Gaming After 40

Adventure: Broken Sword 1: The Shadow of the Templars (2010 Director's Cut)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 19:32:00 +0000

Thanks to everyone who took time to welcome me back! I'm still going through a backlog of comments and sorting out the bitcoin/gambling spam from the genuinely meaningful and informative comments the system has been gathering while I've been away, but I do hope to write a new post now and then.

(As to where my time has been going these past several years, I've been doing quite a bit of acting in various projects, which I may or may not owe to becoming more comfortable on camera doing my video podcasts here. The pandemic has forced/encouraged me to do less live theatre and more film and television work; if you want to know more, here's my IMDb page.)

Anyway, as time has gone on, I've realized this age of "Let's Play" videos makes the type of post I often write about my detailed experiences playing a specific game less relevant. I'll still write about obscure games that aren't likely to be covered elsewhere, but there are definitely games that are very well documented at this point.

So this post will be an attempt at a lighter approach, and honestly one that gives me a little more freedom to enjoy the ride without having to take detailed notes and capture screenshots. I've recently played through Revolution Software's classic Broken Sword 1 - The Shadow of the Templars: Director's Cut, a more seriously-styled point-and-click adventure originally released in 1992. I played the 2010 Director's Cut edition simply because that's the version I had picked up on Steam at some point; it adds some additional story and puzzles fleshing out Nico's story, but many people prefer the 1992 version as some content was changed/cut and puzzles simplified in this version.

One historical note I'd like to make is that Revolution Software founder and Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil did his initial adventure game work on text adventures for Artic Computing and eventually became director of the company. I haven't been able to confirm this independently, but MobyGames credits him as the designer (which in 1982 likely also meant programmer) of Artic Adventures B - Inca Curse, C - Ship of Doom, and D - Espionage Island, which I've covered here in the past. As head of Revolution Software he pioneered the company's Virtual Theatre engine, which has hosted many notable games including the early Broken Sword titles and the classic Beneath A Steel Sky, an excellent sci-fi adventure that is now on my shortlist to tackle sometime.

I'll also note that while I never played Broken Sword 1 on PC back in the day, I did take a run at the Game Boy Advance cartridge version a decade or two back. I never finished it or even got very far into the story -- the game's beautiful high-resolution background art was compromised on the GBA's limited-resolution screen, and there was insufficient ROM space for the well-acted spoken dialogue to be heard. While I was very happy to see a proper adventure game released on the GBA, in practical terms it didn't fully engage me at the time.

With this new approach I'm trying, there are likely to be *** NO MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***, just so you know.

Here's the obligatory title screen shot:

And here's the beginning of gameplay, a moment unseen in the 1992 version, as a prologue to the original narrative confronts Nico with the murder of a family friend. The visual style of Broken Sword 1 is impressive and the Director's Cut release increases color depth a little, so even though the game isn't in full HD resolution the lighting and details look great in every scene.

I really enjoyed this game -- I knew it by reputation and that reputation proves well-deserved. It definitely contains plenty of humor borne out of the many eccentric characters our hero George Stobbart encounters, but it's generally serious in tone with some dark story elements and well-plotted twists and turns. The plot has to do with the Knights Templar, or so it seems, and a trail of obscure clues and puzzles that the player must follow to reach the story's satisfying conclusion. The game features traditional point-and-click inventory puzzles and conversation-driven progress, but also has some visual puzzles involving decoding simple ciphers and positioning mechanical elements to unlock or engage a mechanism. I appreciated these tactile puzzles -- they bring something new to the adventure genre beyond audiovisuals, and they break up the action while also raising the stakes a little with fresh challenges.

I won't go into detail on the plot, but will note that the story sprawls across multiple countries and continents. Each region is well-contained and it isn't difficult to focus on what's of practical value within each sub-section. Inventory is also nicely managed by the game design, leaving items behind once they've been used appropriately and reducing the number of "apply random object to random object" experiments a stuck adventurer has to attempt before a better idea emerges.

The Virtual Theatre engine Revolution Software developed and used in many of its 2-D games is a little different technically from the Sierra AGI/SCI engine and Lucasarts' SCUMM, in that it doesn't seem to support a fully "3-D" layering effect in the same way. There is often a foreground mask element that scrolls in parallax with the background in wider scenes and covers up the background and characters if they're behind it, but within a scene, the background is generally structured so the "floor" is completely open and there's never a need to place characters behind a part of the background. It's an interesting tradeoff -- it's more memory-efficient than Sierra's approach, avoiding the need to keep a background mask in unseen memory, and likely frees up CPU cycles for sprite scaling and managing multiple characters onscreen at once. I don't know the technical underpinnings in any detail, but there are definitely glitchy moments when George's character sprite covers part of the background that should be in front of him, and when animated characters overlap the one that is smaller/farther back sometimes appears on top of the one in the foreground. There are also no maneuvering puzzles -- all pathing is automatic, and the game saves time by going straight to the fadeout when an exit is selected. Honestly, I don't miss those particular engine features -- the Virtual Theatre approach forces cleaner visual design and makes gameplay a little bit more efficient, especially when the player is stuck and trying everything possible in a given area.

What else? The game took me about 18 hours to finish, and I did have to look up a playthrough to get myself unstuck at one point; as often happens in these games, I had the right idea but I hadn't quite followed the intended sequence of actions. And I very much enjoyed the journey and the genuinely exciting climax, even though player choices are a bit limited toward the very end and, as this is a player-death-free adventure game, the only available actions are the game-winning ones at a few key points. The animation is fluid and the characters' visuals and voices are full of personality.

Bottom line, I definitely have Broken Sword 2 - The Smoking Mirror: Remastered on my to-play list now, though I'll likely tackle something else in the meanwhile. Please feel free to comment about this type of post -- I'm hoping I can cover games that are still in circulation like this one in a way that isn't redundant with the rest of the online universe, but still brings some readable observations to the table.

Adventure: 4 Mile Island Adventure (1983)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 17:33:00 +0000

It's been a while... quite a while... nearly two years!

But I had a little free time this week to dive into a nostalgic rabbit hole, and I discovered a few adventure games for the TRS-80 Color Computer that I had seen advertised but never played back in the days when I was an avid CoCo user. Thanks to The Color Computer Archive for keeping these vintage titles accessible!

In this post I'm going to explore 4 Mile Island Adventure, a 1983 release by Owl's Nest Software written in Extended BASIC for Color Computers with at least 16K of RAM. The game operates entirely in memory and was originally available on tape and disk formats. It performs pretty well for a BASIC game, in part because after some initial variable population it handles almost everything with branching logic rather than implementing a "proper" text adventure engine. The presentation mimics the classic Scott Adams style, though it doesn't implement a real location/item "window" at the top of the screen -- text printed below will scroll it off the display like any other output text, with a new room or a LOOK restoring the top section. Another quirk is that I is not treated as INVENTORY, we have to type at least three characters -- all single-character inputs are interpreted as directional commands.

The startup screen confirms the title's implications - our goal is to stop an impending nuclear meltdown:

Can we stop it? Maybe, but there are certain to be...

**** SPOILERS AHEAD! ****

We start out at a locked security gate, whose only purpose seems to be to suggest that we've got no way out but to deal with the problem at hand. The map is tightly designed, consisting primarily of two long criss-crossing corridors and a few smaller sub-areas, and I didn't feel the need to draw a map to cope with this pleasantly maze-free experience.

Time is of the essence, measured in turns and temperature -- as we muddle about trying to find a solution, the reactor continues to heat up, and the game ends with a massive meltdown if we are not successful at cooling it down before it hits 750 degrees. It took me a number of unsuccessful tries before I started to find the most efficient path, but in the classic adventure game tradition it is possible to pare out some informational steps on subsequent attempts, and on my final run I had no problem finishing the game well before the meltdown threshold.

Exploring the office area south and east of the security gate, we find a secretary's desk, though it's called a TABLE for the sake of the parser's inability to distinguish this one from another desk to the south. If we LOOK TABLE, we're informed THERE IS A SHEET OF PAPER. READ PAPER yields "ENJOY THE ADVENTURE," so this is an unnecessary task and feels somehow snarky in context.

South of the secretary's ~~desk~~ table we find a BIG DESK (for the big boss?), and LOOK DESK reveals a drawer. We can UNLOCK DRAWER with the key we have in our starting inventory, whether or not we know we have it, so that's not really a factor in the puzzle. OPEN DRAWER produces a useful BADGE, gaining us access to CLASS 'B' CLEARANCE.

There's a securely-locked steel cabinet in an area down an adjoining corridor to the east, but for now we'll focus on the are north of the offices, where having the badge in our possession allows us to travel north of the 'B' SECURITY ROOM to access the REACTOR CONTROL ROOM, core of this adventure.

READ SCREEN here indicates THERE IS NOTHING WRITTEN ON IT, but that's just a parser quirk - LOOK SCREEN gives us critical status information on the state of the reactor, though at this point we don't yet know what the maximum tolerable temperature is.

Here's where I got stuck for a bit -- I explored the facility as well as I could, learning I could reset the power breakers in the area east of the control room and observing that the generator to the west started turning after I PULLed the red SWITCH. But I couldn't operate the yellow lever to turn on the pumps, as suggested by READ LEVER: IT SAYS - COOLING PUMPS.

I explored the non-functional Security Station near the offices and tried various unsuccessful commands to open the steel cabinet. Fortunately, this is a BASIC language game, and in examining the code I discovered that, while it is not mentioned onscreen or in the game's single-page manual, we are allowed to LOOK WALL, LOOK FLOOR and LOOK CEILING. (I also discovered that the game is aware of potential player frustration and will chide the player for employing three-letter versions of several popular four-letter words!)

Armed with this new ability, I found a slot in the wall of the control room, and INSERT BADGE opened up a staircase to the lower level. Here I found a crowbar, wrench and rod, although only the crowbar serves a useful purpose -- honestly, I like these kinds of red herrings, because they make the world seem a little more fully realized, as if another character in a different situation would have some options I just didn't need.

LOOK FLOOR in another room reveals a loose tile -- it's too heavy to pick up, but MOVE TILE produces an ID that grants CLASS 'A' CLEARANCE. This allows us to enter the actual nuclear reactor, and while there's some spooky buzzing and a lethal-looking green glow about, the game doesn't track any game-ending cumulative radiation metrics. So we're free to go down to the actual vat area and GET the SPANNER inconveniently stored there. (Incidentally, I'm accustomed to seeing American text adventures with wrenches, and UK games with spanners -- this is a rare occasion where both items exist in the same story, perhaps as a means of humoring the parser.)

We've seen a few valves along the way -- three to be precise -- and armed with these tools, specifically both the crowbar and spanner, we can open the valve to the right of Security 'B' to... dump all the cooling water outside of the plant and end the game with a huge meltdown. So that's not what we want to do.

A valve west of the control room is open and can't be closed. But the third, east of Control, can be, and this opens the cooling valve, though not to any immediate effect.

Returning to the control room, we can PULL SWITCH once to get generator output up to 1 megawatt. A second PULL SWITCH gets to 2 megawatts, and a third sets off an alarm and trips the breakers, which we then have to go reset.

I should pause here to note that it's possible to figure all this out by trial and error, but if we take the crowbar back to the aforementioned steel cabinet, we can PRY CABINET to reveal an OPERATIONS MANUAL, which we can OPEN and READ to learn a few technical details. But it's not strictly necessary, as it contains no passwords or other critical puzzle-solving content. I was fairly successful just messing around with the highly sensitive and dangerous nuclear reactor equipment, so that's a good life lesson to take away from this game. Along with any cancer stimulus we may have picked up inside the highly insecure reactor.

Anyway, with the generator back at 1 megawatt of output (not 2, mind!) we can PULL LEVER to activate the cooling system. A display shows the reactor temperature gradually coming down, line by line, and it's actually a pretty effective suspense technique, counting down as we cross our fingers and hope we didn't miss a puzzle somewhere along the way. Fortunately if we have gotten to this point, victory is ours!

I enjoyed 4 Mile Island Adventure -- it only took two or three hours to complete, and it was a well-constructed little adventure game that managed to get good mileage out of a small map and a few puzzles that seemed fairly obvious but interlocked in interesting, mechanically satisfying ways.

Here's my walkthrough, should anyone want a speedy trip through the game (note that my solution here ignores a lot of discovery details, I was trying to find the most efficient route under the mistaken impression that time was a lot tighter than it really is):

S, E, E, S, S

LOOK DESK

UNLOCK DRAWER

OPEN DRAWER

GET BADGE

N, N, N, N

LOOK WALL

INSERT BADGE

D, W

DROP KEY

GET CROWBAR

E, U, S, E

LOOK FLOOR

MOVE TILE

TAKE ID

W, N, E, N, N

PUSH BREAKER

S, W, N, N

GET SPANNER

U, S, S, E

OPEN VALVE

PULL SWITCH

PULL LEVER

(And that's the end!)

Adventure: Castle of Terror (1984)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 23:57:00 +0000

I've had a little bit of adventuring time available in recent weeks, and I ended up tackling Beam Software's Castle of Terror, published in 1984 for the Commodore 64 and Spectrum ZX computers. It's an illustrated text adventure with a parser (of sorts), room illustrations (that take considerable time to draw), and a design that inspired legendary frustration in its day.

I played Castle of Terror via the Antstream game service that launched last year -- recently the company has been adding a nice selection of obscure Commodore 64 and Spectrum ZX text adventures to supplement its growing selection of vintage arcade games and Megadrive titles. When I started this blog I honestly had no clue how many hundreds of text adventures had been created for the early home computers, and I appreciate the curation-by-default Anstream provides. Sometimes a smaller selection makes for an easier decision, especially now that the platform has added a save game feature.

I'm playing the Commodore 64 version, and the title screen shows off a design technique that was somewhat specific to the U.K. approach, probably because the more color-limited Spectrum ZX was so popular there. This title screen uses relatively high-resolution outlines, with blockier color underneath -- the ZX had to make do with relatively blocky color tiles, but the C-64 version is able to apply color at half resolution, making for a strikingly detailed image by 8-bit standards.

As always, I'm going to share my experience in full detail... and while normally I warn fellow adventurers away from the inevitable spoilers, this is one title you might want to know more about for the sake of adjusting your expectations. So consider this a half-hearted warning of...

**** SPOILERS AHEAD! ****

After we hit ENTER on the title screen, we find ourselves in a field where workers toil away with a few pixels' worth of incidental animation, and pleasant background music, atmospheric though no touch on the SID-powered C64's best.

I decide to head South to the location of the Duck Inn; just trying to get my bearings, I continue S to the old church grounds, and S again to a fresh grave. EXAMINE GRAVE reveals a bit of bone, and EXAMINE BONE reveals it seems to be a bit of skull. I'll take it along just in case, per tradition.

I wander around a bit -- we can see a foreboding castle along the north-south road from the village, and can enter a mill where there's a grindstone that might come in handy. The map isn't very consistent geographically -- there are lots of approximate connections along the cardinal directions, and interiors seem to allow any direction as an exit, though it's entirely consistent and mappable.

I enter the mill and try to GRIND BONE or PUT BONE ON GRINDSTONE, but the parser doesn't grasp my intent. There's a ladder onscreen, but trying to CLIMB LADDER only causes me to fall off, and EXAMINE LADDER reveals the bottom rung is broken. We can't FIX RUNG or REPAIR RUNG but we can TAKE RUNG -- it might come in handy as a stake, now that I think of it, or rather that I allow my brain to remain preoccupied by the game's title screen. But EXAMINE RUNG suggests it's the same size as a stay from the dray (wagon) parked outside the Duck Inn.

I haven't been inside the Inn yet, so let's go check it out. There are some villagers grouped in a cluster of mobbish, limited interactivity, and the text also calls our attention to an old man. Unfortunately, the parser will not allow us to TALK MAN, but if we try to TALK it asks us to whom we wish to speak... MAN doesn't yield a response, but TALK TO MAN allows him to ask us to buy him a tankard of ale. Of course, we discover that You have no money with which to buy ale, should we foolishly try to BUY ALE.

Wandering around some more, I find a small cottage north of the mill and enter, TAKEing a KNIFE from the kitchen table (though it is only revealed after we EXAMINE TABLE.) Can we do anything with the dray outside the inn? We can't LOCK DRAY (using the rung as a locking pin) or PULL DRAY or TAKE DRAY (It is too big!)

We can't ENTER CHURCH or GO CHURCH but if we EXAMINE CHURCH we find a dusty cross, always good to have on hand when these sorts of title screens are about. Though EXAMINE CROSS reveals it is made of gold, so if we have to collect treasures it may be handy on that count as well.

There's a gatehouse (apparently near the castle?) with a WHEEL we can TURN to... lower the drawbridge, rather reducing its effectiveness as a security measure. But trying to enter the castle by going N at this point results in our immediate demise, as an iron gate crashes down and sends pieces of our body hurtling down the cliff into the river below! So it's a good thing I saved right before trying that!

The parser doesn't recognize THROW, so my ideas about triggering the trap somehow are for nought. We can't GO RIVER or GO MOAT, as those destinations are unrecognized. I can't BUY ALE with the gold cross or SELL CROSS to anyone in the inn. What else? Oh, if we HELP VILLAGERS in the field where we started, they thank us and pay us a coin.

Now we can return to the Duck Inn, BUY ALE... except, no, I forgot to TAKE COIN earlier, so I have to go back and get it, which I can do even though the room description never mentions it is just lying there. (This will later prove to be something I should have paid more attention to.)

Trying again, we can BUY ALE, but when we TALK TO MAN, he just finishes his drink and bangs his empty tankard on the table... quite a trick, as when we try to TAKE TANKARD it's already in our inventory. So now we have... a tankard. EXAMINE TANKARD indicates it's got ale in it. Oh! We have to GIVE ALE TO MAN (GIVE ALE doesn't work) to hear his tale of woe regarding his missing daughter. He concludes by giving us a key that he indicates will help us enter the castle, before returning to his deep, dissolute depression. Progress!

But how do we use the key? I can't UNLOCK DOOR or UNLOCK GATE, and merely possessing the key doesn't prevent our death by iron gate. Ah -- we have to LOCK WHEEL, as it has a place for a locking pin, and this keeps the gate at bay.

To the North of the drawbridge we find a wooden door, and after we UNLOCK DOOR with the key... the game prompts us to enter the MASTER disk for a load. And on Antstream, this doesn't seem to happen? Oh. No, it does -- but it's a faithful emulation of the C64's notoriously sluggish disk drive, and it takes a minute or two (of a streamed black screen) for the game to finish loading and resume. This is part of the authentic vintage gaming experience I sincerely do not miss.

It seems the game is technically cut into two sections -- while we do retain our inventory from the pre-castle section, the parser's vocabulary actually changes up quite a bit. We find ourselves inside the castle's entrance hall, with exits east and west apparently guarded by knights. We can still go East and visit a cobweb-covered banquet hall, and E again to the Gallery, where we can go downstairs to the Armoury. Here we can TAKE SPEAR, but we can only carry one weapon at a time, so I hope I'm making the right choice by ignoring the axe and sword. Heading back toward the entrance hall, there are only a few paths to explore -- we can try to go Up from the banquet hall, but eerie footsteps force us to turn back.

Heading W of the entrance hall leads to the Library, where a knight statue really does block progress further west. Trying to TAKE BOOK reveals the kind of secret passage we were not hoping to find, as a trapdoor opens up in the floor and sends us tumbling into the dungeon. But we're not immediately dead, so let's keep exploring.

Walking south, we find the skeletal body of another adventurer, clutching a piece of paper with a small dagger near his hand. READ PAPER yields "Beware the living dead - they never sleep", almost certainly a vampire reference in these pre-Walking Dead days. We can TAKE DAGGER -- and examination reveals it has some twine threads on it?

The next bit of tunnel as we continue S contains a spider's web -- and trying to TAKE WEB gets us fatally bitten, but at least when we restart we're not all the way back at the beginning of the game, just at the castle entrance (thankfully, to avoid further disk swapping.) Since we're here, I'll fill in the map a bit -- but there's not really anywhere else to go, as we can't even head north of the entrance hall. So we're probably working our way toward the game's finale.

We can ignore the spider's web, as it turns out, and just continue south, where we encounter two knights whose crossed swords block our passage through a wooden door back north. A staircase leads up, but we'll explore to the south and east first to find an impassable pit occupied by the corpse of another failed rescuer. U turns out to lead us back to the banquet hall, though we can't go back down that way so I have no idea how this geography really works.

There don't seem to be a lot of puzzles here. Can we KILL KNIGHTS? No, but the parser will let us attempt to KILL KNIGHT -- though they still respond in the plural, and are too strong, beating us back. What about the knight in the library? KILL KNIGHT suggests there is no room to use the spear. Returning to the armory and fetching the axe instead, it develops that we can't control the axe very well at all in close quarters. One more try with the sword -- well, we're able to engage now, but we get cut badly with no protection. We can do that repeatedly, though, so perhaps it's not really going to be fatal.

I can't do any better against the knights downstairs with the sword, but revisiting the pit I discover that while we can't JUMP PIT or JUMP EAST, we can LEAP to cross the pit, emerging outdoors near the river. But we can't go anywhere from here -- SWIM and LEAP are both discouraged though not fatal -- so this is probably more of an endgame escape route.

Back to the knights, then... aha! We can TAKE SHIELD in the armory, and maybe that will help (these items are not described in the text but are sort of visible onscreen.) We still can't KILL KNIGHT in the library -- though we don't get cut with the shield in hand, we don't do him any damage either. We don't fare any better against the knights in the dungeon.

EXAMINE SHIELD suggests it protects the body but not the legs? Ah, we have to return to the armory, DROP SHIELD and TAKE ARMOUR (using the U.K. spelling.) We still can't take out the library knight, nor the knights in the dungeon. Man! Hmmm... further experimentation establishes that we can't use the axe on the library knight, but it is effective against the guys blocking the gate. Unfortunately, this only wins us passage back to the spiderweb room, and does nothing to protect us from the spider's deadly venom. And with the armour on, we're too heavy and can't leap the pit to escape.

So it feels like we can explore a bit more freely, but I don't see any obvious puzzles to deal with. I might have to look for a solution, as I seem to be a getting a bit stuck.

Well, there's one new discovery... for some reason, successfully attacking the knights in the dungeon seems to allow us to go up the stairs from the banquet room. Here, at last, we find our beautiful rescuee... and the vampire, who we will assume to be her captor and not just her cousin or lover or Instagram consultant, because it is 1984. This artwork is also striking in its combination of high-resolution pixels and chunky color.

EXAMINE COUNT indicates that the golden cross we are carrying is keeping him at bay: He sees the golden cross and is paralyzed by its dazzling light. EXAMINE GIRL gets her to ask us to help her escape, and TAKE GIRL automatically cuts her ropes with the knife (or the dagger, maybe?) She also suggests that we can escape by the banks of the river.

A quick trip back the dungeon (we can now travel down from the banquet hall) gets us close to the exit. Previous fatal experimentation suggests we should DROP ARMOUR and DROP AXE before we try to LEAP across the pit again. But we can't carry the girl across the pit without support? Like, a girdle or something hernia-related? Puzzled, I go upstairs and try to see if we can claim the rope we cut away earlier, but it's not available. We might as well try to KILL COUNT while we're here, but he simply turns into a bat and flees the room. Maybe we can use the spider web? Maybe not... TAKE WEB is still fatal.

SHOW (a verb I only discovered when I tried to threaten the vampire with the cross) in the spider's web room indicates that the object on the floor I couldn't quite make out is in fact a club. I've already dropped the axe, so I TAKE CLUB, then... CLUB WEB? No, but TAKE WEB works as long as we have the club instead of using our bare hands. We now have the web, or do we? It doesn't show up in inventory, or in the room, but I'll see what happens. I remember to DROP CLUB before attempting the LEAP, but we're still too heavy. Time to drop everything but the web (if we even have it, but webs can be difficult to see)... and the girl?

We're still getting told we need support for the girl (insert joke here.) I discover that we can TAKE WEB repeatedly, and if we've dropped the club in the meanwhile, we get fatally bitten by the owner of the already-cleared web. So that seems to be a non-useful object. Oh, dang -- maybe I shouldn't have cut the rope earlier? But UNTIE MAIDEN still cuts the rope. And the parser doesn't know how to UNTIE ROPE.

Hmmmm. I try to leave the dagger and knife behind so I can't cut the rope too hastily, but now I get You have nothing with which to cut the ropes which bind her when I try to UNTIE MAIDEN. Can we THROW MAIDEN across the pit? Nope, but we couldn't THROW anything in the first section of the game; now the parser clearly recognizes GET ROPE and THROW ROPE but we don't have any rope nor any apparent way to obtain some.

At this point I decided it was time to break down and consult the amazing solutionarchive.com to see if I can figure out what I'm missing. #*(#@! There are actually two mills in the first half of the game -- one of which contains some rope, which is distinct from the rope I'm trying to salvage from the maiden's captivity.

So it's time to restart the game to address my grievous oversight. The same mill that contains the rung also has the rope, but it's not visible or mentioned unless we request SHOW to get some more details about the room, so I feel decidedly non-guilty about missing it. I also discover that we have to EXAMINE RUNG to recognize it as a PIN, the two nouns are not interchangeable even if we already know what we need to do with it -- it's a feature or a bug, depending on one's point of view. A THROW ROPE once we make our way back to the pit immediately takes us back to the jetty by the river, where we still can't SWIM or JUMP, but we can THROW ROPE again to cross the water to victory!

Of course, I've only earned 111 of the possible 290 points -- but Castle of Terror's scoring mechanism is a little strange so I'm not concerned about it. The solutionarchive.com walkthrough indicates that I missed opportunities to earn points by repeatedly helping the villagers, eating some soup in the cottage, and pressing the skull in the library, among other non-essentials. I was more interested to learn that I actually lost points by entering the dungeon the way I did instead of taking a more convoluted route past the knight in the Library, requiring a flint I failed to find near one of the mills. And it turns out that it's actually impossible to kill the Count, nor is that required to finish the game, which I had accidentally fumbled my way through... apparently a subject of some gaming magazine controversy back in the day! So I'm satisfied to have seen most of what there is to see here, figured out most of the puzzles on my own, and accidentally ignored a few that don't actually have to be solved to complete the story.

Castle of Terror isn't a game I would recommend to modern adventure gamers, honestly -- while I appreciate that the design offers alternatives and red herrings, the design is frustrating in ways that it need not have been, with invisible items, parser oddities and a partially unresolved plot when all is said and done. It's very much of its era, for better or worse. But I really do appreciate Antstream's preservation of the text adventure genre, alongside its flashier streaming content.

Adventure: Hugo's House of Horrors / Hugo's Horrific Adventure (1989)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 21:21:00 +0000

I haven't had much time to sit down and dig into a proper adventure game in a long while,so I was pleased to run across an animated adventure game that only took a few hours to play -- David P. Gray's Hugo's Horrific Adventure (its in-game credit), a.k.a. Hugo's House of Horrors (in old shareware ads if memory serves.) It was originally published in 1989 with a mouse-supporting update circa 1997.

The design was inspired by the Sierra/Lucasarts 3-D adventure games and the technology is similar, but it's also a bit of a throwback to the bedroom coder days of yore. It appears Mr. Gray was a one-man team, designing, programming, composing the music and creating the art and animation, so it's a fairly small map and has a homemade feel about it, like an early text adventure with some audiovisuals added. The game was originally released as a shareware demo, and users were encouraged to purchase the full game, if only to have the manual handy to help answer some questions near the end of the game in the pre-Internet days.

For this post, I'm playing the ScummVM-compatible release available at www.gog.com as the first part of The Hugo Trilogy. Note that the ScummVM plugin for the Hugo series uses the host emulator's text boxes, rather than the Sierra-style popups used by the original game, so if you want a more authentic experience you may wish to track down the original release and run it in DOSBox.

As always, I'll recount my playing experience in detail here, so if you intend to play this one yourself, be aware that there are comprehensive...

*** SPOILERS AHEAD! ***

Hugo's Horrific Adventure has no title screen -- we're dropped right into the first gameplay location, a haunted house with eyes peering out and an unCLIMBable fence. We can't walk offscreen left or right, so clearly our first goal is to get inside the house. Our hero, Hugo, is the gent in the very 1980s cyan shirt and magenta pants.

The keyboard controls are similar to the early Sierra AGI titles -- we walk Hugo around with the arrow keys, and type to issue commands, with a general requirement that our hero be close to any objects with which we want him to interact. The animation engine is a little glitchy -- if we repeatedly hit the movement key, Hugo's walking animation resets on each keypress so that he glides across the background. It looks better if we just tap the key to start and stop his motion. The music is suitably creepy-slash-jaunty, with a fun shift in tone if we stay in one place for a while.

There's a suspicious-looking pumpkin on the ground by the front door -- we can TAKE PUMPKIN then OPEN PUMPKIN to reveal a key, which falls to the ground, allowing us to TAKE KEY and OPEN DOOR.

Upon entering the main hall, we see a white-haired gentleman in a lab coat walking to the right of the upper level and vanishing through a doorway. But I'll check out the area a bit before trying to find out what he's up to.

We can TAKE CANDLE from a small round table on the lower level. We can EXAMINE any of the several PAINTINGs but not MOVE PAINTING or TAKE PAINTING so it appears these are just for decoration. EXAMINE DOORWAY near the small opening under the staircase is worthwhile, as it yields a penknife and a small silver whistle. As before, the newfound objects end up on the floor, so we have to TAKE PENKNIFE and TAKE WHISTLE. And we have 46 of the 200 points already? Perhaps this will be a brief adventure!

I chose to explore the upstairs bedroom next -- we can LOOK UNDER BED to find nothing, but there's a chiffarobe/wardrobe/whatchamacallit present as well. We can OPEN WARDROBE to find what looks like a severed HEAD, but is actually a MASK shaped like a monkey's head. In the process of figuring out what the wardrobe was called, I discovered that if we specify EXAMINE [unrecognized object] we are given a room-level description. EXAMINE WINDOW reveals the outline of a shed below, in amongst some trees, so we should try to find that at some point.

