Adventure of the Week: The Deadly Game (1982)

It's been a couple of months since I've returned to the long-running BASIC adventure game series published by SoftSide disk magazine.  So this week we'll be playing SoftSide Adventure #17 -- The Deadly Game on the Atari 400/800, published in October of 1982.  As is the case with most of the SoftSide games, the author is uncredited; all I can say is that this game shares some stylistic characteristics with other SoftSide text adventures.

The Deadly Game starts with a boilerplate Agatha Christie setup, as six greedy cousins gather for the reading of Uncle Henry's will.  A rather lengthy text introduction takes us to Sir Henry Drysdale Vanderbilt's mansion, where we must spend the night -- a substantial inheritance will be divided among the survivors in the morning.  I don't know what sort of person Uncle Henry was in life, but as a corpse he manages to come off as a sadistic jerk who desires to cause his extended family as much bloodshed as possible.

The intro is actually a bit misleading, but we'll get into the specific details later.  As always, I recommend that interested readers sample this one for themselves before continuing below.  This post won't try to kill you, but it no doubt contains murder, mayhem and ...

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

With the intro out of the way, the maid escorts us to a guest room and locks the door, and the game launches right into the action.  We see a bed, a dresser, a portrait of Uncle Henry, and an unbreakable, unopenable window, with deadly gas seeping under the door!  (How exactly we observe that it is deadly gas remains a mystery; I like to imagine it forms cartoon-style clouds in the shape of a skull.)  So it seems we're in an escape-the-room adventure, at least to begin with.

We can TAKE the PORTRAIT of Uncle Henry on the wall to reveal... a safe.  It's already hard to breathe by the second turn.  The dresser has three drawers... all of which are locked.  The bed has a pillow and a blanket... and we can STUFF BLANKET - In what? - IN CRACK to stop the gas from entering.  If we TAKE PILLOW, we get a nasty surprise as You have just been bitten by a tarantula hiding under your pillow.  The title seems fitting, as there's certainly no shortage of ways to die in this game. 

The wall safe has a combination lock.  We can see a gypsy woman down below, through the unbreakable window, and apparently hear her throwing an unsubtle hint our way -- Diamonds are a girl's best friend replacing the constant PSSST of the gas heard earlier.  We can also LOOK DRESSER to see that the top drawer has a bronze lock, the middle gold, and the bottom silver -- so we will probably have to find three matching keys.

The engine uses I for inventory, with no alternate INV or INVENTORY verbs, and we are constrained to a five-item inventory limit, though we aren't carrying anything at the start of the game.  HELP hints that the parser is a little broader than the norm for this era, if a bit awkward -- we can LOOK UNDER - Under what? - UNDER BED to find a bronze key, though it's too far back to reach it (and the initial LOOK step isn't actually required.)  We can also find a wad of gum under the chair, though it's odd that looking under the pillow does not reveal the tarantula waiting to attack.

We can't MOVE BED or take the key WITH GUM.  But we can obtain the key WITH PORTRAIT (that must be why it's initially described as a LONG PORTRAIT.)  We can't UNLOCK TOP, but we can just OPEN TOP now that we have the bronze key, to find a bobby pin and... a zinc key, which doesn't look like much help yet.  But we can use the bobby pin to PICK LOCK and escape this first room, finding ourselves on the balcony which seems to surround the entire house.

An open door adjoining our guest room leads to the body of cousin Fred, who's already been shot.  LOOK FRED reveals nothing further, and we can't SEARCH or MOVE his corpse.  We may also notice that there are no other doors in these rooms, making Uncle Henry's house seem more like a Holiday Inn.

Along the south side of the balcony, we find one room that is locked, and another containing the body of cousin Phil, also shot.  Whoever is doing this isn't being very original, or perhaps is saving all of his or her creative approaches for the player, as evidenced by the fact that the room's walls are caving in, moving towards us!  There's a gold key in here, but it's in a far corner and we can't reach it; at least we can reset the trap by leaving the room, so this puzzle can be worked on later.

A room on the eastern side contains the body of cousin Rachael; also shot.  So three of the five cousins are already dead, and the villain options are narrowing; if we had a list of our cousins, we'd almost be able to name the killer, or so it seems.  The room is dark, and the light switch on the wall does nothing, so if we want to see something beyond Rachael's remains, we may need some illumination here.

Down a spiral staircase we find a massive living room, divided into nine locations.  The front door to the east is locked.  We find an elevator shaft on the western side, and a cellar door in the southwestern corner -- these are rather odd connections to find in the living room.

The cellar has a fuse box with two broken wires that keep falling apart if we try to reassemble them (LOOK BOX establishes all of this.)  We do have to be observant, as some useful items are mentioned in the rooms descriptions and are not listed as distinct objects.  There's also a garden hose, and a workbench that seems to have nothing useful on it, behind it or under it.  We can mend the broken wires with... the wad of gum?  This doesn't seem like it would be a good way to fix a fuse, but we can STICK GUM - On what? - ON WIRES to connect them.  To go back upstairs, we can't GO STEPS as they are described onscreen, but must GO STAIRS.

We can't get back up to the balcony from the living room easily -- we encounter a live rattlesnake, and of course Snake won't let you if we try to GO STAIRS.   But we are free to explore the rest of the lower level.  North of the living room is a long hall with a telephone -- always busy if we try to make an outgoing call, of course -- as well as a dining room and kitchen.  There's a pot on the stove with a lid -- and as we examine the kitchen, Suddenly a shadowy figure throws something sharp at you.  We seem to have plenty of time to figure out what to do as the parser shrieks, "QUICK! DO SOMETHING!"  We can't DUCK the incoming missile or leave the room, but we can TAKE LID as an impromptu shield, and claim the jagged rock thus deflected.

Old school adventure games sometimes have odd puzzles, and here we get to THROW HOSE at the rattlesnake, yielding the surprising response: GOOD THINKING! Snake falls in love (It looks like him too) and takes it away in some dark corner.  Ahem.  I'm not about to LOOK CORNER.

Now we can go to cousin Rachael's room and TURN SWITCH, turning on the lights and getting electrocuted.  So why did we want to fix the fuse box?

North of our starting point, we can go to an attic upstairs, with an elevator, and visit the maid's room which contains a bed and a long broom.  UNDER BED reveals nothing, but says it looks like a good hiding place so we may need to make use of it later.  Taking the elevator is dangerous -- it plummets at 90 miles per hour, and we have to JUMP to survive, ending up in the living room downstairs.  We actually have to take this route, however, as if we try to go back downstairs the normal way we trip and fall, fatally.

Can we use the long broom to block the crushing walls in the late cousin Phil's room?  Not easily, and the parser is unforgiving -- if we try to JAM BROOM or INSERT BROOM or PUT BROOM -- On what? -- BETWEEN WALLS, we get no useful result but the walls still close in within a few turns.  We can't take the gold key with the broom, either.  But we can THROW BROOM (initially the parser takes this to mean THROW BRONZE if we are still carrying the bronze key!) and it automatically becomes a HORIZANTAL [sic] BROOM, preventing the walls from closing all the way.

