Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

So I need to emphasize: the structure of this thing is very odd, even taking the span of all videogames from 19xx to 2024 inclusive. Very shortly after writing the last post I killed the big antagonist of the game (at least in a plot sense), the vampire. That’s supposed to happen near the end of your game. The only comparable game I can think of from the All the Adventures Project so far is Castlequest.

You can take the wooden cross (lying out in the open)…

From this room, with the colorful gravestone description.

…and SHOW CROSS (a perfectly natural action) to get a blast of sunlight.

A STREAM OF BLINDING LIGHT ESCAPES FROM THE CROSS.

It only takes a little thought to try bringing it to the vampire — you just need to not be holding the garlic. That seems to be the hard part of the whole thing (someone who hoovers up all the items just might not know the vampire is there!)

With the vampire dead, you’re able to take the shiny ring that previously had a barrier. (I have no idea what it does.) Another blocked place also opens up. There’s a ladder at the top of the stairs in the castle.

The ladder is not described in the text. I was making the incorrect assumption there would be nothing graphics-only (since the original game was just text). The ladder shaking happens if the vampire is still alive.

Up the ladder is a sarcophagus which just might have our princess, but it is “hermetically sealed”. Magic, then?

And that’s nearly all the progress I’ve been able to make, except I pushed the gravestone and found a locked grate. I assume that’s where the goblin’s key goes.

Being stuck, I made my verb list.

There’s enough verbs that in this situation I generally want to just play “normally” and only consult back in special circumstances. I will at least observe:

• It is possible to SAY in a freeform way so there’s surely a magic word somewhere.
• SEARCH and EXAMINE have been failures nearly everywhere (“YOU SEE NOTHING UNUSUAL” except for at the creepy statue). TURN seems to map to the same word, oddly enough, suggesting that another (hypothetical) secret will involve that physical action.
• You can PET as a verb, but the black cat doesn’t allow it (“SORRY – YOU CAN’T”).
• In terms of movement, JUMP is noteworthy (it asks for a direction) and I haven’t gotten FLY to be recognized but that makes me wonder if we’ll pick up the capability somewhere.

I’ve tried various random things like: feeding the cat bread, moving some giant rocks blocking a cave next to the stump…

I have to wait for an opening where the werewolf isn’t around to test a random action like this. Here he showed up the next turn.

…throwing the flypaper in various places (but not every place yet, the werewolf makes this slow), and trying every word in my entire verb list on the statue while wearing the ring.

I’m not ready for hints yet. I might be if this game had more dubious coding. Also, the fact that the vampire-killing is so simple make me think that somehow all the puzzles are simple, and I just haven’t hit the “waterfall” yet (where the thing you get from puzzle A lets you solve B, which lets you solve C, which lets you solve D, etc.)

This is a good time to stop and admire the graphics.

Here, let’s compare and contrast:

Let’s be fair: Time Zone had the graphics pumped out and a ludicrous rate, and Transylvania’s author did the graphics over 11 months. So there’s a little more care and love. But it’s still interesting to poke at the specifics.

Both at least attempt at some kind of stylization on the stairs. I would call Transylvania’s geometric shift and slight asymmetry elegant; it conveys the darkness of a long-decrepit castle. The Time Zone picture tries to convey something similar (with an old Pyramid) but it comes off more as a glitch than intentional.

The Transylvania art also tries to convey contrast with light and dark, with the coffer having both lights and shadow. The Time Zone art has no light contrast at all. (This may have been somewhat a result of the tools: Penguin’s graphic tools were likely more advanced than the ones used by On-Line Systems. At the very least, the Penguin graphics seem to have a wider variety of “colors” to pick from, color including intermixed texture possibilities.)

I’m also impressed at how image maintains the 3D structure even with the shadow over it, and the color used at the front.

I have long been the opinion that you can have “good graphics” at every pixel level; it is possible to adopt a style that works within the constraints. While early graphical art often looks janky, we need to consider not only the skill of the artist, but the time they had (production time was very fast back then) and the tools. The Tarturian rendered its graphics as literal lines of BASIC; the authors made a tool for generating them, but there were still hard technical limits to how good they could make a face.

The finest art of the Apple II era.