Archive for April 2023
(Reading my previous post on Fantasyland is necessary to understand this one.)
So yet again I put aside a game and one my readers (this time, K) decided to tear it apart to discover its secrets. I did achieve five out of five treasures and the method is wild enough it is worth an extra post rather than just a post edit.
This is a good time to mention two side discoveries regarding Canadian history. First off, I found out the Toronto PET Users’ Group put out a CD with every single disk they ever created. While I haven’t checked every platform, it includes a fair amount of PET material that is not available anywhere else I’ve seen. (Link on Internet Archive.)
Secondly, as Rob points out in the last post, there’s an earlier Canadian videogame company: Speakeasy Software, as mentioned in the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities. Bulls and Bears, their first title from 1978, estimates 7000 copies sold (very respectable for 1978!)
Their other top-selling title. I don’t think Wargaming Scribe has done this one yet.
My suspicion is there’s still some gold to be unearthed in the 1977-1982 period of Canada. This period in computer history is a mess in essentially every country in terms of historical knowledge; everything was diffuse and rarer.
Going back to the game: I had four out of five treasures but could not find the location for a fifth. That’s because I was missing a “direction”.
Specifically, there’s mention in the room A Whiff of Home that “Magic Works”. In literally every other game of the period this would mean there was a magic word like MAGIC or HOME that would cause effects to happen. This turns out to be the case here but it doesn’t get delivered in the same way; the game requires a verb AND a noun. SAY is recognized as SAVE (the parser only looks at the first two letters of each word). With those strictures in place I thought the game was just being weird (in some places it is definitely just being weird) and moved on.
The actual syntax is GO HOME and GO MAGIC. Those are two different “directions” that can be done in all the rooms. You need to be holding the BOOK OF SECRETS for this to work, except every command there’s a 1/10 chance that it will get stolen. However, you can USE PICTURE (the PICTURE OF MOM) to make the book reappear again. The only reason I knew about the latter is I used it correctly when trying to get the JEWELS from MOM (you’re supposed to DROP the picture so you can get the JEWELS — USE PICTURE doesn’t work for convincing MOM, and I realize for someone who dropped into this paragraph without context this makes no sense at all).
So the right movement patterns is to GO MAGIC and GO HOME in every room, while invoking USE PICTURE every time the book gets stolen. The stolen book of course gets irritating, but systematically checking every room also gets irritating (since you’d like to test both alter-directions, but if one of them works, it takes a while to get back to test the other). I ended up using save states to make things go faster.
ADD: check the comments — it is even more complicated than expected. GO MAGIC and GO HOME universally go to the same place (but it seems to be possibly a bug?) and there are rooms where the “alternate direction” is done via holding something other than the book, like a DEFOGGER.
Interestingly enough, I had a little bit of a puzzle-breakthrough in finding the final treasure. It might have just been accidental and there’s plenty of methods that work, but if you like, study the map and try to guess which room I went to in order to USE MAGIC and jump to the final treasure room.
The room that’s useful to use magic at is — Fantasyland!
With shovel in hand you can get the statue, the last treasure. There’s some other magic-hidden rooms, apparently, but this is the only important one. Since there’s no treasure-storing area you just need all five treasures in hand and can end the game right there.
The game was, in its own curious way, staggeringly ambitious. I didn’t even talk about the flashlight, which shows nearby items…
…or the fact that NEW GAME, which I speculated was a broken feature last time, is working as intended. It is broken that sometimes the game is literally impossible to solve, but it does make essentially a “full randomizer” function — every item is shuffled to a new place, including the player’s inventory. I guess this was a way to squeeze a little more longevity out of the game. The author, after all, was still in an era where he had to struggle to find games to play.
The result of another NEW GAME. The SOMETHING is a useful object that helps defeat the guard (or it would be useful if the guard wasn’t buggy anyway). We’ve had plenty of adventure-roguelikes but this is the first time I’ve seen a “default game” that can then be turned later into a roguelike on command. The only comparison I can think of is Adventure for Atari 2600, where Game 3 is the randomized version.
It is the year 2101 and war has broken out between Earth and the distant planet Zekloke. This alien power has established a large military complex on Mars which will soon become a great danger to Earth. Hidden in the massive installation are several secret documents containing the plans for an incredible defense shield — strong enough to stop an entire fleet of spacecraft.
