Colossal Cave Adventure II: Victory!

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

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Step outside and have a drink

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

Step 6: Step outside and have a drink

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

Step 8: Step outside and have a drink

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

Step 10: Have a drink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet victory

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

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

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

FINAL RATING:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Rating: 24 out of 100.

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

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

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

ADDENDUM THE SECOND:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colossal Cave Adventure II: So Very Close

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death by sewer rat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what I see in my nightmares.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game 16: Colossal Cave Adventure II (1978)

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

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

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

A familiar beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

About to be eaten by the Giant.

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

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

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

Colossal Cave Adventure: Victory!

Readers may remember that in my last post I made a big song and dance about consulting a walkthrough to solve some puzzles, and how I was going to try my hardest not to do so in the future.  Well, I did try my hardest, and apparently my hardest wasn't good enough.  Yes, I completed Colossal Cave Adventure, but I certainly didn't do it on my own.

When I last posted, I'd reached the endgame, where the hero is transported to a "Repository" that houses all of the various objects and creatures found in the game, split into a north-east area and a south-west area..  The first time I got to this place I screwed up by making too much noise, and a bunch of sleeping dwarves woke up and murdered me.  I was more cautious on my second attempt, and started exploring the items available to me: empty bottles, lamps, rods, oysters, beanstalks, and some others I'm probably forgetting.  There was also a locked grate in the south-west area that I couldn't figure out how to open.

When I picked up one of the oysters, I saw a message on the bottom, and I thought that I was getting somewhere.  When I tried to read it the game said that I would have to sacrifice 10 points, but I was more than prepared.  I could always play through the game again and take advantage of my new-found knowledge without losing any points.  Alas, this is the cryptic message that I received:

"There is something strange about this place, such that one of the words I've always known now has a new effect."  Not particularly helpful, is it?  I spent the next couple of days wracking my brain and trying all kinds of unsuccessful schemes.  In the end I had to relent, and consult a walkthrough.  I can't say that I was pleased by the solution.

There's a bundle of rods in the south-west area that apparently doubles as dynamite, not that anything in the game would clue you in on this.  If you leave it in the north-east corner, head to the south-west corner, then type BLAST, it will explode and blow a hole to freedom.  Like so:

This, I have to say, is a bullshit puzzle.  I don't know how anyone ever figured this out, short of looking in the source code.  The only clue that the game gives you makes no sense at all, unless you happen to have typed BLAST earlier in the game for whatever reason.  I don't know what that reason would be, unless you're the sort of person that types mild curses when the game gets frustrating.  To top it off, you have to make sure you don't blast a hole in the south-west area, or you'll be flooded by lava. It's frustration all around.

So I'd finished the game (albeit in a less than ideal fashion), but try as I might I wasn't able to get the full 350 points.  I ended up with 349, and I had to look up the solution for that last point as well.  In my first post on the game I wrote about Witt's End, an area that you can wander into that seemingly has no exits.  Just outside of this area there was a magazine on the floor.  To get the last point I had to drop that magazine in Witt's End.  Apparently, if you get stuck in Witt's End, you can get out eventually by going any direction except west.  I never did escape in that way (and besides, wasting that many moves on escaping would cut things very fine in regards to the lantern's battery).  Instead I left this until last, and escaped by being teleported to the Repository.  This is another irritating puzzle, but it doesn't bother me as much as the one above, because it's non-compulsory.  You can quite happily finish the game without it, and if you want to spend your time banging your head against a brick wall to get that last point, then go for it.  Below is a screen cap of the game ending with full points:

I'm not sure what that bit about achieving the next higher rating is about.  None of the sites I've consulted mention a rating beyond Grandmaster, so I'm not going to worry myself about it.  It's time to wrap this baby up.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE

Obtuse Puzzles: This should come as no surprise, because I've been whinging and banging on about it for the last two posts.  I should say that the vast majority of the puzzles in the game are perfectly fair, and some are even rather clever.  There are two that I take issue with, however.  One of those is the final puzzle mentioned above, with the dynamite.  The other is the dark room containing the pyramid, that can only be accessed by using the magic word PLOVER.  Both of these puzzles have one thing in common: there are no clues in the game that lead to the solution.  The player can only stumble across them by dumb luck, and to me that's just poor design.

