Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and this continues directly from my last post.

British schoolchildren (Andy Stoneman, Luke Youll, John Shaw, David Graham, Steven Iveson) using a Video Genie, from the Mirror, 1981.

I left off on the edge of a cliff where the game hinted I needed to use a “wishing staff” but I was unable to do so. The game needs, admittedly logically, the verb WISH. I am still unclear what action is really being taken by the player. I can concretely visualize “wave” or “shake” or even — to cause the wishing staff to shrink back to a normal staff — the verb “rub”. Does wish involve saying some magic phrase, or is it reflective of an internal state of mind? This is not purely theoretical: I know from experience I have a harder time summoning up such verbs when they occur.

The game is also finicky about how the item is held. You must be holding the staff to use wish (and then the game will have you drop it); you must have the item dropped to be able to use “rub” and undo the wish.

Crossing over reveals a “dynamite shack”. Despite visible threats to the contrary it will not tip over no matter how hard you try to whack at it.

The dynamite turns out to be what we need to break into the glass dome, but we need to be able to light the fuse on it first with a match (hence needing both a match, and a thing to strike the match on to light it). The switch either causes some pipes to make sounds (if you type OFF) or water to start running (with ON). I tried each and then running all around the map until I could find a result. With the water ON:

Just in case you want to see the result without the jacket on:

“scoulded most heinus” is a terrific one for the collection.

I was stuck a long time here and ended up finally prowling through source code. I didn’t hit much enlightenment other than finding there were multiple “cave” rooms. My prior attempts at poking in the dark cave led me to breaking my neck. Here is when I needed to take a leap of insight/faith.

We have seen many, many different methods now of coping with darkness. Darkness will randomly kill you if you are in it long enough (Crowther/Woods Adventure); darkness will kill you upon one step (Zork); darkness will kill you if you go “down” while it is dark (Ferret); darkness is safe as long as you don’t run into a wall (Scott Adams). Given this was designated as an Adams tribute, I should have figured it would be the last case, but I was originally treating the darkness more like Zork.

The other thing is: “exploring” in the dark in the Scott Adams games was always a sort of hack. In Savage Island, Part 1, you could technically skip solving a puzzle via tediously mapping through the dark, but it was obviously not an “intended” solution, so here, I was treating the darkness in a similar way. This was a mistake.

You have to feel through the darkness in this game.

This means, essentially, you have to map your way through with random fatal falls. There is the unspoken rule in some games that this level of randomness means you have reached “brute force” and need to lean off, but it doesn’t take long here if you start mapping to find some “strange oozy mud” which glows in the dark.

Here’s the map I made, including the “stubs” I added when I fell in the dark:

To the south you can pick up a match (as long as you’ve swapped the geyser from below-ground to above-ground) although you still need a way of lighting it. To get that you need to first get by a “large rock” in the cave. You are explicitly given the hint to try to “prise” it but I was having no luck. I realized the fact I could undo the wishing operation meant the staff was a likely candidate tool, and indeed:

The next step uses an object I only mentioned incidentally: a bone that’s sitting at the scary altar from last time. Past the rock is a valley of bones, so I tried (based on the game’s text) to return the bone back home.

The empty match box has the standard-issue friction surface on the side, which is sufficient to light the match. So we can take match, box, and dynamite back to the glass dome to win the game. (Mind you, this still took me a while, I tried commands like STRIKE MATCH and the like which were not understood; the game wants you to skip all the implicit action and go straight to BLOW DOME.)

Go bowling forever, I guess.

I’ve been wondering, from the author’s note in my last post about trying to publish the game, who he tried to publish with. The TRS-80 was not prolific in the UK; if you saw one, it was often the cheaper clone system Video Genie (seen the top of this post) instead of the proper Radio Shack system. Even given the clone presence, there wasn’t a giant stack of publishers to choose from like with the ZX-80/81/Spectrum; really the most likely possibility is Molimerx, which published the early Howarth work and also Temple of Bast. I wouldn’t say they were overwhelmed with adventures, though. My guess is if Paul Standen accurately reported that they wanted “arcade games” because of having too many adventures, it was rather that Golden Apple was not quite at the same standard as the other games. Or maybe the swearing and tone weren’t respectable-commercial enough. When in the dark you are told you “can’t see shit”; this is not the sort of message that would appear in any “respectable” adventures until, maybe, the late 90s? (I’m thinking Little Blue Men by Michael Gentry of Anchorhead fame, and Chicks Dig Jerks by Robb Sherwin who went on to make games like Cryptozookeeper.)

