Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I am finished, and you should read my previous posts about this game before getting to this one.

Old printed walkthrough that comes with a copy of Transylvania on eBay.

I almost managed the feat of being able to say Transylvania pulled off not having any jank puzzles, but alas, I ended up looking up how to deal with the moose head.

Before doing that, though, I realized I could RIDE BROOM. This results in a colorful description of flying through the air before crashing in a tree.

This is only a hint for the cabin insofar as indicating it is important. This would have been a perfect opportunity for a little more detail, to avoid having the player refer to a second-order object on the moose head itself, and PULL ANTLERS.

I suspect the original text version was just fine, but the author got tempted by not only having the head only be rendered visually but making the player refer to the antlers as an entirely separate object.

Searching the cloak finds a lock pick. I took that over to the door at the cave (which I suspected might stay closed, but I guess not) and popped it open to find a cave with a crystal ball.

The crystal ball can’t be taken, just looked at. It reveals a figure wearing a wizard’s cloak (check) and a shiny gold ring (check) and waving the ring at the statue. In other words, waving the ring (which I had tried many places) does work, I just needed to be wearing the wizard cloak too (which I had just found) in order for it to activate.

This reveals an alien creature who says he is “deeply indebted” to you and then crushes your ring.

It is possible to get a little stuck from here because now you just need to wait for time to pass. Eventually you see a “shooting star”.

After doing so you can head back to the place with the statue and find a new encounter, a flying saucer.

This scene leaves you with a mysterious black box with a button. But this is exactly what you need to win, as the button serves to open the sarcophagus with the princess.

Now winning is just a matter of following the directions from the book: wave elixir, pour elixir, and clap hands.

Before getting to the end, a digression.

I’ve come across many people for whom Transylvania is one of their core childhood memories; Jimmy Maher makes it one of the rare early graphical adventures on his Hall of Fame list. So people certainly remember this one fondly, and…

…actually, I was just fine with it, antlers notwithstanding. This clearly was intended as a romp, and one that had appeal to children (attested by many childhood recollections I’ve read) so I’m not going to ding too much on the simplistic writing.

The game design was curiously open and mostly attempted to be “easy”, but that’s far better than the games we’ve seen (ahem The Mask of the Sun) that try to add very hard elements.

Speaking of The Mask of the Sun, I’d like to go double-meta for a moment, as I found this thread while searching around for reviews at the intfiction forum. It’s about Apple II graphical adventures as a whole.

I couldn’t believe I saw them again. They were all terrible adventure games. The writing is especially awful. The art was mind blowing at the time, especially because I understood the advances in Apple II programming that were producing the art in these games…

I really remembered Mask of the Sun, and I was excited to watch it be played on YouTube, and then, it was really terrible IF. It starts with a story, and then it’s a lot of maze, of roads. Solve maze, go inside, new maze. Almost at random, you get to put a thing from one place to another place.

Especial reward, an animation that was not possible on Apple II. Oh, that’s why I remember it.

— J. Robinson Wheeler

There is the general implication (not just this quote, but elsewhere) that these games are only good for nostalgia. Mask of the Sun indeed had some design issues which I went into, but it’s certainly not true that every game is bad in the same way.

When I write these things, I want to distinguish between things in a old style that you have to grant to move forward, and things that are genuinely bad regardless of style. An inventory limit is an example of the former: there’s nothing technically inherently wrong with one, and not having one means you miss out on puzzles like Magic Mirror or Adventure Quest had. Eventually games started to get so much inventory that they started to obtain a “rucksack” style object, but this is not just good or bad, but a tradeoff.

On the other hand, something like the antlers being separate is a bad design choice overall, even compared to other games of the time (which did not necessarily do such a thing).

One of the ways paradigm shifts in gaming happen is to revive one of the previously “bad” elements with a twist. If I told you about a game that is timed and you have to keep starting from the beginning to win, you might think I meant an NES game, but I also mean the multi-award-winning Outer Wilds. Part of what Dark Souls did was simply restore the idea that the difficulty of a game can push back, and the “troll level” in Mario Maker came from a similar re-think of the rules of game design. We shouldn’t think of our current state of game design as perfected and older design as regressive: there are different expectations and design goals that can be met.

