(Continued from my previous post)
I’ve managed to beat the game, and while not the most cryptic game ending I’ve ever managed to resolve, it surely is in the top 5. I in fact had been mid-sentence trying to write my “I’m sorry, no idea how to finish this” post when I tested something and made a breakthrough.
First, to clear up some things I was puzzled on last time.
Regarding the goggles and the gravshafts, if you are in a room without wearing goggles, and then you put them on while in the room, the gravshaft is now “visible” and any future passes through the room do not require goggles. If you are simply entering the room while wearing the goggles (which does show the gravshaft, and even mentions in the text description there is one there) it will not give this effect. Taking the goggles off causes the gravshaft you spotted to “disappear” and you’ll walk in the trap if you try to leave. Yes, this seems like a bug.
This is a case where I entered the room wearing goggles. The better approach is to enter without goggles, put them on, and take them off again.
Additionally, the change of color when wearing goggles is the sole thing making drones invisible. This is meant to encourage the fact you shouldn’t leave the goggles on; I had at least one time I forgot I had them on so I thought a drone was just invisible normally, but it really is a goggles-only condition. I’ll grant this is canny in a game-design sense in that the traps are relatively nullified out if the goggles can be worn all the time.
One other method to deal with the traps is to use a WELDER. This also seems to be bugged, as if you’ve “spotted” the trap the welder doesn’t work, but if you haven’t then you can use the welder to seal up the hole.
There’s one last very important fact about gravshafts I didn’t discover until later, but let’s get back into gameplay.
The way the game is supposed to be configured — and I’m not sure it is airtight — is that you start on a floor where you can immediately find goggles, and then while carefully avoiding traps, find a white crystal and a black crystal. Somewhere on this floor there will be a place you can use the TRANSLATOR and open up a door, and to get down further, you need to use a white crystal to remove a force field.
The force-field door and translator door incidentally both visually appear (although don’t open) with the GOGGLES, which makes another good reason to test them in every room. Also, “floor” is somewhat approximate, as some of the rooms in this area might still be up or down stairs, but there’s still always a “white crystal barrier” blocking off any further objects.
Picture from a different playthrough; that black rectangle is stairs leading down, and they need me to USE WHITE CRYSTAL to pass.
The second section is where you find a welder and a blue crystal. So just to list all items: gun, translator, goggles, white crystal, black crystal, blue crystal, welder. There’s only one more we’ll talk about in a moment (a remote).
Other than an auditorium, which is just for color…
It is possible to find items or even gravshafts here.
…there’s another force field. This force field requires you to USE the BLACK CRYSTAL. The black crystal, oddly enough, causes all the objects you are carrying — except for your gun — to disperse to random spots on the map. The best option here on a playthrough is to drop everything but the black crystal, use it, and then don’t worry about where it snuck off to (you’ll see why in a second).
With the force field removed, you can enter into a room with a “faint hum”. The goggles reveal a gravshaft, although oddly, it won’t stay revealed if you do the wear/take off goggles trick. The goggles also reveal the remote.
Here I was trying to figure things out so brought every single item. I was holding the gun but it’d normally go in the gap to the left.
I tried every single item and saw nothing. I went back and tried every single item on every single room and saw nothing new. Don’t forget the shoot-em-up thing was still going on: I fought off waves and waves of drones in the meantime (I started getting decent at shooting them down, they more mostly an annoyance if I was trying to use goggles, since swapping the goggles off takes enough time for them to get you).
(Incidentally, last time I commented how swapping between joystick and keyboard would be a pain. There’s a contemporary review of the game that points out the annoyance, and suggests the game be played cooperatively, where one person uses the keyboard and the other the joystick.)
I thus was ready (and started) to write my final post, but for some reason it occurred to me even though the game doesn’t let me GO DOWN, perhaps I could USE GRAVSHAFT. At no other point in the game had I tried to USE an item “in the world”.
Access denied!!!
Huh, that’s a new message. I went back and tried USE GRAVSHAFT elsewhere — with one of the goggle-revealed gravshafts –and found I could “teleport” to a new room that way without getting hurt. So there was something special about the hum-room gravshaft.
