Back-Tracking: The Scott Adams Graphic Adventures - Adventureland, Pirate Adventure, and Mission Impossible

A while ago, when I was playing Dog Star Adventure, I had the bright idea to explore the different ports for the games that I played.  I still think it's a good idea, and one that helps my blog stand out a little by exploring some versions of games that don't get brought to light all that much. I'm also kind of fascinated by the minor differences that old games have between platforms, so it helps keep my interest up on the blogging side of things.  In the era that I'm currently in it's perfectly viable, as the games - particularly adventure games - are short, and can be blasted through in a matter of minutes once you know all of the solutions.  Later on it's going to be untenable, because the games will just get too big, but I plan to keep it up for as long as I can.

While I was playing through ports of Scott and Alexis Adams' Voodoo Castle, I stumbled across one for the Commodore 64 that had graphics.  Through that I discovered that all of the Scott Adams adventures were re-released with a graphical upgrade, which was something of a revelation for me.  I grew up with a Commodore 64, and amassed a sizable collection of ill-gotten games over the years, but I never encountered these.  I wasn't planning to go back and play through ports of the games I'd already covered, but for ones as significantly different as these I thought I'd make an exception.

SCOTT ADAMS' GRAPHIC ADVENTURE #1: ADVENTURELAND (1982)

The original cover was much more representative
of the game, but this one has it's good points.

This version of the game was released in 1982 for the Apple II, but because I found these games through playing a Commodore 64 port of Voodoo Castle, I decided to play the C64 version.  I just had a quick check, and my usual sources didn't have this for the Apple II anyway, so my options were limited.

For those who need a quick reminder, Adventureland was Scott Adams' first game, and his attempt to get a game similar to Colossal Cave Adventure onto a personal computer.  It's a treasure hunt with a loose fantasy theme: there are dragons but there are also references to Paul Bunyan, so the mythology is a hodge-podge. I liked it at the time, and I think I'd still rate it as the best of his games I've played so far.  My initial post on the game is here.

The opening screen of Adventureland.

I have to admit, I had a lot of trouble with this game at the beginning.  As I explored the opening wilderness, it appeared to me that the graphics had completely replaced the room descriptions.  Nothing was described, and none of the items you could take or interact with were even mentioned.  I was all set to come into this review with a scathing take-down, until I accidentally bumped the Enter key.  If you hit Enter without typing a command, it toggles between the graphics and the room descriptions.  You can actually play this game completely without the graphics, if you prefer, but you certainly can't do it the other way around.

Based on my hazy memories of Adventureland - which I jogged by making a Trizbort map of my old notes - the game hasn't been changed.  If there are any changes, they're almost certainly very minor ones.  I was able to play through this with little trouble (once I got past my initial issues), and even the random elements like the bees dying in the jar didn't give me any hassles.

This is meant to be a hollow tree stump.

For the RADNESS Index, I'd rate this a point higher in Aesthetics.  The graphics aren't spectacular, and there are definite points where they really don't give a good representation of what's meant to be in the room.  They're not all that interactive, either.  But despite all those issues, it's still an aesthetic step up from the all-text version.  As for Mechanics, I'm torn on it.  I found the constant toggling between graphics and room descriptions a chore, but you can actually play the game in its original form if you ignore the graphics.  I'll rate it about the same as I rated the original.  If I take away the game's bonus point for historical significance, that leaves it with a RADNESS Index of 38, just one point higher that the original version.  That seems about right.  It's exactly the same game, with just a dash of extra visual flair.

SCOTT ADAMS' GRAPHIC ADVENTURE #2: PIRATE ADVENTURE (1982)

I don't remember this from the original.

As with Adventureland, the graphical version if Pirate Adventure was released in 1982 for the Apple II.  Again, I'm playing the C64 version.  Adventure International were really trying to ramp up the sex appeal of their games with these covers.  I'm not against it, but it does make me wonder what their sales were looking like around this time.  It seems like a bit of a desperation move.

In this game, you have to explore an island to find some pirate treasure.  It's a lot thematically tighter than Adventureland, but I remember not quite enjoying it as much.  My original posts on it start here.

The opening screen of Pirate Adventure.

Pirate Adventure endears itself to me immediately by ditching the toggling between room descriptions and graphics.  The graphics window stays there at all times, the text is underneath, and it's much less annoying to play.  Unfortunately, that means that you can't choose to play it all text, in its original split-window format, but it's a fair trade-off.

Like Adventureland, this version has barely been changed in terms of its structure and puzzles.  It's major changes come from the addition of graphics, which are a fair bit more interactive than those of Adventureland were.  As the screenshot above shows, the items you can pick up are visually depicted.  When you take them they disappear, and they'll appear in any room where you drop them.  It's similar to Roberta Williams' Mystery House in that respect.

This game has very little in the way of random elements, so it was a simple matter to consult my old notes and get through it.

They had the chance, and they still never fixed "dubleons".

It's a little boring to show two screen-shots of the same place, so here's one from the island.

During lockdown, this is as close as I'm allowed to go to a beach.

The graphics for this are a little better than those in Adventureland in terms of accurately representing your surroundings, but they're still only worth one extra point in Aesthetics.  I'm tempted to ding this for not using the Adams split-window layout, but it earns a point back by allowing any inventory item to be depicted on-screen in any area.  It comes in with a RADNESS Index of 32, two points higher than the original game.

SCOTT ADAM'S GRAPHICAL ADVENTURE #3: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE aka SECRET MISSION (1982)

Who knew the enemy spy in this game was
a sexy lady? Dragging the corpse around to
solve a puzzle suddenly feels a lot more sordid.

Again, this was a 1982 release on the Apple II, but I'm playing the C64 version.  My original post on the game can be found here.

Adams' foray into the spy genre wasn't one of his finer efforts, but it had certain merits in terms of environmental storytelling.  The graphical adventure version, like the others, is fundamentally the same game with a visual overlay.

Starting Secret Mission.  It was still called Mission Impossible on the Apple II
version, though.

This one returns to the system used by Adventureland, where you could toggle the graphics on and off.  It also doesn't show your inventory items like Pirate Adventure.  It does have a cool death screen though.

