I didn’t have much left to go before finishing. Really, with the exception of the rather strange last puzzle, everything was a matter of figuring out the parser.
First off, only 5 minutes after I made my last post, I realized that while holding the log I could GO FLUME and the ride would begin. I assumed you sat down the log and got on it, which seems reasonable, but I guess not. This leads shortly to a beach with a cliff, which you can climb to find a mighty eagle.
With the sighting of Feathers I realized this was the second “ingredient” in my Arrow of Death; I had the arrowhead already, and with feathers I just needed the shaft. However, I was completely and totally unable to interact with either the eagle or the feathers other than — rather unhelpfully — I could kill the eagle with my sword, causing it to disappear.
Frustrated, I went back to the other part I had verb trouble with — the chained slave — and once again found immediate success. I tried FREE SLAVE which instructed me to CUT his CHAINS, so I suppose it’s a really firm sword I’ve been toting around.
Once you free the slave he will follow you. Heading up to the boulder that had me stumped, trying to MOVE BOULDER told me that I received some help, and it opened up a cave.
That’s all that was in the cave. Nothing magic or even new information — I already knew I needed feathers! I spent a long time trying to SEARCH CAVE and the like but even the noun CAVE wasn’t recognized.
Bouncing around futily trying to examine things for the nth time, I went back to the eagle and tried another crack at extract feathers. Here I was saved by my “verb list” procedure I had gone through earlier…
…and I realized, off of my “rare” verbs in the far right column, that PLUCK worked. (I first added it back when playing Vial of Doom and later used it in Ulysses and the Golden Fleece. It has shown up in no other games so far.) PLUCK FEATHERS not only put feathers in my inventory but got the Eagle to fly me to a new area.
And then … I’d like to describe some fabulous adventures here, but it seems like the author ran out of space, or gave up? There’s a brook you pass by…
…there’s a hut with a dead dwarf that has a silver medallion…
…a lot of random grassy locations with nothing…
…and a Cellar with a MASTER FLETCHER. I assumed that after collecting the shaft for the arrow I would be returning here.
Finally, past a marsh, I encountered a willow, and immense parser frustration.
The Guardians of the Willow are the final obstacle for the game, but I have no idea what they even look like! They prevent the action CUT WILLOW without any details. All I know is I was able to take the silver medallion I just got a few minutes before, and throw it; they chased the medallion, distracted.
Guardians
Chase Medallion!
Then I was able to CUT WILLOW and get the last piece of the Arrow, and the game ended, informing me to continue the story in Part 2. Not even a scene returning to the Fletcher and assembling the arrow, booooo.
CONGRATULATIONS!!
You can now make the Arrow
See ARROW OF DEATH (Pt.2)
I think the one thing this game emphasized for me is just how solid the original Scott Adams games are. Now, I had legions of complaints, of course, but I never felt like I was in a scenario where an item was in the room description that couldn’t be referred to, or where I circled for an hour finding the right verb rather than using any kind of logical reasoning. (They had their own, unique problems, mind you, but just not in implementation.) I do strongly get this was possibly Brian Howarth doing the ports from his original TRS-80 games in haste, really wanting to get back to writing new games.
At least the slightly askew ZX Spectrum graphics grew on me. They’re not traditionally pretty, but they’re trying their best. As an aside, I tried out the Z-machine z6 conversion using Frotz, and it lets you see the room description and room graphic on the same page as you play; it made the static nature of the graphics seem a touch more sensible, as I never had a situation where I would read text and then switch to graphics to see a scene that did not resemble the text much; having them both delivered at the same time made the issue feel less irritating.
An example. There’s supposed to be a chained slave here, but I’m honestly not sure what I’m looking at.
I confess this just wasn’t as strong as The Time Machine, and at least Golden Baton had a memorable ending. I’ll just save overall judgment until part 2, I suppose, but that will have to wait until sometime in 1982; I’ll keep with the ZX Spectrum for when I get back to the worlds of Howarth, and his first game that was written solely for the Scott Adams database system.
The VIC-20 Digital Leisure version of Arrow of Death Part 1, which was cut by the author into 8K, half the size of the original. Howarth was “persuaded somewhat against his will” into doing the arrangement and “felt he was cheating the people who were buying the games”. (Source.) Source from Gareth Pitchford, picture via @AgentReyes2 on Twitter.
A bit of progress over last time. I carefully re-re-re-checked each room and found that in the opening courtyard in the game if I did LOOK COURTYARD I would find a rope. This happened in the Kitchen as well (with a hook) but rather frustratingly, the actual syntax doesn’t even work elsewhere: LOOK THRONE in the Throne Room gives an error-type message, the same as LOOK VAULT in the Vault. It came off as a pointless bit of bad UI — someone could easily have “trained” themselves that the syntax didn’t work at all before finding any items — moreso than a well-hidden secret.
I was able to use the rope with the hook and attach them together, put the hook in at the top of the ledge, climb down to the armor, tie the armor up, and then drag it up by pulling the rope back at the top of the ledge.
This let me go into the dark cave (shown above, even before it gets revealed in the game) with armor on, and able to survive walking into darkness. After some thought, I retrieved the orb that showed the cave and rubbed it again while inside the darkness, and it lit up showing a serpent. Multiple whacks of my sword were sufficient to take the serpent down, and I was able to retrieve an arrowhead after the fight. I assume this is a piece of the titular Arrow.
Nearby the cave location in the TRS-80 version is this precipice. It doesn’t serve any puzzle-solving purpose so I can understand why it was cut from the more minimal remake, but I still liked the cinema of it.
I thought I’d have opened up more areas by solving what I did, but I was at a dead end. Another combing through all the rooms, and this time, while in the forest and frustrated…
…I decided to try out the hint that the beggar had earlier (“when all seems lost, WAIT”). I assumed previously this clue meant WAIT was intended to be tried out in some location that felt like a dead-end (like the Cave which had the serpent) but apparently it was really intended for the forest. Using WAIT teleported me to a new location, where there was a riverbank and a barge with a ferryman. The Ferryman held his hand out — and the amulet I found off the Messenger had a picture of a barge — so I GAVE AMULET which was sufficient to get passage.
This led me to a new area with a ruined forest, a chained slave in a clearing (who can’t talk to or interactive with via any verbs I’ve tested, an apparent dead end at a rock wall, some toadstools, a large boulder (I’m not strong enough to carry it), a “cookhouse” for some giants, and a giant building.
If you try to enter the giant building you “trip” and give yourself away to giants living within.
The “cookhouse” has a cauldron with broth. You can take the toadstools and POISON CAULDRON (not any verb referring the toadstools themselves, which would be the usual thing) leave, and then somehow in the interim between leaving the cookhouse and going to the main giant building the giants have quaffed the poison so you can safely walk in.
This leads to an upper level with a log and a log flume. Any attempts to drop the log on the flume and ride it or otherwise get it moving have been denied by the parser.
So to summarize, I’m stuck on:
a.) the log/flume part, which may just need the right verb to get the two to do anything together
b.) the chained slave part, which may just need the right verb to interact (I don’t otherwise have a key or something helpful in breaking a chain)
c.) a heavy boulder, which I might assume I need to enlist a giant for except I knocked them out already (was that a mistake?)
d.) and a dead-end rock wall which I again have found no luck with
At least progress is progress, but it is frustrating knowing what might be stopping is getting the right phrasing (POISON as a verb took me a while, for sure).
This is, as far as I can find from records, the last of the Mysterious Adventures to have a unique TRS-80 version. Just as a reminder (or if you haven’t read my prior entries) the original TRS-80 versions were rather more verbose than the later versions, which were re-written (and later, freshly-designed) to run using the Scott Adams database system. This led to some scenarios where it was easier to solve a puzzle on one version of the game than the other; I simultaneously ran the BBC Micro and TRS-80 versions and hopped back and forth when I was stuck.
I’ll do relatively the same here, but with more emphasis on the minimal version, for two reasons:
1.) Since Part 2 (coming in 1982) will be the ultra-minimal style, I’d rather have my Part 1 gameplay be somewhat comparable.
2.) Due to the recent passing of Sir Clive Sinclair, in his honor I wanted to play this game using the ZX Spectrum version of the game.
By playing on the ZX Spectrum I also can show graphics, but since I have yet to show ZX Spectrum graphics on this blog and not everyone has yet experienced the joys, I need to explain: they look strange for a technical reason. Here, for example, is the title screen for one of the best of the ZX Spectrum games:
This screen does a good job hiding the tech problem, but if you look at the “S” you may notice there is a portion where the white “bleeds over” into the yellow.
Zoomed in. I’ve circled the relevant spot.
This is because, on any given 8 by 8 tile on the ZX Spectrum, only two colors are allowed. So you could have white on black or yellow on black but not white, black, and yellow all the in the same area. This led to lots of clever and not-so-clever tricks of mitigation, and on some games it is clear the authors just gave up and let the colors go wild.
I give all this intro to avoid confusion. I gather my older European audience is just used to this and are waiting patiently for the main show to start, but I assure you for someone not raised on such graphics it looks like there might be some sort of graphical error. Here is the first screen to Arrow of Death Part 1:
This is why, for example, the black lines to the right have interruption around the white, since there’s a portion that is set to show only yellow and white.
The story picks up from The Golden Baton, where the magical gizmo in the title which brings magical prosperity was returned (by yourself) to the Palace of Ferrenuil. An evil spell descends on the kingdom and the Baton, which had previously “shone with a brilliance far surpassing that of ordinary Gold” has now become “dull and tarnished” and and anyone nearby now feels “an almost tangible feeling of hatred for living, growing things.”
The king’s sorcerer, Zardra, tries to study the baton, but has been missing for three days, and there have been screams and flashes of lightning from the castle.
You return to the palace, with a messenger, and the plot picks up — with an interesting jump hinting at a hidden event — at the Courtyard of the palace, with the messenger dead for some unknown reason:
The “text description” screen and graphics screen are separated where you can switch by hitting ENTER, just like many games at the time. The interface “locks in” to either one or the other in such a way that the way to play with graphics is to “peek into” the graphics window at each step to see the new room, then switch back since there isn’t enough information without the text. Another odd side effect of this is that there is a death graphical screen, but you almost have to pre-setup to see it, by switching to the graphics window, typing a command (on an unseen object, location exit, etc.) and have the death occur. It’s weirdly like playing blindfolded. In Saigon: The Last Days there was sufficient text with the graphics to get what was going on, plus you would see the graphics initially upon entering a room.
Taking the messenger’s amulet, it is only a few steps in to encounter Zadra and the Baton. Trying to interact with the Baton kills you. Talking to ZARDRA quickly results in his name description becoming ZARDRA (dead):
He gasps and says:
Magical Arrow…Destroy ZERDON..!
He Dies!
Despite there not being that extreme a difference in plots, I found this opening more engrossing than The Golden Baton’s — just the minor action at the start makes the difference — which threw out a bunch of undigested lore before the quest for the Foozle. Here, I’m guessing the Arrow is the Foozle, and then in Part 2 we’ll need to shoot it in the right direction.
Despite the Baton being deadly on even trying to LOOK at it, it is otherwise safe to explore the castle, and I racked up a few items both secret and not-secret:
a hook in a Kitchen (the room was otherwise empty, I had to LOOK KITCHEN, just LOOK wouldn’t do it)
a suit of armour (wearable)
a sword hidden in a secret passage (enterable by turning a Coat of Arms multiple times)
a pillow hiding a purse with coins (the pillow can be cut open with the sword)
The Kitchen, with the hidden hook. None of the items shown can be referred to.
The Coat of Arms, which can be turned to open a secret passage. The graphic is entirely static.
There’s a beggar outside the castle, where if you give the coins you get a Glass Orb and a Note.
When all seems lost.. WAIT!
I’m stuck fairly shortly after that.
I can make my way to a “ledge” and climb up, although the armour is too heavy to go up. There’s a cave up top (findable via rubbing the Glass Orb) but entering it is death:
AARRGGHH!!
Serpent eats me!
I suspect either a.) there’s some way to shuttle the armour up, in which case it might protect against serpent-eating or b.) some sort of serpent-repellent or c.) a light source I’m missing. There’s also the ever-classic-for-me d.) I missed a room exit but the game is very tight so I doubt I made a mistake, but it wouldn’t be the first time.
If I get stuck for much longer I’ll break out the TRS-80 version for comparison purposes. If nothing else sometimes approaching in a fresh context can help my brain unlock new puzzle-solving ideas, kind of like how if I’m editing a text it helps to switch devices to prevent my eyes from skipping over typos.
Suddenly, we were over Saigon, but I couldn’t recognize it. The huge cloud was still overhead, and the lightning added a witches’ brew flavor to the ghostly, blacked-out city. I could see Tan Son Nhut airport only when the lightning flashed. There were several tires scattered throughout the town. More artillery and mortar. More desperate voices on the radio. The city was dying.
I made it to the end. If you haven’t read it yet, you should go to my previous post for context.
From Mobygames.
With “made it to the end” I will say I relied on hints quite a bit, enough so that I’m not going to call out every instance. Let’s just say there were a large number of instances where the parser did not want to cooperate, and one instance where an object I assume is meant to be revealed by LOOKing I could not for the life of me make appear, even after I knew from a walkthrough it existed.
Continuing from before, I was stuck in a scenario where I was penned in by a machine gun nest with a booby trap, a minefield, and a checkpoint. I found a rock I could climb letting me loop back around, but nothing else. Remembering past Pearson games, I tried LISTEN every and found (at a location right before the checkpoint) that there was a whirring sound to the west, past some bushes. Still, I found no way to barge into the bushes or get over, and I even pulled up my old verb chart and tried every single word on the bushes just in case.
It is here I first broke down and checked hints, and found out I had been struck by a case of scene scripting.
You see, if you find the rock and loop back around, nothing has changed. However, if you go listen to the whirring first, and then loop back around to the machine gun nest with the radio:
THE BODY IS GONE..
A MACHETE IS HERE.
I think the intended script is that there is a man at the checkpoint that looks like they’re holding the same machete, and you can attract their attention and then flee over the rock so the man investigates, avoiding the minefield but setting off the booby trap. I in fact tried to implement this exact plan (run into the checkpoint, then run back out) but there was no indication that this was going on, and if you stand next to the checkpoint and just wait, nothing happens. It is as if the authors (Jyym and Robyn) had a script in their minds but the world-universe wasn’t fully coded to implement it.
Moving on with the machete, I was able to chop away the bush and hop onto a waiting helicopter just a bit farther along (how the Vietnamese soldiers didn’t notice the helicopter, I don’t know).
This is essentially true, there were large numbers of refugees trying to get into the last days of the evacuation. Evacuation had proceeded all the way through the year but logistics made it slow to implement.
This would be a short game except the helicopter gets downed by rocket fire and crashes. You wake up “PARYLIZED” and the only way to undo this is to use the verb MOVE. (Other verbs which imply motion do not help.) Finally you awake and meet a friendly person, Ming Li:
Out of context the yellow color is kind of shocking (yellow stereotypes of Asians, I mean), but it is the base cover of everyone, including non-Asians.
She offers some food (which has something crawling in it) and then after eating she offers to help you escape. This leads through a sort of “cutscene” where she takes you past the crashed helicopter, then a secret series of caves, then finally pulls a chain to reveal a rope ladder so you can climb up to the main city.
There, you run across soldiers chasing an “escaped prisoner” and shooting. Ming Li dies in the crossfire.
Here I got stuck again for a bit. There’s a warehouse with a door I was able to break down with my machete, and a soldier wanting a pass.
There was a door behind the door (see above) and I was unable to refer to it or see anything new, so I moved on and found that there’s a second pull chain revealing a rope ladder on the top, even though there is no way (as far as I can tell) to see it in the room description. The intent is to re-trace the steps you did before with Ming Li, although it is quite possible to just wing it and map out the underground section, falling into pits along the way.
I mostly remembered the way to go. The section had gone by fast enough I hadn’t made a map.
Backtracking you can find the helicopter again — which you had no time to interact with before — and some binoculars, a wallet (containing a pass) and a revolver. (There’s also VC soldiers in a ravine you need to stay away from.)
Oddly, even though there is a dead US soldier here, you can’t take their uniform (blood soaked or something, I suppose). There is one down in the cave whose uniform you can grab, though.
Heading back and using the pass, I ran into a South Vietnamese soldier who wanted something to help escape.
The uniform works here; then he clears out and allows you in a plaza with refugees.
Before proceeding farther, though, I wanted to loop back to deal with the warehouse. A walkthrough told me there were some WIRES. Maybe it’s easier to get them mentioned in the text-only version? In any case, they can be removed with the pliers from all the way back at the start of the game (they had been used already to undo a snap).
Inside the warehouse is dark, and there’s heavy breathing to the south. If you try to proceed, things explode and you die. The binoculars (which have night vision) let you see a figure.
The right action is then to blast with the revolver. There’s a shovel, dog tags, and a parachute left behind. (The dog tags say A.K.C. REGISTERED and the parachute I never found a user for even though I toted it to the end of the game.) The shovel turns out to be immediately useful … but you have to backtrack a second time to where the helicopter crashed.
The soldiers are gone. Yet another invisible trigger happened, although I don’t know where. A dirt mound is left behind, that you can dig with the shovel and find a corpse in a body bag.
You need to remove the body bag and take it with you, because this is still an adventure game. Ugh. (It’s also very easy to miss this, and the bag isn’t used until the end of the game, so it’s bad both in a player-doing-distasteful-stuff sense and a puzzle sense.)
Speaking of the player doing distasteful things, the next destination is back to the plaza with refugees, where on the south side there is a South Vietnamese soldier with a tank. He warns you to leave. It’s revolver time:
It’s plausible to happen, at least — in the later stages of the Vietnam war there was the practice of “fragging” where soldiers murdered officers they didn’t like, usually with grenades. This still feels like Escape from Traam where you randomly kill a human even though they aren’t actively stopping you.
If you then wait a beat, the refugees come in a mob and tear you apart. Maybe this should be the canonical ending. But assuming you want to continue after blasting one of your allies for no good reason, you hop into the tank, and drive it all the way through a wooden wall into a river.
Swimming to shore you can find a large crowd around a “game” being played where two people put their hands on a “mark”, a cobra is released, and whoever moves their hand off the mark first loses. The winner gets $1000. The loser might be dead from the cobra.
This whole process seems randomly specific, but I don’t know the source. The closest I can think of is the Russian Roulette in the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter.
You can go back in and volunteer to play, winning $1000. However, as you will see in a moment, you need $2000, and if you play a second time, the snake bites. So you need to come back with an edge.
Specifically, not far nearby (after climbing up a pipe and a ladder) you can find this soldier, who wants a bribe in order to pass. If you offer the $1000 he says it isn’t enough.
After this scene (and only after this scene, because narrative railroading) if you talk to a guard at blocked off courtyard…
…he will ask (after doing TALK twice) who sent you? The answer is MING LI.
This takes you into a courtyard with more refugees which doesn’t seem too helpful; there’s a locked door to the south. LISTEN mentions a VOICE IN YOUR HEAD, and you have to LISTEN VOICE and Ming Li will speak to you from the dead:
KEEP THE BOX… KEY IN DEPTH
Key in depth is a cue to go back in the river (the one you swam out of, GO RIVER and the like don’t work, you have to JUMP, because why would communicating anything in this game be easy) and DIVE where you can find a RUSTY KEY. The RUSTY KEY can go back to the courtyard to unlock the door and find an apothecary with a box and some “ampules”.
The ampules automatically spill on your hands. I kept the box through the rest of the game but I don’t know what it does — probably prevents something bad I never saw.
The substance on the hands turns out to be snake repellant, which lets you win the cobra game a second time for another chunk of money. Bribe in hand you can shoo away the soldier past the ladder, and then almost be done with the game…
…and here’s where the body bag comes in. Drop the bag, climb on in, and wait: you’ll be loaded on.
I’m guessing you’ve noticed in my tone I was not impressed with this one. I mean, kind of? Certainly in a raw rating-number-of-stars way, I’d give it pretty low for the clunky parser and tank scene alone. (Not counting the random mystical voice, the vague undercurrent of racism, the premise being ahistorical, etc… ) The art also isn’t helping matters, but the very original 1981 version of this is text-only, so I’ll give that a pass.
In a way, though, I am flabbergasted by the ambition. Go back at my All the Adventures list and look for games that try to be this audacious with plot. The “Interactive Fiction” series like Dragons of Hong Kong, I suppose, but those were meshed firmly in genre. This game really tried to blend classic adventure style with tragedy. People die unexpectedly by gunfire or rocket fire, people you get to have actual conversations with. The main character does odious things to survive; not remarked upon, but given the effort put into the refugees reaction to the murder, it at least is an intentional touch.
Almost nobody, in this era, was actively trying to create adventure game art. They were still getting used to their bearings and copying old formats. (There were still some beautiful strokes, mind you, and I deeply appreciate all of them.) So despite my feelings for this game, I recognize it as historically interesting. Furthermore, we aren’t done with the Jyym/Robyn Pearson duo yet! They even have another game for 1981 (The Institute) which I have heard is very good, so there’s still something to look forward to in their development.
Jyym Pearson continues his busy pace for 1981 (previously: The Curse of Crowley Manor, Escape from Traam, Earthquake San Francisco 1906) and teams up with Robyn Pearson for the first time, with graphical work in a later port again by Norman Sailer.
I intended to play the Apple II edition, just like I did with Jymm Pearson’s prior games, but no Apple II port exists on the Internet, and possibly anywhere. Even though an Apple II port was advertised in a November 1983 ad, a full year later in a December 1984 issue of Compute! the ad takes off the mention of an Apple version while maintaining the Apple being listed on the other related games.
It seems odd that they simply “sold out” of Apple II copies given the other ones still being mentioned. Also note in both the original and new ad the screenshot is given specifically for the Atari version (and all the other screenshots are for Apple II). Maybe there was an unfortunate tech accident and the port just never happened?
The upshot is we are seeing Atari screenshots instead of Apple II ones, which seem to my eye to have muddier color, although that was perhaps intentional given the setting.
As the ad mentioned, the game is set right before the “Fall of Saigon” on April 30, 1975. The US has already been following Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy and all combat forces had been withdrawn by 1973 following the Paris Peace Accords. The action starts with you as a captured prisoner; this isn’t historically realistic as all captured POWs had been released with the withdrawal of combat forces, but 1981 was a year where conspiracy theories about POWs still in Vietnam were still rampant. (This formed the plot of the movie Rambo: First Blood Part II from 1982.) Mashing the theory together with some imagination allows the situation in the game.
Like the previous games, there’s a “text game” window that is entirely separate from the graphical one, and you can swap back and forth. Repeated use of LOOK is necessarily to be able to see everything, and the graphics will sometimes show something before the text does.
Exactly one turn in after starting, a mortar blows up the hut you were trapped in…
…and then you are thrust directly in the quirky world of the Pearson parser. You can LOOK to find a DEAD VIET CONG, then LOOK VIET CONG to find they are wearing a JACKET, then LOOK JACKET to find it has a pocket with a snap. Trying to OPEN SNAP says YOU CAN’T and trying to UNSNAP SNAP says THE SNAP IS STUCK! It is unclear why the message are different, and at no point is anything listed as a “visible item” (that’s only items you can pick up, so we are fortunately not needing to tote round a dead body).
Moving away from the exploded hut is a log by a stream, where PUSH LOG is sufficient to roll it into the stream and form a bridge.
The log isn’t mentioned in the room description without using an extra LOOK command, but since it is visible in the picture I started interacting with it anyway; this makes for one definite difference between playing this version and a text-only one.
Past the bridge is a machine gun nest, where hanging around for long enough gets you killed.
There’s some pliers there, which you can take back to the previously-unopenable-pocket on the dead person to get a grenade and a document which says CODE = WHITE XMAS. (In adventure gamer terms, this is perfectly normal. In a narrative sense by the standard of Vietnam War stories, this is utterly bizarre.)
The grenade is simply described as Russian. The way to use it is to PULL PIN and THROW GRENADE, and now I really need to grump a bit, because the pin is not described at all and the only way it gets acknowledged is that the parser intercepts the custom command PULL PIN (PULL doesn’t even work in other contexts!) I went through various permutations of ARM GRENADE before hitting the correct answer. This is one of those moments that would look perfectly normal on a walkthrough but didn’t work in practice, and again we hit the problem where a “cinematic” style author isn’t thinking carefully enough about the world modeling beneath.
Using the grenade you can blow up the machine gun nest, and then CLIMB up to it.
The radio music as reflected in the document. This was the actual code signal for evacuating Saigon. I don’t know if there’s some in-game ramification or if it is just here for atmosphere.
I tried to TAKE RADIO (I couldn’t) and MOVE RADIO (in case the code meant something) and was rather baffled when I was blown up by a booby trap. Heading back with a saved game, I found the body looked like it was on top of something, and MOVE VIET CONG also blew me up by booby trap. It didn’t make sense for them both to be booby traps, but I realize the parser was simply intercepting any kind of MOVE command as moving the body, providing another object lesson in how slight parser irregularities can cause radical confusion in interpreting the world universe.
Moving on (from possibly a puzzle, or might have just been a trap) you can find a minefield. I could step out into the minefield and have one turn with a mine underfoot before exploding, so it is possible there is some disarmament procedure, but again, I’m not sure; it might just be a trap.
Heading north away from the minefield is a three-room road leading to a Viet Cong checkpoint.
In the middle of the road there is a rock you can climb to get back to the river/log area, but it seems to be a one way trip. I suspected, briefly, that I could pop my head in the checkpoint, run back, crawl up the rock to hide, wait as the Viet Cong pass, and let them accidentally blow themselves up in the minefield, but trying to enter and exit the checkpoint just led to immediate death (as well as several other tricks I’ve tried).
I’ll save talking about the game’s depictions of Asians for when I’ve got farther in. Nothing as egregious as the Chinatown encounter in the last game, yet.
So, to summarize:
1.) I can blow myself up at the radio with a booby trap.
2.) I can blow myself up at the minefield.
3.) I can blow myself up get shot at the checkpoint.
I haven’t found any new items (I’m still toting around those pliers and the document, but that’s it) so I still strongly suspect the rock in the middle of the path is used somehow. The early part of Earthquake San Francisco 1906 had reasonable puzzles; let’s hope the same pattern holds here before things start getting ludicrous (or possibly all the puzzles will be reasonable…?)
We’ve finally hit the December installment of the Softside Adventures of the Month, which (just like Around the World Adventure the month before, and Jack the Ripper from September’s selection) is credited elsewhere to Peter Kirsch. However, unlike those games, I have fair certainty the author is not Kirsch — I’ll get to why later.
Out of the various unlicensed movie rip-offs we’ve seen for All the Adventures, it’s generally been the usual nerd-cred suspects: Star Wars, Star Trek, and Alien. Dr. Who is coming, just not quite yet. Battlestar was undoubtedly the strangest with a crossover between Battlestar Galactica and Fantasy Island.
One thing I never expected to see re-imagined was the 1979 Disney movie (and box office failure) The Black Hole.
The crew of an interstellar craft discovers the long-lost Deep-Space Probe One, the Cygnus, at the edge of the vortex surrounding an immense black hole. See if you can foil the plans of Dr. Hans Reinhardt.
Softside, December 1981.
It isn’t even trying to hide the comparison, given the villain hasn’t changed names. V.I.N.CENT (the good helpful robot) and Maximilian (the big bad robot) are also both in by name, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, this brief video clip from the movie should get you up to speed:
The Atari version of the program (although not the TRS-80 one) includes more backstory which is just a simplification of the movie: you are captain of the Palomino (and it is just you, although maybe there are crew members staying on the ship), and you find the ship Cygnus around a black hole. The ship had vanished decades earlier with its captain Dr. Hans Reinhardt. You land to find the ship controlled only by the Doctor and some robots. Your job is to escape.
(The robots in the movie are really just humans, who were “lobotomized” into drones in a neo-Dr.-Who-Cybermen sort of way.)
Having said all that, the game is almost entirely exploration. There’s one puzzle at the start which is gnarly.
Pushing the red button tells you that your ship is missing “fuel” and “parts” in order to blast off. This will be important later.
Specifically, the “open door to the south” is not actually open. In order to get past you need to SHOW PIN. In the process of noodling with this (before finally giving up and checking hints) I found that you can’t READ things or EXAMINE things or really interact with much anything at all. This can work, but not when you’re starting the game with a puzzle that requires flailing in place waiting for the exact right command with no clueing and a bug which makes it confusing why you’d need to be solving a puzzle in the first place.
Wrr. After that, the map opens wide for exploration, and you can go nearly everywhere:
There’s a “blaster” and some “ammunition” in one of the crew cabins you need early, because robots will eventually start randomly appearing and you need to blast them (similar to Forbidden City which we just played, but also, importantly, Dog Star Adventure with a constant stream of guards).
This is the one robot you can blast that’s fixed in place.
I gathered an inventory of random items like an IDENTIFICATION BRACELET and FRUITS AND VEGETABLES (called FOOD in the game) with no notion what they’re for. I did run across Maximilian, although he doesn’t bother you as long as you don’t try to shoot the Doctor:
The item other item that turned out to be handy was a KEY which let me get into a supply room that has ALL SORTS OF THINGS. The only place we’ve run across a similar situation (kind of) is Dog Star Adventure which, in its original BASIC type-in listing, pulled the same trick where you had to guess what items the supply room held and type them in (like GET BLASTER). That’s the same case here. Remember the FUEL and PARTS? You can find them here by typing GET FUEL and GET PARTS. Then you can take them back to the ship, drop them off, and hit the red button to blast off and win the game.
Well, sometimes. There is (according to Garry Francis) a 30% you’ll just get blasted by a laser cannon and die, and there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s just random.
There’s also some other ending involving … going into the black hole and starting a new world? You need to get BOB (another robot from the movie and the Atari intro text, but not the TRS-80 one!) who also happens to be hidden in the supply room, and apparently the “DISKETTE” in the room with Maximilian I showed a screenshot of also is useful … maybe? The game is very unclear about why certain things are happening and I really got the vague sense the author was frantically gesturing at moments from the movie they found exciting without finding an adequate way to convey that excitement in adventure game form (other than random death).
Another death that can happen, although I don’t know if it is based on randomness or just spending too many turns exploring.
Back to my original assertion this is not a Kirsch game: the parser, text layout, and general competence are quite different. I could see slacking on the third point, but Kirsch (for example) always uses “Some exits are” to list exits; this goes back to Kidnapped. He also allowed abbreviations like N/S/E/W for north/south/east/west, which this game does not (you have to type EAST in full to go east). There is no doubt in my mind this is a different author, possibly one who was using Dog Star Adventure as their base source code; that game does use the “OBVIOUS DIRECTIONS” text, plus has random guards easily changeable to robots, plus has the bizarre supply room we haven’t seen anywhere else. (Except the laundry in Escape From Colditz I guess?)
I gather this was a phase where getting a monthly schedule for Softside was hard, and so they couldn’t be too discriminating in what they published for their monthly choice. Backing up in a holistic way, the game is kind of interesting — a relatively expansive map, the inclusion of movie beats despite very little action, the alternate endings — so I can see why it made print, but it still feels like a relic of 1981 publishing practices rather than a real game.
I got this when I tried to take off when a robot was still in the room with me. The game never clarifies what the evil plans are.
With this game I close the book on something I’ve been working on for a long time: playing through all the games listed as source code in the Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures, as collected and published by Bob Liddil of the Programmer’s Guild. We’re not quite done with Liddil (he put out a later volume for C64, Castles and Kingdoms) but still, given I technically started the book with Adventureland in 2015, it’s the ending of a long trip.
From the aforementioned book.
I ended here — and saved this game for close to the end of my 1981 sequence — because the source code wasn’t anywhere on the Internet, so I knew I would need to type it. I got part of the way through, but one day I noticed a website
show up on my arrival links for the blog. Clicking curiously, I found the original author (Harry McCracken) had revived his game and wrote about it in detail, and made a version playable at that very link!
So, no typing the entire chunk of BASIC source code after all. Not today, Satan. Also, rather vitally, the author discovered that the source code contained a bug that made the game entirely unplayable, and fixed some other bugs besides. He also added features — it seems mostly to be a slot machine he coded in 1979 — so if I was super-concerned about original authenticity I would go back to typing anyway, but in truth, if there was one bug that likely came from a printing error, other bugs might come from the same source, so as long as I note the major changes ahead of time (as I just did) I feel perfectly comfortable playing the 2021 remix.
Even if you’re not planning on playing the game, I do recommend reading the history rundown which includes nuggets like:
Harry McCracken was (and still is) friends with Charles Forsythe (of games like Tower of Fear) and first encountered Bob Liddil when he visited the TRS-80 Users’ Group of Eastern Massachusetts, which met at their school.
There’s a largely imaginary bio in the book that claims he was fifteen (he was actually seventeen) and that he took computer courses, played Dungeons and Dragons, and was a science fiction fan (none of which were true).
In addition to appearing in the book (which he knew about) he also showed up in the still-mysterious MICRO-FANTASY tapezine (I have never seen any actual copies) but without permission. He only learned about the tape quite recently.
This admittedly falls within Bob Liddil’s self-description as a “hustler and a huckster”.
(I’m incidentally about to describe a “full playthrough”, so if you’re genuinely interested in a 1981 game that has been revised in 2021, you should try playing it at the link above first.)
Moving on to the game itself, it has an odd sort of innovation in not being clear what the main objective is. I didn’t actually know the objective until I had won the game. That sounds “objectively bad” but there’s a sneaky bit of deception that I’ll get into which made the maneuver interesting. (Also: a little bit of shades of Mystery Fun House where I didn’t find the explanatory message until about halfway through.)
In the meantime, you start in an igloo with a coat and shovel. I quickly used the shovel outside the igloo to unearth a large chest containing a wetsuit and radio. (The radio gives random “general help” messages.) The wetsuit was sufficient for me to dive into the nearby (very cold) ocean, but I was stuck floating at the surface. It does the interesting TRS-80 trick of very briefly showing the room description of the place you try to get into before booting you back to the prior location, so some quick screenshotting can be used to get an idea what’s ahead.
Near the igloo is a cave leading down to a polar bear guarding a flare gun, and a locked gate leading farther down. Going in a different direction, there’s an ocean with an ice floe you can ride.
For a while this happened apparently at random, but I think it is simply based on weight being carried. I tried to keep my inventory at a minimum at all times — the map is pretty tiny so it wasn’t onerous to keep dropping things — and I ended up mostly safe after.
This leads to a village with a “small casino” which I gather is one of the new additions to the game, and has a slot machine mini-game the author wrote in 1979 that he pitched in. The casino gives $25 and you need to get up to $40, so playing the slot machine is required. I eventually realized the odds were tilted pretty seriously towards the player, but in my first game I nearly lost all my money. This is a variant on an issue I’ve written about before where if an essential event is triggered by randomness, some players will miss it by bad luck. Here, the luck is more of the accumulative sort, but it’s still roughly the same problem; I thought perhaps I needed to do some serious save-and-reload-game fiddling to get more money before I started having jackpots.
The village also has a “trading post”, “rustic shack”, and “kennel”. The kennel has a trainer with a dog, and is willing to give over the dog for sufficient chips from the casino (this is what the $40 is for, although the trainer doesn’t tell you how much money is needed so I needed to go back and forth until I met success).
Incidentally, the first time I got the dog — which was after a lot of slot machine pulls — I went back to ride the floe back to the starting area and died. Oops.
The shack only had a raging fire (which will be useful later) and the post, curiously, had a storekeeper who says “Drop your treasures here and I’ll give you supplies.” This is the “bit of deception” I was talking about; there are treasures with asterisks around them just like a Scott Adams game (*TREASURE*) and in every other game from the era I’ve played it means the treasures must be dropped in a particular collection area to gather points and win. Here, the concept ends up being similar (you need the treasures to win), but this is not a treasure hunt for its own sake — you’re only dropping the treasures in order get items from the storekeeper to solve more puzzles. The author was playing with the standard form here, but the standard form is so long out of memory I’m guessing it is not obvious for most modern players anything is being changed.
With only the dog in tow, I tried seeing if it would get me anywhere new. The only thing that was new was that the radio — which previously had random messages — gave a message about saying MUSH to go to base. Unfortunately, the dog was not a help at the bear (not like I could blame the pupper) and after enough random meandering I realized I could LOOK IGLOO at the starting place to find an ICE BRICK.
It took me longer than it might normally would to find the brick because the igloo is a place you can GO. The general principle for Scott Adams style adventure games has been that objects that are just “navigation places” don’t contain extra secrets, although it is logical an igloo would have something. What is not logical is that you can remove the brick to elsewhere, go back, and LOOK IGLOO again to have the brick teleport back.
Looking at the brick, the game noted it might be hiding something. I tried BREAK BRICK and THROW BRICK various permutations thereof before deciding the shack with a raging fire would be a help.
Still trying to be careful about inventory, since hopping back and forth between the igloo area and village area requires riding the ice floe.
I took the key back to the locked gate near the bear, and was able to go underwater to grab a *MEDALLION* treasure. There was also a “lost ship” (Charles Forsythe reference, I reckon) with an octopus and another treasure but I immediately floated up to the surface of the ocean when I tried to go in there (the TRS-80 only-show-the-screen-for-a-moment trick again).
Still, I was able to trade the medallion for a harpoon gun. Great! That’d be useful against an octopus … except I can’t get to the octopus without floating up and away.
Really, all I had left puzzle-wise to solve was the polar bear, so I made various futile attempts to deal with it.
The response here reminded me of YOU UNFORTUNATELY ARE THE ONLY ONE THAT CAN BE KILLED from Mummy’s Curse, but without the existential dread.
Finally — and this was the last real difficulty I had with the game — I did LOOK on an item I had got from the very start: LOOK COAT. There were rations in the pocket. Argh!
(Veteran readers may know I’ve had this trouble in Trek Adventure and elsewhere. In my defense: why would you not notice they were there if you were wearing the coat?)
The rations were enough to make the bear happy, so I grabbed the flare gun it was guarding, went out to the igloo, and fired it into the air. A plane came by and dropped off some weighted boots. Kind of a random choice to be helpful, but actually what I needed!
Wearing the boots (and the diving suit, and the coat) let me take on the octopus, and the *ANCIENT RUM* which manages to still be ok despite being underwater.
One last trip to the trading post: for the ancient rum the storekeeper gave me a sled. I had to struggle a little with the parser here; you can GO SLED like a location, and then trying SAY MUSH notes that you have to hitch the dog. HITCH is not a verb I’ve encountered in an adventure before, but the instructions were explicit enough I was able to ride to victory.
I seriously thought until I saw this screen that the base was just a new location and I’d be riding the dog to more adventures.
This was honestly as good a send-off for Captain 80 as I could hope for: not too absurd to figure out, reasonable puzzles despite my inability to find pockets, and a slight twist in the overall structure just for one last iota of game-theory interest. It will not reverberate through the ages, but the whole point of All the Adventures is to try everything, both the grand gestures via epoch-making games and the little moments formed by a high school student’s game being published by random chance meeting only to be unburied 40 years later.
The overall map is nicely compact, which I also appreciate.
Part of an alternate cover of a version of Mummy’s Curse sold by Softsmith, from the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
So I was correct that the straw-and-dirt tunnel was necessary to pass for progress. I had made — or to be honest, the authors made — what I’d call a Scaling Error. This is where an object is described in world in such a way that you (the player) visualizes it in a different way than the author does, making solving the puzzle much harder. Alternately, it could be something slightly improbable is meant to happen based on the clearly-described size of objects (a refrigerator being toted in one’s pocket, for instance).
The way to get by an entire passage blocked up with dirt was to … POUR WATER from a normal-sized ewer. This loosens the dirt up enough to go through.
I mean, maybe? But it comes off more as the pitcher of water being turned into the generalized concept of water, and water is plenty to get dirt muddy, voila. It’s a little like wordplay puzzle, except the thing gets converted to a word which gets converted back to a thing of a slightly different type than the first thing but the same name.
Moving on! The ramp goes up to a “dome room” (nothing happens there) and you can go make a brief visit to the wicket Princess Fatima.
She does nothing and there seems to be no purpose to her being there, other than — kind of — to warn you about a bit shortly after where you can die by walking into a mirror.
Nearby is the trap door shown above, and the way through is to just try going DOWN at which point the game prompts you that you need a knife to pick the lock. ??? Okay, I have a knife:
The lock doesn’t stay picked, either. There’s no state to the trap door, PICK LOCK is just treated like a movement command. Also, the explicit giveaway to a puzzle (where someone could still get stuck if they didn’t think to just try going down as opposed to UNLOCK DOOR and other fruitless tasks) is vaguely curious. I’m wondering if this was a testing-situation where they decided to toss the comment in to make the puzzle “easy” but didn’t anticipate someone just not doing the action and seeing the hint.
This mirror is where going NORTH kills you, even though the game isn’t clear you are facing north. Nearby (heading south instead) there is a bottomless pit, followed by a three-headed serpent.
Strength (the HORUS amulet) is enough to jump over the pit, and snake (the APEP amulet) is enough to get by the snake. This leads to a room with a scepter, which turns out to be the last gizmo needed to reach the end — waving it or rubbing it causes you to float.
With scepter in hand I was out of things to do in the palace, so I went back to the empty room at the mummy’s tomb and tried using the scepter there.
I floated up to the object of my desires (see above) but was then confronted by THE MUMMY.
Trying to escape normally leads to messages like the mummy having his hands around your neck. I tried to DROP MASK and it said
IT IS YOUR FOREVER BEGONE WITH YOU
and poking and testing out more directions for a long time was … enough to win the game? You die, but the game asks if you want to keep playing, and if you say YES you end up with the winning screen:
Was this intentional? Or was this a weird glitch like in Mission: Asteroid where you save the Earth only to have it destroyed by an asteroid if you keep playing. I’m honestly not sure, because the other ending (I looked up hints, which mentions both) is to take the “BEGONE WITH YOU” as instructions and type BEGONE ADVENTURER. (There’s sort of a clue with the blue-robed person saying BEGONE AMAHD causing you to get blown out of the room, but AMAHD doesn’t work here, it has to be ADVENTURER.)
This results in the exact same ending! Is this also an ending where the adventurer dies? What does typing the command even mean, given we aren’t SAYing anything?
I’ll still take it in the Win column as Beating the Game Without Hints, hurray. I’ll leave behind the existential crisis presented and offer some regret that we have, once again, a situation where someone — or in this case two someones — have a burst of energy in developing their skill at creating adventures, but bail out right when they start getting good. Alas, the market in 1981 was not a sure thing despite (or perhaps “because of”) the ability to start from zero, and it chewed up developers.
Next up: a TRS-80 game I was halfway through typing when the developer popped up recently and produced a newly revised version.
Continuing from last time, the portion inside the pyramid turned out to be relatively straightforward. It’s starts off feeling like it’s going to be a maze in the “you need to drop objects” tradition, but I realized fairly quickly that something else was going on. I had already had a nagging feeling about the image on the back wall where the inscription was…
…so I tried matching it with what I had so far in my map, and found it worked as long as I turned the map upside-down. The small rectangles to the south and east are because going those directions “leaves the pyramid” but drops the player in a pit. (The one to the west is something else, which I’ll show off in a moment.)
