Dole’s 5-A-Day Adventure

Posted on October 18, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

So far, all of the food-related advergames I have seen on this blog have been for items that are not held in high regard by nutritionists. So here is Dole’s 5-A-Day Adventures which promises to teach us all about proper nutrition and exercise in the most cloying ways imaginable.

Dole's 5-A-Day Adventures -- Overal game map

So this is pretty straightforward. There are 8 areas, as seen in the above screenshot. Each one provides the player with a lecture about some aspect of nutrition or exercise, usually delivered by anthropomorphic produce (“Hey kids! Remember to eat lots of me and my friends!”). Here’s the phyto chemical parade. I’m trying to figure out if there is a demographic that would be old enough to comprehend words like “phyto chemical” yet still young enough to withstand the inanity of this game.

Dole's 5-A-Day Adventures -- Phyto chemical parade

Afterwards — and the UI is a bit confusing in this respect — the player can choose to either take the Challenge or the Ultimate Challenge for a given area. The respective challenges are a bit misnamed. The unadorned “Challenge” is actually significantly tougher and revolves around trivia that is sometimes multiple choice (as seen in the next screenshot) and sometimes interactive (like having to build a food pyramid). Players earn tokens for correctly answering these questions.

Dole's 5-A-Day Adventures -- Fit Kid Challenge

The “Ultimate Challenge” is an insidious misnomer. These present a series of yes/no questions where correct answers are awarded a gold star each. After a little playing, you will no doubt notice a distinct pattern: all the answers are a resounding “Yes”. And they all seem to be somewhat behaviorally-oriented:

Dole's 5-A-Day Adventures -- Ultimate Challenge

Other questions were along the lines of “I sang one of the 5-A-Day songs to my family”; “I sang a 5-A-Day song with my friends.” It was around this time that I decided this was a little messed up. Let’s face it– the only way that kids are going to be exposed to this is in a compulsory context in a classroom environment. And here is this automated mechanism dispassionately supplying repeated negative feedback if a child dares to answer that he or she did not sing a 5-A-Day song.

With any luck, some budding computer hackers exposed to this at a precious young age were able to reverse engineer the data file format, which the game was nice enough to store in a folder on the desktop. Let’s have a look:

Dole's 5-A-Day Adventures -- Hacking the data file format

Then launch the game again, select the hacked file:

Dole's 5-A-Day Adventures -- Token load dialog box

Then call the teacher over to show off the fact that I successfully completed all the objectives in the game, and may I please go outside and play?

Dole's 5-A-Day Adventures -- A winner is me

After feeling like I emerged triumphant in that skirmish, I checked my pantry only to discover a shelf of Dole brand canned products. So it seems Dole has won the larger battle here.

The CD-ROM I have is marked “2000 edition” and I found references on the internet dated as early as 1998. I also found a portfolio page from a company named IDD which claims credit for this game. IDD is not mentioned in the credits for my version, nor is their screenshot similar to anything in my edition. I was able to contact someone involved in the creation of this edition at eMotion Studios and my contact confirmed that there were just these 2 versions of the game.

See Also:

Taco Bell Tek Kids games — In the virtual schoolyard, the Tek Kids would probably bully around the kids from this game
The Lost Island of Alanna — Cherry Coke’s CD-ROM tie-in

At MobyGames:

A Tale of Two City Builder Games

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

I have had these two games sitting in my inventory for a long time, procured from various eBay raids, and waiting to be entered into MobyGames: Build City and Create City. Since they sound so similar, I wanted to attack them both at the same time. I assume they both fall into the category of city building games, the archetype of which is SimCity which, I must confess, I have never played. I have, however, played a game called Moonbase which had me managing said lunar installation. I also greatly enjoyed Skateboard Park Tycoon very early in this experiment.

Proceeding alphabetically, I delved into Build City first. I found no manual on disk and no in-game help. However, there was a demo mode which tutored me just a little bit. So I jumped into the first mission delegated by the monarch. I can place farms, roads, houses, and markets anywhere on my little plot of land. But building this stuff costs money and I only start out with 400 gold. I’m expected to grow this town to 500 people and have 1500 units of food harvested into storage by the end of 2 game years. I got off to a difficult start.

Indeed, the very beginning of the game is the toughest part as you’re trying to spend your precious 400 gold in such a way as to build the population up to just 100 people. Why is that important? Because at that threshold, the town can support a church. When a church is near a housing unit, that unit becomes more prosperous. More prosperous households are more reliable taxpayers. After awhile, the treasury sort of takes care of itself. But getting to that point is a big hump to get over. At other population thresholds, the player also gets to build schools, medical offices, and most importantly, taverns. There is only one means of recreation in the early 1700s when this game is set, and that is alcohol consumption.

