Archive for the ‘temple-of-bast’ Tag
I have finished the game. This is a direct continuation, so my prior posts are needed for context.
It turns out my major issue was technical: I was playing in TRS-80 Model 3 mode. The Model 3 was out when this game was — it was first released in 1980 — but for whatever strange reason the game was refusing to interpret a particular parser command while I was in Model 3 mode versus Model 1. It is faintly possible the development platform was a Video Genie — which was popular in the UK — and there is some obscure technical incompatibility (the Video Genie is the same clone from Hong Kong as the Dick Smith Model 80).
Anyway, it is only sort of the game’s fault I got stuck; I tried the parser command I needed quite early in my solving process, just it wasn’t understood. The parser is still finicky but Part 2 of the game (in Egypt) is strong and nearly all the puzzles were satisfying to solve.
To recap, I realized I needed to put the “Alice oil” in the sprayer to get it to work, but no amount of whacking helped. One thing I knew (from the instructions) is that the game did understand prepositions and indirect nouns, so I thought maybe this was a case where rather than making a separate prompt for indirect noun, the game switched parser modes and required having the command typed as a whole phrase. Just FILL SPRAYER doesn’t work, you have to FILL SPRAYER WITH LIQUID. Trying this on Model 3 gets
BAD COMMAND FORMAT
LanHawk in my comments had in the meantime tried the game and found the command worked. He was in Model 1 mode, although we didn’t realize yet that was the issue until I did some experimentation.
Voila, what I was expecting to happen. Before stepping through, I want to mention two other things I sleuthed out in part 1 of the game.
First, I was able to recreate picking up the key at the start. I still think this is a bug. One version of the sequence goes: EAST, GET RUG (this reveals the safe), WEST, OPEN CUPBOARD, DROP RUG, MOVE SWITCH, LOOK SWITCH. There is a hidden key now with that sequence.
I still think this is a bug. Without dropping the rug, if you LOOK SWITCH before moving it, the game says SWITCH IS OFF. After you move it, the game says I DON’T SEE ONE upon doing LOOK SWITCH (but you can move the switch back to off!) The I DON’T SEE ONE gets overridden if and only if you’ve dropped the rug in the room. That’s in the territory of Koble’s Chinese Puzzle in terms of not making sense. I assume something in the game’s object table got jumbled up.
Somewhat more sensical (but still frustrating) I managed to pull off making a fishing line. I had a PIN and a THREAD; before you can tie the thread to the pin you need to BEND PIN. Then the tying works. You can also then BAIT the PIN with some spaghetti.
All remaining screenshots, passing through the mirror into Egypt, will be in Model 1 mode.
You land on the other side of the mirror at a dais, right next to a temple. The temple is guarded by “foo dogs” who give “kamic vibrations” if you try to enter the temple.
You can FISH LAKE in this location and get a fish which will be useful later. It’s also helpful to visit the bottom of the lake (just DIVE LAKE or, if you’re holding too much, you’ll sink down by going into the lake anyway). You can then use the SCREWDRIVER from way back at the house to PRY the grating open.
The water tunnel then takes you up into the temple.
The “tingling sensation” at the pool is important and will come back shortly. This whole section is a very tight puzzle, akin to the opening area, but without having to fuss about combining objects together. This section is more about magic, but there’s at least enough logic that I never felt like I needed to wave things randomly everywhere, and the tight space itself limits the things you can do with magical objects besides.
Going north is blocked by the same dogs as before, but you can go south.
The message is quite serious and you need to read it literally. You must be invited in. If you go in without the invitation you will die. The clever bit is the death isn’t immediate; you start getting chased by a mummy and can try some futile fighting back (for example, using fire against it; a message later indicates the mummy is flameproof).
Mucking about with options, I realized I could RUB the LAMP in the main temple. Rubbing once gets a dire warning, so of course I had to rub it again.
This is not a game over! You need to get turned into a rat. As you are not a (wo)man but a rat, you can now go into the tomb. You can then grab a “silver ankh” (it is small enough) but not do anything else.
The presence of the mirror is a classy bit of game design here. It clearly is set up to go back home using Alice-spray, but its location here also serves to emphasize the rat-ness of the player at this moment.
Fortunately, the pool with strange tingling also works for spell removal so you can turn back into a person. If you’re carrying the ankh, it will drop to the bottom of the pool, but you can DIVE to retrieve it again.
Now, what to do with the silver ankh? I prodded around a bit thinking about how it represents “life”, and tried touching the cat statue.
This is of course the Temple of Bast, the cat god, so the cat is able to invite us in the tomb.
You are then safe from the mummy. Unfortunately, while you are free to safely get the gold, you can’t get it out again (remember the weight pulls you down in water!) You have to get out via the front, but the foo dogs are still stopping you.
There’s another secret object farther in. First, you need to get the torch by the archway lit (SOAK TORCH WITH OIL, and yes, that took a while to find, followed by LIGHT TORCH at the eternal flame) and the you can go in the sarcophagus and close it. After closing it (and only after closing) do you see a “secret panel” you can enter.
I was originally confused thinking it was something you were supposed to SLIDE.
