It has been a slow few months for collecting old games that no one cares about. However, I have managed to accumulate a few choice items that still enjoy no representation in the MobyGames database:

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• Barbie: Swan Lake: The Enchanted Forest — Yep, I will never run out of Barbie games to enter
• Dear America: Friend to Friend — Not sure if this is technically a game or not but my curiosity was piqued by the cover copy boasting “featuring FriendLink Technology: Non-Online Chat”. Not sure if “non-online” is a synonym for offline.
• Infinity City: The Gigglebone Gang by Headbone Interactive; other titles chronicling the Gigglebone Gang include AlphaBonk Farm and Pantsylvania– nearly every name in this series seems strangely suspect.
• Rock Tour Tycoon — Embellishing my collection of odd “Tycoon” titles. “Dream it! Manage it! Rock it!” Also, “MP3 included.” Not sure what that means.

I have acquired 2 titles in some “Elroy” series from different sources:

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There’s a dedicated wiki for this series. The wiki gives me the impression that Elroy Goes Bugzerk and Elroy Hits the Pavement are the only 2 games in the series.

Other items, including 2 titles that originally came from fast food restaurants:

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• Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker: The Music Game
• Martha Speaks: Martha’s in the Middle — I don’t know which of those segments is the title and which is the subtitle. The disc is marked as 5 of 5 and was distributed by Chick-Fil-A restaurants.
• Pokemon: Gotta MAKE ’em All! (Red) This appears to be a creativity tool rather than a game. A little searching reveals that there is also a blue version of the disc.
• Disney’s Treasure Planet: Etherium Rescue — distributed by McDonalds and appears to only be a demo
• Fun Bundle II for Mac — 4 games:
  • Zone Warrior — Maybe this game?
  • Glider Pro CD
  • Crystal Crazy
  • Step On It!

I’ve been going through my backlog of acquisitions (dozens!) that I have yet to mention. I thought I would compose a post to showcase the ones that aren’t in MobyGames as of yet. Sometimes, if I don’t mention a game, that vast ocean of knowledge known as the internet will have no record that it ever existed. It’s a solemn duty that I undertake.

2 more ‘Tycoon’ games in this bunch:

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• Caterpillar Construction Tycoon: A simulation game sponsored by the construction giant (I never realized that they own the domain cat.com); published by Activision Value
• Midnight Outlaw: 6 Hours to Sun Up
• Prison Tycoon: Alcatraz– there are at least 5 games in the Prison Tycoon series and I have now collected 3 of them
• Fate: The Traitor Soul– part of The Fate Series; not sure how large this series has grown but I now have 2 titles that aren’t on record

There’s some good licensed schlock in this bunch:

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• Merrian-Webster Spell-Jam (Tik Games)– I find it grammatically odd that “Spell-Jam” is hyphenated, but far be it from me to argue with the dictionary people
• Fashion Craze (Viva Media)
• Sonny’s Race for Chocolatey Taste– a Cocoa Puffs game!
• Common Cents– a game sponsored by State Farm Insurance; the jewel case copy mentions Flash Player as a requirement which leads me to believe it started life on the web and was also published on CD-ROM; comes from year 2004
• Burger Island Combo (eGames)– a compilation of Burger Island and Burger Island 2
• Whitetail Fever– hunting game by Valu-Soft

I visited my favorite thrift store today. It has been a long time since my last visit and their CD bins were all absolutely overflowing. I had to make some choices because I didn’t want to take home too many games.

Here are the items from this score that have no representation in the database:

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• Barbie: Team Gymnastics– yep, there are still Barbie games that neither I nor MobyGames know about yet
• Big Action Construction by Fisher-Price
• Get Ready for School, Charlie Brown!
• Puzzlemania CD-ROM from Highlights (as in, the magazine from your dentist office)

All of these items fall into the category of either “probably not or definitely not a game”:

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• ‘Tronic Phonics from McGraw-Hill School Interactive, listed as disc #11– might be a game
• One Banana: A Jungle Counting Book– very unlikely to be a game
• Location & Direction– lists ISO-9660 on the disc, even though it was published by 1999 (companies mentioned: Arc Media Inc. and Mars)– possibly a game
• Microsoft Cinemania ’95– certainly not a game
• Invention Studio from the Discovery Channel– build, design, and test your own inventions; there’s even a patent office section; might be a game as other titles in this series qualified (notably Team Xtreme: Operation Weather Disaster)
• Attactix: Battle Figure Game, Star Wars Starter Set CD-ROM, Series 2– I have no idea what to make of this; the lengthy title sounds like it’s a digital supplement to a tabletop game

And the stuff that’s already in the database:

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• Need for Speed: High Stakes (EA Classics release, and marked as “For sale in India only” and the price tag is “RS 399,00”)
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2
• Planet Dexter’s Grossology— the jewel case copy purports to teach “Gross science that kids want to learn!” I’m happy if they want to play it, but I really don’t, so I am glad that it’s already in the database. The screenshots on record could stand to be redone, but I probably won’t bother.
• Tropico: Paradise Island

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• Mary-Kate and Ashley: Crush Course
• Gamefest: Pro Pinball Challenge: Fantastic Journey (disc 1 of 4)
• Supercow — didn’t expect this one to be in the database, but there it is, probably because it’s fairly recent (copyright 2007)
• Stone-Jong
• Eradicator from Accolade

I showed up at work one day to find a Whole Foods bag on my chair:

Strange. However, a glance inside revealed a bevy of games. A coworker had learned that I collect any old CD-ROM games that people happen to have lying about. So he dumped this lot on me:

There were about 25 games inside. Sorting through them all, I found a single game that is certainly not in the MobyGames database yet while I found 3 more that don’t appear to be present. The vast majority of the games have cover art or media scans that are missing from the database, so there is plenty of work to do as always.

