I’ve saved the world. On my Apple II simulacrum, at least. Read my previous posts on Critical Mass here.
From the Sirius Summer 1983 Catalog.
I was stuck on multiple things, but I went for the mini-game first. This involved water skiing in Miami, while passing to the left of green buoys and to the right of red buoys.
I had trouble with the game for a while, and had almost fully justified the game was impossible. My problem turned out to be essentially one of hitboxes. (These are the little boxes that register collision in video games, and they often don’t match graphics exactly in order to be “more forgiving” for players but also for ease of calculation.) The “front” of each buoy is only at a spot near the very start of the rectangle, and then you can pass clean through the graphic without issue.
So rather than thinking of the obstacle course as dodging to the left or right of things, I switched mentality to passing through the white-colored side of each of the buoys. I suddenly had much more success, although in some cases the turns are very tight.
The graphical settings are a bit off on this recording, but you can see what the sequence looks like, courtesy of AppleAdventures.
The whole point of the sequence was to win a beach towel. (Yes, this game has “dirt quests” just like Time Zone where you meet Julius Caesar only so you can steal his ladder. We had to carry chicken soup with us all the way from New York, and we couldn’t just obtain a towel from a store with money, we had to win it. The difference here is that the game is clearly taking a comedic bent to the whole approach.)
With the beach towel I could resolve one of my other issues, that of having the explosion at the boat. After GET GAS causes a spill, a simple CLEAN GAS and we’re able to take off at San Juan without blowing up.
This leads to an open ocean map and you can steer in the wrong direction and go forever. I knew from the tip in London that I needed to find St. Thomas, and eyeballing a real-life map it’s a bit east, so I just decided to try typing EAST multiple times, and fortunately it wasn’t long before I arrived:
St. Thomas isn’t large and consists only of one beach house. (That sort of simplification happened in Time Zone all the time, but here it’s just comedic representation of geography.) There’s a door where you can KNOCK ON DOOR and they ask who you are looking for. I tried RAND or MAJOR RAND (again, based on the London tip) with no joy.
My critical issue turned out to be this is the kind of game where learning information can open things up. Uncle Harry’s Will had a moment where you had to listen to a radio broadcast about an open route before a gate would actually be open; the causality doesn’t really make sense, but it’s trying to force a certain game-plot. Here, I’m not even 100% sure what the exact conditions are. I know on the save file I was using to get the screenshot I had not met the contact in London, so at the very least, this is a case of Major Rand not showing up until you are told Major Rand is going to be there.
I’m going to loop back to the things I missed (both London and Rome) and then return to St. Vincent shortly.
First, back to London. That Telex that stopped mid-word had more information.
I thought we were supposed to infer that this is convey that missiles are going to be used rather than bombs, and the rest is just unreadable. There are games where the player really is meant to just filling in the missing information themselves, but here you’re just supposed to SHAKE TELEX.
The message goes on to indicate the contact is at the bridge (so you don’t have to hit upon him randomly after all) and also a “CODEWORD” that is intercepted. It gives the letters SNE but then the screen goes black, and then the screen goes back on showing only the letters ED and the revelation you’ve had your (not-visible-in-inventory) money stolen.
You might recall the Krishna gave over money if we gave flowers, but I was confused why we needed to do that since the player has money from the start. This scene is why. Just make sure you get the replacement money after this scene.
Outside the telex there’s also been a “blunt instrument” left behind which turns out to be a telescope. I guess you just hit people with whatever’s handy.
With the telescope in hand, we can resolve the issue at Rome. You can’t ever go through the gate — fortunately I was catching on the vibe and didn’t waste too much more time here — but if you LOOK DOOR rather than LOOK GATE you can see a note.
Trying to look while not holding the telescope.
What happens if you are holding the telescope instead.
The bizarro thing about this sequence is we get told again shortly the exact same information. I assume this “unlocks” something in the sequence to follow, but it is nearly possible to skip Rome entirely. The only reason why not is that you pick up a flashlight at Rome (needed for a cave later), but I’m pretty sure they also sell those in airports.
With those gaps filled in — and with the key from Paris still unused in our possession — it’s time to repeat the Miami sequence, followed by the boat sequence, followed by arriving at Major Rand’s door.
We’ve found Rand, so we can ask about Stupertino:
The plot is deeply confusing. How do we know Major Rand wasn’t up to anything nefarious as opposed to Count Stupertino? Why is it that the energy company mentioned in the newspaper ties everything together in the first place? I assume the informant-shorthand conversation was meant to imply all these things, and for a bounce-from-one-place-to-another plot of Rungistan it’s fine to be brief about such things, but here the player genuinely needs to be investigating in the correct direction.
Nevermind: with this info in hand we can hunt for Martinique, again using the power of real-life geography. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no way to do this other than eyeball things, realize Martinque is southeast somewhat of St. Vincent, and do some guesswork.
I ran into Antigua first, which is north of our destination. I don’t know what other places are included, but I did run into a crash once so there’s clearly some bugs in the air.
From St. Vincent, 14 steps south with the boat, followed by going east until hitting landfall will work.
Stepping off on Martinque results in landing at a “topless beach”…
…and then eventually a cave.
Inside is where the “code word” gets used, combined with the idea from way back at New York where a door might respond to a voice command. Say SNEEZER.
This is the final area. There’s a giant gun on one floor, followed by the “evil Count Stupertino” on the next. He throws a dagger at you and you need to (in real time) type DUCK.
The Count runs away and you can approach the panel. The launch countdown is already going, but you can activate the giant gun from earlier using the key from Paris.
