Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

…I thought “well this could mean, shall we say, a mass market piece of hardware. Shops were springing up, not that many but they were springing up, retail computer shops, and they were selling software and hardware and I thought “well this is an opportunity”. So I thought “well why don’t we try it?” I put together a number of games, packages to sell, did all the artwork, bags, you know we’d copy those, we’d staple the bags together at night, and I’d take one or two days off during the week and run around to the few computer retail outlets that were here in Victoria and direct sell. And I sold a lot. I sold a hell of a lot.

— Reynolds quoted in Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality by Melanie Swalwell

I finished the game; this continues from my previous post.

Since I pulled the verbs from the walkthrough, I spent a while trying to keep from checking hints the rest of the way, and that was a mistake.

Last time I had, after immense struggle and finally giving up, realized the game shifted the verb SHOOT to the verb BLAST, and immediately after a long tape load you needed to BLAST TROOPER on the very next turn. (Even if I had the patience to apply my verb list to a game where the verbs swap every few rooms, it wouldn’t have helped here.)

The elevator, as already mentioned, is a trap: you’ll end up skipping the next (required to win) section, although there’s an aspect that makes this obvious before the next screen appears: the tape load time is given as a whopping 128 seconds, because the tape has to move farther.

Avoiding this trap-exit and heading north…

…is another Jillyan, although this one is peaceful. (I am glad the author didn’t go the route of allowing another BLAST — the weapon is out of juice — because I could see reflexively killing the Jillyan and softlocking as another “puzzle”.) This might have been harder to work out except with the verb list available (BLAST, GET, LOOK, DROP, TALK, SAY, GO, PRAY) there was no other way of being aggressive, so the right word is TALK. The trooper asks

DO I KNOW YOU?

and the right response is the word PAX that was learned by rubbing the prism.

While I came across this immediately (again, nothing much to do with the verb list) I was very frustrated by it, because there really is no reason a prism in a sealed case would give us a codeword to pass on to a spy. There’s a tendency among adventure games I’ve taken to terming Codekey Anywhere Syndrome, where a clue for unlocking something across the map is given in a place where it makes no logical sense. With a physical key there’s no problem having it land just about anywhere on a map, but authors tend to treat “information” keys the same way even when the logic doesn’t make nearly as much sense. This isn’t just a cranky nitpick, as sometimes the nonsense nature of the connection can make the puzzle hard to solve; rather than a puzzle solved by thinking about the plot, this is a puzzle solved by ignoring the plot. Epic Hero 1 had a moment where numbers you saw through a telescope somehow matched a safe underwater, but at least in that circumstance one can imagine a person seeing the numbers first and setting their combination accordingly (…still admittedly dodgy, though).

Moving on, the spy gave us a ring and told us about an idol. The idol isn’t hard to find. Just to the east:

This reveals a BALL which turns out to be an explosive.

Going through all this also reveals a secret exit to the east and allows exit to the next (correct) tape load.

Smoothly going through the prior section, I was confident the verbs would pull me through this time (LOOK, CLIMB, INSERT, OPEN, TURN, THROW, READ, CRAWL, JUMP) but the game found another way to make the parser painful. The goal here is to get to the east side of the corridor and turn the wheel (which is only distantly visible on the west side). Your way is blocked by invisible lasers.

The CRAWL and JUMP immediately came to mind as helpful, but neither verb was understood! I tried CRAWL EAST and JUMP EAST with similar bad luck, so I assumed I needed to set something else up first, and struggled for far too long for a minimalist VIC-20 game. (The RING and BALL are still being held and the ring can activate the ball as an explosive, so I was noodling with that, but it’s only supposed to be used later.) I finally had to check the walkthrough again and I found I needed to

CRAWL BEAM

that is, even though there’s no way to know about the beam except by dying, you’re supposed to apply it as a noun in your parser command! I can’t think of another instance where this has happened. (Even including Ferret, the king of pre-knowledge games!)

As the text says, this is just the first beam. You can CRAWL BEAM to repeat for a second beam, but if you do it again for beam number 3 you’ll get fried. The trick is to switch to JUMP BEAM, and then CRAWL BEAM again for a fourth (and final beam). This is another circumstance where the verb list made the process much easier.

At the end of the hall you can TURN WHEEL (which opens the reactor) and then repeat the same beam steps but backwards: CRAWL, JUMP, CRAWL, CRAWL.

Now at the reactor, you get even more issues, as you need to INSERT RING in the BALL, then TURN RING to start the ball ticking.

Then you can throw the ball in, and now it’s time to escape! Next tape load.

This is meant to parallel the scene with Luke and Leia at the chasm in the Death Star, so I get to share this bit from the Empire of Dreams documentary which explains how it was done without stunt doubles:

Back to the battle against the Jillyans, I spent a little while looking for a grappling hook before I realized I could just JUMP. Not if you’re holding the power cell, though.

And here there is yet another infuriating parser moment! It immediately occurred to me to try to THROW things so I tried THROW RING (which I still had) and the game just said SORRY, which made me put it out of my mind. The ring isn’t actually too heavy, so you can still be carrying it; THROW CELL on the other hand sends it to the other side properly.

