Since last time I’ve prodded open the easily-accessible treasures, as well as one of the less-accessible treasures, but I’m stuck with major parser issues.
Let’s start with the dragon. As Rob observed in the comments last time, the appearances in dark rooms makes it akin to the vampire bat from Windmere, but making less sense. The Windmere bat can also be easily fended off with a cross, whereas here the dragon is more annoying as it can only be dealt with temporarily.
Specifically: if you have the arrow head and shaft, and you’re standing in the “carpenter’s shop”, you can MAKE ARROW.
You don’t need to bother with lighting the room up first either. The dragon is just as likely to appear with the room lit as with the room dark.
With the BOW back at the cottage from the start of the game, you can then shoot the dragon and reduce it to ashes.
YOU LOOSE YOUR ‘ARROW’ AND IT NEATLY PIERCES THE BEAST’S HEART. HE WRITHES ABOUT AND FINALLY DISAPPEARS LEAVING ONLY A SMALL PILE OF ASHES.
However, dragons continue to occur with roughly the same frequency, so this is only a temporary reprieve. I found it better to simply grab the object in each dragon-guarded room (if there is one) and leave. In the rare case where more than one action was required, I went elsewhere a while and came back to re-roll the dragon appearing. (It doesn’t seem to be “random” so much as “alternating” in appearances but I’m not certain about that.)
I tried to find an iconic “tiny dragon” from this time period, and the closest I could get to was the dragon on the 1981 printing of the Basic Rules for Dungeons & Dragons. It might fit in a bedroom? Via eBay.
Heading back to another issue, that of wondering if you can refer to anything that’s not a separate object: above the guard room is some busted machinery for the closed drawbridge. Remembering the lamp had regular OIL in it straight from a kitchen, I tried OIL GEARS and it made some progress.
Following this with PULL TEETH seemingly resolves the problem with the drawbridge for good.
THIS ROOM CONTAINS THE DRAWBRIDGE MECHANISM. THE GEARS ARE WELL OILED AND FREE AND THE DRAWBRIDGE IS RAISED.
However, no command I’ve tried has gotten farther than this. No LOWER DRAWBRIDGE, or TURN GEARS, or PULL (imaginary) LEVER. (The last one is obviously a stretch but I ran out of options, and this seems to be bespoke-coded anyway where it’s just fishing for a specific phrase rather than referring to a world-model.) The puzzle appears to be optional anyway, because it is possible to traverse the catacombs to return to the treasure-drop point. An even easier way is to use the magic words HOKUS POKUS from the book back at the library.
This either zaps everything in inventory (except the lamp) back to the the treasure room or takes everything from the treasure room and drops it at the player’s feet. This seems to be based on a.) if the player has a item to be teleported in the first place and b.) if the player has already just used HOKUS POKUS but I’m not 100% clear on the logic. I muddled through enough that I was able to use it to rack up close to 60% of the points, so it works sufficiently well.
(If SHAZAM or ABRA CADABRA work anywhere, it must be in a very specific scenario, because the game usually just says SHAZAM??? or ABRA CADABRA??? like my character has just spoken nonsense.)
Out of those points I’ve attained, a good chunk of them are the treasures from the second floor like a ruby ring, an emerald necklace, and a diamond brooch. A dragon would occasionally show up but the treasure can be nabbed in one turn so an arrow is not required.
One room has a dog, fortunately straightforwardly defused by the MEAT.
Thank goodness it didn’t need to be poisoned like in Bedlam.
On the ground floor there was an atrium with some dirt, and bean elsewhere that it was possible to PLANT. The game said the beans needed more, so I took the MANURE from the stables (needed the sack to get it in the first place) and dropped it, getting a little but not enough result.
I took the CHALICES over to where the water in the fountain to the north was and tried GET WATER, and the message I got indicated the keg of ale got filled instead (??). This is just the game being buggy again: it expects the keg and will claim to use it even when it is in an entirely different room. Getting the hint, I drunk the ale out, took the empty keg over, did GET WATER, and after some failed attempts (like DROP WATER, assuming the interaction would mirror that of the manure) found POUR WATER works.
This leads to a tower with a spinning wheel and some flax. In order to avoid dragon-trouble I nabbed each item away, and then tried SPIN FLAX only to get an error. Fortunately, I was persistent in testing things out and tried SPIN FLAX while still in the tower, and the command worked. This is another bug: the command is location based, not based on where the spinning wheel is!
This represents the only new room of the game I’ve found since last time.
Hence with only one exception I’m stabbing at “secrets” where I’m not sure if there’s a secret, and the parser’s difficulty makes the whole process painful (since I might be doing the right thing, just phrasing it in the wrong way). The one exception I just mentioned is the well to the south of the Castle out in the open:
I’ve got a pillow I tried tossing in — no dice, you can only drop it — and I’ve tried forming a rope out of various items like the silk and/or the thread, again without luck. This could of course be the sort of passage that can only be entered from below rather than above.
Potential secrets include:
1.) A study with a portrait of OLD MERLIN. The portrait seemingly cannot be referred to, but I don’t take anything for granted with this parser. The DESK might also yield something (but not with OPEN DESK or OPEN DRAWER).
2.) A heraldry room which originally held a signet ring. There’s a suspicious hole that is resistant to all my attempts to refer to it.
3.) The balcony I showed off in my last post. You can jump to your death, very exciting. But maybe you can climb somewhere?
4.) Any other room in the entire game.
Even a random nondescript catacomb-room might react to one of the magic words. I am thrilled about the possibility of testing the two unused words (SHAZAM and ABRA CADABRA) in every single one. This is my thrilled face.
WELCOME TO THE KINGDOM OF ZODIAC. IT IS A SMALL BUT VERY INTERESTING KINGDOM. THE LANDS ARE MOSTLY WOODED WITH LARGE OAK FORESTS. THE CASTLE ITSELF IS QUITE LARGE FOR THE SIZE OF THE KINGDOM BUT THE RULER ALWAYS HAS BELIEVED THAT HIS SUBJECTS SHOULD SUPPORT HIM WELL.
This is the last of the North Star adventure games we’ll be playing that was published by Dynacomp (see Uncle Harry’s Will for historical context; Whembly Castle and Windmere Estate were the other two games). Like Windmere Estate, this game is from the mysterious Dennis N. Strong.
This time you start in a glen near the castle and must find and accumulate treasures. The play is the same, but the treasures and circumstances are different.
Again, there are both North Star version and Apple II version again; this time the original Apple II version was broken but now has been fixed thanks to LanHawk. Apple II seems to be the optimal version now for both Strong games. My guess is it was written second in both cases and the author used the opportunity to make some bug fixes (and add a fatal bug in the case of Zodiac Castle, which now has been fixed).
THERE ARE MANY PLACES TO EXPLORE, RIDDLES TO SOLVE, AND TREASURES TO GATHER. THE ‘GUILDED COCK’ IS WHERE TREASURES ARE DROPPED TO SCORE.
Mind you, the game still isn’t bug-free, as you’ll see.
Action starts in a GLEN next to the usual forest-style area…
…with a DENSE FOREST room meant to catch anyone who goes the wrong direction. The game then (upon moving any direction from the dense forest) will either loop back to the same room are send the player to the glen. I am grateful there is no maze.
The tavern with the colorful name is where the treasures go. There’s a LAMP and ALE there that can be taken; the lamp uses oil, as an emphasis on while Windmere Estate was in a “realistic modern” area, this one’s set in a fantasy castle.
To the north is a cottage with a BOW (but no arrows). The sleeping loft above requires light (just the command ON to use the lamp). Upon entering I made a curious discovery:
Either the dragon is very small or the cottage is very large! In all seriousness, in various “dark rooms” across the map the dragon can appear in any of them so I assume does a fair amount of magical teleportation. It isn’t 100% aggressive, and if you grab the cheese and go you’ll be safe, but any hanging around or especially threatening the dragon will result in death.
