Priority Adventure 8: Ghost Town (1980)

Among the many things that can kill a blog is a repetition of the same material over and over again.  It's possible I'm in danger of committing that sin right now, as I'm back with yet another Scott Adams text adventure.  Not only that, it's another Scott Adams treasure hunt.  I'll say this for the man, he knew what was working and he stuck with it.  Thankfully he has a habit of switching up the themes and settings.  So far he's done a D&D-style fantasy, a pirate game, a spy game in a nuclear facility, two horror-themed adventures, a sci-fi, a spy game set in a theme park, and an Egyptian adventure.  Now he's back with a game set in an Old West ghost town.  There aren't a lot of Western-themed adventure games that I'm aware of, so this one promised to be a bit of a novelty.  Well, for the sake of the blog I sure hope so...

Another accurate cover from
Adventure International

There's not a lot out there about the creation of Ghost Town.  It's coming towards the end of Adams' white hot creative output, where he released a dozen games over the course of three years.  We'll see eventually if the workload starts to affect the quality of Adams' games, but thus far he's been remarkably consistent.

I played Ghost Town back in May.  Apparently I played the TRS-80 version, as my victory screenshots at the end of this post will attest.  For reasons of convenience I used the Apple II version to get my screenshots while replaying the game to write this post.  I'm now only two games away from catching up on the games I played when I thought the blog was dead.  Once I've caught up I have some plans which might allow me to increase my output.  We'll see, I make no promises; regular readers will be aware of how erratic and inconsistent I can be with my schedule.

As I mentioned above, Ghost Town is a treasure hunt, set in an Old West ghost town.  There are thirteen treasures to collect (which I assume was done deliberately for maximum spookiness).

Does anyone know who the Cherens were?
I got nothing.

The game begins with the player standing out in the street of the titular ghost town.  Checking my inventory revealed that I was carrying nothing.  Typing SCORE told me that I had stored 0 treasures, giving me a score of 0 out of 100.  It also showed that I had 0 out of a possible 50 bonus points.  This was a new wrinkle to the Adams formula, and although I scored a few along the way I didn't figure the bonus points out until I started reading a walkthrough.  More on that later.

On one side of the street was a jail, with barred windows and a door latched from the inside.  On the other side was a barbershop, where I found a stetson hat.  Wearing the hat gave me the message that "something feels strange", which immediately set my alarm bells ringing.  Adams doesn't put these messages in the game for nothing, so I was convinced that there was something hidden in the hat.  Looking at it told me that the hat was my size, but nothing else I tried gave me more information.  I wouldn't figure out the hat's secret until much later.

Heading east down the road eventually led to Boot Hill (the name of TSR's western tabletop RPG, and also a common term for a burial site for gunfighters).  A rattlesnake was here, and although it wasn't particularly hostile its presence was enough to stop me from getting anything done in this area.  Trying to take the rattlesnake caused it to bite and kill me (predictably).  This was something to come back to later.

West of the barbershop and jail was more road, flanked by a saloon and a dry-goods store.  In the saloon I found a large bell and a mirror.  Looking in the mirror told me that I was "very pretty", while ringing the bell caused a ghostly voice to whisper the word "vain...".  Could these be connected?  (Probably not, because the ghost kept pestering me all over the map regardless of the bell's presence.  The ghostly voice was sometimes accompanied by a bell sound.)  I was able to take the bell, but not the mirror.

In the dry goods store I hit the inventory jackpot: a shovel, a compass (pointing north), and a dozen matches.  A sign here read "DROP *TREASURES* THEN SCORE", which could be rudimentary dating advice but in this context meant that this is where I needed to bring the town's various treasures to beat the game.  Finding the place where you need to store your treasures is always a massive relief in a Scott Adams game.

Heading west down the street again, I came to a telegraph office and a hotel.  The office contained a safe (locked) and a telegraph key,  Nothing happened when I pressed the key, so I left and entered the hotel lobby.  Behind the counter was a *cashbox* - my first treasure!  There was also a sign that read "RING FOR ROOM SERVICE".  Ringing the bell I'd found in the saloon seemed like the thing to do, but had no effect here.  East of the lobby was an empty hotel room.  Empty rooms are always suspicious in these games, so I tried ringing the bell again (it was for room service, after all).  This caused a bed to appear.  I was able to get inside the bed, but no amount of examining or trying to look under the bed revealed anything.  This was another mystery for later.

Even further west down the road I came to a stable.  Inside I found a stall and a manure pile.  There was a horse in the stall (called 'Ole Paint, which is apparently an American breed of horse), and a horseshoe.  Getting on the horse was the obvious course here, and once I was up there I found some *silver spurs* (where were they before?).  I tried putting them on and spurring the horse, but he bucked me off into the manure pile.

(On the subject of 'Ole Paint, I assume that I'm supposed to read its name as "Old Paint", but the placement of the apostrophe makes that difficult.  It should be spelled Ol' Paint, but as it is in the game the horse has a name like Hole Paint, Pole Paint, or maybe even Swole Paint.)

Leaving the horse for now, I used my shovel to dig in the manure pile.  All I found was a pile of white crystals.  Back in the stall I saw that there was now a hole in the wall and a bare hoof print.  I tried shoeing the horse, only to be told that I was missing something (nails, I suspect).  Sure enough, through the hole was a storeroom where I found a keg of nails.  I couldn't take the nails directly; I had to empty the keg and take the nails once they were on the ground.  After all this, I was still unable to shoe the horse.  Maybe I need a hammer or something similar.

Continuing west down the road I was finally out of town, at a crossroads leading north and south.  The path north led to a large (and empty) field.  As I've said before, nothing in these games is ever empty, and this was no exception.  Digging revealed some yellow powder, which immediately made me think of gunpowder.  (I'm not sure why, I have no idea how gunpowder is made.  But what other powder would be appropriate in a western?)  I tried typing MAKE GUNPOWDER, only to be told "something is missing".  So I was right, I just needed to find more ingredients.

South of the fork was a ridge with a narrow ravine.  (Remember that word "narrow", it'll be relevant in a later head-slapping moment.)  I tried to go down the ravine, but the way was blocked by impassable sage brush and tumbleweed.  This was the last avenue of exploration that was obviously open to me, so it was time to take stock of what I'd already discovered and start figuring things out.  I'd only found two out of 13 treasures, which meant that I still had most of the game ahead of me.

