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Oddly, this is one of the fastest games I’ve beaten in a while; the last time I remember an experience this brisk for All the Adventures was … Roger M. Wilcox Adventure #1. I can’t say he’s gone full circle, because the puzzles are more sturdy (despite some curious science) and there will be three more games to come in 1982, but maybe a lasso shape of some sort.
As I indicated in my last post, this is the third of a trilogy, so possibly the author didn’t feel obliged to go for long. We’ve gathered our trash/treasure and for some reason got captured, even though our trash collection could have been anywhere on the island and there were no “savages” to be seen.
The complete map.
It is also unclear why directly below the “Cell” you start in there is a “possessions room” which has the skeleton key and shovel that you were toting around last time. How nice of the captors to let you keep exactly the items needed to escape. In the same room you can DIG to find some oil that you can use to oil the “locked bamboo bars” which are then openable with the skeleton key.
There’s a small smattering of rooms including a “stone pick” which lets you get past a cave-in, and when everything is collected there’s also a spear, battery, a “churn with heating elements”, steel wool, flash powder, a piece of string, and red treated paper.
I wasn’t sure what was going on with the latter three but I had suspicion there was enough items I should try the WRAP verb mentioned at the start of the game. Lo and behold, a makeshift stick of TNT emerged (sure, why not), which I was then able to place at a dead end. Then rubbing the steel wool on the battery caused a spark, which blew the TNT up, which either makes a helpful hole in the ceiling or an unhelpful hole in your body depending if you are holding it when the explosion goes off.
Then there’s really not much more too it — there’s a face-off with a “savage” where THROW SPEAR takes care of the problem (ugh)…
…and when you find your old speedboat the motor is still out of gasoline. You can dig some oil up with a shovel and use it in the churn (?) to somehow get gasoline…
…which works on the motor. Voila:
Given how small and straightforward this one was, allow me a philosophical aside.
If you’ve been keeping track, I really am nearly done with 1981 — Softporn Adventure, two CLOAD games for TRS-80, and Michael Berlyn’s Cyborg. Likely, barring high difficulty in Cyborg, I’ll be wrapped up before the end of the year. So I’ve been poking ahead at 1982, and boy howdy, the list of games is starting to get big.
Now, I already realized ahead of time this was coming, but as I do preliminary research roughly a month or two ahead, I’m “experiencing” the list for the first time. I realize there is to some extent All the Adventures will never be “finished” but I am still determined to play all the games. But how much should I write about all the games? While there are plenty of “meaty” games — more than any previous year so far, including 3 games from Infocom — there’s still honestly a good amount of “gather 10 treasures, yay you won” sorts. I’m thinking for particular games I should revert to a shorter format. (Of course every time I start thinking that, I hit an oddity like Atom Adventure which appears as standard as possible yet does something radically different with its gameplay.) On the other other hand, part of why I started the project is I felt like one-paragraph reviews that I was seeing for historical games were deeply unsatisfying for knowing what’s really going on.
I’m still vacillating on this, and in all honestly I’m probably just going to revert to writing about everything. But such thoughts have been passing through my head. I would like to hear, assuming a condensed format for some of the minor works, what you find most useful/fulfilling to read.
Roger M. Wilcox bequeaths us one more set of games to (finally!) round out his 1981 selection. They were originally a trilogy. The original titles are
In Search of Trash Island
Hidden City of Trash Island
Escape From Trash Island
although the first two he later combined into a single game, Trash Island. A password from that game is needed to go onto the last one (which I’ll play next). And in case you’ve lost track (and I know I have) these are games #16, #17, and #18 of his complete collection of twenty-one adventures which started in 1980 with Misadventure and were never “published” until recently, except for uploading adventure #7 (Vial of Doom) to the Internet sometime in the 1980s.
The opening gives me a Where the Wild Things are feel, although rather than a sailboat, we’re going to escape our room and put together a speedboat.
After escaping is a fairly small area where the goals are to a.) gather items to form a speedboat b.) gather items to form an engine for the boat and c.) make a shovel (which won’t be used until arriving at Trash Island).
One of the items is glue, and I’ll let you guess what the result of PRESS BUTTON is. Ew.
Weird concept here: you find a sign about dropping *TRASH* but in this particular area there are no items marked with asterisks, that is, no treasure. It took me a while to puzzle out what was going on, but fortunately (as you’ll see shortly) when I finally had my vessel ready I grabbed every item I could in case it was a one-way trip, including the sign. Given that Escape from Trash Island is the last title I had the (correct) guess that it would be a one-way trip.
I did my usual technique of rattling down a bunch of verbs that I’ve seen before, and it turned out to be super useful in this game. I didn’t know what to do with the skeleton until I hit upon SHAKE; sort of a meta-solve, since I wasn’t shaking as an intentional action, but as an attempt to try everything. (The skeleton key is incidentally useful for opening a “fiberglas” factory which has some of the materials for the speedboat. With those materials plus the glue…
…you can MAKE the boat. MAKE is another case where I was just running down a verb list and found it useful, since the game takes MAKE on its own (and explains you don’t have enough material yet, assuming you’ve done the verb early). This meant I knew one of my goals fairly quickly. FIX I was productive with in the same way (I could FIX a broken engine) as was CONNECT, where I attached the stick and the scoop (from one of my earlier screenshots) to make a shovel. I wasn’t even thinking about those two objects going together at the time, but I’d rather the game err on understanding more than I really typed in as opposed to being too stringent and not understanding when I’ve clearly typed the right command.
With the engine (which you can fill with gas) and the motor you can be on your way, although it took poking source code to realize the correct verb for getting the motor running. (I even tried REV MOTOR but somehow didn’t come across START.)
This enters “part 2” of the game, and was previously a separate game altogether. There’s just a short area with a beach and the shovel is useful to find some random objects like a “lodestone” and a “bottle of moonshine”. The moonshine can be used to burn away some scrub, although I had parser difficulty in that BOTTLE is treated separate from MOONSHINE.
Past this point the main gimmick of part #2 is revealed, and it is oddly similar to the one from Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, except all the treasures are marked with asterisks, Scott Adams style, and they’re all items like a TRASH CAN or SEWAGE. The best moment was having a regular bottle with vitamins that, once used, becomes trash; that is, by removing the “intended use” of the item, it becomes a treasure!
Most of the items are fairly straightforward to find; there’s no convoluted constructions needed, just mapping out a (minor) maze with an in-joke within.
The only difficult part is that it doesn’t appear at first that there’s any good location to do the usual “drop the treasures” gain points thing. However, if you remember, I grabbed a sign earlier that said to drop the trash here; dropping the sign created the treasure room where the sign was placed. Then all the trash in the same place is worth points.
Notice the Hustler tossed in there. No wonder Mother disapproved.
This was all relatively smooth and pleasant so far. It feels like Wilcox maybe got the attempts at trying to be difficult out of his system. (Except for the bit with the sign, which was apparently only added after parts 1 and 2 were combined.) There’s still not much in the Wilcox programming oeuvre resembling complex systems that can really make hard puzzles pleasing — it’s gathering and combining objects — but when the gathering is straightforward and kind of silly it makes for a decent hour’s play.
We’ll see if the finale holds up, though!
The most cunning thing about Supersoft’s version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy might not even appear that much from someone approaching from afar, but as someone who has now trudged through far too many treasure hunts (collect X items, place in position Y) once I caught on to what trick the game was pulling my thought was “oho, that’s even thematic”.
