I’ve finished the game. Just like Dungeon Adventure was an anti-Zork of sorts, this can be thought of as an anti-Starcross, both in a negative and a positive way.
Voltgloss and Rob helpfully dropped some hints in the comments. The big piece I missed was the shortage of oxygen, but before getting into that, some small pieces to wrap up:
1.) the silver wire is … simply there as silver, and counts as a treasure
2.) the box which a knob gave the messages BEAM ON and BEAM OFF allowed me to mess with the main tractor beam for the ship; I was originally quite confused because it seems like there’s a literal beam coming out of the box, but no, that’s supposed to be a voice message or psychic impression or something; it also is a source of a bug at the end
3.) the oven is ignorable (Rob’s hint indicated a “fish”)
4.) the flashlight is also ignorable
5.) the shielding is safe to get before you’ve started the power, and as predicted, it does turn into gold with the lead-to-gold machine
6.) as mentioned by The Larch in the comments, the color code is just the official resistor code; there are some transistors that otherwise are a “red herring” but they’re intended as a hint; this also really puts even more into question the “alien ship” thing
With all that taken care of, I technically had found all my treasures, but couldn’t get them back to the ship in time, even with strategic teleports. The cutting torch comes with a tank (and it needs the tank to work, and the tank will eventually run out of gas if you leave it on).
Gas for welding/cutting uses a small amount of oxygen but is generally other gases, and I already knew it was being actively used in the cutter, so it never occurred to me it’d be safe to hook up to a spacesuit. However, Voltgloss’s first two hints…
You already have another oxygen source available already.
But didn’t recognize it as such.
…led me to go…. wait….
The metallic spacesuit can hook up to the tank and it works as oxygen. I think I may have audibly yelled at the screen. Look, you can buy oxygen canisters as separate things, and apply them in the mix, but it’s not oxygen alone, it’s called oxy-acetylene for a reason!
(As KarbonKitty points out in the comments, it’s technically different gas for cutters and welders, even though the canister is labeled as for welding but gets used on a cutter; also, you’d have different composition for a helium environment.)
And yes, some future-spacesuit-thing could just extract the oxygen and filter out the rest somehow, but that’s getting into the realm of fantasy-physics. This is part of why I said it’s sort of an anti-Starcross; it sets up as if science helps (even tossing in the resistor code, which I didn’t know) yet undermines the science at a crucial moment. It’s not terrible but — you know Lebling would never put a puzzle like that.
There’s another reason why this is the anti-Starcross (the “positive” way I alluded to). In that story, originally titled The Gift from the Stars, the aliens set up a task as a way of intentionally giving away advanced technology. Here, we are just wholesale swiping stuff, up to sabotaging the engine room just for some lead. It could have the same title with quote marks applied: The “Gift” from the Stars. I don’t normally think of the fate of our protagonists after their stories, but I can’t imagine our unhinged protagonist with an immortality serum ready to sell is going to land at a healthy ending.
While I have a full score, I was undermined by a final bug. There’s a message along the lines of “BUT YOU’RE STILL STUCK HERE” if you haven’t turned off the tractor beam (using the knob) but somehow my game got confused and even with the tractor beam off it still thinks it is on. I confirmed with checking Dale Dobson’s final screen that I had done everything correctly, the game just decided to collapse in a pile of bad parity settings.
Yet again, Aardvark tries some astounding ideas in a crumbling technical framework. They still stuck around through at through 1984, when higher-memory-capacity computers were becoming commonplace; I wish they had taken the opportunity to revamp some of their games to be slightly less reliant on super-tight programming (like Bruce Robinson did). Of course, Rodger Olson wasn’t even willing to fix regular bugs, so it isn’t a surprise we’re stuck with what we have. For Bob Retelle, who I quoted earlier, this behavior caused him to leave and make his own company entirely.
