Penn&Teller's Smoke and Mirrors

[Shadowlayer]

This guy TheRedEye at the somethingwaful forums just got a copy of Penn&Teller's Smoke and Mirrors. For those who dont know this could be one of the rarest SegaCD games ever.

The game is finished, it had some reviews in several magazines back in 94/early95 (I've a gamepro with the review) but aparently it wasnt released.

Here's what that guys has to say about the game:


A lot of you probably know that tracking down unreleased videogames is a quirky (and fucking expensive) little hobby of mine. Well, yesterday I finally got a copy of something I've been after forever: Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for the Sega CD! It's a really weird and (I hate using this word) postmodern kind of adventure game, packaged with a handful of goofy little minigames and "tricks" to play on your friends. Oh, and it also has DESERT BUS, which may be the best game ever created. More on that in a bit. Here are some screenshots I grabbed with an excellent little emulator called Gens:

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/01.png

This is the title screen. It shows the title of the game, which is Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors. Sometimes when I tell other people about the game I mix up which part has the "&" and which part has the "and."

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/02.png

This is a still from the introductory movie, in gloriously garbled Sega-CD-O-Vision. Penn & Teller explain how they totally came up with all the ideas here and coded everything by themselves. At one point Teller makes a couple action figures get into a fight, and blood goes everywhere. At the end the pizza delivery guy shows up with their pizzas and asks if all the work he's done on the game is panning out or not, and then Penn and Teller rush him out the door so the audience doesn't think he made the game himself. Oh Penn & Teller you are so funny lol!

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/03.png

Here is one of the minigames, DESERT BUS. The music on this title screen rocks so hard that I broke several bones just listening to it.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/04.png

In DESERT BUS you drive a bus in the desert. Your goal is to go from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas. Your bus never goes more than 45 miles per hour, so the trip takes approximately eight hours (in real time) to make. There is no scenery or even other cars on the road, just plain desert, for 8 hours. Oh, and your bus veers to the right just slightly, so it's impossible to just tape down a button and go do something else. Rumor has it that if you make it to Vegas, you score one point.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/05.png

This is Mojo the Psychic Gorilla. In theory, this is a game you play at a party with a deck of cards in front of you. Using some clever and subtle button combinations, you can make Mojo use his "psychic powers" to read the card your friend has drawn. Unfortunately the guy I got the game from lost the instruction sheet, so nobody knows what the button combination is anymore. There are a couple other minigames that share this same fate, so I'm going to skip them and go to the actual game now.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/06.png

This shot is more or less from the beginning of the game. You control Penn & Teller at the same time, and can switch back and forth between them to use their unique abilities and solve puzzles. The storyline is that a competing magic duo, Stinkburger and Rot, have convinced the world that magic is REAL and they have SUPER POWERS and everyone should give them lots of money. So Penn & Teller set out to stop them, because they're fucking liars. You'll notice a cockroach counter on the top. When you collect enough cockroaches you can sell them to movie producers and wildlife reserves and stuff for cash!

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/07.pngThis is a shot from inside one of the many places of business in the game, Debbie's Travel Agency. Every store in the game is named either Harry's or Debbie's, and the clerk is always played by Deborah Harry from Blondie. And really that's just so awesome that I don't know what else to say.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/08.png

This is the first boss in the game, The Great Escapo. You end up killing him in a really violent way that I'm not going to spoil.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/09.png

This is a really creepy carny who charged $100 to guess my age. The bastard got it right every time, until I bought a fake ID and fooled him! Take that carny! For a prize, he gave me a nail gun.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/10.png

Oh yeah, this part is awesome. You can hire stunt doubles in the game. They look nothing like you, and they can run around doing all these awesome jump kicks and punches and stuff. The thing is, though, they can't do anything BUT hit people, they can't even go in doors, so using them is completely useless. When you pause the game, it shows a two minute completely unskippable movie of Penn & Teller eating pizza in silence, and then you regain control.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/11.png

This is a carnival freak. He sings a funny song about how he's in love with the bearded lady, but she doesn't seem to notice. And that's his only function in the game, as far as I can tell.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/12.png

This is a random shot from inside Stinkburger and Rot's casino. To the left is a room with a guy selling hot dogs. For some reason, whenever you find a guy selling hot dogs, it acts as a warp zone back to New York.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/13.png

This is me attempting to use my nail gun on a tiger's stupid face. It didn't work. I still haven't figured out how to get past them.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/14.png

This is the second boss, I forget his name. He was pretty easy. Actually, all the fighting stuff is easy, since you can't die. It's kind of like a Lucasarts adventure, but with action.

http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/15.png
http://www.lostlevels.org/stuff/pt/16.png

These two shots are of my favorite move in the game. Penn points up and goes "Hey, look!" The guy looks up, and you control Teller as he crawls behind him. Then you push him over his back!

You can see the original topic here (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1667022&perpage=40&pagenumber=1)

[Sally]

I think you mean this guy:
http://assemblergames.com/forums/member.php?u=1158

And it is cool he released it for dload...

