Missed Classic: The Paradise Threat – WON! (with Final Rating)

 

Written by Will Moczarski

Did I say I was stuck? Well, that didn’t last long. Just a short recap to get you up to speed: My protagonist had reached a room with a sleeping dragon who ate me when I woke him up by attempting to talk to him, climb him, or attack him. I found out rather by coincidence that I was able to plant the seeds from the beginning once more here, causing a giant plant to grow right away. However, when I tried to “climb plant”, the dragon woke up and ate me. When I tried again...it worked! What had I done wrong?

This is how it's done.

It was a typo! In my transcript I could see that I typed in “climb plano” which caused the parser to understand “climb [wrong word]”, assuming I’d want to climb the dragon. In other words, it is vital to type “climb plant” and only that will work. Be very wary of typos, kids, or the dragon will eat you. It’s an educational game!

Missed Classic: Sherwood Forest - Won! (with Final Rating)

Written by Michael

So, when we last spent time together, I was doing my best imitation of an angel at Christmas.  So, I’m in a tree, with an ax.  I try the obvious.  CHOP TREE.  The game thinks, just maybe, that might not be the best plan while I’m still in it.

Huh.  Guess you’re right, game.

Missed Classic 133: The Paradise Threat (1982) – Introduction

 

Written by Will Moczarski

We’re back with our odd little company from Chapel Hill, NC, still going by the name of Med Systems in 1982. Although the company’s final adventure game was Asylum II they went on to release the three final games by the unusual and quirky game designer Jyym Pearson. If you’re interested in Pearson’s always surprising work you may want to read my coverage of his first six adventure games for this blog: 1 2 3 4 5 6. With Pearson’s two final games, the Med Systems marathon comes to a close, and I’m excited to have simultaneous coverage with Jason Dyer from over at Renga in Blue once again! Be sure to read his take on The Paradise Threat as well!

Once again, you say? Yes, we already teamed up for Lucifer’s Realm, you see, and The Paradise Threat is not only Jyym Pearson’s next game but a direct sequel to it! A quick reminder: In Lucifer’s Realm, our protagonist died right at the beginning of the game only to be sent to hell where Satan begged him to help him get rid of Adolf Hitler who had plans to overthrow the place. Because of our good deeds towards Satan (!) we are starting the next game floating up to paradise where a group of valiant men now needs our help way up there because Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s most notorious followers, is causing trouble with the infernal Deecula Statue. 

Missed Classic: Sherwood Forest - Cats Always Land on Their Feet

Written by Michael

This will be a shorter post than you usually get from me.  I was too busy hitting on the ladies at a hotel bar.

Sorry for the absence! I stepped aside to allow a couple of other games to finish up, and some important ones to start. But I haven't forgotten my beatnik hero trying to win the hand of the beautiful Maid Marion.

When we last left, I had just picked up my snazzy new suit from the tailors.  Will it do the job and get me past the bouncer at the river crossing?

Missed Classic: Sherwood Forest - An Outlaw for an In-law

Written by Michael

So, the premise of this game is really quite original.  Robin Hood seems to have a little amnesia, forgetting who he is, and everyone seems to have forgotten what Robin Hood looks like in normal street clothes.  So, we need to help him convince others (and probably himself) that he is who the game says he is.  Then, we need to get his fiancée, Maid Marion, to accept it as well so their wedding can go on as planned.

Last time, we started to explore a little, finding even an owl that looks at him and questions, “Who?”

So let’s explore some more.

Missed Classic 131: Sherwood Forest (1982) - Introduction

Written by Michael

Back in the early years of graphic adventure gaming, there were many releases of games that were often no more than a disk and a paper in a plastic baggie on a spinner rack at the local computer shop.  There’s so many stories of the varied quality of these games.  That’s the history of the predecessor to Ultima and also the first release of Mystery House.   It’ll be fun to explore some of the games of that time.  

My choice today was packaged a little better than that.  As best I can tell, it was a professionally-printed cardboard folder holding the single disk and a double-sided instruction card.  The game was Sherwood Forest, a 1982 release from Phoenix Software, Inc., of absolutely no relation to the then-growing Phoenix Technologies, responsible for the BIOS in many early IBM PC clones that helped make MS-DOS a standard and Bill Gates very, very rich.