Referring back to Transylvania, the time limit and inventory limit (onerous to modern players) clearly are meant to have a particular effect, and it was on hour 4 that I finally went to triumph with the princess, which made it satisfying in a way that would otherwise be hard to duplicate.

There is a sequel, although it goes in a different direction: the hero from this game, Princess Sabrina, and Prince Erik find a vampire lord has killed King John the Good. You can switch characters while playing. That doesn’t seem to match the ending here, so maybe alternate universe? In any case, we’ll need to wait a while before arriving at The Crimson Crown.

(Continued from my previous posts on this game.)

I remember playing this for hours when I was younger. With every move toward a new screen the eerie scratching of the Apple disc drive would scuff along making a sound that added to the suspense!

It had to as the game had no sound effects and no music. This somehow made it even spookier. Every screen rendering (slowly) before your eyes as if some creepy phantasm was programming it just for you.

— Via the Retroist, 2015

So my “waterfall” prediction of an easy chain of puzzles was essentially correct. I was misunderstanding a message in one of the rooms.

You can see this coffin by doing EXAMINE on the cart, but because the coffin did not respond to any of my actions (OPEN, MOVE, GET, etc.) I thought perhaps it was just scenery. Since I was out of things to try I gave it another go, and then it finally occurred to me that maybe the wagon was considered a location, and I could ENTER WAGON.

Grr. This likely wasn’t even intended as a puzzle.

Opening the coffin reveals a corpse, some hungry mice, and a silver bullet. You can placate the rats with bread and carry them around.

The silver bullet was what I had been waiting for with the werewolf. LOAD PISTOL and then SHOOT WEREWOLF:

Comparing the two deaths (werewolf and vampire) I still would say the werewolf is slightly more difficult to wrangle, since you only need one item (the cross) for the vampire, and showing crosses to fend off vampires has about as much mythological heft as shooting werewolves with silver bullets does.

Getting back into the game, the mice in hand meant I knew where to take them next. The cat will chase after the mice if you drop them down:

Fortunately, the witch never shows up. I think.

The broom I’ve found no use for (even when attempting to SWEEP every room in the game) but I was able to test my theory about the weak acid revealing the stump’s message.

The knocking teleports you in a cave, I assume the cave previously blocked by rocks. (I think this means the door is never unblocked, although you see it in this picture.)

Again following the waterfall, I could get the flies with the flypaper. Before taking them over to the next logical place (the bullfrog) I tried reading the book.

Trying to take the book teleports you out of the cave. It just a couple steps then to feeding a bullfrog some flies:

Again quite direct, even telling us where to go next. Is this game about to fall? Heading to the goblin and saying the magic word causes the goblin to drop the key and run screaming.

I was then able to take the key over to the locked grate and open it, finding an elixir underneath.

And there the waterfall finally ends. The book suggests the sequence SHAKE ELIXIR, POUR ELIXIR, CLAP HANDS, and all three actions work but get NOTHING HAPPENS in the place I’ve tried it — the statue and the sealed sarcophagus. My guess is we need an open sarcophagus and then it will work?

I’m close to out of options though. Other than the elixir I still have yet to use the shiny ring from the castle, and the broom from the witch hut. I tried every verb on my list on both the sarcophagus and statue to no effect, and I’ve tried everything I can think of with the ring. I did make one other discovery, in a log cabin that I previously could get nothing to happen…

…but I haven’t gotten anything more than this to happen. (The head is incidentally not in the text description.) I suspect I’m just looking for one more waterfall and then I’ll be at the end of the game, but it is of course possible there will be a last surprise.

PC-98 Japanese version as sold by Starcraft, via Mobygames.

(Continued from my last post.)

So I need to emphasize: the structure of this thing is very odd, even taking the span of all videogames from 19xx to 2024 inclusive. Very shortly after writing the last post I killed the big antagonist of the game (at least in a plot sense), the vampire. That’s supposed to happen near the end of your game. The only comparable game I can think of from the All the Adventures Project so far is Castlequest.

You can take the wooden cross (lying out in the open)…

From this room, with the colorful gravestone description.

…and SHOW CROSS (a perfectly natural action) to get a blast of sunlight.

A STREAM OF BLINDING LIGHT ESCAPES FROM THE CROSS.

