A number of advertisements appeared in 1984 for the company Bug-Free, including in Popular Computing Weekly and Micro Adventurer magazine.
The four games being advertised (In Search of the Quill, Gunpowder Plot, Dr. Watt and the Darlics, Hells Bells) were all adventure games written by the person mentioned in the ad (J. Wright) so represented yet another one of our bedroom coders who self-published in the UK. The difference with J. Wright and our other bedroom coders is that J. stands for Jacqueline. This is the first author we’ve had of this sort that’s a woman.
Ms. Wright also continued her entrepreneurship as she shows up later in the 80s all the way through 1992 with a series of ads for a call-in hint line with eventual separate hint lines for separate games, and not just adventure games. 0891 445 926 was for First Samurai. As mentioned in The Adventure & Strategy Club publication, she was one of a whole group of people doing their own hintlines (Sue Roseblade, Joan Pancott, Sylvia Parry, Debbie Lawford, Mike Barton).
Now, the reason we are playing one of her games in 1982 is that the BASIC source code has a 1982 date and lists the company Jaxsoft. Neither I nor anyone else has been able to locate sales under the Jaxsoft label, but the ’82 UK games environment was such that tapes could have just been jammed in at the local computer store (or grocery store, or golfing store, or music instrument store, …) so I won’t necessarily call it unpublished. On the other hand, sometimes people would make up a “company name” for their own personal work. It isn’t certain either way.
The setting is colorful, although this is in the end another Treasure Hunt.
Travel through hell, purgatory, limbo, etc… Meet (among others) the undead, demons and the Angel of Death. Try to escape with B. Elzebub’s hoard and your sanity!
This has the simplistic minimalism of an early Hassett game, with a quite limited verb set: CUT, DIG, DRINK, KILL, UNLOCK, WAVE, JUMP. One thing it does have going for it (that I’ve yet to see in any game) is that the Spectrum character set attributes are used to make tiny graphics for the different objects.
Before things kick off, the game feels obliged to mention if you try to kill a monster, it will ask you with what weapon, and you can try to use your bare hands by just pressing ENTER. This will be important later.
The map is laid out in three sections, essentially aboveground, underground, and deep.
The first phase, aboveground, you need find a key for the locked door to go belowground. This involves taking the candle (you can’t go anywhere otherwise, I suppose this is deepest night) and stumble around the forest until you get to a room with a pit and a spade.
I was using the bottle of wine — the only other item I had other than the candle — to map rooms out. This game turns out not to have any “loops” but only an early one-way exit that makes things confusing. However, it isn’t like I’d know the game lacked loops until I had finished making the map show that in the first place!
Jumping in the pit is possible, but death. It needs to be returned to later.
This is also the sort of the game with no exits listed so you have to test every direction.
With the spade you can then test DIG in every room in the forest, eventually come across one where the game says
YOU FIND
SOMETHING.IT VANISHES
I have marked the “dig room” with an octagon. It is the only place digging is useful, but again, I didn’t know that, so for the rest of the game I tried DIG in every single room.
Having “something changed” in a narrative sense is interesting in that it makes for a slightly unexpected event: I was fully expecting to have an item in hand, but instead I was left fumbling through the forest again just in case the item showed up somewhere, and used DIG yet again on every room (in case the buried item re-buried itself somewhere). All that really happens is the key moved itself to the entrance room.
There’s an untakable “bench” to the north that I wasted time with thinking it might hide something, as it is the only item in the game that does nothing.
With the key you can unlock to the underground.
The very first room has a dagger and a dragon. The game informs you that YOU CAN’T if you try to take the dagger (you’re supposed to infer the dragon is stopping you — that’s true for messages in general in this game, like how you can’t go into the forest without the candle implies it is too dark but the game doesn’t say “too dark” or the like).
Since there’s no weapon otherwise aboveground, your only choice is to follow the curious directions at the start and try to KILL DRAGON and just press ENTER when the game asks you with what. This is invoking yet again the “kill the dragon with your bare hands” moment in Crowther/Woods Adventure.
A demon guarding a rug (a treasure) does not allow similar treatment: you need to use the dagger.
There’s elsewhere a “cord” around a chest where you need to CUT it (possibly a struggle for a player normally, but I had already made my verb list). Doing so yields a golden passkey, which lets you go down yet another level.
Giving a map of the lowest floor…
Purgatory is just a trap room. The game softlocks if you enter.
…the zombie is quite serious that the wrong way is death, although there is no logical method to figuring out the “right way” — you just have to die in other directions via an ANGEL OF DEATH until you find out west is correct.
Not interesting in a gameplay sense, but good for atmopshere. There’s not much otherwise that really gets across the “you’re in hell” message the game is supposed to have.
This is followed by a rod of silver, and then a chasm where you can immediately wave the rod of silver you just found to make a bridge.
This is a puzzle for people who wouldn’t think to WAVE, I think — that is, this would make more sense for being someone’s first adventure game.
Other than that you can find a gas mask and ruby pendant and leave, going down which will end up somehow bringing you back to the underground floor. You are passing through twisty passages without much distinguishing them once the items are gone so I had the fun case of mapping out rooms without realizing I was just re-creating the map I had already made.
The gas mask goes back to the pit above ground, where you can jump in and find a Van Gogh.
Other than that, the rest of gameplay is about gathering the treasures you’ve run across and dropping them off at the start, where they will disappear if they count as points. The golden passkey is described as just a passkey after you first find it so it is the least likely to be remembered; I just went ahead and tried all my objects just in case and discovered it worked by accident.
I was still stuck after so I was seemingly missing a treasure, meaning I had to go back and DIG everywhere yet again just in case I missed a secret. What I had overlooked is that UP and DOWN are directions that can be used arbitrarily, and in one of the twisty passages you can go DOWN to find a hag.
Not really a puzzle; the wine bottle works to stave off the hag as long as you have it in inventory. Someone who previously drank the wine (softlocking their game) would get stuck.
This has a “author’s first game” feel to it: the Treasure Hunt setup, random combination of monsters, straight-up copy of Crowther/Woods puzzles (even if the dragon is delivered in yet another novel way), the softlock room, the sudden-death exit room. However, the game was still solvable; the author didn’t try for anything overly ambitious requiring convoluted parser input, or go for a stretch like saying HI to a ghost. I had genuine fun which is all I’m really wanting from a bedroom coder’s first game. The others from J. Wright do not have a similar dating scheme so they will await us once we arrive at 1984.
For now, let’s visit a game with graphics that, like Rungistan, has animation, but uses it in an entirely different way.
For those anticipating the second Impact Softwear game, my apologies. It turned out The Quest was quite solidly RPG rather than adventure. I added a note to my last post with some screenshots.
But that leaves us room for an entirely different oddball game! Allow me to first discuss the French computer industry.
