Archive for the ‘fairytale’ Tag
(Continued from my previous posts.)
I’ve finished the game. This was far more elaborate than I expected and it might verge into a “good” game if some of the dodgier design choices were tweaked. It certainly is not the game a child would likely solve on their own (despite it being positioned as a children’s game by Molimerx).
Basic adventure mainly aimed at the kids but for all the family! Uses a scenario of nursery rhymes and fairytales within which to find the treasures.
Last time I was stuck with the palace/parlour and trying to get the pie to do something, and planting a “ruby seed”. I ended up making progress not being thinking of the goals but thinking of the verbs and objects I had available I hadn’t used yet.
CUT, DIG, READ, DRINK, EAT, LOCK, TIE, POUR, PULL, MOVE, MAKE, WEAR, GIVE, EXAMINE, BUY, KISS, PLAY, COOK, FOLLOW, CHOP, PLANT
Of the verbs, TIE came to mind as notably unused (and there’s no equivalent UNTIE to match). I still had a “line” from the maid which previously had laundry, and I had a and I thought where a rope might go, and I faintly remembered that at the dog/cat/moon/etc. scene when the cow appears, you can try to take it, but it give the message “it keeps escaping”. On something else (like the moon) the game just says you can’t do that; I had mentally shelved the two things together but that was a mistake. It is possible to TIE COW.
Now the cow is portable! Or at least it takes as much inventory space as a piece of toffee does. But what to do with a cow?
I admit getting distracted for a while thinking of the spiders back in the shed, and maybe somehow re-creating the curds/whey scene, but none of them are giant spiders (in fact, the spiders are entirely a red herring).
The cow instead goes to the pedlar…
…and it was only after this moment I remembered Jack in the story traded a cow for beans, rather than money. I perceived the “ruby” part of the bean earlier as just a modification of the story, but there are instead two beans, the ruby one and the regular one.
You might incidentally notice the pedlar has disappeared; he just has moved to a new place, outside the hut (where the murder of an old lady happened). So you can also give over the money to get a ruby bean too and that just counts as a treasure in itself. (There’s some maybe-softlocks here, as forewarned by Voltgloss in the comments. If you get the ruby bean first the pedlar doesn’t move, and then if you get the regular bean after he moves and the ruby bean moves. I eventually found the ruby bean back at the pedlar sign even though I had it stashed at the candy-house. Something went awry in the coding here.)
Now that I had the right seed, I almost had enough to plant the seed, but I still was missing a parser command, because straight PLANT SEED doesn’t work. You need to first DIG HOLE (a noun not appearing in the game, you just need to come up with it), followed by PLANT SEED, DROP MANURE, and POUR WATER.
Predictably, this makes a beanstalk you can climb up…
…but I’m going to wait on going inside and meeting the giant, because I solved the puzzle inside last.
Rather than puzzle-solving or verb-solving I switched to item-solving and thought about what I had left I hadn’t used. The plastic mac (“raincoat”) in particular was prominent and unused and almost certainly had to go somewhere, yet I had only found water in one place.
I maybe was deceived by playing the illustrated version of the game; this doesn’t look like the sort of waterfall with a secret cave, but it is absolutely the kind of waterfall with a secret cave. One GO CAVE while wearing the mac later:
Going west kills you from here and the game is never clear why.
MOVE ROCK opens a passage, which you can go through to find a cottage.
The honey and pliers are two other items I hadn’t used yet, which is why I was holding them at this moment.
Notice the knife! I’ll refer to it later.
Combining comments from Voltgloss and arcanetrivia helped here. Voltgloss mentioned that Saucepanman will take other gifts other than just oats (I used the sugar from candy-house in the end) and arcanetrivia suggested making porridge out of oats. It was messy to work out still, because you need to GRIND OATS first (mortal and pestle, which ground the bones last time) and then MAKE PORRIDGE while holding a saucepan with water.
Or as I’ve typed here, MAKE PORR, as the game only looks at the first three letters of each word.
Heading back west, you can POUR (PORR)IDGE and make some bears happy…
…but now Goldilocks is sad. (It’s funny how in the Red Riding Hood story you just see the aftermath, and here you instigate the whole thing.) I had been toting around the honey; dropping the honey first distracts the bears, so Goldilocks can get some of the porridge and give a GOLDEN LOCK as a prize.
