Archive for the ‘doomsday-mission’ Tag
I was fully prepared to write a failure post here, but then I decided to give things one last try and made it to the end. Phew. The Earth in saved and I’m ready to outwit any evil AI that surface in the future by using prompt engineering to show how it stores copyrighted material verbatim with the power of adventure game puzzles.
When I got stuck I tried poking through the binary but the text messages weren’t that helpful. The only thing I found was this: a new way to die.
The first thing I managed to resolve was more or less a parser issue, although it was essentially a lack-of-feedback issue: how to make the object described in a circuit diagram. I knew MAKE was a verb, I knew the game understands MAKE DIAGRAM, but it normally says
I HAVENT GOT ENOUGH.
without detail on what might be missing. You need, specifically, in the room with you: the diagram, a sonic screwdriver, electronic parts, and a small box (which otherwise has no description at all and prior to this working I thought might be cardboard).
That’s one of my tasks done but I couldn’t use the deactivator yet without making it to the computer. One of my other issues was getting stuck in a cell with a cassette and being unable to escape with it. I had, unknowingly, already soft-locked my game long before. A prior screenshot:
LISTEN was the softlock. You’re supposed to LOOK MAN first and see a bracelet he’s wearing; once you get the narrative moment from him you are no longer able to take the bracelet.
This is one of those situations where you could easily have found the bracelet without realizing there was even an issue there; no doubt the authors didn’t even think about this problem.
While wearing the bracelet I could sneak in, grab the cassette and use the bracelet to teleport out. (It just sends you back to the room with all the bodies.)
However, playing the cassette was still a problem. I left a ROBOT in a LAB with a MAD SCIENTIST, and you can PUT the cassette in. Nothing happens. The ROBOT has two slots, and something needs to go in the other slot.
That something is outside the airlock. Last time one of the spots I thought might have been just a matter of parser trouble was in fact that. I was in a space suit ready to hop through an airlock but kept floating away. I had flexible bandages that I could attach to a hook, but no way to grab them. You’re supposed to WEAR them. Fair enough, I suppose.
I was unable to get anything useful here; the only reaction I got from the rectangle is typing TAKE RECTANGLE while holding a kitchen knife from the first floor of the station.
I TRY TO PRY THE RECTANGLE OFF THE STATION,
SNAP…THE KNIFE BREAKS.
This is in fact where I was prepared to throw in the towel, as by process of elimination (and my peeking at the binary, which really didn’t help much otherwise) I knew the rectangle had to be what goes in the slot.
I tried every single item I could think of to do some prying, but then got an idea looking at the knife, as it is explicitly described as BLUNT. Hmm. I didn’t have a sharpener, but I did have a mirror I could break into glass shards. The problem is when breaking it I always had a security guard (the same one who doesn’t like you shooting a phaser at the MAD SCIENTIST) kill me. However, if you break the mirror outside (or inside, but before passing through the airlock) the robot doesn’t appear.
This is still glitchy because the robot catches you if you fire a phaser outside. I also wish the rectangle was described as needing cutting, since trying to use the kitchen knife suggests prying.
With both rectangle and cassette inserted back at the robot I was finally able to get it to play:
The mad scientist is still hanging out. You never deal with him, you just finish off the computer and escape.
The robot went over to a previously empty “large room” and bashed open a hole, destroying itself in the process.
One last obstacle! If you just try to go in you get fried by a laser (the game is helpful here and will even have the laser attempt a potshot if you LOOK HOLE; weird that now is when it starts caring about being fair).
Fortunately, the phaser works here:
Deactivator in hand, you can go in the hole and ATTACH it to the master computer. I went through quite a few verbs before realizing this was the right one.
With the teleport activated the end is just a matter of walking back to where you started and winning. Except don’t forget to drop your phaser otherwise the gas still kills you, oops!
So while that was ultimately satisfying for me to play, I hardly can recommend it for others, especially with the three-days-stuck portion in there, the dubious softlock, and the cavalier approach to death. I do want to highlight this ended up being more interesting than the prior games closest in spirit, Death Dreadnaught and Domes of Kilgari. Dreadnaught only had one interesting puzzle (killing the creature) and was otherwise about wandering and soaking in atmosphere; Domes of Kilgari had lots of deathtraps but they felt like they were there because the author couldn’t think of any other obstacle. Here, there was some decent thought put to the world modeling, an actual plot sequence that had more to it than “a sequence of deathtraps”, and some variety in the way players move through space.
