Dogs 1
Release type: Shareware
Release date: ~1992-1993 (original release)
Levels: 7
Author: Gary Acord
Website: Acord Games
Registration bonus: Dogs 2 and Dogs 3, hint sheet, secret bonus game, copies of all shareware games, membership in the Zapper Game Club
Registration price: $20
Related games: Street Wolf, The Head
FULL ENTRY COMING SOON!
Gary Acord's games tend to categorize themselves into one of two overlapping threads: his own personal league of superheros, and his obsession with Pac-Man. Some superhero games borrow from Pac-Man's design; Acord's knock-off Pac characters tend to show up in his superhero crossovers. Ergo, most of his games sit somewhere on a complex web of relationship.
A few games, though, like Dogs and The Head, make an effort to stand apart as their own smaller works, with only a shared design sensibility and audio-video library to associate them with the greater Acord cosmos. The games remain baffling, yet this isolation and comparable modesty make the games easier to digest and may therefore offer the player a clearer window into the technicolor chaos that defines Acord as a designer.
Structurally, Dogs brings to mind the "minus zone" and "secret level" areas of NES games: those portions of the games where you follow a glitch outside of the intended bounds of the game and find yourself traversing a world of open-ended game templates fed by miscellaneous data trapped in the console's RAM. These areas are illogical and difficult to navigate, as they were never designed by any deliberate process. Part of the joy in these glitches is in finding oneself in the wilderness without a compass, seeing unfettered sights you were never meant to see.
For all practical purposes, Dogs inhabits a single map, a map shared with other games in the Acord cosmology and possibly originating many edits earlier as a level from Andy Stone's Nebula.
(Three levels are nearly identical, and shared with Street Wolf.)
Contents
Story
You'll begin to think the world has gone to the dogs, as you become entranced into a surrealistic dimension, viewed from the perspective of a dog, as you run jump and shoot your way through this fast moving VGA arcade game and its 4 way scrolling screens and gargantuan worlds.
Instructions
- Arrow keys - move around.
- [X] - jump right. [Z] - jump left.
- [Space] - shoot low.
- [A] - shoot high.
- [P] - pick up objects.
- [M] - small right jump.
- [N] - small left jump.
- [F1] - instructions.
- [F2] - inventory.
- [F4] - toggle sound.
- [F5] - save game. [F6] - load game
- [F7] - joystick setup.
- [F1O] - about Acord Games.
Credits
Resources
As with The Head, the levels are all variations of a level from Street Wolf.
Availability
Distributed through contemporary bulletin boards, through the author's Website, and through several third-party mirror archives.
Archive History
On November 7, 2010, Demu.org maintainer Swizzle pointed out the archive of Gary Acord material on the site -- which was swiftly added to the Game-Maker Archive.
Links
Listings
Misc. Links
Downloads
- Dogs (417 kB)
- Areas 1, 2, 3, 4, Fine map (2.25 MB)
- Area 5 map (808 kB)
- Area 6 map (1.05 MB)