The maze is mercifully tiny; small enough that it mainly serves to cause a little drama as the torch light is limited.
At the end there’s an electrum amulet, which will let you get by the dogs. You can grab mirror, gold, amulet, and spray and take them all outside back to the starting point.
You can attempt to revive the foo dogs along the way.
Once there you can drop the mirror off and spray it with the Alice oil.
So you’re back in London: now what? There’s not even a SCORE command, nor some special trophy case you take the gold to where the game says “you’ve won!” However, there’s a mobster lurking outside.
He is now your friend.
This ended up being much better than I expected. I ran into parser oddities early so didn’t have high confidence. However, the intricate use of object ended up being fairly logical in the end, and despite solving-for-unprompted-magic-items being one of my major grumpy points, the use of magic was sparse and clear enough I didn’t run into the issue of having to mark up a large map and test every single magic word in every single room or wave completely random objects hoping they had something to them, etc.
The main fall-down overall was technical. This is a case where I wish the author had a modern copy of Inform because they could have done a bang-up job. I especially liked how the steal-the-treasure concept ended up getting both played straight (you are, indeed, just going in a sacred place and grabbing gold) averted (you are invited in) and subverted again (the whole goal was to pay off a mobster) all in the same plot.
Let’s get back to graphics, shall we? Up next on the docket is a Apple II hybrid RPG-strategy-puzzle-adventure game by an innovative author whom some of you may recognize.
The Weighing of the Heart. Anubis reads the scales. Osiris presides to the right. From The Met.
So far I have still only opened up one more room (an attic) since last time. The object puzzles are elaborate enough that (in a way) the objects themselves make up the exploration space, not the rooms.
Also as was prophesized, due to this, the game really fell down hard on its parser. This is true even of the very first puzzle I solved immediately after my last post: dealing with the fuses. Specifically, I had a broken fuse, I had some wire from disassembling a hen run, and I could FIX FUSES. I’m don’t 100% visualize what was wrong on the bad fuse but at least the shenanigans are slightly believable.
Where things then fall down hard is putting the fuses back in. INSERT FUSES doesn’t work (SORRY I DON’T KNOW HOW) and PUT FUSES is even worse; the game says OK as if it was successful, and you have to carefully look at the room description to realize the game just parsed PUT as a synonym for DROP.
No, the right action is REPLACE FUSES. Then you can MOVE SWITCH (if you haven’t already) to kick the power on. This allows the saw in the back to work properly. (What happened before, if you don’t remember, is you could swap fuses and still run the saw, but it would cause both fuses to bust. So the game explicitly added a fixing route that was wrong.)
The saw can be used to cut up a pair of post into pieces, but that’s also wrong. You need to get some BOARDS from upstairs (they were LOOSE FLOORBOARDS hiding a PIN)…
Nice repurposing here — the boards would normally just be the thing hiding the “useful object” but they become useful in themselves.
…and cut those instead.
Then you can take the posts and boards together with some screws to make a ladder.
I tried the ladder in every room and always got NOWHERE TO CLIMB TO. It then struck me there might be a secret exit up, and I’m finally trained enough by the school of hard knocks (Nuclear Sub from 1980 plus my recently-played Doomsday Mission) to try LOOK UP.
Upstairs is dark, but you can grab the extension cable from the shed and the lamp from the study to provide some light.
Getting the mirror ends up unfortunate:
IT’S RATHER CUMBERSOME PERHAPS IF I … WHOOPS!
OH DEAR! I COULD DO WITHOUT SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK!
While there are PIECES OF BROKEN MIRROR, they aren’t super useful and going down the ladder kills you.
If our heart is judged worthy is not mentioned.
This is mostly where I’m now stuck. redhighlander in the comments mentioned the ladder but also a fishing rod, which I haven’t been able to make and I assume is useful later. I did somehow manage to get a key and I think it was a bug. I was able to get a key by … looking at the main switch?
Somehow my screenshot didn’t save, but I looked at the switch and I was told I saw something, and suddenly I had the key. The key I could then use to open the safe to the east.
The blue liquid is poison. Drinking it kills you. I assume it is topical (on either yourself or an appropriate item) but I haven’t been able to rub it.
While I have a saved game past the key-finding bit, so it doesn’t really matter I can’t replicate the behavior (probably, unless I soft-locked in some other way) I’m very stuck parser-wise now. I peeked at the machine code and you can take the SPRAYER in the shed and have the LIQUID inside of it, so I guess then you can spray … the mirror probably? However, all attempts at POUR LIQUID or FILL SPRAYER or the like fail.
I’m 85% certain I’m just stalled on a parser issue but knowing what the issue was doesn’t necessarily help solve it. I also don’t have anything approaching a fishing rod and I could see it possible I softlocked myself out of one.
Any and all help at this point is appreciated. I’ll keep going a while longer but it is faintly possible my journey will end here. The weird appearance of the key makes me especially nervous about more lurking bugs.
Molimerx is a company we’ve only brushed by briefly (see: The Golden Baton); they were a specialist in the TRS-80 based in the UK, specifically, Bexhill in Sussex.
