Game 6: The Game of Dungeons (aka dnd) v8 (1978)

Back when I started The Game of Dungeons, I noted that there were two versions on cyber1's PLATO emulator.  I played and finished version 6, but I said at the time that I would eventually revisit the game and play version 8.  Since Moria is becoming a drag I figured that now is a good time.  I'm glad I did, because version 8 is certainly different enough to merit some posts.

In version 6 of The Game of Dungeons, the goal was simple: find the Orb at the bottom of Whisenwood Dungeon, defeat the dragon guarding it, and escape back to the surface.  That goal remains in version 8, but the game has been greatly expanded.  There are now three dungeons: the aforementioned Whisenwood, the Tomb of Doom, and the Caverns.

Whisenwood Dungeon in this version of the game no longer holds the Orb.  Instead there's a fountain at the bottom that supposedly cures all ills, which is guarded by the Grim Reaper.  The Orb and the Dragon are now found on the lowest level of the Caverns.  There's another quest item in the game as well: the Grail, which is in the Tomb of Doom and guarded by "The Vampire".  Retiring to the Hall of Fame is done by claiming both Orb and Grail.

I've been playing version 8 for about an hour or so, and while the basics of the game remain intact, I'm also noticing some significant differences.  The most notable of these is probably character advancement.  Version 6 didn't have levels; instead, any gold you carried out of the dungeon was directly converted into hit points, at a rate of 1 hp per 4000 gold.  Now the game has levels, and your gold converts into experience points instead of directly into hit points.  It's difficult to figure out how much experience is needed to gain a level, because I can't find a screen that shows me what my current experience is.  You also gain experience for defeating monsters, which I'm pretty sure is new to this version of the game.

I've been exploring the top level of Whisenwood, and the layout is different than it was in v6.  It looks as though the levels are 15x15 squares, but I don't know how deep the dungeons go (Whisenwood had 20 levels in v6).  The Excelsior Transporter is still there (for the uninitiated, it can be used to quickly transport to any level of the dungeon, but using it costs hit points, and takes more the deeper you go).  The top level also has two new additions: an Alchemist and an Armory.  You can buy potions from the former, and magic weapons and armor from the latter, but the prices are steep.

There are new monsters in the game, and they do more than take away hit points.  Rust Monsters will eat your sword (and your icon changes to match, in a charming touch).  This makes you less effective in combat, but you can get a new one by making it back to the surface.  Shadows drain a point from your Strength score, while Vampires feed directly on your experience points (and yes, you will lose levels).  Mind Flayers feed on your Intelligence score.  As in v6, monsters have strengths and weaknesses against the various spells, which I'm still trying to figure out.

Character creation has a couple of new touches that makes things more interesting.  The first is your race.  In v6 this was never specified, but here you can be a Human, Elf, Dwarf or Gnome.  It's randomly determined, unfortunately, but at least it gives a small amount of differentation.  Elves are better at spellcasting, and have higher IQ and Wisdom.  Dwarves are better at fighting, always know what level of the dungeon they're on, and have higher Endurance.  Gnomes are more agile, better at running away, and also better at avoiding traps when opening chests.  Humans can carry more gold than the others.

Also, every character has an inheritance, and most of them will begin the game with a magic item.  My first character started with a +1 helmet, and others have had potions and amulets of ESP.  I'm a big fan of this, it makes each character feel unique.  It also gives some extra menace to the monster known as the Eye of Thieving, which often pops up to steal your stuff.  There's not much point to it if you don't have anything to steal, is there?

The magic system hasn't changed a great deal, except for one great addition: charm spells.  You can charm any of the monsters that attack you, and they will follow you around the dungeon and fight for you.  I don't think you can have more than two at a time, but it's cool to have minions to order around, and it does a lot for the survivability of low-level characters.  I've been getting a lot of use out of my meat shields.

You can see at the top of the screen that I have a charmed Vampire in my service.

There's more to The Game of Dungeons v8 that I haven;t mentioned yet, but I think I'll save it for future posts.  I'm having a blast getting back to this game: v6 was probably my favourite of the ones I've played so far in the blog.  It's certainly a welcome change from Moria.

Moria: Failure to Video

This is going to be a short post this week.  I'd intended to have some footage of myself playing Moria, but it turns out that making videos is harder than I thought.  Who knew?  There are millions of kids doing it on Youtube, how complicated can it be?  (As it turns out, very.)

