I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.
I finished on the Amstrad version, which runs a little faster and does seem to be nearly identical (comparing against the walkthrough by Garry Francis). Even that ancient manuscript I mentioned counted for essentially nil: there are no glasses to read it. I’m not sure why the author even added it in, other than a general love of red herrings; the dog, hammer, dynamite, bulldozer, and rubbish bin all signify nothing other than the debris of the British countryside.
Cover of the magazine the game first appeared in, via eBay.
My two issues (the missing treasure, and the heavy lid I suspected hid a treasure) both had their solution nearby. The lid straightforwardly opened with the “sharp sword” at the mansion, no hammer or dynamite needed.
I don’t know what the “sorry” is about, sometimes the parser printed that randomly.
I mentioned mushrooms I was not able to pick up last time. This is an Amstrad-specific bug. The game does not let you type GET MUSHROOMS or even GET MUSHROOM (it just re-displays the room over again). You need to type GET MUSH or GET MUSHR. I assume there’s some length limit I’m hitting. (The Oric does not have this problem! I’d consequently say the Oric is less buggy but Garry may have fixed the mushroom while he was busy fixing the general can’t-pick-anything-up bug. It’s all just a mess, let’s just leave it at that.)
With the mushrooms, er, MUSH in hand, you can deliver them to the gamekeeper nearby. Again, GIVE MUSHROOMS fails, it needs to be GIVE MUSH.
This is the only place a spacesuit is mentioned. I don’t know how the kissing worked.
That puts us at a full list, now it’s just a matter of getting all the objects over in one save file. This was slightly tedious but made somewhat less so by the discovery that PRAY rotates through locations a bit at random; after making a delivery I did PRAY until I was close to my next targets. I did still have to tote a BOAT all over the map twice.
Item pile in progress.
I didn’t even get to drop my last treasure, this displayed with the camera still in my inventory. I wonder if the game is bugged so you leave one treasure behind you can still win the game.
There’s no puzzle for entering the spaceship. I suppose the power of friendship was within us all along.
This was a lot of words for a type-in (mind you, that’s the style of this blog) but it’s worth a close look for if nothing else not only did Steve Lucas publish many games, he published at least two “how to write adventure games” books, one for MSX and one for Amstrad. If his style evolves over time we need his starting point accounted for. I’m hoping over the process I can shake a few more biographical details loose (what was his past background? what happened to him during the 90s?)
But for now: our first Japanese game for 1983, one considered a landmark work.
(Continued from my last post.)
From the cover of Games Magazine November 1984, with the Amstrad version of Space Traveller / Visitor from Space, although this particular illustration is meant to go with a different game, Interplanetary Miner. Mind you, I think they’re just pulling from the same stock archive of space pictures for both.
As promised, I went through the Amstrad version of the game, with some places having expanded text. I don’t think any of the text helped me with puzzle-solving, but it did make combing over the map less repetitive since things looked slightly different.
Just west of the start. The original just describes it as a field, without the extra textual hint about digging; if I hadn’t found the treasure already this would be a case where the expanded text was helpful.
No busker (or Beatles reference) in the original.
Outside the warehouse, previously with no mention of dark glass.
There was one genuine change in content (that I’ve seen so far): an ancient manuscript in the warehouse (seen above) which originally just had a box. Like the newspapers and poetry book, it can’t be read without glasses.
I guess you can also count the Oric in the computer shop changing to an Amstrad; would expect that one.
I did reach two new areas, but before describing those, two quick treasure finds, the first being right at the opening with the pebbles. EXAMINE PEBBLES reveal a zirconium nugget.
Additionally, back at the bus stop, if you WAIT at the queue you will eventually be able to get on, and while on the trip there will be a roman coin you can scoop up. (This incidentally takes you to the north part of the map without praying. The other option — adjacent to the bus — is a taxi where you can GO TAXI to do the same thing, but no coin on the way.)
