Archive for the ‘masquerade’ Tag
(Prior posts here.)
The line between “tight, difficult puzzle box” and “impossible puzzles” is fine enough that making a good difficult adventure is one of the tightest of high-wire acts in all of game design. Every puzzle — in the standard formulation at least — is bespoke and potentially a disaster. Combine that with the general lack of beta-testing in the early ’80s and a gem that remains super difficult is rare indeed.
So when Masquerade fell down hard near the end, well, at least I had sympathy. There were still some clever moments, though–
Map from the FM-77 version, via Mobygames.
–so to kick off the pain right away, let’s return to the popcorn I received by spending a dollar, and fed to the bird.
From this point I had softlocked. Now, it wasn’t the mere existence of softlocks that was a problem — I had ample forewarning and it is an intentional style — but rather, the popcorn had something concealed in it, which you can find if you SEARCH POPCORN.
I had mostly given up on SEARCH as a verb, as it only worked on the body beforehand, but also wouldn’t the bird leave the badge behind? Or at least it would be very obvious something went horribly wrong upon eating the large piece of metal?
With the badge I could breathe a bit easier, as I could a.) go in and out of the zoo freely and b.) get into the office, where as predicted, I could turn off the switch to the electric fence.
Inside the electric fence area I found a grate near some grass (more on that in a second)…
and a construction area.
There was a helmet back in the theater that served as protection (never mind it’s a safari helmet, not a construction one) and hence I was able to retrieve a hammer and some dynamite.
I also discovered by trying to juggle inventory in this area — and it will become important later — is that if you drop off some items, they will disappear as you see something furry run by.
The hammer does not pass through the electric fence, though (too big to carry) meaning it had more immediate use. Specifically, you can use it to smash open the grate.
(The magic button works too, but you need to keep one of the uses. Just as a reminder, it was used once to get in the trapdoor, but it hasn’t been used since; I used it to open a gorilla cage but that was speculative.)
This leads back down to the tunnels, which was interesting since I didn’t have anything in particular I needed to do down there.
The reason for a second visit (there’s going to be a third!) is to apply the hint from the note:
IF YOU’RE REALLY SHARP, YOU’LL TAKE A SHORT CUT AROUND THE BLOCK!
Specifically, now that the theater is open, the player has access to a RAZOR. And the razor can be taken back to the balsa block of wood in order to cut it.
I don’t think this is a terrible puzzle — the note is explicit about what to do — but it does mean from this point the elements of the game are best not thought of “realistically” (why would we get a note from the bad guys on how to defeat the bad guys)?
Moving on, what use does a toothpick have?
Picking a lock, with a wooden toothpick? Suuuuuuuure. (It’s easy after the fact to say “well just don’t think of it realistically, but coming up with the puzzle solution is required before doing it!)
I still had the weird mystery of the cage to work out. I did find out a new way to kill the gorilla by accident. I was messing around with the slot at Mr. Topp’s (to look for other potential objects that might cause a reaction) when I found out the bra had a curious message:
Some more experimentation revealed the message didn’t have to do with the slot at all, but rather having the rock also being held. With both rock and bra in hand either INSERT ROCK or INSERT BRA forms a makeshift sling, so SLING GORILLA because an alternate method of doing away with the animal.
…yet, I still didn’t know why I was doing this? And here I was truly and completely stuck and needed to check hints.
First off, I needed the bird for some other purpose other than scaring off; furthermore, I needed the snake for something so scaring it off was bad besides. What I had missed was SEARCH WEED or SEARCH GRASS or SEARCH FIELD north of the electric fence. No, that’s no explicitly a noun mentioned in the main text, unlike every other puzzle in the game, it’s a noun from the title of the room.
grrrrr
With the glove you can safely grab the rock and the snake.
With the bird in hand, you can then: go in the cage and get trapped, drop the bird who will fly out, get a match, and come back…
…and then drop the dynamite and light it causing a hole to appear.
