Archive for the ‘zodiac-castle’ Tag
This is my victory post, so my previous posts on this game are needed for context.
From the North Star Catalog, January 1978, via Bitsavers. I tested the North Star version of this game some and the only major difference I found was that the oil for the lamp was placed one room over.
I was originally going to title this post “Outsmarting the Parser” but one puzzle near the end (the last treasure I couldn’t get) dropped me with a pile driver from the top rope.
Continuing from last time, I started prodding at various elements in the environment trying to get them to be recognized. I came across some luck with a suit of armor in the entry hall.
ARMOR MAKES SENSE–BUT TOUCH??
This is different than the usual message which would be TOUCH ARMOR??, so I ended up just jamming through the various possibilities on my verb list.
OPEN turned out to get a different reaction, meaning it was possible for OPEN ARMOR to do something useful, but what item was I missing? I had a piece of cheese still which didn’t seem right, but maybe the hammer?
I would not have gotten that without some of the parser juking there. The whole sequence gave me pause, though, because even in some circumstances with an item I knew was usable, (like the lamp I was holding) I wasn’t getting the “MAKES SENSE” message. I played around some more and realized not only was the parser cutting at five letters, to get the “MAKES SENSE” message on an noun that can be used it needs to be typed in at exactly five letters: no more, no less. That is, the command “TOUCH LAMP” gets
TOUCH LAMP???
but “TOUCH LAMP ” with the extra space at the end gets
LAMP MAKES SENSE-BUT TOUCH??
This turns out to be a vitally important fact which helped me break most of the rest of the game. Going back to the drawbridge puzzle from last time:
The screen above shows the state of the drawbridge room before having applied the oil to the gears. If you do any verb followed by GEARS, the game will recognize the noun GEARS. Even a non-real-verb works; after Z GEARS:
GEARS MAKES SENSE-BUT Z??
Getting this important message means that the gears is a recognized noun in the state of the room at this exact moment. After doing OIL GEARS, gears no longer is recognized, so Z GEARS gets the regular message of
Z GEARS???
and you’re instead supposed to refer to the TEETH, so that noun gets activated. Then, after PULL TEETH, the game reaches the horribly stuck condition I was in last time.
I had already rammed through a verb list (ROTATE, TURN, MOVE, LOWER, OPEN, OPERATE, USE, PUSH, PULL, SPIN) with the DRAWBRIDGE, MECHANISM, GEARS, and TEETH. Rather than futilely testing the whole set on every noun in the universe, I could now check to see what noun was actually recognized through the “MAKES SENSE” trick! I did Z on every plausible and non-plausible object that might be referred to in the room before finally hitting paydirt on … the noun BRIDGE. Not DRAWBRIDGE, but BRIDGE. Sigh.
Doing this unleashes some RATS. I was able to give the rats the cheese I had been hanging on to (turning them into FAT, LAZY RATS) and then I could take the rats whilst holding the sack. They’ll be useful later.
I was then able to use the MAKES SENSE trick to figure out the heraldry room. (I want to emphasize I would not have found the trick at all except the word ARMOR had exactly five letters in it. This feels a bit like when a speedrunner finds a glitch that allows skipping a level just because the exit was made 80 pixels high rather than 78 pixels high.)
Mind you, no noun in the entire room description succumbed to the trick: I did Z LARGE, Z COAT (with that crucial extra space after), Z ARMS (ditto), Z HOLE (ditto again), Z VOLUM, Z BOOKC, Z SHELV. This meant I could say with confidence that the solution was not “verb + some noun in the room”. This of course assumes that there is a solution, but the hole in the volume was screaming for something to happen.
Excluding the magic words (which I tried) this left “verb + some noun I was carrying”. I remembered (or rather, noticed from my map) that the SIGNET RING started in the room, so I took that item over and crawled through every verb on my standard verb list, hitting paydirt with INSERT.
Does this feel like “adventure gaming”? Not in the slightest. But at this point I’m satisfied with beating the computer.
The passage leads to the last area of the game, where things mostly went smoother.
The area is mostly dark which means the dragon is in play. I ended up having to get the bow/arrow setup just in case; just note that the dragon can come back any time after being shot, even the exact same turn it gets shot! A much better solution — which I found out when I was done with the game — is to carry the “friendly dog” around which scares the dragon, kind of like the kitten in ADV.CAVES. (The dog is needed anyway because it counts as a treasure.)
The “through happiness” hint applied soon after, as there’s a wine room with a wine bottle (treasure) in a rack.
