I’ve finished the game; a lot of what I had to deal with in the end was parser struggles.
Let’s take the antique shop first. I had approached it, was told the showcase couldn’t be accessed, and tried various varieties of BREAK to get in. I also tried WITH ITEM knowing that the game allowed skipping over the original command (WITH CROWBAR, WITH BRICK, WITH LADDER, etc.) Some games map USE to a synonym but this game just responds “TRY TO USE IT YOURSELF” with the command USE even though applying WITH here is essentially the same thing.
My problem was I was standing too close! The game was fine with you breaking the window, but you needed to be standing just a bit to the west, in the “street”, and then WITH BRICK would work appropriately. (I understood the point — the glass on the inside is somehow stronger than the glass on the outside — but it still left me grouchy.)
Also, weirdly, you don’t see the result of the action on the visual unless you either LOOK or leave the room and come back.
Nearby, just to the south, was the bank. The bank had a sign about seeing a teller. I had done lots of different actions to try to summon a teller, thinking I was at the teller window — and it certainly looks that way — but you’re supposed to just type GO TELLER.
Then there’s even more guess-the-phrase as you’re supposed to WITHDRAW CASH. The fact you have some in the bank suggests you are a local deciding to crush your old neighborhoods.
Again, the result has already happened: there’s CASH now sitting here. You won’t see it unless you LOOK.
Speaking of guess-the-phrase, it’s time to steal the car. (I just checked the walkthrough for this.) It turns out you can type TEST DRIVE.
So trusting, given he’s already living in a village that’s been raided dry by whatever thieves have come before our protagonist. This takes care of a couple puzzles at once, because not only do we now have access to both houses (Mr. Smith’s keys work on the Hughes mansion as well), but we can use the car to pick up the boat trailer and other large things.
Let’s raid the house first, though. Then we’ll pick up the large items, then finally hit the mansion.
Helpfully, Mr. Smith has a copy of the Picasso in the art museum (pretty clear what’s going to happen with that in a moment) and it is covering a safe. Trying to OPEN SAFE has the game respond that it needs the combo.
Fortunately, our trusting Mr. Smith is the sort to just write the combo on a paper two rooms over.
Unfortunately, this game is the sort to make it impossible to figure out how to input anything. TURN DIAL, ENTER COMBO, OPEN SAFE while having the paper open, etc. failed on me; I just went straight for the walkthrough again because the game had officially crossed my threshold. You’re just supposed to type L15 R7 (that’s verb L15, noun R7) and it works:
THE SAFE OPENED UP FOR A SHORT MINUTE. SOMETHING FELL OUT.
The “something” here is a set of stock certificates and some diamonds. The keys work on the mansion, too, but let’s handle the painting in the art gallery first since we have the copy.
Oops! I don’t know if this is an issue because of the crack or an issue with the original game (based on the parser’s absurdity, I’m about 50-50) but you need to SWITCH PAINTING (not SWAP, CHANGE, HANG, etc. I absolutely hate this parser) in order to keep the game from hanging.
OK! A FORGERY IS HANGING ON THE WALL!
Oddly, the painting looks different when dropped off with the stash.
This stash is going to start to look quite crowded by the end of the game.
Next up I promised to go for the “big items”. One of them is the “raft” from last time. As suggested by arcanetrivia in the comments, ROW worked to move it (I usually don’t associate ROW with rafts, but it does get described as having paddles).
Eventually the only way you can paddle is up to the the same boat dock the *boat* is at. We’re going to steal both the boat and the raft at once, and it is going to look very silly.
With the keys Mr. Smith gave over, you can just hop in the Corvette and type DRIVE CAR. Then the bottom of the car serves as a sort of frame as you drive around town.
Sadly, the game doesn’t let you drive into buildings.
I drove over to where the boat trailer was, stopped the car, and tried ATTACH TRAILER. No luck. HITCH TRAILER? No. PUT TRAILER? Nyet. LINK TRAILER? Also no.