Back when we were worried about clouds of radiation, not clouds of bacteria.

This game was still pretty fresh in my memory, and the puzzles are pretty simple, so I was able to get through it quickly without the need to resort to a walkthrough.

Defusing a bomb in the comfiest of settings.

As with the others, this one gets an extra point in Aesthetics, and it remains the same in every other respect. It get a RADNESS Index of 28, two points higher than the original.

NEXT: I'll be getting stuck into the 430 point version of Colossal Cave Adventure. As for my next back-tracking project, I have a quick post lined up for Colossal Cave Adventure II and Mystery Mansion, and I've been playing the original TRS-80 version of Temple of Apshai.

Game 43: Enchanted Island (1979)

Sorry Greg, it only required a fraction of my cunning.

Okay, so I screwed up.  Remember a few posts ago, when I said that I had the order of the Greg Hassett games screwed up?  And that my next game would not be Enchanted Island but would instead be Sorcerer's Castle Adventure?  Well, I forgot to change my notes, so I ended up playing Enchanted Island anyway.  This is my completely nocturnal quarantine brain in action.

Enchanted Island is technically the sixth of Hassett's text adventures, and it's the fifth one that I'm playing for the blog.  They didn't start out all that great with Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure, but his later efforts like Voyage to Atlantis have shown signs of improvement.  All of them have scored pretty low on the RADNESS Index though, which makes me question why I have such an inordinate amount of fondness for Greg Hassett.  The fact that he's about thirteen years old around this time certainly has something to do with it.  But the more I think about it, the more I realise that he's pretty much exactly what I wanted to be when I was that age.

I went to uni to study IT (an ill-fated decision) with the intention of getting into the games industry.  I wanted to make games!  Unfortunately, I didn't want to make games in the system that was around in the late 90s and early 2000s: I wanted to be a solo creator, or part of a small team, not one cog in a huge machine.  So I dropped out, bummed around, and eventually picked up a job in a library archive.  The sad thing is, I could have had what I wanted in the 80s and maybe the early 90s.  I could have had what I wanted from about 2010 onwards.  I just happened to reach adulthood around the time where doing that was pretty much impossible.  (Eh, who am I kidding anyway, I never would have had the drive to be a success at it.  I just slept from 10am to 1am.)

What does my sad life story have to do with Enchanted Island, you ask?  Well, uhhhh, they're both set in Australia?  (That was a segue, folks. I didn't spend three years studying professional writing for nothing.)

So, Enchanted Island.  Like Hassett's other games, it was originally released through Mad Hatter Software for the TRS-80.  There was a later port for the Apple II, but I couldn't find it, so I'm playing the TRS-80 version.  If this post at Gaming After 40 is anything to go by, the version I found is a revised one that was written in assembly language rather than BASIC.  I'm not entirely happy with that, but I couldn't find anything else so this is what I had to work with.  (I did find something that I think approximates the original version, but more on that in Ports of Call below.)

As I mentioned above, Enchanted Island is set in Australia, or more accurately speaking, on an island off the Australian coast.  That's what the opening of the game says, anyway.  The description on the packaging says that it's set on an island in middle of the Pacific Ocean, which isn't quite the same.  For all that it matters, I'll go with what the game says.  The goal of Enchanted Island (surprise, surprise) is to scour the island for treasure.  It's a beacon of familiarity in these uncertain times.

Crikey mick, I'm on a flamin' island!

The game begins with the player standing on a beach.  There's a sign that tells you that dropping any treasure found here will increase your score.  I do appreciate a game that does this outright, rather than making me figure out where to drop things on my own.  Checking my inventory I discovered that I was carrying nothing, and typing SCORE I learned that I needed to earn 140 points.

There's also a warning not to go south, so of course that was the first thing I tried.  I ended up in the ocean, where I drowned.  (Wouldn't you think I'd turn back when it got to chin height or something?)

After a restart I headed north along the beach, and eventually to a thicket where I found some tasty food.  Remembering that just about every second puzzle solution in Hassett's games involves FEEDing something, I took the food with me rather than eating it myself.  East of the thicket was a rocky flat and a cave, but it was dark inside so I decided to go elsewhere to look for a light source.

East of my starting location I found a green bottle in the sand, but I couldn't open it so I took it with me.  Further east I found an oasis, with a single palm tree.  I climbed up the tree, and there I found a vulture guarding a golden feather.  The feather was denoted with + symbols, meaning that it was one of the treasures that I needed to find.  I fed the tasty food to the vulture, which flew away, and I was able to claim the feather and take it back to the beach.

I can't imagine that hand-feeding a vulture is much fun.

Heading south from the oasis, I found a dusty book half-buried in a sand dune.  Reading the book gave me the following clue: MAGIC BREAK WORD BOTTLE "BIMBO".  This looked like two clues jumbled up to me.  I tried breaking the bottle, only to be told that there was nothing hard enough here.  I also tried typing SAY BIMBO, but nothing happened.  The game definitely recognised BIMBO though, so I was on the right track.

I followed a winding path around from where I'd found the book, past a waterfall (with no secret room behind it, what a rip), and to the edge of a cliff.  There I found a lighter, which would definitely come in handy if I ever found a light source to use it on.  North and east of that I eventually came to a place called Spyglass Hill, where I encountered a deer.  Nothing I tried to do worked, not even KILL DEER, so I left this for later.

South of the deer I found a shady spot, where a warlock was guarding a silver key, the second of the treasures that I needed.  Much like the deer, the warlock didn't respond to anything I did, but he also wouldn't let me take they key.

This was all looking very similar in structure to Voyage to Atlantis.  That game had treasures scattered around the map, most of them guarded by creatures that served no other purpose than to act as obstacles to the treasure they were guarding.  Solving the game was a case of finding the solution to getting rid of each creature, and if memory served a lot of those solutions would involve food.  I'd already found one that backed that up.

The only other place to explore was east of the oasis, which led me a large rock with writing on it.  The writing read: "WARLOCK SLIP. HIT DEER".  The first part of that didn't look like something I could act on right now, but I went back and tried HIT DEER.  I was told "I've no weapon, so I'd rather not."  Something else to remember.

