I never got any farther based the skeletons than I did last time, but I did scoot by to scout out the rest of the map and the remaining two ruins. My presumption that this is gamebook-style structure is holding out; it is very clear for reasons you’ll see that the ruins need to be done in order, and there is at least one “self-contained” road encounter which could come straight out of a Fighting Fantasy book. Just to give the basic map the game gives again first…
…followed by my own map, where I have squished the ruins into single rooms.
For out-on-the-road encounters, a straightforward early one (if you just head west) on the very first road has a hut with woman who asks for food and gives a flute in exchange. Straightforward as we start the game with food.
This is mid-animation of the woman disappearing.
Nearby there’s an idol with a head removed. You can pick up the head, put it back on, and have a jaguar walk away. Again, really a set piece rather than a puzzle (I haven’t seen the up-shot yet).
This is animated.
Then, City of Thieves style, a man somehow knows I am suffering under a curse, and offers to trade a cure.
This is set up to feel nominally like a puzzle as you GIVE every item in your inventory; the one the man wants is your REVOLVER.
This sort of encounter is not common in adventure games; it is, again, a set-piece, and it is very easy to back out and ignore the man on a re-try. It suggests, yet again, a different philosophical approach to writing the game (at least for the road parts). It is of course possible the scene of getting ripped off is needed for some later scene, but this game doesn’t give me that sort of vibe.
No puzzle even here: you just drive by faster and don’t even have the encounter (I have the feeling I’ll be meeting them after finishing with the second ruin).
Speaking of the second ruin, when entering you get an encounter with a creature who has been kept immortal and gives you a hint about using three bowls (jade, silver, gold) to get through the upcoming obstacles. I only have two out of the three, but it is nice the structure here is so explicit that Ruin 1 leads to Ruin 2.
Immediately after this you are blind in a room with toxic gas. I assume the jade bowl helps somehow but I have yet to puzzle out what to do (it might even be the missing silver bowl I have to use first, so I haven’t been trying too hard yet).
The third ruin can also be reached straightaway, and you can walk around a little, but you are stymied in all directions by doors that need keys. It seems nearly certain that Ruin 2 has the keys to get into Ruin 3 and make it to the end of the game.
I am perfectly happy to get spoilers on the boulder and/or skeletons in the first ruin, although please use ROT13.
Anson says that the company has defined 115 distinct tasks involved in putting out an adventure, and many of those tasks involve creating and refining a story. Everything is planned; frequent meetings are integral to every step of the production. Ideas for the plot of the game, the characters, the puzzles— all are tossed around at these bull sessions.
The manual for Mask of the Sun from the later Brøderbund printing, via the Internet Archive.
So before getting back into the gameplay, I wanted to discuss the game’s parser, which I hinted last time left something to be desired. The Softline article I quoted last time certainly tries to pump it up:
Ultrasoft’s parser is based on concepts of artificial intelligence. In any given message, it eliminates words that don’t make sense and attempts to make sense out of words that are relevant to the situation. This method frees the player from the verb-noun format of the typical adventure’s input. Consider: If you’re in a room with two men, one old and one young, in an adventure with a two-word parser, you might have to make several tries before finding the correct verb-and-noun combination that expresses your wish {as to what is correct, the arbitrary decision of the programmer is final).
In Serpent’s Star, there is just such a situation. But with the Ultrasoft parser, you can type, “Co sit with the old man at the table,” and the parser extracts the operative words “sit” and “old man” and sits you down next to him. Once you’re familiar with what the operative words are, you can just type “old man” and know the parser will understand. Many of the verbal “puzzles” of the two-word parsers are really only hindrances to realistic game play. After all, you can only put up for so long with messages like “I don’t know how to OLD something.”
I can’t comment on Serpent’s Star (Ultrasoft’s second game which we’ll visit in ’83). I will say this game’s parser has serious issues, and their handling of the issue cited above is terrible.
For example, there is a scene early with a jade bowl. You can GET BOWL and the game will react like you’d expect. However, immediately after, trying to EXAMINE BOWL gets:
I don’t recognize an object in “EXAMINE BOWL”.
??? I was seriously baffled for a while until I realized EXAMINE JADE BOWL was what worked. So not only do most actions require the adjective, the game inconsistently requires it, so one scene you can refer to the bowl as a bowl while the next you can’t.
As another example, let me pull up my verb-testing list for the game.
This represents me going through the list and typing each word alone. Sometimes the word genuinely works alone (DIG: “DIG doesn’t work here.”) but usually the response on one of the green-marked words is something like:
I don’t recognize a noun in “CLIMB”.
Fair enough, although I should point out using grammar terms isn’t the greatest way to do this; “you need to say what you want to climb” would be better. It’s better to explain why something went wrong in a game from the perspective of what the player needs to fix rather than from the perspective of what caused the computer to be confused. That isn’t what the main issue is, though. Take USE:
I don’t recognize a noun in “USE”.
This made me think USE OBJECT might be useful in some circumstances, but here’s the response to USE ROPE:
I don’t recognize a verb in “USE ROPE”.
Which straight up comes across as a bug. I’m still not sure what to make of it. Does this mean that USE will work somewhere, but only in a very specific place, just like you can refer to the “jade bowl” as just a “bowl” but only when taking it? This wild inconsistency is far, far, worse than dealing with a two-word parser.
At least two-word parser give you their restrictions up front. Here I’m paranoid about guess-the-phrase showing up, and it isn’t like removing “excess words” like THE is that big a deal (another thing the manual touts).
Enough grumping, let’s move on. Last time I entered a ruin and was cut off in darkness, lacking a match to light my lantern. I missed possibly the most obvious thing to try, which was to check my inventory in case I had something helpful to start.
So we get a box of matches, knife, bottle of pills, ancient amulet, and loaded revolver in our inventory as the adventure begins, added onto immediately by the shovel, lantern, food, rope, and map from the jeep. We’re actually well equipped! (Like you would expect to be true on a real adventure!) I’ve observed before getting a lot of tools to start is pretty rare, even though in a verisimilitude sense it would match better with the situation. I’m wondering if this is a positive effect of the “strategic planning” element of Ultrasoft; that is, they thought about adventures at a “meta level” and wondered themselves why so many of the games start you with nothing.
Of course, because this is the Ultrasoft parser, trying to refer to a the match box is futile, and I mean totally futile.
