Before getting into the action — and there’s a fair amount to report, given I missed a section of town last time — I want to discuss the game’s parser, which tries to model itself after Sierra On-Line but is more dubious.
The chart above shows the result of my testing every verb in the game. DIG for example has the game respond WITH WHAT? Typing THROW has the game respond DROP WHAT? For anything not understood the game says YOU CAN’T DO THAT HERE! This is true even if you put in absolute nonsense words.
The game turns out to allow locations with “bespoke verbs” that only are acknowledged in the right place to use them. This might seem like it theoretically works with “you can’t do that here” on wrong commands but the end effect on the player is to make feedback muddy and for parser messages to end up being deceptive anyway (not being able to do the verb “kick” in a particular place, for instance, implies it ought to work elsewhere).
The other oddity is the “WITH WHAT?” response. This response has been with us in both Scott Adams and Roberta Williams games. Essentially, you are asked to do some action, and the game asks “with what”, and so you type WITH NAMEOFITEM as a response. The side-effect here is that you can — depending on the system — sometimes skip the initial command entirely, and type WITH NAMEOFITEM straightaway. This a.) saves a turn (which was important for the ending of Time Zone) and b.) allows lawnmowering through using WITH on every object held, like a point-and-click adventure where you try every single item on an obstacle.
The sum effect of the items above has been for me to wander around certain spots trying WITH X on random inventory items rather than thinking in terms of a regular text adventure.
Last time I had mentioned in passing a jewelry shop that was shut tight. I had a hat, a brick, a gas can, some peanuts, and some stamps (a treasure); there was also a nearby sledgehammer at the Pawn Shop where the owner said I was allowed to “borrow” it. This requires the full command BORROW HAMMER.
The sledgehammer and the jewelry store went together, but the end result was not what you might think.
Using WITH HAMMER twice (no need to say BREAK) you can get the window busted open and an alarm to sound. I asked in my last post what the standpoint of the police is, and what would cause them to care about a crime; apparently, setting off an alarm at a jewelry shop (or at least this jewelry shop) did not cause them to care. No police ever show up.
The sign says “jeweler has jewels”. The store has already been cleaned out! You might think, “oh, they were just taking their stock and fleeing”, but if you are responsible and return the hammer quickly (just smash the window and go back, check out the vault after) you get rewarded by the pawn shop owner.
He gives you some “jewelry”. This implies not that the jeweler took everything thinking the vault wasn’t safe enough, but had to pawn everything in order to escape. This isn’t just idle plot-theorizing — I need to know if there’s still a puzzle ongoing. For example, the bank that mentions the teller (which I still haven’t been able to summon) might have jewels in a safe-deposit box if I pretend to be the jeweler; or, this may be entirely a closed thread and I shouldn’t even be thinking in terms of the vault leading to another puzzle. I’m about 50-50 on the possibilities; at the very least, this is a game that implies some very bad things have happened in the village causing both shopkeepers and the postal workers to flee.
I mentioned not being able to resolve the bank; I did manage to figure out the hardware store with the cutters.
The sign says that wire cutters are in Aisle 2 but none of the regular directions work. I finally hit upon GO AISLE where the game prompted me WHICH AISLE. Some more struggle led me to GO 2. Hence I could finally pick up the wire cutters.
A second aisle implies the existence of a first, so I tried GO 1 and found a crowbar.
No aisle 3+, sadly.
I immediately thought this was great and there so many places that could use either item but … I haven’t been able to use either yet. The antique store showcase, for instance, implies a crowbar to me, but no dice.
The hardware store was next to a kennel with a guard dog; normally food is needed to befriend/distract in such a case, but here I just needed to PET DOG.
You can now TAKE DOG. The guard dog is an inventory item!
That leaves the Picasso, the hi-fi system, and the gas station to deal with in the areas I’ve been in; I’ll also toss in the gutter I mentioned where if you LOOK GUTTER the game says you see something but is not specific what that something is.
But that’s ok, because there’s a whole new area to talk about! I had some slight issues in room placement which led me to missing some exits at the car lot.