Petting is considered a threat. In seriousness, this seems to intercept any verb connected to DRAGON to have this result, even a nonsense one. That is, every action is “blacklisted” here and there likely is only one or two “whitelisted” actions that will help defeat / scare away / make friends with the dragon.
The castle has its drawbridge up so can’t be entered directly; if you jump in to swim while holding the lamp, it will get ruined. The trick is to go to the south where there’s a visible ledge and THROW LAMP.
This dumps out the oil if done anywhere else, which is annoyingly inconsistent. If I were giving author advice I’d say to simply prevent THROW LAMP working elsewhere with some message about “that’s risky because the oil might come out, you should only do that where you really need it”.
With that done you can SWIM over (finding a SILVER GOBLET on the way) and then head southeast down a DARK SLOPING PASSAGE into some CATACOMBS. You might expect with that name and the predictability of being a Treasure Hunt that this is a maze, but only sort of.
In nearly every room, there is only one entrance and one exit. The “maze” is just a linear path. Mapping it still involved significant work because no directions are specified, so I had to keep testing all ten possibilities (N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW/U/D) in every room, and I had to keep testing even after finding the exit just in case there was some deviation from the pattern.
There was in fact such a deviation, where you can go north, south and east from the room in the middle; this is reminiscent of the Crowther/Woods all-alike maze having a “diagonal” exit hiding the pirate treasure, when every other exit was normal cardinal directions. That is, the intent is to trick the player into thinking there is a universal pattern when there is one slight deviation that holds a treasure.
Both the magic ring and jade idol you get from rubbing it count as treasures.
At the end of the catacombs my lamp burned out, so I ran through again with the lamp off and had a unique problem.
The game doesn’t stop you from walking through darkness with grues or inconvenient pits to tumble into. However, at intervals along the path there are rooms where the code is broken (“YOU ARE”) and if the player walks into one they are now in a “Void”. Just like the similar rooms in Bilingual Adventure the game is now broken and softlocked.
It turns out there’s no need to be conservative: having the lamp run out upon leaving the catacombs is a hard-coded event! So the author sacrificed simulationism for a dramatic moment of getting out of the darkness just in time. After, there’s some oil in a vat (seemingly unlimited) you can find and FILL LAMP, which gives exactly 100 turns. In other words, the game switches from a drama-time treatment of the light source to a simulationist treatment.
Just past the catacombs is a small castle worker area; guard station, stables, blacksmith, carpenter. All of these locations are dark (you need to get the oil from a vat in the castle itself and then come back) and all of them potentially have the dragon show up.
All together there’s a MUSLIN SACK, THIN WOODEN SHAFT, HAMMER, MANURE, and ARROW HEAD. The quote marks around SHAFT in the screenshot above means you’re supposed to refer to the THIN WOODEN SHAFT as just a “shaft” in the parser.
The game does understand MAKE ARROW but says I don’t have the right tools yet. I haven’t experimented with this sufficiently to know if this message is location-based or object-based or both.
Trekking into the castle proper next:
The game tries hard to add color to the room descriptions.
I’m having the issue — which happened in Windmere as well — of not knowing what I should be paying attention to. The objects are clearly separate and able to be picked up, but is anything else in a room description interactive? The main issue here is that — assuming the answer is yes — then most nouns in the room descriptions don’t work. So this is a scenario where playing requires dealing with a lot of error messages trying to see if there’s anything special.
For example, you can’t find if the chair might unlock some secret until you try actions like SIT CHAIR. (The game just says SIT CHAIR??? if you try it. GET CHAIR and the game claims “THERE ISN’T ANY CHAIR YOU CAN GET”.)
The book above incidentally indicates some spells, it “MUST HAVE BEEN MERLIN’S BOOK OF MAGIC” and mentions “SHAZAM”, “HOKUS POKUS” and “ABRA CADABRA” as possibilities. Only HOKUS POKUS is recognized although the result is mysterious.
THERE ARE STRANGE RUMBLINGS FROM SOMEWHERE UNDER THE GROUND!
YOU ARE IN A LIBRARY
THERE IS A SILVER ‘GOBLET’
The goblet was not there before; it was a treasure I had stored back in the Guilded Cock. My guess would be the word lets you warp treasures back and forth somehow so you don’t have to go in person to deliver all of them, but it feels broken, and might even be buggy enough that the effect is supposed to be something totally different (like opening a particular secret passage).
Elsewhere in the castle there’s a VAT OF OIL for refilling the lamp, some MEAT, CHALICES, a SIGNET RING, and some BEANS. The BEANS can go over to some DIRT at the Atrium but the game claims the beans must need “SOMETHING ELSE”.
On to upstairs now:
The upstairs room are almost purely treasure dispensers. In a row there’s a blue bedroom (DIAMOND BROOCH), a pink bedroom (SATIN PILLOW), red bedroom (RUBY RING), and green bedroom (EMERALD NECKLACE). The only wrinkle in just snatching and leaving is that the rooms are dark and so the dragon can visit.
There’s some SILK in a Maid Room, a CAMEO BROOCH and DIAMOND NECKLACE in a Sitting Room, and JEWELED DAGGER and ferocious dog in the Master Bedroom. OK, I suppose the dog isn’t a treasure. Meat would be the most obvious thing to try on the dog but I haven’t experimented yet.
Finally, just like Windmere Estate, there’s a balcony with a view.
The issue that made Windmere difficult was a plethora of secrets to open (and those secrets ended up having some sequences where the puzzles got tricky). My intuition is telling me this isn’t as hard a game, but Windmere didn’t seem that hard at first either.
One bit I skimmed over outside: there’s a well to the south of the castle with no rope.
I’m not really “stuck” in that there’s many things I haven’t tried yet, but I’ve reached the edge of the obvious map so I’ll have to start prodding for those secrets soon.
This unfortunately a case where the Bedlam’s ambitions described by the manual were technically correct but in practice nearly everything is a smokescreen. There are only three (3) endings, and one of those gets chosen at random. The game starts to approach a fascinating idea but the author doesn’t quite fully get there. I’ll get back to this thought after I’ve done showing off the game.
Before bringing up TRS-80 screens again, I want to pull one more thing out of the manual: it has a psychological questionnaire.
While this is in the external materials, I’ll still count it as part of the game, marking a first of sorts that gets picked up again by games like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Tender Loving Care. It’s in a format similar to the (in)famous Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test which gets used as a diagnostic tool. Here are some samples from the real one:
I think I would enjoy the work of a librarian.
I am easily awakened by noise.
My father is a good man (or if your father is dead) my father was a good man.
I like to read newspaper articles on crime.
My hands and feet are usually warm enough.
The test sometimes has the feeling of being “stacked” against the one doing the test and there are questions involving actions supposedly “everyone” has done so they are used to determine if someone is lying. For Beldam’s version, every question has no correct answer, so you are already determined to be psychologically unfit by the end:
Question 2 — Thinking you are smarter than others
Answering Yes points to a “Superiority Complex,” which may be corrected with time and shock treatment. Score 5 points for a Yes Answer.
Answering No indicates a feeling of inferiority, which may or may not be true. Further study is needed, so score 5 points for a No answer.
Unsure shows a very wishy-washy individual. Go back and answer with a Yes or a No, or else give yourself 10 points for your uncertainty.
Question 20 asks about the word PLUGH and is one of the “hints” for the game. PLUGH is from Crowther/Woods but here it is also useful, because if you’ve had the “lobotomy” it will cure it. (I’m fairly sure the neither the doctor nor nurse are licensed professionals, especially for a reason you’ll see shortly.)
Moving on:
To the west of the starting area there is a maintenance room with a “hook” intended for opening windows (there are no windows in this game) a BLUE PILL, and a cabinet with a red key trapped inside.
I tested after some thought GET RED KEY WITH HOOK and it worked. (The only reason it took me a little time is the hook’s description tags it for a totally different purpose which it never gets used for.) With the red key in hand it is possible to open all three doors to the south that are originally locked.
