Mickey's Space Adventure

Format: DOS/Commodore 64/Apple II
Publisher: Sierra On-Line ©1986

The average American child is at school for approximately nine hundred hours per year. Needless to say, this is a huge encroachment into the video game playing schedule. Kids games suck because they’re educational; no one wants to come home from school and put on a game about addition on the old NES. The figure doesn’t include homework time, which when tacked on increases per year at a seemingly exponential rate. The hours allotted to learning are there, so overlap with gaming is intolerable.

As kids, we came home from school and unwound in the form of mindless shooters with far-fetched plots to rescue existence from hordes of aliens. Absolutely no useful knowledge is gained playing Contra and I for one am much obliged to Konami because of it. But consider this: what if learning on video games could be represented on a scale such as a number line? Games like Carmen Sandiego would be plotted to the right, with a higher value representing the amount of education that the game presented. The aforementioned Contra would fall somewhere damn close to zero on the graph. Now you may ask, “Why, Mike, are you making me use math?” Well, I can assure you that I both hate math more than you and that I’m coming to the point. Given your graph of the educational value in video games, most into the category of greater than or equal to zero knowledge presented. But what of the negative values? Do games exist that actually teach knowledge contradictory to what you learn in school? Could video games erase the damage done during those nine hundred wasted hours? Enter, Mickey’s Space Adventure: a kids’ game that lands itself aggressively far left of zero on the scholastic gaming chart.


One small step for a mouse, one giant leap for gaming.

Many games lose learning points with their poor translations and mockery of English grammar rules. Old school text adventures instilled in us the habit of speaking in clauses and followed a set of punctuation rules somewhat akin to ee cummings. While those games welcomed English mastery that Instant Messenger would later also embrace, they still forced a player to type. Mickey’s Space Adventure sent that concept the way of Atari console systems by introducing a system that allowed gamers to form simple clauses by highlighting words already typed for you on the screen. Sure, it makes snide comments such as “You’d be better off pressing it,” at you if you try to “Push Orange Button.” And the fun of generating responses such as “I don’t know how to pee,” when you instruct the game to do so is stripped away. But for the most part, the ingenuity of eliminating the tedious task of typing from gameplay is a welcome advancement when trying to achieve maximum laziness and mental inactivity. Similarly, true text adventures forced the audience to use their imagination to visualize the different events and locations through which they traversed. Space Adventure requires no imagination, displaying a picture of Mickey dawdling around in each new location with his trusty canine counterpart Pluto at his side. Truly, this is an adventure for the lazy. But that’s not what makes it so counter-educational.

A brief synopsis: aliens from the planet Oron in the Alpha Centauri system have stored the entire knowledge of their radically advanced race into a crystal, which a nameless thief stole and shattered into 9 parts. Coincidentally, there are nine planets in that orbit the sun. Can you guess what the space adventure will be? Of course the wily thief tucked each fragment neatly away in a hiding place on separate planets in the Earth’s solar system. Disney’s own Mickey Mouse has to hop onto a cheesy knock off of the spaceship in Close Encounters and track down each of the crystals in order to save all that the Oronians have accomplished from being forgotten. Following the imperative commands you relate to him in two, sometimes three word fragments, it’s up to Mickey, a retired steamboat captain and one-time wizard apprentice, to play astronaut hero.


I’m gazing in amazement too.

The genius part about Mickey’s Space Adventure is that it masquerades as an educational game. Thus, parents might be inclined to purchase it for their little rug rats and expose them to its covert agenda of teaching factual inaccuracies about the other celestial bodies in our solar system. This leads me to the biggest drawback of Space Adventure: in order to pilot the spaceship to the next planet of your necessary destination (the crystals must be recombined in order, for some reason) you must guess the planet correctly from a hint that is provided. Here’s the part that is included to trick parents: the hint comes in the form of an actual fact about the planet. Theoretically, however, you don’t have to really learn about the planets in order to advance. Eliminating Earth, since the game begins there, you have a one in eight chance of correctly guessing the planet you need to travel to. The odds increase in your favor by process of elimination as the game progresses too. Aside from this one minor marketing annoyance, when you land on the different planets factual trivia about them is displayed. Mickey can also weigh himself with a bathroom scale to demonstrate how gravity changes as planets increase and decrease in size. These few educational moments are easily skipped with the press of a button, and canceled out completely by what follows when you step outside of your craft.

