Author Archive
Continuing from last time, the portion inside the pyramid turned out to be relatively straightforward. It’s starts off feeling like it’s going to be a maze in the “you need to drop objects” tradition, but I realized fairly quickly that something else was going on. I had already had a nagging feeling about the image on the back wall where the inscription was…
…so I tried matching it with what I had so far in my map, and found it worked as long as I turned the map upside-down. The small rectangles to the south and east are because going those directions “leaves the pyramid” but drops the player in a pit. (The one to the west is something else, which I’ll show off in a moment.)
What’s canny here is that the way the rooms repeat makes this a little non-obvious — there’s a “blue sky” room, for instance, that shows up at each of the three “entrances” (although remember two are just by death pits)…
…so that on my first foray (admittedly wandering randomly) I got befuddled by assuming there was only one blue-sky room, even though the map is pure N/S/E/W with only “extended connection length” fouling things up and no nonsensical connections; no loops or hidden turns. It is the first adventure game maze I’ve enjoyed in a while. (I think the key move here, in an author-conceptual sense, was to be unafraid to make things easy, and to add just enough of a wrinkle so to avoid the puzzle being simplistic.)
The maze has matches, a flashlight, gold coins, and a “full ewer” (which can serve as a water source and be refilled; there’s a “thirst timer” in this game just like Elephant Graveyard but it is much more generous on number of moves).
The flashlight lets you poke into a dark section the west side of the pyramid, entering from the outside. I expected another large area but instead got a clue.
This turned out to be a helpful clue; HORUS, APEP, AND SMA are the names of the amulets in the game. I had found SMA and tried to use it and it did seem to “activate” but I wasn’t sure what was going on. It turns out in all the cases the amulets simply provide a “persistent effect” that gets applied later and then used up. (Again, I think the authors were really shooting for easier here — a more typical situation from this time period would be to require use of the amulet immediately before an obstacle.) There still was something of a twist to the setup, as it is possible to use the resource in the wrong place. Back to the mountains and the Nile river, I had drowned when I tried to swim across…
…but if you’ve used SMA, you survive (although your possessions are swept away by the water). This originally led me to suspect this simply meant I needed to be unencumbered, but past the river there was another deadly section.
The Mummy’s Tomb (seen above) is just past, but stepping inside you find the air is thin and pass out and die. This is where the SMA effect is needed, so if you use it too early you die right after. So the solution is to find a different route across the Nile. I liked this resource-being-used-up puzzle insofar as a.) the punishment for using the resource came right after, so there wasn’t a long period of walking dead b.) the loss of possessions was another hint maybe something was wrong and c.) it was genuinely pleasurable to hit the solution, as it required insight across time as well as space. (Shades of Hadean Lands, here.) That is, rather than thinking in terms of I-have-object-X-where-does-it-go (which this game does have a lot of) I needed to think more in a story sense about the events that happened.
Speaking of where does object X go, the gold coins go to the merchant selling a shovel and knife I mentioned last time, and fair warning, stereotyping ahead.
There’s some more Fu Machu style dialogue after making a purchase but I’ll spare you that. I’m not sure what Fu Manchu is doing in Egypt.
Relatedly, with the second stereotypical character, Abdul the palace guard from last time, you just get by by using SAY HI.
I came up for this by testing HELP to see what the verb would do and the game told me SAY HI was useful. It also said MAKE was handy, which will be important later.
The only other things in the palace are an empty room with a table (“BROTHER THIS GUY DOESN’T HAVE MUCH OF A PALACE.”) and a passage sealed with dirt and straw I haven’t gotten by yet.
QUICK INTERLUDE ON THE STEREOTYPES
We’ve certainly hit a few before, most egregiously in Earthquake San Francisco 1906, but what I find fascinating is the (relatively) low level of hostility in their use. The SAY HOW from Ghost Town raised my hackles…
I can also see: Indian ghost
>LOOK GHOST
OK
I see
nothing special
>SAY HOW
How?
Geronimo says: “Its easy! Happy Landings!”
…but it was intended as a joke based on Westerns, as opposed to Westerns using the stereotype “straight” giving the damaging impression of indigenous people having simplistic language. Geronimo responds to the joke in English and it could almost be a scene from Little Big Man if the context was tweaked slightly. I still hold it is Not Good, but at least it was trying. It’s a little bit how certain 1990s authors would write “strong women” while not quite shaking off old ways. (Guess the Famous Author: “Slender and barely taller than Mat’s shoulder, at the moment the Wisdom seemed taller than any of them, and it did not matter that she was young and pretty.”)
Getting by the friendly palace guard by just saying hi seems to play on the hostile-Arabian-region stereotype most famously explicated in the original opening song of Disney’s Aladdin. (It had the line “Where they’ll cut off your ears if they don’t like your face”, which was removed in all home-release versions.) Trying to attack him (or anyone else) has the game explain
YOU UNFORTUNATELY ARE THE ONLY ONE THAT CAN BE KILLED
INTERLUDE OFF
Moving on with our bounty from the shop, the shovel can be taken to “something buried in the sand” in the desert to reveal stairs leading to a crypt.
Inside are a number of art pieces, and the HORUS (strength) amulet.
There’s also a “religious altar” next to an ax. You can take incense (laying in the open in the mountains) and light it to open a secret passage with the APEP (snake) amulet.
From here I was a bit stuck but thought back to the hint about needing to make things, and a locked gate in the mountains. I happened to have a stick (again out in the open in the mountains) and thought, well, if I got really lucky, maybe I could just make a key to fit. Lo and behold:
Behind the gate was a forest with some hemp. The hemp could be used to MAKE ROPE, the trees could be cut (with the ax) to get some logs, and the rope and logs combine to MAKE RAFT.
With the power of the raft I was able to go back to the Nile and get across without removing my lung power. Then I could get inside the mummy’s tomb, with SMA saving me:
I’m not sure what to do next. I suspect I need to enter stealthily, but I’m running low on items I haven’t used yet. My inventory is
FULL EWER, FLASHLIGHT, MATCHES, AX, KNIFE, SHOVEL, WOODEN KEY, RAFT
and rather nicely, the game hasn’t shown any kind of inventory limit so the list is everything still available. But I’ve used all of it! (The knife was needed to carve the key.) That doesn’t mean there isn’t re-use, but the only puzzle remaining is the dirt-and-straw filled passage in the palace, and the shovel is being no help there, so perhaps I’m missing a room exit? I also haven’t encountered an opportunity to use the strength or snake abilities.
I still suspect I’m nearing close to the end. The map ended up fairly large but the puzzles have generally gone briskly. There’s been a real sense of being an explorer (as opposed to crawling inch by inch trying to get to the next available part).
Our journey with Highland Computer Services comes to an end. It was established in 1980 by Butch Greathouse and Garry Rheinhardt and was shuttered by the end of 1981. While Creature Venture did well by the standards of the day (an estimated 10,000 units) Mummy’s Curse only sold 1000-2000 and was their last game.
Now we get to the heart of the downfall of HCS. The people who answer the phone, package the orders, write the manuals, and program all day can’t be the same two people. We couldn’t create new products and do everything else so we just sort of starved ourselves out of business. All the money went right back into the business and we weren’t the greatest business people in the world.
