Game 50: Kadath (1979)

Being a fan of super-hero comics I know the value of a nice round number, so it feels somewhat momentous to have finally reached Game 50.  I didn't realise that it was coming up, so I didn't arrange for it to be anything special.  Instead, I've just gone ahead with my standard chronological order, and played the next game on my list, Kadath.

Not gonna lie, any game with this C64 font is
gonna hit my nostalgia buttons hard.

Kadath was a text adventure designed by Gary Musgrave for the Altair, one of the earliest available home computers.  From what I can gather, the Altair was primitive in 1979 when compared to something like the Apple II.  It doesn't appear to have had a monitor display, so I suspect that Kadath accomplished that with paper printouts, in a similar manner to Richard Garriott's DND1.  Like I said, primitive.

The game was ported to the Commodore PET in 1981, but as I mentioned in my last post I haven't been able to find that version.    In 1983 it was ported to the Commodore 64, where it was renamed as Eye of Kadath.  That's the version I played for the body of this post.  Somewhere along the way it also got ported to the Exidy Sorcerer, a short-lived PC that I had never heard of before today.  I'm told by Jason Dyer of Renga in Blue that this version is probably closest to the original, and thanks to his instructions I'm able to briefly cover it below in Ports of Call.

In this game you play as a archaeologist who uncovered a tomb around ten years ago. In that tomb, the archaeologist found an ancient tablet, and has spent years translating it by consulting such dark volumes as the Unaussprechlichen Kulten and The Necronomicon.  The tablet spoke of the rise of a dark evil that would occur when the dark star Kynath was in conjunction with Arcturus.  Now, with only fifteen days left until that event will come to pass, the archaeologist has travelled to the ancient city of Yaddith intending to put a stop to it.

Laying out the backstory.

If any of the above sounds familiar to you, then you've probably read or heard about the noted horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Lovecraft is one of those writers that - due to his massive influence on genre fiction and Dungeons & Dragons in particular - I should have read years ago.  I keep putting it off.  I tried a few years ago to get through a bunch of his short stories in audiobook form, but they slid right off my brain with no impact.  I suspect that's more due to the format than the stories themselves, but regardless, I'm only familiar with Lovecraft via what I've absorbed through pop-culture osmosis.

Kadath marks a pretty big first, in that it's the earliest known video game adaptation of Lovecraft's work.  Given the name, you'd think it was an adaptation of his novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, but a quick look at the Wikipedia entry indicates that there's little connection.  I suspect that Kadath may be an original story cobbled together from elements of Lovecraft's stories, but I'd appreciate it if any Lovecraft experts out there can set me straight.  (From further research, I'm seeing that there are elements in the game taken from stories by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan; he was one of a bunch of writers that built on and added to Lovecraft's work over the years, with varying results.  It looks like Musgrave has drawn on elements not just from Lovecraft, but his many collaborators and imitators.)

What's also notable is that Kadath isn't played using the parser system that so defined text adventures in the wake of Colossal Cave Adventure.  Rather than typing in commands, the player is presented with a number of possible actions, and must choose one.  In some ways it's similar to playing a Choose Your Own Adventure or a Fighting Fantasy gamebook.  I can't say for sure if this is the first game that ever used this format, but it must be among the earliest.  It's hard to give this much historical significance, because it's not a style that really ever caught on in the digital realm, but it deserves at least a little bit of credit.

The first thing that struck me when I started playing Kadath is that the quality of the writing is very high by the standards of the genre at the time.  This is especially impressive on a home computer; there have been games with well-written descriptions before this, but they've been exclusive to mainframe systems.  Most of those on home computers have been very terse, no doubt due to memory constraints, and I was surprised to see something this good coming from a computer like the Altair.  I would later find out that the game isn't very long, which explains how Musgrave was able to cram it all in.  It was a good choice though; the game is short, but it manages to evoke a Lovecraftian atmosphere, something that would have been very difficult without longer room descriptions.

The game begins with the player entering the catacombs beneath the city of Yaddith, with the ultimate goal being to stop an ancient evil from arising.  The instructions lay out the five things you need to do to complete this goal:

1. Enter the labyrinthine caverns
2. Find the hidden and guarded "Eye of Kadath"
3. Return the "Eye" to its rightful place
4. Invoke the Elder Powers
5. Destroy the gate through which this unspeakable evil will gain dominion over all the Earth.

All of this must be accomplished within fifteen days.  I tried waiting it out, to see what would happen; I've played other games that threaten you with deadlines but don't deliver when the time comes.  I got to around twenty days with nothing untoward happening, and I was about to add Kadath to that list, but then disaster struck while I was poling a raft into a cave.  Luckily, beating this game before the deadline hits is not at all difficult.

This sounds a bit like me during one of my regular
bouts of bronchitis.

The first chamber of the catacombs has four exits (not including the one you entered from), and after a small amount of exploration I was pretty hopelessly lost.  This game is difficult to map, and can be quite disorienting.  There are a bunch of near-identical rooms, all with five exits, and where those exits lead is relative to the one through which you enter the room.  So exit 1 might lead to a dead end, but when you return to that room exit 1 will lead somewhere else entirely.  There are also room where the exits are labelled as Left or Right, and I have no idea if those are relative or not.  Even after finishing Kadath I'm not sure that my map is correct.  I'm not sure if this was purposeful design, but it's another thing that adds to the game's Lovecraftian vibe.

Starting the game.

As you'd expect, you can die in Kadath, but for the most part it requires doing something stupid.  Do you want to dive into a lake from a high cliff?  Or creep across a vast cavern littered with bones?  Or wade through black, waist-deep water?  Go ahead, but you ain't gonna survive any of those.  I found myself doing dumb things on purpose just to read the descriptions, which had some macabre entertainment value.  Another benefit to dying is that the game tells you how well you're doing.  It will clue you in on whether you've found the items you need to beat the game, or if you've destroyed one of them, which I appreciated.