With the gold key we can open the middle drawer in our own room and obtain a brass key.  This allows us to access the room containing the corpse of cousin Marilyn, who has also been shot.  A note here reads, "76L."  This sounds like a combination, but my initial attempts to use suggested (incorrectly) that it's not for the wall safe.

So what next?  LOOK ROCK reveals some writing, and READ ROCK reveals an inscription: 31R.  So we seem to be picking up the combination in pieces.  But I still couldn't figure out how to DIAL it as suggested when we try to OPEN SAFE; I tried DIAL RIGHT, DIAL 31 RIGHT, DIAL 31R, and DIAL 31R76L, which didn't get me anywhere.

Exploring some more, I realized I'd been getting tripped up a bit by the parser and was missing some key items.  While we can't OPEN CABINET in the kitchen, or look behind or under it, if we simply LOOK CABINET we find an axe and some nails.  We can use the axe to SMASH DOOR into the last guest room, producing a broken door and PLANKS OF WOOD.  Inside the room is cousin Alex, also shot.  With the saw we can SAW WOOD to... what?  Ah, a step is produced.  Maybe we can get back upstairs now and use that hiding space.

While checking this possibility out, I discovered a small bug here.  We can LOOK STAIRS heading up to see that now A wooden step is missing. Looks dangerous!  But then the game follows with the puzzling, "IN A GUEST ROOM. The door is  open".  This is just a minor glitch, not game-breaking.


Now it seems we should try to FIX STEP, but Sorry, you can't do that.  FIX STAIRS is more informative: You can't yet.  We probably need another tool, like a hammer.

I wandered into the living room at this point and ran into THE KILLER -- who shoots us.  Hmmmm... we've already found the bodies of Cousin Phil, Cousin Fred, Cousin Alex, Cousin Marilyn and Cousin Rachael, which accounts for all five of them.  But there's clearly an independent murder at large, contradicting the game's scenario -- the greedy cousins are not out killing each other.  It doesn't seem I can get through here any more, after we have broken down the door to Alex's room, and there's no time to react:

So I ended up backtracking to a previous save for better navigational freedom.  Given my lesson with the kitchen cabinet, maybe i should go back to the workbench?  Ack - LOOK WORKBENCH (and all the variations on that theme) reveals nothing, but LOOK BENCH turns up a can of hydrofluoric acid and a jar of turpentine, considerably more useful.  The acid reportedly dissolves glass -- that's strong stuff in that can! -- and we can return to our own room to POUR ACID / ON WINDOW to dissolve it.  This doesn't really do anything for us at the moment, though.  The gypsy woman is still down below, still reminding us about the diamond she apparently expects us to produce.  We can also POUR TURPENTINE / ON PORTRAIT, but it doesn't seem to do anything.

It seems we've explored the place pretty thoroughly, and there aren't any new puzzles pending, so it's time to see if perhaps we can survive any of the deaths we've discovered.  A little a priori knowledge from a previous life lets us SMASH PILLOW / WITH ROCK -- yielding CRUNCH - You killed a tarantula under your pillow.  I had to peek at the code to figure this out, though -- and also to learn that we can now use the pillow to WIPE PORTRAIT to reveal another painting, and READ PORTRAIT to get the third part of the combination, 33R.

Now we seem to have the whole combination. 33R 76L 31R (or a variation, swapping the two right turns.)  But I'm still having problems getting the parser to understand what I want to do.  Ah - we have to DIAL 31R76L33R, cramming it all into one "noun" to get it open.  The safe contains a diamond, and it seems we should take hint and THROW it to the gypsy, who tosses us the silver key in exchange.  Now we can get some gloves out of the bottom drawer, and maybe these will help us survive the electrocution in Rachael's room.

This proves to be the case -- the electrocution was built into the switch itself -- and now we can see and take a hammer, and go back to the balcony stairs to repair the step.  Now we can get back up to the maid's room  again, where we find a gun hidden under the bed.  It contains a single bullet -- probably meant for us, and it implies the killer is either a really good shot or a really bad planner.

Leaving the maid's room, we run into Uncle Henry's lawyer, who says, "You need a permit to carry a gun."  Busybody!  And the game rubs it in by claiming that I don't know what 'SHOOT LAWYER' means.  He won't let us past him with the gun in hand.  But if we put it back and then try to go and call the police downstairs, the killer shows up and shoots us, so it seems confiscating the gun is a good idea.  The lawyer disappears if we drop the gun, and reappears if we pick it up, so this constraint seems intentional.

But aha!  We don't need a permit to carry a bullet, so we can disarm The Killer this way, assuming he or she doesn't have any other ammunition.  I am certainly beginning to suspect the maid, what with the tarantula under the pillow and the gun hidden in her room and all of my greedy cousins dead of gunshot wounds.  Not to mention her locking us in our room just before the deadly gas hits, at the very beginning of the game.

We may notice now that we still have 2 nails after repairing the step -- I wonder why, as the remaining nails never come into play.

Going back to The Killer's usual haunt, we are again confronted by this villainous figure -- but this time the empty gun clicks, and we are informed that "It's the maid! She was deemed to inherit uncle's fortune if no one survived.  You grasp her and she can't escape."  Funny that Uncle Henry's lawyer didn't mention this catch-all condition at the reading of the will, so we could have sent the maid away for the night on account of her clear conflict of interest.


Anyway, we are fully able to drag the captured maid all over the house.  But what we should really do is go to the telephone, CALL POLICE, and take her to the front door to await processing.  There's a knock, we OPEN DOOR... and apparently we are supposed to load some sort of climactic piece, but the game is bugged or expecting to load from cassette!  There's no further section of code on the disk that I can see.  Ah, well, I'm going to call it victory and assume whatever's left unseen here is just a quick wrapup, bundling the maid off to jail while we enjoy the much larger inheritance her machinations have afforded us.  Hmmmm... maybe we shouldn't press charges.  At any rate, the game ends happily if not very neatly:

In testing my solution, I discovered that The Killer does not appear as expected until we have found all of the bodies; we don't otherwise have to visit Cousin Fred's room, but the plot demands it.  And the rattlesnake did not appear on my second go either, perhaps for similar reasons.  The biggest issues I had with this game were parser wrestling problems, especially when discovering contents of cabinets and workbenches.  But there are some tricky-for-the-wrong-reasons puzzles afoot too -- I can say with a high degree of confidence that there aren't many games where SMASH PILLOW actually does something interesting, and THROW HOSE was a bit of a stretch too. Fortunately the SoftSide games are written in BASIC, so it's not difficult to dig into the details when necessary; I like to think of it as a meta-adventure of sorts.

To save others the headaches, my walkthrough is available at the CASA solution archive, and is included here below the fold.