It only takes a little thought to try bringing it to the vampire — you just need to not be holding the garlic. That seems to be the hard part of the whole thing (someone who hoovers up all the items just might not know the vampire is there!)

With the vampire dead, you’re able to take the shiny ring that previously had a barrier. (I have no idea what it does.) Another blocked place also opens up. There’s a ladder at the top of the stairs in the castle.

The ladder is not described in the text. I was making the incorrect assumption there would be nothing graphics-only (since the original game was just text). The ladder shaking happens if the vampire is still alive.

Up the ladder is a sarcophagus which just might have our princess, but it is “hermetically sealed”. Magic, then?

And that’s nearly all the progress I’ve been able to make, except I pushed the gravestone and found a locked grate. I assume that’s where the goblin’s key goes.

Being stuck, I made my verb list.

There’s enough verbs that in this situation I generally want to just play “normally” and only consult back in special circumstances. I will at least observe:

• It is possible to SAY in a freeform way so there’s surely a magic word somewhere.
• SEARCH and EXAMINE have been failures nearly everywhere (“YOU SEE NOTHING UNUSUAL” except for at the creepy statue). TURN seems to map to the same word, oddly enough, suggesting that another (hypothetical) secret will involve that physical action.
• You can PET as a verb, but the black cat doesn’t allow it (“SORRY – YOU CAN’T”).
• In terms of movement, JUMP is noteworthy (it asks for a direction) and I haven’t gotten FLY to be recognized but that makes me wonder if we’ll pick up the capability somewhere.

I’ve tried various random things like: feeding the cat bread, moving some giant rocks blocking a cave next to the stump…

I have to wait for an opening where the werewolf isn’t around to test a random action like this. Here he showed up the next turn.

…throwing the flypaper in various places (but not every place yet, the werewolf makes this slow), and trying every word in my entire verb list on the statue while wearing the ring.

I’m not ready for hints yet. I might be if this game had more dubious coding. Also, the fact that the vampire-killing is so simple make me think that somehow all the puzzles are simple, and I just haven’t hit the “waterfall” yet (where the thing you get from puzzle A lets you solve B, which lets you solve C, which lets you solve D, etc.)

This is a good time to stop and admire the graphics.

Here, let’s compare and contrast:

Let’s be fair: Time Zone had the graphics pumped out and a ludicrous rate, and Transylvania’s author did the graphics over 11 months. So there’s a little more care and love. But it’s still interesting to poke at the specifics.

Both at least attempt at some kind of stylization on the stairs. I would call Transylvania’s geometric shift and slight asymmetry elegant; it conveys the darkness of a long-decrepit castle. The Time Zone picture tries to convey something similar (with an old Pyramid) but it comes off more as a glitch than intentional.

The Transylvania art also tries to convey contrast with light and dark, with the coffer having both lights and shadow. The Time Zone art has no light contrast at all. (This may have been somewhat a result of the tools: Penguin’s graphic tools were likely more advanced than the ones used by On-Line Systems. At the very least, the Penguin graphics seem to have a wider variety of “colors” to pick from, color including intermixed texture possibilities.)

I’m also impressed at how image maintains the 3D structure even with the shadow over it, and the color used at the front.

I have long been the opinion that you can have “good graphics” at every pixel level; it is possible to adopt a style that works within the constraints. While early graphical art often looks janky, we need to consider not only the skill of the artist, but the time they had (production time was very fast back then) and the tools. The Tarturian rendered its graphics as literal lines of BASIC; the authors made a tool for generating them, but there were still hard technical limits to how good they could make a face.

The finest art of the Apple II era.

Via the Internet Archive.

(Jimmy Maher was able to interview today’s author, Antonio Antiochia, in detail. Check that link if you’d like to see more.)

Antonio was a 13-year old in 1979 who was at Eastern Michigan University, where his father worked, and was playing with computer terminals in a lab.

A picture of a computer terminal from Eastern Michigan University circa 1978, via the Aurora ’78 yearbook.

He found he could access games with a guest account and came across Adventure, but due to a lack of any starting instructions was unable to get anywhere. (Jimmy mentions in the comments to his post it might have been Wander instead, because of the lack of a tutorial to start. However, Wander was a lot rarer and there were enough ports of Adventure a rogue one could have the instructions cut off.)

