Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

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

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

This was mostly a matter of realizing the system this was going for, which is to use almost no verbs at all. The command list given in the game is essentially

GET, DROP, EXAMINE, INSERT (insert keys), SHOOT, READ

with a heavy, heavy reliance on DROP. DROP doubles as USE: it applies the object you put to whatever is nearby, and it may or may not display a helpful message as it does so.

The atmosphere is something a cross between Seek and Arkenstone. Seek in that having nearly everything happen with DROP (combined with sparse descriptions) makes for an almost board-game like feel, and Arkenstone in having all of the locations from the book jammed together in a way that doesn’t entirely make sense.

Continuing from last time, there was a warp transporter hanging out near Arthur Dent’s House that I was unable to activate with a crystal. Following my statement above, you just need to DROP the crystal and it works, but it works by opening a passage to the south with no fanfare.

This leads to a “Betelguese Spacedome” and I’ll mark the whole area in light purple. Not everything is accessible right away.

You’re first stopped by a “nutty Vogon guard” and you’re supposed to DROP some peanuts (ha ha, ha).

the Vogon jumps for joy and runs off
with a handful of peanuts

This is immediately adjacent to the Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy (see? it’s like Arkenstone geography) where you can buy a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster with money. (Or rather, you try to TAKE PAN, are told the bartender needs money, drop the right item, and then you are allowed to take the Gargle Blaster. Also, take the item you used to pay for it, since it just gets left right there.)

After that comes a fountain with a babel fish that is not cooperative about being picked up…

…and an “angry Arkelsiesure” blocking a hallway. (As usual, it isn’t clear the creature is blocking anything — you only find out after resolving the obstacle.)

Available also for nabbing are some matches, a Vogon mega-steak, and a galactic data card. There’s one locked door (keys are coming soon) and some whalemeat that you do nothing at all with.

We are on an undulating walkway

You can go North, East

That looks like
ten tons of whalemeat

Taking the matches, we can head back over to the hay monster that was stopping us before and set it on fire (again, DROP, not LIGHT MATCHES or anything like that). This opens up a Small Shop with a stun gun, which can then be toted over to the Vogon Captain and — astonishingly enough — used via the SHOOT verb rather than DROP. I guess here it seemed too implausible to activate a gun by dropping.

This opens up the third area, which is roughly “ship + outer space” but again things are very loosely connected to any real geography:

Some keys (told you they were coming) are easy to grab, as is a cheque signed by Zaphod Beeblebrox which is ripped directly from Supersoft Hitchhiker’s. Let’s save the cheque for now and go use the keys:

Poetry, my favorite, and it gets applied in exactly the same way as it does in the Supersoft game: to scare a way a tiger.

From here you can access a “beast of TRALL” who will take the mega-steak, opening passage to a white mouse that is too fast to take. Going east instead leads to an Engine Room described as having an improbable situation. I nabbed the Improbability Drive (just hanging out in town), plopped it down, and was mystified when nothing happened. This is the one part where EXAMINE was useful, as I could EXAMINE the engine.

Fortunately I had one of those; dropping both items activates the engine and new exits, leading to: a Vogon coin, a Vogon data machine, a robot control circuit, chocolates, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought, and a mega-elephant blocking the way. Deep Thought is an item you can pick up and as far as I can tell (despite being the mega-computer that figured out “42” in the book) is entirely useless in the game.

To get past the mega-elephant, you need to go back to the market with the cheesecake, buy it with the Vogon coin, and drop it at the mouse, which suddenly gets described as sleepy. (There’s some text that doesn’t show in the game about it eating the cake up. The cake doesn’t actually disappear, though.) Then toting the mouse over to the elephant:

This opens up a Vortex where there’s a colorful poster; the poster is one of the artefacts. (We’ve already seen two other artefacts, the book of poetry and the Hitchhiker’s Guide. The only way to tell is to drop the items at the Inn and check if your score has increased.)

Toting the chocolate back over to the babel fish — look, this was just something you did in the Supersoft game, I have no idea what the motivation would be here — you can drop it, and the fish will eat the chocolate and get drunk, allowing you to pick it up and get the language-understanding from the book.

If you use the cheque (from way back a bit when we found keys) you can buy the Gargle Blaster and deliver it to the Arkleseizure; as long as you’re wearing the babel fish you will find out exits you can take. Again, this is entirely a ripoff of the Supersoft game, including the softlock that happens if you hand over the drink before wearing the babel fish.

In the original he said to go west.

This opens passages to a dirty towel (not a treasure), a bowel of petunias (treasure), Slartibartfast (who you can pick up for some reason), and Marvin the depressed robot.

Dropping the circuit board from back in the Vogon/space area over here doesn’t seem to work, but it’s just the game’s code being weird; once you have dropped the board, you are allowed to take Marvin, and the board will come along with him.

There’s a third game this all reminds me of, and that’s Eldorado Gold. That was a game which took a different game (Lost Dutchman’s Mine) and did sort of a parody version but was otherwise ripped quite directly, including I expect the code.

Here, there doesn’t seem to be any parody going on: this is just the author apparently being a fan of the Supersoft game and doing their own remix, including stolen puzzles. It still counts as its own game and the extra bugs (and intentional red herrings) mean you can have very strange object lists.

According to the walkthrough on CASA, there’s some unused text:

“The barman won’t let us”
“The barman says THAT’LL DO NICELY”
“The mouse swallows the cheesecake,burps and falls asleep”
“Marvin says LIFE’S TOTALLY BORING and wanders off”
“Great Idea Guys-nothing happened”
“Whoops!! A nasty Vogon just spotted us”
“Vogon has disintegrated us”
“Great Idea Guys,maybe the Megadonkey cancarry some stuff”
“jumping Gargle Blasters,the Megadonkey kicked everything off
and bolted”

which suggests the author got up to the point where the game was “working” and then decided it was good enough to put onto tape. Is Marvin wandering off a softlock or was there meant to be a mechanic where we can follow him around? Was the Vogon meant to be more aggressive? What was the real plan with the Megadonkey? The inventory limit is 3, so an increased capacity would have been welcome. Funnily enough, the presence of the Megadonkey means this game could even have gone to the same source as Eldorado Gold (Lost Dutchman’s Mine) as that game has a mule that you can use to carry inventory, and it isn’t a common attribute in games of this era at all.

Peter Smith will return soon with a Dr. Who-themed game. For now, coming up: two short games, and then the sequel to one of the most difficult games from 1981.

One exit will either send you to a random close-by room if you’re holding the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, or send you into space if you’re not. I have no idea if there was some plot or puzzle this was supposed to lead to that the author simply forgot about.