Archive for the ‘countdown-to-doom’ Tag
I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.
Last time I had left off being stuck on a volcano chimney, with a subsidiary issue of radiation sickness. Rather than obstacle-oriented thinking, the best approach was item-oriented thinking: what hasn’t been used yet? Everything had a clear purpose so far except for the space suit. That is, it was better to simply focus on: What does the space suit get used for?
Mind you, it was still tricky to work out what to do even when asking the right question. It’s an interesting enough puzzle I’m going to pause for a moment for anyone wants to try to think it out.
The very first puzzle I had solved (by accident) was going past a swamp, and if you fail to step safely, the message is…
You gingerly step out onto the swamp. There is a rich gurgling noise as the swamp gives way beneath you. In moments it is over your head
Lacking any air, you choke to death
Rather than the game outright jumping to death, it gives the condition “lacking any air”. That means if we did have air, by, say, wearing a space suit, it would be safe to go in!
You gingerly step out onto the swamp There is a rich gurgling noise as the swamp gives way beneath you. In moments it is over your head.
To your delight, the oxygen in your suit works. You drop slowly through the swamp, and then come to a stop
You’ re at the bottom of the swamp, on firm ground. You can’t see anything but swamp, of course
This is quite an unusual design finesse — a previous failure state is being leveraged for a new location. Going in any direction drops the player into darkness which is yet another maze.
What you see above is an incomplete map. This time you can drop items to map the rooms out, just it is dark so you can’t see what’s there. Fortunately, the game’s command GET (with no noun) will get whatever happens to be in the room (we saw this trick with Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest). This allows somewhat slow mapping, and after not too long I had found a life support machine, a medikit (picking it up cleanses the radiation sickness) and the exit.
I already knew offhand that finding these two items brought my total up to twelve (six repair items, six treasures) so I decided to gun it for the exit and hope I was done with the maze (I was).
There are four exits from the room with the beeping machine above. All four lead up a chimney to the surface of the volcano (in other words, the solution to that puzzle was: it’s an exit you use from the other side). However, three of the exits are deadly.
Now, given modern save states it is possible to save-reload your way to the right answer, but I started to catch on that the number of beeps counted 3, 6, 9, or 12; if you interpret the number as if on a clock, then the direction given is the “safe” one. So 6 beeps go towards 6 on a clock, or south. 9 beeps means go towards 9 on a clock, or west.
That’s the last of the treasures! I didn’t have everything in one “run” yet but it didn’t take me too long to put together a sequence (I started with a save file that made a beeline for the dome first and defeated that) and I had a decently roomy number of moves left, somewhere in the 70s. I did not make a walkthrough this time but this game was shorter than the “remix” version.
In the end, I was quite satisfied: this is in the upper tier of the Cambridge games I’ve played. Despite it having similar attributes of cruelty to Brand X and Acheton on a surface level, the game nevertheless felt more “fair” and solvable.
To be more specific, there’s violations aplenty of the venerable Bill of Player’s Rights. I’ve marked in bold the offenders.
1. Not to be killed without warning
2. Not to be given horribly unclear hints
3. To be able to win without experience of past lives
4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events
5. Not to have the game closed off without warning
6. Not to need to do unlikely things
7. Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it
8. Not to have to type exactly the right verb
9. To be allowed reasonable synonyms
10. To have a decent parser
11. To have reasonable freedom of action
12. Not to depend much on luck
13. To be able to understand a problem once it is solved
14. Not to be given too many red herrings
15. To have a good reason why something is impossible
16. Not to need to be American to understand hints
17. To know how the game is getting on
Yes, this list is getting on in years considering Graham Nelson first posted it in 1993 (more recent discussion here and here about the datedness, and the lack of accounting for a game like Outer Wilds) but what I want to focus on here is despite the strong violations of rules 1, 3, 4, and 5 (and light violations of 8 through 10) this game was much more playable than many other rules-violators.