Next door is a bathroom:

We can't seem to USE TOILET or USE TUB or TAKE BATH or USE WATER CLOSET; EXAMINE WINDOW reveals the same shed seen from the bedroom. EXAMINE SINK provides no useful information, though EXAMINE MIRROR confirms the 333 text written in lipstick that we can plainly see in the artwork, so we'll make note of that information.

Entering the Professor's room causes us to lose the monkey mask, so at first I thought solving this room might have to do with sneaking it in somehow -- actually, it appears to be a restriction imposed simply to avoid animation complications. Upon entry, the Professor urges us to get in place to "begin the experiment!" by stepping into a large open box connected to some wires and an imposing control console. There's another character here, a large green fellow who looks a bit like the Green Yamo from the old Datasoft Bruce Lee game but is actually Igor. EXAMINE TABLE near the door indicates there's a useful rubber bung here, but we don't seem to be able to TAKE BUNG as the glass door of the experiment booth is blocking our access to the tabletop.

So we might as well step into the box as the Professor asks to see what happens -- Igor mistakenly presses the red button instead of the blue as the mad scientist directs, and our hero is shrunk to about half his usual height. The Professor departs in frustration, and now that we're smaller we can walk behind the glass door and TAKE BUNG, at least, but now we're too short to reach the unusually high-placed doorknob to exit this room. So we're going to have to work something out with Igor here.

We can step back into the box and say IGOR, PUSH RED BUTTON -- of course, he pushes the yellow one, and now we're normal size but so discombobulated we can't coordinate ourselves enough to open the door. Asking IGOR, PUSH YELLOW BUTTON causes the green one to be pushed, creating a pixel-fragmented Hugo that is equally unable to open the door. It appears Igor tends to push the button to the right of the one we we ask for, so IGOR, PUSH GREEN BUTTON causes him to push the blue button, restoring Hugo to his normal condition, and I decided not to ask for any more button presses. I also stopped to TAKE MASK again after exiting the room.

Heading north on the lower level leads us into the house's kitchen, where we can try (but fail) to TAKE the BROOM leaning against the wall, which is magically held in place somehow. There doesn't seem to be anything in the oven or the cupboards, but we hear a feast going on in the room to the right. We'll go left for now, only to encounter an attack dog, so we'll make a hasty trip back to the kitchen. Re-entering to try my luck again, I was attacked and (I presume partially) eaten by the dog and had to restore a saved game, but I was able to catch sight of a mousehole on the wall in the dog room that may bear re-examination if we can deal with the angry pooch.

Exiting out the back of the kitchen, we see the fabled backyard shed -- which isn't really camouflaged at all, and we can't leave the path that leads to it so we have no choice but to check it out. It's locked with a combination lock, and 333 -- surprise? -- is the correct combination for entry. EXAMINE SHED discloses that the structure is in severe disrepair, but we see an oilcan on a crumbling shelf -- and for a change Hugo automatically adds it to inventory, presumably to avoid having to depict the shed's interior at all.

Returning to the house, we can enter the Feast room, which is populated with the standard Halloween characters -- Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula -- as well as... Gwendolin, Hood, Pea Head and Slime, so no Universal lawyers will be knocking on Mr. Gray's door.

The butler asks, "Care for a chop, sir?" -- answering YES leads to Hugo's swift demise, as the butler chops the interloper's head off with a carving knife. Answering NO leads to the same conclusion, so we'd best just avoid the butler as he patrols the upper side of the room. But there doesn't seem to be much else to do here, and it turns out that if we WEAR MASK we can use the disguise to make off with a pork chop from the efficient but easily deceived butler.

Now let's try giving that to the dog... this takes a little coordination of text input versus the animation, because there isn't really enough time to type the whole command before the dog takes Hugo down. This is the first of several situations in the linear last section of the game where it worked best for me to type the command, enter the next room, and hit ENTER to execute it. My attempt to GIVE CHOP was unsuccessful despite my clever timing, but following the game's helpful post-death recommendation to THROW CHOP instead worked. Now we can EXAMINE MOUSEHOLE to find... a pile of squishy mouse droppings. Hooray!

Hugo refuses to take any, erm, droppings, and attempting to leave and return to the room puts the dog back on dangerous full alert despite the luscious-looking pork chop still lying on the floor. So why are we here? EXAMINE RUG suggests a corner near the door looks uneven; moving to that side of the carpet allows us to MOVE RUG and discover a trapdoor. This feels significant but I hope we have everything we need, because I suspect there's no going back after this point.

Well, perhaps we don't have everything necessary, as the trapdoor is bolted shut. I try to TAKE BOLTS and OIL BOLTS and OIL TRAPDOOR to no avail. But OIL BOLT works (there's only one big, rusty bolt) -- but then we can't PULL BOLT or REMOVE BOLT or UNSCREW BOLT or OIL BOLT again?

Ah! It turns out this is not the nut-and- but the sliding sort of bolt, and OPEN BOLT works, followed by OPEN TRAPDOOR. Hugo discards the monkey mask automatically, yet again, and we find ourselves in the basement. 117 of 200 points so far!

LISTEN DOOR yields some muffled sobbing so perhaps we are close to rescuing Penelope! (I only know this is what we're supposed to do because getting killed by the dog suggests that now we'll never accomplish this laudable goal.) TALK PENELOPE establishes that this is in fact Penelope, but she's gagged so she can't suggest anything. If we stand around too long, like we're taking blog notes or something, the game starts prompting the player to see if some help is desired, but I'm resisting for the moment.

We can see (by mousing around) that there's an EXIT underneath one of the rocks near the door, but we can't MOVE ROCK or PUSH ROCK successfully. BLOW WHISTLE produces nothing interesting. UNLOCK DOOR reveals there's no keyhole or bolts, so it's not clear how we can open it. PUSH DOOR is not useful either. And we can't get back upstairs, so it's truly a one-way trip after we pacify the dog.

What to try? In Hugo's inventory, we currently have a penknife, a bung, a whistle, a candle, a key, and an oilcan. We can't BURN OILCAN, although we can OIL DOOR, making it an oily door that still won't budge!

OH! We can maneuver Hugo between the rocks by the door to the Exit to reach a cave, where Hugo immediately gets attacked by some vampire bats, fatally so. But readying a BLOW WHISTLE for immediate execution confuses the bats' sonar so that we can explore the cave area we're in.

Unfortunately, the next room contains a murderous mummy, so it seems we need to prepare some kind of offense or defense here as well. I couldn't burn the mummy's bandages or find any other way to attack him, but as he always just makes a beeline for Hugo it appears we can use the onscreen geography to get him trapped behind rocks and navigate past the room, being sure to TAKE TREASURE on the way.

Next, we find ourselves at an underground lake with a passage on the far side, near an old man with a fishing pole. There's a small boat on the near side -- we can't USE BOAT or BOARD BOAT, but GET IN BOAT reveals a hole in the vessel's bottom, so we have to PLUG HOLE WITH BUNG before we can proceed. Good thing we've been faithful adventurers, collecting every object along the way!

We can't move the boat yet as it's tied to a post -- we can't UNTIE ROPE (it's too knotted) but we can CUT ROPE with the penknife, then GET back IN the BOAT and PUSH OFF. We drift over to the other side of the lake, but can't GET OUT because the old man is stubbornly in the way. TALK MAN reveals that he wishes to help, but he vows to test our adventuring mettle by asking a series of questions, mostly related to popular fantasy literature.

I was able to answer BILBO as the first name of the hero of The Hobbit; NARNIA as the home of Aslan; and BRAM STOKER as the inventor of Count Dracula. I successfully chose (c) Drink It concerning what one should do with a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. The final question is a riddle: "What's the name of the only mammal that can't fly that can fly?" I initially guessed PIG, incorrectly, and was doomed to float forever on the old man's lake, which seems a bit harsh when all he really has to do is move a foot or so. Fortunately, we can just TALK MAN again to re-take the quiz; I tried SQUIRREL and FLYING SQUIRREL, also unsuccessfully, before successfully arriving at HUMAN -- we can't fly naturally, but we can fly with technology, which seems obvious in retrospect. Two more questions remain -- "What was the name of Roy Rogers' dog?" I knew Trigger was his horse, but I had to look up this bit of trivia - BULLET (the Wonder Dog) is the correct answer, and then of course I answered YES as to whether I really want to rescue Penelope.

We now have 179 of 200 points as we venture past the lake into a guard station where a more fleshy-looking version of Igor stands watch over the beloved Penelope's cell. TALK GUARD yields no meaningful result, nor does BRIBE GUARD, but GIVE GOLD cause Hugo to wisely slip him just one gold coin from our recent looting of the mummy's treasure. And now Hugo has all 200 points collected!

Once we enter Penelope's cell, therefore, the game wraps up rather hastily -- text informs us we have rescued her and exited the house somehow getting two people past the dog and all other obstacles, and apparently Hugo and Penelope live happily, if not ever after, at least until the second game in the trilogy, presumably. (Apologies for the obscured screenshot, I wasn't able to grab an image without the wrap-up text overlaid on top!)

Hugo's Horrific Adventure/Hugo's House of Horrors was an entertaining little animated adventure -- it only took a few hours for me to play through it, including taking notes and gathering screenshots, and I appreciated its straightforward simplicity. Haunted house rescues and escapes were a very common theme back in the text adventure era, and the heavy use of the parser here felt nicely old-fashioned. I'll likely return to this series in the future.

At Random: Karnov (NES, 1987)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 01:27:00 +0000

I recently acquired Hyperkin's Retron 5 multi-console -- it's essentially an emulator in a console casing, with a generic wireless controller, clean HDMI output, and support for cheats and patches, video filtering options, screenshot captures, and save states for games that never had a save capability originally.

It's not tremendously well constructed, and emulation will always have some shortcomings here and there, but this little box has one great feature from my perspective: physical cartridge slots for the Nintendo Entertainment System, its Japanese counterpart the Famicom, the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Game Boy Advance family (including the original Game Boy and the Game Boy Color). This means that a lot of cartridges I've acquired over the years at rummage sales and flea markets can now actually be played on a modern display, and moreover with minimal cleaning and fussing, avoiding a basic issue that has kept me from enjoying NES games in particular as often as I'd like.

So I've been digging into my collection a bit, and I came across a title that was always something of a personal nemesis back in the 1980s: Data East's Karnov.

This title screen is the cartridge's entire attract mode. There's no title music, no demo sample. Push start or go home.

The original 1987 arcade version of Karnov was a challenging side-scroller -- one-hit deaths and a barrage of incoming enemies discouraged me from investing many tokens in playing it, but it was a visually interesting experience. It was one of the first 16-bit coin-op games I had seen at the time and it was clear that my beloved NES was rapidly falling behind the state of the arcade art. When the NES conversion arrived in 1988, I rented it once, spent an evening failing to get through the first level despite the home version's more generous two-hit deaths, and decided to leave Karnov alone for a while. (I was disappointed that the original coin-op did not turn up on Data East's Arcade Classics compilation for the Wii back in 2010, but recently learned this was because the rights to Karnov and a few other Data East games were sold to Paon in the mid-2000s, instead of to G-Mode like the rest of the company's library, and the current IP owners haven't done much with the property.)

Of course, a decade or two later the NES cartridge turned up somewhere in my travels at a reasonable price and became part of my library. I don't recall spending much time with it in the intervening years, but it came to hand as I was looking for something to play on the Hyperkin box, and so it was time to take Karnov for a spin.

Karnov is powerful Russian! Karnov needs no shirt! No neck! No eyeballs!

Karnov is a fire-breathing Russian (ostensibly a circus performer and strongman of the non-Putin variety) who has to face down a number of bizarre creatures across 9 fairly brief, relatively slow-moving side-scrolling levels, with the customary boss at the end of each.

First level boss! Crazy green fishnik tosses missiles from stupid American fanny pack!

There's a little more depth to the game than that summary suggests -- an RPG-lite inventory system tasks our hero with collecting and using bombs, magic wings, ladders and other special items along the way. The wings and bombs are critical to getting through level eight, but the other artifacts are more or less optional, which is good because the two-button NES controller means we can only select items by nudging Karnov himself left and right until the desired item is flashing so we can finally press the SELECT key to use it. Since the game's side-scrolling structure and limited NES-era memory generally spawns enemies as the screen inches to the right, and re-spawns them if we retreat to the left, this mechanic isn't as much fun as it ought to be.

To the game's credit, there are alternate paths for the exploration-minded available in most of the levels, but dogged left-to-right movement will finish the game just as readily. Even with the simplest, most straightforward approach, Karnov remains a difficult game for yours truly; many of the enemy creatures fire missiles at angles that are tough to avoid by ducking or jumping, and even though their individual attack styles become more familiar as the game goes on, my aging skills were soon outmatched. I did manage to get through the first level, finally, but then I spent half an hour dying in more or less the same spot early in level two, only once getting to the mid-way checkpoint before hitting game over and starting back at the beginning of level two (the game supplies infinite continues but one has to complete an entire level on a single "credit" to make any real progress.)

So... I took advantage of modern emulation technology to apply a cheat code, giving Karnov invincibility against everything but falling in a (mercifully rare) hole in the level design. This enabled me to see all nine available environments, and witness the endless repetition of the same background music and the re-use of boss enemies across multiple levels, because, hey, cartridge ROM space didn't grow on trees in 1988.

Darn you, capitalist Pepperidge Farm fish-crackers! Go back to your barrel and gorge on American hearty-attack breakfast!

Finally, after swimming and running and shooting and flying and shooting and shooting and shooting and jumping and shooting some more, our dauntless Russian has to fight off a single-headed, triple-entrance dragon creature:

Hold, please. Mr. Karnov is taking damage and currently unavailable to come to the screen.

And after all that -- battling legitimately through nine increasingly difficult levels or waiting three decades until a wondrous technological solution becomes available -- the game's ending is... well... a bit of an anti-climax:

In Soviet Union, game finishes you! Exclamation points are expensive, third one sold on black market.

So that's my experience with Karnov on the NES. I'm glad to have finally sort-of-played through the entire game, instead of just watching a YouTube video, but there's not a lot I can say about Karnov. It's very much of its time -- colorful and challenging, reasonably well-ported from the arcade, but also early enough in the life cycle of the NES to get by without pushing the hardware, cartridge size or gameplay possibilities. It's a competent, typical example of the 8-bit side-scrolling videogame, but history has pushed it into the background, overshadowed by NES genre-mates like Super Mario Brothers, Castlevania and Battletoads.

At Random: Magician Lord (Neo Geo, 1990)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 00:49:00 +0000

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything here, and I'm heading into another busy period so this may be my only post for a while to come as well. But I've recently found myself drawn back to SNK's Magician Lord, a launch title for the Neo Geo arcade system/console.

He's a Magician! He's a Lord! He's Magician Lord!

This side-scrolling, single-player fantasy action game was developed by Alpha Denshi working closely with SNK during the Neo Geo's development. And it was fairly impressive when it hit arcades in 1990 -- the graphics were bold and colorful with scaling sprites and deep parallax scrolling, the audio included digitized speech and music with sampled instruments, and while it was an arcade machine with a difficulty level designed to keep the coin slot fed, it was possible to get a feel for the visual style and gameplay on a single token.

But what I think appealed most to me was that you could play THIS version, exactly as it was, at home on SNK's Neo Geo console in 1991. Today we're used to coin-ops arriving at home in arcade perfect form, or as close as emulation and control options will allow, but the Neo Geo was the first system to deliver actual arcade hardware to the living room. The system was an investment -- around US$600 for the system, and building a game collection was even more expensive with titles in the neighborhood $200 apiece. But look at that massive Magician Lord cartridge -- packed with so much gaming goodness it needed TWO edge connectors!

23 Megabits of Magic + 23 Megabits of Lordliness

Magician Lord isn't a bad game, but it falls short of being a great game. The action is simple and repetitive -- walk, shoot magic, jump, duck, climb a ladder, take a couple of hits, use up your lives, and put another token in to continue. Occasionally there are transforming power-ups to acquire, with six different alternate forms for hero Elta the Magician Lord to take, but the game throws so much at our man that (at least in my less-than-capable hands) these temporary modes tend to be very temporary indeed.

There are also some unintentionally amusing bits between levels when the main villain stops by to complain about the player's progress, from the days before careful Japanese-to-English localization was a thing:

Sticks and stones...

Aren't we all, dude. But we're only two stages in. Chin up!

Magician Lord was an early title for the Neo Geo, and the relatively small 46 megabit cartridge's limitations become apparent as one gets deeper into the game. Many enemies encountered in later stages are palette-shifted versions of earlier foes, the excellent 80's-synth background music gets reused on multiple levels, and the maps are generally compact aside from a few late-game mazes that seem very out of place in an arcade experience. The bosses are large and nightmarish and varied enough, but rather stiffly animated and predictable, and the end of the game wisely features a mini-boss rush rather than revisiting the big guys.

But maybe these limitations are part of what I like about this title -- it feels stuck halfway between a coin-op and a home console experience, and it's more richly textured and progression-oriented than most of its arcade and Neo Geo brethren. Over time, it only became more unique as SNK's later success (and title releases) focused almost exclusively on fighting games.

As tempted as I often was, I could never quite convince my checkbook to ante up for the Neo Geo console back in the day, so I only actually played Magician Lord a few times in the arcades, most memorably for the first time at The Circus in Marinette, Wisconsin. I remember being surprised and disappointed that it was never ported to home consoles -- it seems like the Genesis and SNES could have handled a reasonably accurate conversion, or the Playstation if cartridge space limitations were the problem. Maybe it just wasn't popular enough to be worth the effort; the game didn't resurface in any officially licensed form until emulation of the original arcade software became possible some fifteen years later on the Wii, PS2, Playstation Vita, SNK's own Neo Geo Mini line, and most recently on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, XBox One and PC via HAMSTER's Arcade Classics Archive series.

And despite owning the game in multiple forms over the years (even the physical cartridge shown above, despite never owning the console... yeah...) -- and playing it many times -- I realized recently that I'd never actually finished Magician Lord, or even gotten very close to the end. So I bought the most recent PC emulated version (from Microsoft's store, as it doesn't seem to be available via GOG.com or Steam) and set out to tackle it seriously. This time I finally navigated patiently through a couple of frustrating, game length-padding later levels where I'd gotten stuck before, where visually identical doors and ladders are not in fact identical, and made it to the penultimate stage.

It was here that the nails-hard difficulty very nearly exceeded my abilities, where a series of platforming moves are combined with a plethora of floating, firing enemies and, despite the game's generous continue approach, I couldn't survive long enough to get anywhere at all before putting the next virtual token in. The idea is to jump/walk across a series of floating platforms without getting hit by the floating spheres or their fireballs.

I either fell off the platform or exploded into Elta fragments while trying to capture this screenshot

But!

I did finally make it -- not quite getting all the way across, but somehow getting far enough that keeping the joystick pressed leftward allowed me to land on a lower level instead of falling to my usual untimely death. And a little more navigation led me to collect the final book (yes, each boss guards a mystical tome of power that will ultimately restore freedom to the land when the magical, lordly shelf is filled or something to that effect):

I am not an animal! I am not a human being!

After this point, inserting far more in virtual quarters than the $7.99 I paid for this incarnation of the game to continue whittling down the various mini-bosses and final boss while getting my hat handed to me every few seconds, I managed to make it to the end!

Not the final boss either, but these giggling, leaping mini-boss twins are just too cute

"Of course, everyone has died while crops and water were unavailable all this time. I survived by eating my beard."

So now I have experienced all that Magician Lord has to offer, and yes, I still have a nostalgic soft spot for this game and will probably return to it now and then. If I'm honest, it was the technology advance the Neo Geo represented, and the just-out-of-my-reach pricing at the time, that really made an impression on me, and this game was just the most personally appealing of the launch titles. But it still makes me very happy to be able to finally play it at home more than 25 years later.

Adventures in VR: Dead Secret (2016)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 15:51:00 +0000

Hi-ho!

It's been a long time, more than a year. But while I haven't been writing much about games of late, I have had time to play a few and to goof around with virtual reality using the HTC Vive platform. This is exciting stuff, actually, and reminds me a lot of the pioneering days of video games I have so often written about; conventions for movement and interaction are still evolving, the technology is here but has definite room for improvement, and interesting gameplay experiments are happening. Its immersive qualities are great for adventure games, and while I tend to favor the "theatre of the mind" created by classic text adventures, this technology is taking us to some fascinating new places.

This past fall, I played through Robot Invader's 2016 indie adventure game, Dead Secret. The game also supports standard PC mouse-and-keyboard play, but I'm going to focus on its virtual reality mode here and what that brings to the experience. I played it on the Vive; it also supports the Oculus Rift, and a Playstation VR version is expected soon.

I haven't ~~mastered~~ ~~figured out~~ even started to work out a reliable way to capture decent screenshots from VR games yet -- the projections and distortions applied to the image to make it look "real" in a headset don't translate very well to flat images. And my attempts so far tend to look a little inebriated at best:

Since this is a recent game, I'm going to do my best not to spoil the plot, which is in many ways this game's best feature. But I will be citing some specific examples from my experience with this adventure, so there may still be a few...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD *****

Dead Secret is a mystery adventure game set in and around an old house whose owner, a professor, recently died or was perhaps murdered. As a reporter with one arm stuck in a cast, it's the player's job to explore the area, find clues and evidence, and figure out what really happened.

Let's start by talking about the game's VR interface. Virtual reality's biggest strength is its ability to put the player inside the game's world, and Dead Secret does a good job of this in the basic sense. We can look freely around the world, texture resolution is sufficient to avoid obvious pixellation, and items of interest are sometimes hidden in areas we'll only spot if we peer under the furniture or behind a prop. Locomotion is handled by pointing a cursor at a possible destination, then clicking; we slide slowly to the new area, and are free to look around while we're moving, as if riding on a conveyor belt. (There is a comfort mode that limits the field of view during motion, for players prone to motion sickness in VR -- I am building a tolerance for it, but my brain still doesn't like it when I seem to be walking or tilting quickly and my body is not doing the same. I had no problems with Dead Secret's default movement speed.) Doors and transition points like stairs are identified with icons, and the world fades out and back in at the new location, a VR convention that works well here.

Text is nicely presented, anchored within the world rather than floating in front of the player's face -- descriptions of items are presented on surfaces nearby, museum-style, and the many printed clues we find are rendered as folders we can hold in our hand and read. I was happy to see that the font handling supports up-close viewing, so everything is clearly readable and there are no obvious bitmaps visible. And when something scary is happening, being "there" definitely heightens the impact.

Unfortunately, the interface betrays its non-VR origins in a lot of ways, probably due to the game's support for both desktop and headset play. The game is running on a point-and-click engine, which means that even though we feel very present in the environment, we can't simply pick up and manipulate objects at will -- we have to click on a limited set of movable items, using a floating pointer rather than an in-game hand, and the inventory system takes us out of the game world into a menu system where we have to point and click the old-fashioned way. (Other VR adventures I have played use a backpack or a belt to provide a more "realistic" approach to inventory handling, though scale is always a little weird when we can SEE that we're carrying all this stuff with us. Text adventures had their awkward conventions too!)

Using an object where interaction is supported also feels artificial; we have to access the item in inventory, then point at the intended location and click, at which time a scripted animation plays out. We don't get to really fit things into place, turn keys or open drawers directly, and Dead Secret's approach robs the game of some of the immediacy important to VR. In the most egregious case, when we are tasked with solving a puzzle involving weighted bottles and a scale, it feels like we are manipulating icons rather than really weighing bottles on a scale. We want to lift and drop bottles and shuffle them around in real time, even with only one workable hand (a limitation that serves the game's drama well at times), but we're only able to "click" them into predetermined slots, severely breaking the reality for the duration of that puzzle.

The game's plotting is well handled -- there are moments that might be paranormal in nature, or might not be, and the story behind the professor's death is revealed in small, interesting revelations as we discover clues. Seeing our character in a mirror early in the game was surprisingly effective -- I'm so used to being anonymous in adventure games that I thought this would seem like an imposition, but in a world that feels this real it was satisfying to inhabit a character with defined limitations, goals and (as we discover during the game) dreams and emotions. There are a number of scary surprises, mostly involving a masked, robed figure that lurks and attacks at key moments in the story, and much of the game's drama comes from the rush of desperate escape and concealment. VR and horror are remarkably effective in combination -- without the distance that a screen provides, even simple "jump scares" can be unsettling. Dead Secret uses the medium very well in this regard, with measured pacing to convey approaching menace and jeopardy. Part of my brain knew it was just a game -- but part of it didn't, and I found my heart pounding and breathing rapid several times along the way.

Multiple endings provide a little bit of extended play value -- one is accessible at the very beginning, if we opt to just leave the house rather than investigating, but the others depend on choices made near the very end, and the game generously allows us to restart just before that point to discover the alternatives. I was so involved in experiencing the environment and events of the story that I didn't do a great job of finding and making sense of all the clues, so I wasn't at all sure about my factual determinations, and this design concession to the player hours invested up to this point was greatly appreciated.

Dead Secret is not a perfect adventure game, and its VR implementation misses some opportunities. But the experience stuck with me -- not just the eerie moments, but the discoveries of new spaces and clues in a virtually real environment. Immersion to this degree is perfect for old-fashioned adventure games, where methodical examination and consideration is of more importance than fast action, and I look forward to seeing what else the nascent VR game industry produces along these lines.

At Random: Quest for Camelot (Gameboy Color, 1998)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 21:49:00 +0000

Hi, everyone! It's been several months since I've posted here, but my current show is up and running and rehearsals for the next one don't start for a few weeks aside from a staged reading I'm doing next weekend -- whew! -- so I have a little time to do some gaming and writing.

One of my brother's students has given me an opportunity to play a game that hadn't even crossed my mind -- Quest for Camelot for the Gameboy Color, published by Titus Software to tie in with Warner Brothers' 1998 animated fantasy movie. It showed up in the mail on October 1st, so I've been able to spend a little time with it!

Licensed games are almost always at a disadvantage, especially when development schedules are constrained by an immovable studio release date. Generally, these games end up using an existing engine, or even modifying a work-in-progress game design and just grafting on graphics related to the licensed property. Projects like this are valuable, in that they keep many a fledgling developer afloat while they work on more original and substantial projects, but the results are usually rushed and unpolished. For example, this terse, silent title screen could have done with a little color and context and 8-bit music:

To its credit, Quest for Camelot differs from most licensed titles in that it's not a side-scrolling platformer -- instead, it opts for a Japanese-style Action RPG design. We can select English, French or Spanish language at the start, after which a lengthy sequence of illustrations and text screens sets up the story -- our hero, young K... something, must discover what's happened to... oh, man, I've already forgotten what the storyline is. Time to reset!

Okay... a young girl named Kayley jumps off a pony into the arms of her father, Sir Lionel, who must leave immediately for Camelot; she wants to be a knight too. At Camelot, Sir Ruber demands King Arthur give him more than his fair share of land, and attacks the King when his "need" is denied. The King successfully defends himself against Ruber's attack, probably because Sir Ruber's arm appears badly broken (or his name is actually pronounced "Sir Rubber") and he has no idea how to wield his mace or aim at his opponent:

Somehow Ruber manages to escape all of the charging knights -- but what's this? RUBER HAD LEFT A HORRIBLE REMINDER OF HIS BETRAYAL! By taking a big... oh, no, by killing Sir Lionel. As the game begins, it is ten years later, and Sir Ruber returns to... well, the text cuts off here and there's no music to set the stage in these cutscenes, but we see a grown Kayley fleeing on horseback before the action cuts to...

... some dude we haven't met before, standing out in the woods someplace and suffering from acute constipation judging from the expression on his face. Oh, wait! When I start walking around and turn the character to the side, I can see that it's Kayley... I think... she has a ponytail, at least, but who knows what she did with her horse? The first person I talk to, a FARMER, gives us directions about how to talk to someone, which is not very helpful as I've already figured out how to GET IN HIS FACE BY PUSHING AGAINST HIM AND PRESSING THE A BUTTON. After telling me that Sir Ruber has captured my mother, Lady Juliana, and warning me about his ruthless knights, and informing me I should visit the blacksmith to the east, he tells me to hold the control pad in the direction of the person I want to talk to and press the A or B button, and that I need 30 gems to save my game. Then Mr. Farmer flees offscreen, apparently in terror of our heroine's aggressive questioning technique or fearing he will be discovered by the RPG GRP (Game Reality Police).

Mr. Farmer's flight has cleared the bridge to the south, but I'm going to go explore to the east before we start out on what I presume will be a long and arduous journey. There's a blue knight wandering around here, and if I walk into him, I lose one of Kayley's five life hearts, accompanied by a horrible farting sound, so I guess he's not somebody we should be talking to. There's an impassable fence line to the east, and nowhere else to go up here, so we'll travel south across the bridge and then head east in search of the blacksmith. We have to avoid some more blue knights in the area, but I find the blacksmith where I was expecting to -- he tells us that Ruber's knights have scared his hens away, and offers to help us if we can round them up. Why the Blacksmith has hens is not explained, so we'll call this Rushed Development Clue #1!

Now, a lesser game might ask us to find a hen, or maybe three, but Quest for Camelot is no quick cash-in... we have to find FIVE of the feathered blighters. I find the first one in a cave -- well, it's actually a path to another area of the map, and Kayley's passage through it is accompanied by a flash of light and a rather neat screen-warping effect, rather overselling what appears to be a village underpass. The blacksmith has no interest in only one of his hens, and tells us to keep looking, forcing us to carry live hens around while we search in caves... oh, I guess that WAS a cave, I just expected such a cavern to look different from the surrounding countryside. It doesn't take long to find the five hens, and on my way back to the blacksmith, I encounter a ghostly, shaky-looking, possibly inebriated Merlin, who advises me that RUBER IS IN THE MANOR but we must become a skilled sword fighter before we face him. I soon realize I have wandered into another section of the map and the blacksmith isn't here, but I go back through a "cave" and find my way back to him. He gives Kayley a sword and advises her to seek training from his brother, who lives in A HOME to the south. I hope he means a house.


"Here's a great sword for you, the best I ever made! Now go pick it up out of the dirt!"

