2024 – Renga in Blue (2024)

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Howard W. Sams — previously employed for Goodyear and General Battery — eventually landed at the battery manufacturer P.R. Mallory during the 1930s (headquarters: Indianapolis, Indiana). While there his responsibilities included sales literature and he got involved with technical printing like with the Mallory Yaxley Radio Service Encyclopedia (1937).

He tried to coax his employer into diversifying into technical publishing in general; being rebuffed, he founded his own company in 1946, named after himself. Howard W. Sams and Co. became prolific in publishing “Photofact” guides and their technical manuals are still valued by people who work with old electronics.

The company Sams eventually became large enough to purchase Bobbs-Merrill Publishing (famous for The Joy of Cooking) and diversified into textbooks in general before selling the company to ITT Corporation in 1967 (while eventually being sold again in 1985 to Macmillan Publishing).

As a technical publisher, they got into computers early, like with the Computer Dictionary & Handbook (Sippl, 1966)…

…or the book Computers Self-Taught Through Experiments from the same year. The culmination, Chapter 17, is titled Building a Calculator.

You might assume they would immediately make a natural segue into programming languages when those books started to appear, but their books through the 70s tended to stay at their roots in electronics, aimed the “circuit design” layer. The first book of theirs I’ve been able to find with programming is the 1977 volume How to Program Microcomputers, followed by The Z-80 Microcomputer Handbook from 1979. Both stick solely to assembly language. In 1980 Sams finally broke into the mainstream source code market with the Mostly BASIC book series by Howard Berenbon (an automotive engineer in Michigan who worked on computers in his spare time).

I’ve referenced the first book before as it has an early CRPG, Dungeon of Danger. It is not impressive as a game, but it does represent Sams entering the software industry, in a sense. They soon after entered the software industry proper (with boxes on shelves). But why?

It could be brisk sales of the book (enough for a sequel) gave them favorable thoughts. However, my current best theory has to do with a competitor: in late 1980, the California company Programma was bought out by the Hayden Book Company. The timing is suspicious: in March 1981 Sams formed the spinoff division Advanced Operating Systems, and they hired a former Programma employee, Joe Alinsky, to be in charge of the division.

Unlike Hayden, Advanced Operating Systems planned to build their catalog from scratch. Palmer T. Wolf (previously at Instant Software) was hired as the “Software Acquisition Manager”. Wolf blitzed classified ads in the trades looking for submissions.

In the original 1982 printing of Caves of Olympus, he even included a letter in the manual identical to one from magazines. I haven’t been able to unearth anything about the authors (Thomas and Patrick Noone) and if they had any prior relationship with Sams, but it is possible they simply saw one of the ads and sent their game in. (Wolf claimed “50 submittals” in his first six weeks, so around one game a day.)

The above is the cover from 1982. The survival of Advanced Operating Systems as a separate division from Sams was short-lived; they got wrapped back into the fold in 1983 (without Alinsky and Wolf), so a re-print in 1984 of this game is purely under the Sams label (I’ll show what that cover looks like in a later post).

This is the only adventure game published by Sams and the only game by Thomas and Patrick Noone. (The credits also list a documentation editor, Jim Rounds; shockingly, a company renowned since the 40s for providing documentation for technical devices cares about their documentation.)

On the devastated planet Olympus, beneath the ruined palace of the Emperor, lie the Caves of Olympus, the last fortress to withstand the onslaught of the evil Loren hordes.

You are Anson Argyrus, an advanced Vario-500 robot. Stranded and alone, you must make your way through the caves to safety and freedom. Cunning is your ally, reasoning is you1 weapon, as you battle against the destruction waiting at every turn-false chambers, one way doors, death traps.

But negotiate the caves successfully, and you’ll escape to join the rebel forces gathering to counter the Loren invaders.

We’re a robot! I think the last time we got close to that was Cranston Manor Adventure but that was pretending the “I am your puppet” perspective had a digital avatar in the world conveying information to us. Cyborg from Michael Berlyn united both the the player-avatar and the computer-narrator. Here, we are straight out playing a robot, no human attributes at all. Not only are we a robot, we’re a small robot “a little more than fifty centimeters tall” and who is centuries old. We are in fact old enough to have helped build the Caves of the story, but our “bio memory” has failed us so we don’t remember what’s inside.

Regarding the graphics, the display uses Jyym Pearson logic where you press enter to swap between text mode and graphics mode, and you pretty much have to keep swapping between the two as you’re walking around as you don’t get enough information conveyed while in graphics mode.

I should also highlight — and it will be come more obvious soon — the actual graphical style is very different than anything we’ve seen before. Essentially all the 1980-1982 Apple II games have used some form of vector graphics, like Mystery House; some have looked better, and have incorporated wavy lines and fancy fill effects and the like, but still there’s a sort of basic continuity where it is easy to recognize Apple II graphics as falling within a certain family tree.

No vectors: Caves of Olympus relies heavily on pixels. This is very different from every other adventure game I’ve played in 1982.

Notice the random break-up of mountain ridges by pixels rather than smooth curves. It’s almost like the authors added “noise” as a stylistic feature. It looks as if at least part of the images are being stored as bitmaps.

I’m not sure what to do with the ID-STRIP. Trying to TAKE, EXAMINE, etc. just gets the message RESULT: NEGATIVE! and if you waste more than one turn before going inside the meteorological station, you die. So I’m going to assume the strip works automatically for someone travelling north to keep the Bad Guys out.

Going in, we arrive at a “vestible”.

The room description includes some “narrated action” which skips some steps. Rather than going from straight outdoors to the room we’re in, our robot hero goes from the outside to a meteorological station, and from there into the caves. The part in the middle is skipped over, more like a gamebook than a regular adventure game. Not all room descriptions are like this but there are some others which assume action rather than just description.

For example, heading north, there is a dark room with a combat-robot (fortunately you can just sneak on by)…

…and the room farther north is both described and depicted quite oddly.

This sort of room description tends to get avoided in modern text adventures, since it doesn’t hold up well to repeated viewings. For example, if you go back to the starting vestibule, you get the same dramatic description as if you just entered the room with the station exploding behind you.

Moving on further, you reach a hall with a dead creature.

Taking a turn west, there’s a combat robot, and trying to move on further is disasterous.

I’ve explored more rooms but I’m still getting a feel for the geography (and what interactions really work) so I’ll save more details for next time.

(And thanks to Allen Wyatt, who has been helpful with the history here, as he worked for Advanced Operating Systems starting in mid-1981. He moved to Michigan City to be closer to AOS in late 1982 but had to move again a few months later to Indianapolis when the operation got wrapped back into the main headquarters location.)

Posted August 15, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with caves-of-olympus

I’ve finished the game, and you’ll need to have read my previous post to make sense of this one.

Before I get back into the game proper, I’d like to do a side trip into history, as this game (and the Softside adventures in general) relate to something interesting about the history of “public domain” distribution companies and preservation as a whole. With that in mind let’s visit the retailer Currys (“Britain’s Electrical Specialists”) before they were bought by Dixons in 1983–

(Ad allegedly from 1980 according to the channel. Does anyone know what is up with UK stores and their lack of apostrophes?)

