I have completed the game; this continues directly from my previous post.
To clarify something on the video nasties from last time, 72 were listed for banning, but not all were prosecuted for obscenity; only 39 were. One on the list that was not only listed but prosecuted I was rather surprised to see.
Above is the trailer for Evilspeak. I always considered it one of the “goofy” horror movies of the 80s/90s era, along with Chopping Mall, Death Spa, and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (because just one Christmas horror movie isn’t enough). It involves a child who is bullied at a military academy so he uses an Apple II to summon the Devil.
I’m serious. That’s the plot. (There is “Satan summoning” type imagery and some genuine gore.) It is hilariously dated now but it does give a good sense where the mind-space of the morality judges was at the time.
And yes, we’re going to get to how Ship of Doom got its association–
So I left off last time with a square microbattery, a coin, a laser coin, a hook, a torch, and a silver rod with a square slot. As Mike Taylor pointed out the microbattery really ought to go in the rod, but with INSERT failing, and PUT failing, and then a bunch of other verbs failing, I was still stumped. Of course I missed the fact at the time that PUT had set the item down, so I went through the correct verb and was sidetracked a while realizing I hadn’t actually tested the verb yet.
With the sonic screwdriver, direct from Dr. Who, it was time try to open the case with a key in it.
Unfortunately, I went through every verb on my verb list, with no luck. Then I went over to the key hole at the computer room and tried every verb again, still with no luck. After some severe bafflement I realized that the game does not recognize the word SCREWDRIVER at all. You have to refer to it as a SONIC.
… pardon, need to go take a moment …
OK. I’m back. No primal screaming here, nope. Why on EARTH would you accept the adjective and not the noun kljASFJGkjlj234
… sorry, let’s try that again …
OK. Breathe. Things did go better from here. It really would have helped had the game had a few more error messages — it isn’t really revealing much even if you’re typing a noun that the game doesn’t recognize. On top of all this the verb is a pretty odd choice, but at least I had it on my standard list: POINT.
Now the key goes back to the key hole, but before I show that off, let me give the result of using EXAMINE (or GAZE) at the key hole, and get an ad.
Fun! So with the key inside, it seems that a heater has been activated.
So we can go back to the frozen body, wait a beat, and see what happens when it is unfrozen.
The little girl is not helpful and if you spend enough turns hanging around she’ll strangle you to death. You should instead shoot the door and move on, although the game also lets you KILL GIRL if you want (spoiler: the whole ship is going to blow up anyway).
You can scoop up the knife in the first room you encounter and a mirror in a side room (which I’ll talk about later). While you are doing this aliens start appearing, akin to the dwarves in Adventure. You can SHOOT ALIEN to kill them or try to run away, and they may or may not follow.
Shooting an alien has a decently high chance of success, but you might just miss, giving the alien a chance to shoot back. The alien’s aren’t bad shots either so there’s essentially a random chance of guaranteed death.
Nearby there’s a laser beam which will trigger a security system if you try to pass.
I don’t know why CRAWL is an understood verb. Maybe the authors thought they were going to use it but thought better of it. It doesn’t work anywhere.
I got through by … EXAMINING it? I honestly don’t know what happened here or what this sequence was supposed to represent, but I saved my game and I didn’t have to think about it any more.
Yes, but why? Is Fred behind the scenes hacking the tech, C3-PO style? I sort of imagined Fred more like the robot from The Black Hole.
Moving on there’s a couple colorful scenes, including a human tied to a table awaiting androidization; if you release him, he’ll strangle you.
There’s also an android working on a ship attached to a rope, and you can chop the rope and the android will float away. I found quickly I could TIE ROPE to the hook I had earlier, and I spent a long time trying to get the rope to work in another scene with a switch in a control room.
The switch is a red herring; you’re supposed to instead go to a PIT ROOM (no other description) and realize it makes sense to THROW ROPE, and climb up to a higher level.
