Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Back when we were first exploring early British games in 1981 we came across Trevor Toms who made a “Create Your Own” adventure system and wrote a game to go with it, City of Alzan. Both were published by Phipps Associates.

In 1982, Phipps published a tape that had just Trevor Toms system games written by Mike Farley:

From zx81stuff.

Greedy Gulch, the first on the list, involves entering a ghost town, finding a nearby mine, and getting a nugget of gold within. I originally had the thought to play all three games on the tape and cover them in one entry, but for reasons I’ll get into Greedy Gulch was a serious pain. It seems particularly to have been designed to troll the player like one of those Super Expert levels for Mario Maker.

I made a decision which may have been bad in retrospect. I switched from playing the ZX81 version to the ZX Spectrum version.

From World of Spectrum.

I had decent reason: while the opening room is more or less the same between the two…

Yes, it’s a top-down map. The game does this in the streets of the ghost town you start the game in.

…once the room descriptions started the ZX version had more room for text and managed to describe things more vividly.

In particular, there’s an emphasis on sound. A fair number of authors of this time appealed mostly to visual senses.

There are more pictures in the ZX Spectrum version but that seemed like just extra flavor.

I felt confidence, after mapping out what turned out to be a small opening town, that I would be over with the game quickly.

Some places, like the general store, require typing ENTER STORE, while other places just are connected (inconsistently) via compass directions.

The town felt like it mostly was meant to serve up a bunch of objects: a hat, a plank, a lamp, some matches, a leather bottle, an axe. A little more fussing about revealed a tin of oil in a cabinet, although the ZX version made it harder to find.

The ZX81 version just says “THE WALLS INSIDE THE CAFE ARE LINED WITH CUPBOARDS.”

The issue here is that it is sometimes hard for a player to know when something that’s part of the “regular paragraph” text of the game is important, as opposed to the “separated text”. There’s a longstanding tradition for objects that can be picked-up/manipulated to be mentioned separately, so the player does not waste time poking a bunch of unrecognized nouns. Trying to do something with the tables, for instance, is entirely unhelpful. In the ZX81 version of the game this mixing of important objects in the main text doesn’t matter because it is so short in order to draw attention; with the ZX version it isn’t as clear that the cupboards should be zeroed in on. So while the extra text is more vivid it also causes play issues with the way the game’s nouns are handled.

One last item I managed to pull out was a map. A nearby hotel mentioned a ZEEK THE MINER entry…

…and in a nearby assay office (with maps sorted by name) I was able to get Zeek’s map by typing GET ZEEK.

Having gathered everything I could manage, I tried going east to a ravine, and typing JUMP RAVINE leading to a desert.

I was just experimenting, because I hadn’t been able to do something else crucial that I figured would be important: fill the bottle with water. If you try to follow the path of Zeek on the map you die of thirst. There’s a “pump” just before the ravine that seemed like it’d work, but all my attempts (FILL BOTTLE, GET WATER, etc.) failed to yield results.

My best was typing USE PUMP which got the water to gurgle. I had to look up what to do here: you just need to USE PUMP twice in a row, which causes the gurgle to flow enough to get the water.

So, water in hand, I went back to the desert, and with a little false start (I thought it the path started North-East-East-East-South, but I had one too many Easts) I was able to trek through. However, I should emphasize something.

The ZX graphics drawing routine in this game is very slow. Ludicrously slow. Even cranking the system to 300% each step took a while. This will be important later.

Anyway: the result of my trek was a “plateau” where I could refill water.

Eyeballing the map, I figured I then needed to go east to head to the mine, but that landed me back in the desert, where I then could not get out and died of thirst. Whoops!

My last save was at the start of the desert, so I trudged back through the slooooooooooooooooooow loading graphics screens again, saved at the plateau, and then went in the correct direction (west). I was able to successfully light a lamp at the mine.

Well, not without the parser difficulties that dog the entire game. Here you need to STRIKE MATCH (?!), which automatically also lights the lamp (?).

Then immediately afterwards I got bit by a snake:

To be fair, this was intentional. I was testing, and with axe in hand, I … was not able to use it against the snake.

It turns out, the proper weapon again a snake is a gun. Yes, apparently it is easier to shoot a snake with a gun than it is to simply chop it with an axe. Learning!

