Bill Demas had several games published by Scott Adams' Adventure International, and was heavily involved in Adams' Adventure #12, Golden Voyage. The two-game Talking Adventure series appeared in 1981 for the TRS-80, and since playing the first one, I have learned both games were remade in 1985, under new titles for the Apple Macintosh computers, with the digitized voice removed, a new mouse-based interface and hi-res black-and-white graphics added. I plan to document the Mac editions in the future, but wanted to finish the series on the humble TRS-80 first.
So why did it take me so long to get around to playing this sequel? Well, I had started it shortly after the first game, and was making good headway, but I got hopelessly stuck very near the end of the game (details below, in the spoilers section). Fortunately, after I ran a short article with some new information received from Mr. Demas, reader Gaël got in touch -- he's a French Macintosh game enthusiast who was trying to track down this series' author, in hopes of finding a copy of the Mac game Utopia, the remake of Forbidden Planet Part I. And Gaël's published walkthrough for the Mac sequel, Futuria, a remake of this game, gave me the information I needed to finish the TRS-80 original! So I owe a big debt of gratitude to a very dedicated adventure fan, William Demas, and the Internet.
The game follows the established Talking Adventures model, but the voice samples are briefer this time, and I did not run into the "play beyond bounds" audio bug/glitch I encountered with the first game. The voice samples are used more appropriately here, often when announcements are played or robots are talking, which makes the audio more atmospheric than the first game's parser feedback. And we hear both female and male voices, another pleasant change, though most adventurers will still want to turn off the voices after a while.
As always, I encourage interested readers to sample Forbidden Planet Part II before proceeding here. It's a decent escape-in-the-space-ship adventure with some interesting and logical "alien" puzzles, and it provides a good level of challenge. Beyond this point, be forewarned that there are guaranteed to be...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
Forbidden Planet Part II is a fairly straight sci-fi tale, without the cameo appearances by ogres and centaurs seen in the first game, and most of the gameplay consists of figuring out the switches, keys and levers scattered around the map.
We begin this second game game exactly where we left off at the end of the first, standing on the shore of the strange lake. The lake is still poisonous, of course, so trying to GO LAKE remains a bad idea.
There's a door with a small speaker nearby, and a sign gives us... an encoded password? What about the one we were given at the first game's conclusion? Ah -- this is an optional puzzle that we can use to decode the correct password if we don't have it; that's a nice touch. We can't SAY the wrong thing to the automated door's query, either, as the parser simply responds with I don't know what "[entry]" is if we misspeak.
Once cleared for entrance, we have to travel some distance west in the long metal tunnel -- and we eventually reach an advertising sign reading, "Have you completed part I of "Forbidden Planet" yet?", which would be a pointless question if not for the password clues.
We keep traveling W until we reach a point with an opening, and after we go through the opening, it seals behind us.
We can try to go through a steel door nearby, but a voice (and the text onscreen) says: ZAP! I'm electrocuted! I'm dead! Play again? I'm not sure who's speaking here, as "I'm dead!" is a particularly difficult sentence for anyone to utter. But we will need to start over or restore a saved game after quitting. (There are pirated versions of this game online that lack a functional SAVE GAME command, but a proper edition provides a convenient set of 10 game saves with descriptive entries, so we have plenty of freedom to experiment.)
Further down the street, a graphic of a robot appears, holding what appears to be one of those drinking bird novelty gadgets, at least as portrayed by the TRS-80's limited graphics. But we are informed that Robot has a gun, and if we are unlucky, Robot shoots me! I'm DEAD! So we will be dealing with random attacks again, and should focus on trying to find some means of self-protection against these trigger-happy machines.
The city's transportation center has a crystalline cube with a red button, and a monorail. If we PUSH RED, a cube begins whining, and eventually explodes; we can escape the danger by hiding in the monorail, but what we really need to do is GET CUBE and use it to blow up the robot by throwing it before it blows up. Just before he goes to the great Radio Shack Discount Bin in the sky, the Robot says "Stop" or "Stop alien", but we will ignore his directive, given the gun in his mechanical hand.
Inside the monorail, a rusty lever won't budge; the blown-up robot leaves behind some unspecified Robot parts, laying in a pool of oil. We can't just GET OIL though, so the lever will remain rusty for a while. The monorail also has a control panel with a green button, a lever, and a slot, but we don't have anything to put in the slot just yet.
