Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my previous post.

Portion of the ad from Softside’s January 1983 issue announcing that Adventures of the Month are now being moved to the disk/cassette version of the magazine.

Just to get it out of the way first, we’ve got headhunters again, something I’ve written about before. Since this is set in India and vaguely Indiana Jones-shaped I checked in case it was making a reference, but Temple of Doom came out in 1984. Perhaps Indiana Jones was making a reference to it, or at least stereotypes like it; the movie has an infamous “monkey brains” banquet, and as Roshan Seth (who plays one of the villains, Chattar Lal) explained to Empire magazine:

The banquet scene was a joke that went wrong. I got a great deal of flak for it because people kept saying, “How does an intelligent man like you agree to be in a film which shows Indians dining on beetles and eels?” Steven intended it as a joke, the joke being that Indians were so fucking smart that they knew all Westerners think that Indians eat cockroaches, so they served them what they expected. The joke was too subtle for that film.

The original script had a line from Indy that Hindus wouldn’t touch meat and this prompts an additional line about being suspicious of who the hosts are; it never made it to the film.

Still from the relevant scene.

Moving forward, I was stuck last time on a bear, or at least a bear was stuck on what I thought was likely an oar, but the bear was sleeping and wouldn’t move. What I had neglected to do is LOOK TREE.

(Nevermind climbing the tree doesn’t mention the nest, even though you’d think it would.) Throwing the apple at the nest resolves the bear issue. You can throw the knife instead but it loses whatever item you throw (and you can go back and get another apple; you’ll need it in just a moment).

THROW APPLE

At what?
(Example: AT NATIVE)

AT NEST

Hornets emerge from nest
and bear runs for his life
far off into the jungle

With that resolved, it was time to take care of the canoe. The stalling for time with the bear puzzle led me (via a comment of Voltgloss) to realize I could CUT ROPE twice and take the rope with me that was holding the canoe; it gets used multiple times later. I then hopped in the canoe, applying the previously-found PADDLE verb.

I find it interesting it doesn’t understand PADDLE, but does understand PADDLE ACNOE with my typo there.

You can LOOK CANOE to see the previously-unmentioned hole filling with water. You need to PLUG HOLE; the only item that works is the apple. Which is kind of absurd but at least the game has it come out mid-paddle.

The lost gun (and fact it gets you just killed earlier) puts this as yet another data point in my list of games where weapons are red herrings. The knife doesn’t get used for violence, either.

More jungle! This time it’s a small set piece, where to the southeast there’s some quicksand; you can CLIMB TREE (every single jungle room has a “tree room”, I’m leaving them off) and find there’s a sturdy branch. Assuming you remember to take it off the canoe, you can tie the rope to the branch, then go down and SWING ROPE across the quicksand.

To the northeast are some headhunters; if you try to pass by to the northeast, one will throw a spear (if you don’t, they’ll leave you alone, which suggests a structural-solving puzzle solution you’ll see shortly).

With the spear thrown the headhunters will go in hot pursuit and follow you around. If you haven’t guessed yet, the right action is to circle back to the quicksand, and swing over using the already-prepared rope.

You then can retrieve the spear, except the game insists on having some kind of obstacle.

After much gnashing of teeth with PULL SPEAR and JUMP SPEAR I finally came across PULL HARD; applying a verb modifier is extraordinarily rare and downright abuse of the system (given the author-player contract generally has established it as a verb-noun form at nearly all other times, even disallowing PADDLE by just itself earlier).

Past the headhunter section is a chasm; you need to tie the rope to the spear, then tie the rope to a tree on the side you’re on, then throw the spear before finally climbing the rope across the chasm. Strangely, it works intuitively well; ropes are infamous for having implementation issues, but it helps the rope refuses to let you do anything other than the right actions for solving the puzzle.

You can retrieve the spear (although you need to cut the rope to do so). It gets used one more time on the section right after: another maze.

I get what the author was after; he wanted the jungle to feel tangled but didn’t want a full Crowther/Woods style tangled mess, but this still was a tangled mess to map out. Kirsch really wanted you to not bother mapping at all, because he added in a native who wants something valuable. You can hand over the spear, getting directions out of this area in the process:

I had my map already complete before I got this hint.

The southwest exit hinted at leads to another small area with a waterfall and wall of fire close to each other. You can GO WATERFALL first to get wet, then go back and go through the fire, where being wet is enough protection to pass through.