Drawn here as a literal padlock.
That’s everything for that side-story (the lock goes with the treasures), but the knife is useful! I had tried to CUT PIE at one point and the game crashed, which suggests right-action-wrong-conditions. Cutting a pie with an axe might be considered a bit much, but what about a knife?
The amber claw that’s in the room description is the result, the birds aren’t useful for anything.
I was then on the last puzzle of the game, the giant.
The giant starts non-aggressive but wide awake. I puzzled out that getting the tooth was needed, and the pliers (of my unused objects) would come in handy, but it was impossible to just yank right away.
I thought this was the best puzzle of the game, but as I’ve already mentioned, I like the cross-lore puzzles. Jack deals with a sleeping giant, but in this case we need to make the giant sleeping. What have we already seen that might help cause sleepiness?
The needle that pricked Sleeping Beauty! It counts as a treasure so I had it stashed. With the giant asleep you can now PULL TOOTH (which counts as a treasure) but that wakes the giant up, who is now definitely not peaceful. You can at least run away, and can even go back down the beanstalk, but eventually the giant gets you and you die.
Again, cross-lore works here.
The axe that was used at the Battle of Grandma’s House strikes again! It took down both a Big Bad Wolf and a Giant. Get it framed.
The moment before I realized the ruby had moved from the candy-house to the place where the pedlar had been.
As I started with, this verged near to a “good” game, ruined by some unfair elements. I especially liked the items being passed around the stories, and I made a chart of the more iconic items and how they get shuffled.
That’s genuinely clever design and I’d love to try Keith Campbell’s next two games to see if he shakes off doing so many softlocks, but neither is available in any form. Stott also wrote Goblin Adventure in 1990 along with his ports but it’s an original game. So Wonderland and Dreamworld will have to wait and see if either the BBC Micro or TRS-80 versions turn up somewhere. We still have three more of his games to go: a demo game from his book published with Melbourne House (The Computer & Video Games Book Of Adventure) followed by two games in 1984, The Vespozian Incident and The Pen And The Dark.
Coming up: a previously lost game.
(Continued from my previous post.)
“Toffee!” said every one in surprise, “What do you want toffee for?”
“To eat, of course,” said Moon-Face. “I just thought if you had any toffee to give me I’d let you slide down my slippery-slip — you get down to the bottom very quickly that way, you know.”
“A slide all the way down the Faraway Tree!” cried Jo, hardly believing his ears. “Good gracious! Whoever would have thought of that!”
“I thought of it!” said Moon-Face, beaming again just like a full moon. “I let people use it if they pay me toffee.”
— From The Enchanted Wood
The Folio Society version of The Enchanted Wood. That’s Moon-Face on the center bottom, a little less sinister-looking than in the original art.
Fairytale has the relatively unique condition of being not only a private game for family and friends, but one meant to be played under very particular conditions with groups; it only occurred to the author to publish later. This means that the author (who originally played Adventureland with his family) knew a reference to The Enchanted Forest would be understood and the puzzle of dealing with Moon-Face by using the exact moment from the book (see the top) was not only reasonable but a nice gesture at shared knowledge. As I already mentioned, I tried giving items to Moon-Face and he simply took each one (softlocking the game in the process) but my next step was to try every item available, and that included the candy items from outside the house (toffee, sugar barley, marzipan). So it was technically solvable but still unfortunate design; making it so giving the wrong item is a softlock combined with the book knowledge (pointed out by Matt W. in the comments) is certainly not polite.
To end on a compliment, I do find satisfying “cross-lore” type of puzzles, in this case where a piece of candy from Hansel and Gretel is used to satisfy a character from The Enchanted Wood. They’re both just stories, there’s no reason one can’t be a walk-on extra on the other.
Before plowing ahead with the next big obstacle I resolved, I should point out that one of the other items from candy-house (the marzipan) is special. If you just examine it while first encountering it the game just says “you see nothing special”, but if you examine it while the item is being held you find out it is really an emerald.