(I almost included the KILL DRAGON puzzle here, but there's a cheekiness about it that I admire, and the game does at least prompt you with a question.  Discovering the solution to this made me smile, and that makes all the difference.)

Random Dwarves: This is a minor niggle, but I don't like being randomly attacked and killed in adventure games.  I don't mind dying because I tried something stupid; half the fun of this genre is finding absurd and amusing ways to die.  But having a dwarf pop around a corner and throw a knife through my ribcage isn't fun if I have no way of preventing it.

WHAT I LIKED:

Places of Interest: Colossal Cave is a joy to explore.  Unlike the RPGs that I started this blog with, there's very little wasted space.  Almost every room has a treasure to find or a puzzle to solve, and more often than not solving a puzzle opens up even more interesting places to see.  RPGs and adventure games, in these earliest days, are both trying to adapt Dungeons & Dragons, but they're approaching it from completely different directions.  RPGs are more interested in the statistical side of things, and the resource management inherent in a simulation of dungeon exploration.  Adventure games strip away that side of things, and focus on the interesting places that spring from the Dungeon Master's imagination, and the struggle of the players to solve the mysteries those places present (and, for better or worse, the idiosyncrasies of said DM's personality, which in adventure games manifests in the perversity of the puzzles).  Both are fun, but adventure games pack more into a smaller space.

The Puzzles That Made Sense: Despite my misgivings about a couple of puzzles above, I must say that most of the puzzles in Colossal Cave Adventure are logical, and not too difficult.  The highlight has to be the sequence with the Troll.  Crossing his bridge requires that several puzzles have been solved, and ends with a bear attack.  I want more weaponised bears in my gaming, is what I'm saying here.

Historical Legacy: There's no doubting that games like dnd and pedit5 are foundational for the RPG genre, but nothing I've played comes close to Colossal Cave Adventure.  It's quite astounding just how advanced it feels; the text adventure has arrived here almost fully formed.  Playing it felt very familiar.  Part of that came from the interface, but in large part it's due to the game's massive influence on Zork.  Zork is probably the most famous example of it's genre, and the amount of stuff it takes from Colossal Cave Adventure is almost too much to list.  The treasure-hunting quest; the lantern with a time limit; the enemy who steals your stuff; the maze of twisty passages, all alike.  Zork is a more polished affair by far, but it (and consequently the text adventure as a whole) owes a lot to its progenitor.

ADDENDUM - FINAL RATING:

Some time after completing this game I instituted a scoring system with which I can rank the games I play.  I've been gradually going back and rating the games I played earlier in the blog, and now it's time to give Colossal Cave Adventure the same treatment.

Story & Setting: The story, a bog-standard treasure hunt, is as generic as it gets for this game genre.  The setting, however, is quite evocative.  Certain sections are based on Crowther's caving experiences, and the end result is that the places in the game feel authentic.  There are other areas that feel tacked on, though, and the endgame is pure nonsense.    Rating: 2.

Characters & Monsters: There aren't a lot of characters in this game, and the ones that are present have a limited range of interaction.  Most of them are obstacles (the troll, the snake, the dragon), some are nuisances (the dwarves, the pirate) and one is a useful tool (the bear).  None of them are actual charact6ers, though.  Rating: 1.

Aesthetics: Text adventures are never going to score highly in this area, I'm afraid, but I'm going to award Colossal Cave Adventure an extra point for its evocative descriptions.  Rating: 2.

Mechanics: Colossal Cave Adventure has a simple parser, but very few of the problems I had with the game stemmed from that aspect.  The random elements were perhaps a little too frequent.  Being surprise attacked and killed by dwarves in a CRPG is all fine and dandy: that genre is usually heavily based around combat.  But in a genre geared towards puzzle-solving, it can get really irritating.  Rating: 3.

