August is wrapping up, with a few more new titles for download as a U.S. holiday weekend approaches...
DSiWare -- Nothing for the Wii this week, but there are several portable titles on the wire; only one for the DSi, though. Escape the Virus: Shoot'em Up is a fast-paced pattern shooter with a biological theme, and not, as the title suggests, a PSA for vaccination.
3DS eShop --Two new games and an old one arrive here. The Game Boy Color title Toki Tori (also on Wii and Steam these days) returns and continues to provide a good old-fashioned puzzle/platform challenge. SpeedX 3D is a 3-D tunnel racer with a stained-glass look, as though one is racing through a series of Tiffany lamps. And Outdoors Unleashed: Africa 3D is more disturbing than the title suggests -- with an array of non-tranquilizing weapons on hand, the player is tasked with shooting a wide variety of beautiful and in many cases endangered animals. In the head. At least the wildlife is poorly animated, so the game resembles a demented target gallery/puppet show more than actual specicide.
XBox Live Arcade -- One new title here, as Activision's fading Rock Band series abandons the traditional plastic instruments in favor of the standard controller, with Rock Band Blitz. It does, fortunately, continue the series' tradition of licensing well-known pop songs, with (somebody's) favorites by bands ranging from Foster the People to Quiet Riot.
PS3 on PSN -- Three new games here: Rock Band Blitz (see above), skateboarding remake/update Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD, and Lights, Camera, Party!, a Playstation Move mini-game compilation.
Notable Elsewhere -- Telltale Games' episodic The Walking Dead series continues on its current roughly bi-monthly schedule, as Episode 3: The Long Road Ahead arrives on XBLA, PS3 and PC. This one's on my personal must-play list this Labor Day weekend.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Adventure of the Week: Blackwell Unbound (2007)
This week, we're tackling another of Wadjet Eye Games' recent point-and-click adventures, as we take on company founder Dave Gilbert's Blackwell Unbound, published in 2007. This adventure, second in the Blackwell series, was actually created out of historical flashback sequences intended for the third released game. Production and cash-flow exigencies called for a little restructuring, but while this story may have been intended to set up the events of the third game, its a self-contained tale that stands well enough on its own.
Blackwell Unbound focuses on Rosa Blackwell's aunt, Lauren, whom we heard about but never saw in The Blackwell Legacy, and her own adventures with our favorite spirit guide Joey back in the 1970s. Lauren's story mirrors Rosa's, as she tries to help some unfortunate ghosts pass on to the next plane of existence in New York City. As is the case with most of Wadjet Eye's titles, the graphical style is intentionally retro, but the VGA-resolution visuals take advantage of modern color depth and transparency effects. The game also benefits from an evocative, jazzy score by Thomas Regin and a talented cast of voice actors who interpret Gilbert's dialogue with humor and sensitivity. There's also an optional commentary track, allowing the author to inject background and anecdotes, but for obvious reasons it should not be turned on for the first playthrough.
As always, I encourage readers to explore Blackwell Unbound before continuing here -- this 2007 adventure is commercially available from the publisher, and also via Steam, as a single title or as part of the Blackwell Bundle trilogy set. It's not a difficult game -- persistence and thoughtful consideration pay off -- and it's very reasonably priced at US$4.99 (at this writing). Beyond this point, be warned -- much of the fun of adventure games lies in experiencing the story first-hand, and my remaining commentary will necessarily provide plenty of...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
The story opens with Lauren standing in the Void, the passage for spirits established in the first game, pondering the nature of infinity.
Then we're back in her apartment, where she has to indulge her cigarette addiction before getting on with the case at hand. It's odd not having our old friend, Lauren's niece Rosa Blackwell, involved, but it's also interesting to see Joey in a slightly different milieu, at a different time in his post-life. We actually get direct control of Joey first, an interface improvement not available in the first game, while Lauren takes a smoke break on the balcony -- we have to get her back on task. Because Joey can't physically interact with the world (he can't even blow on things in this game), his limitations usually make for interesting information/conversation puzzles.
Clearly Lauren is mad at Joey, and chatting eventually establishes that some pipes unexpectedly burst during an investigation earlier today, Lauren got soaked, and he laughed. This is unusual for an adventure game -- we're dropping into an established relationship, without the usual intro and orientation; in this case, the first game provides some context, although one needn't have played it to join in progress here. This exchange establishes the relationship between the characters, and Lauren's addictive personality, before we get into the plot; it works well.
Lauren's case list, drawn as usual from leads in the newspaper, already has three closed investigations -- the "ghostly" reports turned out to be manifestations of rats, water pipes, and alcohol. There are two remaining cases to solve -- Strange music heard on the Roosevelt Island Promenade, and Construction halted on 53rd street due to bizarre "accidents." We can pick up Lauren's dictaphone and camera before heading out to see what we can learn, and take a look at a family photo (seen in the first game, at a later time, in Rosa's apartment) to learn a bit about Lauren's family, and her late mother, former medium/custodian of Joey.
Blackwell Unbound features the streamlined pick-a-destination navigation approach common to modern adventure games, and as a minor but effective detail, the New York city skyline circa 1973 still features the World Trade Center. We can choose to visit Roosevelt Park or 53rd Street; there's no fixed order to resolving these investigations, though for coherence here I will focus on one at a time.
The park features a ghostly jazzman, playing his translucent saxophone in the dark of the night. He won't tell Lauren anything about himself. He won't respond to Joey either -- but as a fellow ghost, at least Joey can harass him by pulling on his saxophone. The startled spirit thinks he is onstage at Johnny Ivory's, having his set interrupted, and whacks Joey with his sax after a few exchanges (apparently ghosts can feel pain when it's inflicted by another ghost with a suitably ghostly implement.) We'll need to figure out more about Johnny Ivory's before he'll say anything useful, it seems.
Back at the apartment, we can look up Johnny Ivory's in an old-fashioned 1973 phonebook to find the place, at Bleeker and 7th; it's a jazz club, which Joey looks forward to visiting. (We can also call up Rabbi Stone from Gilbert's earlier game, The Shivah, though he has nothing to say to us; it's just a little in-joke.)
The Blackwell games feature moody NYC-influenced scores, and composer Thomas Regin makes solid use of modern non-MIDI technology at Johnny Ivory's, with real pianos and saxophones. A man plays the piano, and flirts with Lauren ("These fingers can go all night long.") His name is purportedly C. Sharpe -- get it? -- and he knows musicians, but the jazzman's description doesn't ring a bell. A photo on the wall depicts a beautiful singer, an older sax player who Lauren recognizes as the ghost, and a younger pianist whose face is obscured -- we should note that the photo is provided by Jambalaya Records.
C. claims not to know anything about the band in the photo (and Gilbert's commentary, well worth listening to on a second playthrough, reveals that he wrote explanatory dialogue here, but due to an oversight never got the voice actor to record it, and so had to patch it in by recycling existing dialogue.) Lauren can't examine C.'s sheet music, but Joey can float up to look over his shoulder and observe that C. actually wrote the song he's playing, and that his full name is Cecil Sharpe, a detail he readily admits to when Lauren asks.
We stop back at the apartment to get the address for Jambalaya Records, and the phone is ringing; it's Lauren's brother, Jack. She listens to his voice but does not reply before hanging up; judging from her comments earlier about the family photo, she thinks her brother will have a better life if he has no contact with her. It's an odd and poignant moment -- we can get Lauren to call Jack back, but she won't say anything before hanging up again.
So we're off to Jambalaya Records to talk to the proprietor, Dwayne, a Jamaican one-man promotion and management operation for small, unknown jazz and reggae groups. He can't help identify our mystery sax player without seeing the photo, and he's too busy to go to Johnny Ivory's. So it's time to use Lauren's 1973 instant non-digital camera. With the photo, we learn the band was a lounge jazz group called the C-Sharps, and that they haven't been active for 8 or 10 years. But Cecil still claims ignorance.
So it's time to use another of the Blackwell series' core mechanics -- we can combine items in Lauren's notebook to draw conclusions and come up with new topics. Combining Cecil Sharpe and the C-Sharps produces a new C Sharps and Cecil Sharpe item. Now we can ask Cecil directly if he was ever in a band called the C-Sharps... but he still denies it.
Paying the jazzman a second visit introduces us to The Countess, an older woman who seems seriously imbalanced but is not a beggar or bag lady; she claims to see patterns in the world, of dire import, before she leaves in a righteous huff. Talking to the jazzman doesn't produce any new information, but Dwayne at Jambalaya confirms that Cecil Sharpe was the band leader of the C-Sharps, and an impressive pianist. Now we can confront Cecil, and after he admits that he was the leader of the C-Sharps, he tells us that the sax player's name is Isaac Brown, and someone strangled him to death. We also learn that a reporter named Mitchell from the New Yorker magazine came around asking questions about Isaac at one time, before he died; Cecil also lets on that he was not unhappy to see Isaac go.
Joey can now talk to the ghost of Isaac Brown, who is still not very talkative, but confirms that the New Yorker reporter asked him about his life. Back home, we can call the magazine's editorial offices and learn that the reporter's name is Joseph Mitchell - an actual reporter for the magazine in the real world. He won't answer his phone, but we can go up to the office to see him. The New Yorker sequences are like some other instances in the Blackwell series -- we can't do anything but talk to our target; there are no props or puzzles in the room to deal with, so we can only enter, have a conversation, and leave.
Mitchell won't talk much about himself, or about the late Mr. Brown, but confirms that he did interview him... and lets slip that Brown had a sister. We also learn that he never published his article after Brown was strangled, out of respect (or so he says.)
Trying to ask Cecil about his sister provokes an angry response, and he clams up. We can try again, but Joey's negative assessment of Lauren's PR skills is generally accurate. And Isaac's ghost is no more talkative than before, nor is Dwayne. Joey seems to be volunteering to help, but beyond noting that Cecil seems hung up on a girl, he can't really do anything. This observation does, however, open up some conversational options for Lauren, asking him about love and his unwillingness to let go of the past, and we learn that his sister Sarah Brown died after an illness destroyed her singing voice, then Isaac did too. Cecil says that Isaac was a violent heavy drinker in life, and he feels a bit responsible for how Isaac ended up after Cecil fired him. He also mentions that Sarah and Isaac used to play a duet at the band's gigs -- so maybe we should use Lauren's dictaphone to capture a sample? This doesn't seem possible, but we can listen to Lauren's own recordings -- she has been capturing her dreams, many of which seem to foreshadow events in other Blackwell games.