Before I could do much investigating, though, the sun started going down, alerting me that the passage of time is important in this game.  After a while the sun went down completely, and it was too dark to see.  Moving around in the dark made me trip and break my neck, and no matter how long I waited it never got light again.  I tried sleeping in the hotel bed, and woke up the next day with the sun shining again, but obviously I'd missed something here.  I figured I needed a light source of some kind so I could explore the town at night.  I had some matches, but those only lit up for a short time.

I didn't have a light source, but remembering the matches made me think that I might be able to use them to burn the undergrowth blocking my entry to the ravine.  This worked - all I had to do was LIGHT MATCH - and with the sagebrush burnt away I could descend to the bottom.  There I found the charcoal remains of the sagebrush, and the entrance to a mine.

Inside the mine it was predictably dark, but my recent play-through of Pyramid of Doom reminded me that items are often hidden in dark areas.  I lit a match, which briefly flared and revealed a passage down, as well as a *silver bullet*.  (Werewolves?  In a western-themed game it seemed unlikely...)  Heading down into another dark area, I lit a match again and... eureka!  A candle!  I now had a light source, and could explore the mine without the risk of breaking my neck in the dark.

Alas, there was nothing to explore.  A passage south led to a dead end with no apparent purpose.  I tried digging there, but found nothing.  There was nothing to do but return to town, drop the *silver bullet* off at the store, and try to solve some other puzzles.

The first thing I tried was looking around town at night now that I had the candle.  The only thing out of the ordinary was in the saloon, where something was scared off when I entered.  A bunch of stuff flashed on the screen when this happened, but it was all too fast for me to read.  I could have tried taking a screenshot to read the flashing messages, but I figured that players in 1980 wouldn't have had that luxury.  Whatever this mystery is, I wanted to solve it as legitimately as possible.

The next puzzle I solved happened almost entirely by accident.  Frustrated after an hour of ineffectually trying things, I decided to take a look at the compass.  Normally it points north, but this time it pointed to the horseshoe (which I luckily had in my possession).  A magnet!  During the last hour I'd tried the door to the jail, which was barred from the inside, so it was fresh in my mind.  Using the horseshoe I was able to unlatch the door and get inside.

As I went inside, a ghostly voice whispered a strange message: "Don't collect $200 then don't pass go! Contrapositive."  I took the meaning of "contrapositive" to be that I should pass go and collect $200.  Typing PASS GO informed me that "I can't do that... yet!"  Something to keep in mind for later.

Inside the jail I found a *golden derringer* and a locked door.  I couldn't unlock the door (the magnet didn't work), and I had no idea if the derringer had bullets or not.  But I did have an idea of where I could try it out...

Heading east out of town, I tried shooting the snake with the derringer.  Much to my surprise, the gun shot a stream of water; not what I expected, but enough to make the snake go away.  With the snake gone I was able to dig with the shovel, creating an open grave.  Inside the grave was a *gold coin* and a purple worm.  Thankfully this purple worm was less deadly than the type from Dungeons & Dragons, or the one from Pyramid of Doom.  I was able to kill it, leaving behind some purple slime and giving me a sense of satisfaction (as well as 1 bonus point).

I can't imagine this ending well in real life.

I was stymied again for a while, and spent a lot of time cycling back through the same areas and trying things that didn't pan out.  My next breakthrough came at the ravine.  I'd thought that making my way down the ravine was all I needed to do in this area, but I'd missed one important piece of description: it was a narrow ravine.  I tried jumping over it, and much to my surprise it worked.  I leaped over the ravine, into a whole new area of the game.

There wasn't much here though, just an old shack with creaky floorboards and another telegraph key.  Pressing the key did nothing, so I left.  It wasn't until some time later that I registered the creaky floorboards as unusual.  Taking one of the floorboards, I uncovered an entrance into the cellar, where I found some *pelts*.  Another treasure down, seven left to go.

The problem was, this time I was really stuck.  I had plenty of loose ends: the locked door in the jail, the safe, the two telegraph keys, getting what I needed to shoe Swole Paint, the incomplete gunpowder ingredients.  The last of these is the one I solved first - I had the crystals and the yellow powder, but the final ingredient I needed was the charcoal left over from burning the ravine underbrush.  So now I had a pile of gunpowder, but no way to pick it up.  The solution here was the keg I'd found earlier, which had originally been filled with nails.  I had a keg of gunpowder, now all I needed was something to blow up.

The obvious candidate was the safe, so I took the keg to the telegraph office and dropped it there.  I had matches, but lighting one didn't seem like the wisest course of action here.  (I tried it anyway, with predictable results.)  For that to work I needed a fuse, or maybe to make a trail of gunpowder.  The game didn't seem to recognise the word FUSE, and I wasn't able to figure out a way to take a handful of gunpowder from the main pile.  Either I was missing something obvious, or I didn't have what I needed to blow up the safe without killing myself.

I eventually caved here, and looked up the answer.  I was on the right track with using the gunpowder, but the method of blowing it up was not what I'd have expected.  I needed to move the safe, thereby exposing some loose telegraph wires.  By connecting the wires and pressing the telegraph key, I could run a spark through the wires that would blow up the gunpowder.  Of course pressing the key in the telegraph office would kill me as well, but that's where the other key in the shack across the ravine came in.  By dropping the keg here, going to the old shack, and pressing the key there, I could blow up the safe.  This left the entire telegraph office as a smoking crater, with the wrecked safe lying open in the middle of the street.  Inside it was a bag of *gold dust*, leaving me with six treasures still to find.

While messing with the key in the telegraph office (after connecting the wires) I'd received a clue in the form of a morse code message: "... .... .- -.- . - --- .--. .--. . .-.".  Luckily for me I was playing this with the aid of the internet, where I was able to find a handy morse code translator; I pity the poor kids who had to figure this stuff out in the 80s from actual books with their actual brains.  The code translated to SHAKE TOPPER, which baffled me for a bit before I realised that the topper it was referring to was a hat.  Shaking the stetson I'd found earlier made a key fall out (and also made the hat fit my head properly).