Trying to take the *Corvette* at the lot suggests you need some keys, and nearby there is a dealer office. The sign on the desk says DAVID SMITH but I have not been able to provoke Mr. Smith or get any car keys from him.
Huzzah for more janky-looking people, though! I know you’ve been missing this.
Near the auto dealer is another gutter (LOOK says there’s something there, nothing I’ve tried works) and the jail, where just walking into the jail gets you imprisoned into it (again much like Urban Upstart).
South from the gutter leads to another new big chunk of village (possibly the last, although I suspect there might be a sewer system to dive into in our future).
First comes a “Blacksmith’s Office” with a Blacksmith inside (not abandoned!) who has a sign about cleaning while you wait. I don’t have anything to clean.
Not far from the blacksmith is a glass shop with a *chandelier* too high to reach.
Also near is a “ship lot” with a boat trailer. Trying to pick up the trailer implies it is too heavy, and PUSH, MOVE, and other verbs I’ve tested have also had no effect.
In addition to the boat trailer there’s an actual boat next to a lake, or rather a *boat*. You need to steal a boat! I think that’s a first; I’ve never had a boat be a treasure.
As there’s the lake mentioned to the south, it may be the trailer is a fake-out and you somehow need to move the boat to where you need it. DRIVE BOAT mentions you need keys.
You might notice the name “Howard” there. Nearby there are three residences. One of them is the “Hughes” mansion hence I assume it is a Howard Hughes reference; I haven’t been able to break in. The same applies for Mr. Smith’s house (Mr. Smith was the auto dealer).
There is one house you can go into right away, and that’s the domicile of Mr. Jones.
He has a *T.V.* and the asterisks mean you need to steal it. If you just try to take it you will die (the only death I’ve found in the game).
MR. JONES DOES NOT LIKE THIEVES, SO HE SHOOTS YOU BEFORE YOU HAVE THE CHANCE AND THEN CALLS JOLLYVILLE MORGUE.
There’s one last place I haven’t mentioned yet: an insurance office. It includes a memo pad with a note about repossessing the television set. If you take the note over and then get the T.V. he’ll think you’re there on valid business.
So this is a little more grim than our standard treasure hunt? I at least appreciate what the authors were trying to do by adding thematic heft. The parser and graphics aren’t quite matching the ambition, but I’ve also still got more game to go so we’ll see how things shake out.
To recap, my obstacles are:
Getting the Picasso without alerting police
Getting the stereo without alerting police
Getting the jewels, if any still even exist
Getting the chandelier that’s too high
Opening or at least getting the thing from the gutter
Breaking into the houses of Hughes and Smith
Stealing a car and a boat (likely the houses need to come first)
Possibly doing secret things at the bank or electric company or city dump
Oh and one last treasure! You can LOOK HAT (the hat you start the game with) and find a GOLD PIN which nets you 3 points on your score straight off the bat. I only have the stamps and jewelry and T.V. to contribute extra so there’s still a ways to go.
Origin, the company based in Texas formed by Richard and Robert Garriott, is now mostly known for publishing the Ultima games and Wing Commander; it was founded due to Richard’s issues publishing Ultima 1 and Ultima 2 with other companies. Origin did keep a steady outflow of other products, including their first non-Ultima game, Caverns of Callisto (1983). It was written by Chuck Bueche, aka “Chuckles” (famous for appearing as a jester in some of the Ultima games).
One of those non-Ultima games — published a year before Wing Commander — was OMEGA.
Via Mobygames.
OMEGA was a game with a long gestation; Stuart B. Marks first had the concept in 1984, wanting to make a military robot game with vehicles controlled by the player’s programming. (An Apple II buff, he likely was influenced by Robot War.) Quoting Stuart himself:
I was so fascinated by the idea, that I continued refining the design and by late 1986 was calling it “Tank Battle”.
The design kept evolving, and Marks, who was living in Austin local to Origin already, eventually got the company interested enough by the summer of 1987 to publish the project. It still went through many rounds of modifications from there…
The idea of making the player an employee of the Organization for Strategic Intelligence, grew from a conversation with friends during a round of beers at a local tavern. Later, Richard Garriott, the author of the Ultima series, contributed a workable method of including manual control of the cybertanks, and Paul Neurath, the author of Space Rogue, came up with the idea for team play.