I don’t recognize a noun in “OPEN BOX”.
I don’t recognize a verb in “OPEN MATCH BOX”.
I don’t recognize a verb in “OPEN MATCHBOX”.
I don’t recognize a noun in “OPEN”.
(Just like USE, yes.) I eventually puzzled out I could just LIGHT MATCH straight up, so even though you don’t see individual matches in your inventory, you can still refer to them. Look, this sort of thing is a nice quality-of-life feature to jump straight to pulling out a match, but that doesn’t mean you get to skip the player being able to refer to the box itself. What if there’s a limit to the number of matches? Maybe there is, I don’t even know.
(Incidentally, back to the inventory, those pills are “your lifegiving pills” and you start with 97 of them. I assume you have moments where your curse-illness strikes, so they’re for lasting a little bit longer. Good atmosphere, that.)
With the lantern lit I was able to enter the first ruin properly, and see what was hissing. What you’re about to see is a series of animation screens, and the animation keeps going as you type. If you wait long enough you’ll die.
The final screen immediately triggers after typing SHOOT; you don’t even hit enter. (Bespoke! So much for their advanced parser. But this time it worked out in practice.)
This leads to a room with a pedestal and a left and right passage. Compass directions are now out. You have to type LEFT or RIGHT or FORWARD or BACKWARD to move, and sometimes the directions are relative (that is, if you enter from the east, going right will be north) and sometimes they’re not and just based on the image that you see on the screen (so the passage on the RIGHT will always be oriented that way in a particular room, no matter how you arrived at the room).
RIGHT and LEFT are both dead ends.
Your companion will lower a rope you can climb, so this is a “cinematic set piece” rather than a puzzle.
If you try to EXAMINE the pedestal the game says you should search further, so SEARCH PEDESTAL instead gets a secret door you can open:
Further in is the jade bowl I was complaining about earlier.
If you pick it a trap triggers and the room brings you down to another level.
In one direction is a teetering boulder, and it is honestly atmospheric as the boulder is animated teetering in real time. I haven’t managed to get it to trigger even on purpose for an amusing death message.
In another direction are some sarcophagi. You can get Raoul to help you open one, revealing a spirit.
Just waiting long enough seems to cause the spirit to go away, leaving a gold bowl.
In a third direction is another branching area. Moving a heavy urn from one pedestal to another opens a passage to the outside, so you can go back to the jeep.
Going to the “right” leads to some skeletons guarding a silver bowl (remember I already have jade and gold). However, the skeletons wake up and defend this one, Harryhausen-style, and even animate kind of like Harryhausen.
This animates as you are typing, just like the snake.
Again, waiting too long kills you, and this time (admittedly as expected) the gun doesn’t work. I’m still not sure how to deal with the skeletons; I don’t know if I’m supposed to be yet. I kind of want the boulder to kill the skeletons but I can’t get it to trigger and based on the map I don’t think it’s a straight shot. (If you run away, the skeletons just resume guarding position, so you can’t lead them over.)
The reason I feel like I should deal with them now is the game has been structured so far more like a gamebook than a standard text adventure. By which I mean: lots of self-contained set pieces, left or right branches that sometimes lead to nothing, and the general feel of “cinematic scenes” akin to Arabian Adventure more than a big looping puzzle-box. I’m not far enough in to be certain, though.
High Technology, Inc., is a company now almost entirely forgotten, were it not for the fact they — as one of the small number of initial distributors for Apple — produced the first television ad for an Apple product, in 1977.
A second former Apple distributor — the one that is our focus today — also flamed out in a 1980 lawsuit: Omega Northwest (although this one for, as Apple claimed, “unpaid indebtedness to the Company and for fraud”).
To back up a little, in the 60s the businessman Richard Lawrence founded Omega Northwest as a camera company in Washington state; they extended to hi-fi audio and then eventually computers, with multiple branches (Seattle, Bellevue, Lynwood). For Apple, they made a spin-off subsidiary, Sigma Distributors, who focused entirely on Apple and worked on distributing across the northwest United States.
In 1981, a vice president at the Sigma subsidiary in the software section — Larry Franks — decided to get into the adventure business, hiring a software analyst at Boeing (Christopher Anson) to lead the effort, who himself hired the programmer, Alan Clark. Clark made a BASIC program first as a proof of concept for an adventure system, then the two of them (Clark and Anson) turned that into a machine language interpreter. By the end of the year Anson went to work on the spinoff company, Ultrasoft.
All this is from a Softline article, and I want to quote a specific part:
The moment of conception for Ultrasoft can be traced to an observation by Clark that most adventures, and most entertainment software in general, were written by hand. He had an idea that, with the tool-using approach that Anson had brought from Boeing, he could write better adventures more efficiently
This is a little true. You can certainly find random adventure games for sale in 1981 written from scratch (like Oo-Topos) but the most prominent adventures — the Scott Adams games and On-Line Systems games — both used tools like Clark is speaking of. So the statement about “most adventures” being written by hand isn’t incorrect, per se, but almost is misleading.
The main thing to keep in mind is that unlike almost every other game we’ve seen for the Project, The Mask of the Sun came from a long-standing company that was large enough to tussle with Apple in a lawsuit. This is not a “bad thing” in that they have a sense of organization that some of our other companies have lacked, and that means (for instance) they hired a professional artist, Margaret Anson, who had a team that did storyboarding (rather than making a single 19-year old produce so much art they had a mental breakdown).
There are some other parts of the Softline article worth highlighting — the company was very proud of Ultracode, their generalized game-writing tool which got touted on the back of the box — but I’ll spread the details out over my multiple posts on this game.
Now it’s time for plot!
Via Mobygames.
We are Max Steele, archaeologist in the Indiana Jones vein, and while we recently found “the scrolls of the monks of Lhasa” they were stolen by our “colleague” Francisco Roboff. In retribution we nab an amulet from said colleague, and do research back in the United States to find out it is a “Pre-Columbian artifact from central Mexico that is surrounded by legend and folklore.”
However, the amulet has some sort of “curse” that lands us in the hospital with our body fading away, and we find out that a mysterious “Mask of the Sun” affiliated with the amulet might hold a cure.
