Priority Adventure 3: Mission: Asteroid (1980)

The best quality image I could find of this game's
Apple II packaging

Well, I've been gone for quite some time, and let me tell you returning to the blog is going to test my memory.  After I wrapped up Local Call for Death and decided to take a break from blogging - a potentially permanent one - I kept on making headway through my list. In late November and early December I played through Mission: Asteroid, Eamon: The Lair of the Minotaur, and Maces & Magic: Balrog Sampler.  I also got a start on Wizardry, but tossed that aside after several of my parties got wiped out. I definitely wasn't in the right frame of mind to be playing a game that would murder me ruthlessly and repeatedly, especially after my long slog through Rogue, so I took some time off to replay The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That's just as well for the blog, because otherwise I'd have a lot more games to catch up on.

What I'm saying is, you'll have to bear with me for the next few entries.  I might not be as detailed as usual, and there probably won't be as many screen shots. Things should be back to normal when I reach Wizardry again, and hopefully by that time I'll be emotionally prepared for that meatgrinder of a game.

Thankfully, my first game back is pretty simplistic, and shouldn't be difficult to recap.  Mission: Asteroid - designed by Ken and Roberta Williams - is designated as Hi-Res Adventure #0, but in actuality it was released after The Wizard and the Princess.  Apparently Mission: Asteroid was deliberately designed as a game for novices, and so it was placed before their other games in the series.  It is much easier than its predecessors, but that doesn't mean it isn't without its own peculiarities, as I'll explain below.

An evocative beginning.

Mission: Asteroid begins with the player standing in front of a building. I started my usual SCORE, INVENTORY, HELP routine, which was interrupted partway through by a beeping sound. An examination of my inventory revealed a watch with a switch. I pressed the switch, and a voice from mission control gave me some instructions: I was to report to the briefing room at once, and the password I should use is "starstruck".  I wasn't able to wander off in any other directions, so I had little choice but to open the door of the building and go inside.

The first room was a reception, with a secretary who wouldn't let me continue without giving the password. Beyond that was the briefing room, where a general gave me my mission: an asteroid was headed for the earth, and I had to fly up there and blow it up. The asteroid collision was going to happen at 7:15, which means that NASA was cutting things very fine here.  It's a very stealthy asteroid, I must assume. (The game prompts you to salute the general when you meet him, and if you don't you're kicked out of the air force and the game ends. I guess they'd have back-up personnel for these missions, but it seems a little drastic to sack your number one pick for a small breach of etiquette when the world's at stake.)

Roberta Williams always finds the dumbest ways for you
to fail in her games.

The general also makes a point of saying that the mission is top secret, and that plays into the room directly to the west, where there are a pair of reporters. What they're doing their if the mission is top secret is anyone's guess, but if you talk to them it's another game over.  Never mind that the verb "talk" doesn't necessarily mean "spill your guts about the top secret mission you've just been given", but apparently the hero of this game just can't help himself.  I shouldn't criticise, because when I played the game I talked to the reporters with the almost-certain knowledge that I'd be blowing the mission wide open.  What can I say, sometimes finding ways to lose is the most fun part of an adventure game.

Back past the briefing room is a computer room, with a "diskette" (yes, we called them that sometimes, but I have no idea if there's a difference between a diskette and a floppy disk). I loaded the diskette, and the computer displayed my flight plan from Earth to the asteroid: right for 10 minutes, up for 5 minutes, left for 15 minutes, down for 5 minutes, left for 5 minutes, and up for 10 minutes. It seems needlessly erratic, to be honest. I was also wondering how these directions would apply to a text adventure, where time doesn't always pass unless you input commands. I tested things with my watch, and discovered that 5 minutes passed every time I made a move.

Next was a supply room, which contained the explosives required to blow up the asteroid.  North of that was the pre-flight checkout, where a doctor gave me the once-over. Apparently my personal hygiene wasn't up to standard, as the doctor wouldn't let me pass until I'd exercised in the gym and taken a shower.  Given the urgency of my mission, I question this doctor's sanity. He's really going to put the world in danger of destruction because I smell bad?

This might be the first game I've played where having bad
BO is a major obstacle.

Once past the doctor, I was able to head out to the airfield and over to the rocket. Inside was a throttle, and four buttons: white, black, orange and blue. These corresponded to left, right, up and down, respectively. Using the throttle launched me into space, where I had to navigate to the asteroid. As I suspected, each move corresponded to a five-minute interval, so it was a simple case of pressing the buttons the right number of times (once for 5 minutes, twice for 10, or thrice for 15), then landing on the asteroid. The need to press the buttons multiple times goes against space physics, of course, but it's hard to see how else this could have been implemented in such a limited parser.

In the space rocket.

The surface of the asteroid was a small maze, made up of just three areas (unless I mapped it incorrectly). The only danger here was suffocation: I needed a spacesuit to survive outside of the ship, and it had a limited oxygen supply. With such a small area to explore I soon found my destination, a cave which contained a deep pit. I set the timer on my explosives, dropped them in the pit, hightailed it back to the rocket and took off.  The asteroid was blown up before it could strike, and the Earth was saved.

Well, that's how it should have gone.  The first time, I dropped the explosives in the right area, but without specifying that I was dropping them in the pit. The explosion didn't fully destroy the asteroid, and it struck the Earth. (I hope it landed right on top of that doctor who insisted I take a shower.)  The second time, I didn't give myself enough time to escape. You have to set the timer on the bomb before dropping it in the pit; I set it too low, and was caught in the explosion.  The third time, I got it right, giving myself enough time to get back to the rocket, retrace my flight plan in reverse to get back to Earth, and watch as my world-saving handiwork took effect.

Oh no, I've been struck by Hugh chunks!

Oddly, the game allows you to continue playing once you've saved the Earth. I wandered around for a bit hoping that some characters might congratulate me, but nothing about the game changes, and when the timer runs out the asteroid destroys Earth anyway. I thought that maybe something was wrong with my copy of the game, but looking around at other blogs I see that this is a universal experience. It makes sense to me when modern games ship with bugs, but in something as small and simplistic as this it's quite baffling. Still, it doesn't affect gameplay at all, so it's hard to complain too much.

