I had missed a couple things in the open, and then missed one (1) mostly absurd puzzle, then had to struggle a bit more with the parser to get to the end.
Back when I had found the letter and the rubbish bins, I had missed (because it was only implied in the text, and you had to LOOK again to see it) that a “cheque card” dropped along with it. (I still needed to interpolate what that meant; that term does not get used in the United States.) I had also missed the fact you could go “west” at the bank despite not being able to go in it.
I then hit a potentially serious headache by trying TYPE 1001, as told to me by the phone call.
ASIDE: Dialing 1001, as I tried to do after, is equivalent to dialing a random number, which is the reason for the other message, which apparently was meant to be the local time “at the third stroke it will be 3.23 and 30 seconds”. Repeating dialing 1001 alternates between another message (“4.31 and 30 seconds”) before returning back to the first one, so I think the implication is the system is broken and it isn’t giving a real time at all. In other words, that part was a “red herring” meant for “atmosphere”.
Returning back to the bank machine, the parser here did something monstrous: “TYPE 1001” gets the response that you’ve typed the wrong number!
I baffled for a few beats and it was only my experience with similar issues elsewhere that held out here: I tried the process of entering the card in and typing 1001 on a line by itself, no verb, and it worked. I guarantee some gnashing of teeth was felt in the 80s on this part.
After that, while scrounging about the map, I found I missed another room exit, going east at the rain section. This leads to an isolated room where there’s a small key that will be used later.
With the fiver and key in hand, I was still stuck on the rusty door at the house. In the meantime, Strident had made some comment about a milk commercial from the 80s…
…and I was truly baffled, as while I had tested drinking the milk, it simply said “you drink the milk” and the item went away. There’s no indication of any kind of effect. (In general, I’m always quite cautious with consumables on old school games; if there’s no immediate effect usually it either gets given to a character or applied, like the cheese, or is a complete red herring, like the food in this game.) However, I went through the map and tested nudging everything again to see if there was something new, and found magically I could now open the rusty door. (I assume you Hulk Out and manage to rip it off its hinges due to the raw power of milk, but it just says you open the door in the text so it is left to the player’s imagination.)
Definitely the worst puzzle in the game, although not nearly at the same level as the skull puzzle in Invincible Island. I imagine some players never even realized the puzzle existed (going to drink the milk first before even trying to get into the building).
In the basement of the building were some rats; fortunately I already had the rat trap with the cheese prepared.
Past the rats is a “cardboard box” where it isn’t clear it is a sealed box with something inside (rather than an empty open box) but I experimented enough to realize I could OPEN BOX WITH SCISSORS, yielding a pair of boots.
With the boots now worn (remember this switches outfits, so our player is no longer wearing a lab coat or dungarees, but just boots) I was able to get past the building site. At the far west were some pipes where EXAMINE PIPES yielded a flight suit.
After this comes the final part of the map: the airport.
While walking in the airport is straightforward, there is an officer inside the airport that tries to stop you if you go in any farther.
I was left (by this point) with the official papers, the fiver, the small key, the flight suit, the book, the old hat, and the food as unused items. The last two are red herrings; the other four get used here to win.
You can give the official papers to the officer and he’ll then say there’s a “pass fee”.
Is this a bribe? This feels like a bribe.
Handing the fiver over, you get waved in to find an airplane.
The panel indicates it needs a key for the ignition; this is where the small key gets used. You also need the flight suit worn and need to have read the book (which teaches flying) to do the final command, which isn’t FLY or many other variants I tried. I even started to check if there was an “invisible” item like a joystick or if the plane also needed gas. I eventually gave up and had to look at a walkthrough: TAKE OFF.
I agree with several people who said that Urban Upstart was by far their favourite adventure, and great fun to play. Its success on the Spectrum has now led to a Commodore 64 version just being released.
Urban Upstart was quite well regarded, and Pete Cooke has indicated it was by far his best selling game. While I’d mark it as “above average” it does fall short of “all time classic” given the janky parser and occasional awkward clueing. (I didn’t even discuss how the game is extremely slow to run; I had to crank the emulator to 900% before it became fluid.) I could just chalk that up to being an “old” game where people simply have greater standards now, but it does seem like there’s more going on than just that.
Another Scunthorpe picture from 1983.
Being in the “cultural mood” helps; I will return to a more detailed examination of politics and industry under Thatcherism in a later game (as Thatcher herself even makes an appearance). I think this is also a case where the medium is deeply appropriate for the message. That is, it just feels right to have a satirical, slightly-punk game on the ZX Spectrum in the first place. With a rich fantasy world, the limits to the art and parser can be jarring; here they seem appropriately on theme.
