Oddities: Friday the 13th (1988)

In the Atari 2600 days, Wizard Video's games based on slasher classics The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween were controversial and sold "under the counter" to minimize negative publicity.  Fast forward to 1988, and the world has changed -- Friday the 13th is published by LJN Toys for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and sold at Toys'R'Us with an official Nintendo seal:

The credits screen is more complicated than the norm, with an unusual distinction of the "underlying source code" as belonging to LJN Toys Ltd., separate from the intellectual property of Friday the 13th owned by Paramount:

LJN Toys was notorious for producing weak games, often with exaggerated and unfulfilled claims on the box, but Friday the 13th is fairly accurately described.  The gameplay is not the usual 8-bit side-scroller, though its attempt to make an adventure game of sorts out of the concept doesn't make for a compelling experience either.

The concept borrows a bit from Mystery Mansion -- the player has six different camp counselors available to pit against perennial franchise villain Jason Voorhees, choosing one at a time to take on the challenge at Camp Crystal Lake:

The player has to round up clues and artifacts by wandering around the campsite, rescuing campers and eventually assembling the necessary ritualistic elements to take on Jason.  This isn't an immediately terrible idea, but the implementation leaves much to be desired.  For starters, the map shown so neatly above doesn't work that way in-game -- instead, we travel left and right in a side-scrolling view, with occasional roads "into" and "below" the screen available.

This approach makes it very difficult to get our bearings, especially because since Jason is being kept out of play for the climactic confrontation, so we have to make do with ersatz enemies unrelated to the franchise.  These fright-wig wearing, slow-walking zombies aren't even much of a threat -- only one ever appears onscreen at a time in the early going, and we can either beat them down by throwing rocks at them, or simply jump over their heads and leave them behind.  (Different counselors have different abilities; George can jump high and easily leap over the zombies.)  Even when the enemies are not really dangerous, the constant harassment makes it hard to map the world out -- the relationship between the map and the in-game display is there, but it's not very intuitive.

Occasionally we are allowed to enter a building and search for clues and items:

Again, this isn't a bad design idea, but it's let down by clumsy execution.  Walking around in the cabin is awkward because we can only walk forward or turn; turning is almost instantaneous, while walking forward requires the counselor sprite to crawl up the screen a few steps before the display refreshes, giving the navigation a clumsy rhythm.  It feels like we're slogging through molasses when we try to explore this interiors, and there's no dramatic reason for it; there also don't seem to be any enemies inside, so there's precious little horror going on here.

We can run into other counselors in cabins and switch places with them.  In these pre-ESRB days, it seems an opportunity is wasted here to build on the slasher genre's ultimately conservative morality by allowing George to "TAKE" Debbie or vice-versa, summoning Jason as punishment:

We can take a rowboat out, where we are harassed by crows and yet more zombies that come flying out of the river like Castlevania's fish-men creatures, except not fun as sometimes they simply and inescapably land on our heads:

And on occasion a camper is threatened -- an alarm goes off and the map shows us a flashing cabin where the attack is taking place.  But we can't always get there in time, and if we run into Jason on the way, he can make short work of any idiot camp counselor, albeit not as creatively as in the movies -- he basically throws an axe at us until we die a bloodless death:

Note also Jason's unusual color scheme -- blue mask and hands, purple jumpsuit and hair.  The NES' color palette was limited, but these are odd choices by any measure.

Friday the 13th ultimately feels more like a clumsy scavenger hunt than a horror movie come to life -- we enter small cabins with nothing of interest in them, and occasionally a larger building with a note that serves as a clue to the next note we must look for.  We need to pick up artifacts and items so that we can carry out basic assigned tasks like lighting fires in fireplaces, but most are not hidden anywhere specific, instead showing up in mid-air when we wander around the woods avoiding half-hearted foes.  The whole experience seems slow-paced and random, only hazily building toward a climax we begin to suspect will be less than riveting.  I imagine most players, like myself, gave up before really getting close to victory.

LJN Toys Ltd. and Friday the 13th -- two occasionally acceptable tastes that taste awful together.

Oddities: G.I. Joe: Cobra Strike (Atari 2600, 1983)

"Yo, Joe!"

It's the Fourth of July, Independence Day here in the States, and a fine time to celebrate America's history (or at least its high-tech, buzz-cut military reputation) with a quick game of G.I. Joe: Cobra Strike, produced in 1983 by Parker Brothers for the Atari 2600.

The cartridge was based on Hasbro's 1980s revival of the venerable action figure line, replacing the solitary 12" G.I. Joe hero/adventurer with a new, team-based 3 3/4" approach that made for exponentially more toys and marketing opportunities.  Unfortunately, the Atari 2600 wasn't really up to rendering individual G.I. Joe characters, vehicles or costumes, so the conflict is played out from a 50,000-foot view.  A giant snake-shaped C.O.B.R.A. robot fires venom and lasers at terrified military personnel running along the bottom of the screen, while the player, as the heroic but rather remote and uninvolved Joe team, tries to shield them with a sliding barrier.  The manual tells us that the anonymous figures running for their lives are G.I. Joe recruits; I like to imagine them cursing out the glad-handing officer from the high school career fair, as they dodge instantly fatal poison and sizzling laser beams fired by the obviously better-capitalized and highly motivated C.O.B.R.A. forces.

There's also a two-player cooperative mode, in which each player uses a paddle to control one shield and one of the gun turrets at the sides of the screen (which, despite the visual depiction, fire straight up -- at least the missiles are steerable while in flight.)  The Joe-team player(s) can win by destroying the giant snake with 8 direct hits on its eyes, although occasionally it is vulnerable to a single direct hit,

The best thing about this game is that a third player can opt to grab a joystick and control the C.O.B.R.A. forces, trying to zap the helpless infantrymen as they run along the bottom of the screen.  This is also the worst thing about the game, as it's a lot more fun to be the bad guy firing the heavy weaponry instead of the good guys playing defense and limited offense.  The C.O.B.R.A. player wins by killing capturing four of the hapless, disposable recruits.

The Parker Brothers engineering team knew its way around the Atari 2600, and this game is technically impressive, with a lot of visual detail given the system's capabilities.  The running recruits move at slightly different speeds and appear in different shades of green, and up to 4 appear at one time with no visible flickering.  And the C.O.B.R.A. robot has an undulating body that floats up and down as it moves across the screen -- it's one of the largest moving objects ever seen on the 2600, and when destroyed it splits in two, a neat little visual reward for the player's hard work.  The sound is not as spectacular -- we hear a basic single-voice reveille as the game starts up, and the rest of the soundtrack is dominated by bomb-dropping sounds for Cobra's venom, and deep beeps whenever a recruit is taken out.

More intricate G.I. Joe games would surface on the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System later on, but this initial console entry isn't bad.  The gameplay gets old after a while, as there isn't much variety available in a 4K ROM cartridge, and a normal round of play is just one long, repetitive escort mission.  But with a range of difficulty settings available, or a skilled second or third player, the basic concept is solid enough to offer quite a bit of fun.  If only it were more entertaining to be the good guys...

Clueless Gaijin Gaming: Mami Inoue Kono Hoshi ni Tatta Hitori no Kimi

This week, I'm sitting down with one of those odd PC Engine discs I picked up not in spite of, but because of, the fact I had no idea what to expect from it.  As it turns out, Mami Inoue Kono Hoshi ni Tatta Hitori no Kimi stars the erstwhile Japanese idol Mami Inoue, and plays like a digital comic, with crude juxtaposition of cartoon artwork and digitized photos of the star.  The title screen is in Japanese, English and, for a change of pace, French (a language I can translate -- it says, "I will never forget my little girl Mami", an odd comment given the fleeting nature of Japanese idol fame):

Playing this Super CD-ROM release with little knowledge of Japanese or the questionable talents of Mami Inoue is a bit like traveling from the Horsehead Nebula in search of entertainment, only to find oneself trapped inside the headquarters of the Bay City Rollers Fan Club.  Ms. Inoue was 16 years old when this disc was put together, with the requisite Tiger Beat vibe, and the storyline casts her into a series of improbable adventures.  (There are apparently three different episodes on the disc, but I was satisfied to have made my way through one of them.)

