Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I did get a victory screen, and I am surprised because I thought the whole game was going to collapse in a mess of bugs before I got there. I had Dunmark Pykro in my inventory when I won the game.

(My previous post needed for context.)

Continuing directly from last time, I had a robot guard where I was unclear what to do. Part my of issue is that using OPEN on the PURSE gives an error, and I had already been able to nab the food from the grocery store; combining the two facts, I assumed the purse was being implicitly used somehow. No: the purse is opened by using LOOK on it, at which point you find some GOLD. You can then GIVE GOLD which is effective on the guard, and even the main character is confused that the puzzle solution worked.

This opens up a new section of the game.

To the east of the guard is a “sewer entrance” and a “thiefs lair” and as far as I can tell you never get your objects stolen so the lair is just for color.

This might genuinely just be for atmosphere.

To the north of the sewer (… not even going to bother with the forward/backwards/left/right thing anymore …) there is an armory with a robot de-activator. You can cart the de-activator back over to where the ROBOT DOUBLE was and use it to fry the robot, leaving behind a robot hand.

Behind the fried robot there is a universal communicator, which you can take over to the alien — the one that was our informant but we couldn’t understand — to get the password for the keypad.

If you go back to the start which had a side entrance with a keyboard, trying to use the password just gets you tossed into jail.

I should give some attention to jail, as it is entirely optional — you just avoid anything that gets you caught — but it does something clever. The first time you’re caught, you end up in a “low security” cell where you can CUT MATTRESS (how? don’t know) and reveal some SPRINGS, then use the springs to PICK LOCK and escape. This deposits you at the LOCKERS and you can LOOK LOCKERS to retrieve all your stuff you had in your inventory. (This includes, still in my case, a TECH GUN, ROBOT GUARDS, ALARM, and SECRETARY. This will become important later.)

If you get caught again (in addition to the door trap, typing SLEEP will get you picked up) you land in a medium-security cell. This time there are WALLS you can look at to find a BOLT, and USE BOLT will free you (it is unclear what is being done with the bolt, but I assume it’s PICK LOCK again except there’s no lock object to refer to).

If you get caught yet again you land in a high-security cell, which you can escape with the power of your mind via THINK. The text clues it pretty well (I had also made my verb list by now and I knew THINK was on it).

Get caught a fourth time and you die. The “upgraded accommodation” trick I ended up finding the best part of the game (there’s shades of a similar trick in Legend of Kyrandia 3 but it is still uncommon).

Returning back to the action: the password needs to get stored under our hat for now, and fortunately there’s still another route to go, as heading east from the sewers will reach a Urr-Beast. The Beast blocks exits to the north and east but you can still go south to find a BEAST KEEPERS ROOM.

The side room has a GROOMING KIT; taking it back north, you can GROOM BEAST and it will purr happily and go to sleep in the corner. This opens access to a data library with a MANUAL…

There’s a MAGTAPE also that can’t be referred to. This game has a nasty tendency to put objects in the room description that don’t exist with respect to the parser.

…and the manual can be read in order to learn operation of a ANTI-ASSASSIN COMPUTER and shut it down.

I never found out what grisly death this prevents.

Back at the guard which was bribed with gold, there’s an exit to the west (I had the accidental fortune of finding it after I finished all the events above). There’s a palm scanner and you can use the robot hand from the double in order to activate it.

Now comes the hardest of the three minigames, as after you cross the bridge over the spikes you get swarmed with droids. They appear on all sides, and you move with the keys right, left, A (up), Z (down), with space for shooting.

This game is genuinely original. It feels somewhat like Solar Fox as far as flying around a middle space section and avoiding things from the side, but I can’t think of an exact equivalent. You’re still getting shot at just like the previous mini-game and once again you have to defeat all the enemies twice.

This was by far the hardest of the three mini-games due to having to keep track of all four directions. If you hit a wall you bounce, so there’s no wrecking on the sides, but it is very easy to keep trapped with no way out by a rogue bullet. It was possible to be trapped in the first mini-game but only at the very start with the initial volley of bullets all coming at the same time.

You can afford to get hit twice, and there’s colorful narrative text going along with the hit. This is another fairly novel idea but it gets tiresome when you are playing the arcade game on repeat, which you will be unless you make liberal use of save states.

