While we’ve had games with excess verbs that don’t do anything in the game, this didn’t seem like the sort of game to do that. I might normally say such verbs “put space to waste”, but it isn’t necessarily a waste; Countdown to Doom at least accepted EAT and SWIM to let the player know they weren’t going to be doing this on an alien planet, and sometimes in a modern Inform game it comes off as restrictive and awkward not to be able to THROW something even if it turns out throwing isn’t useful.
Speaking of throwing, that is one verb (other than wait) that hasn’t been used yet! I had already found the axe worked last time and went through all the other objects in the game and found none of them wanted to be thrown: “I can’t throw (insert item here)”.
The message in the forest about TREES ARE RESERVED FOR COFFINS seems to be here to explain why CHOP only works on the thicket but not here.
So what could we throw an axe at? The locked door had resisted my attempts at violence with CHOP DOOR — which you think would be the right way to bust in (especially given the lack of being able to HIT / SMASH / etc. even though the player has a mallet) — but I hadn’t tried THROW AXE.
Not “moon logic” exactly but the game should have accepted some alternate hitting methods. Limited space on a 8K VIC-20, though!
The inside has a sharp stick and a spade.
We now have and mallet and a wooden cross in addition to a sharp stick, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any “stake a vampire” verb in the set; what’s going on here? You’ll see in a moment. To recap, we also have the magic word unused (OVYEZ) as well as the lamp and the gold coins.
The spade, as I suspected, goes over to the sunny field.
I was storing my items here because of the “Crusifix”.
DIG is a little hard to operate; you can’t DIG CRUSIFIX but rather need to DIG HOLE, at which point a pit will appear you can go in.
Going out requires the ladder, but be careful because the ladder follows similar rules to the rope and will collapse if you have too much in your inventory.
The tunnel leads to a “subterranean cavern” and a seeming dead-end…
…but the THROW AXE is useful again (at least this time throwing seems the most natural thing!) This opens up a cave and nearly the last part of the game.
I had the lamp lit by this point; I don’t know the exact threshold it is needed.
Nosferatu! If I hadn’t spent my time investigating my verb list beforehand, I would have spent a while here uselessly trying to stake the vampire; he’s active rather than fully asleep and if you don’t have the wooden cross, he “rises from the altar, and bites my neck!”
The stick and mallet are complete red herrings. (The presence of a red kipper earlier at least hinted at the possibility.) The right thing to do here is to use magic.
According to the author’s web page, this doesn’t kill Nosferatu, it just gets him out of the way.
We can then grab the Bloodstone and retreat (being careful to drop most everything but the Bloodstone to climb up the ladder without it breaking).
This still isn’t quite the end of the game. The gold coins come in handy, as well as the very last unused verb: wait. You can go over to the bus stop and wait for a bus, and then pay for a ride in gold (!!). I guess he didn’t need exact change.
The author seemed somewhat down on this game…
If all of this leaves you with the impression that I don’t think much of the game, I suppose that’s true. But I still regard it with affection because, well, I was fourteen. Cut me some slack.
…and yes, there were a fair number of irregularities I already pointed out. I enjoyed myself more than some of our other games marked “haunted house” just because it did feel incredibly earnest; also, the fact we were not here to defeat the big bad racked up a few points on my imaginary scoreboard. I will say I could see a player getting incredibly frustrated by the ending and the useless mallet and stake. Although it makes perfect sense to me in a narrative sense why they wouldn’t work, it still would be better a design to acknowledge attempts at using them (along with textual hints suggesting that they’ll never work). This would have made a better overarching theme — sometimes the goal shouldn’t be destruction — that would go along with what happened to the witch (who we didn’t have to beware at all).
Some questions to the author, since he’s been in the comments:
1. What was the logic behind the fake-out with the stick and mallet?
2. Which puzzles were from Myles Kelvin, in the previous co-written game? (Also, was it such that you feel like you should both be on the credits?) What elements carried over and what changed?
