Archive for December 2019
It is THE FUTURE. The year NINETEEN NINETY FIVE.
Earth discovers, via radio receivers, a transmission from the center of the galaxy. The transmission continues for thirty years before mysteriously cutting off.
The signals, while never fully decoded, were sufficient to jumpstart giant leaps in technology, including xenon energy storage and magnetic recoil reaction drive. The two together would enable ships to travel to the stars, eventually with ships reaching 87% the speed of light.
…
Noteworthy in the lore for G.F.S. Sorceress is that there is no faster-than-light travel and the distances between star systems are “realistic”, so several (or many!) years may elapse in a single trip. Relativistic effects also apply (so 12 years to observers appear to be 6 years on the ship). This has gameplay ramifications I’ll get back to later.
…
It is THE PAST, roughly around 1500 CE in Earth years, on the planet Epsilon Indii II.
A scientist (whose original name is unknown, and is simply referred to as X) was conducting experiments with organ regeneration when he “accidentally dosed himself with the entire research serum.”
He discovered the next day he suddenly had the power to change his body at will; not only appearance but number of limbs and species. As a consequence of this, he could also heal any physical injury immediately (since he could just reshape the affected body section).
He used this power not for good, but for evil.
X’s typical modus operandi is to infiltrate positions of authority by murdering a superior in front of witnesses while disguised as one of his rivals for the newly vacant post. Preferred targets are military installations whose weapons can be turned against helpless civilian population centers. Over three hundred major cities and five entire planets (including his own) have been conclusively proven to have been destroyed by X.
His shape-shifting and regeneration abilities have made him essentially immortal. He is still at large at the time our story begins.
X’s original, long-discarded appearance.
…
Fast forward to 2582:
The main character of our story is Joe Justin, Weapons Officer on the G.F.S. Rheingold.
This has been one of those weeks that start badly and end worse. I am beginning to doubt either my memory or my sanity — probably my sanity is slipping away as I drift abandoned in interstellar space.
His troubles start with a low-gravity racketball match against the Executive Officer of the Rheingold, Commander Bernard Taub. Amidst a particular tense round, Joe accidentally injures the Commander, but moments later there appears to be no wound and the Commander himself denies anything happened. Afterwards, Joe notices blood on his racket.
Later, the Commander does a surprise inspection of quarters and seemingly ignores the blood still on Joe’s racket.
A week later, Joe has just finished covering a shift for a crewmate when he is dragged out of bed and brought to the brig, and then to a makeshift interstellar court marshal, officiated by the ship’s computer, with Commander Taub as prosecutor.
The ship’s captain had been just murdered, and there was damning evidence: a video clearly showing Joe Justin walking into the command module and shooting the captain, in full view of witnesses.
The punishment for mutiny and murder is ejection into the vacuum of space. This is where the player’s control of the story begins.
…
Commander Taub is of course not really Commander Taub, but X. His inspection of the racket was just confirming that our hero had learned something very dangerous to know, if Joe were to connect the dots. (In fact, one can assume, since we are now controlling Joe Justin, we realize what just happened whilst staring into the blankness of space.)
YOU ARE FLOATING IN SPACE. YOU SEE STARS AND A FAINT ION TRAIL.
YOU ARE WEARING A SPACESUIT. YOU ARE CARRYING NOTHING SPECIAL.
While the Rheingold is now long gone — presumably with X now as its captain — Joe has the almost astronomically lucky fortune of being nearby another ship, the G.F.S. Sorceress which just suffered a collision with a meteor storm as is similarly just floating in space.
…
I left off last time making it inside the ship but getting eaten by an AMOEBOID. I also found a “young woman” in another part of the ship but she shot me immediately upon entering and threw me out of the room.
It turns out to be necessary to defeat the amoeboid first; the lore necessary to solve the puzzle is jammed somewhat awkwardly in the middle of the short story I summarized above.
However, when exposed to the activated xenon gas from a leak in a starship’s fuel tanks, an amoeboid can grow very quickly to an alarming size and become a menace to the safety of the entire ship. When that happens, standard weapons are of no avail because the creatures are able to absorb energy or projectiles. The only solution is for some brave volunteer to duck by the amoeboid (which never goes far from the source of the xenon) and patch the leak or shut the open valve.
The solution here was to SHUT VALVE. I had already tried to TURN and CLOSE the valve with no success so this was almost like a copy-protection check where I had to work out the correct word.
TURN, TURN, TURN. THE VALVE IS TIGHTLY SHUT.
THE AMOEBOID IS SHRINKING… SHRINKING… IT VANISHES!
Once the amoeboid is gone, the woman in the other part of the ship doesn’t shoot you on sight anymore.
SHE SAYS: “I AM CAPTAIN SELENA SAKAROV OF THE G.F.S. SORCERESS. YOU ARE A STRANGER TO ME AND I HAD TO TEST YOUR COURAGE.”
Soon after:
HE SAYS: “PERHAPS WE CAN DEVELOP A SERIOUS RELATIONSHIP AFTER YOU ESTABLISH YOUR INNOCENCE. FOR NOW, YOU HAVE COMMAND OF THE SHIP. I WILL BE IN HYBERNATION UNTIL OUR RETURN TO EARTH.” SHE SASHAYS OFF TO THE HYBERNATION ROOM.
I feel like the conversation is missing a few beats here. We just got ejected from another ship but we’re now given command of this one? I could see “have a conversation about X where Joe Justin is very convincing” might fit the story logic, but as it went I was a little puzzled. (Also, somewhat sad this meant I didn’t have a snarky NPC following around during the adventure.) But at least the premise is now setup: we’ve been framed by a shape-shifter, and before we can return to Earth, we have to prove our innocence.
Story jump aside, we now have a ship that can fly around.
In another game, pushing a button for a planet might cause a little time to pass as the hyperdrive does some magical things, but remember the lore: no faster-than-light travel. So the button locks in a destination, and then you have to go into cold sleep and several years pass. Since this is a planet-hopping type adventure, it means in all likelihood the game will take place over 20+ years.
I’ll get into detail on the planets themselves next time, but I should note the time compression/expansion pattern continues on the planets themselves; a particular action might be just walking from one room to another, or it might involve walking several kilometers, or it might involve spending several weeks inside a space worm.
G.F.S. SORCERESS is a science fiction adventure game which is actually the first part of the continuing saga of Joe Justin and Selena Sakarov aboard the Galactic Federation Starship Sorceress. In the game, you will take the part of Joe Justin as he attempts to clear himself of a false charge of mutiny. Be sure to read the short story which accompanies the game to get the flavor of this adventure, not to mention some useful clues!
