Adventure of the Week -- The Staff "Slake" (1981/2012)

Time to tackle The Staff "Slake" (1981/2012), the twelfth game in Roger M. Wilcox's recently unearthed text adventure series -- the games have not been converted in chronological order due to the vagaries of aging TRS-80 cassette tape, so this one was written in 1981 and converted to Windows by the author in 2012.  As the title suggests, this one takes place in a traditional fantasy setting, with magical creatures, weapons and treasures to find.

I always encourage interested readers to sample the Adventures of the Week before reading my comments, as they are certain to ruin many of the surprises.  But (at this writing on 05/20/2013) I will note that this one is difficult (actually impossible) to finish correctly due to a handful of bugs, an unusual oversight which I suspect Mr. Wilcox will soon remedy.  Like all of his games, The Staff "Slake" is freely available for download from the Roger M. Wilcox archives.  And while I couldn't quite finish the game, I was able to see most of it, so there are definitely...

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


We begin in a clearing in the midst of a forest, with paths leading in all directions (a traditional fantasy adventure start, and thus beholden to the adventurer's conventional amnesia about how we got here.)  We have nothing in inventory, and have nothing to DIG with, so we'd best do some exploring

North is the entrance to an underground stronghold, with steps leading down to a foyer and darkness ahead.  We can't muddle our way through -- bad moves mean You fell and broke your neck! You're dead! -- so we need to find a light source.

East we discover a secluded and deserted campsite, and what appears to be a makeshift gunpowder factory not subject to OSHA regulations.  A mound of white phosphorus and a pile of sulfur lie perilously close to an old lantern which is self-igniting, but couldn't possibly hold liquid fuel.  It needs some sort of fuel however, as an attempt to LIGHT LANTERN confirms.

South of the starting area is a desert wasteland, and to the west is a dense jungle, so we may need to do some maze mapping here.  The wasteland features the skeleton of a prospector, an empty canteen, and a shovel.  The prospector has a cracked ribcage -- but we can't TAKE RIB or GET RIB or KICK SKELETON or GET SKELETON.  OPEN RIB mysteriously replies, "You don't have a key." 

The desert area isn't really a maze -- it's just two rooms, with most directions just returning to the current location.  The jungle is similarly minimal, with only one location we can't even seem to DIG in.  So where can we dig?  Digging in the phosphorus and sulfur at the campsite yields a key and a sign indicating the campsite is the *SCORE* location.  Now we have a key, but reality holds -- You can't open a rib.  We can BREAK RIB, though, to obtain a dry human rib bone.

We can dig in the dark area south of the foyer to find something we can't see yet... but we're informed that the stone is rushing downstream quickly, and shortly thereafter The stone flowed on past you.  Is this lava?

We can GET SULFUR and GET PHOSPHORUS, but trying to FILL LANTERN correctly suggests that Phosphorus would explode.  How do we... ah, MIX SULFUR produces a sulfur-phosphorus mixture, then we can GET MIXTURE and FILL LANTERN.

Now we can return to the stronghold to see an uncompleted room with dirt walls (and hear a river trickling by, apparently being in the dark somehow prevented the sound from reaching us earlier.)  There's also a locked iron gate denoted as the stronghold's final entry point.  We have a key, so we can simply UNLOCK GATE, and it disintegrates, leaving us with a Coated key due to some deteriorata left behind.

Digging in the uncompleted room produces a river of wine, and the stone called "Staffbreaker."  Now we understand what the rushing and stone business in the dark earlier was about.  We can GET STONE before it washes past, and FILL CANTEEN with wine.

Entering the stronghold, we find ourselves in a hallway laden with cobwebs, the body of a previous adventurer bearing two large puncture wounds in his back upon closer examination.  Giant spider?

An out-of-the-way dead-end room features a thin iron door, which the parser informs us "can't be opened by normal means, but it does have a keyhole.  Just go through the motions."  I tried to INSERT KEY -- which seems to work -- but couldn't then TURN KEY or UNLOCK DOOR or OPEN DOOR.  The door reads, "Treasure room. No entry."  The key is coated with a black, stinking, pressure-sensitive powder.

There's actually nothing to prevent us traveling through the cobweb room -- I had assumed a spider attack was in the offing -- to reach the brink of a pit.  There's a nice bit of user-friendly design here -- if we go into the sheer-walled pit when we're improperly equipped to escape, the game gives us one chance to take back that command. We will want to go back later to retrieve the *Jeweled crown* visible during our brief stay down there, though.

Past the pit is a "T" intersection with the warning, "Entry to the west is prohibited."  Going west, as our investigative honor compels us to do, we face an armored warrior with a magic sword that magically can't magically miss.  Game over!

Going east instead, we find some leprechauns guarding a * Pot of gold * in a cul-de-sac.  We also (in my playthrough) learn that the lantern eventually burns through its fuel, forcing us to return to the campsite for more.

There's a bug here (as of 05/18/2013) -- we can INSERT KEY at the thin iron door, but it remains in inventory.  We can then drop it elsewhere, and see it there, but when we try to GET KEY again, "It is in the door, sorry."  Back at the door, TURN KEY for some reason reports, "You don't see it here."  We can't PULL or TOUCH or PRESS or HIT it to any productive end, either.  I had to peek at the source code to find the right combination to make progress -- we have to INSERT KEY, then DROP KEY in the same room as the thin iron door, and then TURN KEY.  I think the design thinks that inserting the key also suggests that the key is in the room, but the logic isn't quite coded that way.

Now a gunpowder explosion (from the coating on the key) blows us back and reveals a passage to the south.  In the main treasury/weapons chamber, we find the titular treasure -- * The staff "Slake" *.

HELP suggests that we can PARRY and FILL, as a couple of unusual verbs.  PARRY versus the magic warrior prompts, With what?, and LANTERN is of no use.  But STAFF works much better, causing the magical warrior to magically drop his * Magic sword * and run away in magical fear.

West of the guard station is a large stone door, apparently requiring a key, and a "bird house" room featuring a carnivorous goose, eyeing you hungrily -- a gander is appetizing for the goose, it seems.

The armored warrior is still hanging around and blocking the entrance, sans his offensive gear, and we can KILL WARRIOR -- With what? -- SWORD to destroy him with his own weapon.  Taking the sword and staff to the campsite, the two treasures yield a .16 percent score, which suggests we have a lot more treasures to capture.  Even if it's meant to be read as 16 percent, we have a long way to go.

We can't KILL LEPRECHAUNS or KILL GOOSE.  We can't GIVE BONE or FEED GOOSE either, but if we DROP BONE, The goose eats the bone, lays an egg, and says, "Goodbye."  Somehow a talking male goose that can lay golden eggs seems much more valuable than the * Golden egg * remaining, but we'll have to settle for what we can get.

Examining the staff suggests it can be tapped against the ground to produce a retributive strike.  But TAP STAFF -- Against the what? -- GROUND does nothing to dispel the leprechauns, despite the three-gold-snakes-and-no-potatoes motif of the staff's design.  Does it work against the stone door?  Nope.

What about this stone called "Staffbreaker"?  We can drop the staff near the stone door, and THROW STONE to produce a "RETRIBUTIVE STRIKE!" flashing message, after which we see a disintegrated door and some loose * Gold dust * we can't yet pick up.  The now-accessible last treasure room contains a * Silver worm statue * and a * Rod of pure ruby *.

What about the wine? Can we get the leprechauns drunk?  Doesn't seem so.

The pit?  We can't even go into the pit, it seems.  Ahhh -- we need to have the staff "Slake" to be allowed in (without the fatal warning, with its immediately fatal consequences if we proceed.)  I had to peek at the code -- we can TURN STAFF to make the ruby glow, then TAP STAFF to produce an energy beam from its ruby tip to destroy the boulder in the pit, revealing a path back up to the "T".  Whew!  (If we use the ruby in the wrong place, it deforms from the energy and is useless.)