Missed Classic 114 - Transylvania (1982)

 Written by Morpheus Kitami

Polarware/Penguin Software is a name we've seen on this blog before, but in a really roundabout way. Back when Voltgloss talked about Oo-Topos he was also reviewing the first Polarware game the blog has seen. I'm sticking with Polarware. Polarware was the brainchild of one Mark Pelczarski, who I suspect is Polish in some way. He started off creating some of the first color drawing programs on the Apple II. Somewhere around 1982, Pelczarski decided to publish some adventure games. So the story goes that the author of this game, one Antonio Antiochia, then a teenager, showed it to Pelczarski and he liked it so much he gave the lad his drawing program and said he'd publish the end result.

Actually, I say adventure games, but really, only one came out in 1982, everything else that year were generic and forgotten action games. The only interesting titles among those they published outside of the adventure genre was some of Damon Slye's early work. Its a funny thing in retrospect, how so many of these action titles from the '80s people worked hard on at the time, and now they are forgotten entirely in lieu of adventure games only enjoyed by a select few.

All of these games use Polarware's very own COMPREHEND Engine, and most use The Graphics Magician, their in-house graphics engine. The Graphics Magician got licensed out to companies, so I think this is the very first example of a engine part getting licensed out to other companies. Don't quote me on that, I haven't done any research. Ironically enough Oo-Topos was the last Polarware title to use The Graphics Magician, so you've already seen how this will end.

I'll be playing the Macintosh version. The game was released on most available western computers, along with some Japanese computers. There was also a rerelease, with presumably a newer engine and the ability to play it on an Amiga, but it doesn't look that impressive to me. One quirk here, the game disk ejects every time I quit the game. Which means sometimes when I quit I have to reinsert the disk.

Missed Classic: Lucifer's Realm - WON! and Final Rating

 Written by Will Moczarski

One of the advantages of playing through a game simultaneously is that if one of the two players gets hopelessly stuck (like I did) the other one may be able to help. And what can I say? Jason Dyer quickly came to the rescue with the words “Oh, you’re so close!” and four hints encrypted with rot13. His first hint read: “You are correct in that you drop stuff in one specific room in the forest, and it comes out in the cave. It's just a matter of finding the correct spot.”

Last time I had tried all of the spots that seemed likely to me: the room next to the stone wall, the room with the sign and the room in which the trees look greener than in the other rooms. My two options were now to try and brute-force it or to decrypt another one of Jason’s hints. Naturally, I tried to brute-force it first and was VERY lucky because I started with the correct room right away. Things seemed kind of fishy because I dropped the iron club in the penultimate room of the forest – before I reached the stone wall – and when I looked again it was gone. I chalked this down to bad luck because items had gone missing before but when I restored and the same thing happened again and again and with every item I’d drop I knew I was on the right track. Much later, after having finished the game, I decrypted Jason’s other hints and found out that you could “look trees” in each of the rooms to discover white marks on them, sort of like there was a waymarked trail through the maze. The last room with a white mark is the one where you should drop the items but I still have MAJOR issues with this puzzle and still think that this does not count as a clue at all. Why? Because the white marks also lead you to the stone wall which is at the end of the forest. Even if you discover them with the rather obscure move of typing “look trees” while no trees are ever mentioned (except in that one room where they look greener than in the others) in the room descriptions you wouldn’t expect them to be more than a means of simplifying the maze itself. 

That said, I would have liked any of my own (wrong, admittedly) solutions much better than the actual one because they made at least an iota of sense. The actual solution just came down to trial and error. Incidentally, Jason had to take a hint here, too, which goes to show that both of us almost solved the game on our own – but that one thoroughly absurd puzzle threw both of us off track.

Missed Classic: Lucifer's Realm - Request for Assistance

 Written by Will Moczarski

Note: Jason Dyer who is blogging about Lucifer's Realm simultaneously has already finished this game and I hope that he (or one of you) will be able to help me with my request for assistance below. I had planned on finishing the game for today's post, too, but alas it was not to be.

After some time away from the game I decided there were two more things I could try before I would start the game from scratch for the third time. And what can I say? Both were solid ideas and worked out in the end. Now what did I come up with? Looking at my inventory again I thought that I might need to melt the huge ball of wax in case there was something inside. Also, I decided I’d try to attack that snake with my trusty dagger – maybe I did need to feed her the crystal but there’s a chance to get it back somehow. 