You see, my thought last time that you’d collect items in the “Five Artefacts Inn” was correct. My thought that the cheque from Zaphod Beeblebrox was going to be one of the items was wrong — in fact, the game isn’t asking you to collect treasures in a traditional sense, but “artefacts”. What five items would you consider the most valuable to you? Would they necessarily be the most expensive? In the Hitchhiker’s universe, you probably can even guess what one of the items is.
Speaking of the Hitchhiker’s universe…
…fan-fiction can be something of a writing “cheat”, by invoking deep characters without doing much work; just a minimalist-style mention of an established character can unlock images and associations that weren’t really “earned” by the author. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in context, and it means a scene like something like the Bugblatter Beast (as shown above) might merit an extra mark or two in mental vividness, as would a mention of a babel fish, or Marvin the paranoid robot.
The game just doesn’t have enough disk space to ramble on about the weird gimmick of Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses or the terribleness of Vogon poetry and resorts to shorthand (although it does have a piece of graffiti regarding an “Ode to a Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Morning”). It isn’t good or even recommended, but at least it’s understandable.
…
So one of of pieces I was stuck on — the Vogon captain that was stopping me — I simply had neglected to look at the gun, which stated it was OFF and then — well, in the bizarre manner of the two-word parser, the command to switch it on was ON GUN.
Nearby I found a book of Vogon poetry, and a “navigation room” unlocked by the keys I found last time. (Incidentally, I only realized this much later after checking a walkthrough, but the keys came from the bowl of petunias. If you pick the bowl up and drop it again the keys show up, and I had used the bowl to map a room of the maze in the Heart of Gold, so by appearances the keys just randomly materialized in the maze.)
The navigation room includes the “lump of green putty” graffiti, and on a whim I tried to READ POETRY while I was in there.
This causes the ship to move from Earth to Kakrafoon (and if you read the poetry again, back again). The Vogons incidentally start appearing on Kakrafoon and you have to keep the gun handy to shoot them. You need to shoot them the moment they appear — and there can be multiple ones in a row — otherwise they kill you. To add additional distress, the gun has a time limit; if you leave it on long enough it melts away (and you don’t have time to switch between OFF and ON while the Vogons are appearing).
Moving on, I explored Kakrafoon a little…
This bit was much easier than the equivalent puzzle in the Infocom game.
…but was quickly stuck with a Great Green Arkleseizure that is described in a room but you can’t even refer to. With my small verb supply and item supply exhausted, I flew back to Earth and tried poking at the Heart of Gold again.
I did, alas, need to look at hints. I had stuck myself again by the Parallel Universes Problem. There’s a lever that says “don’t pull” so I had tried to PUSH it, and I had also tried dropping the improbability drive from Hong Kong in the same room, and I assumed I had done both at the same time, but apparently not. (I think I had dropped the drive and done PULL, which kills you no matter what — and no, you can’t rescue from being ejected into space, that whole sequence giving you some extra turns to survive was just a red herring.)
Doing things properly causes the Heart of Gold to fly to Betelgeuse, which fortunately does not have any Vogons on it, just a few obtuse locations and puzzles.
The most immediate obstacle is an “Algolian Suntiger” at the “Maximeglon Museum of Diseased Imaginings”, which is defeated via a very special method which actually rises to the level of “good puzzle” presuming you are somewhat familiar with the original Hitchhiker’s series.
There’s at least fair hint that the poetry is execrable from just trying to read the poetry book on its own without knowing the source material, but not “cause all sentient beings to run away” bad.
This is followed by some rapid-fire references, like the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, with a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Remember that cheque from Zaphod Beeblebrox? Here’s where you use it. That’s one expensive drink.
There’s also some shenanigans with a coin that yield some chocolate and cheese-flavored tea. The chocolate is useful in a truly bizarre way.
If you don’t drop the chocolate first the babel fish runs away if you try to get it and the game is softlocked. I had to check the walkthrough for this, and it qualifies as the most random puzzle of the game. Look, the Infocom version of the Babel Fish puzzle is in a way technically harder — certain it involves many more steps, but this one is so baffling and unprovoked I still don’t get it.
You can also get a hint from Deep Thought which happens to be hanging out.
Taking a break from figuring out the Great Question. Maybe if you come at the right time you can get the chocolate explained.
Other than that, I found a towel (horray!), a rubber duck underneath the towel (…ok?), some peril-sensitive sunglasses (which make everything dark so you can see items or room exits and is useless) Marvin the Paranoid Android (who you can try to take, but will run off muttering that he has a “Brain the size of a planet but life’s still depressing”, softlocking the game).
Flying back to Earth, I took a stop by the white mouse that hadn’t been cooperative before and dropped them some cheese-flavored tea. I was then able to pick the mouse up. Then hitching a ride on Vogon Poetry Air again I went back to the Arkelseizure:
If you don’t have the babel fish to hear this, the game is now softlocked.
Past this is an elephant (easily scarable via mouse) yet another tiny maze (not worth even bothering with) and most usefully, a "robot stabilizer" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which informs us DON'T PANIC but otherwise doesn't have useful info.
I admit I was here fairly stumped, other than I realized that while holding the robot stabilizer Marvin was carryable without walking off. I hadn't really figured out the treasures yet, and some experimentation had already indicated some obvious items (like the cheque) didn't boost the score. I just started trying things and found that, the "artefacts" needed are…
…(drum roll please, and maybe you want to predict before I list them)…
…(let me know if you guess all five)…
…the babel fish, the Hitchhiker's Guide, Marvin, the rubber duck (?) and the towel (!). Froody.
With all five safely stowed, you are congratulated with:
Well done! We’ve finished
Well. At least I was not stuck on this game for “13 – 14 years” as noted by Andrew Williams, who wrote a walkthrough.
I will have to say I did “feel” a little bit like I was in some strange variant of the Hitchhiker’s universe. Maybe the off-market one, or a game Ford Prefect himself made in-universe on a lark. What I wouldn’t call it is a cynical cash-in; for its time it was certainly fits in the quality at the time, and even Infocom wasn’t quite Infocom yet.
(Galactic Hitchhiker was still better, though.)
Not the 1984 Infocom one written by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, but the Supersoft one by Bob Chappell.
We haven’t had much yet at this blog on legal tangles; the history of adventures is not chock-full of them like, say, Atari. I’ve skipped over EduWare’s Space I and Space II games despite them being listed at the Interactive Fiction Database as they are really RPGs (the CRPG Addict covered them here) and they were even based so much on a pencil-and-paper RPG (Traveler) that Game Designers’ Workshop dropped a cease-and-desist. I also didn’t mention how with The Prisoner (by the same company!) the producers got permission from ITC Entertainment to open a Prisoner-themed restaurant (??) hoping that would be sufficient cover. Other similar violations were generally done with a computer-games-aren’t-that-big-let’s-hope-they-don’t-notice stance. (This is how Atari was in contrast — it started making “real money” early, and roughly the same time all this was happening they sold millions of copies of Space Invaders for the Atari 2600, as opposed to thousands or hundreds.)
The original version (the tape picture from earlier) was for Commodore’s earliest computer, the PET. This screenshot is for the later C64 version.
It’s certainly tempting to look at the opening screenshot “with kind permission of Douglas Adams and Pan Books” and be skeptical, but at least the Pan Books part was true: Bob Chappell wrote a letter asking if he could make a game based on Hitchhiker’s and they sent back a letter saying yes. After finishing his game he sold it to Supersoft for “500 pounds worth of equipment and assorted programs”. Keep in mind this is extremely early in the UK commercial adventure game market; Hitch Hiker’s was first advertised Summer of 1981 around when most of the other releases I’ve highlighted (like Planet of Death) landed (one earlier game, Catacombs — first advertised March 1981 — was also by Supersoft, although it isn’t available for download). So we’re talking about a request for a license at the very tip of an industry, it is understandable they were a little informal with it.
