Q: I think it’s fair to say the Broken Sword games don’t contain quite the same material, but they have a certain character to them that’s rather distinct. Is there a commonality to the character behind your games?
A: Yes. You could call it puerility. In my heart I know my games were being puerile early on.
— From an interview with Charles Cecil, who calls these early days of development “ultra-indie”
I’ve finished the game; my previous post is needed for context.
I theorized last time I was stopped by parser troubles: indeed I was, and after I resolved the issue it was smooth sailing to the end.
The right command here is to
SWITCH SWITCH
I can’t even blame the system. Just one regular synonym (like PULL or FLIP) would have made this better.
With the switch pulled, the only effect was to have the landing light off. However, this gave me a sudden idea: what if this is where the explosive went? I was thinking of there being a “drama time” event where after turning the light back on, a vehicle would try to land and set the explosive off. (Drama time in that there’s no reason why turning a light off and on again would summon a vehicle — it’s just a matter of the event waiting until the player already has things in place.) However, that’s not quite how things worked out, but it got me to a solution anyway.
Since DROP PLAS(TIC EXPLOSIVE) was getting intercepted by a question as to where, I knew I was on the right track. Since the bulb is in the way, the trick is to UNSCREW BULB…
THE BULB POPS OUT AND SMASHES ON THE ROCKY GROUND
..and then DROP PLAS(TIC) / INTO LAND(ING) works. Then you can SWITCH SWITCH (sigh) again:
The tank moves and leaves its original position unguarded. Not the result I was expecting, but I’ll take it. (You can even go east and see the tank sitting there, but it doesn’t see you or do anything.) On to the last portion of the game!
The path leads to a volcano, and then a METAL PLATFORM and a part I expect a lot people got stuck on. I’d experimented enough with the PEN LIGHT (from the guard that we killed with a knife) that I knew SHINE PEN got the response that I could do that, but not yet. Hence, when a moment came up where there seemed to be not much useful to do otherwise, I was ready:
The secret base has a SAFE where the 27/09 message back at the guard hut applies (remember I knew that 2709 was understood by the parser). The only fussy part is the method of entry: the game directly asks if you want to try entering a code, and you type YES, and then only after you type 2709.
That is, you can’t treat what the game says as a rhetoric question.
Opening the safe reveals a BRIEFCASE and PLANS FOR A MASSIVE INVASION; this must be the “secret” we’ve been sent to find.
Just south there’s a colonel, and we can just straightforwardly KILL him, and take his jacket stored nearby. There’s a guard later that then mistakes you for the colonel so you can get by.
This is followed by a helicopter you can use to escape. Just make sure you don’t PULL LEVER which gives the highly deceptive “I CAN’T DO THAT YET” but instead PUSH LEVER.
Making a beeline for the carrier is not healthy, as indicated above. You need to first fly around a little and then some harriers fly by and spot you.
I think you need to also have dumped the colonel’s jacket first before doing this.
Then you can safely land to victory.
Adventure E by an entirely different author!
The game was … fine, I suppose? There’s very little of the complexity allowed by a Scott Adams game (with timing, multiple attributes, etc.) All of the previous games (A through C) required odd leaps of logic that didn’t really happen here; the “hardest” puzzle probably was the use of the plastic explosion which I admit I solved by accidentally trying to cause a different effect, but it still didn’t strike me as unfair.
I do think the system itself really held the games back. With very little possible in the way of custom messages, and I CANT for everything, this is weak parser; a Greg Hassett game from 1980 does a better job in communicating why an action didn’t work. I think the ZX81 system itself (and the fact the original games even worked on ZX80!) can somewhat be blamed; even the most talented of modern authors would have trouble squeezing more out.
And we in the UK were working with so little memory, compared to our peers in the US. One of the first Artic releases was 1K ZX Chess. We crammed a chess playing game into 1K. The reason that UK programmers and technical people got so good was because we were working with 1k, and then maybe 16k. In the US they were working with up to 64k. We had cassettes and they had floppy disks.
On the other other hand, I can tell you once we reach most text adventures being aimed at the ZX Spectrum, we’re not in a land of milk and honey. But at least they were capable of more.
Coming up: Not sure! Brian Cotton was supposed to take longer to beat, so I’ll try to find something small to finish off the year.
This is the last of the Charles Cecil games made with Richard Turner for Artic Computing. (Previously: Inca Curse, Ship of Doom.) Ship of Doom had the kerfuffle calling it a “digital nasty” due to a particular scene; after publishing Ship of Doom, Turner had his talk with a Whsmith manager about how his art was “rubbish” (as Charles Cecil notes, “…we weren’t worried about logos and marketing. We wanted to make games.”)
