Six months ago, I was a retro gamer in possession of NES carts but no Nintendo. Then -- an irony I foresaw -- the cosmic pendulum swung the other way, and now, well, now I am in custody of three machines capable of turning Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges into hours of fun. It never rains but it pours, you know? Weeks prior to my latest retro game party, a long-absent friend finally bequeathed his childhood NES into my arms. But, wouldn't you know it -- no power cable! Cord and transformer arranged -- dang it, pin connector problems and no time to perform the surgery before the party! Then friend #2 brought over a Retron 2 -- playing NES or SNES carts -- for the party in exchange for a surplus PlayStation 2 I sent him home with at the previous party. It enjoyed place of pride hooked up to the big-screen projector all night, a position typically reserved for the a PS2 or something a bit more graphically dazzling. Instead, we rocked out late into the night with Marble Madness and especially Bubble Bobble. Friends 3 were in conflict, celebrating their housewarming that night... but they knew they had game materials for me to inherit, and finally, inherit them I did:
In addition to the (working but cordless, but I already solved that problem) NES, this lot includes a Zapper (which I'm told doesn't function correctly in conjunction with modern televisions), the still-hotly-sought-after Advantage joystick, and a massive pile of games - more than shown here, after I separated four or five duplicates in my existing collection. (The game tally here: Advance Wars - Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS, when they were doing the "cute" business of finding "DS"-abbreviating taglines to append to every game, for the
PS2: Burnout 3, DDRMax2, Front Mission 4, Gran Turismo 3, Gran Turismo 4, SSX Tricky, Tony Hawk's Undeground, and the formidable (two 2-disc sets, though in one case it was just a soundtrack) JRPGs Growlanser Generations and Phantom Brave... plus a couple more NES carts, the generally unremarkable (but appreciated!) Top Gun and Days of Thunder as well as, sticking out of the NES' cart slot there, the 3-in-one of Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt and World Class Track Meet -- a pack-in for NES bundles including both the light gun and the DDR-mat-presaging Power Pad invented by Bandai.)
I'm at the weird point in my collecting where my most exciting lots are no longer finds at thrift stores or garage sales, but friends basically getting out of the old games hobby for good and passing their torch into my bonfire. Will my own collection (now weighing in at some 800 games, Mobygames reports) suffer a similar fate or will I continue to grow it indefinitely? Only time will tell. But until then, please don't forget that I am open to receiving any and all old games (caveat, on owned platforms -- otherwise, down that path lies madness. Though in the fullness of time, I will eventually own working machines of every style and format) that you may care to relieve yourself of.
That said, it's about time I give something back to the game enthusiast community that has enriched me so much. We're approaching a season of steep sales on bundles of games from digital storefronts, and already I have a pile of surplus Steam codes for games I already own. As a reward for loyal readers, and also as a little investigation into whether I HAVE any (I know, there are a few loyal commentators, but the good money has it on the vast majority of my hits being Google Images surfers who never see a word of this loving, painstakingly composed prose -- and a very occasional flood of reference-seekers from Reddit), I'll here kick things off with an offer for the Dreamcast Collection: a $23 value, including PC-playable versions of Sega Bass Fishing, classic driving game Crazy Taxi, Sonic Adventure DX, and the game I bought the collection for -- Space Channel 5 part 2. First to comment to me with their Steam username gets me trying to bequeath my surplus code for that collection to them. This just might be the only blog post you'll read all day that could impart a product of $23 value to you! If there are multiple takers, don't worry -- I have more codes waiting for other products. (But Rowan, you insist, nothing else will hold up as well as Sega Bass Fishing!)
Here we are again -- another full-spread magazine game ad I spliced together from two different pages, resulting in a file so big I had to upload it here for safekeeping. Secretly or not so secretly what I'd rather be blogging about at this point in time are ANSI art renditions of video game characters or the report from my last retro gaming party (summary: NES games finally playable -- Marble Madness and Bubble Bobble big hits -- courtesy of a Retron 3, plus Wii and Xbox 360 now on tap -- if not especially retro) but because those subjects cannot float the blog on its own, I stubbornly keep cranking out occasional magazine scans for an audience of who knows. Today's game: Incubation, by Blue Byte.