I almost leave without noticing that the sword is just laying on the ground and has not been automatically added to inventory. There's a short, Zelda-ish animation when Kayley picks up the sword, at least. I find my way to the brother's house, and he accuses me of stealing his brother's sword before deciding I look honest. He tells us that we will gain experience through combat, strengthening the sword, and that he will teach me more after I take out all the knights terrorizing the town. Of course, he doesn't actually tell me how to use the sword to fight the knights, and I reach my first GAME OVER screen shortly.

(As I replay the opening, it occurs to me that the Blacksmith looks a lot like one would expect the Farmer to look, and vice-versa. Primary evidence: the Blacksmith is holding a pitchfork, plus the aforementioned hens. RDC #2!) This time, I mess around with the interface a bit and figure out that the Save screen (accessed by pushing START) is also the inventory/equipment screen. I highlight the sword and hit some button or other, and the sword moves up to the top row of the generally featureless inventory screen -- and now I can hit the B button to attack with the sword.

Quest for Camelot's combat mechanics leave a lot to be desired. Basically, we approach an enemy and start wildly swinging the sword -- if we do it fast enough, we generally won't take any damage, though every contact knocks us backwards a bit so we have to be careful not to get cornered or pushed into the bounding box of another enemy. An energy bar is displayed above the enemy's head when we've done damage, and while no numbers are ever shown, the bar display seems to be based on the maximum number of hit points an enemy can possibly have; all of these guys start with the bar only partially filled. Some enemies drop 10 gold pieces or a life heart when killed, which is handy as I have taken quite a bit of damage just trying to collect the hens. It took me a while to find and kill all the knights, but now the swordmaster teaches Kayley a charged-up spinning sword attack, useful when surrounded (well, purportedly useful -- I found that I took more damage when I tried to use the spin attack instead of just beating on the nearest enemy.) The swordsman advises us to seek Merlin to gain entrance to the manor, which the drunk old wizard does by allowing the formerly (and still) featureless bridge nearby to become a portal, and promises to see us again elsewhere.

I almost die at the hands of a number of blue knights just inside the Manor walls, but manage to survive. Inside the Manor, the music thankfully changes to something a little more melodic than the thumping, raspy, percussion-heavy travel tune we've been hearing since we started the game. A servant tells us we need a shield, and he saw a man with a dog pick one up (let's hope the servant's eyesight is pretty good and the guy wasn't just cleaning up after his pet.) Setting out to find him, I run into some cloaked figures -- and the sword as-is isn't much use against them, as they just get larger, doing damage as they press me against walls and furniture, and I die shortly, restoring from a recent saved game to continue.

I find the man in the southeast corner of the manor -- his dog has indeed gone missing, so we have another fetch quest to complete. While looking, I discover that contact with the cloaked enemies causes them to give chase -- so it's really important not to attack or run into them. I see Merlin yet again, who tells us we need to find a grappling hook, and a dungeon key, and then pick up an arrow outside; he also mentions that we can open chests by swinging our sword, as one does.

It's about at this point that I start to wonder who this game's target audience was meant to be -- the adventuring and puzzle-solving is pretty elementary, but it becomes a tedious stealth game at this point, and sometimes the ghosts start making a bee-line for our heroine without apparent provocation. In other words, I am dying A LOT. I find the guy whose dog is missing again, but no sign of the dog -- in fact, he seems to have given up, and just assumes the dog will come back when it's hungry. I also find a large gem of no practical value. Wikipedia tells me that the game has 9 worlds and 60 levels... oh, man, this does not sound like fun. For the purposes of exploring more of the game, I enter a GameShark cheat code (010518C1) that refills Kayley to full health whenever she takes damage.

Now I can continue more readily, and I learn that the ghosts can be defeated -- it's just risky to take them on, because if you end up backed against a wall or even near a less-than-sprite-sized gap when they enlarge, you're hit repeatedly and dead in short order before you can even move out of the way. I find a hidden switch that opens a secret passageway, and this allows me to zzzzzz....

Sorry, this allows me to find the grappling hook. And eventually I find the dog, and the graphics are so clumsy that from the side it looks more like the dog with two backs, y'knowhatI'msayin':

And I learn, of course, that if we run into a ghost with the dog in tow, the dog runs away. so it takes me a few tries to get the dog safely back to its owner and earn the shield. With the shield and grappling hook in hand, I discover that we can only have one item equipped at a time, so we'll have to be choosy about our inventory handling. Returning outside the castle, I realize that the "ARROW ON THE GROUND" Merlin mentioned is actually a pattern of stones on the ground pointing to where we can use the grappling hook, allowing us to access the upper level of the Manor and fight some more knights. And my sword levels up, apparently having drawn enough blood to be more powerful now, though there's no indication onscreen of its level or its XP, so it's anyone's guess as to when it will level up again. I find the dungeon key up here, so we're getting closer to fighting Sir Ruber -- Merlin is standing by the dungeon entrance, and now we can enter it.

Kayley finds herself in an underground maze patrolled by giant spiders now; they're fairly tough to kill, and our progress is slowed by webs on the ground so navigation becomes more important. A tunnel leads to a boss battle with Sir Ruber, who leaps around like an idiot, descending on Kayley's head and otherwise being hard to hit without taking plentiful damage. And he looks more like Peter Boyle as Young Frankenstein than any of the other crudely-rendered Sir Ruber images we've seen so far.

I finally manage to wear him down, but despite Merlin's warning that Kayley must not let him escape, he escapes. A cut-scene (well, some scrolling text followed by some Warner-approved illustrations eating up cartridge space that could otherwise have been used to enlarge the maps or improve the graphics) establishes that Ruber's attempt to steal Excalibur from King Arthur was interrupted, but the legendary sword is now lost in the Forbidden Forest.

The forest is patrolled by invincible moving rock formations, snakes, and winged creatures that are particularly hard to get into sword range without taking damage. Someone named Garrett guards a bridge and will only let us past into the more dangerous part of the forest if he believes in our sword skills, which I will presume means the sword must be at level 2, as despite all the fuss he lets us through immediately. The blue knights have given way to more dangerous gray knights, and we can find Garrett in his house in the forest, though he throws us out immediately for no specific reason. Merlin continues to wander around the map, and here he appears to warn us about a deadly giant plant ahead -- to defeat it, we need a MAGICAL STICK (back to basics here) and he won't let us past without it.

Sure enough, we meet another farmer (this time represented by the graphic used earlier for the blacksmith, RDC #3! Bingo!) whose garden has been destroyed by Ruber's knights. He wants us to kill all the knights in exchange for some reward. The worst thing about these "kill them all" quests is that we're given no indication of how many potential victims there are, so Kayley has to wander around the map, murdering people until she thinks she's dispatched everybody, then check in with the quest issuer to find out if she's really done or not.

While hunting down knights, I visit Garrett's house again -- and this time, the game state has changed so that instead of just throwing us out for no stated reason, he's quite talkative. He volunteers that he knew Sir Lionel when he was a stable boy, and he opens up a sealed spider cave where the magical stick is rumored to be hidden. On the way there, I spend 50 gems on a magic shovel offered by a merchant standing in the middle of the woods, not really the best location for a retail operation. The cave is filled with pitfalls that kick us back to the entrance, and the spiders here are fairly resilient. The magical stick is hidden in a chest, and now we can continue.

As I exit the spider cave, my sword levels up again, its lust for bloodshed ever increasing, kids! I manage to kill all the local knights, and the farmer now allows me to dig up turnips in his garden with the shovel I just bought. Apparently a horse in the area likes turnips, and that's why we're doing this? I find a bunch of small turnips which the game displays but doesn't seem to acknowledge, until after quite a bit of digging I turn up a large one. Now Merlin opens up the gateway to the plant boss, but a strong wind prevents us from walking there, which is apparently why we need to find the horse. Sigh.

Looking hither and yon for the horse, I dig in a suspiciously artificial-looking rock formation to find another heart container, which if I weren't cheating already would be very valuable. And I finally find the horse, back near the beginning of this whole area of the game to ensure maximum ~~backtracking~~ play time. While we're on horseback we can't fight the knights, so I try to avoid them. The horse gets us past the wind (I think we needed to have found the large turnip to make it, suggesting the horse is partly flatulence-powered) but then disappears after we're on the other side. He doesn't run off, he doesn't stop and graze, he just vanishes into the thin air.

We now find ourselves in a maze with little, minimally fire-breathing dragons to kill (think Fygar in Dig-Dug, with a short-range lick of flame coming out once in a while.) I find a slingshot in a dead-end part of the maze, a heart refill, and finally enter a cavern where small carnivorous plants attack from the walls, forcing us to avoid them. The boss battle occurs not too far into the cave, and is perhaps the most tedious affair I've seen in an Action-RPG, thanks mostly to the game's awkward interface.

We have to switch to the magical stick, get it into the giant plant's mouth, switch back to the sword, and attack until it breaks the stick -- apparently what's magic about it is that it can be reused indefinitely. It's hard to dodge the plant's randomly attacking underground tendrils and get close enough to put the stick in without taking damage, and the constant need to interrupt the action to switch equipment becomes tiresome quickly. So I just keep switching and doing and switching and doing some more, thanking the GameShark every so often for keeping Kayley alive in the face of my sheer combat incompetence.

Finally defeating the plant takes us back to Merlin, who informs us that there's yet another crisis to take care of before we can face Sir Ruber. Merlin tells us we have FOUND ALL THE SECRETS, though he doesn't elaborate on which secrets, exactly. And he gives us one piece of a mystical... eight piece... parchment. And then... my game hangs. I can't move or access the menu? Oh, it's just a dramatic pause, apparently.

We now enter the Dragons' Territory, where Kayley meets Devon and Cornwall, a two-headed bickersome dragon that was apparently a major character in the Quest for Camelot feature film. He tells/they tell us we need a dragon's scale to cross a large body of water to find Excalibur, and some dude has it. And exploring this world is even more of a pain, because if we sink in the lake accidentally, we are put back at the beginning of the level, and navigating the narrow shorelines without falling in the water proves pretty difficult until I get the hang of it.

And I am not finding the dragon's scale! It's supposed to be out here somewhere... I finally consult a walkthrough and learn that the sword can be used to cut down some trees. Actually, it only works on one specific tree, so I can excuse myself for not discovering this on my own. And I learn that a compass I was meant to acquire much earlier in the game would be making my life easier at this point, but of course there's no going back from this level so I can't take advantage of this newfound knowledge without starting completely over. And I find a warp point at the edge of the lake that takes me to another area, where I can fight another of those furshlugginer plants...

And for your humble blogger, at this point my motivation is gone for completing this particular Quest. We're approaching one-third of the way through the game; we fought Sir Ruber once already, and while I'm sure he'll be disappointed if he doesn't get to battle us again, I'm starting to share the title screen's distinct lack of enthusiasm. The game isn't as lightweight as I expected, but by the same token it feels padded throughout -- the maps are small and full of wandering and retreading, the inventory handling is awkward, the graphics and sound are stuck somewhere between passable and terrible, and the amount of fetching and finding required to make progress makes it hard to care if Kayley ever succeeds.

I've seen worse licensed games than Quest for Camelot -- but that's not saying very much. Time to disable the GameShark and let nature take its course:

Adventure: Detective Case and Clown Bot: in Murder in the Hotel Lisbon (2014)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 17:57:00 +0000

Ed.: As many have noticed, I'm finding it difficult to keep up with my adventuring and blogging of late. So I'm changing up my approach a little bit -- feedback is welcome!

For several years now I've been doing comprehensive playthroughs and avoiding more recent games -- unnecessarily, as it turns out, since walkthroughs are actually easier to find for modern adventures than the vintage text games I often choose to battle through. So I'm going to try a lighter approach and see how that works -- I'm going to play a game for fun's sake, capture a few screenshots, and then write about it from recent memory, rather than trying to take detailed notes along the way. I won't be doing reviews, exactly, and there will still be some spoilers here where I want to comment on or illustrate something notable. But I'm going to try to focus more on what a particular game brings to the adventure gaming genre, and how it uses or changes its conventions, and break my old habit of narrating every step of the game, at least where more recent titles are concerned.

So, with that said, I've recently been playing Portuguese developer Nerd Monkeys' 2014 point-and-click animated adventure, Detective Case and Clown Bot: in Murder at the Hotel Lisbon.

The adventure game genre never quite died off commercially outside the United States, though I was surprised to see this effort is not implemented using the near-ubiquitous Adventure Game Studio, but Game Maker Studio. The game is designed by Filipe Duarte Pina and produced by Diogo Vasconcelos, with backgrounds by Luis Bacharel, character design by Nuno Saraiva, a great jazz combo score by Rafael Pina, recorded with live instruments but yet somehow seamlessly looped when necessary.

The story is straightforward -- our hero and avatar, the amoral Detective Case, must solve a murder as well as several supplementary cases with the occasionally helpful assistance of an inherited robot sidekick who wants to be a stand-up comedian. (Straightforward as adventure games go, anyway.) The game mechanics are kept simple, and there aren't really any inventory puzzles of the traditional sort -- we do collect items and evidence, but they are used primarily within the victim and suspect interview sequences that provide the bulk of the gameplay.

It's not hard to work one's way through the game using exploration and a little experimentation, and there are walkthroughs available elsewhere, so I'm going to skip the details of the plot other than to say there's a murder afoot and an array of suspects with possible motives. But I'm going to talk about details of the game's style here, so as always, I'll warn you that beyond this point there are likely to be...

****** SPOILERS AHEAD! ******

Detective Case/Lisbon (for short) has an appealing 2-D low-res European comic-strip look about it, with dialogue popped up in word balloons. There's not a lot of character or event animation -- mostly walking, idle animations and some funny close-ups during the interrogations. But the combination of backgrounds and characters (by different artists, no less) works nicely, and there are nice little visual touches like passing traffic and silhouettes used to indicate people who exist in the game's world but aren't available for interaction. The engine smartly allows itself to cleanly adjust to a variety of vertical resolutions by employing a wider canvas (visible in windowed mode):

The writing is funny, unabashedly bawdy and politically less-than-correct at times, but it's not self-conscious or smarmy. The translation to English is sometimes grammatically awkward, and there are a few jokes I never was able to grasp, but the characters come through well enough. The game is not voiced, probably to reduce costs and localization challenges, which I appreciated when trying to click past repetitive dialogue exchanges.

(Speaking of repetition, while the game is generally pretty polished, I did run into one repeatable crash early in the game -- if one clicks on the police station door after entering from the left side without walking farther into the scene, the engine's text positioning calculation fails and causes the game to halt. But I didn't run into any other showstoppers or gameplay dead-ends.)

The game's visual design is very consistent -- the camera angle never changes, so the same sprites are used everywhere; there's not even any scaling, as all entrances are left, right, or through a doorway that transitions to another location. This is used creatively to accommodate a raucous foreground audience that treats the early going as a sitcom, and as a happy byproduct, the game's fast-travel taxi can be summoned anywhere, even inside a hotel room, to speed up gameplay. There aren't many locations in the game, but the excellent score and well-chosen colors and background details keep the visuals interesting.

There's not a lot to actually do in this adventure, beyond pursuing the case at hand by exploring the world, finding connections and interviewing the parties involved to elicit information or confessions. There are quite a few funny little details to check out and conversations to trigger, but many are optional and unvarying, and there are only a few cases where pixel-hunting becomes necessary to find an important item. The interface is helpful -- Detective Case can ask Clown Bot for a reminder about the current objective, and we can review the items in inventory to learn additional details that might trigger an investigative path.

The core of the gameplay is the interviewing mechanic, a graphical reinterpretation of the classic ASK [SOMEONE] ABOUT [SOMETHING] text adventure approach, enhanced and/or limited by multiple choices for both questions and objects. This has always been a problematic approach for me going all the way back to Infocom's The Witness -- each puzzle succumbs to trial and error, of course, but one never feels like much a detective when resorting to that. Here, we're not allowed to initiate an interview unless we have all the necessary evidence to complete it successfully -- a reasonable design choice that saves us from too many dead ends, but it still doesn't help when we just happened to miss an important item somewhere and wish we could talk to someone to pick up an idea about where to look. There's an additional layer of complexity here -- we can conduct a given interview as Detective Case or as Clown Bot, and some suspects react very differently to the two characters, leading to different outcomes based on the same evidence. And the game's finale requires us to interview two different suspects at the same time, switching back and forth through six rounds of questioning instead of the normal three.

Unfortunately, the whole approach is sometimes a little opaque -- two questions may make basically the same point in slightly different ways, with one being successful and the other failing miserably. Essentially we read the three possible questions, review our current inventory, and select the most productive question paired with supporting evidence. But sometimes two pieces of evidence that should support the same line of questioning produce very different results, and sometimes a piece of evidence that seems tenuous at best ends up being the one the game wants us to pick. So there's still some guesswork involved in these interviews, and the finale is especially vexing -- we have to replay the question/answer pairs we know multiple times as we try different combinations for the one we're currently stuck on, and there's no way to save the game mid-interview, leading to a lot of repetition that becomes frustrating the closer we get to finishing the main story.

Still, the game is entertaining, and Detective Case's, um, cases are developed in a light-hearted but logical manner. And there's some charming retro humor on offer, including a vintage arcade stocked with parody coin-op titles in the Space Quest tradition:

Along the same lines, a thorough tour of the Hotel Lisbon allows us to access the mysterious room 401, which leads... right out of the game and into a vintage operating system:

This last joke is handled particularly nicely -- the game autosaves before we enter this area, as there's no way back in once we've exited, hinting at the frustration of 1980s game crashes and adventuring dead ends without forcing a replay.

There's also a nice nod to the development team, appearing as alley dwellers in an optional area of the game, and the band in a restaurant can be induced to play an entire song complete with vocals. The music really makes up for a lot of the gameplay's limitations -- there's always a jaunty, promising feel in the air even when the hunt for evidence, suspects and the right combination of interview questions bogs down.

And that's what I have to say about Detective Case and Clown Bot: in Murder at the Hotel Lisbon! It's not a must-play adventure, but I look forward to seeing what this developer comes up with in the future -- the intentionally limited style seems to be working for Nerd Monkeys, and I appreciate that they aren't biting off more than they can chew like some other indie adventure game devs. Sometimes a simpler style benefits more from modern technology than an envelope-pushing style the budget can't support.

Adventure: Dr. Livingston, In Search Of (Softside, 1980)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Sat, 07 May 2016 18:07:00 +0000

Thanks to all the longtime readers inquiring as to my whereabouts. I assure you I am well, just busy with life elsewhere. I have not written a new post since August of last year, and my old weekly schedule will not be returning any time soon, so I'm going to just start calling these "Adventure" posts instead of "Adventure of the Week."

Anway, I had a little free time this weekend, and so I wandered randomly into the SoftSide disk magazine archives in search of something I haven't played yet. And I discovered that I had somehow overlooked this TRS-80 text adventure from September of 1980: Dr. Livingston, In Search Of... -- also known as African Adventure: In Search of Dr. Livingston when it was ported to other platforms later on.

It's basically a jungle-themed treasure hunt, without much of a plot to speak of. Like many of the SoftSide adventures, this BASIC-language game's author is uncredited -- the engine appears similar to other games the company published, which I will probably appreciate if we get stuck along the way. This game predates the availability of lowercase alphabet display kits for the venerable TRS-80, so the parser will only recognize entries in uppercase.

I've been considering changing my old format for these posts, especially when I'm dealing with animated/modern adventures and well-known games where walkthroughs are commonly available and that level of detail doesn't necessarily add value. But this adventure is more obscure, so I'm going to stick with my usual approach, detailing my playthrough experience in the following. In other words, if you plan to search for Dr. Livingston on your own, you may want to stop here. There are certain to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin where so many other adventures begin, in a bedroom, presumably our own, in pajamas, with a closet, a bed, and some bedcovers that are curiously emphasized in the text as TURNED DOWN.

There's also a TIMEWORN BOOK on hand, so it makes sense to READ BOOK. Oh, right, YOU DON'T HAVE IT. I am clearly out of practice! I GET BOOK -- 'TIS DONE providing a nicely period-appropriate parser response -- and then READ BOOK; TRY READING IN BED. Um... okay. I GO BED and now we can finally READ BOOK to discover its title: "AFRICA - LAND OF THE UNKNOWN - BY R.U. REDDE."

The book seems fairly central to the action here, as we can also OPEN BOOK and READ PASSAGE: "... PLORER NODDED OFF TO SLEEP, HIS THOUGHTS BEGAN TO DRIFT T..." This seems like a clue, but we're not allowed to SLEEP, GO SLEEP or CLOSE EYES, so I'll GET UP and see what else we can do here. EXAMINE CLOSET yields no information... and neither does GO CLOSET? Ah, we have to OPEN CLOSET, adding a faded red knapsack and a pair of hiking boots to the visible items in the room.

I'll GET KNAPSACK and GET BOOTS -- they are automatically worn, it seems. OPEN KNAPSACK reveals only that it's already open, and I can't seem to PUT BOOK or DROP BOOK in any way that involves the knapsack, so we'll assume it is just here for show or perhaps to increase our carrying capacity.

There appears to be no way to leave the bedroom -- N, W, S, E, U and D all reveal various blocking messages. I suspect these are randomized for variety, and that the "THAT DIRECTION IS SEALED OFF" text doesn't necessarily mean we can open up a passage there. We can't seem to do anything with the nightstand, so we'll try going back to bed.

I suspect we need to sleep, but repeated reading of the book doesn't do anything, and I can't PULL BEDCOVERS or COUNT SHEEP. Ah! DRIFT OFF is hinted at by the passage in the book... and now we find ourselves DRIFTING IN A ROWBOAT ON A LAKE. That's a nice transition of a type peculiar to text adventures -- the conceptual pun, if you will.

There's a tiny grey mouse in the boat with us, and we can see a beach on the eastern shoreline. We can simply GET MOUSE and store him in the knapsack, and go E to arrive on the shoreline with our boat conveniently tied to the dock.

The game does not in most cases tell us which directions are available for travel; going N is unsuccessful, so I'll head S into a grassy plain where a native throws a spear at us. Fortunately, HE MISSES AND RUNS OFF, and we can now GET the poison-tipped SPEAR. The grassy plain is a bit of a local maze, and I eventually find my way out to the east, where a trail begins near a tree.

It would not be an outdoor adventure game if we weren't obligated to CLIMB the occasional TREE, and this one hosts a VICIOUS VIPER. We can't seem to SPEAR VIPER or KILL VIPER, but this snake isn't particularly strike-happy, so I'll climb back Down and head south onto the trail.

We can see cliffs to the east leading to a plateau, but I'll continue south for now to the overgrown end of the trail where we find a sack of coffee beans, which we'll take with us in case they come in handy later on. We can't go any further south, but we can travel east to see a nearby village. This would be a good time to SAVE GAME, if this engine sported such a feature; but it does not, so I'll have to live in 2016 and make do with an emulator save state.

As we enter the village, A VOLLEY OF SPEARS FLIES OVER YOUR HEAD! AN OBVIOUS WARNING! So we'll take this under advisement as we flee back W... except we can't go back that way! I stumble S into a hut, where we find a crumpled note that reads: "SWAMI DIAMOND." Okay, I was hoping for something a little more coherent, but we'll keep the note in case this comes to mean something later on.

Unfortunately, when I re-emerge from the hut, we're dead, presumably from a native attack, with only 5 of 250 possible points earned -- but to my surprise, this early game actually has a bit of an auto-rewind feature, and we find ourselves drifting in the boat on the lake again. However, we have none of our inventory... though this turns out to be informative, as when I make a direct return to the native village, people seem much friendlier and one native offers a trinket in trade for something. I think perhaps we are better received if we're not carrying the spear I picked up earlier... and yes, if I restore my earlier save and DROP SPEAR before going into town, we're safe here.

I can't TRADE KNAPSACK or TRADE MOUSE, so let's do some more exploring. I find a jungle south of the trail's end, where we meet a wild dog who is not friendly. Fleeing at random, I find some quicksand -- we can't travel north across the quicksand, it seems, though we can see that a trail continues beyond. I can't seem to find a way out of the jungle, either, so we'll restore again and check out the cliffs alongside the trail we saw earlier.

A FIERCE BLACK LEOPARD BARS THE WAY to an opening in the cliffside, and we can't THROW SPEAR (it just hits the ground) or KILL LEOPARD (THAT'S TOO DANGEROUS.) So I'd better map this area out more thoroughly and make sure I'm not missing some important inventory items. Oh, wait -- I didn't try to TRADE the coffee BEANS to the friendly natives, and that works -- now we have a GOLDEN NOSE RING in inventory and 20 points in our SCORE.

I try to JUMP QUICKSAND when I run across it again, and the game asks, "DO YOU REALLY EXPECT TO JUMP OVER 30 FEET?" To my surprise, when I answer YES, the game displays a short bit of vintage TRS-80 animation as we leap over the quicksand with a satisfying "TA DA" at the end!

Safely on the opposite side, we can acquire some sugar cane. I wander around some more, and apparently we've been whittling as we walk, as suddenly we're informed that we've converted the sugar cane into a CHARMING LITTLE FLUTE. I also discover that if we DROP MOUSE by the plateau opening, the leopard is startled into flight and we can now go U into the opening, where we find a SPARKLING DIAMOND, worth another 20 points it appears.

I discover we can enter the cave to the east, finding a cavern and a pearl-handled dagger -- but our load is getting too heavy, and there's an occasional unsettling voice heard uttering the word "SWAMI," so I'd better decide what to do with some of this stuff. I can't seem to PLAY FLUTE, but I can CHARM VIPER with it, and take the LETHARGIC VIPER along. We can DROP VIPER near the wild dog in the jungle -- the two fight and both disappear into the quicksand, and a DEEP-BLUE SAPPHIRE appears sparkling in the grass.

There doesn't seem to be much of a plot in this adventure. Can we stash these treasures back in our bedroom? Yes, if we return to the boat and DRIFT again, we find ourselves back home. And now we have 102 points, suggesting that this is indeed what we're meant to do with the treasures. I also discover that we can only DRIFT at home when we have the book in inventory, but it does not travel with us to the rowboat.

I return to the caverns and acquire the pear-handled dagger, then find a passage heading east to a valley. A trading post here offers a silver chain in exchange for something... there are ears of corn in a field to the south, but they aren't in demand it seems. I find two shrunken heads on a sign to the west -- apparently headhunter territory. I also find some groundnuts near a squirrel running by, with a sign suggesting this is also a trading post of some kind, although it may just refer to the nearby hut we visited earlier. To my surprise, I can TRADE GROUNDNUTS for the silver chain. Time for a trip home to drop off some treasures, and we're at 137 points now.

Exploring some more, I find a hungry alligator lurking in the marshes but am unable to escape being eaten by him. I stumble into the UJIJI VILLAGE, land of the shrunken-head artistans, and in a pit to the south I actually find Dr. Livingston! I can't GET LIVINGSTON -- or can I? The parser responds, DR. LIVINGSTON?, and when I guess successfully by typing the "magic words" I PRESUME, 'TIS DONE, and now we have him in inventory!

We can take Dr. Livingston back to our room and drop him there, and now we're at 187 points. So it feels like we've finished the story, but we must have at least a few more random treasures to acquire. What haven't we done yet? We can THROW SPEAR to kill the alligator, though the result is randomized and it took me a few tries and fatalities before I succeeded. This doesn't seem to accomplish anything new, though, and eventually the DEAD ALLIGATOR is replaced by another HUNGRY ALLIGATOR with nary a treasure or other substantial change in sight.

What was the meaning of the note in the hut? Are we supposed to bring the SWAMI DIAMOND there? I try that, and nothing happens in the game or score-wise. So I think this is the best ending I can come up with:

Looking at the code, I don't see any other treasures or events I haven't seen. It turns out that we get points for dropping ANY of sixteen inventory items in the bedroom, not just the treasures -- and in fact, it looks like we are better off keeping some of the mundane items than going for the treasures in trade, although there are some other specific scoring events that award points so it's not strictly a matter of treasure hoarding. We've seen what there is to see here, it appears, and I'm not motivated to track down the perfect combination of actions to earn all 250 points, so I'll leave that as an exercise for more obsessive adventurers than I.

So I think that's it for the oddly named Dr. Livingston, In Search Of! And I hope to be back, if not next week, at least relatively soon with another post. Thanks for reading, and for your patience of late!

Spottiness Ahead!

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:07:00 +0000

FYI, my postings here are going to be less frequent for the next several months. I've taken on a couple of theatre projects that are going to eat up more than my available free time, and it's a busy time of year on top of that. But rest assured I will be back, I have some games in the pipeline that I haven't written up yet and several more I am eager to tackle. Thank you for your patience.

Quick Impressions: King's Quest 2015 - Episode 1

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 20:00:00 +0000

I've been remiss in my regular blogging duties this week due to a hectic schedule, but this gives me an opportunity to introduce an occasional look at more recent adventure games. My regular Adventure of the Week posts operate under a self-imposed five year embargo -- yes, I know there are walkthroughs a-plenty out there, but I like to let a game ferment and grow some historical context before I write about it in spoiler-filled detail. But I do play more current adventure games, and I'd like to use this space to write about those now and then. And... for a change there will be...

***** NO SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

This past week I've been playing the new King's Quest game, the first of five planned episodes being released by Activision's revival of the classic Sierra label as an "indie" channel. The season pass on Steam currently retails at $39.99, a bit more than the $25-$30 range other publishers have conditioned us to expect.

First, let me say that I'm glad to see something KQ-related finally come to market after a long dry spell, fan projects and the abortive Telltale Games take on Roberta Williams' classic franchise notwithstanding. It's a healthy sign of revival for the adventure game genre, in that a large mainstream publisher is taking a gamble on a title like this.

Second, I should point out that I'm not a huge fan of the series -- I've played KQ I-VII and written about them here, but I've always regarded the series as a bit contrived and less dramatic than it wants to be. With tongue firmly in cheek, I also question its sense of morality, as Graham and his progeny seem to feel no compunction at all about pushing old women into ovens and such when the plot calls for it; they're unfailingly polite and deferential to everyone else, but witches and non-human creatures are often cruelly dispatched without a moment's thought.

