As promised, here is the next in the Scott Morgan series. (Previously: Haunted House.)
Here, we start at a ghost town and are meant to recover three treasures from a local mine. The ghost town is straightforward enough; nothing is blocked off.
You can grab a gun, twine, explosives, a backpack, a shovel, a mirror, and a bell just laying out in the open.
The bell is just for atmosphere. The registry book has the hint shown which will come up in just a moment.
The Saloon is a little more interesting. There’s a player piano with a knob you can turn to make music, and a ghost sitting at a bar.
This happens when you LOOK GHOST. I love the moment of meta and this is honestly the most memorable part of the Morgan games so far for me; they’ve mostly been robotic and could use more of this kind of humor.
Trying to head north in the mountains, you find an old hook, followed by the mine. The mine entrance is blocked by a bear who is described as “HUNGRY”.
It wasn’t too hard (given the inventory I had building up) to work out the game intended for me to go fishing at a lake on the far south of the map. It was a little harder to work out you could LOOK MINE to get another object (some poles) — for the most part, look has never applied to the location name in any of the previous Morgan games, it only applied to the objects.
With a pole, hook, and twine in hand, you can TIE TWINE / TO HOOK followed by TIE TWINE / TO POLE while at the lake, and then do the verb CAST in order to go fishing.
Yes, this is still the bespoke-phrases-only parser, and no, I did not figure out CAST on my own: I popped open the binary of the file and looked around for text phrases.
With this sort of game you could say I am playing against the technology, not against any kind of story.
Going into the mine itself, there’s *silver* to the west. (It needs to go into the backpack, you type INTO BACKPACK followed by SILVER, and no, there aren’t any directions in the game or even the manual about this syntax.) To the east there’s a dead end, where I was stuck for a long time. When you look at the explosives they say you can set them for 1 or 2 minutes. The right command is not SET EXPLOSIVES or DROP EXPLOSIVES or anything like that, you are just supposed to type out
1 MINUTE
and then wait and the explosion will happen. You don’t even need to drop the explosives! (Not like the game has a way to drop items, anyway.)
This leaves a BIG HOLE and some more exits. You can get *DIAMONDS* down one passage, a ladder down another, but otherwise the sticking point is a monster.
If you LOOK MONSTER you get turned into stone. Yes, somehow a medusa wandered into our Western adventure. You may recall from the inventory list we had a mirror, yet I haven’t been able to get the mirror to work. SHOW MIRROR is directly in the binary code, but it doesn’t work!
I suspect there’s a literal bug at this point preventing finishing the game. Looks like all I was missing was some gold past the monster which you use the ladder to get to, and then the message:
YOU ARE RICH!!! AND A WINNER
THANKS FOR PLAYING!
GET IN SEARCH OF THE FOUR
VEDAS FROM ASD&D TODAY!
I’ll call this a wrap. Incidentally, having Four Vedas as the next game in the “series” is kind of odd. Here’s the catalog with the order so far:
If we’re going from easier to harder, wouldn’t Stone Age (the last game marked Intermediate) be next? And why are the games not given in order in the catalog?
This may have all parsed as fairly simple to manage, but I did took a fair amount of psychic damage working out both the fishing and the exploding, so despite the intrinsic interest of a game based on Vedic religion, I’ll have to save the rest of the Morgan series for some other time.
Next up: Something that uses The Graphics Magician. Need to keep the Apple II fans from nodding off out there. Then there will be a couple more tiny games followed by the return of Level 9.
Renga in Blue 