Zork: Agonising Progress

You may recall from my last post that this game had me snookered.  There were a number of puzzles I was stuck on, with little idea of what to do next.  To refresh your memory, those puzzles were:

1 - The Bank

2 - The Entrance to Hades

3 - The Machine at the Bottom of the Coal Mine

4 - Getting Down Aragain Falls with the Statue

5 - The Robot

6 - The Balloon

I've made progress on most of these, albeit painstakingly.  I am trying, desperately, to complete this game with no help.  I've been helped in that by vague memories of the commercial Zork trilogy, and I feel like I'm slowly getting there.

1 - The Bank: I figured this one out through dumb luck.  As I've mentioned before, in the bank is a portrait of the chairman, which is one of the treasures I need to collect.  The portrait can't be removed from the bank by the usual exits, but it can be taken through a curtain of light leading to the north.  In my last post I reported that this curtain took me to a small room with no exits.  If you wait long enough a gnome appears, asking you for something valuable to store in a deposit box.

I tried giving the gnome a treasure, and he teleported me to the waiting room.  You can exit the room to the south, which leads back to the regular dungeon.  This is one way of getting the portrait out of the bank, but it's not the best way.  You need to give up a treasure to do this, and as far as I can tell there's no way of getting it back.

If you don't give the gnome a treasure he eventually disappears, leaving you trapped in the room.  I spent a good long while in here trying every direction possible, searching for secret doors, praying, and even trying out the magic words from Colossal Cave Adventure.  Eventually I restored my game, and when I later returned I tried WALK THROUGH WALL, and got a message asking me which wall I wanted to walk through.  I typed SOUTH, and I was back in the bank, but I still wasn't abe to leave without the portrait.  Obviously I had missed something.

For some reason, walking through the south wall doesn't work after I meet the gnome.

I tried walking through the curtain again, wanting to find the gnome, but doing so didn't take me to the same room.  Instead I was inside the vault, with a stack of Zorkmids (the local currency).  I found out the hard way that hanging around in here results in a nasty death, so after a reload I tried again, scooped up the Zorkmids, and escaped by walking through the north wall.  Now I had two treasures, neither of which I could remove from the bank.  Walking through the curtain seemed to alternate between the room where 'd met the gnome and the vault.  I couldn't figure out what to do, so I left for a while and came back later.

When I did eventually come back, I found that walking through the curtain transported me to the waiting room, every time.  So I grabbed the portrait and the Zorkmids, walked through the curtain, and was able to escape the bank with both treasures.  I'm not sure what I did, but I'll take it.

2 - The Entrance to Hades: There's a gate to Hades, with spirits that block the entrance.  You may recall that I've had some trouble solving this puzzle.  I had the right idea, remembered from the commercial version: ring the bell, light the candle, and read the book.  And yet, no matter how many times I tried this it didn't work, and I was starting to get rather aggravated about it.

Rather than stoke my rage any further, I instead downloaded a different version of the game.  Previously I had been using the version found here, which had been written in Fortran.  The version I'm using now is based on the game as written in the MDL programming language.  I my have this wrong, but my understanding is that the game was written originally in MDL, and later translated to Fortran. Both versions were constantly revised through 1981, and although they are broadly similar there are some minor differences.  I've noticed some, like the MDL version having a welcome mat that says "Welcome to Zork".  The MDL version also responds to XYZZY and PLUGH (the magic words from Colossal Cave Adventure) by calling the player a cretin.

So, with a new version of the game at hand, the first thing I tried was getting into Hades.  Sure enough, when I rang that bell the spirits quailed, and I knew I was on the right track.  After I lit the candles and read the book the entrance was unguarded.  I have no idea why this didn't work in the version I'd been using previously, but it was gratifying to see that my memory had been correct.

What I found beyond the gate was weird, and the sort of weird that is very specifically rooted in 1978.  I've mentioned before that games of this vintage love to include self-referential stuff about coding and programmers, and this might just take the cake.  What I found was "The Tomb of the Unknown Implementer", with the heads of four game developers on spikes standing before the doors.  There was a pile of empty coke bottles, and a faded printout that revealed some code.  I haven't been able to figure any of this out yet, and it seems that I can't touch the heads or the crypt without being annihilated.  Something tells me that I probably need to come back here much later.

3 - The Machine at the Bottom of the Coal Mine: At the bottom of the coal mine is a machine.  It has a compartment where an item can be placed, and a start switch.that's too small to be manipulated by my fingers.  I suspected that I could place a lump of coal inside the machine, press the button, and it would be transmuted into a diamond.  To this point I hadn't been able to turn the switch, but I thought that perhaps something from my inventory would be useful.  The first thing I tried was the screwdriver, as it seemed the most logical option.  For once logic won out in an adventure game, and my suspicions were proved correct.  I had my diamond, and one more treasure to add to my list.

4 - The Robot: And now, to another machine, found in a series of rooms at the top of a magic well.  This machine has three buttons, and pressing any of them results in electrocution.  To the south of this room is a closet, and inside the closet is a crystal sphere (another treasure).  Taking the sphere causes a cage to drop, and the room to fill with deadly gas.  It's a predicament, but luckily there's a robot nearby that will follow your orders.  Getting the sphere is a simple matter of ordering the robot into the closet with you, then telling it to lift the cage once it drops.  From there it's a simple matter to take the sphere and escape.

I'm not sure what the purpose of the three buttons is.  You can tell the robot to press them, and they seem to change the intensity of the magnetic field in a room nearby.  I'm not sure if this is important, or if I've conquered this room already.

ADDENDUM: I figured out the buttons, mostly because commenter SyoShinozaki gave me a hint that they weren't related to retrieving the sphere.  One of the buttons (I think it was the triangular one) causes in increase in the magnetic field in the room closest to the machine.  After getting the robot to press it, I left to do some more exploring only to find that the Round Room (the one that sends you to one of seven random exits) had stopped spinning.  A box had also been jarred loose from somewhere, and inside it I found a violin.  Another treasure for my collection!

5 - Aragain Falls and the Statue: Near the top of Aragain Falls is a sandy beach, and digging in the sand with a shovel uncovers a statue.  Unfortunately, the only way to get to this location is via boat, and there's no way to sail back upriver.  The only other way on is over the falls (either in a boat or a nearby barrel), which results in a messy death.

The only other thing of note at the top of the falls is the end of a rainbow.  I had previously found the other end at the bottom of a canyon, and I was sure that the rainbow could be traversed somehow. 

In the commercial version of Zork I remember using a magical sceptre, but that item is nowhere to be found in this game.  The closest thing I had found to that was a broken stick, so I picked it up and waved it.  A message came up that said "Very Good", so I felt like I was on the right track.  I took the stick to the end of the rainbow  at the bottom of the canyon and waved it once more, and this time it caused the rainbow to become solid.  Now I could traverse it from the canyon to the falls, and it was a simple matter to get the statue back to the house where I store my treasures.  I even found a pot of gold on the way back, just lying on the ground.

The presence of an "NBC Commissary" on the rainbow is an odd one.  It can't be interacted with in any way, so I gather that it's an in-joke or a reference of some sort.  The NBC logo is sort of like a rainbow, I suppose, but beyond that, I got nothin'.

