Archive for the ‘kabul-spy’ Tag
A third-party hint book for Kabul Spy. From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I have finished the game; make sure to read my previous posts on the game before this one.
As the image at the top of the post implies, I definitely needed some hints, including for one puzzle which might be the most absurd I’ve ever come across, both in terms of solving and of narrative action.
Last time I left off on crossing a river with the help of Hisrin. Little did I know I had softlocked the game already even after the successful crossing.
Going to the east at the intersection above leads to some forest rooms, and then:
Yes, that’s Crowther/Woods Adventure dropped in the middle of Kabul Spy, for some reason. Not only can you get keys, food, water, and a lamp, but you can keep going and find the grate in a depression.
And this still keeps going except for the softlock. The LAMP is not like the lamp from adventure which is electric: you need fire to light it, and the matches are wet from passing over the river. Additionally:
a.) you can try leaving the matches behind and coming back for them later, but it doesn’t work
b.) you can try leaving the matches behind, and bring the lamp back over the river, but the lamp specifically gets lost if you do this
Weirdly, you can light a cigarette and it stays lit over the river, even though the matches get wet enough to no longer be lighting. So the key to the lamp is to light the cigarette, then make a beeline over to the lamp and get it lit with the cigarette before the cigarette goes out. (If you’ve thought to drop the cigarettes and match on the south side of the river, bring the lamp close, then swap back to the cigarettes and light them, alas: the matches get damp even if you haven’t brought them over the river. This almost seems like a bug except the game does mention it has rained recently, so I guess they get wet from being dropped. Still, the game went to absurd lengths to get the sequence it wanted.)
With the lamp lit, you can go in the Adventure cave, although only for a few rooms, up to XYZZY.
Saying XYZZY here warps you back to the surface.
We already saw a smidge of magic with the forcefield blocking the bar, but here the game leaps in fully-fledged. And look: magical realism is an actual genre that works. And yes, it sometimes has books where people with guns co-exist with magic.
At that time Macando was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.
— From One Hundred Years of Solitude
However, this really didn’t work here atmospherically at all; not only are the elements haphazard and the writing not anywhere in the territory of pulling things off, but the possibility of fantasy makes puzzle solving multiple steps harder, as it is not immediately apparent if we’re supposed to do something “normal” with wire cutters or a sniper rifle or supposed to just unlock a door with a magic word. (You’ll see what I mean a bit later.)
Heading back to the west-or-east branch, I then went west and found a man selling photos.
The photos are marginally important (there’s a nearby Iranian encampment that will welcome you in if you have the photo).
This increases your score. Is there some other secret thing?
What’s more important is that if you look at the man he’s carrying a staff, and you can try to BUY STAFF. He’ll trade for 20 rubles, at which point you don’t need your money belt any more. The staff then lets you successfully climb around the nearby terrain, which is otherwise too steep.
The mountains have two nearby caves. One contains another magic word:
Another contains some diamonds and a sniper rifle, neither which I used (although I found out the rifle was possible to use in an alternate route).
Searching around more, I found a dying commander by a tank.
The tank is a great piece of atmosphere (and gives you the hint to ask about Tarsidan — where the Professor is being held — at a nearby bar), but you then take the keys from Adventure and use them to unlock the tank (!!) and get some oil and wire-cutters. The wire-cutters, incidentally, are another item that gets used on one of the paths that I didn’t take, I only needed the oil.
Exploring east from the tank led to this strange room, which will come back with a vengeance. For now I had to turn around:
Exploring to the north of the tank led to an old mine, where I found a door that reacted to the magic word SUIRIS from the cave.
Further in I found a trap door that was rusty and applied the oil, then climbed up and found myself in a cell block, immediately followed by a very hard road block when the game declared
SOMETHING IS BARRING YOUR WAY
I wasn’t quite totally lost to the hint book yet, but I did check it here: you’re supposed to simply GET BARS. Why would the game be ambiguous about telling you what’s blocking your way? What does getting the bars work in the first place?
Once inside I found the professor, who will start to follow you.
Then it was just a matter of going back the way I came and … I got stuck. I kept going in a loop around the mine with no way out. To be fair, I remember a “rumble” with part of the mine collapsing, and found if I tried to DIG in one location it says (rather than giving an error) that YOU’LL NEED A SHOVEL.
