10K Push

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I would hate for March to transpire without a single entry (when I sat down to write this, I had honestly forgotten that I had already logged one post this month, but I am sort of committed to this evening’s gaming now). So here I am, again, at the very last minute. Hey, I think I’ll even resolve to springboard over the 10K mark on MobyGames tonight. May as well since I’m only 15 points away from the symbolic marker. That’s only 7 1/2 screenshots. I think the reason I have been putting this off for so long is because I haven’t had time to prepare my 10K acceptance speech.

It’s a good day to play a game because I just got a new shipment in from an eBay seller. That’s right! I’m still accumulating games from eBay sellers. That’s not as strange as the fact that I found a seller from whom I was able to order over a dozen games, many of which were not in the database yet. Many of these are old DOS games from the early-mid 1990s, some were later re-released on CD-ROM.

Here’s one that is already in the database but only had 2 screenshots: Wrath of the Demon. The reason it interested me is that the person who submitted the 2 screenshots claimed that he couldn’t get far enough into the game to gather anymore screenshots. I’m pleased to report that I was able to collect a few more, but mostly because I remembered to capture things like story screens, game over screens, etc.

I think this is actually a darn good game by 1990-1991 PC action game standards. At least, it excels in the audio/video departments with its parallax side scrolling and MT-32 soundtrack, both beautifully emulated via DosBox. Indeed, the jewel case copy gushes about the features: “Over 3 megabytes of graphics data; over 600 screens of actions! Smooth 15-level parallax scrolling…; Over 100 monsters, some larger than half the screen.” It makes me feel a bit short-changed since I couldn’t get much farther than the original screenshot poster.

The first level, seen above, has you riding horseback, jumping obstacles, and dodging birds. I guessed that last part. I later realized that I could hit the birds using the space bar even though I was pressing up on the gamepad to jump. With a little persistence, I eventually managed to clear this stage. Afterwards, a pair of monsters ambushes your campfire. You go into a sword battle with one while his friend chucks blades at you from a distance. I couldn’t come up with a strategy for besting them. So I had to sit through their victory dance:

No reason to stop there for tonight since I have plenty of new games that pique my curiosity. Try this title, for example: Forced Alliance: The Glarius Mandate. The game comes on 3 CD-ROMs, features a lot of Smacker animation files, and was published in 1997. It prominently features that bizarre animation style that came to characterize mid-90s 3D animation technology. There must be a name for it, but this is a perfect representation:

Force Alliance: The Glarius Mandate — Animation style

The game opens competently enough, with some good looking (for 1997) animations depicting a spaceship prospecting for minerals in an asteroid belt when a new alien threat attacks him. Some humans murmur ominously about this event and the game fast forwards by 10 years. This shows some recruits about to suit up for some space combat training. Unfortunately, this is when the game exhibits another characteristic that I recall was prevalent from the same gaming epoch: instability.

Force Alliance: The Glarius Mandate — Error dialog

So there is no getting past the intro of this game. I’ll try one more game that gives me no clues from the copy– a Mindscape-published game known only as MagnaFlux Runner. It turns out to be a fairly pointless little overhead racing game:

What can I say about it? Well, at least the MIDI music was nice. And it also allowed me an encounter with one of the strangest bugs ever:

Okay, so what happened is that I put the computer on auto-pilot, playing against itself. I was writing up the game’s description in TextPad. When the game got to level 2, I switched back to the game window. However, part of my text editor remained in the game’s window. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that the cars seemed to be treating the text editor window as an impassable boundary! I think the behavior occurred as a result of the game window being obscured during a level change.

Anyway, watch for 10K points soon.

Totally Spies! Swamp Monster Blues

Posted on February 27, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I couldn’t stand the thought of finishing out the month of February without a single substantive entry on the old Gaming Pathology blog. Plus, odd as it may sound, I happen to know that there are people out there who game vicariously through me and this blog. So I’m back for a limited engagement here. And I thought I would start with a game from a cheap batch I scored from an eBay seller over a month ago (slacking!).

Totally Spies! is a cartoon as I understand it. Swamp Monster Blues is an adaptation to video game form by Brighter Minds Media. You may recall that this company is responsible for the 4 Spy Kids Learning Adventure games that I worked through last year. So it would seem that Brighter Minds, and their development house Finite Monkeys, has a corner on video game licenses based on underage espionage agents.

Does Swamp Monster Blues follow the same formula as the Spy Kids games, with a comic book-style story punctuated with minigames but most notably with a supplementary puzzle book that’s key to gameplay? I didn’t see any PDF on the disc at first. But it looks like Brighter Minds learned something thanks to their distribution misadventures with the Spy Kids titles and, indeed, a workbook is installed. The main menu even asks if you want to print it at the main menu.

