An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.
Earlier this week, we looked at the PS1 games Rise 2: Resurrection, NBA Live 96, NBA ShootOut, and Panzer General.
Last time in this series, we looked at our first batch of titles that released on the 3DO in 1993, Battle Chess, Crime Patrol, Dragon's Lair, and Escape From Monster Manor.
Now, we're going to put the 3DO to a socially productive and educational use as we look at Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, Fatty Bear's Fun Pack, Lemmings, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, and Shelley Duvall's It's a Bird's Life.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise
Developer: Humongous Entertainment
Publisher: Humongous Entertainment
Release Year: 1993
Time to Baking a Cake: 65 Minutes*
We're starting with the first of many Humongous Entertainment games to make the trek to the 3DO. For the uninitiated, Humongous was the video game studio co-founded by Ron Gilbert after he parted ways with LucasArts. In the 11 years after their first release in 1992, they put out something like 50 adventure and edutainment games for young children. If you have any distant memories of characters like Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, or Freddi Fish rattling around in your brainpan, it's because of Humongous. Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise seems to have been the second game the studio released, and we'll get to their first game later in this post. It shouldn't be a surprise that this thing plays like a small and very simplified version of an old SCUMM engine game for the aged 3 to 7 crowd.
Our boy Fatty is a teddy bear belonging to a young girl in a stereotypical suburban household. It's the night before her birthday and the various dolls and stuffed animals in her room come to life in order to prepare for the next day's festivities. Our bear Fats takes it upon himself to make a birthday cake while the rest of the crew decorates her room. You point and click around the house, collecting ingredients and dealing with a couple of side missions. The parents apparently got the little girl a puppy for her birthday and the damn thing gets out of its box and needs to be wrangled, and there are a handful of decorative letters that need to be collected for a Happy Birthday sign. You do these things, the cake basically bakes itself, and that's it.
There's only like 20 screens in the whole game if you count the bowling and cabbage dressing minigames. Fategar T. Bear has more inventory slots than he needs, so that's never a concern. This thing is literally baby's first point-and-click adventure, not even being pejorative. I got through it in an hour with a maximum of futzing around, and apparently there are speedruns of the game that last only four minutes. Now, the reason I finished this game instead of moving on after ten minutes is because I streamed it. Turns out people have way more patience with games when they're streaming them. So, my total time shouldn't be taken as an endorsement.
I feel kind of bad for even bringing this up, but the production values are pretty bad for an early-90's adventure game. There are bearly any character animations, and the voice acting is actively bad. Though, most objects in each screen will do something when clicked on, so there is a density of interactivity even if it isn't interesting. As for any educational value that would make it worthwhile from a parental point of view, it seems a bit light. I noticed some counting to five, familiarization of common kitchen objects, and instructions on bathing. There are also a couple of opportunities for self-expression with the aforementioned cabbage and the late game cake decoration. I have no idea if that is a good density of educational/socialization material by children's programming standards. Either way, this would have been fine if you were parking your kid in front of an MS-DOS machine. I'm not sure who in the hell was going to buy an expensive piece of multimedia equipment and then use it for their small child. Kids small enough for this game are dumb and destructive, and I wouldn't let one near my new $500 piece of kit.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fatty Bear's Fun Pack
Developer: Humongous Entertainment
Publisher: Humongous Entertainment
Release Year: 1993
Time to Developing Basic Problem Solving Skills: 35 Minutes
Because going in alphabetical order carries certain risks, we're going to talk about this Fatty Bear themed minigame collection. There are five whole entire minigames on offer: Reversi, Line-and-Box, Go Fish, a coloring book, and some block puzzles that the game refers to as pengrams. The competitive minigames have four difficulty options, none of which should be that hard for functioning adults. Those competitive games are all played against Fatty, and it really feels like he's letting you win.
The non-competitive modes have a decent amount of stuff. There are 36 pictures to color and 20 pengrams to solve. This all seems to be geared towards developing fundamental problem-solving skills in the kiddos. The only things I can find to complain about, with all of these games if I'm going to be honest, is the d-pad controls of the onscreen cursor. This is always bad in every game before the invention of the analog stick. Lastly, the coloring book mode has only five base colors, which can be mixed into ten additional colors. That means your theoretical child only has 15 colors to work with, which seems overly limiting when used in system that has a 24-bit color palette.