As the game begins Lieutenant Joe Justin has just been convicted of mutiny and murder on the G.F.S. Rheingold, and summarily shoved out of the airlock. Equipped with only a standard-issue spacesuit, you, as Joe Justin, must find a way to return to earth with evidence that will unequivocally prove your innocence. To do this, you must first find and repair a starship, then explore strange new worlds.
— From the Instruction Manual for G.F.S. Sorceress
Gary Bedrosian (Lords of Karma, Empire of the Over-Mind) finished his adventure trilogy with G.F.S Sorceress.
I’ve saved this for last in my 1980 sequence because:
1.) I wanted to end with something I knew would be “substantial”; since Empire of the Over-Mind still remains one of the best games I’ve played in this project, I knew the follow-up would at least be interesting.
2.) The packaging came with “lore” including a short story and a “Naval Officer’s Manual” separate from the instructions, so I knew there would be lots of material to draw from.
3.) This is only sort-of a 1980 game; the author states it was written in 1980 and that’s what I’m using, but the opening title screen for the Apple II version I’m playing gives a copyright of 1981 and most physical copies out there give a copyright of 1982.
In general, I’ve been using date of writing rather than release — the Roger M. Wilcox games I just played, for instance, really only make sense in 1980, and some of the mainframe games like Haunt and Warp never had a “release” at all. Despite that, this feels like a game I can use to bridge the gap to 1981.
As the manual text implies, you start floating in space, but nearby a vessel. The vessel is itself stalled in space and appears to have suffered meteor attacks. I went to a hatch in the middle, used the airlock to go inside and …
… was reminded of the big problem with Empire of the Over-Mind, which is that there are no standard north/south/east/west directions and it makes the world confusing to visualize and map. I thought perhaps things would be better with this game — it even makes sense thematically to be lacking standard orientation in space — but this early room description with five different colors of hatches and three different colors of signs disabused me of the notion. I tried the red hatch first.
The text style somewhat buries the lede, and it took me a bit of processing before I noticed the “SPACE AMOEBOID”.
I’m going to have to get myself oriented, and probably study the external material (in Empire of the Over-Mind the poem that came with the game included essential information, basically the first Infocom-style feelie for an adventure game, and I expect this game to have similar circumstances).
Still, the production value is high and I expect good things — the manual lists six testers. Six! Most games from this era were lucky to get one.
Wilcox’s 8th game (after The Vial of Doom) was originally called The Poseidon Adventure, then renamed to The Upsidedown Adventure, then renamed back to The Poseidon Adventure. For those not familiar with the original movie: a cruise ship gets flipped over by a tsunami, and the passengers who survive the disaster need to escape whilst everything is upside down.
The original TRS-80 file had some corruption near the end, so I played the author’s Windows port this time.
From the original 1972 movie poster made by Mort Künstler. The movie is pretty good — I’d say one of the best disaster movies of the 1970s — although I just learned there’s a 1979 sequel called Beyond the Poseidon Adventure which has 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Also, a brief reminder, since I dunk on the game pretty hard: this was written when Mr. Wilcox was very young and only distributed when he was much older. (I very much appreciate these are available; there’s no other collection of “private games” I know of from the era.) This was a learning experience for him, but it still can be a learning experience for us: what makes a design go wrong?
…
Mr. Wilcox seemed to have fallen into the same trap as Mr. Hassett with Devil’s Palace: he had ambitions to make a more difficult game, but a difficult game is hard to make fun, especially when there are no persistent, timed, or “cross geography” effects. (This game technically has a timer, but it’s just an overall timer where the Poseidon eventually sinks and you die, forcing a game restart.)
You’re in a room, you have an object, and you can either use it to defeat a particular obstacle, or you can combine it with another object to make a new object. That’s it. In general, the only way to make a game with these limits hard is to a.) add lots of potential death b.) add some hard-to-find verbs and c.) hide things in obscure ways. The Poseidon Adventure goes for all three.
(For contrast, the game The Vial of Doom had the “strength” effect that made objects do different things; normally the player couldn’t win a fight against a cobra, but adding the magical effect beforehand changed the outcome.)
You start alone on the ship Posiedon. There are no dead bodies or the like, and since the game later says you are the sole survivor, I assume everyone else was cut off on a different section of the ship. Going “up” leads to the cargo hold at the “bottom” of the ship.
Going “down” leads to a “hatch at the ship’s top”. I admit to being highly stuck here trying to OPEN HATCH and TURN HATCH and the like but you can just GO HATCH to get to an “underwater pocket”.
OPEN HATCH should have said something like “the hatch is already open!” but the game just says “I don’t see how to open such a thing.” This is your regular reminder that a good parser is more about making intelligent responses than just how many words are understood.
My full object list from “easy to reach” objects was: a plastic bag, a metal rod, long thermal undies, a bottle of some liquid, a metal claw, a nitric acid capsule, a screwdriver, a drill, a saw, and a lighter.
Fortunately, the parser isn’t necessarily picky about if you apply a noun to a verb, so I found one useful combination by accident: typing MAKE will cause the nitric acid and bottle to mix to become a bottle of nitroglycerin. I was able to use it (with the lighter) to blow up a toilet and find a wrench and a closed window, whereupon I was very stuck.
I resorted to checking the walkthrough at Gaming After 40. Apparently CONNECT is another verb (not ATTACH, grr) and if you type CONNECT while holding the metal claw and rod you get a crowbar. This is sufficient to open the window and drown when the water from outside rushes in.
Whoops! Fortunately, in my experimentation, I found I could WEAR the plastic bag, and that it was sufficient to prevent drowning. (!!)
Where things really got “interesting” was at the end in a “propeller room”.
Push the button and the propeller chops you to bits. I am unclear why the designers of the ship would place the button in such close proximity to the propeller that it controls, but since I already used a plastic bag as a scuba device, I let it slide. However, I still had no idea what to do. The only items I hadn’t used yet were a drill and a saw; neither were useful here.
I went back to the walkthrough, where I found out I missed a completely unprompted secret wall back in the tool room where I found the drill and saw in the first place.
>LOOK
The north wall looks like it used to have an exit, but was boarded up some time in the past.
sigh
DRILL followed by SAW led me to a secret room with an AXE. Then I was able to take the AXE back to the Propeller Room (well, not exactly, I had to restart the game and redo the sequence since I ran out of time) and chop a hole to victory.
>chop
You’ve chopped a hole in the ceiling, which has bright, yellowish light pouring through.
>go hole
You crawl through the hole out into daylight.
Fantastic! You’re the sole survivor of this “Disaster”!!
…
There is exactly one (1) game to go before I am finished with 1980. Excitement!
Across all adventure games, one common theme amongst the truly profound, mind-bending puzzles I’ve seen has been the idea of repurposing — taking an item, location, character or verb that seems to be designed for one purpose and using it for another. Essentially, for a player to solve the puzzle, the rules of the universe itself need to be expanded.
Examples amongst the All the Adventures project include the final puzzle of Mystery Fun House (where what normally would be an ordinary “informational” item gets put to essential use) and the Wumpus puzzle of Adventure 501 (where something originally used merely for transport becomes a weapon).
The puzzle game Baba is You is based around this idea. The rules of a particular level can be changed by modifying the sentences in the world itself. “You” are normally the small white creature as expressed by the sentence “BABA IS YOU”, but if you push the word “ROCK” to form “ROCK IS YOU” you switch to controlling the rocks (all of them, at once).
The Vial of Doom has a repurposing puzzle near the end which is astounding and does a trick I’ve never seen before.
…
This is Roger M. Wilcox’s seventh game. Sometime after 1980 he distributed it to Usenet (but much earlier than his other games) and there’s even an Interactive Fiction Database entry.
He based on it off his own 25-page short story he wrote a year before, which was “influenced just a teensy weensy bit by Michael Moorcock’s multiverse.”
In many ways, this game was a watershed in my adventure-game-authoring career, as I originally thought the story was way too complicated to make an adventure game out of … until I read an article about Greg Hassett’s “World’s Edge” adventure and turned green with envy and grim with determination. I considered it my first “good” TRS-80 adventure game; it was the 7th I’d written, and 14 more would follow it (15, if you count that Star Trek adventure where you can’t even pick things up). When the IBM PC became available to me in 1983, I ported this game to GWBASIC.
I played a QBASIC derivative of the GWBASIC source.
There’s no motivation or plot to start; the player is supposed to mess around since there’s nothing else to do. Nearby the starting room you find a shovel, and if you dig here you find an underground pyramid with a portal.
Touching the portal leads to a room with a plastic container and a lead box, and opening the lead box leads to the Vial of the game.
Chaos is the bad guy, Law is the good guy; unlike the usual Dungeons and Dragons alignment charts (where it’s possible to be Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good) the Moorcock-verse is a straight Law vs. Chaos opposition which is intense enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page. We’re tasked with destroying the Vial and are on the hunt for a turquoise gem, a fire opal, cobra venom, a basilisk eye, octopus ink, and an alabaster bowl.
The vial ends up being used quite a few times throughout the game. Right from the start after taking the lead box, a mummy blocks the way, but as long as you WEAR VIAL, you can PUNCH MUMMY:
Baam! You made it fly apart!
To get out of the pyramid area, you need to DIG again but must be wearing the vial to have enough strength to dig straight up. However (as the screenshot above warns) you can’t wear the vial for much longer, because if you try to step much farther while wearing the vial, you get consumed by Chaos.
However, the vial is still useful; if you WAVE VIAL you can distract people or get a burst of strength.
You are in a pawn shop. Visible items:
Store clerk. Large dagger. Turquois gem. Sleeping pill.
Obvious exits: south
The clerk wants money for the items, but you can just WAVE VIAL
The clerk is now hypnotized.
and use the five-finger discount method.
The parser is unfortunately very awkward; the game even states upfront “I know the verbs STICK, SWING, and PLUCK” but it’s hard to know where they get used. STICK turns out to be handy for STICK COBRA
Into where (one word)? CONTAINER
Squirt! The container fills with venom, and just as quickly, the cobra awakes!
I admit not to thinking through the above action at all, but simply running through every verb possible before the event happened.
I got stuck on one parser issue enough I had to poke through the source code. In front of a jewelry store there is a guard with a thermos of coffee, and I knew the sleeping pill that I already had lifted from the pawn shop would be useful, but I could not for the life of me apply one to the other. The right sequence turns out to be SWING GUARD. THROW PILL. (That doesn’t sound terrible, but I had went through many permutations of PUT PILL and INSERT PILL already, and PUT is even an understood verb, just not the one the game wants.)
At least the actions on a story level are fun. It’s as if the author built up a number of set pieces and only worried about if it was possible to communicate after the fact; at least you get to pluck an eyeball directly from a basilisk and suck ink from a sleeping octopus.
Getting away from the aforementioned octopus triggers the final battle, right back at where we started the game.
You’re still able to go back here and mop up any missing ingredients, but I was led astray a long time because I assumed the way to win and stop the giant battle was to finish the ritual, and I had no bowl. Being granted “great strength” by Law was the key. Perhaps a better clue would have been to use a longer phrase, like “enormous strength, more than you’ve ever felt before”.
I’ve given enough clues you can theoretically try solving the puzzle yourself before going on.
Picture here for spoiler space; this is from a parody ad Roger M. Wilcox made for the game.
The right action is to dig back down to the pyramid location (remember, we’re back at the start of the game), but rather than entering the pyramid, pick up the pyramid itself, go back up, and throw the pyramid at the Chaos giant.
Whump! Chaos is down! Law wins the fight, and says: Make the mixture here!
This absolutely boggled me; the game took what normally was an enterable location and turned it into an object you can pick up.
After taking down Chaos, the Vial still needs to be destroyed. You find an alabaster bowl in the rubble, which is enough to finish the ritual.
The vial vibrates, getting ready to explode. Oh, by the way — ** YET ** !!
> RUN
You’re on the side of a mountain. Visible items:
Wishing rock.
Obvious exits: up
The vial goes off in a red, Chaotic mushroom cloud.
you have only six (6) seconds until the fireball reaches you!
One more action leads to safety:
Roger M. Wilcox was a teenaged adventure game developer in 1980, just like many others whose work we’ve looked at in our grand tour. Unlike the other developers we’ve seen, his games were originally only distributed to his family and friends. I played his first three games in one go; all three were 10-minutes-or-less endeavors and I figured the next three might be similar but all of them had extra curveballs which forced me to take more time in solving them.
Note that Mr. Wilcox’s website has the games; he has Windows ports for all of them and TRS-80 versions of most of them, but I was unable to get Space Traveller running in its TRS-80 incarnation. (The other two games I had no such issue with.)
