Virtual Chess

Posted on January 14, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

The last chess game, Combat Chess, was totally extreme and placed heavy emphasis on the blood that is shed, metaphorically, during an intense chess match. Today’s game, Virtual Chess, comes from a slightly earlier epoch (1995, if the copyright date is to be believed) and is rather pleased to show off its rotating chess board.

First thing’s first: Installation. The first question that this game’s installer throws my way (after inserting the CD-ROM) is something that I feel unqualified to answer, even though I hold a degree in computer science and distinctly remember learning about something called “hash” in school:

Virtual Chess Hash Table Installation Question

After that, there’s a minor bout of DLL Hell when I need to copy some DLL from windows\system -> windows\system32 (or maybe it was vice versa). Anyway, installation was mostly painless, with the right level of knowledge and patience.

What have I gathered from the 2 chess games over the last few days? That I’m still so bad at chess that I should be barred from participating in the game, for my own good:

The above shot demonstrates the look and feel of the game. By default, the window is large enough to accommodate the basic 2D chess board and the 3D virtual chess board. There are icon buttons above each board but they could use tooltip text. The forward/back arrows allow you to rewind and replay moves. The extra buttons above the “virtual” board are used for rotating the perspective. The creators were awfully proud of this feature, obviously, and felt that it’s how they could innovate in the chess sim genre. If you rotate at certain angles, you will even see some attempt at lighting on the board squares. Still, I appreciate that they have normal-looking chess pieces and allow you to select between several common sets.

Putting aside the gimmicky virtual feature, the remainder of the game is quite feature rich. I especially appreciate that the UI does not block when the computer is contemplating its next move, unlike certain other chess sims I could name. I could list the interesting features I found in the game. However, I suspect that — much like my (not very) revolutionary discovery that pinball games have a “nudge table” feature — these chess games all have these same features at a bare minimum. In fact, the first chess game that I ever played, Chessmaster for the original NES, had dozens of features I couldn’t make sense of. I was too busy trying to beat the computer on setting “beginner 2” (the machine was a pushover on “beginner 1”).

The game disc contains a number (5, to be exact) of AVI animations. The first one is played when you start the game. It consists of several overblown logo animations for the various parties credited with production. Then it goes into a seemingly endless sequence of rotating chess boards and pieces, interspersed with the title “Virtual Chess”. This goes on for 3 minutes. I would upload the intro animation to YouTube but I don’t feel like competing for the least-watched video award on the service. However, I did upload this much shorter, and much stranger animation. It depicts the chess pieces melting onto the board and draining off into a container that is then covered up with a lid reading “Virtua Chess” (alternate title or typo?):

Combat Chess

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I love patterns. I enjoy finding common properties of particular genres of media and entertainment. To that end, I adore humorous compilations of cliches. For example, the chess category of this classic movie cliches list mentions, “Great Chess players are always honored to play on some rich guy’s fancy Philipino Art Set. (In reality, better players are almost always adament about playing on a plain, unadorned wood or plastic ‘Staunton’ set. No red or blue pieces, no ceramic or metal, no elephants for rooks.)” Thanks to today’s game, Combat Chess, I think I finally understand why this is the case– because chess is supposed to require concentration on the part of a human player. Sore video game losers often accuse video games of ‘cheating’ by somehow manipulating data factors under the cover of the running program. This game’s cheating is more flagrant: It just assaults your audio and visual senses constantly. It’s hard enough for me to remember the basics of chess and to think one move ahead without this level of sensory onslaught.

Combat Chess is easily the most X-treme variation of the timeless strategy game that I have personally experienced. As intimated above, I don’t necessarily consider that to be of benefit to a chess sim. The game’s intro kicks off with a splashy series of sharply rendered chess pieces slashing the guts out of each other before dropping the player into the above screen. Actually, the first game screen you see is not quite as pictured above. There are a whole bunch of windows open on the little 640×480 fullscreen canvas. One window shows the chess board with classic-style representations, another shows algebraic chess movement history, and there are 2 others whose functions escape me. The UI is, frankly, a mess. Fortunately, the windows can all be minimized as you can see in the screenshot, which still shapes up to be a distraction.