It's nice to be a part of something, though, innit?

Aside from the chambers with five exits, and the obvious death-traps I mentioned above, the catacombs have the following points of interest:

• A balcony overlooking Yaddith, where an ancient scroll can be found.
• A room with a stone block, on which rests a dagger and a sphere. Only one of these items can be taken at a time.
• A room with a huge statue of a nightmarish beast.  Runes at the base of the statue translate as "From death spawned black star great Kadath rises - lord of all".  In the middle of the statue's face is a large pentagonal hole.
• An underground lake with a raft.  The raft can be poled to an island, on which can be found a conch shell. Taking the conch causes the cavern to shake, and dislodges a stalactite that falls close to you.
• The raft can also be poled into two fissures.  One of those leads to a certain death unless you turn back, but the other leads to a room where you will find a glowing green gem.  That gem is guarded by something called a Shoggoth, a shapeless, protoplasmic creature made of black slime.

The path to victory is quick.  You need to find and keep the scroll on the balcony.  If you try take it out, the scroll crumbles and can't be used.  You also need to collect the conch shell from the island.  Then you need to find the Eye of Kadath, which is the aforementioned glowing green gem.  If you try to take it without the necessary item, the Shoggoth will chase you away, and you'll be told that you need a weapon to defeat it.  That weapon is the dagger from the stone block, which is powerful enough to kill the creature with one blow.  With the scroll and the Eye now in your possession, you just need to take them both to the statue, where the endgame begins.

I'm more horrified by the hideous mass of typos.

What follows is a series of questions. Do you put the Eye of Kadath in the statue, on the altar, or on the floor?  What do you use to invoke the Elder Powers?  What is the invocation on the scroll?  Will you destroy the Eye with the conch, the dagger or the sphere?  If you get too many of these wrong, you will eventually lose the game, with a message similar to what happens when you run out of time.  The only one I had trouble with was typing in the chant - KADATH CTHULHU R'LYEH - and that's only because the key mapping for the Commodore 64 emulator I was using was different to a standard QWERTY keyboard.  Luckily for me I spent over a decade using a C64 almost daily, so I had little trouble tracking down that errant apostrophe, and thereby beating the game.

Saving humanity with a conch shell.

Overall, it took me about an hour to beat Kadath, and the experience was short-lived and user-friendly enough that I had a good time doing it.  In a lot of ways, it feels ahead of its time; there's certainly no shortage of brief horror games based on Lovecraft floating around the independent scene these days.  I'm interested to see how it does on the RADNESS Index; it's short and very easy, but it does what it does rather well.

PORTS OF CALL:

Before I rate Kadath, I'll take a quick look at the Exidy Sorcerer version.  The most notable difference is that the Sorcerer has more room for its text: it can fit a bunch more characters per line than the Commodore 64, so the text is a little more detailed.  For instance, the star Kynath is only named in the Sorcerer version.  I also noticed that the Sorcerer does a lot more in the way of creating pacing with its text formatting.  For example, the death screams of the Shoggoth are much more drawn out.  The trade-off is that it has a distracting number of typos.  There are plenty on the C64 as well, but on the Sorcerer they are present to a maddening level.  I suppose it's a toss-up as to which is better, but if you're as sensitive to typos as I am then the C64 version might be more to your tastes.

In terms of gameplay, the only difference I noted came in the endgame.  Some of the questions that are presented as multiple choice on C64 must have the answer typed in on the Sorcerer.  It makes the game a little harder I guess, but not so much that it makes a great difference.

The same ending, with a little more fancy text formatting.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: Kadath has great source material to draw from, and does a decent job of evoking that material successfully.  It might be the earliest horror game I've played that manages to be even mildly effective in that regard.  A lot of the details are vague and unexplained: the nature of the menace you have to stop is barely hinted at, and the various lurking creatures that can do you in are never shown or described.  For some that might be unsatisfactory, but again it's something done to evoke that Lovecraftian feel (which, for the record, is much more about fear of the alien unknown than fear of tentacles).  There's not a lot to the story and setting in terms of size and scope, but it makes up for that with atmosphere and implication.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: As with the previous category, there isn't a lot here in terms of detail: just about every creature in the game is lurking out of sight, never seen but dangerous nonetheless.  They provide atmosphere, but in terms of gameplay they're only there to kill you if you take a wrong step. The Shoggoth is the only creature that can be seen, and it's pretty great in descriptive terms, but it operates solely as an obstacle to victory.  Again, there's no interaction, so I can't rate it highly.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: This is a text adventure with no sound, but the writing is up there in the absolute top tier of the adventure games I've played so far.  This genre is never going to score super high here, but I have to put this one on a level with games like Zork.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Puzzles: The puzzles in this game are very light on, and are solved almost exclusively by entering an area with the right inventory item.  That's the inherent limitation of a text adventure that relies on multiple choice rather than a parser, I guess.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: Everything in this game works the way it's supposed to, although it would be pretty hard to mess up a game in this format.  I suppose it might have been an impressive game on the Altair - I have no idea what other kinds of games were made for it - but by 1979 it already feels very simplistic.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: I finished this game in just under an hour, so I'd say it has little in the way of legitimate challenge.  Navigating the catacombs is probably the most difficult part of the game, but if you move around at random you'll eventually hit everything regardless.  That said, I'm not even sure the game was designed to be much of a challenge; it gives you copious hints about your progress after you die, so even when you do fail it's pretty easy to see where you went wrong or what you're missing.  I feel like it was made to provide an experience rather than a challenge, and on that level it does well. In this particular category, not so much. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: As with most short games, I enjoyed it while it lasted but the experience wasn't meaty enough for me to really get into it.  I might have rated this a little higher as a parser-based game, as that would have provided more interaction and difficulty.  It worked well enough as a game with its multiple choices/branching paths, but the lack of choices brought it down a bit. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus: 1. Kadath gets a single bonus point, for a combination of being the first Lovecraftian game and one of the first Choose Your Own Adventure style games.  Neither of those would probably merit it on their own, but together they're worth a point I reckon.

