Game 43: Enchanted Island (1979)

Sorry Greg, it only required a fraction of my cunning.

Okay, so I screwed up.  Remember a few posts ago, when I said that I had the order of the Greg Hassett games screwed up?  And that my next game would not be Enchanted Island but would instead be Sorcerer's Castle Adventure?  Well, I forgot to change my notes, so I ended up playing Enchanted Island anyway.  This is my completely nocturnal quarantine brain in action.

Enchanted Island is technically the sixth of Hassett's text adventures, and it's the fifth one that I'm playing for the blog.  They didn't start out all that great with Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure, but his later efforts like Voyage to Atlantis have shown signs of improvement.  All of them have scored pretty low on the RADNESS Index though, which makes me question why I have such an inordinate amount of fondness for Greg Hassett.  The fact that he's about thirteen years old around this time certainly has something to do with it.  But the more I think about it, the more I realise that he's pretty much exactly what I wanted to be when I was that age.

I went to uni to study IT (an ill-fated decision) with the intention of getting into the games industry.  I wanted to make games!  Unfortunately, I didn't want to make games in the system that was around in the late 90s and early 2000s: I wanted to be a solo creator, or part of a small team, not one cog in a huge machine.  So I dropped out, bummed around, and eventually picked up a job in a library archive.  The sad thing is, I could have had what I wanted in the 80s and maybe the early 90s.  I could have had what I wanted from about 2010 onwards.  I just happened to reach adulthood around the time where doing that was pretty much impossible.  (Eh, who am I kidding anyway, I never would have had the drive to be a success at it.  I just slept from 10am to 1am.)

What does my sad life story have to do with Enchanted Island, you ask?  Well, uhhhh, they're both set in Australia?  (That was a segue, folks. I didn't spend three years studying professional writing for nothing.)

So, Enchanted Island.  Like Hassett's other games, it was originally released through Mad Hatter Software for the TRS-80.  There was a later port for the Apple II, but I couldn't find it, so I'm playing the TRS-80 version.  If this post at Gaming After 40 is anything to go by, the version I found is a revised one that was written in assembly language rather than BASIC.  I'm not entirely happy with that, but I couldn't find anything else so this is what I had to work with.  (I did find something that I think approximates the original version, but more on that in Ports of Call below.)

As I mentioned above, Enchanted Island is set in Australia, or more accurately speaking, on an island off the Australian coast.  That's what the opening of the game says, anyway.  The description on the packaging says that it's set on an island in middle of the Pacific Ocean, which isn't quite the same.  For all that it matters, I'll go with what the game says.  The goal of Enchanted Island (surprise, surprise) is to scour the island for treasure.  It's a beacon of familiarity in these uncertain times.

Crikey mick, I'm on a flamin' island!

The game begins with the player standing on a beach.  There's a sign that tells you that dropping any treasure found here will increase your score.  I do appreciate a game that does this outright, rather than making me figure out where to drop things on my own.  Checking my inventory I discovered that I was carrying nothing, and typing SCORE I learned that I needed to earn 140 points.

There's also a warning not to go south, so of course that was the first thing I tried.  I ended up in the ocean, where I drowned.  (Wouldn't you think I'd turn back when it got to chin height or something?)

After a restart I headed north along the beach, and eventually to a thicket where I found some tasty food.  Remembering that just about every second puzzle solution in Hassett's games involves FEEDing something, I took the food with me rather than eating it myself.  East of the thicket was a rocky flat and a cave, but it was dark inside so I decided to go elsewhere to look for a light source.

East of my starting location I found a green bottle in the sand, but I couldn't open it so I took it with me.  Further east I found an oasis, with a single palm tree.  I climbed up the tree, and there I found a vulture guarding a golden feather.  The feather was denoted with + symbols, meaning that it was one of the treasures that I needed to find.  I fed the tasty food to the vulture, which flew away, and I was able to claim the feather and take it back to the beach.

I can't imagine that hand-feeding a vulture is much fun.

Heading south from the oasis, I found a dusty book half-buried in a sand dune.  Reading the book gave me the following clue: MAGIC BREAK WORD BOTTLE "BIMBO".  This looked like two clues jumbled up to me.  I tried breaking the bottle, only to be told that there was nothing hard enough here.  I also tried typing SAY BIMBO, but nothing happened.  The game definitely recognised BIMBO though, so I was on the right track.

I followed a winding path around from where I'd found the book, past a waterfall (with no secret room behind it, what a rip), and to the edge of a cliff.  There I found a lighter, which would definitely come in handy if I ever found a light source to use it on.  North and east of that I eventually came to a place called Spyglass Hill, where I encountered a deer.  Nothing I tried to do worked, not even KILL DEER, so I left this for later.

South of the deer I found a shady spot, where a warlock was guarding a silver key, the second of the treasures that I needed.  Much like the deer, the warlock didn't respond to anything I did, but he also wouldn't let me take they key.

This was all looking very similar in structure to Voyage to Atlantis.  That game had treasures scattered around the map, most of them guarded by creatures that served no other purpose than to act as obstacles to the treasure they were guarding.  Solving the game was a case of finding the solution to getting rid of each creature, and if memory served a lot of those solutions would involve food.  I'd already found one that backed that up.

The only other place to explore was east of the oasis, which led me a large rock with writing on it.  The writing read: "WARLOCK SLIP. HIT DEER".  The first part of that didn't look like something I could act on right now, but I went back and tried HIT DEER.  I was told "I've no weapon, so I'd rather not."  Something else to remember.