Then it’s just a matter of strolling back to the gun, waiting for the countdown, and playing a mini-game. You have to shoot down each one of the rockets as they launch (space bar to shoot, IJKM to move the crosshairs).
Get every single rocket and you’ll be victorious.
Yes, that’s it. No idea
1. What happened to the Count
2. Why the Count was shooting missiles
3. Why the fake-out with missiles instead of bombs
4. What connection this had with the energy company
5. Why one of the directors was dead but Major Rand was fine
6. Why the Count had no personnel manning the missile area other than himself
I still enjoyed this roughly as much as Rungistan, and it was even easier — it didn’t have anything like the safe puzzle, or the weird airplane directions, or predicting an eclipse. However, I can objectively recognize the plot doesn’t even make sense as a romp, and someone who was sincerely trying to keep notes of their investigation in the hope of putting the pieces together would be disappointed.
Rather than lingering on that, I would like to discuss a bit more the unique aspect to the game: the action sequences that happen without separation from the regular world. When the bomb arrives you need to pick it up and throw it, and there is no sense that the game mode has shifted at all; the same for responding to the thrown dagger.
When people talk about the leap made by Sierra with King’s Quest 1, the third-person view with character movement is often what gets referred to. But in essence, the real innovation is making the adventure “cinematic”, by adding real-time animations to everything and having the player respond in kind. While the scenes are limited, the Bob Blauschild games are a proto-version of that. A history of adventure games that starts with King’s Quest 1 is missing quite a lot — Sierra’s earlier text-adventure work, for instance — and I think the Blauschild games also form an essential building block, and the only reason the world isn’t animated even more is due to technical limitations. King’s Quest 1 could have worked (awkwardly) in first person, but King’s Quest 1 could never have worked at all if it was missing the connectivity between commands and dynamic animation.
Up next: our first German game of the All the Adventures project.
Renga in Blue 
Fantastic writeups. Critical Mass was one of those games I played as a young kid (8-10 years old) and those live action sequences were absolutely riveting to me in those formative years. They added so much tension; I felt as if you were in a living world (the Apple ][ game Russki Duck– another save the world from bombs plot but in an action game in the style of Atari Adventure – did this for me as well. And come to think of it Adventure was its own very early version of a living world– it’s actually a simulation as the game tracks in real time where all the objects are and they are constantly shifting), which is something that I didn’t feel from the Sierra Hi-Res Adventures. Critical Mass also gave me the feeling of freedom (much in the way Carmen Sandiego did) to travel and explore the world freely, which is something I really wanted to do as a kid (and led to my international travels as an adult; I’m an expat living in a different hemisphere now who has been married to someone from another nationality for 17+ years.)
I tried posting a comment earlier about the Telex machine, but I don’t remember shaking it- I remember hitting it, much in the way we would hit the side of our wooden TV cabinets in the 80s when the picture distorted and that would somehow get it working again. So hitting the TELEX tracks what ordinary people would have done to a box of malfunctioning 80s technology.
How do we know Major Rand wasn’t up to anything nefarious as opposed to Count Stupertino
seems like this is also something of an “out of date trope” dating back to the 80s. In Reagan era times of course an army officer would be considered upstanding and trustworthy, so the bad guy MUST be the “Evil Count” stereotype.
I thought the keyword being the Count’s nickname might be a clue that the Count was the plotter, but that’s pretty tenuous.
Maybe the indication that the Count is up to no good is that it’s a good idea to follow up all your leads, and when you follow up the lead on the Count you find a base full of missiles.
Even in the Reagan Era I would not necessarily have assumed that Major Rand was trustworthy–there’s something about the rank of “Major” that seems slightly villainous, more so than “Lieutenant” or “Captain” though perhaps less than “General” potentially. And his name is the currency of apartheid South Africa which was not very popular at least in my circles. But a Count is just bad bad news.
Regarding King’s Quest, there’s an odd little connection there with a game on your recently mentioned “Innovation 13” list that I recently came across while researching early Scandinavian text adventures. Ragnar Tørnquist, one of the authors of The Longest Journey, has mentioned a few times his numerous early adventures (all now lost, apparently) that he wrote with the Quill as a teenager in the mid 80s, particularly one called Peasant’s Quest, which was supposed to be a parody of King’s Quest. The problem was that he had never actually played it at the time, just read about it in a magazine!
Related to mistertaster’s comment above about early action-adventure games, it’s interesting to note that Eric Knopp and Alan Merrell, the authors of Russki Duck, were also behind Copts and Robbers, which Sirius had released just a few months prior. They were clearly copying from but also trying to build upon the Adventure model, similar to what Atari themselves were doing at the time with Raiders of the Lost Ark, Swordquest: Earthworld, etc.
It really is remarkable the influence Atari Adventure had on gaming. I recall the author Warren Robinette saying that Adventure itself was his attempt at recreating Colossal Cafe Adventure. And of course The Legend of Zelda bears some striking similarities, even down to the little victory sounds when you pick up an object.
I’d learned a few years back that RusskinDuck and Copts and Robbers we’re “inspired” by Adventure. Knopf himself replied to a YouTube video about Russki Duck; he was a teenager when he sold it, I think 15?
also notable that Warren Robinette’s later educational software for the Apple ][ (which was about assembling logic circuits to solve simple puzzles) used the adventure interface to move room to room while picking up and moving objects. I think it was called Gertrude’s Secrets? There was another one called Rocky something or other, but I might be missing up the names.
Rocky’s Boots
That’s it. Have you played any of the Adventure-inspired pantheon? Gertrude/Rocky/Russki/Copts?