Toy Story Action Game/Power Play (Windows, 1996) Walkthrough @MrEightThreeOne

Mr. Eight-Three-One EDIT: Seems the render glitched at the end. To see the last few seconds of the video properly, go here -- youtube.com/watch?v=F7wa79N42K8

At long last, here is an actual complete walkthrough of Toy Story for the PC. Most of you probably know I'm not exactly fond of this version, but it has almost no footage up on YouTube save for my old gameplay video and one other, so I felt it was time to do a good deed and get the whole thing preserved.

Most of you probably know this as a port of the Genesis and SNES Toy Story game. The biggest changes from it include a new Redbook audio soundtrack and a save system that allows you to jump to any level at any time.

...and unfortunately that's where the positives end. I mean, sure it's not anywhere close to as bad as the GB port, but I still expected better than this. The easiest thing to notice right off the bat is that the physics are hasty; nothing has any sort of flow, everything moves so stiffly including Woody himself. His jumping is quite botched, with very abrupt movements and no acceleration. He jumps in a triangle rather than an arc. The pullstring is also really strict, only seeming to land hits when it wants to. Oh, and no bonus levels either; getting every star in a level now simply gives a health refill and a life.

For what it's worth, the port is generally playable, and I wouldn't call it a terrible game. Many of the core features are here, which is the important part. Still, we had better 4th gen console-to-PC ports than this.

(EDIT: So it seems there is actually a lot of good reason this port seems "lazy" at first. It was actually quite the opposite, but check the comments for a surprise)

So, as for the walkthrough? Shockingly, I managed to do all of this in one game, without ever having to refill my lives (granted, I *did* give myself 5 lives...not that it matters, the save system makes the lives completely pointless). I had a few embarrassing gaffs, but overall I think it went smooth.

Level-by-level:
That Old Army Game: Decided to just take the straightforward path and not get all the stars. It's okay, you have plenty of opportunity to see what happens if you do several times throughout this video.
Ego Check: Decided to use this opportunity to get all the stars.
Nightmare Buzz: Once you figure out the rhythm to this boss, it's a walk in the park.
Buzz Clip: The RC in this version is even worse than the console versions, if you can believe that. I was *tapping* the arrow keys during this level and he was still flying every which-way.
Run, Rex, Run!: Those army men are sometimes near impossible to avoid without serious dexterity. Overall this went okay.
Buzz Battle: Sometimes it's a giant pain getting that tire onto Buzz, and it's really annoying when he does his spinning attack because of how long he spends doing it.
The Claw!: This is another easy boss. Duck until the claw reaches for Buzz, wait for Buzz to actually start moving, use your pullstring, swing up, repeat. I actually failed one time because I flubbed the last coin, so I left that painful screwup out; this is why my lives go down.
Sid's Workbench: Awful level. The one section that drained a bunch of lives for me was that one hook after the first checkpoint, following the chain beneath the yo-yos; it took me several tries to realize if you jump off at the *end* of the chain (you know, where it's logical?), you will never jump for long enough and you'll miss the hook every time, plummeting into the pit. If you jump just *before* the end of the chain, you'll go high enough and be able to safely swing.
Roller Bob: I have NO CLUE how I passed this and only took 2 hits. This level is incredibly hard and it's a miracle I was able to pull it off.
Day-Toy-Na: Very simple and easy level. I have to wonder if it's even possible to die on it.
Light My Rocket: *takes a deep breath* Ahem...AAAAAAAH-
Couldn't finish the last level without taking a hit...oh well. Least I had a life.

And that's all. Hope you enjoy this walkthrough; I had fun making it, even if I'm not all too fond of this port. It's a rarity that people get to see this version in action, so enjoy!

updated 6 years ago

Toy Story Action Game/Power Play (Windows, 1996) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2017-12-17 | EDIT: Seems the render glitched at the end. To see the last few seconds of the video properly, go here -- youtube.com/watch?v=F7wa79N42K8

At long last, here is an actual complete walkthrough of Toy Story for the PC. Most of you probably know I'm not exactly fond of this version, but it has almost no footage up on YouTube save for my old gameplay video and one other, so I felt it was time to do a good deed and get the whole thing preserved.

Most of you probably know this as a port of the Genesis and SNES Toy Story game. The biggest changes from it include a new Redbook audio soundtrack and a save system that allows you to jump to any level at any time.

...and unfortunately that's where the positives end. I mean, sure it's not anywhere close to as bad as the GB port, but I still expected better than this. The easiest thing to notice right off the bat is that the physics are hasty; nothing has any sort of flow, everything moves so stiffly including Woody himself. His jumping is quite botched, with very abrupt movements and no acceleration. He jumps in a triangle rather than an arc. The pullstring is also really strict, only seeming to land hits when it wants to. Oh, and no bonus levels either; getting every star in a level now simply gives a health refill and a life.

For what it's worth, the port is generally playable, and I wouldn't call it a terrible game. Many of the core features are here, which is the important part. Still, we had better 4th gen console-to-PC ports than this.

(EDIT: So it seems there is actually a lot of good reason this port seems "lazy" at first. It was actually quite the opposite, but check the comments for a surprise)

So, as for the walkthrough? Shockingly, I managed to do all of this in one game, without ever having to refill my lives (granted, I *did* give myself 5 lives...not that it matters, the save system makes the lives completely pointless). I had a few embarrassing gaffs, but overall I think it went smooth.

Level-by-level:
That Old Army Game: Decided to just take the straightforward path and not get all the stars. It's okay, you have plenty of opportunity to see what happens if you do several times throughout this video.
Ego Check: Decided to use this opportunity to get all the stars.
Nightmare Buzz: Once you figure out the rhythm to this boss, it's a walk in the park.
Buzz Clip: The RC in this version is even worse than the console versions, if you can believe that. I was *tapping* the arrow keys during this level and he was still flying every which-way.
Run, Rex, Run!: Those army men are sometimes near impossible to avoid without serious dexterity. Overall this went okay.
Buzz Battle: Sometimes it's a giant pain getting that tire onto Buzz, and it's really annoying when he does his spinning attack because of how long he spends doing it.
The Claw!: This is another easy boss. Duck until the claw reaches for Buzz, wait for Buzz to actually start moving, use your pullstring, swing up, repeat. I actually failed one time because I flubbed the last coin, so I left that painful screwup out; this is why my lives go down.
Sid's Workbench: Awful level. The one section that drained a bunch of lives for me was that one hook after the first checkpoint, following the chain beneath the yo-yos; it took me several tries to realize if you jump off at the *end* of the chain (you know, where it's logical?), you will never jump for long enough and you'll miss the hook every time, plummeting into the pit. If you jump just *before* the end of the chain, you'll go high enough and be able to safely swing.
Roller Bob: I have NO CLUE how I passed this and only took 2 hits. This level is incredibly hard and it's a miracle I was able to pull it off.
Day-Toy-Na: Very simple and easy level. I have to wonder if it's even possible to die on it.
Light My Rocket: *takes a deep breath* Ahem...AAAAAAAH-
Couldn't finish the last level without taking a hit...oh well. Least I had a life.

And that's all. Hope you enjoy this walkthrough; I had fun making it, even if I'm not all too fond of this port. It's a rarity that people get to see this version in action, so enjoy!

An Attempt at Sonic R (Windows) 2-Player Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2022-08-21 | Key word "attempt."

So my best friend was visiting me over this past week and we played a lot of games together during our down time. We both love all sorts of games, good and bad, and for the fun of it one of the bad games we decided to try together was Sonic R. I have never shown any multiplayer on this channel (aside from Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders which I don't really think count), so I also took the opportunity to record some footage of this! This is of us going through all five tracks once over, and doing one game of hunt-the-balloons (which, after watching this, I think you'll quickly find out why we only did it once).

So the reason I worded that title that way was to prevent anyone from expecting expert-level gameplay. My buddy had never played this before, and it's the understatement of the century to say this is not a beginner friendly game (in fact, one experiment I want to try one day is getting four people who have never played this together and making them try it out to see what happens, because I think that'd be hilarious). The track layouts are extremely confusing to someone who has never seen them before, and because so many of the tracks are built more around the fact that they have hidden items to hunt down rather than to be coherent courses, there are tons of pathways that take you way out of the way of the action, and certain ring doors are deceptive because their only purpose is to conceal items rather than open shortcuts.

I don't have too much to say about the tracks themselves. We had a few attempts that went so badly that we agreed to redo them and try again, so there is some editing going on here. The balloon race was utterly ridiculous as we spent almost five straight minutes looking for those last two measly balloons that were hidden in extremely obscure places (naturally, I sped up most of the searching because I know nobody wants to just watch five straight minutes of nothing happening). Otherwise I think all went fairly well.

There are plenty of videos that cover the single-player content of this game, but naturally much fewer that cover multiplayer, and despite how often we flubbed our gameplay on both accounts, we had a ball playing this together. It was cooler to let him do it on one of my old computers (a Pentium 3), as he had never really used one before. Both of us used Microsoft Sidewinder pads for this video. Maybe I'll be able to recruit more people for multiplayer in the future, who knows. For now, I hope you enjoy this video!

Jeopardy! 2nd Edition (Windows, 2000) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2022-03-02 | I'll take "Clever Description One-Liners" for 800, Alex.

It's been a while, hasn't it? When we last saw Jeopardy! on this channel, Alex Trebek had only recently passed away. In looking up videos though, I had trouble finding any uncommentated footage of this one, so here we are. Plus, I already did Wheel of Fortune's counterpart version of this game, so it seems appropriate.

This is Artech Studios' second take on the classic game show, released two years after their first effort. It is similar to the first version, but with a new presentation and a completely different clue data bank. Unlike Wheel of Fortune, this version actually is just as good as its direct predecessor. The pacing on this one hasn't been drastically altered in any way and it feels like an actual improvement on the overall look and feel. The original Alex Trebek FMV has been completely discarded in favor of brand new recordings, and some extra features too like some Behind the Scenes features and a sample contestant exam.

Unfortunately, one thing does make me prefer the first one for one major reason: the AI in this game is *brutal.* Unlike nearly every other adaptation I've ever played, the AI can actually buzz in before the humans on this game, which can be incredibly irritating. While I get this is more "realistic", it comes off as less enjoyable to play on your own. I knew quite a few correct responses but didn't get them in this video simply because the AI beat me to the punch. I also didn't win this version either, but to be honest I really wasn't expecting to.

So this is worth mentioning, unlike my video of the first version most of my correct responses were made fair and square. There is only one exception to this: "Where are We?" for 500, which I looked up the answer for because I wanted to get the Daily Double. So while I didn't do amazingly well on this game, at least most of my play here was completely legitimate. I guess I've improved since you last saw me so that helps a lot. Some categories I flatly didn't know at all like 60s Songs (sorry, can't say I'm very music literate).

Hope you all enjoy the video!

Marios Game Gallery/FUNdamentals (Windows) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2021-10-19 | Also known as how to get sick of Mario's voice in no time flat.

So, this game actually has seen footage uploaded of it on a multitude of occasions, but every video I've seen is of the DOS version. There was an enhanced Windows (and presumably Macintosh) port that features a higher resolution and better visual detail, and I decided I would go ahead and fill that void, so here we are! There isn't too much different with the way this plays as opposed to the DOS version, aside from the inclusion of the drop-down menus, but hey, it's something. Plus, this game's very existence is just weird and bizarre, so documenting it is always fun.

Yeah, so this game...it's a collection of five stock tabletop games, except you're playing them with Mario. The games here are Checkers, Go Fish, Backgammon, Dominoes, and Yacht (or better known as Yahtzee). Oh, and it's on a computer, not a Nintendo console. Wait, what!?

Yeah, I don't have any explanation for that. I was at least able to venture a guess that Nintendo only contracted Mario is Missing/Mario's Time Machine under pressure that their games were rotting their kids' brains, but I honest to goodness can't think of a genuine reason for why they would commission this one. Or maybe Interplay just paid Nintendo a lot of money for the license, who knows.

Of course, the most noteworthy thing about this game and the piece of trivia most famously associated with it is that it's the first video game we ever hear Mario's current voice actor, Charles Martinet, provide the voice (though we did hear him in some pinball tables prior). But what's more interesting to me is that Mario isn't a mostly-mute protagonist in this game like he is in virtually all of Nintendo's games; here, he actually talks in complete sentences. And...boy, I think you'll quickly realize why that's not usually the case. His voice is charming in small doses, but it can get grating after extended periods of nonstop talking, and unfortunately he never knows when to keep his mouth shut in this game. But hey, if you ever wanted to hear Mario talk for longer than simple "yahoos", now is your chance.

Funny I should mention that, actually -- I found my copy of this game at TooManyGames 2021 (a yearly retro game convention in the Philadelphia area), which Charles Martinet himself was a special guest at. Yes, seriously. Could that timing of me finding it have been any more coincidental? And yes, I said hi to him while I was there, amusingly he couldn't remember if this or Mario Teaches Typing was his first one but I'm fairly certain this was. I didn't pay for an autograph, but my disc was loose anyway and permanent marker can damage discs over time so it was just as well.

A lot of people like to rip on this game, but to be honest, I really don't think it's that bad. Removed from the Mario branding, it's a perfectly serviceable way to play these famous board games. The AI is fairly competent (though difficulty settings would have been nice), the animations are cute and charming, and the games are quite faithful to how they are meant to be played with a little bit of Mario flavor. I feel like I've played worse board game compilations than this, which should tell you something as someone very familiar with this era of computer gaming.

Comments on each individual game:

Checkers: So this one has an annoying rule where you must jump if you can, with no option to turn it off. I've never played with anyone who considers this is a rule so this is really bizarre to me. This one went pretty well, all things considered.

Go Fish: Oh man I absolutely got steamrolled on this one. No description can do it justice, just watch the slow-motion trainwreck that was the end of this game happen for yourself.

Dominoes: So this one is short enough that I decided to play it several times, and I swear the game really prefers Mario to win. I often get handed a really lousy stack when starting. I basically just kept playing until I won...so get ready to see me lose a lot.

Backgammon: Thanks to my dad being a huge fan of this game, some of his skill has passed down to me. I made a few very risky moves but they ended up paying off. Pardon if I spend a while agonizing over moves; this is a game that requires a lot of strategy and can't always be rushed.

Yacht: I assume "Yahtzee" was trademarked so they just went with the closest sounding word. I'll be honest, I have no experience playing Yahtzee at all, I know the rules and all but I am not familiar with strategies or anything. Just as well, because I lost this one too. Oh well.

I hope you enjoy this video! I know it's been a while since I uploaded, and no this isn't the "special" thing I teased on my channel (that thing is stuck in development limbo again, sadly), but hopefully this shows I'm not completely missing in action.

Precision Skateboarding Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2021-04-01 | That is to say, can one ever truly fully complete a game as phenomenal as this?