The early 80s were chaos; no particular manufacturer was dominant, and the French had their own standards that gave difficulty to importers. Instead of video signals in NTSC (US, Japan) and PAL (most of Europe), France had SECAM. An adapter was required, and it caused (for example) the VIC-20 to only work in black and white. Also, all keyboards in France (as had been standard for a long time) used AZERTY standard instead of QWERTY.
Amidst this chaos, the publication Hebdogiciel was founded by Gérard Ceccaldi in late 1983. It was a weekly that printed software listings for the entire menagerie of French computers. In the 6 January 1984 issue it printed the top 15 computers by number of listings sent in. Leading the pack were Texas Instruments with the TI-99/4A, Oric with the Oric-1, and Sinclair with the ZX81. (If you’re wondering why not the ZX Spectrum, the ZX81 came in France early, but the ZX Spectrum came out late. By the time it arrived the Oric had eaten up a chunk of the same market.)
Noteworthy for today is that 4 of the systems in the top 15 — added together, 15% of listings sent in — were pocket computers. Specifically: the Hewlett-Packard HP-41, Casio FX-702P, Sharp PC-1500, and Sharp PC-1211. These are essentially beefed-up programmable calculators. Sharp had one out in 1977 that used assembly language, and by 1980 companies were coming out with programmable calculators that used BASIC.
The Sharp 1211, first out in 1980, was also released by Tandy as the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. I’ve seen many US and UK source code publications now, some of them system-agnostic, and the level of pocket computer coverage was not nearly as high as it was in France.
Here’s a video cued up to where someone plays a Lunar Lander game on a TRS-80 Pocket Computer:
This is all meant to lead to the fact it wasn’t odd for Charles Feydy’s game Des Cavernes dans le poquette (“The Caverns in My Pocket”) to appear as a type-in an a French computer magazine. Specifically, the code was for TRS-80 Pocket Computer, and appeared in the Tandy-focused magazine Trace in their April 1982 issue.
What is unusual is that it manages to squeeze an entire adventure game (kind of) in 4K.
I wanted badly to run the original.
There is such a thing as pocket computer emulation (see: PockEmul) and I tested it out a bit, but I found I really needed the original model for compatibility (either the Tandy PC-1 or the Sharp 1211) and it isn’t supported. I did find an old beta copy of PockEmul that has the 1211 but it gets listed as “experimental” and it broke in my attempts to use it.
I was able to run the PC-2 (that’s the next Tandy machine, also just a Sharp PC-1500) but was running into cryptic issues involving slight changes in the BASIC syntax and the system itself. For example, in the PC-1 version you can write F=4F meaning “the variable F is 4 times F”; that is, 4F with no symbol between the 4 and F assumes a multiplication. This no longer works in the PC-2 version. You need to write 4*F instead. The character limit is tight enough that if you try to add a multiplication sign there, you’ll bust the limit of memory, so you need to remove characters elsewhere to compensate.
The biggest issue is that the original game uses arrays in a way where memory-bleed is nearly a feature. Essentially, before the game starts, you’re supposed to set A$(22) all the way up to A$(65) to a series of text lines, like A$(22)=”E PORTE”. This uses a different part of memory to squeeze even more out of the PC-1. However, on the PC-2 the array memory gets reset on starting a new program, so any reference to A$(22) will be an out-of-array bug rather than the text it is supposed to have.
This error means “Array specified without first DIMensioning it.”
Fortunately, there’s a way to play without the calculator, because Jim Gerrie has ported the game to TRS-80 MC-10. In the process he translated it to English.
The text of the magazine talks about exploring dark and dangerous caves. There are apparently 10 “keys” that can be applied to monsters and get points, but it is unclear the author even intended for it to be possible to get 10 keys. I have gotten, out of all the maps I have tested, 0 of them.
Unfortunately, the game is very broken in terms of generating a level that can be beaten, even moreso than Orb. Jim Gerrie is still worried there might be a bug in his code, but the original is so hard to run I haven’t been able to compare.
You start by picking a “number” which is a random seed, followed by a “difficulty level” (no idea what that does, I didn’t see any difference) and then you’re off to the races:
In this room, you can go all four directions; the PATH, TUNNEL, and LARGE are all just for color. If there’s a monster they will be blocking at least one exit.
In this randomly generated level, there are exits to the north and the south, and one TROLL blocking the north and south. Since there is nowhere to go, the only command that works here is RESTART.
Sometimes it felt like I could actually explore a bit, and get the vibe of an environment:
However, this invariably always got shut down a few turns later when I get stuck again.
Seriously, where are the keys? Would this game have been printed in a magazine if it was so impossible or is it just leveraging some obscure aspects of the PC-1 hardware that would make the experience quite different than it is now?
So this post is maybe just a placeholder for if some expert on pocket computers can come along and tell us what’s really going on. The thread here is where the game was first unearthed and it includes a text file of the source code.
(Shoutout to Strident and Jim Gerrie who helped me get the files for this all this way back in this thread.)
Scotland finally confirmed! As well as, and I am not exaggerating, the weirdest game mechanic this blog has ever encountered.
For context, the only time Scotland has entered the All the Adventures project so far is with Danny Browne, and never with any commercial software. Impact Software — which existed from 1982 to 1984 — has an address listed in Edinburgh. Residential zoning, so likely another bedroom coder, in this case, Ian Richards. Only one other person seems to be associated with the company, Peter Lovett, who wrote their version of Star Trek.
Mind you, despite that status, the company racked up what feels like an impressive list of stockers.
Does this indicate professionalism? It does make the covers of their games puzzling. You see, they all have the same design with the company name as IMPACT SOFTWEAR.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
A a full cover includes the address with “ware”, but this quite earnest ad from November 1983 does include the “WEAR” spelling. I’m guessing it’s an in-joke, and maybe an intentional discussion point, like how mistakes get more people to engage with Tiktok videos?
Ian Richards incidentally did keep in games afterwards through the 80s, but let’s focus on today’s selection, Orb.
Make your way through the under ground labyrinth in your search for the dreaded Orb, which you must destroy. Encounter many monsters, discover treasure and try to remember your route so you can get out again. Save game facility.
The game includes a mini-map similar to Wolstencroft’s game Quest. I began the game wondering if there was some influence. After playing the game, I am 99.999% sure there was influence. I’m guessing the author encountered Wolstencroft’s game on MZ-80A before deciding to roll his own VIC-20 (and later Spectrum ZX) version.
The original Quest game was essentially a big logic maze where you had to work out the right sequence of moves to pass through safely. For example, with the meta-map above, your goal is to start at the opening area, go and get a key, return to the opening area to open a chest with the key, then escape back out.
