I’ve finished the game; a lot of what I had to deal with in the end was parser struggles.
Let’s take the antique shop first. I had approached it, was told the showcase couldn’t be accessed, and tried various varieties of BREAK to get in. I also tried WITH ITEM knowing that the game allowed skipping over the original command (WITH CROWBAR, WITH BRICK, WITH LADDER, etc.) Some games map USE to a synonym but this game just responds “TRY TO USE IT YOURSELF” with the command USE even though applying WITH here is essentially the same thing.
My problem was I was standing too close! The game was fine with you breaking the window, but you needed to be standing just a bit to the west, in the “street”, and then WITH BRICK would work appropriately. (I understood the point — the glass on the inside is somehow stronger than the glass on the outside — but it still left me grouchy.)
Also, weirdly, you don’t see the result of the action on the visual unless you either LOOK or leave the room and come back.
Nearby, just to the south, was the bank. The bank had a sign about seeing a teller. I had done lots of different actions to try to summon a teller, thinking I was at the teller window — and it certainly looks that way — but you’re supposed to just type GO TELLER.
Then there’s even more guess-the-phrase as you’re supposed to WITHDRAW CASH. The fact you have some in the bank suggests you are a local deciding to crush your old neighborhoods.
Again, the result has already happened: there’s CASH now sitting here. You won’t see it unless you LOOK.
Speaking of guess-the-phrase, it’s time to steal the car. (I just checked the walkthrough for this.) It turns out you can type TEST DRIVE.
So trusting, given he’s already living in a village that’s been raided dry by whatever thieves have come before our protagonist. This takes care of a couple puzzles at once, because not only do we now have access to both houses (Mr. Smith’s keys work on the Hughes mansion as well), but we can use the car to pick up the boat trailer and other large things.
Let’s raid the house first, though. Then we’ll pick up the large items, then finally hit the mansion.
Helpfully, Mr. Smith has a copy of the Picasso in the art museum (pretty clear what’s going to happen with that in a moment) and it is covering a safe. Trying to OPEN SAFE has the game respond that it needs the combo.
Fortunately, our trusting Mr. Smith is the sort to just write the combo on a paper two rooms over.
Unfortunately, this game is the sort to make it impossible to figure out how to input anything. TURN DIAL, ENTER COMBO, OPEN SAFE while having the paper open, etc. failed on me; I just went straight for the walkthrough again because the game had officially crossed my threshold. You’re just supposed to type L15 R7 (that’s verb L15, noun R7) and it works:
THE SAFE OPENED UP FOR A SHORT MINUTE. SOMETHING FELL OUT.
The “something” here is a set of stock certificates and some diamonds. The keys work on the mansion, too, but let’s handle the painting in the art gallery first since we have the copy.
Oops! I don’t know if this is an issue because of the crack or an issue with the original game (based on the parser’s absurdity, I’m about 50-50) but you need to SWITCH PAINTING (not SWAP, CHANGE, HANG, etc. I absolutely hate this parser) in order to keep the game from hanging.
OK! A FORGERY IS HANGING ON THE WALL!
Oddly, the painting looks different when dropped off with the stash.
This stash is going to start to look quite crowded by the end of the game.
Next up I promised to go for the “big items”. One of them is the “raft” from last time. As suggested by arcanetrivia in the comments, ROW worked to move it (I usually don’t associate ROW with rafts, but it does get described as having paddles).
Eventually the only way you can paddle is up to the the same boat dock the *boat* is at. We’re going to steal both the boat and the raft at once, and it is going to look very silly.
With the keys Mr. Smith gave over, you can just hop in the Corvette and type DRIVE CAR. Then the bottom of the car serves as a sort of frame as you drive around town.
Sadly, the game doesn’t let you drive into buildings.
I drove over to where the boat trailer was, stopped the car, and tried ATTACH TRAILER. No luck. HITCH TRAILER? No. PUT TRAILER? Nyet. LINK TRAILER? Also no.
I confess, reader: walkthrough again (#3 if you’re counting). It’s TOW TRAILER. Grrrr. While I was at this, I tried to tie the rope to the trailer and to the car, found that didn’t work either, but when I started driving again my raft was tied to the back of the car along with the trailer (even though I had left the raft back on the dock!) At least it didn’t crash the game this time.
Driving on over to the dock with both a trailer and a raft bouncing along connected to a rope, I was able to GET BOAT … I mean MOVE BOAT … no, PUSH BOAT, LOAD BOAT, LOAD TRAILER, FILL TRAILER …
The game wants PUT BOAT.
I was then able to tote everything all at once over to the truck and drop it off (rope, raft, Corvette, boat) for some megapoints. The police really only care about stereo systems and paintings, I guess? (Remember those are two items that set off the police. I already did the painting swap, the stereo puzzle is the very last one I solved.)
Now it’s time to raid the mansion. I hiked back over to the southeast side of town, waving at David in the office on the way (….yes, the car is still being … tested …) and found a much larger area than I expected.
Not this part in particular being large, but where the Tram goes.
Heading west and south leads down to a basement with a will (*will* rather) that is stuck in place.
I was confused about the Patty reference until I went back up and east.
This is *Patricia* Hughes and she counts as a treasure. If you KISS her she will jump in your arms and you can then go over the will and she’ll be able to pick that up too somehow. (I solved this later in the game, but it’s faster to just go through it now.)
There’s also a door to the south of Patricia and that needs the crowbar (“WITH CROWBAR”) to pry open. By doing that you can go down to the tram and what I’ll call The 1% Area.
This is only part of it.
To the south is a “yacht club” with a valuable record…
…and to the north is a wild animal reserve club, with a tiger that will eat you.
Oh, to reach the 1% Area, you need to flip the disk over.
Fortunately off to the side before the tiger is a Clubhouse with a rifle, although trying to SHOOT TIGER just results in a “CLICK”. You need to take a leap of faith and GET BULLETS while in the Clubhouse (even though they aren’t visible) and somehow it works and you can then LOAD RIFLE.
Then you can shoot the tiger dead, grab a valuable *fork* that’s there at the fork in the road (hilarious), and west to an elephant.
If you kept the peanuts from the very start of the game you can FEED ELEPHANT, who will obligingly let you then take … his tusks? I’m past looking for logic.
You can also go east and there’s a maze, but while mappable it is entirely useless to do so. I don’t know why it’s there.
Going back to the main road, you can reach a golf course and yet another hard-game crash. If you go to the 18th hole and LOOK HOLE, you’ll “see something”, and just like any other discovery in the game, you have to LOOK to find out what that discovery is. The problem is — even if you have the graphics off — the game will crash when you do so.
So you need to crash the game, reload, and blindly pick up the ball that you know is there. Then it can go safely back to the treasures.
One more section to the 1% Area:
This mainly serves to have a gate that taunts you…
No way in.
…a shark that eats you…
…and a metal detector that’s just sitting around ready for swiping. The metal detector gets used on the same beach as the shark is hovering around, and it turns out to be the most infuriating parser moment in the game. All the way through it has been chastising you for applying the verb USE to anything; the way to use the metal detector is USE DETECTOR.
A low point in a game with already awful parser moments.
You can then DIG. The game asks WHAT WITH and you need to say WITH HANDS (fortunately I’ve seen this trick enough times, but it always bothers me).
With all that done I was very close to the end of the game. I still had the stereo to deal with.
If you try to GET STEREO in the hi-fi place, the game asks “are you wanting to steal it?” and you’re supposed to respond STEAL STEREO in order to try. The police then catch you and toss you in jail.
You can then PICK LOCK (using nothing in particular, I guess we’re that good) and then OPEN DOOR and ESCAPE. (According to Grunion Guy in the comments, escape can sometimes fail at random. Joy!) After doing this, you can go back to the stereo and try to steal again, at which point the police will not spot you.