So it’s a basic chess game, only with gorgeously animated (by 1997 standards) characters who make a big production out of moving from square to square. Special notice goes to the knights who, despite their full armor, can perform a somersault from a standing position to their target squares. The characters make an even bigger deal out of knocking down a piece from the opposing side. For the squeamish, the game does allow you to configure for no gore. The above screenshot appears to have one of my dragon-pawns facing off against the computer’s mohawked, spike-bra-clad, punk dominatrix queen. It’s not pretty, not on any level.

The game can be viewed from any of 4 angles. The above screenshot is the south view. North, east, and west are also available. I think that perhaps a diagonal/isometric view would have been useful as none of the conventional views made it easy to see all of the overlapping pieces. Combat Chess offers networked human-human play and also has a mode for letting the computer play against itself. I did this when I got tired of trying to focus and just wanted to see if the computer could come up with anymore interesting animations. This is when another obnoxious characteristic of the game hit home in a big way: The UI seems to block whenever the computer is contemplating its next move. This can be problematic when the computer is playing against itself and you want to monkey with the assorted menus. There’s a little-known programming technique called multithreading– learn it!

One final nuisance that the game employs to divert your attention from the task at hand: The soundtrack. It consists of a neverending combination of drum beats, wind noises, and the occasional screaming, or creaky door, or other ambient sounds one might hear in a nominal medieval dungeon. Fortunately, all of these sounds are configurable via this dialog:

Until I saw the above dialog, I never knew that the word “bloody” could be considered inappropriate. This is actually my first clue that perhaps this game was not developed for the U.S. market. The disc is somewhat mysterious– I received it in a lot of 50 CD-ROMs I got off eBay and it was a plain CD-ROM that basically just had the words “Combat Chess” and “ValueSoft” (http://www.valuesoft.net/, which I believe may now be an unrelated company, or one that shifted focus).

To dig into the technical details, all of the animations are stored in a file format with the extension .seq. It’s interesting to note that the installer gives you 3 installation size options– small (~5 MB), medium (~25 MB), or large (~125 MB). Maybe it’s just coincidence that those quantities are 5¹, 5², and 5³ MB, respectively. But, hey, some of us are always on the lookout for whatever patterns we can find.

Snow Day Bonus Games

Posted on January 10, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

We’re not through with that Gap Game yet. I found this article that revealed the codes for the 2 bonus games on Snow Day: The GapKids Quest The 2 6-digit codes were, in fact, in plain ASCII text in the game executable file. I was sort of expecting something a little more Gap-related.

The first of the bonus games is Skate Race (code: 894367). When I first saw the Pac-Man clone, Snowed In, I fully expected to find this type of game elsewhere on the disc. You’ve surely seen this countless times– one of the most famous incarnations is Nibbles. You have a character that moves in straight lines collecting items and avoiding obstacles. Each time you collect an item, you leave a longer trail behind you which only becomes one more obstacle. The first time I ever played a game like this was on the Intellivision (I remember now! It was Snafu).

Now for Snowball Frenzy (code: 426985). Finally! Overt kid-on-kid violence. This is a first-person snowball shooter. Snow or be snowed. All of the kids in the neighborhood have playfully decided to gang up on you. Fortunately, it seems to be a fair fight since you are apparently the best snowball slinger in town. The goal is to knock out every kid that pops out from behind every tree, fence, snowdrift and snowman. You have a limited amount of snowball ammunition but you seem to get automatic refills when you run out. You also have a power meter in this game. Sustain a snowball strike and lose health. Fortunately, you can parry snowballs with your own.

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowball Frenzy

It’s worth noting that the children squeal with glee when you take them down. More FPS games need that kind of positive spirit.

