I have finished the game; my previous post is needed to make sense of this one.
Mind you, I’m not sure how much sense things really make. This game is, in a way, easier for beginners than veteran players: veteran players (ahem) might actually sit down and try to figure out the connections between the various rooms, and why some things appear or don’t appear at random, while a beginner might be satisfied wandering to the end without any such documentation.
I really did make an honest attempt at first at mapping…
…but I kept having connection not make any sense, and directions that went one way during one play-iteration go a different way on another. On top of that, testing exits always could randomly lead to being randomly walloped by a goblin with no chance of rescue, or even by a balrog (who appears at any time).
I found the general idea of the authors was to have hyperconnectivity. By which I mean: there would be two or three or even five ways to get between two points. This can be a fun and charming aspect to early games: Zork might drop the trapdoor after you enter its world at first, but gives quite a few ways to get back to the daylight (someone with more flexibility than others) and it gives the impression of a universe with lots of options; here, it feels more like the authors were just drawing in links at random. There’s a trapdoor that lets you wrap around back to the starting area. You can somehow land back where the boat is (and take the remaining set of items) with the boat never having left.
This only opens from the other side, which is dramatically interesting, but the other side is roughly six steps away and just as easy to get to as walking through the trapdoor, which is not so interesting.
Eventually I managed to randomly come across someone saying the word NEIRIF. This is a trigger to send you to another part of the map that is quite important.
No puzzle solving, just patience and luck I didn’t get walloped by a balrog this playthrough.
This lands you just outside a tree with a rope and some food; all you really need to do is grab one piece of food. Later, nearby, there’s a hungry person who will help you assuming you share.
With the wizard hat on from the starting area, the staff that the dog brought over works and you can WAVE STAFF to form a bridge (and then, with some parser difficulty, CROSS BRIDGE). This leads to a new area where you can just wander around until you find the golden bird, the whole point of the quest.
Hang out and a wizard will eventually appear. The word ZOOT previously just gives a rumbling noise, but here it actually wins the game, for some reason (and yes, I just got annoyed and looked this up rather than actually solve anything).
Referring back to the paradox of the two reviews, yes, I could see someone blustering to the end in a few hours and assuming (given that very little in the way of puzzle solving happened) that this was an easy game. I could also see someone impossible stuck for weeks because of the RNG going in weird directions.
The design intent clearly had the player whacking at monsters — you can get 10 point per monster, and you can use the staff to send down lightning bolts on things. But back even in 1982 we didn’t care that much about score and it was a mainly a way to notice “hey, you missed some puzzles”, not get a genuine feel of achievement the way a new record on Asteroids might.
Via Acorn Electron World.
I feel like the authors zeroed in on aspects they liked (hyperconnectivity, monsters, randomness) without thinking that the structure they’d be left with wasn’t fully sustaining. It’s the sort of game where since the designer knows their map they easily can get a different impression of play than an actual human who has no insider knowledge. I’m hoping they got some feedback which can be applied later, since this is only the first of four games, even if it is the only one of the authors that lands in 1982.
Brytta, 11th King of Rohan, was not to be given a peaceful reign, despite being beloved by all and given the name Léofa. The War of the Dwarves and the Orcs had caused numerous orcs to leave their realm in the Misty Mountains to find settlement in the White Mountains just south of Rohan. Brytta went to war to remove their scourge, and by his death was thought to have destroyed them; this was not so, as they were merely in hiding.
The next king, Walda, met unfortunate circumstances 9 years into his reign. As Tolkien explains in Appendix A of Lord of the Rings:
He was slain with all his companions when they were trapped by Orcs, as they rode by mountain-paths from Dunharrow.
Walda’s son Folca took up the task of vengeance for his father, and swore to never hunt a beast until all orcs were removed from Rohan for good. This task he accomplished by the age of 60, so he followed this up with a trip to the Firienwood (or Firien Wood, or Firienholt) on the border between Rohan and Gondor. It held a mighty boar, and while Folca the orc-slayer managed to defeat the boar, he soon died after from tusk-wounds.
Today’s adventure is from another British company (MP Software) where I have only been able to scrounge out the barest of information. Their adventure Firienwood first gets mentioned in the November 1982 issue of Personal Computing Today as “coming soon”, and I’ve been able to confirm it is listed as existing by the February 1983 issue (reaching the street January 1983) and the internal copyright date says 1982, so we’ll roll with that; if it didn’t quite squeak in being published by the end of ’82 it was close enough. (Thanks to Ethan Johnson who helped with my search.)
As far as I can tell Helen Seymour and John Hudson produced all the MP Software products; this is the first of four adventure games they made (later: Crown of Mardan, Sadim Castle, Woodland Terror). They were originally for the BBC Micro, but also ported (with likely very little change) to the Electron. The address listed (even on later printings) is a clearly residential area in Bromborough, Merseyside, suggesting the pair were yet another garage-operation (well, the houses don’t have garages, but you get what I mean).
From Every Game Going.
This is harkening back to the cavalcade of Crowther/Woods clones but adds an element which makes it almost uniquely painful. It’s easier to explain in context what I mean, so let’s dive in–
Our aim is to find a golden bird of paradise, and there’s a Wizard making things difficult. We are rather unusually told up front that monster kills are worth 10 points each, which is more like RPG than adventure behavior.
Our adventure, not shockingly, starts near the title forest, and if we try to go in we get tangled in and die via thorns.
The intent seems to be to funnel the player towards a boat at the very start, where you pick three out of six items (as you can’t carry more on the boat).
I already know the hambone gets used almost immediately, and I think the sword is necessary, and I’ve found use for the keys. This is not an absolute guarantee that this represents the set that must be chosen. Philosopher’s Quest had two gimmicks, one where a bonus item could be scrounged, and one where an item that doesn’t get taken nevertheless gets found anyway. So I could see (despite me using the keys early) another set of keys somehow surfacing, or maybe a way of putting them out forward. (Having said that, the most obvious action, tossing stuff in the river hoping it gets carried somewhere helpful, doesn’t get parsed.)
Taking the boat leads to a cave with a “vicious dog”. This is where the bone comes in handy.
Specifically, the dog suddenly not only becomes happy, but brings forth a “Wizards Staff” that “has many powers”. The only power I know of so far is that it lights up automatically in darkness.
From here comes the traditional cave-in-many-directions, and I’ll give a pair of screens which might explain my struggle:
Specifically, past this point in the game, a goblin can attack at any time. The goblin will have a random chance of killing you on sight. If it doesn’t kill you, you have a chance of doing KILL GOBLIN via the sword and having success, but then the goblin can still return at any moment. “Any moment” includes actions like “check if an particular direction has an exit or not” or “check if the passage that you entered from the east lets you go back the same way to the west, or if it is one-way”. This has one of those unfortunate twisty maps wherever everything everywhere needs to be checked but this is also combined with a high probability of death at any moment.
(Oh, in addition to N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW, LEFT and RIGHT are directions too sometimes.)
The very curious thing is that the two 80s reviews I’ve run across (not intentionally, just trying to find files for the game) both mark this as a “beginner game”. Both are reviews for the Electron, though, rather than the original BBC Micro version I am playing. I may switch it up if this gets too terrible and see if the authors lightened up the RNG death in the revised version. What I can’t do is simply hack BASIC source, as this is a machine code game.
Renga in Blue 