Bratz: Rock Angelz

Posted on November 26, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Perhaps I need a “girlie games” category for this blog since I clearly have 2 games for such a category in as many days. If you’re unfamiliar with the Bratz franchise, good for you! To fill you in, they’re sort of a band of junior skanks marketed towards young girls. They seem to be universally reviled and condemned by parents yet wildly successful nonetheless. Naturally, they have a game or 3 in their massive merchandising repertoire.

Bratz: Rock Angelz — The main characters: Jade, Sasha, Chloe, and Yasmin

What kind of game is on offer in Bratz: Rock Angelz? I think you could qualify it as a team-based RPG with an assortment of innovative minigames, not unlike an entry into the blockbuster Final Fantasy franchise… or perhaps I’m just trying to make lemonade here. The story goes like this– one of the Bratz girlz gets a dream internship at a fashion magazine working for a demonic editor-in-chief (umm, The Devil Wears Prada, anyone? except that this character was not quite as restrained in her delivery as Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley). The internship is predictably a nightmare as the character faces her two arch-nemeses — who have also been hired on in higher ranking positions — and has to perform menial chores unrelated to the core of her fashion interest. She eventually gets fired — the details are a bit fuzzy but I think it’s because the girl failed to properly screen out the editor’s junk mail — and the rest of the girlz get the bright idea to start their own fashion rag. So they rent an office that turns out to be a rat hole. So the next adventure is to go shopping in order to properly decorate the office space…

And that’s really all I could handle, seriously. I got to chapter 4 (out of 9 chapters). Some of the chapters are adventures where you guide the girlz around rendered sets and interact with characters and surroundings. There is a little exploration element here, but mostly the goals are pretty cut and dried. There is generally one over-arching quest for a particular chapter, but with a number of sub-quests within. These often involve helping other people. For example, the salesgirl at a clothing store is depressed because she can’t get up the nerve to talk to Eitan, the totally hot guy who works at the smoothie stand. So one of the girlz plays match-maker between the 2, and then the salesgirl finally has the spirit to help the Bratz girl in her quest. The game did not offer a “complain to manager” icon.

Wow, I can’t believe I explained that shy-girl scenario in such detail. It should be noted that, in contrast to typical adventure games, the conversations in this game are almost uniformly good-natured, even when the other character has nothing of note to mention. Typical games will be all like, “What do you want? I thought I told you I’m busy!” Where this game is totally like, “Hey, what’s up? Nothin’ much? That’s cool.”

Interspersed between and throughout the chapters are assorted minigames. Things like blending fruit smoothies to spec or picking out the editor’s clothes for a trip. Here is a minigame pertaining to doing a layout for the fashion magazine:

Bratz: Rock Angelz — Magazine layout minigame

I didn’t really try, and I don’t think it was possible to lose. Success at the minigames is rewarded with an upgraded wardrobe that can be changed out at anytime during the 3D adventure portions.

Think that’s a ridiculous detail? To be fair, it’s difficult to criticize Bratz for this outfit selection feature. More serious games have been doing this for years, notably in the Resident Evil series. Certain of these games have special unlockable outfits for the characters while other franchise games allow the player to customize the outfit at the very start (as seen in this screenshot).

Soleil Moon Frye serves as voice talent on this game. Turns out there is life after Punky Brewster. Checking her IMDb credits reveals that there is another Bratz franchise game — Forever Diamondz. Ugh, it just doesn’t end. I get the impression that everything having to do with Bratz must have some plural word in the title so that the pluralization can be spelled with ‘z’.

My Fantasy Wedding

Posted on November 25, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please, let this be an actual game which would merit its inclusion into MobyGames! I spotted My Fantasy Wedding in the clearance software section of an office supply shop. I purchased it even though I was unsure of whether it was technically a game vs., say, a shrink-wrapped wedding planning application. But it was still too tempting. When I got it home and peeled off the clearance sticker, I saw the ESRB rating badge — that means it has to be a game, right?

Who says there are no video games for girls?