To start, you can travel by some orcs (which you can only do once). Once in the “second area” you can grab the key and some coins. You then use the coins to travel to a third area with a cross and a knife, then loop back to the start, using up the knife in the process, but leaving the cross in your inventory. You’d then normally be trapped (because the orc route only works once, and you’ve also used up the spider route) but since you have the cross now, you can take the devil route out to escape.
Orb imagines the same concept but with all the objects randomly placed, and truly random; not placed in a way where there is any guarantee you’ll have the right tool for the right room. Some deadly rooms (which you’ll need to pass through!) have no tool to get by at all and will just kill you outright.
The mini-map in the upper left is also the same as the MZ-80A game.
Here’s the initial portion of Orb’s map to help illustrate:
In one of my playthroughs, the only item that was generated in the initial area was a cross. The cross is used to get by a vampire (not devil this time). However, we are hemmed in by a werewolf (needing a sword) and a pit (needing a ladder). Sometimes when going into a werewolf room the creature will be out the first time through, so you can pass through safely, but it turned out not to be the case here. We have a situation where it is impossible not to die.
If you have a sword, this is what happens to the were-wolf. The were-wolf stays dead, so you technically don’t need a sword for a second pass-through. There are rooms with snakes where you need a sword every single time, though.
Here’s a more central part of the map:
This is an actual path I took during my “““winning””” run. I did not die passing through the dragon; some enemies have two-square lairs, and the general idea is that if the monster is in one side of the lair it will leave the other side empty. (There was no way to “predict” I’d be safe — it’s just a coin flip.) I also had the ladder and sword so I was safe moving past both the snakes and the pit. However, when trying to backtrack later, there was no way to avoid the dragon on a repeat pass-through. In many cases the 2-square lairs are positioned such that you are required to pass through both squares anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if you meet a monster in the first square or not: you’ll have to die anyway. And there’s the bonus chance you might meet the monster in both squares, dying twice. Fun!
So does the game just generate a bunch of impossible maps? Well, no: the game lets you cheat, as a feature. When you die, the game kicks you out of the BASIC source code. Then you can type CONT or CONTINUE (VIC-20 or Spectrum ZX) and then game will resume in the next line, and act as if you caused a reality shift where you survived the obstacle anyway. If you die at a pit, you magically have a ladder (even if you really don’t, and it isn’t in your inventory after). If you are in a flooded room, you happen to have a boat.
The game literally quits and stops executing upon death, and then uses what is essentially the operating system’s debugging command as a central mechanic. The game goes on directly and keeps track of how many continues you used, as sort of a “high score”.
This sounds so outrageous it might loop around to being a good game mechanic, but there is no way to predict where all the objects go, or even if an object spawns at all (on my “winning” game a cross never appeared). Additionally, there are plenty of obstacles like dragons or Satan who have no counter; you have to die to pass through.
Even accepting the game is stomping all over the concept of narrative verisimilitude, and imagining we have the Reality Stone from the Marvel movies, this just doesn’t work; the main appeal of the logic maze is completely destroyed.
There aren’t any puzzles, really; there’s a rusty door you can apply an oil can to, and to get the Orb to the furnace to destroy it you need an extra key along the way.
I mostly played the ZX Spectrum version and I had some hanging crashes, like when trying to pick up some coins. A diamond crown (which needs to be traded for the key) needs to be picked up with TAKE DIAMOND, since TAKE CROWN hangs the game. I tried the Dutch edition of the VIC-20 version (can’t find the English one anywhere), but it doesn’t seem to be any better-coded; I managed to walk into a wall and crash the game.
Blue is the start, yellow is the furnace where the orb is destroyed.
I recommend the solution by Exemptus if you’d like to read more details; in the end this was just a disaster. If the random generation had somehow been done carefully (akin to Mines from 1979) and the overall map was laid out properly, the concept would work. This could have been a proto-version of Tower of the Sorcerer-style games (*), except the author didn’t have the chops to pull one off.
…or maybe they did? Ian Richards released another adventure later the same year, called, quite creatively, The Quest. That’s where I’ll be going next time.EDIT: The Quest is an RPG. More details below; it isn’t worth making an entry for, so I’ll be moving on to a different author.
Yes, game, because you blocked the key in with Satan, so there is no way to win without the cheat.
(*) If you’re unfamiliar with Tower of the Sorceror, this reddit thread should help. It’s a game laid out like an RPG but everything is carefully controlled so it is in reality a resource management game. DROD RPG is a good later iteration for Western audiences, and there’s roughly a gajillion of the games written in Chinese.
ADD: After trying The Quest I can safely say it is an RPG. It’s basically Wizard’s Castle but the floors aren’t completely open and can have dead ends. You start with a lamp and you can shine it in various directions. I fought a minotaur, ran out of arrows, and then found myself stuck on the option to use a flare (which shows information about the minotaur) or to use bribery (which didn’t work) so I had to reboot the game. I found a gemstone in one room, left, came back, and then found a completely different gemstone in the same room. This seems to be just as broken as Orb and I apologize to the RPG chronobloggers for finding this.
Where I softlocked after running out of arrows. The game doesn’t give you the option for sword/armor shopping at the start like regular Wizard’s Castle does.
I felt compelled, after last time, to try playing the PC-88 version of the game all the way through. I come bearing screenshots and also curious differences between the two games.
The compellation came because of a conversation I had with Leigh Alexander, who made a video on Rungistan as part of her Lo-Fi Let’s Play series. She wrote the author, Bob Blauschild, and he wrote her back.
Bob wrote that he was wondering “why computer games were so expensive” so tried out Wizard and the Princess, and ended up going through all the graphic adventure games at the time. He ran out of options so wanted to make his own, so with Raiders of the Lost Ark in mind, he came up with using “action sequences and moments of possible panic”.
He also sheepishly explains the graphics were based on technical limitations at the time. The fascinating thing about the Japanese versions (all made in 1986) is that they do not have the same limitations, but they went with black and white anyway as a style. I realized I wanted to see what it looked like all the way through. This is the remake Bob never asked for but got anyway.
The parser commands are roughly the same as the Apple II game, but the distance between exactly and roughly can cause massive headaches. Right at the start, you still need to call the guard asking for food. In the original I could go
CALL GUARD
SAY FOOD
and it worked just fine. In this version, you need to type
CALL GUARD
WANT FOOD
which was enough to throw me off for a long time. The encounter with the child is still the same…
…but to dig a hole, rather than DIG WALL / WITH SHOVEL you simply can just DIG WALL.
The layout is slightly different here. Rather than spotting the snake before doing the jump over the ridge, you do the RUN and JUMP first, and there’s no “approaching ridge” timing puzzle where you have to type JUMP before the oncoming line gets too close. I can see why the bitmap style doesn’t make the moment work any more.
The snake then can appear anywhere in the desert, including at the knife. Rather than a “slither” motion the snake sprite just slides right to left.
The bear is functionally identical, although it certainly looks rather different.