This could have yielded to a “structural solving” moment insofar as there is nothing to do in the cage, therefore there must be something to do, so might as well try seeing if the bird will do something special that happens nowhere else. Mostly I was just grouchy. The puzzle after is kind of interesting but pulls yet another absurdity:
Specifically, there’s a rat with an earring, and an elevator just past. To deal with the rat, you drop off the snake…
…but the elevator is a little trickier. Assuming you picked the lock rather than used the magic button, there should be a magic button use left, but for some strange reason it “drains” if you walk by a generator. It is unclear that this is happening and I’ve never deciphered why.
The draining doesn’t even happen in this room, it is the room right after with the rat in it.
However, the upshot is that you are stuck if you’ve carried the button down here. Do you remember the furry stealing thing? That’s the rat. You’re supposed to drop the button off at the construction zone, and then somehow the rat can take it safely to the elevator without it being drained, and that means there will be a use left over that you can use on the elevator.
Believe it or not, we’re essentially at the end of the game. There are no new lingering threads. Everything from the zoo is taken care of, but what do we have that works on Mr. Topp? This is one of the puzzles I’m sure someone got by accident but I don’t know how you’d do it intentionally. You have to wear every wearable item in the game, all of them at once. This reaches your max inventory limit.
Then you go in to see Mr. Topp.
I’d definitely say the game vaulted over “difficult” into “just nonsense”. I always try to be careful using words like “moon logic”, which I think get over-used in the adventure community; it really is useful and helpful to distinguish between nonsense and just plain hard. I’m fine with something esoteric like the balsa wood toothpick, and at least there was a sort of halfway-sense to picking a lock with a toothpick. The endgame here was a case where the player is prompting to do something with no clues whatsoever. Just to be clear, with one item missing, all you see is the “imposter” message. There is no indication or comment on your clothing or the amount you’re wearing.
Before leaving here, some historical clarifications, thanks to A2Can:
Both the copies of the text game and the prototype-graphical game (which I have now) are from the founder of Phoenix Software himself, Ron Unrath. Despite my getting stuck on the text game (I still think there’s a way to get a key…) it might be “done”; the graphical version definitely is not. It isn’t “programmer art” then, it is sincerely intended as “temp art”.
Interestingly enough, the object art is in already, and seems to be identical to the final game. That means the pictures of objects are by Dale Johnson, not by Rick Incrocci!
If I had to rank the games so far, I’d put Palace in Thunderland on top, a genuinely solvable game that just happens to be enormously hard, followed by this game, with Mad Venture below. I certainly thought the atmosphere in Masquerade was fantastic, but having a couple nonsense puzzles was enough to ruin sticking the landing. While I’m describing things quickly, each moment of stuck-ness represents a long time of me struggling in the wrong direction.
We’ve got one Dale Johnson game left to go, although this one has him teamed up with yet another person, Dav Holle, and allegedly lightens up heavily on the difficulty. Sometimes an experienced author can produce their best work when they try to write something “easy” (at least, it baselines down to what a more modern game would be like, with less softlocking) so I’m definitely looking forward to that! But first we have another visit across the pond with a publisher we haven’t visited yet (which later published one of the most famous ZX Spectrum games ever made), followed by a return to Japan.
(Prior posts here.)
Well, I’m geographically close to the end. With this game that might mean I’m still far away.
From the Japanese FM 77 AV version of the cover, via Mobygames.
As a bit of a mental break I decided to test out the text version of the game. It seems fairly similar except it is missing the key from MOVE BODY at the beginning, meaning I can’t open the suitcase, meaning I can’t get at the mask and the magic button. Since the button allows travel into the tunnels I was stuck earlier than the other version of the game. Given how complete everything else feels I think it’s just a matter of the puzzle getting changed.
Four changes of note, though:
1.) the player shoots the assassin dead with six shots rather than knocking him out; that’s better at explaining why the gun is empty at the start
2.) the telegram is slightly less nebulous
IT READS: “DISREGARD “ZILCH”
NEW WORD IS “ZORCH”.
