Deer Avenger

Posted on January 24, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Once again, I find myself drifting out into the sea of gaming genres, this time to the wildlife hunting simulation genre. More accurately, tonight’s game is a parody of that surprise hit genre that experienced popularity in the late 1990s (you have a hit, you’re going to see imitators and parodies). Hypnotix developed, and Simon and Schuster Interactive published, Deer Avenger in which the deer who would be hunted turns the tables on rednecks who have dealt suffering to his species.

Based on the data I have gathered so far, I think Hypnotix specializes in developing Smacker-based video games. I guess this is a step up from, say, Visual Basic-based games and they seem to do a reasonable job with their efforts. If the formula works, more power to them.

The game is pretty quick to explain because there is not much to it. And truthfully, the game is only a vehicle by which to make fun of hunter stereotypes as well as the hunting game genre. The game allows you to select from among 3 weapons– the M-16, the bazooka, and the sling shot. I think these are arranged in order of difficulty, i.e., the M-16 actually has a scope and some range while the sling shot can barely launch past arm’s reach. Then you select from among either a West Virginia, Connecticut, or snowy Minnesota locale. Wander through the map from an overhead view and try to locate traces of hunter activity. For example:

Deer Avenger -- Nudie Mag Hunter Markings

When you enter an area to hunt, you are thrust into a first person 360-degree panoramic scan of your current position, hoping — praying, even — that something will happen. But that facet is all part of the parody. Your deer character will keep you entertained with a rotation of quips while you wait. You can trigger more gags by pressing the “calls” icon. You can also use the binoculars to look around but this only serves to seek out humorous tidbits like amorous squirrels doing what amorous squirrels do. If you’re very lucky, you might see one of the selection of humans in the game. This is the allegedly elusive tree man, a survivalist that I saw with inordinate frequency:

Deer Avenger -- Hunting the Tree Man with sling shot

The sling shot must be the toughest weapon to use. Apparently, you fling your own feces, and at an odd angle with very little range. I didn’t have remarkable success in this game, in any of the locations with any of the weapons. The calls and farts (to flush out hunters) don’t seem to have any effect and the encounters appear to be purely random (I can’t believe a parody game would put to much effort into the encounter logic). In the end, I was disappointed to have to call it quits and write this entry before my bloodlust was sated.

This is probably the closest I will ever come to playing an actual hunting simulation. I can’t say I’m particularly excited about the prospect of playing a game like this, only with more real-life accuracy and even greater emphasis on patience. And I was patient enough to complete the stealth action Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.

Taco Bell Aqua Zone Game

Posted on January 22, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Remember that Taco Bell Tek-Kids Flash-Ops game? There were 3 more games in the series. Thanks ever so much to Maxx Marketing, the publisher, as well as their distributor, Yum! Brands, Inc. for graciously furnishing me with the remaining 3 games. It’s a heavy responsibility but I shall fulfill my duty to play through them and preserve their essential statistics for all time via MobyGames. Plus, I want to see that bonus game.

This episode of Tek-Kids Flash-Ops is titled Mission: Aqua Zone. It seems Dr. Havok is back to his old tricks (to be fair, since this is #1 in the quartet, this would be Dr. Havok’s inaugural outing). This time he has an underwater sub that doubles as a weapons factory catering to rogue nations. However, the mortal sin being perpetrated by this leviathan is that it is polluting hundreds of square miles of pristine ocean blue (nautical miles? The difference is undoubtedly important).

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Aqua Zone submarine

I can just tell that all of these games are going to have some kind of environmental message. This somewhat reminds me of some really cheesy Star Wars stories I read some years ago. Each of 6 stories between 2 books was a flagrant allegory for some environmental cause here on earth. I made it a game to figure out as soon as I could in each story what the message was going to be: Save the whales, save the rainforests, etc. Along those same lines, I will try to guess the environmental terror Dr. Havok plans to spread in the remaining 2 missions, Data Island and Sky Fortress. My wager is that the latter is pumping raw pollution into the atmosphere but I’m a little fuzzier on the former. When I think of an island, I think of water, but he’s already polluting the ocean in this adventure. The “data” part of the title may indicate that he’s polluting the internet somehow from some virtual island.

