Alan '95
Release type: Freeware
Release date: February 6, 1995
Levels: 2
Author: Adam Tyner, Alan Caudel
Related games: Alan!, Alan B-Day, Alan '96, The Adam's Birthday Saga Continues, Bear Fun Show, Blip!
A year on from Alan B-Day, and Adam Tyner has grown in his craft. Since our last stop in on this ritual, he has developed four Mister Spiff games and transitioned from the representational (if stylized) design of a year ago to wholly abstract constructions. What elements are representational tend to represent in-jokes and comedic non sequiturs.
So it is that Tyner's next gift for his friend Alan Caudel is a direct and strange successor to Mister Spiff IV. In that game Mister Spiff seems to be revealed as Alan Caudel, complete with a digitized photograph of Caudel for his head. In Alan '95 that notion continues (though now the head has been transplanted to the body of Adam Tyner, as illustrated by Alan Caudel in 1993), as does the side-scrolling maze design of the later Spiff titles.
The digitization that would come to underscore (in turn) Jon '95, Blip!, and What the...?!? takes hold here, in early form. There is some struggle with the palette; rather than conform imported photographs to a usable palette, the game's two levels use the respective random palettes associated with photographs that Tyner chose to insert into the backgrounds. All of the sprites and other background elements are therefore rather washed out and... beige-looking.
There are some nice touches -- like the little guy from the yet-to-be-released Star Avenger II animating on Caudel's computer screen. And one of the better ideas, in theory, from the Spiff games made the transition; the start of each level drains the character of special counters, to ensure that progress is reset after every death rather than rolling over as it otherwise would.
But, that leads us to another discussion. Although on a design level it should be ideal to reset the counters after every death, here the decision underlines to what extent the design is serious about forcing the player through the motions of collecting everything.
To finish the level, you need to collect every pack of Mentos (actually a tile from a larger digitized mosaic of Caudel) then bring the tally to an exit door. Every time you die, you need to start the collection all over -- and the game is intent on making the process as irritating as possible.
As in Tyner's other side-scrolling mazes, but to a greater extent than elsewhere, the levels in Alan '95 present a very rigid branching path. The one-way walls and gravity wells at every intersection ensure that each decision the player makes is for keeps, forcing the player to see a branch through to its end before looping around for another cycle. The game leaves little sense of agency for the player, except for the liberty to mess up -- which the game is happy to facilitate, through an abundance of insta-death tiles.
The player goes through the motions, does what is expected, and then if it's all done correctly, gets to move on. If the player makes an error, oops, it's back to the start. Let's drain away all that progress. And now, go through all the motions again!
Later games would step away from this structure. And at least in the case of Alan '95 it lasts for just two fairly brief levels: enough to get the point without driving the player mental. Furthermore, despite the (it must be) deliberately irritating placement of death tiles, Alan '95 is largely fair. A couple of miscalculated bits of geometry aside, any errors that lead to frustration genuinely do tend to be on the player's end. Pushing through, therefore, does tend to be satisfying -- in much the way that a lab rat must be pleased after hitting that feeder bar.
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|---|---|---|
| Alan B-Day | Alan '95 | Alan '96 |
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Story[edit]
Surprise, surprise. Guess whose birthday it is on February 5th?
My cousin Scott's! But your birthday is February 6th. So is the point of the game. You got a case of Mentos from me, but evil clones of your friends -- Weird Al, Broom Boy, Bear-dog, and the hideous Doghead creature, to name a few, are intent on KILLING you!!! Reclaim your Mentos with your only weapon -- Watermelon Toy! Is it enough....? You'd better hope so.....good luck....you'll need it.
(Cliche!)
Instructions[edit]
Controlling lil' ol' you...
Moving: Use the numeric keypad (duh!).
Attacking: Press SPACEBAR -or- ENTER.
Enemies: Hitting an enemy with a watermelon toy stuns them for 65 ticks... only a few seconds. It's FAIRLY obvious who the enemies are.
What the Heck is the Point? Get all the MENTOS packages you can find. Dying makes you hafta replay the level and gets rid of all your MENTOS! In level one, 11 MENTOS packages opens the block marked MENTOS HERE. Cool.
Corn: It does a body corn. CORN!
Credits[edit]
ALAN'S BIRTHDAY GAME-1995
Special thanks to Seattle Filmworks and Tom Tyner.
Availability[edit]
This game is not known to have been distributed in any form, prior to its addition to the Archive.
Archive History[edit]
After an earlier wave of rediscoveries, on July 13 2011 Alan Caudel provided another archive of previously missing Game-Maker material, including the following:
Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Alan '95 (203 kB)