Once on the other side, you can find a SPACE SUIT in a cubicle, and I tried dropping my ring in order to pick it up and the game wouldn’t let me.

There’s an inventory limit of two items (which I always knew) but it turns out, more evilly, there is a room limit. If you have the cell and the ring and you are looking at the suit, you have softlocked the game, because you are unable to drop anything (too many items in the room!) You can’t THROW the cell back now either. The right approach is to drop the ring first before jumping over the ledge, even though there’s no logical reason you couldn’t dump the ring after finding the suit.

Once the suit is on the door is open and you can escape.

Last tape load! At least this section is straightforward.

Although this appears to repeat the content of earlier, going west or east now has the game respond SORRY TROOPERS ARE EVERYWHERE.

With the suit on and the fuel cell held you can push the button on the panel and go in a lifeboat; then you can put the fuel cell in a slot, and pull a lever to escape.

There’s one last issue to all this I don’t fully understand. Referring back to Garry’s walkthrough, there are two bug fixes. One is for the INSERT command crashing the game; the other is for something that didn’t happen to me.

As each part runs another part, it needs to maintain state between parts and it does this by POKEing values before running the next part and PEEKing these values during initialisation when the next part runs. When the bomb is activated, part 3 POKEs a value to indicate this, but part 4 fails to PEEK this value. As a consequence, it is impossible to finish the game without 6.6 billion people being killed by the Death Star. To fix this, add the following lines to the file ‘death star 4’:

204 IFPEEK(822)=6THENO=1

205 RETURN

I am unclear why I didn’t have this issue; maybe there are different dumps to the game? But at least on Garry’s copy, even when he did everything right the Death Star killed Terra.

Darryl’s later games are well regarded, so I’m not going to judge too much based on this early effort which tried to push the VIC-20 far harder than was reasonable. We’ve only had one other VIC-20 game try to use the tape loading trick to break things up (Grave Robbers) but that was only in two sections; I think the reason this ended up so ambitious was the attempt to downgrade from TRS-80 to VIC-20. This is possibly due to the greater prevalence of the cheaper VIC-20 for the Australian market; the reason Darryl even had a TRS-80 is he had bought one for his previous business making playground equipment. Just like we’ve seen elsewhere, the business purchase ended up shifting to an entertainment one.

Coming up: Some actual TRS-80 games, and then a return to the Apple II for a game you’re likely not expecting.

We’ve had semi-famous adventure game writer Brian J. Betts featured here already with The Secret of Flagstone Manor, but today we feature the other semi-famous bedroom coder from Australia, Darryll D. Reynolds.

Just like Brian, Darryl started with the TRS-80 before switching to Commodore 64, although he went through Tandy Color Computer and Vic-20 on the way. He started with self-publishing and later worked through agents, first under the name Gameworx and later under the name SoftGold (meaning an example credit might be “from Gameworx, published by Computer Classics”). Commenting in a thread about his work from 2012:

Thanks for all the comments (good or otherwise) and it pleases me to see there is still an interest in this style of game. Back then when I saw an opportunity to write my own games I was playing with a Tandy TRS 80 until the Commodore Vic 20 appeared – what a lot of fun, hardly any memory, rudimentary graphics, tape storage. At the time, use of keyboard graphics for an adventure game was a real novelty but it added more to a plain text adventure. When the c64 appeared it was paradise !

For TRS-80 (and CoCo) he had three games advertised. We don’t have any of them in either format.

Australian Personal Computer, April 1983.

“AFRICAN ODD” is the most obscure of the set. It might be a mis-spelled attempt to write “African Odyssey” but with an abbreviation applied. It may be the same game as King Solomon’s Mines (not to be confused with the Betts game King Solomon’s Mines; the double-naming ended up creating a copyright dispute between Reynolds and Betts). Castle Tollenkar and Death Star both got versions for VIC-20; unfortunately, while we have the box art, we currently don’t have a copy of Castle Tollenkar in VIC-20 format either.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

Castle Tollenkar incidentally shares a made-up-fantasy-proper-name with a 1980 TTRPG campaign from the United States: Tollenkar’s Lair published by Metagaming, design by none other than Steve Jackson (of later GURPS and Munchkin fame). While Tollenkar’s Lair involves a labyrinth underneath a forest there is a faint chance the naming is not coincidence based on the bizarre plot description of Castle:

You stand on a windswept crag overlooking an eerie castle. Below you is the Black Forest, dark and menacing. You must gain entry to the castle, find any items needed and recover Castle Tollenkar’s treasure, but watch out for the occupants – any traps set by them.
Can you find the treasure?
Better still, can you find the castle?

We are overlooking a castle and a forest at the same time, and the castle is hard to find? A Commodore newsletter’s attempt at a review just says

We couldn’t even get into the castle in this one, very frustrating! Even with a cheater’s peek at the listing we were still stumped, any ideas?

This suggests something more like the hidden labyrinth of the Steve Jackson campaign, but it really may just be a coincidence. If/when a copy of the game is rescued we’ll have to test this theory further.