The handwriting was on the wall (expenses greater than Income) so Garry and I went back to work at A.P.P.L.E.. [A computer club in Renton, Washington.] I was in charge of the Technical Hotline at A.P.P.L.E. for 3 years and talked to thousands of APPLE II enthusiasts from all over the world and answered their questions.
For the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities.
At least we can try to enjoy their last hurrah, where they transitioned from black and white to color.
The results are decidedly mixed. While I’m fine with some of the graphics, like the desert oasis start of the game…
“Fine” even though the trees look bizarre and the water has a strange blockiness. How does a pool of water look wrong?
…there are some pieces which I just find painful to look at.
There’s something … I wouldn’t call it “charming” exactly, but “more palatable” about the black and white equivalent from the prior games.
An encore performance by Count Snoottweeker, from The Tarturian.
You are tasked with finding the golden death mask of “King Rutattuttut”, and you start in an outdoor area in the desert near a village and a pyramid.
The game does the unfortunate schtick of prior Highland games of forcing you to test directions, but at least only N/S/E/W/U/D work this time. The geography is sanely and pleasingly laid out (see above) and I felt more like I was filling in a map of a real place as opposed to trying to catch up with the fever dream of a robot with graph paper.
In the village you get stopped entering a palace (see farther above), stopped buying a knife and shovel (nothing valuable at hand), and stopped visiting a “mysterious man” in a shroud.
In the mountains, there’s a part of the Nile you can drown yourself in, as well as a locked door (no key) and a stone shrine.
South of here is an AMULET (SMA) and the instructions are clear you can USE SMA to activate it. It glows briefly but I haven’t figured out what the effect is.
In the desert is a buried monument/pillar/ancient-looking-thing which I presume the shovel is for, and a temple with an inscription.
The “hint” from the inscription I assume is intended for the last section, by the pyramid, where there are indeed two pits you can fall into, but it’s so fast to just map things out I already had it figured out (and the entrance to the pyramid discovered) before seeing the inscription.
I’ve found mapping things out enjoyable so far, but I only scratched the surface of the inside of the pyramid, so I’ll get to that next time. I get the impression this may tilt easier than Creature Venture. Fingers crossed, because that one was a bear.
I submitted my first adventure to Cload, a cassette based magazine for the TRS-80. They had previously bought some of my other games (non-adventure games), and they snapped up Frankenstein Adventure. Several months later, it appeared in one of their issues. My first adventure! Within a matter of days I started getting letters. Everyone loved it. I got letters from all over. I even got letters from other countries. Some were in foreign languages that I couldn’t read, but had to have interpreted. Some people would ask for help. Others would simply write expressing their appreciation for the thrilling experience. And although the volume of letters dwindled, I still received letters for many years after that, as copies of my program continued to be circulated.
— From an interview in Syntax, Issue #32
John R. Olsen’s previous work, Frankenstein Adventure, was one of the more solid BASIC-only games I’ve written about; it had an interesting plot hook (a descendent of Dr. Frankenstein fulfilling his legacy), mostly thematic puzzles, and a slight twist at the end with a satisfying puzzle to finish things off.
I’d say I was consequently looking forward to his next adventure, but I still was tentative given it is set in Africa and “based on the jungle settings of the Tarzan novels”.
Via Ira Goldklang. The Elephant’s Graveyard, aka Elephant Adventure, aka Elephant Graveyard Adventure, aka Jungle Adventure, Part I: The Elephant’s Graveyard is on side 2. They really weren’t picky about titles in this era.
The game includes a scene with a village of Central African Foragers, or “pygmies”. In the relevant Edgar Rice Burroughs book:
That is until one day when a Bantu Pygmy came into their territory hunting and killed Tarzan’s ape mother. Crazed with grief, Tarzan followed him back to his village and discovered that these natives were warlike pygmies who killed and ate apes! Sickened at the gory sight, Tarzan decided to rid the jungle of these wicked Bantu Pygmies.
This only mildly resembles what happens in The Elephant’s Graveyard, but I wanted to make the source material clear.
I wouldn’t really call this a Treasure Hunt in my plot categorization (that is, Crowther/Woods Adventure gather-the-loot style), in that there is only one treasure, ivory from an elephant graveyard. You start outside a trading post as seen above, the trough contains water, and inside there is a “revolver” and “bag”. Throughout the entire game there is a very fast “thirst timer” where you die after 9 moves without drinking water. Early on I kept having to send “scouting” runs to look over the map and try to get back to the trough in time to drink the water until finally realized I could PUT BAG / IN TROUGH to fill it with water. (FILL BAG just states “I don’t understand you” and other permutations don’t work, so I assumed the bag was one that wasn’t watertight.) Once the water-filled bag is obtained the thirst timer slows down considerably.
An example of the fast thirst timer. This is only two locations away from the start with the good water. The bad water here made me suspect (while I had discarded the bag as a water-holding possibility) there was a way to “purify” the water and the idea was to “leapfrog” from water site to water site. The red herring here had to be intentional.
Early on I dispatched with a crocodile (see above) and a boa constrictor with my revolver from the Trading Post, but got stuck on some cliffs I couldn’t pass (they were meant for later) and a village with skulls on poles outside.
We are in a Pygmy village. We see:
A large group of PYGMIES.
One of the skulls is the key for getting by.
They’re not being murderous, which is an improvement over Tarzan, at least.
This is followed by a wall with some stones (which I realized after some time I could BURN things with, more on that in a moment) and a scene in an “ancient temple” with a “witchdoctor”.
You can just grab the map and go; snakes appear after an extra turn, but they (and the sealed door) are both red herrings.
The map reveals a secret pass at the cliffs I mentioned by the trading post (typing FOLLOW MAP is the required command, which is one of those verbs I’d have a difficult time with for except I’ve seen FOLLOW used in Lost Dutchman’s Gold).
This leads to a small mountainous area with a charging lion (revolver required, for the third time), some vines, a river, and a waterfall. Behind the waterfall is a dark cave. The vines and some grass can combine to MAKE TORCH, but then comes a dilemma:
You can’t take a torch or anything that can be used to make a torch through the water without it being ruined. This involved a level of re-appropriating an item for a different use that was sneaky enough I had to stop playing a bit, and logical enough I was able to realize the solution while away from the computer.
The bag had been serving as a water container, but since it’s watertight enough to keep water in, it’s watertight enough to keep water out.
Having found the graveyard and grabbed the ivory, I thought it would be a quick matter to victory as all that was needed to take it back to the trading post, but the game had one last wrinkle.
Looking at the map, there are two ways back to the “Foot of Mountains”, which is just a room away from the “Trading Post”. However, both possible exits aren’t possible to go through while just holding the ivory as the ivory is too large: going up from the hidden valley is too steep, and you can’t swim across the river either.
I did know — from previous experimentation after knowing MAKE was a verb — that MAKE RAFT was parsed correctly (although it indicated I didn’t have the supplies). I figured I could get more vines, but I needed some sort of logs, and here was stuck enough to check hints (the only time I needed to).
Remember those skulls on poles where the sacred skull scared away the villagers when it touched the ground? You can get the poles.
This is not only problematic from the amorally-grab-the-sacred-items angle, but in a game design sense prior objects that could be manipulated always were written in ALL CAPS. The poles are the exception.
