Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Via Mobygames.

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 The US has already been following Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy and all combat forces had been withdrawn by 1973 following the Paris Peace Accords.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…?)