The southern part of the map contains a Repository, a thin beam of light, and a steel door which cannot be opened in the traditional fashion. Nor can the red cube be used to blow up the doors, but we can TOUCH BEAM to get them open. The Repository contains a token and a plastic rod; if we TWIST ROD, It begins to glow. But the light does not last very long, so need to save it in case we find ourselves dancing at a rave later on (though that seems unlikely, given that this Forbidden City seems to be populated entirely by homicidal androids.)
A nearby Laboratory area contains a strange (portable) device, some chemicals and a beaker. We can MIX CHEMICALS, but doing so is fatal. We might be able to use the beaker to obtain the oil, and we can if we are successful at wrestling with the parser -- GET OIL / WITH BEAKER doesn't work, but FILL BEAKER does.
With the lever oiled and the token inserted in the slot, we can settle in to WAIT quite a while (six turns) before the monorail reaches its destination. A robot waiting at the other end of the monorail starts following us after we arrive, though he is patient about taking us out. A control panel in the grotto nearby has a yellow button and a slot, but we can't INSERT TOKEN here; we can, however, PUSH YELLOW to enter a dark area and find some more tokens. (We are expected to use the rod for lighting purposes, but if we know our way around we can safely maneuver in the dark.) Now we can escape the robot by getting on the monorail and using another token to go back where we came from.
Piloting the monorail requires a little bit of effort -- we have to PUSH LEVER initially, but for the return trip, we can PULL LEVER. And can PUSH LEVER a second time at the first stop to go to a construction site (which is lit). There's a strange structure here, being assembled by robots -- it appears to be a nuclear reactor, and we can pick up a canister made of lead. Exploring the area turns up a plastic card, which seems magnetic, a green key, and a storeroom containing a very handy laser pistol.
The laser pistol has a knob and 80 charges; SHOOT ROBOT vaporizes any armed robot in the vicinity. We have to do this a lot at the construction site, as they just keep coming, but we must be careful to SHOOT ROBOT one at a time; if we try to SHOOT ROBOTS they attack en masse and we're dead.
Before we leave the construction site, we actually need to step inside the reactor, where we find a red key, which we will need, and some atomic waste, which is the last thing we need. It doesn't take long before I feel sick, and later My hair is falling out, and finally I die of radiation poisoning. We could probably use some protection, but there doesn't seem to be anything useful in the area.
So it's back to the monorail and on to our next stop at the outskirts of the city. A building off of a forlorn road has a red button, and a small box found lying in the road has a red button and a green button. We will leave it alone for a moment -- our most immediate goal is to PUSH RED inside the building, at which point an announcement says, "Decontamination complete." This future technology can apparently actually repair radiation damage already sustained, and we need to do this if we hope to continue the adventure. And we need to do it quickly -- there isn't a move to spare, and if a robot decides to start pursuing us we just have to hope we can get decontaminated before he shoots us.
I discovered that we don't actually have to close the door in the monorail -- we can travel safely with it open, which saves a few moves, and it's handy to keep inventory items inside the railcar until we need them. Other experiments established that we should not open the lead canister found at the reactor site, as the glowing stone inside is highly radioactive, and that if we TURN KNOB on the laser pistol, it self-destructs. This explosion won't destroy the numerous robots at the construction site though, so we shouldn't do this either. And the strange device we found early on is just a radiation gauge -- it glows bright red in presence of atomic waste, in case we are unfamiliar with the dangers of said nuclear byproducts.
We can pick up the small button-bedecked box from the road -- if we PUSH RED, nothing happens, and if we PUSH GREEN, we hear a -CLICK-... ? I realized after trying to figure out why this response was being given that I was on the monorail at the time, and the parser was getting confused between multiple green buttons. (I wish I'd remembered this later on when I got stuck!)
I was starting to get a little bit stuck here, running out of ideas, and I was glad to find a scan of the hint sheet published for the original game at TRS80Stuff.net. This helped me for a while, but was of no use when I got stuck very near the end (are you seeing a trend here?)
Returning to the small grotto, we can use the red key in the slot to turn power on in that area (INSERT RED, TURN RED, PUSH YELLOW.) We can also try to INSERT the GREEN key -- and the voice is actually helpful here, as the screen display says simply, Sorry but the voice further explains, "It doesn't fit."
With the power on, a light beam allows access to an underground room. The control panel here has a two-position lever and a green button, there's a screwdriver in the steel chamber to the north, and we find a metal platform in a small metal room. A storeroom contains a deactivated robot, with an empty slot.