You are a special agent and have just succeeded in sneaking into the alien complex. Your mission is to destroy this threat to mankind and return with plans for the powerful defense shield. The outcome of this mission will decide the fate of mankind.
While we’ve had regular visits to Softside magazine via their Adventure of the Month series, that was a “side series” distributed on disk and tape. They were still printing games in their pages, and Operation: Sabotage by Ray Sato was printed three times: first in their August 1982 issue, again in their December 1982 issue (for different platforms) and yet again in their Best of Softside collection.
The original platform was TRS-80, but I played the Apple version, as the type-in version was recently uploaded by eientei (who normally types in unpreserved Japanese games but I suppose wanted some variety).
The biggest breath of fresh air here is that the game is easy. This is really genuinely solvable, and if we exclude Fun House (which was for kids) and Smurf Adventure (which was public domain and had essentially no puzzles at all) it makes for the easiest game so far of 1982. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the goal seems to be to tell a story more than pose some stumpers, and the game compensates for the low puzzle difficulty by adding quite a few red herrings, so many that it is deceptive to refer to all of them by the same name. Let’s do some splitting:
Background scenery: the outdoor forest in original Crowther/Woods Adventure which you could technically think of as a maze, but mainly serves to make the outdoors feel bigger than it really is
Side events: or in some cases easter eggs, like the stabbing of Julius Caesar from Time Zone
Passive deceptions: like when Ferret had a door with a key in it that appeared to require the newspaper-under-the-door trick, but the door is genuinely unopenable; no real player thought is needed other than the willingness to shrug and move on
Active deceptions: rather than “unsolvable puzzles” this is “items that actively seem like they solve real puzzles that are real, but don’t”; referring to Ferret again, there is a gold key that doesn’t go to any locked door, with the additional catch that taking it along requires leaving behind a silver key which is required
There was once upon a time in the late 90s where I remember Internet discussions claiming that any red herrings were bad form; I think those with that opinion were excluding background scenery and possibly side events. It is the genuinely rare game that doesn’t have some bit of scenery to make the world realistic, although some of the British-style ones (like Zodiac) fit the norm. In Hamil the nearly complete lack of red herrings serves as a clue, since some locations that might “feel” like scenery in a normal game are a little easier to cope with knowing something has to be meaningful to every element.
Operation: Sabotage does all four kinds of red herrings.
Let’s get to the gameplay! To quickly re-explain the plot from the top of this post: you need to sneak into a base, steal plans for a shield, set the base to explode, and escape.
The opening room is a case in point: the blue button opens the airlock and sucks you into space. It probably is mostly a side event although I could see it being a passive deception in trying to work out how to avoid dying. There isn’t really any item or button later that indicates a need to noodle here, though.
The passage you are in then goes south, to a decontamination chamber with a blue button.
This is basically a side event; there’s some indication later of radiation, but you don’t need to deal with it at all.
Then there’s more or less an item frenzy; without doing much puzzle-solving other than getting a CROWBAR and using it to open a locked cabinet in a room immediately adjacent, you can get:
a laser pistol
a key
a computer destruct program
batteries
an electronic control baton
a black device
a calendar
There’s various other buttons you can noodle with, like an “entertainment center” with two buttons that let you turn a movie on or off, and a red button in a bio lab that unleashes a monster.
You can win after typing SHOOT MONSTER enough times (the combat seems to be purely randomized) although this entire scene is just a side event; there’s no item reward. This means that the entire first chunk of the game we are able to sneak in an enemy base with no obstacles whatsoever. The aliens from Zekloke seem to be far too heavily reliant on robots for security, which you’ll see in a moment.
One of the buttons teleports you, as above, and takes you to the second (and last) portion of the map.
The octagons on the map are where you get attacked by androids. They require a shoot-out just like with the monster (and you can randomly die, just like with the monster).
However, you don’t have to deal with the combat at all; take a look at the above screenshot. Notice we’re in the robot control room and there’s a computer. You can just SHOOT COMPUTER and it will de-activate all the security robots.
