At Random: Armored Encounter! / Sub Chase! (Odyssey^2, 1978)

This week's random grab from my bag of loose, dusty Odyssey^2 cartridges came up with another double-feature cartridge, crammed into a mere 2K of ROM space: Armored Encounter! / Sub Chase!, produced in 1978 for Magnavox's keyboard-equipped video game console.

Magnavox often used these two-in-one cartridges to get a couple of weak but playable concepts onto the market, in the hopes that quantity would make up for the lack of quality.  This one's no exception, and as a result, there isn't a whole lot to say about these two titles; they borrow some ideas from Atari's pack-in Combat cartridge, but don't do any of it quite as well.

Sub Chase! is a target-bombardment game -- Player 1's green airplane flies from right to left, trying to bomb the enemy submarine lurking below the ocean's surface (denoted by the border where the permanently dawn-orange sky meets the blue, waveless ocean) while Player 2's enemy submarine fires sea-to-air missiles and tries to do the same to the low-flying jet.

Each player can steer his or her craft up and down, and adjust its horizontal speed to a degree.  And while Player 1's jet, a neutral ship (which costs either player a point every time it gets hit), and Player 2's submarine all wrap around at the screen borders, bombs and missiles do not, limiting the available range and opportunities to do damage.  Some compensation is provided by the players' ability (under some of the 9 game variations) to steer armaments in flight, but Player 2 is at a decided disadvantage due to the game designer's color choices -- the sub's missiles almost vanish against the orange sky, while the plane's green bombs are still quite visible underwater.  Whoever racks up the most points before the clock runs down is considered the winner.

The second contest here, Armored Encounter!, is a more direct lift from Atari's Combat, pitting Player 1's blue tank against Player 2's red tank.  But the obstacles aren't as imaginative or evocative as Atari's rectangular concrete (or so I always imagined them to be) bunkers -- they're either grid-based lines, or simple X's from the Odyssey^2's built-in character set.

While Atari recognized a design flaw in this two-player concept, and compensated by allowing successful shots to knock tanks out of the way a bit, Armored Encounter! does no such thing.  This means the first player to get a good shot in can simply camp out with a perfectly lined-up cannon, instantly shooting the other one's tank every time it recovers from the previous hit.  Ammunition is limited, and some variations allow for "guided missiles" that can be steered after firing, but these don't add a whole lot of strategic depth to the contest.  The player with the most hits after the clock runs down is declared the winner, unless excessive use of the "camping out" strategy calls for invocation of the Mom Appeal, which dictates that whomever has been treated most unfairly during play is the real winner.

The Odyssey^2 always had a tough time in the marketplace, consistently running third against formidable competition from the Atari VCS/2600 and Mattel Intellivision.  Magnavox did produce some innovative games for the Odyssey^2 during the console's struggle to survive.  But Armored Encounter! / Sub Chase! was not one of them.

Sad News: Bob Liddil Passes

I learned last night that Bob Liddil, aka "Captain 80" to many TRS-80 and text adventure enthusiasts of the early 1980s, passed away suddenly on Monday.  He founded The Programmers' Guild, an early computer game publisher, and gave graciously of his time and talents to many, many people, myself included.  I only got to know him myself a few months ago -- he was a warm and funny man, self-deprecating when it came to his own contributions to the fledgling industry, with fulsome praise for the many talented people he worked with.

Bob will be missed.  My deepest sympathies go out to his family, and the many who called him a friend.

Book Review: The ZORK Chronicles

An adventure gaming acquaintance of mine gave me a copy of George Alec Effinger's paperback Infocom novel The ZORK Chronicles several years ago.  It was published in 1990, a decade after the mainframe game DUNGEON made its downsized personal computer debut as ZORK I-III.  As I've recently been revisiting the classic ZORK trilogy, I was inspired to finally get around to reading it.

