We’ve seen Chris Evans once before, with the two-pack Mines of Saturn/Return to Earth, originally published by Evans himself under Saturnsoft, but later picked up for distribution by Mikro-Gen.
Despite many sites claiming 1983 for Mad Martha, it first gets mentioned in a December 1982 issue of Computer and Video Games. The 1982 version seems to be Saturnsoft-only, and the only copies that have surfaced have been Mikro-Gen branded, which explains the discrepancy.
Mad Martha ended up being incidentally important to Mikro-Gen’s history. Briefly: Mikro-Gen went to the ZX Microfair in August of 1983, being placed next to a small company known as a Crash Micro Games Action (of Crash magazine). The two struck up a relationship and Crash received a copy of Mad Martha and gave it a good review (it “prove[s] how much fun a BASIC written adventure can be”). Crash had enough reach that the company Mikro-Gen ended up being one of the well-known British companies through the 80s.
Via Spectrum Computing.
I mentioned the Crash story before, but what I didn’t mention — because I didn’t play the game yet — was how inexplicable the Crash story was. That’s because this game is very bad, and I’ll pull out another review made when the game was published just to show I’m not talking from future-perspective. (And yes, art is subjective, etc., but I tend to be pretty good at figuring out where the boundaries are of “this works as long as you accept norms A, B, and C” but even going up to the Greek alphabet won’t save this game.)
I will grant the game does one very solid thing at the start. While the intro text starts with “you, as Henry Littlefellow” it then asks for your name (for example: “Jason”), and consistently addresses you by that name, clearly establishing Henry Littlefellow as someone different. This is similar to how Softporn Adventure made sure the “puppet” was entirely different from “you”; the “puppet” has a somewhat sleazy objective so it helps to be separated a step.
(In addition to our name, the game asks to pick a difficulty level, 1 to 3 — I’ll come back to this later.)
Henry — that is, the avatar, not us — is wanting to go on a night on the town, and do so by stealing his wife’s cash and sneaking out. His final goal is to turn his 50£ into 100£; however, his alert wife is waiting with an axe and will do Henry in at any mis-step.
Waking up the baby? Axed to death. Tripping over a cat? Axed to death? Wandering out to the bar to spend all his wife’s money on beer and then amble home? Still axed to death, but this time with feeling.
Each location in the game has graphics; first the graphical view is shown, then a text description.
The parser is extraordinarily slow. To be fair, all the Brit-games for ZX Spectrum have been slow, but this one is spectacularly slow, as in the machine needs to be cranked to 7x or 8x times speed to even have a reasonable response time. The author’s previous games didn’t have this problem, so I don’t know what happened; the only other comparable game I can think of is the unoptimized version of Basements and Beasties.
That might be acceptable if the parser was good; it is not.
> examine bed
You examine the china utensil!
Inside it’s rim is a small key
Yes, examine just ignores whatever noun you put and chooses one for you. In general, the parser only accepts the right command it is fishing for and no others.
After “open door”.
Through door 1.
I eventually stopped trying to interact with things, here I was still flailing.
Through door 2 is the room with the baby, and once you enter the baby starts crying.
You can “give dummy to baby” in order to calm him down, then grab an old lamp from the floor and pop over to door 3.
The cabinet has some OIL that you can use to FILL LAMP, and then as long as you’ve picked up the matchbox you can LIGHT LAMP. This is needed because the room beyond the door is dark and you’ll trip over the cat and die (via axe) without light. The rest of the map, incidentally, also requires you to hold the lamp lest the same fate be suffered (including in, say, a bar or a casino).
The matches are used passively, you just go direct to LIGHT LAMP while holding them.
Past the door is a “lounge”, and examining the couch will examine the family portrait instead (of course) revealing a safe. With the key from earlier in hand you can open the safe…
…and then get dropped into a mini-game.
Here’s where difficulty comes into play: it determines our number of lives which apply through this game and the mini-game immediately following this one.
Here, we move slowly back and forth and pound bills slowly appear on the ground while the cat wanders around trying to trip us underfoot. Number keys move up and down, Henry moves either left or right automatically. and if Henry has hit the far side of the scrolling screen, he turns around the other direction.