**** WALKTHROUGH ****

Of Import: L-Dis (1991)

One of the things I remember most fondly about the post-crash era of videogaming was the emergence of publishers with distinct visual personalities.  On the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, everything tended to look about the same -- there wasn't enough graphical flexibility to allow for much distinction, and while some designers were better than others at getting the most out of the hardware, everyone was wearing the same straitjacket.  When the 8-bit NES came along, suddenly there were enough pixels and colors available to suggest cuteness and grittiness, sharpness and subtlety; Super Mario Bros. looked distinctly different from Metal Gear and Mega Man.

I was reminded of this in the negative sense this week, as I fired up Masaya's L-Dis, a 1991 CD-ROM shoot-'em-up for the Japanese PC Engine.  I've only played a few of Masaya's games, and my general impression of the company's work has been less than stellar; it's not so much that their games were bad, as that they were undistinguished.  I have no sense of Masaya's "personality", so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Nippon Computer Systems' games division came up with a pretty strong game this time around.

The story is slightly more interesting than the standard ship-plus-stone-chinned-pilot-versus-universe conceit.  The game's prologue introduces us to two young students, a boy and a girl, whose after-school chalk-drawing session is interrupted by evil forces from another dimension:

Whatever this entity is, it manages to kidnap the girl, and transform the kids' drawings into an array of villains.  We pick one of three weapons options, and we're off to battle!

The game looks really good, with bright cartoon graphics and smooth animation, though there is a little bit of sprite-priority sloppiness causing flying enemies to move "between" ground-based foes and the background layer.  The CD-Audio soundtrack cooks along nicely if unmemorably, and we get to face a good variety of small enemies and several bosses per level.  The difficulty is also pitched well -- while I never quite managed to beat the first level during a quick sample of the game, I got consistently better and at least managed to make it TO the third boss with lives left.



The design is intentionally loose and silly -- all of the powerups are announced in a high-pitched child's voice, and nothing is taken seriously; weapons include ladies' footwear flung haphazardly at the enemy.  The early part of the first level features a colorful sunset and a giant flying sharkish submarine:

Eventually we reach the apparent end of the level, and face a clam monster who initially faces the wrong way and is frightened of all the gunfire aimed at his backside:

After beating the clambot, we are transported into a strange dimension, with a bit of background parallax, to face this bug-eyed robot villain:

L-Dis isn't a spectacular game or a forgotten classic, but it's completely competent and pleasant to play, and its colorful visuals make for a nice change of pace from the usual 2-D side-scrolling shooters that were so common on the PC Engine.  I will probably spend more time with this little cute-'em-up when I sit down to play just for fun.

---

This one's worth picking up -- you might be able to find it for sale here.

The LoadDown -- 04/26/2012

April showers bring... erm, fun-filled hours... of downloadable gaming!

WiiWare -- Quiet here.  Going once?

Wii Virtual Console -- Bobbing back up this week with Capcom's Mega Drive game Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers, in case you need another SFII variant for your collection.

DSiWare --  One title that makes for a full circle of sorts... Chuck E. Cheese's Arcade Room, which is not so much an arcade as a virtual ticket-redemption game center.  Available games include racing, skee-ball, target shooting, basketball, and Smash-a-Munch.  Chuck E. Cheesy!

3DS eShop -- One new game, Block Factory -- something like an unlicensed Tetris Construction Kit.  I'm surprised casual game publishers haven't ensured this DIY generic puzzle creator never saw the light of day.

XBox Live Arcade -- Two new titles arrive:  Bloodforge is a forgotten 80's hair band an M-rated combat action game, heavy on the gore and horned helmet fetishism.  Deep Black: Episode 1 is a third-person shooter focused on underwater movement and combat, a potentially fresh idea with multiplayer to boot.  (Personally, I'd hold off on either of these for a bit -- Episode 1 of The Walking Dead is expected to arrive on Friday, see below.)

PS3 on PSN -- Two new titles this week.  PopCap Games' Bejeweled 3 is yet more color-matching mayhem fun entertainment matching of colors.  And Telltale Games' The Walking Dead series debuts with Episode 1: A New Day -- see below for more details.

Notable on PC and Mac -- Telltale Games' newest episodic series, The Walking Dead, premiered this week.  Based on the universe of Robert Kirkman comic books, it's available on Steam and -- after a few days of technical glitches -- Telltale Games' own website.  Critical reception has been positive, and from my brief experience with it so far I think it's going to be one of Telltale's most successful efforts, both creatively and financially.

Adventure of the Week: Alien Research Centre (1990)

I ran across the prolific output of UK adventure publisher Zenobi Software quite a while ago, but haven't played or written about any of their games until now.  Zenobi published a ton of independently-developed text adventures for the Spectrum and the Atari ST in the 1980s and 90s, and the Balrog himself created a website reminiscing about those times.  Picking a title at random, I came up with the 1990 illustrated adventure, Alien Research Centre, by Ian Smith, Shaun G. McClure, and Tom Smith.

The 48K Spectrum had a distinct advantage over many of its competitors, with enough memory onboard to support tape-based adventures with graphics, and these illustrations are nicely handled with very little evidence of the "color clash" occasioned by the Speccy's graphics system.

It's a fairly standard escape-the-alien-spaceship plot, though in this case we are out to recover an Earthly craft (the off-planet Alien Research Centre) where something has, presumably, gone horribly wrong.  It's distinguished by a solid, relatively bug-free design and detailed graphics, with some obscure but ultimately logical puzzles and many ways to die.  It's easily as good as many of the commercial adventure games of the Spectrum's heyday.

As always, I encourage interested gamers to visit the Alien Research Centre before proceeding here, as I will be documenting the game in detail.  In other words, there are necessarily going to be...

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

We start out in the Docking Bay.  To the south is Doctor Goebbler's office, with a desk and a hole in the ceiling.  EXAMINE DESK yields a doctor's ID card.  Above the office is a vent with dust and rubble covering an exit.  We have a decimator cannon in hand, but it's ineffective against the rubble, so its name seems to be a bit of an exaggeration.

The Biolab to the north of the docking bay contains a titanium scalpel, and to the east is a corridor occupied by a Giant Maggot.  Trying to GET MAGGOT is fatal, but we can saunter past the deadly maggot to visit the crew quarters, where we find evidence of violence and death.  We also pick up a matter disrupter (UK spelling) and some pliers.

Is the disrupter any good against the rubble in the vent?  We can't DISRUPT RUBBLE.  EXAMINE DISRUPTER reveals that ON THE FRONT THERE IS A SMALL SWITCH MARKED 'ACTIVATE'.  But ACTIVATE DISRUPTER only yields I DON'T KNOW HOW TO ACTIVATE DISRUPTER.  Maybe we should PUSH SWITCH?  No, that blows us up directly; the matter disrupter seems to be more of a bomb than a gun.

Can we use it on the Giant Maggot?  No -- if we stay in the area for more than one turn, trying to prepare the bomb, THE BEHEMOTH FLOORS ME AND SUCKS AWAY MY LIFE'S BLOOD.  And while the decimator cannon is modified to only target life forms, this juvenile monster is too fast - IT DODGES IT.