You immediately send a telegram to everyone you can think of who may know about the amulet. Finally, you receive a message from Professor de Perez, of the University of Mexico in Sanchez. He has a map from the University that relates the amulet and the Mask to several Aztec ruins. With only this to go on, you depart for South-Central Mexico, to meet Professor de Perez at an airfield near one of the potential sites. The rest of the adventure is for you to discover!
I’m playing with the most updated version published by Brøderbund.
You start right as the plane has landed, with the Professor and his student Raoul outside. You get both a jeep and some supplies to go with it (a map, a lantern, food, a shovel, and some rope). The food is described as “tasty food” so despite the fancy underpinnings the game is still rooted in Crowther/Woods.
This is “animated” with the image getting closer and closer. One of the touted features of the Ultra system is a fast enough drawing system to have animations.
The map is a nice touch; rather than just randomly wandering out and finding out directions arbitrarily on the fly, there’s a sense of goals.
To go anywhere we need to hop in the jeep first, and driving has an “animation” showing multiple slides.
There’s a branch where you choose to drive either west or northwest. Picking northwest, as it seems to lead to the closest ruin:
There’s a “darkened doorway” at the top of the stairs. Going inside causes the door to shut and there to be a hissing sound in darkness. Unfortunately, the lantern requires matches to light, and the game did not give any at the start.
This seems like a good place to stop while I scout out the territory. Certainly I can say from what I’ve seen so far this is one of the most polished of the games I’ve played for the Project so far; the art has the feel of late-80s Apple II as opposed to the vector squiggles of this time. (Queen of Phobos had animation and some really good style where it leveraged the vector art for a terrific atmosphere; the games with Incrocci illustrations like Masquerade didn’t have them added in until after 1982.)
Mask of the Sun’s parser, on the other hand, does not seem as polished as the authors want to claim, but I want to get a little deeper in the game before I make any over-arching claims about it.
Not too long from a finish, and fortunately not quite so absurd as assuming the existence of an unmentioned item. Still, it is pretty odd.
I knew DIG worked already from testing it on the sand (you find nothing). I guess it sort of makes sense in a shallow pool, but it certainly isn’t the verb I would have used (and I already tried other searching verbs which I thought would have been equivalent).
The tiny graphic is a blue key. This can be taken up to the locked door you can arrive at via rope tied to anchor.
The problem is, going through the locked door takes you back to the strobe room! So it seemed nothing was gained at all from the exercise. However, you can pick up the rope and anchor again after using them, and there’s no way to jump down without them, meaning that the only way to re-use the rope and anchor is to find the blue key, and take the alternate exit after having reclaimed them from the railing.
Almost there. I was stuck on an endless hall, and this was more or less a verb issue again. I tried pushing and pull and some other things on the appropriately marked wall…
…but you’re instead supposed to just GO WALL.
The chest is a red herring. Something about the skull nagged me so I tried smashing it, and I couldn’t do it without using the anchor. This yields a “remote control” with a button, and the only thing left to do is try pushing the button in literally every room in the game while facing every direction. (Fortunately not that many rooms.) I hit paydirt back near the start, at a wall marked “Lost”.
This is the time bomb that has been threatening to blow us up for 30 minutes.
Roger Jonathan Schrag will return for us in 1982 (he wrote another adventure published in a two-pack, just the other half was a different author). I will say I find it fascinating he describes himself as a “hacker” type most interest in testing the limits of coding the system.
I was a kid at the time I did all of my work for Adventure International. I wasn’t doing it for the money. I wrote these programs for the intellectual challenge and for the novelty of seeing my name in full page color ads in the magazines. Checks sort of came in whenever they came in. Sometimes there were sales reports attached. Sometimes not. Since I wasn’t doing this for the money, I really didn’t care much.
He incidentally went on to port the Scott Adams adventure system to Color Computer on his own initiative. While he did get royalties, it seems to have been just for the challenge.
What we still haven’t had much of is a business-focused type, making a plan and assembling an organized team, which is what we’ll get to next time.
(And no, I’m not counting On-Line Systems as being very organized — it was a near-miracle Time Zone got finished. This is an entirely different company.)
It wasn’t that long ago this blog visited Toxic Dumpsite, published by Adventure International in a two-pack with Spook House by Roger Jonathan Schrag, another one of our teenaged auteurs.
Via Giant Bomb.
I didn’t have a great time with the first game but I was misunderstanding the initial setup (that you could look in four directions in each “room”) as well as some of the author tendencies (like the ability to LOOK BEHIND and LOOK UNDER things). There are enough quirks that I didn’t want to wait for too long until tackling game number 2. Yes, I could re-read my old blog post, but there’s an author’s vibe that transcends words that’s hard to cling on to. I hope I can give this game a fairer shake than the last one.
I do have a little historical info I lacked last time. Back in 2009 Dale Dobson interviewed the author. Regarding the inclusion of graphics and the ability to look in different directions:
I think I just saw it as a natural progression. I really enjoyed the Scott Adams Adventures, but I thought it was time to turn up the volume and inject a visual aspect. Facing different directions in a room was just part of adding a dimension to the experience.
This indicates we’re talking about a completely separate thread of development than the line started by Deathmaze 5000. This is quite believable to me as the method of movement is different and the light vs. heavy density makes for very different game types, even if both games are technically in the “first person adventure” genre. I never expected the obscure-and-on-a-different-platform game The Haunted Palace to have had any influence either.
Carl and Rebecca are the author’s brother and sister.
Mr. Schrag also explains that he had no “engine” and simply added code on the fly as he went:
I believe when I went to write Spook House I took the code from Toxic Dumpsite and tweaked it. So I did a lot of code reuse.
But I don’t think I actually wrote an engine per se, probably because I didn’t sit down beforehand and spec out the functionality for an engine. Rather, I just sat down and started writing an adventure. And when I discovered I needed a widget to do X, I coded a widget to do X.
Once again we have a hard time limit, once again 30 minutes done in real time. We are trapped in a spooky house and there’s a time bomb set to explode.
The sign is described as being nailed to the wall, which I immediately noted given the trauma I suffered through the last game.
This game has a much different feel from the previous one, which was mapped out in an “industrial” way; this map tries to be a bit more of a maze. The very first room from the start (to the east) flips around the player a bit, and I was able to explore for a while without solving any puzzles.
Passing through you can find a platform.
You can get to the platform in the distance easily, but I didn’t understand the graphic here at first. I’ll come back to this later.