Humongous sure did get in on the ground floor with the 3DO. It couldn't have hurt the marketing for the system, being able to put these games alongside stuff like Crash n' Burn, Escape From Monster Manor, and Rebel Assault to present the console as being something that the whole family could use. That's my theory at least.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lemmings
Developer: DMA Design
Publisher: Psygnosis
Release Year: 1993
Time to Looking Up The Manual: 5 Minutes
Time to Annoyed: 31 Minutes
It's difficult to untangle the wider significance of Lemmings from the game itself. Fortunately, my experiences with British game development in my PS1 retrospective series has led me to a place where I can chuck both this game and its legacy into the garbage without losing any sleep over it.
This game was originally released on the Amiga family of computers in 1991. It's mildly inexplicable success helped buoy the fortunes of DMA Designs, then a small second-rate development studio, into a place where they could go on to bigger projects. These days, that studio is called Rockstar North and they've spent the last decade (as of writing) raking-in cash from Grand Theft Auto Online while doing jack-all else. There are also claims that Lemmings invented the Real Time Strategy genre, which, NO. I haven't done the research, but categorically no. There's also a statue of Lemmings in a park in Rockstar's home city, because sure. What I'm getting at is that this game was probably the most important Amiga game ever made, which I consider to be a backhanded compliment.
The thing itself is a Puzzle game where some weird little guys drop out of a magical door onto a level and walk in a straight line until they bounce off a wall, fall off a cliff, or get killed by a hazard. The point of each level is to get a minimum number of lemmings to an exit door. You can assign a variety of roles to individual lemmings that cause them to interact with their environment in ways that overcome obstacles standing between them and the exit. The idea is that you're supposed to manage a line of the idiots in real time and in such a way that requires both puzzle solving and quick reflexes. In practice, this gameplay kinda sucks.
Being a computer game, the action is controlled by moving an on-screen cursor around with the d-pad, which I've talked about above. The view is zoomed all the way out, which makes it a crapshoot to select individual lemmings. That isn't a huge issue for the early levels, but it's exactly the kind of thing that will unravel the whole experience later on. The whole thing has a finicky feel to it, which isn't helped by the speed of the gameplay. This thing moves either too slowly or too quickly. When trying to get the cursor moved around and over a lemming that is marching to its doom, the lemmings move too fast to handle properly. Yet, once you have a route established, it can take a couple of minutes for all the little bastards to waddle their way to the exit. That last issue is big enough that a whole entire button on the three-button gamepad is devoted to fast-forwarding the gameplay.
On top of all of this, the game is as ugly as you would expect from a budget Amiga game. The worst part for me is the sound, though. Most of the music tracks are bad midi versions of open license songs ranging from stuff like classical sonatas by Mozart or Chopin all the way to children's rhymes like "London Bridge Is Falling Down". The overall selection is bizarre, and the renditions here mostly made my ears bleed. On top of that, the little lemming noises are annoying. The whole thing looks and sounds like ass all the way around.
I made it to level 11 or something before quitting out of sheer aggravation. This isn't as bad an experience as Lemmings 3D, but few things are. The fact that one of the big games for the 3DO's launch window is a warmed-over Amiga game really bodes ill for this system.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Putt-Putt Joins the Parade
Developer: Humongous Entertainment
Publisher: Humongous Entertainment
Release Year: 1993
Time to Joining The Black Parade: 29 Minutes
Our third Humongous Point-and-Click Adventure of this batch is actually a port of the first game they ever released. Being the original game from this studio, and a year older than Fatty Bear, it's simpler and more straightforward. Though, also somehow more ambitious, for as much as that word could be used to describe these games.
You play as the titular putt-putt, who is a young child talking car that lives on his own pretty far out from the nearest town. The adult cars seem to know that he is living unsupervised at the edge of town and are cool with it. Like with the Chevron Cars or the movie Cars, we are better off not inquiring too deeply into the fictional universe of Putt-Putt. Anyway, there's going to be something called a 'Pet Parade' that Putt-Putt wants to join, but he needs to first acquire a pet and get signed up. This set-up gives the player three objectives: find a pet, get a balloon, and get a car wash.
Accomplishing those goals forces the players to learn that money can be exchanged for goods and services, because two coins are needed to get a car wash. There's a free coin in Putt-Putt's home, but the second needs to be earned by doing an odd job. The two options are mowing lawns and delivering groceries. I'm really fighting the urge to delve into why talking cars have lawns or need groceries. Anyhoo, each odd job nets exactly one coin, and they seem to be repeatable. Other than the car wash, you can get a new paintjob for three coins, so I guess this thing has a basically functional in-game economy. With the street urchin stank washed off him, Putt Putt can get a puppy from a cave and a balloon as a reward for helping a mama car find her lost kid. Not gonna unpack any of that. Finally, you go and get in the parade. That's it. There seems to be a bunch of optional crap that the player can futz around with, if so desired.