Australia will still remain a scarce source of adventure material for 1982; while one of the most notable adventures of the year is from there, I’ve got that one closer to the back end of my list. Can’t burn all the good material early!
A Komtek-1 as mentioned in the ad on the top of this post; it’s an even more obscure TRS-80 clone than the System 80 is.
I’ve made good progress on the game. The way it has gone almost feels like the opposite of what a modern player would want to experience, yet there are aspects of the style that allow unique choices that are tough to replicate without that roughness. It’s easier to just explain in context —
A Dick Smith System 80, from Classic Computers New Zealand. This was a very popular clone of the TRS-80 in the Australasia region and there is a decent probability Doomsday Mission was developed on one. It was sold as a Video Genie in the UK, a PMC-80 in the US, and a TRZ-80 in South Africa. The clone originated from Hong Kong via EACA International Limited.
— so continuing directly from last time, I had found an elevator with a strange message. In a literal-world sense this would be a gag, but it occurred to me not long after hitting “Publish” on my last post that it might be a clue of some sort.
I tried LOOK UP which revealed a secret panel. After finding the panel you can SLIDE PANEL revealing a hole, then GO HOLE to get to the top of the elevator. There’s a cable you can then climb to make it to the second floor.
This results in a second floor chock full of more ways to die.
Heading south a bit leads to a Clinic with a scalpel and some badges; adjacent is a Lab with a mad scientist.
The route to avoiding death here involves a vent by the elevator. You can find a dead body of a crewmember holding a phaser held tight via RIGORMORTIS.
This moment is effective due to the opening of the game. The very first step kills you with gas. Since dropping the starting phaser to avoid the gas is not intuitive, most players (myself included) will have experienced an army of clones being killed over and over before finally getting through. Even though none of them are part of the “diegetic text” of the plot — that is, the “real”, “final” plot where we succeed — they still have an effect of the player. (See also: Pyramid of Doom.) The ghost clones gave me a fairly nervous reaction upon seeing the phaser, rather emphasized via the method of obtaining it, via sharp implement:
You can’t shoot the scientist, but the phaser works even if you aren’t shooting it.
The carrots let you see better so that when you go down stairs to the first floor (skipping the elevator) you can see the way up again. The robot has two slots for cassettes which I haven’t used yet.
Having a kick opening with dying the exact same way over and over is not really polite even in a modern time-loop game, so the dramatic effect was uniquely historical. I also like that in its most refined form, this is just a “take object X and bring it to person Y” puzzle, but the extra plot elements indicate depth beyond a node on a puzzle flow chart.
Moving on to more forms of death, past the radiation door:
The radiation can be taken care of by swiping the space suit from the first floor, which doubles as radiation protection.
More hazards still await. In addition to a PHASER the game starts you with INSTRUCTIONS that ARE PLANS TO DISARM THE MISSILES ON THIS STATION. Well, here’s the missiles, so let’s try it:
Just having an alleged shutdown button there would have just been a trap, but by having the instructions tossed in the player’s inventory from the beginning, throwing a psychological shadow, the trap became delicious. The final method of death is from dropping into a cell, the same one you see after using violence:
This isn’t necessarily a loss here but I haven’t figure out yet how to get out. The obvious choice of sonic screwdriver (Dr. Who’s chosen open-all-doors implement) doesn’t seem to work, although I may just be using the wrong verb. You can use violence to get a security robot to come by but they just eat the key to the door and otherwise ignore you (you don’t immediately die at least).
The radiation area also has batteries. After enough time the life support shuts off and the lights go down. You can insert the batteries in a torch from the first level (that’s torch = flashlight, this is an Aussie game) for the light, and for the life support, you need to be wearing a space suit when the drama hits and there’s a lever in a LIFE SUPPORT CONTROL room that resets things so you don’t need a suit on.
I assume there will be some logical reason we can’t just keep a suit on the rest of the game.
So to summarize what I’m up on:
1.) the missiles are booby trapped and may just not be disarmable at all; there might be a way through the booby trap
2.) escaping the cell (which might be easy?)
3.) surviving going through the airlock on the first floor
Regarding the airlock, I did find the BANDAGES could tie to the HOOK, but I was unable to translate that into using them as a safety net or the like. This may simply be again a matter of finding the right verb.
I do have the suspicion I close enough to the end to be able to wrap up in one post, although I also suspect I will have at least a few more ignominious deaths along the way.
If you want a perspective on the Australian computer industry at the end of 1982, a good place to check is the February 1983 issue of Australian Personal Computer, which has a long section devoted to the upcoming Australian Personal Computer Show and a list of all the vendors showing.
