The LoadDown - 04/18/2011

More new titles for your instant gratification gaming needs...

WiiWare -- One new game and a demo again.  My Little Baby is one of those disturbing but popular titles that treats an infant human being as a virtual pet.  There's also a free demo version of the retro-style BIT.TRIP CORE.

Wii Virtual Console -- One new title this week, as Capcom steps up with the SNES classic Mega Man X.

DSiWare -- Three new titles.  GO Series Captain Sub sends a submarine on a treasure hunt with enemies and bosses to fight.  DodoGo! Robo is a puzzle game where the player must program a robot to navigate a maze.  Music on: Learning Piano Volume 2 continues the music education series (good to see as it's been quite a while since Volume 1 came out.)

XBox Live Arcade -- A couple of interesting retro-inspired titles this week.  Atari dusts off Yars' Revenge for an HD outing, oddly reimagined with an anime style instead of the science-fiction insectoid world of the original Atari 2600 game.  There's also Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes HD, which is a Puzzle Quest-style match-three game set in the Might & Magic RPG universe, originally released on the Nintendo DS.

PS3 on PSN -- Two titles this week...  Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes HD (see above), and Dungeon Hunter: Alliance, a Baldur's Gate-style dungeon crawl with local and online multiplayer.

PSOne Classics -- This platform's been dormant for a couple of months now.  Hmmmm.

Cover to Cover: Virgin Games 1992 Catalog (pp. 4-5)

Our page-by-page survey of the 1992 Virgin Games catalog gets seriously underway, with a few pages of games for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.  Page 4 features three titles that feel more like home computer titles shoehorned onto the NES than native console games:

Greg Norman's POWER GOLF is a fairly sophisticated golf simulation by 8-bit standards, and must have included an unusually large battery-backed memory in the cartridge, as it allows saving tournament play in-progress as well as player-created course designs.  There was, of course, no way to exchange these designs with other players on the NES platform, but it's an interesting and innovative feature borrowed from the personal computer world.

Robin Hood is a licensed game based on the Kevin Costner version, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and unlike most of the movie licenses on the NES, it's actually a role-playing game with some degree of depth.  Which is to say, it's not just a side-scroller with Robin Hood graphics thrown into a standard engine, and the plotline resembles the movie to some degree.

I have played Overlord a lot on the PC, and I have the NES edition in my collection; it's a solid resource-management simulation, with engrossingly detail-oriented gameplay as we seek to colonize the available planets in competition with others trying to do the same thing.  There isn't a lot of action onscreen, so I suspect this didn't sell particularly well on the NES, but it's a decent conversion aside from significant color loss as compared to the PC original.  The game originated and was known as Supremacy in the UK, and likely came to Virgin's attention on the company's native shores.

The games on Page 5 are a little more action-oriented:

M.C. Kids is a licensed title based on the McDonald's fast-food chain, and spawned a 16-bit sequel a few years later.  It's a platformer for one or two players, playing cooperatively, and features cameo appearances by various McDonald's icons.  It's not quite as blatant as some of the free advergames in circulation today, but any game where the players are required to chase down the Hamburglar is going to promote the parent brand to some degree.  The catalog copy mentions that the game was "developed in consultation with Developmental Psychologist Frank Manis, Ph.D.," just in case parents had any qualms about plunking down $49.99 for an interactive extended McDonald's commercial.

Finally, Jordan Mechner's enduring classic Prince of Persia really needs no further introduction (at least to regular readers of this blog.)  It was a huge hit for Broderbund on home computers, and was sublicensed to a number of companies for other platforms; Virgin published the NES conversion, as well as a Gameboy edition coming up on the next page, next time.

Cover to Cover: Virgin Games 1992 Catalog (pp. 1-3)

U.K. entrepreneur Richard Branson has had his hand in any number of businesses -- Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, and most recently Virgin Galactic as a commercial spaceflight operation.  Branson made investments on the fringes of the game industry as far back as the early 1980s, and Virgin Games grew into a major developer through mergers in the late 1980s and 1990s.  Today the company survives as an online gambling concern, but along the way Virgin published quite a few notable (and some not-so-notable) titles for home computers and videogame consoles.

