Sometimes credited as a commercial for Macs, this was a video created by the Mac IT department at Good Humor’s advertising agency. The video itself is a parody of a parody. Scatman was a hit song in the 90s, leading to a commercial parody by the Good Humor ice cream company, leading to the video I’m posting about today.
From Reddit: “The original Scat Man song came out in 1994. Then Good Humor used in their famous commercial in 1996. Then the Mac IT department at Good Humor’s advertising agency (McCann-Erickson) created this parody video in 1997 for their company party. The ‘Computer Man’ was their head of McCann-Erickson’s Mac IT department, hence the digs at Windows 95. It wasn’t a real commercial that was aired on TV which is why there is no company contact information at the end of the commercial.
The reason the IT department at McCann-Erickson made this parody video is because the Good Humor commercial was very successful for their the company, so it was the kind of thing they’d joke around about at the company party. And of course they already had access to all of the music assets and talent they needed to record the parody song.”
With a major narrative game convention happening now where an organizer got angry with people asking for a mask mandate, just a reminder that any convention could do one and protect people from covid and other things if they really wanted to. Smaller conventions like Narrascope, Protospiel, and my local zine fest do them, larger conventions like PAX did them when they cared. So it’s possible for a convention of any size to have one and if you won’t do it because your team can’t enforce one, what makes you think that you can enforce any other safety rules and should have the convention in the first place?
If this blog has been quiet lately, it’s basically because I got really into building a Plex server for streaming my collection of movies/tv/music. It all basically kicked off because of the Bandcamp fiasco and realizing that I should probably have all this stuff backed up. I already had a few SSDs from my dad, who no longer wanted them, so I bought a docking station and started throwing stuff on there. Realizing I had a lot of room leftover, I then started ripping my entire cd collection. Seeing that I still had a ton of room after that, I’ve start putting my film and tv collection together, mostly from ripping my dvd and bluray collection, something I’ll probably be doing for quite a while.
While most of the media on my server had come from my physical collection, I was surprised at how many various places digitally I had accumulated music from. Sources include Bandcamp, Amazon, Itch, Humble, iTunes, Steam, and GOG since I listen to a lot of video game music as well. I also had some movies digitally from various kickstarters I had backed, that brief period when GOG tried selling films, as well as that period where comedians were selling DRM free specials for $5. This seems to have died out, which is a shame because I really enjoyed having DRM free movies. There aren’t really many places where you can pick up DRM free copies of films and tv shows but I did stumble across a few places like Rifftrax, Drafthouse Films, Internet Archive for public domain films, Found Footage Festival, and Vimeo.
I’m not really sure what comes next for the server. Probably buying larger hard drives, but I don’t think I’ll have a machine just for the media server since this is just for my home. It’s still been a fun project though and a nice way to revisit my physical media collection.
Here’s a bunch of recent games I’ve enjoyed lately and other neat stuff
We got a new batch of Domino Club games! Domino Club is an anonymous collective of game developers creating games for jams for the last couple of years. Every jam provides a bunch of interesting experimental games and I recommend checking out the other jams too.
The Games for Gaza bundle is still going! Get a ton of great games and help some people out.
A new Click Or Treat bundle is out. I was lucky enough to be in the one last year with a bunch of great games and this one has a new batch of great games for the season.
Schloss der Wölfe is a short, free horror-themed World War II FPS by David Lindsey Pittman, who has made some great games like Neon Struct and Eldritch.
A new Choicebeat is out! Choicebeat is a free zine covering interactive fiction, adventure games, and other narrative focused games.
The new Indie Tsushin for October covers a bunch of indie games from Japan and features a lot of interviews as well.
karyogenesys is a short atmospheric walking sim with light puzzle elements with a style inspired by the first System Shock. It is now available for pre-order with a launch planned for early next year.
A Kickstarter has launched for the adventure game Brain Hotel: Remodeled. The game is designed by Mark Darin, who worked at Telltale and made indie adventure games like the Nick Bounty series
While ScummVM is the go-to emulator for LucasArts adventure games these days, there’s another one people should consider using. DREAMM is an emulator focused on LucasArts games that relies on low-level emulation instead of reverse engineering, providing a more accurate emulation of these games over ScummVM. The emulator was created by Aaron Giles, who previously worked at LucasArts and created many of the Mac ports for their games. You can hear him discuss the emulator here.
In addition to it providing more accurate emulation for LucasArts adventure games, having a focus on LucasArts games means it supports a lot of games ScummVM never will, like Yoda Stories, Rebel Assault 2, and Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion. You can view the complete list of games it supports here.
I was digging through my google drive and stumbled across a ttrpg I wrote for the 200 Word RPG Challenge contest back in 2018. It didn’t win nor should it have, but it seems alright and maybe I’ll come back to it someday.
It Came from Studio 9 is a GM-less RPG where 3-5 players are part of a crew making a B-Movie. The crew collaborates on the framework of a science fiction, horror, or adventure movie before producing a film in three acts. Players then choose one of the following roles in the movie’s production:
Director (Required) Lead Actor (Required) Supporting Actor Location Scout Stunt Person
Players then film the scenes in each act (usually two or three) by taking turns to say what they’re doing in each scene. If the action seems difficult, they must roll 2d6 to determine the result.
10+: Action is a success (Ex: Lead actor delivers a great performance)
7-9: Action is successful but there’s a complication (Ex: Location Scout gets the beach they wanted but there’s turtles everywhere)
6-: The movie has a disaster (Ex: Director couldn’t get prop guns and actors now must fight killer birds with coat hangers)
After all three acts are completed, the movie is released and the group discusses if it was a huge success, box office bomb, or film that is so bad it’s a cult classic.
I just noticed from browsing MobyGames out of boredom that it has been 20 years this month since the game Conspiracies was released in the US. Conspiracies is a FMV game developed by Anima Ppd Interactive that I’ve had a long fascination with. I picked the game up near release when I saw it was pretty cheap at a Best Buy, during a time when we were desperate for new adventure games but also because back then I already had a morbid curiosity in FMV games. You play as the detective Nick Delios as you investigate a murder and along the way you discover a bunch of weird subplots and bigger mysteries. It plays exactly like a Tex Murphy game, but maybe not quite at the level of quality that we would expect from that series. It’s hard to know where to start with why this game is so fascinating to me. Richard Cobbett wrote a great article about the game for PC Gamer a while ago about it.
Our hero, Nick Delios
I guess a lot of the weirdness in Conspiracies comes from the main character, Nick Delios. He’s not particularly interesting but he’s just such an odd protagonist for an adventure game. Like all characters in FMV games, he wears the same outfit throughout the entire game but it’s just a grey hoodie and grey sweatpants. Since it was a game developed in Greece, he is also dubbed and it doesn’t quite fit but it’s also endearing at the same time?
The PC Gamer article mentions the starting puzzle where you cannot leave the apartment until you make coffee using water from your fish tank, but that’s just the beginning of the odd puzzles. Another puzzle requires you to get by a robotic dog, that is not intimidating at all, by filling an inner tube with water and feeding it to the dog. The most famous puzzle in the game requires you to get a signed cd from a real band called Blues Wire and give it to someone in another location to proceed.
Nothing about it really makes sense. Why is a band from today playing in the future? Why this Greek blues band? Why do you have to pretend you’re dying for them to give you the cd? Like most of the game, it’s not a particularly difficult puzzle, just a really weird one.
However, there is one puzzle that beats them all and caused my friend and I a lot of pain when we played through it. Conspiracies is a game that gives you a ton of inventory items, many of them being completely useless, and a very limited inventory space. Some of these items are small sticks of gum that are scattered throughout the game. My friend and I were playing through the game on our own computers while chatting about it over voice chat and while we each had to dump inventory items to make space, he chose to drop some of those sticks of gum. After all, surely you don’t need six sticks of gum? Well, it turns out you do. Apparently you can figure out what items are needed and which ones aren’t by going to your apartment, and using items on your trash can. If an item isn’t needed, the game will dispose of the item in the trash, otherwise nothing will happen. You’re meant to use the gum much later in the game, where you reach a cutscene of a flying car taking off and Nick combines gum and a tiny gps and throws it at the moving car to get it to stick. If you do not have all six pieces of gum, the game reaches a fail state. We did not know this and my friend spent an hour looking for the stick of gum that he dropped somewhere in this massive 3D space to get past this point. Eventually he gave up and I just sent him my save file so he could proceed. Even the cutscene itself is ridiculous and shows Nick unwrapping and chewing on all six pieces of gum before throwing the gps unit at the flying car.
The reception to this game was a bizarre thing to watch as well. This came out during a time when the adventure game community was desperate for adventure games and would rally behind every single game in the hopes that it would “revive” the genre that many perceived as dead. I think you could make a solid argument that the genre was fine if you were including freeware games and the adventure games coming from Japan, but if you were looking for commercial adventure games for the PC then it was a rough time. Adventure game sites often gave the few commercial games we had glowing reviews, only for bigger outlets to trash the games. This led to accusations that the mainstream gaming press was biased against adventure games and sounds oddly like a conservative talking point we’d hear today but no, the games were frequently just terrible. I have a vivid memory of PC Gamer giving The Moment of Silence, a completely forgettable adventure game, a poor review and the Adventure Gamers forums having a massive thread about it. Even games that I thought were decent, like Broken Sword 3, had unrealistic expectations placed on them and people in the community expected them to single-handedly make the genre popular again. This basically went on until companies like Telltale started making games and I’m glad I don’t see it anymore other than the occasional person at a games outlet saying the genre is dead and then the resulting discourse from that.
Anyway, this all meant that when PC Gamer gave the game a poor review, as it should have, people were not pleased. The developers wrote an angry letter to PC Gamer and the magazine actually published it.
We at Anima PPD-Interactive are new developers. Conspiracies is our first game, and it took us five years of development and our own funding. Do you believe that judging the game that hard is leaving us anything? The most likely thing that may occur is that we sell nothing in the U.S. and stop our efforts here. Is that what your magazine wants? Fewer independent developers?
Also, did you play the game till the end? You think there’s nothing worthwhile? Not even the story or the Puzzles? I think that you’re on the slope that Hollywood is on – lots of effects and explosions, but boring stories or no stories at all. Just kill, kill, kill. Of course I don’t say that our game is at the edge of technology , but all of the gamers that played our game up to now had a lot of fun. FMV games are very expensive to develop, and there aren’t many of this kind on the market anymore.
We’re very frustrated that you don’t count the story factor or human factor but only graphics and effects. As adventure gamers we feel that a game with a boring story and great graphics is worse than a game with a good story and poorer graphics.
We feel sorry that you’re not supporting us independent developers at all.
To which PC Gamer writer Chuck Osborne responded with:
I’m not sure which is more surprising: That we’re supposed to award brownie points to independent developers, or that Conspiracies took five years to make. As I said in my review, I’d gladly play an all-text adventure game (and have!) if it had a great story and compelling puzzles. Sadly, Conspiracies received a 23% because of its confounding plot and pathetic gameplay. To answer your question: Yes, we enthusiastically support small developers – we just don’t support bad games.
Again, this was a thing that frequently happened with negative reviews of adventure games in the early 00’s. I remember Chuck Osborne going onto the Just Adventure forums to explain how he’s not biased against adventure games just because he gave a negative review to the latest Dreamcatcher game and what not, and other journalists would pop onto the Adventure Gamers forums to explain the same thing.
The game must have been a success because in 2011, 8 years after the first game, there was a Conspiracies 2. Even with the long gap between games, it manages to bring back everyone from the first game, including the people who did the dubbing for the English version. It’s an improvement over the first game, although I felt like it removed the weirdness from the game so I never finished it. One day I’ll have to, so I can see how the cliffhanger from the first game is resolved.
While they only developed the two games, Anima PPD seems to still be around today doing video production. You can even buy physical copies of Conspiracies 1 and 2 from their website. I believe this is the only place where you can legally buy them, as they never got a release on Steam or GOG. I hope they do get a digital release someday. While it’s clear I don’t think they’re “Good” games, they are fascinating and must have done something right if I’m still thinking about Conspiracies 20 years later.