So I won a game! I won Snow Day: The GapKids Quest! Sing it from the rooftops! That means I went back and finished all 4 of those Snowed In mazes. It’s not so hard once you get a little strategy down. I must contend that those children armed with shovels could take a snowman. But I didn’t make the game so I didn’t make the rules. The ending shows the group of GapKids enjoying hot chocolate indoors. Wearing their Gap apparel, naturally.

What now? I guess I could try to win the game with the other 3 characters. But I don’t think there are any more secrets in this game. When I exit the game after winning it, the game no longer claims that there are more secret codes to wait for.

See Also:

My first post on this game
Taco Bell Tek Kids — better than you might expect
The Lost Island of Alanna — Cherry Coke tries its hand at a promotional game

At MobyGames:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest
Advertising/Product tie-ins game group — you won’t believe some of the products that have received their own games

The Gap Game

Posted on January 9, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

(Hi! If you came here from Google in search of the forbidden Gap game knowledge, the codes you seek are 894367 for Skate Race and 426985 for Snowball Frenzy.)

I’ve been looking forward to tonight’s game for some time: Snow Day: The GapKids Quest. That’s right: it’s an actual Gap-based video game, or GapKids to be more precise. The sleeve copy states that the CD-ROM contains 3 games ready to play and 2 more that are unlockable via secret code. Oh dear, I hope it’s not another deal like the Taco Bell Tek Kids Flash Ops where I’m expected to collect a number of different discs. No, in fact there is a different system which will be explained (maybe) later.

Indeed, the game holds true to its title– this is a game about a snow day. Finally! A game that I can relate to on a deeply personal level. Actually, where I grew up, if a snow day were to be called, it would happen early in the morning; rarely, if ever would school let out when it was already in session, as is colorfully depicted in the setup for this game. So school is let out early and our group of carefully multicultural GapKids is free to engage in a variety of fun, frolicky, frivolous games that kids play in such inclement weather. Or not. Maybe I should just show you the specifics of the games.

The first — and perhaps most disturbing — game in the repertoire is innocuously entitled Snowed In. The object is simple: shovel all the snow. You wouldn’t expect a simulation of such a laborious chore to be much fun, and the designers shared your sentiment, so they added killer snowmen to the proceedings:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Terrified Snowmen

The above screenshot actually depicts what happens when your GapKid obtains the snowblower powerup in the game– the hunted becomes the hunter and the look of unbridled terror on the snowmens’ faces is priceless. As you can plainly see, this game is a thinly-veiled ripoff of the venerable Pac-Man concept. One key difference is that the 4 snowmen spawn from 4 different places. And if a snowman touches you, your GapKid is depicted as shivering frantically, but not necessarily dying. He does have to start over, but with the same area of snow already cleared.

Next up is Snowman Match. Unlike the previous game which exploits our most profound childhood fears of snow-spawned demons, this is a memory game that briefly shows you a glimpse of a snowman fashionably dressed in Gap apparel. The snowman melts away and 4 new snowmen rise up. You have to match the snowman you just saw, and you have to perform 8 correct matches within a given time limit. It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Sometimes the game throws 4 fairly similar snowmen at you:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowman Match

The last game that is, per default, unlocked is Snowboard Slalom, a fairly benign downhill snowboarding game where you must dodge trees, logs, rocks, and ice patches but, thankfully, no killer snowmen. Your X-treme snowboarder dude is quite resilient:

Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Snowboard Wipeout

Obstacles are merely temporary setbacks and he bounces right back to continue on his downhill trek. The goal is to reach the finish line at the bottom of the hill under a certain time constraint.

There are still 2 locked games. How to unlock the games? That’s unclear, but here is the intelligence that the installation program lends: “Sometime soon, a secret timer inside your Snow Day CD-ROM will ring and your computer will tell you how to unlock 2 secret games! Be sure to check your computer every week so you can find out how to get the secret code.” This is further reiterated when you quit the game:

I want my secret games unlocked NOW! (which, BTW, are Skate Race and Snowball Frenzy and the codes are 6 characters long, or at most 6 characters long). Maybe someone else out there on the vast internet has looked at this first. A quick Google search brings up a brief mention on another of my blogs as well as my master games spreadsheet. I guess I’m the only person out there who has ever thought that this game is interesting enough to write anything about. So now I’m investigating the game a little deeper.

