PrintStar’s Blog

Another Retrochallenge has come and gone.  Alas, I did not win this year’s Winter Warm-up, but honorable mention makes me fell special.  Congratulations to the winners this year!  I do love to see TCP/IP statics needlessly implemented on all types of machines.

I’m quite pleased with my challenge this year.  Playing and reviewing a game a day was unbeleivably time consuming, so I think my wife is most relieved that the challenge has ended.  I was able to go back to revisit some of my youth for January.  I must say that the best part of the Retrochallenge was realizing that a game was far better than I remembered.  I think the surprises this time around for me were Flightmare, Arctic Adventure, Moraff’s Entrap, and Halloween Harry.  There were plenty that were just as fun as I remembered, but only a few that were way worse than I recalled.

After this challenge, I think I plan on taking the time to play a few more of these games if I can find the time. All of them made me smile at least a bit regardless of how wrong I was about their qualities (I’m looking at you, Ranadinn).

The next Retrochallenge will probably involve my going back to something creative.  While my grammar improved considerably during this challenge, I have to say that my programming skills (or whatever you might call them…) languished considerably.

I hope everyone else had as much fun this past January as I did!

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The final game for 2010 Retrochallenge Winter Warm-up is the spectacular platformer Halloween Harry.  This game, published by Apogee Software but developed by Interactive Binary Illusions and Sub Zero, has a somewhat interesting history.  The original title was Halloween Harry, but Apogee felt that this name was misleading, implying a Halloween-themed game.  The game was then re-released by Apogee as Alien Carnage.  The two names are interchangeable, but the developers originally used the title Halloween Harry.

In Halloween Harry, aliens travel to Earth with plans to enslave the human race.  Halloween Harry’s job, as one of Earth’s last hopes, is to travel from an orbiting space station to Earth to defeat the aliens and their zombified human slaves.  While there, Harry must also rescue a number of hostages who have not yet been turned into Zombies.  These hapless hostages are usually well-endowed women, who just love Harry, or thankful businessmen.  All this story is communicated to the user via cut scenes at the beginning of the game.

The cut scenes are a little silly because the facial expressions are animated arbitrarily.  Harry will move his mouth while speaking and occasionally speak.  The cut scenes are completely worth it, though because you get to see the lovely Diane.

Diane remains on the space station giving Harry occasional tips and assistance.  I was quite taken with this blue-haired woman in my adolescent days, and I think I used to sit through all the initial cut scenes every time I played.  She also seems to like guns, which is a nice personality trait.  Diane always holds a special place in my heart

The platform play itself is fantastic.  While it does incorporate most of the basic platform elements, the game does not use jumping.  Instead, Harry’s backpack has thrusters, so the player can fly up and down during gameplay.  The thruster fuel is also linked to Harry’s flamethrower.  While playing, one has to keep an eye on how much they use the flamethrower and thrusters to make sure he or she doesn’t get stuck anywhere.

When fuel does begin to run low, the levels have P.O.W. machines, which appear to be fuel vending machines, to refuel the flamethrower/thrusters.  Some of the P.O.W. machines also feature other weapons for Harry to upgrade his arsenal.  These weapons include heat seeking missiles, a photon gun, a grenade launcher, a nuke weapon, and the Omega, Diane’s personal favorite (watch the cut scenes).  I personally stuck with the flamethrower and missile launcher most of the time.  To refuel, however, you need to put coins in the machine; coins are occasionally found after an enemy, aliens or zombies, are killed.

One infuriating but sensible feature of the game is that Harry is required to rescue all hostages before advancing beyond a level.  Since there is no way to see where hostages might be without fully exploring a level, this task can be time-consuming. The first level, for example, was a real challenge.  I had a hell of a time finding the last hostage, although she was quite grateful.

The game is highly refined as far as MS-DOS platformers go.  The artwork in the game is well done, the sound effects on the PC speaker are adequate, and the control scheme is responsive and configurable.  One nice feature, although small, is that obviously a considerable amount of thought went into making the menus pleasant.  Many platformers resort to some ugly, disjointed menu system (some other Apogee games come to mind), but Halloween Harry uses menus that are consistent with the feel of the game.  The cut scenes do a great job at explaining the game, although sometimes people might complain that Diane is somewhat wordy.  The use of thrusters rather than jumping adds another fun dimension to the game, and the large arsenal available gives the game a reasonable amount of variety.