…with the product finally landing in 1989, after the publication of Ultima V (which Marks is credited on as a designer).
The game is truly a product of the 80s, with a 270 page manual titled CYBERTANK ENGINEER’S HANDBOOK with programming instructions, a free BBS people could log in on to share creations, and an official tournament sponsored by Computer Gaming World:
It was exciting to see all of the tanks duking it out trying to make it to the final round of six tanks, and even more exciting to actually see the final round. Glued to the computer screen I tried to decipher how each tank was working.
I was having trouble finding a video of the game playing it “seriously” (with programming / commentary) but I picked one that at least gives an idea of what the combat is like.
All this, you may notice, is way past 1982, and according to at least the manual nothing Stuart wrote was published that year. After first going into his “professional” level play in tennis and golf:
Stuart attended the University of Texas, studying accounting to learn new methods of depreciating his Apple II computer. Ostensibly purchased to “help with homework”, the computer soon became a tool for dealing with his lifelong fascination with games… and VisiCalc was replaced by Pong. Fortunately, there weren’t many games that really captured Stuart’s attention, and he began developing his own entertainment ideas.
Since 1981, Stuart has created eight different games for the personal computer. The first to be published is OMEGA. As long as Stuart has to take time away from sports to have his rackets restrung and his golf clubs regripped, you can bet he’ll continue his pursuit of the software side of gaming.
We’ve seen this sort of “early adventure amnesia” before (like with Eldorado Gold); what this biography leaves out is a game Marks co-wrote with Richard A. Bliss titled Pillage Village. It was published by “R & S Software Marketing Services”.
I have not found the name of this company elsewhere and the “R” and “S” (I assume standing for Richard and Stuart respectively) mean this was probably a self-published game, and one with not very much reach at all because the only copy I’ve been able to find is one with a long “cracker” message in the intro.
It isn’t listed on Mobygames or any of the other regular sites; I only learned about it when Adam L. (who comments regularly on my Apple II posts) found a copy while digging through his files. (It’s also on the ASIMOV Apple II archive.)
I assume there was a title screen but I don’t know if it can be rescued off the disk. The copyright / author / company information I just pulled straight from the disk’s files, they don’t show anywhere on the opening screens.
The game opens with you standing on the streets of a town village called Jollyville, with only a hat mentioned in your inventory. There are various stores, some of which have items with little asterisks around them (like *stamps*) indicating they are treasures. The goal is nab the treasures except in this case you are quite explicitly committing crime. That is, you must pillage the village.
The treasures go into the truck you start the game at (which has an empty gas can and peanuts to start with). Even the main character of It Takes a Thief was a little more subtle.
Despite us having many, many treasure hunts now…
…they aren’t actually that common on the Apple II! (Or at least, the Apple II game with Sierra-graphics style.) The big exception, Cranston Manor, was a port. Otherwise, the big looming influence has been the Roberta Williams games which didn’t use the Crowther/Woods/Scott Adams formula. Even games you might expect lean into the treasure aspect like Mummy’s Curse tended to focus on one treasure item rather than many.
Just carting away valuable items is a good way to get caught by the omnipresent invisible police, who hover nearby at all times like Urban Upstart.
For example, just to the south of the start is an art gallery. Go in and you’ll find a *Picasso*…
…and if you try to take it, you’ll be “SHOT ON THE SPOT FOR THINKING ABOUT STEALING A PAINTING IN HERE”. With a non-lethal bullet apparently, since this lands you in the jail.
Along the same street to the south is a toy store, and a sporting goods store, and both appear to be empty.
If there was some manual text (or info on the first disk erased by the crackers) I might expect some context about the village being abandoned for some reason. Most shops are either empty or they contain one treasure (with the alert police ready to spring if you take it). The overall feeling is more like post-apocalyptic rather than just urban sleaze.