As was my custom with this style of game, I worked through as many puzzles in my head as I could. I didn’t really want to spend much time on this game tonight. The puzzles were of largely the same style as seen in the earlier franchise, but with a few changes. And the designers also decided to refine the style somewhat– all answers are strictly numeric this time. Even answers that are alphabetic get transformed to numbers using a substitution key. I guess this simplifies the underlying game logic. The first puzzle I tried to solve worked out to ‘0 3 5 19’. Oops. I think I was only supposed to resolve single digits. Any letters that substitute for double digits are probably wrong. Fortunately, when the game challenged me for the answer to puzzle #1, I was able to feasibly brute-force that last digit.

So the Totally Spies! girl trio is engaged in athletic training when they are abruptly called on a mission to search for an abducted courier down in the Louisiana bayou. The story is told in the same comic book style as Spy Kids but with quite a bit more action. So the developers splurged on that aspect. Then come the minigames, initiated by this brain twister:

Yes, it really was that easy, and that was on medium difficulty level. Here’s the 3rd game, which I found rather novel– sort of a concentric Frogger game. I wonder if this has been tried before?

Hop from the middle raft onto the gators and out to one of the 4 exits. The gators will regularly submerge. And I suppose you could consider this game an homage to one of the James Bond films where 007 faced a similar snafu (I fail to recall which of the films; I’m not a huge fan).

See also:

Educational Sprint

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I worked through a bunch of educational/kids games in this final push towards 10K points (not sure if I’ll actually hit that goal by January 1st, but it won’t be because I don’t have enough material stuffed in the MobyGames submission queue; as of this writing, I have 13 new games waiting for approval which might be a personal record).

Let the record show that I gave Pecos Bill my best shot to no avail. The game wants 640x480x256, and I just couldn’t get my system into that mode, not even with all the compatibility settings. But I do have a rogue version of Apple QuickTime 2.0 running around my system now, thinking that it’s in charge of viewing QuickTime, JPEG images, MPEG movies, and assorted other file types.

I then dove into Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland, a series of games & activities that, while simple, can be described in a complicated manner. For example, I described Fliptrack Mountain to MobyGames as dealing with transport logistics at a level that a child can understand. The game presents you with a transport task (like delivering a present from the top of a mountain to a house elsewhere on the mountain) and challenges you with deciding what transport option would be most appropriate– car, train, boat, or helicopter.

Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland– Fliptrack Mountain

Another activity revolves around following a cookie recipe:

Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland– Cookie baking game

Ahem, I know cookie recipes and at first I was ready to call nonsense on the ratios represented in this recipe. But then I noticed that it just seems to be a matter of making rolled butter cookies, and the proportions look a little better.

I subjected myself — however briefly — to another Mister Men and Little Miss title (you may recall The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain). This game dealt with one Mr. Tickle. These games are perhaps more insufferable than the Make My Video games, though I concede that at least these have an excuse since they are directed at a less serious market.

That does it– I refuse to actively seek out any more of the titles in this particular series, and I know there are a bunch. MobyGames is going to get a really lackluster description for this title since I simply could not handle it for very long.

But then I tracked down an awesome little game based on The Flintstones called Bedrock Bowling; perhaps not strictly educational but definitely kid-targeted, so grant me some reprieve today. Curiously, it comes from a developer named Adrenalin Entertainment which, if you examine their record, already has a few bowling-themed games to their record. This makes me wonder if they went out of their way to come up with a bowling angle when tasked with creating a casual game for the Flintstones franchise.

The Flintstones: Bedrock Bowling– Fred, Barney, and The Great Gazoo

Fred Flintstone is ready to clock out of work and practice for the bowling tournament but his boss threatens him with summary termination if he doesn’t finish a series of trenches by the next morning. A little green, floating, omnipotent alien named The Great Gazoo shows up and saves the day. Gazoo strikes me as a highly insecure Q-like being, who really just wants people to like him. Anyway, he uses his powers to create a series of trenches for Fred. Then he helps him practice bowling by giving him some giant bowling ball half shells that he can use to race through 8 trenches. The levels are highly detailed and animated and quite fun to play.

The Flintstones: Bedrock Bowling– Flooded lane

Each lane has 2 segments and you have to do “well enough” by the checkpoint in order to continue with the second segment. I could never quite figure out what “well enough” was, though. It didn’t matter, though, since nothing ever prohibited you from progressing to the next of the 8 lanes.

Finally, I played a Disney Lilo & Stitch title and ultimately decided I had had enough. I spent much of the game time staring at this minigame, such as it is:

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch Hawaiian Adventure — Hula lesson

You basically get to interact with things on or around the stage, and you can poke the young girls to make them dance for you. You can pull down the screen to watch an FMV of an actual hula dance lesson. The title is supposed to consist of 9 minigames of which this is the first. I eventually learned that clicking on the shell carries me to minigame #2 in which I am expected to help an otherworldly monstrosity by the name of Stitch bumble his way around his spaceship’s crash site picking up junk.

I guess if I’ve learned anything from educational games this year, it’s that there’s a threshold to what level of educational game I can tolerate– the preschool/toddler games are right out. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the Spy Kids Learning Adventures series, which were geared for ages 7-10. Take from that what you will.

