Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz

Zork II by Dave Lebling and Marc Blank
Published by Infocom
Release Year: 1981
Version Played: Apple IIe

It might seem weird that I'm doing a review of Zork II before I get around to doing Zork I but I can't really bring myself to play Zork I yet again. I've played it enough. I think I know it backwards and forwards. I know about getting the thief to open the egg and lowering the brass lamp into the well and shutting down the dam so that I can actually type commands in the Echo Room. I know not to get into the inflatable raft with anything sharp or to carry the torch into the mines. It's possible I don't remember some of the solutions but I'm fairly certain they'd come to me as soon as I encountered each puzzle. I'm far less familiar with Zork II even though I played it three to four decades ago. Maybe I'll remember how to do everything in this one too as I encounter each puzzle. But since the only thing I remember is that a wizard hassles you with spells that begin with "F", I figure it'll have a few surprises for me. And if it doesn't, and I grow bored, I'll just delete this post and move on!

Almost the entirety of Zork I takes place in a basement which is why so many of us nerds identified so strongly with it. Zork II continues the trend although it wants to be perceived as somewhat cooler so you begin in a "Barrow." But we all know we're just a little bit deeper in the basement of the white house. I wasn't allowed to keep any of the treasures I looted in the previous game but I did get to keep the brass lantern and the Elvish sword. Maybe a better ending to Zork I is not entering the dark passage after getting all the treasures and instead taking as many as you can carry and getting the fuck out of the Great Underground Empire.

I don't think this game has an official time limit. I think the battery on the lantern acts as an unofficial time/turn limit. So I'll keep it off as much as I can, Grues be damned. I say that but am I really going to take the time to turn the lantern off when I'm in a room with phosphorescent moss when I know I'll just have to turn it on again in a move or two? I know how lazy I am and that part about keeping it off was a huge fucking lie. Also:

The lantern lasts at least 600 moves, minus the few moves where I did remember to turn it off (which wasn't often).

I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to be doing in this sequel since the trophy case doesn't exist. I suppose I'll just have to explore until I figure it out. Being that the subtitle is "The Wizard of Frobozz," and seeing as how he's an irritating piece of shit who constantly casts spells at you that begin with "F" like "Fudgepack" and "Fingerbang," my guess is that I have to defeat him somehow. Hopefully that entails stealing his wand and using it against him to cast "Fondle" and "Fellatio" until he's seduced into submission.

One of the first things I encounter down in the sub-basement.

Finding a unicorn living off roses deep down in a dark basement lit only by barely glowing moss might seem unrealistic even for a fantasy game. But remember: I'm not actually in a basement! I'm in the Great Underground Empire, once ruled by Lord Dimwit Flathead himself! The place may have seen better days but it was once glorious and majestic, exactly the type of place a unicorn would live in a beautiful magic garden.

Coming from a unicorn, "uncouth sort of vagabond" is a compliment. It translates to "I can tell you've totally been laid, dude."

So getting the tiny gold key from the unicorn is the first puzzle I've encountered. And, surprising myself, I don't remember how to get it. That's a good sign! But it's a bad sign for the unicorn because I have a history of murdering unicorns thanks to Oblivion. The Non-Certified Spouse was appalled back when I played Oblivion and murdered the last unicorn in the land. Trying to guilt me, she then began to play the song from the movie, The Last Unicorn, which absolutely backfired because pretty soon she was weeping. It was funny and tragic.

A gazebo stands nearby full of a bunch of inventory items to get the adventure started. One of these items is a place mat and I know immediately how I'm going to use that. So my memory still retains a certain amount of spoilers for this game.

Past the garden is the Carousel Room because Marc and Dave and whoever else was responsible for this game back in the mainframe days are gigantic jerks who simply want to waste my time. Eight exits in various directions lead away from this room. But because the room spins, you never know which way you're going to go. So now whenever I think I have an item to deal with some puzzle elsewhere in the Great Underground Sub-basement, I have to waste my time constantly trying exits until I randomly end up in the proper place. I've got a Frobozznian spell for those asshats: "Fuck you."

Randomly wandering around until I can solve more puzzles, I run into the next NPC: a Frobozz Magic Robot! He comes with instructions that tell me to say, "Robot, Do Something!" and he'll do the something! Awesome!

Bogus.

The robot does help me push some electrified buttons and demolish a cage that traps me in the next room. But who's going to help me with this boner? The unicorn? It thinks I'm a disgusting slut! I heard there's a horny dragon around here somewhere so time to explore some more.

While wandering around, I discover the Bank of Zork and immediately feel like quitting. Isn't the bank one of the hardest puzzles to figure out in Infocom history? Am I remembering that wrong?! I suppose I'll ignore it for now. I think there's a baseball diamond maze around here somewhere. Much easier to solve for a moronic American. I hear you foreigners muttering, "That's redundant," and don't think I didn't think it also as soon as I typed it!

