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[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
I have been playing games for a long time, and there are some games that stick out a bit more in memory than others. Mostly because they were played at an early age on an early console, or more especially, on a computer as I was growing up. As I've been thinking about it, I realize that I've been playing a lot of licensed characters games, games where mascots of various brands get their own game and the point is to promote the brand, possibly to the point where the developers forgot to make an actual game. For the most part, though, the developers did well. Games like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat-em-ups, or Smash Brothers, or the Dragon Ball Z Budokai and the One Piece arena fighters, where there's a game underneath everything that would work just fine and the characters are there mostly to distinguish them from all the other kinds of games. When I was younger, there was a Star Trek game, where the player was in control of the Enterprise, and could warp around various sectors and fire phasers or photon torpedoes at other ships around. Of course, there was energy to be managed and expended and the possibility that one could warp into other things, or get blown up. (At least one recreation of it exists on the Internet, proving that just about anything I have experienced, someone else did, as well, and has better programming skills to bring it back. It was very complex for small-child me, and I never did that good at it. I was much better at other games. We had old versions of various Jeopardy! type games, for example, all under the Jeopardy! moniker. Which, as one might guess, the kid versions were the ones we got good at for the time, since the adult ones were geared for, y'know, adults and not seven year-old children.
There were also other games that used the names and graphic styles of particular media franchises to play a game in a completely different genre. A Monty Python game with the copy protection that required the identification of a cheese wedge to continue, for example, was a game with side-scrolling opportunities, but in the Super Mario Brothers style of after you had scrolled past a thing, you couldn't go back, so there was a definite need to explore, find, and to some degree, memorize what was available in each screen and stage. That particular game had a fiendishly difficult third level where there was exactly the necessary amount of cans of SPAM were present to obtain a piece of the brain of the player character. All four brain bits were needed to obtain the good ending of the game (which involved the player character getting all their brains back and transforming themselves back into a lawyer. Because it's still a Monty Python game.)
And most people who were active in the interactive fiction scene around when Infocom was making Zork are familiar with the Hitchhiker's Guide IF that was a smash-up of things that were in the book and a lot of things that weren't, so that people who had read the book weren't able to walk their way through the game just based on book knowledge. Also, that game was particularly cruel to players, often requiring them to trial-and-error a solution and then supplying them with one less try to figure it out than was needed the first time, necessitating a reload of the game to get it done right the first time and remember where all of the stops and traps for the Rube Goldberg solution were. And a particularly mean puzzle at the end, where a character will ask for any one of a number of objects, all of which needed to have been collected earlier in the game, because the game will specifically ask for something that the player doesn't have, necessitating going back significantly in the game to collect the errant object, only to find out another object was also needed. H2G2 wasn't the cruelest game in the Infocom stable, but it is one of the most memorable for its cruelty.
These kinds of games mostly seem to concentrate on putting together a decent game, the presence of the licensed characters is an extra cherry on top of an otherwise solid and enjoyable game. Other types of games, play a particular type of game and are really only distinguishable from the licensed characters that are present in the game. Which is to say, there are a hundred thousand variations of, say, a match-3 game that are all branded based on your favorite show, anime, or game. I have seen Sailor Moon, RWBY, and Miraculous Ladybug, for example, all basically playing some form of match-3 with different special powers and scenarios that have to be dealt with. You could call all of them Candy Crush clones, though, and you wouldn't be all that wrong. There's another popular game style where the mechanic of what characters you can get and use in your game is dependent on pulling their medals or portraits from a random-draw system that takes premium currency to use. While many of these gashapon games (named after the machines that dispense capsules with random items inside) may have different mechanics of how those medals are used (as a role-playing game, or a first-person shooter with powers, or as a tag battle system), progression in the game often depends on the luck of the draws, which means better progress can be achieved from those who pay for more premium currency to get more draws, or pay for access to specific events that have rare or otherwise-unattainable medals with special and specific powers to use. These games are generally not fun for the free players that rely solely on what amount of the premium currency they get through daily logins and free giveaways, because they eventually hit a wall where all the players who pay can effortlessly dispatch them with their better powers.