You can also find a silver pill in a medical station (I assume it helps if you get hurt, but again you don’t need to worry about it), some nitroglycerin (useless), a portable radio (useless), and an multi-room setup where you can detect radiation with the black device from earlier, push a button to unlock a nuclear reactor, another one to turn it off, and then the ability to walk in and try to blow up the computer in the room. This kills yourself and is entirely useless
This is a multi-room active deception. The nitroglycerin also seems tempting here, and the player even starts the game with a (completely useless!) plastic explosive. No, all you need to do is find the computer center and insert the “DESTRUCT PROGRAM” that had been so helpfully lying around.
The author clearly put a lot of work into the entire nuclear reactor sequence, yet also put the method of starting the base’s self-destruct mechanism right in the open, so I’m not sure what the gameplay intent was. I did like the whole nuclear sequence but I found it after I had already discovered the self-destruct.
With the self-destruct active, you can use a “LAUNCH CASETTE” from a desk to then escape.
(I like how this is just a description of how close you are to finishing your mission, rather than using an abstract score.)
To get the plans, there’s a SAFE in the southeast corner of the map. This is the only part I was briefly stumped, as I did foolishly think the PLASTIC EXPLOSIVE would still be useful for something. (In other words, this is the one time the active deception briefly deceived me.) The game lets you try to THROW it and nothing happens, and there is no method of setting for detonation. No, you’re just supposed to take that electronic control baton from earlier and USE it. This causes the SAFE to swing open and reveal the PLANS, easy peasy.
I don’t know if the author really set to make an “easy” game or just landed on one anyway. It was refreshing to feel like the plot was mostly incidental and I could just noodle with the items given and see if I could discover some new effect with no pressure. The overall effect was definitely not of infiltrating a dangerous alien base, but honestly, after Time Zone I think I’ve proven myself in that respect and could use a vacation.
If you want to download the Apple II version, I have the original version here and a “decoded” version (which runs faster) here.
We’ve had lots of people writing adventure games from the United States and Britain; one person likely from Scotland; another few writing from Australia. There is a country that has been conspicuously absent: Canada.
It is odd they’d be left out; they do have a tradition of games that goes back to at least Microchess from 1976. The author, Peter Jennings, was later a member of the Toronto PET Users’ Group, founded in 1978 and still ongoing. They were at one point one of the largest Commodore enthusiast groups in the world.
It all started in the summer of 78. I decided to buy a TRS 80. Some how a Newfie friend of mine (Fred Wilson) convinced me to buy a PET instead … It came with a free program (Lunar Lander) and a copy of Pet Users Notes #2.
After tiring of Lunar Lander I typed in “NIM” from the Users Notes. Six times I typed it in and it wouldn’t work *@#$!! Humm! seems to be written by some chap from Toronto named Butterfield! I called him on the phone and he invited me down to his home. While I was there I met a friend of his (Peter Jennings) who was writing a program called Microchess. Impressive!!
— From “Lyman Duggan, TPUG’s Founding Father”, from the September 1982 issue of The TORPET
Vince Sorensen, the author of today’s game Fantasyland (aka Fantasia Land) hails from Regina. We know this because it says so in the source code.
1 REM MAY, 1982
2 REM VINCE SORENSEN
3 REM 55 LLOYD CRES. REGINA, SASK.
He was also a contributor to TORPET. Here’s a clip of his review of some C64 games in the September 1983 edition:
When I first got my C-64. the only game that I could find for it was called Froggee. It’s a fun game. but there’s only so long you can keep playing the same thing over and over. I almost went back to my VIC. but happened to run into another or TPUG member who had a C-64. and was saved. He directed me to a place that sold more C-64 games than one could imagine.
It is interesting from a game-history standpoint to have someone switch from VIC-20 to C64 but be tempted to switch back just due to game selection, despite the heavy technical advantage the C64 has. (He even points out later that Omega Race is better on the VIC than C64; to be fair, that might be the actual best of all the VIC-20 games.)
I would say this is the first time a game for the All the Adventures project is from Canada, but John O’Hare (who had three games from 1980) is mentioned as a member of the Toronto group in an issue of TORPET. So it is likely those were the first Canadian adventure games, just I didn’t have a nationality marked at the time. Sorry, Canadians! (UPDATE: No, O’Hare was just someone in Illinois who was a member, see the comment by jcompton. Alas.)
