As is tradition with one of these gigantic cave-delving based games — and there is cave-delving, even though it wasn’t clear at first — let’s spend some time outside first.
To recap from last time, the game starts with you in a parking lot with little direction. Nearby is a dowel rod, a charm with triremes, two disks that allegedly allow teleportation (when magically charged), and a $10 bill. Going west from the road with the bill (and the two to the north) gets you lost in a forest.
The lost-in-forest part that I didn’t map before turned out to be unmappable. You just alternate between “you are hopelessly lost in the woods” and “you are lost hopelessly in the woods” no matter which directions you go, and then you get pulled out by a ground keeper. That doesn’t mean it is necessarily a red herring — maybe there’s some magical item that applies while there — but it could be. I don’t know how similar this game is to Ferret yet in that sense.
Going east leads to the white house from Zork, but with the stairs rotted away and only a can opener and a parchment left behind. The parchment indicates a great evil to be defeated (which I’ll explore the lore of in a later post) and that we need to find a magical flute.
WARNING: We may never reach the flute. Rob played this last year and was not able to visit all the rooms (based on the exploration counter) but there are bugs that need working around and possible some puzzles obtuse enough that we’ll need the crowd here to help out. Assuming no endgame, the goal is to simply get as high a “knowledge” score as possible.
Colorized version of the Zork I map with the “white” house. Atari User April 1987, from Atarimania.
What I hadn’t realized when I first encountered it (I hadn’t thoroughly tested exits yet) is that the forest behind the house (and even, to an extent, the waterfall) is copied off of Zork as well. This means there is a whole new outside section attached to the house. I’ll break it up into South Side Forest and East Side Forest.
The South Side Forest is fairly uneventful, but it’s worth noting that when you try to go to the far west, there’s a fence and the parking lot seen past it; this is a game which tries to form connectivity across its landscape (and isn’t afraid to put down a whole grid of “filler” rooms to make things match up).
To the south there’s a cliff; if you follow the cliff you can get to a waterfall.
There is a set of rock steps leading down onto a narrow ledge below which passes under the waterfall caused by the river Dipestia (to your east) falling over the cliff. The sound of the fall is almost deafening here.
D
Small ledge on the cliff
You are standing on a narrow ledge. The ledge leads east from here and passes directly under the waterfall. Although you may get wet, it appears safe to pass along.
E
Directly under the waterfall
Here the ledge passes directly under the waterfall and continues east. The wall of the cliff and the ground beneath your feet are damp. The sound of the waterfall is almost deafening.
E
Middle of nowhere
You are standing on a small obtrusion sticking out of the cliff. To the east is the narrow path from where you came. Behind you is the cliff. In all other directions is nothing but open air. Looking out from the cliff there is nothing, and looking down reveals no bottom to the base of the cliff.
On the ground is a oak pendant with the image of a cloud carved on the front surface.
The oak pendant with the image of a cloud carved on the front surface goes with the triremes charm, most likely; any bets if we’ll find a fire necklace and a rock on a ring?
Aragain Falls postcard, Zork User Group, via the Zork Wiki. The waterfall is southeast of the house just like Zork; there’s no obvious waterfall or other secret exit in Thissala.
The East Side forest is mostly also “filler” rooms, although it has the ground keeper’s hut and a henhouse.
There’s some corn near the henhouse and you might think to feed the corn to the hen, but the hen is “too nervous”. I assume there’s a puzzle here; there’s no obvious golden egg to steal or the like, though.
Clearing in the woods
Lying on the ground here, is a small pile of dried out corn.
GET CORN
Taken.
E
Outside of the Hen House
You are standing outside of a small shack which is used as a hen house. There is a ramp leading up into the building, which has no door to allow the hens to come in and go out. The place is obviously still being used for it has a certain air about it to indicate so.
IN
Inside the hen house
There are two windows in the hen house, one looking east, one looking north, both overlooking the river, and a long ledge along the south wall
Sitting on the shelf is a small nest
It contains:
A large hen, quietly staring at you.
FEED HEN
The hen does not trust you, and refuses the food.
The keeper’s hut is empty, and that’s even after the rescue from getting lost. Again not sure what kind of game we’re dealing with here, but I at least get the sense this is just for environmental flavor (and to motivate a person suddenly showing up).
Ground keeper’s hut
Directly in front of you to the north is the ground keeper’s hut. Because the weather is so warm, there is no door covering the doorway
N
Inside the ground keeper’s hut
You are standing inside of the keeper’s hut. There is one window to the north that overlooks the great Dipestia river. Beyond the river you can see a large mountain. There is a doorway to the south
Barring any secret exits or ways to fly past the cliff (which wouldn’t be surprising) that leaves the original dirt path as the only way to go. It leads to a “Y” in the path: “One leg leads northeast, another northwest, and the path also heads south.” Northwest leads to a town and mountains after, so let’s deal with northeast first.
Non-descript building
You are standing in front of a rather non-descript building made of brick. There are many small windows along each side of the building.
There is an open doorway into the building to the north, from which you can hear a dull hum.
The building is mostly a maze.
The interesting part is (if you consult the map) you can make it to the center of the maze just by going north, but you can’t get out by just going south. Originally I thought I might have been trapped in by a “hum” sound that permeates throughout, but it’s just a classical maze that can be mapped by dropping objects.
You are in a hall way of the non-descript building.
There is a dull humming noise that appears to come from everywhere.
N
You are in a hallway of the non-descript building.
The humming noise is louder than normal here, and appears to be coming from the room to the north.
N
Strange room
You are in the eastern part of a large, strange room. There is nothing here except the doorway out to the east. The humming is intense here.
A murder of crows fly overhead, appearing from the north and vanishing to the south
(The murder of crows can show up anywhere — the game does not recognize outside vs. inside.)
W
Silver Cube
This is the western half of the strange room. Directly in front of you is a large silver cube, with each side approximately 10 feet long. The humming is coming from the cube, although not from the inside … the actual cube is humming. There are no openings in the cube, no handles, and no writings on the cube.
The cube has no obvious entrances and can’t be taken. I’m not sure yet what to do here. It’s the most blatantly magical aspect to the game so far.
Returning back to the Y junction and heading northwest leads to “T” junction, with a branch that seems intended to invoke the Volcano View from Crowther/Woods.
Riverview
You are standing on a small peninsula that juts out into the swift river “Dipestia” (loosely translated it means division protecting from pestiferous spirits). As far as the eye can see, in either direction, the river is uncrossable. The far north bank is edged by a heavily overgrown field dense in timothy and flora unlike any other. The field is in the shadow of a great snow capped mountain which causes a crepuscular glow to illuminate the ground. Upstream to the west, the field narrows as the river curls around the mountain. Downstream, the field abruptly ends at a forest which, unlike the forest on the southern bank, with its trees of bole and fawn, consists of an incredible blend of color, surpassing even that of deciduous trees in autumn, adding blue and white, and colors that are indescribeable. Directly across the river various wild animals graze insouciantly on the riparian plants. To the southwest is a dirt path. Through a clearing in the trees on the southern bank, in the distance, can be seen an unaturally straight edge of reddish-brown.
I don’t think the game is filled with descriptions like this; in Crowther/Woods this is a reward of sorts for getting deep enough into the caves, whereas here it serves more to build the initial atmosphere. I appreciate the game gives a source for “Dipestia” even though the etymology is imaginary (it could be adjacent to something real, of course, if anyone has a suggestion).
Past the view is the town, where the map is very messy and I can’t promise this is 100% free of errors.
My guess is the authors (or single author responsible for this spot) had a “real” map they were trying to render into text-adventure form but it naturally came out messy; I still don’t know what’s with the weird swerve around the Restaurant, going southwest to end up on a road to the “east”, though. It could be a simple error that was never fixed, but there’s enough strange paths I would say at least some of it has to be intentional.
I should also emphasize — and it is easy to miss this because some games stick solely with compass directions — that in/out are directions in play, and you can’t enter most of the buildings without those two directions.
Hardware Store
The old village hardware store stands much the way it did 50 years ago. The building is made of wood planks, painted red. There are no windows visible from where you stand, however there is a doorway in directly in front of you.
IN
Inside the hardware store
The old hardware store has a plank and peg floor. All of the original furniture has been removed. There is only one door in the room, and that leads outside
Lying here is a long rope with knots tied in it at regular intervals.
There is a copper key here
Resting on the counter is a miner’s helmet. The helmet has a powerful light on the top.
The buildings have a curious abandoned-but-not-abandoned feel going on with them; clearly the groundskeeper is around (and we’ll run into a gnome in a second) so the owner of the hardware store is just fine with us taking things? Or maybe we’re just being very bold in stealing?
The copper key incidentally goes to a “modern” building in the southwest part of town which is still cryptic, even though I’ve solved what may be the only puzzle associated with it.
Modern building
You are standing outside of an comparitively modern building. There is a sign on the building above the door that reads “Bura di change”.
The door into the Bura is closed
UNLOCK DOOR
Click.
OPEN DOOR
The door is now open.
IN
Inside the Bura di change
The room is completely devoid of furniture. There is a small slot cut out in the north wall. Above it is written “IN”. A door leads out.
The door is currently open
The $10 bill fits in the slot. If you make the deposit, you get a “strange looking coin” with no further description.
There is a strange whirling sound from within the wall, which is followed by a short grinding noise. Then from the slot in which you put the dollar, a strange looking coin drops out, and falls to the floor by your feet
Next to the modern building is an “old church”. It has a box with its own slot; opening the box reveals a key marked CHEVY (which I would presume goes to a car, but I haven’t seen a car). The restaurant with the confused exits includes a couple items waiting for you to snatch:
Inside the restaurant
The resturant furniture has for the most part been removed. There is, however, a small counter and a stool left; these were not removed because they are attached firmly to the floor
Resting on a shelf in the corner is a full bottle of Brador
On the shelf is a full bottle of Grolsch
On the shelf is a tuna syrian with everything (hold the mushrooms)
(Both bottles have beer.)
The food (“tuna syrian with everything”) just lets you eat it, which brings up the softlock-or-not question: are we supposed to eat the food, or are we supposed to save it for later? I of course always save it, but every once in a while I’ve hit a puzzle where eating a consumable gives extra energy (The Hobbit being the most notable game where not eating food led to trouble).
Finally there’s a post office (with a single deposit box I haven’t been able to unlock)…
Inside the Old Post Office
You are standing inside of the old post office. Against one wall is a counter. This is was at one time a very busy post office (according to local lore) but now it is deserted. All of the postboxes have been destroyed except for one, which has a set of buttons on the front with a large brass faceplate around them, and a hinge on the left side.
The post office box is securly closed.
open box
The box is apparently locked.
…and a bank.