3. What happened to the “HIDDEN GROVE” from your original working map?
…we [Myles Kelvin and Mike Taylor] went together to a conference in Manchester organised by Terminal Software. That made us feel very grown up at the age of fourteen or fifteen! Ah, the thrill of being allowed to drink beer!
This will be the last we’ll see of Taylor for 1983. He did have another game (The Final Challenge, aka Cornucopia) but it is lost:
Unlike the other games in this series, it required a VIC-20 with not 8k but 16k expansion – and since I didn’t own a 16k board, I had to borrow one from a school-friend, Richard Monk, in order to write it. Seems strange in these days when 4M of memory is considered woefully inadequate. [Meta-note: I wrote that last sentence in 1997 or ’98. As I write now, in 2001, 4M is truly laughable – most people now consider 64M unusable. No doubt by the time you read this, people will look sniffily on any computer whose memory is so tiny as to be measured in something as piddly as megabytes. Plus ca change.]
Of all my games that have been lost to posterity, this is the one that I would most like a chance to play again. I remember it somehow being invested with a strong sense of atmosphere, and having more-interesting-than-average puzzles. I have often tried to recapture elements of the plot to Cornucopia, as it rather bizzarrely ended up being called, but I have never succeeded to my own satisfaction. I particularly remember a tricky initial portion, necessary to get into the caves where the game took place, and a huge underground cavern with trees growing in it.
He’ll return in 1985 with the ambitious multi-player adventure Causes of Chaos.
Terminal Software was started, in a sense, by accident.
RW Stevens, aka Reg Stevens, was working at ICL in Manchester (the business computer company, home of Quest). He had started writing games for the VIC-20 over Christmas 1981:
…I wrote my first game, which was a computer version of [the tabletop game] Connect 4. I wrote it in BASIC and I made it look at the board and work out every possible combination and choose the best move from the criteria I’d coded in… which meant it could take five minutes to make a single move! Any player would get fed up waiting so I did the algorithm which worked out the computer’s next move in machine code. That made it as immediate as a human opponent.
He took it to show a colleague of his at work, Andy Hieke. Hieke thought the game was good and that Stevens should sell it, but Stevens replied he couldn’t be bothered; Hieke offered to do it instead. This would become what was published as “Line-up 4”, and it had only very modest success, Stevens at first getting a check for 20 pounds. However, Hieke got interviewed for a piece that landed in The Times and as part of the interview he mentioned an upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20.
There was no upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20, or at least not yet. Hieke called Stevens and said he needed to write one. This is the first he’d heard of the game’s existence (Stevens was 40 of the time and did not frequent arcades).
I did have my little computer, though, and was finding it fun to program, so I suppose I saw it as an intellectual challenge and rose to the bait. I said I’d have a go, so I took the kids to Blackpool one day to do some research and see what the arcade game looked like.
The game was successful enough to be well-remembered after; the author wrote that
Skramble! was probably my finest moment, although Super Gridder on C64 was probably at least as addictive. The amazing thing about that VIC20 Skramble! was that it was entirely hand assembled.
I wrote it in machine language, but had no assembler or machine language monitor- so I converted the instruction codes into numbers (using the data book for a 6502 CPU) and ‘poked’ them into memory from Basic!
The game got licensed by MicroDigital out of Webster, NY…
…although I’m not seeing the company at New York’s corporation registration site and I don’t have any information how that licensing agreement worked. Stevens did write a text adventure later for Terminal (Rescue from Castle Dread) so we’ll see him again, but today’s game involves a different author, Mike Taylor, who we previously saw here with Magic Mirror.
Nosferatu was written a different process; Taylor had based it on an “unnamed and unpublished game” he’d written with a friend (Myles Kelvin) the year before. Nosferatu was written from scratch with some of the same puzzles as the previous game, and was originally, like Magic Mirror, a “private” game. Once Magic Mirror was published he offered it Terminal and it became his second published game.
