Archive for the ‘haunted-house-aardvark’ Tag

Haunted House: Alfred Hitchcock Presents   10 comments

I’ve finished the game (previous post here), but the actual gameplay was made horribly intense due to a bug, and a very obnoxious final puzzle. Not a difficult-to-find-bug either — it is one that everyone playing the game and trying to win is guaranteed to hit. I think this was a victim of the Aardvark bug-fixing philosophy as mentioned by Bob Anderson:

After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.

I don’t know how this particular game would have shipped with this particular bug without the level of apathy Rodger Olson displayed. (Maybe this was a bug not in the Ohio Scientific that got introduced on the Coco?)

From last time, I went back over every room carefully, only finding a handful of extra messages. I did realize the ANTIQUE CHAIR from the den was considered a treasure (I didn’t realize I could carry it, but I was referring to it as a CHAIR, not an ANTIQUE as the game was wanting. Silly me.)

I went back to the desk and drawer that gave me trouble last time, did OPEN DRAWER to receive an empty prompt, and then did LOOK to find there was now a KEY and some SILVER BULLETS visible. I think I did LOOK DRAWER (which just gives A DRAWER, both before and after opening it) and didn’t think to LOOK at the room as a whole again.

The silver bullets and the gun, when both held, mean the GUN is now able to be used on the WOLFMAN. The game decides to spin a random roll to find out if you hit or not, and as I’ve hammered at many times with RNG, this means a player might get in a situation with 10+ rolls where they miss their shot; most adventure games this would mean they’re doing something wrong. (I did have this happen during one of my loops … and I’ll explain why I needed to do some loops in a moment.)

Also, his description is WOLFMAN (WEREWOLF) but you have to use WOLFMAN instead of WEREWOLF, otherwise the parser gets confused.

Killing the wolfman opens the remainder of the top floor.

Going up, straightforwardly, leads to an attic. The attic has an AX and a TRUNK with a BAR OF GOLD, and if a vampire bat comes by and filches a treasure at random (it works like the Pirate of Crowther/Woods, but completely random and you can’t stop it) it ends up here.

North of the wolfman is a bedroom with an extra DOOR. Doing OPEN on the DOOR reveals a skeleton blocking the way.

You can open the jewelry box to find diamonds (treasure) and a watch (not, although I had to test it to find out). The furniture is meaningless other than atmosphere.

You can just GET SKELETON and it will fall out of the way (leaving a SKULL and PILE OF BONES, again useless).

The package of money is another treasure, the flashlight is the method of getting light to the cellar (well, “CELLER”) without having wind blow it out. We’ll go down there in a second, but first south of the WOLFMAN.

The RARE STAMPS makes for a treasure, but it is hooked up to cause the front door to slam and be jammed permanently. The only way out is now through the cellar. (This is the one moment of Aardvark-style geographic interest for the game.) The BLACK BOOK has a combination for the safe (36, 27, 45) which has a KEY (needed to get out of the cellar door) and GOLD COINS (another treasure).

Taking the flashlight down to the cellar, the huge thing blocking our way is FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER. You can KILL FRANK but have to specify AXE (if you try the knife from the kitchen, it turns into a bent knife).

It was around this time I decided to start depositing treasures, and around this time I made a horrid discovery. The DROP command of the game is broken. If you drop any item, it drops all items in inventory, and not only that, it doesn’t properly reset the item count. So if you’re holding 6 items, and drop one, your inventory capacity just went down by five. Again, I have no idea how this slipped by given even a minor attempt at playing through will reveal this issue.

Arms full with only two items in inventory.

After a few loops where I fully deciphered what was going on, I ended up only winning by starting out via taking treasures to the entrance one at a time. If you are holding one item, and drop it, no damage is done to your inventory capacity. The ANTIQUE CHAIR, VAN GOUGH PAINTING, GOLD COINS (from the desk) and CRYSTAL BOWL are all available this way. Getting more requires killing the Wolfman which requires both a gun and bullets, so I did that next while only holding those items, then dropping them off after; this damaged my inventory by 1 but this was workable. (This game is for children, eh?)

