Archive for the ‘witches-brew’ Tag
(Prior posts on Witches’ Brew here.)
I finished; out of all the Softside games this was the most elaborate, despite remaining in a small map the entire game. The closest analogy I can think of is the VIC-20 game Moon Base Alpha which crammed multiple obstacles in a tiny space just based on necessity; here, there’s more expansive memory to work with, but the density is just scaled up with 11 ingredients to juggle making up the various brews which end up having to be made in a specific order.
Since getting stuck last time I made a verb list (see above). One of the unused verbs was “MOVE” which I decided to try applying to a bunch of things; the thing it works on is the bed the witch is sleeping on (!). I guess that bracelet magic is strong stuff.
(This is one of those odd cases where — based on someone maybe finding the shovel first thing — that someone who lucks onto finding the pillow and wand more quickly might have trouble later, not even realizing there is a genuine magic effect at play, and it isn’t just the witch is a heavy sleeper. Well, the witch might still be a heavy sleeper, because the bracelet doesn’t work on the cat, as you’ll see later.)
The bottle definitely struck me as useful — I still hadn’t found anything to carry water yet, for instance — and a spider leg was on one of the lists but no spider. Even with the new loot I still meandered for a bit and checked help (Gaming After 40’s walkthrough, he does thing in a much different sequence than me). I had previously tried to BREAK some locked cabinets but I apparently wasn’t holding the AXE. Ugh! Normally it getes
SORRY YOU CAN’T DO THAT
but having the AXE in inventory turns it into a SMASHED CUPBOARD, with a plethora of helpful items: a SUGAR CUBE, some CATNIP, and some SEEDS.
Reflecting on the puzzle, I had the BASEBALL BAT along had I had often been picking up the AXE to test things, so I mentally assumed I had tried my best shot at breaking it; I didn’t have the thought “did I have my axe with me?” as much as I assumed it was tested via osmosis. I can’t really begrudge the bat not working — after all, you’re busting through wood — but I would have preferred some kind of message indicating you’ve got the wrong tool for the job. The game doesn’t have disk space for such niceties, though.
I quite quickly took the seeds outside to the garden and tried to PLANT them. You have to come back later (10 turns?) and you can find a beanstalk has grown, which then can be climbed up to the castle. The whole “too steep” thing earlier was a ruse, there’s no way to climb up the mountain. Funny that a beanstalk is easier.
This indicated to me immediately that growth (spit, tears, egg, hair) was needed first (in the walkthrough I mentioned, Dale Dobson went through and interesting sequence where he had more trouble figuring this out). I still didn’t have hair, although I should have been supicious of the dirty piece of metal: it needed cleaning, and then could help get the hair.
I had already tried to clean it before as the outdoors mentions periodic bursts of rain, but you can’t refer to WATER when it gets described. I tried GET WATER while holding the bottle during rain also with no luck. It turns out (yes, I had to check Dale Dobson) that you need to set the bottle down, then wait for some rain. It almost seems like the rain is showing up before you are able to accomplish any action.
That is, the rain shower visible right now has no effect. You have to drop the bottle, then move back and forth until a rain shower happens again, and then you have a bottle of water. Not illogical exactly but it doesn’t quite fit my visualization of the timing.
With the bottle of water I was able to finally clean the metal and find out it was SCISSORS. Well, now I know what to do:
OK, yanking out your hair by your hands would be painful, I get it. At least there’s a moment later where the scissors are definitely required.
Moving the kettle to the fire and waving the wand, I was able to form a BREW and chug it. The game then says YOU’RE GIANT over every room description. I made a beeline for the castle:
Ah-ha, so invisibility next? But would one cancel the other? It turns out, no: you can be giant and invisible at the same time. But invisibility is quite short-lived, so what you need to do is drink the brew right before the camera, then deal with it right then (the shrink potion comes later).
Zipping things ahead, I now needed: snake venom, human blood, nail clippings, cat whiskers. Scissors work on nails, easy enough. The bat I could get blood from, although I was having trouble because I was still trying to use the verb BAT; you need to refer straight for the thing you want out of it, BLOOD, by typing GET BLOOD while holding the bottle.
While I’m at it, the same applies for the third potion, where you need a different ingredient from the same bat so just type GET WING and not CUT BAT or the like.
Snake venom, again: there’s a rattlesnake in the woods, but GET SNAKE doesn’t cut it, you need to specifically type GET VENOM.
Be sure you’re wearing the iron glove from the AXEMAN while doing this!
The whisker gave me a smidge of trouble. I could drop the catnip to get a PURRING CAT but then it got made at me again if I tried to just GET WHISKER. The key here is to use scissors and CUT it instead so the cat doesn’t go ouchy. Fair enough.