That helps a bit, but we're still stuck.  Ah -- we can FRISK ADVENTURER, not SEARCH ADVENTURER which I tried earlier, to find a 2-handed sword and a filled bag.  The 2-handed sword is too heavy to move out of the room after we pick it up, but if we try to GET BAG with it in hand, "A giant spider suddenly leaps from the ceiling, and impaled himself upon your two-handed sword by accident!"  (We can anticipate this if we LOOK UP to see the spider beforehand, though the puzzle and its solution remain a surprise.)

What's in the bag?  We can't EXAMINE BAG (you see nothing special) or OPEN BAG (you don't have a key.)  But we can EMPTY BAG to obtain some * Platinum Pieces *, then use the bag to collect the * Gold Dust * as we FILL BAG.

We have six treasures now, and most of the puzzles seem to be solved.  But we've found no way to obtain the pot of gold?  Can we blast it into dust instead of the staff?  Nope, using the staff here just deforms the ruby.  If we throw the stone at the staff here, it blows up but we just have * Gold dust * and the unharmed * Pot of gold * (and leprechauns) after the explosion, and the stone door remains unbreachable.  Even looking at the source code, I could find no way to dispel the Irish little people and claim their treasure.

The SCORE mechanism is also not quite right -- I think it's meant to award a score of 12.5 multiplied by the number of treasures, but in fact it awards a value based on the number of treasures divided by 12.5, which is why we're not getting anywhere close to 100 percent.

With six treasures in hand, we have:

So I wasn't actually able to finish this one!  Normally that means I don't publish anything here, preferring to give it another go later on, but since we have access to the source code I think I can say that we've seen most of what there is to see and do here.  I expect the prolific Roger M. Wilcox will provide a correction in the near future, as the complexity of this one lends itself to more bugs than the norm for this series.  I'll publish an update if I'm able to conclude the adventure!

Adventure of the Week: Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon (1993)

This week, we're joining the anthropomorphic automobile Putt-Putt and his peppy dog Pup puppy dog Pep for the second adventure in Humongous Entertainment's popular series, as Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon.  Created by Ron Gilbert during his post-Monkey Island years, these games use the SCUMM engine under license and are aimed at children ages 3 to 8.  The target audience makes for simple gameplay, but these are still entertaining little adventures with a charming sense of humor.

The opening features a musical theme song with vocals, brief but rather innovative at the time.  The story begins with Putt-Putt being invited down to the Cartown Fireworks Factory -- and since we've already seen the title, we may presume Mr. Firebird's rockets are rather more powerful than the usual.  Pep is stowed in Putt-Putt's inventory, and the road leads straight to the factory, so we won't be shooing any cows out of the way this time.

Again, there's a ton of fun incidental animation -- kids love to click on things, and every smokestack on the factory does something amusing.  Humongous' artists put a lot of effort into these completely optional, repeating animations, and I'm sure a lot of very young children spent time poking around without ever trying to move the plot along.

But time's a-wasting for the dedicated adventurer, so let's get into the factory and see what's up (according to Putt-Putt's dashboard radio, everyone in town has been invited to the fireworks factory, but Putt-Putt and Pep seem to be the only Cartown residents who've bothered to show up.) 

 Mr. Firebird warns us not to touch the lever with the big "Do Not Touch" sign next to it, but he doesn't know how adventure gamers think, obviously.  We can fiddle about making rockets with Mr. Firebird's help, but we really want to touch the prominent red lever... except Putt-Putt is a good little car, and just says, "I'd better not touch that."  Dang it.


Fortunately, in these games there's always a way to get something to happen without seeming responsible for it, and so it turns out that we can open a window, allowing a butterfly to enter, perch on the ladder, and attract Pep's innocent, enthusiastic attention.  Soon, Pep has pulled the lever and Mr. Firebird is urging Putt-Putt to hang on because he's "going for a ride" (safety last!)  In short order, Putt-Putt and his dog find themselves in space, as Pep dons a dog-sized astronaut helmet he found stashed somewhere.

Putt-Putt is in orbit for a while, and can learn about how far away various planets are from a passing alien tourist booth, but the only reachable destination (as we might have suspected) is the moon, so Putt-Putt goes in for a landing, then starts wondering how he's going to get home.

A spacefaring family of mice, just in from Kansas, suggest that Putt-Putt try launching himself off a flattish rock, but even the moon's weak gravity makes for some challenging escape velocity requirements. Pep runs into a dark cave -- apparently he enjoys these kinds of places, based on our initial meeting in Putt-Putt Joins the Parade -- leading to a game of hide-and-seek in an overhead maze.  This activity is optional -- we can just call Pep back by clicking on the exit arrow in the upper left-hand corner, and while I thought we might need to search the maze for something useful, that never happens.

Responsibility is not one of the things the Putt-Putt games attempt to teach -- we can read the Caution sign at a bridge, but then roll merrily over it until it breaks under Putt-Putt's weight and he falls into a green, mucky river.  He's trapped, but blowing his horn summons Rover, a lunar rover left behind by astronauts from Earth -- he desperately wants to go home too, and gives Putt-Putt a photograph of the moon as a gift in exchange for his promised assistance.

The moon seems to be rather more heavily populated than conventional wisdom would have one believe.  The alien proprietors of Rocket Ice Cream are willing to sell their establishment, a genuine rocket, for ten glowing moon crystals.  We'll also need to track down some parts -- a steering wheel, nose cone, rocket fuel, and key -- to get it into working order.  So this will be a treasure hunt game, in essence.

At the Cosmic Dust Diner, we can play a free round of Bear Stormin', a simple arcade game in which a bear in a biplane dodges balloons, pigs and other obstacles, fun but not required.  Moon City Gas has rocket fuel available, but it seems we will need a container or something as the rocket is a good distance away.

We can visit Moon City Hall, where Governor Moonbeam offers a key for a good deed.  Fortunately there's a little red alien to rescue from the moon goo under the bridge, so that's one part down.  We have to pick one key of several, but if we've forgotten what the rocket blueprint suggested, we can always trade an incorrect key for the right one later.

Some aliens are playing basketball with what appears to be a nose cone as the basket, and we can join in the fun, for fun's sake.  A beauty shop has a machine that performs radical makeovers on the customers -- Putt-Putt can play with this, mixing and matching a variety of cartoon alien heads, torsos and legs to comic effect.  An apartment building features numbered/lettered rooms, populated with creatures doing comical things, again for our amusement.

Putt-Putt can play alien tag -- kind of like whack-a-mole -- and this activity is not optional, as winning earns moon crystals, up to five at a time depending on how well we do at tagging the aliens as they pop up out of craters.  We can play repeatedly, so it's not hard to earn the ten crystals needed to buy the rocket here.

A Simon-like memory color/music challenge earns us entrance past the gate to the opulent home of the Man in the Moon.  He wants a picture of himself, which we happen to have courtesy of Rover, and giving it to him earns Putt-Putt the nose cone (so the basket was just an entertaining diversion.)

In the meanwhile, Rover has found the steering wheel, high up on a ledge where he can't reach it.  He can boost Putt-Putt up, but Putt-Putt's extending arm can't reach it either.  We need to use Pep to drag it closer and claim the last part needed.  Rover goes to pack his things, and now we just need to figure out how to get some rocket fuel.

The Putt-Putt games used CD-ROM technology to support colorful cartoon artwork, especially impressive given the limitations of 256-color 320x200 VGA.

We can observe various constellations using the moon's observatory telescope, and also learn about the planets of the solar system via an animated/narrated wall display.  This educational content is unfortunately wholly optional; it would be nice if we had to know some of this to finish the game, but that might have shut out the youngest members of its target audience.