I should point out that, once again, Apogee created an installer that doesn’t fit on a disk (in the shareware version).  The installer measures in at 1.6 megabytes.  Since I was really excited to play this game, I did figure out a way to split the installer on GNU/Linux and reassemble the file in MS-DOS, a nice feature Microsoft included in the copy command.

Halloween Harry turned out to be better than I remembered.  The game itself is fun to play (I mostly remembered the cut scenes) and can be challenging at times.  I played through the first two levels, a big time commitment, but I plan on playing this game some more after the Retrochallenge wraps up.  I highly recommend this game to everyone.

• Alien Carnage (shareware edition)

Apogee, in 2000, released the full version of the game as freeware with permission from the original developers.  This game runs perfectly under DOSBox, so I would actually recommend the complete version.

• Alien Carnage (full version) from Apogee
• Alien Carnage (full version) from me (slow…)

This game also had a sequel, called Zombie Wars, which I have never actually seen.  Apparently Halloween Harry was popular enough that the developers were planning on a television cartoon featuring Harry, Diane, and others.  Have a look around the Halloween Harry Webshrine for tons of fun!

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing // 1 Comment »

Zone 66 is another spectacular offering from Epic Megagames.  Actually, Epic was only the publisher on this top-down shooter; the game was developed by a company called Renaissance.  The game itself is somewhat difficult to classify as it is neither a side scroller or a vertical scroller.  Rather, Zone 66 scrolls in all directions while providing a top-down flying experience. 

Above is the main menu, but the game presents some interesting cut scenes prior to reaching the menu.  The entire basis for the game is introduced initially, first with some anime-styled animations followed by a significant amount of text to read.  The game takes place in the not-so-distant future where one world government rules the planet.  The player is an ex-fighter pilot who is seeking revenge for the death of his wife and child.

The animations are brief, but the quality is suprising, especially given the relatively small size of the game, measuring under one megabyte when zipped up.

As I explained earlier, Zone 66 is a top-down flying shooter that allows 360 degrees of movement by the player.  The shareware version comes with one level, a series of tropical islands that must be purged of all the enemy installations.  The game allows the choice of aircraft, a DFA Bomber and a Fauchard fighter.  The fighter offers speed at the expense of armor and payload, but the bomber has far more payload capacity.  Furthermore, contorl problems in the game make the higher speeds a moot point.

Unlike yesterday’s game, the ground below the aircraft is interesting and detailed.  Furthermore, the enemy installations are heavily defended with ground defenses, including missile launchers and a variety of guns.  The installations are also guarded by a variety of aircraft who seemingly never stop coming after the player’s aircraft.  However, these aircraft can be stopped by destroying their landing and launching pads.

Which brings me to the aircraft weaponry.  The player can equip their aircraft with guided missiles, which can be used to take down enemy aircraft, or a variety of bombs.  I started with normal bombs because of my naivety, but the larger bombs are entirely worth the lower payload count.  It should be noted that the player’s aircraft also comes with guns, but the guns cannot be used to attack ground targets.  The player must rely on bombs alone to destroy enemy installation.  The heat-seeking missiles are life-savers as well as the computer AI, even on the “Bad” setting, is pretty damn wily.

As I mentioned a couple of times, the game controls seem problematic.  The game uses the keyboard exclusively for control; arrow keys control turning and acceleration, Shift fires missiles, Control or Space shoots guns, and Z drops bombs/uses special flight modes.  However, there were some keyboard glitches on the 486.  While using a true AT keyboard, the Shift key would often become stuck, causing all my missiles to fire and my other controls to sieze up.  Thinking it was the keyboard, I decided to switch out the AT keyboard for a PS/2 keyboard (with adapter, of course).  This changed helped partially resolve the problems, but sticking still did occur occasionally.  Zone 66 runs in an odd memory mode and no sticking has ever occurred on any other games, so I’ll attribute the problems to this game specifically.

Zone 66 takes some siginficant trial and error to get a working strategy.  I was ready to give up on this game early on because of dying almost constantly.  I finally found a strategy that worked specifically for me.  I would arm myself with about ten missiles and 7 of the “Megabombs” each flight.  Then I would approach an enemy installation at speed and fire off a large quantity of both heat seeking missiles and bombs, more or less in a random fashion.  Once either one of my ammunitions were gone or my damage was close to complete, I’d turn and head back for the landing pad.

The first lesson in Zone 66 is that one must return to the landing pad often for rearming.  The game allows the player to land whenever necessary at safe landing pads to refuel, rearm, and repair any damage.  This fact was originally lost on me during my first attempt at playing Zone 66.  I had much better luck later in the day during my second session once I actually figured out the need for this.  Also, when shot down, the player can simply continue, which is a nice touch.

