Archive for the ‘Interactive Fiction’ Category
IN A TURN OF EVENTS:
We found a rope and used it to climb a deep pit leading to a misty lake underground.
Using the nearby raft, we found a clam with a pearl in the middle of the lake.
You are in the middle of Misty Lake. A strange glow emanates from the bottom of the lake. You turn off your light and notice an enormous, bright pearl nestling inside a gigantic clam. The clam is at the bottom of the lake, in only ten feet of water.
Exploring our surroundings, we also found a room full of ice.
Mysteriously, ice forms very quickly in this chamber, encapsulating anything left there for too long. There is so much ice that you can’t even get into the room; however, you see an exit on the other side of the chamber.
We disposed of with the ice in a radical fashion via bomb-hurling…
… and then returned to the clam, for some clam-to-knife combat action.
The clam put up a fight, but we slew it in two hits, averting the danger!
(Seriously, there was danger – in my test runs of this game I only won 1 out of 8 times. The amount of damage from the knife wounds was very high this time.)
In any case, after a bit of shuffling, we have grabbed the lamp (treasure #1 out of 4!) and pearl (treasure #2 out of 4!). While nobody said so, I’m going to guess we’re interested in what’s beyond the ice room.
A magnificently decorated chamber with crystaline designs and intricate rock formations. A narrow, fast moving river flows through the hub room.
Oh no, a ghost! What do you want to do next? (Just write a comment! Anyone can join in!)
Verb list:
Current map (circles indicate places we’ve been, the arrow indicates where we are):
I was frankly excited about getting to this game — another in the Interactive Fiction series of Robert Lafore — because the other work from the series I played (Local Call for Death) is legitimately excellent to the extent I’d put it in my Favorite Adventures List Of All Time, not even restricting to just the 1970s.
Alas, Two Heads of the Coin was somewhat a letdown. Somewhat.
It casts you as a Sherlock Holmes look-a-like, and is pretty explicit that “you” are in the game. You are accompanied by Dr. Watson — er, Dr. Grimsby.
In classic Sherlock fashion, a late visitor comes looking for help, and you (faux-Sherlock) have a conversation trying to pry open the truth. Just like Lafore’s other works, you are supposed to hold a conversation while using proper grammar and so forth although in reality the game is checking for key words.
Unlike a real Sherlock Holmes story, there is no investigating; there’s just the conversation. The visitor, Mr Conway, wants you to investigate the disappearance of his wife.
Unfortunately, a bit of flailing is more or less inevitable here; the conversation starts off fairly solid, but as soon as obvious “key words” run out it becomes very hard to pull out facts. You can ask Dr. Grimsby for help; he does a jab at your investigative skills and then comes up with a question that hasn’t been asked yet.
Local Call for Death didn’t have as much an issue, because it had three phases: 1.) an opening plot sequence where you could do minor role-playing and also see relevant clues 2.) a sequence where you search through a room for evidence and 3.) a conversation where you cause the guilty party to crack; it’s possible during the conversation to swap back to searching the room for more evidence. Since the conversation was focused mainly on objects seen and events experienced I didn’t experience a lot of confusion as to what to say next.
Referring back to Two Heads of the Coin, while the mystery itself was decent, the structure of only having a conversation (rather than getting to go and do a physical investigation) just didn’t hold that tight an experience. (Star Trek: The Next Generation fans might remember the episode where Data talks with the suspect a little and then reveals the entire plot — that’s a little how this felt.)
As a last nitpick, this game’s conceit that “you” are in the game actually made for weakened presentation. When Grimsby gets increasingly insulting, it would be fine if it was some other character (ex: “whoops, I guess Holmes had a little too much opium”) but since he is insulting you for essentially not being able to read the game creator’s mind … the experience is just a little grating. It’s equivalent to “command fail” responses in a traditional parser being mocking rather than understanding.
Having said all that, I did manage to work out the mystery without being prompted, and I felt the ending was satisfying. So if you tried Local Call for Death and are still hankering for conversation-based gameplay, it’s certainly still worth a go.
Lafore manages to fit in some social commentary, here; Mr Conway’s cluelessness fits into the plot.
THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES:
After finding a bomb, our interpid explorer comes across a deep pit.
Our hero, with an apparent death wish, decides to blow up the bomb here, sealing off the cave and eventually dying of thirst.
FIN
Meanwhile …
With much trepidation, our hero enters the dreaded MAZE.
You lose your sense of direction because twisting passages are coming and going at all points of the compass.
Following Standard Adventurer Protocol, the adventurer drops a tent in the room in order to keep track of directions. Proceeding NORTH just goes in a loop, but proceeding EAST leads to something new!