So in our second "Cover to Cover" series, we're going to take a trip back in time and survey the Virgin Games catalog from early 1992, one page at a time.  The recognizable Virgin logo adorns the cover, along with a blown-up semi-abstract screenshot of some (probably) Amiga title I have not been able to identify.

The cover is counted as page 1, so the first interior page is already numbered as page 2.  It presents the company as a daring but safely commercial entity, with a cheeky "SEX and DRUGS and ROCK N' ROLL" attention grabber, before noting that these "are not the kind of stimulation that VIRGIN GAMES is proud to offer in the pages of this catalog."

The text, which continues onto page 3, promotes several upcoming titles we'll see in more detail later on.  Page 3 also promotes other Virgin businesses, with a very 80s picture of Paula Abdul (releasing on Virgin Records) and a map of the Virgin Atlantic Airways international routes, should any gamers perusing these pages suddenly need to fly to Miami in search of the fabled Sound Machine.

With the introductory formalities out of the way... in our next installment... let the games begin!

Of Import: Cotton - Fantastic Night Dreams (1993)

The American TurboDuo version of Cotton - Fantastic Night Dreams is now a sought-after and pricey collectible -- which is why this will not be an East vs. West comparison -- but fortunately the Japanese version is much more affordable, and almost equally playable, as most of the written text is in English.  Sequels and variations also appeared on the Sega Mega Drive and Super Famicom, and later on the 32-bit Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn; there were even Neo Geo Pocket Color and Dreamcast games.  But this "original" console port was published in 1993 by Hudson Soft, based on the Japanese arcade game created by Success:

The cutscenes are in Japanese, of course, but it's not hard to follow the story -- a young witch named Cotton befriends and/or captures a bikini-clad fairy named Silk, and they set out to conquer evil of a supernatural nature, which is really just incidental to Cotton's quest for Willow candy.  Cotton - Fantastic Night Dreams is a side-scrolling shooter pitting the cute little witch and her winged pal against a bevy of bizarre enemies. 

And despite its cute-'em-up appearance, it's not easy -- dealing with this early miniboss requires a lot of tricky maneuvering and firing:

Most of the regular enemies are small in size, leaving the system enough processing power to send them out in well-animated flurries -- these odd little puffy pig thingies are a case in point:

Each level concludes with a Tea Time segment, where Cotton can pick up extra points by snagging the teacups inexplicably cascading from the sky after the boss has met its demise:

There's not really a lot to say about the game design -- it's fairly standard 2-D shmup material, with success based primarily on dexterity and pattern memorization.  But it's a high-quality effort, with excellent CD-Audio music and some neat graphical tricks, including lots of parallax scrolling and warping backgrounds.  The music does repeat on a few of the later levels, as do some of the enemy designs, probably because few players will reach the higher levels at all; there's always some nasty creature waiting to knock Cotton offscreen, screaming in her cute, high-pitched anime voice.

The graphics are colorful and varied, the music is pretty solid, and while the gameplay isn't necessarily superior to the myriad of decent shooters available on the PC Engine, Cotton is still worth seeking out and belongs in any serious collection.  (Which mine is not, given its random nature.  But I'm still glad I have it.)

---

This is one of the good ones. You might be able to buy a copy here or here:

At Random: Football (1978, Odyssey^2)

It's time for another random grab from the donated bag of Odyssey^2 cartridges... and I initially came up with K.C. Munchkin!, which I've already covered.  So I made a second foray, and produced Magnavox's interpretation of Football! .. which I included in a video podcast a while back, but haven't covered in specific detail.  So it's time to fire this one up and see what it tells us about video football game history.

The Odyssey^2's limited capabilities mean that there aren't even 11 players on the field for both teams combined -- we play a simplified game of five-on-five American football.  The players also appear to be naked, although the quarterbacks have heads that resemble something that might be taken to be a football helmet, rather than suggesting Atari's E.T.  And the ball is a short white 2-pixel dash, except when it's being carried by a player, at which moments it cannot be seen at all.