This leads to a northeast path with another LONG ROPE (always fun when you lose an item, only to find another version of the same item later; of course in code, it really is literally the same item). You can CUT ROPE to make two short pieces of rope, which will sort-of become important in a moment.

The “sort-of” is because you next come across a tent (see above) with the kidnapped daughter inside. Climb a tree and wait and eventually you’ll see a bandit come out; JUMP BANDIT to do a knockout. (As far as I can tell, this also works the same if you just go southwest for a while, wait, and come back to the tent.) You can then try to subdue the bandit via TIE BANDIT, and things go wrong.

Dale Dobson couldn’t get the tying to work. He didn’t discover what I found, which is you can TIE HANDS AND FEET as one command (no longer even being a two-word parser) but even though the game seems to understand that it still breaks and the bandit kills you (“You didn’t tie me good enough”).

Dobson studied the source code and found the relevant line never gets called, so he (and I) continued playing via the command NT=3 followed by GOTO 300 (this changes a variable disabling the bandit, and then resumes the game).

After all that nonsense was through, I was able to enter the tent and untie the daughter, who now follows the protagonist for the rest of the game.

The first obstacle is the two bandits that had left the tent earlier start chasing; you can fortunately get past a bridge where cutting the ropes seals off your escape.

This is the other reason I checked the year Temple of Doom came out, although the bridge-cutting scene in the movie was much more dramatic.

Unfortunately, you’re not done with natives yet. A bit more jungle in and you’re blocked by MAD NATIVES; there’s a skunk nearby, but the way to handle it is via the command HOLD NOSE (not even pretending the parser is reasonable any more).

I think this is the first Kirsch game where you need to refer to a body part?

The actual scientific name is “Mephitis mephitis” although I like the “Stinkerus americanus” joke.

This lets you get by but then the natives go in pursuit. If you just try to outrace then they’ll catch you, and there’s no obvious obstacle like a bridge to stop them.

You do pass by some quicksand (not blocking the path) and this ended up being the most clever puzzle of the game (or at least it would be if there wasn’t parser struggle in getting the command to work). You need to put your hat on the quicksand so the natives think you fell in.

Then it’s a clear shot to the ending except for another maze. There’s a mountain you can climb where you will see the embassy is “west” of a cedar tree so the idea is to wander until you find cedar (LOOK TREE everywhere, that is), then keep going west. I already caught on earlier so I did not map the maze this time.

And that’s a wrap! Kirsch is still going full steam in terms of imagining scenes and then trying his best to enact them in the parser; they don’t always survive contact with the implementation which results in things like PULL HARD and whatever mess was happening with the rope and the bandit. I do think the presence of mazes weakened this considerably over his prior games with the same general weaknesses; while he twice gave hints for getting out and clearly did the layout thinking it was more of a “tangled map” than a maze, in practice I still had to deal with the same annoyances as most maps from this era have.

We’ve still got enough Kirsch games to go I don’t want do tier-list them out, but as a general observation, it doesn’t seem like he’s had an “experience arc” like you might hope; there isn’t continual improvement, just the same template being repeated in multiple ways where sometimes it sticks and sometimes it misses. I think the best Kirsch games so far have been

Kidnapped: early game, with building floors being a clever way to set out a series of mini-adventure games

Jack the Ripper: an extended preparation puzzle, including a very clever part with the killer’s knife

Around the World in Eighty Days: the source material is more or less just like a Kirsch game, so this meshes reasonably well

Dateline Titanic: recontextualizing the treasure hunt as rescuing passengers

Arrow One: conceptual sci-fi with a better setting than usual for Kirsch and a clever language puzzle

As far as Kirsch’s own favorite, I’m going to guess he liked Jack the Ripper, because he produced two sequels (which we’ll see in 1983 and 1984, respectively).

I do think his rapid pace may be part of the issue on the lesser games — certainly at least the bugs and lack of polish show — but I’m not sure if just going bi-monthly would fix the issue; I don’t know if introspection would help. At the very least, there’s now a gap until the next Kirsch game. It doesn’t show up until March! That’s because February has an RPG instead, by a totally different author.

Both The CRPG Addict and El Explorador de RPG have played it, if you want to see what it’s like.

Coming up, we’re going to stick with random 1983 games, and I’m making my next pick truly at random (I’m not using the next item on my list, I’m using random.org and having it choose a number) so who knows what will happen?

