Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

I was actually near-done with the town. I had mentioned finding BREAK working as a verb for the crowbar, but I hadn’t tried it yet at the sheriff’s office desk drawer (I think I did in my head but hadn’t actually gone through with it).

One of the keys (the small one) goes to the gun chest, and lets you get the shotgun. I immediately went to try it in the desert and it worked:

However, the monster is kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods; that is, there’s more than one, and the shotgun only works twice. The other shotgun target was the snake, so I didn’t have to bother with all that “antidote” nonsense.

The shovel then can dig up the big sand pile I mentioned, and find a storm cellar. Nobody in the storm cellar, but there is dynamite, because (???).

I tried goofing around the town more (you can blow open the bank vault, it’s the wrong use of the dynamite) but really that’s everything: the tires and truck are a complete red herring, as is the bottle, and the water, and even the food. I discovered while mucking about the desert you get a fairly generous timer so I figured all I needed to do was puzzle out a route and I wouldn’t even need to bother.

There are random loops and bits of geography that don’t make sense in the desert, but I did finally manage a path:

Midway there’s a stop with a dead alien.

(The cube is useful, the rod does nothing as far as I know.) From there there’s a path with “crawl marks” so it isn’t hard to then find the crashed alien spaceship, which I knew had to be there because it’s on the cover of the game.

The whole purpose of the town section is to give the player the dynamite and the shotgun (I had the monster chase me to the end, here, and used my second shotgun blast so I could deal with the UFO entrance without fuss.) The dynamite is fussy to use: it gives the parser command STRIKE FUSE, but my process of

DROP DYNAMITE
STRIKE FUSE
EAST

in order to get away just blew me up. It took a while (after the fact, really) before I understood the game was implicitly picking up the dynamite again in order to “STRIKE” it even though that never gets said outright in the text. THROWing the dynamite didn’t work either.

The actual sequence is

STRIKE FUSE
DROP DYNAMITE
EAST

which is irritatingly specific. With the boulder blasted, you can go in to a brand-new area which feels like a Part 2 to the game.

(It’s not clear at all from the text, but LEAVE OUT from the entrance of the UFO lets you leave again — it felt for a while there I was trapped in.) Compass directions now get dropped: you’re supposed to PUSH X BUTTON followed by ENTER OVAL to go anywhere on the ship. The overall impression is slightly tedious and would be triply irritating for a slow typist.

The strange room descriptions do get cleared up later, but (I suspect for most players) pretty late, as in after the entire map is done being made.

Important rooms marked in color.

There’s a lot of rooms with weirdly-described cylinders and I admit I appreciated the atmosphere of feeling alien as opposed to, say, Menagerie, which clearly was a thinly-veiled Earth-type zoo. The odd movement reinforced this even though it got irritating by the end.

To get in at all you need to fill a hole with the cube from the desert; that causes to buttons to start working. Then deeper in there’s a “grey cube” that gets used on another machine to form a “white cube” and finally on a third machine to make it so you understand the alien language. Nothing is labeled and all three are somewhat distant from each other so it really is just luck for things to happen.

With the final effect, you can understand what rooms are and what the messages mean.

The particularly interesting room is the weapons room.

The white button pops up a viewscreen, and the green button (while the white button is active) gives instructions on how to shoot things. You can pick your target.

Being a loyal Earthling.

With the mothership destroyed, the overall threat is gone, and you can escape the way you came all the way back to the entrance. I had a monster chasing me half the time, so it’s not like the desert is entirely peaceful, but I guess the Air Force can roll in now with guns blazing for the rest.

This game has some vivid memories. Some of this just comes from the distribution influence (Tandy really did not sell much other than Tandy product in their stores, so TRS-80 players often only saw the “official” games like this one) but there is a certain vivid haunting-ness to the environment that I found appealing. From Figment Fly:

I could manage to kill one alien with the shotgun, but I never found a spaceship. I never knew what the game was about back then. One of my dad’s co-workers told me about a spaceship and all that, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.

I could only remember one: An adventure game that began with “Xe…” It featured a dusty empty town, a hot desert, aliens, and a space ship.

Lately I had a yearning to complete the memory, and luckily I found your site. A few emulators later, I’m in Purgatory, and this time I shoot that rotten nine-foot diamondback snake in two. And finally I get past the boulder and get in the spaceship that has taunted me since the early 80s.