I went back to the rock and tried breaking the bottle.  The rock was obviously hard enough, because the bottle shattered and revealed a note inside.  The note read: "HOLY SMOKES, A TIGER! BARBS LIKE BAN..." The rest of the note was too faded to read.  I hadn't encountered a tiger yet, nor had I met a "barb", which I figured was short for barbarian.

North and east of the rock, through some tall reeds, I found a depression with a lantern on the ground.  This was the light source I was looking for, and with the lighter I was able to ignite the lantern and start exploring the cave.  Thankfully, the lantern doesn't appear to ever run out.

The caves were almost as big as the rest of the island I'd explored, but only a few locations had items of interest in them.  In a "sacred chamber" to the north and east I found a gold ring, the first unguarded treasure that I'd found.  West of that, in a dead end, I found an emerald embedded in the wall.  I mustn't have had the right tool on me though, because I couldn't get it out.

A little bit north and west of the entrance I found a cell, with a human skull on the floor.  South of that was another dead end, with a "mammoth ruby", another unguarded treasure that I gleefully pocketed.  I'd thought its implied size might cause me problems, but it didn't.

North of that I found a strange cave, where a medicine man was guarding a crate.  As with every other living thing in the game, he was non-responsive to all of my actions except trying to take that crate.

At this point, I'd explored every part of the island that I could find, and none of the inventory items I had were obvious solutions to the obstacles before me.  I needed something that could make the warlock slip, a weapon to hit the deer with, and a tool to pry the emerald from the wall.  As for the medicine man, I didn't have any clues as to how to sort him out.  There was nothing for it but to retrace my steps around the island and make sure that I hadn't missed anything.

I found the first clue to what I was missing at the top of the oasis palm tree.  The description there said that I could see a jungle to the south, but I couldn't see a way to get there.  This put me in the mind of the passwords from Colossal Cave Adventure and its variants, so I tried SAY BIMBO again.  This time it worked, teleporting me to a dead end in the cave.  This didn't seem all that helpful, so I tried it again, and this time it teleported me to the jungle I had seen from afar.

If I say this word one more time I'm going to get cancelled.

It took a little while, and another death, to figure out what I had done to make BIMBO work.  It turns out that you need the ruby in your possession.  There is a clue to this in the game, although I never found it: if you type OPEN BOOK rather than READ BOOK, a hollow voice tells you that "the ruby was Bimbo's".  I'm not sure why you'd try that once you've read it, but it's not the first game I've played where the two commands give different results.  Usually, it's that there's a note or something hidden between the pages.  Anyway, I worked out the solution through process of elimination, by trying the magic word every time I picked something up or did anything else noteworthy.

The jungle was a pretty small area. To the west, I found a hut with a barbarian guarding some rare spices.  To the north was a tiger guarding a priceless giraffe skin.  And to the east, I found a bear guarding some Cuban cigars.  I also found a bamboo pole, which I took with me, but nothing I was carrying seemed to have an effect on any of these three.  (For old time's sake, with Adventureland fresh in my memory, I tried SCREW BEAR.  Nothing happened.)

The only other avenue to explore was a dark marsh, this game's obligatory maze.  Since this was a marsh I didn't think that leaving inventory breadcrumbs would work as a mapping tool, as I expected them to sink into the bog.  That didn't happen though, and mapping this small maze was no hassle.  I found a bunch of potentially useful items in there as well: a jewel-encrusted coconut (another treasure), a glowing glass ball, a banana, and an iron pick.  I also wandered out of the swamp and into the ocean for another ignominious death, but in a game as small as this it was a minor setback.

The first thing I tried after scooping up all of this stuff (which required multiple trips due to this game's six item inventory limit) was to break the glass ball.  This caused yet another death, but one that came with a vital clue.

This isn't necessarily a game over, you can BIMBO your way out of the
Land of Lost Adventurers. You can't win without the glass ball though.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.  Should vital clues come from failure?  On the one hand it breaks the narrative immersion.  On the other hand, playing an adventure game isn't really like experiencing a narrative at all, particularly in these early days.  It's more like unravelling a puzzle, and repeated failure is a part of that process.  I can see why people have a problem with this sort of thing, but I think I'm okay with it.

I was pretty sure at this point that I had the tools I needed to solve the game.  I started by feeding the banana to the barbarian, who took off and left the peel behind.  I took the spices and the peel, and went to the warlock.  GIVE didn't work as a command, and THROW gave me the message that I could only throw the ball.  So I tried DROP, and sure enough the warlock slipped on the peel and vanished.  (I assume he teleported away out of embarrassment.)  I took his key, and went to deal with the medicine man.  Trying BREAK BALL here results in yet another death, but when I tried THROW BALL the wizard instead took his wrath out on the medicine man.  With the key I was able to unlock the crate, and inside I found another treasure, a golden chain.

"I had the cure for the plague of the 20th shentury and I losht it!"
That's some obscure Sean Connery for you oldies out there.

From there it was a simple matter to pry the emerald out of the wall with the pick, and hit the deer with the bamboo pole.  This causes it to bound away, leaving golden antlers behind.  How this is done by an explicitly female deer is anyone's guess.

So far I'd gathered the following treasures: a golden feather, a silver key, golden antlers, a ruby, a gold ring, an emerald, a golden chain, some rare spices, and a jewel-encrusted coconut. There were two other treasures to be procured - the Cuban cigars and the giraffe skin - but both were guarded by the bear and the tiger respectively.  Based on earlier clues I guessed that the cigars would get rid of the tiger, but that meant I still had to deal with the bear, and nothing in my inventory looked helpful.  The only item I had that hadn't served a purpose yet was the skull, but the bear wasn't interested in eating it, and I wasn't able to throw it either.