In the previous era, though, games that were much more about advertising the brand were still there. So you get games in the Nintendo era like Cool Spot, games involving the California Raisins, or computer games like Chex Quest, which was basically Doom, but with Chex branded things everywhere and Flemoids that had to be dispatched. Kid-friendly Doom, essentially. (Although, yes, you'll see the Pizza Hut logo in early NES Turtles beat-em-ups, because product placement is still a thing.) There's one game of the era where properties other than media franchises were releasing games and that I remember as being particularly difficult and also engaging. Despite completely being an advertisement for Dominos Pizza, the game underneath it works remarkably well. I'm talking about Avoid the Noid, which you can play along with from the Internet Archive, because just about any time I talk about a DOS-era game, it's available on the Internet Archive.
Avoid the Noid is a game where a pizza delivery driver is tasked with delivering an intact pizza to the top floor of the office complex building within the thirty minute time limit (because at that time, of course, "thirty minutes or it is discounted/free" was a pretty common guarantee. Delivery would be a relatively easy task were it not for the fact that this office building is infested with bunny-like creatures, the eponymous Noids, that have no interest in allowing any pizza at all to get into their building, much less to the CEO office where the pizza is intended. Accompanying the Noids are explosive darts that will destroy a pizza on contact with the delivery person. And did we mention that there are also hidden trap doors that will send the player down a floor if they come in contact with them and locked doors that require the keys scattered on certain floors to open, leaving the player vulnerable to Noid attacks while they are attempting to open the door? (Oh, and Noids can go through locked doors as if they weren't there.)
Each stage of the office building consists of three floors of the building, with the exception of the beginning stage and the roof stage at the top of the building, and have a character arrive at the bottom-left and snake their way to the top right. Losing a pizza to the Noids will restart the current three-floor block at the corner the the player first entered the block from.
Balancing out the Noids, darts, and oh, yes, the Noids with bazookas that fire explosive darts that you encounter as you work your way up the floors and the Noids that strafe the roof with water balloon bombs is the fact that this is no ordinary delivery person, but a highly-trained acrobat who is moonlighting as a pizza delivery person. The character can turn flips (that allow him to avoid low hazards like noids and trap doors) and rolls (that allow him to avoid high hazards like explosive darts and noids) and can change speed from standing still to walking to running, which change the distance and angle of his acrobatics. Somehow, the pizza boxes involved in these feats are not crushed, nor the pizzas inside destroyed. Only Noids, darts, and projectiles thrown or fired by Noids can destroy pizzas. The player also receives five Noid Avoider devices that will completely wipe the current screen of any and all Noids and darts. The Noid Avoider device can be used before contact with a Noid, a dart, or a balloon to prevent the loss of pizza. In the case of Noid contact, a Noid Avoider can be used at the point of contact (when the Noid trips or kicks the delivery person and they grunt) and while the caracter will still fall and be dazed, they will get back up at the end of the dazed animation without the loss of pizza. Finally, Noids cannot attack the player character in the elevator spaces between the floors. They will jump out of elevators, they will run into them, and on later levels, certain Noids will track the player, resulting in them jumping out of an elevator, landing, turning around immediately and jumping back in the elevator, but they cannot harm the player while the player is safely in the elevator.
With that, the player can make it to floor 17. However, on floor 17, there is a locked door which does not have a visible corresponding key anywhere in the levels seen up to this point. Throughout the office complex are payphones that ring while the player is on the floor block. These phones are interactive when the player is either standing still or moving at walking speed, but the player might be forgiven for thinking that they are there only as schmuck bait, as most of the time, interacting with a ringing telephone treats the player to a short cutscene of a Noid being on the other end of the telephone, who then presses a dynamite plunger on their end and explodes the pay phone where the player character is, causing the irrevocable loss of a pizza. However, a certain subset of these payphones, when interacted with for the first time, will instead say "You found a key in the coin return!" and grant the player a key. Every subsequent interaction with a key phone will result in the exploding Noid, so players have to be careful to only interact once with those phones. Knowing which phones have keys in them allows passage on floor 17 and certain other floors where there are no visible keys to open the locked doors.
