I promised, after making it through African Escape from the Adventure Pack 2 by Victory Software, I would return to the other games soon.
From the Museum for Computer Adventure games.
As a reminder, the games originally appeared on VIC-20 (super-tiny capacity), C64 (porting the same source code) and C64 again (with some slight enhancements like a verb list). I ended up for various emulator/file-juggling reasons playing Bomb Threat on C64 (non-enhanced) and Hospital on a regular VIC emulator. (As the cover above implies, there were also ColecoVision ADAM versions, but that is a system that will have to wait for another time. There are at least a few ADAM-only adventure games.)
I will say up front both games were considerably more enjoyable than African Escape. I’ve been trying to isolate why; Bomb Threat is extremely tiny and is essentially two puzzles, one simple one and one elaborate one, meaning it manages to handle the extreme VIC-20 constraints (even if the plot is minor). Hospital is wide-open and also centered around only a few puzzles (and has a colorful plot premise to boot).
For Bomb Threat, we need to stop a terrorist plot.
There are only five rooms. First we just need to escape the starting room, by closing a drain, filling a room with water, and getting out through a skylight.
Now all that remains is to get to town to warn people about the bomb. There’s a nearby garage with a car and jeep:
The car is working, and if you go inside there’s a key under mat; the only problem is out of gas. So you need to get the gas from the jeep over to the car.
This requires getting a cord, hose, and pump from the nearby house. The cord can be used to plug the lift in and raise it so the jeep is up higher; then you can hook the hose up with SIPHON GAS, and with a triple prompt.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen this — having to type three separate objects after a verb-noun pair — in an adventure game.
Once the gas is in you can drive the car away to victory.
Narratively speaking there wasn’t much to it — getting a car to run, the game — but at least I was able to figure things out on my own and there weren’t absurd leaps of geography and/or logic.
For Hospital Adventure, you are an assassin, sent to kill a dictator. You have no items with you, but I’m going to assume there were security checkpoints to get in.
We’ve played explicit thieves, but I don’t think we’ve ever actually played a straight murderer before. There’s a point of “check your morality at the door” which you’ll see in a moment.
The design is centered around the elevator as a “hub” which allows a fairly sensible open map. There are no compass directions. The dictator is on the top floor.
As the “16 armed guards” in the map implies, you can’t just make a beeline for the dictator and use a pillow. The first place to start is the fourth floor; there’s a nurse with some scalpels and a tank of nitrous oxide.
You can filch the scalpels but you really need the nitrous oxide, which the nurse won’t let you have. But the nurse is alone, and now you have a scalpel.
In any other adventure game from the time, something which prompts “you fiend” would then be stopped from happening or result in a game over. Here it is necessary for progress.
With the nurse dead you can nab the tank and go to the basement.
One of my pet peeves of adventure games with light is how it is always treated as can’t see-can see, when usually — unless there’s total darkness, like a cave — it is possible to see better by waiting for your eyes to adjust. I never quite expected a VIC-20 game to include this as a feature.
You just need to wait enough turns. (ENTER LIGHT, in normal circumstances, gets a response of HUH? — I was just experimenting.) I also love the color change here.
So with the valve and vent visible, you can hook up the valve to the tank (PUT VALVE / TANK) and then drop the tank in the vent and turn it on.
This connects to a kitchen upstairs on the first floor, and knocks all the workers there out.
Now you can take a white uniform as a disguise and some food, but that isn’t quite enough. You need the food to be poisoned. Fortunately there’s an experiment going on at the third floor.
With the food suitably spiked, you can then deliver the food to the dictator; the result is undescribed, but I’m sure Mr. Robinson was running out of characters.
Hospital Adventure is almost at the threshold I’d recommend generally. The VIC-20 parser jank is minimized by the sheer simplicity; it does try anything more ambitious than GET, PUT, KILL, and FEED, so I didn’t have any particular moments of struggle. The killing of a random nurse still felt kind of shocking even in text form (although I visualized her rather like the cover) and I was able to survey all the area, realize a possible plan of action, and implement it more or less how I expected.
There’s still two more of these VIC-20 oddities to go, and one of them is even graphical! For now, we’re switching countries again, as one successful game gets a sequel.
Renga in Blue 