I confess, reader: walkthrough again (#3 if you’re counting). It’s TOW TRAILER. Grrrr. While I was at this, I tried to tie the rope to the trailer and to the car, found that didn’t work either, but when I started driving again my raft was tied to the back of the car along with the trailer (even though I had left the raft back on the dock!) At least it didn’t crash the game this time.
Driving on over to the dock with both a trailer and a raft bouncing along connected to a rope, I was able to GET BOAT … I mean MOVE BOAT … no, PUSH BOAT, LOAD BOAT, LOAD TRAILER, FILL TRAILER …
The game wants PUT BOAT.
I was then able to tote everything all at once over to the truck and drop it off (rope, raft, Corvette, boat) for some megapoints. The police really only care about stereo systems and paintings, I guess? (Remember those are two items that set off the police. I already did the painting swap, the stereo puzzle is the very last one I solved.)
Now it’s time to raid the mansion. I hiked back over to the southeast side of town, waving at David in the office on the way (….yes, the car is still being … tested …) and found a much larger area than I expected.
Not this part in particular being large, but where the Tram goes.
Heading west and south leads down to a basement with a will (*will* rather) that is stuck in place.
I was confused about the Patty reference until I went back up and east.
This is *Patricia* Hughes and she counts as a treasure. If you KISS her she will jump in your arms and you can then go over the will and she’ll be able to pick that up too somehow. (I solved this later in the game, but it’s faster to just go through it now.)
There’s also a door to the south of Patricia and that needs the crowbar (“WITH CROWBAR”) to pry open. By doing that you can go down to the tram and what I’ll call The 1% Area.
This is only part of it.
To the south is a “yacht club” with a valuable record…
…and to the north is a wild animal reserve club, with a tiger that will eat you.
Oh, to reach the 1% Area, you need to flip the disk over.
Fortunately off to the side before the tiger is a Clubhouse with a rifle, although trying to SHOOT TIGER just results in a “CLICK”. You need to take a leap of faith and GET BULLETS while in the Clubhouse (even though they aren’t visible) and somehow it works and you can then LOAD RIFLE.
Then you can shoot the tiger dead, grab a valuable *fork* that’s there at the fork in the road (hilarious), and west to an elephant.
If you kept the peanuts from the very start of the game you can FEED ELEPHANT, who will obligingly let you then take … his tusks? I’m past looking for logic.
You can also go east and there’s a maze, but while mappable it is entirely useless to do so. I don’t know why it’s there.
Going back to the main road, you can reach a golf course and yet another hard-game crash. If you go to the 18th hole and LOOK HOLE, you’ll “see something”, and just like any other discovery in the game, you have to LOOK to find out what that discovery is. The problem is — even if you have the graphics off — the game will crash when you do so.
So you need to crash the game, reload, and blindly pick up the ball that you know is there. Then it can go safely back to the treasures.
One more section to the 1% Area:
This mainly serves to have a gate that taunts you…
No way in.
…a shark that eats you…
…and a metal detector that’s just sitting around ready for swiping. The metal detector gets used on the same beach as the shark is hovering around, and it turns out to be the most infuriating parser moment in the game. All the way through it has been chastising you for applying the verb USE to anything; the way to use the metal detector is USE DETECTOR.
A low point in a game with already awful parser moments.
You can then DIG. The game asks WHAT WITH and you need to say WITH HANDS (fortunately I’ve seen this trick enough times, but it always bothers me).
With all that done I was very close to the end of the game. I still had the stereo to deal with.
If you try to GET STEREO in the hi-fi place, the game asks “are you wanting to steal it?” and you’re supposed to respond STEAL STEREO in order to try. The police then catch you and toss you in jail.
You can then PICK LOCK (using nothing in particular, I guess we’re that good) and then OPEN DOOR and ESCAPE. (According to Grunion Guy in the comments, escape can sometimes fail at random. Joy!) After doing this, you can go back to the stereo and try to steal again, at which point the police will not spot you.
