Archive for April 2021
I’m not sure the ! mark is appropriate there, but neither is a period mark. Maybe an interrobang (‽).
Fairly shortly after I made my last post, I got by another puzzle, and then the game crashed with an “unhandled exception error”. I tried a different Mac emulator; I tried a different sequence of events; I tried downloading a fresh version of the game. At the moment, the Mac version of Forbidden Planet (Utopia) is busted, so I had to switch to TRS-80.
From the manual, via Macintosh Garden. I guess I’m never making it to Utopia.
I went back to where I was before and did find two small differences 1.) the location with a pair of creatures next to one of the ogres is entirely absent and 2.) a “hole” as described as being on top of the mountain is missing.
I think the hole at the top of the mountain is intended as an extra hint for a puzzle I’ll explain later, although it sidetracked me quite a while as I attempted to work out ways to survive going in or typing a rope to something that would let me climb in. (No addition to a game world is neutral; something may be intended to help, but can serve to distract to enough of an extent that it actually makes things worse.)
The puzzle I solved was at the location above. I decided to SWIM RIVER. I had done so before, apparently, but forgot. Normally you get dragged to the bottom of the river (making me assume at the time it was a dead end) but if you happen to be carrying the log, it lets you cross safely. (It took me multiple iterations before I realized that’s really what happened.)
In the TRS-80 version, here’s what’s on the other side:
Long anticipation for … advertising! At least that’s not the only thing. There’s a paper that says
ross the lake. Price for this service is 9 gold coins.
Combining this with the incomplete message from a book I mentioned last time:
Summon the Guardian of This Land and He Will Transport You Across the lake. Price for this service is 9 gold coins.
You might notice from the Macintosh screenshot I blew a gold coin already giving it to a centaur so it would go away. Whoops. The right action was to note that since the centaur drinks from the well sometimes, and the river is poisoned, you can transfer some water over:
Past the information on the paper is a swamp with an alligator who needs a highly specific verb.
I know WRESTLE was required in Haunt. I think there was one other game I’ve played that needed it but I’m not remembering which.
Then there’s an extremely messy scene involving a pedestal with an amphora on it. A spear trap nails you if you’re not careful, and an asp nails you if you’re not careful after that. Even if you are careful you can just die.
To explain, the bat from last time and the asp here are set to attack and kill at random. By “at random” that can mean “the first moment you see them”, meaning it is impossible to react and you have no choice but to die.
I found this the most baffling part of the game, and ended up just letting Dale Dobson’s walkthrough guide me through it. Let me just quote this one:
Dealing with the asp stumped me for quite a while. Removing the amulet and working in the dark seemed to inhibit its attack for a few moves, buying some time, but I was still dying on a regular basis. I tried to use the bowl to pour some of the poisonous river water into the amphora before shattering it, but that didn’t work. I thought perhaps the alligator would take out the snake, but they’re both more interested in attacking the player than each other. I tried to shoot the asp with the Disruptor and the crossbow, multiple times, missing on every attempt. I tried to THROW STICK, hoping it would take the asp with it, but it always just dropped the asp on the floor or ground, where it promptly attacked. What I finally worked out was that we can leave the Shrine quickly and THROW ASP / IN SWAMP. Whew!
Your services are most appreciated.
This gets you a stash of 7 coins. Combined with the one gold coin (that you have to not give to the centaur) this makes for 8 coins. The 9th one as required by the instructions isn’t hard to find but it requires escaping the cave first.
I originally assumed escape would be “through”, but no, it’s way back at the start. Remember what I said about the small hole at the top of the mountain being a hint? If you LOOK UP in the starting room you can see a hole in the ceiling.
I really ought to not be getting tripped up by that any more. LOOK UP has been a thing; it showed up in Nuclear Sub for instance. It’s still very much an anti-pattern against normal gameplay but I should still toss it somewhere in my How to Beat Moderately Unfair Text Adventures toolbox.
Anyway, knowing there was a hole up and remembering my fussing about with a crossbow bolt attached to a rope, I finally knew where that was meant to be used, but I still had to start the whole section over again. You see, the inventory limit is *very* tight and I had the crossbow outside of the collapsed cave. Time for another restart!
The logistics here are cruel. You have to heavily leverage the fact the cave only collapses when you walk farther in the entrance. You can bring a crossbow, bolt, and rope inside, and drop them at that entrance, and then go back and retrieve any other materials you need. Also, once you’ve finally used the crossbow appropriately and climbed out of the cave, you find out the rope has broken and so it was a one-way trip. That means you also can’t take any unessential materials on the cave expedition, like the conch shell. The upshot is you can only bring in exactly the objects needed for solving puzzles, because there are enough items you find that need to be retrieved (including a pickaxe) that you otherwise won’t have the space to take everything back out of the cave.
