Archive for July 2025
I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.
I finished on the Amstrad version, which runs a little faster and does seem to be nearly identical (comparing against the walkthrough by Garry Francis). Even that ancient manuscript I mentioned counted for essentially nil: there are no glasses to read it. I’m not sure why the author even added it in, other than a general love of red herrings; the dog, hammer, dynamite, bulldozer, and rubbish bin all signify nothing other than the debris of the British countryside.
Cover of the magazine the game first appeared in, via eBay.
My two issues (the missing treasure, and the heavy lid I suspected hid a treasure) both had their solution nearby. The lid straightforwardly opened with the “sharp sword” at the mansion, no hammer or dynamite needed.
I don’t know what the “sorry” is about, sometimes the parser printed that randomly.
I mentioned mushrooms I was not able to pick up last time. This is an Amstrad-specific bug. The game does not let you type GET MUSHROOMS or even GET MUSHROOM (it just re-displays the room over again). You need to type GET MUSH or GET MUSHR. I assume there’s some length limit I’m hitting. (The Oric does not have this problem! I’d consequently say the Oric is less buggy but Garry may have fixed the mushroom while he was busy fixing the general can’t-pick-anything-up bug. It’s all just a mess, let’s just leave it at that.)
With the mushrooms, er, MUSH in hand, you can deliver them to the gamekeeper nearby. Again, GIVE MUSHROOMS fails, it needs to be GIVE MUSH.
This is the only place a spacesuit is mentioned. I don’t know how the kissing worked.
That puts us at a full list, now it’s just a matter of getting all the objects over in one save file. This was slightly tedious but made somewhat less so by the discovery that PRAY rotates through locations a bit at random; after making a delivery I did PRAY until I was close to my next targets. I did still have to tote a BOAT all over the map twice.
Item pile in progress.
I didn’t even get to drop my last treasure, this displayed with the camera still in my inventory. I wonder if the game is bugged so you leave one treasure behind you can still win the game.
There’s no puzzle for entering the spaceship. I suppose the power of friendship was within us all along.
This was a lot of words for a type-in (mind you, that’s the style of this blog) but it’s worth a close look for if nothing else not only did Steve Lucas publish many games, he published at least two “how to write adventure games” books, one for MSX and one for Amstrad. If his style evolves over time we need his starting point accounted for. I’m hoping over the process I can shake a few more biographical details loose (what was his past background? what happened to him during the 90s?)
But for now: our first Japanese game for 1983, one considered a landmark work.
(Continued from my last post.)
From the cover of Games Magazine November 1984, with the Amstrad version of Space Traveller / Visitor from Space, although this particular illustration is meant to go with a different game, Interplanetary Miner. Mind you, I think they’re just pulling from the same stock archive of space pictures for both.
As promised, I went through the Amstrad version of the game, with some places having expanded text. I don’t think any of the text helped me with puzzle-solving, but it did make combing over the map less repetitive since things looked slightly different.
Just west of the start. The original just describes it as a field, without the extra textual hint about digging; if I hadn’t found the treasure already this would be a case where the expanded text was helpful.
No busker (or Beatles reference) in the original.
Outside the warehouse, previously with no mention of dark glass.
There was one genuine change in content (that I’ve seen so far): an ancient manuscript in the warehouse (seen above) which originally just had a box. Like the newspapers and poetry book, it can’t be read without glasses.
I guess you can also count the Oric in the computer shop changing to an Amstrad; would expect that one.
I did reach two new areas, but before describing those, two quick treasure finds, the first being right at the opening with the pebbles. EXAMINE PEBBLES reveal a zirconium nugget.
Additionally, back at the bus stop, if you WAIT at the queue you will eventually be able to get on, and while on the trip there will be a roman coin you can scoop up. (This incidentally takes you to the north part of the map without praying. The other option — adjacent to the bus — is a taxi where you can GO TAXI to do the same thing, but no coin on the way.)
So treasure count wise, that makes five so far: silver bar (dug in the field), zirconium nugget (pebbles), roman coin (bus), gold pen (teacher), and rocket fuel (hut, using key). The rocket key ends up not counting towards the ten treasures (despite it having asterisks) but I’m counting it anyway meaning we’re at 5 out of 11. I’ve got 4 more secured, plus 1 probable location, so I’m close to the end, but close isn’t all the way.
First, let’s go back to the lake by the hut, where I previously did ROW BOAT. Checking each room carefully, I realized SWIM was also a verb that could apply there, and it led me to an entirely new destination.
The landing point is a beach with sunbathers. Back at the store (in the Amstrad game it is described as a “Tesco”) there was a lighter at a store that couldn’t be grabbed because it was by the register and our alien visitor has no Earth money; however, farther away in the same store there’s some suntan lotion and baked beans that are apparently out of the eye of any watchful cashiers. GIVE LOTION to the sunbathers and you’ll get a CAMERA (treasure #6).
Just to the east there is a dead body, just because this is a gonzo adventure and tonal shift is just its thing.
Dying alone and unnamed. Searching reveals nothing. Oddly, unlike the boat trip which is one way, you can just swim back across the lake.
The cliff I’d been looking for! With the parachute (first getting chastised by the parser for trying WEAR PARACHUTE, it just assumes you have it on implicitly) I was able to land safely.
Just to the east is a crab (taking it gets you chomped: death); a few rooms away in a “dark forest” is a “gnome” that is, I quote, “the sort they sell at Woolworth’s”. GET GNOME:
In the middle of a dark forest, putting us back in On the Way to the Interview for a moment.
Between the gnome and crab is a “sandy cove” with a “driftwood” that is hiding a diamond ring (treasure #7).
To get out of the region (without PRAY) there’s a narrow ledge which requires a ROPE. The implication here is that walking through the section takes up two inventory slots already (parachute + rope) so getting the ring + the driftwood requires two separate parachute runs through (maybe the driftwood doesn’t do anything, but I don’t know that yet!) If there’s some way to handle the crab and/or gnome it requires bringing in objects to test one at a time.
Now is a good time to mention the three-item limit is an incredible pain. Either the boat (alone) or the parachute and rope (together) are needed to move from the north to south side of the map, so in a practical sense the inventory limit is either 1 or 2, and so testing any theory about bring an item X to a spot Y requires a lot of shuffling. The size of map really does influence the level of suffering involved with a small inventory limit; a good recent example of this is Mystery House II, where the two-item limit applied in all versions. In the MSX version it was irksome (the entire house was always accessible) but more workable in the versions split into multiple volumes (as they only involved a smaller portion of the house).
Moving past all that, I mentioned I found a second area. Down at the farm there’s a “pigsty” which I thought was merely a dead end, but it is possible to GO IN.