The game still stuck in his head and he was able to return later and make progress all the way to the end. He was then out of adventures to play, and while he was already a capable programmer at age 13, he wrote his own on paper rather than on computer.

I came up with dozens of adventure plots in my spare time (and a few other games), drawing their outlines, their maps, etc., based on a wide variety of themes (a bit heavy on the fantasy genre) — simply out of the joy of creativity and discovery. It was cool.

Antonio later learned about Scott Adams games on home computers and the Ann Arbor Community High School Computer Club, so become a regular there. He wrote his own game on an Apple II (Land of Ghaja, now lost) and distributed it the club, then later followed with Transylvania. These were essentially private games.

Rather like with Magic Mirror getting Mr. Antiochia hooked up with a publisher happened by accident. In 1981 his father was calling Mark Pelczarski to order supplies (the store Micro Co-op) when Mark mentioned starting a publishing company (Co-op Software, but eventually Penguin). The elder Mr. Antiochia mentioned his son had written an adventure game, and Mark said to “send it in”.

The game was text-only in BASIC. Since not-yet-Penguin were to be known mostly for their graphical software, it seemed wrong to publish without graphics, but Mark was able to give his own software (including not-yet-released portions) to Antonio. Antonio then spent nearly a year making graphics, and the package of BASIC + graphics + assembly language provided by Penguin was put together into Transylvania.

There are incidentally later versions, like a Macintosh black and white version, a “high res” Apple II version, and a larger version with more puzzles published by Polarware. I’m sticking with the 1982 original.

The story begins at midnight, as we have been tasked with the King to rescue the Princess Sabrina, “in the clutches” of a “murderous Vampire”. We have 5 hours.

Reading the stump is a puzzle, as it is “covered with sediment and too fuzzy to read”.

The map is quite open. I was able to get to what I suspect is at least 80% of it from the start, possibly more. There are no locked doors. The puzzles seem to be gating the ability to pick up objects and find information, rather than get into locations.

The note says that Sabrina dies at dawn.

Here’s the first part of the map:

Wandering the map results in a lot of activity, both in terms of sounds and in terms of danger. There might be a “grim chuckle”, or an owl, or the sound of bats.

After a set number of turns (I think?) you start to get chased around by a werewolf. If you pause without running while a werewolf is the room you will die. Sometimes it leaves the trail, but not much. (The closest we’ve had to that effect is Masquerade.) You might additionally get picked up by an eagle and dropped in a random spot, which suggests to me the author was familiar with Hunt the Wumpus in addition to Adventure.

Here both are happening simultaneously.

There’s a “small hut” which is clearly a witch’s house, where a black cat hisses at you if you enter and doesn’t let you take either of the items (a broom and some weak acid; I’m guessing the latter helps with reading the stump).

Of items that can be grabbed just lying around, there’s also a garlic clove, a wooden cross, a stale loaf of bread, and a flintlock pistol in various locations (the latter two in an “Old Frame House”), although the werewolf being present means you can’t pick up an item if it is around.

(Also, the gun is not loaded. I’m guessing we find a silver bullet somewhere for the werewolf.)

For non-movable characters / antagonists, there’s a bullfrog, a goblin with a key (there must be at least one locked thing somewhere) and a admittedly unsettling statue.

Trying to break the statue didn’t work, but maybe I need a particular tool.

The werewolf is restricted to this part of the map, because there’s a castle area to the north that is the domain of the vampire instead.

If you are holding the clove of garlic the vampire doesn’t show up at all.

Other than that you can encounter some flypaper (I assume for obtaining a bribe for the bullfrog) and a shiny ring in a coffer, although the ring is protected by a “mysterious barrier”.

I have some ideas I need to test, but the presence of the werewolf makes testing require multiple “runs” (there’s enough time to grab the wooden cross, for instance, but then you have to ignore some other things). This means even if there are no fancy daemons or timers the game isn’t 100% trivial to solve. Mind you, there is an overall timer — death by dawn — so it is possible the timer plays into other events.

Fingers crossed for good progress next time!

There’s a sailboat you can hop into, but it leads you back to “home” and you can’t go home without Sabrina.