Back-Tracking: Journey to the Center of the Earth & Voyage to Atlantis

I know I said that I'd start on Mystery House, but I've been so caught up playing Futurewar that I haven't gotten around to it yet.  So instead, I thought I'd use this post to clear up some minor issues that have been nagging at me.

Some years ago I played through Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure and Voyage to Atlantis, both text adventures written by Greg Hassett.  For whatever reason I wasn't able to find these games for the TRS-80, so I played both of them for the Commodore 64.  It's been bothering me on a very minor level, but I'm at home for a couple of weeks now, so there's never been a better time to clear up niggling trivialities like these.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH ADVENTURE

This was Hassett's first adventure, and I covered it in a post from four years ago.  The Commodore 64 version of the game was quite messy, with a lot of elements in it that served no purpose.  As I expected, the TRS-80 original is not much different.

Stark. Powerful.

The game begins by asking your name, which is something that the C64 version cut, because it never comes into play.  Otherwise the two versions of the game play almost identically, except for one thing: the location of the sword.

The sword is probably the most important item in the game.  Before you find it, you're at the mercy of randomly-occurring bugs that will show up and kill you.  Once you have it the bugs become a trivial nuisance.  The C64 version put the sword on the north side of a chasm.  This necessitated first finding the wand, and then using that wand to magic yourself across that chasm.  But in the TRS-80 version, the sword is found on the south side of the chasm.  It makes finding the sword much easier, and really takes the sting out of the frustrating first stage of the game.

Finding the sword in a surprising location.

I played through the whole game, and got a winning screen just for the satisfaction of it.

The C64 version mercifully changed "adventurerdom" to "adventuredom".

I also made a Trizbort map while I was at it.

Click to super-size it

The TRS-80 version of this game wasn't significantly different from the C64 port, so I'm leaving its RADNESS Index untouched.  It's perhaps a touch easier, but not enough for me to change the score.  I also tried to find the Commodore PET and Apple II version, but with no luck.

VOYAGE TO ATLANTIS

For some reason this was the first Greg Hassett game that I covered, as I had it mistakenly pegged as a 1978 game.  If you want to read more about it, read this post from four years ago.  It's one of the better Hassett games I've played, with decent puzzles and a relatively tight structure.

Greg has upped his presentation game a bit, as the title lowers from the top of the screen and his name comes up from the bottom.

The title screen mid-animation

This version of the game has just one difference that I could find from the C64.  There's a plaque in the C64 version that plugs Hassett's other games, and also causes the game to crash.  In the TRS-80 version it doesn't crash, and it also gives you a clue that makes finding one of the treasures even easier: there's an iron statuette that you have to SCRAPE to reveal that it's made of gold, and in this version the plaque says SCRAPE IRON.  It's a pretty direct hint, and one that wold have saved me some grief a few years ago.

Also, the game doesn't crash during the victory sequence, which is a bonus.

This should be a fairly concrete timeline of Hassett's games.

As with Journey, I trizbort mapped the hell out of this game.  It's really pleasingly laid out, and doesn't have any screwy messing around with the connections between rooms until you get to the Strange Room in the north-east.  That room is specifically flagged up as being weird, so it makes sense for it to have some weird geography.

A click makes it bigger.

Voyage to Atlantis is a slightly easier in its original form, but not so much so that I'd change its score in Challenge.  I'm was tempted to bump it up a point in mechanics, because it doesn't have those game-ending bugs, but I marked it as high as I can justify on my first pass.  So it's RADNESS Index for both versions remains at 28.  And as with Journey, I was unable to find the PET version.

NEXT: I'll probably have started Mystery House by then.  I've also got some other games I want to give another pass, just to clear up some minor stuff.  If this lockdown persists I'll get to them.  And I will, of course, continue plugging away at Futurewar.

Voyage to Atlantis: Victory!

I tell you what, I'm loving these one- and two-post games.  The PLATO games (which I'm still mired in, I might add) were becoming a real drag, and sapping my will to keep going with the blog.  Now that I'm plowing through games in the TRS-80/Apple era, it feels really good.

So, Voyage to Atlantis.  When I last posted, I had located seven treasures and secured them in my submarine: a Platinum Pick, a pair of Gold Scissors, a Silver Key, a Golden Apple, a Jade Medallion, a Pearl, and some Coins.  There were two more treasures that I had found, but I had yet to defeat their guardians: a Platinum Plaque guarded by a Black Manta, and a Golden Fleece guarded by a Minotaur.

I defeated the Black Manta first, but doing so involved some accidental cheating.  I really wanted to find out how many treasures there were in the game, so I decided to open a walkthrough and skim the first paragraph or two.  I should have known better, because I've besmirched my honour as far as this game goes.  I didn't read anything too major in the way of spoilers: all I saw was that I needed to feed my Peanut Butter Cup to the Piranhas, which I had previously thought to be pointless.  I'll accept the tag of cheater, but I'm pretty sure I would have tried this eventually without being prompted.

