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!

Castle: Victory!

I'm done with Castle, and to be honest I spent more time on it than I probably should have.  Sure it has a lot of historical curiosity, and a touch of historical significance, but those don't always translate into a great game.  Castle is... let's say it's interesting.  It has certain elements that would carry forth into gaming through much of the 1980s, though I wouldn't necessarily say that they are positive ones.  I'll explain later once I touch on the endgame.

The first thing I should say is that it's surprisingly complete.  I've played William Crowther's original version of Colossal Cave Adventure (though I didn't blog about it), which is the only comparable text adventure to Castle in terms of vintage.  That game is unfinished.  It has no ending, there are exits from locations that don't lead anywhere, and there's at least one section that crashes the game.  It's also of great historical significance, but the original version wasn't the one that was widely played and circulated.  I was expecting something similar from Castle, but instead I got a game that was much larger and much more complete.  That's probably because Peter Langston worked on it for years after its initial release, but I can only play the games in front of me.  Without the original code for Castle we'll never know.

That's not to say Castle is totally complete.  It has a number of bugs in the code, and I took it upon myself to roll up my sleeves and fix them, which was a tricky thing to do without violating the workings of the game.  I'm pretty sure I managed it, and I may just have the only version in which you can legitimately reach the true ending.  I'll mention the changes I made as they come up.

At the end of my last post I had just found the entrance to a missile silo, and upon opening the doors I'd ended up splattered on the front of a launching rocket.  When I went back there this time, I paid a bit more attention to the sign on the door.  It read: "...ILO.  To la...open doo...uck!."  I took a stab at filling in the blanks, and this time when I opened the door  I typed DUCK.  I wasn't expecting this to work, but not only did I dodge the missile, I found myself in the Missile Control Room.  (You can read the full message by lighting a match found later in the game, and that makes the puzzle a lot more explicit.)

(There's an error message that crops up in the shaft, to do with the OPEN DOOR command.  I fixed it by adding a backslash or two, and now the message doesn't appear.  Missing punctuation is the most irritating thing about coding, and the easiest to miss.)

Blowing up the portcullis

There was a screen flashing here, asking me for a target.  I tried a few things, which involved multiple restarts, as you only get one shot.  I couldn't blow up the moat, or the bridge, or the honeymoon cottage, or even the castle drawbridge.  Eventually, after going through my notes, I hit on the correct answer: the portcullis that had been blocking my way south.

The only exit from the Missile Control Room was a hatch leading up, which exited at the Crossroads where the game begins.  (I fixed a bit of code here as well.  Exiting the Control Room is supposed to change the Crossroads so that the hatch is visible, but the original code didn't point to the right place.  It works now.)

I retraced my steps back through the castle courtyard, and found that the portcullis was a smoking ruin.  To the south were some gardens, where I found some jewels and an ugly frog.  Kissing the frog did nothing, so I took it with me instead.  The jewels end up being useless in the game.  The frog is part of the endgame, which I'll discuss once I get there.

Finding the frog.

There seemed to be nowhere else left to explore.  I couldn't figure out how to cross the moat, or open the drawbridge.  The shaft leading up to the missile silo led downwards as well, but I couldn't find a way to do so safely.  I figured that the only thing down there would logically be missiles, anyway.

So, with nothing left to do I set about testing every possible exit direction in every location.  I normally do this as part of my standard mapping procedure, but for whatever reason I was a bit lax with the early stages of this game.  Eventually I found what I was looking for at the bottom of the well: a secret passage leading north-east.

This led to a secret stairway, with four locations and four buttons.  Two of the buttons are bad, and will block the way back to the well.  If you press these, your escape later on will be much more difficult to figure out.  The other two open secret doors that lead into the castle proper.  There's also a passage that leads into a small maze of prison cells, which can be completely skipped; there's nothing in them.

The castle is big, with a lot of locations that don't really serve any purpose.  Instead of laboriously detailing my exploration of it, I'll hit the highlights in point form.