This is sufficient to MAKE RAFT, which you can then put the ivory on to get past the river and make it to the trading post and victory (or “victory” depending on your perspective).
I will say, relative to other BASIC TRS-80 games we’ve seen, this is skilled design. There was some thought put into the simulation aspects — of water, of fire, of environment — such that solving felt like a rich enough experience that I could experiment (this is despite a very small set of allowed verbs!) Very particular items are flammable, for instance, and you can die by setting a grass field on fire while you are standing in it.
Hence, I’m still anticipating reaching other works by John R. Olsen, although I’d rather get back to works not with inspiration in Tarzan novels. (Part II of this particular series, at least, won’t hit until 1982, which we are lurching ever closer to.)
I’ll be frank up front: this is not Roger M. Wilcox’s finest hour.
For some side nitpicking before the main event, “king of the jungle” doesn’t even make sense as a phrase since lions prefer savannahs (or at least dry forests). However, the photographer Bruno D’Amicis recently (2012) caught some photos in Ethiopia at the Kafa Biosphere Reserve of lions in a rainforest. Back in 1981 when Wilcox wrote this, there were no known actual lions in jungles.
This is his fifteenth adventure game, after The Staff “Slake” and Medieval Space Warrior, and this one really comes off as throwing out ideas and puzzles at random, even moreso than his prior games. That is, while In the Universe Beyond was triply weird, at least it was a weird with a good sense of humor where you can attach some plants to your spacesuit for oxygen and the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE is an item you can pick up.
As explained in the intro above, your goal is to hunt a lion. Nearby there is a dead native with a note explaining the lion “is actually a mutation of a lion due to nuclear testing” and is “his projected image in material form”.
Additionally, there’s a load of inventory items to scoop up, like a medicine kit, a bucket and cow (you can milk the cow and churn the milk to get buttermilk), a shield, a sparker, a rod of cancellation, and an ancient scroll.
>READ SCROLL
A silvery line extends from your finger, and ignites a fireball in midair.
If the last two made you go wait, what? they did for me as well, because fantasy elements get tossed in here; the scroll and the rod are from a “wizard’s hut” and there’s a “held portal” you can TOUCH while holding the rod to unlock it and reach a “pool of oil” and a “fine cloth”.
Other than finding a shovel and digging a rope I got stuck for a good long while on the map portion shown above. There’s also a river with dark liquid that I wasn’t able to interact with, a bamboo forest, and a hole with snakes where GO HOLE leads to death.
I finally realized I could BREAK TREE in the forest to get a piece of bamboo — which sounds ok in retrospect, but I had tried lots of verbs with that similar idea with no luck, and assumed I needed a tool of some kind — and then trying to TIE ROPE / TO POLE led to:
Sorry, it slips off.
I had to look up a walkthrough to realize that you can TIE ROPE / TO BAMBOO, just not to the POLE, even that it is described as a “bamboo pole” so obviously the real noun here is pole and aaaaargh.
With the rope-tied-to-pole in hand I was able to GO HOLE without dying (after fruitlessly attempting actions like dropping the bamboo and typing CLIMB ROPE) where I found snakes in a pit. Nothing I tried helped so I looked up help again, and found that the scroll I already mentioned (“A silvery line extends from your finger, and ignites a fireball in midair.”) is the key.
Yes, you need to AIM DOWN (POINT DOWN also works). Yet another new verb! Even moreso, this is a “preparation verb”, which sets up to “hold a pose” for action after. I admit I’m struggling to think of examples of this that were anything other than confusing; there just isn’t enough feedback to know the basic READ SCROLL message is being affected by player state, or that even would be a mechanic that would work.
The same construction happens shortly after with a snake that shoots laser beams and your shield (which you need to have POLISHed first using the cloth, and that’s the only verb that will work).
Also note how in the first instance the point/aim mechanic indicates a direction while in this case in indicates what object is being pointed.
There’s then a small area with a lion statue holding a piece of a cheese (??) and you can use the rod of cancellation to get the cheese (???? cryptic but I got it anyway).
Then there’s a force field that kills you unless you’ve drank the water from the strange river (which turns out to have been lead?) However, to drink it and not die, you need to have drink anti-toxin first from the medicine kit. But if you drink the anti-toxin:
You got heartburn! You’re dead from an ulcer.
The way to resolve that, of course, is to drink the buttermilk first, which is sufficient to survive drinking the anti-toxin, which is sufficient to survive drinking the lead, which will then let you go in the force field.
Look, I don’t know anymore. The lion is behind the force field, who is easy to defeat because of course it likes cheese.
This wasn’t tough to solve since I was out of items and the stone lion had the cheese, but it doesn’t make the experience any less surreal.
Again, teenaged author, not even attempting to publish these, just a series of private games which lets us peek in on what people were writing for fun, etc. so I’m not going to linger. But as a small piece of analysis, he tried out a new mechanic (POINTing as affecting a command after) without much prompting, mashed sci-fi and fantasy together in way that led to incoherence rather than a plausible setting (Medieval Space Warrior at least had a structural transition) and even when the puzzles were easy they were along of the lines “oh, I guess that worked” as opposed to being pleasing moments of logic or plot.
I managed to finish, so as usual previous posts are needed for context, and complete spoilers ahead.
Before I get into the gameplay, a bit of history. Forbidden City happens to be (via an unofficial translation) one of the only text adventures ever published in the USSR, and I’m not sure if the original author (Demas) even knows about it.
Aaron Reed recently wrote about P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A., a parody game published in Czech for the ZX Spectrum which includes a copy of Marx’s Kapital in a toilet and an inspiring newspaper editorial that is required to solve a puzzle (“YOU IMMEDIATELY ACQUIRED A TASTE FOR WORK, WHICH IS AN ESSENTIAL HONOR FOR ANY SOCIALIST CITIZEN TO DO.”) Jim Gerrie has translated the game into English so you can go play it yourself. For obvious reasons — the Velvet Revolution was still a year away — the game was distributed slowly and the author Miroslav Fídler intentionally mangled the source code to hide its authorship.
That’s not the case with Město Robotů (Robot City) from 1989, which had sponsorship from the Czech government, and is a direct translation of Forbidden City.
Image from Spectrum Computing. Despite the official nod for the game itself, the cover artist, Kája Saudek, was banned from mainstream media.
The game, programmed by Vít Libovický, was released as part of a contest by Zenitcentrum Beroun, a center for computing run by the state. There were ads on Czechoslovak Television and in the press. It went for sale “early” before it was meant to be playable — a password to unlock the game was given on air on September 21, 1989, but the password turned out to be easy to crack and the contest had to be cancelled, so winners were drawn by lottery instead.
“A science fiction computer game. Produced by Zenitcentrum to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Pionýr Organization of the Socialist Union of Youth.” Screenshots (and the information about the game) from an article in the book Gaming Globally.
As a side note, the contest inspired a second game a year later from students at the Electrotechnical University in Pilsen: …and what about that?! It is set in a time after the Soviet bloc fell. It involved the main character, a journalist, being tasked to write about Brazilian coffee and discovering a conspiracy in the process. Instead of being a parser game it used hypertext (inspired by, of all things, the help system of Turbo Pascal). I have not been able to find a copy of the game or screenshots.