The peanut butter causes the piranhas' teeth to fall out, and it turns out that the teeth are rare and valuable.  I stashed them in my sub, and after returning to the room I noticed that the Piranhas were still there, now described as "harmless".  I tried adding them to my inventory, and somewhat implausibly it worked.  As the last puzzle solution had involved feeding the peanut butter to the piranhas, I got the idea to feed the piranhas to the manta.  This worked as well, and the manta swam away with a full stomach.  I was able to take the Plaque, but I was careful not to read it this time; it contains an ad for Greg Hassett's other games, but it also causes the game to crash.

Getting the Golden Fleece from the Minotaur sounded like a more dangerous task, but it proved to be not difficult at all.  I took the long trek through the Hall of Mirrors and the Labyrinth (neither of which are all that difficult to navigate), and when I made it to the Minotaur he was guarding not just the Golden Fleece, but the Spear that I had previously used to kill the Octopus.  When you kill the Octopus the Spear vanishes, and I had assumed that it was gone from the game completely.  But no, it appears at the Minotaur's feet, right where you need it, and the Minotaur makes no attempt to stop you from picking it up and killing him with it.  (This is another instance of the somewhat sterile nature of the game.  It's almost like - dare I say it? - visiting the aquarium: full of dangerous creatures that can't do anything to you.)

After you kill the Minotaur, the Spear transforms into platinum, and becomes another treasure.  Together with the Golden Fleece, that meant I had found eleven treasures.  That still wasn't enough to grant me the full 200 points needed for victory, so I needed to find one more.

I suspected that the final treasure was the Iron Statuette that I had pried out of the inside of a giant clam.  As it turned out I was correct, but it took me a while to figure out what I needed to do.  I tried carrying the statue around to different areas, and I tried dropping it in various places that seemed otherwise superfluous.  I tried shooting it with the cannon.  I even tried mapping the game on a grid and looking for secret doors.  None of these worked, and I was getting frustrated.  That walkthrough was looking mighty tempting...

The key to solving this puzzle was the clue I had found in a book in the library: "WHAT IS THOUGHT TO BE ISN'T WHAT YOU SEE! NORI".  NORI is IRON backwards, so I was pretty sure that I was on the right track with the Statue.  I tried cutting it with the Gold Scissors, throwing the Spear at it, throwing Piranha Teeth at it, typing swear words.  You know, the usual adventure game solutions.  Eventually I hit on the solution, which didn't involve any other items: SCRAPE STATUE.  Scraping away the outer layer revealed that it was really gold, and I had found the twelfth and final treasure.

The C64 has a good sound chip.  Write some bloody music!  
Get Martin Galway on it!

Unfortunately, the version of the game that I have ends with a syntax error, so I didn't get the full ending.  I tracked down the source code of a TRS-80 version (labelled as Mod. I, Level II, so probably a revision of the original), and got the full text:  "Tum tum-tum tum...tum te tum te dum de tum... A real Adventurer Grandmaster...Boy oh Boy! Can I shake your hand?"  Totally worth it.

There are a few other things I discovered about the game through play, reading walkthroughs, and the source code:

• In my last post, I had thought that there wasn't an Electric Eel in the Electric Eel Room.  There was, but I had killed it with the cannon.  That seems to be the cannon's only purpose: to kill the Eel so that you can reclaim any equipment sucked away by the whirlpool.
• You can get killed by the Minotaur if you attempt to feed it.  It eats you instead.
• In the TRS-80 version of the game, the Plaque didn't have an ad for Hassett's other games.  Instead it had a clue that said "SCRAPE IRON. NORI".  Seriously, I could have used this.
• The game does have an inventory limit, I just hadn't reached it at the time of my last post.  You can carry up to seven items before the game starts making you drop things.
• You can't kill anything with the spear other than the Octopus and the Minotaur.  It's not logical, but allowing it would break the rest of the puzzles in the game.  It's a design flaw.

FINAL RATING

Story & Setting: This is just a treasure hunt, so story isn't really a focus of the game.  The Roman trappings of undersea Atlantis make for a cohesive setting, but as with the other text adventures I've played on PC the space limitations mean that descriptions are sparse.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: It's just you, some fish and a Minotaur, I'm afraid.  Once again, the creatures in this game are more obstacles than living things. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Despite the heady buzz of nostalgia I got from playing this on a Commodore 64 emulator, I can't in good conscience give this any more than the minimum rating.  It's a text adventure, innit?  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: Although this game cribs a lot from the work of Scott Adams, it hasn't kept the split-window interface that keeps the room description on screen at all times.  It's possible that it was there in the TRS-80 version, but I can only rate the game I played.  The loss of this feature knocks Voyage to Atlantis down a point.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: There was only one puzzle that gave me any difficulty, so I can't rate this too highly.  It didn't give me any serious frustrations, either.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence:  I'm tempted to give this game the minimum score here, because it cribs so heavily from the work of Scott Adams, whose games are much more famous and influential.  I can't do it, though.  It gets one bonus point for being super-old, and another for being programmed by a twelve-year-old.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Fun: I didn't hate playing this, but it didn't really fire me up either.  Like a lot of games of this era, it's probably being scored leniently because it's so short.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