We can, however, drop the matter disrupter in the vent, push the switch, and immediately exit to the office below -- the explosion clears the rubble away but leaves the vent otherwise undamaged somehow.  Now we can travel through the vents -- there's a small door and an air grill halfway along the passage, and some bits of paper along with a Freeze Beast at the southern end.  The Freeze Beast is also shockingly good at dodging the decimator cannon, which we've lugged halfway across the galaxy and is now starting to seem like a gag gift.

We can OPEN DOOR in the vent to access a small storage room, where we find a void-suit and a soldering iron, both of which will probably come in handy.  This is a very classic adventure design -- we are clearly required to assemble some tools to solve the puzzles ahead.

The Freeze Beast is not as aggressive as the Giant Maggot -- we can read the bits of paper without being attacked, seeing that one of them contains scrawled numbers (2749 in my playthrough.)  We can't take the time to CUT BEAST with the scalpel though, it still attacks.

The attractive graphics don't include takeable objects, and often depict things that aren't accessible -- for example, the storage room shows a door, but the parser doesn't recognize it -- but at least we don't have to guess at the names of any objects seen but not mentioned at the text.  Can we open the air grill in the vent?  OPEN GRILL, PUSH GRILL, KICK GRILL, and TAKE GRILL don't seem to do anything.

I seem to be a bit stuck, so I consulted Dorothy's walkthrough at CASA to discover that while we can't CUT MAGGOT, we can STAB MAGGOT with the scalpel.  The parser tells us that IT VOMITS BLOOD AND SHRIVELS UP. I CAN NOW GO EAST.

This slightly-necessary violence allows us to reach the Chemilab, where there is some flux, good for soldering; and a broken Vac-Tube transport, conveniently disabled by a single, easily visible broken wire.  It's a good thing we have a soldering iron and flux!  We SOLDER WIRE, and now we hear a whoosh of air; but we can't USE TUBE or GO TUBE or RIDE TUBE or ENTER TUBE.  But if we try to leave the room to the west, we discover that it has already transported us, and will shuttle us between two floors any time we enter the Vac-Tube room.

We can find a smashed Droid and a wall-mounted cable in the engine room.  Examination of the Droid establishes that it WAS PROBABLY PULLED APART BY A GARGANADON!  It doesn't sound like we want to run into one of those.  The southern part of the engine room smells of ammonia, and a pool blocks a western exit, apparent evidence of a serious janitorial mishap.  If we try to enter the pool, or the western exit, or even just hang around too long, the pool draws us under and we are again dead.  So the pool seems to be sentient, but we can't SHOOT or STAB it; not that we would expect to be able to.

Some of the graphics are reused; to the south of the pool we find a fire axe in the Maintenance Room, which looks exactly like the small storage room.  We can't CHOP BEAST with the axe, but we can SMASH GRILL.

Going down through the smashed grill takes us to a dusky uninhabited alien containment room that seems to have suffered some acid damage.  There's also an airlock, with a hand rail, an outer hatch, and a lurking Vapour Wraith.  If we do the wrong things, the Wraith attacks us with electricity.  If we open the hatch, we are sucked out into the void.  But if we wear the void-suit and HOLD RAIL and then OPEN HATCH, the wraith is sucked out of harm's way (our harm's way, that is) and now a southern passage is open.

The second alien containment cell contains a corpse we may wish we hadn't EXAMINEd (THIS MAN HAS BEEN RIPPED ALMOST TO PIECES AND IS ALMOST UNRECOGNISABLE), and a jar of acid.  We can POUR ACID in the pool, but the chemical combination explodes and takes us with it.  We see this rather downbeat death screen a lot in this game:

The acid proves to be more useful on the Freeze Beast (though the bits of paper are also destroyed, so we'd better have noted the code before using it), allowing us to go down to a Hydroponics Garden... where the Garganadon lurks.  It is also very good at dodging a blast the decimator cannon, and I am beginning to wonder if we are going to get to decimate anything at all.

It's walkthrough time again, to obtain a few key details.  We can CUT CABLE in the engine room to obtain... A USEFUL ROPE.  How did that happen, exactly?  It's explicitly useful, anyway, so we'd best take it along.  And we can KICK FLOOR in the acid-damaged alien containment room to access a lower passage.  (After this point, any time we enter the alien containment cell we fall through the floor -- that was quite a kick!  Winners don't do acid.)

This claustrophobic lower passage runs east-west, and here I notice a dead woman.  EXAMINE WOMAN reveals that BITE MARKS OF A HUGE RADIUS ARE THE CAUSE OF DEATH, which neither surprising nor reassuring.

The Medi-Centre has complicated equipment that did nothing to save the lost crew, in case we were not already feeling wary and depressed about Her Majesty's half-arsed space programme.  We find an access panel and a blue chemical here.  I am finally running up against the game's nine-item inventory limit, so I drop the soldering iron and flux, assuming I only needed them to repair the Vac-Tube wiring in the great adventure game tradition.  We can open the access panel and make our way (a mysteriously one-way traversal) back into the air vents above the doctor's office.

Another corridor west of the medi-centre contains a mutant Land Shark.  (Candygram?)  We can't POUR CHEMICAL or SHOOT SHARK to any productive effect, so we chalk up another failure for the decimator cannon, which apparently fires too slowly to intercept anything but a sedated elephant.  What else can we use the chemical on?  I don't know what it was, but pouring it on the sentient pool informs us that THE POOL HAS VAPOURISED (though the ammonia smell lingers.)  Now we can go west to the Engineering Supplies room; I was expecting a slide rule, maybe some graph paper, but all we find here is a net.

This seems like it would be useful for capturing a water shark, but is it effective against the Land Shark?  Yes, we THROW NET, THE SHARK IS IMMOBILISED and we can travel south.  Here we find the Communications Room, but the equipment has been sabotaged.  There is an SOS Transmitter here, with a start button.  Pushing the button doesn't do anything, but if we examine the transmitter, we spot and remove an IC (an integrated circuit, I assume.)  It's not clear if we can repair the chip or use it somewhere else, but examination indicates IT'S THE VITAL COMPONENT TO MOST TRANSMIT-RECEIVE DEVICES.  Hmmmm.

The IC won't go into the smashed Droid.  We can, however, return to the Hydroponic Garden and SHOOT the GARGANADON; the first try fails, but we just have to be persistent and something is finally decimated as advertised.  Now we can travel east to a huge Agri-Dome.  There's a ledge here, which is probably where we need to use the odd cable-born rope... and yes, THROW ROPE does the trick.

Climbing the rope (U) takes us to the Bridge.  A Security Droid loitering around in lieu of providing actual security says, "State Access Code."  I hope that random bit of paper we found earlier is the real deal!  We can goof around with unsuccessful responses -- STATE 1111, SAY 1111, 1111 -- until we get serious and SAY 2479.  The droid leaves and now we can access the actual Bridge controls.