Putt-Putt buys the rocket ship, and the only item we still need is the rocket fuel.  Putt-Putt is aware he can get it at the gas station, but how do we actually dispense it?  Ah -- clicking on the station's door produces a note from proprietor Robby Radar, who's offsite at Apartment 3A; apparently he can't be bothered to run his own business.  Nor can he stay in one place -- the girl in 3A tells us he's now at 1C (this all seems to be an exercise reinforcing alphabet/number learning, and encouraging youngsters to prepare for an Excel-based future.)  The gentleman at 1C says Robby has now gone to 4C, where we finally track him down, and he agrees to give Putt-Putt some free rocket fuel (with a can, fortunately) back at the gas station.  There's no explanation given for the freebie; perhaps it is some sort of persistence bonus.

Now we have everything needed to blast off... we just have to put rocket fuel in the tank, pop the nose cone on top, attach the steering wheel, and turn the key.  Putt-Putt, Pep and Rover take off and land safely back in Cartown, where everyone was sort of worried but Putt-Putt just had quite a day.  Victory is ours, though it doesn't look like Putt-Putt will be reusing the rocket any time soon and may just barely have made it in without burning up in the atmosphere:

These simple games are quick to play and disarming enough to be entertaining, and... and...

Hey! 

This was my umpteenth escape-the-alien-planet adventure, cleverly disguised as a kid's game!  Rackin frackin' Putt-Putt cute furshlugginer adventure games...

Adventure of the Week: Creatures that Live in the Sun (1981/2013)

After a few posts spent in point-and-click territory, this week we're returning to the Roger M. Wilcox text adventure archives.  Creatures that Live in The Sun was Wilcox's eleventh game, originally written for the TRS-80 in 1981 and converted to Windows in 2013.  Mr. Wilcox's games remain freely available at his website, and they're well worth checking out, especially for adventure fans that may have missed these back in the day.

I'm sure a few readers have noticed the similarity of this game series' author's name to Space Quest protagonist, Roger Wilco.  Any resemblance appears to be purely coincidental, but one can't help noting that many of Wilcox's games feature science fiction motifs, and this one is a time-constrained escape adventure, in which the player's ship has run out of fuel just after landing on the sun's... surface?  (The author notes that this game was based on a creative writing project he wrote in the fifth grade, so we'll dispense with any scientific nitpicking.)  Let's hope we can find enough fuel to achieve escape velocity!

As always, I encourage the intrepid adventurer to sample Creatures that Live in the Sun before proceeding here.  For the historical record and entertainment purposes, I'll be detailing my playthrough and giving away everything I discovered.  In other words, there are inevitably going to be some major...

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

At the start, we are aboard our grounded ship, with a closed airlock and a console populated with patriotic buttons (not, like, Whip Inflation Now, but red, white and blue.)  An engine room west of the starting point features a Better-than-asbestos suit -- presumably this means it is both heat-inhibiting and non-carcinogenic -- an empty fuel line, an empty bucket, and Strange dark goggles, suggesting that we may have missed some important equipment training in solonaut school. 

We've got nothing in inventory, so let's grab everything we can; the fuel line is fixed in place.  We should also SAVE before we start messing with the buttons, if past experience is any guide.  PUSH RED, and the airlock opens -- the sun's temperature melts the capsule from the inside out, and we're dead.  If we PUSH BLUE instead, a transparent cover envelops the interior of the capsule -- a heat shield, perhaps?  PUSH WHITE produces a warning light, "NO FUEL", so that will probably be one of our final actions at the end of the game.

With the shield up, the sun doesn't damage the ship, but if we're not wearing the BTA suit, we're vaporized anyway.  We may note in passing -- literally, while dying -- that It's too bright to see!, so that's probably why we have the dark goggles.

With all the right stuff in place, we can see that B.T.A. sheets protect everything -- not quite as high-tech as I'd imagined, but I like that this new material is apparently named by the same people who produced Uneeda Biscuit and Better Made Potato Chips.  We can exit through the airlock to reach the photosphere of Sol.

(This all reminds me of the old joke -- "How does the [insert favorite ethnic/national/occupational stereotype] mission to the sun plan to avoid burning up?"; [adopt favorite accent]; "We plan to go at night.")

We can see that the capsule is slowly dissolving in the heat, so time is of the essence.  We can also see a solar disturbance, likely wreaking all kinds of cable service havoc back on Earth.  GO DISTURBANCE yields a Scott Adams-esque misleading prompt: Are you just going to walk through that solar flare?  And while a thoughtful "No" click yields A wise decision, a reckless, foolhardy "Yes" click gets us through without apparent ill effect.

This is an interesting idea -- we find ourselves on a river bank, but it's a river of salt (sodium chloride melts at 1474 degrees Fahrenheit, per a quick web search).  We can FILL BUCKET to obtain a bucket of salt, and we can GO RIVER, though there doesn't seem to be a reason to do that yet.  We can't FILL FUEL or FILL LINE with the bucket, though, so we must have to do some further work.

We can POUR BUCKET -- on the surface, it just Soaks into the photosphere.  Actually, it does this anywhere, even inside the ship with the airlock closed.  I spent some more time exploring the river and the bank, but before long, it seems, we're notified that Your space capsule's non-tempered hyperdiamond casing is disintegrating through! and we are in major trouble... unless we return to the ship and close the airlock, which buys us a little time... except, no, wait, it doesn't actually reset anything, and next time we open the airlock the meltdown continues, eventually melting the capsule and ending the game.

What else can we do?  EXAMINE SUIT reveals a yellow button on its left hand.  PUSH YELLOW does nothing of note in the engine room, but if we try it in the river, A ray of cold shoots from your fingertips, doing nothing.  It seems that it will fire, but do nothing, while the airlock is open, but if the airlock is closed it does nothing at all.

I got hung up here -- my attempts to SWIM and DIVE and FLOAT down the river went unacknowledged, but a peek at the source code reveals that we can FOLLOW RIVER once we're in it to reach its end, where a =Deadly gronk gronk= blocks the way.  The freeze ray doesn't do anything about this guy either.  POUR BUCKET here causes an unexpected result -- A silvery line extends from one of the gronk gronk's fingers, and hits you, piercing your suit!  Hmmm?   Ah, this happens randomly, it has nothing to do with whether we've emptied the bucket.  (For some reason, I am picturing the Gronk Gronk looking like the Crunchberry Beast.  I don't know why!)

I had to look at the code again to find out that we can FEEL RIVER -- I was trying to do something similar by DIVEing, but anyway -- to discover a Hyperdiamond "eye," marked Medusa H.D. Company.  So this might be useful -- and yes, SHOW EYE turns the deadly gronk gronk into stone (Good work! The Medusa H.D. Company comes through again!)  I assume H.D. stands for Hyperdiamond and not High Definition.

Now we can reach the "solar junction," a crossroads where an Alien blueish-green man is standing (no word on whether this individual is littleish-small.)  We can't TALK MAN, so we'll explore some more.

A sunspot area features a locked sunspot case (?) that can't be opened at this point.  Another solar flare is decidely not safe to walk through, of course.  And there's a makeshift landing field, where the not-makeshift Solar Challenger (airplane) is parked.  We can GO CHALLENGER to reach the cockpit, where we see green, black and orange buttons, most likely color-coded to prevent confusion on the part of the parser rather than the player, and having nothing to do with The Troubles and/or the Black Irish.

We PUSH GREEN and the plane takes off; we can see a Gronk Gronk Fighter out the window, which based on previous experience we should probably try to dispatch.  We PUSH ORANGE -- and A mechanical voice intones, "What is the password?"   We don't have the password, so PUSH BLACK fires a cold ray, but the fighter evades it.  Fortunately, we can PUSH GREEN to land again.

We can LOOK MAN (or, oddly enough, FEEL MAN) to prompt conversation -- he asks us to defeat the Gronk Gronks' fighter (we suspected as much) and also obtain the key that opens the sunspot case.  He then slips something into our hands -- it's a Gold Credit Card?  There are no retail establishments on our map so far, but closer examination indicates that it's smudged, but we can read an "S."