You cannot pet the dog in Zork II.


No wait. You can pet the dog in Zork II!

After exploring all that I can after solving every puzzle I know I can solve, I realize I probably need to do the Bank of Zork. It turns out, it's not that difficult. The problem is you only emerge from the bank with a stack of Zorkmid bills and a portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead which don't open the game up any further. They're just treasures which I don't know what to do with since I don't have a trophy case to stick them in. Some text adventures have this kind of bottleneck which really drags the game out for a bit. It's because you're presented with a handful of puzzles to solve but you can only actually solve one of them before you can start solving the others. The problem is figuring out which one. Here's what I had to work with: getting the key from the unicorn, unlocking a door with a lizard's head (which probably needed the key from the unicorn, so at least I knew the order of those two puzzle dominoes), getting past Cerberus, getting past the dragon, moving a large stone block, and possibly getting past a glacier.

I was stuck for the longest time at this point, maybe a few days (I think the game took about a week, playing a few hours here and there but thinking about it often). The problem was that as a kid, I had read the Infocom What-Do-I-Do-Now books (ugh. What a tortured Choose Your Own Adventure synonym!) and remembered the dragon puzzle from that book.

I don't remember which one of these it was in.

In the book, you lure the dragon to the ice wall, it sees another dragon reflected in the ice, blasts the ice with its fire breath, and drowns when the ice melts. For some reason, I remembered, incorrectly, that that solution wasn't the same as the solution in Zork II. So I didn't try it for the longest time. Instead giving the dragon gifts and hoping he'd eventually get enough treasure to let me by. He never did. So finally, I flashed the boner left over from the cocktease robot and was all, "Dragon, follow me."

"Curiosity and anger." The reaction from every woman I've ever dated.

Luring the dragon to the ice wall, he accidentally kills himself. I hardly even consider the waste of so many years of wisdom and knowledge simply because I wanted to get into the dragon's lair and steal his shit for a few points. Who's the real monster?

With the glacier melted and the dragon no longer blocking one of the directions I couldn't go, the entire game just opened up and it was practically no time at all that I had 400 points in 600 moves (as seen in the image somewhere previous). The dragon was keeping a princess locked in his lair so I just followed her to the gazebo where the unicorn was all, "OMG! A virgin! Ride me, baby!" That gave me the key which got me past the locked door with the lizard head on it which led into the Wizard of Frobozz's lair. It was there that I performed a sacred ritual using the red, blue, and clear spheres I had found (one of them in the aquarium in the wizard's lair) and summoned a demon.

Only one thing I can think to wish for!


So he's saying it's a possibility?!

So I load him up with treasure, get the Grue Repellent to use as lube, and ask him again.

Dammit!

I just realized I never asked the princess if she'd fuck me. I guess I knew the unicorn would call her an uncouth sort of vagabond and not give me the key if we did it so I didn't try. Also she might have killed me at the suggestion.

The first time I got this far into the game, I simply asked the demon to kill the wizard and he did. This gave me the wand which let me lift the stone to find the collar to get by the dog to find the end. But this time, I tried a different tack.

Ooh! I wonder if I can follow the wizard around and torment him now!

I never do find the wizard again. Killing the wizard or letting him live doesn't change the ending in any way. That's a shame. I wish you'd gain an extra point or two for sparing the wizard.

The adventure ends on the landing of a long staircase leading down in the sub-sub-basement of the white house. That will be explored in Zork III which I don't remember at all. But I look forward to easily beating the snot out of it!

SCORES

Game Title: Derivative! But I guess that makes sense because Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III were all just various parts of the original mainframe game. I think. If you want the actual history about these games, go read the Digital Antiquarian! The subtitle was spot on though because there was a Wizard and I guess he was from Frobozz which, I suppose, means he's a sorcerer whose power is limited to spells that begin with "F". Pretty lame when you get right down to it. Luckily he never tried to Fist me.

Puzzles: Infocom was known for its logical puzzles which always made sense and were often, although not always, hinted at in some way or another. I'm an American so I won't complain about the maze that was meant to be a simulation of running the bases of a baseball field. So easy to figure out! The simplest maze ever! I have a feeling getting the dragon to kill himself and the bank puzzle were the hardest puzzles in the game. Most of the other puzzles basically solved themselves when you finally found the combination of the correct item and where to use it. Perhaps realizing the moldable clay was plastique may have been a bit of an intuitive leap as well although if you play as an arsonist and try to burn everything you come across, you'll learn pretty quickly that it's an explosive. It's hard to say how many of the puzzles in this game my subconscious helped me to solve because I certainly didn't remember a lot of them. Like getting the clear sphere out of the aquarium or getting the red sphere out of the trapped room or getting rid of the pool of tears. Most of those were pretty simple though because they basically relied on items local to the area of the puzzle (or the sword which you should always have on you because this is Zork!).

