Gaming After 40

The LoadDown -- 01/26/2012

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:20:00 +0000

January is traditionally a quiet time for retail videogames, the holiday rush being out of the way with everyone back to work or school. But there are still new games turning up online...

WiiWare -- One new game this week: Newton vs. The Horde, a physics-based action/puzzle game where two scientists must fend off attacking enemies by flinging things around with the Wii cursor.

DSiWare -- Two new E-rated games this week... it appears that Nintendo's handheld focus is shifting more and more to the 3DS, and skewing a little younger on the older platform. Lola's Alphabet Train is an alphabet learning game for 3-7 year olds; it's got a cute panda host, and the exercises seem solid. Flipper 2: Flush the Goldfish owes some inspiration to Earthworm Jim, and despite the name it has nothing do with TV's Flipper the dolphin.

3DS eShop -- One new 3DS-exclusive game, along with the DSiWare titles -- Mutant Mudds, a retro-style platformer with parallax 3D backrounds and pleasant chiptune music. There's also a free downloadable demo of retail 3DS title, Mario & Sonic at the 2012 Olympic Games.

XBox Live Arcade -- Two new, inexpensive, indie-style downloadable games this week, a pleasant break from the recent trend towards more substantial $15 XBLA games. Quarrel is a family word game with strategic territory-claiming elements, and Puddle is a tilt-based fluid-physics puzzler.

PS3 on PSN -- One new game this week: Scarygirl, the platformer based on the popular toys and graphic novels. I got a closer look at the XBLA version that came out last week, and while the art style is nicely preserved in the backgrounds, the camera is pulled back farther than I'd like -- we don't really get to see the terrific character designs that make Scarygirl special. Also, my update last week was inaccurate -- I missed AMY, the survival horror game with an interesting young protagonist but a collection of terrible reviews since its release; and Zack Zero, an old-school platformer with decidedly current-gen graphics.

PSOne Classics -- Nothing new here this week.

Adventure of the Week: James Brand Adventure (1982)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

This week, we're playing another of the SoftSide disk magazine adventures, from an era where the games industry was so small that slightly-modified, thinly-disguised trademarked properties could be "borrowed" with little fear of legal repercussion. It's SoftSide Adventure #10 -- James Brand Adventure, an action-packed (as text adventures go) spy thriller published in March of 1982 for the Atari 400/800 home computer.

As the titular Mr. "Brand," we must save the President from an assassination plotted by the evil Dr. Death (no, not James Kevorkian). The title is inspired by Ian Fleming's James Bond, obviously, though there's actually very little directly lifted from 007 in this story. And in a departure from the usual SoftSide habit of not providing authorial credit, the game's colorful title screen informs us that this game was created by Peter Kirsch:

The game's parser is similar to other SoftSide adventures, strictly text with a simple parser, though it does take advantage of the Atari 400/800 hardware. Unlike most text adventures, the world of James Brand is not very open -- it's largely a series of set pieces that keep the plot moving along at a good clip, at some expense to interactivity and puzzle-solving; most of the time we just have to come up with certain very specific actions the sequence at hand requires.

As always, I encourage interested adventurers to try James Brand Adventure for themselves before proceeding with my commentary here; but I'll warn you that it's not easy to solve, due to some parser oddities and even odder puzzle solutions. The game's nearly three decades old, so I will not shy away from revealing all of the game's events and secrets; in other words, there are...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin at Headquarters, carrying a gun, a small suitcase, and 2 cyanide capsules. The suitcase contains -- well, that's a bit of a mystery, because we can't OPEN (Sorry, you can't do that) or DROP it (You're not carrying it). We can EAT CAPSULE -- You're dead / This adventure is over -- but in general this is not a very descriptive game. We can't EXAMINE anything, but we can LOOK GUN to discover we have 6 bullets left. SHOOT [object] plays a nice Atari sound effect, but we generally Missed..., except, we presume, when it comes to the designer's intended target.

The author seems to be fond of non-linear mapping -- we go W from Headquarters to the street, S from the street to Headquarters. Oh, joy. GO CAR puts us in the car parked in the street, where we find a KEYHOLE for which we don't seem to have a key. START CAR -- Won't start. OPEN HOOD -- Sorry, you can't do that. Okay, this looks like it's going to be tough. We have no key; a suitcase we can't open; three rooms containing a CAR and a KEYHOLE, with no other visible objects beyond our initial possessions; a gun; and a cyanide capsule, which we can swallow but hardly solves the real problem at hand (though there's no QUIT command, so this is a reasonable substitute when the going gets unbearable.) Many verbs that might apply to more creative solutions aren't recognized -- we can't HOTWIRE CAR or RADIO HQ or YELL for HELP.

I had to peek at the code -- really early -- to find out that what we're carrying is not a SUITCASE, nor is it SMALL, but it's a CASE, according to the parser's dictionary. Ack! The situation is not helped by the parser's willingness to fake responses -- LOOK SUITCASE yields You see: nothing special but LOOK CASE reveals You see: red button, yellow button.

Now we have something to explore. PUSH YELLOW -- Knife shoots out from your case / Missed... We probably should have saved that one for a real emergency. PUSH RED -- Heavy black smoke shoots out from your case. At least it looks like we can do these things repeatedly, so we haven't wasted any opportunities. And now we can actually succeed with OPEN CASE -- no puzzle here -- as Something falls out. It's the CAR KEY, at last! We can't INSERT KEY but we can START CAR now. We are immediately prompted to HIT RETURN TO RELEASE BRAKE?...

And now we're in a car, out of control, because somebody has tampered with the non-parking brakes. If only Mr. Kirsch had let us OPEN HOOD and give it a proper inspection! The car speeds up to 55 miles per hour, then 80, then 105, then 130 -- and of course, There's a cliff. We can't JUMP or REMOVE KEY or GET KEY or OPEN DOOR or OPEN WINDOW. And there's a really annoying white-noise sound effect playing constantly through all of this. And if we haven't guessed the right verb in time, we are informed that You fall over / You're dead, which I presume means we have fallen over the cliff, not that we have just keeled over of a sudden heart attack. Trying again, I discover we can't PULL KEY either, but we can TURN KEY to shut off the engine; fortunately someone didn't do a very thorough sabotage job.

Now we're on a north-south road, though it's really just one room that loops back to itself, and it's not at all clear where we should go -- this mission isn't very well planned, it seems. A motorcyclist in a full suit of armor appears, and if we can't figure out what to do, IT'S SHISKABOB [sic] ALA BRAND, and we're dead again. We can use our fancy suitcase, however, PUSHing RED to shoot a smokescreen out, blinding the cyclist and sending him into a wreck; it's not fatal, but his armor is too heavy and he can't get up. We can't LOOK CYCLIST or RIDE MOTORCYCLE; we can try, unsuccessfully, to SHOOT CYCLIST, which I'm sure he appreciates. Nor can we GET CYCLE or GET MOTORCYCLE or MOUNT anything, which I'm sure he appreciates. But we can GO MOTORCYLE and ride until we run out of gas. Again, Mr. Brand exhibits a serious lack of planning.

Now we're on a street, and we have an urban landscape to explore. Near a building to the north, a female voice says, "James, in here". But we'll ignore her summons for the moment, being the suspicious adventuring types that we are. Further north is a beach with a lake and a speedboat, and there's a hot dog stand at the west end of the beach. There's also the Kit Kat Klub -- so we're suddenly in a production of Cabaret? -- and along the street a stranger bumbs [sic] into us and disappears, leaving us with a slip of paper reading, "Meet me at the Kit Kat Klub SIGNED: Madame XXX." Oh, so that's who owns all those movie theatres!

Inside the building, we do not find the source of the alluring voice; we see a note, but someone tosses a box into the room... a box that goes Tick...Tick...Tick... If we pause to READ NOTE, the bomb explodes and we're dead. We can leave the building, and return after the bomb goes off. We still can't READ NOTE, but we can LOOK NOTE to discover that It's C-SHARP! Very funny, Mr. Kirsch. But this isn't just for comic effect -- inside the wall, accessible through a hole blown by the bomb, we can find a quarter.

On the beach, we can try to take the speedboat for a spin. LOOK BOAT reveals an outboard motor and a dashboard, which has another keyhole for which we don't possess the key. We can GO LAKE and find a CLAM underwater. But we can't GET or OPEN it. Visiting the hot dog stand, where our quarter should come in handy (it's 1982, remember), we can't BUY HOT DOG or BUY DOG (there's no BUY verb), or GET DOG or GET HOT. It's not until we think twice about our mental picture of the situation and try to GO STAND that we learn: Sorry, we're closed.

So let's try visiting the Kit Kat Klub instead. Madame XXX is waiting at a table and invites us to sit and have a toast; we are immediately suspicious, of course. LOOK TABLE reveals 2 glasses of wine. PUT CAPSULE lets us drop a cyanide capsule into her glass. We're about to drink the toast when we sneeze and hear a sliding sound. Is it, perhaps, best to SWITCH GLASSES before we drink? Yep. Now Madame XXX is dead. Did we want her that way? After we get up from the table, we're back on the street and the Klub is klosed. I wasn't sure I had done the right thing, so I restored and replayed this section, noting this time that LOOK MADAME before we sit indicates that she has a small pistol tucked into her bra, and that she probably plans to kill you. Further experimentation establishes that if we don't poison her, then she shoots us as we drink the toast. And if we don't swap glasses, we also die. But James Brand's universe is a nihilistic one -- we don't seem to gain anything from the death of Madame XXX, really. Except now the hot dog stand is open.

Inside the Hot Dog Stand, if we have a quarter we can GET HOT (even though elsewhere the word isn't in the dictionary -- the code uses some specific word recognition, rather than always relying on the database, which calls it a DOG.) There's apparently not a speedboat key in it -- the only remaining puzzle for the moment -- and if we EAT DOG all we get is a BURP! But we can GO LAKE and DROP HOTDOG so that the clam... eats it and spits out a key. Oookay.

Getting in the boat, we can't INSERT KEY or START MOTOR but we can PUT KEY, which both inserts it and turns it. LOOK MOTOR reveals a string (I didn't notice that before) and we can PULL STRING; You ride the ocean blue (I thought this was a lake?) until we hit land.

We're now on Death Island -- presumably where arch-villain Dr. Death hangs out -- on the shore of a shallow lake. We can see another island at the other end of the lake, but if we GO LAKE we run into a hungry crocodile. Going the other way leads to a road and a tree, where a Sinister figure throws boomerang at you. It's heading for your head! We need to DUCK here. We can see Dr. Death's palace, but if we wander onto his lawn a guard with a sword appears and chases us, killing us before we can get away. Up the tree near the road is a silencer; with our gun properly silenced, we can kill the guard. But then he somehow still manages to kill us if we head back toward the palace. Maybe it's a different guard? Aha -- LOOK PALACE reveals a *different* guard guarding it, before we ever meet the one on the lawn. We can avoid the lawn and SHOOT this GUARD to get into the palace. But then we fall through a hole in the floor.

Now, in a ludicrous twist beyond anything in Moonraker, we find ourselves in a HUGE HUMAN PINBALL MACHINE where Dr. Death shoots a giant ball at us. These villains always invest so much effort in colorful ways to kill our hero! LOOK BACKGLASS reveals a tilt sign, so maybe we can trigger the machine to dump the ball somehow. We can run from the ball through several locations, with different screen background colors for a nice atmospheric touch, until the only exit shown is DEATH. But as it turns around, we don't even have to run, and there's no need to KICK BUMPER or CLIMB BUMPER or anything; a simple TILT MACHINE ends the game. Exploration finds an OUTHOLE, which seems to be an exit as opposed to a primitive restroom, but we can't GO OUTHOLE -- we must GO HOLE.

Now we're in a small enclosed room, where we find ourselves getting drowsy. There's a vent here, and gas is seeping into the room through a small opening the width of a knife. That seems like a clue, and PUSH YELLOW plugs it neatly with a knife shot from the briefcase.

Now what? There are no other apparent exits. But some directions return to the pinball machine, apparently climbing out of the hole. We're stuck here, it seems. Should we restore and spend some time with the crocodile first? We can't SHOOT CROC. Trying to go E in spite of the creature puts us Right into the croc's mouth!, fatally so. So it'sback to the pinball machine... ah, we can GO VENT! It didn't seem nearly that big in my mind, being the width of a knife and all; I think the gas-spewing opening is supposed to be inside the larger vent. Here we find a small stick, and another hole leading to a hall.

The hall features a locked door and a doorbell -- we can't RING DOORBELL or RING BELL or PUSH DOORBELL but we can PUSH BELL (complete with sound effect). Someone opens the door and shoves you inside.

Now we are face-to-face with Dr. Death, who challenges us to a game of pool, intoning in a sinister manner, "If you win, you live." There are guards here also. We can't really win at the bad Doctor's pool challenge -- actually, we can't even PLAY POOL -- but we can notice that the 8 ball looks strange, and then take it and throw it to kill... the guards, anyway. Now Dr. Death takes a hostage, a woman not previously visible in the room, and if we try to PLAY POOL, or do almost anything else at this point, Dr. Death cuts her throat, and then shoots us.

For some reason, as this drama is unfolding we now learn that You're getting sleepy; apparently Mr. Brand is so calm, cool and collected that adrenaline is not coursing through his veins. I tried to shoot Dr. Death and use my briefcase attacks, but we only have a few turns to act. I couldn't see any source of gas here, so could not figure out why we were getting sleepy. As it turns out, and I had to peek at the code to discover this, this is a hint to YAWN. Dr. Death also opens his mouth wide to yawn, and we can THROW CAPSULE to kill him with cyanide as the girl escapes. Really?

Now all we have to do is rescue the President, I suppose. Outside the pool room with all the fresh corpses in it, we find a Weapons Room with no apparent weapons in it. A workshop nearby has a BOX OF TACKS; we can't GET BOX (There's no "BOX" here) but we can GET TACKS.

Going north from here leads us back to the palace's lawn, where the guard with the sword jumps out again and is just as obstinate about being shot and knifed as before. Nor can we lead him through the pinball machine and lose him or dispatch him -- he just goes back to his hiding place after we enter the palace. We can't KICK GUARD or GET SWORD, either. Cheating once more, I discover that we have to GET SWORD in the Weapons Room, even though it's not visible there. Now we can effectively ATTACK GUARD, after which we run into a flurry of guards chasing you with sharp swords. It's interesting how explosives are obviously readily available to Dr. Death, but he outfits his guards with swords. We can't THROW TACKS but we can DROP TACKS, and the Guards retreat in a hurry! Wimps. But the boss is dead, so I can't really blame them. And Dr. Death's cheapness apparently also extends to footwear.

Now we're ready to face the crocodile, whose mouth is also wide open. We can PUT STICK to jam his mouth open and send him away hungry. On the other side of the lake is... a golf course. There's a flag and a hole here, and we hear a Tick...Tick...Tick... Uh-oh. Near the clubhouse is a sewer, leading to the bottom of the cup... and a bomb. It has a red wire, which is either a trap or the world's simplest disarming mechanism. CUT WIRE reveals Sword's too big, so we need some other way to handle this.

In the golf course's clubhouse we see a man shaving. Even though it's not directly visible, we can make a reasonable assumption and GET RAZOR -- he doesn't put up a fight -- then go back to the bomb (which seems to tick for a good long time) and CUT WIRE to save the day. Victory is ours! Compose(Even though we haven't seen the president -- what if he's already dead?)

