Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Previous posts here.)

I’ve finished the game. Just like Dungeon Adventure was an anti-Zork of sorts, this can be thought of as an anti-Starcross, both in a negative and a positive way.

A design from Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation for artificial gravity on the moon, allowing babies to be born in 1G.

Voltgloss and Rob helpfully dropped some hints in the comments. The big piece I missed was the shortage of oxygen, but before getting into that, some small pieces to wrap up:

1.) the silver wire is … simply there as silver, and counts as a treasure

2.) the box which a knob gave the messages BEAM ON and BEAM OFF allowed me to mess with the main tractor beam for the ship; I was originally quite confused because it seems like there’s a literal beam coming out of the box, but no, that’s supposed to be a voice message or psychic impression or something; it also is a source of a bug at the end

3.) the oven is ignorable (Rob’s hint indicated a “fish”)

4.) the flashlight is also ignorable

5.) the shielding is safe to get before you’ve started the power, and as predicted, it does turn into gold with the lead-to-gold machine

6.) as mentioned by The Larch in the comments, the color code is just the official resistor code; there are some transistors that otherwise are a “red herring” but they’re intended as a hint; this also really puts even more into question the “alien ship” thing

With all that taken care of, I technically had found all my treasures, but couldn’t get them back to the ship in time, even with strategic teleports. The cutting torch comes with a tank (and it needs the tank to work, and the tank will eventually run out of gas if you leave it on).

Gas for welding/cutting uses a small amount of oxygen but is generally other gases, and I already knew it was being actively used in the cutter, so it never occurred to me it’d be safe to hook up to a spacesuit. However, Voltgloss’s first two hints…

You already have another oxygen source available already.

But didn’t recognize it as such.

…led me to go…. wait….

The metallic spacesuit can hook up to the tank and it works as oxygen. I think I may have audibly yelled at the screen. Look, you can buy oxygen canisters as separate things, and apply them in the mix, but it’s not oxygen alone, it’s called oxy-acetylene for a reason!

(As KarbonKitty points out in the comments, it’s technically different gas for cutters and welders, even though the canister is labeled as for welding but gets used on a cutter; also, you’d have different composition for a helium environment.)

And yes, some future-spacesuit-thing could just extract the oxygen and filter out the rest somehow, but that’s getting into the realm of fantasy-physics. This is part of why I said it’s sort of an anti-Starcross; it sets up as if science helps (even tossing in the resistor code, which I didn’t know) yet undermines the science at a crucial moment. It’s not terrible but — you know Lebling would never put a puzzle like that.

There’s another reason why this is the anti-Starcross (the “positive” way I alluded to). In that story, originally titled The Gift from the Stars, the aliens set up a task as a way of intentionally giving away advanced technology. Here, we are just wholesale swiping stuff, up to sabotaging the engine room just for some lead. It could have the same title with quote marks applied: The “Gift” from the Stars. I don’t normally think of the fate of our protagonists after their stories, but I can’t imagine our unhinged protagonist with an immortality serum ready to sell is going to land at a healthy ending.

While I have a full score, I was undermined by a final bug. There’s a message along the lines of “BUT YOU’RE STILL STUCK HERE” if you haven’t turned off the tractor beam (using the knob) but somehow my game got confused and even with the tractor beam off it still thinks it is on. I confirmed with checking Dale Dobson’s final screen that I had done everything correctly, the game just decided to collapse in a pile of bad parity settings.

Yet again, Aardvark tries some astounding ideas in a crumbling technical framework. They still stuck around through at through 1984, when higher-memory-capacity computers were becoming commonplace; I wish they had taken the opportunity to revamp some of their games to be slightly less reliant on super-tight programming (like Bruce Robinson did). Of course, Rodger Olson wasn’t even willing to fix regular bugs, so it isn’t a surprise we’re stuck with what we have. For Bob Retelle, who I quoted earlier, this behavior caused him to leave and make his own company entirely.

The “sloppiness” was another reason I spun off and started up my own software company. I had a real problem with releasing buggy games, which meant my own productivity was far lower than a lot of what was available from Aardvark. After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.

As far as Bob Anderson (the co-author of today’s game with Olson) goes, I’m not sure what happened. We have one more game of his to play (another Haunted House) and his Mobygames credits cut off.

From the July 1983 Aardvark catalog, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

We’ll have to save that for another time, as coming up next: two utterly obscure TRS-80 games, including one resulting from the recent “missing adventures” thread. Part 2 of the missing adventures list will likely show up next week, and then we’ll finally be getting back to Apple II, as Bob Blauschild tries his hand at a game in color.