As Supersoft in 1983 tried to come out with versions of the game for Commodore 64, Vic-20, and Dragon, Douglas Adams’s agent Ed Victor came knocking; a settlement was made out of court, and Pan Books footed the legal consultation bill, so it wasn’t like there was simple amateur confusion going on, just it was easier to avoid a legal fight altogether and settle. It is possible Supersoft had a leg to stand on but Douglas Adams himself wasn’t involved in the original deal, implying shaky ground; it is also possible based on the wording of the letter the rights only applied to Chappell’s original PET version of the game but the physical letter hasn’t surfaced to confirm or deny this.
Unsold copies of “Hitch Hiker’s” was destroyed as part of the settlement and the game was put back onto the market later as Cosmic Capers. (Incidentally, the weird anomaly of Galactic Hitchhiker which I covered last time went entirely untouched by the legal stick, but it stayed on the fringe system of the UK101. No doubt had an attempt been made to republish it would have raised the legal sirens.)
Additionally, the somewhat … unimpressive … text and interaction of the game is still fitting in with most of the product in the UK at the time. You can see what feels to modern eyes like a modern-shovelware-grab-bag, but for the time was a normal commercial game written in BASIC.
Based on a December 1981 review from Computer & Video Games magazine it wasn’t ill-regarded (“a well thought-out attempt to reproduce the imaginative radio/T.V. series”); this is, simply put, yet another typical-for-the-market minimalist treasure hunt with a light dusting of Hitchhiker’s.
Having said all that, I can’t defend the end result. I’m not having a good time so far.
My no-doubt incomplete map of the starting area.
You start in a Quiet English Village near a Five Artefacts Inn (where I presume the “treasures” go) and find, minimalistically and randomly, a white mouse — no doubt one of the hyperintelligent ones involved in the compute that answered the Ultimate Question — a rusty car engine (marked as being an Improbability Drive that is made in Hong Kong), a bowl of petunias, the Encyclopedia Galactica, a Vogon Battle Cruiser (shown above) and The Heart of Gold (also inexplicably parked nearby).
There’s a Kil-O-Zap energy gun I found that I attempted to use on the Vogon captain here. No luck getting by yet. The “set” is the Galactic Encyclopedia, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to read any entries other than the one about aquatic bipeds.
The Heart of Gold does not resemble that from the books/radio show/play/etc. and is mostly just a maze.
The maze has an energy gun (which I already mentioned but haven’t used yet), an Arcturian MegaDonkey steak, some keys that appeared randomly, and a cheque signed by Zaphod Beeblebrox that I assumes is one of the Treasures. There’s also a very tempting lever:
PULL LEVER only is bad at randomized times. (I tried to see if some item I could hold affected it, but no — you just wait for the dice roll to go your way.) When it does trigger, you get zapped into outer space, rather like the scene in Galactic Hitchhiker where you need to wave a scarf, except here there is no scarf.
Maybe that direction is a dead end? You do get a number of turns floating in space before death which strongly suggests there’s some way of flagging down a passing ship, but I don’t even have my towel with me, and WAVE isn’t a recognized verb besides. Other than the typical “go”, “get”, and “drop” there’s just
READ, OPEN, CLOSE, KILL, SHOOT, PUSH, PULL, SAY, PANIC
which isn’t much to work with. At some level having less options to test is nice, but the situation is too heavily constrained as is on the window it shows the player; the least it could do is allow the player a few extra actions for breathing room.
Given only the Vogon captain to work on otherwise there isn’t much for me to whack at, but I’m going to keep trudging at this a bit longer before giving up. I’m not sure why I’m putting so much solving energy into such a dodgy game, but I guess I found the story of its creation a little more motivating than normal. (I’ll still take hints in ROT13 format if anyone wants to give them.)
The Ohio Scientific computer has been one of our more oddball and forgotten platforms, but due to the efforts of Aardvark there nevertheless was a set of original text adventures for the platform (including the first Star Trek adventure game).
The CompuKit UK101 was a clone of Ohio Scientific’s Superboard II (one of their earlier computers) from across the pond.
The machine is notable for both being released early enough in the UK (1979) and having enough memory (8K, just like Ohio Scientific) that it ends up being the platform of the current winner in our long-running Search for Earliest Britventure.
(Technically, there’s a port of Adventure for the PET that came even earlier from Games Workshop, 16K of memory required, but from the descriptions it seems to be a direct port of Crowther/Woods.)
Our honor (ignoring the parenthetical above) goes to Mr. A. Knight of Cleveland, UK, for his UK101 game Galactic Hitchhiker. Gareth Pitchford has collected a set of ads for the game and found the earliest was at October 1980.
A later ad, from Practical Electronics, September 1981.
As you might suspect from the title, it is loosely (loosely!) based on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Unlike Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from a year later (which we’ll be playing next), it was not the target of a lawsuit, but again note the “loosely” — mainly it just copies the attitude, although there is a certain catchphrase that will feature very prominently.
Notice how it attempts an in-world explanation why the parser is going to be limited. You’re “helping” Maurice Marina with commands, Spike is sort of an “intermediary” between you and the avatar but mainly just makes the occasional comment on what is going on.
As Spike explains, Maurice Marina is stuck on a planet that is being evacuated, and your job is to get him home.
Weirdly enough, our avatar has a conversation with our computer guide.
It is squeezed into a tiny amount of space (the same as It Takes a Thief) and allows only a tiny verb-set:
CUT, OPEN, WAVE, FEED, PUSH, PULL, SHOOT, GO
(Even INVENTORY doesn’t work; you get a rucksack in your first move, and then OPEN RUCKSACK to find what you are carrying.) There’s also a fair number of spots you can die and no save-game feature, a good chunk is really just a “walking simulator”, exits are most not described so you can only map by testing every direction (GO NORTH, GO SOUTH, GO EAST, GO WEST, GO UP, GO DOWN) and if you successfully do a command, while it fails to give an error command, it isn’t clear what happened until you check the room (and LOOK alone doesn’t work, the only way I was able to re-examine a room was to leave and come back).
Still, this game is far better than it ought to be. I’d very tentatively recommend it (instructions are in this post although before you play you first need to do a “Cold start”, type “8192” when it ask memory size, and 46 when it asks terminal width, then double click RESET to restart the system — then you can pick up the instructions from there) although a port to something easier to work with would bump it up to … well, still only tentatively recommended. It has problems. But there are parts (likely partly spawned by often not worrying about describing exits) where the writing approaches something Good.
So for anyone brave enough to try it, veer away now, but for the rest of you, I’ve played it so you don’t have to:
Our hapless hero awakens without a ticket, although there is a rucksack nearby. All subsequent items are held in the rucksack.
This was me mapping things out; again, the room exits are generally left out, so there’s no way to know GO NORTH won’t work without testing it.
There’s not much to see on the starting planet, and it takes only few steps to go outside.
I’M IN A RAGING BLIZZARD OUTSIDE THE SPACE TERMINUS BUILDINGS. THE WIND IS HOWLING ROUND THE FIRE ESCAPE
AND THERE ARE FOOTPRINTS LEADING OFF TOWARD THE LAUNCH-PAD.
Most of the action involves wandering around and mapping. There’s even a maze, but it’s a “normal-connected” maze where going one direction and going back the opposite direction will return you to where you came from.