You can turn north find a “fireman’s pole” to slide down, which lands you in some water.
You can swim around a bit for what seems to be just atmosphere…
Either our character is short or being overdramatic. I wasn’t able to die by just swimming around even though the “sinking” message keeps happening.
…but eventually end up on shore, where there’s an anchor and an exit leading up. This is followed by a “strobe room” which literally flashes.
Also, locked door here to the east.
South of that there’s a rotating room which spins around in real time.
If you drop an item in this game, you can’t pick it up again unless you’re facing the same direction you dropped it at. For this spinning room (if you drop an item, with, say, DROP ANCHOR) it means you have to hit the “enter” key at the correct time (having typed GET ANCHOR or whatnot) to pick it up again.
One exit here leads to a trapdoor dropping you back to the entrance, and another one leads to a ramp with a ledge. I was stuck for a while and looped back to that platform I previously mentioned, where I realized it was meant to be the sort of distance I could jump. One JUMP TO PLATFORM later and I found myself at a dead end with a mirror.
Being trained by the author’s previous game, I made sure to LOOK BEHIND the mirror, yielding a rope.
Since the only obstacle I had pending was a ledge at a ramp, and the only items I had were a rope and an anchor, I put them together to make a grappling hook.
This took me only a few beats to puzzle out, but I originally thought of the anchor as much heavier and not really plausible as a grappling hook.
Once up the rope I found a locked door and a “nail file”. Remembering the sign from the start, I tested out a few attempts at using the file before I came across PULL SIGN WITH FILE.
This file can then be used on the locked door by the beach to land in an endless corridor. I have not managed to get out of it.
That’s certainly an encouraging chunk of progress! The locked-door style gameplay endures here but with some more colorful traversal methods. Despite this having a less “grounded” plot than Toxic Dumpsite I’m having more fun with this one and the environment feels more tactile.
1.) figuring out, of the items I already found, which were part of the Key of Time
2.) finding the item on Peladon
3.) resolving the spider on Mutos
4.) finding the item on Mutos
For the first part, I brute forced things by making a beeline to a single object, picking it up, and quitting the game. That gave me a score.
As the above screenshot implies, the “Dr. Who specific” items (the jelly bears, the scarf, the sonic screwdriver) do not give any points and so are not part of the Key. The bananas from the slime world, the ray-gun from Skaro, the white crystal (not blue crystal) from the fog planet, and the large rock from the Moon all gave varying numbers of points.
This doesn’t mean all the other items are useless. If nothing else, you can give the jelly bears to the Time Lord at the very end who will eat it, just for a little role-playing. Some of the uses turn out to be very abstruse.
For example, I found out (rather too late to help) that typing READ RENTICULATOR will give a number, and that number matches the currently held number of key objects.
The main issue here is that the only information given is the item name; there’s no clue or concept of what the item looks like and it would even make some kind of sense to read the thing.
Moving on to the item on Peladon: I was very, very, close to resolving this one, even though it is a spectacularly unfair. I got lucky (?). Remember I had said sometimes the Peladonians are friendly, and sometimes they are not? They are friendly only right here:
By having this happen, in this location you can now go EAST (the only way to spot this is to LOOK or to return to the room).
I just happened to be lucky enough to hit the right moment to TALK but failed to capitalize on my luck, argh. Anyway: one sionated cumquat. Moving on to Mutos, where I need a walkthrough for both these parts…
…actually, let me back up a bit first and talk about beating the game as a whole. It turns out nearly every location can be handled without taking items from other places; that is, PELADON, SKARO, DIETHYLAMIDE, HIDAOUS, and DARK SIDE OF THE MOON can be visited in any order. You might think hitting Skaro (with the ray gun) is better to go to first, because of the ray gun, which blasts nearly anything into powder. However, you can just evade any creatures that appear without fighting, talking, or doing anything (except the Peladonians, as just mentioned).
If you get 40 TARDIS resets — as the Jim Gerrie version of this game gives you — it means you usually can beat the game in time. I ran a Monte Carlo simulation which failed essentially only once every 100 times. (That means you kept trying to reset making it to GALAFRY at the end and landed on SKARO repeatedly, or something like that.) If you go to the minimum the game’s source gave, 21 visits, you have more like a 25% chance of failure for no fault of your own. And that’s not accounting for the fact this probability is for someone who already has the game solved!
Ok, back to the main narrative. Finishing MUTOS is dependent on items from PELADON and DIETHYLAMIDE. The ray gun does not work on the blue spider; if you recall from last time, that’s where I was getting softlocked on Mutos. It turns out — more or less arbitrarily — that you need a blue crystal, and you need to GIVE SPIDER. I tried, on a different run, giving the crystal, and it didn’t work because I was using the wrong parser syntax.
There is no special item hidden here, and the blue spider is not blocking anything. It turns out the game needed another leap, and in another context I’d call this a clever puzzle, but here it was just infuriating.
Specifically, the “dig here” location lets you use the PICK from back on Peladon, and it digs a different route into the sewers than using the grate. However, there is another identical-looking room which is not marked as such, but digging also works here. Assuming you’ve already defeated the blue spider, you’ll find it here.
The dead blue spider is the last part of the Key.
The game presented what is generally pure exploration (with the weird meta-puzzle of finding key objects) but somehow felt the need to toss in two painful object-related puzzles at the end. Perhaps it is for the best.
As I’ve observed before, fan fiction can hit above its weight class in this era, given the space limitations on text; you don’t actually have to spend the time describing what a Dalek looks like. Unfortunately, I really had trouble feeling like I was ever “in the world” due to all the problems I’ve outlined so this will not satisfy a player who is mainly wanting to pretend they’re hopping around the Dr. Who universe. This is even more a pity in that Dr. Who seems wildly appropriate for adventure games (odd, convoluted solutions to things that don’t really involve violence); fortunately, there will be plenty of more such games to come in the future, including a licensed one in 1984.
But for now, we’re going to return back to the United States, for one piece of unfinished business, followed by a well-regarded Apple II game: The Mask of the Sun.
An Unearthly Child, the first serial of Dr. Who, aired in 1963; in 1967, the Doctor made his first appearance in comic book form, via TV Comic issue 800.
Dr. Who is on a planet with his grandchildren (John and Gillian) and is facing off against spiders. The comic authors were somewhat unclear about the general mood of Dr. Who (which involves outwitting more than shooting alien species) but here he goes full blaster.