Brew in hand, it was time to head back to the castle and go invisible. If you go east there’s a control for the camera, and that’s the entire defenses neutralized. I guess the kidnapper is out on holiday somewhere leaving the princess behind.
The other direction has a locked door which doesn’t break; it’s time for the third potion. Bat wing + spider leg + water. The spider leg required getting a sugar cube over to some flies in the forest, dropping the flies at the web, and then GET LEG (again, any reference to the SPIDER itself is unhelpful).
With the shrinking potion you can slip under the door where the princess is.
And then comes what is honestly and genuinely a great puzzle. It doesn’t require a huge leap of thought, but it requires a slightly lateral assumption from how the game has gone so far.
You know enough information to figure it out. I’ll pause with a picture so you can think about it.
From the April 1981 Softside, same issue as the one advertising Witches’ Brew.
In the prior instances you drank the potion yourself to perform some action, but the shrinking potion you only needed to drink half, so there’s still some left. Rather than you drinking the rest, the princess can drink the rest instead, meaning she’ll get too small for the shackles to hold her.
I needed to pick up the princess, and move back and forth a few tiems to get this message, which feels like a glitch.
And that’s a wrap! Clearly, Kirsch has the creative chops for an adventure, but I really would have liked to see what he could do with more technical capabilities. This had lots of fiddly aspects due to the simple VERB NOUN setup, like how you DROP an item in the kitchen to put it in the kettle, but that means you can accidentally mix in an ingredient you didn’t mean to (like put the wing in too early). The reference to taking a WING or a LEG of a creature makes sense but in practice felt wobbly if it’d even work. There was very little help for if you were doing an action wrong (and no intentionality, like HIT CUPBOARDS WITH AXE).
At the very least, it is promising to know Kirsch was expanding his repertoire. Just in terms of gameplay I still found his simpler work (like Kidnapped or Around the World in Eighty Days) to be more satisfying just because I didn’t have nearly as much parser struggle.
(Continued from my last post.)
So I have some big, fist-pump and jump-up and yell kind of news. I realize for 99.999…etc…9% of the population it is completely unimportant, but it was exciting to me. I found an Apple II version of Witches’ Brew. In fact, I found multiple Apple II copies of the Adventure of the Month, filling in many gaps.
They were distributed on “Adventure Pack #1” by The 202 Alliance, an Apple II distribution network that also worked with crack groups, the folks who broke copy protection in the 80s. It’s on the Asimov archive as D3110ADV.SDK in a directory called shk_images and I hope you understand why it took a bit of work to find.
The first thing I did was make a beeline for Black Hole Adventure’s source code, as I had the theory (due to there being no author name) that maybe some credit was present on the Apple II source but removed from the other two versions (as had happened with other Adventures of the Month). Alas, no luck.
SIDE NOTE: I know I called that game rubbish and it really is, but it also has multiple endings in a way that is highly unusual for 1980 and doesn’t really come back until Deadline in 1982. One thing I’ve noticed generally about old adventure history is how innovations appear buried in jank games; people weren’t putting the pieces together and getting, say, multiple plot endings based on in-game actions plus an in-game automap plus dynamic changing locations plus (and so forth) all in the same package.
Anyway, voila:
I’ll play with the Apple version for the rest of this game just to commemorate the moment (I’ve got some more Atari coming soon anyway). There isn’t any inherent superiority to Apple and there’s even a smidge of missing content. You see, the book on the table of the witch’s house has multiple pages. I suspected this already but the parser was giving me a fuss until I tried TURN PAGE (not a noun listed in the game, you just have to guess).
The Apple equivalent doesn’t have the colorful ads on the bottom of each page.
Also, BONUS SURPRISE:
TRS-80 too! This time it came in an email attachment from LanHawk.
I’m not using this version though, because it seems to have either an oddity or a straight-up bug. The cave above should have a SHOVEL and a BAT but you can’t see either. The same issue happens elsewhere; various objects seem to be invisible that are clearly visible in the other two ports. Still the TRS-80 version was useful to have, because of this from the source code:
Not only do the comments (not present in other versions) definitively mark the game as by Peter Kirsch, but it gives something of a work schedule; this wasn’t written all in the month it was published, but rather was a revised version of a game written near the end of 1981.
Going back to the gameplay, the biggest breakthrough I had was realizing that wearing the magic charm bracelet made me essentially immune from the witch altogether. I had tested looking at the witch or even just looking at the bed and running across the death sequence from last time. However, I hadn’t tested this after wearing the bracelet, and managed to find a pillow and matches on the bed and a wand on the witch; I could filch all of them.