P.S. – BOMB SET FOR 6:15 –
GET OUT OF THE HOTEL BEFORE THEN!
that is, ZILCH is simply the old password, superceded by ZORCH, although I’m curious on the whole reason for the bomb in a plot sense, since my original assumption was the assassin himself planted the bomb, otherwise, why have him go there in the first place?
3.) the beggar at the zoo explicitly is asking for treasure
4.) the note from the popcorn vendor is very different
Point 3 turned out to be helpful. I was ready to approach the beggar and just give each and every one of my inventory items to see if any would get a reaction, but since I knew the original game had him ask for treasure, I tried the LEWIS CARROLL book.
The dollar can then be used to buy the popcorn. I already had in mind to take the popcorn to the bird to feed it, and while it consumed the popcorn happily, there was no other visible change. Still, I decided the bird + snake combo from Adventure was worth another try:
This leaves behind the rock and a ticket. The ticket is for the movie theater.
The theater just has the lobby, a bathroom…
…and the lair of Mr. Topp.
The slit ended up falling into what I call a plot-dependent puzzle. This is a puzzle where the solving of it involves applying some information obtained by paying attention to the plot. Many adventure game puzzles are not plot dependent and if you port the exact same items over but with a different scenario nothing gets affected. (Realizing what the Dungeon Master wants in Zork III is plot-dependent; getting by the grues in the dark room is not. While the grue section creates a memorable plot event, it could easily have been tossed in Zork I with no changes, whereas realizing the motivations of the Dungeon Master requires transplanting essentially the entire plot of Zork III.)
I think the most spectacular variant of this is the central puzzle in Spider and Web, where you have to understand where the entire plot structure of the game was leading. Here is a similar moment. I’d been bouncing around more or less trying to get past the next obstacle, but I realized up to this point I had substituted for and was pretending to be the assassin; that was the masquerade of the title. That is, the assassin is summoned via a telegram and isn’t “in the club” yet; we’ve tracked the assassin and either killed or knocked him out depending on what universe we’re in, then not only took his mask and used it but gave his password out, followed by giving another password and receiving the flower to let the criminal organization know we were “safe” (even if we looked like a detective otherwise!)
Hence I deduced what could go in the slot was the assassin’s business card.
Plot-dependent puzzles tend to be extremely satisfying (and unique for adventure games!) This only has the flaw that it is quite possible to brute force through (just test every item in the game on the slot and eventually you’ll get through) so it isn’t like the Zork III or Spider and Web instances where you can’t get through via luck.
The ruse falls apart if you try to go in.
So the question here is: does this mean I need another “disguise element” so Mr. Topp is off guard? (Maybe literally take the assassin’s face like in Asylum II?) Or does this mean my disguise is now “complete” and I need armor and/or an appropriate weapon?
Whatever is going on, I’ve got a few loose threads left. I still never found any method of surviving the elevator or reaching the grates in the tunnels. I’ve managed to kill the gorilla by throwing him the flower (!) but that doesn’t seem to have any use.
You can then use the magic button to safely enter but the cage gets locked behind you, and there’s no new items or the like.
You can, weirdly, throw the rock in the monkey house and it will “roll under the gorilla” as opposed to flying off like it does everywhere else, but I have found nothing useful come from this.
I haven’t gotten into the office of the zoo yet either — still getting stopped by sercurity. My suspicion is there’s some control in the office that turns off the electric fence, revealing another route.
Rather more importantly, I haven’t found any real “alternate solutions”. Remember, part of the setup on this game (according to the ADVENTURER from the text version) is that you can use up items in “wrong ways” to solve puzzles in different ways than the real route. That doesn’t mean for sure I’m doing things wrong — maybe I lucked out! — but I still nevertheless am missing a chunk of content for the game.
Winning post either next time or four posts from now, who knows.
I’ve opened a new area, but it just made things more rather than less puzzling.
First, a revision of something I previously said: I mentioned that when wearing the mask, that the mysterious figure following would eventually pick up the trail anyway. I thought it was a time-based thing, but rather, it is location based:
While in the area marked blue (“City Streets” to “Zoo Midway”) you are safe while wearing the mask. In the red area the figure appears, and you have a random chance of dying to a knife.
