Some miscellaneous news to clear out.
First off, I’d like to apologize, as it looks like my spam filter for comments is more hypertense than normal, and I just had a whole slew that I had to approve. I don’t have any control over how it works so I don’t know why it suddenly got spikier but maybe WordPress had some major troll invasions lately so they tweaked accordingly. In any case, if you ever make a comment and it doesn’t show, please feel free to drop me an email (it is on my About page) if that happens.
Secondly, I’ve sort-of made a special cameo over at Wargaming Scribe as he hit a game that was sort-of an adventure game. (My fictional counterpart, mind you — I didn’t play. I did participate in the multi-player Time Lords and completely couldn’t find anything no matter where I journeyed in time. Let’s just say Julian Gollop was ambitious but his better designs came later.)
Third, if anyone is familiar with the Heathkit computer, could I get some assistance? I’m trying to get a Heathkit only game to work and I am failing miserably even after trying every emulator available. My finest moment was getting H89 to work in MAME (already a troublesome feat, almost nobody has an up-to-date BIOS set) and getting an error that read “no error”. I am now also carrying TEA and NO TEA at the same time.
There’s no rush (it is a 1981 game, so on my loop-back list anyway) but I’d like to get this one at least ready for when it’s time.
There’s a video of disks working, but I think what happened is it was added to MAME support and taken out in a later version?
While I’m at it let me mention some games that are recent and not-quite-so recent that will be of interest to the readers of this blog who like the old-school text adventures.
First off: from very late in 2023, Never Gives Up Her Dead, by Mathbrush. The author has written some extremely good small games in the past, and this is his shot at a massively large difficult puzzle-fest of the old school.
Time is running out after a meteor strikes your interstellar starship. While the crew is under full alert, only you seem to notice the strange red portals opening up throughout the ship.
Explore ten different worlds, learn the truth of your destiny, and confront the mysterious figure who has been haunting you from the start in this epic sci-fi adventure.
Much more recently — as in two weeks ago — saw the release of Moondrop Isle. This is yet another giant game, but with many authors, specifically:
Ryan Veeder, Nils Fagerburg, Joey Jones, Zach Hodgens, Jason Love, Mark Marino, Carl Muckenhoupt, Sarah Willson, Caleb Wilson
It is playable online here and there seem to be some gimmicks that make it an online-specific game — I have yet to get that far but what I’ve seen is very good.
Finally, in old-but-recently-recovered news: on the Stardot forum, longtime poster leenew brought up that the game Satan’s Challenge was broken and seemed to be a bad dump. This led to a giant effort by another longtime poster (duikkie) and many pages of hand-written notes before a reconstructed version was made here. So the game Satan’s Challenge (Microdeal, 1984, BBC Micro) is finally playable for what is likely the first time for decades.
Renga in Blue 
Well, maybe à propos to this post, here’s some random information that could be of interest:
A little while ago, I think I may have stumbled upon a couple of (as far as I can tell) previously undiscovered adventure games, both seemingly from 1984.
The first is called Unicorn Adventure by Loggins Enterprises of Bradenton, Florida and was released for C64 on both tape and disk in the first half of ’84. It seems to have been in BASIC with character graphics. The interesting thing is that it was jointly written by a 6th grade girl and her mother, which I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before. I was able to find the mother’s obit and some recent-ish online presence from the daughter, so maybe it would be possible to contact her and get it preserved? Check out the early/mid ’84 issues of Info 64 and Ahoy and you’ll find a few ads and brief descriptions.
The second is Tombs of Doom for the John Sands branded Sega Sc-3000, by an unknown (presumably Australian) author/company. I found it a few months ago in a ridiculously priced auction including the already known game Pyramids of Mars. The SMS Power site picked up on this, so you can find the pics and info by searching around over there.
Even if these don’t end up getting preserved, perhaps one of the CASA members who post here occasionally could add them to the database?
That reminds me, for some reason… If you have a master list of early Japanese games to cover, make sure you don’t miss Autocracy, from Basic House for the Sharp MZ-700, released 1983. It’s all in English (both input and output) with character graphics. There’s plenty of info on it out there in Japanese, but I’ve never seen it listed anywhere in English other than on an odd site about character graphic games. There’s a few “hidden” Japanese adventures like this that I can recall, so be on the lookout.
Finally, regarding the filter issue you mentioned: I tried to reply to MorpheusKitami about something a few days ago on the Diamond Adventure entry, but it looks like nothing ever showed up. Should I try again, or just post it here?
Sorry for rambling on again. A real problem of mine, obviously…
SC-3000 might be from New Zealand btw
they were big on that for a while and there are a number of NZ games specifically for SC-3000
re: weird Japanese maybe-ADVs, other than the missing building game I mentioned in my Diamond writeup, I wasn’t considering the other oddities from Japan from ’82 to be adventures (I checked screenshots and so forth), but I’ll listen if someone wants to make an argument
Try again on the post, I’ll poke the filter later today to make sure it goes through
Funnily enough, I just noticed that there’s a copy of Takara BD Adventure part 1 for MZ-1200 up on Yahoo JP auctions as we speak for a BIN of 10,001 (around 64 USD at the current crazy exchange rate). I don’t think it would even go for quite that, and this auction has already cycled through at least once with no takers. Does seem to be in good condition though, and has the instructions. Not sure if anyone would really care enough to go to the lengths of buying and dumping it (Gaming Alexandria?), but just thought I’d mention it.
Regarding early Japanese adventure games, if you don’t mind telling multiple people, do you think you could also mention something over at TAG? We also have a “missed classic” spreadsheet for this sort of think. I don’t always do the best job of writing games down as I find them, especially in the oddity department, and even if they’re another dumpster fire, I’ve played enough of those that some weird game from the early ’80s doesn’t even rank on the worst list anymore.
Is there an appropriate thread at TAG for that kind of thing?
Alas, no, perhaps we should do something about that though…
Software Concepts’ Pyramids of Mars seems to be #2 in a series and lists the unarchived African Safari as #3. Perhaps, then, Tombs of Doom is #1 in the series.
The “here” in this sentence looks like a link, and it sounds like it should link to the reconstructed version, but you can’t click on it to go anywhere (it’s an <a> tag without an href attribute).
fixed, thank you!
Thanks to the Wargaming Scribe and Mike “Porkbelly” I have a working copy of Galactic.
link here