Picking up a bill creates a dot on the ground and you can trip over the dots and lose a life; the cat also is death. Strategy-wise, I found it best to start by just moving up and down quite a bit while the bills started piling on the ground, and then once the screen was dense enough to find a horizontal stretch with lots of money and let Henry just go (he might trip over a cat on the way, but that’s only one life).
Immediately after this game comes Frogger.
It took me exceedingly long to get through here; one thing I was doing wrong at the start was pounding the keys (5 through 8, 5 is left, 8 is right) rather than just holding, which registers the movement a little better but does make it difficult to stop.
The traffic moves left to right, and the key rather confusingly moves constantly to the right but wraps around from the right side of the screen to the left. You have to push “down” on the key to pick it up, and the time is very tight to both grab the key and make it back — you basically can’t spend any time at all adjusting and have to jump into traffic right away. I did one step left, and then held down; this let me get down about two-thirds of the way, and then I had to let the key go for a moment to avoid jumping under a car, then pressed it to resume. Then I had to immediately turn back direction and pray as the timer is such you can only win with two or three seconds to go at most.
Note how the game is here referring to Henry, while in the parser it refers to you.
With the keys in hand you finally get to wander outside.
Other than a jail (if you wander into it, game over) and your house (which you have to voluntarily enter back into, but Martha is waiting, game over) there’s a casino, bar, and cinema.
The card is just laying around outside; you’ll need it for the casino.
The bar must be visited first. A drunk will ask you to buy him a drink; do so, and he’ll give you a movie ticket.
With the ticket you can get into the movie theater… .
…where there is a tie lying around. You should wear the tie, because the club requires a tie in the dress code to get in.
Once in, you need to play one more mini-game to win: bet on the Wheel of Fortune. You can distribute 1 pound at a time on multiple numbers, or put them all on the same number, or do some mix; after you do so, the wheel spins around. The number of spins it makes gets the odds that a winner receives back.
Having picked five numbers, and the Wheel mid-spin.
At this point the game was tiring me so I just used save states. Fortunately, if you save, spin, and see the wheel hits a particular number, reloading and betting on that specific number will not change that behavior. That makes it easy to win to the end, and be rewarded with text-character graphics dancing ladies.
That’s it. Everything’s over. Hitting a button resets the game. Given Henry’s wife is still waiting with an axe I expect his night of pleasure to be cut short off-screen.
This sounds almost amusing just narrated out, but the incredibly finicky parser hid some extremely basic puzzles and some amazingly painful mini-games.
Dismal and painful to play. It was well known back in 1983, as Mikro-gen spent a bit on publicity. You were meant to get into the tongue-in-cheek mood of the game, but it is so bad that you’d rather get a dental drilling.
— Exemptus, from Computer Adventure Solution Archive
Slow, terrible puzzles and some god-awful arcade sequences.
— Gunness, also from Computer Adventure Solution Archive
Computer & Video Games did a October 1983 review (not too far off from when the Mikro-Gen version came out) and it was a full page as scathing as I’d ever seen from that era.
The review goes into technical issues with the game itself and calls it “user hostile”.
I tried doing useful things with the potty, but was not rewarded. I tried opening the window without success. I opened the door, and found myself in a corridor, from where I entered a bathroom, complete with “throne” and toilet roll. Neither of these objects reacted when I tried to use them, nor could I have a bath. I concluded that I was extremely clean and must be in need of a laxative.
A very slow parser where a fair number of the commands are going to get sucked up due to objects just not being implemented ends up being one of the most intensely frustrating experiences 1982/1983 can offer.
There’s probably something interesting to be said regarding the “degenerate hero” genre in Britgames; 1983 games will include Denis Through the Drinking Glass where the husband of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher really just wants to go get a drink. We’ll have to build up to some other games before making any conclusions, I reckon, including — unfortunately — another game from 1983, Mad Martha II.
Via Mobygames. “If you upset the Pope, on your own head be it. I’m not going into the fiery furnace because of your irreverance. And speaking of the Pope — don’t in front of Ian Paisley unless you want a right earful of the Armagh twang.” I’m sure this made sense to Brits of the 80s, but I’ll save researching for another time.
