Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed to understand this one.

Via POPCOM June 1983, The Palms being advertised alongside the import game Pinball Construction Set.

Before continuing the events of last time, two points to hit:

1. I breezed past this screen fairly quickly from the kidnapping at the start…

…but just to be clear, this is showing the protagonist getting hit on the head by a coconut, where they wake up to find their girlfriend kidnapped; this is not them getting walloped by the kidnapper.

2. There was a cave where I tried to enter but I didn’t know why I died. Kazuma Satou in the comments mentioned a message about a Moray eel killing us. I have now experimented multiple times and found sometimes the eel response shows and sometimes it doesn’t. The game here seems to be outright buggy (mind you, it might be an emulator issue). Even when it does give the eel message, there’s a delay of a turn (and the game then gives just the “keep trying” message) so it is easy to be confused. For the events that follow with any deaths, I’ve seen similar behavior: sometimes an explanation appears, sometimes it doesn’t. Fortunately there’s nothing like the timed deaths at the start where I was genuinely unsure if my character was falling into the ocean somehow (as opposed to the girlfriend left waiting too long).

Continuing the story, there was a small HOLE I was unable to interact with but somehow I hadn’t tried LOOK, which displays a zoomed-in screen showing a crab.

Unfortunately, the crab turns out to be, while not quite a red herring, mostly useless anyway. If you open the door with the octopus on the wrecked ship, you can appease it with the crab, but you don’t make any “progress”; it just prevents you from dying. This is the sort of mechanic that makes sense in a gamebook (amulet of protection, good for one bad choice) but in an adventure game with a frequent save-reload cycle happening anyway the whole sequence ought to really just be ignored.

Speaking of the wrecked ship, the only reason to go in there is to find the bar, procure the wine…

…and then bust out via BREAK WINDOW. The NAILPULLER gets lost on the last door so I’m not sure what we’re using to bust it open; I assume our fist.

That’s almost everything missing from the big ocean area, except for one spot back at the ruin (which I didn’t find until later).

Over on the west wall there’s what looks like a hole; I tried LOOK HOLE with no dice, but found the right action was LOOK WALL. (In retrospect, there’s tiny writing too.) The “1983” will show up again near the endgame.

To escape the ocean section entirely requires going to a large rock to the west of the eel cave (far NW of the map).

Kazuma Satou’s comments ended up being helpful again, and I’ll just quote verbatim:

Given the circumstances, linguistic ambiguities may be throwing you off again, so let me just mention that the word ROCK is referring specifically to only ONE of the three rock-like objects that you can see on screen. Try using some synonyms to interact with the other two! (This likely comes down to semantic nuances between the words 岩 “iwa” and 石 “ishi” that didn’t transfer 100% cleanly into the context of an English-based parser).

I had run through a good chunk of my verb list previously, but I was merely referring to the ROCK (the big rock). I was instead supposed to be referring to a STONE (one of the smaller … er, rocks). 石 is “small rock” explicitly; while English does tend to imply “stone” is something smaller, it also uses rock as a straight synonym.

Trying to MOVE STONE asks which one; you pick the right one (no particular logic, but there’s no punishment for starting with left) and this reveals the most curious lost-in-translation piece of the game.

The exact text is

ｽｲﾄﾞｳﾉ ｺｯｸ(COCK)ﾉﾖｳﾅﾓﾉｶﾞｱﾘﾏｽ｡

and I don’t think the authors meant a ribald joke, nor does that look like a rooster, so I’m guessing they meant something like a faucet handle that can turn left or right.

TURN COCK then requires you to say WITH LEFT (not TO LEFT or just LEFT) in order to open a passage. I admit I had enough confusion and concern at this point I peeked at a walkthrough.

This leads to a new dark area, where you can go up and find an underwater city.

(More Micro Cabin Mystery House vibes going on.)

From here you can go south, west, or north. West straightforwardly leads back to the ocean (in case you’ve missed something), but south and north are messier: I hit the Parallel Universes problem. Since it’s been a while since the Problem has surfaced, an explanation: you are playing an adventure game, and manage to go from place A to place C, no problem. On a second trip through the game (for whatever reason) you try again going from A to C but now get stopped by some obstacle that wasn’t there before! You are in a parallel universe where a puzzle you previously didn’t even know was there has now appeared, and sometimes it takes effort to realize what changed.