(My guess is “when”, for if nothing else, there’s a Darryll Reynolds collection at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, which is far more preservation than most our adventure authors get.)

Tollenkar himself from the front cover of the “Adventure Supplement”, with a system far more obscure than D&D (Fantasy Trip) and far less likely to make it over the globe from Texas. Still, it’s possible.

Hence I’m going to start with Death Star (even though it seems to be one of the later VIC-20 conversions, based on the ad, it technically was written first); it has the added bonus attribute that it didn’t get remade later in the familiar C64 format most people remember (along with other platforms like Plus/4) so VIC-20 is the only way we can experience it now.

The Rim War of 2685 has reached its final stage. The Jillyan super weapon “DEATH STAR” approaches Terra on the final mission of destruction. You have been secretly teleported aboard with instructions to destroy it at all costs. Your escape is of secondary importance. Can you set your demolition charges and escape before the deadline is reached? Good luck. You are Terra’s last chance!

— From the game instructions, via the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

It was written for a regular TRS-80 (16K of memory) but runs for VIC-20 on an unexpanded VIC, that is, about a quarter of the same amount. There’s some precedent for this, as Brian Howarth cut down his TRS-80 version of The Golden Baton into 8K for a VIC-20-with-slight-expansion port, but that’s still not the same amount of reduction! This game manages the reduction via splitting the game into six parts and as you transition from one to the other you wait for the next tape load to happen.

From the original 1977 Star Wars.

Tape load number one is just the introduction, including music.

We are to be teleported into the enemy base, so it isn’t exactly like Star Wars.

Having this done in a “slide sequence” rather than one text sequence is another go at trying to make the VIC-20 “cinematic” like Secret Mission.

The first loading screen (there already was one tape load to get here).

You land at a SMALL CABIN where, conveniently, a locker has a LASER and a CHARGE, as long as you remember to do LOOK not once but twice. I’m used to it but I’m really starting to get grumpy at this convention (examine a container multiple times to unearth more things).

The VIC-20 only has 3.5 KB of space for BASIC programs, so here’s the entire chunk that starts the game:

Despite the simplicity — you can just walk to the “exit” with the next tape load — this area turned out to be a bear, mainly because of verb issues. In fact, the very start you need an “isolate verb”, a verb I have never seen before in an adventure game and quite possibly never will see again. With the LASER and the CHARGE, you are supposed to ARM LASER to put the two together. Trying to INSERT CHARGE crashes the game.

UNDEF’D STATEMENT
ERROR IN 58

Trying to LIST 58 gets a blank response; the game is using tricks to keep the source code from being easily visible, which only works well when you don’t have a crash bug to worry about.

It doesn’t prevent LIST altogether, but it causes lines to get drawn on top of each other and line numbers to be jumbled.

To the south of the start there’s a CASE.

I AM IN A STORE DEPOT

I SEE CASE.

Typing OPEN CASE gets the response

I CAN’T TRANSLATE

which is the game’s “I don’t understand” message. I really had no idea what to visualize here; the game neglected to mention this is a “locked” container (or at least sealed) so we are supposed to SHOOT it. (Please remember the verb SHOOT, it will come up again momentarily.)

Shooting the case reveals a prism; LOOK PRISM indicates it is green and glows. That’s all the direction you get, and like a fantasy game, you’re supposed to RUB it.

While the prism will roll over in inventory to the next tape load, RUB will not work on it anymore; you’ll get the I CAN’T TRANSLATE response instead. Every time the tape loads the verb set of the game changes. This gets very nasty soon, but first, let’s show off going east from the start.

If you press the button right now, you’ll get ejected into space and die. Also, if you go east…

…and go east again, you’ll get caught by a stormtroopers Jillyan marines and die.

The only way forward is up the ladder, which is the next tape load (63 seconds!)

Now we get to the astonishing part:

The verb SHOOT no longer works. If you SHOOT TROOPER you will die. Furthermore, it isn’t clear that this is a wrong-verb issue; the game just says “THE TROOPER CHARGES” if you try to shoot. Despite SHOOT being the verb used already, now the game wants BLAST, and by this point I had reached for a walkthrough by Garry Francis.

I also read the walkthrough’s general advice, and some excerpts:

If you GO ELEVATOR in part 2, that bypasses a part. As you can’t return to a previous part, this makes the game unwinnable, so don’t GO ELEVATOR. If you get killed, you are given the opportunity to restart, but it only restarts that part. In most cases, this won’t help, so you’ll have to restart from scratch.

Each part has its own vocabulary with just a handful of verbs and they aren’t the same verbs in each part. For example, GET and DROP don’t work in part 3.

All verbs are identified by the first two letters, so there is no distinction between PUSH and PULL for example. Despite this, the parser assumes a verb length when parsing the noun, so LO LOCKER will not work, but LOOK LOCKER, LOCK LOCKER, LOVE LOCKER and LOZZ LOCKER will all assume you want to look at the locker.

The walkthrough includes a list of verbs for all the parts, but the whole sequence above already exhausted me enough so I’m going to pause for the moment and hope the verb list gets me to the end next time.