Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve finished the game; a lot of what I had to deal with in the end was parser struggles.

Let’s take the antique shop first. I had approached it, was told the showcase couldn’t be accessed, and tried various varieties of BREAK to get in. I also tried WITH ITEM knowing that the game allowed skipping over the original command (WITH CROWBAR, WITH BRICK, WITH LADDER, etc.) Some games map USE to a synonym but this game just responds “TRY TO USE IT YOURSELF” with the command USE even though applying WITH here is essentially the same thing.

My problem was I was standing too close! The game was fine with you breaking the window, but you needed to be standing just a bit to the west, in the “street”, and then WITH BRICK would work appropriately. (I understood the point — the glass on the inside is somehow stronger than the glass on the outside — but it still left me grouchy.)

Also, weirdly, you don’t see the result of the action on the visual unless you either LOOK or leave the room and come back.

Nearby, just to the south, was the bank. The bank had a sign about seeing a teller. I had done lots of different actions to try to summon a teller, thinking I was at the teller window — and it certainly looks that way — but you’re supposed to just type GO TELLER.

Then there’s even more guess-the-phrase as you’re supposed to WITHDRAW CASH. The fact you have some in the bank suggests you are a local deciding to crush your old neighborhoods.

Again, the result has already happened: there’s CASH now sitting here. You won’t see it unless you LOOK.

Speaking of guess-the-phrase, it’s time to steal the car. (I just checked the walkthrough for this.) It turns out you can type TEST DRIVE.

So trusting, given he’s already living in a village that’s been raided dry by whatever thieves have come before our protagonist. This takes care of a couple puzzles at once, because not only do we now have access to both houses (Mr. Smith’s keys work on the Hughes mansion as well), but we can use the car to pick up the boat trailer and other large things.

Let’s raid the house first, though. Then we’ll pick up the large items, then finally hit the mansion.

Helpfully, Mr. Smith has a copy of the Picasso in the art museum (pretty clear what’s going to happen with that in a moment) and it is covering a safe. Trying to OPEN SAFE has the game respond that it needs the combo.

Fortunately, our trusting Mr. Smith is the sort to just write the combo on a paper two rooms over.

Unfortunately, this game is the sort to make it impossible to figure out how to input anything. TURN DIAL, ENTER COMBO, OPEN SAFE while having the paper open, etc. failed on me; I just went straight for the walkthrough again because the game had officially crossed my threshold. You’re just supposed to type L15 R7 (that’s verb L15, noun R7) and it works:

THE SAFE OPENED UP FOR A SHORT MINUTE. SOMETHING FELL OUT.

The “something” here is a set of stock certificates and some diamonds. The keys work on the mansion, too, but let’s handle the painting in the art gallery first since we have the copy.

Oops! I don’t know if this is an issue because of the crack or an issue with the original game (based on the parser’s absurdity, I’m about 50-50) but you need to SWITCH PAINTING (not SWAP, CHANGE, HANG, etc. I absolutely hate this parser) in order to keep the game from hanging.

OK! A FORGERY IS HANGING ON THE WALL!

Oddly, the painting looks different when dropped off with the stash.

This stash is going to start to look quite crowded by the end of the game.

Next up I promised to go for the “big items”. One of them is the “raft” from last time. As suggested by arcanetrivia in the comments, ROW worked to move it (I usually don’t associate ROW with rafts, but it does get described as having paddles).

Eventually the only way you can paddle is up to the the same boat dock the *boat* is at. We’re going to steal both the boat and the raft at once, and it is going to look very silly.

With the keys Mr. Smith gave over, you can just hop in the Corvette and type DRIVE CAR. Then the bottom of the car serves as a sort of frame as you drive around town.

Sadly, the game doesn’t let you drive into buildings.

I drove over to where the boat trailer was, stopped the car, and tried ATTACH TRAILER. No luck. HITCH TRAILER? No. PUT TRAILER? Nyet. LINK TRAILER? Also no.

I confess, reader: walkthrough again (#3 if you’re counting). It’s TOW TRAILER. Grrrr. While I was at this, I tried to tie the rope to the trailer and to the car, found that didn’t work either, but when I started driving again my raft was tied to the back of the car along with the trailer (even though I had left the raft back on the dock!) At least it didn’t crash the game this time.

Driving on over to the dock with both a trailer and a raft bouncing along connected to a rope, I was able to GET BOAT … I mean MOVE BOAT … no, PUSH BOAT, LOAD BOAT, LOAD TRAILER, FILL TRAILER …

The game wants PUT BOAT.