Two of the rooms are padded cells; note that they make for one of the available places that patients can show up them (I’ll give the full list of possibilities after I’m done showing off the landscape). The third red door (the farthest to the east) leads to a new hallway with some more padded rooms (these not locked), a kitchen with a refrigerator and MEAT, and finally an exit blocked by a GUARD DOG.
Now, I had some suspicions already about a branch right here, as I tested EAT PILL on a couple runs, and found sometimes it gets a YECCH, TASTES AWFUL! and sometimes it tastes like nothing:
SEEMS RISKY, BUT O.K. GULP! HMMM. NO EFFECT?
There is indeed no effect … if you’re the one that eats it. If you take the no-taste-for-humans pill and PUT PILL IN MEAT, giving it to the dog will eliminate the dog. (I would have expected the “yecch” pill to be the deadly one. The fact the game parsers the command and doesn’t let you deviate too far otherwise suggested to me I had to just keep trying, but it took until my sixth reset that I got the right effect.
This is close to a victory, but if you try to leave, you get tossed in a locked STORAGE SHED. You need to green key that the “nurse” was guarding. There are two ways of doing this.
One, the “normal adventurer” way, is to use the hook again. You can just GET GREEN KEY WITH HOOK while standing in the adjacent room. It’s unclear the hook visualization lets you reach that far, or that the green key was placed in such a way that this would even be practical, but it’s the sort of thing that was worth a try since it worked on the red key.
Two, the “thing I found out from a walkthrough” way, is to use the lobotomy. Specifically, when it happens, you start wandering randomly, the “wander” phase happens before the “nurse applies electro-therapy” phase, so you can pick up the green key, and have the brain damage trigger, escaping her clutches (and then PLUGH works to get out).
With the green key via either method, when tossed in to the shed you can then escape. (If you didn’t get the green key beforehand, you are stuck there forever. Bummer.)
If the game picks the BLUE-PILL-EXIT then you get BluePillA. Otherwise you get BluePillB. Both pills can be dissolved in the hamburger meat and fed to the dog. But BluePillA is poison and will kill the dog.
Before getting into the other two exits, let me briefly describe the characters.
HOUDINI and MERLIN we have already met last time. HOUDINI you can untie and he will follow you around trying to undo a straitjacket, but he’ll never manage (and there’s no way you can help). MERLIN will mutter about you being a demon but also is no help whatseover.
You can also run into a DOCTOR. Or “doctor”. Or “‘doctor'”. It’s hard to tell with this game.
Given the number of unlicensed procedures I experienced while playing, I think the fellow here might be telling the truth. Or maybe he’s only telling the truth on certain world-variants. Either way, he is of no importance to escape.
Next comes PICASSO. He wanders around — doesn’t necessarily follow you, I never quite worked out the logic — and paints doors on the walls.
This represents one of the exits! If this particular ending is the one chosen, then one of Picasso’s painted doors is a real door and you can open it.
THE PAINTED DOOR OPENS TO REVEAL AN ESCAPE ROUTE! YOU HAVE ESCAPED!
Another character you can run across is X-RAY RAY. He is genuinely useful for reasons I’ll get to.
Finally there’s NAPOLEON, the “MIGHTIEST LEADER IN THE WORLD”, as he tells us.
Napoleon being “mighty” is important as there’s a third possible ending. If you don’t have the dog-ending or the painted-door-ending you’ve got a secret-door ending, and you need to wandering around trying either EXAMINE ROOM (I looked this up, it’s pretty unusual parser use) or get Ray to help look at rooms. One of the rooms will have a secret door, but the door is stuck and you aren’t strong enough to open it. Napoleon is, and you can command him with NAPOLEON OPEN DOOR:
NAPOLEON GRABS THE SECRET DOOR AND BUSTS IT OPEN! THE SECRET DOOR LEADS TO ESACPE! YOU’VE MADE IT!
The actual gameplay is fairly chaotic with all the various people and it being unclear what use, if any, do the various people have. In the end, according to random roll,
* there’s an ending which doesn’t involve patients at all
* there’s an ending which involves one particular patient (Picasso)
* there’s an ending which involves a different particular patient (Napoleon)
with X-Ray Ray potentially helping with not only the Napoleon ending, but the Picasso one, as he can see the painted-door exit before it gets drawn in!
Still I feel like this game involved missed opportunity, as for the most part, the interactions you have with the characters is meaningless. It doesn’t always feel that way in practice — I enjoyed prodding Merlin trying to get him to react to things — but without a payoff it was akin to Deadline but without the character interaction model working, or the ability to command characters at all really.
NAPOLEON, GO NORTH
THE OBSTINATE REPLY IS “I DON’T WANT TO.”
What I was really hoping for is something along the lines of Maniac Mansion, where each character has suggested skills and rather than picking characters at the start there are patients randomly assigned to be “helpful”. This would lead to a variety of routes through the game where the skill availability itself is what determines what endings are available.
In actual practice with Bedlam, based on the various testimonials I’ve heard, people often never got as far as an ending; this was a tool to play around and mess around with Merlin and Co., and the randomization added an extra spice which gave it a mysterious aura. That is, by not resolving just exactly what was going on, the game becomes something more in the imagination.
Compared to Xenos, this game is more clever conceptually, while that game works better as an overall experience.
I do want to emphasize this wasn’t end of Arnstein writing games; in 1983 he wrote three action games (Radio Ball, Androne, Reactoid). I’m not sure his full story after, although he eventually returned to his electrical engineering roots. In 1993 his name is associated with three new companies: Rhotech Labs, R & R Labs, and PM Labs. In 1994 Rhotech started advertising a “cartridge emulator” for computers in order to “make your own video game workstation”.
1970: the Association for Computing Machinery held a “Special Events” conference in New York City, which they dubbed THE UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION. It was essentially oriented towards presenting the still-relatively-new idea of computers to the public. As the co-chairmen Monty Newborn and Kenneth King wrote:
Five events are scheduled: Town Hall I and Town Hall II are open free to the public and are intended to provide the public an opportunity to question experts on computer related matters; the Cinema Computer will show a series of movies on computer related subjects, computer generated movies, and a movie and a talk on a sophisticated robot; the Computer Arts Festival is featuring the most recent work in computer art and computer music along with a one day forum involving leading figures in the art, music, and education fields; the First United States Computer Chess Championship is the first tournament of its kind.
I admit I’m very interested in the movie schedule (given on page 8 of the source I just linked). It kicks off with the Bell Labs film The Incredible Machine from 1968…
…and somehow passes through the COMPUTER COMPOSED BALLET AND SWORD FIGHT provided by the Central Office of Information in the UK, a group more known in 1970s for PSAs warning children not to play on thin ice and to stay away from electrical substations.
The relevant event for us today from the UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION is the chess championship, which (as advertised) was the first of its kind. As these games were played on giant mainframes located scattered about the country, play was done remotely, with moves being called in.
Chess Computer Loses Game in a King‐Size Blunder. New York Times, September 02, 1970. Source.
The first exception to this remote style of play happened during the 1977 running of the championship, as a microcomputer was entered in for the first time: 8080 Chess, designed by the electrical engineer Robert Arnstein of Dallas, Texas, using a S-100 bus.
While I don’t have any videos from that particular championship, I do have one from the World Championship that happened the same year in Toronto, so you can watch the style of play.
8080 Chess ended up 9th out of 12 entries; remember every other program was on a large mainframe. 8080 Chess was not necessarily the best microcomputer chess out there, especially given when it was entered into a microcomputer tournament a year later it scored fifth out of 11 (the famous program Sargon won); still, the moment is one that puts Robert Arnstein in the history books.
I mention this because he seems neglected otherwise. We have here the last game we’ll be playing from Robert Arnstein; we started 9 years ago with playing Haunted House (1979) and end our journey here (although Xenos came later chronologically, I’ve covered that game already).
Historically, the trail followed by Ken and Roberta Williams is well-remembered; other Apple II games like Transylvania reflected the same style. Infocom’s Zork sold so well it is perhaps the only pure text-adventure a random modern person could name. Assorted British games like Pimania at least have some recognition in Europe.
The last three Arnstein games — Raäka-Tū, Bedlam, Xenos — also have strong recognition, but for an entirely different group of people. That’s because these were first party Radio Shack games.
When I originally played the game back in 1984, it was at a friend’s house, and it was the first adventure type game I had ever played. I was immediately intrigued that you could tell the game what to do by typing in commands such as go north, go south, open door, etc. Up until that point, the only videogames I had played were the arcade types which were only based on how fast you could push the button to shoot the enemy.
While there was a book they sold which listed sources for “indie games”, there wasn’t the massive outflow of third-party boxed product like there was with the Apple II. The Arnstein games thus formed sort of a parallel history of early adventure games, where players who just had access to a TRS-80 had their strong childhood memories form around these games as opposed to The Hobbit or Mask of the Sun. I have no doubt there were people whose first exposure to Crowther/Woods was via Pyramid 2000.
To put it another way, in the major histories of text adventures in the 21st century (Twisty Little Passages, The Digital Antiquarian, 50 Years of Text Games) Arnstein’s name doesn’t appear at all. Now, there are bazillions of authors we have covered here who don’t, but many of those people aren’t well-known by anybody; for a particular subset of players in this particular cul-de-sac of time, these games were pillars in their imagination. I think maybe out of all the games Bedlam should be better remembered universally, because wow, it does something wildly ambitious.
From Figment Fly.
This has a “you’re in an asylum, get out” premise to its plot which suggests to me Arnstein was thinking of Deathmaze 5000 and Asylum, both which would have been well known to a TRS-80 author. From the manual:
There are no hidden treasures to find, no wealth to amass, no score to beat. There is only one goal–get out, if you can. Your success depends totally upon your resourcefulness and your ability to think clearly. There is always one way out, but be warned–the exit changes each time you load the game.
The fact the “exit changes each time you load the game” suggests Arnstein may have also been thinking of Madness and the Minotaur. This is a adventure-roguelike with a “light” amount of randomization: where the nature of the characters is randomized, and linked to that there are consequently multiple endings where only particular endings might be available on a particular playthrough.
To help you escape, you can try enlisting the aid of some of the people you meet. Just remember where you are. Can a man running around painting doors on walls and claiming to be Picasso really help? Can a man who says he is Houdini get you out? What about using “X-Ray” Johnson to burn a hole in the wall to gain freedom? Perhaps the guard dog just needs a little attention. Maybe the nurse or the doctor with the hypodermic needle (if he really is a doctor) can be persuaded to help you.
Their ability to help also changes each time you load the game. Depending on the active escape route, you will either be able to escape without help from anyone, or you will need help from one or more of the people you meet. Some of the inhabitants of Bedlam are neither friendly nor cooperative. They do not get along with other inmates and some will try to stop you from leaving.
Rather than starting in a cell that requires escape, the door is open and you are free to wander.
Except, you might run across a doctor who gets upset and gives you the needle:
After the lobotomy you start “wandering” at random. I did not type the WEST, NORTH, and WEST commands from the screenshot below, the game typed them for me.
While I have trouble saying for certain at this phase of my gameplay, I think the author designed this with a compact map in mind (compared to his other games) and with an emphasis on complex character interactions / random generation. My map so far:
Everything is laid out in a hallway where the north doors are green (unlocked) and the south doors are red (locked). To the far west is an office where the doctor lurks, although the doctor can wander at random; nearby the doctor is a “dispensary” with a locked cabinet (inside I could see a red key), a blue pill, and a hook meant for opening windows. (Please keep in mind some or all of this might be placed randomly, I’ll need to do more tests.)
To the far east is an electroshock therapy room with a women dressed in a roller derby uniform in a uniform that looks like she does roller derby. There’s a green key there but I can’t take it without getting a treatment (losing the green key in the process).
Of the green doors, two of them have patients (again, in my current save-file). “Houdini” is hanging in one:
I haven’t been able to FREE HOUDINI or otherwise help him.
“Merlin” is in another and he thinks I’m a demon he has summoned.
I’ll need to do some more experimentation to see how far down the rabbit hole this game really goes. I know, at the very least, the manual isn’t lying about the multiple endings.
(And for anyone who has played it, please no hints whatsoever, I’m in the “fun toybox” phase of the game despite the lobotomies. I have suffered four so far. I am now wondering if a lobotomy is required for one or more of the endings.)
Working with only 3500 bytes is tough. Only using the first two letters of a word was by necessity. We had to save every byte that we could. The parser just looked at the first word and last word that the player entered. Hence ‘GET THE RIFLE’ would be parsed to ‘GE RI’. We simply did not have the space.
Each room had a string variable that contained a list of rooms that the player could go to. As an example, if you were in the kitchen and you could go OUTSIDE, DEN, STAIRS, BASEMENT, the string would be ‘OUDESTBA’. This method also allowed dynamic changing of what rooms you could go to depending on actions that you took. If you could no longer go to the DEN, the string would be changed to ‘OUSTBA’. If a new room that you could go to was added such as the GARAGE, the string would be changed to ‘OUDESTBAGA’.
When we programmed, we had to squeeze every byte out of each line of code. There were almost no comments in the code. That was a luxury that we could not afford. Microsoft Basic only used the first two letters of a variable, so our variable names were not terribly descriptive.
While we would have liked to use variable names like ‘MeteorDistance’, we had to settle on ‘MD’.
In the department of high-wire acts in making complicated games for simple machines, I bring you a VIC-20 games with graphics, sound, and animation. It the last 1982 game by Bruce Robinson, who brought us such minimalist fare as Jack and the Beantstalk.
See how the tape cover still indicates unmodified VIC-20.
I was initially wondering how the game might pull such a thing off, even given Bruce Robinson’s talent for putting content in a tiny space. I was fully prepared to talk about the book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and how a complex graphical effect could be made using a small algorithm, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The code uses line-by-line printing of text-character graphics with only a moderate use of repeats.
Where the tricks really happen is to have lightning effects, which is just past the opening room. Each screen has two versions, a “dark” version and a “lit” version when a lightning strike happens. I’ll show this off more clearly with some screenshots in a moment; for now, I should note we’re given a starting inventory
DYNAMITE MATCHES RADIO SANDWICH IN FOIL
and to make any progress, the first step is to OPEN GATE. There is no text description of the fact it’s a gate; you’re just supposed to assume from the picture. This usually isn’t a problem, but unfortunately, just like the original Mystery House, there’s a moment later which requires parsing some ambiguity in the image.
Opening the gate reveals a sign, which you can see alone with GO NORTH. This is when the lightning and rain start.
I could not get a screenshot of the lightning the conventional way — it only shows in full for roughly a frame before disappearing — so I had to run a video and do a capture.
Going north leads to another sign, with the same effect.
Remember, while this is going on there’s the occasional flashing background and sound effects.
Then comes a room that seems to be completely dark, with even more infrequent lightning. You get an indicator of what’s wrong if you keep trying to go north…
…but it almost feels like understanding the animation itself is a very light puzzle. It took me a couple flashes before I realized that I was looking at a dog (rather than, say, a mailbox).
The sandwich is the right tool here vs. the dog, although it took some effort to figure out how to remove the foil. REMOVE FOIL, OPEN FOIL, OPEN SANDWICH, and various other combinations don’t work; I went to refer to the manual (which is really just the backside of the tape packaging) and it gave this verb list:
This is a verb list for all the Victory Software games from this time period; “siphon” shows up in the game Bomb Threat. Still, I quickly zeroed in on UNWRAP which is yet another new verb for the collection. UNWRAP FOIL followed by FEED DOG was enough to placate the vicious ASCII representation, and then I could move forward to the last room of this particular area.
Just giving the lit version this time. I originally thought the zeros-instead-of-letter-O spots were just a “graphical effect” but they become important.