From the blog Die, Hideous Creature, Die! which includes details about the Doctor cheerfully destroying a species.
In Dr. Who Adventure I got to use a Dalek ray gun on a spider and it crashed the game, which somehow seems appropriate. But let’s rewind:
I had left off on planet Peladon. One thing I hadn’t experimented with was the verb SEARCH, which works in any random room for hiding hidden things. I ended up hitting zero going through the entire planet, even when trying SEARCH multiple times, except for back in the Maze:
I originally visualized this as a lockpick or a guitar pick; this is the kind of pick for digging.
The discovery of the item also let me test out just what the map was like, where I discovered that every direction (north, south, east, west, up, down) looped back to where the pick was. This indicates that escape from the maze is more or less random, so I shouldn’t sweat mapping it.
I also discovered, on a later playthrough, that you don’t always find the pick when searching — and it isn’t a matter of searching multiple times, but rather, you have to “loop again” and that resets the chance of the search working. I don’t know if this is true generally for the map, but if so, then trying SEARCH multiple times won’t help at all; you would need to re-enter each room multiple times, and try SEARCH each time, hoping for the random chance of the designated object showing up. I’m not up to that level of suffering yet though.
The “peladonians” are the “wandering random enemy” of the planet, but they’re only sometimes an enemy. Here are two separate attempts to TALK with them.
Success or failure seems to be random. HIDE on the always hand always works (when it is a creature you can hide from at all, there’s a nasty spot later where you can’t). You can also simply just move to an adjacent room, it isn’t like the aliens have any physical reality to them; it’s just a dice roll if you see one in a particular room, and if you step out and come back in they’ll be gone unless the dice roll makes them show up again. We’ve seen this kind of behavior most recently in Africa Diamond; somehow it was more irritating in that game, I think because it kept switching through what creature might show up, whereas here — being always the same encounter on the same planet — it has a vague tinge of realism.
Leaving the planet behind I hopped around a little. Note that not all of them have real episode equivalents, or at least, the author was mis-spelling from some half-remembered episode.
GALAFRY (the actual planet of the Time Lords, but spelled wrong) PELADON (as already seen) SKARO (the planet of the Daleks) DIETHYLAMIDE (probably invented for the game) HIDAOUS (probably invented for the game) DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (a Cybermen base from the episode The Invasion) MUTOS (not a planet; the derogatory term for an alien race on Skaro)
I did a lot of hopping around, for our purposes let’s visit the remaining planets as listed in order.
SKARO
Because it isn’t Dr. Who without Daleks. (Upon the Who “reboot” starting in 2005 it seemed like Daleks might have finally been done away with, but alas.)
I admit, I was initially tentative about exploring here, but Skaro turns out to be safer than some other places, as there aren’t instant-death spots like passing TARDISes and the geography, while jumbled up, isn’t mind-rending.
Stepping out of the TARDIS I found some jelly babies. They’re one of The Doctor’s favorite snacks, and one of the common elements I’ve found across a few planets (that is, some sort of “personal object” of The Doctor is lying around). They’d be my first candidate for the “key of time” items just because of the theming but if so, I haven’t found one on any planet yet.
The atmosphere is nice; it turns out you can ignore red screaming sirens, though.
The most important thing I found (via SEARCH in a random room) is a dalek ray-gun.
You might think I would immediately go back and try to use it on the actual daleks, but I was still slightly nervous at this moment and didn’t want to force a confrontation. You’ll get to see the gun in action later though.
DIETHYLAMIDE
There is no planet Diethylamide, a place of fog and mountains. That’s ok, not everything needs to be a reference.
I’m missing some exits in the northwest that almost certainly just go to death. The reason why is that it turns out to be horrible to test death-exits in this game.
There’s no save feature, and if you die, you simply go back to Time Lord Central and have to hop into the Tardis and type RESET a lot to get back to the planet you want. It isn’t even the time spent that was grating as much as the act of intentionally hurling bodies just to check every direction (N/S/E/W) to make sure they’re all accounted for.
There’s a troglodyte wandering around, and it likely is responsible for the occasion where you get knocked unconscious and sent somewhere random with your items missing. Lying around the planet (or requiring a SEARCH in one case) I found a DESIONATING RENTICULATOR, a BLUE CRYSTAL, and a WHITE CRYSTAL.
No idea what any of this does.
HIDAOUS
A slime world, again made-up for the game. There’s not much I can find (although I haven’t bothered mapping thoroughly yet), just a landing point, a set of “LOST IN THE SLIME” rooms (with a SKULL hidden therein) and a tree with some bananas. I expect I’m missing something, or maybe the author just ran out of disk capacity.
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Where Cybermen are hiding, based off a real series.
I know the Cybermen are supposed to be a threat on par with the Daleks, but I’ve never quite felt the same level of concern with them.
In the game version, they are at least a little more deadly than the Daleks since you can wander into death:
Still, in essence the procedure is the same: hide if you see a threat. I’ve snagged a long scarf (Tom Baker ahoy) and a “large rock”.
MUTOS
A planet with a mysterious monolith, and the one I’m definitely not done mapping yet.
There’s a bit where you can find a sonic screwdriver, and also a sign which says to DIG HERE. DIG works to use the PICK to go down into a sewer, although it seems like you can get the same way from another direction. Either way, the moment where my mapping ceases is right here:
There’s a spider where I softlocked the first time through (no items, no way to escape, HIDE doesn’t work) and the second time through, ray-gun in hand, I managed to hard crash the game.
I think maybe there’s supposed to be a PRINT statement there, but when trying to replace the line then playing through again it still seems to be buggy.
So this is at least a good place to do a write-up. My big problem, other than that stalling point on Mutos, is figuring out what the Key of Time parts are. The magazine article claims there is a way to tell what the parts are, and I have no idea. The game has a score but the only way to check it I’ve found is to quit the game. I’ve tried taking items to the Time Lord who needs the pieces at the starting area but I haven’t got a positive reception yet. Maybe I need all the pieces at once.
Cybermen from The Invasion, one of the “lost” serials of Dr. Who, since the BBC didn’t routinely start archiving their materials until the late 70s.
Tarro, where today’s author (James Smith) was located.
