Since nobody has a picture of Time Adventure’s cover as of this writing, here’s another game by the company from the same year. Zombie Island is a top-down game in the style of Robots/Chase, the same style that eventually inspired Deadly Rooms of Death. Source.
To recap, I had (but hadn’t used yet) a sack of coal, a frog, a glowworm, some cheese soup, some matches, and a life boat. I was facing a tiger, a prickly bush, and a “lazer beam” (what turns out to be the only place you can die in the game!)
The general theme of the parts I was stuck on last time can be summed as two parts confusion with the parser and one part personal blindness. Tackling the face-palm first:
I missed entirely — despite it being clearly listed — an exit to the south here. This leads to a “rubbish tip” with a “small white mouse” that will take the cheese soup. The mouse could be considered another Hitch-Hiker cameo.
The key doesn’t get used until later (and it is fairly obvious when it comes up) so I was still flailing. I went back and tested the frog some more; I had tried KISS FROG both while having the frog on the ground and while holding it, and neither seemed to have an effect. The word “seemed” is applicable, as KISS FROG while holding it turns it into a princess, but with no message whatsoever. The only way to find out is to take inventory afterwards. Here’s three screenshots with the whole sequence:
This is doubly tricky in that the response of nothing also tends to happen with other special commands that do nothing (like if you PUSH or PULL or USE where it doesn’t apply, which is most places) so the player has to just guess something happened.
That still doesn’t give progress though! (The princess is used much later.) The last issue was halfway between my fault and the game’s, because I had definitely tested burning the prickly bush with the matches, but I had tried it with USE MATCHES. In general, despite DROP being used for many things, it has always been used in way it still makes sense (giving the whiskey over to the doorman is DROP WHISKY, but you could visualize the act of handing it over being like dropping it). I had no such visualization with matches so I didn’t try the obvious thing of DROP MATCHES. (Implicitly, they’re being lit first, then you drop them.)
This opens a large new area with rooms described as a mixture of “small dark cave”, “dark smelly cave”, and “large underground cavern”.
Within are Terry Wogan’s smelly socks…
Mainly known as an interviewers for the BBC. I don’t know if this is a reference or just being goofy.
…a can opener, a golden statue, and a hungry dragon.
Gameplay is mostly a matter of testing DROP THING with all the various objects, although there’s a few wrinkles. The dragon responds well to the sack of coal.
Further on is some whalemeat, suggesting again this is something of a cross-over from Hitch-Hiker; there’s also a rockfall blocking the way, and a “nasty dwarf”.
The nasty dwarf runs away from the smelly socks. (This would annoy me in other contexts, but given the game’s setup, it isn’t too annoying to test and experimentation comes across as part of the point, as opposed to being moon logic.) This opens up a room to some mirrors, which can then be dropped at the lazer beam in order to go past safely. There’s no message saying the way is now safe, you just have to take the leap of faith; this is one way a wrinkle gets tossed into the usual “drop object to solve” scheme.
We don’t have the right item yet to handle Maxa Merlin. Keep in mind the enemies are all passive so you can hang out and try dropping every item laboriously just to see if, say, a glowworm causes an adverse reaction. (It does not. As far as I can tell the glowworm is useful for nothing, unless it passively activated in the cave somewhere I didn’t notice.)
While out of the cave, it’s a good time to use the whalemeat:
This opens the path to a “cinema” containing some “shrink spray” for no clear reason. This can be applied back at the rockfall (USE SPRAY, not DROP)…
…opening the way to Dracula.
The golden statue which I referenced briefly earlier comes into play here. It is not a statue you can pick up (unlike the game we just played). It is one that PULL works on instead:
This opens a route to a tin of canned blood, and given we just saw Dracula, it’s pretty clear where it goes:
Somehow the can opener gets used here but I’m not sure the setup (there’s no specific command to open it, so it just gets used passively). This opens a route to a locked door, but that key from way back at the mouse who wanted cheese soup can open it (“The door opens with an eerie creak”) leading to a “hallmarked golden ring”.
There’s one more route leading to an “angry prince” but I didn’t find it until later (personal map confusion again) so let’s save that for later, and take the ring over to the magician.
Again, found via random experimentation, and again I wasn’t as annoyed as I might be in a traditional game. The one-to-one mechanic (where each object gets used only once) is so well-established it doesn’t feel as gameplay-breaking to have less-intuitive connections between item and puzzle.
Past that the lifeboat finally gets used, where we can board the passenger ship known as Queen Elizabeth 2. This leads to a small area with a radio and the final location (a time transporter).
From here I needed to comb back over things before finding the cave section I missed, where the princess could finally be happily delivered.
The ruby is what drops at the teleporter to activate it, winning the game. The Brit-games love to play Rule Britannia in chiptune form and this game is no exception; it even does it twice (“and once again”).
I was reminded a bit of Seek; in that game, the particular design decision of putting puzzles in between rooms made the gameplay almost seem like a board game. With Time Adventure the design was tilted so heavily in one direction — one item to one puzzle, most of them dropped to be used — it started to feel like a different style of game than a regular adventure, opening the route in particular to making it seem not so absurd to defeat a dwarf with smelly socks or defeat a magician by dropping a gold ring.
I don’t think the style would sustain for too many games, but Peter Smith isn’t going to return here until much later, when he’s working for BBC Games (the first-party games arm of the public broadcaster BBC). While he has no more adventures listed on CASA, some of his educational games look like they might cross over, so they’ll need some checking out when we reach those future years. For now, coming up: let’s visit the last graphical Apple II game of 1982!
This is one of those unfortunate cases where the developer of a game can’t decide what the name of a game is; the advertising and cassette cover both say Time Traveller, the BBC Micro information screen upon boot-up uses Time Travel Adventure, and the actual title screen says Time Adventure. I’m going to assume the author Peter Smith wanted what was on the title screen (Time Adventure).
Both of those contain the historical background so we can dive right in the game itself, with the open question: does this game borrow specific elements from obscure games just like the other two games did?
The game is mostly new. One of the characters that went from Supersoft Hitchhiker to Peter Smith Hitch-Hiker lands in this game; otherwise everything else seems “original”, following two style points that carry over:
a.) the map is laid out on a grid, without any turning exits, extended-length skips of room connections, or overlapping
b.) the “enemies” are “passive” and block the way, but don’t actively attack while you’re in a room with them
Point a.) turns out to be very important for an innovation this game includes. It isn’t visible from the very start…
…but it is visible as soon as you start moving around.
An automap is very rare at this time. The television show The Adventure Game had one on their high-end computer meant for TV display, not as a product for customers. Nellan is Thirsty had one, likely due to it being designed to teach children. I don’t know where Smith got the inspiration, but it certainly helped he already was using a grid-style, and keep in mind he was also a teacher so may have been thinking pedagogically.
It isn’t quite as lovely as you might think because the map extends past the north-south area available to be displayed, and as soon as you step “off screen” the map reset. If you go back again, the map needs to be redrawn; there is no map memory. It still ends up making navigation faster than normal, even though I had to also make a regular map.
The plot, as shown on an earlier screen, has the player caught in a time warp we need to escape by searching 110 rooms. They start blocked in a castle by a drawbridge, but fortunately there’s a lever nearby so it’s not too hard to bypass.
This opens up to the outside, but you quickly get blocked by a tyrannosaurus rex. In case you were wondering, “time warp” doesn’t seem to mean you get sent to a particular time, but rather things from all times (including you) get sent to the same place.
Here’s my own map of the opening area, with blue marking everything before bypassing the Rex:
The difficult part — not difficult so much in figuring out what to do, but wrangling with the parser — was in a raging fireplace.
Trying to go north.
Elsewhere there’s a bucket and a rusty tap, so it seemed like a natural thing to try to FILL BUCKET. Unfortunately, the game just gives a blank prompt and it isn’t clear the rust needs to be cleared up.
Past the drawbridge is a candle-maker shop with some grease which you can take back to the tap and DROP to take care of the rust problem, but even then the parser is finicky; you need to DROP BUCKET, then FILL BUCKET. However, I had to restart my game the first time around because it wasn’t letting me drop the bucket! (I assume I hit a bug in one of my attempts to fill it that caused it to stick to my inventory.)
With the bucket full of water you can extinguish the fire and get to a new set of rooms.
The object list from here (in addition to bucket & grease) now has a large crossbow (must be called a “bow” in the parser), bottle of whisky, and a bundle of arrows. Before taking out Rex, I should note there’s still a “prickly bush” I haven’t dealt with; I think the game might be fishing for shears, but the object selection starts to get esoteric enough I might be missing something else.
Moving on:
This opens a new area with a “bubbling fountain” next to a “narrow alley” containing a glow worm (hasn’t used yet) and a path to a zoo containing a coin followed by a suntiger. The tiger is the same one from Hitch-hiker; it was defeated in both versions via reading a book of Vogon poetry, but my guess is there’s no bad poetry in this game so it requires a different action.