In 1982, Les Ellingham was a special project manager at Currys, and had the task to launch selling Atari 8-bit computers. Ellingham proposed starting a user’s group in order to more easily show off the Ataris, and got space in a pub in an upstairs room. This was the genesis of BUG (the Birmingham Users’ Group).

The first night — advertised on posters — ended up having a “massive turnout”, and based on the success of the group, they started also producing a newsletter (edited by Ellingham).

The founder himself, writing in Input/Output:

The main objective is to encourage Atari owners in this country to begin writing their own programs, but for those of you who are not as yet ready there are plenty of reviews and hints, and tips for beginners. The magazine started in conjunction with the Birmingham User Group, but is now produced independently although several BUG members contribute material. It has grown quite quickly and many people see it as the UK equivalent to ANALOG magazine.

Page 6 had a strong focus on adventures, trying to keep up a list of every Atari adventure game ever made, and issue 10 (July/August 1984) was a “special issue” devoted solely to the game genre.

Like many Users’ Groups from the 80s, they had a library of public domain software, and unlike many Users’ Groups from the 80s, the entire library is online. Disk #82 (Super Adventures 6) includes both Robin Hood and The Mouse That Ate Chicago (for Atari, of course). The games aren’t technically public domain in the legal sense, being copyrighted by Softside, but if a game showed up in a magazine disk, it seemed to be fair game for any distributors. For those of us delving into gaming history, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: I get the impression that the BUG specifically might be the reason we have a complete Atari collection for the Softside Adventure of the Month games (whereas for TRS-80, for instance, we only have a small selection); one of the early games in the series (I think Alien Adventure?) I only found on a Page 6 disk.

One practical upshot is that when Dale Dobson ran through the complete series, he played the Atari versions which were the only ones readily available. The other upshot is that while Robin Hood had a bug for Atari not present in the Apple, the reverse seems to be true here.

The mice were supposed to be wandering about more than they were (Sam in particular can be lethal), but for some reason their routine was broken. I switched over to Atari and was able to finish the game.

First, a detail I missed that is purely for story. The mountain that was too steep to climb has a cave, and you can enter it to see what happened to Hans and the Professor.

Second, something I had attempted in the Apple version which worked, except (I think) I had the emulator speed too high. If you go to the river where the fight happened and try to GO RIVER, there’s a message…

GASP…PANT…CHOKE

…which made me think I just couldn’t swim. There had briefly flashed on the screen another room, wherein our intrepid mouse-slayer had gone to the bottom of the river.

It immediately occurred to me — especially given the CAT BURGALAR reference when trying to enter a house — that I needed some milk. The grocery store was still open and obliged, and I was able to drop the saucer and use POUR BOTTLE to get a saucer with milk. I tried taking it to the front of the (still-closed) pet store but no cats were being attracted.

Back when I was playing the Apple II version I wandered for many, many turns waiting for the stores to be open. Knowing Kirsch’s prior game had “drama timing” I figured that was the case here (that is, certain events aren’t based on X turns passing, but rather when the player reaches goal Y). As another example, even in the Atari version the mice don’t start wandering until you enter the powerline area.

I was unsure the first time around, but I think the way to read this scene is that Maja is the super-huge mouse, and the other three are simply regular-huge. That is, Maja is Godzilla, King of the Monsters, and can only be taken down by a similarly impressive monster.

Sam is the one that was hanging on Hanco*ck Building (and is the only one of the four that killed me by hanging around). The other two are Puji and Fiji, neither who get descriptions.

To take down Puji, you shoot the powerlines while the critter is nearby. Trying to shoot powerlines at any other time simply has the shot miss, and yes, this doesn’t make any sense.

(Game design reflection moment: this game is supposed to be about discovering the weaknesses of the mice. It is perfectly fair to have only this one succumb to an electrical trap — maybe Sam and Fiji are are too alert and dodge, and Maja is so big he just ignores it. What isn’t fair is having the shot itself fail when the wrong mouse is in the room. In a way, this is trying to make the gameplay easier by preventing a softlock — probably the powerline-shooting would only work once. In a Lucasarts style game, this would be unacceptable. However, I honestly would rather have had the mouse-evasion-plus-softlock scene; I would have known to reload, and it would have given a strong clue I was on the wrong track, just with the wrong victim. A simple UNDO feature, not yet invented, would have evaded this being a real gameplay problem, or the game could even auto-UNDO, similar to failing at one of the grail traps in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The general design lesson is that preventing failure doesn’t always make life easier on the player.)

I was on the right track with cheese on the bridge (which never worked, likely because the cheese-hungry Fiji never goes that way); if you DROP CHEESE at the quicksand your player will automatically put it in as a trap.

This is the moment where the music store but not the pet store opens. The music store, just like the grocery store, is happy to give you something for free if they have it in stock.

(Game design reflection moment #2: drama time is often seen as the superior alternative to constant time advance, but drama time can be so cryptic to decipher that it only works in particular circ*mstances. Certainly Outer Wilds did fine with not only constant time advance but real time. So while it is a more “modern” approach — maybe not the best term since it shows up in 1981 — it isn’t automatically better.)

The music store was more cryptic than the grocery store to figure out but fortunately there aren’t that many instruments that are associated with mice. We need a flute.

With flute in hand you can attract Sam’s attention; as long as you’re in the room adjacent, PLAY FLUTE will cause him to come towards you. Given the bridge hadn’t been used yet, it was quickly clear what route I needed to take.

There’s still the giant, Maja, to contend with, but fortunately the pet store has decided to open. (I get what the author was after using drama time. Due to the plot beat which you’ll see shortly Maja’s defeat has to come last. If I was designing this I would have made the method of defeating the smaller mice available right away and had some specific connection to the pet store owner — maybe they’re too afraid to come until they’ve seen you’ve defeated 3 out of 4, and then they’re willing to let you in.)

I already had the milk-in-a-saucer so I already had a plan: take the cat to the enlarging machine, drop the saucer off to keep him from wandering, activate the machine, and … profit?

This could have been Kirsch’s best game so far. Everything is one connected puzzle. Nearly all the action the player takes is participatory comedy, which is rare even in modern games. The writing could be better but generally hits the right tone all the way through.

However, details matter enough in game design it was still a miss. The promise of being able to figure out the mouse vulnerabilities via observation was an illusion. The movement was random and a bit broken (and even in the Atari version, I had a dead mouse randomly appear somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be). The powerlines puzzle was broken in an effort to keep the wrong mouse from being fried.

At least the ending was comedic and satisfying at the same time.

Yes, I’m sure that won’t be a problem at all.

Coming up: the return of the warm, soothing glow of Apple II graphics.

Posted August 14, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with the-mouse-that-ate-chicago

Then Hans, holding a dripping cheeseburger in one hand, said, “This is a great moment, Professor!”

“Yes, Hans, we shall be able to enlarge anything we so choose. We shall be richer than kings and emperors. We shall own the world.”

We’ve reached August for Peter Kirsch’s next installment of the Softside Adventure of the Month. (Previously: Robin Hood Adventure.) I don’t have absolute confirmation this time the author is him (the author credit tends to be on the TRS-80 version, which nobody seems to have) but the structure is identical to his other games.

So many of our authors, tentatively stepping into the waters for the first time, crank out either a Crowther/Woods fantasy or a haunted house game. Kirsch, needing a game every month, is trying out all the genres. This is not just a giant monster story but also a comedy.

