Dr. Bongo’s plan is to destroy the World, with only hours before his devastating missiles are launched you locate his position. Your mission is to stop him and be the World’s No. 1 hero.
— From Sinclair User, March 1983
Custom Software is another company from the UK that picked such a generic name it’s like they wanted to get lost in history (although to be fair, “Dr. Bongo’s Safari Park” is a pretty distinctive name and doesn’t show up much in periodical searches either). The main gimmick behind the company was not the two adventure games they sold but that they wrote programs “to your specific requirements i.e. EDUCATION, BUSINESS, HOME RECORDS, ETC. Please write stating your exact needs for a FREE estimate. Our prices will astound you.”
Salvage and Dr. Bongo are advertised for Spectrum, ZX81, VIC-20, and Commodore 64. We don’t have any copies of Salvage; Dr. Bongo has been rescued in both Spectrum and ZX81 form.
Via Sinclair User, June 1983 issue. I like how the review talks about the slowness of the program being a feature since it gives “a certain amount of time for thought.”
One point to highlight here is that there was a 16k model of the Spectrum, and a 48k model; this was written for the 16k model, derived certainly from the ZX81 game.
Much of the ZX81’s firmware was taken over to the Spectrum unmodified. We had to get the machine out quickly so the ZX81 code was altered as little as possible. That is why the Spectrum is comparatively slow—the ZX81 was always designed to save bytes, not time.
— Quoting Richard Vickers who did the ZX81 firmware based on John Grant’s work for the ZX80; Vickers went on to do the Spectrum firmware as well
This means we’re still talking about very tight space for BASIC code; no chance for an Urban Upstart.
Via eBay.
You might think I might normally gravitate to the Spectrum version of the program, but allow me to compare the opening screenshots (no title screen!):
That color is tough to read! The ZX81 shows things much cleaner and it doesn’t have the screen-glitch pain some of the ZX80/ZX81 games suffered. Unfortunately, I hit a crash bug early enough (OPEN DOOR at a cafeteria) that my confidence level dropped.
I played enough to also notice that based on the map (which has a lot of empty rooms) it was sometimes easy to miss objects with them buried with the other text in monochrome.
On with the game! As the ad blurb indicated, we’re looking for Dr. Bongo’s missiles where he threatens to DESTROY THE WORLD. They are hidden somewhere in his safari park. Everything is outdoors with no directions other than N/S/E/W, and the map is entirely “regular”; no cases where an exit turns or only goes one way.
The map is more or less completely open, arranged in a big loop. There’s lots of red herrings but I’m leaving them off the map; for example, the room just to the east of the start has a radio that you can’t even examine.
Other red herrings include a table/stool pair, an empty wrapper, a wallet where a moth flies out, and a map where there are glasses nearby that let you read it but the map is useless.
The glasses help to read something else, though.
Animals you can find are an elephant, bear, gorilla, tiger, and kangaroo. The kangaroo is a red herring; the tiger is the only one of the animals that actively blocks an exit (and will kill you if you try to go by).
One of the items just lying about the map is honey. It is near some bees and a hive but not in the same room; if you get the honey, the bees will bear a lifelong grudge and no longer let you pass by.
Since the map is generally a loop it still makes everything accessible, just it means that if you grab the honey early (as I did) you’re going to be plodding back and forth quite a bit, especially as there’s also an inventory limit of four. With the honey in hand you can reach a bear den in the northwest and resort to a little bribery.
Besides fixing the boat, finding the right bribe for each animal is the general goal of the game.
This leaves behind a hat (a chef hat, if you examine it) which you can wear to go into a nearby cafeteria.
CAFETERIA
YOU SEE
banana
bun
doorwayGO DOORWAY
KITCHEN
YOU SEE
dustbin
chef
steak
These two rooms were the most problematic in the game. For the outside, I could not GET BUN or GET BANANA for unclear reasons (the game just says you can’t) and it was only much later I found I could get some COINS from out in a forest area north of the beans and BUY BANANA / BUY BUN. This is despite no active shopkeeper or vending machine being mentioned.
Perhaps even worse, while the steak was easy to grab, the dustbin was resistant to all my efforts to do anything with it; given the number of red herrings the game has, I concluded it was a red herring. It is not. You’re supposed to LIFT DUSTBIN and find some keys. (Which are needed for the very end! I ended up needing the walkthrough of Exemptus for this one, and I have zero regrets spoiling the puzzle.)
The banana, bun, and steak make together bribes for other animals. The banana goes to the gorilla who leaves behind some gloves; the steak goes to the tiger (who will let you pass by safely); the bun goes to the elephant. Not as obvious as the other two but at least the game was establishing a pattern. The elephant moves and reveals a REPAIR MANUAL.
The manual (readable with the glasses) reveals you need wood, nails, and a hammer to fix a boat. Fortunately all these are either in the open or easy to find (the game gives you an axe rather than wood, but there’s trees in the next room over). The main annoyance is the trekking back and forth to gather everything and bring it over to the boat. (Also to find the command REPAIR BOAT, but that’s less teeth-grinding than LIFT DUSTBIN.)
With the tiger cleared out of the way and the boat in hand, you can make it over to a riverbed past the tiger where you can DROP BOAT and ENTER BOAT. There’s no real reason I had to try the boat there other than there’s otherwise no reason to get rid of the tiger.
Using the boat, you come across a gate (the gloves from the gorilla work) and then a CONTROL ROOM.
You have to EXAMINE the notice, not READ it.
Even having extracted the key from the dustbin (finally, I had ditched the chef hat too and had to get it back) I found getting the key to do anything a parser struggle, and I was losing my patience so I checked the walkthrough again. This was a wise choice because you’re supposed to ENTER KEY (!?!?!???).
No PUT or INSERT. At least TURN was reasonable to come across once I had ENTER.
What was most interesting or perhaps “interesting” about the game is, looking back, every single puzzle was theoretically simple (give food to a corresponding animal, use axe on tree to get wood, wear a chef hat to get in a kitchen) but the slightly askew parser made things a bear to get through. There isn’t any reason why the dustbin should have resisted giving out its secrets, but if you miss checking it, you can lose 20+ minutes of time. Neither the minimalism nor the plot bothered me, and even the red herrings were essentially fine (except for the radio and the dustbin, they were obvious) but the whole experience I found more irritating than it seems like it should looking back. I still would like to try Salvage sometime (the other Custom Software game) but it isn’t rushing to the top of my list.
Coming up: one more pure-random pick, and then a Japanese game based on an anime film.
Renga in Blue 
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