To the north of the fountain there’s a doorman that appears thirsty, so I dropped the whisky (just like Hitch-hiker, giving is done with DROP).
This opens up the last area I’ve managed to reach so far.
Immediately after is a frog, and despite KISS being on the verb list, KISS FROG doesn’t work.
The room selection tends to the truly random — story-wise I find it best to imagine a bunch of rooms from various time periods got zapped in — like a coal mine with a sack of coal, a Hypermarket with a drinks dispenser (the coin from the zoo path works to get cheese soup)…
…a workshop with a “life boat”, and finally a mad scientist’s workshop with a “lazer beam”. Heading north kills the player, and this is the first time I realized this game even had death.
The inventory limit is stuck at three, and the rooms also have a maximum limit of three, so it’s been irritating to tote things around and test possibilities. I tried shooting the tiger (no luck) and dropping the cheese soup in various places (no reaction). I have the feeling there is only one (1) puzzle available for me to solve right now and whatever comes from that will lead to a chain reaction, but I’m not clear where that puzzle is. I will take suggestions in the comments for anyone who hasn’t played or looked at a walkthrough.
So far on All the Adventures we’ve seen a wide variety of “borrowings” between games both extreme and mild.
At the most egregious end are people who try to repackage someone else’s game as their own (Example 1, Example 2) but it doesn’t need to be that extreme; an author might start with someone else’s code — or at least initial layout — and remix it to be its own thing. In the case of Eldorado Gold, the remix may have been done directly on the original source code; in other cases like PLATO Adventure it is clear a total rewrite was needed. With derivatives from mainframe Adventure or Zork, the games can be clearly considered “tributes”, and even Woods himself made one of the “derivative” versions of Adventure. When the game being borrowed from is a less well-known commercial product, ethics get hazier.
Hitch-Hiker by Peter Smith, which we looked at recently, bizarrely did a partial rip-off of the Supersoft version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Some (but not all) items and puzzles were seeded from the game.
With that opening, perhaps you should sense danger. Perhaps.
Via World of Dragon.
The Romford, Essex mail order house later known as Software for All started as Syntax Software in 1981, selling ZX80/81 software and books.
The J. Gibbons mentioned in the ad above is Jack Gibbons, and in an issue of Format Magazine he recollects his experiences with them. I’m going to quote a little longer than necessary because he gives a delightful capsule into the UK coding experience in the ZX80/81 period.
In the summer of 1980 I was attracted by this advertisement in one of the ‘dailies’ for a home computer costing less than £100 that was so powerful that it could run a power station. Well, I didn’t have a power station handy but I was suitably impressed — particularly as you had 14 days to get your money back if dissatisfied. So I thought that I could try and see if I was clever enough to be able to drive the thing, without risking a 100 notes (it was worth a lot more then!) …
Not to be put off by size as they say, I quickly powered up my new acquisition and started pressing a few keys to see what it does. I say ‘keys’ although I meant that I pressed pictures of keys on the circuit board. Having burnt the midnight oil for two weeks and managed to type in example programs and make them run, if not understand them, I was convinced I was making headway, the beast was to stay.
Gibbons gets the “16K ram pack” that expands the base unit from the miniscule 1K, noting “it was renowned for wobbling around the back of the ZX80 and now and then forgetting everything it was supposed to be storing”.
He realized, after balancing his checks (and noting how he “always makes mistakes with arithmetic”) that he wanted to write a Bank Account program, and after finishing tried to get it published.
I tried the computer groups and also a few software companies (there were only a few then). Eventually, by March 1981 I had a call from Syntax Software in Essex.
Syntax Software then went “silent” before finally throwing up the ad shown earlier, and this led to Gibbons eventually getting an invite from Mike Johnstone to the first of multiple legendary ZX Microfairs (September 1981).
But back to Syntax Software! Their name change to Software for All happened a year later and they expanded their line to include BBC, Dragon, and Commodore.
The first ad I’ve found for Danger Island is from a Your Computer dated January 1983; based on the at-least-one-month delay of print magazines, that places the game’s publication right at the end of 1982.
This game clearly takes elements from the 1981 game Pirate Island by Paul Shave in order to make a “new” Dragon 32 game. The Shave game was not on my radar originally as the premise here is simply to find a treasure chest and escape; Pirate Island has multiple treasures. Still, as soon as I took one step from the initial room, I had an uncanny feeling.
The well/ladder is meant to be a gag. “WHAT A WASTE OF A GOOD LADDER. THE WELL IS 500 FEET DEEP.”
Just south of the start.
The antidote being 2 gold coins in particular set off my memory. Here’s a shot from Pirate Island:
Just like Pirate Island, the natives throw you in a pot if you try to take the idol/statue, and just to the south there is a monolith with a magic word that helps you escape.
YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE MEMORIAL STONE. ENGRAVED ON THE BASE IS THE WORD ‘-SABU-‘ WHICH MEANS HELP IN THE NATIVE TONGUE.
The word in the original teleports you to the monolith (and can be used to escape from multiple situations); in Danger Island it can only be used at the pot scene, and it teleports you to the north part of the island in a Sandy Cove.
The Forest has some randomness to its exits so it isn’t fully mapped out.
There’s plenty of aspects that are different or missing, so it resembles Hitch-hiker in that style, but it is deeply odd the author felt obliged at all to do this kind of copying. Maybe they saw the Acorn Atom game and tried to recreate it on their own machine (since they didn’t have an Atom), and sometime later decided to sell it?
Moving on, in order to obtain the antidote, there are two gold coins laying about just to the west next to some quicksand (more on that shortly). Playing requires buying the antidote right away because you are constantly bitten by snakes while on the island. (As opposed to being hit by poison darts in the Shave game. One fortunate difference here is that there are unlimited applications of the antidote.)
Just past the quicksand is the treasure we need. You can cross right away as long as you don’t have any inventory. The treasure is too heavy to carry back so you need a different way across.
I like how we can see our main treasure objective almost immediately, even if we can’t take it away yet; that’s more of a modern design move.
Wandering around, it isn’t too hard to find: some cheese, a gold ring, an empty bottle, a knife, a box of matches, a lamp (in a forest), some oil (in a broken paraffin heater). The latter three can be combined together to make a light source.
I first used the light source to explore some caves to the south (again just like Pirate Island, but slightly different contents).
To the west of the second location above is “WHAT USED TO BE A PLACE OF WORSHIP” which has a plank. If you try to take the plank and get out, sometimes the thing making the noise reveals itself:
But only sometimes; once through I didn’t see it at all (bug?) If you do get confronted you need to give it the cheese (killing it is fatal because the monster screams and causes the cave to collapse).
THE MONSTER GOBBLES THE CHEESE AND GOES AWAY.
With the plank you can go back and PUT PLANK OVER QUICKSAND. By some miracle I figured this out without checking the source code, especially given a.) the parser is otherwise two-word and b.) just typing PUT PLANK merely gets the response YOU CAN’T. (This wouldn’t be the first parser to veer away from an apparent two-word parser, but still, guess-the-phrase is extraordinarily difficult.)
With the plank in place you can safely nab the TREASURE (call it TREASURE, not CHEST) although now there’s the matter of escape. Down at the beach there’s a boat just sitting there but some magic is keeping it from moving:
YOU CANNOT TAKE THE BOAT.IT IS HELD BY SOME MAGIC SPELL.
I tried some “logical” actions but had no luck (I don’t think the gold ring is used for anything):
There’s one other item back at the north of the island; a building has a “aerosol can” in a dark room (fortunately you can give the lamp a refill with the oil — another difference with Shave’s game).
THERE IS A LABLE ON THE CAN IT SAYS ‘SLEEP INDUCER’
This can be used to knock out the natives and take their golden statue. Assuming that breaks the magic, I made a beeline down to the beach but found the natives waiting.
So that solves the problem: GIVE STATUE will make it so you can GET BOAT and then LAUNCH BOAT and then (if you’re me) get horribly stuck.
Any subsequent attempt to enter the boat resulted in I CAN’T. I assume either this is a guess-the-phrase moment or a bug (would not be out of bounds, remember the non-appearing monster; also, there was a bug at the plank once where I couldn’t go west for no reason at all and had to restore a game). I went with the ultimate strategy:
That’s me manually setting the location variable to the last room of the game.
ADD: Thanks to Matt W. doing an astute analysis in the comments, we now know the missing command was GET IN. Everything works exactly as shown in my screenshots otherwise. Earlier in the game just the word IN worked to enter a building, but the game decided here to go for an extremely specific phrasing that reuses another standard verb (GET) for a different purpose.
While I’m not sure what Mr. Shave’s opinion would be, I wasn’t terribly grumpy about the re-purposing here; the puzzles ended up going in different directions, and it was especially different to have the sleep-can scene followed by returning the statue in order to break a spell. (The original involves distracting the natives with a clock from a crocodile. The statue is then one of the treasures for points. This version treats the natives a little less naively.)