(In practical essence, I get the impression the author was thinking from their perspective rather than the player, here. The player doesn’t know which items are essential and has to carry multiple loads if they’re taking everything. Once you know exactly which items get used where the logistics aren’t as bad.)
Whew. After getting out, the rest is pretty straightforward as long as you understand the “summon the guardian” message. There’s one uninvestigated boulder — the pickaxe works — and it yields the 9th gold coin. Then you can go back to the river where you crash landed and blow the conch horn safely.
The no-win situations where an enemy reacts before you can even solve a puzzle were clearly a misstep. I found the inventory logistics to be the second-biggest pain. Looming over everything, though, was the parser. It just wasn’t quite adequate for the task. We had USE RAG to mean “break the glass tube that is already slotted in with this rag”. We had the trick where the game breaks a command into two parts
FIRE DISRUPTOR
At what? Like: “AT TREE”
AT OGRE
but that counts as two commands, and at least twice I died to the bat because I got the first command in but not the second. (I later discovered that just typing AT BAT works to zap it.) We needed to convey actions like scooping water from a river and transferring it to a well; of taking an asp and tossing it specifically directed into a nearby swamp. The parser made conveying them incredibly awkward. I got the strong sense Demas was working with good ideas and a nicely dynamic sense of puzzle design, but the actual implementation reduced the strength of the experience.
There’s still one more Demas game to go, as advertised: entering the city across the river. I’ll be saving it for closer to the end of 1981; it does seem to have squeaked into the year but only at the very end, plus that gives me time to diagnose my Mac woes and see if I can at least go back to nice graphics for the sequel.
Had to give up on this one after reaching the bat-infested cave. Was never granted the opportunity to defend myself as no amount of random attempts allowed me to move South of the main entrance without being instantaneously smitten by a blood-thirsty bat (and I did attempt this a good 20 times or so to no avail).
— From an anonymous commenter to the Gaming after 40 post
From 80 Micro, March 1981.
Slight progress. My largest chunk came from simply predicting something correctly in my last post; I could take a potshot at one ogre and lead them to a different one and they would fight.
Very satisfying! Then I could enter the new cave the ogre was guarding and get trapped in after one step away from the entrance.
A little detail here, because this moment is important in a theoretical sense, and also the Thing I Am Most Stuck On.
As the text implies, the ogres fighting are what causes the cave to collapse. This suggested to me this is one of those paused-time puzzles — where an event might normally in a fully realistic world move forward, but waits, for dramatic reasons, for the player to be in a particular position. We saw this in The Colonel’s Bequest where, despite the rapid collection of dead bodies, they waited for us to find them before they got spirited away.
However, the trigger for the cave collapsing is walking away from the initial room of the cave. That means you can walk past the fighting ogres, grab the axe and bones, then walk back away and visit other places. I had to meta-realize that the game wasn’t collapsing the cave for me so I had access to more than I originally thought. (Essentially, I transitioned from the physical logic I was using before into solving by looking at game logic.)
This is in a way bad, because it means there’s yet more items available for me to use to resolve the dilemma. For example, there’s a conch shell (left behind at the first ogre) that you can blow and causes the cave to collapse, but since you can go back and get it, can you somehow cause a “safe” cave collapse? Here’s my full item list, although I can’t carry all of the items at once:
small key (already used on spaceship, probably done)
metal plate (from spaceship)
box (from spaceship)
screwdriver (from spaceship)
old rag (from spaceship)
broken glass (from spaceship)
amulet (worn, providing light)
axe (from cave with fighting ogres)
dusty bones (from cave with fighting ogres)
old book (“Summon the Guardian of This Land and He Will Transport You Ac… The Rest of The Page Is Missing!!”)
rope
leather bag (with three bolts)
crossbow (can use the bolts, can also tie a rope to a bolt but I haven’t found anywhere where this is helpful)
disruptor (still useful; on that screenshot above you need to zap the bat so it won’t kill you)
shovel (can be used to get a “small bowl” in the fighting-ogre cave)
hollow conch
log (took axe back to the forest and got this)
branch (ditto)
The well is refreshing, the river is poison. Either or both could be useful.
Including the items in the cave that collapses, there’s also
gold coin (although I end up giving this to a centaur)
small bowl (already mentioned, can be filled with water)
pickaxe (seems like it could be useful for digging out, but there’s no item the pickaxe can be directed at like a pile of rocks)
I’m sure I’ll make more progress next time (if nothing else, I’ll be willing to start cracking open the walkthrough) but I wanted to take a moment to return to a concept I haven’t written about since Zork I: Kishōtenketsu.
To summarize quickly, it is a 4-act structure rather than a 3-act structure:
Ki: Introduces characters and other necessary information.
Shō: Follows any lead characters, but without major changes.
Ten: Provides an unexpected development. This is the essential substitute for the climax, because it may not be a “confrontation”, but can be just an unusual change in the environment, or enigmatic development.
