Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Sure, hyperbole, but not by much.

I did beat the game, so make sure you’ve read read my previous posts about Toxic Dumpsite before this one.

The puzzle I was stuck on last time was, weirdly enough, fair. Maybe it needed some design finesse but…

…just as a reminder, I had found a vending machine with a coin underneath. Doing SHAKE MACHINE led to a rattling sound and the “all right” message made me think the rattling was referring to the coin. But no, SHAKE still gets the sound, and as mentioned last time, inserting a coin gets it stuck.

However, it dislodged whatever happened to be stuck by a little nudge, so that SHAKE MACHINE again gets it out.

That’s a key. I then immediately tested it everywhere, find it fit in the keyhole next to the window, and turning the key leads to a click.

This unlocks the “control” room downstairs, but before going down there, I should mention while stumped I also managed to find a shovel. LOOK UNDER worked (without documentation or prompting); what about other prepositions?

And no, SEARCH or any other verb does not find the shovel. It has to be LOOK BEHIND.

There isn’t anything intrinsically unfair about including prepositions in searches, but it has to be documented in some way they’re going to occur, especially because they were almost unused in text adventures at this time. I admit my mental logic probably ran along the way the author wanted — I thought that file cabinet is big, I wonder if anything is behind there — but I can still recognize the game is asking for a command without teaching it exists. Text adventures have the unique attribute of “technically anything in English works” but in practice as commands get rarer and rarer they need to be treated uniquely, like you have a platformer where the Z key does something essential but the game doesn’t bother to mention it and you’re just supposed to hit every key on the keyboard trying.

Moving on, with shovel in hand (and the control room unlocked) I headed downstairs, and found the control room was just a message with a single button.

The button unlocks a second door marked “TRANSPORT”.

Just to the left is a button you can push to activate the cart; then pushing the pedal will lead you deeper in the mine, where you start to have trouble breathing.

Curiously enough, the “trouble breathing” isn’t really a timer as you might expect — it means if you try to go too far deep then you die from lack of oxygen, but otherwise the “trouble breathing” state simply hovers around without consequence. Usually for one of these games when something that indicates the player’s medical condition is getting worse triggers, that’s automatically a timer that needs to be beaten.

Further in there is a purple button that can’t be reached. This will be important shortly.

You can then go in the mine, where the lantern (which I assume has been providing light through the whole transport section) is too faint to see in the darkness. You can still DIG (with that shovel from behind the file cabinet) and get an item that your player takes, then leave safely.

If you try to go deeper into the mine, that’s when the lack of oxygen kicks in:

The hammer is described as lightweight which I assume is intended as a hint it can’t be used to break things (like the Office door upstairs which is still unlocked, and is a red herring at the end).

I was horribly stuck enough here that I decided I had enough and needed to poke at a walkthrough, and here we hit the puzzle of the title.

Allow me a brief side mention of a much more recent game, +=3, by Carl de Marcken and David Baggett. Going by the ifdb description:

This one-puzzle game was Dave Baggett’s response to a discussion (flame war?) in rec.arts.int-fiction and specifically to Russ Bryan’s claim that there could be no puzzles which are logical yet unsolvable.

I remember some discussions from rec.arts.int-fiction (the Usenet group) being indistinguishable from flame wars back in the day, so maybe it was both. Here’s the opening (and only) room.

On the Three Troll Bridge

You are standing on a rickety wooden bridge. A burly Three Troll blocks your passage north, across the bridge.

Something is ticking.

In any case, +=3 was essentially a thought experiment: how could you make a logical unsolvable puzzle? Now, as a one-puzzle game, you may want to skip down a bit farther to avoid my spoiling it (I’ll drop a picture of a floppy disk to mark when it is safe to come back), as I’m about to cut and paste in the walkthrough.

Ready?

This “game” is meant to illustrate the fact that “logical” and “simple” puzzles can be made arbitrarily difficult to solve. In this particular case, the puzzle exploits an assumption that experienced text adventure players will make — that things that aren’t listed in one’s inventory aren’t actually manipulable game objects.

>give shirt to troll
>give shoes to troll
>give socks to troll
>n

The solution is perfectly logical and simple. If you were standing on a bridge with a troll who clearly wanted you to give him something, and you had nothing to give him, what would you do? You’d give him the shirt off your back, of course.

Note that if you say “examine me”, you’ll see that you are in fact a clothed human. (If you’d have been naked, the game certainly would have pointed this out, right?)

Everything explicitly mentioned in this game except the troll is a red herring.

I don’t think the game really illustrates anything about logic and simplicity as much as that it is far too much to expect the player to refer to objects that aren’t listed as there (and why can’t our player have boots, instead of shoes)?

All that preface was technically a hint for the puzzle: how do you press the purple button? All the information needed is in my prior posts (or at least all the information needed according to the game itself).

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

So way back at the chest next to the starting room…

…we can REMOVE NAIL WITH HAMMER.

There is no nail in the description, and even being given a “wooden” chest, there is no reason to assume it uses nails rather than, say, screws. The only feasible way to solve the puzzle seems to be to focus entirely on the hammer and what it might be used for, and given that nothing is breakable, come up with the use of pulling nails instead, and try to guess where a nail might be and take the leap of faith.

Weirdly enough, the game was well coded and there was clearly some creativity poured into this, especially given the lack of historical precedent; it’s just the game design effect was a miss. The author likely saw the Med Systems games like Deathmaze but definitely hadn’t seen the Japanese Mystery House, so this concept of a tight 3D environment was all his, and I appreciated the novel ways of stretching what turned out to be a tiny map. I’m especially curious if the graphical elements are what led the author down the road of including preposition-searches; looking at the file cabinet as a graphic did give me the primal urge to peek behind it in a way I’m fairly certain I would not have experienced with text.