I then decided to go more gung-ho and tried to carry the rest I needed all at once: PACKAGE OF MONEY, DIAMONDS, BAR OF GOLD, RARE STAMPS, KEY, AXE, FLASHLIGHT. Grabbing the stamps blocks off the front door, but the flashlight + axe can be used to bust through Frankenstein, and then past the monster is the NORTH CELLER with an exit.

The problem is this is still only nine out of ten treasures. I thought maybe the watch or jewelry box itself would count, but no. The items in the NORTH CELLAR come into play here: specifically the shovel, sledgehammer, and stick.

I knew already DIG was a verb and so I tested it dutifully outside and kept getting rebuffed. It turns out digging only works in the south cellar:

Two more DIGs gets the message “AHA!”, and looking reveals a coffin. Opening it up:

I already knew POUND was a verb (yes, this is another one I’ve never seen in an adventure before, I lucked out from the prefix PO being on my list as POKE) and I found via a lot of trial and error that POUND STICK worked. The game asked me “INTO WHAT” so I assumed this was a “make” kind of command and tried STAKE, but no dice.

The stick is already considered a stake. You’re supposed to POUND STICK / DRACULA.

Fortunately I hadn’t broken my inventory too much during this loop and was able to bring the ring over to victory.

I can see why the “for children” tag landed, just considering the puzzles from a bird’s-eye level: kill a wolfman with silver bullets, open a safe with a clearly-visible combination, kill a monster with an axe, kill Dracula with stick and hammer. The actual implementation (especially with the broken DROP command) makes it highly unlikely to be beaten by children or adults without some source-diving.

Dropping the “for children” part, and just considering this as a game, it comes tantalizingly close again to some interesting choices; having the items that don’t get used like the lunch and knife and fire actually work for the atmosphere. This is combined with such an obstinate parser that all value here is nullified, and of course the very last act requires a giant leap of parser finesse.

There’s one more Aardvark game to go but it lands pretty late in 1983; maybe they’ll have finally tweaked their parser by then? In the meantime, coming up: the other mysterious and mostly-undocumented game for the Interact computer, the appropriately titled Mysterious Mansion.

Posted April 13, 2025 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

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Haunted House (Anderson, 1982)   9 comments

Aardvark has been with us for a while; they started cranking out games in 1980 for the Ohio Scientific line of computers, with ports to the others made fairly straightforward by every game being in basic. The OSI computer was basic enough that there was limited memory capacity and so the parser system they used only went up to two letters each word. That is,

KILL DRAGON

and

KICK DRAGON

and

KISS DRAGON

and

KICKBOX DRIVESHAFT

are all interpreted as the exact same command, because the command is read by the computer as KI DR. Whether they really needed to do this is another matter, given the existence of games like Troll Hole Adventure with even more stringent requirements.

Unfortunately, even given we are nearly at the end of the line, there still hasn’t been advancement; today’s game even keeps the “feature” of sometimes giving a blank prompt on a action (successful or not).

Haunted House is by Bob Anderson, who we last saw with Derelict (good ideas, hampered by the parser) and Earthquake (really good ideas, almost good enough to not be hampered by the parser). This game — at least so far — doesn’t quite reach up to either. It’s a straight by-the-numbers haunted house Treasure Hunt, with a ghost, vampire bat, and werewolf.

The ad copy talks about it being “for children”…

It’s a real adventure — with ghosts and ghouls and goblins and treasures and problems but it is for kids. Designed for the 8 to 12 year old population and those who haven’t tried Adventure before and want to start out real easy.

…but while that was somewhat a stretch for Earthquake, it’s really a stretch here. I wonder if this is meant to excuse the fact the map layout seems to be fairly simple, as even the messiest of Aardvark games have had some interesting structure to their maps.

While advertised for a variety of platforms, the only version I’ve been able to find is for Tandy Color Computer.

The objective is to find the treasures and bring them back to the start before time runs out.

Already: why would the time limit be added in a game for children? There are so many games with frozen time, there’s no need for this. There could even be an in-game plot reason for an endless night while exploring a haunted house.