I digress. When I see the instruction screen it looks precisely the same as the one for Polar Mission, thus, I expect it to feature precisely the same gameplay. Wrong. It’s actually considerably tougher:

Tek-Kids Flash-Ops: Mission: Aqua Zone gameplay

In addition to only moving left and right, you can also move up and down. However, there are essentially two things you’re controlling with the same set of cursor keys: Your swimmer and the target. They move in opposite directions and it’s quite difficult to keep them straight. It’s a good thing this all takes place in shallow water– that makes things more graphically interesting.

Ski Jumping 2004

Posted on January 21, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Another in the series of Super Target dollar-specials, Ski Jumping 2004 doesn’t really sound like it would be all that involved. This turns out to be the correct assumption. I’m beginning to believe that these dollar games are little more than AOL delivery vectors as evidenced by the typical dialog presented as soon as you pop the CD into the tray:

The game is all about ski jumping. Don’t get me wrong– it’s based on a quite nice 3D engine and the programmers obviously know everything there is to know about the raw physics of ski jumping and have modeled them accurately. There are plenty of customizable parameters such as mountain, weather, and night vs. day run. But at the end of the day, it’s still a game about ski jumping. If that’s your thing then this is definitely the game for you. I admit I learned a lot about the mechanics of ski jumping and the support structures and layout of the runs. But after about 10 minutes I was prepared to move on. Though not before configuring the most terrifying run I could possibly engineer:

K185 mountain (185 meters, apparently, and the biggest K-number in the game)
wind from the side, and strong wind as well
icy snow
raining
night jump

Despite all that, I still couldn’t kill my player. The falls aren’t even that spectacular, at least not nearly as exhilarating as some I’ve been watching on YouTube today to bring myself up to speed on the sport and to verify the authenticity of this game.

Some other miscellaneous notes:

The game has a tutorial mode that laboriously walks you through each maneuver you need to master– the jump, the period of time when you coast through the air, and the landing.
Pictured above is the realistic mode. There is also an arcade mode which confused me because I was just watching other competitors jump. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to get a turn or not.
There are also networked multiplayer modes. I should hope this entails 2 skiers launching down the same run at the same time and trying to sabotage each other.
Certain screens kept demanding the CD and then bailing out. Fortunately, they were fairly inconsequential screens like credits.
The game makes heavy use of Ogg Vorbis files for audio (nearly 700 of them). My open source multimedia hacking readers will be interested to know that.

Amazon Trail 3rd Edition

Posted on January 20, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Here’s another game that I picked up in the dollar section of a Super Target store (along with one of every other software title on offer since, hey, they were only a dollar each and none of them are in MobyGames– thus, they shall all be highlighted here eventually). The box copy promises “A wild rainforest adventure that builds real-life skills” and proceeds to name those skills. I could plagiarize the list here, or I could let you figure them out as this review continues. The title seemed somewhat familiar and indeed, the game is the spiritual successor of The Oregon Trail. I remember being enthralled by that game when I had the brief opportunity to watch some friend’s brother play it on that family’s Apple ][ computer. Though I think my fascination was borne more out of a longing to experience some video game — any video game — at my young age vs. any particular gameplay strengths along that game’s eponymous trail.

