I’ve now played Epic Hero #1 and Epic Hero #2 of the series by Marc Leduc. I’ve given the history already at those entries, but as a brief reminder: he was a Canadian who moved to England (and married and had children there); he was a fan of both the Video Genie and the much rarer Colour Genie and produced a series of three games (Epic Hero) followed by a series of six (Colour Quest), where two of the Colour Quest games were written by a different author and the sixth Colour Quest game is mostly a duplicate of Epic Hero #1.
I wanted to get the Epic Hero games off my list as they’re lingering 1982 games; I had them as 1983, based on CASA’s entries, but I found an ad that put them as coming out right at the end of 1982.
Computing Today, January 1983, with a one-month newsstand delay.
I enjoyed Epic Hero #2 as it was based on experimentation in a fantasy universe but had enough logic to how things worked I didn’t feel like the puzzles were just stumbling at random. Will Game #3 hold up? “This Epic is for the very cunning.” is announced on the opening screen, which is worrying. Most of our authors have stumbled when they’ve tried to crank up the difficulty.
Venus Must Live places things in the future, kind of. We are in the far-flung distant year of 2023. Future?-Venus has mining going on, except there have been “electro magnetic disturbances” so we are sent to investigate.
Unusually for a Scott Adams derived game, LOOK no longer works as a generalized “examine” verb. That is, you don’t LOOK VIEWSCREEN on the scene above, but rather EXAMINE VIEWSCREEN (“Foggy!”) This was changed between Epic Hero #2 and #3; I’m guessing the author was bothered by the janky feel of LOOK OBJECT as a command (in regular English you’d expect “AT” in there). The only downside to dropping LOOK OBJECT syntax is that the generalized LOOK has had a meta-aura to it where it generically means “investigate this thing more thoroughly” so it might not just be visual feedback. EXAMINE implies eyes-only, so EXAMINE (COMMS) LINK giving an audio message is slightly off-kilter.
Comms Link: “This is a recorded message.”
“Colonisation of Venus is imminent. However, unusual electronical disturbances on planet indicate sentient life. Find and return a sentient being to preserve the race.”
“Message Out”
The console has a red button and a blue button. The red button blasts off, and doing so right away is a game over but at least one that gives helpful detail.
The ship blasts off!
Comms Link: “Fool! Either you have not found the sentient being or else it is not secure in Life Support. Consider the expense of this mission! We are anxiously waiting for your return! We are short of experimental animals”
That is, despite this ending the game, the message reveals that our real goal is put the creature we’re looking for in Life Support, and also that the spaceship doesn’t need any extra help to get back off the ground (it’s not uncommon to have “fix your ship” or “find fuel” be one of the tasks in this sort of game). One thing I’ve noticed talking with people about Old Multi-Death Adventures is a sense of annoyance at deaths in that “no progress” is made; however, deaths often give useful information, and the ones that don’t tend to be funny.
Pushing the blue button instead of red sends you to a “Central Access compartment”. The compartment has a mysterious Identi-Comp as well as four pad/hatch combos that lead to other parts of the ship (or outside).
The Identi-Comp has a switch that can be swapped between 1 and 2 (TO ONE and TO TWO is the syntax explicitly given by the game if you try to noodle with the switch) but I haven’t noticed a difference, and my attempts to “SPEAK” or “SAY” something so far have not been recognized. It doesn’t allow arbitrary text, it only allows recognized nouns.
The game treats BROWN as a valid noun so you can say it, whereas the verb OPEN is not and so the game doesn’t let you give the command SAY OPEN at all.
Purple goes outside, and without any kind of inventory (as the game starts) it leads to death, so let’s pass over that for the moment…
One of the best death screens I’ve seen in a while, though.
…and press the brown plate instead. This sends the player to the “medical and scientific” area.
You are in a Medical and Genetic Engineering compartment.