Espionage Island is the adventure that came after that talk, so the cover isn’t just plain text anymore.
From Mobygames.
The text adventure engine (based off a 1980 Practical Computing article) still hasn’t changed; plenty of I CANT messages for “I understood that verb but I’m not going to do it for whatever reason” and I DONT UNDERSTAND for when the verb is out of range. (The remaining games, E through H, do change things up, but we’ll save discussing that for when we reach 1983.)
We are, straightforwardly, on a reconnaissance mission to an island, looking for a “secret”. I think realistically we might get a camera or something (at the very least there’s a “disguise” not mentioned in inventory) but we otherwise just start sitting in a plane that was “hit by enemy fire”.
You can GET PARACHUTE, WEAR PARACHUTE, and PULL LEVER to be on your way. This leads to MID-AIR whereupon PULL RING will open the parachute, and you land in a DARK BUNDLE, and then get stuck by the parser.
This is one of those things that looks simple from the author’s end that’s still easy to get stuck by: you’re just supposed to DROP PARACHUTE, and now things open up.
Well, we start in a jungle rather than a beach, that’s different.
To the south there’s a “match” in a jungle thicket, and to the west is the crashed fuselage of our plane. There is a branch you can just grab, and a “dark corner”; if you light a match to look more closely, you die.
I’d say something about “ah, this is one of those games” but this is the only unexpected death I’ve come across so far. For example, a bit farther south there’s a guard, and going south farther kills you, but the game certainly gives sufficient forewarning.
Back at the plane, you can TOUCH CORNER or FEEL CORNER and feel a string; pulling the string reveals some BEADS. The beads can go over to another part of the island where there is a NATIVE WOMAN.
The player can SCREAM at the woman and get killed, but it took me major effort to find any other way to interact.
With the knife, you can eliminate the guard.
Past the guard is a “hut” with graffiti on a table that reads “RICK WAS ‘ERE 27/09”. After some testing I found 2709 is recognized as a word so I’m guessing it goes to a keycode combination later.
South farther is a river with a boat. You can head downstream with the boat, but not too far!
I suppose this death didn’t have much warning, but I still thought I was about to go off a waterfall.
If you (properly) take the boat only for a short trip, you can find a rope, then slide down back a “rocky ground” near a “rock face”. I am still suspicious that the rock face hides something but I haven’t had any luck.
A sneak preview ahead in time: there’s a plastic explosive later, but I wasn’t able to get it to blow open a hole here.
So that leaves the player with the knife, a gun swiped from the dead guard, a penlight swiped from the same, some rope, the match that blew things up earlier, and the branch by the crashed ship. To the southeast there’s an ERODED BANK with a gap and dropping the branch will allow crossing:
This leads to a swampy area which serves as a maze.
I actually ran into this area before going through the beads-knife-rope sequence, so I didn’t have much at hand to do mapping, so I started by trying EAST, SOUTH, WEST, NORTH, just in case this was a grid rather than a more randomly-connected area.
This leads to the next area! So I had the solution to the maze right away, although I still spent the time mapping partly just to be sure I didn’t miss something, but mainly so I can share the many arrows with you, the readers. This is proof that just because a map is messy to diagram, it doesn’t mean it is difficult to travel through.
Past the swamp is “marsh land” and then a mining site.
The ROPE seemed the most pertinent item, and I realized after some noodling the game allows you to TIE ROPE, followed by the prompt WHAT TO? You can specify to the rock hiding a shaft, then to the vehicle. Then you can hop on the vehicle and drive it forward in order to pull the rock.
Genuinely satisfying, and I didn’t struggle with the parser here! It helps that everything is just TIE or PUSH.
This opens a tunnel with a PLASTIC EXPLOSIVE (which you saw a preview of already, and I have yet to use). There’s warning sign about danger below and if you ignore the sign you get trapped in a ROCK CELL.
The way forward is to move on, going back outdoors to where there is a LANDING CLEARING and a CONTROL UNIT containing a switch which is set to green.
Unfortunately, my moment of smooth parser interaction was followed by utter pain: no verb I tried was able to interact with the switch.
I tried making my verb list and then applying each and every verb on there, no joy.
Just trying to move on, there’s a tank patrolling. Unfortunately, a tank is rather larger than a guard and neither the knife nor the gun is of use. I might think the plastic explosive could do something but again, no joy with the parser.
I’m unclear if I’m stuck here because of the aforementioned parser issues or if there’s some “legitimate” puzzle I’m missing. But just to summarize, I have
a.) a rock wall that may or may not be hiding something
b.) a switch that doesn’t want to work
c.) a tank I have been unable to get by
d.) and just for completeness sake, going down from the mine leads to a “cell” but I suspect that’s just a trap.
Renga in Blue 