Just like how in Leopard Lord and in Crypt of Medea the mechanic that EXAMINE and SEARCH are treated differently is important to notice (and not something at all consistent between adventure games!), here, the fact you see something different when an item is being held vs. not-held is important (and again, not consistent between adventure games). The CRPG Addict recently had a post where he examined a set of standard things to look for in Ultima clones (how do secret doors work? do guards care if you steal things?) and it reminded me of that: while these adventure games are all “clones” in a sense, there are small important differences where it can be easy to be tripped up, and just like with Ultima clones you might go 5 games in a row where secret doors are either non-existent or “illusionary walls” but get tripped up by number 6 which goes back to a system where you have to hit the Search key in every suspicious tile.
By which I mean, I know I’ve played adventures where items have different results of EXAMINE when held and not-held, but it’s been a while.
Just to the east of candy-house is the empty chest: this is where the treasures go.
Once I had confirmed that GIVE ITEM really does help somewhere and doesn’t just swallow up all your inventory, I decided to try that with every inventory item on every other character. Fortunately the connections aren’t too obscure, although the first one I found was truly arbitrary.
Jo shook his head. “No, Saucepan isn’t mad. He’s just deaf. His saucepans make such a clanking all the time that the noise gets into his ears, and he can’t hear properly. So he keeps making mistakes.”
Saucepanman came from even before The Enchanted Wood, as he makes an appearance in The Book of Brownies from 1926. His main attribute is misunderstanding what people say (see above) and in Fairytale he’s on the lower level of the Faraway Tree, below Moon-Face.
He wants the oats. I just started handing over everything until I found the response above. HELP in the game (which I checked after solving the puzzle) just says that he “likes gifts”. I searched about the text and couldn’t find a connection with the character that made this work. I also searched about in adjacent rhymes/fairy tales but no luck, so I’m open to suggestions from the audience.
(The saucepan you can get from all this will be helpful later.)
Fortunately, my next discovery was a little less obtuse:
The witch wants the dead bat that was just lying around the forest. I admit I had this on my list to try before I started even rapid firing items. This opens up multiple things: a.) you can GO CAVE now while in this location; b.) you won’t get locked in the oven any more in the candy-house, so you can grab the silver key from within; c.) you can access the cauldron, although it is initially too hot and you have to take care of that first. We’ll tackle the items in that order, starting with the cave:
The book is an ad for either DRAGONQUEST ADVENTURE (if you’re playing the BBC version) or GOBLIN ADVENTURE (if you’re playing Stott’s Archimedes port). It just counts as a treasure, alas. The mortar and pestle get stored along with the saucepan for use later.
From the oven you can now grab the silver key…
…and then use it to unlock the hut to the southeast of the map, finding a grisly scene within.
I like the detail the axe is a “bloody” axe and remains that way for the rest of the game. Both get stored along with the saucepan and mortar/pestle, although I admit I haven’t found where the pliers get used yet.
The axe, on the other hand, I could use right away. To the west of the hut is an annoying prickly bush, so I immediately tried CHOP BUSH.
This opens a secret path over to a waterfall.
With the saucepan you can GET WATER while at the waterfall, then take it over to the cauldron and put it out. This lets you find some ancient bones within.
If you’re wondering about the varying inventory items, some of it is juggling to keep under the limit of 5, some of it is because I made multiple runs through the game trying to put everything together.
I made the discovery rather later (but I’ll disclose now) that you can be holding the mortar/pestle and bones and type GRIND BONES, getting “bone manure”.
The manure suggests some sort of planting-type use, so I’m going to jump over to another GIVE puzzle: the pedlar. I had him next on my list of “try GIVE on everything” people but quickly found the money (from the king in the palace and the pie) worked, and he handed over a ruby seed.
With ruby seed, garden trowel, bone manure, and some more water from the waterfall, it seems like I ought to be able to plant the seed. I even found the right place to do it: by the shed (with the spiders inside), where HELP says
Maybe the ground is too dry or infertile.
suggesting an optimal planting place. However, all my attempts at PLANT SEED or the like have failed; the game responds I can’t do that yet. I admit this might be a case where items X and Y need to be on the ground and A and B need to be held, in some confusing combination, but I haven’t tried all possibilities yet. I also may simply be using the wrong verb.
