Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.) I finished the game (sort of) and then I finished it again (this time with more hints). I’ll explain what I mean in context–

From the first issue of A & B Computing.

One thing that helped was to realize, like Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker, a great deal of the action maps down to simply typing DROP. So the pass at the beginning you show to the guard can be dropped, as can the key that gets inserted right afterwards. This simplifies matters down slightly in terms of verb-hunting (although there’s a nasty one I came across early still).

Even with this condition, the game was quite frustrating as the correspondence between object and solution was often tentative.
Last time I called the Dalek being killed by a pickaxe “verging” on moon logic (weird weapon to pick, but ok); here I think the game embraces it fully. The SportsHall manager, who I thought might want something sports related, instead wanted the helmet with a lamp.

This opens paths to the south and east. To the south is a “blodgaster” (your guess is as good as mine, whatever it is doesn’t play any part in the solution to the game)…

…and to the east are three rooms with treasures. A “cheese” and a “sparkpatter” are easy to get…

…but a first edition of the sparkblatter news has a “very old man” stop you from picking it up.

We’ll be returning to that later. For now, let’s go back to the room with a message about releasing our bonds. Trying UNLOCK or UNLOCK PADLOCK or UNLOCK ASDFSDF in almost all rooms gets the response “I don’t know the combination”; there’s no real “padlock” item despite it being built-in to the inventory. So when I was in the room with the inscription and I tried UNLOCK and got an “I don’t know the combination” message again, I assumed I was missing something else. Instead you need to type the whole phrase UNLOCK PADLOCK.

Just to be clear how diabolical this is, PADLOCK otherwise isn’t recognized as a noun, and UNLOCK seems to not care what text goes after it. This is hard-checking for the UNLOCK PADLOCK phrase here.

The door opens to a strongroom with a gold plated phaser (a treasure, but also a weapon). You would think it applies to the Dalek (the one that likely was a lizard woman in its other incarnation) but no, it goes to kill the tiger instead, although the parser is quite tricky here (SHOOT doesn’t work; you need BLAST). I already had BLAST in my backup verb options based on what happened with Death Star.

Killing the tiger opens exits to the south and to the east.

Taking the south first, there’s a bridge with a “repair man” who will stop you unless you’ve taken the “repair manual” from the west side of the map and dropped it off. (Even when it’s not really moon logic, it doesn’t make a lot of sense narratively.)

Further to the south is a “dead end” with an “antique book of spells” and nothing else mentioned. If you try to take the book, a “Zeblovian caretaker” (previously unseen) stops you.

We’ll be solving that in a little bit; going back to the tiger intersection and taking the east path instead is a force field which needs some equipment to be fixed. Again, the DROP paradigm is being used, and you can cart over a bunch of “this seems like it goes to fix stuff” items until you hit a win against the puzzle, which doesn’t seem like fixing anything at all. In particular, you need a “battery” just to the east of the start (that’s reasonable, I guess) and a “control panel” that was to the north of the start, and I didn’t even think was portable. I started to lean on the walkthrough by Garry Francis because this was getting absurd.

Requiring two items is one way to reduce lawnmowering, although you can just drop as many items as you want until the right ones are present.

Where I really needed the walkthrough was the next step. The force field opens passages to the east and south; to the south you can find a *CENTURIAN* credit card right away (a treasure). (The credit card room has a passage to the east, but I’ll come back to it later.) Just as a reminder, one of my obstacles was back at a bar where I was told that “my kind wasn’t welcome” when trying to take the whisky, and using a purse of money wasn’t sufficient to do anything. The card is useful instead, but the normal route of just DROP CREDIT gets no reaction. However, after you’ve dropped the card down, you can safely take the whisky.

There’s simply no reaction now.

Treasure-wise, I had the two treasures past the Sports person who wanted a lighted helmet, the jeweled pickaxe, the golden phaser, and the credit card. I wasn’t able to pick up the first-issue newspaper yet, so this put me at five treasures. Dutifully carting them over (inventory limit of three)…

Pile in progress.

…resulted in me winning the game.

????! Honestly I was tempted to call this an early out and say I was done with the game, but according to the walkthrough, line 170 is busted; it should have a “10” where there is a “5”.