Welcome to Precision Skateboarding, a very obscure and forgotten skateboarding game. That is truly a shame, because there is absolutely nothing that compares to how beautiful this is. Anybody who was gushing over Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 has clearly never experienced this.

To be fair, this game doesn't have a whole lot of stages. That's okay though, because what it does have is a thorough master class in game design. Every stage is crafted to complete perfection, to allow you to enjoy the game to the fullest. The sound effects truly immerse you into the game, and all of the menus use top-of-the-class WordArt text effects. The game is beautifully simple to play, as it only uses two buttons.

Why is nobody else talking about this? This is such a perfect skateboarding game that nobody has even come close to replicating.

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Happy April Fools' Day, everyone!

The serious description: Over this past Thanksgiving, I was staying with my parents and did a little game hunting in their area. I found a giant stack of games on clearance at Half Price Books, and this game caught my eye...and it caught it for all of the wrong reasons. The front cover was almost a dead giveaway that the game was going to be bad, falling quite deep in the uncanny valley and doing a horrible job of trying to sell the game. It looked like the lowest budget, made-in-two-minutes game to cash in on the Tony Hawk craze of the 90s. At only a dollar, I had to see just what was in the package.

I don't think I was ready to witness what I ended up witnessing. This is truly beyond description. When I booted up the first level, I immediately bursted out laughing breathlessly as I saw just how horrendous the game looked. And then I actually played the game and it all got worse. For nearly three minutes straight I was thoroughly cracking up and cackling furiously. I'm pretty sure I annoyed my neighbors from laughing so loudly and nonstop.

The game's problems don't end at the visuals either. The controls are nonintuitive and bizarre -- you push one button to accelerate which makes your character squat, which any Tony Hawk player might think is preparing for an ollie, but nope, you use the other button to jump. The recovery time after you bail is absolutely insane, taking a good five to ten seconds and effectively meaning you aren't allowed to fall even once if you want to win the race. You can only rotate in one direction in mid-air, meaning if you oversteer, you have locked yourself into a fall. Oh, and you have to rotate 180 degrees off a half pipe, or you'll fall too...riding backwards isn't an option. And that's not even pointing out how you often can't see what's coming up thanks to the bad camera angles.

Just for the record, yes, this is how the game performs even in the best conditions. The computer I ran this on was well above the system requirements and yet it still would look like it was only running modestly well to the naked eye. As far as my actual gameplay, I did every track once. I should mention Half Pipe Race and Half Pipe Tournament are nearly identical, the only difference being the latter is score-based while the former is another race mode. Since there's two tracks where these modes are options, I just did them once each. Oh, and on the occasions it looks like I pass right through something I had to duck under -- that's a quirk in the engine, as long as you're holding the forward key/button, the game will register that you're ducking regardless if the animation correctly loads or not.

So yeah, needless to say, this is not a good game. I really can't hate it though, it made me laugh so hard that I honestly just love it for how low-effort it is. Seriously, just look at it. Every single thing about it is just hysterical.

Oh yeah, and I can't go without mentioning that there are Bible verses plastered around the game on billboards. A bit out of nowhere, but I’m not complaining. Though, hopefully you can't blame me for why I'm left scratching my head.

Well, all that said, I hope you enjoy the same laughs I enjoyed.

Space Invaders (Super Game Boy) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2021-03-12 | NOTE: There is an editing error in this video where some text comes up about four seconds later than it's supposed to. My bad. Sorry about that.

The most remarkable feat ever achieved on the Super Game Boy on the absolute most unassuming game.

So, this isn't like what I usually upload, but it's something I just had to preserve on this site. It's not properly showcased in most videos in its raw form, which I guess is a bit reasonable considering it is annoyingly convoluted and painful to set up in an emulator for little gain. So, what is this exactly?

Back during the Game Boy's heyday, you saw plenty of arcade conversions to offer an option for playing arcade classics on the go. These are usually nothing more than novelties these days considering there are tons of much better ways to play these games on the road and they probably wouldn't be your first choice anyway. There was also an accessory released for the Super Nintendo that allowed one to play Game Boy games on the TV, complete with selectable color palettes and a border. Some games took advantage of the features of this accessory by having special pre-programmed palettes that could even color specific areas of the screen differently from others, giving a better illusion of true color rather than just a gradient of one color over a monochrome image.

And then there's this game.

Okay, so it has enhancements as expected, including a custom border and several extra modes that only apply on an SGB that mimic different versions of the arcade cabinet -- you can pick true black and white, or mimic one of the two ways the original game achieved "color" by adding horizontal "masks" across the screen rows. It ALSO, however, has an SNES game buried underneath. As in, it actually completely hijacks the console and at that point it's treated like any other SNES game cartridge, leaving SGB mode behind.

As far as I am aware, this is the only game to ever do any such thing. The Super Game Boy was a weird accessory that had a ton of potential and this is arguably the coolest thing you could do with it, but unfortunately not only is this the only game to do it, it's a fairly unremarkable port of one of the earliest arcade games. The SNES side of the cart is definitely much more faithful to the original arcade game (in fact, a casual player probably won't even notice a difference), but at the end of the day it's still Space Invaders. There's only so much you can do with it.

For this video I showed off the Game Boy side of things, then I showed the SNES side. I tried to showcase every offered mode and played multiple games on each...I'll confess, I'm not very good at Space Invaders so apologies that I never got particularly far. Oh well, you're seeing what you need to see anyway.

That's about all I have to say. Enjoy!

Mario is Missing! CD-ROM Deluxe (MS-DOS) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2021-01-23 | Not only did Mario go missing, so did all of the game's artistic direction.

(Just a heads up -- I had to record audio and video seperately for this walkthrough, so if the audio sync seems off at certain places, my apologies about it -- I did the best I could and I think I came quite close in every case but hopefully it's not too big a problem)

One of the weirdest things to ever come out of the Mario franchise's history, this is an edutainment game by The Software Toolworks starring...Mario? On the computer? How in the world?

Reportedly this game existed mostly as an effort to capitalize on the edutainment market during its height. I also want to bet Nintendo contracted it under parental pressure that their games were rotting their kids' minds. The result is this absolutely bizarre piece of software that doesn't exactly have the best reputation. This version in particular is famous for the visual design that falls straight into the uncanny valley and gave birth to the once-popular "Weegee" meme of the late 2000s. Funnily enough, most people only know the game for that and absolutely nothing else -- and if they *are* able to describe the gameplay, they almost always refer to the far more well-known (and even worse) NES and SNES adaptations.

In addition, this is of the updated "Deluxe" version, which as of this posting has never had a full walkthrough on YouTube before. It's mostly the same as the original floppy disk version, with the major exceptions being the inclusion of real-life photos and videos from the locations you visit and, most importantly, voice acting. AWFUL voice acting. It's only natural, given this came out in the early 90s when voice acting was treated as an afterthought and usually done by the development team. It doesn't help either that a lot of the dialogue is corny as can be with cringe-worthy rhymes to describe places and things. Of course, it ends up unintentionally giving the game a lot more charm so there is that.

Speaking as someone who loves edutainment games and knows a good one when I see one, I can assure you this isn't one of them. While it's undoubtedly better than the console versions (which is quite an achievement considering those don't have eye-gouging artwork), it fails both as an entertaining game and as an educational one. The gameplay is monotonous beyond description -- you go to random unknown locations around the world, ask around about where you are and attempt to pinpoint which city you're in to bring Yoshi there so you can open the exit, and then spend time hunting down Koopas to retrieve stolen landmarks and return them to their kiosks. When returning them, you are asked a few questions about the landmark and need to answer them correctly, which is done by reading a brochure and attempting to recall specific details mentioned in them. Repeat this process two to four more times per landmark, and then do this again...24 MORE TIMES. Yikes.

And as an eductaional game? Well...it tries, but falls flat. Finding the location is way too easy to do, as oftentimes the townspeople will just say the city name straight away. Having a little bit of geographical knowledge will definitely help speed that up, but it's not really that challenging regardless and the artifact returning is poorly thought out. There is no way a kid is going to recall any of this information once they don't need it anymore, as it's just a quick memorization game before you move on to the next thing. Honestly, if you want a good geography game, just play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and skip this one. That said, the background art is serviceable and I think the soundtrack is quite good, featuring decent reworkings of tunes from Super Mario World. There is obvious effort that went into the product here, and honestly I don't think anyone would have given it anywhere near as hard of a time had it not had the Mario name attached to it.

This walkthrough is heavily condensed down. I did what I could to edit out mistakes, agonizing over answers, and general clumsiness. This is why the "time remaining" jumps downward a lot, if you have a careful eye. I also had to redo part of the game due to it crashing which is why the save file suddenly appears and why I so liberally save after every door following the fifth. How I got through this without directly injecting caffeine in my blood stream is a mystery...well, okay, it's not, I did it because of my passion for making these videos, but you get the picture. Oh yeah, the game also switches resolutions every time you go to the world map, so get used to seeing the resolution display indicator that my VGA-to-HDMI adapter shows every time that happens.

I should mention that one thing I did not show during this is the picture slideshow and video clip show for each location you unlock after clearing it -- I may potentially do that as a separate video, since there's not a whole lot to it and I didn't want it clogging up this video.

Hope you enjoy!

The Learning Company The Learning System Product Catalog (Macintosh, 1994)

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2021-01-19 | Is there a way to convince people that you haven't sold yourself out after uploading a video like this?

So, actually I originally intended this to be part of the video I uploaded yesterday, but didn't realize how elaborate it was so the decision was made to make it separate. This is a little catalog demonstration of The Learning Company's product lineup from around that time, included with various products of theirs. This one is played from the Reader Rabbit 1 disc. Not much else to say, except that I hope you enjoy this little time capsule.

Reader Rabbit 1 Deluxe (Macintosh) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2021-01-18 | I bet you're only reading this to see what Reader Rabbit 1-liner I came up with.

A remake of the very first Reader Rabbit game ever released, this is a game that's already been recorded on multiple occasions but I thought I'd go ahead and do a video on it myself just for fun. This is also of the lesser-seen Macintosh version, though it's mostly identical to the Windows one.

This is a pretty basic edutainment game, there's really not a whole lot to talk about honestly. This includes four activities all based on three-letter-word spelling and phonics. I did each of them several times, trying to show different animations and what happens when you get things wrong, but yeah, it's a pretty straightforward video all things considered. Little fun fact, I actually remember playing this game when I was in kindergarten at my elementary school, though the only thing I could recall from it prior to playing it again was the theme song.

Oh yeah, I should also mention that I zoomed in on the game for most of the video; it runs at 512x384 resolution but most monitors don't support that and I think my capture card doesn't handle it particularly well either so I just ran the game in 640x480 and cropped out the border. So no, the zooming in/out at the beginning and end is not part of the game, before anyone asks.

Hope you enjoy!

Forever Growing Garden Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-12-22 | Because "Occasionally Growing Garden" just wasn't snappy enough.

This game was hiding deep beneath the recesses of my memory. I had it as a kid and vaguely remember liking it, until I ended up snapping the disc in half because of me being dumb and bored.

This is a children's game centered on, shocker, gardens. You pick one of three gardens to grow things in, pick your seeds, plant and water them, and wait for them to grow. After they grow, depending on which garden you picked you can either do something with the "normal" plants or click on the "fantasy" plants to watch them animate. Each garden has some type of gimmick, and there's also a random gopher-catching minigame for some reason.

My playing of this game was the first time I had ever laid eyes on it in almost two decades. And...I'm really just left scratching my head as to why I liked this game so much. It's not horrible or anything, but it's very shallow. You stick the seeds in the holes, water them, and then just watch them grow. That's all. Despite the instructions on the backs of the plants implying otherwise, you never have to water them again afterwards. There's a few side activities but all in all this game wears thin very quick. Considering it was made in 1993 it is a bit impressive as that would make it a very early Windows-based game, but it's definitely rough around the edges. It feels like the developers had an idea for a game but didn't fully understand what to do with it.

And, I must apologize...I made a ton of mistakes while recording this so I had to do a lot of editing to cover for them (this is why there's occasional weirdness like a seed suddenly popping in the bucket and then vanishing, for example). In the end, you still see just about everything except for the back of one of the seed packets (I forgot to record it and it's just a piece of text so I don't feel like going back and doing it again), but yeah, there's a bit of skipping around going on here and some inconsistencies. Sorry about that. I tried to make it as smooth as possible but pardon my haphazardness.

I have very little else to say about this. This is a very obscure game, but I've been surprised at how much traction videos of obscure games can get before so maybe it'll happen this time too?

Hope you enjoy! This is going to be my final video of the year, so see you next year!

The Game of Life (Windows, 1998) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-12-21 | The only game where you can be a doctor and still only make minimum wage.

(If you want to just see the enhanced mode straight away, skip to 59:39)

The late 90s computer adaptation of the classic board game! You have probably played this game at least once, and I'm sure you all know the premise -- you traverse down a one-way board starting either at college or with a career straight away, and go through the twists and turns of a full life up to retirement. This is a very faithful adaptation of the game, and has a great presentation going for it, even if a lot of the CGI does look rather dated now. It includes both the classic board game which is one-to-one with the original (at least at the time; the rules have changed a bit on the current version), and a new "enhanced" mode that foregoes the Life tiles in favor of money-grabbing minigames.

This video shows both the Classic mode and the Enhanced mode, with me against five other AI players both times. The Classic mode went abysmally for me -- I not only got struck with the early luck of going last, I also spun poorly my first several times and ended up being last to get a career, with the worst possible salary at the college option, and I picked the doctor which I had totally forgotten upon recording was a terrible choice as he has extremely few spaces, basically dooming me to playing horribly. Oh, and for some bizarre reason, even though everyone except me retired to Countryside Acres, I didn't get the four free Life tiles at the end even though you're supposed to be locked out of those in Countryside (I guess it was a bug of some sort?), so as a result, I ended up locked in dead last. Oof. I'm really interested in knowing where I would have placed had I gotten the Life tiles like I was supposed to. Also, for those who may ask -- the last time I landed on the "Trade your salary card" space, I picked 90K because the AI will only go for who has the highest salary, which ended up being a miscalculation because that space never got landed on afterwards. Oh well.

As for enhanced mode, I think it's easy to say the game decidedly went a lot better for me...however, once I reached the end, it was clear I wasn't going to come out on top if I chose to retire to Countryside, so I decided to try my luck at Millionaire Estates again and...well, the results speak for themselves. Oh well, everyone has their bad days, right? Also, all of the minigames except Cannonball got hit at least once which was nice. I only landed on two, sadly.

Also, due to a bug, one of the AI players ended up choosing a stock that I already owned. I don't know what would cause this but it did. I guess the "Stock market soars" space doesn't account for stocks already owned if an AI player lands there.

I hope you enjoy the video!

Monopoly (Windows, 1995) All-AI Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-12-04 | There are a million ways to play this game, and it somehow still can't be made good.