I didn’t know there was a UFO back then, until I found your website. I originally thought the game was going to be about ghosts or something like that because of the ghost town feeling in the first half of the game. I preferred the first half “old town” part of the game to the last half about the UFO. It was a lot of fun exploring the town, and the way it was written really made the town come alive for me in my imagination. I could almost hear the wind blowing and see the tumbleweeds moving through the desert.

I’m guessing not a lot of people played with their eye on the art cover. Like: they found it on a parent’s computer and the disk was copied third hand via a piracy network. The desert maze really is very stressful and there’s lots of spaces where you just loop around, and the whole time there’s chasing monsters + messages about dying from lack of food and water (and as far as I know, no portable way to carry water!)

Still not bad for a modern experience, although the parser remained horribly finicky to the end; having a straightforward error message is really so much better that what happened here. It’s one of those route-not-taken in UI history where I think it could have been turned into something special, but people were eyeballing Infocom (and eventually, Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls) as the model to follow, with only a few weird experiments (like Amnesia) otherwise.

One last comment on the title: it refers to the shotgun in the game. We have had, almost as a complete stereotype now, so many weapons fail to work on enemies; they get laid low via some roundabout puzzle instead. This is normal for adventure games. But the shotgun just works and starts blasting things and I had the brief pleasure that usually comes from playing DOOM or something where the hordes fall by the wayside.

3:08 a.m. RRRRIIIINNNNGGGG! At first, you bury your head under the pillow, hoping it will go away. But no…RRRRIIIINNNNGGGG! There it is again. What idiot could possibly be calling at this unholy hour?

You search your nightstand in the dark, clumsily grabbing the receiver. “Yeah?” you mumble at this nuisance of a machine, hoping to convey extreme crankiness and anger. “Dr. Sands?” the voice at the other end of the wire asks.

“Nah, it’s Mary Poppins. Of course it’s Dr. Sands! Who is this and what do you want?”

“Dr. Sands, it’s General Thatcher, U.S. Air Force, at the Pentagon. Sorry to wake you, but I have an urgent situation here.” The general’s voice sounds close to panic.

Xenos is part of a long saga for this blog, as the author Robert Arnstein first appeared in Tandy’s 1979 game Haunted House; I wrote that post 8 years ago. Haunted House is the same game that influenced Das Geheimnisvolle Haus; the fact it was distributed by Tandy itself meant it had more influence on the TRS-80 scene than its quality might indicate. Arnstein’s works after were stronger: Pyramid 2000 was a decent re-skin of Crowther/Woods Adventure, Raäka-Tū was an archaeology-raid game with creative traps, and Bedlam we haven’t gotten to yet but is another adventure along the lines of Asylum.

I’m not actually clear whether Xenos or Bedlam came out first but they both are solidly dated as 1982 so I’m not going to fuss over the order.

From Figmentfly. Notice the 32K of memory requirement: this is chunkier than the standard TRS-80 game from the time.

We play as Dr. Sands, who is tasked by the Air Force with investigating a “strange glow” in Purgatory, New Mexico. Some investigators were already sent in that didn’t make it out, except for one who lost their mind.

7:32 a.m. – You step out of the jeep, just west of Purgatory. Turning to the driver, you ask “Did the general give you any instructions to wait for me?”

“Are you kidding?” the edgy private squeaks. “I’m getting out of here as fast as I can!” The jeep does a 180 and roars off in the direction from whence it came.

Looking down the road you can see that you’ve made the mistake of you life. The air seems oppressive as you begin walking toward town. There are no signs of life — you should have known better than to get mixed up in this. “Next time I’m leaving the phone off the hook,” you say aloud, to be answered by the ominous howl of the arid wind.

I appreciate the plot setup which a.) has us exploring a strange area, as is exceedingly typical for adventure games yet b.) gives the framing an X-Files style setup which is unique enough that I feel from the start like I am entering a story rather than just a world.

Before diving headfirst into the game, I should mention the parser, which is different than any we’ve seen so far. It uses multiple words, and it will ask to clarify if you don’t type enough words for the game to understand something.

The word “which” is flashing.