You know, in a recent MobyGames forum thread, another long-time contributor expressed shock that I had not resorted to cheap or dirty tricks in order to keep gaining MobyGames contribution points. That depends — could it be considered an unfair advantage that I’m willing to try games that no one else would go near? The title screen of this game greets you with squeaky excitement as your virtual narrator describes all the business that needs to be attended to before the wedding may take place. The first thing to do is to choose your bride avatar. Then choose from among 4 wedding locations, and then choose your bridesmaids. Then, you get to choose your groom. Not only that, you get to choose his groomsmen. If all of that is too much work, you can always click the curler-wearing “mother” icon who will make these choices on your behalf and allow you to get straight to the important stuff — shopping.

Much of the action takes place at the mall where you shop for dresses, tuxes, jewelry, bouquets, cakes, and everything else that a happy bride needs for her big day. Where does the “game” aspect enter into play? There are a number of minigames interspersed throughout the mall shops, each with 3 levels. The incentive to complete these minigames is that success unlocks more options in all of the various stores; more dress styles, more cake types, more flower species, etc.

One minigame is a matching game which requires neither an explanation nor a screenshot — this must be the easiest type of minigame to engineer. At least it’s smart enough to limit the number of misses that the player gets. There is a gift packing game that is almost like a sideways Tetris block game — pack as many rectangular wedding presents into the car as possible. There is also a Pac-Man clone that has a slight twist– it’s the flower girl game where the flower girl leads the bride through a maze to collect various treasures for the wedding. The antagonist in the maze is just the single groom — the groom must not be allowed to see the bride. The twist is that the player controls the flower girl while the bride follows a few steps behind. So the game requires some real-time planning.

This was one of my favorite games — the invitation game. Fling letters at the letter carrier marching to and fro on the sidewalk. I think this game could be considered a spiritual clone of Paperboy since it’s possible to break windows on the buildings in the background. Those invitations must be using some thick, expensive card stock.

My Fantasy Wedding — Invitation minigame

This is the most messed-up of the 6 minigames that My Fantasy Wedding has to offer — the bouquet game. It seems that your friends think you are the recipient of entirely too much generosity. You have too many presents and they want to steal your presents. You need to lay down a suppressing fire consisting of bridal bouquets to pacify your covetous girlfriends until they get their own fantasy weddings. It’s important to fire bouquets constantly in this game because the floral ordnance travels slowly and these greedy girls are slick.

There is much music in the game. A lot of it can be selected at the wedding music store in the mall. These are all the different songs that can be played during the wedding proper. These themes are recognizable, traditional, and public domain. However, different minigames and stores have assorted songs playing in the background. Many seem to be one-off renditions of more modern (i.e., copyrighted) songs. I just know that the song which plays during the dice game (where you and your girlfriends roll dice for bridal shower gifts) is an homage to the 1999 Santana/Rob Thomas song, “Smooth”.

See Also:

Barbie as Princess Bride, featuring Mattel’s Barbie in the middle of her own wedding-planning adventure

At MobyGames:

My Fantasy Wedding
Wedding planning game group — there are enough to merit an entire group

Off-Brand Hunchback

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I have been trying to play some games recently but I have been discouraged by the creeping, non-fun sensation I get when I realize that I’m duty-bound to do a bunch of writing afterwards. That’s right, I seem to have finally hit that wall where playing these games is no longer any fun. Still, I have a goal of hitting 10K MobyGames contribution points before the year is out. And at this point in the experiment, you had better believe I understand the most efficient way to get mucho points off of a single game — by exploiting any given Macromedia Director-based game. Why? For these reasons:

They are often spec’d to run on 2, sometimes 3 platforms (Windows 95, Mac, and sometimes Windows 3.x).
I usually have a full cover art set of 3-5 scans.
The games are easy to blow through in a 1/2 hour and I can get a complete description of the game and a diverse set of unique screenshots, usually 20-30.
These games nearly always neatly roll their credits. Enter them for one platform. Once approved, easily copy & paste them for the other platforms.
These games are often produced by obscure, one-hit wonder-type companies that only ever produced a game or 2 before learning the hard way that the road to riches isn’t paved with cheap CD-ROM entertainment. The companies often aren’t in the database yet for this reason.

For all of these reasons, Babes in Toyland recently netted me well in excess of 100 contribution points.