Eventually you’ll run into a “PASSENGER LIFT AT THE LAUNCH-PAD” where you find the escape vehicle has already left, and there’s a key left behind. The key lets you go in a small space-craft in another section which shortly after crash-lands on a new planet, Grecian 2000.
There’s a bit of ordinary-countryside wandering (a field blocked off by barbed wire, a chopping-axe, a ravine by a forest, a mountain, a lake with a “pit-prop” that’s a complete red herring) and managed to end my game for the first time in a glorious manner. I found “A LITTLE SHACK” with “A STILL” and “JUG”:
NOW WHAT SHOULD I DO? GET JUG
Spike here: He’s getting drunk!
Restart! This would go faster except the keyboard responsiveness of an antique 1 Mhz computer isn’t great, go figure. Anyway: get rucksack, find key, escape planet, crash on Grecian 2000, and keep wandering in circles for a while with no help, other than a message that states that Spike — our extra-narrative computer escort who yet somehow is mentioned in the world itself — already gave the password. (I figured out quickly what this meant, but let me save it for when it actually gets used in the plot.)
I had to poke at hints and realize that the forest being nonchalantly next to the ravine implies that CHOP TREE is possible, despite the noun “TREE” not being explicitly in the text.
Past the vaguely described people is a GERBICOP that, grimly enough, you need to CHOP GERBICOP to get by … in order to get a scarf.
Pretty sure we have a random Dr. Who reference too.
In a different parts of the city you can find meat, a wire-cutter, and a loading bay with a “WIRE-MESH FENCE” accompanied by a “HUMMING NOISE”. Trying to apply the wire-cutter to the fence is fatal:
Spike here: He’s been electrocuted!
The wire-cutter is instead useful back in the countryside, where I mentioned a field blocked by barbed wire. CUTting the wire there is the correct route, letting you arrive at a “SPACETRAN” you can board, but it’s another doomed vehicle.
The button ejects you into space, where the only recourse is to WAVE TATTY OLD SCARF (you have to type all that out), which is apparently enough to attract attention:
I’M IN A LABORATORY. I DON’T BELIEVE THIS! I’VE BEEN RESCUED BY A GUY IN A WHITE COAT. HE SAYS WE’RE ON GOMERIAL AND TO
WATCH OUT FOR GHOULIBRUTES…
Gomerial, the third planet, mostly consists of a plaza blocked by a “SPACE RANGER” (I knew enough to stay back and not find out what kind of death I’d suffer) and a desert. The desert again is a very simple not-really-a-maze, with a “ghoulibrute” at the end who fortunately is persuaded to not eat you by an offering of meat off of Grecian 2000.
Next to the ghoulibrute is a shed which has a BLASTER. I took a guess and toted the blaster back to the SPACE RANGER:
NOW WHAT SHOULD I DO? SHOOT RANGER
OKAY, NOW WHAT?
Not even described! But there’s a DEAD SPACE RANGER here now. This opens a route to a the offices of TEMPORAL TRAVEL CORP and a PLUSH OFFICE where you’re asked for a password. This is where the earlier message about Spike is useful: at the beginning of the game, he gave the advice DON’T PANIC.
Pulling the lever takes you back in time to just before the start of the game, where there’s a ticket laying around that you can just take. Yes, this is a time-travel game: our hero dropped his ticket and couldn’t get it because someone else picked it up, but that someone else was just the hero from the future. The rucksack the person stealing the ticket had is the same one we’ve carted throughout the whole game.
The same planet map from the start of the game applies, except this time the escape ship hasn’t left yet, and you can win.
Really, with some extra polish (and presumably, a more powerful system) this game could’ve gone near to something modern. Allow me jump back to a particular moment, right after being rescued from space via waving the scarf.
I’M IN A LABORATORY FULL OF MYSTIFYING GADGETRY. NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE.
Spike here: You got LUCKY, man.
This is written from the avatar’s perspective in a concise way that nonetheless avoids the weirdly distorted minimalism of Scott Adams and related games; they’re sentences a person would actually write normally. The subjective confusion of the protagonist is really the thrust of the narrative, and Spike’s interjection, while cliché, still drips an injection of character. In other words, the game has description that matches the ludic action/plot and interplay between two personalities, not counting that of the player themselves. Not what I expected at all from a system with 8K of memory and 1Mhz of speed.
Burglar’s Adventure is the other sample “full adventure” that came with Bruce Hansen’s Adventure System, which was just the database system developed by Scott Adams with an independently developed editor.
From trs-80.com. According to the Australian magazine MICRO-80 the newsletter shown was put into copies of The Adventure System, with the notion of people subscribing quarterly and having adventures contributed by users, much like the Softside Adventure of the Month Club. As far as I can find there was only issue #1, so the whole project was likely another piece of early 80s vaporware.
Burglar’s Adventure was also quite a bit more enjoyable than Miner’s Adventure. The latter suffered from difficulty with guessing verbs and nouns; there are two bits in this game which are similar but it isn’t nearly as egregious.
The setup casts you as a thief, logically allowing for (once again) having a treasure hunt, this time searching for five treasures in a museum.
Most of the map, excluding the “home base”.
You start at a street by a car. I assumed for most of the game this was “your car” but it is not; you’ve apparently hiked it over here some other way, and can’t go back the same way you came in.
You can LOOK MUSEUM to notice that “It’s an ivy covered building” and CLIMB IVY to get up to an open window. I admit I was stuck here briefly but the need to use a second-order noun wasn’t too terrible just because there isn’t much to do yet!
Once inside, you find a sleeping guard.
If you LOOK GUARD, though, there is an important note that mentions that the “vault” will open at 9 am. Looking causes the guard to wake. You can HIT GUARD to knock him unconscious first. Alternately, you can use the power of magically knowing what the note has due to a previous run-through and leave the guard in peace. Hence, you can do the entire heist without messing with the guard at all. (This includes, at one point, running a chainsaw. Sound sleeper.)
The note also warns you that the red corridor has an alarm set, and indeed, if you try to go in, alarm bells go off. Interestingly enough, this is not an insta-loss. You can explore the “red area” a little bit — all the alarm does is set off a timer that eventually triggers. While I didn’t experiment, it is possible you might be able to get a “non-optimal” win where you grab one treasure while triggering the alarm and leave before getting caught. Sort of an alternate solution?
Even without that, the allowance for some exploration after triggering the alarm ended up being a smooth piece of game design, because it allowed seeing what obstacles were ahead and what items might be needed. One of the issues with adventure game design is having 10 items where items #5-#10 are all used for later obstacles, but because the player has no way of knowing that they spend a lot of wasted time trying to apply items #5-#10 on earlier puzzles. Here there’s a way to make those connections early, even if in the “diegetic universe” of the “final playthrough” the same sequence of items #5-#10 only being used later still applies.
One of the rooms past the alarm corridor. There’s an “ice block” that you can break with a tomahawk — suggesting the intended use of the tomahawk early — before solving the puzzle of how to avoid tripping the alarm.
Before dealing with the red corridor, let’s consider the other available places: there’s a “south of the border” area with beans and dough, a “wild west” area with some sticks, a “cowboy” holding a “LARRIET” and an “Indian” holding a “TOMAHAWK” and a “BOW AND ARROW”; there’s a lumberjack room with a chainsaw and some trees; a restroom with a mirror you can take, and finally a manager door that’s locked.
The sticks at the Wild West area can be rubbed to make a fire, which you can then use to cook the beans and dough and form burritos. I admit this is one of first puzzles I solved; I had run through my “standard verb list” and found that COOK worked so still had it in the back of my head when I saw the food and the fire. The game just says YUMMY so I was quite mystified what the effect was, but I kept playing (and found out the use later).