The way to get by the pig is simply to PUSH PIG knocking it over, cow-tipping style.
Past a long tunnel is a mansion. I have yet to use the sword for anything.
This is followed by a fairly dense area where I doubt everything ends up coming into play, but let’s do bullet points:
- a garden with a gate and a “garden snake”
- a “gamekeeper” in a clearing
- some mushrooms in a woods (they don’t seem to be takeable)
- a platinum bar (remember that trolley from the farmer who liked poetry? you need it to pick up the bar)
- a lead casket (you need something to open it; dunno what yet, see inventory limit)
- a woman in a field (trying to KISS this one results in getting slapped, I guess this isn’t Earth Girls are Easy)
- a large monument with a radio transmitter, another treasure
Finally at the end (drumroll) there’s the spaceship! Except I don’t know how to get in. Forgot my remote and the app stopped working, I suppose.
In the end all the puzzles have been straightforward (except PUSH PIG was pretty odd) but the spread out nature of the map makes things hard to test. I still need to check: blowing things up with dynamite (and can the lighter be taken somehow?), dealing with the dog outside the store, taking various objects like the hammer over to the lead casket, seeing if the gamekeeper will take something, nudging at the mushrooms some more, and even more things I’ve lost track of. This is a lot more work than I expected from an Oric type-in.
I have been sent on a difficult and rather dangerous mission to a distant planet called EARTH. My mission is to locate ten items of treasure and bring them back to my spaceship. I will, in addition, need to locate some rocket fuel for my return journey.
My random roll has landed me on the works of Steve W. Lucas, perhaps best thought of as Britain’s answer to Peter Kirsch. That is, a wildly prolific author who wrote reams of slightly janky BASIC code but with flashes of creativity just naturally from cranking out bucketloads of content. He has 41 hits on CASA but some of those are duplicates — when porting from one system to another he would often change his game’s title and only sometimes change his content. It’s unclear how many distinct games he wrote and it may even depend on your definition of “distinct”; there’s a long thread at CASA that tried to tame the chaos but there still seems to be some confusion. The other comparison with Kirsch of note is how he worked with a wide variety of computers: MSX, Oric, Amstrad, and BBC Micro.
With Journey of a Space Traveller, it first appeared in Oric Owner (Aug./Sept. 1983) but got changed to A Visitor From Space in a 1984 printing for Amstrad, with some expansion of the text. The intro at the top of this post is from the Amstrad version; the Oric version instead starts “I have been sent on the first flight from my planet to the planet Earth” which I think has less punch than “rather dangerous mission to a distant planet called EARTH.” However, I’ve been playing (up to where I’ve been stumped) the Oric version; as is tradition with multi-version games, I might poke at the Amstrad version to see if there’s any tweaks or textual hints to help (allegedly the walkthrough is the same, at least).
The Oric is a new system for this blog. I’m not going to do a system history right now, but I’ll say it is Tangerine’s much more successful follow-up to the Microtan 65 and was particularly well-received in France as it didn’t need an adaptor for their SECAM television format.
It is likely his first published game but I’m not 100% certain; it is his first to appear in Oric Owner, at least, but he also published some BBC Micro software through Silverlind; the first ad for that I’ve found in November, with a “call for games” back in May.
From the Oric magazine original.
The other distinctive thing about his games — specifically the Oric Owner ones but maybe some of the others as well — is how buggy they are. None of the ones printed in Oric Owner work directly as printed; Garry has a patched version that’s needed to get past even the first command. This is the sort of thing I’d normally blame on the magazine rather than the author but it’s odd for it to occur multiple times; the author has two games in the December/January issue with the same problem.
Games Computing, November 1984, with a slightly higher art budget. Well, higher art budget for printing, but given the art has nothing to do with the game I think it was “borrowed” from elsewhere.
The instructions helpfully give the verbs (this seems to be common across all the Steve Lucas games) so I’ll give them, just as they were printed:
GO IN, GO OUT, GO TAXI, OUT, N, S, E, W, WAIT, SING, SAVE, WEAR, SCORE, ROW, SAIL, THROW, LIGHT, GET, TAKE, GRAB, CLIMB, DOWN, READ, **** OFF, TIME, DIG, HELP, SEARCH, DROP, LEAVE, GIVE, OPEN, PHONE, QUIT, LOOK, KISS, PRAY, LOAD, CLOAD, PUSH, PULL, EAT, ATTACK, HIT, KILL, EXAMINE, SWIM, USE, INSERT, UNLOCK, WEAR, JUMP, INVENTORY, BUY, CRACK, COOK, SORRY, SAIL, ROW
(****, OFF not required, gets “how dare you speak to me like that? What do you have to say for yourself?” and you need to respond SORRY before proceeding on.)
It’s a traditional treasure hunt, but with the twists that a.) you are an alien and b.) you’re treasure-hunting on modern Earth. Adventure-behavior — especially without regular communication with characters — is typically a bit non-standard, so I like the idea of the mute protagonist poking and searching every room (digging random floors, hitting walls, trying to climb everything, etc.) being explained away by their alien status.
I don’t know where the spaceship is; part of the goal is to find it. This is a major pain in that the inventory limit is three (weak alien arms, I guess we’re used to lower-G) so I have no idea where to stash things so they’ll be close for their inevitable unloading into a cargo bay of some sort.
Right to the east of the starting point are some pebbles and a shovel…
The Amstrad version adds “The pebbles hurt my feet!” but I haven’t gone past this room.
…and the shovel can be used just to the west to dig up some SILVER bullion, our first treasure. Nine to go!
Heading to the east, there’s a quarry with a hammer, and nearby is some dynamite and a parachute. I have yet to blow anything up (I think it needs a lighter I’ll show off later) nor have I found the right place to apply the hammer and parachute (…presumably not at the same time). There’s additionally dead ends with a Sheer Rock Face and Bulldozer but I haven’t quite worked out yet if this is an “everything is important” style game or some parts are just scenery. I’m leaning to the latter.
A rope is at a bridge (again, haven’t used) leading to a “primary school”. The school has a secretary which you can kiss (the game says she likes it, indicating we’re an alien counterpart to Riker) and a head teacher who has a GOLD pen, another treasure. Examining the teacher reveals they like singing (alien senses, I suppose) and SING will utilize the Oric’s speaker to play a tune, after which you can get the pen. Eight more to go.
Leaving the school (swiping a book of poetry for later, we can’t read it because we need glasses) and proceeding westward we can find a locket hut at a boat. I’ll mention right now there’s a key laying out in the open later used on the hut which contains *ROCKET FUEL* (seven to go); the boat needs to be carted a short way to a lake where ROW BOAT can be applied. Note that the three-item limit applies neutrally, so a LARGE KEY is the same size as the boat in inventory.