As I write this, I'm only about 4 hours into this first episode -- apparently the budget does allow for a little more content than the three hours or so I usually get out of an episodic release -- but I have to say I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's definitely not designed as a point-and-click game -- I'm playing with an Xbox 360 controller, which provides direct control of our hero and works well for the mild action sequences and Dragon's Lair-style events that come up once in a while. That said, there's no parser and interactions with inventory objects are very simple -- we just stand near something that an object can be used on, open inventory, and select objects until something at least responds, often with a groan-inducing pun if it doesn't apply. Sometimes no response is produced at all, but I can't say that's a bad thing.

I like the structure of the story -- an aging King Graham (voiced by Christopher Lloyd) shares tales of his life and exploits with his granddaughter, Gwendolyn, allowing for plenty of "I would have died IF I had done that" instant recoveries and first-person-from-a-distance narration. This convention flows better than the clunky popups and frequent die-and-restore cycles of the vintage King's Quest games.

And I like the artwork a lot -- the three-dimensional environments often call the pioneering painterly style of King's Quest V to mind, and the character models, while a little chunky up close, fit the quality voice acting nicely. Animation is lively and often subtle, and while there are little glitches and priority breaks here and there they never seem all that important somehow. And the effects animation is really well done -- flames and flowing water look great, but not overly realistic, without the pasted-on, memory-constrained look that the vintage Sierra titles often suffered from when trying to look dramatic.

The gameplay is, if anything, a little too reminiscent of the vintage series. I'm currently doing quite a bit of backtracking and experimenting, and a little fast-travel or parser-quick navigation would be handy, but that's always been a problem in these animated adventure games if you ask me. So we do spend quite a bit of time watching young Graham's gangly walking animation, steering him from place to place as we try to figure out what to try with the latest object we've acquired. Dialogue interactions do occur, and are generally informative and/or entertaining, but dialogue doesn't drive the story as directly as in many other modern adventures. For the most part, we have to figure out where to use the thing on the other thing, with the occasional hint thrown our way by another character or future Graham, and the old-school mechanics are fine with me.

All in all, I think the Odd Gentlemen and Activision have done the right thing in bringing King's Quest back. The style is a workable hybrid of the modern choice-driven and classic animated adventure games, and I'm enjoying the story and the puzzles, many of which call the earlier titles to mind without seeming like direct copies. I expect I'll write about this game in more detail some day; for the moment, let me just say that the 2015 King's Quest is proving very worthwhile -- a bit of nostalgia, a lot of genuinely fresh fun. And I'm glad there are still death animations, with the added bonus of quick recoveries.

Adventure of the Week: Wizard's Revenge (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 20:00:00 +0000

This week's subject, Wizard's Revenge, is another of an informal series of text adventures published by the Atari Program eXchange for Atari's 8-bit home computers, and the only one I hadn't yet tackled in my recent posts about these games. Wizard's Revenge was written by Max Manowski circa 1981, and does not appear to use the same parser as the other adventure games in the APX library. It also has a few role playing game-style elements, so it may present some different challenges.

The plot is fairly standard early-adventure material -- the player has been banished to a strange land by a powerful wizard, though this setup does more than most adventure games bother to do, in explaining why the player starts out in an unfamiliar place with no possessions to speak of. The game also handles illumination in a more sophisticated way than most adventures of its era, and the structure is very open-ended -- there aren't many required puzzles, there are a lot of red herrings and atmospheric optional locations to visit, and the player is given a lot of freedom to explore.

Interested readers are of course encouraged to spoil the Wizard's Revenge before reading about my experience here -- but be warned that the game is a little buggy and there are lots of fatal scenarios, and no built-in SAVE facility, so I highly recommend using a modern emulator with machine state save capabilities, as I don't think I would have persevered for very long without that technical assist. I also found that the game seems to work better under an (emulated) Atari 800 OS-B configuration than on an XL platform, though even then I found a number of situations that just hang the game. So feel free to avoid some annoying non-game issues and learn what this one is all about in the...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

As the game begins, we find ourselves in a Forest. YOU ARE 50% ALIVE, we're informed, suggesting that there is a role playing game concept of the player's health involved here. There's a cave to the east, but I'm going to do a little exploring and mapping first.

My initial attempt to head North meets with resistance, as the parser informs us that I DO NOT ACCEPT ABBREVIATIONS. NORTH is more successful, leading to a clearing in the woods with a green pole stuck in the ground. I try to EXAMINE POLE, and the parser's visual response suggests it's only really recognizing POLE -- but just the same, the ground trembles, and we fall through a newly-opened crack before it closes above us.

We are now in a Dimly Lit Room, with passages west, east, and south. Heading SOUTH, we pass through a room with a little light visible to the south, into a Very Narrow Passage -- I thought the game had gotten hung up here, but there's just a pause as we find a sword, get stuck, and struggle back into the room to the north.

Just out of curiosity, I try this again -- and on the second try, I get attacked by vampire bats and my health drops to 37%. This happens again on subsequent tries, until I'm dead, so I guess we're only supposed to find one object here. What's interesting is that after I restart and make another attempt, I acquire a silver button instead of the sword. Curious, I start again and pick up a potion. So it seems this is a way to acquire only non-critical items.

From the room with little light, I discover we can go EAST into a room with walls that feel covered with moss, and we hear strange sounds from the east. We can't go north -- the room descriptions don't always list the available exits, so we have to make attempts in all possible directions, though at least UP and DOWN don't seem to be recognized so I think we only have to worry about four possibilities. Heading south leads us into a Room that feels Damp (this game's text doesn't always name rooms formally, so my capitalization is going to be rather inconsistent here also.)

Here, we can only go back north, or west into a Dry Room with a torch on the wall. I try to TAKE TORCH, based on my recent experience with APX adventures, but we can only GET TORCH... no, that doesn't work either... ah, my mistake. I'd gone back to the damp room, and instead of telling me the torch wasn't available, the parser was just saying HUH? in response to GET TORCH and WHAT? for TAKE TORCH. This suggests the nouns are treated according to situation or location, and maybe given priority over the verbs; the parser actually underlines the words it recognizes with up-arrows after we enter a command, giving us some hints as to how the game "thinks."

In the dry room, I do successfully TAKE TORCH -- and it's already lit, saving us hunting for matches and such. The passage mentioned leading north turns out to be too narrow to enter, but the torch's light reveals that it seems to run on for quite a distance. The only other apparent option is to head WEST, which leads us back to our starting point.

I still have some areas to explore inside the cave, but let's check out the map above ground now that we're back here. Heading west from the forest leads to a Small Stream, flowing north to south. DRINK WATER here proves refreshing, but doesn't seem to improve our health, which remains at 50%.

I head NORTH again and find the source of the stream at the mouth of a small cave. I DRINK WATER once and feel stronger -- but health stays where it is, and when I try to drink again, I die of an overdose! After a restore (there is no SAVE GAME command, so I'm glad I'm playing under the Atari800Win emulator) I drink just once, and confirm that we can't go north or west here, and EAST returns us to the clearing with the green pole, though it's no longer here after I disturbed it earlier.

In the interest of mapping, I follow the small stream south this time, to the point where it flows into a small crack in a large rock. Trying to go west from here leads into an area where The Ground Here Is Very Swampy, and the game appears to hang. So I have to restore again, and hope this doesn't happen too often; the same thing repeats when I try again, so it might be a bug or an intentional dead end. I'll steer clear of it for now.

South of the forest is an area with many trees, and ONE OF THEM IS VERY TALL. We can't go UP, but we can CLIMB to see a deep valley far to the east. I try to go NORTH, and subsequently fall from the tree, knocking my health down by 9%. CLIMB does not bring us back down, but DOWN works here. Just to be thorough, I learn that trying to head EAST from the treetop is fatal, but the player's character is somehow wiser about heading south or west. So maybe under some circumstances yet to arise, we will be able to head east?

I head south of the tall tree to find more trees and a large hole in the ground. The game seems to hang up again if I try to go WEST of this point, and we can't go DOWN into the hole, at least not that way. EXAMINE HOLE proves unintentionally effective, as we find the edge of the hole slippery and fall into it.

This leads us back to the room where we felt moss earlier, but with the torch in hand, we can now see it much more clearly. It has mossy walls and passages leading east, south, and west. This is a really nice way to handle illumination -- we were able to explore in the darkness before we had a proper torch, which is a more natural solution than the usual it's-so-dark-you'll-break-your-neck-just-by-walking-around situation these games often present.

With this insight, I travel back to the dimly lit room we visited earlier, which is now just a room with passages to the west, east and south. I haven't been west yet -- this leads to a room with a Musty Smell, and we can continue west to a small room with a door on the west wall. I try to EXAMINE DOOR, and end up wounded somehow, though the game suggests we might be able to push harder. This seems misleading, as another attempt produces a click, and a dart is stuck in my neck, costing some health as I pull it out. PUSH DOOR produces a similar result, and with my health dropping again I opt to restore to a previous save state.

Heading back to the east, I see some strange powder near the north wall. We can't TAKE POWDER, or PUSH WALL to look for dust-disturbing secret panels, but if we try to go NORTH, a spark from the torch lands in the powder, and it explodes! We don't seem to suffer much damage, but the torch is now useless. I try to DROP TORCH after a restore, but DROP is not even a recognized verb, so we'll do some more mapping before we try to push through this area. I do discover that if we let the torch be blown up, and try to go NORTH, we're told that it's too dark to see anything -- but if we type LOOK, we can learn that we're still in the musty room despite the lack of a light source.

We have some more mapping to do, so I'll head east of the formerly dimly-lit room into a dead end -- but when I try to turn back, a bright flash occurs, we move through the air, and find ourselves in a small cave with a poisonous snake approaching. I try go SOUTH but fail to escape a deadly bite. After yet another restore, I attempt to KILL SNAKE, and to my surprise I'm able to do so even though I don't have an obvious weapon in hand. But the game hangs again here, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm even going to be able to play this one to completion.

What next? Let's check out the strange sound to the east of the mossy room. The passage turns north into a Very Large Room with water blocking the way north and a large, apparently friendly bird. I try to EXAMINE BIRD and SING BIRD and PET BIRD, but only get strange looks and more chirping. CLIMB doesn't work -- he's not that large -- nor does RIDE BIRD. I try to EXAMINE POTION, in case it might be helpful here, but the parser assumes I want to imbibe it, and I find myself back at 100% health... just before the game hangs again.

What is going on? I set up my emulator to run as an Atari 800 with OS-B instead of as an Atari XL, reboot, and now the game seems to be slightly more cooperative. My quick test, heading into the swampy ground west of the trees, leads to a pearl and a hang-free prompt. I opt to head north into knee-deep water, where I get bitten by a water moccasin and die. Restarting, I go to the bird room, and trying to go NORTH reveals that we must either WADE or SWIM. SWIM is not great, as a large fish bites us and we're wounded. WADE has the same effect. Dang it!

Entering the narrow passage, luck grants me a book this time. READ BOOK reveals a single page of writing: "TO LEAVE THE CASTLE, KEEP GOING EAST." That will probably be useful advice. Next, I try to KILL SNAKE in the small cave again, but this still seems to hang the game. I restart and pick up a worm in the narrow passage, which enables me to GIVE WORM and get the bird to fly me across the water. This game seems to depend on random events to a startling degree!

We enter a small passage here, crawling to discover a key before we have to back out. The passage caves in, but another passage north takes us to a Round Room with passages west and south. Writing over the south passage reads: "WHEN SMILED AT ALWAYS SMILE BACK," but then the writing fades away.

We might as well head south, then, to a dead end where a rock SEEMS TO STICK OUT IN AN UNNATURAL WAY. I TOUCH ROCK and fall through a trap door, landing fatally on some spikes. So we'll restore and avoid doing that.

Instead, we'll go west into a room with passages to the south and west. THE NORTH WALL LOOKS STRANGE, but we can't walk through it or otherwise interact with it. The south passage leads to a room with walls that sparkle, and no obvious exits. SMILE and SMILE WALL aren't productive, but I TOUCH WALLS, and we find ourselves at the west end of a valley with steep sides and a western sparkling wall, presumably way to return.

Heading east, I pass some bushes, and reach an area where the walls are not as steep. CLIMB still fails, but we're not hurt after sliding down from about halfway up, and we can continue east to an intersection of two valleys.

A partially readable sign suggests, "TO EXIT GO .O.TH," which means it's a good time to save state for the umpteenth time -- and also suggests that Mr. Manowski's game must have felt a little sadistic in its original, unSAVEable form! I opt not to decide yet, and check out the east end of the valley, where some rocks are starting to fall. EXAMINE ROCKS proves fatal, though, as they crush our health turn by turn, and we can't escape by heading back to the WEST -- all we can do here, in fact, is suffer wave upon wave of falling rocks until we're dead.

Restoring and heading north instead, I find some bushes at the north end of the valley, and go west into a small room with a passage west and a small gem in the wall. Going west leads us to the small cave with the poisonous snake we earlier reached by another route, and again the game hangs up.

I'll restore and try going south at the intersection -- this leads to a stairway in the south wall. The steps are tiring, we're told, but we are able to climb them and arrive at a clearing. To the west is a tall tree -- similar to but not the same as the earlier one -- where we can see a valley to the north and a river to the east. Further west is a clearing with some bushes bearing yellow berries, which I'll ignore for safety's sake at the moment.

This game's map is fairly large, though there aren't a lot of inventory items or puzzles to deal with. I'm going to go back to the east for now, discovering a castle near a river with an open door. GO DOOR is not recognized, EAST causes us to drown in the river, and GO CASTLE is also unproductive. It finally dawns on me that, with the castle's door on its east wall, we've probably just come through that door -- which suggests we're making progress escaping said castle.

I try going SOUTH from here, finding a log across the river that DOESN'T LOOK SAFE TO CROSS. But with the luxury of a save state to back me up, I try to CROSS LOG anyway... and to my surprise, victory is ours!

The game still feels a little bit unfinished, with lots of loose ends, so I restore to my pre-log crossing situation and wander around this area a little bit more. I meet a smiling man in the woods to the west, and SMILE gets him to tell us that "IT'S SAFE TO CROSS THE LOG," which we'd already figured out. I find a flute in a grove of willow trees, but can't PLAY FLUTE to do anything with the poisonous snake. I get the impression that certain random events, especially the discovery of one of multiple possible objects in the narrow passage early on, allow Wizard's Revenge to have multiple solutions, but I'll stop here, satisfied to have found one of them at least.

Wizard's Revenge is certainly not a standard adventure game -- it's got some odd behaviors and a few bugs, but as what I surmise is an attempt to produce a more RPG-like, loosely-structured experience, it's not bad. The map is very large and I have to think that other paths to the ending are available -- at the least, the design presents a greater illusion of choice than most text adventures of its time. As far as I can determine, this is the only game Max Manowski ever published, so we don't have any other examples of his approach to the genre to compare to this one. But I enjoyed wandering through this expansive, if largely plot-free, adventure game.

Adventure of the Week: Castle (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 20:00:00 +0000

Castle is another escape-the-castle adventure involving a wizard's curse, written by Robert Zdybel and published by the Atari Program Exchange for the company's 8-bit computers, circa 1981. (All of these games start up with the same COPYRIGHT ATARI 1981 notice, and I'm starting to wonder if it's really just the engine's built-in notice and these games were released over a longer period of time.)

Castle uses the standard Atari Program eXchange engine written in-house at Atari, with all the attendant quirks I've been noting while working my way through these games in recent weeks.

Interested readers are, of course, encouraged to escape the Castle before reading about my experience below. The game isn't overly difficult, but figuring out how some of the pieces are supposed to fit together isn't always straightforward, and the APX parser's approach gets in the way here and there -- the player tends to have to hunt for the location where an object can be used as intended. In any case, be advised that if you have any interest in experiencing this adventure firsthand, you may want to go away and do that, as there will surely be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin in a large open courtyard -- our imprisonment being rather informal, it seems -- near a beautiful fountain. There's quite a bit of detailed, evocative text in this game, which suggests the map may not be very large. We have nothing in inventory, so we'll explore the large stone arches in all directions.

Heading North leads us into a Banquet Hall, where moldy remains of the last dinner served suggest a hasty departure. There is a parchment lunch sack lying here, and we're told that it has a grease spot in one corner. I try to TAKE SACK and TAKE LUNCH SACK, unsuccessfully, but TAKE LUNCH works. OPEN LUNCH reveals a tuna sandwich, a banana, and a liverwurst cookie.

East of the banquet hall is the Scullery, where we see a large, half-full bottle of water that looks potable. Zdybel's text in this game works around the engine's lack of a typical EXAMINE verb, so it pays to read the room descriptions in detail while the objects are in situ to pick up important details.

South of the scullery is the Ladies Quarters, where cobweb-covered feather beds once hosted the castle's female staff. We can return to the courtyard to the west, but I'll continue south into the Bunk Room, apparently abandoned by the Royal Guard. An Elven steel sword here suggests that the author had recently played ZORK, what with the lunch sack we found earlier and the blue glow we see before us. We'll TAKE SWORD too.

West of the bunk room is the Great Gate, where a thick drawbridge secures the castle. An iron crank probably controls the great drawbridge, but we'll keep exploring, confirming that we can return to the courtyard to the north. The map is straightforward so far, and geographically consistent -- it appears the courtyard is surrounded by a ring of 9 rooms, all connected in the expected fashion.

Continuing West of the Great Gate, we find a Guardhouse containing a brass oil lamp, so we'll TAKE LAMP as custom dictates. A forbidding staircase leads into unknown territory below, so we'll keep ZORK in mind and continue exploring to pick up any other worthwhile adventuring accessories before we go down there.

A Small Grate secured by a heavy, padlocked iron chain lies to the north of the guardhouse, west of the courtyard. It appears we could go west if the chain was removed, but for now we'll have to go north to what should be the last room in this area. This is the Great Staircase, leading upward, but we're warned that The ageing [sic] stairs are showing signs of neglect and just might not hold your weight.

I'll take the risk and head Up to the Chapel, where we see a broken-down pipe organ and a wall of stained glass. PLAY ORGAN isn't recognized by the parser, so that's probably not something we need to pursue.

This upper floor seems similar to the first, with the chapel in the northeast corner. I'll tour in clockwise direction again to visit the Council Chambers, with a wrought-iron grating covering a window cut from the stone; the King's Chamber, with a moldy mattress and a passage upward that's currently blocked for some unstated reason; and a Sitting Room with a potted plant crying for "Water" -- another clear influence, this time from Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave. In the southeast corner of this floor is the Queen's Chamber, with a magically fresh-looking blueberry and raisin cupcake on hand (though we must TAKE CAKE, TAKE CUPCAKE doesn't work) and a route up to the Lookout, a breathtaking view with no other exits. West of the Queen's Chamber is the Sewing Room, and in the southwest corner is a Small Stairwell with a staircase leading up into unfathomable mist, so we can't climb it at the moment. (I later discover that the sewing room seems to exist solely to allow for a joke about early computing hardware logic gate technology -- HINT here suggests that the new Enchanted Castle Limited (ECL for short) represents a major improvement over the TTL series.) There's also a Great Hall connecting the small stairwell to the chapel, and we can go up from the chapel into the Bell Tower to acquire a small sack of birdseed if we TAKE BIRDSEED, TAKE SACK and TAKE SEED don't work. We can't RING BELL either.

Before I go down into the darkness below the guardhouse, I try to TURN CRANK at the great gate, to no avail as it's rusted in place. I try to OIL CRANK with the oil from the lamp, also unsuccessfully, and I also fail to USE OIL and OPEN LAMP.

So we'll continue mapping -- I head down into the darkness, TURNON LAMP (a verb peculiar to the APX engine) and find myself in the Gaol, where a grinning, armed, presumably animated skeleton blocks our way and guards the tempting ring of keys lying on the floor. I try to KILL SKELETON and ATTACK SKELETON, but USE SWORD is the only way to dispatch him as the blow smashes the dancing skeleton into a hundred small pieces. We can't TAKE KEYS or TAKE RING, so the ring of keys on the floor appears to be strictly decorative in nature.

The gaol lies to the south of the Dungeon proper, with torture implements, strange Elven runes on the wall and a suspiciously less-dusty eastern wall. I try to READ RUNES but YOU HAVEN'T DONE SOMETHING ELSE YET, and trying to go east suggests something is in the way. The map down here does not resemble the upper floors -- so far, we can only reach the gaol and the dungeon.

So our map is complete for the moment, and now we can start solving some puzzles. My first thought proves lucky, as I EAT CAKE and feel a strange Elvish feeling come over you, allowing us to READ RUNES: "SPEAK AND THEN ENTER." But no magic words I try seem to work, so we probably need to discover the word somehow.

I try to THROW BIRDSEED and OPEN BIRDSEED at the lookout tower, but nothing seems to work. We can DRINK BOTTLE and EAT LUNCH, for refreshment, but no other results manifest... and I probably should have watered that plant, shouldn't I? There's no SAVE GAME supported, so I'll have to return to an earlier emulator save state.

WATER PLANT causes the plant to grow to the ceiling, just as we expected, but this seems to have no real impact on the story -- it now bellows for water, but we can observe this only at the moment we water it; otherwise, the plant seems to have disappeared from the world. Our bottle is also gone, so there appears to be no way to refill it; I'll just restore again and ignore the plant's entreaties for now.

In the King's Chamber, we can LIFT MATTRESS to find a golden amulet with a strange inscription: "You rule the toads of the Short Forest and every newt in Idaho." There's a Royal Seal on the ceiling, in gold; I try to WEAR AMULET, OPEN AMULET, WAVE AMULET and OPEN SEAL, but the parser doesn't recognize any of these concepts.

In the bell tower, requesting a HINT suggests that the bishop used to feed a flock of birds here. So I try to SCATTER BIRDSEED, which as I expected doesn't work, and DROP BIRDSEED, which does but not the way I wanted it to. We can EAT BIRDSEED, which does nothing beyond leaving a bad taste in our mouth and consuming the birdseed, and FEED BIRDS isn't recognized. It finally dawns on me that I found the birdseed here originally, so the hint is just descriptive.

I'll play some more with the amulet -- the fact we can READ it in the King's Chamber but nowhere else suggests whatever we can do with it must be done there. LIFT AMULET does nothing to open the seal, but INSERT AMULET does, causing a small step-ladder to extend down from the ceiling. This leads us to the conveniently located King's Mistress' Chamber, where a yellow canary looks hungry. I try to FEED CANARY and DROP BIRDSEED, but only FEED BIRD works -- the little bird says, "ARJAYZEE." That sounds like the author's initials, and likely a magic word.

SAY ARJAYZEE doesn't work on the dungeon door, but it does thin out the mist in the small stairwell, allowing us to reach the Wizard's Tower. A thin black spellbook is here, but we can't READ BOOK in this location, so we'll just TAKE BOOK for now.

We can't read it in the dungeon either. Just for fun, I try taking the "SPEAK AND THEN ENTER" clue literally and SAY AND -- and lo and behold, the wall fades into a thinning mist! Now we can enter the Potion Room, with a gigantic vault door to the north. There's a flask of blue fluid here with a faded label, but I have to leave and reenter the room to learn that the parser calls this a POTION, not a FLASK or a FLUID.

READ POTION suggests it's called "OLD IRONBENDERS STRENGTH EXTRACT," and DRINK POTION suggests it lives up to its name. With our newly acquired power we can OPEN VAULT and enter the King's Vault. There's a note here, reading: "... under my mattress, simply insert it into the ceiling and the secret room will appear." So... wow, that was a lot of work for something we've already learned. And our new strength doesn't allow us to BEND BARS in the council chamber or BREAK CHAIN at the small grate to create a new exit.

So where can we READ BOOK? In the Potion Room, we get a different response -- YOU HAVEN'T DONE SOMETHING ELSE YET. It turns out this is very much like the black-light puzzle in Wizard's Gold -- we have to TURNOFF LAMP before we can read fiery script revealing another magic word: "XANADU." We can SAY XANADU right here, as luck would have it, and the potion room's eastern wall disappears.

Now we can reach the Wizard's Treasure Room, where a small silver key is encrusted with gems and inscribed in gold. This is partially a gag, as the key says, "Harvard" rather than the more common "Yale." But the key itself should be useful, and proves to be as we return to the Small Grate, UNLOCK CHAIN here, and open up a passage to the west, out of the castle. Victory is ours!

Castle is clearly derivative of some classic adventure games that preceded it, but after borrowing quite a bit of their flavor it goes off in its own direction. The puzzles are nested a little bit too linearly, especially at the end, but there are a few interesting red herrings designed to raise questions in the player's mind and trip up the experienced adventurer, and Mr. Zdybel wrote some nicely atmospheric text. I think this is the last of the APX games to use this engine, and I've enjoyed working my way through these adventures on summer afternoons.

Adventure of the Week: Chinese Puzzle (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 20:00:00 +0000

This week, we're looking at another Atari Program eXchange adventure game: Chinese Puzzle, written by Dennis Koble (later to co-found Imagic) and published in 1981, using the same engine as most of the other APX adventures for the Atari 8-bit computers.

(A technical note: we have to RUN "D:CHINA" at the Atari BASIC READY prompt to fire this one up, as there's no autostart on the commonly available disk image.)

According to the title screen, we've been drugged by a Chinese madman and locked in a suite of rooms; our only objective is to escape. This game is unusual in that the environment is explicitly constructed as a puzzle, with no attempt to create a realistic atmosphere or establish an adventurous plot. It's just a conundrum in need of solving.

Interested adventurers are of course encouraged to work out this Chinese Puzzle independently, but I'll warn you that it's brief yet much more difficult than the other APX adventures I've played to date. Most annoying is that the final sequence is either buggy or intentionally illogical; I had to decipher the APX engine's data format to figure out the exact sequence of actions required. So feel free to skip the aggravation and sail casually on into the...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin in the 3-Room, deathly silent, paneled with teak and rosewood. "The magic number is 3. Remember that," we are advised, but SAY 3 doesn't do anything, nor is the noun 3 recognized. We have nothing in inventory, so we'll start trying to map the place out.

The map is highly schematic. North is the Red Room; East the Blue Room; South the Yellow Room; and West the Green Room. We can also climb Up to the Grey Room, but we can't go Down yet; SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY. So we probably have to do something to open that passage.

Expanding our exploration, we find the Orange Room north of the Red Room, where a faceted crystal prism breaks the incoming light into a cascading shower of rainbows. We can TAKE CRYSTAL here, and it seems color is going to be a key part of this puzzle.

Heading north of the Orange Room returns us to the Yellow Room -- so the map wraps around on itself. Does the same thing happen when we explore east-to-west? Yes, west of the Green Room is the Purple Room -- with a Chinese ideogram written on parchment lying on the floor -- and the map wraps around back to the Blue Room here.

READ IDEOGRAM produces no effect in the Purple Room -- but this suggests it will do something more interesting elsewhere, so we'll take it along as we continue to explore. Above the Grey Room is the White Room, and above that the Black Room. We can climb Up from the Black Room to return to the 3-Room, but can't return the way we came, as we noted earlier.

It seems there aren't a lot of items to work with here, and no obvious uses, so we'll have to start experimenting. I try to READ IDEOGRAM in every room -- it's written on white parchment, but it doesn't seem to be readable in the White or Black rooms. In the Yellow Room, however, we're told that YOU NEED TO HAVE SOMETHING TO DO THAT. So there must be another object available somewhere.

HELP suggests that TURNOVER is an accepted verb, but I don't seem to have any luck with it anywhere here. LIFT CRYSTAL suggests that an effect may occur somewhere -- and in the Black Room, instead of THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE, the parser responds: YOU CAN'T LIFT A CRYSTAL. Is it sensitive to CRYSTAL? I DROP CRYSTAL, and The crystal rolls across the floor into a corner. Interesting; we can't seem to do anything with the corner, though, as it's not recognized by the parser.

Aha! Mysteriously, now there's a lacquered Chinese box in the White Room. I try to OPEN BOX, but YOU HAVEN'T DONE SOMETHING ELSE YET. We still can't READ IDEOGRAM in the Yellow Room. The box doesn't respond much at all anywhere but the White Room, so it seems whatever's going to happen with it has to happen there.

Oh, wait -- with the box in hand and the crystal as well, I can finally READ IDEOGRAM in the Yellow Room. It resembles the word "CHINA," we're told, and SAY CHINA is recognized -- but is it effective anywhere? Yes, in the Red Room apparently, though nothing is happening yet when we do so.

If we DROP CRYSTAL in the Black Room again, the box returns to the White Room -- one of those easy-to-miss bugs in early adventure games. I notice that DROP IDEOGRAM often returns THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE -- so is it supposed to do something, somewhere? Ah -- in the Yellow Room, The paper flutters to the floor. This has no apparent effect but the mention seems to imply something special has occurred.

Now that we have relocated the ideogram -- for reasons that never become clear at all -- we can TURNOVER BOX in the White Room, and learn that Written on the bottom of the box is the word RUSSIA. Okay, we're starting to see a pattern here. Now we can SAY CHINA in the Red Room -- Ah yes. One of the big 3. So we may be on to something now!

SAY RUSSIA has no effect here, but in the Blue Room it's recognized, though not effective at the moment. Hmmmmm.

I restart and poke around some more, and somehow, without ever SAYing CHINA or discovering the magic word RUSSIA, I've gotten myself into a state where the next step of the solution appears to work. We SAY RUSSIA in the Blue Room and it's recognized as The second of the Big 3. But if I SAY CHINA first, it seems I can't SAY RUSSIA again after that point. And SAY USA doesn't seem to work anywhere, until I discover that SAY U.S.A. should work, potentially in the Green Room.

There's definitely some weirdness afoot here -- we can either TURNOVER BOX to learn about RUSSIA, or OPEN BOX to learn about U.S.A., but we can't seem to do both. And somehow I accidentally stumble onto the endgame by skipping SAY CHINA altogether and jumping ahead to SAY RUSSIA and SAY U.S.A. in the appropriate locations, which isn't very satisfying as it feels like I've short-circuited the intended solution. I'm not even sure the room colors have anything to do with the puzzle at this point.

