The Adventurers Guild

Written by Alfred n the Fettuc

Bob journal #1 : “This is official, aliens are invading Earth! They’re going through our computers and our video games to get in our minds! And who are those weird cultists all around Paris? It’s time to investigate! Maybe the guys at the micro club will be of some help to me…”

Here we go in our first discovery of gaming in Paris. As soon as the weird intro is played out, you’re put in the very noisy shoes of Bob who is apparently going out of the “Théatre des égorgeurs” which could be translated as “Cutthroat Theatre”.

Plop

The interface is nothing to write home about but it seems pretty simple: left-click to interact and right-click to open your inventory. I start with a key and a wallet containing 200 francs (a lot when I was a child, approximately 30 bucks now). One of the cult guys is handing leaflets, which I take and read even though it’s what seems to be nonsense cult advertising. Trying to take the escalator results in the guy making a strange gesture in the air and the escalator ejecting me back in the street… strange. But I guess it means I really have to give him some money to thank him for the leaflet…

People asking for money are very persistent these days…

Ok, so I think I have to put money in his piggybank somehow. Of course the 200 francs bill doesn’t work (your character refusing to give money to the weird cult guy…) Where to look for money, well obviously there is a pay toilet cabinet here so something must be in the money receiving slot… no? Wow at least one adventure game cliché has been avoided… clicking on the pay toilet breaks the fourth wall with your character telling you “we’re not in Operation Stealth anyway…” Funny, especially considering that as far as I know both games don’t have the same company of the same production staff. Seems to be just a friendly nod to one of the competitors. A bit like a Marvel movie promoting the latest Superman flick…

Ok, let’s look around the trash then! Behind the trashcan is hidden an umbrella containing a little key. The little key opens the truck on the left, and into it, among a lot of theatrical trash, there is a coat with a button. I take the button, put it in the piggybank, and it works. The guy lets me take his magical escalator. Two things of note here. The first is this game seems to involve a LOT of pixel hunting. Both the umbrella and the button are hard to discern from the rest of the scenery. The other thing is that nothing of all of this makes sense and it’s only the first screen of the game. The solution occurred to me because I just searched everywhere randomly. There is no logic to all of this, only trial and error. Well ok, let’s not judge the game too fast and move on to the second screen.

Considering the Arc de Triomphe behind, we can safely assume that
the game takes place in one of Paris most expensive neighborhoods...

As soon as I’m here, an alien soldier teleports on the second floor of the building and drops something into a grate… he looks at it and probably decides it’s not important and leaves the screen, scaring the black cat away. The room on the right seems to be the micro club. Nothing is there except a little white pixel which is a one franc coin. Looking at the grate on the upper floor it seems the alien has dropped a weird orange thingy that I can’t reach. Not even my one franc coin can unscrew the grate. Looking at the bikes, it occurs to me that I can open the saddle of the big one, recovering some tools. Great. Let’s try this screwdriver on the grate. It works! And now I have a weird thing in my inventory called a “Shoot Prg” which doesn’t seem to be useful for anything. Strangely, the orange pixel on the bench seems to be a watch blowtorched into the wood. None of my tools seem to be able to get it free so I quit trying to recover it. I try to exit the screen and get the answer “Oh I forgot to check the Beaubourg program on the telescope”. Ok why? Why game? Why do you want me to check the Beaubourg program? It seems like I’m lacking some background infos… Well whatever. I go upstairs again and put the one franc coin in the telescope. I learn that Sark, the crazy cult artist that was on TV in the intro, is exposing in Beaubourg. When I go down the stairs again, the alien goes back to check on the thing he dropped and goes right after me. I lock the door behind me so I don’t get chased. Not doing so results in the first (of many) Game over screen.

And the music is frightening. And loud. And those eyes…
believe me you don’t want to play this game at night.

Interestingly enough, if you try and exit the screen without the Shoot Prg, the game doesn’t let you. I guess it’s kinda reassuring concerning potential missed objects and dead-end scenarios. Doesn’t explain why I can’t do anything with the watch in the bench though… Well we’ll know later if I hit a dead-end.

A cut scene showing me on my scooter and we’re on the third screen. As I arrive, we see a guy knocking out another one and stealing his bike. The knocked out guy is dead, so we go upstairs in our friend Nono’s apartment to look for the killer. He’s right around the corner so we can still catch him up (...and do what?) In the meantime, one of the cult guys appears and makes the body disappear with a laser gun! Something fishy is definitely going on here…

The streets of Paris are definitely less safe every day.

I find a pneumatic hammer in the building site next door and use it to retrieve some kind of cult badge that was pressed into the tarmac where the body was. Too bad I didn’t have that on the last screen for the watch in the bench… and of course I can’t go back. I take my own scooter in hope of pursuing the killer but it’s out of fuel… In Nono’s apartment I find his scooter keys and a compressed air bottle for flat tires. Useful also because as soon as I take his scooter, my tires flatten because of the mess made by the building site. I use the compressed air bottle to fix my tires and go after the killer. Pretty simple stuff for now! If the rest of the game is like this, it’s gonna be a piece of cake!

Spoiler alert : it won’t.

The next screen has many more things in it, including the garage where the killer’s bike is parked. If I approach it right now I get shot by a laser. Ok guys, I’ll look into the bakery and the bar first, I get the message! Jeez…

A Mastabar! From my childhood memories it’s the candy equivalent of concrete.

I try to buy stuff from the bakery but the woman doesn’t have enough change to accept my 200 francs bill. Into the bar we go. I start by ordering a chocolate and, considering the usual bar creeps don’t seem to have any information, I go straight to the back door leading to the “toilets and billiard”.

Wow 4 screens at once where to get things and informations! The game finally opens up a bit.

My gaze is immediately taken to some kind of interesting thingy up on the top of the trophy cabinet. Especially because “I’m too short” to get it and the barman enters to yell at me if I try to get it. Okay, so what do we do considering there is a chair on the left of the cabinet and billiard cues on the right? To anyone answering “climb on the freaking chair” or “use the cues to get to the thing”, we’re obviously playing the wrong game. The answer is way simpler than that : play the pool three times so one of the balls is sent flying in the bull head on the wall, so it drops a key on the ground. Use the key to open the trophy cabinet, then search every cup for ANOTHER key then use this one to open the office, where you find a switch that turns on the electric fan, which blows one of the papers on top of the cabinet to the ground… Adventure game logic at its worst… Finally I get my hands on the paper to find… yet another gibberish cult leaflet. I’m beginning to feel a bit tired. Ok let’s move on.

Bartender! Your strongest whisky please! And leave the bottle…

I pay the bartender with my 200 francs bill finally managing to get a lot of spare change coins. I also get a newspaper from the counter that I don’t seem to be able to read. I then go to the bakery and order everything that isn’t nailed down, which is a liquorice stick, a nougat bar and a Mastabar. No baguette, would have been too obvious. I’m left with finally only one place to go to: the garage! I feel I’ve made some progress because approaching the door doesn’t result in my immediate elimination. The door seems to be locked, when I realize that there is a space under the door, where to put something… Adventure game cliché 101 immediately pops into mind. Using the newspaper under the door only fetch me a “It’s a bit heavy, like the news in Fascination”, which is another bit of promotion for another game, albeit a more conventional one considering it’s from the same game company.

Using the leaflets (both of them) under the door works though and pushing the liquorice through the lock drops the key on it, allowing me to pull the papers and getting the key. It would be interesting to start a contest of the most used up puzzle in an adventure game, no? I think this one is sitting comfortably at the top of the ladder, right next to the mazes and the Tower of Hanoi puzzle.

I’ve done this puzzle so many times I’d love to check if it works in real life.
(spoiler alert : it usually doesn’t)

Finally I enter the garage which is probably linked to the hooded cult / alien invaders. After this open world bonanza of 4 screens at once, we’re back to the usual “one screen at a time” approach. Let’s try and find some clues in there.

Yay, a whole lot of new mess to search!

Opening the door to the office upstairs or making any kind of noise gets me killed and there are not a lot of hotspots to interact with. Pushing the “on” button for the ramp results in a gruesome and squishy death. Except a locked cabinet upstairs and a weird spanner that seems to hide some kind of hollow shape on the wall, there is nothing to do. I admit I was a bit stuck on this one, trying to figure out anything to do around here until I finally catch a little shape right next to the ramp button that was apparently revealed by moving the spanner in the first place.

Can’t blame me for missing this one…

Putting the badge in the imprint opens up the locker upstairs, which reveals another spanner that you have to put in the hollow shape downstairs. Then you can press “off” on the ramp controls which turns into an elevator to a secret basement. Thank god there were not many hotspots in this room because it’s another “trial and error” game to get it done. The next room shows another point of view, a bit reminiscent of Dreamweb, that we’ll play in 1994.

Well that conundrum is a bit complex for hiding a mere parking spot, no?

I die quite a few times in this place. Using the remote control that sits on the counter allows me to open the trunk (where I find a cultist hood) then the back door to hide inside. If you don’t get the hood before entering the car, you die. Forget to lock the trunk you die and if you don’t put the remote control back on the counter or try to get in the driver seat, guess what? After a few tries, I manage to do everything right and I hide in the car just before a cult guy enters the room and drives the car out of there. After a few miles, we find ourselves on a strange planet. Or this car is secretly a spaceship or there is definitely a place around Paris that I don’t know of… Whatever, as usual, we will not get any explanation for that.

We’re not in Pigalle anymore, Toto…

Finally it’s a good spot to call it a day and stop playing for now. We’re now stranded on some kind of strange planet. I’m sorry if I look a bit critical about the game but I have to confess that, even with all the logic jumps and the very caricatural puzzles, the weirdness of all this kinda pulls me toward the rest of the game. See you soon to see if my motivation stays intact after a bit more of this.

Session time : 1 hour
Total time : 1 hour

Inventory : Key micro, Wallet with coins, Shoot Prg, Hood.

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

Written by Joe Pranevich

Last time, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary went out not with a bang but with a whimper as I was unable to defeat the “final boss” of the game in epic ship to ship combat. TBD took a crack at it too, documenting the expanded version of the “Vengeance” storyline, but also failed to win. This would be a sour note to go out on, but we have one final trick up our sleeve: Fry has managed to beat the game and tell us how it was done. It’s teamwork!

After his brief look at the ending, I’ll jump into the final review.

Two minutes later and I’m dead.

No sense beating around the bush, here is Fry with his concluding notes:

This fight took dozens of attempts, so the first step was creating a save immediately at the start of the fight, so I didn't have to go through any puzzles or dialog to get back to the battle. I then created a new save in a new slot whenever I downed an enemy ship, as that's a good point of forward progress. Another key was using the keyboard commands, particularly (D)amage control and the number keys for setting your speed.

The fight starts with you in good position on the Fake Enterprise, so you want to immediately power (W)eapons and lay into it with phasers and torpedoes. With a little bit of luck you can destroy it before it wriggles out of your sights, though probably not before the Elasi pirates show up. Put your (S)hields up when the pirates arrive or you lose track of the Fake Enterprise.

When you have an opponent in view, mash left mouse for phasers. I found it difficult to get enough of a lead on a moving target to hit it with torpedoes, so I didn't use them until I had an especially good shot lined up (typically either head-on or close up behind), then I would mash both mouse buttons to unload both phasers and torpedoes. If you have a target on screen, keep adjusting your speed to maintain a good shot - low speed or reverse if they're very close to you, high speed if they're far away. If you don't have a target available, going to maximum speed seems to help reduce the amount of incoming damage.

Fry didn’t score as many commendations as I did.

Once the Elasi pirates show up, you'll start coming under fire. I turned on (E)mergency power the first time I started taking heavy damage. Using (D)amage control seemed to get critical systems repaired much faster than just leaving Scotty to his own devices. If any of your phasers or torpedoes goes out, get those repaired immediately. Keep your viewscreen repaired well enough that you can see what's going on. After that, work on Engines/Shields/Hull, probably in that order. I didn't have the mental bandwidth to try to review the ship's status, so I just put Scotty to work on whichever one felt most likely to be applicable until he reported he was done (which happens immediately, if the system is fully repaired).

Special thanks to Fry for providing that summary! Once you succeed in defeating the enemy, there’s nothing left to do. An admiral congratulates us on our victory and provides an overall score for the game. That’s it. The CD-ROM edition closes out on a titlecard honoring Gene Roddenberry, but this doesn’t make the experience less underwhelming. I did not miss much. Onward to scoring!

A brilliant visionary. We still miss him.

Final Rating

Puzzles and Solvability

When it comes to puzzles, Star Trek was fine but not fantastic. There were a few great puzzles: my favorites were the chemical mixing to cure the Romulan virus and the base-three math to gain access to the military base at the end, but there were some clunkers as well. I still do not understand the eclipse puzzle from the first episode and far too many solutions were just a matter of figuring out whether Spock or McCoy could do something that Kirk couldn’t.

Alternate solutions that involve redshirt deaths!

Another nice aspect of Star Trek was the points system. I loved that so many puzzles had alternate solutions. The fact that you had to keep your redshirt alive to get maximum credit was a great repudiation of the trope from the original series. If the puzzles were a bit deeper, this would have been a huge mark in the game’s favor. As it is, it just offset the worst offense: the battle system.

What can I say about the pointless battles in nearly every episode? They feel tacked on, like someone else on the design team was working on a combat sim and just threw it in because it was ready. The last battle, un-winnable for me and others, ends the whole affair on a sour note.

My score: 4. Some good and bad puzzles, but the combat system was ill-considered.

So many buttons, so little time.

Interface and Inventory

The interface feels like someone had described what contemporary interfaces were like to a graphic designer… over the phone. We interact with the game in three disconnected ways (combat, bridge, and away mission) and none of them are well-polished. I posted a graphic of the action icons and even readers who were playing along couldn’t name them all. It’s a mess. Add to that an inventory system that crosses the line from “inconvenient” to “broken”. Looking at items is inconsistent and using two items together can fail for no reason if you are in a different room than the author expected. I can guess why it might have been coded this way, but that does not excuse the fact that it was.

All that said, I eventually got used to the interface and accomplished most of what I needed to play the game. We have seen worse.

My score: 3. Three interfaces, none of them very good.

Story and Setting

In the original Star Trek, there were tubes on the set labeled “G. N. D. N.” for “Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing” and that pretty much sums up my experience with this game. It’s not bad exactly, but it doesn’t go anywhere. I know that the original show was not serialized, but we have different expectations in computer games. The lack of connections between episodes left us with no stakes or rising tension and the climax was easily the worst scenario of the bunch. There were good moments! I enjoyed the light-heartedness of the Harry Mudd episode and the narrative complexity of the Aztec one… but I struggle to find good things to say about the rest.

Filler text that is better than the actual episodes.

The library computer deserves special mention because it both succeeds and fails in establishing the setting. At the beginning of each mission, I consulted the computer to learn about what I was up against. Sometimes this provided essential (or at least helpful) hints, but much of the time it was infuriating. Why? Because the stories in the computer were better than the episodes we were given. It told us of Elasi worlds in rebellion, an Andorian colony in a fragile peace with their pirate neighbors, and multiple clans vying for power. I can appreciate that the snippets show that the world of Star Trek is larger than just the part that we play, but it didn’t work for me. Chekhov, the playwright not the navigator, once said, “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.” I am not saying that all games need to follow this, but it was grating just how many Chekhov’s guns were left hanging.

The final nail in the coffin for this game is the last episode. TBD’s look shows a more developed plot and puzzles, but the original game felt incomplete. The writers wanted to create a crescendo with no build-up. They invented a 20-year vendetta against Kirk and expected us to have an emotional stake in it. We didn’t. The episode could have showed that relationship and made us care. It didn’t. That all leads to the game’s final moments: a combat sequence that is too hard against an enemy that we don’t care about. If there is an award for “Worst Ending”, this game will win hands down. No wonder they redid it in the CD-ROM edition!

My score: 3. Disconnected stories building to a lackluster ending.

One of the prettiest scenes in the game.

Sound and Graphics

The graphics in this game are technically good but aesthetically dull. I went back and reviewed every scene to see ones that popped out as imaginative or that did something memorable and came away realizing just how bland much of the art is. It’s nicely colored in the same basic pallet as the original series. It utilizes basic scaling effects in a few of the episodes plus a full 3D-rendered space combat system. But looking back on the art, not much of it did more than serve the utility of the scene it was describing. The first screen of the game (above) is nicer than most of the rest of the game.

In contrast, one element that the game got right is using original Star Trek sound cues whenever possible. Many of the scenes featured only ambient sounds rather than music, but it felt right.

My score: 5. Good but not great art and sound.

Environment and Atmosphere

Although I found the aesthetics dull and the story disappointing, I have to give the designers a lot of credit for successfully translating the feel of the original Star Trek universe into a game. We had a good use of characters, consistently realized technology from the series, and the overall ideas were very Trek-like, even if the execution was sometimes less than stellar. I even liked the overuse of primary colors as respecting the old school feel of the series.

I do not like that a quarter of the game, including both the first and last scenes, are combat sequences. Not only do these not make the game feel like an “adventure”, but they also fit the least well in the Star Trek canon as I envision it-- the Enterprise is not a dogfighter. There is a lot of room for many genres of games in Trek and we will later have real-time strategy games, first-person shooters, a MMO, action games, and so many others. I am not opposed to a Star Trek space combat sim, but this one was glued awkwardly to an adventure and the result displeased fans of both.

My score: 5. It feels like Trek, except for the combat which feels like a poorly executed Wing Commander.

Dialog and Acting

An area that shined beyond its material was the dialog. The writers nailed the “voice” of the characters, so much so that I hardly needed the CD-ROM edition to hear them all in my head. The frequent banter between the characters as I played was a highlight and I loved all of the little asides when the characters (including Spock!) were high on laughing gas.

My score: 7. Character writing shined. Bravo.

You deserved it, Captain.

Final Tally

Adding up the scores we get: (4+3+3+5+5+7)/.6 = 45! I expected a better score, but the game has tremendous highs and lows. The interface was poor and the stories went nowhere but it was nice to be in the company of these characters again. I hope the sequel learns from its mistakes.

With an average guess of 58, a lot of you may be surprised by this score. I hope I’m not kicking a childhood favorite, but it just wasn’t what I hoped it would be. With that, Fry is the winner! Not only did he correctly guess the score, he did so after changing his mind down from a higher one.

Having played some of the enhanced edition, I would have scored it three points higher: one each for story (because of the improved ending), sound (for the higher quality music), and dialog (for the voice acting). That would have been a respectable 50 points, but still not a “Top 10” placement. My “Full House” for 1992 is shot already, how about yours?

That’s it for me for a while. I’ll be working on Zork until we reach game #85: Hook.

Let’s distribute CAPs!