The ZORK Chronicles is not a choose-your-own-adventure book; publisher Avon Books wisely recognized that fiction and interactive fiction are different experiences, and that what works very well in the digital medium feels clunky and disjointed on paper.  Instead, established author George Alec Effinger (1947-2002) was commissioned to deliver a light fantasy novel of the sort that Dragon magazine readers would probably enjoy, set solidly in the ZORK universe.  The story concerns the adventures of Glorian, a Supernatural Guide (one of those mysterious figures who restore our heroes to health after dying and provide the occasional in-game hint), and his heroic charge, a beefy prince of a warrior named Mirakles.  There are plenty of puns and tongue-in-cheek sword-and-sorcery references, wrapped in the usual band-of-brethren-against-unspeakable-evil storyline, and as a quick bit of fiction it's not bad at all.  Effinger is a clever and talented writer, with Hugo and Nebula awards to his credit, and for extra street cred here, I note that he was also involved in game writing and design, working on what is perhaps the best of the late-era Activision/Infocom graphic adventures, Circuit's Edge.

From a gaming appreciation perspective, this is a book best read soon after playing through ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire, ZORK II, and ZORK III, because most of the action takes place on these game's familiar maps.  Many of the novel's surprises and jokes depend on the reader's familiarity with what happens when we play as the famous "unnamed adventurer" who, in this story, is historically renowned for efficiently looting the G.U.E. of its fabulous treasures and solving its most vexing puzzles, some years in the past. 

Most of the familiar locations are here -- the white house with the kitchen window slightly ajar, the Engravings Room, the Round Room -- and though the familiar locations' contents and "puzzles" are generally new for this story, knowing references to the original game's items and events abound.  I can't imagine anyone who hasn't at least sampled ZORK I getting most of these gags -- Effinger even adopts the Infocom style for capitalization of location names, and there are plenty of other little Zorkian asides, like references to the Dimwit Flathead regime, and the regular appearance of legends reading This space intentionally left blank.  The transition to ZORK II territory takes place through the same Stone Barrow as in the games, and the characters visit the Bank of Zork, the Carousel Room, and the topiary garden, and the famous hot air balloon comes into play along with the adjacent ledges.  By comparison, not much time is spent in the world of ZORK III, as by that point the story is well underway and building to an appropriately satisfying conclusion.

Not all of the circa-1990 references will hold up over the long term -- there are a number of early IBM PC computer terms woven into the story for comic effect, touching on Embedded Characters, the Scroll Lock, a Hot Key and the Autoexec (as the ultimate authority in the world of ZORK, superseded only by the possibly mythical Control Character.)  Today, the original games remain playable on any number of platforms, thanks to diligent porting of the Infocom Z-machine by dedicated interactive fiction fans, but the context continues to evolve and these vintage terms are already obsolete.  At least the Implementors, the original ZORK programmers, remain revered and relevant.

In a feat of literary derring-do, Effinger's story manages to be fresh and interesting -- the author has a deep appreciation and familiarity with the Great Underground Empire, and gives the impression he too has spent hours wandering through its digital caverns, reviewing the items in his inventory and scratching his head.  But Mr. Effinger does not feel obligated to retell the story of the game itself, and that makes a big, positive difference in how this novel reads.  This tale features a band of adventurers, unlikely allies on a shared journey, which makes for much better reading than the gamer's engrossing but generally solitary experience.  The novel is set in a different time and place, and some sequences explore territory that's unavailable in the game -- in one chapter, Glorian and a companion must venture beyond the Entrance of Hades, into the desolate landscape beyond.  With his deft, funny prologue and epilogue, Effinger establishes a framework of myths, magic and monsters that places the ZORK universe squarely in the classic tradition, with plenty of inspiration from Joseph Campbell's meta-myth analyses and a few Lord of the Rings references.  It's a knowing nod to the Implementors' inspirations, and a prescient recognition of interactive fiction as a legitimate medium for fantasy literature.

I won't go into detail about the story -- suffice it to say that it works, is entertaining in the way it's supposed to be, and is structured in all the gently inevitable ways that good adventure games cannot be.  The characters are entertaining, recognizably human despite the magical gewgaws and hyperbole, and it's a decent little adventure story with a great deal of humor.  It's also completely family-friendly, without seeming childish or unsophisticated; the few "adult" references are slyly and intelligently cloaked, in keeping with the broad age appeal of a good adventure game (at least circa 1990!)