The game opens with the usual Odyssey^2 "Select Game" screen, but there's only one option to select, which we do by pressing the 1 key on the keyboard to start up a two-player game.  No fancy-pants AI opponents here!  There's an (invisible) coin toss, and one of the teams ends up with the ball.  (To tell which team has it, we have to look at the color of the yardage marker above the field.)

The human player whose team is in possession can control the current ball carrier using the joystick, and press the action button to pass the ball in one of the eight cardinal directions, which means the player can really only throw the ball in the same direction he's running.  The lack of precision targeting is exacerbated by the surprising speed with which the ball moves through the air, producing a lot of missed passes.  There's really no way to get the receiving player lined up intentionally -- all we can do is toss the ball and hope we shot it cleanly at one of our own players.

The human playing defense can control the linebacker and try to intercept the offense's passes, but given the difficulty of passing and the generally uniform speed at which the onscreen figures move, most players in possession will just make a run for the end zone.  Tackles are largely a matter of luck -- once possession is established, each player can select from a small set of pre-programmed plays, and can't really do much to alter their patterns beyond the dangerously tricky passes.  So if your play happens to hit a weak spot in your opponent's pattern, you may see positive results, but it's up to chance to some degree.

There's no "run" button - the players chug down the field at the same staid pace no matter what's going on.  Touchdowns are celebrated with a brief musical fanfare but no visual flourishes -- just the victorious player carrying the (still invisible) ball standing frozen in the end zone while the music plays.

Odyssey^2 Football! (the exclamation point means it's exciting!) is another case of an early video game where the concept was obviously suitable to the newborn medium, but proper execution would have to wait until the hardware was a bit more powerful.  By the time Madden Football came along on the 16-bit Sega Genesis, simulation of the sport would be a lot more full-featured.  But it's always valuable to know where we've been so we can appreciate where we are.

Arcade Memories: The Playground

In the early 1980’s, when I was a high school student in the small Upper Peninsula town of Menominee, Michigan, a vacant restaurant near the Wisconsin border was acquired by Bernie, owner of the gas station next door. He christened it "The Playground," acquired some of those newfangled video game machines, set up a snack bar with a chip rack, a microwave, and a toaster oven, and opened for business.

My younger brother and I (under the influence of too many Archie comic books) assumed this strange little joint was our link to fun and adventure, and we started hanging out there a few times a week. We didn't meet any new girls or get involved in any drag races, but we did get a memorable look at the operation, up close, in all its inept glory.

A portly, bucktoothed gentleman named Dennis managed the place, though that may be too strong a word. He spent most of his time complaining to anyone who would listen about his job, his family, and his boss Bernie. He'd stand indignantly among the piles of used napkins and crumpled drink cups. He’d pontificate endlessly about the kids who'd come in and mess up the place. Occasionally he'd pull out a broom and slide the dirt from one side of the red tile floor to the other, or push a mop casually through the melange of spilled soda, salt, and ketchup. But these initiatives were consistently ineffective, and customers were left to shoulder broom and dustpan to clear a few square feet for themselves.

Dennis commuted to his job from the neighboring town of Wallace, which was a good twenty minutes’ drive away. He was, we soon learned, a volunteer firefighter in his hometown. This meant that on occasion, Dennis would answer the ringing phone, exclaim profanely, shoo everyone out of the place, and close down. We'd watch his truck tear out of the parking lot and wonder whether the flaming structure would still be standing by the time he got there. Then we'd wonder whether he'd turned off the Playground’s toaster oven before he left.

The establishment's selection of arcade games was -- to put it kindly -- dated. The newest machines were Dig Dug and Ms. Pac-Man, each of which were a few years old at the time The Playground opened in 1984. The other games (like Space Zap and Warlords) were of late 1970's vintage and pretty long in the tooth by technology standards.

The candy selection was equally limited, but delivered good value for money, particularly the Ferrara Pan products like "Mike & Ike" and "Lemonheads." These slow-dissolving candies were favored because you could buy a box of them and nibble for days on end. They were also round, hard, and brightly colored, which made them great for pitching at friends. A piece of candy could be thrown back and forth until somebody stepped on it, ending the game and adding to the calorie-rich mess on the floor.

