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.

Panzer Dragoon 2: 2

Posted on March 8, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

The second installment of the Panzer Dragoon series was the single reason for my interest in the Sega Saturn. Even though I now understand that the full official title of Panzer Dragoon II: Zwei simply means Panzer Dragoon 2: 2 (II = 2 in Roman numerals, zwei = 2 in German).

Still, I have always had a major soft spot for this game, regardless of the fact that I have almost no clue what on earth is even going on in this game. The story has something to do with an adorable little mutant dragon and the human who just can’t bring himself to exterminate the precious little monster even those that is his village’s custom.

One day, the human is taking the dragon out for a spin, seeing if it can fly, when wouldn’t you know, a giant ship wipes out his village with a column of energy, Independence Day-style. He survives since he was outside the village and goes down to investigate and also beat up on some of the invaders raiding the village. The action becomes a third person shooter where your dragon just runs along a pre-scripted path but you are free to swivel 360 degrees and fire anywhere. At one point during the village battle, the ship overhead sees fit to drop a boulder in your direction. What an odd weapons system.

In the end, he gets whacked aside by the invading forces and sets out on a quest. Like I said, I’m never quite sure what’s going on or why, or who’s fighting whom. In the second level, you are racing through a canyon. At various junctures, another rider is cruising next to you. He seems to be fighting the same enemies as you and I don’t think you can hurt him.

After the canyon, there’s a brief real-time intermission where your ride takes off and glides to the ground below. It’s very tranquil and well animated. Then, it’s back to business– invading a fortress. The confusing part about this is that there seems to be other forces that are invading at the same time, so it’s not all up to you.

Panzer Dragoon 2 — Invading the fortress

Whatever. I still like the game. And now MobyGames will have a proper set of screenshots. Plus, I think I have a strategy for capturing good screenshots from Saturn games (and PS1 and PS2 games) through my DV bridge, purchased about a year ago.

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:

Chart Topper

Posted on January 3, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

Just taking it easy right now. Pretty soon, I should have the opportunity to enter enough data to catapult me over the 10K mark. But meanwhile, since it’s the start of the new year, it’s actually possible to sit on top of one of the charts:

So I’m reveling in that status for the moment. Actually, I still have a ton of credits for a bunch of games (those Make My Video games had gargantuan video crews for all that FMV).

Let’s see, from last year’s stats, I finished:

Of course, congratulations to Sciere for dominating in most categories.

Evaluating The Year

Posted on January 1, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

So I didn’t hit 10K points on MobyGames by the new year (sitting just shy of 9750 points as of this writing). Ah well, there’s always this new year.

So this blog started out a year ago as a game-a-day blog. Remarkably, I actually kept up with that schedule for the first 3 months. Things got busy shortly thereafter and this blog has been hit and miss ever since. I plan to keep up with this blog on the same schedule that I have had for the last few months, i.e., log a bevy of games — often related by some common thread — perhaps once every week or two, as the motivation strikes.

DJP Mom has notified me that I have a twin, ostensibly separated at birth: Check out Too Much Free Time, a blog authored by an occasional MobyGames contributor. The blog may seem familiar, but in reality, it’s far more ambitious than this little exercise. The author actually wishes to sample every game ever made.

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.