The skiing segment is in, but rather than a “oncoming 3d” look, you are controlling your skier+ from above. It is notably easier here than it is in the Apple II version. (On the M88 emulator, for anyone trying it, control is with the number pad rather than regular arrow keys.)
This is followed with more or less the same area with the saloon as before, including trees you have to look at closely. The dynamite event doesn’t have the visible fuse moving, but you still need to pour water; rather than the egg dropping from above dropped by a flying bird, you catch it from a tree.
The code with the fragments used to open the lock is done exactly the same, including the parser syntax.
The raft puzzle took me a little while. You’re supposed to GET DOOR from outside the saloon first (not DOORS, DOOR) and then MAKE RAFT and finally RIDE RAFT while at the river (you can’t make the raft early, and USE doesn’t work like it does in the Apple II version).
The farmer puzzle is the same, the planes still fly overhead (as sprites now), and the cat still has a magnifying glass.
The almanac’s description, instead of randomly mentions it includes eclipses, specifically states there will be a solar eclipse today. Unfortunately I had trouble figuring out a syntax; PREDICT ECLIPSE no longer works. TEACH ECLIPSE does, though.
The gas station and house with the mailbox are the same. It’s a little easier to tell the writing is writing.
The plane puzzle works the same, except you need to FILL TANK while outside the airplane first as opposed to inside the plane (fair).
The dynamite puzzle is in; the sign that tries to misdirect you the wrong direction is not. The booze you hand over as normal, to reach victory.
While the graphics are certainly slicker-looking the loss of animation does seem to be a bit much. In retrospect, I’m not sure if all the animations would replicate in any other style; the fuse “snaking back” on the dynamite really is only effective with an absolutely clear wavy line erasing dot by dot. The snake, additionally, needs to be both simple and easy to predict to get across its full original effect.
I still salute the effort put into this, and if you (the one reading this) are really stuck on the skiing portion of the original game, maybe you should try this version instead. Just remember to GET SKI, not GET SKIS while in the cabin even though you’re picking up a pair. (?? I assume this is because of something in Japanese, can anyone explain?)
(The skiing you can see in the video above animated up to a crash; the video stops there with a loud beep.)
The plane kept being obnoxious. Lucian Smith gave a hint in the comments that I was genuinely just missing some information. Having no idea what that information was, I combed through the entire game, and had no luck.
I didn’t want to look at a full walkthrough, so I checked for any books from the 80s that covered the game. Kim Schuette had, but I’ve used his book plenty of times before, and I came across one I’d never cracked open.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I did find out what I was missing — and I hope you all are as infuriated as I was — but first I did want to spend a little more time on the book itself, because it was published in 1984 (after On-Line became Sierra On-Line, but before King’s Quest 1) and it rather delightfully includes some contemporary thoughts about these games which are not exactly congruent to modern opinion. I’m just going to wander through a few of these and then we can get back to Rungistan.
All the games can be played with either a monochrome or a color monitor. If you have a choice, you will probably want to use a color monitor to fully appreciate the fine pictures in some of the games.
I love the advice that you need to go out of your way to upgrade to color. On a number of the games the authors again emphasize they play particularly well with color (Rungistan, the book says, works fine on a black and white screen).
In the area of hi-res puzzle solving adventures, Sierra On-Line stands out. They offer seven of these adventures, far more than any other company. The graphics and playability are uniformly good.
Uniformly good, eh?
Time Zone is a crowning achievement in adventures. Both the puzzles and the graphics are of the highest order-and there is enough here to keep you busy for quite a long time.
I probably liked Time Zone more than anyone who has played it in a long time, but it is boggling to me even in 1984 to claim the puzzles and graphics are of the highest order.
The game includes some simple animation. The full screen can change several times for a single move, to give you the feeling of actual motion. This is fun for a few turns, but it becomes repetitive and boring fairly quickly.
This is about Mask of the Sun, which the authors also found brutally hard. They linked Rungistan’s animation, which they called “top-of-the-line”. Sherwood Forest, which we haven’t gotten to yet, incidentally wins the “fast graphics award” for quick load times.
Speaking of Rungistan, let’s get back into it–
I was struggling to control a plane, and went off to look for directions. It turns out they are here, at the mailbox:
You see that line on the ground? I did suspect already it was something, and ran through
LOOK LINE
LOOK GROUND
LOOK MARK
LOOK FLOOR
LOOK VALLEY
LOOK ENTRANCE
LOOK DOWN
and even, yes
LOOK WRITING
and in each and every case, the game responds I DON’T UNDERSTAND. (Except LOOK DOWN, where nothing happens, I don’t know why.) I discarded the line as just a graphical feature.
The book I mentioned, bafflingly, mentioned graffiti. I went back and finally hit upon LOOK PATH:
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
The graffiti has the word “NESSEN”, which is simply directions for the plane. So type N, E, S, S, E, N after FLY PLANE, and you’ll land safely.
This is nearly at the end. There’s a blockade of boulders, where, mysteriously, the dynamite that previously explodes in your hand now will pause after you light it, letting you THROW DYNAMITE and get away as there’s a fuse-shortening animation.
Step away, step back: the road is clear. Then you head south to a minor trap.
Remember, you are facing south. It may appear “west” is the way you want but the directions are reversed.
I understood the trick but I wanted to see the death text anyway.
Going east, the correct way, is the final obstacle: a guard at a gate. Here I found I needed the booze-that-makes-you-go-blind, not the empty bottle.
LIFT GATE (which took a while to find) will let you plow to the end.
I honestly on the balance had fun, even given the moment of infuriation. But let’s talk about softlocks. It’s the same sort that show up in the biome journey of Wizard and the Princess, but made even more aggressive.
I’m acclimated to the games of this era (much like the four authors of the book who have nothing but praise for the early Sierra games) so I was immediately planning and expecting that a biome journey would lend itself to such behavior. With the bottle at the very end, which could have tripped me up, I already had two save files running with the anticipation I’d need either one or the other. I was even anticipating the possibility of simply having to repeat the game: that was how it went sometimes, just like replying the early levels of an arcade game. Solving the game isn’t about the immediate moment, but correctly choreographing an entire sequence of moves.
I am still fully aware it is not a wise design choice. It does lend itself to some unique effects — every choice is a tradeoff rather than fully good or bad — but I have a hard time imagining where I’d use this kind of linear softlock in a modern game.
As a historical artifact, I do want to emphasize the animation in Rungistan is integrated in a novel way; Mask of the Sun approached the same ideas but not as fully. I’m especially curious what Bob Blauschild has in store for his other 1982 game, Critical Mass, which switches the action to color.
From Mobygames.
BONUS POINT 1: As observed in the comments for my last post, this doesn’t really seem to be central Africa (as the instructions say) or any continent in particular given the “-stan” ending and the sahuaro cactus and the El Presidente reference and so forth. (Tucson has Mount Lemmon so you can go skiing, technically. In the deep winter.) The game leans into the smörgåsbord-of-locations idea heavily enough I suspect identifying a continent was a late addition.