Vastly more interesting, though also limited, was The Playground’s "food" selection. The menu offered a broad variety of frozen foods -- burritos, ham-and-cheese sandwiches, pizza -- all ready for a quick warming-up in Dennis' aging microwave. When my brother and I happened to be the first customers in on a Saturday morning, we were often the beneficiaries of Dennis' kitchen experiments with new products. He'd heat something up and give it to us to sample; whether it was still frozen in the middle, or fried to a crisp, we gave him feedback and ate the evidence. It often took Dennis two or three tries to get his cooking approach nailed down, so on these mornings we ate like guinea pigs.

The ham-and-cheese sandwiches were most reliably tasty, with remarkably fresh-tasting bread, salty ham and creamy cheese that tended to leak out all over the place. Considerable care was required because the hot cheese was not unlike napalm -- if it stuck to your fingers or the roof of your mouth, a nasty burn could result.

An inexplicable customer favorite was the frozen pizza, which consisted of a little square of cracker-thin, cardboard-like crust topped with off-tasting tomato sauce, grainy artificial cheese, and shriveled toppings that resembled small insects when the toasting was done. But it was arguably pizza that we kids could afford on a limited budget, so the smell of it always permeated the Playground air on a busy night.

Since there weren't many places for teenagers to hang out in Menominee, The Playground attracted a diverse and patient crowd, but even so it survived for only six months. There were not enough kids in the neighborhood to sustain the business model, and the establishment’s unique character was not likely to inspire return business among the squeamish.

But to this day, every now and then, I hear the Dig Dug theme, recall the scent of scorched frozen pizza and smile.

Adventure of the Week: Arabian Adventure (1981)

Time to tackle another of the long-running SoftSide Publications adventure series.  This is actually the first game in the series, Arabian Adventure, written in BASIC by Peter Kirsch and published in June of 1981 for the Atari 400/800 and Apple II home computers.

I'll be playing the Atari edition here.  After a colorful title banner, the game opens with a brief plot summary and a Scott Adams-style introduction of the basic concept of the text adventure:

The plotline is nothing new -- Princess Jasmine has been kidnapped by the evil wizard Rex, and the player must destroy the wizard in his castle and rescue the Princess.  The Arabian setting isn't particularly realistic or innovative -- the standard accoutrements include a magic lamp and a flying carpet.  And the two-word parser is fairly primitive -- in fact, in lieu of a more bugproof solution, the onscreen introduction carefully warns us not to carry or drop more than one key in the same place, as there are several such keys and the game's dictionary has no way to distinguish between them.  But the text is more lengthy and evocative than the era's norm, and the fantasy Middle Eastern map is extensive and fun to explore.

As always, I encourage interested readers to tackle this Arabian Adventure for themselves before proceeding here, though players should be aware that this one has no save game feature.  And in the interest of historical documentation, there are certain to be...

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

We are standing in a courtyard as the game starts, and we immediately hear a scream from the palace.  This is meant to set the plot into motion, but we can wander around the nearby marketplace indefinitely before investigating; we can still hear the scream from quite a distance, though, just in case we've forgotten our mission.  We can also explore the rooms of the palace before making our way upstairs to the scream's apparent source.  And no matter how long we've dawdled, we always arrive in the princess' chambers just in time:  You run to the window and just manage to see Princess Jasmine flown off on a giant roc in the grasp of Rex, wizard of darkness.


The marketplace streets are lined with remarkably poorly-stocked establishments -- each only carries one item.  There's a Pawn Shoppe, an Olde Rug Shoppe, a modernistic Fruit and Vegetable Shoppe Shop, and a Pottery Shoppe.  We can GO SHOPPE in each of these locations, but can't actually BUY anything or TALK to the merchants.  However, trying to GET the lonely items on display prompts a price quote in riyals -- we learn that the rug costs 5 riyals, the coconut 10, and the clay saucer 10.  It seems the local economy features very cheap rugs, or very expensive dining, but as we have no money to begin with all of these items are initially out of reach.

There's a HEAVY ROCK on the beach, and we can actually GET ROCK without a struggle for a change.  Taking inventory discovers that we are also carrying an ARABIAN SWORD IN SHEATH, likely to come in handy at some point.