With some intuition I tried Z RACKS and hit paydirt (that is, it gave the MAKES SENSE message so I knew the noun was recognized), so I just needed to roll through a (very long) verb list before finally reaching SLIDE RACKS.
Those treasures I could cart back “by hand” to the start if I wanted. Moving on, there’s a guard room with a key (useful in a second), a dungeon with bones (not useful at all) and a torture room which looked like it held a secret.
Again using the noun-reference trick, I found that the GRATE did not count as a noun as far as the parser was concerned so any method of opening it required referring to something else. Going through my very small inventory (barring the whole pile of treasures, none which seemed applicable) I came across dropping the rats.
The passage this opens leads through a “bottomless room” (door which needs a key) up to a “meditation room” with a chair. The chair again can’t be referred to, but I decided to try SIT with no noun.
The dragon remained annoying through all this.
Once I managed to coordinate sitting in the chair with no dragon, I tried various meditation-adjacent verbs until I hit THINK, which teleported me to a “round room”. Going in a random direction led to a THRONE ROOM with more treasure.
The round room otherwise teleports back into the castle somewhere random, so after a bit of dragon juggling (and some issues with randomness because I had to take a second loop; the round room’s destination is purely random, rather than always landing you in the throne room first) I was able to get out with nearly every treasure in the game. The dog and book with the spells also count as treasures and were non-obvious at first; however, even with those I was short some points.
I needed the walkthrough from this, via Alex, and I’m going to take a guess Alex looked at source code. I don’t know how anyone was supposed to solve this.
Back in the study — which to be fair was on my strong suspicion list — I had found via The Trick that no nouns were recognized. The picture of Merlin made me think of magic, so tried bringing over the various magic gizmos like the ring that had previously summoned a genie to see if I could get an effect: no dice. I finally — and fortunately — gave up, to find the right command is USE MAGIC.
…
…
…
Look, your guess is as good as mine. That’s one of the worst parser abuses I’ve ever seen, including the entire 40 years I’ve been playing adventure games.
Taking the pouch of rubies over (and the book which I hadn’t dropped yet) triggered an endgame, which is tricky as well but at least it’s a different kind of tricky.
There’s a SORCERER’S ROOM, a MAGIC ROOM and a STAR ROOM. Between the rooms there’s a sorcerer’s hat, a book of black magic, a rod, and a star. After some experimentation I realized you could not carry the book the same time as the hat; I started sensing the kind of logic used in Chinese Puzzle with an arbitrary set of object flags that need to be set. I was also suspicious that this was the sort of puzzle where the meta-command HINT was necessary to get anywhere.
MOST MAGIC IS MERELY ILLUSION, BUT YOU DO NEED THE RIGHT PROPS.
Needing the right props suggested to me I needed to make a thing; the only thing that seemed reasonable was putting together the star and rod to get a wand. Some parser struggle followed as MAKE WAND and PUT STAR don’t work at all. The right conditions are:
a.) you’re in the MAGIC ROOM
b.) you’re holding the STAR and ROD, and only those two items
c.) you type ATTACH STAR
Going back to the STAR ROOM and waving the wand, I was clearly on the right track.
After some fiddling I finally got HOKUS POKUS out again and got an ending, but not the right ending.
All the points, though! Maybe we can call this a real alternate ending because our protagonist deserved it.
I finally succumbed to the walkthrough … which told me to do exactly the same thing I was doing. It said
HOKUS POKUS (you must carry the hat or else the wand explodes).
and I was, in fact, carrying the hat. I finally got a success and I think it simply involves making sure the black magic book doesn’t get touched ever at all, but I’m still unclear on this. At least I got a win.
Windmere Estate, despite having the same parser system, was a much better game; it had mostly reasonable actions, it had better pacing, and it had a map that was memorably interconnected with multiple routes. This game’s emphasis on magic was its downfall for the same reason fantasy has had issues in other early text adventures: the lack of rules makes it tempting for authors to make arbitrary puzzles.
Mind you, it’s possible to make carefully crafted rules that elevate fantasy game puzzles to a high level, like Enchanter (1983) did, but we have to get there first. Lurching ever closer! Coming up: Misadventures 5 and 6. Mexican Adventure. (Change of plans, technical issues plus one of them looks to be a bad dump.)
(Continued from my last post.)
Since last time I’ve prodded open the easily-accessible treasures, as well as one of the less-accessible treasures, but I’m stuck with major parser issues.
Let’s start with the dragon. As Rob observed in the comments last time, the appearances in dark rooms makes it akin to the vampire bat from Windmere, but making less sense. The Windmere bat can also be easily fended off with a cross, whereas here the dragon is more annoying as it can only be dealt with temporarily.