Australia started broadcasting Dr. Who back in the 1960s roughly contemporary to when they were being made in the UK, but the broadcast history was not straightforward; episodes needed to be censored for “early evening general viewing” — that is, unedited they were considered suitable only for adults — and some of the early serials just never aired at all.
In 1981, the first licensed Dr. Who animation was created, as part an ad for Streets ice cream in Australia. It used Tom Baker, right before Peter Davison took over the mantle of the Doctor. The Logopolis serial (where the switchover between Baker and Davidson happens) was already broadcast in the UK, but it didn’t air in Australia until March 1982.
1982 also saw the first Dr. Who text adventure I’ve been able to locate in any country, written in March 1982 and published in the July 1982 issue of the magazine Micro-80. If you check my dates, you’ll see Baker was still “the current Doctor” from the author’s perspective.
The source is for TRS-80 but I am playing Jim Gerrie’s edited version for TRS-80 MC-10. In his blog post about the game he mentions bug fixes, including one where you can get “mugged” for an object but it doesn’t fix your inventory count, meaning you eventually can hit your inventory limit with 0 items. He also made some random values a little nicer and I’m not that gung ho about authenticity when it simply is going to be pain.
You do not seem to be “The Doctor” but just “you” sent along on a TARDIS the Time Lords have managed to scrouge up. I assume you are a Different Time Lord.
After Dr. Who collected the Key to Time and defeated the Black Guardian, he received many praises and went on to greater things. The Key itself was again broken into its component pieces and scattered throughout the universe.
But the dark forces threaten, and in order to save the universe, the Timelords again need the Key. You have been chosen to go forth and locate it for them.
The Key of Time is from Tom Baker’s run, specifically starting with The Ribos Operation in 1978, where the Doctor is asked by the White Guardian to find the six segments of the Key, bringing balance to the universe. The main gimmick to note for our purposes is that the pieces of the key are disguised as other things; in the first serial, a lump of Jethrik crystal is the first part of the key.
X pieces of some item of power makes for an extremely common videogame plot, so it is not shocking James Smith picked up on this as a game device. Your job is to bounce around planets searching for the Key, given that the pieces will be disguised.
You start on Gallifrey. It is terribly easy to get lost, and at one intersection I got rammed by a passing TARDIS.
I did manage to find a “throne room” where the parts apparently get delivered after finding them.
However, upon exiting the throne room I got stuck in a series of junctions which I’m sure are a fairly simple maze, but since I didn’t have any objects yet I had to restart the game.
So I decided it was best to hop into the TARDIS and start time-hopping.
You will be given a TARDIS (rather old and unreliable, but the best available) that has the coordinates of the planets on which the six parts are located pre-programmed into it. By RESETing its controls you can travel between the six planets and Gallifrey. As usual, the six parts are disguised as other things, and you will have to use your intuition to figure out which is which. (There is a way to tell … )
All the planets are inhabited, and most inhabitants tend to be antisocial. Whether you TALK to them, HIDE from them, kill them, OFFER them gifts of appeasement, or simply ignore them is up to you. Most objects are obvious, but some are hidden and have to be SEARCHed for. Only one key part is on any one planet. Beware the maze on Peladon …
Of course, it was terrific that the first place I landed in an effort to avoid mazes was Peladon, the place of three moons and constant storms.
From a recent Big Finish series set on the planet. “Journey to Peladon, member world of the Galactic Federation and home to intrigue and adventure. With each passing generation, industrial exploitation and deadly political games are taking their toll on the planet.”
sigh Well, let’s try it. I stepped out to a trail, only to find some Peladonians coming nearby. As the instructions mentioned HIDE, I tried the verb out, landing me in the maze.
There was really nothing for me to try than wander randomly. I did hit some non-maze paths but quickly landed in the maze again. I eventually had to simply restart my game and go back to the planet from the TARDIS. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, since RESET from the TARDIS lands you on a random planet; you can’t choose.
The destinations are GALAFRY, SKARO, HIDAOUS, PELADON, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, MUTOS, and DIETHYLAMIDE. You can also just end up in SPACE which in case it is simply another reset.
I wanted to be stubborn and finish what I could on Peladon, so I eventually got there after about twenty resets. The TARDIS incidentally comes with a limited number of resets in this game, and that number is intended to be random! (One of the values made nicer in the MC-10 port is making this random number of resets simply be the maximum from the range.)
Even when not explicitly in the MAZE (as three of the exits go) the map is fairly maze-like and is the sort of game where if I go EAST from one room, I immediately need to test WEST back the other direction to see if it returns, since I’m likely to get a nasty surprise.
The wandering Peladonites turned out not to be a threat — I could just go somewhere else when they showed up — and the only other thing on the planet I managed to find is an Aggedor.
Perhaps I need to return with some music?
From the Alien Species Wiki: “The Aggedor is a wild beast native to the mountainous regions of planet Peladon … The ancient natives of Peladon viewed the Aggedor as a sacred animal and symbol of great power, to be feared and respected. The creatures can be domesticated and trained, and are susceptible to some kinds of music. The Doctor was once able to hypnotize one such beast with his watch while singing a Venusian lullaby.”
This game has been a hassle to get going, so I wanted to report in for now. Hopefully I’ll have visited all the different planets next time. I don’t think this is be like G.F.S Sorceress with a dense plot — this still is only a type-in with limited space — but at least the random elements (whatever they happen to be) should make for an interesting write-up, even if it turns out to be suffering on my part.
PAL Creations is another one of those early-80s companies I haven’t found much on about other than that they existed. They worked out of San Diego, and advertised in Tandy Color Computer magazines like The Rainbow, with games like SKI LODGE (“Manage a Vermont ski lodge”) and SCAVANGE HUNT (“Find the items on the list and return them lo Hickory Ridge to free your niece Rebecca from the hermit of Medicine Tree County”). To give you an idea of the obscurity-level, the ad above mentions 20 games; as of this writing, Mobygames only is aware of the existence of 5.
Our game today is ENO (“You inherited a million dollars. Just one catch – first you have to find it!”) which was given away as a “bonus game” option for buying one of their regular games. It also ended up being published by Dragon Data (the Welsh company I’ve written about here) in a two-pack, Eno paired with a prison-escape game called Stalag.