According to Mickey’s Space Adventure, there are a race of ice creatures living on the Triton, moon of Neptune, who desperately need Mickey’s scarf to stay warm. Similarly, some type of green blob alien lives on Mercury, but he’s sad because his planet is so close to the sun and it is so bright. Thankfully, Mickey plays ambassador and gives him a pair of BluBlockers that prevent the extreme radiation and intense white light from blinding the poor creature. Never mind what your teacher said about Earth being the only planet with life in our solar system. Perhaps most predictably, Mickey’s encounter with an alien on the smallest planet orbiting the sun proves that dogs can exist in temperatures as low as –396º Fahrenheit. Yes, you do meet an alien clone of Pluto on the planet Pluto. The direct assault on science in this game is both fascinating and impressive. Did you know that an inflatable mattress might be used as a raft to cross a river of liquid methane? Well, you do now. Mickey’s Space Adventure teaches you things that you shouldn’t know, and will contradict things that science and education hold scared freely and readily. The game offers no distinction between its presentation of truth and fiction, and the intent to mislead is readily apparent. If you want to unlearn what you have been taught about space in science class, adding negative values to your quantified learning, then this is the perfect game for you.

Oh, and stay in school kids.

How a rainbow ruined my morning

During the past six years, I've spent a lot of time in my car. When I lived in Chicago from 2004 to 2007, I worked as a manager for a dog walking service. My job required me to spend the day driving around the more congested neighborhoods in Chicago, fighting traffic, parking enforcement, and pedestrians so that I could make constant stops at our clients' homes to either supervise their dog walker's visit or in many cases cover the walk myself.

Having since relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, I commute across either the Bay Bridge or the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge daily to reach my employer near the San Francisco airport from my residence in Oakland, and vise versa at the day's end. I currently spend at least two and a half hours in my car per work day, and in Chicago it may have been more. I thought at this point that I could no longer be amazed by the inept, idiotic, imbecilic driving manuevers demonstrated by an omnipresent portion of the American population. I assumed that I'd seen them all. Today I learned I was wrong.

What I saw today was possibly the stupidest thing that I've encountered yet on the road. It wasn't so much the move of one driver- accordingly, you could make a case that a single motorist who begins cutting across four lanes of traffic 50 feet before their exit without signaling still utilizes a lesser degree of brain activity than one person in the mass I came across. However, I would argue that comparing the aforementioned example to what I witnessed on my morning commute is like comparing apples to oranges. The incident at hand involved the mass inconsideration, the absent-minded cluelessness of nearly every driver in front of me on the San Mateo Bridge, a span of Hwy 92 that connects the East Bay region to the peninsula south of San Francisco by crossing the bay itself.

Anyone that has driven on a highway (or riden in a car for that matter) is familiar with the "rubbernecking" phenomenon. When there's an accident or traffic hazard in the on-coming lanes or on the shoulder not directly blocking traffic, people appear incapable of not slowing down to look back at the incident at least briefly. Perhaps it's the desire to at least understand the reason behind the prior traffic snarl, or maybe it's just an instinct on the part of each driver to observe something out of the ordinary. As traffic began to devolve into stop and go conditions on the highway today, this phenomenon or some type of obstacle in the road would have logically been likely culprits.

The play-by-play: I passed through the toll plaza, parted with my $4, and merged back in from the cash only lane to the regular flow of traffic without incident. I continued for several miles down the flat causeway, occasionally circumventing a slower-than-appropriate car by making simple lane changes. For those unfamilar, the westbound bridge begins in Hayward, CA and ends in Foster City, CA in San Mateo County. Immediately before the final approach to Foster City, the bridge raises up to form a large overpass that allows ships to travel underneath as the rest of the bridge sits just above water level. It was at the beginning of the incline to this portion of the span that traffic came to a crawl.

The weather was somewhat overcast, cool and damp when I'd gotten into my car in Oakland. It felt like rain, and as droplets of water started to pelt my windshield almost simultaneously with the slowing of traffic, I was prepared for a full on bout of rain as I entered the other side of the bay. Curiously, as edged forward up the incline in the road, the amount of rainfall didn't increase. I observed a boldly colored, well-defined rainbow off to the right of the bridge and concluded that perhaps the rain had already passed. This led me to the conclusion that in the previous rain some fool had lost control of his vehicle and caused a fender-bender in the road ahead, or worse. Due to my familiarity with Bay Area traffic patterns, the idea that the incident was in the eastbound lanes and people were "rubbernecking" also seemed plausible.

