Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.) I finished the game (sort of) and then I finished it again (this time with more hints). I’ll explain what I mean in context–

From the first issue of A & B Computing.

One thing that helped was to realize, like Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker, a great deal of the action maps down to simply typing DROP. So the pass at the beginning you show to the guard can be dropped, as can the key that gets inserted right afterwards. This simplifies matters down slightly in terms of verb-hunting (although there’s a nasty one I came across early still).

Even with this condition, the game was quite frustrating as the correspondence between object and solution was often tentative.
Last time I called the Dalek being killed by a pickaxe “verging” on moon logic (weird weapon to pick, but ok); here I think the game embraces it fully. The SportsHall manager, who I thought might want something sports related, instead wanted the helmet with a lamp.

This opens paths to the south and east. To the south is a “blodgaster” (your guess is as good as mine, whatever it is doesn’t play any part in the solution to the game)…

…and to the east are three rooms with treasures. A “cheese” and a “sparkpatter” are easy to get…

…but a first edition of the sparkblatter news has a “very old man” stop you from picking it up.

We’ll be returning to that later. For now, let’s go back to the room with a message about releasing our bonds. Trying UNLOCK or UNLOCK PADLOCK or UNLOCK ASDFSDF in almost all rooms gets the response “I don’t know the combination”; there’s no real “padlock” item despite it being built-in to the inventory. So when I was in the room with the inscription and I tried UNLOCK and got an “I don’t know the combination” message again, I assumed I was missing something else. Instead you need to type the whole phrase UNLOCK PADLOCK.

Just to be clear how diabolical this is, PADLOCK otherwise isn’t recognized as a noun, and UNLOCK seems to not care what text goes after it. This is hard-checking for the UNLOCK PADLOCK phrase here.

The door opens to a strongroom with a gold plated phaser (a treasure, but also a weapon). You would think it applies to the Dalek (the one that likely was a lizard woman in its other incarnation) but no, it goes to kill the tiger instead, although the parser is quite tricky here (SHOOT doesn’t work; you need BLAST). I already had BLAST in my backup verb options based on what happened with Death Star.

Killing the tiger opens exits to the south and to the east.

Taking the south first, there’s a bridge with a “repair man” who will stop you unless you’ve taken the “repair manual” from the west side of the map and dropped it off. (Even when it’s not really moon logic, it doesn’t make a lot of sense narratively.)

Further to the south is a “dead end” with an “antique book of spells” and nothing else mentioned. If you try to take the book, a “Zeblovian caretaker” (previously unseen) stops you.

We’ll be solving that in a little bit; going back to the tiger intersection and taking the east path instead is a force field which needs some equipment to be fixed. Again, the DROP paradigm is being used, and you can cart over a bunch of “this seems like it goes to fix stuff” items until you hit a win against the puzzle, which doesn’t seem like fixing anything at all. In particular, you need a “battery” just to the east of the start (that’s reasonable, I guess) and a “control panel” that was to the north of the start, and I didn’t even think was portable. I started to lean on the walkthrough by Garry Francis because this was getting absurd.

Requiring two items is one way to reduce lawnmowering, although you can just drop as many items as you want until the right ones are present.

Where I really needed the walkthrough was the next step. The force field opens passages to the east and south; to the south you can find a *CENTURIAN* credit card right away (a treasure). (The credit card room has a passage to the east, but I’ll come back to it later.) Just as a reminder, one of my obstacles was back at a bar where I was told that “my kind wasn’t welcome” when trying to take the whisky, and using a purse of money wasn’t sufficient to do anything. The card is useful instead, but the normal route of just DROP CREDIT gets no reaction. However, after you’ve dropped the card down, you can safely take the whisky.

There’s simply no reaction now.

Treasure-wise, I had the two treasures past the Sports person who wanted a lighted helmet, the jeweled pickaxe, the golden phaser, and the credit card. I wasn’t able to pick up the first-issue newspaper yet, so this put me at five treasures. Dutifully carting them over (inventory limit of three)…

Pile in progress.

…resulted in me winning the game.

????! Honestly I was tempted to call this an early out and say I was done with the game, but according to the walkthrough, line 170 is busted; it should have a “10” where there is a “5”.