CAP Distribution

150 CAPs for Joe Pranevich

100 CAPs - for blogging through Star Trek 25th Anniversary for everyone's enjoyment
50 CAPs - for blogging through the Dungeon Missed Classic for the enjoyment of all

85 CAPs for Voltgloss

The Grue Up Award - 5 CAPs - For finding that Starcross is also in the Zork universe in the Zork Marathon intro post
Lighting the Way Award – 5 CAPs - for explaining to another commenter how to work around bugs in the 646-point version of Dungeon
True Companion Award – 20 CAPs – for playing along with Dungeon
Truer Companion Award – 20 CAPs – for playing along with Star Trek
Adric Award – 35 CAPs - for going above and beyond what's expected of a true companion and giving extensive coverage of the differences between versions as I play along and hints when I needed them

82 CAPs for Fry

True Companion Award - 20 CAPs - for playing along with Star Trek
This is How You Do It Award - 9 CAPs - for commenting on numerous posts with his solution and providing hints to other commenters
A Winner is You Award - 20 CAPs - Actually won the game for us and wrote about it so we could include it in our Final Rating
Right In The Face Award – 6 CAPs - for taking a guess at Star Trek's interface icons
The Cat Skinning Award - 6 CAPs - for explaining possible multiple paths in episode 5
I Came Here to Save You Award - 11 CAPs - for providing save files to help us win Star Trek
Psychic Prediction Award - 10 CAPs - for the lowest and correct score guess for Star Trek

72 CAPs for MrValdez

True Companion Award - 20 CAPs - for playing along with Star Trek
Extra Credit Award - 7 CAPs - for writing in specific detail about his Star Trek experiences
Sponsor Award - 20 CAPs - for generously donating the prize of Gemini Rue
So That's Your Story Award - 25 CAPs - for sending us What's Your Story answers

45 CAPs for TBD

Want Some CAPs Award – 5 CAPs - for knowing the correct response to "Want some rye?" in the Zork Marathon intro post
True Companion Award – 20 CAPs – for playing along with Star Trek
Veeennggeeeaaaannnnnncccceeee Award – 20 CAPs - for finding the differences with the extended version of Star Trek's last mission and then writing about them

43 CAPs for Andy_Panthro

True Companion Award - 20 CAPs - for playing along with Star Trek and commenting about his progress regularly
You Can Be My Wingman Any Time Award - 6 CAPs - for providing requested hint for combat in EP4
Right In The Face Award – 6 CAPs - for taking a guess at Star Trek's interface icons

42 CAPs for Aperama

True Companion Award - 20 CAPs - for playing along with Star Trek
The Georgia On My Mind Award - 5 CAPs - caught the "Devil Went Down to Georgia" reference
You Can Be My Wingman Any Time Award - 6 CAPs - for providing requested hint for combat in EP4
The Look Beyond the Ball Award - 6 CAPs - for providing Fry a much-needed clue for EP6
Here's Mudd in Your Eye Award - 5 CAPs - for providing Mudd puns as requested

25 CAPs for Laukku

The Ha! You Myst Award – 4 CAPs - for announcing the new version of Scumm VM
The Texas Ranger Award – 5 CAPs - for the Syberia 3 delay announcement
The Zero Retreat Zero Surrender Award - 5 CAPs - for announcing that Zero Escape is coming
The Finn Fun Award - 5 CAPs - for linking to a Star Wreck parody!
The Twice as Fine Award - 6 CAPs - for giving us some Full Throttle Remastered info

21 CAPs for Ilmari

Once More With Feeling Award- 7 CAPs - for knowing that Deadline was the first game with feelies
He's Dead Jim Award - 5 CAPs - for knowing about dead Leslie and other guest cast members
The More Finn Fun Award - 4 CAPs - for linking to a Star Wreck parody!
Just a Little Lower Award – 5 CAPs - partial points for nearly guessing the Dungeon score

16 CAPs for Niklas

The Not Related To Jack Award – 5 CAPs - for recognizing the art used for the second Dungeon post
Right In The Face Award – 6 CAPs - for taking a guess at Star Trek's interface icons
Just a Little Higher Award – 5 CAPs - partial points for nearly guessing the Dungeon score

12 CAPs for Griffin

Can You Give Me a Hint Award - 12 CAPs - for giving numerous hints for Dungeon

11 CAPs for Rowan Lipkovits

Moryoku-tekina hito Award – 6 CAPs - for info on Japanese Zork games in the Zork Marathon intro post
Lurking Grue Award – 5 CAPs - for iInfo on a Zork reference in "Suspect" in the Zork Marathon intro post

6 CAPs for Gren Drake

The One Code is Sometimes Enough Award - 6 CAPs - for telling us about a second way to open the door in the Aztec episode

6 CAPs for Kirinn

The Temporarily Decloaked Award - 6 CAPs - for giving the sad news of Star Trek: Discovery's delay

5 CAPs for Corey Cole

The Robbed That Smiles Award – 5 CAPs - for giving advice for dealing with the Thief in Dungeon

5 CAPs for Reiko

I Call It Mister Pointy Award - 5 CAPs - for recognizing the pointy stick as an Adventure reference

4 CAPs for AJ Rubenstein

Did You Bring Protection Award - 4 CAPs - for info about Star Trek copy protection

Written by Reiko

Broadhead Journal #1:"I've made it to the station, finally. What a crappy place this is. Beats anything I could be doing on Earth, though. Here I can get away from it all and go somewhere totally new. Sure, it's dangerous, but what isn't, these days? Man, that Thom guy has a weird sense of humor. Does he actually expect me to read all this stuff in the data device?"

Home sweet home!

After the background intro, we're dropped into our quarters, very much as if we've just stepped off a transport. It's noon, and each action advances the clock by a minute. Time to get our bearings and learn where to go. But first, the commset is blinking. Who's messaged me?

I pick up the debit card from the desk [2 points] and take a look at it. "Account status information can be accessed through your PV Commset. All amounts are in U.S. Dollars." I examine the commset and find that it has a screen and a card slot, so I put the card in the slot. This shifts the display to a graphical representation of the commset, with a numerical menu. This could have been done in text, but it's a much nicer interface this way.

New currency is one of the top news items.

I read through all the messages and news and bulletin board items. There's a lot to read, and only some of it is flavor text. Both the current events list and the message boards have fifteen items each, and there are three new messages. Relevant points:

Ship handling classes are held each day at 15:00 in room T20. Bring the Corporation-issue DataMan. (I don't have one of those quite yet...)
Thom Seldridge is assigned as my proctor. He wants to meet at 20:00 at the Blue Hell bar.
Terri Neilson is the corporation representative. She welcomes me to the station.
There's a Chinese restaurant with prices about 5-10 times what you might normally expect to pay for Chinese food, and it's advertised as the "Special Week of Reasonable Prices!" Later, one of the news articles mentions that the new currency issued in 2100 involved dropping three zeroes in order to return to an adjusted value comparable with dollars in 1995. That's actually about right for an average level of inflation that doubles prices every ten years, since 2^10 is 1024. Still, even the "reasonable prices" seem awfully high, so Chinese food is quite the luxury on an alien space station.
Level Dog has a Hydroponics Lab with an emergency manual shut-off that triggers maintenance personnel to come fix it if someone trips it (intentionally or unintentionally). The announcement requests that whoever's been tripping it for fun needs to stop.
A protest is scheduled outside the Orion Program briefings at 09:00 in Room T52 on Level Tanya. Something about Green Badges getting preference.
Maintenance robots keep the air ducts clean, but occasionally make noises that sound like rats in the ducts.
The Wyoming PetroFood mines have suffered devastating fires (so I was wrong, the mines are mentioned in-game, although it hardly makes any difference to the plot). I guess "petrofood" is some kind of direct conversion of oil shale to manufactured food. Considering how much food these days is grown using oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, I'm not sure how much different this is. Maybe the surface soil was completely eroded or contaminated so this is more like hydroponics?
There's a recently discovered Heechee device, supposedly some kind of sensor, on display in a museum on Level Dog.
A group of prospectors has filed a lawsuit against the Gateway Corporation regarding withholding information relating to the Orion Program, which seems to be an exclusive group of prospectors that receive better course codes for their ships.

There's also a drawer in the desk, which I open, revealing a book. I take it [3] and try reading it. It's called "Everything We Know About the Heechee." It's blank, but there's a note from Thom Seldridge, the proctor, telling me that it's a joke, and I should take the book to Level Dog and give it to the receptionist in order to get a standard-issue DataMan device. Which I'll need for the training, so that will have to be a high priority.

I check the score and find I have 5 points out of 1600 so far, and an account balance of $1500. Oddly enough, while navigating through the commset information used time, it didn't count that as turns. I've only used 10 turns, but it's 12:45 on the status bar.

Even the receptionist matches the color scheme.

I step out of my room and reach a central area called Heecheetown. I can go east to the Blue Hell bar, north and south through corridors, northwest to the Corporation Administration Section, or back west to my quarters. Apparently this is Level Dog, because if I go northwest, I find the receptionist the proctor mentioned. I give her the book, and she laughs and hands me back a DataMan [5]. Her desk also contains a magazine and a dead rose. It's not clear why I might want either of those things, but she won't let me take them, so I'm going to need at least one at some point, right?

Data devices look awfully plain in the 22nd century.

The DataMan contains another infodump via a device menu screen. Much of the Gateway information section just contains what we already learned in the introduction, but there are a few more details about where specific places are on the station, including the existence of a VR terminal located on the second floor of the Corporation building. The second section concerns the Heechee ships, so that's all new information, but it will probably be covered again in the training session. The third section is labeled "Corporation record" and only lists arriving at the station to start.

Even in the 22nd century, computing technology is subject to stack overflow.

When I go upstairs, I get a little cut-scene with a VR tech, who invites me to try to break the new beach scene he just installed. He offers me a Pedroza Lounge membership pin if I can find the bug. Maybe I can do this before the ship handling class. He gives me a summary of how to break a VR scene, including killing power to the VR, contradicting the purpose of the VR, or creating an infinite progression.

I could see why VR like this would be desirable.

On the other hand, why is there only one VR seat if it's that cool?

I sit on the VR couch and wear the collar, then press the button to start up the scene, since the switch already has Beach selected. The picture shifts to a simple, but relaxing beach, with a comfortable beach chair and a very attentive bartender that will make as many delicious banana daiquiris as one might require by using a technomagical scanner to replicate the drink. Quite the contrast to a cramped space station, for sure. Even the music shifts to a relaxing beach tune.

Ahh...delicious! And quite intoxicating, apparently.

I relax for a few minutes, drinking a couple daiquiris and asking the bartender about his scanner (very sensitive, only for experts). He won't let me do anything with the scanner, of course. Then I take the next drink, and instead of drinking it myself, give it to the bartender. He takes it gladly and drinks it himself, becoming a bit buzzed in the process [5]. Hmm...how drunk will the bartender get? For that matter, how drunk can I get? As it happens, I can get very sloshed indeed before the simulation ends, and some of the antics that go on while becoming more and more drunk are pretty funny. "Just as you decide that life is like a big banana daiquiri, you thankfully pass out."

But we're not here to get drunk, but to break a simulation. So I start handing the bartender more drinks, and he gets more and more drunk, of course. After three, his hand is so unsteady that he doesn't flick the glass straight through the scanner, but pauses, causing three drinks to appear at once, two of which he immediately drinks. Now he's had five...surely he must be close to passing out. And if the scanner can create three drinks at once, it can certainly create more than that. Maybe a lot more...

Overflow achieved! (Pun certainly intended.)

After the next drink, he collapses on the bar, leaving me to do whatever I want without interference. So I put the drink right into the scanner. Which starts producing a steady stream of drinks on the bar, which start spilling and then piling higher until the simulation snaps [10]. The tech is pleased and tosses me his membership pin, as promised. I pick up the pin [10] and leave the VR lounge to head toward the ship handling class.

Next time we'll do some exploring, learn about Heechee ships, and maybe even ride one somewhere new.

Score: 35 of 1600
Balance: $1500
Status: New Fish (white badge)

Session Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

Written by Alfred n the Fettuc

Bob journal #2 : “Ok, so maybe we’re in the suburbs? I don’t really go there a lot, so maybe it’s what it really looks like. I’m a bit surprised to find head-eating monsters though. Or quicksand. Or a killer sun… well I’m pretty sure that’s because of that global warming everyone is talking about… now where did this guy go? And what is this sound in the distance? It looks suspiciously like a giant crab to me…”

So last week we have made a lot of progress in an hour of playtime. Everything was coming pretty easily. This game was going to be a breeze… Even the giant crab I remembered from my youth was dead before it knew it. That when it dawned on me : the wall I hit when I first played this game was not the crab, but a few screens after that. A wall actually. A stubborn, solid, stupid wall. But first things first, we were on an alien planet last time. Let’s explore!

“Miles from nowhere”? That’s one heck of an understatement.

My first contact with the alien world is harsh to say the least. Going towards the sea kills you in a quicksand. Staying put kills you by turning you to stone (I’m guessing because of the sun rays or something because going for the shadow on the left avoids this). The little green pond on the left kills you. Poking the blob monster kills you. Getting in the cave… strangely doesn’t kill you but close enough. Running near a swimming pool kills you. Smoking kills you. Scratching your nose kills you... Well ain’t this a heartwarming welcome!

Famous last words : “Holy Amckerel!”

Okay, avoiding the sand, the sun and the pond, I manage to get to the skeleton, recovering some kind of arm unit in which I can put the Shoot Program. I now have my very own alien gun! Watch out, everything! The first shot I take is at the blob monster who dies in two laser beams. Great! Climbing the stairs not fast enough kills you but we’re quite used to the game over screen by now. Reload… climbing the stairs fast enough allows me to reach the shining orange pixel on the top left that seems to be… another disk! The Mutate Program! As a seasoned adventurer and considering another monster just popped behind me, I try my new program and… it doesn’t do anything. Reload. I go back to the basics and shoot the new monster with the Shoot Program. Nope. Reload. I discover that after taking the new program, I can simply go to the left of the screen, which takes me back to the start. Okay. I try my new mutate program that seems to do something to the quicksand. I can cross it now! So into the red looking sea we go. Bob disappears under water… and… wow it doesn’t kill you. Surprising.

Don’t worry pal. I don’t understand either.

And here I arrive to the dreaded crab battle! Funnily enough, the letters “insert coins” flash in the middle of the screen and “credits” is on the top left. I use my coins on the top left of the screen and it works. Pretty meta if you ask me. The giant crab shows up and it’s shooting time! The mini-game is straightforward. Simply click on the giant crab so he spits a small crab and shoot the small crab. If the small crab reaches you, you take a hit but your life bar is well fed. Around half of the boss life bar things start to get hectic with small crabs everywhere but randomly clicking on the screen works… and the game is won before I realise what’s happening. we’re pretty far from the battles in Star Trek! Strange it was the point I couldn’t pass in my youth… I don’t remember being so bad at action scenes… Maybe my memory is faulty… Well as we say, anticipating a problem is living it twice, so let’s move on!

That’s what I call a pretty detailed sprite for a screen time of about 20 seconds! I’m guessing we’ll see this little guy again before the end of the game.

After another cut scene of Bob swimming in the deep red sea, we emerge… in the St Michel fountain, back in Paris! Okay… Bob doesn’t seem to be too dazzled about all this. I’m starting to wonder if the game designers were actually trying to do something coherent or if every one of them were doing their own game in their corner and they just glued the thing together at the end, cadavre exquis style.

Phew, I’m glad we reused this crab sprite from this other game we had planned… what’s next? Philippe, you showed me a pixel design of Saint-Michel Foutain the other day, right?

Let’s not overthink all of this and concentrate on the problem at hand. I’m blinking in some kind of unhealthy yellow and exiting the fountain turns me into… a green statue with wings? Okaaaay. Time to use the mutate program! I shoot the lions’ mouths and Bob tells me the water is changing color. Shooting the other lion stops the blinking. I can now exit the water safely. If I try to exit the screen, Bob just comes back without telling me why. This is infuriating. He doesn’t tell me I need to find something else. He doesn’t tell me why he can’t exit. He doesn’t tell me jack. He just comes back, looking smug, and awaiting for me to do something else. Well I DON’T WANT TO DO ANYTHING HERE YOU STUPID PLAYER CHARACTER! JUST DO WHAT I ASK YOU TO ALREADY! I guess the bright side about this is that we can’t be dead-ended if we absolutely have to get the objects we’ll need before moving on but a few directions wouldn’t be a luxury.

My mistake, the green arrow must mean “ABSOLUTELY NO EXIT WITHOUT DOING SOME STUPID RANDOM STUFF BEFOREHAND”

I see that the object of my actual fetch quest is the glove under the right statue’s paw. I use the mutate program on the paw (which moves) and try to get them. The statue puts its paw back down nearly snapping off my fingers (which would remove the need for gloves altogether at the same time no? hem...). So the idea is to mutate the paw then shoot the paw. The gloves are mine and I can finally move on to the next screen. Thanks a lot you stubborn player-character!

The Quais de Seine are really right next to St Michel Fountain, surprisingly enough! I was half expecting to end up in another country at that point.

So, now we’re following a guy from the cult. These guys seem to appear everywhere on our path! A word with the bookseller tells me that the guy is one of his usual customers. I try to peruse a few books, but to no avail. Trying to move on to the next screen results on Bob going back in so I’m guessing I have to find something here. I try to look through all the books and I find… another program! This one is called the Translate program. Shooting it on everything here doesn’t seem to do anything so I move on.

And this is where it dawned on me… as violent as a Skywalker learning about his lineage. The chill runs down my spine. No it can’t be happening! The crab I remembered from my youth as the wall that kept me from continuing the game was a false memory. I knew it was too easy… I won the crab battle earlier but I hit a wall after that. Figuratively and namely speaking. This wall.

What’s that? … (realizing) … I know that laugh…

This was the point I never was able to pass on my first playthrough of the game a few years ago! Ok Alfred, don’t be afraid, you’re a grown man now, a seasoned adventurer… You’ll make it!

So I start my pixel hunt. I try shooting my different programs on everything. The Translate program helps me understand one of the graffitis. It says “When the walls are defaced, the city’s heart is laid bare…” The gargoyles seem to be the solution to our problem. Shooting the Mutate program three times on the gargoyles (or “grotesques” here) seem to do something but the third shot in a row reinitiate something. So we’re looking at a three number sequence. I try to shoot at everything. I try to touch/look everything. Well well well. In my inventory are only the hood and the gloves. Damn. What am I missing?

Wait until we spend a few more hours on this screen.

Ok so maybe I missed something. It’s time to RTFM! Looking online grabs me a manual for this game. Except a few more lines about the plot that doesn’t make a lot more sense, I find something incredibly important! You can use an inventory item on another inventory item by clicking the upper-left screen while holding said inventory item! Let’s try this! Maybe we can use the hood on the gloves or one program on another program! A whole new level of inventory interactions open to me! Aaaand… no… it doesn’t work. Clicking on the upper-left of the screen with an item does nothing. Okaaaay. Two possibilities here. Or we don’t have any item that works and it just doesn’t enable the option. Or it’s simply not implemented. Too bad.

After a few minutes randomly and angrily clicking on everything, I decide to restart the game. Maybe I missed something after all and I’m in a dead-man walking scenario. It doesn’t take me more than one screen to realize what I missed : the leaflets! The leaflets I dismissed on my first try considering it was only gibberish! Well the first one is definitely gibberish but the second one (the one we got by painstakingly solving the stupid moose-head puzzle) holds a clue!

My tears got a taste of salt alright for missing this clue

Going back to the bridge and shooting the Mutate program on gargoyles 1, 3 and 6 open the secret passage! Yay! But before moving on, let me ramble a bit. I have nothing against hidden clues of course! I mean Myst and its friends opened a whole new subgenre where the smallest of chirping noise can be a clue, but hiding it inside a leaflet that you remove from your inventory to solve a puzzle is just cruel! Just leave the leaflets in the inventory until you actually really need them no? Having to restart the whole game (granted it doesn’t take very long when you know what you’re doing but still) from scratch seems cruel. I tried to use the newspaper to get the garage key instead of the leaflets, to see if they stay in your inventory, but no, it doesn’t work. Anyway, enough rambling, more playing, let’s move on!!!

Or not…

Well let’s try to move on anyway… As soon as I approach the opened secret passage, a grate falls down in front of me, cutting the entrance. Okay, so apparently I need to do something else. I shoot everything again with my programs but to no avail. Maybe 6, 3, 1 on the gargoyles? 1, 1, 3, 3, 6, 6? Nope. 1, 6, 3? Uh uh… 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42? Nope. I try putting on the hood and gloves, wondering if they maybe have some kind of security camera but nope. I shoot everything again. I restart the game again. I search every freaking nook and cranny… nope nothing to do. I’m stuck. I was considering applying a request for assistance but I was a bit ashamed to do this as soon in the game! (or I think it’s soon, as far as I know, the game could be ending right behind the grate…)

Nothing new on this screenshot but I feel you haven’t seen this screen enough to perfectly understand my state of mind…

I try everything I can think of and just as I was about to give up, clicking on the red graffiti (for what feels like the millionth try) makes Bob going to it and pressing the black spot in the red O. Click. The grate opens. What?

Via 9gag.com

I had to reload my game to understand it. I spent one hour trying everything I could think of on this screen (or the rest of the game so far) and you just had to press the very obvious button in the very obvious red circle? I think what happened is that I pressed the button ten times while the secret passage was still closed and didn’t press it again after it. I tried Mutate the graffiti, translated it hundred times, I even tried to rub my gloves on it to erase it, but I guess I didn’t click on the damned thing. Three hours of my life went down the drain and I can’t even yell at the poor game for it. Well maybe if it gave me some comment while I tried it at first? Like “It clicks but nothing happens”? Or a clear animation of my character clicking on the wall? Well I don’t know. I feel stupid and I feel like I wrote the word “click” too much already. It seems like a good place to rest. I didn’t cover as much ground as in the first post, but I sure spent more time in the game! I’ll never be able to look at the bridges of Paris the same way now…

Yay, this sewer seems a nice enough place to rest… see you next week!

Session time : 3 hours
Total time : 4 hours

Inventory : Hood, Gloves, Arm Unit (Shoot, Mutate, Translate programs)

By Ilmari

Happened so far: Djel the Magician has to prove himself to people of the Kingdom of Ashes by solving three plights caused by three magicians from the neighboring countries. He has already dealt with an infertility problem by finding his beloved who happens to be also a daughter of Azeulisse, a ruler of a nearby kingdom. Now his has to just cure the magician Theros, thus ending a plague that has destroyed almost everyone in the Kingdom of Ashes, and to find gold for pauper Kal, who is using the hunger-induced raids of his subjects as a way to blackmail Djel.

