Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Jason, Thank you so much for the kind words. You were extremely generous given how bad the game was (but…

lesse, there’s Rob Davis https://bluerenga.blog/2026/01/20/the-colonels-house-interview-with-the-author/ Roy Niederhoffer https://bluerenga.blog/about/#comment-103910 the son of Richard Ramella https://bluerenga.blog/2022/12/21/fun-house-ramella-1982/ Alex Kreis https://bluerenga.blog/2020/12/08/the-domes-of-kilgari-1981/#comment-105182 Randy Dobkin https://bluerenga.blog/2024/10/05/raspion-adventure-1981/#comment-101728…

“I generally just have to hope Richard E. Herrick Jr. is alive and tries to Google himself sometime”HA how often…

This I think makes you officially the youngest person featured solo on this site! Only younger is a classroom that…

I was 8-10, trying to teach myself BASIC. I was a HUGE fan of Scott Adams and thought writing my…

Thanks for coming by! I would not call them garbage (I especially liked this one!) Could you talk about the…

My name is Rich Herrick. There are my games. I know they are garbage, but I wrote them as a…

this is more progress than I’ve heard anyone else get!

I’ve started playing this on Cyber1. You gave me the idea that the Curtain of Light was passible, which really…

“GW-BASIC certainly supports it as well (but it is obviously a later product).”No, that’s not obvious, and is actually incorrect.…

Oh, well, there’s always the chance that something eventually does come out. (I mean, I technically do have a Windows…

Looking at the walkthrough, the game prompts for “right? left?” (migi? hidari?) a couple of times, so no special terms…

And maybe you should lay of the rum while playing mate. It’s affecting your eyesight;)

Low res back in the day. So frustrating that detail of the Japanese scripts could be so easily lost among…

[I wasn’t allowed to reply to the benevolentchum’s comment direclty.] Interesting. By reading benevolentchum’s comment, I have just now discovered…

yeah low-resolution fonts don’t help with the classic Similarly-Shaped Kana Mixup (as someone whose reading practice is often augmented by…

“Hello JERRY…” “Hello NUUMEN…”

and now that I have zoomed in, the first character is ever so slightly different, agh

there’s clearly something going on! these are both in the same room and are the same commands but one works…

Looking at the code, I can’t see anything that indicates that the Rum hint must be got. But line 4040…

There might be a bug in the code in the prayer routine: Check following line: 4040 IF LEFT$(A$,4)=LEFT$(V$(5),4)=0 THEN 4090…

I finally managed to get through, and it’s _terrible_ I was doing the right action (you can just type the…

yes, that’s correct as far as the unlocked doors go also, I had already listened to the skulls below, did…

And I don’t know if this effects the original game (probably not due to the Noun-Verb order of Japanese), but…

Oh, and if you get the right prayer phrase, you should get a message saying “Rest in Peace” or something…

You always have to go and visit the Pile and “Listen” for the message before praying over the other skeletons…

It seems that you need to not only “look” at rooms before you can interact with objects, but also AT…

if you’re meaning you can pray amen at random skeletons, I get either “nothing happens” or “I don’t know what…

I’ve completed my translation to English and port of the game to TRS-80 MC-10. I’ve also completed the game, so…

That makes sense. Read the first two pages of Supernova, which explains the whole situation with Interplanetary Communicator and all…

Aha, https://books.google.com/books?id=OgviEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA334 (Playing at the World 2E volume 1, page 334 note 15): “[Lucien’s] long association with the IFW [International…

Don’t eat those biscuits. If you look at them (before picking them up), you’ll get a message telling you they’re…

aaaaa ok, at the storage place where the cook’s room is, you can LOOK there to find a barrel. if…

ok, I’m trying to avoid going _too_ crazy poking at source code but there’s a bookcase somewhere and that’s the…

hmm, I may be just shifting the character set wrong (I’ve been using notepad++ for this in the past). looking…

That’s strange, I got it directly from the disk image! I’ll try again.

I don’t think this is right – the later part of the code is talking about things like equipping a…

“It turns out that objects only exist in a room if you’ve applied LOOK” That’s some solid virtual solipsism right…

Have you tried to “ugokasu” everything? Maybe moving a barrel, cannon, etc. will reveal an item or hidden passage.

[…] is extraordinary behavior and we’ve only seen this in one other game: Omotesando Adventure. I was a little faster…

Got it. 932. Thanks so much for your help! Jim

You’re right, there is more. https://codeberg.org/gschmidl/interactive-fiction/src/branch/main/typein/yuureisen.txt You’ll have to change the codepage to ANSI 932.