In the Pawn Shoppe, we can try to PAWN ROCK, but of course the Pawnbroker says: ROCK is not worth pawning.  If we try to PAWN SWORD, the game insists that You're not carrying it; experimentation establishes that we can DRAW SWORD and PUT (not SHEATH) SWORD, but we can never DROP either the sword or the sheath.  So our limited five-slot inventory is at least partially taken up by a trusty weapon we can never get rid of, leading to some juggling later on.  At least while the sword is sheathed it only consumes one slot.

We're too late to save the princess, but her unmade bed, the open window and a brass lamp are of potential interest.  GET BED yields something slightly different from the standard response -- Be reasonable now.  That's impossible. -- but we can't PUSH, PULL, LIFT or MOVE it either.  It simply stands as evidence of the Princess' poor housekeeping habits.  We can't go through the open window or pawn the brass lamp either.  So we're initially at a bit of a loss; I did discover that, despite this game's vintage, we can't trick the dictionary to discover what nouns it knows about -- GET [object] just says There's no [object] here.

Of course, remembering the game's setting, it soon develops that we can RUB LAMP.  A genie appears and hands us a RARE ARABIAN RIYAL, and we can PAWN RIYAL to get 5 standard-issue riyals in exchange, and thus buy the rug.

Once we have the rug, we can drop it on the ground and GO RUG to find ourselves sitting on the rug.  But I got stuck at this point for a while as I couldn't figure out how to get back off of it.  We can't STAND UP or GET OFF or EXIT RUG.  We can't even QUIT or SAVE GAME (the game supports neither of these options -- it's win or die.)  I finally figured out that we have to SAY FLY to travel -- we disembark automatically after we reach our destination.  The rug travels between the palace courtyard and a desert -- once we've discovered its secret, we can't TAKE RUG any more, so it's a good thing there aren't any rug thieves about.

Adventure games often have odd amalgamations of geography; in this case, the desert abuts a beach, a forest, and some mountains.


Arabian Adventure seems to be inspired by the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad movies, but we also encounter a bit from Jason and the Argonauts, as we find that 6 Skeletons stand gaurd [sic] with swords drawn in front of a mountain cave.  I tried to KILL SKELETONS, but You forgot to draw your sword! You have been slain!  We have to DRAW SWORD and KILL all six, one at a time in what proves to be a very drawn-out battle.

Success is random, but I never died in the process, and eventually we reach the point where 1 Skeletons [sic] stand gaurd, and then none.  Now we can enter the cave, where we will encounter an immediate cave-in, so it's wise to visit the forest nearby and pick up the roll of TWINE before doing so.  We should also drop any excess belongings outside, as once we escape the cave we can't reenter it.

There are no truly dark locations in the game, so we never need to LIGHT LAMP.  The cave is well-lit enough for us to find an AXE and a BAMBOO FISHING POLE in a very tight opening.  That doesn't sound comfortable, but both are useful items.

A tall chamber in the cave has stairs going up, leading to a room with a locked chest, a horsehoe magnet and a hole in the wall.  We can escape through the hole and climb down the mountain, but the roc picks us up and drops us back inside the cave. Carrying the heavy rock does not discourage the huge bird -- no rhyming "hints" here -- but carrying the axe apparently does.  I think this is just a little assist to keep the player from leaving the cave without some critical items needed to finish the game.


Inside the cave, we find what's described as the SHALLOW 'SEA OF DECEIVE', and we espy an iron key at the bottom of this sea.  But a simple GET KEY results in drowning -- the Sea of Deceive is a trap, of course, as the water is actually ten feet deep, not shallow as stated.  It seems we might want to use the twine to dangle the magnet from the bamboo pole, to fish the iron key out of the Sea of Deceive.  But TIE TWINE and TIE MAGNET yield only You can't do that now.  We have to have the twine, magnet and bamboo pole in inventory -- then we can TIE MAGNET to produce a MAGNET TIED TO POLE, and now GET KEY has a much more positive result.

