Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I managed to finish the game, and my previous post is needed for context.

Since nobody has a picture of Time Adventure’s cover as of this writing, here’s another game by the company from the same year. Zombie Island is a top-down game in the style of Robots/Chase, the same style that eventually inspired Deadly Rooms of Death. Source.

To recap, I had (but hadn’t used yet) a sack of coal, a frog, a glowworm, some cheese soup, some matches, and a life boat. I was facing a tiger, a prickly bush, and a “lazer beam” (what turns out to be the only place you can die in the game!)

The general theme of the parts I was stuck on last time can be summed as two parts confusion with the parser and one part personal blindness. Tackling the face-palm first:

I missed entirely — despite it being clearly listed — an exit to the south here. This leads to a “rubbish tip” with a “small white mouse” that will take the cheese soup. The mouse could be considered another Hitch-Hiker cameo.

The key doesn’t get used until later (and it is fairly obvious when it comes up) so I was still flailing. I went back and tested the frog some more; I had tried KISS FROG both while having the frog on the ground and while holding it, and neither seemed to have an effect. The word “seemed” is applicable, as KISS FROG while holding it turns it into a princess, but with no message whatsoever. The only way to find out is to take inventory afterwards. Here’s three screenshots with the whole sequence:

This is doubly tricky in that the response of nothing also tends to happen with other special commands that do nothing (like if you PUSH or PULL or USE where it doesn’t apply, which is most places) so the player has to just guess something happened.

That still doesn’t give progress though! (The princess is used much later.) The last issue was halfway between my fault and the game’s, because I had definitely tested burning the prickly bush with the matches, but I had tried it with USE MATCHES. In general, despite DROP being used for many things, it has always been used in way it still makes sense (giving the whiskey over to the doorman is DROP WHISKY, but you could visualize the act of handing it over being like dropping it). I had no such visualization with matches so I didn’t try the obvious thing of DROP MATCHES. (Implicitly, they’re being lit first, then you drop them.)

This opens a large new area with rooms described as a mixture of “small dark cave”, “dark smelly cave”, and “large underground cavern”.

Within are Terry Wogan’s smelly socks…

Mainly known as an interviewers for the BBC. I don’t know if this is a reference or just being goofy.

…a can opener, a golden statue, and a hungry dragon.

Gameplay is mostly a matter of testing DROP THING with all the various objects, although there’s a few wrinkles. The dragon responds well to the sack of coal.

Further on is some whalemeat, suggesting again this is something of a cross-over from Hitch-Hiker; there’s also a rockfall blocking the way, and a “nasty dwarf”.

The nasty dwarf runs away from the smelly socks. (This would annoy me in other contexts, but given the game’s setup, it isn’t too annoying to test and experimentation comes across as part of the point, as opposed to being moon logic.) This opens up a room to some mirrors, which can then be dropped at the lazer beam in order to go past safely. There’s no message saying the way is now safe, you just have to take the leap of faith; this is one way a wrinkle gets tossed into the usual “drop object to solve” scheme.

We don’t have the right item yet to handle Maxa Merlin. Keep in mind the enemies are all passive so you can hang out and try dropping every item laboriously just to see if, say, a glowworm causes an adverse reaction. (It does not. As far as I can tell the glowworm is useful for nothing, unless it passively activated in the cave somewhere I didn’t notice.)

While out of the cave, it’s a good time to use the whalemeat:

This opens the path to a “cinema” containing some “shrink spray” for no clear reason. This can be applied back at the rockfall (USE SPRAY, not DROP)…

…opening the way to Dracula.

The golden statue which I referenced briefly earlier comes into play here. It is not a statue you can pick up (unlike the game we just played). It is one that PULL works on instead:

This opens a route to a tin of canned blood, and given we just saw Dracula, it’s pretty clear where it goes:

Somehow the can opener gets used here but I’m not sure the setup (there’s no specific command to open it, so it just gets used passively). This opens a route to a locked door, but that key from way back at the mouse who wanted cheese soup can open it (“The door opens with an eerie creak”) leading to a “hallmarked golden ring”.

There’s one more route leading to an “angry prince” but I didn’t find it until later (personal map confusion again) so let’s save that for later, and take the ring over to the magician.

Again, found via random experimentation, and again I wasn’t as annoyed as I might be in a traditional game. The one-to-one mechanic (where each object gets used only once) is so well-established it doesn’t feel as gameplay-breaking to have less-intuitive connections between item and puzzle.

Past that the lifeboat finally gets used, where we can board the passenger ship known as Queen Elizabeth 2. This leads to a small area with a radio and the final location (a time transporter).

From here I needed to comb back over things before finding the cave section I missed, where the princess could finally be happily delivered.

The ruby is what drops at the teleporter to activate it, winning the game. The Brit-games love to play Rule Britannia in chiptune form and this game is no exception; it even does it twice (“and once again”).

I was reminded a bit of Seek; in that game, the particular design decision of putting puzzles in between rooms made the gameplay almost seem like a board game. With Time Adventure the design was tilted so heavily in one direction — one item to one puzzle, most of them dropped to be used — it started to feel like a different style of game than a regular adventure, opening the route in particular to making it seem not so absurd to defeat a dwarf with smelly socks or defeat a magician by dropping a gold ring.