Avon Books published a series of these Infocom novels in the early 90s, each based on a different game, and The ZORK Chronicles is the first of the series that I've read.  If the others are similarly entertaining, I may have to track them down.  Is The ZORK Chronicles a great book?  Not really; its very nature constrains it, as certain expectations of its rather narrowly-defined audience must needs be met.  But I don't think it's inaccurate or unfair to call it a very polished piece of fan fiction, written by a very talented author with evident respect for his source material.  The late Mr. Effinger brought more energy and intelligence to this work than the job specification called for, and that alone deserves praise.  Good stuff, adventure fans!

Commodore 64 Back In Production?!?

Well, sort of.  This has slipped under my radar for a while -- and now that I know about it, it is either the coolest hardware I've seen lately, or the most insane business plan ever conceived.  Probably both.  I learned about it via my wife, who opened up a copy of Disney's TRON: Legacy DVD and found a very well-targeted paid advertisement in the enclosed brochure, for Commodore USA.

See, this new company called Commodore USA has the rights to produce Commodore computers, including the Commodore 64, the VIC-20 and the Amiga.  Isn't that cool?

Yes, it's 2011.  But they're not completely loony -- they're actually putting a PC compatible in a C-64 shell, with emulation of the original machine built in.  They're supplying a new Commodore OS, eventually; initial shipments will arrive with the Ubunto 10.04 LTS operating system onboard.

I wish the hardware was closer to real -- the company isn't taking advantage of the amazing work done by Jeri Ellsworth to fit a C-64 on a chip, and many people would love to see a new run of SID sound chips in production, rather than relying on emulation (though with modern manufacturing techniques the varied and unique sounds characteristic of the original design might be lost anyway.)  And of course, there's no Commodore 1541 disk drive in production, and no cartridge slot, so getting vintage games into the machine will shatter any illusions of authenticity quickly.

The company's only in the preorder stage, so much remains to be proven.  But if I were in the market for a desktop PC, I'd definitely be taking a look at the new Commodore 64.  It's just cool that somebody is doing this, and if it crashes and burns, it will still have been a noble effort.  They also plan to release Amiga-compatibles, though those are even less "coming soon" than the C-64 and VIC-inspired machines they're soliciting pre-orders for.

Visit www.commodoreusa.net for the details.

Adventure of the Week: Tower of Fear (1981)

This week, we're looking at another text adventure from Bob "Captain 80" Liddil's company, The Programmer's Guild -- Tower of Fear, written by Charles Forsythe and published circa 1981 when the TRS-80 Color Computer was the new machine on the block.  Forsythe started out on the black-and-white TRS-80 Model I, and here he indulges in a little color graphics display as the game boots up:

The Tower of Fear parser has a limited vocabulary, but it implements a couple of Infocom-style assumption mechanisms and performs well -- Forsythe always worked in machine language, and there are no visible delays slowing play.  And his engine uses a green-on-black text display rather than the CoCo's default black-on-green mode, which feels a little more "professional" somehow.

I began playing Tower of Fear using the Vcc140 emulator, but had trouble getting the tape-based SAVE GAME command to work, so I switched to David Keil's DOS-based Color Computer emulator (under DOSBox, running an emulator inside an emulator!) to take advantage of its save-state support.  The only disadvantage to the switch was that the Vcc140 text mode uses a deeper black that wears better on modern eyes; the Keil emulator is more accurate, preserving the muddy, dark-green "black" of the original CoCo, which is also harder to look at.

This is a standard solve-the-puzzles-and-collect-the-treasures game -- there's no plot to speak of, no other characters beyond a monster to engage, and the titular Tower does not really inspire any degree of Fear.  But it's a pleasant diversion aside from a few annoying random events that make saving and restoring a necessity.  I have made my walkthrough available below, and at the CASA Solution Archive, but as always, I encourage interested readers to enter the Tower of Fear and explore a bit, or solve the whole game, before venturing into the...

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

Right off the bat, standing at the base of the Tower, we find a memo promoting Forsythe's action game Pac-Droids, a Pac-Man clone with enough modifications to keep the publisher out of legal trouble.  The customary sign indicates that we should drop treasures here and say SCORE, per long-standing adventure tradition, and warns us that oil is scarce, which is no understatement.

The map is fairly small and tight, with few red herrings -- if something looks interesting, it probably yields a treasure under the right circumstances.  One of the first things any experienced adventurer itches to do is readily achievable -- from our starting location, we can go north and GET LAMP.  I found it necessary to maneuver in the dark a bit while solving the game to conserve lamp oil, though the adventure can be completed with the available supply.