Back on the Challenger (which was the name of a still-operating Space Shuttle when this game was originally written), we note that obvious guesses PASS and SOL don't work as passwords.  We can WIPE CARD, though, to see "Srill" (briefly, before the card somehow smudges up again.)  PUSH ORANGE and SAY SRILL activates the plane's SADAR tracking, allowing PUSH BLACK's cold ray to lock on and do the job properly.

We're getting closer, but this was my second serious attempt, and I had taken too much time -- the capsule was once again melting, and we're too far away to do anything about it now. 

Back on track after restoring, we haven't found any reason to PUSH YELLOW or POUR BUCKET yet, so we should see if we can find opportunities to do so.  POUR BUCKET in the solar flare area puts out the solar flare, opening up a passage south to an insignificant part of this granule.  There's a large hyperdiamond here.  We can PUSH YELLOW, and the ray shoots out, this time freezing the hyperdiamond extensively.

I tried to HIT, KICK, PUSH, and SMASH the frozen diamond, but we just need to BREAK DIAMOND to form a hyperdiamond key.  Upon seeing us again, the alien takes us to the sunspot (which was being used as a freezer) and opens the case, revealing a Container of solid fuel, which ought to be just the ticket home.

Moving as quickly as we can, lest our ship dissolve again, we run all the way back to the ship, close the airlock, FILL LINE with the solid fuel, and PUSH WHITE to take off to... ACK!  Not quite, I missed it by just one move it seems!

Doing it ever-so-slightly more efficiently, we get the best ending, marred only by boring transportation!

No treasures, just a fine story to share at the Space Bar after we cool down a bit.  Creatures that Live in the Sun was good fun.  More Roger Wilcox adventures await!

Adventure of the Week: Putt-Putt Joins The Parade (1992)

I've always meant to sample the children's adventures created by Ron Gilbert (Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, The Cave) during his post-Lucasarts years at his own company, Humongous Entertainment.  The company's first published game launched a long-running series --aimed at children 3-8, Putt-Putt Joins The Parade stars an anthropomorphic young convertible named Putt-Putt and was the first of the company's Junior Adventures line.  I'm playing the game on a Windows PC using the ScummVM interpreter.

Gilbert licensed the SCUMM engine he helped create from Lucasarts, and it's interesting to see the same toolset put to use for a younger audience.  Putt-Putt Joins the Parade is a true adventure game, with puzzles and inventory, but it also provides plenty of simple interactive fun for kids.  Almost everything in the world is clickable -- many objects just produce a little sound or animation and have no role in the story; there are puzzles and other activities that don't have to be solved or completed; and some interaction is handled semi-automatically to keep the interface simple.  For instance, in the opening scene, clicking on the box of Tire-O's fills Putt-Putt's breakfast bowl immediately, and many of these actions can be repeated just for entertainment's sake.

The animation is full-blown cartoon style, colorful and fluid in 320 x 200 VGA, and if you're wondering how an automobile functions as an adventure game protagonist, Putt-Putt has a little arm that emerges from his trunk to manipulate objects.  The game also features a MIDI-based score and full voice-over acting, with optional on-screen text.  To aid pre-readers, Putt-Putt will read any signs encountered out loud, and characters are happy to repeat instructions and plot points.  Trying to use objects where they don't work produces a generic "That doesn't seem to work" response, probably to minimize confusion and red herrings for the younger set, and clicking on Putt-Putt himself usually reminds us what's going on -- "Maybe I'll go downtown and talk to Smokey."


I always encourage interested readers to sample the games I write about here before reading my playthrough notes; these games were fairly popular and I often run across them in thrift stores, and some of them have been ported to the iPhone in recent times.  But as Putt-Putt Joins The Parade is not exactly a challenging game, I understand completely if you simply want to sate your curiosity by proceeding into the...

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

Putt-Putt was created by Humongous Entertainment co-founder Shelley Day, but as the sun rises, it looks suspiciously like Ron Gilbert:

The setup involves a Pet Parade happening today in Cartown, which we learn about (automatically) on Putt-Putt's car radio.  But Putt-Putt doesn't have a pet, so that will probably be a project.

First our hero has to get ready to go, brushing his teeth and eating some Tire-O's cereal (with oil instead of milk, naturally.)  There's a frog hidden behind the curtains of Putt-Putt's garage home, and a fly buzzing around; we can open the curtains and click on the frog to get him to consume the buzzing fly, but all of this is completely optional.  The car radio will play a little jingle promoting Toothpaste -- no brand, just the concept, which fits Putt-Putt's intentionally old-fashioned universe.

The design is full of little animations that don't advance the story -- the weathervane arrow on top of the garage can be made to zoom wildly around the screen like a rocket, apples on a tree have individual animations as they bounce or rocket or turn into juice boxes before disappearing into a barrel on the other side of the road, flowers kiss, fish leap, and caterpillars cocoon and turn into butterflies.

The first real puzzle involves an obstructive cow in the middle of the road on the way to Cartown.  All we have to do is honk Putt-Putt's horn to get her out of the way.

Smokey the Fire Engine (somehow that name seems untrustworthy in a fire prevention official) informs Putt-Putt that he'll need a carwash before he can join the parade, and he'll need to bring a balloon and a pet (Putt-Putt has a puppy in mind.)  To raise money to get himself washed, it's suggested that Putt-Putt can mow lawns and deliver groceries for Mr. Baldini.  Smokey loans Putt-Putt his lawnmower and tells him lawn work is probably available on Red Street.

Exploring town a little bit, Putt-Putt suspects that the Cartown Toy Store may have a balloon for sale, but the Irish-accented proprietress says she sold the last one to Mrs. Airbag, who has taken her infant Baby Beep to the drive-in movie.  Lots of the toys in stock can be played with for optional entertainment, including four riddle-telling animal puppets.  There's also one of those mix-and-match tile puzzles, with a fanfare when an entire picture is correctly assembled:

We can mess around with a pachinko-style pin ball game that can be rearranged for fun.  Putt-Putt can also recover his lost magnet and place it into inventory.  The toy store's window features a toy monkey band that plays and goofs around, and a mouse can be tempted out of his hole with gumballs from the machine, yielding several different short and funny animations.

Mr. Baldini's grocery store has free birdseed out front, of which Putt-Putt happily avails himself.  Some groceries need to be delivered to Tami Torpedo at number 3 Green Street.  A few birds are blocking the way to the customer, but Putt-Putt's horn comes in handy (the bird seed also works here, a kid-friendly design that allows multiple solutions but avoids frustration if that detail has been missed.)  The British blue car at #4 doesn't need his lawn mowed, nor do the neighbors at #2 or #1, but Putt-Putt earns a coin for his delivery trouble at #3.  The lawn in front of #2 features a robot that tells time based on the system clock, a neat little touch.

There are nails strewn across the road leading to Red Street -- odd in a town where all the inhabitants are cars, but maybe this is a bad neighborhood.  Putt-Putt can clear them up with his magnet.  Lawn mowing consists of a mini-game where we must traverse all the unmown squares on a grid, and we'll discover a useful inventory item in the process -- a bone which is likely to come in handy.  We also earn a coin for each completed lawn, collecting four cents from the lawnmowing ordinance scofflaws on Red Street.

Cartown Gas & Tires offers windshield washing equipment and (apparently free) gasoline.  The Car Wash only requires two coins, and as Putt-Putt has never had a carwash before (eww!) we have to figure out how the "shower" works.  There are four steps with point-and-click triggers -- soap, rinse, scrub, and dry -- before Putt-Putt is all clean and can get back on the road.