We’ll pass on Stalag for now and stick with Eno, which has the noteworthy attribute of being quite short. So far, if someone has wanted to write a short game for sale, they’ve generally landed in gamedisk or tapedisk format; see Space Gorn for an example. Eno’s publishing demonstrates two other options, being published as part of a “pack” or being given away in conjunction with another game.
It is weirdly both modern and ancient. Let me just narrate what happens straightforwardly and then explain after.
You are simply tasked with finding your wealthy deceased relative’s inheritance, and the “living room” clue is indicative of the full environment of the game. The entire game is in the living room, just it is divided into small sub-areas to make a 15 “room” map.
You start in the center (“Living Room”) and then can move around to each of the pieces of furniture in the room, the TV in the far east, and the fish tank to the northeast.
The verb list (past the usual directions and INVENTORY) is severely limited, but at least the game is good enough to list it in the instructions: PUSH, TAKE, LOOK, DROP, TEAR, TURN, READ, OPEN, HELP. You can, if you want, mechanically try all the verbs on everything in the room, although the game discourages this by having some items in the living room be deadly.
For example, TURN TV (in a valiant attempt to change the channel) results in electrocution.
Both end tables to the west have doors that can be opened. The southwest end table has some smelly nurse shoes; the northwest end table kills you.
The game wants you to type HELP here before moving on to the next screen.
The very important room happens to be to the north, where there is a picture of a black cat. You can move it to find a safe.
It will then prompt you for three numbers if you try to OPEN SAFE, and if you get one number wrong you get a game over.
Although not technically “death”, and even though the game restarts, the “world fiction” technically begins where you left off.
So the rest of the game is a matter of figuring out three numbers, and which order those numbers might go in. This acts a little bit like a Rhem puzzle where there’s a symbol somewhere that only marginally relates to what you’re looking for, but you’re supposed to make the connection anyway. While I only found it in the middle of my searching process, the first item related to the number sequence is hidden under a cushion to the southeast.
This gives you the order you are supposed to enter numbers into the safe, and the source of the numbers: the number of black cats the house is supposed to have, the number of fish the house is supposed to have, and the TV channel showing a space show.
You incidentally cannot find a black cat in the house despite the picture. If you move the rug in the opening room, however, you can find a dead cat under a loose board.
You can count up the fish at the tank to be 29, and as already seen in a previous screenshot, the TV is tuned to channel 11.
Unfortunately, 1-29-11 doesn’t quite work. You’re supposed to examine the cat further and notice it ate one of the fish.
That is, the live-cat count is supposed to be 1, and the live-fish count is supposed to be 30. 1-30-11 opens the safe.
While a modern reaction, I imagine that this brief review by Alastair from Computer Solution Archive captures what people from the 80s likely thought of the game.
No wonder Dragon Data bundled this with another adventure game, this effort is no more than magazine type-in quality.
I don’t actually disagree, but weirdly enough, I liked it? Notice how it
somewhat fits the one-room adventure genre, which really didn’t start kicking until the late 90s
fits the “reduced verbset” genre, which is spread through all adventure gaming but never got “respectable” until probably the 2000s with games like Midnight. Swordfight.
has the clue-finding feel of a modern escape room
tries to make the deaths participatory and comedic
Despite the lack of a save file system, the game being very very short means it doesn’t matter; it’s more polite than a Super Mario “troll” level anyway. In the very specific circumstances here of a reduced-verb short game (where you hand-wave over realism) it works, just in the context of the early 80s market there isn’t much it fits with. The only slightly comparable game I can think of is Mansion Adventure which had its difficulty in clue-interpretation rather than object manipulation.
We will be seeing more from Paul Austin and Leroy Smith (including the other half of this commercial package, Stalag) but next up we’re going to head over to Australia for some Dr. Who.
Previously, we’ve encountered Softside magazine issue 47 (August 1982) with the game Operation: Sabotage. The same issue had a piece by Peter Kirsch entitled Anatomy of an Adventure.
In it he dissects his framework in BASIC that he has used for all his games up to that point:
Early in my adventure writing career, I created an adventure interpreter, or skeleton, as I call it, to serve as the backbone of each of my adventures. It has since been updated many times (now at version 4), but basically remains the same tool.
Magical Journey is clearly version 1, as the same skeleton structure of that game is clearly similar to the general structure Kirsch describes. I’ll go into it in a moment, but a few points from the article:
He gets introduced as “author of most of SoftSide’s Adventure of the Month series.” Alas there is no further biographical information.
He notes “The days of simply finding treasure and returning it to a storage location are gone forever.” which is a curious comment given how many Treasure Hunts there still are in 1982, but Kirsch got it out of his system back in 1980.
He tries different layouts before putting “a final version of my adventure map on a giant piece of heavy paper.”
He ran out of memory in writing Titanic Adventure and had to make cuts.
His games eventually all had ports for TRS-80, Apple II, and Atari; for making the Atari port used a special routine since the Atari BASIC doesn’t support string array, making a single string and treating it as an array by cutting the part he needs.
His parser on TRS-80 and Apple II uses the last three letters. He explains this “alleviates some of the annoying keyboard bounce in the TRS-80”. His Atari parser uses the first three letters because of the Atari string array issue meaning he makes the strings with padding. (I’ve played most of the Kirsch games on Atari, which explains why I didn’t recognize the last-three-letters style parser.)
He found Atari BASIC easier to debug because he could change something and still keep running the program, unlike on Apple on Atari.
Applesoft BASIC has the issue where if you use A has a variable and you write it before a THEN statement it interprets ATHEN as the command “AT”, so parentheses are required.