The “sloppiness” was another reason I spun off and started up my own software company. I had a real problem with releasing buggy games, which meant my own productivity was far lower than a lot of what was available from Aardvark. After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.
As far as Bob Anderson (the co-author of today’s game with Olson) goes, I’m not sure what happened. We have one more game of his to play (another Haunted House) and his Mobygames credits cut off.
From the July 1983 Aardvark catalog, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
We’ll have to save that for another time, as coming up next: two utterly obscure TRS-80 games, including one resulting from the recent “missing adventures” thread. Part 2 of the missing adventures list will likely show up next week, and then we’ll finally be getting back to Apple II, as Bob Blauschild tries his hand at a game in color.
I’ve now utilized the teleportation booths, visiting both an asteroid and an alien city. I haven’t found any way to extend my oxygen (or swap the helium that’s currently in the ship’s air with oxygen); with teleportation it may just be possible to go fast enough, but given I still have some puzzles to go I have my doubts.
All amidst a flurry of bugs, alas.
A preliminary NASA design for a 12-man module from ’69-’70. It normally is in zero-G but allows for rotation to test artificial gravity. This is smaller than the Derelict ship but with the same concept, connecting floors via a central shaft.
My first breakthrough was simply figuring out how to work the glass booths everywhere on the map. Saying both LOOK GLASS and LOOK BOOTH let to the game declaring they weren’t there, but for whatever reason GO BOOTH is special-cased to allow entering. Please note that this is different from every other object in the game; MAGNETIC BOOTS must be referred to as MAGNETIC (or just MA), not BOOTS; it’s using the initial part of the string, with no notion of which part is the verb and what’s the adjective.
Leaving is just a matter of GO OUT, but that’s not safe with the droid (who seems to always miss their first shot, but shots later have a random chance to hit). Trying to PUSH KEYBOARD leads to the game asking for a number from 1 to 99. Trying out “1” since there seemed to be no logical way to do better, as “YOU MOLECULES ARE SCATTERED”:
2 and 3 similarly lead to inadvertent exploration of the known universe; locations start at 4. I ended up just brute forcing all 99 options, although most led to death.
There’s a way to avoid at least some of the brute force (kind of, I’ll get back to that) and three of the locations — as marked in boldface — go to new areas, which I’ll also get back to. I originally didn’t have the colors on my chart but I teleported myself to SECURITY (23) to try to pop open the safe, now that the power was on. Remember, I had determined the safe was
SAFE: BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE
but typing in PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE didn’t work, and I realized quickly the safe really wanted a numeric code. I realized I could triangulate the room colors with the teleport locations, leading me to find the base-10-using aliens had the code
black = 0
brown = 1
red = 2
orange = 3
yellow = 4
green = 5
blue = 6
purple = 7
gray = 8
white = 9
that is, the same order that’s on the chart from the communications room. So BLACK/PURPLE is 07 or just 7, BLACK/YELLOW is 04 or just 4, and BLACK/PURPLE is 7 again. The combination for the safe is 747.
Popping open the safe reveals a ring of keys, a phaser, and some coins. The coins are just a treasure, the keys go to the locked cabinet in the sick bay (which you’ll see shortly), and the phaser can be used to smite droids, specifically with the verb BLAST.
The two-letter parser means there’s a lot of nonsense here: the green verbs are real, blue verbs map elsewhere. I found out from the response to PLAY that PLACE has to be a verb, not on my standard list (but I added it), and BLAST (not listed) I figured out while playing around with the phaser.
Blasting droids is quite satisfying and since they seem to always miss their first shot the droid rooms are now completely safe.
Above, I’ve used the keys on the cabinet, with the debris of a destroyed droid close by. This reveals
a gray box with a knob (this creates a beam, I haven’t done anything useful with it)
a silver wire (I also haven’t done anything useful with it)
and immortality serum (!!). I tried every verb I had extracted to see if it was possible to take the serum and thus survive the oncoming lack of oxygen, but had no luck. I tested out DRINK with a response of O.K. but that just mapped to DROP.