So I finally break down and decipher the game's data file to figure out how these pieces are supposed to fit together. It turns out that a series of actions have to be taken in a precise and counterintuitive order, due to the game's use of what I'll call "flag 4" to track status. In some cases, if we do something and then re-do it, the flag gets reset and breaks (or supports) the expected sequence, and we have to repeat certain actions to make other actions possible. The solution makes very little sense, but below I've listed what has to be done. (You may notice that steps 1 through 5 are technically optional but are required to learn all the magic words; as I had discovered accidentally, the game can be finished very quickly by starting this sequence at step 6!) Here's the sequence:

1. DROP IDEOGRAM in the Yellow Room (sets flag 4:1)
2. TURNOVER BOX in the White Room (requires 4:1, sets 4:2)
3. SAY CHINA in the Red Room (requires 4:2, sets 3:1 which is never required)
4. TAKE IDEOGRAM and DROP IDEOGRAM in the Yellow Room again (resets to 4:1)
5. OPEN BOX in the White Room (requires 4:1, sets 4:4)
6. READ IDEOGRAM in the Yellow Room (requires box in hand, sets 4:3)
7. SAY RUSSIA in the Blue Room (requires 4:3, sets 4:6)
8. SAY U.S.A. in the Green Room (requires 4:6, sets 2:1)

Finally, a secret panel in the floor lies open in the 3-Room, though we won't actually see this unless we Look in that room to see the open passage added to the description. All we have to do now is go Down -- we've reached The Way Out, and victory is ours!

Examination of the data file verifies that there's no more effective way to finish this Chinese Puzzle, so this is indeed the desired solution. There are a few more of these APX adventures in the archives; I really feel like I should branch out a bit, but I seem to be addicted to these odd little games. So I'll just have to see what comes up next next time around!

Adventure of the Week: Wizard's Gold (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 20:00:00 +0000

I intended to play something more substantial while I was on vacation, but instead I've spent my time with another Atari Program eXchange adventure circa 1981, author uncredited, called Wizard's Gold. Our goal is to find a hidden bar of gold and return it to "its rightful place," presumably the other thing we'll have to find.

This game uses the idiosyncratic Atari BASIC text adventure engine, and a lot of the text is misformatted with line breaks in strange places. It seems to have been written in-house, perhaps by Dennis Koble, given a number of references to internal Atari code names of the time.

Interested adventurers are encouraged to retrieve the Wizard's Gold firsthand before reading my notes below; it's not a difficult game at all, though I lucked out by guessing the right verbs the parser expects in a few spots. As always, my goal here is to document these games for the record, and there are sure to be...

****** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin in the bedroom of a wizard's house -- it isn't clear how we got here or gained entry, and that may be better left unspoken, but we're apparently following up on rumors concerning a hidden bar of gold hidden in the catacombs below. The APX games don't generally list available exits, so we'll have to use some trial and error to discover that we can go West to the Kitchen or Up to the Rooftop Garden.

The kitchen contains a bubbling pot and some spell ingredients, but we can't interact with any of these items. We can travel south to the Living Room, or up to the rooftop garden, from here.

We might as well check out the rooftop garden, then -- there's a book here, but if we try to READ BOOK, THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE, which past experience with this engine suggests means we need to read the book in a particular location in order to make use of it. We can explore in all directions within the rooftop garden, but everything loops back to the same location, except for Down which takes us back to the bedroom.

Continuing our mapping, we discover that heading down the stairs in the living room leads to a dark area requiring illumination, so we'll head east into the Observatory instead, where we conveniently find a battery-operated lamp. We'll TAKE LAMP (the traditional GET LAMP doesn't work due to the limited parser dictionary) and since there are no more viable exits here, we'll head down from the living room again and TURNON LAMP (the game's built-in HELP is useful here, spelling out this non-standard command used by most of the APX games.)

The light reveals that we are in one corner of a Large Room. This is a bit of a puzzle, although it doesn't take long to figure out that we've entered in the southwest corner of a 4 x 4 area, making every room a corner. The only new exit is one heading down from the southeast corner, to the Misty Room where fog blocks most detail but a downward path appears to be available. However, SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY if we try to move in that direction, so we'll have to see whether there are any other exits here.

North of the misty room is a Chemical Storage Room filled with empty, broken bottles. Below is the Blank Room, intentionally left blank in the classic IBM manual tradition. The map is pretty linear so far -- the only available exit from this point leads west into the Armor Closet, where we find a slightly used magic broom we'll take along.

We can travel up or down from the armor closet -- below is the Magic Broom Repair Shop, where the parser won't grasp the meaning of FIX BROOM or REPAIR BROOM, so we'll hope it's in good working order. Above the closet is a Mushroom Garden, where we can acquire an ugly black mushroom.

Continuing south of the mushroom garden, we find the Library, where an empty stand reads, "This Book Holds the Secret Words." We can READ the BOOK we found earlier here, revealing cryptic letters: "STELLA" (surely a reference to the working name for Atari's popular 2600 videogame console.)

I try to SAY STELLA, and to my surprise it works right here -- a magic wand appears and we're advised we can Use it to go where fog leads, probably a reference to the misty room.

Before leaving the library, I explore downward to find the Egg Room, filled with rotten eggs as a voice says, "GLEEK." I try to SAY GLEEK, and am greeted with a vintage 1981 pop culture reference as Mork from Ork leaps out of a large egg saying "NANOO-NANOO," and here in 2015 I am sadly reminded of the untimely departure of Robin Williams. But this event seems to have no bearing on the plot, so we'll assume it's just a semi-literal easter egg.

We can continue downward from the egg room into the Wizard's Psychedelic Room. There's a black light poster here which we can't TAKE or initially READ -- it isn't until I TURNOFF LAMP that we can make out the word "COLLEEN" (code name for the Atari 800 computer) using the ultraviolet illumination that remains. SAY COLLEEN has no effect here, however. (We can also note that the Wizard's cultural era probably parallels the author's -- the other posters on the walls are for Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, in the days when the tiny computer game industry freely cited brands and intellectual property from the real world, with nary a thought or worry about approval or licensing.)

We can't go back up to the egg room, and the only available exit seems to be further down, into the Boiler Room. From here, we can go north into the Computer Room, with an ATARI 800 on display. We can travel one-way Up from here to return to the Magic Broom Repair Shop, so we're not forever stuck down here, though I'll make my way back here for now.

East of the computer room is the wizard's Wine Cellar, with one available exit, to the Crossbow Firing Range above. A sign reads, "No Crossing on Foot," which is probably why we have the broom -- and yes, while we can't walk south, we can RIDE BROOM to reach the southern end of the range (actually, this action just opens up the southern exit of the room -- the implementation is an artifact of the parser's approach to map puzzles.)

Now we can visit the Aquarium Room, where a fish tank full of hungry piranha dominates the view. The piranha appear to block a downward path, and DROP MUSHROOM doesn't feed, poison or otherwise satisfy them, though the item isn't lost either and we can just pick it up again.

So let's check out the misty room again -- as expected, WAVE WAND dispels the fog, and now we can visit the Art Gallery and acquire a large rusty key. There are no other exits from this location, and we're told that all the art on display is counterfeit and valueless.

What about the piranha, then? The puzzles up to this point have been very straightforward. SAY COLLEEN does nothing here or in the computer room. But the game's HINT command comes to my rescue -- it gives us rather more of a nudge than we really need, however, as it gives away most of the rest of the game, suggesting that we need to eat to be strong to move the tank, and then we'll need a key to unlock the trap door. So we're probably close to the end here.

And yes... EAT MUSHROOM improves our strength, MOVE TANK now works, and then UNLOCK DOOR reveals yet another downward passage leading to the Treasure Room. Skeletons strewn about the room suggest there may be a trap here, but we'll try to OPEN the treasure CHEST anyway. That fails, but not fatally -- It will take more than a simple word to open this chest -- which is a bit of a misnomer, as a simple SAY COLLEEN works, revealing a glittering bar of gold. We can't TAKE BAR, but we can TAKE GOLD.

Mission nearly accomplished! Now where are we supposed to store it? I return to our starting point in the Wizard's bedroom, per established tradition, and HINT here confirms that we're on the right track as it reveals a table with a sign, not otherwise visible, reading: "GOLD to be put here." We DROP GOLD, and victory is ours!

Wizard's Gold seems to have been intended as an introductory text adventure -- there aren't actually many puzzles, red herrings are few, and the map is neither particularly large nor very convoluted. But it provided a pleasant, brief excursion into the Atari archives, perfect for a summer afternoon's adventuring.

Adventure of the Week: Sultan's Palace (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 20:00:00 +0000

I'm entering the Sultan's Palace this week, in another Atari Program eXchange adventure for the Atari 8-bit computers. It was written by Dennis Koble using Atari's quirky in-house text adventure engine and published in 1981; Koble would go on to co-found Imagic the following year.

We've seen this plot before -- we're to rescue the princess (Fatima) from the evil villain (Sultan Abdul). But this is another example of the freewheeling Atari philosophy of the time, with a couple of puzzles involving decidedly adult content.

As always, interested readers are encouraged to visit the Sultan's Palace independently before reading my detailed notes below. But be advised that the SULTAN.DAT data file included on the Marketing Adventure disk image in circulation online is corrupted in a very inconvenient manner -- a fatal error occurs at the very end of the game -- so look for the stand-alone version. Beyond this point, I will be documenting my experience in salacious detail, so there are certain to be...

****** S.P. SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

The game starts off with more momentum than many text adventures -- the Sultan's guards have been drugged (presumably by our hero?) and there's a massive iron gate in our way, with a feeling of forboding [sic] in the air. In our Inventory we have... PANTS. Okay. I didn't realize how exposed we'd been in every other adventure game. Just for fun, I attempt to DROP PANTS -- and we can do that, but THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE. Erm. There may be an interesting incident ahead for our hero. We can TAKE PANTS -- not GET PANTS, mind, as this parser has a very limited dictionary; we also can't WEAR PANTS so we'll have to assume possession comprises nine-tenths of the decent non-exposure.

We can't go anywhere else from here, so opening the gate would appear to be our initial challenge... except all we have to do is OPEN GATE. We can now reach the Entrance Hall to the north, where many doors await you. So we have some exploration to do -- the APX games don't give us an exits list, and the room descriptions tend to be pretty brief, so mapping requires some trial and error as we test all the possible directions. (I tend to miss the upward and downward paths, as will become apparent later on.)

A Storage Room to the east contains a rusty scimitar, so we'll take that along. A Dusty Empty Room to the west is of undetermined size but doesn't seem to occupy multiple locations. To the North of the dusty room is the Guards' Quarters, currently empty, where we can acquire an empty jar from a pile of trash.

East of the guards' quarters is the Grand Hall, housing the Sultan's diamond-encrusted golden throne and a number of Persian carpets that, if adventure tradition holds, will prove capable of flight, so we'll take one (actually, this seems to take all of them, as if we drop the carpet elsewhere we're given the same description of many carpets.) Heading south from the Grand Hall returns us to the entrance hall; this map is pretty consistent geographically.

West of the dusty room is the Guards' Brothel, where a dark beautiful girl with a fantastic body and sultry expression approaches you. But none of the verbs I can think of (including the CENSORED ones the parser recognizes but pretends not to) seem to be helpful here, and GIRL isn't a recognized noun. I also discover a bug in the APX engine that has somehow escaped my notice in playing through several of these recently -- if we start our command with a space, it errors out.

The brothel's western and southern exits loop back to the dusty room, while heading East takes us to the guards' quarters. North brings us to the Kitchen, where a tray of peacock eyes is available if we wish to TAKE PEACOCK EYES (we must spell nouns out completely to make the parser happy, no shorthand is implemented or allowed.)

East of the kitchen is the Sultan's Chambers, where a golden lamp radiates, beckoning us to TAKE LAMP. And this wouldn't be an Arabian Nights-themed adventure if we didn't at least try to RUB LAMP -- but THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE so we'll have to save the presumed genie for a more appropriate situation.

North again takes us into the Sultan's Bedchamber, where a wall of erotic scenes lends a festive note to the room. It appears this wall can be moved, as when we try to travel west SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY. First, we'll go east, to the Harem Room, where we are suddenly besieged by sex starved lovelies who leave us very tired and unable to move after the required exertions, although we can figure out that there are no other exits from this room. I take a chance and EAT PEACOCK EYES, which renews our strength enough to escape.

Above the Sultan's bedroom is his Observatory, though it doesn't seem there's anything to do here besides pondering the starry night. Can we move the erotic mural? PUSH WALL, RUB LAMP and DROP PANTS (which I just now remembered to try) have no effect, and to my considerable relief neither does RUB PANTS. MOVE BED and MOVE WATERBED are also unproductive.

We've got some more exploring to do, so we'll continue mapping. East of the Sultan's chambers are the Eunuch's Quarters. We can pick up a pink pillow with a heart embroidered on it here; there's a one-way passage north to the harem room, and we can travel east to the Fountain Garden where a tinkling fountain adjoins a beckoning copper door to the east.

North of the fountain is the Concubine's Quarters, where the Sultan's wives live and A lovely girl named SALOME especially tempts you. We can TAKE SALOME -- which just puts her in inventory. Travel West takes us through another one-way passage to the Harem Room -- the design is clearly meant to get us trapped there at some point -- and the only other exit is south, back to the fountain garden. I do try to OPEN DOOR here, but YOU HAVEN'T DONE SOMETHING ELSE YET, this engine's all-purpose response when some pre-condition has not been met.

More mapping remains -- east of the Grand Hall is the Hall of Mirrors, where we can glimpse a reflection of the Princess. This proves to be the southwest corner of a 3 x 3 maze that contains a jeweled dagger. We can also explore up and down from a couple of rooms; there are about 16 rooms in the maze, with some one-way loopbacks, but the only item I find here is the dagger, and it can be located on the main floor without going into any of the mazier passages.

It feels like we've mapped everything that's not behind a blocked passageway now, so it's time to see if we can solve some puzzles. That whole DROP PANTS business is intriguing, so I try it with Salome in our company in the harem room and the Sultan's bedchamber, with no results. But in the guards' brothel, that sultry girl comes into play -- as she performs unmentionable acts upon your body, between gulps she mutters the magic word SHAZAM. So that's not really unmentioning them, is it? But this gives us something new to try.

I get lucky on my first attempt, as SAY SHAZAM opens the copper door by the fountain, so we can OPEN DOOR and then go E to the Exit from Palace. Unfortunately, the game seems to think we shouldn't be doing this yet, and unceremoniously crashes with the magic words ERROR-136 AT LINE 3070. So I'll have to restore to an earlier point using an emulator save state, as this engine has no SAVE command -- this is ameliorated to a degree by the lack of fatal situations in most of the APX games, but unforeseeable dead ends still can and do occur.

Returning to the bedchamber, I can't TALK to SALOME, but I manage to ASK SALOME and she screams the magic word SESAME. SAY SESAME produces the unexpected response YOU CAN'T SAY A SESAME, but OPEN SESAME (which we might have guessed on our own) opens the wall. This leads us west into the Treasure Chamber, filled with gems and gold, as well as a seven-headed Hydra blocking a stairway down.

The parser won't let us try to KILL HYDRA or THROW DAGGER, but we can WAVE DAGGER and it steps out of our way; apparently the bejeweled weapon belongs to its master, confusing the dreaded beast. This allows us to enter the Torture Chamber below, where escape is your only thought. We can escape back Up to the treasure room, but it's more interesting to head South into some Subterranean Caverns, a small cluster of similar rooms with a boulder blocking the way south in the southwest corner. We can't MOVE BOULDER, but if we RUB LAMP a genie appears and rolls the boulder aside with a magic word.

Ah! This is how we reach the Princesses [sic] Room, where there is but one Princess who won't leave with us until we gain her trust. What do we have in inventory? Maybe the heart-embroidered pillow? DROP PILLOW doesn't do it, and we can't GIVE PILLOW, though the parser's response suggests we can give her something else. GIVE SCIMITAR and GIVE DAGGER don't work, and neither does anything else we have in inventory. And we can't leave without the princess, so once we're here we're stuck! Time for another save state restore.

So what have I missed? I start rechecking my mapping, and shortly discover that I didn't try to go Up from the entrance hall, to the Guard's Tower. We can hear voices in the distance here, and if we LISTEN... no, LISTEN VOICES... no, LISTEN GUARDS... hmmm. Can we get a HINT? Yes -- Listen carefully! And now I notice that THERE IS A CAREFULLY HERE in the room, apparently a limitation of this engine; it has to have a pseudo-object present so we can LISTEN CAREFULLY. We hear that SULTAN ABDUL IS A EUNUCH. I guess this is a state secret or something? This information might be a relief to the Princess, but it doesn't seem like an artifact I can carry with me to gain her trust.

Anything else? Aha! I missed another vertical passage -- D from the Sultan's Bedchamber is a Chamber of Horrors, where a wizened head lies on a shelf covered with webs. We can TAKE HEAD, which, erm, suggests... uh-oh... really, Mr. Koble?

Yep. We enter the Princess' room, and GIVE HEAD, and The Princess now likes you and will go with you. We TAKE PRINCESS, return to the fountain garden's exit door, and... I get the same error as before.

AH! After I dig into the BASIC code a bit, I realize that the on-disk data file is corrupted, and the game's attempt to read the description and hint text for this room is actually failing. So the copy of Sultan's Palace included on the Marketing Adventure disk is corrupt. Fortunately, I'm able to find and run a ~~clean~~ corruption-free version with a slightly different version of the engine -- I get a different color scheme, and a much more satisfying ending! Victory is ours!

These APX games are generally not too difficult -- although the limited parser doesn't help, it does keep the puzzles on the simple side. And this one is interesting as an artifact of the days when a company like Atari wouldn't raise an eyebrow, or perhaps even know about, potentially controversial humor in one of its products. There are a few more of these adventures in the Atari archives, though I plan to take a break to play something more substantial before I continue there. Onward!

Adventure of the Week: Sleazy Adventure (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 20:00:00 +0000

This week, we're embarking on a Sleazy Adventure from 1981 -- another Atari Program eXchange release for the 8-bit Atari home computers, using the same in-house BASIC engine as several other APX games released around the same time. This one was written by Bob Smith, and features an unusual theme -- it charges the player with sailing a friend's new sailboat back from Thailand, knowing that you can use it to import contraband. Apparently the contraband will be treated as treasure!

Interested readers are welcome to enjoy a Sleazy Adventure of their own before reading my notes below -- if anyone does and manages to reach a more concrete ending than I did, I'd be very interested to hear about it. Everyone is of course welcome to read my about my playthrough experience in the remainder of this post -- just be advised that there are going to be plenty of...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We start out at Bangkok International Airport with nothing in inventory but a passport (though even this doesn't show up in our Inventory, so it must be a permanent item in our possession.) The only exits turn out to be Down, into the Sewer, and South, to the Marketplace.

I'll check out the sewer first, just to see if the sewers are meant to be significant to the story. We can travel east into More Sewer, and TAKE the waterproof FLASHLIGHT floating here. We have immediate need for it as we continue walking east, where we must TURNON FLASHLIGHT to discover that we're in the City Cesspool.

The game gets a little buggy here -- it suggests we are going to have to contract typhoid before we leave the cesspool, and a re-Look tells us THERE IS A TYPHOID HERE. We also see the initial descriptions of a Sleazy Nightclub and a Back Alley, though that's not where we are yet, so this disk image may be slightly corrupted or the data file is missing some end-of-data markers.

With no other grand plans or high stakes this early in the game, I TAKE TYPHOID and on the next move find myself in the Hospital, where we have been brought to recover. We now have to cure ourselves of the typhoid before we can leave the hospital to the south; no other exits are available, though we are told There is a small amount of poison here and we can TAKE POISON (which fortunately just puts it in inventory.)

Fortunately, the game's strange logic here is consistent -- we can simply DROP TYPHOID, and You improve 100 percent, and feel able to walk again. We are now free to go south, out of the hospital and into an Alley where tourists seek unsavory entertainment, though it doesn't seem we can interact with them.

We can walk south again to discover an Unconscious Sailor and TAKE his WALLET (unlike many adventure game protagonists, our character here is notably amoral.) West of the Alley is a Sleazy Alley, fulfilling all of the stereotypes of 1980s Thailand -- open gutters, starving dogs, nightly killings. North of the Sleazy Alley is a Back Alley, with a 2 baht coin lying on the ground for the taking, so we'll TAKE COIN.

The game world's descriptions are brief, but its map is fairly large -- we can travel further north to a Dirty Alcove, where we see a small, ragged waif, and smell a sweet odor coming from behind a doorway (apparently to the west -- as in the other games using the APX engine, we have to navigate experimentally and that's the only valid but blocked exit here.) DROP COIN doesn't produce any effect; the waif is apparently not a doorman, or at least not one who can be bought for 2 baht.

The dirty alcove is otherwise a dead end, so we'll return to the back alley and travel west to a Sleazy Nightclub where a pervert in feathers makes crude offers in your ear. We can visit the Backstage area to the south, where we see half dressed females and midgets selling drugs. This area doesn't seem to serve any real purpose beyond atmosphere, and it links back to the sleazy alley to the east.

South of the sleazy alley is a Sleazy Bar, with a sign reading "SHANGAI HAVEN" and drunken sailors everywhere. We can travel east back to the unconscious sailor; I notice that most of these locations allow us to go D into the sewer, but we always emerge back at the Marketplace, so we'll try to avoid that detour and backtracking cycle as much as possible.

Where haven't we been yet? East of the drunken sailor is a River Bank. This, we are informed, is the edge of the city. Southward lies the forest, the ocean, and ADVENTURE. Before we go there, in case we can't return, we'll check out anything obviously left undone here. As it turns out, the waif in the dirty alcove won't do anything when we DROP COIN, but stands aside when we DROP WALLET.

Now we can access a Hovel, where a boy offers an aromatic package that he assures us is a rare, costly, and potent incense. Incense, right. But we'll TAKE INCENSE anyway. And it turns out, probably due to design oversight, we can TAKE WALLET again on our way past the waif.

Any other areas to explore? East of the marketplace are some Rice Paddies that continue for miles and miles. East of the river bank is a Lumber Mill, containing a bundle of rare ebony; we can't TAKE BUNDLE but we can TAKE EBONY.

The lumber mill reconnects to the rice paddies to its north, and this looks like a maze so we'd probably better map it out and acquire any goodies within. Except... it turns out this isn't really a maze, just a dead end location meant to suggest endless fields that we needn't (and can't) go exploring. We can't TAKE RICE, either.

Well, we have some incense and ebony to smuggle home, so let's see what happens to the south. We find ourselves in a Teak Forest -- but we are lost, and dare not go further. All other exits are currently blocked, and the text helpfully informs us that "A pervert at the nightclub has maps." Ah, those scandalous cartographers!

I go back to the sleazy nightclub and try to DROP WALLET, DROP COIN, and TAKE OFFER to no avail -- HINT suggests that we HUMOR IT (IT being used as a non-gender-specific pronoun, something the language is still struggling with three decades on.) HUMOR PERVERT is indeed the right course of action -- a map appears in an outstreched [sic] hand, and we can now TAKE MAP.

We can't READ MAP immediately -- THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE -- but if we do that in the teak forest, the exits open up; The way to go is still not obvious, but you are no longer lost.

East brings us to a Clearing, where a blind mendicant begs for donations. DROP COIN prompts him to reveal himself as a monk from the Shrine nearby, and he teaches you a mantra to say. Inside the Shrine to the east, a passage leads down; SAY MANTRA has no effect here, though.

I head down into the Meditation Room, a vast underground cavern, and find the way out now blocked by chanting monks. There's a large gold disk here, suspended by wires, with a padded hammerlike affair nearby. I can't TAKE HAMMER or TAKE INSTRUMENT or TAKE AFFAIR. HINT suggests that if we don't know any mantras we should try SYSTEM RESET -- After you strike the gong, of course. SAY MANTRA clears the passage back the way we came, so we aren't trapped. But now I'm curious -- saving the emulator state first (as the game has no SAVE function of its own), I STRIKE GONG -- and a gold Buddha appears at our feet. We can TAKE BUDDHA, though it does seem to be heavy.

We can TAKE COIN from the blind mendicant as we exit -- there probably isn't any reason to do this, just a design oversight that allows us to. I'll head west of the forest entry point now, before going any further south, to visit Sheena's Hut. The Tanya Roberts movie version of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle was relatively current when this game was produced, and we're advised against taking advantage of the woman in a leopard suit standing here. HUMOR SHEENA causes her to sigh, and open the door, but I'm not sure that's meaningful. We'll have to come back here once we think of something to do (and yes, I did try a few of the obvious verbs, but this Sleazy Adventure proved insufficiently sleazy to recognize them.)

There are no other exits here, so we'll go to the Dock south of the teak forest. Here we see our sailboat moored a little distance off shore, and are advised: If you have everything you want, step into the dinghy on the south side of the dock. This seems like a point of no return, so I'll save the emulator state here.

We can go D from the dock to find ourselves Overboard, splashing around, but can readily climb back up into the Dinghy. We find ourselves rowing in circles around the sailboat. I try to BOARD BOAT and GO SAILBOAT and COME ABOARD (per the location description) but finally figure out we can just go U to reach the boat's cockpit.

The first thing we should do, the game urges us, is to GRAB HANDRAIL. Doing so informs us that aboard ship, we must navigate with Fore, Aft, Port and Starboard. The first thing we're supposed to do is drop the mooring line, but we'll try to explore a little bit before we set sail. We can't travel port or starboard here without falling into the water. Aft is blocked, but we can move Fore to the Cabintop, the place to sleep in the sun after we're under way. We can travel fore once more to reach the Foredeck, where a cleat for securing the mooring line exists in the bow of the boat. I TAKE MOORING LINE and DROP MOORING LINE -- it disappears into the water, which was probably the wrong thing to do... ? But I can TAKE MOORING LINE again, so maybe not. I can't SECURE or TIE it up, at least. And if I drop it elsewhere, the cleat seems to move with it, so this isn't a deeply implemented sort of puzzle.

HINT suggests that we need to hoist the jib after dropping the mooring line, but when I try to HOIST JIB, I'm told that I DON'T SEE ANY JIB HERE. Clearly my seamanship is lacking, as I'm not actually sure what a jib is, though I'm sure it is in dire need of hoisting.

We can go D from the cockpit to the Companionway below-decks area. Aft is the Masters Quarters, our bunk for the next few weeks, and there's a suggestive woodcut on the aft bulkhead. MOVE WOODCUT reveals a secret compartment, described as, erm, a damp, secret place here! Ah -- this is where we are meant to hide contraband, it seems, as when we walk into the Secret Compartment, we are advised that It is downright wet in here, so you'd better wrap anything of value. We are allowed to WRAP BUDDHA and WRAP INCENSE, but the others are apparently okay as-is or aren't contraband. I drop these items in the secret compartment, hoping this will keep them away from prying eyes. I try to MOVE WOODCUT again to close up the compartment, but that's not supported so I guess I'll just have to hope it's invisible.

We'll go fore a few times now to reach the Galley, where a hole leads down into the Hold, and a passage fore reaches the Sail Locker, where we can TAKE JIB and TAKE MAINSAIL. The hold is purportedly great for cargo, so I'll DROP EBONY here and see if that passes muster should we run into any authorities.

I return above deck and HOIST JIB at the foredeck, as the boat begins to move. I can't find a place to HOIST MAINSAIL until I climb U from the cabintop to the Mast.

Now the sailboat is ready to sail, and I can access the Helm aft of the cockpit, where I am supposed to give steering instructions. I have no idea where we're going, really, and trying to READ the large COMPASS here suggests only that The oceans are your gateway.

Aha! The act of reading the compass seems to shift the game into a new mode. We can no longer navigate aft/port/starboard/fore at this point -- we're stuck at the helm, and are only allowed to enter compass directions for steering the ship. I discover this accidentally after seeing that Aft no longer works, and trying to go South instead, only to find the boat entering the Gulf of Siam. I end up bumbling my way back to the San Francisco Bay, and south to a Dock. Home sweet home?

As we dock, we are greeted by an IRS agent, an art dealer, a DEA agent, and Hunter S. Thompson, famous gonzo journalist and drug enthusiast. So how do we deal with these folks? HINT only tells us that if no one is here, the computer's SYSTEM RESET button will end the game so we can try again. Is there any action we're supposed to take here, or is this in fact victory?

I can't seem to re-board the boat now that we're on dry land, in order to sell or get caught red-handed with any of my hard-smuggled contraband, so I restore to an earlier state and see if I can greet the welcoming party with more stuff in hand. While exploring, I discover the Bilges aft of the hold, where the GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA lives. (My research indicates that this is a 1924 Sherlock Holmes reference, though I personally first encountered this creature in the annals of The Firesign Theatre.) We DROP POISON, and the creature nibbles it and dies in its sleep; we have to MOVE RAT before we can access the Secret Hold. Interesting -- this boat is full of secrets! We can WRAP EBONY here, where we couldn't in the secret compartment, and DROP EBONY.

I confirm my earlier, luck-driven route home on this second try -- S, E, E, N, S, S. This time, we have added several eager cabinetmakers to the parties from before, so I'm going to assume that victory is ours:

I am still not sure this is the best possible situation, so I check one more time to see if putting the Buddha and incense in the secret hold instead of the secret compartment makes any difference, but it doesn't seem to. I dig into the game's data files and the only person missing seems to be a US Customs agent suspecting I'm importing illegal wood. But we can't seem to TAKE TEAK in the lumber mill or the teak forest, so that doesn't really seem to be something I'm missing, and the contradictory presence of other law enforcement agencies right next to customers with an interest in the same goods suggests the game's logic here is a little confused.

So I'm going to call this Sleazy Adventure finished -- it is giving us a traditional congratulatory message just for making it back here, and the only victory condition the ending suggests is that we have not been victorious if absolutely nobody is here to greet us. There doesn't seem to be any more gameplay available, despite this engine's presentation of infinite prompts with no real ending implemented. I'm calling this one done! Next!

Adventure of the Week: Alien Egg (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 20:00:00 +0000

This week, I'm playing another Atari 400/800 text adventure published through APX, the Atari Program Exchange, in 1981. I had heard of Alien Egg back in the day but hadn't run across it yet, and I found it by chance under the unofficial title "SPCSHP" on the same disk as Rob Fulop's Marketing Adventure. This one was written by Robert Zdybel and uses the same engine.