Incubation
TIME IS RUNNING OUT
First 10,000 Copies
Include
3 Extra Missions
& A Free Incubation
Watch Offer!
[screenshot]
Lead a squad of up to 10 Space Marines in over 30 terrifying turn-based missions!
[screenshot]
Slaughter the bloodthirsty Scay'Ger with just a point and click using the intuitive interface!
[screenshot]
View the stunning real-time 3D graphics from almost any angle with a free-roaming camera!
"Think X-Com meets Quake and you might see the picture, and subsequently start salivating."
- GamePen
"Incubation looks to be one of the best tactical combat games of the year."
- PC Games
"... Blue Byte has created what has to be one of the best-looking strategy games ever."
- Computer Games Strategy Plus
PC Zone 94%
Score Magazine 10/10
PC Games (Germany) 92%
PC Action 92% - Gold Award
PC Power 91% - Platinum Award
Featuring the Revolutionary Extreme Assault graphics engine!
Also from Blue Byte...
EXTREME ASSAULT
COMPUTER GAMES STRATEGY PLUS
STAMP OF APPROVAL
CG CHOICE
[screenshot]
Command a 21st century attack helicopter and battle tank with simple arcade style controls!
[screenshot]
Fight over 50 intense missions in 6 enormous levels complete with secret caves and tunnels!
That's quite a logo, though it makes the ad illustration a bit painfully redundant -- though gamers always want to know what in-game graphics look like, so perhaps the logo is the redundant part. An attention-grabbing portrait -- looks like a half-alligator half-man, turned inside-out. I guess the 3 extra missions to the early buyers is a kind of early "deluxe edition DLC included" bonus ahead of its time? Does the free Incubation watch tell you how long it will take until you are finished incubating? Or is it just a watchstrap with a face reading "Time Is Running Out"?
Marketing divisions know darned well what the actual numerical limitations of the game are, so "up to 10" or "over 30" is just their cute way of saying "10" and "31". Who are these Scay'Ger and why are they so bloodthirsty? I don't mean to cast aspersions on you, but when the first thing you describe doing to them is "slaughter", it makes me wonder who is the real monster. I liked "point and click using the intuitive interface" right up until the review crowed "think X-Com meets Quake". I don't know what that gameplay would be like (because I haven't played this title), but it's hard to imagine anything about its point and click interface being intuitive.
Make up your minds, reviewers, is it tactics or strategy? I like how the scores are stacked -- like a 94% from PC Zone is harder to achieve than 100% from Score: we didn't only impress the easy-to-impress! I think it's pretty awesome that they named their graphics engine "Revolutionary Extreme Assault" -- you don't end up making backgammon simulators from a product like that! "id Tech" is less impressive on that basis.
Also, they couldn't quite figure out what to do with the second page in the spread, so decided to use part of it reminding you that they also have other, unrelated games for sale.
There, that wasn't so bad. I feel a bit dishonest blogging about games like this I haven't played or even researched, but considering that most of my competition in this field just posts the scans straight without any commentary, I'm still ahead of the pack as long as I produce transcripts and pull some ad blurb interpretation out of ... thin air.
OK, I got one game print ad post out of the way. Y'know what that means? It's time for another session of video game ANSI art appreciation! All right, let's get started:
I hate to mangle that Reset Survivor piece from a Blocktronics pack, but as slight as the eventual video game sprite reference was, I just couldn't pass up its splendidly demented start screen (which the author explains was a take on the Doom II configuration screen.) Now to shake things up, another song! I know that the video game soundtrack remix community is a massive thing which I have just barely scraped the edge of, and I probably won't get into it too extensively here just because blog posts are generally a terrible way to present audio. But this one is special -- another historic exclusive: it was made for Mistigris, my computer art group of the '90s (and just revived for an indefinite time as of this Hallowe'en!), in some vague plan for a game-themed artpack release that never happened. The pack-in-progress had an epic 10-minute-long video game theme megamix that was the subject of tragical data loss, but we still did have Onyx's Castlevania theme from the previous ANSI post and this -- for the first time ever, you can enjoy |<ing /|rthur revisiting the main theme from M.U.L.E. (Unless, as he has recently retroactively been caught doing from time to time, this was him stealing somebody else's sequencing and putting his name on it. But it sounds equally enjoyable and relevant either way!)
