Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context.

Via eBay.

Generally speaking, with this size of game, there might be one or two moments at most where a highly nonstandard verb gets used instead of a regular one (FRISK instead of EXAMINE, or from the Pharaoh’s Tomb game we just played, WALK THROUGH DOOR rather than ENTER DOOR). This game has four such moments. In at least the first case the author was doing it intentionally. I’m not sure why, but the author (Mike Farley) seems perfectly fine with inconsistency across similar actions in the game. So one door you might just type IN while another you might ENTER and yet another you might GO THROUGH.

At least to start, the game gives a little help in the ZX Spectrum version. I went back and noodled with the metal door and after enough failed attempts I was prompted by the game if I wanted help. (This is like the Crowther/Woods Adventure style hint system, which is still pretty rare.)

The game wants us to PULL DOOR. This allows the verbs IN and OUT to now work. Inside is a vault with a gold coin; in the ZX Spectrum version there is a message on that wall.

The gold color was used to signal treasures in Pharaoh’s Tomb, but remember that here our goal is to find a scroll of wisdom, not gold treasure.

The ZX81 version of the game just says “I AM IN A LARGE VAULT / THERE IS A CLOSED STEEL DOOR”; it also has the difference that rather than using IN and OUT, the game requires PULL DOOR every time the player wants to enter, and PUSH DOOR every time the player wants to leave. Basically it’s going for this comic:

An apt demonstration of the feeling of playing this game.

The RETURN mentioned in the vault room has a double-meaning. Most clearly (to me, at least) it refers to the coin itself, and if the coin gets used (as we’ll do shortly) it returns to the vault. There is no hint to this in the ZX81 game.

The second meaning is that the carpet will fly with the code word RETURN; this is totally optional as you can just walk out the cave with the carpet; it’s the ZX81 version of the game that won’t let you pick it up. (I don’t know why it didn’t work for me before. I’m guessing I had tried GET MAGIC and GET CARPET in the ZX81 port and just GET MAGIC in the other, but the game wants it referred to as a CARPET.)

My last ZX81 screenshot. If someone knows what was going on with the cryptic message about THAT feel free to drop a note in the comments.

Given the two hints that showed up in the Spectrum game I decided it was time to switch to that version entirely.

The gold coin from the vault seemed to (and fortunately, did) obviously go to the dwarf that was hawking scythes.

Remember, the coin is re-usable and goes back to the vault.

Given the limited locations available, it occurred to me the bamboo forest might be good candidate for the scythe; indeed it was, as using the scythe gave a bamboo cane. With the cane I could USE CANE while at the out-of-reach rope…

…opening up the possibility to SWING ROPE.

Next up comes a “Windy Gulley” with a spider guarding a “corked bottle”. Attached to the room are a “Wet Cave” and a “Cold Cave”; there’s a lizard that (by random) shows up in one of the two. (Remember the “by random”, it will come up later.) I fortunately had the right item in inventory for the game to handle GET LIZARD:

I then immediately took it over to the spider; I figured the lizard would eat the spider, but DROP LIZARD and RELEASE LIZARD and so forth did nothing. The right action is OPEN CASKET. Previously, OPEN CASKET didn’t even work, leading me to believe I was dealing with an open container, but no. The author is treating all the parser actions like they were attempts at solving puzzles, rather than possible manipulations of a world model. This is counter to the typical models in both Crowther/Woods and Scott Adams and most modern games.

I wouldn’t call it entirely the fault of the Trevor Toms system; at least with the previous game we played (Pharaoh’s Tomb) there were world-model elements. I’m guessing Magic Mountain was Farley’s first game (even though it gets listed last on the sequence of games for the tape) and he was still coping with technical issues.

Moving on from killing the spider, I got the “corked bottle” but wasn’t quite ready to handle it yet. First I had to deal with another parser annoyance.

The blankets can be taken; the big trouble is with the trapdoor. OPEN TRAPDOOR? No. How about DOWN, or maybe IN? Or ENTER TRAPDOOR? GO THROUGH TRAPDOOR? All good tries, but no. The game wants LIFT TRAPDOOR.

The book has the words RISE AND SHINE, although they look blurry unless you’re wearing the wizard’s hat.

Heading back to where the spider was, going east leads to a dead-end.

I had a guess (after some futile magic word attempts, see above) the bottle was supposed to work there; if you try to break the bottle you get killed by a very angry genie.

However, OPEN BOTTLE was not understood. The game is fishing for a very specific verb: UNCORK BOTTLE.

Then comes possibly the hardest puzzle in the entire game: phrasing the command to the genie in a way it will actually do the right thing. The walkthrough told me MOVE ROCKS (there are no rocks in the room description, you just have to infer that’s what the author means).

You can now go south to a “crevasse”…

…and there are two ways to deal with it which take you to different places. Realizing this is arguably the hardest “legitimate” puzzle in the game (that is, it’d be hard even with a perfect parser where communicating with the genie, opening the trapdoor, etc. was simple).

First, you can TIE BLANKETS in order to form a rope, then use them to climb down into the crevasse, finding a lantern in the process.