It still wasn’t staying revealed without the goggles, but mucking about with my items, I somehow found if I picked up the white crystal the gravshaft suddenly appeared. Put it down, it suddenly disappeared.
The condition turns out to be extremely finicky: you have to be carrying the white crystal and the blue crystal and not the black crystal. As long as all three are true, the gravshaft in the hum room will reveal itself, and you can USE GRAVSHAFT.
This is on a return trip where I realized getting the black crystal was counterproductive, so I didn’t even bring it.
USE GRAVSHAFT takes you to the final room. There’s no visible exits other than the gravshaft, but if you wear goggles you can see an exit to the north. Then you can try to GO NORTH and crash the game.
Whoops! Again I considered maybe I was at the end and the game was broken. However, I took the time to ferry items over in the shaft just to see if I could cause something new to happen. (Incidentally, if you try to bring the black crystal to the end, you’ll get teleported back to the starting room. Black sheep of the crystal family.)
Nice of the game to tell me dropping the white crystal is death rather than just killing me. It never was clear what the two crystals are actually doing.
I finally hit paydirt with USE WELDER which opens up a shimmery rainbow door.
You still can’t just walk through, but since the REMOTE hasn’t been used yet, it didn’t take long to test out USE REMOTE and get the final animation sequence.
Bye bye, crystals.
We get back in our rocket and take off.
Winning is 100 points, each normal droid kill is 10, each invisible droid kill (with goggles) is 20, 10 points for each item. The score is pointless because you kill an overwhelming number of droids to make it to the end and you can always farm more.
I was unimpressed with the random generation aspect. I tried a “serious attempt” on this three times, and on my second attempt, the map yielded no black crystal, making the game impossible to win. So at the very least the random part is buggy. Additionally, there was nothing interesting in the random setup — which crystal you see first is honestly boring, along with if there’s a gravshaft in the auditorium or not. Randomness is interesting in Rogue because the exact layout of walls tactically affects what happens with the monsters; here, the drones appear in an identical way no matter what the layout is, and because the puzzles need a specific sequence, the items still appear more or less in the same order.
In a holistic game design sense, if you’re making a roguelike, the random aspect needs to contribute something to the game that makes multiple games play in a truly different way. With fixed adventure puzzles there isn’t the same benefit (and this was an adventure, despite the exhausting mini-game spread throughout, where I literally sometimes had to stop mid-typing to fiddle with arrow keys). And sure, someone could try “generated” adventure puzzles — like the riddles changing in Apventure to Atlantis — but doing it in a satisfying way seems to still be only in the capacity of human hands.
Referring back to the essay I mentioned from Clardy:
While Synergistic Apventures are full of obstacles, hazards, puzzles, and traps and while they may take hours or days (or even weeks in some cases) to play, it will never be because you are stuck trying to guess what the author wants at some point. The puzzles have logical solutions and hints are given. That doesn’t necessarily make them easy, but you won’t have to call us for help.
Consider the promise broken. The game never explains why the crystals act the way they do, and the only “alternate” solution has to do with using a welder instead of goggles to handle a gravshaft, but to find out the pit is there to begin with you’d normally use the goggles anyway. It seems like the author really just wanted to be making more RPGs, but the genre boundaries were still ill-defined.
We’ll be seeing another Clardy-Ollmann Jr. adventure team-up, but only in (squints) 1989 with The Third Courier. That’s punting it down a bit.
Let’s try a “normal” adventure game next time, shall we? (Maybe. It’s a company where the two times they’ve been featured here the game seemed initially normal and later went off the rails.)
We last saw Robert Clardy with the odd hybrid game Apventure to Atlantis. This one’s even odder, and combines a shoot-em-up like Galaga and an adventure game.
From Mobygames.
To understand how this happened, it will help to back up to 1981. Synergistic Software had released Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure the year before and moved into a new office. They were working on Atlantis, and Synergistic put out a newsletter titled The Synergistic Source.
