interviewing the man who first reported the body and checking the surrounding area for garbage that might double as a clue. This game has red herrings in quantity unlike many games which follow the Law of Conservation of Game Resources, where there are never any extraneous objects. Fortunately, partner Jerry gives helpful clues about what may prove useful. After you are satisfied you have gathered enough information, you proceed to some other place available to you on the map:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Travel Map

Next, I head to the medical examiner’s office to get her analysis of the situation. Each of the locales you can travel to allow you to pan 360° from the point where you’re standing, and perhaps travel to another office, or look at assorted objects. Since the remainder of the video files rely on QuickTime files, I suspect that the panorama effect might be achieved with QuickTime’s QTVR technology, but I’m not sure.

Next, I bring up the case file and decide that I should submit the blood and hair samples (hair found under the victim’s fingernails, not matching her own) to the crime lab for study. Here is the master case file screen which has a stupendous amount of information:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Case File

One of the key components of this game is time. You have 7 days to solve this case, or perhaps bring it to trial. I can’t remember where that time limit comes from, precisely. However, time flies in this game. Moving a few meters from one location to another in the park and leaning over to pick up a used ketchup packet can take up to 15 minutes. Yet traveling from Manhattan’s upper east side to Long Island takes about the same time. I’ve never been to the the Big Apple, but I hear that the latter feat is not supposed to be possible. I could be mistaken.

I was starting to get into this game. Unfortunately, it seemed to freeze up on me the first time I got a message on my in-game cell phone.

One more video, since they’re so well done– here’s the intro for the game This appears to be a clone of the opening credits except that the computer-generated doppelgängers fill in for the actual actors.

I see from MobyGames’ entry on the game that the “Dead On The Money” idiom (which means to be precisely correct) didn’t translate well into French (La Mort Dans l’Arme => The Death By Weapon [?]) or Italian (Omicidio a Central Park => Murder In Central Park, I’m guessing), and probably not Russian either, though someone else will need to verify.

Spycraft: The Great Game

Posted on February 5, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Some readers have recommended that I lay off the interactive movies, for the sake of my own sanity. I thought about it. But I see this list of known, unprocessed I-movies staring back at me from the surface of my gaming command center and I just can’t bring myself to abandon, or even postpone, the mission at this point, no matter how much it might be wearing on my psychological and emotional well-being. That, my friends, is commitment.

Besides, the next game on the I-movie roster — Spycraft: The Great Game — is one whose movie sequences I have perused before using a video decoder I helped reverse engineer and re-implement. Thus, I know it’s not all bad. In fact, the movie sequences are very good. Further, when I actually played the game this evening, I realized that it’s not pure I-movie but actually places heavy emphasis on some very unique puzzles. For that, I have placed this game in the puzzle games category in addition to the I-movie category, and I think even the I-movie category is iffy.

You play some CIA guy. There’s a big international event brewing. You are summoned into the director’s office to be on a team to investigate a new international crisis. But first, there is training. Generally, these are unique puzzles with a little faux FPS-type action thrown in for good measure. For example, the first training exercise is to use an image enhancement device to make out the license plate on the following picture:

The game features a lot of convenient little gadgets. Between two of the training puzzles, your tutor shows you a camera that operates on film but explains that it has backup, low-resolution images stored in a digital chip. What’ll they think of next? (This game was published in 1996.) Actually, now that I think about it, that device would work better for espionage applications (or would have worked better before film cameras were more or less crushed by digital counterparts) if it operated on more of a steganographic principle and allowed a knowledgable operator to snap innocuous photos on the film and secret photos on the digital chip.

The game is filled with tools that are so sophisticated that it’s a wonder why they need human intervention at all. But there wouldn’t be much of a game in that case. Here’s another interesting puzzle:

Spycraft -- Kennedy Assassination Tools (K.A.T.)

This is the K.A.T.– Kennedy Assassination Tools. This program uses a camera panorama to reconstruct a 3D wireframe model of an assassination site. You need to find two places on the scene where the bullets impacted. Then, use the tool to draw a trajectory to figure out where the round was fired from. Use the panorama camera view to find the suspect and then use the suspect ID computer to put together a computer sketch of the suspect. Finally, you can ask the computer to perform a search for possible matches based on the sketch.