Not only does it allow you to keep playing after a victory, but you can keep playing after you've died as well. After the screen shot above I waited around, and at 7:15 the asteroid hit the Earth as scheduled. Then I flew back to Earth and tried to land, only to be told that I'd landed in the ocean and died (presumably because the asteroid had destroyed most of America). So this game is pretty buggy, but at least one outcome has been accounted for.

The victory screen, soon to be invalidated.

Having completed Mission: Asteroid, it's a real case of a game that's on my priority list because of the games surrounding it rather than because of any qualities possessed by the game itself. It's not particularly good or interesting, and it has very little in the way of historical significance, but the Hi-Res Adventure series is important so it's in the queue.  This is going to happen from time to time; heck, it's going to happen a couple of priority games down the line when I hit the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games for the Intellivision.  It's an inherent drawback with being systematic, I suppose.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The "asteroid colliding with Earth" set-up is a new one, and it's still unusual to find an adventure game with a hard time limit.  The setting is split between mission control headquarters, outer space, and the asteroid itself.  The asteroid and outer space are both disappointingly empty, although I suppose that's realistic.  Mission control has the most content in the game, but most of it's pretty nonsensical. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: There really aren't any. The receptionist only responds to the password, the general is a one-time infodump who gets mad if you don't salute, the reporters are only there as a way to lose the game, and the doctor is an absurd obstacle to you getting to the rocket. Characters you can only interact with in one specific way barely qualify as such, so this game is getting a low score. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: The colour graphics here are on a par with those of The Wizard and the Princess, though it must be said that they're not depicting anything nearly as interesting as what's in that game. They're quite ugly, but colour graphics of any kind on a home computer is still refreshing at this point. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Puzzles: The puzzles in this game are dreadfully simplistic, and most of them are signposted heavily within the game. That's a legacy of designing the game for beginners, but I feel like Ken and Roberta took it a little too far. The most difficult part is probably navigating outer space, or finding the asteroid cave before your air runs out. As a small game with simple puzzles it's not going to get a minimum score, but I can't rate it too highly.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: It's a very simple game with very simple commands, but it does what it does reasonably well I suppose. It's tempting to knock it down a point for the false ending, but it doesn't affect gameplay at all. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: This is definitely one of the easiest games I've played for the blog, but it's short and comes without a great deal of frustration. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: The game may be short, and may be lacking in frustrating elements, but it's also overly linear and gives the player almost no scope to do anything outside of the obvious solutions. Games should at least enable some kind of "play", but Mission: Asteroid just walks the player from one simplistic puzzle to the next. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The above scores total 12, which doubles gives a RADNESS Index of 24. That's well below Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess, and only a little bit above the earliest of Greg Hassett's adventures. It really is one of the least engaging games I've played so far though. It might have been designed for beginners, but I'd be hard-pressed to see it convincing many of them to stick around and play some more adventures.

NEXT: I go back to Eamon to try out its second adventure, The Lair of the Minotaur.  I can't remember a damn thing about playing it, so writing this one up is going to be a test.

Priority Adventure 2: The Wizard and the Princess (1980)

The packaging of the initial release of The Wizard and the Princess

The second game on my priority list - The Wizard and the Princess - is also the second game by Roberta and Ken Williams. I tackled Mystery House, their first game, a few months ago, and didn't exactly love it. It was visually impressive for its time, but the graphics were still crude and often indecipherable, and as a mystery game it left a lot to be desired.  I'm a fan of Roberta's later work on King's Quest, and The Wizard and the Princess covers similar fantasy/fairytale themes.  My hope, before I started it, was that it would be a step up in quality from their first effort.  As I write this, I'm still undecided about that.

The Wizard and the Princess was released in 1980 for the Apple II, through the Williams' own company On-Line Systems.  Mystery House was something of a side-project for Ken, who had initially formed his company to get into the lucrative business software market. He helped program the game to humour his wife, and test if there was any money in selling graphical adventure games.  It turns out that there was, so they set about making their second game a more focused, professional effort.  Most notable of all, they upped the ante on the graphics, taking the monochrome wireframes of Mystery House and adding colour.

Some later covers for the game. The left one is for the initial release on Atari 8-bit
computers, and the one on the right was used for a bunch of different platforms.

The game is set in the land of Serenia, where King George's daughter Priscilla has been kidnapped by the evil wizard Harlin, and taken to his castle in the mountains to the north.  The player is a wanderer who is just passing through, and hears a proclamation that the king will give half his kingdom to anyone who rescues the princess. And so the player sets off, armed only with a pocket knife, a blanket, a loaf of bread and a canteen full of water. All of this backstory comes from the original documentation, and is absent from the game itself.

I checked some later documentation, and the re-release for the SierraVenture line is interesting in that it's presented from Harlin's perspective.  He talks about how he's already been defeated, but that he has the power to reverse time, and try to win again.  It's a nice albeit unnecessary conceit to explain how players can keep trying the same adventure.  It also says that the obstacles along the way were placed there by Harlin's magic, which certainly explains some of the nonsense I'm about to get into shortly.

The version of the game I'm playing is copyright 1986, and was seemingly published
by Green Valley Publishing. Their main claim to fame seems to be an attempt to
monetise an unofficial version of Eamon.

Booting up the Apple II version of this game, I was instantly impressed by the graphics, as absurd as that sounds when you look at them in 2020.  But having spent the last six years playing through text adventures, blocky TRS-80 games, and mostly monochrome games on the Apple, they're a huge step up.  Of the games I've played for the blog, I'd say that only Akalabeth compares to it, and that only has colour in the intro sequence.  The big drawback is that the images are slow to draw if you're playing at authentic Apple II speed, but that's been true of most of the home computer games with graphics that I've played.

Starting the game in Serenia, which really looks like a dump to be honest.

The game begins in a village in Serenia, which is oddly devoid of people.  I started with my usual routine: SCORE gave no response, and HELP got me a reply of "no way".  Checking my INVENTORY showed that I had a pocket knife, a loaf of bread, a blanket and a water canteen, as indicated in the documentation.  This is a good start, as I'm always pleased when the manual matches what's in the game.

I went north from the village, and found my path blocked by a snake that, while not actively hostile, wouldn't let me continue further.  My knife was apparently too short to kill it, and I had no other ideas, so I took off exploring in other directions.  To the east I found desert.  To the south I found more desert.  To the west I found - get this - even more desert.  The desert is a maze, where the "rooms" have identical descriptions but slight graphical variations.  There are only two things in the desert that can even vaguely be interacted with: cacti, and rocks.  The cacti serve no purpose beyond decoration, and the rocks have scorpions hiding under them that will kill you if you try to take one.

The first obstacle in the game.  I can't walk around him for some reason,
even though I'm in a wide open, barren desert.

This was almost the entirety of the first post, because I spent almost three days - playing an hour each day - wandering the desert and getting killed by scorpions.  I don't think I've ever been angrier with a game on this blog than I was with this one.  Sure, I've been stuck in games before, but to be stuck right at the beginning, without having achieved one solitary thing?  That is unprecedented, and I honestly couldn't believe that Roberta and Ken thought this was okay.  It seems I wasn't alone, because apparently the help line for On-Line Systems (and later Sierra On-Line) got so swamped with calls for this puzzle that later versions of the game were packed with a little hint book just for this one section.

Pretty much sums up my first few hours with this game.

Luckily, I figured it out, or this post would have been little more than bile and invective.  My first thought was to map out the desert, but I'm not sure I properly managed it; lots of the locations looked identical, and with only four items in my inventory the bread-crumb method wasn't super-effective.  Eventually I just got lucky, and picked up the one rock in the whole desert that doesn't have a scorpion lurking underneath.  Using that rock I was able to kill the snake, and continue on my way north.  Later on I discovered that typing LOOK ROCK lets you know whether there's a scorpion hiding underneath.  Knowing that earlier would have saved me a lot of grief, but I guess I only have myself to blame. Examining everything is just basic adventure game methodology, and I should be better at this by now.

North of the snake was more desert, but laid out in a much less maze-like fashion.  Exploring around I found a stick, a cracker (sitting inside a hole in a cactus for some reason), a locket, and two halves of a note (as shown further below).  The only dangers in this section are another snake (which appears at random, but can be driven off by hitting it with the stick), and thirst (which is solved by the water already in your possession).  The only other encounter is another snake, which is pinned under a rock.  Given the other dangerous snakes around this seems like a counter-intuitive move, but I picked up the rock and freed it.  The snake turned out to be the King of Snakes, and he gave me a magic word: HISS.  Saying that word turned me into a snake briefly, and could be used as often as I liked.

I also got another magic word from inside the locket: LUCY.  Saying that one caused all of my items (including the locket) to disappear, and I couldn't find them anywhere afterwards.  After that little test I was forced to go back to the beginning of the game.  It has a save feature, which requires a blank disk and some disk swapping, but I hadn't used it yet.  (A note on the disk swapping, if you end up playing this game: be careful not to save anything on the game disk.  I did that by accident, and a bunch of the graphics wouldn't load afterwards.)

The next obstacle came in the form of a chasm, with a house and some woods on the far side.  It was too far to jump across, and when I tried to climb down I fell to my death.  Slithering down the side as a snake wasn't an option, either.  I'm afraid to say that I already knew the solution to this puzzle, from dim memories of other blogs I've read (probably the Digital Antiquarian).  It involves the two notes I found earlier, which combine to form a password as shown below.

The two notes combined to form the word HOCUS.  This might
be the best puzzle in the whole game.

The word is HOCUS, which causes a bridge to appear across the chasm.  This puzzle is actually pretty clever, and makes good use of the game's graphics, but I think it would work better with at least some indication that a password is required.  As it is, you're faced with a chasm that presents to all intents and purposes as a natural barrier, with no magic involved.  A magic password would have been the furthest thing from my mind as the solution, and I have a pretty strong suspicion that I would have had to look up the answer here.

Inside the house on the other side I found an apple.  I didn't get to keep it for long, because as soon as I went into the woods I bumped into a gnome, who nicked all of my gear.  I was worried that I'd done something wrong here, but I kept exploring just in case.  The woods were fairly small, about eight areas.  I found a stream, and north of that a tall tree that I could climb to get a view of the ocean.  I also found a parrot, who I suspected would respond to being fed a cracker, if only I could get it back into my possession.

Finally, I found a hole in a tree in one area and a crevice in another.  The hole was big enough for me to fit through, and it led to some stairs, but the door at the bottom of those stairs was locked from the other side.  The crevice was smaller, but by using HISS to turn into a snake I could get through into a tunnel, where I found my stolen stuff.  The tunnel led to the other side of the door, which I was able to unlock from this side without needing a key.

With my stuff back, I returned to the parrot and gave it a cracker. It rewarded me with a vial of green liquid.  I still hadn't saved my game, so I stashed it away rather than test it.

East of the woods was a beach, but the way forward was blocked by a lion.  I've played enough of these games by now to know that food is usually a good bet, so I threw it my loaf of bread.  (It wasn't interested in the apple.)  It took the bread and left, which seems like odd behaviour for a carnivore, but let's not bring science and biology into adventure games now.

It's a magically vegan lion. Let's go with that.

On the beach I found a coil of rope and a boat.  Getting into the boat I saw that it had a hole, so I fixed it by plugging it with my blanket.  I had my doubts as to whether this would hold, but it was apparently a water-tight seal.  (My approach to the puzzles in this game was starting to boil down to just trying the items I hadn't found a use for yet, regardless of whether it made sense.  I was lucky enough to get it right first time here, and it's an approach that served me well for the rest of the game.)