What I find especially curious is the relation to Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker. It isn’t just that Hitch-Hiker’s also does re-purposing, but that the second 1982 game by Peter Smith was published by Software for All! This makes me wonder not only if the people involved were all part of the same friend group, but also if the game we’ll be playing next (Time Adventure) does the same schtick of adapting another game.
Back when I’ve discussed “bawdy games”, one of the issues that has come up multiple times is the difficulty in advertising. Chuck Benton of Softporn Adventure had the good fortune of being discovered by Ken Williams of (Sierra) On-Line. Some games advertised instead in The Dirty Book, but that book itself had trouble advertising in other outlets.
Interface Age does not feel that the submitted advertisement conforms with the magazine’s standards.
Another option was simply to go via public domain, like with Porno Adventure and Drive-In. Today’s games, however, did not go that route.
(The obligatory not safe for certain work environments warning applies to anything after this point. Also, there’s a somewhat rude word for a drunk person.)
Kettering near Dayton, location of today’s company.
I’m not sure how Bob Krotts of the Softcore Software Company managed, but all the way through 1982 and part of the way through 1983 he put a significant number of ads out for his adventure game products, Misadventures 1 through 7. (The first six came out in ’82, and the seventh came early in ’83.)
As far as why the ads got through, my guess is a combination of
a.) chutzpah on the part of Krotts; notice in the ad below he tried to sell the game in Tandy’s book (this was a book collecting what essentially was ads for third-party software) and bragged about it not getting in. (As further evidence, albeit from later in life, one might consider he later became known as “Dirty” Bob Knotts, ran an adult video store, and is current co-chair of the X-Rated Critics Association.)
b.) chutzpah on the part of the magazines, which were TRS-80 specific ones like 80 Micro, H & E Computronics, and 80-U.S. While one could quantitatively prove this by counting ads or the like, my qualitative sense upon reading these magazines is that they had a more hobbyist bent to them and didn’t try as much to be family oriented.
…may I mention that I have three young teenagers who read your magazine and I find the ad from The Softcore Software Co. offensive.
It seems that people involved with personal computers should be above this “tacky” behavior. Adult book stores and X-rated movie houses are available to those with sexual hangups. Why degrade your magazine for the relatively small amount of revenue from this advertising?
…and following that, I haven’t found any reprints of the ad in the same publication, although I might be missing something. So at the very least there was actual pushback. On the other hand, one of the columns had an extended riff in their November 1983 issue on the first Softcore adventure (Madame Rosa’s Massage Parlor) making a fictional story. The true interpretation might be that the author simply decided to send his ad budget elsewhere.
I’m taking down the first three games (Madam Rosa’s Massage Parlor, Wet T-Shirt Contest, Sewers of Moscow) in order. I’ll handle the other three from 1982 in a separate post.
Misadventure 1: Madam Rosa’s Massage Parlor
Our task is to “discover the hidden photographs of the politician’s beautiful daughter” while looking for a speakeasy at the wharves, avoiding “deadly alleys”, “the bouncer” and “other characters of questionable reputation”.
The game follows the standard Scott Adams-style split window, but without any of the advantages and all of the drawbacks. There’s no object or direction list; there’s just the room description on top, and you have to test exits in every room to figure out which directions you can go. This really would go better with a standard scrolling window.
The parser is one of those which ends up chastising the player most of the time (and not in a fun way). I got “TRY SOMETHING ELSE” and “WRONG” many times in an attempt to do actions.
For example, the response here to SEARCH TRASH is TRY SOMETHING ELSE.
The map is one of those with lots of repetition; south of the locations just mentioned are three that just state “THE ROAD GOES NORTH AND SOUTH.”
This is followed by more rooms that are either “ROAD”, “WHARF”, “ALLEY”, or “DEAD-END” in some variety.
At the far south end is a door with a peep-hole. You can knock, and a bouncer asks if you are old enough, then requests your I.D.
I had no I.D., or even method of checking what my character’s inventory was. On a hunch, I checked the manual of Misadventure #5 (which I had from the earlier link) and found it mentioned the command EXAM. Not EXAMINE (which doesn’t work), but EXAM. I took it back to the pile of trash at the start:
EXAM WINO leads to finding out the wino has some money and and I.D. card. Taking the card back to the door, I was able to break into the speakeasy.
WELCOME TO MADAM ROSA’S SPEAKEASY BAR & GRILL! THE PLACE IS FILLED WITH PEOPLE, MUSIC, AND LAUGHTER! AN OPEN DOOR IS EAST. AN ELONGATED BAR IS FILLED WITH DRINKERS AND BOOZE.
To the east is a poker room with an open seat. You can sit down but this leads to death:
AFTER PLAYING FOR AWHILE, YOU NOTICE A MAN ACROSS FROM YOU WHO IS CHEATING! YOU ACCUSE HIM!!! HE PULLS A GUN AND SHOOTS YOU BETWEEN THE EYES – YOU ARE DEAD!!!
There are seemingly no other exits, but you can go back to the bar and BUY DRINK, whereupon the bartender will ask if you would like to meet some “WILD WOMEN”. Saying “YES”:
A LARGE BOUNCER BLOCKS THE HALL!
I used BRIBE BOUNCER and was able to proceed on.
THE STEPS LED TO A DIMLY-LIT ROOM. THE WALLS ARE ALL OF PLUSH CRUSHED VELVET. A SMILING SCANTILY-CLAD LADY AT A DESK INVITES YOU TO ENTER THE OPEN NORTH DOOR.
Heading north leads to an intersection where a naked lady is running away from some scene to the west. Checking in, there is an “OLD MAN” who is dead but “MUST BE HAPPY – HE IS SMILING!!!”
There’s another scene with an “UGLY” woman with an “OLD WOMAN”, a “LOCKED DOOR” with “MUFFLED BREATHING”, and a room with “OLD MEN” in raincoats looking through peepholes.
Bypassing all this, there’s a door that leads to a stairway up to a new floor.
To the north is a room with trapezes:
THIS APPEARS TO BE A ROOM FOR VERY AGILE PEOPLE! THERE ARE MANY TRAPEZES HANGING FROM THE HIGH CEILING. HMMMM..
You can SWING TRAPEZE but it will cause the bar to collapse; for some reason, EXAM BAR will now reveal the photos.
You can’t go back directly to the previously floor; exploring around leads to a series of rooms with scenes of varying level of questionable-ness (like THE MAYOR OF THE CITY in a hot tub who is PLAYING WITH A RUBBER DUCKY while a girl is in the tub with scuba gear) although the one you want has a book case; TAKE BOOK opens a secret passage to the last section.
The final challenge is a hallway where some of the exits are traps where a bouncer finds you (see above); I didn’t test if you could get the photos back by repeating the trapeze scene. Finally I came across a room with a window that seemed promising:
THE PASSAGE DEAD ENDS IN A CORNER ROOM. AN OPEN WINDOW IS NEXT TO AN OLD BED. YOU ARE SIX FLOORS UP!
A rope is visible through the window and you can climb down and escape:
Well, that was awkward. Before moving on to the next game, I should point out absolutely everything is bespoke. There is no way to take inventory because there is no inventory (if you take the card from the wino, that sets a flag, but it doesn’t have any special world-model attached). The way special commands are given is by room; in the window room at the end, EXAM WINDOW is special-coded to work there:
That means other than directions, the entire game is waiting for exact phrases in exact rooms. It is a wonder it hangs together at all.
Misadventure 2: Wet T-Shirt Contest
We are in trouble with a crime boss and need money fast. The logical solution: winning a wet t-shirt contest. Sure?
IT IS ALMOST DUSK. YOU ARE SITTING ALONE IN YOUR HOTEL ROOM.
THERE IS A LOUD KNOCK AT THE DOOR!!!
(after OPEN DOOR)
3 TOUGH THUGS ENTER THE ROOM. THEY BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF YOU!
YOU ARE INFORMED THAT – IF YOU DON’T PAY THE BOSS THE HUNDRED DOLLARS YOU OWE BY TOMORROW – YOUR ASS IS GRASS! THEY LEAVE THROUGH THE EAST DOOR.
Stepping outside, there’s some trash near the hall with a fish wrapped in a newspaper, doing EXAM PAPER (yes, it’s doing the EXAM thing again):
From here, the city is yours to explore, or mostly wander empty roads in:
The important places are marked: the club where the contest happens (yellow), a science building (blue), an arcade (brown), and a coin (green). You can try visiting a bank and getting a loan (they make fun of you and escort you out) or visiting the IRS (they arrest you for tax evasion).
It doesn’t look terrible but the “skips” in various spots led me to get lost; I was hoping I didn’t have to map, but the coin in particular turned out to be fairly elusive, and it turns out you need to find it first. With the coin in hand, you have enough money to play a game:
The game explodes, leaving only a screen, which you need to take. (Remember, there’s no real “inventory” in a general sense, just a variable flag.)
With the screen in hand, the next stop is by the science building, with an elevator of DEATH.