Ketsu: The conclusion, which unifies the original elements with the “twist”.
I theorized adventure game puzzles didn’t really fall well into a 3-act structure, which is how was seems inarguably plot-like activity sometimes is written off as “not story”.
The ogre battle seems traditional: we have two ogres that won’t let us by locations (the Setup). We can get one of them angry and follow us to other (the Confrontation), and then they’ll fight, allowing us passage (the Resolution). A clever protagonist in a fairy tale could easily encounter similar.
What doesn’t seem to fit 3-act is something I brushed over in the object list above: obtaining a log and branch. I had been puzzling over any use for the forest, despite it being a maze and me needing to spend a fair chunk of time there to map it. I had reached “ki” — seeing the forest for the first time — and “shō”, which developed the forest as an area and where I poked at its puzzle potentials without any real “change”.
This was more a pain to make than it looks because it took some fiddling to get the room placement in a way that made the links between rooms make sense.
Finally, I found the axe, the “ten” (unexpected development) which led to the “ketsu” (conclusion, obtaining the items). The whole sequence seems limp and fruitless in a climax sense but isn’t that far off the mark with 4-act (which doesn’t necessarily need a “climax”) yet this is the sort of manipulation that happens in adventure games all the time: slow discoveries that chip away at the world and increase our ability to manipulate it. When put contiguously, maybe this sequence could be part of a 3-act structure, but it doesn’t happen to the player contiguously. The complete plot, for one of my sessions, was simply finding a log and branch, and it did feel internally like a plot was moving, but when trying to explain to others the revelation, I can’t think of any way that isn’t underwhelming.
It may be adventure games deserve a structure all their own that doesn’t fall under static story lines in any sense.
… a desolate planet where only your skill and your talking computer will help you survive. (80 Micro, December 1981)
We’ve seen William Demas with Timequest (published by The Programmer’s Guild) and The Golden Voyage (with Scott Adams, published by Adventure International); his next two games, Forbidden Planet and Forbidden City, were published by a third company, Fantastic Software.
Fantastic Software (run by Al Loose) and the author William Demas were both located in Las Vegas. Al had come across a piece of software by Dick Barker that could provide voices to the TRS-80. According to William Demas, Al Loose “thought that it would be a great addition to an adventure game” so William went on to write two games that used voices. (Source 1, Source 2)
I’d like to say the voices make a positive addition, but it’s pretty much just the same voice over and over again asking what you want to do next. Let’s just say the sheer novelty does not overcome the annoyance. (I’ll try to get a recording so you can hear it, but I’m having technical difficulties.)
The author later ported both Planet and City to Macintosh, using the names Utopia and Futuria. From what I’ve gathered hopping back and forth between the two games, dropping the voice and adding graphics (with Mac-style tweaks to interface) are the only changes.
I think it ends up being a pretty good trade; the graphics aren’t stellar but aren’t irritating either. They pass the bar of the clunky vector-graphics into an aesthetic.
As the screens above hint, you awake from suspended animation on a spaceship in trouble, and (after some puzzle-solving) end up crash-landing on a planet.
The “puzzle solving” was a pain: you find a key that unlocks a cabinet with a rag, a tube, and a screwdriver. The screwdriver lets you get into a crawlspace with a CHARRED TUBE, as depicted here. The wires are purely a red herring and kill you if you try to take them. I tried various permutations of PUT TUBE and REPLACE TUBE but the right action is to USE RAG. This smashes the old tube (!!) so you can put in the new one.
Upon crash landing, the map opens up quite a bit more; you can see the city of Utopia right where you land (which is apparently the goal for the game).
Exploring a bit, the game oddly went into fantasy mode. I found a amulet which glowed when worn …
The forest is a small maze, but I found nothing useful upon mapping it.
… a crossbow (and some bolts), a rope (which you can tie to one of the bolts), a book that talks about “summoning” something to get to our destination, a shovel (I’ve tried DIG everywhere with no luck) and some small creatures and ogres.
One ogre is guarding a cave; you can kill it by shooting it with the crossbow (but it falls on top of you) and it ignores blasts from the disruptor (which came from the ship).
Another ogre gets mad enough to punch a wall and start following you if you shoot it.
This turns out systematically interesting, because the ogre chases you across the map. I’m not sure where to take it.
I can go through the hole it just punched, there’s a conch shell (blowing it collapses the cave, you die) and a boulder (I can’t do anything with it). However, you can also run around outside, although I haven’t found anywhere useful to go.
This phase of the game has enough open possibilities that I don’t feel like I’m stuck in a “use object on puzzle” mode (possibly with an obscure verb to boot). Maybe I get the two ogres together somehow? Can I set up a trap before hand with the crossbow and the rope? Can I survive a collapsing cave? I’m not sure yet, but it’s interesting enough to keep trying things out.