This is where I got stuck for the longest, and I considered hitting a walkthrough for the solution.  This time my patience held out for once.  I just kept trying different things on the bear until I hit on the solution.  It ended up being a little bit annoying.  Trying HIT BEAR gave me back a message that I didn't want to, because the bear might hit back.  But when, in desperation, I tried FIGHT BEAR, I got the following result.

And I did it *bear*-handed.  That's it. That's the joke. Wacka-wacka.

So I'd already found the solution, I just hadn't worded it properly.  The same thing happened to me recently with Mystery House, where CLEAN ALGAE hadn't worked but WIPE ALGAE did.  At least in that game, it happened with a verb that the parser didn't recognise.  With Enchanted Island, it recognises HIT, FIGHT and ATTACK, which are ostensibly the same action, but only the latter two let you kill the bear.  (Incidentally, trying FIGHT or ATTACK on the deer gets you killed, even if you have the bamboo pole.)

With the cigars now in my possession, I went to the tiger and typed LIGHT CIGAR.  This didn't work, but SMOKE CIGAR did, and I was able to claim the giraffe skin.  These were the final two treasures, and I took them back to the beach and claimed the full 140 points.

I won, I guess?

Somewhat disappointingly, there's no victory message when you win.  I wondered briefly if there was perhaps something else that I'd missed, but my score suggested not.  I confirmed later by playing an earlier version of the game that I'd found everything, so it seems like Greg Hassett either didn't want to congratulate the player or just forgot about it.

This is the full treasure list, and the amount of points that each one is worth:

• Golden Feather - 15 points
• Ruby - 10 points
• Gold Ring - 15 points
• Jewel-Encrusted Coconut - 10 points
• Rare Spices - 10 points
• Emerald - 15 points
• Silver Key - 10 points
• Golden Chain - 15 points
• Golden Antlers - 15 points
• Giraffe Skin - 10 points
• Cuban Cigars - 15 points

And this is my Trizbort map of the game:

Wooaah, the clicks'll make it bigger.

Enchanted Island isn't bad, but it's a pretty slight experience.  Much like Voyage to Atlantis, it's a perfectly competent game that does what it does in the most adequate manner possible.  I didn't love it, but it's a perfectly fine way to fill in an hour or two.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The treasure hunt set-up doesn't earn it any favours, but I was intrigued by this game being set on an island off the coast of Australia.  It doesn't follow through on that at all though, featuring a number of things that do not exist in or near Australia at all.  We don't have tigers (although we did have Tasmanian tigers, but those are different); we don't have bears (although we do have koalas, even though they aren't really bears; and I suppose there are always the dreaded, deadly Drop Bears); and according to the internet we don't even have vultures.  I'll give Hassett the warlock, but "medicine man" isn't really a title that gets used for our country's indigenous elders.  It's much more of a generic hodge-podge of jungle stereotypes, and not all that interesting. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: As with Hassett's other games, Enchanted Island doesn't have living creatures or even the digital representation of such: it just has obstacles.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Silent, text-based, terse. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Puzzles: The puzzles are simple, and not all that clever.  Only two of them presented any difficulty, and the solution to the bear puzzle is really not solvable without simple trial-and-error. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is a basic two word affair, which has its own set of strengths and limitations.  It does pretty much everything it sets out to do adequately, and there was only one place where I had real parser trouble. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: A game that I can knock off in under two hours definitely gets lumped into the too easy basket, but it didn't present me much in the way of frustrations.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: There's not a lot of enjoyment to be gleaned from this one, but as I've said before I always have time for a short game.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The above scores total 12, which doubled gives it a RADNESS Index of 24. That puts it equal 34th overall, and equal 20th out of 27 adventure games.  It's sitting level with Burial Ground Adventure and Hassett's own House of Seven Gables.  In terms of the other Hassett adventures I've played, Journey to the Center of the Earth and King Tut's Tomb are two points below, and Voyage to Atlantis is four points higher.  That's probably because I ranked it pretty early into the blog, but then again it does allow you to shoot a manta ray with a cannonball, which is definitely worth some points.

PORTS OF CALL

I couldn't find the Apple II version of this game, nor could I find a version for the TRS-80 that was earlier than the one I played above.  But on this web-site I found a web-based implementation of Enchanted Island that has a number of differences.  I'd say it's pretty clearly based on the game's original release, or at least something a lot closer than the TRS-80 version that I played.

I'll run through the differences below:

• There's no warning at beginning of the game about heading south into the ocean.
• In the same location where you find the tasty food, there is also some green liquid.  I never found a use for it.
• Opening the book no longer gives you a clue about the ruby belonging to Bimbo. That clue comes from the skull in the cell, and is given to you upon entering that room.
• The warlock doesn't just disappear when he slips on the banana peel, he slips and breaks his neck.
• The clue in the book is slightly different, and comes with a plug for Hassett's five previous adventures.  Instead of saying "MAGIC BREAK WORD BOTTLE BIMBO", the clue after the advertising reads: "BRE BOT MAGIC WORD: BIMBO".
• The clue written on the rock is also different.  Instead of "SLIP WARLOCK. HIT DEER", it reads "SLIP WAR. HERACLES' THIRD LABOR". This is hitting some pretty obtuse territory, requiring the player to have some outside knowledge of Greek mythology.  The third labor of Heracles was to "capture the Ceryneian Hind", a deer so fast that it could outrun an arrow. There are different versions of the story, with different accounts of how Heracles caught the deer, but in none of them does he take a swing at it with a bamboo pole.  It's no surprise that Hassett changed this one in a later revision.

