Game 44: Colossal Cave Adventure (430 point version) (1978)

When I played Colossal Cave Adventure II, the 440 point expansion of the original Colossal Cave Adventure, I wrote a whole paragraph about how the game had a lot of expansions and variants but nothing that could be classed as a sequel.  In my supreme ignorance, I even went so far as to say that the game's original authors - Will Crowther and Don Woods - never made a follow-up.  Well, today's game is the 430 point version of Colossal Cave Adventure, written by none other than Don Woods.  It's not exactly what you'd call a sequel, but more of an expansion to challenge expert players.  Woods wrote it in FORTRAN in 1978, and later ported the code to C in 1995.  Certain places list it as a 1995 game, but I'm covering it as a 1978 game.  I'll be playing the DOS port.

I'm not sure how widespread it was at the time; certainly it didn't circulate in the same numbers as the ubiquitous 350 point version.  From what little I can gather, it seems as though it was pretty much unknown until the release of the C port.  Whether Woods considered it the true final version of the game or an "expert mode" variant is unknown, but regardless of his intent the matter was out of his hands.  His first revision went on to become the template for the entire genre, and the 430 point version languished in obscurity, where it remains as a historical curiosity and nothing more.

I doubt there's anyone out there who needs a refresher, but here goes: Colossal Cave Adventure was written circa 1975 by Will Crowther as a text-based representation of a section of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. In 1977, Don Woods took the game and added to it, expanding the already-present fantasy elements.  The goal of the game was to explore the caves, solve its puzzles, and find all 15 of the treasures hidden within.  The 430 point version has the same premise, but has 20 treasures to find.  If you want even more of a refresher, (and you might, because I'll be referring to the original game quite a bit) my posts on Colossal Cave Adventure can be found here.

(From this point forward, I'm going to refer to the game as Adventure 430.  I've generally gone with Colossal Cave Adventure as the title for these games as a way of distinguishing them from the many other games with a similar name. Adventure is the original game's proper title though, and it's customary to use the points total as an identifier.)

You lose points for reading the instructions, just FYI.

The game begins in the same way as its predecessor, with the player standing at the end of a road in a forest next to a brick building.  The building is a well house, and inside can be found some food, keys, a bottle of water and a lamp.  It was strangely comforting to return to this familiar setting, and I had to resist the urge to head straight down into the caves and start playing through the parts of the game that I remembered.  I had to remind myself that I wasn't here to experience the familiar, but to find the parts that were new.

I had an inkling that the forest would be one of those places that Woods expanded, and I was right about that.  In the original version, the overworld was really small.  There was just the well house, a hill, and a gully leading down to a grate that gave entrance to the caves.  The forest was a mere two areas, although it was made to feel bigger by having a lot of the exits loop back on themselves.  In Adventure 430 the forest is huge.  It has over 20 locations, and I had some trouble finding enough inventory items to accurately map it.  I probably didn't need to do that; there are only two locations of note, and I found those easily enough just by stumbling through at random.  But you never know in these games when you've found everything, so I had to make a map.

The first of those two locations was a clearing in the forest, where I found a "severed leporine appendage".  A quick bit of googling revealed that a leporine is a hare, so what I'd found here was basically a rabbit's foot.  I didn't put that together until much later though.

The second location had an urn embedded into a rock.  I wasn't strong enough to pull the urn out, so I left it for now, thinking that I'd come back after I found some tools or somehow became stronger.  As I later discovered I was on completely the wrong track with this, but I'll get to that.  It's one of the bigger grievances I have with the game.

It's called an urn. Remember this.

With the overworld done it was time to head into the caves, where I set about testing the boundaries of the original map.  I was expecting to find new areas to explore, much as I had in Adventure 440.  What I didn't expect was to find nothing.  I scoured the old map, went through every location, and didn't find a single new path or area.  I was baffled, to be honest.  How was I supposed to find the new content in the game if there was no new content?  Aside from the new forest areas this game appeared to be identical to the original.

It turns out that there are new area to explore in Adventure 430, but they're extremely well hidden.  I tried my best to poke around and find what I could, but I had to resort to a walkthrough for pretty much all of this.  I've been trying to avoid that as much as possible, but here I just couldn't make any progress.  After a couple of play sessions where I accomplished nothing at all, I felt pretty justified in spoiling the whole game for myself.  On my own it would have taken me forever to solve these puzzles, and there's one that I would never, ever have figured out.

First, I'll list the differences in the game that I noticed on my own.

• The game penalises you for saving.  Every time you save your game it takes points off of your score, so a perfect run needs to be accomplished in one go, without any saves.
• It also penalises you for taking too long.  You lose points after 350 moves, and again after 500 moves.  I had a look in the code, and there are penalties further down the line, but I never played for long enough to reach them.  The lamp would run out of juice and end most games before that anyway.
• Instead of typing THROW BEAR to get the bear to chase off the troll, you type RELEASE BEAR.  It's a more intuitive command for sure, but it was a change that threw me off for a bit.  I thought that maybe Woods had changed the solution completely.
• The bird now gets agitated in its cage when you wave the rod (and perhaps at other times, I'm not sure).
• The dragon leaves behind a bloody corpse when you kill it.

Those last two items are important clues, but I can only recognise that in retrospect.  While I was playing I glossed over them as small touches to add some extra detail.  I should have learned by now that nothing should be glossed over in these games.

I'll run through the five new treasures below.

THE NECKLACE

This one is found very close to the cave entrance, just to the west of where you first find the bird.  In that room there's a crack that's too small for you to squeeze through.  It's in the original game, but it's not important and I'd long ago forgotten about it.  If you release the bird and wave the black rod to frighten it, it will fly into the crack and emerge with a necklace.  I might have solved this one if I'd been paying attention, but I have to say I found it hard to approach this version of the game in a diligent manner.  I was so fixated on looking for new paths and branches that weren't there that I neglected to pay close attention to the room descriptions.

In rod we trust.

THE RUBY

The original Adventure had a maze with a vending machine at the centre. If you used the gold coins you could buy a new battery for the lamp, but I rarely did so because you can't win the game afterwards.  That was that maze's only purpose, so going in was completely unnecessary.  In Adventure 430, if you ATTACK or HIT the machine it will open, revealing a secret passage.  Those are the only verbs that I know works for sure; PUSH and MOVE definitely don't.  The secret passage leads to the lair of an ogre, who is guarding a room that contains a ruby.  The ogre can't be killed, and will dodge if you throw the axe at him.  I tried feeding him, but he wasn't hungry.  The solution, believe it or not, is to enter his lair with a hostile dwarf on your tail.  When you ATTACK the ogre, the dwarf throws a knife at you but hits him instead.  Then the ogre chases the dwarf away, and you can nick the ruby.