We start by getting Mami onto the bus and off to school, where she mopes through class until she's allowed to go downtown to drink tea and shop for clothes, giving the lie to the fabled Japanese work ethic.

The storyline is occasionally interrupted by long stretches of fan service (the legitimate kind).  Here, we get to listen to Mami Inoue make enthusiastic (which I like to pretend are snide) comments about a bunch of funny and occasionally grotesque fan art submissions:

And then we get to hear her sing an absurdly country-western Japanese pop song illustrated with digitized still images:

And just in case we think she's too girly, she shows off her muscles with faux attitude and Pippi Longstocking hair:

After the cartoon storyline gets seriously underway, Mami gets to show off her abilities by imitating (badly) a variety of animals -- here, she summons a whale to dump some escaping men into the sea:

And she rides a dinosaur through feudal Japan, scaring the local authorities:

And she shows off a bunch of images from her childhood family album, including the obligatory gratuitous topless shot:

Then she comes home and we can finally shut the machine down after the credits roll:

I decided not to.

---

If you've read this post, you've seen most of what Mami Inoue Kono Hoshi ni Tatta Hitori no Kimi has to offer.  But just in case any of my readers are in the market for odd Japanese pop music collectibles, you might be able to find a copy for purchase here or here:

Clueless Gaijin Gaming: Necromancer

There are licensed games based on movies, books, rock bands... but not so many based on paintings.

For this week's taste of import gaming, we're looking at Necromancer, a.k.a. Jaseikin Necromancer, another Japanese role-playing game I have little hope of comprehending or seriously working through.

But I'm always interested in unusual licensing arrangements, and this one certainly qualifies -- it takes its name and inspiration from a well-known work by the artist H.R. Giger, officially licensed for the cover art, and is a little gorier than the JRPG norm.  It was released by PC Engine co-designer Hudson Soft in 1987, as Volume 5 in the company's own PC Engine lineup and one of the earliest RPGs on the console.  (It was also yet another game referenced in the early U.S. PC Engine magazine coverage that never saw release in the States.)

As usual, we start out as a heroic type, wandering around a village where we have randomly landed with no apparent intent or reason for being here.  We can converse with the locals and gain some insight into the quest ahead, if we speak Japanese, at least.  Oddly, the citizens seem to enjoy jogging in place, constantly waggling their arms and legs as if they are intensely excited about going nowhere at all.  As usual, as a clueless round-eyes I am completely lost as to what this person is going on about or what the menu options represent, but I will presume that some dire threat to the land looms over everyone's heads:

The graphics are simple but shaded with care, though the proportions are a bit off which gives the land a bit of a minigolf feel -- as we approach the King's castle, we discover that it looks to be only about four feet tall:

Inside the castle we find an old man and a younger woman; we will take continued elaboration of the dire threat as read, greet the kingdom's retainers, have a few added to our party, and leave town to seek some experience points and gold pieces to enhance our abilities.  Here, I pause to note that my party includes a bearded man in a yellow dress.  Ah, Japan!

Our party members follow us, though not in the traditional lock-step fashion -- they will arrange themselves to stay near the leader, but don't mimic his moves precisely, which is a refreshing touch.  The random battles occur and play out in the traditional fashion, though the enemies tend to spurt a little more blood than usual when killed. The enemies are fairly well-animated, given that this was a HuCard release, and as we explore farther from our starting point we run into stronger, more dangerous creatures:

Fortunately, given the game's Necromancer concept, the story does not end when our party is wiped out.  Instead, we find ourselves rescued and resurrected in a temple, where we can pay to have our fellow party members revived as well.

And then we can return to battle creepy monsters, like this intestine-spilling half-corpse that puts up more of a fight than one would presume possible:

Necromancer is fairly conventional RPG stuff -- wander, fight, visit a village, wander some more, fight some more.  I have no hope of grasping the story, such as it may be, but I might have been able to figure out how to play properly with a little additional time invested; the menus seem to feature the usual array of fight/cast/flee options.

I thought I might even be able to glimpse the game's later stages, as the former owner of my used import copy of Necromancer included a couple of passwords for later levels, written on a note stashed in the game's manual.  I found, however, to my annoyed surprise, that even locating the appropriate symbols based on his or her handwriting proved a daunting challenge, as I have no familiarity with the standard order of symbols.  With a minimum of 46 symbols to enter, I concluded that it was likely I would misread a few of them, and spending half an hour to enter a lengthy but odds-on invalid password seemed like a futile effort.

So the further mysteries of Necromancer must lie forever hidden, at least as far as I am concerned.  The map is quite large, according to the manual.  But I have more productive RPG fields to explore.

---

This one's not recommended for the faint-of-heart re: the Japanese language, but it's also not an expensive game.  Necromancer may be available for purchase here or here:

Adventure of the Week: Stephen King's The Mist (1985)

The annual Gaming After 40 Halloween week celebration continues with this week's text adventure: Stephen King's The Mist, adapted from King's 1980 novella by Angelsoft in 1985.

Angelsoft was co-founded by author Mercer Mayer, best known today for his Little Critter children's books, and the company did its best to publish literary adventures in the Infocom style, with distribution handled by Mindscape.  The game's designer is not credited onscreen, perhaps in deference to Stephen King as the marquee name, but it was written by one Raymond Benson, who also wrote both of Angelsoft's James Bond adventures and went on to write a number of post-Ian Fleming official 007 novels.

We're playing the IBM PC version, which as an early release for that platform is designed to run on a single floppy drive, swapping diskettes to save progress.  Because of this, I actually had difficulty running the game under the DOSBox emulator, which doesn't support floppy disk changes on the fly.  This meant that I couldn't save the game, a major problem thanks to some randomized events near the story's climax. But to my pleasant surprise, the vintage IBM PC GAME.COM executable runs in plain vanilla text mode, and there are no timing-based events, so this 25-year-old program runs perfectly fine under a Windows Vista command prompt, allowing successful SAVE GAME operations to the current directory.  The only reason to use DOSBox at all is to invoke the separate title screen executable, which presents the only graphics we'll be seeing:

The game opens with a screen or two of text to establish the situation (details below), and then we're in control.  There's a move counter at the top left of the screen, and the day of the week (SATURDAY) is displayed in the upper right-hand corner, though I never saw it change during my playthrough.  Unlike the Infocom games, the status line does not include the current location, and there's no score as such.

The writing is quite good, approaching Infocom quality, though the parser is definitely not up to the same standard.  And the game itself is fairly linear, aside from some seriously obtuse conversational puzzles I would likely never have worked out without the CASA walkthrough handy.  I'll give away all the gory details in the remainder of this post, so if you plan to wander into The Mist on your own, be forewarned that there are thorough...

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


In classic Stephen King style, the player is cast as a hapless New England Everyman, a father standing in the checkout line at Federal Foods as the game begins and The Mist appears.  We start with nothing in your hands, and have only your clothes on your back as people begin to panic in the supermarket.  The town is called Bridgton, and the player's ultimate goal is to find his son Billy, who's "safely" some distance away at the lake when the power goes out and the mist hits the fan.

The initial phase of the game can be mapped out fairly easily -- while there are quite a few rooms in the supermarket, there are only a few items of note left by the panicking crowd, and most of the puzzles lie in the dangerous world outside.