[Dot50Cal]

Your about 6 months late, thats when all this came to pass..

[Shadowlayer]

Damn I'm outdated....

So is this guy banned or something?

[madhatter256]

Damn I'm outdated....

So is this guy banned or something?

No he is not banned. TheRedEye runs lostlevels.org, incase you did not know.

[KaL_YoshiKa]

I don't mind that he brought this up, I missed it when this happened.

[Shadowlayer]

No he is not banned

K, is that his profile seemed a little weird (with no avatar)

[madhatter256]

I don't mind that he brought this up, I missed it when this happened.

Me neither. I never heard of this game either. So RedEye dumped this game on the net a while back?

[Fabrizo]

Yea, TheRedEye released it in September last year. I've had it up on the ftp sense then. Im surprised its not widly known about at this point.

[Hawanja]

I remeber reading that there was a shooter segment in this game, where you played with 2 players and you could hit a button to take control of your friend's ship and make him play all bad while the computer took over your ship and made you kick ass. Coolest game idea ever.

[XerdoPwerko]

I'd never heard of it either, and it looks pretty cool. It takes me a while to find out about stuff, sometimes.
Good post.

[ccovell]

That Debbie ____ Dallas reference is a classic! Anybody else get it?

[Yakumo]

I have never heard of this like many of you. Looks shit as well but I guess I'll give it a download :p

Yakumo

[anagrama]

It is shit. But entertainingly so. :)

[Johnny]

I have a magazine somewhere with pictures and info about the 3D0 version. I'll try to find it.

[bux]

Penn acutally talked about the video game on his daily radio show yesterday on FreeFM. Heres an mp3 of him discussing it.

Smoke and Mirrors discussion
(http://waxy.org/random/audio/Penn_Jillette_Podcast_on_Smoke_and_Mirrors.mp3)

[Sally]

Out of curiosity, has anyone ever tried to make the bus trip?

[Borman]

Edit: Im an idiot

[ServiceGames]

Wow I thought this was some kind of joke at first.. Now I really want to try it.
Fabrizo how do I access the FTP?

[cahaz]

its so bad i might be temptated to download it. Maybe not.


Edit: here's a part of an interview about the game that you can see on the lostlevels site.



“‘Desert Bus’ was a game we thought would really appeal to people who didn’t like unrealistic games, and didn’t like violence in their games. It was just like real, loving life.”

The goal of Desert Bus was to, quite simply, drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada; a very very boring drive, as those of us who have done it know. There were a couple catches, though: in the game, your bus could not go over 45 miles per hour. Also, it veered to the right, just ever so slightly, so you could not simply tape down the accelerator button on your Genesis pad and leave the game alone; you had to man the wheel at all times. Oh, and did we mention the trip takes eight hours, in real time?

“You saw nothing. It was just desert stuff going by,” said Jillette. “And there was a little green tree hanging from the rear-view mirror, one of those things that makes your car smell better? And it would just kind of drift in slowly to one corner of the screen. And you couldn’t take your hands off the controller, and if you did…it didn’t have a spectacular crash, it just slowly went into the sand, and then overheated and stopped, and then the game was you being towed backwards all the way back to Tucson.”

http://www.lostlevels.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/desertbus.gif “And when you went from Tucson to Vegas and did the full 8 hours, you had bus stops, and the bus stops…you could stop and open the door, but no one got on. No one’s ever waiting for you. And if you went by them you weren’t punished at all, because nobody was there. It meant nothing. And a bug hit your windshield five times during the eight hours, and that was the only animation. It was just road after road after road. Eight hours of desert bus. And then when you got in - and I love this - when you got into Vegas and pulled in and stopped, the counter - which was five zeros - went to 1. You got 1 point for an eight hour shift, and then a guy came in and said, ‘Do you want to pull a double shift, Mac?’ And then you could drive back to Tucson for another eight hours for another point.”

Jillette then detailed the official Desert Bus contest that Absolute had planned to accompany the game:

“And we were planning on giving a very lavish prize for the person that got the highest score. It was the person who got like, a hundred [points]. So 800 hours of playing this. We were hoping that groups of people, like fraternities and stuff, would play.”

“It was going to be, you got to go on Desert Bus from Tucson to Vegas with showgirls and a live band and just the most partying bus ever. You got to Vegas, we’re going to put you up at the Rio, big thing, and then, you know, big shows.”

“It was a HUGE prize. It was dedicated to Janet Reno.”

“The really sad part of this is that Barry Marx (http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,58970/), who was the brains behind it and working with us, and a dear dear friend of mine, he had this massive heart attack out of the blue and died. So I think he would have a website certainly that gave all the instructions and everything, because it was really his baby, and a very funny idea.”



http://www.lostlevels.org/

[Fabrizo]

Fabrizo how do I access the FTP?

Check my sig.

[Hawanja]

Out of curiosity, has anyone ever tried to make the bus trip?

