Library: Anti-Climax

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

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

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

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

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

The Chronicles of Count Ass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FINAL RATING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADDENDUM:

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

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

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

Bonus Points: 0.

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

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

Game 23: Library (designed using Wander) (1978)

Wander, as my regular readers may remember, is a programming language designed for creating text adventures that predates even Colossal Cave Adventure.  I've played two adventures created using this language so far: Castle and Aldebaran III.  Both were interesting, and somewhat unusual for their vintage, but ultimately flawed.  I had to rewrite some code just so I could finish them, which is about as flawed as it gets outside of the game not running at all.

Library is the third and final Wander game I'll be playing.  The other two were created by Peter Langston, the creator of Wander and future person of significance at Lucasarts.  Library was made by Nat Howard, who I have in my notes as a co-author of Aldebaran III.  I can't find anything else about him though.  The map for the game is supposedly based on the Widener Library at Harvard, so one can assume that he was a student or a teacher there.

The opening screen of Library.

The game begins with you standing at the steps to a library, in a post-apocalyptic world.  It's 1978, so of course the goal is to gather up all of the treasures in the library and deposit them in the correct location.  In this case, the game tells you outright that this location is the chapel, which is just to the south of the starting area.  I appreciate the lack of ambiguity here, even though we're dealing with yet another treasure hunt.  It's good to have a concrete goal.

You begin the game empty-handed, with a leather sack at your feet.  I'm not sure if it has any other uses, but you can put items inside, presumably to get around the game's inventory limit.  I haven't hit that limit yet, though, so I can't be certain.

There's not a lot to see in the area outside of the library.  There's a chapel to the south, which gives an odd bit of backstory that mentions WWXII, and Bo Diddley, which I'm certain that I'm not supposed to take seriously.  To the east is another library, the "Pusey Pit", the entrance to which is blocked by rubble.  There's an alley running between the two libraries, which leads to a gate and a back door.  The gate, called the Dexter Gate, is so far impassable.  The back door into the main library is covered with ivy, which is quite animated and will block your entrance.  There might be a glitch here, because I haven't been able to return the way I came from the back door.  So far, this game has been pretty good about matching the exit directions between locations.  If you leave an area to the south, it's a good bet you can return to it by going north, unless you're in a maze.  So I was surprised that I couldn't do so at the back door.  I was completely stuck there, with no means to destroy the ivy and no means to go back, so I had to restart.

Any Bo Diddley fans know if this means anything?

The areas inside the library have so far been quite easy to navigate.  There is, of course, an obligatory maze - the Folklore & Mythology Stacks - which uses the standard trick of repeating the same room description and making no mention of exit directions.  I was able to map it using the time-honoured method of marking locations with dropped items.  This was made a little more difficult due to a lack of sufficient items to cover all the areas, but I got it done eventually.  Mapping the rest of the library was a breeze.

The initial area is a Lobby, with a desk to the west.  The desk was manned by a robotic guard (the first indication that the previous civilisation was more advanced than the present day), and I also found some keys and a knife.  An inscription on the knife read "Acme Knife, made by Acme Knife & Throttle Co, Framingham".  There's no significance to that yet, but you never know.

Some other areas of interest are:

• A lift with buttons marked 'up' and 'down', and a keyhole.  I guess that the keys I found will activate it, but INSERT KEYS didn't work.  I also tried TURN KEYS, USE KEYS and a bunch of other commands.  Nothing so far.
• A movie theatre.  At first the screen is dark, but you can activate the projector by flicking a switch in the nearby projection room.  It runs a film on venereal disease, which nets you a mildly humourous gag.

This reminds me that Stan Lee spent part of his military career writing anti-VD pamphlets.

• A supposed "bookie operation" which used to run out of the library.  It features a basket, which was used to catch coins used in the movie booths above.
• A men's bathroom, with a vending machine and three buttons.  I tried inserting a quarter that I found, but the coin got stuck.  It's supposed to take $0.25, so I'm not sure what the problem is.  Maybe it's a random chance thing?  Old-school text adventures are known to do that.
• The rare books room, which can only be accessed through the stacks maze.  It contains a 1st edition Gutenberg Bible, which I have to assume is one of the treasures.
• There's a section of erotic books, which is also only accessible via the stacks maze.  In it can be found a diamond-studded vibrator, which has to rate as one of the more interesting treasures I've encountered in an adventure game.  You can't just GET it, though, because someone might be watching.  Instead you need to put it in your sack.  The problem is, I have no idea how to get something out of the sack once it's gone in there.  I need to do a bit more wrestling with the parser on that score.

