Library: Anti-Climax

Upon further investigation of Library, it appears that the game was never finished.  I've explored it as extensively as possible and scoured the source code, and I don't believe that there's a way to beat it.  Maybe I'm wrong, but at this point I'm going to write about the rest of the game, give it a quick rating, and move on.

When I last posted, I had been stuck at a number of obstacles.  The entrance to the "Pusey Pit" (another ruined library) was blocked by rubble, and as I suspected it's impassable.  Likewise, the Dexter Gate is a boundary at the edge of the game rather than an obstacle to get past.  The lift, the back door, the men's room and the chamber with the angry gnome all granted access to new areas once I figured them out (or gave up and checked the code, in the gnome's case).

First, the lift.  It require some keys to activate, which I had, but I'd been unable to find the right verb to use them.  It turned out to be UNLOCK LIFT, which is a reasonable verb to use for keys, though perhaps less so in this context.  Trying to go up in the lift just gets you an "under construction" message, but going down takes you to what is probably the most fun area in the game.  It features two sections of the library: the Mystery section and the Science Fiction Section.

The Mystery Section is specifically dedicated to Raymond Chandler.  There are a number of items found here: a gravedigger's shovel, a still-smoking gun, a crushed pocketwatch, and a "Zygopetalum Crinitum".  I assume that these are specific references, but I've ready very, very few mystery novels, and none by Chandler.  The gun and the watch aren't useful - firing the gun simply results in a "click" - but the shovel comes in handy later.  The 'Zygopetalum Crinitum" is a type of orchid, which I only discovered by using Google.  You can't pick it up by using its name in the game either; you need to use GET FLOWER or GET ORCHID, which is irritating.  This would have stumped me forever before the internet existed.

The Science Fiction section has three wings.  One of those is the Star Trek Room, which is an exact replica of the bridge of the Enterprise.  There are some plastic Spock ears on the floor, and nothing else of use.  To the north is the Moorcock Section, dedicated to the works of Michael Moorcock and entered through what can only be described as a sphincter.  I have to think that this betrays Nat Howard's opinion of Moorcock.  I happen to be a Moorcock fan, but if anyone wanted to describe him as disappearing up his own arsehole on occasion I wouldn't dispute them.  Anyway, in this room you find a black runesword, otherwise known as Stormbringer, the evil blade of Moorcock's Elric saga.  You know, just lying around.  There's some good writing when you pick it up (possibly cribbed directly, but I'm not sure), and the sword reacts in a few places in the game.  You know what?  I can't fault anyone in 1978 for throwing Stormbringer into a game just because.  It's what I would have done.  The only way back out of the room is to tickle the sphincter with a feather, which just doesn't bear analysis.  I don't want to think about it.  Mercifully, the command for this is TICKLE WALL.

The Chronicles of Count Ass.

The southern wing of the Sci-Fi Section is the Andre Norton Room, inhabited by many large cats.  One of them will wake up if you try to cross the room, but you can scare it away with Stormbringer and continue on.  If you don't have Stormbringer you can PET CAT and it will go back to sleep, allowing you to go back the way you came.  Otherwise, you're cat food.  I've never read Norton's work, despite a love of classic fantasy and sci-fi.  I'm only just now discovering that she's a woman, writing under a man's name to make her work more marketable.  It's a gap in my reading that I really ought to rectify.

Beyond the Andre Norton Room is the Dune Room, covered in sand - and cat poo - and exceptionally hot.  Obviously, it's a reference to the David Lynch movie, starring Sting.  And the novel by Frank Herbert, I guess.  If you stay in here for too long you die from the heat, but you can dig in the sand and uncover another door.

The next room is the Computer-Game Room, where a corpse sits in front of a computer screen displaying the following message: "How? With your bare hands?"  It looks like the poor fellow has died trying to solve Colossal Cave Adventure, specifically the dragon puzzle.  What a moron!  All he had to do was type YES.

Continuing loops back around to the elevator, but for some reason you can't activate it again once you're on the bottom floor.  There's only one way back up: you need to return to the Computer Game Room and type YES, which activates a transporter that takes you back to the library entrance.  It's an odd solution, requiring knowledge of an obtuse puzzle from a different game entirely.  It might seem unfair from a modern perspective, but I wonder.  It was probably expected that anyone playing a mainframe text adventure in 1978 would be familiar with Colossal Cave Adventure, and I would think that the solution to the dragon puzzle would be one of its more widely circulated secrets.  It's hard to know for someone who wasn't there, but my gut says that it was pervasive enough to make this puzzle a reasonable one.

The Norton Room, the Dune Room, and the Computer Game Room.

Now, the back door to the library.  It's covered in vines, which reach out to grab you when you try to enter.  I had thought that the runesword would let me cut my way through, but no luck there.  Instead, you need to crawl under them, which is a bit iffy.  There's no indication that the ivy doesn't cover the entire door.

Through the back door is a pit room, with a large pit and a sign telling you to "Throw Literary Critics Here".  I never found a critic to throw in, unfortunately.  Beyond that is a stairwell.  You can't go up, because that area is under construction, but there are two rooms below.  One is a small chamber lined with spikes, that serves no obvious purpose.  The other is a Krazy Komix Kollection, which features a copy of Captain America Comics #1, the famed first appearance of that character that features him punching Hitler on the snoot well before the USA ever entered the war.  I find it odd that the author chose that comic over the first appearances of Superman or Batman, but then again he might just be a Cap fanboy.

