(My previous posts are needed for context.)
I’ve beaten the game, and unfortunately both puzzles involved were terrible. I still will give some latitude because the combining-message mechanic was so satisfying, but let’s get to the end first–
Continuing directly from last time, I needed to get a parchment from the native without resorting to violence. I had tried to GIVE every single item I could possibly bring over. (The SKULL I could not bring, because it triggers natives attacking when it passes by the other native.)
Every GIVE gave a variation like the one above: “what?? I don’t think the native wants it”. The text here clearly implies the game is understanding, and simply rejecting this option.
Instead, no: GIVE NECKLACE was right. But it has to be typed as GIVE NECKLACE TO NATIVE in order to be understood.
I’ve never done relative ranking, but this likely would my in top 3 most deceptive parser messages of all time.
Fortunately this was near the end of the game because otherwise my mood would have significantly soured. I did not come across as “solving a puzzle” as much as “making a meta-leap based on my past experiences, given we know the character has the parchment, the verb list is minimal, and GIVE is on it”.
Knowing the GIVE syntax, I went back to the first native and tried giving an item that hadn’t a use before: the FOOD. The results in the native trading a PHRASEBOOK.
With the phrasebook I could go back and read the two messages previously untranslated, at the sign and the altar.
The first simply indicates to follow the path rather than digress, where the second one might be intended as a hint for the endgame but I’m still massively unclear about it (you’ll see in a moment).
when the page is complete look and you’ll find, west of the sun and the ancient temple,amongst the bones of our ancestors
I still hadn’t used the SPADE yet, but now was the time: I dug starting at the three pillars and going west. Just east of where the skull was I found gold.
Once the gold is revealed, natives immediately appear and start to chase. It’s a little more time than what happens with getting spotted with the skull, but not enough to do anything useful.
Trying to hide in the well. You can jump in the cave but you just get killed in the dark.
If it hadn’t been for the GIVE issue I would have spent a bit longer on the puzzle, but I was grouchy and worrying I might be running into another parser issue. It isn’t a parser issue at all, and just as an experiment, I’m going to pause before revealing the answer. Try your best guess at how to pick up the gold and survive all the way back to the boat; maybe you’ll spot something I did not.
Via eBay.
Did you come up with… be holding the skull while picking up the gold?
Despite being attacked earlier because you had the skull, now you are attacked when you don’t have the skull. I assume there is some logic about a taboo going on but I couldn’t come up with any rationale, nor any way to pull the altar’s clue into the puzzle (assuming it is relevant at all).
With the skull providing safety, you can now walk back to the boat. The boat still needs to be light enough to sail, and you’ve got a bunch of gold, so you need to drop the skull before leaving, but there’s ample time after to sail away.
The puzzles overall were essentially straightforward (coat for the cold, foot pump for an inflatable boat, key for a door) and the wide-out exploration and slowly growing parchment made for a satisfying middlegame. Just it failed to stick the landing. I surely am missing some clue on the skull, right?
I’m going to save Urban Upstart for a little bit later (but not too long, I want to have the “feel” of this game fresh in my mind) and my projected third Britgame also needs to be maneuvered a little, so after I finish writing this I’m pulling out some actual dice to see what comes next. Exciting! Then we’ll be off to one of the first Japanese adventures of 1983.
(Continued from my previous post.)
I have seen all seven parchments put together and even solved the puzzle, but I don’t quite have them all permanently yet.
Strident mentioned the prog band in the comments: The Speedy Bears. Pete Cooke on keyboard. Source.
Progress was mainly a matter of getting comfortable with the game’s norms. For example: last time I mentioned the canary I hadn’t tested yet. Bringing the canary in the “coal mine” (not actually a mine) the canary fell over dead after two steps.
This reflects the “you can’t breath” rooms, but is this letting us know about a potential timed danger, or is there a further puzzle here where we have to make it to place X with the canary surviving? With one of the “every item matters” games like from the Cambridge mainframe (Hezarin, Avon, Quondam, etc.) I would be on red alert until there was further resolution; with this game, the canary is just meant to give the information above, and then you can move on.
Similarly, there’s a part with a “native”; I found that if you pick up the skull and bring it to the same room, a group starts to gather and attack. In some games, this would indicate you’re supposed to find a sneaky way to get the skull by, or eliminate the threat; here, the norms are such that not only is the skull meant as a “trap” (like the stones over the bridge) but the native no longer needs to be considered as a puzzle element (I don’t need to sit around using GIVE on every item in the game or trying other verbs.)
In a more practical sense, I’ve discovered that while the parser is mostly two-word, there’s spots like right here you need four words: use WITH SWORD at the end is how you avoid just using your fists to fight.