There are lots of information resources in this game, including your PDA and your computer which both have access to impressive databases. Among other things, you have an org chart of your immediate superiors and reports. Here’s the dossier for one your subordinates:

I thought the game designers were taking things pretty seriously until I saw where she lived. Chevy Chase, Maryland. Come on, Spycraft, what do you take me for? But on a whim, I googled. Well, I’ll be– town of Chevy Chase, dot org. In fact, there does exist a Chevy Chase Blvd. in Chevy Chase, MD (though no Chevy Chase Road). I can go to bed knowing I learned something new tonight.

The answers to the puzzles always seem to be multiple choice. This is fortunate in most cases, such as the license plate puzzle. Rather than actually having to make out the grainy characters on the plate, the solution is obvious out of the three given. However, the choices grow more bountiful later in the game. And don’t you dare guess. If you get the wrong answer too many times, the director reassigns you to the CIA World Factbook division, which I’m guessing isn’t thought of very highly inside the Agency, or at least not in this game’s story arc. Here’s that particular game over video:

You know, I should start listing the games from this experiment that I have really enjoyed and that I want to revisit someday when this experiment is over, or when I simply need a break. This game definitely makes the cut.

See also:

Interrogation Minigames

Quantum Gate

Posted on February 4, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Ohhhh… this is really starting to hurt. Okay, let’s go: Quantum Gate. This is — you guessed it — another interactive movie genre video game. This one was published by an outfit called Hyperbole Studios, reportedly all the way back in 1993. They subsequently produced a sequel and yet another title. I wouldn’t have expected them to have lasted beyond 1995. But it seems that they were responsible for The X-Files Game as late as 1998. They still have a web presence as of this writing, though the latest date seen anywhere on the site is 2002.

I was going to upload their propaganda video (their term, not mine) to YouTube but screw it; I’m not even going to dignify it. I remember watching this little promotional piece years ago when I first procured the disc. It spoke as if I-movies were going to revolutionalize the industry and that Hyperbole’s titles were watershed events in the history of computer gaming. The final insult was when the CEO of the company, one Greg Roach, was named the Steven Spielberg of multimedia (attributed to The Houston Chronicle, in case you ever need to discredit that newspaper).

You might think that given the vintage of this title, I should cut it some slack. Think again. Let’s walk through my brief playing experience. There is a short company logo animation followed by the title animation, then the menu shows up. Note that if you ESC through the first two animations, none of the menu options are clickable besides “Quit”, which seems to fit right into my plan. Still, I went the long route for the sake of screenshot recon. There is a screen that explains the complex controls. Hint: If the mouse takes the shape of a hand pointing left, you can click the mouse to move left.

Jumping into the start of the game:

QG, you had better not dare tell me that I’m humanity’s last hope. Well, to its credit, the intro didn’t actually claim that, but I think it’s more or less implied. I mean, what game tells you that some other guy is responsible for the fate of earth and you’re just running support?

Anyway, and from what I can put together (it’s not the most coherent story), earth is eminently doomed because of pollution — shame on mankind, as always — and the U.N. has a plan to do… something, I’m not entirely sure. You’re part of some military group that has to launch through space in a special gate (this might be the game’s eponymous gate) to another planet far away. You then attend a poorly managed briefing where someone explains the classified fate of earth. Then, a slightly senior officer explains how it’s going to be your job to help secure the planet from the race of bugs that currently inhabit it. Or something.

Look, I’m getting really tired of trying to sort out these bastard stepchild sci-fi stories. Let’s move on to characters, who I’m sure the creators were quite proud of. First, there’s your character, a military guy — military vanguard or some such — who walks around in a perpetual state of disbelief and whose most common line of dialogue happens to be more or less the same as South Park’s Mr. Slave character. Then there’s this character:

He comes off as a Vin Diesel wannabe, which is strange since Vin Diesel wasn’t a star until well after this game was made. He makes life miserable for everyone else in the room with his antics and interruptions. Thing is, his material is, far and away, the most interesting part of the proceedings. I don’t really want to spend anymore time on characters. No, wait, here’s one more character I always get a kick out of gazing upon– Dr. Scientist Lady, the one who invented the Quantum Gate:

Okay, about those “proceedings” briefly referenced above, I will admit that Quantum Gate has a unique cinematic style while stipulating that different is not always necessarily a good thing. Most of the game (that I saw) showed cinematic sequences (that you can’t skip) where there was a wide, letterbox-style picture depicting the people who were presently talking. Video images of that person talking are overlaid on the picture. Sometimes, one video finishes and another video — of the same person — emerges on a different part of the picture and takes over.