Last time I had just received a statue from magician Theros (and Kal had taken back the one he gave me), so I begun by visiting Theros.

I really wonder where all these wizards sleep.

I tried calling Theros by reading the inscription under a strange mouth-shaped statue (manual calls it a throne, but I think it would be really uncomfortable to sit on it). Theros wasn’t happy to see me and sent me away.

I returned to Theros’s place and did a little more thorough search:

The manual suggested I should put out the candle that was burning and light the candle that was not burning. I met some demon that I had to fight, and after that, I found something called Demon’s Dagger.
By looking at the lava pool, I found a strange creature that told me that Orah gives life. Similarly, a creature I met at the window told me that I already owned Orah. At this point, I had no idea what this Orah was supposed to be, although the manual told that the father of Djel had owned it and that it was the cause of his supernaturally long life.

When I couldn’t find anything else from Theros’s place I moved back to Djel’s house, where I met an old friend of Djel’s - Petroy, the gnome, who wanted to help me with my quest.

Let’s embark on a new quest

Healing a sick man

Petroy told me the ingredients for curing Theros. Unfortunately, first of them, the Nymph’s Eye, could be found in Azeulisse’s country, but I had just lost the statue by which to access this land. Luckily, Azeulisse herself contacted me with my crystal ball and said that there was another Nymph’s Eye hidden somewhere else. With nothing else to do, I visited the new lands that had just opened up, starting with the Ocean of Pearls.

The main thing to do in this land was again detailed in the manual. I tried to approach the bridge, but my mouse was stumped by an invisible force field. I then had to touch a rock and an idol, to make an old man appear. Again, he noted that I owned the Orah and let me pass to an island.

The first time a land consisted of more than one screen

The most important part here was that I could trade the Demon’s Dagger to an Atlas, which allowed me to freely choose which land I could visit. My next target was the Land of Arch.

Not a tourist attraction

Arch had been ravaged by an indestructible fire, set up by Creor (Theros’s friend). Again following the advice of the manual, I clicked on the grill revealing a snake, who told me that Nymph’s Eye could be found here. The snake also gave me a key to open a door to the den of only living person at Arch. He was kind enough to hand me over the Nymph’s Eye for a reasonable prize.

After returning home, I met again Petroy, who transported me to a forest containing the second ingredient of the cure, a forest fruit.

With eyes like these, I bet you won’t need any lamp at night

Land of the Glades seems just like the forest I visited earlier,
except with different colours - or then it’s the same forest at night

Finding the forest fruit was just a matter of few clicks. In the river, I found some strange creature that wanted me to throw some coins to him. Then he let out a prisoner with a good heart, who advised me to speak with the little master of the place.

The King of Ants! And he has the forest fruit!

Petroy used the two ingredients to make the potion, which I immediately took to Theros.

Two down, one to go

Returning to home, I was contacted by Kal, who returned his statue and urged me to collect the money he needed to feed his subjects.

Gold for extortionist

I am sure there must be lot of ways to collect the money Kal requires, because there are various sources of money in the game (and various ways to spend it also). The main way to earn money is to make it. Firstly, one needs some lead crystals - these seems to crop up here and there, often as a reward for solving something.

The other ingredient of gold is the bats, which you can also find in a number of places, sometimes only once, sometimes recurrently. Bats are yet another occasion for a minigame. This time, it’s pretty pointless. The supposed bats move through the screen without any rhyme or reason. The only thing you can do is to shoot some kind of webs, which then move on straight upward and hopefully hit the target. It’s just a matter of luck - the bats don’t even try to avoid the webs and might as well fly straight into them. There can be only one web on the screen at a time, and after a while, you cannot send anymore webs.

That thing over the door is a bat, while the
thing that looks like an eye is a web I’ve sent.
The webs are sent by the hand on the lower part of
the screen, and it can be moved from left to right and back.

With enough crystals and bats, you can then make some coins with Alambic, a money maker in Djel’s library.

I do wonder about the inflation in the Land of Ashes

Bats and crystals aren’t the only way to earn money. Indeed, I‘ve discovered two other major sources of gold. First source started with a visit to the Land of Marsh.

I wouldn’t want to take a swim

Marsh was filled with weird creatures and after a quick battle with one of them, another one promised me a hint for finding Orah.

The mysterious Orah I supposedly own? Do tell me!

It was in my home all the time! (But you cannot find it without getting the hint)

Instead of prolonging his life with it, Djel can use Orah as a bargaining chip in the Land of Ice Floes - if he hand the Orah, his fortune will be doubled.

Let’s see, an eternal life or gold to give to a person I don’t even like? A difficult question!

If that’s not enough, Theros at one point has an interesting message to tell.

A treasure awaiting me somewhere? Couldn’t you be more specific?

I finally found another hint in Arch.

3 gnomes, one tells truth, and of the other two, only one may lie at a time. I love these puzzles!

Could you shut your eyes, this is kind of disturbing?

The gnomes had the following messages to tell me:

The treasure is in the Atlas, but it isn’t in the Kingdom of Ice
The treasure isn’t in the land of the map! It is in the marshlands. Believe in me wizard Djel!
The treasure is in the land of map, I saw it there!

So, at least one of these persons should have told me the truth, while the two others won’t be lying at the same time. What’s the answer then? Well, the gnomes really mentioned just three places, Kingdom of Ice, land of map and the marshlands. If the treasure is in the Kingdom of Ice, then there would be two gnomes lying, which was supposed to be impossible. Thus, if the puzzle is to make any sense, the treasure must lie in the marshlands or the land of map.

Now, I have no idea what this land of map is meant to be. My best guess is that the producers meant a land off the map, that is, a land I wouldn't find in my Atlas. That would also make sense puzzlewise, since then this option would be ruled out by again leading to a situation with two gnomes lying. With no other option left, I decided to check the marshlands again.

A bit of a letdown - the final test for getting the treasure was just another battle

Your people will no longer have to pray to my kingdom? You must mean prey.

Now I have solved all three quests!

Great, it’s summer again!

That was it then, time for the final rating.

Puzzles and Solvability

If you’d look for traditional inventory-based adventure game puzzles in Legend of Djel, you’d be disappointed. There are few simple fetch quests, but nothing more complicated than that. All in all, it’s more about exploration than about puzzles as such - you just need to find the right places to click to gain something and often even what you need to click is spelled out in the manual. There apparently are many ways to solve some problems, but with a game like this it makes it all just way too simple, you might say. The physical problems where your mouse was not able to move the pointer were a fun addition, but ultimately not enough of a challenge.

Of course, this is not the complete truth. There are problems to be solved, but these are not of the adventure game variety, but more like resource management problems. Do you have enough gold? Do you still have enough time to complete the game? Is your strength good enough for a battle? The problems are not so much about finding the correct or one of the correct routes through the game - clicking around will do that quite easily - but about finding the most optimal route in time.

And then there are the minigames. I am usually quite happy to forget those, but this time I was quite enthused about them. With the exception of the lackluster bat catching, the minigames were the true heart of Legend of Djel - I just wished there was an option to play them against a human opponent.

Another one bites the dust!

All in all, a slightly positive experience, even if puzzles as such were mostly lacking.

Score: 4.

Interface and Inventory

The basic interface in Legend of Djel is something we’ll see a lot more in the coming years - just click on the screen and you’ve done it! As a representative of this simplistic type, the interface of the game is rather good - there’s nothing to complain about, no pixel hunting and no bugs. In two cases, mouse apparently stops working, but that’s just a clever part of the plot.

There’s still something to complain about. Inventory and numerical details of the health and wealth of Djel can be accessed only in Djel’s home, although these things would be most important in the various lands beyond the Land of Ashes.

Djel needs a dragon’s brain just to look down to his pockets

Furthermore, there still seems to be no possibility to save your game. This seems nothing but a cheap way to lengthen an otherwise quite short game - without any save states, it would have been very likely that I should have started the whole game again numerous times. Together with the blandness of the inventory, these things lower the overall score.

Score: 3.

Story and Setting

The story behind the game is quite interesting. I am sure some might consider it a fault that the three different strands of the game are fairly independent and that there is no all-explaining plot device behind the three plagues affecting the Land of Ashes. Personally, I am just glad there was no Black Sorcerer behind it all - it just seems so much realistic that way. Indeed, it is not the plagues themselves that are important, but as the name of the game suggests, the growth of Djel to a position of a respectable sorcerer with a nameless lady friend.

Seriously, they named many of the random creatures but not her

Of course, the story still fails to be a complete masterpiece of fantasy. Especially the worldbuilding lacks something. I am not expecting Tolkien-like obsession with maps and geography - I am quite happy with the conception of travelling to these different lands via a magical transporter. It’s more that none of these lands feel very developed and I found it a bit difficult to distinguish some of them.

In addition, there were some minor inconsistencies or perhaps more like unexplained details. Take the magical live inducing Orah. According to manual, the father of Djel told Djel that he now owned the Orah. Then again, Djel is suggested in the game to look for the Orah in his home, and before getting the hint, you cannot even pull the lever revealing the hideout of Orah (I know, I tested). This just seems lazy storytelling - surely Djel would have searched for every nook of his house, if his father said that he left something valuable for him.

And even before we’ve found the Orah, we apparently already hold it

Similarly, manual suggests that Atlas used in choosing the lands Djel travels to is a permanent feature of Djel’s home, but for some unexplained reason we still have to find it in another land.

All in all, these were mostly just minor problems, although they prevent me giving really high scores for the game.

Score: 5.

Sounds and Graphics

The graphics look reasonably good for the period and they do manage to convey the fantastic nature of the lands Djel is travelling in. Sounds are again a weak point. There’s no music and you quickly get bored with the few sound effects the game has, although there’s nothing wrong with them as such.

Score: 5.

Entertainment and Atmosphere

Scifi series often make the mistake of representing a single planet - or even worse, a space faring civilization - with a small village of little more than ten occupants. Often enough, they also too often implicate that this randomly chosen village and its occupants are the cultural norm and that there’s no real diversity among the populace and their customs.

Legend of Djel tries to do something similar. Almost all of the lands are represented by a single screen and there’s just couple of inhabitants in these screens. I know there must have been difficulties with the disk space, but less lands with more screens would have been a more captivating choice.

We see a throne room of the Kingdom of 100 Lands - and even that is so empty

The other problem is that we are given no reason to care for the plight of people in the Land of Ashes. Sure, there are explanations for all of this, but a possibility to walk through the ravaged land and to see and hear the inhabitants I am supposed to rescue would have made the player more emotionally involved in their problems.

But there are good things. The game does manage to catch the sense of magic that is so important in a fantasy game. The eerie surroundings and the weird inhabitants both make clear that we are moving somewhere else than our own home planet.

Score: 4.

Dialogue and Acting

You might have noticed that I’ve switched back to English. Compared to the translation of Emmanuelle, the text of the game seems mostly professional, with the exception of few embarrassing but understandable mistakes. Still, there’s also nothing particularly noteworthy or interesting in the dialogues.

Well, except an occasional stiffness: revolution grumbles in stomach?

Score: 5.

So the overall score is 4 + 3 + 5 + 5 + 4 + 5 = 26 /0.6 = 43.

Quite high score for a Missed Classic (and especially high for a French game), but Coktel Vision still hasn’t improved on Mewilo. Andy Panthro had clearly the closest score guess.

My history of the games designed by Muriel Tramis has reached a phase, where I have only one game to deal with. Unfortunately, it is the one I dread most - Geisha, the spiritual successor of Emmanuelle. We'll see when I'll have a chance to tackle it.

Written by Reiko

Broadhead Journal #2:"Why is everyone calling me 'new fish'? Do I look like a Pisces? It wasn’t just Thom, practically everyone I met said that. Anyway, tomorrow I'll ship out and try to make my fortune. The odds aren't good, but what have I got to lose? Even if I have to stay here a while, I guess it's not all bad. There's a cute receptionist at the office, even if she acts uninterested."

We're exploring Gateway because I don't need to meet Thom at the bar until later. I go north from the central intersection to find the dropshaft, which confirms that I started on Level Dog. Up leads to Level Babe, which nothing has mentioned yet, so I'll leave that for later, and go back down past Level Dog to Level Tanya. I can't help thinking there must be a whole lot of unimportant levels in between Dog and Tanya, because otherwise, those names are awfully random if they aren't more memorable names for sequentially letter-coded levels.

That's got to be a Chekhov's gun...

I go north from the dropshaft on Tanya and find a guard outside an armory. As an aside, there shouldn't really be compass directions on a space station, since there's no magnetic pole, but it's a convention of the text adventure genre. I can walk right into the armory and even take a gun that's conveniently sitting out, but if I walk out with it, the guard merely takes it from me and returns it to the armory. No questioning what I, as a new prospector, might want to do with a gun. (At best, defend myself against hostile aliens encountered on a mission, perhaps?) Nevermind, I don't need it yet. I do notice there's a prominent air vent on the wall in there, though.

I'm still half an hour early for the class, so I wander around the level a little more. West of the dropshaft is the classroom, decorated in green, south of the dropshaft is a corridor next to another (blue) meeting room, and south of there is the hangar. I don't have a badge yet, so I can't go on a ship without being trained first. Wise of them, I'm sure.

The odds aren't really better...they're just less bad.

I go back to the classroom and wait until the class begins. Hector Gomez, the instructor, delivers a lecture in a cut-scene [10] that doesn't really tell us anything new except that the blue badges we're given in place of our newbie white badges contain six codes for locations that have not recorded any fatalities. In other words, it's far better to use the codes we're given even though in theory we could enter any code we want to select a destination. At least we're not guaranteed to die, right?

It also occurred to me later that maybe it would work even better to actually share the list of codes that have been visited, so that each prospector can make a fully-informed decision about where to go. But this is a corporation. Share information? Nah, too easy.

I could go to the hangar right away and go on a mission now, but it seems awfully rash to go without even meeting the proctor, and we haven't explored the whole station, either. There are several other places known to be on Level Dog that we haven't seen yet, and nothing else on Level Tanya, so I return up the dropshaft.

If Chinese food is expensive on the station, surely roses would be worse. Food can be freeze-dried.

North of the dropshaft, I find Central Park, the hydroponics complex. There's an odd machine with an access panel, a red lever, and a yellow sign that describes the lever as a manual feeder shut down for use in emergencies. Also nearby, a planter tray contains a fresh rose. Didn't the receptionist have a dead one? I'm sure she'd love a fresh one for her desk. I take the rose [2] and head back to the office area. The receptionist is indeed pleased when I give it to her, and she hands me the magazine in return [5]. There's only one article of interest, which mentions the disappearance of prospector Rolf Becker.

I'm sure I'm going to need this later too...

The museum is south of the central area, but there's nothing to do there yet besides look briefly at the strange Heechee sensor device as well as a tuning fork made of Heechee metal. So I wander over to the bar. It's only four, awfully early to start hanging out at a bar, but I've got nothing else to do until the meeting with the proctor. The music immediately switches to a jazzy nightclub sort of tune.

Cute robot!

The counter contains a card slot, which I can use to order a drink if I want (only $10!). But while the VR experience seemed to be entirely virtual, these drinks can really get me drunk. If I drink five, I end up passing out on the floor, waking up in my room at 8 the next morning, and being fined $100 for sleeping in public areas and having been removed to my room, not to mention the $50 spent on the drinks. Not a very good idea.

The Pedroza Lounge, with fake books and cheap artwork.

I restore back and instead explore the bar. There's a casino to the east, and farther in, an exclusive club room. I already got the Pedroza Club membership pin from the VR tech, so I can go right in [5]. There's a display case describing the prospecting success of the club's founder and containing a pamphlet with the success stories of other prospectors, two of which are available to read. North of the main club room is a tanning salon, in which it's possible to kill yourself from overuse. I hang out for a couple hours and get a nice light tan, then go back to the main casino to play some trivia.

The casino, with classic gambling games.

The trivia game is another button-based machine interface, but the questions are an interesting mix. Someone clearly had a lot of fun devising the course of history over the next century and making questions based on that future history. Some are real questions about actual things ("What star is commonly known as the 'North Star'?"), some are about the timing of events in future history on anniversaries of dates in real history, and some seem to be just made-up future history or completely made up things ("Double-Daron" as some kind of game or sport, for instance). There are four categories to choose from, and ten multiple-choice questions in each category, always the same questions each time. There's no cost to play trivia, but no reward if you get all the questions right, either. It's just fun, for about five minutes.

I go back to the bar and wait until Thom shows up and orders us both drinks. This conversation isn't a cut-scene, so I can ask him about things in between paragraphs of his little lecture. At one point I show him the DataMan and he laughs and sort of apologizes for his little joke on me. After he finishes his drink, he looks at me expectantly. If I do nothing but wait at this point, he won't say anything more and will eventually just leave. So I buy us a round, per convention, and then he starts talking again, this time about the difference between the "suicide squad" and the green badges.

Did Thom give the receptionist the original rose that's now dead?

Apparently even though he's a proctor, he's still only got a blue badge himself. The green badges are for the A-team, the privileged prospectors who have done something notable and earned the respect of the Corporation. The only way to join the Orion program (were they thinking of the green-skinned Star Trek Orions here??) is to be sponsored by the Corporation rep. My rep is Terri, and he thinks she might be inclined to be nice to me, while he has a rep that doesn't even talk to him. He gives me a memo about the Orion program and suggests I show it to Terri, as she often comes by the bar around 22:00. It's still not clear why I might be favored in this way over most other new prospectors, since I haven't even gone on any missions yet, but it's worth a shot.

If I buy Thom another drink, he relaxes and starts telling me some rumors floating around that there might be something important still hidden on the station somewhere despite all the searching that went on when the place was still discovered. Does it seem odd that such a large station would be practically empty except for the hangar full of ships?

Nubar Kamalian and his medallion.

After 20:30, Thom leaves, but not before finding someone else to come talk to me: Nubar Kamalian. I buy him a drink to hear his story. He's a prospector who thinks he's been screwed by the Corporation because they gave him only $50k for finding a box of intriguing Heechee medallions. The ticket to come to Gateway was on the order of $200k, so he still can't go anywhere else. He offers to play a game with me and if I win, he'll give me the medallion he's wearing. Sure, why not?

He takes me over to the casino and plays the trivia machine, earning 7 points. Good thing I played it earlier. I easily beat that score. He tosses me the medallion [15], then pulls another one out of his pocket. The Corporation didn't take them away from him since they thought them practically worthless. I think it's going to be important, but now I sort of wonder if there's any other way to get one if you don't buy Thom and Nubar drinks to trigger this exchange.

Wanting to join the Orion Program is an effective way to get a girl's number on Gateway.

I continue to wait until Terri shows up. She's rather intimidating, recognizing me immediately but acting rather cool. When I show her the memo from Thom [5], then she focuses on me. As I thought, there's nothing in particular to recommend me for the Orion Program yet. But she does clarify her minimum criteria: "At least two completed missions and one completely unique discovery." Mission results seem to be mostly the luck of the draw anyway, but I suppose "elite" prospectors ought to have some experience. But, as Thom predicted, Terri is pretty nice about the whole thing. She even gives me her direct PV number [10]. She ends with "Call me when you think you've earned a green badge."

And that's it for the first day. I'll go sleep in my quarters and then next time we'll actually go on a mission! I still spent $50 on drinks, but three of those were for Thom and Nubar. I think if you're already holding a drink, you don't order another one for yourself, or I could maybe just order one drink at a time if I’d specified that, but the money doesn’t matter.

Score: 87 of 1600
Balance: $1450
Status: Flight Crew (blue badge)

Session Time: 45 minutes
Total Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

By the TAG Team

Notable Titles: Mystery House, Transylvania, Hobbit, Wizard and Princess, Pawn, Fish!, Spellcasting, Gateway, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, Muv-Luv, The PK Girl

Notable Creators and Companies: Sierra (Roberta Williams etc.), Penguin Software (Antonio Antiochia), Melbourne House (Veronika Megler, Philip Mitchell), Magnetic Scrolls (Rob Steggles, Hugh Steers, John Molloy, Phil South, etc.), Legend Entertainment (Bob Bates, Steve Meretzky, Glen Dahlgren, Mike Verdu etc.), Enix (Yuji Horii)

It's been a while since our last installment on History of Adventure, but we didn't want to just forget this idea, so let's get started! While adventure games in 1970s were all text-based, excluding some quaint ASCII-drawings, since 1980 it became a trend to include simple graphics to help get a gamer in the mood (Mystery House, Transylvaniaand The Hobbitare early examples of this trend). In some cases graphics served no other purpose but to enhance the gaming experience - a notable example includes graphical revampings of Scott Adams’s older text adventures.