Wouldn't those diamond studs be uncomfortable?

• Near the sex books there's a movie booth, which has a coin slot.  I probably should try putting the quarter in, but the only time I've been here I'd already lost it in the vending machine.
• There's a card catalogue room, but I haven't found a use for it yet.
• At the top of a spiral staircase I found a room guarded by an angry gnome.  Once you're in there he won't let you leave.  I've tried to kill him, bare-handed and with the knife, and both resulted in the game shutting down.  Presumably he killed me, but I don't know for sure because it doesn't give me time to read the message.  There's little that shits me off more in a game than being dumped out of it unceremoniously.

I haven't found a lot of items yet.  There's the aforementioned sack, keys, and knife.  The vibrator, of course, and the bible.  I also found a shiny quarter in the stacks maze, and a plastic vomit bag in the movie theatre.  It's a shockingly small inventory for a text adventure.

So far I've explored all of the areas open to me, about 34.  There are a number of obvious places that I should be able to explore beyond, the lift, the gnome room and the back door being the most likely.  The Dexter Gate may also be passable, and the Pusey Pit entrance at a stretch.  Those two strike me as boundaries at the edge of the game rather than obstacles, but I could be wrong.

Right now I'm enjoying Library.  It's laid out very simply, the descriptive writing is good, and there are no random events or time-limit puzzles (like a light source) to contend with.  I have had a small amount of parser trouble, of the "pick the right verb" variety, but we'll see how bad that is once I get properly stuck into the game's puzzles.  So far - getting dumped out of the game aside - it's been a pleasant game to just roam around in and explore.

Game 18: Aldebaran III (aka A3, designed using Wander) (1978)

The closest thing it has to a title screen.

Aldebaran III is the second of three existing games created using the Wander system. The first was Castle, which I covered last year. It was surprisingly sophisticated for being the very first text adventure, although it should always be remembered that most mainframe-based games were developed over a number of years.  It was less sophisticated in its story-telling, with the ultimate "reward" being sex with a prince or princess, whichever of the two you rescued. (Okay, yes, you could also have sex with both of them at the same time. Okay, yes, I did fix the bugs in the game's code so that I could get that ending. Can we move on here?)

Aldebaran III, like Castle, was created by Peter Langston (the creator of Wander) and Nat Howard.  It's more generally known by its filename of A3, but as no title appears within the game itself I've decided to give it a name that's more descriptive.  It might make googling this thing a bit more difficult, but who cares. I like it better, so I'm sticking with it. I may have the date wrong for this game; the source code lists the final update as being in 1982, but the esteemed Renga in Blue has the creation of the game pinned down to 1977 or 1978, so I'll go with that.

Aldebaran III is a sci-fi game, possibly the first text adventure in that genre.  (Greg Hassett's Journey to the Centre of the Earth Adventure is the only other contender, if you count Jules Verne pastiches as sci-fi.)  In it you play as Jaime Retief, under-secretary to the ambassador for the "Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne". You've been sent to the planet of Aldebaran III to avert an uprising by the natives against Terran nationals, which is expected to come to a head at the end of April.

Just from that little snippet, you can see that the storytelling here is a lot more advanced than any other adventure games I've played so far.  This is probably also the first adventure game in which you play a distinct character, rather than a generic stand-in for the player.  There's a reason for that increase in sophistication: Jame Retief (it's spelled differently in the game) of the CDT is a pre-existing pulp sci-fi character, and the star of around 50 short stories. I haven't read any of them, but from what I can tell it doesn't appear that the plot of Aldebaran III is taken directly from any of them.  Certain elements are definitely cribbed, though, and it explains the nagging sense I had throughout the game that I was missing something.  I suppose that makes for another first: the first adventure game to be based on an existing property (albeit unofficially).

Aldebaran III begins when I (as Retief) disembarked in the spaceport.  There was a credit card on the ground, which I picked up and examined. (The parser didn't recognise GET, to my annoyance, but it did recognise the obvious alternative of TAKE.) I'm not sure why it was on the ground, as it belongs to me; I suppose it's so important that the designers didn't want to hide it in the player's inventory.  Speaking of which, my inventory contained my identity papers, and some notes that I had taken on the planet and its inhabitants. Looking at the papers is the only way I know of to learn that you are playing as Retief, although the mention of the CDT in the intro would have tipped off fans of the series.