We're on the right track, though -- we have to ask Cecil about the duet a second time, and then pull out the dictaphone while he's playing. With the song recorded, we can return to Roosevelt Park, and play it for Isaac -- he plays his part of the duet, and a really nice moment, emotional and sweet and melancholy. Isaac realizes he's dead, and Sarah is dead, and now he is ready to go. As he passes into the light, he mentions an old lady who promised to help him, but then strangled him. And when Lauren comes back to our own plane, there's a strange old woman hassling Joey; yes, she can talk to ghosts, and she is the Countess. She thinks she is saving people, like Lauren and Joey do, but she's killing living people. Joey and Lauren try to catch her, but she gets away after Lauren runs out of breath (Gilbert explains that this was a development of convenience -- he wanted to implement some sort of chase sequence, but the game's budget did not allow it.)
After we return to the apartment, Lauren goes out to the balcony for another smoke, and we have to use Joey to get her moving again by engaging her in a little conversation about the mysterious Countess.
Joseph Mitchell doesn't know anything about her, so we'll go investigate the construction site at 53rd and Lexington.
Lauren can't get past the gated wall around the project, but Joey can simply pass through. The ghost of a middle-aged woman wanders aimlessly in this area, repeatedly saying, "My home..." Apparently she used to live in the building that formerly stood on this site. She refuses to acknowledge Joey because he hasn't properly knocked to gain admittance, and his spoken "Um, knock knock?" fails to convince her.
Getting Rosa to knock on the gate gains Joey "entrance" to the ghost's "apartment." She doesn't accept Joey's version of reality, and insists she's in her third-floor apartment, with a "D" on the door; I thought at first that this was her initial, but it's actually part of her apartment number. It becomes clear that she tried to stand her ground when the building was slated to be torn down by a developer, refusing to leave her apartment. We can claim to be various people, but she always sees through Joey's ruse and concludes he is one of "them," presumably her eventual evictors.
In the Seagram Realty foreman's trailer parked on the site, Joey can read a letter on a desk from a Mrs. Harriet Sherman, who apparently moved out but hasn't gotten compensation payments as promised. There's a Farrah Fawcett calendar on the wall, as a little 1970s reminder, except she wasn't yet a TV celebrity in 1973, as Gilbert acknowledges in his commentary.
Looking up Harriet Sherman in the phone book gets us into her retirement home down in Battery Park City. She claims she's owed sixty dollars by the realty company, but is willing to answer some questions. Lauren can take the contents of her rainy day jar along to cover the debt, which is useful because she won't talk otherwise. And she won't give the money back, even after Lauren admits that she doesn't really work for Seagram Realty, so it's good we don't need the money for any other purpose in this game. Like most of the environments in Blackwell Unbound, Harriet's apartment is full of carefully observed incidental detail, like the cheesy seashell wallpaper and plastic fruit display:
Harriet says she did see a strange old lady back at the old building, if we ask her about the Countess, but it falls far short of a positive ID. She says everyone but Mavis Wilcox was happy about the buyout of the old building, but she was a lunatic. We also learn that she didn't leave the building alive -- she was strangled. It seems there's a common thread between these hauntings.
Mavis still won't talk about herself or answer any of Joey's questions. But Joseph Mitchell, oddly enough, knew Mavis Wilcox too, and interviewed her shortly before she died, for another unpublished piece. She was indeed intensely loyal to the building, and almost never left it, but was nice enough; she had family. We can try to look up Wilcox in the phone book, but we need to be more specific as there are a number of them listed. Harriet has some mail that came for Mavis after she died, but she's had it for six months and no relatives have come looking. She allows Lauren to take the envelope, which contains a thank you note from Joseph Mitchell, and a photograph of Mavis with a college-age kid in a Columbia sweatshirt which the reporter was returning.
So can we figure out who this kid is? It's probably family. We can call Columbia University, but we can't get the operator to do anything beyond directing our call. But Joey can claim to be Mavis' son -- gaining some new information as she says, "Sam?" -- and now we can ask her some questions. She says nobody comes to see her, except the grocer on occasion, and somebody she doesn't want to talk about. We can rather insensitively (in Joey's hands) learn that Sam had no brothers and/or sisters, and that his late father's name was John Durkin. She emphatically denies seeing any strange old women around if we ask her about the Countess, but she seems to be dissembling.
There's no phone listing for Sam Wilcox, or Sam Durkin. Mitchell says Mavis seemed proud of Sam, but he got the impression he didn't visit often. And she was divorced from John Durkin several years before he died. Harriet's no use on these topics. So how do we convince Mavis that she's dead? She seems fixated on her address, and the "D" on her apartment door -- this seems odd but turns out to be one of those interactive fiction necessities, a hint that has to be repeated in case we didn't pick up on it earlier.
We can combine "Sam" and "John Durkin" in Lauren's notebook to draw the conclusion that Sam's last name is probably Durkin (this being 1973 and all.) Now Lauren can call Columbia University and talk to the young man (who, Dave Gilbert's commentary informs us, is also a character in Wadjet Eye's first release, The Shivah.) We have to give him Mavis' apartment number, 3D, to convince him we knew his mother (we piece this together from our conversations earlier -- third floor, "D" on the door.)
Sam believes his mother essentially committed suicide by refusing to leave, but doesn't have any theories about her murder. We learn that he once gave her a Mother's Day gift, but can't find out what it was.
The notebook metaphor occasionally breaks down -- it works well for establishing connections between topics so we can learn more about specific details in conversation, but obvious connections that should make sense often result in a default, "Hm, no, I don't see any connection" statement from Lauren. This is kind of jarring when we know, for example, that Sam Durkin was the son of John Durkin and are just trying to make sure Lauren knows it too.
We can now talk to Mavis about the gift, but, reduced to guessing, we don't make much headway. It's not flowers, or any of the other available items in the conversation tree. Fortunately, Joseph Mitchell recalls her showing it to him -- a leather bound edition of Alice in Wonderland. Asking to see it induces Mavis to tell him it's right on the table... and then realize that she can't find it, or pick it up. This creates an opening for Joey to force her to recognize that everything is gone, the apartment and everything in it, by suggesting she look for the book out in the hallway, and then leading her outside the construction zone. She is upset and angry that the apartment has been torn down, but at least she realizes she is dead.
Taking her off into nodespace (a term for the Void that's not, as far as I recall, actually used in the games, but is used in Gilbert's commentary here) lets Lauren send Mavis off into the light. But before she goes, she also mentions an old woman who said she was going to help her, but killed her instead.
So how does this end? Ah, now that both cases are solved, Lauren and Joey are about to call it a night at the construction site when the Countess shows up. In the Isaac Brown scenario it was hard to tell if she was alive or dead, because the lighting and background made her look semi-transparent, but now we can see she's flesh and blood. She's also a deluded medium -- she thinks she's helping spirits enter the next world by strangling people who don't, apparently, meet her standards of happiness. Again, we don't get to track the Countess down -- Lauren runs into a lamppost offscreen, and we're back at her apartment again.
Lauren takes another smoke break, and as Joey we can engage her in speculation about the Countess. She's clearly a medium, as she can see Joey, but she has no spirit guide -- was her guide "killed" somehow, if that's even possible? Is this Lauren's future, losing her sanity as life goes on? The Countess clearly has some connection to the spirit world... the list of names we can discuss from both cases has only one obviously in common, and that's Joseph Mitchell. Joey takes a bit of a jump to the conclusion that Mitchell's writing is somehow telling the Countess who needs to be "helped."
Confronting Mitchell reveals that he hasn't actually written anything today -- earlier we noticed that his typewriter seemed dusty from disuse. Noting that two people he was writing about are now dead provokes him to say it's just coincidence, but calling his bluff softens his reaction and he admits he stopped writing after the deaths. (In real life, Joseph Mitchell did suddenly cease being productive, though he still went to his office at the New Yorker every day for years. There's no evidence that this fictional situation was the reason, however.) Mitchell doesn't immediately accept Lauren's story about the Countess, or her reassurance that he's done nothing wrong; he sees his enforced, window-sitting existence as a penance, and mentions an earlier death we didn't know about. Three deaths, all people he was writing about, so he ceased writing. Lauren tries to get him to write about her, but he can't do it; she explains that she wants to force a confrontation with the Countess, and he finally acquiesces.
Now we wait for the Countess to arrive at Lauren's apartment, full of righteous zeal. And we learn that Joey actually cares about Lauren -- he is concerned for her safety, and doesn't want her to die. But before anything can get too weird or maudlin, the Countess shows up -- we can engage her in conversation to confirm our theory about her connection to the unknowing Mitchell. She also says that her spirit guide "went away" somehow, and snapped her mind. She also mentions that Lauren is loved, which doesn't make sense to her.
Lauren can offer to help the Countess, but she says she doesn't need any help. And then she begins strangling Lauren.
Joey encourages her to fight -- we have control, but most of the items in Lauren's inventory don't really count as weapons... until we, er, light upon her lit cigarette. We can blind the Countess with a quick jab to the face, but then Lauren collapses from the attack. Joey challenges the Countess to help him, an actual spirit, and he can keep talking to her, slowly backing out onto and past the balcony as she follows.
Then Lauren recovers, and can push the Countess over the edge, to her death. Oddly enough, the police don't get involved, but this is probably because the story is wrapping up, ending on an optimistic note as Lauren calls her brother Jack, who is due to be married soon. Joey thinks this is a bad idea, but we won't know why until later in the series.