I TOLD YOU, I WOULD BREAK, YOUR F*CKIN NECK!

Probably the best difference, though, is that this version of the game actually has an ending.  I got my congratulations after all.

I do love the old-school TV aesthetic on this site.

I can't really rate this version on the RADNESS Index, because I'm not sure where it's sourced from.  I think it's authentic, but there's no way to know for certain, and I don't know what release of the game it represents even if it is genuine.  It's not quite different enough to get a changed score anyway.

NEXT: I've been checking in on Futurewar periodically to see if my problem has been fixed, but no luck so far.  The next game on my list promises to be a more substantial undertaking than some other games I've played recently.  It's time to drop back to 1978 and play the 430-point version of Colossal Cave Adventure, which I see was written by Don Woods himself.  I suppose that makes it an official sequel of sorts, or perhaps even the definitive version of the game.  It'll be interesting to check out.

Back-Tracking: Journey to the Center of the Earth & Voyage to Atlantis

I know I said that I'd start on Mystery House, but I've been so caught up playing Futurewar that I haven't gotten around to it yet.  So instead, I thought I'd use this post to clear up some minor issues that have been nagging at me.

Some years ago I played through Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure and Voyage to Atlantis, both text adventures written by Greg Hassett.  For whatever reason I wasn't able to find these games for the TRS-80, so I played both of them for the Commodore 64.  It's been bothering me on a very minor level, but I'm at home for a couple of weeks now, so there's never been a better time to clear up niggling trivialities like these.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH ADVENTURE

This was Hassett's first adventure, and I covered it in a post from four years ago.  The Commodore 64 version of the game was quite messy, with a lot of elements in it that served no purpose.  As I expected, the TRS-80 original is not much different.

Stark. Powerful.

The game begins by asking your name, which is something that the C64 version cut, because it never comes into play.  Otherwise the two versions of the game play almost identically, except for one thing: the location of the sword.

The sword is probably the most important item in the game.  Before you find it, you're at the mercy of randomly-occurring bugs that will show up and kill you.  Once you have it the bugs become a trivial nuisance.  The C64 version put the sword on the north side of a chasm.  This necessitated first finding the wand, and then using that wand to magic yourself across that chasm.  But in the TRS-80 version, the sword is found on the south side of the chasm.  It makes finding the sword much easier, and really takes the sting out of the frustrating first stage of the game.

Finding the sword in a surprising location.

I played through the whole game, and got a winning screen just for the satisfaction of it.

The C64 version mercifully changed "adventurerdom" to "adventuredom".

I also made a Trizbort map while I was at it.

Click to super-size it

The TRS-80 version of this game wasn't significantly different from the C64 port, so I'm leaving its RADNESS Index untouched.  It's perhaps a touch easier, but not enough for me to change the score.  I also tried to find the Commodore PET and Apple II version, but with no luck.

VOYAGE TO ATLANTIS

For some reason this was the first Greg Hassett game that I covered, as I had it mistakenly pegged as a 1978 game.  If you want to read more about it, read this post from four years ago.  It's one of the better Hassett games I've played, with decent puzzles and a relatively tight structure.

Greg has upped his presentation game a bit, as the title lowers from the top of the screen and his name comes up from the bottom.

The title screen mid-animation

This version of the game has just one difference that I could find from the C64.  There's a plaque in the C64 version that plugs Hassett's other games, and also causes the game to crash.  In the TRS-80 version it doesn't crash, and it also gives you a clue that makes finding one of the treasures even easier: there's an iron statuette that you have to SCRAPE to reveal that it's made of gold, and in this version the plaque says SCRAPE IRON.  It's a pretty direct hint, and one that wold have saved me some grief a few years ago.

Also, the game doesn't crash during the victory sequence, which is a bonus.

This should be a fairly concrete timeline of Hassett's games.

As with Journey, I trizbort mapped the hell out of this game.  It's really pleasingly laid out, and doesn't have any screwy messing around with the connections between rooms until you get to the Strange Room in the north-east.  That room is specifically flagged up as being weird, so it makes sense for it to have some weird geography.

A click makes it bigger.

Voyage to Atlantis is a slightly easier in its original form, but not so much so that I'd change its score in Challenge.  I'm was tempted to bump it up a point in mechanics, because it doesn't have those game-ending bugs, but I marked it as high as I can justify on my first pass.  So it's RADNESS Index for both versions remains at 28.  And as with Journey, I was unable to find the PET version.

NEXT: I'll probably have started Mystery House by then.  I've also got some other games I want to give another pass, just to clear up some minor stuff.  If this lockdown persists I'll get to them.  And I will, of course, continue plugging away at Futurewar.

King Tut's Tomb: Complete Victory!

OCD strikes again!

As you can see from the image above, I managed to get the full score of 207 points in King Tut's Tomb.  I owe it all to Adamant, who has been doing a wonderful job of dissecting the code of this game in the comments section of my previous post.

As I had surmised, you lose points if you take too many moves.  I had also suspected that the number of matches you finish with influences the score, but it's more insidious than that.  To get all of the points, you need to complete the game using just a single match.  Given that the torch goes out roughly every 32 moves it seems that this is impossible, but there are some quirks in the code that can be exploited.  Simply put, the torch only goes out on move 32 if you have just entered a room (or used the LOOK command).  If you do anything else on move 32 (or any multiple of 32), the torch stays lit.  By counting my moves carefully, I was able to achieve the screen you see above and satisfy my inner completist.