I went back to the rock and tried breaking the bottle.  The rock was obviously hard enough, because the bottle shattered and revealed a note inside.  The note read: "HOLY SMOKES, A TIGER! BARBS LIKE BAN..." The rest of the note was too faded to read.  I hadn't encountered a tiger yet, nor had I met a "barb", which I figured was short for barbarian.

North and east of the rock, through some tall reeds, I found a depression with a lantern on the ground.  This was the light source I was looking for, and with the lighter I was able to ignite the lantern and start exploring the cave.  Thankfully, the lantern doesn't appear to ever run out.

The caves were almost as big as the rest of the island I'd explored, but only a few locations had items of interest in them.  In a "sacred chamber" to the north and east I found a gold ring, the first unguarded treasure that I'd found.  West of that, in a dead end, I found an emerald embedded in the wall.  I mustn't have had the right tool on me though, because I couldn't get it out.

A little bit north and west of the entrance I found a cell, with a human skull on the floor.  South of that was another dead end, with a "mammoth ruby", another unguarded treasure that I gleefully pocketed.  I'd thought its implied size might cause me problems, but it didn't.

North of that I found a strange cave, where a medicine man was guarding a crate.  As with every other living thing in the game, he was non-responsive to all of my actions except trying to take that crate.

At this point, I'd explored every part of the island that I could find, and none of the inventory items I had were obvious solutions to the obstacles before me.  I needed something that could make the warlock slip, a weapon to hit the deer with, and a tool to pry the emerald from the wall.  As for the medicine man, I didn't have any clues as to how to sort him out.  There was nothing for it but to retrace my steps around the island and make sure that I hadn't missed anything.

I found the first clue to what I was missing at the top of the oasis palm tree.  The description there said that I could see a jungle to the south, but I couldn't see a way to get there.  This put me in the mind of the passwords from Colossal Cave Adventure and its variants, so I tried SAY BIMBO again.  This time it worked, teleporting me to a dead end in the cave.  This didn't seem all that helpful, so I tried it again, and this time it teleported me to the jungle I had seen from afar.

If I say this word one more time I'm going to get cancelled.

It took a little while, and another death, to figure out what I had done to make BIMBO work.  It turns out that you need the ruby in your possession.  There is a clue to this in the game, although I never found it: if you type OPEN BOOK rather than READ BOOK, a hollow voice tells you that "the ruby was Bimbo's".  I'm not sure why you'd try that once you've read it, but it's not the first game I've played where the two commands give different results.  Usually, it's that there's a note or something hidden between the pages.  Anyway, I worked out the solution through process of elimination, by trying the magic word every time I picked something up or did anything else noteworthy.

The jungle was a pretty small area. To the west, I found a hut with a barbarian guarding some rare spices.  To the north was a tiger guarding a priceless giraffe skin.  And to the east, I found a bear guarding some Cuban cigars.  I also found a bamboo pole, which I took with me, but nothing I was carrying seemed to have an effect on any of these three.  (For old time's sake, with Adventureland fresh in my memory, I tried SCREW BEAR.  Nothing happened.)

The only other avenue to explore was a dark marsh, this game's obligatory maze.  Since this was a marsh I didn't think that leaving inventory breadcrumbs would work as a mapping tool, as I expected them to sink into the bog.  That didn't happen though, and mapping this small maze was no hassle.  I found a bunch of potentially useful items in there as well: a jewel-encrusted coconut (another treasure), a glowing glass ball, a banana, and an iron pick.  I also wandered out of the swamp and into the ocean for another ignominious death, but in a game as small as this it was a minor setback.

The first thing I tried after scooping up all of this stuff (which required multiple trips due to this game's six item inventory limit) was to break the glass ball.  This caused yet another death, but one that came with a vital clue.

This isn't necessarily a game over, you can BIMBO your way out of the
Land of Lost Adventurers. You can't win without the glass ball though.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.  Should vital clues come from failure?  On the one hand it breaks the narrative immersion.  On the other hand, playing an adventure game isn't really like experiencing a narrative at all, particularly in these early days.  It's more like unravelling a puzzle, and repeated failure is a part of that process.  I can see why people have a problem with this sort of thing, but I think I'm okay with it.

I was pretty sure at this point that I had the tools I needed to solve the game.  I started by feeding the banana to the barbarian, who took off and left the peel behind.  I took the spices and the peel, and went to the warlock.  GIVE didn't work as a command, and THROW gave me the message that I could only throw the ball.  So I tried DROP, and sure enough the warlock slipped on the peel and vanished.  (I assume he teleported away out of embarrassment.)  I took his key, and went to deal with the medicine man.  Trying BREAK BALL here results in yet another death, but when I tried THROW BALL the wizard instead took his wrath out on the medicine man.  With the key I was able to unlock the crate, and inside I found another treasure, a golden chain.

"I had the cure for the plague of the 20th shentury and I losht it!"
That's some obscure Sean Connery for you oldies out there.

From there it was a simple matter to pry the emerald out of the wall with the pick, and hit the deer with the bamboo pole.  This causes it to bound away, leaving golden antlers behind.  How this is done by an explicitly female deer is anyone's guess.

So far I'd gathered the following treasures: a golden feather, a silver key, golden antlers, a ruby, a gold ring, an emerald, a golden chain, some rare spices, and a jewel-encrusted coconut. There were two other treasures to be procured - the Cuban cigars and the giraffe skin - but both were guarded by the bear and the tiger respectively.  Based on earlier clues I guessed that the cigars would get rid of the tiger, but that meant I still had to deal with the bear, and nothing in my inventory looked helpful.  The only item I had that hadn't served a purpose yet was the skull, but the bear wasn't interested in eating it, and I wasn't able to throw it either.

This is where I got stuck for the longest, and I considered hitting a walkthrough for the solution.  This time my patience held out for once.  I just kept trying different things on the bear until I hit on the solution.  It ended up being a little bit annoying.  Trying HIT BEAR gave me back a message that I didn't want to, because the bear might hit back.  But when, in desperation, I tried FIGHT BEAR, I got the following result.