Both assumptions turned out to be generally correct. I tried to melt the wax using the candles found in the church where the black mass was being held. When it didn’t work right away I thought it may be due to the parser but actually that just wasn’t the solution. Fortunately it didn’t take me long to realise how blind I had been: the fires I had turned off by using the valve in the first pink-tiled room had to come in handy for this. I liked this puzzle a lot and it felt very infocom (yes, I am smugly using that as an adjective) to me. You actually need to leave the ball of wax behind in the room before turning the valve (only one time, it turned out, involving a lot of back and forth, and then one more time to turn the fire back off. I must have been confused by my initial futile attempts last time). Then you can pick up the iron club which was inside the ball of wax (no, I don't know how I should picture this either).

Killing the snake was pretty straightforward. When I tried it before melting the wax the parser flat out told me I had no weapon that strong so I knew I was on the right track. The club worked like a charm (get it?) but the crystal disappeared. My next idea was to go all the way back to the room where I had picked it up (or rather sliced it off) first – maybe now that the snake puzzle was solved (correctly?) I could slice off another piece. And that was actually the case. I found another crystal bar just lying there on the ground which, I assume, became available because the other crystal bar was removed from the gameworld. Maybe it was wrong to listen to the snake last time but at least the game makes it possible to remedy this (potential) dead end. 

The next steps were surprisingly straightforward. I put the crystal bar into the crystal door with the slot (“put crystal bar in slot” was the only combination that worked) and found myself at the edge of a thick forest of black trees. A sign informed me that this was an “official savegame site” and that the game didn’t take responsibility for lost articles. Was this a clever advance notice to tell me that a maze was lying ahead? 

Missed Classic: Lucifer's Realm - Trusssst In Me...Jusssst In Me...

Written by Will Moczarski

So here I am standing on a circular pillar in the center of a vast room. The pillar is sinking, bringing me ever closer to the floor which is crawling with spiders. I fiddle around with the pillar and notice how a beam of light shines on it. As this is a near-death experience, “look light” seems appropriate, and I find out that there’s a hole in the roof with a hook on it. Alas, I keep botching my next move for a while. After three turns the situation resets (I assume) – the screen melts and I start over again on top of the pillar. This is like a quick-time sequence! I try “press X” but predictably that’s not it.

As always be sure to check out Jason Dyer's simultaneous playthrough on his excellent blog Renga In Blue!

Time to get my tongue out of my cheek, you say? That is correct. Frustratingly, after three times three turns I am swarmed by huge spiders and find myself back at the start of the game. This is slowly becoming a truly hellish experience. I try “throw chain” this time and it works – it is caught on the hook and I can climb out of there. 

I emerge in a small ventilation duct. There is a small canvas on the wall. Also, the description of the chain is the same as before in the steel walled room so I assume I have to pick it up again. “Pull chain over hook” doesn’t work this time, so maybe it’s not necessary and I’m wrong.  The canvas is very thick and as there is no other exit I look around. There is another ventilation duct to the east with a vent to the south. That one leads to Hitler’s office but the game won’t let me barge in there just like that. I try opening, moving and breaking the canvas. Saying “Lucifage” doesn’t work, either. “Cut canvas with dagger” does, presenting me with a way out of here. The parser will stop at nothing to wring a few more minutes out of the game, though. Going south (where the new opening is at) does not work. “Go opening” does not work. “Enter opening” does not work. I need to use the words “Climb opening” which I probably wouldn’t have tried in a game by anyone else but Jyym Pearson. 

Missed Classic: Lucifer's Realm - Selling These Fine Leather Jackets

 Written by Will Moczarski 

Be sure to follow Jason Dyer’s simultaneous playthrough of the Apple ][ version with fancy graphics! 

I made some progress but it was hard earned. First I decided to visit all of the rooms again to find out whether I had missed any keywords on my first try. It occurred to me right away that I hadn’t examined the fiery pit from the ledge. Doing that starts an interesting chain of events: I can see that the pit is enormous and full of flaming patterns. Looking at the patterns reveal that they spell a word. I try to read it but the flames are too bright. “Squint” does not work, so maybe I’ll need to find some sunglasses along the way.

I’ll spare you the details of all of the other things I attempted in several of the other rooms and just tell you about what I did find out. For example, this time it occurred to me to not only pick up but also to examine the human skull I found in the huge damp cavern and I was informed that something rattled inside it. “Break human skull” does not work so I may be looking for another blunt object. 

For some reason I am still unable to enter the dark blood soaked pit full of death and decay again because the smell is too strong. After a while I find out that I can “hold nose” and enter without any further hassle. Interestingly, I never stop holding my nose so I imagine my character to be rather one-handed for the remainder of the game.