I should also add while games #1, #2, and #3 were all survive-and-escape endeavors, the ones here all are Treasure Hunts where the player is tasked to gather any item marked with asterisks *LIKE THIS* and then type SCORE.
Space Traveller
Wilcox’s game #4 starts you on Planet X, which consists of just two rooms, one where you drop any treasures you find.
Earth isn’t much larger; when I first landed all I could find was an abandoned hat shop and a single hat.
I next flew to Planet Q which consisted entirely of a maze.
Mapping a maze like the one above with only one inventory item is a definite chore; the only way to differentiate rooms is to make a “second-level” connection, like realizing going north from a particular place goes back to the starting room and assume that only is true for one room. The only problem with this technique is the assumption can be wrong (and in fact, it is wrong for this particular maze). After exhaustive mapping and remapping I found nothing, and was truly stumped enough to poke into the source code. (To be fair, the TRS-80 code crashing on me made me suspect I hit a bug rather than a puzzle.)
I found I needed to SHAKE HAT:
INSIDE IT IS A SIX-FOOT SHOVEL!
The remainder of the game involved applying DIG in pretty much every room, and finding things all over the place. This included a DEAD BODY and an OPEN GRAVE and when putting the DEAD BODY in the GRAVE you apparently become the corpse’s buddy and get a PLATINUM SWORD.
Nuclear Submarine
This is the first of the Wilcox set that really seemed to reach past being a programming exercise, and while I finished without any source code dives, I was definitely stumped in a few places.
Unlike Nuclear Sub, there’s no deep attempt at a “realistic” sub environment here, but the game does make the player wear a scuba suit and pass through an airlock before going outside before arriving at a cave where most of the treasure is, so there’s a layer of atmosphere lacking in the previous Wilcox games.
Getting past this puzzle required throwing a trampoline to the bottom of the cliff.
Structurally, the game is also more interesting than #1-#4 in the re-use of objects. You use a speargun early to kill a shark (just SHOOT SHARK and that’s that) but shortly after you need to break a mirror, and the empty gun works as a pummelling device. Rather more oddly, a copper key used early to open a hatch in the sub also gets used to open a gate. There were a few times where I had dropped an item because I thought I was done with it but had to return to get it (there’s an inventory limit just like all the other games of this period — and I really do mean all of them, I can’t think of a single one that omitted having a limit, even just by accident, unless you count games which don’t have an inventory at all).
The gate I just mentioned is also rusty, and the typical solution is to apply some oil, but I had none. I went back and forth many times here before plowing through my Standard Verb List ™, which is a list of verbs I’ve seen many times and use whenever the going gets tough. I hit paydirt with SEARCH and ended up applying the verb to every room until I found a secret room with the predicted oil can.
There’s one extra wrinkle: just finding the treasures isn’t enough.
Maybe two wrinkles, given the treasures are mostly “fake” items.
The ship won’t start, so you need some fuel. Specifically, you need to grab a piece of plutonium (make sure you use tongs!) and take it back to the ship’s reactor.
Nuclear Submarine felt the most solid of the Wilcox adventures #1 to #6, and it’s better than some games from the time that were sold commercially.
India Palace
IN A SMALL TOWN IN INDIA, YOU HAVE HEARD ABOUT A NEARBY PALACE THAT IS DESERTED AND SUPPOSEDLY HAUNTED. IT HAS NOT BEEN CLEARED OF ITS TREASURES, HOWEVER. THAT JOB IS YOURS.
On the screenshot above, OPEN DOOR doesn’t work.
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO “OPEN” SOMETHING.
This threw me for an enormous loop; almost every game from the era has open as a verb, even if it doesn’t work. It felt analogous to having a north/south/east/west direction system where north and south weren’t recognized. Getting by felt less like solving a puzzle and more winning a struggle against the computer’s source code. Eventually, I used my Standard Verb Lists again and KNOCK won out.
CREEEEEEEEK!
During all this, I discovered an unusual property of the parser — the game remembers what object you last typed, so if you type a verb with no object, it continues with the same object. That is, if you try OPEN DOOR (with the failure noted above) you can then run through all the verbs in the game like HIT without bothering with the object.
CAN’T HIT A DOOR!
If you then use a verb intended to have no object, like just typing W for WEST, the game will generally still parse the action just fine.
This nearly sounds like a feature, except the property also triggers when typing an unrecognized word, and then the game will just keep complaining it doesn’t know what a “DOR” is until you fix it (leading to weird situations where you’re just trying to go west but the game keeps saying it doesn’t know what a DOR is).
Inside, there’s a wall with the magic word DAY-OH. Using it sent me to a small area with hiking boots and a flying carpet. I could use DAY-OH again to get back to where I started, but I was (again) massively stuck on a stone wall.
I eventually had to do a source code dive to realize DAY-OH worked in another (completely random and unprompted) location. I got a MINER’S PICK there which let me dig through the wall.
I don’t have a lot of interesting ideas to report here other than a TECHNOLOGICAL PHASER is one of the treasures, and it’s possible to re-use the pick later by tying it to a rope and making a tightrope over some acid. This game otherwise mostly went back to the simplicity of #4.
There’s a novel typo at the end this time, at least? Usually it’s misspelled as CONGRADULATIONS.
One Last General Observation
Notice from the ending screenshots that games #4 and #6 had an “overall point total”, like Adventure, Zork, and pretty much every other adventure game of the day. Game #5 instead simply listed how many treasures you had out of the full count of treasures. The latter seems like a superior method, since it means the player doesn’t have to guess how many treasures are left based on a percentage or other score, yet this is the only place in 1980 I recall seeing it. It’s like the author had a brief flicker of innovation (however minor) that was immediately snuffed out by his next game.
Roger Wilcox has two more games from 1980 (The Vial of Doom and The Poseidon Adventure); I will write about both of them as standalone posts.
Aardvark gives us one last game for 1980, this time by Bob Retelle (who previously wrote Trek Adventure).
From a 1983 Aardvark catalog. It states the game was plotted by Rodger Olsen, Bob Retelle, and “someone you don’t know”. We definitely won’t know if there’s no name!
I was looking forward to this one, given Trek Adventure was quite solid even given the minimalism. This game, alas, mostly just made me grumpy.
It starts just like Trek Adventure (and Deathship) on a vehicle headed to disaster.