Gameplay: It could have used more kissing.

Graphics: Not a single graphic. Even the cover art was basically just the cover art for the first Zork. Infocom won't have graphics until Zork Zero comes along. And it won't have terrible movie files Return to Zork!

Concept: Same old Zork concept: find all the treasures and put them somewhere. In the first one, you found them and shoved them in a trophy cabinet. In this one, you find them and shove them up a demon's ass. But at least in this one, you're using the treasures so it doesn't feel like you abandoned them at the end of the adventure. It's too bad the only real choice in this game that matters is to have the demon kill the wizard or let the wizard live as you simply take his wand. I wish it made some kind of difference to the end game. It was nice to have an actual antagonist throughout the game although I don't know why he was my antagonist. Was this just some kind of turf war? What was he protecting? Was he like one of the old white men in a Scooby Doo cartoon simply trying to scare me off?

Fun Time: Guess who didn't keep track of his time playing again? This guy with two thumbs! I think I put in a little time every day for about a week. Some sessions could go for an hour or more as I set to work mapping the entire place. Sometimes I'd pop in for just a few minutes as I tried a few things which didn't work and quit to let the puzzles percolate in my stupid head. I'd say every minute playing the game was actually pretty fun. I really enjoyed exploring this one. The map seemed to open up just enough every time I felt maybe I was stuck, allowing me to slowly make progress. I only felt really stuck the one time with the dragon which was stupid because I knew the answer all along and just had convinced myself that it wasn't the actual answer. It's probably a good thing that I'd read those Zork books though because I'm not sure I would have gotten the dragon to follow me, especially because the dragon responds to you in a weird way, making it seem like maybe he won't follow you. And if you do anything else after asking him to follow you that isn't moving in a compass direction, he won't follow you.

The Map!

Starcross

Starcross by Dave Lebling
Published by Infocom
Release Year: 1982
Version Played: Apple IIe

How do people manage to do everything they want to do each day, especially when they've got a job that takes up at least forty hours of that time? I barely work fifteen hours per week (because I own my own business and I'm really bad at it but I make enough to be comfortable (at least I did until corporations began running this whole "It's actually inflation and not price gouging!" scam they've been perfecting since the Reagan era)) and I never seem to move forward on any of my projects. Granted, I also own a cat that expects almost more attention than your average dog. She's sitting by the computer right now just side-eyeing me with ears on the verge of airplaning, just to make sure I know she's annoyed that I'm not paying her any attention. Also, I tend to have too many projects and they bottle neck which causes choice paralysis and then I wind up watching fifteen hours of Twitch. Although too many projects vying for my time wasn't really the problem with my Text Adventures Daily blog. The real problem was beginning Starcross and immediately realizing I didn't fancy it. And the only reasonable reaction to something like that is to never play another text adventure game for two solid years. I can't think of any other choices!

My main issue with Starcross is that it begins with you, the main character, being awoken from a nice restful hibernation by a "strident" alarm which won't shut up until you can figure out how to manipulate the ship's computer. Some of you might already be shooting holes in that barely acceptable reason for quitting a text adventure by pointing out that the game is, you know, a text adventure. How annoying can an alarm be in a text adventure? Oh, I don't know. Shall we test it out?

Oh hey! There's an alarm ringing. Let's wake up and shut that off so we can get on with our day digging up black holes!

Having been awoken while in a nice comfortable bunk, I decide to get out of the bunk so I can turn off the alarm.

Yeah, yeah! I'm coming!

Once out of my bunk, I take a quick look around my living quarters for the computer but find only an empty bureau.

Fuck. Where the hell is the computer?!

How do I get out of this room? Where are the exits?

Oh, ha ha. Still going. I didn't know teeth could grit this grittily.

Oh, of course. I'm on a ship. I go STARBOARD to wind up on the bridge.

I swear to God I will crash this ship directly into the nearest black hole if that fucking alarm doesn't stop ringing stridently!

The mass detector happens to be on the bridge and it has two large buttons, one red and one blue. So without any clue as to how to operate anything on the ship but annoyed as all fuck at the alarm, I hit the red button hoping that it begins the self-destruct sequence. Unluckily, it doesn't. Luckily, it turns off the alarm. Great! Now I can hear myself think as I try to figure out how to steer my ship to the large mass that set off the alarm on the Large Mass Detectortron!