I had to toy with a number of configurations of farms, roads, and houses at the outset. Once the gold started going down and into the red (there is debt in this game), I didn’t know any way to recover so I would start over. Eventually, I remembered that there is a configurable tax rate. It is possible to raise that at the cost of some citizens leaving.

There are 10 missions in Build City handed down by the monarch, each with very clear cut, measurable goals that can be monitored through your status screen. Some missions build on previous missions. E.g., the first mission has you building a new city from scratch while the second and third missions specify that you monkey with that established city. The mission goals make for some odd gameplay decisions, like when I needed to demolish some farmland to make room for new houses. Actually, just as I was about to do that, an earthquake struck my game, obviating the need for such tough choices. But then later on, my town’s recreational rating was too low. This meant I needed to erect a new tavern next to a church (I think I demolished a medical clinic to do so) and I even went so far as to demolish a block of housing to build another tavern. Hey, I already had enough population according to the mission parameters but I needed that recreational rating to climb.

I also found myself messing with the tax rate in unusual ways. At one point, I deliberately raised it in order to keep the population from growing which would put undue burden on the food stores. I did this when I had already hit my population goal and I was just waiting for the mission time period to expire.

Build City -- Finding my way as a medieval city planner

Eventually, I hit my stride and completed about half the missions when I took time out to try Create City. I chuckled as I thought about the irony if it turned out to be the same as Build City. That struck me as unlikely since the CD-ROM had a different company on it. I should know better by now. Yep, it’s the same game.

Studying the contents of the disc, I got the impression is was actually an AOL CD. But then I found a PDF manual for the game which described Build City almost precisely save for the title. The instructions explicitly describe the game as taking place in the 1700s. I’m not sure how that picture of modern skyscrapers found its way into the cover art.

So it’s the same game. That doesn’t make the game better or worse by itself. In fact, I tried Create City and I think it might be the better of the two titles. It has a copyright date on the title screen of 2 years later and has a few UI refinements. The graphics are quite different (still 1700s, more so, even). And there are even 3 more missions in campaign mode (though 2 are tutorials), while gone is the demo mode. And there are trees littering the landscape that must be cleared with extreme prejudice. However, there is also an option to plant more trees. I couldn’t find anything in my statistics to indicate that the citizenry would care about more trees, though.

I kind of like this (these) game(s) and I might try again sometime. Now I need to figure out if the titles should be entered into the database separately or combined.

This game was apparently created in Macromedia Director which makes it the single most involved game I have ever seen created with Director (and you know I have seen a lot of them for this project). It was engineered by one individual as well (save for the music).

See Also:

At MobyGames:

3D Galactic Destroyer / 3D Missile Madness

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

3D Galactic Destroyer is just the type of hyper-generic title that begs me to jump in and see what’s going on here, especially since MobyGames has no record. Google doesn’t even have a record of this title which is even stranger. For that matter, not even the CD-ROM artwork has a record:

The CD-ROM is just one big ad for Starshine Software, whose site is now just one big URL redirect to Cosmi, noted purveyors of budget software. Studying the disc reveals a number of different directories with many different types of software. There is also a strange file called password.rtf which schools the reader in how to properly enter a password to install a piece of software. Note that it didn’t stipulate which piece of software would be installed, just that the user should read the “Program Description” and where the “Program Description” could be found.

I eventually figured out what was going on and this strikes me as unprecedented– In what was obviously an effort to save on publishing costs, Starshine created generic CD-ROMs packed with 10 different software programs (this game, a Mahjongg game, a recipe organizer, SAT and ACT prep software, a home accounting package, and some others). The installation for each is protected by a password which is found somewhere in the “Program Description” which is found somewhere in the packaging. I was getting a little annoyed since I paid a whole dollar for this, until I remembered that this spent game actually came with the jewel case literature intact.

So I figured out the password for the 3D Galactic Destroyer installer (‘mission’, don’t tell anyone). I learned that this is developed by Webfoot… why do I recognize them? Ah yes, they were responsible for Safari Kongo, which never worked for me, and 3D Marble Flip, which worked but was rather bad.

