Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

Since last time I’ve prodded open the easily-accessible treasures, as well as one of the less-accessible treasures, but I’m stuck with major parser issues.

Via a 1983 ad for Dynacomp.

Let’s start with the dragon. As Rob observed in the comments last time, the appearances in dark rooms makes it akin to the vampire bat from Windmere, but making less sense. The Windmere bat can also be easily fended off with a cross, whereas here the dragon is more annoying as it can only be dealt with temporarily.

Specifically: if you have the arrow head and shaft, and you’re standing in the “carpenter’s shop”, you can MAKE ARROW.

You don’t need to bother with lighting the room up first either. The dragon is just as likely to appear with the room lit as with the room dark.

With the BOW back at the cottage from the start of the game, you can then shoot the dragon and reduce it to ashes.

YOU LOOSE YOUR ‘ARROW’ AND IT NEATLY PIERCES THE BEAST’S HEART. HE WRITHES ABOUT AND FINALLY DISAPPEARS LEAVING ONLY A SMALL PILE OF ASHES.

However, dragons continue to occur with roughly the same frequency, so this is only a temporary reprieve. I found it better to simply grab the object in each dragon-guarded room (if there is one) and leave. In the rare case where more than one action was required, I went elsewhere a while and came back to re-roll the dragon appearing. (It doesn’t seem to be “random” so much as “alternating” in appearances but I’m not certain about that.)

I tried to find an iconic “tiny dragon” from this time period, and the closest I could get to was the dragon on the 1981 printing of the Basic Rules for Dungeons & Dragons. It might fit in a bedroom? Via eBay.

Heading back to another issue, that of wondering if you can refer to anything that’s not a separate object: above the guard room is some busted machinery for the closed drawbridge. Remembering the lamp had regular OIL in it straight from a kitchen, I tried OIL GEARS and it made some progress.

Following this with PULL TEETH seemingly resolves the problem with the drawbridge for good.

THIS ROOM CONTAINS THE DRAWBRIDGE MECHANISM. THE GEARS ARE WELL OILED AND FREE AND THE DRAWBRIDGE IS RAISED.

However, no command I’ve tried has gotten farther than this. No LOWER DRAWBRIDGE, or TURN GEARS, or PULL (imaginary) LEVER. (The last one is obviously a stretch but I ran out of options, and this seems to be bespoke-coded anyway where it’s just fishing for a specific phrase rather than referring to a world-model.) The puzzle appears to be optional anyway, because it is possible to traverse the catacombs to return to the treasure-drop point. An even easier way is to use the magic words HOKUS POKUS from the book back at the library.

This either zaps everything in inventory (except the lamp) back to the the treasure room or takes everything from the treasure room and drops it at the player’s feet. This seems to be based on a.) if the player has a item to be teleported in the first place and b.) if the player has already just used HOKUS POKUS but I’m not 100% clear on the logic. I muddled through enough that I was able to use it to rack up close to 60% of the points, so it works sufficiently well.

(If SHAZAM or ABRA CADABRA work anywhere, it must be in a very specific scenario, because the game usually just says SHAZAM??? or ABRA CADABRA??? like my character has just spoken nonsense.)

Out of those points I’ve attained, a good chunk of them are the treasures from the second floor like a ruby ring, an emerald necklace, and a diamond brooch. A dragon would occasionally show up but the treasure can be nabbed in one turn so an arrow is not required.

One room has a dog, fortunately straightforwardly defused by the MEAT.

Thank goodness it didn’t need to be poisoned like in Bedlam.

On the ground floor there was an atrium with some dirt, and bean elsewhere that it was possible to PLANT. The game said the beans needed more, so I took the MANURE from the stables (needed the sack to get it in the first place) and dropped it, getting a little but not enough result.

I took the CHALICES over to where the water in the fountain to the north was and tried GET WATER, and the message I got indicated the keg of ale got filled instead (??). This is just the game being buggy again: it expects the keg and will claim to use it even when it is in an entirely different room. Getting the hint, I drunk the ale out, took the empty keg over, did GET WATER, and after some failed attempts (like DROP WATER, assuming the interaction would mirror that of the manure) found POUR WATER works.

This leads to a tower with a spinning wheel and some flax. In order to avoid dragon-trouble I nabbed each item away, and then tried SPIN FLAX only to get an error. Fortunately, I was persistent in testing things out and tried SPIN FLAX while still in the tower, and the command worked. This is another bug: the command is location based, not based on where the spinning wheel is!

This represents the only new room of the game I’ve found since last time.

Hence with only one exception I’m stabbing at “secrets” where I’m not sure if there’s a secret, and the parser’s difficulty makes the whole process painful (since I might be doing the right thing, just phrasing it in the wrong way). The one exception I just mentioned is the well to the south of the Castle out in the open:

I’ve got a pillow I tried tossing in — no dice, you can only drop it — and I’ve tried forming a rope out of various items like the silk and/or the thread, again without luck. This could of course be the sort of passage that can only be entered from below rather than above.

Potential secrets include:

1.) A study with a portrait of OLD MERLIN. The portrait seemingly cannot be referred to, but I don’t take anything for granted with this parser. The DESK might also yield something (but not with OPEN DESK or OPEN DRAWER).

2.) A heraldry room which originally held a signet ring. There’s a suspicious hole that is resistant to all my attempts to refer to it.

3.) The balcony I showed off in my last post. You can jump to your death, very exciting. But maybe you can climb somewhere?

4.) Any other room in the entire game.

Even a random nondescript catacomb-room might react to one of the magic words. I am thrilled about the possibility of testing the two unused words (SHAZAM and ABRA CADABRA) in every single one. This is my thrilled face.