As I’ve mentioned before, the closest comparison game I can think of is Urban Upstart. Somehow, the overall effect of the grunge in that game was to feel like social commentary (“Grime Street, where all things are possible”) whereas here it just felt — I suppose the best word is “immature”? It hits some of the same points so I’m not entirely sure why; maybe because the protagonist in Urban Upstart was clearly hapless whereas this one is stealing absolutely everything. In a way, I think Pillage Village’s satirical target may have been more along the lines of adventure games themselves, taking to the limit the concept of a treasure collect-a-thon into complete absurdity, but that’s not quite as strong a target as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
In other words, the game has more to say about the Apple II and computer ecosystem than the world at large.
It also helped the people weren’t smudges.
I’m still glad I got to play Pillage Village and I hope the real disk comes up someday because I’m morbidly curious about the missing title screen. I’m also curious out of the “eight different games” Stuart wrote (I assume the rest really were unpublished) if there were any other adventure buried in there. While this game wasn’t terrific it certainly committed to the bit which suggests a second try might be equally creative but with a better parser.
Coming up: another long-sought after game only unearthed quite recently.
I swear I’m not trying to break my blog posts up into convenient chunks this way but … I missed another section of the map. Look, the streets are very bland and it is easy to think you’ve tested an exit when you haven’t. Two cases in point:
East of the room facing the bank is the section I hadn’t gotten to yet; not an enormous chunk, but I did find one amusing encounter, one puzzle that I solved, and one baffling bit of geography.
The baffling geography first: upon going east from the bank area you see a court house. “YOU ARE FACING EAST” and “IN THE DISTANCE YOU CAN SEE THE COUNTY COURT HOUSE.”
Head north and you’ll get the message “YOU ARE JUST PAST BY THE COURT HOUSE.” The same will happen going east from there. In neither case does it seem to be possible to go into the court house. GO HOUSE gets the response “WHY DON’T YOU TRY A DIRECTION?” and GO COURT gets the response “YOU CAN’T GET TO IT FROM HERE”. Diagonal directions (NE/NW/SE/SW) don’t work and don’t seem to be in the game. I have no idea what’s going on here.
What I did figure out is the museum just past the court house, with a *ruby*.
The ruby is protected by a laser (and you’ll get tossed in what I assume is softlock-jail if you go for it). Moving on just a little bit farther is the electrical plant I only saw the backside of before.
Unfortunately what comes next is a game of guess-the-phrase. PULL LEVER, FLIP SWITCH, TURN OFF, YANK LEVER, PUSH DOWN, TOUCH POWER, POWER DOWN, and many more don’t work; the game is hunting for CUT POWER.
ALMOST ALL THE POWER THROUGHOUT THE VILLAGE HAS BEEN SHUT OFF!
By doing this you can grab the ruby safely and stash it with the rest of the treasures in the truck.
One last encounter is the hospital, which I’m pretty sure is just intended to be a dead end, but I can’t take anything for granted.
Maybe we can segue from here into playing The Institute.
The other new area I explored was the sewers, which was, as I feared, a maze, but not a large or terrible one. While I had tried GO DOWN, ENTER GUTTER, PRY GUTTER, FEEL GUTTER, CLIMB DOWN, and numerous other variations, it was a while before I tried GO GUTTER. (In my defense, GO for most things has the game encourage you to try a direction instead. The reason I tried GO out is that message from the court house earlier being special.)
The maze, as I already indicated, is thankfully not terrible, although I did need to drop items to be certain of my map. If you go in a direction and “loop” you need to LOOK in order to see what’s there; it’s almost as if the engine doesn’t want to support the classic Crowther/Woods maze style.
The useful items (besides the “ladder above) are a “ring” and a “wallet” full of credit cards.
There’s also a one way path to the lake which has a *raft* and a rope. Trying to go in any direction says something about needing a water vehicle, which is confusing because the raft is right there. I am 99% certain this area is a matter of guessing the right phrase but I haven’t guessed yet.
Everyone seems to struggle with syntax for launching water craft, including Sierra.
I’ve used all three of the sewer items. First, straightforwardly, the ladder lets you grab the chandelier.