6 - The Balloon: There's a hot air balloon at the bottom of the volcano, but I hadn't figured out how to get it flying.  Obviously I needed to put something flammable in its receptacle, but none of the items I had tried so far worked (coal, timber, guano).  This honestly proved much simpler than I had expected.  I tried a newspaper, thinking that it couldn't possible produce enough fire to inflate the balloon.  But, real-life logic be damned, it worked, and I was soon rising up into the volcano shaft.

Trying to fly out the top of the shaft results in death, but there are two ledges you can land the balloon on.  You need to be careful to tie the balloon to a hook when you land though, or it will float away and leave you stranded.

The first ledge has a priceless Zorkmid coin on the ground, and a passage leading to a library.  There are four books in the library, each of a different colour, but I wasn't able to read any of them.  Instead I gathered them up and dumped them in the balloon's basket.

The other ledge you can land on leads to a bare room with a metal box embedded in the wall.  The box has a hole cut in it, but for whatever reason you can't reach inside, or take a peek.  I didn't figure this out right away, but I got there eventually.  You might remember that the house on the surface contained a brick made of soft clay.  Well, it isn't made of clay, and I found that out the hard way, by burning it with my torch.  One messy explosion later, and I had discovered that it was a plastic explosive.  It seemed that I needed a fuse if I was going to use it safely, and this came in the form of the wire coil found near the stream.  Thus armed I set about blowing up all sorts of things in the dungeon.  I even tried to blow up the Thief, but the timing on that proved to be too difficult.  Eventually I hit on the idea of blowing up the box, and that dislodged it from the wall.  Inside I found a crown, and a card warning me that the area was unstable.

What followed was a comedy of errors, because there are a few ways to die here.  First the room collapses.  Then the ledge outside collapses.  I died in both of those.  I also died because I forgot to untie my balloon from the ledge, and got pulled down.  After many saves and restores I made it to the bottom, but I think I messed up anyway.  The balloon gets destroyed she you land, and the four books that I had left in the basket were still in there.  I'll probably need to go back and replay this section again, because I'm certain those books are there for a reason.

Some Other Things I Worked Out:

Earlier in the game the Thief had opened the Jewelled Egg for me, revealing a clockwork canary inside.  I hadn't twigged initially, but when I was wandering around outside I heard some bird calls, and it all came flooding back to me.  I retrieved the canary, took it into the forest, and typed WIND UP CANARY.  Sure enough, it summoned a bird which dropped a brass bauble at my feet.  I'm convinced that this puzzle lay dormant in my memory because of the extreme mental anguish it caused me in my younger days.  It's a logical puzzle, and I think enough clues are there, but it took me forever to figure it out the first time.  It's almost the perfect adventure game puzzle: obvious in retrospect but so hard to figure out beforehand.  Well screw you canary, I won this time!

After finding the sphere, I tried looking into it, because what else is a crystal sphere for?  I honestly didn;t think it would do anything, but it gave me a vision of a Dreary Room, with a red glow and a door with a key in the lock.  I have no idea where this is or how to get there.

Treasures:

So far, I've found the following treasures:

• A priceless zorkmid coin
• A crown
• A ruby
• A burned-out ivory torch
• A beautiful brass bauble
• A clockwork canary
• A trunk of jewels
• A jewel-encrusted egg
• A chalice
• A huge diamond
• A white crystal sphere
• A statue
• A pot of gold
• A jade figurine
• A sapphire bracelet
• A pearl necklace
• A grail
• A platinum bar
• A crystal trident
• A gold coffin
• A stack of zorkmid bills
• A portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead
• A painting
• A bag of coins

That's 24 treasures.  Dare I hope that I only need 25 to win?  I have 481 points out of a possible 646, so it seems unlikely.  It's back to searching, I suppose, but I am somewhat out of ideas.  Hopefully next week's post won't just be a gif of me slamming my head through my keyboard.

Zork: Stumped

So, I'm stuck on Zork.  Stumped.  Bamboozled.  Stymied.  Confounded.  Snookered.  Writing synonyms for stuck because I don't really want to acknowledge how stuck I am.  This game has me buggered, and I have no idea what to do next.

That said, while I don't know what to do I have a fair idea of where I'm supposed to do it.  So, in the interests of clarifying my problems, I'm going to run through all of the things that are giving me trouble.  Perhaps writing and thinking about them will yield some answers.

• The Bank.  There are three things of interest in the bank.  One is a curtain of light that seems to be impassable.  The second is a huge stone block that seems to be some sort of magic vault.  The other is a portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead, the bank's chairman.  This portrait is one of the treasures I need to collect (I assume so, as picking it up increased my score), but an invisible force prevents me from taking it out of the bank.  ADDENDUM: I've been able to walk through the curtain by typing WALK THROUGH CURTAIN.  I emerged in a room with no exits.  A gnome appeared, then got impatient and left when I couldn't figure out what he wanted.  I wasn't able to find my way back out of this room, so it looks like I'm stuck again.
• The Entrance to Hades: There's an entrance to Hades that is blocked by spirits who won't let me pass.  I don't know what's going on here, because I know what to do: ring the bell, light the candles and read the book (all items found in the nearby temple).  I remember it from the commercial version, and I've even looked at a walkthrough (while carefully avoiding hints for other puzzles).  It has to be correct, but none of this works when I try it.  Perhaps I can't do this yet, or perhaps the version of the game I'm using is bugged.  Either way, it's seriously irking me.
• The Machine: Deep below the coal mine there's a machine that has a compartment and a switch.  I seem to remember from the commercial version of Zork that I can put a lump of coal in here and the machine will turn it into a diamond.  I have the coal, and it fits in the compartment, but I can't operate the switch.  The description makes it seem as though my fingers are too big.  I've tried eating a cake that shrinks me, but that didn't work.
• Aragain Falls: After riding an inflatable boat down the Frigid River, I dug up a statue on the beach (one of the treasures).  The trouble is that I can't get the statue back upriver, as the current is too strong.  Aragain Falls is nearby, but dropping over the edge is a fatally bad idea.  There's a barrel at the top of the falls, and I was able to ride it down the falls, but that killed me as well.  I wonder if I can put the statue inside the barrel and push it over?  (Nope, no luck there.  I can drop the statue in the barrel, but I can;t figure out a way to move the barrel.)
• The Balloon: At the bottom of a volcano there's a basket.  Attached to the basket is a large cloth bag, a braided wire, and a receptacle.  Obviously, this is a hot air balloon, but buggered if I can get the thing to launch.  I would think that I need to put something flammable in the receptacle.  I've tried a lump of coal, some timber, various pieces of paper, the torch, a match, and even a lump of bat guano.  None of these items fit inside, and I'm otherwise out of ideas.
• The Robot: This one will take some explanation.  In one of the more remote dungeon areas there's a machine with three buttons.  These buttons are electrified, and touching them kills you.  To the south of this machine there's a closet, and inside the closet is a crystal sphere.  Taking the sphere results in the activation of a deadly gas trap.  The logical answer here is to use the robot, which will follow your commands.  The robot can survive pressing the buttons, and they seem to activate a magnet or something in another room.  None of them deactivate the trap, that's for sure.  I need to explore this more, but nothing I've tried as yet has worked.

So that's where I am, stuck on six puzzles that all have me scratching my head.  I'll keep plugging away at it, and hopefully by next week I'll have made some sort of breakthrough.  I might download a different version as well, just to see if the bell/book/candle do anything at the Entrance to Hades.  Otherwise I'm not sure what I'll do.  I was enjoying this game, but now it's edging into frustrating territory.