I was a guest on a podcast! You can hear me talk for an hour about Caves and Hunt the Wumpus from my Before Adventure series.
Link to podcast here
Unfortunately my attempt to give plugs at the end got mangled, so let me quickly mention:
Aaron Reed published his article on Wumpus a week before recording, and it had some new research I got to use, as part of his excellent 50 Years of Text Games series.
I also referred some to Alex Smith’s book They Create Worlds.
And while dated, I can still recommend Steven Levy’s Hackers as a good glimpse of the era.
THE NEWEST AMERICAN TRAIN TRAVELS AT OVER 400 MILES PER HOUR, AND YOU’RE ON IT. THIS STARTED AS A VACATION, BUT SOON BECAME A VITAL MISSION WHEN YOU HEARD A NEARBY SCREAM FOLLOWED BY QUICKLY SCAMPERING FOOTSTEPS.
Tanker Train — another in the long series of Roger M. Wilcox — is a good contrast to Castlequest, since instead of a sprawling 100 rooms, it only has 14. It’s a very tight, cinematic, and linear experience where you’re tasked with stopping a saboteur and defusing a time bomb.
You start sitting in a cabin seat (holding an FBI badge and a pistol, so we’re only marginally off-duty, I guess), and we hear a scream as mentioned above and stand up to find a dead body.
Like all the Roger M. Wilcox games, this was originally on TRS-80. I had trouble getting that version working so early on I switched with his modern port.
This is admittedly one of the most puzzling parts of the game — we wouldn’t notice someone else in the room coming in? Wouldn’t the murderer at least notice us and be concerned?
And unfortunately, things don’t quite hit fast-paced from here, because I was terribly stuck for about 10 minutes. You can go back to the original seat you start at an open a window, but try to go through and your hands slip and you go flying out at presumably 400 miles per hour.
I made a verb list testing my standard words
DIG, CLIMB, READ, OPEN, RUB, SIT, POUR, JUMP, PUT, TURN, MAKE, MIX, EXAMINE, SHOOT, GO, SHOW
and while this turned out to be useful later, I was still lacking the right word to get started: FRISK. (Just random inspiration I tried it, but I remember now it was used in a prior Wilcox game, so I have now added it to my standard verbs-to-test list so I don’t get stalled the same way again.)
The body had a credit card, a leaflet advertising a different Wilcox game even though they were still all private games (“GET ‘THE VIAL OF DOOM’ ADVENTURE FOR YOUR TRS-80!”) and a helpful note.
The card works to open the door, revealing a coal fireplace and a fire extinguisher which can be applied to it.
IT’S A GOOD THING THIS IS AN ELECTRIC TRAIN!
I suppose 400 miles per hour on coal-burning would be tricky. The burning leaves a pile of ashes, and DIG ASHES reveals a bent piece of metal, and here I was stuck again for a while longer until I just rammed through the entire list of verbs and found RUB ASHES was useful as well — it meant that I was taking the main characters hands and covering them with ash. (I guess that’s correct syntax, but not usually the way the word RUB is used, so it didn’t occur to me. An odd bit of gameplay where slight variants of action based on the same verb can cause confusion — RUB is usually used to activate magic rings and the like in adventure games of this period.)
Moving on, the ashes were enough to give me a solid grip climbing out the window, and I was able to walk on the train to another car and use the piece of metal to break into it. (OK, it really can’t be going full speed, I guess then.)
Then I was able to drop into a car with a security guard and show my FBI badge.
HE SAYS, “PASS,” THEN LEAVES.
IN THE DISTANCE YOU HEAR A THUD, FOLLOWED BY FRANTIC SCURRYING.
Moving on, there’s another security guard, but trying to show the badge this time doesn’t go so well.
Yep, that’s the saboteur. You’re supposed to shoot him instead. Then just behind him you can find a ladder leading to an open valve (TURN VALVE closes it) and the time bomb. My first thought was to pick it up and take it somewhere to throw safely.
Fortunately, past the bomb there just happens to be a secret lab where you can mix some nitroglycerin. Taking the nitroglycerin back to the bomb and pouring it (as long as you’ve closed the tanker)…
…and victory!
Really, that’s it. That’s the whole game. I said it was short. It still felt satisfying to finish without hints, even if the swiftness of the plot seemed to demand a slightly more expansive parser. It’s the eternal dilemma with action-based text adventures like Heroine’s Mantle — you want to fight a ninja, or whatnot, but spending five minutes to communicate just how you want to disarm the blowdart mangles the atmosphere. Fortunately, with this game the big stopping point was right at the start.
(If you’ve arrived here from elsewhere, you should read the series in order, as this post discusses gathering the last treasures of the game.)
I’m ready to check out of this one. There’s some sort of endgame section, like Crowther/Woods Adventure, and just like various Adventure variants, I have only partial confidence that it even is triggerable. A scan of the source code indicates I have otherwise found all the treasures. So, let’s do my final delve–
I was, rather satisfyingly, correct about the long sequence with the boat — since you open a hole past the moat, you can take the boat that way all the way to a spot where you can cross over to a small island.
