Back-Tracking: Colossal Cave Adventure II & Mystery Mansion

Today I'm looking at two text adventures that I played through but didn't comprehensively beat.  (Not that I really beat either of them, because I relied on a walk-through for both.)  This back-tracking project is probably getting a little self-indulgent at this point. Do I really need to be blogging about my attempts to go back through a game trying to get all the points?  Is that something that people want to read about?  Probably not, but it's my blog.  And if I'm stupid enough to spend my time going back to a game just to get a winning screenshot that I'm more satisfied with, then you can damn well bet that I'm going to post about it.  If it's any consolation, this post should be a short one.

COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE II (1978)

I originally played Colossal Cave Adventure II back in 2016.  I recall it as something of a harrowing experience (well, video game harrowing, which is a completely different thing than real life harrowing).  It took me quite a bit of planning to put together a winning run, and even once my plan was in place the game's random elements would thwart my efforts.  I eventually got through it, but for reasons that I'm still unsure about I only ended up with 436 points out of the full 440.  At the time, I was relaxed enough to let that go and move on to the next game.  I don't know what happened to that sweet, innocent young man, because ever since I started getting more serious about the blog those 4 points have been gnawing at me.  I had to go back and at least try to get them.

Going back to this game in such close proximity to playing Don Woods' 430 point version was interesting.  Both games took completely different approaches to expanding on the original.  Woods' approach was to fill things in at the edges, keeping the map exactly the same but adding some small new areas that were difficult to find, and an extra challenge in the form of a time limit.  Jack Pike and Peter Luckett took a different tack, adding on loads of new areas and just making the game much bigger overall.  New mazes, new puzzles, lots of new treasures.  Both of them are difficult in different ways.

I was expecting this revisit to Colossal Cave Adventure II to seriously vex me, but thankfully my old notes were very thorough.  I hadn't quite mapped things out step by step (as I tried to do with Adventure 430), but I did have a guide telling me what order to get the treasures in, and reminding me to take regular drinks (because this game added an irritating thirst mechanic).  I was able to follow my instructions, and the random elements were kind to me, so it only took me a couple of tries to get the four points that had eluded me.

Catharsis!

I'm going to ignore that bit about achieving the next higher rating, and call this game done forever.

MYSTERY MANSION

I only played this game last year, so it was still fairly fresh in my memory.  I did finish it, but I was well down on the 999 points required for a total win.  This game doesn't just require the gathering of treasure, but to get the full amount of points you need to visit pretty much every location, defeat a vampire and a werewolf, solve a murder mystery, and type score whenever you hear a funny noise. Beating this one is a pretty involved process.

I probably didn't give this game enough credit the first time around for its replayability.  With most adventure games, once you've solved all of the puzzles and beaten a game there's not really much point in going back to it (until years down the track, maybe, when you've forgotten everything).  Mystery Mansion includes a bunch of random elements that make replaying the game, and especially playing for points, a challenge.  They're not the bad kind of random, either, like Colossal Cave Adventure's murderous dwarves, but more of a shuffling of elements.  Most notably, the murder to be solved has a different culprit, location, and murder weapon in every game.  (Although, now that I think of it this game does have a bad random element in the form of the Mole Maze, and its ever-shifting pathways. Thankfully you can save just before it and keep trying until you get it right.)

I discovered a few new things that made it easier to solve the murder and collect all of the necessary elements:

• The warrior who roams around outside carries a parrot.  If you're carrying the parrot, he'll tell you the location of any object in the game.
• Similarly, the glass orb in the games room can be used to locate any person, which is handy for finding the murderer and the werewolf.
• There's also the scroll in the library, which crumbles to dust when you try to open it.  The gardener once told me that it could be opened with a magic word, but I never did figure out what to do here.  Reading a walkthrough informed me that I needed to use the passwords from the garden, which are written on the bottom of two bridges.  There are two passwords, but you actually need to say four words: in addition to saying the words forwards you also need to flip them.  This doesn't just mean saying them in reverse, you also need to turn them upside down: a password like HOMIW becomes MIWOH, as you flip the Ms and Ws.  It's pretty tricky to get right, but when you do the scroll opens and tells you everything you need to know about solving the murder.

I mentioned the werewolf above, and I never did find and kill it in my initial play-through.  I only ever met it once, when I fell through a hole to the basement and got killed by it in the dark.  This time I discovered that one of the characters who roams the house will turn into a werewolf after the sun sets, and if you encounter the werewolf it rips you to shreds.  There's a gun that you can find, and a silver bullet, so the solution to killing the wolf is fairly obvious.  The gun has six regular bullets loaded, though, so you need to find something to shoot to empty it before you can use the silver bullet. I found that unloading a bunch of bullets into the elf was pretty satisfying.

Beating this game involved plotting out a path where I visited every location in the game, solved the mystery, killed the vampire, killed the werewolf, called a taxi, and amassed as much treasure as possible at the end of the game.  All the while, I had to pay attention and remember to type SCORE whenever I heard a wolf howl or a woman scream, or I'd lose 2 points each time I forgot.  Thankfully the DOS port has some PC speaker sound effects that made remembering quite a bit easier. I had those turned off when I first played, because they're very annoying, but they're also useful.

Putting all of this together took me a long, long time.  I think I played this game for about 12 hours straight trying to get this right, and I kept falling short of my goal.  I would score around 950 to 960 points, and I just couldn't figure out what I was missing.  As it turned out, there was one location I hadn't gone to: the bottom of a well in the garden.  The garden has three wells, and two of them are impossible to get out of once you climb down.  Going to the bottom of the other one is worth 20 points though, which was a big help in getting me to my goal.

I also figured out that if I left some treasures at the main gate, I could pick them up right at the end, while I'm waiting for the taxi, to score some extra points.  Normally you have to keep the lantern and the compass in your possession, but at the end you don't need to move around anymore, so there's no need.  The only worry with this is that an NPC like the hunter, the woodsman or the warrior will pick them up, but I solved that by murdering all three.

With all of that put together, I was finally able to make a perfect run at this game and score the maximum points.

Goodbye Mystery Mansion. Goodbye forever.

I got the above screen at something like 8 am, after pulling an all-nighter.  That win was a massive relief, let me tell you.

NEXT: I've been playing Rogue, and haven't had any success so far (surprise, surprise).  I figure I'll be at that one for a while.  As far as games I want to return to, there are still a few.  I just got done with the original TRS-80 version of Temple of Apshai, which I'll have a post on shortly.  I want to revisit Richard Garriot's DND1 and play it a bit more in the version that more accurately represents its teletype origins.  There was one monster icon on the start screen of Swords & Sorcery that I never encountered, so I'd like to keep plugging away at that to see if I can get to it.  I'd like to keep playing MUD1 and earn enough points to become a wizard. There's even a perverse part of me that wants to tackle the nigh-impossible task of mapping the entirety of Oubliette, which is definitely balanced for multiplayer and not something I could realistically achieve.  All of those, should keep me busy for a while, I'd say.  I'll try not to make it to the detriment of progressing on my regular chronology.

Colossal Cave Adventure II: Victory!

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

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Step outside and have a drink

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

Step 6: Step outside and have a drink

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

Step 8: Step outside and have a drink

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

Step 10: Have a drink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet victory

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

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

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

FINAL RATING:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Rating: 24 out of 100.

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

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

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

ADDENDUM THE SECOND:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colossal Cave Adventure II: So Very Close

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death by sewer rat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what I see in my nightmares.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game 16: Colossal Cave Adventure II (1978)

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

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

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

A familiar beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

About to be eaten by the Giant.

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

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

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