Archive for the ‘secret-kingdom’ Tag
In my 2023 recap post, I mentioned being sad about not being able to finish Secret Kingdom for the MZ-700. It didn’t have anything completely remarkable (plot recap: find treasures, win) but I only attained eight out of ten treasures, giving me the feel of a gnawing gap.
LanHawk took this up as a challenge and first managed to extract the BASIC source code; it turns out he had trouble getting anything out of it (baltasarq from my comments also called it “weird and unreadable”) so Lance decided to just play the game using the posts I had so far as reference. He managed to find the last two treasures and send hints.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
First and most simply, I’d been carting around a SWORD the entire game, but apparently had never bothered to LOOK at it.
Since you need the sword to handle the random wolves, it needs to be held pretty much the entire game.
If you look at the sword the game says you’ve found something, and a *GOLD STUD* appears.
The second find is a bit messier and I can understand why I missed it. Look again at the tower room above. There’s a PARCHMENT which LOOKS WORTHLESS and I tried in vain to make it show a treasure map or the like.
GET PARCHMENT and TAKE PARCHMENT led to TRY ANOTHER COMMAND, so I thought I reached some sort of parser barrier, but that was in fact a hint. This was partially a problem with visualization; you are supposed to imagine the parchment is put against the wall, somehow. The right command is REMOVE.
Now with the window revealed you can go outside to get a medallion.
This means the long snow section which I assumed had to have something is in fact entirely a red herring. It seems like a lot of work for the author to have bothered. I half-suspect G. Clark had some ambitions but simply run out of room so had to stop.
I’m afraid there’s no deep insight here — I was hoping there would be some sort of grand step in the final puzzle which would change everything, but alas, I had already racked up the interesting treasures.
At least the loose thread doesn’t have to bother me any more!
(Prior posts on this game are here.)
Via eBay. Notice the lack of backspace. Normally delete (“DEL”) serves as a backspace function but Secret Kingdom has its own string input routine which doesn’t use it. I discovered that the left arrow works as a backspace instead, which is good to remember since it probably applies to the other Sharpsoft games.
Alas: one more treasure, obtained via a source dive, but I can’t seem to get at the last two.
I first want to come back what I said about the game having its own “flavor”. Here’s a comment made by baltasarq to my initial post:
This really seems an advanced adventure for the time, at least in the carefully taking care of answer beyond “you can’t do that”.
This isn’t quite true. Or at least, what’s happening is it tries to nudge its responses in a direction that gives more hints than normal — say, by having a noun that is unrecognized give the response I DO NOT THINK THERE IS ONE OF THOSE — but it context this can mean comedy. For example:
You can ENTER PIT here, but for some reason that’s the only way to reference the pit.
Still, there are small bits of assistance, like here, which is a prime example of what I think baltasarq is referring to:
Nearly every other game would insist you don’t have the right item, or just having the bird fly away while you are fruitlessly swinging. Here, it gives a fairly explicit hint that you should come back with some kind of missile weapon (and if you also use the parser to test if particular nouns exist, you can find out quite swiftly it must be a bow and arrow).
Unfortunately, the game isn’t well coded enough for this always to go well. Consider the OIL which I had trouble with.
“YOU DO NEED IT” is a very nice inverse of the “don’t pay attention to this”; it’s “YES, PLEASE DO PAY ATTENTION TO THIS”. It turns out you can WEAR OIL. At least sometimes. For some strange reason, including in the circumstance above, WEAR OIL just says I’M CONFUSED. I think this happens if you are in one of the lake-adjacent rooms; if you are somewhere without water, you can successfully WEAR OIL and smell like a FIERCE FISH.
I would say, hence, using the staff in the wrong place (which spawns the oil) is a softlock, except you don’t technically need the oil at all. As I suspected, the oil is protection from the lake monster — you stay safe 100% of the time. You also die by getting set on fire if you try to light the torch with the oil on. You can remedy this with USE RAGS, which will get rid of the oil, but the odd thing is that you need the torch to get at a SHOVEL, and once you have the SHOVEL in hand you need to go back in the lake to dig up the crown at the island. So even though the oil gets a bit of removal of random number death, you still need to swim in there anyway, and you can just get lucky all the turns you need to without that much effort. There was some interesting thinking here but the end result was the design didn’t quite fully mesh.
Anyway, returning to the original point about “flavor”: I think the slight boost in customizing parser messages is what makes the game feel a bit different than a standard Scott Adams jam. Other games (including his) have clues in the text, but not to the explicit extent here where you might get a hint without even trying for it.