Keep in mind this was a type-in. My suspicion here is that this is not an “authentic” error but rather whoever typed the game in got frustrated and changed this line so they could win based on what they had. (Alternately: Lucas changed the limit from 5 to 10 during development but forgot to fix the end trigger. I’m leaning to this being an “intentional” error, though.) I didn’t feel like retyping code; to keep going I just deposited the remaining treasures in the room adjacent to the treasure room, sort of an in-game fix to the issue. There was still an emotional effect, as having “won” already meant I started to cling to the walkthrough more freely.

Continuing from before, I had the whisky still from the card; if you drop it at the invisible caretaker of the book of spells, you’ll be able to get it now.

Moon logic but not supermoon logic. I’m able to assess, after the fact, that yes, a random caretaker might like whisky, but there really was no indicator to this. The helmet/light being given to the sports-person might go to supermoon logic, as I can’t see why they’d care about that.

With the spell book in hand, and returning back to the action, and specifically the force field branch, I now went east and found another treasure.

Including the type of computer the game is being made on is a pretty common move, I should go back and document where it happens.

To the north of here is a shelf full of old books. With the DROP logic going, I tried dropping the spell book, opening a passage.

If you thought you might read the book or cast some spells, no. This isn’t that sort of game.

This reveals a “dusty area” with some *ZIRCONIUM* which is the end of the line.

The last part of the game is to the east of where the credit card was; I’ll give a clip from Garry’s map (especially because he includes a room in blue that can only be accessed by hacking the source code).

The Large Deep Cavern has a “rusty handcart” (ignore it). Surrounding it are a statue (a treasure), a dollar (used to obtain a treasure shortly) and a “pfennig” (ditto).

The Space Time Vortex is special also in that there’s another room (a Magnificent Hall) that has an 11th treasure, an Apple computer, and you can leave the Hall to land in the Vortex, but the only way to the Hall is by cheating. (This admittedly puts a piece of evidence towards the “5” earlier being a mistake left in by Lucas. Maybe he put it in for testing purposes to make things quicker but forgot to change it back?)

With the three items in tow (dollar, statue, pfennig) I went back to the west side of the map, dropping the treasure off along the way (but not in the treasure room, since that would end the game). There was a machine that took dollars: that seemed simple enough. Except first, you have to call it a GALAXIAN and not a DOLLAR so my first time through I thought I had grabbed the item but I hadn’t so I had to go back. Then, when I actually did the DROP GALAXIAN at the machine, it started giving messages about the machine dispensing, but no “earring” appeared; this message was now part of my inventory and counted as the earring object.

For the pfennig, I took it back to where the old man wasn’t letting me get the first issue newspaper, and things continued broken.

You know what? I’m calling it there.

This was decidedly the worst of the three Lucas games I’ve played (which all, it turned out, were published by Silverlind at first). Even assuming the bugs weren’t there in the tape version (I doubt it) the logic itself was simply harebrained. In the ad copy this game was listed second, although it may or may not have been written second. Given the extraction of Haunted House from Frankenstein Adventure, I think it’s possible Lucas was eying the source code for Hitch-Hiker before writing this game; even though there’s no exact references, the heavy use of DROP and text layout have some resemblance. (This would be a funny state of affairs, especially because Hitch-Hiker swiped some elements from the Supersoft Hitchhiker’s Guide, and Supersoft themselves later got sued for their product.)

I’m still not clear why (what I’m assuming is) the lizard woman got changed to a Dalek, but referring back to my previous post, I mentioned a warning:

All contributions are, of course, paid for at very competitive rates. So, if you’ve got your eye on a new BBC add-on or you’d just like to supplement your pocket money, get writing! It is vital, though, that all the programs you send to us are totally original, and not ‘borrowed’ or ‘adapted’ from other magazines or books.

This feels like it’s targeted more at outright theft (like what happened with early CLOAD) rather than republishing, but maybe Lucas was being paranoid and wanted to at least avoid matching the ad copy given by the other company. Relatedly, I was wondering if the lizard woman was from D&D, Lucas’s own imagination, or something else (given it switched to a well known intellectual property). The closest match I could find was to Flash Gordon, which has lizard women in its cartoon from the late 70s.