Second, the magic carpet works here with RISE AND SHINE. It is unclear why the words just result in a sassy response from the parser in other places (rather than the magic carpet twitching and failing to go anywhere, say, like a properly hinted game would).

The south edge of the crevasse has a vending machine which dispenses matches as long as you insert a coin. Remember the coin spent at the dwarf re-appears at the vault (or at least a new one duplicates back at the vault); fortunately going over the crevasse with the carpet is not a one-way trip so it’s possible to backtrack.

You need to backtrack again anyway in just a moment for yet another coin, as there’s a witch selling parchments.

The last coin use. The magic re-appearing coin was my favorite part of the game, although I don’t know I would have felt without the “always return” hint. Also, notice the inconsistency: we had to GIVE COIN for the dwarf, but here the game wants BUY PARCHMENT.

The parchment says PHOOEY, which gets used near the end of the game. Near the parchment-seller is a dragon that we need an item first in order to defeat.

Near the witch is a house where you’re supposed to LIFT SLATS (not GET or PULL) and … look, I admit I just got this one out of the walkthrough. It’s not terrible as the use at the trapdoor but it’s still pretty dodgy without some synonyms.

The secret room you find under the slats.

With the keys in hand there’s still the dragon to deal with, and this is a puzzle that’s more likely solved via passive means rather than actively thinking it out. One of the rooms in this area is a “dark gully” and if you have the lantern going it will reveal a new object. (You need to LIGHT MATCH, and then the lantern is lit if you wait a turn more. Only then walk into the dark gully.)

The sword is sufficient to kill the dragon, although at first my attempts to walk in the dragon room were still being stopped. You have to type KILL DRAGON even though the dragon isn’t in the same room as you.

Last area! Let’s bust out of this joint.

First comes the place where the keys (A, B, and C) from below the witch’s house get used.

The game inquires about an order. There’s six possibilities (ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA) and for me the order was ABC, so I didn’t have to try very hard. According to one of the walkthroughs you can ask the dwarf your fortune and get the sequence from him, but working out how to say that (DWARF TELL FORTUNE, I hate this parser) is far tougher than just ramming through six cases.

The rest is straightforward; there’s a storage room with some oars, followed by a river with a dinghy (the author was nice enough to describe it as “portable” so I picked it up before using ROW DINGHY, otherwise it might have taken more parser struggle).

This lands the player next to a “Scroll Bearer’s Path” where going west kills you rather vividly (“The Mountain’s powerful forces combine and blast me with a ferocity unknown to man!”)

You need to head north to scoop up the Scroll of Wisdom first (which is, sadly, not READable, but this was not a surprise).

Trying to leave results in you getting pushed back by an evil force, but as the only unused things I had were

1.) the quill pen
2.) the word PHOOEY

it was not hard to pass through.

The quill pen is a red herring and never gets used.

Just to summarize, the game gave active trouble

opening a door
opening a trap-door
opening a bottle
commanding a genie

with lots of small issues besides (like “BUY” instead of “GIVE” depending on the vendor). This may not read so horrible when I’m conveying what happened in brisk prose, but I assure you each point of getting stopped represents a long amount of time, in some cases 30 minutes or more. While some of it was technical trouble, I think the author also had a walkthrough in mind that seemed reasonable without thinking about the effect on the player. One can see after the fact how MOVE ROCKS would be an appropriate command, but without mentioning them the puzzle becomes a far different experience than intended. Or maybe the author’s technical chops at this point allowed for no synonyms, hence UNCORK rather than OPEN (rather than having them both)?

We’ll see Mike Farley again in 1983, as he does have one more game, this time solely for ZX Spectrum. Hopefully it’s more along the lines of Pharaoh’s Tomb than Magic Mountain! Before checking out I wanted to mention one more quote from the author, back with his comments in Sinclair User; or rather, a quote from Philip Joy (who wrote the article) paraphrasing Farley:

He says that any game advertised as a new set of dungeons each time the game is played cannot be a real adventure. Games such as Catacombs, Perilous Swamp and Oracles’ Cave were in this category. This view could be taken either way but I feel that a real adventure should have the same story each time it is tried.

I find it fascinating that we’re getting some “gatekeeping” as to genre here; plenty of RPGs have been marked as Adventure at this time and the concept of a self-contained game-genre was just starting to be formed. (I’m not thrilled about the term “gatekeeping” as I don’t think sorting games is necessarily a negative thing; the mere act of coining “walking simulators” ended up creating more of them as authors now had a way of hitting the right target audience who wanted more of that kind of experience.) We’re still in the age where people have tried all sorts of adventure-roguelikes — with randomizing of elements including the map — but adventures have never been fully comfortable with randomization. I find the quote also interesting in that Farley had a random element in Magic Mountain (the lizard); perhaps this was something he discarded after experimentation, but why including it in the ZX Spectrum version of the game then?

All this is a funny segue since we’re about to hit a game with heavy randomization, the sequel to Madness and the Minotaur, which remains one of the most difficult games I’ve played due to its logistics and tricky map. Will it murder me as much as its predecessor?