I don’t think the style would sustain for too many games, but Peter Smith isn’t going to return here until much later, when he’s working for BBC Games (the first-party games arm of the public broadcaster BBC). While he has no more adventures listed on CASA, some of his educational games look like they might cross over, so they’ll need some checking out when we reach those future years. For now, coming up: let’s visit the last graphical Apple II game of 1982!

This is one of those unfortunate cases where the developer of a game can’t decide what the name of a game is; the advertising and cassette cover both say Time Traveller, the BBC Micro information screen upon boot-up uses Time Travel Adventure, and the actual title screen says Time Adventure. I’m going to assume the author Peter Smith wanted what was on the title screen (Time Adventure).

Acorn User, November 1982.

This is another Software for All game like Danger Island which was just featured here; Peter Smith’s other 1982 game Hitch-hiker was published by a different company.

Both of those contain the historical background so we can dive right in the game itself, with the open question: does this game borrow specific elements from obscure games just like the other two games did?

The game is mostly new. One of the characters that went from Supersoft Hitchhiker to Peter Smith Hitch-Hiker lands in this game; otherwise everything else seems “original”, following two style points that carry over:

a.) the map is laid out on a grid, without any turning exits, extended-length skips of room connections, or overlapping

b.) the “enemies” are “passive” and block the way, but don’t actively attack while you’re in a room with them

Point a.) turns out to be very important for an innovation this game includes. It isn’t visible from the very start…

…but it is visible as soon as you start moving around.

An automap is very rare at this time. The television show The Adventure Game had one on their high-end computer meant for TV display, not as a product for customers. Nellan is Thirsty had one, likely due to it being designed to teach children. I don’t know where Smith got the inspiration, but it certainly helped he already was using a grid-style, and keep in mind he was also a teacher so may have been thinking pedagogically.

It isn’t quite as lovely as you might think because the map extends past the north-south area available to be displayed, and as soon as you step “off screen” the map reset. If you go back again, the map needs to be redrawn; there is no map memory. It still ends up making navigation faster than normal, even though I had to also make a regular map.

The plot, as shown on an earlier screen, has the player caught in a time warp we need to escape by searching 110 rooms. They start blocked in a castle by a drawbridge, but fortunately there’s a lever nearby so it’s not too hard to bypass.

This opens up to the outside, but you quickly get blocked by a tyrannosaurus rex. In case you were wondering, “time warp” doesn’t seem to mean you get sent to a particular time, but rather things from all times (including you) get sent to the same place.

Here’s my own map of the opening area, with blue marking everything before bypassing the Rex:

The difficult part — not difficult so much in figuring out what to do, but wrangling with the parser — was in a raging fireplace.

Trying to go north.

Elsewhere there’s a bucket and a rusty tap, so it seemed like a natural thing to try to FILL BUCKET. Unfortunately, the game just gives a blank prompt and it isn’t clear the rust needs to be cleared up.

Past the drawbridge is a candle-maker shop with some grease which you can take back to the tap and DROP to take care of the rust problem, but even then the parser is finicky; you need to DROP BUCKET, then FILL BUCKET. However, I had to restart my game the first time around because it wasn’t letting me drop the bucket! (I assume I hit a bug in one of my attempts to fill it that caused it to stick to my inventory.)

With the bucket full of water you can extinguish the fire and get to a new set of rooms.

The object list from here (in addition to bucket & grease) now has a large crossbow (must be called a “bow” in the parser), bottle of whisky, and a bundle of arrows. Before taking out Rex, I should note there’s still a “prickly bush” I haven’t dealt with; I think the game might be fishing for shears, but the object selection starts to get esoteric enough I might be missing something else.

Moving on:

This opens a new area with a “bubbling fountain” next to a “narrow alley” containing a glow worm (hasn’t used yet) and a path to a zoo containing a coin followed by a suntiger. The tiger is the same one from Hitch-hiker; it was defeated in both versions via reading a book of Vogon poetry, but my guess is there’s no bad poetry in this game so it requires a different action.

To the north of the fountain there’s a doorman that appears thirsty, so I dropped the whisky (just like Hitch-hiker, giving is done with DROP).

This opens up the last area I’ve managed to reach so far.

Immediately after is a frog, and despite KISS being on the verb list, KISS FROG doesn’t work.

The room selection tends to the truly random — story-wise I find it best to imagine a bunch of rooms from various time periods got zapped in — like a coal mine with a sack of coal, a Hypermarket with a drinks dispenser (the coin from the zoo path works to get cheese soup)…

…a workshop with a “life boat”, and finally a mad scientist’s workshop with a “lazer beam”. Heading north kills the player, and this is the first time I realized this game even had death.

The inventory limit is stuck at three, and the rooms also have a maximum limit of three, so it’s been irritating to tote things around and test possibilities. I tried shooting the tiger (no luck) and dropping the cheese soup in various places (no reaction). I have the feeling there is only one (1) puzzle available for me to solve right now and whatever comes from that will lead to a chain reaction, but I’m not clear where that puzzle is. I will take suggestions in the comments for anyone who hasn’t played or looked at a walkthrough.