(Continued from my previous post.)
I have more of the map, but I feel like I’m getting trapped by parser nonsense.
Via the magazine Portable Companion, as Dynacomp sold Osborne software.
Let’s start in the area we’ve already seen, at the room just east of the beginning:
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.
I was puzzled by this room description at first as it seemed to imply (via it being a Main Entrance) that we entered through that route, so why would it be rusted shut? Maybe we parachuted in, like Avventura nel castello.
A bit across the estate there’s a crowbar, and if you tote the crowbar back, you can PRY GATE to bust it open and reveal a WAREHOUSE. This is where the treasures go.
Let me give my meta-map before going any farther (this gives how things are connected in a general way):
I’m likely missing a fair chunk; the most likely candidate for missing geography is the strange door at the bottom of the well I gave a screenshot of last time. Just as an encore:
The DIARY found early unlocks with a KEY laying around the estate, and it contains the hint that THE SKELETON IS YOUR KEY TO SUCCESS. I don’t know if that means I’m supposed to make some horrid pun to open the door or if I just use something unusual like a bone; since I haven’t found any bones I can’t test that yet.
On to the main house proper:
It’s essentially one long central hall with some side rooms. To the north there’s a study with a map (“25L 40R 88L”) that we’ll use in a moment, and a book which I haven’t puzzled out yet (other than it does count as a treasure).
THIS BOOK APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN THE JOURNAL OF ONE OF THE ANCESTORS OF THE FAMILY. IT DESCRIBES BEING ROBBED BY PIRATES WHILE ON A SHIP FROM ENGLAND. THE MAN WAS OBVIOUSLY UNHAPPY SINCE THE LAST WORDS ARE ‘BLAST THE PIRATES’.
To the south are a candlestick (treasure) and a truly confusing room with a plaque I shared last time.
The plaque says “STAR BATS”.
Thinking in terms of a mirror, this could be written as STAB RATS. Two rooms to the east there are, in fact, bats, and STAB does nothing as far as the parser goes, although KILL works as long as you are holding the poison from the groundskeeper’s house.
In some games this would mean simple victory, but seems to be absolutely no positive effect to killing the rats. I suspect I’m chasing down a blind alley somehow.
Oh, and speaking of parser issues, there’s a Servant’s Quarters with a DUMBWAITER that is resistant to any of my efforts of having it do anything at all. If there’s another giant set of rooms it probably is related to that.
On to the upstairs (map above)! There’s a gold watch, lighter, and pair of earrings just lying about. The earrings are in a MASTER BEDROOM with a truly suspicious portrait which is again resistant to my parser-shenanigans.
Notice how the last parser message is different. I wonder if this is a “chink in the armor” so to speak; occasionally in what is mostly a bespoke parser I can still work out things like “which nouns are useful to try mucking about with” via odd phenomena like this.
The upstairs also contains a room with a roll-top desk (no idea if it can be referred to) and a VAULT. The vault clearly was intended to have the code from the MAP downstairs applied, but I was truly baffled trying a set of commands like TURN DIAL, OPEN VAULT, ENTER CODE, etc. Rob and Roger in the comments let me know that 25L 40R 88L needed to be typed flat out, exactly like that.
Inside is some CURRENCY, and that’s that. (You’re forced to leave behind the MAP, but it seems to have no value.)
Finally, let’s visit the garage and docks:
Not much to speak of yet. There’s that crowbar used on the main gate, a box of sawdust, and a locked trunk I have been unable to open; there’s oars lying around and a boat you can ROW. Typing ROW BOAT, weirdly, leads you over to behind the caretaker’s house where there’s a treasure (a STATUETTE). I’m unclear the geography here, but given you’re supposed to be moving along a stream, I don’t think it’s meant to be a literal wrap-around map like The Hermit’s Secret.
Instead of jumping in the boat you can go west over to a pier, where there’s a lake and an island visible to the southwest. However, jumping the lake and typing SWIM just takes you back to the docks. The boat won’t move and I haven’t been able to steer it towards the island. I suspect this represents a third set of rooms I haven’t seen yet.
That weird “MOVE” response again.