So I don't have much to say, except for a quick update on my Moria progress.  You may recall from my last post that my character died.  In Moria, as in all games of the mid-1970s, death is permanent.  I spent a good few hours creating new characters, grinding for gold, and ultimately dying due to impatience.  Eventually, though, I managed to build a decent character, and I'm back to mapping new areas of the Forest dungeon.  I built his Wizardry score up to 20, which allowed me to join the Circle of Wizards, and much to my delight I gained instant access to the spell which allows me to teleport back to the city from anywhere.  It's great.  Now I can go back to the city instantly, and use the travel function in the Guild to instantly teleport back to my camp (you can set a camp anywhere in the game).  It's cut down on a lot of back-and-forth travel, and should speed up my progress a fair bit.

I'm not sure what's coming next for the blog, though.  I'll have another crack at some video, because I'd like to give a sense of what these games look like in action.  After that it's uncertain, because I'm running out of things to say about Moria.  It's probably time I added another game to my schedule.

Moria: All The Good Things

Occasionally while I'm playing Moria I feel as though I should be enjoying it more than I am.  Sure, it's empty and huge, and a bit of a chore to play, but the game has so many innovations, and the list of things appearing in a CRPG for the first time ever is pretty big.  I start to wonder if the problem lies with myself rather than the game.  Am I playing it wrong?  Am I unable to appreciate it because of my modern perspective?  Then I spend an hour mapping empty corridors, and I'm right back to blaming the game again.  Even so, there are a lot of cool features in Moria, and I've decided to list them below so that their significance isn't forgotten.

• Stats That Advance Through Use: Your four stats (Cunning, Piety, Valor and Wizardry) all increase as you win more battles, but only the ones that you use.  So if you rely on Valor all the time, that's the only score that will get higher.  It allows you to fine-tune your character to an extent, and decide what you want his strengths and weaknesses to be.  I've been focusing on keeping my characters as well-rounded as possible, but it seems almost inevitable that Valor increases the fastest.  Wizardry seems to be the hardest to increase, because casting spells always drains your Vitality.  It's hard to train your spellcasting when every spell you cast brings you closer to death.

• Character Classes:  Character classes, such as Fighter, Cleric, Thief and Magic-User, are a common element of Dungeons & Dragons style fantasy games.  Although in Moria you don't have a classes as such, there are four guilds that correspond to the classes named above.  In addition to that, the way your stats advance shapes what "class" your character most resembles.  If you mostly use Valor in battle, your character is closest to a Fighter; if you use Piety, you're a Cleric, and so on.  In the other three CRPGs I've played (pedit5, dnd and Orthanc) your character is a hybrid of all the classes.  Moria is the first CRPG that allows you to differentiate your characters based on anything other than equipment.

• Food: This is the first CRPG in which food and starvation are a factor. You begin the game with a supply of rations (about 16 months worth, which makes me wonder where I'm carrying it all), and can replenish it by purchasing more at one of the Supply Stores in the city.  If your food runs out, you slowly lose Vitality until you're dead.  It's got the basics covered, but one thing I've noticed is that, after killing certain monsters, my food stores increase.  Presumably my character is cutting them up for their meat. It's a super cool feature, and a surprising one to see in such an early game. There will be later CRPGs that include a food requirement, but very few of them will factor in the ability to cook and eat the corpses of your enemies.  I haven't paid enough attention to notice which monsters are edible, unfortunately.

• Water: As with food above, you begin the game carrying about 16 months worth of water, and if you run out you will slowly die of thirst. You can buy more from the Water Houses in the city.  Water Holes are scattered about the four dungeons with reasonable frequency (usually two or three per level). Some of these are good, but some are poisoned and will damage you if you drink from them.  It's not as innovative as the food thing above, but again I'm appreciative that the designers factored in the ability to find water in the wild.

• Aging: You begin at age 13, and gradually grow older as the game progresses.  The character I played for the longest got to age 23.  During that decade of life he mapped six levels of the Forest dungeon, which doesn't sound like a particularly efficient use of his time, but in his defense the years pass relatively quickly. The game's help file says that your character can live until at least 100, and after that there's a chance of  death every time you age a year. If you live long enough without dying, you can apparently become immortal.  This is pretty rad.

• Heirs: I've mentioned this in an earlier post, but your character can leave some of his possessions to his heir.  You need to make sure that you've stored some spare equipment at your guild, and if you do so your next character can go and claim it.

• Haggling: Not only is the equipment list extensive, but you can haggle with the shopkeeper for every single item on the list.  No matter the price he quotes you, you can bargain him down to about 2/3 of that, without fail.  It would save time, of course, if he'd just give you the lower price to begin with; it's not like your haggling can ever backfire.  The idea is a good one though, if not perfectly executed.