I'm impressed that this action recognised that I was being chased by
multiple dwarves.

THE STATUETTE

The process for getting this is a pretty long and involved one.  The first step is to release the bird in the forest, which was somewhat hinted at by the bird's agitation when it's in the cage.  If you try to LISTEN, it seems like the bird is trying to tell you something, but you are unable to understand.  The solution to this is to drink the blood of the dead dragon, which is pretty wild.  I might have figured this out if I was more familiar with the story of Sigurd, but I'm going to be real here: all my knowledge of Norse mythology comes from Marvel Comics.  I can tell you a shitload about Volstagg the Voluminous, but I ain't got nothing on Sigurd.  It's pretty esoteric knowledge to expect someone to have.  (I actually did try EAT DRAGON at one point, so my brain was in the right ballpark for a second.  It was just one of many desperation moves when I was stuck, though, and I didn't pursue it.)

Having imbibed the dragon's blood, you can then LISTEN to the bird, who will give you a special password, to be used in an area not far from the Hall of Mists.  Unlike the other passwords in the game (XYZZY, PLUGH, and PLOVER), this one changes every time you play.  Unfortunately for those trying to beat this game in as few moves as possible, that means you can't skip the initial steps of this and go right to using the password.

One of the magic words I got was F'CUW, which sums up my reaction to
certain parts of this game.

When spoken at the reservoir (which is like five whole rooms away from the Hall of Mists, so I call BS on you, bird), this password causes the waters to part.  From there you walk through to the base of a cliff, with the corpses of adventurers piled at the bottom.  Sure enough, if you try to climb up your foot will slip on a rock and you'll tumble to your doom.  This is the one thing in the game that I worked out on my own: you need the rabbit's foot in your possession for the extra boost of luck that will get you to the top safely.  There you can claim the statuette and then climb back down.

(Look, I say I figured it out, but what I actually did was take a guess that the one new inventory item that I'd found might help me.  The luck bonus didn't occur to me until I saw it explained in a walkthrough.)

Some of those adventurers were me, and "several" is an understatement.

THE AMBER GEMSTONE

This puzzle made me so mad.

Remember that urn embedded in the rock, that I was too weak to move?  It turns out that you don't need to get it out at all.  What you actually need to do is fill it with oil, and light it.  Then you rub it, and a genie pops out and pulls the urn out of the rock, to reveal the amber gemstone beneath.

I have a huge problem with this, because I have never in my life heard an oil lamp referred to as an urn.  At first I thought that maybe the failing was mine, but I just checked a bunch of on-line dictionaries, and all of them define an urn as a container for ashes, or for dispensing tea and coffee.  Not one of them defined an urn as a lamp, so I feel justified in being annoyed at this one.  Text adventures live and die based on the accuracy of their descriptions, and this is a pretty big failure.

(Like the dragon, I was in the ballpark with this one for a bit.  Thinking I might be able to loosen the urn from the rock, I tried to OIL URN.  It didn't work, obviously, but I was so close.)

IT'S A BLOODY URN!

THE STAR SAPPHIRE

Next to the area with the urn is a chasm, with a ledge that can be seen on the far side.  It's too far to jump across, though.  What you need to do is fly over on the Persian rug, but before you can do that the rug has to be activated.

The genie gave a clue about this in his warning before revealing the amber gemstone.  He even mentioned the words "traffic" and "light".  What you need to do is remove the amber gemstone from its cavity and replace it with the green emerald.  After this you can fly the carpet over the chasm, take the sapphire, and fly back.  You can't pick up the carpet afterwards until you fill the cavity with the red ruby.  Of all the new puzzles in Adventure 430, I feel like this one is the most clever.

Getting the final treasure.

I may have spoiled the entire game by looking up the solutions to all of the puzzles, but that didn't mean there was no challenge left: I still had to try to get the full 430 points.  To do this I'd need to play through in under 350 moves, without saving.  To call this tricky would be a huge understatement.

There are a number of factors that make doing this nigh-impossible.  The first of those is the dwarves, who roam about the caves and try to murder you with knives whenever they see you.  All it takes is one unlucky shot and your game can be over in an instant.  Then there's the pirate, who will show up eventually to nick whatever treasure you're carrying and take it back to his lair in the maze.  Depending on where you are when it happens, and the number of treasures he takes from you, getting them back can add a lot of moves to your total.  Finally - and this one is the worst - there's the closing stretch of the game, where you have to wait around in the caves until you're whisked off to the end.  This can take around fifty moves just on its own.

I was going to need a meticulous plan to beat this one, so I sat down and worked out every single one of my actions in advance, trying to shave off moves wherever possible.  I used all the short-cuts I could think of, and tried to make the best use of the PLUGH, PLOVER and XYZZY passwords.  I went for the treasures that are deepest in the cave first, because the pirate doesn't appear until later in the game, and I tried to work it so that he'd rob me when I was getting the treasures closer to his lair.  I spent hours on this, trying to come up with the perfect run.

The best I could come up with was a win in 339 moves.  The problem is, that doesn't take into account the time spent waiting around at the end.  It also assumes a perfect run, where the pirate shows up exactly when you want him to, and a dwarf is there to follow you into the ogre's lair at exactly the right moment.  Those things never happen. I mean, I suppose if I tried enough times I might eventually get a game that goes exactly according to plan. That would be great, but the waiting at the end would still put me over 350 moves.

I'll die mad about this.

In practice, the best I could do was a win in 456 turns, with a total of 428 points.  Unless there's a way to speed up the endgame, or a whole load of shortcuts that I'm not aware of, I can only conclude that a win with full points is impossible.  I've read that not even Don Woods could finish it in under 350 moves, which is simultaneously heartening and maddening.  I mean, if the guy who created it couldn't do it I shouldn't feel so bad, but I also think that maybe he should have made the time limit more achievable.  Those two points are going to nag at me forever.