The very first door kills you if you try to pull it. The platform that falls after five turns: there is no way to know that this will be the exact move count without experimenting. It’s fairly easy to do things in the wrong order and get your game closed off (you need the acid can before the desert if you want the diamond, and you can only go through once). Yet: I was playing in a different mode of thought, one where I knew I had many clone duplicates running around the world gathering information. Within the norms of this condition, the game played it fair; for example, the fact the floating platform gives the ghost up after a specific amount of movement is heavily implied by the text.
I think the key here is point 2 (unclear hints), which the game deftly avoided: despite minimalist text imposed by technical requirements (even highly compressed this just barely fits on the goal computer), there really is enough text to figure out everything. This wasn’t the case with Brand X, which had (for example) a moment where if you don’t get an item from the starting zone, it will show up later; there’s no reason to suspect this! Contrast also with the ningy of Acheton, which had a weird and ambiguous message if you did things wrong and made the game unwinnable; there’s no such moment on Countdown to Doom.
A hideous mocking voice sneers: “I suppose you think you’re clever, don’t you!”
(That’s all Acheton says! You can get very deep into the game before realizing this message means “you made a mistake”.)
I have heard Castle of Riddles — which Killworth wrote right before this game — is not so fair. We’ll arrive there eventually in our 1983 sequence and reassess.
Coming up: my evaluation concluding 1982.
(Continued from my previous post.)
I’ve managed to ride a sandworm and do some time travel.
Out of the various obstacles I had left (desert, monster, volcano tube, blob, hover-platform, cube) the hover-platform turned out to be the simplest to resolve.
>PULL LEVER
The metal platform whines and lifts off the ground slightly. It must be an old antigrav device!
>U
The motor unit and platform follow you obediently
You’re on the burnt ground
There is a motor unit here, far too heavy to carry. It is resting on a metal platform of some kind!
On the side of the platform is a large lever
I had experimented with various methods of fiddling with the lever trying not to break it, but I eventually discovered the simple fact that the platform will run out of juice after taking six moves. If you make a beeline for the cargo hold/engine room you’ll take five moves, so this is out of parity; that is, if you try to stall by going back and forth, you’ll reach seven moves, and the platform will land in the wrong spot. You can squeeze in an extra turn by taking a detour down the one-way “slide” from the Mountain Pass to North of the Desert.
Voilà, one motor unit. I’m not sure how the installation is going to work. Just in a structural solving sense, the presence of the one-way exit in the path (which otherwise doesn’t seem to serve much purpose) indicates to me a 98% chance this is the solution.
The blob, monster and cube turned out to be dependent on working out the desert, so that needs to come next.
You are in a valley north of a desert of green sand. There is a unclimbable slide leading up, and a path going north. You feel you should be quiet around here
>S
It is rather warm
You’ re in the desert, with a sandstorm blowing, and your compass spinning like a top
A long-handled fishing net lies here
I wish I had some magical insight here, but I mainly got this via brute force. The verb list I had gotten from my previous “try all the standard verbs” procedure was
CLIMB, BREAK, OPEN, WAIT, KILL, LIGHT, THROW, JUMP, PRESS, PUSH, PULL, MOVE, SAY, WEAR, SHOUT, LIFT, SWING, ATTACH
so going through the possibilities there wasn’t much to try other than to SHOUT. This summons a “giant sandworm” that takes you to a “city square”.
The mention of being quiet to the north of the desert was a lateral hint; the fact nothing happened with SHOUT was still indicating that SHOUT might do something nearby. For an extremely lateral solving method, the inspirational drugs I had obtained last time did signal a Dune-esque type of universe, so making noise in a desert could count as solving by reference (except I didn’t make that connection until after the fact).
Moving on:
You can technically head back into the desert but this just kills you so I’ve left it off the map.
The southeast just has a hint to a puzzle I’ve already solved (“say flezz to robot” which required writing the letters in a grid):
You’re at an open space in the rubble, with a path back the way you came.
The wall of one building has a square pattern of dots, five on a side, printed on it
(Is there a word to the phenomenon of finding hints to puzzles you’ve already solved? Should there be?)
