Archive for October 2023
(Prior posts here.)
I was correct on my guess last time that I just needed to bring the oil and keys over to the locked door in order to get by; the oil works on the rust.
I should be careful saying “just” because, as mentioned in a prior post, the inventory limit here is brutal. Teleporting around requires holding the lamp in hand, leaving three slots; this puts the keys and the bottle (for holding water to get through the desert, then oil for the door) in the remaining places. I also was needing a fourth space (maybe) to grab a trident. The sequence on teleportation goes:
1.) teleport to inside the oasis — this happens trying to enter it and seems to just introduce the mechanic
2.) you can then go south and pick up a trident that, when thrown, generates water bubbles (you can re-fill the bottle with water)
3.) the getting teleported (either by trying to go back in the oasis, or rubbing the lamp directly) sends you underwater by the clam
4.) swim over to the door
From 3 you have a second choice. You can go south a little to pick up a fishing net. You can’t then swim to the door; it is too many moves and you’ll run out of breath.
It is possible the best move is to ignore the trident, get the net first, and then keep teleporting (you’ll eventually land close to the door again) but all this requires major inventory shuffling. As all this is implying, despite it coming off as purely random the teleportation does happen in a fixed order, specifically:
1: inside the oasis
2: at the clam, lake
3: path through forest
4: north of oasis
5: rapids
6: inside guardroom, tower
7: at underwater weed, lake
8: trackless desert
9: tight spiral staircase inside tower
10: lake bed (south of trench)
11: south of oasis at trident
12: underwater (dark), lake
13: road north of building
14: desert south of canyon
15: top of pyramid
16: track up mountain past giant
17: mountain at giant
18: rapids (DEATH)
The last line means the 18th use of teleportation via Djinn will kill you.
This is all a little hard to get a handle of, so I made a meta-map which has numbering on the regions showing the sequence.
This suggests there might need to be some seriously complicated resource juggling and also some constraints. For example, the “top of pyramid” is by the temple where you were asked to find a sundial in a cave; if the cave in question is the one that’s up the mountain and the sphinx can only be bypassed via teleport, then the giant needs to be bypassed before teleporting to the temple. Or maybe the sphinx doesn’t require teleportation hitting the temple early is just a “sneak preview”.
Also, as you can tell from the meta-map, I have not been able to connect up the lake area or the area past the locked door to the main map as of yet. It is faintly possible they don’t connect at all and teleportation is the only way to reach that section, so you’ve softlocked if you need to back there but have already rotated your teleportations too far. (That is, by the time the teleport reaches the second visit to the forest, stop 13, there are no more teleports to the lake.)
Enough stalling, though, as I’m sure you want to see what it looks like past the locked door:
Sadly I had to drop the trident off for now (the “ARMED INTRUDER” thing). There’s a puzzle I found quite quickly where the trident would have been useful.
To the northwest there’s a dragon, and the game implies this is a rematch of sort with dragonkind as we defeated our last one with fisticuffs. This one does not fall as easily.
The water trident would surely work? The dragon blocks off two exits with fire; I have no other ideas what to do.
The east side there’s two areas where arrows get randomly shot at you by orcs, and if you hang out too long you die. Fortunately “too long” seems to be a decent span, I essentially had to get hit intentionally:
You can climb a web to get to a spider, and the earth stone, one of the four doodads we’re collecting so we can have our final showdown with the demon.
The spider only kills you if you try to take the stone.
To the north there’s an elf statue with a missing eye that suggests a gem or the like that fills in the gap.
There’s two other obstacles; one is an exit blocked by giant rocks, which may match with a spot on the mountain on the other side. Maybe this is the way of getting the trident through.
There’s also an orc who spots you and runs off, and if you try to proceed further you get ambushed.
This also happens if you try to do this sequence in the dark.
Noteworthy is that the arrow-shooting area stops being a threat if you let yourself get spotted by the orc but don’t proceed further. Presumably all the arrow-shooting orcs have now moved to new ambush spot. This suggests maybe the orcs can be distracted or blinded first where the arrows originally happen, or maybe stopping the steady drop of arrows in the east part of the cave is more useful than I realize.
Given the widely-spread out puzzles, inventory limit, and messy transportation it gets hard to just “test everything on everything” but that may be what I need to do next. For the record, my open puzzles are:
figuring out the white/black dot system (everywhere, the only black dot so far is at the locked door)
anything with the chapel or graveyard? (lake)
statue, dragon, spider, large rocks, orcs (cave north of locked door)
sphinx (desert)
giant, abominable snowman, other side of large rocks? (mountain)
blocking orcs?, dark shape with tentacles (tower)
Regarding the snowman, I did use the keys to unchain it (just like the bear in Crowther/Woods) and it doesn’t attack, but it doesn’t follow me around either. I feel like I need something else for friendship and then he can move some rocks or tear up a giant or something.
My items are (deep breath) a bottle, keys, lamp, fishing net, trident, Talisman of Life, silver ball, sling, fruit, an “onion” (really garlic), and pan pipes.
This doesn’t strike me as a lot to work with. I do want to test the silver ball out at the statue with the missing eye, but otherwise nothing obvious is occurring to me. (The sling, by the way, says, “Wave it to violently propel stones” but when I try to WAVE SLING it says I don’t have a sling stone.)
I still feel like I’m making regular progress, so no hints yet!
(Prior posts on this game here.)
From Mobygames. This feels like a “grab from public domain” cover like the one from my last post. It is weird to have two versions like that in a row (usually, there’s a “public domain” version, then the company has the money to pay an artist for a reprinting). I’m not sure if this is the game’s 2nd or 3rd cover.
One of the more remarkable items in the mainframe game Warp is a portable hole.
