My previous post is needed for context.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the game but the panel is cool. From Doctor Who Magazine.
I’ve observed before that sci-fi has often fared better than fantasy when it comes to early adventure games (the opposite is true of CRPGs). Fantasy objects tend to be designed without any kind of rules, meaning that the magic pendant that needs to be waved somewhere needs to be waved everywhere since there’s no method to work out what’s going on. Science fiction tends to be better-behaved in that respect, and even with interdimensional teleportation etc. the authors seem to feel more obliged to make it clear how various gizmos operate.
That’s not the case here.
To continue where I left off, I had a locked door I couldn’t get by and a box I couldn’t open. It turns out the lake (that I filled the flask from) was the culprit.
I had tried a number of ways to “dive” into the lake with no joy. I tried taking the heavy gold brick and jumping in the lake while holding it before using it on the wall (there’s a puzzle like this in Sunset over Savannah). I thought maybe that’d have an effect since jumping into water with the powder causes them to explode so maybe this was tracked as well? … but no, that wasn’t it. Despite the game insisting repeatedly it doesn’t know the word DOWN, it does, in that exact spot: you can SWIM DOWN.
The silver key is sufficient to both open the box (crystals full of energy) and unlock the door.
To the east here is a Store Room with a lever where I struggled for a while trying to push or pull it, when you’re just supposed to TAKE it. I don’t know what it does; I carried it the rest of the game, and I assume it got used passively somewhere. The note will be useful shortly, but the next leap is to realize that the beam of light is not some sort of functional thing you’re supposed to interrupt to cause an effect; instead it means there’s another exit you can take, that is, GO BEAM.
Typing INSERT CRYSTALS will cause THE WHIRR OF MACHINES SOMEWHERE. Somewhere is just back in the storage room (with the mysterious lever) where an opening appeared; past that is a wire fence.
CUT FENCE (or SNIP FENCE) works here — it turns out SNIFF was really SNIP, which I think is a new one. Then there’s a room with a safe, and the safe has a dial that turns from 01 to 20. 0519 backwards can’t be 9-1-5-0 (there’s no 0 on the dial) so the appropriate way to read it is DIAL 19 followed by DIAL 05:
That’s essentially it except for one last parser struggle. Taking the key all the way back to the HOLE at the start, I tried INSERT KEY, PUT KEY, etc. with no luck; it turns out I needed REPLACE KEY.
I have no idea what the lever was for, or what the button on the bracelet that we’d been toting around the entire game was for. The whole romp was only loosely connected and only made sense as some sort of challenge delivered by an Evil Entity (maybe Human Resources thought we’d been slacking on the whole Time Warden job thing).
This almost could have been a satisfying game still, but the time I spent with parser troubles — especially the game deceptively claiming it didn’t know the word DOWN — really knocked it out of proportion. I can ignore parser issues if they’re light as a percentage of gameplay; say I spend only 2% of my time thinking about the parser (maybe it’s a long game, so there’s still somewhere I get stuck a while, but it doesn’t linger as the main gameplay). Here, the overarching puzzles were simple enough that the majority of my time was spent on parser trouble.
The biggest issue is the violation of trust: the first time the parser does a horrible hiccup, I start to have my doubts about if patience is worthwhile: should I treat the puzzles as puzzles, or is the next one I get stuck on going to be equally more the fault of the game than myself?
Still, this game was unpublished; would some of these elements have been tweaked on their way to market? At the very least the bottom bar would have been changed to read BUG-BYTE (like The Scepter did); maybe the person responsible for checking if the tape loaded correctly would have fixed a typo or two while they were at it. Since Bug-Byte rejected the game outright it’s impossible to know. One certainly gets the impression of the cheaper-end cassettes of this period that the goal was to do as little testing as possible.
If nothing else, when we see Wadsworth again he’ll be with an entirely different company on an entirely different computer. Certainly his later games feel like much slicker productions, so maybe the technical freedom helped.
Wadsworth had already hopped over to Artic by the end of 1982 as they published his game Invasion Force for ZX Spectrum. This is essentially a variant of the “boss fight” stage in the arcade game Phoenix. Screenshot via Mobygames.
After he wrote and published The Scepter with Bug-Byte, Simon Wadsworth went on to write a second game (today’s selection) and sent it in.
Time Warden never was published:
It was written using the same source code structure [as The Scepter]. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.
In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.
Wadsworth went on after this to publish with Artic (Adventure E: The Golden Apple and Adventure F: The Eye of Bain), taking over the series from Charles Cecil, so this game has some historical importance despite falling into the author’s own memory hole.
DVD cover of the last of the Key to Time serials, via IMDB.
The Key of Time reference makes it clear this is an offshoot of the Dr. Who universe. There is such a thing as a Time Warden in Dr. Who lore but you have to jump up to 1988 and the comics to see it; the Warden shows up in the same comic as one of the foes of the Transformers (Death’s Head) so is only roughly canonical.
From Doctor Who Magazine 135. That’s Death’s Head holding the Seventh Doctor. Death’s Head later had a run-in with the Fantastic Four.
While Time Warden doesn’t stick to canon like Dr. Who Adventure (at least so far, I’m not done yet), “Syrius 5” is a reference, as Sirius IV showed up in the television show during Frontier in Space (Third Doctor, 1973).
Prison Governor: I’m releasing you into the custody of this commissioner. He will fly you back to Sirius IV to stand trial.
Dr. Who: And may I ask what I am supposed to have done there?
The Master: Defrauding the Sirius IV Dominion Bank, evasion of planetary income tax, assault and battery committed on the person of a Sirius IV police commissioner, taking a spaceship without authority, and piloting said spaceship without payment of tax and insurance. Landing said spaceship on an unauthorized area on Sirius III, need I go on?
Dr. Who: I seem to be quite the master criminal, don’t I? You don’t really say the you believe all this nonsense do you, Governor? Whatever credentials he’s shown you are forged.
The Master: Oh come Doctor, you know the game’s up. Why not admit defeat? You know, this man always works with an accomplice. A girl. I’ve got her under lock and key in my ship. Well Doctor, are you coming quietly?
You start, as the author already indicated, returning from a “vacation” finding things have gone horribly wrong. You’d think there’d be a special line for this sort of thing, but I guess we were out-of-dimension.
The “STABALISER” has a small hole where I assume the key is suppose to go. If you try to drop an item here the game says “NOT HERE” as “VIBRATIONS ARE NOT GOOD FOR TIME STABALISERS.”
I did get to inadvertently test out the time limit early because the very start is easy to get stuck in. There’s the “wardens room”, a “grand room” with a “teleporter”, and the teleporter itself, which has a control panel that needs an I.D. CARD which we don’t have. All we start the game with is a BRACELET that has a button on it (I have yet to get the button to do anything).
I ended up having to go into Patience Mode™ and dutifully made my verb list; fortunately, the game is quite clear about if a verb is understood or not.
The parser only understands the first three letters of each word, so SWING is actually SWITCH and UNLIGHT is really just UNLOCK. I’m unclear if SNIFF is really that word or something else (surely SMELL would be more likely if that was important?)
In the process of doing all that and starting to apply every verb on every item, the countdown to doom started to close in so I waited for the axe to fall.
After enough brute force I realized that you can MOVE TELEPORTER. I was clearly visualizing it wrong.
The PASSAGEWAY is then revealed. Behind it is a store room with a shovel and ID card.
(Even with the “bigger on the inside” aspect, is the TARDIS really the sort of thing that can be shoved around? And if it isn’t the TARDIS — and the Dr. Who references are very approximate so that’s fair — wouldn’t a smaller version not be able to hide a passage?)
No reason to linger more, I suppose; using INSERT CARD while in the teleporter causes an “odd feeling” and upon leaving you find yourself somewhere else.
The planet consists (so far) of a mostly linear set of puzzles. To the south there are some bricks on a road, and if you LOOK you find a GOLD one.
Given this is probably a Wizard of Oz reference, I can again assert the author was just not worrying about canon. Mind you, the extended Dr. Who canon technically has the Time Lord in the same universe as Star Trek and the Transformers.
Going a bit farther south there is an unfinished wall. My verb list helpfully had BUILD on it so I tried BUILD WALL, finding out the gold brick was too heavy and caused the whole thing to fall over. This made a hole, allowing entrance to a swamp.
The swamp forms a very minor maze of sorts (not really, but I still had to drop objects to map it); the important thing is that you can DIG in two spots to reveal some BLUE POWDER and YELLOW POWDER.
Taking the prizes and heading back to the road, there’s a branch leading to a field. The field has a lake and also has a branch going up to a mountain with a cave.
Jumping into the lake with the powder is deadly:
This is intended as a hint, rather than as a punishment to the player.
The cave has a flask and a boulder. The boulder is described as having something behind it but MOVE is ineffective.
This is where the powder comes into play. You need to
a.) drop both powders off — you can do it right at the boulder
b.) go back to the lake and FILL FLASK
c.) return with the full flask and EMPTY FLASK (again, the verb list was helpful in making it so I didn’t have to hunt for the right syntax)
As long as both powders are in place an explosion will destroy the boulder and you can go in further. (If only one of the powders is there, it will just dissolve.)
The box does not want to OPEN (“I CANT DO THAT…YET.”) and going farther south leads to a locked door.
I am now stuck here, with no key (time-linked or otherwise). I assume I missed something with the bracelet/button combo possibly? Or I forgot to dig in a spot. Given the opening with moving the teleporter I don’t want to assume it will be easy to make progress, but I certainly don’t want hints yet.
Renga in Blue 