Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Dobbs was too much occupied with other thoughts to take any account of how he was sitting. Just then he was looking for a solution to that age-old problem which makes so many people forget all other thoughts and things. He worked his mind to answer the question: How can I get some money right now?

— B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

I have finished the game. (Previous posts here.)

Via eBay.

I like what this game was aiming for conceptually but the technology (that is, a late-70s or early-80s computer) didn’t hold up with the goal. The basic idea here was to use the MAKE command to build a number of things — far more than any prior game I’ve seen in this chronology — turning combinatorial object creation into a regular mechanic rather than a one-off novelty. The idea works in games like Return to Mysterious Island but that game has pictures of the objects and a UI that clarifies what’s going on. Let’s return to the issue in context and go back to a chunk of map I missed —

Right where I bribed the guard and got a FILE, I used it to nab a CHAIN, get a BAR out of a skylight, and escape. I did not think about the fact the DOOR is also now described as OPEN.

Implicitly I think I was imagining there’d just be guards back there; I was half-right but the half-wrong part was vital.

If you don’t GO WEST as shown above, you can nab some keys, then break into an office and two cells. The office has a map showing the town as well as a FULL CANTEEN (don’t drink it, it isn’t water).

One cell has a hanging body with a paper that has TRANSLUCENT PARTS. You can also use the file on the rope to get it (I did not figure this out straight away and had to loop back long after, but I’m saving time in the narrative). Across of the same cell, reflective of the general prison standards, there is a man who isn’t dead yet but drops over a turn after he gives you a message.

Searching the second man reveals some SPECTACLES. I’m going to condense my prolonged narrative and mention that USE SPECTACLES will cause them to light the paper on fire, revealing a message.

(I have never ever seen any spectacles with this effect, and this won’t be the last bit of dodgy science you’re going to see. ADD: OK, I checked and there are extreme enough reading glasses to make it work. Mea culpa.) This code ends up being useful at the bank — and I even knew immediately it must go to the bank — but I had to check a walkthrough (via Strident) to know how to phrase it. I’m guessing the Spectrum version (which he played) was more helpful about this?

Dark Star gave the syntax out when asking for HELP, but this game does not give any. As far as I can tell the only way to know this syntax is to imagine the same thing carries over between games, because the assertion doesn’t follow a verb-noun pattern.

This gives a SAFE DEPOSIT BOX. The box contains a passport but the passport is in need of a photo. I already had the bottle of developer, tray, photo sheet, and room that could be made dark, but the game let me know about a lack of CAMERA. It turns out — and I had to look this one up too — the safety deposit box and a SKEWER from a house can be used to MAKE CAMERA.

?!??

Here is how I visualize a safe deposit box:

Source.

Could a skewer poke a hole in that? Is that even the right shape for a camera? Is a pinhole camera really enough to make a passport photo? (Indeed the author could have been visualizing the box “correctly” but just saying IT’S EMPTY upon examining it is not sufficient to avoid disjoint visualization.)

At least the game is very specific about the verb FIX here which is not being used in the “repair” sense like it normally is.

Before hitting the cavalcade where things getting even wilder, here’s the remaining object list: BLANKET, SOME WOOD, EMPTY CONTAINER, WIRE, METAL STRIP, IRON BAR, WHEELS, CANTEEN. There’s also a HORSE in a stable, petrol pump and an ENGINE that is too big to carry, the GOLD INGOTS equally too big to carry, and a JEEP that is stuck in QUICKSAND.

The container is used at the petrol pump to get some gas over to the jeep and fill it. I got that far, at least. I also got part of the way to figuring out the WINCH; there’s a pulley that can be mended as long as you’re holding the IRON BAR (shown above) and then MAKE WINCH while holding the chain. Except:

It turns out you can ENTER JEEP … except for the quicksand, which you can cross by USE BLANKET. Why THROW BLANKET does not work is beyond me (leaving the jeep, you don’t use the blanket again, so you ought to get stopped by the quicksand; best just not to think about it to much).

Here, you have to put together the fact the CANTEEN is in fact holding acid, the wire, and the metal strip to MAKE BATTERY. This does not sound safe or even like it would work.

However, you also need the ENGINE. Going back to the HORSE, the only unused items are the WOOD, the ROPE, and the WHEELS, which is sufficient — without nails, a hammer, or any supplies really — to MAKE CART.

MAKE is such a risky verb when any noun in the universe is technically possible, especially if the author is fishing for something specific. This was way too specific for me. I did not visualize the wood as being of the volume for this kind of thing, or the wheels as the kind of thing that would somehow attach without any extra bolts or assistance. Again, I get where the author was going, but with minimal descriptions or no descriptions at all this requires abductive reasoning of colossal size.

The cart allows picking up the ENGINE and delivering it to the JEEP. You can move the GOLD closer while you’re at it if you want. With that done you can START IGNITION, LEAVE JEEP, and MAKE WINCH, finally pulling the jeep out.

The gold fits into the jeep, and apparently we are just getting waved through because it’s the 80s.

Flashing so I couldn’t quite get the whole word “ANOTHER”.

In a narrative sense this had a theme of greed rarely seen in an adventure game from this time. That might seem like a bizarre statement given the number of Treasure Hunts we’ve experienced, but the emphasis has very rarely been on Getting Rich; the treasures are treated as a generalized mechanic for sending the player in all directions. (In some games, the treasures are being moved inside the dungeon/pyramid/complex rather than “liberated”.) Here, there’s no reason we have to take the risk to also get the gold; the passport would normally be enough for an escape, but the protagonist is suffering from That Age-Old Problem. Hence I got more interesting narrative out of this game than the same author’s Haunted House (which is pure treasure hunt) but the leaps of disjoint visualization required to MAKE the objects required left me feeling sour.

Via MZ Sharp Archive.

Still not a terrible game to end the Sharpsoft saga (for now) on. Five 1982 games to go!