The hole, being the absence of anything, is impossible to inspect.
You can place it down anywhere and it will randomly warp you to nearly any room in the game. The actual teleportation isn’t the remarkable part (that’s happened ever since XYZZY) but rather the total chaos of letting you teleport essentially anywhere, including in places with unsolved “blocking puzzles”. Some of these represent puzzles that you have to solve anyway, but at least in one case (because I did it) you can bypass a puzzle — I skipped a pyramid puzzle involving rotating rings that was one of the biggest pains of the game. The only catch is that the teleportation is random rather than controlled so it requires a lot of false moves.
I admire the willingness to push against caution, though; most adventure games try to make very, very sure you don’t skip any puzzles, and here comes a game that cheerfully gives what is almost a cheat code (I’m guessing for most players fairly late in their gameplay, but still).
With Adventure Quest I left off last time on a Djinn that teleported me. I didn’t realize at the time the extent of the teleportation. You can pick up the “lamp” at the oasis and then rub it at any time (twice) in order to get an angry Djinn to do another teleportation, and it really comes off as arbitrary indeed:
You can get by what are clearly puzzles; for example, you can teleport to the pyramid that’s past the sphinx, and use the pan pipes (from back in the “relics” grove) to charm some snakes to get in.
(You can’t get out again, though, because there’s still a sphinx! You have to keep teleporting.)
There’s also a mountain path (just opposite of the canyon) where you can walk your way up and get blocked by a giant, or you can teleport to land just past where the giant is.
If you do this, even though you’re entering from the “wrong end”, you are not able to go back up again.
If instead of going down to the giant you rather go up, you run across an abominable snowman (chained to a mountain)…
…followed by a cave (with a white dot, see those come up again!)
Weirdly, you can take the rope (seen from a post-teleportation screenshot earlier) and climb down here, but that just lands you in the raging river (seen from another screenshot) which seems to serve no purpose, since you eventually die in the rapids in a way that doesn’t seem possible to prevent.
Incidentally, that rope is in a tower surrounded by orcs, and seems to be the tower, that is, the Black Tower that is our quest! We may even be able to have an early confrontation with the demon, although it’s hard to tell if this is really the demon or a sub-monster on the way to meeting him:
You don’t teleport directly here, you just walk from the room with the rope.
Another possible teleport stop is in a lake, where there’s several places to land. I have something approaching a partial map; it took me a while to realize how everything linked up.
The whole section is especially tricky because it is underwater, and you only have a limited number of moves before dying, although two bits (the south and north ends of the lake) let you get out and breath.
On the north side there’s a rusted door, too rusted for the keys from way back at the starting building to work. Intriguingly, there’s also an exit with a black dot (not white) and if you walk in, you get teleported back to the starting building with a white dot. I don’t know if all black dots have matching white dots, or if this is a “rotating” scheme much like rubbing the lamp is.
I do know a place with some oil which might allow the keys to work, but testing anything (given the inventory limit and teleportation requiring multiple jumps) requires a lot of juggling so I haven’t gotten to it yet.
While the teleportation feels random and bypasses some puzzles, after sufficient testing I can say it always goes through the same sequence of places, eventually reaching instant death. Rather than dropping in rapids where you have time to teleport out, it drops you at the end of the line:
This means the teleportation is both terrifyingly open and potentially restrictive at the same time. It may be that you need to make the best of visits to particular places because teleporting is the only way to reach them at first, and you need to have exactly the right items in exactly the right order. This means the teleportation really may not be chaotic in the end but rather presenting an quite demanding puzzle. The end result for now is for me having to fill in a lot of map, though.
A very zoomed-out view of what I’ve mapped so far. I have no doubt this will change over the game.
I will say, as a general pattern, the game is trying very hard to frustrate mapping. The mountain has been the only “safe” region, and that’s just been going up or down for the most part; you can get blocked by the giant or run across that Black Tower from “the other side” but there’s no confusing exits or time limits.
Going higher is death, but you can reach the same room from the other side (via the room with the rope).
I’ll try to collect everything together and solve some puzzles next time. (Other than getting trapped in a temple and going down a rope to nothing in a cave! Incidentally I thought that cave was going to be the one with the sundial, but I saw nothing to indicate a hidden area. Not wanting hints yet, I’m still making progress.)
(Continued directly from my last post.)
ZX Spectrum cover, via Mobygames.
I’ve managed to map out and “clear” most of the opening area. I will show the map in a moment but I do want to first show a part of what it was like in progress.
This is showing the initial room (End of Road) with the stream going south, and the forest maze to the west as far as I had mapped it. At the time I was still having trouble with the wolves (another thing I’ve now managed to clear up) so I was only able to do the object-dropping method a little bit in the Lost in Forest area before dying. Both “Valley” and “20 Foot Depression” on the map also enter the Lost in Forest area, but I had no idea where to link them.
This reflects one of the major mapping difficulties I’ve had in the past, not correctly drawing in new rooms, but connecting up rooms that get entered from an alternate direction. Both Empire of the Overmind and Kadath had this issue; Empire probably unintentionally, Kadath muddled with and played with the idea. The curious thing is that this seems to be a text-adventure only idea, I can’t think of any moment during a graphical adventure or 3D adventure where I had a similar issue.
Amidst the forest I eventually found a tree I could climb which had a silver ball (see above). This got me the idea — due to 1.) silver + werewolves being a thing 2.) dogs + balls being a thing — to try throwing the ball at the wolves to see if anything would happen.
OK. The wolves are startled and run off.
This turned out to be “right solution for the wrong reason” because you can throw any item (or at least anything I’ve tried) and startle the wolves that way. So the wolves turn from a deadly enemy into an annoyance as (while in the initial forest area) you have to throw something every 10 steps or so.