BONUS POINT 2: This was published in Japanese by Starcraft for various systems. The screenshots are neat; they took black and white as a style rather than a fast-Apple-II-animation restriction and ran with it.
I remember this game very well! My late father played all night with one of his friends, and got to the end, only to realize they’d failed to pick up an important item early in the game. My father, instead of re-doing the entire game, figured out how to hack the save-game file and put the item into his inventory. Then reloaded the game and finished it!
Part 3 starts at the side of a river. I had a mouse, catcher’s mitt, bottle of booze, egg, and stick of dynamite in hand.
The river is immediately next to a farm. This is the first (and possibly only) Time Zone-esque “big regular grid” map of the game.
Before you get anywhere, though, you potentially die of hunger.
The egg (caught raw out of the sky) works: it is described upon being eaten as a “GOOD EGG, AND GOOD FOR YOU!” You might the think the crops in the field work but the farmer grows poisonous rutabagas.
You can meet the farmer himself who “LOOKS TIRED FROM HARVESTING CROPS” and HELP FARMER.
This is unconventional parser use but I managed to run across it anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever made a term for this kind of situation; I suppose a scenario puzzle will do. That’s where you have details line up to put the player in a specific (possibly cliche) situation and they simply need to react accordingly. Hezarin had a bit (which I did figure out) where you are prompted in a way encouraging you to SURF.
Now you’ve virtually overshadowed by this, arguably the best breaker of the millennium. What about it?
>SURF
You hold the plank out in front of you and throw yourself flat out on it.
Hezarin had another bit (which I most definitely did not figure out) where you were supposed to CHIMNEY up a shaft, which I think was the author invoking a similar logic — this was a situation they know what to do with just from scenario recognition, but not everyone has mountaineering experience.
I bring up all this because we’re going to have another, much more outrageous scenario puzzle shortly.
Moving on: we’ve eaten our egg, gotten some money for harvesting poison rutabagas, and can travel on a road. The road eventually leads to a cat holding a magnifying glass.
You can trade the mouse to the cat for the glass, and then use the glass to light the dynamite.
THE DYNAMITE BLOWS UP IN YOUR HAND.
This might be helpful if you could light the fuse with the dynamite on the ground, but the game doesn’t let you, so I’m not sure what to do here. I haven’t found a good candidate for exploding yet anyway.
Moving to the west is a guard tower. There’s a helicopter that loops overhead (as an animation) and you have to wait for the helicopter to be positioned near the guard.
Incidentally, all along this section there are sometimes guard planes; if you see one you need to just walk the other way, and then go back. The plane will be gone.
Past the guard tower is a plane on the ground.
North of the plane is a gas station, and the game lets you BUY GAS, but you don’t have a container for it.
This is true even if you’ve drank the booze way back when you first found it leaving you with an empty bottle. (If you wait until after the river trip to drink the booze, the effect is incidentally much different, but we’ll get to that.)
The trick here is to first find an ALMANAC off one of the roads (none of the other roads have such a side exit, so this is a “secret item”…
…and south past where the plane is parked into a “jungle” area. Go in too far and you’ll be hustled into a pot.
This is the second scenario puzzle. In such a position the cliche is to impress the natives (this happens in Return of the Jedi, for instance, where Luke levitates C3PO to impress the Ewoks). We’ve got an almanac with information about eclipses. So:
I get where the author was going with this given the comedy aspect, but could we have one African game (aside from Egypt) that’s cannibal-free? Erf.
Moving on, if you fill the plane with gas you’ll still get a message that you need a pilot’s license to fly, nevermind we’ve cared about other local laws being broken before. If you walk back to the gas station and go west you can find a guard’s house, and in the mailbox you can find the pilot license you earned by reading that HOW TO FLY book way back at the start.
The absurdism is great, and I’m guessing people did not get seriously stuck here. Checking a mailbox is much easier than predicting eclipses.
Finally with the gas filled in and the license in hand you can FLY PLANE. And if you’re like me, die shortly after.
I have found this section baffling. Upon takeoff, typing N shows a level horizon. You’ll get banking if you type E or W:
If you bank in the same direction more than one turn in a row you turn the plane upside-down and crash. If you type S while level N you try to do a 180 degree maneuver and crash. From the banking W, you can only safely type either N or S.
But what do all these directions mean? They seem to be relative to the plane itself, so N is just “move the plane forward”… maybe? But if you do W then S you also have a level plane horizon and can keep going S, but you aren’t driving the plane backwards.
Also: where am I flying to? There’s a button that lowers gear and you can LAND PLANE while fuel starts running out, but every time I’ve tried it I have crashed in the desert. I assume I need an actual airport or some analogue. There’s no way I can find to look at the ground and spot landmarks, so I am flying blind. My best guess is to go in the direction of El Presidente’s budget cuts and the cat and keep flying that way, because maybe the road picks up again (built from both ends like the Chunnel, possibly).
However, I still am not 100% sure which way the plane is facing on take-off, and what the actual effect of the “E” and “W” are in terms of positioning, and if “one turn flying = one space moved on the regular map” or any of those things. I feel like maybe I’m missing some information here.
You can incidentally literally fly blind. I mentioned the booze you could drink upon initial discovery leaving an empty bottle. If you wait, the booze makes you go blind instead. If you drink while in mid-flight, you crash.
I have two save files, one with a empty bottle and one with the full booze, and I have to keep going in parallel until I figure out what the item is for.
PC-98 cover, from the Starcraft translation, via Mobygames.
I talked about “exploration” last time but this ends up being more of a “series of unfortunate events” type game, or as I termed it regarding Wizard and the Princess, a biome journey. The big difference between Rungistan and Wizard (and Rungistan and any text adventure game I’ve played, really) is the heavy reliance on timed events; more than half the puzzles involve typing something in response to an event happening on-screen, and if you are too slow you’ll die.
And if the puzzles don’t kill you, the skiing mini-game might.
The above map shows where we left off last time; the Courtyard is the exit from the prison, and just to the east is the snake where you need to not type while it goes by. Just to the south is a noose and you need to grab the rope.
The rope doesn’t get used until later, and this implies something about the game design: it is cheerfully willing to let you softlock if you miss something. I’ll show getting past the “gorge” on the map in a second, but that’s a one-way trip, so if you somehow skipped getting the rope (or the mouse back at the cell) you’re not going to find out until later. (I’ll take a closer look at this when I get done with the game — I’m not even sure how long you’re supposed to hold the mouse because I haven’t used it yet!)
I then got stuck at a gorge which was “10 feet longer than the world record for standing broad jump”. I initially dismissed the verbosity here as a joke, but it actually is a serious hint: the jumping is described as a “broad jump” meaning the game is interpreting the jump as being done in place. You can explicitly RUN and then JUMP.