Despite the “knocking down” message you don’t have to worry about breaking it.
The ring is described as rusted. Keeping the blacksmith’s note in mind, I went over there and tried to drop the ring and trade the ring and converse with the proprietor and so forth but nothing happened. Using guess the phrase again, I needed to CLEAN RING, which turns it into a valuable *ring*.
Finally there’s the wallet. I knew the gas station had a price on it, and I found from experimenting with phrases again I could FILL CAN while there, whereupon the owner of the gas station demands that you pay before any more progress is made. BUY GAS then gets the prompt “with what” and WITH WALLET didn’t work, leading to a moment of stunned confusion. The game wants WITH CARD, even though that’s not given as the primary noun in the object.
I’m still only just over a third of the way on the score.
Even given all the treasures I haven’t scooped yet (the *Picasso*, the *raft*, the *boat*, the *Corvette*, the *stereo*) I feel like I’m missing quite a bit. Maybe the mansion and Mr. Smith’s house are loaded, but none of the logical commands I can come up with a crowbar and/or brick are doing anything.
It’s much easier to grind on this sort of game when you know it is playing fair, but with the guess-the-phrase aspect I could easily have done the right command but in the wrong way hours ago. I’ll still stick with it a little longer before breaking open the walkthrough. Surely there’s a way to use the raft, right?
Before getting into the action — and there’s a fair amount to report, given I missed a section of town last time — I want to discuss the game’s parser, which tries to model itself after Sierra On-Line but is more dubious.
The chart above shows the result of my testing every verb in the game. DIG for example has the game respond WITH WHAT? Typing THROW has the game respond DROP WHAT? For anything not understood the game says YOU CAN’T DO THAT HERE! This is true even if you put in absolute nonsense words.
The game turns out to allow locations with “bespoke verbs” that only are acknowledged in the right place to use them. This might seem like it theoretically works with “you can’t do that here” on wrong commands but the end effect on the player is to make feedback muddy and for parser messages to end up being deceptive anyway (not being able to do the verb “kick” in a particular place, for instance, implies it ought to work elsewhere).
The other oddity is the “WITH WHAT?” response. This response has been with us in both Scott Adams and Roberta Williams games. Essentially, you are asked to do some action, and the game asks “with what”, and so you type WITH NAMEOFITEM as a response. The side-effect here is that you can — depending on the system — sometimes skip the initial command entirely, and type WITH NAMEOFITEM straightaway. This a.) saves a turn (which was important for the ending of Time Zone) and b.) allows lawnmowering through using WITH on every object held, like a point-and-click adventure where you try every single item on an obstacle.
The sum effect of the items above has been for me to wander around certain spots trying WITH X on random inventory items rather than thinking in terms of a regular text adventure.
Last time I had mentioned in passing a jewelry shop that was shut tight. I had a hat, a brick, a gas can, some peanuts, and some stamps (a treasure); there was also a nearby sledgehammer at the Pawn Shop where the owner said I was allowed to “borrow” it. This requires the full command BORROW HAMMER.
The sledgehammer and the jewelry store went together, but the end result was not what you might think.
Using WITH HAMMER twice (no need to say BREAK) you can get the window busted open and an alarm to sound. I asked in my last post what the standpoint of the police is, and what would cause them to care about a crime; apparently, setting off an alarm at a jewelry shop (or at least this jewelry shop) did not cause them to care. No police ever show up.
The sign says “jeweler has jewels”. The store has already been cleaned out! You might think, “oh, they were just taking their stock and fleeing”, but if you are responsible and return the hammer quickly (just smash the window and go back, check out the vault after) you get rewarded by the pawn shop owner.
He gives you some “jewelry”. This implies not that the jeweler took everything thinking the vault wasn’t safe enough, but had to pawn everything in order to escape. This isn’t just idle plot-theorizing — I need to know if there’s still a puzzle ongoing. For example, the bank that mentions the teller (which I still haven’t been able to summon) might have jewels in a safe-deposit box if I pretend to be the jeweler; or, this may be entirely a closed thread and I shouldn’t even be thinking in terms of the vault leading to another puzzle. I’m about 50-50 on the possibilities; at the very least, this is a game that implies some very bad things have happened in the village causing both shopkeepers and the postal workers to flee.