Hans carefully watches the Professor as he turns on the machine as cheese from his burger slowly drips onto the platform.

The two men stare silently at the hunk of carbon as it begins to glow.

Suddenly, unnoticed, a small mouse scampers onto the platform to the cheese…

Giant mice with catchy names have been unleashed and are destroying Tokyo Chicago, and our job is to stop them.

I have both Apple II and Atari versions but I stuck with Apple II since I had already set up a disk the same time as Robin Hood. I have a download at this link.

The narrative experiment here is to create a wide-open map where the mice essentially roam freely. You’re just supposed to set up … traps I think? Unfortunately, given I have yet to defeat any of the mice, so I don’t know if that’s true generally.

I can give the complete map (so far), the items I’ve gotten (which is not many) and the general behavior of the mice. A zoomed out look at the landscape first:

I’ve divided the map into four regions; the southeast (where you start) is the Laboratory, to the southwest is the Bridge, to the northeast are some Stores, and a powerline-laden road leads to Downtown in the northwest.

Before the action starts, your inventory has a wallet with $39.98.

The road you start on includes a “quicksand bog” which is so far the only place I’ve found you can die…

The laboratory is three rooms: east and west rooms with a MACHINE and a room in the middle with LASER-SHAPED RODS. The machine has a red RESET switch, a green #1 button, and a green #2 button; if you hit these in order the machine will theoretically work (if something is in the laser room that it can transform). I have managed to make something GIANT but I’ll show it off later.

Moving on to the Bridge area…

…there’s a small town to the south with houses you can’t enter.

The Bridge that I’m using to name the region is given with an ominous weight limit…

…and a curious scene on the west side. I don’t know if this is meant as a joke or a hint. Knowing Kirsch it could be either.

You might think this is indicating with a bright klaxon that I’m supposed to get a mouse to follow me, and its enormous weight will drop it to its doom, but I haven’t gotten any of the critters to visibly follow me over to here yet, despite the smashed houses.

Hitting the northeastern area and the stores:

The hardware store, helpfully, has a high-powered rifle. It costs $39.99, and your wallet has $39.98, so you are one penny short. Cruel, cruel capitalism.

Fortunately, outside, there is a “young lady” who wants a “penny for your thoughts” and is being literal.

With the change added to our account we can obtain the rifle.

Two of the stores (the pet store and the music store) are closed with the owners “out to lunch”; the fourth store (a grocery store) is open, and the owner is the opposite of the hardware store owner and is giving away everything for free, as long as you say what it is and they have it in stock.

At the end of the line there’s a MOUNTAIN which is too steep to climb; I assume this comes into play later.

Now, to Downtown, and finally meeting the critters!

First off, at where the powerlines start, is MAJA.

I don’t know what the “small rodents” indicate; I do know this is the only mouse that wanders, although he sticks to the powerline area.

Chicago has more stores, but try to enter them and you get rebuffed by a gust of wind.

Satisfyingly, not long after both of these buildings become SMASHED versions (this happens offscreen). Wandering further there’s another mouse (SAM) wrecking havoc:

I have seen either of the other two mice. I might being hearing one of them as I have been walking around with the message

SQUEAK…SQUEAK

sometimes appearing, although this may be connected to the fact that in the laboratory I created giant stinky cheese.

I haven’t been able to FEED MOUSE or tempt the monsters onto the bridge via dropping cheese in the middle or anything like that. I’ve honestly been having trouble communicating in general, with the only verbs working off my standard list being READ, DRINK, POUR, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, SHOOT, THINK, HOLD, PLAY, GIVE, and ENTER.

The machine incidentally does not work to create a giant rifle (even if you try to convert it before the cheese). I suspect it only works on particular types of matter.

That’s all I have. Despite the size of the map, a lot of the rooms are “filler” (YOU’RE IN DOWNTOWN CHICAGO, no description otherwise) and I suspect some of the geography will be leveraged in the puzzles as we try to lead mice in various ways to their doom. I’m happy to take any speculation people want to make on what to try next.

Posted August 13, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with the-mouse-that-ate-chicago

I’ve finished the game. This link will read my posts in order.

My sequence was:

• conquering one bit where I had previously tried a verb correctly, but not on the sub-noun the game wanted, revealing a new area
• using an item from the new area to bust through the bricked-up door, but it’s pretty esoteric; this leads to the treasure-deposit room
• solving one final puzzle in the treasure-deposit room which is really esoteric

For the sub-noun issue, I warp back up to the bathroom with the gold taps.

I had tried TURN BATH with the notion of perhaps running the water (and to be more literal, RUN WATER) but was running into the generic refusal message so moved on. I was instead supposed to type TURN TAPS. (Which, sure, I guess the game suddenly wants to start referring to sub-nouns now! That will come back again shortly.)

LOOK TOWN advertises one of the co-author’s other games:

IT’S SO FAR! FOR A CLOSER LOOK YOU WILL HAVE TO BUY MEXICAN ADVENTURE!

I tried hard mucking about the roof to see if I could fly the broomstick anywhere, but no dice. In the process, though, I tried to BURN BROOMSTICK (well, at least it is a verb I knew works) and the game informed me I needed a draught in order to start a fire.

If you recall, the bricked door help mentioned a draught, so I brought the broom down and tried burning there:

There was no real coherent thought otherwise; I wasn’t solving a puzzle as much as solving a trail. With the door busted open I could enter the final room, which is a dungeon with a skeleton. LOOK SKELETON reveals a NOTEPAD, and looking at the notepad indicates the treasures go here.

So I dropped the treasures I had (bottle of wine, gold ring, bracelet, book) and I was informed by SCORE that I had only 69 out of 100 points. I did a large search (more than an hour) across the house trying to wheedle out more treasures, including trying to unscrew the gold taps (since they are described as gold).

There was really only one treasure remaining, at it was there at the dungeon the whole time.

I don’t think there’s a “reasonable” way to solve this. I had the intuition something unreasonable was happening so I checked the source code. The only time I recall seeing a comparable puzzle was with Avventura nel Castello where I had to pick up a bone from a skeleton (even though a bone isn’t described).

You don’t pick up a bone. You pick up the skull. I combed over the source code and there’s no hint for this, and there’s no message that happens when you get the skull — it just lands in your inventory. You can then LOOK SKULL and find it has a golden bullet, which lands in the room you’re in (probably the dungeon).

Now typing SCORE confirms we have all 5 treasures and the win.

As I predicted, the source code includes a big pile of bespoke commands. I don’t recommend anyone coding a text adventure like this ever.

This is still fascinating in a historical sense because it might seem all the various tutorials we’ve seen (like the Ken Rose ones) are maybe being a little overmuch about the difficulty, but clearly here is a pair of authors who couldn’t conceive of a different way of handling a parser other than listing every single verb-noun combination a player might possibly type.

Except: remember, Secret Kingdom did have a decent parser! It must have come after this game. I think we can now assume the publishing order matches this ad listing’s order:

That is, the proper order is…

Game 1: Dark Star by A.J. Josey

Game 2: Mexican Adventure by Geoff Clark

Game 3: Haunted House by A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark

Game 4: Secret Kingdom by Geoff Clark.

