Mad TV (MS-DOS)

Okay, this one's called Mad TV, it was a request, and I'm 99% sure it's got nothing to do with Mad Magazine. Probably not a sequel to Smash TV though either.

Right now you're looking at a screen looking at a screenshot looking at this game intro looking though a TV screen to look at a guy fall asleep while looking at his television.

Though the guy is soon dragged back into consciousness by the sight of this strange alien creature presenting World's Ugliest Internal Organs, or whatever program this is. Either he's fallen head over heels in love, or he's just entranced by her gleaming golden wig. Must be worth quite a bit.

After his plan to shove his head through the TV screen fails, the man grabs his sexiest flight jacket and scarf, and races off to the studio to declare his undying love. Yeah, this is going to end well.


LATER, AT MAD-TV HQ.

Yep, pretty sure he's dead.

Oh that wasn't our guy by the way, that was someone high up getting the boot.

The boss of MAD-TV is so furious he's having trouble holding human form. Not only is he in a high stress job, surrounded with incompetents, but now he has to get a new window fitted too. Plus hire a new... whatever that guy was.

But he soon cheers up when he catches the hero coming out of the elevator. There's no text or dialogue here, but I get the feeling this guy just got given the job of running this TV station.

Well that's good news, his chances of scoring a date with that presenter must have just dramatically increased. Though so have his chances of being kicked out of a 10th storey window.

Damn, the last guy really ran this place into the ground, looking at that chart. No wonder the boss has been reduced to recruiting people off the elevator.

I've been given only one goal to meet, win the Sammy for best news, and I've got until tomorrow to do it. And it's already 5 in the afternoon. And I don't even know what a Sammy is!

Alright, I've got the entire run of the building now. The doors are unmarked, though I get a description if I hover over them. I'm lucky the news studio is next door to the boss's office or else it'd haven taken me until tomorrow to find it.

Oh it's one of these games. The kind made by people who think clearly labelled buttons are for wimps.

Alright let's see what I can actually do here. Studio controls do nothing, word processor does nothing, message board...

Hey the message board brought up a new screen! Now I'm getting somewhere.

Okay, I'm guessing that by dragging news from the box on the left to the spaces on the right, I'm buying the stories and scheduling them for today. Except they've got 17:00 written on them, and it's 17:15 right now, so maybe I've missed my deadline?

Also they're $3000 each, and I've only got $197, but I'll worry about that later.

It seems that Mad TV only owns two floors here, and the rest of the building is taken up by rival TV stations, and agencies I can buy stuff from. Eventually. After the bloody elevator makes it down here.

Whoa, I wasn't expecting the game to have real-life movies here to buy. Though since when is The Birds a whodunit? The clue's in the name.

Alright I'll take The Shining, and... High Noon. That ought to take care of four hours of programming.

Crap, those two movies just emptied my bank account. I guess I must have actually started off with $200,000, and they missed off the last three digits to annoy me.

Alright, what else is here in this building? Peace league, Real estate agent, Weapon's dealer, Advertising agency, Consulate of the people's republic of Duban... hey, that one sounds interesting.

That's, uh... what?

Right, I guess I'll be leaving then. Enjoy your petrol.

Now there's a guy who obviously enjoys his work. You can tell just by looking at his smile.

Okay, he's gone to the effort of presenting me with a selection of ring binders, each representing a deal with an advertiser. This one seems to have lots of interesting numbers attached to it, and I'd stick around to figure it all out, except it's just gone 6 am and my station's already started broadcasting 'Art' without me.

I'm guessing 'min. 1.0 million' means I need to get that many people watching the advert, or else I have to pay the penalty. A $150,000 penalty. Considering I'm only at 0.45 million viewers right now, and this is before I've screwed anything up, I think I'll grab something a little less risky.

Oh cool, I've found my office. Only took me two hours.

Okay time to go click on everything then. Donald Duck: useless, Game Boy: useless, desk drawer: useless, PC: works!

This seems to be the heart of the game here, scheduling all the pieces I've bought to get the maximum viewers. To be honest I wish the Game Boy had worked instead now.

