Planet Interactive Fiction Last Update: Wednesday, 22. January 2025 05:02

SharpSoft, the company out of London with products for the Sharp line of computers, advertised four games in the January 1983 issue of Personal Computing World.

Dark Star by A.J. Josey
Mexican Adventure by Geoff Clark
Haunted House by A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark
Secret Kingdom by Geoff Clark

As the links above imply, we’ve played two of them, and have two more to go. I’m still unclear if these were listed in the order they were written or not. Having played Dark Star a little, I can say the parser feels better than Haunted House but worse than Secret Kingdom. However, that’s not really proving anything, and it could even be the case (given we’re dealing with two different authors) they were developing games in an overlapping way.

Both A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark remain mysteriously resistant to my attempts to find them even as references in computer magazines. The closest I found was that there was a person named Geoff Clark who worked as a camera supervisor on some Classic Doctor Who episodes; it would be lovely to find out it was the same person (especially as I know one of the readers of this blog also worked as a camera supervisor for Doctor Who) but there’s absolutely no evidence for that and there’s enough Geoff Clarks out there I can’t call it anything more than coincidence.

I didn’t find much else on Sharpsoft either other than a profile of Michael Opacic who wrote them word processor, spreadsheet, and database software, and “sold full rights — no royalties” with “the attitude that a bird in the hand is worth several in the bush.” A different contract paid out 15% royalties so the company was clearly giving both options; I still have no names associated with the founder or founders.

I originally had this game farther down on my list, due to a technical issue commenter Rob discovered; while you are required to type numerical digits later in the game, the program (in the MZ-700 format we have) doesn’t let you. It is literally impossible to win without modifying the source code.

Rob asked a while ago for help in a Czech MZ Sharp forum, and Lanhawk noticed that advice had recently rolled in. Specifically, this line is wrong:

500 IF(T<65)-(T>90)THENUSR(62):GOTO440

It needs to be

500 IF(T<48)-(T>90)THENUSR(62):GOTO440

What’s happening here is that the game is restricting what the player types to certain ASCII codes. The ASCII code for “0” is 48, and the code for “A” is 65. The first line restricts input to letter characters (anything less than 65 in ASCII is left out), leaving out the needed digits. By changing the value to 48, “0” through “9” are now included.

While it certainly is possible for a unfinishable game to hit in the 80s for no particular reason at all, in this case the game was originally written for MZ-80A before getting moved to the MZ-700. While this more or less just adds color, I could easily see a change like the bug above also slipping in.

So you don’t have to noodle with all that, I put together a package of the game with an emulator and the fix already swapped in. Load save state 1 and hit ENTER to start from the very beginning, or load save state 2 to jump straight to the first room.

The game starts with music, which I’ve dropped a video of below.

Despite the Star Wars theme, the game feels (so far) like an amalgam of Star Trek and Alien. You’re in the Dark Star ship and you are the only one aboard (except for, as you’ll see later, an alien); the closest aspect to Star Wars is a “starfighter” that’s on board, but maybe that gets later to shoot down TIE Fighters so suddenly the theme will be appropriate again.

The most interesting part of the instructions is the notice that this game has no score as it is “mission” based and “you either make it or you don’t!!”

You start in the control room of the Dark Star. There’s no options other than to SIT DOWN. That alone took a bit of time to work out. The command SIT is bespoke and only works in this room in this context (that is, somewhere it is hard-coded to check for “SIT DOWN” as a phrase rather than the command SIT being considered a verb on its own). It (and some other commands) evaded my verb list:

The evasion can be pretty bad; just typing SIT alone gives the message I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY THE COMMAND ‘SIT’, which suggests this is entirely the wrong thing to be typing; SIT SEAT gets equal confusion, and the parser doesn’t even let you type SIT ON SEAT (it will stop you from putting in a space after a second word — the same kind of hard enforcement that led to the bug where numerals couldn’t be typed in).

Sitting down successfully results in a blank screen, a red button and a blue button. Pressing either button just states NOTHING HAPPENS! which is slightly frustating because something happens in both cases. With the blue button, it turns the screen on and reveals the player’s mission: the ship is about to blow up and the self-destruct needs to be de-activated.

The red button invisibly opens an exit to the north, where you can find a map which gives the overall ship layout in glorious ASCII.

Before going on to explore the ship, I want to point out how incredibly odd the opening is in a meta-sense. Surely if we’re here, and we’re the only one, we’re meant to be here — that is, the avatar ought to already know the function of the red button and blue button, so saying that nothing happens is doubly curious? In 1982, the amnesia trick still hasn’t been rolled in much yet to cure player-vs-avatar-knowledge disjoint (Ferret and El Diablero have been the only two); most games from this era seem to just pretend it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to deal with, though; Kirk in a Star Trek adventure game surely should know his own ship’s layout, yet the player needs to map it out.

Following the same order as the ship’s map:

2 is the recreation room, which has a pinball machine and a table. The table has an ID card which will be needed later, and a chart which talks about a star system DILOS DC. I have not used this information yet.

The pinball machine is described as a Captain Fantastic which is a real pinball game from the 1970s (it was the follow-up to Wizard by Bally and sold immensely well; it helped for Bally’s finances that Elton John — whose likeness was used — took his payment in pinball machines).

Moving on to 3 is the research lab, which has a radiation detector, a polystyrene box, and an Orac (a fictional computer from the show Blake’s 7). Sure, let’s toss all the sci-fi shows in there.

4 is the flight deck with a starfighter. You can hop on but the starfighter lacks gas. So much for escaping self-destruct the ignoble way.

5 is the galley (that’s far southeast on the map) which has an old tea strainer.

Stepping into the larder reveals an air vent; you can go in the air vent to find a “blank wall” and going any further results in death-by-alien.

Moving up to 6 is the cargo hold, with multiple suits: a spacesuit, a “metal suit” (which turns out to be radiation protection) and a green suit (which I don’t understand yet). Hidden within the suits are a COMPASS and a NOTE, the latter explaining that the starfighter — the one we saw earlier that needs fuel — responds to spoken commands.

With the ID card back at the recreation room you can get into 7, which is a armoury. It has a phaser (which can only be set to kill) and a coin which goes back at the pinball table.

Finally there’s 8, which can be reached by starting at the control room and going due north. If you just do that right away you die.

The metal suit back at the storage is sufficient for protection.

The control panel has three buttons (yellow, red, and green) with the note that they disarm the self-destruct in the right combination. Why don’t we know the combination? Maybe we’re raiders and there’s a missing manual insert. Just to emphasize why the “bespoke command” feature is dodgy, here’s my attempt at reading the inscription that goes with the colored buttons:

I picked the wrong noun on READ first and it told me the command READ wasn’t understood! This very much implies to stop using READ, and I only persisted because I already observed the response was deceptive.

Once I got past the rough starting command the game became fun to explore. I’m not even “stuck” yet, but I had enough enthusiasm from people who wanted to play along I figured this was a good place to stop.

8 hours ago

what are turns made of?

to everything, turn, turn, turn.

Last week, a reader commented on my use of a carry out rule. That’s great! I’ve been thinking about it, and decided it’s probably time to review action processing.

“Action processing” is a general term referring to order, organization, and outcomes with regard to the things that “happen” during Inform games. Time passing in parser games typically occurs is measured in units of time called turns. Turns pass in response to player commands. Usually, one actionable (valid) command creates a response, and that response takes one turn. The most common command is EXAMINE. If a player examines something, a typical response is for Inform to print the description of that something.

>x chairs
There were an incredible number of seats there, probably twenty at least! I had a hard time imagining so many people in one place all at once. There weren't any people sitting in them, but I had a feeling that there was more to them than I could see at first glance.

This exchange takes one turn, and increments an automatically tracked number called the “TURN COUNT”. We can refer to this number any time we like:

say "The current turn count is [turn count].";

Even though players may not see all or even most of it, a lot of things happen during the course of an Inform turn. I’ll share a link to a very complex diagram of the turn, but don’t get lost in it, as understanding the highlights is often enough.

Check out this 2009 post from Emily Short’s blog.

What I say here will not be exhaustive, but it should provide a good starting point for new authors. I’ll list these in order, though some cycling is possible.

the player’s command.

The turn starts with the player’s command. In nearly every parser game, time stands still until a command is entered. Parser gameplay usually consists of commands being parsed into actions and, when applicable, one or two nouns. While there are some opportunities to get involved with parser operation, a lot of it is not accessible to us as beginners. Let’s set aside the parser for another day.

However, before the command parsing begins, we do have some fairly direct methods for engaging with Inform. This involves two basic formulations:

before reading a command:

Since the game has not read the command yet, our options are quite limited. Perhaps we’d like to check or change some variables or modify the appearance of the command prompt.

after reading a command:

This one is used more commonly. We can check a command in ways we can’t–by default, anyway–check via Inform’s natural language diction. We can even edit or replace commands, bypassing the parser to do so. In fact, the command isn’t really a command. It’s a line of text that Inform’s parser hasn’t evaluated yet.

Note that no turns have passed at this phase, because the parser has not yet turned a command into action.

However, there is a lot to consider while using either tactic, since we are setting aside Inform’s usual framework of parsed commands and actions. That isn’t to say that a beginner should never use them! My advice is just to exhaust the possibilities of action processing first.

before.

Inform will then parse valid commands into actionable elements. This occurs in a series of steps. During this process, the state of the world will be checked several times.

Once a valid command has been processed, Inform will perform a couple of checks pertaining to items included in groupings, for instance what is included in the “all” of TAKE ALL.

Once that’s done, our action rules begin in earnest. The earliest possible action processing rule is the BEFORE rule. BEFORE rules are, in my experience, both potent and uncommon. Uncommon, because it’s not usually necessary or useful to do things with BEFORE (we’ll use later rules for almost everything). Potent, because when you need them, you really need them. The biggest reason to use BEFORE is that it comes before Inform has checked either visibility or accessibility.

“Visibility” is a little misleading. It is a check to determine the room has light or not. We could use a BEFORE room to allow players to perform actions that are prevented by darkness.

If we wanted to render an item or room visible in a less limited sense, we would change the scope of the player. More on that another day!

“Accessibility,” on the other hand, governs what the player can touch (many actions require one or more “touchable” things). Using a BEFORE rule may allow the player to manipulate an item locked within a transparent container, even though that is usually impossible. Essentially, a BEFORE rule will allow the player to touch any visible or in-scope thing, regardless of location. BEFORE also allows actions against non-touchable objects, for instance:

before touching north:
	say "OK!"

will yield

>touch north
OK!

You must name something more substantial.

Note that the “OK!” response is from the BEFORE rule, while the “You must name something more substantial.” comes from the BASIC ACCESSIBILITY RULE, which has subsequently determined that a direction cannot be touched.

The other reason for using BEFORE, and this will be a recurring concept, is that we can “get in front” of later phases of action processing. Let’s say we have an INSTEAD rule (the next phase of the turn) that almost always works, but we need to disable it for a very specific situation. If we don’t want to retool the actions involved, we can just prevent that INSTEAD from firing:

before jumping when the turn count is less than ten:
	say "It's far too early for that." instead.

Still, because of visibility and accessibility differences, it’s good to think such things through.

instead.

Once BEFORE rules have completed, and visibility and accessibility are determined, INSTEAD rules are processed. INSTEAD rules, as the name suggests, happen INSTEAD of something else. Although INSTEAD can be a trap for new authors (I’ll come back to this), it has a lot of uses. I usually use it for simple redirection of actions. We might have a custom action for something, for instance. In some cases, built-in actions might be redirected to it.

instead of cutting something:
	try preparing the noun.

In this way, trying to cut something–an onion, for instance–would redirect to an action we’ve come up with, PREPARING. Note that we can be very general with our INSTEAD rules. There’s nothing to stop us from making a rule like:

instead of doing something:
	say "I prefer not to.".

That’s kind of silly. But let’s say we have an item. It’s an apple. Instead of implementing every possible action with the apple, we can use a general instead rule to head most things off.

instead of doing something other than eating, taking, or examining to the apple:
	say "That apple is only good for eating.".

That can be pretty handy, especially if we are trying to avoid Inform’s built in action responses.

My personal taste is to avoid instead rules in a lot of cases, because INSTEAD stops action processing. If we have an INSTEAD rule for SMELLING THE ROSE, Inform will stop processing that action the INSTEAD is reached. My general preference is to use the entire processing turn unless I have a reason not to. From a learning point of view (I’m still learning, after all), I benefit from keeping an eye on what happens as the turn progresses. Another reason is that I like using AFTER rules for things like keeping score, tracking player goals, and so forth. I’ve written about that here!

Still, it can’t always be helped. This is especially true of actions that are part of the Standard Rules. There are multiple rules governing the EXAMINING action, for instance, and it isn’t easy for us to just jump in the middle of that. Rather than taking a wrench to the action and hoping for the best, it’s probably best to “get in front” of the action with an INSTEAD rule.

instead of examining the jeweled scepter when the house is on fire:
	say "You don't have time to look at that right now!".

Here’s something you don’t want to do, and I want to stress this emphatically: don’t write your game using INSTEAD rules for everything. You can, definitely, and because you’ll be stopping other actions, you’ll never have to worry about what Inform does during the usual turn. You’ll never need to learn how default responses work. Consider this code:

instead of unlocking the iron door with the titanium key:
	say "Even though your hands are sweaty and shaking, you manage to get the iron door unlocked!";
	say "The fearsome mutant blorglebeast charges! But you manage to squeeze through the door in the nick of time, locking it behind you.";
	now the player is in the safe room;
	try looking.

Now, chances are this will all do that the author expects. We have dramatic text, and the player has gotten beyond the locked door! It’s fine. But what if you want a scoring system later? What if you want more than one thing happening, or if it matters if the door is actually open? This will work, but there’s no future in it, and it doesn’t have much to teach.

That isn’t to say don’t use it; just be wary of it.

check.

Next come CHECK rules, which have a narrower scope than INSTEAD. Usually, a CHECK rule is used to evaluate a specific action.

check eating the strawberry:
	say "You are allergic to strawberries." instead.

Note that we are still shutting down the action with “instead.” We don’t have to do that, we could use “check” to print one message or update a status, then continue on with a later CARRY OUT rule.

Why not use an instead rule? Once concept of organization is to use INSTEAD rules for broad, general purposes. If food can have a fried property, we could have a rule that handles all such cases with a single response.

instead of eating something fried:
	say "I've sworn off fried foods for the sake of my heart."

A CHECK could follow behind with specific cases that get past our rather healthy prohibition against fried foods. We can handle such scenarios with more tailored and specific response messages.

check eating kale:
	say "Even though they all say how healthy it is, I can't stand Kale. I can't even swallow one bite of it!"

The general concept is that action processing begins wide but narrows to the specific.

As a matter of personal style, I rarely use CHECK messages (I’ll explain later), but that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to you.

carry out.

By this time, the player’s parsed command has travelled a long way. BEFORE, INSTEAD, and CHECK have all permitted that the action reach the CARRY OUT phase of action processing. As the name suggests, now is the time for actions to be carried out. Things aren’t usually stopped here; the action does whatever it does and moves on.

What kinds of things can happen during carry out? In some cases, the state of the world changes. If a player successfully opens a door, the status of the door changes:

Carry out an actor opening (this is the standard opening rule):
	now the noun is open.

Sometimes, the only obvious result is printed text.

Carry out examining (this is the standard examining rule):
	if the noun provides the property description and the description of the noun is not "":
		say "[description of the noun][line break]";
		now examine text printed is true.

Note that “examine text printed” is tracked so that Inform knows whether it has printed something while examining, it doesn’t have any persistent effect on the world.

CARRY OUT might be a state of mind, then, since complexity, world condition, and printed output are all optional for a CARRY OUT rule. Instead of what such rules do, it’s often useful to think of when they happen during the player’s turn.

If BEFORE is the wide, open mouth of a funnel, then CARRY OUT is the narrowest point in the process. This is where specific, successful actions are carried out. In an abstract sense, a printed failure message might be a valid CARRY OUT rule. If the rule is specific and is going to continue on through action processing, CARRY OUT is a good fit.

Most of what your game does to affect the world or give feedback on completed actions will happen here.

I usually recommend specific rules, rather than complex conditional rules. That is, I prefer

carry out eating the apple:
	say "Juicy and crisp. Delicious!".

carry out eating the plum:
	"Delicious. So sweet and so cold.".

rather than

carry out eating a fruit:
	if the noun is the apple:
		say "Juicy and crisp. Delicious!";
	otherwise if the noun is the plum:
		say "Delicious. So sweet and so cold.".

As part of action processing, multiple applicable rules can execute during the same turn. The built-in rule for eating sends whatever is successfully eaten “nowhere,” or out of play.

Carry out an actor eating (this is the standard eating rule):
	now the noun is nowhere.

By default, both our rule printing feedback and the built-in rule taking the noun out of play will be processed.

after.

AFTER rules follow on after something has been carried out (or otherwise passed beyond the CARRY OUT phase of action processing). AFTER rules are useful and versatile. They can accommodate broad conditions, like

after doing something:

This makes AFTER rules handy for things like scoring systems, where actions and values require checking or updates with every successfully carried out action. If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve used AFTER rules for tracking player objectives, for instance. A familiar idea from the documentation is giving items a property after the player examines them. We can use such a property to manipulate item descriptions, among other things. We’ll use a custom property called “examined” for this purpose.

a thing can be examined or unexamined.
a thing is usually unexamined.

first after examining something unexamined:
	now the noun is examined;
	continue the action;

A couple of features to note! “FIRST” can be used to push a rule to the front of its class. That is, if we have multiple AFTER rules and desire to arrange output in a specific order, we can use FIRST and LAST designations to do so. Note that this is only relevant to multiple rules from the same phase of action processing. We can’t make a CARRY OUT rule execute before an INSTEAD rule, but we can decide which applicable CARRY OUT rule runs first (or last).

The other important element of the above code is the phrase “continue the action.” We haven’t seen this before, but if, for example we want an action to proceed in spite of a rule that would normally end it (an INSTEAD rule, for instance), we can include the code “continue the action.”

AFTER rules, by default, end the action. INSTEAD rules end with a designation of “failure,” which I wouldn’t worry too much about. It’s a technical rather than a practical designation. AFTER rules end in “success.” In both cases, action processing stops. One implication of this is that it isn’t possible to reliably execute multiple AFTER or INSTEAD rules unless we’ve made arrangements. This isn’t a big deal for INSTEAD: that’s supposed to stop things. If we’re using “big” AFTER rules, on the other hand, we need to think things through.

One reason AFTER rules end processing for a specific action is that they can “get in front of” REPORT rules. In our fruit-eating example above, Inform has a built-in success message.

Report an actor eating (this is the standard report eating rule):
	if the action is not silent:
		if the actor is the player:
			say "[We] [eat] [the noun]. Not bad." (A);
		otherwise:
			say "[The actor] [eat] [the noun]." (B).

Now, we’ve already written our own text. This doesn’t interest us. We can stop the report rule from printing, or we can just make an AFTER rule.

after eating a fruit:
	do nothing.

That’s enough to prevent the report message and call the action a “success” (which, again, we aren’t paying too much attention to at the moment). If we preferred, we could move our text feedback here. We could also use AFTER rules to preempt any other REPORT rule, be it ours or Graham Nelson’s.

report.

I don’t do a lot with REPORT, personally, though it’s been helpful to me in some very specific situations. It’s generally used to print success messages from the standard rules. I’m sure a lot of us will recognize this, for instance.

Report an actor taking (this is the standard report taking rule):
	if the action is not silent:
		if the actor is the player:
			say "Taken." (A);
		otherwise:
			say "[The actor] [pick] up [the noun]." (B).

While it’s generally for feedback, there’s nothing stopping authors from messing with world state at the report phase. Some of the things that work other places will work here. Organizationally, though, it’s time to wrap things up by the time REPORT rolls around.

Report can’t handle the kind of broad, “big” rules that AFTER can. REPORT DOING SOMETHING, for instance, doesn’t work. AFTER is for follow ups, REPORT is a lid closing.

churn.

Note that action processing can repeat, or spawn parallel actions during a single turn. If we use INSTEAD to redirect action, for instance,

instead of taking the massive iron weight:
	try pushing the noun.

“Try pushing the noun” will spawn a new action that begins at the BEFORE phase. Consider this possibility:

carry out pushing the big red button:
	try hiding under the table;
	try covering my ears.

Inform will try to perform both actions starting at BEFORE, as ordered in the rule, then go back to try taking the original action (“pushing the big red button”) through action processing.

every turn.

Once every action dictated by the player’s command has completed, Inform will check scene status (I’ll be writing about scenes soon), then take a look at EVERY TURN rules.

EVERY TURN is part of the player’s turn, but it isn’t directly triggered by player action. Rather, EVERY TURN rules run independently. They’re good for general world management and machinery. Perhaps we’d like an ambient sound in a room:

every turn when the player is in the damp corridor:
	if a random chance of one in three chance succeeds:
		say "You hear the sound of dripping water.".

or

every turn when Scene III is happening:
	increment the dangerous number;
	if the dangerous number is 10:
		say "The skylight shatters overhead, and a very dangerous looking man leaps through!";
		now the dangerous man is in the living room.

scene iii ends when the dangerous man is in the living room.