Zork: The Importance of Details

As I was preparing to write this post in my head, I expected it to be a very short one.  Basically, the gist of it would have been that I explored a bunch, found a couple of new areas, and made no progress whatsoever.  I was stuck for the better part of the week, with seemingly no way forward.

Admittedly, this is not uncommon for me when playing adventure games.  There will invariably come a time when I have no idea where to go or what to do next.  And when I figure out the answer (or look it up in a walkthrough, as I am known to do) it's usually something that seems dead obvious in retrospect.  I had that experience just a couple of hours ago.

But first I should write about what I did before I got stuck: exploring the maze.  There's a tried-and-true method for exploring and mapping mazes-of-twisty-little-passages-all-alike: dropping items to mark each location.  It worked wonders in Colossal Cave Adventure and I figured it would work here.

It did, to an extent, but there's an added wrinkle that makes mapping the maze in Zork a bit more difficult: the Thief.  Not only does the Thief wander through and steal your valuables occasionally, but he'll nick any treasures left unattended as well.  One of the earliest things I learned during this process was not to use any treasures for location-marking, because they inevitably get stolen.  The Thief doesn't restrict himself to stealing treasure, either.  He'll quite happily pick up other items and drop them in another location.  Basically, he's a bastard, and as of 1978 he's probably the all-time greatest villain in gaming.

The first thing I found in the maze was the skeleton of a dead adventurer, along with a rusty knife, a burned-out lantern, a set of skeleton keys, and a bag of coins.  I had never realised it before, but this is probably meant to be the protagonist of Colossal Cave Adventure; the equipment fits, especially the dagger, and he is in the one area of Zork that's an almost direct lift from its predecessor.  You can take all of the gear, but taking the skeleton is a bad idea: a ghost pops in, appalled at your desecration of a fellow adventurer, and curses you so that all of your valuables are sent to the land of the dead.  (I assume that this means they're in Hades, but as I haven't found my way in there yet it's hard to say.)

Also in the maze is a way back to the surface: a dead end with a locked grate in the ceiling.  The dead adventurer's skeleton keys unlock the grate, and then you can climb up into the forest. This is probably the exit that I use the least, as it's just too inconvenient to find my way through the maze every time I want to enter the Underground.

Much deeper in the maze, and quite difficult to find, is the lair of the Cyclops.  The Cyclops is a hostile fellow, and wouldn't let me pass.  I tried fighting him a few times, but he was a lot tougher than the Troll.  Perhaps at a higher level I'd be able to defeat him, but at my current level I was no match.  Instead I fed him my sack lunch, which he ate greedily.  Upon finishing he declared that he was thirsty, so  gave him some water.  (It seems like every adventure game so far has involved the feeding of some animal or monster.  It's become my first tactic whenever a creature is blocking my path.)

I passed through the room by climbing a flight of stairs, and found myself in a most unexpected place: the lair of the Thief!  With all of my stolen stuff!  Alas, the Thief was there as well, and he killed me very, very quickly.  Still, finding the Thief's hideout felt like a real achievement, and it's going to be so satisfying when I can come back here and jam a sword through his neck.

With the maze done, and seemingly every location that I could access mapped, I spent the next couple of days butting my head against three puzzles: the Entrance to Hades, the Dam, and the Gold Coffin.

The gold coffin is a treasure found in the Egyptian Room.  It's heavy, but you can pick it up.  The problem comes when you try to move around: it's too big to fit through certain exits, so you can't get it to the surface via any of the means I had yet discovered.  I seem to recall using a sceptre to solve this puzzle in the commercial Zork, but it ain't here in this version.  I figured out the solution eventually, but not until I had opened the Dam.

As I mentioned in the last post, there's an Entrance to Hades, with the gate guarded by evil spirits.  I'm positive that the bell, book and candle I found elsewhere are used here, but no amount of faffing about with these items has produced any sort of reaction.  I still haven't figured this out, and it's starting to eat at me.

Finally, the Dam, which is the "obvious-in-retrospect" thing I mentioned earlier.  I spent a long time trying to manipulate the control panel to open the dam, using every tool I had found, but nothing worked.  I was sure that I needed to turn the bolt on the panel, and the wrench seemed to be the likeliest item to use, but nothing worked.  Eventually I stumbled across the solution, and it really made me feel like an idiot.

Here's the problem: when I'm mapping a text adventure, I often play in SUPERBRIEF mode.  You can set Zork so that it doesn't give you the room descriptions, and only mentions the important items in the room.  I had skimmed past the dam's Maintenance Room without reading in detail, and I had missed that the room has four buttons, each with a different colour.  They're only mentioned in the room description, and in SUPERBRIEF mode they aren't flagged at all.  I was undone by my own haste in mapping, and I felt like a right twit when I discovered my error.

Exploring the dam in Superbrief mode

The buttons were coloured blue, yellow, brown and red.  The blue button causes a pipe to burst, which slowly floods the room.  You'll die if you stay in the room for too long after this, and I haven't figured out a way to shut the water off.  The brown and red buttons are seemingly useless, though I'm not ruling out the possibility that I'll need to press them later.  The yellow button produces a simple click, but when you return to the main chamber of the dam after pressing it you'll find that the control panel is activated.  With that done you can easily turn the bolt with the wrench, and open the dam.

With the dam open, the reservoir is drained, and you can cross over it on foot.  The first thing to be discovered is a trunk buried in the silt at the bottom of the reservoir: it contains some jewels, and is one of the treasures you need to collect.  There's a small air pump on the far bank of the reservoir, which solves the problem of inflating the boat that can be found at the base of the dam.  (I left the boat until much later.)  The next chamber north, the Atlantis Room, contains a crystal trident, another treasure.  Opening the dam felt like a great achievement, and that was only enhanced by the instant rewards I was given for it.

The next thing of interest that I found across the reservoir was a mirror.  I had found a similar mirror on the other side, not far from the entrance to Hades, and naturally I figured that the two were linked.  I tried breaking this one, staring into it, and walking through it, to no avail.  Finally I touched it, and a rumbling let me know that something had worked.  Sure enough, I had teleported from one mirror to the next.

This teleporting trick proved to be the solution to getting the gold coffin to the surface.  I was able to drag the coffin across the reservoir to the second mirror, teleport to the first, and then make my way into the temple.  Another thing I had discovered earlier was that praying at the altar transports you to the forest, so it was a simple matter to take the coffin and put it in my trophy case (which must be bloody ginormous).

Another thing I found on the far side of the reservoir was a slide that goes all the way back to the Cellar, the first area you see when you enter the Underground.  One of the things that elevates Zork is the way that it foreshadows various things.  The slide had been visible when I first entered the cellar, but had been too steep to climb.  I've been wondering about it for a while, and sure enough I found the top of the slide later in the game.

I also found a room that contains a jade figurine being guarded by a Vampire Bat.  The bat will grab you when you enter, and deposit you in a different location (usually somewhere in the coal mine, I found).  It's not hard to figure out how to keep it at bay, though: if you have the garlic it won't come near you, and you can claim the jade figurine.

Nearby is a  Shaft Room that has a hole covered by a grate, with a basket that you can lower into the depths.  It seemed useless at first, but like everything in an adventure game it became vital later on.

