ADG Episode 244 - Jones in the Fast Lane
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- Опубліковано 9 сер 2018
- I'm pretty sure going from fresh out of high school to finishing grad school in under six months is impossible...
Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at Jones in the Fast Lane, a board game simulating a fast track through life's short term goals, developed and published by Sierra On-Line originally in 1991, then again in 1992 as a fully voiced CD-ROM release.
While this game can get repetitive playing solo, it's absolutely perfect for multiplayer, just like a lot of board games. It's also often compared to the board game of Life, although quite frankly, beyond the whole "slice of life" theme, the two games really don't play anything like each other. :P
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Additional Information and Corrections:
* Here's a link to take you directly to the custom installer for Jones in the Fast Lane: sierrahelp.com/...
* You can also sometimes get "Poor Work History" when trying to find a job in this game. This means you qualify for the position both in terms of experience and education, but you haven't put in enough hours of work overall through the course of the game.
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This is still one of my favorite all time games. I can play this anytime and it's always fun.
Also, if you want to just avoid all that trouble getting it running on DosBOX, it is supported by ScummVM and works flawlessly (at least in my experience.) I play it all the time, and sometimes convince my family to play with me too, even if they don't like it as much as I do.
+Damien Cooley I totally missed that ScummVM supports this game! Given the issues I ran into that may indeed be a better route to go! :o
Monolith Burger(s) - a running fake brand name in Sierra Games originating from Space Quest (SQIII if memory serves correctly) :)
It blows my mind that you got it down to the exact sample amount for editing, that's dedication to getting a game running properly and probably more than most people could deal with. It's worth mentioning that Audacity would have converted the OGG audio to WAV then transcoded it back to OGG, which would lower audio quality considerably. If it's possible to rip the audio direct from CD as WAV then edit and convert it to OGG, that would help preserve the original quality. It would still be a lossy encode but not a lossy > lossy encode, which is where it really starts to get night and day in terms of fidelity.
Not that Jones in the Fast Lane is particularly known for it's stellar audiophile sound quality but just saying.
+PlayStationPaul Recompressing previously compressed material only presents quality problems if you change the compression format or reduce the compression quality, otherwise the same optimizations are made and the resulting quality is virtually identical to what you had. Besides which, Audacity's default compression quality for OGG is HIGHER than what the custom installer performed. ;)
I understand that but it's generally considered bad practice to do lossy > lossy audio compression, in the pro audio field and audiophile circles at least, even if the source is uncompressed but originated from lossy. I've been on sites which ban such files and even ban users for uploading them. Mods actually check the files with a spectral analyzer. There will always be a loss of quality with any lossy encode, even though as you say steps can be taken to mitigate it. As a rule of thumb if I have access to the lossless original and need to encode I'll always use that. But I guess if you know what you're doing it's no big deal for something like a game soundtrack.
Pixelmusement That's not true if you adjust samples along the time domain, which you did. Most audio compression formats are divided up into frames, so unless your edits were exactly on a frame boundary, there was generational loss.
+Jim
Leonard I had a thought that that might be the case but I was trying to think what kind of damage to the quality that would actually do... It'd be interesting to see a test of some sort which takes a piece of audio and recompresses it over and over with slight timing differences; see where it ends up. :B
I love the opening title music for this game. So jazzy and funky!
Man, this one is so early-90s it hurts. Pretty fun game, tho.
I loved this game growing up. I found a 'free' version to play as an adult that was fun for a couple of rounds but I agree that once you know what to do, it gets a bit predictable. Amazed I was fast enough to get one of the first 3 guesses this week. :)
Here are some things I learned by looking into the actual game code :D (SC3 Companion ftw)
1) "No openings" is a randomized reaction that actually means "you could have gotten the job" (experience, work history and education are checked separately and answered logically with higher priority) but you were unlucky - this luck is getting pushed away by education, experience and work history though. I think it starts off as a chance of 70% risk of getting "no openings" while the initial state assumes you have a reliabliity of 10% which is good enough to get 4 different jobs at the beginning with no experience
2) a fridge will allow for 1 week of food and it will spoil BUT you are not starving! it is just a happiness decrease due to the spoiling
3) a freezer will allow for 2 more weeks of food (if you have a refrigerator!)