It is still safe to say Fantasyland, despite being all the way out in 1982, is extremely early in Canadian adventure game history. This isn’t as odd as it might sound; for instance, the first commercial game made for consoles in Canada had to wait until 1983 with BC’s Quest for Tires. (You can read the details as well as terrific pictures of every version at Ernst Krogtoft’s blog.) The earliest computer game company may have been Software Magic, which I quite recently wrote about, and they only started advertising in December of 1981. (ADD: Rob from the comments mentions Speakeasy which goes back to 1978.) So while the Toronto PET Users’ Group came early, the commercial market got a slow start, meaning a little lag time is understandable (while we’ve seen some freeware, the vast majority of adventure games have been commercial).
Vince Sorenson incidentally has credits for one other game, a version of hockey using ASCII characters which is two-player only. It later surfaced in the Keypunch Software series, which appropriated old “public domain” software and resold it (how public domain it really was is often unclear).
(If Keypunch sounds familiar, they were the ones with the Cavern of Riches port stuffed on an “Adventure Pak” that was impossible to beat due to a scoring bug.)
Returning back to Fantasyland, being written for VIC-20 (with the C64 literally just being copying the BASIC code) in under 8K it falls into the same club as other super-minimalist games.
FANTASYLAND
BY VINCE SORENSEN
SOME COMMANDS ARE…
QUIT, SAVE, HELP, GET,GO, LOAD, DROP, USE, LOOK, FIGHT, NEW.
REMINDER – ONE TREASURE IS DISGUISED!
We’ve seen various angles for how to handle extra-small sizes (like the Bruce Robinson games): reduced verb lists, cut-down parsers, room descriptions that are just the name and any items nearby. This game includes all of them with a streak of complete and total surrealism. I’ve played some very bizarre games for the Project, but this genuinely might top them all.
The opening room seems to be random; the item placement at first seems to be not. I say “at first” because one of the commands you can type is NEW GAME, and then things get weird indeed:
I’m going to suspect the above — which starts you with two items, including one I suspect is not meant to be portable — is a genuine memory bug. But the game is so utterly wild I wouldn’t put anything past it. Some screenshots to demonstrate:
The goal is to find five treasures. You just need them in your inventory, you don’t have to drop them anywhere.
A sample of the total chaos of the map. Click here if you want to see the whole thing.
I’ve only found four of the treasures, which I have marked above.
1. Find a chest of diamonds. You need to be holding KEYS in order to take them.
2. Find some jewels nearby MOM. MOM needs a picture of herself in order to let you take them. If you use the picture MOM will give you a BOOK OF SECRETS.
You can use the BOOK OF SECRETS to teleport to other places. If you hold the BOOK OF SECRETS for too long it will get stolen by a wizard.
Yes, the COPS are an inventory item in the above shot, and that isn’t a bug.
3. Take a crown by a guard. The game seems to have been designed so the guard stops you, but I haven’t been able to trigger that.
The source indicates multiple solutions (that involve you having the right item in inventory, one possible item being the COPS), and let me just quote:
4. The “secret” treasure is a toilet.
5. The source code indicates something about digging up a statue with a SHOVEL. I have the shovel but despite checking the map thoroughly I have not seen a statue.
Given the BOOK OF SECRETS does a teleport, and there are other rooms that vaguely hint at magic words…
…it is perhaps possible there is a secret area only reachable via magic, but the game hasn’t been welcoming enough for me to try to tussle with it longer.
I will say that Fantasyland is fascinating in the sense of — despite having just treasures to collect — being something entirely different. I can’t think of another game to quite compare it to. That is, even with the absolutely sparest of elements there’s still the potential for variety. There’s been a few truly erratic maps (see Intergalactic from Atom Adventures) but nothing at the level we have here, and where you have a MINISTER OF ROCKS who can’t even be referred to by the parser but is just there for color.
I tried bringing the ROCK and using it to see if the Minister would be impressed, but alas.
For my next game I was going to be writing about a Canadian game, but I wanted to get a mystery out of the way first: the company Software Magic, which sold TRS-80 software but has almost no Internet presence whatsoever.