The trip over water landing at the Footpath (see upper right of above map) is one-way; the only way so far I’ve found to return to the start area is PRAY, which warps you over for some reason. (Religious miracles: alien technology all along!) The PRAY is quite relevant insofar as just to the west you can get lost in a forest that’s an endless loop, and as far as I know PRAY is the only way to get out.
Proceeding in a direction that isn’t a trap passes through a warehouse with a box (nothing in it), and that leads to a carpark, and then a bunch of directions from there, like a bus station complete with queue…
Only in a Britgame.
…a computer store with software you can LOAD…
…a fish and chip shop…
…and a closed newsagent place with newspapers that can’t be read because you still need your glasses. (If this was logical you’d have left them on your spaceship by accident, but I can’t rule out some random passerby’s reading glasses working just as well.)
Nearby all this lurks a LARGE KEY at an intersection which goes back to that hut with the rocket fuel; as I already indicated, the only way I can find so far to head back there is to PRAY.
Moving on to the west, we can pass by a rubbish bin (seemingly containing nothing!) near a supermarket.
To the west of here is a lighter at the cashier. I can try to BUY LIGHTER but the game asks “with what?” Maybe use one of the treasures and get it back later somehow? I still need to experiment.
Lurking outside the supermarket is a dog; no idea what to do here yet…
…followed by a bunch of rooms leading to a farm complete with tractor and a farmer. The farmer wants a book, so if you hand the poetry book over he’ll give you a trolley, because this game is following gonzo logic.
To be fair, the “I’m an alien” does a lot of the work in making the narrative seem semi-normal for an out-of-control treasure hunt. However, I am up on my limit now at only three treasures.
I’m not going to list every obstacle because I don’t know which ones are “real” and which ones are for scenery. Does the forest have a different escape? What can you do at the bus station? Does making the dog happy lead to treasure? This might be the extent of the map and I’m just supposed to mop things up (akin to Invincible Island) or I may have only seen part of it. Given the parachute (and distinct lack of gaping chasms) surely there’s at least a bit more to go. Maybe the supermarket is secretly the alien spaceship.
(My previous posts are needed for context.)
I’ve beaten the game, and unfortunately both puzzles involved were terrible. I still will give some latitude because the combining-message mechanic was so satisfying, but let’s get to the end first–
Continuing directly from last time, I needed to get a parchment from the native without resorting to violence. I had tried to GIVE every single item I could possibly bring over. (The SKULL I could not bring, because it triggers natives attacking when it passes by the other native.)
Every GIVE gave a variation like the one above: “what?? I don’t think the native wants it”. The text here clearly implies the game is understanding, and simply rejecting this option.
Instead, no: GIVE NECKLACE was right. But it has to be typed as GIVE NECKLACE TO NATIVE in order to be understood.
I’ve never done relative ranking, but this likely would my in top 3 most deceptive parser messages of all time.
Fortunately this was near the end of the game because otherwise my mood would have significantly soured. I did not come across as “solving a puzzle” as much as “making a meta-leap based on my past experiences, given we know the character has the parchment, the verb list is minimal, and GIVE is on it”.
Knowing the GIVE syntax, I went back to the first native and tried giving an item that hadn’t a use before: the FOOD. The results in the native trading a PHRASEBOOK.
With the phrasebook I could go back and read the two messages previously untranslated, at the sign and the altar.
The first simply indicates to follow the path rather than digress, where the second one might be intended as a hint for the endgame but I’m still massively unclear about it (you’ll see in a moment).
when the page is complete look and you’ll find, west of the sun and the ancient temple,amongst the bones of our ancestors
I still hadn’t used the SPADE yet, but now was the time: I dug starting at the three pillars and going west. Just east of where the skull was I found gold.
Once the gold is revealed, natives immediately appear and start to chase. It’s a little more time than what happens with getting spotted with the skull, but not enough to do anything useful.
Trying to hide in the well. You can jump in the cave but you just get killed in the dark.
If it hadn’t been for the GIVE issue I would have spent a bit longer on the puzzle, but I was grouchy and worrying I might be running into another parser issue. It isn’t a parser issue at all, and just as an experiment, I’m going to pause before revealing the answer. Try your best guess at how to pick up the gold and survive all the way back to the boat; maybe you’ll spot something I did not.
Via eBay.
Did you come up with… be holding the skull while picking up the gold?
Despite being attacked earlier because you had the skull, now you are attacked when you don’t have the skull. I assume there is some logic about a taboo going on but I couldn’t come up with any rationale, nor any way to pull the altar’s clue into the puzzle (assuming it is relevant at all).
With the skull providing safety, you can now walk back to the boat. The boat still needs to be light enough to sail, and you’ve got a bunch of gold, so you need to drop the skull before leaving, but there’s ample time after to sail away.
The puzzles overall were essentially straightforward (coat for the cold, foot pump for an inflatable boat, key for a door) and the wide-out exploration and slowly growing parchment made for a satisfying middlegame. Just it failed to stick the landing. I surely am missing some clue on the skull, right?
I’m going to save Urban Upstart for a little bit later (but not too long, I want to have the “feel” of this game fresh in my mind) and my projected third Britgame also needs to be maneuvered a little, so after I finish writing this I’m pulling out some actual dice to see what comes next. Exciting! Then we’ll be off to one of the first Japanese adventures of 1983.
(Continued from my previous post.)
I have seen all seven parchments put together and even solved the puzzle, but I don’t quite have them all permanently yet.
Strident mentioned the prog band in the comments: The Speedy Bears. Pete Cooke on keyboard. Source.
Progress was mainly a matter of getting comfortable with the game’s norms. For example: last time I mentioned the canary I hadn’t tested yet. Bringing the canary in the “coal mine” (not actually a mine) the canary fell over dead after two steps.
This reflects the “you can’t breath” rooms, but is this letting us know about a potential timed danger, or is there a further puzzle here where we have to make it to place X with the canary surviving? With one of the “every item matters” games like from the Cambridge mainframe (Hezarin, Avon, Quondam, etc.) I would be on red alert until there was further resolution; with this game, the canary is just meant to give the information above, and then you can move on.
Similarly, there’s a part with a “native”; I found that if you pick up the skull and bring it to the same room, a group starts to gather and attack. In some games, this would indicate you’re supposed to find a sneaky way to get the skull by, or eliminate the threat; here, the norms are such that not only is the skull meant as a “trap” (like the stones over the bridge) but the native no longer needs to be considered as a puzzle element (I don’t need to sit around using GIVE on every item in the game or trying other verbs.)