I finally realized (by testing it at back at the ship) the serum is simply intended as a treasure and we can’t use it. I admit I was looking forward to some even-more-terrible ending message by testing out the teleport-your-molecules device whilst immortal, but alas the technical requirements of this game remain extreme (it uses 12k rather than 8k, at least) and I don’t think the authors would have wanted to custom handle that.
Returning to those new locations: one is supposed to be clued by the projector in the library, which shows a brown and black alien city so the teleportation code 10 matches.
I suspect most people who played got this already by brute force. The thing is: at least some death-testing is required to understand the code, the asteroid has no similar clue, and there’s no reason why the authors couldn’t have dropped yet another hidden teleport somewhere in the 80s or whatnot.
The puzzle is rescued by the fact that the safe really needs the player to have understood the code. I’m not sure if changing the puzzle to remove the brute force (by adding more digits, say) would have made it stronger.
The new locations are above; I marked the teleport destinations. The shaft is the buggy one, as there’s no glass booth in the room, and when you leave the booth to enter the room the booth disappears. There’s also no corresponding color (it’d be black/yellow, 04). That buggy room — which a player is most likely to come across first — is another reason why the brute force can only sort-of be avoided — even if someone spots the pattern early they get dealt a room that breaks the pattern! But it’s the only one.
The asteroid just has a titanium pickax (treasure) and some lumps of coal (not treasure, yet).
The city is more interesting; it has a “press” that you can PLACE the lumps in (…thanks goodness I randomly learned about that verb…) and convert them into diamonds, as long the power is going.
While I now can easily open the bay doors and drop the tractor beam for escape, there’s still the matter of getting the treasures. Things I have yet to puzzle out are:
The box that shoots a beam
The silver wire
A flashlight near where the diamond press is (you can turn it on, but why? there’s no darkness)
An oven with a bottle of cooking oil
A metallic suit, which can’t be worn at the same time as the oxygen is attached
Some “shielding” near the radiation sign
More details on the last point: the shielding is at the hyperspace drive, and I’ve successfully lit up a welding torch and managed to CUT SHIELDING. Unfortunately this simply kills the player.
(By the way, CUT on anything else has the game claim you don’t have a torch, even when you do. I have to keep alert with any parser message to determine if it’s saying something real or if it’s just a bug.)
The reason why you’d want the shielding is back at the lab: there’s a machine that indicates (via cryptogram) it is for turning lead into gold. So I imagine you can get gold shielding if you can just survive ripping it off from the engine.
I suspect I’m closing in on the ending, and I also even suspect I have all the verbs. I’m still probably getting stuck via some cryptic parser response without realizing it. If someone wants to check Dale Dobson’s playthrough, I’d appreciate any ROT13 hints (especially if it turns out I’m missing something outrageous).
I’ve got the layout now, and this is very similar to Starcross in that a complete layout of the ship is really needed before puzzle-solving can begin in earnest.
Just like Starcross, Derelict is set in a rotating cylinder with artificial gravity (given the same author made a Rimworld game the same year, this is not a shock). The directions are up, down, forward, aft, spinward, and antispinward. There’s a central shaft that links to multiple layers of the cylinder, and when inside the cylinder, travel “wraps around” going spinward or antispinward.
Although smaller than this; in two of the layers only two GO SPINWARD or GO ANTISPINWARD actions are enough to loop, and in the middle layer, only three steps are needed.
I’ve divided the central shaft into four layers…
…and I’ll give the map in four parts. My coloring is arbitrary and most rooms have a unique color combo that I’m sure is important (they also all have the mysterious glass booth). In the landing bay, the floor is red and the walls are green; all combos are unique.
That’s everything for the start. Note on the map I have a corner marked; I’m using that to indicate where all the droids are (there are droids #1 through #6). I also have north mapped to forward, south mapped to aft, east mapped to spinward, and west mapped to counterspinward.