They really were one of the earliest and more prominent companies of that time, and lasted from 1978 all the way up to 1987 before petering out. A. John Harding founded it in 1978 with his wife Marion. Quoting Harding’s holiday 1986 message:
I started Molimerx in August of 1978 so this is the eighth time that I have had the pleasure of wishing our customers a Merry Christmas. I do so this year with no less enthusiasm but, I suspect, considerably more weariness. Most of you will remember the gusto with which we all got involved in the microcomputer revolution in those days. The joy of actually finding out what information was held at which address — and the miserliness with which we held onto that information! Now its all business and nowhere near as much fun. The first microcomputer I owned, boasted — and I mean really boasted lK of memory, which one had to program with toggle switches for each bit. Now 256K is considered small.
John Harding, from the magazine 80-U.S., February 1983.
This 1985 catalog lists 400+ items which is a good run for any company of that era. Other than them being the initial publisher of Mysterious Adventures they’re mostly known for the 1980 lawsuit Molimerx vs. Kansas City.
There were a couple companies caught up in this (Kansas City Systems was selling both Microsoft and Scott Adams products on the sly) but on Molimerx’s end the actual instigation of the lawsuit had to do with dominoes. Specifically, J. W. B. Dunn had written a Dominoes program (copyright 1979) intended to be distributed exclusively by Molimerx. The author Dunn had come across the Kansas City version — a friend had bought it via mail order — and wanted to compare it. He found it to be identical, and further investigation led to the lawsuit, which ended up establishing the legal certitude of software copyright in the UK. (See: the book Programming for Software Sharing and also an article here from 1981.)
(There’s also some allegation from Marion that Molimerx almost had a deal with IBM to get LDOS rather than MS-DOS as the IBM system default but John threw the deal. This makes no sense as LDOS was developed by Logical Systems in Wisconsin as explained by one of the developers here. Molimerx was LDOS’s distributor in England but they would not have been the ones dealing with IBM. The actual near-miss-for-IBM-default company was Digital Research with the CP/M system. Marion then claims that LDOS was then sold for the BBC Micro, which never had LDOS. I think something happened because the narrative is quite dramatic but multiple stories got jumbled together.)
However, despite or perhaps because of their pioneer status, Molimerx was prominent in the way Instant Software from the US was — they were mail-order kings when that was relevant, but now a lot of their catalog is lost, including the “children’s adventures” Dreamland and Wonderland. We do have a copy of Temple of Bast but no packaging. It is Malcolm McMahon’s only game.
Via Ira Goldklang.
Our job is to … rescue? unearth? “liberate” for the British Museum? a gold nugget from Egypt.
This feels like it ought to have the same start as Pirate Adventure from Scott Adams; that is, you start in a London flat, and then magic your way over to Egypt-land, grab treasure, and take it back. That might be genuinely the case here, but there’s justification beyond straight averice, as you can’t step outside:
This means the opening has you confined to a relatively tight area:
Importantly, it is a tight area with a lot of gizmos to play with. This feels like the kind of game where you need to mash things together and build things, which is risk with this kind of parser. What I’ve thrown at it has worked so far, but since I’m stuck (as you’ll see in a moment) I can’t guarantee things stay that way!
For the things in the opening room (SCREWDRIVER, FUSES, ELECTRIC METER, MAIN SWITCH), the fuses are the most immediately helpful, as you are told there’s one lighting fuse that works and one main fuse which is dead. You can MOVE FUSES to swap them, then plug in a nearby LAMP in a electric socket upstairs to test it. You can also, in a different room, get an EXTENSION CABLE that lets you tote the lamp for one extra room in any direction, but I’m not sure what the purpose of that is.
Next to the opening room in different directions are a paperback guide to reading Egyptian, a can of spaghetti (!?), and a floor safe that requires a key to open. I suspect maybe the key is in the can because the can is hard to open.
Out back there’s a “hen run” you can DISMANTLE with a screwdriver (fortunately the game gives the exact verb here) to get some wire and some posts.
The shed has the previously mentioned extension cable, as well as ENGINE OIL, an empty SPRAYER, SCREWS, and an ELECTRIC BAND SAW.
If you’ve fixed the fuses you can use the band saw to try cutting open the can, but it busts mid-saw.
I don’t have much else to play with; upstairs I was able to find a pin hiding under some floorboards and turn an unraveling vest into a THREAD. The game asks WHERE? if I want to TIE THREAD but I haven’t found anything that this helps with (yes, I was doing the equivalent of clicking on every item in a scene in a point-and-click game).
Still interesting to have a heavily MacGyver style opening with realistic technology in what originally was advertised as an Egyptian treasure hunt. So far no magic has entered in. Maybe we’re not going to teleport after all? (Eh, who am I kidding, we’re probably going to teleport.)
I’m happy to take guesses from y’all as to what to do next. (Or you can can even just play to test things out, here’s a link to play online.) There’s no guide or walkthrough to consult so we’re on our own.
The MAIN SWITCH works via MOVE SWITCH so you can shut everything off/on. I’m not sure the use of this, but I wonder if the whole point of having an extension cable for the lamp is to be able to test power things and it otherwise isn’t necessary.
Renga in Blue 