The above scores total 15, which doubled gives a score of 30; add the bonus point and Kadath gets a respectable RADNESS Index of 31.  That places it equal 13th overall, and equal 8th in terms of adventure games.  It's level with games like The Wizard and the Princess, Colossal Cave Adventure II and Mystery Mansion, all of which I'd describe as games with a mixture of good and frustrating elements.  Kadath does what it does well, and if it was longer or less simplistic it might have scored quite a bit higher.

NEXT: My next game is Local Call for Death, a murder mystery for the TRS-80.  This one is similar to Kadath in that it's short and well-written; I don't expect it to take more than a single post.  After that, it's back to the priority list for Mission: Asteroid, the third game from Ken and Roberta Williams.  If these short games keep coming, I'll be on to Wizardry in no time...

Back-Tracking: The Scott Adams Graphic Adventures - Adventureland, Pirate Adventure, and Mission Impossible

A while ago, when I was playing Dog Star Adventure, I had the bright idea to explore the different ports for the games that I played.  I still think it's a good idea, and one that helps my blog stand out a little by exploring some versions of games that don't get brought to light all that much. I'm also kind of fascinated by the minor differences that old games have between platforms, so it helps keep my interest up on the blogging side of things.  In the era that I'm currently in it's perfectly viable, as the games - particularly adventure games - are short, and can be blasted through in a matter of minutes once you know all of the solutions.  Later on it's going to be untenable, because the games will just get too big, but I plan to keep it up for as long as I can.

While I was playing through ports of Scott and Alexis Adams' Voodoo Castle, I stumbled across one for the Commodore 64 that had graphics.  Through that I discovered that all of the Scott Adams adventures were re-released with a graphical upgrade, which was something of a revelation for me.  I grew up with a Commodore 64, and amassed a sizable collection of ill-gotten games over the years, but I never encountered these.  I wasn't planning to go back and play through ports of the games I'd already covered, but for ones as significantly different as these I thought I'd make an exception.

SCOTT ADAMS' GRAPHIC ADVENTURE #1: ADVENTURELAND (1982)

The original cover was much more representative
of the game, but this one has it's good points.

This version of the game was released in 1982 for the Apple II, but because I found these games through playing a Commodore 64 port of Voodoo Castle, I decided to play the C64 version.  I just had a quick check, and my usual sources didn't have this for the Apple II anyway, so my options were limited.

For those who need a quick reminder, Adventureland was Scott Adams' first game, and his attempt to get a game similar to Colossal Cave Adventure onto a personal computer.  It's a treasure hunt with a loose fantasy theme: there are dragons but there are also references to Paul Bunyan, so the mythology is a hodge-podge. I liked it at the time, and I think I'd still rate it as the best of his games I've played so far.  My initial post on the game is here.

The opening screen of Adventureland.

I have to admit, I had a lot of trouble with this game at the beginning.  As I explored the opening wilderness, it appeared to me that the graphics had completely replaced the room descriptions.  Nothing was described, and none of the items you could take or interact with were even mentioned.  I was all set to come into this review with a scathing take-down, until I accidentally bumped the Enter key.  If you hit Enter without typing a command, it toggles between the graphics and the room descriptions.  You can actually play this game completely without the graphics, if you prefer, but you certainly can't do it the other way around.

Based on my hazy memories of Adventureland - which I jogged by making a Trizbort map of my old notes - the game hasn't been changed.  If there are any changes, they're almost certainly very minor ones.  I was able to play through this with little trouble (once I got past my initial issues), and even the random elements like the bees dying in the jar didn't give me any hassles.

This is meant to be a hollow tree stump.

For the RADNESS Index, I'd rate this a point higher in Aesthetics.  The graphics aren't spectacular, and there are definite points where they really don't give a good representation of what's meant to be in the room.  They're not all that interactive, either.  But despite all those issues, it's still an aesthetic step up from the all-text version.  As for Mechanics, I'm torn on it.  I found the constant toggling between graphics and room descriptions a chore, but you can actually play the game in its original form if you ignore the graphics.  I'll rate it about the same as I rated the original.  If I take away the game's bonus point for historical significance, that leaves it with a RADNESS Index of 38, just one point higher that the original version.  That seems about right.  It's exactly the same game, with just a dash of extra visual flair.

SCOTT ADAMS' GRAPHIC ADVENTURE #2: PIRATE ADVENTURE (1982)

I don't remember this from the original.

As with Adventureland, the graphical version if Pirate Adventure was released in 1982 for the Apple II.  Again, I'm playing the C64 version.  Adventure International were really trying to ramp up the sex appeal of their games with these covers.  I'm not against it, but it does make me wonder what their sales were looking like around this time.  It seems like a bit of a desperation move.

In this game, you have to explore an island to find some pirate treasure.  It's a lot thematically tighter than Adventureland, but I remember not quite enjoying it as much.  My original posts on it start here.

The opening screen of Pirate Adventure.

Pirate Adventure endears itself to me immediately by ditching the toggling between room descriptions and graphics.  The graphics window stays there at all times, the text is underneath, and it's much less annoying to play.  Unfortunately, that means that you can't choose to play it all text, in its original split-window format, but it's a fair trade-off.