You are at the base of a magnificent underground waterfall. A cool mist rising off the surface of the water almost obscures a small island. A tunnel goes west and stone steps lead up.
CROSS WATER
You are on a small island near a large waterfall. The sound of crashing surf can be clearly heard, although you cannot quite make out the form of the waterfall through the thick mist. A message traced out in the sand reads “GILLIGAN WAS HERE”. There are pieces of a wreck (the S.S. MINNOW?) scattered about.
There is a very large ruby here!
Rather less glamorously, my rope issue was resolved by finding an exit I had missed on my map. I used what I’ve termed the walkthrough method where I wrote a partial walkthrough just to be careful re-tracing my initial steps (and to feel like doing so wasn’t a waste of time, important psychological bit, that). My first thirteen steps (the game understands T for take):
T BULLET. OPEN DRAWER. T CROSS. W. D. N. T HATCHET. S. T GUN. LOAD GUN. T PAPER. S. DROP PAPER.
In the process, in the underground section with a hunchback I found I simply had missed testing a particular exit. I also found, as a side effect, the hunchback is not doomed to die early: he simply acts as defense against the werewolf if it does a sudden attack no matter when it happens. I’ve noticed the rare occasion where the werewolf would cause instant death upon appearance, so this seems to be there simply to guard against that.
With the rope, I managed to go back to the room at the start of the game and retrieve a gold statue outside the starting window. Again, nothing too glamorous there, and even more unglamorously, I figured out my problem with the glacier: I needed to type IN as a direction and I could retrieve a crystal swan.
I still was fairly short on points and knew I was missing a section. Importantly, my use of the rope did *not* apply a grappling hook I had — I simply tied it to a bed. So I tied the to the grappling hook instead and went jaunting around looking for a place to use it.
I came across a cliff past the maze, and a final section:
You are at the edge of a sheer vertical drop overlooking an immense N/S cavern. Narrow paths head away to the east and west.
A rope is hooked to the top of the precipice.
There’s two places probably for atmosphere…
This is the disco room. Multicolored lasers pulsate wildly to the beat of badly mixed music. A stairway down is barely visible through the glare. A large passage exits south, and a smaller one leads west.
S
You have entered the land of the living dead, a large, desolate room. Although it is apparently uninhabited, you can hear the awful sounds of thousands of lost souls weeping and moaning. In the east corner are stacked the remains of dozens of previous adventurers who were less fortunate than yourself. To the north is a foreboding passage. A path goes west.
… but the remainder of the map was there to serve up a cyclops, and a wizard. I was short on items, and tried my cuban cigar on the cyclops.
You are in a tall tunnel leading east and west. A small trail goes SE. An immense wooden door heads south.
There is a fairly large cyclops staring at you.
THROW CIGAR
The cyclops turns to you and says:
“Hey buddy!. Got a light??”
LIGHT MATCH
The light is burning dimly.
LIGHT TORCH
The torch is burning noisily.
LIGHT CIGAR
The cyclops chokes from the rancid tobacco, and crashes through the door in search of water.
There is a cyclops-shaped hole in the door.
This really strikes me as Zork-reference territory — I don’t think if it was ever cleared up with the authors if either one had seen Zork, but both the Land of the Dead and the cyclops in close proximity seem like direct references. As you’ll see in a moment, the Zork references get even more direct:
The broken door leads to a cyclops lair with a sword. Taking the sword further on, it starts to glow:
You are in a tremendous cavern divided by a white line through its center. The north side of the cavern is green and fresh, a startling change from the callous terrain of the cave. A sign at the border proclaims this to be the edge of the wizard’s realm. A rocky and forlorn trail leads east, and a plush green path wanders north.
Your sword is glowing dimly.
N
You are in an immense forest of tall trees. Melodic chanting can be heard in the distance. The trees seem to be guiding you along a N/S path.
Your sword is glowing very brightly.
Just a bit farther in:
This is the wizard’s throne room. Scattered about the room are various magical items. A long message in ancient runes is carved into the southern wall. It translates roughly as “Beware the power of the Wizard, for he is master of this place”. Two green paths go south and east, and a marble walk leads west.
A powerful wizard blocks your way with his staff.
The wizard just vaporizes you if you try to attack him. This is where my previous work in generating a verb list for the game paid off. I looked at any I might not have used, and the only one that came up was WAVE. So instead of swinging for the jugular, I tried WAVE SWORD:
The walls of the cavern tremble as you unleash the terrible power contained in the sword.
The wizard, sensing a stronger power than his own, flees in a blinding flash and a cloud of smoke.
Glorious! Past the wizard I found a cache of money, which represented the last missing treasure.