I also learned through a series of clues that the original title for this game is 3D Missile Madness which produces plenty of Google hits (mostly warez sites, it seems). What kind of well-known game have they hijacked for this outing? The Defender concept:

3D Galactic Destroyer / 3D Missile Madness -- Gameplay

The destroyer skims along a planetary surface taking out various hostile flying enemies while rescuing friendly aliens on the ground. In a slight twist, each level has 3 planes along the surface that the player can (and must) traverse between to neutralize all the bad guys. It’s a decent effort but is rather difficult to control.

Tech support time: This is a Windows 95 game and I’m trying to run it under Windows XP. I had to mark both the “run in 640×480 mode” and “Windows 95” settings in the game’s properties page before the game would run without complaint. Further — and this is critical — it was necessary to manually kill the game from the Task Manager after exiting. Even after what appears to be a clean exit, a process named something like 3dGalacticDestroyer.exe was hanging around in the process list and prevented certain other programs (including itself) from executing.

See Also:

At MobyGames:

GapKids Adventure

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

I spied GapKids Adventure at my favorite spent shop and hoped that I had located the sequel to the Snow Day game, one of the first games from this Gaming Pathology project (and I know that such a game exists, and I know I will locate it one day). Alas, this is unrelated to Snow Day save for its GapKids theme and the probability that it was distributed in the same way as Snow Day (at various GapKids stores). My copy of the sleeve has the handwritten note “code 427” on the front of the sleeve. Will this game feature more of that GapKids trickery goading players to return to the store at set intervals in order to learn secret codes to access more games?

The game sleeve is larger than a typical CD-ROM sleeve because it contains a pair of paper glasses similar to cheap red/blue “3D” glasses. However, these glasses have red tint over both eyes.

GapKids Adventures -- Game sleeve and red-tinted glasses

It turns out that the glasses will be used to “decode” certain obscured clues throughout the game. Such clues look like this secret clue poster which, for some reason, is hanging in the character’s bedroom:

I haven’t seen this technique since the tech specs found on the back of Transformers toy packages over 2 decades ago. I can’t shake the feeling that there must be some standard color adjustment tool found in many graphic editors which would allow you to undo the masking.

Anyway, the game, apparently written in Flash 6.0 circa 2002-2003, has the player selecting either a boy or a girl, dressing them, gathering useful items from their bedroom, selecting a mode of transport and heading over to the tree house after completing some athletic obstacle courses.

The tree house sits atop a magnificent tree with an intricate ladder maze which must be negotiated before partaking in the recreational treasures of the tree house:

The ladder maze is platformer action which somehow manages to defy both the rules of real world physics (as all platformers do with their platforms moving to and fro in mid-air) as well as accepted video game physics (jump on a moving platform and the character remains stationary in air as the platform moves out from beneath).

So I finally get to the tree house (the gameplay was arduous enough that I almost gave up). What’s inside? Well, we have an optical illusion book, a fortune teller fold-up that can be printed, a certificate of completion in the form of a poster that can be completed and printed, a DJ mix station activity, and a secret password that accesses a bonus half pipe game. Oh, and there’s also a compartment with a numeric lock. This is where the code that was scrawled on the sleeve (and was seen earlier in the game using the red shading mechanism) comes into play. What’s the hidden secret in the compartment?

These kids are keeping a monkey prisoner in their tree house! It seems animal rights types would be all over Gap Inc. if anyone had ever heard of this game in the first place (Google searches only produce references to Snow Day).

Also in the tree house is a video game system that offers 2 games. GapKids Adventure was created by a group named Orange Design who demo a number of Flash games on their site. I get the feeling that the 2 arcade games here are Flash games that they had laying around and thought this would be a good opportunity to publish them. One is a Lunar Lander-type game. Wouldn’t you know– here’s the exact Flash game on their website.

The other is standard Pong game with a twist– the whole game field is obscured by the same red masking as the clues, necessitating the use of the red glasses.

GapKids Adventure -- Table Tennis; Pong obscured

You might be able to sort out the clues if you stare at the static images long enough. But you’ll be lost trying to find the paddle and the ball in this field without the glasses.

The game sleeve threatens that this is only Volume 1 so I will be on the lookout for more volumes. Or I suppose I could email the creators who still seem to be in business.

Update:: Thanks to my contact at Orange Design who informed me that they only produced 1 volume of this game.

See Also:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest, perhaps the most popular post on this blog, if only because it revealed long lost codes to special games
GapKids Adventure Archived at Internet Archive

At MobyGames:

Sierra’s Outpost

Posted on August 23, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

I watched a hard science fiction movie recently by the name of Moon in which Sam Rockwell is the lone human operator at a lunar mining operation that harvests energy to meet earth’s energy needs. The movie reminded me heavily of a game from Sierra that I had always wanted to try named Outpost.