The credits sequence features a nice, New York piano bar kind of song with vocals. The game presages The Walking Dead by several years by keeping a few statistics just for fun -- in my playthrough, Lauren smoked 50 cigarettes and Joey was hit 11 times by Isaac's saxophone:
I really like Wadjet Eye's approach -- they've brought back the nostalgic LucasArts style, while taking a more modern "indie" approach to storytelling. There aren't a lot of puzzles to solve here, and the fantastic elements are really just a hook for stories about human beings. The main attraction of Blackwell Unbound, and indeed the entire series of Blackwell games, lies in its well-realized sense of character and atmosphere. I won't be covering the next game in the series, The Blackwell Convergence, for a while, as its 2009 release means my self-imposed five-year embargo on new commercial titles is in the way. But I have played it and can recommend it; I look forward to covering it officially, probably sometime in 2014.
Blackwell Unbound focuses on Rosa Blackwell's aunt, Lauren, whom we heard about but never saw in The Blackwell Legacy, and her own adventures with our favorite spirit guide Joey back in the 1970s. Lauren's story mirrors Rosa's, as she tries to help some unfortunate ghosts pass on to the next plane of existence in New York City. As is the case with most of Wadjet Eye's titles, the graphical style is intentionally retro, but the VGA-resolution visuals take advantage of modern color depth and transparency effects. The game also benefits from an evocative, jazzy score by Thomas Regin and a talented cast of voice actors who interpret Gilbert's dialogue with humor and sensitivity. There's also an optional commentary track, allowing the author to inject background and anecdotes, but for obvious reasons it should not be turned on for the first playthrough.
As always, I encourage readers to explore Blackwell Unbound before continuing here -- this 2007 adventure is commercially available from the publisher, and also via Steam, as a single title or as part of the Blackwell Bundle trilogy set. It's not a difficult game -- persistence and thoughtful consideration pay off -- and it's very reasonably priced at US$4.99 (at this writing). Beyond this point, be warned -- much of the fun of adventure games lies in experiencing the story first-hand, and my remaining commentary will necessarily provide plenty of...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
The story opens with Lauren standing in the Void, the passage for spirits established in the first game, pondering the nature of infinity.
Then we're back in her apartment, where she has to indulge her cigarette addiction before getting on with the case at hand. It's odd not having our old friend, Lauren's niece Rosa Blackwell, involved, but it's also interesting to see Joey in a slightly different milieu, at a different time in his post-life. We actually get direct control of Joey first, an interface improvement not available in the first game, while Lauren takes a smoke break on the balcony -- we have to get her back on task. Because Joey can't physically interact with the world (he can't even blow on things in this game), his limitations usually make for interesting information/conversation puzzles.
Clearly Lauren is mad at Joey, and chatting eventually establishes that some pipes unexpectedly burst during an investigation earlier today, Lauren got soaked, and he laughed. This is unusual for an adventure game -- we're dropping into an established relationship, without the usual intro and orientation; in this case, the first game provides some context, although one needn't have played it to join in progress here. This exchange establishes the relationship between the characters, and Lauren's addictive personality, before we get into the plot; it works well.
Lauren's case list, drawn as usual from leads in the newspaper, already has three closed investigations -- the "ghostly" reports turned out to be manifestations of rats, water pipes, and alcohol. There are two remaining cases to solve -- Strange music heard on the Roosevelt Island Promenade, and Construction halted on 53rd street due to bizarre "accidents." We can pick up Lauren's dictaphone and camera before heading out to see what we can learn, and take a look at a family photo (seen in the first game, at a later time, in Rosa's apartment) to learn a bit about Lauren's family, and her late mother, former medium/custodian of Joey.
Blackwell Unbound features the streamlined pick-a-destination navigation approach common to modern adventure games, and as a minor but effective detail, the New York city skyline circa 1973 still features the World Trade Center. We can choose to visit Roosevelt Park or 53rd Street; there's no fixed order to resolving these investigations, though for coherence here I will focus on one at a time.
The park features a ghostly jazzman, playing his translucent saxophone in the dark of the night. He won't tell Lauren anything about himself. He won't respond to Joey either -- but as a fellow ghost, at least Joey can harass him by pulling on his saxophone. The startled spirit thinks he is onstage at Johnny Ivory's, having his set interrupted, and whacks Joey with his sax after a few exchanges (apparently ghosts can feel pain when it's inflicted by another ghost with a suitably ghostly implement.) We'll need to figure out more about Johnny Ivory's before he'll say anything useful, it seems.
Back at the apartment, we can look up Johnny Ivory's in an old-fashioned 1973 phonebook to find the place, at Bleeker and 7th; it's a jazz club, which Joey looks forward to visiting. (We can also call up Rabbi Stone from Gilbert's earlier game, The Shivah, though he has nothing to say to us; it's just a little in-joke.)
The Blackwell games feature moody NYC-influenced scores, and composer Thomas Regin makes solid use of modern non-MIDI technology at Johnny Ivory's, with real pianos and saxophones. A man plays the piano, and flirts with Lauren ("These fingers can go all night long.") His name is purportedly C. Sharpe -- get it? -- and he knows musicians, but the jazzman's description doesn't ring a bell. A photo on the wall depicts a beautiful singer, an older sax player who Lauren recognizes as the ghost, and a younger pianist whose face is obscured -- we should note that the photo is provided by Jambalaya Records.
C. claims not to know anything about the band in the photo (and Gilbert's commentary, well worth listening to on a second playthrough, reveals that he wrote explanatory dialogue here, but due to an oversight never got the voice actor to record it, and so had to patch it in by recycling existing dialogue.) Lauren can't examine C.'s sheet music, but Joey can float up to look over his shoulder and observe that C. actually wrote the song he's playing, and that his full name is Cecil Sharpe, a detail he readily admits to when Lauren asks.
We stop back at the apartment to get the address for Jambalaya Records, and the phone is ringing; it's Lauren's brother, Jack. She listens to his voice but does not reply before hanging up; judging from her comments earlier about the family photo, she thinks her brother will have a better life if he has no contact with her. It's an odd and poignant moment -- we can get Lauren to call Jack back, but she won't say anything before hanging up again.
So we're off to Jambalaya Records to talk to the proprietor, Dwayne, a Jamaican one-man promotion and management operation for small, unknown jazz and reggae groups. He can't help identify our mystery sax player without seeing the photo, and he's too busy to go to Johnny Ivory's. So it's time to use Lauren's 1973 instant non-digital camera. With the photo, we learn the band was a lounge jazz group called the C-Sharps, and that they haven't been active for 8 or 10 years. But Cecil still claims ignorance.
So it's time to use another of the Blackwell series' core mechanics -- we can combine items in Lauren's notebook to draw conclusions and come up with new topics. Combining Cecil Sharpe and the C-Sharps produces a new C Sharps and Cecil Sharpe item. Now we can ask Cecil directly if he was ever in a band called the C-Sharps... but he still denies it.
Paying the jazzman a second visit introduces us to The Countess, an older woman who seems seriously imbalanced but is not a beggar or bag lady; she claims to see patterns in the world, of dire import, before she leaves in a righteous huff. Talking to the jazzman doesn't produce any new information, but Dwayne at Jambalaya confirms that Cecil Sharpe was the band leader of the C-Sharps, and an impressive pianist. Now we can confront Cecil, and after he admits that he was the leader of the C-Sharps, he tells us that the sax player's name is Isaac Brown, and someone strangled him to death. We also learn that a reporter named Mitchell from the New Yorker magazine came around asking questions about Isaac at one time, before he died; Cecil also lets on that he was not unhappy to see Isaac go.
Joey can now talk to the ghost of Isaac Brown, who is still not very talkative, but confirms that the New Yorker reporter asked him about his life. Back home, we can call the magazine's editorial offices and learn that the reporter's name is Joseph Mitchell - an actual reporter for the magazine in the real world. He won't answer his phone, but we can go up to the office to see him. The New Yorker sequences are like some other instances in the Blackwell series -- we can't do anything but talk to our target; there are no props or puzzles in the room to deal with, so we can only enter, have a conversation, and leave.
Mitchell won't talk much about himself, or about the late Mr. Brown, but confirms that he did interview him... and lets slip that Brown had a sister. We also learn that he never published his article after Brown was strangled, out of respect (or so he says.)
Trying to ask Cecil about his sister provokes an angry response, and he clams up. We can try again, but Joey's negative assessment of Lauren's PR skills is generally accurate. And Isaac's ghost is no more talkative than before, nor is Dwayne. Joey seems to be volunteering to help, but beyond noting that Cecil seems hung up on a girl, he can't really do anything. This observation does, however, open up some conversational options for Lauren, asking him about love and his unwillingness to let go of the past, and we learn that his sister Sarah Brown died after an illness destroyed her singing voice, then Isaac did too. Cecil says that Isaac was a violent heavy drinker in life, and he feels a bit responsible for how Isaac ended up after Cecil fired him. He also mentions that Sarah and Isaac used to play a duet at the band's gigs -- so maybe we should use Lauren's dictaphone to capture a sample? This doesn't seem possible, but we can listen to Lauren's own recordings -- she has been capturing her dreams, many of which seem to foreshadow events in other Blackwell games.
We're on the right track, though -- we have to ask Cecil about the duet a second time, and then pull out the dictaphone while he's playing. With the song recorded, we can return to Roosevelt Park, and play it for Isaac -- he plays his part of the duet, and a really nice moment, emotional and sweet and melancholy. Isaac realizes he's dead, and Sarah is dead, and now he is ready to go. As he passes into the light, he mentions an old lady who promised to help him, but then strangled him. And when Lauren comes back to our own plane, there's a strange old woman hassling Joey; yes, she can talk to ghosts, and she is the Countess. She thinks she is saving people, like Lauren and Joey do, but she's killing living people. Joey and Lauren try to catch her, but she gets away after Lauren runs out of breath (Gilbert explains that this was a development of convenience -- he wanted to implement some sort of chase sequence, but the game's budget did not allow it.)
After we return to the apartment, Lauren goes out to the balcony for another smoke, and we have to use Joey to get her moving again by engaging her in a little conversation about the mysterious Countess.
Joseph Mitchell doesn't know anything about her, so we'll go investigate the construction site at 53rd and Lexington.
Lauren can't get past the gated wall around the project, but Joey can simply pass through. The ghost of a middle-aged woman wanders aimlessly in this area, repeatedly saying, "My home..." Apparently she used to live in the building that formerly stood on this site. She refuses to acknowledge Joey because he hasn't properly knocked to gain admittance, and his spoken "Um, knock knock?" fails to convince her.