The Bridge's touch-pad can be examined -- basic ship systems are reportedly operational, but I NOTICE THAT SOME OF THE IC SOCKETS ARE EMPTY.  We only have one IC -- and we can INSERT IC, but some of the sockets are still reportedly empty, and still only basic ship systems are up.  But we have no need for fancy flight lessons -- we just TOUCH PAD, and we are off to victory!  If only there were a victory illustration instead of this variation of the death screen:

I enjoyed playing Alien Research Centre -- it has a nice sense of atmosphere and a design that's open enough to allow some experimentation and head-scratching, though it's still fairly linear and without a walkthrough handy I would likely have gotten terminally stuck at a couple of points.  I will definitely be looking at more of the Zenobi library as time goes on.

East vs. West: LOOM (1993, PC Engine)

It's LOOM week at Gaming After 40, apparently, as after tackling the U.S. version it seemed like a good time to sample the Japanese PC Engine edition.  Published by Victor Musical Industries in Japan, this Super CD-ROM was a port of Lucasfilm Games' PC point-and-click adventure:

You can read my earlier post to get full details about the game itself; I'm going to focus on some more subtle differences here.  This adaptation is an interesting hybrid of the versions published in America.  It appears to use the game data from the original U.S. release, with the text translated to Japanese.  And it features no voice acting at all, but has more CD-quality music than the American CD-ROM edition.

It's interesting to note that character closeups and other material omitted from the US "talkie" are present here, with brief interruptions of the music as necessary for loading.  These images seem to be based on 256-color VGA updates of the 16-color EGA original, which were reportedly created for but not used in the PC CD-ROM version.  Similar images were also seen in the Japanese FM-Towns version, so this PC Engine port may have been based most directly on that edition.

It must have been tricky to adapt the PC-oriented SCUMM engine to sprite-based hardware; this version of the engine probably could not have been updated to handle sprite scaling, so porting of later games like The Secret of Monkey Island would not have been possible.  Fortunately, LOOM's design uses an old trick, employing multiple sprite sizes for hero Bobbin Threadbare, with changes carefully concealed behind the scenery.

I didn't play through the entire game, but the story appears to be identical.  It looks like the width difference between platforms (320 pixels on the PC compared to a standard 256 on the PC Engine) is accounted for by keeping the original graphic data as-is, and just leaving extra pixels off the left side of the screen. It's easy to see this with the Magic Engine emulator -- the text is off-center, and sometimes sprites that would be offscreen are not displayed until they scroll into the active area:

The engine gets bogged down when there's too much going on -- I presume it's translating spriteand background data to pixel-level rendering, no mean feat on the PC Engine.  But LOOM is completely playable on the PC Engine, and this version was re-ported to American shores for the Turbo Duo, late in the system's life.

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I'd really recommend the North American "talkie" over this version, but it's an interesting historical artifact for adventure gamers.  You might be able to track it down here.

The LoadDown -- 04/19/2012

Taxes are done (at least here in the U.S.) and it's time to see what's new on the near-instant-gratification gaming front... fairly quiet this week...

WiiWare -- Nothing here this week... starting to feel a mite lonely in this part of the Nintendo universe.

DSiWare -- One new game, I Must Run!, a high-speed platformer, more adult than the usual fare, with T-rated language and violence as the orange-jumpsuited hero runs to save his wife.

3DS eShop --  Previously only available with preorders of the new Kid Icarus: Uprising, this 3-D enhanced version of the 8-bit NES classic Kid Icarus is now available to everyone with $5.99 to spare.   There's also a free demo version of the action/puzzler Pyramids.

XBox Live Arcade -- Two new titles arrived this week.  Fez is a cute 2-D/3-D platformer, in development since 2007 and subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie.  Trials Evolution is a much-anticipated followup to the popular physics-based Trials stunt bike game.

PS3 on PSN -- I could have sworn this was released a few weeks back, but it appears that Sega's coin-op port of the light-gun (PS Move) shooter The House of the Dead 4 actually showed up this week.  So go kill some zombies!

Adventure of the Week: LOOM (1992, CD-ROM Version)

Somehow, I have managed to make it through more than two years of weekly adventuring without tackling any of the classic point-and-click efforts from Lucasfilm Games.  So it's high time we remedy that, with a look at Brian Moriarty's LOOM, originally released in 1990 and upgraded to this CD "talkie" version in 1992.

 

LOOM doesn't get a lot of love these days, primarily because it is rather brief, and not as wildly funny as most of the publisher's other titles.  Its unusual interface also takes some getting used to -- it has no inventory system, only a musical staff that the hero can use to cast magical drafts (spells), and basic point-and-click examine actions for items.  But I think LOOM is an unrecognized milestone in the development of the adventure game, for a couple of reasons.

One, LOOM is a clear bridge between the Infocom era and the point-and-click adventure; its use of spells, substantial support for applying the wrong spells, and generally wizardly narrative call the Enchanter series to mind.  Brian "Professor" Moriarty's career spanned the technological gamut, from Atari BASIC (Crash Dive!) to Infocom's Z-machine (Wishbringer) and Lucasarts' SCUMM engine, so the game's pedigree is solid.  And LOOM's design feels like a wholehearted but carefully considered embrace of the graphical, mouse-driven age -- the minimal interface makes sense, as an attempt to tell a compelling interactive story without text or other complex forms of input.

Second, this CD-ROM edition of LOOM is a fine early example of adventure gaming finding its voice.  Raw CD Redbook audio was used originally, as on-the-fly mixing of CD and Soundblaster streams was still a bit iffy, and much of the original dialogue had to be edited down in order to squeeze the voiceover content onto the disc. Internet heresy though it may be, in my opinion the reworked dialogue is significantly improved over the original script -- it has more character and more consistency, and some generic lines are replaced with much wittier stuff.  It's also much more British in flavor, and eminently more actable, suiting the voice casting.  (Unfortunately, there are also a couple of new typos in the new onscreen text!)  Unlike the competition at Sierra On-Line, Lucasarts already had access to proper sound studios and acting talent as the new technology dawned, and this was the first CD-ROM "talkie" adventure game I played that actually sounded like a professional effort. 

The game offers Standard, Practice, and Expert difficulty levels -- I'll be playing on Standard here.  The difficulty setting affects how the game's musical distaff is presented -- Expert mode doesn't label or echo the notes, so we have to learn and replay the drafts based on pitch alone.  The original release had another extra in the Expert mode, which I'll detail below, but that was omitted from the CD version along with some other details.  The current Steam release unfortunately lacks the original "radio drama" intro disc, and the Windows engine by default has an annoying graphics smoothing algorithm turned on which muddies the improved VGA graphics a bit.  The CD version also lacks the constant background music of the original, although the music excerpts that remain sound very nice.  It's good to have the onscreen text turned on, also, as some of the dialogue clips cut off too soon or are poorly aligned, leaving bits of starts and endings in the wrong place.