As I’ve mentioned before, the closest comparison game I can think of is Urban Upstart. Somehow, the overall effect of the grunge in that game was to feel like social commentary (“Grime Street, where all things are possible”) whereas here it just felt — I suppose the best word is “immature”? It hits some of the same points so I’m not entirely sure why; maybe because the protagonist in Urban Upstart was clearly hapless whereas this one is stealing absolutely everything. In a way, I think Pillage Village’s satirical target may have been more along the lines of adventure games themselves, taking to the limit the concept of a treasure collect-a-thon into complete absurdity, but that’s not quite as strong a target as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
In other words, the game has more to say about the Apple II and computer ecosystem than the world at large.
It also helped the people weren’t smudges.
I’m still glad I got to play Pillage Village and I hope the real disk comes up someday because I’m morbidly curious about the missing title screen. I’m also curious out of the “eight different games” Stuart wrote (I assume the rest really were unpublished) if there were any other adventure buried in there. While this game wasn’t terrific it certainly committed to the bit which suggests a second try might be equally creative but with a better parser.
Coming up: another long-sought after game only unearthed quite recently.
I swear I’m not trying to break my blog posts up into convenient chunks this way but … I missed another section of the map. Look, the streets are very bland and it is easy to think you’ve tested an exit when you haven’t. Two cases in point:
East of the room facing the bank is the section I hadn’t gotten to yet; not an enormous chunk, but I did find one amusing encounter, one puzzle that I solved, and one baffling bit of geography.
The baffling geography first: upon going east from the bank area you see a court house. “YOU ARE FACING EAST” and “IN THE DISTANCE YOU CAN SEE THE COUNTY COURT HOUSE.”
Head north and you’ll get the message “YOU ARE JUST PAST BY THE COURT HOUSE.” The same will happen going east from there. In neither case does it seem to be possible to go into the court house. GO HOUSE gets the response “WHY DON’T YOU TRY A DIRECTION?” and GO COURT gets the response “YOU CAN’T GET TO IT FROM HERE”. Diagonal directions (NE/NW/SE/SW) don’t work and don’t seem to be in the game. I have no idea what’s going on here.
What I did figure out is the museum just past the court house, with a *ruby*.
The ruby is protected by a laser (and you’ll get tossed in what I assume is softlock-jail if you go for it). Moving on just a little bit farther is the electrical plant I only saw the backside of before.
Unfortunately what comes next is a game of guess-the-phrase. PULL LEVER, FLIP SWITCH, TURN OFF, YANK LEVER, PUSH DOWN, TOUCH POWER, POWER DOWN, and many more don’t work; the game is hunting for CUT POWER.
ALMOST ALL THE POWER THROUGHOUT THE VILLAGE HAS BEEN SHUT OFF!
By doing this you can grab the ruby safely and stash it with the rest of the treasures in the truck.
One last encounter is the hospital, which I’m pretty sure is just intended to be a dead end, but I can’t take anything for granted.
Maybe we can segue from here into playing The Institute.
The other new area I explored was the sewers, which was, as I feared, a maze, but not a large or terrible one. While I had tried GO DOWN, ENTER GUTTER, PRY GUTTER, FEEL GUTTER, CLIMB DOWN, and numerous other variations, it was a while before I tried GO GUTTER. (In my defense, GO for most things has the game encourage you to try a direction instead. The reason I tried GO out is that message from the court house earlier being special.)
The maze, as I already indicated, is thankfully not terrible, although I did need to drop items to be certain of my map. If you go in a direction and “loop” you need to LOOK in order to see what’s there; it’s almost as if the engine doesn’t want to support the classic Crowther/Woods maze style.
The useful items (besides the “ladder above) are a “ring” and a “wallet” full of credit cards.
There’s also a one way path to the lake which has a *raft* and a rope. Trying to go in any direction says something about needing a water vehicle, which is confusing because the raft is right there. I am 99% certain this area is a matter of guessing the right phrase but I haven’t guessed yet.
Everyone seems to struggle with syntax for launching water craft, including Sierra.
I’ve used all three of the sewer items. First, straightforwardly, the ladder lets you grab the chandelier.
Despite the “knocking down” message you don’t have to worry about breaking it.
The ring is described as rusted. Keeping the blacksmith’s note in mind, I went over there and tried to drop the ring and trade the ring and converse with the proprietor and so forth but nothing happened. Using guess the phrase again, I needed to CLEAN RING, which turns it into a valuable *ring*.
Finally there’s the wallet. I knew the gas station had a price on it, and I found from experimenting with phrases again I could FILL CAN while there, whereupon the owner of the gas station demands that you pay before any more progress is made. BUY GAS then gets the prompt “with what” and WITH WALLET didn’t work, leading to a moment of stunned confusion. The game wants WITH CARD, even though that’s not given as the primary noun in the object.
I’m still only just over a third of the way on the score.
Even given all the treasures I haven’t scooped yet (the *Picasso*, the *raft*, the *boat*, the *Corvette*, the *stereo*) I feel like I’m missing quite a bit. Maybe the mansion and Mr. Smith’s house are loaded, but none of the logical commands I can come up with a crowbar and/or brick are doing anything.
It’s much easier to grind on this sort of game when you know it is playing fair, but with the guess-the-phrase aspect I could easily have done the right command but in the wrong way hours ago. I’ll still stick with it a little longer before breaking open the walkthrough. Surely there’s a way to use the raft, right?
Before getting into the action — and there’s a fair amount to report, given I missed a section of town last time — I want to discuss the game’s parser, which tries to model itself after Sierra On-Line but is more dubious.
The chart above shows the result of my testing every verb in the game. DIG for example has the game respond WITH WHAT? Typing THROW has the game respond DROP WHAT? For anything not understood the game says YOU CAN’T DO THAT HERE! This is true even if you put in absolute nonsense words.
The game turns out to allow locations with “bespoke verbs” that only are acknowledged in the right place to use them. This might seem like it theoretically works with “you can’t do that here” on wrong commands but the end effect on the player is to make feedback muddy and for parser messages to end up being deceptive anyway (not being able to do the verb “kick” in a particular place, for instance, implies it ought to work elsewhere).
The other oddity is the “WITH WHAT?” response. This response has been with us in both Scott Adams and Roberta Williams games. Essentially, you are asked to do some action, and the game asks “with what”, and so you type WITH NAMEOFITEM as a response. The side-effect here is that you can — depending on the system — sometimes skip the initial command entirely, and type WITH NAMEOFITEM straightaway. This a.) saves a turn (which was important for the ending of Time Zone) and b.) allows lawnmowering through using WITH on every object held, like a point-and-click adventure where you try every single item on an obstacle.
The sum effect of the items above has been for me to wander around certain spots trying WITH X on random inventory items rather than thinking in terms of a regular text adventure.
Last time I had mentioned in passing a jewelry shop that was shut tight. I had a hat, a brick, a gas can, some peanuts, and some stamps (a treasure); there was also a nearby sledgehammer at the Pawn Shop where the owner said I was allowed to “borrow” it. This requires the full command BORROW HAMMER.
The sledgehammer and the jewelry store went together, but the end result was not what you might think.
Using WITH HAMMER twice (no need to say BREAK) you can get the window busted open and an alarm to sound. I asked in my last post what the standpoint of the police is, and what would cause them to care about a crime; apparently, setting off an alarm at a jewelry shop (or at least this jewelry shop) did not cause them to care. No police ever show up.
The sign says “jeweler has jewels”. The store has already been cleaned out! You might think, “oh, they were just taking their stock and fleeing”, but if you are responsible and return the hammer quickly (just smash the window and go back, check out the vault after) you get rewarded by the pawn shop owner.
He gives you some “jewelry”. This implies not that the jeweler took everything thinking the vault wasn’t safe enough, but had to pawn everything in order to escape. This isn’t just idle plot-theorizing — I need to know if there’s still a puzzle ongoing. For example, the bank that mentions the teller (which I still haven’t been able to summon) might have jewels in a safe-deposit box if I pretend to be the jeweler; or, this may be entirely a closed thread and I shouldn’t even be thinking in terms of the vault leading to another puzzle. I’m about 50-50 on the possibilities; at the very least, this is a game that implies some very bad things have happened in the village causing both shopkeepers and the postal workers to flee.
I mentioned not being able to resolve the bank; I did manage to figure out the hardware store with the cutters.