I mentioned not being able to resolve the bank; I did manage to figure out the hardware store with the cutters.
The sign says that wire cutters are in Aisle 2 but none of the regular directions work. I finally hit upon GO AISLE where the game prompted me WHICH AISLE. Some more struggle led me to GO 2. Hence I could finally pick up the wire cutters.
A second aisle implies the existence of a first, so I tried GO 1 and found a crowbar.
No aisle 3+, sadly.
I immediately thought this was great and there so many places that could use either item but … I haven’t been able to use either yet. The antique store showcase, for instance, implies a crowbar to me, but no dice.
The hardware store was next to a kennel with a guard dog; normally food is needed to befriend/distract in such a case, but here I just needed to PET DOG.
You can now TAKE DOG. The guard dog is an inventory item!
That leaves the Picasso, the hi-fi system, and the gas station to deal with in the areas I’ve been in; I’ll also toss in the gutter I mentioned where if you LOOK GUTTER the game says you see something but is not specific what that something is.
But that’s ok, because there’s a whole new area to talk about! I had some slight issues in room placement which led me to missing some exits at the car lot.
Trying to take the *Corvette* at the lot suggests you need some keys, and nearby there is a dealer office. The sign on the desk says DAVID SMITH but I have not been able to provoke Mr. Smith or get any car keys from him.
Huzzah for more janky-looking people, though! I know you’ve been missing this.
Near the auto dealer is another gutter (LOOK says there’s something there, nothing I’ve tried works) and the jail, where just walking into the jail gets you imprisoned into it (again much like Urban Upstart).
South from the gutter leads to another new big chunk of village (possibly the last, although I suspect there might be a sewer system to dive into in our future).
First comes a “Blacksmith’s Office” with a Blacksmith inside (not abandoned!) who has a sign about cleaning while you wait. I don’t have anything to clean.
Not far from the blacksmith is a glass shop with a *chandelier* too high to reach.
Also near is a “ship lot” with a boat trailer. Trying to pick up the trailer implies it is too heavy, and PUSH, MOVE, and other verbs I’ve tested have also had no effect.
In addition to the boat trailer there’s an actual boat next to a lake, or rather a *boat*. You need to steal a boat! I think that’s a first; I’ve never had a boat be a treasure.
As there’s the lake mentioned to the south, it may be the trailer is a fake-out and you somehow need to move the boat to where you need it. DRIVE BOAT mentions you need keys.
You might notice the name “Howard” there. Nearby there are three residences. One of them is the “Hughes” mansion hence I assume it is a Howard Hughes reference; I haven’t been able to break in. The same applies for Mr. Smith’s house (Mr. Smith was the auto dealer).
There is one house you can go into right away, and that’s the domicile of Mr. Jones.
He has a *T.V.* and the asterisks mean you need to steal it. If you just try to take it you will die (the only death I’ve found in the game).
MR. JONES DOES NOT LIKE THIEVES, SO HE SHOOTS YOU BEFORE YOU HAVE THE CHANCE AND THEN CALLS JOLLYVILLE MORGUE.
There’s one last place I haven’t mentioned yet: an insurance office. It includes a memo pad with a note about repossessing the television set. If you take the note over and then get the T.V. he’ll think you’re there on valid business.
So this is a little more grim than our standard treasure hunt? I at least appreciate what the authors were trying to do by adding thematic heft. The parser and graphics aren’t quite matching the ambition, but I’ve also still got more game to go so we’ll see how things shake out.