With that, allow me to present the Director-based game, Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Quasimodo in a page from the interactive storybook

Published in 1996, this title is not based on Disney’s movie from that same year. Indeed, today’s specimen might be termed in some circles as a knock-off, but is it really? Disney does not actually have exclusive rights to the Hunchback story, only certain characteristics unique to their telling.

Anyway, this game consists of 4 minigames — rather abysmal minigames, I should note — based around the artwork shown in the story. The main attraction is the interactive storybook. Pages are shown as above. A text overlay is shown onscreen with part of the story. A narrator reads the text while segments are highlighted so that the user (presumably a young child who is disappointed that this game is not based on the real deal from Disney) can follow along. There is also a produced song that the user can opt to listen to. It comes off as something from an easy-listening radio station. I suppose it could very well have been the lead radio single from the Disney Hunchback.

This is one of the minigames, Make-A-Match:

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Make-A-Match memory game

You recognize the concept– the card-matching memory game. This variation is unique in that it gives the player as much time as desired to study the board before covering it up with rocks. Another game called Ring The Bell is yet another memory game where the player must remember and replay and sequence of bell tones.

This was the worst game for play control reasons:

It is called Rat Maze and what makes it so bad is that you have to click on the arrows on the left in order to move the cheese. The problem is that the underlying input mechanism wasn’t programmed in a very future-proof manner and even the speediest mouse click will send the cheese bolting to the opposite end of the maze.

This last item counts more as an ‘activity’ than a ‘game’ — Gargoyle Builder. Build your very own gargoyle from various colored body, arm, and head styles. Then you can press the ‘dance’ button to make him, well, spasm uncontrollably:

Hunchback on Notre Dame — Gargoyle Builder game

I admit that I have not read the original Hunchback tale (I didn’t even sit through all the pages in this animated storybook), though I did see Disney’s 1996 film (which, as an unabashed fan of 1990s animated Disney fare, I thought was an extraordinarily mediocre effort, save for the soundtrack). I did a text search for the word ‘gargoyle’ in Wikipedia’s entry for the story and came up empty-handed. Could it be that this game was brazenly ripping off that aspect of Disney’s creative license? Perhaps the people who developed this game didn’t read the original story either, but just saw the Friday premiere of the 1996 film and worked all through the weekend on this treatment.

This all reminds me of an old Suck.com essay called Faux Film Festival:

It’s a familiar, horrifying scenario. An exhausted parent in a video store or supermarket sees a videotape packaged for sale. The tape boasts a familiar title — Aladdin or The Hunchback of Notre Dame — and an attractive sticker price. Upon arriving home, the tape is proffered to media-savvy children, who immediately proclaim, in loud, whiny voices, “This isn’t the real Aladdin.”

The article notes that Disney lost a lawsuit to try to block such knock-offs. This might help to explain why, in recent years, they seem to have moved away from adapting traditional (read: public domain) stories (the last I can recall is 1999’s Tarzan) and more towards new properties (like The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo & Stitch).

What floors me the most about this game is that the guilty parties still seem to be in business: Peter Pan Industries, the publisher, is still around and is still ripping off everything Disney does. Amazing. Check out their catalog. They have, not one, but three episodes of The Little Cars (see Disney’s Cars). There is also Ratatoing, which I strongly suspect is influenced by Disney’s Ratatouille.

The game was developed by Right Angle, Inc. who has a portfolio to show for their 14 years in operation. This game, however, is not showcased.

At MobyGames:

Hunchback of Notre Dame

See Also:

Hunchback of Notre Dame Archived at Internet Archive

Golf Curse

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Another batch of budget bilge ordered from eBay arrived today. My customary first title of the group is Minigolf: The Game … maybe. It might be Minigolf 2003. Or perhaps just Golf 2003. It depends on which of the 5 companies involved with this game that you ask. This is the kind of game that really causes headaches when it comes to logging its data into MobyGames. As stated, the game mentions no fewer than 5 companies between the packaging and the in-game screens. Further, it contains 3 copyright dates depending on where you look as well as 3 different titles. Which takes precedent?