A pit to the south of our starting point leads to the Lair of the Cyclops, who is armed with a sword instead of a club in a departure from Harryhausen cinema tradition.  There's no way to negotiate with the one-eyed brute -- he attacks as soon as he we enter his lair, and if we haven't picked up the Dagger in a nearby field, we don't have much of a chance.  Even with the dagger, success is not assured -- we must KILL CYCLOPS repeatedly, dealing and taking blows at random, hoping to take him down before he does the same to us.  It's best to tackle this battle early or SAVE GAME before entering the pit, as my success rate was about 60%.  If we succeed, THE CYCLOPS RUNS OFF DEFEATED (but not dead), leaving behind his JEWELED SCABBARD (a treasure) and a SWORD.


From the base of the Tower, we can CLIMB IVY to find an open window leading to a secret room.  It's totally dark inside, even though we just came through a window looking out on the brightly-lit outdoors, and this room is a dead end if we don't have a way to open the door here.  OPEN DOOR assumes (WITH HANDS), and NOTHING HAPPENS as a result.

The parser handles DROP ALL and GET ALL, a surprise given this game's vintage, but there's a minor bug at large - DROP without an object (or missing a space, e.g. DROPDAGGER) does a DROP ALL, which can be really annoying if we didn't notice what happened and have subsequently run out of lamp oil.  We can also YELL, yielding ARRRRRRGG! to no productive effect.


GO ARCHWAY to the north of the Tower leads to a fatal PIT OF SPIKES!  This is not really a dead end, but a puzzle; we will need to come back here later.

With the Cyclops' sword, we can CUT IVY at the base of the tower, creating a hole in the ivy that leads to an east-west corridor with a SILVER BAR treasure and a chain hanging from the ceiling.  If we PULL CHAIN, SOMETHING GOES "CLICK" AND THE CHAIN PULLS UP OUT OF REACH; this enables us to get through the door in the secret room higher up the tower.  A nearby laboratory contains a note reading "EMASES+MIRROR" -- a useful clue, though it's not immediately clear how we should use this magic word.  We have to wander around and SAY SESAME everywhere to discover its purpose.

A storage room north of the laboratory contains boxes of various colors - purple, brown, orange, black, white, green, yellow, blue, red, and pink.  I thought there might be some kind of color-based puzzle to solve here, but there's no ROYGBIV alignment or other obvious pattern.  I tried opening the boxes one at a time, hoping to find such a sequence, and was repeatedly struck by poison arrows, dying each time after a couple such hits.  At first I thought I was on the wrong track, as not one box turned out to be safe to open.  But eventually I figured out that the non-trapped box is randomized -- I was dying and restarting, so the target was constantly shifting on me.  By saving my game before opening any of the boxes, I was able to try each box in turn, dying and restoring until I discovered the right one containing the CLOCKWORK MOUSE treasure.

There's a maze of tunnels to the east of the storage room -- but we can't dawdle here, as if we spend more than a handful of turns exploring the maze, YOU ARE ATTACKED BY A VENGEFUL CYCLOPS!   Even if we have his sword in hand, we are defenseless against his new attack.  So we again have to save and restore the game, repeatedly, mapping the maze by trial and error to find our way to the Fountain Room.  This isn't too hard to do, as any wrong turn takes us back to the beginning of the maze.  In the Fountain Room, we can collect the EMERALD treasure, and DRINK FOUNTAIN to heal any non-fatal wounds we've sustained to date.

A book in the cellar has an odd cover, reading "INSERT ME INTO...", a title unlikely to rocket to the top of the bestseller lists except in, shall we say, certain niche markets.  INSERT BOOK without an obvious target yields (INTO EAR) OUCH!!!  We fill find a more appropriate resting place for it later on.

Doing the math after collecting a few treasures, SCORE seems to indicate that there are eight equally-weighted items to acquire, which proves to be correct.

Returning to the Secret Room after pulling the chain below, we can access a Library with a RUBY treasure, a ladder and a bookcase.  CLIMB LADDER seems pointless, as there's nothing to see up there, but after ignoring this apparent dead-end for a while I realized we can GET LADDER and use it elsewhere.  The ladder is also useful in a pinch due to another bug -- if the lamp runs out of oil and goes out, CLIMB LADDER provides temporary night vision; that is, we can see the contents of the room for one turn after we come back DOWN the ladder.