Here, fortunately, the change was very slight, but let me narrate my first pass-through: I went south first, and found some statues.

While there, I started thinking that since I’m no longer underwater, I should be able to ditch the DIVINGSUIT, so as an experiment I tried DROP DIVING and it worked. Then I went back to the corridor and tested the north exit next, finding myself in a forest with a guard.

We’ll address the guard in a moment: the important thing is I ended up needing to go back through the same section on a different save, and found that I could no longer go north into the forest as seen above. But why?

Quite simply: dropping the diving suit at the statues solved a puzzle (pressure plate of some sort on the destroyed statue). My second time through, I dropped the diving suit as soon as I got to the underwater city since I knew it was safe, not realizing that it would create a parallel universe! This also indicates I got Very Lucky in accidentally solving what could have been a very difficult puzzle.

Back to the guard! Fortunately not a hard puzzle: I (almost) immediately tried GIVE WINE and it worked.

(The “almost” is because I tried directions first, and the game said NO!!!! like we were back in Mystery House again. That message appeared all the time as the default “you can’t do that” message.)

It’s easy to miss that you can also TALK GUARD after plying him with wine; he’ll mention the word HUMMINGBIRD (which, like 1983, will come up later). Exploring the forest now, to the east there’s a rabbit you can just nab…

…and to the west is a boat that is deadly. Just ignore the boat: it’s a red herring.

Heading north lands the player in a city; wandering around a bit I found a key…

…and another guard.

Using GIVE doesn’t work here but you can DROP RABBIT and the guard will be distracted and chase it. This lets you get past the bridge to an ARENA, with a door that can be unlocked with the KEY.

That’s a lion coming after us, and fortunately, I had been dutifully testing SHOUT everywhere I could; here it is finally useful, and it causes the lion to run away.

(This is close enough to Scott Adams Adventureland and the bear that I wonder if they’d had exposure to that game as well. I didn’t cover it here, but Adventureland did have a graphical version for Apple II by this point so I could see Hummingbird playing an import.)

Next up a SANCTUARY is visible in the distance but our way is blocked by BARRACUDA, but we’re also pretty low on items. The right action is to THROW BOTTLE — the one from the skeleton in the ocean.

Now we’re almost down to nothing, and I admit I had to check the walkthrough again to SHOUT HUMMINGBIRD. This reveals a door…

…and I had to check the walkthrough yet again, but in my defense the walkthrough author had a lot of trouble here too. The keypad suggests you’re supposed to enter 1983, but the right sequence is PUSH BUTTON followed by PUSH 1983. We’re almost done!

Further onward is a room with a RING, a HANDKERCHIEF, and a wall that has a smudge. WIPE WALL is sufficient to reveal a hummingbird.

Then you can PUT RING and find yourself mysteriously back at the beach.

You are restricted from doing anything other than picking up that coconut from the start of the game we weren’t allowed to touch before. And voila:

The game leaves the interpretation up the player, as this follows directly with credits.

(Scrolling, so I’ve concatenated some screens together.)

Rob did some sleuthing in the comments to help narrow down who everyone is. First off, 1983 is the year a different company (Starcraft) started publishing translations of the Sierra On-Line games into Japanese (including Time Zone with all the screens redrawn!) They also later re-did the Sirius games Kabul Spy and Blade of Blackpoole, and on the packaging for Blade of Blackpoole there’s some helpful information:

This discusses Masanori and Etsuko Takano, a team of programmers the profile compares to Ken and Roberta Williams. It mentions that after their first two games (The Palms and Knight of Wonderland) they formed their own company so they could work from home. Knight of Wonderland has a more straightforward list of credits:

Producer: Mamoru Imanishi
Scenario: Hiroshi Imanishi
Chief Programmer: Masanori Takano
Assistant Programmer: Etsuko Takano
Graphics: Etsuko Takano and Fumiko Kasai
Art Director: Yutaka Kawamura

With The Palms:

Directed by: ｱｯﾄ ﾏ-ｸ
Program by: DR.KASARI
Graphic Design by: Hiroshi & Etsuko
Color Design by: Etsuko & Yuta
Coopelation: Ryuchan & Masako

Mamoru, founder of Humming Bird Soft, almost certainly was the producer of both games, so he was “ｱｯﾄ ﾏ-ｸ”, that is, “at mark” or “@”. Hiroshi, the brother, also wrote the scenario; he’s listed as working on Graphic Design in the credits for The Palms (maybe the scenario too, but uncredited?). Dr. Kasari must be referring to Masanori and Etsuko Takano; Etsuko is also given as working on graphics, and “Yuta” who is cited as doing color design must be Yutaka Kawamura (the one who was art director on Knight of Wonderland).