Finding keys in the coin returns means the player can reach floor 29. However, on floor 29, there's a keypad that tells the player to enter the code to disarm the door. At which point the player finds out that not only do some phones have keys in the coin returns, but other ones contain the randomly-generated digits that will give the player the code to disarm the elevator door on 29 and turn it into a regular locked door. Incorrect codes, of course, explode the character's pizza, so a player cannot just input random numbers until they discover the correct code. The player, of course, doesn't actually have a key on them when 29's door becomes normal, so they have to retreat to the phone on 29 and check there, which has been transformed into a key-in-coin-return phone only after the correct code has been input. Which unlocks floor 30. Which requires three keys to open the final door, and thus the player has to ascend to the roof and battle the noids water-bombing the roof, as a key moves from place to place over the roof. Three collected keys means the player gets to retreat to 30 and open the CEO's office door and complete the game. Remaining time is added, in points, to the player's score, but there's also no high score table for bragging rights.
It took a long time for all of us in the family to discover the phones had more than just Noids behind them, through a lot of trial and error and remembering where the good phones were, while also having to handle Noids, darts, bazooka-Noids, and also remember where the trapdoors are on each level. When we beat the game, there was a lot of accomplishment felt for having finally gotten through the whole thing.
So now you can play the game, too, and enjoy the frustrations of trying to pick your way through hordes of Noids and wait until they are set up so that a stellar acrobatic sequence will let you get from elevator to elevator without hitting a trapdoor, a Noid, or a dart, and so that you can pick up any necessary phones along the way.
(Or, if you like, you can watch someone speedrun Avoid The Noid, as it was part of the Awful Games Done Quick block at this year's AGDQ event.)
I have been playing games for a long time, and there are some games that stick out a bit more in memory than others. Mostly because they were played at an early age on an early console, or more especially, on a computer as I was growing up. As I've been thinking about it, I realize that I've been playing a lot of licensed characters games, games where mascots of various brands get their own game and the point is to promote the brand, possibly to the point where the developers forgot to make an actual game. For the most part, though, the developers did well. Games like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat-em-ups, or Smash Brothers, or the Dragon Ball Z Budokai and the One Piece arena fighters, where there's a game underneath everything that would work just fine and the characters are there mostly to distinguish them from all the other kinds of games. When I was younger, there was a Star Trek game, where the player was in control of the Enterprise, and could warp around various sectors and fire phasers or photon torpedoes at other ships around. Of course, there was energy to be managed and expended and the possibility that one could warp into other things, or get blown up. (At least one recreation of it exists on the Internet, proving that just about anything I have experienced, someone else did, as well, and has better programming skills to bring it back. It was very complex for small-child me, and I never did that good at it. I was much better at other games. We had old versions of various Jeopardy! type games, for example, all under the Jeopardy! moniker. Which, as one might guess, the kid versions were the ones we got good at for the time, since the adult ones were geared for, y'know, adults and not seven year-old children.
There were also other games that used the names and graphic styles of particular media franchises to play a game in a completely different genre. A Monty Python game with the copy protection that required the identification of a cheese wedge to continue, for example, was a game with side-scrolling opportunities, but in the Super Mario Brothers style of after you had scrolled past a thing, you couldn't go back, so there was a definite need to explore, find, and to some degree, memorize what was available in each screen and stage. That particular game had a fiendishly difficult third level where there was exactly the necessary amount of cans of SPAM were present to obtain a piece of the brain of the player character. All four brain bits were needed to obtain the good ending of the game (which involved the player character getting all their brains back and transforming themselves back into a lawyer. Because it's still a Monty Python game.)
