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.