Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Previous posts here.)

Thanks to Jeremy and Matt W. in the comments nudging a bit more at the game, humanity has been saved.

Placement of backspace and space on the ZX-81 keyboard specifically for this game.

I had made my way to a computer room which needed blowing up, and already had an escape vehicle in place, but actually placing the explosive was eluding me. The magic word for step one was PRIME.

This automatically combines the detonator and explosive together, and if the explosive is now dropped, it blows up.

As I theorized, TURN DIAL does now work (previously just saying YOU CANT), but it’s still a serious pain, because it asks

TO WHICH SETTING???

and I flailed for quite here. I was in the middle of my next post (which involves the same emulator that this game is on) and inspiration occurred to me:

I had actually tried THREE SETTING first, thinking about the unused THREAD verb that Matt mentioned — it’s a four-word parser, so it could have just been THREE as a verb — but that didn’t work. I immediately followed up with swapping the order to SETTING THREE.

PLACE EXPLOSIVE will now set everything to blow up.

I booked it to the escape craft…

…then pushed (I mean, pressed) the button to indicate my mission was over, and failed.

The explosive takes too long to blow up. This explains why the dial was needed in the first place! At setting THREE it is possible to walk your way to the exit, but I had pre-emptively solved what I think may have been intended as the central puzzle: make the timer tighter (TWO) and you can still escape by intermediate ship (not by walking!) and it will blow up before the patrol robots discover it.

Without the parser issues this is a short and well-designed vignette. You’re on a mission you’re actually well equipped to start, there’s some brief visit to a city which is minimal but vivid, you find the robot fortress and need to experiment to use their elevator, there’s some robot blasting with a LASER GUN, and the final part where you need to set a quicker timer to avoid the bomb being discovered (meaning you need a quicker exit) is genuinely satisfying. The problem is the “without the parser” exception, which dragged the game out to a week.

I have an idea what the CODEWORD is referring to: it might be used for a contest when the game was released. Computer Input from November 1983 mentions a contest for one of the other Antarctic Software games…

…so I could see an entry consisting of giving the codeword.

This game did not make much an appearance outside New Zealand; the only reference I’ve seen otherwise is from a truly puzzling mention in the UK Computer and Video Games magazine, August 1984. This comes from the column (common amongst magazines at the time) with people asking for help with their adventure game troubles.

The surreal cover is due to the adventure game based on the TV show Dallas.

New Zealand reader, Colin Foster, from Levin, is playing Antarctic Computing’s Robots on Terminus IV. He says it makes Espionage Island look simple and he can’t unseal the door in the spaceship, nor go near the pub. The fruit machine doesn’t seem to do much and he’s certain he has to go down the well, but can’t. Quite a daunting list, Colin, and unfortunately about а game I have never heard of. Are there any ZХ81 users out there who can cast light on these problems?

How did the door get sealed in the first place? Why would they have trouble entering the pub? Why would you be putting the fruit machine down the well (which only served as a landmark to help with mapmaking)? How did they pick up the fruit machine in the first place? If intended as a guerilla ad of sorts, why would it be in a UK magazine (where they would not have been able to get a hold of the game in the first place)?

ADD: Combining comments from ScienceBall and Gus Brasil, it appears the letter writer is not talking about leaving the ship but the armory. If you don’t get the armory open there’s no laser gun, and in order to enter the bar safely you need the gun (I never tried this) meaning no coin so no lever from the fruit machine. The author mentions the fruit machine and the well together but they’re just two separate dilemmas. Note he mentions Espionage Island (Arctic Adventure D) but Artic Adventure C (Ship of Doom) has a very similar puzzle to the armory one (POINT to use a device).

Coming up: The curious tale of how Clive Sinclair managed to kickstart the low-cost personal computer market in Denmark by a combination of charisma and accident.