But make sure you back up to where the snake was first before you start running!
The running is represented by the edge getting closer and closer; the game requires typing JUMP and then hitting ENTER fast enough in real time. It is not possible to jump “too early”.
The next section is thankfully a little more straightforward (…I think, there’s still the possibility I missed an object).
There’s a knife laying around in the desert and then you need to climb a ledge. Halfway up is a cave with a bear.
KILL BEAR with the just-picked-up knife does the trick. HUG BEAR does not.
The writing on the wall gives instructions which will be pertinent shortly:
Just past the bear is a bridge. Upon stepping on the bridge it sways, and then, in real time, starts falling away.
You need to type JUMP WEST to get off. I was stuck here longer than you might think just because I had got on the bridge via CROSS BRIDGE and thought I was still going north, when the game had invisibly turned our player character to the east.
You can now THROW the ROPE that you hopefully grabbed (otherwise, softlock) and climb your way across.
Up higher it starts to get cold.
There’s a cabin nearby described as “impossibly locked” but fortunately you can can just smash in the door to get in and find some skis.
And now we reach the one part of the game I had heard about beforehand: we have to go back to the snow, GERONIMO, and start skiing. This is an action mini-game.
You just use the right and left arrow keys to steer. I died quite a bit at the start before I realized the game wants you to steer between the trees, not to the far left or right of them. Then it took me only two more goes; it helped to discretely tap the arrow key and count rather than just “push and hold” and hope for perfect alignment.
I saw one account from someone who liked this game but never got past the skiing. This isn’t that far in the game, still; even when people liked these games at the time, they may not have gotten close to winning!
The section after the skis was the hardest I’ve done so far. In particular, one pattern the game previously established gets broken, and one of the puzzles is tough on top of the parser input being ambiguous (in other words, it’s hard to tell if you have the answer wrong or you’re entering the answer wrong).
The pattern that gets broken regards the random environmental scenery. I had examined each and every cactus in the desert and was told it wasn’t important, so by the time I got to the mountains I stopped trying. This was a mistake.
The canteen can be filled at a nearby river — which we’ll be coming back to shortly — and used in a scene with a REBEL GUERILLA.
The fuse starts disappearing and explodes if you don’t stop it in time; you’re “frozen” and unable to run away.
The solution is to POUR WATER with the canteen, but I encountered the fuse before the canteen, so spent a while fruitlessly trying actions like STOMP FUSE and THROW DYNAMITE. This made the puzzle feel different than the timed puzzles before; the bridge and gorge just demanded you type JUMP and have the wits to think about it; here, being an object-based puzzle, I was wanting to run through a lot of possibilities to test especially knowing I might have the right answer stymied by the finicky parser. I appreciated the timed aspect adding drama but it made the puzzle a drag until I had the right item.
Past the rebel is a room with more trees; LOOK TREE reveals a catcher’s mitt and the text “L7” written on the tree. I did not at first interpret the text as letters. The “merged” aspect made them look like part of the graphics, maybe, or at least some kind of arrow symbol, and while they play into a puzzle I haven’t shown you yet, I admit I didn’t make the link until HINT PLEASE told me they were connected.
The catcher’s mitt can be used a bit to the west where a bird drops an egg. Again I found the timed event before the object that would help solve it, and again I was trying fruitlessly to type catching the egg in various ways — and even various times, thinking maybe I needed to hit ENTER right before the egg landed — and it made the puzzle less pleasant than it could be. At least I suspected early here I really needed an item, although I was envisioning a pillow.
The bird is mid-draw. It is hard to get “perfect” frames when the continuous motion is happening, since the game is constantly doing redraws. Mask of the Sun had some screen-flipping tech that made the animation smoother but it likely wouldn’t be able to handle the full range of motion this game does. Honestly the Rungistan tech is extremely good for the era and I’ve not felt any delays at “authentic” machine speeds.
The catcher’s mitt is off course the right item, and lets you CATCH EGG. Now I have an egg. I don’t know what to do with it.
Other than the river, canteen, mitt, rebel scene, and egg scene, there’s a saloon.
When trying to open the cabinet, the game says there’s a lock in it; when trying to open the lock, the game replies
HOW ?
This is where the bad parser comes in. This is another one of the two-part prompts where you are supposed to respond to HOW, but I concieved of this as being something like TURN DIAL or ENTER COMBINATION or even TURN LEFT or the like, setting off a sequence. No, the game actually wants a string typed out in a very specific way. Sample: L2R2L2. In general, by having both a real puzzle and a parser puzzle, the game provides a second-order puzzle, where two probabilities of a potential solution are being multiplied in the player’s mind, making it miserable to solve. I ended up getting the right string to type from a walkthrough (I eyeballed it vaguely enough to not know what the numbers were).
You can look at the horns and see L14 clearly; you can look at the liquor and see 21.
This is a timed event asking you to type REPLACE the same time you are grokking the fact 21 is written on the bottle. (As I was stuck, I thought briefly maybe the one was an I as in the letter I.)
The register has the most important message.
I might have thought this was brilliant if a.) I wasn’t dealing with the parser issue and b.) the L7 clue way back at the tree was a little better-drawn to make it clear what I was looking at. But in summary, we have clues giving:
L14 (from the horns)
L7 (from the tree)
21 (from the bottle)
4R (from the register)
The idea is that in all cases we are seeing part of a string which represents the lock combination. With the slip of paper, there’s even more information if you look at the picture carefully.
The slip originally had the entire code on it, but is ripped. You can see traces of the number before and the number after in the picture. So the actual code, all together is
L14R21L7
That is, you can tell the R is being followed by a “2”, meaning the “21” goes there, L14 and 4R are overlapping to produce the initial part of the string L14R. A different framing might help; I suppose the idea of the codes being placed at random is also a little absurd (including on a far-away tree) but I’m at least willing to accept the game is in the alternate-adventure reality where codes can be slapped on any surface whatsoever from any distance at all from their targets (see: the Rhem games 1 through 4 inclusive).
The cabinet, incidentally, has booze. I haven’t used it yet.
Now we come back to the river. I was originally going to give up there and ask for help, but I combed through the early parts of the game and decided I hadn’t missed anything, so checked very carefully if anything would remotely respond to the possibility of being formed into a boat/raft. (For example, if you try to read the books in the cell again, the guard just confiscates them, but the shelf left behind can’t be referred to.) Since I had no luck there, I re-checked the latter part of the game, and noticed how the doors to the saloon where essentially flat pieces of wood. MAKE RAFT. “With what?”
Since I had read the book on navigating riverways, I could successfully use the raft, landing on THE SOUTH SHORE OF THE RIVER.
