Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I probably should have checked help sooner. Unusually for Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games, it discusses possible bugs in the hints themselves and even mentions a late action only working on two of the six playthroughs. I wasn’t able to get the ending to happen so while I came close, I can’t show the grand finale.

You may want to re-read from the beginning for story points before moving on.

Via eBay, with someone’s hand-labeled disk and hand-made map.

First off, I had something close to the right actions last time.

I had missed the fact in the room with the receipt at the hotel, the phone rings. I did have the sound on, but you need to pause in what appears to be real time; if you’re typing commands too fast it doesn’t turn up, and even after I knew about the phone potentially ringing, I wasn’t able to get anything to happen until a second attempt.

“It’s all set, Beau. She shoves off tomorrow.” They hang up.

Now, you’re supposed to follow the receipt to the red herrings, just as I did. When I did so I had nothing happen and left, but if you wait — by just WAIT or LOOK — eventually someone will spring a trap on you and trap you in a locker.

The locker has a ticket stub (needed for the cinema) so you need to get in here. To escape is the only real item based puzzle: the cigarette and lighter from the desk are needed. You stand on the desk and set off the smoke alarm.

To the game’s credit, I figured out the parser commands here fairly quickly. With ticket stub in hand we could visit the cinema, and there Beau (the fiancée) arrives (I think probably this would not have happened had we not caught the phone call).

However, when we go in, we find the man… dead!

We can take the invitation if we like; whatever happens, it seems to be scripted that if we arrive at the platform where our office is we’ll get a message that tells us to wait at a phone.

We can then follow that phone message over to the (previously not-useful) museum, and have an encounter which results in another dead body.

Now we get into serious bug territory. According to Kim Schuette, the body has a key (according to the source code) but no way to access it in the game. The key then works on a locker in the stadium which opens a duffle bag with barbells, but there seems to be no purpose in this anyway (since neither he in the past nor myself now were able to see any of this in-game).

This encounter is the last you can have before picking up the ransom money, as you were informed about way back at the penthouse; you were supposed to pick it up at 7 PM, then drop it off at the lockers at the bus station at 9 PM. This part of the game is a matter of typing WAIT a lot or just I since that’s a quicker command.

I dutifully rode the clunky subway system back to the bus station, did the drop off, waited nearby for the pickup (as Mr. Schuette explains in his book) … and had nothing happen. The person that is supposed to do the pickup is Livwell (that we learned about via bribery in my last post) but he never shows.

West & 21st St.: Wait and watch for Crowded Corridor. If no one comes by 10 PM (the courier is Livwell), he won’t come due to a bug in the program. (On six near-identically played games, he appeared only twice. Perhaps a flag wasn’t set by doing something which seemed to have no bearing on the game, like not getting the Hanky or going to the “wrong” bank.)

The ending at least sounds dramatic. You’re supposed to follow the man (Livwell) with the suitcase all the way back to the Sizemore building (??) and then sneak in the elevator and shoot him. Then, arriving at the roof for the drop off, you encounter J.J. (the basketball star) and Cartier (the allegedly kidnapped person), shoot the man, and “pull lever” (which I assume stops Cartier, who was in on the scheme all along).

Ugh. I won’t recount my time valiantly trying to play the game for real and getting nowhere. I think the authors had some interesting scenes mapped out, but didn’t have a good way of putting them together that made both narrative and ludic sense at the same time. There wasn’t any learning that happened from the man at the museum, nor with the death at the theater, and no sense of a gradually untangling mystery that requires thoughtful deduction. Simply a sequence of events happened which eventually led to what would be a conclusion (if the game wasn’t broken).

You’ll be glad to hear I am already part-way through my next post, so I hope it won’t be nearly as long a gap before you hear from me next time.

The map from The Book of Adventure Games.

Nothing terrible earth-shaking this time: I visited all the subway stops and mapped everything out.

The key in the top is now fixed, with W and E going the appropriate directions.

We’ve seen the starting office, the penthouse, a museum, and an ATM, but a brief tour of the rest:

Sports Complex:

Mainly seems to be there for a locker, which I assume we get a key for at some point.