From the Flash Gordon wiki.

If the warning making Lucas nervous is really what happened, this might explain his tendency across all his games to keep changing titles and small details. Maybe more information will come out once I’ve figured out just how far the cloning goes.

Today I continue my playthrough of the complete works of Steve W. Lucas, which is harder than it sounds, because what are the complete works of Steve W. Lucas?

Last time, for instance, I played through Haunted House as published by Silverlind, except it turns out it was also published as a type-in a year later, newly dubbed as House on Misty Hill. The game that Haunted House was derived from (Frankenstein Adventure, by a completely different author) was used by Lucas again to make The Monster’s Final Hour (1985) and The Monster Returns (1986).

The next adventure from Silverlind (Journey to the Stars) is lost, but I’m not worried because Lucas almost certainly duplicated the same game under a new name.

You have been sent on a dangerous mission to find 10 treasures — but how are you going to get back? Beware of the Antiflavian MegaTiger and venomous lizard woman!

This is followed by the third and last of the Silverlind adventures, Passport of Death. It was originally going to be my next game, until I found out I had already played it! Despite it having an entirely separate entry on CASA, it’s just a clone of Journey of a Space Traveller as printed in Oric Owner. The same CASA entry mentions Red Alert from 1985 (printed as a type-in) being yet another clone.

Just to be clear, this means the same game was published under four names…

Journey of a Space Traveller (Oric)
Passport to Death (BBC Micro)
Visitor from Space (Amstrad)
Red Alert (Commodore 16)

…with the latter adding slightly more detail but still using the same walkthrough.

From the art that goes with Red Alert. Computer Gamer, June 1985. Source.

The wrinkle is that it isn’t clear-cut “bad” that Lucas did this; it was quite common for games to be published non-exclusively, which is how Galactic Empire (as I just wrote about) ended up with multiple companies. Adventureland was published through Scott Adams himself but also printed in the Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures. The unusual aspect is Lucas renaming the game each time (and sometimes adding some descriptions or items) making it a headache for people trying to sort out the catalog after the fact. I suppose it’s possible someone bought Passport of Death from Silverlind (for BBC Micro) while also subscribing to Oric Owner (for a totally different system) and being annoyed at buying a duplicate for a game they had already typed in, but Silverlind sales were so small I doubt it.

Today’s game comes as a type-in from A & B Magazine, the title being from the fact that the BBC Micro had a model A and a model B.

Source.

The very first issue of the magazine mentions soliciting games in the editor’s note, with the following warning:

All contributions are, of course, paid for at very competitive rates. So, if you’ve got your eye on a new BBC add-on or you’d just like to supplement your pocket money, get writing! It is vital, though, that all the programs you send to us are totally original, and not ‘borrowed’ or ‘adapted’ from other magazines or books.

Remember this note for later.

Turning to the game itself, you start in a loading bay in a starship. Your goal is to find ten treasures.

There’s a slightly unusual twist to the starting conditions found via typing INVENTORY.

Note that everything above is “hard coded” as being inventory rather than regular items you can manipulate; neither PADLOCK nor LOCK are recognized nouns. The parser in general is quite fussy and I’d love to have the actual verb list which came with the article (I don’t have the text of the article in this case, though). For the most part all I’ve managed involves SHOW, INSERT and KILL, although I know PRAY is also recognized.

Praying may be good for the soul,
but it doesn’t seem to work here

Exploring the immediate environs, to the immediate south is a “cargo bay” with a sign which says this is where the treasures go, and to the west, north, and east are sections of the planet we’re on. I’m used to (with this sort of game) our player having a personal vehicle of some sort and a moment where you disembark, but the structure here is almost like the ship that we’re taking all the treasures to is also part of the world itself.

Almost certainly incomplete as I haven’t finished the game yet, and with various obstacles you don’t know what path opens until after the puzzle is solved (so there’s at least one dotted exit missing, if not more).

North is a “security desk” with a “magnetic security key” (that I will be using up later), a “control panel” (I have no idea what it does and it may do nothing) and mineshaft with a lever that looks like an arm. You can’t just pull the lever (the verb isn’t even recognized); I did manage to solve this by the end of my session (I’ll explain when I get there).