As I noted last week, this engine was apparently an in-house Atari project. It features a very basic two-word parser -- text simply scrolls up the screen, exits aren't listed, there's no EXAMINE verb and no GET, only TAKE, but at least we can tell which verbs and nouns the dictionary does and does not recognize.

The object of Alien Egg is not too different from some other space-themed adventures of this era -- we're to find an alien's egg on its home planet, and return it to our spaceship's bio-lab for analysis. The game is fairly grounded in plausible science fiction, though at least one of the puzzles might as well involve magic for all the sense it makes.

Interested readers are encouraged to recover the Alien Egg firsthand before proceeding here -- the game is not too difficult, though the hardcore are advised that the HINT command really is needed, in part to make up for the lack of EXAMINE. Beyond this point I will be discussing my own playthrough experience in detail, for the sake of documenting the history of these games. And that means there are sure to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin in the Astro-Navigation Room, alone on the spacecraft. There's a hatch in the floor, and a light on the console is flashing red. We can't open the hatch (YOU HAVEN'T DONE SOMETHING ELSE YET) and we have nothing in inventory, so we'll do some exploring.

Heading north takes us to the Reactor Control Room, where a "REMEMBER THREE-MILE ISLAND!" poster on the wall reminds us when this adventure was produced; the reference already seems dated and out of synch with the game's otherwise futuristic trappings. There's a reactor control rod sticking out of the console, and a large red caution notice. We can READ NOTICE: "DANGER, PROTECT EXPOSED SKIN SURFACES." That seems like wise advice near a nuclear reactor.

We can head Up from the reactor room to a Billiards Room -- The human race must be civilized after all! North of the billiards room we find the Crew's Bunks, all neatly made by the crew before their mysterious and untimely disappearance.

West of the bunks is the Galley, piled high with dirty dishes. A secured crawlway above is marked with a sign: "ACCESS TO SECURE AREAS CONTROLED [sic] BY VOICE COMMAND."

This engine makes mapping difficult, because there's no auto-listing of exits and the game's text doesn't usually tell us anything either, so we have to bump into or through possible walls a lot to find all the possible pathways. I'm at risk of losing track, so I'm going to backtrack a little bit and make sure I'm being thorough in checking the six possible exits from each room (N, S, E, W, U and D.)

Above the crew's sleeping area we find the Captain's Bunk, containing a thin access-privelege [sic] card that ought to come in handy. North is the Chemistry Lab, where an overturned jar of crystals sounds significant based on its description but is not apparently portable.

Continuing upward from the Chemistry Lab -- there are a lot of up/down connections in this map -- we find the Biology Lab, which the intro has informed us we'll need to visit to finish the adventure. A pamphlet here suggests that the aliens are scared of small furry creatures, almost certainly a hint for facing said aliens.

We can travel east from the chemistry lab into the Observatory, where a large viewport displays the cratered surface of the alien planet upon which we are parked. The security crawlway above is securely bolted, but we'll TAKE the battery operated LAMP here (and avoid turning it on until we absolutely need to, based on past adventuring experience.)

It looks like I've explored everything here, except the blocked security crawlway, so I'll start backing out. Checking navigation in the crew's bunks, I find a downward path to a Weapon Locker, unfortunately empty of weapons. A book here can be taken, but READ BOOK yields only THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE, which my experience with this engine suggests means we have to read it at a certain place and/or time. We'll keep it with us until we figure that out, anyway.

Traveling north of the weapon locker returns us to the Astro-Navigation Room, our starting location, so the map is starting to feel a little more complete. I close another loop by discovering the Needle-Shower room, which uses no water, and can be reached from the Galley to the north and the Billiards Room to the east. There's a Captain's cap here, which we can take with us, but there's no WEAR verb so it doesn't appear we'll be impersonating an officer.

We're closing out more of the map now... D from the Needle-Shower takes us to the Ship's Zoo, where an unlicensed Tribble sits near a dragon-like beast breathing fire, though the creature doesn't bother us if we want to TAKE TRIBBLE. D from the Galley takes us to the Space Suit Closet, where we can obtain a clean space suit that fits, and it reconnects to the Astro-Navigation Room to the west.

What next? We can't OPEN HATCH in the navigation room yet. Can we remove the cooling rod from the reactor room? Nope, TAKE ROD is not permitted, and the parser won't understand PUSH or PULL ROD.

Can we figure out how to operate the voice-activated security system in the galley? SAY OPEN and SAY ACCESS don't work. But I can READ the access CARD we found earlier, on which is written GEMCO. But drat the luck, SAY GEMCO has no effect here either.

Perhaps due to the lack of an EXAMINE verb, this engine sometimes relies on HINT to provide information not otherwise available. Typing HINT in the biology lab, for example, reveals that a sign is present, even if we don't exactly need this confirmed: "Alien organisms to be placed here." So maybe I need to look for hints in more areas to see what the possibilities are, and I realize that there's a quirky context-sensitivity here -- we have to L(ook) in each room to trigger a change in the HINT text, otherwise it just repeats the previous hint.

This gets interesting -- in the crew's bunks, HINT tells us that "The Captain's cap belongs in his cabin." And when I DROP CAP there, a secret panel opens to reveal a cassette recorder. PLAY RECORDER yields the word, "WARNER." I suppose this could be figured out without the hint, just by painful trial and error, but this is the game's only puzzle that makes little practical sense.

We don't have to use the tape after hearing the word -- there's no voiceprint technology at work, so we can just SAY WARNER ourselves in the galley, causing the security crawlway to open, leading to the main computer room above. The entire cabin is filled with the weird sounds that seem to characterize fictitious computers -- very observant, Mr. Zdybel! We can acquire an extra-heavy duty radiation-proof glove here, and there are no other exits from this room so that must be why we're here.

We still can't TAKE ROD, even with the glove? Hmmm. And WEAR isn't recognized. HINT in the reactor room suggests, "NO MORE NUKES! .. SHUT 'EM DOWN." So that appears to be a clear goal. HINT in the billiards room suggests we need to read the book here -- it turns out to be "Theory and Practice of ZERO-G Billiards," by Mork from Ork. Man, I still miss Robin Williams. But what is this supposed to accomplish? It seems to have no obvious impact, and we can't PLAY BILLIARDS so I suspect this is just for entertainment purposes.

What about the access card? I try to WAVE CARD, INSERT CARD and USE CARD, but none of these verbs are recognized near the security crawlways, in the control rooms or in the computer room.

Interesting... an idle attempt to READ GLOVE reveals a label: "Edward Teller Autograph Series," like collectible baseball gloves; Teller was a physicist. I still can't push or pull the control rod with the glove, but MOVE ROD pushes it in, and the reactor shuts down.

Now we can open the hatch and enter the Reactor Room, finding ourselves on a catwalk high above the reactor (which appears to still be operating -- in fact, we're told that our eyesight is quick enough to visualize tachyons!) We can access an Airlock with a card slot to the north, the Engine Room to the west, a Tool Shed to the south, and a Hydroponic Garden to the east. I acquire a small silver key in the garden and an aluminum ladder in the tool shed. HINT in the engine room notes that the engine's serial number is filed off, so it's probably stolen, but I think that's just another little joke.

The Airlock's card slot appears designed for the access card, but I still can't WAVE or USE or INSERT CARD. Aha! We just need to OPEN AIRLOCK -- in fact, it seems we don't actually have to have the card with us, so the access slot may not really have been implemented.

The airlock opens to reveal the planet below, and we can go D to explore the planet's Endless Plain. The airlock after we disembark is now high above, and perhaps unreachable, but we can DROP LADDER to fix that. There's a cave here, but the entrance is blocked by a boulder and we can't explore anywhere else.

I return to the Observatory and try to SAY GEMCO here -- SAY WARNER didn't work, and I could have sworn I tried this earlier, but this opens up the crawlway leading to the ship's nose cone. A large Vegan spider is here -- from the star Vega, I guess, since if it doesn't consume animal products we're safer than we're meant to feel -- spinning a web in the corner, and we see a large mahogany chest, locked and covered with cobwebs.

With the silver key, we can UNLOCK CHEST and find a blaster inside. That might come in handy! The spider doesn't actually harass us, so we're free to go try this blaster out on that boulder. Except we can't SHOOT BOULDER; we must FIRE BLASTER.

We head D into the cave, where IT IS TOO DARK TO SEE ANY DETAIL, but we're ready for that and can use this engine's non-standard TURNON LAMP to gain some light. We can head north from the cave entrance to the Diamond Room, where a splendid diamond is as large as a hen's egg and just as valuable. This seems to suggest that in the world of Alien Egg, either chickens have become scarce, or diamonds have become common.

I travel north into the Stalactite Room, and north again to a... Bottomless Pit? We fall infinitely downward, it seems, and there's no way back -- HINT "helpfully" confirms this -- so I'll have to restore (and I am grateful for emulator save states, as the hint can only suggest hitting SYSTEM RESET!)

Heading east from the diamond room this time, we find the Stalagmite Room, where "some of them look as old as Ronald Reagan." Ah, vintage 1980s humor! There's also a full-grown alien here, guarding the entrance to it's [sic] lair. But we read that pamphlet earlier, so we correctly predict that we can DROP TRIBBLE and frighten it out of the cave.

We're now free to enter the Lair, and TAKE the leathery alien EGG here, hoping it's not going to launch a facehugger, and breathing a sigh of relief when the pickup is uneventful. I TAKE TRIBBLE again on the way out, just in case; clearly we're not meant to confront the full-grown alien, just collect a young one for scientific research. What could go wrong?

Now I think we just need to take the egg to the bio-lab... I grab the diamond on the way, but am surprised we can't CLOSE AIRLOCK on the way back into the ship. I don't run into the alien again, and I guess the airlock isn't critical because we don't actually have to take off. All we have to do is DROP EGG in the designated location, and victory is ours!

I'd like to think I have been a FULL-FLEDGED ADVENTURER for a while now, but the game is over with a satisfactory ending. One odd thing about this parser is that it can't apparently really end a game -- even when we win, the engine just keeps taking input, and I never ran into any truly fatal scenarios. There are a couple more of these Atari Program Exchange adventures in the archives, and I may continue with those while I still have the APX parser's quirks fresh in my mind.

Adventure of the Week: Marketing Adventure (1981?)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 20:00:00 +0000

While I occasionally cover a well-known adventure here, part of the fun of writing this blog is in discovering and exploring more obscure games. This week, I'm very happy to have run across an oddity with genuine historical significance -- something called Marketing Adventure, written by Rob Fulop (Demon Attack) in-house at Atari as a prototype/corporate in-joke over a long weekend, per Mr. Fulop's recollections in a 2013 discussion at the AtariAge.com forums.

There's no year given, but as Fulop left Atari to help found Imagic in 1982 and he was at the company from 1978 until that time, my guess would be that this was put together circa 1981. The game has historical significance because it's set (in thin disguise) at the one-time Atari Headquarters on Borrega Avenue, and the game itself satirizes the corporate culture at Atari, complete with certain legendary sex-and-drugs references from the Grass Valley era.

The game itself is fairly straightforward, though the limited parser gets in the way a lot and the unpolished, old-fashioned scrolling text interface gives away the game's prototype/not-for-publication nature. Our goal is to locate a golden disk (production ready code, in game development parlance) and deliver it to the marketing department.

Interested adventurers are encouraged to embark upon a firsthand Marketing Adventure, but general readers and Atarians should feel welcome to read about my own experience in detail below. As far as I can determine, the game does not actually have a "good ending," so some may find it unsatisfying as a traditional text adventure. In any case, there are bound to be historically interesting...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin in the parking lot of a famous video game company -- that just happens to be located at specific addresses on Borregas where Atari resided at the time -- and note that There are many sports cars here. The two-word parser is very simple, with no EXAMINE verb, so we have to take things at face value, and many objects are not in the game's dictionary. The engine does not like to repeat room descriptions, even when significant details have changed, so we have to use L (LOOK does not work) to redisplay them if we think we might have missed something.

East of our starting point is Borregas Drive, which connects the two company buildings, 1265 and 1272. In the real world, 1265 Borregas Avenue was Atari's Corporate Headquarters, and 1195 housed the Consumer Division, not included in this game. 1272 was the Engineering Building, built in 1978; this suggests that this game dates from the early 1980s, as the company moved to new headquarters in July 1984.

There's a tamale truck parked here, but we can't BUY TAMALE or even take INVENTORY or INV -- only I works to establish that we're carrying nothing. The map is also fairly tight, as from this point we can only head North into the Lobby of CHQ. A guard blocks entrance to an arcade to the east, and a staircase leads up.

We can't get rid of the guard, and I can't find any way to interact with him, so we'll head upstairs to a landing. Stairs continue up to the Marketing Department, and a sign reads, "ONLY THE APPROPRIATELY DRESSED MAY ENTER." If we try to go U, we are told only that SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY; this engine feels very much like an in-house tool, and real playability is not a primary concern.

I'll head back to the west end of Borregas to visit the company cafeteria in the Engineering Building. There's a special today, and an elevator to the east with no visible means of access.

Heading north from the cafeteria confirms one long-standing bit of Atari lore -- the Engineering Building was a coveted place to work, in part due to the co-ed Hot Tub and Sauna here! But there's nothing we can really do here besides bask in the reflected glow of naughty Atari history, as the hot tub is under repairs.

West of the cafeteria is a Lush Courtyard where people are playing frisbee, and where we can pick up a blue card. The parser is definitely limited -- I try to GET CARD, GET BLUE, TAKE BLUE, TAKE CARD, and finally succeed when I TAKE BLUE CARD. Whew!

We can't TAKE TAMALE from the truck, or INSERT BLUE CARD into the elevator. I try asking for a HINT, and am told (as I assumed) that The blue card is an access card. I try to SHOW CARD and USE BLUE CARD, and finally WAVE BLUE CARD works. The elevator door opens, and we can use it to reach the Secretary's Area on the second floor (the elevator only travels between these two floors.)

A large locked cabinet here is marked #3; we're told that The secretary has the key to this cabinet, but she is at lunch today. A locked door to the west is marked "MANAGER."

From this area, we can travel north into a long north-south hallway, which spans two locations. At the far, northern end, we hear people arguing about colors to the west. This turns out to be Lab C, where people in three-piece suits are crowded around a TV, reviewing an epic new game cartridge today.

Heading south into the deserted Lab B, where computer games are developed, we find a sign on the door reading, "Marketing review today, lab C." North of Lab C is Lab D, where in what is almost surely an Atari in-joke, A strange looking woman tries to crash into you on a chair.

We can travel west into a Short Hallway, with tacky artwork on the wall and a sweetish odor to the north. This leads into the Ladies' Lounge, where the MRB holds its meetings. If I had any doubts that this was an in-house adventure never meant for public consumption, they are erased as the author tells us more about the MRB:

There's also a chalkboard with the words, "ITS A SMALL BUSINESS MACHINE," perhaps a dig at Atari management's position on the company's home computers and gaming. It might also be a password, so we'll make note of it.

East of the Ladies' Lounge is the Computer Room, with a very expensive tandem computer that has never been used. A terminal here tells us to clean up our files on the 11/34, and prompts us for a project code.

West of the Ladies' Lounge is a Vice President's Office, with electronic toys and games scattered about. The VP may be at the long range planning meeting; this week being sponsored by Club Med in Mazatlan. There's a company badge here, and we can TAKE BADGE, though when I try to WEAR BADGE, THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE.

I head back to the long hallway and explore its southern end, entering Lab A to the west where people are engrossed in games of Atari's 8-bit computer hit Star Raiders. A tall, wiry man with glasses looks over software specifications, and it's noted that A new person is hired every day here. This room reconnects to Lab B to the north -- the engine doesn't always tell us about which directions are navigable, so mapping this out requires a little trial and error.

East of the southern end of the long hallway is the Hardware Lab, where signs of the impending videogame industry crash may be in evidence: "It is rumored that nobody works here anymore, there are cobwebs everywhere." There is a key labeled MANAGER here, though, so we should go visit the Manager's Office.

The manager's door stands open now -- maybe because the engine doesn't really support unlocking things -- and we can enter to find papers everywhere. One looks interesting -- a memo labeled CONFIDENTIAL. We can't TAKE MEMO, but we can READ MEMO -- it pertains to coffee duty, but we find another scrap of paper in the process bearing the word, "ROCKFIGHT."

Hmmmmm. Is that a project code? I go to the computer room and try to TYPE, ENTER or SAY ROCKFIGHT -- only the latter produces a meaningful response, and that's just the standard non-response THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE. HINT here tells us, This terminal is capable of speech recognition. So we're on the right track, but we must need a different word.

I try going to Lab C where all the marketing people are, and SAY ROCKFIGHT here -- Everybody beams and an official looking person whispers into your ear.... 'project code is 3V2000'. Okay?

I return to the computer room and SAY 3V2000, and the printer produces a 2-page status report. I TAKE STATUS REPORT (TAKE REPORT doesn't work) and now we have the price of admission into the room to the west of the short hallway.

Now we're in the office of the Games Manager, littered with old racing forms (an in-joke about Imagic co-founder Dennis Koble, per Mr. Fulop's 2013 comments.) The manager is playing Missile Command (Fulop worked on the Atari 2600 conversion released in 1980, so that suggests this game was written between 1980 and 1982) and there's a round metal can here with a sign: "STATUS REPORTS GO HERE." There's also a crowbar, which we'll take with us as this is always a useful adventuring tool.

I think I know what to do with the crowbar, so I return to the Secretary's Area and locked cabinet #3. But I can't UNLOCK CABINET or OPEN #3 or UNLOCK LARGE CABINET or BREAK INTO LARGE LOCKED CABINET #3, and the parser doesn't seem to recognize any combination I can come up with so I'm at an impasse until I think of something better to try.

I wander south into a corner office, filled with people playing backgammon, then head back to the other building to see if I can get into the arcade. With the security badge in hand, the guard lets us past.

Inside the arcade, we are dazzled and deafened by the company's own game room. There is a Pierre Cardin tie draped over a pinball machine, which we should probably TAKE and WEAR to get into the marketing department upstairs.

Now we can travel upstairs to Marketing, where all major corporate decisions are made. We learn from a beautiful secretary that the entire department is at Charlie Brown's for lunch, and they have been there since yesterday -- yet another corporate Atari reference, I suspect, though I wasn't able to find any information about Charlie Brown's establishment with a quick Internet search.

East of the Marketing offices we find the Competitive Product Display Room, where competitor's computers line the walls. We're informed that You must have the golden disk to enter the president's office. So we'll want to come back here after we track that down.

What about this cabinet? It doesn't seem like the parser even recognizes the word CABINET -- OPEN CABINET yields OPEN WHAT? -- so we must need to focus on the crowbar. USE CROWBAR and THROW CROWBAR and WAVE CROWBAR are ineffective, but (after quite a bit of experimenting) I discover that SWING CROWBAR does the trick, opening the cabinet to reveal a gold disk (Dysan). This is another now-historical reference -- Dysan was key in developing floppy disk technology, and its media products had a reputation for quality.

I think we're close to victory now -- we take the gold disk to the president's office, and as we enter, a hush falls over the room full of marketing people having an intense discussion. We GIVE DISK... no, DROP DISK... DELIVER DISK? Nope. HINT suggests that these people are waiting for us to say something, so I try to SAY ITS A SMALL BUSINESS MACHINE, and fail miserably to the jeering of the marketeers-- apparently, that was yesterday's password!

Restoring from an earlier emulator save state (the game has no native SAVE capability), I learn that SAY ROCKFIGHT and SAY 3V2000 have no effect or impact either. I try to SAY ITS A SMALL BUSINESS MACHINE in Lab C where the other marketing team is residing, and am ignored. And HINT in the Ladies' Lounge where we found this catchphrase tells us, "Remember these words well." Trying to SAY other random words produces no response. So this seems to be the only place we can employ this particular phrase, but I'm perplexed because this consistently results in losing the game.

There are no published walkthroughs for Marketing Adventure, so I dissect the disk image a bit -- the text is fortunately in clear ASCII for the most part -- and I have to conclude that there is no real victory condition! For better or worse, then, this is the intended ending of the game -- a suitably nihilistic conclusion to a futile corporate errand. It's not a victory, but we've successfully completed the game!

Marketing Adventure isn't a fully-realized adventure game, but it's a great little slice-of-history experience for anyone interested in the Atari generation. Getting to "visit" Atari's Corporate HQ through Rob Fulop's eyes circa the early 1980s makes for a compelling interactive experience, even if we can't "get" all of the in-jokes. Fun and funny stuff, and I'm very glad Mr. Fulop spent a little time goofing around and creating this project, and that somehow it has been preserved for posterity. Truly unique.

Adventure of the Week: Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise (1993)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 20:00:00 +0000

I was considering tackling another game in one of Humongous Entertainment's series of Junior Adventures this week, when it occurred to me that I've never played Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise. This 1993 game, directed by the company's co-founder Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island), was released during Humongous' early years, and was meant to launch another series, I assume. But that never happened for reasons that, in my opinion at least, will shortly become very evident.

This title was released around the same time as Putt-Putt's second outing, Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon, and uses the same 320x200 VGA version of Lucasarts' SCUMM point-and-click adventure game engine. The music is MIDI-based, but is so well arranged I didn't realize this until I'd been playing for quite a while. Like all the HE titles, Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise is fully-voiced, though the animation is more limited than would become the norm as the company's products and budgets evolved.

Interested readers are encouraged to play this simple children's adventure, if only to see where the style goes wrong compared to HE's more successful outings. It's still readily available via Steam at a reasonable price, using the ScummVM engine to maintain compatibility with modern systems. Beyond this point, I intend to spoil what fun there is to be had here as I ask, "What were they thinking?" In other words, there are bound to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

The story opens as Fatty Bear's owner Kayla goes to sleep on the eve of her birthday, bidding him a fond, "I love you, Fatty Bear," as she drifts off to dreamland. The story immediately takes a visually jarring turn as the jolly, plump plush toy Fatty Bear comes to animated life, with his formerly black button eyes acquiring pupils that make him look like Little Orphan Annie. This whole opening sequence comes off as creepier than intended -- all of the toys seem possessed rather than alive, with Gretchen the Dutch doll retaining toy-like facial features and joints, while Matilda Rabbit has no pupils at all and brings Donnie Darko inevitably to mind.

Notwithstanding all this weirdness, Fatty Bear soldiers on as though nothing strange is happening. He tells us he needs to make Kayla a birthday cake; Gretchen wants to make a sign for her, and Matilda Rabbit flies off to the kitchen to start work on the cake, levitating by spinning her ears like a helicopter, or by utilizing all the powers of Satan, depending on whether one has recovered from witnessing Fatty Bear's unholy transformation. I'm exaggerating here, but I'm also not making this up -- there's a dark moodiness to the art direction and music that lends an unsettling texture to the innocent gameplay; the story takes place overnight, to be sure, but the cheery day-glo cartoon colors of the Putt-Putt games are sorely missed here.

As in the other Humongous Entertainment games, we can click on various things in every room -- though, again, seeing these objects come to life while a little human girl is sleeping nearby comes off as scarily paranormal rather than comical. A rocker in the corner creaks with an invisible occupant, for example, and we can interactively decorate Mr. Veggie Head with various noses and eyes, to create... yes, this is all pretty bizarre:

In the study next to Kayla's room, we can cause books to fly around the room with Fatty's telekinetic powers, for now such we must presume them to be. He can also bring a couple of statues to life, but there doesn't seem to be anything useful we can really do in here.

Down the hall are more sleeping humans, blissfully unaware of the creeping plushness wandering about in the dark, as Fatty says: "That's the grown-ups' room. I'd better be quiet!" We can actually safely make quite a bit of noise by clicking on stuff, but the only interesting thing to do is ~~stab them to death in their sleep~~ sneak into their closet and turn the light on and off.

A room at the end of the hall is locked -- a mouse darts out of an oversized hole in the door with a tempting key, but scampers away again before Fatty can grab it. We probably need some bait, so we'll explore elsewhere for now.

In the bathroom, we can hop in the laundry chute, the only way to the basement, where we pick up a garage door opener that somehow ended up in the laundry basket. Fatty's cheerful "Now I can get in the garage!" sounds more menacing than it ought to, as I picture Fatty firing up the family car and gassing the family with carbon monoxide. His overalls aren't helping either, as they make him look rather too much like Chucky of Child's Play fame. A big part of the problem is that Fatty Bear seems to be actively causing the paranormal phenomena in the house to occur -- he seems gleefully responsible, whereas in the other Humongous titles these little animations are more humorous, and fueled by little critters with personalities clearly independent of the main character.

From the basement, we can go up through the cellar door to the house's backyard. The music and the darkness out here seem intentionally scary now. What is it about this game? We can climb up into a ~~book depository~~ treehouse, where a telescope allows us to ~~fuel our rage at Kayla's family~~ see Putt-Putt on the moon, a plug for his own game that came out around the same time.

We can do a little lawn bowling in the yard for fun, and visit the garden where Fatty Bear ~~buries his victims~~ unearths some silly anthropomorphic carrots that we would probably need a net or trap to catch, though this isn't actually a puzzle, just fun to watch. We can't get back into the cellar from the outside, so we'll go around front.

The view at the front of the house looks a lot like the opening of Uninvited -- maybe it's the camera angles that make so much of this game look foreboding rather than friendly. We can ride a skateboard, for fun, and use the garage door opener to enter the garage (thankfully, detached from the rest of the house, allaying my earlier fears.)

There's some sugar stored in the garage, of all places -- it's too high to reach, but a stepladder here solves that problem with minimal trial or error. Now we'll reenter the house -- the front door is unlocked, or, one suspects, its lock succumbs to Fatty's powers as he has already been invited in -- and check out the parlor. An answering machine still has a message from Kayla's dad, who was picking up her present at the pet store. We can make a painted ship in a picture on the wall sink, sacrificing the lives of countless acrylic innocents to satisfy Fatty Bear's dark masters.

A piano allows us to play with sampled sounds to play familiar public domain children's songs, and actually compose little songs on blank pages if we like. Funeral dirges seem appropriate, somehow, but we aren't required to do anything specific here, it's just a fun little side activity.

When we enter the kitchen, Matilda Rabbit is on hand to advise, and Fatty automatically leaves the sugar on the counter -- the game doesn't require much actual inventory manipulation, taking care of those details in many cases to keep young players from getting frustrated by mechanics. We can review the recipe for the birthday cake -- Fatty notes that the first thing we still need is a mixing bowl, but we'll also have to round up some eggs, milk, butter, chocolate chips and vanilla. We can find a few tools in the cupboard, and turn on the kitchen faucets long enough to make a puddle on the floor, probably to help ensure somebody has a slip-and-fall accident (we can also cause a mop to emerge from under the sink to clean it up, but we're not forced to do this.) We can also find chocolate chips, vanilla, and baking powder in the cupboards up high.

The refrigerator contains butter, eggs and milk, but not much else, suggesting more subtle mischief afoot as Fatty Bear wastes the family's limited foodstores on frivolous cake. He also opens Kayla's birthday present, letting the puppy roam free until we can catch her and wrap her back up, for which we'll need some replacement purple ribbon.

We can snag some cheese from the refrigerator as well -- we don't need it for the cake, thank goodness, but maybe we can use it to get that key for the upstairs hall. Yes, the mouse happily exchanges the key for the cheese, and now we can enter the room to find (in addition to plenty of mouse droppings, we assume) an attic with lots of antique junk in it. What do we need here? I don't find anything portable, oddly enough. Outside in the hall, though, there's now a letter "R" hanging below a portrait on the wall, so we'll pick that up to help with Gretchen's birthday sign.

Returning to the kitchen, we see the puppy here, but can't get her back into the present box without something we don't have. We also learn from Matilda that the puppy has run off with some of Gretchen's letters, as already discovered, and she needs our help upstairs. Checking on our cake progress while we're here, we can complete a few steps but are soon stymied by a lack of measuring spoons. Matilda mentioned earlier that she saw Kayla playing with them, so we'll go back to her room for a bit.

As we enter, Gretchen confirms that three letters have been stolen by the puppy, though the "R" we found a little while ago appears to be one of them so we only have two more to track down. She also asks Fatty to blow up five party balloons, but after three are done, the loose puppy keeps running into the room and popping one. I put the "R" on the sign, and it looks like we're missing an "A" and a "Y" now.

Looking around some more, I find a human-looking bone in the refrigerator, and use it to lure the puppy back into her box. But we still need a new ribbon to keep the box closed. Ah! In the parents' closet, Fatty can climb up on a stack of boxes, then jump on a trampoline (these people apparently have some interesting bedroom habits) to bounce up to the top of the closet, pulling a green ribbon from the Bows'n'Ribbons box stored there. Now the puppy can be kept back in the box, and one of our objectives is accomplished. Maybe we should have taken her outside while she was free, but Fatty has no qualms about sealing her back inside a cardboard box with no visible airholes.

Revisiting the treehouse, I find the measuring spoons there -- I didn't recognize them and wasn't looking for them earlier. I should be able to bake the cake now. We mix everything up, and Matilda puts it in the oven, where it bakes almost instantly for the sake of moving the story along. Now we're allowed to decorate the cake. I should resist, I know, but I can't:

Matilda carries the cake up to Kayla's bedroom -- this Palpatine rabbit would be so much less disturbing if she had pupils in her eyes instead of those big blank spots on her face -- and that part of the puzzle is finished, though we're free to bake more cakes if we wish to for fun.

Now we just need to find those last few letters for Gretchen's sign -- I suspect this is why there are some otherwise non-functional rooms on the map. I get the rest of the balloons blown up while I'm looking around, now that the puppy is no longer ~~alive~~ free to pop them.

I have a harder time than I expected finding the other letters, actually! I find the "Y" under the sofa in the living room. The "A" finally turns up in the fish tank, almost the last place I could have looked after wandering through all the rooms in the game several times. Well played, Mr. Gilbert.

Now it's suddenly time for Kayla's birthday! Fatty Bear rushes back onto the bed, and his transformation back into a lifeless piece of plush is even more disturbing than his earlier transformation, as the unearthly lights in his eyes dim and his skeleton seems to vanish into the Hell from whence it came.