Inside the local small bank
Fastened against the wall in the corner is a set of chairs. Secured to the floor is a small counter that was at one time used by townfolk to fill out deposit and withdrawl slips. On the north wall is a button marked in letters now barely visible “Ring bell for service”. In the corner of the room is a staircase going down.
Surrounding the stairway down, is a metal cage, with a closed door
in the front
IN
A little gnome pops out and says “Sorry … you cannot enter without the appropriate withdrawl form”
The gnome makes me think we are again dealing with the ghost-geography of Zork making itself felt.
From the gamebook Zork 2: The Malifestro Quest. Image from Internet Archive.
That’s nearly everything outside (at least nearly everything until I find I accidentally missed an exit, leading to another 50 rooms or so) but at the northwest side of town we can go further, eventually to the mountains.
Along the way up to the mountains there’s a “shack” with some signal flags.
Path through a field
You are walking throught a large field, along a winding path heading southeast and north. The field seems to extend forever to the west, but to the east you can see a very large mountain. There is also the sound of water coming from the east.
N
Outside of the old shack
You are standing outside of an old, rundown shack with no windows visible from where you stand. There is a doorway in facing you, but the door has obviously fallen off of its hinges and is no where to be seen.
E
Inside the little shack
Although there are no lamps, there is enough light from the eastern window to see. On the wall, written in ink, is a message that says “Peter Mac slept here”. The place smells of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.
Propped up against one wall in the shack is a pair of large signal flags.
The signal flags get used shortly after: there’s a climb up the mountain, but at top top there’s a drawbridge controlled by a gnome.
Highest plateau
You are on the highest plateau, which is considerably larger than the two lower ones. Directly below you you can see the Dipestia which flows from the NE to the SW where it curls around Major mountain, to south. Across, but higher up the northern face of other mountain, there is an observation booth with what appears to be a small gnome looking out at you using binoculars. Directly below the observation booth, at the level of the ledge you are on, is a wooden drawbridge.
The drawbridge is in the open position, making it impossible to cross over to Major mountain
WAVE FLAGS
It is obvious that the little gnome saw you waving the flags for he waves back at you. He then disappears into his observation hut. A second later, there is the sound of great motors turning and slowly the drawbridge lowers into place.
S
Major mountain ledge
You are standing on a ledge on major mountain. The ledge is about eight feed wide, and heads east around the mountain. Above you you can see a small observation booth. Accross the river is Minor mountain.
There is a drawbridge here, anchored into the face of Major mountain.
The drawbridge is in the closed position, forming a path accross to Minor mountain
E
Cave entrance
You are standing on a ledge on major mountain. The ledge is about six feet wide here and heads west around the mountain. There is a cave cut into the side of the mountain.
S
Sloping tunnel
You are in a long sloping tunnel that heads south into the depths of the cave
The cave that follows is dark; the game warns of danger if you don’t have a light source. This leads to the first time I’ve died in the game. (The game is much gentler than Ferret in general, telling you about falling down a cliff being a bad idea rather than describing a grim plummet.)
You were warned. Without the light you seem to have gotten yourself killed.
As the darkness of death fades, and the light intensifies, you find yourself falling quickly at first then slower, then slower still until you find yourself looking down on a strange land. Below is a river, a long river, so long that even at this height the river stretches forever. About 1 mile from each bank of the river is a tall mountain range. You slow more until you are about 1 foot from the ground, and then you lite gently on the surface of an eerie world.
Thick mist
The ground, and the river, are almost undistiguishible here due to the dense fog that surrounds you. Upstream, you can barely make out what appears to be a bridge heading to the other side of the river.
The main thing I’m not clear on yet is if this is a “Treasure Hunt” in the capitalized sense, where the goal is to gather specific items and if you find 50 of the right ones you open you reach the endgame (…presuming it works). More exploration next time! And maybe a few more substantial puzzles; so far getting the strange coin and getting the drawbridge to move have been my only wins.
Public attention, as well as the attention of groups such as this, has been focused on the design and application of large, expensive “super computers.” Our national preoccupation with size and power makes this fact understandable. However, the minicomputer, which I define as a stored program computer selling for under twenty-five thousand dollars, is deserving of much more serious attention than it has heretofore been given.
— Robert L. Hooper, from a paper presented at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference
In the late 1960s, there was a technological gold rush in “small computers”. The PDP-8, developed at DEC by a team led by Edson de Castro, gave in 1965 both proof of concept and proof of market that a computer meant for a desk rather than a room was now feasible.
By the end of the decade, small computer companies sprouted up in the legions; the Tracy Kidder book Soul of a New Machine claims “one every three days” in 1968 which is a bit of an exaggeration but not by much. You can compare it to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s; you could also compare it to the dot-com bubble popping, since most of these companies died.
The gold rush wasn’t restricted to the US; the Nixdorf 820 was from Germany. Image via the Computer History Museum.
A list of minicomputers from 1968 to 1972 includes plenty of companies (…Linolex, Minicomp, Multidata…) with “no data” indicating they were amongst the fallen.
The top competitor to DEC was spun out of DEC itself, as Edson de Castro, allegedly annoyed he couldn’t go forth with a new 16-bit design for a computer, left to form his own company (taking some DEC people with him), Data General. They made their public debut late in 1968 with a system they called the NOVA.
The roll-out was at the Joint Computer Conference in December, where they had the mock-up unit above (finished two days before the conference started). One of the founders, Henry Burkhardt III, programmed it with Spacewar, demonstrating it was just as capable as a room-filling PDP-1. The conference was full of a technical audience and this is who they sold it to. They were just inside the front doors, across from IBM.
(The conference included Engelbart doing his “Mother of All Demos” which — in addition to showing off the invention of the mouse — showed hypertext, word processing, video graphics, and even collaborative editing in the style of modern Google Docs. You can watch a video circa 1968 here. It was purely for showing off research, which gives a good notion of the audience; you can find other sessions from the same conference here.)
Despite Data General having fantastic pedigree on their technology, poaching from DEC itself, it was still hard to stand out, and Data General went for pizzazz. The brochure I clipped the picture from above also included glamour photographs of the C-suite, trying to make them look like harbingers of a new age.
The President (de Castro) and one of the Vice-Presidents (Herbert J. Richman).
Contrast with a DEC pamphlet at the same time, which only includes one picture on the front, and is mostly text and a chart showing sales growth.
Their combination of competent technology and edgy marketing pushed them to the forefront of the market, and they went public at lightning speed (November 1969).
NOVA computers ready to ship in 1969, in “Building 1”. From Interface, May 1983, Data General’s internal magazine.
They got a reputation as the “bad boys” of the industry; a modern analogy would be to tech companies with the motto “move fast and break things”. Even from the very start they hired people with little guidance; consider the early programmer John Henderson hired from Bell Labs:
So Burkhardt gave him [Henderson] a pile of rough technical data on the NOVA and some examples of other companies’ software documentation and told him to go write some software manuals. It was a textbook example of how to mismanage a newly hired employee: assign a poorly defined, highly frustrating job, provide very little guidance, no well-thought-out schedule, and then ignore the “new hire” for weeks. But, Henderson loved it. He thrived in this atmosphere, and worked outrageous hours. Data General got a huge pay-off on its investment in giving a talented young person a chance to tackle challenging problems with very little bureaucratic interference. The process was to be repeated time and time again.
As Bill Foster (at Data General in 1976-1979, their greenest years) explains:
I was given very few orders from my boss. Just get the job done. I loved reporting directly to the president of the company — Edson de Castro, The Captain. The founder of what by 1976 had become one of the most exciting and successful computer companies in the world. Although I had a great job at Hewlett Packard I was way down the totem pole at that huge company. At DG I was close to the top. Close to being a star!!
At HP you felt secure, no matter how bad you screwed up. It would have taken an act of bloody murder to get fired. The contrast with DG was extreme. Employees were kept on edge. Your job was simple: help the company make a profit — that’s why you’re here. We were all given a lot of rope. But if you screwed up just take that rope and hang yourself before someone does it to you. It was clear that everyone was expendable.
The general chaotic handling of management really set in when Data General was ready to upgrade from 16-bit architecture to 32-bit architecture, and there were two competing teams within the company working on the same thing. This is the source of the events from the book Soul of a New Machine, and while the history is somewhat relevant to today’s game (the current existing version is on 32-bit) it’s past our scope. This is because our authors came from a different group altogether.
Instructions for the Eclipse MV/8000, the 32-bit project that was actually finished. The group was meant to only update the system without bit change but did the modification secretly, and kept compatibility with 16-bit systems. Image from Internet Archive.
Thissala’s authors were David Auerbach, Paul Chiasson, and Peter Macaulay, all members of Data General’s Corporate Systems Engineering Group. They were not working on new system architecture (or causing havoc with unreachable goals for new system architecture). If you don’t know what a Corporate Systems Engineering Group is, there’s a Data General job posting from Computerworld (September 15, 1980) that explains the idea:
CSE is a systems support group responsible for software support activities which require centralized control and are worldwide in scope. as such it provides a unique opportunity to provide technical leadership and direction through a team of sophisticated software professionals, over a broad range of state-of-the-art products.
In other words, they worked on the custom technical support for businesses. Of the three authors (David Auerbach, Paul Chiasson, and Peter Macaulay) I haven’t seen any mentioned in the literature on Data General, and in general Peter Macaulay is the only one that I’ve been able to find at all. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and went to Manchester for an Electrical Engineering degree, followed by a Master’s at Brunel.
In 1978, Peter’s spirit of adventure brought him across the Atlantic to the United States, where he made his home in Bellingham, MA. His love for exploration never waned, from piloting small aircraft to sailboats, hiking in the mountains of Ireland, New England, and Japan, he was always eager to embrace new cultures and experiences.
There’s still time for more historical information to surface, as this will be a multi-post game. It is allegedly very large. It claims 1000 rooms and 400 objects. The reason for the “claims” there is that the game seems to be unfinished; it is possible there are portions designed but too broken to reach; it is even possible the 1000 rooms/400 objects were planned but not fully made. We have version 0.60 which was ported to 32-bit Eclipse and the change notes read like a work in progress, including this:
The monster are again wondering the different sections. They will attack, but with no strength as of now. There was a bug reported that I believe is now fixed. This should prove or disprove this.
There’s instructions here how to play and some extra historical context by Rob on how the game was discovered; in 2025 the Novas are Forever site started uploading a series of drive dumps, and one of them had a number of lost items, like a novel variant of Adventure, a multi-player RPG called Quest, and an early version of Ferret. Prior to last year, Thissala was entirely unknown and not written about in any histories at all. (This is despite Soul of a New Machine making a big deal out of Crowther/Woods Adventure; there was a strong culture around the game at Data General. I’ll get into that connection more when I’m deeper in the game and have more context.)