Judging Adventure 430 is going to be difficult, because at its core its still a pretty good game.  The additions don't do much to add to the experience, though, as they just make the game far more frustrating to complete.  If I was going to return to Colossal Cave Adventure, I definitely wouldn't pick this version over the 350 point version.  Hell, I don't even think I'd pick it over the 440 point version, which had its own frustrating elements.  At least I could finish that one.

RADNESS INDEX

Story & Setting: The treasure hunt story isn't going to score highly here, but it would be churlish of me to criticise it on that score; the game it's based on did originate the trope, after all.  The caves are taken straight from the original, and are similarly well-realised. Rating: 2 out of 7. 

Characters & Monsters: I gave the 350 point version a one in this category, which is too low in retrospect.  The pirate makes for an extra challenge, and the dwarves (although annoying) make the game that bit more dangerous.  This version adds the ogre, and gives more for the bird to do.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: This is a text-adventure, but it's a well-written one. The new content keeps up the same level of prose. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Puzzles: The bulk of the game's puzzles are identical to the original game, which I scored as a 3.  The urn puzzle is worth a docked point, but the traffic light puzzle is rather clever, and I like the use of the dwarves to get rid of the ogre.  I'll call it even. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Mechanics: It's a decent parser that usually recognises what you're trying to do, but I dinged it a point originally for the randomness of the dwarves.  I'll stand by that. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: Beating the game would rate as too hard, and beating the game with full points seems to be impossible.  I toyed with the idea of handing out my first zero, but in the end I relented.  I'll save that for games that just can't be beaten at all, not ones where you can win but can't get a perfect score. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Fun: I really did not enjoy the process of playing this game.  A part of that is my own inability to solve the puzzles, but most of it stemmed from the futility of trying to get a perfect score.  I can't give it a minimum rating, though, because the heart of it remains a game that I still enjoy a decent amount.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The scores above total 15, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 30.  It comes in equal 23rd, and 13th out of 32 adventure games.  For comparison, the 350 point version scored 8 points higher, and Colossal Cave Adventure II beat it by a single point.  If the full 430 points had been achievable, it would have scored somewhere in the middle of those.  It still has the core of a good game, but it adds a bunch of flawed content on top of that.

NEXT: My next game was going to be Goblins, a graphic adventure for the Apple II, but it presents me with a chronological dilemma.  The original release was all-text, but because it sold about 30 copies it's not out there for download.  The graphic adventure was released in 1981.  I feel a little weird about playing that version in my 1979 chronology.  I shouldn't, because I've played mainframe games in their earliest year of development, and I've been playing ports of games from later years.  I'm still going to kick it down the line to 1981 though, mostly so that I can fast-track the next game on my list.  That game?  Rogue, the second of my priority CRPGs.  I've played this game before, but I've never beaten it.  I'm looking forward to taking on the challenge again.

Colossal Cave Adventure II: Victory!

In my last post for this game, I was lamenting about how difficult it is to put a successful run together.  The version I was playing had no save game feature, and with the number of random elements involved it was really hard to collect all the treasures without dying.  I managed it eventually, but I had to switch to a different version of the game to do it.

As I mentioned in my last post, the biggest obstacle to winning the game was the time limit imposed by the lamp.  After a certain number of moves it runs out of power, and once that happens it's game over.  This was a tight race in the original Colossal Cave Adventure, and with five more treasures to collect in the remake it becomes even tighter.  My plan was to write a walkthrough, so that I at least knew that on a perfect run I'd be able to do it within the rrequired number of moves.  In the end I didn't write a step-by-step walkthrough: there are too many random elements that can change where you need to go.  Instead I wrote a rough guideline, that looked something like the following:

Step 1: Get the platinum pyramid using the PLUGH and PLOVER passwords

Step 2: Get the lamp and the keys, unlock the grate, return the keys to the house

Step 3: Collect the nugget, diamonds, rug, coins, jewelry and silver bars (all unguarded)

Step 4: Step outside and have a drink

Step 5: Collect the tusk, chalice, crown, and orb.

Step 6: Step outside and have a drink

Step 7: Collect the golden eggs, trident, pearl, and ruby

Step 8: Step outside and have a drink

Step 9: Collect the golden eggs, golden chain, spices

Step 10: Have a drink

Step 11: Collect the vase, the emerald and the pirate's chest

That's a very basic run-down of my plan.  The various treasures are grouped by location: those in Step 3 are all near the entrance, those in Step 5 are all near the chapel, and so on.  I also had to make a plan that made getting the golden eggs efficient.  The eggs are needed to solve two separate puzzles (the troll and the giant), and each time you give them away you need to use a magic word to return them to their starting location.  All up you have to retrieve them from the same location three times, which can eat up a lot of moves if you don't do things in the best order.  I found that tackling the giant before the troll worked best.

You'll also notice that I do a lot of drinking, and that's because you can die of thirst if you're not careful.  The thirst timer is connected to the amount of stuff you're carrying: the more gear you lug around, the quicker you get thirsty.  Initially I was carrying a bottle full of water with me at all times, but I found that this was too limiting for my inventory.  Instead I started drinking from the stream on the surface every time I returned to drop some treasures off.  This was fine as long as I remembered, and it allowed me to carry more items, which in turn allowed me to get the treasures in fewer moves.

Knowing when to turn the lamp off was also key to winning.  I would always turn it off before teleporting back to the surface, because you only need it to see when you're below ground.  I would also turn it off whenever I had to enter multiple commands without moving out of a location.  For instance, if I ever had to pick up more than one item I would turn off the lamp first.  You risk falling and breaking your neck if you move from one location to another with the lamp turned off, but any other actions are safe.  (Except for killing the dragon, which I found out the hard way.  For some reason, the game treats it as though you've moved, and sometimes you'll fall and die.  After that happened to me I started leaving my light on for that bit.)  Every little bit helps to make your lamp last longer; it can be fiddly, but it's vital to success.

Even with my plan, I ran into all sorts of difficulties.  The dwarves would kill me (a lot).  I'd take too many moves to escape from Witt's End after dropping the magazine (doing this adds 1 point to your score, but escaping is by random chance, and can eat up a lot of moves).  Sometimes the pirate wouldn't appear.  Sometimes he would appear at the wrong time, and mess up the sequence to an irreparable degree.  Every now and then I forgot to drink, and died of thirst.  I even forgot to turn my light back on a few times, and died in the dark by accident.  Most frustratingly of all, the endgame would sometimes activate before I could get all of the treasures back to the surface; I could get a victory this way, but not with full points.  There are any number of ways to mess up in this game, which makes a successful, flawless run from start to finish very difficult to achieve.  I got frustrated with it, and switched to a version with a save game feature.  Life's too short.

