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
Gary Acord's games tend to categorize themselves into one of two overlapping threads: his own personal league of superheroes, 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 (Street Wolf; The Head) and likely originating many edits earlier as a level from Andy Stone's Nebula. Technically, there are three maps across the game's seven levels, but five of those levels use the same map and the other two each use minor variations on the same.
These edited maps are decorated with a magpie's hoard of tiles and sprites and music, seemingly borrowed from whatever took Acord's fancy in the moment and then repurposed to whatever whim was most pressing. The picture content of a tile may bear little relation to its mechanical function (e.g., whether or not it's solid or has gravity; whether or not it increases or decreases a counter, or changes on contact; whether or not it hurts the character, benefits, or does nothing), or to its structural role in the map design. As in Acord's other games, a level in Dogs may switch on a tile-by-tile basis from a gravity-based platformer to a four-way pseudo-top-down design.
Much like the game's map, Dogs' collage of video and audio resources hails from a shared library with the rest of Cary Acord's games. The resources are customized to the game's purpose only to the extent that Acord's moment-to-moment decisions happen to differ, so in playing Dogs you may enjoy either a sense of deja vu or a primer on what to expect from Acord's more elaborate projects. You will see the same visuals borrowed from Jill of the Jungle and Nebula, with most of the same custom edits; the same menagerie of curious sprites (including the dog sprite that seemed to inspire the creation of this game as an offshoot from another, grander project). All of which is to say, the game's aesthetic is best described as a measured absence of intentionality.
Dogs, like Acord's other games, is a work of nearly pure free association. The game is designed without clear rational direction, and as such provides the player little in the way of guidance, motivation, or structural reward. To play is to embark on an untempered journey into the unconscious of the game's author and the ball of hoarded information and random associations that sits in the back of all our minds despite all our efforts to make sense of it through the world of our experiences. Were Salvador Dali or Andy Warhol alive to see Acord's work, they would have much to say on his authorship.
The spritework in Dogs may make ease the burden of parsing, compared to some of Acord's other games. The player's dog is a small character, who can fit through narrow spaces. Also unlike the two-sprite-tall characters in Acord's superhero games, the player need only worry about the context of the one tile that the dog may contact at a time, lowering the sense of complete randomness to the player's experience. Some of this relief may be set off by the game's unusual controls, which map jumping to the left of the keyboard other movement to the right, and firing to the spacebar. One does, however, adapt to controls in time.
Surreal as it may be, and senseless as it may be to navigate without a strong map, Dogs may be best point-of-entry for those curious about Gary Acord's large and intimidating repertoire. If what you see here intrigues you, there is a great deal more to explore.
Contents
Story[edit]
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[edit]
- 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.
Credits[edit]
Resources[edit]
Gary Acord's games all draw from a common pool of resources.
As with The Head, the three levels in Dogs are variants of a level from Street Wolf, which appears to have begun as a level from Nebula.
Background tiles are sourced from all over, including but not limited to Wolfenstein 3D and Sample.
Many sprites originate from Sample and Penguin Pete; the dog appears to be an edit of a deer from the latter game.
Availability[edit]
Distributed through contemporary bulletin boards, through the author's Website, and through several third-party mirror archives.
Archive History[edit]
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[edit]
Listings[edit]
Misc. Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Dogs (417 kB)
- Areas One, Two, Three, Four, Fine map (2.25 MB)
- Area Five map (808 kB)
- Area Six map (1.05 MB)