The Feelie that comes with Starcross is the Large Mass Detectortron output which spits out of the Large Mass Detectortron when you hit the blue button. This shows the location of all the single large masses in your local area. The screen on the Large Mass Detectortron tells you which Large Mass has set off the alarm. In my case, it was Large Mass UM91. So now all I have to do, I suppose, is insert the coordinates into the computer. Luckily, the way to do this is explicitly stated on Infocom's Starcross Large Mass Detectortron Output Map that comes with the game. Unluckily, the computer tells me there's nothing at those coordinates and maybe I should input a new course. But I, being the captain and a human and not an unthinking electronic device no better than a handheld football game, tell the computer to shut up. When me and the ship arrive at an empty spot in space, the computer decides to never speak with me again and the game ends. I guess I just die out in the cold of space begging my computer to take me to an inhabited planet? How awful!

Pardon me. I just have to get this out of my system: "I like large masses and I cannot lie." Thank you for your time.

I start over, get a new location for the Large Mass (UM12) and get the coordinates right this time. I really couldn't read the Phi on the Computer Game Museum website's scan of the Starcross map the first time. But this time I successfully navigate to the Large Mass and now I'm further in the story than I've been in two years! Not that I played it more than the one time where I spent zero time examining the Feelie and refused to wear my space seat belt. It was a horrible death.

The game takes over for a bit as you just sit there in the cockpit waiting for the safest moment to unfasten your seat belt. If you do it too early, thinking maybe you can explore the rest of your ship as you're traveling, you'll eventually be splattered all over the inside walls of your ship as the Large Mass you're investigating turns out to be a phallic space station. I wasn't as disappointed as you might think. The Large Rod grapples your ship, and hauls you into it at astounding speeds. "Buy a fella dinner first," I quip to the computer. The computer responds, "I don't know the word 'buy'." Why have I put my life in this thing's hands?

If you're keeping track, staying safely belted into the ship for the appropriate amount of time is the third puzzle you must solve. It's not much of a puzzle but then neither was the first puzzle, turning off the alarm. Or the second puzzle either, reading the Feelies to figure out how to guide the ship to the main plot. But the fourth puzzle? Ah, the fourth puzzle! I, um, don't know what to think of it. I solved it but I'm not sure how?

Once on the "Unidentified Rotating Phallus," I can explore exactly one location: just outside the airlock door. The door has some kind of puzzle on it where I need to push one of ten bumps of various sizes. Being that this was before Pluto was declared "Not a Planet," and also because I'm so fucking smart, my guess is it's an abstract of the solar system. By pressing the fourth bump, the airlock opens and a black rod pops out which you can take but should probably discard it as soon as possible because it's a cursed rod whose only purpose is to end your game some 300 moves later (if you're dumb enough to use it (I know this because I'm dumb)). The black rod does not have a black star on the end and doesn't respond to a special magic word. I think, though I'm not sure, that you press the fourth lump because you've found the object around Mars. But now that I say that, Mars would be the fifth bump since the first bump is obviously the sun, being the largest bump. Fuck if I know. Whatever. I stumbled on pressing the correct bump on the third try. Infocom should not be proud of this puzzle. One thing about Infocom is that their puzzles are consistently understandable, if not while trying to solve it, at least afterward!

That last statement probably doesn't say what I wanted it to say. If Infocom's puzzles are always understandable, and I don't understand this puzzle, I must be a fucking idiot. Dammit.

I don't know how I've solved as many Infocom games as I have.

I decided to sit down and completely map the game before I began blogging about it and, in so doing, I'm one problem away from either winning or some kind of endgame. Hopefully I'll realize what I need to do as I recap the story. I sure hope it doesn't have anything to do with the weasels hunting unicorns because I don't want any part of killing unicorns.

What the fuck is going on in this ship?

Apparently this ship has a long history of catching space travelers and making them do chores aboard the ship. So far, none of the aliens have agreed to do them. They've just begun their own civilizations or refused to make webs onboard or died in a fiery crash upon landing. I'm the only one dumb enough to fall for this whole "solve the fun puzzles!" schtick. By the end of the game, it's hinted that by solving the puzzles, the aliens will reward Earth with loads of advanced knowledge. But I think they're just trying to find a species that will do free labor for useless points and an even more useless title.

Once on board the mystery ship, I soon discover another reason why I quit playing this game two years ago even if I didn't know about it then: a time limit. You have only about 250 moves before the oxygen runs out on the ship and you suffocate. As I mapped the ship and discovered more and more puzzles that I'd have to do within that limit, and realized how many times I'd have to go back and forth, and how many turns I'd lose to following other characters around, my mind began to break down. I'm pretty sure some of my brain dribbled out of my nose. This "game" was winding up more stressful than Border Zone! Of course it didn't take long to realize the turn limit goes away once you solve one particular problem. Although is it possible to beat the game without fixing the oxygen system?! Do I dare plan a speed run route?!