With the silver ball not actually being needed for wolves, I decided (given it is described as valuable) to try giving it to the unicorn instead.
The unicorn snorts disdainfully.
At least the action was acknowledged, suggesting giving the right item is the right action. The next most logical thing to try seemed to be the rare orchid (the one I could get by bringing in a table in order to stand on to reach high enough):
The ball is “very valuable”, the orchid is just “probably valuable”. This isn’t a Treasure Hunt but I still may need to keep an eye on this.
Following the unicorn, I found “a grove of tall trees” described as relics of the original Great Forest, a medallion, and some pan pipes.
The medallion is the Talisman of Life spoken of in the scroll I received last time, and just as a reminder (to both you and myself, since it is clue-laden) I’ll quote the whole thing:
Take the Talisman to the Black Tower through the four elements twice. It can defeat the Demon Lord, but only a companion can bring victory at the end. The Talisman is nearby, but you will also need four Stones to gain entry and these are guarded by servants of the Demon. The blessing of Typo, God of Adventures, goes with you.
It appears the next phase is to find the four “servants” being spoken of, although to be honest I’m just bouncing everywhere the game lets me go. Here’s my mostly-complete map of the starting area:
I say mostly because there’s still the darkness going down in the building and there still may be something found, and of course it is always possible I’ve missed something (the cliff to the far south, for instance? … although I get the vibe it is just a barrier).
Moving on to the north is a wide trackless desert.
As the second screenshot implies, there’s a sandworm that prowls around. You hear sliding sand approaching and getting louder over a number of turns before you get eaten. One approach is to simply run back to the edge of the desert on rocky ground to be safe.
Of course this doesn’t allow exploration. I’ve found, rather oddly, that I can stall the worm a little bit if I WAVE TALISMAN — that Talisman of Life from the grove — which will give me an extra turn, but the worm still won’t leave entirely.
The desert also has scattered pillars, as shown. The white dot clearly matches the white dot at the building from the start of the game, but I haven’t gotten it to react to anything.
I have not entirely mapped the desert out but I did find if you go far north and then west enough steps you can go north one more step to arrive at a canyon. Following the path of the canyon you can finally go inside into safety, passing by a sphinx on the way.
Once inside the valley the worm stops appearing, although you still have to deal with thirst. There’s a handy oasis but a Djinn who harasses you.
Weirdly, you can just go south again and the Djinn will teleport you to the place you are trying to go.
However, the Djinn will still threaten you for entering the oasis a second time. For example, if you go south in the water you can find a trident, but if you then go back north you’ll get teleported somewhere else entirely.
This second scene was after I had picked up the “oriental lamp” from the oasis and was carrying it, so it isn’t as if the Djinn is restricted to the lamp. I’m not fully sure what to do here, but this seems like a good moment to leave off.
Adventure Quest is the immediate follow-up to Level 9’s game Colossal Adventure.
While it wasn’t their first game (“their” being Pete, Mike, and Nick Austin), it was the first to bring them notoriety (eventually), and in the same year it was swiftly followed up by two games to make a trilogy. This was partly made easier because they came up with an “engine” known as A-code (similar to how Infocom had Z-code). Timeline-wise, they were advertising Colossal Adventure in an April magazine while already promising the follow-up by August, a month they managed to hit:
From Computing Today, September 1982. By the rule of magazine publication months this was available in August.
One important detail that I didn’t mention last time is that the three first A-code games (Colossal, Adventure, Dungeon) were dubbed in late 1982 the Middle-Earth Trilogy. Colossal Adventure didn’t include any Tolkien elements but the follow-ups do (see “marching to conquer Middle Earth” from the tape cover). The references were removed from the later Jewels of Darkness version, I assume because copyright issues started to get scary. Well, most of the references; according to the Tolkien Gateway one reference to Amon Sûl was accidentally left in. I’ll keep an eye out for it.
I am sticking with the graphical Atari version for consistency but I will flip over to the 1982 BBC Micro version briefly to show off when the Tolkien comes up.
This time we’re meant to find and defeat the Demon Lord AGALIAREPT in his Black Tower. Switching from a Treasure Hunt plot to a Nemesis plot isn’t that much a shift but it does automatically give an end-game confrontation.
I’m fairly sure the white dot over the door is important, but I’m not sure for what yet. You can take the table but note this game keeps up the four-item inventory limit from Colossal Adventure.
This is based fairly closely in feel off original Adventure in that you start in by building in a forest and can grab some starting items. Going down the stairs leads to darkness.
The overall mood is “Adventure, inverted to be more dismal”. There is a river running to the building but it is described as “clogged by dead vegetation”.
I have yet to be able to interact with the unicorn.
The stream keeps running south to dead land.
If you wander too long, wolves gather and attack.
Other than the starting building items, I’ve seen an onion, a rare orchid out of reach (you can drag over the table to get it) and a stone pinnacle. Climbing the pinnacle gets a meeting with a wizard, who hands over our quest.
This is incidentally a moment that is different in Tolkien-alternate-world, where we are the only hope of Middle Earth.
I think that’s enough for now; it looks like Original Adventure with the darkness cranked up. I will try to map things out and report back if I’ve managed to outwit the wolves next time.
The actual tape from the original version, via the Museum of Computer Game History. I think this may be the first time we’ve had an adventure with such a home-made vibe that the original tape branding is visible.
You are Adam Trent, a trouble shooter for the Federation of Space. You have descended to an alien planet where you will make a horrifying discovery, which will impel you to take on a desperate and dangerous quest.
From the cover of Softside June 1982. Escape from the Dungeon of the Gods is an RPG. The magazine cover art is better than the Arrow One art.