In a more practical sense, I’ve discovered that while the parser is mostly two-word, there’s spots like right here you need four words: use WITH SWORD at the end is how you avoid just using your fists to fight.
Additionally, I was thinking there was going to be more map, but what I had last time was nearly all of it. I have marked the positions, and the six new rooms are in the upper right corner.
The first parchment and second parchment I had already found, in the underground area (SW) and island (NW) respectively. I had made a guess about the chest with the snake and the green potion that turned out to be correct: after drinking the green potion the snake’s bite has no effect (it doesn’t say “you feel cured”, you just don’t die); in addition to the trap the chest has the third parchment.
This is just the piece from the chest. After picking up multiple parchments, they automatically merge together, so you don’t need to visualize cutting and pasting.
The fourth parchment I was very close to having, with both a box I was not strong enough to open and an axe. I even tried BREAK BOX (“what with? your bare hands?”) and tested a follow-up WITH AXE on its own parser line. This was before I realized sometimes the parser wanted four words, so BREAK BOX WITH AXE all together does the trick.
I had mentioned the pits before, where one of them is fatal to enter. I hadn’t gotten around to testing the other two yet; both act entirely differently. One is fatal in an identical way…
…but the third reveals the fifth parchment straight off the bat.
Some games would have the norm that similar looking pits would have similar rules (see Probe One: The Transmitter for an example) but here all three pits are different.
My last bit of confusion involves the second fatal pit, two screenshots back. The game specifies you can go “down” and I somehow interpreted that as the same as entering the pit; in reality that’s just an area I missed.
With the anorak from the camp it is possible to climb a mountain and get the sixth parchment from the top without freezing from the cold.
Death soon after. I knew instantly what object I needed but I was curious what would happen if I moved on. This is a “death preview” moment and we’ll see another of its type shortly. See Burglar’s Adventure for more discussion of this idea.
Past the mountain is a pagoda; it is locked with a red key (which is just out in the open from the temple earlier).
The wild thing about the encounter in the pagoda is you can kill the native (with the sword) and get the seventh parchment. The death doesn’t happen until a few turns later, long enough to view the unified seven parchments altogether.
This is a cryptogram. Avoiding the automatic solvers on the Internet, I went to a site that has tools for playing them on a computer (I like them, but find them a pain to keep track of on paper). I swapped unused letters for symbols to get:
UFTL RFT NCET GQ AMKNJTRT JMMI CLB WMSXJJ DGLB, UTQR MD RFT QSL CLB RFT CLAGTLR RTKNJT,CKMLEQR RFT ZMLTQ MD MSP CLATQRMPQ
The puzzle fortunately falls fairly easily to “the most common letter is E” and “the second word is probably THE” as a start.
when the page is complete look and you’ll find, west of the sun and the ancient temple,amongst the bones of our ancestors
I assume this is back at the skull, but since all parchments are needed for the final area (at least according to the decipherment) I still need to figure out the legit way of getting the final parchment piece from the pagoda. I expect it will be either the last puzzle remaining (if finding the treasure is just a glorious “you win” section) or the second to last (if getting out after finding the treasure is still going to be a problem, like in Calixto Island).
Apologies: after a bit of research I’m going to visit Invincible Island first and Urban Upstart second, as they represent the first two text adventures by Pete Cooke in the order he wrote them. (The latter was picked via random number generator to be my next game, rather than anything systematic.) Both were written for the ZX Spectrum.
Pete Cooke is another one of our math-teachers turned programmers, although he started (after graduation) trying to make it work as a piano player in a progressive band; the band failed (he blames punk rock) so he ended up doing degree-work in order to teach math to 11-to-14-year-olds in Leicester.
While their department received a text-only RM 380Z…
A machine developed in 1977, targeted at schools in the UK. From vt100.
…where he really caught the computer bug was the ZX81, where he “sort of lunged at it” and got using one as soon as he could. He ended up making programs that he showed to his students, and:
Eventually I wrote a simple text adventure and showed it to some of the students who said it was seriously good and thought it was better than some of the stuff in the shops!
He sent it to Richard Shepherd Software (previously: Super Spy) and they offered 1000 pounds to buy it, twice his monthly salary as a teacher.
[Adventure games] were interesting, and it was the idea you could explore somewhere. Also, I didn’t have the skills then to design 3D or animated graphics, although I’d been reading about AI and language parsing. It could also have been the influence of games such as The Hobbit, or maybe just the freedom appealed to me. I wrote it from scratch with bits in BASIC and tiny bits in assembler, but essentially hand-coded.
Noteworthy to highlight in the quote is the emphasis on “freedom” and “exploration”. This game has one of those wide-open maps more closely aligned to Roberta Williams than Scott Adams; this was not converted from ZX81 but rather written directly for the ZX Spectrum, along with its increased resources. (There’s a 2022 backport to ZX81 which converts the 48K original into 16K but even with modern resources and cutting out all the graphics, part of the original game was omitted.)
The loading screen has a ripple effect through “Invincible Island” so I wasn’t able to get a shot where all the text showed at once.
We’re back to being on a Treasure Hunt. Sort of.
WELCOME TO INVINCIBLE ISLAND
In this adventure you are an explorer stranded on the remote island of the XARO.
Your only guide is a letter you received from a Dr Chumley several months ago in which he said that he believed that islanders had hidden a massive treasure somewhere on the island.
Unfortunately, Dr Chumley did not live long enough to find the islands secret.
You have arrived on the island in a small boat, your aim is to find the treasure and escape alive.
Hmm. Since they’re hiding a treasure, I guess we have the right to scarf it? (It has come up before, but I want to emphasize that “claim stuff in the name of the British Empire / your wallet” is not common amongst these games despite so many Treasure Hunts. I still think the best instance so far has been making the deal with the demon in Zork II.)
What makes this game unusual compared to regular Treasure Hunt plots is something mentioned on the packaging, about “seven parchments” regarding the treasure. I have found two of them and they give parts of a message intended to be mashed together, so there’s an extra dose of intrigue in a game-mechanical sense beyond finding some “BARS OF GOLD” or a suitcase full of cash under a big W. It still is also possible the final “treasure” isn’t a normal treasure but “the friends we made along the way”.
The island is, as I implied already, pretty wide-open, but before I show off the map, here’s the verb list:
This ends up erratic; notice no READ verb, and there are at least two bits with writing (not even counting the parchments), which gets looked at with EXAMINE instead. PUT is actually WEAR. There’s no way to SWIM, and no way to HIT objects; so there is an AXE early on which I have not puzzled out how to use. CROSS gets used to launch a boat over to a small island.
For the map, I’ll give the whole thing at once to start, then break it into pieces.