See Also:

Followup blog post on this same game — I located the secret codes!
Taco Bell Tek Kids — a shining star among promotional video games
The Lost Island of Alanna — Cherry Coke’s Myst knock-off

At MobyGames:

Snow Day: The GapKids Quest
Advertising/Product tie-ins game group — you won’t believe some of the products that have received their own games

The rest of this post is just me thinking out loud about how to recover the codes, which turned out to be superfluous.

Let’s talk technical: Snow Day is a Smacker-based video game. My first clue to this effect was when I watched the installer program copy over nothing but Smacker files, WAV files, and an EXE file. All of the cutscenes are Smacker files. Further, the backgrounds, character animations, and UI widgets are all Smacker files as well. I am able to see from the directory structure and filenames that there are, in fact, 4 mazes in the Shoveled In Pac-Man clone. I only made it to the 3rd maze. I wonder if formally completing the 3 unlocked games would expedite the unlocking of the other 2 games? My secret gaming shame is that I have never been very good at Pac-Man or derivatives thereof.

Now we get into my favorite computer-related pasttimes: Reverse engineering! There is only one executable file and one support file, the Smacker decoding DLL. I disassembled the executable and looked for interesting strings. The first fascinating string is “Hypnotix”. I recognize that name. I recognize it from a 1995 demo CD-ROM of a Smacker-heavy game called Wetlands. This game bears the name of BrandGames, which is also known to be responsible for Taco Bell: Tasty Temple Challenge which, from the MobyGames screenshots, has nothing in common with this game’s engine. The context in which the “Hypnotix” string appears in the binary is for manipulating Windows registry keys. The registry does have entries in “Software\Hypnotix\GapSnowDay”, but only for CD drive letter and game directory. Thus, I suspect that BrandGames may have licensed the engine from Hypnotix. It also appears that there is a CD check in the game as evidenced by the string “Please insert the Gap Snow Day CD-Rom and then press OK”. But the game still runs fine after installation without the CD-ROM in the tray. A CD check doesn’t make much sense for a promotional game with 35 MB of game data that is copied completely onto the HD during game installation.

I have followed a number of theories to recover the codes:

I found the Smacker file that notifies the user about the wrong code being entered. I looked up the string in the binary, hoping that it would lead me somewhere interesting. I found the filename, but the logic around it was not immediately obvious.
The game has to grab characters entered by the user, but I’m not sure which of the standard imported Windows functions does the trick.
Under the assumption that the string that the user enters is maintained as a string, it would be compared against the correct code string. I see that CompareStringW() and CompareStringA() are being called. Googling these functions brings up Wine references, first and foremost. The usage is quite odd; if I understand this program correctly, it is passing the same string as string1 and string2 into these functions.

So I’m not getting anywhere with this tonight, and I don’t have any good, live analysis tools installed on this machine (i.e., no breakpoints or memory inspection). Perhaps I will get around to installing my old copy of Visual Studio. That could take up to 2 weeks, if memory serves, so it might be easier to just wait out the estimated 2 weeks it will take for the codes to somehow manifest themselves.

I’m still curious about exactly how the game is going to spring new codes on me on a weekly basis. SpyBot doesn’t report any new known spyware, and I don’t think the game installed any special background service (the level of technical ingenuity that went into building the game is certainly not on the same level as writing such daemons). I suspect that when I start the game again at certain times, it will let me know about certain codes. This might imply that the game knows when it was installed (perhaps by checking certain key file timestamps) and checking if the current clock is 1 or 2 weeks later. This could be corroborated by the usage of FileTimeToLocalFileTime() and FileTimeToSystemTime(). I suppose I could set the clock ahead, but I get nervous about doing that for some reason. Perhaps in a VMware session, though?