Six more to go in 1982 for the Softside Adventure of the Month! (Previously: Dateline Titanic, Witches’ Brew.)
This is probably yet another Peter Kirsch jam — it has the same coding style and feel — but there is no name in the source this time to check. Witches’ only had Peter’s name mentioned in the TRS-80 version so its lack in the Apple and Atari version doesn’t indicate anything either way.
I warned you.
While I previously could predict exactly how his games could go (linear set of scenes, trying to be cinematic) the last two games have thrown a wrench in his patterns (big ingredient hunt, and a non-linear passenger-rescue game). This one (again, assuming it is him) is more of a “romp” structurally, in that you pass through the same areas of an alien planet multiple times revealing new things as you go.
I went with the Atari port this time on a coin flip.
Despite a lot of words being dedicated to an intro, there isn’t much conveyed: we’re Adam Trent, landing on a planet, let’s go explore. There’s something extra going on but you’ll see later.
You start — armed only with a LASER — in a fairly small area with a jungle, beach, and a city being blocked by two aliens. The aliens are not described, but based on actions our hero is about to undertake, they probably look more or less like humans, except maybe for spots on their arms or something. Sort of the Star Trek look. (To be fair, there’s a canon explanation in the Star Trek universe where one older civilization seeded everywhere else, which is why everyone is humanoid.)
In the jungle there’s a GOOBA…
…and a crashed shuttle with an alien. You can search the alien and find a uniform. The uniform fits you and you can wear it, and then the aliens at the city will let you by.
Once in the city things open up quite a bit. I’ll mention now as it becomes important later there’s a broken teleporter with a missing spot for a CYLINDER.
There are lots of “NICE” aliens wandering about and while you can’t converse with them, you can shoot them with your laser.
One of my first encounters was an alien who was not NICE, although I am unclear from the minimalistic BASIC presentation exactly why we know this, or why the police don’t care if we shoot the not-nice alien with the laser. The upshot is we can get some SUNGLASSES that let us see a CONTROL ROD in one of the rooms that otherwise just looks like it is filled with light.
Shooting aliens is ok as long as they look mean.
The most interesting location (from a history-of-games angle) is the library, which has a FROTTI, a LIBRARIAN, and an ENCYCLOPEDIA.
The big gimmick here is that there are “alien words” that need translating, and the encyclopedia can help. You type the letter of the alphabet to get the right encyclopedia volume and then hand it back if you want a new one. (The alien language uses all regular English lettering. It’s less confusing than Followers Adventure which included random odd characters in its alien language.)
The FROTTI you can look up by requesting volume F. After you’ve read the volume, the object’s name changes from a FROTTI to a POWERFUL MAGNET.
The powerful magnet, when taken back to the beach from the start, can be used to find a random alien coin. The coin can then be handed to a beggar back in town to get a translator missing a battery.
You can LOOK POCKET in the uniform to find a battery (no, there was no indication of this, and I looked it up). With the translator active it can make certain puzzles easier (for example, you can understand the librarian is yelling at you to return the encyclopedia volume if you try to walk off with it), but it honestly is completely optional.
You can also look up the GOOBA in the encyclopedia (the critter in the jungle) as well as a XIPPI, a bird you can find in a “hen house”.
There’s potatoes elsewhere (although again, they’re not called that, you need to look them up). The potato can go to the XIPPI who gives you an egg, which then can go to the BABY GOOBA to get a TEENAGED GOOBA.
The process can be repeated for an ADULT GOOBA, which can then be ridden.
This lands you in a new small area with an alien that keeps filching your stuff (and putting it in a nearby warehouse so you can pick it up again, it just serves as an annoyance), a teleporter, a locked door, and a “dying professor”.
Up to this point I had been exploring pretty randomly, so it was very odd to suddenly get a motivated quest. It also isn’t totally clear from this screen but the professor (and his daughter) are human; that will be important later.
The key you get lets you ride an “air car” back to the main town. In order to get to the missing daughter you need to get by a “SNARLING ALIEN DOG”.
There’s no marker this would be where the daughter is.
In order to get by the dog, you need to find a “TRUTH MIRROR” that’s just lying around elsewhere in town and figure out how to activate it.
You can look at volume B (only after seeing this message) to find a torn page:
Elsewhere there’s the other half which says “UPRIGHT”. You can then do a little cryptography to get H— UPRIGHT, which turns into the command HOLD UPRIGHT.
Then you can go to the far north of town to a DESERT, which has the occasional mirage. You can find a CYLINDER and a FREEZE GUN amongst the mirages, but if you turn the truth mirror they “become real” and you can pick them up. (The cylinder can go back to the teleporter, but it will say it needs time to charge up.)
With the freeze gun in hand you can go try to freeze the snarling dog.
However, you can’t just walk on by — you have to pick up the dog and walk over to a BOTTOMLESS PIT where you toss the dog down. Why sneaking by is more likely to defrost the dog then the whole picking-up-and-yeeting process I don’t know.
Past the dog you find the daughter who gives you a DOOR KEY, and then who you can lead back to the professor (using the now-working teleporter)…
…and get a serious, serious, plot dump, which recontextualizes the entire game. It turns out this is a Planet of the Apes situation where Adam unknowingly landed back on Earth, not an alien planet, and almost all the humans are now dead via an invasion of aliens. Given the vast number of aliens we’ve encountered have been NICE ALIENS this is a puzzling turn of events.
Anyway, the computer: it is nearby past a locked door where you use a DOOR KEY. The code the professor hands then lets you kill nearly everyone on the planet.
This is not where I expected the plot to be going. I think the author had something lore-heavy in mind but even if you find the professor early you don’t get any context about how the aliens are all deserving of destruction somehow (by that point you’ll have likely seen about 30 “NICE” aliens). You can see how people at this time were struggling to fit in plot beats at the same time as the gameplay; something like G.F.S Sorceress worked by framing the major plot events at the beginning and the end, but this one just had the plot at the end.