Consequently, I made a structural solving decision: I figured that in the “winning run” of the game it was intended for the player to be “safe”, that is, there is no point (unlike Adventure 430) where you can do everything right and still die. This was consistent with the prior games by the author; what this meant is I needed to ignore everything in the red until I had the means to be safe there as well.
(More on structural solving here: roughly, it involves solving puzzles by making deductions about the intended flow of the game.)
There was one bit of hintage at least (although not progress) from the red area. I tested the mysterious box with a button everywhere. It gives a squealing noise twice, and any further button presses there’s just a “click”. That suggests a resource is being used up that only works twice. The special power I discovered at the “monkey house”.
Specifically, pushing the button caused the cage to open. It seems to be a “open the locked door” device. This discovery became important soon after.
Turning back to the initial area, I combed over for things I had missed. One thing I’m sheepish about missing, in that I wrote down the words some things may need to be examined over twice, is that at the body at the start you need to SEARCH twice. The second time you get a telegram.
I wasn’t sure at the time how to interpret this, but I decided — in the spirit of combing over everything very carefully — to hang out at the telephone a little. I didn’t have anyone to call, but ANSWER PHONE gave the message NO ONE IS ON THE LINE. This suggested to me perhaps there would be some moment the line would would be used. The bomb goes off at 6:15, and at 6:09 the phone rings:
Answering the phone has someone ask “what’s the woid”? I figured it had to be one of the telegram words.
ZILCH (“OUT”) gives the password Z3X, and ZORCH (“IN”) gives the password W3E. I think this is meant to be an “are you out or are you in (the gang)” question. Saying Z3X (that is, picking “OUT”) to the popcorn seller gets a NOTE
BEWARE OF THE SQUEALER! IF YOU’RE REALLY SHARP, YOU’LL TAKE A SHORT CUT AROUND THE BLOCK!
and saying W3E gets both the note and a flower, which you are told to wear.
Once you have the flower on you are safe in the red zone on the map, so that’s clearly the better choice. (Incidentally, the popcorn vendor doesn’t respond to either word unless you’ve been through the phone call scene, but it makes sense that he hasn’t been told to expect a code word signal yet.)
I still suspected I wasn’t done with the hotel yet. While you have enough time to leave immediately after the phone call, I wondered what would happen if I waited until the explosion (“SQUEAL BOMB”) from the telegram.
The bomb starts giving the same squeal that my door-opening gizmo gives when I push the button. What if I push it when the bomb is squealing too?
This drops you down a secret trapdoor! Note that this doesn’t work early: You have to hit the button right when the bomb is about to explode.
This is the previously-mentioned brand new area I found.
This is a relatively standard maze, except:
a.) there’s a grate where you land that is unreachable, and a grate in another spot, also unreachable; I don’t know if they’re just for flavor or part of a puzzle, but knowing the author, we need to reach at least one of the grates
b.) there’s a book (LE WIS CAR ROLL) and a bra (MODEL 36EE-2-BBL) just lying around
The Braille has to be a hint, right?
c.) there’s a pair of double doors where the magic button works; however, trying to step inside and you just drop down an elevator shaft
d.) there’s a wood block under a gap in the ceiling; you can move the block to reveal a corkscrew, which you can jam into the block as a sort of stepstool in order to reach the ceiling and get out of the whole complex
This of course could be the “block” referenced in the note the popcorn vendor dropped, but I don’t know how to apply the information.
Climbing up is a one-way trip as far as I can tell, so if there’s a way to safely get in the elevator it needs to be done before this exit.
I’m still very stuck; I guess the model number might be some new key-code and the book might be as well, but I’m making no progress on any of the obstacles I now am blocked by with either. That’d be the movie theater ($5 entry), the electrified fence, the office at the zoo (stopped by security), the snake with rock (can’t pick up the rock without dying), and the gorilla (who as shown earlier, you can free with the magic button, but then he just kills you).