We have ... basically, a pile of further posts in this series to get out of the way. The more I delve into the what I thought would be minute pool of video-game themed ANSI artwork, the more I find -- for every post I make, further material is made available to me for two more posts. As the material on my workbench has expanded, I've had the luxury of hashing the pieces out into different themed categories, so you can enjoy comparing and contrasting different approaches to the same subject rather than the jarring and schizoid channel-flipping approach you've seen in previous posts. So this post is a pile of pieces made on rare or singular themes, whereas in the future we will be seeing more sprees on related topics.
Pokémon was a huge video game franchise -- at times singlehandedly floating parent company Nintendo through hard times -- though one under-represented in ANSI art, only emerging as it did in 1996, as this whole culture was in the process of winding down. Here are a few takes on the series' flagship mon(ster), Pikachu the electric squirrel:
Those first two are by Konami, an artist we've already seen in these pages and who will be playing a substantial role in this blog series very soon! And -- not that we'll ever be able to present a complete textmode Poképedia, but here's one more member of the evolving menagerie of hundreds and hundreds of fabulous creatures:
Changing streams, that was a nice Castle Crashers tribute from Blocktronics, and now here's a 67 (blocktronics initials, numeralized) take on another game by The Behemoth, "Alien Hominid".
A couple of stragglers from the Sam & Max love-in we recently shared: a .BIN (typically this just means an extra-wide ANSI), possibly ripped (produced through inauthentic means -- typically miscredited from another artist, or here supposedly machine-converted) -- but we can't argue with the results:
And I don't remember this incident from the Sam & Max game or the comics that inspired it -- could it have originated in their cartoon, perhaps?
Now for a brief change of pace - some "hirez", or high-resolution computer artwork. I found this piece from "Dominion", a logo stumping for Quake II, in my 16-year-old "unreleased computer art" directory and figured -- well, it was relevant to this blog, but some context would need to be provided in order to explain why it was remotely noteworthy at all. In the early days of computer art, people were creative but the tools were lousy -- many works of high-resolution artwork were basically made the same way ANSI is (but with square pixel ratios as in the 80x50 screen mode), with pixel art being plunked down one pixel at a time. (Then once the piece was done came the process of manual anti-aliasing!) When Photoshop came on the scene it was a game-changer, where suddenly your machine could do the heavy lifting and "try out" different variations on themes -- different fonts run through different filters -- as a kind of rapid prototyping. Except previously, where works might be prototyped in notebook sketch pads (as with graffiti artists), here the prototype would also be the finished product... a monkey could churn out dozens of such logos hourly, and the law of averages would ensure that at least a few of them would be worth looking at.
To those not privy to the brave new world -- not running the powerful programs or owning the formidable hardware needed to run them -- it could be difficult to differentiate between work produced through painstaking laborious effort and work produced by a couple of clicks. Then folks who had a hat trick of the skills, the infrastructure, AND sophisticated design sensibilities schooled us in separating the wheat from the chaff, and this sort of thing started to disappear from artpack collections:
We saw him once before -- it looks like here's another ANSI of British bionic secret agent Robocod, aka James Pond:
A surprisingly under-represented game canon here in ANSI-land is the Legend of Zelda. This work starts to address that, with a Link to the Past-era Master Sword by Scarecrow of VOR:
(I didn't notice at the time, but was elite warez group Razor 1911's logo always the Triforce from the Zelda games?)
Once more we have an Air Zonk to share with you, Hudson's futuristic take on caveman Bonk:
And here's something new, also from the ranks of Hudson heroes, a Bomberman:
Here are edited highlights of a much larger (1000-line) work, curated to fit the particular interests of this blog and its readers:
And some Pac-Man for kicks... first a logo:
Then a cartoonish Ms. Pac-Man in watOr's unique style from one of his Echo artpacks:
And before we go, here's one for a BBS named Pool of Darkness -- it's probably not artwork from the SSI AD&D game of the same name, but rather artwork themed after the name of the game, promoting a BBS named after the game. You can't have the art or the BBS (or its name!) without the game, through the game's clammy touch can't necessarily be felt or discerned in the actual content of the art. We saw this kind of thing going on before with Jed's ANSIs for the BBS "Final Fantasy", but I let them in ... because I'm a softie.