I tried to fiddle with the chainsaw and it told me it was out of fuel. I recalled in the last game extreme shenanigans with forming gunpowder and the like, so I expected I would distill home-made fuel somehow. What I wasn’t expecting was the solution to suddenly appear:
I don’t feel very good. I think I have GAS.
Yes, that’s from the burritos. Once you “have GAS” you can “START CHAINSAW”, and use it to break into the Manager’s Office.
The manager’s office contains a vault. Remember that the note said it opens at 9, and having done this kind of puzzle before, I went back to the central area which had a CLOCK and did TURN HAND to the right time. This let me nab a HOPE DIAMOND and a RUBY. (I guess that means we’re raiding the Smithsonian. Also, the Hope Diamond is now worth over $200 million, making this the biggest payday of any of our player characters so far, except I’m not sure where you would fence such an object.)
For the red corridor, I nearly got it solved on my own, but I had a smidgen of parser issues. I realized I could TIE LARRIET to a coat rack in the central area by the red corridor, and I was able to get the parser to TIE LARRIET to the BOW AND ARROW correctly, but somehow the setup didn’t work. More noun nonsense: the game lets you refer to the BOW and to the ARROW part separately. So while I assumed TIE LARRIET / TO BOW meant implied to the whole bow-and-arrow system, the game just had it tie to the shooting part, not the arrow part. You need to TIE LARRIET / TO ARROW instead.
With the rope so extended (and the guard still sleeping peacefully) I was able to climb over to the second area of the game without any alarm triggers. I’ve already showed off getting ivory tusks off a mastadon (at least we didn’t kill this one ourselves). There’s also a bit where you need to redirect some light with a mirror to get a Picasso and get into a CASE by referring to the GLASS.
This is the second-worst parser moment of the game, but the set piece does have a nifty aspect. You can BREAK GLASS instead to get in the case. The problem is that this sets off the alarm, again. But just like the alarm-setting-off before, it lets you “see ahead” in the plot and get a better run later. The CUT GLASS only works if you’re holding the Hope Diamond, and I cringe thinking of scraping that even if it is theoretically should be strong enough.
From the glass case you can nab a tiara; with the tiara, tusks, Picasso, diamond, and ruby you can then clamber your way back to the car, and drop your treasures off, and…
…realize that this wasn’t the protagonist’s car. I guess it makes sense if we are performing a high-profile robbery we wouldn’t be bringing our own vehicle, but I was still stuck because the only thing I could attempt was START CAR where I was told I didn’t have keys. I poked at a walkthrough and found out that (despite having no tools) the verb HOTWIRE works.
Given our payoff, I hope we’re upgrading our shack.
So, yes: despite some bumps like needing to induce you can refer to the GLASS alone of the “glass case” and it is considered a different thing, this was more fun to tromp through than Miner’s Adventure. I was particularly impressed by the alarm system allowing for “looking ahead” — it was never a true alternate solution if you actually wanted to “win” with all the treasures, but knowing what came ahead helped narrow down my puzzle solving options and know what to focus on. It also made the game less claustrophobic and linear overall.
I’ve mentioned the 1984 games explicitly saying they used The Adventure System. It is hard to know which others might have, given there is no “label” marked in the Scott Adams database if such a thing happens. There are some more random anonymous games that may have used the system for editing, or the authors may have just independently hacked the file on their own to figure things out. So I can’t say The Adventure System made a huge mark on history, but it at least gets some interest for being available so early in text adventure history.
Also, having a chainsaw powered by farts surely deserves at least a footnote in the grand annals.
While Scott Adams wrote his first two games in BASIC (Adventureland and Pirate Adventure) he quickly switched to machine language and in both cases used a “database” file that could be plugged into the same framework every time to run a different adventure.
There was theoretically nothing stopping a person from using the database and requiring the Scott Adams executable file be provided separately to create an entirely new game. Alvin Files and William Demas both independently wrote their own games published by Scott Adams himself, although unofficial games were also quite possible; Kim Watt did this with the unfinished and broken game Marooned. In 1980 Allan Moluf then wrote an early version of The Adventure System he called ADVLIST “for his own use” in BASIC as an editor to make games; this was picked up by Bruce Hansen who rewrote the slower parts (“some ADVLIST commands could take close to three minutes to complete”) in assembly language and redubbed ADVEDIT.
The catch in “providing the executable file separately” is that Scott Adams started protecting the disks to prevent copying. Despite this, Kim Watt (back to him, again) wrote ADVCOPY as a way of getting the executable file anyway, and Bruce Hansen later wrote his own Scott Adams Executor Program to get around any copyright issues.
The new ADVEDIT was eventually launched as a commercial product starting late in 1981.
Manual cover, from the Museum of Computer Adventure Games. Despite the title seeming to be “ADVENTURE the system” here it is given as “The Adventure System” in the manual text proper. The Alternate Source was incidentally a TRS-80 programmer’s journal; this seems to be their only game-related product although they had an offer to publish games made with The Adventure System written into the manual.
The system allowed publishing commercial games using the system. (Jimmy Maher claims there was a $200 fee for that on top of the $40 price of the game, but I can’t find the extra fee listed in either version of the manual I have.) This feels slightly cheeky, given a good initial setup was cadged wholesale from Scott Adams without permission. The only games I know of that took the developer up that offer are the Mega Venture series by Jim Veneskey, published by Big Orc Software in 1984. (At least according to various sites, I haven’t seen a magazine ad or a picture of a box.)
The package came with one “tutorial game” and two “full games”: Mini-Venture, Miner’s Adventure and Burglar’s Adventure. I’ll cover the first two now and save the last for my next post.
…
The tutorial game (or Mini-Venture, or Mugger’s Adventure) is pretty easy to dispose of.
You get out of your car, light a match to see (this a “timed event” so you see the lit room long enough to know where the exit is, then the room goes back to dark), go in your apartment, go up an elevator, unlock you door, and go inside.
Also, to test out the *TREASURES* system, you need to drop your wallet at the end.
It’s solely there to demonstrate how writing an adventure works and the entire sample adventure is printed in the manual.
The most elaborate portion is in the “ACTIONS” section.
The manual both lists the code and explains the meaning of each line after.
AUTO represents triggers that happen every turn. A fair amount of text games from this era lack much in the way of persistent effects, or “daemons”, but they’ve always been a large part of the Scott Adams games (for good or evil). For example, in the original Adventureland there are bees that when caught in a bottle have a percent chance of dying every turn while contained — not good design admittedly. In the follow-up Pirate Adventure there is a surf that goes in and out, and a location that changes based on the tide — this is much better design which not only open puzzle possibilities but makes the environment feel dynamic. Without any dynamic elements it is easy for text adventures to feel like a series of set-pieces waiting for the right phrase or item to continue.
For example, in the start of the source above, if the player is outside their car for 4 moves they are mugged and die, an outcome that happens 100% of the time when such conditions are met (AUTO 100) The “-IN 2” means “in any room other than room 2 (that’s outside).
The lines 5 through 7 are designed to handle if room 2 is lit or not. Light normally happens in any room other than 2 (the -IN 2 again). The command LIGH MATC (“light match”) from line 7 will trigger being able to see in that room temporarily (it will actually show the room description, then pause in real time, then revert to darkness).
Bruce Hansen seemed to have a technical handle on the system so I was looking forward to the sample games being well-coded, but at least for Miner’s Adventure that is sadly not the case.