ASIDE: I incidentally recommend the link in that post by gschmidl which already has everything set up to play Quest; change the third to last line in the mv.ini file which talks about Quest into
EXPECT “\n)”; SEND “dir :games\r”; CONT
which will land you (after booting the emulator up with mv mv.ini) into the games directory. You can then type games to get a menu or enter the name of the game you want directly. You still will want to follow Dan’s instructions for quitting out: type bye, pick y on the prompt, and then q for a total shutdown.
One extra caveat is that the game has “idle” messages if you don’t type for a while, which is annoying when you’re adding to notes or a map in a second window. I used the program Game Pauser to alleviate this (somewhat).
Tracy Kidder discovers the twisty maze of little passages, all different.
Finally, let’s get into the game, shall we?
Middle of the parking lot
You are in the middle of a large parking lot that stretches off in all directions. In the distant north you can see a large mountain. To the northeast you can hear the sound of water.
At your feet lies a long square dowel.
This follows the Crowther/Woods tradition of not being clear about the goal until you look at the help info, but even then the game starts with its cards close. The HELP command asks you to type THISSALA for a description of the game.
The fundamental difference between THISSALA and other games is that the goal in THISSALA is not just to get all the treasure, but to accomplish a substantial feat, that is, to save the world from the forces of evil, and restore the power of good. Hidden somewhere in the land is a parchment describing the tale of THAMOS and MAKASSAR. This scroll holds the initial clues to what must be done.
(The scroll, fortunately, is easy to find, although I’ll save it for the end of this post.)
The help also specifies some statistics, more than other text adventures from this time: POWER (strength), COOR (agility), MAGIC (magic ability increased via specific books), WISDOM, KNOWLEDGE (percent of the game explored). WISDOM is explained with “who the hell knows?” so maybe it’s there for fun?
status
Current power level: 0
Current coordination level: 0
Current magic level: 0
Current wisdom level: 0
Current knowledge level: 0
It incidentally takes 8 rooms visited to increase the knowledge level by 1, so assuming it’s out of 100%, there are in reality “only” 800 rooms rather than 1000. That still puts the game as enormous. (Ferret beats that by about double, but keep in mind Ferret took six months to beat.)
You can incidentally mop up the 8 rooms fairly quickly by just walking around the parking lot you start the game in.
The room descriptions are not elaborate but the game already has thrown four items out, two which seem to be a complex mechanism.
First is the long square dowel. That’s all the game says. (There’s no “examine” feature, like the Cambridge mainframe games; the “on the ground” descriptions of objects try to be elaborate enough to cover.)
Go northeast and you’ll find a beautiful turquoise charm with the outline of a triremes on it. The game does not understand “wear” or “use” although you can wave it (to no apparent effect).
Parking lot (NE)
You are at the northeast corner of the parking lot. To the east there is a tall fence. To the north is a dirt trail.
Near the fence, is a beautiful turquoise charm with the outline of a triremes on it
(I assume the authors meant like the boat, but “a” triremes? Is that just a typo?)
To the east and southeast of the center are a black disk and a white disk. Both have instructions.
Magic stepping disk. To use, place on ground, and step on.
Warnings:
Disks must be used in pairs. You had better know where the other disk is
Disks will have to recharge at various times, not always dependent on usage
Disks require, and drain, magic power
I did some serious fussing but I was unable to work out the parser command to use the disks.
step on black disk
I don’t understand the word ‘step’
stand on black disk
I don’t understand the word ‘stand’
step on
I don’t understand the word ‘step’
step
I don’t understand the word ‘step’
get on black disk
Don’t be silly
stand on black disk
I don’t understand the word ‘stand’
I have yet to do my verb list test; probably next time. One last item of note before leaving the lot is there is the occasional random message, like
A thunder of rhinoceroses pounds by and miraculously, neither you nor anything around you is damaged
or
A murder of crows fly overhead, appearing from the north and vanishing to the south
I don’t know if these are meant just for color, or meaningful. If you don’t pause the game the backscroll can get filled with this kind of nonsense:
Excuse me … but are you still playing?
Hello … hello … is anyone still there?
Excuse me … but are you still playing?
Psst … hey you …
(Hence the Game Pauser. Although if someone knows a clever way to make Powershell just go idle when it isn’t in focus, that would also work.)
Heading north from the only exit away from the lot (north from the NE corner), there is a $10 bill along with a warning.
Dirt trail
You are on a dirt trail that runs north and south. There is a small
sign on the western side of the path
Lying in the path is a $10 bill
read sign
WARNING
DENSE FOREST TO THE WEST
DO NOT STROLL FROM PATH
IN THAT DIRECTION
Heading west leads into what seems to be a relatively standard Adventure clone (the kind with passages all different, too boot) but I haven’t had the energy yet to tackle it. If you wander long enough you’ll get help.
n
You are hopelessly lost in the woods
w
You are lost hopelessly in the woods
w
You are hopelessly lost in the woods
s
You are lost hopelessly in the woods
s
The game and ground keeper appears in front of you and says “Whats a matter … are we a little lost” and then muttering something about damn tourists, he leads you back to the junction in the paths
The aforementioned junction is just north of the dirt road.
Junction in the paths
There is one dirt path leading north, one leading south and a stone walk leading to the east. There is an old sign stuck in the ground on the eastern side of the path.
read sign
HISTORIC HOUSE —>
The historic house in question is the one from Zork.
Most of the map is removed, though, indicating a long-decayed piece of the past.
West of house
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
n
North of house
You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all the windows are barred.
e
Behind house
You are behind the white house. In one corner of the house there is an empty window with no glass in it.
w
Kitchen
You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west and a dark, boarded staircase can be seen leading upward.
To the east is a small empty window with no glass.
On the table is a can opener
w
Living room
You are in the living room. There is a doorway to the east, and a large wooden door to the west, which appears to be nailed shut.
Lying on the floor of the living room is a sheet of parchment
In the very center of the room is an oriental rug.
You can try moving the rug and opening the trapdoor, but you find if you try to go down that there is now a 30-foot drop instead (the game doesn’t kill you! it just warns you of the decay). The whole purpose of the section is to dispense the can opener and the parchment. The parchment gives the actual true plot of the game. It’s rather long but I’m still reproducing the whole thing, because there might be subtle hints.
Oh yee that find me … lend me your thoughts for an instant. Ensconce your eyes on this document, for you maybe the last to do so. Read and imbibe and if you be coureageous follow what follows, my tale and time are short, so I must write quickly.
Many years ago, a colony of explorers settled this region. They grew quickly in number and strength till they were larger and stronger than any people around. They were ruled by a kakistocracy for almost 100 years, during which time they expanded their geographical boundries by war and conquest. Eventually one leader emerged, his name was Makassar he was the most evil – and he continued and expanded the kakistocracy’s policy of conquest and terror. And that continued for thirty years.
At that point, a new leader replaced the just dead Makassar. His name was Magog, and he developed his abuse of humanity by turning on the weaker of his own people. He kidnapped children for his slaves and stole wealth for his pleasure. It was that same year that born to two mountain dwellers was Thamos, who could trace his lineage back to Thamos of Egypt, son of Tuktanfontmarranthon.
And after 20 years of Magog, Thamos came down from the mountain on the back of a great turtle, passed through the woods and accross the Dipestia and entered into Makassara. And he carried a carved oak flute. The good people, the abused, and beaten, joined behind Thamos, while the evil followers of Magog threw rocks and insults. The evil outnumbered the good, and the good were beaten and slain.
Seeing this, Thamos used his one magic power, and passed his hands in front of the people, and the world stopped. Thamos turned to his followers and spoke:
We shall sleep for many a year … and wait the music of the flute.
Thus spoke Thamos. Then he turned to the evils and said:
You shall remain awake … and continue your ways … but never again bear offspring.
Thus spoke Thamos. Then he turned to me and said:
Scribe … record accurately … cache well your parchment … for in your writings be our destiny … speak of the sleep … but more strongly of the flute for it is our future.
Thus spoke Thamos. He then raised his flute in his hand, then lowering his hands the flute remained suspended in the air. And Thamos said:
Go
The flute ascended and disappeared over the trees and into the mountains. And Thamos said to me:
Now hide your document … and return … you have but minutes before you sleep.
Thus spoke Thamos. And I followed.
Our goal seems to be to defeat a great evil by finding a flute that was used to put the people of Thamos to sleep. Thamos of Egypt is incidentally a reference to an obscure Mozart piece. The king is fictional.
The name-clash could be coincidence, but I don’t think so, since we’re on a quest for a magic flute, and (in contrast to Thamos, King of Egypt) The Magic Flute is one of the most famous of Mozart’s pieces.
I have at least a month blacked out for playing this game, it may go for two or longer depending on how much works and how much is broken. As I’ve only played the introduction for now, please keep speculations to this portion of the game; however, you can generally consider this a many-person game like Ferret where everyone can contribute as much as they are able.
This is a temporary post for anyone attending my talk on the 1st year of Japanese adventure games. This links to my discussion of each one I have been able to write about in depth.
For those not attending, there will be a YouTube upload eventually! (Although for my regular readers, there won’t be anything new! But maybe you’d like to hear me talk anyway.)
To continue directly with the most immediately clear solve: the way the barrel works is as a teleporter. It’s not a new location at all, but rather is the dark place between the dungeon and the magician’s room. You can go east or west to get out; the reference to finding a nearby fire to light the candlestick is to the fire in the magician’s room I had already used before. The barrel is a 100% optional shortcut.
Speaking of optional, while struggling with a lack of vase I found one more optional puzzle, back at Lady Vainly.
The main thing to note here on the game is there are two kinds of interaction
1. using TALK and getting some sort of comment or hint
2. randomly using GET on some item that the character possess, and rather than them getting angry at you they just tell you what they want in exchange
I had already discovered the GET earlier with the cookie at the baker (if you just TALK, it says nothing about the idea of trading chocolate moose for cookies) but it still wasn’t in my normal grab of tricks to simply swipe stuff in front of a character and see their reaction. With Lady Vainly you can try to GET the picture she is standing next to.
This is a BEAR. It strikes me as the sort of thing you’d find in a more generalized children’s game (not an adventure) but that seems to be the philosophical approach to the design in general (which is fascinating, and I’ll get more into that element after finishing the game).
She will give you the picture after you name BEAR, and she notes it is already signed. This picture is highly valued by the guard; I had plenty of items to give out (trying to be very efficient on my journeys) but I used this on my last pass before making it to the Peak of Shards.
Past that, I decided the chocolate moose would only be solved once I came across the right item, and I finished trying to give the COAT to every single character in the game (all who have unique messages to that in particular!) The fortune teller gave a message that hinted you needed the coat for yourself, not for a trade.
That meant I was left with the pesky vase. I had earlier thought it might be hiding in the “treasure room” in the maze, but was not having any luck.