We could do without the picture of this Dracula wannabe, but it sure is evocative

In other cases, graphics were an integral part of the gameplay and you simply couldn’t solve all the puzzles without seeing the images, because all that you could see in the pictures was not included in the textual description of the game environment.

If I couldn’t see the picture, I wouldn’t know what the peddler is selling

At first, adding graphics to an otherwise text-based adventure game simply meant that both the amount and quality of the text and the parser had to be reduced. While Infocom emphasised text and parser, one by one the other major text adventure companies were lured in by the graphical trend, especially as the more powerful 16-bit computers started to appear around mid-eighties. An oldtimer like Level 9 published graphical versions of their classic text adventures, while newcomers like Magnetic Scrolls went straight to the graphical market. Finally, even the stubbornly old-fashioned Infocom had to succumb.

Arthur, the last of a noble breed

The ultimate problem with graphical interactive fiction was that it failed to attract the masses, which were already moving on to completely graphical adventure games with no need to fiddle with a parser. The final sigh of graphical text adventures in the Western market of commercial games, Legend Entertainment, produced several games with a kind of hybrid interface in which the player could interact with the game using the parser, by clicking a list of nouns and verbs, and in a limited fashion even by clicking on the pictures. Later Legend games, like Gateway, also included some animated cutscenes and clickable device screens separate from the parser interface. Later on, even Legend dropped the parser altogether and made fully graphical adventure games.

Adventuring just ain’t what it used to be

While the pure text-based interactive fiction had a second life in the hands of independent developers, graphical interactive fiction is rather limited. True, some modern interactive fiction languages do support inclusion of graphics and sounds, especially the non-parser tools like Twine. Most of the interactive fiction published today is still traditionally text-based, but some pieces are enhanced with some proportion of graphics, even parser games. A fantastic recent commercial example is Worldsmith, which offers a standard parser experience embedded within a graphical frame in a browser that updates depending on the player’s context.

Now this looks modern

If we orient ourselves a bit differently, we can find another sort of thematic descendant of graphical interactive fiction elsewhere. In 1983, a game called The Portopia Serial Murder Case helped define the visual novel genre in Japan. Influenced by Mystery House, its creator, Yuji Horii, wanted to introduce graphical adventure games to the Japanese market. Later he helped define a second game genre with the hugely successful Dragon Quest games.

The graphics definitely look like those from the early Sierra games

Although the first examples of this Japanese phenomenon used parsers, when gamers in Japan turned more and more to consoles, such text-based methods of interaction were soon abandoned, making these visual novels more reminiscent of Legend hybrids. Furthermore, the visual novel style generally became less and less of a game and more focused on plot and characters. Some visual novels, known as kinetic novels, are simply graphically-enhanced novels with no real interaction. But many visual novels offer branching plot choices and multiple endings, usually one for each character.

“Their date is really getting in the way, isn’t it?”

Although visual novels are nowadays one of the most common forms of any sort of gaming in Japan, we are unlikely to see many examples in the near future of this interesting offshoot of adventure games on our fine blog. We are not so prudish as to be afraid of the often sexually loaded content of visual novels, but instead we lack the required skill to read Japanese well - a pity, since this interesting genre could really use its own historians. Only a small fraction of original Japanese visual novels have been translated and released in English.

On the other hand, the development of the free visual novel tool Ren’Py in 2004 resulted in a large body of visual novels written originally in English, many released for free, as in the interactive fiction scene. So in more recent years we have visual novels produced in English in parallel to the Japanese market, and some commercial Japanese visual novels are even given an official English translation and release. Two of the most famous of these recent ones are Hatoful Boyfriend and Clannad, which are even available on Steam. But since Steam doesn’t allow sexually explicit content, only non-explicit visual novels can be released there, or only if given an “all ages” release.

Classic anime graphics accompanying a parser.

There’s even some overlap between modern interactive fiction and visual novels. For example, The PK Girl (2002) is a dating sim with anime-style art in the Japanese visual novel tradition, but it was developed in a parser-based interactive fiction system called Adrift. Plus there’s a lot of potential overlap structurally between pieces produced in Ren’Py compared to those produced in a choice-based IF system like Twine or Undum. Ren’Py is optimized for displaying conversations with character sprites overlaid on a background, while the IF systems are optimized for displaying text with options to add graphics, but either system is flexible enough to be used for a wide range of story structures. There are even visual novels and graphical parser games created with Unity now.

As a result of all these different systems and tools, it’s really difficult to draw a firm boundary to separate adventure games from interactive fiction or visual novels. There’s a whole continuum of pieces that span the line from kinetic (linear) novels, to branching or game-like visual novels, to graphical interactive fiction (choice-based or parser-based), to fully graphical adventures. Although there was a historical progression from parser games to graphical adventures or visual novels, none of these categories is necessarily more primitive than the others anymore given modern development tools.

Written by Alfred n the Fettuc

Bob journal #3 :“It’s beginning to make less and less sense! After what I can only assume was a trip to Bargon itself, I’m back in Paris. Under Paris, actually, in a world of smugglers, stolen pieces of art and talking statues… I’m getting closer and closer of this dreadful cult and its alien pals, though. Bargonians, here I come!”

After a week of weeping silently in the sewers after spending three hours trying to pass this stupid wall, I’m ready to resume my adventure! We left Bob under the streets of Paris last time, in what can only be the cult headquarters… As we’ll soon see, the sewers are no less a deadly place than the surface of Bargon. Let’s get sleuthing!

Skulls, grates, torches, bars, chains… we’re one pool-dancer away from a bar I know.

I try grabbing and pulling everything. The ring on the left opens a secret alcove in the wall containing a fountain. Touching the skulls gets me killed by a spider, but shooting them allows me to frighten it. Ah ah, take that stupid spider! I find a phial behind the skulls, but trying to use it on the fountain tells me that no water is coming out. Pulling the right ring opens a trapdoor a few steps back. Another pull and it closes again. I guess it’s gonna be of some use later, for once that a trapdoor doesn’t open right beneath my feet… I move on to the next screen. The decor is even more alike a strange medieval castle here, with a stone statue, a strange wall, more gargoyles (nooooo), a luxury chandelier and a harp. Playing the harp makes the statue talk to me!

Played Loom much?

Fiddling around with the harp have the statue feeding me cryptic clues, one relating to the Sark exposition in Beaubourg for whatever reason. Playing with the buttons have me killed twice : one by having the gargoyles spewing fire at me, the other one by walking underneath the chandelier afterwards (one never knows when the “release chandelier lock” button will come in handy…) Using the Mutate program turns the point on the board into crosses.

Playing tic-tac-toe by myself in the sewers is what I call having a good time.

I spend quite some time here trying to shoot my beams at everything, then I realise that shooting a cross again with the Mutate beam turns it into another symbol. I suddenly remember the Beaubourg program. Of course it was twenty screens ago, but the game had already proven it wasn’t shy of having you restart the game from scratch to find a clue, so let’s go back to the start again.

These aliens have a tendency of putting crucial clues in plain sight…

Pushing the two left buttons after having entered the code opens a secret door behind the statue. Trying to move into the next room grabs me a “I think I forgot something” message, which is way less aggressive than just sending me back in the room. The game gets back in politeness what it loses in coherence. Good, I prefer it this way! So I’m guessing I have to do something with the fountain in the first room. Let’s see if all the fiddling around with buttons changed anything here… Sure thing, the fountain is now running… and a giant ball just start bouncing towards me, like in The Prisoner!

I am not a number! I am a free man!!!

This one is pretty obvious : the trapdoor! Well less obvious is the timing needed because my first try results on the ball nonchalantly jumping over the trap and crushing me. I have to time perfectly so the trap opens when the ball jumps on it. Getting the timing right is tricky, and also a bit boring considering each try gets me back in the “scary game over screen - loading time - reload” ten seconds loop. I manage to trap the ball, fill my phial and move on… into emerald kingdom.

The green “archological” treasures. The other colors are probably in another room.

The room is filled with antiquities stolen and smuggled from all over the world. I search the room for a bit (getting me another game over while trying to open the chest on the right of the statue) then I pour the vial into the plant because why not. And it makes the center carpet disappear because why not. Trying to take the door to the right finally gets me an answer from the (obviously) talking giant statue. It tells me to wait. Then falls silent. I try a lot of other things but to no avail. Trying to open the chest then getting on the center tiles makes it talk again, but I have to do the same thing another time for it to ask me a question.

What? Don’t tell me… this game… is trying to TEACH me something??? Edutainment alert!!!

So of course, being the very good student I used to be, and paying a lot of attention in class have me immediately recall that the vowel A is black for Rimbaud, fingers in the nose.

Of course…

Sorry about that guys, but it’s a grey area here, this is not cheating, I’m not consulting any walkthrough per say! Getting at this point as a kid, in the pre-internet days, would have probably made me resulting to trial and error to pass this point (or, God forbid, open a book!), but nowadays, Google is your best friend. Pretty interesting, though, I admit my lack of general knowledge regarding poetry. Then again, does it have its place in an adventure game, especially one that didn’t have any relation to poetry or edutainment so far? The cadavre exquis continues… Entering my answer is also another thing, because you have to stand on a particular tile (making the arm-band color of the statue change) and shoot the Mutate beam on said arm-band. Another example of weirdness and shifty interface. At no point before that did the game have me stand on a particular spot of the screen to make something happen. Then again, I guess the interface change is not as surprising as the sudden poetry quiz. After three questions, I open the safe to get… a Save program. Whatever that means. Must be pretty important, though, considering the loops I had to jump through in order to get there.

Commenting on the scarcity of the plot doesn’t make it ok, screenwriter friends…

Trying to open the door afterwards grants me another set of questions (because why waste a great idea for padding the game). I actually can answer one of them without resorting to Google! Woohoo! Van Gogh is known for his use of the color yellow! Another trip to the internet to learn about Yves Klein’s use of the color blue and the door is open! Yeehaw. What’s next? My money is on a 300-frogs choral or a black hole made entirely of popcorn.

Yeah, well another smugglers cache was my third guess… a bit disappointing though.

Before we move on, though, Sark appears in the room and converse with the statue! We learn that he knew about us all along and that we were supposed to take this disk! I would be intrigued if the plot had made any sense before that! Well it’s never too late to start, maybe we’re entering a world of conspirations among bargonians!

Searching this new room brings me little new information or things to play with. Using the Mutate program on the flywheel in the top-right of the screen opens an elevator in the right wall, secured by a keycode panel. This one is pretty straightforward now that we’re used to look for clues in all kinds of places. The drawing on the left column spells the code. And into the elevator we go… to the Buren columns!

I always knew this place was hiding something… also the text is becoming less and less clear!

As soon as I arrive, a nice little chirping bird lands on a Buren column and get promptly disintegrated! Well, at least this time we have a warning! Using the Translate program on the graffiti gives me the code A2, B2, C2. Now where to put it? I use the code panel again and this code reveals a button. Pressing it turns off the field around the two first columns. This one is pleasant. I like when one element is used twice in two different ways.

The rest is less pleasant. You have to be very precise when you navigate this screen because clicking on the other side of the room has Bob going around a column and getting fried by the force field.

Hmmmm… crispy...

Step by step, I get closer to the column with the graffiti. Next to it is a coin with a bargonian head imprinted in the ground. I try everything on it but it does nothing. I try fiddling around a bit more here (getting fried numerous times), then I try putting the first code back in the elevator. Strangely it works and I’m back downstairs! Oh I can come back to the last screen now can I?

So obviously I missed something here. I try shooting everything with my different beams (which resume 90% of the gameplay so far), but nothing happens. Thorough pixel hunting reveals that I can select the eye of the horse statue. Pressing it reveals a blue bargonian token! I grab it and go back up the elevator. Putting the token in the imprint (after getting fried again because I forgot to re-enter the second code) turns off the last force field on the right! Yay, we’re making steady progress here! What follows are ten screens of text and cut scenes explaining that we followed a hooded guy to a funfair, entered the gorilla attraction (whatever that is), saw a belly dancer that turns into a bargonian that shoots everyone, barely escaped with our lives, then followed another guy to a hooded church, then saw a spiel from one of the hooded gurus aaaand… got into the church proper. Way to move into the story! It feels like after twenty-something screens of random puzzles, the game suddenly remembers about the plot and rushes through it!

You know, you didn’t have to tell me all this just to bring me to a fairground screen, I’m used to jumping around random places now…

Wow, random nudity! Do we have Muriel Tramis to thank for that?

Wow! Sorry, miss, I didn’t mean to glare!

You my brother the confused player! Try to keep up with the plot!

What just happened? Can I resume playing now?

I realise after a few seconds that the last cutscene of many has ended and that I can play again. I click around me but I can’t seem to move. Suddenly a bargonian enters the screen and shoots me. Way to wake up the players that fell asleep during the cutscene.

That’s what you get for not paying attention.

So, restore. I realise now that the time has finally come to use the hood and gloves I’m lugging around for hours! After sitting through the Buren scene and the cutscenes again, I quickly put on the hood and gloves as soon as I get to move.

What? What about my suit? I left it in my car. But I’ve got the hood and gloves so I’m obviously on your side right?

So this is it! We’ve entered the cultists headquarters! And I feel like Bargon is not far away! Nothing will be able to stop me now! Beware bargonians! You’re as good as defeated! Ahah I’m invicible! I’ll save the world in a jiffy!

Or I’ll get killed by the first flower pot I meet...

Session time : 1 hour 30 minutes
Total time : 5 hours 30 minutes

Inventory : Arm Unit (Shoot, Mutate, Translate programs), Save Program

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

Written by Reiko

Broadhead Journal #3:"I got lucky so far. I stepped on a planet that no human has ever visited before, and I didn't die. Dare I hope I will be as lucky next time? I haven't earned nearly enough to get out of here yet. The Orion Program is my only hope, so I'd better go on at least one more mission. Otherwise, will I be stuck here forever like Thom and Nubar?"

I can't sleep until 12:30 in the morning (it's all so exciting, right?), but after sleeping, I gather up my things and go straight to the hangar. I show my blue badge to the agent, who finds a ship that's ready and programs in my codes. I close the hatch, look around the ship a little, then sit down and take a look at the control panel.

Is there any food on this ship? What if I get stuck?

The ship's control panel is another graphical device screen, quite intuitive. I don't even have to scroll through the alien numbers; I can just click on a code and it will automatically be entered as the active destination. I can pick any of the six codes, but I'll just go through them in order, assuming I survive, of course. It's all rather anticlimactic, really. I select a code and hit GO, and then I see a brief cut-scene where the ship leaves the station and warps somewhere else.

The Heechee ship's control panel.

My first destination ends up being the seventh planet of the Sigma Dayan system. There's no atmosphere, so just a barren rock, with 80% Earth gravity and a small concentration of Heechee metal. I land, put on the suit, and step out onto my first extraterrestrial world. Unfortunately, it's rather boring since it's so barren.

Could this place be any more boring?

Gray cliffs and plains extend in all directions. The only things of interest are a cave in the cliff, too high to reach, and a rockslide that allows me to climb to the top of the cliff. Part of the way along the cliff, I find a boulder right at the edge. Naturally, I push it off [5].

Is it just me, or… doesn't this look like a giant eye?

I go back around to the cliff area with the hole to find that the rockslide I created allows me to climb up and into the chamber [5]...which turns out to be a glowing blue Heechee room. There are no visible exits except one that disappears almost right away. Each turn, the exit reappears in a different place, but not for long enough for me to pass through it. It's moving around the room clockwise, though, so after a couple of turns, I anticipate where it will be and pass through it as it opens.

That's an awfully tiny box.

Now I'm in a strange blue ovoid room [15] containing an intriguing metal box, which I can't open. I take it [25] and nothing stops me. Does this seem too easy to you? Well, it's a good start, anyway. I return to the ship and hit Orbit, then Return to go back to Gateway. When I get back, I get a mission bangle [25] and a $25k royalty advance for the box artifact, which is taken away for study.

It's also the next day. It seems like each Tau-space transit takes twelve hours. Oddly enough, while the status-line time has been in 24-hour time since the beginning of the game, it's in 12-hour time while I'm on the mission, and then reverts once I'm back on the station. Probably it's an indication of how military the station is.

Ooh, pretty!

Well, I might as well go on another mission. I've earned enough to be able to live on the station for awhile, but not enough to return or do anything else. I repeat the steps to initiate a mission and this time choose the second code. The ship departs, only to reappear at the edge of a huge black hole! I automatically hit Return and escape back to the station before any damage is done to the ship. Nothing gained, nothing lost on this one. This trip only took twelve hours total. I suppose the time only advances when I manually hit the Go or Return buttons, not when the plot assumes I've done so.

Technically I've met Terri's requirements now. I've gone on two missions and I've found that box, whatever it was. But am I content to do the minimum? Nope, I want to know where the other four codes go! (Plus I love the space art in this game.)

A beautiful nebula.

A red giant at the end of its lifecycle, with six destroyed worlds around it.

A shattered planet around a blue-white B-class star.

A point in intergalactic space with an excellent view of the Andromeda Galaxy.

There's nothing to find at any of the other codes, unfortunately. Each time I return automatically. So it takes two additional days to check those four codes. There really isn't much point to doing this except for the sake of curiosity and to fill out the destinations on the ship's list of codes.

Calling Terri.

When I call Terri, which is presented more like a text chat, she checks my record and matter-of-factly says she'll sponsor me. I have to meet her in half an hour in the bar. I go right over there. When she shows up, she congratulates me, trades me a green badge for the blue badge [30], and tells me to go to the next Orion Program briefing at 9 in the morning so I can get a code. That was pretty simple.

Terri's already out the door after giving me the badge.

Easy enough. I go to the briefing, and some exec called Leonard Worden gives a speech about how these codes are super-secret, and we'll each get one code to start. He runs each badge through a device to assign a code and then says that the master list of "better" codes will be released to all prospectors after another year, so the Orion Program is just a head start, apparently. Then the meeting is over, and I've got myself a new code [15].

Ouch, quite a sacrifice for the research.

I'm not sure I quite follow the explanation of the high-quality codes. He says that there was a breakthrough in understanding the guidance system, and as a result, they could start to predict which codes would go to useful places. Since each location is only coded with a four-digit numerical code, I find it hard to believe that anything meaningful could be encoded in that number except on the most basic level. For instance, if all codes starting with the equivalent of 1 go to interstellar space, all codes starting with 2 go to M-class planets, all codes starting with 3 go to nebulas... That sort of pattern would be very easy to detect, though, so I doubt that's what they had in mind.

Next time, we'll go on another mission to somewhere more exciting.

Score: 207 of 1600
Balance: $26,450
Status: Orion Program (green badge)
Missions: 6 (or 2, if you do the minimum of trash missions)

Session Time: 1 hr
Total Time: 3 hours 15 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

Written by Joe Pranevich

Merry Christmas! Time flies when we’re playing great games and it’s already time for another Christmas special. In previous years, we looked at two holiday “classics” from 1984: Merry Christmas from Melbourne House and A Spell of Christmas Ice. This year, we have a new holiday treat to share with you: 1986’s Crisis at Christmas, a text adventure for the ZX Spectrum. Our Christmas games so far have been a mixed bag: Melbourne House’s offering was not much more than an early form of adware while Christmas Ice didn’t even get its title on its packaging. Will we finally break the mold with a good game? Before we can find out, I need to introduce some players first: Tom Frost, Tartan Software, and “type-in” code magazines.

The first surprise as I researched this game was that “Tom Frost” was not a holiday-themed pseudonym but rather a real-life gamer and game designer from Montrose, Scotland who tried his hand at nearly every aspect of our industry. By 1984, he was reviewing games for Micro Adventure magazine, had won a £400 prize (and the title “Britain’s Best Adventurer”) by being the first person to verifiably complete Incentive Software’s “Ket Trilogy”, was starting up his own mail-order software business, and won second place in the “Cambridge Awards”, a contest sponsored by CASES Computer Simulations (CCS). The latter also netted him a distribution deal for his submission, a World War II adventure titled 1942 Mission. To make this all more impressive, Mr. Frost did all of this in his spare time. In his “real life”, he was a 49-year old “quality control chemist” for a nearby lab. He was a man of many talents!

Tom Frost (right), “Britain’s Best Adventurer”

One of the first products from Tom’s new software company, Tartan Software, was the “Adventure Builder System”, a development kit to allow others to easily publish adventure games for the spectrum. That system is probably worth a post on its own, but I was only able to find a handful of commercial games written with it and most of those were distributed by Tartan itself. A stripped down version of the kit was even released as a type-in in Sinclair User magazine.

In a later interview, Tom claimed that he started up Tartan Software to give him a platform to sell games because he was rejected by other publishers. By 1986 he had only published one game himself, the curiously named Spy Trilogy, a James Bond pastiche. This may not be true: thanks to a quirk of Mobygames, most of Mr. Frost’s catalog is not included there. They only accept credits for standalone games, but almost everything distributed by Tartan was a combo pack of two or more games. That has forced me to research using other great sources (primarily World of Spectrum), but I caution that enough of the release information is fuzzy that I’m not sure the exact order his titles were released in.