It’s been a while since we’ve played Peter Kirsch, despite this being his 16th game for this blog. (Most recently: The Dalton Gang, Alaskan Adventure, The Curse of the Pharoah). This is the 20th and last game for the SoftSide Adventure of the Month (he didn’t write all of them, but he edited all of them and wrote the majority). He kept going after this with the SoftSide Adventure Series (10 more games!); it was published on their “SoftSide Selections” which has more than just adventure games. The reason for the transition seems to be the desire to put everything on the “disk version” (DV) or “cassette version” (CV) of the magazine, which SoftSide was starting to push out more by this point.

Source.

As mentioned in my earlier Kirsch posts, the benefit of cranking out so many games has been getting to explore every genre rapid-fire, including some where Kirsch is one of the earliest examples (like the track-the-killer game Jack the Ripper, which has two sequels in the forthcoming Adventure Series). Here the game is something in the Indiana Jones mold, kind of. We’re supposed to rescue the American ambassador’s daughter, who has been kidnapped and is somewhere in the jungles of India.

From Softside, January 1983.

As usual, the SoftSide series has Apple, TRS-80, and Atari versions; I do not have a download of the TRS-80 version. I went with the Atari despite being warned ahead of time of an issue which requires modifying a variable mid-game (found by Dobson in his playthrough); I will do the same thing myself when I get to that section.

Dobson points out that “Sam” could be male or female, so I decided to imagine the main character as a woman. I’m reading a book by Sam Hawke (City of Lies) so it works for me.

As far as why I’m going with Atari instead of Apple: in a practical sense, I find it easier to read text when there’s lowercase characters, I haven’t brought out Atari to this blog in a while, and just in general amongst retro-sites I get the sense that Atari users were much keener on the games than people on other platforms. I assume people on Apple were busy playing Sierra games. (Also, the Apple version might have the bug that the Atari version does, and the same fix may not work!)

I decided to make a verb list right away this time; Kirsch games can be finicky and sparse with their verb choices.

Three-letter parser, so typing SHOUT is really just SHOOT. I additionally want to emphasize this is not comprehensive on every possible verb; there’s one verb early not on my list (fortunately easy to work out).

There’s another reason I kicked off with a verb list: the game starts you in a maze. Just stalling a little bit before starting to map made me feel better.

There’s a brief scene if you go northwest, but it seems to be just marking the endpoint of the game.

Maybe you could give some supplies? All the game starts you with is a hat and a gun.

The aforementioned gun and hat then need (ingloriously) to be used as room markers for mapping the jungle. You can climb trees but they don’t always have something to see (this seems to be vaguely buggy, I’ll explain in a moment.

YOU’RE ON TOP OF A TALL TREE

Visible exits:
Down

It doesn’t look like a maze when properly laid out, but I still had to map it out like one (and the general logic to shape didn’t form until about halfway through). At least this isn’t the sort of maze with lots of “arrow jumps”; most rooms are connected to “adjacent” geographic space rather than flying around like a pinball.

Kirsch at least emphasizes the maze in one respect by having apples up one of the trees, but having the apples be stolen when you drop them. They can’t be used as “breadcrumbs” for mapping.

Most of the trees have bananas … sort of. It seems to be buggy; I think the author’s intent was to have jungle trees either be apples (in one case) or bananas (in all other cases) but every once in a while my game would have the bananas just not show up, even if shortly after on a second trip they did. Fortunately, there’s no need to get too fussy about it; all you need is to give a banana to a monkey in the jungle, who will leave behind a knife.

You can take the knife over to a canoe and cut a rope tying it to a tree; while I can then GO CANOE I unfortunately can’t get it to move!

This is where the unusual verb shows up: PADDLE is understood.

Hence, I am fairly certain I am in need of some sort of oar, but there’s only one other place that the oar can be: a sleeping bear in a different part of the jungle.

I thought about using the gun to scare or even just shoot the bear (…although in the latter case the bear would still be sleeping on the object…) but unfortunately this attracts the attention of “natives” who come and kill you (this is true if you SHOOT GUN anywhere, even not in the context of being at the bear).

I could of course check the very walkthrough I linked earlier but I’m going to be stubborn a bit longer. It’s faintly possible I’m wrong about the oar and it’s instead a get-a-boat-to-move puzzle, where there is almost no consistency between games on what commands to use. I’ll still take suggestions (from people who didn’t look at hints) but please no help right now otherwise.