The game somewhat politely takes away some objects from your inventory along the trip. I assume this is to prevent solutions to things that are not intentional by using items from prior sections, but it does reduce the combinatorial explosion on the player’s part as well.
It is possible to reach this point and have skipped all five of the items listed (mouse, mitt, booze, egg, dynamite). I’m still paranoid I’ll need to loop back to the past to nab something I missed, and then have to do the skiing all over again, but I’ll just keep hope for now I haven’t softlocked.
Let’s skip from our cavalcade of obscurity over to something at least a few more people have heard of. Escape From Rungistan tells the story of a tourist (controlled by us) visiting the fictional country of Rungistan.
This game forms some core memories to Apple II buffs; an academic blog post theorizes the following:
So student #1 will let loose in a class discussion with what is probably a brilliant analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics as applied to Escape From Rungistan which he/she plays religiously every evening on an Apple II emulator. But after they’ve finished speaking, since no one else in the class has ever played Escape From Rungistan (or heard of it)* there is an awkward silence.
(*Okay actually that’s not 100% true. I’ve played Escape From Rungistan.)
It’s on the syllabus, week 3, after World of Tanks and before Spacechem.
The game inspiring such writing — even in a theoretical imaginary student sense — means it must have had a publisher with decent reach, and indeed it did: Sirius Software.
We’ve played Sirius Software before with the Tim Wilson games: Kabul Spy and Blade of Blackpoole. This game starts the ouerve of a different author, Bob Blauschild. Bob seems to have been another outside contractor (like Tim Wilson) who I think (but alas can’t confirm) is the same Bob Blauschild who worked in analog circuit design around the same time. At the very least, Rungistan represents some technical chops, as it is made in a combination of assembly code and BASIC, and relies heavily on animation, heavily enough that animation becomes part of the puzzles of the game. (One of the first video results for this game includes in the title “you got Quick Time Events in my text game”.) The Mask of the Sun had some animated puzzle moments but that game was made by a team whereas this was one person.
Some frames from the initial animated sequence.
It also represents technical chops because the game has extremely gnarly copy protection; it breaks all standard cracking tools and 4am’s essay on the issue is worth a read.
What happens when a drive doesn’t see a state change after the equivalent of two consecutive zero bits? The drive thinks the disk is weak, and it starts increasing the amplification to try to compensate, looking for a valid signal. But there is no signal. There is no data. There is only a yawning abyss of nothingness. Eventually, the drive gets desperate and amplifies beyond reason and starts returning random bits based on ambient noise from the disk motor and the magnetism of the Earth.
Seriously.
Returning random bits doesn’t sound useful for a storage medium, but it’s exactly what the developer wanted, and it’s exactly what this code is checking for. It’s finding and reading and checksumming the same sequence of bits from the disk, over and over, and checking that they change.
So after our protagonist’s ill-advised visit to an unfriendly country somewhere in Africa, they find themselves in a cell awaiting execution, and you take over from there.
Note the game not only has animations but music at appropriate moments; I’ve got about 30 seconds worth from the opening in the video below so you can hear what it’s like.
The two books shown above (the book on “navigation of Rungistan waterways” and the “book of aviation”) likely provide a method to explain our avatar’s proficiency in vehicles later, despite being a tourist and not James Bond.
After this I was heavily stuck; the sink doesn’t work, we are too weak to move the bed, the window is too high to reach. I was so stuck I used a feature the instructions mentioned: HINT PLEASE, which told me I could CALL GUARD. I had already tried YELL and gotten beaten by a hose, but I guess I was supposed to yell more politely.
The food was an arbitrary guess — any puzzle that asks for a noun that the player hasn’t seen yet has the difficulty multiply by at least double — but there’s a mouse that occasionally is animated walking by and I suspected I’d get some cheese if I asked, just because that’s almost guaranteed from adventures of this era.
The guard brought a tray…
…which had STEAK, a CANDY BAR, and as predicted, some CHEESE.
The steak you can just eat to get stronger (you’ll see why in a second). The cheese goes to the mouse and then the mouse can be picked up; you need to time typing GIVE CHEESE to be when the mouse is visible and walking in the cell.
With the steak eaten, you have enough energy to MOVE BED; the game asks where to specifically, so you have to say TO WINDOW.
You can then STAND ON BED to see out the window, and see a child outside. The child is afraid but you can hand over the candy bar and he’ll toss you a shovel.
I was stuck for quite a while after because of the parser. Trying to DIG FLOOR and DIG WALL and so forth didn’t work. (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”) I finally broke out my verb list and found it to be no help whatsoever. The game sends any misunderstood input to the same set of messages (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND” or “THAT WON’T WORK. TRY SOMETHING ELSE.”) making it impossible to tell if CUT BED is misunderstood because it is considered nonsense, or if CUT is just never a verb in the game. This sort of information-protection can make sense with nouns (and modern Inform even defaults to it) but only accepting very exact phrasing means the game has trouble giving specific feedback on why things go wrong. If you try to EAT BED a good response is saying the bed isn’t edible; while “I don’t understand” is technically correct it also is much vaguer, and I could see being led astray by being slightly wrong about how a parser command is phrased.
I finally went back over the previous events; I contemplated how the game already had me asked about FOOD despite it not being a listed noun. Maybe I needed to DIG TUNNEL, thus using the word tunnel without prompting? The game then asked me WHERE? I tried typing DIG TUNNEL ON WALL and the game asked me WHERE? again.
After five more minutes of fussing I remembered the bed wanted the command given in two parts (like a Scott Adams game).
Following the sage advice to go north:
OK, I expected that. Going east instead:
This is animated.
As long as you do nothing while the snake animation is happening (it goes all the way across the screen from right to left) you can make it past safely.
It looks like we’re in for a bout of exploration (and probably random deaths). This seems like a good stopping point. I’ll report back in the grisly details next time.
It turned out last time I still wasn’t thinking aggressively enough. I was at a gift shop with some crosses, and while I could break a security camera, I could not then take the cross without the shop minder knowing and calling the police, resulting in my avatar being riddled with bullets.
It did occur to me that one of the guns at the scaffold would be useful, but those set off an alarm system that I had no way of disarming. What did not occur to me is that cannon that I already used to shoot a student’s arm off was portable.
The actual cannon used at a historical marker at the College of William and Mary.
Yes, you can GET CANNON, walk your way over to the shop, then SHOOT CANNON AT LADY. The game, rather brutally, states NOBODY NOTICES and you have to LOOK at the room again to see your result.
The rest of the game went quickly.
First the silver cross can (as I theorized) be used to protect against the spirit at the grave.
This opens a secret path to the church, which is otherwise impossible to enter. An organist took the book I gave and handed over some keys.
The keys can then unlock the gate at the palace. Going in you find a Queen Anne Chair, which based on the hint from the grave, can be moved to find a secret passage.