…meaning I’ve been going in reverse order. (I figured out what the G. stood for as it gets listed with Mexican Adventure. Still not sure about Josey, but you’ll notice Dark Star is solely that author’s work.) After combing over the source code, I don’t think Colditz is connected (other than the Sharp programmers in general were clearly struggling to write a parser).

I weirdly had fun puzzling this out, but that’s mainly because Rob joined me in the comments to similarly take whacks at it, and I was thinking in a meta-sense of this being a mysterious artifact. I never got any sense of being in a haunted house. The game does try for random atmospheric messages and there’s even a bit where a ghost can steal your treasure if you try to wear the bracelet or drink the wine, but given the vast majority of what I typed in gave error messages I was not “engrossed” in a story sense, but rather as a historical challenge meant to be conquered.

Coming up next: kaiju.

Posted August 11, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with haunted-house-sharpsoft

(Continued from my previous post.)

No source code diving yet. I managed get at least part of the “vibe” of the parser, although some authorial decisions still mystify me.

“GO” (as in “GO NORTH”, “GO UP”) seems to be purely for directions, and furthermore, the way the parser works is to simply strike the verb out and just look at what was typed for the noun. This means GO EAST works the same as EAST. However, this also means other perfectly natural GO statements won’t work; for example, typing GO UNDERGROWTH gets parsed as UNDERGROWTH and hence:

I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY THE COMMAND ‘UNDERGROWTH’

Earlier when I was trying to GO POND and it wasn’t understood, the game is simply wanting ENTER there instead.

YOU FIND A DEEP HOLE IN THE POND AND HAVE DROWNED!!

(Für Elise plays, mourning our player avatar’s loss.)

The purpose of the hollow log is simply as a floatation device, so as long as a player is holding the log, they won’t die going in the pond, and will be able to find a key instead.

Using the key you can then unlock the (otherwise not-visible) door at the front of the house, and go inside. Despite the threat from the rock, we are not trapped in.

I don’t yet have a full map of the inside, but at least I’ve got more to explore than last time.

Just to the north is a COMPUTER in a drawing room, and we are told it is a SHARP MZ-80K. I tried to insert my tape a few ways and was having trouble, so just went straight to HELP which told me to LOAD CASSETTE.

It’s unique for the desire to acquire treasure to be a secret objective that requires revealing a little ways in. I’m still not sure where we are supposed to drop the treasure; not outside, which suggests perhaps we aren’t taking the treasure with us, like how The Great Pyramid had us simply sort the treasures in a particular room. (On the other hand, Katakombs initially asked us to take the treasure to a Dark Crypt, but in the end a golem broke open the way so we could take the loot away for ourselves. I guess we “passed the test” so the denizens acquiesced.)

Heading up the stairs next, I found a library with a book that has gold leaf. This book does not let you open, read it, or interact with it anyway, so it’s just a treasure. (This is one of the vibes I mentioned — the game is cheerful about simply not letting you mess with a thing outside the context it is intended for.) Also upstairs is a study containing a desk with matches.

Present in the hall upstairs is a LAMP, which foiled my attempt at taking it with “A STRANGE FORCE”. Again, interpreting the vibe can help: this means you shouldn’t be thinking of taking the lamp at all, but doing something else with it. Indeed, if you look at the lamp, it is described as “oriental”, implying the right action is RUB LAMP.

Upstairs there’s a bedroom with a window you can enter, taking you to a ledge with a bracelet (a treasure) in addition to a bathroom with a BATH that is described as having GOLD TAPS, imply treasure-ness, but I haven’t been able to scavenge anything.

Down at a “Parlour” there’s a cupboard that is enterable, and a green knob. Typing PULL KNOB reveals a basem*nt area.

Inside the basem*nt there’s a bottle described as valuable (still don’t know where the treasures go) and the room that is currently mystifying me:

I haven’t found a way to refer to the supports (and burning doesn’t work). Typing HELP indicates there is a “draught” but I’m not sure what to do with this information. Whatever is supposed to be done here seems to be entirely bespoke (that is, I need the exact two-word phrase in order to move further).

I realize for you just reading along, it may not be apparent how badly the parser is doing. It absolutely is awful. Even ENTER (which I thought before was honestly coded) gets befuddled here; when I tried to ENTER BATH the game says I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY THE COMMAND ‘ENTER BATH’. With essentially no reassurance than any verb in particular might work, the game has a much stronger aura than normal of “guess what the author wants”. In this case I’m not even sure if the magic phrase will involve DOORWAY, DOOR, SUPPORT, SUPPORTS, or BRICKS as the noun. So it might be possible I run across a solution but don’t pair it with the noun the game is hankering for. To find something worse I have to go the very bottom with games like Deathship which didn’t even bother to describe what happened if you did an action successfully.

Again there is the lure of the source code. I don’t think there’s any going back if I check (given what I’m likely to see is a list of complete phrases that lead to completing the game) so I really still want to hold off if I can.

Posted August 10, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with haunted-house-sharpsoft

Today we re-visit the Sharp series of computers, and specifically the Sharp MZ-80K, the original built from a kit. Haunted House is the third game we’ve had from Sharpsoft. We’ve already tried out Colditz (1981) and Secret Kingdom (1982). The author of the latter, G. Clark, is listed as a co-author for this game, along with A.J. Josey. However, it is faintly possible (for reasons I’ll get into) that one or both authors also worked on Colditz.

(I realize they’re not technically pseudonyms, but I still always feel like an author is mysterious when they use their initials. If nothing else, it makes it impossible for me to search if they’re on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatnot and still making things.)

I don’t have an additional history to throw at you here that wasn’t already in my last two posts, except I found a review that points out “all the Sharpsoft games” are £5.85 and this was considered expensive. We’re getting the deluxe experience, everyone!

The start of the game includes some music, so I’ve made a video to let you get your Beethoven on:

It does not set up this “introductory adventure” as spooky to me, but whatever works.

I’m not sure what the objective is yet. Normally with this ambiguity I would automatically say “take the treasure to the right place” but haunted house games do often have an “escape” or “kill vampire” theme so I’ll hold on that until I’ve had confirmation.

There are only four starting rooms, in a two by two square. At the start, to the northeast, is the room shown above with the warning. The rock seems to be unmovable and unclimbable.

To the northwest is some undergrowth concealing a cassette (you can find it with LOOK UNDERGROWTH, looking at the cassette reveals it is a standard C12).

To the southwest is a pond with a log. The log is described as hollow and the pond is described as having shallow parts.

The last room, to the southeast, has a GARGOYLE which is also a GRIFFIN, somehow.

You’ll notice there seems to be no way in the house. The HELP command at the house indicates you should UNLOCK DOOR, and the game does seem to indicate a door is present if you try to unlock it (“YOU DON’T HAVE THE KEY TO THE DOOR!”) and there is otherwise no way to see the door is there. (You can look at the house, but the game just says it looks haunted and you shouldn’t go there.)

Now I suppose I should mention the relation with Colditz —

The parser is dodgy, much dodgier than in Secret Kingdom. I could see a writing progression going Colditz – this game – …. – Secret Kingdom with improvement between games.