And I did it *bear*-handed.  That's it. That's the joke. Wacka-wacka.

So I'd already found the solution, I just hadn't worded it properly.  The same thing happened to me recently with Mystery House, where CLEAN ALGAE hadn't worked but WIPE ALGAE did.  At least in that game, it happened with a verb that the parser didn't recognise.  With Enchanted Island, it recognises HIT, FIGHT and ATTACK, which are ostensibly the same action, but only the latter two let you kill the bear.  (Incidentally, trying FIGHT or ATTACK on the deer gets you killed, even if you have the bamboo pole.)

With the cigars now in my possession, I went to the tiger and typed LIGHT CIGAR.  This didn't work, but SMOKE CIGAR did, and I was able to claim the giraffe skin.  These were the final two treasures, and I took them back to the beach and claimed the full 140 points.

I won, I guess?

Somewhat disappointingly, there's no victory message when you win.  I wondered briefly if there was perhaps something else that I'd missed, but my score suggested not.  I confirmed later by playing an earlier version of the game that I'd found everything, so it seems like Greg Hassett either didn't want to congratulate the player or just forgot about it.

This is the full treasure list, and the amount of points that each one is worth:

• Golden Feather - 15 points
• Ruby - 10 points
• Gold Ring - 15 points
• Jewel-Encrusted Coconut - 10 points
• Rare Spices - 10 points
• Emerald - 15 points
• Silver Key - 10 points
• Golden Chain - 15 points
• Golden Antlers - 15 points
• Giraffe Skin - 10 points
• Cuban Cigars - 15 points

And this is my Trizbort map of the game:

Wooaah, the clicks'll make it bigger.

Enchanted Island isn't bad, but it's a pretty slight experience.  Much like Voyage to Atlantis, it's a perfectly competent game that does what it does in the most adequate manner possible.  I didn't love it, but it's a perfectly fine way to fill in an hour or two.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The treasure hunt set-up doesn't earn it any favours, but I was intrigued by this game being set on an island off the coast of Australia.  It doesn't follow through on that at all though, featuring a number of things that do not exist in or near Australia at all.  We don't have tigers (although we did have Tasmanian tigers, but those are different); we don't have bears (although we do have koalas, even though they aren't really bears; and I suppose there are always the dreaded, deadly Drop Bears); and according to the internet we don't even have vultures.  I'll give Hassett the warlock, but "medicine man" isn't really a title that gets used for our country's indigenous elders.  It's much more of a generic hodge-podge of jungle stereotypes, and not all that interesting. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: As with Hassett's other games, Enchanted Island doesn't have living creatures or even the digital representation of such: it just has obstacles.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Silent, text-based, terse. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Puzzles: The puzzles are simple, and not all that clever.  Only two of them presented any difficulty, and the solution to the bear puzzle is really not solvable without simple trial-and-error. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is a basic two word affair, which has its own set of strengths and limitations.  It does pretty much everything it sets out to do adequately, and there was only one place where I had real parser trouble. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: A game that I can knock off in under two hours definitely gets lumped into the too easy basket, but it didn't present me much in the way of frustrations.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: There's not a lot of enjoyment to be gleaned from this one, but as I've said before I always have time for a short game.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The above scores total 12, which doubled gives it a RADNESS Index of 24. That puts it equal 34th overall, and equal 20th out of 27 adventure games.  It's sitting level with Burial Ground Adventure and Hassett's own House of Seven Gables.  In terms of the other Hassett adventures I've played, Journey to the Center of the Earth and King Tut's Tomb are two points below, and Voyage to Atlantis is four points higher.  That's probably because I ranked it pretty early into the blog, but then again it does allow you to shoot a manta ray with a cannonball, which is definitely worth some points.

PORTS OF CALL

I couldn't find the Apple II version of this game, nor could I find a version for the TRS-80 that was earlier than the one I played above.  But on this web-site I found a web-based implementation of Enchanted Island that has a number of differences.  I'd say it's pretty clearly based on the game's original release, or at least something a lot closer than the TRS-80 version that I played.

I'll run through the differences below:

• There's no warning at beginning of the game about heading south into the ocean.
• In the same location where you find the tasty food, there is also some green liquid.  I never found a use for it.
• Opening the book no longer gives you a clue about the ruby belonging to Bimbo. That clue comes from the skull in the cell, and is given to you upon entering that room.
• The warlock doesn't just disappear when he slips on the banana peel, he slips and breaks his neck.
• The clue in the book is slightly different, and comes with a plug for Hassett's five previous adventures.  Instead of saying "MAGIC BREAK WORD BOTTLE BIMBO", the clue after the advertising reads: "BRE BOT MAGIC WORD: BIMBO".
• The clue written on the rock is also different.  Instead of "SLIP WARLOCK. HIT DEER", it reads "SLIP WAR. HERACLES' THIRD LABOR". This is hitting some pretty obtuse territory, requiring the player to have some outside knowledge of Greek mythology.  The third labor of Heracles was to "capture the Ceryneian Hind", a deer so fast that it could outrun an arrow. There are different versions of the story, with different accounts of how Heracles caught the deer, but in none of them does he take a swing at it with a bamboo pole.  It's no surprise that Hassett changed this one in a later revision.

I TOLD YOU, I WOULD BREAK, YOUR F*CKIN NECK!

Probably the best difference, though, is that this version of the game actually has an ending.  I got my congratulations after all.

I do love the old-school TV aesthetic on this site.

I can't really rate this version on the RADNESS Index, because I'm not sure where it's sourced from.  I think it's authentic, but there's no way to know for certain, and I don't know what release of the game it represents even if it is genuine.  It's not quite different enough to get a changed score anyway.

NEXT: I've been checking in on Futurewar periodically to see if my problem has been fixed, but no luck so far.  The next game on my list promises to be a more substantial undertaking than some other games I've played recently.  It's time to drop back to 1978 and play the 430-point version of Colossal Cave Adventure, which I see was written by Don Woods himself.  I suppose that makes it an official sequel of sorts, or perhaps even the definitive version of the game.  It'll be interesting to check out.