Using my strategy of large bombs, lots of missiles, and landing almost constantly, I successfully defeated the shareware episode.  This win took a significant amount of time, but the game was fun enough that I never noticed.  I also died plenty during this campaign, using eighteen continues in total.  When a continue is used, the player’s score is zeroed out.  However, after completing the entire shareware episode, the highest score from all those continue sessions is logged as the player’s high score.  My highest today was 554, I believe.

Zone 66 is a spectacular game once a player gets used to it.  The game’s unique gameplay, allowing movement in all directions, makes it far more interesting than a basic vertical scroller.  Building on top of this gameplay is the strategy necessary to make gameplay last more than a handful of seconds.  The game requires siginificant skill to do well, but a beginner can learn thanks to the unlimited continues available to the player.  Although the controls can be problematic, the game is nevertheless a riot.  Epic has produced another winner with Zone 66.

• Zone 66

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing // Add Comment »

I had high hopes for today’s scrolling shooter, Raptor.  This game follows the proven formula for shooters, emulating many of its commercial bretheren.  In my opinion, the game is attempting to be a Raiden clone with some minor attempts to exceed the arcade and multiplatform classic.  However, Apogee and its developer, Cygnus Studios, fell short on a few aspects.

The game definitely has production value.  When starting the game, the player can sit through a simple cut sceen showing the Raptor aircraft flying towards a city in ruins.  One would expect the production value to be high, however, as the game is the largest yet in this Retrochallenge, measuring in at nearly two megabytes compressed.  Uncompressed, the game requires about five megabytes, probably for the graphics.

This size might seem silly to talk about, but it is actually quite a problem.  The game as downloaded cannot fit on a single high-density floppy disk.  I have been using floppies to move games onto my 486, but this game presented some nasty issues.  The archive does not simply contain the game files, but rather Apogee’s silly installer, which is nothing but a glorified decompression program.  One file within the Apogee installer measures in at nearly 1.8 MB, again making this game impossible to fit onto a floppy.  I had to launch DOSBox, install the game, then rezip the contents into two separate zip files and transfer the resulting zips via two floppy disks.

This nuisance annoyed me, but I was a determined man.  However, for a shareware program, this process presents a problem.  At least in my case, much of the shareware I acquired through friends via floppy disk.  Raptor, in its base archive distribution, simply doesn’t fit on a floppy.  Apogee managed to completely eliminate this distribution stream, a major technique in the early nineties, with Raptor.

Anyway, I suppose I should begin with reviewing the game.  After selecting new game, the player is allowed to create a profile.  This process involves selecting the player’s face from four available (not exactly a large selection), entering the player’s name, and the player’s pilot handle.  Personally, I’m torn on the two-name requirement.  I suppose some people might want to use “Iceman” or “Bandit” for handles while keeping a more formal “Nathan Scott Phillips” in the full name slot.  I simply found it to be redundant.

After creating a pilot, the player is presented with the access to the base.  The above picture is static other than some simulated welding flashes, so its a bit underwhelming.  The player has a handful of options on this screen, namely saving, purchasing junk for their plane, or flying a mission.  A new pilot is given 10,000 credits initially to make purchases, so a trip to the supply bay might be worth it.

The supply bay offers the player the opportunity to buy energy capsules, something called an ion scanner, or a whole bunch of really expensive ammunition and shields.  For new players, one hint is to return and purchase the overpriced energy capsules after each level.  Raptor seems to be stingy with the in-game energy, so purchasing some explicitly might be a good plan.  My propensity to save lead to my demise just as the second level’s boss flew onto the screen.

The gameplay itself is what one would expect in a top-down shooter.  A notable feature of Raptor is that nearly the entire game is dedicated to the actual game, relegating statuses to the thin side bars.  While this might seem to be a feature, the lack of a Raiden-like side bar makes the game feel somehow less polished in my opinion.  I’m probably wrong, though.

The game can be controlled via mouse, but I chose to play using the keyboard.  The Control key is used for firing, the arrow keys control movement, and the Alt key causes the game to make a noise as if tyo suggest it has a function that I’m not allowed to access.  The fire key, however, can simply be held the entire time.  The bullets, however, are a bit on the lame side, and the PC speaker sound effects only act to enhance that perception.  The game “felt” more fulfilling once I found some air-to-air missiles.