Objects you can see are: Auto-Surg Unit ■ Scanner ■ Brown Pad ■ Closed Brown Hatch ■ Life Support ■
The surgery unit is described as having its “lid” open, and the scanner and life support don’t have any description at all. You can go into the unit and find a black button, white button, and orange button.
The buttons give no descriptions (the author seems keen on “colour roulette”, where you just have to run through the possibilities to see what happens). At first white and black do nothing, but the lid is open; orange closes/opens the lid.
White then turns you into “instant mush”, while black does something … maybe useful?
What will you do now? PUSH BLACK
You’re injected with something, fall asleep and something happens to you. Much later …Auto-Surg Unit: “Surgery Complete”
You can then PUSH WHITE safely and have the exact same text. Possibly undoing whatever the first effect was?
The last ship room comes from pressing the grey plate in the hub, leading to a big stash of equipment.
You are in a Special Equipment compartment.
Objects you can see are: Grey Pad ■ Closed Grey Hatch ■ Thought Bomb ■ 12 Inch Rod ■ Head Band ■ Space Suit ■ Lift Boots ■
Again, not much helpful in the way of descriptions. The thought bomb gives nothing (nothing!?!?) the 12 inch rod mentions a DISK on one end. The head band, suit, and boots don’t say anything when examined. If you wear the suit, a dial mysteriously appears in your inventory (it took some experimenting before I was sure the two were connected). The game also enforces that the boots need to be placed over the suit.
After the shenanigans above, before moving on exploring the planet, I decided it was wise to go ahead and make a verb list.
Notable points: THINK which is rare and can be hard to come up with (I assumed at least the thought bomb is somehow controlled this way — you’ll see what happens with it shortly), the sense of SMELL gets used (which can be easy to overlook), SWIM and DIVE are both in (I sometimes neglect testing DIVE otherwise in water) and FEEL and HOLD are both in.
Disembarking leads to a Venusian jungle, with exits to the east and west. While the environment will kill without a space suit, this is done in old-school style, not with realistic planetary exploration.
Heading east leads to a cliff that can’t be scaled. I would think the lift boots would work to then somehow float or maybe jump high, but nothing I’ve tried has worked (nor can I mess with the dial on the suit, which I thought might be connected). Theorizing that perhaps multiple items operative via thought I tried THINK UP with disastrous results. I guess UP is short for “BLOW UP” to the bomb. That’s useful information for later, at least.
I’ve also tried messing about with the dial on the suit, but nothing I’ve tried has been recognized, including TURN and ROTATE straight from the verb list. I have a feeling I’m missing some basic aspect to getting the equipment to work.
Going west instead of east at the landing point leads to a maze, a small-scale one identical in feel to Epic Hero 1 and 2.
Mappable via dropping objects. You’d think Leduc would get tired of these by now, but apparently not.
The notable place in the jungle can be found by just going west repeatedly: a pool of glowing liquid and an alien statue. The statue has an outstretched hand, but I have not found any method of getting the parser to recognize placing an item there (it may be I simply need the right object for it to be recognized). PLACE just puts an item on the ground.
What will you do now? EXAMINE STATUE
It
has it’s hand out !
What will you do now? PUT ROD
In what?
What will you do now? IN HAND
I am not quite sure what you mean
What will you do now? IN STATUE
I am not quite sure what you mean
You can enter the pool, but I haven’t found anything useful to do other than drinking the pool and finding out the liquid is poisonous and dying again. Even DIVE doesn’t work.
To summarize:
a.) I’m not sure what the injections at the medical pod do
b.) I don’t know what the Identi-Comp does or how to operate it
c.) I don’t know how to scale a cliff even given objects that seem like they’d work; this may be just parser-struggle
d.) I don’t know what the statue wants or what to do in the pool of poison water
I still have a fair amount of things to experiment with (an advantage of the game giving a big inventory load at the start) but I’m worried this game’s ambition may have passed out of the reach of the author, or at least the author’s ability to make a parser.
There are no walkthroughs for this one, so we’re on our own. Suggestions in the comments are welcome.
Renga in Blue 