The ocean gives the illusion of being infinite, but in reality there's a pretty narrow path to another island that can be navigated via visual clues.  The beach I landed on had a great big X on it, so I figured I'd need to dig there once I found a shovel.  Elsewhere I found an empty cave, an anchor on another beach, and a tree house.  The tree house was too high for me to reach, but by tying the rope to the anchor and throwing it over a branch I was able to climb up. Inside I found the shovel I was after.

Digging at the beach I found a treasure chest, but before I could do anything a pirate showed up and ran off with it.  Despite some initial trauma flashbacks to the pirate from Colossal Cave Adventure, I quickly twigged to his obvious hiding place, and sure enough he had left the chest in the formerly-empty cave.  Inside I found a harp, which played a nice tune (described only via text, alas), but was otherwise unhelpful at this point.

The pirate's ingenious hiding spot.

I had no obvious way forward, but I did have an obvious item I hadn't tested yet, so I saved my game and drank the green liquid the parrot gave me.  It turned me temporarily into a bird, but only for a couple of moves. It seemed like a good bet, but I was skeptical that this short duration would be enough to get me over the horizon to an unseen island.  I needn't have worried; the land across the ocean to the north was very close, despite the complete lack of visual clues.  (This would have been a much better place to put the tall tree with the view.)

Heading from the beach into the foothills, I found a sapphire ring.  I tried wearing it, but it had no immediate effect.  Heading up into the mountains I encountered an old woman, who warned me about the local giant.  She doesn't serve any other purpose that I can tell.  East of her is an area with a rainbow, that disappeared one move after I entered the room.  I didn't manage to do anything with it before the opportunity was gone.  East of that was a bridge, and the game was very quick to tell me that it looked like it would collapse under my weight.

Having encountered similar puzzles in the blog so far, I figured that I'd need to get rid of my stuff to cross.  First, just to test it out, I tried crossing as a snake.  It didn't work, but it's the sort of thing that really should have.  Instead, I had to use the word LUCY from the locket, which made my entire inventory disappear.  With all of that stuff gone, I was able to cross.

(Can I just say at this point how much I appreciate that this game has no inventory limit?  Pretty much all adventure games have one at this point, and it's not always necessary.  There are games for which it creates a sort of logistical puzzle, but there are plenty of others where it's nothing more than an irritant that's seemingly only there because Colossal Cave Adventure had one.)

I suspected that the game would be quick to give me back my stuff, and I was right: it's in a cave very close to the other side of the bridge.  East of that is the aforementioned giant, who blocks passage onwards.  He's not otherwise hostile, and will leave if you play him a tune on the harp; doesn't seem like a such a bad chap, really.

North of the giant is the wizard's castle, which has a raised drawbridge and a moat full of crocodiles.  But before that, there's a peddler who's selling a whole bunch of stuff: a dagger, some boots, a jug of wine, a frying pan and a horn.  He's selling these items for one gold coin, which is something I didn't have.  I tried to sell him my ring, but he wasn't interested.

Harlin's castle, with one threatening crocodile.  Were crocodiles in moats ever
historically accurate?  Given that they're not native to Europe it seems unlikely.

The obvious place for me to find some gold coins was the rainbow from earlier, but that had vanished, and didn't look like it was going to reappear.  So I restored to a game before that, and this time when I got to it I typed GO RAINBOW.  This led to an area where I found a single gold coin, and not the pot of gold I was hoping for.  Heading back to the peddler, I had to decide which of his items to buy.  My first instinct was to buy the horn, which I then blew at the front gate of the castle.  The drawbridge opened, and I entered Harlin's castle.

The leprechauns have fallen on hard times.

Obviously, I got lucky here, or was perhaps guided by dim memories from having read about this game before.  With the wrong placement, this "guess the item" puzzle with the peddler could have been pretty rough, but as it is it's only two areas away from the problem it solves, so it's not too bad.  I did go back and test the other items to see if any of those provided solutions, but they're all worthless.  The only one that comes close to being useful is the dagger, which you can throw at the crocodile, but even that just results in you missing and losing the dagger in the moat.

I entered the main hall of the castle, and took some stairs leading up.  In a room to the east I found some shoes in a closet, one of which had the word "whoosh" written inside.  Saying this word whisked me all the way back to the start of the game.  I obviously needed to save this until I'd rescued the princess, so I restored my game.

West of the stairs was a room that with an enormous frog, but before I could do anything the wizard appeared and zapped me away.  I kept trying to go back to fight the frog, but the wizard was pretty insistent in not letting me stay in that area.  I decided to explore elsewhere, and come back here later.

Confronted by a giant frog.

West of the main hall I found a dining hall and a throne room.  In the throne room the wizard appeared again, and zapped me to a courtyard where I was menaced by a giant boar.  I fell back on my standard "feed the enemy" tactic, and gave the boar my apple.  The apple was poisoned, and it dropped dead.  (I don't know why I never tested the apple earlier than this myself. I think I forgot about it until I was searching my inventory for things to use on the boar.)

From the courtyard I went through a kitchen and came to a dance hall, where the wizard appeared again and zapped me into a cell.  The cell was bare, but I was able to escape without much fuss by using the magic word HISS to turn into a snake.  From the cell I explored south and east, and came to a locked door.  I was running out of unused inventory items, but I still had my pocketknife, and I used it to pick the lock.  It worked, and I gained entrance to a room at the base of a tower.  (By being zapped into the cell, I bypassed a pretty large and empty maze that led north from the main hall.  I mapped it later on, which didn't require any of the usual tricks; this maze is pretty trivial.)

At first the top of the tower was empty, but after I left and returned there was a bird fluttering about.  I tried to catch it, but every time it flew out of my reach, and none of the items I had seemed to work.  I was stuck again, and this time - after an hour or two of butting my head against it - I did look up the solution.  It turned out to be the sapphire ring, which is what I had suspected: it was the last unused item in my inventory, after all.  I'd tried wearing it and throwing it and waving it, and a bunch of other things, but the solution was to RUB RING.  This transformed me into a cat, and I leaped up and ate the bird.  (I really need to add rubbing items to my standard methods of testing them, it's been the solution to loads of puzzles.)