Enough of the past, let’s see what’s on tap for the future, where future is roughly circa 1998, which I believe is when this game was first published. When Amazon Trail kicks off, there is a rapid FMV sequence where you enter into a museum and some Amazon artifact with a jaguar head comes to life. The jaguar head implores you to go explore the Amazon, its regional flora and fauna, as well as its indigenous peoples — both good and evil. During a nicely-rendered flyover of the river, the jag also mentions that I will seek out the ancient people and that they will have a message for me to deliver to the world about the Amazon. 100-to-1 says that it’s a message about rainforest preservation. Here’s the intro video:

So after this museum-induced trip, you wind up in Belém, port city at the mouth of the Amazon river. I find myself looking at a storekeeper and a ragtag selection of 4 Amazon guides. Why do I need a guide at all? Because I don’t even know how I made it to Belém in the first place. And, as each guide is quick to point out, the storekeeper will refuse to sell me supplies unless I have taken on a guide. I smell some shady business dealings here but the game doesn’t allow me to lodge a complaint with the Belém Better Business Bureau, so I proceed along the expected path and interview each candidate. It’s painful to watch and listen to any of them act as if they belong here. But I am convinced that they are supposed to emphasize unique characteristics within the game and I select the guy who looks like he could actually survive in the Amazon. Now the storekeeper will give me the time of day. Fortunately, there’s not much picking to do– there are 4 supply package deals that, if I were a guessing man, appear to be tailored to the advice of each of the 4 guides. I take my guide’s advice on the matter and I’m off.

The above screenshot showcases the main canoe screen, where you might spend entirely too much time if you don’t find other diversions. One such diversion is the book icon. That leads to a mini multimedia encyclopedia of Amazon-related knowledge. Birds, bugs, beasts, plants, people, first aid tips– each with pictures and pronunciation tips. I immediately develop more interest in this vs. the actual game — or most games in this experiment, for that matter. There is also a journal for writing. Ugh. This all makes it sound a little too academic even though I already know it’s supposed to be an educational game. I hope there won’t be a test on this stuff later.

Here’s another activity you can select from the canoe– exploring:

You are thrust into a patch of rainforest. Creatures prance back and forth (including a jaguar– should that be cause for concern?) and there are plants that just sort of hang there. You can take pictures and the game asks if you would like to file them in your photo gallery. Before it will do so, you must first correctly identify what you just snapped. A-ha! So there will be a test! It’s a good thing I just read that a banana is also called a plantain as the game allowed me to pick the bunch and add them to my fruit storage. Though it turns out this can also be gamed– you are always presented the correct answer along with 3 random wrong choices, so on the second chance try to remember which option you also saw on the previous round.

Back in the canoe, things are pretty slow-going. I keep checking the micro- and macro-level maps and it doesn’t seem like we’re even moving. Ostensibly, though, we are, and I even manually up the pace. Nothing much seems to be happening. I ask for a status report from the guide. What?! We’ve been at this for 20 days? We’ve already burned through half of our 100 lbs of fish? I don’t even like fish that much. And why are they measuring using lbs in Brazil, anyway? Well, let’s check out this fishing screen:

This is probably the most action-oriented segment that I saw. You use a harpoon from the supply lot to spear one of those aquatic silhouettes. Caught me a 2.7-pounder, I did. 2.7 lbs of fish-based nourishment for the expedition’s supply pile, that is.

So, I’m not sure exactly where the game is supposed to proceed from here. There is something about proceeding down the river, learning more about the culture and environment, avoiding snakebites, and also trading for more supplies. I wondered exactly what I’m supposed to trade with. My food for more food? Actually, it seems that one of the items in the general supply package was a quantity of something called “trading packets”. Novel.

I set the game on the easiest level available as is my custom for this experiment. I’m not doing this for challenge. I am doing it for a quick investigation and to gather data suitable for MobyGames, however, and to that end, I captured screenshots of all the credit screens. This sequence perhaps inadvertantly outlines the entire game as it credits the actors, their characters and at which junctures they appear in the game. Teddy Roosevelt shows up along the Madeira River.

Major spoiler: Yep, I called it. I found the ending FMV sequence and the spirits of the ancients descend to tell you to tell everyone else to, pretty please, not cut down the rainforests.