As always, I encourage interested adventurers to visit the world of LOOM before proceeding here.  It's not a long or difficult game, and it is still commercially available for a reasonable price on Steam.  I should warn you that the drafts are somewhat randomized, so don't take my word for any of the sequences mentioned below.  Beyond this point, young Weaver, there lie...

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


(Apologies for this screenshot, I hadn't yet turned off the graphical filtering.)

As the story begins, a glowing messenger nymph arrives to wake a young, napping Weaver, our hero Bobbin Threadbare, and tell him that he is needed in the village; the voice actress does a Billie Burke/Glenda impersonation here that isn't wholly successful.  Bobbin doesn't have much to do after she departs, except climb down the mountain to the village.  If he inspects the lone leaf hanging on the tree under which he has been sleeping, it falls.  "The last leaf of autumn!", he notes.  This is portentous.

Bobbin visits the Weaver village, his home, which is now deserted; one tent can be entered, where we find the Book of Patterns (with which Bobbin is already familiar), some green fabric, and a dye-pot.  Clicking on the pot, we hear a four-note tune which presumably is a dye spell of some sort.  But at this point we have no way to cast spells, as Bobbin is under-staffed.  (Sorry.  You knew that pun was coming somewhere along the way here.)

Tapestries inside the improbably large temple hidden behind the entrance of one tent tell the story of the Great Guilds -- this bit feels very Infocom-ish, as three tapestries in sequence are encountered, and elegant prose describes the Creation of the World, the Passing of Two Shadows, the Decline of the Great Guilds and the foretold coming of a Third Shadow.

As we reach the heart of the temple, Bobbin witnesses the council of Elders punishing an older female Weaver named Hetchel, who has a lifelong connection to our hero at what now seems to be great cost to her own well-being.  She is transformed into a swan's egg, unexpectedly, when the penalty draft is played, and the other Weavers in authority are transformed into swans.  This is all very strange indeed, and the voice acting here is excellent.

The temple is invaded by another swan, and they all fly off, leaving Bobbin alone in the temple.  He picks up the lead Weaver's discarded distaff, and now he can play drafts, though he only has access to the first three notes, c, d and e.  The swan's egg is trying to open, with e-c-e-d echoing on the musical staff when we click on it.  Playing this opening draft hatches the egg, freeing Hetchel -- now in bird form -- who tells Bobbin that strange things have been happening ever since he was born.  She calls him the "Loom Child," telling him that he must escape this island and find his destiny, before she dives into a rift in reality, following the swans to dimensions unknown.

The sequence C-f-g-c plays on the loom if we click it, but most of the notes are too high for Bobbin to play at the moment.  Exploring the village, we learn that the seagulls on the pier sing e-c-e-d also, so this is apparently a bird theme of some kind.  Or an "opening" theme, actually -- we can cast it on a clam, beachside, and one of the gulls gets a treat.  This is no doubt a useful draft for avian scavengers, and it provides a hint about how this universe works.

Now we can hear more specifically that the dye-pot draft is d-d-c-d; we can use this draft to dye things green, though Bobbin hates that grass green color.  Tipping a flask over in the dye tent plays g-f-f-e.  The manual lists all of the spells, with empty staffs for note-taking, which indirectly hints at what sorts of drafts we should be looking for, though some are red herrings.  The randomization of the drafts falls into two categories -- some spells are reversible, allowing Bobbin to do or undo something, while others are palindromes that operate in one direction only.

Some hollow trees west of the village contain three owls, yielding the partial draft c-d-d... but guessing at a fourth note isn't helpful -- Bobbin tells us either that the sequence we've tried isn't a draft, or that he doesn't think he spun that one right if we do come up with the right sequence on our own.  We have to free a rabbit from some brambles in a nearby graveyard where a fourth owl sits -- it takes the rabbit as prey and returns to its tree, allowing us to listen and complete the draft.  It is in fact c-d-d-c, at least in my playthrough, but we have to see the whole sequence revealed before we can cast the draft; guesswork doesn't count.

Another tent in the village has some gold in it.  It's dark and hard to see inside -- but, ah, we can cast the owl's spell on the darkness to see with the creature's night vision assisting us.  A spinning wheel here is used to turn straw into gold -- d-e-d-c -- and discovering this also enables the "f" note on the staff.

What now?  We can't seem to do anything with the Loom in the temple, its magic is beyond Bobbin's ken as a novice Weaver.  Bobbin's mother, Lady Cygna Threadbare, is buried in the graveyard, and her headstone contains a poem with some clues.  Bobbin notes the last bit in particular -- "The day the sky is opened / And the Tree is split asunder."  We can focus on the sky from the graveyard, but trying to open it yields only, "Maybe I should stand a bit closer."  Returning to the mountaintop, and opening the sky, we see lightning strike the tree and send it tumbling into the lake below; it floats and comes to rest by the dock.  Is this transportation?  Yes, Bobbin can set out on the floating tree for parts unknown, with some of the swans trailing behind him.

Along the way, he encounters an ocean-borne tornado, a waterspout.  The open draft doesn't do anything, but clicking on the waterspout yields c-f-c-c.  Reversing this twisting draft to c-c-f-c untwists it., and reaching shore earns Bobbin access to the "g" on the staff.

From the beach we can enter a forest or approach the glowing green city of Crystalgard.  In the city, we observe an official of some kind conversing with an older man.  Approaching, Bobbin can eavesdrop -- these are the Bishop, and Master Crucible.  Apparently a sphere with the ability to see 4-6 hours into the future has been produced, but the Bishop demands an 8-hour capacity.  After these characters depart, Bobbin can enter a tall crystal; ringing the bell inside transports us to a tower where two men are sharpening a scythe of some sort.  It's a restricted area, so we are summarily sent back (though not killed, as this is a Lucasarts game!)

We can enter another part of the crystal structure, where one Master Goodmold welcomes us and asks if it's true that peering beneath a Weaver's hood brings instant, agonizing death.  Bobbin doesn't know, but this is a useful hint.  Goodmold allows us to look around, "but if you break it, you buy it!"  A finely sculpted chalice is worth investigating -- we can reverse the spill spell we learned from the flask back home to fill it with wine, though we don't need to do so.  We can also explore this area, using one of those then-fascinating "force the player to navigate the 3-D space!  Isn't this cool?" paths through the background's several doors and transport towers.

In the forest outside the city, Bobbin meets a group of four shepherds who are sure he is here to steal their sheep.  They have heard of a wizard foretold and ask Bobbin to show off some magic; they also have some invisibility magic of their own.  None of our drafts seem to work, but when they become invisible, we hear g-c-g-c.  Let's try that... no good, they are not impressed.  This scene has much-improved dialogue compared to the original's generic dismissals -- the shepherds are heartily-voiced and jauntily insulting, sending poor Bobbin away with, "Don't trip on your robe, little Wizard!"

Maybe we can use the invisibility spell in the crystal city now.  We can see something going on up in the tower, probably the people working on the scythe.  We seem to have no opportunity to go invisible ourselves, though; at least there's no obvious way to target Bobbin.  The crystal room is a cemetery, where we can note husband and wife, Luscent and Softshard Bottleblow, buried side by side.