One comparable situation is with the modern lo-fi horror games. Many “indie” horror games now take an aesthetic last seen on the Playstation 1; having giant polygons and uncanny textures can add to the mood rather than feel like unrealism. Unnatural, low-resolution monsters that look broken because the hardware surpassed its polygon limit? Perfect!
Itch even has a compilation of new games called Haunted PS1 Demo Disc.
Similarly, when Urban Upstart does something frustrating, it feels quite akin to dealing with the frustrations of 1983 Britain that were being vented. Sure, you might get sent down a wrong alley for hours because you typed GIVE LAGER and got pounded for not typing GIVE LAGER TO FAN, not realizing you were doing the right thing but with the wrong words, but it just adds to the experience.
Coming up: a new variant of Adventure from 1979 that only made it on the Internet as of today.
…and the only two of note are LISTEN and CROSS, neither which would be obvious things to try in a limited parser. (Keep in mind that there is always the possibility of a rare verb that I don’t have listed, so this isn’t guaranteed to be everything.)
Regarding the football fan from last time: they are indeed, as I theorized while typing my last post, a fan of lager. GIVE LAGER TO FAN works. (GIVE LAGER results in you getting completely pounded, with no indication the parser simply didn’t know what you meant, but I had already been trained by Invincible Island to watch for this issue.) Handing the lager over gives enough time to pick up the rat trap nearby.
The game accepts PUT CHEESE IN TRAP but I have not managed to get any farther than that (I could try dropping the trap in every single room hoping for a hit, but I haven’t gotten that desperate yet).
In more ordinary Me Missing Things, I missed that the fish and chips shop is enterable (with plain ENTER, the game doesn’t understand SHOP). There’s nothing in there although there’s some sounds from the back, where the magic LISTEN verb works. RADIO isn’t an understood noun so I don’t know if this is supposed to be meaningful.
The shop also has a “red herring” which causes a herd of cats to appear following the player. I suspect this is a red herring in both the literal and figurative sense, because authors find this joke irresistible, but maybe this will finally be the game that bucks the trend.
The chip shop is helpfully centrally located (and remember the police are zealous and will nab you if you drop things on the road) so I’ve been using it as my base of operations.
New rooms are in yelllow.
Heading a bit southwest is the red scarf I mentioned quite briefly last time. What I neglected to get into is that there is the sound of heavy boots when you pick the scarf up, and after a certain amount of time you get stomped by someone who doesn’t appreciate the scarf. I assume this is a football hooligan reference. There’s enough time between picking up the scarf and getting sent to the hospital that I assume there’s a puzzle that involves unloading the scarf somehow.
Northwest from the shop is the building site (where I still end up sinking, even after dropping all items) and the small area of rain that requires the umbrella.
Just past the rain is a canal with a bridge; here CROSS is needed (and is the only way I can find to use the bridge, yay for the verb list). This leads to a building with a rusty door I have been unable to break into.
Just south is a car park with “some milk”, one of my only two new items. The other new item comes from back at the dustbins that couldn’t be OPENed because the game wants EXAMINE. Grr. (EXAMINE works on almost nothing in the game. Of takeable objects, the only one that it has worked on is the papers from the Town Hall, described as being written in Greek.)
Here is where things get cryptic and where I am happy to field explanations. I went over to the phone box and dialed the number and got as second number (1001) and when I dialed that number I got yet more numbers:
I’m not sure how to interpret this information or what it gets used on. Other than sinking at the building site and the rusty door I’m out of obstacles to whack at. Optionally it may be possible to deal with the police sergeant somehow upon being arrested but that may also simply be a dead end.
(You can try giving him items, but he just says no bribes.)
There’s always the possibility of “hidden puzzles”; a number of locations didn’t seem to have anything active going on (like the church and graveyard), or a random yellow wall in the middle of town but may reveal something with the right action. I still am not sure which way my character should even be aiming to escape; I’m imagining the big road block is not the route we are going to use, and nothing else suggests a pathway out.
We’ve now seen three games (Pythonesque, Mad Martha, On the Way to the Interview) that have a sort of “satirical urban magical realism” aspect to them, and they’ve all been British.
While we’ve had comparable satire from the United States, it hasn’t been couched in quite the same terms (battling old ladies in the streets, getting run over by a bus literally anywhere including inside houses, husbands being chased down by their wives with an axe). Some of the same flavor can be found in Asylum II but the setting is very much not urban. The closest comparison I can think of is the various “naughty games” like City Adventure and the first two Misadventure games, but they still don’t strike me as inherently focused on urban sleaze, just sleaze in general.
The other term I’ve used for the genre is “British degenerate” game and it fits here too.