The program ends at line 3990, but it seems likely there are some additional lines of code. Any scan? Even…

with some help from Gunther Schmidl: https://github.com/jasonbdyer/classic-basic/blob/master/Yuureisen.txt

Jim Gerrie here (You’ve used a few of my MC-10 ports), Any idea on where I can get the tape…

could always email Jon directly and ask, his email contact is mentioned on his blog https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/

I did some digging here, and I don’t think that article would have been in International Wargamer. Lucien (note the…

unfortunately no – it’s mentioned in Playing at the World and I think was printed in International Wargamer but copies…

“[Alan Lucian] also wrote an article in the same year about the board game Jetan…” — I don’t suppose you…

also this does not apply to opening doors so you can’t look at the door (until you have gazed around…

finally worked out what my mechanical problem was:You have to LOOK at the room first [that is, do ミル (miru)…

You can convert all the game bytes to ASCII and there’s nothing there to explain the direction sequence needed to…

that typo is _very plausible_ for this author but I did double check and it looks like it was mine…

AUTOMATIC LASER BEAMS SLICE YOUINTO A USELESS MASS OF FLASH!!!Just wondering if the message really says “FLASH” as this game…

[…] Three books are also listed as being newly published, and they aren’t the sort of thing that would have…

[…] language stepping into adventures for the first time gets its own chance to interpret verb usage; Geheimagent XP-05 used…

Just saw this thread. To follow up on my own blog post, I did an entire podcast on Ken Uston’s…

just to let everyone know I’m alive and still working on thisbusy work week + I had to pretty much…

huh, that suggests they used a different strategy maybe? one day!

Not that I know of offhand, but this line from the old PC-8801 Game Library description of Odyssey is interesting:…

There can be others behind a mizzen, too, if that helps, depending on the rig. Some ships have four masts…

I’m hoping at some point to do a really thorough breakdown of the various parsers we’ve seen, it certainly does…

that genuinely puzzled me too! my Actual Boat experience is so minimal I don’t have a lot of personal context…

Ironically, “mizzen” originally meant “middle”. Yet here we are, with the mizzenmast being the rearmost mast of the ship instead…

I’m afraid this generalization wasn’t true to begin with. Just as many (if not more) early Japanese adventures that use…

Changed to “uu” One other odd things I’ve been noticing is that some search engines have entirely different search results…

hm, I misread the comment I had linked then – I’ll just cut that section, it isn’t important if double-u…

Hmm, did I say that??? My conclusion is actually the opposite, that the two-line input was purely for linguistic considerations,…

other than random uploads, pasokon Sunday switched networks a couple of times so its most likely restorable in chunks should…

I was going to toss this ad in my next post and also the picture of the company I’ve got…

Not as easy to cheat the computer game! (but you can still save/restore if you like) I did find it…

huh, I saw it that way enough times it seemed like it was the “official” English translation how likely it…

Glad to help with the scans! One quick thing tho – its Pasokon Sunday, not TV Sunday. パソコンサンデー is the…

Your troubles with nautical vocabulary remind me of someone’s idea to write IF set on a pirate ship where every…

“Included during the newspaper phase was one marked January 1982 (published one or two months before).” Should be “January 1983”.…

I actually have the first fabled lands book after i heard about it on some podcast. PRetty intense, but easy…

[…] specify how to parser works: noun, followed by a space, followed by a verb. (Kazuma Satou recently theorized in…

[…] our game: Yūreisen, or The Phantom Ship, by Yasuhiro Kume. It was for PC-8001, the same machine Omotesando was…

I think the closest modern game (sort of) to this kind of feel is Fabled Lands. That’s a conversion of…

this reminds me of Galaha don the atari 800: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galahad_and_the_Holy_GrailIt’s clearly influenced by atari 2600 Adventure, but has no quest…

yeah, it’s one of my general nemeses if a game has a general verblist and resorts to USE, it is…

Games that use the verb “use” seem suspect! I remember when i was looking at inform libraries, there was one…

Hmm… I’m no expert on this, but I can’t see any real options for running the MV emulator natively on…

It’s not smooth animation if that’s what you mean. I didn’t include every frame, though (you can think of it…

it’s much easier to control, at least! Typing anything on the Bally system is a pain

Oh, that version? I’ve never played largely because I saw the source files already… Btw, would you be willing to…

hope yr ok with the comment spam as i dive around…. curious how this fairs vs Dark Mage on the…

is the zombie sequence actually animated or just these frames? scrubbed a youtube playthrough but didnt see the zombo

I actually tweeted to donald before, last i heard he was working at walmart but seemed to be doing ok.…

No, the version in question is actually the long lost original of JAZE_XXX on the Adventure family tree. A later…

“One interesting thing is that he added a bit of a pseudo-RPG element to it, with more combat and a…

huh, weird on the ZK. So v1.0 was 1983 but they also claim on the file “written by William Lees…

Qork I actually had maybeish November but I think you can assume the gigantogame is going to throw off any…

Haha, yeah that was me with the ROCK comment. I posted it there because the Addict said he’d be doing…

In some direct video game references: -The skull seems to be the inspiration for the skull-liches in Ultima. -Zelda 1’s…

I also have a Windows version of Qork that I compiled from the Fortran source.

Yeah, I have Quest running in Dosbox. IIRC, you have to unpack the authoring system, then unpack the game in…

have you been able to get the Quest off the website to run? I can unarchive it but then the…

The direct Zork and Adventure references here and talk about D&D and combat elements reminded me of something I had…

[…] more of a “trickster” than a “warrior” that it became routine in this era for weapons to be red…