In the screen above, I was holding more than one key (I had a skeleton key, a master key, and a brass key) so the game takes the line I just typed and modifies it, to put the word “which” in there as a gap. After the flashing concludes, the cursor is at the empty spot, and the idea is that you then type the needed word (“brass” or whatnot) to make it so the parser now understands you.

This sounds terrific conceptually and is unlike any modern game I’ve played, but it is too easy to get into a loop of misunderstanding. I often just completely deleted the line I was trying to type and moved on. For example, there’s a crowbar that shows up early, so I was trying to use it to get in some areas that were locked.

PRY MASSIVE DOOR WITH CROWBAR

Typing that led to the word ?VERB? showing up, and then the cursor landing immediately before the word “pry”. The problem is I didn’t know what verb to try that the game would understand, or even if I was in the ballpark where any synonym would work. I eventually came across

BREAK MASSIVE DOOR WITH CROWBAR

YOUR TOOL IS TOO SMALL FOR THE JOB.

but in other cases I simply had to abort trying to type anything at all, which required deleting the whole line by hand. I think there’s a possible UI direction here that really does work and completely sidesteps any old or modern norms; it would need to prevent the player from getting “stuck” and frustrated when they don’t have a verb or noun to fix things, or where the player forgets the exact colors of the keys in their inventory.

Back to the X-Files —

Rather than playing like an alien-game, what this really feels like is a Western akin to Ghost Town or Greedy Gulch. The player starts near the abandoned town of Purgatory and there is a large desert around, and crossing the desert requires food and water. The big difference is the monster; if you start by turning around and going west, you’ll have an immediate encounter:

You can run away and there will be multiple turns of the creature “following”. I suspect we might need to get somewhere in the desert first before dealing with the creature, but I haven’t got that far in the game yet.

The town is a big west-to-east street (again like Ghost Town or Greedy Gulch) and it will help visualize things to give a meta-map first:

This is not what things look like square-by-square, which is something more like this, although the map is incomplete:

Essentially there are “in between” squares so that the space in between each of the buildings is included.

The gas station is the first building the player will encounter approaching from the west. It has a crowbar, pump, and skeleton key. The skeleton key (as far as I can tell) only is used to unlock a bathroom on the east side of the station, and there is nothing in the bathroom. Around the back of the gas station there is a junkyard with a broken jeep that has a deflated tire, and an inflated spare tire next to it. The deflated tire is on the jeep and the game indicates it needs to be jacked up in order to get the item, but I have yet to find the right verb combination to make this work. (I also have yet to find the a place where I urgently need a deflated tire, so it hasn’t been a priority.)

Going farther east there is a saloon to the north, and a sheriff to the south. The sheriff is initially locked so we’ll go back to that later.

In addition to the radio which talks about how great you are, there’s a bottle with questionable brown liquid (and a label mentioning it will “help with what ails you” although trying to drink it just informs the player it’d make them sicker) and some water. I would assume the bottle gets emptied to fill with water but I haven’t been able to accomplish this given the parser.

Stepping farther leads to a grocery and hardware store. The grocery, straightforwardly, is mostly empty but still has some food. The hardware store contains a shovel in the back guarded by a snake.

This is a delayed-death so it may be a matter of finding a cure instead of fighting off the snake. To the west of the saloon is a giant pile of sand which requires some kind of tool for digging as is presumably where the shovel goes; there’s also a sign in the hotel which states “in case of tornado all hotel guests should meet at the west side of the saloon and enter the storm shelter”, so there’s definitely a location down there.

Moving further is the aforementioned hotel and a bank. I have not been able to get into the bank.

The hotel has a master key which can be used to unlock two rooms further in. One of the rooms is empty, while the other has a brass key in a dresser. The brass key goes back to the sheriff’s and can be used to unlock the main door.

Again like Greedy Gulch! Unfortunately I’m stuck here; two of the desk drawers are locked (and the third is empty); the cabinet also has resisted my attempts at opening it. This resistance may be because of the ornery parser where it is hard to rapidly test verbs out; I’ll hopefully make progress on that by next time.

Just to be clear, the issues open are: dealing with the monster in the desert, getting the flat tire (almost certainly a parser issue), dealing with the locked things in the sheriff office, dealing with the snake (potentially also a parser issue), and getting into the bank. This feels almost near to playing an Infocom game except for all the “potential parser issue” parts, even though the prose has been straightforward so far.