This is a continuation of the historical story from Uncle Harry’s Will and Whembly Castle, as today’s game was again sold by Dynacomp for North Star computers, but this time with a different author: Dennis N. Strong. Mr. Strong had two games (this one and Zodiac Castle) show up in the Dynacomp Winter Catalog as “late additions”.
Via WorthPoint.
As the disk above implies, there is an important difference between the Strong games and the Turner games: Strong’s were ported to Apple II.
Through the investigations of Roger Durrant, we know the Apple II version of Windmere Estate is preferred (the North Star is glitchier, and the Apple II has some extra ASCII graphics). The reverse is true of Zodiac Castle as the Apple II version of Zodiac Castle has a fatal bug.
This is a straightforward explore-the-place-and-nab-the-treasures adventure; here, they’re going to a WAREHOUSE.
The most notable early difference is that the Apple II port notes
THERE ARE OCCASIONALLY ‘HINTS’ AVAILABLE AT THE COMPLEX SPOTS.
which is not mentioned in the North Star version! HINT is a recognized command on North Star but it crashes the game.
Oddly, the Dynacomp catalog’s “ad” has instructions with more detail than either version. Specifically:
- Lights turn on with LIGHT ON or ON; given the light device is a FLASHLIGHT, this is rather difficult to discover (otherwise why not FLASHLIGHT ON?).
- There is a strong emphasis on hidden rooms.
- The inventory limit is seven unless you can place an item inside another item.
- There are deadly vampire bats although there’s “one sure repellant available somewhere out there.”
For the very first part of the game I’m going to give some clips from the North Star version before switching over entirely to Apple II.
You are in the Rose Garden.
You are standing in the middle of a Rose Garden. To the north a path leads to a small Building. To the south you can see a tall hedge row. A path leads east toward the Main Gate, and west is an old Well.
E
You are At the Main Gate
This is the Main Entrance to the estate, although the gate is rusted shut. Through the gate is visible a large low building South is the Gate House, north, a path runs along the wall, and east is a gravel path.
S
You are in the Gate House.
This is the Gate House for the old Estate. It has not been used for quite some time, and there is dust everywhere. The only remaining furniture is a small cabinet on the floor.
There is a locked leather DIARY here!
Opening the cabinet reveals the FLASHLIGHT where I tortured myself for a while trying to activate it before discovering the information from the catalog (again, despite it be referred to as a FLASHLIGHT in text, the parser wants it used by typing LIGHT ON; light is being used as a verb, there’s no way to light the flashlight by using flashlight as a noun).
Heading back to the start and going north:
You are standing in front of what appears to be the groundskeepers house. There are paths west, south, and east. There is a door and one window visible on the ground floor.
N
It is dark – You cannot see anything!ON
That’s much better!A devilish looking Vampire BAT swoops down and blocks the way
You are inside Groundskeeper’s House.
This building obviously has not been used recently, judging by the dust. There is a cupboard standing open in the corner.
There is a box of rat POISON here!
There is an old SHOVEL here!
There is a coil of ROPE here!
There is a Vampire BAT here!
Unfortunately, at trying to get something the bat swoops down and kills you. You need to get the “repellent” first before the items.
Well, most of them. The ROPE is not placed here in the Apple II version of the game, but rather past a hedge maze leading to the main house!
Finding this difference (and knowing the Apple II version has working hints) I decided to swap over entirely.
The vampire “repellent” was rather quick to find: you can go up past the bat room.
YOU ARE IN THE LIVING QUARTERS.
THIS IS WHERE THE GROUNDSKEEPER USE TO LIVE. IN THE ROOM ARE A BED, A DRESSER AND A CLOSET.>OPEN DRESSER
YOU SEE A SMALL JEWELED ‘CROSS’
Entering a dark room without the cross results in the back coming back, so I expect the cross will be carried the entire game, meaning two of the seven allocated inventory slots have already been eaten up. Not great for a treasure collection game!
Fortunately, just in the closet (OPEN CLOSET) there is some relief, as in addition to a gold key it contains a sack; this presumably is what the catalog-instructions was referring to. Unfortunately, I have no idea what command makes the sack work!
I referenced a hedge maze already, so let me give the initial part of the game:
I used Dungeon Scrawl for the hedge maze.
Getting down to the bottom of the well requires simply TIE ROPE (not ATTACH ROPE as the Dynacomp catalog implies)
YOU DEFTLY TIE THE ROPE TO THE CRANK SPINDLE ANO TOSS THE OTHER ENO DOWN THE WELL.
This leads to a waterless “well bottom” which also turns out to be underneath the house. It connects with a “wine cellar” and “furnace” and some stairs leading up to the main building.
I have yet to get in the door with the strangely shaped keyhole.
Everything past this is very open so this is a good place to pause. I suspect the “hidden rooms” are going to cause the biggest pain. This is especially true because the parser is quite non-cooperative. Nearly every command that is not understood repeats the command back with question marks. So if you want to MOVE BED to check for something underneath, it responds with MOVE BED??? and no information is conveyed about if the verb is understood, or if the noun is something even meant to be referred to.