Back-Tracking: Beneath Apple Manor (1978)

Some years ago I played through Beneath Apple Manor, one of the earliest commercially available CRPGs (and possibly the first ever).  It's something of a proto-Roguelike, and as I recall it was a tight, replayable game that I enjoyed quite a bit.  It scored a 41 on the RADNESS Index, and it's still the third-highest ranked CRPG on the blog so far, so it must have been doing something right.

At the time, in my hurry to move on, I didn't bother trying very hard to complete it on the highest difficulty level.  At the time I was just allowing myself some respite from the endless labour of the PLATO CRPGs, and the prospect of moving forward with my list was too enticing. I had no time to waste on perfecting the games I played, I had to move on to, uhhhh, Space.  Well, they weren't all winners.

Leaving that difficulty level unbeaten has been just one of the things bothering me about the blog, so I decided to go back and have a proper crack at it.  After all, I have the time right now.  My first thought upon firing up Beneath Apple Manor was that I had vastly overrated it.  It's the sort of thing that tends to happen in the early days of a project, before things are nailed down. But gradually I figured out the systems again, and I'm pleased to say that I think I got it right the first time. It's still fun, and it only took me a few tries to beat difficulty level 5 as a practice run.

I'm lazy, so I recycled this screen shot from five years ago.

Difficulty level 10 is another story altogether.  The goal of Beneath Apple Manor is to delve into the dungeons beneath Apple Manor and find the fabled golden apple.  You fight monsters along the way and build your stats, as in most CRPGs.  The apple doesn't appear until your stats are high enough, and balancing the activities that drain your stats (like fighting monsters) with raising them through spending XP is a big part of the game.  Level 10 makes that really hard by making the monsters very, very difficult to defeat.

The original version of the game has five monsters.  It starts with slimes,  that are pretty weak but can damage your armour, and ghosts, which drain your strength score and can only be hurt with magic.  From there it moves up to Trolls (with the ability to regenerate their hit points), Purple Worms (high hit points and high damage) and Dragons (really high damage, but lower in hit points).  On most difficulty levels it's not that hard to beat the starting monsters, but on level 10 even a fight with one lowly slime is no guaranteed thing.

On easier difficulty levels it had been my standard practice to clear out every level, find every treasure chest, and kill every monster.  I had to change that for level 10, and instead of clearing everything I started using hit and run tactics.  If I found a chest, I'd hightail it back to the stairs.  If I encountered a monster, I'd also run back to the stairs and descend to the next level; the levels descend infinitely so it doesn't matter if you skip one entirely.  They generate based on your stats as well, so they don't get any harder until you've grown stronger.  There are ways to avoid combat, by listening at doors, using the X-Ray spell to reveal your surroundings, and using the teleport spell in real emergencies.  It was slow going.

Much like tabletop D&D, you gain experience points from finding gold as well as winning fights, so I was still able to use these hit and run tactics to build my character's stats.  And eventually, after nearly two hours of painstaking advancement, I reached my goal.

You'll have to take my word for it that I didn't just recycle this
screenshot from five years ago.

While I was still in the zone with this game, I decided that I'd quickly cover the special edition, because checking out ports and alternate versions of games is something I do now.  So here's another "Port of Call", which I guess has become a regular feature.

PORT OF CALL - BENEATH APPLE MANOR SPECIAL EDITION (1982)

The Apple II version of the special edition was released in 1982, but for some reason the version that I found didn't work properly.  I can't remember why, and now that I'm testing it, it seems to work fine.  But anyway, it's a cracked version, so it's probably inauthentic in some way.  I went with the DOS port from 1983.  (Actually, according to mobygames this loaded as a boot disk, and didn't run through DOS at all. How that works with current-day DOSBox, I haven't the faintest idea.)

Are IBM-PC games allowed to look this good in 1983?

This one has a proper title screen, and even a nice rendition of Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King".  (I'm the sort of philistine that has more appreciation for a PC speaker version of this than a fully orchestral one; in many ways I'm like the anti-Chester.)  The graphics are greatly improved: instead of ASCII characters or coloured blocks, the characters are represented with icons, and the whole thing is much more pleasant to look at.

The game plays pretty much exactly as it did before, except for the inclusion of two new monsters: Invisible Stalkers and Vampires.  Invisible Stalkers have no icons, and their only special ability is that you can't see them; you have to figure out which direction they're attacking you from through trial-and-error.  Vampires have an icon with a cool Dracula cape-and-collar, and when they attack they drain your Intelligence.  Neither of these additions do much to make the game more difficult: they don't appear until around the same time as Purple Worms and Dragons, and they dish out far less damage than those two monsters.  The added variety is welcome though.

This level has a dragon, a vampire, and one chest. It's probably not
worth taking on that dragon, though.

It also has two new magic items.  The original game had magic swords and armour, a wand that cast the Zap spell at no cost to your intelligence, a wand that opened doors at no cost to your strength, potions that affected your stats, and a potion that wiped your memory (and your map).  The special edition adds magic boots that make it easier to sneak past monsters, and a potion of clairvoyance that makes it so you can see the entire dungeon level.  That potion's a good one, because it's permanent; once you get it, you can see every dungeon level from the start and plan your path out accordingly.  I had that potion for the screenshot above.

Using the same hit and run tactics, I was able to beat this version on difficulty level 10 as well.  The new additions didn't require me to change my tactics, and to be honest the potion of clairvoyance actually made it a little easier.

Accurate for the time.

The ending of this one uses the same pun as the original, by making the "fabled golden apple" an Apple computer.  Then it pulls a swerve, and tells you it's something even better: a golden IBM PC!  A little bit of my tribalistic, Apple-hating heart was warmed by this.  (Don't worry, I'm being cured of my irrational anti-Apple bias by this blog; the Apple II is obviously the best games machine of its era.)

Hold your horses mate, you've got a decade or so before you can brag
about anything.

As far as the RADNESS Index goes, I'd give this an extra point in Aesthetics, and also give it an extra point for the new monsters.  (I think I rated it too low in that category originally anyway.)  Taking away the bonus point, because this version lacks the historical significance of the original, it ends up with a RADNESS Index of 44.  It's the version to play, for sure.