The sign says that wire cutters are in Aisle 2 but none of the regular directions work. I finally hit upon GO AISLE where the game prompted me WHICH AISLE. Some more struggle led me to GO 2. Hence I could finally pick up the wire cutters.
A second aisle implies the existence of a first, so I tried GO 1 and found a crowbar.
No aisle 3+, sadly.
I immediately thought this was great and there so many places that could use either item but … I haven’t been able to use either yet. The antique store showcase, for instance, implies a crowbar to me, but no dice.
The hardware store was next to a kennel with a guard dog; normally food is needed to befriend/distract in such a case, but here I just needed to PET DOG.
You can now TAKE DOG. The guard dog is an inventory item!
That leaves the Picasso, the hi-fi system, and the gas station to deal with in the areas I’ve been in; I’ll also toss in the gutter I mentioned where if you LOOK GUTTER the game says you see something but is not specific what that something is.
But that’s ok, because there’s a whole new area to talk about! I had some slight issues in room placement which led me to missing some exits at the car lot.
Trying to take the *Corvette* at the lot suggests you need some keys, and nearby there is a dealer office. The sign on the desk says DAVID SMITH but I have not been able to provoke Mr. Smith or get any car keys from him.
Huzzah for more janky-looking people, though! I know you’ve been missing this.
Near the auto dealer is another gutter (LOOK says there’s something there, nothing I’ve tried works) and the jail, where just walking into the jail gets you imprisoned into it (again much like Urban Upstart).
South from the gutter leads to another new big chunk of village (possibly the last, although I suspect there might be a sewer system to dive into in our future).
First comes a “Blacksmith’s Office” with a Blacksmith inside (not abandoned!) who has a sign about cleaning while you wait. I don’t have anything to clean.
Not far from the blacksmith is a glass shop with a *chandelier* too high to reach.
Also near is a “ship lot” with a boat trailer. Trying to pick up the trailer implies it is too heavy, and PUSH, MOVE, and other verbs I’ve tested have also had no effect.
In addition to the boat trailer there’s an actual boat next to a lake, or rather a *boat*. You need to steal a boat! I think that’s a first; I’ve never had a boat be a treasure.
As there’s the lake mentioned to the south, it may be the trailer is a fake-out and you somehow need to move the boat to where you need it. DRIVE BOAT mentions you need keys.
You might notice the name “Howard” there. Nearby there are three residences. One of them is the “Hughes” mansion hence I assume it is a Howard Hughes reference; I haven’t been able to break in. The same applies for Mr. Smith’s house (Mr. Smith was the auto dealer).
There is one house you can go into right away, and that’s the domicile of Mr. Jones.
He has a *T.V.* and the asterisks mean you need to steal it. If you just try to take it you will die (the only death I’ve found in the game).
MR. JONES DOES NOT LIKE THIEVES, SO HE SHOOTS YOU BEFORE YOU HAVE THE CHANCE AND THEN CALLS JOLLYVILLE MORGUE.
There’s one last place I haven’t mentioned yet: an insurance office. It includes a memo pad with a note about repossessing the television set. If you take the note over and then get the T.V. he’ll think you’re there on valid business.
So this is a little more grim than our standard treasure hunt? I at least appreciate what the authors were trying to do by adding thematic heft. The parser and graphics aren’t quite matching the ambition, but I’ve also still got more game to go so we’ll see how things shake out.
To recap, my obstacles are:
Getting the Picasso without alerting police
Getting the stereo without alerting police
Getting the jewels, if any still even exist
Getting the chandelier that’s too high
Opening or at least getting the thing from the gutter
Breaking into the houses of Hughes and Smith
Stealing a car and a boat (likely the houses need to come first)
Possibly doing secret things at the bank or electric company or city dump
Oh and one last treasure! You can LOOK HAT (the hat you start the game with) and find a GOLD PIN which nets you 3 points on your score straight off the bat. I only have the stamps and jewelry and T.V. to contribute extra so there’s still a ways to go.
Origin, the company based in Texas formed by Richard and Robert Garriott, is now mostly known for publishing the Ultima games and Wing Commander; it was founded due to Richard’s issues publishing Ultima 1 and Ultima 2 with other companies. Origin did keep a steady outflow of other products, including their first non-Ultima game, Caverns of Callisto (1983). It was written by Chuck Bueche, aka “Chuckles” (famous for appearing as a jester in some of the Ultima games).
One of those non-Ultima games — published a year before Wing Commander — was OMEGA.
Via Mobygames.
OMEGA was a game with a long gestation; Stuart B. Marks first had the concept in 1984, wanting to make a military robot game with vehicles controlled by the player’s programming. (An Apple II buff, he likely was influenced by Robot War.) Quoting Stuart himself:
I was so fascinated by the idea, that I continued refining the design and by late 1986 was calling it “Tank Battle”.
The design kept evolving, and Marks, who was living in Austin local to Origin already, eventually got the company interested enough by the summer of 1987 to publish the project. It still went through many rounds of modifications from there…
The idea of making the player an employee of the Organization for Strategic Intelligence, grew from a conversation with friends during a round of beers at a local tavern. Later, Richard Garriott, the author of the Ultima series, contributed a workable method of including manual control of the cybertanks, and Paul Neurath, the author of Space Rogue, came up with the idea for team play.
…with the product finally landing in 1989, after the publication of Ultima V (which Marks is credited on as a designer).
The game is truly a product of the 80s, with a 270 page manual titled CYBERTANK ENGINEER’S HANDBOOK with programming instructions, a free BBS people could log in on to share creations, and an official tournament sponsored by Computer Gaming World:
It was exciting to see all of the tanks duking it out trying to make it to the final round of six tanks, and even more exciting to actually see the final round. Glued to the computer screen I tried to decipher how each tank was working.
I was having trouble finding a video of the game playing it “seriously” (with programming / commentary) but I picked one that at least gives an idea of what the combat is like.
All this, you may notice, is way past 1982, and according to at least the manual nothing Stuart wrote was published that year. After first going into his “professional” level play in tennis and golf:
Stuart attended the University of Texas, studying accounting to learn new methods of depreciating his Apple II computer. Ostensibly purchased to “help with homework”, the computer soon became a tool for dealing with his lifelong fascination with games… and VisiCalc was replaced by Pong. Fortunately, there weren’t many games that really captured Stuart’s attention, and he began developing his own entertainment ideas.
Since 1981, Stuart has created eight different games for the personal computer. The first to be published is OMEGA. As long as Stuart has to take time away from sports to have his rackets restrung and his golf clubs regripped, you can bet he’ll continue his pursuit of the software side of gaming.
We’ve seen this sort of “early adventure amnesia” before (like with Eldorado Gold); what this biography leaves out is a game Marks co-wrote with Richard A. Bliss titled Pillage Village. It was published by “R & S Software Marketing Services”.
I have not found the name of this company elsewhere and the “R” and “S” (I assume standing for Richard and Stuart respectively) mean this was probably a self-published game, and one with not very much reach at all because the only copy I’ve been able to find is one with a long “cracker” message in the intro.
It isn’t listed on Mobygames or any of the other regular sites; I only learned about it when Adam L. (who comments regularly on my Apple II posts) found a copy while digging through his files. (It’s also on the ASIMOV Apple II archive.)
I assume there was a title screen but I don’t know if it can be rescued off the disk. The copyright / author / company information I just pulled straight from the disk’s files, they don’t show anywhere on the opening screens.
The game opens with you standing on the streets of a town village called Jollyville, with only a hat mentioned in your inventory. There are various stores, some of which have items with little asterisks around them (like *stamps*) indicating they are treasures. The goal is nab the treasures except in this case you are quite explicitly committing crime. That is, you must pillage the village.
The treasures go into the truck you start the game at (which has an empty gas can and peanuts to start with). Even the main character of It Takes a Thief was a little more subtle.
Despite us having many, many treasure hunts now…
…they aren’t actually that common on the Apple II! (Or at least, the Apple II game with Sierra-graphics style.) The big exception, Cranston Manor, was a port. Otherwise, the big looming influence has been the Roberta Williams games which didn’t use the Crowther/Woods/Scott Adams formula. Even games you might expect lean into the treasure aspect like Mummy’s Curse tended to focus on one treasure item rather than many.
