Stumbling through The Games: Summer Edition

[davidn]

A shockingly long time ago, I talked about a game that I had on the PC called The Games: Winter Edition. I remember enjoying it when I first played it in school, but when I went back to it, it became a worrying indicator that I might be allowing nostalgia to cloud the simple fact that I was actually just amused by any old rubbish.

It wasn't the only backwards-titled sports game around - there was a counterpart to it called The Games: Summer Edition, and this is what rakarr suggested I play in the spirit of the upcoming Olympics in London. (I imagine that the game avoids all mention of the Games' actual title in order to avoid having to pay lots and lots of money for using their name and logo - though I accidentally mention the word throughout the video anyway.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35HBS-kyfOg

As a PC owner, I was always rather jealous of the superior graphics and sound that games always seemed to have on the Amiga - though I now realize how much they paid for that in disk-swapping and loading times. This game takes care of the 'sound' aspect by scoring the game with a series of what sounds like people banging chairs together, though I think that this might be at least half the fault of the emulator/recording setup. As to whether I think the superior graphics of this version make it a better game than the experimental joystick-waggling extravaganza that I owned in the 90s... you can make that judgement for yourself.

The game has eight events, none of which I'm much good at.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

What made you decide to play the Amiga version? (Or was this one only available for Amiga?)

Your accent is suddenly making me wonder how Commodore ever expected to find any success with people saying that there's a game available for "a meagre computer"...

Clive the Flippered Octopus is hereby the mascot of Stumbling Through. :D

"Door answering" XD

(psst, half music is probably half volume ;p)

How have I never heard the Great Britain national anthem, apparently! (And what flag do they NORMALLY show?)

I was like "my, what a lavish depiction of their parking lot...?", but I guess that was their way of leaving room for the little 3D window :P

Unusually generous choice to have the computer stick around and be as incompetent as the player.... (I wonder if it's a limitation of having it all overlayed on prerendered video like that?)

Did you really not notice the stamina meter that you'd filled up?

"The Archery"... sounds like a band or something..

I love the guy munching in the corner of the stands.... he needs to be in every game, just sitting in the foreground, silently judging you as you try to rescue the princess from Bowser...

(um, it's just silently doing nothing when I try to post this comment, so let me try splitting it in two maybe?)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Cute touch having runners in the background of the pole vault screen!

XD! The guy just... kinda.... losing interest and letting his pole drag along the ground and stopping. I would love to see someone get all the way to the olympics and be running down the track and then just suddenly realise how silly it all is and leave the field...

Slow-motion replay of shame, so all your loved ones at home can relive your disgrace!

Oh man, the guy just continuously running straight past the pole, that's almost better than his existential crisis halfway there.... There's only one thing you have to do in this event (two if you count "getting there"), I love that they actually programmed in the ability to just NOT do it for some reason. It's an open-world olympics game!

"Reverse splat"... that had better be an actual technical term.

Was that rings guy supposed to be laughing or crying? Did they program that in just in case a player decides to climb up onto the bars then climb back down?? I have a feeling they realised that most people have no interest in doing this correctly... (I feel like this is reminding me of some game from a computer lab of my childhood, where all the children were immensely more entertained by a character making a funny animation when he bumped into a wall than they were by the entire actual game that they never really bothered to explore....)

The hurdles music sounds oddly like music from On The Ball... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHS00nAgdk4#t=16s

I understand needing to reuse the characters' animations, but they couldn't even give you a palette swap to keep it from looking like the Synchronized Hurdle Team?

"Rock n roll baby"?? Are they... who made this????

Somebody had a lot of fun drawing that shotputters swaying buttocks.

.... oh my god, I was imagining how things could go wrong during the shotput when I was commenting on the "alternate endings" for the pole vault up above, but that is even better than I was imagining XD

..... AND AGAIN! Oh god, they actually had to go to the trouble of getting a recording of a guy going "whoa~!" and everything XD

Where on earth did that jingle for "mid-air shoelace tying" come from XD Is that yours?

I'm not sure I follow what you mean about "proceed" and a moderately overweight programmer?

Huh, the water actually refracts what's underneath! Unusual eye for detail in this one...

Do you actually control your movement in the totally unnecessary secondary angle that they somehow convinced someone to make room for in the budget?

And there's a puddle by the ladder on your second dive! Geez, someone was gunning for a promotion...