As a moment-to-moment experience this game was still genuinely fun, especially with the language shenanigans; I realize they’re not even remotely “realistic” but I assumed we were in pulp sci-fi mode anyway, like going to Mars and finding aliens. Structurally you have to loop through the same places multiple times and find new things, yet the game didn’t feel “constrained” in geography and I still had a grand sense of exploration.
Coming up: Level 9, the highest level reachable when only using single digits.
One fascinating thing about history — and this is true can be true of both older and more recent — is how often namespace clash can interfere with research. Is the John Smith you are checking in 18th century records the same John Smith you are looking for, or an entirely different one? In modern times, see my hunt for Doug Rogers. Some people are forgotten to history simply because their names aren’t easy to search for. Maybe parents who pick unusual spellings for their children are onto something.
This can apply to companies as well.
There’s Ramtronics, the US company who manufactured hardware for processing motion pictures and was up for technical Academy Awards, like this 1968 one for “engineering an automatic exposure control for printing-machine lamps.” One of the nominees (E. Michael Meahl) shows up later as an engineer at Caltech.
They seem to have no relationship to Ramtronics, the company out of London, who I’ve only seem manifest via ads in a narrow window of 1982 (like here) for the game Africa Diamond, on the Acorn Atom computer. I’ve seen no evidence of them appearing before or since but I’m getting overwhelmed by references to the other, much more prominent Ramtronics, so maybe one history is blotting out another.
The source code contains the line (c) BEND 1982 which suggests the name of a person, by my guess the sole proprietor of the company who put out ads for their single game.
As the ad above explains, we’re searching an Old Country House for a diamond, and spooky and/or fantasy-adjacent things are about to go down. This of course is an identical plot to Mystery House (Japanese version) and Mansion Adventure; transferring finding loot in a cave to finding loot in a house just seemed like the easiest next step.
What also isn’t really a copy of Crowther/Woods — but people tried a stab at — is the adventure-roguelike genre. Here the overall map is always the same, but items are randomly placed. There are also enemies that appear at random, and the moment of getting at the diamond also requires getting past a random puzzle.
I’m wondering if this is another case of a player who had seen Madness and the Minotaur as there’s a bit of a similar vibe, especially in the somewhat mechanical way room directions are mentioned.
The problem is that room directions don’t always seem to work as described. For example, on the screen above, you can’t go north, you have to GO STAIRS. Rather more egregiously, rather than being able to GO SOUTH, you need to GO OUTSIDE (which also requires a key, which is a little unclear from the game’s setup).
Some rooms just describe exits that aren’t there:
I did, after great pains, produce a map of a “ground floor”…
…and an “upper floor”. No objects are listed because none are in stable positions.
In order to see any objects, you need to LOOK, and do it in every single room.
The RNG packed this one, usually there’s 0, 1, or 2.
I do say pains because, in addition to the slight mismatch between room description and exits, enemies randomly appear.
They are technically only deadly if you insist on hanging around in a room. You can always leave and come back. The monsters are not dictated by positioning (so not Crowther/Woods style, which actually keeps tracks of where the dwarves and you can get chased around) but can appear anywhere at any time and with no particular logic.
They can be killed, usually by dropping the right item. Vampires succumb to a SILVER CRUCIFIX. The man-eating rabbit can be scared away with a FERRET.
I say “usually” for two reasons. One is that sometimes even if you are using the right object it just doesn’t work and you die anyway.
This is flashing green and orange.
The other exception is because one enemy you use no item at all, the dwarf. Typing KILL DWARF will have the game prompt if you mean with your bare hands, to which you can say YES, and the game will just repeat the question.
The fact the message repeats makes it appear that this really is a rhetorical question and you should move on, but no, the game is just wanting you to be persistent: you have to type YES three times in a row to the “with your bare hands” prompt before the game lets you do it.
I’ve observed games improving on the Crowther/Woods “fight the dragon” moment, but I’ve never seen a game mimic it and then make it worse! (This is made triply worse by the fact this is the only enemy not defeated by dropping something.)
It would be nice if you could just ignore all the different monsters, but unfortunately certain exits are predicated on score, which increases based on killing monsters. For example, if you bring a torch into the secret passage past the library, you still can’t go down if you haven’t killed enough — I guess this is “experience points”?
Going down incidentally leads into a cave, which follows the exact same map as the upper floor, and actually is the upper floor, because any items left up top show up in the same places in the caves.
The ad vaguely alludes to advanced programming. It must mean something like this (we’ve seen this re-use before in Wolpert’s Mystery Mansion where a maze collapses and turns into a different maze, but not otherwise as far as I know).
The cave is much more explicit about exits and is much easier to map than the upper floor.
Upstairs has the cupboard with a safe containing the diamond, but again, you are stymied from opening the cupboard. by your lack of monster-killing: you need a certain score. The game is never clear about this.
The upshot of all this is that, gameplay-wise, is that you should wander the map looking for a key (that will allow escape later) and grabbing whatever weapons you can. You can also grab the torch when you find it but going into the caves is technically unnecessary (given the items duplicate from the top floor to the caves). Either while you are at it or after you’ve obtained enough items you should start killing enemies.
Even though you are technically never in absolute danger — you can always leave the room when there’s an enemy you can’t handle — I still found it very easy to mess up and died multiple times just getting through the house. Hanging around a monster without killing it right away is usually death, and you often just end up going east-west-east repeatedly while you wait for a random roll of a room that doesn’t contain a monster.