And most people who were active in the interactive fiction scene around when Infocom was making Zork are familiar with the Hitchhiker's Guide IF that was a smash-up of things that were in the book and a lot of things that weren't, so that people who had read the book weren't able to walk their way through the game just based on book knowledge. Also, that game was particularly cruel to players, often requiring them to trial-and-error a solution and then supplying them with one less try to figure it out than was needed the first time, necessitating a reload of the game to get it done right the first time and remember where all of the stops and traps for the Rube Goldberg solution were. And a particularly mean puzzle at the end, where a character will ask for any one of a number of objects, all of which needed to have been collected earlier in the game, because the game will specifically ask for something that the player doesn't have, necessitating going back significantly in the game to collect the errant object, only to find out another object was also needed. H2G2 wasn't the cruelest game in the Infocom stable, but it is one of the most memorable for its cruelty.
These kinds of games mostly seem to concentrate on putting together a decent game, the presence of the licensed characters is an extra cherry on top of an otherwise solid and enjoyable game. Other types of games, play a particular type of game and are really only distinguishable from the licensed characters that are present in the game. Which is to say, there are a hundred thousand variations of, say, a match-3 game that are all branded based on your favorite show, anime, or game. I have seen Sailor Moon, RWBY, and Miraculous Ladybug, for example, all basically playing some form of match-3 with different special powers and scenarios that have to be dealt with. You could call all of them Candy Crush clones, though, and you wouldn't be all that wrong. There's another popular game style where the mechanic of what characters you can get and use in your game is dependent on pulling their medals or portraits from a random-draw system that takes premium currency to use. While many of these gashapon games (named after the machines that dispense capsules with random items inside) may have different mechanics of how those medals are used (as a role-playing game, or a first-person shooter with powers, or as a tag battle system), progression in the game often depends on the luck of the draws, which means better progress can be achieved from those who pay for more premium currency to get more draws, or pay for access to specific events that have rare or otherwise-unattainable medals with special and specific powers to use. These games are generally not fun for the free players that rely solely on what amount of the premium currency they get through daily logins and free giveaways, because they eventually hit a wall where all the players who pay can effortlessly dispatch them with their better powers.
In the previous era, though, games that were much more about advertising the brand were still there. So you get games in the Nintendo era like Cool Spot, games involving the California Raisins, or computer games like Chex Quest, which was basically Doom, but with Chex branded things everywhere and Flemoids that had to be dispatched. Kid-friendly Doom, essentially. (Although, yes, you'll see the Pizza Hut logo in early NES Turtles beat-em-ups, because product placement is still a thing.) There's one game of the era where properties other than media franchises were releasing games and that I remember as being particularly difficult and also engaging. Despite completely being an advertisement for Dominos Pizza, the game underneath it works remarkably well. I'm talking about Avoid the Noid, which you can play along with from the Internet Archive, because just about any time I talk about a DOS-era game, it's available on the Internet Archive.
Avoid the Noid is a game where a pizza delivery driver is tasked with delivering an intact pizza to the top floor of the office complex building within the thirty minute time limit (because at that time, of course, "thirty minutes or it is discounted/free" was a pretty common guarantee. Delivery would be a relatively easy task were it not for the fact that this office building is infested with bunny-like creatures, the eponymous Noids, that have no interest in allowing any pizza at all to get into their building, much less to the CEO office where the pizza is intended. Accompanying the Noids are explosive darts that will destroy a pizza on contact with the delivery person. And did we mention that there are also hidden trap doors that will send the player down a floor if they come in contact with them and locked doors that require the keys scattered on certain floors to open, leaving the player vulnerable to Noid attacks while they are attempting to open the door? (Oh, and Noids can go through locked doors as if they weren't there.)
Each stage of the office building consists of three floors of the building, with the exception of the beginning stage and the roof stage at the top of the building, and have a character arrive at the bottom-left and snake their way to the top right. Losing a pizza to the Noids will restart the current three-floor block at the corner the the player first entered the block from.