Getting Rosa to knock on the gate gains Joey "entrance" to the ghost's "apartment." She doesn't accept Joey's version of reality, and insists she's in her third-floor apartment, with a "D" on the door; I thought at first that this was her initial, but it's actually part of her apartment number. It becomes clear that she tried to stand her ground when the building was slated to be torn down by a developer, refusing to leave her apartment. We can claim to be various people, but she always sees through Joey's ruse and concludes he is one of "them," presumably her eventual evictors.
In the Seagram Realty foreman's trailer parked on the site, Joey can read a letter on a desk from a Mrs. Harriet Sherman, who apparently moved out but hasn't gotten compensation payments as promised. There's a Farrah Fawcett calendar on the wall, as a little 1970s reminder, except she wasn't yet a TV celebrity in 1973, as Gilbert acknowledges in his commentary.
Looking up Harriet Sherman in the phone book gets us into her retirement home down in Battery Park City. She claims she's owed sixty dollars by the realty company, but is willing to answer some questions. Lauren can take the contents of her rainy day jar along to cover the debt, which is useful because she won't talk otherwise. And she won't give the money back, even after Lauren admits that she doesn't really work for Seagram Realty, so it's good we don't need the money for any other purpose in this game. Like most of the environments in Blackwell Unbound, Harriet's apartment is full of carefully observed incidental detail, like the cheesy seashell wallpaper and plastic fruit display:
Harriet says she did see a strange old lady back at the old building, if we ask her about the Countess, but it falls far short of a positive ID. She says everyone but Mavis Wilcox was happy about the buyout of the old building, but she was a lunatic. We also learn that she didn't leave the building alive -- she was strangled. It seems there's a common thread between these hauntings.
Mavis still won't talk about herself or answer any of Joey's questions. But Joseph Mitchell, oddly enough, knew Mavis Wilcox too, and interviewed her shortly before she died, for another unpublished piece. She was indeed intensely loyal to the building, and almost never left it, but was nice enough; she had family. We can try to look up Wilcox in the phone book, but we need to be more specific as there are a number of them listed. Harriet has some mail that came for Mavis after she died, but she's had it for six months and no relatives have come looking. She allows Lauren to take the envelope, which contains a thank you note from Joseph Mitchell, and a photograph of Mavis with a college-age kid in a Columbia sweatshirt which the reporter was returning.
So can we figure out who this kid is? It's probably family. We can call Columbia University, but we can't get the operator to do anything beyond directing our call. But Joey can claim to be Mavis' son -- gaining some new information as she says, "Sam?" -- and now we can ask her some questions. She says nobody comes to see her, except the grocer on occasion, and somebody she doesn't want to talk about. We can rather insensitively (in Joey's hands) learn that Sam had no brothers and/or sisters, and that his late father's name was John Durkin. She emphatically denies seeing any strange old women around if we ask her about the Countess, but she seems to be dissembling.
There's no phone listing for Sam Wilcox, or Sam Durkin. Mitchell says Mavis seemed proud of Sam, but he got the impression he didn't visit often. And she was divorced from John Durkin several years before he died. Harriet's no use on these topics. So how do we convince Mavis that she's dead? She seems fixated on her address, and the "D" on her apartment door -- this seems odd but turns out to be one of those interactive fiction necessities, a hint that has to be repeated in case we didn't pick up on it earlier.
We can combine "Sam" and "John Durkin" in Lauren's notebook to draw the conclusion that Sam's last name is probably Durkin (this being 1973 and all.) Now Lauren can call Columbia University and talk to the young man (who, Dave Gilbert's commentary informs us, is also a character in Wadjet Eye's first release, The Shivah.) We have to give him Mavis' apartment number, 3D, to convince him we knew his mother (we piece this together from our conversations earlier -- third floor, "D" on the door.)
Sam believes his mother essentially committed suicide by refusing to leave, but doesn't have any theories about her murder. We learn that he once gave her a Mother's Day gift, but can't find out what it was.
The notebook metaphor occasionally breaks down -- it works well for establishing connections between topics so we can learn more about specific details in conversation, but obvious connections that should make sense often result in a default, "Hm, no, I don't see any connection" statement from Lauren. This is kind of jarring when we know, for example, that Sam Durkin was the son of John Durkin and are just trying to make sure Lauren knows it too.
We can now talk to Mavis about the gift, but, reduced to guessing, we don't make much headway. It's not flowers, or any of the other available items in the conversation tree. Fortunately, Joseph Mitchell recalls her showing it to him -- a leather bound edition of Alice in Wonderland. Asking to see it induces Mavis to tell him it's right on the table... and then realize that she can't find it, or pick it up. This creates an opening for Joey to force her to recognize that everything is gone, the apartment and everything in it, by suggesting she look for the book out in the hallway, and then leading her outside the construction zone. She is upset and angry that the apartment has been torn down, but at least she realizes she is dead.
Taking her off into nodespace (a term for the Void that's not, as far as I recall, actually used in the games, but is used in Gilbert's commentary here) lets Lauren send Mavis off into the light. But before she goes, she also mentions an old woman who said she was going to help her, but killed her instead.
So how does this end? Ah, now that both cases are solved, Lauren and Joey are about to call it a night at the construction site when the Countess shows up. In the Isaac Brown scenario it was hard to tell if she was alive or dead, because the lighting and background made her look semi-transparent, but now we can see she's flesh and blood. She's also a deluded medium -- she thinks she's helping spirits enter the next world by strangling people who don't, apparently, meet her standards of happiness. Again, we don't get to track the Countess down -- Lauren runs into a lamppost offscreen, and we're back at her apartment again.
Lauren takes another smoke break, and as Joey we can engage her in speculation about the Countess. She's clearly a medium, as she can see Joey, but she has no spirit guide -- was her guide "killed" somehow, if that's even possible? Is this Lauren's future, losing her sanity as life goes on? The Countess clearly has some connection to the spirit world... the list of names we can discuss from both cases has only one obviously in common, and that's Joseph Mitchell. Joey takes a bit of a jump to the conclusion that Mitchell's writing is somehow telling the Countess who needs to be "helped."
Confronting Mitchell reveals that he hasn't actually written anything today -- earlier we noticed that his typewriter seemed dusty from disuse. Noting that two people he was writing about are now dead provokes him to say it's just coincidence, but calling his bluff softens his reaction and he admits he stopped writing after the deaths. (In real life, Joseph Mitchell did suddenly cease being productive, though he still went to his office at the New Yorker every day for years. There's no evidence that this fictional situation was the reason, however.) Mitchell doesn't immediately accept Lauren's story about the Countess, or her reassurance that he's done nothing wrong; he sees his enforced, window-sitting existence as a penance, and mentions an earlier death we didn't know about. Three deaths, all people he was writing about, so he ceased writing. Lauren tries to get him to write about her, but he can't do it; she explains that she wants to force a confrontation with the Countess, and he finally acquiesces.
Now we wait for the Countess to arrive at Lauren's apartment, full of righteous zeal. And we learn that Joey actually cares about Lauren -- he is concerned for her safety, and doesn't want her to die. But before anything can get too weird or maudlin, the Countess shows up -- we can engage her in conversation to confirm our theory about her connection to the unknowing Mitchell. She also says that her spirit guide "went away" somehow, and snapped her mind. She also mentions that Lauren is loved, which doesn't make sense to her.
Lauren can offer to help the Countess, but she says she doesn't need any help. And then she begins strangling Lauren.
Joey encourages her to fight -- we have control, but most of the items in Lauren's inventory don't really count as weapons... until we, er, light upon her lit cigarette. We can blind the Countess with a quick jab to the face, but then Lauren collapses from the attack. Joey challenges the Countess to help him, an actual spirit, and he can keep talking to her, slowly backing out onto and past the balcony as she follows.
Then Lauren recovers, and can push the Countess over the edge, to her death. Oddly enough, the police don't get involved, but this is probably because the story is wrapping up, ending on an optimistic note as Lauren calls her brother Jack, who is due to be married soon. Joey thinks this is a bad idea, but we won't know why until later in the series.
The credits sequence features a nice, New York piano bar kind of song with vocals. The game presages The Walking Dead by several years by keeping a few statistics just for fun -- in my playthrough, Lauren smoked 50 cigarettes and Joey was hit 11 times by Isaac's saxophone:
I really like Wadjet Eye's approach -- they've brought back the nostalgic LucasArts style, while taking a more modern "indie" approach to storytelling. There aren't a lot of puzzles to solve here, and the fantastic elements are really just a hook for stories about human beings. The main attraction of Blackwell Unbound, and indeed the entire series of Blackwell games, lies in its well-realized sense of character and atmosphere. I won't be covering the next game in the series, The Blackwell Convergence, for a while, as its 2009 release means my self-imposed five-year embargo on new commercial titles is in the way. But I have played it and can recommend it; I look forward to covering it officially, probably sometime in 2014.
Calling Vintage Cyberstrikers...
I mentioned an early online game called Cyberstrike in a posting back in 2010, and as luck and the Internet will often have it, someone ran across it who's trying to reconnect with that community in 2012.
I wasn't a Cyberstriker myself, but it's interesting to see that the game survived until at least 2004 -- the magazine ad that inspired my post was from the early 1990s, so that's impressive longevity for an online game.
Anyway, I can't help this person out, but if the handle KillerDoGG rings a bell with you from Cyberstrikes of yore, he invites you to drop him a line at steven_fleshman@ymail.com:
I wasn't a Cyberstriker myself, but it's interesting to see that the game survived until at least 2004 -- the magazine ad that inspired my post was from the early 1990s, so that's impressive longevity for an online game.
Anyway, I can't help this person out, but if the handle KillerDoGG rings a bell with you from Cyberstrikes of yore, he invites you to drop him a line at steven_fleshman@ymail.com:
Hi i am trying very hard to contact my old friends from cyberstrike days 1996 till 2004. If you have any old contacts from then till now it would mean a great deal to me. you could sinply drop the name KillerDoGG and my email on your blog and i would be grateful.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
The LoadDown -- 08/23/2012
The pace is picking up a bit this week, as Nintendo tries a novel distribution approach for a substantial new release.