So treasure count wise, that makes five so far: silver bar (dug in the field), zirconium nugget (pebbles), roman coin (bus), gold pen (teacher), and rocket fuel (hut, using key). The rocket key ends up not counting towards the ten treasures (despite it having asterisks) but I’m counting it anyway meaning we’re at 5 out of 11. I’ve got 4 more secured, plus 1 probable location, so I’m close to the end, but close isn’t all the way.
First, let’s go back to the lake by the hut, where I previously did ROW BOAT. Checking each room carefully, I realized SWIM was also a verb that could apply there, and it led me to an entirely new destination.
The landing point is a beach with sunbathers. Back at the store (in the Amstrad game it is described as a “Tesco”) there was a lighter at a store that couldn’t be grabbed because it was by the register and our alien visitor has no Earth money; however, farther away in the same store there’s some suntan lotion and baked beans that are apparently out of the eye of any watchful cashiers. GIVE LOTION to the sunbathers and you’ll get a CAMERA (treasure #6).
Just to the east there is a dead body, just because this is a gonzo adventure and tonal shift is just its thing.
Dying alone and unnamed. Searching reveals nothing. Oddly, unlike the boat trip which is one way, you can just swim back across the lake.
The cliff I’d been looking for! With the parachute (first getting chastised by the parser for trying WEAR PARACHUTE, it just assumes you have it on implicitly) I was able to land safely.
Just to the east is a crab (taking it gets you chomped: death); a few rooms away in a “dark forest” is a “gnome” that is, I quote, “the sort they sell at Woolworth’s”. GET GNOME:
In the middle of a dark forest, putting us back in On the Way to the Interview for a moment.
Between the gnome and crab is a “sandy cove” with a “driftwood” that is hiding a diamond ring (treasure #7).
To get out of the region (without PRAY) there’s a narrow ledge which requires a ROPE. The implication here is that walking through the section takes up two inventory slots already (parachute + rope) so getting the ring + the driftwood requires two separate parachute runs through (maybe the driftwood doesn’t do anything, but I don’t know that yet!) If there’s some way to handle the crab and/or gnome it requires bringing in objects to test one at a time.
Now is a good time to mention the three-item limit is an incredible pain. Either the boat (alone) or the parachute and rope (together) are needed to move from the north to south side of the map, so in a practical sense the inventory limit is either 1 or 2, and so testing any theory about bring an item X to a spot Y requires a lot of shuffling. The size of map really does influence the level of suffering involved with a small inventory limit; a good recent example of this is Mystery House II, where the two-item limit applied in all versions. In the MSX version it was irksome (the entire house was always accessible) but more workable in the versions split into multiple volumes (as they only involved a smaller portion of the house).
Moving past all that, I mentioned I found a second area. Down at the farm there’s a “pigsty” which I thought was merely a dead end, but it is possible to GO IN.
The way to get by the pig is simply to PUSH PIG knocking it over, cow-tipping style.
Past a long tunnel is a mansion. I have yet to use the sword for anything.
This is followed by a fairly dense area where I doubt everything ends up coming into play, but let’s do bullet points:
- a garden with a gate and a “garden snake”
- a “gamekeeper” in a clearing
- some mushrooms in a woods (they don’t seem to be takeable)
- a platinum bar (remember that trolley from the farmer who liked poetry? you need it to pick up the bar)
- a lead casket (you need something to open it; dunno what yet, see inventory limit)
- a woman in a field (trying to KISS this one results in getting slapped, I guess this isn’t Earth Girls are Easy)
- a large monument with a radio transmitter, another treasure
Finally at the end (drumroll) there’s the spaceship! Except I don’t know how to get in. Forgot my remote and the app stopped working, I suppose.
In the end all the puzzles have been straightforward (except PUSH PIG was pretty odd) but the spread out nature of the map makes things hard to test. I still need to check: blowing things up with dynamite (and can the lighter be taken somehow?), dealing with the dog outside the store, taking various objects like the hammer over to the lead casket, seeing if the gamekeeper will take something, nudging at the mushrooms some more, and even more things I’ve lost track of. This is a lot more work than I expected from an Oric type-in.
