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.
Renga in Blue 
Assume you’ve tried drinking the brown liquid after getting bit by the snake?
alas, same message
I checked out a walkthrough and (very nonspecific thing that does not spoil any particular puzzles): vg frrzf nf gubhtu gurer ner n ybg bs erq ureevatf, be naljnl guvatf gung ner va gurer sbe ngzbfcurer engure guna chmmyr fbyivat, vapyhqvat na ragver bcgvbany nern gung V jvyy unir n pbzzrag nobhg vs lbh frr vg.
I found a bunch of stuff that seems to be ignorable (like the tires)
at the very least I’m in the UFO and it doesn’t seem to rely on anything other than the dynamite to get in
(the dynamite was _really_ annoying too, you have to light it, drop it, and then run. If you drop it, and light it, and then run you blow up. I guess implicitly the game picked up the dynamite again if you light it but the game doesn’t say anything, and it also doesn’t work to THROW the dynamite at your target, ugh)
I remember playing this many years ago when I went through all the Tandy/Arnstein games on an ancient Mac TRS-80 emulator. What I actually recall most about it was that the emulator wasn’t really supposed to have a functioning savestate feature, but I was able to come up with some bizarre end-around to make them work.
As for the game itself, it’s kind of hazy now, but I thought it was interesting. I’d guess that after all his simple, foundational early works he must have taken a look at something like the original TRS-80 version of Zork and been like “Huh, I really need to up my game here…”, and this is what he came up with.
Regarding the particular vibe of the game, I’d say that relatively recent TV fare like The Invaders, Night Slaves, and Project U.F.O. may have been an influence, as well as the earlier classics in that genre, especially The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.
I did a brief investigation on the issue of release dates for Xenos and Bedlam, and came away fairly certain that Bedlam came out first.
Neither got much in the way of magazine coverage, but the Coco version of Bedlam first shows up in magazines in the Summer of 1982, and is also listed as “available Summer ’82” in the 1982 Coco Program Catalog. The Model I/III version seems to be a bit earlier, as it first appears in the RSC-07 general TRS-80 catalog from ’82, whereas the Coco version first pops up as “New!” In RSC-08. Also, while the Coco cassette label is (c) Robert Arnstein 1982, the Model I/III label is (c) Device Oriented Games 1981.
Xenos, on the other hand, only came up in a couple of magazines in the Summer of 1983, and is described as a recent release. It also does not appear in the TRS-80 catalogs until the 1983 RSC-09 version, where it is specifically listed as “New!”.
Based on all of this, and the style of the games themselves, I’d hazard to guess that Arnstein finished Bedlam around late ’81 and it was released in early/mid ’82, while he finished Xenos in late ’82 and it was released in early/mid ’83, despite the packaging/media being dated ’82, which of course was a common occurance.
I’ll buy that argument
I’ll bring it up when I get to Bedlam (which is not _that_ far away, we’re actually in the latter quarter of my games list now)
Pingback: Xenos: hit the head / and not the chest / headshots are / the very best | Renga in Blue
I thought that after my recent travails with the Whembly Castle mazes it would be a palliative to try something ostensibly less eye straining…and I have now wound up trying to map the bl00dy desert in Xenos. The terms ‘frying pan’ and ‘fire’ spring to mind. It’s just a shame that I can’t shoot the old prospector as a form of Primal Scream therapy.
d’oh!
I didn’t map the desert on this one. I was curious what it looked like but not curious enough to actually draw it all out
It’s very annoying and logistically unrealistic. Going one move east and then back south takes you from one end of the town to the other. I managed to open the drawers in the sheriff’s office with the crowbar and use the key contained there to open the gun cabinet; with the gun I shot the snake and took the shovel. Digging in the pile of sand reveals a door which leads to a storm shelter containing some dynamite enabling you to blow up the safe in the bank and get the money.
I presume the tyres are for something else other than driving the jeep (if they have any use at all) as the jeep has no engine in it. I am now wandering around the desert trying to map as I said earlier; you can’t seem to enter the lake or the canyon from any direction I’ve found yet and there are various footprints leading off into it. At least the prospector has given a clue about the futility of trying to map the western part of the maze – due to magnetic anomalies you can’t. I just hope that doesn’t encapsulate coding anomalies as well. The main problem here is the desert is very large, many times larger than the number of objects available to map it. I am having to drop them all, restore and then try another section hoping that they don’t overlap.
Strangely you can pour the brown solution in the sink and it sits quite happily (and detachedly) next to the water; this at least enables you to pour the solution in in for some storage and fill the bottle with the water although it only adds about a dozen moves to your life in the desert before you succumb to the heat.
I’ve now discovered the green cube, the rod with a green sphere and a dead alien but to what end I don’t know yet. I’ll have another assault in the morning but I’m definitely making progress. I’ve mapped 79 desert locations so far and have discovered the prospector who is suitably unhelpful, a lake and a canyon I can’t enter and the above mentioned dead alien together with the cube and the rod. Several footprint trails lead to the edge of the impassable canyon. And not forgetting some randomised combat with a menacing creature who can be shot but bear in mind the gun only contains two bullets, one of which I used to despatch the snake. According to the score system I am 60% of the way through my mission.
I finally made it into the UFO by mapping the desert and consequently into the second part of the game, involving a lot of tedious button pushing. However, upon entering the SPLURB room and sitting in the chair, I tried squeezing the handgrip, whereupon the game crashed with a “DeletedSystemMemoryOnDiskDisketteTefaultProtectedIllegal…..and so on. This could have been another strange alien name for a new room but no, game over. I don’t think I’m missing much.