Speaking of the lake, there’s also this:
You can DIVE. I discovered this before my last post, but I thought this might just be arbitrary death. What changed my mind is I dived in the source code, which had a curious line where the text segment “BRE” is checked in the second-word spot (it clearly isn’t being treated as a noun). Thinking hard what it might mean, I realized I hadn’t used HOLD yet. HOLD BREATH? Yes.
With the rags and oil puzzled out, all I have left to deal with are the OLD PARCHMENT which does nothing, and the snow area which still does nothing. I combed through for relevant messages, and all I could find that seemed new was a reference to WINDOW as a noun and a room that talks about standing on a ledge. I tried ENTER WINDOW in various rooms (even with a window not described) just in case there was a bug of some sort or maybe I’d get a different response than the default (I DO NOT SEE ONE !) but alas, no luck.
So I’m calling it here. If someone wants to check the source code, be my guest; you can use the second save state (or the one marked “1” since it starts numbering at “0”) at the file here with the game + emulator and type LIST. Or you can just use this link where I uploaded a video of the entire source code being listed out. I don’t know a good way to dump it as plaintext, unfortunately.
From Sharpsoft User Notes #6, showing all three of the initial Sharp models (K, A, and B) merged together in an Escher-like contraption.
So, since my last post this has mostly been a pleasant experience. Alas, the wolf was not destined to be my friend.
Specifically, the wolf has a fairly low chance (I’m thinking 2%? 3%?) of attacking, as shown above. It can be defeated specifically with the SWORD that was in the lake (USE SWORD) although another wolf will return eventually. So the wolf serves a function something like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods Adventure. I should point out, though
a.) the dwarves weren’t truly and completely random — they had physical locations on the map and moved around, and there was a limit where eventually you kill them all
b.) (more importantly) they can’t kill you immediately upon sight
Regarding b.), at least a couple times through the game I’ve walked into a room to have a newly-spawned wolf only to die immediately after without a chance to even type a command. Adventure did make it possible to die with no chance (you miss with an axe by random luck, they hit with a knife by luck) but that at least felt like going through an unlucky dice roll rather than instant death for mysterious reasons.
In addition to the wolf being random, the fish that gobbles you in the lake is random.
I was able to get the sword, swim over to the nearby island, grab a torch and *silver goblet* (my first treasure, with the asterisks around it), then swim back safely. On a second swim (and there is a reason for a second swim) I died instantly. Fortunately saving isn’t too rough on my emulator (it has save states); the original used tape saving which would no doubt be slow.
The asterisks strongly put this in the territory of Scott Adams clone, which it already had the vibe of. I’m not checking the source code yet (spoilers, arr) but it is possible the author even used a magazine reprint of Adventureland or Pirate Island.
Fortunately, other than those two elements, there’s only been one other random number element. I mentioned getting frozen in the snow last time. It turns out sometimes you can survive going a step through. Using some save state shenanigans I made it all the way to the end of the two mountain branches which resulted in … the game looping back to the lake again.
I also tested out dropping an item in the snow room, and found out that you see it over and over again (that is, if you drop the STAFF, there will always be a staff in the room as you go north). The game seems to be making it a “fake room” to save space. It will actually keep track of how far north you’ve gone, so if you take four NORTHs and then try to turn around, it will still take four SOUTHs to get back again. The whole section is mysterious and even though I’ve solved quite a number of puzzles after (as you’ll see) this section remains mysterious.
Also, on the left branch, the snow doesn’t exist as an item, and the right side, it does and you can pick it up.
Moving on, I still felt like the HEADLESS man from last time had to now be dead. I was reading the room wrong: there’s a tower very clearly described, but despite “there is a tower in front of you” being right there in the text my brain mentally sorted it as being “in the distance”, but no, it is supposed to be right there. If you ENTER TOWER when the man is alive, he’ll stop you; after becoming headless, he will not, hence is clearly dead.
The lever opens an upper level (with no parser feedback, I originally thought I hit a bug). At the upper level there’s a TREASURE CHEST (which I won’t open until later) and an OLD PARCHMENT which SEEMS WORTHLESS. It is of course highly suspicious and it probably is in actuality valuable but I don’t know how to get it to change over.
In the cellar, going down:
I’ve already been to the inside of the tree; that’s where the treasures go.
The warm clothing, of course, lets you survive the snow without any random chance of death, but I still haven’t found anything useful out there. While I was at depositing my first two treasures, I also went ahead and lit my torch (acquired from the lake island) with the flint and cedar box. It does nothing with the cold area (I was hoping to maybe melt the snow).