I felt like I'd missed something here, story-wise, so I had to look into the bomb situation -- it seems to tick forever, but it turns out that if we wait long enough, the golf course explodes, the President dies and so do we. That's right, he hasn't been kidnapped by Dr. Death -- a bad assumption on my part -- we're out to foil an assassination attempt while our nation's leader is playing golf. Apparently the golf course is set up so that if the President knocks a ball into the hole, the bomb below goes off and kills him; apparently Dr. Death is counting on him using his putter, and not allowing anybody else to play through. The code seems to indicate that we can witness the President teeing off, but I never managed to discover this in-game -- either we have to be in the right place at exactly the right time, or this scene is not actually implemented.

James Brand Adventure is really just a series of set pieces with very specific actions required -- it's not much of an adventure, in part because it's so linear. It has some nice sound effects usage, and the ludicrous story is kind of fun. But many of the puzzles don't make sense, and it's a little TOO structured and action-specific; I'm pretty sure I could not have finished it without looking at the source code. To save others these headaches, my solution is below the fold and will also be posted at the CASA Solution Archive.

At least the SoftSide series, with its varying authors and styles, is pleasantly unpredictable, and I look forward to the next one.

**** WALKTHROUGH ****

OPEN CASE
GET KEY
W
GO CAR
START CAR (and hit RETURN to release brake)
TURN KEY (out-of-control car stops and we get out on road)

N, N (repeat if necessary until motorcyclist appears)

PUSH RED (smoke screen blinds cyclist)
GO MOTORCYCLE (ride until we run out of gas and find ourselves on a street)

N (voice calls from inside building)
GO BUILDING (ticking box is tossed in)
W (explosion in building)
GO BUILDING
LOOK NOTE (very funny)
GO HOLE
GET QUARTER
W, W

S, W, W (somewhere here we should bump into a stranger who gives us a slip of paper)
READ PAPER
N
GO KLUB (Madame XXX invites us to sit down)
LOOK MADAME
SIT DOWN (she invites us to drink a toast)
PUT CAPSULE (we sneeze and hear a sliding sound)
SWITCH GLASSES (we switch them -- back)
DRINK TOAST (Madame XXX is dead)
W (back on the street)

N
GO STAND
GET HOTDOG (in exchange for quarter)
S
GO LAKE
DROP HOTDOG (clam gobbles it up and spits something out)
GET KEY
U, E
GO BOAT
LOOK BOAT
LOOK DASH
PUT KEY
LOOK MOTOR
PULL STRING (arrive at Death Island)

W, N (sharp-bladed boomerang is thrown)
DUCK
CLIMB TREE
GET SILENCER (it's attached to our gun)
D, N
SHOOT GUARD (You got him!)
GO PALACE (fall through hole in floor to... giant human pinball machine)

LOOK BACKGLASS (there's a tilt mechanism)
TILT MACHINE (ball drops out of play)
S, E
GO HOLE (small enclosed room with seeping gas)
LOOK VENT
PUSH YELLOW (knife shoots from case and plugs gas vent)
GO VENT
GET STICK
GO HOLE (to a hall)

PUSH BELL (shoved inside room, Dr. Death challenges us to a game of pool)
LOOK TABLE (8 ball looks strange)
GET BALL
THROW BALL (explosion kills guards; Dr. Death takes a hostage; we are getting sleepy)
YAWN (Dr. Death yawns too)
THROW CAPSULE (Dr. Death dies, girl escapes)

W, W
GET TACKS
E
GET SWORD (it's not visible, but...)
N
ATTACK GUARD (kill him with our sword)
E (bunch of guards with swords give chase)
DROP TACKS (guards retreat)

S, S, E
GO LAKE
PUT STICK (jams crocodile's mouth)
E (to golf course)

N
GO CLUBHOUSE (man shaving)
GET RAZOR (again, it's not mentioned)
S
GO SEWER
S, E (a bomb!)
LOOK BOMB (red wire)
CUT WIRE (the bomb is defused and the President is saved!)

Cover to Cover: Activision Atari 2600 1989 Catalog (pp. 6-end)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

We're wrapping up our look at the Activision/Imagic/Absolute Entertainment game catalog from 1989, offering new and re-released cartridges for the Atari 2600, even as it sank out of sight beneath the incoming wave of Nintendomania.

Page 6 indicates that maybe there weren't quite enough new games and re-released classics to fill the whole brochure -- or that Activision needed to subsidize their marketing efforts with a little outside advertising to exactly the right audience:

I thought at first that I must actually have missed the first issue of the long-running Video Games and Computer Entertainment magazine, as this cover didn't look familiar. But I remember that the magazine began as a supplement in the Atari computer magazines of the time, in the capable hands of some of the old Electronic Games editors, and was the first "new wave" magazine to reach newsstands when the NES established that there was indeed still a market for home video games, so I knew it was coming. The mystery was solved when I tracked down my own "Premiere Issue" and saw that the actual cover featured Blaster Master -- not Ghostbusters as pictured here, and the other cover copy had changed a bit. This was probably a pre-release promotional image.

And the last page promotes a modest video game sweepstakes, on a scale that seems more appropriate to your neighborhood independent electronics store than the once-and-former-king Activision:

$250 and 5 games was something, but not exactly a jackpot; a savvier Activision could have used this to figure out what platform Atari 2600 gamers were favoring and migrating towards, but I suspect most people just wrote "Atari 2600" on the Your hardware system line, since this brochure was packed in with the company's later 2600 games. I particularly like the promise of 5 crisp $50 bills, with the footnote that you should ask your teller for fifties when you cash the sweepstakes check.

And that wraps this one up. I have to give Activision credit for supporting Atari's comeback attempt, am sorry to say that I don't think their investment was rewarded. The Atari 2600 console was incredibly flexible, allowing creative programmers to do the seeming impossible over its decade-plus commercial lifespan, but the world had changed by 1989. I remember being at a Children's Palace toy store around this time and hearing a well-meaning woman ask her Nintendo-crazed grandson, "What about Atari and them? Don't they make games anymore?"

For the new generation of gamers, the answer was largely irrelevant.

Cover to Cover: Activision Atari 2600 1989 Catalog (pp. 4-5)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

We're looking at the 1989 Activision/Absolute/Imagic product catalog -- all the company's then-current offerings for the rapidly-becoming-obsolete Atari 2600.

Page 4 continues to clear out the warehouse -- that's speculation on my part, actually, it's possible that Activision was producing new cartridges for some of these titles -- with several more Activision classics:

Space Shuttle by Steve Kitchen was a remarkably complex shuttle takeoff and landing simulation that transformed the 2600's bank of switches into game controls to supplement the system's standard joystick; later versions for computers were more sophisticated, but this was a creditable simulation on the humble Atari console. Brother Garry Kitchen's Keystone Kapers was a fast-paced, colorful chase game that remains one of my favorite 2600 cartridges, and River Raid was a vertically-scrolling shooter that squeezed a lot of action out of limited resources. It was designed and programmed by Carol Shaw, one of the few prominent female designers in the video game industry at the time.

Page 5 promotes several games that might have been in development during the first wave of home videogames but didn't see release until Atari revived its system after Nintendo revived the industry. We have two Absolute Entertainment titles, which were also available for the more powerful Atari 7800, and a 2600 version of one of the games that helped Activision survive the mid-80s crash:

Title Match Pro Wrestling was a one-on-one wrestling game with player-vs.CPU and two-player modes; given the challenges of programming the AI, it's no surprise that the graphics are rather limited and the gameplay a bit tougher than it needed to be. Skateboardin' was a side-scrolling skateboard platformer that pushed the 2600 technically but wasn't a particularly memorable game; the NES pretty much owned side-scrolling territory and this attempt at doing the same looked extremely dated on release. The 7800 versions looked significantly better, but are not pictured here; the second one sported the "upgraded" moniker of Super Skateboardin' on Atari's more sophisticated console, itself a casualty of the crash that was brought to market late, just in time to look a bit long in the tooth.

Activision's licensed Ghostbusters works well on the 2600, considering that it originated on the considerably more powerful Commodore 64 several years earlier. Activision survived the crash in part because it had a more diverse product line -- it hadn't put all its eggs in the Atari 2600 and Mattel Intellivision baskets, so when those markets vanished seemingly overnight its computer titles saw it through the tough times. (The company also had some cash reserves, I would guess -- Imagic had also started to branch out, but didn't survive; perhaps Imagic depended too heavily on computer ports of its classic but aging Atari 2600 games.)

Tomorrow, we'll wrap up this little trip down memory lane -- just two more pages to go.

Clueless Gaijin Gaming: Bakushou Yoshimoto Shin Kageki (1994)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I'm sure some of you wonder -- I know I do -- why I insist on playing so many random, obscure Japanese PC Engine games, when I could more easily tackle the acknowledged classics like Cotton - Fantastic Night Dreams and Akumajo Dracula X: Chi no Rondo and be done with it. It's because once in a while I run across a little gem that makes all the indecipherable RPGs, generic shooters and endless rounds of mahjong worthwhile.

Such a game is Bakushou Yoshimoto Shin Kageki, published on the Super CD-ROM format by Hudson Soft in 1994, toward the end of the PC Engine's storied lifespan.

I'm as clueless as always with my lack of Japanese skills, but the opening sequence implies that this game is based on a Japanese comedy TV show of some kind, as we meet what I presume to be several actual human beings and their in-game representations.

I really like the game's music -- the title track is an old-fashioned American-style rinky-tink tune, circa 1920s, combining kazoo-like instrumentation with a throaty saxophone that lends it an appropriately Benny Hill quality. Most of the music is presented in CD-quality Redbook audio, shifting briefly to the sound chip between levels to cover data loading access.

I really had no idea what to expect from this game -- the packaging hinted at some sort of board or quiz game, but it's a proper 2-D comical side-scroller, where the player must dodge or jump over a variety of hazards. The enemy characters, many based on the people introduced at the game's beginning, are varied and bizarre, and I often found myself distracted from the action just trying to catch their comical facial expressions or figure out what they were up to. There's a lovely comic-strip flavor to the proceedings, as our hero Oto-chan makes his way through the levels with a mildly dismayed expression:

The game also takes full advantage of the CD-ROM medium, using the ample storage capacity to interrupt the side-scrolling action with lots of brief and amusing mini-games. There's a
dance contest, where we get to pick one of two ladies with whom to participate in a simple arrow-pressing rhythm game:

A round of Jan-Ken-Pon (paper-rock-scissors) where the loser gets what I assume to be pizza flung in his face:

And a boss battle aboard kites that plays like a cross between Joust and Road Rash:

The PC Engine was created at Hudson Soft, and one gets the impression that with this late release the developers were showing off every last thing the system could do. We see subtle parallax scrolling, detailed and colorful sprites, and lots of voice samples that would be even funnier if I knew what they were saying. Some events and situations seem to be tossed in just to show off, like pinball-speed channels to roll through Sonic-style, an alternate pathway where the player can become bloated by draining the canal of water -- with a straw -- and this high-speed rollercoaster ride:

Our hero can also adopt brief disguises, which lend him offensive or defensive capability, and increase the entertainment value:

The game both honors and parodies many classic games of the 2-D era -- this level set in feudal Japan has a hint of Shinobi about it:

It's also not overly easy -- the first level passes pretty quickly, but things get more difficult later on. Between levels, and when the game ends, the whole affair is revealed to be taking place on a stage -- this explains why we occasionally hear the audience laughing during play, and see them tossing things at us when it's Game Over time:

Bakushou Yoshimoto Shin Kageki is an unsung Japanese classic, inventive and fresh at every turn, throwing in everything the designers can think of just for the sheer pleasure of it. It rarely reuses anything -- there are spot animations that only get used once, and the whole game feels like it's been put together by people who just love making games.

The coming of HD graphics and the associated increase in development costs has made crazy, random entertainments like this more difficult to pull off, and the world of video gaming is poorer for it. At least I've run across this one, and now I've written about it, so maybe someone else will be able to discover it a little more easily.

This one is just crazy and freewheeling enough to be well worth picking up, if you can find it. It's occasionally in stock here.

The LoadDown -- 01/19/2012

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:03:00 +0000

What's new online? This stuff!

WiiWare -- One new title, a first-person fantasy/RPG/melee game called Stonekeep: Bones of the Ancestors. The graphics are simplistic by modern standards, and there doesn't appear to be much structure to it, but at 500 points I'm tempted to indulge in its old-fashioned King's Field/Dungeon Master/early Elder Scrolls style.

DSiWare -- Two new titles are up for the DSi and 3DS. Gaia's Moon is a side-scrolling flying game that looks like a shooter, but is actually more of a dodger, as the player must avoid all manner of obstacles and enemies while being unable to do anything about them. Anne's Doll Studio: Gothic Collection is a dress-up creativity toy with sharing and saving features.

3DS eShop -- One new release, yet another 2-D black-and-white Game Boy title in virtual form -- the arcade semi-classic Lock'N Chase, a maze game officially adapted by Mattel back in the day and released in handheld form in 1990 by its coin-op parent, Data East. (In other news, Nintendo is now making free downloadable demos for retail 3DS titles available, starting with Capcom's Resident Evil Revelations this week.)

XBox Live Arcade -- Two unusual, visually unique titles arrive on the XBox 360 this week. Haunt is a Kinect-based, E-for-Everyone-rated horror game, where the player uses hand gestures to aim a flashlight and open ominous doors and containers, from Masaya Matsuura, creator of Parappa the Rapper. Scarygirl brings the long-running graphic novel character (and Hong Kong vinyl sensation) to side-scrolling, platformy life.

PS3 on PSN -- A fallow week on the PS3 PSN front this week. But I'm sure it won't last.

PSOne Classics -- Also quiet here. Time for PS3 owners to catch up on those games they've meaning to download but never got around to.

Notable on Steam -- For PC gamers, Sega's got Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - Episode 1 (is there ever going to be an Episode 2?) and a PC port of Sonic CD, along with a general sale on all things Sonic this weekend. Also, indie adventure game studio Wadjet Eye Games' point-and-click Blackwell Legacy series is now available on Steam; I've recently been playing the company's sci-fi adventure Gemini Rue, and having a great time with it.

Adventure of the Week: Adventure in Ancient Jerusalem (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

This week, we're looking at another BASIC adventure game for the TRS-80, from the cassette-based CLOAD magazine. I have been trying to track down the original Jungle Adventure, after playing the second part recently; I'm speculating that the first part was also published by CLOAD, and when I found a file called JADVENT in an earlier issue, I thought I had found what I was looking for. But in fact this game is Warren Melnick's Adventure in Ancient Jerusalem, written in 1980 and published in July of 1981.

The game opens with a rather ominous title screen -- the game uses a keypress checking routine to prevent the player from breaking out of the BASIC interpreter to the system prompt, but unfortunately it also makes input slower and less reliable than normal. I should also note that if you're playing on an emulator and aren't seeing your input register, check the CAPS LOCK status -- the game only recognizes uppercase characters.

According to the instructions screen, we must "explore the city while out-maneuvering Arabs that will kill you if you invade their quarter," find nine treasures and pass through the Golden Gate of the original temple. The game is dedicated to the author's brother, Wayne; no onscreen credit is otherwise cited, but I found the author's name in the code. As with many adventures of the early 1980s, the Scott Adams influence is visible; treasures are denoted with asterisks, and many of the same stock responses turn up.

