Several demos for Hulabee Entertainment games discovered

Thanks to some video footage, I was finally able to track down the demo for Mike's Monstrous Adventure. Turns out it's included in a non-Hulabee game called Monsters Inc - Pinball Panic. It might be in other games as well. Thanks to this, I was finally able to check it out. Though I unfortunately can't legally upload its installer due to its license prohibiting redistribution.

A few days ago, I discovered that you can make the full game revert to demo mode by deleting certain files, but it turns out this doesn't recreate all of the things unique about the demo. Most importantly, it has a completely different soundtrack. You can't hear it in the video I linked above due to it muting the music for some reason, but there's a second video where you can hear a few of the tracks, though there are a lot more among its assets. I was even able to confirm who composed it. While the credits don't actually play in the demo, their text is still among the assets, and they claim the music is the work of Ben Hochberg, the composer of Hulabee's previous two adventure games. I thought his soundtracks for those games were pretty mediocre, but he seems to have learned a thing or two since then. It's still not a great effort by any means, but it does have a charm of its own. It's a bit surprising that Hulabee saw the need to throw all of that out and have George Sanger compose a new soundtrack. (Side note: The credits were apparently written before the voice cast was finalized. All of the voice acting is credited to the placeholder name So Andso.)

Note that the demo has the same compatibility issues with modern hardware as the full game. Thankfully, it also supports the same patch for updating the executable.


I also discovered that there are demos for three of the four games in the Treasure Planet Training Academy series. It turns out each of the three disks for the standalone games also have demos for the two other games that had their own disks. Only Ship Shape seems to lack a demo, probably because it was always intended as a bonus for people who have all three disks.

These demos are nothing to write home about, though. They're just stripped down versions of the full games that only feature the first few levels and have a few different lines of dialogue. Still, it's nice to know they exist. I was actually unable to run their installers on my PC, so I had to manually copy their data. But I would assume they also have a non-shareware license, so I guess I'll have to keep them to myself.

Again, they support the same patch as the full game.