We can INSERT BOOK into the bookcase to reveal a secret passage to a secret laboratory containing a GOLD KEY treasure/item and a vat of acid; GO VAT is fatal, no surprise there.  A one-way passage leads us back down to the ground-floor laboratory.  DRINK ACID (yes, I had to try it) yields only YECCCCCHHHHH! and is not as fatal as going for a swim in it.

SAY SESAME turns out to be useful in front of the Archway --YOU HEAR A GRINDING SOUND, and now we can reach the courtyard of the castle, instead of dying on the spikes.  A high wall blocks further progress, unless we have the ladder.  At the top of the wall is a JEWELED STATUE treasure, and above this location is a control room with a locked lever.  A little trial-and-error comes into play here as well -- we need the gold key to UNLOCK LEVER, and then we want to PUSH LEVER to empty the vat of acid back in the secret laboratory.  The more obvious PULL LEVER causes the vat to overflow, killing us instantly upon entering the lab as we find ourselves WAIST DEEP IN ACID!   Once we enter the vastly more hospitable EMPTY VAT, we find the eighth and final treasure -- a DIAMOND.

We have collected all the treasures at the foot of the Tower of Fear, so all we have to do is say SCORE to claim riches and victory!

Tower of Fear is a fun little adventure with a pleasant sense of humor, marred only by a few random, unpredictable events and puzzles that can't be solved except by trial and error.  My walkthrough is below the fold.

**** WALKTHROUGH ****

The LoadDown - 05/09/2011

Tune in, game on...

WiiWare --  One new title, no free demo this week, but the new title is a WiiWare port of the Dreamcast-era MDK2 from Interplay and Bioware.  I've played and enjoyed the original MDK, created by Shiny Entertainment; if this game is half as inventive and action-packed as the first one, and the port to the Wii is decent, it'll be a good investment for 1000 points.


Wii Virtual Console -- Nothing new here this week, though MDK2 on WiiWare is very much in the spirit of the VC.

DSiWare --Three new titles for the DSi this week.  Mighty Milky Way from WayForward (Shantae) features a cute animated heroine (presumably accounting for the "mild suggestive themes") and planet creation/destruction puzzle gameplay.  GO Series Tower of Deus is a simple 2D tower-climbing platform game.  Whack-A-Friend combines the DSi's camera with good old-fashioned whack-a-mole gameplay to let you assassinate your enemies... sorry, beat the comical stuffing out of your friends.

XBox Live Arcade -- Two new titles this week.  Renowned Japanese developer Treasure brings us Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury, a hi-def remake of the classic N64/Dreamcast shoot-'em-up.  And Feelplus/Square-Enix' Moon Diver is a side-scrolling, Strider-style action platformer with support for up to four players.

PS3 on PSN -- Two weeks in a row with nothing new?  That's highly unusual, though we are entering the summer months, traditionally a slow period for video game sales.

PSOne Classics -- Dormant again this week.

Cover to Cover: Virgin Games 1992 Catalog (pp. 13-14)

Back to the product pages, as we continue our page-by-page survey of the 1992 Virgin Games catalog...

Page 13 features Legacy of the Necromancer, an RPG:

It appears that this was meant to be a Dungeon Master-style RPG, with full-blown character stats and a 3-D dungeon-crawl interface.  But as far as I can discover, this game was never released -- Internet searches come up with an unrelated 1989 text adventure trilogy by the same name.


Page 14 features an enduring strategy classic that was ported to the Sega Genesis later on:

The Dune license appears to derive from the movie, but by 1992 publishers were well aware of likeness rights legalities, and so Paul Atreides doesn't look much like Kyle MacLachlan (although the actor is credited, and clips from the film were used in the CD-ROM versions of the game.)  And the adventure/strategy storyline, with competing Houses vying for control of the spice, will clearly interest fans of the books who don't necessarily care for the movie.  The game has more room to explore the storyline and themes of Frank Herbert's novels, and this initial entry spawned a series released over the following decade.

More to come next weekend, as our trip down memory lane continues.