There are only a few human characters, but they're well-written and nicely detailed.  One Mrs. Carmody leads a growing group of followers around the store, preaching an end-of-the-world gospel that can eventually result in the player's demise, as a blood sacrifice to the nascent cult's expiation theology.  It's a twisted but believable take on fundamentalist Christianity, and an unusual theme to see broached in a game of this era.  In practical gameplay terms, Mrs. Carmody and her followers are just there to keep us moving and instill a sense of social hysteria.  The Mist focuses on human characters quite a bit, but the player's interaction with them is limited.  We witness the tentacle-napping of Norm the bag-boy in the storage area, for example, but it's just a set piece -- we have no opportunity to talk to him or prevent his untimely demise.


Outside, the pressure continues, as there are four nasty monsters lurking around which we will eventually have to dispatch --the Bug, the Spider, the Bird and the Dragonfly, all oversized, mutant versions of familiar creatures.  They tend to patrol specific areas of the map, but when encountered, they block the player's movement and kill the player within a few turns, so leaving the store unprepared is not advisable.  For example, death by Dragonfly is swift and unpleasant:

The slug-like Bug can be dispatched with a box of table salt, and the Spider with a can of bug spray.  I pause to note that in these early days of computer gaming, nobody concerned themselves too much with trademarks -- so we have genuine Morton's Salt and Raid-brand insecticide on hand here, lending a nice sense of naturalism to the horrific proceedings.


The parser makes the mistake of trying to seem smarter than it is -- when a non-understood phrase is entered, it won't admit to its lack of understanding, but instead tries to nudge us along with general hints and reminders about our objectives, e.g. It won't do you any good to tell yourself it's only a game.  Sometimes these phrases imply that the engine understood what we were asking it to do, when that is not in fact the case.  For example, START TRUCK yields only Please try to be rational, but trying to go S while we're in the truck usefully reveals that You're not going anywhere without the truck key.  Another parser oddity here is that there is no GET [object] verb, only TAKE and GET OUT, and I and INVENT do not work; we have to type out INVENTORY or use the official abbreviation, INV.  Most annoying, invalid commands still consume a turn, which means that if we type GET RAID instead of TAKE RAID after entering the Bugblasters store, the Spider will have us for supper before we ever get a chance to SPRAY SPIDER.  We should also drop the Raid can immediately after doing so, because otherwise we will have trouble if we try to SPRAY with the insecticide sprayer later on -- the parser always assumes we want to use the empty can of Raid if we're still carrying it, unintentionally robbing us of a vital weapon later on.

Horror is surprisingly difficult to manage in an adventure game -- sudden scares and gory descriptions can be effective, but maintaining a tense and oppressive atmosphere is a challenge when the pacing is largely at the player's discretion.  The Mist tries to keep us on edge with random frightening events, like a tentacle that reaches out of the mist to touch us, but then wanders off.  But after a while we've seen all of these set pieces, and the effect wears off.

My biggest complaint about The Mist is that several puzzles depend on guessing that the right phrasing is needed, without any real clues to point us in that direction.  For example, it isn't initially clear whether we can do anything with the dumpster in the garbage dump south of the supermarket.  OPEN DUMPSTER reveals that It's already open; LOOK DUMPSTER ignores the noun and repeats the general room-level description; and EXAMINE DUMPSTER only indicates that This is a battered, green Dempsey Duster.  I had to resort to a walkthrough to learn that EXAMINE DUMPSTER CAREFULLY reveals a notebook lying on top of the garbage -- though, in fact, the information in the notebook isn't critical to finishing the game, so I can't claim that this adverb dependency is a fatal flaw.  But it still seems odd that we don't notice this with a more casual examination.

For the most part, The Mist plays it straight.  There's a nice little Stephen King in-joke in town, where the local cinema is showing T E DE D Z NE (the David Cronenberg film adaptation of King's The Dead Zone was then current.)  And the mutated creatures allow room for some humor -- the Spider dies like a cartoon bug, and there's a set-dressing caterpillar licking its lips in one location.

The parser's disambiguation works fine in some cases, for example OPEN DOOR - Do you want to open the office door? - YES - The office door is now open.   But in other situations it breaks down, most annoyingly when dealing with the aforementioned truck key.  The game has two keys in it, one of which the parser recognizes as KEY, the other of which must be specifically referenced as the TRUCK KEY.  We have to obtain the key from Mrs. Reppler, and the truck key from Ollie, the Federal Foods manager.  Unfortunately, Ollie will readily tell us that his truck is parked in back of the supermarket, but when we ask him for the key he feigns total ignorance that such a thing exists.  He will only give us the truck key if we specifically ask for it as the truck key.  This means that we can ASK OLLIE ABOUT TRUCK, but we can't ASK OLLIE FOR KEYS or GET KEY FROM OLLIE or ASK OLLIE ABOUT KEY.  The game consistently gives the impression that Ollie doesn't have his own keys for his truck -- OLLIE, DO YOU HAVE THE KEYS? - "No, not today."  So how did he get to work?  Oh, right, he's only able to think and converse like the game's parser -- only if we ASK OLLIE ABOUT TRUCK KEY do we get the desired result.

The Bug is described as slug-like, so we can conclude that the Morton's Salt can be used to dispatch this dangerous foe.  We have to THROW SALT AT BUG, as we can't POUR SALT or DROP SALT (at least, not with the desired target in effect.)  THROW SALT is accepted, but too general, as we just throw the salt randomly around the location and can't reasonably gather it up again.  It's also smart to OPEN SALT BOX before we face this foe, as the Bug has little patience for inventory management and attacks quickly.

We can't carry the bodies of the insects around with us, and they don't revive, so once they're dead, they're dead.  Unfortunately, while I figured out how to kill the Bug and the Spider in traditional adventure game fashion, the Bird and the Dragonfly remained fatally dangerous pests.  I tried hitting them with the bug sprayer, spraying them with it, knocking them out of the air with my bare hands -- no luck.  I returned to the walkthrough to learn that there's a gun in the game, if we have had the spontaneous prescience to ASK OLLIE ABOUT GUN.  He seems like the last person who would own a firearm, actually, and he's far too nervous to use it, but he has one.  But he won't give it to us until we say OLLIE, RELAX first.

There's a gas station in town, but I never had reason to visit it -- the truck is ready to go once we have the key.  There's some nice detail here, though -- the station calls itself Giosti's Mobil,and the 70-year-old proprietor, Bill Giosti, is inside.  We can ASK GIOSTI ABOUT MIST, and he recalls the Black Spring of 1888, when a similar phenomenon apparently occurred.  This doesn't directly tie in with the backstory as it develops in the game, nor is visiting Mr. Giosti essential to finishing the adventure, but it's a nice little optional scene that helps ground this fictional world with a sense of its history.

First move deaths are always amusing -- in this case, we can die immediately after starting the game by simply going N, where we get stepped on by some kind of giant foot in the mist.  Most of the other deaths provide some degree of warning, even when they're instant -- we can see sparks flying in the Central Maine Power Office from outside, so getting fried by the hot sparks upon entering is not completely unfair.

Another Angelsoft parser convention that's a little odd is that it always uses the definite article, making every item sound very specific even if we haven't encountered it before.  This isn't too jarring when we find the salt box in the store, but when we're immediately told that You see the dead soldiers in the supermarket's refrigerated meat locker, we immediately start to wonder if we have met them at some point.

The text has a pleasant, timeless quality -- the only circa-1985 reference I spotted is a description noting that all the store's produce was "scarfed up" earlier by desperate citizens.

Since this is an adventure game, the outdoor map has to be constrained -- most of the possible roads out of town are blocked, but at least the fatal obstacles are varied.  Some areas cannot be explored safely on foot, which is why we need the truck.  Even so, there are still limits -- heading east on Shaymore Road only gets us swept up and devoured by something huge and unseen.

