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Gaming Pathology

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Tag: promo games

Negative Progress; Alanna

Posted on November 30, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I remember when I first set out on this Gaming Pathology journey. According to my master spreadsheet at the time, I had around 80 games in my collection that were not in the database. My MobyGames records state that I contributed 106 games in 2007 and 30 games so far in 2008. Yet, my spreadsheet currently reports that I possess around 110 unentered games. Therefore, I recently resolved to not purchase anymore games until I have made a significant dent in the unentered games in my stock. And then there’s all the screenshot recon to be done!

So I have been reorganizing my computers recently. Most notably, I have decommissioned my Windows XP machine that was my central hub for this Gaming Pathology experiment. In its place, I have created a Windows XP VMware session on my Mac Mini. VMware Fusion for the Mac is supposed to have some nifty features for emulating DirectX so that gaming in a virtual computer won’t be such a drag. However, the virtualization program was quick to tell me that my budget-minded Mac Mini, with its economy class Intel graphics chipset, does not necessarily support all the latest and greatest features.

Somehow, I don’t think that this will be much of a problem given the types of games I often play, the bulk of which seem to be based on Macromedia Director. In fact, I thought I would eschew covering a new game for the time being and try one that I have been wanting to play for awhile: The Lost Island of Alanna, a Cherry Coke promotional game.

Unfortunately, as a result of my recent attempt at a full-on Mac conversion, I am still at a loss with regards to a decent graphics workflow. At the same time, I am also fighting with the newer image capabilities of the WordPress blogging software driving this site. Please accept this single screenshot that highlights what happens when running this 1998 vintage title on Windows XP without setting the compatibility mode to Windows 95:


X, not marking the spot in this cola-themed adventure

X, not marking the spot in the cola-themed adventure


As mentioned, this game came out in 1998. I was excited to snatch this up for cheap on eBay, even though the game has a decent entry already (refer to said entry for better screenshots, which do not vary significantly from the ones I could post). I should have read the MobyGames entry a little more thoroughly. It seems that this game was heavily dependent on materials available at a now-defunct cherrycoke.com URL. I can certify that the game’s eponymous island is pretty much impenetrable without the clues on that website. The Wayback Machine doesn’t help much since I can’t find any front pages for the site that mention Alanna.

Again, though, I should have done a little more homework before my purchase, for there is a complete walkthrough available, listed through MobyGames. Not only that, but the walkthrough author saw fit to post an entire copy of the game at the top of the walkthrough. So, by all means, download it and give it a whirl, especially if you thought Myst was an unparalleled masterpiece.

While the walkthrough reveals every single detail needed to complete Alanna, it also contains a specific deep link into the old Cherry Coke website. This is invaluable for web forensics via the aforementioned Wayback Machine and thus I was able to locate the original online companion materials for this game. Behold: The Standlake University of Cultural Anthropology project on Alanna.

The Standlake University research notes appear eerily authentic. This represents a marvelous impersonation of a dry, boring academic website. Keep in mind that there are some people who believe that video games are supposed to be fun.

I’m ecstatic to report that I finished this adventure game, including the sliding tile puzzle, and I am unashamed to admit that I followed the walkthrough to the letter. I wasn’t going to bother until I noticed that the walkthrough actually had a 71-step process for solving the sliding tile puzzle. The same website, apparently specializing in adventure game walkthroughs, even has software for solving sliding tile puzzles.

See also:

  • Myst, Alanna’s most obvious influence
  • Taco Bell Tek Kids— now here’s a company that knows how to do promotional tie-in video games

At MobyGames:

  • The Lost Island of Alanna
  • Pepsi Invaders, another Coca-Cola video game
Posted in Adventure Games Licensed Schlock Windows Games | Tagged island promo games Windows Games | Leave a comment

The Intersection Of Automatons and Breakfast Pastries

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

In last night’s post, I alluded to breakfast cereal promotions. I decided to tackle that this evening. First up was a disc procured at a garage sale many years ago called 13 Days Of Halloween: Rhythm & Boos. It pertains to Count Chokula cereal. Imagine my disappointment to learn that it is not a game, but an audio CD. I had a similar experience once when investigating a Scooby-Doo disc only to learn it was a video DVD rather than a game. On the plus side, the Rhythm & Boos CD does have a nice 17-minute track of Halloween-type sounds.

No matter, because I still have two representative specimens of a trilogy of promotional discs for the movie Robots from 2005. These games were distributed in specially marked boxes of Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts. I never saw the movie but I claim that this robot is considerably more terrifying than any model of Terminator robot:


Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone

The title Sweeper Zone implied to me that this would be a Minesweeper clone. Actually, no. Your robot’s job is to maneuver into traffic and clean up scrap metal. He can only collect one piece at a time and then return it to the salvage point. It’s not especially difficult and it gets boring very, very quickly. Fortunately, Pop-Tarts cross-promotion shows up so that I can claim that this is a breakfast food tie-in game:


Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone — gameplay

Confusingly, each disc has 2 distinct games (along with a robot building factory activity, and Robots movie promotional material). The second game, which does not receive billing on the CD-ROM, is Chop Shop:


Pop-Tarts Presents Rachet and Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone — Chop Shop

Ratchet must catch the falling junk in his box. Catching the Pop-Tarts logo makes the box wider. It feels like something from an Atari 2600 game and frankly gives a bad name to promotional tie-in games.

The second disc is Rescue The Rusties. Again, this disc actually has 2 games. The one that gets mentioned in the title is quite challenging. The object is to navigate the maze and, well, rescue the Rusties, as well as any imperiled Pop-Tarts logos:


Pop-Tarts Presents Rescue The Rusties

There are malicious robots out to get you but you can slow their pursuit by secreting oil slicks.

The second game is Pick-A-Part, a match-3 game! Yes! I’ll have you know that I am well on my way to becoming a grandmaster at this type of game thanks to my continuing practice at Magic Match. The goal of this game is to keep the gears away from he roving robot at the bottom of the screen.


Pop-Tarts Presents Rescue The Rusties — Pick-A-Part game

Even with my considerable skill, I couldn’t complete the second level at this game. Back to Magic Match, I suppose. It should be noted that Pop-Tarts logos were absent from this last game.

The other game in the series is Rodney Copperbottom And The Robot City Heroes. And I think you know that I am willing to expend considerable effort (well, I’ll frequent thrift shops and eBay anyway) in order to obtain it, along with the other prized Gap Kids game.

See Also:

  • Snow Day: The GapKids Quest — a promo game done well
  • Taco Bell Tek Kids games — promo games done reasonably well

At MobyGames:

  • Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Presents Ratchet & Madame Gasket’s Sweeper Zone
  • Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Presents Rescue The Rusties
Posted in Action Games Licensed Schlock Puzzle Games Windows Games | Tagged movie games pop tarts promo games robots Windows Games | Leave a comment

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).


Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Skate Race

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
Posted in Action Games Licensed Schlock Mac Games Windows Games | Tagged gapkids promo games snow games Windows Games | 4 Comments

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:


Snowday: The GapKids Quest: Secret Code

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.

Posted in Action Games Licensed Schlock Mac Games Puzzle Games Windows Games | Tagged promo games snow games Windows Games | 25 Comments

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