A print advertisement. While the game itself has one friendly robot, as you’ll see, there’s overall much more violence than the picture indicates.
Back to the Forbidden City! And not the 1981 original, but the mid-80s Macintosh port, which — with the exception of a few textual messages — is very close to the TRS-80 version.
I had been stuck on an area that it turned out I had entirely mined out for resources already — my miss was assuming that the dark area that the monorail passed through needed to be skipped and returned to. One of my objects already was capable of being a light source.
TWIST was not on my standard verb list (it is now). I had already tried TURN and ROTATE, neither which work.
In my taxonomy of guess-the-verb
Struggling to Communicate (know to do something, but unable to convey it)
Receiving Bad Information (a verb which could be considered a synonym gives a misleading message)
Hidden (not realizing there was a verb that wasn’t guessed correctly)
this mostly fits under “Hidden”, but I will say (unlike back in Hezarin where I tried to YELL, found the verb lacking, and decided that wasn’t a solution) there was very little intention in my attempting “turn” on the rod. In truth, I visualize twist as a slightly different action (turning the two ends in opposite directions). I suppose the dangling question is: was there any way of me solving this without looking up the answer outright, which I did? A “focus on fiddling with the rod” hint might have done it — I might have even consciously though “what if I twist both ends” — but this still seems like a stumble in a gameplay sense without some extra in-game nudge. The description of the rod from The Staff “Slake” comes to mind, which explicitly says “Its bottom seems worn from tapping against the ground” as both an action and verb signal; maybe the rod could have a similar message about smudges or the like.
Moving on: I found a grotto with a control panel where a yellow button let me open a “dead end” that had tokens and a hostile robot I had to SHOOT with my laser.
Past this point there was a continuous stream of robots appearing. They could appear at any moment and there was no restriction as to how many times a robot would appear in a row, and while they only sometimes (randomly) kill the player, I had to essentially stop to SHOOT ROBOT every time one appeared. This was both intense and annoying. Certainly in a plot sense it made the whole thing more dynamic (and more like the game’s original cover) but there were moments were stopping to shoot was fatal and there’s a limit to laser shots (90) so what was originally slow exploration turned into a mad race (and given the puzzles end up being “decipher what these mystery buttons do” genre, there was an unfortunate clash).
With the tokens in hand, I was able to take the monorail to the third stop, scarf up all the items, and then a fourth and final stop, which had a box with two buttons and a nuclear reactor with a red key.
The reactor makes you irradiated but there’s a nearby decontamination room with a button that cures you; the timing is very tight so you can’t make any stops on the way (that includes shooting a laser at a killer robot if they’re following).
Having raided the fourth station, I took my newfound red key, took it back to the dark station, and after INSERT RED and TURN RED on a control panel the lights for the underground stayed on (which is good, because the light source doesn’t have much juice). I incidentally did not get the TURN on my own and it is the only part of the game where this is required, even on other key locations.
With the power on I was able to use one of those beam-activated doors I had been encountering to enter an underground building.
The building featured a “teleportation station” between floors…
This uses the magnetic card I had been toting around. Also, if you take the green radiation stone in the lead container you get fried, so you have to leave it behind.
…an unmoving robot in a storage room, a robot assembly room, and a security outpost.
The “cartridge” from the robot assembly could be put into the unmoving robot to make a new robot buddy that would follow me around. In the security outpost I found a vent by LOOKing and was able to unscrew it with a screwdriver found on one of the other floors (if you stay too long or have a hostile robot chasing you, the robots at the security station notice and kill you). Through the vent I found a place where I could insert my green key I had been toting around for a while and use it to disable the robots continuously chasing me. Whew!
(This sounded short and smooth, but it took many attempts with lots of false attempts and deaths from the random hostile robots that kept appearing.)
I’m not going to detail every event that happens (and lever that gets pushed, and beam of light that turns out to be fatal rather than helpful, …) but I eventually found a place I could use the “overload” feature of my laser (since I didn’t need it to zap hostile robots anymore)…
…and a control room where Helpful Robot Buddy hit some buttons, although I wasn’t clear what they did…
…and I eventually wound up at a spaceship.
Just in case you forgot, we had crash landed before, so our goal is to get off the planet. It wasn’t clear until this moment.
There’s some very awkward confusion about what buttons to push where — the endgame really is all about deciphering the effect of buttons — and I eventually realized the “small box” that came from near the irradiated plant with two buttons worked here. To get the spaceship moving it needed power, which turned out to be in the form of the radiation-laden stone from the lead container I had to leave behind while teleporting around. (After consulting some more hints I realized there was a room I could leave it in and a lever I could pull to make sure it was accessible from a different floor. This turned out not to be hard, necessarily, but I was getting lost in a swarm of buttons by then.)
However, the green stone is still radioactive and will still kill you after exposure! This was a nice bit of parallelism in the previous puzzle where I thought, perhaps, there was some sort of decontamination process. However, it turns out your robot buddy is still around, and you can get it to take the stone out and put it in the power for you. You still can’t be standing around, but if you go back to the “launch control station” you can operate the robot there.
In principle I was ok with the late-game puzzles; in practice, I kept dying from things exploding or getting sucked into space or just getting confused from various other wrong-button-press actions.
Still, like with all the Demas games, there were lots of strong ideas, and the weird-alien-techno-planet atmosphere came off well. If I had to rank the games, this is the best one — if nothing else, holding to a consistent set of ideas in a way that felt like puzzle actions and plot were the same, as opposed to puzzles being a way to view more plot. I honestly wish he had kept writing — this was a small burst of creativity from when he was very young, and this will be the last game we see of his.
(Unless I expand the project past adventures to action education games. Not happening, though.)
Art by Craig Sadler, including all the nice Macintosh screens you’ve been seeing.
Disk for the Macintosh port of Forbidden City, via Mobygames.
Yes, it’s yet another “I didn’t make much progress, but I’m going to try writing anyway” post (a tradition going back to Zork, Philosopher’s Quest and Gargoyle’s Castle). There’s both a walkthrough and hints, but I’ve been resistant because:
a.) I finally got the Futuria file extracted so I can play on a regular Mac emulator (I learned about exciting details like the difference between Apple’s Macintosh File System and Hierarchical File System, experienced the world’s most unhelpful error messages, and finally resolved my issues when I switched to PCE which happened to have the right utilities built in). The amount of effort I put in to get the game to play normally makes me hesitant to just speed through.
…okay, maybe that’s it. A variation on the sunk cost fallacy. The graphics are appealing and the parser doesn’t seem nightmarish (although given the previous game made some awful parser choices, I shouldn’t rely on surface appearances). I suppose I shouldn’t have to excuse patience, which is a … virtue? … but it means a slower blogging schedule.
As usual, I made a full verb list:
Nothing too remarkable to observe but I need to remember USE is in play as sort of a dread wild card (when the game throws in the towel in trying to figure out how to parse an action, USE is the go-to). I also need to keep SMELL in mind, and what’s INVOKE doing there? I think I’ve had that on a grand total of one previous game, the kind of verb like SCRAPE I only leave on the list due to stubbornness. It could be some different verb, but the parser is taking the first four letters, so it has to start INVO. (>INVOICE DRUNK PERSON FOR THE DAMAGES MADE TO THE BAR)
I am stuck with a monorail I can’t move because a voice asks for a coin; I’ve used one to pass through two stops (the second one was underground and dark) but the monorail won’t move any farther without another.
I suppose a reason b.) for being resistant to hints is that the map I’m stuck on is so small. It is possible I missed something earlier, but even including the dark area at the second monorail stop (where I already tried stumbling around, grabbing items off the ground I couldn’t see, etc.) I’m thoroughly scoured everything before this point.
My items available are
Beaker (full of oil): I already used to lubricate a lever in the monorail so it would move, but the beaker can be emptied and filled with another fluid (assuming one comes up).
Green key: Nothing locked yet.
Canister (made of lead) containing a glowing green stone: Radioactive! You die after holding the unshielded stone for enough turns but there isn’t a need I’ve found so far to ditch the container. It is possible the stone is intended as a light source (for the underground area) but I haven’t been able to move the monorail back to it.
Strange Device: Normally glows green, but as noted in the screenshot above, it glows red when radiation is near.
Chemicals: They explode when you MIX them. I haven’t been able to get any other result.
Plastic Rod: “Deadly fumes fill the air” when you BREAK it.
Plastic Card: “Seems to be magnetic.” I’ve tried using it to rescue the coin used earlier to move the monorail to be able to move it again, no luck with any verbs.
Laser Pistol: “There’s a small knob on it and 90 charges.” The knob sets it to overload and explode (you have enough time to drop and run away). You can shoot one of the robots at the construction site but then they all attack and kill you.
I’m still suspicious of the magnetic card, even though I’ve technically run through the entire verb list I’ve made. However, I’m also thinking there might be only one coin; the one I found is described as a “Small Token” as opposed to using some sort of color and COIN works as a synonym; for other items where there are multiples, the parser asks you explicitly to refer to the item by color (that includes, for example, the green key, even though there are no other keys nearby).
If the coin is irretrievable, that leaves either hacking the monorail with some other method, or even just moving on (perhaps at the construction site with the robots). I sincerely doubt the monorail is meant to be ignored now, though, as the “dark area” includes a two-room map; but maybe there’s a loop back to that area?
Going in a “wrong direction” leads to the player character falling and breaking their neck.
I’ve already shown a screenshot of what happens when you try to shoot a robot; if you try to blow them up by setting the laser pistol to explode nothing happens (you can’t throw the pistol at them like with the cube). They’re said to be building a nuclear reactor so possibly the stone will help “make friends” with them — although my efforts towards this so far have been for naught. Still, my intuition tells me the stone is just intended as a light source (meaning the timing of getting sick and dying leads to a timer for how long you can stay in the dark area).
I’m happy to take suggestions if you haven’t played before, but please no outright hints from anyone who has checked the solution (for now).
Here is the finale to William Demas’s very busy 1981 (see: Timequest, The Golden Voyage, Forbidden Planet), just squeaking in at the end.
From the January 1982 edition of 80 Micro. I’m considering the magazine lag time to be one month, and copyright on the game itself lists 1981.
Just like its predecessor, this one talks in its TRS-80 original incarnation, and the talking is absolutely terrible.
(If the audio player doesn’t show above, click here to listen. The sounds are “Welcome to Forbidden City”, “Password Please”, and “OK”. I cut off there, because the gameplay is followed by “OK” about 10 more times.)
Additionally, it also had a conversion to Macintosh several years later, under the name Futuria. I’ve having some emulation troubles with both the TRS-80 and Mac versions (can’t save my game in the former, can only play an online emulated version of the latter because Diskcopy on my virtual Mac doesn’t want to recognize the file) so I’m muddling my way through with both versions the best I can.
The action continues directly from the previous game, as (after crash landing on a planet) we arrive at a mysterious city. I assume the object is to find some sort of space vehicle and escape (although who knows, maybe we can become God of the Robots and settle down).
After some minor opening shenanigans involving a codeword to open the front door (“The Password is: 3 15 19 13 9 3”) and a long tunnel, you arrive in a city where the doors will kill you.
The map is pretty tight here; there’s just a few buildings, one guarded by a robot, and a monorail. The robot is unfortunately of the same type of enemy NPC in the previous game that attacks when a random roll hits, which means it can attack and kill you on sight (since you need to get by the robot once before taking it down, this means you can have “unwinnable” randomness).
Just past the robot is a cube with a red button that explodes on a timer.
I was stumped for a bit on the electrocuting doors until I tried “FEEL BEAM” with the beam of light just outside — this caused the door to open.
The steps are FEEL BEAM, ENTER DOOR. Don’t try to enter the door without using the beam first or you’ll die. This seems unnecessarily hazardous, but there might be some later backstory that explains why the doors are trying to kill you.
I managed to collect a BEAKER, CHEMICALS (that explode if you try to mix them)…
…a PLASTIC ROD (that lets out deadly gas if you break it), a STRANGE DEVICE (“It’s glowing / light / green”), a COIN, and some OIL from the exploded robot (into the beaker). I was able to use the coin in the monorail and the oil on a lever inside to get it to move. It eventually slowed down and stopped in a tunnel that was entirely dark.
I tried valiantly to get a light to come on, but failed; however, I missed the fact that the lever could be moved another time to get the monorail to another destination, this time outside of the tunnel.
Nearby the new monorail stop are a green key, a magnetic card, and a laser pistol just lying around, and some robots that appear to be building a nuclear reactor…
…but since the monorail asks for a coin to move it again, I’m stuck here. I do have some strong suspicions about what to try next but this felt like a good place to stop. I will say, despite the frustrating amounts of death (I’ve forgotten to open doors and subsequently died three times now) the design has been relatively smooth (I especially liked the obviousness of “just move the monorail past the dark place” which still took me a few beats to get), and the map is constrained enough I haven’t feel the despair of sprawl I sometimes do on these games.
Short update today, but any superfans (or just regular fans) of Alkemstone may enjoy
the new Google Sheet, linked here, with every image and theories placed next to them.
It’s everyone-can-edit so feel free to annotate to your heart’s content. I’ll go back sometime next week and squeeze in some of the older observations.
Casey Muratori (who made the interactive map last year) also has made a Github archive for Alkemstone.
I don’t want get too deeply into clue theories at the moment from the previous thread (there’s quite a few), but Christopher Drum’s observation that the Einstein statue has a star map is surely worth mentioning, and that it shows the stars at April 22, 1979 at noon — when the statue was dedicated. There are enough astrology references it feels relevant.
In fact, if you want to make a giant leap in the dark that is almost certainly wrong:
– start from April 22 (it is “just past winter” yet within Easter-range as hinted at other clues)
– go to the Washington Monument (which Andrew McCarthy observed is roughly a tenth of a mile high matching the DENVER/10 clue and acts like a sundial)
– wait for some particular time for the peak of the shadow to hit a particular spot
– search at the spot!
But what time? Noon won’t exactly work. The most obvious time reference is “TIME IS RELATIVE BUT SEVEN HOURS SHOULD BE ENOUGH” — seven hours starting from what time?
The search continues! (Also, I will be playing other games, and giving updates at intervals rather than just writing about Alkemstone.)