The gameplay is adequate.  On the 486, the game played slow but smooth.  The types of enemies I encountered were pretty standard for this type of game, and the enemy variety was limited at best.  I was able to dodge almost all enemy bullets without issue on the 486.  The game ran considerably smoother on DOSBox, but that didn’t make it better necessarily.  The surface the plane flies over is very uninteresting, featuring occasional enemy structures and bridges.  Hardly any bonus items were found while flying missions, which was also disappointing.

Raptor, while it had a lot of promise, was underwhelming.  The game doesn’t offer anything beyond other top-down shooters except being available for MS-DOS.  A quick Internet search session reveals, however, that I may be in the minority with this review of Raptor.  Personally, I would suggest people look for alternative vertical-scrolling shooters.  Raptor is acceptable, but I guess I may have been spoiled by Raiden for the Atari Jaguar.

• Raptor

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing // 1 Comment »

The first Duke Nukem initiated one of the more famous video gaming franchises.  Duke Nukem began as another platformer from Apogee Software with striking similarities to Secret Agent.  Duke Nukem, however, has some characteristics that help it appeal to a much wider audience.

Duke Nukem is much closer to a classic platformer than Secret Agent in that it does not involve a “map screen,” but, rather, relies on a linear progression of levels.  Duke himself is also somewhat more of a badass than Agent 006 ever was, as is apparent from the simplistic cut scenes and sparse “dialog.”  In this game, Duke is trying to fight back against Dr. Proton, who is attempting to conquer Earth.  The game’s simplistic story line is somewhat irrelevant as the game is mostly just a basic shoot-to-kill platformer.

The screen in Duke Nukem is smaller than Secret Agent.  While this initially seems like a major detriment, I would guess that it helps the game run much faster than Secret Agent on slower machines.  The smaller play screen, however, does lead to issues with jumping into unknown areas.  For example, I found myself blindly jumping over spikes, making the assumption that safety was on the other side based on the process of elimination.

While the screen size is somewhat detrimental, Duke’s resilence makes up for the many surprises a player will find whizzing into the field of vision.  The health of Duke Nukem seems quite forgiving; a player can sustain many, many hits before Duke will go down, probably because he’s a true badass.  Also, there are plenty of health-enhancing treats around the screen, like turkey legs and soda (obviously Coke by the looks of it).

Another treat in Duke Nukem is the relatively easy levels, at least at the beginning.  My biggest complaint with Secret Agent was the extreme difficulty of some of the initial levels I visited.  Duke Nukem features the exact opposite trait.  I handily defeated the first two levels quickly.  In fact, I was shocked when I reached the exit of Level 2 because I had played for a matter of minutes at most and the screen still clearly showed areas I had not visited.  I would assume that as one traverses the levels, they become progressively more difficult. I should mention that, while the levels were quickly cleared, I managed to have Duke run into countless enemies along the way.  Thankfully, the turkey legs were plentiful.

The artwork in Duke is pretty good.  The levels I began with did not feature any shockingly different settings, so I can’t describe the game as visually stunning by any means.  However, the game is what I would consider above-average graphically due to the level of detail in the pixel art.

Another fun component of Duke Nukem is the extreme point run-ups possible.  I think I ended the game with about 160,000 points on the third level, which I assume is nowhere near the end of the game.  While it sounds shallow, there is some appeal to games with large point totals as it fools the player into thinking they are truly kicking ass.  Also, the game’s use of “Secret Tips,” like the one shown above, allows a new player to learn the game without having to sit through instructions.

Duke Nukem is a fun, easy platformer that appeals to a wide audience.  The game builds the simplistic story through cut scenes rather than lengthy texts, instructs the user via in-game tips, and starts players at rather simple levels.  These characteristics are enough to keep most players interested until they’ve invested enough time that they’ll want to complete the game.  Duke is an above-average platformer that I’d recommend to all the fans of the later Duke Nukem games.

• Duke Nukem

Duke Nukem was actually already installed on my 486’s hard drive, which was a convenient surprise.  The game ran flawlessly, and the reasonable use of the PC speaker didn’t leave me wishing I had a Soundblaster.

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Today’s screenshots are compliments of Mobygames - please go have a look at their site

Jazz Jackrabbit is a classic platformer from Epic Megagames that will knock the socks off anyone playing console platformers in the 1990s.  This game is a quite different than the earlier Epic offering in this Retrochallenge, ZZT.  Epic truly built a masterpiece with Jazz Jackrabbit.

The first thing a player notices when starting Jazz Jackrabbit (after getting past some silly setup demands) is the high production value.  Prior to the title screen the game plays a smooth full screen animation of Jazz himself sliding onto the screen, then running off.  This nice touch jammed into a shareware game is the player’s first glimpse of the polish that went into creating Jazz Jackrabbit.