As always, I urge interested readers to take an Adventure in Ancient Jerusalem firsthand before reading the following. It's a tricky game, though; there's no SAVE GAME feature, and plenty of opportunities for unforeseen instant death. But games are an experiential art form, and there's really no substitute for dipping your own toe into the waters. My goal here is to document these games for history's sake, so whether you ever play the actual game or consider this an acceptable substitute, be advised that there will be plentiful...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin on a street in Jerusalem with no inventory in hand; exploring the streets suggests that the neighborhood is a bit of a maze, but as we have no items to drop for mapping purposes, we aren't going to get anywhere trying to figure it out just yet.

To the south is an underpass, from which we can climb to the top of the Western Wall. There's a pair of glasses here, but going down doesn't bring us back to where we were earlier. The map has a number of these one-way passages, so the player is required to do certain things in a fairly linear order.

There's no doubt about the danger warned of in the intro -- if we find ourselves in the Arab Quarter, You are attacked by an Arab. You are dead. We aren't given any warning about this fatal choice of direction, either, so we just need to mark the fatal choice on our map and start over. The game is mostly about mapping, really; there are few traditional puzzles, but several mazes and fatal navigation options.

The first of the nine treasures we are likely to run across is the *SHEPHERD'S STAFF* in the Zion gate area. The fabled Golden Gate to the temple is nearby, sporting a ruby colored button, but it seems we can't just PRESS BUTTON to open it. The second treasure lies near the synagogue -- it's a *BRONZED BAGEL*. Yum!

The glasses, presuming we made it to the top of the Western Wall to retrieve them, and also thought to WEAR GLASSES, allow us to see a secret passage leading to the east in the synagogue. This path leads to a hidden chamber with an old wooden table. We can't see anything lying or written on the table, nor can we climb it, but we can MOVE TABLE to reveal a hole in the floor. The hole leads to a door, but OPEN DOOR yields only How?? and UNLOCK DOOR yields TRY OPEN. We probably need a key, but now that we've come down the hole, we can't go back to look for one. Time to start over.

The keys are a few rooms to the north of our starting position, just lying in the street. With the keys in hand, we can open the door beneath the synagogue's hidden room to reveal a passage to the west. An underground cavern leads to the shores of the Dead Sea; entering the salt-saturated sea instantly and fatally burns out our eyes, so that's a bad idea. We need to avoid wandering south of the shore.

The area does yield a number of treasures, however. We can find a *DEAD SEA SCROLL* in a nearby cave, an *ARCHAIC BOOK* on the beach and a *RUBY RING* on a nearby mountain trail. The book reads: "For more information on these adventures, write to me at:", followed by Mr. Melnick's name, address and phone number circa 1980 when the game was written. It's probably a bad idea to bother whomever resides there now, but the use of "these adventures" is intriguing as it implies there are other works by this author floating around.

We can only carry five items. The parser uses several characters to recognize verbs and nouns, but oddly if we enter a command it doesn't recognize, it sometimes only echoes back some of the letters. I tried to JUMP and was told I don't know how to "JU" -- no pun intended, I am sure -- but when trying to replicate the issue, I only succeeded in crashing the code with an initialization error in line 51000. I suspect there's a misplaced string index somewhere, though I didn't run into the crash in my playthrough.

So I had rounded up five treasures -- though I couldn't carry them all -- and I couldn't figure out how to get back from the Dead Sea area to town. READ RING yields, "It says: I am -Touched- by your curiousity [sic] in the -Gate-." So we will need this to pass through the Golden Gate, as implied by its ruby button.

I tried to CLIMB DOWN from the mountain overlooking Jerusalem, or CLIMB MOUNTAIN, or ROLL DOWN, to no avail. I tried to climb back up from the room beneath the synagogue, also unsuccessfully. I also drowned in the Dead Sea with burned-out eyes several times, until at last I was driven to look at the code, which indicated that I had already mapped the game pretty well. But there are clearly several treasures I haven't seen. Further digging in the game logic (I don't often say this, but BASIC has its advantages) reveals that verbs 26-29 correspond to a puff of smoke taking us somewhere, and that these commands are in the SAY, SCREAM, etc. family. Then I had to look at the map data, as it appears these commands only work in a few specific locations. At last I spotted some additional text I hadn't seen in-game yet, and figured out that SAY AMEN in the underground cavern room below the synagogue takes us back to the streets of the city. (Actually, the code isn't specific here -- we can SAY YOHO if we like, or SAY anything at all.)

I found my way back to the Western Wall area, and at the gate, learned that TOUCH GATE doesn't seem to work as I thought it would based on the ring's text. We just have to WEAR RING and then PUSH BUTTON. This reveals a big lock, which opens with same set of keys we found lying in the street earlier. The gate leads to several rooms of Paradise, whose geography turns out to be rather more Earthly than one imagines. There are four more treasures to be found in Northern, Western, Eastern and Southern Paradise: *SILVA HALVA* (another food made inedible for value's sake), a *GOLDEN CALF* (unlike the famous Mosaic example, this one is small enough to carry), and some *GOLD COINS* and *ANCIENT SHEKELS*. We can again SAY [anything] in Paradise central to return to the streets once more. No lazing about in the afterlife for us!

I had now collected all nine treasures, and my next challenge was figuring out where the score room is -- we get 10 points for entering the Golden Gate, and each of the nine treasures is worth ten points each if stored in the proper place. Traipsing back into the code indicates that [IF O(X) = 9 then SC=SC+1]. Is location 9 perhaps the Western Wall area? Yep. How we are supposed to figure that out is unclear, unless we chance to READ WALL and learn that we are to Leave *TREASURES* here! Okay -- with little additional fanfare, victory is ours!

Adventure in Ancient Jerusalem is pretty straightforward aside from the SAY locations -- that really had me stumped, and it bugged me enough to do some further digging. There is a way to discover this in-game -- but it also feels like a cheat, as we are required to ask for HELP in the underground cavern below the synagogue. This admission of defeat returns the telling phrase, AMEN to Jerusalem! -- and we can be on our way again.

I enjoyed this little adventure, in part because of its novel setting, and even with the odd challenges it only took a few hours to solve. Now I'm curious about whether any other games by Warren Melnick will surface -- one never knows what's buried in the TRS-80 archives. My walkthrough is below the fold, and will be available at the CASA Solution Archive eventually.

**** WALKTHROUGH ****

N, N
GET KEYS
S, S, S, U
GET GLASSES
WEAR GLASSES
D
E
GET STAFF
W, S, E, E
GET BAGEL
W, W, N
READ WALL (store treasures here)
DROP STAFF
DROP BAGEL
SCORE (should be 20)
S, E, E
S (glasses reveal a passage to the east)
E
MOVE TABLE
D
OPEN DOOR (passage to the west)
W, S, W, N
GET SCROLL
W
GET BOOK
N
GET RING
S, E, E, N, E
SAY AMEN (teleport back to streets)

W, S, S, S, U, D, W (at gate)
WEAR RING
PUSH BUTTON (reveals a lock)
E
REMOVE RING
DROP RING
DROP SCROLL
DROP BOOK
W
OPEN GATE
W
N
GET HALVA
S, W
GET COINS
E, S
GET CALF
N, E
DROP KEYS
GET SHEKELS
W
SAY AMEN

W, S, S, S, S
DROP HALVA
DROP COINS
DROP CALF
DROP SHEKELS
SCORE (victory!)

Cover to Cover: Activision Atari 2600 1989 Catalog (pp. 2-3)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

We're paging through Activision's catalog for the Atari 2600 -- circa 1989, at the tail end of the long-running platform's lifespan. Not too shabby for a machine released in 1977!

Page 2 presents some more Activision classics, and another new game:

Chopper Command borrowed a bit from Defender, but played well and looked great on the 2600. Robot Tank was Activision's take on Battlezone, beating Atari's own official cartridge to market. And Kaboom! was a classic fast-paced paddle game that managed to make almost everyone forget it was inspired by Atari's Avalanche coin-op; adding a mad bomber and a sense of humor left the original concept looking bare and boring.

The big news on this page, of course, was Commando, an adaptation of Capcom's coin-op hit for the 2600 (again, also a game available on the competing NES.) The graphics suffered in translation, and it was almost impossible to toss off a grenade using a joystick and single fire button. But it was a reasonable translation that pushed the hardware quite a bit; visually it always reminded my of Imagic's Riddle of the Sphinx, but there's a lot more action on offer here.

Page 3 gives the most prominent spot to a longtime Activision favorite, and also pushes some acquired Imagic properties:

There's not much to say about Pitfall! -- it was and is a classic game, and none of the later sequels and remakes have managed to capture its simple charm. Activision kept the brand name but repackaged Imagic's titles for cost reduction purposes -- no more silver boxes, and the labels were reduced to simple blue backgrounds with white text. But keeping Moonsweeper, Demon Attack and Atlantis on the market was a fine idea. Imagic was really the only other third-party 2600 publisher that gave Activision serious competition, and these games, acquired by its rival during the crash era, have continued to show up in recent Activision packages.

Next weekend, we'll wrap up the remaining 4 pages of this late-era Atari 2600 artifact.

Cover to Cover: Activision Atari 2600 1989 Catalog (cover-p.1)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Most retro gamers will remember that Activision (of present-day Call of Duty fame) got its start when ace Atari 2600 programmers Larry Kaplan, David Crane, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead left Atari to start their own company. Activision was one of the few first-wave videogame publishers to survive the mid-80s industry crash, and apparently old loyalties died hard, as Activision was still publishing and distributing games for the Atari 2600 and 7800 as late as 1989. The 2600 was old news in the Nintendo Entertainment System era, but Atari fans certainly couldn't blame a lack of software for the system's eventual demise.

So our latest Cover to Cover series is going to page through Activision's 1989 catalog, packaged with the company's "revival era" products. We start with the cover, which indicates a little consolidation had gone on in the industry, and promotional budgets were low:

Activision had acquired the Imagic brand, and continued to distribute the company's best-known games. ABSOLUTE Entertainment was an independent publisher whose founders included a couple of ex-Activision alums, including David Crane and the Kitchen brothers, and apparently they relied on Activision for distribution.

I also note that the big sweepstakes offer on the cover consists of a whopping $250 and free software -- the warehouses were probably still well-stocked after the sudden demise of the Atari 2600 market, so we may reasonably conclude that nobody was about to ante up big money to promote these last few titles.

That didn't stop Activision from creating and publishing new games, though -- the catalog features the new titles most prominently, and these are among the rarer Atari 2600 games today. Kung-Fu Master brought Irem's classic coin-op (also well-known as the NES title Kung Fu) to the venerable 2600. (I have to take issue with the catalog copy, though, as I believe Froggo's Karate was the first karate game ever designed for the 2600 -- it dates way back to the ill-fated Ultravision console.)

Kung-Fu Master was a good choice for the aging 2600, as the graphics worked well with a vertical color-table approach; the 2600 couldn't muster much detail per scan line, but it could change colors for each line to produce some dramatic and subtle effects. This version couldn't match the NES' agile sprites, but its color scheme is a better match to the arcade, the game's horizontal scrolling is pulled off creditably, and it plays well. And at $22.95, it was reasonably priced by 1989 standards.

The rest of this page is devoted to clearing out some old Activision stock -- Megamania was an intense fast-paced shooter; Skiing was looking pretty dated but was always more playable than its Intellivision counterpart, which should have been called Falling; and the classic Freeway may well have inspired Konami's Frogger. These have been made available in numerous Activision anthologies in recent years, with pricing that puts $14.95 per game to shame -- cartridges were still expensive to produce, even when they were 4K or 8K.

Tomorrow, the journey continues!

East vs. West: the Manhole (1990)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

In the late 1980s, there were a couple of new multimedia technologies floating around. One was CD-ROM, whose impact was substantial; the other was Apple's HyperCard, a Macintosh innovation that allowed for hyperlinking of elements across virtual notecards. The Web's effectiveness depends on a similar concept, but HyperCard itself was not tremendously successful.

Still, at least one entertainment product was developed using the technology: the Manhole, developed by the team at Cyan who would later create Myst, also using HyperCard and HyperTalk. This title originated on the Mac in 1988, and was ported (translating the HyperCard logic to an independent system) as one of the earliest PC CD-ROM titles by Activision in 1989, and later to the Japanese PC Engine by Sunsoft in 1990. We'll be looking at the Japanese PCE version here; the entire game is framed in a Mac-style gray box with a menu bar, though there's no operating system at work here, just a visual border in keeping with the original look and feel.

I'll admit I played the Manhole, back in the day when there were very few PC CD-ROM titles available and any use of the technology was of interest. But it doesn't surprise me that it isn't well remembered today; it wasn't really a game in the traditional sense, but more of an interactive children's storybook. It has a definite sense of Lewis Carroll-esque whimsy about it, and its early use of animated full-screen graphics (no full-motion video yet) and spot sound effects and dialogue showed what would become possible as multimedia technology advanced. But there's no gameplay here, really; players who found Myst lacking in that area should be advised that at least the Myst games contain puzzles. All the Manhole has to offer is a series of displays with hotspots that can be clicked on, leading to other areas in the world and/or displaying cute, short animations with CD quality music. As an introduction to the mouse for young children, I can't think of a more entertaining exercise; but by today's standards it's just a novelty. There's not even a real end to the story -- when we've grown tired of wandering around, the only way to "finish" it is to bring up the Start-button menu and select the icon marked "END ING", at which point a full credits list for both versions rolls.

I guess an ending is a bit much to expect here, as there isn't even a story per se -- we're just free to explore this land's bizarre geography, where a boat ride can detour through a rabbit's beverage:

And a picture of a fireman's hat on the wall can lead into a sombrero-heavy dance sequence:

Or an elevator can take us to a sunken shipwreck:

There's a fair amount to explore and look at, although the conversion from the Macintosh is a bit odd -- the onscreen text remains in English, but the voiceovers are completely in Japanese. And the manual's back cover appears to have been based on the US version with some comprehension lacking -- the text still reads "What You Need to Run the Manhole", with nothing listed below that point, as the PC Engine hardware was pretty standardized (this game ran on the original PCE CD-ROM 1.0 system card standard.)

The various animal characters we meet are not devoid of personality -- they are nicely drawn and they have character, expressed by their voiceovers and indirectly if we look around a bit. This hip dragon remains a personal favorite:

And the walrus is clearly not fond of company:

But the Manhole's experience runs out steam pretty quickly -- there's not really that much to do and see here, and the entertainment value can be exhausted in a few hours' time. The biggest problem is that we can't interact with these characters or this world in any satisfying sense -- we can't change anything, or learn anything deeper about the world of the Manhole. There's not so much as a fetch quest on hand to provide a sense of accomplishment, and so we're relegated to the role of tourist -- free to explore and find the hotspots, but not really to become part of this world. And so we poke around for a while, and then select the end credits and call it done:

the Manhole was a casual game before that term came into common use, and even that's stretching it; it's more of a toy, briefly amusing but not truly involving. I know it has its fans -- enhanced versions were released as recently as 1995, and it's still commercially available today -- but I don't think it's aged well. Call it one for the history books.

This one didn't sell well enough to be truly cheap, but it's not also much in demand. I can't recommend the Manhole, but interested readers may be able to find it for sale here.

The LoadDown - 01/12/2012

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:23:00 +0000

The holidays are past, and everyone's looking to snag your extra gaming dollars. Here's what's new online for the consoles...