And so forth! General, player-independent management of the game world is what EVERY TURN rules are all about. If they seem similar to AFTER rules used to keep score, they really aren’t. Think of such AFTER rules as responding to actions. EVERY TURN, on the other hand, is concerned with the game world itself.

Note that it is very common to have multiple EVERY TURN rules processing during a turn. If we add “rule succeeds” or “rule fails” or “stop the action” to an EVERY TURN rule, Inform will stop processing EVERY TURN rules. This is true of other phases, too. It usually isn’t desirable to say rules “succeed” or “fail” unless we have specific reasons for doing so.

what else.

Most of what happens next is out of scope for us. Inform will check for timed events, then advance the clock. More scenery stuff, etc.

A brief recap, in order of the kinds of action processing rules:

• BEFORE: first to process. Can bypass checks for visibility and accessibility. Support for “big” rules that can cover multiple actions and such.
• INSTEAD: Best use to redirect actions, prevent broad categories for action, or otherwise get in front of CHECK rules.
• CHECK: Perform checks on specific actions and stop or redirect as needed.
• CARRY OUT: Perform specific actions, print output, update world state as needed.
• AFTER: Good for action follow ups (score systems, property changes). Alternately: a way to get in front of REPORT. Support for “big” rules accommodating multiple actions.
• REPORT: Print output once actions are complete. Like CHECK and CARRY OUT, REPORT does not support “big” rules.
• EVERY TURN: Rules that execute every turn, independent of player action. Best used for checking and updating world state.

Sometimes a mix is good! Eventually, you might want to spread actions across multiple phases of action processing. I think the important thing for us beginners is to try and experiment with every phase, getting a feel for when and how things happen during an Inform turn.

next.

Back to relations. Scenes, too.

I’m on Bluesky!

13 hours ago

Roger M. Wilcox has now had 19 games we’ve covered on this blog. This is the 20th and the last for 1981.

As a brief reminder, they were nearly all “private games” without much a notion for publication. The only exception was The Vial of Doom which the author tried to send to Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures but missed the deadline on. All the games eventually made it to the author’s web site. Wilcox doesn’t give much background for Derelict 2147 other than he calls it a “ho-hum treasure hunt”; his next game for TRS-80 (The Last City, #21) was designed as his grand send-off as he was transitioning to DOS.

He mentions — as a complete coincidence — Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (1987) also being set in the year 2147. It had toys that you could use while watching to interact with the show.

Derelict 2147 is rather like the Aardvark Software Derelict in that you are raiding an alien spaceship. This time the ship has appeared past Mars, and you start from Earth and need to steal a vehicle, killing a guard in the process.

This is akin to the opening of Odyssey 2: Treasure Island, where you have to murder a pilot and steal his plane to go over to the title island. I’m going to assume we know the guard is evil somehow and the ship would otherwise be used for the Evil Empire of Evil to do Bad Things. (Or. sticking with the Captain Power theme, used by Lord Dread in a quest to destroy humanity.)

The game is genuinely straightforward but I only found it that way because I’m used to playing both old games and Wilcox games in particular. For instance, at the very start, there’s a manhole which resists attempts at opening it.

>OPEN COVER
It’s beyond your power to do that.

>GET COVER
It’s beyond your power to do that.

>ENTER MANHOLE
I don’t know how to “enter” something.

PUSH? SLIDE? Nope. I whipped out my standard verb list and tested my way through before doing anything else, resulting in:

CUT, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, CLOSE, KILL, UNLOCK, LOCK, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, PULL, MOVE, MAKE, SHOOT, EXAMINE, CONNECT

MOVE worked on the manhole. Incidentally, I keep trying to use ENTER for the entire rest of the game (this game uses GO only as the appropriate verb).

Hopping in the manhole:

You are in an ancient sewer. Visible items:
Long dead body.
Obvious exits: Up

The body has a gun license. Why do we need a gun license?

Well, the other location at the start is a “weapons shop” which contains guns and knives. You can grab a knife just fine, but if you try to get a gun it says you need a license, and I’m pretty sure grabbing some dead person’s gun license will make everyone happy.

With the gun and knife in hand we can now murder a guard (single guard) blocking an interplanetary spaceship in order to steal it.

>SHOOT GUARD
Zzap!
Wow! That was rather impressive!
>ENTER PLANETSHIP
I don’t know how to “enter” something.
>GO PLANETSHIP
Ok

The ship has a sign indicating *treasures* go here, and a red button with a joystick. Pressing the red button is sufficient to fly all the way to mars and dock with an alien ship.

Let’s rotate our way through the map, using the docking bay as a hub, and starting with far east and rotating counterclockwise.

Upon the first LOOK, the shelves reveal a “small device” with a green button that reverses gravity temporarily. The shelves are the kind you need to LOOK at more than once — the second time around, you’ll find a “five-pound key”. The “panel” is locking the “sliding doors” and need an identity device, which we’ll return with later.

Headed counterclockwise, the next place is a “antechamber” with a cryonics chamber and a lever. Pull the lever opens the chamber, revealing an alien who will now follow you around.

Trying to kill the alien has the game respond it is your friend, so I guess we don’t need to be trigger-happy anymore. I’m curious what the lore is behind the “you’re not a mutant” line; maybe the aliens were trying to escape mutants, so since we aren’t that’s why the alien is friendly?

Moving on to “up” from the docking bay (next on my map), there’s a tunnel with a hole in the ceiling. You can use the temporary gravity shut-off to float up through the hole and retrieve an octagonal crystal (a treasure) and an electric iron rod. The iron rod has a blue button which gives an electric shock.

Keeping our rotation, heading straight north from the docking bay leads to Large Quarters with “rows” of cryonics chambers. Looking at the console:

It has a lever on it.
… with a crystal attached!
An alien voice sounds in your mind:
‘Oh? You want that, eh? Sure thing!”
He removes the gem, opens a chamber, and seals himself off.

This gives a *parasite crystal*, another one of the treasures. Rotating again, my map has the exit “down”. This leads to a strange forcefield and possibly the most interesting part of the game. If you pass through the forcefield you die because of the difference in atmospheres between the inside and outside of the ship, but you see an alien with a metal belt before you die.

That is, the main text says:

>D
Ok
>LOOK FORCEFIELD
It’s very tenuous, only strong enough to impede gasses.
>GO FORCEFIELD
Ok
Your body couldn’t take the transition to zero pressure!
You were ripped apart!

But on the death screen you can see the room description:

You’re on a destroyed platform open to space. Visible items:
Alien wearing a steel belt.
Obvious exits: West

In another room (which we’ll arrive at shortly) there’s a copper coil. If we have the electric iron rod in copper coil in inventory, the command MAKE turns them into an electromagnet. Yes, this could have been very hard to find, but I found MAKE from verb-testing, and I knew both from the game’s response to MAKE (saying you don’t have the right materials yet) and previous Wilcox games that I didn’t need to specify a target. I only needed to use the verb MAKE, and the rest would happen by magic.

The electromagnet can then serve to pull in the alien, which we can only see because of the death screen!

A charge flows through the copper wire.
It was stronger than you thought! It pulled something in.

The alien has a treasure (an *advanced communicator*) as well as an identity amulet. The amulet goes back to the far-east storage room to open the sliding doors, leading to a cabinet with yet another treasure (a vial of Californium).

One last area:

There’s that copper coil I already mentioned, and also a treasure (a *platinum cube*) made deadly by being attached to a wire. If you LOOK CUBE you’ll see the wire, and the knife serves well enough to CUT WIRE, making the cube safe to take. The wire can also be pulled, revealing the pit you’re supposed to be dying in. This lets you climb into the pit safely and retrieve one of the spikes.

The spike turns out to be a “printed-circuit spike” and counts as a treasure. It’s all over!

Again, I want to emphasize: I found this straightforward, but I’m used enough to various conventions to recognize quickly what I’m looking at (and I have my secret weapon, the verb list). It does seem Mr. Wilcox’s heart wasn’t as much in this one; it’s lacking the satire of his other 1982 game, Followers Adventure, or the creativity of the Trash Island games. However, keep in mind this was not meant to be commercial; these are still private games, it’s just Roger Wilcox was gracious enough to eventually make them available.

This game does have one bit of satire, although it might be accidental. In addition to the button and joystick, your planetship has a fuel gauge. Upon docking, the fuel gauge is empty, and we never addressed that particular concern, implying the player character is now trapped on the alien ship albeit with their treasures, making for a grisly tomb instead of triumph.

a day ago

(Continued from my previous posts on Cornucopia.)

There’s lots of new places to see in this post, but before plowing forward, I wanted to address something I’ve found puzzling: why does the writing seem both good and bad at the same time?

As has already been observed in the comments by arcanetrivia, there’s very loose control of commas. Other grammar conventions at times are followed only approximately.

You are in a room which is wider at the east end than at the west end, its length is greater than its width even at its widest point. Strangely there is a powerful draught blowing from this end of the room towards the smaller end, it is probably something to do with the rooms shape. The floor is covered in gaily coloured tiles; red, green blue and yellow ones. The walls are coloured to match and the whole makes your eyes fairly boggle.

I would love to scribble my red pen over this, but it doesn’t feel awful in the way we’ve seen with other games. It struck me finally that most of the awkward sections work fine if read out-loud. Imagine that this was originally an AD&D scenario (as it may have been!) where the Dungeon Master reads descriptions to the players. (Link here if the embed below doesn’t show on your screen.)

It seems to work, no? The phrase “its length is greater than its width even at its widest point” scans with the eye badly but given the natural pauses and emphasis of a voice, it doesn’t seem confusing. There’s a comma that doesn’t work as written (after “end” it should be a period) but if we think of it verbally, as a shorter pause than a period, it makes sense. Even if none of this text made its way into a real campaign, I suspect the author might have written things down with a spoken cadence in mind. Taking a later clip which we’ll see today:

The murals were painted by an artist who was a master of his craft. They depict the scenes of miraculous healing of beings of many kinds, some quite hideous, some enormous and others quite ordinary. No reason for the healing is shown, but it is obvious a great antipathy existed between some of these beings.

There’s nothing broken in the grammar this time, the parallelism-with-a-break parses well (“some” quite hideous, “some” enormous, “others” quite ordinary) and the final suggestion of “a great antipathy” existing between the beings (without being explicit) is genuinely vivid. Mind you, it still isn’t Emily Dickinson, or to make a fairer comparison, Brian Moriarty, but it works better than your average early-80s text adventure.

Back to the game! Last time I had mentioned a section with a gold door–

>ENTER MIRROR
You are in a small square room, the walls of which are completely blank.
There is a gold door in the south wall.

>OPEN GOLD DOOR
You open the door and a little man rushes out and says ‘Oh thank you very much, I have been stuck in there for ages’. I only came back for this, he says, waving a small box, it should have got me out of there but it seems it is not quite perfect yet. He then turns a dial, presses a button on the small box and just disappears. In his haste to depart a note slips from his pocket.

Now that I had the prototype teleport box, I could escape from this area (with the gold bar just to the south) but there turned out to be one catch: the “little man” swipes the transport box if you’re holding it.

You open the door and a little man rushes out and says ‘Oh thank you very much, I have been stuck in there for ages’. I only came back for this, he says, waving a small box, it should have got me out of there but it seems it is not quite perfect yet. He suddenly looks at something you are carrying and says ‘I lost that sometime ago, whereever did you find it?’ Without letting you answer he quickly snatches it. He then turns a dial, presses a button on the small box and just disappears. In his haste to depart a note slips from his pocket.

Fortunately, avoiding this is a matter of just taking the brown sack from the kitchen area and storing the transport box in there temporarily.

The sack has an interesting side effect.

The small box has five coloured buttons on its top side. They are coloured blue yellow, green, pink and black, there is no indication as to their use. The box has the distinct appearance of being extremely delicate, and probably the slightest bump would damage it.

Note the “slightest bump would damage it” part. Trying to drop the box results in a “sickening crunch” and it stops working. However, having the box in the sack is sufficient to protect it (assuming you need to clear your inventory).

Moving on:

The area is made of a chain of six doors: gold, silver, copper, crystal, oak, ruby. Pressing the blue button on the box advances forwards one; pressing the pink button goes back one. (After ruby, it wraps back to gold.) Green advances two and yellow advances three. The black button goes back to the mirror. This is incidentally the only area I’ve found where any button other than black works.

The “silver bar room” seems to be there for just holding a silver bar. The copper door allows a second entrance into the Magi area (bypassing the dragon puzzle!) The crystal door has some mist and a coin on the ground.

You are in a small square room, the walls of which are completely blank.
There is a crystal door in the north wall.

>OPEN DOOR
The crystal door opens.

>N
The mist in this chamber is so thick it is difficult to see where you are.

>EXAMINE ALL
mist : The mist is very thick but you notice something glinting on the floor.
large coin : The large coin is big, about two inches in diameter, with the wording ‘One Centumbro, 376 FA’ written around its edge. On one side is the face of a peculiarly ugly man, with a self important air, and on the other some kind of tree in full blossom.

The oak door leads to a “Woodland” which is a brand new area which I’ll discuss in a moment. The ruby door goes to a hall where there are three holes which suggest three rods.

You are in a short north-south passage, which is bathed in a bright light from an unseen source. The south end is blanked off. In the west wall are three holes aligned almost vertically. The top hole is just over head height. The middle hole is round about shoulder height. The bottom hole is at about knee height.

I skimmed over it last time, so let me quote the note the man from the gold door dropped.

The folded note seems somewhat cryptic, something about inserting the rod’s in ROD order from the top down. It makes no mention of what rods, but presumably this is some sort of code for them, or where they should be placed.

Including things later in this post, I have an opal rod and a diamond rod. I assume somewhere there is a ruby rod, and ruby goes on top, followed by opal, followed by diamond (ROD). That leaves out the sapphire and emerald rods from earlier in the game, but both of those count as treasures so may end up serving solely as treasures.

Regarding those Woodlands:

You arrive where a pixie is waiting, and follows you around.

You are in an enchanted wood. There are well trodden paths to the northeast and south. There is a small Pixie dancing about your legs.

The text hints the pixie is waiting for you to give something, and it takes the whistle (which I never found useful anywhere, so good riddance I suppose).

>GIVE WHISTLE TO PIXIE
The pixie grabs tiny whistle and gaily scampers off playing merrily on the whistle.

The problem is: I’m not sure why this is useful. The pixie doesn’t cause issues with entering a treehouse, nabbing the opal rod within, and taking another path which leads back to the mirror. I assume this is one of those long-pass puzzles where something you do affects another part of the map entirely.

Speaking of long-pass puzzles, a little aside on something from last time: I had tied a weight to open up a dais floor, but couldn’t jump in the resulting pit. That turned out to lift the random granite block jammed in an arch back at the Magi area.

You are in a small dark room, above you can be seen the trap door you came through and a flight of rickety stairs leading up to it. There is an arch in the east wall leading in to a deeper darkness.

>E
You are at the bottom of a pit. You are standing on a portion of the dais. There are passages to the north and south.

>S
You are in a small grubby chamber which must lie below the huge cavern. The west wall had some writing upon it, unfortunately someone seems to have completely erased it. There is a diamond rod on the floor.

There’s diamond! So I just need to find a ruby (or rhodochrosite, or rubellite) rod in order to bust into the area back at the chain-of-doors.

The last major area I made progress since last time was at the ice area. I had found an ice key, but nowhere to put it. Rather sheepishly, I found it only two rooms away; I forget an EXAMINE ALL. D’oh!

Ice cliff
There is a small keyhole in the cliff face, funny place for a keyhole.

>PUT KEY IN KEYHOLE
Ok.

>TURN KEY
The key turns clockwise and as it completes half a revolution there is a click and a strange door opens in the cliff face. At the same time the key melts away to nothing, you must have been holding it too tight. From inside a voice says ‘Enter Oh Searcher of the Key’.

This leads to an “ice palace”:

The north side includes an “ice door” with a place to put a six-fingered hand.

You are in a Hall seemingly hewn from solid ice, a fantastic feat. At the north end a small passage way disappears into the wall. At the south end two flights of stairs lead up to the southeast and southwest corners. Beside the stairs leading up to the southwest there seems to be a sign buried in the ice. Between the two stairways there is a rounded ice door.

If you remember my item stash (and it is completely understandable if you don’t) I had a mummified hand from back in the magi area, and the game customizes the description if you’re holding the hand.

The imprint looks as though it was made by the mummified hand that you are carrying. It would probably fit exactly.

>PUT HAND IN IMPRINT
As you do this a harsh blue light shines momentarily all round the doors edge, the door then slides quietly open.

The door leads back to the Throne area; that is, this is a way to escape the ice zone without using the teleport box.

The mummified hand has a very different effect if you step southwest instead, to a Hall of Regeneration.

>SW
You are in a hall the walls of which are covered in murals. The theme of the murals seems to be that of severely wounded indeed fatally wounded people recovering in a miraculous manner. The murals also contain pictures of the corpses of many hideous beings, these seem to be an interlinked part of the story. There are doorways to the south, west and northeast.

>EXAMINE MURALS
The mummified hand you are holding gives a shiver. You become so mesmerised by this unexpected movement, that you stand still watching it. The hand grows a new body, it is huge. Standing before you a twenty foot four armed hirsute monster, it finds you a tasty snack. You realise, as you are being devoured, that this is one of the beings depicted in the murals. From your sitting position you can see through a glass screen into a room that looks strangely familiar. On either side of you are further skeletons, they have a somewhat glum look on their skulls just as you do. You are dead and have become yet another trophy for the long departed owners of this place.

I don’t know if this is useful yet or just something to be avoided. The hand does count as a treasure so I suspect it must be kept that way.

Heading a bit further south there are two “stasis rooms” where things slow down followed by a “magic circle”. Inside the circle is a “crystal key”.

You are standing in the centre of a large and imposing hall, exits can be seen on all four sides. The ceiling has a small dome in it which was not visible from the sides of the hall. The floor has an intricate mosaic design which makes up a magic circle. There is a small crystal key lying on the floor here.

>GET CRYSTAL KEY
Taken. As you lift the key an unseen panel lights up in the north wall. It says ‘UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY DETECTED GUARDS HAVE BEEN ALERTED’. As quickly as the sign appeared it disappears. You notice that two things have appeared to the east and west of you.

The “things” are an ice devil and an ice warrior.

They follow you around and you can use the rune sword to attempt to do battle. As far as I can tell it is guaranteed to be a losing battle if you fight both of them at once; maybe there’s a way to split them? Or melt something helpful? Or trap them at the bridge to nowhere? I don’t know yet.

>KILL WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
A good blow but it is much too slow.
You manage to dodge the Ice devil’s thrust. The Ice warrior completely misses.

>KILL WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
The flat of your sword hits the ice warrior on the side knocking him over, it quickly regains its feet.
The Ice devil strikes you across the back as you attempt to run away. Oh boy that last attack of the Ice warrior’s was really something, what coordination. Oh! by the way it killed you.

One last piece to mention: I said in the comments I hadn’t found a use for LOOK UNDER even though I knew it worked, and Roger Durrant hinted that it gets used early. Poking around I realized the wardrobe that contained the Fabergé egg could be looked under.

Under the large wardrobe you find a plastic bag.

Messing around more, I found WEAR BAG worked in an interesting way.

Have you never been told about suffocating while wearing one of these, if you don’t take it off you will suffocate.

This does not give protection against the spores in the closet (I tried) but it does let you enter the multiverse world with poison gas in the air. You have to be quick, though, due to bag suffocation.

>ENTER MIRROR
You are in a lovely piece of countryside, although the colours are all tinged with green and things seem distorted just like looking into a pool of water. Due to the distortion of your sense of perception you cannot make out any particular direction as being distinguishable from any other.

>OPEN SPELL BOOK
Opening the spell book reveals :- detect magic spell; dispel magic spell; detect illusion spell; detect evil spell.

>CAST DISPEL MAGIC
The illusion reluctantly fades and you find….. You are in a room which is distorted by the strange effect the cyanide in the air is having, the colours are all tinged with green as well. The room has no exits or, apparently, entrances and no use, seemingly. On one wall is a large steering wheel.

This doesn’t clear up the gas. It does let you turn the wheel (and the dispel magic spell doesn’t get burned). However, the wheel must be another long-pass effect, because I have no idea what turning it does (and even, given the possibility of multiple dispel magic castings, if it should be turned more than once).

To give a full list, I need to deal with (or ignore as a red herring):

• The goo at the tree in the garden
• The compost heap at the garden
• The fish at the garden
• The ice devil and warrior
• The hand regeneration, assuming it doesn’t just get ignored
• Figuring out what giving a whistle to a pixie does
• Figuring out what turning the wheel does
• Finding something useful at the just-mist destination of the mirror
• Finding a ruby rod
• Handling the deadly spores in the closet

Based on nothing more than vibes I think we’ve got three posts to go before the end, which means this game isn’t quite reaching Time Zone length but it does tangle on equal ground with such monsters as Hezarin and Avon.