I have been sent on a difficult and rather dangerous mission to a distant planet called EARTH. My mission is to locate ten items of treasure and bring them back to my spaceship. I will, in addition, need to locate some rocket fuel for my return journey.
My random roll has landed me on the works of Steve W. Lucas, perhaps best thought of as Britain’s answer to Peter Kirsch. That is, a wildly prolific author who wrote reams of slightly janky BASIC code but with flashes of creativity just naturally from cranking out bucketloads of content. He has 41 hits on CASA but some of those are duplicates — when porting from one system to another he would often change his game’s title and only sometimes change his content. It’s unclear how many distinct games he wrote and it may even depend on your definition of “distinct”; there’s a long thread at CASA that tried to tame the chaos but there still seems to be some confusion. The other comparison with Kirsch of note is how he worked with a wide variety of computers: MSX, Oric, Amstrad, and BBC Micro.
With Journey of a Space Traveller, it first appeared in Oric Owner (Aug./Sept. 1983) but got changed to A Visitor From Space in a 1984 printing for Amstrad, with some expansion of the text. The intro at the top of this post is from the Amstrad version; the Oric version instead starts “I have been sent on the first flight from my planet to the planet Earth” which I think has less punch than “rather dangerous mission to a distant planet called EARTH.” However, I’ve been playing (up to where I’ve been stumped) the Oric version; as is tradition with multi-version games, I might poke at the Amstrad version to see if there’s any tweaks or textual hints to help (allegedly the walkthrough is the same, at least).
The Oric is a new system for this blog. I’m not going to do a system history right now, but I’ll say it is Tangerine’s much more successful follow-up to the Microtan 65 and was particularly well-received in France as it didn’t need an adaptor for their SECAM television format.
It is likely his first published game but I’m not 100% certain; it is his first to appear in Oric Owner, at least, but he also published some BBC Micro software through Silverlind; the first ad for that I’ve found in November, with a “call for games” back in May.
From the Oric magazine original.
The other distinctive thing about his games — specifically the Oric Owner ones but maybe some of the others as well — is how buggy they are. None of the ones printed in Oric Owner work directly as printed; Garry has a patched version that’s needed to get past even the first command. This is the sort of thing I’d normally blame on the magazine rather than the author but it’s odd for it to occur multiple times; the author has two games in the December/January issue with the same problem.
Games Computing, November 1984, with a slightly higher art budget. Well, higher art budget for printing, but given the art has nothing to do with the game I think it was “borrowed” from elsewhere.
The instructions helpfully give the verbs (this seems to be common across all the Steve Lucas games) so I’ll give them, just as they were printed:
GO IN, GO OUT, GO TAXI, OUT, N, S, E, W, WAIT, SING, SAVE, WEAR, SCORE, ROW, SAIL, THROW, LIGHT, GET, TAKE, GRAB, CLIMB, DOWN, READ, **** OFF, TIME, DIG, HELP, SEARCH, DROP, LEAVE, GIVE, OPEN, PHONE, QUIT, LOOK, KISS, PRAY, LOAD, CLOAD, PUSH, PULL, EAT, ATTACK, HIT, KILL, EXAMINE, SWIM, USE, INSERT, UNLOCK, WEAR, JUMP, INVENTORY, BUY, CRACK, COOK, SORRY, SAIL, ROW
(****, OFF not required, gets “how dare you speak to me like that? What do you have to say for yourself?” and you need to respond SORRY before proceeding on.)
It’s a traditional treasure hunt, but with the twists that a.) you are an alien and b.) you’re treasure-hunting on modern Earth. Adventure-behavior — especially without regular communication with characters — is typically a bit non-standard, so I like the idea of the mute protagonist poking and searching every room (digging random floors, hitting walls, trying to climb everything, etc.) being explained away by their alien status.
