(Continued from my previous posts.)
I’ve finished the game, and as predicted, there was not much left to go.
I was left before with a crystal rod and a related curious hint.
I have no idea what this hint means. What I instead was eyeballing was the “hole in wall” in the description. I was mentally equating that with the DOWN exit; there have been many games where a listed “background item” simply corresponds to a direction, but given I was horribly stuck, it was worth checking if that was really the case.
Anyone with an idea what the deal with the message was? I also was thinking in a structural-solving sense, insofar as the harpoon and rope make for one of the more elaborate puzzles in the game, yet the end result seemed to just be a relatively weak hint (like how the bottle from the ocean also just had a hint, one I didn’t even need because I had already solved the relevant puzzle!
Going inside the new passage, there is a vault, and now is when that number on the island gets applied:
(Of course, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever a sunken ship would have its combination clued by numbers written on a nearby island.. This is one of those adventure-things that gets handwaved off generally, but it really is so much more absurd than “the color on the windowsill matches the combination five rooms away” here; the game is clearly detached from reality in a “gonzo” sense where anything can happen.)
Sorry, not much update even with the analysis there! That’s the risk with adventure game blogging; you sometimes end up stopping right at the end. I do have one historical update, though:
From a Molimerx ad for the Epic Hero series, Computing Today January 1983.
I found the ad above in a January 1983 magazine (which was on newsstands, so it really was up in December ’82); that means I can drop the 1982/1983 business and stick this and the other two Epic Hero games in the Year 1982.
This game did not seem much like we were being heroic or epic, though? I could see calling a series that and diverging later into less epic material, but with this as the first in the series, it’s a curious naming convention. Perhaps Epic Hero games 2 and 3 will live up to the picture.
But for now, coming up: a wildly unusual mainframe game recently rescued and unlike anything featured on this blog before.
Renga in Blue 
My guess is that “crystal does’nt explode” is a reference to the rod in adventure–that this rod can’t be used to BLAST? If so it is a weird reference though, as it is less a hint than an in-joke, concealed in a weird place. I guess you could see if BLAST gets a funny message. It’s not on your list of testing verbs, is it?
As for the combination, maybe the ship’s purser, on escaping the wreck, decided to carve the combination on the slopes of the nearby mountain so someone might be able to get to it… not really. The other example you gave of the color on the windowsill reminds me of some games (specifically Resonance by Matt Scarpino) where a password is the answer to a riddle carved into the desk, which isn’t very good infosec but is also perfectly realistic! Idea for an adventure game that’s all about tracking down the answers to someone’s security questions. I have an adventure game setup in my house for perfectly realistic reasons–there’s a lock in an old-timey hutch and the key is in the drawer above it, with a post-it on the locked door saying “key in door.” This is effective because the treasure behind the locked door is the dry food that the cats knock over if we leave it out in the open, and the cats can’t read.
have you played any of the Rhem series? that’s like “Bad Infosec: The Game”
I have not! Read along with Carl Muckenhoupt’s playthrough of one of them.
oh agggh it also seems like it’s “getting lost in a 3D space: the game” and I have enough trouble with that in real life.
Carl’s comment on Rhem: “Or perhaps a better metaphor would be reading uncommented source code: all the symbols were presumably meaningful to whoever made them. Heck, it’s not all that different from the ad-hoc notation I’ve been using to take notes while playing the game” sounds like a promising premise for an adventure game. You have to navigate a [location] and all you have to guide you are the notes taken by your adventurer uncle in his annoying private shorthand.
oo, or a horror game! with the notes of all the failed former adventurers that blundered into all the various ways to die
Rhem sounds like I might really like it and also like it won’t run on my Mac. Maybe I should try to dig up a WINEable version.
at least the first one has a Mac version
I think Apple hates backwards compatibility though?
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5112-rhem
With an in-game notetaking facility! and when you die yourself, you can return to the location to discover your old notes!
re:RHEM, yeah, the problem is the backwards compatibility. Old games, and by “old” I mean “games I bought in 2018,” are often easier to run through WINE than through the Mac app, though it’s still very hit and miss. [I’m not emulator-savvy though.]
Well it’s not like there aren’t other games to play…
I do have a Mac around here – I’ll check it out later
If you can find the earlier, non-SE versions of RHEM, maybe those are easier to emulate?
the mac garden one is an older one – I haven’t tried emulating mac on mac before (just mac on linux and mac on PC) but I assume people do it routinely
you can go to an online store right now and buy the Rhem games for Mac but they have a big “32 bit incompatibility notice” on them
Looking at the code for something linked to the “crystal does’nt explode” message, the only thing I can see is some text which says:
“Kabooooom. C….rash. Wham and POP! The ships blows up.” – No idea how this is message is activated though.
Also there looks to be a “help” command, not sure if this made any of the puzzles a bit easier to solve?