Just carting away valuable items is a good way to get caught by the omnipresent invisible police, who hover nearby at all times like Urban Upstart.
For example, just to the south of the start is an art gallery. Go in and you’ll find a *Picasso*…
…and if you try to take it, you’ll be “SHOT ON THE SPOT FOR THINKING ABOUT STEALING A PAINTING IN HERE”. With a non-lethal bullet apparently, since this lands you in the jail.
Along the same street to the south is a toy store, and a sporting goods store, and both appear to be empty.
If there was some manual text (or info on the first disk erased by the crackers) I might expect some context about the village being abandoned for some reason. Most shops are either empty or they contain one treasure (with the alert police ready to spring if you take it). The overall feeling is more like post-apocalyptic rather than just urban sleaze.
I’ve divided the map into three regions, starting with the one above (the southwest side). In addition to the art gallery that somehow has a Picasso, and the empty toy and sporting stores, there’s a City Dump (smelly), a boarded up jewelry store, and a pawn shop with the only visible person in town. The pawn shop’s only available item is a sledgehammer.
Moving on to the southeast side of town…
…there’s a lone telephone booth, just like Urban Upstart, but unlike in that game you can’t use it because the phone has simply been ripped out.
There’s a kennel and a hardware store at the same corner. The hardware store apparently has nothing although there’s a sign about wire cutters in aisle 2. I have not been able to find any but I might be missing some kind of search verb. (Although knowing this game, it might be just adding some extra dose of dystopia.)
The kennel has a guard dog. I haven’t tried to interact with it yet.
There are two other places in this area of note, one being a giant auto lot, which apparently managed to sustain whatever … happened to Jollyville.
There’s a *Corvette* here.
The Jollyville Post Office is abandoned because the workers are on strike. There are *stamps* here and you can take them without the police doing anything.
On to the northeast side, which is almost just as chipper as the other two sections!
There’s a bank with a sign about how TELLERS HELP IN ALL TRANSACTIONS but no teller. Here’s where I really suspect I’m missing a verb of some sort.
There’s also an antique shop with an inaccessible showcase…
…a gas station (with gas at $8.69 per gallon, which is meant to be comically ludicrous)…
…and a hi-fi center with a stereo that the police are watching like a hawk.
I should also mention there’s a “gutter” (which can’t seem to be entered, pried at, etc. at least for now) and a place “behind” an electric company but no way to get in.
All this leads to a curious atmosphere where I’m not sure where I should be prodding. The only logical thing is the sledge hammer, where the pawn shop owner won’t let you take it but he will let you “borrow” it for ten minutes for what I assume is a smash-a-thon. There’s a brick out in a random spot but I haven’t been able to do any smashing with that, nor have I experimented much yet with the other items; I figured I needed the layout of the map first.
This is the sort of game where I need to work out what the norms are. Just how violent is our character being? Is this like Williamsburg Adventure where anything goes, including rolling an entire cannon to a shop and shooting someone dead with it? When do the police care about something and when do they not care? Will the game be sad if I steal from the pawn store owner (or attack him) or is that entirely within the fair bounds of what the game expects? I think the most clear example of this being a problem is how in It Takes a Thief we could shoot a person dead but not a dog. I can’t make any assumptions about where the game’s moral limits are.
This had the hint (I was initially wobbly on translating) that it’s related to previous puzzles except given a twist. I realized perhaps the numbers duplicated the same chart as last time but with digits rather than letters; for the “twist” I needed to either flip the diagram over or turn it. It turns out a right-left reflection was correct: rather than counting columns from left to right I needed to count from right to left. The entire grid “twists” in the process. The third cipher line (35 23 65 55 51) as an example:
I had the extra hurdle of running across archaic pronunciation.
Pierson again. His translation: “On the springfields, mist draws in layers till the blossoming flowers are in full bloom, ah, won’t I meet you my lord?”
The third line is “saku hana no” but you might notice it says “vana”. This reflects a shift in sound that happened in Japanese (it originally didn’t have an “h” sound), which of course wreaked havoc with my searches, but I eventually muddled through.
BONUS NOTE: The “h” sounds were originally pronounced with a “p”, but sometime near when the Man’yōshū was compiled the sound shifted to be the “voiceless bilabial fricative” before landing on the modern sound. (That is, pa went to ɸa went to ha.) The “ɸ” sound still shows up in “fu” in modern Japanese, which you can hear in the video below:
The choice of “v” is Pierson’s own; this volume came out in 1929 and he notes that multiple sounds appear for the “ha” character and so he tries to split the difference:
…the “v” I want to introduce is familiar to the eye, easy to pronounce and can serve in the modern spelling as well.
That’s enough historiography-of-linguistics, let’s get over to the sixth sage–
The presence of the @ character gave me immediate suspicion what I was looking at…
GNT@8H NAKUT@W0 HLQQ
…but I went over to pick up the hint anyway, which said that the answer was “in front of your eyes”. This is meant to be the literal PC-8001 keyboard the game is being typed on.
Each letter and symbol has a corresponding character. If you simply line those up, you get the right answer – no other shifting or turning or anagramming or anything like that. I found it to be the easiest of the six puzzles (especially as I could just type most of the letters directly on my emulator!) The @ mark corresponds with the dakuten (that can turn, say, ウ into ヴ)
Despite being the easiest, I found it the most interesting of the puzzles because of the history behind this particular poem. First, an alternate translation.
Oh for a heavenly fire!
I would reel in
The distant road you travel,
Fold it up,
And burn it to ashes.
This poem is by the attendant Sano no Chigami no Otome, part of a series of 63 poems in a “poem-tale” regarding her lover Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled.
The second account of travel and longing in Book Fifteen (verses 3723–85), attributed to the exiled courtier Nakatomi no Yakamori and his lover Sano no Otogami, comprises sixty-three tanka, arranged in four pairs of multiverse exchanges between the man and the woman, plus a seven-verse coda … it appears to have been based on historical realities; there was an actual Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled to Echizen in early 739 for an unknown transgression and who was pardoned in 741. The Nakatomi-Sano set constitutes a compendium of the conventions of courtly longing.
It includes a hapax legomenon. That’s a word that shows up nowhere else in a set of texts; in this case, the word tatane (“to fold”). It is close to tatam (also “to fold”). This could be a mere typo, but it shows this way in multiple manuscripts of Book 15.
From here the answer (including the invocation of heavenly fire) goes to the seventh sage. I was curious what would happen, given I knew (from the walkthrough) there were only six required answers. It turns out the sage gives yet another puzzle…
…and you’re supposed to send your answer to Micom City for a prize.
I’m leaving the puzzle as an exercise for the reader. This was exhausting enough already. You’re all ready to tackle this now, right?
In all seriousness, it did feel satisfying to finally get the overall pattern of what was going on and how to approach each puzzle, even though I was far out of my comfort zone. One open question is: does the game represent a hapax legomenon of its own? The back of the box emphasizes how “unique” the game is. While it’s not the only word game text adventure, and not even the only one written in Japanese in 1983 (we’ll get there eventually), it might be the only one ever written (including to the modern day) which requires close interaction with ancient texts. So if we narrowly point at that aspect, yes, the game is totally unique and out of time.
Rob did some more sleuthing and found that of the Micom City adventures, Date Adventure was advertised first and would have landed in January, and this game and Ninja Adventure came in February. This is still before the flood of games really starts, so even an oddball game like this might have had more distribution than you’d expect.
The months aren’t exact; I went by first-magazine-ad-I-had-minus-1-month but these are computer stores who might sell something a bit earlier than that. The red-marked games I don’t have copies of so haven’t played yet. There’s at least one more Japanese game in February (at least according to my secondary source that I haven’t cross-checked yet) but March/April 1983 is where the adventures really starts to arrive.
Special thanks to gschmidl who helped me get the file up and running and everyone in the comments who chipped in. And very special thanks to the author of the walkthrough; I likely never would have even figured out the premise of the game without initial guidance. I’m expecting/hoping if Date or Ninja Adventure pop up sometime they’ll be a little less stressful to play.