I spent the time mapping identifying and planning the problems that needed to be solved first. Little did I know, once you insert your red rod into the red slot and spray oxygen all over the ship, you have plenty of time to do the puzzles in practically any order. I said practically!

Getting the lights on was Priority #1. Unless mapping was Priority #1. Unless turning off the alarm was Priority #1.

Some games overwhelm you with locations and items as a way to complicate the puzzles. Other games limit the places you can go until you solve a puzzle or two while offering more puzzles than you can solve with the items you can initially find. Starcross appears to be the latter. The obstacles in my way of mapping were the dark rooms and the obligatory dreaded maze. I didn't want to deal with the maze yet, so it was off to find a light switch.

That yellow slot with a diagram emitting rays looks like an alien light switch! The red slots with diagrams looks like math. Or chemistry. Blech!

I headed off to search for something to stick in the yellow slot other than my penis (which turned something on but it wasn't the lights). Some rat-ants had built a home in the ship's zoo (why does the ship have a zoo? Probably to explain how an alien ship could have Grues, having escaped from the zoo, now living in its dark places). They had a red rod incorporated into their nest which seemed like a good candidate for sticking in one of the three red slots in the Repair Room. This was one of the puzzles that took me the longest to solve but I eventually used an old tried and true Infocom trick: when stuck, look in the manual at the verb list they offer. I hit upon "throw" and threw my space suit at their nest, destroying it. They weren't pissed off enough to kill me but they were angry enough to move to another corner of the room, leaving the red rod for me to snap up.

The yellow rod was being held by an overly friendly alien yet mammalian spider. He wanted to talk to me about everything and anything he could think of. But I didn't want to talk to him because he was gross. So I gave him the set of informational tapes from my ship I just happened to be carrying around with me like nobody would ever do unless they were playing a text adventure game. He loved them and he stopped bothering me after receiving them!

Little did he know, if I hadn't come along, he was only going to need to be sane for another 200 moves.

Before the lights were on, I could only visit the ship's Red Hall, Blue Hall, and Green Hall, with various rooms branching off from these halls and an alien civilization living in the Green Hall. Once the lights were on, I could also explore the Yellow Hall. Based on the layout of the halls, I knew each hall had an airlock to the docked ships I saw on my approach. My ship, the Starcross, was docked off the Red Hall. The spider's ship was docked off the Blue Hall. Based on my map, I could tell the Green Dock was going to be past the warrens where the weasel-like aliens lived. In other words, the maze. So I decided to explore the Yellow Dock which had been covered in debris on my approach.

Tangled in the debris on the Yellow Dock was a dead reptilian alien with a pink rod in his hand. No, I did not immediately think it was his penis.

Um, this was an attempt to solve a different puzzle!

Also in the Yellow Hall was the Laboratory. Inside the lab were a pair of manhole-sized disks (one red, one blue) and a blue rod embedded in a strange silver globe. This blue rod, in conjunction with a later part of the game, was the problem I couldn't solve. I could get the blue rod but it would make the last part of the game impossible. But while at work earlier, I believe I've figured out how to get around that problem. I haven't tested it yet but remember how I mentioned Infocom's puzzles always made sense and were satisfying once you saw how they were solved? Well, my solution I came up with makes so much sense that I'm not even bothered with trying it out. I'll just win the game when I get there! I know I will!

Infocom (and most older text adventures created before Graham Nelson descended from Nerd Heaven and proclaimed, "Death shall not be a requirement to solve a text adventure!") loved making puzzles that really couldn't be solved the first time through. You often had to experience failure to understand the puzzle you were facing. That's the case in Starcross with the ray gun you find lying around somewhere in the already lit area. When you fire it, it seems to misfire with a weird explosion a few feet in front of you. The second shot works just fine. But then that's it for shots and you seemingly need at least four shots to beat the game (one of those in the lab which is why I'm bringing it up now!). So I wondered, "Can the gun be recharged? Maybe if I stuck the black rod I found earlier into it?" So after the gun was out of charges, I tried loading it with the black rod.

Wait, what? Seriously?!

This didn't actually charge the ray gun so I thought, "What if I shove the black rod into the gun before I fire it?" And so, I reloaded and tried that.

Well I do declare! (My space farer was Southern.)

Shaking the gun, I could hear something rattling inside. Looking in the barrel, I could tell something was there. Simply looking in the ray gun revealed a silver rod! That was why the gun was misfiring! Oh, Infocom! You're so much more clever than I am! I had to stupidly try to jam another rod down the barrel of the gun to realize something was in the gun rather than realize the misfire probably meant something was jammed into the barrel. But then, I'm not a Looney Tunes character so what do I know about sticking things in the barrels of guns?

Once the silver rod was removed from the ray gun, I actually got three shots with the charge. Still one shot short of being able to complete the game and the problem I was having before I went to work last night. Before I thought of the solution to the problem I haven't mentioned yet, I could either get the blue rod or get to the end game. But, obviously, you needed to do both. I'll get to that soon enough! For now, I need to get the blue rod!