I continued to creep up to the apex of the bridge's rise and found myself depressing the brake pedal with less frequency as I made my subsequent decent into Foster City. I now had a clear view of the road ahead, and while there were occasional brake lights flickering on the vehicles ahead of me, I could see traffic was beginning to flow more openly and there were no traces of an impediment in the road responsible for the previous delays. The oncoming traffic appeared to be moving clearly as well. I could feel my blood begin to churn as I came to the realization that there was no tangible reason for the hold up. The San Mateo Bridge is routine to me, and the rise and fall of the raised segment is not normally enough of an obstacle to delay all three westbound lanes. I cursed to myself and wondered, "What phantom could be responsible for this travesty?" With no physical roadblock in sight and several more miles to drive, I began to ponder the issue...

Within less than a mile of further travel, I came to a disturbing, flabbergasting, Ipecacian conclusion that I'm 110% sure is the accurate reason for my morning delay. As I stated previously, there were no physical obstacles on the road and any strong rain had already subsided. The word "physical" was the key to my discovery. Brace yourself, for what I discovered was the cause of the commuting delay was no tangible object, but merely a illusion of light. The rainbow itself was the source of the traffic jam.

"Really?!" I shouted aloud in my car, the sound reverberating through the interior. The noise of my cry seeped out of my cracked windows and reached the eardrums of an elderly woman in a small Honda Civic next to me. Ignoring her alarmed gaze, I visualized that the gears in my brain begin to accelerate, causing the overall structure of my mental machinery began to smoke as springs and bolts burst from it. A rainbow!

I began to wonder: were the other drivers slowing as they strained to look over the bridge on the off chance that they were able to spy a wee leprechaun seated atop his pot of gold at rainbow's end? Perhaps they expected the rainbow to be exploding from the belly of a cub-sized pink bear. Maybe they had to look twice (or based on the time delay 525 times) to ensure that a certain agile, yet mildly obese plumber wasn't running up the multi-colored arch in a cape, using it as a bridge to reach some green pipe sticking out of a cloud above. Anticipated sightings of unicorns and Ronnie James Dio may have also been likely.

I don't hate rainbows. The one I saw this morning was a particularly visible one, but it was not a great deal different to the frequent others I'd seen on Peninsula surrounding previous winter rainstorms as recently as a few weeks prior. I can understand taking a moment to absorb the natural beauty of this phenomenon. However, let's review three key facts: this was a morning commute, when people depend upon reaching their destination promptly in order to retain employment so they can provide for themselves and their families. Accordingly, this was not some scenic drive through the country or along the coast during non-peak commute hours where coming to a near standstill in the middle of the road would not necessarily be reprehensible behavior. Finally, the rainbow was not anchored to one static location, and driving at highway appropriate speeds easily allowed one to look at it multiple times without fear of suddenly passing the optical and meteorological wonder.

It seems more than a little bit ironic that a symbol of peace, love, and pride could be the literal cause of death for my faith in mankind's ability to operate a motor vehicle appropriately. What I realized is that the rainbow was just a path for me to see the terrible reality that drivers, particularly in the Bay Area, are oblivious and void of logic. Similar to a rainbow being regarded as the path of Iris, the messenger between Heaven and Earth in Greek mythology, this rainbow was the path between sanity and irrationality on the highways of California.

Perhaps it is selfish of me to seek to deny other drivers their chance to slow down to a halt and take in the natural beauty. Perhaps I'm the irrational one. But dude, I just need to get to work. Please- do that somewhere over the rainbow, not on the highway next to it.

Hippodrome

Format: Arcade/MAME
Publisher: Data East ©1989

I remember first playing Hippodrome when I was on a Cub Scout camping trip to a privately owned cave in fourth grade. I specify privately owned, because I sincerely doubt that any government run institution could’ve amassed such an impressive arcade as the one in the lodge at Eagle Cave, near Blue River, Wisconsin in the early 1990s. It was one of those magical times in your formative years when a likely coincidence leads you to believe that true love between yourself and another prepubescent must be written in the stars. A girl in my class whom I fancied miraculously happened to be camping at the cave grounds the same weekend that my Cub Scout troop was. So, naturally, I didn’t try to rendezvous with her in some dimly lit crevasse deep in the underground onyx maze, perhaps hitting a single about six years early. I did what any other socially inept, undeveloped preteen would do. I headed straight to the game room, and plugged a handful of quarters, coaxed from my dad, into Hippodrome.