We need the non-truck key to get into the hardware store.  ASK MRS. REPPLER ABOUT KEY inspires her to mention that she dropped it on the way to the store.  With Ollie's gun, we can SHOOT BIRD, and discover the key on the ground afterward (but only if we have asked Mrs. Reppler about it -- apparently the act of asking retroactively changes recent history!)

In the hardware store, we find the broom, the old ammunition clip (with three bullets) and the shovel.  We can only carry four items, so this trove makes for some interesting inventory juggling.  If we've dispatched the Bird and the Spider, the pistol's polished clip is down to one bullet.  There's no way to combine the bullets in the old clip with those in the polished clip.  In fact, TAKE BULLET OUT OF POLISHED CLIP is interpreted as TAKE POLISHED CLIP, unfortunately.  So we have to take the polished clip out of the gun, drop it with its remaining bullet, take the old clip, and put it in the gun.

This isn't a serious problem, as the information is optional, but again the parser is a little too unhelpful.  When we try to READ NOTEBOOK after carefully finding it in the dumpster, we are told that You'll have to open the notebook first.  Trying to do so indicates that we don't have it.  So we have to TAKE NOTEBOOK, OPEN NOTEBOOK, and READ NOTEBOOK to learn that radiation experiments with insects are responsible for all the trouble.  I knew it!

In the truck, we can travel out of town to reach a dead-end dirt road.  Here, we can DIG HOLE WITH SHOVEL (DIG HOLE just tells us we need a better tool, even if we have the shovel in hand) to create a tunnel into the top-secret military base, which is heavily fortified against any external threat, as long as it's not carrying a shovel.  Next, we have to shoot a nasty Centipede three times, successfully, and as we only have three bullets, and randomized misses enrage the beast to a fatal degree, it's critical that we SAVE GAME here.  Once the many-legged critter is dispatched, we can explore the deserted base and get to the bottom of this whole misty mess.

There's a tank in a lab, secreted behind an air lock, that contains a weapons-grade pesticide (most likely the one referred to in the notebook.)  On my first attempt, I discovered that it's dangerous to go into the lab without protection -- even the fumes prove fatal after a few turns.  But fortunately, there's a rubber hazmat suit in Captain Jones' closet nearby. Um. At least I am assuming it's a hazmat suit.

There's also a memo on Captain Jones' desk, which we do not have to take or open before reading.  It indicates that the military effort codenamed Project Plague is responsible.  If only these people would choose more responsible names for their biolethal weapons programs, instead of creating these self-fulfilling prophecies all the time!

Now we can fill our not-handy-to-date bug sprayer with the military-strength pesticide, or at least we can if we can get past our most persistent enemy: the parser.  EMPTY SPRAYER reveals only that You can't do that to the sprayer.   Nor can we FILL SPRAYER WITH PESTICIDE.  Instead, we have to POUR INSECTICIDE FROM SPRAYER -- which makes some sense -- then POUR PESTICIDE INTO SPRAYER -- which doesn't, quite, as the pesticide is in a huge vat and we seem to have no real way of pouring the stuff from it.  But the command works.

However improbably girded for battle, we can now drive out to the lake where Billy (remember him, our son?) was last seen.  When we pull in, we are told that The Giant Thing is here, but if we try to SPRAY THING WITH SPRAYER from inside the truck's cab, the engine is forced to contradict itself and tell us that The Giant Thing isn't here.  After we open the door and get out of the truck, we are wise to SAVE GAME to insure against random fatalities, and then spray the giant beastie three times with the deadly insecticide. All we have to do to wrap things up now is enter the bait shop (stepping over its dead proprietor) and make our way downstairs to the basement, the first and only time in the game that we travel up or down.

Here, we find Billy innocently sleeping, apparently having concluded that there's no way Dad is ever coming back, what with all the deadly monsters running rampant and killing everybody, so he might as well get some shuteye while the carnage continues.  Victory, of a tentative sort at least, is ours:

We celebrate our good fortune by being dumped unceremoniously out to the command prompt, leaving us to yell helplessly at a program long since shut down.  "Dad!  Put that kid in a seatbelt!  Holding him on your lap and driving blindly through the mist to destinations unknown while whispering in his little ear is a good way to ensure everybody we've grown to care about still ends up dead!"

Well played, Mr. King.



The Great Scott Project: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1985)

The Great Scott Project is working through the remaining Scott Adams games, and we have arrived at the last of the original series: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, based on the 1984 MGM/UA movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.  MGM's potential-blockbuster licensing was oddly fragmented in the mid-1980's, with the official Poltergeist game landing at Radio Shack, a couple of 2010 games produced by Coleco, and this one adapted by Adventure International.  Unofficially, this game has been referred to as Adventure #14B, though contentwise it's no relation to #14A.  This licensed game was a one-off with no specific series identified; many sources just call it Buckaroo Banzai for short.  It's credited to Scott Adams, of course, and a co-author, Phillip Case.

Like the later QuestProbe games, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai was released in both "classic" and "S.A.G.A.+" versions, as Adams' updated interpreter was not available for some older platforms.  The two versions are very similar, with additional descriptive detail and extended puzzles in the "plus" version, and the game featured graphics by Kem McNair on several platforms.  I intended to play this one using the ScottFree interpreter, but after I had worked out most of the game, I discovered that neither the Windows nor the DOS version would allow me to use the DISCONNECT verb as intended.  So I fired up the Apple II version, which turned out to be in SAGA+ and threw a new puzzle at me almost immediately, invalidating some of what I'd been figuring out.  So I ultimately played through this one using the UK Sinclair Spectrum version, and then took a quick tour through the Apple II version to gather some screenshots.  There aren't many differences, really; the most visible one is the character-based prompt, reading Buckaroo Banzai, I want you to, as seen in the SAGA+ QuestProbe games.

The Buckaroo Banzai game doesn't attempt to cover the scope of the movie.  Instead, it's a prequel of sorts, with a plot that precedes and overlaps the movie's opening sequence -- we have to get Buckaroo Banzai's incredible Jet Car up and running, then stop an atomic bomb from destroying the world.

If you haven't seen the movie (it's currently available for instant online viewing via NetFlix), the game won't give too much away.  But if you haven't played the game, and wish to do so, be aware that there are...

***** NON-MOVIE SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We start out in the Yoyodyne offices.  MOVE TABLE (in the classic interpreter) reveals a Floor Safe.  EXAMINE SAFE yields I see it's a key safe, so we have to track down the key.  The SAGA+ edition includes another puzzle here -- MOVE TABLE results in Sorry, it's too heavy!  But the bomb-disarming passwords are the same as in the classic version, so we don't actually have to solve this part of the game if we've played the other edition.  There's also a staircase in this room, but it's wise not to go down until we've obtained a light source.  GO STAIRS takes us down into the darkness, but trying to go UP from the dark basement causes the traditional neck-breaking fall (another GO STAIRS works, but it's hard to figure that out without the flashlight in hand.)  A technical aside -- the Spectrum version has no illustrations, but the dark rooms still display a solid black block in the graphics area of the screen.

Outside the office we find ourselves in a small town at the foot of a mountain, with a gas station across the way and just a couple of major streets to explore.  This setting doesn't have much to do with the movie, but it's nice to have an outdoor environment for a change, though it's strangely unpopulated.  The SAGA+ version makes it clearer that the town has been abandoned by a panicking citizenry, presumably due to the atomic bomb set to go off if we're not quick about solving the puzzles ahead.

There's a large house in the cul-de-sac at the east end of Hickory -- we can only enter and explore the garage, where a small toolbox bears a sticker reading Sam's Service Station.  With a simple OPEN TOOLBOX we obtain several useful items -- a key, a roll of duct tape, and a flashlight.  The puzzles in this adventure are fairly logical and straightforward -- no magic words or odd usages are involved, though we do have to be creative with the tools we're given.