Like Adventureland, this version has barely been changed in terms of its structure and puzzles.  It's major changes come from the addition of graphics, which are a fair bit more interactive than those of Adventureland were.  As the screenshot above shows, the items you can pick up are visually depicted.  When you take them they disappear, and they'll appear in any room where you drop them.  It's similar to Roberta Williams' Mystery House in that respect.

This game has very little in the way of random elements, so it was a simple matter to consult my old notes and get through it.

They had the chance, and they still never fixed "dubleons".

It's a little boring to show two screen-shots of the same place, so here's one from the island.

During lockdown, this is as close as I'm allowed to go to a beach.

The graphics for this are a little better than those in Adventureland in terms of accurately representing your surroundings, but they're still only worth one extra point in Aesthetics.  I'm tempted to ding this for not using the Adams split-window layout, but it earns a point back by allowing any inventory item to be depicted on-screen in any area.  It comes in with a RADNESS Index of 32, two points higher than the original game.

SCOTT ADAM'S GRAPHICAL ADVENTURE #3: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE aka SECRET MISSION (1982)

Who knew the enemy spy in this game was
a sexy lady? Dragging the corpse around to
solve a puzzle suddenly feels a lot more sordid.

Again, this was a 1982 release on the Apple II, but I'm playing the C64 version.  My original post on the game can be found here.

Adams' foray into the spy genre wasn't one of his finer efforts, but it had certain merits in terms of environmental storytelling.  The graphical adventure version, like the others, is fundamentally the same game with a visual overlay.

Starting Secret Mission.  It was still called Mission Impossible on the Apple II
version, though.

This one returns to the system used by Adventureland, where you could toggle the graphics on and off.  It also doesn't show your inventory items like Pirate Adventure.  It does have a cool death screen though.

Back when we were worried about clouds of radiation, not clouds of bacteria.

This game was still pretty fresh in my memory, and the puzzles are pretty simple, so I was able to get through it quickly without the need to resort to a walkthrough.

Defusing a bomb in the comfiest of settings.

As with the others, this one gets an extra point in Aesthetics, and it remains the same in every other respect. It get a RADNESS Index of 28, two points higher than the original.

NEXT: I'll be getting stuck into the 430 point version of Colossal Cave Adventure. As for my next back-tracking project, I have a quick post lined up for Colossal Cave Adventure II and Mystery Mansion, and I've been playing the original TRS-80 version of Temple of Apshai.

Game 40: Voodoo Castle (1979)

Scott Adams' covers are always a good
representation of what you'll find in the game.

With Voodoo Castle, it's time for another game in the "Scott Adams Adventure" series.  I've enjoyed them all so far, to varying extents: Adventureland was a well-executed attempt to get a game like Colossal Cave Adventure onto a home computer, Pirate Adventure (written alongside his wife Alexis) was a welcome step away from the fantasy genre, and Mission Impossible gave me one of the earliest adventure games that isn't a treasure hunt.  Regardless of how they play today, Adams' text adventures are a cut above their contemporaries, at least in the home computer market.

Voodoo Castle is credited solely to Alexis Adams in the game itself, but I've seen other sources credit both her and Scott.  Scott has apparently said in later years that he did most of the work, while Alexis has claimed that the game was all hers.  I don't know the truth of it, so I'm going to credit them both while assuming that the bulk of the design came from Alexis.  I don't believe that I credited Alexis when I wrote about Pirate Adventure, which was remiss of me: as the first known female adventure game designer she deserves some recognition.

The original release of the game seems to have been by the Software Exchange in July 1979, for the TRS-80.  As I understand it, the Software Exchange was the game publishing arm of SoftSide magazine.  Adventure International didn't form until some time in 1979, so all of Adams' previous games would also have been first published by the Software Exchange.  I'm playing a later TRS-80 version of Voodoo Castle, that's credited to Adventure International, but if you scroll down to my new section Ports of Call you'll see that I checked out a few different versions.

The premise of this game is an odd one: Count Cristo has been placed under a voodoo curse, and it's up to the player to save him from his plight.  There's little else to go on.  Is Count Cristo a good dude?  (Probably not, all counts are vampires.)  Are you his friend?  Is there any reward for this benevolent activity, beyond the satisfaction of beating a video game?  Having beaten this game several times, I am not much the wiser.

This count is Monte's brother, Santo.

The game begins in a chapel with a closed coffin.  Opening it revealed the count's body, a rhyme outlining the objective of the game and a sapphire ring.  I did my usual pregame ritual: I for Inventory revealed that I was carrying nothing, and SCORE revealed that there were no points to obtain in this game.  Waking Count Cristo from his voodoo coma was my sole objective.

Before I begin describing the game, I want to point out the weird capitalised As in the text above.  There are only a couple of them on that screen, but I can tell you that they are all over this game.  There are plenty of lower-case As, so it seems to me that this was a deliberate stylistic choice.  I spent a good portion of the game thinking about this, and wondering if it was a deliberate clue to a puzzle.  It wasn't, it was just a piece of formatting that bugged me a lot.  I'm still baffled by it.

Taking the ring, I saw that it was inscribed with the words WAVE ME.  Doing so had no effect here, but I kept it in mind for later, and started exploring and mapping.  West was a ballroom with a fireplace.  North was a room with a window that slammed shut upon my entrance, and couldn't be opened.  South was a stairwell and some passages which I decided to ignore for now, though I did take a piece of broken glass I found there.  East was a door with a sapphire embedded in it, as well as a bloody knife.  I took the knife, but trying to take the sapphire was fruitless (those old treasure hunting instincts die hard).  The door wouldn't open, but waving the ring caused it to disappear and reveal a chute.  (Also, I'm just now realising the connection between the sapphire ring and the door with a sapphire in it.  I just waved the ring here hoping that something would happen.)