Though, their attention to detail couldn't go so far as to put the diving board someplace that doesn't become almost invisible by contrast with the elements on either side of it...

I can't figure out what's funnier - that the game apparently has insanity effects like Eternal Darkness, or that you were so genuinely concerned for your character's safety from sharks in an olympic game :D "Oh no! Where was the last save point? If I lose a life here, I'll... umm....."

Well, that was a good deal more entertaining a game than it had any business being :) Hooray for bored programmers I guess :P

[davidn]

I love your mega-comments on these... they give me so much to reply to :) The comment about "proceed" was actually two different thoughts stuck together - I'd meant that it sounded like it was just me, personally, having to go around all these events and take part in them myself as the sole person in the entire UK Olympics team. (I suppose by their use of the word "attend", they were speaking to the... actual human player as a spectator going around all of these events instead... or something.)

I tried it on the Amiga mostly because that was the one that rakarr had memories of, and I wanted to try the exact same game without the porting differences. I just downloaded the PC version to compare, but I think that that might turn into an entire post by itself! In general, the graphics and sound are worse but the game runs a lot more smoothly. Interestingly, the PC version actually opens with "Officially licensed product of the US Olympic Committee" - so I'm not sure if that license only extended to the PC version and they used the generic name anyway across all formats or something...

I mentioned the strangely nice rendition of the national anthem, but it apparently the melody channel was recorded as much fainter than it actually plays in the game for some reason - I'm sure you'll recognize the real one. As for the flag issue, the most common sight is seeing the name "ENGLAND" below the Union Jack (how can someone write this without stopping to think that the clue might be in the name?). Semi-relatedly, I remember Actua Soccer managed to skew the flag of England so it looked like one of the Scandinavian countries' crosses (and I'm not sure how Gremlin - from Sheffield - managed that).

There are a lot of really nice background details in this game - the runners, the spectators in the stands or eating crisps off to the side, the completely unnecessary car park in the cycling... it makes it feel much more alive than it normally would :) As part of that, the game seemed to get gradually weirder as it went on, completely by coincidence in the order of events I'd picked... stranger and stranger things started happening to highlight my failures. Breaking the pole or just running blindly past it, falling off the bars or forgetting to do anything on the rings, flying away or hitting yourself on the head in the hammer-throw - and I've seen in a video that you can also break the camera by letting the hammer fly at the wrong time. (While I'm on the subject - I, too, noticed the competitor's unusually lovingly-rendered bottom.)

And the shark...! I've no idea what happened there, why it appeared or why it's in the game at all. You do control your own movement there, but it wasn't concern for my player that made me scream - the volume of the video is really too low for it to be noticeable, but it was the sudden disappearance of the background music and its replacement with the Jaws theme that really scared me to death there.

I... did not notice the cycling stamina meter, not even during my editing or watching of the final video, until you just mentioned it just now. I suppose its colours aren't very distinct to me against the grass, but even with that in mind... that's a very big thing to have missed! As invisible as the diving board is at first glance ;)

Other answers - the jingles in between the later events are mine as I put together a quick rendition of the Olympics theme and dragged different instruments on to it (and sort of fiddled with the intonation, for that diving one...) And I see exactly what you mean about the On the Ball music - it seemed to be a common feature of MOD files, as they were based on playing samples at different frequencies, to include a voice sample and then use it as a demented instrument...

[kjorteo]

I tried it on the Amiga mostly because that was the one that rakarr had memories of, and I wanted to try the exact same game without the porting differences. I just downloaded the PC version to compare, but I think that that might turn into an entire post by itself! In general, the graphics and sound are worse but the game runs a lot more smoothly. Interestingly, the PC version actually opens with "Officially licensed product of the US Olympic Committee" - so I'm not sure if that license only extended to the PC version and they used the generic name anyway across all formats or something...

And yet you still won't go near the ones I played, which came first, on the Commodore 64, and had significantly less mangled names (Summer Games and Winter Games, I guess The Games: ___ Edition came after they lost the license or something?) and freely used the Olympic theme and everything!