We can do a few more grocery delivery jobs, taking some to #3 Red Street and #1 Blue Street.  Some marching band mice are blocking the entrance to Blue Street -- the horn yields only a snippy "Beep beep yourself!" but turning on Putt-Putt's radio gets them marching right offscreen.  4 more lawns can be mown here for another four pennies in the glove compartment.  (We only needed the two cents for the car wash, really, but extra money can be spent to change Putt-Putt's color at the paint shop in town.)

A dark cave to the east outside of town contains a frightened puppy, who will happily jump into inventory for a bone.  Putt-Putt decides to name him Pep (as opposed to Manny, Moe, or Jack, I suppose.)

No comment is made about the irresponsible pet owners who abandoned this poor little dog in a scary cave, but Cartown is apparently rife with such people, as we learn when we visit the movies, where a distraught Mrs. Airbag has lost Baby Beep inside the darkened theatre.  She hands Putt-Putt a photo to use in identifying the lost child, making one wonder if this otherwise well-prepared mother is up to something nefarious, especially because the theatre is actually well-lit.  It's a simple matter of color and shape matching to identify Baby Beep, earning Mrs. Airbag's balloon for helping her escape the wrath of Cartown Social Services.

Now, without much ado after all, Putt-Putt Joins The Parade!  The story wraps up quickly with an interactive, highly clickable survey of all the cars and their pets, after which everyone rides off into the Ronset.

We see a brief preview (just a logo and character animation) for Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, another early Humongous Entertainment release, before the credits roll.

This first entry in the Putt-Putt series is charming -- very simple as adventure games go, and just a few hours' worth of gameplay even with note-taking and screen-capturing.  But the game has a lively sense of kid-friendly fun and humor, coupled with quality animation and storytelling.  I enjoyed this little adventure, and I'll have to check out some of the other Humongous Entertainment series when I have a chance.

Adventure of the Week: Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free! (2008)

This week, we're tackling the second episode of Telltale Game's 2008 series based on the Homestar Runner universe created by the Brothers Chapman.  This time around, in Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free!, our masked hero and frequent emailer Strong Bad is placed under house arrest for flouting the King of Town's email tax -- one Creamy Ding Snack Cake for every email sent.  In response he launches a revolution against the "---- of Town" (refusing to recognize or utter the royal title.)  I'm playing the PC version here.

Telltale's licensed adventure game series have done an impressively consistent job of honoring the source material, and this one does the Homestar Runner universe justice, in part because Mike and Matt Chapman were heavily involved in the writing, with Matt voicing most of the characters as he has always done.

If you want to fully experience the joys of Strong Badia the Free! (if it fits your sense of humor it's a very funny game, and much of the pleasure comes from its dialogue) I strongly advise playing this game before proceeding with my playthrough notes below.  The series is still commercially available at Telltale Games' site and via Steam, as well as on the Nintendo Wii download store.  As always in this feature, I'll be discussing my playthrough experience in significant detail for the sake of historical documentation.  That is, there are bound to be...

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

As "the worst day in the whimsical history of wrongful imprisonment" gets underway, most of the rest of the cast is outside protesting the situation.  Strong Bad is a political prisoner trapped in the House of Strong, and the King even ate Strong Bad's trusty map used for navigating the landscape in the previous episode, so we're really starting from scratch.

We can enter Strong Sad's room in this game, unlike the previous epsiode, acquiring a red towel in the bathroom.  Strong Sad sympathizes, but can't be talked into aiding and abetting an escape -- though he does suggest shorting out the invisible fence's transformer before thinking better of it.

We can acquire a costume eye-patch from the box of Cheats Commandos-Os in the kitchen, for use in the photo booth, and a cardboard fast-food restaurant crown (methinks a King of Town disguise is in the works here.)  The Tarantula Black metal detector returns from the first episode, now with a built-in shovel attachment, so we won't have to track down a digging implement separately as in Episode 1.

The Fun Machine in Strong Bad's room hosts the educational video game Math Kickers --Featuring The AlgeBros, a Double Dragon-style arcade game where the brothers must add or subtract to match the number of attacking ninjas on either side, and then beat up a more complex equation to solve for X (requiring a series of button presses but no real understanding of the algebraic processes at hand -- an exaggerated but credible dig at vintage educational software.)

There's an overstuffed "big fat pillow" in the basement, and a pair of garish costume pants in the dryer.  The Trogdor arcade game cabinet is still broken, and the TV is only receiving the History Unleashed Channel, but we can gather some loose stuffing from a leak in the couch.

It seems like we've done most of what can be done in the house, but trying to leave the premises triggers Strong Bad's house-arrest exploding collar, knocking him back into the house with a serious but not fatal case of charhead.

Can we dress up as the King of Town and sneak out?  The collar will still be in effect.  What else?  The assembled protesters outside have placed a rather basic and unevocative effigy of the -OT near the exploding gates.  By tossing the pillow, fluff, towel and crown down, with a little assembly help from The Cheat, we can incite the protestors to burn the King of Town in effigy and take out the invisible fence along with it.

Now Strong Bad can rally his friends to the cause, as he gives a rousing speech and declares Strong Badia (the small plot of land occupied by a flag and an old tire) an independent nation -- but by the time he finishes his crowd has dispersed, each rebelling to establish his or her own country.

There's a Maps & Minions game board on the ground, which we can use to plot a course to world domination, passing through the "countries" established by other characters -- Bubs likely rules Concession-Stan, and The Cheat has absconded with the old tire to establish his own secessionist territory within Strong Badia, entitled, erm, The Cheat and Tirerea (Strong Bad: "You might want to rethink that one.")

Even the local landmarks are getting in on the act -- the Cool Car flies the flag of Hatchbackistan, the Photo Booth is SnapShakLand, the fence has organized itself under the banner of the Back Fence Revolutionaries.  Page 3 of the Math Kicker/AlgeBros manual is under a box out here; we don't really need to master the game, except for bonus points, but if we want to we will need to collect these pages to discover special fighting moves.

Local entrepreneur Bubs is running Concession-Stantinople, and conversation establishes that certain goods are available only on the "Black Market" -- that is, right around back of the concession stand.  But Bubs has no weapons or human organs in stock, and will only trade his illegally recovered artifact for something of value.

Bleak House is Strong Sad's nation, based in his room at the House of Strong.  The cover of the Math Kickers manual is in the mailbox, and there's a toy airline souvenir medal hidden under a cardboard box.  Strong Sad has been hard at work writing the Constitution and Bill of Rights for his Constitutional monarchy.  We can snag his roleplaying sword ("never before have duct tape and PVC pipe forged so mighty a weapon!") as well as a souvenir inaugural flag (producing 2000 of which consumed Strong Sad's entire life savings.)  We can also find a "tar pit" idea card for a Teen Girl Squad comic -- another optional activity in which we must pick the right props and concepts for each panel to ensure maximum carnage.

Pom-PomErania is based inside Pom Pom's Club Technochocolate, where Bubs tends bar and is totally not embezzling money from the club.  To impress Pom Pom into joining his empire, Strong Bad has to be seen with the right drink and impress the Shogun (Pom Pom) with his dancing.  The Bull Honkey energy drink definitely doesn't impress, nor does the outdated glowy green bottle; the Cold Ones Stout ("ten pounds of wheat in every bottle!") doesn't visibly arouse Pom Pom's ire, at least, but isn't impressive either.

Page 4 of the Math Kickers manual is under a box at the end of the bar, revealing the mysterious Divide by Zero move.  Strong Bad can also acquire a glowstick from the DJ booth, which may come in handy.  Moving to the dance floor suggests (courtesy of Bubs, as Pom-Pom's bubbles don't make for intelligible speech) that Strong Bad looks "too empty-handed" -- venturing out with a Cold One Stout in hand solves that problem, but our hero's moves are still not fresh enough.

