…I thought “well this could mean, shall we say, a mass market piece of hardware. Shops were springing up, not that many but they were springing up, retail computer shops, and they were selling software and hardware and I thought “well this is an opportunity”. So I thought “well why don’t we try it?” I put together a number of games, packages to sell, did all the artwork, bags, you know we’d copy those, we’d staple the bags together at night, and I’d take one or two days off during the week and run around to the few computer retail outlets that were here in Victoria and direct sell. And I sold a lot. I sold a hell of a lot.
— Reynolds quoted in Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality by Melanie Swalwell
I finished the game; this continues from my previous post.
Since I pulled the verbs from the walkthrough, I spent a while trying to keep from checking hints the rest of the way, and that was a mistake.
Last time I had, after immense struggle and finally giving up, realized the game shifted the verb SHOOT to the verb BLAST, and immediately after a long tape load you needed to BLAST TROOPER on the very next turn. (Even if I had the patience to apply my verb list to a game where the verbs swap every few rooms, it wouldn’t have helped here.)
The elevator, as already mentioned, is a trap: you’ll end up skipping the next (required to win) section, although there’s an aspect that makes this obvious before the next screen appears: the tape load time is given as a whopping 128 seconds, because the tape has to move farther.
Avoiding this trap-exit and heading north…
…is another Jillyan, although this one is peaceful. (I am glad the author didn’t go the route of allowing another BLAST — the weapon is out of juice — because I could see reflexively killing the Jillyan and softlocking as another “puzzle”.) This might have been harder to work out except with the verb list available (BLAST, GET, LOOK, DROP, TALK, SAY, GO, PRAY) there was no other way of being aggressive, so the right word is TALK. The trooper asks
DO I KNOW YOU?
and the right response is the word PAX that was learned by rubbing the prism.
While I came across this immediately (again, nothing much to do with the verb list) I was very frustrated by it, because there really is no reason a prism in a sealed case would give us a codeword to pass on to a spy. There’s a tendency among adventure games I’ve taken to terming Codekey Anywhere Syndrome, where a clue for unlocking something across the map is given in a place where it makes no logical sense. With a physical key there’s no problem having it land just about anywhere on a map, but authors tend to treat “information” keys the same way even when the logic doesn’t make nearly as much sense. This isn’t just a cranky nitpick, as sometimes the nonsense nature of the connection can make the puzzle hard to solve; rather than a puzzle solved by thinking about the plot, this is a puzzle solved by ignoring the plot. Epic Hero 1 had a moment where numbers you saw through a telescope somehow matched a safe underwater, but at least in that circumstance one can imagine a person seeing the numbers first and setting their combination accordingly (…still admittedly dodgy, though).
Moving on, the spy gave us a ring and told us about an idol. The idol isn’t hard to find. Just to the east:
This reveals a BALL which turns out to be an explosive.
Going through all this also reveals a secret exit to the east and allows exit to the next (correct) tape load.
Smoothly going through the prior section, I was confident the verbs would pull me through this time (LOOK, CLIMB, INSERT, OPEN, TURN, THROW, READ, CRAWL, JUMP) but the game found another way to make the parser painful. The goal here is to get to the east side of the corridor and turn the wheel (which is only distantly visible on the west side). Your way is blocked by invisible lasers.
The CRAWL and JUMP immediately came to mind as helpful, but neither verb was understood! I tried CRAWL EAST and JUMP EAST with similar bad luck, so I assumed I needed to set something else up first, and struggled for far too long for a minimalist VIC-20 game. (The RING and BALL are still being held and the ring can activate the ball as an explosive, so I was noodling with that, but it’s only supposed to be used later.) I finally had to check the walkthrough again and I found I needed to
CRAWL BEAM
that is, even though there’s no way to know about the beam except by dying, you’re supposed to apply it as a noun in your parser command! I can’t think of another instance where this has happened. (Even including Ferret, the king of pre-knowledge games!)
As the text says, this is just the first beam. You can CRAWL BEAM to repeat for a second beam, but if you do it again for beam number 3 you’ll get fried. The trick is to switch to JUMP BEAM, and then CRAWL BEAM again for a fourth (and final beam). This is another circumstance where the verb list made the process much easier.
At the end of the hall you can TURN WHEEL (which opens the reactor) and then repeat the same beam steps but backwards: CRAWL, JUMP, CRAWL, CRAWL.
Now at the reactor, you get even more issues, as you need to INSERT RING in the BALL, then TURN RING to start the ball ticking.
Then you can throw the ball in, and now it’s time to escape! Next tape load.
This is meant to parallel the scene with Luke and Leia at the chasm in the Death Star, so I get to share this bit from the Empire of Dreams documentary which explains how it was done without stunt doubles:
Back to the battle against the Jillyans, I spent a little while looking for a grappling hook before I realized I could just JUMP. Not if you’re holding the power cell, though.
And here there is yet another infuriating parser moment! It immediately occurred to me to try to THROW things so I tried THROW RING (which I still had) and the game just said SORRY, which made me put it out of my mind. The ring isn’t actually too heavy, so you can still be carrying it; THROW CELL on the other hand sends it to the other side properly.
Once on the other side, you can find a SPACE SUIT in a cubicle, and I tried dropping my ring in order to pick it up and the game wouldn’t let me.
There’s an inventory limit of two items (which I always knew) but it turns out, more evilly, there is a room limit. If you have the cell and the ring and you are looking at the suit, you have softlocked the game, because you are unable to drop anything (too many items in the room!) You can’t THROW the cell back now either. The right approach is to drop the ring first before jumping over the ledge, even though there’s no logical reason you couldn’t dump the ring after finding the suit.
Once the suit is on the door is open and you can escape.
Last tape load! At least this section is straightforward.
Although this appears to repeat the content of earlier, going west or east now has the game respond SORRY TROOPERS ARE EVERYWHERE.
With the suit on and the fuel cell held you can push the button on the panel and go in a lifeboat; then you can put the fuel cell in a slot, and pull a lever to escape.
There’s one last issue to all this I don’t fully understand. Referring back to Garry’s walkthrough, there are two bug fixes. One is for the INSERT command crashing the game; the other is for something that didn’t happen to me.
As each part runs another part, it needs to maintain state between parts and it does this by POKEing values before running the next part and PEEKing these values during initialisation when the next part runs. When the bomb is activated, part 3 POKEs a value to indicate this, but part 4 fails to PEEK this value. As a consequence, it is impossible to finish the game without 6.6 billion people being killed by the Death Star. To fix this, add the following lines to the file ‘death star 4’:
204 IFPEEK(822)=6THENO=1
205 RETURN
I am unclear why I didn’t have this issue; maybe there are different dumps to the game? But at least on Garry’s copy, even when he did everything right the Death Star killed Terra.
Darryl’s later games are well regarded, so I’m not going to judge too much based on this early effort which tried to push the VIC-20 far harder than was reasonable. We’ve only had one other VIC-20 game try to use the tape loading trick to break things up (Grave Robbers) but that was only in two sections; I think the reason this ended up so ambitious was the attempt to downgrade from TRS-80 to VIC-20. This is possibly due to the greater prevalence of the cheaper VIC-20 for the Australian market; the reason Darryl even had a TRS-80 is he had bought one for his previous business making playground equipment. Just like we’ve seen elsewhere, the business purchase ended up shifting to an entertainment one.
Coming up: Some actual TRS-80 games, and then a return to the Apple II for a game you’re likely not expecting.
Renga in Blue 
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