To the south of town is an entirely different issue, a pit that dissolves the player.
We’ve seen a similar obstacle recently with Scott Morgan’s Fun House, but this time the science needed to solve the puzzle is less dodgy. Remember we had a can full of acid from back in the swamp; here is where we can THROW CAN.
You hurl the can into the pool. The alkali dissolves the can, and there is a violent fizzing as the acid and alkali neutralise each other
The pool has a “cubic foot of pure diamond” so that’s another treasure racked up.
Heading west from the city leads to a jungle — the same jungle as the maze — but we end up at the west side of the river, the river which had thermal goggles on the right side. There’s a vine and you can just CLIMB VINE and it will initiate swinging back over to the main part of the map.
The path here (optimizing for shortest moves, we still have 220 turns to beat the game) makes it tempting to wait on getting the thermal goggles. However, to get the can of acid (needed to get the diamond) the thermal goggles are meant to be needed to get through the swamp … unless you’re like me and lucked out at the very start of the game and didn’t need the goggles at all. Optimization by random chance, huzzah!
From the desert there was a fishing net; now is when it gets used. I figured out most of this puzzle quite quickly, except I went over to the blob falling off a cliff and did THROW NET which just gets a default response. It was only later (after pointlessly trying to outwit the monster and futilely banging on the cube) I found I was using the wrong parser command.
Fortunately, using the net on the blob about to fall off the cliff was irresistible; I thought maybe it was a timing issue, but I also inadvertently tried out a few extra verbs in the process, coming across CATCH.
There’s no deep descriptions while back in time. You’re on the same map you were before, more or less. I tested the “ancient phaser” and it’s still ancient even given we’re doing time travel:
What’s deeply weird is if you take an object from the future and drop it somewhere, it appears in that spot in the past! If I were trying to rationalize this I’d say the planet has some time-loop weirdness going on, which wouldn’t be out of character, but in truth I think the author just didn’t bother to go that far with the coding.
This did suggest a hint for what you’re actually supposed to do, which is go up to the area with the navigation box (previously described as “non-functional”) and the space suit (described as “highly decrepit”). They are both still in the same places but in rather better shape.
The time travel is on a set timer, but making a beeline for these items still leaves some time left. I decided to check out the monster nearby, and it was also affected by the time travel:
You re halfway along the crevasse
There is a handful of dilithium crystals here!
A tiny baby six-headed monster is floundering around on the ground
You’re back in time
The monster was previously gigantic and deadly. The monster is still deadly (KILL MONSTER leads to the player’s demise) but fortunately the creature is small enough now to be ignored. You can run to the west and grab some “rare spices”, and also get the dilithium crystals that are just sitting there. The crystals have their own issue, though.
With some careful timing I can get the crystals on the last turn right before moving back forwards in time (still carrying the new navigator box, functional space suit, and rare spices) and this gives enough time for you tote the crystals all the way over to the ship and drop them off without immediate death. Unfortunately future death is suggested because “you’re feeling queasy” is mentioned over and over, just without the death; I am guessing I’m missing an item to deal with that. Or maybe you can win even with the radiation sickness? (That would go well with the now-tiny escapee of Mysterious Mansion and the permanently-blue survivor of The House of Professor Folibus.)
That nearly takes care of everything!
desert
monster
volcano tube
blob
hover-platform
cube
All that’s left is the volcano tube. In addition to the various ship supplies and treasures (navigation box, portable nuclear reactor, motor unit, dilithium crystals, tiny black hole, perfect conductor, magnetic monopole generator, cubic foot of pure diamond, visionary drugs, rare spices) I still have a space suit, sword, thermal goggles, and fishing net. I have not been able to get help from any of them.
You can throw things (“something clatters down the chimney”) but none of the items I’ve tried have helped (I don’t think I’ve comprehensively tried every single one, but I know I’ve tried the tiny black hole which seemed the most suggestive). I’ve also tried using WAIT for many turns both above the chimney and inside and with no help, just the occasional “ship collapse” message.