Giving the TPA (I like to think this stands for Trans Port Airlines but it isn't spelled out) souvenir pilot wings pin to The Cheat reunites The Cheat and Tirerea with Strong Badia proper, and recovers Strong Bad's lighter.  We can also swap Strong Sad's fake sword for the sharp samurai sword hanging in Pom Pom's club.

The lighter is diplomatically useful, that is to say, burning Strong Sad's documents and flag disappoints him, but he is now willing to have his throne usurped by Strong Badia.  (As a possibly unintended but very funny visual, if we ask Strong Sad about his nation after burning these documents, closeups of the now-empty tabletop are shown as he proudly describes them.)  Conquering Bleak House also opens the path to the Homsar Reservation.

Is Bubs interested in the samurai sword for his black market business?  Checking in at the legal side of the Concession Stand allows us to buy a defective toy Strong Bad at half price, using quesos (Bubs accepts all the local nations' currencies.)  But Bubs isn't interested in the sword, as he recognizes it as Pom Pom's.  We can use the metal detector to dig up an old power strip in the Strong Badia plot, a tuning fork and Strong Bad's grandfather's old military medals, and yet another cardboard box conceals the Logarithm Attack page from Math Kickers.

Homsar is as unintelligible as always, but there's a mysterious pylon on the reservation with colored crystals and a "suspiciously obvious hole in the top."  Strong Sad is also here, whining about why we can't just go around the Homsar Reservation, but he has his trunk with him which may prove valuable.  A cave painting provides workspace for a prehistorically-themed Teen Girl Squad episode; the deeper cave is blocked by stones, but the mysterious floating and moving boulders near Homsar suggest he can clear the way if we can get through to him somehow.  Strong Sad has a thermometer in his first aid kit, but any time we approach he uses it to take his own temperature, monitoring his health for good measure while we are in foreign lands.

We can put the tuning fork and power strip into the pylon -- now two of the four colored crystals are glowing, and we can understand part of what Homsar is saying.  The metal detector helps us find a three-ring binder, lighting a third crystal.  There's a hint available here if we're having trouble finding these items, but in my playthrough we had already hunted up the three artifacts depicted in a cave painting near the pylon, finding these artifats near the Stick, the cinder block in Strong Badia, and Strong Bad's mailbox.

Strong Sad is clearly concerned about his health.  We can't substitute the glowstick for his thermometer, but conversation establishes that a high temperature, uncontrollable shaking and difficulty understanding language are symptoms of acute aphasic pretendicitis, requiring removal of the prentendix, which would give us a human organ to trade to Bubs for what is likely the last remaining Homsar artifact we need.   Yep -- heating the thermometer up with the lighter, putting the toy Strong Bad in Strong Sad's fanny pack, and conversing nonsencially with Homsar convinces Strong Sad he really is sick (not that that's very difficult.)  Fortunately, the Homsar Reservation has subsidized health care, and Strong Sad shortly returns with his pretendix in a jar, which Strong Bad can grab for "safe keeping" and trade to Bubs for the final artifact, a pottery shard.

Conversation with Homsar after fully enabling the translation pylon establishes that Strong Bad is the prophesied young boy yadda yadda, and now Homsar's people are aligned and we can access Marzistar or Homezipan, depending on whom one is asking, the nation in Marzipan's back yard.  We can hunt up another Math Kickers manual page and the Marzistar souvenir flag, but the main event here looks to be filling the Strong Badia slot in Marzipan's Model UN display with something representative of Strong Badia.

Strong Bad keeps hinting about Pom-Pomerania when we wander around aimlessly too much, so let's see if we can finish things up there.  Putting the glow stick in the Cold One Stout isn't helpful -- it's too thick for the light to shine out -- but putting a glow stick in the already glowing green drink blinds Pom-Pom to the point that cool dance moves are not even required to make a positive impression.  Another nation brought into the fold!

Now we can get to big/strong/none-too-bright older brother Strong Mad's country, elegantly named "Country," and attempt to enlist his help.  Strong Bad must prove he is a mighty warrior by battling the Taranchula, that is, a stolen heavy metal concert standee with taped on heads supposedly breathing fire breath and ice breath, blocking the bridge to the lands beyond.  We can use the samurai sword to cut the cardboard beast's heads off (as Strong Mad hilariously uses a ketchup bottle to simulate spurting blood from the neck), but the heads regrow!  This is largely a physical timing puzzle -- we can use the samurai sword to cut off the ice head, and while Strong Mad is repairing it, knock the fire head into the river below so it can't regrow.  Similarly, we must light the stack of papier mache skulls standing nearby for visual effect on fire and then knock the ice head into the fire.  Now Strong Mad is on board as well.

We still have to deal with Marzistan before we can proceed to the Of Town's castle.  Marzipan is resolutely peaceful, but Homestar can be talked into calling a Peace Draft for the Homestarmy.  The UN display functions as a spin-the-wheel draft picker, but even with Strong Mad's heavy friend Tony Stony slotted into the Strong Badia slot, the wheel always picks Homestar himself.  We need to shift the "balance of power" somehow to draft a fifth soldier -- Coach Z is on the wheel, and placing the stone in the right slot adds him to the assembled forces.  The battle is on!

.... And doesn't last long.  Even though a few of Strong Bad's allies desert him in his hour of military need, The King of Town surrenders in about five minutes, and now Strong Bad finds himself stuck with the throne.  But what is this?  Sent email history discovered on the King's Snacky 186 computer reveal that this was all an elaborate plot to get Strong Bad to take over the kingdom!  The floppy disks nearby contain recipes suggested by Peasant's Quest (the P. Quest on the disks that I mistook for a Police Quest reference in Episode 1.)

There's a Deluxe Maps & Minions board in the castle which Strong Bad can use to command his troops.  The King of Town also uses email templates, one of which we can use to impose an outrageous tax on Creamy Ding Snack Cakes and arouse his ire against King Strong Bad, sparking a counter-revolution. 

As it turns out, by turning the game board around, Strong Bad can command the other side's forces, as we play a proper round of Maps & Minions to restore the King of Town to his throne.  We can neutralize Strong Sad's depressing conversation by blocking him with Homsar, and Strong Mad's might can be balanced by his good friend The Cheat.  But if Homestar confronts the King directly, all is lost, so we must keep those two separated.  The Poopsmith leaves an odorous cloud behind him, which we can use to conceal the King's whereabouts for a move -- all we really have to do is get the King one move ahead of Homestar and keep a route clear so he can get back to the castle.

Victory is the King's, which mean it's really Strong Bad's, that is, ours!

The Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People episodes are pretty solid across the board, and like a lot of Telltale series it seems to hit its stride more confidently in this second episode.  I really enjoyed some of the puzzles in this one -- they're not too difficult, but the design is a nice blend of conversation, object, and timing situations, and the strategy game at the end ties the whole story together appropriately.  We'll tackle the next episode (of five) before too long.

Adventure of the Week: In the Universe Beyond (1980/2013)

We're tackling yet another Roger M. Wilcox adventure this week, with In the Universe Beyond, the tenth in a series of twenty-one text games written by the author in the early 1980s for the TRS-80 and recently converted for Windows PCs.  I've been enjoying these -- they're not too difficult, the availability of the source code helps a lot when the going gets rough, and Wilcox's interactive storytelling is interesting (and clearly maturing as this series goes along.)  These games were not widely distributed back in the day, so they're also historically valuable -- they're clearly part of the first wave of microcomputer text adventures, but they didn't get much exposure at the time.

In the Universe Beyond is a space exploration adventure that begins with the player standing outside Cape Canaveral, with an unwelcoming sign reading "Welcome to Cape Canaveral! Now get lost."  The true nature of our mission remains unstated, though we will learn more shortly beyond this initial puzzle.

As always, interested readers are encouraged to play In the Universe Beyond for themselves before I give away the details of my own playthrough -- Mr. Wilcox has made his games freely available for download, so if you're running Windows you really have no excuse.  Beyond this Universe... I mean, this point, there are certain to be...