The saving grace — and this game is far too miserable to play to say this saves the game, but at least it helps — is all you really need is points, and the game doesn’t care what monsters you kill to get those points. So you can kill the same monster more than once (you should pick up the item you use after you drop it) so if you don’t have a monster-item correspondence down, you just avoid killing that particular monster.
You could even technically just kill dwarves (via bare-handed method) and only pick up the key, eventually getting the right amount of score (something like 700).
On my way to enough points in my winning run. I never saw the torch, so it is good you technically never need to enter the caves.
Just to make things even more of a headache, even if you drop the correct item to defeat an enemy sometimes the game kills you anyway.
Exemptus valiantly figured this game out only a few months ago and has a full list. (Although it seems to indicate you need to kill one of each monster; I can confirm this is definitely not the case, it is just based on score.)
After all the mess above opening the cupboard magically works over a certain point threshold, but you still have to deal with opening the safe:
This is technically timed — you’ll start to get threatened if you stay trying to open the safe too long — but fortunately my old Mastermind reflexes came through.
After you do this all the objects in your inventory are randomly scattered through the house again. This includes the key you need to escape, so the best thing to do (assuming you know about the trick beforehand) is to drop the key before opening the cupboard. I did not know so I had to find out where the key went, which fortunately didn’t take too long.
Yes, this was absolutely a cavalcade of mysteriously bad game design decisions. I can understand with a lack of models to work from producing something like this in an attempt to produce a “generative” game, but the random monster appearance is utterly spastic and the fact correct items still don’t always work is utterly cruel; the bizarre “you can’t open the cabinet yet” was done with a gameplay goal in mind (“I want the player to fight the monsters”) but with zero clarity to the player that’s what’s going on.
It’s still interesting to have another instance of adventure-roguelike genre, which to be fair, has mostly been a cavalcade of terrible. I have a weird soft spot for Madness and the Minotaur but I still recognize pragmatically it is a mostly terrible game; other than that Lugi has been the only one I felt hit the mark by having a wide variety of possible objectives.
One last bit of strangeness in Africa Diamond before signing out — check out Exemptus’s map of the caves. You’ll notice it has a branch that I didn’t include.
Specifically, the duplication of the top floor in the caves is so extensive that if you’re in the same room as the stairs were, you can GO STAIRS (even though they aren’t in the room description). This gets you a whole new set of caves which duplicate the ground floor of the game, with each of the rooms using the same Caves description. This is truly odd and remarkable and might not even technically be a bug. Whoever BEND was tried to extend their abilities to the limit in order to fit 10K of memory on the Acorn Atom.
The source code with BEND 1982 at the end.
One thing to always keep in mind about very old games is technical restraints in not just what the physical hardware can do, but what tools are available that makes creation easier. A great many of these games have spawned from the fact source code was printed in multiple sources, and the times an author has had to “work from scratch” has had mixed results.
The same is true for graphics, which with the exception of some works that were illustrated after 1982, they’ve nearly all had a general sense of jank; the closest I think we’ve had to “good” game illustrated in 1982 (not a 1982 game illustrated later!) is The Queen of Phobos. The extra hurdle of essentially needing to write one’s own graphics editor was one step too far for many authors.
Mind you, early graphics software did exist; Sierra On-line started advertising their own graphics system in their second print ad. However, it wasn’t until 1982 there was a system advanced enough to be a bona fide hit and work with adventure games: Mark Pelczarski with The Graphics Magician.
The story of Pelczarski has been told well elsewhere (try here first) so I’m not going to do a re-telling, nor will I go into the prior versions which weren’t as famous (he sold Magic Paintbrush in 1979 in a Ziploc); I will say one of the major selling points was that it was fine to use with commercial work as long as The Graphics Magician was credited. (This is similar to Unity’s splash screen requirement.) It ended up being dominant in early 80s graphics.
I’ve seen credited elsewhere that Incrocci used Graphics Magician (with his art like Masquerade, which we recently played) but his games do not credit the program (as is supposed to be required) so I am unclear if that’s what he really used. Other than possibility that we haven’t seen anything of the program (although the graphical version of Oo-topos used it as well as some of the graphical versions of the Scott Adams games — just we didn’t play those versions).
So with those caveats, The Incredible Shrinking Man Adventure is our first game with credit to The Graphics Magician.
It was published in Softdisk in January 1983, but everyone lists it as 1982 because that’s what the copyright notice says.
The diskmags did not have the same rules as printmags in terms of publication delay so it really probably wasn’t publicly available until January, but eh, close enough. (It is faintly possible the game had some circulation beforehand, anyway.)
Softdisk we’ve encountered before (see Planet of the Robots, Space Gorn) and Space Gorn in particular was by Anthony Chiang, who returns in this game as a co-author with Kenneth.
The setup is simply that you have had a science experiment gone wrong and are now very small.
The game at first appears to be simply the On-Line Systems etc. classic view, where you start shrunk under a table…
…but what’s interesting is that the game is trying to render the room you are in as simply multiple perspectives of a real 3D view, and you can view the same thing closer or farther depending on where you are standing. We saw this a little bit in the “dungeon crawler” style games like Asylum and Haunted Palace, but here it still falls within the Sierra style, including only sometimes describing the items that are in view.
You can go in the tackle box and find a hook.
The game is fairly short although not quite as simple as Space Gorn. It is certainly possible to get stuck, although step 1 is fairly clear: take some cheese and give it to a mouse.
On the north side of the big room there’s a door you can squeeze under to find a cat. The cat of course wants the mouse, and you get the string that We Have Garfield at Home the orange cat was playing with.
With the string in hand you can TIE STRING TO HOOK which turns it into a GRAPPLE. The grapple then works on the right spot in the room to be able to hook onto the table and climb to the top.