What appears to be a petrified river bed slopes gently upward leading toward the west. It has a low, four-foot ceiling.
At this point, our adventurer decides to blow the bomb up again. Rocks rain from overhead and the cave shakes. However, the frozen river remains frozen.
What would you like to do next?
(Places we have been marked in green.)
It’s time for a action summary!
Our hero, the unnamed adventurer, arrived at the Devils’ Delve in Kentucky. After surveying their surroundings and taking a light, tent, and knife, the adventurer hopped back in their truck and drove home.
The End.
… and in an alternate timeline …
The adventurer found a thirsty tree, and from a river outside brought in some water. After some confusion, the tree yielded an apple.
In a thoughtful mood, our adventurer decided for no apparent reason to return to the mouth of the cave and then stab themselves to death.
The End.
… and in another timeline …
Moving on further south, the adventurer found a room with cryptic characters that spelled out “THE SPIRITS OF THE FRUIT.” There was a bomb there, which the adventurer then set off, causing part of the cave to collapse, sealing themselves from civilization forever.
The End.
… and in yet another timeline …
After a brief amount of exploring, the adventurer paused for a moment to taste a bite of the apple in front of the cryptic wall. It was delicious, but no secret doors or other obvious effects revealed themselves.
Now, what do you do next?
Protocol: Just reply to this message what you want to do next. Follow along in the replies for responses!
To recap: I found an obscure, probably-only-ever-played-by-a-literal-handful-of-people game in the October 1979 issue of the magazine Micro. Partly due to it being printed in a magazine, it’s meant to be played with a “guide” who reads the location descriptions printed therein.
We’re going to do a little experiment where you, yes, you the readers, get to play. I’m going to consider the map off the cover to be fair game:
as well as this verb list:
Opening screen:
As the guide, I can also say:
You are at the mouth of a large cavern. The sides of the entrance slope steeply upward, and a mysterious passage leads west into the cave.
There is a KNIFE, TENT, TRUCK, and LIGHT here.
GAMEPLAY PROTOCOL:
1. Post a comment with one or more parser commands you’d like to do.
2. After a unspecified amount of time I will take all the commands and try to put them in some sort of sensible sequence. If one player wants to pick something up and the other wants to move to a different room, I will sequence the item-picking first.
3. If two commands are contradictory, but one commands has been “voted on” more than the other, I will go with the majority. If there is a tie (say one person wants to go west and the other person east), I will flip a coin.
4. I will be posting future screens / room descriptions / responses to this post until it gets somewhat full, then making a new one which summarizes the action and keeps things going. Also, I’m going to use “guide discretion” and may occasionally give responses not provided by the Apple II program, but I will specify when it’s the computer and when it’s me.
Good luck! You’re welcome to plan/discuss in addition to just giving parser commands.
For reasons unrelated to this project I was browsing 1979 issues of the Apple II magazine Micro and happened upon this one from October:
Here’s a link to the issue in question.
Thomas R. Mimlitch’s Spelunker is not the very first type-in parser adventure (that honor goes to Dog Star Adventure) but I’m guessing it’s the second? (I’m excluding Quest — which appeared in a July magazine — because it doesn’t have a parser.) In any case, this game is so wildly obscure that I’ll be impressed if someone can post a personal story of having tried this before.
Fortunately, the program was featured on a compilation disk (Micro Apple 1) so I don’t have to type in the type-in. However, there’s another catch which you’ll learn about shortly.
Imagine if when computer games were invented the idea of a “stand-alone” game was unknown, and the computer was more of an aid or companion to play:
This is an adventure fantasy series in which you become directly involved in exploration of a mysterious cavern in southwest Kentucky called Devils’ Delve. If you have never played before, you should take a guide along. The guide will read the chamber descriptions as you enter each room for the first time. He can also supply some hints and clues to help you when you are stuck. Only the guide should use the room descriptions, word lists, and the map of the caverns.
Just to be clear:
a.) It’s an adventure game with an inventory and puzzles and map and so forth. However …
b.) All the room descriptions are inside the magazine, rather than the source code. Furthermore …
c.) The room descriptions are supposed to be read by the “guide”, analogous to the Dungeon Master of Dungeons & Dragons. While the room descriptions are numbered, the numbers are not given in the game itself, forcing the guide to check against a table. Not only are the room descriptions not shown in the computer, but the visible objects aren’t shown either; they have to be listed by the guide, again by cross-referencing off a table.
There are four things in this room, three which you can pick up, and they all have to be described by the guide. Update below!
UPDATE: Well, there was a bug in the code from the compilation I found! The line 9320 reads
9320 IF (STA(1) MOD 100)#LOC THEN 9360
but it’s supposed to say
9320 IF (STA(I) MOD 100)#LOC THEN 9360
After changing it appropriately, objects show up in the room description, huzzah! However, the room descriptions themselves are still printed in the magazine only.
