small differences in the v0.01 Micro Machines prototype

Personally I love these small details, perhaps many of you find these posts about nothing. Anyway Borman posted his first results when comparing the retail version of Micro Machines CD-i and the new found prototype with versionnumber 0.01. Typically the screen above shows us version 0.10 instead version 0.01, that looks like a typo by Philips Media. Borman: "A quick overview of differences (that Ive found so far, with minimal playtime). * Final version has a Philips startup video thing (standard for most / all games), beta does not. * Codemasters logo fades in, has a gradient background in beta. Final version has a plain background, but is animated. * Beta version has a version number on the main title, Final doesnt. * Beta version has no music during races, final does.

More when it comes available. Thanks to Borman.

A review of Cyber Soldier Sharaku (japan-only CD-i game)

Cyber Soldier Sharaku is a Japanese game presumadely made about an anime. Set in the town of Edo in the year 7000, its a world populated by intelligent humanoid-animals where the tradional ways and advanced technology coexist. Sharaku, the player's character, appears to be a mercenary known as a Cyber Soldier working for some sort of organization trying to save the world. Your boss gives you a mission where you must go to Edo and to defeat Syzar and his henchmen: Junk and Nara.

It's a point and click adventure and a very limited and linear one at that. There is no graphical user interface and during the game you have very few options of what to do. Basically if what you're doing doesn't advance you in the game than you would of already seen it. The game-style is similar to "Kingdom: The Far Reaches" except that instead of choosing your location on the map you make your way around by choosing direction. What you can interact with while exploring is basically limited to talking with NPCs but on a couple occasions you can interact with items. There are also boss battles where you have multiple attacks to choose from by clicking on a specific area of the bosses' body. Basically to beat a boss you must select the correct attack using the information you see on the computer at the very beginning. However if you select the wrong attack the player won't be killed so you can always win by trial and error if you don't know where to hit.

Despite the games crippling limitations and that it's entirely in Japanese, the hour or so that it takes to complete is actually quite entertaining. The unenventful talking parts are regularly interspersed by a cutscene such as an action sequence. So there is usually something interesting happening in the story, you never spend too long talking before you can advance or a cutscene occurs. At the beginning of the game, before you aquire your weapon (a pole), there is an action sequence where a couple guys try to start trouble in a restaraunt. One of them uppercuts a bystander and than throws a punch Sharaku, who grabs his fist and twists his arm around disabling the attacker. Not long after that there is a fairly long cutscene when you find your main ally - Naigan. She takes you a laboratory of some sort where she gives you high tech glasses capable of identifying the tyrant. The player automatically uses those glasses at the performances in the town in order to find Syzar.



The boss battles are definitely the best parts of the game, the anime-style action sequences and the inclusion of blood make them quite entertaining. Also the multiple choices of attacks during the battles means they are the most interactive part of the game. During the first battle with Junk you must cripple his arm because he blocks your attacks with his claw. Once he can't use his arm than he can be easily hit in a vulnerable spot and defeated. The battle with Zara is the worst one, you only have 1 second to be able to move the cursor and click before being hit by a fireball. This can get quite annoying as it might take a long time before you are able to hit the right spot. A doppleganger of the boss will appear and you must decide which is the real one before attacking and killing her. By far the most spectacular battle is the one at the end with Syzar. The character fails with his first attacks to do any damage and the boss retaliates by smashing him through a wall. Then the battle takes to the roof of a tall pagoda where they fight in true anime style: flying into the air, throwing energy balls and surviving massive explosions.

In conclusion the game is an interesting one that is definitely worthy of a playthrough. However it loses its entertainment value very quickly because it is so linear. Therefore you should treat it as a curiosity, if you play it expecting decent gameplay than you will be dissapointed. Because it's one of the few games developed in and exclusive to Japan that makes it one very interesting CD-i obscurity!

Credits: Shroo-man

Philips ADS talks about their CD-i history (part 2)

Be sure to check out part one first here. Philips ADS remained, until recently one of the unsung heros of CD-i games development including Pac-Panic, Arcade Classics and Atlantis - The Last Resort. Now Atlantis and Arcade Classics is sure to be an interesting story all by themselves! For now i'd like to focus on the first game developed by ADS in Pac-Panic. This particular game simply oozed quality from Johnny Wood in the Flesh! the retail package complete with closed slipcase which was very unusual for a European release including seperate manual and the standard CD-i jewel case. In comparison with rival systems where the game went by the name Pac-Attack the CD-i version was glorious with spectacular use of colour, animation and sound this quality lacking from any of its counterparts. What made this version so special to ADS in what turned out to be an award winning title for the studio?