The key unlocked the door in the jail, which led to a cell.  The only thing in the cell was a hammer, but I'd been looking for one of those for ages.  It was the last item I needed to shoe Profiterole Paint.  I figured that now I'd be able to ride him somewhere, but when I tried I was told that I "may need a magic word".  The first thing I tried was PLEASE, which obviously didn't work, but I had no other ideas, and there hadn't been any obvious clues.  After a bit of experimentation I tried GIDDYUP as the obvious thing you say when you're on a horse.  Asshole Paint raced off with me on his back, until he eventually bucked me off and left me in a hidden canyon next to a teepee.

Inside the teepee I found a *sacred tom tom* and a *turquoise necklace*; only four treasures to go!  The problem was, I had no obvious way out of the canyon.  With nothing else to do I ran through my inventory and started using the items I was carrying.  The sacred tom tom provided the solution, as playing it summoned an Indian ghost.  I must have really been in the stereotypical Western mindset at the time, because it didn't take me long to try saying HOW.  "Geronimo" teleported me back to the manure pile in the stable, and I was able to deposit my treasures.

At least the game didn't ask me to smokum peace pipe.

The last few things I'd discovered had completely wiped out my list of loose ends, so I went through my notes to find anything that I hadn't found a use for, or other odd things I hadn't worked out.  There were two things on that list, both involving the saloon: the mirror, and whatever it is that runs away when I go there at night time.  The saloon ended up being the place that led me to all four remaining treasures, but I didn't work any of this out myself.  From this point on, I was completely relying on a walkthrough.  Eight years of this blog, and I'm wondering if I'm ever going to get good at these games...

The first thing I'd missed was a ghostly piano player that shows up during the day (apparently after the mysterious bell noises I've been hearing periodically).  The ghost and his piano are insubstantial, but if you clap the ghost takes a bow and vanishes, leaving his piano behind.  (I guess this is the solution to the "vain" hint, with the piano player being the vain one in question.)  Playing the piano clues you in that something is inside, and opening it reveals a map.  The following message is written on the map: "IT'S MINE, DIG ROOF!"  Aha, the dead end in the mine!  I'd forgotten all about it as a potential mystery.  I went back to the mine and used my shovel to dig away at the roof, and found a *gold nugget*.

For the next treasure, I had to wait until nightfall and go back to the saloon.  After entering (and scaring the patrons away), I extinguished my candle and then lit a match to briefly illuminate the place, which was now full of ghostly line dancers.  I danced along with them and won a prize: a *silver cup*.

Getting a brief glimpse of the ghostly square dance. If this
is what happens in the afterlife, I choose oblivion.

The next treasure was hidden behind the mirror, but breaking it without the right preparation resulted in me being slashed to ribbons by flying glass.  I needed to tape the mirror using a roll of tape found under the bed in the hotel.  I hadn't found that tape, despite searching the bed multiple times.  What I'd needed to do was MOVE BED, which is the second time in the game I'd been stumped by the need to move things around.  By taping the mirror I was able to break it safely, and gain entrance to a hidden office.  There I found an *Oriental Go board*, and only had one treasure remaining to find.

I was able to get the last treasure on my own.  I'd been clued in previously about the need to PASS GO, so I tried it here and was rewarded with $200.  This is the second adventure game I've played that's used a Go board in conjunction with the idea of "passing go" from Monopoly.  I think the other one was Aldebaran-III.  I'm not sure that Aldebaran-III was widely played, so it's possible that Adams came up with it independently.  It is the sort of odd pun that he seems to like.

With all of the treasures in hand, all that was left to do was collect them all at the store and type SCORE.  This was my winning screen.

It looks like my candle had run out just as I beat the game.

Winning was satisfying, of course, but having -34 bonus points wasn't something I could stand for.  Apparently the amount of bonus points is determined by how many moves you make before finishing the game (as well as a single point for killing the purple worm in the grave).  I wasn't able to find a detailed breakdown anywhere as to how the points and moves correlate. I ended up using a walkthrough with a solution, because I really couldn't be bothered sitting down to figure out an optimal path on my own.  Here's my completely unearned total victory:

I've solved it ALL, except the bits I didn't!

Having more or less finished Ghost Town, it feels like a more satisfying experience than most of Adams' other games.  The puzzles are difficult without being unfair (I was too quick to get help with the answers at the end), and it sticks to its theme throughout.  Another solid effort from Adams, who has been nothing if not consistent.

THE RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The treasure hunt plot isn't going to score highly, but I like the Western ghost town setting.  It sticks to its theme well, with only a moment or two that break the verisimilitude (I'm thinking mainly of the water pistol derringer here).  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters:  There are various ghosts about, as well as a snake, and 'Ole Paint.  As usual with Adams, they're all obstacles with little in the way of personality or possibilities for interaction. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics:  Come on now, you know how this works by now.  It's a text adventure. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics:  Another mechanically sound effort from Adams.  His parser does the job, but it's still very simplistic.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Puzzles: There were some genuine headscratchers in this one, but they all made sense in their own way.  I especially liked the whole sequence required to blow up the safe: it's involved, but every step makes sense.  My only complaint is that certain puzzles (especially saying HOW to the indian ghost) are easier if you have a familiarity with the kinds of Western stories that were common circa 1980.  I grew up watching those movies, so for me it wasn't much of a problem, and I doubt it would have been for anyone when the game came out.  Those Western cliches have very much gone out of style, but it's hard to criticise a game for expecting knowledge that was ubiquitous at its time of release.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: I feel like this one was balanced pretty well, with a variety of puzzles and no frustrating random elements.  The bonus points are also a nice optional challenge for those who want to try beating the game faster.  I'm a little disappointed in myself for giving up on beating this game legitimately near the end; I feel like these were all puzzles I might have figured out eventually.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Fun: Aside from The Count (Adams' best game) and Adventureland (a genre that's right in my wheelhouse), I think I enjoyed playing this more than any of Adams' other games.  Something about the setting and the nature of the puzzles came together for me, and it also didn't have any annoying early bottlenecks.  It's a primitive text adventure, so there's only so high this rating can go, but the process of working this one out was enjoyable.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The above scores total 19, which doubled give Ghost Town a RADNESS Index of 38. That puts it just above Adventureland, Adams' very first game.  I probably enjoyed Adventureland more, but if I'm being honest that game has a bunch of annoying random elements that drag it down.  I'm happy enough for Ghost Town to sit second out of all Adams' games, with only The Count ranking higher.

NEXT: It's time to go back to the dunjon, with the latest Dunjonquest installment, Morloc's Tower.