Challenge: Some of the puzzles in this game are fun, and well thought through.  Others are obtuse as hell, to the point where the game is unsolvable without extreme luck and guesswork.  For that, I have to knock it down significantly.  Rating: 2.

Innovation & Influence: Given that this is the first ever game of its genre, I have to give it a maximum score here.  Rating: 7.

Fun: Despite its flaws, I enjoyed Colossal Cave Adventure a lot.  Perhaps it was just the change of pace from playing lengthy PLATO CRPGs, but I found this game to be really refreshing.  Rating: 5.

I don't feel any particular urge to play this game again, so it doesn't get the bonus point.  The scores above add up to 22, which gives it a final score of 44 out of 100. This puts it slightly ahead of Adventureland (the only other text adventure I've rated at the time of writing), which feels about right.

Final Rating: 44 out of 100.

ADDENDUM THE SECOND:

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

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

Puzzles: This is the formative adventure game, so a lot of the puzzles seen here are massively influential.  Most of them are fair, and I think the dragon puzzle is amusingly clever.  I have to knock this one down for it's final puzzle though, as the BLAST command is never made known to the player at all.  I'm not a big fan of the PLOVER puzzle either.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2. The influence of this game is so massive that the entire adventure game genre is named after it. It's shadow is long, and I'd hazard a guess that I'll be at this blog for many years before I find an adventure game that doesn't have any of the DNA of Colossal Cave Adventure in it somewhere.

Colossal Cave Adventure's RADNESS Index is 38. So far that puts it third, behind The Game of Dungeons and Orthanc, and ahead of The Dungeon. It's the top-rated adventure game though!

NEXT: I'm still playing Moria, so I'll do a check-in with that.  While I continue to plug away at that game in the background, I'll check out either Oubliette or the DND game designed for the PDP-10 system.

Colossal Cave Adventure: Walking Through

There comes a time in the life of every gamer when he must hang his head in shame.  That time has come for me.  It's not that I'm doing badly with Colossal Cave Adventure.  On the contrary, I believe that I'm very nearly done with it.  No, the problem is that I have broken a sacred tenet of the blog, and resorted to a walkthrough for help.  I'm not sure if I ever said so in a post, but one of the rules I set for myself when starting the blog was that I wouldn't cheat to beat a game.  I've gone back on that rule, and so I hang my head in shame, and hope that my readers can forgive me.

It could be worse, though.  I only used a walkthrough to spoil one puzzle, and I had another one spoiled for me by accident.  I've figured out the rest of the game for myself, and I intend to complete it in the same fashion, unless I become hopelessly, desperately stuck.  After all, I don't want to be bogged down in one game forever.  This time I capitulated too easily though, and I don't intend to do so again.

With that confession out of the way it's time to talk about the game, and I suppose I'll begin with the two puzzles that I had help with solving.  If you recall from my last post, I had encountered a dragon that was sitting on a Persian rug.  The rug is one of the treasures I need to recover, but nothing I tried could move the dragon.  I poured water on it, I poured oil on it, I threw an axe, I threw a trident, I threw a canary.  None of it worked, and I doubt that I would have ever come across the solution on my own.  This is the puzzle I mentioned above, that I spoiled by accident when I saw the solution on the Wikipedia page.  I was reading it for research purposes, and thought I would be pretty safe from spoilers, but that was not the case.  Here's the solution below:

Yes, that's it.  It's clever, and it's certainly funny, but I don't think it plays fair.  The message that displays when you type KILL DRAGON - "With what? Your bare hands?" - is exactly the same message that appears if you try to kill a dwarf, or a troll, or any other creature in the game.  In those instances, if you try to answer the question posed the game will act as if it doesn't understand.  How does the player know that this situation will be any different?  Perhaps I'd be happier about it if the wording had been slightly different, as a way of flagging to the player that this could be the solution.  As it is I'd never have tried this option with the dragon, because it didn't work anywhere else, or even acknowledge that it could work.