The wand of course is necessary for anything in the book. To summarize more succinctly:
invisibility: snake venom, human blood, nail clippings, cat whiskers
growth: saliva, tears, human hair, egg
shrinking: spider leg, bat wing, water
In all cases “PUT IN KETTLE, HEAT, WAVE WAND.”
I can get close to growth. For saliva you can just SPIT and for tears you can just CRY.
For the egg you can take the pillow, deposit it outside at the tree, and go through the branch-breaking sequence which you will now survive. This yields you an egg. That’s one sturdy pillow.
Incidentally, the AXEMAN who I had trouble with last time can just be referred to as a MAN. Unfortunately you can’t be friendly or anything; the best I can do is to KILL him with my baseball bat, which lets me filch his axe and an iron glove (followed by a scene with a vampire bat).
Speaking of vampire bat, you can go in a direction I somehow missed west into the woods and meet it, along with some flies and a snake. I managed to kill the bat but haven’t had luck getting the blood off of it.
Going back to the growth potion: it needs saliva (check), tears (check) and egg (check). But I can’t get human hair.
Not being able to get hair is very, very bizarre. I’ve got a dead body outside, and even if the axeman is outside, I could technically use my own character’s hair. I also can’t try grabbing witch hair. I can’t tell if this is meant to be a puzzle or if I’m hitting parser difficulty again. If it’s a puzzle then it clearly is in absurd object sourcing (aka Caesar’s ladder) territory.
I’m getting close to the threshold of using hints, but I am liking the game’s density; there’s a good feel of having more layers in each room than you’d expect. But a nagging feeling I’m missing some abstruse verb is not helping keep my willpower.
Well, there’s twelve of them for the year, so we might as well pull another Softside magazine Adventure of the Month out of the jar, this time from April. (Previously: Windsloe Mansion, Klondike, James Brand.)
When I hit this game I had an immediate reminder of how fragile the media I write about is. I remember seeing the file in the past on some forum post, which now does not seem to exist. Atarimania, the most commonly recommended archive, didn’t have it. I finally got a hit at Atari Online, but you know availability is getting dicey for a when you have to break out the Polish archives for a US monthly subscription-on-tape.
As the Atari name implies, that’s the only platform I found it for. The TRS-80 versions and Apple II versions are supposed to exist.
Also, the game has no author listed, but based on the style and layout it is most certainly another Peter Kirsch one, despite the content changing things up on his usual modus operandi (having a linear sequence of short scenes).
Regarding the plot (“find and rescue the princess”), weirdly enough, we haven’t had a lot of princess-rescue games. Technically the very first adventure (Castle) is one, but there’s also a prince you can rescue, or you can rescue both the prince and princess. Wizard and the Princess played it straight. Dragon Quest Adventure kind of played it straight but also you weren’t supposed to kill the dragon and you get a kiss. Treasure Hunt had a “black book” with the “addresses and phone numbers of every beautiful princess that lives in Vermont”. The Program Power game just titled Adventure had a princess that kept running away.
I’m starting to think people were thinking the idea was old hat even in the 1970s. For our purposes here though, this seems to be playing it straight, but I haven’t gotten far enough to be sure. At the very least, the focus is more on the witch in the title than a princess.
To be clear on it looking like Kirsch, compare to James Brand and notice the upper-case room description to start, the exits listed with one space of indent, the visible items listed with three spaces of indent, and the pattern of when text gets “highlighted”.
Still, this game has a unique kick-off on gameplay: a very short timer, with you placed adjacent to a Witch Cottage with both a sleeping cat and a sleeping witch. This is the sort of game where you send a lot of “clones” to be killed to get things worked out, even though the starting map is very tiny.
A selection of deaths:
There’s a table inside the cottage containing a book which seems to indicate our overall goal: get ingredients for an invisibility potion.
I mean, the first ingredient location is obvious, but taking a whisker without raising a fuss seems trickier. Can the blood and fingernails come from us? And I haven’t seen any snakes. What I have seen is a cave with a shovel and bat (not the flying kind), a garden with a MAGIC CHARM BRACELET (which you have to dig up), an AXEMAN by a tree (I can refer to the tree but not the axeman), a branch up the tree, and robin’s egg (see previous death screen).
Finally, there’s a mountain where the castle is, but it is too steep to climb.
That doesn’t give me much to work with. But I’m still intrigued to have quite a lot going on in a tight space, so I’ll keep fussing about here. I did seem to have resolved one issue already, though. As promised on the opening screen, we have to worry about it getting dark. However, picking up the MAGIC CHARM BRACELET makes the messages go away, so I assume either it is glowing so we can see or it is stopping time in some manner.
This means failure.
Renga in Blue 