WiiWare -- This revival series keeps on going, with its third installment: Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math: The Case of the Crumbling Cathedral. I'd wager that the crumbling has something to do with poor civil engineering -- someone didn't do his math properly -- but the actual game finds the cathedral already crumbled as the player travels the globe, solving math problems to track down the villainous Ms. Sandiego.

DSiWare -- Two new releases here this week. Hip Hop King: Rytmik Edition is a music improv/composition tool with a hip-hop leaning to its sample library. 101 Pinball World is a pinball game that makes good use of the system's twin screens -- but I'd be more enthused if there weren't 101 pinball tables included; something tells me they won't all be stellar.

3DS eShop -- If you have a 3DS, you can also play the DSiWare games. But you might be wise to avoid 101 Pinball World in favor of Zen Pinball instead -- it's in 3D, of course, and spreads itself less thin with four diverse tables, complete with LED displays.

XBox Live Arcade -- Two new titles arrive. Choplifter HD (see above) remakes Dan Gorlin's Apple II classic for the current hardware generation, and I'm pleased to see that while the graphics are updated to a modern 3-D engine, the chopper still floats and can only face to the left, front and right. I particularly like the voice samples provided for the rescuees, who toss off casual, good-natured thanks exactly the way I always imagined they would. AMY is a French survival horror game that takes more than a page from Capcom's Resident Evil series, but ups the emotional stakes with its painfully vulnerable 8-year-old protagonist.

PS3 on PSN -- Two new titles arrive. Crazy Machines Elements is a physics-based puzzle/construction game, and retro gaming fans will want to check out Choplifter HD (see above).

PSOne Classics -- A good one this week: Square Enix's Final Fantasy Origins, remaking the original Final Fantasy I & II for the Playstation (and, with these simpler early games, presumably avoiding the loading times that plagued some later ports to the PSX.)

Notable on Steam -- Choplifter HD shows up here as well.

Something Newish -- Plants vs. Zombies (2009)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I had some time over the 2011 holidays to tackle a 2009 game I'd sampled but not really dived into -- PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies, a tower-defense game from the publisher responsible for Peggle and Bejeweled, among other casual gaming classics.

The tower defense genre fascinates me because it's fairly recent in origin, yet I can easily imagine simple TD concepts that would have worked on the Atari 2600. The basic idea is that you have towers, of various offensive and defensive types, and the enemy has hordes of various incoming baddies; gameplay requires a balance of planning and improvisation as you set up your towers to deal with the invaders as efficiently and effectively as possible. Wikipedia gives credit to a number of forerunners to the genre going as far back as 1983, but it's really only become established as a genre unto itself within the past five years or so. I really enjoyed Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord and Defense Grid: The Awakening, so I was ready to pit a few plants against the walking dead.

Plants vs. Zombies follows a fairly simple model -- the zombies charge across the player's lawn or rooftop via six distinct lanes, and the player installs various plants to take them on. The level layouts never really change -- some have a pool in the center lanes, and the rooftop levels require flowerpots to be built before anything can be planted in some locations -- but there are always six lanes of zombies. The zombies don't move across lanes either, so to some degree the player is guided along a set path -- wherever the first zombie shows up is where your first offensive plant should be placed. The game has an economy, of course -- different plants require different amounts of sunlight, which operates as the game's currency. The player can opt to plant sunflowers early on to increase the amount of resources available, but must also deal with the threats at hand.

A "hardcore" TD game like Defense Grid: The Awakening provides variety by changing up the level designs, forcing the player to deal with more complex enemy paths and new traffic control challenges. It took me a little while to get used to Plants vs. Zombies' simpler model, which provides variety only by introducing new plant and enemy types -- one senses that the game will start to get stale the moment novelty ceases, and the designers had the good sense to end the main story just as that's starting to happen. Even so, some of the plants are almost useless, or are introduced only to be superseded by something similar but much more powerful a few levels later. At least there is some strategy required as the player selects a limited number of seed packets at the beginning of each level, and different plants thrive during daytime and nighttime levels -- but I found myself sticking to a handful of stalwarts after a while, and completely ignored some of the available options. When there are thirty plant varieties available and only 5-8 seed slots, it pays to stick with what works.

Most of the onslaughts are fairly brief, and the game isn't particularly difficult -- I managed to get through the main adventure mode in about 8 hours, and only a few situations required retries, usually because some novel variety of zombie showed up at the last minute when I wasn't prepared for it. There are some levels that function differently -- instead of planting what we can as sunlight permits, a scripted series of plants become available over time and we must make the best use of them we can. This is also true of the game's final boss battle, where it doesn't quite work -- we never feel like we're really defeating the boss, we just have to survive long enough to win.

Fortunately, once that somewhat disappointing climax is past, Plants vs. Zombies has a kick-ass closing theme by Laura Shigihara, complete with an animated music video that's funnier than anything in the game proper. And thanks to the designers who had the foresight to include a REPLAY button afterward -- I replayed it a few times, and have been happy to have this bouncy little J-Pop song stuck in my head. I'd link to the official music video on Youtube, but you should really play the game through and enjoy this cool little reward the way it's meant to be.

Instead, I'll link to Ms. Shigihara's YouTube page, where you can see and listen to some of her other work and covers.

Sometimes playing through a decent if not spectacular game has surprising and unexpected rewards.

Adventure of the Week: Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon (1989)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Time to pick up where we last left off playing through one of Sierra's influential 3-D Animated Adventure series, with Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, created once again by the original Two Guys From Andromeda, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy and published by Sierra in 1989. I played this one back in the day on the Atari ST, which was as far as I can see identical to the IBM PC version I'm playing here; Sierra's format was standardized so the same graphic and audio data and gameplay scripting could be used on all machines, with custom interpreters for each platform.

This was the first Space Quest game to use Sierra's new SCI interpreter, which doubled the graphic resolution of the earlier AGI games to 320 x 200, though it remained limited to 16 colors at this time and still featured a text parser interface (later, controversially, replaced with a strictly point-and-click approach.) The biggest advance was really in the audio department, with support for MIDI and specifically the Roland MT-32 sound module. Most of Sierra's first-round SCI games featured impressive MT-32 scores created by established composers, and this one's no exception -- the soundtrack is by Bob Siebenberg of the 1970s rock group Supertramp, and kicks the action off with a nice rock mix of the Space Quest theme.

When we last left our janitorial hero, Roger Wilco, he had settled in for a long sleep after escaping Sludge Vohaul in Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge. As The Pirates of Pestulon opens,
Roger's ship is scanned by a robot-piloted junk trawler and drawn in as scrap; his suspended animation interrupted, Roger awakes in the hold.

I always encourage interested readers to play these games before proceeding here, and even though it's now more than two decades old, Space Quest III is still readily and inexpensively available for Windows PCs as part of the 2006 Space Quest Collection, in retail box form or via Steam. As usual, I will be playing through the game and documenting its quirks, plotline and puzzles for history's sake, so there are certain to be...

***** SPACE SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

This is still a parser-based game, though the text line is hidden until the player starts typing. LOOK and EXAMINE JUNK don't reveal anything interesting, so we might as well explore the ship. A rocket stage, fairly intact, lies to the east.

There's a nice simulated-3D shadow effect here (cast on the wall) as Roger explores the tube. The description doesn't really tell us much at a room level, but we can GET WIRE if we take the only decent piece of wire available toward the left side of the screen. At the other end of the tunnel we find a large metal Battlebot head, reminiscent of a Transformer. It has a broken window eye, and as this seems a good time to check inventory, we note that Roger is still carrying a Glowing Gem left over from Space Quest II.

And, of course, we can fall off a barely visible boundary toward the bottom edge of the screen, dying in the usual colorful Sierra manner.

We have to be careful with our keyboard or joystick-driven maneuvering to walk Roger close enough to CLIMB WINDOW and enter the Battlebot's head. Once we're inside, we can't come back out -- the window somehow closes permanently, even though it's broken. I have a sneaking suspicion that we're going to need to restore the game to an earlier point, but we'll explore while we're here anyway. Inside the Battlebot's head we find a small ship and a large ship. The small one is a pod, with "For a good time, don't call HAL!" written on it, a 2001 joke. The large one is called the ALUMINUM MALLARD (a Star Wars joke) and has a small hatch on top.

Climbing into the Mallard presents a challenge. It has a non-stick coating, apparently. And trying to CLIMB SHIP in any place I tried yielded only You're not in a good location for climbing that or You are unable to scale anything here. So climbing isn't likely to work. The small pod has a tiny meteoroid hole, but it's too small to fit into, and we can't insert the wire or the gem into the hole or otherwise make use of it.

Restoring back to the first room, LOOK OBJECT reveals that the prominent object on the floor is a warp motivator, with a modular plug. It's too heavy to pick up and carry, it seems. But we can travel south from the starting location as well, to find a junked TIE Fighter, an Acme rocket a la Wile E. Coyote, and the Jupiter 2 (from Lost In Space.) To the east is a junk conveyor tower -- Roger can walk onto the moving platforms and ride the conveyor to another belt moving horizontally. We have to get him to STAND and JUMP to safety on a nearby railing before he's shredded by the system. These kinds of animation-based timing puzzles were really not possible in the move-based text adventure days; while they are often annoying, especially when a plot point requires us to hide and wait for an extended period while some scripted event happens, they do up the drama level a bit and are used to good effect in the Space Quest games. And it's usually entertaining to see what happens to poor Roger when we fail, as long as we have a recent saved game to restore.

Safe for the moment, Roger can walk west into a computer room with a claw-bearing machine moving along the rail and a monitoring droid whose attention we need to avoid attracting. We can RIDE MACHINE to take control of the grabber, and PUSH CLAW in various locations to grab interesting items from below. We should be able to get the heavy warp motivator with this -- yes! It takes a little time-consuming trial and error to pick it up and place it in the Aluminum Mallard.

Getting off the machine is dangerous -- the monitoring droid tends to zap Roger with a laser if we dilly-dally for very long. We can LEAVE MACHINE and jump down a chute that has a handy disembarcation platform, to reach another dumping room with alien rats -- they initially resemble wolves -- on watch. There are some nice lighting effects here, as Roger's color palette shifts in certain shadowed areas. We can't GET LAMP, even though there are lamps mentioned in the description, so there's another adventure game tradition gone out the window with these newfangled 3-D games that aren't even actually 3-D.

Climbing the ladder on the right gets us back to the main area, and its upright stance makes it stick out like a sore thumb, suggesting correctly that the ladder can be taken by Roger. Apparently there's a small reactor powering the lights, which we can find by noticing a wire running to a hole to the left, and examining the hole (or, as I did, by referencing a walkthrough after getting stuck.) We can GET REACTOR, and after we CLIMB LADDER to escape, we can GET LADDER and take it along. As we head back to the Battlebot to check in on the Mallard, though, a rat beats Roger up and takes the generator and wire. And if we've already taken the ladder, we have to use the conveyor to go the long way around again. After we reclaim the reactor and wire, the rats leave us alone without further negotiation or puzzle-solving -- so this little incident seems to be nothing more than time-wasting padding.

Now we can finally go back to the Aluminum Mallard, set the ladder at the side of the ship, and climb onto its roof, which is still dangerously slick. With a few careful steps we can OPEN HATCH and enter the ship to find a red button, a diagnostic computer, a cockpit and a couple of passenger seats. We can USE COMPUTER in the grand old text adventure tradition to learn that, of course, power is critically low, the reactor is not online, and there's insufficient power to even do a systems check. We can INSERT REACTOR INTO COMPARTMENT and USE WIRE to compensate for a missing short cable. Now USE COMPUTER establishes that everything's at NOMINAL level -- the reactor, the landing gear, and the warp motivator -- probably not ideal, but we may be able to get this bird off the ground. (Unless we entered the Battlebot without the reactor or the wire, and now have to restore and track those down before we get inside.)

We can ENTER COCKPIT to prepare for takeoff, if we can figure out how to work the cockpit computer -- the interface is fairly self-explanatory, but this may also take some trial and error. Simply taking off causes an explosion as we hit the roof of the freighter, but our death throes provide a hint about using the ship's radar. With radar engaged, the ship hesitates before hitting the ceiling, and we can fire the ship's weapon system to blow a hole in the junk trawler's hold. Unfortunately, as everything else gets sucked out into the vacuum of space, the Aluminum Mallard gets crushed as well. We have to enable the ship's rear shields before shooting, and then we get spit out like a watermelon seed, and we're on our way!

But where are we going? The ship's navigation system can be used to scan and find the planet Ortega. As Roger warps into light speed, a certain Schwarzenegger-esque robot's ship materializes -- Roger is wanted for vending machine retail fraud, with orders to TERMINATE. Justice is severe in the future.

The planet Ortega is VERY hot, we are warned. If we insist on disembarking, Roger gets melted after taking a few steps, so we probably should not start here. More scanning of the neighborhood reveals the existence of Planet Phleebhut, and the fast-food station Monolith Burger, a parody entity making its debut in the Space Quest series here.

Planet Phleebhut is windy -- and the Terminator-esque ship has also touched down. The robot has a localized cloaking device, and only its footprints in the planetary dust give its movements away (another nice, animated touch that wouldn't have worked in a text-based game.) To the south, travel is cut off by the territory of a giant snake that eats Roger whole. To the west are some pulsating, roof-clinging pods that do very much the same, but in a more controlled fashion that will come in handy. To the east, a venomous scorpazoid menaces Roger but can be avoided with skillful keyboard maneuvering. The planet map is fairly small -- we wrap back to the Mallard after four screens, and there isn't really that much to see and do here.

Most of the real activity on Phleebhut centers around a giant statue/robot to the north called Mog -- we could view the planet from its head, according to the sign, except it is closed for repairs at present. We can still enter the elevator concealed in Mog's right foot and PUSH UP to ride up. There is heavy machinery in Mog's internals; Roger can, of course, wander into the gears to be chewed up if we are careless or bored.

Further to the north, electrical storms zap Roger, providing another impenetrable navigation barrier. But there's a World o' Wonders gift shop tucked between Mog's feet, and we can observe a happy alien family exiting this obvious tourist trap. The glass case out front contains a cute, cuddly Antarean slime devil; it's not a good idea to OPEN CASE. The gift shop's proprietor, Fester Blatz, is a good-ol'-alien, and he's actually one of the best-developed minor characters in the Space Quest series. The gift shop's goods include Thermoweave underwear, useful for Ortega we might guess; an Orat-on-a-stick, which works like a reach extender; and an Astro Chicken flight hat based on the popular arcade game (in the Space Quest universe, anyway.) He also offers entertaining postcards from Arrakis (Dune reference), Black Hole Bertha, Ortega (hinting about the underwear), a starless void, Achoron (a misspelled version of Acheron from the original Alien film) and RobertaLand -- perhaps poking fun at the EGA remake of Roberta Williams' King's Quest, then in the works: "Come join the fun at the funpark of the future! See characters from your favorite stories come to life again and again." But Roger doesn't have any money at the moment, so we'll have to come back here.

Exiting the store, Roger runs into the Terminator robot. But he's in a good mood, so he gives Roger a head start -- time enough to run to the cave to the west and get the robot disposed of by the ravenous pods. We have to position Roger appropriately so that the robot walks through the cave, which means we should enter from the upper edge of the screen and hope that the robot enters from the right and makes a beeline for Roger through the danger zone. After the robot is digested by the pods, his invisibility belt remains -- it's directly under the pods, though, so we will probably need the Orat-on-a-stick to get hold of it safely. We need to get some buckazoids.