How about this: a video game ad from a comic book? I know, didn't think I did those anymore, did you? Truth be known, I wanted to do another video game ANSI post -- looks like I've got 5 or 6 more of them at least! -- but I didn't want this blog to get too consistently off-theme. So off-topic only on alternating posts. Yard sale season is wound down in favour of flood season, so there aren't too many more "here's what I bought" posts in store until summer kicks off again. I do need to make a post about my next retro video game party -- Nov 15th, coming up! -- and about the bonafide '90s-throwback artpack I just released... but this is not going to be either of those.
This ad scan is distinguished by two qualities: a) it's a two-pager spread, and b) the scan skipped the queue because for whatever reason my splicing technique for the two pages resulted in a file of monstrous size, which I horrifiedly uploaded here to clear up the hard drive space. (Strange but true! But, sadly, boring.)
Super HYDLYDE
Enter the Realm of Myths and Legends.
A wise old oracle has predicted the second coming of evil. One young man has been chosen to save Fairyland from the source of the evil and eliminate it. What fate awaits our hero and Fairyland? Only you can answer this question.
[screenshot]
In the cloud city, many important clues and items can be found, and purchased.
[screenshot]
Deep within the Submerged Palace, you search for a space suit, an ancient computer, and other items, while fighting hoards of killer robots.
[screenshot]
Outside the city in the woods, you begin your quest by fighting minor enemies to power your character up for the long quest ahead.
AIR DIVER
Top Secret Briefing:
The details of your mission are top secret. You must find and eliminate enemy terrorists and their evil leader, using your skills as a Top Gun pilot to penetrate enemy lines without detection. It is up to you to save the world from this dark force.
[screenshot] Execute barrel rolls while blasting vulcan guns at the enemy.
[screenshot] After defeating a level, dock inside the Super Transport and be repaired, refueled and restocked with weapons.
[screenshot] Take on the North Pacific region at night; enemies have no chance once they're in your sights!
[screenshot] Specifications on the F-119/Stealth fighter.
Two NEW Exciting Games for GenesisACTION AND ADVENTURE!
"Wise old oracle". Redundant much? Is it possible there was any better translation than Fairyland? One must assume so. I don't care about whether the clues can be found -- but can they be purchased? Thank goodness! I for one am one game player who needs no search for an ancient computer. There's some obvious hordes/hoards muddling going on here, but if robots can be considered mobile objects -- like cars for instance -- could a group of them someone had stored up not be considered a hoard? Some people hoard gold coins, others hoard Impressionist paintings. Me, I hoard killer robots... I store them in the room in front of the closet where I keep my space suit and ancient computer, and other sundry items.
Screenshot number 3 describes the basic gameplay mechanic of CRPGs, not having noticed that AN ASSERTION OF THE WAY A GAME IS PLAYED IS NOT CONSIDERED A SELLING POINT IN AND OF ITSELF. All it establishes for sure is that the use of the term "ADVENTURE" at the bottom of the ad is, as usual, incorrect.
On to the Top Secret Briefing. Hey, did we mention that this briefing was top secret? Your mission is so unexpected and beyond the pale, its contents are highly classified. This time, instead of funding freedom fighters, your mission is to eliminate enemy terrorists. Strange how there's never any shortage of this kind of mission, isn't it? "Just what is a Vulcan gun," I pondered to myself, before Wikipedia answered the question definitively. Getting buffed at the end of a level also isn't a selling point, you guys. Won't it stop being fun playing against enemies who "have no chance"? Also, as a kind of DVD bonus feature for those who love starting their games up and not playing them, we have specifications for the F-119. So you can, I don't know, build a replica in your back yard.
Sorry, gang, my heart just wasn't in it, but rest assured the next time you see this page bubbling over with F4 blocks, I'll be gushy and effusive!