I tried referring to every item in the picture, being very unclear as to what nouns even to use; for example, trying to open a BAG (noun doesn’t exist) or move what appeared to be a TAPESTRY (noun doesn’t exist) or a CURTAIN at the back (noun does exist, but the game just says to try walking that way). I was thorough enough that I discarded this for a while and tried USE COLOR in every single room in the game, looking for an invisible vase appearing. No luck.
It was time to whip out the big guns.
This is a page from Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games, the most popular book of hints from the 80s (including maps of every single area in Time Zone, for instance). I checked the back hints for the vase that holds shadows, and was mystified to see a mention of the vase in a cupboard. The only cupboard I remembered was in the magician’s room, but trying OPEN CUPBOARD and GET VASE led me to finding no vase. Hmm.
That thing I thought was a tapestry in the treasure room was actually a cupboard.
Even after the fact, that doesn’t look like a cupboard to me. What’s with that black portion on the bottom?
The funny side effect of all this is you can find the vase almost right away in the game; for such a player, the mystifying part might be its use, but I had already staked out where to find the shadow of a child.
I found this deeply unsettling.
Returning the shadow to the witch…
…I now had USE INVISIBILITY and USE VISIBILITY as spells. Finally I could wander the castle! It turns out the trapdoor-navigation lets you visit most of the rooms; only a handful were inaccessible. The first is past a guard stationed by the kitchen, which goes to a church. Since I heard the hint already about the location of the shard, I automatically got it added to my screen just for entering the room.
To the far east is another previously-unseen room, the King’s Royal Chambers.
Going south from here leads to a place the jester hangs out, but also a moose on the wall.
The moose is what the baker wants, but the cookie just serves as another bribe for the guard, so I ended up not using it.
The Royal Chambers have a locked door to the north and trying to unlock the door indicates Voar locked the door and swallowed the key, so I admit I spent a little time trying to trick him into eating a cookie while invisible and causing him to throw up the key somehow. Except: I still had the lockpick! (The game isn’t into object re-use otherwise, so it took me more time than it normally might have to come to this realization.)
Having applied it on every single other room, knowing to USE COLOR to the painting was immediate.
That’s all the shards in the castle! Following my guess earlier, I then went to the tavern to see if Brother Jon was there to teach sign language. (There’s a hint from the bard about getting wine after you’re prepared, although I only realized the connection after the fact.)
Having entering the tavern be a softlock prior to this point (since you get everything stolen, including required items) is astonishingly rude even for a game not targeted at children.
TALK now enters a mini-game. It’s just Simon but with hand motions. Q/A/Z for high/medium/low on the left hand, O/K/M for high/medium/low on the right hand, copy what the Father is doing enough times and you win.
Solved the first time, but I honestly preferred an easy mini-game to the nonsense I had to deal with while fishing.
Now, with ring in hand, you can go over to the forest and TALK to the old man when he shows up.
This allows you to get to the endgame section, which is mostly linear.
Once past the mist there’s a bridge (I was worried there was a puzzle here where you can fall, but it’s just meant to look epic) and then one side route where you can meet someone fishing at a stream and get a hint.
This is a random encounter like the others, so there may be nobody here. The map is designed so you can accidentally loop back here; I met the person here on the second-loop round.
The mountain then gets cold as you travel upward, and there’s a “tight squeeze” where you can only carry one item. This is meant to make you actively think about the coat as being useful (that is, the puzzle otherwise would likely be solved by most players “passively”; by actively making them choose the coat, the puzzle isn’t just solving itself).
Above is a trap: trying to take the mirror shard now leads to a wailing alarm and you get captured. You need to WAIT for the right shard to appear in order to complete the picture. This entire setup does not make sense to me in a plot-coherence sense (why, if Voar was able to secure the mirror with fake mirrors, does he even have the real one show up at all?) but the entire game has played it loose with plot beats so I just rolled with it.
Or at least I tried to, but as mistertaster had been warning me in the comments, the shards don’t actually fit together correctly. I admit I went a bit meta; there’s that picture from the later printing…
Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.
…and one of the shards from that picture shows up if you wait long enough.
While I wasn’t clear before without playing the game, all the references to non-violence in the historical background hinted to me this was aimed as a “children’s game”. I now think this is the case and it isn’t a bad thing. It led to:
strong emphasis on visuals that looked like they were supposed to, with many animations
emphasis on interacting directly with the visual environment (not that words are bad, but the game took a genuinely original approach that went past anything Sierra On-Line had done yet)
many straightforward puzzles throughout where you either told directly what is needed as long as you ask correctly (a crystal ball for the fortune-teller, grain for the inn-keeper) or at least the connection is not hard to make (fish for a cat)
more feedback on giving items than is standard for a game of this era, so there’s some engagement even when the player is doing the “wrong thing”
Essentially, the authors leaned more to the easy side of things; while there were some hard and even obnoxious puzzles (the vase being the most extreme example) it was framed by enough simplicity I didn’t feel like I was being crushed. There was enough environmental atmosphere (and optional encounters) that it was genuinely enjoyable to just bop around the map looking for something new. Despite it not being in the character-in-an-environment format Sierra On-Line would start following after King’s Quest (evolving into the “point-and-click” adventure), it followed a similar sensibility (and was even willing to show the main character during the mini-games).
Mind you, not everything went well. I understand why the authors put a limit on the number of times Voar could catch you (otherwise all the work putting bribes for the guards lacks in importance) but in the end it’s like Hezarin trying too hard to keep a player from guessing at a puzzle solution and breaking the game; there isn’t enough benefit to punishing the few people that will go 25+ loops, so all it really does is create anxiety for players.
(Long term time limits are, in general, a horrid design choice. Fallout originally had a time limit for finding a water chip at the start and then ripped it out. I’ve been tempted to play Xtal Soft’s breakout CRPG, Mugen no Shinzou, but the game gives a turn limit of 30,000 meaning you might be 80 hours into the game and have to restart because you weren’t efficient enough. Something like Ancient of Domains of Mystery works better because “corruption” increases over time, but it can be managed rather than forcing a hard stop to the game.)
Some historical points to tie up before closing things off:
I had promised to bring back Michael Kosaka. Specifically, he is mentioned in the manual for doing the art for the joust.
This would normally just be side trivia, but it’s more interesting than normal because his later career (as I already indicated) generally emphasized sports games, including Budokan: The Martial Spirit from 1989 (for Electronic Arts) which has combat with some aspects of the jousting in it.
Only a few years later he was positioned as Commissioner of the EASN.
You can thus draw a direct (if faint) line between The Coveted Mirror and the modern Electronic Arts sports empire.
Also, both Eagle Berns and Holly Thomason kept up a relationship with Penguin. Holly did the graphics for the Macintosh version of Transylvania; Berns worked on COMPREHEND (Penguin’s later “general” system for adventure games) as well as the Mac version of The Graphics Magician.
While it’s a little harder to find than her Penguin Software work, Ms. Thomason made another original game: In Search of the Secret Stone (Creative Publications, 1986). It is an “educational” game quite directly this time meant to teach mathematics, but it is also quite clearly an adventure game with graphics in the same style as The Coveted Mirror.
Finally, it’s worth at least looking at the screens for the Japanese translation of the game. Starcraft did the translation (just like with the Sierra On-Line games, such as the Time Zone game where they re-drew every single screen). What I find fascinating here is they tried to do heavy localization, changing the setting to Japan and radically modifying the graphics. Two screenshots of the PC-98 version via Mobygames:
According to Rob in the comments, it changes gameplay aspects as well, like removing the mini-games, removing the 25-capture limit, and making the vase visible in the treasury. The pickpocketing is both more forgiving and meaner at the same time: it doesn’t happen instantly when you enter the tavern, but if you wait long enough you’ll get pickpocketed without any kind of warning.
FM-7 box cover from Mobygames.
Coming up: An absolutely enormous game that was lost until quite recently.
Progress, but not quite as much as I’d like. Still, I think I’m one or two posts away from the end.
My main target for today.
The most immediate thing I solved — roughly five minutes after making my last post — came from one last re-read of the fairy looking for their glasses.
I realized that it might not be a tiara or hat on the fairy’s head (as my brain was originally interpreting), but rather the glasses themselves (especially since the game already had the “hidden in sight” puzzle with the lockpick). It took a little fussing to actually work out what to do, though, since you can’t just GET them (the game does politely say you’re on the right track). HELP gives the majority of the verbs that are available, though.
GET, PUT, MOVE, OPEN, CLOSE, USE, OFFER, READ, TALK, GO, WAIT, CLIMB, LOOK, INV, OR A DIRECTION
(Not all of them – you can LIGHT CANDLESTICK back at the magician’s room.) I was trying to do POINT and SHOW and so forth but consulting the list the only thing that seemed like it might work was MOVE.
It’s wildly unusual at this point in gaming history to have a puzzle like this; most of our graphics up to 1982 have been too squiggly (even some of the games with very good art, like Lucifer’s Realm, did not have their art done in 1982; it was added later). Even then it took some squinting and a leap of faith because of the pixel size but at least it gets very directly mentioned in the text.
Unfortunately, the effect here has not led me to solving any new puzzles. This gives access to USE COLOR (which incidentally took some noodling to figure out — even with a mostly-complete verb list it’s not always easy to work out how to communicate things, and it’s still not clear what action the player is doing to cast the spell). This causes the screen to change color briefly before returning to normal, but I have tested it in over half of the rooms in the game with no effect. There is no textual message given, and I wonder if it’s meant to find something hidden.
That is, in this moment of color inversion, you might see something secret.
Before leaving the fairy, I should mention I was misinterpreting another part of the image. There’s a door in the back but I thought it was simply the way we entered in on (the room only vaguely looks like the bottom of a well, so I thought there was some extra step being implicitly taken by going down, and you can easily go back up again). However, you can OPEN DOOR and find yourself on the other side of the hill. So that issue is resolved.
New route marked in blue.
Nearby all that is the inn, and I misinterpreted yet another image.
I thought that was a door behind the bull, and it represented the way back into the inn. It does not: it’s a passage to the outside, through the back of the Inn, leading to a brand-new area. Mind you, not one that I have gotten too far into yet, but some screenshots to explain:
Putting together the clues from before, I need the ring and the sign language to communicate with the man in the Forest, who will then take me through the Fog here to the fifth and final mirror shard. So it likely should be saved for later.
Speaking of saving things for later, my suspicion on the tavern where supposedly we can learn sign language (but our stuff gets stolen instead)…
…is that this gets saved for last. That is, I need all four other mirror shards, and something will happen in the tavern which will allow a scene to go forward. I suspect this because the hint talks about Brother Jon only showing up “rarely”.