Expanding the silver globe by setting the dial on the machine allows you to shoot the globe without harming the blue rod embedded in it. The globe disappears for a moment before the machine reforms it. But during that moment, the blue rod drops safely to the ground. Just a few more rods to go: gold, green, brown, clear, and violet.

First the gold rod because it's basically free. Just off the Green Hall, there's a computer room with an access panel loaded with cards. One slot is empty. Just stick a card in the slot and the ship's computer is back up and running. Back in the Repair Room, I found a metallic and ceramic square. This is the card that needs to go in the slot. I'm not sure I would have made that connection except that I accidentally stuck it in the slot one game because I'm terrible at these games. And even though I didn't think I had a card, I typed, "Put card in slot," and the game was all, "Sure thing! Boom! Right in! Good job! Here's a gold rod!" So then I had to wrack my brain trying to figure out where I had found a card! Really, that wasn't easy. It took awhile before I remembered the metallic and ceramic square. Seriously. I don't know how I've beaten so many Infocom games!

The next rod was the green rod. To get that one, I needed help from the ship's Roomba.

The garbage collector probably looks like a mouse so a player might think the way to get the red rod is to lure the mouse to the rat-ant nest where the guard will be distracted while fucking the mouse. But that, um, probably didn't work.

Did I mention the blue and red disks were teleport pads? That was easy to figure out because what else would they be?! Once I sussed out their purpose, I figured there would be two possible puzzles using the disks: to get to a location that I couldn't normally get to or to get an item to a location you couldn't normally get it. Turns out both of those puzzles are used plus one more: to get out of a place that you can't get out of in the regular way without dying. So three uses for the things! Of course, you lose one of the disks after the puzzle where you use them to escape the situation where you'll die otherwise. So that becomes a puzzle in itself if you forget about the disks, or think you don't need them anymore. But that's part of the puzzle I couldn't figure out earlier! First, the green rod!

If you follow the mouse around for a bit, you'll discover it takes any items it's carrying through a small hole in the wall which you can't fit inside. Aha, I thought, I have to shrink myself! But I couldn't find a way to do that so I remembered the thing I thought when I found the teleport pads. I just needed to get one of the pads through the mousehole and I could teleport inside. So I just dropped a disk and let the mouse take it. The first time I did this, I let the mouse take it and then just left it so that when I teleported out of that life and death situation I keep being vague about, I would just go right into the mouse's lair. But now I realized maybe I need the escape disk in a completely different location later. So I'll deal with the mouse in one fell swoop.

Inside the mouse's lair is a trash bin. Inside the trash bin is the green rod. Also inside the mouse's lair is a secret door which lets you back into the main part of the ship with both teleport pads. But it's one way so don't think you're going to cheekily find it when you have to restart and try again. Also don't think about how large the teleport pads are (manhole-sized) and how the mouse can get them through the door and how you can't fit through the door. Mostly don't think about that because the size of the door wasn't actually the problem; I just couldn't open it. Maybe if I'd ripped off the mouse's head, I could have operated the door! Seems like the kind of solution my space farer would have come up with, seeing as how I didn't mind destroying nests and desecrating holy places (we'll get to that!).

After this, it was time to attempt the maze. But first, I needed to set up the solution to the puzzle I couldn't solve earlier! The Repair Room is on a different level than the colored halls. It is in the center of the spinning tubular satellite I was on. The interior of the tube looked like a national park, maybe to go along with the zoo theme. At either end of the tube-like room are two glass domes. Because they are at the exact center of the spinning satellite in space, there is no gravity between them. At one end, I could climb up a large tree to reach the dome and the area of no gravity. To get to the other dome, I had to propel myself while floating weightless between the domes. To do that, I could shoot the ray gun three times. But after getting the blue rod, I only have two shots left. To move the final distance, I thought maybe I needed to throw something heavy. The only thing I thought was heavy enough was my space suit. But I can't climb the tree with the space suit. "A-ha! I bet this was the second puzzle which can be solved using the teleport pads!" I thought presumptuously. The problem with that is that I needed the pads to escape from the area past the maze. And that's where I hit on the solution! If I set up one of the pads inside the dome at the top of the tree, I'll teleport out of the maze with my space suit and have it ready to propel me across the gap! Well, not my space suit. The tattered space suit. But, um, we'll get to that! First let's see if I can set the pad up in the dome. I haven't tried this yet! If it doesn't work, I'll probably quit and never play another Infocom game in my life!

Fuck it. I didn't want to play anymore Infocom games anyway.