That's right, it's Westwood's 1995 computer game adaptation of the (in)famous board game. Just for the record, that one-liner was a quip about the base game -- this computer game is actually a very valiant effort and sometimes considered the best adaptation due to its personality and heavy level of customizability. That said, if you ask any board game enthusiast worth their salt about what their opinion is on this game, it's probably not a very flattering one. Not that I can blame them -- it was deliberately designed to be bad from the outset (after all, it is about the dangers of unchecked capitalism, not that anyone ever noticed).

So as the title implies, this was a purely AI-controlled game, I did absolutely none of the work. Figured it was a better use of my own time considering games can drag on and on, so I wanted to just let the computer have at it. In retrospect, I think turning off the "thinking" time may have been a bad idea because it means things like trades happen way too quickly for the human to notice, but eh, it's a small price to pay. If I ever do another Monopoly PC adaptation though I may not be so lucky. Also, I love how the AI names are based on already-existing video game characters.

I have very little to say about this since I didn't do any of the playing. Like I said, it's a really good adaptation that has a lot of neat little touches, and while I may not like the board game it's based on, I think Westwood did a great job with what they were given and I do hope you enjoy the video!

Jeopardy! (Windows, 1998) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-11-26 | In memory of Alex Trebek: 1940-2020

My apologies about the super long and unexpected hiatus. I don't know, I guess I just haven't been feeling the video making itch lately? Either way, I figured this was a good time to do a video on one of the many Jeopardy computer game adaptations, due to Alex Trebek's recent unfortunate and untimely passing.

So...let's get the elephant in the room out of the way first. I am BAD at this game. No joke, no exaggeration, I am absolutely horrendous at it. The first time I played this game, I ended with a score -750. No, that minus in front of it is not a typo. I really did end up with a negative score. So, if you are here expecting a skillful player, leave right now. Please. I guarantee you will be screaming at your monitor at least five times minimum during this video.

Are all of you willing to deal with my bad skill still around? Good.

Does this really need any introduction? You all know this show, it's run on a nightly syndicated basis since 1985 and goes back even further than that. It's a reverse of the trivia format, each game consisting of six categories with five answers each worth different money amounts based on the clue difficulty. This particular computer game adaptation was released in 1998, and is very faithful to the show right down to Johnny Gilbert as announcer and the legendary Alex Trebek as host.

So, this will also need to be said, yes I cheated a few times. Trust me, if I didn't, you porobably wouldn't even be seeing Final Jeopardy. This game can't be exploited quite as easily as I could for Who Wants to be a Millionaire though, as there isn't anywhere near as much time given to answer questions, and some clues are worded in a vague enough way that even Google won't save you. I also generally hesitated to buzz in if I didn't know the answer right off the top of my head, though that often meant the computers buzzed in on questions I could have potentially gotten.

Overall, I actually did kind of okay even with answering questions I did know. I kinda feel I underperformed in the "Apostles" category in the second round (though it doesn't help I don't tend to remember contextual details like the things they asked about), and I had a few dumb mistakes as well, but there were times I didn't feel too bad about not knowing as well. All in all though, I think this turned out alright and yeah, I know I didn't deserve that victory, but hey, I do prefer to actually show games being won for this channel so there is that.

I hope you enjoy this video!

Fatty Bears Fun Pack (MS-DOS) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-08-29 | Holy heck, I did it. I actually did it. I finally found a copy of this game. A game so rare I was genuinely convinced it didn't exist for a time. There is absolutely nothing to describe how hard this game is to find...well, if you're looking for it on computers, anyway.

For reasons I will never be able to understand, this game is excruciatingly hard to find. In the last decade (!!!) that I have eyed eBay, I have only seen copies of the PC version pop up a total of three times. Yes, three. If you want the 3DO version, it's no slouch either, but is significantly simpler to run across. Go for the computer version though, and you're in for a rough time. Why this is the case, I have absolutely no clue -- Putt-Putt's Fun Pack is ludicrously easy to find by comparison. So when a decently priced copy showed up on eBay a week or two ago, you better believe I immediately lunged at the chance to grab it.

And...it all is a timeless tale of how rare =/= remarkable. If you already played Putt-Putt and Fatty Bear's Activity Pack, you've already played this game. This is a compilation of 5 minigames, which all later got repackaged as part of the aforementioned game. There are two main differences -- the main menu is different, and instead of using Putt-Putt Joins the Parade's soundtrack, this uses Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise's soundtrack. That takes quite a bit of getting used to, given the two scores have pretty different moods. Aside from that, the coloring game has one extra picture to color that isn't included in The Activity Pack. I have no clue what prompted them to make that one small change considering it wasn't even close to using the whole space on the disc, but it is what it is.

So yeah, I'm not even sure if I need to comment beyond that. I did make sure to actually win Reversi this time, and once you figure out the strategy, it isn't too hard. Just know I agonize a lot over what spaces to use. I also played Go Fish on Medium this time, specifically because it employs an extra rule that isn't used on Hard or Hardest -- if you draw the card you guessed, you get to go again. This accounts for two extra lines of dialogue you wouldn't otherwise get to hear. Yeah, I know that made winning a foregone conclusion, but to my knowledge this tidbit has never been shown so I wanted to do it.

Other than that...geez, is there really anything else to say? I am absolutely in awe I actually have a real copy of this game now, and I can't believe it's taken more than ten years for it to happen. But like I said, that doesn't at all mean the game is anything to give a closer look at.

Hope you enjoy the video!

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Windows, 1999) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-08-02 | In loving memory of Regis Philbin: 1931-2020

If ever there were a period piece of early 2000s television, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was that incarnate for game shows of the time. You all know the show by this point, and in fact it's one of my earliest TV memories that doesn't involve PBS. Of course, I was so young at the time that I didn't know an ounce of even the 100 dollar questions, but a lot of things about it stuck with me -- the dramatic lighting, the dark and foreboding music, all the sounds you heard, "final answer", lifelines...indeed, it was a ratings behemoth for several years and was a big trendsetter, for better or worse, on game shows to come, such as the aforementioned dramatic environment, trivia questions, lifeline equivilants, super slow pacing, and extremely prestigious top-dollar prizes. With a show as popular as this, it's pretty much inevitable it'd get a video game adaptation, and I figured doing a video of it was a good way to pay tribute to Regis Philbin, which as suggested from that first line has only recently passed away as of this posting (in fact, by sheer coincidence I first tried this game on the day of his passing, as you may note in the high score list...talk about timing).

The game is exactly as you expect, but for those who may be too young to remember this show, the format is as follows -- you are presented with a multiple-choice trivia question. Answer it correctly, and you win the next tier cash prize. There are fifteen questions in total, and the top prize is -- what else? -- one million dollars. However, if you mess up on even one question, the game is over, and you will either walk away with nothing, the fifth-tier prize, or the tenth-tier prize, if you reached either one. Or you can choose to take what you have if you don't want to take any risks (which is kind of pointless in this game since no real money is involved so why not just try to go as far as you can anyway? Sure, you won't hit the high score list, but does that really mean anything?). If you're stuck, you can also use a lifeline to potentially aid you in answering the question, but you only get one use of each of the three, so use them wisely.

So let me just say this right now, I absolutely cheated my way through this game. Oh come on, don't act like you're surprised, if you were doing a video on this and needed to show off winning the top prize you'd do it too. And besides that, it's no secret that I am absolutely horrible at trivia. In fact, I'm bad enough that I've even messed up some of the first questions on this game (though it's not always guaranteed to be kindergarten-simple, in my defense). So yeah, I basically had my phone on stand by to look up answers while I played. I did make sure to use the lifelines at least once so you could see what they were like, and since this would have been very short if all I showed was one perfect run, I also showed a few more odds and ends they included as part of the package. Some of them are pretty funny (hey, it is Regis Philbin after all!), so stick around!

Hope you enjoy the video!

All copyright belongs to their respectful owners.

Adventures in Odyssey 3-D CD-ROM Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-07-31 | An Adventures in Odyssey computer game? To borrow the colloquialism, surely you jest!

Yes, really. This is the first game to be based off a Christian-centered radio drama for kids that has run since 1987. About a year ago, I started listening to the show while at work, and I've liked it a lot. I'm young at heart, and I am a Christian as well, so I guess it wasn't too surprising. It helps that it's a genuinely well-made show in its own right that has complex continuity, fan service for long-time listeners, and it covers some pretty intense topics for a kids' show.

That said, this game adapts a bit more from the cartoon rather than the radio series. This is evident by the presence of Dylan Taylor as the main child character and the existence of the Strata-Flyer, which only appeared in the animated series and got a...erm, rather unflattering mockery in the radio show. In spite of that, a few characters that were regulars on the radio show but weren't in the cartoon do show up here, such as Tom Riley, Harlow Doyle, and Bernard Walton. The latter did eventually appear in the cartoon, but this is otherwise the only animated depictions we have ever gotten of the former two.

This game very clearly attempts to ride on the success of activity center type games of the mid-90s. Unfortunately, while the visuals and the look and feel do just fine, the mechanics lack in polish. Nearly every minigame is marred by one or two faults that make it a little difficult to enjoy. If you're willing to look past it, the game works just fine I suppose, but leaves something to be desired.

I played the game on the medium difficulty as I found the hard difficulty cranked it up a little too high.

Scavenger Hunt: You find 20 objects, and also have to help out people around Whit's End. Minigame comments, if applicable:

Wise Guys: A game that would be alright if it weren't for the fact that I think a lot of the knowledge based questions are too hard for the game's target audience (seriously, I had to Google most of them and I'm way past the target age range). Some questions also require you to be pretty knowledgeable on the show's continuity too, which I got one such question. I will admit I do like the idea of the morality-based questions though.

Mug Shots: ...really? They expected you to get everyone from memory? Having some sort of hint system here would have worked wonders. In fact, I suggest to have the game manual near by and copy the portraits from it. This won't help you for Doug or Jesse but it will for everyone else. Harlow says that he has a sheet you can refer to for hints, but no such thing actually exists in the game.

Muddy Menace: A nice action based game. It took me quite some time to realize the better strategy for closing a window that's about to open is to quickly open and shut it, rather than waiting for it to open. Oh, and the minigame lasts way too long, and any messup means you have restart.

Soda Shop Bop: Arguably the worst of the bunch. There's two issues with this -- first, the game is *stupidly* picky about where you place dishes, and if you put it down in the wrong place, it falls to the floor and you need to get another. Second, it is very unforgiving (boy, there's irony if I ever saw it, a lack of forgiveness in a Christian game). You are given very little room to leave customers waiting before you lose. Oh yeah, and you would think you would just need to hit the bell once after filling an order, but no, you need to hit it at a specific time. I find it best to just hit it over and over until Connie picks it up. Bleh.

Strata Safari: An alright game. The mechanics work okay, though for a while I didn't realize you were actually supposed to aim the crosshairs at the kid instead of slightly ahead of him.

The Mystery of the Roses: This one features Evelyn Harcourt from the cartoon episode "A Fine Feathered Frenzy". Thankfully we don't have any nightmare sequences with child-hungry lawnmowers, but we do get another series of minigames. Most of them repeat, but there are two new ones.

Build-A-Bot Countdown: Even though Eugene says you need to put the parts in a specific order, that's incorrect, you can put them in any order you want.

The Robot: Only a few more minigames to go. For whatever reason as soon as you're tasked to help Jesse, you're taken to...more trivia? What the heck does that have to do with helping her out? And why does a cut scene randomly show up in the middle?

Aqua-Bot Peril: This game can be really annoying because every time you get hit, you lose an item, and if you get caught in the middle of a drain, you lose everything.

After that was done, I showed the game select screen, the credits, and also showed off the AIO behind the scenes video that came with the game. As far as I know, this is the only place to see this making-of as it's not on any currently circulating AIO media, so I hope you enjoy!

All copyright belongs to their respectful owners.

Sonic & Knuckles Collection (Windows, OPL3 Music) Sonic Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-05-23 | (NOTE: I need to apologize about the really bad microstutter present in this video; unfortunately, regardless of which computer I played this game on, it seemed to happen and I couldn’t find a way to eliminate it. It appears to be an issue with this particular version of the game)

The Intel Pentium has blast processing. The Cyrix 6x86 doesn’t. So what’s blast proc- wait, that’s not how it goes…

That’s right, it’s the PC port of Sonic 3 & Knuckles! This compilation includes all three ways to play the third entry in the Sonic series (Sonic 3 alone, Sonic & Knuckles alone, or the two of them locked on; you can also play Blue Sphere as well, normally accessed by locking on any other cartridge besides Sonic 3 or Sonic 2 to S&K).

Okay, I won't pretend this game hasn't already been recorded and played to death all over the Internet, and you know good and well I try to avoid games that have been recorded a million times over. However...the recordings of this version that *do* exist on YouTube make a pretty fatal mistake:

General MIDI music.

Now, in most cases, I'd just say your preference for sound synthesizers is up to personal taste. But this is a pretty glaring exception. The General MIDI score for this game is AWFUL. The instrumentation is horrendously chosen and it can't bend notes, leading to issues like the title theme having no upward slur like it's supposed to. I'm no musician, I won't pretend I know the first thing about music making, but compared to the Genesis version, the GM score mangles everything so badly. The *correct* way to play this version is to use an FM synthesis chip (and no, you can't just tick the "FM synthesis" box on the options to accomplish this, you need to have a sound card that specifically has that sort of chip or emulation thereof like a Sound Blaster 16 or an OPL3-SAx). This not only gives you a soundtrack far closer and more faithful to the Genesis version, it also is actually...well, decent. It is able to pitch-bend and doesn't have any of the ear-shattering instrument balancing issues that plague the GM score. This shouldn't be too surprising, as the FM synth chips that were originally popularized in PCs, the Yamaha OPL2 and later the OPL3, are very close relatives to the Genesis's sound chip, the OPN2.

I also have to confess...I never finished this game up until I recorded this. No, really. I got through Sonic 3's half, but never did so while also getting every Chaos Emerald, never mind the & Knuckles half and every Super Emerald. That's due in part to how unforgiving the special stages are -- a single mistake will ruin it, and once you enter a special stage ring, it’s gone forever even if you reload a save game. And I'm not emulating this either, so I don't have save states to save my skin.