3 days ago

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Friday, Dec. 13, 2024 in the MIT Trope Tank and over Zoom. Keltana, Hugh,  Josh Grams,  Doug Orleans,  Matt Griffin, and  Pinkunz, were online.  Zarf, Mike Stage, Andrew Stephens, Emery Joyce, Dana Freitas, Cidney Hamilton (not pictured), and Michael Hilborn, anjchang welcomed newcomers Kit Riemer and Dave Gilbert to the MIT Trope Tank. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Celebrating the post PR-IF meeting dinner ritual to say farewell to the Cambridge Brewing Company.

EJ is working on the Short Games Showcase: https://itch.io/jam/if-short-games-showcase-2024. an exhibition of shorter interactive fiction works made in 2024. There’s still time to vote!

Andrew Stephens showed a working iPad demo of a game he’s working on.

Kit is working on a Translation Game https://slugzuki.itch.io/verses

Matt gave an update on Narrascope, happening at Drexel University June 20-22nd. NarraScope 2025 is accepting submissions for talks and papers until February 7, 2025. Also they’re looking for volunteers.

5 days ago

All the Way for the Win was just published by Penteract Press — today! It’s available for sale from their online store.

This book of poetry begins by narrating the birth of the universe and concludes after describing the eradication of the last human-authored poetic text.

While it doesn’t deal with everything in between, it’s meant to touch on many aspects of human history and experience.

The poems in the book consist entirely of three-letter words.

Six of the poems from it were published at the very end of 2024 in DIAGRAM.

The book has received two great endorsements:

“DNI LOL. XML DIY SSL. P&L ICU MIA ILY. IDK KPI FAQ GTG. WTF AFK FTW.”
—Tan Lin aka TAL

“How fun, the way the pen can act and fit its aim: new art did cry out and hum for ear and eye.”
—Lai-Tze Fan

I hope many of you will enjoy the poems that are online — and that several will go all the way and read the book!

10 days ago

(My previous posts about Cornucopia are needed to understand this one.)

So the Dungeons & Dragons references got even stronger since last time.

My main piece of progress was figuring out the stone dragon. Kind of.

>ENTER OPENING
You are in a small spherical shaped room inside the dragon’s head. In front of you are two round windows which look out into the cavern you have just come from. Just under the windows is a small desk with a chair beside it. The desk has three buttons which are coloured red, brown and amber, the desk also has two levers coloured black and blue. It is quite warm in here, the heat seems to be coming from below.

>PUSH RED BUTTON
There is a click and then a low wheezing noise.

>OUT
The control room exit seems to have vanished.

I realized that the red button closed the hatch to the outside, while the amber button opened it. I ended up closing the hatch, then messing with the brown button, black lever, and blue lever entirely at random. I unfortunately do mean random as I was just mucking about but somehow I hit the right combination that when I went to test going south again where the mechanism previously activated, I found myself safe.

You are at the south end of a large cavern. To the south the cavern narrows down to a small passage. Crouching and facing the narrow passage is a large rock formation which looks exactly like a dragon.

>S
You are in a long north-south corridor which has been carved out of the solid granite.

I somehow got doubly lucky (again, I think) insofar as there is a door that looks like it ought to be a stopping point that mentions the lever positions. This particular save game has the giant rat already dead, so I just have to hope that’s right. (Probably not, eh? I’ll deal with it when it comes.)

>S
You are at the south end of the granite corridor. The exit to the south is glowing slightly. Written upon the wall here is the following – Have you got the levers right!

>S
You are in an oblong shaped room which has exits to north, south and west. The floor has a wooden trap door let into it. The room is otherwise quite bare.

The leads to a small part of the map I’ll call the Magi Area.

Going down the trap door leads to a “small dark room” with an “arch” that is blocked by a “granite block”. The game notes the block is “obviously not part of it and has been put there with the intention of stopping a through passage.” Neither the block nor the arch register as magic (or evil) and nothing I’ve thrown has had any effect.

The magi’s quarters have nothing, but there’s also a laboratory with a mummified hand…

You are in what was once the Magi’s laboratory, a strange chill comes over you in this place probably as a result of the lingering remnants of fiendish magic spells. There are exits to the west and north. There is a severed hand lying on the floor here. It looks to have been mummified.

…and a library, with a “guide book” and a “large die with one hundred faces”.

>W
You are in what was the Magi’s library – the walls were covered in bookshelves, which presumably contained many books on arcane magic. What little there was left of the shelves after the vandals left has long since rotted away, the floor is covered in the resulting dust. There are exits to the north and east. There is a small guide book discarded here. A large die with one hundred faces lies here.

The book is described as the “Dungeon Masters Guide Book”. It opens to page 739, and reading it just says it is “quite useless” as it shows “the best way to roll dice of different dimensions.” (If the water weird wasn’t enough, it’s definitely clear here what game the author was thinking of.)

The large die rolls to be 6279, and always the same number. (The description notes it doesn’t have normal side-numbering, but doesn’t say it is the same number on all sides, so I suspect the die is heavily weighted.)

>ROLL DIE
You spin the large die and it comes to rest showing the number six thousand two hundred and seventy nine.

None of the above objects (mummified hand, die, guide book) are marked as magic or evil. The hand gets marked as a treasure, so it is possible it doesn’t have any use other than getting points.

My adventures in magic-dom continued past this thanks to solar penguin in the comments, who speculated about just levitating past the magic tiles rather than stepping on all of one color.

>CAST LEVITATE SELF
As the spell takes effect you rise up in the air, suddenly an extra strong gust from the draught catches you and sweeps you towards the other end of the room, passing over the floor without touching it. The draught sweeps you out of the other end of the room and you find yourself….. You are in a strange room, it has five walls and therefore five corners, in the eastern corner is an exit which is almost totally concealed. The walls are covered in symbols and diagrams of a most arcane sort. The room is otherwise quite devoid of furnishings or markings.

>EXAMINE SYMBOLS
Strangely as you study these symbols you find you start to understand them, it seems whoever used this place used the walls to take notes on in his/her? attempt to summon a demon from one of the planes of hell. The success or otherwise of the attempts is not made clear.

This does not burn the levitate spell, so it still is usable to go back up the tower (you can’t carry everything at once, so dragging stuff to the cottage for points requires multiple loads).

Unfortunately, I have been unable to summon the demon. The symbols are not marked as magic, or evil (!). There is no illusion in the room. (I have been checking, still, despite the dispel getting used up back at the countryside. For one thing, it is possible you aren’t supposed to pass through that room at all, and another, DISPEL ILLUSION and DETECT ILLUSION are separate spells, and it may be there’s an illusion later that you can detect but don’t need to kill entirely in order to bypass.)

Speaking of spells, the one that’s been burning a hole in my pocket, er, spellbook, is DISPEL MAGIC. I can use it on the rune sword, for instance, and it gets totally destroyed; you can also cast it on the spell book itself to cause it to consume itself in a fireball. (It’d be amazing if this was the intended use for the spell! I’d have to be near the end of the game, though.) The complex is otherwise filled with quite a few non-magical things (according to the spell) so I haven’t found any other effects.

I’m still not ready for hints, but anyone who hasn’t looked at a walkthrough is welcome to chime in with ideas in the comments.

6 days ago

I beta-tested, so take this as a promo rather than a full review.

Roottrees! They're back! And more hand-drawn than ever!

If you haven't played The Roottrees Are Dead, now's the time to jump in. One of the top static deduction games to follow in the Obra Dinn's wake. Like I said about original free version of Roottrees:

The Roottrees are a five-generation dynasty of candy magnates from western Pennsylvania. Or rather, they were, because the most famous scions of that line just died in a plane crash. You're handed a blank family tree and ordered to fill in the names, faces, and professions of every blood descendant of old Elias Roottree. It's 1998 and you have a state-of-the-art terrible web browser. Get searching.

Now the UI is spruced up, it's got a contextual "ask the rubber duck" hint system, there's more voice acting, and the AI-generated art is gone. The plaid shirt is really plaid now. You have a search history to review your findings; that was my dearest wish from playing the old version.

If you have played Roottrees, now's the time to play it again. It's still a fun puzzle. Really, I found it nearly as much of a challenge the second time around. I'd forgotten a lot of the critical details since last April.

But also, once you complete the original game, a whole new chapter unlocks: Roottreemania! You've found the known descendants -- now hunt for rest!

(You know, the ones born on the wrong side of the sheets. Love-Roottrees. Roottrees bar sinister. Some Roottrees slept around, is what I'm saying.)

The new chapter is as big again as the original. The final sealed-envelope challenge is deeper and asks more deductive twists of you. But like the original, you can't get very stuck on it. Figure out as much as you can, use as many hints as you like, and then hit the "wrap it up" button. You'll get a satisfying story ending even if you haven't figured out every detail.

Did I say recommended? Recommended.

7 days ago

I’m delighted that after more than four years of work by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and myself — we’re co-editors of this book — the MIT Press and Counterpath have jointly published

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023

Book launch events are posted here and will be updated as new ones are scheduled!

This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While not restricted to poetry, fiction, and other creative projects, it reveals the rich work that has been done by artists, poets, and other sorts of writers who have taken computing and code into their own hands. The anthology includes examples of powerful and principled rhetorical generation along with story generation systems based on cognitive research. There are examples of “real news” generation that has already been informing us — along with hoaxes and humor.

It’s all contextualized by brief introductions to each excerpt, longer introductions to each fine-grained genre of text generation, and an overall introduction that Lillian-Yvonne and I wrote. There are 200 selections in the 500-page book, which we hope will be a valuable sourcebook for academics and students — but also a way for general readers to learn about innovations in computing and writing.

You can buy Output now from several sources. I suggest your favorite independent bookseller! If you’re in the Boston area, stop by the MIT Press Bookstore which as of this writing, has 21 on hand as of actually publishing this post, has 14 copies!

Upcoming Book Launches, Talks, and Events

January 20 (Monday) Toronto book launch with me, Matt Nish-Lapidus, & Kavi Duvvoori, at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture & Technology, 6pm–7:30pm. Free & open to the public; please RSVP.

February 24 (Monday) Carnegie Mellon University book launch with the editors, room TBA, 5:30pm–7pm. Free & open to the public.

March 11 (Tuesday) Massachusetts Institute of Technology book launch with the editors, MIT’s Room 32-155, 5pm-6:30pm. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to the MIT Press Bookstore.

March 29 (Saturday) AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, on the panel “Making a Literary Future with Artificial Intelligence,” Concourse Hall 151, 1:45pm–3pm.

April 5 (Saturday) Both co-editors are on a panel at Baltimore’s CityLit Festival, details TBA.

Previous Events

November 11 (Monday): Both editors spoke at the University of Virginia, Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge, Floor 2. Free & open to the public. 5pm.

November 20 (Wednesday): Online book launch for Output, hosted by the University of Maryland. Both editors in conversation with Matt Kirschenbaum. Free, register on Zoom. 12noon Eastern Time.

November 21 (Thursday) Book launch at WordHack with me, David Gissen, Sasha Stiles, Andrew Yoon, and open mic presenters. Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, 7pm. $15. Book sales.

December 6 (Friday) Output will be available for sale and I’ll be at the Bad Quarto / Nick Montfort table at Center for Book Arts Winter Market, 28 W 27th St Floor 3, 4pm–8pm.

December 9 (Monday) Book launch at Book Club Bar with the editors, Charles Bernstein, Robin Hill, Stephanie Strickland, and Leonard Richardson. 197 E 3rd St (at Ave B), New York City’s East Village. Free, RSVP required. 8pm. Book sales thanks to Book Club.

December 13 (Friday) European book launch with the editors, Scott Rettberg, and Tegan Pyke. University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, Langesgaten 1-2, 3:30pm. Free & open to the public, book sales thanks to Akedemika. This event was streamed & recorded and is available to view on YouTube.

January 13 (Monday) “The Output Anthology at Computer-Generated Text’s Cultural Crux”, a talk of mine at the UCSC Computational Media Colloquium, Engineering 2 Room 280, 12:30pm–1:30pm. Free & open to the public.

3 months ago

With “let’s WRITE IF” concluded, what’s next?

spring thing, here we come.

As I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere, I have two small games planned for the 2025 Spring. One is Portrait with Wolf. I’ve written a lot about that in the past few months. As of right now, that project is complete from a Top Expert point of view. I’ve shared code and project templates for readers to make games of their own. You can find them on my itch.io page:

https://kamin3ko.itch.io/lyric-storytelling-widget

https://kamin3ko.itch.io/linear-storytelling-widget

I’m excited to share the completed game with you! I hope you’ll check it out when it releases.

The other game has also been written about extensively here at Top Expert: Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight. It’s been a while, though, so I thought we could back up and review some of its key elements. Like Portrait with Wolf, it uses a lot of variable text, though the implementation details are quite different. My specific goal when starting this project was to learn about relations and scenes. Both always seemed a little mysterious to me, as I don’t often see them discussed online. Relations, in particular, feel a bit intimidating. We may as well start there.

why do I want to relate.

I think the biggest hump to get over, when it comes to relations, is to understand why one would bother with them. At least, that was my initial struggle. Let’s just get this out of the way:

A lot of what relations can do could be accomplished with variables, properties, kinds, and so forth.

By the time we’re ready to investigate relations, most of us will be very comfortable using these other methods:

now the perch status of the parrot is true.
now nest of the parrot is the tropical abode.
now the tropical abode is occupied.

And so forth. If we’re scanning through the chapter on relations in the documentation, it might be natural for us to wonder what we’ll get out of them.

In my assessment, we get a couple of things. The first is a simple and readable way to associate things, texts, or numbers without creating one-off variables and so forth. It makes for consistency, portability (and shareability), and ease of use. Besides: they really aren’t so strange. In fact, we have likely been using them from the very start. These sentences and phrases make sense, don’t they?

now the player is in the secret lab;
if the blue blazer is worn by the player:
the sleeve is part of the jacket.
the ancient elvish sword of great antiquity is carried by the adventurer;

These constructions, called “sentences” in Inform, are all made possible by relations. Several relations are defined in Inform’s Standard Rules, and many beginning authors will have used one or more. So, as you can see, they allow us to characterize things in the game world simply and succinctly. How would we make our own?

making our own relation.

We can think about a new relation in terms of a sentence we would want to write. Consider birds and nests. Maybe we have a game about getting birds to their homes. To start, let’s keep things simple. Getting any bird to any nest is good enough. To get the most out of things, let’s write the sentence two ways. To start, let’s use the nest as the subject.

housing relates one thing (called the roost) to one thing.

OK. The start of our declaration, “housing”, will be the name of our relation: the housing relation. I can give a nickname to the first noun (here, the “roost”). This allows me to use phrases like “roost of the blue jay” in my code. Note that this is a one-to-one, exclusive relationship. A thing can only have one roost, and vice versa.

Next, we need to define the verb(s) we can use in our sentences.

the verb to house implies the housing relation.

This is straightforward, and gives us everything we need to start using the relation in code.

now the nest houses the blue jay.

Until otherwise directed, Inform will remember where the blue jay resides. We can also say things like this, using the “roost” that we defined above.

say "The blue jay currently occupies [the roost of the blue jay]."

Inform is pretty smart about recognizing the verbs we use. However, if we need to define a verb ourselves, we use this format:

the verb to house (she houses, they house, she housed, it is housed) implies the housing relation.

To make the most of things, it is best to make what is called a “reversed” relation. This will allow us to write more sentences using the same concepts.

the verb to perch in (he perches in, they perch in, he perched in, it is perched in) means the reversed housing relation.

What’s different? The nouns have switched places. This enables sentences like

now the blue jay perches in the nest.

It may not be clear why this matters. Readability is one reason. Ease of construction is another. If we try having relations that are not one to one (think about player inventory, where many items can be carried by one person), we may find that some sentences make more sense than others.

At our basic, beginner’s level, it might be as simple as finding the way that works best for us.

experiments.

OK, let’s further the “putting birds in nests” idea. We start, as always, by declaring a room. Let’s go further by putting birds and nests there.

lab is a room.
a bird is a kind of animal.
a nest is a kind of thing.
the tropical abode is a nest in lab. 
the common residence is a nest in lab.
the ground rest is a nest in lab.
an ostrich is a bird in lab.
a parrot is a bird in lab.
a blue jay is a bird in lab.

OK. We have two kinds and some things to play with. Here’s our relations once again:

housing relates one thing (called the roost) to another.
the verb to house (he houses, they house, he housed, it is housed) implies the housing relation.
the verb to perch in (he perches in, they perch in, he perched in, it is perched in) means the reversed housing relation.

Let’s make a custom action where we send birds to nests.

sending it to is an action applying to two things.
understand "send [something] to/-- [something]" as sending it to.

Now, we could send anything to anything, but this relation is only intended for birds and nests. I have options. I could make an instead (less preferred) rule or a check rule (usually recommended). Unless you have something special in mind, I recommend “check” (see Wade’s comment below). A typical “check” would look like this.

check sending something to something:
	unless the noun is a bird and the second noun is a nest:
		say "Birds must be sent to nests; no other combination will work." instead.

However, these days I’ve been trying to use the whole action processing turn. I’ll check things during “carry out” for that reason. This will leave things open for me to use “after” and “report” rules if I want.

carry out sending something to something:
	unless the noun is a bird and the second noun is a nest:
		say "Birds must be sent to nests; no other combination will work.";
	otherwise:
		now the noun perches in the second noun;
		say "Great. Now the [noun] perches in the [roost of the noun]."

Just as we’ve seen with wearing and other common relations, “the noun perches in the second noun” is enough to associate the two things. We can immediately begin referring to them in phrases like “roost of the noun.”

If we want to change the way a nest is listed (room descriptions or inventory), we can tweak that:

after printing the name of a bird (called the avian) while listing contents:
	if the avian perches in something, say " (perched in [the roost of the avian])";

Here’s another action processing usage:

check taking when the noun perches in something:
	say "You don't want to disturb [the noun]'s rest." instead.

As we’ve seen, these relationships can vary text and be used as conditions for action processing rules. Using simple, straightforward sentences to manage relations is a powerful tactic that also makes it easy to standardize and share code.

what’s missing.

Because our relation associates “one thing to one thing,” we have declared that the relationship is exclusive. A bird cannot have more than one nest, and a nest cannot have more than one bird. When we declare this relationship (now the noun perches in the second noun), we are simultaneously negating any other bird-nest that either previously had. If the blue jay is perched in a new nest, the old nest will become empty, and any bird already in the new nest will be evicted.

To work this into a game, we would likely want to report the updated relationship, just like Inform prints “Taken” when the player takes something.

Inventory illustrates why we might want relations that are not one-to-one. A person can carry multiple things, but only one person can carry a given thing. We could associate multiple things with multiple things: perhaps more than one person has multiple job responsibilities, some shared, some unique.

But these permutations can seem complex at first, so we’ll be focusing on one-to-one relationships in future posts.

next.

more relations.

Today’s Code

I update multiple social media accounts when I release new posts, but I’m most active on BlueSky. Get updates on all my stuff (game dev, Top Expert, and Gold Machine) there.

https://bsky.app/profile/bitingcat.bsky.social

My Discord ID is probably “golmac”.

8 days ago

Now that we're past the holidays, here's your reminder that NarraScope is accepting talk proposals. (It's been open for a few weeks, but you know, holidays.) The deadline is February 7th.

This year we also have a track for academic papers. We're trying to do more with Drexel, our host university this year, so this is a bit of crossover. The paper submission form isn't open yet, so keep an eye on that if you're of the academic persuasion.

Oh, there's also a brand-new NarraScope account on Bluesky. So brand-new that we haven't said anything yet, but that will change soon... And all the other contact lines are still open, of course.

See you in June in Philadelphia, I very much hope.

10 days ago

(My previous posts on the game are needed to understand this one.)

I managed to finish the game, with some help from Rob digging through source code in the comments. I was in fact very close to the end, but it required a leap of absurdity to get through.

Specifically, on one of my runs I had found a POMME (apple). It was nowhere remarkable or specific, it was just another item in a room.

If you have a load of inventory you try to fence with the apple contained within, it gets no offer.

This is meant to be a pun. The apple is in fact an Apple, that is, an Apple Computer, the secret computer we are looking for! I was threw off by both the fact it was not very secret, but also the level of removal from the language; I think if I was holding an APPLE the pun might of occurred to me, but since I was mentally translating it, I only visualized it as a real apple, maybe for use in some specific event later where someone can be bribed with food.

Now, the problem is — as the instructions specify — we are supposed to then make a getaway with a vehicle. The VOLER (steal) verb comes into play again. Rob wasn’t sure where, but he knew that it was possible to steal some keys. I wasn’t seeing any scenes at either the bar or the restaurant until I realized it was possible to ASSEOIR (sit). You get offered a menu and then can order, and then have an encounter where you can try to steal.

In the scene above, we’ve been caught, and the manager searches Larcin and confiscates all the stolen items.

There’s a similar scene at the bar; I wasn’t able to steal anything resembling a car key in either one.

What actually worked was stealing at the register! Maybe there’s valet service such that the car keys get stored there?