It first pokes its head out early in 1982 with ads for “Potions”; here’s one from Computronics, March, 1982:
Later the same year, starting at least by October they started advertising a catalog you could get for $1 with “adventure, simulation, D&D and arcade programs”. The November edition of 80-U.S. in particular advertised the adventure games Lunar Mission and Marooned in Time.
Dale Dobson over at Gaming after 40 is the only person in the entire history of the Internet who seems to have ever had any encounter with them, as he somehow obtained the spring 1983 edition of the $1 catalog in his younger years. The entire catalog — just a few pages — is at the link above.
There are 16 products listed; 3 of them are adventure games: Gods of Mt. Olympus, Marooned in Time, and Lunar Mission. Based on the ad I showed earlier at least two of those were from 1982.
Out of all sixteen games, none of them are available in any archive. All have vanished. What makes this more distressing is that other than the French Canadian house Logidisque there doesn’t seem to be any earlier companies in Canada devoted to publishing games; in other words, what was quite possibly the first English-language Canadian videogame publisher is a ghost.
I’ll get into the Canadian-made adventure game we do have a copy of next time; this seemed like too big a side mention to put into a footnote. Also, I wanted the faint possibility that someone in the future who recognizes the name Software Magic might happen across this post via Internet search and enlighten us in the comments what happened with them.
I’ve reached the ending, and if you’ve arrived here from elsewhere you should read the previous posts on this game first.
Last time I left off being sent to find a kill the Master Mystic and bring back proof of his defeat. (Spoiler: he does not get “defeated”, exactly.) I received an ivory key and found a heptagon of doors to explore.
The heptagon included:
1. A “fix-it man” that quickly throws me out
2. An entomologist
3. A philosopher who wants a book of law
4. A “bored” terrorist who is in the same room as a vending machine
5. An exterminator; the game specifically says you need to TIPTOE to go inside, otherwise he throws you out
You can unlock other doors, but unlike Asylum 1, there isn’t a high density where you have to check over each and every one; there’s signals once you are outside each door that it goes somewhere, like “you smell bug spray” for the exterminator.
After a quick-runthrough of the encounters above I decided to go back to the original hexagon and check for more exits. There were three on the “outside ring” that were unlockable with the ivory key.
Two of them led to a short passage which links directly with the heptagon (it is shown in the map above). Each of the short passages includes an extra passage; when entering, I saw rats in hallways but shortly after died from rat poisoning via the exterminator I had met earlier.
The third led to a brand-new area which took a while to map.
Part of the trouble were “revolving doors” (which I’ve depicted on the map as barrels in the corners). When stepping in any of the adjacent squares, you get spun around rapidly with the screen flashing before getting flung in some nearby direction. I suspected something useful in the 3 by 3 gap of my map. I tried spinning around quite a few times before concluding this was a trap of some sort that needed to be evaded with a new item from elsewhere or I needed an alternate route to get in.
The spinning is out of your control once entering a revolving spot. I would show the animation but there’s also a lot of blinking.
The other parts of trouble are another teleport (from northwest to southeast, at least how I have my map oriented) and a very random area marked “BEWARE THESE HALLS” which is nearly impossible to map (the only reason to go in is to pick up a knife, which I’ll discuss more of shortly).
Once I had the issues above settled I had, newly found, a knife, a rope, a banana peel (which you slip and fall on when you first encounter it), and a rat suit. Unable to be picked up was an electric catapult, which you can try to ride by sitting and pushing a button.
I discovered a few things messing around with the items:
a.) if you examine the banana peel you find a caterpillar (yes, that goes to the entomologist)
b.) if you drop the peel and walk around and step on it a second time you get approached by a lawyer who tells you that you should sue and gives you a law book (yes, that goes to the philosopher)
c.) if you STAB ME WITH KNIFE you find out it is a trick knife
The last one was an absolutely random find: I was messing around with the fact ME was on the vocabulary list and trying to ATTACK ME WITH BANANA PEEL and finding out that this makes you considered violent so you get warped to electro-shock therapy and then the starting cell (this is useful for fast travel). So I tried STAB ME WITH KNIFE as well:
This was immediately after an electro-shock treatment, which I guess didn’t work.
Going back to that list in order: the entomologist eyes your catepillar as you walk in:
In “thanks” he parades his trained army ants, which then proceed to eat you.