Still, everything is coded very tightly and I don’t feel like I’m stuck because of jank programming, so I’m happy to keep whacking at the puzzles and hoping something falls out.
From Mobygames.
We’ve so far seen two games by Dale Johnson, Mad Venture (with Christine Johnson) and Palace in Thunderland (with Ken Rose). In Mad Venture there was an item that mentioned Palace, and in Palace there was an item that mentioned Mystery in Madness, Dale Johnson’s third game.
>READ BOOK
IT READS, “LOOK FOR THE NEXT ATTRACTION, MYSTERY IN MADNESS” AT YOUR LOCAL COMPUTER STORES SOON!”
The game never was finished as Mystery in Madness, but there was a 1982 version called Mission in Madness.
This was followed by another 1982 version called Madsquerade, which added what I might call “programmer art” to the game.
From A2Can’s Twitter feed.
Neither of these versions are that famous, and in fact I have no access to the early graphical version. What I do have access to is the version from 1983 called Masquerade (eventually dropping the “mad” bit altogether) as published by Phoenix Software. It includes new art by a name that might be familiar.
Yes, that’s the same Rick Incrocci who did Lucifer’s Realm.
Back in ’82 I bought my first Texas Instrument Computer – then an Apple II. I fell in love with computers and things just started happening. I had been a cartoon illustrator for many years prior – so making the move to computer graphics was no big deal (I bought two very expensive graphics tablets that Apple used to make – back then, they were about $800 each). I was doing computer graphics for a few Chicagoland educational houses – then places like Phoenix and Penguin Software just started calling me out of the blue. It was a small world back then – just a few computer artists in Chicagoland and a lot of small software companies that actually worked out of their homes. Not any more.
— Quoting Incrocci from the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities
I wish could explain exactly the history sequence here, but it is still a little mysterious. Dale Johnson died in 1999 so nobody can ask him. I especially don’t know where or how the earlier two versions surfaced — were they published? I haven’t found any ads indicating such, and Mad Venture and Palace in Thunderland had both fairly prominent spreads. Maybe they were just given out at the Northern Illinois Apple Users Group, or even shown off without distribution? Everyone in the Chicago area knew each other, so at least it isn’t shocking that Madsquerade landed into the hands of Phoenix for publishing.
I’m going to play the Incrocci version but I may refer back to the text game sometimes, especially if the puzzles start to get gnarly; perhaps there will be a different description or puzzle sequence that will help decipher what’s going on in the 1983 version of the game.
By “everyone seems to know”, there later was a French version called Marmelade, which is the sort of thing that can only happen if your game gets widespread; additionally, it made the charts at Softalk. Still, the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities, who got their numbers from Ron Unrath, founder of Phoenix Software, gives an estimate of 1500 copies sold. 1500 is not huge even for that era, but I suspect widespread piracy; Paul Berker (of the prior Phoenix games Birth of the Phoenix and Adventure in Time) mentions at “pirate parties” most people he bumped into at Apple II meetings knew about his games but hadn’t bought them.
Masquerade has our hero a detective on the hunt for the crime lord Mr. Topp. In both of the early versions the intro reads:
YOU’VE BEEN TRACKING A NOTORIOUS HIT MAN FOR WEEKS. YOUR MISSION IS TO FIND THE “TOP MAN” IN THE ORGANIZATION AND DO AWAY WITH CRIME!
For the 1983 version:
YOU’VE BEEN TRACKING A NOTORIOUS HIT MAN FOR WEEKS. YOU TRAIL HIM TO A SEEDY HOTEL ROOM, BREAK IN, AND WITH THE BUTT END OF YOUR TRUSTY .44 MAGNUM, KNOCK HIM COLD. THIS COULD BE THE LEAD YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR.
This makes it a little clearer what’s going on at the start:
That is, we weren’t hanging out in a hotel room and got ambushed; we did the ambushing. Searching the body reveals a wallet with one (1) dollar and a business card.