For the opening area, walking along to the east is a deep pit; going in is death.
There are at least three pits that look like this on the map, so I assume there’s some aspect I’m missing and this isn’t just a trap.
Further are some STONES, which are something of a trap, but they only kick in later. Yet farther is a hut with a necklace.
Headed the other direction, there’s a RUSTY KEY nearby a chest that the rusty key conveniently opens. Unfortunately, doing so is, you guessed it, a trap.
I realize as I type this there is a mysterious “green potion” nearby which might be the antidote. I only tested it alone and nothing happened.
Moving farther along, just lying about on the ground is some FOOD, an AXE, a TORCH, a SPADE, an ANORAK (that’s a polar coat, maybe the top of the island is really high) and a caged yellow CANARY.
Before anyone asks, I have tested DIG with the spade in every location accessible so far with no luck. Near the same area is a “native” — the only one I have run across so far — and anything I’ve tested so far with GIVE (the only character-action verb that isn’t just KILL) has been rebuffed (I have not tested every item in the game thus far, though).
Turning east, there’s multiple rooms that are a “dark forest” where there are the occasional eyes peeking out, and more than a few turns in the forest turn out to be deadly.
There’s a BOX at the end of a path, but my character isn’t strong enough to open it.
Swinging back over to where the canary was, you can light a torch and go west into a “maze” except it’s a 4×3 set of rooms.
There are two rooms where you have trouble breathing — I assume the canary is somehow important to these rooms, but I’ve been able to just pass on by so I haven’t tested this yet — and spread out you can find a SWORD and one of the pieces of parchment.
The only way out of the “maze” is to the north…
…where there is a small area of “barren plain” including a SKULL, but soon after there is a river and lake.
One point requires crossing a bridge, and this is where the stones from earlier are a trap: if you’re carrying them the bridge collapses. Other items seem to be safe.
You can wrangle up a FOOTPUMP and a DINGY over to where there is a visible island on the lake, and the CROSS over to find another piece of parchment.
I’m wondering if the inflatable boat is from Zork. Infocom was never huge in the UK (lack of disk drives) but we saw at least one case of clear influence from 1982 (Goblin Towers).
I’m assuming all the fragments combine to make a cryptogram that needs solving, but it’s hard to tell with just the two.
Finally, past the native (who does not block your way, despite appearances) there’s a path leading to a temple and altar. The altar has writing that you can’t read and a red key but otherwise I have found nothing else of note.
I still have things to test (like using GIVE on more objects, seeing what happens with the canary, and seeing if the potion is an antidote) so I’m not stuck yet, but I also am unclear where more rooms (which clearly are out there) are going to come from, as I don’t have any clear navigational blocks except for the pits. Maybe this is a “multi-level maze” where we go underground, then go back up again elsewhere? In any case, with only two out of seven fragments so far, this is looking to be a meatier game than I originally expected.
The people involved with today’s game are Nick Hampshire and Carl Graham, both who have important parts to play in the history of technology.
Nick Hampshire’s early college experiences (1970-1975) bounced around a bit as he went from Zoology to Computer Science and moved between college studies in England, Sweden, and the United States. He followed this with some technology work in San Francisco; using the S-100 bus (the backbone of the Altair and many other early computers) he made his own 8-bit computer he called the System 8, then went back to the UK to try to sell it in 1977.
From Personal Computer World, August 1978.
In order to promote his new system (and other S-100 bus systems he became a dealer of), he made his own magazine he called Computabits. This ended up determining his life trajectory as the System 8 completely failed (I can’t even find it even mentioned in any of the usual “museum of obscure computers” sites) but Computabits as a magazine did quite well for itself, being swept into the early magazine Practical Computing as a “magazine within a magazine” starting in its second issue; Hampshire was later listed as “technical editor” and was set on his career as a writer. He ended up writing 9 books between 1979 and 1984, some being (relative to the market) best-sellers; Vic Revealed made it to 400,000 copies worldwide.
ASIDE: Of his early Computabits articles, the most relevant for today is one he wrote on “epic games” where he discusses textual compression techniques (similar to those Infocom and Level 9 would come up with) like using single characters to represent whole words. He also theorizes about extending the “epic game” into an “electronic novel” where “no longer does the reader identify himself with the hero — he or she is now the hero.” Jack Pick read the article and inquired for further help on text compression, trying to apply this to his mainframe game Adventure II. (Also, keep in mind that February 1979 issue, as we’ll come back to it for something else later.)
Mr. Hampshire still tried his hand at hardware for the Commodore PET, but really had more success with his publishing ventures, including the launch of Commodore Computing International in 1982.
One of the employees throughout 1982-1985 was Carl Graham, listed as a “programmer”; he was a “staff writer” in the sense of being focused on writing type-in code for Commodore BASIC to be printed in each issue. Carl Graham himself was also quite hardware-minded, with earlier projects starting in the 70s including rewiring a Texas Instruments calculator in to be a digital timer (“looking at thin films of water breaking up into beads on glass using photo sensors to measure propagation speed”), making a Z80 assembler in BASIC, and and making his own plotter for his TRS-80.
Today’s game, On the Way to the Interview, is a type-in starting on page 14 of the magazine above where the article (not game) title is Anatomy of an Adventure, another one of the articles allegedly teaching how to make an adventure game. This sometimes is an excuse for a sub-par adventure game. This one is just … unusual.
It is written in Commodore BASIC and supports the line in general (PET, VIC-20, C64), although I ended up playing the BBC Micro port in the Nick Hampshire-edited book BBC Programs Volume 1.
Your goal: make your way through streets to your scheduled interview at Slave Driver International. Your starting inventory: a CHEQUE, presumably from your last job. Perhaps winning is losing in this game.
The graphics shown are an automap. The reason the game can do this is the entire thing is oriented on a grid.
Even more unusually, the way the game’s data is stored is by roads. That is, each road is listed and the elements of that road are listed in sequence, but from the player’s perspective a road is a whole sequence of rooms.
There are nearly no puzzles. If Pythonesque and Mad Martha are British degenerate games (where one goes about an urban environment causing havoc) this is an anti-degenerate game. The goal is to be a “responsible citizen”. The route — starting at 24 on the map, winding over to the northeast — consists mainly of things you need to ignore, lest you throw off this title. For example, early on there is a shopping bag you pass by, otherwise it will kill you.
The game keeps track of minutes passing in real time. You need to make it to the interview in less than 7 minutes. With this screenshot, I had left the emulator running overnight.
Later there is a TRAMP. Simply talking to the tramp (ASK TRAMP) ends the game. (“I’ve just had a bad experience with a tramp.”)