4) a stove seems to only have an effect on happiness
5) I have never seen and it should be programmatically impossible that there is low wages and high living cost - apart from that your rent might stay high and then everything drops, (you get a wage cut) I do not see this happening - everything that costs money should be linked to one central economy scale factor
A small addition to the game, I figured this out as I was digging in the code - it might be the sierra script interpreter messing up, but some things look that they are really hardcoded:
1) it is highly unlikely that stocks, prices and wages go up all the way they potentially could - the chance that SHOULD be fair balanced has a 0% chance of jumping upwards "normally" because of a variable mismatch, and it only does jump upwards with the special event "inflation, prices could soar" so you will likely end with everything being at the bare minimum - so then if you had the regular high security you have to work a LOT, it is advised to switch back and forth on the house so you get the cheaper rent ;)
2) the AI indeed is hardwired to always know exactly how their stats are and which jobs require what education, and what jobs are "soon" to be reached and it basically is - unless there are events like a robbery or jobs being lost, they always will win because they play perfectly :D
I love the concept (as it does offer more input over Game of Life), but whilst I played it a bit as a kid? It's certainly one I don't really revisit now, if only because of that lack of having friends nearby to enjoy stuff with :(
Never knew about the differing tones on the employment screens though - I genuinely love that from a design angle for feedback. Not that devs should be solely relying on audio cues in Space Year 2018 though :)
+hellfire64 With the floppy release or speech disabled you'd get it as text bubbles. ;)
A PC game called "No Time to Relax" came out a little while ago that's basically a remake and update to this game, if anyone is curious. I've played it; it's pretty good stuff.
LOVE this game
Another issue with food spoiling is that you tend to get food poisoning poisoning and lose time and money going to the doctor. So yeah, save up for a refrigerator, then buy food for the whole month if you want to save time and money.
Wow, 90s fashion...
The Employment office guy looks like he's moments away from saying "My dad said I could sell the Poop Tube!"
Hot tip on Sierra games! You can copy drivers from one game to another to add support. Once the files are copied into the game's directory, they pop up in the installer/setup menu! So if you want EGA , CGA, or Hercules, (or a differ sound device) just copy the driver from another game. Works for sure on old text parser games. I've only done this with backwards compatibility, never tried dropping a VGA driver in an older game.
This would take a lot more experimentation to see exactly what's going on, but you can't "add" content to games just by dropping in a driver, as in, if the game isn't capable of converting its existing content to other formats on the fly, this won't work. The reason it would work readily with the AGI games though is because not only do those games already have support for nearly every common graphics mode already, but they do NOT use bitmapped graphics! (Well, not for the backgrounds anyways.)
@@Pixelmusement Perhaps the games were developed with support and then those particular graphics modes got axed prior to shipping? Or perhaps it was some sort of licensing thing? I don't know if seirra had to pay a license for including the drivers? Point being, you may want to try dropping an EGA driver on the CD version of Jones to see if it works, or maybe try forcing EGA through scummVM. I doubt the actually removed the EGA code for the CD release, probably just didn't include the driver so it wouldn't show up in the install menu.
There is a trick to beating Jones on hardest difficulty... The Goals are meant to be set to the highest values, so Jones' goals arent that much lower than yours and you've got a fair chance. Also the Factory is the best career path, every time.
Now that's some job hopping.
i played this as a kid and then found out as an adult that apartments come with a refrigerator, freezer, stove
This game is a classic! I've played it lots and compare it the the same fun as sim city2000 or dune or watching back to the future .
Good review
Ah, fond memories of playing this with my brother as a kid! :D I still prefer the floppy version over the CD release, though.