Sliding down the chute (with no way back up) I found a room with a crack on one wall and a hole on another.  There was also a plaque, but because the letters are phosphorescent I couldn't read it in the light.  (If I hadn't been carrying the broken glass, I'd have been told that the print was too small for me to read. The game doesn't indicate that I'm using the glass here, and is bad in general at letting the player know when an item is being used passively.)

The crack was too narrow for me to pass through, and I was informed that I'd need powerful magic to get by.  I was able to get through the hole though, into Medium Maegen's Mad Room (or as the game irritatingly puts it, "Medium MAegen's MAd Room".  I startled the medium when I entered and she disappeared.  Not knowing how to get her back I decided to examine her crystal ball, but "spirit vibrations" drove me from the room, leaving me conveniently at the top of the chute.

I decided to check out the fireplace this time, which I was able to enter.  I found a dusty idol there, and a flue that opened easily to give me access to the chimney.  The chimney was dark, and much like Colossal Cave Adventure moving around in the dark can break your neck in this game.  Dusting the idol revealed that it was glowing, though, and I was able to get up there safely.  All I found was some soot, and wooden boards nailed to the chimney wall.  The boards were solidly in place, but somehow I was able to take the soot.  Don't ask me how, but I gathered it all up because this is an adventure game and has a pretty hefty nine item inventory limit.  I could also hear someone moaning, which made me think of zombies, so I got the heck out of there.

On my way out of the fireplace I was accosted by a maid who was angry about me tracking soot everywhere, and she hurried me out of the room.  I found myself in a dungeon with a shovel on the floor and an open jail cell nearby.  I decided to enter the cell, and the door slammed shut behind me.  Inside was a leaflet, which read "For a reading just "SUMMON MEDIUM MAEGEN" today!!"  Typing SUMMON MEDIUM didn't do anything here, but the game did acknowledge it, so I made a note to try it elsewhere.  Unfortunately, the cell door was now locked, and nothing I had on me was able to open it.  I couldn't even dig my way out with the shovel.  There was nothing for it but to restart.  (To be honest, I never did figure out how to get out of the cell on my own.  There's a saw elsewhere in the game, and you can SAW DOOR to get out.)

Starting over, I decided to explore south.  Up the stairwell I found a stone statue of a Ju-Ju Man (who I gather was some kind of voodoo priest).  Exploring east of the stairwell I found a room with a big kettle full of soup. Eating the soup gave no response, but examining the kettle revealed a dark hole underneath. I pushed the kettle aside, climbed down, and lighting my way with the idol found a lucky rabbit's foot.

North of that was a room with some animal heads (on the wall, one assumes, but I guess they could just be severed heads on the floor).  I wasn't able to take them, so I explored to the east and found a cast-iron pot containing "witch's brew".  I was a bit more suspicious of this than the soup, so I didn't try any.  (Eventually I succumbed to my curiosity, and found that it transforms you into a broom. A witch then appears and rides you away, for a quite bizarre game over.)

Further east I found a lab, with three items of interest: a Ju-Ju bag, some test tubes, and some chemicals.  I was keen to examine this stuff, but as soon as I tried to open the bag one of the test tubes exploded, and I was unceremoniously killed.

The only random factor in this game, I'm pretty sure.

Starting over again again I headed west from the stairwell and found the dungeon.  This time I ignored the open cell and went south to the torture chamber.  There I found a tiny door, which was far too small for me to enter.  Again, I was told that I'd need powerful magic to get through.  East of that I found an Armory, with a shield, a broken sword, and a suit of armor which was too heavy for me to lift.  The game didn't recognise WEAR as a command, so I took the other items and left.

At this point I'd explored all the paths that were obvious to me, and it was time to begin painstakingly putting this puzzle together.  And I do mean painstaking: I was determined to get through this one without any outside help, because I've been leaning a little too hard on walkthroughs for my liking.  Every step of the following process involved lots of trial and error, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The first thing I figured out was that I was able to take the animal heads using the broken sword.  Behind them was a safe, with a dial numbered 33 to 38, that I wasn't able to open.  The second thing I figured out is that I could survive the exploding test tubes by carrying the shield.  As with using the glass to read, neither of these results were signposted. I had to figure out what was going on myself.  (Incidentally, you can carry these exploding test tubes with you as long as you also have the shield. I spent way too long exploding every room in the game to see if anything would happen.)

Now I was able to examine the Ju-Ju bag, but I discovered that it couldn't be moved or opened... yet.  (If there's one thing the game is good at, it's letting you know that an action will be possible in the future.)  Instead I examined the chemicals, which I was told looked like they could be mixed.  So I mixed the chemicals and drank them like any good scientist, and was rewarded with a clap of thunder and a reduction in height to 4 feet tall.  This is never reversed, by the way: the protagonist of this game remains four feet tall forever.  Such is the price for meddling with voodoo, I suppose.

Now that I was small I could get through the door in the torture chamber, and past it I found a graveyard.  There was a rusty saw there, as well as a four-leaf clover growing out of a grave that was supposedly reserved for me.  (With the deaths I had suffered already, it was probably getting a little crowded in there.)

Exploring around a little, I went back to the room with the window.  This time it stayed open when I entered, apparently because I was carrying the lucky four-leaf clover.  On a ledge outside I found a doll with pins in it.  I couldn't pull them out, but a voodoo doll had to be important in Voodoo Castle so I held on to it.

(There's also a raven that flies around the window, and if you listen it tells you to go and buy The Count, Scott Adams' next adventure.  Apparently it will be "LOVE AT FIRST BITE!", a pun the authors are so proud of that they capitalised it and gave it an exclamation point.).