I was now entirely stumped and flailed around a bit in an earlier section before deciding to check hints again. That oddly colored bridge I mentioned earlier?
“SOMEONE HAS DRAWN THE BRIDGE THAT CROSSES THE RAVINE HERE.” I admit I found the phrasing funny but was mostly puzzled by the fact CROSS BRIDGE and the like didn’t work. The game literally means what I presume is the author for the game drew in a bridge that wasn’t supposed to be there, and you’re supposed to ERASE BRIDGE.
The game had passed my limit: it was “cling to hints at every juncture” time. Fortunately I wasn’t too far from the end.
You need to say KOJA TARSIDAN here (where is TARSIDAN) which will lead you to a new area. Why Arabic again!? Arabic is only spoken by something like 1% of Afghanis.
(Aside: our character may not have spoken English at any point in the game; the very first scene has a sign which the player “TRANSLATES” and reads. All subsequent written material the protagonist is simply able to read, so I’m guessing they understand the local language, which makes sense if the CIA sent them in the first place. The fact even later signs clearly aren’t in English means the author kept his brain in this mindset. That still doesn’t explain the Arabic. Hrf.)
I ended up not having to make a frontal assault on the prison at all. (If you do that, you get to use the sniper rifle and wirecutters and map out a minefield. The last makes me glad I didn’t take the front route.)
If you go to the west you find a hole; to get across you need to THROW ROD which will wedge itself in the hole so you can walk across. (Sigh.) This leads to a dead end but there’s a shovel, which is what the game told me I needed earlier!
So, with hope maybe I wouldn’t need to cling to the hint book for dear life any more (ha) I went back through the mine scene, this time with shovel in hand, and was able to dig myself out and the professor. I then needed to ERASE BRIDGE again some reason, and get stuck on a large locked gate.
You’re suppose to RESET GATE to bust the gate open. Yes, I had RESET on my verb list, but I would not have had the patience to figure that out, and I still don’t know why.
Going inside leads to … a jet!
But you aren’t able to get away with it, as there’s a LOCK. I guess someone didn’t pay their parking tickets. (By the way, pretty much checking all the hints now.) You first need to get a nearby “device” hidden in grass. You walk over the grass and see something in the distance, and need to SMOKE GRASS. No, this isn’t a drug thing; it seems to be you set it on fire? I think? After doing that you see a DEVICE which you can then pick up, and put on the LOCK to open it.
sigh
breathe
Look, I really try my hardest not to “judge” in a numerical sense — all these games have had worthwhile aspects, and Kabul Spy really does have major ambitions. While it wasn’t the only adventure game trying to do contemporary warfare (see Saigon: The Last Days) it was based on a war that was currently ongoing the time it was written. It has, by my calculation, absolutely no words spoken in English (I mean, they’re in English in the game, but Hollywood Translation style). It has the very fascinating moment with shooting the priest. It has multiple branching possibilities, including fake-out softlock ones early and real ones at the end.
In a way, it is frustrating because I think with a good amount of editing pen this could have been … well, not a good game, but a middle-range quality game. The central through line is solid, it just needed to not ask the player to perform some absolutely absurd puzzles.
Just to stay positive, I’ll just let someone else close things out. This is from the August 1982 issue of Electronic Games, and shows despite the odd mixture, the fresh setting was appreciated at the time:
This game is further proof that computer gaming has moved into a new, more sophisticated period. As recently as a year ago, most software suppliers would’ve thought twice before bringing out an adventure game that wasn’t closely tied to science fiction or fantasy. Kabul Spy is undeniable proof that dragons and space marauders aren’t always necessary to create an involving, fascinating role-playing experience.
From Mobygames.
So the source of most of my issues last time was either an emulator issue or an issue with the files I was using. Specifically, I was using this version of Kabul Spy from the “Woz-a-Day” collection. WOZ is one of the file formats for Apple II disks; it is a bit less lossy than DSK files that were previously standard:
Capturing highly accurate bit data is of no use if you don’t have a container to hold the data. The WOZ format was designed to be able to contain every possible Apple ][ disk structure and layout. It can be so accurate that even copy protected software can’t tell that it isn’t an original disk.
A “flux visualization” of the first disk side of Kabul Spy, showing the internals bit by bit.