I was then able to tote everything all at once over to the truck and drop it off (rope, raft, Corvette, boat) for some megapoints. The police really only care about stereo systems and paintings, I guess? (Remember those are two items that set off the police. I already did the painting swap, the stereo puzzle is the very last one I solved.)

Now it’s time to raid the mansion. I hiked back over to the southeast side of town, waving at David in the office on the way (….yes, the car is still being … tested …) and found a much larger area than I expected.

Not this part in particular being large, but where the Tram goes.

Heading west and south leads down to a basement with a will (*will* rather) that is stuck in place.

I was confused about the Patty reference until I went back up and east.

This is *Patricia* Hughes and she counts as a treasure. If you KISS her she will jump in your arms and you can then go over the will and she’ll be able to pick that up too somehow. (I solved this later in the game, but it’s faster to just go through it now.)

There’s also a door to the south of Patricia and that needs the crowbar (“WITH CROWBAR”) to pry open. By doing that you can go down to the tram and what I’ll call The 1% Area.

This is only part of it.

To the south is a “yacht club” with a valuable record…

…and to the north is a wild animal reserve club, with a tiger that will eat you.

Oh, to reach the 1% Area, you need to flip the disk over.

Fortunately off to the side before the tiger is a Clubhouse with a rifle, although trying to SHOOT TIGER just results in a “CLICK”. You need to take a leap of faith and GET BULLETS while in the Clubhouse (even though they aren’t visible) and somehow it works and you can then LOAD RIFLE.

Then you can shoot the tiger dead, grab a valuable *fork* that’s there at the fork in the road (hilarious), and west to an elephant.

If you kept the peanuts from the very start of the game you can FEED ELEPHANT, who will obligingly let you then take … his tusks? I’m past looking for logic.

You can also go east and there’s a maze, but while mappable it is entirely useless to do so. I don’t know why it’s there.

Going back to the main road, you can reach a golf course and yet another hard-game crash. If you go to the 18th hole and LOOK HOLE, you’ll “see something”, and just like any other discovery in the game, you have to LOOK to find out what that discovery is. The problem is — even if you have the graphics off — the game will crash when you do so.

So you need to crash the game, reload, and blindly pick up the ball that you know is there. Then it can go safely back to the treasures.

One more section to the 1% Area:

This mainly serves to have a gate that taunts you…

No way in.

…a shark that eats you…

…and a metal detector that’s just sitting around ready for swiping. The metal detector gets used on the same beach as the shark is hovering around, and it turns out to be the most infuriating parser moment in the game. All the way through it has been chastising you for applying the verb USE to anything; the way to use the metal detector is USE DETECTOR.

A low point in a game with already awful parser moments.

You can then DIG. The game asks WHAT WITH and you need to say WITH HANDS (fortunately I’ve seen this trick enough times, but it always bothers me).

With all that done I was very close to the end of the game. I still had the stereo to deal with.

If you try to GET STEREO in the hi-fi place, the game asks “are you wanting to steal it?” and you’re supposed to respond STEAL STEREO in order to try. The police then catch you and toss you in jail.

You can then PICK LOCK (using nothing in particular, I guess we’re that good) and then OPEN DOOR and ESCAPE. (According to Grunion Guy in the comments, escape can sometimes fail at random. Joy!) After doing this, you can go back to the stereo and try to steal again, at which point the police will not spot you.

As I’ve mentioned before, the closest comparison game I can think of is Urban Upstart. Somehow, the overall effect of the grunge in that game was to feel like social commentary (“Grime Street, where all things are possible”) whereas here it just felt — I suppose the best word is “immature”? It hits some of the same points so I’m not entirely sure why; maybe because the protagonist in Urban Upstart was clearly hapless whereas this one is stealing absolutely everything. In a way, I think Pillage Village’s satirical target may have been more along the lines of adventure games themselves, taking to the limit the concept of a treasure collect-a-thon into complete absurdity, but that’s not quite as strong a target as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

In other words, the game has more to say about the Apple II and computer ecosystem than the world at large.

It also helped the people weren’t smudges.

I’m still glad I got to play Pillage Village and I hope the real disk comes up someday because I’m morbidly curious about the missing title screen. I’m also curious out of the “eight different games” Stuart wrote (I assume the rest really were unpublished) if there were any other adventure buried in there. While this game wasn’t terrific it certainly committed to the bit which suggests a second try might be equally creative but with a better parser.

Coming up: another long-sought after game only unearthed quite recently.