The NOISE MAKER seems tempting for some puzzle where we have to distract bad guys, but I haven’t come close to any related scenario yet.

Unfriendly:

There might be a scene later, but this was the most bare-bones of the destinations I could find. It just is described as an unfriendly part of town, with no buildings to enter.

Broken Arms Hotel:

We can see from the registrar where Beau McBride is staying (that’s the new fiancée of our kidnappee), and visit to see a shipping notice.

I did find the crate, which I’ll show off in a moment.

“Executive Row”:

Where broken-down executives go to self-medicate.

There’s a person who indicates they know something that you can bribe. I am quite unclear what it has to do with the case — I feel like I’m seeing something out of sequence. All I can clean is someone named Oliver Livwell exists and was acting suspiciously.

Bus Station

Rather like the Sports Complex, this seems to exist for the purpose of providing a mysterious locker that we can unlock. Again, we seem to be out of sequence:

Warehouse

There’s a steel door that we can’t get through (and where I assume more drama occurs) but also the crate I promised would come up again. It is full of red herrings.

Cinema

There’s a cinema that is currently playing a movie, and it doesn’t let you buy a ticket; however, if you have a stub, you can see a movie in progress. So this is just a matter of waiting for the right item.

Apartment

You can visit your own apartment, which is very messy. There’s a picture of your mother with a safe behind it.

The combination hidden in the office (from a few posts ago) works, although it took me a while to get the syntax. You need to TURN DIAL LEFT or TURN DIAL RIGHT, and then a real-time interface happens where a number rapidly increases and you have to push a button when it hits the right spot — almost a mini-game.

The statue contains a statue which appears to be a reference to The Maltese Falcon.

It’s a statue of a bird of some sort. This is a family heirloom, handed down to you from your great grand-dad. On the bottom of the base it reads, “Made in Malta.”

If the statue shows up in the plot, I haven’t seen it yet; at the moment it appears to be just a reference.

Bank

Nothing exciting about this. I assume this is simply another location the bankcard works at, but maybe a future event happens here.

Summary

This seems to be the sort of game where I’m supposed to find clues in a specific sequence, and various people and events will show up at the right intersections once I learn about them; alternately, I’ll get a key for one place, which then has a key for the next one. In a ludic sense, I don’t really feel like I’m investigating anything, but let me save any design conclusions for the end of the game.

The locations end up not being large so I suspect once the progression really gets going unless there’s some difficult puzzles along the way, I might blaze through what remains of the plot. So hoping for a win next time?

From eBay.

Other than my life-delay, there were a couple aspects going for Crime Stopper making it hard to get moving on progress:

1.) The variant-versions fiasco I already wrote about; anything where I have to switch emulators or disk versions or the like can take away my momentum.

2.) The ALL CAPS block text, which hasn’t been a pain in other Apple II games but is here. There’s a fair amount of reading giant chunks.

I’ll give the non-blocky version of this shortly.

3.) The way travel on the map works, which I have only touched on briefly.

Each of the circles shown is a subway station. You go into the subway, buy a token, then wait on the platform for subway cars to come by. If you’re trying to go a particular direction, you have to wait for that particular car. The directions (as partially indicated by the compass) are Uptown (right), Downtown (left), East (down) and West (up). (And yes, if you check against the map, east and west are reversed for some reason compared to the compass guide.) I found it very easy to go the wrong way, and every time you use the subway you have to buy a token (hope you didn’t max out your inventory, otherwise you need to figure out what item you want to drop), wait for the right car (which takes a while), enter, and wait while in the car (which also takes a while).

You start at 2nd and 90th and the telegram asks you to go to 2nd and 50th (one stop uptown). Even figuring out this fact took a while of parsing the subway system.

If you go downtown instead of uptown, you end up at this museum which is at the far upper left of the subway map.

So from here (unless I run into a specific problem) I’m going to pretend I’m fluently flying around the subway system, although I’m also running into inventory capacity problems and having to dump things on the subway platform hoping that I won’t need them four stops away and have to do tedious backtracking. I will say in a theoretical sense it is interesting how simulationist the authors went here in their world-modeling, but in a practical sense I was pining for a fast-travel.