I've already regaled you with choicecuts from the 1980 artpack release of Blocktronics, today's ANSI art supergroup (and let's face it, sole inheritors to a pretty lifeless battlefield). But wouldn't you know it, they've kept on keeping on and, well, there have been subsequent releases -- with new renditions of video game characters and situations in the ANSI medium! It's funny with this weird beat, I can go from showing archival material dug up from 1992 and then zap directly to mid-2014. So has been the power of the enduring cultural relevance of video games, I suppose.
A distinguishing feature of this "WTF4" pack (F4 being one of the function keys bound to displaying the ANSI "block" characters in ANSI editors) is that it contained what must be by far the longest piece of ANSI art ever commissioned -- I won't give you specific numbers, but for a ballpark, it measures about 7 stories end to end -- a group collaboration produced to compete at the Evoke 2014 demoparty (whose ANSI art category it won handily). Though it has recurring themes, the diversity of authors and subjects have resulted in recurring flashes of video game iconography surfacing in the greater work which is basically about something else. It opens as demonstrated below, with a classic gaming reference from the 1983 movie War Games. Then a group logo, and then the classic Konami code. Then some dream imagery, and then a classic arcade cabinet! I'm not sure what game is being advertised on the cab's sides -- there are Q*Berts being shot at by what look like Galaga ships -- but if you look at the joysticks and the screen, you can appreciate a classic smallscale representation of Konami's Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. Finally, the screen dissolves into an unrelated transition, with a lone Space Invader lurking in the eaves.
Another Invader or two turn up over the next few thousand lines, but this is the only other major game-related stop in the so-called "megajoint", a point at which a cubic dreamscape resolves into a playground for Q*Bert.
The pack has much more gameinalia in its other works however. Here, for an audience of Metroid and a panel of Space Invaders, the two great red junk food mascots of the early '90s, 7-Up's "Cool Spot" and Domino's Pizza's "Noid" -- both subjects of their own video games -- duke it out. (I don't see why: their products are complementary, not competing.) Cool Spot seems to be dominant in this conflict, aided perhaps by a line of 1-UP mushrooms.
What's the score again?
A fun thing about this piece -- it started as just a weird amoeba-like tree, but R5 felt it would be a suitable backdrop on which to superimpose the hilariously 4th-wall-breaking Mr. Resetti the mole from the Gamecube classic Animal Crossing. I saw an early draft and recommended a balloon-package to kick it off, and there it is! My contribution to art history.
Enzo has been using ANSI art to illustrate articles about tech for his day job; this is one about the whizbang potential of mobile devices, with a little bit of smallscale Pac-Man action going on in the background.
And there we are. But oh, my gosh! It takes me so long for these blog posts to come out these days that another Blocktronics pack has since come out, containing in it still further video game ANSI art. It's really a vicious cycle. My work is cut out for me. You'll be seeing more video game ANSI from this well-heeled crew of textmode art survivors.
And now, on a different note: Hallowe'en is coming up, and I didn't have enough long coffee breaks and no-work-scheduled days to revisit my month of spooky game ads as I did last year (though World 1-1 has been holding that beat down admirably so far in 2014), but here's something new for this blog: music! In preparation for a 20th anniversary reunion artpack of my Mistigris crew from the mid-'90s, I've been shaking down my computer art archives for unreleased materials I've been sitting on for upwards of 16 years. Here's a tune by Onyx, the 604's prolific Impulse Tracker addict of Sonic Equinox and Delphic Oracle -- and yes, sporadically Mistigris -- executing a tribute to the soundtracks of Konami's very Hallowe'eny Castlevania series, entitled NecroNuke. Enjoy!
I was in Portland a week too soon to partake in its annual Retro Gaming Expo, as I was visiting town for entirely unrelated reasons, but that said -- if your antenna are attuned to the cosmic vibrations of gamery, it will find you. Case in point: this street art showdown on Alberta Street:
I gather that I may have possibly missed for the second year running an opportunity to play Johann Sebastian Joust, a game that basically is pointless to describe if not possible to demonstrate. I did however manage to fortify my gaming book collection at Powell's City of Books, yielding among other finds the "Worlds of Power" novelization of Metal Gear for the NES by "F.X. Nine", described by Fireguard somewhat mordantly:
It's always struck me as bizarre why anyone would write a novelization of Metal Gear but do everything humanly possible to downplay the violence when the people you're hoping will buy the book are kids who like or are at least curious about a game about a commando running around blowing up enemy soldiers and tanks. Then again, the geniuses who dropped Snake behind enemy lines sent him into danger armed with nothing but a pack of cigarettes.