The other puzzle I had trouble with, and the one for which I had to consult a walkthrough, involved the room with the emerald shaped like a plover's egg.  I mentioned in my last post that the entry to this room was narrow, and that I had to drop all of my gear to squeeze through.  This included my lamp.  The Plover Room (as it's called) is lit, but there's a dark passage leading away that I was unable to explore.  I figured that there must be some other way into the room, but after exploring every area in the game I was unable to find it.  The solution, as I discovered when I capitulated and looked it up, is one that could only be arrived at by dumb luck and sheer frustration.  It turns out that PLOVER is another magic work, like PLUGH and XYZZY.   Typing it while in the Plover Room will teleport the player to a cavern closer to the surface, and vice versa.  Armed with this knowledge I was able to teleport in with my lamp and explore the dark passage, which led to a room containing a platinum pyramid, the last of the treasures I needed to locate.  Of all the puzzles in the game so far, this is the only one I have genuinely bad feelings about.  At least the KILL DRAGON puzzle is amusing in the way that it trolls the player.  With the PLOVER puzzle there are no clues at all, and it doesn't feel clever or funny.  It just feels cheap.

And now, on to the puzzles that I figured out on my own.  One of those was the troll guarding the bridge, who demanded a treasure for every time I wanted to cross.  Getting across the first time was no problem, as I could give him a golden egg, then use the magic words FEE FIE FOE FOO to return the egg to its original location.  It was crossing the second time that was giving me grief.  I tried giving the troll a gold coin, thinking that I would perhaps only give him a single coin, and therefore not lose the treasure.  No such luck there.  In the area past the troll was a volcano, some rare spices, and a bear locked up with a gold chain.  The spices were a treasure, and giving them to the troll had no apparent effect.  The same went for the gold chain, and the volcano - despite having a pretty cool description - seemed to serve no purpose.  I was at a loss until I figured out that I could TAKE the bear, and it would follow me.  This was obviously the solution, and although it took me a few goes to figure out the correct command I was able to defeat the troll.

THROW BEAR.  Seriously.

The last treasure that I had some difficulty locating belonged to the pirate, who occasionally jumps out and steals all of your treasures, as shown below.

The pirate hides your treasures in the maze, as he says.  This game has two mazes, one with twisty passages all different, and one with twisty passages all the same.  The pirate hides his treasures in the latter.  Mapping that maze was time-consuming, and involved dropping items in each location so that I would always know where I was.  Unfortunately I never had quite enough items to cover every location, but I was able with difficulty to map the whole place out, and I found my stolen treasure in a dead end very deep in the maze.  I also found the pirate's treasure chest, which is another of the items that are needed to complete the game.  I would have liked the chance to put an axe between the pirate's eyes, but I suppose I'll have to settle for stealing his stuff instead.

With the treasures all located and safely deposited in the building on the surface, I started getting a cryptic message.  I can't remember the exact wording, but a voice kept announcing that the cave was now closed, and that I should leave via the main office.  I tried to get out using the magic words, but those no longer worked, and I was starting to panic because my lamp was running out of power.  Eventually, the following occurred, and I was transported to a new area.

This new area seems to be a repository of all the objects used in the game.  It's all a bit meta, and I'm surprised to see such blatant breaking of the fourth wall in a game as old as this one.  I explored around a bit, grabbing various items in case I would need them again.  I should have paid more heed to that warning about not waking the dwarves, though.  In the next area I went to there were loads of snakes, and loads of birdcages.  I released one of the birds, just to see what would happen, and sure enough it chased a snake away as I expected.  Unfortunately, it also woke the dwarves, and they all got up and riddled me with knives.

ADDENDUM: Though I had thought I was nearly finished with the game, I've run into a problem.  I can recover all of the treasures with little difficulty, but for whatever reason I'm not being sent to the final part.  I don't know what I did to trigger the endgame, and none of my wanderings after recovering the treasures have helped.  All of my games are ending with me fruitlessly roaming the caves until my lamp runs out, and I'm not sure what to do.  I guess I'll just keep plugging away at it, and hope I stumble into the solution, because I'm determined not to look up the answer.