Here we embark on the final part of the trilogy from the ZX81 Adventure Tape 1 as published by Phipps Associates and written by Mike Farley (see previously: Greedy Gulch, Pharaoh’s Tomb). The collection of three games was based on the Trevor Toms system used in The City of Alzan. The Toms system itself was based off the code in a August 1980 issue of Practical Computing. Additionally, Farley was an admirer of the Artic games, again based off the August 1980 issue (derived directly).

The package served as an advertisement of sorts for both the ZX81 Pocket Book and the make-your-own-adventure system that gets mentioned within, as the instructions include a sample from City of Alzan as well as ordering information (book for £5.95, accompanying cassette £5.00).

132 PAGES OF GAMES, USEFUL SUBROUTINES, ARTICLES ON EFFICIENT PROGRAMMING, USING MACHINE CODE, USING THE TIMER, HOW TO CREATE ADVENTURES PLUS MUCH MORE.

The games were republished in 1983 individually for ZX Spectrum. With Magic Mountain — for reasons you’ll discover — I decided to play both versions, meaning I gritted my teeth and make it through the screen-clear-as-you-type interface on ZX81. I’m stuck at the same part in both versions. I might normally just bust out hints now, but the nature of where I’m stuck involves a “crossword clue” (maybe) which lends itself to crowdsourcing. That is, assuming you aren’t reading my archive, I’m stopping at a point where you, the one reading this might now, might be able to figure out what to do next.

The three-game ZX81 collection was also republished in 1983 with a new cover, as shown. Via zx81stuff.

Our goal is not to collect a hoard of treasure but rather to find the Scrolls of Wisdom on Magic Mountain. Maybe they’re the Four Vedas. Score is given by progress rather than by placing treasures back at the starting room.

Rather oddly, the directions state the possible directions are north, south, east, west, and down. No up.

The ZX81 version of the game starts with

I AM AT THE FOOT OF A MOUNTAIN
PATHS GO EAST WEST AND DOWN

and you might notice the ZX Spectrum version does not say anything about the east and west exit. I’ve been needing to test exits on the revised version but never on the ZX81 one (although to be fair, on Pharaoh’s Tomb, the extra CLIMB SLOPE at the start was just as secret there as on the ZX Spectrum version of the game).

All this is to say: it’s easier to map out the ZX81 version, not only because of the issue above but also because there’s a maze right away and the player doesn’t have to wait for the graphics to slowly redraw at every step.

Red-marked exits go to the red-marked Maze room. The blue north exit off Edge of Fissure is on the ZX Spectrum version of the game; the ZX81 map just has the exit from that room going to the west.

Prior to the maze let’s take the starting east-west chunk. From the far west is a “cave entrance” and no way I can find to enter (ENTER CAVE, IN, GO IN CAVE, etc.)

The casket is a “box” in the ZX81 version and OPEN BOX / OPEN CASKET doesn’t work.

Just to the east is a room with a steel door that appears to be locked. At least here I don’t feel like I’m missing a parser trick.

Note that the east/west exits are given here. The inconsistency is quite frustrating.

One more step goes to the starting room which you’ve already seen, and then on the far right there’s a rope just out of reach along with some soft shoes. I’ll give the ZX81 screen this time:

I think it’s possible this is simply showing action in medias res. That is, we are supposed to assume the rope was used in a prior attempt (either by the current protagonist, or a prior adventurer). The back of the ZX Spectrum version of the game reinforces this:

An out-of-reach rope above a rock fissure is the only way into this Magic Mountain — or is it? Rumour has it that there are vast stores of treasure inside, but legends also tell of huge poisonous spiders, lizards and magic at work — you’ll need more than just cunning to come out of this in one piece! An Adventure which uses split-screen graphic pictures and scrolling text window, and machine coded English command line scanner for fast word recognition.

Heading back to the start and going down leads to a “large cave” with a quill pen as a dwarf selling scythes:

The fortune telling got added for the ZX Spectrum version.

Past that is the maze already mapped above; note that it follows the same “sinkhole” pattern where most wrong exits funnel back to the start. This has the specific effect of making it harder to get to the exit randomly, with the side effect of feeling unrealistic.

At the last step of the maze before looping back to the dwarf, you can go down instead of n/s/e/w to find a hidden cave.

This is the part where I am truly and completely stuck and appeal to y’all reading this right now. The carpet can’t be taken, so it seems like the intent is to fly away with it on the spot, but the obvious commands (like FLY CARPET) get nothing. The ZX Spectrum version of the game doesn’t even provide any guidance with HELP.

The ZX81 version of the game, on the other hand, does!

I suspect this might be an intentional guess-the-phrasing puzzle rather than an accidental we-left-out-tons-of-synonyms one. (See for comparison: riding the camel from The Sands of Egypt.)

BOOK THAT TO “WHERE”

The clue might be literally cryptic, as in “cryptic crossword” of the kind common in the UK. That’s at least how the review from the May 1982 issue of Sinclair User refers to things. It did occur to me that the highlight on HAT was referring to the wizard’s hat from the opening room, but that hasn’t helped me in my tussle vs. the parser. Any recommendations are welcome!

Via eBay.