This is the safe deposit vault, an immense room with polished steel walls. A closed circuit T.V. camera hums quietly above you as it pans back and forth across the room. To the east is an open elevator. Engraved on the far wall is the message:
“DEPOSIT TREASURES HERE FOR FULL CREDIT”
There is an ornate skeleton key here!
There is a bottle of vintage champagne here!
There is an ivory-handled sword here!
A gold statue is glistening in the light!
There is a silver cross nearby!
There is a very large ruby here!
Perched on the ground is a valuable jade figure!
A sapphire sparkles on the ground nearby!
There is lots of money here!
A delicate crystal swan lies off to one side!
Now, the reason I’m suspicious the ending might be broken is that the score acts oddly here; I checked at one point and had 275 points. I did a slight bit of object rearranging, and then afterwards, had 271 points even though the same treasures were in the vault. Some hidden timed element, perhaps? Either way, I got no messages indicating something signficant had happened, nor secret areas open up. I did find a real “ending text” scanning the source code but I’d rather only give it if I ever manage a true ending.
The game claims upon exit that I am a MASTER of Castlequest, which is honestly good enough for me.
ADD: Arthur figured out in the comments there’s a hidden time limit, and if you don’t get the treasures fast enough you don’t get the endgame. He made his own posts playing through the game here and here, if you want to see what the end is like. I also recommend his outstanding code comparison between Adventure and Castlequest (for example, Castlequest forces verb-noun order, while in Adventure word order doesn’t matter so you can GET LAMP or LAMP GET equally well).
…
Castlequest managed to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of 1979/1980 games; except for the maze with the bizarre changing names, the puzzles are essentially straightforward, and it was a longer game simply due to content as opposed to trying to get the player stuck on the same puzzle for hours. Most of the issues (ahem missing exits) I admit were essentially mine.
The framing around a nemesis to fight gave a slight bit more motivation than “just go find treasure”, and the castle structure also made the underground part seem less random (even when it started resorting to putting a jungle a few steps away from a glacier, and a disco room adjacent to the screams of the dead). It would be nice, still, to have a slightly more modernized port; there’s a save game feature, for instance, but it quits the game, and RESTORE only works at the very start of the game. The game also only understands ALL CAPS commands which turned out to be a source of 50% of the errors for me (especially when I kept switching back and forth to a map!) But in the end I am very, very, grateful both the authors (Michael Holtzman and Mark Kershenblatt) and Arthur O’Dwyer who helped rescue this game from oblivion.
As I stated on my first post about this game, The Pits (another lost 1980 game, this time on an online system called The Source) is also buried somewhere in the US Copyright Office. Anyone want to make a go at nabbing the treasure?
I’ve reached a point I’m fairly sure is near the end, so I’m in my finish-or-bust phase.
After killing the vampire from last time, I went into an underground section.
I should mention, first, that while underground the werewolf attacks drop off, and you get attacked by gnomes instead.
There is an ugly little gnome in the room with you!
The gnomes are functionally identical to the dwarves in Adventure, including throwing the hatchet to kill them — shooting with the gun doesn’t work.
THROW HATCHET
You killed a dirty little gnome.
There is a blood stained hatchet here.
You are in a perfectly square room carved out of solid rock. Stone steps lead up. An arched passage exits south. Above the arch is carved the message:
“ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE”.
S
You are in a long sloping N/S passage. The darkness seems to thicken around you as you walk.
S
You are in a narrow room which extends out of sight to the east. Sloping paths exit north and south. It is getting warmer here.
S
This is the fire room. The stone walls are gutted from centuries of evil fires. It is very hot here. A low trail leads west and a smaller one leads NE. A sloping trail goes north.
A wall of fire bars the way to the NE.
If you have a bottle of water you can EXTINGUISH FIRE to get through. This lets you find an empty room with the word “POOF” — it’s a magic word that teleports you back to the second floor, although unlike Adventure it doesn’t work until you’ve found it — and a vault.
This is the safe deposit vault, an immense room with polished steel walls. A closed circuit T.V. camera hums quietly above you as it pans back and forth across the room. To the east is an open elevator. Engraved on the far wall is the message:
DEPOSIT TREASURES HERE FOR FULL CREDIT
I’ve found a bit more in the way of treasure but not a lot: a jade figurine, a champagne bottle, and a sapphire. I still suspect whatever treasure hunt remains is not that extensive.
This is the honeymoon suite. The entire room is finished in red. In the center of the room lies a heart shaped bed. To one side is a heart shaped bath. A large mirror is mounted on the ceiling above the bed. The only exit is back the way you came.
There is a bottle of vintage champagne here!
The sapphire was past a maze. Veterans of Adventure might notice the room descriptions vary:
You’re in a short and winding maze of passages.
N
You’re in a maze of long and winding passages.
E
You’re in a long and winding maze of passages.