Obviously this is the sort of thing that can only be done with careful dissection of the code, or an extreme amount of luck.  You'd need even more luck than it seems, though, because get this: whenever you light the torch it uses a random number of matches between 1 and 4.  I spent more time lighting the torch at the start of the game, checking how many matches had been used, and reloading than I did actually playing.  There's also the mummy, who you can't defeat by burning if you want the full score; you just have to rest your hopes on the 50/50 chance that he'll slip on a banana peel rather than kill you.  So yeah, the chances of getting this score without knowledge of the code are practically zero, but with Adamant's help I was able to do it.  Thanks!

Game 21: King Tut's Tomb (1978)

Apologies for the lengthy delay, but Ultima VII is real good, you guys.  So good that when I finished it I launched immediately into Ultima Underworld II, and Serpent Isle following that.  What can I say, I got that Ultima bug, and it caused me to neglect whichever of the virtues covers "diligent blogging".  Sacrifice maybe?  Honor?  Whichever it is, I hath verily lost an eighth, and I'm back to make amends.  (And if you don't know what I'm talking about, well, stick with the blog, and all will be revealed in the years to come.  Or better yet, just go play Ultima IV right now.)

This title screen depicts a brilliantly accurate scene of our hero 
exploring the tomb without his torch.

Today's game is the next effort from boy genius Greg Hassett, King Tut's Tomb.  Having created a game based on Jules Verne, and another tackling the haunted house genre, Hassett's next effort draws from stories based on Egyptology and the legend of the mummy's curse.  All of these genres are perhaps overdone by today's standards, but all three are firsts in the text adventure field in 1978, which has to count for something.

This game was developed for the TRS-80, and that's the platform I'm emulating it on, but there's a caveat to that which I ought to mention.  Every copy of this game that I could find for the TRS-80 has problems with the code: in particular, there's a certain point that, once you've progressed past it, doesn't allow you to return to the entrance of the tomb. At first I had thought this to be a clever puzzle, but it seems not. Every walkthrough and all the ports of the game that I tried - not to mention the source code that's available in this book - suggest that returning to the entrance should be no trouble at all.  I'm not sure where the problem originated.  Was it in the game's initial release?  Did someone writing the code to put up on the internet type it in wrong?  I have no idea, but I feel safe in declaring that it was definitely an error.  With that in mind, I fixed the code to match the published version, which changes some of the map connections.  I also took it upon myself to fix a minor bug when encountering the mummy, and to fix some spelling errors, because I'm like that.  So I'm playing a slightly tweaked version of the game than what's available on the web, but one that can actually be beaten. As usual, if anyone wants this code they should shoot me an e-mail.

The opening area of the game.

As with Hassett's other games, this is a simple text adventure. It has a two word VERB NOUN parser, which only recognises the first three letters of each word.  I have mixed feelings about this level of simplicity.  It can be limiting, but it's also nice to know that I won't have to deal with any particularly complex puzzles. Your character has an inventory limit of eight items.  Much to my surprise it recognises the command DROP EVERYTHING (more commonly seen in games as DROP ALL), allowing you to dump all of your inventory at once. It's a nice aid for inventory management (and move conservation) that I would never have expected to see in such a simple, early game.  It doesn't recognise GET EVERYTHING, however.

Speaking of simple and early, this game is another treasure hunt. You play as an unnamed explorer/adventurer/who-knows-what, raiding a pyramid to find various treasures, I guess for their monetary value. There's no explanation, and I really don't require any.  Collecting shiny things is just what text adventure protagonists do, and what they use them for once the game is done is best left to the realm of imagination.

There are thirteen treasures to collect, and finding them isn't difficult in any way. It's simply a matter of exploring every room in the pyramid and carting them back to the entrance.  There are a couple of small mazes to navigate (like, three or four areas each), and a gate to unlock, none of which is challenging.  The main puzzles/logistical problems to overcome, what few there are, are detailed below. 

Light: A late 70s adventure game where you need to carry a light source? How unusual!  I kid, of course.  Every adventure game I've played, except for the two developed for Wander, has had a light source of some kind.  In King Tut's Tomb you carry a torch and some matches.  The torch will go out periodically, and if you move around in the dark you'll eventually fall and break your neck.  You need to relight the torch with a match.  I never ran out of matches in the game, but a look at the source code tells me that there's a limit of 25.  They're also used to get around another obstacle, as detailed below, and the number you have left at the end influences your overall score.

The Mummy: Occasionally a mummy shows up to menace you as you explore, because it's an Egyptian-themed game and a mummy is obligatory.  He'll try to kill you, and there's a 50/50 chance that he succeeds.  On the times that he fails, there's a message about him slipping on a conveniently placed banana peel that is equal parts amusing and baffling.  (It can happen anywhere, so does that mean every location has a banana peel?  Who left them all there anyway?  Or does it spontaneously generate when the mummy appears?)  The mummy is easy to defeat, though, as the most obvious means of killing him is given to you at the beginning of the game.  All you need to do is BURN MUMMY while carrying the matches.  (The original code didn't display the message saying that the mummy was destroyed, although the mummy still vanished.  I tweaked this so that it works.)

Maybe the goobers eat bananas?  Or maybe I'm giving this 
game far too much thought?

The Goober: There's another monster that randomly shows up to try to kill you: a "goober".  These things are immortal and indestructible, and will follow you around and throw knives at you until they eventually hit and kill you.  One way to get rid of them is to head back to the pyramid's entrance: for whatever reason, they won't follow you outside, and when you re-enter they will be gone.  The other way to scare them away is to show them a snake.