Keep in mind this was a type-in. My suspicion here is that this is not an “authentic” error but rather whoever typed the game in got frustrated and changed this line so they could win based on what they had. (Alternately: Lucas changed the limit from 5 to 10 during development but forgot to fix the end trigger. I’m leaning to this being an “intentional” error, though.) I didn’t feel like retyping code; to keep going I just deposited the remaining treasures in the room adjacent to the treasure room, sort of an in-game fix to the issue. There was still an emotional effect, as having “won” already meant I started to cling to the walkthrough more freely.

Continuing from before, I had the whisky still from the card; if you drop it at the invisible caretaker of the book of spells, you’ll be able to get it now.

Moon logic but not supermoon logic. I’m able to assess, after the fact, that yes, a random caretaker might like whisky, but there really was no indicator to this. The helmet/light being given to the sports-person might go to supermoon logic, as I can’t see why they’d care about that.

With the spell book in hand, and returning back to the action, and specifically the force field branch, I now went east and found another treasure.

Including the type of computer the game is being made on is a pretty common move, I should go back and document where it happens.

To the north of here is a shelf full of old books. With the DROP logic going, I tried dropping the spell book, opening a passage.

If you thought you might read the book or cast some spells, no. This isn’t that sort of game.

This reveals a “dusty area” with some *ZIRCONIUM* which is the end of the line.

The last part of the game is to the east of where the credit card was; I’ll give a clip from Garry’s map (especially because he includes a room in blue that can only be accessed by hacking the source code).

The Large Deep Cavern has a “rusty handcart” (ignore it). Surrounding it are a statue (a treasure), a dollar (used to obtain a treasure shortly) and a “pfennig” (ditto).

The Space Time Vortex is special also in that there’s another room (a Magnificent Hall) that has an 11th treasure, an Apple computer, and you can leave the Hall to land in the Vortex, but the only way to the Hall is by cheating. (This admittedly puts a piece of evidence towards the “5” earlier being a mistake left in by Lucas. Maybe he put it in for testing purposes to make things quicker but forgot to change it back?)

With the three items in tow (dollar, statue, pfennig) I went back to the west side of the map, dropping the treasure off along the way (but not in the treasure room, since that would end the game). There was a machine that took dollars: that seemed simple enough. Except first, you have to call it a GALAXIAN and not a DOLLAR so my first time through I thought I had grabbed the item but I hadn’t so I had to go back. Then, when I actually did the DROP GALAXIAN at the machine, it started giving messages about the machine dispensing, but no “earring” appeared; this message was now part of my inventory and counted as the earring object.

For the pfennig, I took it back to where the old man wasn’t letting me get the first issue newspaper, and things continued broken.

You know what? I’m calling it there.

This was decidedly the worst of the three Lucas games I’ve played (which all, it turned out, were published by Silverlind at first). Even assuming the bugs weren’t there in the tape version (I doubt it) the logic itself was simply harebrained. In the ad copy this game was listed second, although it may or may not have been written second. Given the extraction of Haunted House from Frankenstein Adventure, I think it’s possible Lucas was eying the source code for Hitch-Hiker before writing this game; even though there’s no exact references, the heavy use of DROP and text layout have some resemblance. (This would be a funny state of affairs, especially because Hitch-Hiker swiped some elements from the Supersoft Hitchhiker’s Guide, and Supersoft themselves later got sued for their product.)

I’m still not clear why (what I’m assuming is) the lizard woman got changed to a Dalek, but referring back to my previous post, I mentioned a warning:

All contributions are, of course, paid for at very competitive rates. So, if you’ve got your eye on a new BBC add-on or you’d just like to supplement your pocket money, get writing! It is vital, though, that all the programs you send to us are totally original, and not ‘borrowed’ or ‘adapted’ from other magazines or books.

This feels like it’s targeted more at outright theft (like what happened with early CLOAD) rather than republishing, but maybe Lucas was being paranoid and wanted to at least avoid matching the ad copy given by the other company. Relatedly, I was wondering if the lizard woman was from D&D, Lucas’s own imagination, or something else (given it switched to a well known intellectual property). The closest match I could find was to Flash Gordon, which has lizard women in its cartoon from the late 70s.

From the Flash Gordon wiki.

If the warning making Lucas nervous is really what happened, this might explain his tendency across all his games to keep changing titles and small details. Maybe more information will come out once I’ve figured out just how far the cloning goes.