Check back in 1 and 2 weeks.

Update: Things just got easier when I found this old article that mentions the 2 codes: “For Skate Race, enter 894367; for Snowball Frenzy it’s 426985.” According to the article, the game would periodically tell you to visit your local Gap store to get the codes for the other games. I should try that just to see if they know the codes for this 6 or 7-year old game.

Update 2: See also Snow Day Bonus Games.

Of Light And Darkness

Posted on January 7, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Here’s another game that falls into my “always wanted to try playing” category: Of Light And Darkness, a 3-CD game from 1998. It is most notable for the voice talent of James Woods as some character named Gar-Hob.

Immediately after installation, the game exhibited a trailer for some Interplay-published Star Trek game or another. Who can keep them all straight? I just didn’t appreciate the fact that I couldn’t find a way to easily skip it once I realized the media wasn’t related to the immediate task at hand– Of Light And Darkness.

If I were to have to explain what this game is about, which I suppose I have to, I would claim that it’s about the coming apocalypse. You know, end of the world. I am a little unclear about what exactly is bringing about armageddon. There are intonations throughout the game that manmade pollution brought about by manmade greed are to blame. Spiritually, it has something to do with a bunch of apparitions appearing. Perhaps the manmade bad stuff is causing the apparitions to arise, which in turn are bringing about the end of the world. In order to avert this apocalypse, your job is to redeem the apparitions.

Enough storyline. Of Light And Darkness is, in fact, a game in a strict technical sense, complete with actual gameplay and goals. If I didn’t understand much about graphic technology and played this game in 1998, I would be absolutely stunned by the imagery on display– extremely smooth and detailed 3D graphics. However, I know better, and I know that this is purely a pre-rendered, FMV-based interactive movie. That said, I can honestly tell you that the graphics are exceptionally sharp and the game is well-produced, even if it is a bit difficult to wrap your head around.

Technically, the game is a bunch of individual pre-rendered FMV files strung together with some control logic and a few item objects superimposed on the proceedings. The FMV files are all MVE files, the sort used in many games published under the Interplay umbrella at the time. Your player is stuffed in a dazzling location. You then move the mouse around. Moving it to the extreme left or right of the screen affects a rotation around the current location. Sometimes you can look up (probably down in certain locales as well). When the mouse pointer icon is moved over certain hotspots it transforms into a pair of walking feet indicating that you have hit upon one of the pre-ordained paths and may move there. When you move to a new location and scan around, sometimes there will be apparition artifacts, or sometimes videos that attempt to explain more of the story, as seen in the screenshot below. Or, more likely, there will be one or more colored orbs, of which a blue example is also seen in the screenshot below:

Apparitions will occasionally appear. They don’t really hurt you directly (you don’t have a power meter in the game). But occasionally you will be accosted by an apparition and the game will notify you that you have 1 minute to dispatch the apparition or armageddon will begin. And you thought you had deadline pressure at work? The way to do away with apparitions is to combine a red orb, a green orb, and a blue orb to create a white orb, and then flash the white orb as a Ghost-B-Gone apparition exterminator. They’ll be back. Good thing that orbs are littered around the landscape and keep regenerating.

The decor and color of the game are really madness-inducing, so I think the designers reached their goal in that department. You really get the feeling that the weight of all the world’s sins are weighing down on your shoulders, but in a quasi-humorous manner. Like the pride place: There is a theater that represents pride. A pleasant, disembodied, female voice explains in a dispassionate, informational tone what pride is and why it’s bad. This sin room will come into play later on in the game, presumably. There are certain junctures where a cacophony of voices is heard snidely reciting financial terms or words associated with money: “Stock market! Dow Jones! Mercedes!” I think this is supposed to have something to do with greed and the badness thereof.