There's a room that smells of gas, in which I found a sapphire bracelet.  I suspect that if I had come in here with an open flame I would have been in trouble, but with the lantern I was able to take the bracelet with no danger.  (ADDENDUM: Yes, entering this area with the torch is fatal.)

The coal mine is probably the most annoying part of the area over the reservoir.  It's another maze, though it's mercifully smaller than the first.  There's nothing in it except a ladder leading down to another area.

In the area below I found a lump of coal, some timber, and a passage that was too narrow to enter.  I could squeeze through if I dropped all of my inventory, but that meant leaving my lantern behind, which left me trapped in the dark on the far side.  The solution involved the aforementioned basket: by placing the ivory torch in the basket and lowering it, I was able to illuminate the area beyond the narrow passage.  I'm not sure how useful it is to do so.  What I found there was a machine, with a compartment I could open and some controls that looked too small for me to manipulate.  I suspect (or perhaps remember, it's always difficult to say with games I've played before) that I need to put the coal in here so that I can transform it into a diamond, but I haven't been able to get the machine to work.

That was where my post was going to end, but I just recently figured out a few more things, so if you can stomach a few paragraphs more I'll continue.

I found the time to inflate the boat, and float downstream on the Frigid River.  You can land the boat at any time, but if you head downstream too many times you'll go over Aragain Falls to a nasty death.  There are beaches on the east and west banks.  I never found anything on the east bank, but on the west I was able to dig in the sand with my shovel and uncover a statue.  It also leads to the top of Aragain Falls, where there is a barrel with the words GERONIMO written on it.  I tried getting in the barrel and going over the falls, but it was a bad (and fatal) idea.  There's no way back upstream, so I haven't figured out how to get the statue back to the trophy case.

Near where I found the coffin is a room with a large glacier blocking the western exit.  I tried to melt it with the torch, and much to my surprise the glacier transformed into a torrent of water and swept me to my death.  Forewarned, I went back and tried throwing the torch instead.  This time the glacier melted without killing me.  I found two things on the other side: a ruby (one more treasure, huzzah), and what appeared to be a hot air balloon.  I can't get the balloon to work.  It has a receptacle, where I assume I have to put some fuel.  I've tried the coal and also some timber, but neither of them fit.  Perhaps the bat guano might work?

I also managed to go back to the Thief's room and give him the jab in the neck that he deserves.  As you score points from gaining treasures your rank increases, and so does your combat ability.  I had about 200 points when I killed the Thief.  Aside from an immense feeling of satisfaction, there are a few benefits from killing him.  The most obvious is that he doesn't roll through and take your stuff anymore.  It also allows you to reclaim any treasures that he has stolen; in addition, he has a silver chalice in his lair that you can take.  And finally (something I discovered by accident) the Thief opens the jewelled egg, to reveal a clockwork canary inside.  The egg and the canary are separate treasures, so if you kill the Thief before he does this you can't finish the game.

An ill-fated attempt to kill the Thief

Finally, I found a new area that can only be accessed from the Round Room, which sends you to certain random locations when you exit.  In this new area is a door, and you need to answer a riddle before it will open:

"What is tall as a house,

Round as a cup,

And all the king's horses can't draw it up?"

I had no trouble with this one: the answer is a WELL.  Beyond the door I found a pearl necklace, and a bucket at the bottom of a well.  The bucket was too large to take, but I was able to get inside it.  I tried filling the bucket with water, and lo and behold it rose into another area.

The rooms at the top of the well felt weird even by the standards of this game.  The first was a Tea Room, which had four slices of cake on a table: a red slice, a blue slice, an orange slice, and a slice that had EAT ME written on it.  The orange slice made me explode, so I ruled that one out.  The blue one caused me to grow too big for the room, which crushed me to death.  The red one did nothing.  I figured that the one marked EAT ME would cause me to shrink, but buggered if I could figure out how to eat the thing.  The only descriptor it had was EAT ME, and typing EAT EAT ME CAKE was - unsurprisingly - not a command that the game understood.  I managed to eat it by taking all of the other slices into another room (which allowed EAT CAKE to function as a command) but that left me without access to the cake that would return me to normal size.  I eventually hit on two solutions.  The first was to put the other cakes into the sack and close it.  The second was to use the command EAT EATME CAKE.  It's not the most intuitive thing to type, is it?  There are other ways around it, thankfully, but there's little worse in a text adventure than knowing the solution but not being able to find the correct words.

Eating the cake shrank me down, and I was able to enter some cracks and find a vial of poison.  Eating the blue cake returned me to normal.  I'm not sure what the poison is for, or whether I'll need the remaining cakes, but I'm holding on to them anyway.

The next chamber contained a robot, with instructions for bossing the thing around.  The room beyond that had a huge machine, with three buttons.  Pressing any of the buttons resulted in my electrocution, so I probably need to use the robot.  Nearby was a dingy closet containing a crystal sphere, but taking the sphere activated a trap that killed me.  Investigating this bit is next on my agenda, but I haven't had time to figure it out just yet.

So, I'm still having a grand old time with Zork.  It's undoubtedly one of the best games I've played so far, and definitely the best text adventure on my list.  I also haven't spent much time being stuck: so far I've been making constant progress.  I'm not sure if it's that I'm getting better at adventure games, or if my subconscious memory is guiding me, but I feel really clever.  I hope the next few days don't do anything to discourage me.

I have about 250 points out of 585, which suggests that I'm about halfway through the game.  That's a bit disheartening, actually.  Given that I've found fourteen treasures, I had thought I was almost done.  Either there are more than the assumed twenty treasures, or there's more to the game than a scavenger hunt.  Hopefully by my next post I'll know.

Game 15: Zork (aka Dungeon) (1978)

We're all familiar with Zork, aren't we?  I suppose it's possible that there are younger readers who don't know the game, but it's fair to say that everyone reading this has either played Zork or played a game that's influenced by Zork.  It's one of the most important foundational games ever made, and its influence is impossible to escape.  It was even mentioned in one of the biggest movies of 2015.

Despite that, I think it's also fair to say that few of my readers would have played Zork in its original form.  The original Zork was developed on a PDP-10 mainframe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but when it was later released commercially it had to be split into three parts, because the game was too large for home computers.  The Zork trilogy is the form that most people are familiar with, but today I'm going back to take a look at the game in its primal form (more accurately, as it existed in 1980, which is close enough for my purposes).

The mainframe version of Zork was developed by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling.  Inspired by Don Woods' expanded version of Colossal Cave Adventure, they worked on it continuously from 1977 to 1979, though the basic game was playable in the Summer of 1977 and complete in 1978

The game's original title was Zork, but the version I'm playing is called Dungeon (there are so many games called "Dungeon" and "Adventure" that it gets very confusing, and I opt for the alternate name whenever possible).  "Zork" was at the time a nonsense word used by hackers at MIT as a name for any unfinished program.  The developers eventually called it Dungeon, but after a notice of copyright infringement from TSR (the oft-litigious publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG), they changed the name back to Zork.  Which is a much better name, to be honest.

This is the first game in the project that I've played before.  I completed the Zork trilogy about seven years ago, and I still remember bits and pieces of it.  Not enough that this is going to be easy, but there are certain puzzles that I have memorised, and certain others that I'm sure will come back to me.  I don't doubt that there'll be things I've forgotten completely.  I do recall that I got through Zork 1 without the need for a walkthrough, but Zork 2 and especially 3 were much too difficult for me. I'll try my best to complete this version of the game unaided.