The Orium (glowing gem) Roger has been carrying since Space Quest II turns out to be rather valuable on Phleebhut. Fester is definitely interested in acquiring it:

It's not a bad idea to SAVE GAME before agreeing on a price here. We can negotiate him up to 425, but if we try to go higher he'll offer no more than 100 after that. If we play our cards right, we can buy all three of the interesting gift shop items and still have 350 buckazoids left over.

Using the Orat toy to retrieve the belt takes some work, mostly because the animation only functions correctly in a very specific location -- I got a lot of Try approaching from a slightly different angle messages, or got Roger chewed up by the ceiling-dwelling pod creatures. It works most reliably if we do it from the same position we took to trap the Terminator robot.

Is there anything left to do here? Mog's workings seem only to be for getting Roger killed, although there's an alternate solution to the Terminator puzzle involving the upper level's gears. And it seems we've solved all the available puzzles, so it's time to go to Ortega. With the ThermoWeave underwear, Roger can explore the surface and discover a couple of ScumSoft employees surveying the planet. They have a small scout ship and are heavily armed, but they seem to be wrapping up and will leave shortly if we are patient. The invisibility belt doesn't seem to help here; its charge is low.

We can see a broadcasting satellite antenna on a nearby planet, viewing it through the ScumSoft team's telescope. We can also take a thermal detonator from a crate, but walking over the unstable lava surface with it tends to be fatal. And we can't seem to drop the detonator at all. So we may be stuck.

So, let's restore and visit Monolith Burger first. The place features a diverse lot of alien customers, including a Hutt-like creature and other assorted life forms. One clerk (employee of the week) is available to help us. READ MENU gives us a selection of items to choose from, though we have no choice (Yes/Yes) about buying Space Fries and Blattfruit Pie.

No matter what we buy, we end up with a generic Bag of Fast Food in inventory. We can also play the restaurant's Astro Chicken coin-op; it's a Lunar Lander-type game, but faster paced, and if we land the chicken safely (more than five times, I think) the machine displays a coded message. We have to EAT FOOD (Roger somehow survives this) to get a decoder ring we can use to read the message. (It's amazing how easy it is to read the code once one gets rolling.) The message indicates that the Two Guys From Andromeda are now Two Guys In Trouble, held captive by the ScumSoft Pirates on a small moon of the planet Pestulon. The planet is surrounded by a force field, of unknown origin to the Guys (but we have been to Ortega so we know what's going on here) and ScumSoft security is armed with jello pistols. They're counting on us, as high-scorers a la The Last Starfighter, whoever we are.

Knowing the ScumSoft team is only using jello guns, we can just charge in and... get Roger suffocated in an impenetrable block of non-Jell-O(TM) brand gelatin. So perhaps we should use the invisibility belt? If so, we need to charge it somehow. I tried to take advantage of the lightning on Phleebhut, to no avail, but did note on this return visit that we can see Mog in action from a distance. I happened to come in from the side earlier and never saw his head looming over the horizon from the south.

I was getting stumped a bit, so it was once again time to check my progress with a walkthrough. I discovered that there's no way to charge the belt, on Phleebhut or anywhere else -- this was a self-imposed red herring, we just need to wait for the ScumSoft team to leave. So it's back to Ortega, then -- we can take the detonator, and the pole holding the anemometer to vault across the chasm and avoid the unstable rocks. (I did note that if Roger knows what he's looking at because we've seen the Astro Chicken note from the Two Guys, we now get different, better-informed text when looking at the satellite beam through the telescope.) We can only VAULT CHASM in the one spot -- but when I tried, the parser kept yielding Why not just walk across? Ah -- per the walkthrough, we need to modify the chasm first, by blowing up the force field generator.

We can enter the domed complex and climb a ladder (seeing a small-scale Roger in a more panoramic view of the complex) to get to the rim. Here, finally, we can DROP DETONATOR. Climbing back down is tricky -- it seems nearly impossible to keep Roger on the ladder. As it turns out, we have to CLIMB DOWN, not CLIMB LADDER; even in the animated adventure era, parsers can be temperamental. Now we can VAULT CHASM, navigate back to the Aluminum Mallard and go on to Pestulon, as the exciting conclusion approaches.

The entrance to ScumSoft is protected by two guards, and there are not many places we can go here -- we can only stay, return to the ship, or try to enter ScumSoft. So this seems to be where the invisibility belt comes into play. We can use it just long enough to sneak past the guards and get inside.

There's some nicely-handled pseudo-3D animation used here, as Roger walks the circular halls of ScumSoft, though it can be tricky to get Roger to stop walking at just the right point to access any of the doors -- it's an unintentional arcade action challenge much of the time. Entering the accounting department is fatal, as Roger is spotted as an intruder and ends up once again encased in jello. Another interesting door requires a keycard and a facial scan. Roger can find a janitor's closet by typing LOOK after going into one of the indistinguishable doorways; we can then SEARCH CLOSET to find some coveralls, and a Mr. Garbage vaporizer. And we leave all of our old inventory behind in the process, so the endgame must be near.

Entering accounting again, we are still spotted as "an intruder in accounting disguised as a janitor" -- dang it! We have to maneuver quickly before we are noticed, and USE VAPORIZER on any wastebaskets we happen to pass; verisimilitude is the key here. There's a color copy machine in the office area, which we can use to make a copy of the life-size picture of ScumSoft president Elmo Pug posted on the nearby cubicle wall before replacing it. Now we just need Pug's keycard.

Roger can walk past Pug's office to look out into the vehicle bay, where he sees his ship surrounded by ScumSoft fighters; this will have to wait, however. Elmo Pug has left his office now, so Roger can snag his ID. (I also note that one of the guards cracking the whip on the hapless ScumSoft employees appears to be Ken Williams.)

Behind the keycard-protected door, we find the jello-encased Two Guys from Andromeda, on a central platform accessible only by retractable bridges. I failed to USE KEYPAD or EXTEND BRIDGE, but PUSH BUTTON works. Of course, after we free them from their gelatinous prison using the vaporizer, the bridges retract and none of us can get out of here. We can't JUMP to safety as the guards arrive, and then Elmo Pug himself shows up, with an army of ScumSoft lackeys backing him up.

Roger is escorted to an arena, while the Two Guys are separated from their would-be rescuer. So we are not quite done yet. Nukem Dukem Robots is the name of the game (based on the classic Rock'em Sock'em Robots toy, as Duke Nukem was still years away), and is a fighting game with clunky keyboard controls. It's not hard to beat Pug's mech -- we just have to punch a lot, blocking is almost optional. Well, at least it didn't seem hard the first time I tried -- after an initial success and a failure to save game later, I had a tough time doing it when I had to restore and replay this section! Timing and positioning seem to have a lot to do with it -- it burns energy to punch, so we have to be diligent about blocking and finding the right opportunities to strike; but it does generally seem to work better if we are more aggressive. With Pug down, Roger and the Guys escape in the Mallard, but we are still short 110 points (in my playthrough). We have to use the ship's weapon system to fire on the chase ships and make good our escape.

After eluding the ScumSoft ships, the grateful Two Guys from Andromeda (I think their appearance here counts as more than a cameo) offer to fix the ship's disabled light-speed system, and we're off to Monolith Burger. Except we didn't get the course laid in first, so we are sucked into a black hole. There's no way to avoid this, it's part of the plot, and we find the Mallard parking at a distinctive office building in the Coarsegold, CA area.

On the other side of the black hole, the Guys meet Ken Williams (Sierra did a lot of self-referential humor) and get hired as game designers; Sierra doesn't need a janitor, but Roger is satisfied with his mission accomplished. There's no explicit sequel setup at the end of this one, which is unusual for the series, but there would be several more games to come after Roger takes off for parts unspecified.

There's a nice medley of Siebenberg's musical themes that runs during the end credits, most of which are real, some of which are just an opportunity to squeeze in a few more gags.

At the end of my run through Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, I was still short 10 points -- I had 728 of 738 possible -- so what did I miss? Research indicates that we can search the Aluminum Mallard's pilot seat for a few extra buckazoids; I did not do that, but earned enough trading in the orium so that it was not an issue. I thank the detailed documentation at the excellent Roger Wilco's Virtual Broomcloset site for solving this mystery!

The Space Quest games are always fun -- the games' sense of humor and plentiful pop sci-fi references keep the action light and lively, and they have a better sense of pacing than some of Sierra's contemporary efforts. I'll be tackling Space Quest IV in due course.

Clueless Gaijin Gaming: CAL III (1994)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I took a look at CAL II a while back, and might as well cover CAL III this week. Like its predecessor, this PC Engine Super CD-ROM game is a digital comic/adventure from NEC Avenue and Birdy Soft.

My general impression is that this sequel was made with a smaller budget than CAL II -- the title screen is simpler, there are fewer characters and locations, and gameplay is much more linear. Many sections take place entirely in the dark, so while the voice actors provide some drama, there's nothing to see (or pay artists to draw.) And the navigational map screens are gone -- all we can do is make appropriate or inappropriate dialogue and action choices to keep the story moving forward, and some menus only provide a single "choice."

As a non-Japanese speaker, I just picked options at random, repeating as necessary until something budged, and never ran into a game-ending situation. But I also get the impression that the plot is a little stronger and more coherent this time, so what CAL III sacrifices in interactivity it may gain in storytelling.

Like the first game, this one concerns our unseen hero Wataru, who appears to be trying to cure his girlfriend of some sort of disease.

Once again he is drawn into an alternate reality, as cat girl Chezu returns via his desk drawer:

As seen in CAL II, most of the music is generated using the PC Engine's audio chip -- this keeps the disc access clear for extensive, well-digitized dialogue and artwork. The game also saves itself periodically, so we can continue where we left off, more or less, next time we fire it up. Autosave was not common at the time, but maybe it was cheaper to implement than an actual save menu. And we can skip through the lengthy dialogue sequences by hitting the controller buttons.

Chezu's role is much more substantial this time -- in CAL II, she was kind of a gateway character, providing information about the quest and singing a cute little song from her arboreal perch. This time, she accompanies Wataru, offering advice and occasionally getting mad at him when he asks stupid questions:

It appears that Wataru's loved one's illness is somehow linked to the illness of the Greek goddess Venus. She and her sister goddesses provide most of the male-oriented eye candy -- also less prominent here than in CAL II, though it appears that Zeus overdoes it on the air conditioning:

After we arrive in what looks like ancient Greece, one of the goddesses' officials joins the group, or at least her presence does -- we never see her, but we often hear her voice chiming in with advice and information. Then Wataru and Chezu make it to an Arabian environment, where Chezu must help Wataru steal a golden apple by distracting its current owner with her take on traditional dancing:

I'm not sure exactly what happens after this -- it appears that Chezu and Wataru's girlfriend somehow merge into the same character. And then things start getting strange. We next arrive in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, where it appears some evil spirits are running amok:

The Cheshire Cat, who also appeared in CAL II, returns for a brief conversation:

Humpty Dumpty appears to be taking a bad coke trip:

Chezu seems to go a little crazy among Wonderland's plants -- perhaps some kind of mystical catnip -- and takes off her clothes, then falls asleep. And we meet Alice herself, who is menaced by leering playing cards:

Then we visit Chezu's wealthy parents, where a wild party puts everyone to sleep and Chezu can try to steal the magical... something... to assist in the quest. But of course, a villain of some sort shows up to prevent this... and appears to be trying to stage some sort of coup against Venus. There's not a lot of animation in CAL III, but the facial expressions are well-drawn and often provide the most entertaining moments in the game. We visit a pleasant, apologetic young lady:

And meet an irritable fairy:

And then a sea serpent shows up, but gets knocked out by the traitor as her follow conspirators look on. And our heroes get sucked through a cave into a desolate land. And as the plot thickens further... I realize I've put about three hours into this game, with little real comprehension or entertainment value to show for it, and it's time to close out my attempt to play CAL III.

There's certainly a lot of content here -- three hours plus, clearly, and that's with a lot of dialogue skipping on my part. The acting is solid, with most of the dialogue fully-voiced, and the story is reasonably substantial. But these kinds of games were very much of their time -- the player doesn't actually get to do very much, and a clueless Westerner like me isn't going to get much nuance out of the story either.

The best I can really say about CAL III is that it's not very collectible and turns up often and cheap; it wouldn't surprise me at all if a copy is currently for sale here.

The LoadDown - 01/05/2012

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:02:00 +0000

It's a New Year, and there are new games on the wire...

WiiWare -- One new game: Zombii Attack, which adopts novel spelling for this E10+ rated slingshot shooter. It's not an FPS, but more of a shooting-gallery approach akin to Crossbow or Chiller, with realistic physics but dated, simplistic graphics.

DSiWare --Two new titles for the DSi and 3DS: Quick Fill Q is a cute Japanese puzzle/strategy game in which the rolling title character (Q) is constantly threatened by oddly shaped holes in the ground; the player must carve matching stoppers on the lower screen to plug the holes. 3 Heroes - Crystal Soul is an RPG/puzzle game that plays like a hybrid of Puzzle Quest and Hexic.

3DS eShop -- Two new titles for the 3DS, including a game and a... non-game. The game is Samurai Sword Destiny, a scrolling beat-'em-up set in feudal Japan, with a female lead and T-rated blood and violence. The other new entry is Swapnote, a social note-passing tool that allows users to send each other personalized, decorated 3D notes and drawings -- though how exactly a "3D note" works is unclear.

XBox Live Arcade -- Just one new title this week, EA Sports' latest incarnation of NFL Blitz, also out on PS3.

PS3 on PSN -- Two new games this week: NFL Blitz recreates the Midway arcade game of the 1990s, which was never quite as popular as NBA Jam but seems to have found a solid home under EA Sports' ownership following Midway's dissolution. TNT Racers is a multiplayer racing game, coming to PS3 after what must have been a successful release on WiiWare.

PSOne Classics -- A quiet week here, but I doubt it's down for the count, unlike, say, the Wii Virtual Console and Microsoft Game Room.

Something Newish -- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (2010)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I will always be ten years old when it comes to Star Wars. I was a kid in 1977 when the original movie came to theatres, sans the Episode IV: A New Hope moniker tacked on later. And in a decade whose greatest films were R-rated productions I wasn't going to get to see for quite some while (think The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Midnight Cowboy...), George Lucas' old-fashioned space opera was exactly what I wanted to see on the big screen.

Fast-forward several decades, and I've played my share of Star Wars videogames. A few were great, most just presentable, but I've enjoyed most of them, even Rebel Assault. So when Steam ran a sale on Lucasarts' The Force Unleashed franchise in early December, I opted to pick up the PC version of The Force Unleashed II for $4.99, jumping into the middle of the story with this year-old sequel, owing to its slightly better metacritic scores. (I think it is brave and commendable that Steam includes such scores, and links to reviews, from within its purchasing system.)

The fact I'm already writing about this game less than a month later, a busy holiday season month at that, may provide a clue about my experience with the game. Like the Star Wars prequel episodes, all unnecessary three of 'em, The Force Unleashed II is pretty to look at and fun in small doses... but there's not a lot of "there" there. (There will be a few SPOILERS ahead, but I'll try to keep them to a minimum.)