To illustrate, here is my verb hunting list:

That’s almost too tiny to do anything, and I think JUMP has an auto-reject message as “A FRIENDLY SPIRIT STOPS YOU.” EAT doesn’t really eat, it just goes EAST; that is, only the first two letters are being used to parse EAst. WE, NO, and SO also all work, suggesting this is a two-letter parser overall, but then if you take that non-visible door and try to UN DO (rather than the full UNLOCK DOOR) the game says

I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN BY ‘UN DO’

The phrase “UNLOCK DOOR” is hard-coded in so that you have to be standing in that exact spot for it to work, and you have to type the full phrase.

All the parser reject messages follow that same form (I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN) so you can’t puzzle any extra things out other that what is on the list. Despite the pond and log seemingly both hiding something, I haven’t been able to get help from either. I even used my entire verb list specifically on the LOG just to be sure.

Come to think of it, this is in some ways worse than the Colditz parser — even though that was a one-letter parser at least it became clear early on what worked to communicate, and the game tried to hand out explicit command combos. Here, it’s like the parser is pretending to be one that understand things but falls incredibly short even though the game clearly requires some “normal” parser commands to make any progress. At least I don’t have to type LOOK DETAILS rather than LOOK to examine the room.

I’m going to keep taking my best swing at this a little while longer, but this seems a candidate for assuming that puzzling out directly from the source code will be part of the game.

ADD: If someone wants to play and doesn’t want to deal with emulator wrangling, I dropped a copy in the comments where you just need to start the mz80k executable, then load the save state.

Posted August 9, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with haunted-house-sharpsoft

Ken Rose’s Adventures in Adventuring column has featured in this blog once before, where I wrote about the first three installments, including Journey to Planet Pincus. The column was printed in the bi-monthly magazine Softline (essentially an extension of the Sierra brand, at least when it started) and was meant to teach people how to program their very own adventures in BASIC.

Today I’m going to take down the remaining issues of 1982.

Just like the previous three installments, there’s a prefatory article explaining the thing being taught; unlike the previous three, the source code has no commentary with REM statements. My guess is as the games started getting longer it became harder to justify the print space. The September article even discusses the increasing length:

You’ll probably notice that as these programs become more sophisticated, they become longer. Most of the length is taken up not by the logic of the program but by the descriptive words needed to flesh out the story. In fact, in most commercial adventure games, the program takes up very little of the disk. The bulk of the disk is filled with the wordy descriptions used to make the game interesting.

The articles still explain what’s going on section by section. I’m hence treating these as “teaching exercises” rather than full-fledged attempts at games; each games tries to emphasize one particular aspects of adventures as opposed to being complete experiences.

I did manage to avoid having to type in any of the type-ins. Werewolf and Minotaur I found on this disk at the Internet Archive. It was uploaded from “crates” via the Rhode Island Apple Group, and this particular disk comes from the Big Red Computer Club (a public domain distributor similar to Brunswick Publications). However, I couldn’t find any Apple disks that had the Diamond game.

What saved me is the Atari. All the programs from the Adventures in Adventuring series were converted to Atari and then sold on disk. You can find the files in a thread here.

However, there’s a catch! Disk 2, the one shown above, is corrupted. I used the Atari Explore disk utility and was able to rescue Diamond and Minotaur; Diamond is the file that I didn’t have in Apple form. I have a hacked version of the disk here (with the menu for disk 1 — pick option 2, Please Pass the Zork, which will actually play Diamond).

So the upshot is I’m playing July on Apple II, September on Atari, and November back on Apple II. All three only give credit to Ken Rose (and given Michael Rose — who after some Internet scrounging I am 98% sure is Ken’s younger brother — was pretty explicitly mentioned in Jan. and May, I’m not going to assume he’s not involved here, but it is faintly possible).

The Werewolf Howls at Dawn

The easiest way to control time is to set up a counter that keeps track each time a move is made. These moves can be called hours, or minutes, or stardates, and they can be incremented every time another move is made. This is the technique illustrated in this month’s program.

This is essentially a 5-minute game. The idea is you’ve been bitten by a werewolf and have a limited number of turns to get some wolfsbane which will cure your condition, so the game is showing off how a “timer” works in a game.

The room descriptions, at least, are colorfully done. There are regular messages indicating your slow transformation into wolf-form.

Curiously, the parser has regressed: it’s the type where you type in a verb, and then if it applies, you type in a noun. This game is so simple the author apparently wanted to isolate just the time-changing aspect.

You just need to grab some CATNIP from the cave and some PLANT CLIPPERS from a swamp. Then you need to pass by a panther, with THROW CATNIP.

Past the panther is an alcove with the medicine you need. The clippers need to be used to CUT first, then you EAT.

This game isn’t that surprising out of context; if all I was doing was demonstrating a global timer, I’d also want the game to be short in order to quickly show off how it works (and how it’s not just a simple “move” increment but actually using a clock). The only part I’d do differently is make sure that typing in something wrong (like a bad direction) would not increment the time, and discuss the idea of how meta-moves and mistakes shouldn’t count, because something as simple as a typo can then kill the player.

The main issue is that not everyone would encounter this game in context! It was, as I mentioned, on a public domain disk, and made it to an unofficial DOS port. I imagine some people popped it open expecting something a little more substantial, when something substantial might have actually interfered with the demonstration.

The Case of the Pig-Headed Diamond

The September article is titled The Thing’s the Thing and is “about” objects. Again the game is quite small.

This month we’ll deal with the handling of objects in an adventure program — how to pick things up, use things, and drop them. Our adventure has a mystery theme, in that we will be trying to recover a stolen diamond of little value.

The game has switched back now to a two-word parser. I’ve been wondering if all these games were really written in sequence for the articles or if there was a certain amount of scrounging from the archives, so to speak. Again, the map is quite simple:

The room descriptions have been nuked for functionality. (And less room in the magazine.)

There are no room exits so mapping is slightly slower than the previous game (which was good enough to mention every possible exit in descriptions). The overall effect is for the game to feel even more like a demo than Werewolf.

You first need to grab a shovel, and then use that shovel to dig out a ladder from a garage. Why the garage has a dirt floor is left unclear.

Then take the ladder inside to find a chandelier.

You can use the ladder to help grab the diamonds.

CLIMB LADDER

YOU HAVE OBTAINED SOME DIAMOND—LIKE PENDANTS HANGING ON THE CHANDELIER. YOU CLIMB DOWN THE LADDER.

…and then the Atari BASIC broke down and kept insisting on “TWO WORDS PLEASE” over and over after making the heist. Oh well. I think I’ve seen enough here.

ADD: Matt W. in the comments points out the actual goal: bring the ice cubes back (the chandelier is a fake-out) as well as some matches. If you drop the matches first at the bank, then drop the ice, you’ll get a “win”.

4020 IF OB(3) = 1 THEN PRINT : PRINT “THE MATCHES FLARE UP AND MELT THE ICECUBES AND OUT FALLS A CHEAP INDUSTRIAL GRADE DIAMOND. NOT MUCH, BUT ENOUGH TO WIN.”: PRINT : GOTO 4100

I would much prefer to teach good game design at the same time as teaching the programming, but I suppose the author felt it was appropriate here to noodle around with fake-outs, especially given the number that appear in the next game.

The “adventure” part is so barren I can understand why this game was left off the Apple II disk. It really is just a demonstration.