The game begins in very familiar territory: a field near a white house with a mailbox.  The mailbox contains a leaflet, which gives a bit of an intro blurb to the game, and also indicates that more information can be gained with the HELP and INFO commands.  These commands display more text than will fit on a single screen, and it flashes by too quickly on modern computers, but luckily the version I got has a read.me file with the relevant text included.  HELP has information about the parser, and other aspects of how the game functions, while INFO outlines how the game is won.

I should discuss the parser a little more, because it is absolutely revolutionary. Every text adventure game to this point (and all the ones I've played that come after, I'm pretty sure) feature a simple two-word parser.  Zork expands on that significantly, as it allows the player to use prepositions, and understands more complex sentences.  You can even use multiple commands at once, separated by commas. It's easily the most complex text adventure parser created to date, and would set the standard for a while to come.

Not everything can be revolutionary, however, because the goal of this game is to gather treasures and return them to the trophy case inside the house.  Colossal Cave Adventure casts a long shadow, but it will be interesting to revisit Zork to see what it does to transcend its simplistic story.  Finding and storing the various treasures gains you points, of which there are 585 in total.  The backstory is similarly simplistic, at least in the beginning: there's a lost labyrinth beneath the ground that's full of treasures, and the player is an adventurer who wants to explore it.  It gets more interesting as the smaller details are fleshed out in bits and pieces during the game.

The opening section of the game takes place in a forest, with the goal being to get inside the white house and find an entrance into the underworld.  There are only two things of interest in the forest.  The first is a pile of leaves that is hiding a locked grate, but the grate can't be opened at this stage of the game. The other is a nest in a tree that contains a jewel-encrusted egg.  The egg is one of the treasures I need to collect, but I have a vague memory that there's something inside it, and that I need to open it somehow.  (This was confirmed when I later tried smashing the egg with a sword.  There's a delicate clockwork canary inside that did not survive the process.)

Aside from the egg and the grate, you can explore a canyon that leads to the end of the rainbow.  My vague memory tells me that I need to cross the rainbow at some point, but I can't do it yet.

Getting into the house isn't all that difficult.  The front door is nailed shut, and the windows on the north and south sides are barred, but there's a window on the east side that can be opened, allowing you to enter the kitchen.

The house has three rooms: the kitchen, the attic, and the living room. The kitchen contains a bottle of water, and a sack containing a lunch and a clove of garlic. (I have the sinking feeling that I need to keep my character fed...)  The living room contains some of the most important items in the game: an elvish sword, a lantern, and the trophy case where you store your treasures.  The attic has some important things as well, but it also has this iconic moment.

"It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."  It's a simple puzzle, but it's a good bit of design in that it gives the player a relatively safe place to learn about the lamp, and the dangers of not using it.  Later in the game this message pretty much means you're dead: once all of your light sources run out, the game is as good as over.

Once it's lit, you can see that the attic contains some rope, a knife, and a clay brick.  I'm pretty sure that the clay brick isn't here in the commercial Zork.  (Speaking of things that are new to this game, the living room also has a newspaper that details recent updates to the game. It is dated 18th July 1980, and notes that the endgame is here and that there have been some puzzling discoveries near the thief's hideaway.  It also provides an address where people can send written complaints, and highly discourages personal visitors.)

The only other thing I haven't mentioned is the rug in the living room.  It's not important in itself, but underneath it is a trapdoor, with stairs leading down into darkness. This is where the game proper begins, and also where it starts to feel dangerous: when you descend, someone closes and bars the door above you.  The elvish sword also starts to glow with a faint blue light.

Those who haven't read Tolkien might think that the sword has just become a handy source of light, but the rest of us know better. In Tolkien, elvish swords glow blue in the presence of orcs; in Zork, being one area away from any enemy will cause the sword to glow as a warning.  In this case the sword is glowing because there's a troll in the next room.

Zork takes a cue from Colossal Cave Adventure here, in that it has enemies that can be killed by brute force.  There's nothing tactical about the combat in Zork: you simply type KILL TROLL WITH SWORD until one or the other of you dies.  Still, the combat text is rather entertaining, and I find the battles to be tense and gripping.  This version of the game accompanies the text with a whole lot of numbers, but I can't figure out what they're trying to tell me.  The Troll isn't all that hard to beat, but there are tougher enemies to come.

There's not a lot you can do before killing the troll.  the first area I explored featured an artist's studio and a gallery. The gallery contained a painting, and the studio had a chimney that led back up to the kitchen.  The chimney was too narrow for me to climb with all of my stuff, but with only the painting and the lamp I was able to make it through.  I'm not sure why I can't get back down the same way, but at least it's not to hard to get back to the studio (after placing the painting in the trophy case, of course).

The only other area open before killing the Troll is the bank. I only have the barest memories of this place, and can't remember how to solve it at all (it's actually from Zork 2, so the commercial games really did rearrange things).  It features a couple of waiting rooms, a viewing room for looking at safety deposit boxes, a chairman's office with a portrait, and a giant stone cube.  There's a also a curtain of light that I wasn't able to pass through.  I haven't touched or investigated anything in here just yet, as I usually like to map out a text adventure before I start solving puzzles.  I'll get back to this, but the uneasy feeling I got when I first found the place is making me nervous.  I think my subconscious memory is trying to remind me how hard this was to solve the first time I played it.

Past the Troll the game opens up, with a lot of areas to explore.  It's large for a text adventure of this vintage, and I expect that I've only mapped a fraction of it.  At first the areas past the Troll are mostly featureless: passages, ravines and canyons.  It doesn't take long to find interesting stuff though, which I'll lay out below.

• I'll get the most frustrating thing out of the way first: yes, this game has a maze.  A maze of twisty passages, all alike, just like the one in Colossal Cave Adventure. It can be mapped by dropping items to mark the locations, but Zork has an added complication: the thief.  Occasionally he wanders through to steal things, or to pick them up and drop them in different places.  I'll discuss him later, but needless to say he's one of the most hated antagonists in my gaming career.   I haven't finished mapping the maze yet, so I'll discuss this more in my next post.
• There's one area with a shaft leading down, and a railing at the edge of the hole. You can't descend unaided, but you can tie a rope to the railing and climb down that way.  At the bottom is a flaming torch that never goes out. The brass lamp from earlier has a finite lifespan, but I'm pretty sure that this torch burns forever.  It's handy, but it's also a treasure, and the aforementioned Thief loves to steal it and leave you in the dark.
• One room has a mirror that covers the entire south wall. I'm not sure what this is for yet. I broke the mirror, but there's nothing behind it.
• Another room has a wall covered with a large glacier.  Presumably I need to melt it.  I've found some matches, but I doubt they are enough to get the job done.  Perhaps I could try the torch?  I get the feeling I'll need something more substantial.
• The Egyptian Room contains the gold sarcophagus of Ramses II.  It's empty, and too heavy to move, but I'm positive that I need to get it back to the surface somehow.
• The Loud Room contains a platinum bar, but anything you do in this chamber besides leaving the room results in an echo. If you type GET BAR (or anything else for that matter) the game simply repeats your command back at you. This is a puzzle that I remember.  Typing ECHO results in a shift in the room's acoustics, and after that you can pick up the bar without trouble.
• There are quite a few rooms in and around a dam.  The lobby contains some matches, and a guidebook that identifies the dam as Flood Control Dam #3.  It also provides what will probably be the player's first glimpse into the backstory of Zork, with mentions of The Great Underground Empire and the tyrant Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive. A nearby maintenance room contains a wrench, a screwdriver and a tube of "magic gunk", while at the base of the dam you will find an inflatable boat and a broken stick. There's also a control panel with a metal bolt and a green plastic bubble on it, but I haven't investigated this yet.  As mentioned before, I've been mapping.  Puzzles can wait.
• The Temple has a number of interesting objects in it. The first is the Grail, which I haven't found a use for yet but is no doubt one of the treasures. Further in I found a bell, and on an altar a book and some candles. The book has a rather bizarre message about the phrase "hello sailor", which as I recall becomes important later. The mythological significance of finding a bell, a book and a candle isn't lost on me, but I haven't figured these out yet.
• Near the temple there's an entrance to Hades, with a pile of corpses nearby. The gate is guarded by evil spirits who won't let me pass. I vaguely recall that the bell, book and candle are used here, but I don't know how or in what order. I'll keep experimenting.
• I've also found a shovel, some bat guano and a shiny wire.  I've no idea what any of these are for yet, but being a D&D player guano always reminds me of the fireball spell. The Zork team were definitely D&D players, so we'll see if this is where they're going.
• The only other thing of note is not a location, but a character: the aforementioned Thief.  Occasionally he'll wander in as you're exploring, and lounge around casually. You can sometimes get away from him, but more often than not he will steal your treasures and escape. Fighting him is a bad idea at this stage of the game - he's quite deadly with his stiletto knife.  He's much like the pirate from Colossal Cave Adventure, only more threatening and more capable of interaction with the game world.