However, Applewin (my emulator) is a bit fussy when it comes to disk changes while using WOZ, and two of the places I was stuck on were purely related to that. The guard bribe was supposed to work as originally intended. Also, you aren’t supposed to get tossed into jail upon crossing the river; rather, the game is supposed to prompt you to flip to side 1 of the disk, then back to side 2. I believe this is loading a “second section” of the game (and if you make a u-turn you have to go through the procedure again to re-load the “first section”).
I only found this out by switching to the old DSK version. It doesn’t preserve the original title screen (so using the WOZ is generally better) but the disk-flipping bug doesn’t seem to occur. (Given the guard payment bug, it is also faintly possible the copy protection on the WOZ is busted and there’s some silent method of sending the player into a softlock once they reach a certain point of the game.)
Getting back into the game, the bit where I got beaten up at the railroad and tossed in the jail at least started as intended.
You can then GIVE (amount) — the same syntax as the boy in Quetta — in order to deliver a bribe, upon which the guard will let you free. The whole point of the scene is to find out what the old man is drawing in the dirt: this is where you need to break in to find the professor.
Incidentally, this needs a little pre-knowledge preparation for the scene. The people that beat you up take everything but your money, but you can find your way back to the train station and if you’ve dropped your items off you can pick them up safely. So in a narrative sense, you have to drop everything off but your money, where it safely sits around (including the pistol and cyanide pill) for you to return.
After the bribery scene, it’s time to buy a train ticket. If you go straight to the border (which I theorized might be a viable route last time) the game is softlocked; there’s a “log” provided by the river which seems to indicate it could be used to cross without losing items, but no: the log is entirely a red herring.
So you need to to Quetta first. I incidentally had missed something upon arriving:
The bed is described as lumpy, so I had tried various permutations of EXAMINE BED and LOOK UNDER BED.
I was still suspicious and did my “standard verb list” check, and found LIFT to be be promising. This turned out to work, and yielded a newspaper. It let me know some language terms (these are all Arabic):
WHERE -> KOJA
HELP -> KOMAK
GOOD MORNING -> SALAM ALEIKOM
These turn out to be essential shortly.
I then had the scene with the directions (which I already went through) to get to a bar apparently blocked by a force-field. This is a truly bizarro puzzle. There’s a sign that mentions the bar’s name is “The Devil’s Den” and instead of just typing WEST or GO BAR, you’re supposed to enter by typing GO HELL. I discovered this via the game’s built in HINT feature, which quite explicitly says GO TO HELL.
It is unclear what typing this really represents as an in-game action. After all, we’re not saying a password; we’re just conveying the information to the parser in a slightly different way, kind of like how TAKE and STEAL got differentiated in the Program Power game Adventure. (At least in that game, the parser acts sort of as a snarky narrator, and we’re really interacting with it; here, the parser remains characterless, so what is really happening in the narrative?)
Moving on, once in the bar you need to utilize the words from the newspaper to communicate and find your contact Hisrin.
Hisrin then tells you to go outside and watch the sunset while he does his confession before setting off.
Going back in the bar will summon Hisrin (this is “drama time”, not based on the number of turns or anything) who will then take you to the same place that the log/river was at earlier, except this time there is no log. He drags a raft out from hiding and you can ride with him across the river.
This gets your matches wet, which will become important later. What becomes immediately important is Hisrin gets killed.
This turns out to be a softlock, not a story branch. You can’t let this scene happen. How to get through? Well, if you go back to where you’re looking at the sky, the room mentions you can go west. This leads to a church with a priest (we don’t see Hisrin, but this is presumably where the confession happened).
If you look back on the scene with the thieves, they talk about how FATHER WILL BE PLEASED. They don’t mean father, as in parental figure, but The Father, as in the priest. Remember how the back of the box told us we might need to be ruthless?
Before making the river crossing: SHOOT PRIEST.
This deters the thieves, and Hisrin leads you to Afghanistan without getting killed:
Despite requiring foreknowledge of the future — reading the narrative only forward in time, our protagonist pre-emptively shot a priest just because he looked suspicious — this was my favorite moment of the game so far, and it seemed as if the gritty premise that the box for the game promised might actually be starting to kick in.
Unfortunately, the scene right after did not hold with that, but as I’m still exploring the general area so I’ll wait for my next update to explain.
Back cover of the FM-7 port and translation into Japanese of Kabul Spy, as published by Starcraft. Via Aucfree.