Balrog Sampler: Near Victory

Yes, I know, it's taken me ages to get around to writing this post.  There hasn't been anything going on in my life to prevent me from writing it up, and I haven't been dealing with any particular personal problems that might affect my desire to write.  This delay has come down to one thing, and one thing only: I really didn't want to spend time replaying this game.

It's a problem of my own making, really. If I'd just taken some screenshots when I played through it the first time I might have been able to knock up a post from memory.  I say might, but that's debatable: my memory of this game is hazier than pretty much anything else I've played for the blog, and I only went through it about six months ago.  That's one of the benefits I've found with keeping the blog: the games I've written about stand out sharply in my memory.

Anyway, I've now replayed Balrog Sampler, and the pain is all in the past.  I'm very keen to knock this post out so that I can move on to something (literally anything) else.  Last time around I went through the basics of the game, and played through the wilderness area. This post will deal with the dungeon, which is the meat of the game, and where things get much more difficult (as you'd expect).

Early on, the thing that always stymied my progress was the combat, specifically the random encounters.  They're not overwhelmingly common, but they happen often enough to be annoying, and my starting characters invariably got killed by them.  There's supposedly a way to balance things by choosing the correct combination of weapons and armor based on your character's Strength and Dexterity scores, but I never figured it out. I didn't try every combination of course; there are far too many weapons for that. I tried quite a few though, and nothing seemed to work.

What I found was that the trick to surviving is in raising your character's Strength.  One way to do that is with the Personality Change Machine in a room to the north of the dungeon entrance.  When you use it, it rolls up completely new stats for your character.  It's a little random though, and doesn't really raise your Strength beyond the normal limits.  The better method is to head south and west from the entrance, and find the library.  There are a number of books to read, one of which is about physical fitness.  Reading it summons a drill instructor, who forces you to do push-ups that raise your Strength by two points.  Unlike many of the other stat boosts in the game this one can be done repeatedly, and the only limit to how high you can get your Strength score is your gold, as each reading costs 10gp.  Eventually you'll get it to a point where none of the monsters can threaten you, but the trick is to get there before a random encounter wipes you out.  I'd also recommend not boosting your Strength too high; this game is fragile, and any numbers outside of the usual range can cause it to cack itself.

There's a third method of getting through combat that I haven't mentioned yet, because it's definitely a bug.  After I played for a while, the monsters suddenly all had Strength ratings of 0, and were incapable of doing any damage.  Having suffered through the early stages of the game, being killed repeatedly by every random encounter that came along, I seized on this immediately when it happened.  Most of my exploration of the game was done with this glitch in effect.  Once I'd solved most of the puzzles playing this way I went back and fought my way through legitimately (or as legitimately as I could in my probably-cracked version of the game that starts me with 30,000+ gold pieces).

Fighting nothing in a bugged combat.

Adventure games like this are a little unfocused, so I sometimes struggle to figure out which areas to write about first.  This is why my adventure game posts often resort to point form, as it helps me to organise my thoughts.  The goal of Balrog Sampler is to find various treasures and take them back to the bank vault on the surface.  I'll break this one down by the treasures to be found, and hopefully that will cover everything important.

• Necklace:
• South of the dungeon entrance is a room with a dwarf, who tries to charge you for passage through doors to the south and east.  He'll let you go back to the north for free, though, and when you come back into the room he's gone. Quite a number of encounters in the game are like this: you get one crack at them, and then they disappear forever.
• South of the dwarf is a room containing four boxes: one marked "poof", one marked "fizz", one marked "skull" and one marked "flower".  The "skull" box contains the necklace.  The "poof" box contains a genie, which can be asked for a number of wishes (none of which end up benefitting the player).  I think the "fizz" box has a strength potion, and I can't remember what the "flower" box has inside.  I also can't remember what happens if you try to open more than one box, I just know it's not good.

• Witch Protect Cross
• This can be found a few areas south of the box room. It's sitting in an alcove, and there's nothing special that needs to be done to obtain it.
• The cross, as the name says, will protect you from witches.  There's a witch in the secret room east of the dwarf, but there's not much of a reason to go and see her (although you can apparently get her to transform into Helen of Troy and have sex with her if you choose the right options; I never figured out how).
• Silver Tiger
• North from the entrance is a room guarded by a snake. To get past this snake, you need a stone mongoose.
• The mongoose can be found in a room with six statues just north of where you find the cross.  The statues are of various historical, mythical and fictional warriors, ranging from Attila the Hun to Conan of Cimmeria.  Pressing the button on Alexander the Great's statue reveals a secret compartment containing the stone mongoose.

• The Silver Tiger is just lying on the ground in a passage about a half-dozen-or-so rooms beyond the snake. There are some encounters along the way, including a crazed doctor and a mummy, but those can be easily avoided.
• Ruby
• Past the hallway with the Silver Tiger is an Oracle, who will give you some clues if you stick around to listen.  The oracle doesn't always oblige; I assume that your stats determine whether you get the clue or not, but I'm not sure how. It doesn't really matter, because you can just keep trying until it works.
• Further along there's a fight with a thief, and after that the path splits in two. There's only one exit to the west, but it leads to two different locations. As far as I can tell, the place you end up is totally random.
• One of those locations has a lion with a thorn in it's paw. Unlike the well-known story, if you take the thorn out the lion will kill you.
• The other location has two doors, one marked "Lady" and the other marked "Tiger".  (I've heard the phrase "the lady or the tiger" before, it's apparently from a short story published in 1882.)  The door marked "lady" leads to a tiger named Lady, and the door marked "tiger" leads to a lady named Tiger. It's amusing enough, but neither this encounter or the one with the lion are important beyond your own survival.
• The path then leads to a wizard's laboratory, where you can fight a wizard and take his wand.  I have vague memories that you can bribe this guy, or trick him somehow.
• The room beyond the laboratory is dark, but you can light it with a torch. At the end of the room is an alcove with a keyhole.  The key from the shack will unlock it, but there are a number of lethal traps to avoid through trial-and-error. Inside is a ruby.
• Emerald Orb
• East of the entrance room is a "spaghetti maze".  There's no trick to this one, you just have to keep picking an exit until it randomly spits you out on the other side.  Once there you'll find the emerald orb.
• Bag of Jewels
• South of this and down a ravine is a river that leads to a lake, where there's a woman sleeping on the shore.  There's also an island in the middle of the lake. You can get her to show you where a boat is buried, and if you use it to get to the island you'll find a bag of jewels. If you try to swim, you'll be attacked by the island's "guardian".
• Diamonds
• South of the river is the "Monster Maze", which I had to map using the time-honoured method of dropping inventory items. It's a pretty big maze, but being able to drop different amounts of gold coins really helped to speed the process. The diamonds are found at a shrine deep in the maze.
• Chalice
• On the far size of the Monster Maze is a rusted door. To open this door you need to fill a jug with oil.  The jug is found really close to the dungeon entrance, but it's through a tight tunnel that can cause a lot of problems. If you try to get through with too much inventory, you'll get stuck and eventually die.  I've gotten stuck even with no inventory, so I think it might be based on a die roll of some sort.  You have to get through twice, and I've had more characters die to this tunnel than pretty much anything else in the game.