The next room has a bed, where GO BED will reveal yet another secret passage.
Finally going north leads to a maze, and the map from the store is sufficient to make it through. You don’t even need to think about dropping items or wandering.
So I’d like to draw attention back to the Microdeal cover, which also was used for the C16 version of the game.
I kept waiting for the butcher to appear, but there is no butcher! I went back and searched and found the scene in question really involved the tavern, if you try to dine and run without paying, but that’s not remotely the same thing:
My guess is there was some disconnect between the marketers and the people who knew the game. If anything, we are the butcher. We brought a giant cannon into a gift shop to blast the store owner in order to steal a cheap silver cross.
No wonder the police were gunning us down on sight.
We’ve had amoral characters before, and to paraphrase my previous writing on the subject, I’m fine “role-playing” a particular type knowing ahead of time what’s going on; what turns out to be distressing is playing mostly “myself” only to find I need to resort to cold-blooded evil halfway through a game. Here, though, everything was short enough I never had the wind-up, and the satirical nature just makes the whole thing come off as a goofy historical in-joke. But what did people think at the time?
Your Commodore, June 1985.
They, er…. quoted back the marketing copy without playing all the way through the game. At least they tested to make sure the tapes worked, since the Commodore version of Adventure 1 was busted. Commodore User (August 1985) gave the exact same feedback about the non-working tape, and the exact same reproduction of marketing copy without ever wondering where the butcher was.
So I guess they thought: since Williamsburg Adventure was budget software, the only worry was if the game was able to start.
Williamsburg is a small Colonial Town where there is hidden the Golden Horseshoe, your goal is to find and bring home the Golden Horseshoe. Beware Evil Spirits, and the Ghost of Bruton Parish, your adventures will get you shot by the Police, chased by the Butcher, and lost in the Maze, will you get the Horseshoe??? Only your Dragon computer knows!
Look, marketing copy is hard. At least the cover of Microdeal’s version of this game is one of the most memorable we’ve had all year.
From World of Dragon.
Microdeal we’ve had before with Mansion Adventure, as first published by Chromasette in January 1982. (Chromasette was a Tandy CoCo spin-off of CLOAD, the TRS-80 tapemag.) Microdeal published the game in the UK for the Dragon, a Welsh machine mostly but not entirely compatible with the CoCo. Mansion Adventure was a curious choice to kick off a series because it was extremely short and almost devoid of traditional puzzles; it was all about picking up clues to a numerical sequence and applying them.
Microdeal’s Adventure 2 we’ve also played: Adventure in Ancient Jerusalem. That game was “traditional” but had serious gameplay issues, especially with excessive death traps. The version Microdeal published was not from the July 1981 CLOAD, but from Chromasette, in the August 1981 version.
This game is given on the Microdeal cover as Copyright CLOAD 1981, but didn’t actually get published — and only in Chromasette — until September 1982. I’m going to put both 81 and 82 in my post title but still sort it with the rest of my 1982 games.
The author, given in the source code, is Mike Hughey.
The address of King George is more important than usual, as it is close to the real Williamsburg, and the game’s locations are based on the real Williamsburg. He also shows up in the yearbook for the College of William and Mary in 1982, which makes a physical appearance in the game.
The best comparison I can make is with Nijmegen Avontuur. That game was similarly based on a real town and had you hunting a single treasure. I got hung up early on imagining I was in a real town and wasn’t aggressive enough, despite the presence of such items as a bazooka. In Williamsburg, the same thing happened: I started off too “peaceful”, but this game clearly means for you to go full Grand Theft Auto and cause as much carnage as possible on your way to obtaining the Golden Horseshoe.
The note about “two-word commands” will become important later.
This is a good contrast with my last game (The Paradise Threat); that game had a high density where every room had something in it (even what seemed like an ordinary hallway room had a secret). This game has some locations like the starting one which are just room descriptions, but I think this may be because of the town-modeling idea: the action starts set on Duke of Gloucester Street, with some of the corresponding locations going off of it.
The starred locations all make an appearance, as well as the Governor’s Palace.
Even though everything is highly compressed from the real map, the author clearly felt some streets representing connective tissue were necessary; you start on Duke of Gloucester south of the Governor’s Palace and just east of the Church, but you have to pass through “Palace Green” going north to arrive at the front gate of the Palace.
Without that extra room there it might have felt (to the author or anyone who knows the area) that the map was a bit too far awry, having the distance west to the church and north to the palace be “identical”.
Typing LOOK GATE mentions “a keyhole” but just typing OPEN GATE or UNLOCK GATE (even without a key, I haven’t found one yet) just states “O.K.” The gate doesn’t actually open; it seems that a “you failed” message was never properly put into the logic here.
You can scoot to the west of the gate to a wall, and try to GO WALL to climb it, but disaster results:
The rather aggressive police gives our first hint this might be Grant Theft Colonial but let’s do the two puzzles we can pull off acting like a normal tourist first.
On the east side of town (see above) there’s the King’s Arms Tavern. Our inventory starts with a fifty dollar bill so we can eat there.
I’m not sure if you’re supposed to eat the dinner yet, but you are supposed to pay for it, because the waiter gives you back a quarter and informs you the only place you can spend now is at Scribner’s. This generous (?) hint leads the player over to obtain a map.
The object name describes it as a map to the Maze.
And here I was stuck quite a while after. There’s a music shop that needs a ticket to enter, the capitol needs a ticket to enter, and there’s a student hanging out at William and Mary College. There’s a gift shop with some cheap crosses that you can’t buy…
…a church that I am unable to enter…
Parser issues, or does the game just not let you go in?
…and a graveyard that can kill you.
Yes, only STONE works even though it is described as a GRAVESTONE.
A cross might protect me from this?
Where I finally managed to nudge ahead progress was a the College of William and Mary.
You might think to SHOOT CANNON to get the student’s attention, but that does nothing. Now we come to the breaking point.
Keep in mind our author was a student, so he’s got satire on his mind here. Our author also “forgot” about the two-word instruction because we need to break that.
The student leaves behind a STUDENT ID. This ID lets you get in the “ticket” places for free, that is, the capitol building (which has nothing of interest) and the music store (which has an organ book you can just take).
I haven’t been able to get anything to happen with this at the church.
Still with the notion of violence-is-the-way, I was able to make a smidge more progress on the gift shop.
So I can bust the security camera but I need to get the lady distracted, perhaps?
No clue where to prod otherwise. I haven’t mentioned the stockade (at the real-life courthouse) but that just has some guns that are alarmed and you will die if you try to take any.
This does have walkthroughs (multiple ones!) so I have a fallback but I’ll keep at it for a while longer. Still, if someone knows this game I will take hints of any kind as long as they’re encoded in rot13. I’m especially curious to know if the church-entering is truly prohibited or it requires a serious game of guess-the-noun.
Renga in Blue 
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