So the structure of Kabul Spy isn’t quite what I was expecting, and I’m still not sure where it is going. I’m going to toss some lingo out to narrow down what I mean (coined by Sam Kabo Ashwell and Dan Fabulich):
branch-and-bottleneck: A structure that has ostensible story branching, but with eventual merges where all paths lead to the same place.
If a player has multiple routes through a town but will get arrested at a specific time no matter what that route is, then the player has reached a bottleneck.
This keeps the same “main beats” in the story while allowing freedom on how to get there, with the downside of reducing the impact of individual choices across the story as a whole.
Dan Fabulich (of Choice of Games fame) defines a slightly different variant, called delayed branching. This essentially modifies the structure so that nodes and their linkages aren’t all there is to a story; there might be statistics that get modified all the way through a game that affect later choices, so something early in Plot Branch #2 genuinely might affect an aspect later, even given the “merge” of main plot beats. (For example, someone who builds friendship with an antagonist over multiple meetings might get a “friendly” option in an ultimate climax scene that would not otherwise be available.)
I think what Kabul Spy is doing is delayed branching (with the added 1982 bonus of possible softlocks).
First scene: bus ticket. No fancy branching here; you can get killed by walking into a jet engine, but otherwise you are required to buy a bus ticket to move on.
Second scene: train station. You have three branches here. First, you can buy a ticket to Quetta, a town near the border of Afghanistan. Second, you can buy a ticket straight for the border. Third, you can go out to the tracks and find some men to beat you up and toss you into jail. (You’ll lose all your items except your money belt.)
Quetta scene: You start in a sort of “town maze”. There’s a boy who you can choose to give money that will give a hint “ENE”. He explains that that’s the directions he used to find you (traveling from the bar that your contact is at) meaning you are supposed to reverse the directions and go WSW.
The bar the directions point to has a “force field” blocking your way.
This part I haven’t solved. Is there some kind of science fiction going on to this game? Nothing in my starting inventory (knife, gun, cyanide pill, money) is suggestive of a way to break in, and other than some cigarettes and matches, I haven’t picked up anything helpful along the way either.
Going from the bar to the east, you’ll end up in the “Desert” which is roughly where you land going from the train straight to the border.
Afghanistan border scene: you arrive here either via train or via walking from Quetta.
There’s a river with a log; the log is suggestive of you being able to use it to cross the river safely, but I must be missing some kind of syntax to make it work. If I try to PUT LOG IN RIVER and CROSS LOG (or various other permutations of the same concept) I get all my possessions swept away, the same as if I just tried to cross the river without any preparation beforehand.
Arriving at the north side of the river results in getting captured and tossed into jail, the same jail you can arrive at if you don’t take a train at all.
So to summarize so far:
1. I can arrive at the jail with the money belt, but that only, via skipping the train.
2. I can arrive at the jail without any items by trying to pass through the stream.
There’s also a fair amount of choice on spending, other than just the ticket prices varying; the boy who offers directions in Quetta, for instance, will take any bribe amount (even though he asks for 100, he’ll give the directions for even 1 ruble). This suggests some sort of dynamic variation between routes with the amount of money being held.
The other distressing thing about route number 1 is you arrive with a guard there, who says asks if you can make it worth his while to escape. Since you have the money, you should be able to do bribery, but neither OFFER (amount) nor GIVE (amount) nor GIVE (amount) RUBLES TO GUARD nor 50 other variations I’ve tried seem to work. If you arrive via route number 2 there is no guard at all! Does the guard only hang out if he knows you can bribe him? Is the game softlocked in the second case?
I will say at least the manual is suggestive of alternate routes, with the scoring system giving 700 as a “maximum score” even though more is possible. Does spending less money equate to more score in the end?
The score is displayed as a ratio of 700. It is possible to get over 700 points in some circumstances, but rest assured that reaching 700 confers the status of “expert” upon the player.
If anyone knows the game (or feels like perusing a walkthrough) I will take hints at this point (ROT13 format, please) on any of my three dilemmas (force field, river, guard).
While the character art of Asylum II counts as graphics, it has been a while since we’ve had a game fully illustrated with pixels; the last that really counted was the Japanese version of Mystery House from back in October. So, more than six months?
It’s overdue: let’s luxuriate in the purple-tinged nostalgia of the Apple II, as we try to rescue a missing professor during the Afghani-Soviet War.