Modern painters was there when I started, but I've somehow managed to pull the next episode off the air, so now MAD-TV is broadcasting a test signal (bottom left) and my secret spy cams reveal that our audience has wandered away from their screens to live happy and productive lives (bottom right). Ooops.

With a bit of work I managed to get High Noon slotted in, and some advertising attached to the column on the right, so television is saved! I got tomorrow's schedule sorted out while I was there, but unfortunately it wouldn't let me go any further than that.

Well, okay I can't see a fast forward button, so I guess now I just sit here at my desk waiting until the advertising cash rolls in.

Actually screw that, I'm going exploring.

It seems that the MAD-TV library lets me pull out series I own to... snake man! Hypnotic snake man! Fuck this, next room!

I couldn't click on anything in the Tobacco Lobby room. Fortunately. Touch something in this room and you'll be living with orange fingertips the rest of your life.

There's actually an Anti-smoking room right next door. Bet there's a lot of awkward moments out in the corridor as they come to work each day.

This Anti-smoking room looks really familiar somehow. I guess quitting smoking led them down a dark path of sugar addiction. There's just one thing I'm not sure of: is that blue guy on the right a anthropomorphic lollipop or a bubble?

Is it weird that the first thing that actually stood out to me while looking at this image is that they didn't remember to paint out the smoke on the skeleton's head?

Oh sorry guys, I was looking for, uh... the toilets.

Hey, didn't this game used to be some kind of TV station simulator? I'm sure I remember seeing a timetable, and scheduling movies on it, or maybe that was something else. I don't even know anymore

I'd open the door and let him out, but considering all he's got in there is a snorkel, the poor bloke must be long dead by now.

Oh shit, so are my ratings! My audience has entirely abandoned me. It's like they don't even care about people talking about art. For four hours straight. I'm going to have to pay so much penalty cash for my adverts!

Things aren't so bad though. I managed to grab an electric tin opener with the last of my cash before I went into the red, which should go some way to winning over the TV presenter's heart. After all, that's all our hero really wanted in the first place!

With -13 cash my options are pretty limited, so I tried asking for more cash. And when that didn't work I tried a new approach.

Didn't really work out so well either.


MUCH LATER.

But I'm not the kind of guy to just give up on a game because I have no idea what I'm doing and it's making me miserable. Actually I'm totally that kind of person, but I'm trying not to be.

So this is attempt number... four, I think. This time I got the adverts in fast enough to actually get a few of them viewed on day one, though my quality news programming still didn't win a Sammy award. My new plan is to produce my own TV series to pull in the viewers, as somehow this art show just isn't doing it for them.

I managed to hire an MC and two star guests, with zero dollars to spare! I ran back to the studio, told them the actors have been hired and they could greenlight the series. The guy acts like I haven't hired anyone yet. So I go walking all the way back to the supermarket (where else would you hire actors?) and then I notice it. That little down arrow on the left showing that this cast list keeps going, and I'm already out of cash.

Back out the window then I guess.


I tried to be patient with this game and to figure it all out, but it's not exactly intuitive. Plus I hate the way I have to walk to each room myself, waiting for the elevator to arrive, watching my airtime tick away. Then I get all my stuff done for the day, or run out of cash, and I find that waiting's all that's left for me to do, though at least I found a way to accelerate time a bit in the end. Still it could be worse; the Amiga version adds ridiculous loading times on top of that, for every single room, in and out.

But I guess the game must have had a few fans, as someone's made a turn-based multiplayer version: http://www.madtv-online.com/index. Perfect for anyone who's been wanting to try a economic simulation game in their browser. I haven't played it, but I can confirm it's got the proper music, which is probably the best bit of the game, you know, besides the backgrounds.

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If you'd like give your own opinions on the game, complain about my disgraceful lack of patience with it, or just want to request something else for me to play, then feel free to leave a comment.

And then if you're still bored you could always link the site to all your friends, post about it on a forum, stick it on Facebook etc. Though of course if your advert isn't viewed by enough people I'm afraid I'll have to charge a $150,000 penalty.