The Case of The Cautious Condor is an adventure game in the format of a comic book. It was released in 1989 by Tiger Media Inc, and was available DOS, CDTV and FM-Towns.

My first encounter with Condor was in 1992, while on vacation in Euro Disney with the family. It was in a display set for future of gaming platform, featuring the CD-ROM. It’s been on my mind ever since.

Without an apparent reason, I figured it’s time to extract all sprites and audio banks. The version I chose was the CDTV, but the code works with DOS version as well.

Condor comprises over 200 .RTF file, each contains a CEL sprite, (optionally) a palette and (optionally) an audio stream. Sprites are 32 colors (5 bit palette index), and audio is 14700 hz 8bit mono.

Game logic was implemented in C++ and is in the executable file in full. The following script was rewritten without reverse engineering the game, with pure trial-and-error.

Owners of the CDTV copy are more than welcome to download the python script at extract-condor-assets.py. It will dump all sprites into separate PNG files, and all audio in Microsoft .wav files (requires PIL and sox). Released under GPL license.

Alternatively, you can view all sprites in a kickass collage online.

And remember: Means, Motive and Opportunity!

Mod of the day. Click for full size.

We live in the dark ages of 3rd person role playing games and first person shooters. The year is 2009, and I expected we’d be over this by now. What in the early days was titled revolutionary, visionary and ground-breaking is today summed up into the word “Indie”.

Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game from the Czech studio Amanita Design. It is IGF2009 Winner and PAX10 finalist, but none of this matters really.

What really matters that it’s awesome on so many levels. In an era of burning desert, this is a precious drop of water.

Setting in a robot world, you play an honest robot that was just dumped as spared parts. Other robots are very poor, and two (robo-)bullies make the life of everybody a living hell.

What captured me about this game most, is that it brings back the most important essence of classic adventure gaming: everything takes time. After I purchased the game, I thought to myself, there’s no way to skip this walking sequence, with my ADD, I will never manage to complete it in this lifetime.

Machinarium is different.

I couldn’t stop and put it down. The puzzles were incredible, and so fun to solve! The graphics are mind blowing, the plot is awesome, and all the little animations and bits of story that make this game a perfect 10. (video)

Several other things that I just had to point out: the game has no HUD (Head-up Display), you have inventory and options, but the game goes all over the screen. There’s no speech, no text, no dialogs. Your brain makes up with imagination instead. Events are set up in a way that you are never lost, you always have a mini-game to solve or a place to go. And one last thing, robots have feelings. This story is about corruption, greed, crime and true love.

A demo is available for free download; if you loved Another World, Grim Fandango or King’s Quest 5, I guarantee you’ll fall for this as well.

I’ve been making a huge progress with my Toki reverse-engineering project. Toki has been one of my all time favorite games since the day it was added at the arcades. You play a monkey (win!) that can fire bullets from his mouth (epic win!).

All level backgrounds, all parallax secondary backgrounds, correct palettes and most sprites are extracted and converted to PNGs. At the moments the sprites are discovered by trial and error – hoping to find how they are stored in the code. I will release all code as GPL when I’m through.

I wouldn’t have been able to do any of these without the help of Mame. I hope to soon post a post-mortem on this game and its uber cool architecture.