(The version I switched to can be played on-line at http://gobberwarts.com/, along with a lot of other classic adventure games.  It has a nifty map of the caves as well, which is cool if a bit spoilery.  Luckily for me I had already solved all of the puzzles.)

I collected all the treasures, but my lamp ran out of power before the endgame could start..

The endgame for Colossal Cave Adventure II is exactly the same as that in the original game.  After you've found all the treasures, a voice tells you that the cave is closing soon, and that you should leave by the main exit.  At this point the magic words that teleport you to the surface stop working, and the grate exit is locked.  There's no way out, and you have to pass the time until you are taken to the endgame  The trick is to pass that time without running out of lamp power, and dying in the dark; I did it by going to the room where the emerald is found, as it's one of the few rooms that has its own light source.

When the endgame activates you're taken to a storeroom containing many of the items and monsters from the game, including lots of sleeping dwarves.  If the dwarves wake up you'll be killed.  The solution here is that the room contains some black rods that are actually sticks of dynamite; you use the dynamite to blow up the dwarves, and escape.  I complained about this puzzle in the original game, because there's no foreshadowing or clues about it at all.  Pure guesswork is the only way to solve it.  Luckett and Pike had a chance to solve that problem here, but they left it as is, unfortunately.

Sweet victory

You'll notice above that I only got 436 out of 440 points.  That's a big part of what delayed this post; I would have had it up last week, but I spent far too long trying to find the last four points.  I have no idea how to get them.  I visited every location in the game, I took every item, I tried everything I could think of.  I even scoured the source code looking for the solution.  I couldn't find it, and I also couldn't find a walkthrough with a comprehensive point list.  So I had to give up on 436, which I'm not all that happy about.  If anyone knows the solution, I'd really appreciate it.

Scouring the source code usually turns up some fun things in text adventures, and this game was no exception.  I discovered a rather baffling sequence of events that happens if you drink from the reservoir using the chalice.

As far as I can tell this serves no purpose at all.  The chalice gets destroyed in the process, so even if you drink then refuse to help the princess it's a bad idea.  As pointless as it is though, it's more interesting than anything else the game has to offer.  There are all sorts of hints and implications towards an epic story here, but there's nothing else in the game that lives up to it.  I wonder if Pike and Luckett intended on expanding the game, but never got around to it?  Like I said, it's baffling, but oh so intriguing.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: The setting is exactly that of Colossal Cave Adventure, with a bunch of new locations bolted on.  The story is also the same, only with more treasures to collect (and an intriguing sequence that's pointless but far more interesting than the main quest).  There's more here, but it's more of the same, and not interesting enough to rate any higher.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

EDIT: I noticed that my rating in this category for Colossal Cave Adventure was a 2, mostly due to superior writing and the realistic caves. Given that Colossal Cave Adventure II has the same level of writing, adds a bunch of new things and doesn't take anything away from the original game, it should have the same score in this category. Actual Rating: 2 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: As in most text adventures of the era, the creatures you meet are more obstacles than actual characters.  The dwarves' can move items around now, which I guess gives them a bit more complexity, and there's the addition of a giant, an owl and a spider.  None of it's very inspiring though.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: As usual, this being a text adventure gives it a distinct disadvantage in this category.  The writing is decently evocative, but it's not really on the level of a Zork.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

EDIT: Again, this game should have the rating here as Colossal Cave Adventure. Actual Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: This has all of the good and bad points of the original.  The parser is solid, but combat is clunky, and I feel like there are too many random elements.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: I'm tempted to give this a score of 1, but I don't want to be negatively influenced by the hard time I had because I wasn't able to save my game.  That said, it still has the dynamite puzzle, which I hate, and random deaths are abundant.  There are also two new mazes added (albeit small ones).  I have to mark it low, for being difficult in ways that aren't fun.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: Given that this is an expansion to an existing game, it has to rank low here.  Still, the thirst timer might be the first of its kind in adventure games, and the way that the dwarves move items around could be a first as well (depending on this game's release relative to Zork).  Rating: 2 out of 7.

EDIT: This is also the first expansion of Colossal Cave Adventure, something which becomes a sub-genre in its own right. I feel like that deserves an extra point.  Actual Rating: 3 out of 7.

Fun: I derived little more than mild enjoyment from this one, but that's from the perspective of having already played the original.  I would have enjoyed it much more coming to it fresh, but I can only rate it on the experience that I had.  Colossal Cave Adventure II adds some new things, but more often than not they're frustrating rather than enjoyable.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Sorry game, no bonus point for you: I won't be playing you again.  The above scores total 13, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 26.

Final Rating: 24 out of 100.

EDIT: With the alterations I made above, the Actual Final Rating is 30 out of 100.

That's the lowest score for an adventure game on the list so far (and the lowest score for any game).  For comparison, the original Colossal Cave Adventure scored 44, which is significantly higher.  A score of 24 seems rather low; it really isn't the worst game I've played.  I think it suffered because it's so similar to the original.  My rating was mostly based on what's been added to the game, and that material is largely uninspiring.

EDIT: It's no longer the lowest-rated adventure game, but it's not far off. The new score seems a little fairer to me. Don't worry though, this is the only game I'm going to reassess. Everything else is set in stone.

ADDENDUM THE SECOND:

I guess everything wasn't set in stone.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 keeps many of Colossal Cave Adventure's puzzles, and adds plenty more of its own. Most of those were either too difficult for me to figure out, or involved a lot of frustrating backtracking and rigmarole. A lot of that frustration came not so much from the puzzles themselves, though, but other random elements, like the dwarves.  Even so, I can't quite bring myself to rate this as highly as the original Colossal Cave Adventure.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 1. I'm giving this a bonus point for being the first significant expansion of Colossal Cave Adventure, something which became something of a genre all its own.

Colossal Cave Adventure II's RADNESS Index is 31.  That places it 8th so far, and 4th out of eight adventure games.

NEXT: I'm still working on finishing The Game of Dungeons v8, and I've also started A3, a sci-fi text adventure created using the Wander system.

