Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and this post will only make sense if you read my other ones about this game in context.

Via eBay.

To continue directly from last time, I drained a pool (grabbing the scepter I used as a hook along the way) and went down.

Going west there’s a boat, which mentions a place you can tie a rope. Having tied the rope I got from braiding fronds, I wasn’t able to do much with it other than FLOAT BOAT.

(FLOAT is another one of those “magical riddle words” the game’s looking for, but I previously had created my “standard verb list check” and it was on there. PUSH BOAT or any other kind of movement command aren’t understood.)

I was able to GO BOAT…

…but here I was horribly stuck. Pretty animation, though.

If you hang out in the boat, it’ll keep floating to the east, underneath the hole you came in, and the eventually plunge over some falls. If you skip the boat and go west, the ledge collapses.

I kept trying to manipulate the rope and failing. It occurred to me to try to have the boat move to the west but no command I tried seemed to be recognized, including PADDLE.

You can’t do that now.

I should have been more alert here. My brain was interpreting this as being on the wrong track still, but the message in the CoCo version for “I don’t get that verb” is

I don’t understand.

and the different message subtly indicates that PADDLE does make sense to the game, just it doesn’t want to do it. Of course, the game never says something like “you don’t have anything to appropriately paddle with”, because life is suffering. I did happen to grab quite a few of the items just in the random hope one would later be helpful (like the axe) but the one time I tried PADDLE I wasn’t holding the actual helpful item letting you paddle, which is the SHOVEL.

You can then tie the boat to the pole and GO ARCHWAY to leave the boat (LEAVE BOAT or the like of course don’t work).

Yet again, the game is fishing for the right word here. Our character is established as an esteemed gentlemen archaeologists, of course he can read hieroglyphics. But for some reason, you need to use the verb TRANSLATE instead to actually read them.

PUT SCEPTER (which normally just drops it in the room) works here special, and you can specify IN MUMMY. The room shakes and opens a crack.

You are told multiple people are needed to take the treasures; the ladder is what you need. You can now backtrack, hopping on the boat, and CLIMB LADDER when the boat passes under the hole in order to get back up top. The physics of this are weird and I was expecting to leave the boat first before somehow getting a ladder inside a hole but I’ve learned to stop asking questions of this game.

Then it seems like nothing has been accomplished, as you just looped back to the pool, but you can give the camel another ride and this time it goes somewhere different.

Honestly a little galling if you think about it — our selfish main character annoyed his workers but managed to find a treasure hoard and then claim it for the Crown, the British way. I’m a little more appreciative now of how the Infocom ending went instead. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read Jimmy Maher writing about Infidel, although the ending really is best experienced organically if you plan on playing it.)

I guess both The Sands of Egypt and Infidel have one similarity, in that the authors were unhappy with the result. Berlyn mentioned in an online conference he “hate[s] the game” (that is, Infidel; I enjoyed it but it’ll have to wait until 1983) and in that same interview where Bjork talked about infusing an arcade sensibility into adventures, he said:

My final comment on “The Sands of Egypt” is it could have been a little better.

No expansion. Did he mean the parser, or the plot actions? Both feel a little undercooked — we go underground, we find a treasure, we leave, and the actions are elaborate more because of the opening maze and riddle-verb parser rather than any kind of complex puzzle-solving you might expect in an Egypt-themed game. Compare with Temple of Bast which had an ancient curse that had to be outwitted in two different ways.

I will say the animation is solid. To compare briefly back with the Apple II, I do think it is clear the art was intended for the CoCo and its unique palette. Something about the Apple translation makes it muddier.

The orange along the sides feels “sharper” somehow.

The Apple version isn’t bad, exactly, but it doesn’t seem to be leveraging the strengths of the hardware. The CoCo is being used to make interesting custom “textures” (sometimes animated) which get blurred up a bit even when clearly the same assets are being used.

From Transylvania. Not that different in color scheme, but made more specifically for Apple II.

If you want to compare with Atari, too, Dave Dobson has a playthrough here.

Technically Datasoft has another adventure coming up — one based on the TV show Dallas, from 1984 — but that’s long enough away we can kick the can a bit and think about our immediate lineup. I’ve got a handful of small solo-author games, a C64 game which is a ripoff of an Apple game (as in stolen code that a company pretended was theirs), and then a most curious exploration of what happens when you hybridize an adventure game with a shoot-em-up.