I don’t know where the spaceship is; part of the goal is to find it. This is a major pain in that the inventory limit is three (weak alien arms, I guess we’re used to lower-G) so I have no idea where to stash things so they’ll be close for their inevitable unloading into a cargo bay of some sort.
Right to the east of the starting point are some pebbles and a shovel…
The Amstrad version adds “The pebbles hurt my feet!” but I haven’t gone past this room.
…and the shovel can be used just to the west to dig up some SILVER bullion, our first treasure. Nine to go!
Heading to the east, there’s a quarry with a hammer, and nearby is some dynamite and a parachute. I have yet to blow anything up (I think it needs a lighter I’ll show off later) nor have I found the right place to apply the hammer and parachute (…presumably not at the same time). There’s additionally dead ends with a Sheer Rock Face and Bulldozer but I haven’t quite worked out yet if this is an “everything is important” style game or some parts are just scenery. I’m leaning to the latter.
A rope is at a bridge (again, haven’t used) leading to a “primary school”. The school has a secretary which you can kiss (the game says she likes it, indicating we’re an alien counterpart to Riker) and a head teacher who has a GOLD pen, another treasure. Examining the teacher reveals they like singing (alien senses, I suppose) and SING will utilize the Oric’s speaker to play a tune, after which you can get the pen. Eight more to go.
Leaving the school (swiping a book of poetry for later, we can’t read it because we need glasses) and proceeding westward we can find a locket hut at a boat. I’ll mention right now there’s a key laying out in the open later used on the hut which contains *ROCKET FUEL* (seven to go); the boat needs to be carted a short way to a lake where ROW BOAT can be applied. Note that the three-item limit applies neutrally, so a LARGE KEY is the same size as the boat in inventory.
The trip over water landing at the Footpath (see upper right of above map) is one-way; the only way so far I’ve found to return to the start area is PRAY, which warps you over for some reason. (Religious miracles: alien technology all along!) The PRAY is quite relevant insofar as just to the west you can get lost in a forest that’s an endless loop, and as far as I know PRAY is the only way to get out.
Proceeding in a direction that isn’t a trap passes through a warehouse with a box (nothing in it), and that leads to a carpark, and then a bunch of directions from there, like a bus station complete with queue…
Only in a Britgame.
…a computer store with software you can LOAD…
…a fish and chip shop…
…and a closed newsagent place with newspapers that can’t be read because you still need your glasses. (If this was logical you’d have left them on your spaceship by accident, but I can’t rule out some random passerby’s reading glasses working just as well.)
Nearby all this lurks a LARGE KEY at an intersection which goes back to that hut with the rocket fuel; as I already indicated, the only way I can find so far to head back there is to PRAY.
Moving on to the west, we can pass by a rubbish bin (seemingly containing nothing!) near a supermarket.
To the west of here is a lighter at the cashier. I can try to BUY LIGHTER but the game asks “with what?” Maybe use one of the treasures and get it back later somehow? I still need to experiment.
Lurking outside the supermarket is a dog; no idea what to do here yet…
…followed by a bunch of rooms leading to a farm complete with tractor and a farmer. The farmer wants a book, so if you hand the poetry book over he’ll give you a trolley, because this game is following gonzo logic.
To be fair, the “I’m an alien” does a lot of the work in making the narrative seem semi-normal for an out-of-control treasure hunt. However, I am up on my limit now at only three treasures.
I’m not going to list every obstacle because I don’t know which ones are “real” and which ones are for scenery. Does the forest have a different escape? What can you do at the bus station? Does making the dog happy lead to treasure? This might be the extent of the map and I’m just supposed to mop things up (akin to Invincible Island) or I may have only seen part of it. Given the parachute (and distinct lack of gaping chasms) surely there’s at least a bit more to go. Maybe the supermarket is secretly the alien spaceship.
Renga in Blue 