With that set aside, one last piece of progress is I took every single available item over to be appraised and found that the ones that work as bribes are not obvious treasures. Specifically, of the items I have…
AX, ROPE, BONES, CANDLESTICK, JUG, BROOM, LOCKPICK, COAT, SHOVEL, RING
…the AX, JUG and BROOM are all valued as bribes. I’m particularly surprised about the broom, since it was just taken from a room in the castle; the AX seems like a utility item, but now almost certainly not. Unless I’m far off base, anything that counts as a bribe does not otherwise get used as an item for puzzle-solving. This means the rope, bones, and coat are the only items left where I’m completely unsure as to where they go (I haven’t applied the ring yet, but the game hints amply where it will show up later).
I decided next to do a big push on the tower; while the person inside laughs if you TALK, the face also “beckons” you if you do LOOK. I decided this had to be the missing witch. Given you can see the tower from the outside, I wondered if you could enter from the outside, given there were two holes in the bushes just outside the tower.
Further experimentation (especially considering the verb CLIMB on the help-list) led me to realize that climb was being recognized in that room, I just needed extra conditions, or more specifically a ladder. (The noun LADDER is recognized.) We’ve already seen a ladder, though!
It is not obvious in the slightest from the picture that you can just rip the ladder right off the well — I would think it was mounted — but you can just take it, and then PUT it at the castle.
This doesn’t quite let you go high enough, but I also had a rope I hadn’t used yet, so:
Finally the witch!
The witch requests bones and the shadow of a child. The bones were easy (I was already holding them freshly dug from the graveyard) but I still don’t have the shadow. The vase that holds shadows was hinted at by the fortune-teller, but I still don’t know where to find it; I do know if you are at the hovel which has a child in the picture, you can try to GET SHADOW and it says you don’t have the right container for it.
One last bit of progress, kind of: on the south side of the town there is a barrel in the picture (not mentioned in the room description, just shown in the picture). I found I could MOVE BARREL and get the top off, and even GO BARREL afterwards.
The problem is that the barrel is dark. LIGHT CANDLESTICK (like I did at the magician) says something about lighting it at the nearest fire, so I went and tried to light it at the alchemist, and the baker, and the glassblower, and the blacksmith, and in all cases it said it didn’t understand the command LIGHT CANDLESTICK. I could go all the way to the magician and light the candlestick but it apparently is unlit by the time you walk over to the barrel. So I’m not clear what to do here.
Just for an open-problem update:
a.) finding the vase that holds shadows
b.) figuring out the barrel
c.) chocolate moose ingredient for the bakery to get the cookie
d.) figuring out where to use the color spell (this may only apply at the endgame)
This is a much shorter list than before which is why (despite me still only being a two pieces of the mirror) I suspect I’m winding closer to the end, at least closer to the point where I’ll be able to enter the endgame.
Before getting into the puzzle solving, let’s tour the last part of the map, where “there’s less hustle & bustle”.
This is just past the main town, to the south. Just west of the room above are the stockade (with the scene I discussed last time) and the jousting.
Just like with town, the various rooms have random encounters. It isn’t nearly as bad as it could be, and I’m guessing they’re programmed in a way that forces a rotation rather than hoping the random number generator doesn’t make it so you might have to test each location 10 times. In the location just past town, you might see nobody, or you might meet a Bolshevik.
TALK here gives SOFT–AND CARRY A BIG STICK. Some of the characters give random hints (like talking to random town members in a JRPG) although it is also possible to try to GIVE items, so I don’t know if any of them represent puzzles. This isn’t the only encounter you can have here!
I met her on my fourth-pass through, rather than having to go back and forth ten times. I’ve most recently written about the perils of character appearance RNG with Ringen.
TALK gives a more active clue, about an NPC I had gotten lucky with and met on my first visit to the room in question.
Let’s just hop all the way over there — it’s on the far east, marked Near Forest of No Return on my map.
This man’s appearance is less frequent than other characters, which I suspect is why the hint is there. He’s also hinted at by the bard, he mentions MUNIJSTAN & HIS SILENT FRIEND and how you need to WAIT WITH THE RING AT THE DARK FOREST’S END.
Trying to TALK gets the response HE GESTURES IN SIGNS YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND; we’ve also had the sign language reference given by Alice at the hovel, but I don’t know how to learn the sign language yet. My suspicion, based on Alice’s hint about sign language at the tavern, is that someone hanging out in the tavern (where the pickpocketing happens) knows, but that’s one avenue I’m still dead-ended at (talking isn’t useful, nor waiting around, nor coming back and forth a bunch of times).
Let’s zip back to Outside Town and take a path by a graveyard next.
The graveyard sometimes has a ghost. The ghost makes a reference to digging.
Last time I had found a solving path (release person in stockade helps get the candlestick, candlestick gets bellows from the alchemist, bellows go to the blacksmith who gives you a shovel) that gets a shovel, so I tried it out and got some bones. Unfortunately, I don’t know what to do with the bones yet. (Giving them to the dog, the dog says — yes, it talks — that it prefers steak.)
Heading north, there’s another multi-character room, a crossroads. Encounters include a talking horse that lets you know again about the ring-forest connection.
If you try to ride the horse, the game lets you know it is a FREE SPIRIT.
There’s also someone who gives out elixirs for health that can sometimes appear and I think he may be there purely for color.
This shows the result of me trying to GET ELIXIR.
With that done, let’s swerve east which turns out to go into a house, the residence of Lady Vainly. (Some games, architecturally, will always put “boundary” rooms to set up transitions between outdoors and indoors; here this game is being a little more freeform.)
The dialogue above is the result of using TALK, and it is meant to hint that if you go east…
…you can GET GRAIN. Nobody says a peep about stealing or the like, the game just says OK and it lands in your inventory. We’ll be using the grain somewhere else shortly. First, a visit to a fairy.
Heading north from the grain is a well, with a bird in a nest. Again, I think the nest may be just “for color” — I’m still unclear how much content in this game is meant for pure atmosphere — and going down leads to a fairy.
The fairy asks you to find her glasses. I’m not sure where to even begin to look so this is one of those puzzles that will eventually solve itself.
Swerving back to the intersection with the talking horse, and going north, there’s a door in a hillside (locked) adjacent to a jug (which I have yet to use anywhere, and trying to take it to the tavern just gets it stolen). Going north from here is where the fishing is, which I will talk about (along with the jousting) in more detail later.
Neither mini-game is a proper “room”; the game just prompts if you want to start the game when you go a particular direction.
Finally there’s an inn. There’s a hint elsewhere (given by a woman randomly in the town) that the innkeeper likes to receive grain.
I guess he’s so keen on grain he gets kicked out if tries to go for Lady Vainly’s fields so can’t just walk over and grab it himself.
The reason he wants the grain is to feed his beloved bull; you can enter the door and see the bull assuming you’ve handed over the grain. There’s a rope in the room you can then take.
I originally thought that was a whip.
I did finish the mini-games but with a lot of save-state abuse. Starting with the joust, you have a series of clashes where you control your lance with A and Z (high/low) your shield with semicolon and period (high/low) and press SPACE to charge.
We’re controlling the person on the right.
There are two issues, one likely with the emulator. The first is that the game simply moves too fast at default settings, and I had to change the computer to be half speed. (Nothing else in the game, including the fishing, has this issue.) The other issue is that I don’t understand when you win or lose. The scene above looks to me like the right-side lance hit the opposing knight and the shield is placed correctly to block, but the scene shows a LOSS. I never could figure out a pattern and just kept reloading a save state and hitting buttons randomly until I won a match. Four wins means you are through and done with the game.
I assume the ATHLETIC PROWESS works to defeat another puzzle I haven’t seen yet.
The fishing is at least comprehensible, although still finicky enough that I resorted to save states again.
A and Z move the hook up and down, and the fish swim left to right, and you try to hit SPACE when the hook and fish match places. Your goal is to catch 14 fish before running out of time; time is not “real time” in a normal sense, but rather, the hourglass counts down by 1 if either a fish is caught or a fish is missed. You’ll notice I was cutting things tight above (goal of 14, 17 hourglass ticks) but I already knew from previous tests I was going to do save state abuse, and I was trying to fit both the jousting and fishing in one trip (without using up a bribe in order to increase time).
(Speaking of bribes: the only treasure I’ve found is still that necklace from the start. Given how long certain sequences take, I’m paranoid if I use the bribe early, I might get some later section that I won’t have the time to do on one jaunt before getting yanked back to the dungeon with the mirror shards.)
The main issue is the hitbox on correct presses of SPACE; there were many times it looked like a fish was properly being caught but it got away. I think there’s a slight offset (the fish maybe should optimally be a little below the hook?) but I never could figure out a pattern that worked consistently, so save state abuse ahoy.
After winning at fishing, the game informs you that you’ve obtained enough patience / quietude in order to stealthily read the Abbott’s book without getting caught. It’s nice when a puzzle solve is so direct! The book also quite directly tells you that one of the pieces of the Coveted Mirror is in the church at the castle.
This is definitely a case where you need to see the information before the mirror gets registered (so it isn’t like we did the mini-game for nothing). I know this because there’s a similar situation involving another mirror piece that I did find, which you’ve been seeing on some of the screenshots, one in the shape of a rectangle. To find it, bring the horseshoe to the jester (who wanted luck) and he’ll give a poem explaining there’s a mirror shard right in the dungeon at the start.
Once you know that, going back to the Dungeon is enough to trigger the mirror piece showing in “inventory”. (You can’t even refer to it in the room! It just has the picture appear.)
I unfortunately have yet to make it to the castle’s chapel so I can’t get the third piece marked down yet.
I managed to eke out one more puzzle solve, by taking the fish from the kitchen (only available via trapdoor, and you have to get caught right after, but you can retrieve the fish from the treasure room in the maze). I took the fish over to the sewing shop. I knew the woman there wanted a fish because I tried GET COAT and she’d indicated she would trade.
Some characters will say what they want if you just TALK, some will only say what they want if you try to take a particular item. The baker, for instance, doesn’t let you know about the chocolate moose ingredient until you’ve tried to GET COOKIE.
I do not know where the coat goes. I can’t USE COAT so I assume I give it to a person. There’s no obvious candidates. At least, there are custom messages when you give it to the wrong person, which is a very nice touch that makes the whole situation less frustrating.
It’d be hilarious if we then need to make a fake designer label, but this isn’t that kind of game.
To recap my issues, some which carry over from last time:
a.) two locked doors, one in the tower at the castle and one outside town at the hill
b.) I still need invisibility
c.) the people at the tavern (and the cryptic mention of sign language); relatedly, learning sign language for understanding the man at the forest
d.) the astrologer who pines after the fortune teller
e.) the “moose” ingredient
f.) the glasses for the fairy
g.) does Lady Vainly need anything or was that whole scene just for the grain?
h.) what to do with: bones, ax, coat, broom, and rope.