There’s some more clearing up to do, but I figure it can wait until Humming Bird returns again in 1983 with Knight of Wonderland.

Mamoru from LOGiN October 1984.

Regarding the game itself–

Even if it was terrible to play, it would hold a novel place as really being Japan’s first game in the absolute style of the Apple II imports (excluding, again, The Odyssey which arrived slightly before). However, I generally enjoyed myself despite the language difficulties and the gauntlet of parser issues near the end.

While I’ve mentioned both Sierra and Micro Cabin references, this game also clearly points to Omotesando Adventure as well. What Omotesando established is a very in-joke sort of game where the player is dealing with the company that made the game; here, the Hummingbird references start from the very first screen and the player is clearly infiltrating “the temple of the Hummingbird” in the same manner as sabotage in Omotosando. It still comes off as the Japanese industry in their final “learning phase” and things are going to get much stranger as we get deeper into 1983. For the most part, because I already have them sorted, I will be trying to follow the history chronological by month.

If you’d like to jump ahead, the Game Preservation Society in Japan did a writeup of the game Recapture, a game that diverged from fantasy into satire.

The protagonist, a researcher at Fly Pharmaceuticals, is a young man who is putting all he has into a “100% Perfect Male Contraceptive” (according to the manual). He succeeds and creates the male contraceptive “Kondoh-Muyo” (literally “condomless”). However, rival company Mosquito Pharmaceuticals will not take this lying down and steals the research files from our protagonist while he is out drunk while celebrating.

Also, special thanks to the folks at Gaming Alexandria who helped me through some language troubles.

(Continued from my previous post.)

Via a September 1983 review in LOGiN, showing the starting village.

Last time I left off having trouble with getting both the ring (for the girlfriend) and a diving suit (apparently needed due to the kidnapping). The solution is off the verb list…

LOOK, SEE, SEARCH, GO, ENTER, GET, TAKE, OPEN, DROP, PUT, EXIT, LEAVE, OFFER, GIVE, PUSH, PRESS, TALK, ASK, SET, BUY, PAY, KILL, STAB, FIGHT, ATTACK, USE, WITH, BREAK, CROSS, WADE, BOARD, THROW, SWIM, WEAR, REMOVE, PEEL, RUN, ESCAPE, CRY, SHOUT, YELL, TURN, WIPE, RUB, UNLOCK, RENT, INSERT, BORROW, MOVE, DRINK

…but unless I missed something (more likely than usual given the circumstances) it isn’t clued that this is even possible.

The right word is RENT. You can BUY RING and then RENT DIVINGSUIT and then move on from there. (The player starts with 95 credits; you can BUY DIVINGSUIT for 95 and not have any for the ring, but this causes the timed loss like avoiding giving the ring altogether eventually does.)

Immediately after the kidnapping, you can WEAR DIVINGSUIT and then go north into the water.

Before exploring, I wanted to highlight something that’s been showing on the images I haven’t pointed out yet: notice in the lower right there’s a N or a S. This is showing which way the player is facing. Just because the game is trying hard to be a Roberta Williams Hi-Res Adventure (and you’ll see more of this in a moment), doesn’t mean it went completely without other inspiration; I’m fairly certain the reason “facing direction” got added was influence from Micro Cabin Mystery House, which is done in a first-person view akin to Wizardry.

One other thing to highlight is that death has been ambiguous. Nearly all the adventure games we’ve seen (including the Japanese ones we have played) have been explicit about what has caused player death, and sometimes have been even gleeful about it, such that the main plot is in the death scenes (see: The Domes of Kilgari). For the early deaths, the game just cuts things short and gives the equivalent of a “keep going!” message (頑張ろう, that is, ganbaru) while warping the player back to the start.