Still, given there’s only six ship parts and six treasures, I must be very close to the end.
(Continued from my previous posts.)
I’ve made enough progress for an update, although the game is still high on difficulty.
The cart format of the game, via Acorn Electron World.
I managed to clear out the “Jungle” first to the west, which turned out to be both more straightforward than I expected but also more irritating. Dropped items disappear into the undergrowth, but I figured I would try a bit of wandering anyway to see if I could get something to happen at random:
A few steps in I realized the room descriptions were different, and there are in fact four different rooms with very similar text.
Room 1: You’re in a jungle with exits in all directions
Room 2: You’re in the jungle, with exits in all directions
Room 3: You’re in the jungle. There are exits in all directions
Room 4: You’re in the jungle. Exits leave in all directions
This is intended to be another repeat of the all-different maze from Crowther/Woods; you simply use the text differences to map things out.
At the end of this you end up on the east side of a river (no swimming, remember) with some thermal goggles. I think this is meant to be the only prize.
You find yourself standing in an open patch to the west of the jungle. A wide river lies west, with more jungle beyond. Crevasses block progress along the river bank
There is a pair of infrared goggles here
I could just make grumpy noises and move on but despite this being the sort of maze designed on a spreadsheet, I wanted to test something out: is there a mathematical way to determine how difficult the maze is? I’ve mused about this before with no good result but finally came up with simply cranking the maze through a Monte Carlo Simulation. I have a program that starts the player at the Landing Area and has them wander for 100,000 turns, while keeping track of how many times the player arrived at a particular room. The results:
That means out of 100 random turns, the player reaches the goal approximately once.
A random walk is not absurd player behavior, even — sometimes I have just started typing directions randomly in frustration, and depending on the maze design, that can lead to good results. Authors did think for and account for this; even Don Woods made a “diagram of the first maze (the all-alike maze), used to check whether any simple repetitive actions would get you out.” Here, at the least, there is no connection going from Room 1 to Room 4 but plenty going the other way, so there’s at least a “trap door” effect so beloved of authors in this time period.
Alas, we still can’t just look at that percentage (“1%”) and call that an objective measure that allows comparing all mazes in adventure games. For one thing, there is a significant difference in gameplay when objects need to be dropped, and especially if the player has an object shortage and needs to shuffle objects around the maze as things get figured out (which is why I’ve sometimes had maps with rooms like “Dagger 3” and “Rope 4”). Even without that, there’s the “repetitive action” that Woods was testing for; with the Jungle if you just keep going NW you’ll get to the destination of the maze. This doesn’t get accounted for in a random walk. Tricks like the diagonal exit in the All Alike maze of Adventure (where every exit is north/south/east/west, except for the very end) don’t get calculated in either. Additionally, if the author keeps sticking to particular patterns, even if they use the “most extreme” design possible, by staying consistent to a pattern it can make it so the player has an easier time puzzling it out.
For example, the most extreme example of a maze is the “all or nothing” style, with a sequence of rooms where
a.) only the right direction makes forward progress
b.) all other directions are wrong and will always send the player back to the very start of the maze
(For an example of this in the wild, see Adventure 500.) Testing this configuration in my Monte Carlo setup using the same number of rooms as the jungle maze, I get that the player will reach the final room only 1 out of every 100,000 tries (rather than 100). However, the majority of players will catch on to what’s going on and start to just search for the forward-exit in each room and ignore the other ones; it additionally makes for an easy to chart diagram.
One of the issues here is how comfortable the author is with the player hitting a solution “at random”. Some seem offended by the idea of luck playing a part in puzzle-solving, while others are more relaxed about it. An author who hates wins attained at random might be more likely to pick the all or nothing structure (even though the effect in gameplay is unrealistic, on top of making the act of mapping more mundane).
Speaking of hitting solutions at random….