There's a snake in a pit quite deep into the pyramid.  At first the snake won't let you get near it, but if you feed it (with food that you find right at the start of the game) the snake calms down and you can carry it in your inventory.  The problem with that is that it eventually gets annoyed again, and will bite you.  The poison kills you eventually, but there's some wine you can drink that acts as an antidote.  As soon as you drink it, though, the snake slithers away and is gone.

The goobers will flee at the sight of the snake, but to be honest the rigmarole involved with carrying the snake around is more annoying than the goobers themselves.  Eventually I stopped bothering to carry the snake, because it was barely worth it.  Instead I just retraced my steps back to the entrance, or lured the goober to the snake pit if I was too deep within the pyramid.  They flee from the snake regardless of whether it's in your possession.

The goobers are really the only deterrent to finishing the game, and their random appearance can make or break any attempt.  They keep appearing even after you scare one away with the snake, so there's no way to get rid of them permanently.  In some games I would encounter three or four, and in others I wouldn't see any at all.  It's luck of the draw, and generally I just hoped to get a game where none would appear rather than bothering with the snake.  Starting over is probably less hassle than going through the process of carrying the snake for thirty or forty moves.

I got Goobered.

As you can see in the image above, the game offers reincarnation in much the same manner as Adventure and Zork.  If you take the offer, you'll find yourself back at the entrance with your torch and matches, and the rest of your inventory scattered throughout the pyramid.  It doesn't give you any benefits above just restarting that I can see.

It's not clear who it is that reincarnates you, other than "the game", but it does tie into the one clever thing that King Tut does.  When you're reincarnated, said mysterious benefactor does so with  the aid of some orange smoke that's stored inside a sarcophagus.  One of the treasure in the game is a sarcophagus, and if you open it, you get a face-full of orange smoke and a forcible reincarnation, complete with transportation to the entrance and the scattering of your inventory.  It's annoying, but I'm already on record as saying that I have an appreciation for a good adventure game trolling.  So to this I say, well-played Mr. Hassett.  Ya got me.

There are some other items in the game besides the treasures.  Some are red herrings, like a worthless glass medallion, or the Steve Martin poster that references his novelty hit King Tut.  (As a side note, I'm certain that I remember a time when Steve Martin was funny, but it sure wasn't that song.)  There's the cup of wine for curing snakebite, as mentioned above.  The only other useful non-treasure item is the Book of the Dead, which contains instructions for defeating the mummy and the goober.

Once you've retrieved all of the treasures and brought them back to the entrance, your score will be 175 out of 175.  The game gives you a possible 32 bonus points, though, for a grand total of 207.  I'm not certain what factors influence these bonus points exactly, but the highest score I could manage was 203.  Looking at the source code, I can see that you lose points if you take more than 310 turns.  The number of matches you have left is also a factor.  Other than that I can't figure it out, but I'm happy enough to leave it with a score of 203, which is still enough to gain the top rank of Grand Master.

Goddamn those 4 points!!!

Now, on to the FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: There's no story to speak of, and although the pyramid setting is novel for the time, the descriptions are (necessitated by hardware limitations) too bare to evoke much of anything.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters:  There are the goobers, the mummy, and a snake.  Two of those are obstacles, and one is an inventory item.  It would be tempting to give this a score of 0, but I'm trying to avoid having to do that.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics:  It's a text adventure in grey and black, with the most minimal descriptions possible.  This is as bare-bones as games get, and it can't escape a minimum score.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is adequate, but very simplistic.  I was tempted to bump it up due to the recognition of DROP EVERYTHING, but in the end I decided it wasn't enough.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge:  What challenge?  The game barely has any puzzles at all.  The mummy is a trivial nuisance.  The goobers are irritating, but eventually you'll get a game where they don't appear.  Other than that there's a locked gate.  That's it.  Sometimes an easy game is welcome, but there ought to be some challenge, and King Tut's Tomb doesn't present one at all.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: It's yet another treasure hunt, with only the Egyptian theme to differentiate it from what has gone before.  I'm not sure it merits an extra point, but I'm going to give it one just because it's such an early game in the genre.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: King Tut's Tomb is such a slight experience that I struggle to see what enjoyment anyone could get out of it, outside of someone in 1978 playing an adventure game for the very first time.  I won't give it the minimum score, because I'm reserving that for games that elicit genuine hatred from me.  This game didn't elicit anything except a resigned shrug of the shoulders.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Point: No bonus point.  I won't play this game again.  What would be the point?

The scores above total 12, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 24.  This makes it the lowest rated game of the blog so far, although it's only 2 points below Hassett's other games, House of Seven Gables and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  Gables is probably the best of his games that I've played so far, and given that I'm not 100% sure of the chronology I probably played it out of order.  It's a more complete game than King Tut, that's for certain.

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, and the ones that are there are incredibly simple. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

King Tut's Tomb's RADNESS Index is 22.  That puts it equal last along with one of Hassett's other efforts, Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  Should I feel bad for picking on a little boy?

NEXT: It's back to the Wander system, for the evocatively named Library.  It's all the excitement of my day job, in game form!

Game 19: The House of Seven Gables (1978)

Evocative.

The House of Seven Gables is the second game from Greg Hassett, twelve-year-old rival of adventure game legend Scott Adams.  Hassett's first effort, Journey to the Centre of the Earth Adventure, had all the hallmarks of a game that was incomplete; it was full of red herrings and areas that served no purpose. It also only had one puzzle, making it extremely easy to finish.

The good news is that The House of Seven Gables is a much tighter game. There are still a few things in it that I never found a use for, but it felt to me less like Hassett didn't program them and more like I just didn't solve the puzzles.