The first time I died I thought maybe I got swept in the water, not that the girlfriend’s scene was timed. Maybe it’s not even meant as a death but a “time reverse”? Either way, part of my early confusion was just realizing what was wrong. The first event trigger (if you don’t enter the shop) allows some time; the second (enter the shop, but haven’t bought the ring) is short; the third (after you have the ring) gives a little more time again. After the kidnapping there’s yet another timer running for getting the DIVINGSUIT and going in (now fairly short, and again with no detail why you just lost).

Again, using the same vibe from Roberta Williams, we have a grid where only some of the squares are important. Again, I have mixed feelings on this; one surely would expect underwater to be big and contain some locations that are empty of anything more than fish.

Especially for a player of this era, just moving around an environment and seeing graphics change as you move can be an engrossing experience.

Still, the actual game effect is to make the player treat the map as a lawnmower, mopping up each square, sometimes using alternate lives if one dies for inexplicable reasons. Still, the density isn’t too bad; this is maybe halfway between Time Zone and The Dark Crystal in terms of number of “interesting” rooms. (To be clear, The Dark Crystal wasn’t out yet; I’m just trying to describe the feel.)

Heading immediately east is a knife. (If you haven’t noticed yet, all takeable items are drawn in a white square.)

Tracing around the border and heading due north, eventually (five turns later) you’ll find a skeleton with a bottle.

Keep turning and there’s a cave to the north; try to enter and you’ll get another one of those vague, unclear deaths. (Is it simply a trap to avoid? Will it work if I get a light because I’m bonking my head? Or is it more like a creature I can’t see?)

West and south from the above area is a RUIN. You can go in and find an altar with the Humming Bird Soft logo and a blue ring that looks like it matches the red ring. It looks like the kidnapping may have been due to magic afoot in the antique ring we bought, rather than coincidental circumstance.

South a bit and there’s a SHARK. Fortunately, the KNIFE picked up earlier works to KILL SHARK (it prompts with what, you need to type WITH KNIFE). If you just try to hang out with the shark, eventually you’ll die, and again — no description of being chomped, you just get told to MAKE MORE EFFORT.

With the shark out of the way you can see the thing behind, which is a SLATE. I think it is meant to deliver the clue we are supposed to SHOUT somewhere to scare something off?

This has been moving in a spiral, so let’s mop up the last “interesting” spot which is just north of the starting point; I haven’t been able to get anything to happen here but it does invoke the English word (ROCK) which seems like a hint something ought to happen.

Finally, spiraling a bit more, we arrive at a shipwreck.

Entering is one way (as far as I can tell, there may be some parser nonsense).

The layout ends up having five doors, three which can immediately be opened while using the nail remover. (The double room aspect is again reminiscent of Micro Cabin rather than Sierra.) To the immediate west of the entrance is an octopus (the knife doesn’t work this time, and before you ask, yelling/shouting doesn’t help either, we are in a diving suit though):

To the east is a dark room which the game refuses entry; in this case I assume it has to be a light source issue. (The text just says you can’t go that way.)

At the end of the hall the west and north doors don’t open, but the east one goes into a bar where you can find wine in a CABINET, but you’re still stuck (I can’t even get out of the bar, let alone the wrecked ship).

Despite the Japanese text, this does give me the vibe of a lost Sierra On-Line game, with the same quirks and absurdities. Roberta Williams was never afraid to describe deaths, though, but at least with a shark or octopus I can guess what happens.

This blog has so far covered Japan’s adventure games with

Omotesando Adventure (published by ASCII)

Mystery House (published by Micro Cabin)

Mystery House II (Micro Cabin)

Diamond Adventure (Micro Cabin)

I’m lacking access to Takara B. D. Adventure (Micro Cabin again, same month as Diamond Adventure) and Odyssey Part 1 (Prosumer, squeaking in right at the end of the year and written for PC-88 with a Kanji ROM). One day!

While Diamond Adventure and Takara have notable connections with both Omotesando and Mystery House, and there are a few games (like The Spy) from 1983 that are linked, the industry mostly moved in different directions. Today’s game reflects that, completing an origin trilogy of sorts for Japanese adventure gaming.

Via Giant Bomb.

1980s Japan had a “bubble” in real estate, especially in the city of Tokyo; in 1990 the Harvard Business Review pointed out that just (in terms of real estate value) the ward of Chiyoda-ku alone could purchase the entire country of Canada.