Colossal Cave Adventure II: So Very Close

Is there anything worse in gaming than knowing you can do something, but not being able to do it?  That's where I am with Colossal Cave Adventure II: I've found all twenty of the treasures, and I'm pretty sure that I've worked out all of the puzzles, but I can't put it all together in a single run.  I'm so close to finishing the game, and yet I can't quite get there.

Oddly for an adventure game, the problem I'm finding myself in has nothing to do with any of the puzzles.  Instead, the problem is a logistical one: my lamp runs out of power before I can find everything.  I could recharge it with a battery from the vending machine, but that requires sacrificing the gold coins, and you can't beat the game without all twenty treasures.  I've had a few attempts, but so far I haven't been able to put together an optimal run.  I know how to do everything I need to win, I just don't know how to do it efficiently enough.  It's bloody frustrating.

I could continue to make attempts until I eventually luck into a successful run, but the smarter option is for me to sit down and write up a walk-through.  If I plan out my run and write it out in advance, I'll know that I can definitely do it within the required number of moves.  I'm pretty sure that the lamp lasts for 390 moves, so I have an upper limit.  The real trick is going to be avoiding the game's random elements: being murdered by dwarves, having my stuff stolen by the pirate, or drowning in the sewer maze are all factors that could throw off a successful run.  I'll need to leave myself some leeway to account for them.

That's for another time, though.  For now, I'll run through all of the treasures, and how I acquired them.  First, here's a quick run-down of the treasures found in the original Colossal Cave Adventure:

• Gold Nugget (found near the entrance; can only be removed by using the PLUGH password to teleport)
• Diamonds (unguarded)
• Gold Coins (unguarded)
• Jewelry (unguarded)
• Bars of Silver (unguarded)
• Ming Vase (unguarded, but you need to drop it on a pillow or it will break)
• Persian Rug (under a dragon, which you have to kill with your bare hands)
• Golden Eggs (found at the top of a beanstalk, and can be used to pay a Troll who is guarding a bridge; saying FEE FIE FOE FOO returns them to their original location)
• Trident (at the top of the beanstalk, behind a door that need to be oiled before it will open)
• Pearl (inside a clam that can only be opened with the Trident)
• Emerald (in the Plover Room; can only be retrieved by passing through a narrow passage while carrying nothing except the Emerald)
• Platinum Pyramid (in a dark room just off the Plover Room; can only be retrieved by using the PLOVER password to teleport in)
• Rare Spices (found on the far side of the Troll bridge)
• Golden Chain (found around the neck of a bear, which must be placated with food, then used to defeat the Troll)
• Pirate's Chest (found deep in the maze with passages "all alike")

Colossal Cave Adventure II adds five new treasures to the game.  I'll run through them one by one.

Ivory Tusk: The tusk is found in an area just off a series of tunnels that are described as "unsafe".  (I think that's just flavour text, as the tunnels never posed any actual danger to me.)  To reach the tusk I needed to pass through a narrow tunnel, through which I could only take my lamp.  Of course, I wasn't able to go back that way carrying the tusk, so I needed another way out.

In the room is a steep tunnel that's submerged by churning, filthy water.  I mentioned it in my last post; when I had tried to enter I drowned in sewage.  Upon further investigation I discovered that the water ebbs and flows with the tide, and when the tide was low I was able to enter a maze-like sewer system.  Obviously, this was the way out.

It wasn't easy though, because this place is a deathtrap.  The maze isn't large, but it took me a long time to map simply because it's so dangerous.  The tide that I mentioned earlier is one of the deadly factors; when it rises the entire maze is flooded, which kills you instantly.  The other thing to watch out for is a horde of rats, which will swarm up out of the water and gnaw you to death.  I don't mind dying in adventure games (indeed, there are some games where it's my favourite part) but I don't think it should ever happen randomly.  I could be missing some way of avoiding death here, but if not I think it's bad game design.  (On further inspection, it seems that both of these factors aren't random, but are instead on a timer.  That's not as bad, but it's still unwelcome.)

Death by sewer rat

Despite many inglorious sewage-ridden deaths, I found the exit and escaped to the Bedquilt area.  What a relief.

Crystal Orb: This orb is found in a room near the basement of the chapel.  There entrance has a warning sign that says "Wizards Only", but signs are no deterrent to a real adventurer.  When you go in a slab covers the only exit, and there is seemingly no way to open it.  Taking the orb is no problem, but there's no way to get it out.  I bashed my head against this puzzle for a while, until I decided on a whim to drop the orb.  As soon as I did so, a grey-robed wizard appeared and teleported me to another location, along with the orb.  I was convinced that this was too easy, and that I had somehow missed something, but as far as I can tell this is the actual solution.  It barely counts as a puzzle at all.

I wish more games had wizards that could solve all the puzzles for me

Chalice: There's a strange man who pops out of the shadows occasionally to give cryptic hints.  One of those hints is about the chalice, which he say has strange powers.  I'm not sure what those powers are (perhaps they play into the endgame), but at least he gives a hint about the existence of this hidden treasure.

Not that it's very well hidden.  When you enter the chapel there's a rope hanging from a ceiling beam.  Climb the rope, and the chalice is sitting on a beam at the top.  It couldn't get much easier than that, really.

Crown: Also near the chapel is an area called the Thieves' Den.  It features a hook with a loot bag and a black mask, both out of reach.  It also features a crown, which can be taken without trouble.  I thought the chalice was easy to get, but this was even simpler.

My attempt to get a screen-grab is jeopardised by a hostile dwarf

Ruby: This treasure was the most difficult to obtain, and I only really did so by accident.  There are two puzzles that need to be solved to find the ruby.  The first involves the giant.  I mentioned him in the last post: he hangs around in the Living Quarters, and if you go in there he snatches you up and puts you in his dungeon before eventually eating you.  I never figured out how to escape from his dungeon, but as it turns out you don't have to.

Th trick is to have the golden eggs on you when you enter the Living Room.  If you do, the giant grabs them and starts eating them.  It's not really logical that eggs made of gold would be edible, but logic is rarely your friend in early adventure games.  I was lucky enough to be carrying the eggs on one of the occasions I decided to tackle the giant, otherwise I'd still be trying to figure out a solution.

Eating eggs while reclining on a couch? It's a disaster waiting to happen.