In any case, I can’t really “play” this game without help. Also, in order to set things up / check the code’s sanity / realize what was going on I had to spoil a large chunk of content. So I think the most appropriate course of action is for me to be the Guide, and for some of you — yes, I’m speaking to you, the readers — to be the players.
So, quick survey: if you’d be interesting in playing, make a comment to this post. Also let me know which option you’d prefer:
Option 1: We could play-by-post where people put their parser commands into the comments and I provide the screenshots and guide commentary.
Option 2: We could play live. It would likely be sometime during the weekend of March 25th-26th; I would stream the game on Twitch, and y’all could type parser commands in chat.
ADD: We went with option 1. The play-by-post starts here.
We last saw Lance Micklus in Treasure Hunt (1978) which was only sort-of what we’d recognize as an adventure game. This one is a clear Adventure-based game including a parser with the distinction that it is the first of its kind printed in a magazine: the May 1979 issue of SoftSide.
To be clear, this was a “type-in”, meaning it was intended that to play the game you’d have to first type in the source code. I used to do this all the time. When I was young (7 or 8 or so) I spent weeks typing in an adventure game from a book (this one, maybe) but somehow the source code was too large and the entire disk crashed as I was putting in the last lines. I was disconsolate and crying. My mother, being sympathetic, bought me a copy of Zork 1. This was my first Infocom game.
When typing an adventure it tends to be obvious in the process of typing what all the puzzle solutions are. Fortunately, Dog Star Adventure later got published under the Adventures International “Other Ventures” line, and there are plenty of copies besides (8 versions, at least). I do predict at some point in the future I will have type in a type-in, but not today.
Let’s quote the plot directly from the ad copy:
The evil General Doom and his Roche Soldiers are preparing to launch an attack against the forces of freedom led by the beautiful Princess Leya. The Princess has been captured by Doom — and it’s up to you to pull of a daring rescue and save her and the royal treasury!
It’s not even trying to disguise its Star Wars origins, although science fiction adventures are still rare for this time period. Also note, even with a plot that really doesn’t demand it, there’s still a treasure hunt tossed in (at least if it’s the royal treasury you’re not trying to steal it for yourself, right?)
I ended up playing the commercial port; if you really want the classic type-in experience (complete with having to fix a typo in the source code) check out Jimmy Maher’s playthrough. Early on, there is a very significant gameplay difference:
The original supply room just states it has “all kinds of things” and you are literally supposed to just guess what the room contains, and then try to take it. I would call this “breathtakingly unfair”, even compared with games that actively strive to be unfair.
You can’t get that far without the supply room either. There’s no dark rooms, so no time limit as far as a limited light source goes; however, every once in a while a security guard will pop up (in some versions you can call them “stormtroopers”) …
… which you can take down with the blaster from the supply room. The blaster has a limited number of shots (and can only be refilled once, with the ammo that’s also in the supply room).
The game is otherwise fairly straightforward as far as puzzles go; you grab stuff mostly in the open and cart it back to the ship. At two points you need to use “key words” found elsewhere in the game (SECURITY to get into a vault and SESAME to open the space station doors). There’s also an infamous puzzle involving a hamburger:
Much to my own surprise, I figured out what to do with it. There’s an attack robot you find later, who is … hungry? Clearly instead of activating the clones in Star Wars Episode 2 to stop the droid army, the Republic needed to cook up some fast food.
Also of note: if you wait too long the hamburger will get cold, and the attack robot won’t take your offering; it’s game over. This happened to me the first time I played.
In any case, the game ends by the player collecting as many treasures as possible (including Princess Leya, who you pick up like any other item), and then launching the ship to escape. Due to the primary tasks of rescue and escape you don’t need all the treasures to get a “win”, which I found to be a nice design finesse. For games that are pure treasure hunts, this often doesn’t come across as an option.
I still can’t recommend this one for modern players. The puzzles are either too hard (hamburger, original supply room) or too easy (most everything else) and the experience of making it to the end felt more grinding than insightful. Still, it is surely important in being the first readily available source code to people who wanted to write their own adventures. I am curious: does anyone know of any works in particular that specifically mention they were based off the Dog Star source?
ADDENDUM:
Just for historical reference, Dog Star’s first started being sold a month earlier than the May issue mentioned above. Here is a page from the April 1979 issue of Softside:
It also is listed on page 41 as a “new arrival”.