Rotating around the next character, the northeast corner has the castle with the sleeping girl at the spinning wheel. I realized even though I was actively thinking of Sleeping Beauty I hadn’t tried the Sleeping Beauty specific action:
I’m pretty sure the silver needle is just a treasure and that’s that; I can’t get anything from the spinning wheel. Given I haven’t finished the game yet anything is possible.
Finally we can rotate back to the Faraway Tree and the two “worlds” that you can visit by going UP from Moon-Face, the moon/bowl/spoon etc. scene and the palace. The choice of place is entirely a coin-flip and sometimes I went to the same place 6 or 7 times in a row (RNG strikes again); I could easily see someone simply not realizing there’s another destination there! (Maybe there’s a third place to go with some specific parameters?)
So with the scene above, I had observed you could nab nearly everything but the moon. What I hadn’t tried is simply taking the fiddle and playing it without picking up anything. The idea is to set up the whole Hey Diddle Diddle rhyme:
Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
I had played the fiddle but had already picked up the dish and spoon so they couldn’t do the “ran away” line, messing up the whole scenario. This idea of creating the conditions to re-enact the rhyme will come up again.
The whole purpose seems to be to get the “fiddle” to turn into a “Stratovarius” which is a treasure, but the cow might also be useful too.
Now on to the other destination:
I don’t have this fully worked out, but at least I got one of the really wild (in a game-design sense) parts. Let me give the entire relevant nursery rhyme, which I admit I had only partly remembered.
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?
The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money.
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.
I kept trying to do things with the pie at the king. I admit I still have had no luck. EAT PIE lets you just consume it, no birds. OPEN PIE just says the word “open” isn’t even recognized.
My suspicion is that the birds aren’t even in the pie yet and we’re supposed to put them there. If you recall from way back at the start you can see “blackbirds” in the tree, so somehow they combine with the pie? (I tried a bunch of verbs with the pie in the location, no dice.)
Even without that there’s a secret, though. The room just says you can go OUT, but if you study the rhyme, it mentions “The queen was in the parlour”. What parlour? Well, you can just GO PARLOUR and find it.
This is outrageous at a level I don’t have much comparison with; maybe the book references of Ring Quest where you could ask an elf (who wasn’t even visible in the room) for a ring, only guessing they have to be there and making a leap of faith.
You can’t take the bread or interact with the Queen (that I could find). You can take the honey but I don’t know where that is useful.
Oh, one last thing: back at the maid, you can look at the laundry to find an “ebony clothes pin” which counts as a treasure, and you have wet trousers left over. Not sure if they’re useful for anything.
To summarize:
- I’m still likely missing some action in the palace/parlour akin to what happened with the fiddle, although maybe the whole purpose is to take the items. I still suspect you need to make a “scene” with the pie by somehow stuffing birds into it, but while you can see the birds from the top of the opening tree I don’t know where to get at them.
- I still can’t plant the ruby seed, even though it seems like I have everything I need to do so. This may just be parser-struggle.
- I haven’t done anything with: pliers, the spinning wheel, or some of the treasures (like the silver needle) although of course the treasures I haven’t “used” may simply be points.
- It is possible I’m still missing a one-shot secret kind of treasure like the marzipan/emerald one unrelated to the larger puzzles. I am missing 3 treasures. The ruby seed counts as one, so I suspect after using it to grow a beanstalk (probably beanstalk, right?) it will be retrievable.
Given the need to know external references I’m happy to field any suggestions to try to get this to the end. Maybe there’s a nursery rhyme I blithely skipped over without realizing it?
Keith Campbell is well-known amongst a certain circle of adventure enthusiasts as from issue 1 of the UK magazine Computer and Video Games (November 1981) he ran an Adventure column. The column ran both reviews of games and hints, with a steady influx of letters of people asking for help on particular games or just commenting about adventures in general. It became a central information hub for adventures through the 80s.
So, for the uninitiated, what is Adventure? The game consists usually of a logical network of locations which must be explored or traversed. The locations can contain objects, creatures/monsters, and/or treasures, which may be carried and manipulated in sometimes obscure ways to achieve the objective of the game.