Having climbed to the top, you can find an antidote for the shrinking, although to get into the vial you need to take a comb from the floor and set it down like a ladder.
the cut text is “THERMAL NUCLEAR WARHEAD. World’s safest science fair!”
Given the context — what is assumingly a fan duo rather than a professional company — the graphics were clear and well-designed, so I appreciate this (if nothing else) for an early example of The Graphics Magician being used by the public. This will also not be the last appearance from the Chiangs (they have two more games on Softdisk, and one in a different publication) but they’ll have to wait until 1983.
As promised, here is the next in the Scott Morgan series. (Previously: Haunted House.)
Here, we start at a ghost town and are meant to recover three treasures from a local mine. The ghost town is straightforward enough; nothing is blocked off.
You can grab a gun, twine, explosives, a backpack, a shovel, a mirror, and a bell just laying out in the open.
The bell is just for atmosphere. The registry book has the hint shown which will come up in just a moment.
The Saloon is a little more interesting. There’s a player piano with a knob you can turn to make music, and a ghost sitting at a bar.
This happens when you LOOK GHOST. I love the moment of meta and this is honestly the most memorable part of the Morgan games so far for me; they’ve mostly been robotic and could use more of this kind of humor.
Trying to head north in the mountains, you find an old hook, followed by the mine. The mine entrance is blocked by a bear who is described as “HUNGRY”.
It wasn’t too hard (given the inventory I had building up) to work out the game intended for me to go fishing at a lake on the far south of the map. It was a little harder to work out you could LOOK MINE to get another object (some poles) — for the most part, look has never applied to the location name in any of the previous Morgan games, it only applied to the objects.
With a pole, hook, and twine in hand, you can TIE TWINE / TO HOOK followed by TIE TWINE / TO POLE while at the lake, and then do the verb CAST in order to go fishing.
Yes, this is still the bespoke-phrases-only parser, and no, I did not figure out CAST on my own: I popped open the binary of the file and looked around for text phrases.
With this sort of game you could say I am playing against the technology, not against any kind of story.
Going into the mine itself, there’s *silver* to the west. (It needs to go into the backpack, you type INTO BACKPACK followed by SILVER, and no, there aren’t any directions in the game or even the manual about this syntax.) To the east there’s a dead end, where I was stuck for a long time. When you look at the explosives they say you can set them for 1 or 2 minutes. The right command is not SET EXPLOSIVES or DROP EXPLOSIVES or anything like that, you are just supposed to type out
1 MINUTE
and then wait and the explosion will happen. You don’t even need to drop the explosives! (Not like the game has a way to drop items, anyway.)
This leaves a BIG HOLE and some more exits. You can get *DIAMONDS* down one passage, a ladder down another, but otherwise the sticking point is a monster.
If you LOOK MONSTER you get turned into stone. Yes, somehow a medusa wandered into our Western adventure. You may recall from the inventory list we had a mirror, yet I haven’t been able to get the mirror to work. SHOW MIRROR is directly in the binary code, but it doesn’t work!
I suspect there’s a literal bug at this point preventing finishing the game. Looks like all I was missing was some gold past the monster which you use the ladder to get to, and then the message:
YOU ARE RICH!!! AND A WINNER
THANKS FOR PLAYING!
GET IN SEARCH OF THE FOUR
VEDAS FROM ASD&D TODAY!
I’ll call this a wrap. Incidentally, having Four Vedas as the next game in the “series” is kind of odd. Here’s the catalog with the order so far:
If we’re going from easier to harder, wouldn’t Stone Age (the last game marked Intermediate) be next? And why are the games not given in order in the catalog?
This may have all parsed as fairly simple to manage, but I did took a fair amount of psychic damage working out both the fishing and the exploding, so despite the intrinsic interest of a game based on Vedic religion, I’ll have to save the rest of the Morgan series for some other time.
Next up: Something that uses The Graphics Magician. Need to keep the Apple II fans from nodding off out there. Then there will be a couple more tiny games followed by the return of Level 9.
(Continued from my prior post here.)
As I suspected, I didn’t have far to go, and it was a matter of verbs, really.
I had to deal with a ghost with the given inventory above. Due to some emulator glitch issues (which were bad enough I had to revert to a prior version of Classic99 to get the program running again) I had to replay to this point where I discovered the purpose of the glowing cube was just to give light to the cellar, so I knew it probably wasn’t the solution to the ghost. (This is definitely a one-object-to-one-puzzle sort of game.)
I had already tried THROWing all my various objects with no luck, until I hit upon, even though the visualization doesn’t make any sense to me, POUR LIQUID.
Maybe this would make sense to me if the ghost was preventing me from going down, but it was preventing me from going up. I get the sense the author didn’t visualize the act as much as think “what’s the action that goes with taking liquid out of a container” and rolled with it.
Above the ghost is where the “grab everything” aspect becomes useful; the chair from earlier can be used for a lift, so you can STAND CHAIR to get up to the attic.
This is a pretty interesting moment (at least for me the most interesting one of the game), as if you try to take the ruby and go down, you’ll get teleported back to the attic. In terms of atmosphere it is the best moment of the game. Except: unless there’s a way I’m missing to drop items — and surely there is, right? — this also represents a softlock, if you don’t have the means to teleport out from here.
As long as you have the chocolate chip cookie from the vampire, you can make a great escape.
This last shot I had to get by unusual means. The screen vanishes too quickly for a screenshot or even reading it (probably the emulator’s fault, not the game’s) which meant I had to replay and start OBS to make a recording. Then I freeze-frame advanced until I could see what the text for winning is. Just like how Aqua Base signaled Haunted House as the next game to play in the series, this one tags Miner 49’er (which seems to be Mr. Morgan’s take on Ghost Town/Greedy Gulch).