Missed Classic 106 - Lucifer's Realm (1982) - Introduction

 Written by Will Moczarski

It’s time for the next game in our Med Systems marathon, and it’s another entry by our old acquaintance Jyym Pearson. I have played through The Curse of Crowley Manor, Escape from Traam, Earthquake - San Francisco 1906, Saigon: The Final Days and The Institute for this blog, and now it’s time to tackle the most notoriously difficult of them all (according to its reputation at least): Lucifer’s Realm.

Missed Classic: Asylum II – Got Behind the Mule! (WON! and Final Rating)

Written by Will Moczarski

Eight more hours in the asylum, and I’m done. And done. What a slog! First of all, apologies for the five-month gap between the third and fourth Asylum II posts. You can probably guess the reason for it as it’s currently affecting the whole world. I went through some tough and exhausting times, too, although I’m grateful to have remained healthy (so far), and none of my loved ones have suffered from the Corona virus too much. Work life, however, became very different following the initial lockdown, so there has been zero time for fun and games in a very long while.

With such a long gap, a short recap seems inevitable: To wit, I had five unsolved puzzles and not a clue. My goal was to find (and vanquish) the elusive “master mystic” in order to escape the titular asylum. The five puzzles were: (a) a programmer with the same name as the actual programmer of Asylum II, William Denman; (b) a terrorist who wouldn’t let me use his vending machine; (c) an electric catapult that I couldn’t figure out; (d) Emmett/Emmit the fix-it man who was very unhelpful for a fixer, and (e) McCoy (of Star Trek fame) who kicked me out of his room every single time.

Vetinari helpfully provided some clues in Rot13 (again thank you very much!) but I decide to give it another try without resorting to them just yet, so I go through every room again to get back into the game. And man, I had forgotten how tedious it is to move around those mazes!

After a short while, I don’t know anymore what’s what, and even worse: due to the inventory limit I had picked several places where I could store my stash. However, it’s been months, and I don’t find any of them anymore. Should have marked them on my map.

Asylum II: Stubborn Like a Mule

Written by Will Moczarski

Last time I thought I’d made a pretty good run through Asylum II – the game seemed as tedious but a lot easier than part one, that is until I was confronted by one of the guards who told me that my escape was not to be this easy. The difficulty ramped up after that and the events that followed left me scratching my head more often than not. My new goal was to rid the asylum of the “master mystic” and present the guards with some proof of my achievement in order to be allowed to leave.

Missed Classic 85: Drive-In Adventure (1982)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Sex sells. Whether you personally consume pornography or not, it is undeniable that whenever a new media technology came along, it quickly adapted for adult entertainment. Pornography influenced the rise of VHS in the 1970s, the early internet in the 1980s, and eventually the broadband push in the 2000s. Some of these claims are spurious, of course-- do people really favor phones with larger screens now because of porn?-- but it is undeniable that adult entertainment is a massive and often hidden economic lever that has shaped our technology landscape.

Adventure games were not immune to this pressure. In 1981, On-Line Systems (later known as Sierra On-Line) released Softporn Adventure; it supposedly sold so well that 25% of Apple II computers owned a legitimate copy, not even accounting for piracy. In 1986, Infocom released Leather Goddesses of Phobos, their final true hit. Even though it came out late in Infocom’s lifespan, it still became their 5th best selling game of all time. Both of these had remakes (Leisure Suit Larry, for one) and sequels. Larry sold 300,000 copies in its first year! There was a market for lewd (and more than lewd?) games.

And yet, none of those games could be called “pornographic”. At best, they contained sexy situations and innuendo. Graphical nudity, where present, was censored. In honor of making it to Leather Goddesses in my Infocom marathon, I am taking a detour back to the dawn of the genre to investigate the very first X-Rated work of interactive fiction, 1982’s Drive-In Adventure. It’s not a great game by any stretch, but at the time it must have seemed revolutionary. It also must have evinced a certain sense of nostalgia for those that played it; it warranted, by my count, no less than three ports or updates in the years that followed. In the interests of our readers (and Google search ranking), I will keep this review as close to PG-13 as possible. I’ll talk about the naughty bits, but forgive me if I must be a bit circumspect.

Asylum II: The Birds, Part 2

Written by Will Moczarski

Missed Classic 83: Asylum II (1982) – Introduction

Written by Will Moczarski

Asylum must have been a major success for Med Systems Software, as the team of company president William F. Denman jr. and Frank L. Corr jr. teamed up once more about one year later to program its sequel, simply called Asylum II. The original version of this game seems to have been written – once more – for the TRS-80, and the game marks several forks in the road for Med Systems Software: It was the last game by both Denman and Corr as well as the last adventure game they developed in-house. They published three more games by Jyym Pearson but apart from that, the following years saw only re-releases and re-packagings, mostly of their short-lived Asylum brand. Asylum II, in particular, was confusingly re-released as simply Asylum for the Commodore 64 and the Atari computers in 1986. This was the game that made me first encounter Screenplay, the company formerly known as Med Systems Software, and the desire to go back and play through it gave me the idea for this whole marathon.

