Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and this post continues directly from my previous one.

While I mentioned it last time, let me delineate out carefully the four versions of the game:

1.) Pythonesque, the original 1982 version, released for PET and Commodore 64 (I played this version, on C64). The top of the screen at the start actually reads

PYTHONESQUE or The Cricklewood Incident

but the catalog just calls it by Pythonesque. Either title is appropriate, I suppose.

2.) Streets of London, a 1983 version just for C64. The intro screens are different and at least one of the rooms has a different name, so there is some tweaking going on despite the games allegedly being identical.

This is important because the walkthrough I used — and yes I absolutely, completely needed a walkthrough for this game — was for Streets of London (1983), not Pythonesque (1982), and it is possible, likely even, that I played a worse version of the game. This is a type of game where even a small (and non-obvious) change of variable might drastically change the gameplay experience.

This is called “Strip a go-go” in Pythonesque.

3.) The Kilburn Encounter for Oric. This seems to try to match the original.

4.) The Cricklewood Incident (alone, without the “Pythonesque”) for Electron, Dragon, and Spectrum, with at the very least textual changes.

From the Centre for Computing History. This feels closer to an actual graphic Monty Python would make than Streets of London did.

I have no plans to investigate items 2 through 4 thoroughly because, at least in the incarnation I played, the game was extraordinarily bad. Mind-rendingly bad. I think if I’d been able to follow the walkthrough as written, it might have been okay but still painful; I had to deviate and come up with my own route. It was rewarding in a “I finished something hard” sense but not in a “fun” sense.

To pick up from last time, I was in a scenario where I was occasionally getting money but I didn’t understand why, but I otherwise was either applying a magic word (OH YANGTZE) to move around or waiting to get teleported at random.

I first discovered that the source of my money was the magic — every time I used it, I would get 50p. However, the word is only usable a maximum of 3 times. The word lets you go almost anywhere in the game, including the second-to-last place you’re supposed to go. Behold:

I also discovered if I had money, and I hung out at the tree-lined lane at the start, I would start to get mugged continuously by the Hell’s Grannies. The amount they take is dependent on the difficulty level at the start of the game (remember I went with easy, which was a wise choice).

More rarely, this message happens. The flask of meths incidentally is useful once (only once) for a teleport just like the magic word, and subsequent uses send you to the hospital.

One major thing I was missing is that MUG is a word; that is, you can mug the grannies back. Sometimes you’ll just get some money (something like 10 to 110 pence), sometimes she’ll put up a fight.

I just jammed the keys as fast as possible. Your health resets on a hospital visit, which happens if you hit 0 health, but going to the hospital also drops your money by half.

I think an optimal strategy might be to jam the 9 key quickly (run away) and only get money from the “guaranteed” muggings.

There’s one other method of getting a large chunk of cash (more than 10 pound at once) but it requires an almost absurd leap: at a “squalid DHSS office” you can SIGN ON. (Which I guess means … pick up your pension check, maybe? … they don’t even exist anymore, so I have no idea.)

I also worked out the navigation in general, and this is where the nightmare truly begins. First and most simply, if you “die” for whatever reason, you land in a hospital (which takes half your money) and then you can travel back to the start.

The starting area has a bus stop. You can wait at the bus stop and spend money to ride a bus. This bus will drop you somewhere random off a list of 6 places. If you hang out near the bus stop and just wait for an “incident” to happen you might either land at a bus stop but you might also land at the hospital or just another spot on the tree-lined road.

A random teleport. It happens once every 60 turns or so but it truly is random, so if you are depending on it you might having to wait for 100+ turns.

Then, at one of the bus stop stations, there is also a train station. If you buy a “rail-rover” for 5 pounds (something I never was able to gather until the SIGN ON bit) you can also start riding the rails, and it means you can wait for trains. These trains will also take you to random places off a different list of 7 places.

The trains are likely to kill you (at least in Pythonesque). You sometimes are on the train with “skinheads”; if you have the machine gun you can kill them first, although you still are liable to end up with “travel sickness” unless you also have travel pills handy (which can be bought from a shop). I found if I left behind either the gun or the pills I almost always failed to ride the train before landing in the hospital.

One of the trains takes you to the “dark forest” area which is the final portion of the game (and eventually leads to that rabbit cave I showed off earlier).

In a meta sense, it looks like this:

Keep also in mind this game has an inventory limit, and if you’re playing without knowing the solutions first, you don’t know what you’re supposed to be toting around in what order.

Traveling with this structure is the most painful I’ve ever experienced in an adventure game. (This includes sluggish late era 90s CD-ROM stuff that made molasses look fast.) I knew (or prior to me deciding to lean on the walkthrough 100%, thought I knew) the place I wanted to go, but it often took 10 iterations to get there, and in the meantime it wasn’t hard to randomly end up in the hospital or just run out of cash by using the bus too many times. If you end up in the hospital from the train, to get back you have to first luck out and get to the right bus station, and then get back on the train from there. (Also keep in mind I also only discovered the “solution” for skinheads relatively late in my gameplay.)