The philosopher is a little more peaceful: he takes the law book and leaves you a “nirvana scroll” in trade.
I guess legalese has this effect on people.
For the knife, I was truly, horribly, stuck, and needed help from Will Moczarski, who explained that I needed to go over to the bored terrorist and do a repeat performance of the stab-self-with-knife scene.
Ugh. Even thinking in a cartoon-y, stereotypical sense, I’m not sure what about this would impressive to a terrorist. This has my vote for worst puzzle in the game.
This leaves behind a vending machine, wherein you can insert a coin.
If you attempt to insert a coin the game states “Broken! Please tell the author of Asylum II immediately!” This might normally be a problem except I already met the author of Asylum II.
Back at the maze area with the revolving doors, there’s also two rooms with people: a “picnicker” who throws you out shortly after you enter, and William Denman. And yes, you can refer to Denman as INMATE:
He goes off to fix the machine and then disappears from the game.
Heading back to the machine and inserting a coin in the now-functioning machine, I got a bomb. Let’s take a solve-it-yourself moment, since everything you need to solve the puzzle is in this post: do you know where the bomb goes?
Remember that attempting to use the catapult results in your splatting into the ceiling. But what if there was no ceiling?
PUT BOMB ON CATAPULT
PRESS BUTTON ON CATAPULT
Now you can safely use the catapult. I’m unclear why the landing is safe (you don’t have a bean bag or whatnot breaking your fall) but nevertheless, this causes you to land in that 3 by 3 area from earlier inside the spinning doors. There you can find a jar. I quite quickly realized the jar’s usefulness:
I had a suspicion that ants + picnic would make an interesting combo, and the game provides another “you’re the axe murderer this time” moment.
This leaves a lunch, which is … a curious trade for a human life. (To be fair, given the meta-aspect of the programmer being in the game, the chicken suit scene, the rocket belt, etc., I don’t think we are supposed to read into this any kind of cruelty. It’s more like the inmates are all actors in a play where you just need to find the right bits to move the script forward.)
Here I was fairly stuck except for one thing: I could go back to the plastic surgeon, who asked if I wanted yet another new face; I said YES and gave over a coin (you can give “coins” plural which hands them all over, which is a mistake) giving me the face of Captain James T. Kirk.
Well then. That didn’t help me with my lingering last dilemma, which was the rat poison. I did realize the exterminator that I could TIPTOE to had to be the one dispensing the poison, so he needed to be eliminated, but my various stratagems were failing. After fiddling around with all the items I had I finally … looked up a hint to realize I needed to use the rope. TIE INMATE WITH ROPE:
OK, fine. This one was actually logical.
Now that he was tied up, I could enter the rat area in peace, which led to a new short map. I needed to take my rat suit with me and WEAR SUIT upon seeing rats in order to live in peace.
I didn’t find much, other than a machine I remember being the Time Machine from Asylum 1 (which seems to be just filler graphics here), a locked door I couldn’t get through but which turned out to be important, and Dr. McCoy himself from Star Trek.
The “transporter” is broken and needs fixing. There was still a “fix-it man” that I hadn’t made any headway with, so I toted the transporter over and … still found myself getting thrown out. Hmm.
It turns out you can have the plastic surgeon do his work again, and it works. I’ll just give this as a sequence of pictures. I had the lunch already in hand. Maybe you can have it make sense. Is there some Duran Duran reference I’m missing?
The inmate fixes the transporter once the lunch is delivered. Pressing the button on the transporter tells you
OK…. nothing apparent happens.
Huh. I was ready for suffering a lot more frustrating when my finger slipped and I tried to walk into a wall, which normally displays SPLAT! (Remember movement is by arrow keys in this game.) I instead walked straight through the wall. Interesting!
There was only one locked door of interest left in the game, back in the rat maze, so I tried the pass-through trick there:
This doesn’t kill you but rather literally restarts the game from the start as you’ve been sent back in time. Oops.
Given there was no time to react it clearly was some sort of “held condition” in order to enter without being time-nuked, but what? Items didn’t help, but there was one other thing I could change:
If you try to do this again, it rotates back to Hitchcock, then Kirk.