Kayla wakes up, her Dad enters, and the puppy is immediately presented by running into the room. The poor kid doesn't even get to unwrap the box we spent all that time working on, and for some strange reason she thanks Fatty Bear instead of her Dad. Perhaps Dad is actually the sinister puppetmaster behind the night's curious events, especially as he seems unfazed at the blazing candles on the birthday cake and the balloons hovering menacingly at ceiling level despite being filled only with the non-existent breath of a plush, presumably lifeless teddy bear.

Fatty Bear winks at the camera as if to signify that Kayla's nightmare is only beginning, and the screen dims with a sense of foreboding as the credits roll.

Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise is not really much different from the early Putt-Putt games -- the goals and puzzles are similarly simple and easy to navigate. But I have to conclude that Putt-Putt is simply a more appealing character than Fatty Bear, and the colorful cartoon Cartown universe better suited to children's entertainment than Fatty Bear's more realistic suburban nighttime environment. I've exaggerated the stranger aspects of the game for fun here, obviously, but the game is genuinely more sombre and less fun all around than its sibling series. The presence of actual human beings in the story pulls it back to earth in weird ways, and makes the game's goings-on a little suspect in the playing. That may be why Putt-Putt went on to a long career, while Fatty Bear appeared only in a couple of mini-game compilations and cameos after this first outing. But I'm glad I've played this Junior Adventure, if only to find my own answers to the questions surrounding Fatty Bear's short career at Humongous Entertainment. Onward to cheerier tales!

Adventure of the Week: Putt-Putt Enters the Race (1998)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 26 May 2015 20:00:00 +0000

I've been working my way through Humongous Entertainment's Junior Adventure games every now and then, and we're up to the fifth game starring the company's mainstay character, Putt-Putt the anthropomorphic purple car. In this 1998 adventure, Putt-Putt Enters the Race, Putt-Putt... well, I guess the title is a bit of a giveaway, plotwise.

The Humongous games use the classic Lucasarts SCUMM game engine, which founder Ron Gilbert licensed from his former employers, and the animation, music and voice acting are plentiful and of high quality. These games are definitely aimed at children, and there's not much challenge here for seasoned adventurers, but they are true adventure games, and I suspect the recent resurgence in the genre's popularity owes something to players who grew up with Putt-Putt and friends.

The entire Humongous library remains commercially available at reasonable prices via Steam, and interested adventurers are encouraged to sample at least one of these titles; they don't take long to play, and while the stories are unsophisticated, some of the gags and characters are genuinely funny. As always, my goal here is to document these titles and my playthrough experience in detail, so there are certain to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

As the story gets underway, the mail truck arrives to deliver an invitation from Redline Rick to Putt-Putt, inviting him to enter the Cartown 500 race. (There's a funny bit here as Putt-Putt's dog Pep sniffs around the mail delivery truck's tires, causing her to hasten on her rounds.) Pep climbs into Putt-Putt's interior, we have nothing else in the inventory trunk, and we're off to the races!

I notice that Putt-Putt's voice actor has changed, likely because the original child actor was sounding too old by 1998. I didn't recognize the voice at first, but our hero is now voiced by Nancy Cartwright of Bart Simpson fame. Putt-Putt Enters the Race continues the publisher's tradition of including lots of funny little incidental animations and sounds, as Mr. Gilbert had noticed that children too young to follow the story of his classic The Secret of Monkey Island still enjoyed clicking around with the mouse. I'd be lying if I didn't say I tend to do the same thing on most screens, even though, unlike some of the Humongous titles aimed at older children, the truly useful items in the Putt-Putt series tend to be obvious and explicitly mentioned in dialogue.

A recurring motif of the Putt-Putt games, some kind of animal blocking the road in the early going, manifests in the form of an armadillo. Putt-Putt has to think of a way to get the critter to move, and of course, his horn does the trick... oh, wait, no it doesn't! It just scares the armadillo briefly into a ball, but then he uncurls and hasn't really budged. Calling on Pep does the trick, though, with some impressively fluid hand-drawn cartoon animation.

We're at the Cartown Speedway in no time, and Redline Rick gives Putt-Putt a list of four things he needs to round up in order to participate: a triangular flag with the number 5 on it, high-octane gasoline, speedy radial racing tires, and a safety helmet (for Pep.) Our objectives are established, and it's time for Putt-Putt to get to work exploring the map and solving some puzzles.

Clicking on a yellow car at the left side of the raceway screen triggers a substantial Beach Boys-style musical number, fully animated (though not full-screen) as the other cars encourage Putt-Putt to race and recap Putt-Putt's basic objectives. Humongous was never hesitant to invest in this kind of optional but fun content, and I hope most kids discovered this little diversion.

As in earlier Putt-Putt games, Cartown is oriented around a central hub map, with seven directions we can explore. I'll work through these in clockwise order, just to make sure I don't miss anything.

The toy shop offers some free batteries, so we'll grab those. There's a racing-themed pinball game we can play here for fun -- the old-fashioned kind, where a ball drops down through a field of pins into scoring buckets or the drain at the bottom. The proprietor is a matronly bumper car who likes to play with all the new toys, and she confirms that the batteries are free for the taking.

A feature from the first Putt-Putt game returns next door -- we can spend coins acuired in our travels at Cartown Color to get our protagonist a new paint job. But I'll keep him his usual purple for now.

Smokey the Fire Engine at the fire station doesn't have a lot to say besides some cheerful, peremptory small talk. There's an empty bottle sitting here, and Smokey asks Putt-Putt to do him a favor and get it recycled. That's easy enough to handle, I guess.

Heading up the road north of town, we meet Pick-Up Chuck, a wrecker who's blown a tire of his own. He's trying to pump it back up, but there's a triangular hole in the rubber and his efforts are futile. He asks Putt-Putt to retrieve a tire patch kit from his auto parts shop, and cut it into the right shape to fix his flat.

Continuing down the road past Chuck, we find a more residential hub area. Outback Al has added a new aardvark to his collection, but the poor little fellow is hungry and Al has forgotten what he eats. Putt-Putt offers to save the irresponsible Australian zookeeper by finding something appropriate for the little guy. I'm guessing ants, maybe? Al has a triangular racing flag he doesn't need, but Putt-Putt is too nice to take it despite his offer without helping him first.

Mr. Fender-Bender is having problems with his cat, who won't obey his commands. We can get another bottle to recycle here.

We can travel west from this part of town to a construction site, with a big "Nailers Wanted" sign posted. The path is blocked by a load of heavy pipes -- Pete Crane here has lost his hook, so if we can find it we can probably get past this point to something new. Inside the walls of the site, we can play whack-a-nail for fun, though it's not all that entertaining. Still, if we finish at least one round, Betsy Bulldozer will give us a safety helmet the right size to fit Pep. One item down!

The library is our next stop, where an encyclopedia of animals tells us aardvarks like termites, ants, and green grapes. There's a good chunk of optional educational content here -- we can learn about 26 different Australian and African animals if we spend some time flipping through the book, and Putt-Putt reads a short poem about each animal aloud if we click on the text, a nice feature for learning readers. There are some safety scissors here as well -- we can't take them along, as they belong to the library, but Putt-Putt says he can use them to cut things out so we will probably be back here with the tire patch material.

Heading north out of the residential hub, we find a pay phone that we can't really use aside from snagging a coin from its coin return, and another bottle to recycle. We can pass through a dark, narrow tunnel -- we have to honk before entering, per local traffic custom, lest we have a head-on collision with traffic coming the other way -- and run over something clunky we can't make out in the dark, so we need to come back here with a light source.

Next we arrive at a farm, where Torville Tractor lets us have his flashlight. It's "broken" because it has no batteries, so we can readily fix that and return to the tunnel to acquire Pete Crane's missing hook. I'll continue down the road this way, though, before we go back to Pete. The farm road leads into an agricultural maze, where we can pick some green grapes in the northwest corner. I can't figure out if Torville is supposed to be Swedish or Irish, his accent is a little ambiguous.

Pete is happy to have his hook back, and he moves the pipes, so now we can visit yet another little hub -- this game has a bigger map than the earlier Putt-Putt games, though it seems there's less to do in each location.

At the ice cream shop, we can acquire another recyclable bottle. The proprietor is Rover, the lunar vehicle we rescued in Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon, and he gives us some milk or a milk shake free, though Putt-Putt just consumes the treat and we don't get to keep it in inventory.

The car parts shop has the radial racing tires we need, but the shop is closed while Chuck is out of commission. Fortunately, there's a tire patch kit just sitting here for the borrowing, with Chuck's earlier permission, so we should be able to work this situation out.

We'll visit Mr. Crankcase before we proceed -- he has a bunch of junk in his front yard, which fell off some shelves when he bumped into it and "almost twisted my lugnuts." We can fit the stuff back into place based on the shapes of the items and the available slots; a gas can is left over, which Putt-Putt is allowed to keep. We can also recycle our bottles here, earning a coin for every three bottles we run through the machine.

Cutting a triangular tire patch at the library -- the interface here is nicely interactive, we have to find the triangle pattern and then cut from vertex to vertex -- we return to Chuck to fix his tire. He gives Putt-Putt a deal on the racing tires when we meet him back at his shop -- one coin apiece, half price, but we only have three coins at this point so we'll need to earn some more.

I haven't visited Mrs. Airbag yet -- she has another bottle for recycling. And we'll stop back by Outback Al's to give the green grapes to the hungry baby aardvark, and take the racing flag, though we still need to put a number 5 on it.

Back at the main town hub, we visit Mr. Baldini's Grocery Store. He gives Putt-Putt a job -- going out to the farm and picking an orange, a zucchini, and a head of lettuce, for pay of two coins. Perfect! (Cartown apparently has no child labor laws.) We can do this again to earn more coins, but my priority right now is to buy the radial racing tires. Chuck measures Putt-Putt's tires, a slightly uncomfortable moment for our hero:

How are we doing on our checklist? We still need high octane gas and a number for our flag. We can visit the gas station in town -- the gas is available, and apparently free. We can fill Putt-Putt up -- he visibly vibrates and starts moving a lot faster than usual, apparently this stuff is quite a rush -- and we can also fill up the gas can so we have enough for the race.

What about that number 5? It seems like we've solved most of the puzzles here. There are some numbers on the activity table at the library, but they only seem to include 1, 2, and 3... ah, there are more once we take a closer look. This "puzzle" is clearly aimed at younger players -- we just need to identify the number 5.

Now we're all set to enter the race! This is actually an arcade-style event, where we steer with the mouse and the SCUMM engine is pushed pretty hard to present a simple 3-D race track with obstacles and fellow racers to beat. The track is pre-rendered, spooled animation, I believe, but the oil slicks, ducks, and fellow racers are scaled sprites that work pretty well in motion, though they occasionally drift out of place compared to the background animation.

If we don't win the race, we can try again until we do, or we can choose to accept our best effort and end the game happily. Putt-Putt and Redline Rick rightly point out that it's not all about winning. And it's not actually all that easy to win the race, due to some rubber-band AI and sluggish steering. But it is possible, and after several tries on my part, victory is ours!

Putt-Putt Enters the Race bears a strong resemblance to Putt-Putt's debut game Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, with some of the same characters and similar simplicity of design, and it doesn't feel as fresh this time around. There isn't much of a plot here, nor anything really at stake beyond our hero's desire to enter the race. But it's still a pleasant little children's adventure game, and there are a few more Putt-Putt titles we haven't covered here yet, so I'll happily continue with this series when the mood strikes.

Adventure of the Week: Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - Episode 3: Baddest of the Bands (2008)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 19 May 2015 20:00:00 +0000

It's been quite a while (more than two years!) since I've come back to the Telltale Games library. I'm currently thoroughly enjoying their current series Tales from the Borderlands, and it's high time I tackled Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People - Episode 3: Baddest of the Bands! I really enjoyed this series based on the Chapman brothers' Homestar Runner web cartoon when it was released back in 2008, and this was my favorite of the five episodes, so I'm looking forward to seeing if it holds up to a replay. These episodes were designed to fit within tight 50 MB space limitations for Nintendo's WiiWare downloadable channel, but the PC version is a little more liberal with audio quality and texture resolution, over 200 MB, and that's the version I'm playing here.

Like most of the early Telltale adventures, the Strong Bad series is played for comedy in keeping with its inspiration. The writing and voice acting (Matt Chapman voices all the characters but Marzipan) is consistently high-quality and provides plenty of entertainment value. But there are genuine puzzles here, unlike the more story/event-driven games the company has been producing of late, so if you've found the more recent Telltale titles less than challenging, you might want to seek this one out.

I can recommend Baddest of the Bands to all adventurers -- the humor may not be to everyone's taste but there's nothing offensive here, and it's a fine, well-paced point-and-click adventure. It remains available via Steam and other channels including Telltale Games' own website. Beyond this point, I will be detailing my playthrough experience -- so as always, be advised that there are certain to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

The game begins with a game within a game, as Strong Bad turns on his Fun Machine console to play Limozeen: Hot Babelian Odyssey, licensed based on the once-popular (in the Homestar universe) hair metal band. The gameplay is similar to Scramble or Super Cobra, but of no real consequence, as the game quickly glitches out and incites a little action. The opening credits roll, as Strong Bad gets harassed by a small group of bats not usually indigenous to this world.

Strong Bad has to take the broken console to the mercenary Bubs, the only licensed repairperson in town, and Bubs' Concession Stand is added to the map (the game preserves the geographical vagueness of the characters' universe by allowing the player to place some locations wherever desired.) We'll spend a little more time in Strong Bad's house before we set out, though.

There's no change or folding money to be found in the messy laundry pile, foreshadowing this adventure's primary obstacle -- our antihero doesn't have the cash to get his console fixed. He also doesn't have any notebook paper, so any further Teen Girl Squad adventures will have to wait until he has something to draw on. We can take the metal detector from Episode 2 along, it will likely come in handy.

Downstairs in the rec room, we find a pair of leopard-print pants in the sofa cushions, but no cash. The Trogdor arcade cabinet is still out of order, as it has been in every episode so far, waiting on some parts to clear through customs.

Next, we'll check out the living room and kitchen on the main floor. We can greet the green bushes out the window rock concert style ("Good afternoon, green bushes, how ya FEELIN'?") and find a Limozeen shot glass in the Luxa Lounger. We can also acquire a can of aerosol cheese from the fridge. The microwave is out of order because "someone" fried some forks in it yesterday.

Upstairs on the top floor of the house, we can visit Strong Sad, our hero's considerably less confident brother. He won't let us borrow his ancient "fillum"-based camera, and he doesn't have time to talk much. We can get him to tell us he's decided to become a snooty rock-and-roll journalist (a concept Strong Bad finds laughable in and of itself), and that he's raising the bats (the Von Blaubluds) in his bat hutch. He also advises us to take the broken Fun Machine to Bub's. We can't borrow his fake sword either (it's made it back from Episode 2's Club Technochocolate.)

We can also visit musclebound Strong Mad, who is currently angry about his missing guitar pick to go with his (literally) heavy bass guitar. We learn Marzipan has founded a band called Cool Tapes, and Strong Mad and the Cheat are involved; this adds Marzipan's house to our map. In the closet is a scary demonic painting that whispers "COME ON IN HERE" and freaks our hero out (I appreciated the PC's audio quality here, as I never quite made out what it was saying on the Wii!) We also run across an album cover defaced years earlier into the Best Album Cover Ever by Strong Bad (age 8), which we suspect will come in handy later on.

Finally, we'll check out the computer room. Fiddling with the light switch turns up the cover of the manual for the Limozeen game -- this collecting-the-manual concept returns from earlier episodes, though it usually doesn't have much bearing on the outcome of the game. Checking Strong Bad's email is always fun, and sometimes relevant to the plot, so we'll open the one message here. This one's just for fun -- a fan writes asking for help naming a band, and Strong Bad suggests something futuristic like, um, "My Personal Jetpack." We can try to unplug the laptop, but something's miswired and Strong Bad gets a brief zapping. Potentially of use later on, methinks.

Outside the house, there's nothing in the mailbox, and we can't do anything with the metal detector, so we'll head off to see Bubs. He has a diamond-plated record at the Concession Stand, but doesn't want to talk about his former life as a member of the hit act Two-o Duo. He'll repair the Fun Machine in exchange for a "big sack o' cash."

Strong Bad can't raise the money by getting a job, of course -- "There has to be a more convoluted way" -- and a vision of Limozeen inspires him to stage a Battle of the Bands for profit. Bubs offers to help promote the event and skim off the top. He tells Strong Bad we need two things -- security (jacket provided by Bubs) and celebrity judges to attract an audience.

An aging contest flyer posted nearby suggests a possibility for the latter need -- the winning album cover design will win a whole day with Limozeen, and it seems we already have a template, we just need to stage a similar photo. We can also liberate Bubs' SECURITY stencil for further use.

We can wander around the large field surrounding Bubs' place to see what's going on in the usual hot spots. Strong Badia (Strong Bad's plot of dirt with flagpole and tire) has been defaced with graffiti promoting rival bands on the white picket fence. The cool car is leaking oil. The whale is as hard to hear as ever, but pops his white plastic "spout," for no apparent reason. We can steal a gold star from Bubs' advertising sign a short distance away from his stand.

The metal detector activates here, and it's not hard to find a decidedly non-metallic treasure -- a poster from the very last Two-O Duo concert. The band apparently consisted of Bubs and Coach Z. Showing the poster to Bubs is not an option, though, this is just a collectible for background and bonus cred. We can also find a pair of weirdly stylish Hollywood Boulevard shoes, and after that Strong Bad won't deploy the detector again so our treasure hunt here is finished.

Let's head to Marzipan's and see what Cool Tapes might offer in the way of puzzle-solving possibilities. We can acquire a Zen rock from Marzipan's Zen garden, and use the detector to find another Limozeen shot glass.

Entering the house, we get an alert about an incoming email (we'll have to return to the House of Strong to read it) and find Strong Sad in the living room. A few messages on the answering machine indicate that Cool Tapes is going to be playing at Bat Aid, and someone named Wade needs a publicity photo of the band, preferably with just the guy with the baseball bat (?) as the other members of the band tend to freak out the locals.

Strong Sad is here to cover the band's Bat Aid activities, in his capacity as snooty rock journalist, and he's trying to pick up any news about other cool new underground bands. We can try to convince him that the Security jacket is a tour artifact from an up-and-coming band of the same name, but Strong Sad demands further evidence, like flyers or other street-team doings. In a cage is an endangered Lithuanian Albino Vegan Bat, whose species is the intended beneficiary of Bat Aid this year. Marzipan confirms this, and tells us the bat's name is Pasquale.

There's nothing else to do here at the moment, so let's go back home and check email. This one's just a question about which era of rock rocked the hardest, and with more than his usual wisdom Strong Bad defines it as the era when the person thinking about it was 18 to 24 years old. I take time to review the album cover design, now that we've explored a bit, and it looks like we need to ignite the oil around the cool car, put the star on its antenna, get a girl to hold a sword on the hood or roof, and put some kind of dinosaur in the foreground. With the Brothers Strong out of the house, we can borrow the camera, the fake sword, and, with some hesitation, put the bat hutch into our pants-o'-inventory as well. We can also open the other side of Strong Mad's closet to avoid the scary painting and acquire a stuffed toy dinosaur. Progress already!

Let's go out to the car and set up the props we have so far. We need a hot blonde, or a blonde at least, to hold the sword, and Marzipan is our only real option so that will have to wait. We can use the lighter to light the oil, which will presumably stay burning until we can arrange the rest of the picture, attach the star to the car's antenna, and and put the dinosaur toy in place so the magic of forced perspective will make it look huge in a 2-D photo. Close, but not quite there yet.

I stop by the Concession Stand to see if Bubs has anything new happening, and discover a Wesley Willis reference in one of Bubs' parting lines: "Rock over London! Rock on Chicago!" I always admire jokes that only a few people are going to get and I had completely forgotten about this one.

Can we disrupt the Cool Tapes rehearsal by introducing the fruit bats? Strong Bad doesn't think the Von Blaubluds are going to want anything to do with Pasquale. And if we offer the sword to Marzipan, she refuses to be involved in the album cover project. But Strong Bad says, "She's not the only blonde in town!" Hmmmm. Should we check out the photo booth and see if there's a wig available? Or is the furry Cheat the blonde? Ah, yes, he is! And he'll be at the shoot, in a bikini, as required.

Let's get that out of the way, then -- and voila! With added bats for extra coolness!

Now let's see about this Security thing. Can we spray paint with aerosol cheese on the fence in Strong Badia? Yes! And Strong Sad shows up just in time to accept "SECURITY" as the next big thing he can be snooty about. Bubs sees him in the Security jacket, hands him a billy club, and we're ready to mount Strong Bad's Battle Royale of the Bands! After we mail off the album photo and win the contest, of course, assuming it's still going on -- the flyer seems to be about ten years old.

And, of course, in the blink of a transition, Strong Bad is the winner! It's time to talk to Bubs about booking some bands. He suggests the Cool Tapes, of course, plus Pom-Pom's band at the club (now on our map). Strong Bad asks about Two-O Duo, but Bubs will have none of it and storms off, though we now have the track on our map so we might be able to arrange a reunion by talking with Coach Z.

Marzipan's been cleaning her aquarium when we arrive, and there's some smelly gravel lying in the front yard. We can set the Zen rock in the pile to set a good example for its smaller relatives, though it's not clear why we are doing this. Inside, we can grab a glossy publicity photo of Cool Tapes. Marzipan would love to participate, but the Battle Royale is the same weekend as the Bat Aid concert. Hmmmm.

Well, let's talk to Pom-Pom. I'll wander around first, acquiring one of his albums ("Food Related Love") and talking to Homestar, who we are finally seeing in this episode. Homestar wants to audition for Pom-Pom's band, but he forgot his accompanying music. It seems Pom-Pom wants to make his piano act a duo, and it would probably serve our interests to help Homestar get the gig.

Pom-Pom is too busy looking at glossies of potential bandmates to listen to Strong Bad. He has a slow cooker, for making victory chowder after he gets his band going. Interesting. We can squirt some aerosol cheese into it to make a nice fondue.

Ah, here's something tractable. We can put Pom-Pom's album on the club's turntable, and Homestar gamely goes out and starts singing. But he stumbles on the lyrics, and we need to help him out by pointing out various objects in the club to inspire him. I always like these kinds of puzzles -- they're something new that point-and-click games with audiovisual timing made possible, or at least a lot more fun than text alone could have managed.

There are a number of food possibilities in the club, though this puzzle throws a few curve balls our way. It's easy enough to rhyme "sing" with "buffalo wings," but Homestar doesn't recognize "escargot" and calls it a "plate of snails." We fare better with the Merlot, then the snails, and then I have a little trouble with the fondue. It turns out I was just standing in the wrong spot, and the retry lets us pick up at this last bit, so we're all set now. Pom-Pom loves Homestar's audition, and accepts an entry form for the Battle Royale.

Let's go talk to Coach Z now, since I don't have any new ideas for convincing Marzipan to enter. He apparently has a heavy crush on her and is too depressed to think about anything else. He needs an encouraging "sign" from her, but the standard glossy in Strong Bad's inventory just goes into his collection. We can acquire an unbent wire hanger from the shower, where it appears it is being used to clean the drain. Coach Z won't let us take his Z-branded toilet paper or the bottle of bleach in a locker, but we do find an old Cool Tapes poster as a collectible.

The Snap Shak photo booth is fun but doesn't contain anything we can use outside, it seems, so let's talk to Marzipan again. I check email also, but it's just another fan letter from someone who's being creeped out by a coworker, which Strong Bad misreads as "cow worker" to comic effect. We can get Marzipan to autograph a glossy -- she reluctantly agrees to sign it for Coach Z, even though he's been sending Cool Tapes some disturbing fan mail lately.

Coach Z is overjoyed at getting "all her best," and Strong Bad encourages him to go over there and tell her about his feelings. This allows us to grab some toilet paper and bleach. Can we bleach the bats somehow? Strong Bad can't combine inventory items, but he does remark that the bleach should only be used in "laundry-type situations." And yes, we can put the bleach and the bats in the washer, making them look a lot more like Pasquale.

Before we go inside Marzipan's house, though, we'll talk to Coach Z. He can't even get Marzipan's attention and wonders what he should do next. We can suggest he do the John Cusack Say Any thing by holding a boom box over his head, but he has tried and failed that before. And his attempts at romantic poetry are just embarrassing. We can suggest he throw some pebbles at her window, and he throws the Zen rock through it (so that's why we wanted to do that earlier!) She is not happy, but Bubs is impressed that Coach Z has demonstrated some delinquent chutzpah, just like the old days, and a reunion may be in the offing.

We can release the bleached fruit bats to convince Marzipan that the species is not so endangered, and she lets Pasquale go to join his simulated brethren. With the Bat Aid concert unnecessary, she agrees to enter the contest. Two down! (The early Telltale games often follow this long-time adventuring tradition of puzzles coming in three parts.)

Now we need to get that third band going -- Coach Z is not at the track, and to my surprise Bubs is not at the Concession Stand. Where could they be? If we try to steal the diamond-plated album, Bubs' new security robot kicks in and we're prevented from doing so. But we can see Bubs is building the stages for the concert next door, however rickety they appear to be, and give him the signed entry forms for the two bands we have lined up.

Talking to Bubs about Two-O Duo gets us a peek at the cover of the old album, and one of the things they used to rap about was "TP'ing the stick." With Coach Z's branded TP, we can convince Bubs that Coach Z is an O.G. again, or at least take a step in that direction. The album cover also mentions "stealin' stuff from my own dang store," and while we can't steal the album from Bubs' stand (it's glued permanently in place), we can steal the alarm itself and shut the robot down.

Now we need to frame Coach Z for the theft. The shower's not a suitable place to plant the evidence, but the trophy case is closer, though still not right. Let's try putting it in his office... and yes, Bubs homes in on the stolen artifact, and is impressed by Coach Z's return to the wayward ways of his youth. Two-O Duo is back in business!

We have three bands now, and are almost set to go -- but after expenses, Strong Bad's profit on the Battle only adds up to half a big sack o' cash. So he decides to form his own band -- with the remaining available characters, Homsar and the King of Town. This does not bode well for success, but we're into the final act of this episode.

Cut to rehearsal and the naming of the band, where each member contributes something based on the player's selection of indistinguishable dialogue options, and I end up with "Deluxe Omelette Ink Machine." Okay, I guess it will do. The bigger problem is that D.O.I. sucks, and so Strong Bad's only hope is to sabotage all the other bands, who are now added to our map at the three stages Bubs has built for the event.

As I go to check out the Cool Tapes, I run into a technical bug -- none of the dialogue can be heard. I save, go back to the main menu, and restore -- and now I can hear the voices, but Bubs' eyes have gone missing! Time to relaunch the game, and everything appears to be in better shape after the restore.

We can obtain Strong Sad's billy club, as he prefers to engage using rational discourse, but he won't let Strong Bad onto the stage, tasing him for his trouble.

Limozeen has "arrived" in the form of a cardboard cutout with webcam and cheap speakers, while they cruise around in their tour bus and judge the contest remotely. They like Cool Tapes' sound but not Marzipan's preachy remarks about the environment, so maybe we can provoke a little more of that in the act. (I also discover that we can use Strong Bad's microphone to "rock out" in various locations, and sometimes a box will materialize, in this case containing a page from the game manual -- but as I have not been doing this earlier and some locations are now inaccessible in the game's final act, I'm not going to worry too much about it.)

We'll check out PomStar's rehearsal next -- Homestar is wearing earphones. Suspicious earphones, Strong Bad thinks, as normally Homestar can't string two words together and now he's sounding smooth as silk. We might want to interfere with his prompting. Hmmmm. We can't use the wire hanger on Homestar, but the talkative whale speaker is here (trust me, in the Homestar Runner universe this all makes some kind of sense) and we can use the wire as an antenna to aim its audio into Homestar's headphones, causing him to spout inanities and lose his audience. Sabotage #1 complete!

The Two-O Duo are firing on all cylinders as we arrive. How can we disrupt them? The metal detector turns up a game manual page, but nothing useful for the challenge at hand. There's a box of records on the stage that we can reach, being used as sample sources. The names all suggest choreography -- "Slide to the Right," "Roll wit' Da Punches," "Left Shift Alt Delete" and "Doin' the Wigglie." We can influence the order of the set by swapping the records around, so maybe we can sabotage the act this way. Yep -- by moving Coach Z far to his left, then a bit to his right, then rolling and punching Bubs... well, it's not quite that simple. We need some different elements to work with than what's available here, and we find those back at the House of Strong in Strong Sad's record collection, conveniently left in the living room.

Adding the "3 O' Clock Twist" lets us get Coach Z turned 90 degrees. "Hugo Left Me Miserable" heads left, but not quite as far as the other record does. Getting Coach Z to dance to his left, turn 90 degrees, shuffle left again, and punch does the job, and the assaulted Bubs leaves the stage and the act.

Now what about Cool Tapes? Political discord seems like the right thing to inspire. If we try to bleach the pond by Two-o Duo's stage, Strong Bad talks about Marzipan's wrath if he were to do so. These puzzles have been fairly self-contained so far but this one seems a little more complex. Marzipan's song is about wetlands pollution, apparently, so can we pollute the pond in a different way? Ah, yes -- we can put the bleach bottle in the cardboard Limozeen's hands, and the auto-rocking arms dump it in!

Marzipan doesn't know this has happened, but we can take an instant photo of the pond with its dead fish and "Limozeen" holding the incriminating bottle of bleach. But she won't look at the photo while performing, and Strong Sad still won't let us up on stage.

What to do? Marzipan is also talking about the exploitation of women in the music industry, but we don't have our old album cover handy. We need to get her to take a break, somehow. We can't seem to show the photo to anyone else at the Cool Tapes stage, either.

Can we do anything new at the D.O.I. stage? Homsar and the King are still making strange noises on the stage. Oh, I hadn't noticed that the Limozeen cutout is here too, far off to the left. And there's an official, unspoiled Limozeen coloring book sitting nearby. Strong Bad is eager to take it home and "improve" it, so let's do just that.