The elevator has 21 floors, and there’s no information on the game which floor is helpful; you just need to test them all. Keep in mind this is a game with no saved game feature! (Normally, I used save states.) Here’s a full table:
21 – stuck in 3×3 area
20 – electrocuted
19 – electrocuted
18 – killed by dogs
17 – electrocuted
16 – scientist / secret door
15 – stuck in 3×3 area
14 – stuck in 3×3 area
13 – no 13th floor
12 – electrocuted
11 – alarm
10 – killed by dogs
9 – killed by women
8 – electrocuted
7 – scientist’s lab
6 – electrocuted
5 – killed by dogs
4 – stuck in 3×3 area
3 – scientist / secret door
2 – electrocuted
1 – lobby
The “3×3 area” is just a small set of rooms that do nothing and the only thing to do is to leave. The “scientist / secret door” involves a scene with a scientist leaving through a secret door and farting. The “killed by women” is, um, kind of like a scene from Softporn Adventure but a bit darker.
KNOCK-OUT GAS COMES OUT OF THE VENTS…
YOU AWAKE TIED TO A BED. YOU ARE NAKED!
5 BEAUTIFUL WOMEN ENTER AND RAVISH YOUR BODY!!! WOW!
UH, OH…YOU CAN’T TAKE IT! YOUR HEART GIVES OUT!
Maybe you’re the “old man” from the first game. The floor that you actually need is 7 (lab) although it too is extremely deadly. There’s a series of hall intersections where if you choose wrong you will die: lots of killer dogs plus a trap floor.
THE FLOOR GIVES WAY! YOU FALL TO YOUR DEATH!
The correct sequence (w w n n w n w door s s w) can only be found by trial and error.
I first came across this scene before even finding the coin (I was still hopeful I could avoid making a city map); if you do the coin-screen sequence first, you can GIVE SCREEN in order to progress the scene forward:
The whole gimmick is that you can then push a button to switch to the body of the woman.
YOU ARE IN THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN’S BODY!
THE PROFESSOR SAYS THAT YOU WILL REMAIN THIS WAY FOR 1 HOUR!
YOU ARE NOW ALONE IN THE ROOM (EXCEPT FOR YOUR BODY IN THE CHAIR). THE SCIENTIST HAS LEFT.
The rest of the game is pretty straightforward as far as actions go, if a bit icky plot-wise. You need to follow the same steps it took to arrive at the lab, just backwards, then hoof it back to the club near the start of the game.
You win due to your (the other person’s) “transparent” shirt. With $200 in hand you can hike it back to the lab, where you’ll transfer back and win the game.
I guess you could think of this as a degenerate’s version of Savage Island Part 2. Technically speaking there was a lot more death than bawdiness to the game. Let’s jump ahead now to….
Misadventure 3: Sewers of Moscow
We’re now a superspy, meant to stop some catastrophe or another gallivanting around Moscow. What we’re stopping is unclear because we’ve lost our memory. The ad copy still the obligatory low-key mention of smut…
THE BEAUTIFUL SPY YOU FIND TIED SPREAD-EAGLED TO A BED HOLDS THE KEY TO THIS MISADVENTURE. BUT BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT YOU DO TO HER.
…but to start with, we awake with our memory gone, and:
I just changed them to RETURN and the game was able to play all the way through. Maybe they’re for the sound shenanigans the game’s title screen mentions it has.
You start in a forest having an unfortunate parachute accident, and once again, the parser is bespoke in an almost unique way.
The key here is to CLIMB TREES — ok, that part’s not too bad — finding yourself in tree branches. The key phrase then is CLIMB N.
Not swing, or just movement, or even CLIMB NORTH; it has to be specifically CLIMB followed by the abbreviation N. I suspect this is the kind of game the author only tested themselves. (Unlike Softporn Adventure!)
Past that, there’s a set of very plain rooms with descriptions like “CLEARING”, “NOTHING”, and a “NOTHING” where you also need to “BEWARE OF THE ANTEATERS!”
Sadly, no anteaters appear in the game.
There’s a few death-exits in this area, but it isn’t death-at-every-step like the science building in Misadventure 2 (that’ll happen later). The key to moving on is to go to a VERY DARK VALLEY and type the word FEEL alone. Just the word FEEL.
Just to be clear, yes, I checked the source code for the CLIMB N and FEEL-word-by-itself parts.
With the shovel in hand, you can go over to a NOTHING where the floor is DAMP and DIG. This drops you into a maze with a mean trick.
It’s a “normal” maze with no loops, but going east leads to a whole section which is all dead ends, whereas going west is a very short trip to the exit. It’s essentially the maze equivalent of a shaggy dog joke.
There’s also this elongated description in every room.
Past that obstacle, you can climb some stairs to find a mysterious door, where a “SHORT MAN WEARING A GREY OVERCOAT AND HAT” ushers you in a room and points out a panel. Pressing a button in the panel triggers a message:
After this enlightenment returns:
YOUR MEMORY HAS RETURNED!
YOU REMEMBER THAT:
YOU ARE AN AGENT OF THE U.N.
YOUR MISSION – ONCE DROPPED DEEP INTO SOVIET TERRITORY – IS TO ELIMINATE THE POSSIBILITY OF WW III.
You are supposed to enter the number just received into a phone. Unfortunately, this is a “suicide mission” and you’ll die in the process of ambiguously stopping WWIII.
This is followed by a “death building” fairly similar to the science building…
…except going the wrong direction gets you gunned down by secret police:
A LOYAL MEMBER OF THE MOSCOW SECRET POLICE SPOTS YOU, PANICS, AND SHOOTS! BETTER DEATH THAN TORTURE…
Eventually one route leads to a locked door; to get through the locked door, you need to pass through a dark area and finally reach the hinted-at smut.
If you examine the gag, you’ll find a key; if you free the spy (UNTIE ROPES) she kills you.
FOOL – I AM REALLY A DOUBLE AGENT!!!
SHE REACHES UNDER A BED, GRABS A KNIFE, AND STABS YOU IN THE HEART – YOU DIE!!!
With the key in hand you can go back to the locked door and find the promised room with the phone. I think the code is randomly generated — mine was 196 — and typing CALL 196 triggered the end of the game.
So despite the advertising, Misadventure 3 really had no smut whatsoever, as well as a grim fatalist ending. Not even stopping WWIII, just delaying it!
Brief Introspection
We’ve seen a fair number of authors “cheat” with specific moments of bespoke parser use; it is very rare to essentially make that an overarching coding style, up to and including making it so there isn’t even really an inventory to speak of. To make a comparison I have to go back to something like 1979’s Jungle Island:
400 PRINT”THE VINE BREAKS!! YOU HEAR WARRIORS APPROACHING!”
401 INPUT V$
410 IF V$”RUN” GOTO 220
420 PRINT”YOU’RE RUNNING AS FAST AS YOU CAN!”
430 INPUT T$
440 IF T$”N”,”S”,”E”,”W” GOTO 310
450 PRINT”IT IS NOT ADVISABLE TO RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE”
The cases here aren’t quite as bad as that game; the Misadventures have a centralized “hub” of commands in each area, and that perhaps informed the author’s style of making big tangly maps for everything. This all has the odd effect that unexpectedly, I thought the bawdiest of the games (Misadventure 1) was the strongest. There’s not really anything going for this author in terms of puzzles, and certainly the parser can’t handle anything stressful, so all that’s left is exploration; at the very least the sequence of naughty scenes showed some variety (…and creative use of margarine). With Misadventure 3, the most interesting room was one literally called NOTHING with a side reference to anteaters.
We’ll visit the other Misadventures soon and see if this trend of non-naughty naughty games continues (the ones available; Misadventure 4: Casino of Pleasure is lost) but for now, coming up: two Britgames, and the very last regular graphical Apple II game of 1982. We are getting close to the end!
By 1892, the Dalton Gang — only formed a year before — had gotten a reputation for outrunning the law while performing a string of train robberies.
Of the founders Bob and Emmett Dalton, Bob previously had filled his father’s shoes becoming a lawman, and was familiar with the issues in Oklahoma: a fragmented group of sheriff services with only the U.S. Marshals having jurisdiction over the whole. They recruited a group based mostly on people they grew up with, and the gang ended up having a rotating roster with the brothers at the core. The two other brothers, Bill and Grat Dalton, were imprisoned at the time but Grat later managed to escape and join the group and Bill was acquitted.
Their exploits included a near-miss at Red Rock. The gang was eight strong at the time and they planned a heist on June 1 at the arrival of the Santa Fe, with the train scheduled for 10:00.
A train did arrive, but the lights were out. The station agent went inside and Bob sensed something was off, telling the gang to hold off and wait. Indeed there was a trap, as deputy marshals awaited inside. The plan of the heist had been learned of, but Bob’s sense of danger meant the gang waited for the first train to leave and the next train — the expected one — to arrive. The haul ended up not being much for the size of crew (at most around $10,000) but that’s because the first train was carrying the majority of the money, at 6 times that amount.