I did have to go through the process twice. The first time through, I took the keys down to the parking lot and went trying to unlock doors none of them would open. Trying to steal again at the register led to failure, but if I ended the burglarizing session, and then went back to the register to try again on a fresh day, I was able to get another keychain. The second one worked.

Thus ends a very odd game that straddled between feeling like a strategy game and an adventure game. I would say it counts as an adventure: the chain is a puzzle which requires the magnet to solve, the moment-to-moment action felt more like roleplaying than the “big picture” style gaming that strategy normally involves, and realizing the odd pun with the apple is not something that’d be part of any strategy game. It’s still essentially a very minimal adventure game with strategy game dressing.

I’d like to end with another source that Rob found, of an interview done with the Louis-Philippe Hébert and the young authors of Logidisque’s first game (Têtards, or tadpoles). Roughly 1:19 is when Hébert starts speaking.

I’ll quote part:

Il ya un choc culturel parce que on découvre tout à coup un nouveau médium. Un nouveau médium donc une nouvelle possibilité, de créer de nouveaux objets … ça nous pousse que dans nos dans nos traditions, parce que évidemment la plupart d’entre nous avons une formation littéraire ou cinématographique …

There’s a cultural shock because we’ve suddenly discovered a new medium. A new medium, and therefore a new possibility, to create new objects … that pushes us in our traditions, because obviously most of us have a literary or cinematographic background …

We’ve only had a few people for All the Adventures (like Robert Lafore) who styled themselves in this period as “writers” or “artists”; Hébert here is recognizing that the leap over mediums is difficult to make, and he claims that young people in particular have a certain “banalité de demain”, that is, banality of tomorrow, where they have an easier time dealing with the new medium that seems to be “the future” as they were born into it.

Coming up: a large and very difficult puzzle-fest with an elaborate magic system. Back to roots!

11 days ago

Deep beneath the earth, the dragon is rising! Quest into mysterious underground caverns and forests to learn magical secrets, draw strength from friends and family, secure alliances that can save your home, and carry on the heroic legacy of Stronghold!

Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery is an interactive fantasy novel by Amy Griswold, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—380,000 words and hundreds of choices—without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy sat down with author Amy Griswold to talk about the upcoming game and some of her other works. Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery releases Thursday, January 30th—you can wishlist it on Steam today, it really helps, even if you don’t plan to purchase it on Steam. 

We’re returning to the world of Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate. This is something of an indirect sequel, right?

Yes, it’s a chance to revisit the town founded in Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate with a new generation of characters facing new challenges. The influence of your town’s founding hero determines the starting situation of your town and the personality of your grandparent, the town’s current leader. But for players who want to jump in without playing the first game, there’s the option to choose a preset backstory or make detailed choices about your town’s history when you begin the game.

How was it for you picking back up the threads of the Stronghold universe?

I really enjoyed revisiting the world of Stronghold and getting to explore some corners of it in more detail. In Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, the goblins are mostly seen at a distance, and the dryads are enigmatic forest protectors. Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery takes a closer look at both goblins and dryads, with befriendable (and romanceable) goblin and dryad NPC companions. It was also interesting to write a game primarily focused on sorcery. In Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, it’s possible to never engage with the lost magic of your ancestors at all. In Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery, the player character and their friends Corbin, Zoe, and Fox are all sorcerers, and “I use sorcery!” is the obvious way to approach a lot of problems. This required making the magical system more complex and varied, with options to focus on the knotwork of goblins and dryads or the experimental science of alchemy as well as rediscovering your ancestors’ lost arts.

Between these two games you published The Play’s the Thing with us, which is a fantastic game, and a fantastically different setting. Tell me a bit about the inspiration there, because within the Amy Griswold canon we’ve also got one of my all time favorite games, The Eagle’s Heir, which is a wonderful Napoleonic alt-history. You seem adept at jumping around in genre.

I like changes of pace. The Play’s the Thing was a fabulous chance to play with a bunch of dramatic tropes that would probably be over the top in a Stronghold game — wicked rulers, troubled heirs, long-lost siblings, and a deadly curse! plus a dancing bear! — while at the same time exploring what it’s like to try to make art that means something while the world is falling apart around you. The Eagle’s Heir is a swashbuckling steampunk adventure with airship racing and dastardly plots, but it’s also about how personal choices can shape political change. And both Stronghold games are fantasy adventures built around the tropes of classic tabletop games, and are also about how your choices influence other people in a small community. To me, the Choice of Games format is well suited to games that let players soak up the atmosphere of a particular genre, while at the same time exploring the reasons why choices and stories matter.

What surprised you most about the writing of Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery?

I kept finding edge cases carried over from A Hero’s Fate that I had forgotten were possible and needed to be accounted for. What happens if the original player character has no children (biological or adopted) and no nephew, and then chooses a protégé as their heir, and then their protégé dies, leaving no one the right age alive to be the grandparent of the player character in Caverns of Sorcery? Etc.

There’s a dragon in this game. Choice of Games is a dragon-heavy publisher. Please say a bit about your dragon.

Dragons are useful because they give player characters a problem to react to in interesting ways. It’s hard to ignore a dragon. The dragon in Caverns of Sorcery was imprisoned by your ancestors centuries ago in the caverns near your town. It would very much like to escape, set your town on fire, and feast on the survivors. What else the dragon wants is possible to explore over the course of the game. But this isn’t, at its heart, a game about a dragon; it’s a game about a situation where doing nothing will lead to disaster, so you have to try doing something. What kind of “something” is up to you.

In addition to writing interactive fiction for us, you’re also a prolific novelist, I’d love to tell our readers about other works of yours they can enjoy.

Fans of the steampunk world of The Eagle’s Heir may enjoy the gaslamp fantasy mysteries Death by Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club (with Melissa Scott), in which metaphysician Ned Mathey and detective Julian Lynes solve mysteries and navigate the fascinatingly awful world of Victorian London and its gay community. And for sci-fi adventure, I recommend the Stargate Legacy series, a virtual fifth season of tie-in novels set after the end of the Stargate Atlantis TV series (start with Homecoming by Jo Graham and Melissa Scott.)

What are you working on next?

I’m working on revisions to a science fiction novel, Gyre, that’s under contract for probably sometime in 2026, and I’ve got a couple of historical fiction projects on the back burner as well.

10 hours ago

I’m in Canada today — Toronto, specifically — to celebrate the publication of Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. (ed. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram & Nick Montfort, MIT Press & Counterpath 2024) in conversation with Matt Nish-Lapidus and with a reading by Kavi Davvoori. I haven’t been here very long, and the Output event doesn’t start for an hour and fifteen minutes, but I’ve already enjoyed walking from the airport, and then around town, not to mention consuming a smoked meat omelette.

While I’ve come to praise Output and not to bury the lede, I wanted to take this occasion to thank two Canadian institutions for making another recent book of mine possible. Narcissystem is an amazing production by Montreal-based Anteism and a great example of innovating publishing / publishing as an artistic practice. Ryan & Harley at Anteism realized this project with a foil seal on the cover, a Smyth sewn binding, and a special feature on the inside front cover that really makes this bookwork / artists’ book complete. The other organization I must thank is the Canada Council for the Arts, which provided support to make this publication possible.

Narcissystem is a computer-generated book, of the sort represented in Output, but the program that generated it is quite remote from “Generated AI.” Perhaps it’s more honest, however, about the way computer systems (like poems) tend to mainly gaze lovingly at themselves?

a day ago

I was closer to the end than expected.

I have finished the game, and my previous posts are needed to make sense of this one.

Before the grand finale, I wanted to tag something else that seems likely to have been an inspiration; not from Advanced D&D, but “Basic” D&D as published in 1977, also known as Holmes Basic.

Remember, Cornucopia starts out in a cottage in a “fungus forest”.

You find yourself in a strange forest of giant fungus growths, they create an eerie feeling. No particular direction seems to suggest itself to you here. There is a particularly huge specimen here, with what appears a dark opening in it.

I originally contextualized this in relation to Goblin Towers, the author’s previous game, with the notion it was a “ruined” version of that map, but I didn’t know the level of D&D connection at the time.

In Search of the Unknown was an extremely popular module, as it was B1, the first created for the Basic Set and was even packaged with it for a time. The actual fungi location in the dungeon crawl is just a single room, number 22 on the map, the Garden.

The floor is covered with a carpet of tufted molds that extends to all the walls and even onto parts of the ceiling, obscuring the rock surface. The molds appear in a rainbow assortment of colors, and they are mixed in their appearance, with splotches, clumps, swirls, and patches presenting a nightmarish combination of clashing colors. This is indeed a fuzzy fairyland of the most forbidding sort, although beautiful in its own mysterious way …

B1 was intended as a “beginner adventure” (not just beginner players, but beginner Dungeon Masters). The author, Mike Carr, explained for the Goodman Games reprint:

…I wracked my brain to come up with as many interesting and mysterious features as I could think of for what could be considered within the place, particularly the garden of giant fungi and the room of pools. That had to be done considering that the adventurers were going to be low-level characters, so nothing could be too deadly or too challenging to overcome — and that meant that there were limited options on the design side.

Mike Carr picked the fungus room for the cover as he felt would be “striking as well as exotic”. The art was done by David Trampier and David Sutherland III; specifically, Trampier did a version with characters was deemed “too cartoony” (the art later showed up in The Polyhedron Issue #5, they almost look like something from The Smurfs) and Sutherland (art director at the time) re-did the characters in a more realistic style that matched the look of the Holmes Basic cover.

Even though the Cornucopia forest is outside, the prominence of the B1 imagery at the time makes me believe the two are connected. An old blog post at Grognardia from an author recalling that period discusses the imagery being “seared” into their imagination. There was revised art in 1981, but it too was done with fungus.

I had left off last time on being attacked by an ice devil and an ice warrior, and unable to win the battle. This leads directly to finding the Cornucopia (with one hiccup along the way as I had missed an item) so represents a climax with a denouement following (the treasures still need to all be arranged back at the cottage, and there’s one more thing that needs to be done in order to deliver the Horn of Plenty back to the gods).

Passing through the Hall of Regeneration whilst holding a mummified hand, rather spectacularly, causes it to grow back into a monster. Avoiding that fate allows you to reach the magic circle with a crystal key, but upon picking it up, you get attacked from the west by a ice devil and from the east by an ice warrior.

>GET KEY
Taken. As you lift the key an unseen panel lights up in the north wall. It says ‘UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY DETECTED GUARDS HAVE BEEN ALERTED’. As quickly as the sign appeared it disappears. You notice that two things have appeared to the east and west of you.

>W
You are at the west side of the magic hall. There is an exit to the west. In the centre of the hall is a huge magic circle. The north and south ends of the hall can be reached by going northeast and southeast. There is an ice warrior here, he is very menacing.
The ice devil guardian has followed you.
You receive a gash in the arm from the Ice warrior.

>KILL ICE WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
The flat of your sword hits the ice warrior on the side knocking him over, it quickly regains its feet.
The Ice devil strikes you across the back as you attempt to run away. You get a numbing blow from the Ice warrior, you don’t feel too good.

>KILL ICE WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
You strike at the ice warrior but it easily side steps.
You manage to dodge the Ice devil’s thrust. You stagger back under a hail of blows from the Ice warrior.

The variety of messages is quite good, and there are even some rare ones (once I slipped on my own blood, causing me to dodge a deadly attack). This feels like — and ends up being — the climactic battle of the game.

The two monsters will follow wherever you go, so I figured quite quickly the environment mattered. Back at the door opened with the hand, you can jump back into the main underground world, so I figured there had to be some opportunity back there. (You can also use the transport box, but upon arrival at the mirror room, in another classy/frustrating touch, one of the guardians smashes the mirror instead of attacks you.)

I tried the warmth of the dragon, or even getting the dragon fire to kill one of the enemies rather than myself. I tried to see if the toxic tree would help. I tried fighting in the dark. (I found out that the “grue” stayed down in the troll area, so you can safely walk around in the dark! You get followed by the devil and warrior but they don’t attack until the lights come on again.)

I was making things too hard on myself: the key was the Hall of Regeneration. I think it occurred to me early but I thought the picture meant the devil and warrior would receive regeneration, not me.

You are in a hall the walls of which are covered in murals. The theme of the murals seems to be that of severely wounded indeed fatally wounded people recovering in a miraculous manner. The murals also contain pictures of the corpses of many hideous beings, these seem to be an interlinked part of the story. There are doorways to the south, west and northeast.
The ice devil guardian has followed you. The ice warrior guardian has followed you.

>KILL ICE DEVIL WITH RUNE SWORD
You feel so full of vitality and energy here that with a single swipe you dispatch the ice devil. The ice devil falls rigidly to the ground and disappears in a violent blue flash.
The Ice warrior guardian takes a mighty swing at you, the blow seems to have had no effect at all.

>KILL ICE WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
You feel so full of vitality and energy here that with a single swipe you dispatch the ice warrior. The ice warrior falls rigidly to the ground and disappears in a violent blue flash.

Can’t regenerate if you get vaporized in one shot. (taps forehead)

With the crystal key in hand, I was almost ready to claim to the cornucopia, but I still was missing one thing: the ruby rod. This ended up being an unglamorous use of EXAMINE ALL everywhere (again) although with a particular emphasis on the multiverse worlds.

High Priests Chamber
In the centre of the east wall is a small stone alcove. A large old writing desk stands in one corner, the left hand side of the desk contains a drawer.

>EXAMINE ALL
alcove : In the centre of the east wall is a small stone alcove. Having moved the small idol you notice that the alcove has a false floor.
writing desk : The writing desk is large and ornate made from carved oak, it must have taken two men to move it. The writing desk has seen much use from the ink blots and doodles on its surface, all of which are quite unintelligible. The left hand side of the desk contains a small drawer.
drawer : The drawer is closed.
false floor : Examining the false floor reveals that a ruby rod is hidden beneath it.

Whoops! That was being hidden by a small gold idol sitting on top of it before (I think EXAMINE ALL would’ve worked anyway). With the ruby rod, the opal rod (from the pixie forest), the diamond rod (from the magi area), it was now time to go back to the three holes, and use the combination ROD.

>I
You are carrying:- transport box; battery lamp; spell book; crystal key; opal rod; diamond rod; ruby rod.

>PUT RUBY ROD IN TOP HOLE
Ok.

>PUT OPAL ROD IN MIDDLE HOLE
Ok.

>PUT DIAMOND ROD IN BOTTOM HOLE
Ok. As the last rod goes in an opening quietly appears at the south end of the passage.

This leads to a “Centre” with a crystal case.

You are in a square room made entirely from crystal. The crystal seems to be pulsating with a life of its own. In the centre of the room is a large crystal case, apparently extruded from the floor itself.

>EXAMINE ALL
crystal case : In the centre of the room is a large crystal case, apparently extruded from the floor itself. The crystal case is closed and despite being crystalline, its contents, if any, cannot be seen.

With the crystal key via the guardians, the case can be unlocked revealing the horn of plenty!

>OPEN CRYSTAL CASE
You find the crystal case locked but discover that the crystal key unlocks it.

>EXAMINE HORN
Cornucopia, the fabled horn of plenty, is something of a disappointment – it appears much like any other ram’s horn except for being much larger. How it is used though is not at all apparent and I suspect attempting to use it would not help you to live to a ripe old age.

Now, taking the corncuopia isn’t an instant win, and taking it back to the treasure storage place (the cottage) doesn’t help either. I had PRAY tagged from back when I made my verb list, but with the item in hand:

Nothing happens.

This can be worked out by process of elimination, as there’s only one multiverse world that hasn’t been used yet: the swirling mist with nothing else.

>ENTER MIRROR
You are in a swirling grey mist, all directions are the same.

>PRAY
You are in a small but luxurious room, well it would be small if you were a giant. The room has no obvious exits, but then Gods don’t really need doorways.

>WAIT
Time passes……

>I
You are carrying:- transport box; battery lamp; brown sack; horn of plenty.
All of a sudden amidst a burst of golden light one of the Gods who originally sent you on this mission appears. He sees you have the Horn and takes it. The God speaks ‘You have performed your task adequately and so we pardon you for your crimes against our Temple this time.’ With that you find yourself transported home with all the treasures you managed to salvage, you did manage to salvage some! didn’t you? You have scored a total of 670 out of 740 in 1284 moves giving you a rating of Pardoned.

I turned out to be only short one puzzle (and corresponding treasures). It turned out not to be:

• The gold coins in the fountain — those don’t count as a treasure
• The gems at the acid tree — those also don’t count as a treasure
• The compost heap, which is just a compost heap
• Anything to do with the pixie (from the walkthrough after I finished, I found out that the pixie is supposed to steal things unless you appease it with the whistle, but the code is broken)

Fake-out treasure feels more aligned to D&D than normal adventure games. The D&D module In Search of the Unknown includes a “Wizard’s Annex” with illusionary treasure.

The true missing puzzle in Cornucopia was back at the mould near the sleeping demon and the mirror.

You are in a small closet which is very unwholesome with rotting clothes everywhere, basically it stinks. The centre of the closet floor seems covered in what appears to be a horrible brown mould.

I had done the right thing but had a misleading parser response, so never pursued it further. BURN MOULD WITH TORCH gives a colorful exploding death, and my attempt to THROW TORCH just resulted in “Dropped.” so I didn’t think further of it.

>THROW TORCH AT MOULD
The torch seems to have been enveloped in the mould.

You can then leave, and an explosion will happen behind you. This gets rid of the mould and reveals a way down.

Reception room
There is a small explosion nearby.
>S
You are in a small closet which is very unwholesome with rotting clothes everywhere, basically it stinks. There is a flight of steps leading down into the floor. There was a trap door covering the steps but the explosion seems to have completely destroyed it. There is a torch here which is all used up.

>D
You are at the bottom of a flight of steps which leads back up to the closet you came from. An archway to the south leads in to the King’s treasure chamber. Built into the middle of the floor here is a strong iron safe. On the safe’s door is a small dial with numbers around its edge. The safe contains:- pearl; amethyst rod; tiny key.

This is modified from the original game (I’m playing the “fixed” version from CASA made by Alex, who also wrote a walkthrough). To the south is a portcullis blocking the treasure chamber, which I already lifted via using the wheel in the toxic gas room. However, something is broken in the code so you can’t move south, so the fixed version moved the safe from the treasure chamber over one step so you can get at it here. Consequently, you don’t need to dial up the safe code, which turns out to match the four-digit number on the rolled die.

Fortunately, I can still show you the vault, as further reading on the CASA forums led me to two debug commands: TVQREX and XERQVT. Those let you advance the location counter by one or subtract by one, so XERQVT from the bottom leads to:

You are in the King’s treasure vault. Unfortunately it has long since been looted and vandalised and little or nothing remains to be found. The archway you entered the treasure chamber through is to the north. Built into the middle of the floor here is a strong iron safe. On the safe’s door is a small dial with numbers around its edge. The safe contains:- pearl; amethyst rod; tiny key.

With the pearl and amethyst rod safely placed, I had all the points, and earned my final ranking.

With that you find yourself transported home with all the treasures you managed to salvage, you did manage to salvage some! didn’t you? You have scored a total of 740 out of 740 in 1336 moves giving you a rating of Demigod.

Well. That was a bit of a mess.

I found it an interesting mess and I always felt engaged, although some of that might be due to the meta-mystery of the game (nobody had gotten a full score before this weekend). I do think the story behind the freed demon and the “long departed” owners of the castle made for a decent amount of environment and atmosphere, even given the much more random assortment of multiverses.

I will say — despite seemingly like it might diverge into total evil — the game was essentially fair. The troll puzzle was arguably the worst (I solved it, but by accident); I also wasn’t thrilled about the glitch with the torch-throwing puzzle, or the random assorted glitches otherwise. Once when trying to wrangle the bottle to get another drink of water (you get thirsty every time you pass through the illusion-gold card route) the game responded with

water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water

etc. As LanHawk points out in the comments, this port may not be from Brian Cotton at all.

However, everything else fit together in a logical way, in a much better way than many other authors trying to aim for “difficulty”; it helped that Cotton kept track of enough conditions (even small things, like not taking a torch into an igloo) that the complexity level rose just naturally on its own; trying to parse through what was important and what could be discarded was a major part of the gameplay.

The original was a 32K disk game for Commodore PET; the 32K + disk explains why this managed to be much more ambitious than nearly any UK game that wasn’t made on a mainframe or via Level 9 (which had its own compression technology, that worked even better than Infocom’s). There wasn’t even a C64 version made of this one. It likely is very rare and it is possible the original 1982 disk is now completely lost to time. So I am thankful I did have some way of playing it, even with the glitching around the edges.

As far as historical interest goes, this was by far the most integrated-into-D&D adventure I’ve played. Dungeon Adventure had parts allegedly adapted off a real campaign, but Level 9 filed off the edges enough it isn’t clear where the points of inspiration were (except for being able to see when items are magic). Cornucopia put a water weird with a straight-from-the-manual method of destruction, as well as an actual Dungeon Masters Guide with accompanying in-joke. I found it interesting even given the elaborate combat message system, the only straight-combat was the entirely optional fight with the giant rat; the pull of adventure-gameplay is towards interesting solutions to problems and not regular combat, so the more elaborate encounters (troll, ice creatures) both required puzzle-solving instead.