If we empty the chalice and examine it, Bobbin remarks on its beauty and we get a brief history lesson from Master Goodmold.  This artifact is the famous Chromax Conundrum -- for unknown reasons, carved out of diamond instead of glass by Luscent Bottleblow -- and it is the only surviving example of his work after a dragon attacked the city years ago.  We learn that the first Scrying Sphere was lost in the attack -- so perhaps we should see if we can find it.

While we have been exploring, a solution comes to mind -- we can cast the invisibility spell on the people working in the tower, which effectively makes Bobbin invisible, it just works differently than I had assumed.  He can eavesdrop on the workers to learn that Master Crucible is selling a scrying sphere to the Bishop for a considerable sum, though nobody knows why the Clerics would want such a thing.

Invisible Bobbin can also walk right past the workers and take a different crystal tower to access the Scrying Sphere.  And now, in one of those illogical time-travel puzzles, we learn that e-f-f-e apparently transforms Bobbin (in what appears to be an illusory fashion) into some beast that scares the Shepherds away.  So now we have a new draft -- I guess the learning is legit, it's just a paradox that doesn't quite make sense.  We can also see a vision of fire in a cave, and of a swan's eye, hearing C-f-g-c as the associated draft.  Examining the deadly giant scythe on the way back out of the tower, we learn a-a-a-g -- apparently a sharpening draft.

Using the illusory spell, the shepherds now see Bobbin as the dragon of times past and flee.  A new draft, d-e-f-a, sends the remaining shepherd's sheep over the fence, and the inverse brings them back again.  We can dye the sheep green, and the shepherd complains about it -- how can he watch sheep he can hardly see? -- but there doesn't seem to be a reason to do this.

At the far end of the shepherd's fields, we find a small cottage.  Here, Fleece, female leader of the Shepherds, tells Bobbin that there are problems with the dragon.  The creature spots the white sheep easily and makes off with them, which is making it very hard to fill Bishop Mandible's order for 10,000 sheep.  Hmmmm.  Is he raising an army?  Of sheep?

There's a sickly lamb in the cottage, and we can try to dye it green to demonstrate the idea that obviously springs to mind, but no, that doesn't work.  Fleece's healing spell -- c-a-a-c -- is not helping the poor animal, but we should make note of the spell for later.  We can turn all the sheep in the field green -- and immediately, the Dragon arrives and picks up Bobbin as the easiest target.  She is disappointed in her catch, comically so, and rather vain and house-proud to boot; this dialogue is substantially rewritten for CD, and the performance is very entertaining. 

The dragon informs us that some wizard came in a while back and made off with much of her treasure, and destroyed her glass collection, except for a glass ball that survived.  Can we reverse d-e-d-c to turn her gold into straw?  Yes.  She demands we turn it back -- NOW -- but we gain the "a" note on the distaff for our trouble.  We also learn that she's not fond of breathing fire -- she can do it, but generally won't.

So we have learned a bit, and we aren't being eaten, but we are still stuck in the Dragon's cave.  The healing spell doesn't help us, but we can use the e-f-f-e spell to manifest as fire -- apparently we look like whatever our target fears or at least dislikes the most.  The dragon flees, and afterwards... hmmm.  The straw is actually all burned, so Bobbin's fire mode was more than an illusion, it seems.  Now we can navigate out of the dragon's cave through an unblocked passage -- the fire fulfilled the earlier vision from the scrying sphere -- and cast the owl spell so we can maneuver through the dark cavern, with a simple "spotlight" showing only the immediate area around Bobbin.  We can wander around quite a bit, but the only "success" I had here was finally walking Bobbin off a ledge, causing him to take a one-way fall to another part of the cavern.

There's a pool here; what draft should we use on it?  Clicking on it yields a new draft -- f-a-a-f -- which shows Bobbin's reflection in the water.  Trying the spill spell indicates that we must be trying to flood the cave; the inverse, however, dries it up, and we find the dragon's Scrying Sphere.  It shows us an erupting volcano, reprises the earlier vision of Mother Cygna, and shows us Bishop Mandible acting generally suspicious.

Now how do we get out of here?  I tried a number of spells on the pool in both dry and filled states, to no avail, before figuring out that we have to travel back into the maze proper by going up behind the area where we emerged after falling.  Now we can make our way out of the cavern to a twisty outdoor staircase, untwisting it to continue. 

We find ourselves in a cemetery, lit with an eery orange glow.  A boy lies fast asleep on the ground; we can cast the healing spell to wake him, long enough to learn that he is one Rusty Nailbender of the blacksmiths' guild, before he falls asleep again.  There really is some beautiful artwork in this game, considering the era and the newness of 256-color VGA graphics:

Bobbin can approach the impressive smithy; he is told by a strapping, shirtless man in the tower that the gate only opens for Blacksmiths, but the open spell gets Bobbin in, at least until he is immediately escorted back out.

Casting the fear spell on Rusty doesn't do anything; we can try the "send home" sheep tune, but Rusty just complains about being bothered and goes back to sleep.  We can try to cast the open draft on one of the graves -- the ground shakes, and Bobbin concludes that perhaps he should not try that.

What have we learned recently?  The reflect spell doesn't do anything interesting on the grave, despite its shiny bronze surface. But we can cast it on the boy, and it switches our images.  Now Bobbin looks like Rusty and can enter the smithy.  Unfortunately, just like the real Rusty, Bobbin has gathered no firewood, so he is thrown into a dungeon while the distaff is taken from him as a scrawny bit of fuel.  The blacksmiths are busy making swords for the Clerics, which seems a very unclerical thing for them to be needing.

Stuck in the cell without the distaff, Bobbin-as-Rusty is tempted to sleep on the straw.  It's the only thing we can do, actually, and sets off a fairly complicated cutscene.  The dragon spots the sleeping "Bobbin" and devours his flesh (offscreen), leaving a bloody skeleton behind and an angry Ghost of Rusty.  The distaff cast into the fire magically refuses to burn, drawing the attention of Hetchel (still in bird form), who arrives avis ex machina to return it to Bobbin, who has returned to his normal appearance now that the mirror image is disrupted.

Exiting the cell with the open draft, Bobbin can explore the smithy a bit, or would do so if he didn't realize he's inappropriately dressed.  We can go downstairs to eavesdrop on Bishop Mandible some more; like most power-mad world-domination schemers, he's not being very circumspect about his plans.  The ten thousandth sword is almost finished!  We'd better cast an unsharpen draft -- g-a-a-a -- but it's too noisy to cast any drafts in the active forge.  Listening to the Bishop's conversation produces a brief respite from the blacksmith's pounding during which we can do a little weaving.  The draft a-a-a-g doesn't do anything, so let's try sharpening it instead.  This doesn't quite work as I expected -- it acts the same way a twist spell would have, ruining the blade and getting the quietly lurking Bobbin noticed by Bishop Mandible, and not in a good way.