Not clear what would happen, I went through the door to the Mystic again, who says something about “I see a rat, but don’t smell one!” This is while wearing the rat suit, so you need to drop it off first:
You also need the nirvana scroll here, which is fortunately not too hard to realize given we’re nearly out of items to try solving puzzles with and the design clearly intended to be “tight” and have everything get used:
He then says “I see the light!” and disappears, leaving behind a dragon ring, also providing a hint to look under your desk. Yes, we were supposed to “kill” him, but the ring works fine. However, if you just make a beeline for the Doctor Exit with ring in hand it doesn’t end well:
Long, long, back, I had found a picture under the desk (because I obsessively checked under every desk and bed the entire game, given what happened with Asylum 1) but hadn’t been able to get it. I assumed some secret button would activate the access, but no, it’s just parser frustration. So frustrating I had to check Will Moczarski’s post; you must type GET PICTURE UNDER DESK exactly with that syntax. Argh! The game had been so good about avoiding parser annoyances like Asylum 1 only to have a trip-up at the end.
Picture in hand I took it over to the surgeon and showed it off, who used it as a reference to reconstruct the player character’s original face. Then I was able to exit with the ring:
I was then told “Stay healthy! We will need you very soon!” followed by:
Considering the whole series (keeping in mind Frank Corr wrote the first one solo and co-wrote the other two):
Deathmaze 5000: still the tightest “plot” but with a few terrible puzzles like the “turn, turn, turn” one; the red herrings hurt rather than help in the end, and there’s “magic physics” to contend with not in the other games
Labyrinth: a much more diffuse layout which feels less like a story arc, but with puzzles fair enough they genuinely can all be solved without hints
Asylum 1: weird, curious, sprawling, and requiring tons of patience; I think the big change between 1 and 2 is less of a need to exhaustively test keys, plus it has some large-ness for its own sake
Asylum 2: only two large maps so it feels much more in control than Asylum 1 in terms of the player experience; you don’t need to prod through each and every room to find what’s important.
This feels like a natural learning curve; not exactly “getting better and better” but trying a new thing then realizing the flaw with that element and fixing it in the next version. It would be nice to see where this journey goes next, but unfortunately, this marks the end of William Denman’s adventure games, unless you count the ports from TRS-80 to other systems. Will Moczarski has more detail and screenshots if you’d like to see more about what they’re like.
Oddly, this is not the end of the line for first-person adventure games in 1982, but unlike Asylum (which got reasonably famous with its ports), the game I will be playing in the future is known by almost nobody at all. (It is for Apple II and I am not referring to The Prisoner 2; it is far enough away that’s all I will say at the moment.)
Asylum II went completely wild, which I suppose is thematic. Prior posts needed to understand this one.
The C64/Atari tape version of the game, via eBay.
To make two caveats before I begin:
a.) I switched from using trs80gp in Model 1 emulation to Model 3 emulation. Normally I prefer Model 3 (the graphics look a little crisper) although I was having trouble getting the game to start in Model 3 mode. Over at the trs80gp Discord I asked about it, and JRace realized the version I had been using had this data added on to it:
BUY ALL YOUR UTILITIES FROM:
ZETA MICROCOMPUTER SOFTWARE …
P.O BOX 177 RIVERSTONE NSW 2765
THIS PROGRAM MODIFIED USING “OFFSET”
(C) 1983, ZETA MICROCOMPUTER SOFTWARE.
It appears to be from some sort of convert-tape-to-disk software; tapes could have copy protection just like disks but there was software to get around that.
One of the versions available (asylum2b from here) did run fine with Model 3, so I swapped over. The upshot is the screenshots are a little mixed this time. See if you can spot the difference!
b.) I had to use hints twice. One puzzle was kind of clever and obnoxious at the same time, one I was fooled slightly by inconsistent behavior.
Let’s finish dealing with the fuses first. Last time I had managed to get everything in the dark, but my attempt to bring a fuse back to the circuit box to fix it failed. I speculated offhand I might just be typing the parser command wrong, and that turned out to be correct: PUT FUSE IN CIRCUIT seems to work (despite FIX and REPAIR both being verbs they don’t apply here).