The aliens can appear anywhere, and sometimes one after each other in sequence.
You can use the coin from way back at the bank to get the drink from the bartender, but it knocks you out with a giant headache and you end up imprisoned. This is a good thing.
This is a good thing because you can use the mirror I mentioned earlier to cause the bars to “fuse” so you can escape. (I do not know why the mirror didn’t work on the laser beam earlier.) The verb here has to be USE; again my verb list came to the rescue.
This room represents the final challenge, and is essentially brute force. There are six button combinations, and each take you to a different place. Green-orange-red just ejects you into space which is not helpful. Red-green-orange and orange-red-green drop you back closer to your starting ship, which will be helpful in a moment. Red-orange-green takes you to a computer room.
Why do we even have that button?
Down brings you back to the combo room. I used orange-red-green to get back to the Map Room nearby where the key with the Artic ad was and it was a short trip back to the ship. I was unclear until I hit the escape button if starting self-destruct really had shut down the tractor beam.
Look, a passenger!
The game events seemed colorful enough but it came in really jerky jumps and starts due to me having to struggle with the parser every time I wanted to use it. The fact it was only two-word was really saved it from some unmanageable guess-the-phrase battles.
So back to those tabloids. In an interview Charles Cecil talks about people wanting to use swear words in his first game (Inca Curse):
I made my first game for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. That was my first commercial project; a text adventure called Inca Curse. I immediately learned about frustrating players. Players would type something like ‘look at man’, and the game would reply ‘does not understand ‘look at’. I know a lot of players would then type in expletives.
This causes him to get creative in his second:
I made sure my next game – which was Ship of Doom in 1982 – would understand swearing. You could type in any expletive, and the game would understand it. You could try out those expletives in the ‘Android Pleasure’ room. That was okay, until I got busted by The Sun. They thought games shouldn’t have pleasure rooms. I remember they ran the piece at the bottom of page three, which felt ironic really. It even went on to be discussed in parliament, as the Obscene Video Act at them time. If video games had been included in that act at the time, I would have been an extremely unpopular person.
Here’s the room in question:
If you “do the deed”:
SHE POINTS OUT THAT PERHAPS YOU WOULD BE MORE SUCCESFUL USING A SCREWDRIVER
This is what raised the attention of an alert parent who discovered their child in the room in question. The subsequent chain reaction of events led to a story in The Sun about the Pleasure Room —
Computer Game Nasty Zapped by the Sun
— which caused some returns from Whsmith. Artic also heard from a couple who bought the game expecting erotica and was upset to find a sci-fi text adventure. Others traders wanted the tapes specifically because of the notoriety; as Richard points out, despite the returns, they were able to sell out.
While the first-mover status (in terms of getting on the ZX text adventure market early) might have helped Artic, and along with the better art, the moment of news fame surely was the biggest boost, just like controversy over Death Race helped Exidy back in the 70s (which had stopped building new copies of the game already, but suddenly got an influx of orders after it became a scandal). They published five more adventure games following this one. I don’t know otherwise if they would have gotten that far.
Via Mobygames.
Coming up: A short Australian game involving a combination software distributor / jazz musician, followed by one of the most obscure games in the On-Line Systems catalog.
Renga in Blue 
From zjuric’s solution on CASA:
“Typing HELP will give a clue very rarely in this game.
In android pleasure room you will find an android girl. You can f*** her, and a message which will appear seems for me as a random selection from a set of 5 messages, because I didn’t find any correlation between messages and actual state of the game.”
So, it seems like the screwdriver joke might just be one of a randomized set, but some of them may also serve as game clues (sort of?). Also, there’s a selectively implemented HELP command? The thing is, I remember kind of just breezing through this game very quickly, but looking at the actual solution and your play-through, there’s a few seemingly unclued puzzles and some notable parser chicanery, so maybe that’s what helped me? Unfortunately, I just don’t remember at this point.