The west end of Hickory ends in another cul-de-sac -- the classic version has a house with a living room containing nothing of interest, while the SAGA+ version has an empty lot, and tells us that there were probably plans to build houses here at a later date.

At the west end of a parking lot we find the fabled Jet Car, which will be the object of most of our puzzle-solving.  The cockpit is open, and there are power terminals, a fuel tank and a jet engine connected to the tank by a hose.  The graphical version has a nice illustration by Kem McNair, though the Jet Car is white instead of black as in the movie:

We can ENTER CAR and EXAMINE DASHBOARD to discover a starter button, a glove compartment, and a fuel gauge on empty.  The glove compartment contains a fuel formula and a glowing jar of green fluid.  The formula reads Fuel is made from gasoline, sand, quartz, catalyst; we can correctly presume that the mysterious glowing fluid is the catalyst.  (The SAGA+ version replaces the quartz with Bauxite crystal.)  So the first major puzzle is set forth -- we have to mix up some jet fuel before the car's going to do anything.  Time to GET OUT of the car; EXIT doesn't work.

To the north is a lifeguard shack on the beach, containing a small ham radio that will be involved in  the game's primary non-fuel-related puzzle.  It has a transmit switch, but no battery and no antenna, so it's not working.  We have to take it to a shed on west Hickory, where an immovable antenna lead exists.  Arranging a power source will take a bit more work.

The beach abuts a cold, shallow mountain lake - we can SWIM while standing in it, but that never does anything or takes us anywhere, and we can't HOLD BREATH in this adventure -- so the only useful thing here is the water itself.  The mountain nearby is more intriguing -- EXAMINE MOUNTAIN at the foot yields I see a ledge about 15' up with a small peak.  Precise measurements are always suspicious, so we'll be on the lookout for something measuring fifteen feet or longer.

We can only carry five inventory items at a time, although temporary overloading is allowed when an action discovers or produces new items that are automatically carried.  So there's some juggling required as the game progresses, and we need to be efficient, given the time pressure presented by the bomb.  The hardware store on Main Street has a number of useful items - a climber's pick (described more helpfully as a pick ax in the SAGA+ build), hydrometer (for testing car batteries), manual hand pump, and jumper cables.  The gas station has gas pumps, a cashier's booth, and a padlocked filler pipe connected to the underground gas tank, which we can unlock with the key found in Sam's toolbox. The cashier's booth is cluttered with a trash pile, containing an old, empty car battery, and a control console with a switch for the gas pumps, which proves useless.  So we have a fuel source, but no ready way to get at the fuel.

With Sam's flashlight, we can return to Yoyodyne and see the basement laboratory and its mixing vat, presumably handy for making jet fuel once we've gathered the requisite ingredients.  I had to consult the CASA walkthrough to find a container for the gasoline -- EXAMINE STAIRS in the basement lab does the trick.  The floor safe in the Yoyodyne office can't be opened with the service station key, so that remains a puzzle for the moment.

It's always worth trying to DIG anywhere and everywhere in these games, and Buckaroo Banzai hints at a solution by responding Not with these hands when we try to do so without the proper equipment.  With the climber's pick in hand (oddly, it's not at all useful for climbing the mountain!) we can DIG a hole in the field of tall grass near the freeway to find an underground phone line.  It's best not to venture onto the freeway, as once we've gone up the exit ramp we cannot leave the open pavement, and we can only walk east or west for a few turns before An atomic explosion erupts.  I'm fried Banzai.  So that's not a productive area to explore.

We can FILL BATTERY in the cool, shallow lake, and CONNECT BATTERY to the ham radio, though that doesn't do much good until we can charge it up.  We can remove the fuel hose from the Jet Car and carry it to the gas station, and in the ScottFree interpreter I ran into something weird here.  I believe I tried to CONNECT HOSE at the gas station -- it didn't appear to work, and the hose wasn't connected to the distant car, but the car fuel gauge changed to read full.  Trying to START CAR, however, caused it to blow up, so apparently it was filled with regular gasoline, not the required jet fuel.  I ultimately restored and tried again after confirming that I was on the wrong track.

We can use the manual hand pump to help out here, but it took me some time (and the walkthrough) to get everything worked out.  I discovered that we can't CONNECT PUMP / TO PIPE at the gas station.  At the Jet Car we can CONNECT CABLES / TO BATTERY and TO TERMINALS, though in the classic version we can't really tell if it's actually connected; the SAGA+ display is clearer on the details.  The hydrometer can be used to TEST BATTERY; it initially tests as Dead.  CHARGE BATTERY is recognized by the parser, but the correct approach requires more specific actions.

(I found a related bug while working on this, in the classic edition - once the Old car battery becomes Battery attached to radio, we can EXAMINE TRASH to find the Old car battery again.)

To get the quartz/Bauxite, we actually have to DIG twice in the field to make Another large hole.  I couldn't quite tell at first why this is allowed -- GET LINE yields I can't, it's still attached, even after CUT LINE says I see the line is severed.  With the walkthrough I was able to figure out that we have to cut the line in two spots to free up a section, which is why we are allowed to dig two holes.  CUT LINE requires the climber's pick, which isn't generally a problem as we're using it to dig the holes.  The whole process yields a suspiciously precise 20 feet of phone line.

Now we can go to the foot of the mountain and THROW LINE, which catches and dangles down from the ledge fifteen feet above.  The quartz is accessible from the ledge, but we need a tool to free it from the mountainside, and we can't climb while carrying anything.  So we have to TIE LINE / TO PICK, CLIMB LINE, then PULL LINE to retrieve the pick, which now allows us to GET QUARTZ.

EXAMINE HOSE indicates that the fuel hose is clean, which isn't significant at this point, but its condition will be important later on.  The manual hand pump has a hose 6 feet long, which is not enough to reach the fuel in the gas station's underground tank, but we can duct tape the car's fuel hose to the pump to make a combined hose 10 feet long.  Now we can INSERT HOSE (yielding It does reach the gasoline) and PUMP GAS if we have a suitable container.  At last we're able to MIX FUEL in the basement vat at Yoyodyne, yielding a Jug of jet fuel.

The modern ScottFree interpreter caused me no end of problems at this point -- I could not get it to allow me to DISCONNECT HOSE, so I couldn't finish the steps required to get the car going.  And when I refueled the vehicle (after the odd CONNECT HOSE bug occurred earlier) the fuel gauge in car now read full full, probably because the game's internal state had both gasoline and jet fuel in the tank simultaneously.  I didn't run into any of these issues while playing the Spectrum and Apple II versions.

With a tank full of jet fuel, we can start the car (unless we forgot to clean and replace the fuel hose, in which case the car either blows up or doesn't work at all.)  It's important to take a moment here to charge the car battery using the jumper cables -- the car doesn't need it, but we need it for another purpose.  If it's connected while the car is idling, it will go from Dead to Weak, enough to run the radio later.  The car fuel gauge remains on full while it's idling -- only driving from place to place seems to use up fuel.

At this point we're almost ready to go.  PUSH BUTTON yields I drive to Main St for attempt to mountain; the SAGA+ version is clearer, saying I drive the jet car to Main Street for an attempt at entering the mountain.  PUSH BUTTON a second time replicates the movie's opening sequence, with a brief animation in the SAGA+ version:

Once we're inside the mountain (using the Jet Car's remarkable matter transparency capabilities) we'd better still have the flashlight, with which we can discover the bomb.  EXAMINE BOMB indicates that it has an RFI (radio frequency interference) shield, currently turned on, and a switch.  There's also an envelope nearby, which contains the key for the floor safe at Yoyodyne.  We need to turn off the bomb's RFI shield -- how anyone would know this before exiting the mountain and failing to stop the radio from detonating using the radio is beyond me, so chalk this action up to the traditional "It's an adventure game, so any unpressed switch should be pressed at least once" rule.