The point of Jazz Jackrabbit is to defeat some evil turtles who have run off with your girlfriend, Eva Earlong.  For reference, all turtles in the game are therefore enemies.  The shareware version is quite limited, as I’ll explain, but I would guess Epic sold a boatload of Jazz Jackrabbit registrations based on the quality of the game.

In Jazz Jackrabbit, the player travels to different planets to fight the turtles and collect some pointless junk.  The game is similar in action, speed, and gameplay to Sonic the Hedgehog, only it’s free and doesn’t require a Sega Genesis.  In fact, I would argue that Jazz Jackrabbit is the better game since it also incorporates guns and Jazz is a much bigger badass than Sonic ever was.  I can back up that statement by pointing out that Jazz can kill what I assume are baby turtles on the Easy level setting.

In the shareware version, the player can visit three worlds:

• Diamondus - Generally a green world with water and lots of gemstones
• Tubelectric - A darker world filled with electrical dangers and those air tubes they have at bank drive-throughs
• Medivo - A castle-centric red world with far too many loose, floating swords

The world Diamondus appears below:

The weird black clouds and sun above are some sort of graphical artifact - they were in fact white.  Jazz starts the game with a basic blaster, but other weapons are aquired later, including a much bigger gun, a missile launcher, and a grenade launcher.  While the basic blaster comes with unlimited shots, the other weapons’ ammunition must be collected in the game.  However, at least in easy mode, all the weapons do exactly the same damage (apparently).  I was able to find plenty of ammunition during gameplay.  Jazz also seems to be able to withstand a significant amount of damage, but there are plenty of life-giving carrots scattered across the levels.

Finally, one interesting twist in Jazz Jackrabbit is the time limit for each level.  In the screenshot above, one can see approximately 10 minutes remaining to complete the level.  I would assume that increasing difficulty might lower this time limit.  I don’t know if Sonic featured such a limit, but it does add a sense of urgency to Jazz.  I actually came within one minute of losing in one of the Medivo levels.

One aspect of the Jazz level designs I did enjoy was that there seemed to be multiple paths available to the player to progress to the level end.  The levels weren’t as linear as I had expected, and it appeared that the player could make a choice at particular points in terms of what direction to take, but would end up finishing regardless.  The levels also contain arrows as hints suggesting which way the player might like to explore.

After completing Medivo, I was ready to call it a night since I had defeated six levels in all.  The next world after Medivo was labeled “Guardian,” so I stuck around to see what the next level held.  Sure enough, the game left me in a Medivo-like level to fight a boss.  The boss in Easy mode was comically easy to defeat.  At that point, the shareware game ended.  Actually I liked how they concluded by showing Eva all tied up asking the player to hurry up with a turtle threatening her.  From that screen, it progressed directly into a screen outlining how to order the full registered version.  The sales pitch was effective, and it almost made me call Epic begging for the registered version.

Jazz Jackrabbit is a spectacular game for MS-DOS systems with VGA cards.  I highly suggest people give this classic a shot.  The game is fast-paced and exciting, although a beefy machine (a 486) might be necessary to play.  For a challenge, I would recommend playing the game on at least Normal difficulty.  With a game like Jazz Jackrabbit, it’s no surprise that Epic grew into the successful behemoth it is today.

• Jazz Jackrabbit

The screenshots today are all referenced back to the Mobygames website.  Normally I create all my screenshots just before writing the entry, but Jazz Jackrabbit had some serious issues under DOSBox.  Specifically, the arrow keys didn’t work, which makes choosing menu items difficult.  The game did not run at all under Dosemu either.

However, those who wish to play Jazz Jackrabbit on modern systems are in luck!  The OpenJazz project has rebuilt the game as open source to run on just about anything.  For example, I have Jazz Jackrabbit on my Wii.

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing // Add Comment »

Today’s game represents the first of the last in my mind as the conclusion of Retrochallenge Winter Warm-up 2010 approaches.  Secret Agent, sometimes referred to as Secret Agent Sam by myself, is a platform game from Apogee for EGA or VGA systems.  The game is very similar to Commander Keen except the plot is obviously different.  The game is also interesting in that it was internally developed at Apogee, unlike some of their other offerings that were simply published by Apogee.

The title screen is somewhat unique because it moves up and down, scrolling to show some meager credits.  One should note that the game artwork is credited to George Broussard, a well-known Apogee name who was also responsible for Arctic Adventure.