Also from that solution:
“This game has updated version, created using GAC by Sean Ellis, with more locations, more events, more tasks to solve, and with (rather simple) pictures.”
I remember wanting to check that out after I was done with the original, but I never did get around to it. Did you take a look at it?
Yet more useless triva ™ – One of those video-nasty related media quotes you used caught my eye: “Scarred for life: Experts links street riots and…”
I think the authors of the really excellent two volume (so far) “Scarred for Life” set of books about the dark weirdness of British children’s media in the 70s and 80s might have nicked this quote for their title. Highly recommended reading, in any case.
Sounds like Dragon’s Keep could be coming soon? I actually played it back then, through rather odd circumstances…
A bit of context for non-UK readers for the author’s remark “they ran the piece at the bottom of page three, which felt ironic”: Page Three of The Sun was given over almost entirely to a photo of a young woman posing topless. It was a daily piece of soft porn in a newspaper that at that time would have had a circulation of 2-3 million, I think, so much easier for curious children to get hold of than an Easter egg in a text adventure.
From the description it sounds more like the paper was affecting its default stance of performative outrage as an excuse to write about the game and titillate its readers with the idea of computer porn. (Little did they imagine that computers would become porn’s default medium!) If they’d really wanted to create a moral panic about it they would have gone all-in, and then the consequences might have been for video games to be included in the legislation.
I’ve used the search feature for Parliamentary debates (which is generally pretty good) but haven’t found the exact moment where it gets mentioned. Both Charles and Richard say it ended up there, though. I’m guessing it was referenced elliptically (“and even video games are now having rooms of pleasure.” or something like that)
Copies did get pulled from shelves so it wasn’t nothing, at least.
I remember when I learned that Adventure A to C were created for the ZX-81, and felt disappointed finding out that only the presentation screen was improved with some colors… Maybe converting the rooms and objects text to the appropriate lower case and upper case letters was too much work, but surely just changing the color of the prompt wouldn’t have been so tough, and it would have improved the looks of the game for sure.
I knew I had to specify which version I was playing because the only way to tell otherwise is the font!
It is to be noted that only the first of those five was written by Charles Cecil (and it probably had already been written when Ship of Doom was released). The others were published over an extended period of time, some used a standard creation system (The Quill) and involved other authors, to nobody’s surprise. By the end of 1985, when the compilation _Assemblage_ was released, they had ditched the idea that they should form a collectible series. Artic managed to remain a staple of the Spectrum scene until the World Cup Carnival fiasco tarnished their reputation in 1986. But this is another story.
Artic tried to survive by launching a budget label (tongue-in-cheekily called Antartic), but they arrived late and badly to that market at a time when larger and more prepared companies had already made inroads into budget sub-labels. They just couldn’t survive in that context, and they folded shortly after. Funnily enough, and apart from Jon Ritman’s games, Artic is remembered mostly for the adventure series, as it was foundational to many of us who started computing in those days.
My completely random guess is that Cecil’s game D would be their last if they hadn’t had the boost, and they never would have had the games after. But that’s the sort of hypothetical even the founders of the company wouldn’t be able to answer.
It didn’t take long for their financial legs to get wobbly, since they were already in trouble when World Cup happened.
I realized that the game does not recognize the word SCREWDRIVER at all. You have to refer to it as a SONIC. […] Why on EARTH would you accept the adjective and not the noun kljASFJGkjlj234
In modern Doctor Who fandom calling it simply “the sonic” is pretty typical, so perhaps Who fans in 1982 did too; but that said, I can’t find evidence in looking through search results from transcripts on chakoteya.net that it was ever referred to in that way in the show dialogue up to that point (there are some hits in episodes from recent times).
I think maybe they were expecting like Rob mentioned in my last post to have people type SONIC SCREWDRIVER in full. This truncates to SONIC. But it’s a known two-word parser, so I never even tried to say things in three words.