Groovy Super Phat Crazy Trainee?

The notes span multiple pages, and I had to to read them multiple times to get all of the information, as Retief kept getting too bored to continue.  I learned the following relevant info from them:

• The planet's atmosphere is close enough to Earth's. It's day lasts for 18.628 Earth hours (although they still use a 24 hour clock). It's axial tilt is such that the planet has no variance in the seasons and the length of it's days, which is a really clever way to explain why sunrise and sunset always take place at exactly the same time in the game.
• The ruling species on Aldebaran has six legs, a human torso, and a "brain-case" with tendrils that give them exceptional senses of sight and smell.
• Some of them have larger brains, and can alter the appearance of their bodies at will.
• Aldebaranites are deeply religious, and place a great importance on certain "magic" artifacts.
• The Aldebaranite language has a lot of dialects, and differs greatly from region to region.
• The head of state is known as "the Rep".

There's a bunch of other stuff, but the clues above are the ones that play into the rest of the game.

As you might have noticed from the first point above, Aldebaran III keeps track of the passage of time.  The game begins at midnight on April 1st, and time advances by an hour for every action you take. As mentioned above, you have until the end of April to stop the uprisings. I finished the game well within that time-frame, but I decided to loiter around to see what would happen. On the dawn of April 29th you get a message that "Tensions seem on the breaking point".  Then again on April 30th. Then again on April 31st. Hang on a second. Then again on April 32nd.  As far as I can tell, April just extends on forever, and there's no actual deadline implemented, which is a shame. I wouldn't be surprised if the intention was there to put one in, but for whatever reason Langston and Howard never got to it. Sure, the only way I ever got close to the deadline was by waiting around doing nothing for weeks on end, so it's not a genuine threat, but it would be nice to have something happen. Even a message saying "You Have Failed" would be enough.

The opening area of the game is the Aldebaran Spaceport. Its most notable feature is a vending machine, which you can buy various items from: cigarettes (10 credits), mystery grab bag (10 credits), biorhythms (25 credits) and subway tokens (25 credits). You only begin with 50 credits, so at this point in the game it's a tough choice, because you can't buy everything. You don't need the cigarettes. Getting your biorhythms read is an excuse to drain you of your money and make a joke about it. The "mystery grab bag" at first gives you a condom, which gave me some uncomfortable flashbacks to the ending of Castle, but I never found a use for them in the game. Buying the grab bag a second time gives you an electronic all-dialect dictionary, which is essential to reading various messages in Aldebaranite scattered through the game. The tokens are also essential, because the subway is the only way to travel between regions. You don't need to buy them here, though, because there's another area that sells them much cheaper. I didn't discover it until much later in the game, so I spent most of my time wasting half of my money on a mere 2 subway tokens.

Okay, good one. Ya got me.

Leaving the spaceport involves a trip through customs, where you'll need to show your papers and declare the items in your inventory. Some of the items in your possession (the cigarettes, condoms, dictionary and your credit card) come with a customs fee, which is another drain on your credits. Even without buying the cigarettes and taking the condoms, I was left with 0 credits by the time I got through. You can save 5 credits by dropping your credit card in the spaceport, where the wind will blow it through an electrified fence and into an alleyway outside, but it's hardly worth it.

The customs official also gives you your first taste of the casual racism of the native population, calling you a "Terry" and being condescending in general.

The game is split into five sectors, and you begin in the spaceport sector. It has the following interesting locations:

• An alleyway, where you can find some keys and an old wine bottle. Looking at the bottle gives you this image, which is reminiscent of some of the images from Zork. 
  
  

  

  Supervisions?

  
  
  You can also find your credit card here if you dropped it in the spaceport. Sometimes when you enter the alleyway you'll be robbed by ruffians, who steal your credit card. (You can find them in the bar afterwards, beat them up and take it back.)

The only time in the game where you get to kick ass.