The Labyrinth of the Minotaur

For the November article, Ken Rose feels obliged to teach us about mazes. Could we skip teaching the masses that one, please?

Ever since Adventure, it has been almost a requirement that an adventure game contain a maze. Perhaps the neatest among the current ones is the maze in Zork I, because of its complexity and the necessity of exploring it thoroughly.

I assure you it is not “almost a requirement”, especially given the author’s own Palace in Thunderland did not have a maze! To be fair I think the percentage of adventures with mazes has been roughly 80%, not counting “confusing geography” as a maze, and some of that no-maze percentage comes from multi-title authors like Scott Adams and Peter Kirsch who shook off the need to have a maze in all their games.

I can say of all the games, it is the only one that felt “substantial”; it took about an hour to map out.

The game gives only five gems to map 20 rooms. You can do the “relay” method to an extent (take the red gem you used in the room 1 and transfer it to room 6) but that only works if some of the exits don’t warp you back a significant way, and you might notice a room two away from the exit room goes nearly back to the start.

In addition to that annoyance, the game includes death rooms next to signs.

Another sign tells you “Don’t go west” and the exits of east, south, and west all kill you. (That is, both following the sign and following its opposite by going east are both deaths.)

You’ll finally hit a sign that says ABSOLUTELY DON’T GO NORTH and that’s when you finally do want to go north, escape, and reach the twist ending.

The maze is a “cheap” way to extend game time. It forces the player to slow down and map and requires almost no design thinking on part of the author. And I guess people were still having … fun with it? At least I appreciated the moments of cruelty mixing things up, even if I only muscled through by using save states on my emulator.

Postnote

The author indicates the development so far has been systematic…

Those of you who have been following this series of articles can probably see how we have been using various routines to build up from very primitive programs to some level of sophistication. If you entered the game late and are feeling a bit bemused by all this, pick up earlier issues of Softline and you’ll be able to see why these things work as they do.

…and I’m not quite so sure, given it isn’t using the exact same structure every time. For example, in Minotaur the maze data is all saved together as one data file, and only uses N/S/E/W:

10010 DATA 2,7,1,1,1,7,3,2,3,8,3,3,3,4,5,4,5,5,5,5,21,
16,16,16,1,1,7,7,4,8,8,9,4,9,10,8,5,15,15,15,7,16,11,11,
17,7,12,12,8,13,13,12,9,19,14,14,15,15,14,15,11,16,16,
6,12,17,17,11,13,18,18,18,18,20,20,20,20,20,20,20

while Diamond splits things up, and includes UP/DOWN directions.

10020 DATA 3,1,0,0,0,0, “LONG SHADY ROAD”
10030 DATA 5,2,0,0,0,0, “BOTTOM OF HILL”
10040 DATA 0,0,5,0,0,0, “DUSTY GARAGE”
10050 DATA 8,2,6,4,0,0, “OPEN FRONT DOOR”
10060 DATA 0,0,0,5,0,0, “OVERGROWN GARDEN”

Any of the source code could be helpful for a budding adventure writer, just if I was building the series I would have tried to build up the source code so later months always duplicated prior months precisely. We saw something approaching this systematic approach with Basem*nt and Beasties. At least the line numbers essentially match in terms of section organization. For example, moving around in Minotaur starts at 1410:

1410 IF VIS = “NORTH” THEN R = N(R)
1420 IF VIS = “SOUTH” THEN R = S(R)
1430 IF VIS = “EAST” THEN R = E(R)
1440 IF VIS = “WEST” THEN R = W(R)

and it does as well in Diamond, just the logic has sightly different structure:

1410 R1 = R
1420 IF VIS = “NORTH” AND N(R) > 0 THEN R = N(R)
1430 IF VIS = “SOUTH” AND S(R) > 0 THEN R = S(R)
1440 IF V1$ = “EAST” AND E(R) > 0 THEN R = E(R)
1450 IF V1$ = “WEST” AND W(R) > 0 THEN R = W(R)
1460 IF V1$ = “UP” AND U(R) > 0 THEN R = U(R)
1470 IF VIS = “DOWN” AND D(R) > 0 THEN R = D(R

I can’t claim this is arbitrary as teaching material, then, although I’m most curious where things eventually lead, as there are three more months to go in 1983. Will there be a “culmination” adventure including all the previous learnings, or will the series just fade out?

Posted August 7, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with werewolf-diamond-minotaur

(You can read all my entries on this game in order here.)

I had the nagging feeling there was some frustrating, brand-new way of hiding stuff I had to muscle through, and then I could make it to the end of the game. I was essentially correct.

Bach to the maze!

And specifically, something where I was looking at what I wrote and re-considered my position. Here, I’ll go meta:

Given finding the bunk in the first place required searching some wreckage (and it is the only place where SEARCH works in the game), I thought it highly improbable there was nothing here, but I concluded after failing enough times it was a situation where I needed to come back later (maybe pushing a different button elsewhere opens a secret). Not an unreasonble conclusion, but the vent picture in particular kept nagging at me, so I kept trying a whole slew of things, like LOOK UP (on my regular checklist, but it didn’t work here) and, for what I believe is a first for this blog, EXAMINE CEILING.

Colossally frustrating. I have trouble believing I could — in the real circ*mstances — be searching so thoroughly and never come across a grille that’s right there. At least I got saved by the ZX Spectrum picture; the TRS-80 and BBC Micro version have no such help. (Dave Dobson needed a walkthrough here and somehow that didn’t bother him, but I’ll get back to that.)

It’s also unclear from the description (and attempts to enter) that you need to JUMP to enter, you can’t just GO in.

Just above is an area with a cable. I immediately guessed that went back to the lathe, but I wanted to explore a little further before testing that.

The storage crate here has a square block. Remembering that the oven needed something ROUND in a hole, and that the cable probably goes to the lathe … I immediately knew what to do next, except for the eternal “struggle with the parser” bit.

Specifically, you need to FIX LATHE while you have the cable (not PLUG CABLE, or INSERT CABLE, or ATTACH CABLE … you’re not really fixing it in the classical sense, are you? …).

Something happened!
Lathe works

Then you can TURN CUBE (??) in order to insert the cube in the machine and transform it into a ROUND BLOCK. With this in hand you can go back to the oven and FIX OVEN (not INSERT ROUND BLOCK, of course). With the mix I mentioned last time (including the tablets) you can make a poisoned fruit cake made especially for the creature.

I then took the magnetic boots, and the space suit from the locker, suited up, went over to the airlock with the orange button, and–

I’m blasted into deep Space!
I’M DEAD!

Well. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Fortunately, I already had a bead on an alternate exit, because I went around trying EXAMINE CEILING on all the bunks and found the Captain’s Bunk (which already held the tablets) also held another secret.

I admit I was annoyed at the game enough at this point that I just checked a walkthrough. I was missing the fact at the lathe you could GO LATHE. Urf.

Because I had already been noodling with the MAKE command off the verb list, I came across MAKE SCREWDRIVER without too much trouble, which is apparently enough to allow REMOVE PANEL back at the Captain’s Bunk. You do not refer to the clips that hold the panel down despite them clearly being part of the issue. It seems like for every basic action, the game insists I try phrasing it four different ways before it’ll work.