Specifically: if you have the arrow head and shaft, and you’re standing in the “carpenter’s shop”, you can MAKE ARROW.
You don’t need to bother with lighting the room up first either. The dragon is just as likely to appear with the room lit as with the room dark.
With the BOW back at the cottage from the start of the game, you can then shoot the dragon and reduce it to ashes.
YOU LOOSE YOUR ‘ARROW’ AND IT NEATLY PIERCES THE BEAST’S HEART. HE WRITHES ABOUT AND FINALLY DISAPPEARS LEAVING ONLY A SMALL PILE OF ASHES.
However, dragons continue to occur with roughly the same frequency, so this is only a temporary reprieve. I found it better to simply grab the object in each dragon-guarded room (if there is one) and leave. In the rare case where more than one action was required, I went elsewhere a while and came back to re-roll the dragon appearing. (It doesn’t seem to be “random” so much as “alternating” in appearances but I’m not certain about that.)
I tried to find an iconic “tiny dragon” from this time period, and the closest I could get to was the dragon on the 1981 printing of the Basic Rules for Dungeons & Dragons. It might fit in a bedroom? Via eBay.
Heading back to another issue, that of wondering if you can refer to anything that’s not a separate object: above the guard room is some busted machinery for the closed drawbridge. Remembering the lamp had regular OIL in it straight from a kitchen, I tried OIL GEARS and it made some progress.
Following this with PULL TEETH seemingly resolves the problem with the drawbridge for good.
THIS ROOM CONTAINS THE DRAWBRIDGE MECHANISM. THE GEARS ARE WELL OILED AND FREE AND THE DRAWBRIDGE IS RAISED.
However, no command I’ve tried has gotten farther than this. No LOWER DRAWBRIDGE, or TURN GEARS, or PULL (imaginary) LEVER. (The last one is obviously a stretch but I ran out of options, and this seems to be bespoke-coded anyway where it’s just fishing for a specific phrase rather than referring to a world-model.) The puzzle appears to be optional anyway, because it is possible to traverse the catacombs to return to the treasure-drop point. An even easier way is to use the magic words HOKUS POKUS from the book back at the library.
This either zaps everything in inventory (except the lamp) back to the the treasure room or takes everything from the treasure room and drops it at the player’s feet. This seems to be based on a.) if the player has a item to be teleported in the first place and b.) if the player has already just used HOKUS POKUS but I’m not 100% clear on the logic. I muddled through enough that I was able to use it to rack up close to 60% of the points, so it works sufficiently well.
(If SHAZAM or ABRA CADABRA work anywhere, it must be in a very specific scenario, because the game usually just says SHAZAM??? or ABRA CADABRA??? like my character has just spoken nonsense.)
Out of those points I’ve attained, a good chunk of them are the treasures from the second floor like a ruby ring, an emerald necklace, and a diamond brooch. A dragon would occasionally show up but the treasure can be nabbed in one turn so an arrow is not required.
One room has a dog, fortunately straightforwardly defused by the MEAT.
Thank goodness it didn’t need to be poisoned like in Bedlam.
On the ground floor there was an atrium with some dirt, and bean elsewhere that it was possible to PLANT. The game said the beans needed more, so I took the MANURE from the stables (needed the sack to get it in the first place) and dropped it, getting a little but not enough result.
I took the CHALICES over to where the water in the fountain to the north was and tried GET WATER, and the message I got indicated the keg of ale got filled instead (??). This is just the game being buggy again: it expects the keg and will claim to use it even when it is in an entirely different room. Getting the hint, I drunk the ale out, took the empty keg over, did GET WATER, and after some failed attempts (like DROP WATER, assuming the interaction would mirror that of the manure) found POUR WATER works.
This leads to a tower with a spinning wheel and some flax. In order to avoid dragon-trouble I nabbed each item away, and then tried SPIN FLAX only to get an error. Fortunately, I was persistent in testing things out and tried SPIN FLAX while still in the tower, and the command worked. This is another bug: the command is location based, not based on where the spinning wheel is!
This represents the only new room of the game I’ve found since last time.
Hence with only one exception I’m stabbing at “secrets” where I’m not sure if there’s a secret, and the parser’s difficulty makes the whole process painful (since I might be doing the right thing, just phrasing it in the wrong way). The one exception I just mentioned is the well to the south of the Castle out in the open:
I’ve got a pillow I tried tossing in — no dice, you can only drop it — and I’ve tried forming a rope out of various items like the silk and/or the thread, again without luck. This could of course be the sort of passage that can only be entered from below rather than above.
