Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

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.