Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, and in particular my last post which described how the 1981 PET version of the game was recently rescued.)

The disk copies we have are for the “4040” edition of the game. This is referring to a disk drive pair by Commodore; image via the Centre for Computing History. While the predecessors (2040 and 3040) were for the US and Europe respectively, this one seems to have gone international; it gets mentioned in an Italian book, for instance.

Catacombs was more frustrating to get to the finish than I expected because some aspects got changed, the fact I hadn’t put together a “full run” of the game before, and one extremely nasty bug. Regarding the second point on making a “full run”, there are some things that need to be done in a particular order, otherwise a softlock can happen. The easiest to point out is simply that you can’t drain the lake and enter Poseidon’s realm (an action that never even worked on the DOS version) until after you’ve swam over it to castle on the other side of the lake. In general, you have to look at the overall map and plan a general route before executing it. I have a meta-map below explaining the layout:

Points to note:

▸ The church is the starting point, and you can use keys to enter the catacombs directly or you can use a secret passage (pull a rope three times). You need to cut that same rope (with a sword you find early) to reach a jeweled clock hand on the top of the church which is one of the treasures, but that can be saved for the very end of the game.

▸ As I mentioned last time, you can cross the River Styx with a coin (as was required in the DOS version) but it counts as a treasure, so that particular route should be avoided.

The purring ball is a red herring.

▸ The other way to reach the Afterlife is via a lake, where you can drain it and enter via Poseidon’s domain, but there’s no way to refill the lake, so the castle you reach by swimming has to be done first.

▸ The afterlife also includes a spot where a geyser is blocking your way. There’s a “tap” in the living-world you can turn to stop it and get by, but by using the tap the place it is at gets blocked off. The secret entrance then becomes the only way to get into the catacombs.

▸ There’s an inventory limit of six. Usually this means a maximum of five held objects because the lamp is required for most of the game, so there’s at least some aspect of needing to sweep through for treasures first before starting to wreck things.

All this represents the “puzzle” that I missed solving by only worrying about getting individual treasures.

The bug I will get to in context, but let’s just say even though I was warned ahead of time and supposedly did everything “right” to avoid it, I was still struck by the bug and had to restart the game.

The Angel of Death appears quite frequently and does nothing (no manure drop like the DOS version, you just find it in the open). I did find out from Alastair that EXAMINE HOODED or EXAMINE HOODED FIGURE both work. EXAMINE FIGURE gets the response “I don’t understand that”. It generically applies to both misunderstood verbs and misunderstood nouns.

Based on the meta-ponderings, I planned an attack in this order:

a.) nab the keys and get the lamp/sword/coin and wand too (which is by the lake, does no magic, and is just a treasure)

b.) open the secret passage and nab treasures nearby, this includes a bottle for holy water

c.) fill the holy water, nab the cloak, and try killing Dracula with the holy water (in the DOS version killing the vampire was worthless, in this version of the game it gets you 27 points)

c.) with the cloak of invisibility-to-undead on, swim to the castle and take care of the actions there

d.) pull the plug and pass through the afterlife focused on getting into Heaven

e.) turn the tap, do a second pass through the afterlife with the geyser

f.) take care of the spider in the palace (with the flamethrower from the castle?) and any last treasures still lingering

g.) cut the rope and get the treasure from the clock as one final step

This went fine at least early on. When I tried killing Dracula I had a problem where I threw the bottle first before taking the cloak.

I had also been warned not to take the cloak but rather WEAR it directly off the floor, because it messes up the inventory otherwise.

From there it was time to visit the castle, which had a slightly different map layout than before. (For example, the flamethrower in Classic Quests is tossed in a cell to the side, whereas here it shows up in the torture chamber.)

The zombie stationed at the front, who was straight out buggy in the DOS version and could even cause the game to crash, will sometimes stop you from passing through at random, but you can just try again and you’ll get through.

There’s later a hint mentioned in the fireplace about killing undead with fire…

…and the flamethrower is still present, but I never got it to work.

The game doesn’t even allow the command CLEAR FLAMETHROWER WITH PEN from the first game (it cuts off before it reaches that many characters) and just CLEAR FLAMETHROWER gets a “huh!” message which appears when the verb is applied to most nouns.

Fortunately, you can ignore the flamethrower entirely. You still need to plant manure to get a purple cube…

…and nab a purple sphere too (still mysterious to me what their deal is, only the sphere counts as a treasure), and you can escape via a teleport like last time.

Following my process, I needed to go yank the plug next, and this is where I ran into trouble. This is with just the book in my inventory (for getting past the Pearly Gates) and the lamp:

Alex reported having this bug too, but it was fixed by using WEAR CLOAK rather than taking it, and also dropping the cloak once it was done being used. I did both things and still had the bug. I knew I could get through because on another attempt (before working my sequence out) I could pull the plug properly, so I’m still not sure why it shows up or is missing. I ended up going nuclear and pulling out Alex’s walkthrough and following it step by step, with the hope that the reason for the bug wasn’t pure randonmness.

Phew. Fortunately everything else followed straightforwardly; I nabbed the trident (not reachable in the DOS version) and I was able to use the book to get by the Pearly Gates.

Death decides to take a visit to the Pearly Gates as well.

Then I did a second loop (you can go into the drained lake) where I first turned the tap, shutting off the geyser…

The Angel of Death is persistent. It’s mildly hilarious in a story-implication sense. Imagine a TV show where a person with a skull helmet randomly shows up each episode but everyone ignores them.

…used the scissors to cut the grass at the Elysium Fields (still the weirdest-to-find treasure of the game) and did the whole section going by the geyser (which was now turned off), retrieving a cup.

This is a riddle. You’re supposed to say SILICON. I don’t remember it being in the DOS version.

The only thing remaining was the spider at the palace, previously completely impassable. It turns out you can just “clear web” here, no flamethrower required.

The final step involves using the sword to cut the rope (which was previously needed for entry into the secret part of the catacombs) and nabbing the jeweled short hand from the clock.

What I found most curious about the experience was how many “loose ends” were there in the original game. For example, in the palace, in the DOS version there’s a crown you find in a laundry bag, but in the original, the crown is just sitting out in the open, but the laundry bag is still there.

Why is the laundry bag there? It doesn’t add to atmosphere or even humor; it really seems like it was meant to hold the crown but Brian Cotton forgot to hook it up to the initial release; a bug that got fixed later, maybe? The hooded figure you just ignore was equally odd; did Cotton intend all along to have the manure appear because of the rider’s visit, but never got around to implementing it at first? Why make an entire ASCII art in the fireplace indicating you should kill undead with fire if you don’t need to bother with it?

These don’t feel like intentional red herrings but more like the author didn’t hook up everything he was planning. This suggests the DOS port is in some ways closer to the author’s intent, but of course that version is still broken (although at least, if someone ever gets hacking, they know what really is supposed to be happening).

The one thing that changed very little between versions was the general text in the rooms. None of the text was stored in memory, enabling Cotton to type more words than an in-memory game might allow. This has the downside that it runs very slow; I ended up playing most of the time at 3.5x PET speed. This would have been distressing to play otherwise; Cotton’s willingness to make the trade-off is what led to this very early British game (with long descriptions more like a proper late-80s game) existing in the first place.

Coming up: Some 1983 games. I’ve been doing a lot of pre-1983 mopping up lately, as so many things keep getting discovered; there’s a trilogy coming up (in perhaps a month?) in the same category.