Coming up: No idea. I wasn’t expecting be done with Cornucopia yet. Likely some small games; you can peek at my final stretch of 1982 list and speculate if you’d like.

2 days ago

(Continued from my previous posts on Cornucopia.)

Since last time I made quite a bit of progress; so much progress that this is a “I better make a post before it becomes too hard to describe everything” moment as opposed to a “I’m stuck” moment.

The first small thing that happened is that I managed to defeat the troll the “proper” way. It was by absolute luck. Let me pretend first I thought things out.

There is a game from 1998 (Enlightenment by Taro Ogawa) which is one of my favorite early IFComp games (it gets some criticism for being too hard, but I’m the sort of person that voluntarily plays Cornucopia). You’re at the end of the game, there’s a troll to get by, and you, the paranoid adventurer, have lots of light.

You are carrying:
  your backpack (providing light and being worn and closed)
  your sword (providing light)
  your cross (providing light and being worn)
  your amulet (providing light and being worn)
  your lamp (providing light)

You need to ditch all of it, then get the troll’s own light source (his eyes) snuffed out. At the end the troll will get eaten by a grue.

Cotton is Zork-inspired, so it makes sense he’d have grues, although the logic here doesn’t quite work the same as Ogawa’s game. The troll here lurks in the dark. The grue-like creatures seem to be tracking the player, and going by smell. So, when the player arrives at the troll and it is dark, the “abominable” smell of the troll becomes the new target. (Grues can take down pretty much anything as long as it is dark, so that part at least is consistent with Zork.)

You are in part of a trolls lair, all manner of stuff is strewn around, including parts of its previous meals. To the west is a low tunnel and to the south what looks to be a tiny cavern. A huge and hairy troll stands here blocking your way.

>TURN OFF LAMP
The battery lamp is now off.
Darkness falls, you hear a few tentative steps in the dark and then a very loud crunching and chomping, it then goes very quiet.

I wish I could say I thought all that through, but instead: I was noodling around and I accidentally wandered into the troll lair while it was dark.

I’ll take the wins where I can find them. Past the troll is a crown which counts as a treasure and I think that’s the only result.

There’s a second small thing I found early (which turned out to be big later). I found yet another spot where the levitate self spell works: at the fountain with the “goldfish”.

>CAST LEVITATE SELF
You float upwards towards the top of the fountain. You are floating near the top of a large fountain of water. The noise from the jet of water is quite loud and the spray is soaking you.

After a few turns you float back down. I thought this was something meant to be saved for later. Also, doing this uses up the levitate self spell (unlike the tower-climbing use and the fly-over-tiles use we’ve seen in previous posts).

As an aside, regarding the “burning spells in the spellbook while casting” — I mentioned this doesn’t match AD&D behavior, and it doesn’t, by standard rules. However, according to Zenopus Archives, there was an article by Gary Gygax in the June 1982 edition of Dragon which described casting spells directly from a spell book, with the spells disappearing accordingly. This later landed in the Unearthed Arcana book, which I had actively blocked from my memory.

The upshot is Cotton could have seen this article and used it as a reference, rather than just going with his own homebrew! Still, the levitate behavior is irregular, and the preserve-in-certain-circumstance exception seems intended to help with the puzzle structure.

Put a pin in all this, I’ll get back to it later.

My big breakthrough happened at the room where the torch originally appears:

You are in a short north-south corridor. The south end leads to a spiral staircase leading down. There is a doorway to the east and on the west wall there is an iron bracket. The bracket contains a flaming torch.

>GET TORCH
Taken.

>TURN BRACKET
An opening slowly appears in the wall next to the iron bracket.

>W
You are in what was the reception room for the King’s Quarters. There is a small closet in the south wall.

This gets close to opening up, quite literally, a whole multiverse. We just need to kill a demon first.

The closet to the south contains an obstacle I haven’t managed to wrangle yet. Another time.

You are in a small closet which is very unwholesome with rotting clothes everywhere, basically it stinks. The centre of the closet floor seems covered in what appears to be a horrible brown mould.

>EXAMINE MOULD
As you try to do that the mould ejects a large number of spores, which completely cover you.

(death message etc.)

The demon-killing part turns out to be trivial. Going west one more step leads to the King’s Bedroom, and a moment that’s more for lore-plot than it is to actively stump the player.

You are in the King’s bedroom, it was once richly furnished but only decay remains. The exception to the decay is a huge four poster bed. There are exits to the east, south and west. Sleeping on the bed is by all appearances a very beautiful woman.

>EXAMINE WOMAN
What you thought was a sleeping woman isn’t, from a closer examination you see that she has a pair of wings, horns and all the physical accoutrements one would expect a Demon to have, nasty!

>KILL DEMON WITH RUNE SWORD
You strike at the Demon while she is sleeping and unable to protect herself. The power of the rune sword banishes her back to the Hell from whence she was summoned.

(Mind you, if you haven’t figured out the tile thing yet here, you won’t have the means to kill the demon, so this still counts as a puzzle.) It seems that the reason the demon-summoning circle wasn’t usable in any sense is that it already did its work, with the demon still actively summoned!

Moving the bed requires the demon is dead first, and this leads to a secret area.

>MOVE BED
Moving the huge bed reveals a secret chamber in the north wall.

>N
You are in a small dusty chamber, which has lain unused for many years, a southern exit leads back to the King’s bedroom. A large full length mirror, on the north wall, dominates this small chamber. An old leather bound diary has been dropped here.

>GET DIARY
Taken.

>READ DIARY
The old diary’s cover, which is bound in a very high quality leather, indicates that this once belonged to a King named Fftumbol, or perhaps it means the line of Fftumbol – it is not very clear.

>OPEN DIARY
The old diary opens.

>READ DIARY
The old diary’s contents are all rather boring containing the trivia of the day to day running of court life. The last entry is much more interesting and has been done in a great hurry. The court Wizard, Fflluccer, has apparently summoned, for an unspecified reason, a demon. Fflluccer, the fool, has lost control of it and she is rapidly depopulating the castle. Not even the power of the sword has been of any use, what is left of the court are fleeing in all directions.

I’m guessing Fffllucer thought he could get a succubus girlfriend, and things went awry? This is AD&D, not Pathfinder!

The mirror is the important part:

You are in a small dusty chamber, which has lain unused for many years, a southern exit leads back to the King’s bedroom. A large full length mirror, on the north wall, dominates this small chamber.

>EXAMINE MIRROR
The large mirror is completely blank, no reflection at all.

>CAST DETECT MAGIC ON MIRROR
The large mirror is very highly magical, it is as if the large mirror was in many places at the same time.

Trying to enter the mirror as-is causes a death reminiscent of Ferret: “The large mirror not being focussed on anything yet, spreads your molecules all over the multiverse.” I ran through my verb list and found RUB MIRROR sets a destination, rotating between six possibilities: “The large mirror shimmers and a weird reflection appears.”

• A “distorted” countryside “tinged with green” — walking in kills via arsenic
• A “swirling grey mist” — this is just a single room that loops
• An “icy waste” where you die without protection from cold (*)
• A “huge cavern” with a “low dais” which is safe to enter (*)
• A “chasm” at a ledge (*)
• A “small square room with a metal door” which traps the player without a method out (*)

For this post we’ll visit the four marked with an asterisk, starting with the “huge cavern”.

>ENTER MIRROR
You are at the narrow south end of a huge cavern which must be at least a hundred feet high, and at least two hundred in width at its widest point. The floor is littered with rubbish, mostly rotting food. There are passages leading to the south and west, the southern one is much wider than the western one which appears to lead into a small chamber.

>N
You are standing on a dais which is at at the north end of the huge cavern. The dais is raised about one foot above the rest of the ground. There appears to be some sort of design carved on the dais. The dais doesn’t seem to be part of the ground, there is a very thin gap all the way around its edge where it meets the floor. There is a large weight here, with a carrying ring fixed to its top.

There’s a rope to the west attached to something out of sight (sixty feet), and if you take the weight over and tie it there will be a “grating noise”. This is the dais opening up into a pit, so you can walk over, try to go down, and die by falling into the pit. Oops. Levitate doesn’t work there, unfortunately; I still need to work out what to do.

Going south from the Huge Cavern incidentally hops back to the secret room, but that’s not true of every place; some require return via a different method.

At the chasm area, the way back seems to step out in a void, but you can answer YES to the game’s YES/NO question and arrive back to safety anyway.

>ENTER MIRROR
You are on a small crumbling ledge on the east side of a deep chasm. The sound of dripping water reaches your ears echoing up from the chasm’s depths. Along the ledge to the south is a cave like entrance into the cliff wall.

>W
Are you sure you want to step out into the chasm?
>YES
You step off the ledge into the chasm and suddenly you find that….. You are in a small dusty chamber, which has lain unused for many years, a southern exit leads back to the King’s bedroom. A large full length mirror, on the north wall, dominates this small chamber.

Actually moving forward takes the player to a “cruel looking idol” with two sockets, one with a red gem and one empty. In some games this would be a cue to steal the red gem, but here we take the green gem that I had sensed was evil (but not magic!) and drop it in. The idol helpfully steps aside.

You are at the eastern end of a large cavern, which is dominated by a cruel looking idol. The idol, which is right before you, is some eight feet tall and incredibly obese. The air is thick and overpowering with the smell of incense. Its mouth is full of very sharp teeth and he has six arms all of which end in very nasty looking talons, all in all a very nasty bit of work.

>PUT GREEN GEM IN SOCKET
As you place the green gem in the socket the idol seems to grin at you, and for an instance you become dizzy and disoriented as a waft of stale air passes your face.

Inside there is a room dedicated to the High Priest, where you can snag a gold idol (a mini-version of the big one), a gold ring, and a cloak of feathers which is helpfully warm.

With the cloak on, it is possible to survive a trip to the cold.

I haven’t had much luck here yet.

>ENTER MIRROR
You are in an icy wilderness, there are ice spicules blowing all about you. To the east there is an icy plateau.

>S
You are on the north side of a crevasse – there is a thin ice bridge spanning the gap. The crevasse looks very deep and dark. It sounds as though there is water at the bottom.

The bridge leads to a dead end, and there isn’t an illusion there: it just stops. There’s an igloo to the east (that reacts badly if you’re holding a torch) which contains an ice key (described as “made in Iceland”, ha ha) but I have not found a place for it to go. I am fairly certain I am missing something.

What was even worse (the first time around) is that there is no way out. No jumping into a chasm to magically go into a mirror instead.

I was thinking about the “manual” from a few entries ago…

This is not so much a manual more a diatribe on the brilliance of the inventor of a device which enables one to transport oneself virtually anywhere. This device is apparently box-shaped with a selection of dials and buttons on its upper surface. Reading between the lines it seems there was at least one prototype which was limited in its transport abilities using only a series of buttons for control.

…and that it’d be nice if I could find said device, because it seemed likely to help in these places that seemed like random traps. Additionally, one of the other worlds hinted that the prototype device would likely help.

>ENTER MIRROR
You are in a small square room, the walls of which are completely blank.
There is a gold door in the south wall.

>OPEN GOLD DOOR
You open the door and a little man rushes out and says ‘Oh thank you very much, I have been stuck in there for ages’. I only came back for this, he says, waving a small box, it should have got me out of there but it seems it is not quite perfect yet. He then turns a dial, presses a button on the small box and just disappears. In his haste to depart a note slips from his pocket.

(The player is otherwise trapped in the scene above. The note hints about inserting rods in ROD order from the top down, whatever that means.)

Still with no idea where to look, I went back to the main map and started doing EXAMINE ALL everywhere. I had discovered that the button F5 actually types the phrase, and it gives descriptions of every item in a room. Many games are very hesitant about this kind of help (I’ve even seen GET ALL disabled to avoid this) but here the help has a built-in hotkey!

Perhaps you know where this is going.

>CAST LEVITATE SELF
You float upwards towards the top of the fountain. You are floating near the top of a large fountain of water. The noise from the jet of water is quite loud and the spray is soaking you.

>EXAMINE ALL
transport box : The small box has five coloured buttons on its top side. They are coloured blue yellow, green, pink and black, there is no indication as to their use. The box has the distinct appearance of being extremely delicate, and probably the slightest bump would damage it.
black button : I see nothing special about black button.
blue button : I see nothing special about blue button.
green button : I see nothing special about green button.
yellow button : I see nothing special about yellow button.
pink button : I see nothing special about pink button.

aaaaaa it was right there.

This incidentally burns the “levitate self” spell, which might normally be a problem. To get at what I mean, here’s a meta-map:

You start at the cottage where treasures are stored. To get into the underground, you either levitate up to a tower (which doesn’t burn the levitate) or pass through an area with a card, an illusion, and a slot that eats up the card. So if you want to keep returning treasures to the cottage, the levitate route is needed; not only does a treasure get removed from the game, but the route can only be used once, after which there seems to be no way to the main underground section.

With this thought in mind, I went back to the icy area to test buttons, trying to return back to the mirror.

>ENTER MIRROR
You are in an icy wilderness, there are ice spicules blowing all about you. To the east there is an icy plateau.

>PUSH BLACK BUTTON
You are in a small dusty chamber, which has lain unused for many years, a southern exit leads back to the King’s bedroom. A large full length mirror, on the north wall, dominates this small chamber.

The black button works, great! But what happens if I push the black button again?

>PUSH BLACK BUTTON
You are in a lit chamber about twenty feet square. The dust is very thick on the floor. The chamber is partitioned-off half way across with a transparent crystal wall. Behind the wall you can see several chairs, all but one of them has a skeleton sitting in it. A sign above the skeletons reads ‘TROPHY ROOM’. On the north side there is a closed door and beside it, at about waist height, there is a small slot. There is an inscription on the door which reads as follows:- AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Pushing the black button yet again, from the skeleton room, returns back to the secret chamber. This means the act of inserting the gold card into the slot can be skipped, and the route via the skeleton room can be now used to re-enter the main part of the map.

The transport box simply doesn’t work in many places, although it definitely allows hopping in the gold door section I was previous trapped in; however, this is my longest entry yet for Cornucopia, so it is a good place to stop for a breather until next time.

5 days ago

IGF finalists were announced yesterday. I don't have a pile of reviews queued up for this year, but I can at least post my quick comments.

---

(The only new review in this post:)

Thank Goodness You're Here!

• by Coal Supper -- game site

A diminutive, violent, nonverbal salesman goes to Yorkshire. Run around punching things and solving puzzles.

This got nominated for approximately everything. Look, TGYH! is fundamentally a trivial game. It has no guiding principle except "Throw nonsense at the wall, as hard as possible." Does it really deserve all these awards?

...Yes. Yes it does. It really is the best animation and the best voice performance and the background graffiti and the accents and the subtitles and the song and oh god. The Yuichi-Yokoyama sense of scale. Even the design, which pretends to be an open-world setup with arbitrary fetch quests, does a tremendous amount of work to keep everything bouncing along.

(Okay, you can argue that this is a satire of the point-and-click format. That's a guiding principle. But TGYH! goes way beyond that.)

I'd say that the complete randomness leads to a bit of a pacing problem; it's all kind of uniform, with no big goals in sight. (When you achieve a big goal, it's always a surprise.) Running around can feel like a grind, even though you can't get very stuck. And then, with no warning, it's over. But you know what -- fine. It's a winner. I even forgive them for getting "Ilkley Moor" stuck in my head forever.

---

(Games I've already played:)

Indika

• by Odd-Meter -- game site

That Russian nun game. Surreal, ambiguous -- ambiguous about how surreal it is, which is a good trick. Basically a walk-and-talk about faith and sin and free will, wrapped up in a walking simulator with light puzzles and platforming. I enjoyed it and then I had to think about the ending (I don't think it's nihilistic! But you might disagree!) That's all I ask out of a short game like this.

Full review here.

Animal Well

• by Billy Basso -- game site

Loved it. Beautiful, sneaky, all about the joy of discovery. An open-world metroidvania, which is harder than it sounds.

I liked that your expanding bag of platforming tricks gives you more and more ways to approach levels. (And people will discover them in different orders -- open-world, right?) A lot of areas that present as "precision platforming" turn out to be easier later in the game. It's still a platformer but my modest dexterity sufficed me.

Also, I reached the <spoiler> without <spoiler>ing <spoiler> and therefore didn't have to get all the <spoiler>s. And the game allowed for that. That's pretty cool!

Full review here.

Miniatures

• by Other Tales Interactive -- game site

A small mixed-media point-and-clicky thing, in the line of Vignettes or Islands: Non-Places. It didn't blow me away but it was short, evocative, and good for unwinding of an evening.

The Rise of the Golden Idol

• by Color Gray -- game site

More static deduction, Lemurian style. The gameplay is expanded in interesting directions, the story is more engaging, and it's not pixel art any more. All improvements.

I worried the Golden Idol gimmick itself was mined out, after the first game. (Or even in the middle of the first game!) It's not -- the designers found a good new direction to take it in. But I hope they're not stuck in this setting forever. I'd like to see a fresh start.

Full review here.

The Thaumaturge

• by Fool's Theory -- game site

A meaty RPG set in a slightly alternate 1905 Warsaw. It teases being a Witcher knockoff, but really it's bouncing off of Disco Elysium. That's fine -- it bounces in its own direction.

Excellent narrative work. Excellent writing and sense-of-place. (I have many favorite characters and you will too.) Not bloated in length. The combat, yeah, that's a slog, but whatever -- switch to easy mode and call it the price of admission.

Full review here.

---

(Games I have not played, or have not played much:)

Caves of Qud

• by Freehold Games -- game site

I have not played Caves of Qud. I am scared of Caves of Qud.

Seriously, I have read many articles about Qud, including the chapters in Procedural Generation and Procedural Storytelling (ed. Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams). One of my friends livetwooted chunks of his experience. It sounds amazing. I'm glad it exists. I don't feel the need to get into it.

UFO 50

• by Mossmouth -- game site

I played a few chapters at a party. Again, it seems cool, but it's not my nostalgia bracket and I'm not hankering for fifty small games.

Blue Prince

• by Dogubomb -- game site

I played a demo of this last summer. It seems like an interesting idea and I love the vibe. Looking forward to the release.

Mouthwashing

• by Wrong Organ -- game site

This has been recommended quite a bit. I am not in a horror mood right now (real world, thanks) but I may get to it.

Consume Me

• by Jenny Jiao Hsia -- game site

Sounds harrowing. I wind up loving some of these "teen years of horror" games, and bouncing off others. Not sure how this one will land.

Arctic Eggs

• by The Water Museum -- game site

I know everybody loves this, but man, I did not get into it.

Ginger

• by Kevin Du -- game site

I said "what the hell" several times in a row, and then I made it do something, and then I said "what the hell" very loudly indeed.

(That was on the demo of Ginger. It's not fully released yet.)

Instant top of my list for "what the hell" games. I have no idea if it will be playable in any real sense, but I am going to try.

5 days ago

In partnership with World of Darkness and Paradox Interactive, Choice of Games is proud to announce the release of Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove by William Brown, now available on Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 25% off until January 23!

William Brown’s earlier game The Mysteries of Baroque is 33% off as well!

Full moon. Cold night. Dark shadow. Warm gun. The Beast of Glenkildove has stalked Ireland for centuries. Now, you must hunt it.

Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove is an interactive novel by William Brown, set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Eight years ago, when you were eighteen, the Beast of Glenkildove killed one of your closest friends. You’ve never returned to Ireland since that day.

It’s difficult to remember what happened. As you’ll soon learn, the human mind blots out the traumatic memories of facing a werewolf.

Now, you must stalk that werewolf across the shadowed glens and fogbound mountains of Ireland, hunting a shapeshifting killing machine with your friends, your wits, and a shotgun.

But you and your friends are not alone. You have entered a world of Hunters, humans who dare to challenge the dominion of the monsters who rule over them. Can you trust the fanatics of the Society of Leopold, the scholars and savants of the Arcanum, the ruthless Duffy crime family, or the enigmatic biotech company Fada?

Can you even trust your oldest friends?

Redemption for some. Retribution for others. A reckoning for all.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; befriend or romance humans and supernaturals of any gender
• Kill, study, capture, document or negotiate with the creatures you hunt
• Craft your own traps, gear, and weapons to take the Hunt to the enemy
• Find camaraderie and romance with the only people in the world that you can trust to fight alongside you
• Adopt and train your own wolfhound to assist you in the Hunt
• Build and maintain your own safehouse at the Wolf’s Head Inn in the Wicklow Mountains

Become the thing that even nightmares fear.

We hope you enjoy playing Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store and on Steam. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

6 days ago

Here's a little something I've been working on: The Visible Zorker!

Really, go give it a shot. It's a toy. You can read the rest of this post later.

...Okay, a quick introduction. The left pane is regular old Parchment, the Z-code interpreter, playing Zork 1. You type commands; the game responds.

Just regular old Parchment? Not quite! This is Parchment exposed. The upper right pane shows the stack trace for the current turn. That's all the ZIL functions called, and all the text printed, when executing the most recent command.

