Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Q: I think it’s fair to say the Broken Sword games don’t contain quite the same material, but they have a certain character to them that’s rather distinct. Is there a commonality to the character behind your games?
A: Yes. You could call it puerility. In my heart I know my games were being puerile early on.

— From an interview with Charles Cecil, who calls these early days of development “ultra-indie”

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

From Lemon 64.

I theorized last time I was stopped by parser troubles: indeed I was, and after I resolved the issue it was smooth sailing to the end.

The right command here is to

SWITCH SWITCH

I can’t even blame the system. Just one regular synonym (like PULL or FLIP) would have made this better.

With the switch pulled, the only effect was to have the landing light off. However, this gave me a sudden idea: what if this is where the explosive went? I was thinking of there being a “drama time” event where after turning the light back on, a vehicle would try to land and set the explosive off. (Drama time in that there’s no reason why turning a light off and on again would summon a vehicle — it’s just a matter of the event waiting until the player already has things in place.) However, that’s not quite how things worked out, but it got me to a solution anyway.

Since DROP PLAS(TIC EXPLOSIVE) was getting intercepted by a question as to where, I knew I was on the right track. Since the bulb is in the way, the trick is to UNSCREW BULB…

THE BULB POPS OUT AND SMASHES ON THE ROCKY GROUND

..and then DROP PLAS(TIC) / INTO LAND(ING) works. Then you can SWITCH SWITCH (sigh) again:

The tank moves and leaves its original position unguarded. Not the result I was expecting, but I’ll take it. (You can even go east and see the tank sitting there, but it doesn’t see you or do anything.) On to the last portion of the game!

The path leads to a volcano, and then a METAL PLATFORM and a part I expect a lot people got stuck on. I’d experimented enough with the PEN LIGHT (from the guard that we killed with a knife) that I knew SHINE PEN got the response that I could do that, but not yet. Hence, when a moment came up where there seemed to be not much useful to do otherwise, I was ready:

The secret base has a SAFE where the 27/09 message back at the guard hut applies (remember I knew that 2709 was understood by the parser). The only fussy part is the method of entry: the game directly asks if you want to try entering a code, and you type YES, and then only after you type 2709.

That is, you can’t treat what the game says as a rhetoric question.

Opening the safe reveals a BRIEFCASE and PLANS FOR A MASSIVE INVASION; this must be the “secret” we’ve been sent to find.

Just south there’s a colonel, and we can just straightforwardly KILL him, and take his jacket stored nearby. There’s a guard later that then mistakes you for the colonel so you can get by.

This is followed by a helicopter you can use to escape. Just make sure you don’t PULL LEVER which gives the highly deceptive “I CAN’T DO THAT YET” but instead PUSH LEVER.

Making a beeline for the carrier is not healthy, as indicated above. You need to first fly around a little and then some harriers fly by and spot you.

I think you need to also have dumped the colonel’s jacket first before doing this.

Then you can safely land to victory.

Adventure E by an entirely different author!

The game was … fine, I suppose? There’s very little of the complexity allowed by a Scott Adams game (with timing, multiple attributes, etc.) All of the previous games (A through C) required odd leaps of logic that didn’t really happen here; the “hardest” puzzle probably was the use of the plastic explosion which I admit I solved by accidentally trying to cause a different effect, but it still didn’t strike me as unfair.

I do think the system itself really held the games back. With very little possible in the way of custom messages, and I CANT for everything, this is weak parser; a Greg Hassett game from 1980 does a better job in communicating why an action didn’t work. I think the ZX81 system itself (and the fact the original games even worked on ZX80!) can somewhat be blamed; even the most talented of modern authors would have trouble squeezing more out.

And we in the UK were working with so little memory, compared to our peers in the US. One of the first Artic releases was 1K ZX Chess. We crammed a chess playing game into 1K. The reason that UK programmers and technical people got so good was because we were working with 1k, and then maybe 16k. In the US they were working with up to 64k. We had cassettes and they had floppy disks.

On the other other hand, I can tell you once we reach most text adventures being aimed at the ZX Spectrum, we’re not in a land of milk and honey. But at least they were capable of more.

Coming up: Not sure! Brian Cotton was supposed to take longer to beat, so I’ll try to find something small to finish off the year.