The magic word, remember, can let you go anywhere, and it is what ended up letting me struggle to the end of the game.

So, here’s how things are supposed to go, and I’m going to give the “no magic word” version:

First, mug enough of the Hell’s Grannies to get money for bus rides and some purchases. That maximum I could get to was roughly 2.50, but I didn’t try doing the run-away strategy when the Grannies fought back.

Second, get the money from the DHSS office; in the meantime nab the machine gun (in the open), a truss from a chemist and some travel pills (the walkthrough ignores the pills, don’t do that), a shrub (maybe, I’ll get back to that). You’ll also find the cheese shop scene…

…but rather than shooting the owner, you need to shoot the person making music instead. The owner will be happy and give you a map. (The map, again, might be optional just like the shrub, I’ll get to that.)

Near where the train platform is you should buy a rail-rover ticket when you can. You should also get a green bottle with some “big boy macho tablets” from that weird coffee table scene I mentioned last time (Voltgloss pointed out it was from a Python sketch involving “Doug and Dinsdale Piranha”).

Note that amidst all this you’re skipping a bunch of items that seem like they might be useful (like a claw hammer and a ferret). Did I say already how mean this game is? I’m also ignoring the fact you don’t have enough inventory slots to carry all that above all at once so you have to ferry things in multiple trips.

You need to then hit the trains. You need to be holding the rail-rover to get on, but also machine gun and travel pills at all times on the trains. Make sure you kill skinheads if you see them, and take the travel pills otherwise.

You need to go to a sex shop to pick a doll (which costs money, hope you haven’t run out from the muggings, the Grannies will mug you on the train platforms too), a holy hand-grenade from a cistern, and a torch just laying out in the open. You will not be able to carry all these at once so multiple trips are required (probably involving trekking all the way from the start to the trains again and doing some more muggings and hoping you don’t land in the hospital).

The most important station is Inverness (I showed a version of this in my last post before it was connected to a station):

To get past the Dark Forest you need the map (to get by the “maze”) and the shrubs (to get by the Knights). You can then use the doll from the sex shop to distract an “oaf” and open a new path.

North of the oaf is the castle with the virgins, and there’s some garments and a spade there you need. You’ll end up at the hospital with the virgins unless you are holding the green bottle with the Big Boy tablets (but you don’t need to have eaten them … in fact, if you’ve eaten them, there’s some ravenous ladies that will tear you up on the train, so it’s a bad idea).

Then you can take the garments and TIE GARMENTS to make a rope for the nearby cliff.

Then you can finally get to the long-awaited killer rabbit, the “non-magic-word” way.

However, THROW GRENADE here is still a dud. You need the Book of Armaments. That’s back at the library, in the bus stop section. Additionally, to get that book, you need a library ticket. To get the library ticket you need to unlock a locker. To unlock the locker you need a key, which you obtain by moving a big rock near the cliff, and to move the big rock you have to be holding the truss.

It’s the hernia-patient thing that goes around your waist.

So you have to get all the way to the cliff area — with the many back and forth trips given you have basically one inventory slot free, and of course perfectly knowing exactly each items you need — and then take the key back to the bus station area, then get back to the train area once you have the book.

I didn’t have a torch the first time through here and wasn’t able to see in the cave.

As the above images imply, I was finally able to pull things off, but only with a little magic help in the middle. There’s enough locations in the cliff area that a random teleport gets there without too many attempts; so what I did after getting the truss was to OH YANGTZE my way to the rock and grab the key early. That allowed me to avoid some of the steps. Then when I had the green bottle, book, hand-grenade, doll, and torch (max inventory, notice no room for even the train ticket) I teleported back to the cliff area again trying to figure out how to wrangle the train ride and was able to finish the game. (All this implies the map and shrubs are technically unneeded, since this strategy skips past their use — of course you have to know all about this beforehand!)

Getting back is easy, since you can drop your rope (garments) and fall down the cliff to the hospital, then take two more steps back to home from there.

You know, I would be disappointed by the ending, but … sure. Fine. I was expecting that. After all, the original movie had an anti-climax and then filled the blank part of film after with organ music.

I still feel like I made everything appear smoother than it was. The narrative above assumes the straightforward path of how to do things, but I had so many instances of random jumping around, not having enough money, just having the train go to the wrong place over and over, and even having the train in one instance never stopping (a bug I guess, I was trapped forever) that Pythonesque was a prime example of me suffering so you don’t have to.

I did imply that a slight change of variables would make things better. I think the best single change would be to simply drop inventory limits — let the player carry everything and it would reduce the number of ferrying trips by 5 times. If the game also was more generous with magic word use — despite the fact it could be used to bypass some puzzles — and tweaked some other aspects (like maybe always get 100+ pence from a mugging) Pythonesque would be plausibly playable. It may be that some of the later versions have done those things. The walkthrough, as I’ve already implied, says absolutely nothing about needing a machine gun or travel pills on the train, despite the fact I only safely made a train trip one (1) time without them. This suggests the authors lightened up a little.

Regarding the humor, I don’t have much more to add from what I’ve said: it’s essentially references without punchlines.