• The king's bedroom has nothing interesting in it, but one of the doors from the secret stairway leads in here.  Nearby is the Queen's Boudoir, where a gossamer gown can be found, and a Sanctum which contains a signet ring.  Neither of these items is useful.
• Close to those rooms is a Guest Chamber with a gideon bible.  Trying to take the bible results in a snarky message about how it was put there to help people renew their faith, or whatever, but reading it gives you a clue that tells you where to use the match.
• A storeroom in the castle has a sack of potatoes in it, which is essential for completing the game without starving to death.  You can still die of starvation, but the potatoes are the most filling food you can find in the game.  (Not that it matters, because the game lets you carry on playing after starvation anyway.  I never bothered to try and fix that in the code, because it was much too beneficial.)
• The lower level of the castle features a mead cellar and various kitchens and rooms for servants.  There's a wine bottle in the cellar, and a knife and a match in the kitchen.  The match can be used to read the sign in the Missile Silo, as I mentioned before, and the knife can be very useful in escaping the castle if you've blocked the Secret Stairs.  The wine bottle doesn't have an explicit use, but I like to drop it in the Armory (see below).
• There's a throne room, but you have to be careful when approaching it, as any weapons you're carrying will disappear, and I haven't been able to find them again.  There's a sign that warns you about it, though, so it's not unfair.  Sitting on the throne opens a door to the Secret Stairs, but you can't pass back through it the other way, and if you've pressed the wrong buttons in the stairwell you can trap yourself forever.
• The Castle Armory is curious, in that all of the weapons are held to the wall by a magnetic or magical force.  Dropping an object in the room causes the game to crash, and this is where I had to go in an do some tinkering with the code.  I think Langston's intention was that dropping any object would trigger the C4 explosive on the wall, blowing everything up except for a mace that you can then take.  That's how it works after my rewriting of the code, though I'm not 100% sure it works in the way originally intended.

Blowing up the armory.

• The drawbridge is up, and the chain that lowers it is too rusted to be moved.  You can break it with the aforementioned mace, and once opened the drawbridge leads to the portcullis area.
• There are two other obstructions in the castle.  One is a barred door leading from the Grand Ballroom to the Courtyard, and I never figured out how to open this.  The other is a wooden panel that blocks the passage between the Guard's Quarters and the Banquet Hall.  This can be cut through with the knife.
• The castle has an East Tower and a West Tower.  In the East Tower is a 30-foot-long wig, and in the West Tower, there is a distressed damsel.  Both of these are crucial to the end-game.

Once I found the damsel, I figured that the goal of the game was to rescue her, or perhaps win her love or something.  I spent a good deal of time messing about, trying to give her various items to no avail.  The first thing I tried to do was TAKE DAMSEL, but the message I got was a surprising one: "Don't be lewd! (This is neither the time nor the place)"  This implied that there was a time and a place, and believe me, I was correct.

Eventually I hit on the correct command: CARRY DAMSEL.  Which is bullshit, really.  It's what I was trying to do in the first place, only the game blocked me to make a sex joke about it.  I don't really appreciate puzzles that involve exact, precise word usage, but I'm pretty sure I have a lot of them in my future if I'm going to continue with this blog.

The damsel told me that if I could get her to the Crossroads she'd reward me, but there was a problem: as soon as I picked her up the stairs leading back down were blocked by a stone wall.  This one wasn't hard to figure out, given the wig in my possession and the fact that the tower was named after Rapunzel.  I tried CLIMB WIG, which allowed me to climb out the window and down.  Not all the way down, though: the wig frayed while I was climbing on it, and I had to scramble through a window back into the castle.  I was past the wall, but I still had to get out of the castle.

An improbable rescue.

There are a few ways to do this.  If you haven't blocked the Secret Stairs, you can just open the door by sitting on the throne, and climb up out of the well.  You can use the same exit by dropping into the maze of prison cells from the Armory.  If you've blocked the Secret Stairs, things get a bit trickier: you have to blow up the Armory to get the mace, and then use the mace to open the drawbridge.  If you've already blown up the Armory, it gets even trickier, as that area the becomes impassable.  The only way through is to cut the wooden panel with the knife, which will get you back to the drawbridge.