This game isn’t interesting as a grand moment in game design (although the philosophical handling of darkness was accidentally of note); it does give another good data point of what a schoolchild’s real game-writing was like, with the attitude of the “Adventure narrator” cranked higher in intensity and lower in maturity.

Just a joke bit.

Coming up next: A sequel, where we must battle against Hitler one last time.

Guiseley, a suburb of Leeds.

Paul Standen describes his game Golden Apple (or Glod) as written when was a “schoolboy”; he sent it to a software company (not specifying which) back in 1982:

We do loads of adventures, we want arcade games is not what they said, but implied. I packed away my computer and joined a band.

He then brought it out again in 1990, and with the aid of David Hunter, converted it to a system called AMOS for Amiga, releasing it to the public domain. AMOS was meant to be a language for implementing games on the Amiga (that allowed for compilation) and is probably most comparable to something like Gamemaker today.

Via Dominic Ramsey.

He originally wrote it in “Scott Adams” style, although the game can be played more like an Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls game. I went with the author-preferred look.

To be clear, the author does not live at the address below any more, so my apologies if you are a “nice looking girl” who is wowed by the author’s writing prowess.

The object is simply to find and claim the golden apple, and the secret of immortality with it. The “claim” part is important because while I have found the apple I have not been able to get inside the container it is within and win the game.

Early on you find a “lagoon” where you can swim in and find a kipper. Examining the kipper indicates that snakes hate kippers.

This makes the next part seem like it ought to be easy, but I had to reckon with the parser a little.

The Scott Adams games quite universally had good noun discipline: if you saw a noun mentioned, you could at the very least refer to it. (It occasionally had a “secret noun” — that is, a noun you could refer to implied by the room description but not separated as a noun — but that doesn’t seem to apply to this game.) Because you do not need to refer to the mamba, the game here simply doesn’t even think that it exists in the corresponding parser command. This is a sign that the author isn’t using some kind of rigorous object-based system for their adventure but rather having parser commands accepted on the fly, making it harder to communicate with confidence.

This is a pattern of the game generally, where things are only half-implemented. It is a little like someone who writes a game based on a pre-written walkthrough but only does cursory checks for deviation. Mind you, you can at least die:

Swearing by the game was very unusual for this era. If anything the game chastised you for using such language. Also, the bronze sword is in the room adjacent to the snake and I haven’t found a use for it yet.

You don’t need to refer to the mamba because you can just drop the fish instead.

Past that is a tree, where if you climb it you find a basket full of snakes. I was baffled by the basket for a while.

At least you can refer to the basket with an examine command but the game fails to allow any interaction otherwise, including dying. Just in the spirit of experimentation I went back down to the tree (without climbing) and tested my various possible verbs on the tree itself.

I hit paydirt with SEARCH (which is distinct from EXAMINE in an unclear way), as the basket fell down from the tree along with some skeleton keys.

Moving on, there’s a dark cave and a locked gate.

The dark cave remains cryptic to me for now; you fall and die without a light source. The newly-found skeleton keys go to the gate, though, opening a new area.

The room descriptions look vivid but there’s not many objects to fill the imagination. There’s a spooky graveyard with a spooky house but I can’t even get nouns to be recognized in either.

The most glamorous location is a blood stained altar, where you can obtain a “shin bone”; just past that is a “vault” where you can find a “wishing staff”.

The wishing staff is quite odd and I suspect I’m missing something parser-wise. You can rub it to get the staff to shrink but only if you aren’t holding it.

EXAMINE STAFF gets the message “use it at the cliff” but I have tried to do so with no good result.

Not even JUMP at the cliff does anything. What self-respecting Scott Adams clone doesn’t let you jump to your doom, at least?

Mopping up the last locations, there’s a pond with some goldfish (can’t pick them up or refer to them in any way I can find) a field with a corn cob (which you can get, and is “corny”) and a door in a stump which leads to, perhaps anticlimactically, the golden apple.

In a narrative sense, having the golden apple be shown off so early is a strange move; in a gameplay sense, it is an interesting curveball. I’m guessing all we’re really questing for now is one good cutting item (some games use a diamond, so let’s say that).

I’m not ready to plunge into the source code yet (this is uncompiled, so I can read everything) but it is comforting to know it is there, because the somewhat hacky parser may turn out to be my nemesis.

(Thanks to benkid77 at the CASA forum who helped me find the game in the first place; you need to download the AMOS system separate from the Golden Apple source code which can be found on a public domain disk.)