Having the killer rabbit, Book of Armaments, and hand-grenade all used together might make someone recall the famous scene and enjoy it for its own sake, but it isn’t telling a joke. You just have to remember the “five is right out” line and “who being naughty in my sight, shall snuffeth” and chuckle internally, I suppose.

From Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor.

Can you escape the padded cell? Will the old lady hit you with her knitting? How much longer will you have to wait for a 96B bus? These and many other questions will be answered in PYTHONESQUE.

— From the Winter 1982 Supersoft Catalog

Supersoft we’ve seen twice now before: Brian Cotton’s game Catacombs (for a while lost media, first of a series, we’ll get to the rest sometime) and more relevantly for today, their own version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The company received permission from Pan Books to publish Hitch Hiker’s but got in a legal tangle trying to re-publish the game (so re-named it); here, we have a game that started life as Pythonesque — as in the Monty Python comedy troupe — and later again surfaced for the C64 as Streets of London. There was no legal tangle to speak of but perhaps the company was a little nervous.

From Mobygames.

The authors (Allen Webb and Grant Privett) also have credits on The Cricklewood Incident and The Kilburn Encounter which allegedly just rework the elements of Pythonesque on different platforms. They look different enough I’ll keep them separate for now (meaning they’ll wait for a later year).

The game starts, oddly enough, with you choosing a difficulty level (1 to 5, I went with easy, usually a wise choice on old adventures where the interest is more in puzzle-solving). You then wake up in a padded cell and decide you need to go locate the Holy Grail.

This one absolutely spins the wheel on random, and draws items from famous Monty Python movies and sketches, like the Holy Hand Grenade. The structure is heavily surreal in a way we have yet to see in this blog.

Namely, the game is spread out amongst many small micro-chunks. You teleport (either via random chance, or using a magic word I’ll show off in a moment) and might be in a one-or-two-room area, and one of the directions will drop you right back in front of the padded cell again.

The magic word comes from a piece of toffee paper just outside the entrance: “OH YANGTZE”. It teleports you to completely at random to one of the micro-chunks I’ve been mentioning.

If you don’t recognize the words (I admit I’ve only seen a couple episodes in whole and the “greatest hits”) they’re from the skit asking the deep question “Why is it that so many of Britain’s top goalies feel moved to write about the Yangtze?”

I’m not sure everything is meant to be a reference, although in the same area where you find the toffee paper is one of the most famous ones, one of Hell’s Grannies.

In game form, she isn’t as threatening, or at least I have yet to have her try to hit me as illustrated at the front cover at the top of this post. As implied, there’s also a bus stop there, but the problem is not getting beaten at the bus stop, but rather lacking in money.

I’ve gone through various runs where my character’s finances go up, but I have no idea why or how they do. Money is important not just for the bus but for the fact some places require you to buy things rather than just letting you take them.

The hand grenade just lands with a thud if you try to throw it and doesn’t explode (you can’t PULL PIN). The machine gun I’ve managed to use on the old lady but that just nets you a dead old lady and no game progress.

If you do have money to ride the bus it works like the magic word — you get on, get off, and find yourself at some new random location. Also, sometimes you randomly just get swiped up for no apparent reason and sent to a new place.

I don’t have anything resembling a complete map yet — the random aspect (and fact some directions will teleport you to the start, and you can’t tell which ones until you try) make my efforts scattershot, and I have some puzzles sticking me in some locations besides. Let me give a far-out view first, just to show general patterns:

Blue marks “teleport back to the start” rooms. The tag in the corner marks possible landing points (sometimes you get more than one in a section). You’ll also notice some rooms are completely closed in, and I’ve gotten myself stuck before, because the only way out seems to be via magic word, and the magic word only has a limited number of uses.

Above is one of the larger contiguous sections. Going “up” at the vertical cliff requires gear, you get stopped by an “oaf” trying to go north at the tavern, and while you can get past the Nasty Knight Types in order to enter the Dark Forest (they want a shrubbery for heading south, but will let you go north), the Dark Forest consists of two rooms where you get stuck in an endless loop.

I know where the shrubbery is — it is for sale elsewhere, but on the run where I had this encounter I didn’t have the shrubbery in hand (again, the only movement is random, and you have a limited uses of the magic word).

I have a hard time encapsulating all of what’s going on. Some of it is fairly raunchy (that Galahad scene from Holy Grail is in, you end up in the hospital; fortunately the hospital just lets you teleport back to the start). Some of it is plain confusing:

If you take the hammer somehow the table comes off and the whippet runs away. Is this another reference?

I’m not sure yet whether to be positive or negative about the game, although the number of softlocks I’ve hit is starting to tilt to a thumbs-down. Maybe there’s a way to manage the movement I’m not seeing. It’s simply very hard to test objects on things to see if they form solutions when there is very little guarantee I’ll have item X at puzzle Y.

I also don’t think the comedy is hitting, really — it’s so far just been references rather than actually trying to tell jokes — but I’ll reserve judgment on that until I manage to solve some puzzles (or grab for the walkthrough once I get frustrated by the randomness).