…
The premise of Miner’s Adventure is to go into a mine, get treasures, and return them to the main office.
Yet another treasure hunt, but they’ve worked out fine before. This one has trouble right away. If you LOOK DESK you can see a DRAWER which you then can OPEN with the message “Strange, the drawer was hard to open.” This cues the player to LOOK DRAWER and find an envelope taped underneath. Good so far (and I like the use of tactile sense as a hint). However, I then spent the next 15 minutes searching for a way to get at the envelope (GET ENVELOPE: “I don’t see it here”. GET TAPE: “I don’t know what TAPE is.”) I finally just checked a walkthrough and found I needed to UNTANGLE ENVELOPE, which is the worst guess-the-verb I’ve seen in a long time.
The envelope has a key and a paper stating “Cross over into another world”. The key let me unlock a nearby shed with a fuse, empty dynamite box, and shovel. Outside the shed I was stopped at the Mine Entrance by a guard (and no verbs worked on the guard) and the only other thing I had access to was a “Mining Office”.
The way the room is set, the only available item (other than the SIGN which you can just look at) is the DESK. This time I had about 30 minutes of frustration, since I wasn’t sure if I was really supposed to do something here now (or maybe have treasures checked later or something along those lines). Again I finally resorted to a walkthrough, which told me I needed to GET JOB.
OK, you’re hired
This is the most infuriating sort of parser abuse and I pretty much lost all faith in the game past this point.
Inside the mine, there’s some coal lying out in the open, and “freshly dug earth” you can use the shovel on.
The next awful bit is shown above. Even though the game seems to be coded for ROCK being the noun (as you can LOOK ROCK) GET ROCK gets “I don’t see it here.” No, you need to TIE TWINE / TO KEY. It isn’t clear at all the “keystone” can even be referred to as a separate object, and it can of course be confused with the actual key item from earlier.
After pulling there’s an OBSIDIAN BOWL which is a treasure, and a “stone” with a “sharp edge”. The pile of rocks is still there but GET ROCKS says “I don’t see it here”. The next action is to use the rocks which you can’t see and can see simultaneously and also can’t refer to in any other way in order to MAKE BRIDGE.
As a general rule, the author doesn’t seem to care that an item that is getting used can be referred to in any other sense; only a lateral command (where it isn’t explicit what is happening, and I had to just guess afterwards) works as a method of reference. When this sort of thing happens too often the game ceases to have a “world model” with objects that can be each thought of as entities that can be manipulated and instead asks the player to find the Special Words to make progress.
Next comes a “tropical valley”.
The water from the pond can be taken back to the lava area to pour it and get some “sulpher” (this can mix with coal to make gunpowder, you have to summon up the command MIX GUNPOWDER from the void). You can also dive in the pond (pulling away a piece of metal which turns out to be a speargun) to find some crystals.
The speargun can be used to kill and the sharp stone can skin an alligator for its hide (it’s a treasure). (It’s also good for confusing the parser where you type GUN and it doesn’t know if you mean gunpowder or the speargun, argh.)
You can then swing a vine to a cave, load a cannon with a gunpowder/fuse/bamboo combo (there is no prompting that the word CANNON is even in the vocabulary of the game, but that’s what you have to make)…
…use the cannon to kill a SLEEPING MASTODON (not even being threatening), follow it to take its ivory…
…escape out a stream and using a pole with the word VAULT, because let’s just keep piling it on for hard-to-find verbs, and finally tote the treasures, including the ivory from killing a rare animal, to victory.
This did not feel like victory.
I’m hoping Burglar’s Adventure is a touch better? The author here was good at designing colorful events, not so good at making sure all the pieces were lined up so the players could find the right knobs to push to make those events happen. (I have trouble believing anyone came up with making a “cannon” unprompted — where you had to type that exact noun — without reading the source code.)
(Click here to read my entire Institute series in order.)
One of the manual covers, from The Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I have finished. The remaining three dreams turned out to be short, so the structure remaining was more like bouncing between environments as opposed to solving mini-adventures.
I’ve written before about how in this period when authors wanted to make a game difficult, and they didn’t have much in the way of conditional states (like environmental factors that change, or certain timing that needs to happen) they tended to resort to either lots of instant death, hard to find verbs, or hiding things. Given dying is almost a benefit, the game has to resort to the latter two, especially hiding things.
One extra side effect of puzzles being mostly reliant on hidden items is that past a certain juncture, puzzle solutions can come in a flood, where when finding one item it becomes totally obvious where it goes, and the problem is getting the item in the first place. Then, using that item to solve the puzzle in question yields another item, which again has an obvious place it goes, etc., especially given a map that has been combed over many times.
You start at the “Giant Statue Area”. The next dream is an impressionistic version of the Titanic, followed by a temple, followed by a dream with a saber-toothed tiger, going back to the giant statue. To finish the game I had to travel the loop quite a few times. The cover above tries to depict all four.
Fairly quickly after I left off last time, I found an UMBRELLA (I hadn’t done a “LOOK” at the natives just past the large green man). This let me at least get started on the next dream, which starts ambiguously in some smoke, but if you an open an umbrella you float upward out of a smokestack…
…and land on the deck of a ship.
The life preserver reads “TITANIC”. There’s not much to do other than go inside where there’s some furnishings and a picture; the picture is held in by screws. On the outside you can go to the stern of the ship and watch some icebergs incoming which eventually sink the ship. Using the life preserver you can, oddly enough, peek underwater after going overboard, and find a crowbar on the ocean floor. This doesn’t make sense for a deep ocean, but this honestly works fine as dream logic; one of the things I’d expect is expansion and reduction of space. The ship is known as very large but in gameplay is quite small; the ocean is quite deep but in gameplay terms is quite shallow.
There’s nothing else to do after obtaining the crowbar but eventually drown, but fortunately that makes for an exit from the dream. The dream that follows, outside a temple, I was able to get started by noticing a plant poking through the door, and applying the WATER to it.
Inside I found a blood-stained altar and a door with a lizard. I picked up quickly and realized I could try SACRIFICE as a verb, but the game asked me of what, and I was at a loss. I decided the item I needed was probably elsewhere.
You have to die to get out of this dream, which you can do by trying to open the door (a trap slices you) or trying to CLIMB when outside (you fall and die). Either way, you can visit a pre-historic area:
Again, very small: it only turns out to have 3 rooms. If you approach the chest you see at the start the tiger eats you. There’s also an area with rocks and a stream to the south where the water is poisoned and you can drink it to boot yourself out of the dream.
In actual gameplay terms, from here I died, and moved on exploring each dream carefully starting from the Giant Statue one, but to save time in narration, I should mention that if you go south and check the rocks carefully you can find a lizard. You can likely guess where it goes:
This is followed by a men-with-reptile-head room…
… and climbing up some stairs and dying due to toxic gas. The solution to the gas turns out to be straightforward but due to the rotating nature of the dreams I decided to move on and come back.
I poked through the loop a few times trying to search for things I had missed. A “shrub” had popped up at the color-changing water in the Statue area, which I was able to dig up with the shovel. I tried planting the shrub in various places with no luck, and decided to peek at hints again, although I wasn’t fully determined to read them; the questions themselves can be hints of sorts. However, even though the clues were encrypted by rotating the alphabet, I immediately was able to decipher the answer to the key problem anyway.
Specifically, on #8 above, figuring out what to do inside the statue was one of the dilemmas I hadn’t resolved last time.
I thought perhaps I needed special spectacles or the like and moved on, even though I had missed doing an action I already used elsewhere: JMMI SN, which I realized had to mean LOOK UP.