We escape the mountain by simply walking north and exiting through a handy door, at least in the classic interpreter version.  The SAGA+ edition has extra locations inside the mountain, a tunnel and a duct-like maze that presumably contains something to help us move the heavy table.  I never did actually solve this in my playthrough, as the flashlight I carelessly left on for too long earlier kept running out of juice before I could explore the area thoroughly.  But as it turns out, the same bomb-disarming code words found in the classic version are also valid in the SAGA+ version, and the game does not require that we actually find and read the paper to win.  So I was able to finish this run using the a priori knowledge from my Spectrum run.

In the classic version, I can confirm that the paper found in the floor safe reads:

Disarm Code: 1=Warfin 2=Yoyodyne

This is a bit odd -- Warfin is spelled differently from the name of John Lithgow's movie character, Lord John Whorfin (alias Dr. Emilio Lizardo).  This is an odd mistake to make, because the character actually spells out his name letter by letter during a phone conversation in the movie!  But back in the day the designers may have had to work from a raw script without later additions and on-set revisions, and in any case we have to abide by the game's spelling to satisfy the parser.

Once we get back to the radio shed and connect the battery to the ham radio, we hear a doomsday countdown.  In both of my walkthrough-assisted attempts, we had plenty of time left until detonation, more than 400 moves, so there wasn't a lot of pressure at this point.  Of course, we can't hear this status update and breathe any tentative sighs of relief until we have the radio hooked up, and if we left an item behind or forgot to do anything important inside the mountain, we're stuck at this point.

Since we have the opportunity to compare, let me record a few random observations about the SAGA+ interpreter as compared to the classic Scott Adams engine.  LIGHT and UNLIGHT are replaced by TURN ON / TURN OFF, and DROP MANUAL PUMP at the gas station seems to ignore the adjective and still prompts for disambiguation regarding gas pump versus manual hand pump.  I also found the Apple II version a bit frustrating just because it plays more slowly due to graphics loading time, but that's just because I've recently been spoiled by the lower-quality but faster-loading graphics of the IBM PC QuestProbe games.  I suspect the classic interpreter build was cut down from a primary design intended for SAGA+ -- the SAGA+ text is more elaborate, and the MOVE TABLE and mountain duct maze puzzles bookend the whole story, making it seem like those were cut for space in the classic version.  Also, one oddity is that in SAGA+, GO STATION works the same as ENTER STATION, but GO YOYODYNE puts us "at" the Yoyodyne building instead of taking us inside from outside.

In either version, all we have to do now is transmit the bomb-disarming passcodes in the proper sequence -- the world is saved, and the game is over:

(The Want to play again? prompt always strikes me as disingenuous at this point.  I realize it's a standard behavior of the game engine, but I'm almost always ready to be done once victory has been achieved!)


Next time, we'll take a look at Scott Adams' post-Adventure International return to the genre and a favorite adventuring environment, with his independent shareware release, 2000's Return to Pirate's Isle 2.

Oddities East and West: Jackie Chan (and his Action Kung-Fu)

Back in 1991, comic martial arts actor Jackie Chan was known on American shores only to die-hard kung fu movie fans and Cannonball Run aficionados.  But he was a major star in Japan, which is why Hudson Soft produced Jackie Chan for the Famicom and PC Engine (as the company's thirty-sixth title for the machine.)  The game was a solid platformer, with particularly nice graphics on the PC Engine, and it came to the US for the Nintendo Entertainment System and even the TurboGrafx-16 as Jackie Chan's Action Kung-Fu.  We're looking at the PC Engine/TurboGrafx edition here.

The only real difference is in the title screen:

Which was translated to:

The game maintains a light-hearted sense of humor, with Jackie determinedly kicking and punching his way across the landscape as he seeks to rescue his sister from an evil sorcerer.  The world map unfurls on a classical-style Asian scroll, and while Jackie's progress is strictly linear, the artwork provides a nice sense of atmosphere:

Befitting the actor's stature, videogame Jackie Chan has a number of attacks at his disposal -- he can punch and kick, crouch and low kick, and leap through the air for a flying kick, with some more complicated fireball and spin kick moves available as the game progresses.

There are some really nice special effects in the game -- Hudson Soft designed the PC Engine and knew how to get the most out of the hardware, with rotating platforms, color-cycling background animation, parallax scrolling on some levels, and this interesting shadow effect, unique in my TurboGrafx gaming experience:

The animated caricature of Jackie Chan is full of personality, though when he isn't fighting he looks rather more like a dark-haired Gordon Ramsay.  Green frogs turn up from time to time, with a little amphibian abuse yielding power-up items, like bowls of rice to restore Jackie's hit points.  Occasionally Mr. Chan finds a bell, enabling access to a Special Stage.  These bonus challenges include bouncing off of clouds to pick up fruit, and punching a series of targets as quickly as possible, with his weary sensei rating his success afterward.   The text is in English in both territories -- this is from the Japanese edition:

The animation is cartoonish and simple, with some very nice backgrounds and enemy sprites.  Unlike Bonk, Jackie isn't subjected to the indignity of Westernization -- when he dies, he gets the bug-eyed, twitchy manga treatment on both sides of the water:

The action is not overly difficult but it takes some practice and memorization to master each level.  The challenge ramps up significantly as we progress, and a limited number of continues means that eventually it's time for Jackie Chan to be crushed under granite:

Jackie Chan is a charming little Hudson platformer, with solid controls and memorable music.  The license was unfortunately too far ahead of its time in the States, but knowledge of Mr. Chan's work isn't essential to appreciating the gameplay, which still holds up well almost two decades later.

---

Jackie Chan hasn't been remade or released on the Wii Virtual Console, probably due to re-licensing issues, and it's gained some value as a licensed collectible, so it's not always easy to find at a good price.  It may be available for purchase here.

The Great Scott Project: QuestProbe #3 - Human Torch and The Thing (1985)

The Great Scott Project's tour of the Marvel Comics-based QuestProbe series wraps up here, with the last released game of the series, QuestProbe #3 Featuring The Human Torch and The Thing, also known as Fantastic Four (Part One) or (Chapter 1).  Presumably another game was planned to feature the remaining Fantastic Two, Dr. Reed Richards and Susan Storm; QuestProbe #4 Featuring X-Men, was still in development when Adventure International went out of business in 1985.  The Marvel comic book tie-in story for game #4 was finished, but published later in Marvel Fanfare, and the Quasar series wrapped up the Chief Examiner storyline.  So the Marvel story ultimately saw some closure, but the game series stopped abruptly; fortunately, this game's story is self-contained.

It's a shame the series ended here, because of all the released titles QuestProbe #3 feels the most like a proper Marvel/Scott Adams collaboration.  The first two games made errand boys of The Hulk and Spider-Man, sending them out to hunt for gems by solving arbitrary puzzles.  This adventure dispenses with the treasure-hunting motif in favor of a rescue-the-princess plot that... well, at least it feels more like a story.  More significantly, the design allows the player to switch between the two lead characters, creating new types of puzzles as Johnny Torch and Ben Grimm must work together, leveraging their capabilities as a team.  And in this one, our heroes can actually die, ending the game if either bites the dust.

I'm playing the IBM PC version once again, which uses the S.A.G.A.+ engine to support the character-switching design; reportedly, some UK releases on platforms that did not support this more advanced parser ported the gameplay to another engine altogether.  Once again, we're dealing with CGA graphics on the PC -- the Human Torch is rendered in red and white, which doesn't look too bad, but The Thing is resolutely gray instead of his usual striking orange color.  Releases on other platforms were far more colorful.

These characters were among Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's first creations for the modern Marvel Comics line, dating back to 1961, though an earlier, android version of The Human Torch dates all the way back to 1939.  That's all the information I can share without giving away aspects of the game itself, so if you plan to try this one yourself, I advise you to stop reading here and do so.  Because from here on in, True Believers, there are multifarious...

***** SPOILERS! 'NUFF SAID! *****


As we have seen previously, the opening copyright credits do some spoiling of their own, informing us that QuestProbe #3 will feature licensed, trademarked and consistently capitalized appearances by the CHIEF EXAMINER, RINGMASTER, FIRE EATER, LIVE WIRE, THE CLOWN, PRINCESS PYTHON, CANNONBALL, FLYING GAMBONNOS, BLOB, XANDU, and DOCTOR DOOM.  Most of these occur as quick, otherwise uncredited cameos in a single illustration of the CIRCUS OF CRIME, set up in a fairground just outside Latveria.  And DOCTOR DOOM... well, I'll leave that for later, in case you've been tempted to read this far but truly, honestly meant to go away and start playing.

The game starts in the CHIEF EXAMINER's office, with the player a disembodied entity as indicated by the initial, generic prompt OK, I WANT YOU TO.  It becomes specifically character-based once we TALK EXAMINER and get the story underway.  The dictionary no longer recognizes SCOTT as a synonym for EXAMINER, so it seems the character was formally being separated from its inspiration at this point.  The CHIEF EXAMINER informs us that:

In this test you must free ALICIA MASTERS from DOCTOR DOOM.  You'll have to master the powers of 2 MARVEL SUPER HEROS (TM).  You'll be able to switch your point of view at any time. Good luck!

The prompt then becomes HUMAN TORCH, I WANT YOU TO, and we can SWITCH to see THING, I WANT YOU TO.  This is an innovation -- while Infocom had done multiple-character games, memorably in Suspended, we've never seen two different character perspectives in a Scott Adams adventure before.  The "puppeteering" approach that seemed a little awkward in QuestProbe #2 makes more sense here, with the player explicitly controlling one character or the other.  It still has the effect of distancing us from the characters to a degree -- the stakes seem lower because we aren't playing as Ego -- but from a gameplay perspective, this structure works out well.

The game starts off with an immediate puzzle -- we can explore the world a little bit as the Human Torch, but the map isn't large, favoring more complex puzzles over a sprawling landscape.  And there isn't really much time to explore -- The Thing begins in an uncharacteristically helpless situation, sinking in a tarpit while the Torch tries to find some way to help him.  There's a small shack near the tarpit, and the Human Torch can GO IN SHACK or ENTER SHACK to find a candle; the S.A.G.A.+ engine alters the old Scott Adams convention, as GO SHACK now stays in the current room and places the character "at the shack," a capability that doesn't come into play in this game.

I tried a number of ideas here without much success.  As The Thing sank progressively up to his knees, waist, chest, and mouth, I was running pointlessly around as Johnny Torch.  We can see The Thing out there in the tarpit, sinking, and if we don't rescue him in time, he drowns in the tar.  We can take out our frustrations by BURNing the SHACK, which leaves the chimney standing, but it's not a recognized object and we can't use it to rescue our teammate.  The Thing is wearing a REED RICHARDS watch, which isn't pictured or described in detail, but I like to imagine his stretchy arms grasping each of the numbers firmly instead of simply pointing like those Mickey Mouse timepieces.  READ WATCH reveals the number of moves used, and the health status (of the character carrying it) on a 100% scale.  This doesn't mean much to The Thing, but the Human Torch needs to keep his health (read: flame charge) up and a number of puzzle solutions depend on his ability to FLAME ON LOW, HIGH or NOVA at the right time.

EXAMINE SELF reveals some interesting detail -- HUMAN TORCH is not flying and is not burning.  This was useful in my playthrough, as I had forgotten he can fly!  We can FLY OVER PIT, and GRAB THING by the arms, yielding I've got THING. I'm flying.  We can try to FLY OUT, to learn Sorry, I can't budge THING.  This is a nice puzzle, not too contrived beyond the premise (how did THE THING get into this situation in the first place?) and there are quite a few options to explore.  We can LIGHT CANDLE and DROP CANDLE, and see it get sucked down into the tar, but it doesn't cause any kind of explosion or otherwise help free our teammate.  We can BURN TARPIT, with FLAME ON HIGH, but that kills the tar-coated THING and ends the game. If we are still holding The Thing's arms when he drowns, the Torch goes down as well.  If we switch characters to become The Thing, we can't KICK or JUMP or EXIT the tarpit.  If, as the Torch, we LIGHT CANDLE and GIVE CANDLE TO THING, the tarpit doesn't react in any interesting way when he goes down.


I finally had to resort to the CASA walkthrough to find a solution.  Ben Grimm has a pretty strong constitution, given that he seems to be made of orange rock, and he can HOLD BREATH for a loooong time, perhaps even longer than Guybrush Threepwood.  Enveloped by the tar with his mouth closed, he does not drown -- from the Torch's perspective he sinks into the tar, but the game does not end.  The WAIT verb is useful here, and supports several specific increments -- we can WAIT 5, WAIT 10, WAIT 15 or WAIT 50 turns to help pass the time (arbitrary numbers are not accepted).  Eventually the I'm being sucked down by something! messages cease, and FEEL AROUND yields I feel machinery.  Now, as The Thing, we can CLOBBER MACHINERY -- he smashes his way through and breathes fresh air at last.

We still can't see anything in the dark, and can't seem to SWIM in any direction.  But we're actually not in the tar anymore -- The Thing finds himself in an underground cavern, and can walk around.  Fortunately, in this game Scott Adams abandons the neck-breaking falls that usually result from moving in the dark, so we can map out the available exits blind.  At last we reach a room with a glow visible to the east, and emerge in a section of the cavern near a Wall of Fire.  On the other side of the flaming barrier we can see a *Bio gem accompanied by a Natter energy egg, as seen in the previous QuestProbe games, but in this case we don't have to retrieve the gem, just avoid the egg's explosion later on.  The Thing can't penetrate the wall of fire, but he can LIGHT CANDLE in the wall of flame and go check out the map in more detail.

The Thing discovers that most of the rooms are barren of interesting detail, until we find a room with a hole in the ceiling and a panel with fifty tiny holes in it.  The candle flickers here, so we can surmise that there's a draft passing through.  The hole in the ceiling is Adamantium lined, so even The Thing can't SMASH HOLE to any effect.  We can PUT TAR IN HOLE - the tar gets sucked away, but produces no interesting result, though it's no loss as we don't need it for anything else.  Now that The Thing has saved himself from drowning, no thanks to Johnny Torch, we can switch back to his super-colleague and continue at a more leisurely pace.

Whoops.  If the Human Torch has neglected to FLY OUT of the tarpit after handing the candle off to The Thing (and ideally grabbing his watch as well), we return to find that his flame has gone out and he's now stuck in the tarpit, with no hope of holding his breath as long as The Thing (nor would that help us finish the game.)  If we had the presence of mind to FLY, or have a good save game for backtracking (this edition supports 4 save slots), we can fly up into the sky to observe some hills, Dr. Doom's castle, and a fairground, and we can explore the world a bit.

We find that the BLOB (clearly, his parents christened him with the hope that he grow up to be some sort of professional thug) guards the entrance to DR. DOOM's castle, and to the south is a fairground outside the village of Latveria.  The BLOB is resistant to the Torch's flames; we can DIG here to find a purple worm (shades of Adams' Adventure #8!) but I never found a purpose for the creature.  We won't be able to do anything here until The Thing is back above ground, but it's a good opportunity to point out that Kem McNair's artwork in several locations uses comic-book panels to present multiple perspectives and detail views within a single display -- it's a clean, simple effect that works well and captures the right Marvel Comics atmosphere.

