Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Via Your Computer (Australian version), July 1983. The ad mentions Doomsday Mission as being priced at $25.50. In 2023 Australian dollars that’s about $98, which converts roughly in US dollars to $66.50.

I was fully prepared to write a failure post here, but then I decided to give things one last try and made it to the end. Phew. The Earth in saved and I’m ready to outwit any evil AI that surface in the future by using prompt engineering to show how it stores copyrighted material verbatim with the power of adventure game puzzles.

When I got stuck I tried poking through the binary but the text messages weren’t that helpful. The only thing I found was this: a new way to die.

The first thing I managed to resolve was more or less a parser issue, although it was essentially a lack-of-feedback issue: how to make the object described in a circuit diagram. I knew MAKE was a verb, I knew the game understands MAKE DIAGRAM, but it normally says

I HAVENT GOT ENOUGH.

without detail on what might be missing. You need, specifically, in the room with you: the diagram, a sonic screwdriver, electronic parts, and a small box (which otherwise has no description at all and prior to this working I thought might be cardboard).

That’s one of my tasks done but I couldn’t use the deactivator yet without making it to the computer. One of my other issues was getting stuck in a cell with a cassette and being unable to escape with it. I had, unknowingly, already soft-locked my game long before. A prior screenshot:

LISTEN was the softlock. You’re supposed to LOOK MAN first and see a bracelet he’s wearing; once you get the narrative moment from him you are no longer able to take the bracelet.

This is one of those situations where you could easily have found the bracelet without realizing there was even an issue there; no doubt the authors didn’t even think about this problem.

While wearing the bracelet I could sneak in, grab the cassette and use the bracelet to teleport out. (It just sends you back to the room with all the bodies.)

However, playing the cassette was still a problem. I left a ROBOT in a LAB with a MAD SCIENTIST, and you can PUT the cassette in. Nothing happens. The ROBOT has two slots, and something needs to go in the other slot.

That something is outside the airlock. Last time one of the spots I thought might have been just a matter of parser trouble was in fact that. I was in a space suit ready to hop through an airlock but kept floating away. I had flexible bandages that I could attach to a hook, but no way to grab them. You’re supposed to WEAR them. Fair enough, I suppose.

I was unable to get anything useful here; the only reaction I got from the rectangle is typing TAKE RECTANGLE while holding a kitchen knife from the first floor of the station.

I TRY TO PRY THE RECTANGLE OFF THE STATION,
SNAP…THE KNIFE BREAKS.

This is in fact where I was prepared to throw in the towel, as by process of elimination (and my peeking at the binary, which really didn’t help much otherwise) I knew the rectangle had to be what goes in the slot.

I tried every single item I could think of to do some prying, but then got an idea looking at the knife, as it is explicitly described as BLUNT. Hmm. I didn’t have a sharpener, but I did have a mirror I could break into glass shards. The problem is when breaking it I always had a security guard (the same one who doesn’t like you shooting a phaser at the MAD SCIENTIST) kill me. However, if you break the mirror outside (or inside, but before passing through the airlock) the robot doesn’t appear.

This is still glitchy because the robot catches you if you fire a phaser outside. I also wish the rectangle was described as needing cutting, since trying to use the kitchen knife suggests prying.

With both rectangle and cassette inserted back at the robot I was finally able to get it to play:

The mad scientist is still hanging out. You never deal with him, you just finish off the computer and escape.

The robot went over to a previously empty “large room” and bashed open a hole, destroying itself in the process.

One last obstacle! If you just try to go in you get fried by a laser (the game is helpful here and will even have the laser attempt a potshot if you LOOK HOLE; weird that now is when it starts caring about being fair).

Fortunately, the phaser works here:

Deactivator in hand, you can go in the hole and ATTACH it to the master computer. I went through quite a few verbs before realizing this was the right one.

With the teleport activated the end is just a matter of walking back to where you started and winning. Except don’t forget to drop your phaser otherwise the gas still kills you, oops!

So while that was ultimately satisfying for me to play, I hardly can recommend it for others, especially with the three-days-stuck portion in there, the dubious softlock, and the cavalier approach to death. I do want to highlight this ended up being more interesting than the prior games closest in spirit, Death Dreadnaught and Domes of Kilgari. Dreadnaught only had one interesting puzzle (killing the creature) and was otherwise about wandering and soaking in atmosphere; Domes of Kilgari had lots of deathtraps but they felt like they were there because the author couldn’t think of any other obstacle. Here, there was some decent thought put to the world modeling, an actual plot sequence that had more to it than “a sequence of deathtraps”, and some variety in the way players move through space.

Australia will still remain a scarce source of adventure material for 1982; while one of the most notable adventures of the year is from there, I’ve got that one closer to the back end of my list. Can’t burn all the good material early!

A Komtek-1 as mentioned in the ad on the top of this post; it’s an even more obscure TRS-80 clone than the System 80 is.