I’ve divided the map into three regions, starting with the one above (the southwest side). In addition to the art gallery that somehow has a Picasso, and the empty toy and sporting stores, there’s a City Dump (smelly), a boarded up jewelry store, and a pawn shop with the only visible person in town. The pawn shop’s only available item is a sledgehammer.
Moving on to the southeast side of town…
…there’s a lone telephone booth, just like Urban Upstart, but unlike in that game you can’t use it because the phone has simply been ripped out.
There’s a kennel and a hardware store at the same corner. The hardware store apparently has nothing although there’s a sign about wire cutters in aisle 2. I have not been able to find any but I might be missing some kind of search verb. (Although knowing this game, it might be just adding some extra dose of dystopia.)
The kennel has a guard dog. I haven’t tried to interact with it yet.
There are two other places in this area of note, one being a giant auto lot, which apparently managed to sustain whatever … happened to Jollyville.
There’s a *Corvette* here.
The Jollyville Post Office is abandoned because the workers are on strike. There are *stamps* here and you can take them without the police doing anything.
On to the northeast side, which is almost just as chipper as the other two sections!
There’s a bank with a sign about how TELLERS HELP IN ALL TRANSACTIONS but no teller. Here’s where I really suspect I’m missing a verb of some sort.
There’s also an antique shop with an inaccessible showcase…
…a gas station (with gas at $8.69 per gallon, which is meant to be comically ludicrous)…
…and a hi-fi center with a stereo that the police are watching like a hawk.
I should also mention there’s a “gutter” (which can’t seem to be entered, pried at, etc. at least for now) and a place “behind” an electric company but no way to get in.
All this leads to a curious atmosphere where I’m not sure where I should be prodding. The only logical thing is the sledge hammer, where the pawn shop owner won’t let you take it but he will let you “borrow” it for ten minutes for what I assume is a smash-a-thon. There’s a brick out in a random spot but I haven’t been able to do any smashing with that, nor have I experimented much yet with the other items; I figured I needed the layout of the map first.
This is the sort of game where I need to work out what the norms are. Just how violent is our character being? Is this like Williamsburg Adventure where anything goes, including rolling an entire cannon to a shop and shooting someone dead with it? When do the police care about something and when do they not care? Will the game be sad if I steal from the pawn store owner (or attack him) or is that entirely within the fair bounds of what the game expects? I think the most clear example of this being a problem is how in It Takes a Thief we could shoot a person dead but not a dog. I can’t make any assumptions about where the game’s moral limits are.
This had the hint (I was initially wobbly on translating) that it’s related to previous puzzles except given a twist. I realized perhaps the numbers duplicated the same chart as last time but with digits rather than letters; for the “twist” I needed to either flip the diagram over or turn it. It turns out a right-left reflection was correct: rather than counting columns from left to right I needed to count from right to left. The entire grid “twists” in the process. The third cipher line (35 23 65 55 51) as an example:
I had the extra hurdle of running across archaic pronunciation.
Pierson again. His translation: “On the springfields, mist draws in layers till the blossoming flowers are in full bloom, ah, won’t I meet you my lord?”
The third line is “saku hana no” but you might notice it says “vana”. This reflects a shift in sound that happened in Japanese (it originally didn’t have an “h” sound), which of course wreaked havoc with my searches, but I eventually muddled through.
BONUS NOTE: The “h” sounds were originally pronounced with a “p”, but sometime near when the Man’yōshū was compiled the sound shifted to be the “voiceless bilabial fricative” before landing on the modern sound. (That is, pa went to ɸa went to ha.) The “ɸ” sound still shows up in “fu” in modern Japanese, which you can hear in the video below:
The choice of “v” is Pierson’s own; this volume came out in 1929 and he notes that multiple sounds appear for the “ha” character and so he tries to split the difference:
…the “v” I want to introduce is familiar to the eye, easy to pronounce and can serve in the modern spelling as well.
That’s enough historiography-of-linguistics, let’s get over to the sixth sage–
The presence of the @ character gave me immediate suspicion what I was looking at…
GNT@8H NAKUT@W0 HLQQ
…but I went over to pick up the hint anyway, which said that the answer was “in front of your eyes”. This is meant to be the literal PC-8001 keyboard the game is being typed on.