The metal platform turns out to be an elevator, with buttons marked 2 and 3, and we can INSERT CARD to activate it. Level 2 has many dangers -- the security outpost is staffed with numerous robots, and it is very likely that Robots spot me and attack! I'm DEAD! What's worse is that using the platform appears to consume the plastic card, but in fact, it somehow ends up in the hands of the deadly robots. There's a green light beam here, but TOUCHing it vaporizes our hand, so we don't want to do that. We also need to pick up a cartridge in this area.
We seem to be stuck here, but if we LOOK FLOOR we can find a vent, and with the screwdriver from Level 1, we can OPEN VENT / WITH SCREWDRIVER. A robot can still follow us into the narrow vent, and it seems there is no way out, until we learn to CRAWL.
This takes us to the Security Control Station -- we can INSERT GREEN (key) here, and PUSH RED, to deactivate all the robots! Whew! And our pass card gets returned to the slot on the platform.
Now we can INSERT CARTRIDGE into the deactivated robot, and it follows us. With the robots deactivated, we can use the exploding laser to blow up the security door on Level 3. The control panels become a bit repetitive -- there's not much variety here -- but we want to use the yellow key found here back in the security control station on Level 2, inserting the key and pulling the lever to open a door on level 3.
A force field still blocks access to the Lead Room on level 3, but the robot, once activated, can make sense of the nearby switch room with its overwhelming number of levers and buttons. We can only GO FIELD after the robot helps us out here.
As it turns out, we can't transport the lead canister on the metal platform, which is more of a matter-transfer device than an elevator, because Radioactive material causes a malfunction. I materialize extremely malformed, which is not a good thing. We need to revisit Level 1 and use the green button there to transport the canister to the Lead Room. There is some transuranic waste here, and it's deadly, so we should SAVE GAME before we start experimenting and figuring out how to dispose of it with various combinations of PUSH LEVER or PULL LEVER and PUSH GREEN on Level 1.
If we leave an activated enemy robot wandering around, we can't shoot him later after we've deactivated the security 'bots -- once we have activated the "good" robot and it follows us, the game will no longer let us SHOOT ROBOT. So we should mop up any stragglers before turning off the security robots that are NOT following us around.
Once we have the canister safely transported to Level 3, we can GO into the force FIELD. This leads to a corridor with a window, where we can see outer space. We GO PLATFORM to reach the Launch Control Station, which sounds like it may help us get out of here at last. We find the hangar doors open, and the space ship closed. PUSH YELLOW opens the space ship, but touching the lever seems fatal. If we TOUCH BEAM past the force field, then I'm sucked out into space. I'm DEAD! This does not seem to be based on the space ship's closed/open status, so we need to PUSH RED and PUSH GREEN on our control box in this area to fix the situation. PUSH RED closes the hangar doors, and PUSH GREEN opens them. With the hangar doors closed, we can open the ship's door safely, and then GO SHIP. Aboard the space ship, PULL LEVER closes the door, and we can PUSH to open it again.
Here's where I got stuck. It seems clear that the glowing stone in the lead canister is needed to power the ship, and we can enter an empty compartment with the friendly robot in tow. If we DROP CANISTER there, PUSH RED causes the robot to take the glowing stone; this ought to be a good thing, but we die of radiation poisoning immediately thereafter with no chance of decontamination. I felt like I must be close to the end, but I couldn't quite figure out how to get the stone into place without dying from the radiation. PUSH RED didn't seem to work outside of the fueling compartment, and if we try it in the room with Many colored buttons & levers, the command pushes something else and the ship blows up.
Fortunately, Demas' later Mac port Utopia and Gaël's walkthrough saved me after several hours of beating my head against this puzzle. The parser confuses the box's red button with the remote control unit's red button, and the button on the box takes precedence only outside of the space ship's compartment room. So while I was trying to PUSH RED in various locations, it only seemed to work in the radiation room and not anywhere else. I could witness the robot taking the glowing stone out of the canister when I pushed the remote control's red button at that location, but then, of course, I died of radiation poisoning, and I couldn't seem to use the remote to trigger this action from anywhere else. As it turns out, we have to get rid of the two-button box to fix the parser's confusion, and ultimately PUSH RED on the remote control unit from a safe distance back at the launch control station, which is the only other place that the remote will work. With all this straightened out, the robot now announces that the ship is now fueled and we are ready to go.