For the skeleton, he does something relatively distinct from other BASIC authors to start things off:
He has every single room description as a PRINT statement, and manually sets room exits along with these statements. From Magical Journey, where A is the variable which indicates the room the player is in:
10 IFDT=1THEN320ELSEONAGOTO11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86
11 PRINT”IN A FOREST.”:W=1:N=3:E=1:S=1:GOTO350
12 PRINT”ON TOP OF A TREE.”:D=1:GOTO350
13 PRINT”AT THE BASE OF A MOUNTAIN.”:S=1:E=4:GOTO350
14 PRINT”ON AN OPEN PASTURE.”:W=3:GOTO350
15 PRINT”ON TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN.”:D=3:GOTO350
This is wildly atypical. Consider Hog Jowl mansion (written July 1981, printed January 1982 in 80 Micro), which starts with room descriptions but uses DATA statements instead:
50 DATA “IN A DUMBWAITER.”,0,0,2,0,21,0,”IN A LONG HALLWAY.”,0,6,3,0,0,0,”IN A WORKSHOP.”,0,0,0,2,0,0
60 DATA “AT THE BOTTOM OF A SECRET PASSAGE.”,0,0,0,0,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,0,9,0,0,0,0
70 DATA “IN A TORTURE CHAMBER”,2,0,7,0,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,0,11,8,6,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,0,12,0,7,0,0
80 DATA “IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,5,0,10,0,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,0,0,11,9,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”
This is the method given in other tutorials at the time, like the booklet for Deathship. Kirsch used DATA for objects and verbs, so clearly had a notion of just using a “data table” for exits rather than having to specify what the variables equal each and every time. My guess is due to the Atari string handling he didn’t want to deal with changing the method.
The remainder of the skeleton also follows the Magical Journey structure fairly closely. There’s a routine for display exits (“IFN>0PRINT” NORTH”; :B(2)=N”), a player input routine, special routines for movement, taking, and dropping, and then the whole list of other verb routines. This is followed by DATA statements for objects and verbs, and then — quite importantly for me, as you’ll see — the line
3000 PRINTA$” WHAT?”:RESUME390
What’s going on here is that the game is set up to automatically send errors to 3000. The intent is for anything that confuses the parser past what it can understand has at least some grace and a sequence reset back to resetting the parser. In practice, it means that if there’s a bug in the main code, it will stop what’s going on and jump straight to WHAT, as opposed to breaking out with a custom error message explaining what’s wrong, making the game much harder to debug.
Unfortunately, I only realized what was going on fairly late in my process of debugging Magical Journey.
For a while, I thought the issue above was potentially some sort of parser misdirection, but no; in the portion of the code that handles removing and adding objects to the player’s inventory, there was a straightforward typo. See if you can spot it:
That should be K2=1 to 5, with an equal sign, not a minus sign.
Or consider the hungry dwarf I gave a screenshot of last time:
There’s a farmhouse with an oven, pie filling, and pie crust, and you can BAKE PIE with them all together, but after YOU HAVE JUST BAKED A RHUBARB PIE. the game told me WHAT? and gave me no item. Spot the error:
810 PRINT”YOU HAVE JUST BAKED A RHUBARB PIE.”:PE=1:A$(59)=”RHUBARB PIE”:H$=”59)=A$(59):A(59)=25:K3=21:R$=””:GOSUB1100:K3=25:GOSUB1100:M$=””:K3=21:GOSUB1200:K3=25:GOSUB1200:GOTO5000
A few more along these lines happened, so I was simultaneously exploring the map and then every once in a while searching the source code for a misplaced character. This was as close to the metal as adventuring gets. (I also hit one inexplicable bug at the very end which I’ll get into later.)
Fortunately, the game itself was extremely simple in terms of puzzles. Find SNAKE FOOD, it goes to some RATTLESNAKES.
A GIANT CHICKEN wants to eat some CORN.
This leaves a golden egg.
For an only slightly more elaborate example, some FLYPAPER was next to some FLIES was near a GIANT KILLER FROG.
The meta-map of the game seems slightly elaborate…
…but for the most part there is only a handful of obstacles that block your way. In addition to the pie mentioned, a troll needs a toll which you can offer with a SILVER DOLLAR (not marked as a treasure) found down a pit. Even a dragon is relatively easy to defeat.
Two rooms away are a GAS MASK and some SLEEPING GAS, and the dragon is described as wide awake.
The only part slightly messy to juggle is that the game can return you to the start in two cases; in one case (passing through a dwarf house) you need to take the warp back, because it puts you at a treasure (a gold watch) before returning to the starting area.
To get back to the starting area to the main junction you need the shovel, so if you’ve left it behind, this means your game is softlocked, which is kind of rude for what is clearly intended as a beginner’s game.
The only slightly less obvious puzzle; you throw sneezing powder to defeat a MADMAN swinging an ax.
My major hang-up turned out to be at the very end. Quite inexplicably, after getting in the cave past the dragon, and heading west, the game decided to always crash, or at least stop with WHAT? when trying to show the room name, then end up in endless loop. This turned out to be the last room.
The end room is marked in red.
I still have no idea the reason for the crash. I ended up having to add some code to essentially hack my way out of the bug:
300 N=0:W=0:E=0:S=0:U=0:D=0:Y=0:CLS:PRINT”YOU’RE “;:IF(DK=0)*(A>5)DT=1
305 IF A = 72 GOTO 82
310 GOTO10
Line 305 is mine. Rather than going to the select-a-room routine, I just have the game jump directly to the relevant line that displays the room name (82). This bypasses whatever is going on with line 10 to have a bug.
With this fix in place, I could finally see the last room.
Pressing the button congratulates you and then tells you how many of the 17 treasures you found.
6000 PRINT”CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE MADE IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH AND BACK.”:IFNT=17PRINT”YOU FOUND ALL 17 TREASURES.”:GOTO6100
6050 PRINT”YOU ONLY FOUND”NT”TREASURES, HOWEVER. THERE ARE”17-NT”STILL OUT THERE SOMEWHERE.”
6100 INPUT”TO PARTAKE ANOTHER JOURNEY, HIT “;A$:RUN
I should possibly be thankful for the bugs. Other than the interest of the “rucksack” holding all treasures while ignoring the inventory limit, there wasn’t much of theoretical interest, but I essentially had to study all of the source code in order to make it to the end. The adventure wasn’t an abstract magical journey as much as one programmer’s journey — badly typed by someone else in the past — as interpreted by some quirky source code.
Unfortunately, some of the rooms remain inaccessible, including one to the west of a room “near the magic garden”. You’ll see on my meta map it currently goes to the opening forest, but it isn’t supposed to do that — it is supposed to go to a tool shed where you can find a ring.
Feel free to check the source yourself to try a diagnosis (including my extra line 305). It seems to have trouble with room numbers 72 or larger (jumping to lines 82 and up). Alternately, you can download a disk here I have prepared that can be run directly with the emulator trs80gp (just drag and drop the file on the emulator). I can’t guarantee there aren’t more bugs. (For example, colors of keys will change when you drop them, but at least that isn’t important for winning the game.)
Renga in Blue 