0:45 -- "Welcome... to... Ameri....cana. Please... make... your..... selection..... followed.... by... the... pound.... sign.... now!"
Next week's is Silverball, right?
DukeNukem2417, Silverball is not that bad. I suppose it's more futuristic name like title CB is up next. That game really sucked!
I had the floppy version, box, manuals, everything. I threw it away in 2010 or so.
Oooh, I do have a boxed copy of this. Wasn't even all that expensive, as I recall.
Jones in the Fast Lane! One of my favourite games from around just before I was 10. IIRC, I have my boxed copy because I swapped an other, older game that I don't even recall the name of (or was it a magazine?) for it with a family friend that we were holidaying with. I think it was a good deal. :-)
Downloading the video to my phone for when I can watch it later.
Burger for $66? My, the inflation is out of wack.
Just saying, your hint at the end is probably gonna get people new to your channel sending in guesses for a game you already reviewed.
I love Sierra but I dunno if I'll be seeking this game out, despite the Space Quest connection.
BTW, review request: One day, do the MS-DOS version of the original Rayman!
i knew it was Jones in the Fast Lane just wish it be at gog
How many of you paused at 0:19 to read the whole text?
+wanmoke It's actually the first section of the massive audio track typed out. ;)
Way too much work to get the Redbook audio working -- what program did you originally use to rip it? imgburn creates a bin/cue that IIRC worked just fine the last time I tried it.
If you're ripping to a compressed format after editing the file, this is not a problem with the disc but rather with the emulator. CDROM works perfectly on real hardware, even an MPC-1 class system, so my hackles raise when people hint at "maybe my CD was bad" or "maybe the CD was mastered incorrectly".
+Jim
Leonard I was indeed using Imgburn. Seriously, the image would not mount no matter what I tried and I even tried re-imaging multiple times, but Imgburn insisted it was being created properly. I even tried looking through the raw CD data and found all kinds of junk data in the TOC and even using an audio player the junk data I mentioned removing from the ripped audio track WAS actually present on the disc, yet mounting the disc itself did produce the correct timecodes, even if the seek times were abysmal, so... yeah, getting this working was just a bad time and I found no info online pertaining to the issues I was having thus I had no way to know if it was my specific CD, my specific drive, these CDs in general... But I didn't want to assume no one else would have problems, thus why I went into details on the troubles I had.
Pixelmusement Have you tried DOSBOX-X?
+Jim
Leonard Nope. I normally don't keep other DOSBox builds on my system other than the standard 0.74 build, SLIGHTLY modified to fix a bug with the video recording feature's memory handling, which is why it shows up as an SVN build. Given all the other builds out there I don't want to create a confusing mess where I'm constantly recommending different builds for different games or having to test every game with every build, so I just stick with the standard build so as not to overwhelm everything. The second Lands of Lore game so far has been the only exception, but that was because the game was virtually unplayable with the standard build without hardware acceleration. :P
great game
First time on go for broke i lost with 2 weeks, second time we were finished at the same time but Jones won and right after i won too but then player 1 should win cause he gets first so weird...and third time i beat him with 2 weeks so it can be done. but you have to choose certain jobs and certain diploma's from school to get to the highest paying job fast and then you can beat him
Isn't that game was already covered by PushingUpRoses? I always think about LGR, PM and PUR as holy trinity which should not repeat each other (in theory) :D
+Николай They've BOTH covered this game, so... now we ALL have! 8D
While others play chess, Kris plays 8D Jones in the Fast Lane
+Ralph
Außerbauer Not that I don't have an all glass chess set! ...'twas a birthday gift many years ago. :B
You can minimally customize your character by buying clothes.
There is a browser-based version, which is what I've been playing.
i thought that went offline?
Also try to get money for luxury apartment before 1st rent is due
Go for broke ai is easily defeated by getting a job at blacks market and buying food for 1 week ever week, its not at all hard or rng impossible.
Not án easy game