There’s no shovel, but we do have dynamite. (I admit going back through the rooms and peering quite carefully at the flashing lights in case I missed an item. There’s nothing lying around, though.) However, because it is raining we can’t light the matches (they turn out to be a complete red herring). What you’re supposed to do instead is LOOK RADIO and find an antenna, then PUT ANTENNA followed by PUT DYNAMITE. This will eventually attract a lightning strike which blows up the dynamite. I don’t think that’s how that’s supposed to work.
I realize that might have been tricky to follow with the dark/light screen tricks, so here’s a video of the opening of the game given by Highretrogamelord, and be forewarned the sound is loud:
If you stay to the end, you’ll see the video stops at LOADING PART II. My guess is the Youtuber hit the same issue I did here: the game crashes with the currently existing copy. So I had to switch to the later C64 version to finish the game, which also gives a fresh title screen:
This reveals both authors, Bruce Robinson and Dr Alan Stankiewicz; according to Robinson himself in my comments the latter was also an author on Hospital Adventure.
The first part of the game is almost identical between the C64 and VIC-20 versions, except that you don’t start with the sandwich; there’s a side room with a TRASH that you need to look in to find the SANDWICH IN FOIL. Ew. I’m not sure what this adds to the game other than making it only 98% linear at the start rather than 100% linear.
The shaded room is only on the C64 version.
Going back to the explosion and going down, we now enter Part II of the game (the C64 just has everything as one file).
Here was my major point of “parse the picture” puzzlement. I originally thought that “high voltage” message was on a sign or poster, but it’s meant to be marking a box, and not just any box, but a FUSEBOX. OPEN FUSEBOX led me to more puzzlement…
…in that I wasn’t sure what the circles were supposed to mean. They’re fuses where one of the fuses is missing and needs a replacement. This is where the FOIL goes. (This allegedly works and is quite unsafe, but we’re just trying to rob a dead person here.) Incidentally, that LE0 0IL logo makes a reprise, and it took a long time for me to realize it’s probably meant to be a chunk of gravestone.
With the fusebox fixed, you can ENTER ELEVATOR — and yes, you have to make another jump to realize you’re looking at an elevator in the distance, but at least I made the correct guess this time.
After some fiddling, 4 is the current floor; 3 doesn’t work, 1 is locked (that’s a keyhole under the buttons there, represented by a playing card spade), so 2 is the only option.
You can move the picture to reveal a safe; trying to OPEN SAFE then has the game request a combination. This is honestly — and unusually for a puzzle like this — the most interesting puzzle in the game. I’ve given enough hints you can solve the puzzle if you want to try before moving on.
The LE0 0IL thing is the code. Flip that 180 degrees to get: 710037 (or as the game enforces by adding dashes as you type, 71-00-37).
Despite my complaining, that’s impressively recognizable as a key.
The elevator is stuck between floors so you can’t go back in. What you can do is douse the fire by using soil from the plant, and then GO FIREPLACE to a dark room, leading up to the third floor we had to skip, and then using JUMP to get back on the elevator.
The key then unlocks floor 1, and essentially right at victory.
You need to CUT GLASS (with the diamond) to get out.
I’m vaguely reminded of the Japanese game Diamond Adventure (just in the shortness of form and diamond as a goal) except there is essentially 0% chance the authors would have heard of it. The comparable aspect is technical, in that both cases the author(s) had to deal with creating a graphics system from scratch, leaving not as much room for the usual aspects of an adventure game.
The tight requirements mean this is a marvel as an artifact even if it doesn’t play as well to the modern player as a game. This was a product of sheer determination to see something resembling a graphical adventure on the VIC-20.
With more memory to work with, this certainly won’t be the last time we’ll see C64 character graphics as an art style; the games by the Australian Brian J. Betts starting in 1983 all fall in this category.
92 through 94 with all the POKE commands is where I think all the flashing happens. Those commands essentially execute assembly language in BASIC and so can cause fast graphical effects.
Coming up: Bedlam.
BONUS UPDATE: Gunther in the comments came up with a method of fixing the VIC-20 original, so it can now be played all the way through. Download here. I have some screenshots of the second part of the game, which is mostly the same, except the fire in the fireplace doesn’t need dousing.
One, I have a version of the game which is very near to the intended experience. You can download it here, and be sure when you start to say YES to loading a save game. (In the emulator DCHector, this moves your tape from 31/63 to 32/63. If you want to rewind the tape back a step, go to Tools/Tape Unit and use the single left arrow to move the 32 back to 31. This lets you overwrite the save file with a new one, or reload the same save file on restart without having to reboot the emulator.) The save file is identical to the normal start of the game, except that the beaker in the laboratory is now bubbling, meaning you can skip using the apparatus (which is broken in the machine code somewhere).
Two, possibly more importantly, is that Gus Brasil figured out the last step in the game. I had realized it had to be a reference to the “FOR EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON” song/Bible verse and I spent most of my time trying out various permutations of SAY THING with no luck.
Gus had made an observation based on something I provided a screenshot of straight from the hexadecimal.
The very end of the clip (BIG3SMA4TIN5BEL6TUR) is providing nouns. That is, there’s a BIG KEY, a SMALL KEY, a TINY KEY, a BELL CORD, and a … TUR?
This had briefly flitted in my consciousness when I tried SAY TURN, and it did lead me to wonder if I had messed up some other flag in the game and SAY TURN (either done once, or SAY TURN typed three times in a row like in the song) was the key. Knowing Gus had won the game, I pondered the extra possibilities and … surely not?
Yes, TURN TURN wins the game. Even though it’s a two-word parser, TURN TURN TURN also works (the parser doesn’t accept any more characters, so SAY TURN TURN TURN isn’t even typable).
First of all, what is the character actually doing at this moment? Clearly not saying the words out loud, since saying them doesn’t work (as I amply proved lots of times before writing my post yesterday). TURN TURN is an “non-reality” command, kind of like in Warp how the game asked you to REGISTER SHORT ROPE. At least in Warp you were “talking” to the underlying computer running the game, here it isn’t clear at all how to interpret this final act. (You could be a spoilsport and claim that SAY not working is just a bug, and TURN TURN is being said out loud, but there’s enough intentionality going on I am fairly sure this is what the author intended.)
Second, what happens after? Somehow the player has won, but the game doesn’t narrate escape (as Gus points out, while there is an escape message, it doesn’t get printed in the game). Also, just like how the ending of La maison du professeur Folibus left the main character blue permanently, here there is no indication that the shrinking has been “cured” upon escape.
With the Roger M. Wilcox game Derelict 2147 there was a similarly ambiguous ending, where the player seemed to be trapped on the Derelict of the title even though they had won by gathering all the treasures. Roger made the insightful comment that:
The fate of the craft is probably the same as the fate of being stuck on Trash Island with an empty gas tank. Except there was no “Escape from Derelict 2147” sequel (nor did I ever think about writing one). Basically, once you get all the treasures, the universe ends.
With Mysterious Mansion it is quite possible the author never thought through any of what I just outlined — there’s a victory screen, so the universe ended. Don’t worry about what happened after. Maybe the tiny person who escaped from Mysterious Mansion and the blue person who escaped from the world of Folibus team up and fight crime. Your imagination can take you anywhere.
…
Since you’re still reading, a quick bonus: here’s the remainder of the 1982 games before we can declare it done, as seen in my post on the final stretch. There’s already a few games in 1983 I suspect will get pushed back, and some 1980 and 1981 discoveries made that will need to be attended to in the future, but after this list is done we can officially embark on 1983 games. Feel free to guess what the order will be!
Bedlam (TRS-80, by the author of Xenos) Countdown to Doom (from the Cambridge mainframe that brought Acheton, Hezarin, Avon, etc.) The Curse of the Pharaoh (Peter Kirsch does graphics) Enchanted Forest (TRS-80 Color Computer does graphics) Geheim-agent XP-05 (Early German game) Grave Robbers (Unmodified VIC-20 game with graphics) The Hobbit (The famous one) Mexican Adventure (The last Sharpsoft game) Misadventures 5 and 6 (Two more bawdy games from Ohio) Zodiac Castle (follow-up to Windmere Estate)
Unfortunately, not long after my last post, I reached what looks like a fatal bug in the game.