The gripping climax.

This seems pretty pointless, unless you know that the bird is actually the wizard Harlin in disguise.  The game certainly doesn't tell you this, and the only indication of it is that he stops showing up to zap you afterwards.  Regardless, this is the first game I've encountered where the hero wins via cannibalism.  I mean, it's presented as a cat eating a bird, but we know what's really going on here.  It also makes the backstory with Harlin reversing time after his defeat a bit odd.  Where's he doing that from, inside my stomach?

The only thing left to deal with was the frog, which in true fairytale fashion transformed back into the princess after I kissed it.  I have to say, though, that the graphics did a lot to obscure that this was the princess.  Scroll back up and take a look at it. That frog looks threatening, and when I first encountered it I was convinced it was an enemy.  I was actually mildly surprised that it ended up being the princess, which is hard to do with a "frog/princess" situation.

With the princess in tow, I used the magic word WHOOSH, and we returned to Serenia, where I won the game.  My reward was being declared a "junior-master adventurer"; I'll have to assume that I was given "half the kingdom" as promised off-screen.  Although, given that the kingdom is a hellscape of desert, rocks and scorpions, I'm not sure I really want it.

Some day son, half of this could be yours.

Having written all of that out, I'm still undecided on The Wizard and the Princess.  I'm glad I played it; it has historical significance, and serves as a sort-of prequel to the King's Quest series.  And to be honest, the middle portion was pretty enjoyable.  I made steady, constant progress through it, and that's where I like to be in an adventure game.  The ending has some issues, particularly the anticlimactic non-confrontation with Harlin.  I'm not sure how anyone would get to RUB RING except through trial-and-error.  Making it a lamp might have been a little obvious, but at least rubbing a lamp is something you might try in an adventure game.

The real problems with this game, though, are at the beginning.  When you end up having to create special documentation just for one puzzle, you know you've messed up somewhere.  It's impossible to get the numbers, but I'd love to know what percentage of the people who bought this game played it for half an hour and quit in disgust, never to return.  I suspect the number would be far, far higher than those who solved it on their own.

I guess I have to lump The Wizard and the Princess into the category of "flawed classic", but that flaw is pretty significant.  I'm interested to see where it ends up on the RADNESS Index, because I don't think I've yet had a game that's pretty good except for one terrible, almost game-breaking element.

(Normally I'd do a Ports of Call here, checking out some other versions of the game, but for Priority List games I've decided that I'll save this for when the game comes up in my chronological order. It's my sneaky way of allowing myself to play the classics more than once.)

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting:  The story is a standard "rescue the princess from the evil wizard" affair, but what's surprising to me is how little that's been done at this point in adventure game history.  In fact, going through the list of games I've played, this might be the very first one.  (Castle had a princess, but no wizard.) I have jumped ahead in the timeline, given that this is a priority list game, but I've only jumped by a year or so.  It's weird to think that this could be the first adventure game to use such a cliched plot as its basis.

The game's structure is also notable, in that it's a pretty linear progression through a series of dangers and obstacles.  This feels familiar to me from later Sierra games (King's Quest V in particular, which now strikes me as something of a remake of this game), but it's unusual in the context of what's gone before.  Most of the games earlier than this have been quite a bit more open, and it does give this game more of the feel of an epic quest.

It's hard to rate this too high, given the well-worn fairytale territory that it's drawing from, but I was surprised at how different it actually is from the games before it.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: The characters in this game barely qualify as such.  In true early adventure game fashion, they're obstacles to be bypassed, not interacted with.  The wizard does seem to pop in and out to harass you in his castle, but those events are tied to certain locations, so he's not as dynamic as he first appears.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: The addition of colour does elevate this game above the graphics of its predecessor, Mystery House, but the actual drawing of the scenes and characters is similarly crude.  The writing is also very rudimentary, and there's nothing in the way of sound effects or music.  Despite the improvements from Mystery House, I can't quite bring myself to give this a 3, so it's stuck on the same score.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Puzzles: For most of this game, the puzzles are simple and effective, even if some of them don't necessarily make sense.  On the basis of those I might have given this game a 3 in this category, but there's the whole desert maze/rock/scorpion ordeal to consider.  For that puzzle alone, I have to knock this game down by a whole point. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is simple, but it does its job, and I never had any problems with it.  The only mechanical element I can complain about in this game is the painful slowness of the screen drawing, but its hard to criticise something that was innovative at the time.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: As with Puzzles, this is a hard category to judge.  For most of the game, the challenge level is really well judged.  But for one puzzle, it's the opposite of that, and it's also the first thing that players have to tackle in the game.  The vast majority of those playing this game at the time would have been adventure game novices, and the desert maze is not a novice level challenge.  I'd have been more lenient if this puzzle came later in the game, but it loses an extra point for its extremely ill-judged placement.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: Had I rated this after my first couple of fruitless sessions with the game, I'd have given this the lowest mark without hesitation.  Once I got over that point though, I found the game enjoyable, but unfortunately I have to take those first few hours into account.  If I hadn't been playing this for the blog, I never would have continued with it.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 1.  I'm giving this game a bonus point for historical significance, and its status as a precursor to King's Quest.

The above categories total 15, which doubled gives a score of 30.  Add the bonus point, and The Wizard and the Princess gets a RADNESS INDEX of 31.  Out of 55 games, that places it equal 24th, and in terms of adventure games it's equal 13th.  It scored three points higher than Mystery House, which feels about right.  For the most part its an improvement, and without the desert maze puzzle it would have scored around a 37.  This would have been enough to put it alongside Adventureland, up among the more enjoyable adventures I've played so far.  But alas, this game was dragged down by venomous scorpions, like so many of those who have tried to beat it.  A fitting result, I'd say.

NEXT: The next game on my list is Journey, a text adventure for the Apple II.  I know nothing about it, except that it's standing in the way of me playing the first Ultima.

