Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

For this, we return to Bruce Robinson, Victory Software and the absolutely miniscule games they wrote for the VIC-20. (Previously: Adventure Pack I and Jack and the Beanstalk.)

Although they came out on C64 too. Picture via eBay.

The first adventure pack had a game get swapped by circumstances I discuss in those prior posts, but this second pack has a fixed set of games: African Escape (you crash in the desert and need to get out), Bomb Escape (stop the terrorists) and Hospital Adventure (do an assassination).

They get progressively higher in intensity, and one intrepid artist for the UK version (as published by Mogul) tried to put all three games in the same picture.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

I admire the commitment to the bit. I originally was planning a three-in-one post like I did with our first visit to Victory Software, but the initial game in the set, African Escape, ended up being a massively painful experience, so rather like Greedy Gulch I’m going to punt on the other two for now.

And it is a tiny map. I mean, look at this thing:

There’s not even much depth to it (like with Big Bad Wolf). The game has a parser that is so minimal that only the “correct” action at any given point will give any feedback; that sort of concept can work of the actions are very intuitive, but that’s not the case here. For example, at the start…

…trying to LOOK WRECK or LOOK CACTUS get nothing useful in particular. By all appearances this is the sort of game that drops the player outright in a maze — and the player is started with food and a knife which could theoretically be used to map things out — but DROP is not understood as a verb. (Nor any variants like LEAVE. There is no way to drop objects in this game!)

After a bunch of hassle trying to figure out a creative way to map things out, I gave up and looked up a walkthrough, which starts with CUT CACTUS.

AHA! WATER. NOW I CAN SEE STRAIGHT.

Now rather than there just being a wreck and a cactus, there’s also an OASIS.

The idea that you’re hallucinating enough to not see the oasis is a reasonable one (it seems like that’d trigger after we’re dehydrated a bit longer though, this seems to be happening right after the wreck). However, there’s no indication of this and you just have to muddle into a guess that cutting the cactus is useful.

Once in the oasis, you can climb a tree and get coconuts, but are blocked from further progress by lions (keep in mind deserts are wide open, I don’t know why we’d be blocked). I did manage to find out the right action here, to throw the coconuts at the lions which scare them away. Of course.

However, it’s bumpy from here on out, and the next two puzzles basically caused me to drop trying to solve anything at all. Going west from here drops you in some quicksand.

From here you need to YELL. I wouldn’t expect anyone around to hear in the desert area, but given we have now rapidly changed biomes to jungle (??) I guess it sort of makes sense.

I went into the problem with “cannibals” on the Dr. Livingston game.

Now, apparently without the guard noticing, you can DIG using the KNIFE and somehow do it long enough to make it into a silver mine.

Outside this mine are some vines, where you can bring them back to the mine and tie them to the beams … I mean to the SUPPORT (beam isn’t understood as a noun) and then go back outside and yank to collapse the mine. The whole purpose is to get some rocks.

The rocks go to make a path across the stream, and you don’t build a bridge or anything, you just THROW ROCKS at the stream and apparently they land how you want them.

You can FEED NATIVES (not GIVE FOOD) and get traded a flute, which you can then use to get into the cave where there’s some nasty snakes.

But make sure you type CHARM SNAKES, because if you thought PLAY FLUTE to work for making flute music you’re thinking of an entirely different, better game.

With the TAR from the cave you can then go back to the shipwreck outside which is apparently not that wrecked because all you need to do is THROW TAR at some holes and it’ll become seaworthy and you can escape. Oh since we’re at the ocean I guess we changed biomes again?

I don’t typically rank my games but I will say here this is one of the worst games I’ve played for the entire project. The parser was at Deathship-level (without that game’s clever use of geography) and the plot somehow managed to be both minimal and nonsensical at the same time.

I swear the original four of the Victory games weren’t this bad, even though the parser was constructed in roughly the same way. All of those games involved a relatively wide-open map and somewhat intuitive actions (well, not Computer Adventure, but you could at least get a good chunk of exploration done before being stuck). The author’s style — when dropped into a linear-scene game which requires guessing-the-right-command — became far more abrasive.

In order to be fair to the other two games in the trilogy, I’m going to punt them down my list (not too far, just a little) so I can approach them with a fresh mind. In the meantime, for our next game let’s relax with some pleasant Apple II graphics, shall we?