He looks familiar somehow...

Crisis at Christmas was not initially distributed by Tartan but rather as a type-in feature for Sinclair User magazine in their January 1987 issue. (Cover dates are generally one or two months ahead of reality; this issue would have shipped in time for Christmas 1986.) Before researching this post, I only vaguely remembered type-in software. As a kid, I had a few books of simple software for the Commodore 64 that I forced a babysitter to type in for me, but I remember very little of it ever working. It was far too easy to make typos, especially when we didn’t understand what the code was doing.

If I thought that was hard, you cannot even imagine the difficulty that a young player in 1986 would have had with this software. The code provided in the magazine is five pages of extremely tiny print, divided into four columns. Some of it is recognizably BASIC, but the majority is nothing more than endless streams of numbers. Using a ruler, I estimate somewhere close to 2500 lines of code. I’m absolutely impressed by the gymnastics Mr. Frost is doing to code an assembly-language game in BASIC, but seeing it printed out makes my eyes water. I can’t imagine anyone successfully entered it all in without errors.

There are PAGES of this to type, but at least you get a star!

Fortunately, the game was subsequently re-released by Tartan Software as The White Door. Having already played the game as I type this, I assure you there are no white doors in it, but he renamed it so that it could take its place as the second game in his “Door” series: Open Door, White Door, Green Door, Red Door, and Yellow Door. I’m not familiar with any of the other games in the series to know if and how they connected. Tartan continued producing games at least through 1992; I count fifteen games designed by Mr. Frost plus a few more by other developers. After that, I do not know what became of him or his company. I know he was starting to work on games for the Amstrad CPC, but why he chose that instead of a more universal platform like the PC is a mystery to me. I welcome any gaming historians to come and help me figure out what became of “Britain’s Best Adventurer”.

Enough of that! Let’s play the game!

Remember kids: don’t drink and game.

We get a few introductory notes as the game begins: our character arrives home on Christmas Eve just after the babysitter put his (or her) kids to bed. Before we can relax, we get a phone call from our spouse that her (or his) car has broken down and she won’t make it home in time to help us put the presents in our children’s rooms. Worse, we neglect to ask her where the presents were hidden before she hangs up. If only they had invented cell phones! It will be up to me to locate the presents and stash them in the kids’ rooms before morning. One nice feature off the bat is that we can select whether we are playing as the husband or wife. Female protagonists are rare in adventure games and having the choice is a nice touch.

I start in the lounge and have free reign to explore the house. With the exception of the basement (too dark) and the attic (more on that in a moment), we can go everywhere immediately. Rather than narrate it out, I will run down what I found. I also drew a map!

The Ground Floor:

The starting room contains a note and a glass of sherry. The note tells us not to drink it; it’s for Father Christmas.
A nearby study contains the first hint: a day-planner (they call it a “diary”) with a note that says “Boy-D” and “Girl-U”. My guess is that this is hints at which present goes to which kid.
The kitchen has a hand-towel, scissors hidden in a drawer, and the entrance to the basement. It’s too dark to see down there, so I expect to find a light source soon. We also get a note that we (the husband) do not go in here very often. That sounds vaguely sexist, don’t you think?
I find the flashlight (“torch”) in an alcove and batteries for it in the pantry (“larder”). It takes me some time to figure out that I have to “insert battery” as the parser wrongly believes “put battery in torch” means I want to drop it. I have no idea why. I also realize that we have limited space in the inventory so I ferry anything not nailed down to the room where I started.
With the flashlight in hand, I discover a locked chest in the basement, but no way to open it.
Other items include a pair of boots (on the patio), some string (in a garage cupboard), a chisel (in an outside shed), and wrapping paper (in a cubby by the stairs).

Completed map of the game.

Upstairs:

Our bedroom contains a ton of stuff: a key hidden in a jewelry box, a red poncho in the wardrobe, and an ottoman that I can’t do anything with yet. I suspect that is the key to the chest, but it doesn’t work because the lock is rusted. Do I need to find oil first?
The two kids' rooms (son to the north and daughter to the east) are inaccessible. When I enter, the kids wake up and see their dad instead of Father Christmas and the whole thing is ruined. I will need a disguise... I also find shaving foam in the bathroom. Is this going where I think it is going?

With that, I’ve seen everything and start solving puzzles. I turn first to the chest in the basement. The key from the bedroom doesn’t work in the rusty lock and I never found any oil. What else to try? Eventually I try the direct approach and force the lock with the chisel, scoring us our first present: a ZX Spectrum! Unfortunately, I have no idea where the second present is except that it may be “up”. An attic? I haven’t found a path there yet so I work on being able to enter the kids’ rooms next.

I know I need a “Father Christmas” disguise so I work out that I can put on the boots, pancho, and even a dollop of shaving foam to make a Santa passable in the dark. That works, but then I learn that I need to wrap the present first. No problem! I can “wrap” it with the string, wrapping paper, and scissors. I deliver the present to my son’s room and am halfway there!

Knowing that the second present is “up” (from the diary), I type “look up” in every location until I find a trapdoor in the upstairs hallway. I am not able to reach it, but there’s a hint that I can stand on something. The Ottoman? It is too heavy to move, but after some experimentation, I realize that it can be opened to reveal blankets and other items. Do British Ottomans really have storage compartments? I had no idea! Moving the Ottoman still requires me to inventory-shuffle as it can only be moved when it is empty and when I am carrying nothing else. Once it is in place, it is no difficulty to get into the attic, unlock a second trunk, and collect a doll. I wrap it and put it in my daughter’s room and win the game! For completeness, I play again as the wife: there are some text changes (more on this in a moment), but otherwise it plays the same.

Whew! I’m glad I only dreamed all of that.

Time played: 1 hr 35 min

Just like in years past, we will not be using the PISSED rating scheme for this game, but rather the curiously similar “EGGNOG” scale. If you need help converting between the two, I recommend laying off on the holiday beverages.

Enigmas and Solution-Findability - This is a fun little romp with a couple of real puzzles and dead ends. If you drink the sherry, for example, your kids wake up and think you are a drunk! It’s about the level of challenge I hope for in a holiday game. Score: 3.

Game UI and Items - Crisis uses a stripped down version of the “Adventure Builder System” interface and it’s not bad. The parser is rudimentary with some tricky wording, but there’s good use of color. Score: 3.

Gameworld and Story - We have a basic but interesting premise with a fun area to explore. There’s not much challenge to it, but it feels like a real place. Predicating the whole misadventure on forgetting to ask your wife (or husband) where they put the presents is silly, but we’ve seen worse. I am disappointed it turns out to have been a bad dream. Score: 3.

The wife isn’t allowed into the shed. What decade is this?

Noises and Pretty Pixels - Other than the opening graphic, there are no images in this game. I know that Mr. Frost’s other adventures featured rudimentary graphics but I assume they had to be stripped out for a type-in. Other than that, all we get are beeps. Score: 1.

Overworld and Environs - Not much fancy here, but the text descriptions are complete and it’s a nice touch that some of the descriptions change depending on whether you are playing as the husband or wife. That said, most of the changed descriptions come off as sexist today. The dad built the patio with his bare hands! The mom does all the cooking! The game loses something by defining its characters in this way. Score: 2.

Gregariousness and Thespianism - I’ve already mentioned the text and the sexism, but overall the prose was put together well and the introduction brings you into the story. Score: 3.

If we tally all that up, we get (3+3+3+1+2+3)/.6 = 25. I will use one discretionary point to dock the game for the sexism. It wasn’t just the room descriptions; for example, why does the son get the computer while the daughter gets a doll? That hardly seems fair. Is there any wonder why not enough women go into the sciences?

That leaves us with 24 points and our best Christmas game ever! Congratulations! It’s as good as Hugo’s House of Horrors!

I regret that I have been unable to contact Mr. Frost or to even confirm whether he’s still with us (he’d be 79 today). While I haven’t played any of his other games, I wager that he was better known to UK audiences than US ones. As a guy that loves and writes about adventure games, Mr. Frost seems like a kindred spirit even across decades. His story is fantastic and if anyone knows anything else about our mysterious author, please let me know. Has anyone played any of this other games? Why was the “Ket Trilogy” considered so difficult? Have any of you played it?

Up next from me will be Zork I in a week or two. I’ve beaten the game now and it’s just a matter of reporting on it.

Written by Ilmari

Watch out, I see a nipple!

I am going to reveal a secret, known only by few persons.
Oregon Trail was not the first game I played in the hope of blogging it for The Adventure Gamer.

Back when Trickster was still in charge of TAG, it seemed for a while that Emmanuelle would be the first game that could be played as a Guest Game. I thought doing a Guest Game might be a fun experience, so I tried my luck with the game and survived to write the first game review in my life. And then some regular commenter convinced others that the game was worth Trickster’s time.

I still vouch for my words

My quest for completing Muriel Tramis’s early works has finally taken me to a point, when I again have to endure an erotic game from Tomahawk, the subsidiary of Coktel Vision. This is Geisha that will be the topic of our annual Welcoming the Turn of the Year Week posts. I hope I won’t have to regret my decision to play this piece of art.

They sure liked their colour charts at Coktel Vision -
all the games I’ve played thus far have had one.
In fact, they have used the exactly same colour chart,
which just makes the whole idea a bit redundant.

Because some of the material in the forthcoming Geisha-posts might be a bit unsuitable for our younger audience, we have decided to use an old trick from Leisure Suit Larry -games. We have made up a multiple choice quiz that should positively weed out all too young readers. Because we are also worried about the ticky tickers of our elderly readers, the quiz will furthermore be surely failed by too old persons. Because this is a retro game site, the quiz is suitably dated - it is designed for persons who had their teenage in the nineties. And oh yes, the first one to post the right set of answers in the comments wins 20 CAPs!

Warning!!!!!! Take the test before continuing further!

“But wait, I can read this without taking the test!”
"You did what??? Shame on you !!"

***

The first screens of the game are at least good looking, and there’s some groovy enough music playing in the background during the credits - it sure shows that the DOS version of Emmanuelle was not a good choice. As for the opening itself, I really don’t understand what is going on, so it’s time to look at the manual.

Could someone explain what I am looking at here?

When you combine a female with a robot you get…?

...a broken glass container?

I have no idea who this peeping Tom is

In addition to the normal help for getting the game to run and for controlling the game, the manual contains a story of the game. That is, not just the background of the game, like in Legend of Djel, but the plot of at least the beginning sections. I guess the pretty pictures took so much space that the story had to be covered in the manual. I won’t reveal the whole plot here, but I will refer to the manual as I’ll get further in the game.

The game begins in Paris, in chic apartment in Montparnasse district. The hero of the game is looking at the world through a camera. And CLICK… doing anything else, but moving the camera around sends you to the next segment.

This just smells of a dead end bait. You can take a photo of a one place in the room, and the photograph then appears in your inventory. I have a feeling I need to take a picture at just a precise spot or otherwise I will at some point have to begin the whole game anew.

Should it be the stereos?

Or perhaps the calendar with Japanese symbols?

This is the beloved of the nameless hero, Eva.
Manual says she is “moving sensually and erotically.”
I’d call that sitting in an awkward position.

The manual is the only place telling me what happens after I take the photo. Apparently a man tattooed like “Samurai” knocks the hero, while a “Sumo” fighter grabs Eva on his shoulders. After that, the two men carry Eva to a limousine and vanish.

The hero comes to the conclusion that the two gentlemen were Yakusas. Apparently some Japanese researcher had wanted Eva to assist him as a “de-luxe Geisha”. Poor Eva was actually an astrophysicist and she was emotionally hurt by all the men ogling her, when she was giving a presentation on a conference.

Actually, that last bit sounds quite intriguing. I bet back in those days it was quite usual that female researchers were not taken as seriously as their fellow males - and that attitude was especially true, when the woman in question was considered sexually interesting. Could it be that instead of a ridiculous piece of would-be erotica I am actually playing a game with a real message?

The next segment takes place in Tokyo, where the hero has booked a three-star ryokan in the Ginza district.

According to manual, folding screen educates young
girls so that they can please their future husbands

The sparsely decorated room had some objects to interact with. Firstly, there’s the cupboard. Opening a door revealed an ad for Li-Fou’s submarine city Nereis. The ad was weirdly interactible - I could look up the various types of sea animals and sectors of Nereis these animals lived in. I suspect I’ll need this info at some future point.

I can just imagine how fun it was back in the day trying
to find out what animal species these Latin words meant

The locker of the cupboard contained something that looked like a small matchbox.

Except it was empty

At the table was a bottle of Hinoki oil. The manual told me that coating hands with this stuff would help me capture bugs, which are paralysed by its smell. And indeed, there was a cricket sitting in a bonsai on a table (good luck I was so thorough, since the cricket was only one pixel in size). If I tried to take it without anointing my hands, I saw a cute animation, where the small cricket ran away and vanished forever. When I anointed my hands, I could easily capture the cricket into the empty matchbox. I have no idea what I’ll do with the thing, but I guess it must become important, since this strange ritual was described in the manual.

This doesn’t look tempting

I wonder if it is important that it is a female cricket?
(And if the game involves carnal interaction with crickets,
I am going to have a major headache)

Our hero has also purchased from Narita Airport the most modern piece of multi-media interactivity - the HYPERMED. The buttons on the lower part of the hotel room screen supposedly represent the key-accessible functions of the HYPERMED. It’s a cool gadget, because it allows you to save and load - a feature I dearly missed in all Coktel Vision games thus far. It also lets me use my inventory, look at my messages (at the moment, none) and travel to different locations (at the moment, nowhere).

But wait, there’s more! HYPERMED gives me access to SEXYTEL, which contains ads to read and games to play. Manual tells me that the games are actually minigames which I’ll eventually have to play during my adventures and SEXYTEL provides me an opportunity to practice them in advance. Thus, I’ll leave describing them to another post.

You can even play them with a partner!

The ads describe the Tokyo’s three most daring houses, and by reading the story in manual, I know I will have to visit each of them.

I guess this is where the intro happened

I am pretty sure geisha balls can be found with my local pharmacist,
but I am positive it won’t be as easy to get them in this game

The game was published in 1990 and set in year 1993 - did they really
think holographic projection would be invented in three years?

There’s also an ad for tsuki-pastilles, which you can order and add to your inventory.

I think I got this same ad to my personal e-mail today

The final service I could access with my HYPERMED was PREDICTEL consultation. PREDICTEL provided me, firstly, with an astrology service, which I could use to find out the lovemaking properties of different signs.

Chinese signs, that is

Let’s see what I got

PREDICTEL also offered me a live second sight service with Sensei Isuzu, who apparently already knew of my quest and set me up with someone called Elegant Cricket, who had the same enemy as I did.

So Skype was invented already back in the 90s?

After talking with Sensei, I could now visit someone called Mr. O - the manual told me that’s the same person as Elegant Cricket. Choosing to travel, I entered the first numbered scene of the game.

This appears to be a good spot to end my first post. It’s still a bit early to say, whether I like the game or not. Certainly lot of things have improved from Emmanuelle, but the clear admission that there will be minigames to handle makes me a bit wary.

Time:1 hour
Total time: 1 hour

By Ilmari

Where I stopped last time

Story so far was that Eva, the fiancee of the hero, was kidnapped by men that were supposedly members of Yakusa. A new plot twist turns everything around. Mr. O who might help me, is actually the leader of Yakusa. The real villain of the story is Napadami, famous scientist, who has created gynoids, which are in principle female sexbots. Napadami had once kidnapped geisha loved by Mr. O and used her exceptional beauty to power up his machines. The geisha died of repeated orgasms, and the same fate awaits Eva, if I don’t get to Napadami’s gynoid brothel Shato, which is located on a nearby island.

I am starting to feel a bit of a headache...

“Youthful looks”, said the manual. If he is youthful, I need not worry about my age

After telling me the plot of the game, Mr. O told me he would contact me afterwards with e-mails and then promptly disappeared. I was left beside a fabulous pool, with a woman suntanning herself.

She does look a bit pale

I could leave the scene, but since I could not return, this seemed like yet another dead end trap. There wasn’t much to try my hand on. If I touched the woman, she told me to go away. If I took the bottle of oil and held it above the woman, the icon of the bottle tipped and some oil was poured on the woman - and now if I touched the woman, she thanked me, but I still went away with empty hands. Finally, if I took the cocktail glass and held it above the woman, I’d drop the drink on her. The woman would raise her head and scream to me, but at the same time she would drop an access card (it was probably hidden in her hair). It’s great to begin a day with a puzzle that makes no sense!

After getting back to my hotel room, I read a message from Mr. O, who told me that I should take a look at Napadami’s other establishments, first of which was the Jade Temple.

Seduction ended with me throwing drinks on women. I wonder how this will go

The gimmick of Jade Temple was the use of holosuits - the guest puts on the suit and his hologram appears on the stage, where a woman will move about and the guest feels this movement through the suit. The manual told me that the woman on stage happened to be Eva, but the game itself showed no signs of this.

My aim was now to find a sequence of five movements, which when executed by my docile partner would take me to absolute pleasure (suddenly my headache became worse). The different movements were represented by numbers (there were eight in total), the order of them had to be exact and I had only a limited number of guesses available. This sounds quite familiar...

Yes, it’s Master Mind

Lucky I am not descapitated

Having save states to use, the minigame wasn’t too hard - and looking now at my screenshots, it shouldn’t have been even that hard, since the correct answer is told you, when you lose. Oh well. When I had found the right movements, I saw a brief animation of the woman twisting around my hologram and then climax occurred with maximal efficiency.

After this bit of “fun”, I was seized by Napadami’s men, who challenged me to a run of Erotic Battle.

I will, if I can stop playing Master Mind

The Erotic Battle is a simple game of cards. You and the opponent have a set of five cards and both play one of them on the table. If only one of them is trump, the one with the trump gets a point. If neither or both is a trump, the one with the highest card gets the point.

And if you are wondering, here’s the order of the different cards, highest one being on the left

After both players have played their five cards, the one with more points wins the round. The player winning two rounds wins the whole game.

The game was surprisingly fun, and I could well imagine playing it with someone else. The most fun part are the little animations, reminiscent of the old Battle Chess in that the characters in the cards show little pieces of animation after each draw of cards. The only even remotely erotic ingredient of the game appears in these animations, which at least imply various sexual proceedings.

In one of the less sexual interactions, we see samurai slicing
sumo wrestler’s pants, making him run away bare and ashamed.

But the best part is that the opponents let me choose the trumps. With odds like these, how could I loose?

“You are a trained triathlonist, so we’ll let you start half an hour earlier.”
“You are a noted grandmaster in chess, so we’ll play without our queen.”
“You are…”, oh you get the point

After having been beaten fairly and squarely (not a single restore, I tell you!), Napadami’s henchmen just let me go back to my hotel. Such decent chaps!

The next item on the list was Baths of Desire, but gaining entrance required finding geisha balls (these are apparently quite a rarity in Japan). Luckily, Mr. O could help me. He suggested that I would go and meet pearl fisher Oko, who might help me to find some black pearls, which assumedly make great geisha balls.

So far the game hasn’t done it, I hope this time it’s different

Oko suggested we should enter the submarine city of marine collector Li-Fou, who had got hold of a rare shellfish that Oko had fished. At the same time, Oko would collect me some black pearls, which apparently are an important ingredient for geisha balls. Unfortunately, Oko did not know where pearls could be found.

If this were an early adventure game, they would be found in caves

Some of you might remember from the earlier post that I had seen an ad of Li-Fou’s marine collections, which provided me information of the whereabouts of certain marine animals. Problem was that the names of the animals were in Latin. Nowadays, it’s all just one google away, but back in nineties this type of puzzle would have been extremely hard.

Manual underlines that this delicate creature swims in the nude

Time for another minigame! Diving is a typical example of an action game, which I am so not good at. The ocean view had three levels and I could move Oko from one level to another. At every level, there were dangerous fishes swimming, and if Oko hit them too many times, she was a goner - luckily I could also shoot the fishes. At the very top, Oko could take some oxygen, if her air was running out. And the lowest level contained all the pearls. Some of them were white, others black - and I needed two of the latter.

After too many attempts, I finally managed to obtain two black pearls, and Oko made them into two geisha balls. I had now gained entrance to White Willow or the Baths of Desire, where I was supposed to meet Kine, a dancer who had just returned from Shato and who might help me gain entrance.

“Kine liked to be stripped - for her it combined business
with pleasure since she gave massages with her whole body.”