Part of the problem, of course, is that the Star Wars canon as established by the films must always be held inviolate by these officially licensed but officially unofficial spinoffs. Anyone who's read the lesser Star Wars novels will recognize the situation -- we find ourselves working with characters who have to squeeze their own heroic tales into the gaps and cracks of the greater saga. Yes, Boba Fett can show up for the fans; but he will be carefully whisked offstage at the earliest opportunity, most likely leaving us to plod through a story about IG-88's quest for the whatsit on DantooDagobAalderiine, where the stakes rise about as high as Luke's boyhood homestead looms over the Tatooine horizon.

In this case, our hero is a clone of the first game's hero, a dark but lightward-inclined Jedi master named Starkiller -- or is he? It's a conundrum that never really gets resolved by the game's story, and in fact it's a poor device from the get-go -- either this guy isn't a clone, thereby undermining the dramatic impact of Starkiller's climactic sacrifice in the first game (I gather); or he is, in which case Lucasarts can just keep pumping out meaningless copies as needed. Neither answer is very satisfactory from a dramatic standpoint. It's a shame, too, because a lot of the writing in The Force Unleashed II is quite good in the cutscenes, where characters actually get to interact. There's an appropriate degree of gravitas in the dialogue, delivered by actors who take the material seriously enough that it doesn't sound silly. And Darth Vader works surprisingly well as a character in-game -- the designers aren't afraid to acknowledge his established weaknesses and treat him as a damaged, corrupted man in a scary suit, so it doesn't seem out of place when we're able to do him a little damage later on in the story.

But the game outside the cutscenes suffers from problems I can only attribute to budget constraints in this new High-Definition era. The Force Unleashed II features beautiful artwork -- the prequel movies have their problems, but the splendor of the Old Republic is genuinely gorgeous to look at in the movies and in this production. The game also benefits from interesting level designs, believable animations, stunning weather effects, and challenging, varied enemies... about two and a half hours' worth.

And there's the Hutt in the ointment -- the game lasts a good 6-8 hours at the outside, even for an aging gamer like me, and while there are some amazing moments -- channeling a massive force attack through a shipboard gun turret to cut an Imperial Star Destroyer in two, for example -- there's a lot of repetitious padding in between. It's fun to throw lightning at jet-pack equipped stormtroopers, sending them spiraling helplessly into the distance as we force-push another pack of stormtroopers over a railing. It's a challenge to deal with the big enemies -- do we deflect their weapons back at them, try to cut their power supplies, or jump into the fray directly to take them apart with masterfully-animated pyrotechnics and authentic Ben Burtt sound effects? And it's great to jump from platform to platform, using the Force to pull random bits of architecture into place to create a passable route while we fight off attacking goons from the Empire.

The problem is that it's not necessarily fun to do these same things over and over again, with minor variations, and it starts to feel like Jedi Final Fight after a few hours. And the difficulty is uneven; the game's checkpoint system is quite forgiving of missed jumps -- and there are a lot of well-concealed gaps, so that's appreciated -- but if we fail during one of the big set piece combat sequences, we usually have to start the whole marathon battle over again. Sometimes we are sent so far back after a failure that it becomes a chore to continue, yet in between these extra-challenging sections we're overpowered enough (and the controls are slick and straightforward enough) to make short, visually impressive work of the poor Stormtroopers, who must surely have wives and children back home. I mean, they're just doing their jobs.

On occasion we find ourselves getting lost while we try to find that one lone stormtrooper we can hear taunting us, but not see -- until we finally find him stuck somewhere in the ornate set design and put him out of his misery so the next door will open. And the powerups we can use make a difference, but it often feels a little unsporting to reconfigure our already overwhelming Jedi skills for the sake of easier cleanup. A Jedi should be disciplined, efficient and effective -- killing every last soul in the place hardly seems appropriate to the gentle religion of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But kill we must, or we'll never see the end of the story; the only thing missing is a big white Vader glove urging us on to the next section down the street as the last bit of dismembered stormtrooper fades away.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy aspects of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II -- it's still fun to see the Star Wars universe from a different perspective, the action definitely has its exhilarating moments, and it is a gorgeously modern game. But, very like the prequel movie trilogy, this game would be a lot more enjoyable if there was less of it. This short game ends up seeming longer than it is -- there are great ideas here, but they're driven into the ground by an unavoidable aura of been-there-done-that, Young Starkiller.

As if hundreds of voices lovingly designed it with care, and were muddily silenced.

Adventure of the Week: Utopia (1985)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

It's a new year, and high time I started exploring a new platform for the joys of adventuring. The early Apple Macintosh computer was black and white, WYSIWYG-oriented, mouse-based, and more successful than the ill-fated Apple Lisa computer. The machine made rapid inroads in the publishing industry, and also hosted a number of adventure games, with many original or unique to the machine. This week we're going to look at the Mac version of William Demas' 1981 TRS-80 game, Forbidden Planet Part I, known as Utopia on the Mac and published in 1985 by Unicorn Software.

The Mac version is extremely close to the TRS-80 original, so I'll refer readers to the link above for more details. The biggest change is the removal of the original game's irritating digitized voice effects, and the addition of graphics, created by Craig Sadler:

Reader and Macintosh collector Gael was kind enough to set me up with a good Mac emulator, and he shared some pictures of the original Utopia packaging, which I'll share here with his permission, as this is going to be a fairly lazy post gameplay-wise. The Unicorn Software editions were distributed in plastic clamshell cases with attractive cover art:

Readers interested in playing Utopia are, of course, urged to do so before continuing here. As I've already covered this game in its TRS-80 version, I won't be divulging as much detail as I usually do. But I will be pointing out a few salient features, and there will still be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

There aren't really many differences at all between the TRS-80 and Mac versions. The opening screen drops the original dedication to Scott Adams' Adventure International, and introduces the game simply as "Another Macintosh Adventure By William Demas." The dedication to a competitor was apparently not a problem in 1981 for Fantastic Software when the TRS-80 version was published, but it probably didn't make sense for Unicorn Software in 1985, especially after Adams' company went bankrupt that same year.

The game's HELP output is the same, but now also references the hint booklet included with the game. The verb HINT also works, which was not recognized by the TRS-80 game, and can be typed or selected from the Mac application menu. Gael also scanned the Utopia hint booklet:

Sadler's digital illustrations are small, allowing plenty of room for the command window and a dedicated location/item/exits display, but many of them are quite nice, like this initial view of Utopia after the player arrives planetside:

Utopia is so similar to Forbidden Planet Part I that my TRS-80 walkthrough works well for both games (following a few corrections noticed by Gael!) It's been a while since I've played the TRS-80 original, but I did notice some timing differences. We have fewer moves available before our ship's rough landing, so it's a little bit tighter getting everything figured out in time for a safe landing. And the ship takes TWO turns to explode, instead of one, after we land, so we have slightly more time to get out of the way (or to try, and then return just in time to get caught in the explosion, which is what I did after wondering why I hadn't heard the expected BOOOOOM!)

I also note that the centaur now just screams and dies, instead of saying, "AHHHH! POISON!" in the process -- this seems much more natural, though it means that a player who has not committed unintentional suicide by drinking from the river may not really understand what happened here, if he or she just stumbles upon the solution.

And the ending is now more final when we READ SIGN -- we don't get a password for Part II, and we don't end up in front of the gates of the Forbidden City, confronted by a small speaker. Instead, the story's ending indicates that we live out our days peacefully in UTOPIA, instead of merely surviving the journey to get here:

Forbidden Planet Part II, a.k.a. Forbidden City, was also ported to the Mac as Futuria, and in fact appears to have been converted first given this game's introduction as "Another" adventure. But the two games are very different -- this one is more fantasy-oriented, while the other is more sci-fi in nature -- and the links between the two games were always loose, so neither title really suffers from the separation.

We'll look at some other Mac adventures in the future -- I'll probably wait a while to play Futuria, as I'd like to look at some of the Mac exclusive games first, but I'll keep it in my back pocket, knowing that if I'm pressed for time, it should allow for another quick playthrough.

Of Import: Shubibinman III (1992)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

If you follow this blog at all, you know that my import game habits tend to be pretty random; if I can pick up a Japanese game that I haven't played for a reasonable price, it's a candidate for the collection. Sometimes this means I end up with good games, common and cheap because they were deservedly popular back in the day, and sometimes I buy bad ones, cheap because nobody really wants to play them.

I'm glad to say that Masaya's Shubibinman III (full title: Kaizo Chojin Shubibinman III: Ikai no Princess) for the PC Engine is one of the good ones, despite its publisher's decidedly mixed reputation. The Shubibinman series started out as a bit of a Mega Man imitator, especially the second game in the series which arrived in North America (and on the Wii Virtual Console) as Shockman. But by the time the series reached its third entry, the first and only installment released on the CD-ROM format, it had matured into its own style of game. This one has sharp, arcade-quality 16-bit graphics, quality CD remixes of the game's musical themes, and substantial, high-quality animation and voice work.

And it's quite a fun ride -- while it doesn't quite reach the heights of Treasure's Gunstar Heroes or SNK's Metal Slug series, it shares an anything-goes love of novelty with those classic side-scrollers. Our hero (or heroes -- two can play simultaneously) fights through side-scrolling levels and simple mazes, battling various robotic and organic enemies. But the game takes full advantage of the CD-ROM medium's capacity to shift gears early and often, preventing the gameplay from becoming predictable or repetitive. It's also technically impressive, pulling off some striking effects on the PC Engine.

The opening animation sets up the story, which has a little more character than the norm -- while I don't speak Japanese, I was able to suss out that the pink-haired villainess has something against our champion, based on her tone of voice every time she spits out "Shubibin Man!" She's accompanied by a couple of comically useless henchmen, and the whole affair is treated in a lighthearted manner, allowing for plenty of variety in the gameplay.

The first level is graphically impressive, with parallax scrolling way beyond the usual scan-line effects; large buildings are placed clearly in the foreground, no mean trick on this platform. Shubibinman can attack by swinging his sword, and if we hold down the fire button for a while before releasing, he can fire a semi-steerable ball of intense energy. And after taking out a number of routine enemies, our hero defeats and commandeers a giant mech, sprinting through the rest of the level firing its lightning weapon and occasionally tripping and rolling harmlessly past low-lying obstacles.

Later, the game takes a stylistic break from its futuristic setting, presenting a classic kung-fu movie scenario with a setting sun and a traditional jump-kicking foe -- who turns out to be a cyborg as we whittle him down.

We also encounter a snowman made of sprites, who appears in several different forms, including this one that spawns miniature snowmen to get underfoot and cause trouble.

Eventually we face the ostensibly final boss, who unleashes magical attacks until we succeed in bring her down.

Of course, she is not the real enemy here -- she has been manipulated by this purple-haired dude, who summons an array of demons and creatures for a final boss rush sequence.

Along the way, this cool spotlight effect turns up -- I'm really not sure how this is pulled off on the humble PC Engine, but it looks very nice:

This dragon boss is impressively large, though the absence of other background imagery gives away the programming tricks involved as we flee, dodging its laser breath and trying to duck above its wings to get in a few shots of our own:

After defeating the real final boss, there's this very bizarre coda in which a genie robot talks Shubibin Man's ear off before finally succumbing to his attacks:

And then it turns out it was all a dream, as Shubibinman wakes up on the beach -- or was it? Our trio of villains shows up at sea, riding a giant mech -- and the game is over, the sequel apparently promised here never having materialized.

There's an unusual Omake bonus section that becomes available on the Options menu after the game is finished -- it features art submitted to Masaya by fans of the earlier Shubibinman games:

As well as a brief little cartoon that features our hero's own fan art, presenting our heroes in a situation with which our female lead is apparently not in agreement:

This proves a cautionary tale for otaku everywhere:

And that's where the fun of Shubibinman III finally ends. It's too bad that Shockman apparently didn't sell well enough in North America to merit release of this solid sequel -- it really does show off the hardware nicely, and it's far less repetitive than most games of its era. But the CD-ROM peripheral was not a strong seller here, and localization would have required a significant investment in translation and recording. At least we can still play the Japanese original -- it will run just fine on the American TurboDuo and TurboGrafx-CD -- and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.

This one is well worth owning, and it's not overly expensive. You might be able to find a copy for sale here:

The LoadDown - 12/29/2011

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:26:00 +0000

Christmas is past, and it's almost 2012. Not a lot of major titles coming out during this post-holiday season, but here's what's new on the wire this week, for all those new consoles Santa brought...

WiiWare -- The new incarnation of a long-running educational videogame character continues, with the second game in what seems to be a series: Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math: The Big Ben Burglary. Just the one new game this week, which seems to be par for the course lately.

DSiWare -- Two new titles. Cake Ninja is a stylus-driven cake-slicery game with decent gesture recognition and physics, though one imagines the concept gets old after a few minutes of chopping up flying cakes. Slingo Supreme is just what it sounds like, if it sounds like anything -- it's a game of Bingo with numbers generated via slot machine.

3DS eShop -- Two new games up here as well. VVVVV is a decidedly 8-bit-style maze/puzzle game with a screen-flipping gravity mechanic. Bionic Commando is the black-and-white Game Boy version of Capcom's arcade and NES hit, replacing trusty hero Super Joe with the gimmicky-sounding Rad Spencer but retaining the timeless gameplay style.

XBox Live Arcade -- Just one new game this week, All Zombies Must Die!; also available on PS3.

PS3 on PSN -- Two new titles up this week. All Zombies Must Die! is a twin-stick multiplayer shooter with an undead theme. Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath HD brings the last of the Oddworld Inhabitants releases for the XBox to the PS3 -- this imaginative game didn't get the attention it deserved when it was released, so it's nice to see it getting a second bite at the apple.

PSOne Classics -- One new title this week, the classic 2.5-D cartoon platformer Klonoa: Door to Phantomile.

Adventure of the Week: Jungle Adventure Part II - King Solomon's Mines (1982)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

This week, we're tackling a game informally listed as "Solomon Adventure" in the online archives, published in January of 1982 by the cassette-based CLOAD magazine for the TRS-80 home computers. It's actually billed as Jungle Adventure, Part II -- King Solomon's Mines, but I haven't yet been able to track down Jungle Adventure, Part I, so we will just have to start in the middle of the saga. This BASIC-language adventure was written by John R. Olsen Jr., of Newberg, Oregon, author of quite a few adventure games, mostly in the early 1980s with several published as late as 1992; this is the first of his works I've covered here.

This is a fairly difficult adventure -- there are time pressures of various kinds to deal with, and once a puzzle is figured out it's often necessary to restore, go back and re-execute as efficiently as possible. The game does have a functional SAVE feature, but it allows only one slot and using it seems to count as a move, so some care is required even there. My walkthrough below attempts to optimize the game's solution, but one wrong move can spell failure.

I always encourage interested readers to play these games a bit before reading my comments here; I'm going to be documenting the game's storyline and my experiences while playing it, and for history's sake, there will doubtless be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

The game begins outside a trading post near a watering trough, and we are told that (presumably in the first game) Yesterday you brought back IVORY from the Elephant's Graveyard. You are now ready to start out alone on your next quest.

We are carrying a letter, which tells us to bring the treasures from King Solomon's Mines to the trading post and say SCORE, so we can surmise that this will be a traditional treasure hunt adventure. TRS-80 users with lowercase kits beware -- the parser is case-sensitive, so read letter doesn't mean anything but READ LETTER does. We can GO POST to find a plastic bag, a revolver, and some ivory, all of which will potentially be useful. (Though the intro implies that by using the ivory for another purpose, we'll be negating everything we worked so hard to accomplish in the prequel Jungle Adventure.)