See how the disk is floating? Yeah, I forgot about the whole no gravity thing in the dome. And the disk only works when it's securely placed on a flat surface. So that's not going to work. Oh well, how about I just get as far as I can and then see what happens?

I've got just two more locations to explore before nearing the end game: the maze and the observatory. I'll leave one of my teleport disks in the observatory and then head on over to deal with the maze and the weasel aliens.

He obviously wants my space suit.

I don't really need the space suit anymore (I don't think?) but I do need the brown rod. So I point at it to make clear that we're trading. He seems to understand and then I give him the suit. He takes off his tattered suit, leaving it for me to scrounge, puts on my suit, and then tries to pretend he doesn't have a brown rod. Fucking piece of shit. I have a ray gun but I don't kill him. I just point at the brown rod again and he honorably gives it up. But I'll remember this betrayal! I'll get even for this slight by destroying his most sacred thing! After reluctantly giving me the brown rod, the chief pouts away into the maze.

About that maze! I tried to map it earlier but Infocom, realizing early on how people learned to map mazes, began coming up with new tricks every game to keep the mazes difficult. In this one, I found I couldn't drop any objects to mark each location because the young weasels steal the stuff I left lying about. Or their parents take it from them and give it back to me. At first, I thought maybe I'd let them steal one of the teleport disks. But once I did that, I couldn't put down the other disk to stand on it because the little buggers steal that one too. So I tried to brute force it by moving in every combination. First every direction in the first room. Then every direction in the room to the north. Then every direction in the room to the north of the north room. At one point, I wound up outside the maze. But I wasn't paying attention. So I tried again and noticed I wound up outside the maze simply by moving from the first room. But that had never happened before. So I experimented a little more and realized the maze was almost certainly one room with a small chance of exiting the maze every time you chose a direction. This is proven if you deal with the chief just inside the maze because he'll drop the tattered suit and no children will take it. Then every direction you go, you'll be In the Warrens with a tattered suit.

Realizing the maze was just a big illusion, I figured the only way through was to follow an alien. You can't follow the children because they just stand there staring at you. But you can follow the chief after he pouts and flounces off with your suit. So that's what I did. For a whole bunch of moves. But it finally pays off when you wind up in the center of the warren!

Is he trying to seduce me?

The chief lives just above the Green Airlock. He seems to want me to visit so I head down to the Green Dock where there's another ship. The cargo hold of this ship is full of worthless offerings, dead flowers, and decaying fruit. Just past the cargo hold, on the bridge, is a shrine to the dead pilot of the ship, still seated on his control couch. By touching the skeleton of the pilot, his arm falls from the arm rest and he drops a violet rod. I take the violet rod but cannot fix the position the corpse was in when I found it because if I touch it again, it will crumble and I'll be immediately killed as a blasphemous heretic. And if I leave the ship and head back to the Chief's room, he'll know I messed with his shrine and kill me. The only way out is to teleport. So I drop my disk and disappear. But I'll never get that disk back. I hope I don't need to teleport anymore!

I wind up in the observatory where I'd left the other disk. I hadn't mentioned this place because I couldn't do anything here until I got a broken black visor from the cargo hold of the shrine I just looted. I feel like Indiana Jones, the super cool imperialist thief of other people's relics! Inside the observatory is a blinding light coming out of a projector. If I look into the projector, I go blind and wind up getting eaten by Grues. Not because me being blind equates everything becoming darkness where Grues live but because me being blind means stumbling into a dark corner of the ship where the Grues are hiding. I don't know where that dark corner is now that I turned on the lights. Probably under a table somewhere. Anyway, with the visor, I can look into the projector to get the last rod.

The clue there was something in the projector was that the color of the planets it was projecting were all off. But the real clue was the projector was something in the game that I could fiddle with.

I now had 325 points out of 400 and all the rods. I think. The only puzzle left is figuring out how to float from the drive bubble to the control bubble. Hopefully I have everything I need and just haven't quite figured it out yet. Otherwise, I guess I'll shamefully be looking up the Invisiclues for this one.

I eventually manage to get the suit up the tree by putting it on the teleport pad which is a total cheat of the system and something the playtesters should have noticed. My thinking is that it's bulky enough to propel me 1/3 of the way to the control bubble by throwing it. But it is not. I am at a loss. I am stuck. The game has beaten me!

Knowing that you can get across with three blasts of the ray gun, my guess is that there's another way to get the blue rod. But I tried getting help from the Garbage Mouse. I tried getting help from the spider. I tried using the teleport pads under the silver globe but only managed to kill myself in a terrible teleportation accident. I tried putting things on the globe. The only other thing I haven't dealt with in the game are the unicorns in a grassy field and the weasel hunters hunting them. Is that something? I don't know. But I've exhausted the limits of my mind. I'm disappointed but it looks like Starcross has beaten me. Time to check out the Invisiclues.