At MobyGames:

Video Casino Games

Posted on January 16, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

A friend of mine who is more familiar than I with the gambling biz was IM’ing me today and we were sorting out the winning odds of certain card games. I decided to check the big list of unprocessed games in my care and found one “maybe” game that perhaps qualifies for inclusion into the MobyGames database: Video Casino Games. I think it was probably some kind of commercial game. The CD lists a lot of instructions, and even a phone number for support. Put it in and see what happens. Just like last night’s game, I’m moving out of my comfort zone, genre-wise. Further, I suspect that this will serve as my baseline for gambling games.

The game CD lists the supported OSes as Windows 3.1 and 95. During installation, I can see Visual Basic runtime files being copied over. Okay, no big deal– I’m sure it’s possible to write a halfway decent game in VB. I have yet to play such a game, but I’m not ruling it out. The game seems to think I am running Windows 3.95, which is interesting. ‘ver’ from the Windows command prompt reports 5.1.2600, but as long as the game deems the revision high enough to run, no matter.

First impressions: This takes me back… to when I had roughly 2.5 days of Visual Basic experience under my belt. Cursory set of nitpicks on the UI:

The custom dialog boxes are not modal (but the stock system alert-style dialogs are).
Windows aren’t sized properly when you enter a particular game, leaving you quite confused if you have less than a passing familiarity with the most basic gambling setups.
Quitting the app does not prompt for verification.
The help button doesn’t always work. Though, by the time this happened, the program was in an incredibly weird state in which I probably could have broken the bank.

So let’s start with Blackjack, the only game I understand, partially.

It’s pretty straightforward, as long as you are cognizant to stretch the window out sideways to get the whole table in view. I appreciate that the game counts on my behalf, further lessening the amount of brainpower I have to expend.

Let’s proceed to Roulette. Now, the roulette wheel on the title screen is drawn reflecting the aspect ratio of the window area it is allotted. This can lead to properly round wheels under the right circumstances. I figured the same would hold true for the main wheel, but no. You get the weird shape no matter what. I think it’s supposed to be some crude 3D simulation. So, the thrust of Roulette, per my limited understanding, is to bet money on the odds that the ball with land on a particular number. You can wager more generally on, say, black or red, but the payoff isn’t as high. In this video representation, you raise or lower the number on your chip icon, then click where you would like to bet. Click on the wheel to affect an instantaneous spin. There isn’t any satisfying feedback here, just a summary result. I figured this was all pretty silly until I won $1750 on a $50 bet after a few tries. I’m primed for Vegas now!

However, I think the Roulette game might be the buggiest game in the casino. Observe the following arrangement:

I was trying to deplete all of my money. I was down to $5 so I placed a $5 bet. But I still had $5. So I placed another. By now, my available cash meter read $15. I placed $5 everywhere on the board to drive the total up to $225. I fully expected the program to have a catastropic meltdown when I “spun” the wheel, but nothing really happened. I was able to back out to the main screen with my $225.

I’m so unclear on gambling games that the above scenario might actually be what happens at a typical roulette table when a gambler is down on his luck. But let’s move swiftly over the the Craps table. This table uses the same circular pictorial representation for chips, with a number drawn on top for amount. In may interest you to know that $99 is the maximum wager when these chips are involved. Why? Because the program is only set up to draw 2 digits on a chip. The instructions state as much.

The craps board is just as confusing to me. I just keep clicking in places until something happens. It turns out that I can place bets in a number of the delineated areas, with similar types of risk/reward payoff ratios present at the Roulette table. Click on the dice to generate an instant gratification roll.

Here’s another odd characteristic of this game that I am not confident reflects reality: While I would normally lose money if the dice roll did not have something to do with my selected wager, in the above screenshot, I placed a $50 bet on “big 8”. Then I continually rolled the dice until I got an 8. I never lost money through all these dice rolls, but would win $50 more every time 8 came up. I tend to doubt that’s how it works in the real world. If I’m wrong, do please tell me as I would like to speedily exploit this heretofore unknown get-rich-quick scheme. For further weirdness (bugginess?), when I placed a $95 bet in the same situation, the payoff would be $105 each time.