It includes reprints of some reviews of Synergistic products, and also hypes up the upcoming game Apventure to Atlantis. As part of this, Clardy philosophizes on his goals in his essay “What is an Apventure?” It reminds me a little of Ron Gilbert writing a “manifesto” (Why Adventure Games Suck) placing his design at LucasArts in opposition to what was going on with Sierra On-Line. There are five important differences with Clardy’s essay vs. Gilbert’s:
1.) it mashes Clardy’s earlier RPGs together with Atlantis, muddying the definition of an “adventure” in general
2.) it feels very much written as a after-the-fact justification, insofar as Clardy’s first game was simply made by modifying Bob Bishop’s Dragon Maze and likely had very little philosophizing involved
3.) since this was written in 1981 it is only based on Sierra On-Line’s early work
4.) it’s meant for commercial self-promotion
5.) it doesn’t land quite as definitively and coherently as Gilbert’s rules.
Still, it’s useful to see someone this early in gaming history being introspective about their work, and what is said here gives a concept of what Clardy was going for.
Apventure is a term meaning an Apple-Adventure that we’ve coined here at Synergistic Software. These are adventure games specifically designed to take full advantage of all of the Apple’s many capabilities.
Clardy consolidates this to mean “animated, with no static displays”, “sound effects”, and “random events to keep the challenge of the apventure fresh.”
The third feature listed above, random events at all stages of the adventure, is also rarely seen in other adventure games. Every apventure is different. The hazards and obstacles and the placement of treasures and magical items all vary from game to game. A fresh adventure awaits your every visit.
He then goes on to quote a review of Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess:
In a sense, this is a linear adventure. Without object A, you can’t get object B. Without object B, you can’t get to a new location, and so on. If you get stuck at any point, you can’t go on to new areas. True, that’s part of the rules in this universe, but it can be frustrating, especially when you know there are undiscovered wonders beyond your reach. The other problem is that once the game is solved, there is nothing left to do with it. Since it is linear, you will have encountered every obstacle and seen every location after a successful play.
This is the essence of Clardy’s idea. As he states, he wants each game to allow resets where each involve a “new world”, where “your old maps are obsolete”, and where “a variety of resolutions or paths that can be followed to reach the goal”. Essentially, he’s saying all adventures should be adventure-roguelikes.
We heard an identical sentiment from Tom Rosenbaum which led to the making of Madness and the Minotaur.
Tom loved to play adventure games but was disappointed in the computer adventure games that were out there because they had no re-play ability. Once you solved them, playing again was exactly the same. Tom also liked board games like Civilization, and decided that a computer game with the randomness and unpredictability of games like this would be something he would enjoy playing over and over.
Despite us seeing many experiments now, the adventure-roguelike essentially died as a form; it was more suited to RPGs with recurring systems of monster combat that could easily be built off of; the narratives of adventures are more likely to be one-shot. Despite many attempts at “adventure creators”, even using modern AI, the necessity for custom content means the genre tends to land into “hand made” territory. Diverge too much and you’re not dealing with an adventure game any more. AI Dungeon isn’t really an adventure as much as a story-telling companion.
(Incidentally, Clardy chopped out the last part of the review paragraph he was quoting: “On the other hand, finding the solutions and conquering the obstacles is a pleasure. For all the frustration encountered, the program made me think, and provided hours of fun.”)
In addition to being different from play to play with random elements, every Synergistic Apventure must have a variety of resolutions or paths that can be followed to reach the goal. During a given game, you should never get bogged down trying to figure a way past a given barrier or hazard. If you can’t figure out the secret of some obstacle, just go some other way. The other way may be longer or more dangerous, but at least you aren’t stuck forever.
This feels like the RPG “contract” where you can sit around and level up if a boss is too difficult, so again seems to be aspiring to another genre. Atlantis did have some puzzles with multiple solutions (in the last island sequence especially) but plenty more that did not. There are adventures with hand-crafted alternate solutions to everything (or like Wishbringer, at least a way forward) but the modern avoidance of being stuck comes down more to a design sense closer to the ideas encapsulated by Gilbert’s essay.
Probe One: The Transmitter is not called an Apventure, but that’s likely just because it’s for Atari. I don’t know why Atari but probably because of the programmer he was working with: Clardy is listed in the manual as providing the design with everything else credited to Lloyd Ollmann Jr.