The famous end of the Dalton Gang came upon an attempt in October (with Bill Powers, Bob Dalton, Grat Dalton, Dick Broadwell, and Emmett Dalton) to enter the history books by robbing two Kansas banks simultaneously in daylight. This is the event most dramatized in media, not only for the wild gunfight with marshals and the citizens of Coffeyville, but because Emmett Dalton (the only survivor) survived to write two books and spread the mythos about the group, re-painting them in a Robin Hood light.
Today’s game is essentially a revised version of that pitched battle, where you fight against the brothers solo, although the “slippery between the hands of the law” aspect that the brothers held comes into play.
Peter Kirsch returns! No prologue this time like The Deadly Game: you’re got 0 DOLLARS OF CASH and a SIX-SHOOTER to your name, you’re on a street, and there’s a sign telling you about a vacant job as sheriff.
As usual with Softside, there are Atari, Apple II, and TRS-80 versions of the game. I picked TRS-80 straight off the bat this time given my experience with The Deadly Game. Yet again that’s no guarantee it is the best version, and for reasons I’ll get into later there are some advantages and disadvantages to the Atari version.
However, by random chance, I started exploring the opposite way, forestalling the encounter. The town is laid out roughly west-east with a turn in the middle, and the mayor is on the far west side.
To speed things along, though, let’s imagine I followed the author’s script and went to the mayor first (even though there’s no way of knowing the mayor is there until you map out and find the office).
The $200 on a “PERFORMANCE BASIS” turns out to be a huge pain for me later.
With a STAR in hand I wandered and checked out the rest of the town. The sheriff’s office has a cell but no keys; you’re supposed to apply your six-shooter to the desk and shoot out a lock, revealing the keys (they won’t get used until later).
I guess this makes it feel more like a Western.
Adjacent is a saloon (we’ll save that for later) and a general store that is closed (which we’ll also save for later).
Yet further is a stable with a BLACK STALLION (ours, but it needs a saddle) followed by a newspaper office.
I immediately guessed (correctly) this was a clue to a maze.
Next along the row is a rain barrel (empty) followed by a bank (also nothing there for the moment); at the end of the line is a “golden rattler” blocking the way.
You can try to shoot the rattler but you’ll get stopped by an Indian.
I wandered a bit in this state, also finding a path leading to a “creek” going to the west side, before I finally went to visit the saloon last (I had already seen it once before becoming law enforcement).
Kirsch is essentially combining an open style with triggered events, like his game Robin Hood. This is a location-and-condition trigger; you have to be the sheriff and have entered the saloon for the bank robbery to start. Sometimes this works well, but for my game it was awkward to explore a town all the way over twice before anything kicked off.
Heading back to the bank…
…the robbery has ended but there is a shootout. (Your gun, by default, is holstered, so you need to either TAKE GUN or DRAW GUN; be sure to holster it again before entering a store or they’ll kick you out.) Waiting too long here is lethal; Emmett and Bob aren’t in shooting range. The one Dalton that you can get a bead on is Grat.
Back to the west a little there’s a rope ladder leading to the roof of the newspaper office. You can backtrack and climb up to get a different angle on the scene:
If you head back to the Mayor’s Office, the clerk reports to you the mayor has been kidnapped. I did not find out this way — more on that later.
After the shootout, the general store is now open:
The mayor gave us $200 to spend (remember another $200 comes later). You cannot buy everything at once; I had to reload my game multiple times to figure things out, and while there are technically multiple options, you at least need to get the CANTEEN and the SADDLE. (AMMUNITION is good too. The six-shooter needs reloading after 6 bullets.)
The food and pouch of tobacco, incidentally, go to the east side of town where there’s the GOLDEN RATTLER. You can give the food to make the snake happy, and then past that there is an Indian with a pipe. Trading the tobacco:
According to Dale Dobson there’s some part of the code that indicates it works as a dowsing rod, but the water in the game is quite easy to find and I was never able to get the stick to work. Neither puzzle gives any points.
(I should mention, as an aside, there are 8 points total in the game revealed by typing SCORE. Taking down the first two Dalton brothers led to 1 point each. This will be important later.)
With the saddle you can put it on the STALLION and ride it around (just using normal directions, you don’t have to RIDE SOUTH every time or whatnot).
The horse doesn’t make you go “faster” and you have to get off every time you go in a building (DROP HORSE). I still found it gratifying to ride around in an atmospheric sense.
I was stuck from here for a while before I realized back at the CREEK on the far west side of town it was possible to GO CREEK, moving past to a new area. (It is unclear why there wouldn’t be a compass direction for that.)
Just past the creek. As the message implies, you can’t go farther from here without using the horse.
Past the creek is a pasture (see above) and then a desert.
The desert is a maze but the “SEEN NEWS” message from the newspaper office is intended to indicate directions. While in the desert, you start getting thirsty quite quickly (be sure to GET WATER from the creek before entering the desert; this is why the canteen is the other necessary purchase) and there are rattlesnakes that randomly appear.
You need your gun out and loaded, and you can shoot the rattlesnakes as they appear. Following the SEENNEWS route and using the gun several times on the way, a “dusty trail” comes up next.
This is where the Daltons are hiding, but once again I didn’t quite do things in the right order; first I went south and found a “dusty trail” with a “hill” and a “mine”. Alert because of my creek issue, I treated both as possible directions, and tried GO HILL first:
This is how I found out the mayor was the extra person the Daltons was getting away with (never mind the mayor was all the way on the other side of town at the time of the bank robbery). I also realized I was softlocked and needed to bring the ladder in for a rescue; this got me a point, for 3 points out of 8.
There’s a “secret” path that loops back directly to the mayor’s office so you don’t have to do the desert route back.
The “mines” are a maze, this time not one with a gimmick.
I thought Kirsch had shaken off doing such things, but alas.
The only room of interest had a wooden floor:
The game decide to be annoyingly resistant to my attempts to refer to any of the nouns described, so I decided to move on. Instead of heading to the hill/mine area, I went northwest to a CABIN; this is where the Daltons lurk.
Oops! So, if you hang out at the cabin for long enough, or go in some bushes to hide (which requires dismounting the horse) the Daltons spot you and gun you down. The visible horse here is the problem. (According to Dale Dobson’s walkthrough I checked later, in the Atari version you can ride the horse into the bushes; that doesn’t work here.) You might think to go elsewhere, ditch the horse, and then walk over to the cabin, but the horse will take off if you leave it somewhere and it happens to resurface right at the cabin. (There is no explanation why the cabin serves as, er, horse catnip. What’s a thing that attracts a horse?)
To the south of the cabin is a small tree. The idea is you can dismount here without the horse taking off right away (for some reason) which gives you time to TIE HORSE. Given the other non-cabin locations have the horse make a bolt for it, this was tricky but not impossible to figure out.
With the horse tied away — presumably not making suspicious horse noises outside the cabin causing the outlaws to notice — you can head back to the cabin and hide in the bushes.
No matter which brother you aim for, they both scatter to different locations. Emmett goes to town and Bob goes to the mines. The cabin itself is completely undescribed on the inside other than it has a crowbar you can pick up.
Taking down Bob first, he’s lurking at the room with the wooden floor.
Occasionally Bob would fire a shot; my shots back always missed. I realized — upon needing to reload — that I might be able to heed the words of Dirty Harry.
“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ To tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I lost track myself.
“But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
Bob did not fire every turn, but I waited (rather, typed LOOK) until Bob had fired exactly six shots, then dived in the room safely. With a clear shot, SHOOT BOB worked, and then the crowbar worked (after many attempts) via the command GET BOARDS. (Note for Atari version: it uses GET BOARD, singular, instead.)
The sack of cash is able to go back to the bank for another single point, bringing the score to 4. Shooting Bob did not give any points (ominous music).
Emmett turns out to be out back in town hanging by the bank. If you just try to walk (or ride) down the street to him he’ll take off.
The key here is the second paycheck from the Mayor. I admit I was baffled for a while discovering this, but it turns out that the moment where the Daltons scatter from the cabin is also the moment the powers that be decide you can get an extra $200. Curious how that works.
The extra money is enough to buy all the remaining items from the general store, including the disguise kit (which normally was too expensive after buying just the saddle and canteen). If you dump your lawman badge and wear the disguise, you’ll be able to safely make it up to Emmett without him getting spooked.
You can then shoot him dead, and I admit this is where I started to think something was fishy. I was able to get return the bank’s cash but I was otherwise stuck with nothing to do and two dead bodies — the Dalton gang are taken care of, where are the fireworks? I had incidentally tried ARREST and was not understood, and I didn’t have any handcuff-items either, so I still assumed that violence was the answer, but no: you can GET EMMETT. I guess the player is holding rope in their inventory that doesn’t get mentioned? (Atari version again: ARREST actually works as a verb.)
You can cart each Dalton back over to the jail, and use the keys from the gun-blasted desk to lock them in (if you don’t lock the door they won’t stay). Each Dalton captured is 2 points.