To recap, my obstacles are:
Getting the Picasso without alerting police
Getting the stereo without alerting police
Getting the jewels, if any still even exist
Getting the chandelier that’s too high
Opening or at least getting the thing from the gutter
Breaking into the houses of Hughes and Smith
Stealing a car and a boat (likely the houses need to come first)
Possibly doing secret things at the bank or electric company or city dump
Oh and one last treasure! You can LOOK HAT (the hat you start the game with) and find a GOLD PIN which nets you 3 points on your score straight off the bat. I only have the stamps and jewelry and T.V. to contribute extra so there’s still a ways to go.
Origin, the company based in Texas formed by Richard and Robert Garriott, is now mostly known for publishing the Ultima games and Wing Commander; it was founded due to Richard’s issues publishing Ultima 1 and Ultima 2 with other companies. Origin did keep a steady outflow of other products, including their first non-Ultima game, Caverns of Callisto (1983). It was written by Chuck Bueche, aka “Chuckles” (famous for appearing as a jester in some of the Ultima games).
One of those non-Ultima games — published a year before Wing Commander — was OMEGA.
Via Mobygames.
OMEGA was a game with a long gestation; Stuart B. Marks first had the concept in 1984, wanting to make a military robot game with vehicles controlled by the player’s programming. (An Apple II buff, he likely was influenced by Robot War.) Quoting Stuart himself:
I was so fascinated by the idea, that I continued refining the design and by late 1986 was calling it “Tank Battle”.
The design kept evolving, and Marks, who was living in Austin local to Origin already, eventually got the company interested enough by the summer of 1987 to publish the project. It still went through many rounds of modifications from there…
The idea of making the player an employee of the Organization for Strategic Intelligence, grew from a conversation with friends during a round of beers at a local tavern. Later, Richard Garriott, the author of the Ultima series, contributed a workable method of including manual control of the cybertanks, and Paul Neurath, the author of Space Rogue, came up with the idea for team play.
…with the product finally landing in 1989, after the publication of Ultima V (which Marks is credited on as a designer).
The game is truly a product of the 80s, with a 270 page manual titled CYBERTANK ENGINEER’S HANDBOOK with programming instructions, a free BBS people could log in on to share creations, and an official tournament sponsored by Computer Gaming World:
It was exciting to see all of the tanks duking it out trying to make it to the final round of six tanks, and even more exciting to actually see the final round. Glued to the computer screen I tried to decipher how each tank was working.
I was having trouble finding a video of the game playing it “seriously” (with programming / commentary) but I picked one that at least gives an idea of what the combat is like.
All this, you may notice, is way past 1982, and according to at least the manual nothing Stuart wrote was published that year. After first going into his “professional” level play in tennis and golf:
Stuart attended the University of Texas, studying accounting to learn new methods of depreciating his Apple II computer. Ostensibly purchased to “help with homework”, the computer soon became a tool for dealing with his lifelong fascination with games… and VisiCalc was replaced by Pong. Fortunately, there weren’t many games that really captured Stuart’s attention, and he began developing his own entertainment ideas.
Since 1981, Stuart has created eight different games for the personal computer. The first to be published is OMEGA. As long as Stuart has to take time away from sports to have his rackets restrung and his golf clubs regripped, you can bet he’ll continue his pursuit of the software side of gaming.
We’ve seen this sort of “early adventure amnesia” before (like with Eldorado Gold); what this biography leaves out is a game Marks co-wrote with Richard A. Bliss titled Pillage Village. It was published by “R & S Software Marketing Services”.
I have not found the name of this company elsewhere and the “R” and “S” (I assume standing for Richard and Stuart respectively) mean this was probably a self-published game, and one with not very much reach at all because the only copy I’ve been able to find is one with a long “cracker” message in the intro.
It isn’t listed on Mobygames or any of the other regular sites; I only learned about it when Adam L. (who comments regularly on my Apple II posts) found a copy while digging through his files. (It’s also on the ASIMOV Apple II archive.)
I assume there was a title screen but I don’t know if it can be rescued off the disk. The copyright / author / company information I just pulled straight from the disk’s files, they don’t show anywhere on the opening screens.