Fortunately, I was able to hack my own save file to give myself the required item. I’m glad I did, because what happens after is astonishing.
Unfortunately, I still haven’t finished the game. I am what I am certain is at the ending but I am unclear if the part I’m on is broken or not. I’m calling this my last post on the game for now.
It’s very likely the programmer of the two Interact text adventures was John Stout, shown on the left in a fall 1982 Micro Video newsletter. He is described as having “a hand in almost every piece of software in our last two catalogs” — that includes Mysterious Mansion — and he had just finished with the CRPG Mazes and Monsters. I think a comparison of coding style might help make the case solid but I’m satisfied enough for now. He’s described as having both B.A. and M.A. degrees in Composition and writing music for the University of Michigan Marching Band. He died in 2017 of cancer.
The one (1) action I still had left I could have simply figured out — although I’ll admit I don’t know how I would have figured this out — is getting the key from the crystal ball. If you have the crystal ball and play the organ, the ball shatters in such a way you can get the key (why this works and just shattering the ball by hand doesn’t, I don’t know). The small key then opens the door in the clock to reveal yet another door. We need a tiny key now.
It turned out all my problems after this point stemmed from a bug. I was unable to operate an APPARATUS in a lab. I should mention this bug wasn’t isolated; when you wear the invisibility ring, it becomes described as a RING IM WEARING even when dropped, and if the SKULL is dropped in a random place it turns into the skeleton of the summoning portal, and you can get a second skull due to inventory bugs that causes the portal to the laboratory to be summoned anywhere.
I had found that if I did PUT LIQUID after the apparatus asked for some juice, I ended up with a RING on the ground. This is true even if you are currently wearing the ring, and it is possible to pick up the second ring (except they’ll merge if you wear the second ring). I am 100% now certain this is meant to be a different object, BUBBLING LIQUID.
Unfortunately the game would normally stop from there, but I felt unusually determined yesterday so I started invoking the spirit of Hackerman. Remember, with great processing power comes great responsibility.
My first step was just seeing what I could find by plowing through the relevant file
The Mysterious Mansion Adventure (1982)(Micro Video).k7
in a text editor. The most relevant item I found was a list of objects…
BED
CANOPY BED
COLLAPSED BED
CRYSTAL BALL
STOOL
STOOL
CROSS
LARGE HOLE
2 MOUSE HOLES
A MOUSE HOLE
DAGGER
DAGGER IN BED
…which continued on sequentially for every object in the game. Notice the two STOOLs. The way object state is handled is to repeat an object multiple times, so there isn’t one RING, but rather a RING and a RING IM WEARING as two separate objects. This why you can hold two rings at once, except when you wear the second ring the rings now “merge” into one.
There are three BEAKERS. The first I believe is empty, the second is the starting one with poison, and the third has the BUBBLING LIQUID that the apparatus is supposed to produce (as opposed to making another RING).
What the parser list of the game looks like in a hex editor.
The emulator DCHector I was using does handle save files properly, although they get saved directly to the tape file (write protection needs to be turned off). I made three save files, one where I did a save from the very start of the game, one where I did LOOK ORGAN, and one where I did LOOK ORGAN followed by TAKE PIPE. I used the program HxD and its comparison feature to figure out where the changes were happening. I also for good measure made a fourth save file for right after I picked up the SKULL at the witch (my inventory had a SKULL, RING IM WEARING, CROSS, DAGGER, and PIPE).
For example, with a save file made after doing LOOK ORGAN, at byte 4010 the first six bytes in hexadecimal were
02 05 05 1c 11 11
after TAKE PIPE they changed to
02 05 05 1c 11 ff
It turns out that that sixth position is the location for the PIPE object, at what happened is it got moved from 11 (the starting room of the game, 17 in decimal) to FF, which is what the game uses to indicate an item is in the player’s inventory. This was sufficient for me to make a chart of different item locations in data.
Ultimate hacker mode, PENCIL AND PAPER.
While I also identified the player’s inventory count number, I didn’t want to fiddle with that. I ended up taking my game-in-progress and turning the CROSS and DAGGER into “00” and giving my player the BUBBLING BEAKER and TINY KEY. After some more experimentation I backtracked and just swapped the cross into the beaker, as the tiny key is only found after using the beaker (so it isn’t busted like the beaker is).
DRINK LIQUID results in the message I SHRINK VERY VERY SMALL.
Also, don’t drink it while you’re at the cat, who then thinks you’re a mouse, whoops!
All items are dropped. There is in fact only one item you can carry while tiny, the TINY KEY (which we’ll get later). Before getting there, I should mention the cat above is a preparation puzzle — there’s a spot on the map later where you need to go through one of the mouse holes and out the other, so the solution is to prepare yourself.
I’ve been on the record as being quite fond of preparation puzzles, but they’re very hard to do without a vicious softlock (you won’t find out about needing the pipe here until later, and you have to backtrack to before shrinking to use the pipe as shown).
Shrinking modifies the player’s ability to traverse the map. (This feels like Retelle’s game Nuclear Sub when you flood the sub; everything is irreversibly changed.) You can’t go from the master bedroom to the attic anymore; what you can do is go in the fireplace and go in the chimney that was previously too small.
This puts you on a roof. You can approach edges on the north, south, east, and west sides. I admit I was stuck for a while here; I tried jumping but it just resulted in death.
However, one of the four sides — the west side — has a balcony below and you can jump down to safety. I don’t know if there’s a way to get a hint for this, I just started testing sides when I realized object-based gameplay was now out the window so my options were low.
You can then find the tiny key, which is the whole point of going through the sequence in the first place. The tiny key can be picked up by our tiny avatar.
If you’ve put the pipe down, you can safely get by the cat; the mouse-hole passage links you down to the starting room of the game.
Then (I assume with some unmentioned climbing about) you can OPEN CLOCK at the last tiny door.
It took me a few beats to realize that the PLAQUE that says FOR EVERYTHING is meant to be combined with the book’s message of THERE IS A SEASON. That is, it is actually reconstructing text of Ecclesiastes 3, the verse that Pete Seeger derived the song There is a Season from.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.
Unfortunately now I’m at a hard stop. Remember, we’re permanently small. The tiny key disappears upon using it. That means no inventory at all.
The maze never got used for anything, but I’ve done a pass through with the torch (in case the dim light means an object is hidden) and also while small. Because of the cat, the latter is only possible if you drink the liquid at the cubbyhole…
…and it really feels like there ought to be something to this, given how much work was put into the maze with no reward, but absolutely nothing new is revealed while small I could find. I’m wondering if the Attic was originally designed so that you couldn’t backtrack but had to pass through the maze to get out, but the author left in a “bug” allowing leaving by a simpler route.
There is the SAY verb. It will repeat what the player says as long as it is between one and six characters. So the ending could be some matter of code-word, but I’ve tried everything both reasonable and unreasonable (TURN, PEACE, LIFE, DEATH, SEASON, SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER, FALL, HEAVEN, etc.). I also went and used the actual verb TURN on everything including the clock multiple times.
I’ve checked over closely the machine code and see nothing in the plaintext that suggests a code-word. Given how many broken spots the game has I’m not inclined to push farther as the ending could be just as broken as the lab puzzle was. (Or at least, by skipping over the lab puzzle, some other element needed for the end never got triggered.) However, I feel like I’ve experienced everything the game has to offer (and the ending just shows YOU HAVE ESCAPED) so I’m satisfied with moving on. Readers are still welcome to take a whack in the comments with my fixed file, but coming up, continuing with the minimalism theme: a VIC-20 adventure game that manages with graphics somehow.
From the last of the Hector line, the MX from 1985 by Micronique. Source. This game never got translated into French. We will be returning to this computer in the future with a very nice-looking graphical adventure.
Victor Lamba II HR, one of the French offshoots of the Interact. Notice the AZERTY keyboard. Every time I boot my emulator (which is French) I have to remap a few keys to turn it into QWERTY configuration. Via Retro Ordenadores Orty.