Maybe I’ll switch back to North Star for a while; even if it is buggier than the Apple II version, it might be buggy in different ways that will reveal potential puzzle solutions. Maybe just seeing the text without ALL CAPS will trigger my brain to move in new ways.
Renga in Blue 
Something that you mentioned with the lake/pier is supposed to work, so I’m a bit puzzled here. Did you try the relevant verb(s) in each of those locations?
I will poke at it. Note that at one point reading the plaque just stopped working for no apparent reason so it is quite possible I typed the right thing somewhere but the game decided to reject it anyway.
I honestly didn’t encounter any bugs that I can recall, but aside from the terrible parser, I think there were one or two things which required an exact sequence of two commands within one room, or an otherwise valid command wouldn’t work.
I took a brief look at Zodiac, and it seems even worse. I think I’ll take a hack at the Apple II version when you get there, and just see if a code fix will work for the reportedly fatal bug. I don’t think I have the stomach for any more North Star emulation right now, after trudging through Harry and Whembly.
That Dynacomp ad you linked is interesting, because Starship Landing Party is also listed as being available for Apple and Atari by their 1984 catalog. The blurb claims it features full sentence input and command take-back.
Annoyingly the parser understands PICTURE and not PORTRAIT. The rat poisoning is a softlock; they are needed somewhere else. The North Star version, though unfinishable does understand PORTRAIT I think. Without looking at my notes at home I can’t remember the boat problem very well.
I am sure you can swim to the island. Have you tried SWIM SOUTH from the end of the pier? Remember to leave the flashlight behind. I am fishing from my memory pool here but I think those observations are correct. I can’t remember which room needs the rat solution but it may be the one with the fireplace.
yeah, the Apple II one is still buggy:
GET EARRINGS
YOU TAKE SOME DIAMOND ‘EARRINGS’
S
I/O ERROR
BREAK IN 0
I never had any problems like that when I played it via Applewin; strange indeed. I ended with full points but beyond parser annoyances I had no game breaks. Zodiac Castle via North Star crashed innumerable times when moving in the dark passages at the start (although not subsequently and my saved games in this section enabled me to blunder through) and there is an exit mentioned that is not explorable but also not needed. I suppose the latter makes a change from unmentioned exits. The latter game at least is finishable as you can descend the grate in the dungeon.
That’s weird, because nothing like that happened to me either. Maybe some specific command or sequence that you had done earlier somehow triggered bugs to appear later? I remember that Whembly on the North Star was very unstable like that, to the point that some bugs seemed specific to individual save states.
I had no problem with the weathervane, as I think the very first command I tried was TURN. I didn’t even know that location was one of the few with a hint until I skimmed through the code of the North Star version to look for differences after I’d won. The one that irritated me the most was the parser shenanigan of only TAKE suddenly working instead of GET when you need the rope back from the well to descend into the “platypus” cave near the end. I think I actually flipped the bird at my laptop screen in disgust after that one…
you realize the weathervane is described as being to the WEST when it is to the EAST (in an entirely different room), right?
I kept trying a bunch of things on a weathervane that wasn’t actually in the room, because the only way for it to be to the west was it for also to be in the observation tower
Ha! I just went back and looked at my map, and you’re right. The only explanation must be that when I first hit that room I did my usual thing of saving and then systematically testing out all of the possible exit directions before trying anything in the room itself. Thus I quickly hit the actual weathervane room without getting hung up on that. This may be a consequence of me being an inveterate “text mapper” rather than using drawn maps or Trizbort. I’m always scanning through my columns of linked numbers, and tend to put more emphasis on that than the room descriptions themselves, until I absolutely need to.
Speaking of the observatory, I did like the spyglass bit. Nice use of a treasure as a necessary item in a geographically logical location, and also fits in well with the author’s obvious map-centric game design, with his predilection for secret rooms, linking up locations, etc.
I finished, and the final post will likely be today. I found the large weathervane to the “west” to be rather rude.
Yes not a great logistical puzzle. It would have been if the directions made sense. Tower Of Barad has a field of wheat bending to the south in a southerly wind.