Potential secrets include:
1.) A study with a portrait of OLD MERLIN. The portrait seemingly cannot be referred to, but I don’t take anything for granted with this parser. The DESK might also yield something (but not with OPEN DESK or OPEN DRAWER).
2.) A heraldry room which originally held a signet ring. There’s a suspicious hole that is resistant to all my attempts to refer to it.
3.) The balcony I showed off in my last post. You can jump to your death, very exciting. But maybe you can climb somewhere?
4.) Any other room in the entire game.
Even a random nondescript catacomb-room might react to one of the magic words. I am thrilled about the possibility of testing the two unused words (SHAZAM and ABRA CADABRA) in every single one. This is my thrilled face.
WELCOME TO THE KINGDOM OF ZODIAC. IT IS A SMALL BUT VERY INTERESTING KINGDOM. THE LANDS ARE MOSTLY WOODED WITH LARGE OAK FORESTS. THE CASTLE ITSELF IS QUITE LARGE FOR THE SIZE OF THE KINGDOM BUT THE RULER ALWAYS HAS BELIEVED THAT HIS SUBJECTS SHOULD SUPPORT HIM WELL.
This is the last of the North Star adventure games we’ll be playing that was published by Dynacomp (see Uncle Harry’s Will for historical context; Whembly Castle and Windmere Estate were the other two games). Like Windmere Estate, this game is from the mysterious Dennis N. Strong.
I threw everything I could out but could not locate Mr. Strong. The Dennis Strong mentioned here who is a transportation engineer is actually Dennis W. Strong. That means all we’re left with is the Dynacomp ad copy, which compares Zodiac Castle to Windmere and says says:
This time you start in a glen near the castle and must find and accumulate treasures. The play is the same, but the treasures and circumstances are different.
Again, there are both North Star version and Apple II version again; this time the original Apple II version was broken but now has been fixed thanks to LanHawk. Apple II seems to be the optimal version now for both Strong games. My guess is it was written second in both cases and the author used the opportunity to make some bug fixes (and add a fatal bug in the case of Zodiac Castle, which now has been fixed).
THERE ARE MANY PLACES TO EXPLORE, RIDDLES TO SOLVE, AND TREASURES TO GATHER. THE ‘GUILDED COCK’ IS WHERE TREASURES ARE DROPPED TO SCORE.
Mind you, the game still isn’t bug-free, as you’ll see.
Action starts in a GLEN next to the usual forest-style area…
…with a DENSE FOREST room meant to catch anyone who goes the wrong direction. The game then (upon moving any direction from the dense forest) will either loop back to the same room are send the player to the glen. I am grateful there is no maze.
The tavern with the colorful name is where the treasures go. There’s a LAMP and ALE there that can be taken; the lamp uses oil, as an emphasis on while Windmere Estate was in a “realistic modern” area, this one’s set in a fantasy castle.
To the north is a cottage with a BOW (but no arrows). The sleeping loft above requires light (just the command ON to use the lamp). Upon entering I made a curious discovery:
Either the dragon is very small or the cottage is very large! In all seriousness, in various “dark rooms” across the map the dragon can appear in any of them so I assume does a fair amount of magical teleportation. It isn’t 100% aggressive, and if you grab the cheese and go you’ll be safe, but any hanging around or especially threatening the dragon will result in death.
Petting is considered a threat. In seriousness, this seems to intercept any verb connected to DRAGON to have this result, even a nonsense one. That is, every action is “blacklisted” here and there likely is only one or two “whitelisted” actions that will help defeat / scare away / make friends with the dragon.
The castle has its drawbridge up so can’t be entered directly; if you jump in to swim while holding the lamp, it will get ruined. The trick is to go to the south where there’s a visible ledge and THROW LAMP.
This dumps out the oil if done anywhere else, which is annoyingly inconsistent. If I were giving author advice I’d say to simply prevent THROW LAMP working elsewhere with some message about “that’s risky because the oil might come out, you should only do that where you really need it”.
With that done you can SWIM over (finding a SILVER GOBLET on the way) and then head southeast down a DARK SLOPING PASSAGE into some CATACOMBS. You might expect with that name and the predictability of being a Treasure Hunt that this is a maze, but only sort of.
In nearly every room, there is only one entrance and one exit. The “maze” is just a linear path. Mapping it still involved significant work because no directions are specified, so I had to keep testing all ten possibilities (N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW/U/D) in every room, and I had to keep testing even after finding the exit just in case there was some deviation from the pattern.