He has some later work which ties directly into his magazine writing, so I’m not going to linger on the history there, but rather, take the scene slightly earlier—
Keith Campbell had been an electrical engineer working in southeast England with the Central Electricity Board for a long time (starting in 1961); in 1980, he obtained his first computer, a TRS-80, and his career was about to change. He took the TRS-80 with him to show to some “colleagues” in Kent (this was when computers were still novelty items) and one of them happened to have a tape of Adventureland to try out:
None of us had heard of it before, and had no idea how to play it. However, we were all so intrigued at the apparent intelligence of the game, that I ordered a copy almost immediately. It arrived the next day (a Saturday) and the whole family sat down and played it.
A later (May 1984) version of the header of Keith’s column, when it included a Helpline section for game hints.
A year later, when he had changed jobs to the Engineering Computer Applications section of the Board, he then got the idea (with three colleagues who all owned TRS-80s or Video Genies) to have an “adventure competition” at the Social Club for the company. He bought a copy of Ghost Town (Scott Adams), played it through taking notes to prepare, then held a race with four teams (four of five each) all playing at the same time.
We provided aids like a large sheet of paper to draw the map, stick on stars to mark where treasure was to be found, and I walked around half answering questions, and giving cryptic clues to those who were lagging. A forerunner of the Helpline! The result was that three people who were playing went out and bought a TRS-80 the very next week, just on the basis of playing that game!
He needed more competition games so rather than spending money he decided to write them himself, in the end getting a trilogy of games: Fairytale (today’s game), Wonderland, and Dreamworld.
It was while the first of these was being played during a competition evening, and bugs were being thrown up, that I suddenly realised I had an excellent play testing system here, and decided to see if I could get the game published.
He had published a game already with Molimerx, a strategy game called Creole Lobstercatcher…
The theme of this interesting new program is that the player is a fisherman in the Caribbean and when he commmences play he owns one boat, six lobster pots and no cash. He may fish inshore or offshore and in the case of the former. he can earn £2 per pot per day and in the case of the latter.
…so sent the trilogy over to them, which advertised it as “aimed at family participation”. Notably, that means while at least the first game ended up in the classroom (more on that in a moment) it was designed for children and adults simultaneously working together, rather than just “for children”.
The catalog entry is long-rambling and the proprietor A. John Harding clearly was thinking of the Mysterious Adventures and Temple of Bast they published the same year being in machine code.
When one comes to think of it there really is no reason why an adventure should not be written in Basic … We elected to publish this Basic adventure because it was written with the hindsight of the machine language program and indeed, it follows the general layout of them quite closely.
He points out that speed and security are the two general problems, but that Fairytale is reasonably fast (“there is some delay after an instruction is entered before the computer complies, but it can only really be called a hesitancy”) and the Break key is disabled to avoid snooping in the source code.
None of the three original TRS-80 games are available. However, likely keeping in mind the “child friendly” aspect, and the ease of porting BASIC, the trilogy got ported to BBC Micro (the overwhelming choice of machine for British classrooms in the 80s) when Molimerx expanded into the market in the middle of 1983. The only three of the BBC Micro games we have is Fairytale, which was rescued from a dodgy WAV file posted to Facebook.
Still, that means we have a file close to the original of this game! And we have it in a different way, because William Stott (the teacher who had his class write Dragon Adventure) also did a port. Just like Dragon Adventure it was originally for Acorn Archimedes; he later made a z-code port but that one seems to have been lost (the original web site is nuked, the Internet Archive only saved the Archimedes ports, and the file never got put on the if-archive).
Before diving into the content, I should also mention Fairytale is based on a children’s book series, the Faraway Tree series by Enid Blyton, which kicked off with The Enchanted Wood in 1939. It involves three children (Jo, Bessie, and Fanny) who move to the country and find the Enchanted Wood near their house, with creatures in the branches like Dame Washalot and Moon-Face, where “if you climb to the very top you can walk into a different world almost every day.”
The goal of the game, while ambiguous from the starting room, is simply to collect all the treasures, Adventureland-style.