• Stealing: You can attempt to steal gold from any of the four guilds.  I haven't tried this yet, because if you get caught you are thrown in prison, and will only be released if someone pays your bail. I'm not sure if that's something I could do with a new character, or if it would require another player on the system to bail me out, so I haven't risked it. I might try it the next time I start a new character, just to see how much can be stolen (and how risky it is).

• String: One novel feature, that I've never seen in any other game, is the ability to tie a string to any area.  Later on you can simply press a few keys to instantly return to that point. It's a handy navigation tool, though it doesn't always work, as monsters will sometimes find your string and cut it.  I'm not sure if it works between dungeon levels, either.  It's failed every time I tried to do so, but it's possible that a monster cut the string.  I should do some more tests.

Everything on that list is a feature that is appearing in CRPGs for the first time ever.  I've probably missed some stuff, as well, because I'm constantly discovering new features.  It's a remarkably sophisticated game, it's just a shame that it's is so large.  If it was of a more manageable size, I'd probably be singing its praises.  There's also one other thing to remember: a big feature of Moria is that it's a multi-player game.  A lot of its features are intended for multiple players, to help them form groups and tackle the dungeon as a team.  I imagine that with a large group of players involved a lot of my problems with the size and emptiness of the dungeons would be alleviated. So while I'm not having the greatest time trying to finish this game, it's always good to remember the many things that Moria does right.  It may not be the most fun game I've played, but it is probably the most sophisticated and innovative.

Moria: Too Quick, Too Dead

A week ago, I had this post all planned out.  I was going to write about how I was playing this game all wrong.  I had a whole rant prepared about how preposterously easy it is, and how I needed to stop being so cautious and methodical.  My conclusion was that I had to stop mapping the game level-by-level, and start jumping ahead.  So I did, moving straight from level 6 of the Forest to level 11.

Then I died.

I've mentioned before that the groups of monsters grow larger the deeper you explore.  On level 6 I was fighting groups of five or six monsters.  When I went to level 11 I found myself up against groups of 10 or more.  (Now that I write it out, the numbers roughly match the dungeon level.  I'll have to pay more attention and see if this is actually the case.)  The actual combats weren't that much more difficult, they just became more time-consuming, and drained me of more hit points.  That wasn't the problem, though.  The problem, and I've noticed this a lot in my gaming, is that I got complacent.  The fights were so easy on the upper levels that I'd lost all sense of caution.  So I kept barreling along, not paying much attention to my Vitality, and I got murdered by a gang of Slasher Worms.

At least I got to capture this rad death screen.

Losing that character hurt.  I had managed to put together some good equipment, and my stats were high.  My Valor (the stat I relied on most often in combat) was up around 40.  I had moved up a rank in my guild (The Union of Knights), an effort which had required a donation of a million gold pieces.  (Supposedly being a member of this guild gave me the ability to behead my foes, but I never saw it in action.)  Going back to the beginning was difficult.  My character's progress had been earned by painstakingly mapping six levels of dungeon.  With a new character, I'm going to have to grind for ages before I'm strong enough to get back to where I was before.  I just want to explore new territory and keep mapping the game, but I'm stuck going back and forth over places I've already been.

To top it off, my new character didn't inherit my gear like I thought he would.  I had gotten it into my head that all I needed to do was create my new character right away after dying, and all of my weapons and armour would be passed down.  What I'd forgotten was that the gear to be inherited had to be stored in my Guild Locker (a place you can use to store equipment and treasure).  I hadn't put anything in my locker, preferring to sell my gear instead.  My own stupidity was forcing me to start over from scratch.

For my new character, I once again chose to start with a high Valor, mostly because this stat controls your weapon choice.  You need a Valor of 15 in order to wield a one-handed weapon.  Anything less, and you have to use two-handed weapons, and forgo the protection of a shield.  I don't think that I'm going to join the Guild of Knights this time, though.  One of the most frustrating parts of the game is travelling back to town, so I will probably join the Circle of Wizards.  That guild gives the ability to teleport back to the city, which will make the game a bit more enjoyable.

With the setback in progress I just had, I'm going to focus on Moria for the next while.  As I mentioned above, I'm not sure how to progress now.  Should I continue to be cautious and methodical, thereby stretching this game out interminably?  Or should I go hard, and delve deep as quickly as possible to go for the quick win?  For the moment, I'm going to grind cautiously until my new character gets as strong as my previous one was, and then I'll decide which play style to adopt.

Moria: More Maps

This post is for David Blair, who requested that I post my maps from Moria.  For everyone else who likes maps, enjoy.  For the rest of you, there's nothing else to see here.  What kind of inhuman monster doesn't love maps, anyway?

Wilderness

Forest level 1

Forest level 2

Forest level 3

Forest level 4

Forest level 5

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.