Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

I have won the game, by some relativistic value of “won” — I needed to check the walkthrough a few times due to communication issues, but also one wildly unfair spot.

I will try my best to convey first what any future potential players might need to have a better chance before getting deep into spoilers. Before any of that, a little more detail on how the game was discovered:

Specifically, this happened on the Sinclair ZX World forums. A user named “willinliv” posted about a set of his father’s collection of “about 30” ZX81 tapes, some of them commercial and some of them hand-made.

One of the tapes from the collection, “GMSave”.

Our tape of particular interest was marked “Jeux 16k” (Games 16k).

I have been trying to get a better capture of the tape ‘Jeux 16k’, which seems to be a collection of software that my Dad traded with a ‘pen pal’ from France. Some of these are pirated copies of mainstream releases but some I kind find any info about or copies online. Unfortunately there are audio drop-outs recorded into the tape, particularly on Side B, and also my expertise is minimal.

Nightmare House was on the side B and did suffer damage. As XavSnap writes…

The wav file is broken and i had to rebuild the Basic file in binary (Bits rotations, bad basic length…).

…also pointing out the source code was explicitly based on the Trevor Toms code.

All objects, conditions and moves are located in the VARs memory segment, but this part don’t match in the P file [that’s the file used by the emulator]

After some significant work after the code was reconstructed. This is important in that it is faintly possible one of the odd behaviors you are about to see was related to the reconstruction, but after thorough enough testing I don’t think so: the game is really meant to be very linear with lots of death options.

If you plan on playing the game yourself, note that:

a.) On the two occasions where there are multiple things — the buttons on the recorder and the three trains — you’re supposed to refer to them by digit. So PUSH 1 or PUSH 2 or ENTER 1 and so forth.

b.) INSERT is used for both putting a thing in another thing as well as for typing.

c.) The way to wait is NOTHING. This might seem rather cryptic from the Apple version which just says “Command?” but the original more explicitly asks “what do you do?” As a conversational response, NOTHING (RIEN) makes sense, but I’ve almost never seen this before in an adventure game, where quite typically there’s an implicit “I WANT TO…” placed before the command; this gets fiddled with on rare occasion (DON’T PANIC from Hitchhiker’s Guide, for instance). The “almost” never is because this command also shows up in Folibus, which I think makes it pretty clear the author was deriving their code directly from Brégeon’s magazine article rather than from the Trevor Toms book.

With that out of the way, here’s the entire map.

Not large, yet somehow it manages many many ways to die. From where I left off last time, I had trouble with an acid bottle (just ignore it) and some trains. As I hinted at earlier, you’re supposed to ENTER one of them; trains 1 and 3 kill you (either by explosion or electrocution). This is hinted at in the previous room, which had an unplugged speaker; if you PLUG SOCKET (not the speaker, and no, the socket isn’t in the room description, even in the French version) you’ll get a hint about “always taking the second”.

With ENTER 2 you enter into darkness and where I got stuck again:

The train here has stopped in darkness. You can’t go any of the cardinal directions, and going down kills you (falling down). This is the moment where you need to do NOTHING.

The train moves along farther and ejects you into the room seen above. There is a beam going from north to south (the little squares in a column), an “electronic eye” next to a door to the west, a “black box”, and exits otherwise to the north and south. Trying to exit either way — at least my first time through — disintegrated me. I checked the verb list and there was nothing along the lines of sliding under the beam or jumping over it (like I did recently in the German game Geheimagent XP-05).

This was the part that I wasn’t stuck on due to the parser, but just being generally unfair. At the very start, there were some tools and a laser gun; you’re not supposed to pick up the gun.

That’s the only difference! You can’t even drop the gun once you’ve arrived at the beam room, you have to have left it behind. There is no indication that the weapon is the issue.

From here, you can go north into a room that looks fairly tantalizing, which has a “hole with a riveted ladder”, and a “window overlooking the sea with a lever”.

You’re supposed to ignore both those things (unless you want to die) and instead pick up the bottle (GOURDE) and cassette (CASSETTE). The bottle can be drunk but there’s a fun death later if you don’t drink it so let’s save that, and take the cassette back to the player at the intersection.

Putting the cassette in the player and using PUSH 2 (again I had to look up the interaction mode here) causes the previously-closed door to the west to open.

Inside is a lamp and a door with a keypad.

There’s also UNE MACHINE QUI RONRONNE, where “ronronne” can be either purring or a hum. I think purring is funnier.

You can’t open the door yet, but you can grab the lamp, turn it on, and jump back on the 2nd train. You will see a code for the keypad in the darkness.

It doesn’t give an explicit number, it just says there is one.

Circling back to the intersection you can then INSERT CODE (or rather, INTRODUIRE CODE) and reach the final room of the game.