We get a feel for how this game's going to go when we discover that we have also started out very thirsty -- we get a You will die of thirst in 5 moves message shortly after starting. Even moves that the parser doesn't understand get counted against this expiration timer, which can be a bit frustrating while we're figuring things out.

We can observe a rock slide to the east, where after one turn the room description suddenly includes a RHINO charging you, with no additional comment from the engine. Once he charges, we're pretty much dead, although if we have the revolver we can shoot him twice to casually turn him into a dead RHINO in the Great White Hunter tradition.

There's foul water in the grassland to the west -- DRINK WATER yields the perspective-challenging It's poison! We're dead! So finding potable water really has to be our highest priority. The watering trough in our starting location will do, so this really isn't much of a puzzle, though the textual sound effects are entertaining: Slurp! Ahhh! But the respite doesn't last long -- unlike many games where drinking takes care of the issue for the rest of the game, thirst will be a constant challenge here. It seems we need to drink water every 9 moves to stay alive, which will put a serious cramp in our adventuring style.

There's a pygmy village at the end of a winding jungle trail littered with skulls. South of the village is a rock canyon with stones littering the ground (they turn out to be flint if we LOOK STONE, so we ought to be able to use these to make a fire.) A jungle clearing features a dead tree, from which we can observe our surroundings but not really obtain any new information.

We can't map very far away from the trading post's trough without dying of thirst, so we need to solve that problem. We can't seem to carry water in the skull or the bag, and there are no canteens at the trading post. We can't GET TROUGH either, not that I really expected to be able to. I was on the right track, so I don't feel guilty about peeking at the game's programming code to figure this one out. As it turns out, we can't FILL BAG, or GET WATER / WITH BAG or GET WATER / IN BAG, but we can PUT BAG -- In two words, tell me where? -- IN TROUGH to get some potable, portable water. LOOK BAG now tells us that It contains 24 turns of water. Oddly, we never have to actually drink water from the bag -- having it handy just allows us to move for 24 turns without running out of water and starting to die of thirst.

Now we can make it to the edge of a lost city, where we see a temple and poisonous SNAKES slithering towards you. We can't move after we see them, because immediately The SNAKES bite you! You have been killed! We can't shoot them with the revolver either, at least not effectively -- one gets killed but the rest keep coming.

We pause to note here that the revolver has limited bullets -- we start with 6, which should be plenty. Our inventory is limited to 5 slots, which is more of a challenge. GET checks the inventory limit before resolving the object -- GET [anything] yields You're carrying too much! even if we've asked for something nonexistent or un-gettable.

We will need to deal with the snakes somehow, it seems. We can GET GRASS in the grassland to come away with a handfull [sic] of GRASS, though this isn't immediately useful either. We can STRIKE FLINT and observe that, as expected, The FLINT makes a small spark. If we do this in the grassland, though, we observe FLAMES!! It's a grass fire!! and we are dead again. Making sparks doesn't seem to help with the snakes, and it doesn't seem we can light a handful of grass on fire either.

Aha! There's some trading possible with the locals. If we DROP IVORY in the Pygmy village, then leave the "room" and come back, we find a carved wooden MAP in its place. This opens up a hidden trail out of the village; we can FOLLOW MAP to find a small ravine with a cave, a bubbling SPRING, a knife and an old stick of dynamite. Now we're getting somewhere.

The cave to the south is extremely dark; it seems to be black hole of sorts, as if we don't have a light source we can't even walk back out the way we came without falling and getting ourselves killed.

The dynamite seems like it might be useful for clearing the rockslide, but if we just LIGHT DYNAMITE it immediately explodes. LOOK DYNAMITE (following a restore) indicates that There's no fuse. With a handful of grass we can MAKE FUSE to produce a FUSE made from woven grass. But we're still on the wrong track -- we can't just DROP DYNAMITE, light the fuse and run; it explodes but makes no visible impact on the rockslide. We can't seem to use it against the snakes either; we are fatally bitten before we have time to drop the dynamite or light the fuse, even if we light it before entering the temple area.

Can we find anything of value in the cave? Well, if we go into the dark cave with the flint and the dynamite, we can LIGHT FLINT, which ignites the fuse... but doesn't illuminate our surroundings at all. Nor does a brief spark from the flint without the dynamite nearby show us anything about the area -- it really is dark in here. We can try to map the cave in the darkness with repeated SAVEs and LOADs... if we try to move in an invalid direction, we get the potentially revealing You can't! But if we are successful at finding a valid direction, then we fall and die of a broken neck. So this approach is not going to be very productive.

LOOK TREE in the clearing reveals that The BARK has been eaten away. But we can't seem to CUT BARK or GET BARK or CUT WOOD from the dead tree. It's impervious to dynamite also.

We can CUT HORN to obtain the dead rhino's horn, and then trade this to the pygmies to get a wood FLUTE. (I pause here to note sadly that, in the real world, rhinos are being driven to extinction by the superstition-driven demand for their horns. I plead self-defense here.) The flute is carved to resemble a snake, and PLAY FLUTE scares the snakes away. (We are not given any information about what tune it is we have played, but clearly it's no charmer or we are really bad at playing it.)

Now we can access the ancient temple -- and its sealed stone door. OPEN DOOR yields only I don't understand you, so it's pleasantly satisfying when we figure out that this is where the dynamite finally comes into play.

The temple contains goggles, a stone idol, and an elaborate wall mural depicting men cutting tree bark and chewing it. Okay. If we wear the goggles, everything looks dark, so we may want to try these in the cave... nope, they're not night-vision goggles. Maybe the mural indicates that we need to chew some bark too. We can't CUT BARK at the base of the tree, as previously established, but by climbing the tree we can get some.

Chewing the bark makes everything too bright outdoors in normal light -- the goggles cut the light down, so we can take them off in the cave to see normally now. There's a path going down to a rock ledge, and another ledge across the way. JUMP LEDGE yields You weigh to [sic] much right now. We have to drop everything to make it across to the other ledge.

At last we have found King Solomon's treasure room! There are sapphires, rubies and diamonds here on a stone table. But we can't JUMP CHASM with any of these treasures in hand -- they're too heavy. And eventually we are told that Your eyes itch, which can't be a good thing; they eventually return to normal and we can't see in the dark any more. So we need to get the treasures out of here, and quickly.

We can try to THROW RUBIES to the other ledge, but They scatter and fall into the chasm. Maybe we can put them in the bag, if we empty the water first? Yes, that works, and THROW BAG causes it to land on the other ledge. But the bag can only hold one type of gem at a time -- it fills up quickly with our questionable gains, so we have to make several trips to rip all of these invaluable archaeological finds out of their in situ location so we can cash in. And of course, we are likely to run out of night vision partway through the process, and have to go get some more bark. Ack. It is possible to get all the treasures bagged, tossed and retrieved before the timer runs out -- but just barely.

On our return from the treasure cave, we find that our path is blocked in the pygmy village by a large group of PYGMIES, previously unseen. We need one of the skulls (which we selected at random but turns out to be the Sacred Skull) to drop, so we can scare them off without giving them a treasure. Of course, we can't get to the skull pile with our path blocked, so if we didn't think to bring a skull along before we went into the cave, and our save post-dates that point, it's time to start over.

With the pygmies dispersed, we can either empty the bag and fill it with water from the spring, or just drink water at every opportunity to get safely back to the trading post and deliver the treasures. Despite our blatant disregard for animal life, native religions and archaeological integrity -- victory is ours!

This was a pretty challenging game, but it's a fair design that doesn't cheat too much beyond the usual die-to-learn-how-not-to adventure situations. I'm pleased to see that Mr. Olsen created quite a few games, and I look forward to playing more of his work. My walkthrough should be available at the CASA Solution Archive soon, and is posted here below the fold.

**** WALKTHROUGH ****

READ LETTER
DROP LETTER
DRINK WATER
GO POST
GET REVOLVER
GET BAG
GET IVORY
S
PUT BAG (In two words, tell me where?)
IN TROUGH (bag is filled with water)
DRINK WATER
E
LOOK ROCKSLIDE
SHOOT RHINO
SHOOT RHINO
DROP REVOLVER
W
PUT BAG, IN TROUGH
W
GET GRASS
MAKE FUSE
S, W, S
DROP IVORY
S, N (ivory has been replaced by a map)
GET MAP
FOLLOW MAP (to a small ravine)
GET KNIFE
E, N, E, N, E, E
CUT HORN
W
PUT BAG, IN TROUGH
W, S, W, S
DROP HORN
FOLLOW MAP
GET DYNAMITE
PUT FUSE, IN DYNAMITE
PUT BAG, IN SPRING
E
GET FLUTE
S
DROP MAP
GET STONE
S
PLAY FLUTE (snakes slither away)
DROP FLUTE
E
DROP DYNAMITE
LIGHT FUSE
W (an explosion in the distance)
DROP STONE
E
GO DOORWAY
LOOK MURAL
GET GOGGLES
W, W, N
GET MAP
N
FOLLOW MAP
PUT BAG, IN SPRING
E, E
CLIMB TREE
CUT BARK
DROP KNIFE
D, N, W
GET SKULL
S
FOLLOW MAP
DROP MAP
DROP GOGGLES
DROP SKULL
POUR WATER (bag is now empty)
DRINK WATER
S

(NOTE: There is little room for error here -- if your eyes start to itch, you may need to come back out of the cave early and get more bark, then go back for the remaining treasures.)

CHEW BARK (everything becomes bright)
D
THROW BAG (it lands on the other ledge)
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
S
GET RUBIES
PUT RUBIES, IN BAG
N
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
GET RUBIES
DROP RUBIES
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
S
GET DIAMONDS
PUT DIAMONDS, IN BAG
N
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
GET DIAMONDS
DROP DIAMONDS
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
S (eyes start to itch, vision running out)
GET SAPPHIRES
PUT SAPPHIRES, IN BAG
N
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET RUBIES
GET DIAMONDS
GET BAG
U, N (in the nick of time as eyesight returns to normal)
GET SKULL
DRINK WATER
E (a large group of pygmies)
DROP SKULL (pygmies scatter)
N, E, N, E
DRINK WATER
GO POST
DROP RUBIES
DROP DIAMONDS
GET SAPPHIRES
DROP SAPPHIRES
SCORE

What's Santa's Favorite Video Game?

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Schoolyard joke one day, national magazine cover the next:

My recollection is that the handling in Namco/Atari's racing coin-op Pole Position was pretty drifty already, so turning it into a special ice-laden Christmas edition would have been straightforward. (And if the game were around today, in the age of DLC, it would probably have happened.)

This is a magazine cover circa 1983, from Electronic Fun magazine's second year of operation. I've found actual Christmas-themed video game advertisements to be unexpectedly rare in these seasonal issues. Most companies just ran the same ads they did year-round, we just saw more of them printed during the gift-shopping season. In 1983 the home game market was not as mainstream as it is today, nor was Black Friday quite so prominent, and new releases were not necessarily promoted at retail in the days when a "big" release might sell tens of thousands rather than millions of copies. So the holidays were not necessarily a big sales period for anyone but the console manufacturers... and, of course, the kids who depended mostly on Santa for new games. That well-used copy of Combat was just itching to move into a cardboard box under the bed.

Too bad that North Pole Position cabinet doesn't have any room for Santa's bag of toys. And it's even more unfortunate that Santa's watching the screen instead of his actual flight path, and appears to be headed for the outer limits of the Earth's atmosphere. Asphyxiation appears imminent; perhaps Santa heard about the X Prize and mistakenly thought it had something to do with Xmas.

C'mon, you know you laughed when you read that, in spite of yourself.

Happy Holidays!

Santa Claus Will Be Sad If You Don't Subscribe

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

I'm not quite sure what the illustration selected for this 1982 holiday season subscription ad for Electronic Games magazine was supposed to convey. Santa's expression certainly doesn't befit his usual image as a jolly old elf. He appears to have forgotten something important, like his bag of presents. Or maybe his pants.

I like to think he suffers the same memory malady I find myself experiencing more and more often as I get older. I'd be willing to wager I sport much the same expression as Saint Nick here, whenever I find myself thinking:

"I know where I am. Why the heck am I here?"

But we know why Santa's here. He's here to sell magazine subscriptions, and sucker people into subscribing for years in advance. I wonder if anyone had a subscription paid through 1987, say, and bugged the new Electronic Games publishers for long-delayed fulfillment during its brief relaunch attempt in 1992?

Clueless Gaijin Gaming: PC Engine Hyper Catalog 4 (1993)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Christmas Day approaches, and as it's Friday, I've managed to find a Japanese import disc with a seasonally appropriate theme. PC Engine Hyper Catalog 4 is not a game, per se, but an edition of a periodically issued reference/demo disc with lots of cool stuff onboard. While most of the content is in Japanese, the back cover of the disc insert advertises the "PC Engine Monthly Magazine for Game Freaks" -- in English. I presume this ad refers to another publication, as I don't think this CD-ROM would have come out monthly. And I don't know how many issues were produced, but I can say with reasonable certainty that Shogakukan and PCI produced at least 4 of these discs -- this one is from Winter of 1993.

And while I'm personally more inclined to wish my diverse circle of friends "Happy Holidays!" than "Merry Christmas!", this is definitely a Christmas issue, not a generic holiday theme. It opens with Christmas-y music as an odd purple dinosaur (no, not that one) scoots out of the way as our boy and girl hosts appear -- all quite nicely animated. Note the Christmas stockings, stars, bells, and... yes, Christian churches in the title screen's background:

The disc actually opens with a neat trick, as the PC Engine startup CD-ROM menu seems to tilt and rotate into the background when we press the RUN button -- but if we boot with an alternative system card, like the TurboGrafx-CD, the impressive effect is revealed as a pre-rendered sequence, not a real-time image warp. Past the title menu, our friends spot Santa claus zooming through the skies over Tokyo, and rush to see what he has left under the tree. A candy cane cursor provides access to the selectable gifts:

The centerpiece of this PC Engine CD-ROM disc is the Hyper Catalog of games, with prices, genres, and brief text details -- but no images. If I could read Japanese, this would be a really valuable resource; one assumes it was updated in each issue of the series, so that PC Engine otaku would have a reasonably current and complete database available. We can search by vendor and other categories, and see brief summaries and reviews. Today, we have the internet and the fabulous PC Engine Bible, so I'm not really feeling left out. But in 1993 this must have been the (Hudson) bee's knees:

From a cost-effective vintage gaming perspective, the disc's best feature is the series of demos onboard. Some are playable excerpts of the full game, others are non-interactive animated promos -- but all of these are fun to look at, and may save collectors a few curiosity purchases.

First up is Gojira - Bakuto Retsu Den, a.k.a. Godzilla:

We only get to pit Gojira against a few of his traditional foes from the popular Toho kaiju films -- Rodan and Anguirus -- but it's a pretty healthy sample of the game:

Next up is Super Darius II, second in Toho's series of robotic fish-themed shooters:

We're allowed to play one level, after which the demo game is over whether we beat the boss fish or not.

Next up is the intro sequence, complete with its excellent music, from Falcom's RPG Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys.