Colossal Cave Adventure: The Joys of Cave Exploration

I can't express how refreshing Colossal Cave Adventure has been after months of primitive RPGs, and especially Moria.  I love RPGs, but sometimes they can devolve into repetition, following patterns in order to increase the numbers that drive your success.  I don't mind this style of gameplay, as long as I'm able to continuouly explore new areas and find interesting things.  Colossal Cave Adventure is nothing but exploration and finding cool things, and I'm really digging it.

At this point I think I've mapped most of the game.  It's always hard to be certain of this in text adventures, though.  There are often directions you can go that aren't mentioned in the area descriptions, and I'm paranoid that I've overlooked some.  I try to test all of the directions in every location, but they can be easy to miss.  On top of that, the directions of the exits don't always match up between locations; just because you got somewhere by going north, doesn't mean that going south will take you back to where you came from.  So yeah, I have more trouble mapping text adventures than I do RPGs.  I doubt that's going to change.

Mapping problems aside, though, I've been finding lots of cool areas, locating some of the treasures I need to complete the game, and running into some puzzles that I haven't solved yet.  Here are a few of the more interesting things that have happened.

• There are a number of treasures that are lying around unguarded, not far from the entrance.  Near the Hall of the Mountain King I found some jewellery, some gold coins, and some silver bars.  A little farther away from that I found some diamonds.  These items are all easy to get, and easy to return to the building so that I can claim points for finding them.  I don't think I'll need these to solve any puzzles, except for the coins.  I might need those to buy batteries, but I'll discuss that later.
• North of the Hall of the Mountain King is a room with a rock inscribed with Y2.  Sometimes when I enter this room, a hollow voice says "PLUGH".  I tried typing the word myself, and it works the same as XYZZY: it teleports me from Y2 to the outside building, and vice versa.  It's really useful, far moreso than XYZZY has been.  I don't know why this word didn't become the iconic one.
• In my last post I mentioned a gold nugget that was too heavy to get up the stairs.  The solution to this problem was simple, as I was able to carry it to Y2 and use PLUGH to take the nugget to the surface.
• Deeper in the caves, in the "Oriental Room", I found a vase.  This was one of the treasures (you can tell which items are treasures, because they're marked with an exclamation point), but every time I tried to drop it, it smashed on the floor.  The solution was to take a pillow from a room nearby and drop that before dropping the vase.  I like the puzzles in this game so far; they make sense, and lack the obtuseness that adventure games often suffer from.
• At the bottom of a pit there's a small beanstalk that cries out for water.  The game gives you a bottle of water at the beginning, so this is an easy puzzle to solve, although you do have to water the beanstalk twice before it's large enough to climb.  At the top of the beanstalk is a Giant's Room.  There's no giant to be seen (thankfully), but there is a nest full of golden eggs.  There is also a sign that says FEE FIE FOE FOO, and after a bit of experimentation I discovered that typing all four words (one at a time) returns the egg to the nest in this room.  I think I know which puzzle this will help me solve.
• Near the Giant Room is a huge door with rusted hinges; I needed to fill my empty water bottle with oil so that I could get this door open and find the trident inside.  The trident is a treasure, but it's also needed to open a giant clam elsewhere in the caves.  The clam has a pearl in it, which rolls several areas away when the clam is opened.  You wouldn't believe how long it took me to find that pearl, when all I had to do was go Down twice.
• Quite deep in the caves there is a tight tunnel that I can only squeeze through by dropping all of my stuff.  There's an emerald in there, and I'm able to retrieve that with no trouble.  There's also a dark tunnel, and I'm afraid to explore it without my lamp.  I suppose that I need an alternate light source, or perhaps an alternate path into the room, but I'm yet to find either.
• There's an area in the maze that is called Witt's End.  I stumbled into it during my first few hours playing the game, and I was completely unable to escape.  Every direction I took just led me back to Witt's End, and none of my items were able to help me.  I've avoided it ever since, but I get the feeling I'll have to return there eventually.