Okay, hang on, only one more video casino game to plod through: Video Poker. This is not too difficult to figure out and, from what I could tell, worked as advertised:

This game could have used some visual cue to indicate when a round was over. Audio cues would have been even better. But this is such an early game that it was probably unreasonable to expect sound cards as standard issue yet.

Final analysis: I think this game has made me an even worse liability to myself if I were to actually enter a casino.

Update: The gambler has confirmed for me that the Craps quirks actually have some basis in reality, though I don’t pretend to understand all the rules.

Skateboard Park Tycoon

Posted on January 15, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

No one said that this Gaming Pathology project was going to be easy, or that I would enjoy even a small percentage of the games involved. In fact, due to the obscure nature of many of these games that haven’t even earned a spot in the MobyGames database yet, I recognize that the “hit-and-miss” ratio would be heavily weighted towards the “miss” end of the spectrum. Call me sentimental but I just realized that, according to my records, I purchased Skateboard Park Tycoon 4 years ago this very evening. And I actually wish I had tried playing it back then as well.

I admit that it was a big step to try this game out. I’m really moving outside of my comfort zone since managerial simulation games often seem complex from a distance and that doesn’t mix well with my simple-minded nature. In fact, the last such simulation game I can remember playing was an early 1990’s DOS-based game called Moonbase and I wasn’t very good at it. Plus, this game is supposed to feature skateboarding elements a la the Tony Hawk franchise and I have yet to play such a game. And we’ll just disregard the fact that the game revolves around a certain clique at which most of the other cliques in my high school were inherently opposed to.

But I’ve made the commitment to clear out this queue of games needing residence in MobyGames. So press forth I must. Some tech/trivia notes: Skateboard Park Tycoon is published by Activision Value, Inc., a company that screams “cheap!” for some reason. No matter; the game is among the most fun I’ve experienced in this experiment. I was a bit surprised, though, when the game announced that I had 2 video cards installed on my system and asked me to select between them (when I thought I only had one). However, the game is able to run smoothly in 1024×768 mode making it the most visually sharp game so far in the experiment. That’s a lot of fine detail, so please accept this cropped and scaled screenshot to get some brief idea of the management screen:

There’s a lot to say about this game, and I took pages of notes. I’ll try to distill my stream of consciousness into list form:

I thought that perhaps I should approach this game with some sort of concrete goal. How about: Cause as much misery among skater patrons as possible. Nothing like a good simulation game to awaken the dormant sadist in all of us, or so I’ve heard.
I use the above goal as a jumping-off point to focus my reading as I learn about the features of the game through the in-game tutorial.
There are tons of features as can be expected from a modern simulation video game. You start with an empty property and must build artificial structures conducive to skating; support facilities such as food and beverage dispensaries, restrooms, and first-aid stations; other commercial ventures such as a skateboard shop.
A-ha! Immediately, I zero in on those support facilities: If I can eliminate first aid and restrooms, the skaters will have a wretched time!
In the grand scheme of running a commercially viable skateboard park, however, such a scheme would seem to undermine the end goal.
I am thrust into the “Instant Action”, selecting the small parking lot property on the easy setting.
Now, granted, the only exposure I have ever had to the notion of a skateboard park was this rather minor, public park back where I came from. So I’m not sure what to expect or, more precisely, what my skater patrons will expect.
I don’t really understand all of the stuff I can build from — and I have an incredible array of options — half-pipes, quarter-pipes, rails, street surface, curbs, pools, and on it goes, all interlockable like a set of skater Lego blocks. I felt it was a major breakthrough when I figured out how to rotate a piece that has been placed down.
I’ve only put up one or two of these things called half-pipes when I see something scurrying around my pristine vacant parking lot. It looks like a rodent of some sort. I move one of the half-pipes to try to squash it. Oh! That’s not a mouse! In fact, that’s my first patron. And they can’t be offed that easily. Resilient, just like I remember the skater breed.
So I have my first skater and that’s with just one or two things to skate on. Skaters have lower expectations than I remember. But a transformation occurs– I suddenly wonder what I can do to attract more patrons.
I try building a few more skating attractions and then I decide to build some support facilities. I put up a snack machine, wholly expecting it to be vandalized. In fact, it is patronized immediately by the 4 faithful skaters, and is now generating profit.
I placed a bench, which I thought had to do with — you know — sitting. It’s actually for skating, in the eyes of the skaters. Anyway, some business is actually willing to pony up $100 per day to buy ad space on that bench which will be seen by all 7 of my current patrons.
Next, it occurs to me that I can right-click on a skater to display the menu seen above. You have creepy surveillance and psychic powers over each of your individual patrons. One pane shows the skater’s stats, the second has a log of all his attempted and succeeded tricks, and the final pane shows the skaters’ current thoughts (“I’m hungry”, “I’m thirsty”, “I’m going to rest a bit”, “The restroom lines are too long”).
So you have at your disposal unprecedented mechanisms for evaluating customer feedback. It seems reasonable that you should proceed according to that feedback. The number one complaint observed was that the restroom lines are too long. This surprised me because when I first considered restrooms, I skipped right past the porta-potties and small restroom facilities and went straight to the large restroom facilities. Hey, this stuff would be important to me in real life. But there are only 8 skaters in the park at this point. How could the restroom lines possibly be too long? Face it– customers always suck, even simulated customers.
In addition to right-clicking the patrons, you can also right-click on support facilities and micro-manage them. You can learn how much business they’re doing (this is when I find out that the restrooms cost $1 to use– and they’re doing good business). You can monkey with the retail price of the services or sell (get rid of) the facility altogether. Also, from this menu, you can select one of the game’s coolest features: The skate cam! From whatever facility you chose, you can view a 360 degree real-time panorama from that point:

I keep coming back to the restroom issue. I watch the skaters go in and out. They only seem to go in one side, presumably because there are no skater chicks. This makes me wonder if I should make both sides of the large restroom facility male-only. Alternatively, perhaps it would help to just have a phalanx of porta-potties and forget about the independent restroom facilities that would be more accommodating to the fairer sex. I know my customer base.
This is about the time that I decide that this game is rather infectious. Even the nonstop skater music starts to grow on me after the 127th repetition. The music is made by a group called “Formula 1”. The game reports that I can check them out at www.slimpickinsonbass.com, after the name of the full length album from which the 3 featured songs originate (“312”, “Lucky”, and “the Kids”). Sadly, the original website is no longer in service but is now the site of a squatter. I expect this blog post may very well take over as the top Google hit for the likely-defunct group.
These skaters are an awfully thirsty bunch. One of the top complaints is that the beverage lines are long. No problem; more beverage machines are cheap, and highly profitable. Skater thirst seems almost unquenchable, though.
Every time the game starts to feel a little repetitive, I notice some more icon options. For instance, there are icons to rotate, zoom, and tilt the simulation environment.
There are also options to assess the macro-level view of the park’s operations. When I first find these icons, I learn that the default park admission is $40! I don’t remember members of my high school’s skater clique having that much disposable allowance. I lowered it slightly and garnered some more patrons.
One of your status measurements is a park rating. The only goal here, as far as I am concerned, is to make sure the number is larger than it was a minute ago. When I hit 400, I got a new sponsorship, just for being popular with 15 skaters, I suppose.
Getting back to the actual skating structures which are supposed to be the primary attractions, they remind me a lot of the old Habitrail modular pet rodent cages. There’s a metaphor there, I’m sure of it.
Based on what I remember of the skater sub-culture, I can’t help but think that my skateboard park could profit mightily from a few cigarette vending machines strategically placed in unmonitored areas. I wonder if this game is mod-able?

I didn’t get to try out the exhibition mode, which is where you actually skateboard. Maybe another night. This is a game I can easily stretch out to multiple evenings.

See also:

Skateboard Park Tycoon, Part 2

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Windows Games