Priority Adventure Game 1: Mystery House (1980)

The cover to the original packaging of Mystery House

I was supposed to post this on the weekend, but with quarantine happening and nothing to do but sit at home, my sleep cycles got so messed up that I basically lost a day or two.  I've been playing a lot of games and catching up with a lot of stuff for the blog, but what I haven't being doing much of is writing.  So today I'm getting back on schedule, and hopefully I'll be able to keep it that way.

Today's game is Mystery House, the first adventure game on my Priority List.  I considered leaving it off, along with the other Sierra Hi-Res Adventures, because I was going to get to them in reasonable time in my regular chronology.  I left the Scott Adams adventures off the Priority List for that very reason.  But the post-King's Quest Sierra games are a definite priority, and I couldn't really justify playing those before covering the company's earlier work.  So the Hi-Res Adventures are in, and the first of those is Mystery House.

The cover of the 1982 re-release, with a playing
card motif that has nothing to do with the game.

Mystery House is often touted as the first graphical adventure game.  It's not, technically; The Atlantian Odyssey, which I covered not too long ago, came out in 1979, so it has Mystery House beat by at least half a year.  It is, however, the first significant graphical adventure.  As history shows, sometimes it doesn't matter if you got there first, what matters most is getting there first in a way that people notice.  Hardly anyone played The Atlantian Odyssey, but a whole heck of a lot of people played Mystery House.

The game was written and designed by Roberta Williams, and programmed by her husband Ken.  Ken Williams had spent the 1970s working in the business side of computers, bouncing from company to company, always seeking a bigger paycheck.  He'd mostly worked on mainframes during that time, and he bought an Apple II with the plan of creating a version of the FORTRAN programming language that would work for it.  As it happened, among the applications he had for that Apple II was a copy of Colossal Cave Adventure.  Roberta, who is usually described as the model housewife and mother before this moment, became obsessed with the game, and even she admits that she neglected her children while playing it.  After she finished it there were few options for similar games, and she thought that she'd be able to make her own, as long as she had someone to do the coding.  Ken eventually came around to the commercial potential of making such a game, especially when the idea of adding graphics came in, and it became the first hit for On-Line Systems, later known as Sierra On-Line.  Overall it's said to have sold about 80,000 copies, which is a huge number for the time. You probably know the rest: Roberta would go on to spearhead the King's Quest series, Sierra would be the biggest force in adventure gaming throughout the 80s and into the 90s, and the two of them combined would be major players in helping video games to become a part of pop culture at large.  (For a more detailed look at the early years of Ken and Roberta, check out this article over at the Digital Antiquarian.)

The original title screen. The re-release adds a few more with the Sierra
logo, and a page of text about the public domain release.

Mystery House was released on May 5, 1980 for the Apple II, and later ported to a bunch of Japanese computers.  (I do find it odd that the game wasn't ported to any other computers in the US.  It seems especially strange that money-hungry Ken Williams wouldn't have seized the opportunity to get his games onto, say, the Commodore 64.  Perhaps there was a technology issue, but I have no idea.)  I am, of course, playing the Apple II version on an emulator.  I couldn't find the original; all the versions out there are from 1987, when the game was released into the public domain to celebrate Sierra's 7th anniversary.  (Why celebrate the 7th?  You couldn't wait three years?)

The plot of Mystery House was apparently inspired by the Agatha Christie novel And Then  There Were None.  I've never read any Christie, but looking at a plot summary it seems that the connection is very loose.  Both stories feature a group of people who've been invited to a house, and are murdered one by one.  There all similarities end.

In addition to its credit as the first graphical adventure, Mystery House also sometimes gets credited as the first adventure game to have a mystery story.  That's probably not the case: the similarly-named Mystery Mansion (which I covered back here) has it beat.  Of course, Mystery Mansion was developed over a span of years from 1978 to 1981, so there's a small chance it wasn't quite playable by the time Mystery House was released.  It's only a small chance though; evidence points to Mystery Mansion being played in the 1970s, and there are some claims that it was created even earlier than 1978.  Regardless of that, Mystery House gets the credit for being the first mystery game that a large number of people played.

This is probably the best-looking screen of the game.  Just ignore the tree.

The game begins with the player standing outside the titular house.  There's nothing else to do but go up to the front door and enter, after which the door is slammed and locked behind you.  You are now trapped in the house, along with seven other people whose depictions I could best describe as amateurish.

They all look identical here, but will get unique depictions later on.

You can't get descriptions of any of these people during the game, but the instructions have more details as to who they are:

• Tom, a blond plumber
• Sam, a brunette mechanic
• Sally, a red-headed seamstress
• Dr. Green, a brunette surgeon
• Joe, a brunette gravedigger
• Bill, a blond butcher
• Daisy, a blond cook

Is it weird that there are three blokes here described as brunettes?  I always thought that was more of a female descriptor.  Regardless, as soon as I saw these descriptions, I figured that hair-colour would play some role in solving the mystery.

As well as the seven other guests, the entry hall also has a crude note on the floor.

They were going to write "losers weepers" but they ran out of space.

"Valuable jewels are hidden in this house.  Finders-keepers."  This level of atrocious hand-writing at first led me to suspect Dr. Green, but then I realised that the writing was legible, so I abandoned this theory.  Besides, you can't accuse anyone of the murder, or even talk to the other guests.  You can't even kill any of them yet, and it's not like an actual crime has been committed at this point.  There's nothing to do but leave the room by one of the three doors, or by the stairs to the top floor.  As soon as you leave, the other guests all disappear from the entry hall.

West of the entry hall is a kitchen, which has a fridge, a cabinet, and a stove.  It has a sink as well, which is shown in the graphics but not mentioned in the room description.  This stumped me for a little bit, because I was only interacting with the items that the game went out of its way to mention.  I opened the cabinet, and found some matches.  I opened the fridge, and found an empty pitcher.  I ran into some problems here, though, because I just couldn't figure out what to call the thing in the fridge.  I tried JUG and GLASS and even EWER, because I read far too much fantasy fiction with old-timey words.  It wasn't until much later that I hit on PITCHER, and I can't even tell you why it took me so long.  I can say that it's not the word I'd use in that context: it's a god-damn JUG, I tell ya!  None of this would have been a problem if it was described in the text.