These are the games from the haul that are, or are probably missing:

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Grey Wolf: Hunter of the North Atlantic is no where to be found in the database. The other 3 are a bit sketchy. There are a lot of different Railroad Tycoon II games. But there are none that bear the specific title of “Railroad Tycoon: The Next Millennium: Special Edition”. Similarly, several Carmageddon variations are on record but none that specifically mention “Carmageddon: High Octane” which probably deserves its own record.

As for the final item in the photo, these are the Magic: The Gathering Games on record. Is this game already mentioned? I wasn’t sure, so I unrolled the sleeve:

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This marks the first time I have ever officially owned Magic: The Gathering cards. Anyway, this has the core game (which I assume refers to the traditional, offline game), plus the online game. This probably corresponds to the online game currently on record.

Here are some other miscellaneous acquisitions from the previous months, which may or may not be actual games:

Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa is probably the most interesting and truest game of this set. “King Solomons” [sic] has some pretty cover art and the system requirements listed on the back (486 vintage) intrigued me. However, a little investigation revealed that it, like the “FiveStar Casino” disc, is just an entry into online casinos.

Then there is VR Soccer ’96, notable for being bundled with 3D Rage hardware, and a Cosmi disc that takes some shareware games and shoves them on a CD-ROM.

Finally, we have the Planet of the Apes Limited Edition CD-ROM. This is a tie-in with the 2001 movie and bears logos of Blockbuster, Coca-Cola, and 20th Century Fox.

I investigated the disc assets to find any sign of an actual game but only found QuickTime movie trailers and featurettes. I started the disc in order to confirm this. However, the disc expects you to register online:

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I tried to register, just to see if the site was still online. However, Windows 7’s security facilities blocked network access by some NavBrowser.exe program and I was left with an error dialog prohibiting me from viewing the contents. I’m not in marketing but it doesn’t seem like adding this much friction to the promotional process is well-advised.

I hit the thrift store today. I found this specimen– Digital Extreme Sport Games: Bike Agility.

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You’ll notice that it’s disc 4 of 4 in a Taco Bell promotion. It was created by Maxx Marketing in 2005 (according to the copy on the back). This is the same group that would, in the following year, create the Taco Bell Tek Kids series of games, extensively documented on this very blog. The fact that there are 4 of these discs and I only have one creates an irrational drive for me to complete the set. For the record, the box copy also lists a technical support hotline in operation between July 29 and September 15, 2005, implying that that’s when this promotion ran.

Sometimes I think that it might be a bit silly for me to endeavor to document these video games. Not because it constitutes ephemeral pablum of a pop consumer culture; that’s a debate for a different forum. But I sometimes get the impression that with so many people on the internet blogging and tweeting and facebooking and what have you, that a bunch of stuff like this will be passively documented and archived by default. Yet, I can’t find any trace of this game when I google for variations of the name (except for a copy from some Amazon seller). Indeed, googling for the Tek Kids series mostly yields results either from this blog, or from MobyGames (data submitted entirely by me), or data cribbed from one of those 2 sources.

So I guess I’m doing some good (for fairly loose definitions of ‘good’) by trying to document this junk.

To that end, Taco Bell has been keeping up their tradition by putting out some more CD-ROMs with their kids meals. In fact, this Atari promotion might still be in restaurants:

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This is a promotion with Atari in which 4 classic Atari games– Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, and Lunar Lander. Each cover states “The legend is back by popular demand!” I’m assuming this is a reference to the fact that they ran this same promotion 2 years ago, in the spring of 2010. I picked up the full set of CD-ROMs then as well, though I wouldn’t begin this acquisition log until a year later.

They switched up the cover art between promotions:

Actually, now that I post those cover art scans, I recognize another difference: Super Breakout vs. Breakout. I tend to doubt the difference between the 2 games is especially significant.

It looks like I already did most of the documentation work for those Atari games 2 years ago. I see that I already have cover art scans and screenshot sets for all 4. I guess I just needed to do the MobyGames write-up and tweak it 4 times, and make a post for this blog. I must have gotten too busy. But I hope to get back to looking at these games soon since I’m eager to see if these are exactly the same as the games from 2 years ago. The 2010 games were interesting technically in that they were developed using Adobe AIR technology (which I had a hand in at the time). I remember these not being a very, eh… performant showcase of the technology. However, a bonus, unadvertised feature was that they were able to run on Linux due to the (now discontinued) Linux support for AIR.

Oh, but there’s more Taco Bell goodness. Here’s a series of games distributed with kids meals in 2001:

The full title of the series is X-Games Xperience, and the corporate logos involved include Taco Bell, ESPN, and ESPN2. There are 3 games: BMX, Inline Skating, and Moto X. However, there is a fourth unlockable game– Skateboarding. I know because it looks like I had the screenshot sets all ready to go for this series as well (I must have been planning to write this one up at the same time as the previous set). Ah, the memories.

At least knowledge that these titles ever existed should be available, should anyone query the googles on the matter.

Leftovers from today’s thrift shop raid:

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• A demo for the PC version The Grinch, 2000
• Bounty Hunter, which (based on the back cover screenshots) appears to be a Global Star rebranding of BHunter, which finally expands the title out to what people assume is the full name anyway.
• SODA Off-Road Racing

See Also:

• My extensive coverage of the Taco Bell Tek Kids series
• My own write-up of the BHunter title