The second part of the puzzle involves the web maze that I mentioned last time.  (There are four distinct mazes in this game!  Bloody sadists.)  You can enter this maze from the giant's Living Room.  The only thing of interest in there is a giant spider.  It doesn't pose a danger to you, but you can't kill it either.   I tried setting fire to its webs, I tried throwing the axe at it, and I tried using the trident, but none of it worked.  The solution?  I needed an owl.

In the areas surrounding the chapel there's an owl who flaps away when you approach it.  You can summon him by saying HOOT, but he won't stick around unless your lamp is turned off.  I had thought he would be useful in defeating the giant, but I was wrong.  The owl is used to kill the spider, which I only figured out by going through all of my items and notes and trying everything.  I thought he could only be summoned near the chapel, but nope, he's more than willing to fly into the web maze.

It turns out that there are some legal documents in the spider's web, which I was not expecting.  Said documents belong to the giant, and when you go back through his area while carrying them he rewards you with a ruby.  Job done!  After that it's a simple FEE FIE FOE FUM to get the golden eggs back, and move on to the endgame.

That questioning "hoot?" at the end sounds suspiciously like an owl being poisoned by a 
spider from the inside.

Or I would be moving on to the endgame, if I could retrieve all the treasures in a single shot.  I should have the game done by next week, if I can draft an effective plan of action.  And if the dwarves don't get me.  And if I don't die of thirst, or get eaten by rats, or have my treasure stolen by the pirate at a bad time, or drown in sewage.  Adventuring: it's a rough old time.  Wish me luck!

Colossal Cave Adventure II: A Maze of Twisty Little Passages All-Different

This is what I see in my nightmares.

Most of my gaming efforts have been channeled into The Game of Dungeons v8 over the last week, so I don't have a lot to write about Colossal Cave Adventure II.  I only did one thing in that game since my last post: I explored one of the mazes.

So far in my explorations I've found three mazes: one with passages that are "all alike", one with passages that are "all-different", and another that is a cavern filled with swirling fog.  That last one wasn't in the original game, and I have no idea how to map it, so I've steered clear of it so far.  The one I decided to explore was the "all-different"maze.  It's the easiest to map, if perhaps the most irritating.

Take a look at the image above.  You'll see that each location in the maze has a unique descriptor, based on four words in different combinations: twisty, twisting, little and maze.  You just have to pay close attention to the arrangement of these words.  The main trick here is not to mix up "twisty" with "twisting".  I didn't have much trouble with it this time around, but when I played the original version of the game it was a while before I figured out that those two words were different.  This time I was on the lookout for it, so I had little trouble making my map.  It was annoying and time-consuming, but not difficult.

Just like the maze in the original Colossal Cave Adventure, this maze contains a vending machine at a dead end.  You can use a gold coin to buy a battery from the machine, and the battery can be used to recharge your lamp.  This sounds useful, as the lamp will run out eventually, but I wouldn't recommend it.  The coin is a treasure, and you'll need it to win the game.  It's only really of value when you're mapping and exploring, not trying to win.

I wasn't expecting this maze to be any different to that in the original game, but this one had a nasty surprise.  There's a tunnel deep in the maze that leads to a "tangled web of intersecting passages".  Yes, that's my reward for exploring the maze: another bloody maze!  And not just another maze, but a maze with a giant spider.  It's hitting all of my nightmare fuel at once.

That's all for now.  By next week I should have explored the other mazes, and will hopefully be close to completing the game.  It depends on whether I'm close to beating The Game of Dungeons.  Believe it or not I feel pretty confident about beating that game soon as well: I have new ideas.

Game 16: Colossal Cave Adventure II (1978)

Colossal Cave Adventure never had an official sequel.  Although it was eventually released commercially, and became iconic in its own right, for whatever reason no-one ever decided to create one.  There's also the matter of the game having multiple creators and versions.  Who would the official sequel come from?  William Crowther, the game's originator?  Don Woods, the man who expanded it into its most widely known form?  The latter would probably have had the best chance of creating a sequel that would be accepted as such, but he never tried, and neither did anyone else.

What the game did have was multiple expansions.  As Colossal Cave Adventure spread across university campuses all over the USA, many people took the game and rewrote it, adding new areas to explore and puzzles to solve.  There are at least fourteen versions of the game, usually distinguished by the number needed to get a complete score.  I suspect there are many more, and that more than a few have been lost.

I'm not planning to play every expansion of the game, mostly due to the difficulty of identifying and tracking them all down.  They're an important part of the history of adventure gaming though, so at the very least I wanted to play Adventure II, the earliest known rewrite.

A familiar beginning.

Adventure II was developed by Peter Luckett and Jack Pike, who were working together at Royal Aircraft Establishment Farnborough, in the UK.  They started the game in 1978 (the original code is dated December of that year) and apparently worked on it up through 1981.  The game was missing up until 2001, and it was only through the intrepid work of a number of folks (Jack Pike included) that it can be played today.  You can check out the full story here.

I spent a few hours earlier today going through the game, mapping it out and reminding myself of the geography.  It's very much based on the framework of the original.  As far as I can tell, everything from the Don Woods version is structurally intact, and all of the puzzles have the same solutions.  Luckett and Pike have made additions rather than alterations.  You may want to check out my posts on the original Colossal Cave Adventure, but I'll do a quick refresher below.

The goal of Colossal Cave Adventure is to explore the Colossal Caves in search of fifteen treasures, and return them to a nearby building.  I finished the game (albeit with a little help from a walkthrough), and along the way I had to contend with the following puzzles and obstacles:

• Hordes of knife-throwing dwarves 
• A lamp that would eventually run out of power
• A snake that I drove away by releasing a bird
• A bridge over a chasm that only appeared when I waved a black rod
• A dragon that I had to kill with my bare hands
• Three magic words that I had to master: XYZZY, PLUGH and PLOVER
• A troll that I needed to knock off a bridge by throwing a bear
• A pirate who constantly pops up to steal your stuff
• A maze of twisty little passages, all alike
• A maze of twisty little passages, all different

The original Colossal Cave had the following treasures: a piece of jewelry, some bars of silver, a gold nugget, gold coins, a ming vase, a golden egg, diamonds, an emerald, a gold chain, rare spices, a trident, a pearl, a persian rug, a platinum pyramid, and a pirate's chest.