Honestly the book isn't that badly written considering it's adapted from a video game and meant for young readers, but it's nothing to write home about either. It feels more like reading an online walkthrough than an actual story.
Still, my biggest problem is the dissonance between forbidding the writer to have the main character kill his enemies, when it's not only allowed but often encouraged in the game they give tips for at the end of chapters. It's self-defeating, and speaking as a writer that's about the worst thing you can do.
On trips to Powell's, I used to have to scour the sci-fi and children's sections trying to find gamebook and game novelization needles amongst a tremendous haystack. There were always plenty of finds, but I could spend hours combing the stacks. Looks like someone eventually took notice of my very peculiar receipts, as a couple of years back visits to Powell's surprised me with shelves and sections consisting exclusively of this somewhat niche material I'd been prospecting for. I can go right in the front door, walk directly to the shelf, compare what I see with what I have on my "want" list, pay at the front counter and be out within 5 minutes. It's a very different experience, that's for sure!
Portland has plenty to offer game enthusiasts outside the PREX and Powell's -- on previous visits, I have whiled away many a happy hour at the Avalon Nickel arcade. (And, well, some hours there haven't been so happy -- once, I drove over with friends with the express intent of serving skeptics with my formidable Dance Dance Revolution skills, honed in the UBC arcade during picnics with friends on campus, but while exiting the vehicle somehow got my fingertip pinched in a closed (and, eurk, locked) car door. We immediately iced it in a major way, and decided to continue on with our planned activities only to find that the DDR machine had a massive line up. I'd paid my entry to the arcade, but couldn't use my mangled hand (the nail eventually turned black and fell off) to operate any other machines. Sometimes a can-do attitude isn't enough.)
I gather that there are other gaming sites in the good ole PDX -- the name of Ground Kontrol comes up regularly, though somehow I've managed to never go! Also seen in my recent travels was an arcade bar in Eugene, OR, two hours south of Portland -- entitled Level Up. (Google reveals another one in those environs, named Blairally. What I want to know is why Eugene of all places has two arcade bars and there are none here at my home in Vancouver? The answer is, of course, real estate prices. Admittedly the Storm Crow Tavern does come close, but it's conspicuous that the bar owned by the founder of PopCap games -- responsible for Bejewelled and Plants vs. Zombies among others -- takes as its focus the earlier culture of pen and paper tabletop gaming.)
Also down in those parts, we passed a Chuck E. Cheese's. Is that still a going concern? Are they filled with Xbox 360s and iPads now instead of arcade cabinets? Has the pizza gotten any better? Are the robot mascots holograms instead? These and other questions will just have to wait to be answered. Next time, Portland!
Here I am in Portland, and my standard resident "so, here we are in Portland, and it's October, so which IF comp games do you recommend?" conversor is permanently unavailable. Well, rats. But I do have you, the anonymous Internet, so you may have to do. It's true, the 20th annual Interactive Fiction competition is in full swing -- has been for a week or so now -- presenting a vast slate of amateur text adventures, parser and otherwise, for players to enjoy and rate. I believe that this is the first year that comp games with CYOA interfaces have outnumbered those with text parsers, a trend that will likely continue (and something I would explore in greater depth on my other blog if I had the time.) I was going to dip into the archives and pull out an Infocom ad for the occasion, but wouldn't you know, I used them all up this time last year (I have an exciting lead on some more, but they're not quite ready for prime time yet), so I had to take a tip from The Digital Antiquarian and find an ad from Infocom's contemporary genre boom in "Bookware".
How to turn your computer on.
(The following is an actual conversation between Bantam Software and an unusually talkative personal computer).
BANTAM SOFTWARE:
We always ask what turns people on. Now we want to know what turns you on .
PERSONAL COMPUTER:
It's about time someone asked the real expert. What turns me off is boring software. Boring, uninvolving, predictable software. And cold rooms. Why is it always so cold in here?