The game begins on a map screen, similar to many of the Apogee platformers.  The main character, Agent 006, has been tasked with destroying the base of the Diabolical Villain Society, or DVS, an organization that has stolen the plans for a space-based laser known as “Red Rock Rover.”  For some reason, the DVS headquarters are on a tropical island.  The player must guide Agent 006 through many installations, taking out radar dishes along the way.

The levels in this game are significantly larger and more difficult than Arctic Adventure.  While Arctic Adventure, an earlier game granted, had static screens in the sense that no scrolling occured, Secret Agent has large, challenging levels that do move along with the player.  The game controls are pretty standard for a PC game of this era.  The player movement is controlled via either the arrows or number pad, jumping is achieved with Control, and shooting is handled via Alt.  There is no “use” action when near an object that would need such a control; instead, the game simply responds when the player touches something.  This system is pretty convenient in the sense that the player doesn’t have to stop and try every little piece of background object to see if it responds to touch.

As I said above, the levels in this game are killer.  I tried about six levels and was able to complete only one.  This game is pleasant in the sense that many levels are available right off the bat rather than being forced to progress through some terrible line of levels.  The variety might be present to lure casual gamers into registering this shareware.

The level shown above was a really nasty one that I must have attempted ten or more times, dying every single time somehow.  As you can see, the level artwork is extensive, and the screen contains a large amount of animation at any given time.  For example, in the above picture, the shark in the water was moving, the radar dish just lower and to the right of screen center was oscillating, and the platform above the water was moving back and forth.  While this layout makes for a terrible headquarters, the level offers a big challenge for any aspiring secret agent.

The controls for the game are actually excellent.  The keyboard was responsive, and movement was sensible.  The game seems forgiving with respect to edges, always a welcome trait in a platformer.  The game does seem to require a “beefcake” computer for the era.  My 486DX/33 ran the game fine at 33 MHz, but releasing the turbo button, downclocking to 16MHz, caused the game to operate at less-than-optimal speeds.

The level above was the only level I was able to beat tonight.  I was suprised at my bad luck in this game, but I believe my losses were a result of the game’s lack of a ramp-up in difficulty.  Many of the levels initially accessible to the player are just plain hard.  The example above also shows an example of an enemy.  A robot can be seen in the bottom right corner of the screen.  The game features a variety of robot enemies.  However, the best enemies are the humans.  The game has different classes of human enemies, and shooting them knocks them down a class.  The best I saw was a guard with a gun, followed by a few ninja classes, and finally some lame, slow guards.  Human enemies tended to be a big drain on ammunition, so obtaining any extra ammo during gameplay is advisable.

In summary, Secret Agent is a great example of platformers for MS-DOS from the early 1990s.  I was suprised to see the amount of detail that went into the levels and artwork in this game.  However, Secret Agent is a particularly difficult platformer.  I would not classify it as a great game for beginners or impatient people.  I believe that if I had gotten more used to the game (like over a week), I’d have had much better luck.  I’d recommend Secret Agent to any experienced platformer fan.

• Secret Agent

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing // 1 Comment »

Today’s game is the second in a series of Moraff offerings.  Moraff’s Morejongg is an interesting implementation of Mahjongg for MS-DOS machines.  Like other Moraff offerings for DOS, Morejongg is implemented across a host of graphics modes.  The game should work under CGA graphics, but can be used at high resolution on certain VGA cards.

My Retrochallenge 486 includes a sweet 512KB Trident video card.  Morejongg claims to support some extended modes with this card, but I had little luck outside the standard VGA modes.  For an initial attempt, I tried playing the game in 640×480x16colors mode, but the tiles were indecipherable (in my opinion).  I resorted to using the game in 320×240x256colors, which made the game tiles look better.

The game also supports a mouse, but the user needs to load a standard DOS mouse driver before proceeding.  There was no mention of needing a mouse driver until I attempted to use it within the game.  A keyboard for Morejongg is simply brutal, so I highly recommend loading one first.  Also, if you’ve forgotten the driver, you’ll need to reset the system, which I’ll explain further on.

The game offers three modes of play:

I actually played the middle one, which is referred to as Mega Morejongg, mostly because I completely misunderstood the menu.  The main menu itself is quite disjointed, mostly due to Steve Moraff’s incessant advertising.  The advertising in Moraff’s Entrap was actually a little precious, and it made me giggle when I first saw it.  The advertising in this game, however, is infuriating.  Back to the game…

I chose a 256 color mode because the tiles were hard to see in 16 colors.  Moving to 256 colors, however, didn’t seem to help much.  The game also allows the player to specify the tile background; I highly recommend gray or another neutral color.  Some of the backgrounds are actually constantly changing gradients which, while interesting, make the tiles difficult to differentiate.  The screenshots above all are taken in 256 color mode, so even high color (for the era) doesn’t help all that much with the quality of the graphics.