The game is keen on USE X so I may just need to start grinding (check every room for use of bones, ax, coat, broom, and rope).
I’ve got most of the map laid out, and things are open enough that I’m not really “stuck” but I wanted to report in anyway.
Story from the later version of The Coveted Mirror, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.
To clear one thing up right away, regarding the mirror pieces: you don’t pick up the ones you find. You instead just see them and remember their shape, and trying to pick one up mentions a “protection spell” (I’ve only found one of them so far, but it clearly is consistent across the game). This at least partly explains the setup: Voar doesn’t need to be near the mirror shards to use them, isn’t worried about sabotage, and probably doesn’t even know seeing what they look like would be necessary information to find the fifth missing shard (given he hasn’t been able to locate it).
I also think the original wizard is still alive, despite the original manual indicating he wasn’t. There’s also reference to a Queen so maybe that’s who Voar pushed out?
No invisibility spell yet. That would be lovely to find.
The player starts “locked” in the first floor of the castle in the Dungeon (not really that well locked), can travel to a second floor, can leave to go into a town, and a little past. There is a timer on each trip out of the starting room. After the timer runs out, you get teleported back to the start, and lose any items you are carrying to a holding room on the second floor.
You can bribe the guard that checks the room for extra time. This required first having the bribe — there’s a necklace you can find early that works — and then typing WAIT while hanging in the Dungeon. Then you hand the item over and the guard gives you extra time.
I’m honestly not fully sure on the formula here, but I think the more valuable an object you give, the more extra time you have. It may be possible to not bother at all with this mechanic but since getting deep into (and past) the town does take a decent chunk of clock, it may instead be impossible to win without resorting to at least a little bribery.
Red spaces are spots you get caught. Yellow spaces are places you land from trapdoors (more on that shortly).
I incidentally say (GUARD) for all the red rooms but some of them are courtiers or other hangers-on of the evil Voar as opposed to proper guards. Any run-in will send you to Voar then back to the Dungeon (and one of your 25 times you can get into trouble gets used up).
From the Dungeon you can just move a bed to sneak your way out (through a dark room that I later managed to light up). Going south leads to a staircase, going up then leads to a mysterious locked door (and that necklace that helps with bribery).
One element to highlight (as touched upon in my last post) is that text is extraordinarily sparse and sometimes doesn’t try to describe the room at all (as in the above scene). The game is dependent on you looking at the picture and figuring out not just what to interact with but what nouns to use. Here “door” and “necklace” aren’t that hard to come up with, but later there are multiple items in a scene where I had to guess if the game would let me pick up something in particular.
I incidentally have no idea yet how to unlock the door. You can ignore it for now and go south or east, which leads to a maze which takes up the second floor of the castle.
The “twisty maze” aspect isn’t done in a classical Crowther/Woods sense, but rather in having trap doors which will shoot you back to the first floor.
These trap doors correspond exactly with the yellow rooms from the earlier map. This can be helpful as a way of jumping past the rooms you can get caught in. Before trying that, I should also point out:
a.) Going E-S-E-E-N-N-W-W from the necklace drops you in Voar’s treasure room; if you get scooped up back to the Dungeon while holding items, this is where they go. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of steps to start a run, so that already runs a fair amount of the hourglass out; I think the game intends you to time things out, storing items safely so you don’t have to deal with this.
You can hit ENTER on its own like a Sierra game to switch to text mode; if there’s items here they’ll be listed before the short description.
b.) One of the pieces of the Coveted Mirror is in the maze.
This is the first mention of the Peak of Shards. Metacommentary is an odd place to be introducing lore.
Dropping into trapdoors, you can make it into a kitchen…
Despite lots of visuals going on, the only thing I could find to do was GET FISH.
…and also a Great Hall.
This seems like a good moment to remind you that many of the scenes are animated; in this case the dog’s tail moves. I haven’t been able to interact with it but I assume some kind of food or bone would be appreciated.
The Great Hall is connected up with Voar’s throne room if you feel like getting yourself caught directly, and two rooms which have a random chance of encounters. This mechanic shows up much more in the town, but I’ll mention now there are a fair number of rooms where you may or may not meet a character.
South of the dog is the jester.
TALK gets this response. I think I know what the jester wants, just I haven’t managed the logistics yet of shuttling the item over here. It wasn’t clear to me right away that this was even an item request, I thought for a while maybe OFFER HELP or the like would work, but conversation seems limited to TALK in each location it can happen.
East of the dog is a bard (which, again, shows up at random — the hall may be empty).
Doing TALK here gets the response:
SO MUNJISTAN & HIS SILENT FRIEND FARED LONG AGO TO THE MOUNTAIN BEND. IF YE ASPIRE TO ASCEND, WAIT WITH THE RING AT THE DARK FOREST’S END.
I don’t think any further puzzle is here (although if a music sheet shows up it would be worth taking to the bard). North is where Voar is hanging, and to the east is a room with nice art and not much description.
Just a general fact about the keep, rather than trying to describe the room (and making clear the broom is takeable).
Time for an escape! Fortunately back at the staircase you can just go south, and there’s a window you can open.
The random mention of the Queen. I hope I’ve made clear why the confusing lore like this can be frustrating in an adventure game; is there a Queen that’s alive we are trying to find? If so, that means some artifact that seems like it belongs to the Queen might be an aid in finding her. Maybe she’s in the tower past the locked door?
To the east of the “main entrance” you pass by is a “good place to hide loot”; I haven’t experimented with if there really is a problem dropping objects in random places and you have to be strategic to avoid things being yoinked.
You see this as walking away from the castle and towards the town.
Here’s my map of the town:
There’s a lot of content, and I’ll mostly take it north to south. At the far north there is a tree where going UP lets you climb and find an AX.
It’s not clear these are climbable trees. Fortunately I was obsessively trying N/S/E/W/U/D in every room.
If you try to take the AXE the game suggests you use AX instead. I find it fascinating when the game clearly understands your meaning but tries to force your typing in a particular way instead rather than just recognizing the alternate spelling method.
The next east-west row has a tavern on the far west, where you get something stolen when you enter. I haven’t noodled here at all nor worked out if the game is softlocked once an item is stolen.
There’s a gate where “Starina” (optional encounter) tells you IN THEE LIES THE HOPE OF ALL STARBURY. GREAT HOPE MAKES THEE GREAT! and I’m again wondering what the biographical context of our main character is, and if it matters for any puzzles.
Past Starina to the east is an astrologer, who is pining after a fortune-teller, and the fortune-teller right next to him.
We’ll be back here later with the crystal ball she wants.
Going back to Starina and heading south, there’s a blacksmith (who needs something to help with his fire) and a hovel.
South even further is a “town square” with multiple possible encounters, including “Granny Garbled-Marbles” who lets you know a candlestick of hers was stolen by an Abbott.
To the east is a church, with Brother James (and the aforementioned candlestick) and the Abbott’s room.
If you try to read the book, the Abbott appears and throws you out.
To the west is a glassblower place, where you can find a crystal ball. This is the ball you need to take to the fortune teller (mind you, the fortune teller seemed to indicate she had lost her ball and you’re finding it … this seems like you’re getting a new ball?) When trying to GET BALL the glass-blower first quizzes you on what a picture is, showing it piece by piece; you need type MERMAID and you can go ahead.
Just to jump ahead a bit, if you take the crystal ball back to the fortune-teller, you get told about a magical vase:
Was the scene necessary to win, or will you find the vase anyway even if you don’t hear about it first?
Resuming our north-south walk, on one side is an alchemist.
He needs the candlestick. I’ll do that whole sequence in a moment.
Across from the alchemist is a bakery, where the person inside needs an ingredient for chocolate “moose”.
Reaching the outskirts of town, there’s a path passing by a pig, chicken, and goose (at various moments, their appearance is random); there’s also a horseshoe lying around which I believe is the lucky item the jester wants.
Further on is a shop where you can “appraise” items. It will determine which items are considered valuable as bribes (this is quite directly given in the text — something is listed as valuable or not “TO GUARDS”).
Also, there’s someone sewing with a cat.
There’s still more map south past the town, but I’m just going to highlight a couple things. First of all, you can find a joust minigame. You are informed you need to win four times in a row. You can move a shield and a lance independently, and it is possible to win, lose, or tie at any clash. I don’t know what you get if you win.
(The game also keeps track of your hourglass time and you will get booted back to the Dungeon once time is up.)
Similarly, you can also find a fishing minigame nearby. Again, I’m not sure what the reward is, although I found this easier than the jousting. Again, hourglass time will pass as you fish, so it is possible to lose by getting booted back to the Dungeon.
This and the other minigame show our avatar!
Finally, there’s a stockade just outside of town. If you talk with the criminal within, they let you know they have a lockpick out next to the tavern. You’ve actually seen the lockpick!
That little dot and line in the bottom right is the lockpick! (This, plus the minigames, plus the emphasis on parsing the world visually rather than reading text, plus the people appearing at random, make me think of later Sierra games.) You can just GET LOCKPICK, even if you hadn’t heard about it previously from the criminal.
With the man free, head over to the church, and he’ll cause the Father to chase him so you can grab the candlestick. You can then take the candlestick over to the alchemist who will take some of the metal for alchemy (not the whole thing) and he’ll give you his bellows. You can then take the bellows over to the blacksmith who will trade you his shovel for the bellows. I have yet to be able to dig anything up with the shovel.
That’s mostly it for this update, but one more thing: I was captured with all the aforementioned items, retrieved them, dropped down the trapdoor to the magician room, and then lit the candle using the fire at the flask. I could then open the cupboard and go in where it was dark, finding an item.
Just to recap the obstacles remaining, I need to deal with
a.) the jester (just need to get the horseshoe over, most likely)
b.) the locked door
c.) the various people in the halls (likely need the invisibility spell, likely meaning I need to find a witch)
d.) the people at the tavern (and the cryptic mention of sign language)
e.) the astrologer who pines after the fortune teller
This might just be for color, but maybe you give a flower or something along those lines.
f.) the Abbott and the book
g.) the “moose” ingredient
h.) something at the sewing shop (nothing seems to be requested?)
i.) winning the joust
j.) winning the fishing
k.) some exploration past the town which I’ll save for a different post
l.) probably at least one thing I’m missing because of the random appearance of characters and also the fact exits aren’t mentioned, so I have to test N/S/E/W/U/D in every room and I likely missed one by accident
I haven’t had a game split in this many directions in a while. The time-limit part is interesting in keeping each expedition “directed” (for example, jousting and fishing take enough time that they likely each need their own individual journey, without any extra stops). I certainly don’t need any hints or suggestions yet, so please save those for if I later get stuck.