There’s a mummy, a lever, a button, and a screen; there’s also a “controller” (or as the Apple game says, “stick”) to the west. The lever, button, and screen are all tantalizing, but again, death maze: push the button and the mummy wakes up and murders you.

If you haven’t drunk the bottle before entering:

You catch the plague. You die.

If you are holding the black box from the room with the beam.

The bomb explodes. You too.

You should ignore everything except for the stick, and pull it:

x

This gives the message

UNE TRAPPE S’OURVRE

VOUS VOUS RETROUVEZ DEHORS. VOUS AVEZ GAGNE.

which translates to

A TRAPDOOR OPENS

YOU FIND YOURSELF OUTSIDE. YOU HAVE WON.

I do want to emphasize that this exact style is fairly specific; we’ve had plenty of games with multiple options to die, but the sheer overwhelming preponderance of death-options here is high enough to form its own mood, akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure where more than half the options lead to a BAD END.

Be an Interplanetary Spy: The Red Rocket, from 1985. Source.

Eventually in 1983 we’ll reach The Manor of Dr. Genius for the Oric, by a known company (Loriciels) but with the same general flavor as Folibus.

We’re back in France with this game; the most relevant prior game to read about is La maison du professeur Folibus.

As observed in my posts on Folibus, the ZX81 had a stronger impact in France than in its country of origin (the UK); while the competition landscape was one likely factor, a major one was the French SECAM format for televisions worked with the UK’s hardware in black and white (ZX81) but was a pain for color (ZX Spectrum). (SECAM’s main difference from PAL and NTSC is that PAL and NTSC have color signals sent by amplitude modulation — how “tall” the electromagnetic waves are — whereas SECAM uses frequency modulation — the “width” of the waves.)

This ramification of this was that the French-translated version of the The ZX81 Pocket Book by Trevor Toms had more an impact than the English original, and La maison du professeur Folibus became the “origin adventure” of France even though it literally wasn’t the first.

Interior of a French ZX81 box, via Sinclair Collection Site; the two tapes came with the set.

Just like how Omotesando’s early status led to further Japanese adventures in building break-ins, the “death-maze house” design of Folibus had a little cloning. By death-maze I am not just meaning a game with lots of ways to die (like, say, Time Zone) but rather that the plot follows a restricted path where one action is right and most others lead to death.

Today’s game is such a clone, and we don’t have a year or even an author.

Via the ZX81 France Facebook group. See the fourth game in column B.

It was rescued by French ZX81 enthusiast XavSnap off an old tape and may have been a “private game” originally meant for family and friends. It seems extremely likely is was made somewhere within a year of Folibus but there’s no way to be certain.

Plot: the protagonist has been kidnapped by a maniac and put in a house full of traps.

The title, as shown above, is Cauchemard-House (Nightmare-House) so that’s what I’m using, but the “d” is a typo; when the good folks at Brutal Deluxe Software ported the game recently to Apple II they not only added an English version, they also changed the title to Cauchemar House.

While this is a Folibus offshoot, there’s one innovation straight away:

That’s a top down view! That’s us (the “o”) with two arms (“(” and “)”). The text just says

YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY ROOM

THERE’S ALSO:
– LASER GUN
– TOOLS

WHAT DO YOU DO?

Scooping up the items and heading north, er, NORD:

No death yet! But soon. There’s no “room description” (I suppose the image is the description.)

THERE IS AN UNPLUGGED SPEAKER
A TROLL APPEARS.
TO THE EAST THERE IS A DOOR WITH A TAPE RECORDER WITH TWO BUTTONS AND TO THE SOUTH THERE IS A RED BUTTON

THERE’S ALSO:
– SUIT

Trying to go NORD results in

UNE FLECHE VOUS TRAVERSE

that is, “an arrow goes through you”; the same result happens in any other direction (other than west, where you just get stopped). You can push the button and the game says it’s just a “projection”; push it again and then the arrows stop happening, although only east is available.

This is a mini train station with three wagons, and an acid flask. Guess what happens if you pick up the acid?

The bottle was leaking, your hands are eaten away, you immediately catch leprosy (LA LEPRE).

For a game to be a death maze it needs death with this kind of frequency. Catching leprosy somehow from a flask of acid is optional.

And … now I’m stuck because of the parser. I’ve been alternating between the French ZX81 version and the translated Apple version (both are on Github) and I haven’t been able to refer to any of the wagons, and I’m still puzzled by the room with the tape recorder (it refers to the recorder having buttons, but I haven’t been able to press either). I also can’t find a way to refer to the troll (although the troll is gone if you go in the wagon room and then come back).

There’s a walkthrough provided by the Apple version so I can certainly muscle through but I’d like to try to puzzle things out a bit longer. While I suspect this is more a parser battle than an object-based one, I’ll still take suggestions in the comments if anyone has one.