I also tried lighting the stove, and got a very terse message telling me that the stove exploded, and I was dead.  One quick reload later, I determined that the stove was probably unimportant, and not to be tampered with.  Chalk that up as my first arbitrary death in a Sierra game.  Alas, this one didn't have the charm of their later games.

You can leave the kitchen by a back door, but that just leads into a forest maze, and I wasn't prepared for maze mapping at this early stage, especially without a full inventory to leave a trail.  I couldn't figure out how to get back to the kitchen though, so after getting hopelessly lost I had to reload again.

This time I went east from the kitchen and found the library, complete with seven whole books.  There is a cobweb in the corner though, and most of the windows in the house are boarded up, so I assume the place has been abandoned for some time.  I found a note on the floor, which had another crudely written message: "7-6 = 1. THEN I AM DONE!"  Ooh, foreshadowing!  What could this possibly mean!  (Obviously it means there will be murders.  But if there are seven guests plus me, this murderer's math is all screwed up. Perhaps I was not expected?)

Another door led outside where I found the first murder victim: Sam the mechanic, who had been hit on the head by a blunt object. Look, you can see the big lump on his head!  And those X's for eyes, he's as dead as a doornail.

Alright, one less person looking for the treasure!

I went back inside through another door, into a dining room. I could see that there was a candle on the table, and... something in the background.  A christmas tree?  A tent?  Eventually I figured out that it's a lamp, but it doesn't matter, because it's irrelevant.  It does highlight one my biggest gripes with early graphical adventure games though, and it's their expectation that you'll know what the objects depicted in the graphics are supposed to be.  It happened earlier with the pitcher, and it's happened again here with the lamp.  This won't be such a problem later, when graphics get better and room descriptions get longer, but in this era of crude images and terse descriptions it really sucks.

An illuminati symbol?  A dwarf holding a kite?

After a short time the sun goes down, and if you don't have a light source by then it's pretty difficult to navigate (although you can still fumble around in the dark).  I used the match to light the candle, but when I lit it in the dining room I tripped on the rug and started a fire.  I tried leaving by the back door, but that only resulted in my fiery death.  After a reload, I figured out that you can take the candle out of the dining room first before you light it. Crisis averted!

Having explored all of the ground floor I went upstairs (a floor which is inexplicably larger than the one below it, unless the rooms on the bottom have a much bigger volume).  Heading east and west I found four bedrooms.  In the nursery I found the body of Dr. Green, which disproved my bad hand-writing hypothesis.  He had been stabbed, but there were no other clues to be found.

In a boy's bedroom I found another note, that said "YOU WILL NEVER FIND IT! IT'S ALL MINE!!"  In a large bedroom I didn't find anything, but someone tried to kill me with a thrown dagger.  I grabbed the dagger and gave chase, but whoever it was had quickly vanished.  (Replaying the game to get some screenshots, I just had this dagger thrown at me even though I'd already taken care of the murderer.)

The last bedroom had another body, that of Sally the Seamstress.  She'd been bumped on the head just like Sam, but this time there was another clue: a blond hair!  My list of suspects was rapidly dwindling: only Tom, Joe, Bill and Daisy were still alive.  Of those, Joe was a brunette, so he was probably ruled out.

Heading north I saw a stairway up to the attic, but I decided to explore a doorway at the end of the passage first.  It led to a study, with nothing inside but a desk that I couldn't interact with, and a window with a lovely view outside.  Next to the study there was a bathroom, where I found yet another murder victim: Bill the butcher, who had been strangled with a pair of pantyhose.  I mean, it's possible that this is a Michael Hutchence situation here, but it's probably safer to assume that this guy was murdered.  Based on the graphics, I miraculously figured out that you can take a towel from the rack.  You can't use the toilet, though, which is a bit of a black mark on the game.  If you're putting a dunny in a game, you better let me take a shit in it, that's all I'm saying.  (Actually, this game doesn't even let you type any cuss words.  Try it, and you get hit with an instant game over.)

Heading up to the attic, I found a hammer, which I took, and a ladder that was too heavy to move.  In a storage room just off the attic there was a chest, which was locked.  I guess I'd have to go looking for the key.

At that point I'd pretty much explored everywhere, or so I thought.  I mapped the maze, but I didn't find anything there: it was just a pointless maze of trees that didn't seem to go anywhere.  I did figure out that you could leave the forest by going UP from the initial location, which doesn't make much sense, but it did come in handy later.  I also noticed the gate in the back yard, which led to a graveyard.  There I found Joe the gravedigger, who had just finished digging six graves.  I tried to take his shovel, thinking that maybe I needed to dig somewhere in the forest to find the key.  Joe wouldn't let me, so I stabbed him to death.  Him digging six graves was highly suspicious behaviour, so I'm sure he deserved it.  Digging in the forest didn't turn anything up though, so I was a little bit stuck.

Hahaha the giant X's on his eyes.

Eventually I noticed the sink in the kitchen, and figured out that I could turn the taps on with the dubious command of WATER ON.  That one's pretty rough, but it was singled out in the instructions so I remembered it pretty quickly.  I gathered some water with the pitcher, and also took a butterknife that was lying in the sink.

With some water in my possession I figured that I had some fire-fighting capabilities, so I went back to the dining room, where I once again tripped on the rug and set it ablaze.  Pouring water on the fire put it out, which left a hole in the rug.  In that hole I found a key, and with that key I was able to unlock the chest, in which I found a handgun with one bullet.

I'll never turn down a gun in any game, but this wasn't the clue I was hoping for.  I'd found four dead bodies, and made one myself by killing Joe.  That left Tom and Daisy, one of whom was probably the murderer.  They weren't coming to me it seemed, so it looked like I'd have to find them.  And what's a murder house mystery without a secret passage?

I started rechecking all of the rooms, and eventually I found my solution in the study.  Here's a picture of that room, with it's lovely window view.

It still looks like a window to me.