It has been a while since I’ve posted about the Apple II game Alkemstone (and some reading this might have arrived from elsewhere without seeing my previous posts) so a brief summary/recap:
Alkemstone was a game released in 1981 by the company Level-10 with a $5000 prize attached (later upped to $7500) where the titular “Alkemstone” was hidden somewhere in the real world, and the clues on where to find it were hidden inside the game. It was confirmed fairly recently by the lawyer in charge of certification that nobody has claimed the prize. The company that sponsored it is long defunct, and the object buried was not valuable in itself (you didn’t even need to extract it to get the prize, just explaining the location of the Alkemstone was enough), so solving the mystery is only of historical interest, but still — a 40 year old mystery nobody has cracked!
Last year I did a playthrough of the game, which involved running around a maze and finding clues that flashed at irregular intervals on the walls, ceiling, and floor. I managed to extract quite a few clues, but I knew (because someone on Mobygames found a clue I hadn’t) that there were still clues I was missing. I just didn’t know how many.
May I present to you:
To clarify, a reader (Andy Boroson) did some hacking at the game file itself and managed to extract the locations of the clues as well as a method of stopping the invisible-flashing-clue effect from happening. This led to him making a complete map…
… and the file of images above. They are given the numbers matching the map above; some of the sequential numbers clearly go together (even if they aren’t placed together on the map) so the numbers themselves may serve as a clue. There are 80 clues (84 listed, but one of them is blank, and likely removed some time during development; 3 are “special coded” to be findable at the same location, marked “00” on the map) and I managed previously to find about 3/4 of them, but some of the missing ones have what seem to be essential information, so it is quite possible it was not feasible to crack the mystery until now, the moment I post this.
The ZIP file preserves the screenshots in a complete fashion, so I’m going to survey them numerically and clip images together when possible. (That is, what shows up as separate clues I have merged into the same image, for compactness; again, if you need “clean” images, refer to the ZIP file.) Additionally, some of the text clues are stored as text, so I’ll just give those in text format.
Are you excited? I’m excited.
Just as a note ahead of time, the main guess/presumption based on the clues is that the treasure is hidden somewhere in Washington, DC. However, there is nothing I’d call certain confirmation on this. I will say it is near certain (based on a trio of clues I’ll get to last) that the treasure is in a public place somewhere, meaning it should be in an urban environment, not hidden in some random place in the wilderness.
When booting Alkemstone, this is the first thing visible upon entering the maze…
There’s no “hanging banners” style messages other than this one.
…which is certainly reminiscent of the Albert Einstein statue in Washington DC, which was finished just in time for it to be part of the game (1981).
#1 John F Kennedy
#2 Stonewall Jackson
#3 Zachary Taylor
The #1 and #3 clues are names of US Presidents, while the #2 clue is the name of a Confederate General. This suggests historical US sites rather than something dealing directly with the Presidency itself (like the numbers attached to each president).
#4 (on left)
#5 (on right)
Both suggesting wordplay, and #5 is new. There are multiple anagrams using the letters P, I, N, E, S so I’m not sure which one to prioritize, but I should point out the author’s previous game included an ambiguous anagram puzzle as well.
#6
Bruecke is “bridge” in German but rata isn’t anything in German, but maybe it is wordplay leading up to that. (The Rs being lined up is intentional.)
#7 What You Don’t Do To Go
#8 (written as a fraction) DENVER / 10
Again not sure, although I have suspicion #8 is referring to Denver being the “Mile High City”, that is, the clue refers to a 10th of a mile. I haven’t had luck with zipcode or the like.
#10 Calentadora de dedos del pie
#11 Wo Adler sich sammeln
#10 is “toe warmer” translated from Spanish. #11 is “where eagles gather” translated from German.
#12 JOB
#13 TESS
#14 MARIA
The one and only puzzle I’m certain we have the real solve for. Roger Durrant pointed out that both names appear in the song They Call the Wind Maria from the musical Paint Your Wagon.
A way out here they got a name for rain and wind and fire the rain is Tess the fire’s Joe and they call the wind Maria
“JOB” is a “typo” but it may have just been an honest mishearing. (I don’t think it’s a clue, but you never know.)
#15 144
I theorized long that this possibly references the fact that with 12 zodiac signs you can pair them with another 12 to get 144 angles (there’s zodiac symbols elsewhere). However, I haven’t found any confirmers to put this guess at high confidence.
I also pointed out the War Memorial in Washington DC had a 12-arrowed floor that could be interpreted in a zodiac direction sense.
#16-#22
All 7 images appear in roughly the same spot when drawn, so there may be some relation.
#23
Not quite in the same place as the previous clues, so might be distinct. Possibly hinting as to a time of year, that is, Easter (there are later references to this as well).
#24
Hinting a place with a famous speech? Or perhaps a current place (at least current for 1981) where speeches can be made.
#25 BLACK OR WHITE They Are All The Same To Me
This is where the internal number I think is helpful — it certainly seems likely #24 and #25 are related, perhaps referencing the I Have a Dream speech?
#26 Don’t Smell The Salt
#27 THOSE THAT SEEK TO FIND MUST FIRST SEEK TO PASS
#28 Seemanns-warnung
#26 might mean avoiding the ocean. #28 is “sailor’s warning” in German. I’m not sure if #27 is connected.
#29 The First To Recognize The Second
#30 For Us It Is Already Here
#31 Of All This One Is Equal
Not sure on any of these.
#32 WITH GIN YOU BEGIN THE END
More wordplay? I feel like there’s got to be word fragments being glued together at some point (“join” is a clue later).
#33 For the One You Seek The Two Are Known The Three Are There
Again not sure.
#34
The two theories I’ve heard are a.) the signature of TS Eliot and b.) (courtesy Casey Muratori) a metal access panel.
#35 My first is sixth My second is content Followed by the rest Finally a child could play
One of those riddles indicating letters in positions, perhaps, or word fragments being mashed together? I could see “the rest” being the literal “day of rest”, either “sat” or “sun” depending on your theology.
#36 -CIDE
Another word fragment clue. If it is the same as #35, is SLIDE (“a child could play”) somehow tweaked to be CIDE?
#37 join
Again, internal numbering adds some information; this probably refers to #35 and #36, at least.
#38 Coat Of Blue
Possibly the Civil War song.
#39
Look between the pillars?
#40 ONU
Another word fragment?
#41 To Start Anew
Feels very crossword-clue to me.
#42
Bees tend to be popular in rebuses for the sound “-be-” getting put somewhere.
#43 Don’t Go When Winter Blow
#44 Warmer Than Others
Referring back to the potential Easter clue, this might refer to a time of year. Easter has to (no matter the year) land after winter. This also might be simply fitting in with rebus logic somehow (the fragment “apr”, for instance).
#45
Redundancy with the child playing clue?
#46 GPI
#47 FTN
#48 pnijure
#49 BUSH
Not sure.
#50
I’ve played with this one quite a bit (add the numbers on top, then divide, subtract then divide, etc.) without much luck.
#51 Nothing Runs Like A Deer / And It Is A Beaut
The “Nothing Runs Like a Deere” slogan has been around since 1972 for the company John Deere, but I don’t know if the intent here is a pun or something else.
#52 It’s Best To Rest
Another resting reference.
#53
A word ladder? Don’t know what clue this indicates, though.
#54
#55, #56
The best I could come up with here is a reference to the Battle of Wounded Knee, but I have no idea what that would indicate.