• A bar, which has sign (in Aldebaranite, so you need the dictionary to read it) telling you that you can't leave without showing the bartender your papers. If you do, he sees that you're a UNIX user and offers you a free drink. (And yes, if you check your papers it mentions that you're a member of USENIX.) The bartender has more to offer than free drinks, though. If you type ASK BARTENDER he leaves a map on the counter, which you can take and read outside. It has a message on it: "Find Ignarp in Crystal City -- secret password is 'Axolotyl'." The plot progression of the game is a little obtuse, but I suppose that the bartender is a Terran sympathiser, and after seeing your papers directs you to the person who can help. It just about works.
• There's a series of maze-like streets, which you can only progress through by typing LEFT or RIGHT. Choosing correctly takes you to the next street, and choosing incorrectly dumps you back to the beginning. If you get to the end, you'll be rewarded with a shovel (and a lot of alliteration).
• When leaving the street with the shovel, you get a message that says "Not always..." I've come to be suspicious of non sequiturs like this in adventure games, so I made a note of it as something to come back to later. I'm glad I did, because solving it became one of the keys to the game. If you type SOMETIMES, you are taken to the Information Booth in the Hoople St. Sector, and you can get back from there by typing the same thing. In that sector is where you can buy cheap subway tokens, which allows you to save some credits.
• Finally, there's an iron gate with a slot in it. If you insert a subway token, you gain access to the  Subwalk Station, where you can access the other four sectors: Hoople St, Boardwalk, Imperium Worlds and the Government Sector.

The Hoople St. sector, which you can gain access to by the secret way I mentioned above, or by the subwalk, is a much smaller area, and only has two things of notes.

• A machine from which you can buy tokens for 1 credit each (much cheaper than paying 25 credits for two tokens in the spaceport). You need the dictionary to translate the sign above the machine, though.
• A tourist information machine that will tell you the location of various things and people in the game for the price of 2 credits. Given the note on the bartender's map above, the obvious thing to ask about is Ignarp, which gives you the message "Ignarp is where you find Him." Asking about HIM or GOD doesn't produce any results, but if you ask about CHURCH it tells you to "Subwalk to Imperium Worlds Station, rub ring and ask directions." This would be a good clue to follow after obtaining the map, but I completed the game without ever using this machine.

The Boardwalk Sector is an interesting one. It begins by noting that ground is made out of white paper, which seems odd at first, and only gets odder when you realise what it's getting at.

• A jail, which you can't enter unless you have the keys. If you do go in, the guards close the door behind you and confiscate the keys. The only way to get back out is to BRIBE the guard, which only costs 1 credit and also allows you to get your keys back. I'm don't think there's anything else to do in there.
• A riot happening on 'Park Place'. If the rioting Aldebaranites see you, they will beat you up and steal your subway tokens. If this happens, you'll be saved by a disguised "TerrySymp" (Terran Sympathiser).
• The Terran Embassy, where your intended boss, Ambassador Pouncetrifle, lies dead under a pile of rubble. Only his hand is visible, and his ring which you can take. The ring has some writing on it that's too small to read. Looking in the source code, I see that it's supposed to be magnified using the wine bottle, but I can't get it to work; either the code is wrong, or I'm using the wrong command. It says that the ring can only be activated on a clean surface.
• A paper-covered street named 'GO'. The ground is marked with a gridwork pattern, with black and white stones placed like so: 
  
  

  

  I have no idea.

  
  
  It's the boardgame Go, obviously, which is not a game I've ever played. You need to move the white stones (marked with the @ symbols) into a winning position in order to win some credits. Not knowing how Go works, I did it through trial and error. You can leave and come back as many times as you want, which is very helpful; saving and restoring with every failure would have been tedious. Winning gained me the sum of 10 credits, which seemed a bit paltry to me. That's because I hadn't fully solved the puzzle. You can win 200 credits by just typing PASS. Because if you pass Go...  Yes, it's a Monopoly Board. Don't ask me why. It's a puzzle that I never solved, and would have saved me some grief later on; I wouldn't have had to work out that SOMETIMES puzzle. This sort of nonsense fits really well in certain types of adventure games, but Aldebaran III set itself up as more naturalistic than the standard treasure hunts that have come before. Finding a city sector modelled after a Monopoly board was incongruous to say the least.

The Imperium Worlds sector is where the plot comes into focus, and most of the action of the game happens. You can skip Boardwalk and Hoople St. altogether, but you can't win the game without visiting Imperium Worlds. As soon as you try to exit the subwalk, you'll be told that "I don't think you're quite clean enough for this neighborhood". The trick is to type CLEAN, which sends you through a hidden autobath, and dumps you on a spotless street. It's not a puzzle that's obviously singposted, but I solved it on a whim. You can get a hint to the answer by rubbing the ambassador's ring while in the station; a local appears and tells you that cleanliness is next to godliness.