Asylum II has the same graphics and the same plot as its predecessor – once again, you are a mental patient who needs to escape from the asylum before he goes “insane.” Both the asylum and the game’s concept of “insanity” have a b-movie feel and don’t even make an effort to come across as realistic. If you haven’t read my other three playthroughs of Med Systems’ trademark “Continuum” games (Deathmaze 5000, Labyrinth, Asylum), you may be surprised at the wireframe 3D graphics that apparently challenged Sierra’s claim to have released the first graphic adventure with Mystery House in 1980. However, these games evolved from a different tradition – that of 3D maze games, a viable mainframe genre that first came into contact with the yet-undeveloped genre of the adventure game in the famous Hunt the Wumpus and its many clones. The “Continuum” games thus progressively qualify more and more as adventure games – while the plot of this latest iteration is not very complex, there are some notable NPC encounters as well as actual puzzles apart from geographical ones. I have very mixed feelings about this game as I kind of enjoyed Asylum but it took me a very, very long time to solve it and I had to resort to a hint sheet in the end. As my memory of the game’s Commodore 64 port is more than hazy, I don’t really know what to expect. Sometimes that’s a good sign, though, innit?

Missed Classic: Starcross - Won! And Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

The entire game summed up in one image.

Last week, I had a ton of fun exploring the alien vessel in Starcross. One part dungeon-crawl, one part “hard” science fiction, it wasn’t like any of the games that I have played so far in this series. Unfortunately, I found a few of the puzzles too challenging and I had to give up. I could not turn on the lights to explore the rest of the ship and I could not fix the leaks which caused me to run out of air. I also knew of several colored rods that I was unable to collect. With the help of a few hints, I was able to get the game moving again and complete my explorations. This week, I’ll conclude my tour of the accidental generation-ship and close out the fifth game in our marathon.

The first challenge I faced this week was turning on the lights, a problem so solvable that I had done it a half-dozen times without even realizing it.

Missed Classic: Starcross - Zorks in Space! (Request for Assistance)

Written by Joe Pranevich

My trusty ship, the Starcross.

Last week, I embarked on an adventure: While searching our solar system for miniature black holes to mine, I instead found a gigantic alien ship. Before I knew it, I will pulled alongside and forced to dock. With my ship trapped, all I could do was board the vessel and see what was up. I solved one difficult (to me!) puzzle at the door only to find a long red hallway and suspiciously breathable air. We’re not in Zork anymore! It’s time to play Starcross.

Let me start with the usual disclaimer: I play these games like an OCD weasel on caffeine and so I’m sorting the events in a way that describes the individual areas even as it doesn’t quite reflect the jumping back and forth that happens when inspiration strikes. Much of the ship I am about to explore is open immediately and so a lot of the early part of the game is just getting the lay of the land in an alien ship. Although it is a very “Zork” experience puzzle-wise, the setting never feels like anything that has come before in this series. It’s mind-bending.

Missed Classic 38: Starcross - Introduction (1982)

Written by Joe Pranevich

A few weeks ago, Zork III fell to the might of my trusty elven sword. That’s four games on our Zork marathon completed and I remain excited for this series and what comes next. It’s time to take our first official side-trip: Starcross. Released simultaneously with Zork III and tied for the mantle of Infocom’s fourth game, Starcross is another genre-buster for 1982. While Marc Blank proved that text adventures could work for mysteries, Dave Liebling went after hard science fiction. I’ll be playing it because (I am told) it has elements that directly tie it into the Zork universe, albeit not part of the main series. We’ll have to wait and see.

Right off the bat, Infocom wanted to make Starcross unlike any game that had come before. Only a few months after introducing the “feelies” with Deadline and starting to distribute their own materials, Infocom took creative packaging to the next level by utilizing a distinctive “UFO” shape for the release. The “box”, if you can call it that, was a plastic flying saucer. I vaguely remember reading about this gimmick years ago; boxes literally rolled off the shelves. It’s a funny way to start what promises to be a serious game but let’s hope they didn’t pour more creativity into the packaging than the game itself.