NEXT: I'll play Greg Hassett's Enchanted Island over the weekend (a probable one-post game) and on Monday I may have a quick back-tracking post up on the graphic adventure versions of Scott Adams' first three games: Adventureland, Pirate Adventure and Mission Impossible.

Priority Adventure Game 1: Mystery House (1980)

The cover to the original packaging of Mystery House

I was supposed to post this on the weekend, but with quarantine happening and nothing to do but sit at home, my sleep cycles got so messed up that I basically lost a day or two.  I've been playing a lot of games and catching up with a lot of stuff for the blog, but what I haven't being doing much of is writing.  So today I'm getting back on schedule, and hopefully I'll be able to keep it that way.

Today's game is Mystery House, the first adventure game on my Priority List.  I considered leaving it off, along with the other Sierra Hi-Res Adventures, because I was going to get to them in reasonable time in my regular chronology.  I left the Scott Adams adventures off the Priority List for that very reason.  But the post-King's Quest Sierra games are a definite priority, and I couldn't really justify playing those before covering the company's earlier work.  So the Hi-Res Adventures are in, and the first of those is Mystery House.

The cover of the 1982 re-release, with a playing
card motif that has nothing to do with the game.

Mystery House is often touted as the first graphical adventure game.  It's not, technically; The Atlantian Odyssey, which I covered not too long ago, came out in 1979, so it has Mystery House beat by at least half a year.  It is, however, the first significant graphical adventure.  As history shows, sometimes it doesn't matter if you got there first, what matters most is getting there first in a way that people notice.  Hardly anyone played The Atlantian Odyssey, but a whole heck of a lot of people played Mystery House.

The game was written and designed by Roberta Williams, and programmed by her husband Ken.  Ken Williams had spent the 1970s working in the business side of computers, bouncing from company to company, always seeking a bigger paycheck.  He'd mostly worked on mainframes during that time, and he bought an Apple II with the plan of creating a version of the FORTRAN programming language that would work for it.  As it happened, among the applications he had for that Apple II was a copy of Colossal Cave Adventure.  Roberta, who is usually described as the model housewife and mother before this moment, became obsessed with the game, and even she admits that she neglected her children while playing it.  After she finished it there were few options for similar games, and she thought that she'd be able to make her own, as long as she had someone to do the coding.  Ken eventually came around to the commercial potential of making such a game, especially when the idea of adding graphics came in, and it became the first hit for On-Line Systems, later known as Sierra On-Line.  Overall it's said to have sold about 80,000 copies, which is a huge number for the time. You probably know the rest: Roberta would go on to spearhead the King's Quest series, Sierra would be the biggest force in adventure gaming throughout the 80s and into the 90s, and the two of them combined would be major players in helping video games to become a part of pop culture at large.  (For a more detailed look at the early years of Ken and Roberta, check out this article over at the Digital Antiquarian.)

The original title screen. The re-release adds a few more with the Sierra
logo, and a page of text about the public domain release.

Mystery House was released on May 5, 1980 for the Apple II, and later ported to a bunch of Japanese computers.  (I do find it odd that the game wasn't ported to any other computers in the US.  It seems especially strange that money-hungry Ken Williams wouldn't have seized the opportunity to get his games onto, say, the Commodore 64.  Perhaps there was a technology issue, but I have no idea.)  I am, of course, playing the Apple II version on an emulator.  I couldn't find the original; all the versions out there are from 1987, when the game was released into the public domain to celebrate Sierra's 7th anniversary.  (Why celebrate the 7th?  You couldn't wait three years?)

The plot of Mystery House was apparently inspired by the Agatha Christie novel And Then  There Were None.  I've never read any Christie, but looking at a plot summary it seems that the connection is very loose.  Both stories feature a group of people who've been invited to a house, and are murdered one by one.  There all similarities end.

In addition to its credit as the first graphical adventure, Mystery House also sometimes gets credited as the first adventure game to have a mystery story.  That's probably not the case: the similarly-named Mystery Mansion (which I covered back here) has it beat.  Of course, Mystery Mansion was developed over a span of years from 1978 to 1981, so there's a small chance it wasn't quite playable by the time Mystery House was released.  It's only a small chance though; evidence points to Mystery Mansion being played in the 1970s, and there are some claims that it was created even earlier than 1978.  Regardless of that, Mystery House gets the credit for being the first mystery game that a large number of people played.

This is probably the best-looking screen of the game.  Just ignore the tree.

The game begins with the player standing outside the titular house.  There's nothing else to do but go up to the front door and enter, after which the door is slammed and locked behind you.  You are now trapped in the house, along with seven other people whose depictions I could best describe as amateurish.

They all look identical here, but will get unique depictions later on.

You can't get descriptions of any of these people during the game, but the instructions have more details as to who they are:

• Tom, a blond plumber
• Sam, a brunette mechanic
• Sally, a red-headed seamstress
• Dr. Green, a brunette surgeon
• Joe, a brunette gravedigger
• Bill, a blond butcher
• Daisy, a blond cook

Is it weird that there are three blokes here described as brunettes?  I always thought that was more of a female descriptor.  Regardless, as soon as I saw these descriptions, I figured that hair-colour would play some role in solving the mystery.

As well as the seven other guests, the entry hall also has a crude note on the floor.

They were going to write "losers weepers" but they ran out of space.

"Valuable jewels are hidden in this house.  Finders-keepers."  This level of atrocious hand-writing at first led me to suspect Dr. Green, but then I realised that the writing was legible, so I abandoned this theory.  Besides, you can't accuse anyone of the murder, or even talk to the other guests.  You can't even kill any of them yet, and it's not like an actual crime has been committed at this point.  There's nothing to do but leave the room by one of the three doors, or by the stairs to the top floor.  As soon as you leave, the other guests all disappear from the entry hall.

West of the entry hall is a kitchen, which has a fridge, a cabinet, and a stove.  It has a sink as well, which is shown in the graphics but not mentioned in the room description.  This stumped me for a little bit, because I was only interacting with the items that the game went out of its way to mention.  I opened the cabinet, and found some matches.  I opened the fridge, and found an empty pitcher.  I ran into some problems here, though, because I just couldn't figure out what to call the thing in the fridge.  I tried JUG and GLASS and even EWER, because I read far too much fantasy fiction with old-timey words.  It wasn't until much later that I hit on PITCHER, and I can't even tell you why it took me so long.  I can say that it's not the word I'd use in that context: it's a god-damn JUG, I tell ya!  None of this would have been a problem if it was described in the text.