So, if you have an eagle eye, you might notice a few discrepancies from the start of the video up to Carnival Night. The reason for these is because I started the walkthrough on my Pentium 2 computer, but for whatever reason it slowed to a crawl at that zone so I had to switch over to the Pentium 1, which is how the rest of the walkthrough ended up being done. There shouldn’t be any major inconsistencies, however the sound effects are a lot louder on the Pentium 2 (initially, the music was too loud so I turned up the wave audio volume, but I think I overdid it a bit). Mercifully, the sound cards on the two computers aren’t drastically different -- the Pentium 2 has an OPL3-SAx while the Pentium 1 has a Sound Blaster 16 (with a real OPL3 chip, not the CQM synthesizer). Additionally, I didn’t realize until post that the Pentium 2 footage is actually a little faster than it should be -- I think this occurred because my monitor refresh rate was mistakenly set to 70Hz, and the game syncs to the refresh rate in full screen mode. That does at least mean the microstutter was lesser, but if it looks suspiciously faster for the first three zones, that’s why. Carnival Night onward are all at the correct speed. I could have slowed it in post but that would have meant the music would get slowed down too so I left it as it was.

As far as gameplay goes, I did my best to cut out any particularly sloppy moments and deaths, unless the death didn’t cost me a whole lot of time. I admit I’m not the best at this game, and the play especially gets sloppy beginning at Sandopolis, which I had only reached that point in the game one time prior to this recording. I also cut out any special stages I failed, which didn’t happen a huge amount thankfully enough. I also did what I could to avoid using Super/Hyper Sonic too much beyond the first time just to show what he was like, though I did use him at a few bosses.

I don’t have a whole lot else to say. As the title states, this is a Sonic playthrough; I currently have no plans to do a Knuckles one, though some day it may happen.

Hope you enjoy!

Lego Island Xtreme Stunts (PlayStation 2 100%) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-04-24 | Hang on, I'm confused. Which gear was the Brickster not even in yet?

Once again, it's time to check out the third and final game in the Lego Island series. Years ago, I did a walkthrough of the PC version of this game, but in retrospect I'm not very satisfied with how it turned out; my play was very sloppy and I didn't really put forth any rhyme or reason as to what tasks I did and which I didn't. I aimed to take care of that by going all the way this time and doing 100% completion straight up. Originally, I hesitated because this game can be really tedious to finish all the way -- it always comes down to the last five red bricks you missed. Thankfully, with the magic of video editing, I could easily skip extended periods of aimless wandering. Also, if I'm not mistaken, this is the very first 100% walkthrough of this game on YouTube and the first of any kind for the PS2 version as well!

This game combines the free roaming style of Lego Island 1 and the story driven aspect of 2, and it comes together for a surprisingly good experience. To this day I still stand by my opinion that this is a very underrated entry. If you are familiar with the PC version already, this one is pretty similar. In some ways, however, it's also significantly better. First off, unlike the PC version, this one will obviously run with zero fuss as long as you have a PS2; the PC version, even with era-appropriate hardware, is notoriously difficult to run. Second, the corrupted save issue isn't here at all, which is an absolutely huge plus. Finally, this version has absolutely no fog at all -- the draw distance is completely uncapped. So when you're on top of the mountain, you get a full view of the entire island, instead of a boring view of the sky like on PC. The only trade-offs compared to the PC version are incredibly minor -- the water isn't as nice looking and there aren't as many graphical touchups in the scenery (for instance, there are no weeds popping out of the grass). Compared to the improvements though? Yeah, I'd say it's weighted pretty heavily in this version's favor.

Now, as for what 100% entails -- this includes getting all red bricks, all gold bricks, placing all brickimals, completing all three ranks of every minigame, finding the two secret LAFTAs, getting all trading cards (and performing sidequests to do such), getting all three vehicle licenses, and completing all levels of Photo Fit. Trouble in Store is not required in any capacity to achieve 100%, but I showed a level of it to give an idea of what it's like. It quickly gets complicated and insane so I didn't show any more beyond that. I also managed to get everything while leaving out one sidequest which I promptly took care of as soon as I figured that out.

Getting 100% on this game actually isn't too bad for the most part, except in one major area -- the red bricks. It takes ages to do and when it comes down to the one or two left where they could be absolutely anywhere on such a massive, sprawling map? Yeah, it's a recipe for a headache. Thankfully, there weren't really any periods of aimless wandering for any of the walkthrough and it all fell into place. For whatever reason, the final gold brick doesn't appear until you get the other 20 first. The helicopter is the best way to search for them due to its mobility.

I have little to say about the main story minigames, all of those went as planned. Ripcord Rescue is annoying because of how long it takes, and if you miss any rescues or fail the landing you have to do it all again. I cut out all failed attempts at minigames. I left in load screens as well, which I'm not completely sure was the best idea but oh well.

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

Animaniacs Game Pack Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-04-19 | Citizens of Anvilania, I stand before you because if I was standing behind you, you couldn't see me!

A quirky little game based on the TV show of the same name. I'd say this fits right in with the typical "activity center" type games that were prevelant in the 90s, but to be honest, it kind of doesn't. It's more or less five arcade styled games that have a flavor of mid-90s edutainment in terms of visuals. It's pretty dang good, at that. If I had seen the show as a kid, I can tell you I would have loved this game. It fits right in with the spirit of the show, including having the original cast reprise their roles, and the visuals are very lively and bouncy. The only thing that leaves something to be desired is the sound design, as it's pretty repetitive and doesn't always fit very well.

There are five games included in this pack, and I showed them all to their fullest at the best of my ability.

Prop Shop Drop: A 9-level auto scrolling game that I don't have much to say about. Getting the props does nothing but increase your score so I tried play it safe rather than going for them all the time.

Tee Off Minigolf: A pretty standard minigolf game. I do think it holds your hand a little too much and it's a little hard to judge how hard to hit the ball but overall I did alright.

Smoocher: This best resembles Mario Bros. (the arcade game), particularly with the TNT in place of the POW block. I made it through every level before things start repeating so I didn't mind dying on level 9.

Baloney's Balloon Pop: The only game in the collection to be directly based off a short from the show ("Baloney and Kids"). It's your pretty basic Breakout clone. I probably played this longer than I really needed to, but I wanted to show off every feature the game has (that I'm aware of anyway), and that included the rubber bumpers which don't appear until stage 11.

Belchinator Too: The most intricate and involved game in this collection, and honestly one that could have been sold as its own product had it been a bit longer. It appears to take some inspiration from Zombies Ate My Neighbors on the SNES. This is also a pretty difficult game beginning with the fifth level; you will notice I save pretty egregiously beginning with that area. I also edited out any clips where I got a Game Over so it appeared to be a "perfect" run, but believe me when I say it was far from it. In fact, if you want to see all the cases I got a Game Over, just check the high score screen at the end. I actually Game Overed so many times that I quit bothering putting my name on the list.

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

James Discovers Math Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-04-07 | G'day mate, can I interest you in math edutainment?

I needed content for this channel, and it wasn't going to make itself, so I went through my game discs binder and flipped through until I found one I could walkthrough at a moment's notice. And here you go. This is actually a game I had as a kid that was buried deep in my memory's farthest reaches. It's another one among Broderbund's library of edutainment titles, but compared to some of their more noteworthy titles, this one feels kinda dry. That's not to say it's a bad game, not at all -- but I only remember playing it for a little while when I was very young (no older than 5), and didn't keep playing it very long compared to other games in my library. It has a lot of character and charm to it, there's effort that was put into it, but...I dunno man, I guess it just didn't stick with me like other games did.

Playing it again, I honestly forgot how young an audience this game targeted. The game only teaches the absolute preschool level fundamentals of math -- so mostly shapes and counting. There's only one activity in the whole game that teaches any sort of equations. The prevelance of early age voice acting makes that even more apparent. While I don't necessarily want to knock the game down for that, early learning edutainment games usually focused on a broad range of subjects and even then still had trouble cramming enough activities in to keep kids entertained -- so spreading it as thin as one subject ends up with a very barebones experience, in my opinion. I will say, I did at least like the storybook activity as a kid.

If you have fond memories of this game, by all means all the more power to you -- it was noteworthy enough to get a Wikipedia page which has to count for something. Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (All Puzzles, Every Difficulty) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-02-28 | Fleens? You're not Fleens!

Yes, it's the legendary edutainment game Zoombinis! Later released as Zoombinis: Logical Journey by The Learning Company (this walkthrough is of the original Brøderbund version) this is a fondly remembered and well-loved game centered on logic puzzles. It surprisingly does a fantastic job both on a creative side and an educational side, as it has a very unique premise, charming visuals, and some pretty memorable voice work. On top of that, unlike most edutainment games, this one can be quite challenging regardless of your age.

So, right off the bat you will probably take note of the fact that this is not a "625 Zoombinis to the end" walkthrough. Simply put, doing that would test my patience to levels not seen since JumpStart 3rd Grade. That takes an absolute eternity to do and there's no reward for doing so. And while I realize I could have potentially tried getting all of the buildings, that also takes more time to do than I really care for. If someone else wants to try for that, be my guest -- it's not going to be me who does it. In order to advance the difficulty of the paths, you have to get a full group of Zoombinis through them three times each without losing any -- in total, that would mean I'd have to do every path six extra times in addition to recording the first attempt, which would just mean a lot of wasted time on my end, all to see some extra building graphics at the end. Yeah, sorry, no chance.

This walkthrough, for obvious reasons, is heavily edited down to remove the parts where I agonize over what choice to make.

Difficulty acronym key:
NSE -- Not So Easy
OSH -- Oh, So Hard
VH -- Very Hard
VVH -- Very Very Hard

Allergic Cliffs: The most straightforward of all the puzzles. With OSH, you will look for another iteration of the same feature, while on VH and VVH you will look for two and three specific features respectively.

Stone Cold Caves: Honestly, this is pretty much Allergic Cliffs but with two more paths and way more room to mess up.

Pizza Pass: Only the last difficulty of this poses any real threat. The other three can easily be cheated by simply checking all the toppings once and then giving what all the trolls want. I only narrowly got through VVH without getting any Zoombinis lost, and it was sheer stroke of luck.

Fleens!: With careful focus this never really gets difficult at all, even after they try to mix it up.

Hotel Dimensia: I somehow managed to get through VH on my first attempt without being forced to leave any Zoombinis behind. That's not an easy feat, since they board up several of the rooms and you can potentially set yourself up to be unable to progress.

Mudball Wall: This one never gives me any sort of trouble, even on the ones where the pattern shifts diagonally.

Captain Cajun's Ferry Boat: Believe it or not, this one actually consistently gave me the most trouble out of all the puzzles. This is one of those that is significantly harder than it looks. And, yeah, I admit it, I cheated on VVH. It was going to take me hours to get past it if I didn't and I know good and well it makes very little difference to watch me cheat as opposed to doing it legitimately, since in the end you still get to see a solution anyway. Thank you very much to Colorful Arty for his Python program to help solve this puzzle for you.

Titanic Tattooed Toads: This one is painful. Due to my own insecurity I frequently trace the same paths over and over just to be absolutely sure I don't accidentally screw myself over. In VH and VVH, it's best advised to only swap lily pads of the same shape -- the crabs are set up to be able to get through no matter what, and they only ever move by shape, so swapping shapes can break the flow.

Stone Rise: This didn't give me any real issues until VVH.

Lion's Lair: A lot of people consider this the hardest puzzle in the game on VVH, but I don't see why. If you use two Zoombinis that share all but one trait, that already can help you narrow it down significantly.

Mirror Machine: Ironically, I think this one actually gets easier the higher the difficulty. Once you figure out the "flow" of this puzzle it's really not too bad.

Bubblewonder Abyss: This one can be problematic if you try to rush it. You really have to be good at planning to succeed at this one. Thankfully, there are a finite amount of layouts you can get, so once you figure out the trick to a layout you can keep using that same tactic all future times you get it.

After all that was done, I went ahead and showed what happens when you fail/lose a Zoombini in each puzzle, then ran the credits. Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

Microsoft Return of Arcade Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-02-01 | Complete with bad early 90s upscaling!

A compilation of four Namco arcade game ports released in 1996, and another case of "I made this because I felt like it". This isn't anything remarkable, but it's definitely a relic of early Windows 95. I actually got this game complete in the box at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo recently, and...well, why not? You've probably played these games a million times by now given how often Namco rehashes their old content, but it is worth stating that this particular compilation was released only a year after the first Namco Museum game so it still was a pretty big deal at the time. Included in here are Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Pole Position, and Galaxian. They're fairly similar to the originals but have some customizable features if you so desire, including things like being able to change your character or enemy speed. I showed off a full game of each one of them, and showed them to the best of my ability. Nowadays this is far from the ideal way to play the games, but it's still a neat novelty regardless.

Pac-Man: You all know what to expect from this one. I don't think I have anything to add to it to be quite honest.
Galaxian: Okay, I'm going to open myself up to controversy on this one, but I really don't care much for this game. I know it's very historically significant as the first sprite-based hardware known and looking really impressive next to Space Invaders, but everything it did, Galaga just did better, and anything historical about it is sort of negated by Space Invaders existing. And, in my opinion, despite being more technically impressive, I still find Space Invaders to be a way more entertaining and interesting game. This is caused by your ship moving back and forth way too slowly and the distance between your bullet and the enemies being a little too far for my taste. I wish I had more positive to say about this game but I just don't think it holds up that well.
Dig Dug: Probably the easiest game in this compilation, I never was a huge fan of this but if you play long enough it does get a little difficult. In fact almost all my lives were lost on the last few levels I played. I also tried to use the rocks and collect vegetables as much as I could.
Pole Position: This one actually supports mouse control, giving an experience pretty close to using the steering wheel. However...this one is actually a lot easier than the arcade version. This is because of one simple thing -- you can turn a lot tighter on this one and skidding doesn't happen as often. The last left turn usually destroys me when I play the arcade version, but here it's no problem at all. I managed to get a pretty easy full race finished on this video, which is really rare for me to do on most adaptations.

Enjoy the video! If you care, I blacked out part of the "About" screen due to it having someone's full name on there.

Kid Pix Studio (Windows) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-01-30 | (Note: Before we start, I want to apologize for the annoying audio clipping present for a good majority of the video; I went a little too high on the capture volume and didn't realize until I recorded a substantial amount of the video. Sorry)

A FAMOUS TRIO OF SWISS HORNBLOWERS...wait, what?

You may or may not remember that I did a video of the original Macintosh version of Kid Pix, but here's a variant that you might be more familiar with if you were born in 1993 or later. This is Kid Pix Studio, an extended version of the original game. In short terms, it's basically the original with five new creative activities thrown in. None of them are especially better than the painting one which is the star of the show, but it's still neat that they chose to do a true successor like this.

There wasn't anything in particular that inspired me to make this video; I guess since I had a rare successful attempt at getting my old 486 to actually boot, I figured I'd do one of the few games that works best on this particular machine. This game bases the timing of quite a few of the animations on the processor clock speed so even though this computer has a really weak video card, it still was the only one that could run this game without having the animations move lightning quick.

I go through each of the activities included on the disc, starting with the flagship activity and working my way counter-clockwise on the main menu. Activity comments, one by one...

Painting: Basically what you expect, but now with a few new features that weren't present in the original such as adding backgrounds. Unfortunately I didn't have a microphone attached to this computer so I couldn't do the voice cameo like I did last time.