The fairground contains a circus tent, occupied by the RINGMASTER, FIRE EATER, and the other members of the CIRCUS OF CRIME.

Apparently this is a dastardly criminal organization that finds it convenient to conduct its nefarious business under camouflage as itinerant showpeople, yet fails to realize that calling itself the CIRCUS OF CRIME is a bit of a giveaway.  As in our previous encounter in QuestProbe #2, the RINGMASTER can command us to leave, but we can CLOSE EYES to negate his powers.  Most adventure games feature a circus tent when a cannon is called for, and such is the case here.  As the Torch, we can FLAME ON and attempt to LIGHT CANNON -- but FIRE EATER swallows the low-level flame.  If we FLAME ON HIGH and try it that way, the circus tent burns and the cannon melts, which does us no good either, though it does appear to rid the (game) world of the CIRCUS OF CRIME.  The Human Torch's fire has a way of burning other things in general, with the game responding Sorry, [something] is burning! at the least convenient times.  Johnny Torch would have been a terror in preschool, although if memory serves he wasn't bombarded with cosmic rays until later in life.


The game has an odd limitation in that we can't really TALK to anyone after the CHIEF EXAMINER at the start; even the Thing and the Torch have nothing to say to each other.  HELP yields Sorry, I can't but order a HINT BOOK!  Call (305)-862-6917, which provides precious little assistance these days.

The Human Torch's ability to reach the hills visible from above is initially blocked by DOCTOR DOOM's castle, which fires a deathray at him every time he tries.  But now that the Thing is safely underground, we can BURN TARPIT with a high flame, creating a smoke cloud that prevents Doom's raymen from firing.  This allows us to FLY HILLS and ENTER CAVE.  The engine displays Wooooooo, which confused me a bit at first -- I wasn't sure if the Torch was making that noise just for fun, or if it was natural (or supernatural) in origin.  But it soon becomes clear that it's a repeating sound, and EXAMINE BOULDER reveals that wind is whistling under the rock.  I thought perhaps we could send fire through the gap, moving the boulder or somehow signaling The Thing, but discovered instead that if we CAST FIRE AT BOULDER with FLAME ON HIGH, it chips! and creates a pebble.  We can DROP PEBBLE UNDER BOULDER, and SWITCH to see it show up where we left The Thing waiting, underneath the hole in the ceiling.

Now that we have our bearings, it's time for The Thing to take over again.  We ask him to THROW PEBBLE UP HOLE, and he responds I gently toss it up. I see it fall back., which seems rather out of character.  If we tell him to THROW PEBBLE UP HOLE HARD, then Dust falls down.  SWITCHing back to the Human Torch establishes that the boulder is now gone, and Going down the shaft's a virtual hurricane!   Why The Thing, who is made of rock, had to wait for The Torch to toss him down a pebble, rather than, say, clipping his big toenail, remains a mystery.

Now the ball is back in the Human Torch's court.  We can ENTER SHAFT, but the strong draft tends to make Johnny's flame go out, so he can't FLY back up and he starts falling, getting fatally smashed a few rooms further down the shaft.  I still don't understand how this puzzle is supposed to work -- a walkthrough informed me that we have to FLAME ON NOVA and FLY DOWN from a point partway down the shaft.  Why flying faster towards the floor of the shaft is safer than falling remains unclear -- perhaps we are breaking through the Adamantium-lined hole and enlarging it, but the description doesn't indicate that.  Maybe it's just a controlled landing (in the pitch dark) instead of a crash landing.

I had to wander around a bit before recognizing the map layout -- I had extinguished the Thing's candle while he was waiting, as the strong draft tends to make it go out in this room anyway, and in the dark I didn't realize that the Torch had landed in the room directly below the shaft.  Reunited, and it feels so good! (Peaches and Herb, 1980)

As the Human Torch, we can ABSORB FLAME (thanks, CASA!) from the Wall of Flame to restore health more quickly.  We can't ENTER WALL, but we can ENTER FLAME to enter the room with the *Bio gem, and keep moving E immediately before the Natter energy egg explodes -- in this game, we don't need the gem at all, and these items appear to be here for consistency's sake.  Away from a strong draft, light is never an issue for the Human Torch, but we definitely need to FLAME OFF before reaching the dark rooms at the end of the long east-west tunnel -- even on low, the HISSSSing we hear yields the informative but fatal:  BOOM! Gas explodes and tunnel collapses causing small earthquake in castle above! HUMAN TORCH dies!   The castle earthquake is important to note, though we don't want to do this until later -- still, it's not a bad time to figure out that we can THROW FLAME TO EAST from the adjacent room to set it off safely.

What we need to do here is FEEL AROUND some more in the dark to find a hole leading to a maitenance [sic] area.  Here, we can FLAME ON LOW for light and find a lever with HIGH and LOW positions, currently set to HIGH.   I learned a little bit about how the parser works (or does not work) by trying to THROW SWITCH LEFT -- this did a SWITCH.  I was able instead to MOVE LEVER LEFT.  This reduces the virtual hurricane flowing down the shaft to a strong wind.

This next bit is a little tricky -- the Human Torch barely has enough energy to fly back up the shaft with The Thing in tow, but can do it with full health and FLAME ON HIGH.  Now we can apply a little Mighty Marvel Team-Up force to the remaining puzzles.

Or at least we think we can.  CLOBBER BLOB doesn't affect our doughy nemesis.  But The Thing can CLOSE EYES, ENTER TENT and TAKE CANNON while the criminal circus performers presumably stand around, helplessly gawping.

Either character can ENTER LATVERIA near the circus tent -- technically, Latveria is a country per standard Marvel mythology, but this is an adventure game, and it's easier to implement a populated area in limited memory if Houses & shops are mostly locked & boarded up & people have fled, and one makes liberal use of ampersands.  In the village, we can ENTER SHOP and GET GUN POWDER, which seems an odd moral lapse -- while neither The Thing nor The Torch will KILL people, or BREAK objects except as necessary, both claim I Don't know how to BUY something!  My conclusion is that neither of them has a good place to carry a wallet, and under normal circumstances Reed Richards generally picks up the tab.

Dealing with the BLOB remains a challenge.  THROW FLAME AT BLOB doesn't faze him, but THROW HIGH FLAME AT BLOB does, causing him to step aside momentarily into an alcove.   Knowing this, we can PUT POWDER IN CANNON, AIM CANNON AT BLOB, ENTER CANNON as The Thing, LIGHT FUSE as the Torch, and THROW HIGH FLAME AT BLOB.  If we've done everything correctly, we are treated to a brief animation of the BLOB stepping aside while The Thing gets propelled into the castle entrance by the cannon.


We're almost there.  The Thing can travel S to the castle great room, where we find XANDU the magician, a RUBY OF DOMINATION, and the captive ALICIA MASTERS, along with a partial statue of DR. DOOM, whose busy schedule does not permit his putting in an actual appearance in this game.  XANDU commands The Thing to leave, and in this case CLOSE EYES is no defense.

Now it's a job for the Human Torch to go back to the underground caverns and create a small earthquake in the castle above, as we discovered earlier.  Once that's done, the statue collapses on XANDU, and The Thing can safely GET ALICIA (who appears to be fleeing the room, recognizing that it's simply dumb luck the statue tipped over onto XANDU instead of herself.)

The Chief Examiner brings us back to his office to offer brief congratulations and give us another password -- MAEGEN!  One might speculate that these passwords are the names of Adams' children, but I don't know that he has twelve of them.

Whew!  We've completed QuestProbe #3, ending the published series on a high note with some solid teamwork-based puzzles.  The series was cut short in its prime, it appears, and we may never know what purpose the entire set of 12 (or 11, maybe) passwords would have served.  Next time we'll look at another licensed Scott Adams adventure game, based on the MGM movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.