Additionally, I was thinking there was going to be more map, but what I had last time was nearly all of it. I have marked the positions, and the six new rooms are in the upper right corner.
The first parchment and second parchment I had already found, in the underground area (SW) and island (NW) respectively. I had made a guess about the chest with the snake and the green potion that turned out to be correct: after drinking the green potion the snake’s bite has no effect (it doesn’t say “you feel cured”, you just don’t die); in addition to the trap the chest has the third parchment.
This is just the piece from the chest. After picking up multiple parchments, they automatically merge together, so you don’t need to visualize cutting and pasting.
The fourth parchment I was very close to having, with both a box I was not strong enough to open and an axe. I even tried BREAK BOX (“what with? your bare hands?”) and tested a follow-up WITH AXE on its own parser line. This was before I realized sometimes the parser wanted four words, so BREAK BOX WITH AXE all together does the trick.
I had mentioned the pits before, where one of them is fatal to enter. I hadn’t gotten around to testing the other two yet; both act entirely differently. One is fatal in an identical way…
…but the third reveals the fifth parchment straight off the bat.
Some games would have the norm that similar looking pits would have similar rules (see Probe One: The Transmitter for an example) but here all three pits are different.
My last bit of confusion involves the second fatal pit, two screenshots back. The game specifies you can go “down” and I somehow interpreted that as the same as entering the pit; in reality that’s just an area I missed.
With the anorak from the camp it is possible to climb a mountain and get the sixth parchment from the top without freezing from the cold.
Death soon after. I knew instantly what object I needed but I was curious what would happen if I moved on. This is a “death preview” moment and we’ll see another of its type shortly. See Burglar’s Adventure for more discussion of this idea.
Past the mountain is a pagoda; it is locked with a red key (which is just out in the open from the temple earlier).
The wild thing about the encounter in the pagoda is you can kill the native (with the sword) and get the seventh parchment. The death doesn’t happen until a few turns later, long enough to view the unified seven parchments altogether.
This is a cryptogram. Avoiding the automatic solvers on the Internet, I went to a site that has tools for playing them on a computer (I like them, but find them a pain to keep track of on paper). I swapped unused letters for symbols to get:
UFTL RFT NCET GQ AMKNJTRT JMMI CLB WMSXJJ DGLB, UTQR MD RFT QSL CLB RFT CLAGTLR RTKNJT,CKMLEQR RFT ZMLTQ MD MSP CLATQRMPQ
The puzzle fortunately falls fairly easily to “the most common letter is E” and “the second word is probably THE” as a start.
when the page is complete look and you’ll find, west of the sun and the ancient temple,amongst the bones of our ancestors
I assume this is back at the skull, but since all parchments are needed for the final area (at least according to the decipherment) I still need to figure out the legit way of getting the final parchment piece from the pagoda. I expect it will be either the last puzzle remaining (if finding the treasure is just a glorious “you win” section) or the second to last (if getting out after finding the treasure is still going to be a problem, like in Calixto Island).
Apologies: after a bit of research I’m going to visit Invincible Island first and Urban Upstart second, as they represent the first two text adventures by Pete Cooke in the order he wrote them. (The latter was picked via random number generator to be my next game, rather than anything systematic.) Both were written for the ZX Spectrum.
Pete Cooke is another one of our math-teachers turned programmers, although he started (after graduation) trying to make it work as a piano player in a progressive band; the band failed (he blames punk rock) so he ended up doing degree-work in order to teach math to 11-to-14-year-olds in Leicester.
While their department received a text-only RM 380Z…
A machine developed in 1977, targeted at schools in the UK. From vt100.
…where he really caught the computer bug was the ZX81, where he “sort of lunged at it” and got using one as soon as he could. He ended up making programs that he showed to his students, and:
Eventually I wrote a simple text adventure and showed it to some of the students who said it was seriously good and thought it was better than some of the stuff in the shops!
He sent it to Richard Shepherd Software (previously: Super Spy) and they offered 1000 pounds to buy it, twice his monthly salary as a teacher.
[Adventure games] were interesting, and it was the idea you could explore somewhere. Also, I didn’t have the skills then to design 3D or animated graphics, although I’d been reading about AI and language parsing. It could also have been the influence of games such as The Hobbit, or maybe just the freedom appealed to me. I wrote it from scratch with bits in BASIC and tiny bits in assembler, but essentially hand-coded.
Noteworthy to highlight in the quote is the emphasis on “freedom” and “exploration”. This game has one of those wide-open maps more closely aligned to Roberta Williams than Scott Adams; this was not converted from ZX81 but rather written directly for the ZX Spectrum, along with its increased resources. (There’s a 2022 backport to ZX81 which converts the 48K original into 16K but even with modern resources and cutting out all the graphics, part of the original game was omitted.)