This game has nothing more to offer me, so it doesn't earn the bonus point.  The scores above add up to 15, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 30.  That puts it as the lowest text adventure on the list, just under Pirate Adventure, and the lowest game on the list.  That seems a little harsh, but it lost a lot of points for being derivative.

Final Rating: 30 out of 100.

ADDENDUM:

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

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

Puzzles: I remember this game having a decent variety of simple puzzles.  The SCRAPE IRON puzzle was the only one that troubled me, a frustration exacerbated by the fact that the game originally gave an obvious hint for it. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

Voyage to Atlantis's RADNESS Index is 28. That puts it 8th out of 10 games so far, and makes it the lowest rated adventure game.  It's not too far below Pirate Adventure though.

DND v8 Update!!!  I just cracked level 90, so I'm on the home stretch.  One episode of Raw and one episode of Smackdown should do it.  If this character dies, I may just end it all.  The game, the blog, my life, everything.

NEXT: I'll probably focus on finishing The Game of Dungeons v8, since I'm getting so close to level 100.  In the meantime I should have a single post up for Space Invaders, which will break the format a little, and won't take me more than an hour or so to do.  Then it's back to the wonderful world of Greg Hassett, with Journey to the Centre of the Earth Adventure.  I probably could have scheduled that better.

Game 12: Voyage to Atlantis (1978)

It's difficult to find any information about Voyage to Atlantis.  What's out there is sparse, but it had me eager to play it.  After all, how many commercial games were designed by a twelve-year-old boy?  Yes, apparently designer Greg Hassett was twelve when he wrote this game, and there are a bunch more by him to come in the next few years.  I'd love to learn more about Hassett, but a Google didn't turn up very much.

Released through Mad Hatter Software (which I'm pretty sure was set up just to publish Hassett's games), Voyage to Atlantis was originally on the TRS-80.  I wasn't able to find that version of the game, so I've had to settle for the Commodore 64 version released in 1983.  It's far from ideal, and I can't shake the nagging fear that I'm playing a version that's different to the original.  Nevertheless, there's a lot of nostalgia for me in firing up a C64, even as an emulator.  My very first computer was a Commodore, and it was on that machine that I had my formative gaming experiences.  I still have it, but I don't have a copy of Voyage to Atlantis, so there's no point in firing it up just yet.  Perhaps later.

But, I digress.  Voyage to Atlantis is yet another treasure-hunting text adventure, much in the vein of Colossal Cave Adventure, Adventureland and Pirate Adventure.  Indeed, one would be forgiven for mistaking this for a Scott Adams game: the instructions on the intro screen are almost identical to Adams' games.  Not only that, but the opening area features a sign that instructs the player to bring any treasures back there and say "score".  I doubt that Hassett ever saw Colossal Cave Adventure, but there's no doubting that he played at least one of Adams' adventures.

Is that you, Scott?

The game begins with the player in his submarine, having docked in the sunken city of Atlantis.  The goal is to find all of the treasures, and bring them back to the sub.  I wasn't able to find a copy of the manual, so I've got no idea how many treasures there.  I've located nine so far (some of which I haven't yet been able to take), but I'm certain there are more.

Having explored all of the areas that are open to me, I have to say that I'm a little disappointed.  Not with the game itself; it's perfectly well-designed.  But there's a certain expectation that comes with a game created by a twelve-year-old.  I was hoping it would be a little crazier, you know?

The version of Atlantis presented here is in the vein of Ancient Rome, and quite a few of the locations draw on Roman mythology: the Pillars of Hercules, Prometheus' Chamber in Olympia, and so on.  This is mixed with a bit of Jules Verne (the sub, some mentions of Captain Ahab).  It's thematically tight, with the only real incongruity being the presence of a rail station.  Admittedly that's a big one, but in this era of adventure games you expect at least one area that makes no sense.  At least I haven't wandered into the insides of a computer yet.

As the city of Atlantis is underwater, you have to carry an air tank around at all times in order to survive.  Drowning without the tank is the only way of dying that I've discovered so far.  I live in constant fear that the tank is going to run out, but so far that hasn't been a problem.  I also thought it might be annoying to have an inventory slot constantly taken up, but I've yet to hit a limit on the number of items that I can carry.

I do love a game that insults me when I die.