The EGM review I read about this said they actually did it, but they must have been working from an earlier build becasue they said you could get a C-clamp and keep the bus on the road.

Funny how you can remeber something you read in a magazine once over ten years ago.

[wombat]

LOL the bus trip sounds like an killer app for beer partys haha

[cahaz]

i wonder if you could speed things up with an emulator such as gen, or something.:shrug:

[wombat]

I cant get the iso converted to PAL/EUR to play on my MCD2... Is there anyone who can help me? I already tried scdconv.

[Benedict_Arnold]

This made the news sort of:

http://theinquirer.net/?article=30033

[Sally]

Slashdot too... why did it take so long to hit the media? Or, why do they even care?

[sayin999]

uh wait, did sega even pulisch the game at all? I thought it was someone else. But i was thinking, wouldnt that bus games cuased the sega cd to burn out alot faster after all that use.

[jp.]

It wasn't released? Weird, I had this game (probably still do, I'll have to go home and dig through my old Sega CD games) way back in the day.


Actually, I often tell people about how stupid it was, and how me and some friends dedicated an entire Saturday (I was in middle school at the time I think, or junior high) to beating that damn Desert Bus game. Though we did not take the offer to make the trip back. Funny, I didn't realize it was something to be treasured or that people were actually looking for it, I just figured it was a shitty game that nobody knew about (and for a good reason!).


At any rate, next time I go home for holidays or something I'll dig it up, take pics, etc.

[cahaz]

It wasn't released? Weird, I had this game (probably still do, I'll have to go home and dig through my old Sega CD games) way back in the day.


Actually, I often tell people about how stupid it was, and how me and some friends dedicated an entire Saturday (I was in middle school at the time I think, or junior high) to beating that damn Desert Bus game. Though we did not take the offer to make the trip back. Funny, I didn't realize it was something to be treasured or that people were actually looking for it, I just figured it was a shitty game that nobody knew about (and for a good reason!).


At any rate, next time I go home for holidays or something I'll dig it up, take pics, etc.

you mean, commercial version? :110:

[Yakumo]

Downloaded this last night via BT (486kbps !!). I comes on 2 discs and can honestly see why it never got released. Graphically it looks poor with most of the art being made from that horrid grain style that many western designers used. Pen & Teller themselves are ok but the game is just annoyingly dull. Still well worth keeping hole of if you're in to collecting unreleased stuff but we all know that if this was released it would belong in the big pile of Mega CD crap :lol:

Yakumo

[jp.]

you mean, commercial version? :110:

Its disc only. Given how bad it was I never really bothered looking for a "complete" copy. If I recall correctly my Grandad gave it to me for Christmas along with a box full of other Sega CD games (this was towards the end of the Sega CD's life, when all the games were in bargain bins).

[TheRedEye]

Why do we have an Unreleased Games forum if threads about unreleased games are posted here?

[sayin999]

it has to do with the fact, and what has caused so many to have sub sections, that this was brought up due to an intervirew with pen recently, as such its done in the rare section. Or the most likely answer

is that the person who made this post thought that this might be a rare game that is a beta, belive me off topic and general sometimes blur together.

[Yakumo]

Thread moved to Unreleased section of the board.

[fro]

Do you have stairs in your house?.

[Yakumo]

Do you have stairs in your house?.Who? Me? No, I don't have stairs in my house. It's a 1 floor house.

Yakumo

[Taemos]

Who? Me? No, I don't have stairs in my house. It's a 1 floor house.

Yakumo

I believe that was a SomethingAwful joke. Someone here said that TheRedEye was a member of the SomethingAwful forums, so I assume that's why he was asking.

(I never understood the joke, as I'm not a member, so could someone explain it to me?)

[Sally]

Do a google for "space robots stairs" there's a farily ammusing flash animation for it.

"We are the space robots. We are here to protect you. We are here to protect you from the terrable secrets of space..."

[Borman]

Id love to see the comments they put in the code when they were writing it

'LoL, I wonder who will actually play this shit

[fro]

Do a google for ...

Aww you spoiled the fun :( boo.

[sayin999]

i downloaded this a while back when they had it on the lost levells forums, however the copy i have lets out this nasty screaching static sound, which i discovered is from the tracks themselves, does anyone elses copy they downloaded have music thats nothing but static and screaching?

[Yakumo]

Mine seems to be fine. I played it on an Emulator because I couldn7t change the bin file to JPN format.

Yakumo

[sayin999]

was it in bin/cue format? Cause that way you can't hear any of the audio tracks. I didn't discover this till i actually burned it and played it on an actual sega cd.

[Yakumo]

yes it was a cue bin but you can here the audio tracks once it's burned to CD.

Yakumo

[TheRedEye]

Do you have stairs in your house?.

Do you like sharp things in your face?

[Shadowlayer]

LOL the bus trip sounds like an killer app for beer partys haha

Dunno, I think Rez is THE game for parties and such