That is, by all appearances, this is another clone of the maze of rooms, all different. But! The room descriptions change.
Yes, trying to utilize the facts room descriptions change will get you hopelessly lost. I’m not sure if the logic is extensive or minor, but using the standard “drop objects to form a trail” method works instead just fine. I’ve never seen a room description fake-out quite like this before.
Past the maze, in addition to there being a sapphire, is a glacier marked with an “X”. I can melt the glacier with a helpful torch to form a hole, but I don’t have any other command I can use on the hole (I’ve tried entering it, looking in it, and so forth). If I try melting it again the glacier melts all the way and kills me.
For the same place I can go up and meet up at that room past the moat — where I needed to use a rowboat before.
You are on the far side of the moat. You can see a full view of the castle here in all its deadly splendor. A small town can be glimpsed far off in the distance. An old sign nailed to a tree reads:
“YOU CAN’T REACH THE VILLAGE FROM HERE!”
There is a large opening in the ground.
However, the boat is on the wrong side to then go over the moat. I’m not sure what to do here, but I found the re-use of geography — on what seemed previously like a dead-end — to be fascinating. I think it’s possible what I need to do is open this area, walk all the way back around (maybe using the POOF teleport if I want to), then take the boat back across the moat so I can take it down? Remember, if I try to take the boat in the castle through the other way it doesn’t fit, but assuming I can get it to fit going down, there’s a candidate place for using it.
You are at the base of a magnificent underground waterfall. A cool mist rising off the surface of the water almost obscures a small island. A tunnel goes west and stone steps lead up.
You can’t swim, but maybe you can cross to the island with the boat.
The other bit of oddity is even though I have a grappling hook and a place to use it (the window at the very start of the game, you can melt the bars with the acid and clearly it is meant to then let you climb a rope) I still have yet to find a rope! I might be just missing an obvious exit with the rope in the open, or it might be a late-game item.
Either way, by next time I’m going to hang this one up for now or cruise to victory.
I made it past a significant chunk; the game isn’t necessarily hard (which is a relief, considering other mainframe games we’ve seen) and my delay between posts has more to do with work/life distraction than the game itself.
(Also, I needed to finish AI: The Somnium Files. Long game, that. Three-quarters visual novel, rather unique adventure sections.)
Very close to after I hit “send” on my last post I realized at the boarded door that I couldn’t chop with a hatchet, I could still THROW HATCHET.
The door opens to a brick wall. —DEAD END—
A note on the wall reads “L 8 R 31 L 59”.
So, progress, but not much! I then made my usual gaffe of missing room exits, and on a room I even clipped an excerpt from last time. Since it’s been a week, here’s the room in question:
You are in the foyer. An umbrella near the door is dripping on the thick pile carpet. A black cape is draped neatly over the banister of a grand staircase leading up. A magnificentl archway leads north. Corridors lead south and southeast, a small hallway heads west, and a narrow stairway goes down.
The butler is sound asleep.
You can go down and you can go up. Novel, that. (To be fair, the ordering of exits is a little odd — they’re mentioned in the order up, north, south, southeast, west, down. Usually up and down get clumped together.)
This shows the second and third floor, although some puzzle solving is required to wander around the attic as “A huge vampire bat hangs from the doorframe and blocks your way.”.
The parts I could reach fairly easily yielded a quill pen and a skeleton key. The quill pen and paper from last time applied to the butler, which I need to explain —
I was stumped for a little while not for puzzle reasons, but for narrative reasons. I assumed the butler was an obstacle, insofar I was sneaking into a vampire’s castle, quite naturally the butler would stop me, and there would be some later puzzle that involved making sure the butler wouldn’t wake up.
I was wrong about this. The butler is helpful, something I was clued in on while experimenting with the gun:
You killed a deaf-mute butler (Not very sporting of you).
Oops! The right action here is WAKE BUTLER who then motions for some paper. Dropping the quill pen I just mentioned and the paper from last time, he writes on the note and shows it:
“Look behind the mirror.”
The skeleton key from the second floor will eventually take care of that locked door from last time. I say “eventually” because if you try to go back to the starting room with the key (which is near where the locked door is), you get dumped in a trap door:
You have fallen through a trap door and find…
You are in a dark stone E/W passage.
This isn’t a bad thing, as it leads to another new section, and another “what appears to be foe is in fact friend” area.
You are at the proverbial fork in the road. Paths lead east, northwest, and southwest.
SW
This is the torture chamber. A matched set of thumb-screws hangs on the far wall. A large rack occupies the center of the room. A skeleton hangs from its thumbs above you, swaying gently. An arch leads NE.
A nasty hunchback eyes you from a corner of the room.
FEED HUNCHBACK
The hunchback gobbles down the food and smiles at you.
TAKE HUNCHBACK
OK
NE
You’re at the fork.
A smiling hunchback is following you.