Just a bit farther is a GUN, which has all sorts of game-ending possibilities. First off, you can simply try backtracking and shooting the tramp, but it doesn’t even let you operate the gun (“I’m not having anything to do with shooting things.”)
There’s a policewoman later that will arrest you if you’re holding the gun in the open. You can just have the gun randomly go off while holding it. There’s a bank along the way where if you step in with a gun they’ll think you’re doing an armed robbery.
The right thing to do in the bank is, responsibly, CASH CHEQUE (yet another “isolate” verb I haven’t seen yet, but I had my eye on the source code by now in my playthrough for reasons I’ll get into). This gives you MONEY, and lets you later pass through a private park.
Once through the park, it’s a straight shot to the interview, making a beeline for the northeast corner of the map.
Ending, with an exit to the operating system. You don’t even find out the result.
Here’s the full route, with the side trip to the bank marked in green:
Again, this is a “learning game” so there’s some latitude for simplicity, and the article actually does try to make the layout of the source code crystal clear. It’s still a very curious model given that most action besides movement is bad, really, and how many adventure games are on grids like this? (Very, very, few. Even Asylum and friends use “razor walls” as opposed to having a grid with blocks filled in, also known as “worm tunnels”. The only other example we’ve had here is the unfinished/unpublished game Castle Fantasy.)
I still haven’t gotten yet into the worst part of the game. Every once in a while, at random, you get run over by a bus.
It doesn’t matter if you are on a road, in a park, or in a police station: the bus will come. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the bus. This is essentially a slot machine game. Perhaps the RNG on Commodore is better, but on the BBC Micro version, I could not beat the game: I consistently got run over before reaching the park. I had to cheat by changing the source code and modifying my starting location. This admittedly enhances the feeling of being hapless (as opposed to Fighting the Machine) but is a deeply odd choice to make for a learning game.
We’ll see both authors again in 1984, as there was adventure custom-written for the BBC book (one that looks on the face of it slightly more traditional, but I know never to trust Britgames to stick to normal). As that will take some time to reach, I should mention both had distinguished careers after; Hampshire kept writing books and doing journalism, as he “contributed to magazines such as Personal Computer World, PC Magazine, Byte, Interface Age, as well as newspapers such as the Times, FT, Telegraph, and Mail”. While Graham left games for a while (making database software from 85-90) he eventually picked up a job at Argonaut.
Carl Graham, left, Pete Warner, right. Source.
You may know them better as the makers of the FX Chip for Super Nintendo games; Graham was a coder on the original Star Fox and has a long list of credits after.
Regarding the unusual grid, I do have one suspicion where it might come from. I said I would come back to the February 1979 issue of Practical Computing. Earlier in the same magazine there is an article by T. J. Radford which doesn’t present a full game, just an “idea” which spans two pages (early computer magazines sometimes had this, I assume they had trouble filling space). It involves creating a D&D-type map as part of the theorizing:
Long shot, I know, but it gives me the same crossword-grid-like feel, and I wonder if Hampshire internalized it as a possible way to make an adventure game map.
Coming up: The somewhat-related but much more substantial escape-from-British-suburbia game, Urban Upstart.
(My previous posts on Marooned are needed for context.)
I have finished the game, using the time-old technique known as “reading the source code”. I am fairly sure I would have made zero progress otherwise. This just gets absurd, and not due to bugs.
I’m not going to sequence in order of how I “solved” things or in narrative order, but rather from most to least reasonable.
Money from under the big W.
Let’s start with the treasure under the trees I couldn’t get to. As I suspected, it was a straight parser issue.
Things that don’t work: DIG, DIG TREES, DIG UNDER, DIG BETWEEN, GO TREES, DIG W, FIND SPOT, FOLLOW MAP, DIG SPOT, DIG TREASURE, FIND TREASURE, LOCATE TREASURE.
The game was fishing for GO W, and then DIG.
This was the treasure with no name originally, hence the fix calling it MYSTERY TREASURE. Now I know the context, there’s a fair chance this was intended as SUITCASE OF CASH.
Not terrible for a work in progress, but it still stuck me entirely. To grab from the source code, I used software called Scottdec:
141) 1 56 [GO W] /* MISSING STRING */
? PLAYER_IN (13 = *I’m on the west shore of a deserted island)
? CLEARED_BIT (22)
-> 1 = PRINT(OK)
-> 58 = SET_BIT (22)
This is much cleaner than trying to read off the database file directly, which has “1 56” on its own without the verb and noun linked to it. The “missing string” comment is supposed to go somewhere else, but it looks like something in the sequence of comments is out of sync.
Next up is the cave, with the tiny hole and the chisel.
I had additionally tried LOOK HOLE, FEEL HOLE, RUB HOLE, and pretty much anything on my standard verb list that seemed reasonable, but unfortunately, the game uses a brand-new verb I have never seen before in a text adventure: REACH HOLE.
This isn’t done yet! Despite the diamond being a treasure with asterisks, the treasure can be made into two treasures, via CUT DIAMOND / WITH CHISEL.
If you get greedy and try to get yet more treasures by repeating the process, the diamond gets ground into dust.
The really wacky thing here is that one is not necessarily more valuable than the other (except in a black-market sense, except we aren’t going to make it that far). No, it’s simply taking the fact that the game wants, abstractly, 7 treasures, and can only get all the way there by turning one distinct treasure into two.
There is incidentally a “clue” earlier about the diamond, but it is a complete red herring clue (in the Ferret sense of being actively misleading).
There is no boat. BOAT is listed as a noun so I wonder if the author considered this, changed his mind, and never got around to cleaning up the clue (work in progress!) as opposed to creating an intentional red herring.
Nearly to the end now, to the most absurd jump of all. I knew from the start of the Scottdec file what the goal was:
TGoal: store 7 treasures in room 24
Room 24 is a HUT, but we haven’t seen one, because you’re supposed to make it. With the leaves from the trees and the string from the dead body, you can (on the west side of the island, at the W) use the command MAKE HUT.
Now, you can GO HUT and deposit treasures. We’re one short, but after a little time here is a “quick flash of red light”; LOOK LIGHT reveals a RUBY. Amusingly, it doesn’t even need to be picked up, just revealed.
Oh, on the darkness: from the source code I found there is an overall light timer, so it wasn’t the flashlight turning off the sun, just the game being mean. It gets so dark at night you literally can’t see anything at all.
Like Strange Adventure, we are king of an island at the finale with no visible way off. Enjoy your two diamonds!