The rest is straightforward: you walk into an airlock, out the ship to a shuttle, and escape. (Putting on those boots and suit in the middle there, and pressing the white button at the Bridge from a while back was needed to let the airlock open.)

Look. Object Hunt: the Game can be fun; I already noted that Jigsaw essentially uses it as its premise (but also with a prevent-change-in-the-timeline plot and delicious prose). The gameplay here was essentially overwhelmed with me having to check if there were any more obscure ways to EXAMINE a thing I was missing, cojoined with an epic parser struggle. There was a creature to worry about, I guess? But it just peacefully hung out waiting for you to bring some poison, and was only a threat if you decided to take a nap. (There’s technically a time limit too — after enough turns the natural daylight cycle of the ship turns off and you need to leave the rod on, and your rod can run out of energy. I never came close to this being a problem.) The overall plot effect was the most un-heroic disaster escape ever made.

Both nimusi and Exemptus at the CASA Solution Archive had similar disappointment to myself over the game. Exemptus additionally points out the larder (the room) works as a container that you can pick up and carry around with you.

What I find fascinating is that Dave Dobson (and one of his commenters) had the exact opposite reaction.

Escape from Pulsar 7 was an entertaining challenge — not too arbitrary, and tough for (mostly) the right reasons. Maybe I’m just personally biased toward the science fiction side of things, but I had a lot more fun on the Pulsar 7 than in Howarth’s fantasy worlds.

I totally agree that this was better than the Arrow of Death games. Needed some of your tips there!

It’s easy to brush over such disparity with “it’s just subjective” and move on, but given how often my opinion has matched Mr. Dobson’s, it’s worth some thought about what’s going on. I don’t think it’s just because of being sci-fi. Studying his post, he had to use the walkthrough on three crucial parts:

I had to reference a walkthrough to learn that SMASH LOCKER (once the hammer has been found) is the way to access its contents.

There are two points where we have to EXAMINE CEILING from a bunk to find somewhere new to go — I missed this entirely and needed a walkthrough nudge, as the first ceiling entrance I found was clearly visible.

I spent quite a bit of time in the Pulsar 7’s airlock trying to figure out how to keep myself from getting blasted into space. Even when I was wearing the space suit and magnetic boots, the result was always the same. A much-appreciated walkthrough informed me that there’s a secondary, well-hidden emergency airlock.

For the second moment in particular, not only did I not need to check a walkthrough, I found it enraging when I solved it. Is this a possibility where using a walkthrough makes a puzzle more palatable? I certainly have encountered games before where people have given thumbs-up but I long suspected that the thumbs-up is conditional on not lingering too long trying to figure things out. Perhaps Dobson was being more casual here about when to check hints and moved on as soon as the experience started to be trying.

Still, though, better than Arrow of Death Part II? That game featured a clever unfolding structure which overlapped, and had reasonable enough puzzles I made it all the way with no hints at all.

For the record, my current ranking is something like

Pulsar < Golden Baton < Arrow Part I < Time Machine < Arrow Part II

but maybe (as my final theory) some people are more immune to guess-the-verb troubles.

Posted August 6, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction

Tagged with escape-from-pulsar-7

(Continued from my last post.)

I have been making progress in the game, but in a weird scattered way that is hard to write about.

I was getting tripped up by how you look at things in the game. When a text adventure author wants to hide things in the items of a game that gets revealed, they have a few options:

a.) Just have one consistent command, like LOOK, for everything.

b.) Have examining and searching be considered separate actions.

c.) Add in LOOK UNDER or LOOK BEHIND.

d.) Require some specific “movement” command like MOVE or PUSH.

In addition to all the above, a game might have a “second order” style looking, where a description of an object has something inside it that can be looked at (as we saw with El Diablero and the thread).

Now, none of the above necessarily are “good” or “bad” design on the face of it, but they need to be implemented in such a way that the game is careful about feedback. Jigsaw (1995, Graham Nelson) has finding hidden objects as a mechanic, and introduces this early with a rolling stool.

Vestry
The vestry once held surplices. Today, it holds a surplus. Debris, broken furniture, blown-in leaves, panes of dusty glass and mildewed cloth, all unwanted.

There’s even an old Victorian piano stool, but no sign of a piano.

>examine stool
An old wheeled piano stool, wide and tall, with a hinged and padded seat.

>search stool
You can’t see inside, since it is closed.

That makes the bit after not-so-frustrating:

>look under stool
There’s a charcoal pencil underneath the stool.

>move stool
It rolls a little.

>look

Vestry
The vestry once held surplices. Today, it holds a surplus. Debris, broken furniture, blown-in leaves, panes of dusty glass and mildewed cloth, all unwanted.

There’s even an old Victorian piano stool, but no sign of a piano.

On the floor, underneath where the stool used to be, is a pencil.

You can incidentally just move the stool; either way, the game is training you that LOOK UNDER works different than EXAMINE or SEARCH. At the very least, there are no conflicting messages, where a player thinks they did a thing, but did not actually do a thing.

Now, back to Pulsar 7, and first off, something I had on my map last time and neglected to mention.

This is a “wrecked cabin” that is inside the maze. The only thing you can see is “Wreckage” and EXAMINE WRECKAGE responds

I see nothing of interest

If you instead SEARCH, or, weirdly, FRISK the wreckage:

I’ve found something!

This reveals a bunk. The bunk appears to have nothing.

I even tested EXAMINE BUNK and SEARCH BUNK, keeping in mind Arrow of Death Part I had a moment where you could search the name of the room you were in (even though it wasn’t technically an object). I still found nothing (and later in the game, where I tested every verb on my list for reasons you’ll see in a second, I still found nothing).

This would normally be a discouraging dead-end, but thinking about the situation later, I realized I hadn’t done the same test in other bunks. Normally, EXAMINE NAMEOFROOM gets a “missing noun” error, but it at least lets you examine the bunk. I remembered it being weird that the captain’s room had nothing in it…

…so doing GO BUNK and then EXAMINE BUNK, I hit paydirt:

These are sleeping pills (which you can verify by trying to eat them, you fall asleep and get eaten by the creature). If you’re holding them with the other cake ingredients when you MIX CAKE, the tablets disappear from your inventory too, so I’m guessing they made it in.

I realized while I had looked at everything in the game, I hadn’t done both EXAMINE and SEARCH. It turns out SEARCH is (maybe) only useful at the wreckage, whereas EXAMINE works on more things. I had mentally been mislead by “I see nothing of interest” since I had (essentially unconsciously) interpreted the act of searching to be equivalent to examining, even though I was well aware authors have a tendency to separate them.

So my progress after came in pinpricks, finding out things I could examine and gathering more stuff:

Back where I was able to MOVE COUCH at the start, finding a rod underneath, I tried EXAMINE. (Which, again, I thought I had already done, but apparently I just used SEARCH.) This found me a small key (no idea where it goes) and a note.

Says:
…as the only surviving member of the PULSAR 7 crew…

That is, it is a note you wrote! This doesn’t seem to be amnesia as much as the protagonist has more knowledge than you do (which has been a odd running theme the whole time — surely the protagonist knows the layout of the ship).