We’ve featured companies here before (like Adventure International and Sierra On-Line) that started their main development in games, with a few extra utilities being sold on the side. When Mark Pelczarski formed Penguin Software, their initial core product was (rather than a game) their Graphics Magician, which held them steady through their early years. However, they eventually became prominent for their adventure games: Transylvania, Crimson Crown, The Coveted Mirror, The Quest, and their re-published version of Oo-Topos (originally without graphics at all). Considered across multiple platforms, the adventure games are what sold the best for Penguin, but it took The Graphics Magician existing in the first place for those games to appear.
Their first adventure game, Transylvania, came to them essentially by accident and didn’t originally have graphics. They got the author (Antonio Antiochia) an early copy of Graphics Magician to make it a flagship product alongside The Graphics Magician.
After The Graphics Magician was published, they got a call from a programmer named Eagle Berns at Stanford. Burns had been there as a programmer since 1959 (and their IBM 650), overlapping with the early computer science great Donald Knuth. Close to when he started his Apple II journey (1980) he worked some on LaTeX (one of Knuth’s projects) as well as Foreign language processing at Stanford.
Importantly for us, he decided to pivot to personal computers and specifically the Apple II, and using The Graphics Magician he had written a game using the tool with Michael Kosaka. (Michael Kosaka only has a small part to play in today’s game, but as an aside: of the people I mention today, he had the deepest involvement with later games, working on Skate or Die, Madden NFL ’94, and an unreleased Sonic game for 32X which would require a several-thousand word essay to adequately explain.) Quoting Pelczarski on Burns:
A great, creative person, he went on to make his mark at Apple Computer (on the Macintosh team), Micro Focus, and Oracle. But first and foremost he turned into a good friend who also happened to write, with Michael Kosaka, the first game with Graphics Magician: Pie Man. The game was loosely based on an I Love Lucy skit, with pies coming rapidly off a conveyor belt while you try to put whipped cream and a cherry on top and put the pie in a rack, while avoiding grease spots and obstacles. (Remember that these were the days when state of the art was Break-Out, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man.) A non-violent game with a bit of personality was very unique and new.
The non-violent part is worth highlighting; Scott Scram started writing games for Penguin with Crime Wave, and wanted to follow up with something “completely non-violent”; Mark Pelczarski suggested porting Pie Man to Atari.
People who play violent games excessively may do so for psychological reasons. Perhaps they seek a jolt of self-medicating adrenaline, or they need to feel powerful in the game world as opposed to feeling powerless in their real lives … I enjoyed porting the game, and it turned out well with the use of some Atari additions such as a 4 part musical soundtrack.
Unfortunately, the world was not ready to give up the really cool violent games that were coming out at about that time, and the game did not sell well. But, the popularity of Tetris, solitaire and others prove that there is a market for non-violent games and puzzles.
A video of some of the Atari version below:
Eagle Berns followed up Pie Man with an adventure game, The Coveted Mirror, working with his friend Holly Thomason (and a small contribution from Michael Kosaka, which I’ll highlight when I eventually reach that part of the game).
From the back of the later printing of the game using an updated engine, although supposedly it loses some minigames.
The story is set in the “Faraway Land of Starbury” where “people were happy and life was good”. However, there was a “villian” named Voar with a “heart of black poison” who sought to rule the kingdom as his own; however, he was stopped by the Wizard Munjistan who had a magical Mirror who could see all “troublemakers” who would cause destruction to the land. One night, Voar entered the realm of the wizard in a forest and tried to steal the mirror, but it broke into five pieces, and he was only able to steal away with four (how it got to the mirror in the first place without being spotted is unclear).
Thus it befell that with most of the pieces, Voar’s power waxed and overshadowed that of Munjistan’s. However, without all the shards of the Mirror, Voar’s power was yet incomplete. Munjistan knew he had very little time to secure the last piece against Voar’s craving, so he desperately searched his magic books for a spell to save Starbury. Alas, to no avail! The best he could find was one which required he hide the piece and wait for a champion born beneath future stars. If the champion is pure of heart and bests Voar in the race for the piece, the evil one’s power will be shattered.
Voar in the meantime learned to wield the other four pieces in order to spy on citizens and send people to the dungeons, but he could not find the fifth piece. The wizard managed to disguise himself as a court magician to stay close to Voar but has since passed away. This is where you come in. You (no biographical background) have been captured by Voar, and the action starts in the throne room.
The title screen animates the mirror shattering.
The essential gimmick of the game is that you’re a prisoner and get started by being sent into a dungeon, but it isn’t hard to escape; however, Voar “can generally find you easily with his mirror pieces” meaning you aren’t really free. A “prison guard” will “check on you regularly but you may find a way to cope with that.” Additionally there’s a time limit (given by the sands) where the guard will return to check on you.
Whilst you are doing all this, your job is to find various mirror pieces and assemble them into a rectangle.
This is all summarized directly from the manual and I admit I haven’t been this baffled by the premise of a game in a while.
a.) If the mirror let the wizard watch for trouble, how did Voar get close enough to steal it?
b.) Who was ruling over the kingdom before Voar? The Wizard? Maybe it was some sort of collective and the wizard was just keeping the peace? Is the wizard’s disguise going to be an important detail later, even though the wizard is now dead?
c.) If we’re aiming to find the fifth mirror piece, but Voar can always just watch what we’re doing, couldn’t he watch us going for the fifth mirror piece and stopping it?
d.) But if Voar has the mirror pieces, how are we able to find them around the castle? How are we able to keep them given the whole process of getting tossed into the dungeon?
e.) If we’re under surveillance, why is there a regular guard appearing with a timer? Why doesn’t the guard immediately know when we’ve escaped?
I ended up checking the later (1986) version of the game which has its own story book, and at least one of the holes gets filled up: Voar starts a crime wave in order to distract the Wizard, which is why he’s able to sneak to the location of the mirror. One other slight change: the wizard shares the secret of the fifth shard’s hiding place with “one other soul”.
This still doesn’t address how we are picking up mirror pieces despite Voar tracking us, or the setup behind the guard regularly appearing. With most media I am pretty tolerant of “plot holes” as simply things a story hasn’t bothered to explain but likely has some explanation; unfortunately with an adventure the interpretation of the plot can be important in puzzle-solving so I find the confusion more of a problem.
The king’s face is incidentally animated. Many scenes are, and it adds a feeling of polish to the game that makes it seem more like later-Apple-II graphics rather than depths-of-early-Sierra. (You can also contrast with The Hobbit. That game was made by four computer scientists with interests in systems and languages; this game was made by two people — with minor help from a third — that were more graphics-oriented.)
No matter what action you do (at least any action I could find) there’s the response…
I’LL HAVE THEE BEATEN FOR THY INSOLENCE
OFF TO THE TOWER!
(THAT’S 01 I’LL ONLY ALLOW IT 25 TIMES.)
…and then you appear in the dungeon. (The first immediate issue with the plot being sketchy rises up right here: are we supposed to do something at the king? Or was getting thrown into the dungeon just a “cutscene” so to speak?)
There is no more text than what you see (“YOU ARE IN THE DANK, DESOLATE, PRISONER TOWER.”) The game expects you to see items and refer to them by name from the picture, not from the text. It took me a while to realize the item to the right is a PITCHER (not a JUG) and even when I realized it the game told me that it’s just scenery when I tried to pick it up.
You can move the bed to find a hole, then GO HOLE into darkness.
Going west from here leads to the magician’s room with “mysterious odds & ends”, except all that’s visible is a flask which is too hot to touch and some books.
You can’t take the books (“THEY’RE NOT YOURS TO TAKE”) but you can READ BOOK, find a diary of the magician, and read multiple pages which give hints.
IF THAT OLD WITCH DOESN’T GIVE ME HER INVISIBILITY SPELL SOON, I’LL CHANGE HER INTO A STARBURY STRAWBERRY.
I thought the wizard was supposed to be the good guy?
I WONDER IF VOAR KNOWS BORIS LETS THE PRISONERS ROAM IF THEY OFFER HIM THE RIGHT THINGS!
I’m wondering if this means you leave a present in the room that the guard finds while you’re out. Otherwise there isn’t a reason for a gift (if you’re physically there, nothing bad happens).
BORIS KEEPS CLOSE WATCH ON THAT HOURGLASS, BUT SOMETIMES HE FALLS ASLEEP & PRISONERS GET EXTRA TIME.
IF BORIS WAKES TO FIND THEIR TIME IS UP BUT THEY’RE NOT BACK IN PRISON, HE REPORTS THEM TO VOAR.
SO VOAR USES THE MAGIC MIRROR TO WHISK THEM BACK & GLADLY PUTS THEIR BOOTY IN HIS TREASURE ROOM.
I’m guessing this is the sort of game where you can simply avoid this happening, but we have had some games where you have to hit the fail-state at least once (including how you need to have the pirate steal your treasure in Crowther/Woods before the pirate chest shows up).
BUT EVEN VOAR CANNOT SEE BEYOND THE IMPENETRABLE MIST.
Is this another way to hide from getting teleported away, or just a hint where the fifth mirror piece is?
I’m still trying to get a hang of the game’s norms (which seem to vary quite a bit from what we’ve had here before) so I’ll try to get a fair chunk of the map made before reporting in next time.
Rendition of Sapas Mons on Venus, a volcano 400 km across and 1.5 km high, using coloration from Venera missions. Via NASA.
Last time I was thinking about the bug I had run across with the rod becoming two rods when entering the pool.
Despite the glitch here, some further mucking about confirmed the rod is the only item that this happens with, and the special coding indicates that it is meant as a puzzle to get the rod into the cave. (This type of logic I’ve called “structural solving”, although there’s two kinds. One is where there are restrictions based on the structure of the game that force certain things to be true, like an exit closing off meaning a puzzle behind the exit has to be solved first. The other is the “author suggestive” kind where they put work to incorporate some element to the map or plot sequence which doesn’t make sense unless it gets used in a certain way. The first type of solving is almost ironclad, the second relies on the author not leaving any loose pieces. Here, Leduc wouldn’t special-code the rod getting foiled by the dense pool unless the rod needed to get by.)
I realized I hadn’t tried xenoshifting and putting the rod into the hole at the ledge both in the same saved game, so I went ahead and tried it: start with the regular space suit and the boots, wear them both, take the rod to the ledge, PUT ROD / IN HOLE, go back in the ship, dump the boots and suit (you don’t need them any more the rest of the game), xenoshift, then go past the pool into the cave.
Oho! So I was in the same situation as before (nitrogen stream, cube) except with the rod. Given it could extend for very long I tried various ways of dropping it and applying CROSS ROD. Unfortunately, the parser hard-code interprets that as CROSS STREAM without the player attempting to use the rod as a plank. (The game never describes if the rod is thick or thin, so I don’t know how reasonable an ask this was anyway.)