Each letter and symbol has a corresponding character. If you simply line those up, you get the right answer – no other shifting or turning or anagramming or anything like that. I found it to be the easiest of the six puzzles (especially as I could just type most of the letters directly on my emulator!) The @ mark corresponds with the dakuten (that can turn, say, ウ into ヴ)
Despite being the easiest, I found it the most interesting of the puzzles because of the history behind this particular poem. First, an alternate translation.
Oh for a heavenly fire!
I would reel in
The distant road you travel,
Fold it up,
And burn it to ashes.
This poem is by the attendant Sano no Chigami no Otome, part of a series of 63 poems in a “poem-tale” regarding her lover Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled.
The second account of travel and longing in Book Fifteen (verses 3723–85), attributed to the exiled courtier Nakatomi no Yakamori and his lover Sano no Otogami, comprises sixty-three tanka, arranged in four pairs of multiverse exchanges between the man and the woman, plus a seven-verse coda … it appears to have been based on historical realities; there was an actual Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled to Echizen in early 739 for an unknown transgression and who was pardoned in 741. The Nakatomi-Sano set constitutes a compendium of the conventions of courtly longing.
It includes a hapax legomenon. That’s a word that shows up nowhere else in a set of texts; in this case, the word tatane (“to fold”). It is close to tatam (also “to fold”). This could be a mere typo, but it shows this way in multiple manuscripts of Book 15.
From here the answer (including the invocation of heavenly fire) goes to the seventh sage. I was curious what would happen, given I knew (from the walkthrough) there were only six required answers. It turns out the sage gives yet another puzzle…
…and you’re supposed to send your answer to Micom City for a prize.
I’m leaving the puzzle as an exercise for the reader. This was exhausting enough already. You’re all ready to tackle this now, right?
In all seriousness, it did feel satisfying to finally get the overall pattern of what was going on and how to approach each puzzle, even though I was far out of my comfort zone. One open question is: does the game represent a hapax legomenon of its own? The back of the box emphasizes how “unique” the game is. While it’s not the only word game text adventure, and not even the only one written in Japanese in 1983 (we’ll get there eventually), it might be the only one ever written (including to the modern day) which requires close interaction with ancient texts. So if we narrowly point at that aspect, yes, the game is totally unique and out of time.
Rob did some more sleuthing and found that of the Micom City adventures, Date Adventure was advertised first and would have landed in January, and this game and Ninja Adventure came in February. This is still before the flood of games really starts, so even an oddball game like this might have had more distribution than you’d expect.
The months aren’t exact; I went by first-magazine-ad-I-had-minus-1-month but these are computer stores who might sell something a bit earlier than that. The red-marked games I don’t have copies of so haven’t played yet. There’s at least one more Japanese game in February (at least according to my secondary source that I haven’t cross-checked yet) but March/April 1983 is where the adventures really starts to arrive.
Special thanks to gschmidl who helped me get the file up and running and everyone in the comments who chipped in. And very special thanks to the author of the walkthrough; I likely never would have even figured out the premise of the game without initial guidance. I’m expecting/hoping if Date or Ninja Adventure pop up sometime they’ll be a little less stressful to play.
Kazuma Satou made the point in my comments that even for people who are proficient in Japanese (I am not) this game can be rough, as the poems are in ancient Japanese. With the puzzle I left off on last time I ran into the issue directly.
ウナハノノ サシトハナクニ アトヒルニ
The old man’s hint was about “it is by block” and in the context of the previous puzzle, it seemed to indicate this was another anagram, except each of the three segments would be self-contained.
I focused on the first part, which had u, na, ha, no, and no. (Not only did it seem simple, but when searching for poetry, it’s easier to search for the first line.) My first suspicion, rolling with the idea Matt T. used last time on looking for common poetry words, was the word “hana”, or flower, which is the sort of thing that goes in poetry everywhere. I knew from binge-reading ancient poetry over the last two days that “no hana no” or “hana no no” were both possible, but the “u” was rather tricky, I ended up putting it at the beginning as an exclamation of sorts. While both regular Google and the Internet Archive were struggling, Google Books gave me some hits, and I finally hit victory with a book by Frederick Victor Dickins from 1908.