BONUS SIDE RANT

Look, I realize I’m perhaps getting grumpy out of proportion. The thing is, for this era, seeing an adventure marked “for children” is a good thing. I realize a random children’s product from this time might normally and rightfully be thought of as dross…

Oh boy, math drills! From a 1981 Intellivision catalog.

…but in the case of adventure games, a product normally for adults, thinking of children has so far led to innovation; Nellan is Thirsty had an automap, and Dragon’s Keep tried map navigation with menus.

Sierra later (1984) experimented with menu controls including full commands in Mickey’s Space Adventure. Designer Roberta Williams.

This was an era when user convenience was unusual, so thinking about “how do we accommodate younger players?” led to innovations that only became standard years away. In the case of Haunted House, clearly the company thought the map and/or the puzzles were simplistic in a way they didn’t want to endorse as “for adults” yet it has the same terrible parser along with the other Aardvark products and I wouldn’t dare put in front of an 8 year old. Even 8 year old me — who had already written a text adventure in BASIC — wouldn’t know what to do with it.

RANT OVER

You start at the typical house-represented-by-four-locations where going one direction loops around the faces. The south face has an extremely heavy rock; the north face has a CELLER DOOR which is locked from the inside.

Heading to the porch, OPEN DOOR gives a blank prompt and it was unclear to me until I fiddled for a while that this meant it was possible to now go EAST and inside the house.

The inside looks to be rich with objects, but a fair number of them give a blank response to LOOK. It is hard to tell if they are filler or not.

To the south is a DEN. The GUN can be taken, at least. LOOK DESK mentions a drawer, and while OPEN DRAWER gives a blank prompt, and LOOK DRAWER says nothing, if you think to UNLOCK DRAWER it says:

NO KEY

However, I’m still not sure if that’s really the problem, because that’s the response to any command of unlock on any item, even nonsensical ones.

LOOK GUN also is unhelpful and it took me trying to shoot something (and getting the response NO BULLETS) to find out for certain it was unloaded. (I am 99% sure there is a silver bullet somewhere.)

Regarding verbs, I should jump in and mention what I have found by dragging through my standard list:

DIG, READ, OPEN, DROP, EAT, LIGHT, UNLOCK, SHOOT, KILL, FEED, POUND, OF(? offer?)

Remember, only the first two letters are understood, so DIP is considered the same as DIG. I had to use some subterfuge to get all of them. PO when applied to a target in inventory says NO HAMMER, and that’s the only verb that makes sense to me (I previously had it as POUR). FEED will say NO LUNCH if you don’t have a particular food item in inventory.

I still am unclear if OF is OFFER but I’m not sure what else it would be.

The fact PO isn’t POUR was a surprise to me because of this room. I assumed I needed to get water (and WATER — or at least WA — is a recognized noun) and put out the fire, but now I’m not so sure. The painting is at least a treasure out in the open and I was able to confirm after depositing it at the start, the game’s score turns into 10 out of 100 (meaning we’re likely hunting for ten treasures total).

I remember this trick from Trek Adventure. LOOK at anything else gives no message.

To the east is a DINING ROOM with a CRYSTAL BOWL (treasure) and a TABLE AND CHAIRS; next to that is a KITCHEN.

The candle, lighter, knife, and lunch are all able to be taken. OPEN OVEN and OPEN REFRIGERATOR give blank prompts (maybe they worked and I’m doing something wrong as a follow-up?)

Going down the stairs leads into darkness. If you have the candle lit (via lighter) a gust of wind blows it out, so I don’t know yet what is down there.

Instead going up, there’s a BEDROOM (with a BED I can’t interact with) and a BATHROOM (with a SINK and TUB, likewise). Trying to go farther past these two rooms, I am blocked by a werewolf.

Trying to feed him the lunch.

The vampire bat and ghost I alluded to earlier appear at random. The vampire bat will swipe treasures and take them to the attic (which I have yet to reach) and the ghost … looks spooky?

There’s zero walkthroughs or videos I can find for this one but fortunately the source code is BASIC. I’m going to hang on a little longer for the sake of all those 8 year olds out there from the 80s that somehow found themselves trying this game.

Posted April 12, 2025 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction

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