• Near Y2 is an area with a window overlooking a chasm.  Across the chasm I can see a figure waving at me from another window.  I haven't been able to figure out what purpose he serves yet.  I've been able to get to the opposite window, but when I looked out the figure was on the other side, near Y2.  I've got no idea how I'm going to corner this bugger.
• I've also found a dragon sitting on a persian rug.  The rug is a treasure, but of course I need to remove the dragon before I can take it, and so far none of my items have worked.  Thankfully the dragon doesn't try to kill me, but I'm also unable to kill it.  I have no clue about this one.
• There's bridge guarded by a troll, who demands a treasure every time you try to cross.  I've worked out how to get across the first time, by giving him the golden egg and then using FEE FIE FOE FOO to make the egg return to its nest.  I haven't been able to work out how to get back across without losing another treasure, though.
• There are two treasures to be found across the bridge: some exotic spices, and a golden chain.  The spices are unguarded, but the chain is around the neck of an angry bear.  I was able to calm the bear by giving it food, but the chain was locked.  Suprisingly, the keys found at the very beginning of the game are able to unlock it.  I had thought they wouldn't be useful aside from unlocking the grate, but they work here as well.  Still, even though I know where these two treasures are, I'll need to solve the troll situation before I can claim them.
• The lamp is invaluable, as without it you will be exploring in the dark, which inevitable leads you to fall into a pit and break every bone in your body.  Of course, the lamp eventually runs out of batteries, and once that happens it's effectively game over.  There's a battery vending machine in one of the mazes, and I guess that I'll need to use a coin to buy a replacement.  I've tested it, and the coins disappear when I do this, so I'd like to avoid it.  I'm pretty sure that I can complete the game before my lamp runs out, once I know all the puzzle solutions.
• The game provides you with food and water at the beginning, but at no point do you need to eat or drink.  I was half expecting to deal with this, but it turns out they are just puzzle items.
• I spent a good deal of time visiting areas and waving the rusty rod around, just to see what it might do.  I was pleased to discover that it creates a crystal bridge across one of the chasms, but in reality it's a pointless shortcut that saves very little time.
• The knife-throwing dwarves that I mentioned in the last post can kill you, but you get the option to be reincarnated.  I tried it out, and it sent me back to the beginning and subtracted some points from my score, as well as emptying my inventory.  I'm trying to get the full score of 350, so I won't be bothering with this again.
• There's a pirate who occasionally appears, steals my treasure, then boasts about how he's going to hide it in a chest in one of the mazes.  I haven't fully explored the mazes yet, so I have no idea where the chest is hidden.

I feel like I'm about halfway through the game. I've successfully returned ten of the treasures to the building, and I've found two more.  I also know where the rug is, even if I don't know how to get it.  My score is around 180, which reinforces the feeling that I'm about halfway done.  My next move will probably be to explore the mazes, which remain the areas of the game that I've steered clear of thus far.  One of them is a maze of "twisty passages all different", and the other is a maze of "twisty passages all alike".  I don't look forward to exploring either, though I have developed some tactics in this regard from playing Zork.  I'm enjoying the hell out of this game, and can't wait to finish this post and get back to playing it, so forgive me if I end things here.  I got caves to explore.

Game 5: Colossal Cave Adventure (1977)

Though I'm net yet out of the PLATO RPG wilderness, it's time to move ahead to something entirely different.  I haven't finished with Moria, and probably won't for a long time, but a blog needs to be fed.  And so I come to Adventure, also known as Colossal Cave Adventure, the first ever text adventure game.

The original version of Adventure was developed by programmer Will Crowther.  Crowther was also a caving enthusiast, and much of the game was modelled after his experiences exploring the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.  Crowther's game is not the version that most people played, though.  In 1976, a student at Stanford University named Don Woods discovered Adventure, and set about expanding it.  He did so with Crowther's blessing, and greatly added to the fantasy elements of the game.