The security desk and office seem like they could still be part of the same starship as the cargo bay, but the mineshaft seems like we’re on a planet now?

To the east is a “battery” along a walkway, a “security pass” at a kiosk (which I will also be using shortly), and the Jolly Sailor. There’s “whisky and soda” at the Jolly Sailor but we are apparently judged inadequate to receive its wondrous alcoholic properties.

Surely this means we’re parked at some kind of spaceport, right? The game just isn’t clear where starship ends and spaceport begins.

Just to the south off of where the pass is there’s a Dalek blocking our way. You know, I’m starting to think Lucas was just throwing around his geography and obstacles at random.

Taking the pass and the key in hand, you can instead head west to the SPIGON HQ. The game is unclear what SPIGON is referring to. At least I know what a Dalek looks like.

Blocking the way is a guard, but you can just show the pass that was lying around just a bit to the east and you can get in. Good security procedures! I bet the passkey on the computers is “4”.

There’s another gate inside, but the magnetic key serves to open the way further.

Two branches, actually. To the south are some “tunnel” rooms with KRYPTONITE (described as too heavy to carry), a helmet with a light (weird since you have a lamp) and a door with a lock.

I haven’t been able to get in here. Incidentally, saying UNLOCK (just by itself, remember the word LOCK isn’t recognized as a noun) gets the response “I can’t remember the combination”; is the engraved message inside the door and we’re just remembering that the message is there? I otherwise have been unable to find any way to read the engraving.

Going back to where the gate was, to the east there’s a Centurian selling crystals…

…a vending machine that takes dollars next to a jeweled pickaxe (which is the first of the treasures)…

…a repair manual (to what, the game doesn’t say), a SportsHall manager that blocks our way (to what, the game doesn’t say) and a rock with the word BLACKPOOL on it. If you try to say BLACKPOOL the game says that’s too dangerous to do here; I think it’s reading that as typing the word BLAST. (It’s a two-letter parser, so it only is reading the BL.)

After quite a bit of noodling, I realized I could take the rock back to the “arm” lever and drop it to open the grate. The real issue was that the parser is dodgy enough I thought maybe I was just typing PULL LEVER wrong.

This unfortunately doesn’t help with progress; it’s just a single room mineshaft where you can loop forever back to the same room.

The message here doesn’t change even if you have the helmet with the light and/or the battery.

I did have one other solution, verging on the dreaded “moon logic”. (A less frequent visitor on this blog than you might think, although I’ve discussed it here.) That pickaxe which counts as a treasure also counts as a weapon and works to defeat a Dalek. I have no idea how you’d come across this without simply trying everything on everything at random (the phase I was at).

Past that you can find a purse with money (I should go back and try buying a crystal, come to think of it), a “rusty padlock” on a narrow path (an item you can take, not an obstacle), and a tiger in a clearing.

The tiger increased my suspicion of something that I’m sure a number of you have already spotted: this is probably the missing Journey to the Stars from Silverlind. In both games you’re looking for 10 treasures; in both games you’ve got a tiger as an obstacle. The Silverlind game mentions a lizard woman which this game doesn’t have (I skimmed the source code), but notice the Dalek is talking about poison which doesn’t make a lot of sense. What would make sense if it had been reskinned from a “venomous lizard woman”. I of course can’t be 100% confident but I’m hovering at around 98% that they’re the same game.

“Ironside” Dalek via eBay. Defeating a lizard woman with a pickaxe also makes more sense to me than defeating a Dalek with a pickaxe.

To summarize, I’m stuck on: getting by a SportsHall manager, a mineshaft that seemingly goes nowhere, and a tiger. There’s also various places I haven’t been able to get anything useful from (like the bar and the control panel) although they’re not actively blocking my path.

There’s two walkthroughs and the whole thing is in BASIC so I could always source-dive, so I don’t need general hints from anyone who knows spoilers, but I will still take suggestions from anyone in the audience who is “playing along”. Note the inventory limit is 3 so it’s a little slower testing “lawnmower style” than some other games.