Wacky TV: Okay, what in the world is with some of the videos they supply? "Wacky" might not even be enough to describe them. This is a pretty standard AVI player that lets you toy with the videos, most amusingly playing them in reverse and in double-speed.

Moopies: Probably the other most enjoyable part of this pack, this gives you brushes that animate after you draw. Funnily enough, I think this computer would have absolutely been brought to its knees from this activity had it not been for the fact that it appears to do all the animation using palette cycling. That's a pretty genius way to save on resources.

Stampimator: ...eh. It exists I suppose. It's fun to play with for a little bit but wears its novelty off pretty fast.

Digital Puppets: Again, since I can't record my voice on this computer, I couldn't show too much of this off, so I tried to compensate by showing every puppet and every action you can perform with them. Can't really think of a whole lot of creative potential with this tool to be honest.

Slide Show: A place where you can show off all the amazing things you've drawn. Well, that's a bit difficult to do considering I haven't drawn a whole lot on here. However, since this computer does still have the default desktop backgrounds, and since some of them are full-res bitmaps, I at least had things I could stick in. Oh, and don't forget two pictures of Trans Ams. What, you don't have Trans Am pictures saved on your computer?

(Okay, funny story about that actually -- the reason those are on this computer is because my dad actually used to own one. He is by and large a huge car person, a gene which I didn't inherit. That said, when we moved houses in the late 90s, we downgraded from a 3-car to a 2-car garage; with my mom also already owning a car plus my dad owning a more practical family car, one of his two had to go, and so he had to sell off the Trans Am; he did so online, back before the majority of the world was off dialup, and as such that was a pretty big deal. He had no scanner or a digital camera, so the best he could do was pull some random pictures off the Internet and say that his car looked like the picture. The pictures still remain on the computer's hard drive to this day!)

Hope you enjoy the video! It definitely feels quite nice to give my childhood computer a little more time in the spotlight!

Computer Specs:

486DX4 100MHz
850MB Hard Disk Drive
16MB RAM
Trident TVGA8900B 1MB Video
Sound Blaster 32
Windows 95

Tonka Space Station (Windows) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-01-17 | Because when you think of Tonka, you always think of outer space.

It's been a while since we last saw Tonka on this channel. I have a long history with this game. I first bought a copy at a Scholastic Book Fair when I was in Kindergarten, but I didn't have any computers that could run it. I did however have a neighbor who was able to run the game, and I gave up pretty quick because I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on.

Then when I went to play this game years later, I found myself having the same issue. That's...kind of a major problem for a game that targets an age 5 demographic. I had no issue whatsoever understanding how to play Tonka Construction or Tonka Search & Rescue at age 4, so the fact that I not only couldn't figure out this game when I was only slightly older was not only a bad sign then, it's an even worse sign when adult me has to open the manual to understand a Tonka game.

In this game, you run a space station and build one of eight modules across eight spaces. The station will be inhabited, so these affect three statistics -- productivity, population, and happiness. You want to get these stats as high as you can so you can advance in rank. Reach the final rank, and you will get to play the bonus level. You also must ensure two sets of resources, food and electricity, won't run out as well.

If that sounds confusing for a game aimed at "ages 5 and up"...that's because it is. Like I said, I had to open the manual to figure this all out, and the game does a very poor job of explaining this to you. Furthermore, there's no on-screen feedback beyond bar graphs that your population, happiness, or productivity is actually growing, which is a MAJOR blow for this target audience. The game also is not clear on what determines your ranking, which is the first thing any game with a ranking/leveling system should prioritize, kids or not. Listen, if you want to tell me you understood the game just fine as a kid, that's fantastic, but I'm standing by my hypothesis that you were the exception, not the rule.

And for such a complicated metagame, the actual minigames themselves are pitifully easy and simplistic. If the metagame was simple to understand I would have been perfectly forgiving of this, but the fact that the minigames are so shallow contrasts badly and leads this to feeling like a game that isn't sure what it wants to be.

Also, yes I did play this on Easy, and it's not as dumb as you might think. I actually tried recording this before, but I hadn't played enough prior to know what the difficulty settings actually did -- and as it turns out, the only thing it does is make the game more tedious. Your stats have to reach much higher levels before the game will rank you up. Which means you have to play all the minigames way, WAY more to actually win. The difficulty settings don't affect the actual difficulty of the minigames themselves. Needless to say, playing on Hard is absolutely infuriating and all I'd do is bore you to tears watching the same minigames over and over again (though I did cut repeats).

One final note, I replaced the non-Tonka Joe FMVs from the original recording with rips straight from the game; the PC I played this on stutters when playing the FMVs really badly.

Communications: You fly through a wormhole and dodge things. Yay.
Defense: By far the quickest module, a good way to get easy happiness stats as the minigame is over in about five seconds.
Factory: GOOD GRIEF COULD THE MINER MOVE ANY SLOWER, WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS
Housing: Easy population stats, woohoo. The minigame itself isn't super riveting but it's the only one that does use the third button.
Harvest: Oh my GOSH you are going to get so sick of seeing this one by the end. Since this is the only way to get food, you're going to be playing this one more than just about any other save for Power Plant, and by golly does it get old. It's also needlessly long which just makes it worse.
Power Plant: Same story as Harvest, but slightly less painful due to being shorter.
Research: The spider-y vehicle is almost as sluggish as the miner, only slightly less. This one is also excruciatingly long and doesn't really give you any serious rewards beyond productivity, which you'll already obtain a bunch of from playing Power Plant over and over to begin with.
Sports: This one's okay, and is an easy happiness farming choice.
Boss: Why did they even give you regular bullets for this? The charge weapon does so much more damage that it's completely rendered moot.
Bonus: You can't reach this one until you get the final rank, and...for all that you have to do to get to it, it sure is underwhelming. It seems to be a "catharsis factor" type game, but there's no effect from your performance. You just collect meaningless items and that's it. Also, I know I got demoted after finishing, but after all the annoyance I went through to make this, the last thing I wanted to do was finish off by ranking back up.

Hope you enjoy.

Backyard Baseball & Soccer (Plug and Play Game) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2020-01-02 | Back in my day, we didn't have no stinkin' characters with actual personalities!

Remember back in the day when companies used to make those weird self-contained game "consoles" that were basically only one step above Tiger handhelds? Well, okay, the ones with ports of classic arcade games were pretty good, but then you had...these. These were a thing for a while up until the mid-2000s (with them seeming to have fallen out entirely once the 2008 recession hit), and apparently even Humongous wanted to get in on the action with this one. It was released in 2005 and developed by Hasbro and Milton-Bradley. An Internet friend of mine did a video on the Backyard Baseball half of this a few years back, but this one shows off both halves.

Of all the bizarre things to ever come out of Humongous's legacy, this one is right up there with the Backyard Sports TV special and Big Thinkers. It's not entirely clear whether was this was released pre- or post-bankruptcy as Humongous's name is nowhere to be found anywhere on the product, including the original box. It could have been something that Atari independently commissioned Hasbro and MB to make, but there isn't a huge amount of clarity, given that this released the exact same year that Humongous shut their doors for good.

This thing's bizarreness doesn't end there though. Heavens, far from that. Despite the fact that this was released in 2005 -- well after the series had transitioned to the thick-line character designs and left SCUMM behind -- this game takes the large bulk of its inspiration from Baseball 2001 and Soccer MLS Edition, both of which were simple updates to the original 1997 and 1998 games. This means despite the fact that all the branding on the game uses the 3D-era labelling, the game itself bears way more resemblance to the early era, right down to using the original character designs!

So, how's the game, you ask?

Oooooh boy, it's...umm...it's something alright. The game feels very low budget for starters. Maybe you could argue I shouldn't have expected too much, but I've played a few other plug and play games from this era and they still are a lot better than this. The controls are super confusing and unintuitive -- you have a standard four button layout, but starting from the bottom and going counter-clockwise, it's YXAB (for comparison, an Xbox controller is ABYX and a typical Nintendo controller is BAXY). I have no idea why they couldn't just copy one of the common controller layouts or just use something a little easier to remember like DRUL. I effectively have to look at the controller every time it asks me to press a specific button. Perhaps the most annoying example of the bad and inconsistent controls -- when playing Soccer, if you are defending, you push Y to switch players, but when you have the ball, you push X to pass. Switching and passing should never EVER be different buttons from one another, but somehow they managed to make that rookie mistake. In Baseball, when you are fielding, the four face buttons throw to the corresponding base which is perfectly reasonable, but when batting, you have to push a direction and X to run to a base forwards and a direction and A to run to a base backwards. You have no idea how many times I tripped up thinking Y was what you used to run back only to remember the game uses a really bizarre control layout. Speaking of, the characters run way too slow and frequently you aren't able to make the plays you want in time just because the game doesn't do what you want it to. Ack.

Oh, and just for the record, I know the video looks horrendous. That's not my fault. This game's video output really does look this bad. It looks okay on a small 9-inch CRT screen but put it on anything bigger and it just looks awful. And on a related note, the visuals are...well, I mean, it's the same as the SCUMM games, but the character designs are...well, again, they're something alright. They reuse a few of the character sprites like putting Sally on Vicki's body, Ricky on Ernie's, and Stephanie's on Jocinda's. And as JuniorAdventurer mentioned, we also get Gretchen's long lost twin, apparently.

The games themselves went alright. I ended up putting my foot in my mouth towards the end of baseball by intentionally striking out at the top of the 6th and then almost having the AI come from behind and beat me at the bottom, but I managed to pull through. Soccer is significantly shorter and I have even less to say about that.

Hope you enjoy. Heck of a way to roll in the new decade, huh?

Lego Racers 2 (PlayStation 2 100%) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-12-20 | Are you sick of Lego racing games yet?

Yes, here we go again, this silly old game once more, but this time on a console instead of a computer. Also, it includes me getting everything in the game. Yay.

You probably are quite familiar with my general feelings towards this game. I'll be perfectly honest, I kinda started warming up to it a bit more when I recorded this. I still don't like it, don't get me wrong, but I used to outright hate this game and...well, I guess I've just been playing too many truly bad games as of late that this really didn't feel so bad coming back to it. It's still very flawed, I still think it could have been so much better, but hey, I guess take what you can.

This walkthrough, unlike my PC walkthrough, gets *everything* in the game -- all 35 golden bricks and all the bonus minigames. Which also means this walkthrough has a ton of fluff in it, so you may wanna keep your hand on the video slider to skip the boring stuff. I wanted to do something to set this one apart rather than just doing it all over again. In case you care, there is no tangible reward for getting all the golden bricks, you simply get a fireworks show on Sandy Bay. Whoop dee doo.

As for the quality of this port...well, it's virtually one-to-one with the PC version in nearly every aspect, with the only changes being extremely minor. The load times are longer, there is less time spent waiting for the race countdown to start, the minigame vortexes are solid instead of transparent, and the Arctic music was slightly rearranged. Oh, this one also has support for controller vibration...not that it's that big of a deal, since the PC version supported force feedback controllers. I'd say it does suffer from a far more inconsistent and weaker frame rate, but to be honest, the PC version was horribly optimized too (sorry people who like this game, it is), so it really isn't that drastically different.

Sandy Bay: I actually really didn't even need to get everything in one go here, since you intermittently return here whenever you finish a world. That didn't stop me from getting everything before heading off to Dino Island anyway.

Dino Island: This world is such a slog on every angle. The tracks are boring, the music is annoying, and the races go on for an eternity. I'll also be honest, I thought about hesitating to upgrade my car speed egregiously, but...nah, the sooner I could power through this world, the better. At the least, I did decide to go with one steering upgrade too. I didn't upgrade my shield at any point because car destruction is pretty much a non-issue in this game.

Mars: This is pretty much the point where the walkthrough becomes boring due to how much the speed upgrades break this game wide open, arguably even more so than the warp turbo in the first game, since once you have the speed upgrades, there's no going back. The game is permanently easy from there on out. I don't have a whole lot to say here.

Arctic: Where steering goes to die, and the frame rate has a stroke when there's a snowfall. I also must apologize, I took one of the worst possible cars for this -- the sail obstructs a ton of your view. Thank goodness it's the first piece to go when you crash. That, and this world was really hard to play -- my recording setup has me playing the game on a small 9-inch CRT TV with the actual recording going into my computer, and it's really hard to see an all-white world on such a screen. Also worth stating, the Berg was the only race in the entire game I actually had to retry. Once you get ahead of him it's smooth sailing (no pun intended), but prior to that you have to be extremely careful with dodging the stalagmites. Easier said than done considering this game has very slippery controls.

Xalax: And here we go, the only world in this game I actually enjoy. Every track has variety and stands out from one another, there are actual stage gimmicks, and you aren't just constantly retreading the same ground. If only the rest of the game ran by this design philosophy. Even if the final race against Rocket Racer is super lame, at least the journey there is worthwhile.

After that was finished, I went back to Sandy Bay to show off the fireworks show you get as a reward for all the golden bricks (seriously? They couldn't come up with anything better?) and ended it there.

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough! Since I will be gone for Christmas, this will likely be my final walkthrough of the year...and by extension, the decade. See you all in 2020!

Lego Stunt Rally (Game Boy Color) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-12-12 | Was the PC version of this game just not shallow enough for you? Were you clamoring for an even more forgettable experience?

Hang on, what game was it I played again?

Oh, right. The Game Boy Color adaptation of Lego Stunt Rally. I stand by my original assessment of the PC version being one of Lego's weakest games, but try sucking what little life that iteration had and you're left with this. I don't necessarily fault the developers for it, they were probably asked to stay as close as they realistically could to the PC version, but unfortunately taking a game like that and cramming it into a tiny 8-bit cartridge was asking for trouble from the start. And unfortunately, so it is. This has to be one of the absolute easiest, least immersive games I have ever played. Even for as much as I ripped on Lego Racers for the GBC, I can at least admit I still had to formulate a strategy for winning the game, and that I had to remain attentive at all times. This game, on the other hand...geesh, it's basically just tapping the A button and occasionally changing lanes. Heck, I have won entire races simply just holding the A button down. I am dead serious. No amount of "it's for kids" excuses that sort of low difficulty, that is "winning by doing nothing" territory.

So...how does this game work? Well, it's the same premise as the PC version -- you have a top down view of the race track here, and use A to accelerate, B to switch lanes, and the d-pad to use powerups. That control scheme may sound really bizarre and awkward at first...and that's because it is.

So, beyond the excruciatingly low difficulty, my biggest peeve with this game is how utterly picky it is on how fast you're allowed to go through turns. As much as I may not like the PC version, it at least is good at making it clear how much tolerance you're allowed before you'll skid through turns. This one leaves it very ambiguous, and as a result it's best not to keep the gas on all the way all the time. It's better if you try to keep the gas almost to the top. But wait, the GBC doesn't have analog buttons, how can you do that? Well, by tapping the button of course. If that sounds annoying...guess what, that's because it is. Again.