The influence of Adventure cannot be understated.  It directly influenced Ken and Roberta Williams to found Sierra On-Line, and was the progenitor of an entire genre of games.  Not only that, but it was later released commercially for systems such as MS-DOS and Commodore 64, and has been rewritten and expanded even further by a multitude of programmers over the years.

The question that faces me at this point is: which version should I play?  Crowther's original is out there, and I've messed around with it and mapped it, but it's incomplete.  There's no real goal as such, and no point-scoring system, and many of the areas are unfinished.  It's a fascinating historical curiosity, but not a complete game.  The commercially released versions, as well as the expanded versions made after Don Woods' involvement, would be playable, but they fall well out of the time-frame that I'm currently exploring.  I may revisit them at a later date, but for the moment I'm sticking with the 1970s.

I'll be playing the Don Woods version, also known as Adventure 350 due to the number of points scored in the game for solving all of the puzzles.  It's the earliest version, it's the most well-known, and to be perfectly honest it's the one I'm most interested in.  Finding a copy of this isn't difficult, but finding one that runs on Windows 7 is a bit harder.  I'm running it using Dosbox, and that seems to work fine, though I'm not certain whether the version of Adventure that I got has any added features that were not in the original.

When the game first loads, it asks if you want to read the instructions.  Typing 'YES' brings up the screen above, which tells you that the goal of the game is to enter Colossal Cave and look for treasure.  The rest of the instructions confirm what I already expected: this is going to be a traditional text adventure, with loads of typing and a command parser and all the frustration that entails.  I'm actually a little bit surprised that the game accepts abbreviations like N, in lieu of typing GO NORTH.  I'd expected that was something that would be introduced later in the genre, but here it is right at the beginning.  It's a pleasant surprise.

Typing 'INFO' as instructed brings up another screen that gives more information about scoring in the game.  You get points for finding the various treasures, and more points for bringing them back to the building at the start of the game.  Points are also awarded for finding certain areas, and it also mentions a "master's section", which I don't like the sound of.

The adventure begins, as you can see above, with you standing in a forest next to a building, with a gleaming tower in the distance.  Obviously the house is the first thing I should explore, and after a bit of trial and error I found that I could enter by going west (by typing W), and also by typing IN, and even HOUSE.  In fact, typing HOUSE anywhere on the surface brings you back here, which has been quite handy in the instances that I've become disoriented.

Inside the house I found a set of keys, some food, a bottle of water, and a lamp.  The influence of this game on Zork is very strong.  No doubt this is the building that I have to return all of the treasures to, and I'll be coming back here quite a lot during my quest.

Next I went to the tower, but there wasn't a lot that I could do there.  The door was firmly closed, and I couldn't unlock it with the keys (unless I haven't used the right command, which is always a caveat when playing these kinds of games).  A curious sign on the tower read "NO ENTRY DANGER PARTICLES AT WORK".  This made no sense to me, so I made a note of it and left to explore further.

Aside from the house and the tower, there's not much to see on the surface.  The forest feels larger than it really is, because it often randomises your destination when you leave, and it can feel like you are lost at times.  The only thing to do is to follow the stream down through a valley to a locked grate.  The keys unlock the grate, and it's a simple matter then to go down into Colossal Cave.

At first the cave is quite linear.  It begins in a small chamber.  Away from this chamber the caves are dark, and I needed to light my lamp to explore further.  West from there is a tunnel, where I found an empty wicker cage.  West of that is a room full of debris.  On the floor I found a three foot black rod, topped with a rusty star, but of more interest was a note on the wall.

XYZZY!  I've seen this work referenced before, and I knew it was from Adventure, but I never really knew the context of it before.  I did a bit of experimentation, and worked out that if I type XYZZY while in this room I am teleported to the building on the surface.  Likewise, if I type it while in the building, I'm teleported back to this room.  It doesn't work anywhere else, alas.  I suppose it's handy, but it doesn't really save much time.  I expect it will be used to solve a puzzle later on.