The extreme restriction here — for structural solving reasons, the obstacle has to be the stream, and the rod has to be important somehow — led me to tread through the entire verb list but still no luck. However, that doesn’t mean every verb is accounted for! (Especially in a game with REPROGRAM.)
Fiddling with the 11 foot pole, I suddenly recalled a very different game, Terminal City. The developer Powerhoof (who recently published The Drifter, one of the best adventure games I’ve played in the last few years) made as a gamejam project an endless runner that’s also a Sierra-style adventure game, and it’s as harebrained as that sounds.
As part of Terminal City, I remembered a particular moment where you need to take a long pole and type VAULT. Well, it is a particularly long pole in Epic Hero 3:
This is a rare verb. We had it in Earthquake San Francisco 1906, but I can’t come up with any other games in the Project that have used the actual verb VAULT. I found out after the fact both CROSS and JUMP work, but you have to be holding the long pole (and the game makes you have some intentionality since you have to TWIST RIGHT three times to get it at the correct size).
The creature attack is the worst part of the design. It merely happens at random: it’s just like the vampire which can follow you all the way to the sunlight in Epic Hero 2 and not be affected. My first two times through it attacked right away, so I thought I was supposed to be solving some sort of puzzle, but no: you’re just supposed to do things quickly and ignore it.
You are in a subterranean cavern.
Objects you can see are: Narrow crevice ■ Large reptilian creature ■ Wide Stream ■
Regarding the narrow crevice, the idea is to widen the crevice so you can pass through (the creature won’t stop you). I didn’t know that at the time so I first was thinking about fighting the creature off. I didn’t have anything that suggested violence other than the bomb, so I dropped it, vaulted back, and used THINK to set it off. (The only catch is, as I pointed out last time, the rod needs to be set to 12 inches to be used as a relay. So you need to TWIST LEFT twice to restore the rod to a short size, do the explosion, then TWIST RIGHT twice to get back to vaulting size.)
Fortunately, this accidentally wanders into the solution of expanding the crevice to a “wide crevice” you can enter, and the creature doesn’t stop you if you saunter on by.
Past the room is the last room of the game, a silvery mist room with an alien. Remember earlier the alien had said they wanted to ask a question.
You are in a greyish coloured nest.
Objects you can see are: Alien
Possible exits: EAST⠤
Alien says “ZRVZYWQ AVZTRXHG”
Unfortunately, the alien speaks alienese, and if you don’t respond correctly here, you will get blasted.
Alien raises its hand and
fires a strange weapon at you !!
This final(-ish) puzzle required a lateral mental leap. Remember the rod has multiple functions: in its smallest size, it can fit into the small hole, in its largest size, it can be used as a pole vault, and at 12 inches specifically, it works as a “relay” for the bomb. I realized it might help communicate with the alien, so I tried all the sizes before hitting a result.
The egg from the previous room, the red furry cube, and the triangle all appear to be alive (when applying EXAMINE). But which one is sentient? Hiking everything back to the lab and turning back to human, I did SCAN on all three of the items.
It took a little parser struggle after to work out what the game intended with storing the triangle in life support. Dropping or placing gets special parser treatment here to be interpreted as the item being put into the right place, and PUT doesn’t work.
There was one last catch: I somehow messed up getting the Identi-Comp set correctly on my transformation back to human, and the pad wasn’t recognizing my touch. This made me wonder if possibly I could do a City of Alzan style ending.
I dropped everything, switched back to alien in the medi-unit, held my breath, and made a beeline for the main control room. Then I pressed the red button to take off, whilst HOLD BREATH was still in effect.
I had a save state and it would have only taken two minutes to fix the computer, but I wanted to see if this would work. City of Alzan let you leave the city with a deadly disease still in effect but win anyway.
This game unfortunately did follow the pattern of increased difficulty pushing against the technical capabilities of the author, specifically here the capabilities of the parser (especially the weirdness of PUT being inconsistent, and the two part PUT ROD / IN HOLE applying itself to the rod even if you try to PUT some other item). However, the game still handled the various conditions far more skillfully than your average text adventure author of this time; Leduc deserves to be known at least as much as Brian Howarth.
The reason for obscurity, other than the first three games being trapped on TRS-80, is that his remaining games ended up on the ultra-obscure Colour Genie. Leduc’s Colour Genie club was nearly the only reason for activity in the UK at all on the system, so the games he wrote were restricted to a very small crowd. Which is exciting, in that we may have some gems coming up that hardly anyone knows about! However, we’re going to take a breather from Leduc for a while, as we have coming up: The Coveted Mirror, for the Apple II.
And since I have an excuse to drop this here, a screenshot from The Drifter, which I highly recommend. It includes a puzzle late in the game where you have to put all the pieces together into one action and the entire meaning of what’s been going on shifts.
I was trying to push to the end, but I still must be missing something fundamental. At the least, I can say (checking the list of rooms in the machine code) that there isn’t much more for me to explore; this is intended to be a “tight” game like Savage Island Part 2, and the way the alien-transformation works makes me think the author even had Savage Island Part 2 specifically in mind.
Progress hinged on two relatively obscure parser actions (one is from Savage Island and I really should have thought of it, I needed spoilers from Alastair). First off, the Identi-Comp.
What will you do now? EXAMINE COMPUTER
Notice on Identi-Comp: “Speak Clearly”
You
see numbers 1 and 2
A switch is set to
1
What will you do now? TO TWO
Okay
What I was missing (sleuthed out by Rob) is the verb REPROGRAM works on the system.
What will you do now? REPROGRAM COMPUTER
Identi-Comp: “Reprogramming commences after
second medical
usage”
The one-or-two part is setting whether the “reprogramming” happens after one or two medical uses (I’ll explain what that means shortly). I’m still not sure what “speak clearly” is all about; that may be the fundamental thing that’s keeping me from winning the game.
It’s a bit of an exhausting moment not only because this is the first time the verb has shown up anywhere, but it’s unclear what action the player is even doing. There was a moment in Seiko’s Adventure where you needed to “close hatch” while looking at a lot of buttons, essentially jumping over the first-layer interaction (which buttons are getting pushed, exactly) straight to the second-layer interaction (the hatch gets closed). Most classic text adventures stick with first-layer interaction and will come up with interfaces with five buttons that all happen to coincidentally be different colors to facilitate this; in Epic Hero 3, to launch the spaceship back off the planet you merely press a red button, as opposed to typing LAUNCH SHIP and letting the avatar in the world figure it out.
Just a reminder the Identi-Comp is in the central hub room on the ship, a fact that will be important later.
So what, exactly, is the avatar doing when the player types REPROGRAM COMPUTER? How do we even know (from the minimal description we get) that it’s got enough available parts to do that? I admit I visualized it smaller-scale with just the one-two switch, and was instead focused on potentially breaking the system open to fiddle with some wires. (For all I know, maybe that really is what the player-avatar is doing! Or maybe the “reprogram” action is actually a command spoken out loud?)
The second obscure command — the one from Savage Island — is HOLD BREATH. Back at the medical unit, you can transform yourself into an alien (made clear by the fact your space suit no longer fits based on your shape). Unfortunately, this means you breathe Venus-atmosphere but not ship-atmosphere, so opening the unit kills you.
With HOLD BREATH, you can safely hit the button.
There’s no apparent way to unhold, just after enough time your face will start to “turn red” and after “Gasp!” you’ll start breathing again. In alien form, you should be on the planet when this happens.
One last catch before going there! If you haven’t gone through the Identi-Comp reprogramming, specifically with the setting on TWO, then you will no longer be able to operate the door in alien form.
You are in a Medical and Genetic Engineering compartment.
Objects you can see are: Auto-Surg Unit ■ Scanner ■ Brown Pad ■ Closed Brown Hatch ■ Life Support ■
What will you do now? PUSH BROWN
Okay
Nothing happens
I think pressing the orange button and closing the unit counts as one medical operation, and pressing the black button to convert counts as the second; once we are xenoshifted, the ship changes the controls to allow us to use them in our new (non-described) form.
Non-described protagonists are nearly 100% the norm for this era, but it’s absolutely fascinating to have this then extend to where we clearly aren’t “ourselves”. Do we have tentacles? Multiple eyes? A large hump on our back used for breathing? This is not purely theoretical since it extends to our body’s capabilities in the world (for example, it wouldn’t immediately occur to me that we still have the kind of body where holding our breath makes sense). Neither the suit nor the boots fit anymore, although the headband does still fit and work.
One small … step? … tentacle glide? … for xenokind.
This shows holding breath from opening the medical unit, all the way to getting on the planet and walking to the pool/statue, where “Gasp!” shows when we need to take a breath.
No running out of suit air at least! We can still go over to the alien statue and SHAKE HAND to get a message, although we need to be wearing the headband to do so (this is true in either human or xeno form).
“Enter my domain. I have a question for you.”
We are now dense enough to go in the pool, HOLD BREATH, and DIVE DOWN (my problem before was not putting DOWN there, this is not nearly as smooth a parser experience as Epic Hero 2).
The purple plants glow and you need them in your inventory before going into the hole, leading to a small new area.
It took me a few beats to realize that the hole beneath the pool liquid does not lead to more liquid, but rather is an “open air” (in terms of alien atmosphere) room. There are circumstances where the tunnel winds in a way that this makes sense, but I was visualizing something entirely different at first.
That is, it’s fine if we run out of breath here and “gasp”. HOLD BREATH needs to happen again before going west (which leads back to the pool).
To the north is a stream which is smoky (it turns out to be liquid nitrogen) and a furry red block, which “contains something alive”.
You can break the block, resulting in just “red bits”. It doesn’t count as sentient though; if you take it back to the lab, and SCAN BLOCK (another new thing I discovered) the game informs you of this, meaning it isn’t our ultimate goal. I would expect that given this particular path hasn’t used either the explosive or the weird ledge found by jumping with boots.
I’ve tried taking the thought bomb into the hole and placing it either at the stalagtites or the nitrogen stream, but in both cases there’s a “crater” and no other result. The funny side result is I had the 12-inch rod with me, and when trying to dive it “floated up” and turned into a 9 inch rod and a 12 inch rod.
It turns out the thought bomb only blows up if you are wearing the band and holding the rod while in 12 inch form. (Without the rod, the game indicates a “relay” is missing.) The rod only goes in the ledge-hole if you have it in 9 inch form. This weird duplication bug means you can both have the rod deposited in the hole at the ledge and blow something up after, but clearly the intent was to have the rod be inaccessible (meaning the blowing up should happen first). I have not tested every single room but I have tested most rooms, and I’m worried there’s some special way to put the bomb in place that I’m missing (but is special coded for a particular room).
Any suggestions from this point (even guesses) please put in ROT13; I’m still going to try pushing to the end on my own.
Renga in Blue 