129) 52 35 [MAKE HUT] /* 2 DIAMONDS TO DUST */
? IS_AVAIL (65 = String)
? IS_AVAIL (45 = Leaves)
? PLAYER_IN (13 = *I’m on the west shore of a deserted island)
? IS_AVAIL (47 = Leaves)
-> 1 = PRINT(OK)
-> 73 = CONTINUE:
130) [Cont’d] /* NOTHING ELSE WORKS */
-> 53 = MOVE_INTO_AR (63 = Hut)
-> 59 = REMOVE (45 = Leaves)
-> 59 = REMOVE (47 = Leaves)
If this was a published game, the hut puzzle would enter the all-time most absurd list; it gets an asterisk due to the work-in-progress nature of the game, since the author may have had some plan in mind before running out of space.
I do think, now, regarding “why this was unfinished”: it was a matter of running out of memory space. In order to fix the TAKE commands, the code went up to 19k, and that’s excluding items like the screwdriver and leaving in numerous other erroneous parts that the author clearly intended to get back to later. The game doesn’t seem large/impressive but Watt did try to write a list of features that started to extend past the game’s reach. SCREW is intended as a verb (unused); the BOAT is listed but doesn’t show; there’s ICE and a BOOK for some reason. I tried to cross-correlate with other Scott Adams games (in case one served as a template and these are “vestigial words” left in) but no dice: I’m pretty sure everything listed is something the author intended eventually. Hitting a wall like this from an original plan is bound to be frustrating for development and it is a miracle at all the game was left close to a state that could be played all the way through.
Coming up: Three Britgames, followed by games from Japan, New Zealand, and Denmark. This will be our first 1983 game in Japanese, and neither New Zealand nor Denmark have appeared on this blog before.
(Continued from my previous post.)
I’m not done with the game yet. It is a unique experience in that I normally would be wildly upset at the number of bugs if this was a published product — it has more than even our worst offenders — but as-is, I consider something of a window in time. In terms of history of game design: what limits did authors have they were running into? What was the fault of bad design and what was the fault of authors just working with what they had? What concepts did they have that ended up undercooked just because of technical issues? My most comparable other playthrough was Irvin Kaputz which was a game abandoned because of running out of memory space, where adding even one more character to the text causes a crash; the author there had some ambitions of object-modeling that were rare for the time, but the fact this extra detail caused failure is a good lesson in why bare-bones was more the norm.
Scott Adams stated with Adventureland the reason the game has the span it does he kept writing until he ran out of space (versions vary of the data file, but they all are around ~16000 bytes).
I’m not sure if the memory issue applies here. Mr. Watt certainly had access to 32k (see: his Microsoft Adventure copy program) but he may have still had 16k as a target goal. There are actually two versions of the data file for the game, one at 12576 bytes and one at 15588 bytes, the former having spaces taken out for compression purposes. This suggests he realized he was reaching his limit and did a pass, but was still running short accounting for everything else to make this feel like a polished product. I’ll study the issue more once I’m done with the game.
After Kim Watt went to Texas, Super Utility was published in partnership with Powersoft. Cover of catalog via Ira Goldklang.
My progress essentially involved combing over everything seen and finding extra items along the way. To start with, when grabbing the seat as a floatation device from the plane, it turns out LOOK PRESERVER reveals some batteries. Of course, the batteries don’t let you TAKE them (of course) so you can be in the middle of the ocean and have it happen and they’re just floating there. Don’t worry, they’re ok!
A flashlight turns out to be nearby as well. On the first beach I had done DIG to get the response
With what?
I don’t have a shovel.
Quite often this means a shovel is coming later, but Rob in the comments suggested trying HANDS anyway.
——-^ Tell me what to do? WITH HANDS
OK
So “With what?” is meant to be a parser prompt! Also noteworthy: unlike some games that include the WITH syntax, you have to get the DIG-prompt first for the WITH HANDS to work. So there’s also a diggable item on the next beach you come across (a rusty knife) but I originally just tested WITH HANDS and only discovered later DIG was required first.
Back to the first beach, digging gets a hole and the hole has a flashlight. I took the flashlight back to the ocean and was fortunately about to LOAD FLASHLIGHT / WITH BATTERIES and it worked. The unfortunate thing is that this starts the light timer (…sometimes?…) and when the timer goes off, everything goes dark, including if you are outside in sunlight. The better thing to do is to wait for until you are next to the cave later to LOOK PRESERVER so the batteries get dropped close to where they are used. (Having said all that, one of my test-playthroughs the flashlight timer just didn’t seem to cut off at all even after many turns. The timer is just busted generally.)
That’s still not everything in the first area; in the ocean where you land you can DIVE.
OPEN CHEST results in
I can’t
it’s locked.
Getting stumped here, I got around to making my verb list. Notice neither LOCK nor UNLOCK are understood verbs.
Having noting in the way of HIT verbs, I kept trying around things until I realized the game lets you refer to LOCK as a noun (…just assuming a visible lock on the locked chest…) and CUT LOCK / WITH CUTTER works to pop it open, yielding *GOLD COINS*.
All this being done while floating in the middle of the ocean since you can’t take the chest, of course.
Just to recap, I had newly-found: FLASHLIGHT (from beach), RUSTY KNIFE (from other beach), and GOLD COINS (from chest). The progression is to land at the first beach, swing through the jungle to the second beach, then go into the ocean again, where yet again DIVE works to find something.
The smeared map, if you wait enough turns, will clear up enough that it dries out and you can read it. (I think the smearing would not undo itself? It felt clever anyway.)
Unfortunately, DIG doesn’t work like it did before. I have no idea what parser command to use here.
It’s pretty clear what movie is being referenced, though. From It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, near the ending under the “big W” where the treasure is buried.
As implied earlier, the flashlight/batteries now allow entrance into the cave on the south side of the island.
There’s a large cavern with hole (that you can enter), a small cavern with a hole (that you can enter), and a tiny cavern with a hole (that is too tiny to enter). In the third room LOOK AROUND reveals a CHISEL (not takeable). I haven’t been able to use the chisel on anything. It is possible there is a HAMMER that goes with it but I haven’t found it.
I still have had no luck getting by the quicksand or overgrown bush in the jungle, or the floating jelly in the lake. I suspect I am not far from wrapping things up but the game is not even close to playing fair.
Anyway, here’s this skinny blonde kid, around 6 feet tall, wearing silver Ray-Ban sunglasses, driving a royal blue Formula Firebird that says he’s Kim Watt! Can you believe it? Oh well, he sounds like he does on the phone, so I guess it’s him.
— From Inside Super Utility Plus
This is written seven years after my previous post on Marooned.
I got a surprise in my comments when El Explorador de RPG mentioned he got the game — previously completely non-functional — into a fully playable form. It works all the way to the end, and I have a download here. (Run ADVENTUR, then pick 2 when prompted for which adventure to play.)
Via Ira Goldklang.