Ivan Tupickemoff — Professional Assassin — Hours by Appointment
Plot-wise I’d think we’d want the assassin awake for interrogation, but maybe things went a bit wrong. Perhaps we need to wake him up as part of the game (there’s a tricky aspect to that you’ll see in a moment).
Moving the body reveals a key (note: SEARCH and MOVE revealed different things — this also is probably a game where you need to SEARCH multiple times). The key unlocks the briefcase which has a mask and mysterious box that gives a high-pitched squealing sound; I have yet to find a use for the latter.
Just outside the hotel room is a phone booth with a bomb. The bomb is set to explode at 6:15 exactly. In addition to the gun we start with a watch indicating that’s about an hour away.
Just as a test, I went outside the hotel and waited, and you can indeed witness demolition followed by rubble. Since no items seem to result, this seems to be more of a general time limit we have to worry about than a return-later style puzzle.
Before moving on to town, I want to mention one difference in the text-only version of the game. There’s a meta-conversation where there’s a room in the hotel with an adventurer.
YOU ARE IN A PRIVATE HOTEL ROOM
EXITS: EAST
OBJECTS: ADVENTURER. APPLE.
>LOOK ADVENTURER
HE IS EXHAUSTED. HE MUTTERS, “AT LAST I FOUND THE TOP MAN, BUT, AS USUAL, GOT KILLED. LET’S SEE, THAT’S ABOUT 17 DIFFERENT WAYS I MANAGED TO KILL MYSELF. (GASP, COUGH!) THE PUZZLES SEEMED SO EASY AT FIRST, BUT THEN I REALIZED THAT THERE WERE MULTIPLE SOLUTIONS AND ONLY ONE IS RIGHT. BUT WHICH ONE…”
This is explicitly discussing up front one of the game’s patterns, which is that you can solve puzzles in a “wrong way” using up an item that’s needed for later. I know one bit where I’ve likely already hit this. I’ve never seen the “main text” of a game — as opposed to hints from the game’s manual — explicitly call out one of the gameplay patterns early like this.
(Aside: is there a better term than “gameplay patterns” here? That’s all I’ve been using in the past but I’d love a term that implies “things that aren’t true about all text adventures generally, but just about some games in particular, and they can take some work on the player’s part to extract out and might even be subconscious tendencies of the author they aren’t aware of”.)
Moving on past the hotel room to the main town, there’s not any explicit investigating going on: rather, you are being followed.
The “mysterious figure” who is watching you shows up in the graphical game in the lower left corner as a shadow. Once the figure is following it has a random chance of throwing a knife and killing you outright like one of the dwarves from Crowther/Woods Adventure. You might think to use your gun to just shoot the person, but alas, your gun has no bullets.
There is a way to forestall the figure appearing for a while: wear the mask. The figure normally appears immediately upon leaving the hotel area, but the appearance is delayed at least slightly if you’ve got the mask on.
Here’s the map of the town I have so far:
Due to knives it took a couple passes through to see everything. There’s a movie theater early that wants $5 for entry (only a dollar to start from the assassin’s wallet, alas) and there’s a zoo that wants $1 for entry.
While paying the $1 works for the Zoo, there’s a popcorn seller immediately inside who wants $1, so I suspect you might get in the Zoo via a different route and save the dollar for popcorn.
Other scenes in the zoo: a fence that’s electrified and will kill you if you climb it, a building with security that will kill you if you try to go in, and a snake by a rock that will kill you if you pick up the rock.
Another part of the zoo has a bird, but if you try to take the bird and throw it at the snake (copying the Original Adventure solution) it just flies away.
Finally there’s a “beggar” and a “monkey house” I’ve done nothing yet with.
This one’s going to be tricky, I’m sure. I’m not just basing this on the previous Dale Johnson games (Alice in Thunderland was delightful but absolutely personified tough-as-nails puzzlebox) but the fact there was a contest with $1000 for a solution to the game, invoking the same shenanigans as various UK companies. The contest was eventually won and paid out but after Phoenix already got sold to another company (American Eagle) for reasons I’ll save for another time.
Renga in Blue 