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Stumbling through The Games: Summer Edition
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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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
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I tried it on the Amiga mostly because that was the one that
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...
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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!
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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;
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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?