At this point I finally remembered the leaflet that had told me that I could summon Medium Maegen. So I went back to her room, and after she vanished I typed in SUMMON MEDIUM.  Sure enough, she reappeared and gave me a cryptic hint.

Give it to me straight, lady!

I figured that this meant the Ju-Ju bag could help me through the narrow crack, but seeing as I couldn't move the bag at all right now it wasn't that helpful a revelation.  But on my way to the medium's room I had passed by the plaque that I'd been unable to read before.  Obviously I needed some darkness to read the phosphorescent writing, but I didn't know how to make it dark in that room.  I'm embarrassed to say that it took me a very long time to figure out that I could pick up the plaque, and carry it to a dark room.  I dunno, I figured it would be screwed into the wall or something.

So I took the plaque into the dark chimney (leaving my glowing idol temporarily behind) and was able to read its message: "safe --> 38 33".  I went to the safe behind the animal heads, and after some wrangling with the parser - the relevant commands were TURN 38 and TURN 33 - I got it open and found an antique hammer inside.  (I guess it's antique to explain why the hell it's being kept in a safe.)

Back to the fireplace, I used the hammer to take the nails and then the boards.  Behind those was a grate, which I cut open with my saw.  Behind that was a button, and pressing it activated a fan that sent me whooshing up the chimney.  All this time I'd been worried that the moaning I could hear meant that I was about to be eaten by a zombie, but what I found further up the chimney was somewhat less frightening: a stuck chimney sweep.  Obviously the fellow wasn't too happy to be in there, so I tried to help him and eventually hit on PUSH SWEEP.  Grateful to be free, he gave me a piece of paper before leaving. On it was written this message:

Chim-chimerny, chim-chimerny
chim-chim, cheroo
I only exist
to solve puzzles for you

"SAY ZAP to restore someone changed to stone."  I went back to where I'd left the Ju-Ju man statue, said the magic words, and restored the Ju-Ju man to life.  He was standing there mumbling, and at this point I got a bit worried and high-tailed it out of the room.  The game warns you that you might be in trouble, and the packaging tells you to "beware that you don't end up a victim of the voodoo man", so I was wary of this guy.  It turns out he's friendly, and if you listen to his mumblings he will tell you to take his bag, as it will help you -CRACK- the curse.  I missed this unsubtle clue, but in the end it didn't hinder me too much.

I'll refrain from a joke about bags and cracks.

After trying a bunch of stuff I discovered that I could now take the bag and open it.  Inside I found a stick and a book on removing curses.  Inside it read: "With knife in hand you take a stand. Circle coffin and..."  The rest of the page was missing, but I finally felt like I was getting somewhere.  The only place left for me to explore was the crack, and I guessed that the rest of the page would be somewhere beyond.

I took the bag down to the crack, but I still wasn't able to get past.  This is where I really got stuck, and spent a good half-hour trying dumb things and experimenting just to make any progress at all.  I actually had to sleep on this one, and as is the way of such things when I got back to the game I hit on the solution on my first try: WAVE BAG.  (The medium had clued me in on this by telling me that a "moving bag" would get me through, but I only figured out what she was on about in hindsight.)  Beyond the crack I found the page, and the rest of the ritual: "...wave the stick and hold the lamp and don't forget to yell "CHANT"! Oh yes, to help it succeed, a doll you'll need..."

I had everything I needed, so I took it all back to the coffin and started trying to cast the ritual on Count Cristo's body.  None of it worked.  Not circling the coffin, not waving the stick, not telling the game to go screw, not nothing.  I only hit on the solution by accident.  Figuring that emptying my inventory might help, I started dropping things.  When I tried to drop the lucky rabbit's foot, I got a message: "On what?"  Knowing how limited the parser was, I skeptically typed in ON CRISTO.  It worked!  I was able to go through the steps of the ritual, and eventually succeed in lifting the curse.

Smiling Count Cristo could definitely be a wrestler from the 1970s.

So I was only technically victorious: I hadn't figured out how to escape the jail cell, so the info I got from going in there came from earlier games where I'd died.  I still got to the endgame though, even if there was one puzzle I didn't figure out.  I'll take it!

Despite the satisfaction of beating a game legitimately, though, I didn't get much enjoyment out of Voodoo Castle.  Adventure games often operate on a sort of weird Rube Goldberg/puzzle box logic, but most of the other ones I've played at least try to disguise it somehow.  This game just rolls with it, and makes very little attempt to explain itself.  Why is there a chimney sweep stuck in there?  Because it's a puzzle, that's why.  "Because it's a puzzle" is the entirety of this game, and it nagged at me the whole way through.  It's well constructed, but it's so obviously constructed that it hurt the experience, at least for me.

Before I get into the RADNESS Index, here's my Trizbort map of the game:

Clickin' makes it bigger.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The game doesn't do a lot to explain the context, but there is a story here: the count is cursed and you have to help him. Who cursed him?  Why?  Why are all the things you need conveniently scattered around the castle you're in?  Who is Medium Maegen?  Why can't she do the ritual if she's so great?  Why the hell is there a chimney sweep stuck in the chimney?  It goes on and on.  Because puzzles, that's why.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: We're in early adventure game territory here, where the characters serve no other purpose except as problems to solve.  They have no personality, and no reason to exist otherwise.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Text adventure, no sound, terse descriptions. You know the drill by now.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Puzzles: I will actually give the game some praise here, it does have some good puzzles, and all of them are fair.  Sometimes it's not all that clear when you've solved a puzzle, or that there was a puzzle to solve in the first place, but in hindsight the solutions all make sense (even if some of the situations don't).  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Mechanics: I've always been a fan of the split-window style of the Scott Adams adventures, and even though this is a simple two-word parser it does the job adequately.  I had a couple of moments where I had to wrack my brain for the right command, but none of them stumped me for too long. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: I spent most of this game frustrated, and making progress felt painful, but in retrospect I was never stuck for long.  The puzzles were all fair, the random deaths were minor setbacks, and I was always making some kind of progress.  And I was able to finish it without a walkthrough.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Fun: Despite the things I praised above, I didn't actually enjoy playing this game.  I just found something impenetrable about it's weird illogic, which isn't something that normally bothers me this much, but in this game it did.  For whatever reason, I couldn't connect with it, and the whole thing felt like pulling teeth.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Bonus Point: 0.

