Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

So, let’s be honest, we’ve been through a lot.

We’ve fought dragons, traveled through time, explored futuristic cities, and raided Egyptian tombs. We’ve encountered some of the toughest puzzles ever written, and even conquered some of those without looking anything up. We’ve defeated a demon lord (twice) and re-enacted the “you shall not pass” scene with a balrog by destroying a bridge. We are now an ultimate adventurer, and we need an ultimate game to match.

We need a game where we face off against bears, sharks, squids, meteors from the sky, and we PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE.

Via World of Dragon.

Ultimate Adventure is by Phil Edwardson of Americus, Kansas, who studied printing technology in the 70s; this is his only amateur effort. It is another one of the games from tapemag Chromasette that ended up getting picked up by Microdeal for a Dragon port. (See: Mansion Adventure.) As a brief reminder, CLOAD was the very first tapemag and published for TRS-80, and Chromasette was a spin-off started after the Tandy CoCo became available.

From the May 1982 issue, in which Ultimate Adventure appears.

I also need to make a correction, as I previously implied CLOAD must have had better sales than Chromasette due to the rarity of the latter. According to the editor Dave Lagerquist, Chromasette actually exceeded CLOAD in sales (he estimated 3000 subscriptions at its peak, although he didn’t remember if it was 3000 for each publication or 3000 combined). In the same interview he mentions — relevantly for today — that CLOAD submissions had gone through a hobbyist-to-professional cycle as people started to master programming for the original TRS-80, so that by the time Chromasette kicked off in the summer of 1981, TRS-80 Model 1/3 programming had “matured” into complex machine code games; the Tandy CoCo’s debut in September 1980 essentially “reset the stage” so people were experimenting and writing hobbyist work again.

Also from the May 1982 issue.

Ultimate Adventure, despite the name, is only marginally an adventure. It belongs in the strategy-adjacent genre seen most recently with the Apex Trading Haunted House and not recently at all with Lance Miklus Treasure Hunt.

The goal is to obtain $1000, starting with $250. The starting money is because everything needs to be bought; there are no puzzle-solving items to be found “in the field”.

The small-ish map of the game consists of various biomes connected by “portholes”. These portholes are “teleportation portals” and normally just behave like rooms but there is a random chance one will send the player to a different location.

Yellow marked rooms are the “puzzles”. For example, you are unable to enter outer space without a space suit on. You are unable to dive underwater without scuba gear. The game is fairly polite about telling you what’s wrong.

Going back to that price list, the knife and the gun are weapons, some items help protect against a hazard which might or might not appear. Consider, for example, the “fur coat” which clearly goes to the arctic; you may simply not get cold in the arctic by luck, and even if you do, it will be a decrease of strength points penalty, rather than the end of the game.

Even if you don’t have a weapon, you can still try (as the game’s instructions suggest) typing HANDS and getting through via chutzpah. Here are two different results from punching a bear:

The CLUE will let you know where a treasure is hidden…

…and buying the shovel will probably do something useful? I never quite figured out if it helped with the treasures or not.

Other than random encounters with biome-appropriate hazards…

The game is prompting for an item here.

…the gameplay consists of visiting each one and typing SEARCH. This may or may not yield a treasure. A little “line moving” animation accompanies the search.

Multiple searches tend to be required. Each search is accompanied by a random chance of a bad hazard. For example, while searching underwater I found a treasure (SUNKEN TREASURE WORTH $224) but I got set upon by a giant octopus in the process.

The helpful thing — the thing that makes the game manageable — is that one of the rooms is an Infirmary. When you step inside your strength, which tends to get battered around by the various hazards of the game, gets restored to full. This place can be re-visited as many times as you like.

This ends up making the game more or less just a matter of patience. While it can be un-nerving to search through a mine field without appropriate protection, you can try to literally punch anything to get your way out of it.

Hazards can roll at any turn, and that can include right after encountering another hazard. So it is possible to get three polar bears in a row charging, and it likely is even more possible if the difficulty is cranked (it goes from 1 easy, to 5 hard).

I have no trouble with strategy, but Ultimate Adventure doesn’t really scratch that itch: it doesn’t have any interesting choices to make other than “do you push your luck searching, or go back to the infirmary now”. A very young me desperate for entertainment might try to scrounge the turn count down but again, the game is lacking in the ambiguous choice and multiple viable routes that really makes a strategy game work.

We did get to punch tigers! And landmines, somehow.