Uuuugh. I really wish I had more good to say about this game, I really do. Again, I don't think it was completely the dev team's fault (especially since Lego seemed to have a history of demanding too much out of their game developers), but it's a good example of what trying to aim too high can do.

I did a full run of the championship mode, then also showed off what the track builder is capable of. And just for the record, I know exactly how bad it looks like I'm playing in this video -- the game is so easy that it really doesn't matter. Since the game is so finnicky on what counts as going through a turn too fast, and since you have too little time to react to turns, it's best to just tap the A button instead of holding it down.

In addition, I also showed off what using the track editor was like after finishing the main game.

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

Earthworm Jim (Windows 95) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-12-03 | Look, they're meatballs!

This is a walkthrough I've wanted to make for a really long time, of the somewhat forgotten yet very well-made PC port of Earthworm Jim: Special Edition. People often argue over which version really is the best, and...sorry, it's no contest, this one easily bests them all. In fact I would argue the only thing you miss out on is the slightly more detailed backgrounds on the SNES version. Otherwise, this has the edge in almost every case -- CD audio music, every level ever featured across all versions (including Intestinal Distress and Who Turned Out the Lights?), no dithering in the backgrounds like the Sega CD or Genesis version, the ability to skip to any level you want without the use of passwords, and better audio quality than its Sega CD counterpart. Yes, this one really does have it all.

...unfortunately, it loses out in one pretty important area -- it's really hard to run on any OS past Windows 98. It can be done, but don't expect it to be hassle-free. That has sadly doomed this port to being rather obscure in the modern world. Hopefully this video helps put it back into the spotlight!

You'll notice I actually had already gotten halfway through the game before recording this video, hence why up to Level 5 was unlocked. I don't know how to clear the game data so I was stuck with it. Sorry.

This was played on a Pentium 3 computer running Windows 98SE. I also didn't run the game in full screen mode for two reasons -- one, because extra UI elements like the loading message and the level name at the bottom aren't visible in full screen, and also because the wormhole in Andy Asteroids doesn't animate in full screen mode for some reason.

New Junk City: Chose to go the "stud" path for the second part of the level because I'm a show-off like that.

Andy Asteroids: For some reason, Jim was extremely fond of saying nothing except "I'm a rocket, man" for most of these stages. I swear he usually has more variety than this. Also not much to say about these, I won all except one (which I'll get to in a minute).

What the Heck?: Went near flawlessly, save for getting mauled by Evil the Cat a couple of times.

Down the Tubes/Tube Race: I had a few close calls in the water, almost shattering the glass on several cases, but fortunately I made it through.

Big Bruty: I am not fond of this level. It's very slow-moving, there's no music (only droning ambiance), the flies are a pain to take out if you don't have missiles, and you pretty much have to tiptoe in order not to get eaten by Bruty (not to mention he's a one-hit kill, even at full health). This level is actually exclusive to the Special Edition, but I wouldn't say you're missing much if you skip it.

Level 5: This level actually originally didn't live up to its name, but thanks to the Special Edition adding a level, it now does (unless you count Tube Race as a separate level, which I don't). This is where I'm a little less practiced, by the way. I normally don't get past the cage section of the level, but I had so much extra ammo this time that it was no issue.

Who Turned Out the Lights?: A very simple, straightforward level with a very unique premise. Definitely a fun little bonus for those who manage to find it.

Snot a Problem: Heck yes, beat all three rounds on my first try! The third round is rough, but somehow I managed to pull through after almost not making it.

For Pete's Sake!: Oof, this was rough. I got chewed up by Peter several times in this level, and had to retread ground quite a bit (I sped up two instances of me having to retread ground a third time). What can I say? It's no walk in the (dog) park. And no, there was no chance I was going to try the hard path after all I went through.

I actually failed the Andy Asteroids stage before the next level, and ended up in a situation I didn't even know was possible -- if you tie with Psycrow, you still have to face him off (and there's even a unique voice clip for this situation!). It had been quite some time since I had to do this so pardon if my fighting is a bit rusty.

Intestinal Distress: Everything went fine up until the boss, which took me several tries before beating. His attacks are close to impossible to avoid even when you know what to do.

Buttville: So, I actually Game Overed on my first attempt, twice. Thus, the recording you see here was done on a different game spliced together with this recording. I did really good on this particular run...and then the bug at the very end snipped me. Agh. Thankfully, I just barely managed to get the zapper gun (which kills Queen Slug-for-a-Butt's first form in only one hit) that hangs next to the penultimate checkpoint, which got me through the part I was having so much trouble with.

And that's the game. Hope you enjoy the walkthrough! Yes, this port also includes the other two endings for beating it on Easy and Hard as well, though you'll be seeing the normal ending here.

Lego Racers 2 (Game Boy Advance) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-11-26 | Because, you know, the first handheld installment was just soooooo dang good that everyone was begging to try the next one.

Okay, for real, it's the GBA iteration of LR2! ...yay? This is a full play through of the game's single player story mode, which is basically shot-for-shot the same as the PC/PS2 version's storyline, right down to the exact same text boxes. Of course the tracks are all different given that this is a watered down handheld adaptation, but you probably already guessed that. This game also has a new set of powerups and new minigames as well.

And...that's about all there is to say from a general perspective. Is this game any good? Honestly...no. I think the only real positive I have to say about this game is that it's better than the GBC Lego Racers, but that's starting at rock bottom so there wasn't much direction to go except up from there. The game had potential to be decent, but it's wrecked by game mechanics that do not at all complement the track designs. It is way too easy to go crashing into walls, over or under steer, and the drifting system is one of the worst I've ever seen in a kart racer (yes, even worse than the console version of LR1!), where you just do a really quick skid that doesn't really take you in any definite direction. On top of that, this game also transplants the car upgrade system from the main versions, and it's not only just as broken here as it was in the original, it's even LESS refined; upgrading your engine makes it near impossible to avoid falling off the edge or hitting walls. This especially is true for going off jumps, where you will frequently be going so fast that you physically will have no way of avoiding going off the track. Getting a steering upgrade to compensate doesn't fix this either. And on top of that, the tracks are horribly designed, frequently not making it obvious where you're supposed to go, and they're very bland and uninspired. And, beyond that...why does this game even exist? Mario Kart: Super Circuit was announced pretty much around the exact same time the GBA was unveiled, did they really think they stood a chance against such a high profile kart racing name like that?

World-by-world comments

Sandy Bay: You go through the exact same first several races as you do in the original, and by golly are they a walk in the park. There is also a minigame in this world that...well, I won't spoil it. Just watch. It has to be seen to be believed.

Dino Island: A little more difficult, but not much. The minigame in this world (and the next) is garbage; trust me, if you think I'm playing bad, it is so much easier said than done to avoid things in this game, and there's no radar to tell you where the nearest egg is so it's a total guessing game. Either way, not much else to say.

Arctic: So. If you notice that the video suddenly gets way darker and easier to see halfway through this world...no, that's not your imagination. I didn't realize until I reached this world that I turned up the contrast on my capture card just a liiiiiiittle too high and thus the snow in this world was way too bright with none of the detail visible. My apologies about that. I wish I had began recording with it like that from the outset but what is done is done. Anyway, this world is alright, but has some extremely confusing track layouts.

Mars: Not a fun world. Way too many jumps and the lava is way too easy to fall into. In fact, this is probably the worst world in the game. Oh, and you don't even get to face Riegel in his giant mech. Ah well, I guess I can forgive that.
Oh, also fun fact: prior to recording this video, I had not played past the first few tracks in Mars. If you can believe this, I actually got so bored when first playing this that I just gave up, restarted, and began making the walkthrough from there. So, yeah, beginning about halfway through this world, this was done blind, and this recording was in fact my first time finishing this game. Imagine that.

Xalax: Bad track design at its peak. 90 degree turns everywhere, walls way too close to each other, and the fourth track of this world has to be seen to be believed, the utter pinnacle of bad design. It appears they tried to replicate the figure 8 course in the original, but they went about it by making one long road with a circle on each end, and it's extremely not obvious that you're supposed to enter those circles from one direction and exit from the other. Would it have killed them to split the track down the middle? That could have saved so much confusion. At the very least, Rocket Racer is much more of a climactic showdown in this game than he is in the original, though that has more to do with the spaghetti track you race him on than anything.

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough! I certainly hope more so than I did playing this game.

Hydro Thunder (Nintendo 64) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-11-23 | Hey, you found a secret!

Okay, no you didn't, but here's a game that's been on my mind for quite some time now. I had recently experienced this game for the first time on the PC, and saw that the Nintendo 64 port had minimal amounts of footage around YouTube, so I figured I'd go ahead and fix that! This is a fun, though really brutal at times, racing game made by Midway in 1999 for arcades, with this port releasing a year after. This isn't the best version around, but it does have the unique trait of being the only home version of the game to support 4 player multiplayer (however, I may advise against playing it that way -- it turns into Hydro Molasses with four people thanks to the excessive lag).

Note: I must apologize about the really bad lighting on this video. In some tracks like Nile Adventure it's near impossible to see in places; sadly, this happened on the capture level and I wasn't able to fix it in post. Trust me when I say this looks a lot better than this video makes it out to be.

All failed attempts were edited out so this video looks like a perfect straight run through.

Stage-by-stage comments

Easy courses: So, I'll just admit, for the earlier courses I didn't bother getting first place if I still reached the completion requirement. The first three courses really are nothing special; my apologies if I missed any secrets or shortcuts on these courses.

Medium Courses: Again, not much to say.

Expert Courses: NY Disaster and Ship Graveyard took several tries for me to be able to do well. Since coming in first is mandatory on these courses, you absolutely have to take all the shortcuts.

Bonus courses: Nearly all of these except Nile Adventure gave me some sort of trouble, especially Castle Von Dandy. I had one almost-win on the latter but was overtaken at the very last second, hence the presence of another score by me on the high score list.

After all that is finished, I went ahead and showed off some gameplay of each of the four bonus boats (and also showed one of the shortcuts I missed). These boats aren't particularly great for actually playing competitively but they're a nice bonus reward.

Enjoy the walkthrough!

Breakout (Windows, 2000) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-11-09 | Oh hey, another walkthrough! Been a little while, but let's get right to it -- this is the 2000 PC (originally on the PS1) update to the arcade classic of the same name. It was made by the same company as and can be considered a spiritual successor to Pong: The Next Level. You play as Bouncer, on a quest to rescue his love interest Daisy from the evil Batnix.

This is a surprisingly good, if short, remake, brought down by a few bad design choices. If what I've heard about the PS1 version is any indicator, this version is significantly better simply because of the inclusion of mouse control; while the PS1 version does surprisingly support the mouse, this one *also* has the advantage of allowing you to use the keyboard alongside it, meaning you can angle the paddle while playing with a mouse too. Having that extra level of precision, on top of that much smoother frame rate this version can allow you to play with, makes this the definitive way to play this game -- however, you can also argue it makes this version quite a bit easier and thus makes an already short game even shorter. That said, I still enjoyed it and would easily argue it's an improvement over Pong: TNL -- again, bad design choices do bring it down, but I'll take it over frustrating pinball and fishing levels.

World-by-world comments

Prison: About as run-of-the-mill as introductory stages go. I did get my first Game Over at the first wolf chase, mostly because I forgot exactly how the ball placement worked.

Egypt: I had considered editing out when I was fumbling around with that wall for extended periods of time, but I went ahead and left it in.

Farm: With this version's mouse control, the hen stages are *way* easier. Since you can make on-a-dime movements, keeping multiple balls in play is no trouble at all. However, the duck raft level remains a huge pain in the neck. I got a Game Over on my first try (which I edited out), but the second try I was able to push all the way through.

Castle: The first section with the knights took some time, but other than that this was a cinch. Well, I also failed the dragon boss three times, but I edited that out as well. Trust me, I'm saving you a lot of pain.

Factory: Shockingly, all three of the pipe puzzles went without a hitch. Normally these are the sections that drive a ton of people crazy, but for me it wasn't much of an issue at all.

Space: The boss fight with Batnix is a huge pain. After you land two hits on him, you then have to get three or more missiles out at once, which is much easier said than done, otherwise he'll dodge every time. The final stage where you play classic Breakout was sadly rather quiet when I played it here -- the music is obnoxiously loud when the game starts which I thought I had taken care of, but I guess the game decided to forego that by this point.

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

Microsoft Excel 95: The Hall of Tortured Souls Easter Egg

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-09-22 | A very famous Easter Egg included with the 1995 iteration of Microsoft Excel, and probably one of the most bizarre things Microsoft has ever done. I normally don't do this sort of thing, but when looking around for footage of this Easter Egg, I was mostly dissatisfied with the results. This is a very no-frills video that tries to be as raw in showing this Easter Egg as possible, and done on real Windows 95-era hardware. My coworkers and I were talking about this the other day and it prompted me to give it a look, which is why this sorta came out of nowhere.

This is a developer credits gag that is done in a very Doom-like manner, where you are in the first person perspective and can view the credits for the Excel 95 development staff. What's more bizarre, there's an Easter Egg within this Easter Egg where you reveal yet ANOTHER hallway with a group photo of the staff (and good heavens getting across the narrow bridge is a giant pain to figure out how to easily do).

To access this Easter Egg:

Go to row 95 and highlight it all the way across
Tab over to column B
Click Help, then About Excel
Hold Ctrl+Alt+Shift and click "Tech Support"
To reach the hidden room, simply type "excelkfa"

You cannot expand the window, sadly, so I simply worked around that by zooming into the "game" on the video when I reached that part. You can look up and down using D and C, respectively.

Enjoy this little oddity.

Monkey Island 2: LeChucks Revenge Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-09-17 | Here we go again! This time, it's a longplay of one of my absolute all-time favorite computer games...nay, one of my favorite games, period. It's the sequel to Ron Gilbert's most popular work, and everything about this game just resonates with me -- the amazing hand-painted backgrounds, the outstanding sound design and musical score, the hilarious and frequently dark writing, the puzzles...everything just hits the perfect note for me. I absolutely adore nearly everything about this game (though a few puzzles are a little too far-fetched, but other than that...) and frankly could gush about it all day. Indeed, this is a game that has already been recorded to death, but I wanted to give it my own personal tribute in the form of a longplay of my own. So here we are!

I actually recently got this game CIB. No, you did not misread that. I have the original box, the code wheel, and the five floppy disks that shipped with the game. I first played the game quite some time ago, in a bit of an unorthodox manner -- I bought the iOS port of the Special Edition and played it in bursts on my old iPod Touch, in classic mode. Despite not exactly being the intended way of playing, that didn't stop me from loving it just as much as I would have had I played it on the original PC version.