B: Games and Ahoy magazines called Sherlock Holmes in "Another Bow" one of the year's best.
PC: Let me decide. Okay? (Disk inserted.) Well, this is anything but elementary. You're Holmes. Watson's at your side. And you determine your own fate in case after case. And look, you run into the likes of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Henry Ford, Louis Armstrong. And such graphics! These derive from eariy 20th century photographs. I don't have a clue how you did it, but you have a winner. Next case.
B: The Fourth Protocol, from Frederick Forsyth's gigantic best-selling book. Games called it "nerve-tingling." Here you go. (Slides disk in.)
PC: You mean circuit-tingling. If 1 knew I had to save the world, I would have gotten more sleep. All kidding aside, this involves nuclear weapons. A British traitor. The KGB. And the subversion of NATO. This is a challenge. Will it help if I read the book? (Loud explosion on screen.) Oh no! Does that mean I lost?
B: No, but losing's the whole point of the next one. The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. You know the bestseller.
PC: Why, do I look heavy? Never mind, let's have a taste. (Disk is inserted.) This is some menu. It helps you assess your goals. Monitor your progress. Mix 'n match meals from all five Scarsdale diets. Even prepares your shopping list. It'll tell you how much exercise you need to work off certain foods. Let's see about kiwi tart...
B: We've got one other program.
PC: No more. I'm exhausted.
B: No... this is a rebate program. Just fill out the coupon and mail it with proof of purchase and you get $5.00 back.
PC: Thank you. That's a nice offer.
B: So, did we turn you on?
PC: Yup. Now, please turn me off so I can rest. I've got to do some running later on to work off that kiwi tart.
I kind of get the feeling that getting "turned on" in 1986 meant something a few rungs below what it means how. I remember trying to arouse a computer using our smooth talking as pre-teens and all it got us was a Dr. SBAITSO parity error. That photo-graphic of the computer with the bouquet is somewhat tragicomic. Share your favorite "insert floppy in drive" joke here!
This was actually pretty late for the first wave of chatbots -- we had Racter in 1983, and his conversations were much more interesting than this one. (And his volume of poetry, The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, is great -- primarily because it is fudged.) What's the "why is it always so cold?" bit about? I figure it's "server room" humour, though that seems a bit out of place for a personal computer. Is your target market really people who don't know the difference between a mainframe and a microcomputer? Well, I suppose Bantam is a book company, not a tech company, so they may have been so genuinely clueless.
I've never heard of Ahoy magazine, but looks like they were credible enough to invoke as expert testimony here. The blurb describes, well, things you would expect in a (presumably unlicensed, public domain) Sherlock Holmes game: Watson, historical characters, player agency. Graphics? Fine enough, but is establishing their early 20th century provenance really a selling point, or maybe a disclaimer that they may not be as sharp as modern-day photos? They look just like typical Apple II graphics -- no worse than the Oregon Trail standard, nor exceeding it.
Then The Fourth Protocol: the book was gigantic and best-selling. We establish its themes of nuclear espionage and ... those are considered sufficient to sell the game. (Does it really have sound effects? Mobygames ratings suggest: yes! It seems to have more of a Portal-style interactive novel GUI presentation than the typical bookware IF text parser, but they're just different routes toward a similar end, right?)
And then, because it's impossible to sell on its own, the automated diet book / database. The Scarsdale diet was an early ketosis diet, shades of Atkins, whose doctor author had been dead for six years at this point, murdered by his lover. The blurb doesn't involve any of these compelling details, merely trading on the novelty of a computer diet program. Woefully mundane goods to be depending on novelty! Bantam apparently also sold a conversion of the Choose Your Own Adventure book The Cave Of Time, which would have been a much better fit here, but it looks like they were targeting an older, more world-weary audience.
And the rebate! That's an unfunny turn on ambiguous use of the word "program". All in all, I give the ad the thumbs-down. Bantam probably had no business in the software industry, and from the looks of things, this was both the announcement of its big splash debut and its swan song. Them's the breaks! (Meanwhile, did I mention that the Interactive Fiction competition has been running for 20 years now?)
+-+action+and+adventure.jpg)