[davidn]

"Won't go near" - it's not as if I've been hanging back afraid of this game from the moment you brought it up, afraid that starting it up will result in being shot by snipers or opening a hole through time and being dragged in by unknown tentacles/flippers, I just never felt a particular drive to download or play through them. I could! Although as I note below, all sports games seem to be more or less the same thing - it was this game's strange additions (for disastrous failure) that made it stand out.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Oh, shoot -- I get the 'proceed' thing now XD Yes, one athlete running exhaustedly from event to event, briefly changing into drag for the uneven bars... :D

Ohhhh, Our Country Reeks Of Trees (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x79zxf_ren-stimpy-the-royal-canadian-kilte_shortfilms)! Yes, I know it. :D Geez, how weird that it turned out that way... maybe it only recorded the left or right audio channel or something? (If MODs are anything to go by, I think amiga only had hard stereo...) Man, I wonder what else didn't sound the same :S
Anyway, yeah -- I can totally hear the rhythm in that counterpoint now :)

actually, do you still have the feed from the game in an uncompressed format? I might like to make a GIF of that shotputter XD;

[davidn]

Strange as it is for me to imagine that this might be the context in which this song is most familiar to someone... yes. It's especially odd because I didn't think the rest of the music was... actually, yes, I did think the rest of the music was that bad. But other pieces of music weren't noticeably affected by the phenomenon between game and recording, is what I mean.

I do have the feed from that section of the game! Though it's in a very uncompressed 300MB - would you like any bit in particular?

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

That was just fantastic. I enjoyed all the events and I was looking forward to seeing you fail as much as I had, and you didn't let me (or Great Britain) down. I think the rings were the best. Oh, and the... very sad, delusional closing ceremony at the end.

I admit that because the events are short I was hoping for a revisit to most of them like you did with the pole vault, but at 24 minutes I suppose that might have been extending it a bit too much. As I said, though, it was fantastic and hilarious, and thank you for doing it.

... I liked the music, though! Although I admit the sound effects were pretty... uh... unique.

[davidn]

The number of ways that they rendered your failure at events was truly impressive :) I suppose that might be the fun part about track and field games like this, because otherwise, how do you make most of the events different from each other...?

We played the only game with a more generic title, "World Sports Competition", last night - and it boasts 18 events, but easily nine or ten of them are exactly the same thing - bash buttons as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that you fill a stamina meter up/drain an oxygen meter down.

As for revisiting events... the sad thing about the rings was that I took multiple attempts at it, and that was the most successful one ;) I never worked out how to get him to just... hold on and attempt to move about at all.

Thanks for suggesting it, and I'm glad that you enjoyed my journey through it!

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

As it doesn't use the olympic name, it feels like this is a comedic parody of sports games, rather than an actual representation of olympic sports. Why is there a shark in the pool????????

[davidn]

I've no idea! I sort of want to see what happens if I let it touch the diver, instead of panicking and pressing every button thereby skipping to the menu to censor the next few seconds...

It got gradually weirder throughout, but that was still a huge shock.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

:O! You cut that short instead of seeing what happens?? Oh, man -- now that it's set up, would it be difficult to just hop into that event and see...?

[davidn]

I looked - unfortunately it was very anticlimactic! Even though I thought the shark was coming closer to me when it turned around, it just keeps on swimming back and forward at the bottom of the screen there while the scary music plays until you eventually skip to the scores screen.

Still. Not what I was expecting to see in a sports game...!

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

That was hilarious. :) Between Clive the electrically-tormented octopus drummer, the pole-vaulter that sprints straight past the bar, and the fact that "splat fall" is apparently now a recognised parallel bars move, I was in stitches. :P (Also, the depressed rings guy who gets a lift up there, realises "ohmygoshIjustcan'ttakeitanymore" and gives up and bursts into tears then and there deserves an honourable mention. :P)

I kind of wanted them to move the really generously-scoring judge on the left hand side in the diving competition next to the really hard-to-please guy in the middle, to see if a fight would break out between them. :P

Next up, James Pond; Aquatic Games? :P

D.F.

[davidn]

Wow - I had Robocod, but I had no idea that there was a 'sports' game with James Pond. That could turn out admirably mental...

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

I think I still have a copy in the garage somewhere; it's mostly repetitive button-bashing, á la press-A-and-B-alternately-to-run, so if you have an autofire joypad you pretty much ace the events. It was a pretty crappy game even when it came out, but it was quite popular for some reason. I like to think it was because of Mark the Shark, the unicyclist whose name I found endlessly amusing when I was younger, but somehow I doubt it.