There easily could be a secret here, but nothing I’ve tried has worked. The plaque says “STAR BATS”.
I’ll give the full tour next time.
Renga in Blue 
I’ve got most of the game mapped out, I think. It’s probably a matter of solving a few puzzles now, and then figuring out the sequencing to get all the treasures stored. Speaking of which, this seems to have one of the highest ratios of treasures to to room count that I can remember. You have to collect way more treasures than usual compared to most traditional treasure hunts, and the inventory limit is small, so it’s too much repetitive lugging back and forth. At least the map isn’t huge, and the way you can keep linking it up with shortcuts as you go along is clever. The parser is complete trash, though. I think it’s actually worse than Harry/Whembly, and is actively misleading at times.
I don’t want any hints yet, but I’ll mention I did find STAB RATS is recognized at the plaque. The parser problem is STAB RATS does nothing in that room (“YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT TRACK BUT IT IS JUST NOT RIGHT”) and it gets completely misunderstood elsewhere (just “STAB RATS???”). That’s severely rude; I just have to assume when I get the three question mark thing I get no information other than that exact phrase doesn’t work in that exact room under the exact conditions I did the typing.
I think it is about a third of the size of Whembly Castle Rob but at least without the hundred odd maze rooms of that game. I have always liked mazes but even I got fed up with Whembly’s interminable examples. This has around 105 rooms if memory serves me correctly so it certainly isn’t small. I shall follow the progress on here when I can as I am away until next Monday.
There are definitely some prize parser frustrations in this one Jason. Some objects are given different names in the description compared to parser acceptability; ‘portrait’ and ‘picture’ for instance. The map and safe should keep you busy banging your head against the wall. There are some clever puzzles however and I was certainly fooled by the rat poison for a while. This one is not afraid to throw some softlocks at you.
if you mean the method of applying the code from the map onto the vault upstairs, I am happy to take spoilers if it’s just a syntax thing (if that’s just wrong somehow, I’ll work things out myself later then)
Not being at home at the moment I can’t check my notes but I remember having a lot of trouble parsing the safe combination in a way the game understands. For some reason you can’t take the map back out with you which I never really understood and I spent a long time trying to don’t in case it was a puzzle in itself. I seem to remember struggling to launch the boat too and there is that hardy perennial the missing exit description as well. Despite these impedementa I still rather enjoyed the game including the nice touch recharging the lamp.
The puzzle is that there is no real puzzle. Just enter the combination straight in, exactly as it’s written. The only shenanigan is that you nonsensicaly have to be holding the map for it to work, but the game’s response kind of clues you in on this if you enter the combination without holding it, so it was just a matter of having to run back and fetch it, which is all too typical of this game.
I actually got this one quickly, mostly because of something similar in another game I played not too long ago, and because I had figured out that this crap parser is completely bespoke location/item based, and can’t handle any sort of extended sequences. I had also already seen that this game has a pattern of destroying your non-treasure items after their one proper use, so I figured the map getting stuck inside wasn’t actually a softlock. The portrait thing that Roger mentions is much worse, and is somewhat similar to the Orac hint command silliness in Dark Star, now that I think of it.
One other thing that seems to be janky in this game is the percentage counter for rooms visited. I’ve got what must be almost the entire thing mapped out, having been sure to visit each room at least once, but the percentage listed always lags well behind my mapping. Maybe this will suddenly fix itself in the end, but it still seems odd. It’s a weird feature anyway, being counted separately from the actual score, which seems entirely treasure-deposit based.
You seen a nice enough “sole” 😂
I love the amateurishness of the games of this era.
Being a sole it makes me wonder why you need to use the boat.
Another bug revolves around location descriptions not updating. The map for instance is still described as being in the room you take it from after having been removed from this location if I remember correctly.
I’ve won the game. Misspelled winning message redacted so as to not spoil its glory. I had hoped this one would take a bit longer, but oh well. I’ll save my final thoughts on it until after you’ve finished.
415 of 415 points in 778 moves. However, it says I covered 95% of the area, when in fact I visited every room, which I confirmed by looking at the maps on CASA after I won. So that counter stayed janky to the end. I think it may have something to do with moving around in the dark, but it doesn’t really matter now.
I put the map up on CASA a time ago but I think I had the same message as you i.e. less than 100 per cent covered. The additional exit bss gur oerrmrjnl had me floored for a while I seem to recall.
Wow, it’s really jarring to see a 5¼-inch floppy with a website URL. I wonder when these were produced.
Cranston Manor! I knew nothing of the non-Apple ][ lineage, but when I read the first entry that’s immediately what I thought… “shades of Cranston Manor”.
The other one I was thinking of was Journey (the 1979 Apple II game) which has a well, a rat fight and a vault. It is still different enough I can’t say for sure, though.