#57, #58
Is the first picture of a train or something else?
#59 It’s Not Right
#60 The road is clear But you may have to leave it To find your way
Is this referring to directions at the actual site, or literal wordplay still?
#61 KAMM
#62 CIBURA
More word fragments, perhaps?
#63 Don’t Tread On Me
Another American History reference? All four words are written on separate lines so it could be the initial letters DTOM.
#64, #65
5 is the base? Don’t know what the deal is with those parallel lines on the 5 then, if that’s the case.
#66 This Is Almost The Age of AQUARIUS
Another day of the year reference?
#67 TIME IS RELATIVE BUT SEVEN HOURS SHOULD BE ENOUGH
#68 THAT WHICH GOES DOWN / MUST COME UP
#69 follow your nose / where taylor goes / but not too far / you’ll find a scar
The last clue may refer to some specific site involving Zachary Taylor, although it is unclear what.
#70 ONE SHOULD BE TEMPORATE IN ALL THINGS
This might intentionally be related to time rather than a misspelling of temperate.
#71 Wherever You May Roam There Is No Place Like Home
#72 a billion stars may show you the way
These (plus clue #81) might reference specific museums in Washington DC. The ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz are at the National Museum of American History, the stars might refer to Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory (or that might just be another astrology reference so the clue goes with #66 etc. instead).
#73 Large And Small – Can’t See Them At All
#74 THE SUN ALWAYS RISES / THE SUN ALWAYS SETS
#75 WHOLE BUT NOT COMPLETE
#76 DO NOT OVERLOOK ANYTHING
#77 After Awhile We All Pay The Price
#78 MIDDLE AGE IS THAT TIME WHEN THE BROAD MIND AND THE NARROW WAIST TRADE PLACES
#79 THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY MAY BE OF VALUE
#80 97914
#81 If You Want A Scene / Holocene and Pleistocene Might Do
#81 might be the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
Finally, not with regular numbering, there are three clues in the same dead end (corresponding to the three walls). I’ll give the pictures this time:
Due to the status in the game, I suspect this is a meta-clue showing the structure of what is being solved for “Where I Live” is one set of clues, “Be Upon” is a second set, “A Thought of You” is a third set, and “How Far I May Go” is a fourth. All this is still guesswork, though.
While the “watch them play” feels most likely a park, it is possible this refers instead to “play” as in music; either way, not wilderness? (Although maybe you could stretch with a particular named rock monument.)
I’ve skipped some speculation from my previous posts, so if you’re looking for more inspiration, feel free to read those as well as the comments which include some more ideas. It’s fair to say the puzzle is still wide open at this point.
ADD: I put everything into a Google Sheet. It has all the images in miniature and a place to enter speculation.
Well, I held up some dignity.
As usual for my end game posts: spoilers for absolutely everything, and you’ll want to have read the rest of the series first.
Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I figured out two cheeses that were very important.
1.) Normally, if you save your game immediately before going into a room talking to the Oracle, you will always get the same piece of information. However, if you do an extra turn (going in an impossible direction, for instance) the random generator will “rotate” and the Oracle will give a different clue. You can repeat this process (restore save, run into a wall twice, go east, talk to oracle; restore save, run into a wall three times, go east, talk to oracle; etc.) in order to eventually pump the Oracle for all the possible hints. On the saved game I was using as my “final run” (no particular logic, I just decided enough was enough) I managed to extract these relations:
powerring: belrog
truthring: lightring and flute and akhirom
shield: dagger
lightring: powerring and rope and nergal
vial: talisman and mitra
skull: okkan
sword: rope
defeat satyr: sword and negral
defeat troglodyte: spellbook and crom
defeat sprite: skull and powerring
defeat minotaur: sword and shield and powerring
defeat scorpion: talisman and powerring
defeat nymph: flute and okkan
(The one monster I never saw a hint on was the nine-headed hydra, but it has its own special circumstances.)
Some of them cause dependency chains; for example, you can’t get the truthring without the lightring, flute, and akhirom spell; you can’t get the lightring in order to get the truthring without the powerring, rope, and nergal spell, and so forth. (Nergal isn’t an item, but a spell — that explains away my confusion last time, since it’s just a magic word and not a noun.) It would have been utterly impractical to play without the list above.
2.) Perhaps even more important than #1, the earthquakes that happen at random and block exits do happen based on time passing, but they are not inevitable. That is, there is some random chance at minute X that an earthquake will occur, and if you get unlucky, you can restore a save game from far enough back and find the next time minute X passes there is a different result (that is, no earthquake).
Despite a few workarounds (the powerring lets you just plow through blocked exits, for instance, and the spell CROM clears them out but it takes a while to get) this was the key that made the game playable. It is possible (as Voltgloss indicated in a rot13 hint) to “wait out” a blocked exit (they eventually “rotate” places based on further earthquakes), but the end result is often followed by yet another blocked exit immediately after, and it becomes too hard to track monsters that move around (and in the early part of the game, items can move around as well as long as the sprite is still alive).
Even with these extra edges to my game, playing was very difficult and intense. The main issue is that inventory capacity is very tight; in practical circumstances you can carry at most three items, but sometimes even two or one. Inventory is especially hard to juggle when a JUMP or just climbing up a staircase is necessary. For example, to get to the “escape room” where treasures are stored, you just need to go UP from the very first room of the game. I found a ruby out in the open, and carrying the ruby and only the ruby, I wasn’t able to make it up the stairs! I had to make a full loop around — as I mentioned last time, there’s a pit in the bottom floor that will go to the right place. Even then, the JUMP at the end to the last location can be unsuccessful!
To make progress, the first thing I did was go after spells. I did, finally, manage to get the mushroom and food together after great effort. (Remember, this first step isn’t mentioned in the original manual, only the one for the Dragon! I’m not sure how anyone back in the day made any progress.)
Fortunately, as shown above, you get a “thread” to follow for all subsequent spells. To “activate” each spell requires bringing an item to a particular room and the previous spell; the rooms are all described as “crackling with magic” and are spread across the map almost entirely at random.
Green-marked places crackle with magic. I think it is always 1 room on the first floor, 3 on the second, and 4 on the third floor.
Getting to each step was essentially like solving a logistics puzzle. For example, Nergal requires a vial. The vial needed a talisman to get (and a previous spell I already had, Mitra) so I had to loop around, get the talisman, then take the talisman to the place I knew the vial was lurking (the minotaur lair) which only had one way out, down to the maze level. Then I tried to jump from the maze to the first floor, but I kept dropping the vial in the process. I ended up not quite having enough strength (it’s a depleting resource; it can be reduced by getting hit by monsters, failing jumps, and casting spells) so I had to leave the vial behind, grab some food, and loop back and keep my fingers crossed I could handle getting the vial to the first floor.
Once I finally managed it, I wasn’t done yet! I had been eliminating “magical crackling” rooms (only one spell per room), but I still needed to figure out the right one to take the vial to.
Up to here the spells had been, in order, VETAN, MITRA, OKKAN, AKHIROM, NERGAL. I hadn’t gotten any of them to do anything yet! (I figured it out later, and they’re mostly very specialized.) However, BELROG (as obtained in the screenshot above) turned out to be intensely handy, because it forced a jump into working. This meant all the spots I had trouble navigating because I would drop an object trying to go in a particular pit or over a particular chasm I could just spell my way over.