Kim Watt was a pre-med student in 1978 when he got his first computer, a TRS-80, and started to build a consulting service around it. He eventually dropped out of college altogether to focus on computers. He became well-known as a “genius” and never did outlines, simply writing directly from his brain to assembly language.
While he started in Michigan (and lived there in 1980, when today’s game was likely written), he later moved to Texas and took on a look to match:
To underscore his reputation as a renegade guide through the wilderness of home computing, Watt has wholeheartedly adopted the role of Software Cowboy. It is not unusual to find him at computer shows throughout the country, dressed in a ten-gallon hat and boots, signing autographs and counseling his followers. Though he is originally from Michigan, he looks the part. He has steel-blue eyes, disheveled hair, and a serpentine tattoo on each bicep. His demeanor is also on target; the strong, silent type, he is wary about discussing his work. His comments and answers are clipped and guarded, expressed in a quiet monotone.
Kim Watt is mostly remembered in the TRS-80 community for his utility software like Super Utility, used for salvaging data off broken diskettes or even copying protected disks (Super Utility itself was protected, and refused to copy itself; it was eventually pirated anyway). Watt later wrote a book disclosing the secrets of Super Utility for an eye-popping price tag of $500; those who would buy it (including MIT, the Navy, and Radio Shack employees) would discover the secrets of Watt’s methods. Although:
Watt points to a stack of computer printouts, almost two feet high, on a bookshelf on the other side of his office. “Couldn’t fit all of it into the book,” he says.
In his early days he worked on multiple games, mostly arcade action, and even had one published by Adventure International (Scott Adams’s company) in 1980.
The curious thing about this is that the same year, Watt also wrote his “Intercept” program which essentially broke the copy protection that Scott Adams started applying to his adventure games. This seems to be before his generalized copy-program, meaning Scott Adams games were essentially a testbed for the ideas that went into Super Utility. He gave a similar treatment to Microsoft Adventure (that is, the Microsoft port of Crowther/Woods for TRS-80).
As part of all this, Watt wrote a game in the Scott Adams database format, Marooned. Similarly: Pyramid of Doom was written by Alvin Files who simply figured out the format himself and sent the game over to Scott Adams. Allan Moluf described the file format in 1980 and used that as a basis for an editor program; this was expanded upon by Bruce Hanson and published commercially as The Adventure System the next year.
The game starts by asking for which adventure you want to play, 1-9 (this is standard for Scott Adams interpreters 7.8 through 8.5) but by typing in 10 we can start Marooned, which describes itself as adventure 10. Less glamorously, you can type 1, because it only is taking the first character. (Also, as I already mentioned, if you’re playing the fixed version, pick adventure 2.)
This is not a game damaged from a bad tape read, like Mystery House II; rather, this is a game that had development abandoned midstream, and one of the treasures you’re required to collect didn’t even get a name (the fixed version calls it a MYSTERY TREASURE, although I haven’t gotten to it yet). It is buggy far out of proportion to other games we’ve played, and El Explorador had to manually add the commands to pick particular objects up; in an effort to make minimal changes, only items that are needed to be taken are takeable.
Before getting to any treasures, our hero(ine) needs to get past their immediate dilemma, which is a crashing airplane.
Action starts in a very restrictive 3-room area, the place I was stuck at 7 years ago.
To the south is the “tail end” of the plane with a broken cable, knapsack and toolbox. The knapsack turns out to be a parachute, but you can’t pick it up, you can only WEAR it (and while taking inventory, it has no name, you just get “being worn” message by itself). The toolbox has a wrench, screwdriver, and cutters, but you can only take the cutters.
If he had finished debugging the game, I would guess the other two items would be takeable but remain as red herrings.
For some reason, you can PULL the cable, but only while holding the cutters (?) and this reveals a knob. TURN KNOB then reveals a secret door, and you can OPEN DOOR to find some *TOP SECRET PLANS*, the first treasure of the game.
To escape, the sequence is truly bizarre. Back in the center of the plane, you can LOOK AROUND to find a RING on the ceiling. (Not LOOK UP, which we have at least had a few times. LOOK AROUND is brand-new for this game.) Then — I assume some descriptions never got done — you can CONNECT CORD/TO RING resulting in “ripcord attached to ring”. OPEN DOOR will then jerk you out of the plane; if you want to, you can DROP PARACHUTE before leaving and somehow survive anyway as long as you’ve done the ripcord action.
Neither the geese nor plane have a description, because what is supposed to happen (assuming you still have the parachute) is that this is a “timed view” room which doesn’t allow any commands, but just sends the player down to the ocean.
I was stuck for a while until El Explorador mentioned I needed another item for swimming, and I realized that for some reason TAKE SEATS back on the plane in the starting room yields the player a floatation device. (No description when looking at the seats — again, I assume the author bailed before even getting to that part. Remember, taking items doesn’t even work at all, this had to be fixed.)
With the floatation device, you can bail on the parachute and then SWIM multiple times to reach a shore.
This leads to a progression through a Forest, where every directions loops; you can climb up a tree, then LOOK AROUND (that new command again) to see a VINE, and SWING VINE reaching another forest, with one more SWING VINE reaching a new beach (I assume on the other side of the same island).
From the new beach you can dive into the ocean again and SWIM until reaching a slightly more elaborate island, and this is where I am stuck. My map so far:
The west shore has a coconut tree (top: coconuts + leaves) and palm tree (top: dates + leaves) and in both cases only the leaves are takeable, and you can take both of them, meaning Leaves. and Leaves. are both in inventory.
This doesn’t mean the coconuts and dates are useless, but whatever happens to them has to happen on the spot.
To the south is are branches to a Jungle and Cave. The Cave is dark and I have no light source, while the jungle has overgrown brush (which suggests it can be whacked away) and quicksand (which is a one way trip and quite possibly another red herring).
To the east is a lake and going in there is some floating jelly which is described as “awfully slimy” and trying to get it is fatal.
Finally, to the north is a dead man. Trained by other painful games, I used FRISK to find a STRING and used MOVE to reveal a BAG. While the bag cannot be taken, EMPTY BAG reveals some *PEARLS*.
Given the number of other issues with the code (it isn’t even a “private game” as I usually have defined it but a “work in progress”) I would normally follow this with code diving or even assuming the game can’t be finished, be El Explorador has now played all the way to the end, so I’m going to treat it as a “real game” for a bit longer and try to solve puzzles as if most of the item descriptions weren’t missing.
If anyone else wants to join in, perhaps they can have the glory of being the first person (outside El Explorador who had to modify the code) to finish the game, ever. This includes the original author! When I finish I’ll dive down into the technical layer and try to diagnose why this happened.
Renga in Blue 