From Mobygames.
We’ve seen Sirius Software and the author Tim Wilson once before already, with The Blade of Blackpoole. This seems to be the earlier game, as it gets marked “1981” in lots of places (including the game itself), although according to the US Copyright Office it wasn’t published until February 1982, so this is likely a situation like Time Zone where the intended release date slipped a little.
While early Sirius games and particularly the programmer Nasir have received quite a bit of attention, the period after for the company hasn’t had nearly as much. A great deal of the top-selling Sirius games early on were Nasir’s (he was there right at the founding as the only programmer, but only got royalties, not equity); he left in August 1981 to form his own company (see: no equity), and Sirius kept trucking out games quite rapidly after based on outside submissions.
One or two of every ten games submitted to Sirius is given serious consideration. Sometimes a game meets Sirius’s standards 100 percent, like Tony and Benny Ngo’s arcade game Bandits. If a game is only 70 percent, however, the author works with product manager Ernie Brock. … Releasing three to four games a month for the Apple, Sirius is publishing at a torrid pace.
— Softalk, July 1982
Tim Wilson was one of the outside submitters; Bob Blauschild, the other adventure game writer (on Escape from Rungistan and Critical Mass) will wait for another day.
Kabul Agent is set mostly in Afghanistan, which nearly always features in videogames as a warzone. This game is no exception, dropping the player in the thick of Afghanistan’s conflict with the USSR although I’m still hoping for some scenes not of the type found in Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat and Call of Duty: Black Ops II. (If nothing else, the Afghanis are the “good guys” in this one.)
That’s the back cover material, which is interesting in the moral ambiguity it lays onto the protagonist: “…you are not known for your charity … Let’s hope you are clever as you are ruthless.” I don’t know yet if this is setting up our protagonist for amoral behavior or if it is just the manual trying to be clever.
Despite the graphics (see above) sometimes seeming like they came out of On-Line Systems, the parser allegedly understands full sentences, so there’s a hidden technical jump from those games. What does seem to match quite well with Time Zone (published a month later) is the level of instant death. The sign warns you to not go east, but if you ignore it, you get sucked in a jet engine.
The fact any substantial message takes multiple screens of reading is the reason for the customized bigger text screen later seen in Blade of Blackpoole.
Whee! To reiterate what I’ve mentioned before as my position on this kind of thing: insta-death is a perfectly fine design choice, it just means the player is supposed to save amply. With a more flexible undo option (or something like the Lucasarts Indiana Jones adventures which automatically reverse time a bit if you botch something up) it can work in a modern design, it is just that 1982 (with slow computers and disk drives) was not the year to invent the autosave.
There’s not much to do other than go in the building, where there’s a ticket counter. Fortunately, you start the game with cash.
More specifically, you start the game with
300 RUBLES IN YOUR BELT
A MONEY BELT
A PISTOL
A CYANIDE PILL
A SHARP NASTY KNIFE
which is quite a bit more than most games we’ve seen. At the counter we can buy a ticket for a bus as well as get a A BOOK OF MATCHES.
The bus leads to a train station, where you get two choices for tickets: the town of Quetta (in Pakistan) or the northeast border of Afghanistan. These lead to two entirely different experiences, and there isn’t an obvious way to hop from one location to another. Could this be an actual full-on plot branch?
For the Quetta trip, you land in a town where a boy asks for 100 rubles. Since you have them, you can easily hand them over and get a piece of paper which says “ENE”. Following these directions (east, north, east) leads to just more town, which indicates either the whole thing was a deception to get money, or there’s some added trick involved (and no, it isn’t east and then northeast).
I wandered a bit and also found “outskirts” but I haven’t made a detailed attempt to map the town yet.
Going the other directions leads to mountains and then desert and then forest. I found a “small log” but haven’t explored what I’m guessing is more map; this is a little bit of a maze as well.
You eventually get captured and tossed in a cell with an old man, and that’s where I decided it was a good time to pause for now.
The double plot branch thing is wildly unusual. Going by the intro text we’re looking for the guide in Quetta to help us get into Afghanistan, yet we can go straight there. Does following the appropriate order mean we don’t get captured? Do we just have two different ways of making it in?
And for those who experienced that game, is the character art better or worse than Time Zone?
Renga in Blue 