I also tried lighting the stove, and got a very terse message telling me that the stove exploded, and I was dead.  One quick reload later, I determined that the stove was probably unimportant, and not to be tampered with.  Chalk that up as my first arbitrary death in a Sierra game.  Alas, this one didn't have the charm of their later games.

You can leave the kitchen by a back door, but that just leads into a forest maze, and I wasn't prepared for maze mapping at this early stage, especially without a full inventory to leave a trail.  I couldn't figure out how to get back to the kitchen though, so after getting hopelessly lost I had to reload again.

This time I went east from the kitchen and found the library, complete with seven whole books.  There is a cobweb in the corner though, and most of the windows in the house are boarded up, so I assume the place has been abandoned for some time.  I found a note on the floor, which had another crudely written message: "7-6 = 1. THEN I AM DONE!"  Ooh, foreshadowing!  What could this possibly mean!  (Obviously it means there will be murders.  But if there are seven guests plus me, this murderer's math is all screwed up. Perhaps I was not expected?)

Another door led outside where I found the first murder victim: Sam the mechanic, who had been hit on the head by a blunt object. Look, you can see the big lump on his head!  And those X's for eyes, he's as dead as a doornail.

Alright, one less person looking for the treasure!

I went back inside through another door, into a dining room. I could see that there was a candle on the table, and... something in the background.  A christmas tree?  A tent?  Eventually I figured out that it's a lamp, but it doesn't matter, because it's irrelevant.  It does highlight one my biggest gripes with early graphical adventure games though, and it's their expectation that you'll know what the objects depicted in the graphics are supposed to be.  It happened earlier with the pitcher, and it's happened again here with the lamp.  This won't be such a problem later, when graphics get better and room descriptions get longer, but in this era of crude images and terse descriptions it really sucks.

An illuminati symbol?  A dwarf holding a kite?

After a short time the sun goes down, and if you don't have a light source by then it's pretty difficult to navigate (although you can still fumble around in the dark).  I used the match to light the candle, but when I lit it in the dining room I tripped on the rug and started a fire.  I tried leaving by the back door, but that only resulted in my fiery death.  After a reload, I figured out that you can take the candle out of the dining room first before you light it. Crisis averted!

Having explored all of the ground floor I went upstairs (a floor which is inexplicably larger than the one below it, unless the rooms on the bottom have a much bigger volume).  Heading east and west I found four bedrooms.  In the nursery I found the body of Dr. Green, which disproved my bad hand-writing hypothesis.  He had been stabbed, but there were no other clues to be found.

In a boy's bedroom I found another note, that said "YOU WILL NEVER FIND IT! IT'S ALL MINE!!"  In a large bedroom I didn't find anything, but someone tried to kill me with a thrown dagger.  I grabbed the dagger and gave chase, but whoever it was had quickly vanished.  (Replaying the game to get some screenshots, I just had this dagger thrown at me even though I'd already taken care of the murderer.)

The last bedroom had another body, that of Sally the Seamstress.  She'd been bumped on the head just like Sam, but this time there was another clue: a blond hair!  My list of suspects was rapidly dwindling: only Tom, Joe, Bill and Daisy were still alive.  Of those, Joe was a brunette, so he was probably ruled out.

Heading north I saw a stairway up to the attic, but I decided to explore a doorway at the end of the passage first.  It led to a study, with nothing inside but a desk that I couldn't interact with, and a window with a lovely view outside.  Next to the study there was a bathroom, where I found yet another murder victim: Bill the butcher, who had been strangled with a pair of pantyhose.  I mean, it's possible that this is a Michael Hutchence situation here, but it's probably safer to assume that this guy was murdered.  Based on the graphics, I miraculously figured out that you can take a towel from the rack.  You can't use the toilet, though, which is a bit of a black mark on the game.  If you're putting a dunny in a game, you better let me take a shit in it, that's all I'm saying.  (Actually, this game doesn't even let you type any cuss words.  Try it, and you get hit with an instant game over.)

Heading up to the attic, I found a hammer, which I took, and a ladder that was too heavy to move.  In a storage room just off the attic there was a chest, which was locked.  I guess I'd have to go looking for the key.

At that point I'd pretty much explored everywhere, or so I thought.  I mapped the maze, but I didn't find anything there: it was just a pointless maze of trees that didn't seem to go anywhere.  I did figure out that you could leave the forest by going UP from the initial location, which doesn't make much sense, but it did come in handy later.  I also noticed the gate in the back yard, which led to a graveyard.  There I found Joe the gravedigger, who had just finished digging six graves.  I tried to take his shovel, thinking that maybe I needed to dig somewhere in the forest to find the key.  Joe wouldn't let me, so I stabbed him to death.  Him digging six graves was highly suspicious behaviour, so I'm sure he deserved it.  Digging in the forest didn't turn anything up though, so I was a little bit stuck.

Hahaha the giant X's on his eyes.

Eventually I noticed the sink in the kitchen, and figured out that I could turn the taps on with the dubious command of WATER ON.  That one's pretty rough, but it was singled out in the instructions so I remembered it pretty quickly.  I gathered some water with the pitcher, and also took a butterknife that was lying in the sink.

With some water in my possession I figured that I had some fire-fighting capabilities, so I went back to the dining room, where I once again tripped on the rug and set it ablaze.  Pouring water on the fire put it out, which left a hole in the rug.  In that hole I found a key, and with that key I was able to unlock the chest, in which I found a handgun with one bullet.

I'll never turn down a gun in any game, but this wasn't the clue I was hoping for.  I'd found four dead bodies, and made one myself by killing Joe.  That left Tom and Daisy, one of whom was probably the murderer.  They weren't coming to me it seemed, so it looked like I'd have to find them.  And what's a murder house mystery without a secret passage?