Adventure II includes all of the above, basically unchanged from the original.  The same treasures are there, with the same obstacles and the same solutions.  There are new areas and new puzzles, though, as well as a couple of differences in the way the game behaves.  I'll run through them below.

• You can now die of thirst.  Eventually you'll get a message saying that you can't last much longer without something to drink  There are plenty of water sources around, so it's not to difficult to stay hydrated, but it means that you need to keep the water bottle on your person at all times.  Thankfully the bottle is found very early in the game.

Dying of thirst.  As in the original game, you can be reincarnated several times, 
although it lowers your score.

 

• The version of the game I'm using doesn't recognise the RESTORE command.  I can SAVE a game, but I haven't figured out how to actually load it.  So I've had to do a lot of restarting from the beginning, which is getting a bit irritating.
• The dwarves now move objects around the map.  Occasionally you'll see a dwarf with something stuffed inside its coat, and when you kill it an item from another location will appear.  This mirrors the behaviour of the Thief from Zork; I wonder which game implemented it first?

This Dwarf has stolen the Persian Rug.  Also note the fellow who pops up to provide a clue.

• There's a fellow who pops up occasionally to provide clues (pictured above).  So far he's given me clues about the magic bridge, and mentioned something about a chalice.
• There are spiral stairs leading down from a chamber just off the Hall of the Mountain King.  At the bottom is a chamber, and a cellar that is blocked by a rusted portcullis.  A crystal orb can be seen on the cellar floor, but not reached.  The portcullis can't be opened, but it doesn't matter because this area can be accessed from somewhere else.
• "Somewhere else" is a basement, with an entrance that has a message stating that only Wizards may pass.  When I entered the cellar to claim the orb, a stone slab dropped to block the exit, and I couldn't figure a way out.  Eventually a grey-robed wizard appeared and teleported me out (along with the orb).  That was the good news.  The bad news?  He teleported me into one of the mazes, and I died of thirst before I could escape.
• There's a chapel area to the south of the Antechamber near Witt's End.  In several areas near the chapel there's an owl who flies away with a HOOT when approached.  The owl can be summoned by typing HOOT, but it will only approach if the lamp is turned off.  I haven't figured out what the owl's deal is yet.
• Also near the chapel is a crypt where the air is cold, and a stable with a large beast behind a partition of some sort.
• North of the anteroom is a series of unsafe tunnels.  There was a shaft I could slide down, but going all the way to the bottom resulted in me drowning in a pool of slime.  One of the chambers here contains an ivory tusk, which is one of the treasures.
• In the chapel's attic I found a Thieves' Den.  Lying unguarded was a crown, which was yet another treasure.  Some of them are not hard to find at all.
• If you wander into the Living Quarters, a giant grabs you and drops you in his dungeon, where you will eventually be eaten.  I haven't figured out how to escape from him yet.

About to be eaten by the Giant.

• Near the reservoir is a large cavern full of swirling mists.  The mists are difficult to navigate, especially as my usual tactic of dropping items doesn't work: any item dropped can't be seen.  It's a bit of a nightmare, and I'm kind of hoping that I don't need to do anything here.

The only other places that I haven't explored are the two mazes; both of these mazes are large, and as I recall a real bitch to map.  I'm not looking forward to tackling them again.

So I know where three treasures are, and they're not too difficult to retrieve.  I've read that this version has twenty treasures, so I'm not too far away from finding them all.  I don't think that will be too difficult. The real question is whether Luckett and Pike have altered the endgame.  I doubt that will have, as they've remained super-faithful to the original game.  Hopefully by next week I'll find out.

Colossal Cave Adventure: Victory!

Readers may remember that in my last post I made a big song and dance about consulting a walkthrough to solve some puzzles, and how I was going to try my hardest not to do so in the future.  Well, I did try my hardest, and apparently my hardest wasn't good enough.  Yes, I completed Colossal Cave Adventure, but I certainly didn't do it on my own.

When I last posted, I'd reached the endgame, where the hero is transported to a "Repository" that houses all of the various objects and creatures found in the game, split into a north-east area and a south-west area..  The first time I got to this place I screwed up by making too much noise, and a bunch of sleeping dwarves woke up and murdered me.  I was more cautious on my second attempt, and started exploring the items available to me: empty bottles, lamps, rods, oysters, beanstalks, and some others I'm probably forgetting.  There was also a locked grate in the south-west area that I couldn't figure out how to open.

When I picked up one of the oysters, I saw a message on the bottom, and I thought that I was getting somewhere.  When I tried to read it the game said that I would have to sacrifice 10 points, but I was more than prepared.  I could always play through the game again and take advantage of my new-found knowledge without losing any points.  Alas, this is the cryptic message that I received:

"There is something strange about this place, such that one of the words I've always known now has a new effect."  Not particularly helpful, is it?  I spent the next couple of days wracking my brain and trying all kinds of unsuccessful schemes.  In the end I had to relent, and consult a walkthrough.  I can't say that I was pleased by the solution.

There's a bundle of rods in the south-west area that apparently doubles as dynamite, not that anything in the game would clue you in on this.  If you leave it in the north-east corner, head to the south-west corner, then type BLAST, it will explode and blow a hole to freedom.  Like so:

This, I have to say, is a bullshit puzzle.  I don't know how anyone ever figured this out, short of looking in the source code.  The only clue that the game gives you makes no sense at all, unless you happen to have typed BLAST earlier in the game for whatever reason.  I don't know what that reason would be, unless you're the sort of person that types mild curses when the game gets frustrating.  To top it off, you have to make sure you don't blast a hole in the south-west area, or you'll be flooded by lava. It's frustration all around.