Kazuma Satou made the point in my comments that even for people who are proficient in Japanese (I am not) this game can be rough, as the poems are in ancient Japanese. With the puzzle I left off on last time I ran into the issue directly.
ウナハノノ サシトハナクニ アトヒルニ
The old man’s hint was about “it is by block” and in the context of the previous puzzle, it seemed to indicate this was another anagram, except each of the three segments would be self-contained.
I focused on the first part, which had u, na, ha, no, and no. (Not only did it seem simple, but when searching for poetry, it’s easier to search for the first line.) My first suspicion, rolling with the idea Matt T. used last time on looking for common poetry words, was the word “hana”, or flower, which is the sort of thing that goes in poetry everywhere. I knew from binge-reading ancient poetry over the last two days that “no hana no” or “hana no no” were both possible, but the “u” was rather tricky, I ended up putting it at the beginning as an exclamation of sorts. While both regular Google and the Internet Archive were struggling, Google Books gave me some hits, and I finally hit victory with a book by Frederick Victor Dickins from 1908.
This is the right poem, as all the syllables for the other anagrams work correctly. I came across so many flower poems with the same first line but a miss on everything else. (Keep in mind also: while figuring this out I had no idea if I was using the right method of solving, and tried some weird theories involving the gojūon arrangement — more on that later. There’s at least some valid comparison with my discussion of second-order puzzles with no confirmation in the middle if you’re on the right track; once I hit upon “no hana no” it felt close enough I had at least partial confirmation I was doing something right.)
This incidentally isn’t even using text I expected (u no hana no), but rather all as one word. Modern Japanese dictionaries do not think it is a word.
However, we’re looking at very old poetry. According to a dictionary on ancient Japanese texts, unohanano refers to the Deutzia scabra plant (Japanese snow flower) when it blooms.
I still needed to find the next sage for delivery; again, I had to use brute force and I have no idea how the visual relates to which sage is the next one in sequence.
I put the pictures for sage 3 and sage 4 (this one) next to each other as image files in a directory, then rapidly went back and forth between them. The image did not change at all.
First the puzzle, then the old man’s clue to go with it:
You might notice the English letters tossed in there. Indeed, the ciphertext this time appears to have no Japanese in it.
AA CA ED QBA GB
JA ID FA BD QDC IA QCB
AC IC FA CB BB
The hint says to refer to the 50-symbol chart, and also asks “what is Q?”
The chart in question is the chart that hiragana or katakana characters can be arranged on, where the vowels go a, i, u, e, o in order on one side, and the consonants go the other direction. I took the chart from Wikipedia, and guessed that the letters were coordinates; for example, GB would be row G (or 7), column B (or 2). I then used this to plot all of them on the Katakana chart. There are three with a “Q” that I’ve marked in a different color.
(I actually did with the previous puzzle too! I was thinking maybe the chart was a “block”, but my answer didn’t go anywhere.)
Getting in mind my last search, I broke things up and typed a-sa-ne-ka-mi-wa-re and got a hit:
There are some slight differences having to do with Japanese phonetics; all I needed anyway was the poem and the last two lines. Just like before, they were enough to satisfy the next sage.
…and the hint is that it’s like what we’ve seen except it is broken or twisted. (Also it gives as a hint, “what is the +”?) I have no idea what this means and I haven’t started yet, but it seems like the sort of thing to kick over to you, the readers.
We’re fairly close to the end; there are six puzzles and we’re on sage number 5. (There are seven sages, but you only need to solve six, at least according to the walkthrough, I assume because the seventh is there to take delivery of the last puzzle.)
As found by Rob on Yahoo Auctions. The front cover’s sign says “those who rush are lost” and “think carefully”; the back cover says that by the author’s choice “no explanatory text is included”, and there are “tricks” for “those who are not satisfied with conventional games”.
The game’s instructions (see auction above) mainly emphasize we are trying to solve the puzzles from the sages, and how sometimes “you won’t even know where you are”. It also explains the game uses katakana with no spaces and that
For detailed information, please try the game and figure it out for yourself.
From last time I was stuck on a particular code:
ナリノメノ ルゲサニミケシ ヒノユシノ
The old man’s hint said something about exchanging and symmetry. This is meant to indicate some of the characters swap places. Somehow (“recognizing jumbled phrases likely to appear in a Man’yoshu poem, and searching for them”), Matt. T. managed to work out this was poem 8.1500 which I’ll talk about in a moment; this was enough for me to pull up the starting characters of the result:
ナツノノノ シゲミニサケル ヒメユリノ
All the even-positioned characters swap places, in the manner shown…
…which is both elegant and hard to figure out. You don’t technically need to do this step, as long as you realize the initial 17 characters have been jumbled somehow. Remember from the first puzzle, you need to give the completion of the poem. It was written by Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoue (695–750).
I checked multiple translations, and I prefer this one:
As the fields in summer,
Awash with blooming
Scarlet lilies, is
Love unknown and unrequited,
A bitter thing, indeed
To give the answer I needed sage number 3, which is one of the sages with a marked forehead. This one was just to the southwest of the start. I still don’t know what the logic is; I just got lucky.
This is the same text as the previous sage, except the code is now…
ウナハノノ サシトハナクニ アトヒルニ
…and the old man’s clue is something about the puzzle being by ブロック, by “block”.
I don’t think the game means this kind of block, but I still like doing image-searches for vocabulary. Source.
You may notice that all our clues have been in the format 5-7-5; waka poetry in general follows the pattern 5-7-5-7-7, so the idea behind each puzzle has been to identify the 5-7-5 part in order to figure out the missing 14 characters at the end of each poem. Going long back historically, the term waka was actually a more general term for poem, but 5-7-5-7-7 predominated enough to become synonymous with the form. I mention this in case the solution has to do with the exact numerical aspect somehow, like perhaps arranging the characters in a grid of some sort…
…although it could be just whatever operation being done stays within the “block” of each section. I tried struggling a bit with simply rearranging ウナハノノ (u, na, ha, no, no) and while “hana” is promising (the word for flower), and I got “hana no” in one poem…
…I did not get a full hit. The problem is that this may be entirely the wrong method, so if someone who is happy to peek at the walkthrough wants to check, I’ll take a hint that either I’m on the right or entirely wrong track.
The previous game I played, Wonderland by Richard Ramella, was based on a five by five grid, with randomly distributed characters and a word puzzle to solve. This all applies to Puzzle Adventure as well, except the grid includes confusing teleport exits, the characters need to be talked to in a particular order otherwise it’s game over, and there are multiple word puzzles involving 1400-year-old Japanese poetry. Pretty much the same, right?
In all seriousness, Wonderland is the best comparison game I can think of that we’ve played before; maybe a bit of Dennis Koble’s Chinese Puzzle. This is an “abstract” adventure where you are supposed to find six sages and answer their puzzles. Each puzzle involves a line of poetry.
The game was published by Micom City (マイコン・シティー) and written by Ryuhei Suzuki. Micom’s publishing seemed to last from late 1982 to late 1983 and then drop off from there. Their first game I’ve been able to find is a space shooter. Helpfully, the title screen gives a date of November 21st, 1982.
The ad in the Youtube thumbnail is from I/O Magazine, September 1983. It shows all four of their adventure games.
From top to bottom they are: Time Bomb Adventure (“disassemble the time bomb on the screen within the time limit”), Date Adventure (“overcome obstacles to get a kiss from your girlfriend”), Ninja Adventure (“steal the secret document”) and today’s game, Puzzle Adventure (“the biggest mystery with the fewest words”).
They were originally for PC-8001 (the same platform Omotesando Adventure was on). The Game Preservation Society lists the latter three games as being from January 1983 and the earliest issue I can find of the various ads for the company is from March 1983, putting a release at January or February; the Date/Ninja/Puzzle trio thus represent the earliest new adventures of 1983, alongside The Palms.