I am guessing that this game was developed by a non-English-speaking development house, as evidenced by the instructions screen. A portion is shown below and illustrates how the title for the post is derived:

Right off the bat, it’s fair to say that I prefer those 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures games from Taco Bell. This Macromedia Director-based game left me with the impression that the developers had never actually played minigolf, or just don’t grasp what the appeal of the game is. I refer of course to goofy courses. This overhead perspective take on the game is a bit sterile, to say the least:

You can place the ball anywhere in the circle to start. Then you use the mouse to determine the ball’s vector; the force that the ball is hit with is implicitly determined by the length of the line.

You don’t actually play against anyone. You merely play against yourself and must sink the ball in a certain number of strokes. A hole in one is worth 10 points. Each stroke beyond that is worth progressively fewer points: 5, 3, 2, 1 then 0. After the 0-pointer, you are given one more opportunity where the game warns you that you must play for your, ahem, “live”:

Play or die. The game’s final question was not difficult to answer:

3D Armada

Posted on September 18, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Aside from a disproportionate number of educational titles, this blog has also covered an inordinate quantity of what I have recently learned is called a casual game. The casual game is a quick, throwaway diversion, one that does not require a whole lot of time or thought to understand and can be counted on for at least a half hour of occasional entertainment. The casual game model fits this blog well.

Here’s one recipe for a casual game: Take a classic home board game, transpose it to video game form (whether or not it makes sense to do so), spice it up with some 3D graphics and add some catchy tunes. Such is the case with 3D Armada. It was a little exciting to pop this disc in since I had no idea what to expect. One glance at the hexalingual manual clued me in that this just might be a video game adaptation of the classic Battleship theme. This turned out to be the correct guess.

How would a Battleship clone operate as a video game? Something like this:

It requires more suspension of disbelief than normal when there are 2 10-ship fleets sitting next to each other in the water, effectively blindfolded as to the other’s precise nautical location. Although this game finally made me question just how much the original home game’s battles were rooted in naval reality.

I’m pleased to report that playing this game is actually a lot more efficient (or at least less tedious) than playing an actual game of Battleship. Since the computer automatically takes care of calling the shots and managing what has been sunk (complete with nifty BOOM effects), the Armada games go much faster and allow me to get the most out of the 1/2 hour of casual gaming time that I have budgeted for a game like this.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the throbbing, Euro-techno soundtrack (courtesy of the game’s Dutch developer), quite reminiscent of the Amiga tracker heyday. A wholly inappropriate soundtrack for epic naval battles, but sentimental for MOD music aficionados, such as myself.

RC Daredevil

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I was justifiably nervous about RC Daredevil— it’s another eGames title. Fortunately, it appears to come from after their reformation period, when they started publishing games that A) worked; and B) were not bundled with spyware. I also spied the file VBRUN300.DLL (Visual Basic 3.0 runtime) on the CD-ROM and groaned.

Mercifully, the game works, did not infect my system, and may not even be written in VB. It’s also the most sophisticated flight game I have played since Pilotwings on the SNES. This game has the player flying one of 5 radio-controlled planes against computer-controlled radio-controlled planes in a variety of different competition modes, such as dogfighting, aerial racing, and paint balloon bombing campaigns.

Take a look at this screenshot:

RC Daredevil -- Handicap parking and strange architecture

It highlights two interesting details about the game. First is the kooky, jagged residential architecture. The second is the fact that every parking lot has handicap parking spaces. Very conscientious. The artists paid a lot of attention to details in this game. However, here’s one detail that they probably hoped no one would notice:

I only noticed these cardboard cutout trees because the game can be hard to get the hang of and I was trying to get back down closer to the earth.

On balance, RC Daredevil is a decent casual game, stipulating that I don’t expect much from eGames in the first place. There is nice visual detail, and I think the developer did a good job with the ambient sounds such as the faithful recreation of downtown traffic cacophony during the air race through the downtown skyscrapers. In fact, it’s the rare game that was good enough for me to start up and play again even after I had collected enough data for a MobyGames submission. That said, it’s still a casual game that won’t keep you entertained for very long after the novelty of all 4 game modes wears off.

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Windows Games