Wii Virtual Console -- The SNK Neo*Geo titles keep coming, with Metal Slug X, basically an enhanced version of Metal Slug 2. The whole Metal Slug series saw a disc-based release early in the Wii's life, but it's nice to have this well-animated action series available this way too.
DSiWare -- Just one new game here, as the 3DS XL debuts and Nintendo shifts its focus ever more in the direction of its newer portable system. Abyss is an exploration game where the player's robot must find resources in caverns, as visibility deteriorates over time and the tiny craft's thrusters combat gravity.
3DS eShop -- The big news here is that New Super Mario Bros. 2 is available as a downloadable title, arriving simultaneously with the physical, packaged retail release. Both editions are priced at $39.99, which seems wrong somehow given that no trucks, boxes, or plastic are involved in delivering the digital release -- but Nintendo is treading carefully at this stage, and likely doesn't want to stick retailers with dust-gathering shelf stock if the online channel suddenly explodes. There's also VectorRacing, rendered in seriously retro wireframe/vector style, and in true 3-D to boot.
XBox Live Arcade -- Two new games this week... see the PS3 section below for more info on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure HD.
PS3 on PSN -- Four, count 'em, four new titles this week. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure HD brings the anime-inspired Dreamcast fighting game back for another round. Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive brings the latest in the popular multiplayer team combat series to the PS3, arriving simultaneously with PC, Mac and XBox 360 releases. Retro/Grade is an indie rhythm/shooting game where the player must re-fight a space battle -- backwards, to preserve the space-time continuum. And Deep Black is an underwater swimmer/shooter originally announced as Underwater Wars.
Wii Virtual Console -- The SNK Neo*Geo titles keep coming, with Metal Slug X, basically an enhanced version of Metal Slug 2. The whole Metal Slug series saw a disc-based release early in the Wii's life, but it's nice to have this well-animated action series available this way too.
DSiWare -- Just one new game here, as the 3DS XL debuts and Nintendo shifts its focus ever more in the direction of its newer portable system. Abyss is an exploration game where the player's robot must find resources in caverns, as visibility deteriorates over time and the tiny craft's thrusters combat gravity.
3DS eShop -- The big news here is that New Super Mario Bros. 2 is available as a downloadable title, arriving simultaneously with the physical, packaged retail release. Both editions are priced at $39.99, which seems wrong somehow given that no trucks, boxes, or plastic are involved in delivering the digital release -- but Nintendo is treading carefully at this stage, and likely doesn't want to stick retailers with dust-gathering shelf stock if the online channel suddenly explodes. There's also VectorRacing, rendered in seriously retro wireframe/vector style, and in true 3-D to boot.
XBox Live Arcade -- Two new games this week... see the PS3 section below for more info on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure HD.
PS3 on PSN -- Four, count 'em, four new titles this week. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure HD brings the anime-inspired Dreamcast fighting game back for another round. Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive brings the latest in the popular multiplayer team combat series to the PS3, arriving simultaneously with PC, Mac and XBox 360 releases. Retro/Grade is an indie rhythm/shooting game where the player must re-fight a space battle -- backwards, to preserve the space-time continuum. And Deep Black is an underwater swimmer/shooter originally announced as Underwater Wars.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Adventure of the Week: Alexis Adventure (1983)
This week, we're taking a look at a TRS-80 text adventure of uncertain provenance -- I haven't been able to track down an author, but Alexis Adventure was published in the January 1983 issue of the cassette-based CLOAD magazine. It's a fairly straightforward adventure based on Greek history and mythology. As Alexis V of Xanthus, we must reclaim our father's crown by escaping jail, traveling to four other islands, finding the Crystal Sphere, raising an army, and battling General Tarkaan, usurper of the throne.
Alexis Adventure is written in BASIC, and competently executed, though the parser is occasionally obstructive and a few of the puzzles don't readily present themselves as such. There's also one situation that can occur randomly and forces a complete restart, as the game has no SAVE command. But it's not unsophisticated -- the text is in upper and lowercase (something of a rarity for the era), and there's even an unexpected twist to the game mechanics at the end.
I encourage interested readers to sample Alexis independently before proceeding with my comments, as always -- but in this case I must add an additional caveat. This adventure is actually self-spoiling, as it displays all the locations, objects and verbs onscreen while it's building its database! So if you really want to avoid any giveaways, close your eyes for about twenty seconds after getting past the instructions. And if you've played the game already, or don't intend to, feel free to march your faithful soldiers into the...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
Our hero starts out in a jail cell, holding a small pouch, which very conveniently contains a skeleton key. The engine is slightly cumbersome -- while each room starts out with a Scott Adams-style display, the room description eventually scrolls off and does not refresh without a LOOK. So when we OPEN POUCH, we see something interesting, but EXAMINE POUCH just tells us that It looks like a small pouch. We have to LOOK at the room to see that the act of opening the pouch dropped the skeleton key on the floor. And, as is sometimes the case in hobbyist-created adventure games, if we OPEN POUCH a second time the key is spirited out of our possession and back onto the floor.
There are quite a few locations in this game, but there isn't much for us to do in most of them. We can explore the great city on the island of Xanthus, behold a valley where many battles were fought, and find the palace gates where a suspicious guard will not let us pass. But there are no objects of interest here -- all we can really do is make our way to the dock and board a sailing ship, the Xenophon, which fortunately we are free to command.
The sailing navigation is rather odd -- it seems to be semi-random, and doesn't force us to stay inside what seems to be a local 9 x 9 grid; some confusion results from the game's announcement of "Land!" whenever we're near an island, without telling us which of the game's five islands it might be or in which direction we can see it. In general, Xanthus is to the north, Tripolis to the east, Hyklos to the far north, Skiros to the southeast, and Ikaria to the southwest . We have to watch the weather -- we can end our journey by drowning in bad conditions, and this is somewhat random; it can even occur on our first move out of dock, so this can be fatal and game-restarting. Other than that glitch, we are free to travel the archipelago, visiting and returning to each island at will (assuming we can find our way there and back.)
On Tripolis, we can acquire a witch doctor's mask. There are angry natives in the village, and a cave with a portcullis and a suspiciously placed skull. We can PULL SKULL (not TAKE or TURN it) to reveal a passage. Inside we find a faded scroll, containing hieroglyphics (aren't those usually Egyptian?) telling of "the treasure of the shores of Skiros." Past the scroll we encounter an angry native armed with a spear; we can do the obvious and WEAR MASK, which frightens the poor fellow into running away, dropping his spear.
The cave also contains some magical phosphorescent light which we can simply TAKE with us, and a catapult. We can't GO or USE or ENTER or FIRE the catapult, it seems, or CATAPULT ME. Examination reveals that it has an ammunition chamber, and a lever. Hmmmm.
The island of Hyklos hosts a very dark cavern, so the phosphorescent light we picked up on Tripolis is important. Inside is the river Styx, and Charon, the traditional boatman. He won't let us on the boat -- we probably need a coin, per tradition. We'll have to come back here.
The island of Skiros has shores populated by tropical trees. We can CLIMB TREE and TAKE BANANAS there, but getting down is more of a challenge -- CLIMB DOWN and CLIMB TREE do not work, but for some reason going N does. The site of a recent forest fire yields charred pottery, still full of hot coals which ought to be useful for igniting something. A giant gorilla guards a map on the island's summit; we can't GIVE him the bananas, but if we drop them he'll take them and leave. The map thus obtained is no help for ocean navigation, but shows us a trail through a rockslide somewhere in the game's world. I tried to DIG for treasure all over the island, even though I had no special tools for doing so; I got no error responses, but still came up empty. There's also a wall of vines covering a passage to the south; we can BURN VINES with the hot coals to make our way inside. Here we find a sword of sharpness (unlike those cheap swords of dullness, apparently.)
The island of Ikaria contains the massive rockslide the map is supposed to help us with. The tidepools along the coast contain a huge oyster. We can simply OPEN OYSTER (with the sword of sharpness, apparently) to reveal a giant pearl, and leave the poor creature as an annihilated oyster. There's also a pickaxe available along another shore. With the map from Skiros in hand, we can... well, we can't GO ROCKSLIDE, or walk N into it, or USE MAP or FOLLOW MAP. But we can GO TRAIL to find a sheltered cove, where the fabled Cyclops lives, though perhaps not particularly lavishly, as he looks hungry. We can't KILL CYCLOPS -- no real surprise there -- and he doesn't want the oyster. And if we hang around too long, our hero gets eaten, so that's not useful for our purposes.
Going back to Xanthus, we can try to KILL GUARD outside the place, which gets us thrown back in jail... though none of our possessions are confiscated, it appears. Can we use the catapult on Tripolis? Yes, we can INSERT SPEAR - In 1 word, where will you insert it? - CATAPULT to load it into the long, narrow ammunition chamber. We PULL LEVER, and it fires but... hits nothing. At least we can retrieve the spear, now lying on the ground, and re-load. I assumed it would have more range... aha! The catapult is itself portable -- I was picturing something more substantial, I think the author is actually thinking of a crossbow.
Now we can kill the Cyclops with the catapult and spear, and take his eye as a trophy. We can't go anywhere beyond the Cyclops' lair, though, so what else is there to do? We can go back to Tripolis to check out the angry natives. We can't SHOW EYE or WAVE EYE or DROP EYE to impress them. What about the treasure on Skiros mentioned by the faded scroll? Now that we have the pickaxe, we can DIG and get a different response at our landing site -- we find a collection of gold coins.
Let's see if Charon will take a coin now, in the cave on Hyklos. It's a bit of a parser struggle, but GO FERRY takes care of the details, and we soon find ourselves on the other side of the Styx, where a three-headed wolf (probably a relative of Cerberus) blocks the way south. We can KILL WOLF, and the sword of sharpness handily dispatches the creature. To the south we find ourselves in Hell, where Pluto holds reign and the crystal sphere is visible.