Time Bomb Adventure is listed as “upcoming” for March but may not have come out until later in the year; a Japan Travel Adventure was slated for the same month but seems to have never been released. The ads in general state the company wants software that they will purchase at a “high price” and they prioritize “originality”. The author of Puzzle Adventure, Ryuhei Suzuki, was likely an independent author who took the solicitation to heart (Ninja and Date are also by him, I don’t know about Time Bomb).
Close-up of the Puzzle Adventure cover.
Before diving into the game itself, I should mention my emulation setup. I’m using Quasi88, which you can find on the author’s page here. The most recent version includes a katakana keyboard. I have a download here with everything packaged together including a save state which will jump you right to the start so you don’t have to bother with tape loading (go to the second to the last tab on the menu, press the button marked ロード).
Officially, the title is パズル アドベンチャー.
The phrase “anata wa totemo fushigina sekai ni imasu” or “you are in a mysterious world” repeats with essentially every room. If you want to see anything you need to look around (“miru”). You do not start alone.
You can see an old man.
You are in a mysterious world.
The structure of the game is to go around and find sages (like the sitting person on the cover) and talk with them. Then you can go back to the old man in the center and ask for a hint, which will give more information to solve the puzzle. The puzzle will resolve to be a line from a poem. You need to then find the next sage, who will first ask for the previous puzzle’s answer; if you give it correctly, you’ll get the next puzzle.
You can wander the landscape with north/south/east/west (or rather, kita/minami/hisashi/nishi) although as I hinted at from the start, this isn’t a straightforward grid. There are some landmarks around like “rabbit” and “flower” that can help but many of the non-character rooms have nothing. There are no items to drop to help with the mapping, either. I was having enough trouble I threw in the towel part-way and just went for the walkthrough’s map which I will reproduce here.
(Note that I know this walkthrough map has errors; north-west-south-east from the start does not lead back to the start, for instance. I’m just coping with random flailing when I need it, to be honest.)
The green spots are where the sages are located, and while those spaces always have sages in them, which sage goes in which spot is random. “Which sage” is very important. The randomization happens when you meet a sage, not when the game starts. Talking with the wrong sage is a game over…
“Idiot fool! You aren’t ready to talk to me yet! Start over and come back when you’re ready!”
…and they are indistinguishable in text. You need to use ヲミル which will “examine” the sage and the game will give a picture.
The different sages look very similar and while the walkthrough has a guide to this I haven’t looked at that yet. I know the picture above is of sage 1. With this sage I’m not sure…
…but I’ve also seen sage 2, and they look indistinguishable to me from sage 1. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve just had to use brute force.
Once finding the proper sage, you can type セイシンニキク (ask the sage) and you’ll get the appropriate puzzle.
The last part is:
Very well! This is my puzzle!
ヘルシコト ムキテﾞクムロヒﾞ フナモムス
How is it? Can you solve it?
I did not translate the puzzle itself because I can’t. This is a ciphertext puzzle. (You know what this reminds me of also? An Andrew Schultz game. Except the author is Japanese and in the early 80s rather than writing a new English wordplay game for seemingly every single IFComp.) It’s possible to just solve the puzzle from here (assuming you’re good at cryptograms in Japanese) but the old man’s hint at least makes this a smidge less painful.
Assuming you can get back and find him (if you eyeball the map, you’ll notice you can only enter the start going to the east) he says “the characters are shifted”. This is essentially a Caesar shift, using the standard order katakana letters. Move each back by one and you’ll get something that makes sense. (For example, “コ” or “ko” turns into “ケ” or “ke”.) This causes the text to turn into
フリサケテ ミカツキミレハ ヒトメミシ
which is direct from the Man’yōshū compilation of poems. Specifically, Poem No. 6-994 by Ōtomo Yakamochi (who likely was the one who compiled the collection in the first place), starting with “furisakete mikazuki mireba hitome mishi”. He wrote the poem when he was sixteen.
From A Warbler’s Song in the Dusk: The Life and Work of Otomo Yakamochi by Paula Doe.
After multiple stalled attempts I found the second sage (middle east side of the map, but remember it is random) which quizzed me on what the puzzle’s answer was. I confidently gave the shifted translation but I was told it was wrong, and asked if I had gotten a hint from the old man yet. (This is how you are supposed to know you ask for hints!) I finally realized that the poem connection wasn’t just a reference, but essential to the puzzle. The answer isn’t the first part of the poem, but the completion of the poem.
That is, pawing through ancient poetry is required to beat the game.
In any case, I now have a new puzzle. It also doesn’t make sense as-is so must be another cipher somehow.
ナリノメノ ルゲサニミケシ ヒノユシノ
Getting the old man’s hint I got something like “This is a character exchange. Pay attention to the nature of the symmetry!”. I’m happy to hear suggestions from anyone who hasn’t looked at the walkthrough (even if you don’t know any Japanese, you might have some idea that will work!) I’m riding far past the edge of my ability but I’ll try plowing ahead anyway.
An adventure is an undertaking that carries risk, surprise, and sometimes danger with it. There is no danger in these games. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I dislike computer games in which a player must pretend to pay the death penalty just because of a wrong choice at the fork of a path.
The reason three games can all fit together is that they are all from Richard Ramella of Chico, California, who we saw last year with Fun House. He wrote small games for children, games intentionally designed small and straightforward enough to make them tempting to modify.
I’m going to admit only three kinds of people into Fun House: Kids, adults who have friends who are kids, and people who haven’t lost the sense of playfulness that kids have as standard equipment. Fun House is more about fun than houses.
…and followed this after with his Fun House column in the September issue of 80 Microcomputing; the column ran until the April 1984 issue (as 80 Micro started cutting back on their games coverage). He followed with two books that combine “fiction and computer programs to form one giant fantasy for young readers” (Rainbow Quest and Lightyear Excuse). He was active enough that I might be missing something; there’s also the issue that books for children tend not to be preserved in libraries as well as other materials (paperbacks get beaten up and disposed of, and serious academic libraries tend not to collect them as a focus). If you want to see the hybrid fiction/type-in style of Lightyear Excuse, Ramella’s brief-lived column with Color Computing Magazine that started after Fun House should give you an idea.
The March 1983 column is titled Adventure Secrets, although — given the tiny-game restriction — it’s a fairly loose definition of “adventure”. Treasure Trove in particular counts even though it’s unusual in a way I’ve seen before.
Starting with The Gingerbread Caper, it’s a choice-based game where all the choices are “fake”, so to speak; Ramella calls it “linear” and marks the game as being for children seven and up. I want to emphasize that the age of seven guidance is not just reading or playing the game, but inputting and/or modifying it.
100 ‘ * THE GINGERBREAD CAPER * 4K BASIC LEVEL II
110 CLS
120 A$=STRING$(10,”*”)
130 INPUT”What is your name”;B$
140 PRINTB$;”, you are in the woods with Hansel and Gretel.”
150 PRINT”Hansel says: Leave a breadcrumb trail (1)”
160 PRINT”Gretel says: No, eat the bread (2).”
170 INPUT”Your choice”;X
180 PRINTA$
190 IFX=1THENPRINT”Birds eat the crumbs. You’re lost.”
200 IFX=2THENPRINT” You’re lost but not hungry.”
210 PRINT”You come to a fork in the path.”
220 PRINT”Hansel says Go left (1), Gretel says Go right (2)”
230 INPUT”What is your vote”;X
Maybe your seven-year-old novice doesn’t know what every element means, but they can still modify text strings, which is one way to start being a developer. (The legendary Tales of Maj’Eyal started as just a text-string hack of Angband to make it Tales of Middle Earth.) The actual choice turns out not to matter or make the player lose; the crumbs get eaten if a bread-trail is left. The remainder of the story is similarly low-stakes choices. You may want to pause and try the game yourself online (click “emulate edited program” and you’re good to go).
The column’s version of the game is all-caps. Whoever typed this version started putting in lowercase and then dropped halfway through.
The only “bad” choice is nibbling the gingerbread house at the end, which has an ELDERLY WOMAN come out to chase you and you get reset back to the start (not dead, just lost in the forest again where you can make choices again — something like the old Time Machine gamebooks). If you wait, the woman invites you inside and you can call your parents and stay over the night.