Hippodrome is one of the first games I can remember that stripped man-to-man combat down to its most primitive essence: the strength, agility and wit of one warrior tested against that of another in single combat. Hippodrome was a fighting game before the world even knew what one was. Let’s face it: the Street Fighter series really began with its second installment. If someone had been wise enough to make a Hippodrome II, perhaps today Sharon the Armor Dragon would’ve achieved semi-recognizable status to the general public as Street Fighter’s Ryu has.

In this game, you play as some blonde haired gladiator named Michael with a rather meager bank account balance (more on that in a minute). Though I didn’t know that I shared a namesake with the Hippodrome hero back in 1991, it made me laugh when I discovered it upon replaying the game recently. It’s clear that In-game Mike means business too; he stands in the wind and takes a lightning blast to the metal sword he wields without flinching before his first bout. His ultimate goal seems to be the best fighter on the planet, and he aims to do so by winning a tournament held yearly in the Hippodrome. What the Hippodrome is though remains a mystery, since the different battles are fought in various arenas with hellish names such as Tarterus [sic] and Acheron. The road to glory won’t be easy, however, and that’s putting it very lightly. You’ll go head-to-head with gargoyles, lizard and scorpion Men, sorcerers, dragons, and other standard fantasy archetypes before your ultimate showdown with a gargantuan mace-wielding giant. The most menacing obstacle in your path could be the rather inconsistent hit detection however. Many times, Michael seems to take damage when he is standing several feet away from the nearest threat.


Left: The “entrance fighter” screen for Michael, of the powerful fighter race.
Right: Cawnus, a Lamia Noble, choking big Mike and drawing the most incredible digitized barf noise since Bayou Billy died.

The play control is abysmal by modern fighter standards, but as far as pre-Street Fighter II one-on-one combat games go it’s not bad. Instead of having various special moves, you’ll be able to earn golds (sic) with which you can purchase medieval weapons such as a hammer and halberd (eventually). The hammer’s strength is worth one damage point, while the halberd’s is worth one strong damage point. No further distinction is given. You can also purchase potions that will extend your life meter, but I would recommend waiting until you have all the weapons you want to buy those. Their affect apparently wears off when you continue. You’ll select your opponents on a screen that resembles the Mega Man games, except only three matches will be available at a time. Once you defeat the first three challengers, three newer and more powerful ones will be opened up. As you beat each opponent, a bluntly satisfying statement that reads “DEAD” covers their pixilated visages. Just so there’s no mistake that Norfolk the lizard man might be hooked up to a feeding tube in intensive care. There is a two player head to head feature, though I’m not really sure what the point is. You don’t get to play as any of the other characters that you’ll fight throughout the tournament. Player two is merely another gladiator named Spike, who looks like he belongs in Rancid.

So, taking that description into consideration, you’re probably wondering why you should’ve played Hippodrome. Well, look no further than Sharon the Dragon, available to be your opponent as early as the fourth round. This dragon can speak, and in its late eighties digitized voice says one thing, “Dragon’s Breath!” as it bellows and a blob of orange goo your way. First of all, how can the dragon speak while it is shooting what the game alleges is fire from out of its mouth? And more importantly, why does it feel the need to announce the name of the maneuver that it is performing? While that practice has become commonplace in fighting games, consider what the dragon is saying from its perspective. Next time I drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and start a brawl down at the saloon, should I shout “Human’s Fist!” before landing a haymaker on a rival patron? It gets even better however when you land your deathblow. Make sure to strike the dragon as low as possible for maximum hilarity to ensue. If tears of both joy and brain matter aren’t pouring down your face as Sharon’s head topples off and floats gently to the ground when your sword strikes its gut then you should seriously reexamine why you play video games.


Poor Sharon loses his head, for some reason.

Hippodrome is the perfect remedy for about half an hour or so or of pure boredom, and presents an ample amount of challenge from both the strangely appealing fantasy clichés who you’ll face in the coliseums and the downright wretched play control. Still, the gameplay isn’t much more shallow than the outrageously popular Mortal Kombat games. With the modern luxury of arcade MAME emulation, it won’t even cost you the $20.00 I probably spent on that camping trip back in fourth grade to finally see the end boss. What is most enjoyable about Hippodrome is just how truly absurd it is; as if someone took the worst parts of DAW paperbacks and Roman mythology, and crafted a fighting game based on the relatively unknown Street Fighter I. God bless Data East, the world truly mourns your passing. Do yourself a favor, and go a few rounds in the Hippodrome. “Haaa!”

All images ©1989, Data East