He was familiar with (but had not yet played) The Count by Scott Adams, and had not heard of any of the other vampire games we’ve seen here already. The goal is much different than the usual “kill Dracula” goal, as the printed instructions just say we need to “get home from Nosferatu’s castle with the precious bloodstone.”
I made my usual verb list, and none of them suggest we are killing the vampire, although I may be missing some special case.
Kill, stab, stake, and hammer are not included. (Note, no violence at all! Although there’s an axe you can THROW.) As my ambiguity above suggests, I’m not done with the game yet, although as a VIC-20 game (using the 8k expansion) it surely can’t be too much larger than what I’ve seen?
It starts with a mysterious in medias res moment:
How did end up here? Did we somehow get smuggled into Nosferatu’s castle this way? Did we get attacked and deposited here? I thought briefly (before checking the manual’s objective) that we were playing as the vampire, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The opening areas yield up a “bottle of whisky”, a “rope”, and a “7-pound mallet”. In the same room as the rope there is a locked door. A bit farther is a Graveyard with a “newly dug grave” and a warning about needing to BEWARE THE WITCH…
I’m unclear why it turns from a grave to a cave.
…followed by a … bus stop? Hey, there was one in Haunt. Turning south, there’s a sarcophagus that is too heavy to open, although drinking the whisky will give a boost of strength and allows the player to open it.
Inside is a corpse that turns to dust if you touch it (no idea if the dust is helpful) and a wooden cross (which I haven’t used yet).
Heading east from there is a library, with an Atlas, book of Magic, and book of Games.
The book of Magic has a word that seems like it’d be helpful (see above) but I’ve tried it in every accessible room so far to no effect. The atlas mentions a cesspit near a oak forest (which you find anyway even without the atlas) and the book of Games just says:
Bored with this game already, huh?
I mean, it could have booted up Skramble? On an 16K VIC-20?
Moving on, heading north there is a rail at a balcony, and you can tie the rope to go down, finding a brass key and a red kipper. The author is sheepish that a similar puzzle shows up in The Count, and indeed two other vampire games also have this moment, but it almost doesn’t seem like a puzzle as much as a natural action; at least I didn’t feel like there was anything stale going on.
If you carry too much down the rope it snaps and you die.
With the brass key you can unlock the door back up north and open a large new area.
Up first are a “sharp axe” and a “ladder”; this is followed by a pond with a shark and I have no idea if you can do anything with the shark. I’m not even sure how to die from the shark.
What I am sure you can die from is a little farther where there is a “flimsy bridge” and it will collapse if you have too many items. Past the bridge is a hut that is locked and the brass key doesn’t work; I have yet to get in the hut.
I guess it’s implied the shark gets us?
Past that is a “sunny field” with a “crucifix” on the ground (spelled wrong) and I suspect the DIG command goes here but I don’t have any digging tool yet (which might be in the hut! which I haven’t gotten in yet!) What I can do is go around to a “cesspit” which has some gold coins, and use the ladder from earlier to climb out.
An easy softlock. This doesn’t have a save game feature.
There’s a “cliff” with a backwards sign….
…which indicates you’re supposed to use the axe to chop the thicket.
Past this are two rooms at the edge of a chasm, a “safety match”, and a “fountain of youth”. You can use the bottle from earlier (with the strength boost) to scoop up the water from the fountain of youth and take it back to the witch, trading it for a lamp.
(I kind of like how I was expecting some sort of battle confrontation but this was just a trade puzzle!) The match works to light the lamp but I haven’t found anything dark enough for it to have an effect. To recap:
a.) I’ve got a hut I can’t get in
b.) I don’t have a way of digging
c.) I don’t have a way past the chasm (if that’s even supposed to be a thing)
I’ve already visited both sides of the brick wall so I’m not sure if it’s really meant to be a puzzle.
I get the intuition this is going to be the sort of game where I just have to resolve one puzzle and then the rest will be a straightforward progression. But I have to find that one puzzle first!
Renga in Blue 