 ****** SPOILERS AHEAD! ******

The security guard standing near the unwelcoming sign is likely none too friendly, but there aren't many options available -- we can't explore anywhere else, and we have nothing in inventory.   EXAMINE GUARD suggests that He barely seems to hear you!  We can't PULL or PUSH or KICK or HIT or KILL or KISS him, though, or SHOUT or YELL... oh, wait, yes, we can YELL, and The guard misinterprets the direction of the sound, and runs off, leaving the entire complex unguarded.  (A very similar puzzle exists in the author's earlier game Jailbreak.)

We can't OPEN GATE, but we don't need to, we can just GO GATE to enter the facility and see a space ship, a scientist and some green plants.  EXAMINE SCIENTIST prompts an explanation -- a second universe is converging on ours, so we must travel there and remove the center of this invading universe, after which we will be richly rewarded.  And the password is QMY$.

We can GET PLANTS before we go, but then we can't seem to GO SHIP or BOARD SHIP or ENTER SHIP or navigate onto it.  We have some green plant leaves in inventory, and HELP yields What do plant leaves have that makes them green? -- but we can't LEAVE either.  Ah -- of course, we can SAY QMY$ to find ourselves aboard ship.

The ship's control room features a viewscreen that displays our current surroundings -- the landing site on Earth -- along with a white button and a blue button.  The adjoining equipment room contains a helmet, a large belt (It has a single 360-degree hook on one side), a maser pistol, and a sealed hatch.

The blue button launches some kind of massive weapon -- The space ship destroys the planet below! The planet's remains fly out in all directions, bashing your ship into scrap. You die inside it.  So we shouldn't do that indoors, then.

PUSH WHITE takes us to a view of the Milky Way galaxy, where PUSH BLUE causes us to crash through the light barrier and the edge of the universe where we see the planets and stars repelling each other.  If we PUSH WHITE here, we find ourselves in weak anti-gravitational orbit about a planet.  We can try to BEAM DOWN from the equipment room, but we are out of range; PUSH WHITE just toggles between near-orbit and general galaxy positioning, so we can't get any closer to the planet.

Can we BEAM UP, given the opposite nature of this place?  Yes! ... But we die quickly in the unbreathable air on the surface of the planet, and there's not enough air in the helmet to keep us alive either.  HOLD BREATH doesn't buy us any time; as soon as we land on the planet, Your helmet runs out of air quickly.  You pull it off and The air is not breatheable.

What about the sealed hatch in the equipment room?  SHOOT HATCH sears it off, allowing us to access an auxiliary store room below and pick up a promising canister, though this also seems to use up all the energy stored in the maser pistol.

Carrying the canister with us doesn't help planetside, so we must need to do something more complicated with it.  OPEN CANISTER prompts With what?, but HANDS doesn't do it.  We can't CONNECT HOOK or CONNECT CANISTER, but we can HOOK CANISTER using the hook on the belt.

But we still can't breathe!  BEAM UP and SAY QMY$ have different but similarly fatal results, as we suffocate either in space or on the surface of the planet.  I had to peek at the code to learn that we can WEAR LEAVES -- apparently this somehow protects us in a cloud of breatheable atmosphere, though what chlorophyll has to do with it I really can't say.

Planetside we spot a shovel, and we can explore the forest's edge to the north and a big field to the south.  DIGging in the field yields a can opener.  OPEN CANISTER -- With what? -- CAN OPENER fails (Sorry, but no go Joe), but replying with OPENER instead opens the canister, revealing a smaller canister inside it.  Digging in another field to the east yields a small black cylinder with a switch on one side.

We can't CLIMB TREE in the impenetrable forest, and the cylinder is stubborn -- we can't PULL SWITCH or PUSH SWITCH or FLIP SWITCH or PRESS CYLINDER.  Is the cylinder the center of the other universe?  Apparently not, as the scientist back on earth is completely uninterested in it and it seems a little premature for us to be ending the adventure.  We can't CHARGE PISTOL or INSERT CYLINDER or INSERT PISTOL either...

Aha! We can SWITCH CYLINDER, which emits a whir, although you can't see anything happening to it, and it is now an Activated black cylinder. 

Is it explosive?  We can DROP CYLINDER by the forest, but it doesn't seem to go off (and we can't easily pick it up again without dropping some other items, as inventory handling seems to have a limit-counting bug, or perhaps the digging up of objects which end up in our hands temporarily exceeds the normal limit.)  If we EXAMINE CYLINDER after activating it, it cuts our head in half, fatally so.  So the cylinder must be a cutting tool of some kind -- and yes, we can CUT TREES -- With what? -- CYLINDER to clear a pathway through what is now a forest of stumps (apparently we overdid the tree-cutting a bit.)

A ravine lies on the other side of the erstwhile forest, and we can JUMP to reach its eastern side, where a fat steel post resides.  To the north is a wasteland, where DIG yields what is initially described as a piece of slate... though EXAMINEing it indicates it's probably flint, as it makes sparks.  We can try to CUT POST, but neither the cylinder nor the can opener prove useful against its fat steel.

We've done all the digging we can, but EXAMINE STUMPS in the forest yields a Handle with gas nozzle (oddly, it's described as jumping into our hands, though it doesn't seem sentient.)  We can LIGHT NOZZLE with the slate, then CUT POST with the nozzle to turn it into a fat open-end steel stump.

It seems obvious that we should GO STUMP, and discover that It's too dark to see! -- even though the nozzle is still lit.  At least we can safely go back U.  What to do for a light source?  We can't CUT STUMP to make a torch or anything.  We can tell which directions we can't go in the dark, so we can navigate D, D ... whoops, You fell and broke every bone in your body.  The same happens if we try to navigate blind after that first downward move, so this isn't going to help.

We can OPEN PISTOL to remove a used but still active power source, glowing Radium as it turns out, and now we can see that we're in a cave with a loose dirt roof.  The cave isn't really a maze, we just have to navigate a few rooms to find ourselves in front of a Lead wall with peephole notch.  EXAMINE WALL, LOOK PEEPHOLE, EXAMINE NOTCH, and PEEP HOLE don't reveal anything of interest; in fact, neither the notch nor the peephole / hole are even recognized by the parser.  Further DIGging around in the cave rooms isn't very productive either.

After being stuck for a while, I peeked at the code again to figure out that we can't just DIG in the critical cave room, or DIG at its loose dirt ROOF specifically -- we have to DIG UP to find a key.  (This does kind of make sense, but I wasn't hitting on the right action and the game doesn't provide much help here.)

With the key in hand we can OPEN WALL and then PUSH WALL to move it aside and discover a six-section lead plate.  Going east now leads us to a perfectly spherical room, wherein lies the fabled Center of the universe.  Now all we have to do is GET CENTER, and... Congratulations, you have been sucked into the center of the universe. Dummy!  So that's not the right thing to do.

The six-section lead plate might be useful, though I wasn't quite picturing it properly -- I was trying to UNFOLD PLATE and THROW PLATE or DROP PLATE, but we can FOLD PLATE to make a lead box, which somehow allows us to safely GET CENTER (that's an awfully strong lead box!)

Now the pace picks up a bit, as the planet begins to shake. The whole universe is shaking! You have only 12 seconds until it envelops you!   Fortunately, each move we make only takes one second, so we have time to exit the cave, jump across the ravine, run through the forest back to the beam-down site, and BEAM UP -- fatally transmitting ourselves into the inside of the planet, dash it all!

Trying again, I don't quite make it in time -- I tried to BEAM DOWN one move too early -- and CRUNCH!!! The universe has closed in on you!, just before I was able to PUSH BLUE and go back to our own time-space continuum.  (The universe may have begun with a Bang, but apparently it ends with a Crunch.)