Now, for the inconsistent behavior: I had given a stethoscope to a hypochondriac, causing him to keep appearing and running away, shouting about GERMS. Before I had given the stethoscope I had tried using my AXE and I was picked up for violent behavior, just like all the other times I tried violence, so I figured that was that.
Once the hypochondriac is in his “germ phase” after handing off the stethoscope…
He runs off screaming ‘GERMS! GERMS!’
…you can then attack (even just a KICK seems to work). He will drop some pills and run away, but you will not sound any kind of alarm.
I pretty quickly sussed out what the pills were for, but I first want to go back to the rocket belt. I had, recall, found myself flying into a wall and dying. I ended up being baffled enough I just checked hints outright here. The clever bit has to do with leveraging the geography of the game.
You see, as you are moving with the rocket belt, there’s a message about “accelerating”; however, the rocket doesn’t last forever, and if you keep going there’s a message about “decelerating”. So what you need to do is find an extra-long hallway; in fact, the longest one in the game so far, the one on the very top of my map.
This part of the puzzle was gratifyingly clever (even though I didn’t solve it myself). I first used the term unexpected re-purposing back with Deathmaze 5000, and here the game transforms something mundane (not only mundane, but useless “maze filler”) into a puzzle.
This wasn’t the entire puzzle, however. As the animation above implies, you still die on impact even after the long hall. The way to survive is to also drop that bean bag I’ve been toting around on the far end; it will break your landing. First off, I had an unfortunate issue of visualization (like this confusion regarding an urn in Adventure 430). The item is described as a “bean bag”, not a “bean bag chair”, so I was imagining something small, like these throwing beanbags as the first image on Wikipedia. Second, I had the same mental state treating items as I did back with Deathmaze 5000 where I was able to carry around a snake by carrying the “box” that it was in; I thought that if you just dropped a bean bag (which is described as in a box that you can open) that it was treated on the ground like a physical box.
On crash-landing the rocket leaves behind a copper wire, which is one of the supplies the scientist needs. As we have the battery we just need the magnets, now.
Back to the pills. I remembered the plastic surgeon needed drugs, so with some trepidation I toted the pills over.
Horror and comedy wrapped into the same moment.
Well. The most obvious step was to make a stop by the “mad movie producer” who had been throwing me out.
With camera in hand I quickly got accosted by a guard who seemed to be a fan.
Thinking about the items I had left to use (not many) I handed over the bird costume and he took it away “gleefully” to change leaving behind a uniform.
With uniform in hand I was aimless for a while until I tried yet another whack at the phone with the axe.
This time, success! Also, the phone is described as having a “receiver”, so you can hack at that as a separate item.
The coins I haven’t used yet (although I have a suspicion where they go); the magnets can now go with the other items to the scientist.
By the way: essentially everyone you can refer to as an INMATE. Adventure games in general often feel like staged plays, where the right items just happen to be available in the right places and in the right quantities to solve puzzles that are in just the right sequence to be resolved by the items you have. Or: characters are cooperative in very specific ways that just happened to be oriented around the world-verse you’re in to make progress. Why would the scientist go through the trouble to build a time-stasis machine just to leave it behind? It makes sense if a.) they’re an inmate being told what to do and b.) they’re taking part in a staged play of sorts. b.) is reinforced by plot events which you’ll see in a little bit.
I really had nothing left to whack at other than the psychologist, so it seemed to be time to give the time stasis a whirl. Prior visit led to me dying from boredom, so maybe let’s make time pass a bit quicker?
The smock is the doctor’s outfit! Is that it? Are we done with the game. Ha. Ha ha. No. But we can go through the Doctor’s door now.
The entire dialogue is:
It’s amazing you have gotten this far! You are smarter than we realized! However, your escape isn’t to be this simple! If you can find the Master Mystic and rid us of him, we will let you go free! We will require proof of your success! We will give you a pass key. Go to your room and rest! Good luck!
So the entire process was a test of sorts, like Zork III? (It’s one of those things that’s an easy way to explain away all the different adventure tropes.)
This lands you an ivory key. I haven’t tested it thoroughly, but I can say the door to the far east of the opening maze is now unlockable, and it goes to a series of corridors similar to the hexagon, except now it is a heptagon.
A partial map so far. Alas, not nearly as easy to make clean looking as the hexagon was.
Renga in Blue 