At the start, we’re not at the faraway tree, but we can climb it to see things far away. (I was initially quite confused because the first item is listed as “candy” but you can’t take it. You see candy in the distance. Surely this confused some of the beginners who were playing.)
The actual faraway tree is instead just to the east.
The game doesn’t say why you can’t get the saucepan.
If you just step up one level on the tree, you can safely go back down again, but if you go up to a higher branch, you’re now in danger.
That’s the moon-faced man from the book; if you try to go down the game will kill you, tossing you in a death scene that is clearly derived off of Adventureland.
This is a “friendly death” (ignore the fire and brimstone) insofar that you have unlimited turns to get out. Going up brings you back to the moon-faced man, going down brings you safely to a “one-way street” which leads back to the regular map.
The problem here is this scatters your items. Theoretically, it means you need to get down into safety, which can be done by going in the “slippery slip” that Moon-Face guards. However, nothing I’ve tried has worked on him, and GIVE ITEM will just have him take it (…and the item disappear forever? Are softlocks really that easy?)
Going up from Moon-Face activates the Faraway mechanism and you can be sent to one of two places. (If more, I haven’t figured out how yet.)
Here, despite the game being picky about your inventory earlier, you can grab the “cat”, “dish & spoon”, “dog”, and “fiddle”. The only thing you can’t grab is the moon (nor can you GO MOON to get to a new location; it was worth a try). PLAY FIDDLE just gives “lovely tune” but no effect I can find yet.
The other location is a palace.
You can nab the line and laundry (the maid doesn’t care, and I haven’t found any way to even interact); you can go into the palace for another scene.
The “book of accounts” is a “micro-computer” in the BBC Micro version (which can’t be taken, again, no explanation); you can safely grab the money and pie.
Unfortunately, none of these objects will work to bribe Moonface — he’ll just take them and then they are lost. Trying to GO SLIP gives the message (in the Archimedes port) that Moon face won’t let you yet. With the BBC Micro version the situation is even worse: I don’t have a way of communicating trying to get by. (My guess is if you solve the puzzle an exit east or west will open up. The Archimedes port simply added a message to clarify things. I was baffled enough as an adult that I worry what will happen here with a child playing.) I’m starting to wonder if there’s book knowledge that would make the puzzle easier; typing HELP mentions that Moonface has a weakness, but there’s such minimal text here it isn’t conveyed what that weakness might be (and I haven’t read any of the Blythe books).
Looking at the rest of the map, there’s a “dead bat” to the forest of the west before arriving at a shed, with “oats”, “spiders”, a “garden trowel”, and a “plastic mac”.
Just like Dragon Adventure, inventory items being held are displayed graphically.
Heading back to the start point and going north instead, you pass by a witch…
…with a food-based house to the north.
Inside you can find some chocolate money (marked with the “treasure” indicator) and an oven. You are unable to take the money and I’m unclear why.
You can enter the oven (which has oven trays and a silver key) but the door gets shut behind you and you die, so obviously just plowing right in isn’t the best approach.
Moving past the candy-house, there’s an empty chest, followed by a “pedlar” hanging out at a room with a “no pedlars” sign. I tried giving the pedlar some items but he simply took them without anything being traded or anything good happening.
This appears to be a dead end, but that’s because it’s possible to enter from the other side. Looping back to the start and heading due east past the Faraway Tree to the last section, there’s a thorny bush that scratches you as you go by (no death or other ill effects) followed by a hut which is locked. Continuing even farther, there’s a “Fairytale Castle”.
The castle can be passed through to reach the place where the pedlar is, or you can go upstairs and find a “dusty spinning wheel” and a “sleeping girl”.
That’s a lot of content and essentially no puzzle-solving! Very curious for a game based on a children’s book. Unlike Deliver the Cake which had very clear messages about what to do, this one is aiming for the regular Adventureland experience, except everything seems quite unresponsive. None of the characters talk, and the only “effect” I’ve had is the generic one where they accept an item you give them; this makes it distressing to test giving items as a solution.
I’ll keep cranking at it, I still don’t expect this to go for long. Has anyone read the books and have a notion what at least Moon-Face is up to?
Renga in Blue 