…I was mostly wrong about the swamp last time. I had, by sheer luck, found not only that I could step onto the swamp by going northeast, but also all steps after went to the north. This is generally not what’s supposed to happen. The thermal goggles from the jungle are meant to aid in figuring out where the safe spots are, and it isn’t always going north. Otherwise the result is the same (getting a black hole and a can of acid).
Besides that, the progress I’ve made is back at the mysterious alien dome.
Entering, again, requires dropping all items, so this section is entirely self-contained. You start by following a path eventually leading to a dead-end, getting a sequence of shapes that is randomly determined out of square, triangle, hexagon, and pentagon. Pressing one of the symbols (it doesn’t seem to matter which) drops you in a maze, where the direction you are facing is now tracked, and the only commands are AHEAD, BACK, RIGHT, and LEFT.
This time my map is not fully-made out because it seems at least the shapes have some randomization, and I confirmed after enough testing the only things to find were a.) a set of four symbols on the floor, that can be picked up and b.) a hole leading down further.
The next level has a sword and a nuclear reactor, followed by a robot (with the solution I mentioned last time still holding — it doesn’t seem to be randomized — the word is always FLEZZ). The robot is followed by a giant rat. Last time I killed it with the sword, but this time I just ignored it. This turned out to be a wise choice (I’ll explain why in a moment). Last time I also didn’t realize the symbols on the floor were portable, but this time I took them along, and after some struggle realized THROW PENTAGON (etc.) would get them in the machine. I had to follow the same sequence as earlier:
If you’ve killed the rat, you get a different message:
You have passed all the tests, earthling, save one — you killed without reason. Begone!
The intent seems to be to lampoon fantasy adventures and their tendency to kill rats with swords on sight. (SIDE NOTE: There’s a little more lampooning in the verbs. I singled out RUB and WAVE last time; apparently Killworth thinks along similar lines, as if you apply the verb to an object like the sword, the response is “This isn’t a fantasy game you know — doing that won’t help.” Rather than roaming into sci-fi as simply a different window dressing to the adventure form, Killworth specifically is trying to root things in a marginally more scientific world. Marginally.)
And that’s essentially it! Going down there’s still exits with the four symbols, but this time you can pass through safely (although again, you need to repeat the same sequence as before).
Once to the end you can go through an exit out the back, leaving the artefact behind for good.
Still remaining to reckon with: the desert which causes the compass to go haywire, the monster at the icy crevasse, the volcano tube which shoots up lava when trying to climb inside, the blob which eventually falls off a cliff, the hover-platform without an easy shutoff, and the mysterious large cube which you can enter.
You are inside a three metre cube of metal that vibrates slightly as if it only partly exists. The exit is north
(If I remember right this allows time travel somehow? The game might suddenly get much bigger. I have yet to get the cube to acknowledge my presence, though.)
DOOMAWANGARA. Abbr: Doom.
Climate: varies dramatically from desert to jungle, glacier to swamp [N.B. Reason unknown; exogeologists baffled]. Atmosphere intensely volatile; explorers must guard against rapid corrosion of equipment and spaceship alike.
Dangers: Atmosphere, as above. Automatic defence system. Also the artefacts, reputed to have been the home, aeons ago, of the Ancients; none who has entered them has ever returned.
Special features: The large number of crashed spaceships littering its surface, many of which had been carrying treasure from one planet to another, make Doom a potentially lucrative source of income for that special breed of explorer known as adventurer.
[Extract from Intergalactic Times, 3,7,187/qbf.]
— From the expanded version of Countdown to Doom
There’s the 1982! Is it a typo or was the intent to have a much earlier release date? Via eBay.
Let’s take a tour! But before a tour of planet, a tour of the game’s verbs:
The pale purple verbs are ones where the game helpfully nudges that they won’t be used, even though they’re understood, like
>EAT
Nothing on this planet gives sustenance
or
>SWIM
On an alien world? No way!
There’s no absolute guarantee they won’t be used, but it’s more likely they won’t be.