Once out of the castle it's simple to get back to the Crossroads, at which point the endgame begins.  Well, one of the endgames, because this game has multiple end sequences.  If you return with the princess, you get the following:

Well, if I must...

If you return with the frog, you get the following:

If you insist.

The game, of course, wants you to have sex with whoever you rescued, and it won't take no for an answer.  In fact it won't accept any other command, except for the one that results in sexytimes.  Reluctantly I entered the command, and if I wasn't wryly irritated enough, I was dumped out of the game before I could read the victory message.  I hate it when games do this, just pure, unadulterated white-hot hatred.  I've sunk hours of my life into this thing!  I've even bloody re-coded your stupid game so that it works!!  Let me read the damn victory message!!!  Anyway, once my blood cooled I went and found the message in the source code.  It was totally worth it:  "Oooooooh!  Aaaaaaaaah!  Congratulations, you are an Expert Wanderer!"  Yep.  Totally worth it.

That's what I was talking about in the opening, with the elements that would carry forward into 1980s gaming.  There are a lot of games which treat sex as a reward, and they usually have an unpleasant, puerile "boys' club" atmosphere about them.  I'm not opposed to sex in games, really.  I love Leisure Suit Larry.  As with most things, the trick is in the execution.  The treatment here is in the puerile camp, and especially grating in that it comes in right at the end with little warning.  Despite that, I have to give Castle some props here, in that you have your pick of genders.  Your own gender isn't even specified, so it's quite progressive in that regard.

Speaking of progressive, there's one more ending I haven't mentioned.  You can rescue the princess, and you can rescue the prince...  But what if you save them both?  Well, Peter Langston thought of that as well.

Um, what if I just turn around while you guys do your thing?  Would that be okay?

Well, I say he thought of it, but he didn't exactly implement it.  The ending is in the source code, but there's no way to access it as written.  In the code there's a line that displays the message "Flirt!" if the frog and the princess are in the same area.  What it also does is change the princess into a frog, which makes the ultimate victory unattainable.  I'm not sure if this was intended, or simply a bug that never got ironed out.  Well, I got in there and fixed it, because I'm persistent in that way.

And what was my reward?  I'm glad you asked!  "OOOOOOOH!!!  AAAAAAAAAH!!  Congratulations, you are a Master Wanderer!"  A Master Wanderer indeed.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: The story of this one is a bit garbled, and only comes into focus right at the end.  Even then, it doesn't make much sense.  The castle and its surroundings are quite well realised, even with the incongruous missile silo.  Even so, I can't quite bring myself to rank this as highly as Colossal Cave Adventure in this regard.  Yeah, I'm knocking it down for the sex ending.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: The prince and the damsel are the only characters here, and they only exist as a reward for the player.  Not even being tied for "the world's best lay" can earn them an extra point.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Text adventures never score well here, but I'm willing to give them extra points when they're well-written.  Castle has some good descriptions and writing (victory messages notwithstanding), about on a par with Colossal Cave Adventure, so I'll rate them as equals.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: For the most part the game works well, but on the whole I would say that the parser isn't as strong as that in Colossal Cave.  Then there are the bugs.  When I have to dig into the code and fix a game, points are going to be lost.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Challenge: To be honest, the main challenge here was in getting the code to work properly.  As for the game itself, I feel like it had a decent balance, marred perhaps by a couple of puzzles that required very precise language.  It's also a little loose in its design, in that certain things that feel like they should be puzzles can be easily skirted around.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: I suppose I have to give this one top marks, don't I?  It was created in 1974, after all.  There is the caveat that it was updated throughout the 1970s, but even in 1980 having multiple endings was something of an innovation.  Rating: 7 out of 7.

Fun: I didn't have a great deal of fun playing this, but I really enjoyed digging into its inner workings.  That shouldn't factor into things, though.  To be honest, any game with bugs ought to lose points in this category.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Castle doesn't get the bonus point; I won't be coming back to this one ever again.  The scores above total 19, which gives me a final rating of 38.