Also in this sector is a church, where you meet a strange man who demands to know your identity. He doesn't trust your word or your ID papers, but if you ask for his identity by typing SAY NAME something weird happens. He tries to tell you that he is Ignarp, but something about the church makes it impossible for him to lie, and he reveals that his name is really R. Nixon Shilth. He springs to attack you, but if you fight back it gets even weirder: he undergoes some sort of internal struggle and morphs into a female. This is the true Ignarp, who was slipped a "Groaci drug" by Shilth that gave him dominance over her for a time. You can't so anything here unless you have the password from the bartender's map: AXOLOTYL. If you give this word, Ignarp explains the plot to you.

Look! A story!

So it turns out the riots are being orchestrated by Shilth, who wants the land that the Terran Embassy sits on. Shilth stole three sacred art objects and sold them to Ambassador Pouncetrifle, who proudly displayed them as his own. Pouncetrifle was arrested as the thief, but managed to negotiate things so the return of the objects as well as a fine of 1,000 credits would settle matters. Pouncetrifle paid 985 of those credits, but the art objects have once more been stolen and hidden by Shilth.

So that's the objective of the game: collect the three art objects, and return them to the Rep along with 15 credits. The objects are a "green zwerf", and "alabaster yangst" and a "pale xyller". I had one clue: they were rumoured to have been hidden in an area near Pont St. Michel.  It's a little unfortunate that for all the great work done in the intro to create an interseting story, it all boils down to a treasure hunt.

Pont St. Michel is a street not far from the church. It leads over a flimsy bridge, and ends at a locked gate. You can only carry one item over the bridge, which can result in some problems later. Getting through the gate requires the keys, but this is where things get a little contentious. As I did with Castle, I needed to alter the code here to beat the game. I spent hours trying to get this gate open, until I gave up and went into the source code. Here's the problem: it's coded to open if you have a "key" in your inventory, but the one you find in the alleyway is listed in the code as "keys", plural. There's nowhere else in the code that refers to a singular key, and the game itself doesn't even recognise the word. So I feel justified in changing the code to work with the keys I had; I'm 100% sure it's an error on the part of the designers.

Beyond the gate is a graveyard area, which functions like a small maze; all of its areas are described identically, and you can't go back through the gate. All three of the art objects are buried in the graveyard, the yangst in one specific area and the other two found at random.  I was expecting an extensive treasure hunt, but to be honest I wasn't disappointed to be denied one. Sometimes I just want a game to be easy.

The way out of the graveyard is through a crypt, which loops back to the locked gate. Inside the crypt is a coffin, and if you open it a "Transylvanian Count" pops out and invites you to rest with him. Yes, this game has Dracula in it.  Normally I'm quite happy to have Dracula pop in any type of narrative you care to name, but even I'll admit he's out of place here. He gets very annoyed if you try to leave, and stops you from getting past. He tries to kill you, but he never managed it against me. I simply kept moving around the graveyard with Dracula in pursuit until the sun came up and vaporised him. It's an odd addition to the game, made even more pointless because you can just ignore the coffin entirely and he won't come out. Perhaps this sort of thing is consistent with the original Retief stories, but somehow I doubt it.

One! One anachronistic vampire! Ah Ah Ah!

With zwerf, xyller and yangst in hand, it should be a simple matter to return them to the Rep, shouldn't it? Well, no, there are still some obstacles to solve. The first is taking all three of the objects across the bridge one by one, which sounds easy enough but is complicated by the nature of the items: if any two of them are dropped in the same area, one will come alive and consume the other. This is signalled when you pick them up: one of the items will quiver in your hands.  Still, the solution here is just to drop them in separate locations, which requires a couple of loops back through the graveyard but is no real hassle.

The real problem is that if you ever drop your subway tokens, they will be almost immediately stolen, and you can't take them across the bridge because you need the keys to unlock the gate. Without fail, every time I've gone to unlock the gate my tokens have been stolen before I could get back.  And without tokens, there's no way to get into the subwalk station, and no way to return the art objects.

This is the puzzle that stumped me the longest, but the solution is quite clever, and well signposted. The clue is that in this sector you will occasionally see a message telling you that a speck of dust has landed on the hyper-clean streets, and vacuum cleaner pops out to suck it up.  The proper solution is to type DROP DIRT, which results in the cleaners sucking you up and spitting you out in the subwalk station.  That's not exactly how I did it though...

A valid solution.

Yes, I got frustrated, and as most people do when they get frustrated with a text adventure I started typing obscenities into the parser.  Wouldn't you know it, I typed SHIT and was promptly whisked to my desired destination. I'm not proud of it, but I chuckled for a good long while.  So yeah, I solved this game with vulgarity, but a win is a win.