Unfortunately, the hunchback didn’t survive long.
You are in a low, dark chamber. A single mirror is set into the far wall. The exit goes south.
A smiling hunchback is following you.
There is a fearsome werewolf in the room with you!
The hunchback drives away the werewolf and dies in the struggle.
The werewolf is most definitely foe, and acts much like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods adventure do, showing up at random. The odd thing here is I have a gun and a silver bullet which work fine for taking the werewolf down (the body is dragged away by a “old gypsy woman”) and while the werewolf does keep re-appearing, the gun keeps still working. So I’m not sure if the sacrifice of the hunchback is really necessary here, and if I possibly did something wrong.
In the process of running around I came across a vial of acid (I haven’t used it yet) and some blood, which I used immediately after because I know where it went. Heading back to the attic with the vampire bat:
FEED BAT
The bat gulps down the blood and flitters away.
N
You are in an old attic filled with old-fashioned clothes, a pile of newspapers and some antiques. An entrance to a cedar closet is to the east and there is a door to a crawlspace to the west.
The door to the west has a combination lock, which I already knew the combination of from the dead-end-hatchet room.
LEFT 8
OK
RIGHT 31
OK
LEFT 59
The lock is now open.
W
You are crawling along a low passage that leads east and west.
This eventually took me to an encounter with the long-awaited vampire:
You are in a huge anteroom to an even larger, mysterious chamber. A chilling wind seems to blow at you from all sides, and a deathlike, vapid black mist surrounds your feet. Hundreds of sinister looking bats cling to the ceiling and eye you with a spine-tingling anticipatory pleasure. Two dark, foreboding passages exit to the east and west, and a steep sloping corridor descends NW.
W
You are in the chamber of the master of the castle, Count Vladimir! Pictures depicting scenes of tranquil Transylvanian countrysides line the walls. A huge portrait of Vladimir’s brother, Count Dracula, hangs upon the near wall. In the center of the room is a large, ominous, mahogany coffin.
The coffin is closed.
I just wanted to experiment so I opened the coffin with no preparation … and instead of dying, found a sleeping vampire! I guess it would help if I had the wooden stake just lying around one of the rooms in the open, huh? I went to grab it, came back, and found the vampire awake. Fortunately, I was also toting around a silver cross, and my SHOW CROSS prophecy came true:
The Count sits up and prepares for breakfast-namely you!
SHOW CROSS
The Count is frightened by the cross and cowers in the coffin.
STAB COUNT
The vampire clutches at the stake and dies, leaving only a pile of dust.
A note materializes on the wall which reads:
EMERGENCY EXIT–The mirror maze will lead you to the locked door. The exit lies within.
I’m not sure if that means if the cross is optional presuming you are wise enough to have the wooden stake the first time around? Does this puzzle have optional parts, maybe?
The mirror maze the note mentioned was one I had guessed was a “trick maze”.
This is the mirror maze. A myriad of mirrors reflect your image in a dazzling array of light. The reflections make it impossible to discren a direction.
Random wandering before just led me to some nearby rooms, nothing helpful. Random wandering *after* seeing the note led to that locked door that I was never able to get back to (due to the trap door).
You are in a dim corridor lit by gaslight. Doors exit to the east and west. A stairway leads down.
UNLOCK DOOR
OK
OPEN DOOR
OK
W
A cool wind blows up a stone stairway which descends down into a large stone room. A note written in blood reads “VERY CLEVER OF YOU TO MAKE IT THIS FAR”. The door leads east, back to the hall.
I’ve poked around a bit farther and it feels like the game changes to be more “standard adventure”. I’ve still only found two treasures (the silver cross, and a jade figurine past the locked door) so I don’t know how much game is left.
Assuming there are no more twists, the structure has been
1. start having already broken into the castle … or maybe we got kidnapped or something?
2. gather materials and get past obstacles to confront the vampire
3. kill the vampire
4. make it to the “escape” which holds an entirely new exploration section with treasures
It means killing the Big Foozle may only be the midway point, which is decidedly a bit odd in general, although Dracula Avontuur did something similar where finding a treasure came after the vampire-killing.
What’s also odd is that it is 100% certain both games are entirely independent of each other. Something about the “kill a vampire” notion unlocked an experience more structured than the typical games of this time. Perhaps it is that the horror genre leads more naturally to classic-adventure-gameplay than the fantasy genre does. (See also The Count and Secret of Flagstone Manor, although the latter has a ghost rather than a vampire.) If monsters are killed in horror, they require particular artifacts or rituals — essentially, some sort of puzzle solving is required by convention. Whereas in fantasy one is expected, D&D style, to be able to just swing a sword — see how killing the troll in Zork isn’t even a “puzzle” really. Hence the puzzles of adventure games fit more naturally into the horror mold (consequently doing a better job integrating gameplay and story) and fantasy games have to work a little harder.
Renga in Blue 