In my “winning run” — I had to restart to fix the softlock — I ended up dealing with the mayor last, meaning the game ended while still in a pit:
Once again I find myself appreciating what kind of ambition Kirsch had in exploring all the genres — and different iterations of event-based gameplay — while being frustrated by technical limitations. The game anticipates more than you might expect, with the horse mechanics and is-your-gun-holstered check, but I still had moments like applying the crowbar which give a reminder this is still a monthly series of games rapidly cranked out in BASIC.
I also appreciated the alternate routes in terms of either shooting arresting the last two Dalton brothers, even given the unfair implementation. I would very much have preferred some extra indication the game goes to an unwinnable state if either brother is a corpse!
(For books, I used Daltons! The Raid on Coffeyville, Kansas by Robert Barr Smith via University of Oklahoma Press, and Into the Sunset: Emmett Dalton and the End of the Dalton Gang by Ian Shaw via the University Press of Kansas. The former aims to dispel the Robin Hood mythos and expose the Daltons as gang mostly interested in stealing and giving the money to themselves; the latter establishes a little sympathy or at least understanding to their situation.)
This has absolutely nothing to do with the game but the panel is cool. From Doctor Who Magazine.
I’ve observed before that sci-fi has often fared better than fantasy when it comes to early adventure games (the opposite is true of CRPGs). Fantasy objects tend to be designed without any kind of rules, meaning that the magic pendant that needs to be waved somewhere needs to be waved everywhere since there’s no method to work out what’s going on. Science fiction tends to be better-behaved in that respect, and even with interdimensional teleportation etc. the authors seem to feel more obliged to make it clear how various gizmos operate.
That’s not the case here.
To continue where I left off, I had a locked door I couldn’t get by and a box I couldn’t open. It turns out the lake (that I filled the flask from) was the culprit.
I had tried a number of ways to “dive” into the lake with no joy. I tried taking the heavy gold brick and jumping in the lake while holding it before using it on the wall (there’s a puzzle like this in Sunset over Savannah). I thought maybe that’d have an effect since jumping into water with the powder causes them to explode so maybe this was tracked as well? … but no, that wasn’t it. Despite the game insisting repeatedly it doesn’t know the word DOWN, it does, in that exact spot: you can SWIM DOWN.
The silver key is sufficient to both open the box (crystals full of energy) and unlock the door.
To the east here is a Store Room with a lever where I struggled for a while trying to push or pull it, when you’re just supposed to TAKE it. I don’t know what it does; I carried it the rest of the game, and I assume it got used passively somewhere. The note will be useful shortly, but the next leap is to realize that the beam of light is not some sort of functional thing you’re supposed to interrupt to cause an effect; instead it means there’s another exit you can take, that is, GO BEAM.
Typing INSERT CRYSTALS will cause THE WHIRR OF MACHINES SOMEWHERE. Somewhere is just back in the storage room (with the mysterious lever) where an opening appeared; past that is a wire fence.
CUT FENCE (or SNIP FENCE) works here — it turns out SNIFF was really SNIP, which I think is a new one. Then there’s a room with a safe, and the safe has a dial that turns from 01 to 20. 0519 backwards can’t be 9-1-5-0 (there’s no 0 on the dial) so the appropriate way to read it is DIAL 19 followed by DIAL 05:
That’s essentially it except for one last parser struggle. Taking the key all the way back to the HOLE at the start, I tried INSERT KEY, PUT KEY, etc. with no luck; it turns out I needed REPLACE KEY.
I have no idea what the lever was for, or what the button on the bracelet that we’d been toting around the entire game was for. The whole romp was only loosely connected and only made sense as some sort of challenge delivered by an Evil Entity (maybe Human Resources thought we’d been slacking on the whole Time Warden job thing).
This almost could have been a satisfying game still, but the time I spent with parser troubles — especially the game deceptively claiming it didn’t know the word DOWN — really knocked it out of proportion. I can ignore parser issues if they’re light as a percentage of gameplay; say I spend only 2% of my time thinking about the parser (maybe it’s a long game, so there’s still somewhere I get stuck a while, but it doesn’t linger as the main gameplay). Here, the overarching puzzles were simple enough that the majority of my time was spent on parser trouble.
The biggest issue is the violation of trust: the first time the parser does a horrible hiccup, I start to have my doubts about if patience is worthwhile: should I treat the puzzles as puzzles, or is the next one I get stuck on going to be equally more the fault of the game than myself?
Still, this game was unpublished; would some of these elements have been tweaked on their way to market? At the very least the bottom bar would have been changed to read BUG-BYTE (like The Scepter did); maybe the person responsible for checking if the tape loaded correctly would have fixed a typo or two while they were at it. Since Bug-Byte rejected the game outright it’s impossible to know. One certainly gets the impression of the cheaper-end cassettes of this period that the goal was to do as little testing as possible.
If nothing else, when we see Wadsworth again he’ll be with an entirely different company on an entirely different computer. Certainly his later games feel like much slicker productions, so maybe the technical freedom helped.
Wadsworth had already hopped over to Artic by the end of 1982 as they published his game Invasion Force for ZX Spectrum. This is essentially a variant of the “boss fight” stage in the arcade game Phoenix. Screenshot via Mobygames.
It was written using the same source code structure [as The Scepter]. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.
In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.
Wadsworth went on after this to publish with Artic (Adventure E: The Golden Apple and Adventure F: The Eye of Bain), taking over the series from Charles Cecil, so this game has some historical importance despite falling into the author’s own memory hole.
DVD cover of the last of the Key to Time serials, via IMDB.
The Key of Time reference makes it clear this is an offshoot of the Dr. Who universe. There is such a thing as a Time Warden in Dr. Who lore but you have to jump up to 1988 and the comics to see it; the Warden shows up in the same comic as one of the foes of the Transformers (Death’s Head) so is only roughly canonical.
From Doctor Who Magazine 135. That’s Death’s Head holding the Seventh Doctor. Death’s Head later had a run-in with the Fantastic Four.
While Time Warden doesn’t stick to canon like Dr. Who Adventure (at least so far, I’m not done yet), “Syrius 5” is a reference, as Sirius IV showed up in the television show during Frontier in Space (Third Doctor, 1973).
Prison Governor: I’m releasing you into the custody of this commissioner. He will fly you back to Sirius IV to stand trial. Dr. Who: And may I ask what I am supposed to have done there? The Master: Defrauding the Sirius IV Dominion Bank, evasion of planetary income tax, assault and battery committed on the person of a Sirius IV police commissioner, taking a spaceship without authority, and piloting said spaceship without payment of tax and insurance. Landing said spaceship on an unauthorized area on Sirius III, need I go on? Dr. Who: I seem to be quite the master criminal, don’t I? You don’t really say the you believe all this nonsense do you, Governor? Whatever credentials he’s shown you are forged. The Master: Oh come Doctor, you know the game’s up. Why not admit defeat? You know, this man always works with an accomplice. A girl. I’ve got her under lock and key in my ship. Well Doctor, are you coming quietly?
You start, as the author already indicated, returning from a “vacation” finding things have gone horribly wrong. You’d think there’d be a special line for this sort of thing, but I guess we were out-of-dimension.
The “STABALISER” has a small hole where I assume the key is suppose to go. If you try to drop an item here the game says “NOT HERE” as “VIBRATIONS ARE NOT GOOD FOR TIME STABALISERS.”
I did get to inadvertently test out the time limit early because the very start is easy to get stuck in. There’s the “wardens room”, a “grand room” with a “teleporter”, and the teleporter itself, which has a control panel that needs an I.D. CARD which we don’t have. All we start the game with is a BRACELET that has a button on it (I have yet to get the button to do anything).
I ended up having to go into Patience Mode™ and dutifully made my verb list; fortunately, the game is quite clear about if a verb is understood or not.
The parser only understands the first three letters of each word, so SWING is actually SWITCH and UNLIGHT is really just UNLOCK. I’m unclear if SNIFF is really that word or something else (surely SMELL would be more likely if that was important?)
In the process of doing all that and starting to apply every verb on every item, the countdown to doom started to close in so I waited for the axe to fall.
After enough brute force I realized that you can MOVE TELEPORTER. I was clearly visualizing it wrong.
The PASSAGEWAY is then revealed. Behind it is a store room with a shovel and ID card.
(Even with the “bigger on the inside” aspect, is the TARDIS really the sort of thing that can be shoved around? And if it isn’t the TARDIS — and the Dr. Who references are very approximate so that’s fair — wouldn’t a smaller version not be able to hide a passage?)
No reason to linger more, I suppose; using INSERT CARD while in the teleporter causes an “odd feeling” and upon leaving you find yourself somewhere else.
The planet consists (so far) of a mostly linear set of puzzles. To the south there are some bricks on a road, and if you LOOK you find a GOLD one.
Given this is probably a Wizard of Oz reference, I can again assert the author was just not worrying about canon. Mind you, the extended Dr. Who canon technically has the Time Lord in the same universe as Star Trek and the Transformers.