620 PRINT”THE HOUSE BELONGS TO RED RIDING HOOD’S GRANDMA.”
630 PRINT”GRANDMA INVITES YOU ALL TO VISIT.”
640 PRINT”YOU CALL YOUR PARENTS ON GRANDMA’S PHONE.”
650 PRINT”THEY SAY YOU MAY SPEND THE NIGHT.”
660 PRINT”AND EVERYONE LIVES HAPPILY EVER AFTER.”
670 END
This sort of bespoke-coding might be a bad idea in an adult game, especially when a parser is involved (see Johnson’s Castle Dracula for one I wrote about recently) but works fine for the context and low-stakes here.
The second game in the column, Treasure Trove, is the first one I came across. It was entirely without context. I have a collection of unsorted-by-year-or-author games and I found this one before realizing it connected with Ramella.
It is cryptic and I first wondered if something was broken or if the game was incomplete.
Treasure Trove is shorter than Gingerbread, but it does a lot more. You are put into a scene, told your location, given a tool, and told its use.
There’s no obvious goal on the start screen.
You go through a series of “tools” and try to use all of them in sequence. I first tried typing “W” to move and got the message “What, W a box with a feather? Impossible !!!”
Trying it again gets the message:
B-O-N-K !
which based on the article, is supposed to mean you went in a direction you couldn’t do. So I was briefly thrown for a loop by it seeming that: a.) you start by having a command to go west be misunderstood followed by b.) having the command to go west be understood, but have it run into a wall.
What’s really going on is that the game has two prompts, “action” followed by “direction”. It asks for an action even if you’re somewhere you aren’t supposed to be doing the action. So while the screen above has the player start at a box with a feather, “tickle” just lets you know the action is impossible; you might think you’d want to just specify a direction then, but you’ve got to go through the hoop of handling the “action” prompt first.
What, tickle a box with a feather?
Impossible !!!
I finally realized that the way to get from “action mode” to “direction mode” without an error message is to hit “enter”, that is, send a blank prompt.
550 INPUT “ACTION”; E$
560 IF E$=”” THEN RETURN
Once the game is in “direction mode”, it doesn’t exit it until you’ve successfully landed a direction (rather than just getting “B-O-N-K” to come out).
This would all be more troublesome with a larger map, but the entirety is a 2 by 2 grid.
The feather thus goes up to the dragon (who I wouldn’t assume is ticklish, but the only thing where the action “tickle” even makes sense).
The “key” then goes over to the box.
Good Move
The box produces a ladder
This is your new tool
Its purpose: climb
The ladder works on the beach tree:
Good Move
The tree produces a shovel
This is your new tool
Its purpose: dig
Finally, the shovel works on the beach.
Commands need to be typed in lowercase for the version I played; the original is all uppercase and doesn’t need to account for that.
While Treasure Trove technically counts as an adventure, it mainly held interest in watching someone reconstruct the concept of a parser from first principles in an effort to simplify things for children; unfortunately it made things more confusing for children instead.
Now on to the last game, Wonderland, which won’t have the same lower-case/upper-case issue as the other two, because it doesn’t seem to be archived at all. I had to type it in myself. You can find the code here.
Again the rules are irregular, but it isn’t as anti-intuitive as Treasure Trove.
This program borrows 10 characters and 10 items or scenes from the Lewis Carroll stories Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Each is assigned a different place on a 5-by-5 grid.
Note the regular grid this time only uses cardinal directions, as opposed to Treasure Trove which tried to hard-code in NE/NW/SE/SW into the program.
At the start, one of the characters is secretly made the mystery character. Your goal is to identify that character and then find its location.
The grid is set up at random. Some rooms are “locations”, some are “characters”. Some (independent of if they are a location or a character) have “clues”.
You might notice the count of 10 locations and 10 characters means that not all 25 squares are covered; some duplicates are included. Below is a complete map of one playthrough.
Clue-spots are marked in the corner, although I’m unclear their exact system; some spaces have more than one clue (that is, if you gather a clue and revisit, you’ll get another clue). To gather a clue, you need to solve an addition problem that briefly flashes on the screen. (For this age, it is testing both addition and paying attention; it’s fast enough — and the time even has randomness applied — that I sometimes missed seeing both numbers.)
Getting a clue right adds a “letter” to a list. The letter is simply a random letter chosen from the “mystery character” you’re supposed to be guessing.
If you reach a character, you’ll get prompted if you want to guess at the mystery character. You don’t have to guess at the character that is physically present; it just wants any guess typed in, and if you get it correct then the game says you need to find that character to win.
Although you are also welcome to guess the right place with the answer.
I found this oddly compelling, moreso than Treasure Trove at least. The main “parser” is just movement and getting interrupted by questions doesn’t feel too unnatural. The addition-problem aspect seems more of a vision quiz than a math puzzle so feels appropriate to the setting, and even though everything is just spread out references, the game benefits from the “fan fiction boost” of familiarity.
Two Queen’s Throne rooms. I guess she has a backup.
Despite these only barely qualifying as adventures (and I wouldn’t count Wonderland at all) I still found it interesting to see an approach to writing something intended as “adventure gaming” but not following the standard rules. This likely won’t be the last time we see this approach, despite “guides” starting to become common.
Even if his books never come up, Richard Ramella will come up again with a type-in in 1985; I also suspect once the Amiga steps in we’ll have a return performance as for many years he published the first Amiga diskmag, called Jumpdisk.
September 1986 issue, via eBay. Includes “Where’s Tom”, an “electronic time map” game of Tom Sawyer.
Coming up: assuming I can get over the technical hurdles (being more a pain than normal) our next game is from Japan, and it bears some resemblance to Wonderland.
Three months after Time-Line started being offered, Tim Gilberts attended one of the legendary ZX Microfairs with his parents (Number 7, Alexandria Palace in London, June 4th).
As mentioned last time, his parents were quite supportive of his efforts to start a company; his father Howard was a telephone engineer who was always into electronics (building a TV Tennis game for his son as a birthday present) and he always had a “sideline” job (that is, he supported entrepreneurship).
The younger Tim’s experience with computers in school was originally quite minimal, with no access to hardware. Coding was done in the language CESIL (Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language) and sent to a central location for processing (most likely being returned later to the student with an error).
Students didn’t even use punch cards, they wrote on a “Coding Sheet” to be passed on to an operator. Reproduction from Ian Dunmore.
He had two maths teachers interested enough in computing (and displeased with the paper situation) that they wrangled not only a desktop…
…but a terminal that connected directly to the school’s mainframe.
CESIL was still being used in the classroom — it was part of the O-Levels — and Tim Gilberts was tasked with one of the teachers (Mr Danks) to make a CESIL interpreter, lending a TRS-80 for the purpose.
This was probably my first commission for software – unpaid of course.
This is why one of Gilsoft’s earliest products was not a game at all, but a CESIL interpreter.
From Spectrum Computing.
He was able to buy a ZX81 with money he saved, and being supportive of what looked to be a budding career, his father purchased him a ZX Spectrum right when it came out. (Tim was still in school at the time working on his A Levels.)
But back to that Microfair in June–
Tim with his mother Pam and his father Howard. Source.
This was actually their second public sales event, after a small one in Bristol (where they made “a small quantity of mail order sales”). Gilsoft was positioned at stand E2, right next to the company Bytewell (one local to Barry that Gilberts had written a game for). Unfortunately, sales did not pick up in London; while they made money, this was because they had their Spectrum hooked up to a DK’Tronics keyboard that attracted attention, so they walked across the hall to where DK’Tronics was selling the keyboards and bought a set in bulk at vendor-cost to resell at their own stand.
The total turnover on the day when we counted the cash in our caravan in the Alexandra Palace carpark was some £1200 pounds with only a very small percentage from the sale of software. Disappointing as this was the production costs were low, the artwork for the cassette inlays being the most expensive items” but, they were not very advanced at the start.
This would change by their next Microfair, around Christmas, when it would be Gilsoft’s software attracting attention.
For now, we aren’t quite that far, as while Yeandle had made an adventure, Tim Gilberts wanted to try his hand at one too. He used the same database setup that Yeandle had made. This wasn’t just based on his interest but also on marketing savvy.