Final Rating: 38 out of 100.

That places it below Adventureland and above Pirate Adventure.  From a historical perspective it perhaps deserves a higher spot, but to be honest I wasn't feeling this one.  If it had been properly functional it would have scored higher.

Speaking of which, if anyone wants the re-coded version of the game they should shoot me an e-mail, and I'll be happy to send the text files across.  You'll still need the rest of the Wander files, though (which can be found here).

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: I remember this game having some okay puzzles, but nothing too clever.  It also doesn't help that I had to jigger with the game code to get certain things to work. Am I solving the puzzles as they were intended?  I'm not entirely certain.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 1. As possibly the first game of its kind, this probably deserves the full 2 points. But so few people played it, and it's barely remembered today.

Castle's RADNESS Index is 29 out of 100. That puts it 8th so far, and 4th of the adventure games I've played so far.  It's only 1 point below Pirate Adventure, and would have topped it if the code was functional.

NEXT: ZORK!  I've found a port of the original mainframe version, which I'm dating as 1977 even though the game was modified up through 1980.  Anything to move this up in the list, really.

Game 14: Castle (designed using Wander) (1974)

This one requires a bit of explanation.  When I came across the excellent blog Renga in Blue, I learned that I had missed a whole load of adventure games when compiling my list.  Not only do I now have another ten games to complete before I'm done with 1978, I also have a few from earlier years that I haven't played.  I'm going to have to backtrack, and the first game that I'm playing is Wander, from 1974.

Wander is a text adventure.  More accurately, it's a system for designing text adventures, and it predates Colossal Cave Adventure.  Colossal Cave is often touted as the first ever text adventure, but that's not accurate.  It's a more influential game in the grand scheme of things, but it's not the first.

Wander was designed by Peter Langston, a teacher at Evergreen State College in Washington DC.  He had already designed the strategy game Empire before beginning work on Wander, and later in life he was instrumental in helping to start up Lucasfilm Games (which later morphed into Lucasarts).  Wander is probably nothing more than a footnote in his career, and for decades it was considered to be lost.  Apparently all it took to rediscover the game was an e-mail to Langston (I'm pretty sure there was more to it than this, but I'm hazy on the details), and once that was done several more versions turned up in quick succession.  Wander was revised continuously into the the early 1980s, and I believe that I'm using a version from 1981.  Anyone who wants to have a crack at it should follow this link.

Several games were designed using Wander, and today I'll be tackling the first of those, Langston's own effort called Castle.  Langston wrote a few other games, and there's at least one by another author, but for the moment I'll concentrate on Castle, ostensibly the first text adventure ever made.

From the outset, it's not clear what my goal is.  The opening begins with my character being sucked into a television, and appearing at a crossroads in a forest.  Without any purpose in mind, I spent my time exploring and mapping, which is my usual MO at the start of any text adventure.  The first thing I noticed is that the quality of the writing is much higher here than in any of the other text adventures I've played.  Colossal Cave Adventure was the previous holder of this crown, but Castle crushes it in this regard.

Before I started exploring, I checked my inventory.  I was carrying the channel selector knob from my TV, and a guide.  Reading the guide provided me with basic instructions for moving around and interacting with the game world.  I wasn't sure what the knob was for, and I haven't found a use for it yet.  At first I had thought it was a button from a TV remote, but then I remembered that the game was made in 1974, and that it was probably a big chunky dial broken off the TV set.  (A TV set that probably had legs, and fake wood panelling on the sides.  Old TVs are rad.)

I also tried typing SCORE, and got the following message: "Keeping score is an outdated, materialistic concept, don't you think?"  I smiled, but I'm always slightly surprised to see games of this vintage being so self-aware of the genre conventions.  No doubt this was added to the game in a later revision, after Langston played Colossal Cave Adventure.  I also encountered a reference to the magic word XYZZY, and an admonition that this was "an old, worn-out magic word".