I was surprised that there are more screens, voice lines, and minigames in this thing than in Fatty Bear. Even though the graphics and interactability are comparatively primitive, this is still the more fully featured video game of the two. As far as educational value: there's counting to four, steps for brushing one’s teeth, steps in a car wash, waiting to cross a busy street, basic image recognition, and some simple logical deduction. Probably a good spread for the post-toddler, mostly illiterate demographic. This game also seems to have been something of a revelation in the edutainment space. It's hard to know for sure without deeper study, but this seems to have changed the entire thought process behind educational game design, to an extent that there is a pre- and post-Putt-Putt edutainment industry. As far as this being a launch window game for the 3DO, well, 16-bit systems surely couldn't have handled the raw power of Humongous Entertainment.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shelley Duvall's It's a Bird's Life
Developer: Sanctuary Woods
Publisher: Sanctuary Woods
Release Year: 1993
Time to GO BIRDS: 45 Minutes*
Gonna be upfront with you, I don't know what to make of this damn thing. This isn't so much a video game as it is a barely interactive storybook with a handful of facts about birds, clouds, and rainforests thrown in. Also, yes, this is that Shelley Duvall. It's hard to find information on whatever this is supposed to be, but I get the sense that it was a quick little project between Duvall and her long-time partner, Dan Gilroy.
So, Duvall was very active in children's programming in the late-80's and early-90's, which is what makes her involvement in early edutainment software make sense. According to the credits, she produced the game and did all the writing, so this wasn't just a licensing thing. As for her partner, Gilroy, he seems to have co-produced the game and created all of the music tracks. He was apparently a moderately successful musician in the 80's who seems to have been involved in getting Madonna's early career off the ground. I'll get back to the music in a couple of paragraphs. The developer they worked with was an also-ran multimedia studio whose only notable accomplishment was publishing a couple of the games in the Journeyman Project series. I don't know what to do with this information, so I'll leave it for your consideration.
The CD itself contains a handful of encyclopedic entries about birds, a basic connect-the-dots game, character profiles, and the storybook itself. This is a barely animated and occasionally narrated children's book story about Shelley and Dan's menagerie of seven or so tropical birds going on an adventure after their house burns down. Each bird represents a different species and have their own fully voiced personalities, which I wish they didn't. It's kinda weird that Duvall would write a children's story where her house burns down or include a seemingly superfluous emphasis on her pet dog. The story raises further legal questions around whether any of those species of birds are in a protected category, which is the kinda question you don't want to raise when creating any kind of autobiographical material. Again, I don't know what to do with any of this.
Finally, there's the music. For reasons that should be obvious, the half-dozen or so music tracks are the most well produced things on this disc. They also give off the vibe of being produced in Gilroy's personal recording set-up on whatever topic he was thinking about at the time, and then handed off to the developers to somehow make fit. There's a real disconnect between the quality of the art, animation, and voice acting versus the music. No amount of description can do this bizarre nonsense any justice, so see it for yourselves below.
As far as I can find, It's a Bird's Life was only ever released on the 3DO, which is probably why it's so obscure. Finding forgotten, truly bizarre oddities like this thing is what keeps me going with this blog. Also, I streamed my experience with it, which is why I spent so much time here.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It doesn’t feel wholly applicable to rank most of these games, but the rules are the rules. Here's how this batch fits into the Ranking Of All 3DO Games:
1. Escape From Monster Manor
…
3. Putt-Putt Joins The Parade
4. Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise
6. Fatty Bear's Fun Pack
7. Shelley Duvall's It's A Bird's Life
9. Lemmings
…
10. Crime Patrol
This ranking list gets more cursed with each update.
Next Wednesday we'll go back to the PS1 with Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire, Descent, In The Hunt, and Magic Carpet.
I want to say that we finally have a batch of real 3DO games to look at in two weeks, but I also don't want to lie to you. Regardless, we're going to close out the 3DO in '93 with Star Wars: Rebel Assault, Stellar 7: Draxon's Revenge, The Life Stage: Virtual House, and Twisted: The Game Show.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I played these games over on my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. The archive can be watched below.
Log in to comment