I started rechecking all of the rooms, and eventually I found my solution in the study.  Here's a picture of that room, with it's lovely window view.

It still looks like a window to me.

While I was looking around the house I tried to look out this window, and was told that all of the windows on the house were boarded up, except for the one in the attic.  The attic window only gives a view of the forest, with nothing helpful to impart.  But if all the other windows were boarded up, what about this one in the study, which was very clearly open?

Well, it turns out the graphics fooled me again, because this was not a window but a painting in a picture frame.  The picture was bolted to the wall with four screws, but I was able to loosen them with the butterknife from the kitchen.  (The dagger should maybe work here, but it doesn't.) Behind the picture was a button, and pressing it opened a secret door.

This secret passage led down to the basement, where I found the final corpse: that of Tom the plumber.  He'd been stabbed, and was clutching a daisy in his hand.  Even I could understand such boneheaded symbolism, and with this clue and the process of elimination I figured out that Daisy was the murderer.  Now I just had to find her.

Poor Tom, he'd only just been awarded the key to the city.

It was impossible not to notice the huge key on the table, which was a skeleton key.  Obviously it's called that because the ginormous bloody thing was carved out of an elephant's thighbone.  The door out of the room led to a pantry, with no way through.  Later on I figured out that it connected to the kitchen, through a hole behind the cabinet that was bricked up.  I had to used the hammer from the attic to smash the bricks to get through.

There's also a tunnel leading from the basement, which somehow led to an area with a large pine tree.  I tried climbing the pine tree, and found a telescope.  Looking through it, I could see into the attic through the open window, where I spotted a trap door in the ceiling.  Why I could see this through a telescope from outside better than three feet away with my actual fucking eyes I have no idea.  There was nothing else to do but head back down the tree, which dumped me in the middle of the forest maze.  I was thankful at this point that I'd mapped it out, and getting back to the house wasn't too hard.

Heading to the attic, I climbed up through the trapdoor, and found myself in a tower with the murderer, Daisy.  Examining her gave me the unambiguous message "She is going to kill you", so I unloaded by gun right into her face.  I'd stopped the murderer!  And well, murdered a couple of people myself, but they deserved it.  I still think Joe was in on it.  (My replay only strengthened this theory, because somebody threw a dagger at me after I'd already shot Daisy's head off.  I reckon she killed the victims that were stabbed, and Joe killed the ones that were bashed on the head using his shovel.)

This worked, actually.

In the attic I found another note, that said "It's in the basement!"  So I went down to the basement, and started typing things like BREAK WALL and FIND SECRET and END ALREADY.  I noticed that the walls were covered with algae, and I even tried CLEAN ALGAE, but that didn't work.  I was stuck on this for quite some time, until I eventually caved and looked up the solution.  It was WIPE ALGAE, or RUB ALGAE, so I was on the right track, I just hadn't gotten the wording right.  You need the towel here as well, or the game tells you that you have nothing to wipe the algae with.  With the algae cleaned away, I found a loose brick, and behind that I found the jewels.  With the murderer dead and the jewels in my possession, I was able to leave the house and win the game.

A guru wizard?!?

So, Mystery House.  I can't say that I enjoyed it, exactly.  Wrangling with the combination of a primitive parser and bad graphics was a trial at certain points. It's not like the mystery story was any great shakes either, and you don't even really solve it except by the process of elimination. But there were certain aspects of the game that were impressive, most notably the graphics.  Not that they look good; they are, in fact, rather terrible.  But the changes to the game environment being reflected graphically is definitely impressive for the time.  Doors open and close.  Items disappear when you pick them up, and will appear in any location when you drop them.  I don't recall any games doing this before.  It's one impressive thing in a see of irritations, though, and I can't really recommend Mystery House as anything other than a historically significant curiosity.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: The mystery story is still a novel one at this point, and I appreciated the change, but it's really not at all well executed.  And, of course, there just has to be some treasure to find, doesn't there?  The house isn't particularly well realised either, although adding the graphical dimension makes it a little more memorable.  I'm wavering between 1 and 2 here, but I think perhaps I'll be generous. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: This category starts promisingly, but it turns out that the characters here are little more than corpses to be strewn throughout the game.  Only Joe and Daisy are found alive after the initial room, and they can barely be interacted with.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: This is a pretty ugly game, and the novelty of the graphics doesn't really mitigate that.  There's no sound, and the writing is terse.  The game does do some novel things with its graphical interactivity, but I'm dealing with that down in Mechanics.  Plus you lose points here when I have to spend significant time trying to figure out what an object actually is.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Puzzles: The puzzles in this game aren't actually too bad.  Most of them are pretty simple and logical, they're just hopelessly obscured by the graphics and the parser.  None of them are particularly clever though.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is really not all that good, and as I've said the graphics don't help it.  It's not hopelessly broken though, and the interactivity of the graphics earn it an extra point here.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: It's an often-baffling game, but I wouldn't say it's a particularly hard one.  Without the graphics and parser issues I've already mentioned it would probably rate a little better here, but with them I would have to say that this game is a frustrating experience. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: I didn't enjoy Mystery House a great deal once I got through the initial exploration, mostly due to the issues above.  It's pretty short though, and that's usually enough to get a game out of a minimum score in this category.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2.  For graphical innovation and historical significance I grant this game the full amount of bonus points.

The seven categories above add up to 13, which doubled totals 26.  Add the two bonus points, and Mystery House gets a RADNESS Index of 28.  That places it equal 24th overall, and 15th out of 26 adventure games.  It's even with Voyage to Atlantis and just above The Cottage, which was probably an even more frustrating experience than this one.  So it's down there with some of the games I've not enjoyed much, but not right down there with the very worst.

NEXT: My next game was going to be Empire of the Over-Mind, Gary Bedrosian's follow-up to Lords of Karma, which I rather liked.  But although he wrote it in 1979, it wasn't released until 1981, so I'm kicking it down the list by a couple of years.  After that I had Enchanted Island by my boy Greg Hassett, but it looks like that's his last game for 1979: before that he wrote Sorcerer's Castle Adventure.  So I'm swapping the two around, and by the weekend I should have a post up on Sorcerer's Castle.