You must remember from the early industry people just wrote anything and threw it at the wall. [We] commonly called the magazines in advertising [to] see what sold. Adventure games seemed to be selling so I wrote one.
His game was called Diamond Trail.
Just before its long awaited premiere, the priceless Sinclive Diamond was stolen from the Jewel room of Spectraisia’s Capital, Microdrivia.
You must restore it in as short a time as possible, before the public begins to doubt its existence. Also bring the fake back to headquarters.
Unlike Time-Line, there are multiple ports, as after the initial Spectrum-only game it was moved to the actual Quill system, and from there taken to other machines. In fact, I was unable to find a non-Quill version of the game (I tried eight different versions) so I just went with it.
From the Commodore Plus/4 version.
This game takes multiple cues from Time-Line, both in a technical and design sense, but I think it came out stronger in the end just from having a more coherent setting (with some clearer British-urban-satire applied with a dose of Wales).
Our base of operations is an apparently abandoned secret police base. It is so secret that nobody is around and it’s possible (likely even, given a few circumstances) to be arrested for stealing. Maybe we’re one of the Slow Horses.
The secret police HQ also has an “armoury” with a long knife and an “office” with a bag. Neither seem to be helpful at first (the bag I never found helpful at all; maybe it increases inventory capacity somehow but I didn’t get it to work). Where the knife’s failure as an armoury-tool becomes clearly apparent is going east from the HQ, where you get immediately ambushed by a man with a gun. Once this starts, the man keeps shooting at you until you die.
I am in a seedy back road which goes SOUTH. Doors open to the EAST and WEST.
A man appears and takes a shot at me, he missed!
I was puzzled trying to USE KNIFE and KILL MAN with no effect, but I finally came across THROW KNIFE.
>throw knife
The Knife skims past his head & falls to the ground.
I’m hungry!
A man appears and takes a shot at me, he missed!
Done Crowther/Woods style this might just involve throwing the knife enough times and getting lucky with RNG, but the knife will never hit. You instead need to use a different weapon instead entirely.
You might also notice the “I’m hungry!” Just like Time-Line, there’s an almost immediate and deadly hunger timer. It took me a while before I could resolve it, for reasons I’ll go into shortly.
Heading west from HQ thankfully is bullet-free, as you are described as on the east side of a busy road. Trying to enter the road was deadly.
The death does the word cut-off just like both Reed’s article and Time-Line.
Avoiding that for the moment, heading north leads to a “large junk shop” with a “small purse” where you can open it and find a one-pound note. I do not know why taking it doesn’t count as stealing.
I am inside a large junk shop.
The exit is SOUTH.
I can also see:-
A small purse.
>get purse
OK.
>open purse
I am inside a large junk shop.
The exit is SOUTH.
I can also see:-
A £1.00 NOTE.
Just south there is a cathedral with a ladder outside, and a collection plate inside with a 50p coin. If you take the 50p coin and just walk off your game is over.
You need to instead drop the note first, and then you are safe. The police are watching that closely (but can’t help with a bloke shooting at you, apparently, or do anything other than flail their arms around when it comes to a stolen jewel).
The ladder incidentally feels a bit like the one from Time-Line; in that game, you could try CLIMB LADDER but the game would say you check and there’s nothing up there. In this case, CLIMB LADDER is the actual right thing to do, as in the same area as an entrance to an Underground Tube Station there’s a ledge described as up high.
Try to go down into the station and you will be asked for a ticket. We’ll get that later.
The key is useful for when you go a bit farther south to a “small museum”. The museum has an old lamp and a locked door. You can go around a back alley to CLIMB DUSTBINS and find a back room with a “laser cutter”, then use the key from the ledge to get back into the small museum via the back way. The reason to do this (other than snagging the cutter) is that if you try to take the old lamp away you’ll get busted for stealing again.
So after getting the lamp you just go back out the back window and then you’ll be safe. (Maybe it’s all those surveillance cameras London is known for … except they weren’t known for that yet in 1983. Thatcher something something?)
All this time there’s been “you’re hungry” messages and I admit being stuck a while. I also tried running past the shooting man to explore past a little; there’s a travel office with a ticket (but no way to pay for it, neither the note nor 50p coin work) and a closed/sealed manhole going the other way.
Exploring while cheerfully ignoring impending doom. The number of turns it takes to die is entirely random. The shooter can appear anywhere on the map. I originally thought maybe there was a way to get him run over by traffic.
What broke the case was my thinking, oddly enough, of a hint given in the prior game.
The hint here is complete nonsense in Time-Line, but of course maybe LOOKing both ways is the right way to approach the road?
sigh
This is one of those makes-sense-in-the-text-universe only puzzles, since of course normally you’d see the crossing. CROSS CROSSING will safely move to the west side of the road.
This alleviates the hunger issue as there is a deli with a vending machine that accepts the 50p coin from the cathedral; you can get a hamburger and then not worry about hunger thereafter.
Also about is the tower with the missing jewel (there’s a fake one you need to take back to HQ, as per the instructions) and while trying to go back there’s a fire hydrant that sprays acidic water on you which is a problem unless you’re wearing a mackintosh that happens to be lying around near the tower.
This seems to be random rather than timed so I think you could get lucky rather than wearing the raincoat.
Finally — and I admit I missed an exit for a while so it took me a moment to find it — you can go west from the hydrant to find a library which has a book (logical) and a gun (???).
The book gives directions on using the laser cutter from back at the museum (“twiddle” the knobs). With the gun, you can shoot down the person who has been after you…
…leaving the way open to bust open the drain cover with the laser cutter.
>twiddle knobs
I am in a Cul-de-Sac, The exit is NORTH.
There are some NEW WEEDS here.
I can also see:-
A drain cover with a neat round
hole cut in it.
This leads down to a maze, again invoking the spirit (and some of the literal code-base) of Time-Line.
One of the rooms has the sound of water falling which indicates this is the one spot in the maze you should use “down” (as opposed to N/S/E/W) — this is exactly analogous to the “draft” in the Time-Line maze which indicated it was possible to go up.
Going down reveals a “credit card” in the sewer; moving along farther reveals the secret hideout of the jewel thieves, although they’ve already left.
You don’t ever apprehend them; you’re just trying to get the diamond back.
From the hideout you can go into the tower the “back way”; this will be handy later. For now, let’s use the credit card and try the train ticket.
Random cheeky red herring, just like Time-Line.
The trick here is to simply WAIT TRAIN again and get on the second train, not the first one.
The inside of the “lost property office” has a crate. If you have the knife from the start of the game (the one useless as a weapon) you can use it to open the crate and get the diamond.
I am in a lost property office.
It seems deserted. The platform is to the WEST.
I can also see:-
A real diamond.
Some splintered wood.
Now winning is just a matter of returning the real diamond to the tower, although if you try to do it from the front, you get arrested for stealing! (…..??…..) You need to instead sneak through the sewers and drop it off where the fake diamond was.
I am in the Jewel Room, a spiral staircase leads DOWN.
I can also see:-
A real diamond.
I’m ready for your instructions.
>d
I am inside a room at the base of the tower. A spiral staircase goes UP, and an open door leads to the NORTH.
I can also see:-
A sign which says;
“Tower closed to PUBLIC”
Now you can walk back to the HQ and victory.
I have no interest in optimizing.
The action to Time-Line boiled down to eating food, finding pliers and a key, cutting a fence, using the key, and using a battery to get home; in a story-sense, not terribly exciting. The action here was a bit cryptic (why does nobody care someone is shooting at us all over London? why all the arrests for stealing even when we are returning a diamond?) but still more compelling to deal with, and even though the puzzles were straightforward the game was still substantial enough to get through I didn’t feel like it was cut short.
Via Spectrum Computing.
I’m curious how many of the design elements from the first two games keep holding in later Quill ones. I’ll be pausing the Quill story for now; we’ll eventually return to the first game that was actually written directly with the Quill (rather than ported). For now: Some rare adventures or at least adventure-adjacent games, including one that isn’t archived anywhere and I had to type up.
Renga in Blue 