Going a bit farther south there is an unfinished wall. My verb list helpfully had BUILD on it so I tried BUILD WALL, finding out the gold brick was too heavy and caused the whole thing to fall over. This made a hole, allowing entrance to a swamp.
The swamp forms a very minor maze of sorts (not really, but I still had to drop objects to map it); the important thing is that you can DIG in two spots to reveal some BLUE POWDER and YELLOW POWDER.
Taking the prizes and heading back to the road, there’s a branch leading to a field. The field has a lake and also has a branch going up to a mountain with a cave.
Jumping into the lake with the powder is deadly:
This is intended as a hint, rather than as a punishment to the player.
The cave has a flask and a boulder. The boulder is described as having something behind it but MOVE is ineffective.
This is where the powder comes into play. You need to
a.) drop both powders off — you can do it right at the boulder
b.) go back to the lake and FILL FLASK
c.) return with the full flask and EMPTY FLASK (again, the verb list was helpful in making it so I didn’t have to hunt for the right syntax)
As long as both powders are in place an explosion will destroy the boulder and you can go in further. (If only one of the powders is there, it will just dissolve.)
The box does not want to OPEN (“I CANT DO THAT…YET.”) and going farther south leads to a locked door.
I am now stuck here, with no key (time-linked or otherwise). I assume I missed something with the bracelet/button combo possibly? Or I forgot to dig in a spot. Given the opening with moving the teleporter I don’t want to assume it will be easy to make progress, but I certainly don’t want hints yet.
Via the Internet Archive. The “Back-Up Program Certificate” is intended for getting one (1) copy for back-up use in case the original disk gets busted.
It’s hard to give a “narrative” of everything that happened because I had found most of the map already; progressing to the end involved finding the extra hidden pieces, plus one extra annoyance at the end which we’ll get to.
Let’s talk about the mansion (or at the game sometimes switches to, house) first. The new rooms are marked in red:
I spent a significant amount of time eye-balling the verb list I had made and trying every action I thought was reasonable on every object I thought was reasonable.
For example, upstairs there is a globe, and I realized I hadn’t tried to ROTATE it, which seems a reasonable thing to apply to a globe.
You can BREAK GLOBE (putting a “SMALL HOLE” in the bottom) and then do ROTATE GLOBE again to get a RUBY to fall out, yielding one of the glorious treasures.
Downstairs, at the statue I was having trouble with, I had tried PUSH but apparently not PULL:
This opens a secret room with a bracelet (more treasure) plus a stool. I already knew the picture in the study had been described as out of reach, so I decided to try to drop it there and STAND ON STOOL. While the picture still can’t be taken, I went back to the verb list and hit paydirt with MOVE.
This yields a SILVER CANDLEABRA and is the last treasure just lying about the house where things get stored.
Up next comes the parachute. I had theorized two posts ago that while the parachute is fatal from the opening chasm, it might still work elsewhere, but I hadn’t systematically tried it out yet. The parachute was next to message about “following in my footsteps” and I realized a cave near a fissure had footsteps leading to it, so it was a very good candidate to try:
Oho! The area this lands in includes a bottle of rare wine (treasure) a message (“hot or cold, warm or cool, the sapphires free if you can find the tool”) which is supposed to be a hint. You go via one-way exit back up to the “random exits” room.
I say “supposed to” be a hint because it led me astray for a while. I did realize where they were: you see them if you examine the icicle in the ice room. However, I thought the hint meant I just need to apply the right tool directly to the icicle (or rather, because tools sometimes get used passively, apply all the possible verbs while holding as many tools as possible).
I was looking in the wrong direction. I needed to go back to the furnace, with a dial I had attempted to TURN but was denied. Just like the FLOOR BOARDS, this was a case with a deceptive parser message; TURN DIAL is right, it just can only be done while holding the PLIERS (which I thought I was holding but I had apparently juggled them to my storage pile while testing other things).
With this done, you can go back to where the icicle was and nab the treasure.
The melting ice also reveals an exit to the north, leading to yet another treasure (a goblet). I did not catch this at first because I had already thoroughly done mapping via testing exits, and that route didn’t occur to me as a “future exit” that I should mark down.
Back at where the furnace was, another path led up to a Venus flytrap. As Matt W. guessed in the comments, the burger back at the house works to satiate it; it drops a rare stamp when you do so and opens a path by.
Before showing what is just past, I should highlight an item I’ve mentioned already but given no detail on: a magazine you can find by digging into some sand. The contents seem cryptic and I originally thought they could be an Easter egg style reference akin to the magazine in Crowther/Woods.
Just past the flytrap is a computer room (the door is locked, but the key that unlocked the main gate also unlocks this door). While this game is “modern” so it doesn’t feel comparatively jarring, I’m still reminded of Microsoft Adventure tossing a hacker’s den in the game for some reason.
I also got stumped for a very strange reason. Here was my initial conception of the map:
To be clear, this is WRONG.
Take a look at the room description and see if you can spot my mistake:
My brain, zeroing in on “the only exit lies to the north”, assumed the other directional references (“disk drive” to the east, “printer” to the west, “computer” to the south) were positional references and not actual directions that you can take. I’m going to blame myself for this one, mostly — except the parser’s non-responsiveness was such that I could refer to the printer and computer and disk drive in such a way it wasn’t obvious they were far away!
With the extra rooms filled in, the computer wasn’t difficult to get started. First, the disk from outdoors needs to go into a drive that has two buttons (push red button to start, blue button to open, PUT DISK IN DRIVE, blue button to close). Then the computer has a LOAD button that must be pressed, and three prompts must be given responses based on the magazine buried in the sand:
Without the magazine this would be a hassle, since there wasn’t a way to realize where to hunt for the missing information.
The printer then gives a PRINTOUT which I showed in my last post: a map of a maze.
Let’s jump ahead to that — remember from last time you need to pry the FLOOR BOARDS / FLOORBOARDS, causing you to fall down into a new area. Heading north goes past a bridge over lava and into a maze.
Inside the maze is a violin and a power pack. (I never used the power pack. I assume it recharges the lamp, but I never got low enough during normal play to worry; I only had it start to flicker when I was first making my map and testing every single exit in every single room to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Ha. Ha ha.)
Leaving then goes through the iron panel I was puzzled about:
As I suspected, I was essentially done with everything here. I had in fact found all the treasures:
I was short some points, and completely baffled as to why. I went through the walkthrough on CASA and combed through “drop” messages looking for the list of treasures, double-confirming I wasn’t missing anything. I eventually resorted to just restarting the game and running through the walkthrough wholesale, before realizing I had missed passing over the quicksand.
GET BOULDER and the like (which tried before) failed. I might assume PICK here means “apply pickaxe” except this action works even if you aren’t holding the pickaxe. I have no idea how to visualize what is happening.
I bestow the title of Second Worst Spot in the Game. Passing through is otherwise completely optional since there’s another way around.
I think, based on what Roger Durrant was alluding to in my comments, if you are short the points here but then take care of the boulder, you win the game right on the spot. This feels rather more unsatisfying than dropping off the final treasures, but since I was just repeating the walkthrough I took it all the way to the end.
Despite the hiccups already mentioned I did enjoy myself overall; there was a sense of combing for clues that other Treasure Hunt crawlers from this era tend not to have (with notable exception: some of the additions made to Crowther/Woods, like in Adventure 430, but most of those aren’t consistent with the rest of the game). I could see leaning in the direction of Mansion Adventure and making a Columbo Goes on a Dungeon Crawl game with lots of backtracking and cross-checking details.
Other than the obvious follow-up of Crime Stopper, I don’t see a clear link with the rest of Dan Kitchen’s output. Garry’s reverse engineering eventually led to him getting hired by Activision; Dan Kitchen went to Activision as well. Dan did still work on some Apple II games, most notably on the ports of Little Computer People and (Activision’s) Gamemaker.
I’ve combed over Dan Kitchen’s credits and the closest he gets to another adventure game is much later in life where he is the designer on a 2010 “casual” adventure titled Romancing the Seven Wonders: Taj Mahal (think hidden object puzzles, tangrams, etc.)
Via Mobygames.
At least in a business sense, the fact Garry and Dan founded a company early is important; it granted the independence to outlast Activision imploding after its transformation into Mediagenic, such that Dan’s credits are given to over 150 games, and he still remains active in the industry, with a recent release of a new Atari 2600 game, Casey’s Gold.
Coming up: Dr. Who, followed by a Western, followed by some naughty games courtesy a company in Ohio (with ads saucy enough to kick up an angry letter to a magazine editor).
I’m hovering near the ending, but I think it will be better for me to finish before I give all the discoveries. I wanted here to focus on something I found relatively late — so late I suspect I might only have one or two puzzles to go — and it ended up being a uniquely horrendous parser moment that’s worth close attention.
Title screen from the Commodore 64 version of the game.