And the bottom right pane shows the ZIL source code -- the original text, written by Infocom folks in the 1980s. Click on any function or printed string; it'll show you that code in context.

Now check out the other tabs!

The "World" tab shows the game world as nested objects. The "State" tab shows ZIL global variables. "Timers" is the table of timers and daemons -- functions called every turn or counting down to a future call.

All of these displays update live, every turn, as you play the game. You can click on any line to see the ZIL source that implements it.

And those green buttons? Those display my comments on the source. ZIL isn't the easiest language to read (it's a Lisp derivative), so I wrote up some helpful footnotes.

Really, go play with it. Run around. See how Zork works. Haven't you always wondered?

(I mean it about the spoilers, though.)

Seriously, you did what?

Infocom's games are among the best-researched works in videogame history. The Z-machine format has long since been documented. The games have been disassembled and analyzed. And then, in 2019, we got their original ZIL source code.

But most players have never read this stuff. What if I built a way to visualize the Z-machine as it executed? Like the Visible Woman at the science museum. Internals illuminated; cheerfully explaining itself; transgressively fascinating. (Especially if you're a twelve-year-old science nerd... boy.)

I think of it as a kind of exploratory programming. It's on the code-reading side rather than code-writing -- but reading code is so much of software development!

Or you can think of it as the Penn-and-Teller approach to the magic of game design. Zork is a great trick, and knowing how it works makes it greater.

And wow, this was a fun project to work on. A challenge, on several levels.

What was hard about this?

The first problem was extracting the data that the Visible Zorker needs.

I said that Zork (and the Z-machine) had been analyzed to the bones right? Yes, but not in the way I needed. Remember, ZIL is a compiled language. All the functions in the source code have been converted to numeric opcodes, operating on numbers.

Here's a bunch of opcodes extracted from the compiled game file. This is the function at memory address $100D8. We've had this listing since the 1990s:

Routine 100d8, 2 locals (0000, 0000)

100dd:  GET_PROP        L00,#07 -> L01
100e1:  JL              L01,#00 [FALSE] RTRUE
100e5:  SUB             #00,L01 -> -(SP)
100e9:  PUT_PROP        L00,#07,(SP)+
100ee:  GET_PROP        L00,#11 -> -(SP)
100f2:  CALL            (SP)+ (#04) -> -(SP)
100f7:  RTRUE

And here's the corresponding ZIL source, which we got in 2017:

<ROUTINE AWAKEN (O "AUX" (S <GETP .O ,P?STRENGTH>))
     <COND (<L? .S 0>
        <PUTP .O ,P?STRENGTH <- 0 .S>>
        <APPLY <GETP .O ,P?ACTION> ,F-CONSCIOUS>)>
     T>

If you have a reference, you can see how these match up. The first line gets property 07 from the object in local variable 00 -- that must be the STRENGTH property. It stores that value in local variable 01. Then it checks whether that's less than zero. (JL is "jump if less than...") And so on.

But -- here's the trick -- how did I know that these definitions went together? How did I know that function $100D8 corresponded to the AWAKEN routine rather than, say, I-FIGHT or INFESTED?

In some cases it's easy. Here's another disassembled routine:

Routine 10a3e, 0 locals ()

10a3f:  JE              G78,#39,#23,#2b [FALSE] 10a4f
10a46:  PRINT_RET       "You can't do that."
10a4f:  JE              G78,#38 [FALSE] RFALSE
10a53:  PRINT           "It looks pretty much like a "
10a66:  PRINT_OBJ       G76
10a68:  PRINT_RET       "."

The PRINT and PRINT_RET opcodes contain embedded string data -- the disassembler knows how to decode this. It's easy to find the ZIL code that corresponds to that. It must be this function:

<ROUTINE DUMB-CONTAINER ()
     <COND (<VERB? OPEN CLOSE LOOK-INSIDE>
        <TELL "You can't do that." CR>)
           (<VERB? EXAMINE>
        <TELL "It looks pretty much like a " D ,PRSO "." CR>)>>

So the first thing I did was write a ZIL parser. It runs through the source files and parses all the functions. For each function, it records (a) the function name; (b) the location in the ZIL source; (c) all the strings used in TELL statements.

And then I wrote a parser for the disassembly dump, which runs through and extracts (a) the function address and (b) all the embedded strings in PRINT opcodes.

I figured I'd have to write a fussy search algorithm to match up functions in the first list with functions in the second list. And for function with no embedded text, like AWAKEN? I'd have to match them up by hand!

...Then it turned out that the ZIL compiler generated functions in strict source code order. I didn't have to do any searching; the two lists were already in the same order. Exploratory programming, right?

(It wasn't quite that easy. ZIL supports conditional compilation -- like #ifdef in C -- and my parser had to account for that. Just a bit more work. On the up side, I needed those source code locations for the app anyhow.)

Well, that takes care of the functions. What about the objects? Here's a ZIL object definition:

<OBJECT LAMP
    (IN LIVING-ROOM)
    (SYNONYM LAMP LANTERN LIGHT)
    (ADJECTIVE BRASS)
    (DESC "brass lantern")
    (FLAGS TAKEBIT LIGHTBIT)
    (ACTION LANTERN)
    (FDESC "A battery-powered brass lantern is on the trophy case.")
    (LDESC "There is a brass lantern (battery-powered) here.")
    (SIZE 15)>

The same disassembler can generate a list of the object data:

164. Attributes: 17, 31
     Parent object: 193  Sibling object: 183  Child object:   0
     Property address: 1a97
         Description: "brass lantern"
          Properties:
              [18] 44 51 44 5f 44 c8 
              [17] 6e 32 
              [16] e9 
              [15] 00 0f 
              [14] 87 4d 
              [11] 87 5f 

Happily, the object description ("brass lantern") is embedded in the object data, so that's easy to match up.

...or is it? What about this object dump?

 59. Attributes: 5, 6
     Parent object:  82  Sibling object:  60  Child object:   0
     Property address: 1091
         Description: "Maze"
          Properties:
              [30] 3c 
              [29] 36 
              [23] 3a 
              [11] 90 cd 

The description is "Maze"... just like the other fourteen "Maze" rooms. How do I tell those apart?

Turns out the property data describes the exits. Property 23 is UP, 29 is WEST, 30 is EAST, so can we find a maze room definition with pattern? We can. And hey, that tells us what rooms $36, $3A, and $3C are too...

Mind you, at first I didn't know what property matched with which direction! Extra puzzle fun. But it was solvable, working backwards from the dead ends and the Troll Room.

Working through this mapping was a real deja vu moment. I was mapping the Zork maze! One room at a time, checking the exits... It felt like 1980 all over again.

Then I did it all again for the global variables list, the properties, the attributes...

After all that, I remembered that Allen Garvin, Ben Rudiak-Gould, and Ethan Dicks did lot of this analysis work back in 2007. That didn't solve all my problems -- they didn't have the ZIL source, so they made up their own function names and so on. ($100D8 is CheckStrength in that file.) But it confirmed the property, attribute, and global variable numbers pretty well.

So after that it was easy, right?

Hooking up Parchment to a display UI was pretty easy. That was a question of collecting internal Z-machine info into a JS object and exporting it. (A list of global variable values, a list of object locations, a list of function addresses called this turn... Just numbers.) Then I had to convert all the address mappings I'd worked out (and objects, globals, etc) into JSON data. The UI loads all that JSON, and then it can display $100D8 as AWAKEN.

Designing that UI was a journey. Again, exploratory: a very iterative process.

I started out with the basic ideas of a call tree, a list of printed strings, a table of objects. But how is that presented? Does the call tree include printing strings, or are those separate tabs? What does the source-code pane display at any given time?

I built a display pane, tried it out, and asked "What can't I see?" Then I did it again. And again. "What button am I reaching for that doesn't exist?" (I didn't know that the source pane needed forwards/backwards buttons until I reached for them.)

The Timers tab wasn't even an idea until I asked "Where is the lamp's battery counter stored, anyway?" I had unconsciously assumed it would be a property of the lamp object, because that's how Inform works. But it's not. It's not a global variable either. Where the heck is it?

Turns out it's a timer function which counts down from 200. When that runs out, it displays a message from LAMP-TABLE and resets to 100. Then 70, then 15, then it's dead. So the total lamp life is 385, but you have to dig quite a bit to understand why.

But you can't illuminate the workings of Zork without showing the lamp counter! So I added the Timers tab. Once I looked at it, I realized it was indispensable.

More questions...

How long did this take?

I wrote the ZIL parser over Thanksgiving, just because I was hanging out at my parents' place with my laptop. But I didn't seriously get started on the project until, let's see, Dec 22. That's when I started banging Parchment into the shape I needed.

So a bit over three weeks. Mind you, I've been pretty obsessed with this project. I worked on it a lot over the holidays.

Do you plan to add anything more to it?

Not much. There's a few UI tweaks left, and I could keep adding commentary as long as I feel like. But it's basically done.

I might add a "Map" pane. That would be fun. It'd be a bunch of SVG work, though, so I didn't try to include it in today's release.

Ooh, map! Could you use this tool to build a "more playable" Zork, with a built-in map, inventory and room displays, and so on?

You could certainly do some of that.

I think it's a limited path, though. Any attempt to really modernize the Infocom games would involve changing the game -- that is, compiling a new version. New game responses, enhanced descriptions, different timers, etc. Some people have already tried this; see this Modern Planetfall project.

That's a perfectly valid approach. But it's not what I'm interested in. I am approaching this as an educational project, a museum exhibit. Most obviously, I'm not worrying about spoilers. The Visible Zorker is 100% spoilers and that's fine.

If you really want to update Zork for a modern audience, you have to think about adapting the puzzles so they're more approachable but still good puzzles. That's a much harder problem.

Are you going to do the rest of the Infocom games?

I doubt it. It wouldn't be much fun. I'd have to reconstruct the object numbers and functions addresses and so on for each game, and maybe rewrite some of the display logic as well. (I tried to keep it general, but some things are still hard-coded for this specific Zork release.)

Also, I wouldn't learn any more React that way. One unstated goal of this thing was to get some React on my resume.

(See also BlorbTool, which I released last month.)

Mind you, if you want to hire me to do the rest of the Infocom games, I'd be fine with that. That'd be awesome. That's what resumes are for, right?

What about other kinds of games?

I dunno. What other kinds of games would work? Not many games have this kind of complex game logic and source code available.

Are there easter eggs in the Visible Zorker?

Where could I possibly hide such a thing?

---

Updates

Jan 15th: Fixed some syntax-coloring bugs. Local variables are tinted brown now. Added some commentary.

8 days ago

(Continued from my previous posts, which you definitely need for context before reading this one.)

The spellcasting in Cornucopia, as Matt W. has pointed out, is “Vancian”, following roughly the same model as Dungeons & Dragons.

Vancian is so named because of the Dying Earth series of novels by Jack Vance, where wizards memorize spells and then forget them as they are cast. Cornucopia uses casting directly from a spellbook with the same sort of disappearance effect (except for the case of levitating at the tower, as I showed off in my last post; that seems to be to allow the player to take that route multiple times without penalty).

Having such a system isn’t a guarantee D&D was involved (after all, maybe the author went right to the source!) but there’s a critter that I’m fairly sure is D&D-only.

Back at the kitchen (adjacent to the giant rat, which we’ll also reckon with in a moment) I was testing out GET ALL everywhere and found death.

You are in what appears to be the old kitchen. There is a flight of stone stairs leading up and doorways in the east and west walls. In the northwest corner a spring enters the kitchen and pours into a large granite basin. The water level in the basin is kept constant by a drain hidden from view.

>GET ALL
granite basin : As you approach the basin with the spring water in it a strange form rears up and grabs you, obviously some form of water weird. The strange form pulls you into the basin and you are drowned. From your sitting position you can see through a glass screen into a room that looks strangely familiar. On either side of you are further skeletons, they have a somewhat glum look on their skulls just as you do. You are dead and have become yet another trophy for the long departed owners of this place.

Fortunately, there’s a weirdly specific spell from the spellbook that immediately came to mind.

>OPEN BOOK
Opening the spell book reveals :- detect magic spell; dispel magic spell; purify water spell; dispel illusion spell; detect illusion spell; levitate self spell; detect evil spell.

>CAST PURIFY WATER
The spring water is now quite pure and the water weird has been killed.

With this done, I was able to get the empty green bottle filled with water (mind you, it isn’t FILL BOTTLE or FILL BOTTLE WITH WATER, but the oddly phrased PUT WATER IN BOTTLE). This technically provides a solution for getting thirsty while going east from the dried brook, but I have yet to work out anything to do with the grate (the only thing you can find there).

The culvert ends here in a blank wall and the water disappears down a grating set in the floor. The culvert extends away to the west along a narrow ledge. The grating is of a fine mesh, such as to catch most things that would be brought along by the current of water, if there was any.

>OPEN GRATING
The grating can’t be opened or closed.

Adjacent to the water weird is a giant rat. The giant rat succumbs to simply stabbing quite a few times (with a combat scene just like Goblin Towers, or Zork) but something about this feels wrong.

>KILL RAT WITH RUSTY SWORD
A quick stroke gets the giant rat in the side and blood starts to trickle down one of its legs.
You dodge but the giant rat still manages to nip you.

>KILL RAT WITH RUSTY SWORD
A quick stroke gets the giant rat in the side and blood starts to trickle down one of its legs.
You dodge but the giant rat still manages to nip you.

>KILL RAT WITH RUSTY SWORD
With a deft side step you stab your sword into its heart. The giant rat slumps down dead.

This leaves behind merely a giant rat corpse, which you can pick up (it is heavy and have to drop everything other than the lamp), but I haven’t found any use for it.

My last piece of “progress” wasn’t really progress in a sense: I was able to get by the troll.

The troll, remember, ate any swords I tried to use to attack it.

You are in part of a trolls lair, all manner of stuff is strewn around, including parts of its previous meals. To the west is a low tunnel and to the south what looks to be a tiny cavern. A huge and hairy troll stands here blocking your way.

I was testing out various options when I tried SMASH TROLL.

The troll breaks into a million pieces and is destroyed.

>S
You are in a small cavern which looks like it was the sleeping chamber for the troll. The only exit leads to the north. Lying discarded here in one corner is the King’s crown.

SMASH works on everything in the game, destroying the object. Important treasures? Smashable. Statue standing on a pedestal with hidden gold necklace? Smashable. Giant full sized dragon made from rock? Definitely smashable. Although you still die if you try to go south due to dragon flame. It appears that the troll stopping the player is dependent on the “troll object” being present while the dragon flame is hard-coded for going south from the dragon.

>SMASH GRATING
The grating breaks into a million pieces and is destroyed.

While you can smash the grating that “can’t be open or closed”, it doesn’t allow leading to any new areas, so that seems to be wrong. Smashing the tree still results in the player dying if they try to climb the tree.

You are at the centre of the Royal Gardens, there is a tree here in full bloom, the blooms are pink. The perfume from the blooms is very heady. The base of the tree is circled by some kind of goo, within this goo there appear to be many jewels.

>SMASH TREE
The tree breaks into a million pieces and is destroyed.

>U
You get up into the low branches, it seems the tree is somewhat sentient and resents this. The tree shakes you from its branches and you fall into the goo at its base, which is extremely corrosive. From your sitting position you can see through a glass screen into a room that looks strangely familiar. On either side of you are further skeletons, they have a somewhat glum look on their skulls just as you do. You are dead and have become yet another trophy for the long departed owners of this place.

This presents an unusual dilemma: what if SMASH is the legitimate and only method of solving some puzzle in the game, in an intended way? (Surely the troll isn’t.) Would I be able to tell? Will doing things the “right way” nonetheless feel like cheating? If nothing else, I now know it’s just a treasure past the troll and not some long branching path.

I’d like to close out by listing out all the obstacles I’m stuck on and theorize about solutions. The evil tree seems like a good place to start.

And yes, the tree is detected via spell as evil:

>CAST DETECT EVIL ON TREE
Surprisingly for something so marvellous the tree seems to have an evil awareness.

You can die by a.) climbing and being dunked in the goo, which dissolves you b.) trying to get one of the gems in the goo, which dissolves you, c.) falling unconscious from the tree’s perfume, and falling into the goo, which dissolves you.

If you try to set it on fire with the torch the tree “shies away” from the torch and “no matter what you do you just cannot set fire to it”. The goo itself is not flammable. I do suspect fire is involved in a solution still somehow, just in needs to get conveyed to the tree in a more forceful way (and before you ask, THROW TORCH AT TREE just gets the response “Dropped”).

Next up is the stone dragon at the cave. Going inside, I mentioned three buttons and two levers.

>ENTER OPENING
You are in a small spherical shaped room inside the dragon’s head. In front of you are two round windows which look out into the cavern you have just come from. Just under the windows is a small desk with a chair beside it. The desk has three buttons which are coloured red, brown and amber, the desk also has two levers coloured black and blue. It is quite warm in here, the heat seems to be coming from below.

>PUSH RED BUTTON
There is a click and then a low wheezing noise.

>PUSH AMBER BUTTON
There is a click and then a whooshing noise.

The brown button causes a click no matter what sequence I try to do things in, and the levers just pull (or push) and then move back to the center with no apparent reaction. I’ve tried quite a few variations followed by testing going south past the fire (in the hope something happened silently) but no luck with that either. I suspect I’m just missing the right permutation of moves, though; I don’t have much to work with other than brute force testing.

Other than those two spots I’m stuck on small things, or what might not even be puzzles:

• The statue facing west only yielded the necklace; I don’t know if there’s some other secret involving the statue moving.
• There’s a small alcove seen when entering the fungus elevator; that might simply be the elevator entrance that can reached from the throne area, though, and not really a puzzle.
• The area with the gold card can only be left (at the moment) via using up the card at a door. The gold card does seem to be a treasure so I must be missing something. Also, what does the “that will do nicely” message mean?

The card is solid gold with an ebony edging and writing on one side in a bold gothic script which reads ‘Admit one only’. On the other side in almost microscopic letters it says ‘that will do nicely’, the meaning of which seems quite obscure.

• There’s a “compost heap” at the garden I haven’t been able to do anything with.
• I still have a fountain at the garden to deal with. There’s pirahna protecting some gold coins, and there’s a “water jet” at the fountain in the garden still awaiting an item. I suspect I will know the item when I see it (and it will help with the fish problem may influence the empty brook).

There is a lovely carved stone fountain here, it is quite a rude design. The jet of water is so large it could easily support a small object if placed exactly right. The pool at the base of the fountain has many gold coins that have been tossed into it. There are what appear to be goldfish swimming about in it.

>PUT BOOK ON JET
It would just fall off the jet of water, so there’s no point.

I get the uncanny feeling this is one of those kind of games where there’s “wrong” ways to solve things and you can easily put the game in an impossible state with a wrong solution. Maybe I can get the giant rat to follow me over to the tree and distract it? Or make friends with the troll?

7 days ago

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve done, as promised, some serious mapping, and can share the layout and the initial obstacles. But first, a look at the verb list:

This is quite a wide coverage for this era and feels more aligned with Infocom than a Commodore PET game (as this originally started as). While Goblin Towers had very little change between the two versions, I highly suspect Cornucopia had serious additions to at least the text; not only are there a fair number of lengthy room descriptions, it more “fun” messages than usual while messing around with verbs the game understands, mirroring Zork’s multiple “jump” responses for instance:

>JUMP
Well done.
>JUMP
That is really childish!
>JUMP
I suppose you want a medal for that.
>JUMP
Wheeeeeeeee

SMELL and LISTEN are also notable (and do, in fact, get used, sometimes for pure environment); PRAY is good to keep in mind given the theological theme, and PLUCK is the most unusual of all the verbs (although it seems to just be a synonym for “TAKE”).

Now, a grand tour of the map, where I’ll start with a meta-map. (This is arranged by connectivity between regions, where each region is a set of rooms.)

The player starts at the cottage which I showed the map of last time; let’s take the route entering the giant fungus first. You step in an “elevator” and there’s a small alcove briefly visible (I have not been able to interact with it yet) before landing at:

You are on the edge of a small brook, which has long since dried up. A path follows along the course of the brook to the east and west. Across on the other side of the brook you can see lush rolling countryside.

The west is a “solid gold” card with “Admit one only” on one side and “that will do nicely” on the other; I assume it is a treasure, but we’re about to consume it in a moment.

To the east there’s a culvert that leads up until a grate:

The culvert ends here in a blank wall and the water disappears down a grating set in the floor. The culvert extends away to the west along a narrow ledge. The grating is of a fine mesh, such as to catch most things that would be brought along by the current of water, if there was any.

Heading down the culvert has an unfortunate side effect: the player starts getting thirsty. The “green bottle” the player starts with seems to be empty, but even with a fountain later the command FILL BOTTLE doesn’t seem to be understood, so I’m not sure what’s going on. I suspect visiting here first is out-of-order of how it is supposed to be.