That's the extent of my exploration so far.  The game hasn't really done anything yet that Colossal Cave Adventure didn't do before it, but it does so with wit and charm. The best games in a genre rarely do things first: more often than not they build on the innovations of an earlier game. That's exactly what Zork does: it takes the best parts of Colossal Cave, improves them, and adds its own distinctive character.  It's great fun.

Castle: Victory!

I'm done with Castle, and to be honest I spent more time on it than I probably should have.  Sure it has a lot of historical curiosity, and a touch of historical significance, but those don't always translate into a great game.  Castle is... let's say it's interesting.  It has certain elements that would carry forth into gaming through much of the 1980s, though I wouldn't necessarily say that they are positive ones.  I'll explain later once I touch on the endgame.

The first thing I should say is that it's surprisingly complete.  I've played William Crowther's original version of Colossal Cave Adventure (though I didn't blog about it), which is the only comparable text adventure to Castle in terms of vintage.  That game is unfinished.  It has no ending, there are exits from locations that don't lead anywhere, and there's at least one section that crashes the game.  It's also of great historical significance, but the original version wasn't the one that was widely played and circulated.  I was expecting something similar from Castle, but instead I got a game that was much larger and much more complete.  That's probably because Peter Langston worked on it for years after its initial release, but I can only play the games in front of me.  Without the original code for Castle we'll never know.

That's not to say Castle is totally complete.  It has a number of bugs in the code, and I took it upon myself to roll up my sleeves and fix them, which was a tricky thing to do without violating the workings of the game.  I'm pretty sure I managed it, and I may just have the only version in which you can legitimately reach the true ending.  I'll mention the changes I made as they come up.

At the end of my last post I had just found the entrance to a missile silo, and upon opening the doors I'd ended up splattered on the front of a launching rocket.  When I went back there this time, I paid a bit more attention to the sign on the door.  It read: "...ILO.  To la...open doo...uck!."  I took a stab at filling in the blanks, and this time when I opened the door  I typed DUCK.  I wasn't expecting this to work, but not only did I dodge the missile, I found myself in the Missile Control Room.  (You can read the full message by lighting a match found later in the game, and that makes the puzzle a lot more explicit.)

(There's an error message that crops up in the shaft, to do with the OPEN DOOR command.  I fixed it by adding a backslash or two, and now the message doesn't appear.  Missing punctuation is the most irritating thing about coding, and the easiest to miss.)

Blowing up the portcullis

There was a screen flashing here, asking me for a target.  I tried a few things, which involved multiple restarts, as you only get one shot.  I couldn't blow up the moat, or the bridge, or the honeymoon cottage, or even the castle drawbridge.  Eventually, after going through my notes, I hit on the correct answer: the portcullis that had been blocking my way south.

The only exit from the Missile Control Room was a hatch leading up, which exited at the Crossroads where the game begins.  (I fixed a bit of code here as well.  Exiting the Control Room is supposed to change the Crossroads so that the hatch is visible, but the original code didn't point to the right place.  It works now.)

I retraced my steps back through the castle courtyard, and found that the portcullis was a smoking ruin.  To the south were some gardens, where I found some jewels and an ugly frog.  Kissing the frog did nothing, so I took it with me instead.  The jewels end up being useless in the game.  The frog is part of the endgame, which I'll discuss once I get there.

Finding the frog.

There seemed to be nowhere else left to explore.  I couldn't figure out how to cross the moat, or open the drawbridge.  The shaft leading up to the missile silo led downwards as well, but I couldn't find a way to do so safely.  I figured that the only thing down there would logically be missiles, anyway.

So, with nothing left to do I set about testing every possible exit direction in every location.  I normally do this as part of my standard mapping procedure, but for whatever reason I was a bit lax with the early stages of this game.  Eventually I found what I was looking for at the bottom of the well: a secret passage leading north-east.

This led to a secret stairway, with four locations and four buttons.  Two of the buttons are bad, and will block the way back to the well.  If you press these, your escape later on will be much more difficult to figure out.  The other two open secret doors that lead into the castle proper.  There's also a passage that leads into a small maze of prison cells, which can be completely skipped; there's nothing in them.

The castle is big, with a lot of locations that don't really serve any purpose.  Instead of laboriously detailing my exploration of it, I'll hit the highlights in point form.

• The king's bedroom has nothing interesting in it, but one of the doors from the secret stairway leads in here.  Nearby is the Queen's Boudoir, where a gossamer gown can be found, and a Sanctum which contains a signet ring.  Neither of these items is useful.
• Close to those rooms is a Guest Chamber with a gideon bible.  Trying to take the bible results in a snarky message about how it was put there to help people renew their faith, or whatever, but reading it gives you a clue that tells you where to use the match.
• A storeroom in the castle has a sack of potatoes in it, which is essential for completing the game without starving to death.  You can still die of starvation, but the potatoes are the most filling food you can find in the game.  (Not that it matters, because the game lets you carry on playing after starvation anyway.  I never bothered to try and fix that in the code, because it was much too beneficial.)
• The lower level of the castle features a mead cellar and various kitchens and rooms for servants.  There's a wine bottle in the cellar, and a knife and a match in the kitchen.  The match can be used to read the sign in the Missile Silo, as I mentioned before, and the knife can be very useful in escaping the castle if you've blocked the Secret Stairs.  The wine bottle doesn't have an explicit use, but I like to drop it in the Armory (see below).
• There's a throne room, but you have to be careful when approaching it, as any weapons you're carrying will disappear, and I haven't been able to find them again.  There's a sign that warns you about it, though, so it's not unfair.  Sitting on the throne opens a door to the Secret Stairs, but you can't pass back through it the other way, and if you've pressed the wrong buttons in the stairwell you can trap yourself forever.
• The Castle Armory is curious, in that all of the weapons are held to the wall by a magnetic or magical force.  Dropping an object in the room causes the game to crash, and this is where I had to go in an do some tinkering with the code.  I think Langston's intention was that dropping any object would trigger the C4 explosive on the wall, blowing everything up except for a mace that you can then take.  That's how it works after my rewriting of the code, though I'm not 100% sure it works in the way originally intended.