Unlike those two games, the goal is not to rescue the ship, but merely to escape. This was part of the reason I was originally baffled; I spent a while trying to “fix” the problem, leading me down entirely the wrong path. The game constantly reminds you about rising core temperature
and even though it turns out time is relatively ample, getting a message of imminent death every 10 turns threw off my normally patient adventurer demeanor.
The first major puzzle involved getting a leaking battery (whilst wearing gloves) and pouring the battery acid on a broken hatch. This led to a flooded compartment, going down was death.
The right action here was HOLD BREATH. I had sussed out an identical action in Savage Island Part 1, so theoretically I could have found this on my own, but keep in mind this is still with the Aardvark two-letter-only parser where communicating anything at all is rough.
After HOLD BREATH you can go down into a flooded compartment to find a locker and a chest. If you open either one, you get no description, but you can then either LOOK LOCKER or LOOK CHEST to find out what’s inside…
…and then die again. HOLD BREATH only gives you one turn of leeway. So you have to HOLD BREATH, GO DOWN into the flooded compartment, OPEN LOCKER, go back up, HOLD BREATH again, GO DOWN again, see what’s in the locker (an underwater lantern and a box of washers), and forgetfully try to then OPEN CHEST and die from drowning yet again.
Wait, that maybe shouldn’t be “you” there, but it was sure “me”. This was incredibly frustrating; it turns out the CHEST has SCUBA GEAR, and once the player has the gear they’re safe from drowning.
From here, the game had stripped off pretty much all resistance I had to checking for hints. I have zero regrets, because the next puzzle was even worse.
Would you think to … LOOK UP?
I suppose the puddle was supposed to be a clue, but the action is entirely out of left field for text adventures.
After knowing the pipes are there, you can BREAK PIPES with a SLEDGEHAMMER which causes the submarine to flood completely (this is why you needed the scuba gear). You’re informed all the electrical systems are now shot, but the meltdown has fortunately now stopped.
If the PIPES were in the room description to begin with, this would have been a conceptually cool puzzle: in order to prevent reactor meltdown, we have to destroy something else and completely change the environment. And it really is changed, because now inside the sub there is a MORAY EEL and ELECTRIC EEL (you can see previously both outside in the ship’s periscope).
The effect of trying to get past the moray eel.
You can pick up the electric eel as long as you have rubber gloves (whether this is remotely plausible in real life, I have no idea) and then you can use the electric eel to scare away to moray eel. This isn’t quite so unreasonable, except for the verb you need to use.
That’s SHOO EEL, and this may be the only time in a text adventure game I ever see the verb SHOO. (ADD: Andrew Plotkin and Matt W. are theorizing other options in the comments, given SH is the recognized verb. SHOCK definitely works.)
Past the EEL is the torpedo room. If you’ve fired a torpedo before shutting down the power (you just declare FIRE TORPEDO, there doesn’t seem to be a button or anything), you’re able to go through the torpedo tube to the outside and escape.
So, in summary: HOLD BREATH, LOOK UP, and SHOO EEL. Nuclear Sub had some good ideas, but it needed a better parser and world model to pull them off.
I was still impressed by the player causing the entire map to get immersed underwater. This kind of dramatic change is very rare, but is the sort of dynamism that makes adventure games interesting.
I also like how the map felt very tight and modern; nothing tangled or sprawling, and it is easy to remember where everything is.
Joel Mick and James Taranto return for one last game. By my best reckoning, this is the first adventure game ever made that involves traveling back in time. (Krell Software’s Time Traveller is more a strategy game, and TimeQuest didn’t come out until 1981. There were also no Dr. Who adventure games until 1981. )
The first two Odyssey games (#1, #2) both had prior background of the player character that isn’t fully disclosed right away. In game #1, the plot didn’t move at all until the player chooses to kill a royal messenger; in game #2, the player rummages through a dead person, takes their stuff, and steals a plane.
The second game, in particular, was fairly grating, whereas the character for this game, while also cheerfully amoral, was a lot more fun to play.
My theory is that Odyssey #2 did nothing to establish the character as the type of person who might steal a plane. It started with a default “the player is you” but then expected some acts that “you” might not normally consider taking. Odyssey #3, on the other hand, establishes the player character as some sort of absent-minded mad scientist before the main action starts: a robbery spree across time. Additionally, “robbery spree across time” just feels like something a character who is more Chaotic Good than Lawful Evil would do — akin to the Time Bandits movie mentioned above. (There’s also a level of PC wickedness that’s too much for me, even given a distinctly well-drawn character, but we haven’t reached any game like that in the All the Adventures series yet.)
You start in a bedroom with no other context (see above), but given the circumstances later, the player character is just being forgetful. Stepping north leads to the first obstacle of the game.
After getting by the mouse (using a furry little kitten) there’s a STRANGE LABORATORY with a LOCKED DOOR, DINGUS, TEST TUBES, and TINY WHITE MICE.
>GET MICE
AFTER WHAT HAPPENED OUT THERE, I’D RATHER NOT!
The DINGUS is described as having a battery clip, and if you ATTACH BATTERY to it, you are told
NOW I RECOGNIZE WHAT THAT DINGUS IS!
and it turns into a TIME MACHINE. The time machine has a black and a white button; the white button jumps to the “present” while the black button jumps between different periods.
Each period has a single treasure you can acquire. A fair number of them are in the open, not even designed as a “puzzle” really — for example, in London, there’s a costume (and you are told explicitly it looks like it’d be fun to wear); if you wear it you find a Shakespeare manuscript inside.
What puzzles do exist are relatively minor; the building that contains the TRS-80 prototype in the screenshot above has a guard who is open to bribery.
Where I had the most difficulty was not nabbing treasures, but getting them to their “home”. I had every single treasure before I could reach the place they needed to go — a locked door in the laboratory — but since a treasure is required to get the key, this seemed to be quite intentional sequencing.
This was — by a multiplier — more fun than most of the “easy” games from 1980, and I think it came down to the actions being performed; bribing a guard as an action on its own is mundane, bribing a guard to steal the TRS-80 prototype from 1977 is kind of hilarious. As another example, the treasure in Germany is a Gutenberg Bible; however, instead of stealing one, you have to fix a machine and print a brand-new one for yourself.
If you’d like to try Treasure Acquisition Journey Through Time for yourself, the game is on IF-Archive (unfortunately I don’t have an online play link, so you’ll need to use an emulator, there’s guide on how to do that here).
Aardvark released six adventure games in 1980; so far we’ve seen Trek Adventure, Deathship, Escape from Mars, and Pyramid.