The ending screen would have been funnier had I reached the attic without having tried eating the cookie yet, since the game doesn’t even describe the teleportation aspect; you just go straight to the win screen, so somehow you have to infer what it is a cookie did to lead to a great escape.
These “bespoke command only” games can be intensely frustrating but at least this one was easy enough to work; I dread eventually getting up to In Search of the Four Vedas which is supposed to be “expert” level. However, I’m going go ahead and stick with Miner as my next game because I’m feeling “in the groove” of the author and it helps with playing other games; even just remembering that LOOK is the only verb for examining things can take a little while to get the hang of. (I should point out the issue from Aqua Base didn’t happen here — that of deceptive “you can’t do that messages” — simply by virtue of almost no verbs getting implemented in a general way at all. One advantage of only accepting bespoke phrases, I suppose.)
So … that’s it. Not much to report this time! Videogames are good, I guess? Anyone been playing any good non-adventures lately? I’ve got a Baldur’s Gate 3 run going (I picked my character with the Random feature and it gave me a Warlock with a patron of the Great Old One, so Cthulhu basically) and I’ve also been struggling through Void Stranger which is like you took the apparently-linear gameplay of a puzzle game but mashed it with La-Mulana type secrets and meta-aspects and came up with something wild on the other end. Nothing is as it seems. Also I’ve embarked on the Japan-only Wizardry Gaiden series and it still doesn’t quite capture the same magic as original Wizardry but I hear it improves as it goes on. The new Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord remake looks interesting — it literally is using the Apple II version as the “frame code” and you can watch the Apple II version simultaneous with the remake graphics — but I played the game recently enough I’m not itching for another traversal yet.
It’s been a while since we’ve revisited our Spooky Domicile namespace chart, but we’ve had enough new entries I think it’s time:
So the games have been piling into Haunted House, and the only spot left standing without a namespace clash is Haunted Mansion. For today’s game, assuming you’re paying attention to my title line, we’re dealing with Morgan, specifically Scott Morgan, who we saw near the start of our 1982 with Aqua Base, a James Bond-style story with the world’s most ineffective super-villain.
(And more importantly for us, a dodgy parser that pretended to parse things that it didn’t, so PUSH NOUN-THE-GAME-REALLY-DOESN’T-UNDERSTAND says “nothing happens” as if you typed something sensible. Something for me to be alert for.)
His games were all for the TI-99 computer and published by American Software Design and Distribution Co. out in Minnesota. Previously I only had a PO Box (see for example this catalog) but the Haunted House manual links to an actual address in Eden Prarie. It is most definitely a residential area, not a business district.
View of the street via Google, although not at the exact house.
This suggests the business was originally a garage outfit before the proprietor later got a PO Box. I’m not going to say the proprietor is Scott Morgan himself; the catalog lists his name just on the page of adventures, and usually if the owner of one of these distribution outlets that feels like spreading their name around in one place they plaster it everywhere. Still, I get the vibe we’re dealing with a 2 or at most 3 person operation here.
On to the game! Haunted houses, despite not being from the Adventure Ur-text of caves and treasures, lend themselves quite naturally to the adventure game format. It doesn’t take research for an average bedroom coder to fill a house, and having a restricted environment (as adventures usually require) is quite natural for horror. The player has an excuse to get shut in with the general and simple plot concept to just get out. Here, we need to also get a ruby first.
Given the forewarning on the parser, it seemed wise to make a verb list. Here’s how my attempt came out:
This excludes motion verbs, LOOK, and TAKE, but otherwise, that’s really everything: just GO, OPEN and PUSH. DROP doesn’t work. I have not found a mechanism for dropping items.
Unfortunately, it turns out my usual verb-sleuthing method was failing me, because the game has hard-coded phrases. Essentially, rather than understanding individual verbs everywhere, it will them only when given in the right place with the right noun (that is, they’re hard-coded in).
Despite this I managed to get pretty far.
After finding a letter warning you “YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT” and a screwdriver hidden in some bushes, you can go in the open door of the house which vanishes.
The very first thing I found (going west) was a wizard hanging out at a book that he wouldn’t let me read, but where he was otherwise non-threatening. Weird but ok. Wandering elsewhere, I found a glowing cube, some powder, a “door with strange keyhole”, a chair (UNSCREW CHAIR so you can pick it up), and a cellar with a chest containing a “triangle” and a locked door.
Having everything in hand I could manage, I went over to the wizard and noodled with all the objects available. I took the powder and tried to THROW it which caused the wizard to disappear.
(Remember, THROW isn’t understood as a verb generally! Just at the wizard.)
The book doesn’t have any words in it but it does have a key, which I used to unlock a “wine cellar” with an empty bottle. Stuck again, I tried the strange keyhole, and found the triangle was able to unlock it somehow.
Yes, this is a “figure out the arbitrary magic” game.
Past that there was some “pink liquid” I could load up in the bottle, a playroom with “bloodstained walls”…
…a ghost preventing me from going up an exit…
…and a dead body at a guillotine, with a silver cross (if you LOOK BODY).
Silver cross in hand I wandered over to Dracula, in order to steal his chocolate chip cookie.
SHOW CROSS. Again seems to be bespoke-coded for this location.
The cookie, when eaten, teleports the player outside the house. Useful since escape is one of the objectives! But I still don’t have the ruby, and I suspect it is past the ghost, maybe right past the ghost with no more puzzles, but even if I’m just an inch away I can’t get by the inch.
My available inventory. The ghost has no description.
I’ll take suggestions if someone has any. All the other puzzles were “easy” (if involving arbitrary magic) so I suspect I’m overlooking something simple although perhaps with a very specific bespoke verb attached.
Renga in Blue 