Blowing up the armory.

• The drawbridge is up, and the chain that lowers it is too rusted to be moved.  You can break it with the aforementioned mace, and once opened the drawbridge leads to the portcullis area.
• There are two other obstructions in the castle.  One is a barred door leading from the Grand Ballroom to the Courtyard, and I never figured out how to open this.  The other is a wooden panel that blocks the passage between the Guard's Quarters and the Banquet Hall.  This can be cut through with the knife.
• The castle has an East Tower and a West Tower.  In the East Tower is a 30-foot-long wig, and in the West Tower, there is a distressed damsel.  Both of these are crucial to the end-game.

Once I found the damsel, I figured that the goal of the game was to rescue her, or perhaps win her love or something.  I spent a good deal of time messing about, trying to give her various items to no avail.  The first thing I tried to do was TAKE DAMSEL, but the message I got was a surprising one: "Don't be lewd! (This is neither the time nor the place)"  This implied that there was a time and a place, and believe me, I was correct.

Eventually I hit on the correct command: CARRY DAMSEL.  Which is bullshit, really.  It's what I was trying to do in the first place, only the game blocked me to make a sex joke about it.  I don't really appreciate puzzles that involve exact, precise word usage, but I'm pretty sure I have a lot of them in my future if I'm going to continue with this blog.

The damsel told me that if I could get her to the Crossroads she'd reward me, but there was a problem: as soon as I picked her up the stairs leading back down were blocked by a stone wall.  This one wasn't hard to figure out, given the wig in my possession and the fact that the tower was named after Rapunzel.  I tried CLIMB WIG, which allowed me to climb out the window and down.  Not all the way down, though: the wig frayed while I was climbing on it, and I had to scramble through a window back into the castle.  I was past the wall, but I still had to get out of the castle.

An improbable rescue.

There are a few ways to do this.  If you haven't blocked the Secret Stairs, you can just open the door by sitting on the throne, and climb up out of the well.  You can use the same exit by dropping into the maze of prison cells from the Armory.  If you've blocked the Secret Stairs, things get a bit trickier: you have to blow up the Armory to get the mace, and then use the mace to open the drawbridge.  If you've already blown up the Armory, it gets even trickier, as that area the becomes impassable.  The only way through is to cut the wooden panel with the knife, which will get you back to the drawbridge.

Once out of the castle it's simple to get back to the Crossroads, at which point the endgame begins.  Well, one of the endgames, because this game has multiple end sequences.  If you return with the princess, you get the following:

Well, if I must...

If you return with the frog, you get the following:

If you insist.

The game, of course, wants you to have sex with whoever you rescued, and it won't take no for an answer.  In fact it won't accept any other command, except for the one that results in sexytimes.  Reluctantly I entered the command, and if I wasn't wryly irritated enough, I was dumped out of the game before I could read the victory message.  I hate it when games do this, just pure, unadulterated white-hot hatred.  I've sunk hours of my life into this thing!  I've even bloody re-coded your stupid game so that it works!!  Let me read the damn victory message!!!  Anyway, once my blood cooled I went and found the message in the source code.  It was totally worth it:  "Oooooooh!  Aaaaaaaaah!  Congratulations, you are an Expert Wanderer!"  Yep.  Totally worth it.

That's what I was talking about in the opening, with the elements that would carry forward into 1980s gaming.  There are a lot of games which treat sex as a reward, and they usually have an unpleasant, puerile "boys' club" atmosphere about them.  I'm not opposed to sex in games, really.  I love Leisure Suit Larry.  As with most things, the trick is in the execution.  The treatment here is in the puerile camp, and especially grating in that it comes in right at the end with little warning.  Despite that, I have to give Castle some props here, in that you have your pick of genders.  Your own gender isn't even specified, so it's quite progressive in that regard.

Speaking of progressive, there's one more ending I haven't mentioned.  You can rescue the princess, and you can rescue the prince...  But what if you save them both?  Well, Peter Langston thought of that as well.

Um, what if I just turn around while you guys do your thing?  Would that be okay?

Well, I say he thought of it, but he didn't exactly implement it.  The ending is in the source code, but there's no way to access it as written.  In the code there's a line that displays the message "Flirt!" if the frog and the princess are in the same area.  What it also does is change the princess into a frog, which makes the ultimate victory unattainable.  I'm not sure if this was intended, or simply a bug that never got ironed out.  Well, I got in there and fixed it, because I'm persistent in that way.

And what was my reward?  I'm glad you asked!  "OOOOOOOH!!!  AAAAAAAAAH!!  Congratulations, you are a Master Wanderer!"  A Master Wanderer indeed.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: The story of this one is a bit garbled, and only comes into focus right at the end.  Even then, it doesn't make much sense.  The castle and its surroundings are quite well realised, even with the incongruous missile silo.  Even so, I can't quite bring myself to rank this as highly as Colossal Cave Adventure in this regard.  Yeah, I'm knocking it down for the sex ending.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: The prince and the damsel are the only characters here, and they only exist as a reward for the player.  Not even being tied for "the world's best lay" can earn them an extra point.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Text adventures never score well here, but I'm willing to give them extra points when they're well-written.  Castle has some good descriptions and writing (victory messages notwithstanding), about on a par with Colossal Cave Adventure, so I'll rate them as equals.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: For the most part the game works well, but on the whole I would say that the parser isn't as strong as that in Colossal Cave.  Then there are the bugs.  When I have to dig into the code and fix a game, points are going to be lost.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Challenge: To be honest, the main challenge here was in getting the code to work properly.  As for the game itself, I feel like it had a decent balance, marred perhaps by a couple of puzzles that required very precise language.  It's also a little loose in its design, in that certain things that feel like they should be puzzles can be easily skirted around.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: I suppose I have to give this one top marks, don't I?  It was created in 1974, after all.  There is the caveat that it was updated throughout the 1970s, but even in 1980 having multiple endings was something of an innovation.  Rating: 7 out of 7.

Fun: I didn't have a great deal of fun playing this, but I really enjoyed digging into its inner workings.  That shouldn't factor into things, though.  To be honest, any game with bugs ought to lose points in this category.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Castle doesn't get the bonus point; I won't be coming back to this one ever again.  The scores above total 19, which gives me a final rating of 38.

Final Rating: 38 out of 100.

That places it below Adventureland and above Pirate Adventure.  From a historical perspective it perhaps deserves a higher spot, but to be honest I wasn't feeling this one.  If it had been properly functional it would have scored higher.

Speaking of which, if anyone wants the re-coded version of the game they should shoot me an e-mail, and I'll be happy to send the text files across.  You'll still need the rest of the Wander files, though (which can be found here).

ADDENDUM:

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

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

Puzzles: I remember this game having some okay puzzles, but nothing too clever.  It also doesn't help that I had to jigger with the game code to get certain things to work. Am I solving the puzzles as they were intended?  I'm not entirely certain.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 1. As possibly the first game of its kind, this probably deserves the full 2 points. But so few people played it, and it's barely remembered today.

