Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I can’t really write “Finished” because this is yet another Adventure clone that doesn’t want to trigger the endgame, but it’s safe to say I’ve seen nearly everything.

If you’ll allow me a lateral analogy:

In Pac-Man 256 you are being chased by “the glitch” from level 256 of the original arcade Pac-Man. Weird numbers and broken shapes follow Pac-Man as he tries valiantly to escape the universe being consumed.

With Bilingual Adventure, distressing bugs kept creeping up. I found more “void rooms”. (Fortunately, I found out that the magic word Y2 works everywhere, even in those rooms.) The lamp started running out of power even though I had the lamp off (the game seems to be “cheating” and just keeps a timer once the lamp is turned on, and never bothers to check if it’s off or even in the player’s possession). Halfway through the game, trying to THROW AXE at a dwarf just led to the dwarf mysteriously disappearing and a blank prompt. My inventory capacity started reducing for no apparent reason until I could only hold 3 items at a time.

Dropping from the stalactite puts you in the room marked with the purple arrow (it’s different than in Original Adventure). The two rooms marked red are void.

Last time I was stumped by a sword in a stone, when Draconis mentioned that the HELP message should really be in the description of the item.

?? help

I guess you need some help getting the sword out. Well this might help. There is an inscription on the blade which says – “ONLY MY NAME WILL WIN YOU FAME”.

Ah, this must be one of those “magic word based on pop culture” deals.

?? excalibur

The sword begins to quiver and suddenly springs into your hand.

Now, I need to do a big mea culpa: the dragon *is* in the game. However, you aren’t allowed in the right area until you’re holding Excalibur. So this whole process seems to have been meant to “fix” the absurdity of the original scene.

You are in a secret canyon which exits to the north and east.

A fire breathing green dragon as big as a Winabago bars the way. He is standing on a priceless Persian rug.

There is a rare Persian rug lying here

?? kill dragon

With one mighty stroke of the sword you have offed the beast. His once mighty body is being consumed in its own fires. There is nothing left now but a little green ash on the carpet.

One other change:

You are in the giant room. The ceiling here is too high up for your lamp to show it. Cavernous passages lead east, north and south. On the west wall is scrawled the inscription, “FEE FIE FOE FOO sic”.

There is a nest of golden eggs here

In the original, saying FEE, FIE, FOE, and FOO in order would summon the eggs back to this spot if they’re gone. The words don’t work here; the game makes jokes instead.

?? fee

There is no fee – this is a free game.

?? fie

You seem to have a slight accent liebchen?.

Instead, the final word of FUM from the original fairy tale is what summons the eggs. (This may have been intended to be another cheap way to avoid keeping track of state — that is, the game expects people to say the four words and then FUM at the end, but only bothered to record the FUM.)

The joke is different in French.

Sur le mur de ‘louest on voit un graffiti: “BA BE BI BO etc.”

?? ba

BABA au rhum? – Interdiction absolue d’avoir de a’lcool ici.

?? be

BEBE ou? J’espere pas, c’est la nourriture favorite des sorcieres.

This is a good moment to segue out to my last point: Bilingual Adventure really seems to be the only parser text adventure with mid-game language switching in existence. I’m not meaning “the first since 1979” I’m meaning “the first and only since 1979.” (Language switching is common in lots of other games, but parser does raise the difficulty a bit.) I’m happy to be proven wrong here, but even if there’s another example or two I’m missing, I’ve got to give the crew of Manning and friends some props for blazing a trail that (almost?) nobody else followed.