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.

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?