Stone Age is the last game from Scott Morgan for TIAdventures, and in some senses the simplest one. I may simply have gotten used to his parser quirks, but I beat it in roughly 10 minutes flat.
My guess, if you look at the ad that was published in the ASD&D catalog…
…that reading from left to right, these were still written in the order shown: that is, Haunted House, Stone Age, Fun House, 007: Aqua Base, Miner ’49er, and Vedas, especially since last two felt “denser” than the other games. In terms of the chain-of-recommendations the games have made, it goes in a different order, but it is quite possible all of these were written as one set and the suggestion about getting the next game from ASD&D was made only after a publisher was secured. (On the other hand, Aqua Base was released for cassette only, which suggests special status.)
In all honestly this is just a guess. The simplicity didn’t bother me so much just because it meant that none of the puzzles stopped me horribly (for long) due to parser troubles, and while the game does rip a puzzle directly from Roberta Williams, this version might be considered an improvement.
This one’s a “biome journey”, with the meta-map shown.
As the front cover indicates, we’re a victim of time travel to the past, to “5000 B.C.” Given the presence of dinosaurs, I think we’re a little further back than that, but this is the same author who turned acid into water with some lichen.
The game starts with a reasonably clever in medias res moment as we find ourselves in a cavern with no clothes, and the only real clue to what’s going in is found by typing INV or INVENTORY and realizing we have a “driver’s license”.
Doing LOOK LOG reveals a SPEAR and KNIFE; you can also TAKE LOG. To get further along the stream, you need to USE LOG which will invoke it as a water vessel of sorts. (The only hard part is figuring out the right parser command.)
The bear fortunately succumbs to violence; with KILL BEAR the game asks you with what, so you need to type WITH SPEAR. Just like with Fun House, the two-part aspect to this is fakery; in reality the game is searching for “WITH SPEAR” on its own, and you don’t have to say anything about killing the bear first.
The bear leaves behind a skin, “FLESH&MUSCLE”, and a bone, two which will be useful.
Moving on to the south there is a EUCALYPTUS TREE, and typing LOOK TREE reveals some EUCALYPTUS LEAVES. Doing it again, even after picking up the leaves, reveals more LEAVES.
Further south there’s a BRONTOSAURUS in the way, but you can distract it via the newly acquired leaves.
Also, I know this isn’t a big deal, but we’re off chronologically. (I do know one of my readers is a professional paleontologist, so feel free to chime in here.) Brontosaurus was in the ~150 mya (million years ago) era, whereas Eucalyptus was in the ~52 mya territory. We’re additionally going to be tossing in a T. Rex later which was in the Cretaceous (~75 mya). I really would like to find a game, any game, which treats deep time accurately and we can visit the Eocene or something like that with animals totally outside the normal pop culture. I think a lot of misconceptions about evolution come from the ludicrous time jumps authors seem to put on anything pre-human.
A Phenacodus, an Eocene-era herbivore. 55 million to 38 million years ago. They could have eaten Eucalyptus leaves. C’mon, wouldn’t you love a game full of creatures like this? Picture via Wikipedia.
Moving on, there’s a desert and the bit where I warned Roberta Williams was getting ripped off. Wizard and the Princess had a maze at the very start where there were many rocks and nearly all of them had a scorpion, except for one. That one rock was the one you could pick up without dying. It was such trouble that later printings of the game put a hint card in the package just for that one puzzle.
This game simply has a bunch of rooms described as “desert” not really in a maze, and LOOK ROCK in most cases reveals a scorpion, but there is just one which says you see nothing special. The map is quite simple…
…and you don’t need to spot any subtle graphical differences: so, superior to the original, in a way.
Moving on, there’s a snake blocking the way, just like Roberta Williams, and (again just like Wizard and the Princess) you can THROW ROCK to drive the snake away.
Unlike Roberta Williams (unless you’re jumping over to Time Zone) there’s a T-Rex immediately after. It’s happy with the flesh from the cave bear that was speared earlier.
Next comes a beach, and a boat with a hole. Trying to FIX BOAT has the game prompt you WITH what, but running through my inventory led to all items being ineffective (fair enough, plugging a hole in a boat with a bone seems awkward). This was the only moment that gave me pause.
You’re supposed to go back to the tree and get more leaves. The leaves then can be used to fix the boat via WITH LEAVES.
That’s almost everything! The ocean is a very minor maze (unclear why you’re blocked off from any direction in particular, let’s assume strong currents) and that leads you to another beach and eventually a shack.
Trying to go into the shack, I found myself kicked out for “indecent exposure”.
Confused, I checked my inventory and found I could WEAR SKIN from the ever-useful bear. This allows entering the shack and finding a PROFESSOR with a TIME MACHINE.
If you just try to GO MACHINE, the professor stops you. It took a beat for me to realize I needed to prove I belonged inside, so I did SHOW LICENSE (the driver’s license that starts in our inventory) and got jumped immediately to the end. So fast that even when I recorded in OBS I couldn’t capture the screen, so here’s the text:
ZAP!!!!
YOU MADE IT BACK!!
BUT CAN YOU MAKE IT THROUGH
THE NEXT ADVENTURE?
“The next adventure”, not an ASD&D game. We’ve broken the time loop!
In all seriousness, for its short span the game wasn’t bad; it clearly was intended as a romp, and the ending made me laugh. A bad parser and dodgy writing and minimal world-model all can still sustain an adventure game as long as you don’t spend long in the universe.
In fact, if I were to go back and rate the Morgan games, the only two I’d say are worth playing are this one and Four Vedas (with the albatross puzzle, except that gets spelled wrong). I hesitate to say for certain but I’m guessing the author was young and these were produced at great speed. However, for the end user looking at the company catalog that doesn’t matter: they got advertised along with everything else. This sort of game with this sort of parser — bespoke elements and all — was part of the texture of the age.
The six adventures plus Entrapment, the game picked up by Texas Instruments for official publishing. Via TI-99ers.
Coming up: the final Softside Adventure of the Month for 1982, followed by the final next-to-last Aardvark game we’ll see (ever), followed by the sequel to Troll Hole Adventure.
Renga in Blue 