Penn&Teller's Smoke and Mirrors

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:



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."



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!



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.



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.



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.



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!

This 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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.




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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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

Yakumo

 

It is shit. But entertainingly so.

 

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

 

radio show

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

 

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

 

Edit: Im an idiot

 

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?

 

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.

http://www.lostlevels.org/