(As simple as the above looks, it took me a little while to figure out because I didn’t have an item and the loop going down at the Central Shaft was counterintuitive. Dropping the magnetic boots gets you stuck in zero gravity, and of course dropping your suit or oxygen are similarly fatal. I eventually found out that the sign at the start of the game which tells you DROP TREASURE HERE is takeable so I used it for mapping purposes.)
Moving on to the next floor, the one I’m calling “Technical”:
Past the starting floor all names of rooms are given in cryptograms. I suppose this is meant to represent an alien language but if it’s just a cryptogram, doesn’t it mean they use English? If I keep the thought process going I’d imagine we’re looking at a human ship that’s been tossed back in time, but in all honesty this is almost certainly meant like “Hollywood English” in a movie set in a non-English country; we’re just supposed to get the feeling of translating an alien language without having to do it.
The yellow sign says IZWRZGRLM, or RADIATION. I have a feeling I’m going to need the “metallic suit” that’s in the storage room on the same level, although just passing through isn’t fatal. Also noteworthy is a CUTTING TORCH with a TANK (with a cryptogram on it that says WELDING GAS) as well as a transmitter with a ruby crystal in it (my first treasure) and a chart with more cryptograms.
…let’s just ignore the two bathrooms (is this really an alien ship?) and note the locked cabinet in the sick bay…
…a “library” next to a “rec room” where there’s some playing cards (aliens?!), some jeweled gaming pieces (treasure number 2), a platinum globe (treasure 3), a projector that needs power…
…and in the XZKGRZMH XZYRM (CAPTAINS CABIN) there’s a log book giving an encoded safe combination.
Using the crypto-translated chart from the communications room, that comes out to be
BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE
or maybe just PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE if we’re ignoring the initial #.
(I should also highlight, referring back to the screenshot, one of the major annoyances of the game. Aardvark games always have had a tendency to give no response at all to particular commands, and this is true for many of the things you want to look at or read. In this case, READing a log book shows nothing, and you have to LOOK!)
Moving to the top:
The safe is right there (HVXFIRGB, or SECURITY) but it needs power; an oven has cooking gas, and a lab has a “large machine” which needs power as well.
Finally the very top is the control deck, where a CRT indicates there is no power, and there are three colored buttons.
That’s POWER, TRACTOR BEAM, AND BAY DOORS. Rather like Dog Star Adventure, it’s clear the beam and doors need to be operated before we get out. Pressing either one indicates there is no power, so that must be the right press?
The exit down gets cut off, and the droid (and I assume all the other droids) wake up.
Other than running out of oxygen (the oxygen is really tight but I don’t know yet if we get a refill) there hasn’t been any hazards in the game yet. The ship is waiting for us! This might end up being a “preparation puzzle”, one of my favorite kinds, where we have to pre-create a safe route before lighting things up. It’s too bad the Aardvark parser makes everything three times harder to deal with.
Aardvark is a company I’d never heard of before starting the project, but we’ve spent an awful lot of time with now. They originally wrote their games targeted at the ludicrously small-memory requirements of the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P computer, and made some odd parser sacrifices to get there (like only understanding the first two letters of each word). Despite this they’ve been rather clever in terms of geography, with (for example) Bob Anderson’s Circle World having a fair number of locations only reachable by teleport, but having all areas united together by the end. Earthquake, the game we most recently looked at, had an almost completely wide-open map, but led to puzzles where the thought process sometimes went “what store would have a solution to this” and not simply thinking about items.
Derelict is another Bob Anderson game from 1982, where he is again listed as co-author with Rodger Olson (founder of Aardvark). I’d be cautious about saying this was an equal collaboration; quoting Bob Retelle (of Trek Adventure):
Credits often resulted from “Hey why don’t you write an adventure based on xxxx” and it became “By Rodger Olsen and (whoever)”. At least I got paid (sometimes).