It gets a little bit interesting here -- I think the author was trying to design an unpredictable puzzle, but if we've inadvertently anticipated that by carrying both the eye of the Cyclops and the oyster from Ikaria, the logic gets a little muddled. If we try to TAKE SPHERE, Pluto sees that you have the eye of the Cyclops, so he wants you to bring him the giant pearl of Ikaria instead. These underworld figures are always so deceptive and demanding! And even after we open the oyster we've been carrying, he still sees the eye and won't accept the pearl. We have to DROP EYE and then TAKE SPHERE, at which point the Lord of the Underworld will ignore the alternative lying on the ground, at last allowing us to give him the pearl in exchange for the sphere. The generic EXAMINE handler is disappointing here -- EXAMINE PLUTO yields only, It looks like Pluto - god of the underworld.
Now we must pay Charon for passage back to the other side of the Styx, and work on raising our army. The valley on Xanthus now shows 144 soldiers under General Tarkaan's command. They seem to be waiting for us to join the battle, but we have no soldiers and can't recruit any here. Back to Tripolis we go, where the formerly angry natives are now bowing and worshipping us as we have the fabled Crystal Sphere in hand. They happily join the cause, and we now (in my playthrough) have 174 soldiers in inventory -- let's hope their greater numbers are a match for Tarkaan's well-trained and equipped troops.
Somehow all of our Tripolean fighters fit on the Xenophon, and we can return to the valley on Xanthus. And suddenly, the game shifts modes -- it's no longer an adventure game, but a simple strategy exercise:
We can choose from four different tactics -- Defensive fortification, Frontal attack, Flanking maneuvers, and Encirclement of the enemy. Option #4, Encirclement, seems like a good choice, and it is -- since we have more soldiers, and can apparently move into surrounding positions quickly, Tarkaan's forces are quickly disposed of. If a tactic isn't working out, we can retreat and change our approach before we lose any more soldiers, but in truth the battle's development seems pretty random and the outcome is largely determined by the size of each side's forces. I retried the battle several times, and all four options worked fine for me with the numeric advantage I had. The code randomizes the number of soldiers on each side, between 125 and 225, so I may just have lucked out when the digital dice were rolled.
With Tarkaan's forces defeated, Alexis can walk through the unguarded palace gates, TAKE CROWN, WEAR CROWN... and victory is ours!
The length of Alexis V's reign is based on how long it takes us to finish the game -- I only got 8 years out of him, but the ocean navigation tends to take up a lot of moves while we try to find our way to the right island. I'm content with eight good years -- after all, that's as much as any U.S. President can ever get. The CLOAD adventure games don't have the consistency of similar series, like the SoftSide adventures, but this one provided good value back in the day, and was fun to revisit through in 2012.
Alexis Adventure is written in BASIC, and competently executed, though the parser is occasionally obstructive and a few of the puzzles don't readily present themselves as such. There's also one situation that can occur randomly and forces a complete restart, as the game has no SAVE command. But it's not unsophisticated -- the text is in upper and lowercase (something of a rarity for the era), and there's even an unexpected twist to the game mechanics at the end.
I encourage interested readers to sample Alexis independently before proceeding with my comments, as always -- but in this case I must add an additional caveat. This adventure is actually self-spoiling, as it displays all the locations, objects and verbs onscreen while it's building its database! So if you really want to avoid any giveaways, close your eyes for about twenty seconds after getting past the instructions. And if you've played the game already, or don't intend to, feel free to march your faithful soldiers into the...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
Our hero starts out in a jail cell, holding a small pouch, which very conveniently contains a skeleton key. The engine is slightly cumbersome -- while each room starts out with a Scott Adams-style display, the room description eventually scrolls off and does not refresh without a LOOK. So when we OPEN POUCH, we see something interesting, but EXAMINE POUCH just tells us that It looks like a small pouch. We have to LOOK at the room to see that the act of opening the pouch dropped the skeleton key on the floor. And, as is sometimes the case in hobbyist-created adventure games, if we OPEN POUCH a second time the key is spirited out of our possession and back onto the floor.
There are quite a few locations in this game, but there isn't much for us to do in most of them. We can explore the great city on the island of Xanthus, behold a valley where many battles were fought, and find the palace gates where a suspicious guard will not let us pass. But there are no objects of interest here -- all we can really do is make our way to the dock and board a sailing ship, the Xenophon, which fortunately we are free to command.
The sailing navigation is rather odd -- it seems to be semi-random, and doesn't force us to stay inside what seems to be a local 9 x 9 grid; some confusion results from the game's announcement of "Land!" whenever we're near an island, without telling us which of the game's five islands it might be or in which direction we can see it. In general, Xanthus is to the north, Tripolis to the east, Hyklos to the far north, Skiros to the southeast, and Ikaria to the southwest . We have to watch the weather -- we can end our journey by drowning in bad conditions, and this is somewhat random; it can even occur on our first move out of dock, so this can be fatal and game-restarting. Other than that glitch, we are free to travel the archipelago, visiting and returning to each island at will (assuming we can find our way there and back.)
On Tripolis, we can acquire a witch doctor's mask. There are angry natives in the village, and a cave with a portcullis and a suspiciously placed skull. We can PULL SKULL (not TAKE or TURN it) to reveal a passage. Inside we find a faded scroll, containing hieroglyphics (aren't those usually Egyptian?) telling of "the treasure of the shores of Skiros." Past the scroll we encounter an angry native armed with a spear; we can do the obvious and WEAR MASK, which frightens the poor fellow into running away, dropping his spear.
The cave also contains some magical phosphorescent light which we can simply TAKE with us, and a catapult. We can't GO or USE or ENTER or FIRE the catapult, it seems, or CATAPULT ME. Examination reveals that it has an ammunition chamber, and a lever. Hmmmm.
The island of Hyklos hosts a very dark cavern, so the phosphorescent light we picked up on Tripolis is important. Inside is the river Styx, and Charon, the traditional boatman. He won't let us on the boat -- we probably need a coin, per tradition. We'll have to come back here.
The island of Skiros has shores populated by tropical trees. We can CLIMB TREE and TAKE BANANAS there, but getting down is more of a challenge -- CLIMB DOWN and CLIMB TREE do not work, but for some reason going N does. The site of a recent forest fire yields charred pottery, still full of hot coals which ought to be useful for igniting something. A giant gorilla guards a map on the island's summit; we can't GIVE him the bananas, but if we drop them he'll take them and leave. The map thus obtained is no help for ocean navigation, but shows us a trail through a rockslide somewhere in the game's world. I tried to DIG for treasure all over the island, even though I had no special tools for doing so; I got no error responses, but still came up empty. There's also a wall of vines covering a passage to the south; we can BURN VINES with the hot coals to make our way inside. Here we find a sword of sharpness (unlike those cheap swords of dullness, apparently.)
The island of Ikaria contains the massive rockslide the map is supposed to help us with. The tidepools along the coast contain a huge oyster. We can simply OPEN OYSTER (with the sword of sharpness, apparently) to reveal a giant pearl, and leave the poor creature as an annihilated oyster. There's also a pickaxe available along another shore. With the map from Skiros in hand, we can... well, we can't GO ROCKSLIDE, or walk N into it, or USE MAP or FOLLOW MAP. But we can GO TRAIL to find a sheltered cove, where the fabled Cyclops lives, though perhaps not particularly lavishly, as he looks hungry. We can't KILL CYCLOPS -- no real surprise there -- and he doesn't want the oyster. And if we hang around too long, our hero gets eaten, so that's not useful for our purposes.
Going back to Xanthus, we can try to KILL GUARD outside the place, which gets us thrown back in jail... though none of our possessions are confiscated, it appears. Can we use the catapult on Tripolis? Yes, we can INSERT SPEAR - In 1 word, where will you insert it? - CATAPULT to load it into the long, narrow ammunition chamber. We PULL LEVER, and it fires but... hits nothing. At least we can retrieve the spear, now lying on the ground, and re-load. I assumed it would have more range... aha! The catapult is itself portable -- I was picturing something more substantial, I think the author is actually thinking of a crossbow.
Now we can kill the Cyclops with the catapult and spear, and take his eye as a trophy. We can't go anywhere beyond the Cyclops' lair, though, so what else is there to do? We can go back to Tripolis to check out the angry natives. We can't SHOW EYE or WAVE EYE or DROP EYE to impress them. What about the treasure on Skiros mentioned by the faded scroll? Now that we have the pickaxe, we can DIG and get a different response at our landing site -- we find a collection of gold coins.
Let's see if Charon will take a coin now, in the cave on Hyklos. It's a bit of a parser struggle, but GO FERRY takes care of the details, and we soon find ourselves on the other side of the Styx, where a three-headed wolf (probably a relative of Cerberus) blocks the way south. We can KILL WOLF, and the sword of sharpness handily dispatches the creature. To the south we find ourselves in Hell, where Pluto holds reign and the crystal sphere is visible.
It gets a little bit interesting here -- I think the author was trying to design an unpredictable puzzle, but if we've inadvertently anticipated that by carrying both the eye of the Cyclops and the oyster from Ikaria, the logic gets a little muddled. If we try to TAKE SPHERE, Pluto sees that you have the eye of the Cyclops, so he wants you to bring him the giant pearl of Ikaria instead. These underworld figures are always so deceptive and demanding! And even after we open the oyster we've been carrying, he still sees the eye and won't accept the pearl. We have to DROP EYE and then TAKE SPHERE, at which point the Lord of the Underworld will ignore the alternative lying on the ground, at last allowing us to give him the pearl in exchange for the sphere. The generic EXAMINE handler is disappointing here -- EXAMINE PLUTO yields only, It looks like Pluto - god of the underworld.
Now we must pay Charon for passage back to the other side of the Styx, and work on raising our army. The valley on Xanthus now shows 144 soldiers under General Tarkaan's command. They seem to be waiting for us to join the battle, but we have no soldiers and can't recruit any here. Back to Tripolis we go, where the formerly angry natives are now bowing and worshipping us as we have the fabled Crystal Sphere in hand. They happily join the cause, and we now (in my playthrough) have 174 soldiers in inventory -- let's hope their greater numbers are a match for Tarkaan's well-trained and equipped troops.
Somehow all of our Tripolean fighters fit on the Xenophon, and we can return to the valley on Xanthus. And suddenly, the game shifts modes -- it's no longer an adventure game, but a simple strategy exercise:
We can choose from four different tactics -- Defensive fortification, Frontal attack, Flanking maneuvers, and Encirclement of the enemy. Option #4, Encirclement, seems like a good choice, and it is -- since we have more soldiers, and can apparently move into surrounding positions quickly, Tarkaan's forces are quickly disposed of. If a tactic isn't working out, we can retreat and change our approach before we lose any more soldiers, but in truth the battle's development seems pretty random and the outcome is largely determined by the size of each side's forces. I retried the battle several times, and all four options worked fine for me with the numeric advantage I had. The code randomizes the number of soldiers on each side, between 125 and 225, so I may just have lucked out when the digital dice were rolled.
With Tarkaan's forces defeated, Alexis can walk through the unguarded palace gates, TAKE CROWN, WEAR CROWN... and victory is ours!
The length of Alexis V's reign is based on how long it takes us to finish the game -- I only got 8 years out of him, but the ocean navigation tends to take up a lot of moves while we try to find our way to the right island. I'm content with eight good years -- after all, that's as much as any U.S. President can ever get. The CLOAD adventure games don't have the consistency of similar series, like the SoftSide adventures, but this one provided good value back in the day, and was fun to revisit through in 2012.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
The LoadDown -- 08/16/2012
August plods along, with just a few new downloadable games on the wire...
WiiWare -- Nothing at all this Wiik.
DSiWare -- One new game -- Crazy Chicken: Pirates, a point-and-shoot stylus-driven rail shooter starring a bevy of piratical poultry that the player must knock out to win treasure. Judging from the title, it's meant to be part of a series.
3DS eShop -- I hesitate to call this a separate game, since the DSiWare version will run on the 3DS and it's about the same price, but if you want visual depth, you can buy Crazy Chicken: Pirates 3D instead.
XBox Live Arcade -- One new game here, as the Summer of Arcade wraps up: Dust: An Elysian Tale, an action RPG with beautiful hand-drawn animation. It's also notable for its indie cred, as it was developed mostly by one person and won the 2009 Dream.Build.Play challenge run by Microsoft.
PS3 on PSN -- Just one new game here as well, an intriguing indie puzzle/adventure game called Papo & Yo. The story concerns a frog-craving pink rhino named Monster, a toy (or is she?) robot named Lula, and a young boy hero named Quico; it's an allegory for alcoholism and the damage it inflicts on loved ones. And no, I'm not making that part up this week!
WiiWare -- Nothing at all this Wiik.
DSiWare -- One new game -- Crazy Chicken: Pirates, a point-and-shoot stylus-driven rail shooter starring a bevy of piratical poultry that the player must knock out to win treasure. Judging from the title, it's meant to be part of a series.
3DS eShop -- I hesitate to call this a separate game, since the DSiWare version will run on the 3DS and it's about the same price, but if you want visual depth, you can buy Crazy Chicken: Pirates 3D instead.
XBox Live Arcade -- One new game here, as the Summer of Arcade wraps up: Dust: An Elysian Tale, an action RPG with beautiful hand-drawn animation. It's also notable for its indie cred, as it was developed mostly by one person and won the 2009 Dream.Build.Play challenge run by Microsoft.
PS3 on PSN -- Just one new game here as well, an intriguing indie puzzle/adventure game called Papo & Yo. The story concerns a frog-craving pink rhino named Monster, a toy (or is she?) robot named Lula, and a young boy hero named Quico; it's an allegory for alcoholism and the damage it inflicts on loved ones. And no, I'm not making that part up this week!
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Adventure of the Week: Thunder Road (1980)
This week, our regular adventure series returns to the vintage TRS-80 era, with Thunder Road, an adventure game created by the father-and-daughter team of Don and Freda Boner. Billed as A TRUE LIFE ADVENTURE, this one has a refreshingly different theme -- we're runnin' moonshine and avoiding the sheriff in the hills of Kentucky.
I'm playing the original version, though the BASIC code I found in the archives seems to have been typed in by an anonymous benefactor, as there are a few textual differences between this version and the one published in the Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures. The game was commercially published by The Programmer's Guild in 1980 before appearing in print form, and has also been ported to the Commodore 64 and IBM PC.
The player's goal is simple -- we must DELIVER WHITE-LIGHTNING (MOONSHINE) FROM YOUR FARM IN GEORGETOWN THROUGH THE HILLS AND HOLLOWS TO KNAWBONE. (The original source code refers to POSSUM HOLLOW instead of GEORGETOWN, which may be a clue about where this version originated.) The intro tells us that is the player's official last run, trying to raise money for college before going straight, but warns us that IF THE LAW DON'T GET YOU, THE MOUNTAIN WILL.
Thunder Road is somewhat unusual among adventure games, as it has very few inventory objects, and no command for listing our current inventory. It's a linear story, with lots of dead-ends and single-choice scenarios, but the simple plot moves along quickly.
I always encourage interested readers to explore the games I cover here before reading my detailed comments; Thunder Road isn't difficult, as long as it's approached with persistence (and ideally an emulator with good save-state support.) I'm trying to capture these in detail for posterity, so I will have no qualms about revealing the plot, the puzzles, and the ending. In other words, beyond this point you'll find plentiful...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
We start out down on the farm, with a classic '57 SOUPED UP CHEVY LOADED WITH WHITE-LIGHTNING, along with an old barn and our faithful still. We can't GO BARN, but EXAMINE BARN suggests that THERE IS SOMETHING THERE. We have to ENTER BARN instead -- this may turn out to be an old-fashioned parser struggle in places.
The barn contains two spare tires and some parts for the still. GET PARTS is ineffective -- YOU NERD- WHAT WOULD I DO WITH IT -- but we can GET TIRES. Any unsuccessful GET, even for items that don't exist in the game, returns the default response, so we can't trick the parser into revealing clues about the dictionary.
We can't go N unless we're in the car; unlike the navigation systems in most adventure games, we'll be spending most of our time in our car. Immediately after leaving the farm we see that THE REVENUERS (horrors!) are ABOUT 10 MILES BEHIND ME, and we are approaching 3 FORKS IN THE ROAD. Going S does not take us back to the farm, but downhill on Dead Man's Curve, where we shortly perish; E takes us back to the farm.
Going W at the fork instead runs into a narrow road where DUMB OLD DEPUTY EARNEST HARDLEY has a roadblock set up. We can't JUMP ROADBLOCK -- the standard adventure game navigation system doesn't really capture the feel of speeding along mountain roads, I must say. If we hang around too long near the Deputy, though, we're arrested and the game is over.
North of the fork is a dead end where the revenuers shortly catch up with us, so we'd better see if we can talk to Deputy Hardley and get past his roadblock somehow. Any contact seems to lead to arrest. I tried to STEER CAR on Dead Man's Curve, revealing that we are ill-prepared for the task at hand, as apparently I NEVER LEARNED HOW TO 'STEER' SOMETHING. We can't HIT DEPUTY or AVOID ROADBLOCK, nor does it help to SPEED UP, PUSH GAS or DRIVE FAST. HELP just tells us that DEPUTY HARDLY DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH SENSE TO GET OUT OF THE RAIN. But we can RUN ROADBLOCK to get past it, smashing through it and leaving the angered deputy in the dust.
Past the roadblock, we come to a "T" in the road. Heading north takes us to some woods, where we find out that SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE CAR. We can EXIT CAR to find a FUNNY LOOKING BOX containing... A FORTUNE COOKIE. We can't GET COOKIE -- but OPEN COOKIE helpfully yields DON'T BE FUNNY. TRY, BREAK COOKIE. We BREAK COOKIE and WHAT DO YOU KNOW, A FORTURN! [sic -- but this isn't the Boners' fault, it's a mistype.] The fortune reads, cryptically, "HE WHO ABANDONS HOPE WILL BE CLOSED OUT." But if we dilly-dally too long here, the law soon catches up with us.
South of the T is a dark wood leading to a BUMPY ROAD where we see A CUTE BLOND LADY HITCHIKING [sic]. We should probably stay focused on the task at hand, but for history's sake I'll stop and... PICK UP BLOND? PICK UP LADY? GET LADY finally hints that we should TRY PICK-UP LADY. And after all that trouble, we see her take off in our car, with our precious cargo of moonshine. Restoring and just driving past her, we're still stuck; smoke pours out of the hood, the engine's blown, and we're arrested. There's nothing we can do to prevent this, it's just the wrong choice to make; Thunder Road's designers provide us with lots of choices, but in general only one is correct at any point.
Trying the northern route again, we see on closer examination that the problem with the car is that it has two flat tires. We CHANGE TIRES, using the spares we took from the barn at the start of the game, and we're automatically back on the road.
We soon come to another T intersection, this one branching east and west. W puts us IN D [typo] DARK TUNNEL, and continuing west brings us to where we see A STRANGE LIGHT UP AHEAD. I hope it's not a train! It's not, but going W again leads to another dead end, where we discover SHERIFF BUBA WITH A GUN AT MY HEAD. Man, I bet that guy would like to buy a B.
S leads to an UNKNOWN ROAD -- we're apparently not a very well-oriented ridge runner -- and driving west at that point leads to a lightning strike that sets the car on fire, destroying the moonshine and the player. Going south instead leads to a bridge... that's out, as helpfully noted by a sign. We can get out of the car to find an old pipe, which I never found a use for, and some bushes and tree limbs. We can't HIDE CAR or JUMP BRIDGE, but EXAMINE TREE discovers AN OLD ROAD BEHIND THE TREES! Fortunately we have time to MOVE TREES before the law catches up again.
Backtracking to check out more of the map, I learned that heading E of the east-west T leads to a gravel road, where the revenuers take a wrong turn; roads here lead east to a church parking lot or south back to the bridge area. We can get out of the car at the church, where we see AN OPEN DOOR; we can't ENTER DOOR but we can ENTER CHURCH to find a LARGE PIPE ORGAN. It's unplayable, it seems, but closer examination of the instrument yields A SET OF KEYS. These always come in handy in adventure games, so we'll take them with us.