Doing everything right, we manage to deliver the Center of the universe to the scientist, and while we've saved our own universe, the promised reward is something of a disappointment:

It seems like this sort of thing ought to merit at least an episode of NOVA, but at least victory is ours!

I like these tense little endgame sequences, mostly because they make my adventurer's obsession with mapping on graph paper feel more like actual productivity.  And with game number ten played and conquered, we're about halfway through the Roger M. Wilcox oeuvre, with more to come sometime soon.

Adventure of the Week: The Poseidon Adventure (1980/2013)

We're going back to the Roger M. Wilcox archives this week, to tackle the author's eighth game, another recent Windows conversion after the original TRS-80 source code was recovered from tape.  Like a number of early computer games, The Poseidon Adventure was inspired by an existing property without benefit of licensing -- but as these games weren't commercially distributed, it never became an issue in this obscure corner of the nascent technology/entertainment industry.

In case we thought this might be an adventure starring Poseidon, God of the Sea, we are immediately informed that The cruise liner "Poseidon" has capsized at sea, and you're trapped on board!  You'd better find a way out before it sinks!   So this will be an escape-the-non-alien-ship adventure, it appears.

As always, I encourage interested readers to sample The Poseidon Adventure before reading my further comments.  Mr. Wilcox has graciously made his adventures freely available, and it's always interesting to compare playthrough notes after the fact.  My purpose here is to document the history of the adventure game genre by way of specific examples, so this discussion will necessarily contain...

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

There's no starboard/port navigation here, the game retains the normal N/S/E/W/U/D conventions, though movement in the vertical directions is predictably not quite as expected.  And I believe this is the first Wilcox adventure to incorporate a true ticking clock element.

We have nothing in inventory to begin with, so a little exploration is in order.  The first room is rather generic -- just the ship "Poseidon" -- but things get a little more specific as we check things out.  A tool room contains a hand drill, screwdriver, and keyhole saw.  A medical "closet" contains a bottle of some liquid -- we can't READ BOTTLE, but EXAMINE BOTTLE indicates it contains lye soap.  So it's not liniment, or a health potion or anything, then.

A hallway ends at a grate over a long, dark shaft -- we can UNSCREW GRATE -- With what? -- SCREWDRIVER to gain access to the air shaft, which leads to a bathroom where (echoing a memorable moment from the film) EXAMINE TOILET indicates that It is on the ceiling.  A nearby room for smokers contains a cigarette lighter.

Heading U or D from the starting location confirms that we're aboard an inverted, most likely sinking ship.  The cargo hold at the bottom of the ship now lies above, and we can find a plastic bag and a closed suitcase containing a metal rod and long thermal undies.  (I found myself approaching the game's seven-item inventory limit here, something I didn't really run into much in the earlier Wilcox games.  To this efficiently we'll have to drop some things when we're done with them; fortunately most items are used to solve a single puzzle and can then be discarded.)

Below the starting area is a room with a hatch that's now located on the "floor."  West of here lies an ex-stoner's cabin containing a Nitric acid capsule.

And that's about it for mapping at this point, so let's see if we can figure out how to open the hatch and get out of here.  Except... wait, we're upside down, so that's probably a bad idea.

The metal rod has a place for a connection at one end.  We can try to CONNECT ROD in various places, but something is missing.  And while I've been exploring and experimenting, the parser is now informing us that "The Poseidon is sinking fast!"  So yes, time is of the essence.

Can we SAW HATCH?  No, a keyhole saw requires a small hole.  Can we make a small hole with the acid?  OPEN CAPSULE?  SQUIRT ACID?  EAT CAPSULE?  Erm... DROP ACID?  Nope.  And as I try to DRILL HATCH and DRILL FLOOR with the same lack of success, we reach the point where The Poseidon has sunk.  The adventure has ended.

I like tight-timing adventures -- they're usually brief, intense experiences, and it's oddly entertaining to relive the same experience, trying to do everything right this time and inch closer to victory.  But I seem to be stuck here -- what am I missing?  I've tried to SEARCH ROOM (there's no "search" verb) and EXAMINE ROOM everywhere; I've examined all the objects I've run across and discovered no new salient details.  So what am I missing?

A peek at the source code suggests part of my problem -- we need to simply LOOK or EXAMINE in the tool room to note that The north wall looks like it used to have an exit, but it was boarded up some time in the past.  (EXAMINE WALL yields only, "You see nothing special.", and I didn't expect LOOK to behave this way.)

Now we can DRILL HOLE and SAW WALL to reach an Abandoned tool shed (as Mr. Wilcox's source code comments note, this is an odd thing to find onboard) and acquire a large hand axe.

We can't WEAR UNDIES -- I have a feeling it wouldn't look good on you -- so they must have some other purpose.  We can INSERT CAPSULE -- I was trying to get it into the hatch somehow, but what this actually does is put it into the bottle of lye soap so that we now have a Bottle of nitroglycerin.  This could be very useful if we're careful.

Of course, if we LIGHT BOTTLE while holding it, You're blown to shards!!   We can DROP BOTTLE and then light it, but all it does in the hatch room is go BOOM!  If we do this in the bathroom, however, then The explosion destroyed the toilet, made a hole in the ceiling, and caused something to fall out!  -- a pipe wrench, apparently left behind by a plumber like an absent-minded doctor's surgical sponge.

We can now travel upward from the bathroom now to visit a passenger's room with a closed window.  We can try to OPEN WINDOW -- With what? -- AXE, but that's surprisingly ineffective -- It remains closed.  Nor can we CHOP WINDOW.

What about the hatch?  We can't OPEN HATCH with the wrench, or TURN HATCH... ack!  We can just GO HATCH at any time to reach an underwater pocket, and all along I had been assuming it was sealed against the ravages of the fathoms below!  We can pick up a metal claw here, and examination reveals that It is of solid construction, as if it were one end of a crowbar.  We CONNECT ROD, and now we have a useable crowbar, though we don't need to PRY HATCH obviously (and I wonder about the structural integrity and durability of a two-piece crowbar.)

We can't PRY WINDOW either -- "pry" is not a recognized verb -- but we can OPEN WINDOW -- With what? -- CROWBAR.  Of course, It cracks open stubbornly, then bursts forth with water from the surrounding ocean, and we drown.  We can avoid this fate if we have the foresight to WEAR BAG -- this plastic bag apparently holds enough oxygen to allow fairly extensive underwater exploration, and is also resistant enough to external water pressure to keep us from being suffocated by the bag itself.

We're too far below the surface to swim up and escape that way, it seems, but we can navigate the waters outside the cabin to enter another passenger's room with a (fortunately) broken window, though why the water has not used this breach to take the whole ship down faster is unclear.  Those cabin doors must be pretty airtight!  From this second passenger room we can reach a slanting hallway, blocked by a Wall of flames (also undamped by ocean water, though it may be slanting upwards.)

And -- since we can't wear the undies, this solution suggests itself -- THROW UNDIES puts out the fire, as the "Thermal" evidently meant fire retardant. (They even remain miraculously unburned!)  Now we can pass through a corridor leading toward the Propeller Room, where there's a shutoff valve.  An upward passage is blocked by live steam, which is where the pipe wrench comes in handy.

At last we're in the actual Propeller Room, where there's a button.  We PUSH BUTTON, and... The propellers have started!  You're ground to pieces!  So maybe that was a bad decision.  But we're obviously at the bottom of the ship now.  What we actually want to do here is CHOP HOLE with the hand axe, and then GO HOLE to victory!

Without the source code I think I would have been stuck for a while, although I suppose eventually I might have tried to DRILL HOLE everywhere and in everything until it worked in the tool room.  And I got tripped up on my own assumptions about the hatch -- it seemed like opening the hatch would comprise the game's major puzzle, when in fact it was not even an obstacle.  The Poseidon Adventure is more good old-fashioned fun from Mr. Wilcox, and I'll be continuing our journey through this series in the future.