So I tracked down the game on eBay (along with a few other fluffy titles that will show up on this blog eventually). The game is already in MobyGames, but not with very many screenshots. Unfortunately, I could not make the game run in Windows XP. I was able to capture the above screenshot using a separate movie player — the game uses many FLIC animations, one of the oldest of the old school animation formats.

Popping the CD-ROM in the tray produces the following dialog:

Clearly, this is a later revision of the game, ideally with some bugfixes. But afterwards, it launches the setup.exe program which is clearly indicated in the task bar:

But does not do anything else, aside from playing a sound. It should be noted that the usual Windows compatibility hacks were fruitless. So, all in all, a disappointment… or was it? The game comes with a 120-page manual in PDF format. While interesting and well-written, it’s also very long. Playing this game would have been a significant time investment, not unlike attending a class on a subject that won’t be particularly useful throughout your life. At the risk of sounding elitist, the more I read through the manual, the more I felt that I should be putting my vast intellectual resources to better use (there are at least 1/2 dozen unentered Barbie games, for example; or maybe even something completely unrelated to gaming).

According to the MobyGames trivia entry, this game was once awarded “Most Brutal Customer Stultification in 1994” by a gaming magazine.

See Also:

Skateboard Park Tycoon, a simulation game that sucked me right in
Restaurant Empire, a simulation game that wasn’t quite as riveting

At MobyGames:

Outpost

Sky Island Mysteries

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

The month is winding to a close and I don’t like for an entire month to transpire without making sure I play at least one strange new (old) game. So I picked one that I have had my eye on for quite some time due to its natural mysteriousness: Sky Island Mysteries. See? “Mystery” is right there in the title. Combined with sparse cover art and no manual, it sounds intriguing.

As usual, my interest was quickly dashed when I dove into the actual content. It’s another Macromedia Director-driven educational kids game. One thing I’ve finally started to notice about these games is that I’m pretty sure I’m hearing a lot of the same sound effects among various Director-derived games. I’m beginning to suspect that Director comes with a library of royalty-free sound effects that authors are allowed to distribute in their games.

So here I am, enlisted as a special assistant to one detective Joe Clue-steau. At Clue Central, he describes an outbreak of criminal activity and how I can help gather clues. (Brief aside: I wonder if I’m the only one who has been trained to cringe at the word “clue”? In the last decade, the word has so often been used in the context of an epithet.) The method for gathering clues is to solve puzzles unique to each of 3 sky islands. This doesn’t actually have anything to do with sleuthing, from what I could discern. After solving enough puzzles, some snake creature goes and retrieves a clue for us.

One type of puzzle — seen above — is the rebus found on, well, Rebus Isle. I had never heard of this before but it was certainly interesting. Based on the pictorial and animated clues, add or subtract sounds to develop words that answer the joke riddles. The one above was the most complicated that I encountered. It seems that rebus puzzles require a decent command of English phonetics.

Then there was Airshow Isle as shown above. To be honest, I was completely baffled by this one– something about organizing the logistics and flight plans of an entire airshow. Aren’t we supposed to be catching criminals, darn it? I just took a screenshot and moved on to Stadium Isle, home of — you guessed it — the stadium. The puzzle involves something called “Fripple”. The game doesn’t make it entirely clear what a Fripple is. Depending on the context I heard the word used, it could either be the sporting event being played in the stadium, or the race of misshapen creatures gathered for the event.

The player’s job during these puzzles is to place different creatures in seats depending on certain ad-hoc rules for those creatures. E.g., the cheerleaders only feel secure cheering when their sitting near other cheerleaders.

I was left a bit frightened of the consequences when the game challenged me thusly:

I assure you that, despite your overactive imagination and cynical worldview, the Fripples do something quite innocuous.

Somewhere along the line, these inane puzzles were supposed to net me enough clue currency to whittle down the list of suspects and solve various mysteries. No one has ever accused me of being very civic-minded and I didn’t care that much about taking a bite out of crime. I guess that makes me part of the problem rather than the solution.

See Also:

Trivia/Knowledge Munchers Deluxe, another similarly repetitive and annoying educational romp

At MobyGames:

Thinkin’ Things Sky Island Mysteries

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Windows Games

Dole’s 5-A-Day Adventure

A Tale of Two City Builder Games

3D Galactic Destroyer / 3D Missile Madness

GapKids Adventure

Sierra’s Outpost

Sky Island Mysteries