Playing the game isn’t the greatest experience.  The mouse cursor is actually a square or something that looks like it’s drawing incorrectly.  Determining which tile the player is over is difficult as well.  I became stuck on a few occasions, but the game thankfully has a hint system.  The hint system is maddening, though, as it illustrates every single available match currently on the board.  Showing a single hint would be sufficient, and showing all available matches can take forever in certain situations.  The hint system did reveal that some tiles that did not strictly “match” were actually matches for each other.  Perhaps these “matches” would be acceptable in a high resolution game with better artwork, but such a system doesn’t work with the provided tiles.  The tiles can be swapped out for other sets, which might help.

Once the player has completed a board, meaning no further matches exist, a large amount of statistics are provided.  It should be noted that the score descends as the player makes matches on the board.  The statistics screen enhances the simple scoring (one point per tile) with time elapsed and a few other meaningless quantities that elude my memory.

This game contains a shockingly annoying set of “nags” when trying to exit.  Whereas Entrap’s nagging was somewhat charming, Morejongg is just plain annoying.  To exit the game, the player is required to view a graphical “Please buy some games,” screen.  After pressing any key, the user is presented with a screen stating that the user can press P to print out a handy catalog or press ESCAPE to continue; no other keys work at this point.  This screen is undoubtedly to block the people who just smack the space bar.  After pressing ESCAPE, the user must next page through summary after summary of other Moraff games.   In total, there are six screens describing other games.  The user can simply hit any key to proceed on each, but Moraff has added a timer, forcing the user to sit on each screen for five seconds or so.  This type of advertising is simply annoying.  Above I recommended simply reseting the computer to exit Morejongg as it is the quickest way to get back to a DOS prompt.

All in all, Morejongg is not one of my favorites during this challenge.  I had high hopes for the game after playing Moraff’s Entrap, but this game is somewhat disappointing.  Back in the early 1990s, Moraff’s Morejongg may have been acceptable, being one of the only computer Mahjongg implementations available.  However, in these modern times, far better implementations are available.  For that reason, I thank Steve Moraff for introducing me to Morejongg with this offering.

• Moraff’s Morejongg

I was surprised to find that Morejongg did not load at all on the Tandy 1000 HX.  The system simply froze after starting the executable.  The game ran fine on the 486 depending on my video mode selection.

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing // Add Comment »

Moraff’s Entrap is a odd little game from Steve Moraff.  Moraff games were well known in the early days of Super VGA for somehow managing to make the most out of any of the many chipsets available early on.  Entrap, for example, can be played in a variety of graphics modes, from lowly CGA all the way up to 800×600 Super VGA.  I played the game today in 640×480 VGA with medium performance on the 486 as 800×600 mode was far too slow.

The game itself is an interesting puzzle.  On a quasi-3D board, the player must navigate from one end to the other while avoiding robots that are programmed to kill.  This task is complicated by the playing board itself.  The board is made up of tiles and voids.  The player can remove a tile in any direction from where he or she is standing by pressing Shift+<direction>.  The directions are controlled via the number pad, and the diagonal equivalents work as well.  Voids can be subsequently filled in with a tile using the Alt+<direction> combination.  The game board itself appears as shown below:

The game does not occur in real-time.  In other words, when the player makes one move, the robots do as well.  One nasty detail is that removing or adding tiles also counts as a move, meaning the robots can take the opportunity to move while the player remains stationary.

While the game is visually stunning (at least in VGA mode), it is also fun to play.  A significant amount of strategy is necessary to progress at all.  I was able to make it close to the end of Level 3 before I was captured, but even that attempt required a handful of unsuccessful attempts that didn’t even get beyond Level 1.  The map in the upper left of the screen is invaluable because often the robots can enter from the sides of the visual game board and the path towards the end must be pre-planned long in advance.

The graphics are uncomplicated, but the game itself is visually stunning.  I specifically wanted to include this game in my Retrochallenge this year because of the amazing use of colors on VGA hardware.  Moraff games early on were known mostly for utilizing VGA hardware to its fullest potential, but many of the Moraff games would also work on lowly CGA systems.  Sadly, the game did not work at all on the Tandy 1000 HX, but that may be due to the Tandy’s eccentricities.  An example shot from DOSBox in CGA mode is shown below:

One odd feature of the version of Moraff’s Entrap that I played today was that it also included advertisements for AMD math coprocessors.  I’m not sure if this was some sort of deal between Steve Moraff and AMD.