At the drawing table, this becomes another Teen Girl Squad adventure, without interactivity this time, an optional exercise that became a little repetitive in the first two episodes. The underlying original comic book is quite hilarious in its own right ("The band knows that publicity photos are all about doing different stuff with your hands!") and as usual, the girls meet violent, accidental ends along the way. Maybe Strong Bad's "Teen Girl Squad Meets Limozeen!" adventure will be enough to draw Marzipan's attention... but we can't interrupt her with that, either.

We haven't been back to the PomStar stage in a bit, so let's go there and look around. Ah, right, Marzipan is here when we're here. We can show her the photo and the coloring book. She is reasonably forgiving after seeing the first item, but is more upset with Limozeen after the second. But she's still only at about two-thirds dudgeon.

I tried to attach the billy club to the Limozeen stand-up at the Cool Tapes stage, and the band expressed enthusiasm, but they have no arms at that location so I couldn't actually do anything. Here, their right arm is waving, and... yes, with the coat hanger inserted in the whale speaker, the resulting photo gives the impression they are doing anything but saving the whales.

Now Marzipan is indignant enough to forgo entertainment value in her act, and sing an anti-Limozeen anthem -- with the audiences and the judges insulted by the catchy tune, we're the front runners! Well, that is, until the crowd consisting of people in bands Strong Bad has just sabotaged shows up, driving his score on the contest meter to rock bottom.

D.O.I. genuinely needs to rock now, and Strong Bad has prepared some kind of impressive heavy metal prop that he can release by pressing a big red button at the other side of the stage. Easier said than done, of course. A big fan at stage right is blowing hard and preventing us from reaching the ladder, but we can advance just far enough to grab a spiked helmet from the nearby coatrack. The wind blows Strong Bad across the stage on his knees, a cool if unintended move that scores a few points with the audience.

Next, I find that the button is freely available at stage left, but of course it's not working, because the King of Town has chewed through the wires connecting it to the release mechanism. There's a fog machine here that's not creating the intended heavy metal atmosphere, due to the fan, so we have a couple of reasons to disable it.

Experimenting, I put the spiked helmet on Homsar, who is playing an oversized theremin called the TheremAxxx by hovering and circling around it, and the audience likes that too. We can use the metal detector here, but whatever it's picking up seems to be offstage, so I'll put it away again.

Introducing the King of Town to the crowd gets him to swing his guitar around and knock his last remaining snack lobster out of its bucket. We can use it to cut the rope holding a speaker in place above the stage -- or achieve the same net effect, anyway, as the lobster's claws aren't sharp enough to cut it but the King of Town pursues him, knocking the speaker down and trying to hit the lobster with his guitar, much to the audience's enjoyment.

It's actually going well, if accidentally so. What about the fan? We can "conduct" Homsar around the ThereMaxx, raising him higher and circling wider until his spike lodges in the fuse box, shorting it out. The bleached bats choose this opportune moment to arrive, circling the stage in a cloud of fog. The crowd is going wild!

Now we can unleash the prop to end all props -- but it can't be seen as it's blocked by fog and bats! The lobster bucket is one of the few unused items left onstage. Pouring its buttery sauce into the fog machine butters the bleached bats, inspiring the King to leap into the air and eat them. It's a fantastic and thoroughly metal intro, even though the band hasn't played a song of any substance, and the crowd carries the King of Town away on their shoulders, leaving Strong Bad victorious but alone on the deserted stage.

But all's well -- the Fun Machine is back in hand, with a few oversized bandages applied. Except... it's still not in working order, until Strong Sad notices the wad of aerosol cheese stuck on the end and fixes the problem. So this whole crazy rock'n'roll adventure was entirely unnecessary, but thoroughly entertaining. Victory is ours!

The end credits roll over a nice medley of Homestar Runner songs, and after the credits there's a preview of SBCG4AP Episode 4: Dangeresque 3! I'm actually falling behind on the Telltale games now, my five-year self-imposed embargo threshold having been crossed by several late-2000s titles, so I'll probably try to finish up this series this year. Thoroughly entertaining in my book.

Adventure of the Week: Adventure in Time (1983)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 12 May 2015 20:00:00 +0000

This week, we're embarking upon an Adventure in Time, written by Paul Berker for the Atari 8-bit home computers and published by Phoenix Software in 1983. This was the second in an intended series that appears to have stopped after this game's release. Berker's style uses a basic two-word parser, but his text is evocative and his puzzles tend to be fair and logical. I recently enjoyed his first adventure game, Birth of the Phoenix, meant for novice players, so I wanted to try this ostensibly more challenging adventure next.

The title page informs us that a file has been stolen which documents the hidden components of a deadly, world-destroying weapon. Our part in this story, then, is likely to involve recovering or destruction of said file and/or weapon.

Interested readers are, of course, encouraged to have an independent Adventure in Time before proceeding into my playthrough notes below, and I can wholeheartedly recommend giving this one a spin. I didn't find any published walkthroughs for this game, but I was able to solve it honestly with a little head-scratching and quite a bit of backtracking. Beyond this point, as always, be aware that for history's sake, there are certain to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

As the story begins, we find ourselves in a living room, feeling WOOZY, AS IF YOU'VE BEEN DRUGGED. Taking Inventory establishes that our PACK IS EMPTY (which seems less appropriate to this game than its predecessor), and there's a suspicious syringe lying here.

A picture of a spaceship on the wall almost covers an area of heavily scratched paint; the picture is securely fastened to the wall. We can GET SYRINGE, and I try to SMELL SYRINGE to ascertain what we might have been drugged with, but that's not recognized. We can't MOVE the CARPET here (we can, actually, but nothing seems to happen), and the game sidesteps that old trope, but EXAMINE CARPET reveals a worn area near the south wall, where there's no obvious exit.

PUSH WALL surprises me by actually working, and a robot emerges from a hidden access door. GET ROBOT seems an imprecise approach, but THE ROBOT IS NOW PROGRAMMED TO ACCOMPANY YOU ON YOUR TRAVELS. We can't order the robot to do anything, it seems; at least, ROBOT, GET PICTURE is not recognized by the simple parser (I DON'T KNOW HOW TO 'ROBOT', it explains, so this parser must have been woefully embarrassed at 1980s dance parties.)

We can explore north, east, and west of the living room, so we'll do that with our robot companion. A dormitory to the east is filled with badly worn military cots, and there are burnt scraps of paper on the floor. A surviving fragment reads, "BURN AFTER READING." Or is this a whole piece of paper? I DON'T KNOW HOW TO 'BURN' so I'll assume this is just a fragment.

West of the living room is a kitchen, where we can acquire a pencil. The walls are filthy and the cabinets are empty; a rat sees us and dives into a hole which we can't interact with, as HOLE is not in the parser's dictionary. We're told that the rat looks at us HOPEFULLY, though, before it scampers to safety, so maybe we should try feeding it later on.

We'll head north of the living room now, into a north-south entryway that leads to... a cliff? It's a lot like the one in Birth of the Phoenix, with the same 300-meter height. We can acquire a hammer here and observe some birds, vultures most likely, wheeling through the sky at a distance. The pencil is a DIXON TICONDEROGA 1386 NO. 3, a nice bit of detail. I have to try to SAY PHOENIX here, but of course nothing happens in this game.

What now? We can see a stud on the anterior surface of the robot. PUSH STUD provokes the response: "I CAN'T GIVE YOU ANY HELP HERE." So at least we know the robot might be helpful elsewhere, and in fact the game's HELP command refers us to the robot.

It turns out that PUSH STUD in the living room causes the robot to open up the south wall. We can now explore the Security Room, which has exits leading east, west, south and southwest, opening up the map quite a bit. The security monitors are dark, some apparently kicked in -- and there's dried green blood on the floor.

We can't go E yet -- CODE NAME, PLEASE? -- so we'll head south into a Laboratory, where it appears an alien skeleton has been under examination. We'll take a soft cloth here, as IT COULD BE USED FOR PICKING UP DELICATE THINGS. The microscope has nothing on its stage at the moment, but we'll likely be back to examine something later on.

The lab allows further exits east, south, and west. Heading east, we discover a Library with rotting books, in an alien language with metallic bindings. We can pick up a brown card, a blue card, and a manual, but I'm running into the game's six-item inventory limit so I'll have to drop the paper to pick up the manual. The manual is badly mutilated and contains only a few apparently blank scraps of paper, though its title, A.I.T. 1984, might mean something. I'll leave the cards here for the moment.

Southwest of the library (and south of the laboratory as the map begins to connect back to itself) is a Storeroom containing a translator and a laser. The translator doesn't seem to help us with reading the manual, and I DON'T KNOW HOW TO 'TRANSLATE', either, if we try that. But it will likely be useful at some point.

West of the storeroom is a greenhouse, lined with hydroponic tanks but nothing else of note. West again leads us back to the storeroom, and going east from the greenhouse takes us all the way back to the security room; this seems like a mapping implementation error more than an intentional bit of strange routing, as it doesn't really take us anywhere new in any direction. Northwest of the storeroom is the Computer Room, neatly filling in the last obvious hole in this section of the map as it adjoins the security room and laboratory with geographic consistency.

The computer room walls are covered in dials and gauges, with a smell of ozone in the air. There's a computer keyboard here, with an instruction plate: "DATA MAY BE INPUT IF AUTHORIZED"; we don't need the translator to read this, so I'm not quite sure what has happened here yet. Are we in an alien facility, or a domestic one?

I try to PUT MANUAL on the microscope's stage, and at least we learn how this works -- a speaker comes on and says "NO FINGER PRINTS SEEN," then the stage is cleared, dumping the manual onto the floor. I try a bunch of items here, and the syringe provokes a more interesting response: "FINGERPRINT CANNOT BE IDENTIFIED, HAS BEEN SMUDGED." So I probably should have picked it up with the cloth instead of my bare hands to avoid that problem. Before I restart, I EXAMINE LASER to learn that we must SAY "F" TO FIRE THIS LIGHT LASER -- and we don't actually SAY F, we just use F (an efficiency whose value will become apparent later.) I try Firing it a number of times without apparently running its power down, so we may be able to play with it freely; I do so, but find no obvious targets in the map we've discovered so far.

Let's restart and see if we can identify those fingerprints. They belong to... Nostradamus! We are clearly in for a bunch of vague quatrains that people of the future will consider prophetic in nature. So were we drugged by Nostradamus?

This gives me an idea, and I head into the security room to SAY NOSTRADAMUS -- the security system comes on, and blasts us out of existence. Whoops! On the retry, I establish that saying other random words does not have this result, so we must be on the right track but missing something. Having the brown and blue cards in our possession doesn't make any difference.

Can the robot help us again? In the computer room, it advises us to "INPUT NAME, NUMBER OR CODE." INPUT NOSTRADAMUS is productive: "NOSTRADAMUS HAS MASTER CODE NECESSARY TO MAKE FINAL TIME SHIFT. SEE 'HUNTER.'" Hmmmm. INPUT HUNTER tells us: "PRESENT ASSIGNMENT IS TO APPREHEND NOSTRADAMUS. IMPERATIVE YOU RECOVER AND INPUT MASTER CODE." Ah, so perhaps we are this Hunter person?

SAY HUNTER in the security room appears to confirm this, as now we can travel east into the Control Room, where a sign near the Time Machine Console advises against operating the device without qualifications based on the A.I.T. manual. If only it weren't mutilated!

Well, we'll try to use the time machine anyway, after we SAVE GAME to a formatted disk (or more conveniently, just save state in an emulator.) The time machine's console featuers a dial labelled T1, another labelled T2, and a card reading device along with a lever in the UP position. I INSERT BROWN, PULL LEVER... and die. Dang. The same happens with the blue card.

I try to READ T1 and READ T2 and learn that both dials are set to 1984, so perhaps that's part of the problem. The cards don't seem to change these settings, though, and we can't TURN the dials directly. The lever only has two positions, and apparently returns to the up position immediately, so we can't PUSH it past its current location.

I try to F the laser at the manual to no avail, but then it occurs to me that the U/V lights in the greenhouse might reveal any invisible ink -- and they do! INSERT CONTROL CARDS, PULL LEVER, and RETURN WITHIN 40 are all we can make out, but that should help.

Taking the plural "CARDS" to heart, I INSERT BLUE, INSERT BROWN, PULL LEVER -- and I don't die, at least. What can we accomplish in 40 turns, whenever we are? We'd better get cracking!

Some exploration and retrying will likely be in order -- it appears we've traveled into the future, as the cave entrance leading from the cliffside back into the house has deterioriated, with plaster falling away to reveal wire mesh underneath. I don't find anything else novel, so I return and PULL LEVER again, though it doesn't seem I've gone anywhere.

I try reversing the order of the control cards -- INSERT BROWN, then INSERT BLUE -- and now I seem to go back to -5000 (anno indeterminio, apparently.) The entryway is still crumbling, but now we can travel down from the cliffside using a path. This leads us to the Druids' Woods, and heading northwest we find the legendary Stonehenge, where we see a potion and an imposing stone altar.

There are exits north, south, east, and northeast. North of the circle of monoliths we find some marsh seeds; northeast, we encounter a guard. Fortunately, if we try to travel past him, the translator kicks in with a greeting that allows us to pass.

North of the guard is a meadow where some Druids are gathered. We can pick up the flute here and PLAY FLUTE, creating pleasing music though nothing special seems to happen. Heading south for a few moves and then northeast, we find a notepad with a faint indentation that we can almost make out, but we can't FEEL or TOUCH NOTEPAD to reveal its content.

Can DRINK POTION help us read the notepad? Nope -- it's DISTILLED FROM THE DEADLY MANDRAKE ROOT, and we fall fast asleep and then die. It seems we've explored the woods here now, so after a quick restore we'll head back up the cliffside.

I'm worried about the RETURN IN 40 admonishment, as I'm pretty sure I've wasted some time. But I'm not sure what I should be doing next, anyway. Examining the time machine console, I see that the blue card is in the slot and the screen depicts an old man with a knife in his hand at Stonehenge? Is that a future version of us? Someone we managed to avoid? An ad for a stone-fired steakhouse?

I return to Stonehenge to investigate, and EXAMINE ALTAR suggests it can be moved; MOVE ALTAR reveals a small hole, with a green object in it -- a green card! I'm off to ply my trade in the US, before I realize that it's probably another control card for the time machine.

I'm beginning to get the hang of this -- I INSERT GREEN, PULL LEVER, and now the cliffside leads down to a cave entrance, where a venomous snake is poised to strike. F SNAKE is not useful except as verbal catharsis, and I die while experimenting; KILL SNAKE with the hammer works, though, on the retry.

Heading north of the snake, I find the cave dark, and I don't have a light source at the moment... oh, wait, I do! F fires the laser long enough for us to get our bearings before the room goes dark again, a nice concept Scott Adams used a few times that works well here. The cave is fairly large but not convoluted, consisting mostly of narrow passages, and I manage to find a yellow card, and a bow... the kind used to play a violin, upon closer EXAMINEation.

As I'm finishing mapping out the cave, I get a warning that the time machine is starting up... must be that 40-turn limit! When I return to the house, I discover that the whole thing is gone, replaced by a large open field full of matted-down grass. So I need to retry and pick these things up more quickly; it seems like we're okay if we make it back inside the building, as we'll travel with it even if it does fire up, so that makes this a little more manageable than I was thinking it would be.

Returning in good time this time, I INSERT YELLOW and see where we're going next. I finally figure out that the console shows us possible hazards where we've arrived -- it showed the snake from the green zone earlier -- and now it depicts a burly guard. I'll take the hammer, and the potion in case we can poison him, I guess, and definitely bring the translator.

The cliffside now leads down to a paved, tree-lined road, and we can head east here onto the Appian Way, the road used by the Roman Legion. It leads east and then north to the Colosseum, where people jostle and shove to enter the building. We can walk right in -- if we want to get eaten by a group of lions, that is. That's a funny thing. (Wait for it...)

I'll explore downward on our next life, finding a path west to the Forum. We're prevented from traveling north by the Men of the 1st Legion, who point and laugh at us, and we can't get away from them to go back the way we came. I try to KILL MEN, but that's unsuccessful and fatal, as I expected. They continue to guffaw after a restore, and I'm stuck again, and beginning to suspect that I am the funny thing happening on the way to the Forum.

Trying again, I head the other way and find the Alcove of the Soothsayer, acquiring a foul-smelling charm from this elderly Lord of the Sooth. This allows us to enter the Colosseum (which I do without meaning to as I explore) without being attacked by the lions kept here in the animal holding area. There's also a red card here, which we'll take before making our hasty retreat.

I don't find anything else to do here, so we'll use the red card in the time machine to visit the prehistoric era of the dinosaurs. I am impressed by this game's substantial map! The cliffside in this era takes us into a Mesozoic forest, and it only takes me a few turns of travel to die in a quicksand bog. More exploration takes me past a dinosaur herd, only to die in the teeth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I don't find much here beyond these two fatal hazards.

The dinosaur herd appears hungry, though, and I do have those marsh seeds. I try planting them in the meadow, but conditions are not good and they rot and disappear as we watch (is time somehow accelerated here?) But I don't find a better place to plant them, though the ground near the quicksand seems more suited to marshy plants. The seeds are small; if we go into the bog with nothing else in inventory, can we survive long enough to plant them there? Nope.

Can we play the flute for the dinosaurs? It doesn't appear to do anything. Can we rub the pencil on the notepad to reveal the writing? Yes! It brings out the note, "BACK OF DIPLODOCUS..." Does that mean we can CLIMB DIPLODOCUS? The parser doesn't think so, but we can try to CLIMB DINOSAUR; unfortunately, the wandering herd steps on us and ends the game.

Do we need to plant the seeds in a different time and place to produce some feed for the dinosaurs? I try going back to the Druids' forest where the plants originally seeded, but I neglect to bring the translator and get killed by the guard when I fail to return his greeting.

I think I need to be a little more organized -- I have left some useful objects all over the map at this point, and I'm not sure where to reclaim them in case I need them here. The robot's absence is particularly missed, so I'll restart and try to leave everything in the control room. (Along the way, I discover a bug -- if we MOVE ALTAR at Stonehenge, the green card is whisked back to its original location in the hole underneath.)

Can we impress the Roman Legion outside of the Forum somehow? I bring the laser, and the flute, but neither does any good. I do have the robot, however, and PUSH STUD says, "SENSORS INDICATE EXTREMELY LOW FEAR THRESHOLD TO CERTAIN ANIMAL LIFE." Hmmmm. The dead snake doesn't do anything for us. How about the rat from the kitchen, if we can get it? We can't lure the starving rat into our clutches yet, as far as I can figure out, anyway.

Let's see if the robot can help us with the dinosaurs. Near the herd, he tells us, "ANALYSIS INDICATES REPTILES ATTRACTED TO UNUSUAL PLANT FRONDS AND ARE SUSCEPTIBLE TO CERTAIN DRUGS." So maybe the potion, plus something else? Oh, we have a greenhouse, don't we? Let's try PLANTing the SEEDS there! Yes! Now we have some plants, and the potion. DIP PLANTS doesn't work, but DRUG PLANTS does the trick.

Now we can GIVE PLANTS to the dinosaur herd, and all but one falls asleep, while one remains upright, and sounds like it's... humming? Ah, it's a machine, we discover after we CLIMB DINOSAUR, and there's a storage compartment in its back. We can OPEN COMPARTMENT, obtaining a small vial. But no card? Maybe we're out of new eras to explore and need to do some backtracking now.

Uh-oh. It occurs to me that perhaps the live snake is what I'm supposed to use to scare the Roman Legion, and I've killed it instead of, say, stunning it with the flute. I restore to a much earlier save and PLAY FLUTE -- yes, it puts the snake in a trance, and we can carry it around with us now. Hmmmm. Let's see what happens. (I end up leaving the flute in the cave so I can pick up the yellow card, so I hope I don't need it again.) And yes, we can DROP SNAKE and it chases the Romans away so we can enter the Forum.

Inside, we find the Emperor Nero, and a violin, so he probably wants the bow... or maybe not, as GIVE BOW produces no reaction, perhaps because Nero is just cowering in a corner. If we try to PLAY VIOLIN, we're apparently not nearly as good as we are with the flute, producing a TERRIBLE UNMUSICAL SOUND. That may come in handy for opening the vial, methinks...

And yes, the shrill sound cracks the vial, and now we have a piece of microfilm; we don't even need a reader to see that it says, "MASTER CODE IS L99AV." Now we're getting somewhere! I return to the time machine facility's computer room and I INPUT L99AV. We're asked to SEE T1 DATA FOR INPUT INFORMATION, and we can return to the time machine control room to check; READ T1 yields 2396, so is that what it wants? INPUT 2396 does look promising -- we're told that Nostradamus has been located and transportation is in progress, and we're supposed to PROCEED TO EXIT, which I presume is at the cliffside.

And yes, we discover Nostradamus at the cliffside, finishing reassembly of the Ultimate Weapon. But I don't have a weapon of my own with which to stop him -- I try to PUSH NOSTRADAMUS off the cliff, but that's not possible, and my attempt to KILL NOSTRADAMUS with my bare hands results in a struggle that accidentally sets off the weapon and destroys most of the known universe. Trying again with the hammer in hand -- fortunately there's not a strict time limit on this and we can go grab it before stepping outside -- we succeed at last! The universe is saved, and victory is ours!

Adventure in Time is a well-designed, moderately difficult adventure that's a lot of fun, and in my opinion it should be better known than it is. I enjoyed working through its logical puzzles, and when I realized I'd taken the wrong path I never felt like the game had misled me or omitted a critical piece of information. The text is well-written, and all the required clues are present if we're careful to explore, experiment, save often, and restore when things go wrong. I wish Paul Berker had written more of these games, as I've enjoyed the two I've played, but all good things, as they say. Onward!

Adventure of the Week: Birth of the Phoenix (1982)

noreply@blogger.com (StillGaming) — Tue, 05 May 2015 20:00:00 +0000

This week called for something fresh but brief, so I'm tackling an obscure adventure for the Atari 8-bit computers... Birth of the Phoenix, a novice-level tutorial adventure published in 1982 by Phoenix Software, programmed (and designed I presume) by Paul L. Berker. A version reportedly exists for the Apple II, but I haven't been able to track it down.

Mr. Berker's design uses a two-word parser, with an unusual hybrid presentation style that borrows the Scott Adams location summary display at the top of the screen, but also displays quite a bit of descriptive text in the interactive command window below.

Interested readers are of course encouraged to experience Birth of the Phoenix firsthand before reading my playthrough notes below. It's not a difficult game, though without the manual to look at I did need to reference a walkthrough at the CASA Solution Archive to come up with the magic word required at a critical juncture. Beyond this point, I'll be detailing my experience with little regard for giving anything away. In other words, there are sure to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin in a dark forest glade, in the autumn, with nothing in inventory (thoughtfully represented as an empty pack). There's a book here, and if we READ BOOK, I DON'T SEE THAT HERE! Um... it is right here, in the room, but we have to GET BOOK and OPEN BOOK before we can READ it to discover that THE PHOENIX IS REBORN EVERY 500 YEARS BY BURNING THE OLD PHOENIX. Okay, that probably sets up the game's finale in some way.

We can predict that this is not going to be too much of a challenge when we head east to a Toolshed, where we see a shovel and a flashlight just here for the taking. I try to DIG -- WITH WHAT? -- SHOVEL, but THE GROUND IS TOO HARD TO DIG HERE. I try to LIGHT FLASHLIGHT -- SORRY BUT I CAN'T DO THAT! TURN ON FLASHLIGHT and USE FLASHLIGHT also fail, but ON FLASHLIGHT does the trick -- unfortunately, the light is MIGHTY FEEBLE and the switch is now jammed in the ON position. And I DON'T KNOW HOW TO 'OFF', just in case we thought we might try that anyway.

The flashlight only lasts a few turns, so I probably tried to use it too early, but let's keep going and see what happens. West of the glade (the toolshed is a dead end) we find a forest with a conspicuous tree. CLIMB TREE leads us up to the tree top, where we see a branch and a net. I am surprised to find that this simple parser provides some detail when I EXAMINE NET, learning it's made out of a soft material. There's a branch here, but we can't GO BRANCH or CLIMB BRANCH; it's apparently smaller than I was imagining, as we can readily GET BRANCH. Before descending, I note that the ground is still too hard to dig, up here in the tree where one wouldn't expect it to exist, let alone put up much resistance.

Traveling north through the forest, we arrive at a clearing with a well and the burned out remains of a wood cabin. There's a rope leading down into the well, so we'll chance heading down there and hope we can return. It's very dark, and our narrator is afraid of snakes, so we'll head back up for now; I probably shouldn't have wasted the flashlight earlier, so we'll handle this differently on the next go.

East of the well we find a cliff, with a raging rapids 300 meters below. We can't get down there from here, but we can continue East into a shallow cave containing a dial and a safe (so a combination lock, it would appear, then.) We can't OPEN SAFE (because we don't have it and can't GET it) but we can TURN DIAL to a specified number. If we fail, a disembodied voice heralds our failure.

I'm sure there's a clue to the combination somewhere in the game, but I like trying to crack these freestyle sometimes, and some experimentation establishes that the first number of the combination is 10. More work gets me to 10, 22, but then I get stymied on the last one and after a while I decide to look for the real answer elsewhere.

This also seems like a good time to start over to conserve the flashlight's battery, but all I get from the bottom of the well are some (RUBIES), apparently a treasure. I try to JUMP at the cliffside to cross the chasm, but fall to my death. On the retry I confirm that we can GET RUBIES without turning on the flashlight at all, just in case it proves valuable at all later.

I wonder if we can make a bridge across the gorge using the branch, but DROP BRANCH doesn't seem to do it and MAKE BRIDGE isn't recognized. I was doing so well up to this point, but after trying a number of things with the limited objects we've run across, I decide I am actually stuck here, so I consult a walkthrough to learn that if I'd read the manual (and had a copy to read) we can SAY PHOENIX at the cliffside to magically cross over. Here, some numbers are carved into the cliff: "10 22 35." I must have missed that last one -- I was thinking it might represent a date, maybe the author's birthday, so I jumped into the 60s and up while searching for the last number, then worked my way back down but clearly wasn't methodical enough in the thirties. There's also a key here.

Before we go back to open the safe, let's check out the paths to the northwest and northeast. Northeast takes us up a road to the mountains; there's a stick here, which we can take. Continuing north, we find ourselves at a mountain pass. We can see but not pick up a clock here, and while I keep trying to DIG the ground remains resolutely firm and unyielding.

The clock is running down, and before I quit trying to pick it up and realize I need to go back and get that key (which I neglected to pick up earlier) in order to WIND CLOCK, the game ends because YOUR TIME HAS RUN OUT BECAUSE YOU'RE RUN DOWN. Retrying, I get the clock wound until it's ticking briskly again -- this seems to solve the problem permanently -- and then head west onto a rocky road where we see and pick up a potion.

Continuing west, we find ourselves on the road to Heliopolis, and can acquire the (SAPPHIRES) here. The unpassable road west apparently leads to Oz, based on the signage, which may explain the road's pavement of yellow bricks. But we can only go north, to the Treasury, where we're supposed to store our treasures. I DROP RUBIES here, and check SCORE -- that's 30 of the possible 100 points already, and depositing the sapphires here gets us up to 60.

Heading north again takes us into the Temple of the Sun, where there's some myrrh on hand. A phoenix is carved into the altar's marble base, and YOU FEEL A SENSE OF SERENITY AND ACCOMPLISHMENT HERE.

But that feeling seems premature, as we haven't finished the game yet, so we'll return to the cliffside and head northwest to find a Guardhouse, guarded by a guard, per longstanding and well-guarded traditions of guardianship. The ground here is crumbly and soft, and our feet sink into it, dirtying our socks, which provides an ample hint that we should DIG here. The action unearths a bag, and OPEN BAG scatters a bunch of funny little pieces of colored paper on the ground, along with a label reading, "MAZE MAPPER (PAT. PEND.)" Is there a maze ahead here? The guard won't let us proceed to the northwest.

I'll go back and get the diamonds, and after we drop them off at the Treasury we're up to 90 points. What about those pieces of paper? We can take the myrrh from the Temple -- I'm not sure that's a good idea but it's not immediately fatal -- but the guard's not interested in it. If we GIVE POTION, however, he drinks it and falls into a deep, happy sleep.

Ah, I get it -- the different-colored pieces of paper will probably make it easy to map out a maze instead of using other inventory items we might not want to leave scattered around. Heading NW from the guardhouse, I find the expected maze, and use the colored slips to map things out, finding the Inner Sanctum of the Phoenix without too much trouble. The Phoenix won't be EXAMINEd -- it hisses and spits as we attempt what must be a more hands-on approach than this standard adventuring verb usually implies-- and we can't initially GET PHOENIX, but we can CATCH PHOENIX with the net, then GET it successfully.

Now what? The Phoenix's nest seems rundown, so perhaps we're supposed to burn the mythical bird and help it regenerate, though BURN PHOENIX isn't recognized. Getting back out of the maze is a little tricky -- we can't get there with cardinal directions, but U takes us back to the maze entrance, I finally discover, and we can go SE from there to return to the Guardhouse.

It seems like I ought to take the phoenix into the Temple of the Sun now, so I do that and drop it here. I try to BURN PHOENIX again, but BURN still isn't recognized by the parser. ON MYRRH and LIGHT MYRRH don't do anything here. The branch we've been carrying is very dry and brittle, but can't be lit directly. The stick is reportedly AN UGLY STICK. And we can't START FIRE, as the parser doesn't recognize START.

So... hmmmm. RUB TWIGS? This is helpful, at least, as the verb RUB is recognized. RUB STICK? OK. NOTHING SEEMED TO HAPPEN. I pick up the branch and try again -- and now, with no further direct action on our part, the wood bursts into flames, and the Phoenix voluntarily leaps into the fire. It is consumed, then reborn, and victory is ours!

Birth of the Phoenix was a little more fun and challenging than I had anticipated, even though it's not a lengthy game, about 90 minutes with note-taking included. It's a well-structured design with some nicely written prose, and I'm a little bit surprised that Paul Berker only wrote one other adventure game, again for Phoenix Software, called Adventure in Time, and that's on my to-play list now.