We see some character dialogue sequences during the demo, and we also get to take control of the Ys series' hero Adol and putter around town a bit, although none of the shops are open for business (the owners appear briefly to tell us, I presume, that we should buy the actual game), there don't seem to be any substantial quests on offer, and of course we can't save or load.

The PC Engine had no shortage of RPGs, and an interactive demo of Irem's Sol Moonarge presents a lighter, more comical example of the genre:

Next up is a "SPECIAL VERSION" of Hudson's classic Bomberman '94 -- I'm not sure what makes it special, really, but it's preceded by a mock disclaimer apparently denying the existence of the game.

It's good, clean Bomberman fun:

We also get a preview of Konami's dating sim, Tokimeki Memorial, due to arrive in 1994:

Which can come off a little creepy to Western eyes:

We also get to see the opening for the anime/manga adaptation Yawara! 2:

The first Yawara! game was a digital comic; this one has more game elements, as we can play a quiz game, or participate in a slow-moving, serious round of judo:

Next up is a PC Engine adaptation of one of the first true deathmatch games -- Faceball, popular on the Atari ST once upon a time:

The 3-D graphics are primitive, but the PC Engine pulls off this occasionally intense two-player battle:

We also get to try out fighting game Flash Hiders, a coin-op adaptation which doesn't hide much of the flash and features a few female characters who, er... like a bowl full of jelly, y'knowhatI'msayin?

Finally, we get a sample of the classic PCE hex-based strategy game Nectaris, known in the US as Military Madness:

It's a good bundle of gaming -- nothing full-length, but plenty of variety and a great way to sample some of what was hot on the PC Engine circa Winter 1993. I will have to pick up more of these PC Engine Hyper Catalog issues as I run across them.

Merry Christmas!

The LoadDown - 12/22/2011

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:47:00 +0000

Christmas is nearly here, which means a lot of people will have new consoles to play with. And if whatever Santa left turns out to be less than entertaining, perhaps something newly available for download will fill the bill...

WiiWare -- One new game this week, Soccer Up, a simple soccer game with 4-player local multiplayer and Mii support. There's also a free demo version of Gnomz, a Smash Bros.-style fighter that came out in November.

DSiWare -- Three new titles available for the DSi and 3DS. Doodle Fit is a shape-fitting puzzle game. Rytmik Retrobits is a musical tool for creating loops, beats and tracks in a retro-drum machine style. Chronicles of Vampires: Origins is a hidden-object hunt.

3DS eShop -- Two titles arrive exclusively for the 3DS. TETRIS is the black-and-white Game Boy version of this classic puzzle game; it was the Game Boy's killer app when it first came out and is still a great game today. WayForward's Mighty Switch Force! is a 2-D sidescrolling platformer/shooter, with puzzle elements, really nice hand-drawn graphics and action from the folks who brought us Shantae and Contra IV.

XBox Live Arcade -- One new game this week: Trine 2 is a sequel to the Finnish side-scrolling fantasy game; the original never came to XBLA but this worthy sequel is a lot of fun, and supports 2-player co-op fighting and puzzle-solving.

PS3 on PSN -- Two new titles. Sonic CD is the Sega CD-specific Sonic the Hedgehog game; it's been re-released in recent years on Sonic compilations, but it's good to see this overlooked classic available as a stand-alone title. Apples to Apples brings the categorization-based card game to the PS3 and may be a good choice for family holiday gaming.

PSOne Classics -- Well, it's something, I guess. Many families may be nostalgia-suckered into buying Atari's PSX "reimagining" of the classic Centipede, but this awkward 3-D version doesn't hold a candle to the original.

Notable on Steam -- Steam's holiday sale is in full swing, with a meta-game featuring special bonus achievements in a variety of games. I've become a big fan of Steam's ability to push me to sample and buy indie games I might otherwise have missed, at very reasonable prices.

Adventure of the Week: Klondike Adventure (1982)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

This week's adventure has a bit of a Christmas theme, though I didn't expect that to be the case. We're returning to the long-running SoftSide Publications disk magazine adventure game series, with SoftSide Adventure #9 -- Klondike Adventure, written by James Bash and published in February of 1982. The author credit on the game's title screen is unusual -- most of the SoftSide games were uncredited onscreen, or at best had the author's name buried in the BASIC code. Maybe Mr. Bash managed to slip this quick mention subliminally past the editors, just before the normal startup screen:

From the game's introductory text: Face brutal snow, ice, and bitter cold as you search for fame and fortune in the northern country. The player's simple goal is to find five treasures and store them in a specific location before freezing to death; this is a thematic forerunner of the later SoftSide Adventure #19, Alaskan Adventure. We're playing the Atari 400/800 version here.

The SoftSide adventures are generally brief, uncomplicated treasure hunts, written by a number of authors with some "house style" consistencies and some interesting variations. Klondike Adventure follows the traditional model introduced by Scott Adams -- we must collect the items denoted as *TREASUREs*, store them in the prescribed location, and say SCORE to win.

As always, I suggest interested adventurers sample Klondike Adventure independently before continuing here. I will be documenting the game's puzzles and storyline, and there are definitely...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

The adventure begins in the lobby (is that the right word?) of a small building, with a vending machine and a sign reading "GOODIE STORAGE LOCATION." So this is presumably the SCORE room. INVENTORY at this early stage yields I am currently carrying: ZILCH!!! The author's parser has a sense of humor and tries to keep itself fresh with randomized standard responses -- for example, its incomprehension phrases include No comprendo, Run that by me again? and That does not compute.

The vending machine sells FUR COATS for $19.95; presumably we will need one for the journey, to avoid the aforementioned freezing to death. A locked door is to the east, and if we go north we find ourselves standing outside in front of YUKON BILL'S COUNTRY STORE, where we can also see AN AWESOME SNOWBANK.

We will also shortly discover that we can't even leave Yukon Bill's establishment safely -- we get locked out as we leave the store, and we'll likely freeze to death within a few turns. But this is an adventure game, so we might as well map the world as best we can before we die in the frozen wastes.

The Alaskan Pipeline runs through a snow-covered valley to the north of the store. We can CLIMB PIPELINE to enter it, but it's not warm inside. There's a frozen pond to the east, and some mountains to the north. A KILLER WALRUS occupies the mountain pass -- we can't get past this surprisingly active large aquatic mammal, so we will need to eliminate him somehow.

So before we can really accomplish much outdoors, we're going to need that fur coat; we'll need to poke around Yukon Bill's and see if we can scare up some cash. A PAN in the storage room inside the store might be useful -- this is the Klondike after all, home of the historical Gold Rush. But The pan is on a high shelf and we can't just GET PAN, nor can we CLIMB, KICK, HIT, or MOVE the SHELF.

The solution to this one is rather interesting -- we can MOVE or PUSH some items, and we're asked for a direction, so we can actually relocate these objects to another room on the map. This is an unusual implementation for this generation of text adventures, and a neat idea. We can actually move the vending machine into the storage room, and then CLIMB MACHINE to retrieve the pan. Cool! EXAMINE PAN confirms that I don't think it's for cooking... so we can probably use it to pan for gold, if we find a suitable stream later on. There doesn't seem to be one running through the country store.

We still don't have any way to buy a fur coat. We can't BUY COAT or OPEN MACHINE, but we can attempt to BREAK MACHINE -- and out pops a coat! This reveals a bit of intentional design strangeness -- the author likes to avoid using common words, so that we have to guess at the dictionary's intended term. In this case, examing the coat reveals that It has a small piece of cloth affixed to the collar with writing on it. But we can't seem to READ COAT or READ COLLAR or READ WRITING or READ CLOTH; most of these are not recognized as nouns, so we can't GET any of these objects first either. I ultimately had to inspect the source code to learn that the dictionary wants us to call this a LABEL -- and READ LABEL reveals this is a *GENUINE MINK* and therefore a treasure. I always like it when a treasure doubles as a utilitarian object -- and I can image players wondering where that fifth treasure could possibly be, when they've been wearing it all along.

Now that we're suitably befurred, we can explore the game's world in more detail. The Alaskan Pipeline is a bit of a maze, but it's linear and fairly easy to map now that we can stay warm long enough to do it properly. There's a valve inside the pipe; we can TURN VALVE, but Oil comes gushing down the pipeline towards me! I drown in a sea of petroleum! I'M TERMINATED!! So that's a bad idea. At the end of the pipeline we arrive in an oil field with a LARGE OIL WELL, and atop the oil well we find an OLD PARCHMENT, which turns out to be Yukon Bill's Last Will and Testament -- we can claim the oil well simply by signing on the dotted line. Of course, this is an adventure game, so we have to find something with which to SIGN PARCHMENT.

I pause here to note that READ and EXAMINE seem to be the same verb in this game -- so we don't have to deal with any pointlessly obtuse There's writing on it! messages.

We can't just KILL WALRUS, because He gets upset. He eats me! We can BREAK ICE on the frozen pond to swim underneath -- we are told it's surprisingly warm - it must come from a geyser of some sort. This is another simple maze -- we can just go straight down to the bottom and ignore the other directions offered for exploration. But there are definite limitations on how long we can hold our breath, and there's no apparent reason to come down here yet.

I checked, and moving the GOODIE STORAGE LOCATION sign does NOT actually move the location, so we will eventually have to get back into Yukon Bill's Country Store to get credit for our accumulated treasures.

And the AWESOME SNOWBANK doesn't register as a noun with which we can do anything, according to the implacable parser. I was getting a bit stuck at this point -- I had run into several dead ends, without the one key I assumed would unlock some other solutions -- and I finally had to reference the code to learn we can collapse the snowbank with a YELL. This reveals a key -- literally; it opens both the front door and the door at the end of the hallway inside Yukon Bill's.

The toolshop inside contains a SCRAP OF PAPER with YUKON BILL'S CHRISTMAS LIST - item 1 is a Pickax, item 2 is a Surprise gift... There are no treasures here, but we can surmise a pickax will be involved in this story at some point.

With the snowbank collapsed, we can GET SNOW, MAKE SNOWBALL and THROW SNOWBALL - AT WHAT? - AT WALRUS to get him out of the way. We can now access, but not enter, a FLOWING GLACIAL RIVER -- because I get frostbite! I'M TERMINATED! -- nor can we seem to PAN RIVER or PAN GOLD. There's a hole in the glacier from which the river flows, but it's too dark to see inside, and we can easily slip and suffer a fatal broken neck in the traditional adventurer's manner.

Things become more interesting when we suddenly find ourselves at the North Pole -- and a billboard outside a building reads, "SANTA'S WORKSHOP." The building can be entered -- it is, of course, S.C.'S HOUSE, and there's a FAT GUY IN RED SUIT here. The stable to the west contains a REINDEER, who turns out to be the famous Rudolph, just in case we needed further confirmation of our whereabouts. We can try to KILL SANTA -- one of the pleasures of old-fashioned text adventures is trying anything we can type -- but the jolly old elf only gets mad and walks away, permanently. We can't seem to show Yukon Bill's list to Santa, even though LOOK SANTA indicates that He seems to be expecting something.

Oh, dear -- I think I just figured out what he's expecting. We have to SIT LAP first -- LOL! -- and we need Yukon Bill's Christmas List in hand. Now we can ASK PICKAX -- and despite the grammatically awkward phrasing, Santa says 'Ho Ho HO'. And a PLATINUM PICKAX appears on his lap. (Sounds painful, but it serves him right for calling me a Ho.)

ASK INK also works (handy for signing the parchment will) -- though ASK PEN and ASK for other things gets no response. The parser's responses inadvertently reveal whether any particular noun is known to the dictionary -- we can see the difference between ASK WHAT? and a recognized item name. I took advantage of Santa's tendency to leak information to learn that no SHOVEL or LAMP is available in the game.

Given that knowledge, perhaps Rudolph's nose bears closer inspection. We learn that IT GLOWS - '45 watts' -- and while we can't GET NOSE -- it's connected somehow -- we can UNSCREW NOSE. Rudolph cries & runs away -- sorry, dude, but we have treasures to find.

With Rudolph's creepy disembodied, glowing nose in hand, we can now get into the hole in the glacier and find the even creepier frozen remains of Yukon Bill. We can DIG deeper inside the glacier with the pickax to find a *FIST-SIZED SILVER NUGGET*. We have to EXAMINE BILL more than once to notice that he has boots on. We can't EXAMINE BOOTS at all, but we can GET BOOTS, which reveals that they're fishing boots. If we try to WEAR BOOTS, the game responds, That's kinky! Apparently sitting on Santa's lap is not bizarre, but wearing fishing boots is considered outrageous. As it turns out, we don't have to explicitly wear the boots; having them in inventory is enough.

We can also use the pickax to dig at the bottom of the frozen pond and find a rusty fountain pen, which we can fill with ink and use to sign the deed to the well, converting it to an official treasure.

Now we've only got one treasure left to find, and we haven't used the pan yet. With Yukon Bill's fishing boots, we can now GO RIVER and PAN RIVER to find *GOLD FLAKES*. They're probably not worth nearly as much as the other treasures, but they count just the same, and with all five treasures gathered at the late Yukon Bill's Country Store, we just have to say SCORE... and victory is ours!

This one's pretty straightforward, aside from a few parser-guessing challenges that tripped me up long enough to send me into the code. My walkthrough is available at the CASA Solution Archive, and also here, below the fold. I'll continue tackling the SoftSide Adventures now and then -- they're usually fun and quick to play through.

**** WALKTHROUGH ****

MOVE MACHINE (which direction?)
S
CLIMB MACHINE
GET PAN
D
BREAK MACHINE (out pops a fur coat)
GET COAT
WEAR COAT
N, N (door locks behind us)
N
CLIMB PIPELINE
N, N, W, W, N (arrive at an oilfield)
GO WELL
U
GET PARCHMENT
READ PARCHMENT (Yukon Bill's last will and testament)
D, S, S
E, E, S, S, E (back outside)
S
YELL (snowbank collapses)
GET KEY
UNLOCK DOOR
S
DROP PARCHMENT
E
UNLOCK DOOR
E (to the toolshop)
DROP KEY
GET PAPER
READ PAPER (Yukon Bill's Christmas List)
W, W, N
GET SNOW
MAKE SNOWBALL
N, N
THROW SNOWBALL (AT WHAT?)
AT WALRUS (killer walrus runs away)
N
GO BUILDING (it's Santa!)
SIT LAP
ASK PICKAX (* PLATINUM PICKAX * appears)
ASK INK (BOTTLE OF INK too)
GET PICKAX
GET BOTTLE
D
DROP PAPER
W
EXAMINE REINDEER (it's Rudolph!)
EXAMINE NOSE (it's 45 watts)
UNSCREW NOSE (sorry, Rudy!)
GET BULB
E, S, E
GO HOLE (it's the frozen remains of Yukon Bill!)
N
DIG (find a silver nugget)
GET NUGGET
S
EXAMINE BILL (repeat if necessary -- he's dead AND wearing boots)
GET BOOTS
S, S
DROP BULB
GO RIVER
nPAN RIVER
DROP PAN
GET FLAKES
W, W, S, E
BREAK ICE (fall through into warm geyser water)
D, D
DIG
GET PEN
U, U, U
W, S, S
DROP NUGGET
DROP FLAKES
DROP PICKAX
GET PARCHMENT
FILL PEN
SIGN PARCHMENT (it's now a valid deed)
DROP DEED
READ LABEL (coat is a *GENUINE MINK*!)
DROP COAT
LOOK (just to survey your treasures)
SCORE (victory!)