Heading north from the landing point of the dried brook is a “countryside” where “you are walking through some green countryside, but don’t seem to be getting anywhere.” Dropping an item (like the SWORD) causes it to “disappear from view” but from mucking about I decided every direction except back south to the dried brook simply loops the player. I became highly suspicious:

>CAST DISPEL ILLUSION
As the illusion fades you find that… You are in a large well lit cavern. The roof soars away so as to seem almost as high as the sky. You are near the west wall of the cavern and can see an exit carved into the very rock. To the south you can make out the small brook you crossed earlier. A sword which is quite rusty but in a useable condition.

(The sword is the item that was dropped earlier, which had previously disappeared.)

This has the side effect that I likely don’t need to keep hunting for possible illusions elsewhere, although it may be that this entire route is wrong and the illusion should be ignored in favor of getting through the grate somehow.

Removing the illusion allows going west, whereupon the player is trapped and can’t even go back east.

You are in a lit chamber about twenty feet square. The dust is very thick on the floor. The chamber is partitioned-off half way across with a transparent crystal wall. Behind the wall you can see several chairs, all but one of them has a skeleton sitting in it. A sign above the skeletons reads ‘TROPHY ROOM’. On the north side there is a closed door and beside it, at about waist height, there is a small slot. There is an inscription on the door which reads as follows:- AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

However, the gold card can be put in the slot:

>PUT CARD IN SLOT
From deep within the walls you hear a whirring sound and a voice says ‘That will do nicely’ and at the same time a door slides open, the gold card is drawn into the slot and disappears.

>N
You are in a hall orientated north to south. It is about sixty feet long by some twenty feet wide. On either side of the hall is a row of doric columns, carved from solid marble. These support a high arched ceiling. The south end of the hall leads nowhere but the other looks to open out into a large chamber. The walls are decorated with countless heraldic shields, depicting the magnificent lineage of the former owners of this place.

This jumps to an area on the meta-map I called Throne/Kitchen…

…but let’s wait on visiting there and go an entirely different route, levitating up the tower. I’ve already shown off the troll at the very bottom. I still haven’t gotten anywhere with that route, so let’s step out of the tower into a series of passages.

There’s not anything to see here — it’s just a 4 by 3 grid — and if this was Infocom I’d be highly suspicious of some geographical-placement puzzle afoot, chasing or evading some creature. As things currently stand the only extra item of interest is a statue.

You are at a junction of an east-west passage with a north-south one. At the centre of the junction a large stone statue stands on a pedestal, the statue is facing the west.

>GET ALL
pedestal : You can’t take a pedestal.
statue : You can’t take a statue.

As I mentioned in my last post, the GET ALL trick is extremely handy for parsing what’s useful here; I might normally have just tried to examine the statue but not the pedestal, missing a treasure in the process.

>EXAMINE PEDESTAL
You notice that there is a slight gap between the heel of one of the statues legs and the pedestal, in this gap a small gold necklace has been concealed.

The gold necklace, according to the spell, is not magic, so likely not used in a puzzle otherwise.

The west-facing statue is highly suggestive that we might be turning the statue around (like Hollywood Hijinx or Whembly Castle), but attempting to do so just gets a joke from the parser:

>EXAMINE STATUE
The statue stands on a low pedestal in the middle of the junction, the statue faces west and has a somewhat expectant look upon its face. One of its arms also points in this direction, as if directing someone.

>TURN STATUE
Hmm, zo zis is very interesting, do you get zese urges very often hmm!

So keep an eye on that I guess? Actually going to the west leads to a room with many colored tiles…

You are in a room which is wider at the east end than at the west end, its length is greater than its width even at its widest point. Strangely there is a powerful draught blowing from this end of the room towards the smaller end, it is probably something to do with the rooms shape. The floor is covered in gaily coloured tiles; red, green blue and yellow ones. The walls are coloured to match and the whole makes your eyes fairly boggle.

…where just trying to walk across is failure.

You cross the floor not caring which you tread on, and stepping on a tile of each colour at least once. You suddenly realise that you are back at the position you started from, although the transition back to the wide end of the room came unnoticed by you.

You can instead WALK ON RED TILES (or YELLOW, BLUE, or GREEN) in order to get to a room. There’s one for each color. The red tiles lead to an armory with a rune sword, the yellow tiles lead to a gallery with a painting, the blue tiles lead to an empty room, and the green tiles lead to a “gadget room”.

You are in a small rectangular room, it is quite unremarkable having no special features at all, even the exit to the east is plain. In the centre of the room is a large stone casket the top of which has been forced open and fallen to the floor where it has shattered. The stone casket contains:- user manual; emerald rod.

The manual is enigmatic:

This is not so much a manual more a diatribe on the brilliance of the inventor of a device which enables one to transport oneself virtually anywhere. This device is apparently box-shaped with a selection of dials and buttons on its upper surface. Reading between the lines it seems there was at least one prototype which was limited in its transport abilities using only a series of buttons for control.

So that’s fun to look forward to! (I also don’t know what the emerald rod does yet either.)

Hopping back to the passages, going east leads to the Throne / Kitchen area, the same area reachable via using the gold card.

The throne has another secret item (a green gem). To the east there’s another elevator, this time one that goes up and lands the player in the fungus forest. Going up there’s an odd pair of lavoratories where there’s a snake that sticks its head out; the player can attack it with a sword and make it disappear, leaving them free to grab a sapphire rod.

Heading down leads to a kitchen instead.

You are in what appears to be the old kitchen. There is a flight of stone stairs leading up and doorways in the east and west walls. In the northwest corner a spring enters the kitchen and pours into a large granite basin. The water level in the basin is kept constant by a drain hidden from view.

>E
You are in what was the kitchen’s grain store, all that is left is a pile of rotted cereals. The exit is to the north. There is a giant rat here gorging itself on the grain.

I have not managed to do anything with the rat yet; there’s a plain sack just lying about heading the other direction.

From the throne room you can also head straight north (passing by a torch on the way which can be picked up) and find a garden.

Resolving the slightly maze-like aspect, there’s a compost heap to the west (haven’t found a use yet) and a whistle to the east. To the far north there’s a fountain with deadly fish.

You are in a part of the formal Royal Rose gardens. Nearby you can hear the tinkle of water from a fountain.

>N
There is a lovely carved stone fountain here, it is quite a rude design. The jet of water is so large it could easily support a small object if placed exactly right. The pool at the base of the fountain has many gold coins that have been tossed into it. There are what appear to be goldfish swimming about in it.

>EXAMINE GOLDFISH
On a closer examination the goldfish are in fact piranha.

(I have not found anything that properly goes onto the jet of water yet.)

Finally in the middle there’s a tree that has some deadly goo. Or if you hang around it is deadly. Or climb the tree it is deadly.

You are at the centre of the Royal Gardens, there is a tree here in full bloom, the blooms are pink. The perfume from the blooms is very heady. The base of the tree is circled by some kind of goo, within this goo there appear to be many jewels.

Heading back to the throne area, there’s a different exit down that leads to some “cells”.

Some have various things scratched in them (see the map) and there’s also some magazines where you can play Spot the Typo.

You are in a room with three exits. There is an extremely unwholesome smell here. The walls seem to have many deep and long scratches in them. There is a large pile of discarded magazines here.

>GET ALL
pile of magazines : Taken.

>READ MAGAZINES
The pile of magazines contains the following – Torturers Weekly, 101 Ways to Torture an Elf, Inflicting Pain Monthly, Bone Choppers Annual, Computnig Toady and Torture for Fun and Profit.

I’m sure something elaborate might happen here (maybe after we “ring for service”?) but it’s a pretty empty area so far. Heading down even further goes to a cavern with a stone dragon.

You are at the north end of a large and apparently very old cavern. A narrow tunnel leads away to the north. High overhead a forest of stalactites, some of them huge. To the south you can see a large and unusually shaped rock formation.

>S
You are at the south end of a large cavern. To the south the cavern narrows down to a small passage. Crouching and facing the narrow passage is a large rock formation which looks exactly like a dragon.

You can climb in the dragon and find some buttons and levers and I’m sure the controls are just lovely, but I hit this point right at the end of my last session and I knew my post was already going to get rather long, so I decided it was a good point to stop. Still, let me show what happens if you try to just ignore the dragon:

As you approach the narrow passage a huge gout of flame shoots from the Dragon’s mouth incinerating you. From your sitting position you can see through a glass screen into a room that looks strangely familiar. On either side of you are further skeletons, they have a somewhat glum look on their skulls just as you do. You are dead and have become yet another trophy for the long departed owners of this place.

You incidentally still are playing from here except you are now in the skeleton room, but dead. I do wonder if this has an Acheton-like scenario where dying is required, but it may just be meant here as a bit of worldbuilding as we fall victim to the long departed owners.

Despite the conglomeration of events feeling randomly put together, I still feel like there’s some coherence; not quite the full lore of Zork, but at least enough of a consistent mood I started to feel like I was in a “real environment” rather than just a series of puzzles. I have yet to try seriously solving anything though, so who knows what wonders / terrors / bad comma splices will eventually unfold.

8 days ago

We’re excited to announce that Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove is releasing this Thursday, January 16th!

You can play the first three chapters for free today, and check out the author interview as well!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.

9 days ago

The first moment I was absolutely gleeful in Cornucopia was when I opened a spell-book in the starting area.

>OPEN BOOK
Opening the spell book reveals :- detect magic spell; dispel magic spell; purify water spell; dispel illusion spell; detect illusion spell; levitate self spell; detect evil spell.

This is what you start with! This game is going to take a while. I have the rest of January blocked out.

I recently played Brian Cotton’s game Goblin Towers, which was his second published after Catacombs by Supersoft, and it was quite simple, to the extent it may have been written first. (Read those two posts if you would like the historical background on the Cotton games.) Cornucopia returns to a more complex world, and in fact is allegedly Cotton’s most complicated game, trying to go for a full Zork experience (or I guess Enchanter, except Enchanter wasn’t out yet when this game was released!) Remember, it was clear from Goblin Towers that Cotton was thinking of Zork, not Crowther/Woods or Scott Adams as most other writers were.

There’s reference in Cornucopia to Goblin Towers right at the start, which makes me think it is in the same universe. Before showing off what I mean, I should mention that this game (like Catacombs) was lost until the Classic Quests version for DOS showed up; also just like Catacombs, this game was originally broken and unable to be finished. However, Cornucopia has a fix! If you want to play, use the Fixed Game link here which makes the game completable.

Having commited a heinous crime against the Gods (spitting on the steps of the temple, I think), you are summoned before them. This is an extremely rare occurrence, as most offenders are summarily executed with a lightning bolt! As you cower before the Gods, half blinded by their splendour, they reveal why they have spared you – temporarily. They have a small task for you to perform: ‘Find the Cornucopia and bring it here’ they boom.

While we have a designated collect-the-treasures spot, just like Cotton’s other two games, there’s a secondary objective now of getting a specific Cornucopia for the Gods. I like the “spitting on the steps of the temple, I think” — it’s as if our main character has committed so many crimes against the Gods the narrator isn’t sure which one is considered the heinous one. Either that, or the narrator is like a storyteller making things up on the fly that never entirely filled in that detail.

You are outside a small cottage, a doorway leads into it although there doesn’t seem to be a door. The cottage is surrounded by a forest made up of huge and grotesque growths of fungi, a damp dismal mist shrouds the ground making everything quite indistinct. The outlines of a path leading south can just be made out.

Just like Goblin Towers, we start outside a cottage, and from the cottage there is a forest and a tower. Assuming it is the same forest, it is now a different maze and overgrown with fungus (see how Adventure Quest has the “degenerate forest” following the normal one of the first game).

Going in the cottage:

You are inside a small cottage, little better than a hovel really, the only exit is to the north. There is a huge wooden table in the middle of the room, it appears to be extremely old and is obviously well used. Sitting on the wooden table is :- spell book; rusty sword; battery lamp; small note; green bottle.

A couple subtleties here with how items work: you can examine items, but they won’t always give more descriptions. However, the “lying on the ground” descriptions are a little more complete than the one given in the list here.

A battered battery lamp is here with what appears to be an everlasting battery in it.

The sword has both an ground description (“quite rusty but in a usable condition”) and an EXAMINE description.

This sword is in very poor condition and has obviously been used by a hacker, by the state of the blade, it is rusty and pitted. A sword which is a disgrace to its owner.

The other important detail is that not only does GET ALL work, but it seems to give away every referrable item in the room. That makes it easy to tell what should be zeroed in on in each description (some games try to prevent this, but given the allegedly difficulty here I’ll take any advantage I can get).

>GET ALL
wooden table : The wooden table is beyond your strength to lift.
spell book : Taken.
rusty sword : Taken.
battery lamp : Taken.
small note : Taken.
green bottle : Taken.

The table can incidentally both be looked under and broken, so there’s a fair amount of physical simulation going on. For the last items: The green bottle, cryptically, contains nothing. The small note reads “leave treasure here”. The spellbook has a description of the outside, and must be opened to be read:

>READ BOOK
The spell book is large with thick padded covers. The covers have runic designs around the edges and particularly ornate bits in the corners, the whole is decorated with small gemstones and gold leaf. It must be worth a fortune.

It contains, as I already showed off, spells; here’s the details on each one:

detect magic spell (CAST DETECT MAGIC ON OBJECT, tell you if an item is magic)
dispel magic spell (CAST DISPEL MAGIC ON OBJECT, remove magical abilities of object)
purify water spell (CAST PURIFY WATER, will cleanse nearest body of water)
dispel illusion spell (CAST DISPEL ILLUSION, will remove any illusion close by)
detect illusion spell (CAST DETECT ILLUSION, will inform the player of any illusions close by)
levitate self spell (CAST LEVITATE SELF, rise vertically)
detect evil spell (CAST DETECT EVIL ON OBJECT, determine if an object is “based in evil”)

Now, the big catch here is that the spells disappear when used, at least sometimes. I’m not clear the conditions, for example, using CAST LEVITATE SELF when in the starting hut:

You rise into the air and hover around for a while before slowly dropping back down again, quite good fun in fact.

The spell is now missing from the spellbook. However, there’s a part I’ll show off shortly where levitate self helps solve a puzzle, and the spell remains! Maybe there’s a “if it is useful, you hang on to it” rule? It makes the DETECT ILLUSION spell a bit dicier to use (since the whole point is a binary yes or no, and if you already know yes why not go straight to dispel?) However, I’m early enough in the game I might be misunderstanding what’s going on; it may also be possible to find a way to replenish spells or even add new spells.

In the forest there are two ways to exit (unless some random maze room has an illusion that needs dispelling or whatnot — I haven’t gone through and tested it everywhere yet since saving and loading will be needed). The first is a large fungus just to the south of the cottage:

You find yourself in a strange forest of giant fungus growths, they create an eerie feeling. No particular direction seems to suggest itself to you here. There is a particularly huge specimen here, with what appears a dark opening in it.

>ENTER FUNGUS
As you enter the fungus you get a weird sinking feeling You are in a circular room, above and below you it is dark. You have a weird feeling of falling.

The inside is described as an “Elevator down” in the short room description, and there’s a “sensation of falling” until arriving at a countryside.

>WAIT
Time passes……
You are on the edge of a small brook, which has long since dried up. A path follows along the course of the brook to the east and west. Across on the other side of the brook you can see lush rolling countryside.

>W
You are at what was once the source of the brook but is now just a tangle of broken boulders. The only way out from here is to the east. There is a small slim oblong piece of card here.

>EXAMINE CARD
The card is solid gold with an ebony edging and writing on one side in a bold gothic script which reads ‘Admit one only’. On the other side in almost microscopic letters it says ‘that will do nicely’, the meaning of which seems quite obscure.

There’s a wide open space I have yet to fully explore, so I’ll get back to y’all soon on that. The same is true for the other route out, which involves finding the tower in the forest. You can’t climb due to a lack of “handholds”, but the levitate spell works.

>CAST LEVITATE SELF
You rise up and up and up, the top of the tower seemingly getting no closer. The power of the spell seems to be wavering but still you are rising and just as the spell runs out of steam you find yourself… You are in a small room at the top of a tall tower. In the centre of the room, which is circular, there is a staircase leading down into darkness. The room is lit with the light that comes through a single window. Through this window you have a somewhat dismal view over a large area which is covered with huge fungus growths. This view is only broken by the sight of a somewhat delapidated cottage. Against the wall opposite the window is a large wardrobe, this was apparently at one time used as some sort of a bedroom.

The wardrobe has a Fabergé egg (our first treasure).

Again, the map spreads out quite extensively, and just a clipping to show what I’m dealing with:

I’ll get into the details next time, although let me draw attention to the troll at the bottom of the stair (if you just keep going down the stair after levitating into the tower you’ll find him).

You are at the bottom of spiral staircase which has opened out onto a small landing. It is very dark here and with the state it is in, it has been used as a toilet by some large animal, it smells abominable. To the east is a low tunnel.

>E
You are in part of a trolls lair, all manner of stuff is strewn around, including parts of its previous meals. To the west is a low tunnel and to the south what looks to be a tiny cavern. A huge and hairy troll stands here blocking your way.

>KILL TROLL WITH SWORD
The troll being a rather dull creature just grabs the rusty sword from you and without further ado eats it.

This reminds me quite a bit of the Zork I troll that eats things that you toss at him (although you can wield a weapon without it, too, being eaten). My guess is I need to find some kind of poison or sleep drug and it will do its work.

For now, quite a bit of mapping to do. This feels like the most “dense” game I’ve played for All the Adventures since Dungeon Quest.

10 days ago

Like a lot of boys, I grew up loving trains. And like a lot of men, I retain my fascination for them today.

Once upon a time, I could happily spend hours and hours with my Lionel locomotives. They were, back in that era at least, satisfyingly heavy, made out of the same good solid iron as the full-sized models they imitated; they even smoked the same as the real things when you dropped a bit of “smoke fluid” down the stack. I wiled away many an afternoon driving my trains around and around in circles, learning through trial and error just how fast I could take those corners before disaster struck. But for better or for worse, after I was given a Commodore 64 for Christmas in 1984, model railroading fell by the wayside pretty quickly. (How’s that for a parable of the modern homo digitalis?)

Nevertheless, and much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife, I’m always chomping at the bit to visit any train museum that happens to be within range, whether I’m in Dallas or Nuremberg, Odense or London. I look upon any opportunity to actually ride the rails even more favorably; I love me a vintage tourist railroad, no matter how cheesy. Heck, I still get a little thrill from boarding a train that serves merely as everyday public transportation, something that’s a lot more common here in Europe than it is back in the States. Speaking of which: back in the 1990s, when I was still living in my country of birth, I took a break from my usual backpacker holidays to foreign climes in order to ride the trains of the perpetually underfunded underdog Amtrak all the way from one side of the United States to the other. In marked contrast to most people who have dared such a journey, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Ditto the trip I once took from Vladivostok to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railroad (if and when Russia comes to its senses and stops being a geopolitical Doctor Evil, of course).

Just what is the appeal of trains? I could prattle on here about how they’re a far more environmentally friendly way to travel than planes or cars, but that’s not what causes them to tickle my romantic fancies. The range of feelings that trains evoke in me and in countless others is as rich as it is diverse. Small wonder that they’ve been such a staple of folk and pop music practically since Robert Stephenson’s Rocket first puffed down a track in 1829. The rock and roll of a train became the rhythm of twentieth-century music. A train can carry you away to a better life, or it can carry your baby away to a life without you. A train can be as life-affirming as a heartbeat or as mysterious as a nightmare.

But trains are more than just a set of all-purpose metaphors. They’re also feats of engineering that continue to entrance the little boy in me. The biggest locomotives from the Age of Steam are nothing short of awe-inspiring in their sheer size, artifacts of a lost epoch when high technology meant building on an ever more gigantic rather than an ever more miniaturized scale, when a single piston could be several times the size of a person and a single wheel taller than a willow tree. The newest railroading wonders may not have quite the same nostalgic allure as their coal-fired ancestors, but they too live at the ragged edge of technological feasibility, traveling at more than 300 miles per hour on the magnetic cushions that serve them in lieu of wheels.

Then, too, the historian in me marvels at trains as the wellspring of the modern world. As the first form of fast, efficient mechanized transportation, they produced first-order and knock-on effects that touched every aspect of people’s lives. The very concept of the nation-state as we know it today is largely a tribute to railroads, those steel ties that bind a multiplicity of localities together in a web of travel and trade. The clocks that regulate so much of our lives owe their existence to the emergence of “railroad time,” to which everyone had to learn to synchronize their activities in place of the older, less precise practice of reckoning time by the position of the Sun in the sky. Wide-angle corporate capitalism as we know it today was invented by the great railroad trusts and the oligarchy of so-called “robber barons” who ran them, ruthlessly enough to make Jeff Bezos blush.

Indeed, the facts and figures and lore and legends of railroading are so bottomless that some people get obsessed with the subject almost to the exclusion of all else. Personally, I missed my chance at becoming a hardcore trainspotter as soon as I got my hands on that childhood Commodore 64. That said, the old flame still burns brightly enough that any computer game which focuses on trains is likely to get a little bit of extra attention from me.