Hunt Or Be Hunted

Posted on December 24, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Actually, the title of this game is merely Hunt, which will make it annoying to search for when it gets into MobyGames soon. It’s of the “casual game” genre, or must be, because not only did I pick it up in the budget software section where I found My Fantasy Wedding and Bratz: Rock Angelz, but also because it was on clearance. It’s a curious genre cross between a first person shooter and a hunting game.

First, there is the section where you go out into the haunted or perhaps radioactive forest, armed with 4 different weapons, and mow down aggressive animals like bears and boars (later levels apparently have rabbits too):

When you reach the flagstaff, you have the opportunity to switch to a more traditional hunting scene in a more serene setting.

There’s a bear in that picture, but it’s a little far off. It’s easier when the random bear encounter occurs closer to you.

And that’s all I really feel like writing on Christmas Eve.

Spy Kids Wrap-Up

Posted on December 9, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Hey! Do you need the PDF for Underground Affair? I mirrored it here after rescuing it via the Internet Archive: Spy Kids: Underground Affair. Regrettably, I can’t find a copy of the PDF for The Candy Conspiracy.

It’s time to put this Spy Kids Learning Adventures series to rest and eat up the free MobyGames contribution points that are basically guaranteed by 2 more Macromedia Director-based games: The Nightmare Machine and The Candy Conspiracy.

Or not. To review, these Spy Kids games are animated comic book/educational games that each have 8 minigames as well as a supplementary puzzle book whose puzzles must be solved and the corresponding codes entered at certain junctures in the storyline (for example, in order to gain entry into the enemy’s base; now why does the spy service’s computer control the codes for the enemy’s base?). Each puzzle book has 14 puzzles which remain largely the same from episode to episode. But there is consistently 1 or 2 that trip me up, usually the word unscramble. There is also the word search, which is not difficult, just tedious; most of the puzzles can be solved in under 30 seconds, but the word search requires finding about 30 words in a letter grid, then using the uncircled letters to yield a code phrase, key letters of which yield the final 4-letter code word.

And if the weird puzzles didn’t stop me, the baffling minigames sometimes would. The previous minigame is Penguin Path from The Nightmare Machine. You need to toss fish into unoccupied squares in order to goad the flightless birds into moving. There’s a pattern to how the penguins move, and how to determine which will occupy the square after several penguins rush to it. I never figured out the pattern, but I still got through by focusing on moving one bird at a time.

All the series games seem to have a pair-matching minigame, so I got lucky there. Well, notwithstanding that the games have 20 pairs to match on the medium difficulty level. As in previous games in the series, I often chanced my way through certain minigames, never really figuring out what was going on. Such was the case with Epidemiological Excitement!, my pet name for Incident Reports from The Candy Conspiracy.

The thrust of this game is to study incident reports to find the center of an outbreak of odd behavior wherein young people are eschewing playtime in order to focus on studies and chores. Unfortunately, while I bumbled through this puzzle once and made it past the next 2 minigames, I soon faced the third obstacle — random game crashes. And when I restarted, I had gotten over my beginner’s luck with this game.

Again, if anyone should need the solutions for any of the puzzles, see below in the entry. (Extra credit: Download the PDFs and solve the ones that I have — ahem — been too lazy to solve. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Too lazy, or else I would solve them. Or to just check my work, if you’re up to it. The games ask for codes randomly, so I have not been able to verify each one by entering it.)

3D Marble Flip

Posted on December 7, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Welcome to the most casual of casual games– a computer simulation of those old marble labyrinth games you might have played as a child. I loved these, though I never had the privilege of owning one.

3D Marble Flip comes to us from Webfoot, the same group behind the eGames-published Safari Kongo. To its credit, this game, unlike that one, actually runs. So that’s one good thing I can say about it. It might be the only positive thing I have to say about the game.

I really wanted to like this game, since I liked those old labyrinth games so much. This title had potential but was seriously hampered by a rather key feature– physics. The gameplay is such that the player uses the cursor keys to tilt the game board in any direction. But as soon as the keys are released, the board immediately bounces back to a perfectly level orientation and the marble stops rolling. It somewhat ruins the concept. The gameplay feels like the marble is covered is something very sticky.

The goal of each maze is to pick up all the coins in the maze and then roll to a little pink pit. Avoid falling into the void, if possible. Thing is, it’s incredibly frustrating to actually get into the pit. The game seems to want you to be perfectly centered in the pit. As mentioned, the marble is incredibly sticky and you will have to keep maneuvering the board to get the marble off the walls of the pit as you combat that nagging feeling that the level should be over already.

An incredibly unusual item about this game — perhaps a first for all the games in the experiment, certainly of the casual gaming genre — is that the game has an AutoUpdater program. Just to make sure that this incredibly simple game is up to date. This game has a 2002 copyright date, yet the server still seems to be up and responding:

Checking for new version of AutoUpdate...
No new version of AutoUpdate found.
Checking for new version of 3D Marble Flip...
No new version of 3D Marble Flip found.
Update complete.

See Also:

Wooden Labyrinth 3D, this same concept done more than right

At MobyGames

3D Marble Flip

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Windows Games