Past the church is a GAS STATION, with paths leading back to the bridge area and the church. Taking the hidden road by the bridge leads to another dead end with a locked gate, and unlocking the gate is complicated by the LARGE MEAN LOOKING BEAR here. HELP suggests, perhaps unwisely, that we FIGHT IT! - and, to my great surprise, FIGHT BEAR actually works: OH NO ** WHAT A FIGHT ** YOU KILLED IT (though we can also randomly fail.) But then the law catches up again, while we were distracted beating a bear to death. This plays out much faster if we just UNLOCK GATE immediately after pulling up to it -- this seems to be a bug, actually, as afterward we just "GET BACK IN THE CAR," without ever having to deal with fighting the bear or even exiting the car.
Now we're driving across FARMER BROWN'S PASTURE, where we again have a few choices about which way to go, only one of which is a good idea. Driving south gets us permanently stuck in FARMER BROWN'S LAKE; the western route leads to a BULL PASTURE where bulls charge the car and we're dead again.
Going east gets us back on to the main road, where a sign indicates we're now just 2 MILES SOUTH OF KNAWBONE. Of course, another bridge between here and there is closed for repairs. The game's parser again reveals a refreshing sense of humor -- if we try to JUMP BRIDGE, we're told DON'T BE RIDICULOUS. WHAT I NEED TO DO IS JUMP RIDGE. That works, and after we JUMP RIDGE we find ourselves on the other side. One quick move north to Knawbone, and victory is ours!
These people must really like our moonshine -- they're prepared to give us ALL THEIR MONEY, which ought to cover the player's college education (at least, circa 1980.) It takes a village to raise a child, as they say --in this case, a booze-loving village with minimal living expenses and no sense of irony.
I hadn't played any of the Boner family adventure games before -- they created at least four titles for the TRS-80, working with Bob "Captain 80" Liddil's The Programmer's Guild. Thunder Road was a quick little game to play, something I appreciated after tackling more substantial adventures in recent weeks. The design is very linear, with numerous unpredictable fatal dead ends, but it has a sense of humor and with a modern emulator (and frequent saves) it's much more playable than it was back in the day. Good, albeit brief, stuff.
I'm playing the original version, though the BASIC code I found in the archives seems to have been typed in by an anonymous benefactor, as there are a few textual differences between this version and the one published in the Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures. The game was commercially published by The Programmer's Guild in 1980 before appearing in print form, and has also been ported to the Commodore 64 and IBM PC.
The player's goal is simple -- we must DELIVER WHITE-LIGHTNING (MOONSHINE) FROM YOUR FARM IN GEORGETOWN THROUGH THE HILLS AND HOLLOWS TO KNAWBONE. (The original source code refers to POSSUM HOLLOW instead of GEORGETOWN, which may be a clue about where this version originated.) The intro tells us that is the player's official last run, trying to raise money for college before going straight, but warns us that IF THE LAW DON'T GET YOU, THE MOUNTAIN WILL.
Thunder Road is somewhat unusual among adventure games, as it has very few inventory objects, and no command for listing our current inventory. It's a linear story, with lots of dead-ends and single-choice scenarios, but the simple plot moves along quickly.
I always encourage interested readers to explore the games I cover here before reading my detailed comments; Thunder Road isn't difficult, as long as it's approached with persistence (and ideally an emulator with good save-state support.) I'm trying to capture these in detail for posterity, so I will have no qualms about revealing the plot, the puzzles, and the ending. In other words, beyond this point you'll find plentiful...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
We start out down on the farm, with a classic '57 SOUPED UP CHEVY LOADED WITH WHITE-LIGHTNING, along with an old barn and our faithful still. We can't GO BARN, but EXAMINE BARN suggests that THERE IS SOMETHING THERE. We have to ENTER BARN instead -- this may turn out to be an old-fashioned parser struggle in places.
The barn contains two spare tires and some parts for the still. GET PARTS is ineffective -- YOU NERD- WHAT WOULD I DO WITH IT -- but we can GET TIRES. Any unsuccessful GET, even for items that don't exist in the game, returns the default response, so we can't trick the parser into revealing clues about the dictionary.
We can't go N unless we're in the car; unlike the navigation systems in most adventure games, we'll be spending most of our time in our car. Immediately after leaving the farm we see that THE REVENUERS (horrors!) are ABOUT 10 MILES BEHIND ME, and we are approaching 3 FORKS IN THE ROAD. Going S does not take us back to the farm, but downhill on Dead Man's Curve, where we shortly perish; E takes us back to the farm.
Going W at the fork instead runs into a narrow road where DUMB OLD DEPUTY EARNEST HARDLEY has a roadblock set up. We can't JUMP ROADBLOCK -- the standard adventure game navigation system doesn't really capture the feel of speeding along mountain roads, I must say. If we hang around too long near the Deputy, though, we're arrested and the game is over.
North of the fork is a dead end where the revenuers shortly catch up with us, so we'd better see if we can talk to Deputy Hardley and get past his roadblock somehow. Any contact seems to lead to arrest. I tried to STEER CAR on Dead Man's Curve, revealing that we are ill-prepared for the task at hand, as apparently I NEVER LEARNED HOW TO 'STEER' SOMETHING. We can't HIT DEPUTY or AVOID ROADBLOCK, nor does it help to SPEED UP, PUSH GAS or DRIVE FAST. HELP just tells us that DEPUTY HARDLY DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH SENSE TO GET OUT OF THE RAIN. But we can RUN ROADBLOCK to get past it, smashing through it and leaving the angered deputy in the dust.
Past the roadblock, we come to a "T" in the road. Heading north takes us to some woods, where we find out that SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE CAR. We can EXIT CAR to find a FUNNY LOOKING BOX containing... A FORTUNE COOKIE. We can't GET COOKIE -- but OPEN COOKIE helpfully yields DON'T BE FUNNY. TRY, BREAK COOKIE. We BREAK COOKIE and WHAT DO YOU KNOW, A FORTURN! [sic -- but this isn't the Boners' fault, it's a mistype.] The fortune reads, cryptically, "HE WHO ABANDONS HOPE WILL BE CLOSED OUT." But if we dilly-dally too long here, the law soon catches up with us.
South of the T is a dark wood leading to a BUMPY ROAD where we see A CUTE BLOND LADY HITCHIKING [sic]. We should probably stay focused on the task at hand, but for history's sake I'll stop and... PICK UP BLOND? PICK UP LADY? GET LADY finally hints that we should TRY PICK-UP LADY. And after all that trouble, we see her take off in our car, with our precious cargo of moonshine. Restoring and just driving past her, we're still stuck; smoke pours out of the hood, the engine's blown, and we're arrested. There's nothing we can do to prevent this, it's just the wrong choice to make; Thunder Road's designers provide us with lots of choices, but in general only one is correct at any point.
Trying the northern route again, we see on closer examination that the problem with the car is that it has two flat tires. We CHANGE TIRES, using the spares we took from the barn at the start of the game, and we're automatically back on the road.
We soon come to another T intersection, this one branching east and west. W puts us IN D [typo] DARK TUNNEL, and continuing west brings us to where we see A STRANGE LIGHT UP AHEAD. I hope it's not a train! It's not, but going W again leads to another dead end, where we discover SHERIFF BUBA WITH A GUN AT MY HEAD. Man, I bet that guy would like to buy a B.
S leads to an UNKNOWN ROAD -- we're apparently not a very well-oriented ridge runner -- and driving west at that point leads to a lightning strike that sets the car on fire, destroying the moonshine and the player. Going south instead leads to a bridge... that's out, as helpfully noted by a sign. We can get out of the car to find an old pipe, which I never found a use for, and some bushes and tree limbs. We can't HIDE CAR or JUMP BRIDGE, but EXAMINE TREE discovers AN OLD ROAD BEHIND THE TREES! Fortunately we have time to MOVE TREES before the law catches up again.
Backtracking to check out more of the map, I learned that heading E of the east-west T leads to a gravel road, where the revenuers take a wrong turn; roads here lead east to a church parking lot or south back to the bridge area. We can get out of the car at the church, where we see AN OPEN DOOR; we can't ENTER DOOR but we can ENTER CHURCH to find a LARGE PIPE ORGAN. It's unplayable, it seems, but closer examination of the instrument yields A SET OF KEYS. These always come in handy in adventure games, so we'll take them with us.
Past the church is a GAS STATION, with paths leading back to the bridge area and the church. Taking the hidden road by the bridge leads to another dead end with a locked gate, and unlocking the gate is complicated by the LARGE MEAN LOOKING BEAR here. HELP suggests, perhaps unwisely, that we FIGHT IT! - and, to my great surprise, FIGHT BEAR actually works: OH NO ** WHAT A FIGHT ** YOU KILLED IT (though we can also randomly fail.) But then the law catches up again, while we were distracted beating a bear to death. This plays out much faster if we just UNLOCK GATE immediately after pulling up to it -- this seems to be a bug, actually, as afterward we just "GET BACK IN THE CAR," without ever having to deal with fighting the bear or even exiting the car.
Now we're driving across FARMER BROWN'S PASTURE, where we again have a few choices about which way to go, only one of which is a good idea. Driving south gets us permanently stuck in FARMER BROWN'S LAKE; the western route leads to a BULL PASTURE where bulls charge the car and we're dead again.
Going east gets us back on to the main road, where a sign indicates we're now just 2 MILES SOUTH OF KNAWBONE. Of course, another bridge between here and there is closed for repairs. The game's parser again reveals a refreshing sense of humor -- if we try to JUMP BRIDGE, we're told DON'T BE RIDICULOUS. WHAT I NEED TO DO IS JUMP RIDGE. That works, and after we JUMP RIDGE we find ourselves on the other side. One quick move north to Knawbone, and victory is ours!
These people must really like our moonshine -- they're prepared to give us ALL THEIR MONEY, which ought to cover the player's college education (at least, circa 1980.) It takes a village to raise a child, as they say --in this case, a booze-loving village with minimal living expenses and no sense of irony.
I hadn't played any of the Boner family adventure games before -- they created at least four titles for the TRS-80, working with Bob "Captain 80" Liddil's The Programmer's Guild. Thunder Road was a quick little game to play, something I appreciated after tackling more substantial adventures in recent weeks. The design is very linear, with numerous unpredictable fatal dead ends, but it has a sense of humor and with a modern emulator (and frequent saves) it's much more playable than it was back in the day. Good, albeit brief, stuff.
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