RUB and SHAKE are useful to keep track of because they tend to be used in non-obvious situations (where gizmo X is used by either rubbing or shaking), SAY lets you type anything as a noun (suggesting a “spoken keyword” type puzzle”) and SWING is the only one I’d call rare, and the response suggests it is only used in a special situation, like hanging off a rope:
>SWING
I’d be interested to know how you’d do that!
Continuing from last time, I had busted through the front door of the ship to reach a clearing “under a dull copper sun”. There’s lots of directions to go in, and I’m going to start with southeast and rotate clockwise. As the quote from the start implies, we’re going through a wild variety of environments in the process.
Southeast is a mountain pass.
You can enter a “vent hole” by just going down, leading to a “narrow chimney” where “you’re dripping with sweat”. Trying to go farther down leads to death:
As you climb, a red hot spout of lava shoots upwards and engulfs you
(There’s a lot of death coming up, if you can’t tell.)
Back at the mountain pass there’s another turn you can take leading to a box canyon with the message “write steep, read flat” which will come up later, you can also veer left to land at the south route via an alternate method.
I tried to get another death here for my collection but despite the warnings about sound, SHOUT doesn’t do anything (“Thanks, I needed that!”) To the south there’s a desert, and all I have been able to do is pick up a fishing net then get lost and die (phew, was feeling deprived for a moment).
Going back to the clearing, southwest goes back in the ship we started in, and west goes into a jungle, with the same sort of getting-lost as the desert, except without a thirst timer.
You’re in the jungle with exits in all directions
If you try to drop items they get swallowed up (“Something disappears in the undergrowth”) so you can’t do standard mapping. A general pattern of the game seems to be “geographic puzzles, but no standard mapping”.
Northwest, north, and northeast all lead to a swamp, although only northeast is safe, and only if you are holding no items; otherwise you fall in and die. This has the curious effect that for most players the section wouldn’t even be a puzzle, but for someone who happened to search in those directions while holding an item, they might not even realize the reason for their failure.
The first items I picked up in the game. The can has acid and opening it kills you.
East is complicated and gets its own map.
Events start out on an “area of scorched ground” where there is a blob approaching a cliff. Wait a bit and the blob will fall off a cliff, presumably to its doom, so I’m guessing there’s some timed thing here.
The sequence here freezes in time if you just pass through, so it’s possible to go by the blob, come back through, and still save it (or whatever it is you’re supposed to do). I remember a blob from the 2000 edition of the game but I just remember it blocking a path, not approaching doom like the game Lemmings.
Let’s consider the scorched ground a new sub-nexus and get rotating again; south moves the player into a mysterious metal cube that “vibrates slightly as if it only partly exists”. Down leads to a motor unit (presumably a ship part) on a platform, and while the unit is too heavy to carry, pulling a lever will cause the platform to float and follow you.
The hard part is to get the hover-platform to stop following because the lever breaks if you try to push as opposed to nullifying the movement.
East is, straightforwardly enough, a junction leading to a dead end with a phaser. The phaser is described as ancient and will overheat and kill you if you try to use it in most circumstances:
The cooling system in the ancient phaser isn’t too good; the phaser melts in your hand, which is not good
I have found the circumstance it does work, but we’ll see that later.
Northeast is a rather elaborate section with a “grey metallic dome” which is an ancient artefact. It’s possible to go in to find a new section, but first, a side trip to a random message on a cliff nearby:
I originally thought maybe this was the decipher code for a cryptogram and tried writing the letters a through z underneath, but I ended up going past by one; there are exactly 25 letters. That led me to suspect maybe I was dealing with a grid instead, so I broke the letters into groups of five, then spotted the word “say” while reading down:
sedlr
azieo
yzstb
ftaho
lobet
Fully deciphered this is “say flezz to disable the robot”, which is a codeword that will come in handy inside the artefact. The message “write steep, read flat” clearly was meant to hint about this but I only realized the connection after I had already solved the puzzle. (It indicates writing the text vertically and reading horizontally, which will give an equivalent solution.)