The other city typically cited as benefitting from the bubble? Osaka, home of the real estate company M・A・C.

Mamoru Imanishi was in the Computer Division, and significantly, a son of the CEO. While he got his start in computers with a TK-80 kit…

From Wikimedia Commons.

…his true beloved was an Apple II; he ran a club devoted to the system and was familiar with import games. He somehow wrangled (see: son of CEO) a separate store and software line in late 1982 called Humming Bird Soft; they started with some PC-88 and Apple II graphics and utility software. Joining Mamoru Imanishi was his brother (Hiroshi Imanishi) and a small team.

The best scan I have at the moment of a February 1984 article in ASCII. It looks like today’s game has credits in the data file but I don’t want to poke too hard at it until I’ve finished.

They made their big splash in January in 1983 with The Palms for Fujitsu’s FM-8 (later FM-7).

Source. The FM-8 was Fujitsu’s first fully built computer but it was thought of as a “business machine”. Hence, a bifurcation happened after with Fujitsu’s follow-ups, the FM-11 being the business computer and the FM-7 being for general consumers. The NEC PC-88, Sharp X1, and FM-7 are the three 8-bit Japanese computers “casual” retro-gamers will likely run across.

The slow rendering speed on the PC-88 (and similarity between Fujitsu’s and Apple’s CPU) led them to make this hardware choice; what was even more daring was that they made the game solely for disk. Quoting Mamoru Imanishi:

I was anxious. After all, it’s a world where you can’t see the future. And I wondered: what extent would there be a demand for disks? I was unsure until the very end if cassettes would be better.

Omotesando introduced adventures, Mystery House introduced graphics, but The Palms goes back to the source — the Apple II Sierra On-Line games — and set a technical standard by a.) being in color and b.) being written for and only published on disk.

(What about the Odyssey game by Prosumer? It landed only a month before, and was in color, but worked on cassette and was allegedly quite slow. I will investigate whenever I get a copy, but for now just note it did not have the same impact The Palms did.)

We are at a seaside village for our girlfriend’s birthday. She’s been wanting a ring at the local shop; we’ve arrived with money saved from hard work. She awaits under a palm tree, but something is about to go wrong.

(Text above: “I’m in front of a seaside shop.”)

The village is laid out like a Sierra-style grid; the only directions are the cardinal ones and up and down (no diagonals).

While I’m at it, in addition to the directions I just mentioned, here’s the entire verb list (as extracted from the data file) — still following my policy of giving myself verb lists early on games in languages I’m not good at.

LOOK, SEE, SEARCH, GO, ENTER, GET, TAKE, OPEN, DROP, PUT, EXIT, LEAVE, OFFER, GIVE, PUSH, PRESS, TALK, ASK, SET, BUY, PAY, KILL, STAB, FIGHT, ATTACK, USE, WITH, BREAK, CROSS, WADE, BOARD, THROW, SWIM, WEAR, REMOVE, PEEL, RUN, ESCAPE, CRY, SHOUT, YELL, TURN, WIPE, RUB, UNLOCK, RENT, INSERT, BORROW, MOVE, DRINK

Ignore the appointment and wander around and you’ll eventually lose; the right thing to do is go into the shop, which offers a RING and a DIVINGSUIT…

…then BUY RING, and find the palm.

Giving the ring…

…is immediately followed by a kidnapping.

I haven’t gotten much farther than this. One last item is a NAILPULLER out in the open…

…but the only other item I’ve found is in the shop, and there’s not enough cash remaining to buy the diving suit.

There’s also a church with a locked door…

…and two cliffs, neither of which want to be climbed.

It looks like our destiny is to chase the damsel in distress under the ocean and have further shenanigans from there.

Just getting oriented has been slow going; it doesn’t help that the font is stylized in a way that seems designed to give headaches. On that last screenshot, the character before the period is a タ (“ta”). I sort of see it after the fact, but it’s taken puzzling above and beyond the adventure game puzzles created by the authors. Fluent Japanese readers are welcome to chip in with how readable they’ve found the text.

Fortunately, the pictures generally are clear. I’m essentially in the reverse position of the early Japanese pioneers playing import Apple II games with dictionaries by their side, scrounging in wonder at a new art form.