Quick example: this portion on the northeast corner of the third floor map is only reachable by jumping over a pit, but the pit was such that I couldn’t jump over with nearly anything in my inventory. So I would have one essential item but be stuck in getting it to that area. With BELROG I could get it over no problem. The only downside is it eats up health.
BELROG made the actions after go a bit smoother. I managed to get CROM and then finally ISTHAR without too much trouble after. Despite me looking forward to CROM because of the earthquake issue (remember, CROM clears blocked passages) I ended up not needing it because of Cheese #2! ISTHAR, on the other hand, originally gave me a surge of joy — it teleported me directly to the forest where all the treasures go! But it stopped working, and I found it later it only gives a couple uses before being entirely gone (the spell does not “regenerate”).
Still, after ISTHAR, I had the full set of 8 spells, and each spell gave me 10 points, so I already had much more progress than from the 0 I had before. Next I wanted to take down the monsters; each of the monsters (except one, which I’ll get to) had a treasure, so I knew I had to take them down. I figured, even if I made no more progress, I couldn’t leave a game called Madness and the Minotaur without killing the minotaur.
I wanted to go after the sprite first, so I didn’t have to be paranoid about items being shifted around the map any more. (In practice, it didn’t happen much, I think because I was very tight and efficient as far as saved games go due to avoiding earthquakes.) This required getting the skull and powerring, both which fortunately only required spells to be in inventory (so I didn’t have to juggle the “required item tree”).
The treasure dropped lands in an adjacent room.
I wanted to tackle the nymph next, but the nymph required (in my iteration of the game) a flute, and the flute was in the room with the nine-headed hydra, and the hydra is unique amongst the monsters for pushing you out of the room when you try to enter. So I tried valiantly to handle the hydra (given I had no oracle hint) but failed enough to look up hints; there’s a fixed solution here.
That is, you’re supposed to use an action on a noun that is not present in the room the action is done in. This breaks one of the implicit adventure rules pretty hard, but given how tough everything else was, I couldn’t be disappointed.
Once I tied the hydra up I could go in, but even the walkthrough I consulted had me confused; it indicated you could STAB with the DAGGER, but that was unrecognized. Using the sword was futile, as shown above. I eventually resorted to trying every spell (I remembered the manual saying one of the spells could defeat monsters) and hit paydirt.
The NOTHING SPECIAL HAPPENS is a bug — that’s what the spell normally does, and the fact it worked here didn’t override the text.
The most difficult monster after was the minotaur. This was because three items were required (sword, shield, powerring) and remember the weight limit is extremely tight. I essentially had to max out to full health (with a mushroom) and race as fast as I could with the three items to the right spot. I failed the first time (an item gets automatically dropped when your strength no longer sustains your inventory) but managed it the second by optimizing my movements even tighter:
For my last monster, I was stuck longer than I should have been. I saved the satyr for last, which the oracle reported I needed the sword and negral spell for.
I baffled for a long time before realizing I had, in fact, killed the satyr — that’s the message when a monster doesn’t have an item. One of the six randomized ones (not including the hydra) has no treasure, so the satyr was skippable on the map I was playing. (I was fooled for a while thinking the Oracle was lying to me — the manual hinted that could be the case — but the Oracle can’t lie. I’m guessing it was a cut feature, since the truthring is an item that exists but does nothing mechanically in the game.)
So the next step would normally be to go find all the treasures … but I’m honestly fine stopping here. I’ve got a little loot (shown above), I’ve eliminated the threats, I got a full bevy of spells. I think I can call the expedition a success.
I did look up some of the treasures, and there is a little puzzle-solving involved. Unfortunately, the brutal inventory limit makes it very hard to experiment, and find things like:
- there’s a parchment with music, and a flute; if you take them to a room where you hear “music” on the maze level, and play the flute, a ledge appears; with the rope you can get a treasure from the ledge
- there’s a packrat with an item that it will give you if you are holding some other specific item; the specific item it wants you to be holding is randomized
- there are two openable “crypts” that require all items dropped and the player to be at full strength, although one you can use for a powerring for (not the other!)
- there’s an item in a random spot in the first level that can be found by turning the lamp on in a particular room (!?)
- there’s some glowing rocks where an amulet appears if you cast OKKAN, which is used nowhere else (I solved this one, but never bothered to get the amulet on my “final save”)
Despite — or perhaps because of — the majority of the game being dominated by logistics — figuring out which route to get to the next item, juggling inventory, keeping enough saves to handle if an earthquake happens — this was distressing to play in a unique way, like the game came from an alien world with different ideas about “entertainment”. Oddly, the game can be forgiving in certain aspects; the food, for example, randomly appears somewhere else after you eat it, so you never “run out”; the lantern has a pretty forgiving oil timer, plus there’s an URN with extra oil and after you get the last spell POOLS OF OIL start randomly appearing (and if you use one up, another randomly shows up elsewhere). So the game tried hard to be “fair”. It also made every effort to make the mere act of traversing the map painful, and over half of my expeditions ended in failure as I couldn’t make it over a pit, or an item I expected to be able to take got stuck, or I just simply got confused in the maze.
In a design sense, the prominent question is: did any of the randomization work?
1D4D: 1A ; TROGLODYTE
1D4E: 45 0B 38 80 ; AX, SCEPTER, MITRA
1D52: 23 7D 80 ; SPELLBOOK, CROM
1D55: 43 07 3B FF ; DAGGER, SHIELD, NERGAL
1D59: 1D ; SATYR
1D5A: 46 3B 80 ; SWORD, NERGAL
1D5D: 44 2B 38 80 ; MACE, LIGHTRING, MITRA
1D61: 23 77 FF ; SPELLBOOK, VETAR
1D64: 1E ; MINOTAUR
1D65: 46 07 2A 80 ; SWORD, SHIELD, POWERRING
1D69: 44 0F 0B 38 80 ; MACE, VIAL, SCEPTER, MITRA
1D6E: 45 3B FF ; AX, NERGAL
The above is clipped from the source code. This indicates the different combinations possible for different monsters, and it does seriously change some of the sequences — just needing the ax and nergal spell for the minotaur would have meant I could kill him relatively early in the game, for instance, and not have to finesse with great difficulty in order to carry three items at once.
However, the randomization essentially set a “strategy game” background, as the “adventure game” parts — like the layout of the map itself, and some of the puzzles — were fixed. The overwhelming difficulty of the game makes it hard for me to evaluate how successful it really was. I could see with some nudges to a lighter difficulty the system being more successful. There’s at least one more chance to try out the idea, as there was a follow-up game to Madness and the Minotaur. Quoting John Gabbard again (I quoted him back at my first post):
The first program I wrote for Spectral was Keys of the Wizard. I use the term “wrote” very loosely, because the underlying code was from Madness and the Minotaur and most of the “writing” I did was in the form of map changes, dictionary changes and room descriptions changes. There were a few code changes and additions that changed the way battling creatures worked, and that gave a few of the creatures the ability to “catch your scent” and follow you, but it was mostly Madness code.
So, we’ll see if Keys of the Wizard holds any redemption for the ideas. I can say personally this game made for a weary week and I’m glad for the time being to put myself to more traditional pastures.
Renga in Blue 