One thing you will definitely take note of is that this walkthrough is significantly longer than some of the others you will find on this site. That's because I wanted to try and set this one apart in some way, and one particular pattern I noticed is that many walkthroughs/longplays sort of rush through the game. They just sort of solve all the puzzles right away without any time or thought, and spend no time toying with many of the other things you can run across if you stop and smell the roses. As such, I spent a lot more time in this walkthrough messing around with things that are otherwise unnecessary to finishing the game -- I tried to use the "look at" command on everything I could, show off some of the scenes you may not come across when normally playing such as the ever-expanding wanted poster or the "pick up" command on Kate Capsize, and ensure you saw every plot point before actually progressing. In some spots that means the walkthrough goes on a whole lot longer than it really needs to, but hey, if you want something quicker, there's plenty of other places to do that.

I did miss a few things in spite of all of that. One thing I wish I had done was buy everything you could buy from the antique store on Booty Island; you can also buy the bowling plate, for example, even though it has no use in the game (thus making it a red herring item).

I also cut out a bunch of parts where I made mistakes and/or wandered aimlessly, so if anything seems inconsistent at some points, that's why.

And, as is tradition at this point, I also made sure to record this on real, authentic hardware. Yes, this is an actual MS-DOS machine...well, a Windows 95 machine that runs DOS underneath, anyway. It's a Pentium so it's significantly newer than what it was intended for, but it's the only computer I own that has a Sound Blaster with a real OPL chip (my 486 has an AWE32 that has a fake OPL chip that doesn't sound as good as the real one). If I'm going to play through one of my favorite games, might as well go all the way!

Operation (Windows, 1998) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-09-16 | Yet another one of those games I used to own as a kid as a result of the General Mills cereal box promotions. Apparently I'm just destined to do board game adaptations at this point!

This is, of course, a take on the classic children's board game. Now, considering that the board game is based on your ability to carefully use tweezers to take out pieces of plastic, this one takes an awful lot more liberties from the source material, to the point of being almost in-name only. That said, in spite of all that, it's a pretty good adaptation. There are five hospitals for you to go to, each with five patients, and the "main" minigame of each hospital involves you bringing tweezers down into the patient and retrieving the specified ailment. Each hospital also has a second, smaller minigame to play as well, and can be your choice of how you want to cure the patient as well.

In terms of my thorough-ness, I tried to show what every patient looks like when you operate on them, and what happens if you mess up the ailment. On the last patient in each hospital, I played the second minigame as well. These don't change an awful lot from patient to patient so I felt it was really only worth showing once. They do get progressively harder the more you play them, but I didn't feel that was enough to make it worth showing them a second time.

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex Loading Screen...FOR AN HOUR

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-09-05 | A terrible, terrible idea that crossed my mind earlier today.

Yes, I grew up playing the original PS2 version of this game, which is unbelievably notorious for its load times (which were mercifully fixed on the other platforms and the Greatest Hits release of this game). You could say I'm a sadist who uploaded this to trigger everyone's childhood PTSD. You're welcome!

Yes, I know this has nothing to do with what I usually upload, but as soon as I got the idea...I'm sorry, there was no way I was passing it up.

Tempest 2000 (Macintosh) Gameplay Quickie

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-09-02 | A video of a port of a game I recently just came across at a buy/sell/trade meet that I had no idea even existed. For the uninformed, Tempest 2000 is a modernization of the arcade classic Tempest by Atari, originally released on the ill-fated Atari Jaguar console and widely considered one of the best (and among the only good) games on the system. This port seems to be extremely obscure; while the Saturn and PC ports have been covered a few times, this one never has, and remains a relative rarity.

That's a shame, because this port is vastly superior to the PC version, come to find out. Looking at this version and the Jaguar version side by side, it in fact even appears to almost be a 1:1 copy. The only thing that seems to be missing here is the "Classic Tempest" mode, but considering you can play that version on several arcade compilations, I can't say that's a huge loss. Now, I have been informed that the Saturn version leaves out the third type of bonus level, and I have not played this one enough to confirm if it has it, but I will promptly update this description if I find out.

New to this version is also a high-resolution mode, which sadly I could not show off because this computer is too weak to run it well (I do wish I had at least shown what it looks like, but oh well). In the options menu this is referred to as "small pixels" mode. If you're curious, "big pixels skip" is the same as "big pixel" mode shown in the video, except instead of doubling every line (the resolution the game is actually running at is 640x480, not 320x240 as it may appear in the video), it fills every other line with black, giving it a CRT scanline look. The screen size option is a bit inconsistent depending on what the pixel mode is, but depending on which one you have selected it'll shrink the game down and surround it with black.

Most of the video is spent on the main attraction of the game, Tempest 2000 mode. I also briefly showed off Tempest Plus and very very briefly touched on Tempest Duel. This was not intended to be thorough, I just wanted to get this rarely-seen version out on the Internet if nothing else. If demand is high enough I may consider a full walkthrough of this game, but it is very hard so don't expect it to come in the near future. I think you saw what you needed to see anyway, so either way, enjoy!

Pajama Sams Games to Play on Any Day Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-08-26 | And at long last I finally got this game taken care of. For those unaware, this is one of the single rarest Humongous games in existence (by physical copies; obviously, the existence of the Steam version has made this a bit obsolete). It was released at the tail-end of 2001, had a very limited run, and is widely forgotten today except among the most hardcore of HE enthusiasts. I believe this game came shortly after Humongous had laid off half of its staff and had chosen to focus the Backyard Sports for a while, which meant this game didn't see much time in the spotlight. I didn't even know it existed until I was in middle school or so. I finally was pointed to a copy on eBay though (thanks to Reddit user 5potatoes for notifying me!), and snagged it with no second thoughts. Truth be told, I could have easily just used the Steam version, but I wanted to showcase this game as it was originally meant to be played off its original interpreter, not through ScummVM (which can produce inaccuracies and bugs not around on the real thing).

So, what is this game? It's a minigame collection. It can be considered a spiritual successor to Putt-Putt's Fun Pack and Fatty Bear's Fun Pack (and by extension, The Activity Pack). It's pretty well made for what it sets out to do, if unremarkable. The music heard in this game is also higher-quality versions of Pajama Sam 3's pieces, which is always a plus.

Game by Game Comments

Goody Goody Gumdrops: It's Reversi! Sadly, I only BARELY lost this one. It was absolutely painful to see that final tally. Ouch. I'm not amazing at Reversi so I do apologize.

Jumping Beans: It's an adaptation of checkers. About as basic as it gets.

Fans and Teleporters: Snakes and Ladders, what else would it be? Unfortunately, luck wasn't on my side in the end for this one.

Rockpile: An adaptation of Mancala. And...oooooh boy, if you ever want evidence that I have never played this game before, this video should tell you everything you need to know. This is easily one of the most embarrassing things I've ever shown myself on through this channel's life. The game was pretty much decided about halfway through, and constantly hearing "I get to go again" was just rubbing salt in the wound. I deeply apologize to every Mancala enthusiast on the face of the planet who has to bear the misfortune of watching this.

Happy Fun Squares: I edited out a good chunk of the "filling" the board part, and sped up a lot of it as well as I didn't want to just completely toss it all out. By the way, due to my VGA-to-HDMI adapter sadly crushing a lot of the bright colors together (it doesn't matter what the colors are set to or the brightness), you can't see Sam's face in the background on this one. My apologies for that. Anyway, I exploited the same AI breaker that you can pretty much always exploit in games like this -- when you get to a point where you *have* to give your opponent a cluster of squares to fill, first fill up whatever he gives you, but give the last two/four spaces (depending on the situation) to him. He will fill those in and then be forced to give you another cluster. It's pretty cheap, but come on, why would you not do it?

Puzzle Games: I think this one speaks for itself. I wasn't even going to try to solve a sliding puzzle because of how bad I am at those.

Concentrate: I feel like my performance on this one could have been better, but it is what it is.

Cheese and Crackers: Of course you know they were going to bring this back, and of course they were going to put you with Darkness. Once again, this one I think speaks for itself.

4 Cheese Pizza: Trivial Pursuit, but without the trivia. This one would be fine if it weren't for how stinkin' long it takes to do anything. The spinner animation lasts way too long and it can easily fall into a vicious cycle of waiting for the color, and getting the mouse can be incredibly infuriating.

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

Candy Land (Windows, 1998) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-08-23 | Another board game adaptation! And once again, just like with Chutes and Ladders, I got this game during its run as a General Mills cereal box prize. This is an alright adaptation, though very much a by-the-numbers one. The only real addition over the board game here is the inclusion of minigames based on locations found in the original game.

And, since the question will inevitably rise again -- no, I did not play this with three other players. Again, this game entirely depends on the luck of an RNG with no real player input involved. I felt it would be most interesting if I had the maximum amount of players around and would also bring about the highest likelihood that I would be able to show every board travel scene. And it all worked out indeed -- the only thing I missed out on was traveling the rainbow path. I even got all of the wild cards (which is what I call any of the pink cards with an icon that take you to a specific space) too which is neat. Speaking of, good heavens I forgot how much those cards can screw you over.

Through the latter half of the board game, especially after the first player reached the end, I turned off movies and just started rushing everyone across the board. It was late at night and I was sick of playing at that point, plus I was getting sick of watching everything slowly crawl by, and just wanted to be done. I then went back and showed off all the minigames. None of them are very intricate but you gotta be complete, right?

Hope you enjoy this walkthrough. I don't have much else to say.

Microsoft Pinball Arcade (1998) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-08-21 | Basically a total filler video. An "I made this because I was bored" video, if you will. This is a quick little video showcasing Microsoft Pinball Arcade, a collection of seven emulated Gottlieb tables. This is not intended to be super in-depth, just something I figured I'd make off to the side. Most of the tables included aren't crazy either, so I figured it'd be fun to do this. Better emulations of these tables have been done since this game's release, but...why not?

I should preface, I am not a pinball wizard. You'll pretty quickly realize all my missed opportunities to bump the table at very opportune moments. I apologize in advance. I also apologize about the resolution indicator in the top left corner when I switch tables; I have no way around that thanks to my VGA-to-HDMI adapter.

Baffle Ball: This is less pinball and more pachinko. Though then again, how much do you expect 1934 technology to provide?
Humpty Dumpty: Now we're getting a bit deeper, a game with actual flippers. However, it's still very much more pachinko than anything, as the flippers don't really bring the ball back upwards, they just help prolong its play somewhat longer.
Knock Out: A boxing themed-table, though still not crazy deep. I tried being a lot more liberal with my table bumping in this stage, and I think I did somewhat decently. In addition I think you got to see pretty much every aspect of this table too.
Slick Chick: Okay, if my assumptions about what kind of places hosted this table are correct (according to Wikipedia it was inspired by Playboy), I don't think I would have come within a fifty mile radius of one of these tables. Theming aside it's an okay table, but not one I'm going to come back to.
Spirit of '76: An okay table. My first round went so poorly that I decided to give it another try, where I decidedly did a whole lot better.
Haunted House: NOW we're talking! This is a fairly recognized table among pinball enthusiasts, most noted for its three levels of play gimmick that was quite ambitious back in 1982. Sadly I never reached the third level in this video, but it isn't as interesting as the first level where it goes under the glass, which I did reach, so I think it's all good.
Cue Ball Wizard: Probably one of the most intricate and involved tables in this collection. I played this one several times to try and show off as much as I could, but unfortunately, this port suffers from one very fatal flaw -- the ramp (which you are constantly nagged to shoot, by the way) is way too hard to get. Even on the few occasions I do reach it, the ball tends to not have enough momentum and just comes right back down. And I've seen this table emulated on future arcade collections and played in real life, and it's nowhere near as bad as it is here. In fact, it's actually harder to shoot the ramp from the left flipper than the right, which makes absolutely no sense. Because of my lack of ramp shots, this video isn't as thorough as it could have been. Oh well.

Hope you enjoy the video!

Fatty Bears Birthday Surprise (Macintosh) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-08-20 | Because why not?

I got a new capture card in the mail and wanted to give it a test run, so I decided to try a version of an old familiar favorite I don't believe has seen much attention on YouTube. This is pretty much what you've seen numerous times but now with bad MIDI. Woohoo. I don't have a whole lot else to say, quite honestly. I do apologize if I spammed the music toggle a little too much in this walkthrough; however, given that the background music is the main difference with this version, I felt it was important to try and get as much variety as I could. And, annoyingly, the Macintosh version has the same quirk as the DOS version where if the cursor isn't on-screen when the music finishes, it will repeat, which means you can potentially go for a long period of time hearing the same music over and over.

This was played on a Power Macintosh 7600. Hope you enjoy!

Pong: The Next Level (Windows) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-07-04 | Did you ever play Pong and think about how cool a modern re-imagining would be?

No?

Oh well, that's what this game seeks out to be. I recently learned of it and it piqued my interest due to my knack for enjoying updates to old arcade cabinets, so I went ahead and tracked it down. There was no decent footage of the PC version on YouTube either, and I figured maybe I could fit that bill. So here we are!

This was played on my Pentium setup with a 3DFX Voodoo. I could have gone with something more modern, but it's clear this game wasn't written with high frame rates in mind. The only real trouble I had was that the main map chugs pretty badly on here as you will notice. However, it's not a big deal since you're only on the main map for like 2% of the whole game anyway, and since there's no gameplay there, it wasn't much to lose. Submaps ran properly, thankfully.

This is a pretty basic, straightforward game. It's a fully featured modernized Pong remake, 3D visuals and all. Surprisingly, it's pretty fun, if frustrating at parts. There are 19 levels in the game to complete, and each of these have three variants that award gold bars. Each variant is more difficult than the previous. This walkthrough earns every gold bar in the game. Little fun fact, this game also supports up to 4 players; especially with the extras you can unlock, it seems like the kind of game that would be a lot of fun to challenge a group of friends to.

Nearly all failed attempts were cut from this walkthrough, so to a regular viewer it looks like a perfect run through; I left in two failed attempts, I believe, but otherwise it looks like a flawless run (unless you take note of the fact the music is already running when a level starts a good chunk of the time).

Zone 1: Everything was smooth sailing until I hit the clown level. Good heavens was it a test in patience. The first level is easy, but the second level is a pain, and all bets are off on the third. The third I was stuck on for almost 15 minutes (particularly frustrating after losing on the last ball on my first try; I literally had one job and couldn't do it).

Zone 2: The only level that really gave me trouble was Rock and Roll, Part 2. The problem with this level is that the ball travels so fast that it becomes impossible to react. Moreover, the AI is *incredibly* good at aiming the trajectory of the ball so that it gets a power-up, which this game doesn't allow anywhere near enough precision for a human to do consistently.

Zone 3: Puck Pong is a huge pain, as the grabbing ability is wildly inconsistent on how well it works. The best advice I can probably give is to try and keep the balls on your side and don't accidentally shoot past the puck.