Prodding further at things, I found that the SEALED DOOR I ran across earlier is described as being made of salt. I had a WATER BAG from the lake that was filled with water, so I tried POUR WATER. This caused part of the door to dissolve and allowed me to enter.
This drops the player into a small cave system.
To the west there’s a pit of snakes; if you have the torch you can safely drop in as the snakes are scared of the torch.
The chain mail syntax is annoying here. You have to use the verb REMOVE to get it off, you can’t just TAKE MAIL.
Going to the south, there’s a rope and a shovel. You then find yourself at the bottom of the well from earlier; you have to THROW ROPE in order to make a route to escape. I appreciated the inversion here; I expected to find a rope and eventually climb down the well, but instead the well was exited from the other side.
Going to the IRON LADY with the newly-found chain mail, I was able to avoid getting spiked:
Inside there’s a *diamond* and a key. The key goes over to the treasure chest, revealing yet another treasure and a hammer.
For the hammer you’re supposed to think creatively. I did not. I wandered around doing USE HAMMER everywhere.
Ha! Ok, I admit that was clever. The stone incidentally is its own separate item I have yet to be able to use.
I was starting to run out of places to hunt for treasure. I did have the shovel so started of regimen of doing DIG everywhere, while being told NOT HERE. I am proud to say I realized fairly quickly the best place to try would be the island back in the lake.
One last treasure I eked out by getting the BOW and ARROW over to the bird and typing SHOOT BIRD. It dropped a gold ring.
This makes me sad.
Putting everything together so far:
I’m truly stumped now, though. Each treasure has been worth 10 points, so there’s almost certainly three left.
Pretty much I just have the snow area left un-prodded. There’s also the OLD PARCHMENT that still claims to be worthless, and the OIL that smells like FIERCE FISH I have yet to use. I have some RAGS where I feel like I could dip them into the OIL, then maybe set a trap for the big monster fish. Unfortunately, that’s just a feeling, because no verb I’ve tried has worked.
A source dive is still possible! We’ll see if I can hang on to the end.
(Oh, and if you’d like to try the game yourself, I have it packaged with an emulator here. Just load the third save state and you’re good to go.)
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
We’ve only had the Sharp line of computers here twice before, and only glancingly; once with the Japanese game Mystery House (with a Sharp MZ-80B port I never could find) and once with the British game Quest (or Fantasy Quest) which originally was for the Sharp MZ-80K but I played for the Oric-1 instead.
This time we have a game that was only for Sharp computers, so we get to dive in for real. It was originally for the early computers MZ-80A, MZ-80K and MZ-80B, and later had a port to the MZ-700. The MZ-700 is essentially portable with the MZ-80K, so likely the only addition was color, as the original systems were all monochrome.
The publisher was Sharpsoft out of London, which as the name implies, was dedicated solely to Sharp machines, and published a “User Notes” newsletter which gives the feel almost of a fan-run user group (like the Toronto PET Users’ Group we just saw with Fantasyland).
The cover of Issue 3, the last User Notes of 1981. The illustration is by one of the readers, John Trippick.
Here’s a clip from issue 3 just to give an idea:
From your feedback it appears that software, which you can run on the MZ-80K, is an aspect of these User Notes that readers find helpful and stimulating. Last issue we introduced “Tiny Pilot”; P.L. Birch wrote to us with his comments and suggested changes to this package. Mr Birch’s comments are presented in the letter section of this issue. Our thanks to all those readers who have donated their ideas and software. If you have hints and/or software you would like to share with other MZ 80K owners drop us a line at SHARPSOFT.
Through the 80s they came up with a respectable catalog of software, including at least five adventure games. Escape From Colditz from 1981 does not seem to be available (no relation to the TRS-80 version … I think?) so we’re starting with G. Clark’s Secret Kingdom.
According to their advertising they were “specially commissioned by Sharpsoft”.
From Personal Computing World, Jan. 1983. By the rule of magazines being off their date by a month, this puts these games in the tail end of 1982, although there may be earlier ads.
Nothing fancy plot-wise here: we’re supposed to “find treasure and put it in the correct place to score”. Will we finally get a “proper” Adventure clone here, or will the British pull a weird trick again?
HELP is not recognized as a command. Maybe they forgot about it.
Well … maybe? I made a bit of progress, enough that I’ve not up for cracking open the source code right away (it’s just BASIC and the listing is easily accessible) but I still have quite a bit of game to go.