Two years ago I blogged about lost mainframe games, including this one:
LORD (1981, Olli J. Paavola)
I’ve got dual interest in this one, not only from it being a mainframe game from Finland (it was written while Olli was at the Helsinki University of Technology) but also for being allegedly the first interactive fiction book adaptation.
…
With 550 separate locations, this game is huge by most standards. It does not really try to be completely consistent with Tolkien but mixes elements from many other sources. It is clear, however, that it is made with a great love for and knowledge of Tolkien’s books.
I got a couple emails (by both Anthony Hope who helped unearth Wander, and the journalist Jukka O. Kauppinen) letting me know that the source has been found (by Mr. Paavola himself) and is currently at exhibit and playable at the Finnish Museum of Games.
Unfortunately, playing it means physically being in Finland; there’s no general release. Anyone in that neck of the woods?
The museum has on display one more text adventure I’d never heard of before — Aikaetsivä! (1986) by Jukka Tapanimäki:
All the entries are nestled safely at the Interactive Fiction Database.
Please check yours for edits you’d like to make / cover art you’d like to add / errors you’d like to fix where I put 1878 rather than 2016 as the year / etc.
Joel Mick is another young entrepeneur, like Greg Hassett or the trio of Viggo Eriksson, Kimmo Eriksson and Olle Johansson. In all these cases (including Joel himself) the authors were about 13 when they started.
I do wonder if I missed my fame/fortune window by being born 10 years too late. I wrote Night of the Vampire Bunnies at roughly the same age, but by 1990 the market for slightly dodgy text adventures in BASIC was long closed. It’s currently 2 1/2 stars on IFDB, which might be a little overrated, but it’s still much better than Burial Ground Adventure.
1.) Just like many other games from the era, there is no plot: your only objective is to collect treasures. Also unfortunately like some other games of the era, the setting is pretty random: you’re on an island that happens to have a catacomb and a house with treasure. The house, of course, must include every room possible:
2.) There’s a “pit” you fall into and can’t get out without the right item. This is par for the course for the era, but things ratchet up a level in that even when you *do* have the correct item, it’s difficult to figure out how to use it:
What I think Mr. Mick was running into was the adventure game problem I call “implicit action”. He really seemed to visualize: a.) forming a lasso with the rope b.) throwing the looped end of the rope and c.) catching it on a rock which is not described anywhere in the room. The actions needed to be boiled down to a single two word command (having an intermediate state would have been more complex than the coding here could handle) so he went with THROW ROPE which is puzzling on its own. If you imagine the literal action, it’s just throwing the entire rope; you have to have the other parts to it for the command to make sense.
3.) A portion later suffers the same problem, even worse.
This time I confess to checking Dale Dobson’s walkthrough, but he admits he had to check the source code himself, so it’s faintly possible nobody in the world other than the author figured out this puzzle without help.
Again, implicit action seems to be to blame, although in a different sense. The author seemed to have in mind raising the trapdoor by pushing it up with the bamboo, but couldn’t figure out how to express it in a two word parser. He could have gone the route of PUSH DOOR working as long as the bamboo was in the inventory, but that would allow the implicit action of utilizing the bamboo to do it. This would lead to a puzzle likely being solved without the insight, so he settled on the nonsensical PUSH BAMBOO instead.
So in first case, the puzzle was confusing because it allowed the implicit action; in the second case, it was confusing because it disallowed the implicit action. Implicit action still bedevils adventure games to this day, where in games that involve a single-click interface the character does some action that turns out to be useful but never actually occurred to me until the game did it for me.
4.) After obtaining a key by feeding two types of meat to some dogs, you can break into the catacombs which I presume are the “burial grounds” of the title. The catacombs are connected to a maze which in several directions will inexplicably drop you in the upper rooms of the house. This is an easy contender for the most nonsense piece of geography I’ve seen in an adventure.
I guess we’ll just say it’s “magic”, right?
There are two elements that I found interesting and different, so I’ll switch from numbering to lettering:
a.) There’s not only a gun object, but ammunition you can find later; when taking the ammunition the gun will automatically be loaded. However, the gun is a complete and utter red herring. You can attempt to use them on the previously mentioned dogs (the ones you feed meat to) but things don’t turn out well.
This suggests both a game design finesse (having a weapon be useless really is a nice red herring) and possibly some sort of social commentary on violence.
b.) Right before the catacomb, there’s a dark room. The only light source is a match, but the source lasts very briefly.
There is way to “see” the room, but it turns out to be totally unnecessary. While I’ve played text adventures while fumbling in the dark that mostly due to trying to preserve battery life; here there is a room that is meant to *never* be seen, which makes for a nice moment.
So here, again, I find a common experience for this project: authors still fumbling with a new art form, with faint glimmers of possibility. Did I really need more than that?
Renga in Blue 