Of course it wasn’t as easy as speaking with Kine, but I had to go through another minigame. This time, it was kind of an action variant of rock, paper and scissors (or sword, statue and fan). At first, I chose the object I wanted - then the cursor started running wildly through rows of swords, statues and fans, and I had to pick the correct item on time. A successful round let me take away one piece of Kine’s clothing.

I can’t believe this game has so many fans!

After being completely disrobed, Kine finally told me the bare truth. Apparently Shato was well guarded, but there was a submarine entrance I could use, but it was guarded by deadly virobots that I could neutralize with an extaser, which Kine gave me (I smell another minigame coming up).

Already? I thought there’d be more foreplay

The story in the manual breaks at this point, so this seems like a natural place for me to stop also. I’ll just quote the final passage from the manual, just to give an inkling what’s in store for me:

“By now the excitement was becoming unbearable, my blood was pulsating all through my body and I had reached the point of no return. There was no turning back, however I had to postpone the final explosion. The ecstasy was the prize………………..”

Dear, I think I have too much headache tonight...

Time used: 3 hours
Total time: 4 hours

By Ilmari

Eye candy for lovers of female anatomy - scantily clad people

Eye candy for lovers of male anatomy - a metallic phallus

Yes, I was supposed to board that contraption and penetr... infiltrate the enemy base. I had to move through three levels and find within each level a pink access to the next level. I had to shoot killer robots and there were also lips to contend with. Lips with no teeth kissed my shaf... shuttle and then its shields became har… stronger. Lips with teeth bit my shuttle and its shields became sof… weaker.

If you think this is disturbing, don’t ever watch Three Caballeros

This minigame wasn’t so difficult to begin with and I got couple of things to help me. Remember the card I had cleverly found by pouring my drink over a semi-naked woman? Turns out, this wasn’t a dead end bait, but something rarely seen in adventure games - an optional puzzle. I could use the card before I entered the base and gain access to additional doors between levels.

I could also use this Viagra substitute to “improve my shot”

After infiltrating the base, I encountered one of Napadami’s gynoids, which was programmed to undress with a look any intruder.

Interestingly, the robot with the feminine shape is called he.

I really have difficulties understanding what was going on here. Apparently my character was shooting the gynoid with his extaser, while the gynoid was at the same time projecting some rays, which undressed my character. My shot was represented by the sliding puzzle in the middle of the screen, and I had to complete the puzzle, before the gynoid’s gaze would have its full effect. Needless to say, I was forced to put the emulation cycles quite low, and I wonder how people managed to get through this back in the day. Anyway, when I had completed the puzzle, the gynoid collapsed from pleasure.

I’ve been at this stage long time ago

After all the minigames, it was refreshing to see some old-fashioned adventure game puzzles. I was behind doors of a temple, with a 3 times 4 grid containing some symbols inscribed to the floor. I was supposed to take the sacred bonsai and put it on the symbol that corresponded to the sign of my kakemono. But when I picked up the bonsai, it’s secret guardian alerted everyone of my presence.

Checking the bonsai tree thoroughly, I found its one-pixel guardian - a male cricket. Since I had been carrying a female cricket so long, the next step was easy to solve.

That’s why I never use crickets as guards

Now the only problem was to know what my kakemono was. Luckily, I had took a photo of it at the very beginning of the game.

I can just imagine the frustration of a person who just realized that he had took
the photo of a wrong spot and was forced to start again from the very beginning.
And yes, this sign changes every time you start the game.

Inevitably, it had to… Well, you know what I mean

Then final confrontation with the evil boss.

If the game thus far has made little sense, the final scene is no better. I was face to face with Napadami, who threatened me with a gun, and in few minutes, shot me. I had my cursor, which presumably represented my extaser, and I tried to click it on Napadami… and part of the picture of Napadami vanished, revealing another picture behind it. Of what, you ask? Of a nude female form, of course.

What on Earth is going on?

The timer had luckily stopped and I had no fear of Napadami shooting me anymore. What I then had to do was start clicking parts of Napadami-picture, and if I hit the correct one, it vanished and revealed more of the underlying picture. Was the game trying to say that Napadami was actually a woman? Or was the woman behind a cardboard image of Napadami, which I was shooting to pieces? Or perhaps this was a clever political statement for transgender rights? Who knows.

This part of the game wasn’t particularly difficult, but the sounds… Every time you clicked the picture, the game emitted a kind of loud moaning which will certainly make your neighbours look at you with a smirk on their face when they see you next time. Needless to say, I had a sudden urge to find headphones.

And this was it. After revealing all of the nude picture, the creature collapsed from pleasure and I could proceed to release Eva. “Ecstasy awaits me”, the game said and opened up an animation of naked Eva lying on bed and moving her hands around her body. At this point, touching anything else but oneself lands the player to OS, and since the animation itself serves no other purpose, but to gratify any poor soul who had to play this game just to see anything remotely sexual, I’ll refrain from showing any screenshot of it. So, let’s rate this game!

Time used: 30 minutes
Total time: 4 hours 30 minuts

Final rating

Puzzles and Solvability:

Have I ever told you that I just loath minigames in adventure games? And then I am submitted to a game where the majority of the gameplay consists of minigames…. In addition, the few puzzles of the game manage to break all the rules of fairness. An obligatory use of external source of information? Check (Latin dictionary). Pixel hunting? Check (both crickets). Dead ending player at the very beginning? Check (taking a photo of a wrong spot).

A further point of unfairness in this puzzle is that it is so easy to just use the camera accidentally

Still, the puzzles at least make some sense, and in that respect the game is a leap forward from Emmanuelle. How do you fool a male cricket? With a female cricket. How do you catch a female cricket? With an ointment which dozes crickets. This a perfectly reasonable string of problems, while in comparison, in Emmanuelle I had to appropriate a toucan to become a better swimmer. Also, there’s the nice optional puzzle to consider in favour of the game.

Rating: 2

Interface and Inventory

The interface of Emmanuelle was simply horrible (at least in DOS version): no ability to save, no mouse support in a game that cried for it, either horribly slow or unbearably fast speed, impossibility of finding the right pixel to press - frankly, I am astonished Trickster gave the game even 1 in this category. Compared to this, Geisha (played with Atari ST emulator) is simply pure bliss. Even if I wouldn’t have used save states, the game would have had in-game save game ability. The game included mouse support and the game interface was reasonably smooth, although a bit cumbersome at places. Inventory was a bit boring - just a list of items - but it did its job.

Also, there were very few items in the game - I am holding most of them

Rating: 4

Story and Setting

James Bond movies are rarely watched for their deep plots.You get some kind of handwaving at the beginning of the film - world is in danger, there’s this evil organization with an ultimate bad guy as its leader blah blah blah. But why Mr. Bond is actually at some location remains often quite unexplained - or if explained, the explanation makes no sense. But who cares what he is doing dropping from an aeroplane, as long as we get a dashing fight scene which defies the laws of physics.

Remind me again, why are we playing this minigame?

The plot of Geisha follows a similar non-logic. Sure there’s some kind of overarching story - your fiancee is in danger, there’s this evil organization with an ultimate bad guy as its leader blah blah blah. But in the end, it’s all about taking the player from one minigame to another. Why are we actually scouring the various erotic salons? Who cares. I am not saying this is inherently bad kind of plotting. It is used to good effect in many action movies, as long as the individual scenes make your adrenaline levels go higher. Compared to the aimless wandering of Emmanuelle, the plot of Geisha has drive, even if at times it felt like I was just railroaded through the game.

Rating: 3

Sounds and Graphics

One commenter criticised Trickster’s review of Emmanuelle, because it forgot that European game developers were not as experienced in the art of making games as their American peers. If my journey through Muriel Tramis’ games has showed anything, it is that they did have experience in making games. Indeed, when it comes to sounds and graphics, the problem was more that they targeted their games to different computers than in the American market - PC really didn’t become popular in Europe before 90s.

So, it’s no wonder that the graphics of the Atari ST version of the game are pretty decent, when compared to the standards of 1990, and many of the animations are well made. The sound department is more of a mixed variety. The opening music is pretty catchy, but that’s about the only time any music can be heard. Sound effects consist mostly of beebs, bloobs and moans.

It's your fault if my neighbours start to spread rumours about my supposedly lewd lifestyle

Rating: 5

Environment and Atmosphere

Trickster complained about the sexist nature of Emmanuelle. Personally, as a male, I’d find it strange to call a game developed by an assumed female sexist - who am I to criticize the motives of Muriel Tramis in designing Geisha? Thus, I’ll just note that the game has a very traditional and even worn out take on what erotic means - exposition of mammaries and pubic hair, with some high-pitched squeals and sighs to underline what is going on. This does not by itself mean that Geisha would fail in being erotic - even worn out methods could be put to good use. More important is how well Geisha fares with the ultimate test or eroticism - would you consider playing Geisha with a partner (or partners, if that’s how you roll), in hopes of getting the mood to a more carnal level?

Yes, I kind of guessed that.

Master Mind, the ultimate invention in erotic gaming

In fact, it is hard to pinpoint what is the atmosphere that the developers tried to achieve. The game is definitely not erotic, but it’s also not funny enough to be a parody and it fails as an action flick also. There are even suggestions of a more serious message (you should not judge the intelligence of a person just on basis of her looks, and you should not assume that a sexually active person wants to have intercourse with everyone), but these feel kind of tacked on to this amalgam of disparate styles.

Rating: 3

Dialogue and Acting

The dialogue and other texts in Emmanuelle ranged from unintentionally humorous to incomprehensibly mysterious. I don’t know if we are to credit the writers or the translators for this sad state of affairs, but at least in Geisha they’ve put their act partially together - I could mostly understand everything what was said. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the text was flawless. There were minor errors, like same characters having slightly different names in the manual and in the game. More importantly, the text in the game was so full of cheese, you really couldn’t read it with a straight face, especially when it tried to be very profound.

Seriously, instilling the essence of erotism in chimeric creatures?

Rating: 4

(2 + 4 +3 + 5 + 3 +4)/0.6 = 35. Do I have any reason to give or take a point? Actually, I do. The card game with the ridiculous name of Erotic Battle was quite fun. In fact, with a slightly more modern graphics and sounds and a good deal more of complexity (and challenge - no automatic choice of trumps), and Erotic Battle would make quite fun app. Getting one bonus point for this great minigame, Geisha scores 36.

Is this a fair score? Many of the failings of Emmanuelle were due to an utterly useless interface and unbearably crude graphics and both of these were fixed in Geisha. It’s still a game that is hard to enjoy, but at least it didn’t feel like walking through a scorched desert with nothing to drink.

Written by Joe Pranevich

Box art that cannot be unseen.

A few weeks back, I conquered mainframe Zork (also known as Dungeon), one of the most influential text adventures of all time. It was a fantastic game but a true marathon: at more than thirty-six hours of play (not counting my look at the 616-point version afterwards), it is the longest game currently on the site. It had plenty to explore, well-designed puzzles, and a parser that is still best of breed. Written by students for a very specific MIT-flavored PDP-10 system, it wasn’t intended to be a commercial success. It was a fun coding project by a bunch of guys that really thought they were going to get real jobs after graduation.

That is where the story of Dungeon ends and the story of Infocom begins. In 1979, the original designers (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling) formed a company together. It wasn’t a gaming company. It wasn’t intended to sell Zork to the masses. It was a way to keep the band together as they transitioned to “real” projects. That they changed adventure games forever happened entirely by accident.

The TRS-80, the first personal computer to run Zork.

While others on the team thought about serious software, Marc Blank and a new collaborator, Joel Berez, experimented: how much could mainframe Zork be compressed? At nearly one megabyte in size, Zork was enormous by late-1970s standards. They could not approach that amount of memory on personal computers of the day but floppies were nearly large enough. By building a custom engine and paging to and from disk, they could just about squeeze an abridged version of the game onto a personal computer. Dave Lebling returned to streamline Zork to fit into the new constraints while Joel and Marc finalized the engine. This evolved into a fully interpreted game system capable of “write once, run anywhere” decades before Java made the idea commonplace. Infocom negotiated with Personal Software, a huge name in early 1980s productivity software, to distribute the game. Zork I hit the shelves-- terrible cover art and all-- in December 1980 for the TRS-80.

Diving into Zork I is surreal after having played so many hours of Dungeon. Nothing is exactly as I expect it and at first even my fingers rebel from “muscle memory”. Because this game is essentially a refactored Dungeon, it is difficult to talk about separate from that game. If you are joining us late, I cannot recommend reading this without looking at my review of the original first. With that out of the way, let’s begin!

Our adventure re-begins!

Playing It Again, For the First Time

Zork I starts exactly where Dungeon did: the mailbox by the white house with the boarded front door. From there, it’s deja vu as we find the leaflet, the forest maze, the window at the rear of the house, and the trophy case inside. And yet, everything is also just slightly different: there are no explosives in the attic, we can see the chimney leading to the cellar in the kitchen, and the forest is laid out differently enough that I have to map it over again. I quickly discover that I will have to map everything again.

After I descend into the Underground Empire, it’s apparent just how different the game really is. While most of the rooms are accounted for, they are connected in different ways. Some things are simplified: mainframe Zork loved connecting rooms in asymmetrical ways but now when you go west you can almost always get back to where you were by heading east.

Under the house in Dungeon (left) and Zork I (right).

The area under the house exemplifies this, but I could have picked just about anywhere in the dungeon and found the same. Zork I replaced Dungeon’s six rooms in something like a figure-eight pattern with five rooms arranged in a straight line. All exits are bidirectional and the rooms align nicely with a grid. The chimney is now one square east of the trapdoor, for example, just as it is above ground. The Twisty Maze, and from there the Thief’s and Cyclops’s rooms, are off to the west instead of the east, allowing the connection with the living room to make sense. You almost have to compare side-by-side to see how much they changed. Also missing are the one-way passage from the Torch room (now part of the Temple complex) and the Bank of Zork (presumably in a future installment). Neither of them made sense to be near the white house anyway and moving them is good worldbuilding.

I am getting ahead of myself. Rather than narrate the whole game straight, let me tell you what I found. This is mostly in order:

The White House

Both the Troll and the Thief can drop their weapons, an axe and a stiletto, during combat or at death. Other than as new pointy things, I did not find a use for them.
There is a “Zork manual” in the artist’s studio.
The Twisty Maze is significantly easier to map: it has the same number of rooms, but the Thief does not bother your stuff (or he does so considerably less frequently). It takes me only one pass to do it once I gather enough items.
You no longer have to open the bottle of water before you give it to the cyclops.
As it was in the 600+ point versions of Zork, the trapdoor remains open for use after you find any other path to the surface.
The “Round Room” is just a regular room with five (not seven) exits; no magnets or hidden violins.

Temple Complex

The “Temple Complex” now includes many of the religious-themed areas from the first game all together: the Engravings Room, the dome, the Torch Room, as well as the Egyptian Room are all consolidated together near the altar. We can still pray there to reach the surface.
The Egyptian Room puzzle with the coffin is completely redesigned. Instead of being part of the Dam puzzle (we had to drag the oversized coffin across the drained reservoir), it’s now connected to the altar room. We have to “pray” it outside through the altar.
The bell, book, and candle are still together, but now the book has a hint to the exorcism puzzle if you turn the page.
The Torch is now just a treasure and permanent light source. Since there’s no longer a glacier to destroy, we’re able to use it all the way to the end of the adventure.
The exorcism is the improved version where we have to ring the bell, etc. (rather than just type “exorcism” as in the older version), but there is no Crypt of the Implementers on the other side. Instead, we find a crystal skull in the Land of the Dead.
Strangely, the grail and its room is missing from this game. It would have fit in perfectly with the religious theme, but perhaps someone didn’t like to mix Christian and Egyptian themes so directly.

Flood Control Dam #3

The machinery room in the dam now also contains tool chests that disintegrate when you touch them.
Draining the reservoir works exactly as before with one exception: it takes time for it to drain. You have to “wait” or do something else before you can cross to pick up the treasure on the lakebed.
The “Loud Room” still has the “echo” solution, but the sound is now more clearly coming from the dam and draining the reservoir makes the noise stop as well.
The matchbook is still used for the exorcism (above), but both the Don Woods puzzle and the volcano have been removed from this game.

Coal Mine

The Coal Mine is now much more linear. You have to pass the vampire bat (with garlic) to get in rather than have him in a side passage. Otherwise the coal gas puzzle and the diamond machine worked exactly as before. This is the most difficult puzzle of Zork I and I’m pleased that it didn’t get nerfed like most of the others.
The Coal Mine maze has been redesigned from seven rooms to four and with far fewer extraneous exits. It’s just about possible to map without items, but I did it the old fashioned way.
The Mirror Room is unchanged. The slide is returned to its previous version and no longer features the hidden “Sooty Room” that required the timber and rope. It still doesn’t make any sense for the slide to emerge into the cellar.

River Rafting

The river section is simplified. Traveling upriver with the treasures (without using the rainbow) no longer requires juggling the gunk, pump, and pointy stick to maneuver the boat through a gap.
We still have to dig on the beach to find a scarab, but now the digging section is on the opposite bank.
I initially thought that you had to wave the scarab to make the rainbow solid, but that is not the case. This leads to the only other new puzzle in Zork I: the location of the scepter (formerly known as the pointy stick). That’s now hidden in the coffin in the temple. I struggled with this for a long time as there was nothing in the coffin in the previous versions.
The emerald is still in the buoy just as before, but there is no longer a barrel at the top of the waterfall to prove how dangerous the descent is.

When you collect and store the final treasure, you get a message that says, “Look to your treasures for your final secret.” There’s now an ancient map in the trophy case which we can follow to find the Stone Barrow and the entrance to Zork II. What is missing? Off the top of my head, I did not find the volcano, the glacier, the giant well, Wonderland, the robot puzzle, the sliding puzzle, or the endgame. There’s probably more and I should make a spreadsheet...

Time played: 5 hr 30 min
Total Zork Marathon time: 41 hr 55 min

To be continued!

Final Rating

Rating this game is difficult because we must evaluate it on its own merits. Most players would have come to these puzzles without the baggage of 30+ hours of Dungeon. Even so, I feel underwhelmed. This is a pale imitation of the expansiveness and cleverness of mainframe Zork. A kernel of that still found here but without most of the best puzzles, ASCII graphics, or the majority of the difficulty level. This is “just” a treasure hunt now, but let’s see how it does in our scoring system:

Puzzles and Solvability - Many of the most creative puzzles didn’t make the transition to this game, but what we are left with is still very good. The updated versions of the Dam, the Loud Room, and Temple were welcome, but less so the river rafting which lost most of the challenge. We have to evaluate this game only in its own context and what we have is vanilla but a lot of fun. Score: 5.

Interface and Inventory - The Infocom parsers are still fantastic and this game retained most of the excellence of the MDL parser despite the cramped conditions. I can’t do much worse than rate it the same. Score: 5.

Story and Setting - I love this setting, but this game doesn’t really go anywhere. Without the later stages of the original Zork, all we have is a basic treasure hunt and an ending that little more than “explore over there next”. This game world and setting feel more like a real place. The environment makes sense in a way that mainframe Zork never managed to do. Score: 4.

The Zork I map is considerably smaller than Dungeon.

Sound and Graphics - All of the ASCII art that was present in mainframe Zork have been expunged, either because the illustrated items and puzzles were moved or because they didn’t know how to handle it on mixed-size displays. There is only one score we can give. Score: 0.

Environment and Atmosphere - In many ways, this is the superior version of Zork with a consistent world and an environment that was humorous but didn’t hit you over the head with it. And yet, it’s also considerably less varied than its predecessor without any glaciers, volcanos, or giant wells. Still a joy to explore. Score: 3.

Dialog and Acting - The writing remains top-notch, helped in no small part because this was an opportunity to go back and polish everything. Score: 4.

That gives us a final tally of (5+5+4+0+3+4)/.6 = 35! That is significantly fewer than the mainframe version of Zork, but in good company with other adventures of the era including Spider-man, Shadowgate, and Winnie the Pooh. It’s hard to get around that this was only part of a completed vision. Will we have to wait for Enchanter to have a real Zork game that was designed from end-to-end for personal computers?

Looking at the guesses, most of you guessed a lot higher. Mainframe Zork was a classic and this condensed and abridged version lost a lot in that translation. Lakku guessed the closest and will win our prize! CAP distribution will come with the next mainline game to be completed.

With that, I am off to play Zork II and see how this series evolved. I’ll see you all in a few weeks.

Written by Alfred n the Fettuc

Bob journal #3 :“This is it, I’m in the eye of the storm now… I’ve gained access to the cult headquarters and I’m approaching the heart of the alien invasion. It’s time to put an end to this, with my faithful arm cannon. If only I could get past these stupid flower pots…”

So we’re now finally in what appears to be the cult headquarters. Around us we have a flower pot with weird looking flowers (that obviously kill you when you approach it), some kind of locked cabinet and cult members going back and forth on the first floor.