If The House of Seven Gables sounds familiar, it might be because there's a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel of the same name. The game has little to do with the book, although both have elements of witchcraft and the supernatural. Hassett's game is the first "haunted house" adventure I've played for the blog, and possibly the first one ever made. A lot of haunted house games will follow, so it's influential in that respect. (Oddly enough, at the same time I'm playing The House of Seven Gables, I'm also playing House of Hell over on my gamebook blog. That one's a bit more hardcore though, there's some genuine nightmare fuel in that book.)

One rule of my blog is that I try to run the games I'm playing as close to their original version as I can get. Where possible, I'm going to play games for the system for which they were developed. The House of Seven Gables was released for the TRS-80, so I'm emulating that machine. The emulator (found here) was a little finicky to get running. I had previously used it to play some early Scott Adams games, but had completely forgotten how to use it in the interim. A bit of Googling served me well, though, and I was ready to go.

The game begins with you standing at the front door of a house with seven gables. There's a doorbell, and a compass lying on the floor. The compass is an odd thing, because you can't move anywhere without it. As soon as you pick it up the exits from the room become visible, and you can move around. It doesn't make a lot of logical sense, and it also takes up an inventory slot which is kind of annoying. Once you pick it up though you can forget about it, so it's not such a big deal. Just don't lose it, or you'll be stuck in one location forever.

There's nothing to do outside the house except to pick up the compass (GET is recognised, but not TAKE, the opposite of my complaint about A3). You can't open the door, but if you ring the bell you'll be sucked inside to the living room. At this point there's no way out, until you defeat the witch who is in charge of the house (although that's not apparent just yet).

But why am I even here?

What's also not apparent is the objective of the game. Escaping from the house alive is one, but as is customary with games of this vintage there are treasures to collect. There's also a score, with a maximum of 160 points. You earn points by returning the treasures to the Living Room, which is something that I had to figure out on my own. Not that it was that hard, because Hassett's previous game used the same device, and a bunch of other early adventure games have done so as well.

The first thing I do when starting a text adventure is to map out as much of it as I possibly can. I don't think I've described my method before, so I'll quickly give an example. Instead of making a map of the physical space, I simply list all of the rooms that I find in alphabetical order, with exits marked and interesting features noted. Every time I add a new room I place a line beneath it for every possible exit: N, E, S, W, NE, SE, SW, NW, U, D.  I then try each direction in turn, regardless of whether the game tells me there's an exit. If it leads to a room, I note the destination. If it doesn't, I delete that line. It may be an unusual system (I'm not sure how anyone else does it), but it ensures that I don't miss any exits, and still gives me a good sense of the map in my head. Here's an example of what the end result looks like below:

LIVING ROOM

    E - DINING ROOM

    S - TOP OF A STAIRCASE

    W - GUEST ROOM

MAD SCIENTIST'S LABORATORY

Objects: Chemicals

    D - MAZE OF HALLWAYS 4

MAMMOTH ART GALLERY

Objects: Priceless Rembrant

    N - ONE END OF A HALLWAY

MAZE OF HALLWAYS 1

    N - MAZE OF HALLWAYS 2

    E - WEST END OF THE HALLWAY

MAZE OF HALLWAYS 2

Objects: Rusty Axe

    N - MAZE OF HALLWAYS 2

    E - MAZE OF HALLWAYS 2

    S - MAZE OF HALLWAYS 1

    W - MAZE OF HALLWAYS 3

Exploration in The House of Seven Gables is made difficult by two enemies that pop up at random.  The first is the Ghost, who demands a treasure from you. If you don't give him one he kills you, but if you do give him one you can't get the maximum score. I never did figure out how to defeat the ghost, or if you can retrieve any treasures given to him. Once he shows up, though, there's nothing you can do but relinquish a treasure or restart the game.

Running ghosts are a rarity.

The second enemy is the One-Eyed Ghoul, who will show up in a room and kill you on your next move. Dealing with him is less obvious than the Ghost, and it took me a while to figure out how to kill him. The solution is to mix some chemicals found in a Mad Scientist's Laboratory, and throw them at the Ghoul, which melts him. What's kind of lame is that Ghouls just keep showing up and attacking you no matter how many you kill, but the chemicals don't disappear after you throw them so it's not so bad. It's just another item you need to keep in your inventory along with the compass.  You also need to mix the chemicals when you find them, or they're useless against the Ghoul; there's a hint about this in a room of the house where a hollow, disembodied voice cryptically tells you "MIX THEM".

"Heavens!" is perhaps a sanitised exclamation here.

There are eight treasures in the game, which I'll list below.

• Silver Candlesticks (worth 10 points). These are found right next to the Living Room, so claiming them is no trouble at all.
• A Rusty Axe (worth 5 points). The axe is found in the middle of a very small maze.  Mazes are an obligatory part of any adventure game at this point, but thankfully this is a small one; the limited memory of the TRS-80 is good for something after all. The axe is not only a treasure, but it's also used to chop down a locked door that leads to a staircase to the upper floor.
• Some "Valuable Recipies" (worth 15 points). They're written in "Witchish", so you can't read them. They're found on the upper floor, not far from the stairs.
• A "Priceless Rembrant" (worth 20 points). Really, Greg Hassett might have been well served by spending less time on coding adventure games and more time working on his spelling. The painting is on the upper floor, in an art gallery.
• A Diamond (worth 15 points). Again, this is on the upper floor, not far from the entrance to the Witch's lair.
• A Beautiful Rose (worth 10 points), found at the top of the stairs to the upper floor. 
• The Witch's Hat (worth 50 points). You need to defeat the Witch in order to claim the hat, but more on that below.
• A "Sulton's Dagger" (worth 35 points). This is one of the more difficult treasures to obtain. It's found in a coffin, which also houses (surprise!) a Vampire. The Vampire can be driven off with some garlic from the kitchen, but later on it will block your path back to the Living Room. The garlic doesn't work on it a second time; you need to STAKE VAMPIRE while the dagger is in your possession.