The loading screen has a ripple effect through “Invincible Island” so I wasn’t able to get a shot where all the text showed at once.
We’re back to being on a Treasure Hunt. Sort of.
WELCOME TO INVINCIBLE ISLAND
In this adventure you are an explorer stranded on the remote island of the XARO.
Your only guide is a letter you received from a Dr Chumley several months ago in which he said that he believed that islanders had hidden a massive treasure somewhere on the island.
Unfortunately, Dr Chumley did not live long enough to find the islands secret.
You have arrived on the island in a small boat, your aim is to find the treasure and escape alive.
Hmm. Since they’re hiding a treasure, I guess we have the right to scarf it? (It has come up before, but I want to emphasize that “claim stuff in the name of the British Empire / your wallet” is not common amongst these games despite so many Treasure Hunts. I still think the best instance so far has been making the deal with the demon in Zork II.)
What makes this game unusual compared to regular Treasure Hunt plots is something mentioned on the packaging, about “seven parchments” regarding the treasure. I have found two of them and they give parts of a message intended to be mashed together, so there’s an extra dose of intrigue in a game-mechanical sense beyond finding some “BARS OF GOLD” or a suitcase full of cash under a big W. It still is also possible the final “treasure” isn’t a normal treasure but “the friends we made along the way”.
The island is, as I implied already, pretty wide-open, but before I show off the map, here’s the verb list:
This ends up erratic; notice no READ verb, and there are at least two bits with writing (not even counting the parchments), which gets looked at with EXAMINE instead. PUT is actually WEAR. There’s no way to SWIM, and no way to HIT objects; so there is an AXE early on which I have not puzzled out how to use. CROSS gets used to launch a boat over to a small island.
For the map, I’ll give the whole thing at once to start, then break it into pieces.
For the opening area, walking along to the east is a deep pit; going in is death.
There are at least three pits that look like this on the map, so I assume there’s some aspect I’m missing and this isn’t just a trap.
Further are some STONES, which are something of a trap, but they only kick in later. Yet farther is a hut with a necklace.
Headed the other direction, there’s a RUSTY KEY nearby a chest that the rusty key conveniently opens. Unfortunately, doing so is, you guessed it, a trap.
I realize as I type this there is a mysterious “green potion” nearby which might be the antidote. I only tested it alone and nothing happened.
Moving farther along, just lying about on the ground is some FOOD, an AXE, a TORCH, a SPADE, an ANORAK (that’s a polar coat, maybe the top of the island is really high) and a caged yellow CANARY.
Before anyone asks, I have tested DIG with the spade in every location accessible so far with no luck. Near the same area is a “native” — the only one I have run across so far — and anything I’ve tested so far with GIVE (the only character-action verb that isn’t just KILL) has been rebuffed (I have not tested every item in the game thus far, though).
Turning east, there’s multiple rooms that are a “dark forest” where there are the occasional eyes peeking out, and more than a few turns in the forest turn out to be deadly.
There’s a BOX at the end of a path, but my character isn’t strong enough to open it.
Swinging back over to where the canary was, you can light a torch and go west into a “maze” except it’s a 4×3 set of rooms.
There are two rooms where you have trouble breathing — I assume the canary is somehow important to these rooms, but I’ve been able to just pass on by so I haven’t tested this yet — and spread out you can find a SWORD and one of the pieces of parchment.
The only way out of the “maze” is to the north…
…where there is a small area of “barren plain” including a SKULL, but soon after there is a river and lake.
One point requires crossing a bridge, and this is where the stones from earlier are a trap: if you’re carrying them the bridge collapses. Other items seem to be safe.
You can wrangle up a FOOTPUMP and a DINGY over to where there is a visible island on the lake, and the CROSS over to find another piece of parchment.
I’m wondering if the inflatable boat is from Zork. Infocom was never huge in the UK (lack of disk drives) but we saw at least one case of clear influence from 1982 (Goblin Towers).
I’m assuming all the fragments combine to make a cryptogram that needs solving, but it’s hard to tell with just the two.
Finally, past the native (who does not block your way, despite appearances) there’s a path leading to a temple and altar. The altar has writing that you can’t read and a red key but otherwise I have found nothing else of note.
I still have things to test (like using GIVE on more objects, seeing what happens with the canary, and seeing if the potion is an antidote) so I’m not stuck yet, but I also am unclear where more rooms (which clearly are out there) are going to come from, as I don’t have any clear navigational blocks except for the pits. Maybe this is a “multi-level maze” where we go underground, then go back up again elsewhere? In any case, with only two out of seven fragments so far, this is looking to be a meatier game than I originally expected.
Renga in Blue 