Vampire Castle is (as far as I can tell) Mike Bassman’s only adventure game. It was, as usual, originally written for Ohio Scientific computers, and (also as usual) later ported to the Commodore 64.
From the Aardvark November 1981 catalog.
Rather unusually, there was also a MS-DOS port.
The sign says “the vampire wakes up at midnight”.
I went ahead and played the Ohio Scientific version as I did with the prior games, but I should note while the “concealed goal” idea mentioned in the instructions above seems cool conceptually, in practice here it’s bizarre; I’m in a game called Vampire Castle, I wonder if there might be some enemy I might need to defeat, one that likes to hang out in coffins?
This is also a quite straightforward and easy game, where I only got stopped twice (once from parser trouble, once from a genuinely interesting bit where I had already used up a resource). Hence, I think it’s an ideal test-bed for something I’ve wanted to try for a while: make a map not of the game, but of the inter-relation between puzzles. (If you desperately need a traditional map — and I’m not going to begrudge you because a fair number of visitors to this blog come for the maps — CASA has you covered.)
Now, this is not an novel enterprise; game designers make this kind of thing all the time[1], but I haven’t seen it as much from the player end, and I figured it might be an interesting device in my arsenal to have if I’m stuck on a game (perhaps allowing the ability to use structural solving, for instance).
To go there, I need to explicitly spoil the entire sequence of the game, so veer away now if for some reason you plan to play this first. (You can play the MSDOS version online at this link; it has some differences from the original but is close enough.)
Here’s a public domain spooky moon picture for spoiler space.
The game starts in an east-west hall with a fireplace, a library, and a parapet accessible. You also find an axe and sledgehammer in the same hall. Entering the fire leads to being burned to death, and GO PARAPET leads to falling, so those puzzles aren’t solvable right away. The library has a scroll indicating not all exits are obvious, and PUSH BOOKCASE opens an exit down.
The down-exit goes to a secret passage with a rope, a flask of oil, a bucket, and a crate. The axe can be applied to break the crate and get some wooden stakes.
The rope is sufficient to go to the parapet and TIE ROPE. This opens up an area with a key, holy water, and an oar. You can get the holy water with the bucket.
Once obtaining the water, you can DROP WATER at the fireplace to extinguish the flames. Inside the fireplace is a torch but nothing else; however, you can BREAK FIREPLACE to open a secret passage[2].
The hidden passage leads to a boat, which you can row as long as you have the oar. Then there’s a tapestry nailed to an overhang. The overhang is too high to reach, but if you haven’t destroyed the crate yet, you can drop it and use it as a step-stool to reach the overhang and remove the nails (using the sledgehammer, which apparently doubles as a regular hammer). This lets you pull down the tapestry and get to a secret passage[3].
There’s then a rusty door which requires oil to get through, followed by a room with a coffin. Opening the coffin (using the key) reveals the vampire; if you’ve got the wooden stakes you can then KILL VAMPIRE and win.
Only having the parser understand the first two letters of each word wrecks havoc on one’s spelling.
That’s the setup, here’s my diagram:
Dotted lines indicate a resource is used up.
I’m not happy with it yet; it looks like something meant to be read by computers rather than people, it doesn’t lead to any extra insights, and on a more complicated game this is going to turn into a nightmarish tangle. So, I need to keep experimenting.
Maybe:
1.) Rather than insisting on an arrow for everything, have some “distance connections” indicated by matching numbers (like on some complex text adventure geographical maps).
2.) Make the objects smaller and more like unified lists, so the actual puzzle-events have more space.
3.) Mark the crate in a special way indicating it’s possible to waste it before it can be used (that is, if you break it before using it as a step-stool, the game is soft-locked).
Any suggestions along these lines are helpful, I might take another crack at this soon. In the meantime, I’m down to 7 games to go before finishing off 1980!
…
One of my commentators managed to crack the case.
From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the Milo Winter illustrated edition.
I had been stumped with this “crossword puzzle”.
IT SAYS:
ACROSS
1. SLEIGHT OF HAND
2. TYPE OF PUZZLE
THE REST IS TORN OFF.
I assumed (in fact correctly) that 1. indicated “MAGIC” and 2. indicated “WORD”, but I tried things like SAY MAGIC WORD with no luck. I was parsing the clue slightly wrong.
ACROSS
1. MAGIC
2. WORD
It’s indicating that ACROSS is the MAGIC WORD. So at the RAVINE where I was stuck, I just needed to SAY ACROSS.
This led me to some COAL. I was also able to DROP my LADDER here to get over to a *CAVE PAINTING* (another treasure), but obviously the coal (in its starting form) didn’t quite qualify. There was no magic machine as in Zork to process the coal, but it occured to me this might be a situation like Pyramid of Doom where the coal was just surrounding something else. Going over to the ocean and typing SWIM OCEAN gave the coal enough of a bath to get a *DIAMOND*. UPDATE: It looks like the bath part was unnecessary, just LOOK COAL is enough to cause it to switch to a diamond.
I also mentioned last time not being able to get anything off a newsstand; I was misunderstanding the situation and it’s possible to GO NEWSSTAND as if it were a room to get a copy of Hustler. There’s more detail in the comments, so I’m going to just refer to that and that say the entire business is optional.
From last time, we had a dilemma where the young officer Fallow cursed out the King of England and in so doing condemned himself. The punishment as given by law is death, but the captain is allowed to pardon an offense. However, the execution will hurt morale (for obvious reasons) and a pardon will as well (as it appears that the law is not enforced).
We had landed on an isolated bay on mainland France so Fallow could attend the burial of his brother, and pulled him aside after out of earshot. What’s interesting here is while the game explicitly gives execute and pardon as choices, the game hints there might be “another way”. This is related to an idea I laid out while writing about Star Trek: 25th Anniversary — that an issue with choice-based moral decisions is that in reality, even knowing there is a choice at all can be difficult.
I had surveyed all of you, the readers, to give me responses, and they fell into a few categories.
Category #1: Pardon
“I’ve decided to pardon you. The men will understand, in the circumstances.”
pardon the boy.”
Two people went with the given “pardon” option even though the game was hinting at a hidden “third option”; I find this particularly interesting in that even knowing about the third option this one is still tempting. A potential problem I see with the “hidden choice” mechanic is the feeling that once found, that choice is always better than the other two. Based on events later in the story, it is mechanically, but that doesn’t mean it’s still morally (by whatever metric the player is roleplaying as) the best choice.
