Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

I’ve finished the game. Given it was a 7k-byte type-in, it seemed inevitable, and it turns out there are almost no puzzles, but I had trouble anyway due to a particular decision by the authors. (And it is authors, plural, I’ll get into that later.)

The general pattern, from the starting point, is to hop on the Love Boat, then visit six islands in sequence, then go back to the start. If you ride the boat yet again you’ll go through the sequence as many times as you like. This pattern of a treasure-hunt where you rotate through the destinations has shown up in Alaskan Adventure but given that was in a December issue of Softside it is unlikely to have had an influence. (Also, unlike that game, this game doesn’t necessarily require a repeat, although for the one puzzle there is a good chance you’ll need to loop around.)

The main destinations are marked, although it is unknown where the player starts. I also didn’t work out exactly where the Maori village of the game might be in New Zealand.

Before plunging ahead, I should also highlight that the treasure hunting feels uncomfortable this time around. “You are in Maori Museum. You see: *valuable relics*.” Taken in a literal sense, this is a story of visiting some islands on a tourist boat and stealing their stuff. However, I don’t think the authors designed it in that sense. Rather, this is meant to be a light visit to some destinations and the presence of “treasures” in an abstract way of making it a game. (Think of them as replicas being found as part of a scavenger hunt, if that helps.) If the game was written later when puzzle-less was established more as a genre, I suspect they might instead make something like The Cove from 2000, which is purely all about exploring an environment and finding neat animals.

Picking up from last time, I was stuck with the parser command for filling a car with gas. It turns out that the game is fishing for a noun not mentioned in the text: FILL TANK. The really big issue is that if you try FILL CAR the game says you don’t have everything you need yet, leading players down the wrong path. This is a strong demonstration of how important unambiguous errors messages can be in making a parser game manageable.

The trick I was thinking of last time would have worked — you can jump to the boat with the PICK command, where it chastises you for picking flowers and teleports you to the boat. However, you do need to move the Trans Am in order to get back to the start.

READ PASS (from the boarding pass in the car) gets the message

YOUR CABIN NUMBER IS G7 AND YOUR TABLE NUMBER IS A1

and while at the tables, you can GO A1 to arrive at a table; while at the cabins you can GO G7. (Again, the error message you get otherwise isn’t super helpful, and I just took a shot in the dark at the specific letter/number being odd to mention.)

The table, A1, has some *silverware* which is the first treasure. (Again, the treasure collecting is super odd if we try to imagine it’s a “real” narrative.) I used this place as my stash point for treasures as I collected them whilst traversing the six islands.

By entering the cabin, G7, the boat starts to move. When you disembark you end up on the next island in the sequence. Here’s all of them, and the sequence is left to right then top to bottom:

At the first destination, Samoa, you can:

• try to take the pink hibiscus you see and then get kicked back on the boat for breaking rules
• go to a “Council House” which has a “basket full of pearls” you can freely take
• see a fire knife dancer; there’s no text message, just a musical ditty which implies you are watching the dancing

I have the music in the clip below. Note that the “beep” that happens upon entering a room happens upon entering every single room of the game, every single time.

There are no obstacles other than avoiding the flower-based rules. The combination of parts is why I say it doesn’t seem like you’re doing a robbery; it’s showing off brief elements of place like it was a virtual travel tour or the clues of a Carmen Sandiego game (although baskets are associated with more islands than just Samoa).

Next is a Maori Village where you scarf valuable relics from a museum, and visit a Meeting House and a Lagoon while you are at it. (The closest I could find to this description is Whakarewarewa, video below.)

Next is a Fiji Village where you can find some Tongan coins (used later automatically — I never figured out where, they just disappeared) and a “diamond headed spear” in a “chief’s house”.

Next comes Tahiti, where the *Tahitian orchid* and *carving of a fish* count as the two treasures, and you find Boy Scouts singing for some reason.

Via Tripadvisor.

Then comes Tonga, with a tropical waterfall…

…a Tongan festival with free hula lessons…

…a Queen’s Bedroom (with a bird of paradise) and a Queen’s Bed (with a *beautiful woven mat*).

Last comes the Marquesas Village, which lands the player at an “active volcano” and has a guest house…

…a warrior’s house (with treasure)…

…and a cooking house, with a knife that is too hot.

The knife is the only real puzzle in the game (past the pesky parser business at the start). I realized the can that held the gas might hold water too, but got stuck for a while because I assumed the “waterfall” was the right place to fill up. Hence I started trying more and more outrageous parser messages, before finally realizing the “lagoon” from earlier could also have water. FILL CAN worked there; then I was able to POUR at the knife.

Then the remainder of the game was ferrying the remaining treasures back to the start.

I tried to check if the words earlier (like HA’E TOA for WARRIOR’S HOUSE) were from some actual indigenous language. If the only option was Marquesan, the answer seems to be no, but there’s multiple languages and dialects to account for and this is the sort of thing online resources are pretty bad at. It’s worth checking because this might represent the first time an indigenous language is represented in a computer game. (It is also of course possible the authors made those parts up, but that seems like an odd thing to make up.)

Earlier I mentioned there were two authors. The REM statements of the BASIC source mention Don and Linda Dunlap of Reynoldsburg, Ohio. The contest book only mentions Don Dunlap. I’m not sure if there was some one-person rule they were using but I’m going to change my links to mention both people.

From the perspective of the Falsoft people running the game, I could see how they perceived this as a “cute” sort of game which is a bit different from the norm so worth printing (“It is an enchanting land of adventure, charm and intrigue that seems apart from the rest of the world.”); they maybe also realized the HELP function worked to mention the FILL TANK issue that I was stuck on. Maybe they were more impressed with the sound than I was (at least, there are tiny bits of music throughout that substitute for visuals, albeit in a crude-old-computer-speaker way — the Boy Scouts singing and the Hula section are both included).

Coming up: another contest game from the book, followed by the recently-unearthed Tolkien game in Norwegian which has long been one of my Holy Grails.