And one confused-looking guy under a hood

Shooting the flowers with my shoot beam works. They disappear, only to leave some other kind of flower that I can pick up (on the second try, though. It’s worth noting that the first time I killed the flowers, nothing happened for whatever reason, encountering a game-breaking bug if I had saved after that). Funnily enough, trying to use the flower I picked grants me a hint message, remembering a line from the leaflet. Would have been nice to have this kind of feature for the gargoyle puzzle no?

Yeah, you also read a lot of other stuff in the leaflet that you didn’t bother remember earlier…

“It withers in the shade”. I try using the flower on the cabinet that is in the shade, or using it on me while standing in the shade. Nope. Then I realize that the light near the right door is selectable, so I use the flower on it… and I disappear in a ray of light… to reappear on the surface of Bargon! Bargonian flowers appear to have teleporting powers… I try not to overthink the fact that I left that stupid cabinet locked behind me and I look at this strange alien land.

Apparently these flowers also have the power to strip you from your hood and gloves

As soon as we arrive, some kind of weird crab-like flying creature hovers over me and a Bargonian appears to take aim. My ultra-fast reflexes (and a couple of reloads) allow me to shoot a laser at the Bargonian before he’s able to do the same. Shooting the mutate or shoot beams at the crab doesn’t seem to result in anything except getting crushed to death, but going into the green door on the right and activating the keyboard allows me to lock it in. Now to focus on the red sand pool that impedes my progress. Walking on it is obviously deadly but using the Mutate program on the milestones make a safe path appear on the sand.

Ok, “safe” might be a strong word

The two milestones on the left lead you to your death but the one on the right opens the way to the building on the other side. I enter some kind of transportation device and am treated to another cut scene, where Sark contacts me and tells me that the Earth has already been destroyed (!) but that I can restore it using the Save Disk I found in the smugglers cache. I’m then supposed to contact the Bargonian revolution and help them revolt against their leaders.

Naturally! But wait… you mean I wasn’t on Bargon already?

I then appear in some kind of cave where no less than six lion-like slug monsters lying around. I simply kill them all with my Shoot laser to be able to progress. I’ll come back to this but I feel like all I’ve been doing for a long time is shoot random beams at random things. We’re kinda remote from the Moose-head puzzle in the first part of the game! And not in a good way… All we have to do here is select shoot laser, click on monster one, then select shoot laser, click on monster two, etc… well at least, we’re making progress...

Most boring 3rd-person shooter ever...

After slaughtering all the monsters from the cave, we emerge in the daylight of Bargon. We find there a stela telling that we’re in a military training area. “Open to the public, every civilian found trespassing is considered an enemy and must behave as such”. I would have loved if it added that it was the only path to the local public school…

Another thing : if you’re close enough to read the stela, does it mean you’re already in the training area and considered hostile? That’s what I call a fair warning!

Walking around this area reveal a few places where you sink and die (as usual). Funnily enough, this is how you solve the puzzle of the screen. If you walk on the down left of the stela, you sink… but you go back up on the back of some kind of big worm. Trying to do anything here is just leading you to your death. Move from the worm and you die, but wait for it to move and it brings you to the next screen! Another example of random game design. To solve, you must go against everything this game has taught you so far. Walk in a random place (which usually gets you killed) and then wait for something to happen (which usually gets you killed). I can’t decide whether it’s more or less sadistic than the warning stela, but I’m starting to think this game might have been developed by real Bargonians… It might even be a fabulous fourth-wall breaking to reveal something like this… Nah, I’m probably overthinking all of this, it’s probably just plain bad game design.

At least the game is still pretty…

The next screen is a bridge with “no hiding places” as Bob says, so we’re probably awaiting an ambush of some kind. Sure enough, just walking to the other end of the screen gets me killed by another Bargonian. I’m pretty sure something has to be done with the mirror in the center of the screen. Shooting it just breaks the mirror, but the good thing about this is that I die before being able to enjoy my seven years of bad luck. I’ll spare you the looong time of searching that leads to the solution of this one. You have to shoot the Mutate beam at the milestone for it to (probably) reflect and turn you into a Bargonian. Why not, after all, that’s not such a stupid puzzle, right? Well what’s stupid about it is that you have to be in a very specific place for it to trigger. You can’t be too far or too close of the mirror and NOTHING tells you you’re on the right track while using the Mutate beam, just the usual “it doesn’t work” message. I’m guessing that a lot of players (such as me) just stumbled onto this one by sheer luck, while others probably spent way too much time on this screen. Then again, maybe not a lot of players had the patience to reach this place anyway… Exiting the screen while being a Bargonian leads you into a bar where another painfully long text explains to you the context of the revolution on Bargon.

Who would have known punk and fierce-looking fellows like this would be so versed into political science? Don’t judge a book by it’s cover, kids!

Billions of unemployed? Not that far from a correct prediction of Earth’s state nowadays!

What happened to our interactivity? A player asked the developers, banging his mouse on the table.

These cut scenes are so long that I’m beginning to think Hideo Kojima worked on this game as a consultant.

I’m feeling dizzy as well, just get me back to the game so I can shoot random beams at random things again please…

Finally I find myself back in control, right next to the central computer. This screen is probably the place where I spent the most playing time (apart for the damned gargoyle screen), if trial and error to its worse can be considered playing time. This screen holds three bridge parts (that you can move by Mutating them) and two buttons. Spoiler alert : the solution is to move the 3rd bridge, then press the right button, then move the 3rd bridge again.

This is the place where the fun comes to die.

Any other solution (or order) leads to one of two deaths : or the bridge you’re on brings you to the bottom-right of the screen, where you’re evaporated by lasers, or a Bargonian comes out of nowhere and zap you. Meaning that you have 3 bridges, multiplied by 4 buttons combos, plus 3 bridges again : 35 ways of dying before stumbling on the right answer. At no point the game gives you any clue. The buttons don’t change the direction of the bridge movements, you can’t direct the bridge. Heck, you don’t even know where you’re trying to go. Every try takes its toll of 10-15 seconds before being able to try again, and at this point of the game, you’re so sick and tired of the game over screen that only pure willpower stops you from throwing your head against a wall every time it appears. Stumbling on the right answer doesn’t bring you relief, it angers you even more because you don’t know how you did it. This is not a game, this is a boredom russian roulette. Let’s wrap this up already.

The Central computer! Please let this be the last screen of the game!

The central computer is finally at hand. Going towards the central armchair gets you killed by a Bargonian sitting in it, obviously, so you have to use the Shoot program on it before walking in the room (because why not add another random unpredictable death if we can?... it’s FUN). You then seat in the armchair and get treated with another cut-scene telling us that Sark has been arrested and that the revolution is as good as crushed.

The police trucks must be really large on this planet.

At the end of the cut-scene, another Bargonian appears and we use the Shoot program on him. Is that still considered as a puzzle? We can now enter the elevator on the right of the screen, which brings us to the second floor where we find… the disk drives! We just have to put the Save disk in disk drive 3 and we’re done!

Wait, what? It’s right in front of your eyes!!!!

But we still have one surprise ahead of us. The first try to put the disk in drive 3 gets us a “I can’t reach it” for a drive that seem to be right in front of our eyebrows (and the appearance of a killer Bargonian right after that). You have to first press a button that raises some sort of stepladder THEN put the disk in drive 3. We can now escape with the elevator. We’ve saved the Earth!!!

Question : are we sure that the Earth being destroyed then recreated from a Save Disk can be considered a success?

First example of trouble with recreation from a Save Disk : messed up jacket and hat colors.

So what is coming for us now? One final gauntlet of legendary puzzles? One epic click fest action game against the giant crab? One overly long cut-scene?

Oh. Okay...

So this open-ended finish means that they were actually thinking about a sequel? Ballsy, guys. Ballsy...

Session time : 2 hours
Total time : 7 hours 30 minutes

Written by Joe Pranevich

More familiar box art.

Last month, I conquered the first real game in our marathon, Zork I. It was a good game, but it could not hold a candle to the original Dungeon. It’s time to turn our attention to its sequel, the aptly named Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz. How will the designers, Dave Lebling and Marc Blank, fare when they have to create a new game using the parts of an old one? I look forward to finding out!

Before we get to the game, there’s a bit of history to follow up on. The first Zork hit the shelves for the TRS-80 in December 1980. This was Infocom’s first product, but were they a gaming company? Or a business software company that sold games to get off the ground? This question would eventually sink Infocom several years later, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Since they still had more Zork that was not yet adapted, Dave and Marc spent much of a year building a new game around the puzzles excised from the previous one and new challenges that they were devising. Personal Software distributed the previous game, but it was clear at this point that they were not focused on marketing games. To better control the product and the messaging, Infocom brought distribution in-house and managed their own mail orders. Although Zork II wouldn’t take advantage of it, this in-house distribution system would later allow them to build the creative “feelies” that they became known for. Perhaps more so than with Zork I, this game marks the moment when Infocom became a real company: they had an office, they had their first real employee, and they were managing the sales themselves. The foundation was built for them to expand.

Full disclosure, I also played this game as a kid although I do not think that I beat it. I vaguely remember that there’s a wizard that comes by and shoots spells at you and that we’ll have to steal his wand to solve some of the puzzles, but that’s just it. My memory may be jogged as I play. If you are just joining us, you’ll probably want to read my review of Dungeon before reading this as I may skim over the solutions to puzzles introduced in that game. Let’s play!

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am: stuck in a barrow with you.

Zork II begins immediately after the end of its predecessor. The climax of that game was discovering a secret passage into a barrow and that is where we start this one. Our trusty sword and lamp are also here, although nothing else carried over from the previous game. We didn’t enter a password or load a saved game to start this one so that makes sense. Even though I’m a native English speaker, I still had to look up what a “barrow” was: it’s an ancient burial mound. I hope you’re not too disappointed in me.

I traverse a linear path into a cavern, across a small bridge, and finally into a dark tunnel where I need to turn on the lamp. This is all new and I’m mapping carefully. Two rooms later and I’m dumped into a “Carousel Room”. The Wizard of Frobozz is here (already!), points a wand at me, and shouts, “Filch!” Whatever he was doing didn’t work and he leaves in a huff. This reminds me: he can only cast spells beginning with “F”, right? The Carousel Room is a familiar place with an unfamiliar name: it’s just the Round Room with a different name. It has eight exits and we are punted out one randomly when we leave. I’ll be on the lookout for an entrance into Wonderland to try to turn this crazy thing off. I head out a random exit into a “Marble Hall” where I pick up a clay brick. We have explosives! That means that the volcano is probably around here someplace as well and I’ll need to find something to use as a fuse. A few rooms north across a stream and up a cliff face, I find the sturdy wooden door with the keyhole from the 616-point version of mainframe Zork. I’m going to need a doormat…

Is this the way the whole game is going to go? Do we just have a new set of rooms stringing together all of the old puzzles? That would be a letdown. I won’t know until I finish mapping. Just to the west, my fears are put to rest as I discover a huge dragon blocking a path to the north. I am able to sneak west without dying to find the Bank of Zork. There are some new puzzles at least! The Wizard pops by again and successfully “Filches” my sword and I have to reload. I suspect that I’ll need that. Before I can even get back to where I was, he appears again and casts “Feeble” to cause me to drop my stuff. I’m forced to “wait” until my strength returns to normal to continue. His interjections are getting old already, but he doesn’t even stay around long enough for me to attack him.

The Wizard, as he appeared on the C64 manual cover.

Once I make it back, I complete the Bank puzzle just as I did before to snag the portrait and the zorkmids. Both of them have had their ASCII art descriptions replaced with prose ones. As I’ll carrying out my loot, I realize that I have no idea what the point of the game is. Is it just to gather treasure? If so, where should I be putting it? Is there a trophy case hidden somewhere? I trace a path south of there and end up in the Carousel Room from a different direction. This is as good a place as any to store my treasures, I suppose. I save my game, just in case the Wizard is the thieving type.

On my next random exit, I get lucky and find the Riddle Room! It has the same riddle as before (the answer is “well”) and I collect a pearl necklace as my reward. I realize that I can’t ascend into Wonderland yet as I do not have a bottle of water. I drop the necklace off with the rest and keep exploring.

A couple of tries later, I land in a “Cool Room” adjacent to an “Ice Room”, the game’s equivalent of the glacier. Will they bring the ivory torch back from Zork I for this or will we have to find a new solution? There’s at least a new exit up a lava tube to the “Volcano View” so I know we’ll be dealing with that soon enough. A few rooms later, it’s a “Cobwebby Room” with a piece of black string. Could that be the fuse? Yes! Now all I need are matches.

I’m still just mapping random exits from the Carousel Room and the next one takes me to a garden area. There’s three rooms here connected north to south with some evil-looking topiary at the south end and a gazebo to the north. A unicorn appears with a gold key around his neck, but there’s no obvious way to get it yet. Do I need to “filch” it with the wand? The topiary is in a variety of animal shapes including a dragon, a unicorn, a serpent, a dog, and some human figures. Are those clues to the types of monsters I’ll be facing this game? I cannot seem to interact with the topiary at all-- the game’s legendary parser doesn’t even know that word-- and I make a note to come back later.

We found the credits!

It takes me longer than I should admit to figure out that I have to type “enter gazebo” instead a cardinal direction to get inside, but there I find a trove of useful things. There’s a newspaper with the credits, just as we saw in the previous games, plus a matchbook, a teapot, a placemat, and a letter opener. The matchbook entices us to “Visit Exotic Zork I” so no Don Woods puzzle here. The rest of the items seem to analogs to ones from Dungeon: the teapot could hold water instead of the bottle, the placemat could be used instead of the welcome mat, and the letter opener can probably push the key out. As I pick them up, I get a warning: the lamp is running out of charge. I had hoped that perhaps the lamp would be permanent this time. Just to rub it in, the Wizard appears and casts “Freeze!”. I’m stuck in place and have to wait it out. I can’t even restore my game while frozen! As soon as I can move again, I restore back. Battery charge is at a premium already.

What should I work on first? I fill the teapot with water from the stream and head to Wonderland. The whole area is a duplicate of Dungeon with only one exception: the pool and the leak in the tiny room are now tears rather than sewage. Poor Alice must be stuck someplace… I gather my candy then use the robot to disable the Carousel Room’s rotation and get the red sphere. Literally a piece of cake! I now have 110 points. After I leave, I discover that if we drop the cakes outside of Wonderland, they crumble to dust. I’m not sure if that is an improvement. They go through the trouble to ensure that you still have the “evaporate” cake after collecting the candy, but then they have it crumble to dust before it can be used again? That seems odd. The carousel is now stopped and the violin has dropped from the ceiling. 130 points, but no closer to understanding what I’m supposed to do.

Follow along with this trusty map! Gold is a treasure; Red is an unsolved puzzle.

The next puzzle I know how to solve is the wooden door so I head there next. My guesses were right: we place the placemat under the door then push out the key with the letter opener. Inside is the blue sphere. I peer into the sphere and see a “Murky Room” rather than the “Sooty Room” of Dungeon. I’m going to have to explore to find that so I work to full in the rest of my map. West of the Carousel Room is a “Room 8” and a can of grue repellent. Looks like a new puzzle! I’m also retroactively pleased that the exit counting that I did back in Dungeon finally amounts to something. Why set it up so you can normally find seven of the eight exits without having the eighth be interesting? Thirty years later, it seems they agree with me.

South of the Carousel Room is another area that I never hit randomly, the “Menhir Room”. The centerpiece of the room is a large rock inscribed with the letter “F” that is blocking a southwest passage. My guess is the “F” is for Frobozz, but was it put there by the Wizard? Or is it a clue that I need him (or one of his spells) to pass?

This is what a menhir is. I didn’t know either.

Past that is a stairway into an “Oddly Angled Room” with passages in all directions. Is this the first maze of Zork II? There’s a diamond-shaped window in each room that is either dark or dim. I explore a few rooms and discover a wooden club with the name “Babe Flathead” on it, then it clicks: baseball! I start to map it, carefully recording which windows are dim and which are not, and the Wizard pops by to tell me that I’ll “never get to first base at this rate”. He’s right because it’s pointless: the exits change. My whole map is useless because it seems that which room you end up in is randomized each time or based on a factor I haven’t worked out yet. My best guess is that I need to find a ball, hit it with the bat, and then something will happen that will make sense. Since I don’t have a ball, I leave.

That leaves only one remaining exit unexplored: a “Guarded Room” in the southwest of the map past the cobwebs. It’s guarded by a lizard head (like the topiary) and any attempt to go near it nearly gets my hand bitten off. I can’t attack it. I can’t open it. With that, I have explored everything I can. I’m going to have to solve some puzzles to advance any further.

Postscript

I was going to end here, but the next incident is so embarrassing that I can’t help but to relate it. My first puzzle to target was going to be the dragon but on my way I got napped by the Wizard with a “Fierce!” spell. I don’t think anything of it until I arrive in the dragon’s room and start attacking it on sight. He naturally burns me to a crisp and I die.

I died.

In death, I may have found the first hint as to what I am supposed to do. My spirit finds itself traveling through a red mist, then blue, white, and finally a black mist. There’s a “huge and horrible” presence there and he tells me that I may be useful to rescue him from his fate. Who is he? Not the wizard, certainly? Is this a Faustian thing where the evil (?) wizard has trapped a demon. Either way, he might not be all bad because he brings me back from the dead. I restore immediately after because I’m not ready to die yet… but do we have a glimmer of a plot?

Let’s recap! I found and solved:

Wonderland, scoring some candy and a red sphere.
I stopped the carousel to get the violin and grue repellent.
The locked wooden door, nabbing a blue sphere.
The Bank of Zork, stealing a portrait and some zorkmid bills.

I have not solved:

Fire-breathing dragon.
Lizard-headed door.
The glacier which probably leads to the volcano.
The “Oddly Angled” maze
The “F” Menhir and the southwest passage behind it.
The unicorn and the topiary garden.
Whatever we’re supposed to do with the Wizard.

There’s a better mix of old and new puzzles than I realized. I’m not sure how well the old puzzles fit in with the new ones, but so far so good. I still do not know the point of the game, but I still have things to experiment with. What is driving our nameless adventurer to explore caverns and banks to steal treasures he doesn’t need? I hope I find out soon.

Time played: 3 hr 55 min

Since this is an introduction post, don’t forget to try to guess the score. Thus far in our marathon, Dungeon has scored 41 points and Zork I only 35. Will Zork II exceed its predecessor? Could it even eclipse the original? I have no idea!

Written by Reiko

Broadhead Journal #4: "This place is supposed to have a better chance to hold a jackpot. But man, what a dump. It's full of acid and ugly plants and even uglier aliens. There'd better be something really amazing here."

All the previous codes are labeled, with the new code on the right.

I mentioned last time that it isn't necessary to go on the rest of the missions, but if you don't, the list of locations matching the course codes in the ship's interface is never completed. Even though you switch badges and the new badge gets a new code, somehow all the codes you were given still show up in the list every time you go out on a mission.

The first aliens I encounter have to be the ugliest creatures ever.

The new code takes me to an undeniably alien world, with strange vegetation and two suns in the sky. And aliens! Aliens that are not very happy to see me, apparently. Their crude village is only two screens east from where my ship landed.

South of the crossroads next to the village there's a purple lake of acid with a pile of rocks on the shore, but the rocks are all stuck together. If I wait a minute, a salamander appears and adds another rock to the pile and sticks it together with its saliva. While I can't get any rocks, I can pick up the whole salamander and take it with me [5].

I guess they're called Mutzers because they say "Mutz!" a lot.

Northeast of the crossroads (north of the village), there's a huge dome of Heechee metal with a panel and a small circular hole. I can also hide behind a boulder and watch this entrance area. If I wait for several minutes, I start hearing strange wailing noises from the direction of the village. After a couple more minutes, a group of the ugly aliens appear and I get a short cut-scene where they hold some kind of ceremony.

The village leader gives a bit of a speech and inserts a Heechee rod into the hole in the dome. The panel opens to reveal a screen, but nothing much happens beyond some clicks, then the dome spits out the rod again. The aliens look disappointed and go back to the village. Some kind of check-in, perhaps?

The village is undefended.

I need to get that rod from the village so I can try to get into the dome myself. But the aliens won't let me into the village. I need to sneak in while they're occupied. Maybe they'll do another check-in ceremony soon. I try waiting at the lakeshore for a while. An hour later, I hear the wailing again. I wait one more minute for them to move away and then enter the village unopposed [2]. Now I can enter the hut belonging to the alien leader.

Go fetch, salamander!