This is Lloyd Ollmann Jr.’s first game and he went on to have a career all the way through the 80s and 90s, including (along with Clardy) working on the adventure game The Third Courier. (The CRPG Addict played it and he called it “a nearly pure adventure game masquerading as an adventure-RPG hybrid”.)
From the back cover:
You are the commander of the Terran Confederation scout ship PROBE ONE. You have been sent to bring a newly developed matter transmitter to Terra before it can fall into the hands of the Drelgan Hegemony. The device is the only hope the human race has of averting extinction in their war with the Drelgans.
We hear an emergency call from a research colony which was attacked by a warship. The colonists, dying of radiation, programmed labor droids for security. The matter transmitter in the title was at the colony and it needs to be rescued.
REQUIRES: 40K, ATARI 400/800, BASIC cartridge, Paddles or Joystick.
Joystick or paddles required!
Specifically, the little white thing that kind of looks like the ship from Demon Attack is your gun. You can move it left or right just like the ship from Demon Attack, and every once in a while droids appear that you need to shoot down exactly like Dem–, like, hm, the UFO from Space Invaders, except the droid will stop in place somewhere and if you wait to long it will come down and nab you.
I mapped the left and right joystick controls to my left and right keyboard arrows, and “shoot” to my up arrow. The droids can appear slow (at the easy difficulty level, 1) or fast (and the hard level, 5). I picked 3.
The keyboard controls otherwise are
G go
T take
D drop
U use
O off
L look
I inventory
? display all valid commands
where if you see, let’s say, goggles, you press T for Take, and then type the word GOGGLES and then hit ENTER. This is all while also being ready to spring with the joystick. My keyboard configuration was fine but this seems like it’d be obnoxious to keep switching from joystick to keyboard and back.
This is most comparable to the middle sections of Apventure to Atlantis, which had randomly generated palaces where occasionally you’d wander in a room and see a critter you need to shoot. The shooting was always from a single point on the bottom of the screen and you changed your angle to aim. Here the shooting being just left-right scrolling feels a little better (in a gameplay sense, not a verisimilitude sense) but that’s good because droids can pop up at any time.
It also copies the Altantis schtick of objects being cryptic blobs of pixels that are hard to decipher, and you need to LOOK CORNER or the like to get an idea what the object is.
If a droid gets you, they don’t kill you outright, but rather carry you to the opening room. (Although “each attack may cause some internal damage” so eventually you will get hurt.) The terrible part about this is that your objects get left behind, and your gun is considered one of those objects, so you no longer have the joystick-or-paddle-controlled ship on the bottom to shoot at droids. This is especially bad if the gun ends up somewhere you can’t get to.
For example, in one of my playthroughs, I went north twice, then went back south once and fell down a gravshaft. The gravshaft teleports you somewhere random. However, it isn’t always the same random, so if you fall and lose your gun after, and then try to go back to get it, you might have no plausible route to retrieve it. You can make the game unwinnable by doing this.
The main key for making any progress I discovered early is the goggles which always appear in the first room. You want to USE GOGGLES to look for traps and secret exits in every single location. For example, you can see the gravshafts with them on, and if you leave a gravshaft room while wearing goggles, you won’t fall in.
I’ve found, so far, multiple crystals (blue, black, white) in addition to the goggles, but I don’t know how they work. It doesn’t help that there’s a four item inventory limit and the gun and goggles are essentially required at all times.
The game also gives you a “translator”. It makes the famous song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and where I first tested it, it opened a new secret door. I have no idea why a translator would open a secret door, especially since I’m supposed to be at a “human” base?
Oh, did I mention some of the drones are invisible? They will block exits if you try to leave so the only way I found one was being told there was a sentry, but since I couldn’t see one, I tried shooting randomly in a bunch of places before succumbing to getting scooped up again back to the start.
Anyway, the general summary is: I’m feeling the burn, but I’ll keep persisting for now. Ernst Krogtoft, who has terrific photos of a real copy, was also deeply puzzled: “I played for about an hour and I never really knew what I was doing or what was going on.”
I do get the sense this is structured enough like Atlantis that I should eventually have a breakthrough. If nothing else, having a save state feature (which the original does not have) might “fix” the game to be playable since I can undo unfortunate trap accidents.
Renga in Blue 