The game opens with you standing on the streets of a town village called Jollyville, with only a hat mentioned in your inventory. There are various stores, some of which have items with little asterisks around them (like *stamps*) indicating they are treasures. The goal is nab the treasures except in this case you are quite explicitly committing crime. That is, you must pillage the village.
The treasures go into the truck you start the game at (which has an empty gas can and peanuts to start with). Even the main character of It Takes a Thief was a little more subtle.
Despite us having many, many treasure hunts now…
…they aren’t actually that common on the Apple II! (Or at least, the Apple II game with Sierra-graphics style.) The big exception, Cranston Manor, was a port. Otherwise, the big looming influence has been the Roberta Williams games which didn’t use the Crowther/Woods/Scott Adams formula. Even games you might expect lean into the treasure aspect like Mummy’s Curse tended to focus on one treasure item rather than many.
Just carting away valuable items is a good way to get caught by the omnipresent invisible police, who hover nearby at all times like Urban Upstart.
For example, just to the south of the start is an art gallery. Go in and you’ll find a *Picasso*…
…and if you try to take it, you’ll be “SHOT ON THE SPOT FOR THINKING ABOUT STEALING A PAINTING IN HERE”. With a non-lethal bullet apparently, since this lands you in the jail.
Along the same street to the south is a toy store, and a sporting goods store, and both appear to be empty.
If there was some manual text (or info on the first disk erased by the crackers) I might expect some context about the village being abandoned for some reason. Most shops are either empty or they contain one treasure (with the alert police ready to spring if you take it). The overall feeling is more like post-apocalyptic rather than just urban sleaze.
I’ve divided the map into three regions, starting with the one above (the southwest side). In addition to the art gallery that somehow has a Picasso, and the empty toy and sporting stores, there’s a City Dump (smelly), a boarded up jewelry store, and a pawn shop with the only visible person in town. The pawn shop’s only available item is a sledgehammer.
Moving on to the southeast side of town…
…there’s a lone telephone booth, just like Urban Upstart, but unlike in that game you can’t use it because the phone has simply been ripped out.
There’s a kennel and a hardware store at the same corner. The hardware store apparently has nothing although there’s a sign about wire cutters in aisle 2. I have not been able to find any but I might be missing some kind of search verb. (Although knowing this game, it might be just adding some extra dose of dystopia.)
The kennel has a guard dog. I haven’t tried to interact with it yet.
There are two other places in this area of note, one being a giant auto lot, which apparently managed to sustain whatever … happened to Jollyville.
There’s a *Corvette* here.
The Jollyville Post Office is abandoned because the workers are on strike. There are *stamps* here and you can take them without the police doing anything.
On to the northeast side, which is almost just as chipper as the other two sections!
There’s a bank with a sign about how TELLERS HELP IN ALL TRANSACTIONS but no teller. Here’s where I really suspect I’m missing a verb of some sort.
There’s also an antique shop with an inaccessible showcase…
…a gas station (with gas at $8.69 per gallon, which is meant to be comically ludicrous)…
…and a hi-fi center with a stereo that the police are watching like a hawk.
I should also mention there’s a “gutter” (which can’t seem to be entered, pried at, etc. at least for now) and a place “behind” an electric company but no way to get in.
All this leads to a curious atmosphere where I’m not sure where I should be prodding. The only logical thing is the sledge hammer, where the pawn shop owner won’t let you take it but he will let you “borrow” it for ten minutes for what I assume is a smash-a-thon. There’s a brick out in a random spot but I haven’t been able to do any smashing with that, nor have I experimented much yet with the other items; I figured I needed the layout of the map first.
This is the sort of game where I need to work out what the norms are. Just how violent is our character being? Is this like Williamsburg Adventure where anything goes, including rolling an entire cannon to a shop and shooting someone dead with it? When do the police care about something and when do they not care? Will the game be sad if I steal from the pawn store owner (or attack him) or is that entirely within the fair bounds of what the game expects? I think the most clear example of this being a problem is how in It Takes a Thief we could shoot a person dead but not a dog. I can’t make any assumptions about where the game’s moral limits are.
Renga in Blue 