It’s been a while since we’ve played Peter Kirsch, despite this being his 16th game for this blog. (Most recently: The Dalton Gang, Alaskan Adventure, The Curse of the Pharoah). This is the 20th and last game for the SoftSide Adventure of the Month (he didn’t write all of them, but he edited all of them and wrote the majority). He kept going after this with the SoftSide Adventure Series (10 more games!); it was published on their “SoftSide Selections” which has more than just adventure games. The reason for the transition seems to be the desire to put everything on the “disk version” (DV) or “cassette version” (CV) of the magazine, which SoftSide was starting to push out more by this point.
As mentioned in my earlier Kirsch posts, the benefit of cranking out so many games has been getting to explore every genre rapid-fire, including some where Kirsch is one of the earliest examples (like the track-the-killer game Jack the Ripper, which has two sequels in the forthcoming Adventure Series). Here the game is something in the Indiana Jones mold, kind of. We’re supposed to rescue the American ambassador’s daughter, who has been kidnapped and is somewhere in the jungles of India.
From Softside, January 1983.
As usual, the SoftSide series has Apple, TRS-80, and Atari versions; I do not have a download of the TRS-80 version. I went with the Atari despite being warned ahead of time of an issue which requires modifying a variable mid-game (found by Dobson in his playthrough); I will do the same thing myself when I get to that section.
Dobson points out that “Sam” could be male or female, so I decided to imagine the main character as a woman. I’m reading a book by Sam Hawke (City of Lies) so it works for me.
As far as why I’m going with Atari instead of Apple: in a practical sense, I find it easier to read text when there’s lowercase characters, I haven’t brought out Atari to this blog in a while, and just in general amongst retro-sites I get the sense that Atari users were much keener on the games than people on other platforms. I assume people on Apple were busy playing Sierra games. (Also, the Apple version might have the bug that the Atari version does, and the same fix may not work!)
I decided to make a verb list right away this time; Kirsch games can be finicky and sparse with their verb choices.
Three-letter parser, so typing SHOUT is really just SHOOT. I additionally want to emphasize this is not comprehensive on every possible verb; there’s one verb early not on my list (fortunately easy to work out).
There’s another reason I kicked off with a verb list: the game starts you in a maze. Just stalling a little bit before starting to map made me feel better.
There’s a brief scene if you go northwest, but it seems to be just marking the endpoint of the game.
Maybe you could give some supplies? All the game starts you with is a hat and a gun.
The aforementioned gun and hat then need (ingloriously) to be used as room markers for mapping the jungle. You can climb trees but they don’t always have something to see (this seems to be vaguely buggy, I’ll explain in a moment.
YOU’RE ON TOP OF A TALL TREE
Visible exits:
Down
It doesn’t look like a maze when properly laid out, but I still had to map it out like one (and the general logic to shape didn’t form until about halfway through). At least this isn’t the sort of maze with lots of “arrow jumps”; most rooms are connected to “adjacent” geographic space rather than flying around like a pinball.
Kirsch at least emphasizes the maze in one respect by having apples up one of the trees, but having the apples be stolen when you drop them. They can’t be used as “breadcrumbs” for mapping.
Most of the trees have bananas … sort of. It seems to be buggy; I think the author’s intent was to have jungle trees either be apples (in one case) or bananas (in all other cases) but every once in a while my game would have the bananas just not show up, even if shortly after on a second trip they did. Fortunately, there’s no need to get too fussy about it; all you need is to give a banana to a monkey in the jungle, who will leave behind a knife.
You can take the knife over to a canoe and cut a rope tying it to a tree; while I can then GO CANOE I unfortunately can’t get it to move!
This is where the unusual verb shows up: PADDLE is understood.
Hence, I am fairly certain I am in need of some sort of oar, but there’s only one other place that the oar can be: a sleeping bear in a different part of the jungle.
I thought about using the gun to scare or even just shoot the bear (…although in the latter case the bear would still be sleeping on the object…) but unfortunately this attracts the attention of “natives” who come and kill you (this is true if you SHOOT GUN anywhere, even not in the context of being at the bear).
I could of course check the very walkthrough I linked earlier but I’m going to be stubborn a bit longer. It’s faintly possible I’m wrong about the oar and it’s instead a get-a-boat-to-move puzzle, where there is almost no consistency between games on what commands to use. I’ll still take suggestions (from people who didn’t look at hints) but please no help right now otherwise.
Renga in Blue 
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