It’s a pretty game and I want to like it. But it’s tough since I have so little concept of what’s going on and exceptionally low regard for the interactive movie genre. It may look like an expansive 3D world but it’s actually exceedingly constrained. If there’s one feature I can appreciate about the game, it’s the fact that moving from one spot to another is very quick, particularly through long tunnels, an exercise that would be tedious in normal 3D games. This type of game makes me wonder how hard it would be to make a replacement game engine on the basic assumption that the engine could not possibly be that complicated. It primarily plays some FMV files, the format of which is well-known and fairly well supported in existing open source software.

One thing I enjoy about this game, and have enjoyed ever since I studied the multimedia files on the discs a few years ago, is a few odd musical numbers from the game, one during the opening credits and one during the ending. This is the intro movie, featuring “Mondo Apocalypso”:

The lyrics for that song sound fairly straightforward. I’m more interested to try to figure out what on earth they’re saying on the rap during the credits, “F-Death” (starting with understanding what “F-Death” even means):

The first time I heard the song I thought it sounded like Lil’ Kim. Of course it’s not. Some of the lyrics I’m able to make out include “Everything you know is incorrect, Eugene… you can’t collect your underwear, and you stare at your abductors, when they hook you up to electrical conductors and they pull the switch… this could be Roswell…” The chorus sounds like, “F-Death! Party in the ruins!” over and over again. It’s all there for your listening pleasure.

Further Pinball Madness: Soccer Themes

Posted on January 5, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

The final 2 games/tables from that 5-game Arcade Pinball compilation package covered in the last post are both soccer-themed games (that’s ‘football’ to you non-American foreigners). Here’s the first table, Soccer 98:

That’s an awesome level of detail and creativity on display. The grassy board, the soccer ball-colored pinball, the goal at the bottom of the table which symbolizes where you need to keep the ball out of. The opposite end of the table has a goal guarded by a goalie and 4 players. One purpose of the table is to knock down all 4 players and then you can go for the goal. Another cute detail is that there is a cameraman on the left side of the table that follows the ball everywhere it rolls. Novel though it may seem, I eventually realized this table was a little dull since there simply wasn’t much happening on much of the real estate. That’s when the game pulled through and raised up that giant, mutant, spinning soccer ball you see in the middle of the table field.

It’s interesting to note that in the intro animation for this table, the camera swoops down over a soccer stadium with 2 ads plainly visible: Judge Dredd and Zorro. That tells me that Pin-Ball Games Ltd. probably has a latter-themed pinball game in addition to a former-themed table.

This game and the next game, Team 98, appear to be based on a slightly different engine than the 3 tables described in the last post. Specifically this engine is more prone to crashing on my machine. But if you try running it enough times, you will eventually make it to the table. One of the new features I noticed is that shaking the board actually produces a visual effect (unlike the bubble level meter from the old engine).

The next game is easily the most interesting of the 5 in this collection: Team 98. It’s a 2-player competitive soccer-themed pinball game. That’s right– somehow, 2 players compete head-to-head against each other in a pinball-based soccer metaphor. Fraps had trouble capturing the main game screen but here is a shot of the table from the gallery:

It works like this: There are 3 15-minute rounds (where the time goes really fast, not real-time) and the game puts out a soccer pinball on each side. If the ball falls through your flippers (where the goal is), that counts as a goal for the other player. Then it gets pushed back out through the flippers. There is a similar player/goalie challenge at the other end of the board where you can score additional goals against the other player.

So it’s not very interesting in single-player mode. In fact, it gets downright annoying when, since there is no second player activating the other set of flippers, a British voice is heard to exclaim in disbelief, “He put it in his own net” every time player 2’s ball drops between the flippers. However, it occurred to me that this could very well prove to be the ultimate single-player pinball challenge. Imagine one player working to keep both balls on both tables in play!

I’m not sure where the title “Team 98” comes from since it is clearly a 2-person competition. I would like to point out that there is some random chaos built into the game since you can leave the flippers on both sides alone at the start of the game and despite the game’s symmetry, the balls will take different paths.

This is easily the most I’ve ever enjoyed a game of soccer.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Windows Games

Virtual Chess

Combat Chess

Of Light And Darkness

Further Pinball Madness: Soccer Themes