I flailed at nothing for a while before checking a hint Gus Brasil dropped; he suggested I MOVE the bed. I’m pretty sure I tried PUSH with no luck, ugh.
This opens up a HOLE, although it isn’t clear from the description the orientation, so I was a bit surprised when I tried GO HOLE and plummeted to my doom. Oops.
I had worked out the ROPE / SHORT ROPE business earlier — and I could see how that could be a huge hassle for someone who didn’t visualize the fact they weren’t reaching high enough to cut the rope — so fortunately TIE ROPE / CLIMB ROPE was now easy to come by. The landing place is dark.
I also had the MATCH from up in the high cupboard and the TORCH still, so I took these too back to the dark room to find a HOLE with a CROSS and nothing else of note.
Where things get interesting (in the “may you live in interesting times” sense) is upon trying to leave. This requires passing through the hallway with the cobwebs I found no use for.
Dropping the torch before entering is possible, but carrying over my knowledge from Troll Hole, I remembered the dark rooms in this parser allow moving around and dealing with items with no penalty. That is, you can go in the dark room, GET CROSS, and leave with CLIMB ROPE without ever turning on a light. So for my current run I still have a preserved match and torch in case I need it later (which might evade solving some puzzle involving clearing out the cobwebs first, and clearing out the cobwebs might reveal an item, so I can’t forget this entirely).
With the CROSS in hand the most immediately obvious next step was to try it on the vampire.
The vampire drops a ring, and just past the vampire is a skeleton with a missing skull. I figured I needed the skull from the witch, but the witch not only prevents passing through but also prevents taking the skull.
Fortunately, the ring that was just dropped presents a solution to this. I tried WEAR RING in case I could do a magic spell or some such (even though there’s no feedback given) and it turns out there’s a spell at work the whole time.
That is, the ring has turned us invisible! The skull can now be grabbed. The cat with two mouse holes is still hanging out in the same room but doesn’t present an immediate obstacle or threat so I’m guessing we’ll deal with that later.
Before showing off the skull, I should mention that going into the PASSAGE the witch was guarding leads to a CUBBYHOLE with a LEVER. Pulling the lever drops the player into a maze.
This took a bit of work to map at first, and I had to run the clock out once just trying out directions.
I still had the “turn, turn, turn” hint in mind, and thought it might apply here, since rather than the verb TURN it could apply to simple directional movement. The layout finally dawned on me, and the hint indeed helped:
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help me at all; the route here lets you go from the witch area down to the pantry next to the kitchen, but there’s no treasures in between. In Troll Hole, there was a maze where if you hadn’t found the gold nugget yet (too large to take out the normal way) the maze would also seem similarly useless, so that’s what I suspect here: this is intended as an alternate route later in the game.
Returning to that skull I mentioned, and doing PUT SKULL while at the headless skeleton in the vampire section:
The portal leads to a laboratory which is a dead end, with an APPARATUS, LOOSE WIRE, and BEAKER that has LIQUID.
The apparatus is described as having a loose wire and doing TIE WIRE gives the message
IT IS NOW FIXED
BUT NEEDS JUICE
but I’m unclear how to work things past that. I tried POUR LIQUID and the game said O.K. but with no apparent result. I’m worried that the parser is wanting something very specific, here (although it is also faintly possible it wants something other than the liquid). I did incidentally try drinking it…
…with little surprise as to the result. To summarize everything that’s a blatant loose end:
There’s an angry cat at some mouse holes (this likely won’t come into play later)
I can traverse a maze but didn’t find anything (this likely is meant as a through-route, but maybe I missed a secret)
I still can’t get at the small key in the crystal ball, in order to unlock the door in the clock
I need to operate the apparatus in the laboratory somehow
There’s a chimney too narrow to enter
This is leaving out the possibility of more secrets (like from clearing cobwebs; there’s also an apparently empty closet but maybe something happens there?) I don’t know how close I am to when Gus Brasil got stuck but I’ll take any hints or spectulation whatsoever.
This is, as the manual notes, the “spine-tingling successor” to the Troll Hole Adventure, the game we played recently for the rare Interact computer from Michigan (and the less-rare-but-still-unusual Hector computer in France). The historical background is over at that link, so I’ll just dive in.
Well, maybe one piece of history. There’s a story in a 1983 edition of the Micro Video newsletter which talks about a Don Stockton of Ft. Lauderdale who modified his Corvette using an Interact computer. “Besides monitoring the car’s basic electrical functions, the Interact uses a ‘simple BASIC program’ to display a series of menus which Don uses to control gear shifting and other operations when driving.” As Don points out, the chunky character screen ends up being an asset for car visbility.
This game is published by Micro Video, rather than the Long Playing Software label I theorized was just an imaginary “subsidiary” which only used the name once.
There’s no treasure: this one’s just an escape from the spooky house, and with a time limit of 240 moves, ending at midnight. The time limit is emphasized enough the game gives warnings at 180, 120, and 60 moves from midnight. Aardvark’s Haunted House we just played had exactly the same trick (running to midnight with a minute per action) but it ended up being a fairly generous limit (only pushed closer to the limit because of the weird bug that forced me to take out treasures one at a time). However, that was just due to the straightforward nature of the actions. Based on Troll Hole and the parts of the game I’ve seen so far, this one will still have a tight map but might have lots of backtracking, so turn optimization may come into play later.
Not until I’ve solved more puzzles, though!
The layout is the typical multi-floor house with rooms like “kitchen” and “library” and “hallway” and etc.
The text is still chunky. Behold.
This is one step in, after doing LOOK ORGAN and finding the PIPE, which can be taken.
The sign is a warning (“DANGER DO NOT PLAY THE ORGAN”) and if you try that right away without taking away the pipe first, this happens:
NICE LITTLE TUNE
LOOSE PIPE FALLS
ON TOP OF ME
I AM DEAD WITH 236 MOVES TILL MIDNIGHT
The fireplace can be entered; there is a BIG KEY (which can be taken) and a CHIMNEY which is too narrow to enter.
Back at the drawing room, the clock is said (via LOOK CLOCK) to HAVE A BIG DOOR. OPEN CLOCK gets the response
DONT HAVE A KEY
but if you grab the big key from the fireplace first, it will open, revealing a second, smaller door.
I’ll talk later about the small key corresponding to the second door, so let’s visit other places, east first:
THERE IS A SEASON made me immediately think of the following “TURN, TURN, TURN”, so I assume something somewhere needs to be TURNed, but nothing I’ve tried the verb on so far (including the book) has had an effect.
Further there’s a WINE CELLAR (with nothing) and stairs down lead to a VAMPIRE who is HUNGRY FOR BLOOD. He prevents going up the stairs or entering an ARCH. The Dracula in Aardvark Haunted House technically doesn’t “kill” you, he just softlocks the game if you don’t have the sledgehammer/stick handy since he prevents you from leaving, whereas here the difference is a death scene.
UNSAFE FOR CHILDREN.
Heading back to the drawing room, there’s a dining room to the north with a TABLE, TORCH, and BELL CORD. You can just pick up the torch, the table doesn’t do anything (?? not a safe assumption given this company’s last game) and the BELL CORD makes noise if you pull it.
We’ll come back to the cord later, and also to the room to the east, which has a kitchen with a cupboard that is out of reach.
For now, heading back to the start and going up:
You can’t take the cobwebs, and TURNing them has no effect either.
Here’s my map for now, but I’m sure it is incomplete:
To the south is a bedroom with bed; trying to TURN it gave me the cryptic message.
DONT SEE IT
After experimenting more, it seems like “fixed” objects give this message, but it’s possible the parser is leaking here in such a way I can figure out which objects are important and which are not. That is, trying to TURN COBWEBS gives a message of O.K. while TURN BED has the odd DONT SEE IT which might imply the cobwebs are important but the bed is not.