Castle's RADNESS Index is 29 out of 100. That puts it 8th so far, and 4th of the adventure games I've played so far.  It's only 1 point below Pirate Adventure, and would have topped it if the code was functional.

NEXT: ZORK!  I've found a port of the original mainframe version, which I'm dating as 1977 even though the game was modified up through 1980.  Anything to move this up in the list, really.

Game 14: Castle (designed using Wander) (1974)

This one requires a bit of explanation.  When I came across the excellent blog Renga in Blue, I learned that I had missed a whole load of adventure games when compiling my list.  Not only do I now have another ten games to complete before I'm done with 1978, I also have a few from earlier years that I haven't played.  I'm going to have to backtrack, and the first game that I'm playing is Wander, from 1974.

Wander is a text adventure.  More accurately, it's a system for designing text adventures, and it predates Colossal Cave Adventure.  Colossal Cave is often touted as the first ever text adventure, but that's not accurate.  It's a more influential game in the grand scheme of things, but it's not the first.

Wander was designed by Peter Langston, a teacher at Evergreen State College in Washington DC.  He had already designed the strategy game Empire before beginning work on Wander, and later in life he was instrumental in helping to start up Lucasfilm Games (which later morphed into Lucasarts).  Wander is probably nothing more than a footnote in his career, and for decades it was considered to be lost.  Apparently all it took to rediscover the game was an e-mail to Langston (I'm pretty sure there was more to it than this, but I'm hazy on the details), and once that was done several more versions turned up in quick succession.  Wander was revised continuously into the the early 1980s, and I believe that I'm using a version from 1981.  Anyone who wants to have a crack at it should follow this link.

Several games were designed using Wander, and today I'll be tackling the first of those, Langston's own effort called Castle.  Langston wrote a few other games, and there's at least one by another author, but for the moment I'll concentrate on Castle, ostensibly the first text adventure ever made.

From the outset, it's not clear what my goal is.  The opening begins with my character being sucked into a television, and appearing at a crossroads in a forest.  Without any purpose in mind, I spent my time exploring and mapping, which is my usual MO at the start of any text adventure.  The first thing I noticed is that the quality of the writing is much higher here than in any of the other text adventures I've played.  Colossal Cave Adventure was the previous holder of this crown, but Castle crushes it in this regard.

Before I started exploring, I checked my inventory.  I was carrying the channel selector knob from my TV, and a guide.  Reading the guide provided me with basic instructions for moving around and interacting with the game world.  I wasn't sure what the knob was for, and I haven't found a use for it yet.  At first I had thought it was a button from a TV remote, but then I remembered that the game was made in 1974, and that it was probably a big chunky dial broken off the TV set.  (A TV set that probably had legs, and fake wood panelling on the sides.  Old TVs are rad.)

I also tried typing SCORE, and got the following message: "Keeping score is an outdated, materialistic concept, don't you think?"  I smiled, but I'm always slightly surprised to see games of this vintage being so self-aware of the genre conventions.  No doubt this was added to the game in a later revision, after Langston played Colossal Cave Adventure.  I also encountered a reference to the magic word XYZZY, and an admonition that this was "an old, worn-out magic word".

The opening area is quite small (a 3x3 grid), with obstacles blocking my progress on every side.  To the west was a bridge that wasn't able to support my weight.  To the north was a lake that was too wide for me to swim across.  To the east was a wall, with a locked gate.  And to the south was a forest that functioned much like a maze.  Also of note was a river to the north-west, and a well to the south-east.  In the river was a boat, but the current was too strong for me to use it.  I was also unable to climb down the well, as there was no rope.

I was stuck for a little bit, with no obvious way to progress.  I also kept dying; the game has a starvation counter that runs down quite quickly.  I've been able to postpone starvation with an apple that I found near the woods, and some strawberries found in the woods, but those don't last long.  The woods themselves were also quite annoying until I figured them out.  At first I thought they were a maze, similar to the ones in Colossal Cave.  In reality most of the exits just loop back to one location, and the only way out is to keep going east or north-east.

(A note about starving to death: it doesn't end the game.  I got a message telling me that I was dead, but I was still able to continue exploring after that.  I'm not sure if this is bad design, or just a glitch in the version I'm using.  I'll take it though, it makes exploring the game a lot easier.)

Starving to death is a temporary setback.

Eventually I tried taking the boat, and this worked.  I was stumped a bit here, because GET isn't recognised by this game, and that's the command I always use to pick up items.  The command that this game uses is TAKE, which took me a while to figure out.  But once I had the boat, everything fell into place.  I dropped the boat in the lake, and was able to sail to an island with a honeymoon cottage.  There I found a rope, which I was able to use to climb down the well.  At the bottom of the well were some keys, and I was able to use those to unlock the gate.  I was through the initial area, and into the castle's courtyard.

The courtyard was another area of roughly 3x3.  The castle proper is blocked off by a moat, which is full of piranhas, crocodiles and giant leeches.  There's a passage leading south, but that's blocked by a portcullis.  There are only two things of note in this area: a pear orchard, and an outhouse.

The pear orchard is pretty simple.  It contains a dead cow, and some pears that you can pick.  It seems to me that the pears are poisonous, and sure enough the game doesn't allow you to eat them.  I haven't found a use for them just yet.  You can't take the dead cow.  I thought about dumping it into the moat to distract the piranhas, but I don't think it's possible.

The outhouse contains a balloon, and also something of a trap.  If you're carrying the keys with you, you will invariably drop them in a toilet, and they are seemingly lost forever.  The gate closes, and as far as I can tell that leaves you stuck on this side of the wall with no way to progress in the game.  It's a little irritating, and the kind of trap you can only avoid by falling for it once and reloading.  There's a ladder elsewhere in the courtyard, and I would have thought that could be used to scale the wall, but if it can I haven't figured out how to do it yet.  (Addendum: All you have to do is type CLIMB LADDER to get back over the wall, which makes me feel a little foolish.)

Attempting to retrieve my keys, with surprising and hilarious results.

Upon finding the balloon, I instantly had an idea.  I took the balloon back to the bridge that couldn't support my weight, and sure enough it was filled with helium, and made me light enough to cross over.  The area on the other side was small.  The only thing I found there was a shovel, and a patch of forest that was really difficult to escape from.  I starved to death while trying to find my way out, but through persistence (i.e. just going north over and over again) I was able to get back to the bridge.

At the bottom of the well had been a sign that read "Can you dig it?", which was an obvious clue.  I went back there to dig with my shovel, and unearthed a glass tunnel.  Further along I came to a hatch, which opened into a missile silo.  Given the name of this game I'd expected that this was a fantasy setting, but the missile silo really threw me off there.  To be honest, this makes things a little more interesting.  I wasn't able to explore further though, because a missile blew through the shaft and killed me.  This time I was really dead, as the death message just kept repeating no matter what I did.

 

That's where I left it.  I'm not exactly stuck, but I don't have much of a clue what I'm supposed to do in that silo, or even if I'm supposed to be there.  I'm actually pretty keen to get back to it.  Not having an explicit goal intrigues me, as does the incongruous discovery of the missile silo.  I'm probably building it up too much in my mind, but these unanswered questions make me feel like this game has a stronger story than any other text adventure I've played for the blog.  It's not just another treasure hunt, and that's really refreshing.