Bobbin is thrown into a hanging cage, where Mandible's assistant Cob (seen later in a Secret of Monkey Island cameo, where his name is spelled "Cobb" and he promotes LOOM) is eager to torture the young Weaver.  Bobbin and Loom's provinciality are somewhat underestimated by the arrogant Bishop, and there's some good dialogue and acting in this scene.  Bobbin is forced to demonstrate his power by opening the cage -- it comes to mind that perhaps it would be more interesting to open the cage of a small dragon also housed here, but it's not accessible at the moment.

Mandible takes Bobbin's staff, and informs us that he plans to open the vast graveyard below, raising an army of ten thousand undead soldiers and launching the Age of the Clerics.  He has preparations to attend to and dismisses Bobbin, under Cob's watchful eye, as he is to touch nothing.  We can try to gaze into the Bishop's Scrying Sphere -- not touching it, mind -- but Cob won't stand for it and demands a foolish trade.  He wants to do some looking of his own, testing the old warning that to look under a Weaver's hood brings death, and it does, as it turns out.  It's a quick, disintegratey death, though Cob's screams are heard only as annoying noise by the Bishop out on the balcony.  (The original version showed us Bobbin's bare face, briefly, when playing on Expert difficulty, but that feature was cut for this edition; I admit to being curious, but storywise I like the idea of the Weavers staying hooded and mysterious.)

Now Bobbin can observe the sphere, where he sees an image of mother Cygna again, a roast bird of some sort, and a single black feather floating to the ground.  We return to the balcony, but do not have time to stop the Bishop -- he opens the very fabric of the world, releasing an evil being who resembles Disney's Maleficent.

The new CD script makes it clear that Chaos does not consider herself to have been summoned; she has been released, and thirsts for power.  She tears the Bishop's body apart in a surprisingly graphic bit of animation, and then stalks off in search of evil to do on this plane.  The distaff is left behind for Bobbin to reclaim, but the other cage in the dungeon is now open.  The hungry dragon steals up behind Bobbin on the balcony, causing him to fall into the rift in reality.

Through various wormholes, Bobbin can revisit earlier locations to marshall his resources for the presumably apocalyptic battle ahead.  Visiting the blacksmiths' graveyard, we encounter the late Rusty, who is a bit ticked off at being dragged back to the real world while waiting to finish his transition to the next.  He is saddened that the Forge has been destroyed, of course, but we can heal his corpse to restore Rusty to the land of the living, which improves his disposition.  He goes off to investigate the fate of his fellow 'smiths.  We'd like to follow, but Bobbin can't wander far while visiting these earlier locations, just to keep the narrative tight.

Revisiting Crystalgard, we find Master Goodmold dying on the ground.  The crystalmakers could not bring themselves to use the Scythe, fearing its terrible power would make them the equal of the enemy; Chaos stole it and is now armed for the world's destruction.  His corpse vanishes before we can heal him.

We can also reach a new location, the Shore of Wonder, outside the Pattern of the world, where Mother Cygna and the other swans are floating.  Bobbin is the first to see it with mortal eyes, but he doesn't have the full range of notes on the distaff yet.  Bobbin learns that the swan is in fact his mother (this has been thoroughly telegraphed earlier), who did not die but was banished in swan form by the Elders when Bobbin was born of the loom, unforeseen.  We also learn that Chaos seeks control of the Loom, while Hetchel is trying to stop her.  Cygna advises her son to close the holes rent in the Pattern before confronting Chaos.

We stop by the Shepherds' field again, to find most of them dead, and Fleece trying to put them out of their misery.  She enlists Bobbin's help, but while we can't invert it, the healing spell actually works, and they are revived.  The new CD script has Fleece and company fearing Chaos' impending "harvest," which is a much better and more Irish-accent-friendly line than the original, in which they feared that, erm, "the Dead Ones [will] return to reap us again!"

With the last hole sealed, note "b" is added to the staff, and Bobbin can cross the Shore of Wonder to return to the island of Loom, and to the Temple where the Loom itself resides. 

Which draft should we use on the Loom?  The open and heal spells do nothing, nor does untwist.  Clicking on the Loom yields Cygna's draft, but we still don't have access to the high C needed to weave it.  Chaos appears and demands that we teach her to use the Loom, as her trusted advisor, despite Bobbin's protestations and outright refusals.  Chaos has drafts of her own, and Hetchel is silenced when she tries to give Bobbin the unmaking draft necessary to rend the Loom and defeat Chaos.  (Chaos was male in the original game, but her voice and gender are clearly female this time around.)

Maybe we can unsharpen Chaos' scythe now?  All of our magic appears useless on her.  We can't heal or reflect Hetchel to free up her speech.  Clicking on the loom yields b-a-g-f; reversing it does nothing interesting.  Casting it on Hetchel frees up her speech, but she soon gets fried by Chaos, and served on a plate, to boot. 

Now the Loom gives us b-f-b-f... but what to cast it on?  Hetchel, the Loom, and the Dead One seem impervious to it.  But we can reverse it on Hetchel; the Loom is just echoing the most recent spell cast, which I had forgotten.  She returns to bird form, but now gets killed properly by Chaos, rather graphically torn apart in a small but bloody explosion; Chaos also seizes Hetchel's last feather (as seen earlier in the Scrying Sphere) as a memento.

The Loom now recalls b-c-c-b.  We can use it to rend the loom in similar fashion.  Now Chaos is unhappy, trapped on one side of reality, but so are the rest of Bobbin's friends, subject to her now-limited but still thoroughly evil reign.  High "C" is added to the staff, and Bobbin knows he must return and face Chaos.

However, we are now floating outside the Pattern, with the last note available.  Our earlier visions and recent events indicate that C-f-g-c ought to be useful now.  Bobbin casts it on himself... and...

Bobbin turns into a swan and flies off with the others, leaving Chaos in charge of the remaining world on the other side of the rift.  Presumably our hero may be back to fight another day, but it's not a very satisfying ending, given that no sequel emerged.  (Apparently two were planned, FORGE and FOLD, featuring further adventures of Rusty and Fleece and presumably a final confrontation with Chaos, but these games didn't happen.)

The original LOOM had closing scenes of Rusty and Fleece watching the swans fly away, but these were cut from the CD version.  One suspects this is because it was now clear that the sequels were not going to see production, but these moments might also have been trimmed so that the CD music could play through the ending credits, without pausing to load new data from the disc -- quite a slow proposition at the time.

Hey, George "The Fatman" Sanger of The 7th Guest fame worked on the music!

I played LOOM when it was released back in 1992, and enjoyed revisiting it for this post.  It may not be a masterpiece of adventure gaming -- it is on the easy side, as at worst we just have to try casting every draft we can think of on every object we encounter -- but it's a solid piece of interactive storytelling, with solid graphics and great voice acting, and I have always enjoyed it on that level.  It also captures a moment in time, as the text adventure gave way to the full-blown multimedia era, and many of Lucasarts' innovations inform gaming to this day.