The opening area is quite small (a 3x3 grid), with obstacles blocking my progress on every side.  To the west was a bridge that wasn't able to support my weight.  To the north was a lake that was too wide for me to swim across.  To the east was a wall, with a locked gate.  And to the south was a forest that functioned much like a maze.  Also of note was a river to the north-west, and a well to the south-east.  In the river was a boat, but the current was too strong for me to use it.  I was also unable to climb down the well, as there was no rope.

I was stuck for a little bit, with no obvious way to progress.  I also kept dying; the game has a starvation counter that runs down quite quickly.  I've been able to postpone starvation with an apple that I found near the woods, and some strawberries found in the woods, but those don't last long.  The woods themselves were also quite annoying until I figured them out.  At first I thought they were a maze, similar to the ones in Colossal Cave.  In reality most of the exits just loop back to one location, and the only way out is to keep going east or north-east.

(A note about starving to death: it doesn't end the game.  I got a message telling me that I was dead, but I was still able to continue exploring after that.  I'm not sure if this is bad design, or just a glitch in the version I'm using.  I'll take it though, it makes exploring the game a lot easier.)

Starving to death is a temporary setback.

Eventually I tried taking the boat, and this worked.  I was stumped a bit here, because GET isn't recognised by this game, and that's the command I always use to pick up items.  The command that this game uses is TAKE, which took me a while to figure out.  But once I had the boat, everything fell into place.  I dropped the boat in the lake, and was able to sail to an island with a honeymoon cottage.  There I found a rope, which I was able to use to climb down the well.  At the bottom of the well were some keys, and I was able to use those to unlock the gate.  I was through the initial area, and into the castle's courtyard.

The courtyard was another area of roughly 3x3.  The castle proper is blocked off by a moat, which is full of piranhas, crocodiles and giant leeches.  There's a passage leading south, but that's blocked by a portcullis.  There are only two things of note in this area: a pear orchard, and an outhouse.

The pear orchard is pretty simple.  It contains a dead cow, and some pears that you can pick.  It seems to me that the pears are poisonous, and sure enough the game doesn't allow you to eat them.  I haven't found a use for them just yet.  You can't take the dead cow.  I thought about dumping it into the moat to distract the piranhas, but I don't think it's possible.

The outhouse contains a balloon, and also something of a trap.  If you're carrying the keys with you, you will invariably drop them in a toilet, and they are seemingly lost forever.  The gate closes, and as far as I can tell that leaves you stuck on this side of the wall with no way to progress in the game.  It's a little irritating, and the kind of trap you can only avoid by falling for it once and reloading.  There's a ladder elsewhere in the courtyard, and I would have thought that could be used to scale the wall, but if it can I haven't figured out how to do it yet.  (Addendum: All you have to do is type CLIMB LADDER to get back over the wall, which makes me feel a little foolish.)

Attempting to retrieve my keys, with surprising and hilarious results.

Upon finding the balloon, I instantly had an idea.  I took the balloon back to the bridge that couldn't support my weight, and sure enough it was filled with helium, and made me light enough to cross over.  The area on the other side was small.  The only thing I found there was a shovel, and a patch of forest that was really difficult to escape from.  I starved to death while trying to find my way out, but through persistence (i.e. just going north over and over again) I was able to get back to the bridge.

At the bottom of the well had been a sign that read "Can you dig it?", which was an obvious clue.  I went back there to dig with my shovel, and unearthed a glass tunnel.  Further along I came to a hatch, which opened into a missile silo.  Given the name of this game I'd expected that this was a fantasy setting, but the missile silo really threw me off there.  To be honest, this makes things a little more interesting.  I wasn't able to explore further though, because a missile blew through the shaft and killed me.  This time I was really dead, as the death message just kept repeating no matter what I did.

 

That's where I left it.  I'm not exactly stuck, but I don't have much of a clue what I'm supposed to do in that silo, or even if I'm supposed to be there.  I'm actually pretty keen to get back to it.  Not having an explicit goal intrigues me, as does the incongruous discovery of the missile silo.  I'm probably building it up too much in my mind, but these unanswered questions make me feel like this game has a stronger story than any other text adventure I've played for the blog.  It's not just another treasure hunt, and that's really refreshing.