From there it's no problem at all to head to the Government Sector, which only has two things of note: the hall from which the art objects were stolen, and the Rep's house. I marched into the Rep's house, and despite his extreme rudeness I handed him all three of the art objects as well as the credits. Getting the credits can be tricky if you spend all of them in the spaceport, but you can get the required amount by playing Go, or buying the cheap subwalk tokens.

"My Yangst!" he crows: the catchcry of the late-90s teen.

I beat the game, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get a screenshot of my victory because the stupid game dumps me back to Windows as soon as it's over.  This is the winning message:

"You Terries aren't so bad after all," admits the Rep as he flicks a

switch that cuts the power to all the androids that were leading the

uprising. "Why don't you stay for dinner?" Which, of course, you do."

Not exactly a gripping finale, is it? And too bad about all of the murder and destruction committed, when apparently this douche-nozzle I'm about to sit and have dinner with could have stopped it all with the press of a button.  Still, I can take a bad ending, or even an anticlimactic one. What I really hate is being unceremoniously booted from the game. I'd fix the code for it if I knew how to do it.

And now, for a Final Rating!

Story & Setting: This one starts off really strongly. Even though the setting and characters are taken from the Jame Retief stories, they're well-realised and entertainingly described, at least at the beginning. And there are a lot of clever touches, such as the explanation for the game's unwavering timescale.  Even the plot is original, at least for adventure games: a race riot orchestrated by an evil businessman looking to make a land-grab is the sort of thing that hadn't been seen to this point. Hell, just having a plot beyond "collect these treasures" is unique in 1978. Too bad it eventually does boil down to a scavenger hunt. Add in the incongruous elements such as Dracula and the Monopoly board puzzle, and it falls apart a bit. There's a lot to like here, but Langston and Howard couldn't quite move past the standard adventure game tropes. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: The characters in this game actually have character, which is a novelty. From the condescending racism of the customs officer, to the rudeness of the Rep, everyone you meet in this game has at least one trait you can recognise. You can't interact with them much, though, and there aren't a lot characters you can meet. I'm not rating it very highly, but aside from Zork this is the first adventure game I've given a score higher than 1. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: There's no sound or graphics, but the writing is quite good, if a little clumsy in places. It also has a charming and quirky sense of humour. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is quite sophisticated for the time, able to recognise commands of up to five words. It has a few problems with word recognition, though (not recognising GET, for instance).  And then there's the matter of the code for the graveyard gate being bugged.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: This is a short game, but none of the puzzles were too challenging, and I thought that one of them was even quite cleverly done. Weirdly enough for an adventure game, the most challenging thing was probably resource management, in that you had to find ways to save your credits unless you figured out the Go puzzle. Probably a little too easy on the whole, though. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence:  I would say that the influence of Aldebaran III is negligible, as the Wander games were never all that widely distributed.  It's innovations come on the story-telling side of things, as it's the earliest text adventure to have anything even vaguely resembling a plot and a deeper setting. (Actually, Zork has a bit more going on than a standard treasure hunt, now that I think of it.) Rating: 4 out of 7.

Fun: I got some mild enjoyment out of quirky setting of this one, and some of the writing. The Imperium Worlds station puzzle tickled me, although that may just be the way I solved it.  I wasn't ever all that eager to sit down and play it, though. Rating: 2 out of 7.

It doesn't get the bonus point, as I'll probably never play it again.  The scores above total 19, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 38 for Aldebaran III.  That puts it dead level with Castle, which was more innovative, but weaker in the storytelling, and riddled with bugs.  It sounds like a fair assessment to me.

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 has a weird blend of the realistic, the surreal and the nonsensical.  I'm still not sure how I feel about the Shit/Drop Dirt puzzle, or the immersion-breaking Go/Monopoly game.  My gut says the puzzles in this aren't as good as Colossal Cave Adventure, so I'll go with that. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 1.  This one gets a point for being the first adventure game to shamelessly nick an established property, even if it's something not many have heard of. Casual IP theft is a staple of the genre, and this is the first instance of it.

Aldebaran III's RADNESS Index is 35. That puts it at a respectable 9th overall, and 4th out of nine adventure games.

NEXT: It's The House of Seven Gables by child prodigy Greg Hassett.  And I've already finished it!!! I can't blog fast enough now that the games are so much shorter!