The above scores add up to 15, which doubled gives a RADNESS Index of 30. That places it 20th overall, and 11th for adventure games.  Coincidentally enough, it's equal on points to Pirate Adventure, which seems appropriate.  If I'd been able to connect with it a little better it might have done quite respectably.

PORTS OF CALL:

This is a new section I'm trying out, where I try to play through some other ports of the game I'm covering.  I won't do it for everything, because even I only have so much time, but for games that are quick to play through I'll check out a few different versions.

The Apple II version is pretty much the same game, with two minor differences: it features a dedication "to all Moms" at the beginning; and its advertisement of The Count says that it will be LOVE AT FIRST BYTE, which is an even worse pun.  Oh, and the game is in all caps, so it doesn't have all those irritating upper case As everywhere.  I'd be tempted to bump it up a point in Aesthetics just for that, but that would be frivolous.

You think any kids were disappointed that this wasn't a sequel
starring Smiling Count Cristo?

I also found an earlier TRS-80 version than the one I played above, although I couldn't tell if it was early enough to be the Software Exchange version.  It was pretty much identical to the Apple version, except that it retained the annoying As.  Oh, and for some reason both the Apple and early TRS-80 version have an extraneous empty room that got cut from the later version.

There wasn't a port released for the Commodore PET, surprisingly, but there was one for the VIC-20.  I couldn't get it to work, though, so I jumped all the way ahead to the Commodore 64 port from 1985 and got a big surprise.

She really loves those MOMS.

Apparently a whole bunch of the Scott Adams catalogue got converted to graphic adventures in the 1980s, and I'm only just finding out about it now.  I was a C64 kid, how did this happen?  Anyway, the gameplay and puzzles here remain the same, although the graphics replace some of the text in places.  Some of the visuals change when you take certain actions (such as opening the coffin above), but there are other places where they remain annoyingly static.  The raven in this version has lowered his standards, though: rather than advertising The Count he tells you that Questprobe featuring The Hulk is a SMASHING GOOD TIME.  He's lying.  Still, this is a good adaptation. I'd mark it a point higher for Aesthetics, but without the split-window letting you always know what's in the room I mark it a point down for Mechanics, so it comes out even.

Did I win? 'Cos dude is still lying down.

NEXT: The next game on my list is Eamon, a text adventure RPG hybrid that also intended as a system for people to create their own games.  It still has something of a fan community, I understand, and it all sounds pretty intriguing.  I'll post about it on Sunday.  Because I have a schedule now!

Game 13: Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure (1978)

It's time for another game by Greg Hassett, the twelve-year-old wonder prodigy of 1978.  But before I kick on with Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure, I should clear up some errors.  The main thing I've gotten wrong (at least recently) is that Voyage to Atlantis is a 1979 game, rather than 1978.  That's what I get for believing Mobygames, I guess.  This was revealed to me when I stumbled across the excellent blog Renga in Blue.  The owner of that blog is going through adventure games in chronological order, and it seems to me that he knows his business.  If he says it's a 1979 game, I believe him.

Another thing I discovered in reading his blog is that I missed a whole load of games in my list.  I had thought I'd be done with 1978 after finishing Journey to the Center of the Earth, but it turns out there are another eight adventure games from that year that I still need to play.  There are two earlier games that I should play as well: the recently uncovered Wander, which beats out Colossal Cave Adventure as the earliest text adventure game; and the original mainframe version of Zork, from 1977.  I'm not at all upset that Zork has been fast-tracked on my list, I can assure you.

But now it's time to look at Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure.  With Voyage to Atlantis relegated to 1979, that makes Journey Greg Hassett's first game.  I'm playing the Commodore 64 version, as I wasn't able to locate a ROM for the TRS-80, so it's possible that it's been tweaked or upgraded from the original release.  It can't have been tweaked too much, though, because this game is a mess.

I wasn't able to find the manual, but the premise isn't too hard to figure out.  You begin the game in a ship that has crashed underground (presumably your own), and the goal is to collect treasures and return them to the ship.  Unlike Colossal Cave Adventure and the works of Scott Adams, there's no obvious guidance as to what you have to do.  Perhaps it's in the manual, but the only way the game lets you in on the goal is if you type HELP while you're in the ship.  The ship also has a broken "fribulating gonkulator", which needs to be replaced so that you can return to the surface.

(I noted in my review of Voyage to Atlantis that Hassett had ripped off Scott Adams quite obviously.  This game feels less inspired by Adams' work; it seems that he didn't start cribbing from Adams until a bit later.)

At the outset of the game, there's a limited area that the player can explore.  You're blocked off to the north by a chasm, and to the south by a nine-headed hydra.  Most of the locations in the initial area are dusty caves, and dark places, and you can be ambushed at any time by giant bugs.  The bugs are hostile, and you won't have the means to kill them until you figure out how to cross the chasm.  Most of my initial exploration phase was spent being murdered by bugs and reloading.  It was frustrating, but also kind of refreshing after the sterile safety of Voyage to Atlantis.

So dramatic.