Johnny: Well for all of us I think Pac-Panic represented a major chance and a perfectly timed one for us all to prove our skills. Pac-Panic might never have made it to CDi. The machine used a 68020 chipset, which was a 68000 series (like on the amiga) but with all the stuff you really needed to make Amiga quality games in assembly took out. As Pete Dabbs would testify, basically all the tricks you could do to save processing time like shifting data to act as a quick multiply rather than adding up stacks - saving loads of clock cycles and stuff wasn't an option. I wont talk about that now cause it makes me sound geeky, and there might be chicks reading this. But you really had to push the machine to get anything like that.

Our job at the ADS was to help the worlds developers cross over to the machine. We had a few tricks that we sort of developed ourselves. Mostly down to Andy Morton and Tom Drummond, a couple of genius old school programmers. When people looked at Pac-Attack on the other versions, the amount of animated sprites at any one time was considered undoable on CDi. Bear in mind all our contempories had dedicated graphics hardware. CDi never did, but we took a look at it and Andy developed a multiplexer that allowed you to fill the whole screen with animated sprites. This was bloody amazing on CDi and once that was out of the way we knew we could not only match the other versions but we could make it better.

Where the other machines like the Genesis had 2 layers of 8 bit colour, CDi had DYUV mode which was similar to HAM mode on the amiga, so the backdrops could be 24 bit colour. On top of this, we weren't limited to 8 colours or anything for our foreground sprites, we could use 256 colours. Namco sent us the original assets from the genesis. But ours were better. I was a big Pac-Man fan. Its what got me into video games and just to have my name on the re-emergence of the new generation was pretty damn cool. So I put my heart and soul into it. Andy and Tom deserved a bit of glory too, Where as its a much harder job, its never as much glory being in a research role as it is making your own game! So we set out to kick ass and show the guys at the top how we did things 'down town' so to speak.

Must of worked, cause we got the pretty box and won the award 'n stuff. We still to this day aren't sure if this is down to our 'post production' antics.... Which involved us travelling around London every weekend and going into all the Games shops and switching all the copies of Pac-Panic with whatever was listed at number one on the display racks.

Devin: Arcade Classics soon followed suit with another quality classic conversion. What challenges did this represent and can you share your memories developing this outstanding compilation.

Johnny: Yeah man! We just took the same approach but this time we had 3 games to do. The same sort of issues emerged. The number of animated sprites that Jason had to pump around for Galaxian, which him being the 'new' guy and fresh from his degree, Andy thought he'd never cut it. Of course he turned out to be the most amazing genius we could have ever wished for and the other coders were impressed. We could have done with him back in the early days. Games may have come out differently.

We had Rak in full swing now on art, so with me freed up more we had another chance to make the games better than the contempories. We didn't want to get labelled a conversion house, so making them better than the rival machines versions. When to be honest for this sort of game; Multi-sprited Arcade games, CDi was possibly the worst equipped on the market. Thats not to say it was bad, I mean look at Dragons Lair, 7th Guest, Burn Cycle. Try coughing up those puppies for a genesis... No chance! This time we worked from the arcade machines. Namco sent us all the original stuff, apart from Ms Pacman where they sent us a whole mother board from the first generation machine! The original chipset! So we took the graphics pixel for pixel.... And er... then I added more colours.

I played pacman a lot and also miss pacman. There's a real skill to playing it, Jason and I started messing about with the mazes and found just by putting up stumps so the player could stop would bring in a whole new strategy. Long tunnels added a turbo panic to the play so in my spare time I made some extra mazes. Namco thought they were cool too, so they stayed in. I was sorta proud of that. Man I sure hope chicks are reading this bit. It makes me look dead cool dunnit. I designed mazes for Ms pacman girls!

It was during the development of Arcade Classics that Paul Reid got drunk and puked on Flavias carpet. Paul did an amazing job of entertaining us like this. I think he somehow held the crew together. We were poles apart really, but somehow there was a real team spirit. That shows through in the game. Even to the credits. Of course when it came to do the credits I'd been a bit miffed after Pac-Panic had had loads of people coming in the credits when really it was 5 guys in an office so I made up a few of my own names; Yvette Miepies... Thats how you say "You've ate my pies" in brummy, added the office cleaner who I fancied (Beth) and put in my local pub. Because the ADS where always shrouded with mystery we got away with it.