I don’t want the game to be too dry or technical; it has to bring the culture of the rails to life, has to make me feel something. Do that, and chances are I’ll be all over your game. Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon is one game that did it, marrying an aesthetic presentation that is executed as perfectly as was possible with the computers of 1990 — the theme song that plays over the opening credits is one of the few pieces of game music I occasionally find myself humming at random while I’m doing something else — with a rich and compelling layer of strategic possibility; for my money, it’s rivaled only by Pirates! for the title of Meier’s very best game, beating out even the storied Civilization. I like Railroad Tycoon’s spiritual successor, Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon, a lot as well, even though its focus on trains is somewhat diluted by all the trucks, planes, and ships it throws in. And on a very different note, Jordan Mechner’s adventure game The Last Express uses the last voyage of the Oriental Express from Paris to Constantinople as a metaphor for the passing away of the entire Belle Époque in Europe during the fateful summer of 1914; I find playing it to be an experience of almost unbearable poignancy, filling me with nostalgia for a lost past of dinner jackets, evening gowns, and refined drawing-room conversation that I never actually knew.

Needless to say, then, I wanted to like Railroad Tycoon II even more than I do the typical game that I play for these histories. That always produces a certain trepidation of its own. I’m therefore thrilled to be able to say that — spoiler alert! — it lived up to the high expectations I had for it, enough so as to become the fourth train game to find a place in my intensely idiosyncratic Hall of Fame.

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The story of Railroad Tycoon II begins with a young Missourian named Phil Steinmeyer, who in 1994 sold to the Los Angeles-based studio and publisher New World Computing a light wargame called Iron Cross that he had designed and programmed all by himself during evenings and weekends. In some ways, Iron Cross was quite forward-looking, doing a lot of what SSI’s Panzer General did to major commercial success that same year: it personalized the experience of war, by having you create a character, CRPG-style, and lead him through a dozen scenarios, with the possibility of promotion or demotion looming at the end of each of them. Sadly, though, it didn’t fully live up to its concept, failing to find the sweet spot between simplicity and interesting choices that Panzer General had nailed, coming off more like a prototype than a finished product. It was not an injustice that Panzer General revitalized its publisher and spawned a long-running series of similar games, while Iron Cross came and went from store shelves in a scant few months.

Still, it was good enough to become Steinmeyer’s entrée to the games industry. Impressed by his enthusiasm, work ethic, and programming talent, New World’s founder Jon Van Canegham asked him to stick around as a regular contractor, working remotely — a rarity at that time — from his Midwestern home. Steinmeyer’s next project for New World was another strategy game with CRPG flavorings, one whose legacy would prove far more enduring than that of Iron Cross: he became the main programmer on Van Canegham’s own Heroes of Might and Magic, which was released in late 1995 to strong sales. He moved even further up in the pecking order with the sequel. On Heroes of Might and Magic II, which was released barely one year after its predecessor, he was credited not only as the lead programmer but as the co-designer, alongside Van Canegham.

Steinmeyer and New World parted ways just after Heroes II was finished, for reasons that are a little obscure. In a 2000 magazine column, Steinmeyer claimed that “my publisher [i.e., New World] was experiencing financial troubles, and abruptly cut relations with all third-party developers, including me.” I’m actually not aware of any serious financial problems at the company around this time, although it had just been acquired by 3DO, which may have led to a change in policy regarding contractors. In later years, there was significant bad blood between Van Canegham and Steinmeyer. I don’t know whether it stemmed from the circumstances of the latter’s departure from New World or from subsequent events. (See my postscript below for more on these matters.)

At any rate, Steinmeyer decided to turn PopTop Software, the little one-man company under whose auspices he had been developing games for New World, into a real studio with real employees and a real office, located in St. Louis, Missouri. For the re-imagined PopTop’s first project, he wanted to create another colorful, accessible strategy game, yet one very different from Heroes of Might and Magic in theme and mechanics. He had decided that, with the capabilities of computers having come such a long way since 1990, the time was ripe to build upon the template of legendary designer Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon, one of his favorite games of all time. He hired a staff of half a dozen or so others — mostly industry neophytes who were willing to work cheap — to chase the dream alongside him.

His timing was propitious: MicroProse Software, the publisher of the original Railroad Tycoon, wasn’t doing very well and was desperate to raise cash. Having moved on to Transport Tycoon, they saw little commercial potential in returning to a railroad-only strategy game. In fact, they had already rejected Bruce Shelley, Sid Meier’s co-designer on Railroad Tycoon, when he came to them inquiring about the possibility of a direct sequel. Steinmeyer was amazed when MicroProse answered his own initial query not by offering to publish the sequel but by offering to sell him the rights to the name outright. Steinmeyer would later call clinching that deal his most “awesome” single moment during the development of the game.

But it did leave PopTop still in need of a publisher. In early 1998, Steinmeyer signed on with an upstart consortium known as Gathering of Developers — or, to use the acronym that they positively reveled in, G.O.D.

G.O.D. could only have come to exist during the late 1990s, a heady time in gaming, when people like John Carmack and John Romero of DOOM and Quake fame were treated as rock stars by their adoring fans. Scatter-bombing rhetoric that smacked more of a political revolution than a business startup, G.O.D. trumpeted their plan to upend the traditional order in gaming and give control and money to the creatives at the studios instead of the suits at the major publishers. The full story of G.O.D., an incongruous cocktail of naked greed and misplaced idealism, will have to wait for another day. For now, suffice to say that G.O.D. never succeeded in becoming the revolutionary collective its founders wanted it to be, not least because the only people willing and able to pony up the seed capital they needed were the folks at Take Two Interactive, one of the very same traditional publishers that they so loudly professed to despise. For PopTop, however, Take Two’s involvement was ultimately all to the good, as it gave them access to a mature international distribution network of which Railroad Tycoon II would take full advantage.

First released in North America in November of 1998, Railroad Tycoon II was later translated into German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese for the European market, and, even more far-sightedly, into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to cover the fast-growing consumer economies of East Asia. Combined with a Mac port, a Linux port(!), and reasonably credible ports to the Sony PlayStation and Sega Dreamcast consoles, all of this outreach delivered worldwide sales that may have exceeded 1.5 million copies.

In light of this, it’s remarkable how under-remembered and under-sung Railroad Tycoon II is today. To be sure, you can still buy a “Platinum edition” of the game at the usual digital storefronts. Yet it keeps a weirdly low profile for a title that at the turn of the millennium was the third most successful “builder”-style game ever, trailing only the perennially popular SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon, a game by Chris Sawyer of Transport Tycoon fame that was released five months after Railroad Tycoon II.

In this reviewer’s opinion, Railroad Tycoon II was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one.

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A comparison of Railroad Tycoon I and II provides a good education in just how much gaming changed during the eight years that separate them. The first game relies heavily on procedural generation to add variety to its handful of maps. There are only a few ways to customize your experience, and no broader framework of progression beyond the “New Game” button.

Railroad Tycoon II, on the other hand, has two 18-scenario campaigns to offer if you include its Second Century expansion pack, plus plenty more singleton hand-crafted scenarios, each with its own historical context, starting and stopping dates, and victory conditions. But if you don’t want to mess with most of that — if you just want to set up a bunch of trains and watch them run — you can do that too by playing in sandbox mode. If, by contrast, you want maximally cut-throat competition, you can play in networked multiplayer mode with some of your mates, engaging in epic business conflicts that can become, as Bob Proctor wrote in his review for Computer Gaming World, “as vicious as any Starcraft game.” In short, Railroad Tycoon II does everything it can to let you turn it into exactly the kind of train game that you most want to play. In my case, that means playing through the campaigns, which I absolutely adore.

The first campaign — the one found in the base game — is divided into thirds: six scenarios taking place in North America, six in Europe, six in the rest of the world. It gives you the sense of living through a huge swath of railroad history, even as it gradually teaches you the ins and outs of what proves to be a deceptively complex game, slowly ramping up the difficulty as it does so. Its scenarios challenge you in a wide variety of different ways, guaranteeing that, by the time you finish all of them, you’ll have engaged with if not completely mastered all of the game’s facets. Some of the scenarios are all about logistics: get a line built from City A to City B before time runs out. Some make you think about your larger role in the economy, by demanding that you adequately service a range of industries. And still others force you to engage with the nitty-gritties of the financial game, by insisting that you acquire a certain corporate or personal net worth by a certain date.

Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market. If you want to win gold on every scenario — the gold, silver, and bronze victory levels are another way the game lets you set your own goals for yourself — you’ll need to learn to wheel and deal as shrewdly as Cornelius Vanderbilt and as heartlessly as Jay Gould. I recall struggling futilely for days with the thirteenth scenario, which expected me not only to connect Delhi, Calcutta, and Kabul between the years 1850 and 1880 but to be the only surviving railroad left on the Indian subcontinent at the end of that time period if I wanted the gold medal. Then one day I figured out that I could pump and then dump all of my starting company’s stock, leaving it as nothing more than a one-station rump on the map, and use my windfall to buy up a controlling interest in the most dangerous of my two rivals. After that bit of skullduggery, it was smooth sailing. Guile never felt so good.

The Second Century campaign is even more audacious and creative, if a bit shakier in its granular implementation. As the name would imply, it focuses on the later period of railroading that gets somewhat short shrift in the original campaign, beginning during the Great Depression and winding up in a surprisingly dystopic middle 21st century, when global warming and nuclear war have led to civilizational regression on a global scale and you’re now forced to work with old-time steam locomotives once again. Whether this sobering vision will prove prescient remains to be seen, but, in the meanwhile, I can’t say enough admiring things about PopTop’s determination to continue bending and twisting their core game in intriguing new directions. Some of the Second Century scenarios are essentially new games unto themselves, like the one where you have to keep Britain connected and functional during the Blitz, or the one where you have to bring up sufficient troops from the eastern hinterlands of the Soviet Union to resist the Nazi invaders pouring in from the west. Sometimes the scenarios play radically with scale, as in the one that wants you to build a subway system to service a city instead of a railroad network to serve a country or a continent.

Even when giving due consideration to the premise that this is a campaign for veterans, most of the Second Century scenarios are really, really hard — a little bit too hard in my opinion. Less subjectively, there’s a general lack of polish to the second campaign in comparison to the first, with more bugs and glitches on display. In too many of these scenarios, your chances of winning gold are heavily dependent on luck, on the economy turning just the way you need it to just when you need it to. All of this would seem to indicate that the second campaign got a lot less testing than the first, such that PopTop may not have even fully realized how difficult it really was. It’s still worth playing if you finish the first campaign and want more, mind you. I just wouldn’t get too stressed about trying to win gold on every single scenario; I had a lot more fun with it once I accepted that silver or even bronze was good enough and stopped save-scumming and putting myself through all manner of other contortions to bring home the gold.

Inside the scenarios, Phil Steinmeyer made an unusual and refreshing choice in strategy-game sequels, electing not to build upon the blueprint of Railroad Tycoon I by heedlessly piling on additional layers of complexity. In some ways, this sequel is actually simpler than the original, despite the gulf of eight years of fairly frenetic technological development in computing that lies between them. There’s generally less emphasis placed on the mechanics of running your railroad. You must still choose between single or double tracks, and must learn when one or the other is more desirable from a cost-benefit standpoint, but you don’t have to futz around with signals. Two trains running in opposite directions on the same piece of track don’t ram into one another; the one just pulls politely over to a siding that magically appears and waits for the other one to pass by. Likewise, your options for manipulating cargoes and consists^[1]In railroad speak, a “consist” — the noun is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, not on the second as in the verb — is the particular collection of wagons that a given locomotive pulls. at stations are reduced. Most strikingly, tunnels don’t exist at all in Railroad Tycoon II; your only option for getting to the other side of a mountain range is to go around it, to go over it — very slowly! — or to try to find a natural pass through it.

Any way you slice it, the absence of tunnels is kind of weird. Otherwise, though, if you haven’t played the first Railroad Tycoon, you’ll probably never notice the things that Railroad Tycoon II is missing. If you have, you will, and you might even be a bit put out — there’s real joy to be found in getting a complicated network of signals functioning like the proverbial smoothly running machine — but you’ll soon get over it. For Railroad Tycoon II makes up for its simplifications in traffic and cargo management with a lot of meaty sophistication in other areas. The stock market and the management and investment of your corporate and personal wealth are, as I already noted, as vital and rewarding as ensuring that your trains run on time. Meanwhile the specificity of the scenarios turns the game into a form of living history that the more generic, semi-randomized maps found in the original are unable to match. The same tool that PopTop used to build all of the campaign scenarios is included with the game, for those who want to roll their own. There was once a thriving community of scenario builders on the Internet. This is no longer the case, but their leavings can still be found and downloaded. Or, if you buy the Platinum edition of Railroad Tycoon II, you’ll find that a curated selection of 40 of the very best fan-made scenarios is already included.

Last but not least, I have to pay due tribute to the masterful aesthetics of Railroad Tycoon II. There are some contrary old grognards out there who will tell you that audiovisuals don’t matter in strategy games. That’s an opinion that I’ve never shared. Whatever else they may be, computer games are a form of mediated entertainment, and good mediation goes a long way toward making our time spent with them enjoyable and memorable.

Railroad Tycoon II is a fine case in point. Even today, it’s a lovely game just to see and hear, with audiovisuals that immerse you deeply in its subject matter. Every control you manipulate is presented onscreen as a mechanical switch, which, when you click on it, clunks with the same satisfying metallic solidity that I appreciated so much in my Lionel trains as a kid. The video clips that play before the campaign scenarios, mostly sourced from old public-domain newsreel footage, have a graininess that only adds to the period flavor. Playing in the background as you watch your trains puff along is an old-timey blues soundtrack recorded on real acoustic instruments, all wailing harmonicas and resonator guitars, fit to accompany Robert Johnson down to the crossroads for his meeting with the Devil. Each scenario in the campaign is introduced by the game’s one and only voice actor, a crusty geezer who likes to use words like “whippersnapper.”

Now, you could say that all of this is best suited to the Age of Steam, that it’s becoming more than a little anachronistic by the time you’re driving sleek, high-speed electric locomotives through the Chunnel, and you’d be absolutely right. But those sentiments must be tempered by the understanding that Railroad Tycoon II was developed on a shoestring by barely half a dozen people. Phil Steinmeyer used a variety of techniques to compensate for the large team of artists he lacked, such as photographing model trains and importing them instead of trying to draw each locomotive from scratch. He also compensated through the technology of the game engine itself. “Railroad Tycoon II had 3D terrain, good shadows and lighting, and, perhaps most importantly, a higher standard resolution (1024 x 768) than any competing game,” he notes. Back in the day, it pulled off the neat trick of looking like it had had a far bigger development budget than was actually the case.

Today, the combination of clean and evocative audiovisuals, progressive design approaches, and a slick and elegant interface all add up a game that subjectively feels like it’s considerably younger than it really is. The few places where it does show its age — like the lack of an undo function when laying track, which forces you to do the save-and-restore dance if you don’t want to waste tons of money tearing out your mislaid lines — only serve to highlight the general rule of modern elegance. You don’t need to be wearing any nostalgia goggles to appreciate this one, folks. Just fire it up and see where it takes you. If the toot of a steam whistle stirs your soul anything like it can still stir mine, you might have found your latest obsession.

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Postscript:
Heroes of Might and Magic II and Railroad Tycoon II: Separated at Birth?

When I first announced that I’d be writing about Railroad Tycoon II, reader eldomtom2 pointed me to some allegations that Greg Fulton, the co-designer of Heroes of Might and Magic III, leveled against Phil Steinmeyer in an online newsletter in 2021. In the course of a somewhat rambling narrative that he admits is rife with hearsay — his association with New World Computing didn’t begin until after Steinmeyer’s had ended — Fulton posits that Steinmeyer kept the Heroes I and II source code he had written for New World and used them as the basis for Railroad Tycoon II. When the first demo of the latter game was released in mid-1998, Fulton discussed with his colleagues how it “felt familiar.” One colleague, he says, then “decompiled the [Railroad Tycoon II] executable and found Heroes II references in the code.” Fulton goes on to say that New World’s corporate parent 3DO sued PopTop and G.O.D. over the alleged code theft:

After some legal wrangling, the judge ordered both NWC and PopTop to produce printouts of the complete source code for HoMM2 and RT2. In the end, it was clear Phil had used the HoMM2 source code to make RT2. In his defense, he asserted [that] JVC [Jon Van Canegham] had told him he could freely use HoMM2’s game engine. JVC found this claim laughable.

Ultimately, Take Two Interactive, who had a stake in Gathering of Developers, asked 3DO what they wanted to make the lawsuit go away. 3DO asked for 1 million USD… and there it ended.

I’m not sure whether we are to read that last sentence as meaning that 3DO was paid the demanded $1 million or not.

What are we to make of this? At first blush, the accusation against Steinmeyer seems improbable. I can hardly think of two strategy games that are more dissimilar than Heroes of Might and Magic II and Railroad Tycoon II. The one is a turn-based game of conquest set in a fantasy world; the other is a real-time game of business set in the world we live in. The one has a whimsical presentation that lands somewhere between fairy tales and Gygax-era Dungeons & Dragons; the other is solidly, stolidly real-world industrial. And yet, surprising as it is, there does appear to be something to the charges.

When you start a new standalone scenario in Railroad Tycoon II, the different difficulty levels are represented by icons of horses running at varying speeds. This is a little strange when you stop to think about it. How are such icons a good representation of difficulty? And what are horses doing in our train game at all? I’ve heard the “iron horse” appellation as often as the next person, but this seems to be taking the analogy way too far.

Well, it turns out that the icons are lifted straight out of Heroes of Might and Magic II, where they’re used, much less counterintuitively, to represent the speed at which your and the other players’ armies move on the screen when taking their turns. I can hazard a guess as to what happened here. Steinmeyer probably used the icons as placeholder art at some point — and then, amidst the pressure of crunch, with a hundred other, seemingly more urgent matters to get to, they just never got changed out.

For what it’s worth, these are the only pieces of obvious Heroes II art that I’ve found in Railroad Tycoon II. Yet the presence of the icons does tell us that Steinmeyer really must have been dipping into his old Heroes II project folder in ways that were not quite legally kosher. Based on this evidence, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that there are some bits and pieces of code as well in Railroad Tycoon II that started out in the Heroes games. Personally, though, I’m willing to cut him some slack here. The code in question was presumably his code to begin with, after all. And, given how drastically different the games in question are and how low-level the code that he reused must therefore be, the repurposing seems likely to have saved him a few days at the most.

So why was Jon Van Canegham — a man once described by Neal Halford, a game designer who worked with him for several years at New World, as “terminally mellow” — so much less inclined to be forgiving? I think there may have been some external factors involved. Greg Fulton remembers Canegham telling him that “Phil Steinmeyer was the main programmer on Heroes 1 and Heroes 2.  He offered up ideas, just like Debbie [Canegham’s wife] did, so I gave him a design credit.  After he left, he told anyone who would listen [that] he was the reason Heroes was a success.”

Again, there’s some truth to these accusations. While he was trying to build a buzz around Railroad Tycoon II in the months before its release, Steinmeyer was indeed happy to call himself “the designer of the first two Heroes of Might and Magic games” — full stop. In one preview, Computer Gaming World rather cryptically described him as the designer who “will forever be remembered as the man who saved Heroes of Might and Magic from self-destruction.” In addition to being manifestly incorrect in its core assertion — absolutely nobody remembers Phil Steinmeyer in those terms today — this sentence would seem to imply that Steinmeyer has been telling his journalist friends tales out of school, ones that perhaps don’t cast the schoolmaster at New World in an overly positive light.

I think we can see where this is going. Angered by these exaggerations and possible imprecations — and by no means entirely unjustifiably — Van Canegham must then have started working to deprecate Steinmeyer’s real contributions to Heroes II, a game on which Van Canegham had once seen fit to give him a full-fledged co-designer credit alongside himself, not the mere “additional design” credit he received for Heroes I. And he must have told the legal department at 3DO about his other grievance as well, the one he might be able to use to bleed his cocky former colleague. It became, in other words, a good old-fashioned pissing match.

I don’t know whether any of this really did result in Steinmeyer’s camp having to pay Van Canegham’s camp money, much less precisely what sum changed hands if it did happen. As always, if you have any additional insight on the subject, feel free to chime in down below in the comments. For my own part, though, I think I’ll stop chasing scandals now and go back to playing Railroad Tycoon II. I still have the last few Second Century scenarios to get through…

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Sources: The book Railroad Tycoon II: The Official Strategy Guide. Computer Gaming World of March 1989, November 1994, February 1997, August 1998, September 1998, December 1998, January 1999, March 1999, August 1999, and October 2001; Next Generation of May 1998.

Online sources include an archive of all 42 “Inside the Sausage Factory” columns that Phil Steinmeyer wrote for Computer Games magazine, the Fanstratics newsletter where Greg Fulton conveys Jon Van Canegham’s accusations of code theft against Steinmeyer, a 1998 CNET GameCenter Q&A with Bruce Shelley, a 2000 Eurogamer interview with PopTop historical consultant and scenario designer Franz Felsl, and an extended 2007 Gamasutra interview with Mike Wilson.

Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com.

12 days ago