Moving on to the third part of the game, it goes fairly linearly. First, there’s some toxic gas (wearing the breathing apparatus works to get through).

This is followed by a uniform storage closet.

You need to wear a uniform, as well as nab the makeup kit from the lockers and use that as well, so you appear like one of the regular guards. This lets you get past a security checkpoint…

…and a secretary (which our protagonist wants to skeevily hit on, 1930s noir style).

Just walking past takes you to a transport tube, where there’s another keypad. This time you can type the password (PYKRO RULES) without getting caught.

Finally our hero reaches the Dunmark Pykro’s office, and things go very strange indeed both at the reality level and at the game-bug level.

The cut-off part of the text says he’s SURE ACTING KINDA’ KINKY. I have no idea what the evil business overlord gave us, because it never appeared in the room or in my inventory. In fact, Dunmark Pykro isn’t in the room at all. (I can at least reassure you that no WHIP object exists in the game.)

Baffled and strongly suspecting the game might be unfinishable, I tried going LEFT and found myself back at a steel door with another keypad. Trying to use the password again got me caught and tossed into jail (I hadn’t burned all three iterations on this save file) so I broke out and looked over every location I visited in case something new had happened. Indeed:

That’s back at the beast keeper place, where there was also a newly-added pile of junk. The Dunmark Pykro object somehow got teleported over here, and furthermore, I was able to TAKE him and carry him in inventory the rest of the game.

Heading back to the steel door, you can just ignore it and move on to find an intersection. Off in one direction is a SMALL ARMORY with a spacesuit…

…and in the other is a spacecraft you can escape with.

Again, Pykro was still in inventory when I did LAUNCH. I did try to KILL PYKRO but the game said

IT DIDN’T WORK FOR SOME REASON.(!?)

and no other verb from my big list had any effect at all. It doesn’t matter because launching the spacecraft leads to the third mini-game, followed by victory.

Almost identical to the first mini-game, but the two rows of ships are moving in opposite directions and you’re shooting from the bottom.

As before, the ships move faster when there are less on the screen. Unlike before, you need to beat the screen four times — that is, after everything is killed, it resets and you have to do it again — before reaching victory.

Adventurecade #2 coming soon, eh?

Let’s check out of this by asking the question: why did the company disappear? First of all, as you can probably tell, the quality was wobbly; despite some clever moments, I would take any of the Sierra On-Line games over this one. The mini-games were not fun to play and tilted annoyingly hard, especially given the screen repeats. I will give the game the benefit of the doubt as far as the bugs go; like most Apple II games, this one needed to be “cracked” to be played due to copy protection, and it is possible something broke which caused a SECRETARY to show up in the player’s inventory immediately upon finishing the first mini-game.

Still, for Apple II circa 1982, it had a fighting chance in the market, especially because the graphics genuinely hovered around “decent”; all the people were clearly of the squished-head Sierra variety, but the environmental graphics shows some genuine artistic thought.

Mind you, even Sierra was struggling to sell their graphics starting in 1983 (when The Desecration finally hit general distribution) so possibly it was a game made a little too late.

Additionally, the Mind Games duo (Greg Segall and Gil Beyda) went entirely on their own: they turned down distributors at Applefest (which was, in retrospect, a mistake). A September 1983 profile from the magazine L’Ordinateur individuel notes they have “d’entreprise bien américain” and how it was admirable that they did everything up to and including distribution to retailers. The article claims it is “un exemple à suivre” (“an example to follow”) but I suspect low sales led to their downfall. I have never seen a copy of this game for sale so it is likely quite rare.

In my comments, Rob had found a Japanese article from 1979 involving a visit to Los Angeles and their computer stores. This picture is from Computers Are Fun in central LA, where Gil Beyda was working. The article notes the store mostly specialized in Apple II products but had trouble making their rent of $400 a month. (Image assistance from eientei and ftb1979.)

Maybe it was good for the experience. While I don’t know about Greg Segall, Gil Beyda at least went on to a successful career in technology and now works as a venture capitalist.

Coming up: Some small non-sci-fi games, just for a change of pace, including another early Tolkien game.