We’ve seen Chris Evans once before, with the two-pack Mines of Saturn/Return to Earth, originally published by Evans himself under Saturnsoft, but later picked up for distribution by Mikro-Gen.
Despite many sites claiming 1983 for Mad Martha, it first gets mentioned in a December 1982 issue of Computer and Video Games. The 1982 version seems to be Saturnsoft-only, and the only copies that have surfaced have been Mikro-Gen branded, which explains the discrepancy.
Mad Martha ended up being incidentally important to Mikro-Gen’s history. Briefly: Mikro-Gen went to the ZX Microfair in August of 1983, being placed next to a small company known as a Crash Micro Games Action (of Crash magazine). The two struck up a relationship and Crash received a copy of Mad Martha and gave it a good review (it “prove[s] how much fun a BASIC written adventure can be”). Crash had enough reach that the company Mikro-Gen ended up being one of the well-known British companies through the 80s.
Via Spectrum Computing.
I mentioned the Crash story before, but what I didn’t mention — because I didn’t play the game yet — was how inexplicable the Crash story was. That’s because this game is very bad, and I’ll pull out another review made when the game was published just to show I’m not talking from future-perspective. (And yes, art is subjective, etc., but I tend to be pretty good at figuring out where the boundaries are of “this works as long as you accept norms A, B, and C” but even going up to the Greek alphabet won’t save this game.)
I will grant the game does one very solid thing at the start. While the intro text starts with “you, as Henry Littlefellow” it then asks for your name (for example: “Jason”), and consistently addresses you by that name, clearly establishing Henry Littlefellow as someone different. This is similar to how Softporn Adventure made sure the “puppet” was entirely different from “you”; the “puppet” has a somewhat sleazy objective so it helps to be separated a step.
(In addition to our name, the game asks to pick a difficulty level, 1 to 3 — I’ll come back to this later.)
Henry — that is, the avatar, not us — is wanting to go on a night on the town, and do so by stealing his wife’s cash and sneaking out. His final goal is to turn his 50£ into 100£; however, his alert wife is waiting with an axe and will do Henry in at any mis-step.
Waking up the baby? Axed to death. Tripping over a cat? Axed to death? Wandering out to the bar to spend all his wife’s money on beer and then amble home? Still axed to death, but this time with feeling.
Each location in the game has graphics; first the graphical view is shown, then a text description.
The parser is extraordinarily slow. To be fair, all the Brit-games for ZX Spectrum have been slow, but this one is spectacularly slow, as in the machine needs to be cranked to 7x or 8x times speed to even have a reasonable response time. The author’s previous games didn’t have this problem, so I don’t know what happened; the only other comparable game I can think of is the unoptimized version of Basements and Beasties.
That might be acceptable if the parser was good; it is not.
> examine bed
You examine the china utensil!
Inside it’s rim is a small key
Yes, examine just ignores whatever noun you put and chooses one for you. In general, the parser only accepts the right command it is fishing for and no others.
After “open door”.
Through door 1.
I eventually stopped trying to interact with things, here I was still flailing.
Through door 2 is the room with the baby, and once you enter the baby starts crying.
You can “give dummy to baby” in order to calm him down, then grab an old lamp from the floor and pop over to door 3.
The cabinet has some OIL that you can use to FILL LAMP, and then as long as you’ve picked up the matchbox you can LIGHT LAMP. This is needed because the room beyond the door is dark and you’ll trip over the cat and die (via axe) without light. The rest of the map, incidentally, also requires you to hold the lamp lest the same fate be suffered (including in, say, a bar or a casino).
The matches are used passively, you just go direct to LIGHT LAMP while holding them.
Past the door is a “lounge”, and examining the couch will examine the family portrait instead (of course) revealing a safe. With the key from earlier in hand you can open the safe…
…and then get dropped into a mini-game.
Here’s where difficulty comes into play: it determines our number of lives which apply through this game and the mini-game immediately following this one.
Here, we move slowly back and forth and pound bills slowly appear on the ground while the cat wanders around trying to trip us underfoot. Number keys move up and down, Henry moves either left or right automatically. and if Henry has hit the far side of the scrolling screen, he turns around the other direction.