Rewinding a bit now, just because it’s been a while you may have forgotten the plot–

A newscaster appears on the set. “There is still no word on the demands of the kidnappers of construction heiress Cartier-Blanche Sizemore. Miss Sizemore disappeared today from the plush 2nd Ave penthouse she shares with her mother, Millicent-Hyacinth Sizemore. Mrs. Sizemore herself made headlines last October when she announced her divorce from her husband, the internationally known gambler Henri Louis Chevron. So far the police have issued no official statements except to confirm the kidnaping. We will have more information for you as it develops.”

That’s from your office you start at, where you can turn on the television and CHANGE CHANNEL. You get an urgent phone call at 7 AM with a “trembling female voice” saying “they are coming to get me” with loud noises, and there is already a telegram from Sizemore’s mother asking you to come to the 2nd Ave penthouse regarding a strictly confidential matter.

Putting my mystery hat on, there’s already something very bizarre here: the kidnapping is supposed to have already happened. What is with the phone call seeming to be the event occurring on the spot? While you can’t read the telegram first, it is already sitting at your desk when the phone call happens. Is the telegram about some different thing that then changes because by the time we arrive the kidnapping has happened, or is there some kind of setup? The television program clip also can be seen immediately after the phone call, which doesn’t make much sense with the timing.

Going outdoors, we can buy a newspaper (I already showed a screenshot of part of it, but here’s the whole story converted to more readable text, for both your benefit and mine).

Cartier-Blanche Sizemore, daughter of construction magnate, Millicent-Hyacinth Sizemore, was abducted from her 50th floor penthouse apartment at 10 AM this morning. Two masked gunmen forced their way into the Sizemore building, captured Miss Sizemore, and escaped in a black limousine. The police are puzzled by the gunmen’s apparent familiarity with the Sizemore building’s layout, as hell as their unconventional getaway vehicle. “there are no firm suspects at this time,” said Detective Frank Sanderson, who is in charge of the investigation, “but it is still early.” Over the years, the Sizemore family has received a certain amount of notoriety for their frequently turbulent personal lives. Miss Sizemore made news several months ago when she spurned her fiancée of two years, megabucks basketball superstar J.J. Johnson, in favor of Beau McBride, a Bristol’s department store clerk. Mrs. Sizemore and her husband at the time, Henri Louis Chevron, were stunned by her decision and threatened to disinherit her.

Several weeks later, the social circuit shaken by Mrs. Sizemore’s stormy divorce from Chevron, an internationally-known gambler, Chevron was reported to have filed for bankruptcy following his removal as acting head of the corp.

Although Detective Sanderson has made it clear that there are no real suspects as of yet, Mr Chevron could not be reached for comment. Mr McBribe also could not be reached at his room in the Broken Arms Hotel.

Yes, the fiancee’s name is written McBride, and then McBribe. This might be an intentional typo.

(…skip by subway transport shenanigans. grr this is annoying…)

Arriving at the Sizemore building, there’s a letter from the mother explaining there had been “treats two weeks prior” and that “now it is too late”. You get a account number (10-28-81) and a bankcard in order to make withdraws, and are informed that there is ransom money being prepared that we can pick up by six o’clock.

According to the map we can head “Downtown” back to where we started, or “East” in order to go down on the map. Going “East” we get to a bank and can use the bankcard we just acquired.

That is, as long as you make sure you use the syntax correctly. Typing 102881 or ENTER 102881 or ENTER 10-28-81 all fail; you have to type exactly 10-28-81 for the withdraw to work.

And even if you get through that, the transaction might just fail anyway! This happens if you exceed $100 in-hand, and I was holding $10 of my character’s personal money, and I tried to get $90 which seemed to be possible. Argh!

I’ve gotten a little farther than this, but I think this gives enough of an idea what I’m struggling against for now. Update on all the map locations next time, and then maybe we’ll see a dead body.