This goes back to the above-ground part of the game around the mansion. I had by then discovered a few secrets inside, but I had already discarded the shed outside as being a mere container of objects and not of secrets. This is for good reason:
The only thing that seemed somewhat suspicious, the FLOOR BOARDS, did not even exist as a noun.
Here’s the issue: while the game does not let you refer to BOARDS or FLOOR BOARDS (following the exact spelling of the game), it does let you refer to FLOORBOARDS.
The “nothing under” is already pretty deceptive but at least the noun her is acknowledged (note this problem wouldn’t have occurred had it been a five-letter parser rather than a six-letter parser!) But wait, there’s more! … if you try to LIFT FLOORBOARDS the game simply says
YOU CAN’T DO THAT.
which the game normally does anyway for any other use of the verb! However, if you happen to also be holding the crowbar from underground, the game passively uses the crowbar and you can get inside (using either LIFT or PRY).
To recap, this is spectacularly bad in multiple layers:
a.) first off, the noun conveyed in the text is not the same spelling as what the parser is required
b.) even if you have the right spelling, the verb LOOK UNDER acts as if it doesn’t hide anything
c.) even if you have the right action, if you aren’t holding the crowbar you get a deceptive message
I’ve seen instances of each of these three (noun mismatch, deceptive response to a descriptive action, deceptive response to an action the game doesn’t consider valid) but I’m failing to remember a case where I had all three at once.
I needed a walkthrough. If this was one of a restricted number of rooms I might have persisted a bit longer with at least my noun troubles, but keep in mind this is one location of many, and in many cases room description elements are just there for color.
The only thing that saves the moment slightly is the roaring sound. That’s supposed to indicate that this is very close a lava flow river that is below. Heading north leads to…
YOU ARE NOW IN A TREMENDOUS UNDERGROUND CHAMBER THROUGH WHICH A RAGING LAVA RIVER FLOWS. THE RIVER ORIGINATES FROM A LARGE CRACK IN THE EASTERN WALL OF THE CHAMBER ANO DISAPPEARS INTO A LARGE ABYSS IN THE FLOOR TO THE WEST. TO THE NORTH, A RICKETY WOODEN FOOTBRIDGE SPANS THE LAVA RIVER ABOUT 10′ ABOVE ITS SURFACE. STEAM RISES FROM THE RIVER ANO FILLS THE CHAMBER. A PATH LEADS SOUTH.
…which is vivid but wasn’t quite worth it.
Past the bridge is a maze. At least stalling on the “floor boards” puzzle gave me enough time I already had this printout from another puzzle by the time I arrived at the maze.
I’ve revealed enough of the map that it is time for an update. Last time I left off on entering the mansion depicted on the title screen.
Unlike, say, Windmere Estate, there’s not many rooms at the house itself; the underground is where most of the rooms are. The game also seems to keep up a fairly high room-to-important-object number, and I have to add the “seems to” because there’s details in the room description that the parser technically recognizes. That doesn’t mean anything will happen with them, though!
Just to illustrate the inherent issue, here’s me attempting to get something to happen in the hallway with stairs and a statue:
On the map I marked a chandelier in a drawing room just because it was the only item in the room of importance, and in the parlor I zeroed in on the picture (GET PICTURE: “I CAN’T REACH IT”) but I’m just guessing here. This is the inherent problem with having a game where manipulatable objects fall in the room description; because the parser isn’t going to handle any of the “non-working” objects with more than default messages the amount of effort it takes to find a secret gets multiplied.
Also, there’s a burger in the abandoned kitchen full of cobwebs. It is safe to eat (“THANK YOU! IT WAS DELICIOUS!”) although it might need to be used on an obstacle.
Upstairs there’s a “small bedroom” (SLEEP BED: “I HOPE YOU’RE RESTED NOW!”) and a study with a ladder that can be climbed.
The ladder leads to a trap door with rusted hinges; the oil can from out in the shed can be used to OIL HINGES and go inside.
The cupola is where the treasures go. Once again we have a scenario with a “Treasure Hunt” where it feels more like the player is redecorating rather than scarfing for profit. (The type-in Spelunker from 1979 remains the only case I’ve come across that does actual currency conversion even though treasure gets hawked in CRPGs all the time.)
In order to get underground you need to visit that suspicious stump outside I mentioned last time, but first, an attempt at using the parachute, back at that elaborately-described chasm.
I don’t know if we’re intended to fix the parachute — no verbs I tried had any effect — or if this is all a big red herring. (Or, alternately, there’s a place later where the parachute will open properly.) While I’m at it, here’s the verb list as I have it so far:
Noteworthy, KICK but no other method of hitting things (no SMASH or KILL or ATTACK), both SIT and STAND, LIFT (which is often its own isolated thing to find secrets), and MELT. None of these suggest repairing a parachute even with the right items.
Back in the forest there was a stump that didn’t react to any of my commands, but I hadn’t tried it on the shovel yet. DIG does not work on its own; it needs a target. It also isn’t a single-use item because I’ve already used it twice more, so I’m now keeping constant lookout for sandy and/or unstable ground.
The underground is designed along the lines of long tunnels rather than dense interconnections. Starting from the bottom of a long hole, headed north there is an intersection, and essentially three different routes:
a.) east past some GOLD TOOTHPICKS to a Quarry. The quarry has a pickaxe (which I haven’t put to use yet) and a large boulder, but it is possible to push the boulder out of the way…
…revealing another room with treasure (a small chamber with a necklace) which appears to be a dead-end.
b.) down to a place with many passages where you are invited to “choose at random”; this does the Crowther/Woods trick of sometimes having an exit loop you back to the room you’re in rather than a secondary destination.
From here, one side passage just leads to a “cubbyhole” with a rare painting, but three others are or seem to relate to puzzles.
To the northwest, there is a compass on the floor. With it in hand, you see it start spinning as you get closer to an electric generator and a computer. The HARD DRIVE found outdoors is suggestive but I haven’t been able to find any verbs that use the two together.
To the southwest, there’s a furnace with a red dial. I have not found any way of interacting with the dial.
To the west, there’s a venus flytrap. Not much to say here; I probably need to feed it.
Backtracking to the junction near the start, going north isn’t a full-fledged route because of some quicksand in the way. It could be a puzzle but there’s a room later that might just be the other side. I’ll still keep it in mind if any obvious traversal methods arise.
c.) Going west from the starting junction first passes through a “frozen ice” room with a giant icicle (I’m guessing MELT comes into player there followed by a “jade ring” and a long hall of ugly art.
Is this purely for atmosphere? I have found no way to refer to the body of the artist.
Heading farther in, there’s a bearskin rug in a “fur trapper” room, and two curious rooms dedicated to a “music student”.
The piano can be played (“IT IS VERY OUT OF TUNE”) but I haven’t otherwise been able to interact with either room past picking up the platinum record (a treasure). The iron panel to the northwest is particularly curious as it seems like it ought to be hiding another exit but again none of my verbs have been much use. Out of anywhere I’ve seen so far here I’d expect it to be a magical effect (playing some sort of instrument? … but not the piano, which can’t be moved).
Also near this route is a “white sand” room which can be dug into using the shovel, revealing a magazine. The magazine’s description is esoteric enough I think it might be intended to mirror the magazine in Crowther/Woods (which was intended for use with the “last lousy point”).
Moving on to the last area I’ve explored:
The most memorable room here (for me, in terms of description) is of a dead explorer in a corner with a crowbar. I have yet to find a use for the crowbar although PRY is a verb.
This is followed by a mostly linear sequence of rooms, although off one branch is a “wall of lava” which may or may not be traversable, and there’s two more fissures where you can jump to your death if you feel so inclined.
Following all the way down there’s a dead end and a pit. You can dig into the pit and find a tusk, which counts as another treasure.
I think this is the end of the line here.
That was a big chunk, so to summarize:
I have, gathering from above and below-ground, a CAN OF OIL, RUSTY SHOVEL, BRASS LAMP, HARD DISK, RUSTED PLIERS, SMALL PARACHUTE, SMALL METAL CROWBAR, and COMPASS. I now have a variety of treasures (including some GOLD DOUBLOONS in a CHEST I neglected to mention) and none seem like the sort of item to be used a puzzle; I should still test them for magical effects. (However, there’s no WAVE or other verb that would naturally seem to apply! Maybe everything is “realistic” barring the giant Venus flytrap.) As far as obstacles or at least rooms of interest go, there’s the just-mentioned Venus flytrap, the computer with generator, the furnace, a weirdly decorated corridor, some quicksand, a cold room with an icicle, and a couple places that can be jumped into (currently resulting in doom, but I need to test the parachute out more). I also should do another pass on the mansion as surely something like the picture will shake loose a secret.
The game’s manual implies this is a game about finding hidden things, perhaps more than overcoming outright blatant obstacles.
CRYSTAL CAVERNS is subtle, complex, and devious. Imagination and persistence are your most valuable tools. Pick up anything that looks vaguely useful. Move, dig under or open anything that appears suspicious…or rattles.
Renga in Blue 