Picking up a bill creates a dot on the ground and you can trip over the dots and lose a life; the cat also is death. Strategy-wise, I found it best to start by just moving up and down quite a bit while the bills started piling on the ground, and then once the screen was dense enough to find a horizontal stretch with lots of money and let Henry just go (he might trip over a cat on the way, but that’s only one life).
Immediately after this game comes Frogger.
It took me exceedingly long to get through here; one thing I was doing wrong at the start was pounding the keys (5 through 8, 5 is left, 8 is right) rather than just holding, which registers the movement a little better but does make it difficult to stop.
The traffic moves left to right, and the key rather confusingly moves constantly to the right but wraps around from the right side of the screen to the left. You have to push “down” on the key to pick it up, and the time is very tight to both grab the key and make it back — you basically can’t spend any time at all adjusting and have to jump into traffic right away. I did one step left, and then held down; this let me get down about two-thirds of the way, and then I had to let the key go for a moment to avoid jumping under a car, then pressed it to resume. Then I had to immediately turn back direction and pray as the timer is such you can only win with two or three seconds to go at most.
Note how the game is here referring to Henry, while in the parser it refers to you.
With the keys in hand you finally get to wander outside.
Other than a jail (if you wander into it, game over) and your house (which you have to voluntarily enter back into, but Martha is waiting, game over) there’s a casino, bar, and cinema.
The card is just laying around outside; you’ll need it for the casino.
The bar must be visited first. A drunk will ask you to buy him a drink; do so, and he’ll give you a movie ticket.
With the ticket you can get into the movie theater… .
…where there is a tie lying around. You should wear the tie, because the club requires a tie in the dress code to get in.
Once in, you need to play one more mini-game to win: bet on the Wheel of Fortune. You can distribute 1 pound at a time on multiple numbers, or put them all on the same number, or do some mix; after you do so, the wheel spins around. The number of spins it makes gets the odds that a winner receives back.
Having picked five numbers, and the Wheel mid-spin.
At this point the game was tiring me so I just used save states. Fortunately, if you save, spin, and see the wheel hits a particular number, reloading and betting on that specific number will not change that behavior. That makes it easy to win to the end, and be rewarded with text-character graphics dancing ladies.
That’s it. Everything’s over. Hitting a button resets the game. Given Henry’s wife is still waiting with an axe I expect his night of pleasure to be cut short off-screen.
This sounds almost amusing just narrated out, but the incredibly finicky parser hid some extremely basic puzzles and some amazingly painful mini-games.
Dismal and painful to play. It was well known back in 1983, as Mikro-gen spent a bit on publicity. You were meant to get into the tongue-in-cheek mood of the game, but it is so bad that you’d rather get a dental drilling.
— Exemptus, from Computer Adventure Solution Archive
Slow, terrible puzzles and some god-awful arcade sequences.
— Gunness, also from Computer Adventure Solution Archive
Computer & Video Games did a October 1983 review (not too far off from when the Mikro-Gen version came out) and it was a full page as scathing as I’d ever seen from that era.
The review goes into technical issues with the game itself and calls it “user hostile”.
I tried doing useful things with the potty, but was not rewarded. I tried opening the window without success. I opened the door, and found myself in a corridor, from where I entered a bathroom, complete with “throne” and toilet roll. Neither of these objects reacted when I tried to use them, nor could I have a bath. I concluded that I was extremely clean and must be in need of a laxative.
A very slow parser where a fair number of the commands are going to get sucked up due to objects just not being implemented ends up being one of the most intensely frustrating experiences 1982/1983 can offer.
There’s probably something interesting to be said regarding the “degenerate hero” genre in Britgames; 1983 games will include Denis Through the Drinking Glass where the husband of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher really just wants to go get a drink. We’ll have to build up to some other games before making any conclusions, I reckon, including — unfortunately — another game from 1983, Mad Martha II.
Via Mobygames. “If you upset the Pope, on your own head be it. I’m not going into the fiery furnace because of your irreverance. And speaking of the Pope — don’t in front of Ian Paisley unless you want a right earful of the Armagh twang.” I’m sure this made sense to Brits of the 80s, but I’ll save researching for another time.
Renga in Blue 