All we have to do now is go back to the ship, close the doors and push the green button (which apparently opens the hangar doors as well as launching our ship) -- and victory is at long last ours!
Forbidden City was quite an adventure -- it was fairly challenging to explore and learn how everything was supposed to work, and the constant barrage of enemy robots requires constant attention to what's going on. Sadly, there were no more Talking Adventures published, but the existence of the later, retitled Mac versions means I will be revisiting this world at some point.
My walkthrough is available at the CASA Solution Archive, and is included here, below the fold.
**** WALKTHROUGH ****
SAY COSMIC
GO DOOR
W (x 14!)
GO OPENING
W, W, S
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
GET TOKEN
GET ROD
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
N, N
GET CUBE
S
PUSH RED
E
THROW CUBE (Where?)
AT ROBOT
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
E
GET BEAKER
W
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
FILL BEAKER (with oil)
W, N
GO MONORAIL
OIL LEVER
DROP BEAKER
INSERT TOKEN
PUSH LEVER (We're moving.)
WAIT (x 6)
TWIST ROD (optional, can maneuver in dark if you like)
GO DOOR
E
PUSH YELLOW
W, N, E
GET TOKENS
W, S
GO MONORAIL
INSERT TOKEN
PUSH LEVER (Moving again)
DROP ROD
WAIT (3x, until car stops)
GO DOOR
W
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
GET PISTOL
(From here on, SHOOT ROBOT whenever one shows up)
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
S
GET KEY
N, E
GET CARD
E
GET CANISTER
W
GO MONORAIL
INSERT TOKEN
DROP TOKENS
PUSH LEVER
(Might be wise to SAVE GAME here, the radiation poison sets in VERY quickly; don't stop even to
SHOOT ROBOT until after decontamination)
WAIT (5x, until car stops)
GO DOOR
N, W
GET BOX
N
GO REACTOR
GET KEY
E, S, E
GO BUILDING
PUSH RED ('Decontamination complete')
S, S
GO MONORAIL
INSERT TOKEN
PULL LEVER
WAIT (5x)
PULL LEVER
WAIT (4x)
GO DOOR
E
INSERT RED
TURN RED
PUSH YELLOW (power is back on)
W
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
N
PUSH GREEN
PUSH LEVER
S
GO ROOM
DROP CANISTER
GO OPENING
N
PULL LEVER
N
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
EXAMINE ROBOT (deactivated, with empty slot)
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
N
GET SCREWDRIVER
S, W
GO PLATFORM
INSERT CARD
PUSH 2
REMOVE CARD (or robots will steal it)
E, E
GET CARTRIDGE
W, S, N, S, W, S
EXAMINE FLOOR
UNSCREW VENT
GO VENT
CRAWL
GO OPENING
DROP SCREWDRIVER
EXAMINE PANEL
INSERT GREEN
PUSH RED (Robots deactivated!)
GO OPENING
CRAWL
GO VENT
N, E, N
GO PLATFORM
INSERT CARD
PUSH 1
N, E
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
INSERT CARTRIDGE
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
W
GO PLATFORM
PUSH 3
W, S
TURN KNOB
DROP PISTOL
N (explosion!)
S
GO OPENING
E
GET KEY
W
GO OPENING
N
GO PLATFORM
PUSH 2
E, S, W, S
GO VENT
CRAWL
GO OPENING
N
INSERT YELLOW
PULL LEVER
S
GO OPENING
CRAWL
GO VENT
N, E, N
GO PLATFORM
PUSH 3
W, S
GO OPENING
E, E (Robot pulls levers and presses buttons, then disappears for now)
W
PUSH YELLOW
PUSH LEVER
W
GO DOOR
GO ROOM
GET CANISTER
GO OPENING
GO FIELD
E
GO PLATFORM
GET CARTRIDGE
PUSH YELLOW
EXAMINE BOX
PUSH RED (space ship is now open)
GO PLATFORM
W
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
GO SHIP
GET CONTROL
DROP BOX (this is important, or the parser gets confused about which red button is intended)
E
DROP CANISTER
W
GO DOOR
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
E
GO PLATFORM
PUSH RED (Robot says "Ship ready for launch")
GO PLATFORM
W
TOUCH BEAM
GO DOOR
GO SHIP
PULL LEVER
PUSH GREEN (blast off to victory!)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment