The Neverhood

Although a sequel called Skullmonkeys was released on the PSX, the game was pretty much forgotten and Dreamworks stopped future development (including a film that was in the works.)

I have always loved Klaymen and the magnificent soundtrack. I thought of taking some time off to rewrite the game using ScummVM framework and make it available for modern platforms.

The progress I made is available here. A script that unpacks the BLB container files. Each BLB contains background graphics, audio, music, sprites and video (in smk format, supported by ffmpeg). Another script will extract background graphics and convert them into PNGs. The file formats of any of these files is unknown, so you’ll see lots of guesswork in my code.)

See a full collage of all background graphics from The Neverhood.

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.

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.

A while ago I wrote a post about how video games change history facts and make the Third Rich a scifi team of super villians. To make my point stronger, new screenshots from EA’s upcoming Wolfenstein RPG (iPhone) were released to the public, rendering Hilter as a modern struggling rockstar with a badly glued toupee. And to calm everybody down, the swastikas were replaced by a plus sign. Remember when Guy Montag burnt down historical art because it might upset people. Just a bad taste in my opinion. Not only you are killing history, but if you’re making a theme game (Nazi), at least get the BRAND straight.

Charlie Chaplin did:

I intend to publish a technical article about Readysoft’s FMV engine, and compare different console versions. It’s part of Gawd’s Museum of Dissected Games, and a detailed autopsy and source code will be uploaded later.

This is a rewrite of the animation code made for the PC platform. The Amiga, Atari ST and Apple IIgs used similar code and graphics. Visit the ReadySoft Animation Player.

So, for your viewing pleasure. (Almost) The Best Moments of Computer Game History:

Also found on YouTube: King’s Quest Playthroughs.