Renga in Blue 
There should be a cat-friendly interactive fiction rating like Emily Short’s cheese rating. This one is the equivalent of the sub-Cheez Whiz tier; there is a cat but you cannot pet it and the PC’s attitude towards it is hostile.
The third sentence of the Denis quote makes sense to me; the Rev. Ian Paisley was the leader of the radical Northern Ireland Protestants (founder of the Ulster Protestant Volunteers paramilitary and later the Democratic Unionist Party) and would not have been fond of the Pope at all. Armagh is the city and county in Northern Ireland* where Paisley was born, so presumably “Armagh twang” refers to his accent. Though Wikipedia says he was brought up in Ballymena, County Antrim, and perhaps that would shape his accent? I am definitely not able to distinguish different Northern Irish accents.
*Did that come up in that awful riddle game where we still haven’t figured out why one of the answers is Delhi?
I’m not sure how that’s gonna come up in the game, but the British Degenerate genre seems to be pretty free form
(Pythonesque counts, btw)
She must really dislike Monterey jack if it’s rated lower than moldy cheddar! Or perhaps she doesn’t consider it to really be cheese, since it stands for the level of “cheese is mentioned but not present”…
I think maybe that is meant to be non-linear; there is more cheese, which is good on its face, but the attitude toward cheese is wrong. I suppose that that is what I am saying about this game; ordinarily I would say that a cat is better than no cat, but is that still true when the game so blatantly refuses to appreciate the cat?
My fave British Degenerate (excellent coinage, btw) adventures are probably Hampstead and Urban Upstart. The absolute worst has to be Dodgy Geezers, though. The entire game design is built around silently softlocking you because you don’t happen to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, over and over. That one still infuriates me, years after I played it…
The name “Dodgy Geezers” very effectively conveys “infuriating British Degenerate text adventure” (or possibly “infuriating British Degenerate ZX Spectrum platformer with an inexplicable control scheme and unorthodox enemies).
The last sentence of the third paragraph has some awkward wording in it, I think you could remove “they the company” without losing anything.
This game feels very weird, in the sense that you’re not actually winning when you win. Even games where you technically lose when you win still feel like something was resolved. This just ends without any real resolution. I wonder if that’s a first?
“they” is just a typo
I did have to check the walkthrough when I was “done” just to make sure I was done, and yeah, that’s it
We have had collect-the-treasures games where you just get max score and the game doesn’t even end, but for a game with a goal this had a pretty sudden ending.
Loading the game proved troublesome — I kept getting VO errors. The cassette label didn’t Indicate how many copies it contained. So I listened to the lilting of the data signals until I reached a spot where I thought another copy might start.
I gather from this that it was typical to put multiple copies of the same program on a tape? I guess perhaps to guard against corruption resulting from the same section being read over and over again?
I was always a bit confused by the line in Monty Python’s “Accountancy Shanty” that goes, “Some people say it’s folly / But I’d rather have the lolly” as I couldn’t quite work out what they were referring to. Here it seems clear that it’s simply a slang term for money. I wonder what the derivation of that is. I checked Wiktionary and Etymonline, but both just say it is slang without offering any history of the word.
Yeah, multicopy was common. Often it would be just the same program on both sides, so if side a failed at least you could do side b.
For some other 8-bit machines (not the Spectrum) there were sometimes multiple copies recorded at different baud rates too.
I’ve not heard lolly for a long time (outside of the use for lollipop or ice lolly). There are so many British slang terms for money… I guess it may show some discomfort talking about it directly… and lots of regional variations. We even have different words for money in Welsh for different parts of Wales… Money in the south is “arian”, which also means silver. Money in the north is “pres”, which also means brass. That feels like some sort of commentary on the economics of the areas.
I guess there was some ambition, at least, in Mad Martha with all those graphics and arcade mini-games which is probably what impressed Crash. Reviews from the early 80s are always a mixed bag. I don’t think many adventures were ever completed by the reviewers and games were hailed as “value for money” by virtue of them being obtuse and hard to solve.
