The Games I've Played #4

Learning With Leaper is an educational game for the ColecoVision. My sister and I used to play it several times, and at one poin I really didn't like the game.



LWL gives you four different games to play. You choose them by moving Leaper around. Leaper is some kind of olive with legs and horns. It bounces as it moves. It's kind of a weird mascot, but I think he appeared in one other Sierra game. Anyway, the choices are paint, counting, running through a maze, and compare and contrast.



We'll start off with the maze, cause there isn't much to say. You're a frog, and there's a caterpillar. There's no time limit, and the caterpillar doesn't do much besides wonder around aimlessly. If you let him catch up to you, he'll just turn back around. The frog moves slowly and the game seems to be aimed for really young children. There are much more complicated mazes than this, but not many dead-ends.



Another game that's aimed for the really young is this counting game. You have to select the correct number of bones for the dogs. It's a cute game where the dogs will either wag their tails or bark at you. The game last till ten tries unless you make mistakes. I used to enjoy just waiting until all the dogs showed up and I would only give a bone to one of them.




Probably the only game that older kids would appreciate is the compare and contrast game. You play as an balloon with a hook and you match up crates with the crate on the top right. It starts out easy with letters, moves on to shapes, words, and eventually hard-to-tell shapes. My sister used to play this a lot, and I eventually began to dislike this game because I was a selfish kid who wants to play games a lot. Totally different from today.



The last game was paint. My sister liked this game even more. Here you pick a color and click anywhere on screen to fill in the space. You can't undo anything, which sucks. There are four pictures, which you wouldn't know unless you accidently pushed the 3 button. We must have painted this house several times before we knew there were more options. Observe.










My sister like the fourth picture, naturally. I liked either 2 or three, mostly because I was already bored with the house. The odd this about this game was that there were clear spaces for you to fill in, but for some reason the paint program wouldn't fill them in all the way. For example:



This one wasn't so bad because I liked to make the sky black and the other side yellow to make it look like night.


So that's what the Leaper taught us young kids. That and patience. Lots of patience. What I left out is the fact that after you're done with a game, you see the opening screen again, and have to watch the Leaper slowly jump around again. And you have to watch the menu screen again even if you just want to play the next level of the maze or balloon game.

I wonder if anybody who worked on this game remembers the horny* olive with legs. Isn't Sierra still around**? It would be interesting if someone brought back one of the weirder educational game characters.




* - Not that kind of horny!
** - Nope. It was bought up by Vivendi at some poin but they kept the name.

The Games I've Played #3

I couldn't think of anything to post so I'll dust off this old entry that I meant to post after the first The Games I've Played but I was never satisfied with it. Now I just want to post anything. Remember, here at Tork's Blog, it's always quantity over quality!







Today I'll talk about Miner 2049er. It's another Atari 800 game. It was the second of three games that we kept in our house. Of course, in this case we had two copies of the game.



Miner 2049er is about a mounty named Bounty Bob. You're looking for a guy named Yukon Yohan because...I forget. I'll have to look up the instruction manual, but that guy is the bad guy. Not that he's in the game or anything. Anyway, the goal of the game is to walk over every piece of land, turning it from solid to blank. You have to avoid mutants and falling to your death. Items around the level can be collected so you can get rid of the mutants Pac-Man style.

Miner 2049er is basically a trial and error game. You need to find out the best way to clear each area, how far you can drop down, and the best way to allocate items to clear out the mutants. There are ten levels, which each have a gimmick like slides or a big cannon in the last level.



Bob is supposed to be a mounty, even though the box art makes him look like a grizzled old prospector. I think they made him a bounty because the sprite has mounty hat. It couldn't be any other kind of hat.


My favorite level is the sixth one, which has a big vat of radioactive waste for no reason. There's really no poin for it since you could fall to your death without it. I think Big Five was just showing off.






This is a classic game, and I really recommend it. You can download an emulation of the game here, although for some stupid reason they mapped the jump button to the escape key. This program also includes the sequel.

The Games I've Played #2

Recently I saw a music video starring David Bowie. That reminds me!

Today's game is named Omikron: The Nomad Soul. It was released for the Dreamcast.

I would like to add that there are spoilers.

I first saw this game in a store and played it briefly. You were some guy running around a screen with a few elevators that led to some apartments. The place had a cold, futuristic look to it. I forget what else I saw, but something about the game stood out, so when I got a Dreamcast I knew I had to get this game. Luckily Sega had just dumped the console and this game was 9 bucks.

Omikron starts off with a cop asking you, the player, to have your soul jump into his body. From there it seems like the game is an adventure game where you need to solve some crimes. You start off in some city that is heavily influenced by Blade Runner. There are giant fans everywhere. The city seems to be lit up mostly by street lights and ads for "Quanta Cola."

(This is preceded by a Bowie song called "New Angels of Promise", which I always liked.)

In Omikron people seem to have wrist bracelets that can call up cars that'll automatically drive you to your destination. You will usually see flying vehicles in the sky. There are lots of places

At first you seem to just be a cop who is dealing with a suspicious murder. When you go to your apartment, you meet your wife. You have the first conversation where you can pick multiple answers. Unfortunately, the game doesn't branch depending on what you say. Too bad. One of the rooms has a training simulator where you can learn about the games crummy fighting. Omikron, besides the usual adventure mode, also has a first person shooter mode and fighting mode. More on that later. After you talk to your wife, you can climb into bed with her. She climbs on top of you in one of the games racier moments, and... the camera cuts away. T rating, you see.

Anyway, you go to work and meet some suspect. She works for a whiney underground group straight out of The Matrix. They called themselves the Awakened, because those kind of people have to convince themselves that they are superior to the "sheeple." Unfortunately, in the context of this game they're right. You later find out that you are not hunting a person, but demons. And it gets worst, because the chief of police is a demon, feeding souls to some big demon. And even worst, he feeds the souls of dumb players. Like, say, you?