• The oil is found in an area north of the spaghetti maze. It's past a bridge with a troll who demands treasure; I killed the troll rather than bother to find the right treasure to give to it. Beyond that is an oasis, with some stereotypical arabian trappings, and you can fill your jug with oil there.
• With the oil you can open the rusted door, and the chalice is in an alcove on the other side.
• God of Waterfalls
• If you follow the river from the lake, you'll come to a waterfall. Climbing the waterfall can be difficult, but each time you fall you get a boost to IQ so it's actually pretty helpful.  If you keep trying you'll eventually make it to the top, where you'll find an idol called the God of Waterfalls.

• Golden Eggs
• There's a secret area behind the waterfall that can be accessed by pulling a lever. Whether it opens or not is random, and probably based on your stats (again, the game isn't great at letting you know when this is happening, and I don't have the motivation to go trawling through the code to find out).  Usually it takes me a few minutes of repeatedly pulling the lever until it opens, which can get really annoying.
• Beyond is a room with two pits, reminiscent of the Twopit Room from Colossal Cave Adventure.  The east pit contains a rusty sword, and the west pit has a tiny beanstalk calling out for water.  You can collect water in a flask to make the plant grow, which allows you to climb up to another area.
• Singing Harp
• Clock
• Both of the items above are found at the top of the beanstalk, but I can't remember the details.  The game I have currently saved shows that I have a flask filled with water in my inventory, but when I go to water the plant it doesn't acknowledge that I have the item.  My patience with Balrog Sampler is wearing really thin, so I'm not going to bother going to the effort of starting a new game so I can get back to this area.
• Collar
• I have a collar written down in my list of treasures, but it's not anywhere on my map, so I have no idea where it came from. Again, I'm leaving this one as a mystery (assuming it's actually there at all).
• Pearls
• North-east from the dungeon entrance is a large door. This door can only be opened with the correct password. There are a number of clues to this password scattered around the dungeon (one is in the library, one is deep in the Monster Maze, and I think the other is given by the oracle).

• For some reason, I always have to say the password twice.  I'm not sure if this is deliberate, or a glitch.
• North of the door is a room with an oyster in a pool of water. If you burn some coal the water will boil and the oyster will open, revealing the pearls.
• Ruby Skull
• Silver Pirate Ship
• Chest of Jewels
• The three treasures above are found past the door, but there are a lot of deadly obstacles in the way before you can reach them.
• The first of these is a Fire Lizard, that will immediately attack if you enter its lair. A new Fire Lizard attacks every time you stumble into this room, but you can skirt around the lair once you know where it is.
• Further along is the lair of a Phase Spider, which is similarly hostile. Again, you can avoid this lair if you know where you're going.
• Next up is the final gauntlet of encounters, which begins with an unavoidable battle with a Baby Chromatic Dragon.  (For those who don't know, a Chromatic Dragon has five heads, one of each type from Dungeons & Dragons; it's one of the deadliest monsters in early D&D. For those who watched the D&D cartoon, think Tiamat.)

• Deeper into the lair is the "Daddy Dragon", which is a Chromatic Dragon so large that you can't possible fight it.  The only way to defeat the dragon is to release a mouse in its presence.

• After the battle you find a secret door, which leads to the lair of the Pirate.  I don't think I've mentioned him before: he shows up occasionally to knock you out with sleep powder and steal your treasure. He's pretty much an exact copy of the pirate from Colossal Cave Adventure, except that you have to fight and kill this guy in order to claim his treasures.  These treasures consist of the three listed above, plus anything else that he's stolen from you.

Finding the treasures above got me to 1871 points out of a possible 1951. Those missing points will haunt me, but not enough to ever want to go back and try this game again (unless I find a complete walkthrough, or someone just tells me what I'm missing).  I think I know where the missing points might be: there's a high alcove in the library that can be reached with a ladder, but lurking in the alcove is a creature that bites my arm off or eats my weapon when I try to reach inside.  I've tried all sorts of things: throwing pretty much my entire inventory, waving a magic wand at it, trying to wedge its jaws open with an iron bar.  I'd have tried more, but the game frustratingly tells you that you're wasting time after a few ineffective usages of your inventory. You then have to leave the area and go back, which isn't that bad, but it's pretty grating when you add it to the many other inconveniences that the game piles on you.

The 80 points that will haunt me until I die.

I think that's about where I'm going to wrap things up with Balrog Sampler.  There's some interesting stuff in it, even if the adventure game elements are a bit simplistic.  None of the good elements are able to get past how horrible this game is to play, though.  Just getting the thing running is nightmare enough, but once that's done there's no shortage of errors and bugs.  Sometimes the game won't let me buy weapons when I start a new character.  Sometimes it doesn't acknowledge items in my inventory. There's the bug with the monsters in combat that I mentioned above (a blessing in disguise, really).  And to top it all off, the save game system doesn't always work, so I was constantly having to restart.  I really wasn't kidding when I said that I didn't want to play this game ever again.  I dread the sequels.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The story is yet another treasure hunt, with little to distinguish it's plot from the multitude of other games inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure.  The dungeon setting has no rhyme or reason, with nothing to connect its various areas.  And now that I think of it, it doesn't contain a balrog of any sort, which makes the name quite nonsensical.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: Although there's not much in the way of interaction, there are a number of characters scattered through the dungeon, and a good variety of monsters.  The monsters aren't differentiated by anything more than their strength, but at least some effort has been made.  Rating 2 out of 7.