There was in fact such a deviation, where you can go north, south and east from the room in the middle; this is reminiscent of the Crowther/Woods all-alike maze having a “diagonal” exit hiding the pirate treasure, when every other exit was normal cardinal directions. That is, the intent is to trick the player into thinking there is a universal pattern when there is one slight deviation that holds a treasure.
Both the magic ring and jade idol you get from rubbing it count as treasures.
At the end of the catacombs my lamp burned out, so I ran through again with the lamp off and had a unique problem.
The game doesn’t stop you from walking through darkness with grues or inconvenient pits to tumble into. However, at intervals along the path there are rooms where the code is broken (“YOU ARE”) and if the player walks into one they are now in a “Void”. Just like the similar rooms in Bilingual Adventure the game is now broken and softlocked.
It turns out there’s no need to be conservative: having the lamp run out upon leaving the catacombs is a hard-coded event! So the author sacrificed simulationism for a dramatic moment of getting out of the darkness just in time. After, there’s some oil in a vat (seemingly unlimited) you can find and FILL LAMP, which gives exactly 100 turns. In other words, the game switches from a drama-time treatment of the light source to a simulationist treatment.
Just past the catacombs is a small castle worker area; guard station, stables, blacksmith, carpenter. All of these locations are dark (you need to get the oil from a vat in the castle itself and then come back) and all of them potentially have the dragon show up.
All together there’s a MUSLIN SACK, THIN WOODEN SHAFT, HAMMER, MANURE, and ARROW HEAD. The quote marks around SHAFT in the screenshot above means you’re supposed to refer to the THIN WOODEN SHAFT as just a “shaft” in the parser.
The game does understand MAKE ARROW but says I don’t have the right tools yet. I haven’t experimented with this sufficiently to know if this message is location-based or object-based or both.
Trekking into the castle proper next:
The game tries hard to add color to the room descriptions.
I’m having the issue — which happened in Windmere as well — of not knowing what I should be paying attention to. The objects are clearly separate and able to be picked up, but is anything else in a room description interactive? The main issue here is that — assuming the answer is yes — then most nouns in the room descriptions don’t work. So this is a scenario where playing requires dealing with a lot of error messages trying to see if there’s anything special.
For example, you can’t find if the chair might unlock some secret until you try actions like SIT CHAIR. (The game just says SIT CHAIR??? if you try it. GET CHAIR and the game claims “THERE ISN’T ANY CHAIR YOU CAN GET”.)
The book above incidentally indicates some spells, it “MUST HAVE BEEN MERLIN’S BOOK OF MAGIC” and mentions “SHAZAM”, “HOKUS POKUS” and “ABRA CADABRA” as possibilities. Only HOKUS POKUS is recognized although the result is mysterious.
THERE ARE STRANGE RUMBLINGS FROM SOMEWHERE UNDER THE GROUND!
YOU ARE IN A LIBRARY
THERE IS A SILVER ‘GOBLET’
The goblet was not there before; it was a treasure I had stored back in the Guilded Cock. My guess would be the word lets you warp treasures back and forth somehow so you don’t have to go in person to deliver all of them, but it feels broken, and might even be buggy enough that the effect is supposed to be something totally different (like opening a particular secret passage).
Elsewhere in the castle there’s a VAT OF OIL for refilling the lamp, some MEAT, CHALICES, a SIGNET RING, and some BEANS. The BEANS can go over to some DIRT at the Atrium but the game claims the beans must need “SOMETHING ELSE”.
On to upstairs now:
The upstairs room are almost purely treasure dispensers. In a row there’s a blue bedroom (DIAMOND BROOCH), a pink bedroom (SATIN PILLOW), red bedroom (RUBY RING), and green bedroom (EMERALD NECKLACE). The only wrinkle in just snatching and leaving is that the rooms are dark and so the dragon can visit.
There’s some SILK in a Maid Room, a CAMEO BROOCH and DIAMOND NECKLACE in a Sitting Room, and JEWELED DAGGER and ferocious dog in the Master Bedroom. OK, I suppose the dog isn’t a treasure. Meat would be the most obvious thing to try on the dog but I haven’t experimented yet.
Finally, just like Windmere Estate, there’s a balcony with a view.
The issue that made Windmere difficult was a plethora of secrets to open (and those secrets ended up having some sequences where the puzzles got tricky). My intuition is telling me this isn’t as hard a game, but Windmere didn’t seem that hard at first either.
One bit I skimmed over outside: there’s a well to the south of the castle with no rope.
I’m not really “stuck” in that there’s many things I haven’t tried yet, but I’ve reached the edge of the obvious map so I’ll have to start prodding for those secrets soon.
Renga in Blue 