This is the right poem, as all the syllables for the other anagrams work correctly. I came across so many flower poems with the same first line but a miss on everything else. (Keep in mind also: while figuring this out I had no idea if I was using the right method of solving, and tried some weird theories involving the gojūon arrangement — more on that later. There’s at least some valid comparison with my discussion of second-order puzzles with no confirmation in the middle if you’re on the right track; once I hit upon “no hana no” it felt close enough I had at least partial confirmation I was doing something right.)
This incidentally isn’t even using text I expected (u no hana no), but rather all as one word. Modern Japanese dictionaries do not think it is a word.
However, we’re looking at very old poetry. According to a dictionary on ancient Japanese texts, unohanano refers to the Deutzia scabra plant (Japanese snow flower) when it blooms.
I still needed to find the next sage for delivery; again, I had to use brute force and I have no idea how the visual relates to which sage is the next one in sequence.
I put the pictures for sage 3 and sage 4 (this one) next to each other as image files in a directory, then rapidly went back and forth between them. The image did not change at all.
First the puzzle, then the old man’s clue to go with it:
You might notice the English letters tossed in there. Indeed, the ciphertext this time appears to have no Japanese in it.
AA CA ED QBA GB
JA ID FA BD QDC IA QCB
AC IC FA CB BB
The hint says to refer to the 50-symbol chart, and also asks “what is Q?”
The chart in question is the chart that hiragana or katakana characters can be arranged on, where the vowels go a, i, u, e, o in order on one side, and the consonants go the other direction. I took the chart from Wikipedia, and guessed that the letters were coordinates; for example, GB would be row G (or 7), column B (or 2). I then used this to plot all of them on the Katakana chart. There are three with a “Q” that I’ve marked in a different color.
(I actually did with the previous puzzle too! I was thinking maybe the chart was a “block”, but my answer didn’t go anywhere.)
Getting in mind my last search, I broke things up and typed a-sa-ne-ka-mi-wa-re and got a hit:
There are some slight differences having to do with Japanese phonetics; all I needed anyway was the poem and the last two lines. Just like before, they were enough to satisfy the next sage.
…and the hint is that it’s like what we’ve seen except it is broken or twisted. (Also it gives as a hint, “what is the +”?) I have no idea what this means and I haven’t started yet, but it seems like the sort of thing to kick over to you, the readers.
We’re fairly close to the end; there are six puzzles and we’re on sage number 5. (There are seven sages, but you only need to solve six, at least according to the walkthrough, I assume because the seventh is there to take delivery of the last puzzle.)
As found by Rob on Yahoo Auctions. The front cover’s sign says “those who rush are lost” and “think carefully”; the back cover says that by the author’s choice “no explanatory text is included”, and there are “tricks” for “those who are not satisfied with conventional games”.
The game’s instructions (see auction above) mainly emphasize we are trying to solve the puzzles from the sages, and how sometimes “you won’t even know where you are”. It also explains the game uses katakana with no spaces and that
For detailed information, please try the game and figure it out for yourself.
From last time I was stuck on a particular code:
ナリノメノ ルゲサニミケシ ヒノユシノ
The old man’s hint said something about exchanging and symmetry. This is meant to indicate some of the characters swap places. Somehow (“recognizing jumbled phrases likely to appear in a Man’yoshu poem, and searching for them”), Matt. T. managed to work out this was poem 8.1500 which I’ll talk about in a moment; this was enough for me to pull up the starting characters of the result:
ナツノノノ シゲミニサケル ヒメユリノ
All the even-positioned characters swap places, in the manner shown…
…which is both elegant and hard to figure out. You don’t technically need to do this step, as long as you realize the initial 17 characters have been jumbled somehow. Remember from the first puzzle, you need to give the completion of the poem. It was written by Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoue (695–750).