Now, inside the dome:
You are required to drop all items before going in (otherwise you get stopped by a sort of force field). The game in general starts to take a more abstract style like Xenos.
There’s a sequence of four shapes at it appears to be randomly rolled; for the instance I first played, I got the sequence square, pentagon, triangle, hexagon; on the second time through I got hexagon, pentagon, square, and triangle. Pushing on one of the niches drops the player into a maze where the compass has been broken.
This is a relative-position maze, and is fortunately consistent in terms of bi-direction; that is, if you go forward from one room, going backwards will return you to where you started. The symbols (square, pentagon, triangle, hexagon) are placed in such a way that you just need to keep track of their relative position (that is, if a hexagon is “near the door to your right”, and then you go right followed by backwards”, the hexagon will now be at your feet).
Eventually — and I don’t know the pattern to this yet, and if it’s important to even work it out — you will run across a hole going down to a new area where there is a store room with a sword and a cramped cubicle with a portable nuclear reaction (again I assume a ship part).
The way north is blocked by a robot but you can use the earlier word FLEZZ to get by.
This is followed by a giant rat (which you can just kill with the sword, but that might be wrong) followed by a “weird vegetable mass which is also a computer. I don’t have anything to put in the slot so I may have needed to explore the maze more.
Going down from here leads to a “square room with four exits” and the four symbols again (pentagon, hexagon, triangle, square). All of them killed me when I tried it via the computer dropping a “heavy weight” so I assume I missed something while exploring. (I remember this whole sequence in the 2000 game but I remember the atmosphere and vibes far more than the exact solution. The vibes are excellent and feel on the right edge of alien but understandable.)
But that’s not quite everything yet! Way back at the starting clearing we have done all compass directions, but missed that going UP is another direction as well. This leads to the exogeologists just quitting in frustration as we go up to a glacier.
There are some persistent messages about being very cold (as well as a “non-functioning navigator box lying around, I haven’t fiddled with it yet). Climbing up higher leads to an ice wall and the message that “you’re freezing to death”, which would normally be a bad thing except we have the phaser from earlier.
Inside is another treasure, some visionary drugs for navigation (I’m guessing the ships work kind of like Dune?)
Finally there’s a branch off the glacier to the north, where you find it warmer and can pick up a “decrepit space suit”; further on is a “crevasse” and I’ll just give the screenshot this time:
There’s plenty for me to prod at, so I’m not in any sense “stuck”, but I figured I had enough of the layout to give an update. I remember from my last playing that there’s some options in what sequence to tackle puzzles (notice how the alien dome takes away all objects, so it has to be self-contained) but the puzzles aren’t entirely separate from each other either. Curiously enough I remember more the overall events than details about how to solve things, which I suppose makes this more like a real play-through. (Maybe it’d have helped me remember to have some sort of diary that follows along with my playing. I’ll need to get on that.)
No matter how small an Adventure you write, it will take far, far more time and effort than you thought it would.
— Peter Killworth from How to Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron
Double surprise!
You may be wondering why I am ending my 1982 sequence with what I am marking as a 1983 game. As of this writing, Mobygames, CASA Solution Archive, and IFDB all list the game as 1982. Unlike Critical Mass where I could find a physical copy with the date, there’s no rationale I can find to even get the year by mistake. Acorn User in their May 1983 issue states outright that
Acornsoft are due to release seven new packs this month — three on chemistry, a programming package called Microtext, Draughts and Reversi, Starship Command (see reviews) and another adventure — Countdown to Doom.
Ads start to appear in the second half of the year, so I am fairly certain I have already ended my 1982 sequence and am starting 1983 (however, I’m still happy to hear evidence to the contrary).
To backtrack to the history: this is another game by Peter Killworth. We haven’t seen him for a long time, not since Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest, but technically he’s been busy, because 1982 was the year he took Brand X (which he wrote for the Cambridge system with Acheton, Hezarin, Avon etc.) and turned it into a commercial product for Acornsoft.