Balancing out the Noids, darts, and oh, yes, the Noids with bazookas that fire explosive darts that you encounter as you work your way up the floors and the Noids that strafe the roof with water balloon bombs is the fact that this is no ordinary delivery person, but a highly-trained acrobat who is moonlighting as a pizza delivery person. The character can turn flips (that allow him to avoid low hazards like noids and trap doors) and rolls (that allow him to avoid high hazards like explosive darts and noids) and can change speed from standing still to walking to running, which change the distance and angle of his acrobatics. Somehow, the pizza boxes involved in these feats are not crushed, nor the pizzas inside destroyed. Only Noids, darts, and projectiles thrown or fired by Noids can destroy pizzas. The player also receives five Noid Avoider devices that will completely wipe the current screen of any and all Noids and darts. The Noid Avoider device can be used before contact with a Noid, a dart, or a balloon to prevent the loss of pizza. In the case of Noid contact, a Noid Avoider can be used at the point of contact (when the Noid trips or kicks the delivery person and they grunt) and while the caracter will still fall and be dazed, they will get back up at the end of the dazed animation without the loss of pizza. Finally, Noids cannot attack the player character in the elevator spaces between the floors. They will jump out of elevators, they will run into them, and on later levels, certain Noids will track the player, resulting in them jumping out of an elevator, landing, turning around immediately and jumping back in the elevator, but they cannot harm the player while the player is safely in the elevator.
With that, the player can make it to floor 17. However, on floor 17, there is a locked door which does not have a visible corresponding key anywhere in the levels seen up to this point. Throughout the office complex are payphones that ring while the player is on the floor block. These phones are interactive when the player is either standing still or moving at walking speed, but the player might be forgiven for thinking that they are there only as schmuck bait, as most of the time, interacting with a ringing telephone treats the player to a short cutscene of a Noid being on the other end of the telephone, who then presses a dynamite plunger on their end and explodes the pay phone where the player character is, causing the irrevocable loss of a pizza. However, a certain subset of these payphones, when interacted with for the first time, will instead say "You found a key in the coin return!" and grant the player a key. Every subsequent interaction with a key phone will result in the exploding Noid, so players have to be careful to only interact once with those phones. Knowing which phones have keys in them allows passage on floor 17 and certain other floors where there are no visible keys to open the locked doors.
Finding keys in the coin returns means the player can reach floor 29. However, on floor 29, there's a keypad that tells the player to enter the code to disarm the door. At which point the player finds out that not only do some phones have keys in the coin returns, but other ones contain the randomly-generated digits that will give the player the code to disarm the elevator door on 29 and turn it into a regular locked door. Incorrect codes, of course, explode the character's pizza, so a player cannot just input random numbers until they discover the correct code. The player, of course, doesn't actually have a key on them when 29's door becomes normal, so they have to retreat to the phone on 29 and check there, which has been transformed into a key-in-coin-return phone only after the correct code has been input. Which unlocks floor 30. Which requires three keys to open the final door, and thus the player has to ascend to the roof and battle the noids water-bombing the roof, as a key moves from place to place over the roof. Three collected keys means the player gets to retreat to 30 and open the CEO's office door and complete the game. Remaining time is added, in points, to the player's score, but there's also no high score table for bragging rights.
It took a long time for all of us in the family to discover the phones had more than just Noids behind them, through a lot of trial and error and remembering where the good phones were, while also having to handle Noids, darts, bazooka-Noids, and also remember where the trapdoors are on each level. When we beat the game, there was a lot of accomplishment felt for having finally gotten through the whole thing.
So now you can play the game, too, and enjoy the frustrations of trying to pick your way through hordes of Noids and wait until they are set up so that a stellar acrobatic sequence will let you get from elevator to elevator without hitting a trapdoor, a Noid, or a dart, and so that you can pick up any necessary phones along the way.
(Or, if you like, you can watch someone speedrun Avoid The Noid, as it was part of the Awful Games Done Quick block at this year's AGDQ event.)