I had seen a gun, back in town, but I originally thought it was possibly just scenery: the sheriff’s office had a locked gun cabinet, but I never managed a key. Testing back a saved game step or two, I finally after much heartache found USE AXE (trying to SWING AXE or BREAK CABINET or any other logical command didn’t work).

However, the gun was unloaded, and I was completely and truly stuck. I consulted a map, which indicated two places I hadn’t found. First was a backroom to The Store.

After some failed movement, I came across OPEN DOOR. Apparently that rectangle to the right is a door. Argh!

The ZX81 version, straightforwardly, says

THROUGH THE GLOOM YOU SEE A DOOR AT THE BACK

There’s a crate with some ammo in it, so you can load the gun.

(At this point, I was having some serious inventory-juggling problems; I hit my limit and needed to drop items to carry more. You can’t take everything with you on the desert trek, it seemed like, although I didn’t work out the true horror of what this implied until later.)

Going back to the map, I went to the other place of mystery, the barber, which I knew had a cellar beneath it.

Again, I ran through many, many verbs; this time, I struck out entirely and had to check a walkthrough, which advised me to LIFT BOARD.

!!!?!???!??

Look, it isn’t even 100% clear we’ve got a floor made up of boards. They don’t show up as a noun anywhere in the description, only potentially (potentially!) implied by the sound description. And on top of that, the verb that has to go with the board is relatively unusual, and plenty of my other actions I tried prior should have had the same effect.

I can’t even say the ZX81 fixes this problem.

Oh well. You need a light source in the cellar, which burns out the oil in your lamp, but fortunately, there’s that tin from the cafe that works. The cellars has some poles. I wasn’t immediately sure what they were for, but I knew I was now deeply in trouble as far as inventory juggling went.

The items that seem to go to the mine are

leather bottle (for the water), map (for the route, and you can’t just leave it behind, I tried), loaded gun, poles, plank, hat, matches, lamp, axe.

That’s three items too many. I thought maybe the axe was done, having smashed a cabinet. I didn’t record exactly what my other discards were, but I did get far enough to shoot the snake, then die immediately after:

It took me a couple iterations of slow (so slow) desert travel to realize, but you need every single item taken over to the mine. That means you need to cart some items to the plateau, drop them, then go back for a second load. This would not be a problem if you could just retrace your steps by the map but … you can’t! Trying to retrace leads you nowhere. Even though the game gave a clever method for avoiding maze-mapping on the way to your destination, now you’re in a maze that you need to map. So it’s like the game gave an easy route to a puzzle only to yank it away, haHA! you thought that bit with the arrows was the exit, but no, that’s just another spot that kills Mario.

It took me a couple tries to handle the logistics correctly and the desert wasn’t loading any faster, until finally I made it to the mine with all items in hand. (You can drop the map and bottle at the water spot, and after lighting the lamp you can drop the matches.)

I still had to work out the mine collapsing, and it required again a very novel and very specific verb, not in any game I’ve played before. PROP. You need to PROP ROOF.

To get by the “pole too long” problem you need to chop them down with your axe, but that only works if you remembered back in town to apply the command SHARPEN AXE at the blacksmith. Otherwise it’s back to a whole sequence of desert runs for you!

Then you can finally safely get the gold. To the west is an Adventurer’s Delight. What is an Adventurer’s Delight, you may ask? A maze that is completely useless and serves only to waste your time.

At least I was expecting troll behavior by now so I didn’t spend too long.

Gold in hand I went back to the starting place to reach victory.

It felt hollow.

I’m probably being unfair on Mike Farley’s game, but I’m going to take a psychic break on other things before trying to tackle his other two from this tape. Some aspects were truly just bad luck, but the structure really does seem intended to wind the player up before providing failure. Simply having the desert travel not be a pain would fix 95% of the issue; I wouldn’t even have minded SHARPEN AXE had it been a small matter to travel back.

This is all more the pity because the ZX descriptions really are decent! If I evaluated the game purely on room description writing (the later ZX version, not the original) it would be in the upper tier compared to other games from the era.

By the way, it may have been a bug, but as far as I can tell the water at the pump only fills once. So you might think to just make another full trip to fix something you’ve forgotten, but no: if you try to do another extra loop past the one the game intends, you’ve softlocked the game.