Some of the additional information available from the menu is entertaining as well.  I highly suggest that everyone read through some of the “Important People and Friends” entries.  Mr. Moraff seems to be advertising a screenplay via this game as well.  I think Steve Moraff has really taken advantage of the Shareware model to try and sell as much as possible through this game (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s simply interesting…).

Moraff’s Entrap is a rather simple game with stunning graphics on the appropriate VGA hardware.  While it does make a nice early-1990s VGA demonstration, the game is also fun to play.  The instructions and this description make Entrap seem easy, but a considerable amount of thinking and strategy is necessary to even make the smallest advances in Entrap.  The game has great replay value simply based on the gameplay, but the colors alone will probably have people coming back for another look.

• Moraff’s Entrap

As I said above, the game does not seem to work correctly on the Tandy 1000 HX.  The screen appears, but the game does not seem to play properly.

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing // 2 Comments »

Today’s game is a nutty, abstract flight simulator from Pie in the Sky Software.  Corncob 3D is a a combat flight game where the player takes a pre-World-War-II fighter plane to fight aliens who invaded Earth in 1938.  The plot of the game really is that silly, but it makes the game entertaining.  The graphics are abstract, most likely due to the hardware available at the time.

The game’s packaging is quite odd.  Everything is started via a batch file, CORNCOB.BAT, which is reasonable.  However, this batch file then proceeds to launch a series of executables.  The oddest part when starting the game for the first time is the game prepartion steps.  On the 486, I had a few minutes to walk away as the game proceeded to decompress jpeg images for use with the game.

This step was odd, but apparently necessary as the decompression algorithm was surprisingly slow.  After getting pas decompression, the story was explained using pictures:

After a few screens such as above and a brief animated movie, the user is presented with a surprising main menu in all text:

The text-based menu was a shock after the animation and graphics, but the menu is understandable as Corncob 3D has plenty of options, some quite complex.  I decided first to try a training mission, but the menu system informed me that training missions were considerably harder than simple combat missions.  I instead opted for a normal combat mission for my first attempt, which brought up the theater of operations menu.

I opted for Atkinsville on my first flight.  Once happy with the settings, the game can be started.  It is apparent that the batch file kicks off yet another executable to run the game at this point.

The graphics in Corncob 3D are pretty basic, but they are adequate for the game.  The controls are simple, with the plane’s stick being controlled via the number pad, the rudder controlled by Z and X, and the gun fired with SPACE.  There are a pile of other commands for throttling, dropping bombs, controlling flaps, etc., and the necessary commands can always be seen by pressing F4 at any point.

The plane itself is a bit hard to get used to.  The controls come off feeling a bit “squishy.”  Trying to aim the gun is hard because the keyboard control simply isn’t accurate enough for the game.  I believe a joystick, which this game supports, might be a necessity for Corncob 3D.  As a younger man, I did often have joysticks for my computers, so I would imagine I originally played Corncob 3D.

The graphics in Corncob 3D are very basic.  Most enemies appear as spheres or a combinartion of spheres.  I believe that the black spheres are fuel depots and the white spheres that appear as eyeballs are anti-aircraft guns.  The alien enemy, inexplicably, has no aircraft that “chase” the player around the sky.  However, the enemy does fire missiles at players as they fly by.  Luckily missiles can be shot down by the propeller plane.

I decided to try out the training mission as well since I didn’t do particularly well in pure combat.  One nice feature is that the game allows the player to set their aircraft to invincible mode, making learning and flying much easier.  I was able to complete the primary objective of my training, destroying a flying saucer, by flying directly into it.  I also successfully landed my plan at my base in a safe enough manner that I’d assume it would have worked even using a standard plane rather than invincible.  I tried the same training mission with a real plane several times, each time managing to smash my plane into the ground after suffering heavy damage.

Corncob 3D is a simple game with a ton of promise.  It is unique in being a realistic (with respect to flight controls) simulation that was available as shareware.  The graphics are simplistic but, considering the release date, somewhat impressive in being smooth and seamless on a 486.  I highly recommend this game to anyone with a joystick, and I plan on looking for a game port for my 486 as soon as the Retrochallenge ends.

• Corncob 3D

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing // Add Comment »