Would it even hold its value in a post-apocalyptic society?

This comic is one of the treasures that you need to take to the chapel, but there's a problem.  First, you get strangled going back past the ivy if you don't have the runesword.  Second, as I mentioned in my last post, there's no path leading away from the back door except through the ivy.  There's no way to get back to the chapel once you've walked up to the back door.  Presumably there would have been one in the full game, so I edited one in just so I could test what happens when you get all of the treasures.

The third new path I found was in the men's room, behind the vending machine.  Previously, I'd had trouble with my quarter getting stuck when I insert it into the machine.  You can fix this by either pressing the A button on the machine before inserting the coin, or typing HIT MACHINE after it gets stuck.  It's weird that I didn't think to try the very first thing I'd do in this situation in real life.

The vending machine has three buttons, and you can only use one in a single game.  One button just gives you a useless plastic comb.  Another gives you a guide, which mentions there being a secret door behind the vending machine.  The other opens the secret door.  Beyond is a room known as the Plagiarism Archives, and beyond that is the Spaceport Bar from Aldebaran-III.  It's an interesting bit of commentary, in that the game is utterly ripping off a scene from a game the author co-designed, and that said game was pretty heavily based on the Jaime Retief stories of Keith Laumer.  It's a nice bit of self-deprecation, and I chuckled.  It serves no other purpose, though.

Finally, we have the gnome.  Once you enter his chamber he won't let you out again, and he'll eventually kill you with his knife.  You can beat him with your own knife, eventually, but it takes a number of turns repeatedly typing KILL GNOME until you get him.  You can also kill him instantly with the runesword, but it's probably better to use the knife, because he throws a shoe at you during the knife battle which you can keep.  It's all a moot point, though, because the gnome battle is bugged as hell.  He doesn't disappear when you kill him, and I wasn't able to figure out how to make it work.  There's only one room beyond his chamber anyway.  It has a hole, and if you drop his shoe inside a door opens and shows an "Under Construction" sign.  So fighting the gnome is at this point meaningless.

With the entire game explored, it was time for me to take all of the treasures to the chapel.  The source code showed that there were three: the comic, the orchid and the Gutenberg Bible.  Getting the bible out of the library involved a bit of minor puzzle solving.  If you're carrying it, bars will block the entrance.  You can get past this by putting the bible in the sack.  In my last post I hadn't figured out how to get things back out of the sack, but the trick is to ENTER SACK.  You can get inside and pick up anything that's in there, then climb back out again.  A bit silly, but not the least logical puzzle I've encountered.

Not that there was much point in solving it.  I took all of the treasures to the chapel, and dropped them.  Nothing.  My score actually went down when I dropped them.  Checking the source code, I couldn't find any kind of victory message, so I feel justified in declaring this game over and done with.  Time for a Final Rating.

FINAL RATING

Story & Setting: This one started promisingly, being set in the post-apocalyptic ruins of a university library. It does get some mileage out of the setting, with a few decent library-based and literary chuckles, but it still comes off as a little disjointed.  The story's a treasure hunt, and you know I'm getting sick of those.  There might have been more to the completed game, but that's not what I'm judging.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Character & Monsters: There's the horribly bugged gnome, and that's the extent of it.  This might be the poorest entry in this category to date.  Luckily for this game I don't hand out zeros.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: One thing this game has going for it is that the writing's quite good: clear, evocative and concise.  That's the extent of it, though, and the writing isn't good enough to bump it up out of the bottom rung.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: What we have here is a game with a serviceable parser, albeit one that had me hunting for the right verb on more than one occasion.  Unfortunately, it has a gnome fight that's horribly bugged, and a treasure that can't be taken to the final location.  It also dumps you out of the game when you die, which gives me the irrits.   I can't quite give it a bottom score, because a good portion of the game is actually playable.  It was close, though.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Challenge: The puzzles that are solvable probably verge on the side of being a little too easy, which would probably result in a score of 3.  I'm knocking it down a lot for being unfinished, though.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Innovation and Influence: It follows in the footsteps of the Wander games that came before it, and adds very little to what those games innovated.  It is one of the earliest games to be based on a real-life location, though I suppose Colossal Cave Adventure beat it there.  As far as influence goes, this game had none.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: I enjoyed the early stages of this game, when I was just roaming around and looking in the various rooms.  Some of them are quite amusing, and I especially enjoyed the Sci-Fi Section.  It fell apart quite badly when I started trying to solve puzzles though, with a lot of frustration coming from the game's unfinished nature.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

I'm putting this game in my dust and never looking back, so it doesn't get the bonus point.  The above scores total 10, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 20 out of 100.  That puts it dead last on the list, 4 points below King Tut's Tomb, which had no puzzles but was at least finished.  It's probably not fair to rate an unfinished game against commercial products, but I'm doing it anyway.  If I play it, it gets a rating, regardless of any notions of what's fair.

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for adventure games with a category for Puzzles.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Puzzles: It's a little difficult to rate an unfinished game, because most of its puzzles serve no concrete purpose. I liked a number of them though, particularly those in the Sci Fi Section. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

Library gets a RADNESS Index of 20 out of 100, which puts it dead last. That seems reasonable, given that it's the only game I've played for the blog which is legitimately unfinished.

Coming up next I'm going to have a poke around in MUD1, the first ever Multi-User Dungeon.  Following that, which will probably be a single-post game, it's on to Treasure Hunt, a sort-of text version of Hunt the Wumpus.  I'm closing in on the end of 1978, which has been far too long in coming.