As you can see from the above screenshot, you are occasionally granted the opportunity to have your character interject something. This is apparently of little consequence, but the game throws you an interactive bone anyway. It’s also much worse than a screenshot can possibly convey. Imagine the most painful mumbo-techno-jumbo-jargon-packed Star Trek episode you ever watched. Now imagine not being able to fast forward it or even turn off the television.

The whole initial briefing implies that there will be combat with some alien bugs. Eventually, I get to try my hand at a simulation of such combat. The combat consists of a pre-rendered FMV sequence where some vehicle roves across alien terrain looking for the alien bugs and locks on. From there, I have to press the space bar to fire on them. I could never get past the second bug. My loss.

That’s it. It’s all over for tonight. But as I look at my list of unprocessed I-movies, I already know that I haven’t seen the worst yet.

In The 1st Degree

Posted on February 2, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I have no shortage of interactive movies yet to process. Today’s game is In The 1st Degree developed by Brøderbund, popularly known as that software company with the weird ‘o’ in its name. This is the third I-movie in a week that has referenced San Francisco. D made a completely superfluous reference to the city. Beyond Time showed us a brief pan of downtown SF to assure us that the game is supposed to begin in a Frisco museum. But In The 1st Degree is entirely set and filmed in the city by the Bay. As a current Bay Area resident, I can personally vouch for the authenticity of this game and I had a good time figuring out where the characters were presently situated in the tiny (by American standards) city. Why, here’s an authentic sequence driving down a famous San Francisco hill past a famous S.F.-style cable car:

In The 1st Degree -- San Francisco Cable Car

Someone’s Dead. Someone’s Lying. Can You Prove Murder One? That’s the game’s tagline. There was a kerfuffle between a Frisco artist and a Frisco art gallery owner and the owner wound up shot to death. You play the district attorney and your ultimate goal is to get the artist convicted in court with murder in the first degree. Not second degree, not manslaughter, and certainly not an acquittal. You want murder one.

The first part of the game deals with reviewing documents, dossiers, and crime scene photographs. You drive around town and interview the witnesses at their homes or their places of commerce. And you also review the tapes of the witness interviews conducted by the police inspector:

In The 1st Degree -- Reviewing witness tapes by the Bay

As you can see, you get to review the tapes at your Pier 5 office, overlooking the Bay, Yerba Buena Island, and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The game’s writer(s) knew San Francisco and it shows in the characters’ dialogue which, BTW, is extraordinarily well-delivered by the standards of the I-movie genre. The second part of the game is where you go to trial with the evidence you have gathered and secure the most severe conviction you can. I didn’t get that far but I can honestly say this is the best I-movie I have seen to date and one that I would actually like to play again, perhaps to completion.

I knew that there was something different about this game when I first studied the QuickTime multimedia files some years ago. In The 1st Degree is fond of using the time-honored exposition-by-newscast narrative device where the story unfolds from the lips of television news anchors and correspondents. I would upload some samples to YouTube but YouTube has the worst time converting QuickTime files while retaining accurate A/V sync. At the beginning of the game, you (the DA) are sitting at home (which looks to be located in Noe Valley, if I were to guess), eating dinner:

What does a successful (we hope) DA eat? Looks like celery, cottage cheese, cookies, and a pastry. But about the main course on that plate — why, that looks for all the world like one of many fine Chef Boyardee pasta-in-a-can products. And — wow — that’s one honkin’ big cell phone, but this was a 1995 game. Ah, how far we’ve come.

Some interesting technical trivia about the game: Even though my computer display is set to use 1280x1024x32-bit color, the game complained that I needed at least 256 colors. It worked fine when I demoted the video mode to 800x600x16-bit color (8-bit isn’t even an option). Also, the game uses MIDI music to great effect. Even though the game claimed not to recognize my MIDI device, the music played and sounded great.

See Also:

At MobyGames:

In The 1st Degree

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Windows Games