The chest has 20 Arabian riyals in it, and the merchants back in town are willing to make change, so now we can go back and buy the saucer and the coconut.  There is, at this point in the story, no obvious reason to do so, but as this is an adventure game and the totals suspiciously align, we should probably do what we can with the resources at hand.

Most items in this adventure have a single use, so we can drop each of them once it's served its purpose.  We can drop the axe after we've used it in the forest to CHOP TREE, yielding 4 CHOPPED TREES.  We can't GET CHOPPED or GET TREES or GET 4, but we can BUILD RAFT and carry it to the beach, where a BOAT PADDLE lies conveniently nearby.

Now we can drop the raft and GO RAFT to board it.  Navigating while on the raft actually moves among various rooms in which we're Sailing the Wrestling Seas, the Wicked Seas or the Whispering Seas.  Eventually a huge green sea monster arrives, threatening our crude raft and blocking all paths.  Drawing our sword to KILL MONSTER causes it to back off, and after much repetition finally kills it.  We can sometimes avoid the creature altogether, if we are lucky, by sailing quickly to the east after we launch the raft.

Once ashore, we are informed that our raft is done for, and we encounter a monstrous Cyclops who tends to strangle us.  If we run west and climb all the way to the top of Cyclops Mountain, though... well, that doesn't do anything obviously useful.  Hmmmm.  We still can't KILL CYCLOPS, and throwing various objects at him doesn't do anything either.  If we GO MOUNTAIN once more from the top, we somehow end up sailing the Whispering Seas again, even without a raft, and can maneuver safely to the shore.  But the Cyclops is just waiting for us again, apparently having run down the mountain while we were making our way back.

I got stuck here, and finally took a peek at the source code to discover that we apparently need a banana peel.  And that we have to obtain it by eating a banana.  Which is not available in the Fruit and Vegetable Shop.  We get this useful fruit by executing a RUB LAMP again at the top of mountain, causing the Genie to reappear and hand us a banana, for no apparent or predictable reason.  But we can now EAT BANANA to get the peel, DROP PEEL, and send the Cyclops tumbling down the mountain, never to be seen again.

Now we can reach the Wizard's Palace at last, and climb up to the tower, to find the Princess miniaturized and held in a tiny cage.  A flashing sword appears, apparently floating in thin air, and the palace front door is locked after this point.  The finale is upon us.

Fortunately, the wizard's floating sword is not immediately fatal, nor does it follow us with any great degree of urgency or accuracy, so we can take time to explore the rest of the palace in search of puzzle solutions.  There's a lasso in the small dungeon downstairs, some flour in the kitchen, a book and some strange white powder in the alchemist's chamber.  The book tells us we must mix the white powder and milk together in a dark place to restore the Princess to life size.

A nasty-looking tarantula guards a tiny key in the wizard's sleeping chamber.  We can borrow the Princess' hand mirror from the tower, and DROP MIRROR to transfix the spider with unrequited love for his own image, so that we can GET KEY and rescue the imprisoned (though still miniature) Princess Jasmine.

We can THROW FLOUR to make the wizard visible -- this is an invisible, impressively hands-on villain, no magical swords or enchanted ghost warriors here -- and KILL WIZARD with far greater ease than any of the other creatures we've encountered.  The dead enchanter drops a large key, which we can use to escape the wizard's palace.

This seems a good time to mix the coconut milk and the powder in the clay saucer, per the book's recipe.  PUT POWDER helpfully yields Pour milk first.  And we need our old friend the HEAVY ROCK to split the coconut.  But the potion spoils easily here in the wizard's place -- all the rooms are too brightly lit to mix the potion, it seems, even in the dungeon.

This is actually okay, because as it turns out it's fairly convenient to take the Princess home in miniature.  We have to THROW LASSO to catch the roc, who carries us back to the beach; use the carpet to make our way back to the Princess' palace; and mix the recipe in the dark cellar there to restore her to normal size.  Victory is ours!

I enjoyed the Arabian Adventure, though without access to the source code I might have found it frustrating in a few nonsensical spots.  To save others the more significant headaches, I'm providing my walkthrough below the fold and have also uploaded it to the CASA Solution Archive.

**** WALKTHROUGH ****