What’s canny here is that the way the rooms repeat makes this a little non-obvious — there’s a “blue sky” room, for instance, that shows up at each of the three “entrances” (although remember two are just by death pits)…
…so that on my first foray (admittedly wandering randomly) I got befuddled by assuming there was only one blue-sky room, even though the map is pure N/S/E/W with only “extended connection length” fouling things up and no nonsensical connections; no loops or hidden turns. It is the first adventure game maze I’ve enjoyed in a while. (I think the key move here, in an author-conceptual sense, was to be unafraid to make things easy, and to add just enough of a wrinkle so to avoid the puzzle being simplistic.)
The maze has matches, a flashlight, gold coins, and a “full ewer” (which can serve as a water source and be refilled; there’s a “thirst timer” in this game just like Elephant Graveyard but it is much more generous on number of moves).
The flashlight lets you poke into a dark section the west side of the pyramid, entering from the outside. I expected another large area but instead got a clue.
This turned out to be a helpful clue; HORUS, APEP, AND SMA are the names of the amulets in the game. I had found SMA and tried to use it and it did seem to “activate” but I wasn’t sure what was going on. It turns out in all the cases the amulets simply provide a “persistent effect” that gets applied later and then used up. (Again, I think the authors were really shooting for easier here — a more typical situation from this time period would be to require use of the amulet immediately before an obstacle.) There still was something of a twist to the setup, as it is possible to use the resource in the wrong place. Back to the mountains and the Nile river, I had drowned when I tried to swim across…
…but if you’ve used SMA, you survive (although your possessions are swept away by the water). This originally led me to suspect this simply meant I needed to be unencumbered, but past the river there was another deadly section.
The Mummy’s Tomb (seen above) is just past, but stepping inside you find the air is thin and pass out and die. This is where the SMA effect is needed, so if you use it too early you die right after. So the solution is to find a different route across the Nile. I liked this resource-being-used-up puzzle insofar as a.) the punishment for using the resource came right after, so there wasn’t a long period of walking dead b.) the loss of possessions was another hint maybe something was wrong and c.) it was genuinely pleasurable to hit the solution, as it required insight across time as well as space. (Shades of Hadean Lands, here.) That is, rather than thinking in terms of I-have-object-X-where-does-it-go (which this game does have a lot of) I needed to think more in a story sense about the events that happened.
Speaking of where does object X go, the gold coins go to the merchant selling a shovel and knife I mentioned last time, and fair warning, stereotyping ahead.
There’s some more Fu Machu style dialogue after making a purchase but I’ll spare you that. I’m not sure what Fu Manchu is doing in Egypt.
Relatedly, with the second stereotypical character, Abdul the palace guard from last time, you just get by by using SAY HI.
I came up for this by testing HELP to see what the verb would do and the game told me SAY HI was useful. It also said MAKE was handy, which will be important later.
The only other things in the palace are an empty room with a table (“BROTHER THIS GUY DOESN’T HAVE MUCH OF A PALACE.”) and a passage sealed with dirt and straw I haven’t gotten by yet.
QUICK INTERLUDE ON THE STEREOTYPES
We’ve certainly hit a few before, most egregiously in Earthquake San Francisco 1906, but what I find fascinating is the (relatively) low level of hostility in their use. The SAY HOW from Ghost Town raised my hackles…
I can also see: Indian ghost
>LOOK GHOST
OK
I see
nothing special
>SAY HOW
How?
Geronimo says: “Its easy! Happy Landings!”
…but it was intended as a joke based on Westerns, as opposed to Westerns using the stereotype “straight” giving the damaging impression of indigenous people having simplistic language. Geronimo responds to the joke in English and it could almost be a scene from Little Big Man if the context was tweaked slightly. I still hold it is Not Good, but at least it was trying. It’s a little bit how certain 1990s authors would write “strong women” while not quite shaking off old ways. (Guess the Famous Author: “Slender and barely taller than Mat’s shoulder, at the moment the Wisdom seemed taller than any of them, and it did not matter that she was young and pretty.”)
Getting by the friendly palace guard by just saying hi seems to play on the hostile-Arabian-region stereotype most famously explicated in the original opening song of Disney’s Aladdin. (It had the line “Where they’ll cut off your ears if they don’t like your face”, which was removed in all home-release versions.) Trying to attack him (or anyone else) has the game explain
YOU UNFORTUNATELY ARE THE ONLY ONE THAT CAN BE KILLED
INTERLUDE OFF
Moving on with our bounty from the shop, the shovel can be taken to “something buried in the sand” in the desert to reveal stairs leading to a crypt.
Inside are a number of art pieces, and the HORUS (strength) amulet.
There’s also a “religious altar” next to an ax. You can take incense (laying in the open in the mountains) and light it to open a secret passage with the APEP (snake) amulet.
From here I was a bit stuck but thought back to the hint about needing to make things, and a locked gate in the mountains. I happened to have a stick (again out in the open in the mountains) and thought, well, if I got really lucky, maybe I could just make a key to fit. Lo and behold:
Behind the gate was a forest with some hemp. The hemp could be used to MAKE ROPE, the trees could be cut (with the ax) to get some logs, and the rope and logs combine to MAKE RAFT.
With the power of the raft I was able to go back to the Nile and get across without removing my lung power. Then I could get inside the mummy’s tomb, with SMA saving me:
I’m not sure what to do next. I suspect I need to enter stealthily, but I’m running low on items I haven’t used yet. My inventory is
FULL EWER, FLASHLIGHT, MATCHES, AX, KNIFE, SHOVEL, WOODEN KEY, RAFT
and rather nicely, the game hasn’t shown any kind of inventory limit so the list is everything still available. But I’ve used all of it! (The knife was needed to carve the key.) That doesn’t mean there isn’t re-use, but the only puzzle remaining is the dirt-and-straw filled passage in the palace, and the shovel is being no help there, so perhaps I’m missing a room exit? I also haven’t encountered an opportunity to use the strength or snake abilities.
I still suspect I’m nearing close to the end. The map ended up fairly large but the puzzles have generally gone briskly. There’s been a real sense of being an explorer (as opposed to crawling inch by inch trying to get to the next available part).
Renga in Blue 