Heading west led through a canyon and into a cave where a bird was singing.  I tried to get the bird, but no matter what I tried (GET BIRD, USE CAGE, WAVE ROD) it always flew away from me.  I tried dropping the cage and leaving the room, and I tried putting food in the cage (you can't).  In the end I resorted to typing HELP, as the game had instructed earlier.  That brings up a screen that mostly tells you ways to navigate the game, and also that you can look at what you are carrying by typing INVENTORY (or I).  Of most interest to me, though, is a note that there is a black rod in the caves that scares the bird.  I was a little miffed that the solution to the first puzzle was given away like that, but then again I did go to that screen seeking hints.  I dropped the rod, and was easily able to get the bird in the cage.  I'd "solved" the first puzzle, but that was all the help the game was going to give me.  The rest I'd have to do on my own.

Further west was a pit, with stairs leading down to a room full of mist.  To the west was an impassable fissure.  I went south and found a room containing a huge nugget of gold.  A note on the wall read "You won't get it up the stairs", and sure enough, after I picked up the nugget I found that I was unable to climb back up.  I left the nugget behind (as it was heavy, and I'd had to discard some items to pick it up), and decided to explore for an alternate route to the surface.

At this point a dwarf appeared, threw an axe at my head, and ran away.  I'm not sure if I could have died here.  Normally I would think not in this kind of game, but it's always hard to say when you're exploring the earliest days of a genre, before the conventions were set.  Regardless, I was able to retrieve the axe, and felt a little bit safer for it.

Heading north I came to the Hall of the Mountain King, which sounded suitably epic.  The first hint of danger was introduced, as a huge green snake was blocking my way onwards.  I didn't have much trouble with this, to be honest.  The first thing I tried was to release the bird from its cage, and sure enough it chased the snake away.  I'm not sure if I've encountered a similar puzzle in a later game, or if there's a mythological story that it's drawing from, but the answer popped into my head right away.  I'm good at this!

At that point a hostile dwarf wandered into the room, and hurled a knife at me.  It missed, but I started to panic.  Nothing I seemed to type was working.  I tried KILL DWARF and HIT DWARF, but the game seemed incredulous that I would try to do so with my bare hands.  I tried KILL DWARF WITH AXE before remembering that the parser only accepts two word commands.  Eventually I settled on THROW AXE, and that worked.  My axe hit home, and the dwarf vanished in a "puff of smoke" (or as I prefer to imagine it, a "gout of blood").  (You may notice that the "puff of smoke" isn't shown in the screen-grab below.  Confession time: most of these images were created after the fact, with me trying to recreate the original occurrence.  I couldn't get the puff of smoke this time.)

After this I did a bit more exploring, and hit the mother lode.  South of the Hall of the Mountain King, I found some jewellery.  To the west, I found some gold coins.  To the north, I found some bars of silver.  No doubt these were some of the treasures I was looking for, and if I added that gold nugget from earlier I had already discovered four of them.  I tried to load up, only to discover that I couldn't carry anything else.  It looked like an inventory limit was something I would have to contend with, and it wasn't just restricted to the heavy gold nugget as I'd hoped.

At this point I got a bit lost while wandering around, and couldn't find my way back to familiar territory.  Then, horror of horrors, I encountered this nightmare.

I mentioned this game's influence on Zork earlier, but I hadn't realised exactly how strong it was.  I had stumbled into a maze of twisty passages, all different.  You'll notice that each one has a different description, and I could probably use this to map them.  Not right now, though.  Right now I'm too dismayed, and I'm having horrible Zork flashbacks, and I need to have a little lie down.  It's time to quit and start again.

Despite this setback, though, I'm having a lot of fun with Adventure.  It's surprisingly sophisticated, and the emphasis on exploration and puzzle-solving is a welcome relief from Moria and the other RPGs I've been playing.  I'm pretty excited to load it up and try again.