Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and my prior posts are needed for context to read this one.

Before reaching the finale, I’d like to mention two other historical tidbits on the author.

First, a number of people associated with CHROMAtrs — including the author himself — show up in this thread. A “Chuck Sites” who seems to be speaking from personal knowledge mentions

South Shore was lucky to get Robert French to write ChromaBasic. At Thirteen he could program circles around anybody. And he could type unbelievably fast too.

and a StevenHB, who actually worked for South Shore (the company that sold the hardware) adds

I worked with the author of CHROMA Basic, who was a (shockingly) young student from Kentucky.

with Robert French himself chiming in:

Wow, I just ran across this web page by accident. I’m the “shockingly young student from Kentucky” that StevenHB referred to above. I was 14 when I wrote and sold Chroma BASIC to South Shore, and I still remember it well. I also remember writing a Pacman-equivalent and some other games.

In the mid-80s Robert French’s other “big” TRS-80 product was a BBS system he called The French Connection.

Via 80 Micro Nov. 1985.

I mention it not because the context will help with understanding Strange Adventure — it doesn’t really, other than being another showcase for our author’s machine language skills — but rather to dissuade any future historians from accidentally mixing up the program with a much more famous BBS. One of the very first personal BBSs (from 1979) was also called The French Connection, and was run out of California by an infamous con artist named Stephen Cohen. It was intended as a dating service. His shenanigans include posing as “Tammy”, who would not only keep the interest of lonely men but also extract their money (subscriptions were $18 a month).

My guess is Robert French was not aware of any of this when he named his BBS software.

Back to the game! Continuing from last time, I had vaporized a rock into rock dust (see above) and I was stuck on a “tiny hole” where the HELP command claimed some kind of hidden switch.

I pulled open the source code to solve the puzzle. First I checked the BASIC code to find the room itself:

17000 RO=33:PRINTB1$;” YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM. THERE IS A “;:IFAI=0THENPRINT”TINY”;ELSEPRINT”LARGE”;
17010 PRINT” HOLE AT YOUR FEET.”;:IFAI=0THENPRINT
17015 PRINT”THERE IS A PASSAGE TO THE EAST.”

It looks like the hole changes from TINY to LARGE when the variable AI is something other than 0, so I traced next where the value of AI gets changed.

156 AI=1:POKETR+NO,34:A=0:RETURN

Fine, where does line 156 get called? I traced it back to line 151, which seems to trigger when you drop an object, and specifically

IFRO=33ANDNO=7THEN156

That is, if the room number is 33 (the small room with the tiny hole) and the item we are dropping is 7, the flag changes.

Fine, which item is 7? From the machine code part I turned, with this section

SIC JEW ROP LAM BOT KEY RIN BOAT RUB LAS BAT PIL

The SICKLE is item 1, so counting from there, the RIN is 7. The ring?!? Why the ring?

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve done it. I have found, after hundreds of games, the most absolutely pure piece of moon logic ever in an adventure game, and yes, this one deserves the name of “moon logic”.

The diamond ring drops into the room below.

The dragon does not block your way (nor stop you from taking the ring) so you can just be on your way if you want, and my first time through I did that, because this puzzle is rather difficult. Not “pure moon logic” this time, just rather tricky. Rather than plow in the order I solved things let’s just get this puzzle over now.

Examining the dragon has the game say THE DRAGON IS JUST THE KIND OF DRAGON YOU MEET EVERY DAY. The HELP indicates the dragon might be sleepy, and that refers back to the NOTE from early in the game: DEAR JOHN, SLEEP WELL. GOOD NIGHT, MOTHER. I tried SAY GOOD NIGHT (SAY GOOD also works) and the game claimed nothing happened, meaning it understood the word GOOD, even though it doesn’t represent a takeable object of any sort. I also, separately, had tried to DROP PILLOW (one of the treasures I had) but also to no effect. You need to combine the actions: DROP PILLOW, and then SAY GOOD NIGHT.

Not moon logic! Not the greatest of puzzles, either — there should always be an indicator if you have half of a solution so you know you are on the right track — but not completely arbitrary either.

The bag can incidentally be used to scoop up the rock dust from earlier, which is otherwise too fine to pick up.

Proceeding onward, there’s another area with some *HONEY*, and a crack. I was able to open the crack but only because I had previously extracted the verb list, and this is how I found WI stands for WIDEN.

Probably the only time we’ll see a game that requires this verb.

The room past the crack has some *SPICES*. With the honey and spices in hand we can go out of the cave (from a western exit) and find ourselves blocked by a bear. If you throw the honey he eats it and is still hungry (and of course being a treasure that is a bad thing). The spices scare the bear off:

Past the bear is … er, whoops!

HELP informs us our decision to push the button earlier may not have been wise.

Even given the trolling, I admit I loved this moment. I anticipated already that blowing up a rocket with an unseen missile seemed unlikely to be helpful, and the game already had shown the HELP command (which encouraged pushing the button) to be a bit of a trickster.

This is true of the very first room. Climbing the tree gets you eaten (by the tree).

Re-doing everything and passing by the button:

Here the game switches to sci-fi setting.

There’s a “mysterious puddle of water creeping around the room” early on that you can destroy by throwing the sponge from earlier in the game. Close to that is an experimental lab with a flask, which gets used right away when you hop in another side room and have the door seal shut behind you.

You eventually find a teleporter which leads to an engine room, and can start the engines, then go back to a control room to launch, and have the entire rocket blow up.

For whatever reason the self-destruct system has also been activated but only triggers upon launch (or maybe it is a long enough timer it takes travel into space for it to be meaningful); that can be taken care of with another button.

If you try to go back out the airlock, things don’t go well, as you’re in orbit.

For some reason this spelling made me laugh.

The teleporter has been redirected to the planet you are orbiting, instead.

To get anywhere on the icy surface you need to throw the “rock dust” for traction, and yes, that’s very easy to miss if you weren’t ready for that. (Back at least a saved game slot! At least the game has saving!)

Notice how, in a real-universe sense, we have completely stranded ourselves on a single island on a faraway planet with only our 9 treasures to keep us company. Maybe dragon eggs are edible.

I admit I appreciated the near-twist to the ending, and felt like it matched the general theming of the HELP command with attitude and other troll-like events. I realize, in an absolute “do I recommend this” sense, the answer is quite definitely no, and if I came up with a rating system (perhaps with a clever acronym, someone want to make one up for me?) this would score near the bottom on essentially every metric, but that’s not really the point of me playing this kind of game in the first place. Usually there’s something interesting and different and memorable in even the most out-there of games, and being given wrong advice by what normally is a meta-command surely qualifies; even the snarky narrator of the Infocom version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy didn’t go that far. The closest I can think of a similar trick being pulled is the Ice-Pick Lodge game The Void, and given the company responsible is mostly famous for Pathologic, this clearly dives into territory only explorable by avant-garde Russians and fast-typing 14-year-olds.