Hey Strident, it’s unrelated to this subject, but there’s something I wanted to ask you, as I know that you’re an expert on the Quill and all things Gilsoft:
Recently, I’ve been tackling the two Norace games (Gnom Gimre and Jungel Jakt). I felt sort of duty-bound, as these are amongst the earliest Norwegian adventures, I can speak the language, and no-one seems to have ever solved them. I thought these were the only commercialy released Quill games in Norwegian, but in poking around, I found another game that seems to have recently been added to GB64 called Dragedreperen. It’s listed as a Quill game, but some of the info in that entry seems off. Additionally, I noticed that the game text uses ‘aa’ instead ‘å’, while one of the key features of the Norace Quill is having a properly implemented Scandinavian vowel set. So, if it is a Quill game, it must be the regular UK version. Do you think you’d be able to tell if it really is? I’d like to give this one a go as well, but I can’t find a link for it. It must be out there though, because someone on YT actually put up a couple screens of it translated to English, but it seems he couldn’t figure anything out and gave up.
Oh, and one other question: Norace’s own advertising from the time indicates that there were also Spectrum versions of their games. Do you know if that was actually the case? There’s that one shot of the originals in Tim Gilberts’ own collection, but I assume those are just the C64 versions?
Well, Dragedreperen is definitely a Quilled game, as I’ve just run it through UnQuill and had a nose through the game database. (You can download the game from the Gamebase 64 version19 file on the Internet Archive. Use the filename on the GB64 page to locate it.) According to the credits the game was produced by ZIGMA ZOFT, POSTBOKS 1642, 8010 BODIN.
[As an aside… I can’t UnQuill the two Norace games. I don’t know if that’s down to some additional protection on those games or an indication the Norwegian Quill has slightly different coding that the version of UnQuill I’m using doesn’t like. I don’t do a lot with the C64… It’s really quite an alien system for me].
The usual Sinclair archives don’t currently have any references to Norace as a publisher for the Spectrum. However, I can see that the Norace Quill adverts, game adverts, and some of the articles about the initial translation do mention it being available for the Spectrum too (and potentially CPC). TIm himself may know more.
Re. Zigma Zoft. A noticed this article from PC mikrodata 04/1985 which Google Translate has parsed as “ADVENTURE CLUB Bjørnar Austvoll Jensen invites everyone to become a member of the newly started adventure club in Norway. The goal is to have the largest collection of tips in the Nordic countries, he writes. The club will also publish a club magazine 5-10 times a year. The club promises good membership offers, thanks to a close collaboration with Zigma Zoft, which produces adventures in Norwegian. If you want more information, you can contact the Adventure Club, PO Box 1642, 8010 Bodin. And remember to return postage!”
Great, thanks for all the info! I’ll try to get through Dragedreperen after the Norace games. It seems like CASA is in better shape technically now, so maybe I’ll finally stop being lazy and register there to upload some stuff. I can say that Gnom in particular definitely “feels” a little different than a normal Quill game. It seems more devious and complex, there’s some odd use of colors and character graphics, the text is a bit more descriptive, etc. Obviously, he was very well-versed in the system, was a pretty good coder, and was trying to use this game as a bit of a showcase.
I had been through some of the early Hobbydata issues, but hadn’t gotten to the Mikrodata/PC Mikrodata time-frame yet. I’ll have to change that, because this one issue alone is a goldmine! Besides the adventureklubb ads, there’s also the last section of a 4-issue long adventure type-in (also recently added to GB64 as “Adventurespill” but I don’t think anyone’s actually typed it in yet), a mini-review of a seemingly unknown Norwegian Dragon 32 adventure (“Eventyr”) and a Norace ad that has more details than I had seen before. I recently found some interesting stuff while going through issues of Hjemmedata (including a lost MZ-700 adventure called Gruva), so it’s safe to say that the Norwegian scene is still fertile ground for lost/unknown games.
Just a quick follow-up here: I played a little way through Dragedreperen, and it is indeed a very typical early Quill game. The easiest comparisons that sprang to mind were the first couple of Larsoft games on the Electron, before Larsen mastered the program and made some much more intricate and atmospheric (almost “folk horror”) adventures. Very simple fantasy quests, but enlivened by a bit of humor – a peppering of prog rock references in the Larsoft games, and a cerrtain sarcastic tone in Dragedreperen where he’s basically acknowledging that it’s the most clichéd premise possible. The Norace games (Gnom in particular), as I mentioned before, are more impressive, and seem influenced by the traditional, tough treasure hunts of the late 70s/early 80s.