I’m not keen on “cultural zeitgeist” theories why certain trends happen; they tend to lead to of-the-cuff speculation:– when Tolkien became popular with the counterculture of the United States there was the rumor Tolkien wrote the books while on drugs, and an article in the Ladies Home Journal claimed
No youngster is going to believe in a beautiful knight on a white charger whose strength is as the strength of 10 because his heart is pure. He knows too much history and/or sociology, alas, to find knighthood enchanting in its feudal backgrounds and to dream of Greek heroes and of gods who walked the earth. But give him hobbits and he can escape to a never-never world that satisfies his 20th century mind.
which seems comedically off the mark; Tolkien’s sources were also quite old.
Still, there was something particular to culture in the UK both in their humour and in their politics that led to these sorts of “urban satire” games; certainly, given the literal title of one of the games, Monty Python (and by extension, The Goon Show) deserves some credit; Not the Nine O’ Clock also could be an influence. I have a theory regarding the ZX Spectrum in particular but I’ll save that for when I’m done with the game.
Urban Upstart is explicitly an “escape from 20th century suburbia”.
We are literally trapped in the city and need to escape. Choice of time: 3 o’clock in the morning.
Incidentally, if you don’t put the dungarees on, after you get out of the starting house you get arrested for indecent exposure.
The opening house has some scissors and a lager in the fridge, as well as a large key for unlocking the front door (which is locked from both ways?) After some fiddling about with the parser trying to leave the house (just the word LEAVE alone or LEAVE HOUSE works, don’t try to ENTER DOOR, GO DOOR, etc.) we’re out on the town.
The bookstore is enterable (!) and has only one book, on How to Fly, suggesting our final exit may be via aeronautical vehicle.
There are “dustbins” in the back of the house but neither OPEN nor EMPTY work and I’m not sure if they’re there for anything else other than flavor (there’s a lot of dead ends and “urban debris” type rooms, so it might just be atmosphere). What you can find is an umbrella lying about a bus stop, and food and cheese in a park. Park cheese, delicious.
The park is adjacent to a church with a graveyard. The tombstone says John Smith.
Just past the bookshop is an alley near a Football Ground, and a grumpy football fan past that (hanging near a rat trap, for some reason).
I haven’t tried giving him the lager yet.
The fan pounds you if you try to pass (or don’t, even) and you end up landing in a hospital in a different part of the map. There are multiple ways to get sent to the hospital but let’s follow the path there next.
You land in an unsupervised hospital bed in a straightforward maze, but if you try to walk out of the hospital, a doctor escorts you back to the bed.
The maze includes a white coat, so the way to get out is to simply wear the white coat over your dungarees and sneak out the entrance.
To the west is a hill with some red tape on the top — that’ll be useful in a moment — and going back east passes by a sign (“Keep Britain Tidy”), a car abandoned in the road (can’t enter or drive), and a red scarf.
Incidentally, the police are quite serious about keeping Britain tidy, and if you drop an item while juggling inventory onto the street, you will immediately get arrested.
Looking at the north part of town…
…there’s more civic grime (on “Civic Street”), a phone box (with a working phone, I don’t know who to call), a very serious roadblock at the far north…
This is the kind of parser which insults the player. It does fit the theming.
…and a “wasteland” nearby which has an “old hat”.
At the end of Civic Street is a Town Hall which you normally can’t enter, but I thought to bring over the “red tape” and I got in. I get the perception this game may not be 100% looking for realism in puzzle solutions. In the Town Hall you can find “official documents” which I haven’t used yet.
The last obstacles are around a turn at “muck alley”. One involves an area that mysteriously rains; I’m sure nabbing the umbrella will help, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet (or rather, when I went to get the umbrella and needed to trade inventory, that’s when I discovered the town policy on litter so haven’t bothered to go back around yet). As a side path off of that is a “wet and muddy” building site which describes you sinking, and if you are there too long you get trapped in the mud and sent to the hospital.
Continuing the theme of not wanting to fiddle with inventory yet, I think getting through here may involve simply dumping my inventory elsewhere (the author’s last game, Invincible Island, had something similar). To summarize, I’ve found scissors, a lager, a key, dungarees, an umbrella, some food, some cheese, a red scarf, a white coat, some red tape, and some official papers. In terms of active obstacles I still need to take the umbrella through the rain, get through the building site, and get past the football fan; optionally there might be a way to get out of the police station. (If you just walk in the station you get trapped in, just like if you were arrested. LEAVE doesn’t work. This might even be a parser issue!) However, it is quite possible I’m simply missing some spots due to the parser being finicky.
Renga in Blue 
