Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’m sorry, I’m going to have to pitch this for now. If there’s a future version with save games (or at least where the frequency of knife attacks is greatly reduced!) and perhaps less bugs I can take another swing. (ICL’s Quest which I also bailed on has had recent progress, so it isn’t impossible even given the circumstances of being on an unusual platform written in NORD-FORTRAN where we don’t have the source!)

Full setup for playing SVHA Adventure on real hardware, via Ronny Hansen.

Regarding bugs, I ran across some erratic text messages, including one that made me unsure if I was even doing the right thing or not. The snake that got chased off by the bird makes a reappearance in SVHA Adventure, and by scooping the bird back up again I was able to get past where the snake was lurking:

You’re at bottom of long flight of steps.

(This is right after getting out of Witt’s End by going southwest and reaching a new area.)

S
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. You are on top of long flight of steps going down and north. There is a strong oak door leading south, with no handle or key hole on this side of the door.
S
You can’t go through that oak door.
You’re at top of long flight of steps.
OPEN SESAME
S
You can’t go through that oak door.

Note that OPEN SESAME (prompted by the hints about Aladdin, as suggested by bananathoroughly in the comments) gives an absolutely blank prompt, as opposed to any kind of feedback if you’ve done something right or wrong. Other words don’t have the same sort of response…

ABACADARA
I don’t understand that!
SHAZAM
Good try, but that is an old worn-out magic word.

…which makes me quite worried a bug is interfering with the act working. And if not, well, I have absolutely no idea how to get through, and getting back to the particular location is a slog; you have to keep randomly going directions in Witt’s End many times, enough times that the game prompts multiple times if you want a hint at getting out!

Incidentally, trying to leave after arriving at the door is death:

N
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. The snake suddenly strikes from the fissure!! You’re bitten and pummeled and strangeled thoroughly. That must have been an irrated snake!

It might be that the only way the enter is via the other side, and the only reason I know that is yet another bug:

There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
You’re in hall of mists.
Rough stone steps lead up the dome.
GET AXE
key hole on the other side. There is, however, a key hole on this side.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!

The “key hole on the other side” line seems to be randomly printing from somewhere else in the text. I’m extremely patient with jank and frustration in games, but when it might be combined with a bug it becomes too much. It potentially turns getting unstuck not just “figure out what the author intended” but also “make sure to avoid memory corruption”.

Via NDWiki.

And as mentioned before, there’s the extra condition of “avoid getting killed by a knife”. Original Adventure always had a dwarf appear first and throw an axe that missed; you can get unlucky and meet an orc first, meaning you will have no weapon at all. Or you can get super unlucky and die immediately upon sight of an orc, although it doesn’t matter; either way you are essentially dead.

There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
One sharp nasty knife is thrown at you!
It gets you!
Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed. I might be able to help you out, but I’ve never really done this before. Do you want me to try to reincarnate you?

One other bit of business, though: I accidentally missed an exit.

This is back where you find the ring; you can turn west to enter a Crypt, with a “vault” to the west. I wasn’t able to get any farther, though.

You are in something that seems like a chapel or something. We’ll call this the sacred chamber. There are something like an altar on the south wall, and various things on the walls that suggest a religious place. To the north is an opening from the chamber, usually barred by a gate.
The gate is up.
There’s a ring of a curious shape on the altar. It looks magical.
GET RING
OK
N
You are in small room with dirt floor.
The gate is up.
W
You are in a crypt. A coffin is standing in the middle of the room.
There seems to be a vault to the west. A passage leads east.
The vault door is closed.
The coffin is closed.
OPEN COFFIN
You don’t have the necessary piece of metal for doing that.

This area turns out to be the section taken from a Greg Hassett article in Creative Computing, July 1980 on how to write an adventure. If you’re not familiar with Greg Hassett (who at this time was 14), you can try my writeup of World’s Edge; in the article he mentions his games before that are (in order), The House of Seven Gables, King Tut’s Tomb, Sorcerer’s Castle, Voyage to Atlantis, Enchanted Island, and a machine-language version of the same game called Enchanted Island Plus.

This is not from any of Hassett’s games, but rather an imaginary game written purely for the article. The Studio-54 group turned it into a real game! Except there is some variation because holding the ring does not allow for opening the coffin (as suggested in the article) and while there’s a limited number of items to test I’ve spent a week struggling so I’m done.

I did at least get to test throwing the ring in the volcano (just in case of a Tolkien reference) but alas, nothing happens.

I’m afraid I’ve left things too incomplete to make any large conclusions, but I do want to emphasize the code is currently held together with duct tape and being run on an emulator. It is easily possible that some of the difficulties I mention are due to bugs or emulator issues and so aren’t “authentic”; this is especially possible with random number generators which are enormously finicky across platforms. (A concrete example: for a long time the Pokémon Red/Blue speedrun community banned all emulators except for a very specific one called gambatte-speedrun; every single one had different RNG than a real Gameboy, despite many being completely authentic otherwise and even allowed with other games. Now, there’s exactly two emulators allowed, and all others are banned.) Given the endgame isn’t even reachable with the current game’s state I don’t feel that bad about setting it aside.

COMING UP: A type-in, followed by the glorious return of Infocom.