Puzzles: I wavered on whether to use the Puzzles or Combat category here, and ultimately I went with puzzles because I spent most of my time playing the game with the combat horribly bugged.  The puzzles are rudimentary, and almost entirely inventory-based. Those that aren't rely heavily on random chance, or multiple choice options with little in the way of clues to guide you.  What puzzles are there are either simple or frustrating, with nothing in-between. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: The writing for this text adventure is good for the time, and it often displays a warped sense of humour that is by far the game's best feature.  It's not enough to elevate it very far, though. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: As an RPG/adventure hybrid there are some interesting things going on in this game: the multiple-choice interface might be simplistic, but the inventory system is quite involved, and the combat seems to be trying to emulate the tabletop RPG Tunnels & Trolls.  Unfortunately, this is probably the most broken game I've played for the blog, not counting those that are incomplete, such as Library.  Between the effort it took me to get running, the many crashes and bugs, the unreliable saves, and the general clunkiness of the interface, I can't give it anything but the minimum score. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Challenge: Although the puzzle aspect is not too hard, I never was able to reach a balance where I could survive the combat without ramping up my Strength score to absurd levels.  I found this game difficult, and not at all in an enjoyable way. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Fun: This is easily the most painful game to play in the history of the blog. It would be nice to find a stable version that works the way it's supposed to, but the version I played was very far from that ideal scenario. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The above scores total 9, which doubled gives a RADNESS Index of 18.  If the game worked the way it was supposed to it would have scored a lot higher, perhaps somewhere around a 30, but the sheer volume of technical problems has placed it as my lowest-rated game so far.  That's the curse of playing games chronologically: you have to take the terrible games alongside the gems.

NEXT: It's back to the priority list for a CRPG classic: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.  I've never played any Wizardry games for any great length of time, so I'm looking forward to ticking this one off my bucket list.

Game 53: Maces & Magic - Balrog Sampler (1979)

Nothing this rad appears in the game.

Of all the games I've played for the blog, this has been one of the most difficult.  Not difficult in terms of completion: that nod probably goes to The Game of Dungeons v8, Moria, or Rogue. But in terms of getting the game running, and researching the history? Balrog Sampler has caused me all sorts of problems in those regards, and refreshing myself on the game - which I played through back in November - has been somewhat less than pleasant.

Balrog Sampler was originally called Dungeon (undoubtedly the most over-used word in titles in the CRPG genre so far), and published by Adventure International for the TRS-80. For an early game by such a famous developer there's surprisingly little written about it: I got pretty much all of this history from the CRPG Addict, who interviewed one of the creators a while back. That creator was one Richard Bumgarner, an x-ray technician who was one of three medical professionals that formed Chameleon Software to create CRPGs in their spare time. We still don't know who the other two were, as far as I know. Poor sales and some legal threats from TSR, the highly litigious publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, forced them out of the gaming industry after a few years.

Despite the short tenure and the obscurity of their creation, there is some historical significance to what they did.  Balrog Sampler is the first installment in the Maces & Magic series, one of the earliest attempts at a CRPG franchise.  It's also possible that it might be the first true text adventure/CRPG hybrid: to the best of my knowledge it seems that Eamon was released around the same time, but it's not known which of them came first.  There are sources that place both games in 1980 rather than 1979, so really it's all very uncertain.

Before I get started, I'm going to give some instructions on how to get this thing running. I don't normally bother with this sort of thing, but if any of you want to play this game I'd like to save you the arse-ache that I had to go through. Here it is, step-by-step:

1. First, download the trs80gp emulator. You can find it here.  Normally I use trs32, but that one wasn't cutting it for this game.
2. You also need to download trsdos13 to run the emulator. You can find it at this link, as trsdos13.zip. When you run the emulator, set the trsdos13 file to drive 0 (under the Diskette menu at the top). That should get it going, but I am a little rusty on this early TRS-80 set-up, so I can't guarantee that there won't be some extra steps required.
3. Set the emulator to run as a Model III in the File menu. (It might be set as that by default, I'm not sure.)
4. Download these Balrog Sampler disks that I made. I had to split the files across two disks, because I noticed that the versions of the game that I was finding didn't include all of the required files. In fact, the size of all those files was too large to fit on one side of a TRS-80 disk, so I downloaded them all separately and split them in two. They can be found here.
5. Load up the emulator. Put Balrog Sampler A in disk drive 1.
6. Type BASIC at the prompt.
7. You should see a prompt asking "How Many Files?" Type 8.
8. When prompted for Memory Size, don't type anything. Just hit enter.
9. At the Ready prompt, type RUN"START"
10. You'll get a prompt that says "INTRODUCTION (Y/N)?" Hit whichever you like, though I do recommend watching the intro at least once.
11. After the intro, you'll be told to put Disk B in Drive 0. Do exactly that, by putting the Balrog Sampler B file in disk drive 0 (replacing trsdos13.dsk.
12. Hit enter after replacing the disk, and you should be good to go.

This title screen is relatively impressive in motion.

The first notable thing about this game is the Adventure International intro, which is a real production. It includes a rotating globe of the Earth, the AI logo turning into a train, and a little guy running after the train trying to catch up. It's fairly impressive for a system that technically doesn't have any graphics capabilities, but it does seem a bit wasteful. How much memory is this thing eating up?  All of the relevant files probably would have fit on one disk without it, which would have made things a lot easier for me.

The Woody Allen quote at the start points towards the
humourous tone that parts of the game display.

After the title screen, some stats are given for how many adventurers have died in this adventure. You're then asked if you want to load a saved game or use an experienced adventurer; I technically have a character that's finished the game already, and it's pretty tempting to use him to make going back through the game easier, but I can't remember things well enough to skip over them. If I'm going to write about this stuff, I'm going to have to slog my way through it all over again.

If you're making a new character, you get the option of buying some weapons.  The game actually asks if you want to see the list or not, which seems like an odd question until you get a look at how many weapons there are in the game.  The complete list of weapons comes to 80, with a lot of the usual selections as well as really odd stuff like war fans, crowbars and arbalests, and things I've never heard of like the oxtongue, jambiya, bich'hwa and bagh nakh. Every weapon has numbers indicating damage dealt, as well as a minimum Strength and Dexterity score required to effectively wield it. Unfortunately, you have to choose your weapons before you know what your stats will be, which seems like something of an oversight.

