Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

I suspect I am near the end but am unable to find whatever magical parser combination is needed to win. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords, who will no doubt get confused whenever they have to play chess against an Atari 2600.

Via Brian Blackie.

Continuing from last time, I had left off on a monolith where I was unclear how to interact with it. The monolith is the entrance to a secret robot facility, with an invasion force of spaceships you’re supposed to stop.

The right command is PRESS, either PRESS RED or PRESS BLUE. Except red summons a robot who shoots you so you should choose blue.

Inside is an elevator, which switches the verb from PRESS to PUSH. I’m generally a fair hand at experiencing such oddities, but I can imagine another player getting hard stuck right here.

Red makes the elevator go up, green makes it go down. You can go up to the top of the monolith but there’s nothing there (other than confirming the logic behind the elevator); down one floor is death because of a robot that shoots you on sight, but down two floors is safe.

There are still robots around, but you can shoot them with the LASER GUN from back in the armory.

To the west is an “underground launch area” with “hundreds of spaceships”. You can (after blasting a robot guard) hop in one, and find it is broken because of a hole in a control panel.

The hole is easily fixed by the lever from the slot machine; you can then pull the lever to zip over to the spaceport where your own vessel is (and back).

LEAVE CRAFT is needed to exit, even though you enter by walking SOUTH from the ship bay.

There’s also a store room with a PINCH BAR (another robot, again blastable) and a vent that can be unscrewed with the loose screwdriver from back at the original spaceport. This leads through a vent to a COMPUTER COMPLEX.

I am 99% sure the idea here is to then set the detonator to blow up the computer center, make a beeline back to the ship via jury-rigged slot machine lever, and save the galaxy. The problem is I have no idea how to get the explosive device to work. The EXPLOSIVE is described as having a dial, and dropping the explosive creates a bug in the inventory where the second line mentioning the dial is still listed with the I command. There’s additionally a DETONATOR whose operation is mysterious.

The unfortunate thing here past some of my prior games (like Danger Island requiring GET IN) is that this involves multiple items, so it is possible I need to do things with very specific object placement or command sequence; maybe TURN DIAL is a correct command (otherwise it gets YOU CANT) but only at the right moment.

I do appreciate the author going with “secret base in an inhabited area” rather than another barren planet; I also thought the atmosphere of the robot base came off well. The parser simply is not good at supporting whatever it is the author planned for the last steps.

I am incidentally still having to say “the author” even though I have a little more documentation on the company Antarctic Software. Other than this game they wrote The Caves of Time, Detention Center on Nebulon, and Intelligence Service Adventure, all lost media. I don’t know if they did more; they were officially founded as a company on 18 May 1983 so I suspect the 1983 date is right, and lasted all the way up to July 1989 in a commercial address suggesting it was run as a computer store for its lifetime (rather than the games being just from an ambitious “bedroom hacker”).

Address via Google Maps. Now a hair salon, not someone’s house.

We will be seeing more of New Zealand, as 1983 also saw the launch of the Sega SC-3000. The computer got crushed in other territories, but companies like Atari weren’t paying much attention to New Zealand, giving Sega an opportunity to become enmeshed in the cultural fabric.

Back page of November 1983 issue of Computer Input.

For now: a return to Europe, and the country of Denmark, another new visit for the project.