Newly inspired, I finally found at the PILLOW DISPENSER I could MOVE PILLOW and find a circuit board. Using the circuit board, I then went over to the bridge and the “Console Control” and was able to INSERT BOARD.

Outside at the console, I tried EXAMINE CONSOLE and found a white and a black button. The black button does nothing, the white button says “something happened” but I have been unable to figure out what that things is. I assume it comes up later.

Not part of the examine-fest was finally being able to open the locker.

I was trying to direct actions against the locker (and had tried every single one on my list) with no luck; I needed to be directing my verb on the tool I was using. USE HAMMER breaks open the locker, and then EXAMINE LOCKER reveals it has as spacesuit.

Which I can’t use yet, because I need the magnetic boots the creature is guarding still. Hmmf.

To give my current issues:

a.) I still can’t use the oven even with the pill-poisoned cake mix. I noticed FIX OVEN seems to give a coherent response, just I don’t have the right item for it, and EXAMINE OVEN notes a round hole. My guess is I use the lathe to make something that goes in.

b.) Except I can’t get the lathe working either. I assume the socket is a power plug so I need a cord to connect the two. Is it just hiding out there? Do I need to start frisking everything too in case that’s considered a separate verb sometimes?

c.) I still have a key I don’t know the use for, and I don’t know what pressing the white button did.

d.) Surely there’s something at the wreckage with the bunk? I tried every verb I could both in the “bunk room” and standing next to it.

I’m hoping I’m just missing one item that will chain-reaction the rest of this thing. I will take a hint if anyone knows one of the examine-spots is ridiculous somehow.

Posted August 5, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with escape-from-pulsar-7

We are back in the house of Brian Howarth, whose Mysterious Adventures series started with Golden Baton, followed by The Time Machine, Arrow of Death Part I, and Arrow of Death Part II.

Howarth still had a friendly relationship with Molimerx who kept publishing his games in TRS-80 format (Dale Dobson used that version in his playthrough) but he also had his own spinoff company Digital Fantasia in order to make BBC Micro and (eventually) ZX Spectrum ports.

The new element here is that Mr. Howarth had a collaborator: Wherner Barnes. According to an interview with Brian in Retro Gamer, Wherner was

a dude who was around the same age as me who I knew from a group of my drinking buddies that went fell-walking in the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales

and … that’s all we have. This is despite the collaboration happening for 3 of the Mysterious Adventures games (that is, about 25% of the series). I don’t know how the division of labor went — was this a situation where Howarth was just editing what someone else wrote, or was this more of a 50-50 split, or what exactly?

Well, at least we can get into detail about the game itself! The premise is that we are part of the crew of the space freighter Pulsar 7, with a mission to obtain and deliver the ore Redennium to planetoids in the Xanotar system. An alien creature was given as part of the payment from one of the planets.

The creature, normally peaceful, had managed once to escape from its cage and roll around in some Redennium. Unfortunately, this led to disasterous effects in the days ahead, as the creature grew at an alarming rate and started to kill and eat crew members.

Everyone is now dead except for you and the still-hungry creature. Your goal is to reach the freighter’s shuttlecraft and escape.

We’re back to the curious ZX Spectrum graphics system (I have an explanation here of how it works) which is why there’s “color bleed” from the blue onto the black.

We’re also back to how the graphics system is oriented with the text system, which is you need to hit ENTER to switch from the picture and back. Enough information is given on the text portion you really need to be looking at that most of the time. Hence gameplay involves playing the game like a normal Scott Adams joint, except every time you enter a new room, you’re supposed to peek at the room’s picture (a process with a very small draw speed at authentic speeds) and flip back again afterwards.

When you see blanks after WHAT NOT? on my screenshots, that’s just me switching modes back and forth.

You start at a crew social area next to two rooms with bunks. If you want to speedrun Death%, go into one of the bunks rooms, GO BUNK, and then SLEEP. Fun!

With the bunk to the south, there’s a door you can close; by closing the door, the game says “Something happened!” and the bunk has a “auto-dispense pillow” but I haven’t found anyway way of taking it or manipulating it. Perhaps this is meant to tempt you into the SLEEP death above.

Back in the social room, you can MOVE COUCH…

I’ve found something!

…which reveals a “Dull Illuminant Rod”. You can then TURN, TWIST, or ROTATE the rod and it will light up. You can turn it off again the same way (unclear yet if the creature utilizes light in any way, but I could see needing to turn it off for stealth reasons).

To the west is a bunk with a different setup: there’s a vent visible.

You can GO VENT and then sometimes — sometimes! — die by the air blasting and blowing dust into your lungs. As far as I can tell this is entirely random. (I tried LISTEN and SMELL, both understood by the parser, just in case there was some indication the vent was running and was unsafe.)

Past the vent is the main part of the ship. You’ll notice it is a bit twisty and while I could see a ship being a touch labyrinthine I can’t make topological sense of what’s going on here.

To the west is an airlock where you can push a button and it blasts you into space. I get the impression this is the route we need to take to find a shuttle, just we need a little bit of safety first.

The “Ship’s Bridge” has an console with a Electrical Edge Connector (not mobile). I don’t know what to do with it.

The “Galley” connected to a “Larder” has a bottle of water, a bag of flour, and a bag of raisins.

I found a cake tin later and was able, after fussing over the parser enough, to make a CAKE MIX. (POUR the water in the tin first, then MIX while holding everything.) Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to actually do the final deed of cooking the cake. I even enlisted my verb list to help.

It seems like a lot of coverage! But given the cake, and a bit later where there’s a locker that can’t be opened, this isn’t the greatest of parsers — “knowing” a word in the vocabulary database isn’t the same as having a good response to using it, or at least a response that makes clear why the action isn’t working. There’s a “closed steel door” at the start of the game (which you arrive at the other side of after using the vent); “OPEN DOOR” says “Sorry” and you have to just imagine what’s going on, since the room is enterable from the other side (and then you’re trapped in again).

Other than the places I’ve mentioned, there’s also a “workshop” which you can only enter in one-way. It has a lathe (which the game says needs repair) and a socket (which I have not been able to manipulate or get a description of).

Going down from the workshop leads to a maze. The maze has a lot of “loop back to the room you’re in” exits, so when mapping them out I used a line stub to indicate the loop for a cleaner image. Additionally, “up” is on the northeast side and “down” is on the southeast side of each room.

Other than the cake tin I already mentioned, you can get to a reactor and find a hammer and peice of wood. (Yes, spelled that way.) I haven’t found a use for either yet.

The “creature’s hide out” is where you can finally encounter the beast while awake.

If you duck out right away you’re safe; spend any time and you die.

CREATURE rips my head off!

My best bet is I need to finish baking the cake by fighting the parser boss, and somehow that will be sufficient to distract the creature long enough to get the boots. After that?… maybe we’ll be led along a chase. There’s multiple places where you can go into a “bunk” which feel like they’d be used for hiding; there’s also one extra steel door that can be left open or closed leading from the “metal passageway” to the “galley” on the main map. It is possible this will be a “preparation puzzle” where we have to yoink the boots first, then do a series of puzzles to make it safely to the airlock for escape. This means while I haven’t been impressed with the game as of yet, things could pick up.

Posted August 4, 2024 by Jason Dyer in Interactive Fiction, Video Games

Tagged with escape-from-pulsar-7