To the west of the hallway there’s a crystal ball…
…where LOOKing at it shows the small key (THERE IS A SMALL KEY INSIDE). However, you can’t get it (DONT SEE IT). In other circumstances I’d call that message a bug, but the layer of enigma makes it work. Trying to break the ball is unhelpful…
BREAKS INTO TINY PIECES
…so let’s try EAST of the hallway instead, with a bathroom that has a SINK, STOOL, and MIRROR.
The mirror and stool are both portable, and I assume we can fill something with water from the sink later (like Troll Hole). There is nothing behind the mirror, unlike Troll Hole.
The stool can go downstairs and be used to reach the cupboard in the kitchen. There is a match inside the cupboard which I haven’t used yet, so let’s go north of the hallway to a MASTER BEDROOM with a CANOPY BED. LOOKing notes there is something inside, and going in you find a DAGGER.
It’s a structural dagger! Taking the dagger causes the bed to collapse, and if you’re holding the pipe it lets you survive.
In a game design sense it is likely the player will have found the pipe by now, but it’s possible they won’t be holding it on their current loop through the game.
The collapse reveals a new exit, to an attic with “2 mouse holes”, “passage”, “cat”, “witch”, and “skull”, as well as a passage the witch prevents the player from entering.
The mouse holes are described as being across from each other, the cat is described as mean, and the witch is described as ugly. I tried bringing the mirror in just in case the witch’s ugliness was somehow “magical” but no luck.
One more thing! The stool works to get a match from the high cupboard, but it’s also useful with the ringing cord. If you take the dagger over to the cord you can try to CUT it and get a SHORT ROPE.
Trying to TIE ROPE after gets the message it is too short; the game here is broken. If you take the stool from earlier, drop it, and stand on it before cutting the cord, the result is now a ROPE (rather than a SHORT ROPE) evading the problem.
This feels much denser to describe than is typical for a game this size; the style here has not only any object potentially come into play (multiple times) but the possibility of using an item wrong (so while playing I have to keep track of items from the past and not just what I happen to be holding). There is no walkthrough or video available of this game and even Gus Brasil (who defeated Troll Hole before me) hasn’t been able to beat this game. I’ll take any suggestions people have!
I’ve finished the game (previous post here), but the actual gameplay was made horribly intense due to a bug, and a very obnoxious final puzzle. Not a difficult-to-find-bug either — it is one that everyone playing the game and trying to win is guaranteed to hit. I think this was a victim of the Aardvark bug-fixing philosophy as mentioned by Bob Anderson:
After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.
I don’t know how this particular game would have shipped with this particular bug without the level of apathy Rodger Olson displayed. (Maybe this was a bug not in the Ohio Scientific that got introduced on the Coco?)
From last time, I went back over every room carefully, only finding a handful of extra messages. I did realize the ANTIQUE CHAIR from the den was considered a treasure (I didn’t realize I could carry it, but I was referring to it as a CHAIR, not an ANTIQUE as the game was wanting. Silly me.)
I went back to the desk and drawer that gave me trouble last time, did OPEN DRAWER to receive an empty prompt, and then did LOOK to find there was now a KEY and some SILVER BULLETS visible. I think I did LOOK DRAWER (which just gives A DRAWER, both before and after opening it) and didn’t think to LOOK at the room as a whole again.
The silver bullets and the gun, when both held, mean the GUN is now able to be used on the WOLFMAN. The game decides to spin a random roll to find out if you hit or not, and as I’ve hammered at many times with RNG, this means a player might get in a situation with 10+ rolls where they miss their shot; most adventure games this would mean they’re doing something wrong. (I did have this happen during one of my loops … and I’ll explain why I needed to do some loops in a moment.)
Also, his description is WOLFMAN (WEREWOLF) but you have to use WOLFMAN instead of WEREWOLF, otherwise the parser gets confused.
Killing the wolfman opens the remainder of the top floor.
Going up, straightforwardly, leads to an attic. The attic has an AX and a TRUNK with a BAR OF GOLD, and if a vampire bat comes by and filches a treasure at random (it works like the Pirate of Crowther/Woods, but completely random and you can’t stop it) it ends up here.
North of the wolfman is a bedroom with an extra DOOR. Doing OPEN on the DOOR reveals a skeleton blocking the way.
You can open the jewelry box to find diamonds (treasure) and a watch (not, although I had to test it to find out). The furniture is meaningless other than atmosphere.
You can just GET SKELETON and it will fall out of the way (leaving a SKULL and PILE OF BONES, again useless).
The package of money is another treasure, the flashlight is the method of getting light to the cellar (well, “CELLER”) without having wind blow it out. We’ll go down there in a second, but first south of the WOLFMAN.
The RARE STAMPS makes for a treasure, but it is hooked up to cause the front door to slam and be jammed permanently. The only way out is now through the cellar. (This is the one moment of Aardvark-style geographic interest for the game.) The BLACK BOOK has a combination for the safe (36, 27, 45) which has a KEY (needed to get out of the cellar door) and GOLD COINS (another treasure).
Taking the flashlight down to the cellar, the huge thing blocking our way is FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER. You can KILL FRANK but have to specify AXE (if you try the knife from the kitchen, it turns into a bent knife).
It was around this time I decided to start depositing treasures, and around this time I made a horrid discovery. The DROP command of the game is broken. If you drop any item, it drops all items in inventory, and not only that, it doesn’t properly reset the item count. So if you’re holding 6 items, and drop one, your inventory capacity just went down by five. Again, I have no idea how this slipped by given even a minor attempt at playing through will reveal this issue.
Arms full with only two items in inventory.
After a few loops where I fully deciphered what was going on, I ended up only winning by starting out via taking treasures to the entrance one at a time. If you are holding one item, and drop it, no damage is done to your inventory capacity. The ANTIQUE CHAIR, VAN GOUGH PAINTING, GOLD COINS (from the desk) and CRYSTAL BOWL are all available this way. Getting more requires killing the Wolfman which requires both a gun and bullets, so I did that next while only holding those items, then dropping them off after; this damaged my inventory by 1 but this was workable. (This game is for children, eh?)
I then decided to go more gung-ho and tried to carry the rest I needed all at once: PACKAGE OF MONEY, DIAMONDS, BAR OF GOLD, RARE STAMPS, KEY, AXE, FLASHLIGHT. Grabbing the stamps blocks off the front door, but the flashlight + axe can be used to bust through Frankenstein, and then past the monster is the NORTH CELLER with an exit.
The problem is this is still only nine out of ten treasures. I thought maybe the watch or jewelry box itself would count, but no. The items in the NORTH CELLAR come into play here: specifically the shovel, sledgehammer, and stick.
I knew already DIG was a verb and so I tested it dutifully outside and kept getting rebuffed. It turns out digging only works in the south cellar:
Two more DIGs gets the message “AHA!”, and looking reveals a coffin. Opening it up:
I already knew POUND was a verb (yes, this is another one I’ve never seen in an adventure before, I lucked out from the prefix PO being on my list as POKE) and I found via a lot of trial and error that POUND STICK worked. The game asked me “INTO WHAT” so I assumed this was a “make” kind of command and tried STAKE, but no dice.
The stick is already considered a stake. You’re supposed to POUND STICK / DRACULA.
Fortunately I hadn’t broken my inventory too much during this loop and was able to bring the ring over to victory.
I can see why the “for children” tag landed, just considering the puzzles from a bird’s-eye level: kill a wolfman with silver bullets, open a safe with a clearly-visible combination, kill a monster with an axe, kill Dracula with stick and hammer. The actual implementation (especially with the broken DROP command) makes it highly unlikely to be beaten by children or adults without some source-diving.
Dropping the “for children” part, and just considering this as a game, it comes tantalizingly close again to some interesting choices; having the items that don’t get used like the lunch and knife and fire actually work for the atmosphere. This is combined with such an obstinate parser that all value here is nullified, and of course the very last act requires a giant leap of parser finesse.
There’s one more Aardvark game to go but it lands pretty late in 1983; maybe they’ll have finally tweaked their parser by then? In the meantime, coming up: the other mysterious and mostly-undocumented game for the Interact computer, the appropriately titled Mysterious Mansion.
Renga in Blue 