I checked multiple translations, and I prefer this one:
As the fields in summer,
Awash with blooming
Scarlet lilies, is
Love unknown and unrequited,
A bitter thing, indeed
To give the answer I needed sage number 3, which is one of the sages with a marked forehead. This one was just to the southwest of the start. I still don’t know what the logic is; I just got lucky.
This is the same text as the previous sage, except the code is now…
ウナハノノ サシトハナクニ アトヒルニ
…and the old man’s clue is something about the puzzle being by ブロック, by “block”.
I don’t think the game means this kind of block, but I still like doing image-searches for vocabulary. Source.
You may notice that all our clues have been in the format 5-7-5; waka poetry in general follows the pattern 5-7-5-7-7, so the idea behind each puzzle has been to identify the 5-7-5 part in order to figure out the missing 14 characters at the end of each poem. Going long back historically, the term waka was actually a more general term for poem, but 5-7-5-7-7 predominated enough to become synonymous with the form. I mention this in case the solution has to do with the exact numerical aspect somehow, like perhaps arranging the characters in a grid of some sort…
…although it could be just whatever operation being done stays within the “block” of each section. I tried struggling a bit with simply rearranging ウナハノノ (u, na, ha, no, no) and while “hana” is promising (the word for flower), and I got “hana no” in one poem…
…I did not get a full hit. The problem is that this may be entirely the wrong method, so if someone who is happy to peek at the walkthrough wants to check, I’ll take a hint that either I’m on the right or entirely wrong track.
The previous game I played, Wonderland by Richard Ramella, was based on a five by five grid, with randomly distributed characters and a word puzzle to solve. This all applies to Puzzle Adventure as well, except the grid includes confusing teleport exits, the characters need to be talked to in a particular order otherwise it’s game over, and there are multiple word puzzles involving 1400-year-old Japanese poetry. Pretty much the same, right?
In all seriousness, Wonderland is the best comparison game I can think of that we’ve played before; maybe a bit of Dennis Koble’s Chinese Puzzle. This is an “abstract” adventure where you are supposed to find six sages and answer their puzzles. Each puzzle involves a line of poetry.
The game was published by Micom City (マイコン・シティー) and written by Ryuhei Suzuki. Micom’s publishing seemed to last from late 1982 to late 1983 and then drop off from there. Their first game I’ve been able to find is a space shooter. Helpfully, the title screen gives a date of November 21st, 1982.
The ad in the Youtube thumbnail is from I/O Magazine, September 1983. It shows all four of their adventure games.
From top to bottom they are: Time Bomb Adventure (“disassemble the time bomb on the screen within the time limit”), Date Adventure (“overcome obstacles to get a kiss from your girlfriend”), Ninja Adventure (“steal the secret document”) and today’s game, Puzzle Adventure (“the biggest mystery with the fewest words”).
They were originally for PC-8001 (the same platform Omotesando Adventure was on). The Game Preservation Society lists the latter three games as being from January 1983 and the earliest issue I can find of the various ads for the company is from March 1983, putting a release at January or February; the Date/Ninja/Puzzle trio thus represent the earliest new adventures of 1983, alongside The Palms.
Time Bomb Adventure is listed as “upcoming” for March but may not have come out until later in the year; a Japan Travel Adventure was slated for the same month but seems to have never been released. The ads in general state the company wants software that they will purchase at a “high price” and they prioritize “originality”. The author of Puzzle Adventure, Ryuhei Suzuki, was likely an independent author who took the solicitation to heart (Ninja and Date are also by him, I don’t know about Time Bomb).
Close-up of the Puzzle Adventure cover.
Before diving into the game itself, I should mention my emulation setup. I’m using Quasi88, which you can find on the author’s page here. The most recent version includes a katakana keyboard. I have a download here with everything packaged together including a save state which will jump you right to the start so you don’t have to bother with tape loading (go to the second to the last tab on the menu, press the button marked ロード).
Officially, the title is パズル アドベンチャー.
The phrase “anata wa totemo fushigina sekai ni imasu” or “you are in a mysterious world” repeats with essentially every room. If you want to see anything you need to look around (“miru”). You do not start alone.