So I'd finished the game (albeit in a less than ideal fashion), but try as I might I wasn't able to get the full 350 points.  I ended up with 349, and I had to look up the solution for that last point as well.  In my first post on the game I wrote about Witt's End, an area that you can wander into that seemingly has no exits.  Just outside of this area there was a magazine on the floor.  To get the last point I had to drop that magazine in Witt's End.  Apparently, if you get stuck in Witt's End, you can get out eventually by going any direction except west.  I never did escape in that way (and besides, wasting that many moves on escaping would cut things very fine in regards to the lantern's battery).  Instead I left this until last, and escaped by being teleported to the Repository.  This is another irritating puzzle, but it doesn't bother me as much as the one above, because it's non-compulsory.  You can quite happily finish the game without it, and if you want to spend your time banging your head against a brick wall to get that last point, then go for it.  Below is a screen cap of the game ending with full points:

I'm not sure what that bit about achieving the next higher rating is about.  None of the sites I've consulted mention a rating beyond Grandmaster, so I'm not going to worry myself about it.  It's time to wrap this baby up.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE

Obtuse Puzzles: This should come as no surprise, because I've been whinging and banging on about it for the last two posts.  I should say that the vast majority of the puzzles in the game are perfectly fair, and some are even rather clever.  There are two that I take issue with, however.  One of those is the final puzzle mentioned above, with the dynamite.  The other is the dark room containing the pyramid, that can only be accessed by using the magic word PLOVER.  Both of these puzzles have one thing in common: there are no clues in the game that lead to the solution.  The player can only stumble across them by dumb luck, and to me that's just poor design.

(I almost included the KILL DRAGON puzzle here, but there's a cheekiness about it that I admire, and the game does at least prompt you with a question.  Discovering the solution to this made me smile, and that makes all the difference.)

Random Dwarves: This is a minor niggle, but I don't like being randomly attacked and killed in adventure games.  I don't mind dying because I tried something stupid; half the fun of this genre is finding absurd and amusing ways to die.  But having a dwarf pop around a corner and throw a knife through my ribcage isn't fun if I have no way of preventing it.

WHAT I LIKED:

Places of Interest: Colossal Cave is a joy to explore.  Unlike the RPGs that I started this blog with, there's very little wasted space.  Almost every room has a treasure to find or a puzzle to solve, and more often than not solving a puzzle opens up even more interesting places to see.  RPGs and adventure games, in these earliest days, are both trying to adapt Dungeons & Dragons, but they're approaching it from completely different directions.  RPGs are more interested in the statistical side of things, and the resource management inherent in a simulation of dungeon exploration.  Adventure games strip away that side of things, and focus on the interesting places that spring from the Dungeon Master's imagination, and the struggle of the players to solve the mysteries those places present (and, for better or worse, the idiosyncrasies of said DM's personality, which in adventure games manifests in the perversity of the puzzles).  Both are fun, but adventure games pack more into a smaller space.

The Puzzles That Made Sense: Despite my misgivings about a couple of puzzles above, I must say that most of the puzzles in Colossal Cave Adventure are logical, and not too difficult.  The highlight has to be the sequence with the Troll.  Crossing his bridge requires that several puzzles have been solved, and ends with a bear attack.  I want more weaponised bears in my gaming, is what I'm saying here.

Historical Legacy: There's no doubting that games like dnd and pedit5 are foundational for the RPG genre, but nothing I've played comes close to Colossal Cave Adventure.  It's quite astounding just how advanced it feels; the text adventure has arrived here almost fully formed.  Playing it felt very familiar.  Part of that came from the interface, but in large part it's due to the game's massive influence on Zork.  Zork is probably the most famous example of it's genre, and the amount of stuff it takes from Colossal Cave Adventure is almost too much to list.  The treasure-hunting quest; the lantern with a time limit; the enemy who steals your stuff; the maze of twisty passages, all alike.  Zork is a more polished affair by far, but it (and consequently the text adventure as a whole) owes a lot to its progenitor.

ADDENDUM - FINAL RATING:

Some time after completing this game I instituted a scoring system with which I can rank the games I play.  I've been gradually going back and rating the games I played earlier in the blog, and now it's time to give Colossal Cave Adventure the same treatment.

Story & Setting: The story, a bog-standard treasure hunt, is as generic as it gets for this game genre.  The setting, however, is quite evocative.  Certain sections are based on Crowther's caving experiences, and the end result is that the places in the game feel authentic.  There are other areas that feel tacked on, though, and the endgame is pure nonsense.    Rating: 2.

Characters & Monsters: There aren't a lot of characters in this game, and the ones that are present have a limited range of interaction.  Most of them are obstacles (the troll, the snake, the dragon), some are nuisances (the dwarves, the pirate) and one is a useful tool (the bear).  None of them are actual charact6ers, though.  Rating: 1.

Aesthetics: Text adventures are never going to score highly in this area, I'm afraid, but I'm going to award Colossal Cave Adventure an extra point for its evocative descriptions.  Rating: 2.

Mechanics: Colossal Cave Adventure has a simple parser, but very few of the problems I had with the game stemmed from that aspect.  The random elements were perhaps a little too frequent.  Being surprise attacked and killed by dwarves in a CRPG is all fine and dandy: that genre is usually heavily based around combat.  But in a genre geared towards puzzle-solving, it can get really irritating.  Rating: 3.

Challenge: Some of the puzzles in this game are fun, and well thought through.  Others are obtuse as hell, to the point where the game is unsolvable without extreme luck and guesswork.  For that, I have to knock it down significantly.  Rating: 2.

Innovation & Influence: Given that this is the first ever game of its genre, I have to give it a maximum score here.  Rating: 7.

Fun: Despite its flaws, I enjoyed Colossal Cave Adventure a lot.  Perhaps it was just the change of pace from playing lengthy PLATO CRPGs, but I found this game to be really refreshing.  Rating: 5.

I don't feel any particular urge to play this game again, so it doesn't get the bonus point.  The scores above add up to 22, which gives it a final score of 44 out of 100. This puts it slightly ahead of Adventureland (the only other text adventure I've rated at the time of writing), which feels about right.

Final Rating: 44 out of 100.

ADDENDUM THE SECOND:

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 is the formative adventure game, so a lot of the puzzles seen here are massively influential.  Most of them are fair, and I think the dragon puzzle is amusingly clever.  I have to knock this one down for it's final puzzle though, as the BLAST command is never made known to the player at all.  I'm not a big fan of the PLOVER puzzle either.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2. The influence of this game is so massive that the entire adventure game genre is named after it. It's shadow is long, and I'd hazard a guess that I'll be at this blog for many years before I find an adventure game that doesn't have any of the DNA of Colossal Cave Adventure in it somewhere.

Colossal Cave Adventure's RADNESS Index is 38. So far that puts it third, behind The Game of Dungeons and Orthanc, and ahead of The Dungeon. It's the top-rated adventure game though!

NEXT: I'm still playing Moria, so I'll do a check-in with that.  While I continue to plug away at that game in the background, I'll check out either Oubliette or the DND game designed for the PDP-10 system.