It does seem so far to want to nail highly traditional fantasy without any odd side-turns into comedy or surrealism. I will say the “flavor” is yet again its own thing; that is, it still feels different than any of the 1982 works we’ve tried so far in a gameplay sense. I’ll try to nail down why more concretely in a later post.
The first part of the map is just a 3 by 4 grid of barren moorland. There’s “fireworks” lying around as well as a “well” (which I have done nothing with yet, but responds to ENTER WELL with YOU CAN’T DO THAT AT THE MOMENT).
There’s also an IRON LADY where LOOK LADY states LOOKS LIKE IT HAS A HIDDEN SECRET. I was baffled on visualization for a while; I thought maybe it was a statue, possibly even a parody of Margaret Thatcher (like the DICK NIXON statue in Escape From Traam). PULL LADY gets the message
PULL YOURSELF A PINT INSTEAD
I tried to create a verb list. The game fairly consistently rejects nonsense verbs with a specific message…
I MUST BE STUPID BUT I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY ‘ASDFAS’
…so I went through every verb on my “standard list” and marked every verb which gave a response other than the “I MUST BE STUPID” one.
This certainly was a help, but there were some verbs I was dubious about testing in action. I realized that for some reason, the I MUST BE STUPID happens on some verbs _only_ when there is also a noun. I’m unclear why the behind-the-scenes parser would do this, but I took another run through my verb list and crossed out all the verbs where VERB LADY gives the STUPID prompt.
In the process I found out what the iron lady was really referring to. Witness: ENTER LADY.
Ow! That does suggest the action is right, just preparation is needed.
In the process of this verb-searching I discovered that noun-searching works as well; for example GET NONSENSE has the response I DO NOT THINK THERE IS ONE OF THOSE whereas GET TORCH says I DO NOT SEE IT HERE.
Moving on to the top part of the map:
Straight out of the moorland you find a lake with a wizard standing around who LOOKS LIKE HE WANTS SOMETHING. The wizard is entirely static, but if you are in the north part of the map a wolf starts to follow you around.
The wolf I have not been able to get any reaction from; he doesn’t kill you, he just follows. You can try to KILL WOLF but the game then asks how (by saying, for instance, USE FISTS) but nothing has had an effect. Maybe the wolf is actually helping us and will jump in at the right moment?
Back to the wizard, I did figure him out. Going by the assumption this was a Tolkien reference, I did GIVE FIREWORKS and he left behind a STAFF.
IT HAS A STRANGE POWER.
I figured out the staff’s primary use, but let me get back to it in a moment. Exploring clockwise around the lake I found some RAGS, followed by a CANNONBALL, and then an UP exit which led to a slightly busy place:
You can CLIMB the tree or ENTER it. If you ENTER you can find a cedar box and some flint which I assume is useful for lighting things on fire (like the TORCH I know exists somewhere). If you climb the tree you end up directly above the man in armour.
Wolf buddy! Or at least I hope he’s my buddy.
You can then DROP CANNONBALL and go back down to find he is now a HEADLESS man in armour. I do not know the reason for this. I suspected (due to the iron lady) I was supposed to take the armour, but TAKE ARMOUR indicates that’s not even a noun the game recognizes! I’m also unclear based on all the verbs I’ve tried if the man is even, technically, dead (yes, no head, but I mean, fantasy?)
The bird is incidentally holding something shiny. I haven’t gotten it yet.
Rotating a bit more around the lake, there’s an exit north to some snow. Travel too far north and you die from cold. I suspect the fire is useful again, too bad I don’t have anything I can get burning.
Finally, to the east there’s a small hollow leading to a stair with three orcs.
This is where the staff is handy. You don’t even need to be in the room; just USE STAFF and it will leave behind some oil (that “smells like a fierce fish”) but the orcs will also be turned to stone.
Ripped from the Hobbit, maybe?
Going up further gets a sealed stone door. I suspect the bird’s item will be useful.
That would normally seal up everything I’ve solved, but in the process of testing a couple verbs in the process of writing this post, I ran across something by accident. You see, I have no idea in the MZ-700 emulator I am using how to backspace. I was going to check something with ENTER TREE but realized, mid-typing, that I was next to the lake rather than the tree. So I hit enter on my keyboard with just ENTER showing (expecting it to be an error so I could move to the place I intended), and:
Trying to get the sword results in death:
However, I haven’t tried yet making a beeline for the island or using the staff and seeing if the “fish smell” oil distracts the monster. So I’ve got more to work on, but this is still a good stopping point.
Renga in Blue 