The ladder you spot by doing so lets you get up to a locked room which takes a keycode. (It is incidentally fortunate I happened to be holding the SHRUB — this is where it is useful, as otherwise there is a lack of oxygen.) Fortunately, I had a keycode lying around from last time (with the billboard) that I hadn’t used yet. I led me into another octagonal room with a metal plate on the ground I was able to remove with the crowbar (from the ocean in the Titanic dream). Below that was a bolt, and I knew I probably needed a tool I hadn’t found yet.
Still, that wasn’t quite enough to set off a chain reaction, but passing through the lizard-sacrifice dream again, I tried on a whim HOLD BREATH (the shrub didn’t do anything, but maybe…?)
The hole was frustratingly non-responsive to commands, but enough plodding led me to insert the mirror in it and get light to bounce inside. A rumbling started, and I tried to WAIT to see what would happen but then the whole sequence just aborted! I figured the parser wasn’t worth tangling with here and went straight for a walkthrough which revealed I needed to LISTEN, which is really the same thing as WAIT, but… well, let’s just move on with the result: some meat and a comic book. The meat I figured could go for the hungry tiger who kept tearing me apart in the pre-historic area:
(This is where everything speeds up.)
I was able to throw the meat and the tiger ran off after it, letting me open the chest. The chest had a screwdriver (dream logic, fine) which I immediately toted over to the Titanic (after going through the death cycle again twice) and used to get the painting off the wall.
This yielded up a small key, which I then took immediately over to the locked toolbox I remembered being stuck on and got a wrench.
The wrench I then took back to the bolt in the statue, which after I turned it caused the statue to fall over; you get “thrown free” and land on top of a gold key.
I wasn’t sure where else to go, but I decided “gold key” felt fairly final (and the counselor suggested the father — who the statue is of — being the “key to your insanity”) so I went back to the original Institute area and wandered a little, finding the Counselor was out.
There was a locked door now, which the gold key worked on, and victory.
…
Creators of art in a new medium don’t have much to go on; they can peer sideways at other works and peer forward at blackness and try to spill light in the right directions, but to make art that really says something in a deep and enduring sense requires some luck.
The Institute did start off promising; the hints of hidden background, the drug-induced mechanism for dreams, the dystopian atmosphere, the Counselor who was there to “help” but you also had to keep attacking, and later get to shoot themselves while in dream form.
The very premise gave lots of leeway for adventure-game oddness while opening a gap for profundities and revelations. Neither was reached. I wouldn’t say this is just from the ending — which essentially gave up the steam of narrative, surprisingly so given the prior Pearson games — but random puzzle after random puzzle just didn’t add to anything. I was expecting maybe the live father to show up and have a conversation, so we could find out what all the references were about, and maybe some of the items would have secondary meetings, but no, sometimes a scalpel is just a scalpel and a statue is just a statue.
As the screenshot hints, yes, there’s more Pearson to come. Lucifer’s Realm involves going into Hell to stop Adolf Hitler from raising an army to organize a coup over Lucifer. Some stores apparently refused to carry it? So that’s promising, but we’ll have to wait until 1982 to see it — which is getting very close, about 7 games to go before I wrap up 1981.
(Continued from my previous post)
I had roughly the right ideas last time, but the Pearson parser remains ever-finicky.
I’m still puzzling over how many of the odd tendencies are things One Could Get Used To, and how many are truly bad design. To compare with a later game, Graham Nelson’s Jigsaw (from 1995) requires you in at least one spot to LOOK UNDER an object. Early on (before the moment where the command is required), there’s a rolling piano seat, and you can find something underneath if you MOVE or ROLL it. This gives an early hint that needing to LOOK UNDER things is required, but since it’s not a requirement, there’s still a little bit of ambiguity and the later moment can easily be missed. At the time it was written, LOOK UNDER was kind-of-standard but not really? I remember complaints at the time. Note that SEARCH, EXAMINE, and LOOK UNDER all gave different messages:
Vestry
The vestry once held surplices. Today, it holds a surplus. Debris, broken furniture, blown-in leaves, panes of dusty glass and mildewed cloth, all unwanted.
There’s even an old Victorian piano stool, but no sign of a piano.
>search stool
You can’t see inside, since it is closed.
>look under stool
There’s a charcoal pencil underneath the stool.
>examine stool
An old wheeled piano stool, wide and tall, with a hinged and padded seat.
The Pearson standard list of verbs has LOOK UNDER. I had tried it early (LOOK UNDER BED) but hadn’t seen anything and forgot about it — the message was IT DOESN’T SEEM TO WORK. Later, I tried it again, but just typing it as LOOK UNDER — the parser usually takes verbs only, and that especially feels natural when the parser is mostly a two-word one. (There’s even a bit later where you are forced to break a command into two parts, like Scott Adams, rather than type all four words as one phrase.) Yet, it turns out at the bed at the very start, if you wait until after the dwarf leaves, you can LOOK UNDER BED to find a mug.
What elements of me being caught by this are “my fault”, so to speak? I was cued in already to the possibility of LOOK UNDER, but that was only because it showed up somewhere in a previous Pearson game (I’m not even remembering where, exactly); there’s no “training moment” like in Jigsaw. I did make a full LOOK UNDER BED but apparently it was too early. Later, it changed — is it really fair that it changed? Certainly “IT DOESN’T SEEM TO WORK” feels like it is being in reference to the action itself, not that there was nothing useful to see. Jigsaw also had the virtue of being a full-sentence parser where it feels normal to type three words, whereas the Pearson parser breaks open 3+ words only in special cases, and really doesn’t seem to “understand” such sentences.
…that was a bit long for just one moment. In any case, I found a mug, which I took over to the padded room from last time (the one I got to by using ATTACK on the counselor) because I had meanwhile found another secret via a Pearson tendency.
Even though there isn’t any particular reason to, LISTEN will reveal a dripping sound. You can then LOOK DRIPPING to find there is water. I previously didn’t have a way to get the water, but DROP MUG lets the mug start filling with water, and you can wait to get thrown out of the room and the mug stays behind (the staff is very on top of some things and very apathetic about others). Then, you can go back and attack the counselor again which gets you tossed in the same padded cell excepted this time the mug is full of water.
From here you (and I) can go on to finally quaff the red powder from last time, but before I do that I’m going to mention another action in the padded cell — I found this rather later in my gameplay but I’d rather get this out of the way. I had theorized last time, remember, of taking a sharp object in the cell. I found a SCALPEL by doing LOOK SHELVES a second time at the place I found the bottle at before (yet another Pearson tendency, repeat those commands until they run dry, and then repeat them a little more just in case) and tried to CUT WALL and CUT PAD and STAB WALL and the like but got nowhere. I eventually found out from a walkthrough I could CUT PADDING (even though the actual word “padding” doesn’t show up in that form in the game, it simply mentions a “padded cell”) and get a rope that was useful later.
Enough noodling around, it’s dreaming time. Grabbing the bottle with the red powder and holding the water from the mug, I could finally EAT RED POWDER.
Just as a heads up, this gets very dense; this is a dream where anything can happen and while there is continuity of landscape, characters can block your progress without anything resembling motivation.
To the east there’s a cliff, which you can climb using the rope and find a telescope. Then you can LOOK TELESCOPE to find it out of focus, and see the Earth.
In yet another Pearson tendency (a good or bad one?) you can keep LOOKing at deeper and deeper levels, LOOK EARTH lets you see continents, LOOK CONTINENTS lets you see a metropolis, LOOK METROPOLIS lets you see a tall building, LOOK BUILDING reveals a billboard on the roof, and LOOK BILLBOARD finally gets a code (which I haven’t used yet).