Stupid game, all Vampires are Draculas.

Claiming all of these treasures earns you the full 160 points. A few times while playing I noticed that my score had dropped into the negatives, and kept dropping with every move I made. At first I had thought that this was to do with losing treasure to the Ghost, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I also thought it might have been the result of escaping from the Witch without killing her, but that wasn't it either. It's a mystery I haven't solved, and not one I'm ever likely to.

As mentioned above, you can't get one of the treasures without killing the Witch. The first hint of her presence is found in a Dungeon, where a crude note is found on the wall: "YOU CAN'T GET OUT WITHOUT KILLING ME FIRST! --WITCHY POO".  Her lair is accessed via an altar on the upper floor that has a button on it; press the button and you're whisked away to her lair. (There's a book in the library with the helpful hint "NOTTUB SSERP"; thanks, I never would have gotten that otherwise.) The Witch isn't dangerous at all; she doesn't attack, and you can easily escape from her lair via an exit which leads to the Living Room.  Killing her is not hard to figure out, but there's a clue you can find by unfolding a paper airplane: "REMEMBER THE WIZARD OF OZ". The answer, of course, is to douse her with water, which you can find by filling a bucket in the kitchen.  Then it's a simple case of THROW WATER when you're in the Witch's presence, and she's done for.

"Her hat remains." I don't know why, but it makes me laugh.

Once the Witch is dead an exit to the north appears in the Living Room, and you can leave the house. This counts as winning the game, regardless of whether you've earned all 160 points or not.  But if you've collected all of the treasures, you'll get the screen below.

Sigh. If only I'd taken one more move.

Hardly the most satisfying conclusion, but it's par for the course at this stage. Really, the most satisfying thing about this was being able to knock off a game in a single day. After the long PLATO slog, it's a massive relief.

Before I give this game a Final Rating, I'll list some of the things that I never found a use for.

• The house does indeed have seven gables, but I'm not entirely sure that Greg Hassett knows what a gable is. As you progress through the house you'll find areas named "First Gable", "Second Gable", etc.  Hassett must have thought that a gable is a room, but it's actually defined as "the triangular upper part of a wall at the end of a ridged roof".  I kept expecting the Gable rooms to become important, but they have no significance.
• There's a banana in the kitchen. If you eat it you're left with the peel, but it never became useful. I had thought I might be able to trip the Ghoul with it, but no luck there. You can't drop it in the Witch's cauldron of brew either.
• In the Second Gable is a black cat. If you try to catch it it disappears, with the ominous warning that it will return. It does show up in other rooms of the house after that, but nothing I've tried works on it.
• In the Third Gable there is a test tube of fluid. Drinking it results in a black cloud that makes you drop all of your items, which is a game over because it means you lose the compass. Otherwise, it does nothing that I've been able to discern.
• The compass goes from shiny to tarnished after a while, for no apparent reason.

That's not too bad, compared to the unfinished feeling of Hassett's first game. Now that that's done, it's time for the Final Rating.

Story & Setting: It's a treasure hunt, without even the proper rationale for one. There's no reason given for why you're at the front door of the house, or why you'd want to go inside.  Perhaps one was given in the documentation, but I wasn't able to find any on-line. The setting has all of the standard haunted house trappings, but the writing is so sparse that it never manages to create a spooky atmosphere. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: The game has a few characters throughout the game: the Ghost, the Ghoul, the Vampire and the Witch. Interaction with them is minimal, though, and they do little except for functioning as puzzles or obstacles. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: The game has no sound, and the graphics are limited to black-and-white text. The descriptions are exceptionally terse, as necessitated by the extremely low memory of the TRS-80, and as such they don't convey much beyond the purely functional. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: It's a simple two-word parser, and there are one or two instances where the obvious command isn't what the game is looking for, but the game is small and tight enough that it's not a big problem. I also like how it has the room description at the top, with the character's actions and their results below. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: The game is pretty easy, though a touch more difficult than Hassett's first game. The major difficulty is with the Ghost: if it pops up, you can't beat the game with full points. Otherwise, the game shouldn't trouble anyone for more than an hour or two. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: In terms of mechanics, it's very much like Journey to the Centre of the Earth Adventure, and the first two Scott Adams adventures. It does get some points for being the first ever "haunted house" adventure, though. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Fun: I'm writing this bit in March 2020 as I review my posts, and I noticed that this category was missing. I can see from my spreadsheet that I gave a 2 in this category, which means I had a very small amount of fun with it. Rating: 2 out of 7.

This game doesn't get the bonus point, because I'll never go back to it. The above points add up to 13, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 26. This puts it dead level with Journey to the Centre of the Earth Adventure, which is about right. It's a better game, but not a great deal better. From a modern perspective, they're much the same in quality.

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: There are a decent amount of puzzles in this game, but they're all quite simple. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The House of Seven Gables has a RADNESS Index of 24. It's 17th overall (third from the bottom), and 9th out of ten adventure games (with only Hassett's Journey to the Centre of the Earth below it).

NEXT: It's Acheton, a mammoth adventure game from England that borrows heavily from Colossal Cave Adventure. It's quite a bit larger, though, and much more sadistic. It's so large that I haven't even finished mapping it yet, and I very much doubt that I'll be done with it before my next post.