Maybe the other game in the two-pack (Spook House) will go better now that I know the author’s tendencies, but I’m going to take a breather before trying it, and instead go to a game series I know very well: the Phoenix mainframe series, and the ultra-hard British game Avon.

Since last time I got unstuck by figuring out I was missing something on the interface, only to get stuck again quite soon afterwards. Voltgloss helped in the comments and I was able to make a micro-piece more of progress. Just plunging through that hint sheet is starting to look tempting, but maybe pausing to write will help break things through.

So it had always occurred to me that it might be possible to look in alternate directions, but I checked the manual carefully and this is all it had to say about movement. N/S/E/W as well as F/B/L/R work as I describe — you only can move with them, and if you run into a wall or a closed door the game just says you can’t go that way.

However, if you TURN NORTH or TURN SOUTH you actually change your facing. This is not in the documentation. (It turns out the arrow keys, which the manual indicates are equivalent to F/B/L/R, do allow for turning, if being used while holding the shift key.)

The storage room has a book you can see facing south which contains a “credit card” where one side says “Mine 1A”. The north side has a chest (as shown) with a lantern.

The furnace room has a message on the north side…

…and if you face the door leading back to the hall to the west, you can see a button. I do not do what the button does.

I should add it isn’t 100% obvious you should check the door facing the hall — that is, looking back the way you came — but the view of the message on the wall shows the button to the left. This let me know I was supposed to turn more. This differs from Mystery House II (MSX version) where all views were narrowly only of the environment directly in front.

Having done all that, I was still stuck.

I had to plunge all the way down the hints Voltgloss gave to find the command SHOW CARD. I don’t think that square is supposed to be a camera, I think it is supposed to be the cardboard with the message, and the camera is just hidden (this is because there’s another spot later where the card works, and no square).

I still don’t have access to much, but I also don’t think (due to the graphics and needing to have graphics for multiple views) this is a large game.

I haven’t gotten into the “Offices” yet but the doors are marked with what is inside.

To the north there’s a snack machine and another distinctly unfair moment.

First off, if there’s any way to push one of the particular three green buttons (as opposed to just PUSH GREEN) then I don’t know if I’m doing it right or not. Both PUSH GREEN 1 and PUSH GREEN BUTTON 1 give a click sound, but the game also accepts commands like READ BOOK 1 indicating it is just ignoring the later stuff in a command.

Shaking the machine reveals a sound, but I was heavily stumped until, via instinct, the game’s picture, and experience in Graham Nelson games, I tried LOOK UNDER MACHINE, revealing a hidden coin.

I checked later, and SEARCH doesn’t work — it has to be LOOK UNDER. The manual once mentions LOOK INSIDE but no clue that LOOK UNDER works, and I can assure you this is a very rare command to cause a unique effect in this era.

You can insert the coin in the machine but none of the green buttons do anything. I still strongly suspect this might be where I’m stuck on forward progress, as I’m pretty much empty on things to do elsewhere.

For example, there’s a locked file cabinet to the east. There doesn’t seem to be any potential shenanigans possible without a key. There’s also a guard post with a window next to a keyhole, but again no key.

You can also step out to a platform to the west, turn around, and SHOW CARD while facing the door, which causes it to work like an elevator.

The lower floor just consists of two locked rooms, and the SHOW CARD trick doesn’t work on either.

I would guess this is where the shutoff lever is hiding.

It is faintly possible the author is being too clever with the parser. The manual gives “CAREFULLY EXAMINE THE BOMB” as a possible command and LOOK UNDER is parsed as its own command. Maybe there’s some sensible syntax to press a green button but it only works ordered as a very particular sentence; most games of this era would let you PRESS 2 or the like.

I’m still happy to take ROT13 hints on anything at the moment.

As far as the “classic” Scott Adams goes, they’re taking a break throughout 1982; the first six of the Adams games were converted to graphical format, but I’m not replaying games just because they add graphics.

However, Adventure International was still selling at a brisk rate through the year, including some products by high school student Roger Jonathan Schrag. One of them, Arex, is a Qix variant of sorts that looks genuinely well-programmed.

Maybe his adventures are the same way, but I could only get a little bit of the way into Toxic Dumpsite before being stumped. It, along with the game Spook House, were sold as a “double feature” in a single game package; both feature TRS-80 graphics.

As the manual states:

Something’s gone very wrong at the Toxic Dumpsite where life-threatening nuclear wastes are treated and buried. The entire plant will explode like the Fourth of July in less than 30 minutes unless you can avoid the many traps and protection systems, find the right controls and shut the plant down in time.

The 30 minutes is counted in real time. If you step away from the keyboard and come back 30 minutes later the explosion will have happened.

(This is, in a way, very bad and not bad at all. Very bad in that real time and typing don’t always mix, not bad at all in that when I play games on a modern emulator with save states I can usually beat any time limits handily.)

You start with a note in your hands — it seems like you’d be briefed about this information beforehand?

Other than that, you start in a series of three rooms: the entrance, a storage room, and a room with a furnace.

Trying to head north or south from the entrance leads to locked doors (I assume one of the locked doors was simply the way we came in). I’ve tried many verbs and actions on the doors and the furnace with no luck. So I’m stuck on the game right away.

I’ve tried every verb on this list on the furnace.

There is a hint sheet for the game but I know if I check it this early I’ll have very little resistance for checking hints later. If someone would like to deliver a hint in ROT13 in comments, though, I’ll take it that way.

Having an extremely hard opening puzzle doesn’t mean the game will be dire — Subterranean Encounter started the same way — but it certainly doesn’t give a good first impression.