While I was looking around the house I tried to look out this window, and was told that all of the windows on the house were boarded up, except for the one in the attic.  The attic window only gives a view of the forest, with nothing helpful to impart.  But if all the other windows were boarded up, what about this one in the study, which was very clearly open?

Well, it turns out the graphics fooled me again, because this was not a window but a painting in a picture frame.  The picture was bolted to the wall with four screws, but I was able to loosen them with the butterknife from the kitchen.  (The dagger should maybe work here, but it doesn't.) Behind the picture was a button, and pressing it opened a secret door.

This secret passage led down to the basement, where I found the final corpse: that of Tom the plumber.  He'd been stabbed, and was clutching a daisy in his hand.  Even I could understand such boneheaded symbolism, and with this clue and the process of elimination I figured out that Daisy was the murderer.  Now I just had to find her.

Poor Tom, he'd only just been awarded the key to the city.

It was impossible not to notice the huge key on the table, which was a skeleton key.  Obviously it's called that because the ginormous bloody thing was carved out of an elephant's thighbone.  The door out of the room led to a pantry, with no way through.  Later on I figured out that it connected to the kitchen, through a hole behind the cabinet that was bricked up.  I had to used the hammer from the attic to smash the bricks to get through.

There's also a tunnel leading from the basement, which somehow led to an area with a large pine tree.  I tried climbing the pine tree, and found a telescope.  Looking through it, I could see into the attic through the open window, where I spotted a trap door in the ceiling.  Why I could see this through a telescope from outside better than three feet away with my actual fucking eyes I have no idea.  There was nothing else to do but head back down the tree, which dumped me in the middle of the forest maze.  I was thankful at this point that I'd mapped it out, and getting back to the house wasn't too hard.

Heading to the attic, I climbed up through the trapdoor, and found myself in a tower with the murderer, Daisy.  Examining her gave me the unambiguous message "She is going to kill you", so I unloaded by gun right into her face.  I'd stopped the murderer!  And well, murdered a couple of people myself, but they deserved it.  I still think Joe was in on it.  (My replay only strengthened this theory, because somebody threw a dagger at me after I'd already shot Daisy's head off.  I reckon she killed the victims that were stabbed, and Joe killed the ones that were bashed on the head using his shovel.)

This worked, actually.

In the attic I found another note, that said "It's in the basement!"  So I went down to the basement, and started typing things like BREAK WALL and FIND SECRET and END ALREADY.  I noticed that the walls were covered with algae, and I even tried CLEAN ALGAE, but that didn't work.  I was stuck on this for quite some time, until I eventually caved and looked up the solution.  It was WIPE ALGAE, or RUB ALGAE, so I was on the right track, I just hadn't gotten the wording right.  You need the towel here as well, or the game tells you that you have nothing to wipe the algae with.  With the algae cleaned away, I found a loose brick, and behind that I found the jewels.  With the murderer dead and the jewels in my possession, I was able to leave the house and win the game.

A guru wizard?!?

So, Mystery House.  I can't say that I enjoyed it, exactly.  Wrangling with the combination of a primitive parser and bad graphics was a trial at certain points. It's not like the mystery story was any great shakes either, and you don't even really solve it except by the process of elimination. But there were certain aspects of the game that were impressive, most notably the graphics.  Not that they look good; they are, in fact, rather terrible.  But the changes to the game environment being reflected graphically is definitely impressive for the time.  Doors open and close.  Items disappear when you pick them up, and will appear in any location when you drop them.  I don't recall any games doing this before.  It's one impressive thing in a see of irritations, though, and I can't really recommend Mystery House as anything other than a historically significant curiosity.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The mystery story is still a novel one at this point, and I appreciated the change, but it's really not at all well executed.  And, of course, there just has to be some treasure to find, doesn't there?  The house isn't particularly well realised either, although adding the graphical dimension makes it a little more memorable.  I'm wavering between 1 and 2 here, but I think perhaps I'll be generous. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: This category starts promisingly, but it turns out that the characters here are little more than corpses to be strewn throughout the game.  Only Joe and Daisy are found alive after the initial room, and they can barely be interacted with.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: This is a pretty ugly game, and the novelty of the graphics doesn't really mitigate that.  There's no sound, and the writing is terse.  The game does do some novel things with its graphical interactivity, but I'm dealing with that down in Mechanics.  Plus you lose points here when I have to spend significant time trying to figure out what an object actually is.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Puzzles: The puzzles in this game aren't actually too bad.  Most of them are pretty simple and logical, they're just hopelessly obscured by the graphics and the parser.  None of them are particularly clever though.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is really not all that good, and as I've said the graphics don't help it.  It's not hopelessly broken though, and the interactivity of the graphics earn it an extra point here.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: It's an often-baffling game, but I wouldn't say it's a particularly hard one.  Without the graphics and parser issues I've already mentioned it would probably rate a little better here, but with them I would have to say that this game is a frustrating experience. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: I didn't enjoy Mystery House a great deal once I got through the initial exploration, mostly due to the issues above.  It's pretty short though, and that's usually enough to get a game out of a minimum score in this category.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2.  For graphical innovation and historical significance I grant this game the full amount of bonus points.

The seven categories above add up to 13, which doubled totals 26.  Add the two bonus points, and Mystery House gets a RADNESS Index of 28.  That places it equal 24th overall, and 15th out of 26 adventure games.  It's even with Voyage to Atlantis and just above The Cottage, which was probably an even more frustrating experience than this one.  So it's down there with some of the games I've not enjoyed much, but not right down there with the very worst.

NEXT: My next game was going to be Empire of the Over-Mind, Gary Bedrosian's follow-up to Lords of Karma, which I rather liked.  But although he wrote it in 1979, it wasn't released until 1981, so I'm kicking it down the list by a couple of years.  After that I had Enchanted Island by my boy Greg Hassett, but it looks like that's his last game for 1979: before that he wrote Sorcerer's Castle Adventure.  So I'm swapping the two around, and by the weekend I should have a post up on Sorcerer's Castle.