Back in 1979, he had taken the language used for Acheton and made a small puzzle involving a cliff:
I had a problem which revolved around using a pivot to get up a cliff. Put weight on one end, and the other goes up — but you have to be careful to get the weight right. I programmed it on the mainframe, and left it for a friend to have a look at. When I came back next morning, I was deluged with messages from people I’d never heard of, all telling me where I’d gone wrong in the program.
With the launch of the BBC Micro, Acornsoft started looking towards Cambridge University for software, with the offer of a BBC Micro to takers; a friend of Kilworth’s had a program accepted so Killworth decided to convert Brand X (which is how it became the originally-abbreviated Philosopher’s Quest).
Converting from a mainframe to a home computer means — like Infocom by necessity, and Level 9 by choice — he needed to include a text-compression algorithm in order to fit everything he needed.
I have an unofficial competition running with Pete Austin of Level 9 and various other people on text compression. We’ve got it to about fifty per cent.
Throughout 1983 — which we’re now kicking off — he wrote Castle of Riddles and Countdown to Doom as original games for the BBC Micro, and also converted Partington’s Hamil. Eventually, with all the Topologika editions that happened in the late 80s, he wrote an expanded version. Unlike Philosopher’s Quest which essentially restored the mainframe content, the new content was written specifically for Topologika. A third edition appeared in 2000 when Killworth announced conversions of his three “Doom trilogy” games for z-code (that is, the type of file Infocom used that can be run with software like Frotz, Nitfol, etc.)
Killworth in 1984.
This game is fairly special to me in that not only have I beaten the game before (in the year 2000 incarnation) it represents what I might call the first difficult adventure game I’ve ever beaten without hints. (Infocom? Always relied on the Infoclues somewhere. This makes my memory of how to solve the puzzles foggier, which is why I barely remembered Zork III’s content at all when I played through. I had beaten Lucasarts games without hints but none of them were “difficult” in the same way as a game by a Cambridge oceanographer who moonlights with adventure games.) Part of the reason I had waited until the end of “1982” to play this is I figured some extra passage of time might help with forgetting how things work. I still have the walkthrough I had to write to beat the game in the end, though.
What I haven’t beaten (or played before) is the older, shorter version, and after much waffling that’s the version I’m going with. This is partly to juke my memory of the game even further, but also because this is a case (unlike the other Cambridge games) where the extra content was truly a late-80s addition.
As implied earlier, this ended up being the first of a “Doom trilogy”, a set of games on the planet Doomawangara. The first game is a relatively traditional solo-character treasure hunt, the second involves timing out a series of events akin to a mystery like Suspect but it’s a planet-adventure instead, and the third game involves a group with multiple characters.
Our ship crash lands and we need to look for six “components”. In addition to the components there are six “treasures” which seem to be optional (I don’t remember them being optional before) although like any proper adventure we’re going to try to get them all. (It’s not an “innovation” exactly as even Acheton let you get away without having all the treasures, and on my Hezarin playthrough I skipped two, but it is interesting that the game is formally set-up to let you bypass all the treasures.)
There’s a hard time of what seems to be 220 turns; this is why I needed a walkthrough last time I beat the game, because while it isn’t a ludicrously tight time limit (like Madventure, which required solving puzzles in different ways to optimize) it also isn’t one that you can hit by natural exploration.
You start trapped in the ship you crashed in as the exit door is jammed; there’s fortunately an explosive that can help as long as you LIGHT EXPLOSIVE followed by THROW EXPLOSIVE (and clear some space). Unfortunately, just trying to open the door from that kills you, as a reminder this is still a game from the Cambridge family of authors.
Using PUSH DOOR instead gets out, and leads to many directions to explore. We’ll search around the planet next time.
(I’m still doing a “concluding 1982” post like I did with 1981, but I’m going to finish this game first. Since I’m updating my recommendation lists, feel feel to speculate what might land on them; the four categories are Games everyone should play, For adventure enthusiasts, Things I personally enjoyed quite a bit that didn’t make the above list, and Some bonus games for historians.)
Renga in Blue 