The hut contains a large tank full of the purple acid water plus an opening leading down into a crawlspace. I can't reach into the tank, but I could toss the salamander into it. But there's nothing in there yet. So first I hide in the crawlspace and wait [2]. I hear the alien chief return from the ceremony and get into its tank. It's distracted, so I can re-enter the hut from below. I see that he has the cylinder with him, so I toss the salamander in [10]. If I wait a minute, it retrieves the cylinder and wanders off with it.

Now I just have to go back to the lakeshore and the salamander has dropped the cylinder by its pile of rocks. Fortunately, the cylinder isn't attached to the rocks the way they are to each other, so I can just take it [15]. I go use it in the hole on the dome to see what the aliens are seeing all the time.

Which one is different? Obviously.

The panel opens to reveal another button-interface screen that looks a lot like the ship codes, with Heechee numbers (which are inexplicably labeled with Arabic numerals also). This one has a display with five symbols in a row: three triangles, a circle, and another triangle. Maybe this is actually an intelligence test that the indigenous aliens are failing to recognize or understand.

I go back and check the Heechee numbers (I experimented with the numbers in the ship's panel when I was at the station, before locking in a destination) and realize the five buttons are labeled in Heechee as 0, 2, 4, 6, 8. So it's not a code because the numbers are all even. That means I'll try pressing the fourth button to correspond to the symbol that's different. Ah, that did it. Now the symbols show a pentagon, an octagon, a triangle, a circle, and a square. The one circle is still the only symbol without corners. Yep. Now we've got a series of symbols formed by two straight lines, some crossing and some not. The parallel lines are the right answer.

Somewhat harder questions.

Now a set of double overlapping shapes with a dot in the center. This time it's the two thin rectangles, because one is rotated relative to the other one. The others are all just shifted without rotation. Now we have a series of nested circles. There's only one where the edges of all three circles meet, so that's the answer, and I'm done. Definitely an intelligence test, and the acid-wallowers aren't able to figure it out or even just systematically try buttons until they stumble on the right sequence.

The treasure is mine!

A portal opens and I'm able to go inside [20]. There are three fan-shaped objects hanging near a platform holding a machine of some kind. I can take all three [2 each, 6 total] and climb the platform to reach the machine. Now we've got a color puzzle. Each fan can be placed into one of the three slots. Below each primary color slot we have a secondary color light. So I just need to put the right fan in each slot that would make the corresponding secondary color by mixing the colors of the fan and the slot.

One last basic intelligence test.

Into the red slot I place the blue fan to make purple [5]. Into the blue slot I place the yellow fan to make green [5]. Into the yellow slot I place the red fan to make orange [5]. Once I have all three, the machine starts hovering and spinning, and I can take it [25]. I don't know what this thing is, but it's bound to be worth quite a bit back on Gateway! If nothing else, it hovers, right?

I return to the ship and send myself back to Gateway with the device. Results: "You are awarded a $50,000 science bonus for discovery of a proto-civilization. You are awarded a $1.5 million royalty advance for discovering the Heechee device." Awesome. Now I'm set, right? I can go back to Earth and retire? Well, not quite. That was only the end of Part 1.

Next time we'll start Part 2: Other Worlds. Apparently we've spent six weeks celebrating and manage to spend $30,000 of that prize. I think the PC is not very good with money management. If it really costs $5k per week to live on the station, then I think we'd better decide pretty quickly whether to take another mission or go home, or we're not going to be able to retire.

Score: 307 of 1600
Balance: $1,541,450
Status: Orion Program (green badge)
Missions: 7

Session Time: 1 hr 15 minutes
Total Time: 4 hours 30 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

By the TAG Team

Notable Titles: King’s Quest I-IV, Police Quest I-II, Space Quest I-III, Leisure Suit Larry I-III, Gold Rush, Conquests of Camelot, Hero’s Quest, Quest for Glory II, Colonel’s Bequest

Notable Creators and Companies: Sierra Entertainment (Roberta Williams, Jim Walls, Al Lowe, Lori and Corey Cole, Mark Crowe, Scott Murphy, Christy Marx)

Sierra Entertainment had a fantastic idea for the next logical step of adventure gaming. Some time earlier, Sierra already had an engine that was capable of rendering pictures to go along with a basic IF-styled game, with the at-the-time groundbreaking idea that they could create an on-screen image using purely vectors.

Great things come from humble beginnings

Then Sierra had the original, if not revolutionary idea that they could have a game which would allow the player to play an adventure game where they were actually able to control their onscreen character, not being limited by the mainstay parser issue of having to have each new screen give a brand new description of what was going on. The AGI interpreter and King's Quest was born!

They truly reached for the skies with this game

Thanks to King's Quest, the directions 'NORTH, SOUTH, EAST and WEST' were no longer the bane of all adventure gamers, unsure as to whether the thicket to the top of the screen could be walked through or not. No, we could now find out by simply attempting to walk our character directly into the obstacle and seeing what happens! The trope of dying over-easily was already quite strongly embedded into all games of this era, so the fact that you were more than likely to walk directly into said thicket and be impaled was really the least of all concerns.

Well, we had to give it a try.

These games all included the option to further clarify what something onscreen was, giving an old-fashioned text screen of what was going on in addendum to simple pictures that gave a solid idea of what was on screen. The main problem with these games was and is that they faced the dilemmas of both interactive fiction and graphical adventures. They continued to use the parser system – there's a classic example in Leisure Suit Larry 2 where this actually made the ending of the game almost impossible to complete. By giving the freedom of both typos and alphabets, there was always the possibility for minor issues to sincerely impact gamers.

What am I doing wrong here?

At the same time, these games were very particular on the position of your character - “Go a little bit closer” is a message you are bound to see in many games of this style. Furthermore, not knowing that a small speck on the screen is a pen/rope/bar of soap means that if the item isn't named in the overall LOOK description, the game is made exceedingly difficult. Later versions of Sierra's games included mouse support, which meant that one could right click on the things in question to LOOK at something without the parser – which is where we all know the gaming world ended up heading.

Another problem: you know you should check the condition of your vehicle, but parser doesn't appear to understand your commands, because you are meant to just walk Sonny around the car

When you combine all these problems with the occasional pointless death scene and dead end, you might find a reason why this particular style of adventure gaming was not favoured by any other prominent producers. A few other games of this style were published at the beginning of 90s - notable examples are Hugo-series, Les Manley: Search for the King and Earthrise, but these were more like a last breath of an outdated fashion.

This was retro already in 1990

It seems then no wonder that no commercial game producer has bothered with this type of adventure game in a long time. If you find a new parser-based graphical adventure game somewhere, it will most likely be a fan continuation of some popular Quest-title.

Space Quest: The Lost Chapter. Did they have to beat Sierra in its own
game and create the world’s most annoying adventure game scene?

Written by Alfred n the Fettuc

Now that we’ve completed the last screens of another example of french adventure gaming, it’s time to give it its Final Rating. I used to have fond memories of this game, probably because the first half is, all things considered, pretty cool. The fact that it’s loosely based in reality and have you play as a young parisian computer geek might have something to do with it. However, the second half has really taken its toll on my nerves and I was eagerly waiting for the end (as were the developers, I think, considering how this half feels rushed). Let’s see how all of this fares in our beloved PISSED Rating.

I probably should have taken this guy seriously...

Final Rating

Puzzles and Solvability

The separation in two halves is really obvious here. The first half involves a few fun puzzles. The stupid one with the moose head is not that problematic considering barely clicking on everything leads you to the sequence of events that resolves the puzzle (billiard balls, moose head, first key, trophy case, second key, office, fan) so it’s more funny than annoying. You’re often left without directions and can lose a lot of time wandering around trying to find a clue (especially if you have to restart the game for it). The puzzles however are all pretty easy (until the dreaded wall with the gargoyles) and even if all of these don’t make a lot of sense, it’s all pretty pleasant to play.

Moving, prodding, destroying everything that’s not nailed down : Adventure Gaming 101

The second half of the game, however, is a long and difficult slog. Once you’ve acquired the Laser Arm, you spend most of your time shooting every kind of beam on everything, get randomly killed, and don’t really understand most of the time what is expected from you. I really wanted all of this to end quickly, and I think the developers wanted this as well. Shooting on seven immobile monsters in a row to be able to progress or pressing random buttons on random places awaiting for something to happen is not what I call good puzzle design. Kudos to the weird poetry quizz in the middle of the game as well…

My score : 3. Might seem a bit harsh, but the second half of the game is just insufferable, shooting beams at everything and getting killed all the time is just plain bad design. It’s too long and boring.

Interface and Inventory

At first the interface and inventory might seem efficient and classic, however, there are a few problems that become aggravating pretty quick. First, there is this famous “click on the top-left of the screen to use an object on another object in your inventory”. Granted, it’s only written in the manual, but it just doesn’t work at any time, so an option we didn’t need in the first place becomes a bug just because it wasn’t implemented. Then inventory items disappear every time you leave a screen not necessarily when you don’t need them anymore but any time after that... Why do you keep the key micro as long as the first trip on Bargon for it to disappear afterwards without any explanation… it’s weird and feels broken. Finally, the biggest problem in my opinion is just when the game shifts focus without reason : at one point you’re supposed to stand at one point for something to happen, while your position on the screen didn’t matter beforehand. A few times, little bugs came here and there, with the statue not talking to you for whatever reason or the flower not appearing the first time…

And don’t even get me started on the disappearing leaflets…

My score: 3. Always work eventually, but feels broken and amateur.

Story and Setting

There is definitely something interesting underneath the whole mess, even if it’s kinda fleshed out more in the comic book and not actually in the game. The whole idea of the alien playing some kind of “death game” hoping that once they die, they’ll reappear on Earth against overwhelming odds is interesting. The rest of the story is not that fascinating though. Moreover, most of the time, it’s difficult to understand half of what’s going on, be it by bad writing or broken translation. (Don’t worry though, english player, you’re not missing a lot. I’ve played through parts of the game in french, the writing is not very clear either…)

Yeah, well I fainted at the seventh page of text in a row

Half of the game, the story is discreet to say the least, and then, just like the designers realised they have limited time to expose their fascinating story, you’re subjected to five-ten pages of text in a row several times. The treason of Sark is not really explained, just as the power struggle between the unemployed soldiers of Bargon and the Computer Headquarters. Finishing the game on an open end while it seems there is plenty of loose threads is unsatisfying as well…

On the good sides, the fully-voiced introduction, the fourth-wall breaking in the battle against the giant crab and the whole idea of Bargon’s game of death redeem the bad storytelling a bit.

My score: 4. Storytelling is a mess, barely understandable and badly translated. A few good ideas and the fully-voiced introduction avoid the grade to go down further.

Sound and Graphics

Graphics in the game are pretty good, all things considered. The style of the game is kinda weird, but faithful to the comic book. The graphics are nice, well detailed and the scenes are varied. In fact, the lack of coherence attains this part of the game as well. We go from the very nice (the whole introduction, a few views of Paris or Bargon) to the kinda ugly (the design of the characters in the bar and the bakery, the many screens of metals and greens around the end…). It’s a mixed bag, just like the rest.

Don’t worry, even after reading through the comic book, a lot is still unclear...

The sound is serviceable but that’s about it. The sound steps were less horrible than I remembered and I was more annoyed by the sound of the laser (shiouk shiouk) because I was required to use it all the time. Don’t get me started again on the frightening death theme that made me lower the sound of my computer the first time.

My score: 5. Mixed bag between the pretty and the Meh...

Bargonians in the moonlight...

Environment and Atmosphere

There is definitely a good idea in the concept of the game. There are not many games taking place in Paris, and even if the Paris in Bargon Attack sometimes feels like a collection of landscape (Eiffel Tower, Beaubourg, La Seine, Fontaine Notre-Dame, Colonnes de Buren…), it’s kinda nice to evolve in it. And I’m guessing the whole idea was to start with the familiarity to progress then into the alien worlds of Bargon. However, the trips back and forth between Bargon and Paris, without any explanation, tend to break this nice idea.

The truth is, you’ll never know where the next screen will bring you, and while there is a fun side to this, you spend more time feeling lost and just moving to the next screen than trying to pursue an objective. At no point did I have a feeling of coherence of an existing game world. The Cadavre Exquis feeling is overwhelming and you really feel like the developers were slapping one idea to the next without ever thinking about the bigger picture. Shame, because it could have made something nice in this department.

My score: 4. Interesting views of Paris and Bargon, but the lack of coherence ruins everything.

One of the few dialogues of the game

Dialog and Acting

Not much to say here unfortunately. You spend a lot of time alone in the game, or with people that tell you stuff during five screens of text. There is very little character interaction per say, except with the bar tenants and the baker. Every interaction that could have been interesting is conveyed by the overly long cutscenes, and you don’t really have another motivation except “the world must be saved and someone has to do it”. No one explains why our character is special in any way or why he was chosen by Sark to begin with.

My score: 2. Our world saving has been a lonely one.

Sorry french developers, this is not the game that will bring us glory.

Final Score

So for our final score, we have (3+3+4+5+4+2)/.6 = 35! I think it’s well deserved. I’ll even remove a discretionary point just because the game was so soul-crushingly boring in the end. The game started okay, that’s why I kept a nice memory from it from my childhood, but it just crumbles around the middle and what we have left is “use different beams on everything, die randomly and try to figure out what was in the developers’ heads”. If at least the game over screen (that I’ve seen hundreds of times) had some kind of ironic little phrase each time, à la Sierra, it might have made the whole experience less boring, but it didn’t.

So, congratulations, Laukku, you were the one who guessed the lowest score, and you win! Sorry guys, I think everybody felt this game would do better, me included, but it’s not the game that will save the french developers reputation...

I’ll then move on to Dark Seed, which is another game I’ve always been curious about without ever being able to go far in it. Let’s hope it fares better than this one!

How about some CAPs now :

CAP Distribution

100 CAPs for Alfred n the Fettuc

Blogger Award - 100 CAPs - for putting up with Bargon Attack for everyone's enjoyment

105 CAPs for Joe Pranevich

Classic Blogger Award - 50 CAPs - for continuing The Great Zork Marathon with Zork I
Genre Legacy Support Award - 5 CAPs for adding some Tom Frost games to Mobygames
Festive Blogger Award - 50 CAPs - for blogging about Crisis At Christmas at the appropriate time

100 CAPs for Ilmari

Classic Blogger Award - 50 CAPs - for playing Legend of Djel for our enjoyment
Classic Blogger Award - 50 CAPs - for playing Geisha for our enjoyment

10 CAPs for Laukku

Psychic Prediction Award - 10 CAPs - for the closest score guess for Bargon Attack

10 CAPs for Andy Panthro

Psychic Prediction Award - 10 CAPs - for the closest score guess for Legend of Djel

9 CAPs for Voltgloss

Cause We're Really Smart Award - 9 CAPs - for figuring out Zork's clues that Joe missed

5 CAPs for Fry

European Gothic Award - 5 CAPs - for pointing out the difference between Gargoyles and Grotesques

5 CAPs for Paul Franzen

Catching Up On Old Times - 5 CAPs - for catching up on the blog just in time for the new year

1 CAP for TBD

Better Late Than Never Award - 1 CAP - for kinda guessing Bargon Attack's score and doing it way too late

Answers: Torch
Introduction and captions: TBD

Here's our chance to get to know Torch, who will soon (4 games from now) be blogging through KGB for us.

Now, over to Torch...

Torch is also very useful if you don't want to be eaten by a grue

I’ve been thinking of submitting this for a while, but I never got around to it. But I’m falling behind on my CAPs acquisition, so I guess now’s as good a time as any.

My home country is...

Norway

My age is…

Ugh... I regret not submitting this a year ago. Then I would still be in my thirties. Anyway, it’s 40 now.

The first adventure game I played was…

It’s a toss up between Space Quest 1 and Police Quest 1. A friend had them both, and I can’t remember which one we tried first. Regardless, I was insta-hooked.

My favourite adventure game is…

This is like asking a mother to pick a favourite child, but I’ll try. Can I at least present a couple of candidates before deciding upon one….? [No, you cannot - ed]

I’ll just pretend someone said yes. [All right, fine. If you insist - ed]

Despite being introduced to the genre by Sierra games, my top list is still pretty Lucas(film/arts)-heavy. I think the funniest game must be Day of the Tentacle, though Monkey Island is a close second. Before these were even a speck in their creators’ minds, I played through Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders at least seven times, so… yeah.

Zak McKracken held top spot in our leaderboard for three months, before Hero's Quest took its place

As for Sierra, I like most of the games, but I have quite a soft spot for the Quest for Glory series, particularly…. well, all of them really. Perhaps QfG2 has the edge…. although QfG1 ( the game formerly known as Hero’s Quest ) was the first one I played and… ok, this is a really tough question. Better move on to the top spot and be done with it. Also, this is starting to look at lot like the top 10 list. ( Btw, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m still geeking out a bit every time Corey Cole posts some tidbits about the inner workings of Sierra back in the day. )

To top it off, my number one pick, for reasons which will hopefully become clear some time during 2017, would have to be Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. This game has it all; adventure ( well, duh ), humour, epic story, replayability, graphics, music, I-can’t-believe’it’s-not-Harrison-Ford voiceover. You name it.

Coming soon to an Adventure Gamer Blog near you

When I’m not playing games I like to…

Well, I play saxophone. And also tennis. Not at the same time, mind you. I also like to fiddle with Linux. In fact, I don’t have a single Windows computer in my home.

This happy gentleman is also a Norwegian sax player, but I don't know if he uses Linux

I like my games in (a box, digital format)…

Both are fine. My old games are in boxes, of course, but they take up quite a bit of space, so buying games on gog or steam or whatever is pretty practical. I prefer buying my Playstation games on disc, but I’ll get them on the online store if they’re not available otherwise.

The thing I miss about old games is…

As long as you can still play them, what’s there to miss? What I really miss is having the time to really get into a game. Being a dad and a husband, I usually only have a couple of hours to play during the evenings after the kids are in bed. ( Unless I’m doing something with my wife, although she sometimes watches me play ).

In the olden days, I could be preoccupied with a game for weeks, even months if I was stuck. I would think about possible solutions to a puzzle while I was away from the computer, and then try them out when I got back. Also having played fewer games ( and watched fewer movies), I think I was more inclined to really “believe” in a game. I think the pure quantity of imaginary settings, fantasy worlds, universes etc. we’re exposed to these days makes it harder to let yourself be immersed in them. Even when I play really story driven games Uncharted and the likes, I get annoyed by stuff like “how can our guy soak up 10 000 machine gun bullets during a fight, but he goes down from a single shot by a pistol during a cut scene”. I think they call it suspension of disbelief. Well, I guess my disbelief is not as easily suspended as it used to be. Maybe age plays a part...

The best thing about modern games is…

Graphics, I guess. Also loading times. I like open world games ( GTA, Red Dead Redemption, etc. ) , games that have physics engines that let you do fun non-predetermined stuff. Newer games are often also more forgiving, letting you save as often as you want, regular checkpoints. Stuff like that. I'm not really sure if that IS better, but in my current grown-up life, it's easier to play games when I can divide my play time up into smaller chunks.

The one TV show I never miss is…

I don’t usually watch regular TV, just streaming services like Netflix, HBO, etc., though I make sure to watch new Game of thrones episodes as soon as they’re available.

If I could see any band live it would be…

Pat Metheny Group. ( Actually I have, but I would definitely go again )

They will be playing in Oslo on May 20th. Buy your tickets here, Torch!

My favourite movie is…

The Incredibles

One interesting thing about me is…

I can tap my right little finger really hard, so it makes kind of a loud noise. My wife claims it hurts if I tap her on the head with it. Not interesting enough? Ok, I have my old Amiga 1200 in perfect working condition, hooked up in my basement, complete with a 420 MB hard drive and a 28MHz Motorola 68030 accelerator card with 8 MBs of delicious Fast RAM. Oh yes.

This may or may not be a picture of Torch's basement

Bargon Attack - Paris is burning

Star Trek - Won! (Sort Of) and Final Rating

Gateway - Data Overload

Bargon Attack - Gargoyle’s Quest

Missed Classic: Legend of Djel - Won! (With Final Rating)

Gateway - New Fish

History of Adventure 2: Interactive Fiction with Graphics (1980)

Bargon Attack - The Kessel Run

Gateway - Early Missions

Missed Classic 32: Crisis At Christmas (1986)

Missed Classic 33: Geisha (1990) - Introduction

Missed Classic: Geisha - The Broad Way of Pleasure

Missed Classic: Geisha - Won! (With Final Rating)

Missed Classic 34: Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (1980)

Bargon Attack - Won!

Missed Classic 35: Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz (1981) - Introduction

Gateway - Intelligence Tests

History of Adventure 3: Parser-based Graphical Adventures (1984)

Bargon Attack - Final Rating

What's Your Story - Torch