As in other games of its type, there are treasures just lying around for the taking.  In the initial area I found a parrot in a cage, a diamond, a ruby, and a gold nugget.  Returning these items to the ship gained me 40 points out of a possible 175.

There's also a maze, which seems obligatory for adventure games of the time.  I've yet to play one that doesn't feature a maze of some sort, and this game has the classic maze of twisty passages, all alike.  What was it about the mazes in Colossal Cave Adventure that other designers felt the need to rip them off?  Yes they can be tricky, but I personally consider them a pain in the arse.  Thankfully the one in this game is small, and can be easily mapped by dropping items.

The only thing to be found in the maze is a magic wand, but this wand is needed to cross the chasm.  All you have to do is WAVE WAND while you're on one side of the chasm, and it will teleport you to the opposite side.  This is a puzzle straight out of Colossal Cave Adventure, so it seems very likely that Hassett did play that game after all.

On the other side of the chasm is a sword, which is used to kill the bugs; once you have the sword the bugs become a minor annoyance rather than a lethal threat, as you can kill them easily when they appear.

Sweet revenge.

Also on the other side of the chasm is a wooden bridge.  Crossing the bridge takes you to an area guarded by a troll, who killed me by throwing his axe no matter what I tried.  I was never able to defeat him, but as it turns out you don't have to do so to get the full score.  I checked a walkthrough, and apparently if you have the parrot with you it blurts out the name SIR ALEXANDER, which you can use to scare the troll away.

Killing the troll is unnecessary, though, because you can sneak into his palace through a secret entrance.  This involves another small, easily navigable maze.  The palace contains some gold bars and a diamond necklace, two more treasures that need to be returned to the ship.  For whatever reason the troll himself never enters this area, so you can loot it at will.

Heading south from the ship leads through an Ice Cavern, and eventually to the aforementioned Hydra.  I wasn't able to kill the Hydra with my sword.  I had a few other items of note, besides treasures: some keys, a quarter, and a lighter.  The answer, of course, was drawn from mythology: BURN HYDRA.  I had my doubts that a lighter could destroy such a powerful creature, but as it turned out the Hydra was highly flammable.

Killing the Hydra.  With a cigarette lighter.

With the Hydra dead, the rest of the map was free for me to explore.  To the west, in a room with clam-shell walls, I found an emerald.  South was a Velvet Room containing a ming vase, and a garden where I found some silver bars.  There was also a Treasure Room, guarded by dwarves, but I'm pretty sure this was intended as a joke; you can't do anything here, and the treasure is described as "nothing to flip over".

One of several baffling and pointless rooms.

One incongruous area (though not the most incongruous in the game) was the Arabian Room, in which i could hear sitar music.  There was an oil slick on the floor, because racial stereotyping was all the rage in 1978.  It turned out not to be just stereotyping though, as south of that room I found Mac's Earthdigger Body Shop, and a functional fribulating gonkulator.  All I needed to do was return the gonkulator to the ship, repair it with some tools I found, and the game would be over.

Luckily for me, this Gonkulator was fribulating correctly.

At this point I had nine treasures in total, as well as the gonkulator, which is worth 50 points alone.  This was enough to get me the full 175 points, and win the game.  Not bad for the work of an hour or two.  Normally at this point I'd kick on and give it a Final Rating, but there are a few other things I want to mention first.

I don't feel like this game made me earn the title of Grandmaster.

I wrote above that the game is a mess, and it does have a lot of loose ends.  They keys don't unlock anything.  You can find Al's Diner (which is the most incongruous area of the game), wherein you can get some food and buy a coke by inserting a quarter into a machine.  Neither the food nor the coke are used for anything.  It's rare to find these kinds of extraneous things in early games; memory is often at a premium, and can't be wasted.  More than anything this smacks of being Hassett's first game.  Many artists take on an overambitious project in their early years, and those projects are rarely finished.  I feel like this game was intended to be larger, but got cut off by memory constraints.

This game was a momentary diversion, more than anything.  I almost spent more time playing Space Invaders than I did on this.  It really is beginner-level stuff, with only one or two puzzles of note.  All you really need to do is cross the chasm and beat the hydra, and the game is over.  An underwhelming experience, I'm afraid.

FINAL RATING

Story & Setting: The story is the same one we've seen over and over in this genre, and the setting is a series of thinly-described caves and other areas that don't make much sense. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: The bugs give the early game some menace, but the hydra and the troll are merely obstacles to get through rather than actual characters.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: It's a text adventure, and the descriptions are sparse.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is a simple two word affair, that only recognises the first three letters of each word, but it works well enough.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: The game has no challenge, really., outside of the opening when the bugs keep killing you.  Most of my time playing the game was spent on exploration; once I'd finished that I beat it almost straight away.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: This game doesn't do anything that Colossal Cave Adventure and Adventureland didn't do before it.  Even some of the puzzles are lifted.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Fun: The game's too short and lacking in substance to prove much amusement. It might be a good one to start young kids with, but I didn't get much out of it.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Definitely no bonus point for this game; I won't be revisiting it.  The scores above total 13, and doubling that gives a Final Rating of 26.  That makes it the lowest ranked game so far.  I feel a little bad for ranking a twelve-year-old's game at the bottom, but I can only rate the game in front of me.  For all I know Scott Adams might have been eight years old.

Final Rating: 26 out of 100.

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: This game barely has any puzzles at all. Once you figure out WAVE WAND and BURN HYDRA, you're basically done.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0. I'm tempted, but I don't think this being the first game in the Greg Hassett series nets it a point.

Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure has a RADNESS Index of 22.  That makes it the lowest-rated game so far.  It was certainly the one I knocked off the quickest.

NEXT: I'm going to take a trip back to 1974, to have a look at Wander.  Assuming I can find a workable version.