That element of the game always freaked me out a little. Maybe I'm easy to scare, but after I learned that fact I always felt like I had to beat the game one day no matter what. And I felt the same when I replayed it. It wasn't a matter of just beating the game; my soul was stuck in the Dreamcast! (And I went back for seconds.)


More later... I hope to give my full thoughts on this game. And add some pics, but just pics stolen from google image. For now, enjoy New Angels of Promise at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZAAW6Dxue4

----------------------------------- Update --------------------------

Anyway, after having sex with someone else's wife and checking out the mostly useless stores, you have to go to a grocery store (OF THE FUTURE!) to fight some bad guys. Here the game introduces the first person shooter thing. Unfortunately, it's not that great. Even worst, fps usually give me a headache. Maybe I don't like it because I suck at fpses, but I just don't think it works too well. I prefer the exploration of the dark, cold cities. I'm not a fan of fpses where you have to aim with one thing and move with something else. I prefer games like Goldeneye or Metroid Prime where you stop and aim. Because of this I'm usually a sitting duck. Worst yet, after you get pass the shootings, you are introduced to a fight. The fights in this game are awful. All I do is find out a couple moves and do them and hope I can outlast the opponent. The makers of this game can't be faulted for ambition, but they fell short in these two parts of the game.

So that leaves us with the adventure part, which is fortunately the best part. To me, Omikron was trying something where Grand Theft Auto 3 eventually succeeded. Omikron attempted to give you big cities to explore where you can find all kinds of things to do. Maybe I'm remembering the history of games wrong, but it seemed like a big step forward from the N64/PS generation. There's not too many things that's worth checking out, but this game does have stuff like videos, magazines, and a few interesting places to check out. In keeping with the cold futuristic theme, there's a few strip clubs. One of those places has one of those booths where you put a quarter in the machine and you watch a girl do stuff. Since it's a T rated game, and the graphics are better then previous generation but still primitive, you wonder why they would bother, except for atmosphere, I guess. Again, the game feels like an early try to be what the GTA3 series became.

After spending some time as a cop, you will eventually become a target of the police. As you escape from the first city, you get blown away by a robot. You get rescued as you find out that you have the ability to switch bodies, even after you die. You touch a bald-headed nurse and she's your first switch (unless you figure out how to switch before getting blown away.) I remember playing the game the first time and it seemed like I was a nurse for almost as long as the cop. Her bald head was annoying me for a while. It was around this time that I found this game's version of Zion. I think there was a quest where the whole poin was to hijack a sattelite so the Zion computer leader could broadcast a dumb message to tell everybody to wake up. Yeah, that'll work. What else is on?

As the game goes on, I think the cities grow less interesting. I would have actually liked to play a game where you're just a cop in a Blade Runner world doing things. The ability to morph into other people is an ok gimmick, but it doesn't let you do much. If you could steal a body and then pretend to be that person it would be interesting, but as far as I can tell, the most that changes is your stats (which I never paid attention to) and the apartment key you have. There aren't anymore wives in the game so the most you can do in an apartment is steal stuff and watch a holographic video or two. Seems like a wasted opportunity.

The game itself has some programming problems. There are many, many times where you'll run into some lag problems. I got stuck quite a few times, and buying hints in the game didn't help me. (I have an account at ign.com because of this. Gamefaqs only has a FAQ for people you can jump into.) When you jump into water, there's a very noticible pause as the game switches control schemes. The graphics are ok from a distant, but like I said earlier, too primitive for it's ambitions. People aren't detailed enough, like the David Bowie character. He deserves better as he sings "Survive."

Anyway, I thought I would say more, but my thoughts are jumbled right now and I'm having trouble finding a way to tie them all together. Let's just say that this was an interesting experiment that I wish was better. If there's a sequel, they'll probably release it for a system I don't have or plan to get.


Out of five stars, I give this game a ranking of: Coulda been a contender.


Oh, and say no to this guy: http://youtube.com/watch?v=y9lQX3kAIGI

The Games I've Played #1

Yeah, there hasn't been much activity going on lately. My heart hasn't been into it the last couple weeks. So to fill space, let's look at a video game I've played. I'll give my random thoughts on the game.



Today's game is Donkey Kong for the Atari 800.



My dad and uncle bought about a couple dozen Atari computer games but most of them stayed with Uncle Buddy. Donkey Kong was one of the few that we kept at our house. I still think it's the best of the home versions.

As you can see the sprites are all squashed and a little fat. The barrel level only has four floors. The cement mix level doesn't have retractable ladders. The game also has less color and has a blueness to it. (I never noticed this at home because I could never get color with our crummy game switchbox.) You'll note that Pauline is a brunette, like they made her in the last Donkey Kong DS game. It has all four levels, which makes it better then the NES version and the levels are in the proper order, which makes it more accurate then the Donkey Kong 64 version.

What makes this game great is that it's really fast. Mario is really quick and Donkey Kong can throw several barrels down at you. I love the arcade game, but it is slow compared to this version.

One funny thing about this game is that it has rubber walls. You can actually jump at a wall and if your toe touches it, you'll jump backwards and land safely. You can avoid a firefox this way. I forget if this is in the arcade version, although I wouldn't waste a quarter to find out. Other funny things include the fact that you could steal rivets by touching them slightly with your feet on the right side and the fact that you could score poins by jumping up and slightly missing the spring.

The instruction manual mentions that this was the brief time where Mario was a carpenter. It also mentions that you should be careful climbing ladders because the barrels have a mind of your own. When I was a kid, I took this literally.





On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this game a ranking of "Desert Island Game."