This might be the first CRPG that's gone beyond the
AD&D Player's Handbook for its weapon list.

After that you are asked to buy some armor, which doesn't have stat limitations, but each piece comes with a limit as to how many you can wear at a time. Every item has a weight score as well, so the amount of stuff you can carry is limited by your Strength score.

I'm not sure how much gold a character is meant to start with in this game, but on the version I have you are given well over 30,000 gold pieces to play with. I suspect that it's been cracked somewhere along the way, but given how much trouble I had getting it running I'm not going out and looking for a more authentic version. It's not actually that much of a help, to be honest, as you're only allowed a few weapons, and the armor you can use is limited as well.

A suspiciously large amount of gold for a starting character.

After you've bought your gear, you get a look at your character's attributes. The character is always called Ceron, and as far as I can tell there's no way to change it or select a different name. The six attributes are Strength, Intelligence, Luck, Constitution, Dexterity, and Charisma.

• Strength determines how much stuff you can carry, and which weapons you can use without getting tired. If your Strength ever drops below 5 due to fatigue, you'll pass out and be easy pickings for whichever monsters are nearby.
• Intelligence apparently determines whether you find secret doors, correctly identify potions, or notice other warning signs.
• Luck is simply used to determine if certain situations go in your favour, which mostly happens in the background without you noticing.
• Constitution functions like hit points.
• Dexterity is used for things like climbing and balancing, and also determines which weapons you can use effectively. If you use a weapon for which you lack the required Dexterity, there's a chance you'll hurt yourself.
• Charisma affects how some NPCs will react to you.

In addition there are experience points, which I'm pretty sure are awarded for solving puzzles and finding treasures, just like the points in loads of other adventure games. Language Level is also something I'm not sure about, though it may factor into NPC interaction and whether you can read certain messages.

The game proper begins with the exaggerated creaking of a door as you exit the general store (represented by large text), followed by a bit of set-up. Apparently the protagonist is an adventurer who has come to this place following a map, without any particular goal in mind (except, presumably, the accumulation of treasure).  With nothing better to do, the adventurer decides to head off in the direction of a castle in the distance, and the game begins.

Very little of this is relevant to the adventure to come.

I described the game above as a CRPG/text adventure hybrid, but the text adventure part is rather simplified. Rather than using a full parser, it works more like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, presenting a number of options for you to pick from. There are a number of commands you can execute at any time: you can (g)et or (l)eave objects, use an item from your (p)ack, look at your (s)tatus, (w)ait, or look at your (i)nventory.  Looking at your status at this point reveals that there are 1951 points required to fully complete the game.

The initial area is a forest that's bisected by a turbulent river. Trying to swim across the river at any point results in an instant death, There's not a lot to find on the west side where you start, just a cave where you can find some junk (a shackle chain, some mice, an iron rod), and a hill where you can meet a hermit. Sometimes you can't get anything out of him (presumably based on your Charisma), but if you're able to talk to him he'll tell you there's an entrance to "the underground world" on the other side of the river.

There are two ways across the river: a toll bridge and a fallen tree. Crossing the bridge is safe, but will cost you 5 gold pieces. You can try to cross by force, but the young man who collects the toll is apparently the "dungeon master's" nephew, and will blast you with lightning. The fallen tree is free to cross, but requires a roll against your Dexterity. Failure means you fall in the river to your death. It's risky, but in the dozens of times I tried it, it only happened once, so it's worth a shot if you happen to be poor.

There's a shack on the east side of the river that contains a ladder, some keys, a torch, a wooden wheel, and a shovel.  Further east is a building marked as the "Woodland Hills Bank". Inside, you can deposit gold pieces, or make a withdrawal. You can also do the same for inventory items, which - in the grand tradition of Colossal Cave Adventure and almost all of its offspring - is what you need to do with the treasures you'll find.  As in those games, you get points for finding treasures, and points for depositing them. The bank also has the game exit, which you can use when you're done playing.

I'm pretty sure trying to rob the bank is an instant death,
but I didn't try it this time.

Just north of the bank is an area of redwood forest. A gap in one of the trees leads down into the main dungeon, which is where the bulk of the game takes place. So much for that castle on the horizon...

I could probably knock this out in one very long post, but I think I'll take a break here.  The next post will cover the dungeon, and if I'm lucky I might be able to figure out the stuff I missed last time and finish the game with full points.

Game 51: Local Call for Death (1979)

The covers for Adventure International
games are usually very accurate, but this
one has loads of differences from the
actual game.

Today's game is Local Call for Death, a very short bit of interactive fiction for the TRS-80.  And when I say very short, I really mean it: I knocked this game out in about 40 minutes.  I wouldn't mind a long run of games of about this length.  I mean, I might have felt ripped off at the time if I'd paid for it, but when I have a list that's many hundreds of games long ahead of me I ain't complaining.

You may have noticed that I described this game as "interactive fiction". It's not a term I generally go for, preferring to describe these early games with the somewhat less pretentious label of "text adventure".  But with Local Call for Death, interactive fiction really is the most fitting descriptor for it.  Set a couple of years after the Great War, you play as an amateur detective helping to solve a murder mystery, with most of the input being in the form of your own dialogue.  It plays out much like a Sherlock Holmes adventure, with the player in a role similar to that of Doctor Watson, being prodded by a smarter detective to solve the mystery.  (Unlike with Lovecraft in my last post, I've read most of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.)

Local Call for Death was written by Robert Lafore for the TRS-80, and released by Adventure International.  We'll see Lafore again later in 1979, and he has some games in 1980 and 1981 as well.  Wikipedia credits him with coining the term "interactive fiction", so he has that claim to fame, and he also seems to have had a lengthy career in the computer field, as well as writing books on programming.  He would have been in his early 40s when his first games were released, which explains why Local Call for Death feels a lot more mature in tone than many of its contemporaries.

Mobygames says that Local Call for Death was a 1980 game, but the title screen and source code have it as being written in 1979.  Generally I'd prefer to go with the release date, but I've already played the game and started writing this post, so I might as well get on with it.  It came out for the TRS-80, and the documentation indicates that it was also released for the Apple II.  I couldn't find the Apple version, so for this post I'm only looking at the one for TRS-80.  I suspect the versions aren't greatly different.

The title screen.

After a request from the author to "please spell correctly" ("the computer is, alas, not bright enough to correct your mistakes"), the game asks you for some details about your character.  It asks for a title - Mr., Miss or Mrs. - rather than a gender, as well as your first and last name.  (Ms. is dismissed as being inappropriate for the time period.) Finally it asks what town in America you come from.  After the last couple of weeks I know a lot more American towns than I used to, but I still went with the boring answer of New York.

A level of spelling and grammar heretofore unseen in gaming.

The game begins with the player, an American visiting England, dining at a club with three people: famous English detective Sir Colin Drollery, a retired soldier named Major Wormsley, and a financier named Mr. Blackwell.  This section plays out much like the opening scene of a short story, with minimal input from the player.  The major characters converse among themselves, with the player being asked minor questions such as what they do for a living, or whether they want to drink some more wine.  At this point, the player's responses have very little effect on the game.

The conversation is extensive and well written, with quite a number of detours and red herrings, but the relevant details are as follows: someone has won the lottery today, and Blackwell's finance company is currently in some trouble.  The dinner ends after Blackwell's nephew Rodney - a gambling addict and womaniser - calls him to threaten suicide if he is not loaned 500 pounds.  Blackwell refuses, and the call ends with the sound of a gunshot.  It's all played off by Blackwell as another of Rodney's cries for attention, and everyone goes off to play bridge before going home.

The next morning the player is woken by Sir Colin, who has received a call from Blackwell; it seems that his nephew is dead after all, and he wants the two of you to investigate the crime scene.  So off you go, and this is where the game properly begins.  You are given a description of the room, in which Rodney is slumped over his last meal with a gun in his hand and a bullet hole in his head. Sir Colin then prompts you to explore various items within the room for clues.

The scene of the crime.

The first time I got to this point of the game I hadn't been taking notes, so I got completely stumped.  After scouring the room for clues, you're asked if you want to accuse someone of murder.  The preamble was so interminably long that I zoned out and forgot the names of the other characters.  The culprit was obviously Blackwell, but I had no idea how to accuse him without remembering his name, so I had to start again.

The second time through I took lots of notes, and was prepared to accuse Blackwell when the time came.  (You can accuse yourself, Sir Colin, or Wormsley, but all of those suggestions are dismissed as absurd. I tried to accuse the prime minister and King George V, but the game wasn't having it.)  Figuring out who committed the murder is trivial; the meat of the game is finding enough evidence of Blackwell's guilt. I didn't pick up on all the clues, and had to be prompted by Sir Colin once or twice, but I got there eventually.  Some of those clues are:

• The phone is hung up on the receiver, which is pretty unlikely if Rodney shot himself while calling Blackwell.
• Rodney has this morning's newspaper on the floor, impossible if he died last night.
• There's a piece of material caught on the table leg that matches Blackwell's trousers.
• Rodney is clutching the torn corner of a lottery ticket, and Blackwell has the rest of the ticket in his pocket,
• Rodney's suicide note matches Blackwell's handwriting, which can be found on a business card he gave me over dinner last night
• The window is open, and the coffee spilled on the table would be frozen if it had been left there overnight

Lord Colin Drollery lives up to his surname.

That's far from all of it, but it's enough to accuse Blackwell.  Perhaps the biggest difficulty in this section is getting the wording right.  Sir Colin insists that you give your answers in the form of complete sentences; you can't just type NEWSPAPER and move on, even though the game is probably responding to keywords.  The one I had major trouble with was matching the torn material to Blackwell's trousers.  I never did get that one right, but I was able to find enough other clues to make my accusation.

Once that's done, Sir Colin runs through his own reconstruction of the case, as is customary in these kinds of stories.  Blackwell makes some empty threats, and the game ends as you and Sir Colin shake hands over a job well done.

Let's be real, Lord Colin didn't need me there..

Local Call for Death is certainly interesting as a "path not taken", and it's often impressive in terms of how well it responds to the many sentences you can input.  Still, it feels a little bit like too much of a story and not enough of a game.  It's a bit like a micro version of those late 90s JRPGs that felt like they were 90% cutscenes.  What it does, it does well once the game gets going, but it does take a little too long to get to the point.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: Both of these were very well realised, if somewhat limited in scope.  Of course, in comparison to murder mystery literature it's pretty cliched stuff, but it's at the top end of quality in terms of the video games I've played for the blog thus far.  The main complaint I have is a lack of interactivity for the majority of the game.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: There are only three characters of note in the game aside from murder victim Rodney, but they have more depth than pretty much anything else we've seen so far (i.e. they have actual personalities).  Unfortunately, it's only Sir Colin that you really get to interact with; Blackwell and Wormsley don't do much outside of the heavily scripted opening scenes.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: This game is among the more well-written text adventures of its era, and it almost perfectly evokes the tone and style that it's going for.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Puzzles: Rather than having many smaller puzzles and obstacles, Local Call for Death has one large, interconnected one: gathering enough evidence to accuse Blackwell of murder.  This requires observance and logic on a level that's pretty much unheard of at the time; this might be the earliest adventure game I've played where everything makes sense.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Mechanics: This is a difficult one.  What this game is doing looks impressive at first, but I had all sorts of problems wrangling with the parser and getting my ideas across to Sir Colin.  At one point I even had him interpret my input as the exact opposite of what I was saying, so it's far from foolproof.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: The mystery here isn't all that difficult, especially for anyone who has read a bunch of stories in this genre.  Even if you get stuck Sir Colin is there to smugly guide you, so I'd say most players would get through this on their first try as long as they're paying attention.  For a commercial release it's certainly far too easy.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Fun: I only had to go through this game twice, and it would be very difficult for such a short game to get a minimum score.  I definitely got sick of the opening scenes though, as I do in any game where it takes too long to get started.  Once I was able to play I enjoyed it, but the ratio of story to game was way off.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 1. I haven't played anything quite like this game before, so it gets a point for innovation even though it's something of a game development dead end.

The above scores total 17. Double that and add the bonus point, and Local Call for Death gets a very respectable RADNESS Index of 35.  That puts it equal 11th overall, and equal 6th in terms of adventure games.  The last two entries have seen good showings from two short games that do what they do pretty well.  There's not a hell of a lot of game here, but fans of old-school text adventures and mystery stories will probably enjoy it.

NEXT: It's back to the priority list for the third game from Ken and Roberta Williams, called Mission: Asteroid.  I've already finished it, so expect a post in the not too distant future.