Heading back the other way to the starting room, you find a corpse that wasn’t there before:
I haven’t been able to do anything with him yet.
Going through my standard rigamarole, I was able to LISTEN to hear a willow whispering, and talk to it where it asks where I am from. SAY INSTITUTE causes it to reveal a stair going down.
There’s the Counselor from the “real” world, who, as part of his speech, repeats the line
SOCIETY MUST BE PROTECTED FROM YOU..AND WE MUST PROTECT YOU FROM YOURSELF
Since he does what you ask, you can ask him to SHOOT the gun he’s holding and he’ll disappear
THE GUN FIRES..
HE DISAPPEARS IN A FLASH
After this encounter comes a stream with an owl.
The plaque referred to here is in the “real” world with the inmates, which says PEACE = DEATH. It will be useful in a moment.
By drinking the water, your skin changes color:
WOW!! YOUR SKIN TURNED BLUE..
South of the river is a statue (LOOK BASE reveals a tube of glue) where if I say the magic word I learned from the inmates last time (SHAFLA) a door is revealed. I didn’t make any progress otherwise so I assumed a key was somewhere.
Then there’s an encounter with the fellow above, who the game describes as — slur warning — as a “midget”. To be fair, this isn’t like the Earthquake San Francisco 1906 situation; it is quite possible circa 1981 not to know; here’s Roger Ebert in 2005 being informed for the first time the word is derogatory in regards to a review of Death to Smoochy.
In any case, he demands to know what death means, which you must respond with PEACE. This inspires him to the try to start kicking and punching, and you just need to attack back to dispatch of him. Dream logic, yeesh.
The next encounter is a log where CLIMB for some reason is the right verb (but I was used to it from, you guessed it, other Pearson games) except you slip, as shown above. You can take the glue before and either PUT GLUE followed by ON SHOES or simply use GLUE SHOES. (The full phrase PUT GLUE ON SHOES doesn’t work. Also note that shoes never actually show up as an inventory item.)
I finally became horribly stuck on a green man.
He kills you if you try to enter. In dream land this causes you to exit the dream, which isn’t necessarily bad! — and I’m guessing there’s other parts where you want to die. However, I still kept with the current dream and tried various contortions to get through, before I finally resorted to checking hints again.
Remember the river that changes your body’s color? If you keep drinking (remember, in Pearson-world, keep repeating things!) your body turns red, then back to blue, back again to red, back yet again to blue (you’d think you could stop here, but no), green, blue, red, blue, red, bright green. Green is useful, but bright green is really the useful one, as the bright glowing lights up rooms to helps solve a second puzzle later.
Being green is sufficient for the green guard to let you by. While I was hitting the hints, I also found out that after I had crossed the log, I could GO LOG (!) and find a SHOVEL and COPPER KEY hidden away. The key was enough to get inside the locked door from earlier…
…but I couldn’t find anything there (the room was all one color and hard to see) so I moved on to the area past the green man.
The village have other green men, and a hut with someone who calls himself RUDY BEGA…
I assume this is a specific reference, but I’m too exhausted at the moment to figure out what it is.
…and a dark shack where you can find a toolbox as long as you’re glowing.
Locked, can’t open it yet.
Finally there’s wall with a “dark hole” containing an “oracle”.
Using the right item (from my last post, I’ll let you work it out) broke open a crack I could enter and then wake up and exit the dream without dying.
I don’t know if there’s something superior to this method of exit than just dying.
To recap the open threads, because that only vaguely resembled a narrative, I still have to investigate:
– the corpse, who might just be there for plot reasons
– the room inside the statue that’s all one color and hard to see in
– if there’s something useful to do with Rudy Bega
– some way of opening the tooolbox
I suspect that I’ll need to visit other dreams and loop back. Just to be clear, all items carry over, so these aren’t entirely self-contained areas. I additionally yet have to use the code I found from the telescope.
Once I got out of the dream I went back to the red powder to try eating it again. I found three more dreams this way before looping back to the original one, but I haven’t explored yet. Some screenshots to close things out, though:
The duo of Jyym Pearson and Robyn Pearson finish off 1981 (finally!) with The Institute. Will Moczarski calls it a near-masterpiece so we’re likely in for a ride.
Rather than Adventure International, this game was originally published by Med Systems as text-only (for both TRS-80 and Atari computers), and after Med Systems switched to being Intelligent Statements, Inc. (trademark filed July 13, 1982) they published a Commodore 64 version of the game sometime that year (probably text-only, see image above). The next year they published graphical versions for Apple, Commodore 64, and Atari using the name Screenplay. (Screenplay is listed as a trademark owned by Intelligent Statements, even though the trademark on Intelligent Statements itself was listed as abandoned in 1984, so I’m not totally sure what’s going on other than possibly bad handling of paperwork.)
I’m playing with the Apple II version.
It hasn’t been that long since I tackled a Pearson game (see Saigon) but there’s a general style and rhythm where once you get used to it the Pearson games are easier to solve. For example, using LISTEN in all locations, applying LOOK not just generally but to what seem like “location objects” that otherwise can’t be referred to, and being prepared to use movement verbs like CLIMB when otherwise not prompted to.
The premise, from a 1983 version of the manual:
Trapped in a mysterious “Institute”, you know that you are not mad, and yet many of your fellow inmates are. The Freudian solution to your entrapment becomes a series of vivid dreams, induced by a strange powder. Each of the dreams takes place in a different location, making the adventure actually five adventures in one. Each location contains objects and information that you must use in other places in order to escape. You may actually have to let yourself be killed in order to escape one dream and proceed to another.
Promising! The prior Pearson games had issues where the heavily linear structure led to some obnoxious softlocks (Escape from Traam in particular) and we’ve seen with other games from this era that splitting into smaller areas has often made for stronger games.
The credits are incidentally slightly different on this one (not surprising given the change in company)
Written and Produced by Jyym and Robyn Pearson
Programmed by Norm Sailer and Jyym Pearson
All graphics created with the aid of: THE COMPLETE GRAPHICS SYSTEM by PENGUIN SOFTWARE
Illustrated by Rick Incrocci
The graphics have a new illustrator, which starts to be obvious when you see people.
You start awakening in a bed unable to move, and a dwarf enters that you can TALK to.
After the conversation, you can GET UP and walk around.
You can break off a piece of the mirror, descibed as SHINY. I haven’t used it yet.
There’s not much accessible at first. There’s a room with a bottle of mysterious red powder, but if you try to walk away with it you get stopped by a guard and tossed back in your room. You can duck into a closet and try to eat the powder but it “sticks in your mouth”.
There’s a room full of inmates — and this is where the improved art starts to be more obvious —
and you can TALK here multiple times to get clues like the one above. I haven’t gotten anywhere with SAY SHAFLA, but I assume that gets tucked away for later. The most useful message otherwise seems to be:
A MANIAC STARES AT YOU AND YELLS, “YOUR DREAMS HOLD THE KEY.. ATTACK HE WHO WOULD HELP YOU”
Well, I can try to oblige that request at least. The third thing easily accessible is the “Counselor”.
Also, SOCIETY MUST BE PROTECTED FROM YOU..AND WE MUST PROTECT YOU FROM YOURSELF
Trying to ATTACK does get a reaction: you get tossed in a padded cell. I haven’t found anything useful here. Maybe smuggle in something sharp at tear at the walls? I have gone through the requisite LOOK and LISTEN regiment but it is hard to miss things anyway.
Renga in Blue 