After further investigation, I believe that I’ve found some pretty solid evidence, aside from the references in period articles and ads, that Spectrum versions of Norace Quill and the two games do indeed exist:
In Joachim Froholt’s original article on Spillhistorie about the discovery and preservation of Norace Quill, there is that one picture that I mentioned previously of Tim Gilberts’ personal collection. Well, if you blow up the photo and look closely, you’ll notice that while the version sticker on the bottom right of Gnom says CBM, the one on Jungel Jakt, mostly hidden behind a couple copies of (ironically) Denis Through the Drinking Glass, actually starts with an ‘S’, presumably for Spectrum. You’ll also notice that both games have two copies standing in front of each other, possibly one for each platform.
In that same article, Froholt mentions the only other two known (at that time) Norwegian Quill games, both for the Spectrum, and links to their entries on CASA. Now, if you examine them carefully, you’ll notice that one of them, Prinsessen i Berget det Blaa, was clearly written with the standard UK Quill, as like Dragedreperen, it uses the standard substitutions for Scandinavian vowels – ‘aa’ for ‘å’, ae for æ, a zero for uppercase ‘Ø’ and ‘oe’ for lower case. However, the other game, The Lost Quill, uses the proper vowels, strongly indicating that, unless author Frode Tennebø came up with some special tricks, it was most likely written using the Spectrum version of Norace’s Quill. Perhaps this might be possible to check out, as it may not present the same difficulties you’ve had with the C64 files?
In any case, it would be interesting to confirm this with Tim Gilberts directly, and see if he might be willing to have them dumped and preserved. It would seem that he also has the Norace Quill manual, which as far as I can tell has never been scanned in.
As a cockney from London’s East End “lolly” is very common down here. It apparently goes back to 1854 whan the verb “to loll” became a back formation to a noun implying someone you dangle as a temptation. There are of course many many different colloquialisms for money. Around here a lady is £5 (Lady Godiva equals fiver) a cockle is a tenner (cockle and hen is ten) and my personal favourite; £15 is a Commodore (three times a lady). If you watch an episode of the fabulous Minder you can learn a whole lot more.
One of the weirder ones is to ‘loid a lock (meaning to open a locked door with a credit card).
“Commodore” is fantastic! I’ve been exposed to a lot of these from the cryptics in the Graun, where “ready abroad” is sure to mean bhat or rand or some other overseas currency. As well as a bunch of other rhyming slang such as “porridge” meaning a prison sentence because “life” rhymes with “porridge knife,” for some reason. (Though the OED first attests that in 1950, as a judge who gives heavy sentences dishing out the gravy or porridge, so maybe the rhyming slang is a folk etymology?)
Some of them work at several times removal. “Arris” means backside down here. This comes from arris-Aristotle-bottle-bottle and glass-arse. Another common one is “taters” from “potatoes in the mould,” meaning cold. Another classic is “syrup” meaning wig from syrup of figs.
Oh yeah, there was one recently where the clue seemed to depend “syrup” becoming RUG because it was a reversal of gur, another name for the Bangladeshi sugar product jaggery, and the fifteensquared* commenters were complaining that jaggery is a solid not a syrup, and then someone piped up to say that syrup = wig = rug. Even the Britons were mad about that one.
*A blog for discussing British cryptics–this is how I learned many of these expressions. You never know what will cross the pond, on Friday a setter named Yank had “Cold one in dictator’s funerary sand” and I popped in “BEER” (homophone for “bier”) without a second thought, while the British commenters were furious about “cold one” as a definition for beer.
I like to stimulate the synapses with the Times Crossword and have struggled with it over the years. I don’t agree with its politics apart from Rob Liddle but two classic clues from my memory are Die Of Cold (3,4) and Magic Well (5,9).
So, Crash and Mikrogen got to an agreement at that fair. I wonder what was the winning part of the agreement for Crash… ;-)
Mikro-Gen had some decent games later, but wow, this was a weird one to start with.