I've found a few treasures lying around unguarded, and returned them to the sub: a Platinum Pick, a pair of Gold Scissors, a Silver Key, a Golden Apple, and a Jade Medallion.  Treasures are denoted by asterisks, so there's no mistaking them.  Some are needed to solve various puzzles, as you'll see below.

I've located a bunch of other treasures that are guarded by various forms of hostile undersea life.  I'll run through these below:

• A chest guarded by an Octopus.  The octopus can be killed with a spear that's found nearby, but you also need a spear-thrower that's a found a little further afield.  This was the first puzzle I solved (not that it was exactly a head-scratcher).  The chest contained a pearl (one of the treasures) and a note.  More on the note later, when I outline the various clues I've located.
• A platinum plaque guarded by a Black Manta.  I don't have any ideas on getting rid of the Manta, but I haven't put much thought towards it yet.  The Manta doesn't let you take the plaque, but you can read it, and doing so gives you an ad for Hassett's other games.  Presumably this wasn't in the original version, as it mentions games designed well after 1978.  It also caused a syntax error that crashed the game, so I won't be trying this again.
• A Giant Squid guarding a pile of coins.  There's a hint elsewhere in the game that the Squid doesn't like loud noises, and I was able to scare it away by typing YELL.
• A Minotaur guarding the golden fleece.  I suppose the Minotaur isn't aquatic life, but it does fit the mythological theme.  The Minotaur lives at the heart of a maze, which is mercifully easy to navigate compared to those found in Colossal Cave Adventure. 

So I've returned seven treasures to the sub, and there are two more that are still guarded by nasties that I've yet to defeat.  I could be close to finishing the game, but honestly I have no idea.

The city is strewn with various papers, books and journals that provide clues.  Here are all the ones I've found to date:

• There's an area designated as "Captain Ahab's Quarters", and his journal is found there.  It contains this cryptic note: "LEE SAID POW AND DIED".  So far this is meaningless to me.
• Inside the chest there is a note, as I mentioned above.  It says "PUT SHOT IN GUN".  This is easy to figure out.  There's an old cannon in an Atlantean fort, and elsewhere on an Olympic Field there's a shot put.  I've been able to load the shot put into the cannon, and I've even fired the cannon, but it had no discernible effect.
• An old newspaper found in a dark cave had a number of cryptic messages for me: "USE CRUST TOOTHPASTE FOR SHARPER TEETH (SNAP!)  SQUIDS HATE LOUD NOISES (W O P T O N).  The bit about squids and loud noises helped me obtain one of the treasures, but I don't know what the rest is about.  Toothpaste?  W O P T O N?  I'm baffled.
• A book in the library contained the following: "WHAT IS THOUGHT TO BE ISN'T WHAT YOU SEE! NORI".  Again, baffled.

There are a few other mysteries and things of note that I want to point out as well.

• I found a giant clam, and I was able to prise it open with my platinum pick.  Inside was an iron statuette that I've yet to find a use for.
• One room contains some Fierce Piranhas (and kudos to Greg Hassett for getting the spelling correct; old text adventures are usually terrible for this).  They don't do anything, and are seemingly pointless.
• There's a gate between the Rail Station and the Jail that can be unlocked with the silver key.
• I've found an area that's at the top of a cliff, and the text indicates that there are signs of life below.  I haven't been able to figure out a way down yet.
• One room has walls with figures on them that look as though they've come to life.  I'm not sure if this is important, or just flavour.  It's right next to an area with mirrored walls, so it could just be foreshadowing.
• There's a street with a post in the middle of it, and I can climb to the top of the post.  There's nothing up there, though, and the view doesn't reveal anything useful.
• As well as the air tank, the submarine also contains a peanut butter cup.  I haven't found a use for it, and the thought of eating peanut butter is too horrible to contemplate.  I may not have the necessary cruelty to force even my digital alter ego to consume it.  Perhaps if I pretend that it's Vegemite.
• One area is a whirlpool, and if you enter it all of your inventory items are sucked away, except for the air tank.  The items are thankfully not gone forever, and you can find them in the "Electric Eel's Room".  Curiously, this room doesn't have an electric eel in it, and you can just take your gear back with no trouble.  It does only have one exit, though, and that leads to the Jail.  And if you end up here without the key, and the gate still locked, there's no way out.  Unless I haven't found it yet.

I guess I can do this underwater?

So that's my progress through Voyage to Atlantis.  I've enjoyed the initial exploration phase, but I am finding the game to be a bit sterile.  The descriptions  are very sparse, and none of the creatures interact with you outside of preventing you from taking the items they guard.  It's all well and good to describe the octopus as "fierce", but it doesn't come through when all it does is sit there.  I'm hoping that I can have this one done by next week.

DND v8 UPDATE!!!  I've been grinding diligently while WWE programming plays in the background, and my character Strider is riding high at Level 70.  Not long to go now...