Some of them are simply Australian branches of well-known international companies (like IBM Australia, or the publisher Addison-Wesley). Some of them are local computer groups (like Atari Computer Enthusiasts). Some are hardware sales groups (ComputerWave). But not many at all are local software houses.
Lothlorien Software, GPO Box 1033, Sydney 2001. Tel: (02) 398 4023.
Lothlorien Software produces a range of educational software whose key-note is ease and simplicity of use in both tutorial and lesson-making modes.
Each tutorial program presents and drills material, giving immediate corrective feedback. Teachers can rapidly compile sets of lessons to add to the comprehensive set provided on the master diskette.
Also see: Microbee: “…on display will be the recently developed Wordbee word processing package, Pascal and Logo, to provide a variety of educational environments and a range of options not allowed under Basic.”
A skim through ads for 1982 indicates the same: lots of emphasis on import. In other words, Australia’s home-grown software industry was taking a while to develop. It still wasn’t at zero, one exception being Cosmic Software, as owned by Tom Theil.
They mostly were known for arcade game conversions for TRS-80 that are genuinely decent, although quite frank in their clone-ness.
They worked with at least one outside group, Malabar Trading, who did Outland (sort of Missile Command with a city being attacked but where you have crosshair shooting) and Morgath (a series of three “action adventure” segments put together into one plot).
Every game I could find of theirs was published in 1982, and that includes what seems to be their sole adventure game, Doomsday Mission, as written by John Bland and Phil Salomon. Being a fairly technically solid outfit otherwise it is not surprising their TRS-80 adventure (even if it was another “outsider publishing venture”) would not be in BASIC but in machine code.
(And before I start showing screenshots, I need to give thanks to George Phillips, who helped me get this running in trs80gp. The emulator needs to be in Model I mode; additionally, it can’t have any disk drives attached at all, which is doable with trs80gp -m1 doomsday.cmd -dx.)
The plot involves the building of an orbital space station able to fire nuclear missiles at any alien attacks. The wise powers that be have decided to give control to the stations over to large language models the machines, and things have gone horribly wrong.
This has what I informally call a “kick opening”, where the game kicks you pretty hard with an opening puzzle, leaving you stuck with few options. (Another example is Savage Island, Part II, where you had to either HYPERVENTILATE or BREATHE DEEPLY.)
I started almost immediately by making a verb list which usually only happens on pretty hard games:
MAKE and LISTEN are the two worth keeping track of; they’re not always typical nor are they easy to summon up in a game context. (MAKE is typically used for something like getting a plan for a bridge which you then have to assemble with MAKE BRIDGE. It can be hard because you are making something which doesn’t technically exist as a noun in the world yet.)
Rather unusually for a kick opening, this is honestly a good puzzle. I solved it by thinking about the reaction to using any kind of violence. If you shoot the phaser you’ll get a fatal backlash from the space station:
When making the verb list, literally every attack variant was intercepted the same way (BREAK, HIT, KICK, etc.)
After some contemplation I realized since there were intense sensors for weapons or violent activity, it would be in the station’s interest to stop a PHASER from getting through. So I just did DROP PHASER as the first action, and made it through the gas safely.
No weird actions, just a slight subversion of expectations as: while you start with a helpful inventory object you need to immediately dump it.
Past the initial puzzle is a much more open map, one feeling vaguely reminiscent of Star Trek, just with a lot more dead people.
There’s a 3D-chess game that you can kill time with before the game kills you.
There’s a SPACE SHUTTLE in the bay below that is full of dead bodies and that I haven’t been able to enter.
Next to the space shuttle is an airlock. While there’s a space station, stepping out of the station kills you as you float into space. There’s a hook nearby I assume you need to attach a tether to, but I haven’t found any appropriate item.
There’s an ELEVATOR which traps you in with a weirdly non-thematic message.
I’m otherwise fairly stumped on progress, although I still need to make a couple more circles of the map for secret interactions.
You can also hop in the bed and SLEEP for some reason.
Despite the amateur feel, there’s clearly some passion being tossed around which I appreciate. Also,
“THE COMPUTER HAS GONE BESERK, THE ONLY WAY TO DESTROY IT IS TO UGH GASP GROAN”, HE DIES.
implies the man is saying the actual words “ugh gasp groan” as he’s dying, which is hilarious to imagine. Hence I would normally follow by saying “I’m not ready to check hints yet” but as far as I can find there are no hints, so I guess I’ll have to just figure it out then.
(Or hack at the binary, where the text is plaintext. But that’s definite last resort.)
Renga in Blue 