(Continued from my previous post here.)
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.
From World of Dragon.
Renga in Blue 
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