Also, it had Pond himself looking the least fish-like out of his incarnations, in that the cover art gave him a giant round nose/snout/thing that looks really out of place on a fish. And yet it's still not as bad as Codsby... :P

D.F.

[davidn]

That fish will remain in my nightmares for many years to come. Actually, I never thought that James Pond looked particularly like a fish, apart from the way that his legs were actually the halves of his tail... he was more like a red-faced clown sort of psychopath thing (that could extend his body many metres at will in order to climb into your bedroom window).

The trouble with sports games like this, I think, is that it's very difficult to make them actually different from each other. The day after I uploaded this video, we bought and played the only game with a more lawyer-pleasingly generic title - "World Sports Competition" originally on the PC-Engine. It boasts 18 events, but at least ten of them are all exactly the same - bash two buttons to go faster and stop occasionally to recover stamina, with perhaps a third one for jumping or throwing or collapsing into a heap.

[davidn]

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, Robocod was also one of those things where I saw the parody before the real thing - so whenever I hear this it's inescapably an orchestral version of the James Pond 2 theme.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Ironically, the exact same thing happened to me; I remember thinking it was unusually well-written and catchy when I heard the video-game version, then I saw the film much later, and the penny finally dropped. :P

D.F.

[davidn]

Now you've got me watching a playthrough video of Robocod. I'd forgotten how properly mental that game was - having to bounce around Santa's toy factory p-p-picking up penguins, jumping on enemies like a wind-up man made out of cakes and a cock-eyed double decker bus that shoots grannies.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

The third one was even worse (I got it as a gift; my parents thought they'd bought me Robocod, but someone at the shop had put #3 in #2's box - score!); it turns out the moon is actually made of cheese. And milk, and custard, and yoghurt, and ice-cream, and (apparently) fungus - presumably from the mould on the cheese - and you have to go and stop Dr. Maybe's cheese-mining operation before he corners the global markets. And there's something along the way about stink-bombs made of Stiltonium, and the final boss is a giant flying cow, and oh good grief it was mad. Fortunately it had, like, a hundred levels, most of which were impossible even when I was younger and my platforming skills weren't as atrophied as they are now, so I don't think anyone actually ever finished it. :P

D.F.

[premchaia_pre4]

You did collide with the other cyclist early on! That's what the cartoon-scuffle-like clouds-of-smoke icon seemed to be associated with, at least.

[davidn]

On reflection, that could have been something to do with it, yes. Nice to know that the affinity for letting the player continue in doomed scenarios without telling them they'd effectively already lost wasn't only limited to Sierra with the adventure genre!

[kjorteo]

That was amazing. It was almost half an hour but thoroughly entertaining throughout and absolutely worth it--well done. :) There are so many things I could say about basically everything, but for now, I'll just say that I anxiously await your review of LucasArts' adventure classic Day of the Flipper.

[davidn]

I am very glad that you and everyone else enjoy these so much :) Less so that you can hear my mistakes and then transpose flippers and tentacles whenever you talk to me for many years to come!

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

A bit late to the game (har har) but a wonderful stumble, nonetheless.

There were a few moments when I was laughing out loud - mainly at the moments when there was the "you screwed up" animations. I'm surprised that the cycling competition felt so "rigid" compared to the hammer throw where you managed to clonk yourself in the head. XD

If you're going to continue with Amiga games, and would like some *nice* music and sound, you've gotta keep an eye out for "Gods". Oh man, I loved that theme music. Sadly the game has no in-game soundtrack...

Though, now, I'm wanting to dig through some of my ancient C64 games. I have games that no-one else I know of ever played (Kennedy Approach and Paradroid come to mind). Or heck, I could play through that Raid over Moscow (http://tamakun.livejournal.com/1059599.html) game that I reviewed a little while ago...

[davidn]

I remember Gods - I think it was on the PC as well, but I know it was one of the games that made me jealous of the Amiga's superior graphical capabilities and... general feeling over DOS.

The cycling really is the dullest part of the whole game and I almost cut most of it out before uploading the video... for the other events, the sheer range of failure that you can experience borders on unbelievable! At the end, the shark came as a huge shock - it's so strange that they put in such a variety of 'rewards' for not doing what you were supposed to do...

It would be great to feel I'd encouraged more people to upload videos of their games :)