(Regarding getting paid, Retelle points out how ports were considered “owned by the company” so the original author did not make money off them. In one case a store told him about how the TI-99 port of his RPG Quest II was popular, except this was the first he even heard of a TI-99 port existing. Also, there is no Quest I and calling it II was a marketing stunt.)
Our goal is to raid a 1000-year old alien vessel for treasures. This is kind of like Queen of Phobos if we were one of the thieves. The catalog says it is “the new winner in the ‘Toughest Adventure at Aardvark sweepstakes'” and notes there are “no irrational traps and suddenly senseless deaths”.
This ship was designed to be perfectly safe for its builders. It just happens to be deadly to alien invaders like you!
This description made me hesitant. Earthquake was genuinely good (almost recommendable) but still had the miserable Aardvark parser. Any game designed as “easy” can get away with a less robust parser, not just because the player will have less moments of stuck-ness in order to test the boundaries, but because easy games tend to ask the player to communicate fairly straightforward actions.
The two versions of Derelict I’ve been able to find are for the Commodore PET and C64. I went with the Commodore PET this time. There’s a short series of messages about being pulled in a ship by an alien tractor beam, and then:
My first problem was just trying to pick anything up: GET BOOTS says “IT’S NOT IN SIGHT”. This is another instance of a parser’s try-not-to-reveal-too-much attitude is hurting, those boots are clearly right there! The default message is trying to avoid noun-hunting but it ends up leading to a bit of nonsense right at the start.
You’re instead supposed to TAKE MAGNETIC (or TA MA, this is a two letter parser) and you can do that for the other items. The sign indicates the treasures go in the room for points; yes, it’s one of those games. (Oddly enough, not common for Aardvark! They’ve been cranking out escape games, not Treasure Hunts.) Moving on with all three things (boots, spacesuit, oxygen):
Here is the usual airlock setup where you close one door to open the other one, go outside, and then:
I… what? Didn’t you say I was wearing the oxygen, game?
READ OXYGEN gives the message ATTACH/DETACH OXYGEN. Ok, fine, but it seems weird to make this essentially a puzzle. (And give the oxygen a response to reading! The magnetic boots give a blank message when you try to read them.)
Finally, through with that, I went outside again, did LOOK #1 DROID, and got the response
WHAT?
(EXAMINE doesn’t work at all, READ gives a blank prompt.)
Hmm, maybe try the booth instead? LOOK BOOTH:
THAT’S NOT HERE
Oh that’s right, it needs the noun from the start, it needs to be called “glass” instead. LOOK GLASS:
THAT’S NOT HERE
Game. Excuse me. You literally have the text “THERE IS A GLASS BOOTH HERE”.
Ye flask indeed. I don’t remember having anywhere near this trouble with Earthquake, but keep in mind this game has already tried to having both items being worn and things attached, and I have no doubt there’s something weird and complicated going on in the landing bay, but I’m still unclear what that thing is. Maybe it is best to just move on and explore.
This one’s going to be a headache to map out, isn’t it? And likely buggy.
I remember discovering some of the bugs of other games in early testing (it was pretty common for Rodger to hand out tapes of new games before they were put in the catalog), but it was like pulling teeth to get him to fix any of them.
In “Mars Adventure” (or was it “Pyramid”.. hmm.. I forget exactly), there was a stairway with exits that didn’t line up with the next locations. That is, you’d exit to the East, say, and end up in a room with exits to the North and South. Going south would take you back to the first room (it should have said West). Made it really tough on people who liked to map the advanture. Rodger’s response was something like “tough”.
Another one let you eat the key that was absolutely essential for escaping (maybe that was the Pyramid bug). Again the answer was “well, then don’t eat the key”.
Let me get a bit farther and report back next time. Aardvark games always stayed in tight constraints so there’s no way this goes out long, but if the parser difficulties stay this could still require multiple parts.
Renga in Blue 