On a final note, after our playthrough of the first game together, my friend wrote the studio an email thanking them for making the game. I don’t think the email was entirely sincere but there wasn’t any sarcasm in it either. To his surprise, the studio responded and sent him a bunch of Conspiracies swag like a poster and a copy of the game with a bonus dvd of extra material, which I believe was signed? Just an incredibly kind gesture from a small studio that didn’t need to do so, and this enthusiasm is probably why I’m still recommending it to streamers and enjoyers of obscure games today.
When people are nostalgic for the 90’s internet, it seems like they’re often thinking about personal sites that are built around silly purposes. Being fascinated with this era means I get to stumble across these sites such as the Cybertub. This was a site created in the mid 90s just for measuring the temperature of a hot tub in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The Cybertub was created by Paul Haas in early 1994 and by the beginning of 1995, appears to have been getting 1000 visitors a day. The earliest coverage I can find of the site is from the Ann Arbor News in January, 1995. The article has an interview with Paul about how the Cybertub is just a fun little personal project that he made to make sure the hot tub’s water doesn’t drop to freezing temperatures, as well as other parts of his site like the temperature monitor for his fridge. The site seemed to have continued growing in popularity where even the New York Times covered the site in late 1995.
I’m not sure when the popularity of the site started to decline but the legacy of the Cybertub lives on. At BornHack 2019, a hacker camp in Denmark, a large wood-fired hot tub used an internet connected temperature sensor, and if you look at the comments you can see someone from the camp thanking Paul. “I am proud to call Paul Haas one of early mentors. Thank you Paul.”
A really neat thing I wanted to do a shout out to is all the recipe collections on Itch.io. Since it’s a site focused on games but supports other things, I think it’s cool that people are using the Books section to upload their recipe zines. I made a collection here that you can check out to find some of them. There’s a wide variety of themes, one is paired with a tabletop rpg and others are inspired by video games. You can find more by checking out some of the tags on Itch like recipes, food, and cooking.
It’s not on Itch but I also wanted to mention Alpha Chrome Yayo’s album Let’s Get Cookin’, which also features a cookbook as part of the purchase on Bandcamp. It’s a good album and I just like seeing people finding unique ways of distributing recipes.
The 1994 DOS game Pizza Connection/Pizza Tycoon also came with a recipe book of pizza recipes and it’s also part of the download if you get it on GOG. More games should come with recipes. Even the ones that have nothing to do with food.
A nice little feature I’ve discovered this year in ScummVM is the ability to replace the soundtracks of some games with other versions. The ScummVM website mentions it but I didn’t know of it until I saw that George Sanger, also known as The Fat Man, started selling soundtracks of his games on Bandcamp that also included files for ScummVM that allow you to listen to a higher quality version of the soundtrack of games like Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo while you play. It’s been really nice listening to these while revisiting the games with my kids. The soundtracks you can do this with are currently:
Cover of the Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon soundtrack
But I would also encourage you to check out the other albums on his Bandcamp page because there’s a lot of great stuff on there.
Tom McGurk has also rereleased his soundtrack for Spy Fox 2, which comes with files for ScummVM.
Another place where you can find mods for game soundtracks is through the ScummVM Music Enhancement Project by James Woodcock. The project is focused on recreating midi soundtracks of games at a higher audio quality level and isn’t trying to do an “improved” soundtrack or make any drastic changes, and the site is very open about how they are a big fan of the original soundtracks and are just doing it as a fun personal project. Also from reading this post about The Gene Machine, it sounds like he gets permission before releasing an enhanced soundtrack. I think they’re really neat and will have to use them when I replay some of these games. You can check out a video doing a comparison of the original and new Beneath a Steel Sky soundtracks here:
Currently the games supported by the ScummVM Music Enhancement Project are:
It sounds like there’s an enhanced soundtrack being made for Simon the Sorcerer 2 right now, so be sure to follow the project for future updates.
The ScummVM website also links to ways to replace the Loom soundtrack with your preferred version of Swan Lake and building a talkie version of the original Monkey Island 1 and 2 using the voice acting from the special editions. I just think it’s really nice that these things exist when we revisit some of our favorite games.