Category #2: Escape
LET YOU ESCAPE
“I’ve decided to shoot you with an unloaded or empty pistol. When you hear my gunshot, fall down and play dead or feign or fake your death. Do not move again until we have left. From there you are on your own. Good luck lad. Now, I order you to run.”
Both of these are understood the same way.
Note that the complex plan in the second doesn’t quite work in the physical situation — the captain already has loaded pistols, so essentially this would require going back in time and changing the setup. I find this one fascinating from a game design angle: suppose you had a parser that genuinely understood the whole thing as typed, what would be the optimal response? Would saying “your guns are already loaded” be acceptable here? Or maybe it’s possible to “retroactively” change reality — Schrödinger’s gun, so to speak, which is neither loaded nor unloaded until it becomes clear what the player’s intent is?
This may also indicate simply that the distance between choice-points in a traditional CYOA structure might be a little too large to pull this sort of thing off — if all the preparation steps were simulated like a traditional text adventure game (>PICK UP PISTOLS, >LOAD PISTOLS, etc.) it would have been possible to prepare the complicated scenario.
Category #3: Doesn’t Quite Make Sense Given the Scenario
MAROON FALLOW
I actually typed this when I first played the game! But if you go back and read carefully, this is on the French mainland, so “maroon” doesn’t make sense as an idea here. Again, I’m curious what the optimal response here is (“But we’re on the mainland, sir. Are you feeling ok?”)
Category #4: Maybe Doesn’t Give Enough Instruction
FAKE YOUR DEATH
FAKE YOUR EXECUTION
Neither of these are understood, but in even in an optimal understand-everything parser, I’m not sure they ought to be? It doesn’t really convey to Fallow what to do right at that moment. Something like “What exactly are you proposing, sir?” or that like.
Category #5: Indicating Future Action in an Ambiguous Way
“…sentence you to death, but allow you to escape.”
Is this indicating the captain will be giving a later chance of escape somehow? This option is fascinating because it seems to want to plan events in the future, but in such a way that it’s not guaranteed particular things will hold up (perhaps the intent is to have him escape by boarding the boat, but he might already be restrained by another crewmember at that point — is the captain going to somehow wrangle that to not happen?) The game incidentally parses this like Category #2.
For all of these, it helps to find the “third way” if the dialogue about “what if he tries to escape?” is visible. In the game that text is on the previous screen, and I was actually quite baffled. Not just in the usual puzzle-solving way, but with the existential dread of anything I could possibly type being an option. It was a unique experience. It made me wonder even if game responsiveness and AI evolved to the point we could have a full “holodeck”, would the player even “play” in a way that led to a responsive story? Does the ability to do anything still require a tutorial?
Robert Lafore himself discussed this puzzle in a later essay, and it definitely seemed intended players might miss the solution the first time through the game.
You have to decide whether to hang him or not. If you do, the crew thinks you’re being too harsh. If you don’t, they think you’re soft. Either way, in the big sea battle at the end of the story, they abandon their posts. It requires a little imagination to figure out the right thing to do. It’s a third choice in a situation that seems to have only two choices. Most people figure it out eventually. That’s one of the tricky parts of writing interactive fiction: The decisions the reader—the hero—is called upon to make have to be hard enough to be challenging but not so hard that the story becomes frustrating. The idea is that the third or fourth time the reader faces the situation he suddenly sees the solution, smites himself on the forehead, and cries. “Why didn’t I think of that before!
— Softline, September/October 1983
I’m not quite sure how optimal this really is. Keith Palmer mentioned a contemporary review…
…wherein the reviewer gave up and just hung Fallow because he was frustrated. This is the meta-frustration of lack of communication, not the in-universe recreation of the captain’s dilemma.
Before I go into spoiling the rest of the story, I should mention Jimmy Maher has converted the entire thing to Choicescript so you can just click your way through, rather than type. There are still some differences — I’ll get into those later — but the most significant puzzle you’ve already had spoiled (assuming you’ve read to this point) so you’re fine playing the converted version.
The structure is in three parts:
The Burial of Fallow (Chapter 1, 2 and 3)
In addition to the events above, the player has to choose who to promote to be the new Lieutenant. They are explicitly given two choices:
Lt. Beagle, who is fiercely loyal but sometimes brash in battle.
Lt. Wiley, who is very competent but also ambitious and angling for the captain’s job.
Either choice can work out; the next part of the story includes two incidents, one where it’s better to have Beagle, and one where it’s better to have Wiley, and the player needs to be aware enough when a particular action is a bad fit.
The Spanish Galleon and the Small French Ship (Chapter 4 and 5)
In the next chapter the Impetuous comes across a Spanish treasure ship, but because the ship is near a fort, attacking it requires a daring plan.
“NOW,” SAID WALTON, THINKING OUT LOUD, “IT WOULD BE A BLOW TO SPAIN IF WE CAPTURED THE TREASURE, AND THE PRIZE-MONEY WOULD BE CONSIDERABLE. BUT THE RISK IS HIGH. ASSUMING, HOWEVER, THAT WE DID DECIDE TO ATTACK, WE WOULD ROW IN AT NIGHT IN THREE OF THE SHIP’S BOATS. YOU, MR DASHER, WOULD LEAD ONE PARTY, I WOULD LEAD ANOTHER, AND LT WILEY WOULD TAKE THE THIRD. THAT WOULD LEAVE YOU, MR STAYSON, HERE WITH THE SHIP.”
(Replace “Walton” with the name the player chose, and “Wiley” with “Beagle” as appropriate.)
The choice here is simple to attack or pass on by.
If the player has Wiley, this mission is as success; if the player has Beagle, he will shout “Death to the Spanish!” early and spoil the plan.
…
Later, the captain has orders to steer clear of all encounters and meet the fleet. The Impetuous encounters a French ship pursuing an American one.
“SHE’S CHASING THE AMERICAN, BY GOD,” LT DASHER SAID. “AND SHE’LL CATCH THEM SOON ENOUGH AT THAT RATE. LET’S GO AFTER THEM, SIR!”
“WE CAN’T. AS YOU KNOW OUR ORDERS FORBID US TO ENGAGE THE ENEMY FOR ANY REASON.”
“I WAS FORGETTING, SIR.”
“IF WE ATTACKED HER, AND THE ADMIRALTY FOUND OUT, IT WOULD MEAN A COURT-MARTIAL FOR ME.”