You can see an old man.
You are in a mysterious world.
The structure of the game is to go around and find sages (like the sitting person on the cover) and talk with them. Then you can go back to the old man in the center and ask for a hint, which will give more information to solve the puzzle. The puzzle will resolve to be a line from a poem. You need to then find the next sage, who will first ask for the previous puzzle’s answer; if you give it correctly, you’ll get the next puzzle.
You can wander the landscape with north/south/east/west (or rather, kita/minami/hisashi/nishi) although as I hinted at from the start, this isn’t a straightforward grid. There are some landmarks around like “rabbit” and “flower” that can help but many of the non-character rooms have nothing. There are no items to drop to help with the mapping, either. I was having enough trouble I threw in the towel part-way and just went for the walkthrough’s map which I will reproduce here.
(Note that I know this walkthrough map has errors; north-west-south-east from the start does not lead back to the start, for instance. I’m just coping with random flailing when I need it, to be honest.)
The green spots are where the sages are located, and while those spaces always have sages in them, which sage goes in which spot is random. “Which sage” is very important. The randomization happens when you meet a sage, not when the game starts. Talking with the wrong sage is a game over…
“Idiot fool! You aren’t ready to talk to me yet! Start over and come back when you’re ready!”
…and they are indistinguishable in text. You need to use ヲミル which will “examine” the sage and the game will give a picture.
The different sages look very similar and while the walkthrough has a guide to this I haven’t looked at that yet. I know the picture above is of sage 1. With this sage I’m not sure…
…but I’ve also seen sage 2, and they look indistinguishable to me from sage 1. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve just had to use brute force.
Once finding the proper sage, you can type セイシンニキク (ask the sage) and you’ll get the appropriate puzzle.
The last part is:
Very well! This is my puzzle!
ヘルシコト ムキテﾞクムロヒﾞ フナモムス
How is it? Can you solve it?
I did not translate the puzzle itself because I can’t. This is a ciphertext puzzle. (You know what this reminds me of also? An Andrew Schultz game. Except the author is Japanese and in the early 80s rather than writing a new English wordplay game for seemingly every single IFComp.) It’s possible to just solve the puzzle from here (assuming you’re good at cryptograms in Japanese) but the old man’s hint at least makes this a smidge less painful.
Assuming you can get back and find him (if you eyeball the map, you’ll notice you can only enter the start going to the east) he says “the characters are shifted”. This is essentially a Caesar shift, using the standard order katakana letters. Move each back by one and you’ll get something that makes sense. (For example, “コ” or “ko” turns into “ケ” or “ke”.) This causes the text to turn into
フリサケテ ミカツキミレハ ヒトメミシ
which is direct from the Man’yōshū compilation of poems. Specifically, Poem No. 6-994 by Ōtomo Yakamochi (who likely was the one who compiled the collection in the first place), starting with “furisakete mikazuki mireba hitome mishi”. He wrote the poem when he was sixteen.
From A Warbler’s Song in the Dusk: The Life and Work of Otomo Yakamochi by Paula Doe.
After multiple stalled attempts I found the second sage (middle east side of the map, but remember it is random) which quizzed me on what the puzzle’s answer was. I confidently gave the shifted translation but I was told it was wrong, and asked if I had gotten a hint from the old man yet. (This is how you are supposed to know you ask for hints!) I finally realized that the poem connection wasn’t just a reference, but essential to the puzzle. The answer isn’t the first part of the poem, but the completion of the poem.
That is, pawing through ancient poetry is required to beat the game.
In any case, I now have a new puzzle. It also doesn’t make sense as-is so must be another cipher somehow.
ナリノメノ ルゲサニミケシ ヒノユシノ
Getting the old man’s hint I got something like “This is a character exchange. Pay attention to the nature of the symmetry!”. I’m happy to hear suggestions from anyone who hasn’t looked at the walkthrough (even if you don’t know any Japanese, you might have some idea that will work!) I’m riding far past the edge of my ability but I’ll try plowing ahead anyway.
Renga in Blue 