I want to know who came along and said "you know, I love Pong, but you know what it needs? Fishing." Talk about a completely out of place stage. The first time I played this game I got really frustrated at this stage, but this time through it went without a hitch. That may have been because I knew using the keyboard was better for this stage than the mouse.

Zone 4: Not much to say.

Zone 5: A regular Pong level, pinball, and...evil frogs? Boy, if the fishing level wasn't out of place enough...

The pinball level (third variant) can seriously go die in a hole. I spent nearly TWO HOURS trying to beat this one. It wasn't until I discovered a bug that prevents the gutters from being hit (with properly timed table bumps) did I suddenly start finding the level a lot easier. Now, in the words of Brutalmoose, "you may see this as cheating, and I see it as...well, cheating, but also, I don't [care]." Even after I did find this though, it still took me about another hour or so to beat.

It also bears mentioning, I switched to keyboard control for the third pinball level as well; bumping the table with the mouse is near impossible to do, as it requires you to double-tap left or right. This variant practically requires you to abuse bumping to win.

I love the fact that all of the sound effects in Frog Follies are ripped straight from Frogger '97.

Zone 6: The chicken level can be a pain; surprisingly, it was the second variant that gave me the most trouble. The third variant only required two tries before I beat it. The third variant of the penguin level can be problematic, but I only failed it once so mercifully it wasn't too horrible.

Zone 7: Absolutely no parts of this zone were cut. I left in the failed attempts and missteps. There was only one failure across the whole bunch, but I did miss a few balls which required me to retread a bit of ground.

Zone 8: Classic Pong games! It's about as basic as it gets, really. Once I did this, I went ahead and showed off some of the secrets you can use when you progress enough, particularly the power-ups that are otherwise inaccessible without them.

Kid Pix (Macintosh v1.2) Gameplay

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-06-15 | No, I have no clue who Susie is, don't ask.

Okay, on a more sincere note...KID PIX!

Yes, really. The classic drawing toy that inspired many a child to create insane splatter paint works of art before Microsoft Paint made it cool. This is of one of the oldest versions of the game, which I recently got at a retro computer meetup. I got it for free, in the box no less. Pretty dang cool. In fact, this is an old enough version that it came on two floppy disks, not a CD. Amusingly, this game also works both on a black-and-white and a color Macintosh. I find it a bit counterintuitive that a drawing game would work on a B&W Macintosh, but hey, I guess you gotta target the widest audience you can.

I doubt I need to introduce this game at all, because pretty much anyone who grew up using a computer played this at one point or another, but the basic premise -- it's a drawing tool for children. It features all sorts of wacky brushes (in fact, that's what they're officially called) that you can use to create all sorts of hilarious creations. I'll admit, it's more fun playing with the brushes than it is actually drawing anything, but...hey, isn't that how we all felt playing this? Though if I want to be real, I had the most fun as a child using the erase buttons. Since this is of the original game, there's nothing more than a drawing canvas to play with here -- there's no slide shows or "moopie" drawing tools that would be standard in "Studio" onward.

In this video, I primarily attempted to show off every tool available at your disposal, and showcase every feature, including voice recording. Yes, I actually have a microphone attatched to this computer.

Oh, and to explain the first sentence of this description -- this copy of the game apparently once belonged to someone named Susie. I couldn't find any way to change that -- presumably, it asks you the first time you start the game, and it's highly likely the previous owner played this game straight off the floppy disk instead of the hard drive, so that would explain why it has an old name on there.

This was played on a Power Macintosh 7600 running Macintosh System 7.5.3. Hope you enjoy!

Toy Story Animated Storybook (Macintosh) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-05-29 | Another Disney game, and this time of one I never actually played as a kid! This is part of Disney's answer to Living Books, and one of the most popular games in said lineup. I wanted to do a Macintosh walkthrough now that I actually have the ability, and I felt there was no better place to start than on a game that uses a MIDI-based score. Also, this game was natively developed for Macintoshes (evidenced by the fact that it runs entirely on QuickTime and how the MIDI seems more purpose-built for this version), so I felt it was a fitting case.

To be honest though, while the MIDI sounds pretty alright, it had to be ruined with one thing -- it's way too muffled and quiet. I don't know what in the world happened, but the volume on it is just ridiculously low and there's no way to adjust it. Pretty lame, because the MIDI sounds really nice.

I don't have a whole lot to say; I know this has been done before, but I figured I could at least try to put a new spin on it. I tried to uncover every click point that I could and checked any I was unsure of on whether they had more than one animation; there was no risk in trying, since you can easily skip any animations.

Minigame wise, I mostly just played on the highest level. I should have probably shown a bit more of them, especially the moving van chase minigame, but ah well. Also, I probably played the claw game way too long; my apologies about that. On the "escape plan" page, I also decided to show what happens if you fail each of the scenarios for every case, even going so far to show every incorrect stacking combination (of which there's five).

Hope you enjoy the walkthrough!

All copyright belongs to their respectful owners.

Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon (Macintosh) Demo

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-05-23 | The last of the classic HE demos on Macintosh. Enjoy!

Fatty Bears Birthday Surprise (Macintosh) Demo

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-05-23 | Demo number two. The same spiel as usual, nothing much you haven't already seen aside from the bizarre MIDI. Enjoy.

Putt-Putt Joins the Parade (Macintosh) Demo

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-05-23 | Yes, we're doing this. I wanted some reason to make use out of my newly-purchased Power Macintosh 7600, so what better way than to round out the classic Humongous demos?

I will only be doing the classics for these (as in, the first three adventures), as all the other Macintosh versions are virtually identical to the Windows versions save for using microscopic yellow cursors. These are unique due to using unusual MIDI synthesis through QuickTime.

And yes, this is on real hardware, this is not emulated. I had wanted an old Macintosh for a long time and I finally made good on that by buying one from a friend. Hopefully this can lead to some walkthroughs I otherwise wouldn't have been able to make. Enjoy!

Boggle (Windows, 1997) Soundtrack

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-05-06 | By request of a user, I decided I'd go ahead and upload this game's OST, especially since no one else has. These tracks are named based on how they're named in the in-game options menu, and are ordered both by how they're listed there and by music track number (they're one in the same). Enjoy!

Track list

0:00 Powdered Wig (Default Classic mode music)
1:00 Boggle Down (Default Breakaway mode music)
2:25 Letters from the New Age (Default Space mode music)
3:42 Starlight
5:10 Can You Spell Stroll? (Default Battle mode music)
6:35 Smokey
7:44 Macon Out
9:20 Beach Blankey Boggle
10:53 My Volvo
12:27 Lovebeads
13:57 Safari (Default In Your Face mode music)
15:31 The Strut
17:00 Snappin'
18:28 BlondeRock
20:02 Texas Skies

Lego Island 2: The Bricksters Revenge (PlayStation) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-05-05 | Re-uploaded due to the old one being too dim

This is the much lesser-known console port of Lego Island 2. This is actually the version I originally played when I was little; my computer (then the awful ThinkPad laptop) wasn't able to play the PC version, so as a compensation my parents got me this one. A neighbor of mine had the PC version though, so I was quite well aware that it was vastly superior in pretty much every way. Well, MOST ways anyway, more on that later.
Given that the PC version was released in 2001, it's pretty puzzling that they released this version at all. The PS2 had already been out for nearly a year by the time this one came out, and Lego Racers 2, released only a few months after, got a PS2 port. And, on top of that, given that this game was already extremely time-strained as it stood, and that this version had the same development team as the PC version, this really just amounted to more stress and agony on the development team that they already had plenty of since they effectively had to develop two completely seperate versions of the same game (as far as I'm aware, the GBC and GBA versions were done by a different team). The PS1 is vastly inferior to the hardware the PC version had targeted, so this one is insanely watered down as a result.

It follows the same general structure as the PC version -- on the whole, it has the same plot, the same minigames, the whole shebang. Where it differs, however, is that, immediately noticeable is that the graphics are much weaker, with lower-poly models and lower quality textures. The island is shrunken down and stripped of a lot of detail too, such as the lack of the train and a good number of characters. And, if you're familiar with the PC version, you'll immediately take note of the fact that you only need to serve 9 pizzas instead of 11.

On the whole, this version easily pales in comparison. Even once you get past the whole watered down visuals thing, a lot of the cut scenes also lose important details which can lead to things that just make no sense at all (such as how Mama and Papa aren't restrained yet still beg for help, and how the Brickster's dialog at the end with Pepper is for whatever reason totally missing).

HOWEVER...it's actually better in a few ways too. First off, the loading times are *greatly* reduced. They're still way longer than they ought to be, but holy crap, it feels like you don't spend half the game waiting for it to load. Also, this one is significantly less glitchy than the PC version, as I find getting stuck in walls to generally never be an issue. It still has the feel of a rushed game, don't get me wrong, but being on the PS1, it was able to get away with a lot more cut corners.

Start: I spent way too long trying to hop the space port fence at the beginning. Ick. This is all fairly straightforward.

Castle Island: Holy heck, Cedric's cutscene is just downright incoherent in this port. Not to mention the fact that he just sadly walks away instead of being catapulted off. What even.

Adventurers' Island: Hang on...there's...there's no fishing minigame!? There's...this is a joke, right? I must be dreaming...

...nope, it's really not in this version.

...HALLELUJAH!

Seriously. Easily the worst minigame in the PC version, bar none. I absolutely despise that minigame and everything that goes with it. Good frickin' riddance. Granted, it does leave a bit of a plot hole when Pepper says he "caught a big fish", but I will easily take it over the agony that that stupid minigame has given me over the years.
Either way, the rest of this is...basically what you expect. Bi-Plane plays significantly different in this version, and honestly, I'd call it an improvement.

Ogel Island: The cut scene on Lego Island prior to coming here is a sight to behold. No description can do it justice, it's just...laughable beyond words. Either way, both parachute minigames got the axe on this version as well. That's a bit of a sadder loss, given that they were two of the best minigames, but eh, it is what it is.

After the main game is finished, I went ahead and showed off Pepper's House and the Information Center. Believe it or not, I never knew until recording this that you could look at the screen like you could in the PC version. It doesn't exactly help that there's no indicator that you can.

Enjoy the walkthrough!

Lego Racers (Game Boy Color) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-04-22 | Welp, if there were ever evidence I have no life, this is it. I have made a walkthrough of every version of Lego Racers in existence now. What is wrong with me?

And...hooooo boy, is this one ever a doozy. Now, given that it's already a watered-down handheld adaptation from the get-go, your expectations were probably low going into this. If you can believe it, it's actually worse than you might assume. The fact that they managed to fit a racing game on the Game Boy Color is a feat to be recognized in and of itself, but that doesn't mean it's a good game. The graphics are pretty bland for starters, and the music...oh gosh, what the heck happened here? There's like three music pieces in the entire game, and they're all very poor conversions of tunes from the console/PC versions. They seem to have especially loved abusing "vibrating" instrumentation, which gets grating really fast. The way I've described it in the past is that it feels like they threw the tunes into an 8-bit blender. Oh, and they use one music piece for no fewer than *three circuits* (or 9 of the 19 tracks, so almost half the game!), and I guarantee if you play this game all the way through, you will never want to hear it again for the rest of your life.

And of course, the game itself is...well, think of OutRun on the arcade or Rad Racer on the NES, but way less fun. The first problem I have is that the weapons are stupidly unbalanced and overpowered -- the projectiles stop you dead in your tracks and it takes forever to recover, and the boost speeds you up by an insane amount. The other problem with the weapons is that you can never tell when one is going to show up, forcing you to rely on remembering where the bricks are. Really, it becomes a game of memorizing where the green bricks are on the track, which let me tell you, makes for one heck of a dull experience. Either way, if you're able to amass green bricks extensively and you don't get harassed with cannonballs, you never have to worry about losing.

In fact, I actually got so far ahead on a few tracks that it took nearly a solid minute after crossing the finish line before the final results were determined (I believe it won't show the results until the second-to-last racer has finished). Regardless, this is far from an enjoyable experience, and I wouldn't recommend it at all. The GBC doesn't have a lot of racing games to begin with, but I have trouble believing there aren't any better than this.

Circuits 1-3: Quite straightforward, a few gaffes here and there but it's nothing that exciting.

Note: In Circuit 3, the video goofs up for a bit. I have no idea how this happened, as my capture software wasn't showing any dropped frames. But it doesn't last horribly long and you get to see the track again, so no huge loss.

Circuits 4-6: Surprisingly, the difficulty shoots way up around this part. In fact, the game can actually get really frustrating if you're not prepared -- not the least of which is caused by the unpredictability of the cannonballs hitting you when you least expect it. It's doubly frustrating if you *just* activated a boost and a cannonball more than happily cancels it out. The shields are barely any help, as they don't last long and you don't know if anyone is behind you. Tons of this just boils down to luck. Thankfully, if you get first on two of the three tracks, you can still afford to come in second and win the circuit on the other. That doesn't mean the game is difficult, mind you, it just makes it frustrating to play at times.

Circuit 7: If I have to commend this game on one thing that it actually did right, it's making Rocket Racer a one-on-one match. The main versions of the game made it another six-player race, which I feel was a bit inappropriate for a final showdown. Oh, and there's no warp turbo to spam here, but as with the rest of the game, it boils down to more "remember which sides of the track the greens are on and follow it." Eh, it is what it is though. Also, why is his track based on Alien Rally Asteroid from the original game, rather than Rocket Racer Run? And why did they use an unfitting music track for this race?

Enjoy! For those curious, this was recorded using my newfangled Game Boy Player (I cropped out the border). You may potentially see more Game Boy stuff in the future now!

Pajama Sam: You Are What You Eat From Your Head to Your Feet (PS1) Walkthrough

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-04-13 | Now here's something I've wanted to do for a while but just never got around to until now -- it's the little-remembered PS1 port of Pajama Sam 3. Honestly I'm quite impressed this even exists, but...after playing it, I think I was happier forgetting it did. According to the programmer of this port, they had to pretty much do this all from the ground up...and while I can tell they definitely tried, the end result leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest issues are the excessive amount of loading and the fact that the game is vastly cut down. A lot of the music is removed, many cut scenes are gone (most egregious being the etiquette scene, which happens completely off-screen in this version), and it just isn't a pleasant port to play. But eh, for completion's sake, I suppose I might as well give it a run through.

I don't have a whole lot to say honestly, it's the same old same old. I picked the paths that I thought would be most interesting for this walkthrough (in particular, I made sure to get all the minigames). Other than that, it's as you expect. Enjoy.

Lego Chess Soundtrack (Sound Blaster 16 OPL3)

Mr. Eight-Three-One 2019-03-19 | After doing the Lego video the other day, I felt an urge to upload this game's score off a classic Sound Blaster 16 card. So, I went ahead and recorded it all and got it thrown together in one video! Hope you enjoy!

0:00 Main theme
4:06 Western
8:07 Pirates
12:11 Standard chess