AND YET, WALTON THOUGHT, WOULD THE ADMIRALTY FIND OUT? ONLY THE SENIOR OFFICERS–DASHER, STAYSON, AND WILEY–KNEW THE CONTENTS OF THE ORDERS.”
If you made Wiley a senior officer, attacking here is a bad idea — he will report your behavior to the admiralty. Beagle, as the loyal one, will not.
This gives a chance to get treasure by using either officer — if Wiley, the Spanish vessel, if Beagle, the French one. Of course, a player in the midst of the game isn’t aware of the structure, so they might attack the Spanish Galleon even if they’re aware it could be a bad idea, just because of concern this might be the only way to get treasure (this was, ahem, me in my first playthrough).
BUT AS THE AMERICAN SHIP VANISHED OVER THE HORIZON WALTON REMEMBERED–WITH A SUDDEN SENSE OF FOREBODING–THE CALCULATING LOOK IN LT WILEY’S EYES.
The Battle of the Fleets (Chapter 6 and 7)
“NOW, I’LL EXPLAIN THE SITUATION.” ADMIRAL WORMWOOD UNROLLED A LARGE CHART ACROSS HIS DESK. “OUR FRIGATES HAVE SIGHTED THE COMBINED FLEETS OF FRANCE AND SPAIN PUTTING OUT FROM THE HARBOR OF FERROL, HERE. WITH THE ADDITION OF YOUR ‘IMPETUOUS’ TO THE FLEET WE HAVE 27 SHIPS. SUPERIOR BRITISH SEAMANSHIP SHOULD ENABLE US TO DEFEAT THE 40 OR SO SHIPS THE ENEMY WILL SEND AGAINST US, ALTHOUGH THEY ARE GENERALLY LARGER VESSELS, AS YOU KNOW.
THE COST MAY BE HEAVY, BUT THE FATE OF ENGLAND–AND INDEED THE WORLD–HANGS IN THE BALANCE. I NEED NOT TELL YOU THAT ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN TO DO HIS DUTY. LET US HOPE THAT WE WILL MEET AGAIN, ON THE DECK OF A VANQUISHED ENEMY.”
The finale is where the captain meets with Admiral Wormwood, and the player gets reminded of any mistakes made in previous chapters. Here is some of the actual BASIC source code.
5160 A$=” THAT YOU ARE HAVING CONSIDERABLE
TROUBLE WITH DISCIPLINE ABOARD.#
#I’M AFRAID THAT’S TRUE, SIR. EVER SINCE I ”
5170 GOSUB2000
5180 IF VF=1 PRINT”HAD TO HANG”
5190 IF VF=2 PRINT”PARDONED”
5200 IF VF=3 PRINT”HAD TO SHOOT”
5210 A$=”POOR MIDSHIPMAN FALLOW THEY’VE BEEN OUT OF CONTROL.
THEY’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO ACCEPT THE “:GOSUB2000
5220 IF VF=1 OR VF=3 PRINT”HARSHNESS”
5230 IF VF=2 PRINT”LENIENCEY
–IT MUST HAVE SEEMED LIKE FAVORITISM TO THEM–”
5240 A$=”OF MY DECISION.#
#LET’S HOPE THEIR INTRANSIGENCE DOES NOT PROVE FATAL,#
THE ADMIRAL SAID.”:GOSUB2000
Then the battle begins in earnest, as the Impetuous faces off against “towering masts” akin to a “giant forest”.
“WE HAD BETTER BACK OUR SAILS, SIR,” STAYSON SAID. “TO WAIT FOR THE REST OF THE FLEET TO CATCH UP WITH US. OTHERWISE WE’LL HAVE ALL THE ENEMY BROADSIDES TURNED ON US AT ONCE.”
“BACK OUR SAILS? AND SHOW FEAR IN THE FACE OF THE ENEMY? NEVER!” CRIED LT DASHER. “I SAY ATTACK! DAMN THE ODDS!”
The best result comes from attacking right away, but it only works if the ship is at full strength — no hits to morale or people lost during the Spanish Galleon attack.
“MAY I SAY THAT IT WAS MAGNIFICENT, THE WAY YOU WENT AFTER THE ENEMY PRACTICALLY SINGLE-HANDED. A STERLING EXAMPLE FOR US ALL. I WOULDN’T BE SURPRISED IF YOU’D JUST WON YOURSELF A KNIGHTHOOD, AS WELL AS THE UNDYING GRATITUDE AND RESPECT OF YOUR COUNTRYMEN.”
If waiting, it’s still possible to have made a mistake and still survive — another ship comes in and steals the glory, but at least you’re not sunk.
WALTON’S CAREER WAS INDEED RUINED, AND BECAUSE OF HIS REGRETABLE FAILURE TO ACQUIRE ANY PRIZE-MONEY, HE WAS FORCED TO BECOME AN ITINERENT PEDLER. HE DIED OF THE POX IN AN OBSCURE CHELSEA ROOMING-HOUSE IN 1837.
…
There’s other small events in between the ones above; the steward occasionally comes by to offer wine or dinner; Stayson has the occasional question about sails. Some of the type-in prompts are definitely designed for open roleplaying. When attacking the Spanish galleon, you can say something to inspire the crew (but your words get lost in the din of combat, so the game even is clear as to the fact it had no “in game” effect). The game even encourages swearing at one point:
7035 D$=”
#1, ASTONISHED BY THE SPIRIT WITH WHICH THE
ENEMY SHIPS ATTACKED, UTTERED THE SALTIEST OATH
HE KNEW: #”
7040 GOSUB2000:GOSUB1000
7044 IFLI/2-FIX(LI/2)=0 A$=
” #I COULD SWEAR BETTER THAN THAT WHEN I WAS A WEE LAD,#
MUTTERED #2 TO HIMSELF.”:GOTO7046
(#1 is the captain’s name, #2 is either BEAGLE or WILEY depending.)
There’s also a nice moment talking with the Admiral where you seem to be prompted with for a THANK YOU, but you need to remember this is chain of command, so either THANK YOU, SIR or THANK YOU, ADMIRAL is the appropriate phrase. You get berated for getting this wrong (but not in a way that affects the story arc). I admit being rather pleased to getting the “SIR” in the first time around.
Even though ‘Impetuous’ has its share of communication issues, I’d say it made a noble try at open-ended player interaction, even more open-ended than either parser or choice have aspired to. Nearly 40 years later, it feels like a map to some hidden shell — covering new possible worlds of gameplay — yet to be cracked open.
Title graphic from the Apple II version of the game. Via Mobygames.
Renga in Blue 