After reading the clues and discovering exactly how to get the blue rod without using a shot from the gun, I don't feel too bad. I almost had it but didn't put it all together. You have to put the disk under the globe and put something on the globe before setting the dial to 4. I had done both of those things but never together. I may have even done that once but while holding the other pad instead of putting on the ground where it needs to be to work. As I've pointed out several times, I don't know how I ever solved an Infocom game!

Luckily I had a save state where I'd done everything except get the blue rod. Because I figured there was a way to do it without using all three shots. It might seem a problem that I only have one teleport disk but that's easy enough to get around. I just slide the disk under the globe, put the gun on the globe, set the dial to 4 so that the gun falls on the teleport pad and teleports itself and the blue rod to the blue disk in the weasel shrine. Then I grab the red disk, stand on it, and get all my loot while on the weasel ship. Then I teleport back and I'm ready for the end game, a little bit sad because I had to get a fucking hint.

Does the amount you hate yourself ever fill up like an overflowing bucket? The older you get, shouldn't you despise yourself more and more for every time you've disappointed yourself? Or will I eventually forget that I failed miserably at solving Starcross completely? I guess that's what will happen because I barely remember that I also needed exactly one hint to solve Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels.

Carrying all my rods, I climb to the drive bubble, use the silver rod to open it, and enter. There's a white rod and white slot here so that basically takes care of itself. After that, I leap from atop the drive bubble so that I'm floating over the forest. I fire my gun at the drive bubble three times to wind up on top of the control bubble. Climbing down, there's a gold slot for my gold rod. Now all that's left is entering the control bubble and shoving all of my various rods into a bunch of holes.

Wait a second. Did these ancient aliens just trick me into having sex with their ship?

Inserting the rods bring up the controls for the ship. Once I figure them out, I set course for Earth and promptly use it as a slingshot to fire myself into deep space. So I restored the game and set the course correctly, ending in an orbit around Earth rather than slingshotting around it (one option has you set course for the center of Earth. I should try that one next!) and I succeed! Now instead of Indiana Jones, I'm like Han Solo! It only took me two tries to correctly pilot this hunk of junk!

Oh no! I'm never leaving Earth again! You can personally meet some other human chump.

The game ends as if I just brought tons of knowledge to the human race. But what I actually brought them was a ship loaded with weasel-men, rat-ants, and a super curious spider man. Oh, and the weasels and ants are fucking pissed at me. Hopefully all the Grues were killed when I turned on the emergency lighting system, leaving them no dark rooms to hide in. Or maybe this is how Grues got to Earth! Is that the big twist? This is a prequel to Zork and I was the jerk that brought Grues to our world?! What a catastrophe!

SCORES

Game Title: The title confused me. I thought this was going to be a space romance about star-crossed lovers. Instead it was about a lonely miner with so little going on that he doesn't mind picking up after some ancient aliens who were so careless about their colored rods. The ship's name was Starcross so the title makes sense in that regard. But why was that the name of the ship? It's not like mankind currently has the capability to cross to other stars. That's the information the ancient aliens are going to give them. Also, why am I mining for black holes in the Sol System? Maybe my ship can travel between stars in the Milky Way. I don't really remember all the background stuff.

Puzzles: The puzzles were all really fair (maybe not by today's text adventure standards. But back in the '80s, we understood that death was often crucial to solving certain puzzles. And everybody except Graham Nelson didn't actually mind). This was labeled as an Expert Infocom game but I don't think any of the puzzles were spectacularly hard or unfair. The way to get the blue rod correctly so that you can win the game may be the only really "Expert" puzzle I can think of. Pretty much all the other solutions to puzzles are hinted at in the text or via your actions. They aren't always the best hints, like the colors of the projected planets being off or the gun's misfire. But they absolutely make sense after the fact, and I could see truly expert Infocom players grasping their meanings. I'm not sure that I cared for the way the adventurer, me, needed to solve some of the problems but then I never actually hurt anybody. Hell, I saved them all by fixing the oxygen system and the computer! And I murdered all the Grues. Oh yeah. So I did hurt some creatures. And if you don't feel bad about killing Grues, you probably haven't played Wishbringer.

Gameplay: Have you played an Infocom game before? It's like that. But with less explanation of where the exits are. Which is fine because you're in a huge tube with four long hallways. If you didn't try to go in every direction once you realized directions weren't consistently noted, that's on you. You're supposed to map these things, you know. It could have used more kissing.

Graphics: None. Not a single one. Which is not to say it couldn't have used some. I know Infocom text adventures don't have graphics but they've managed before to include helpful ASCII drawings. Take Infidel as an example. It showed you the runes inside the pyramid so you had the best chance of translating them instead of trying to describe them to you. This game had at least two locations that would have really benefitted with some kind of visual aid. Like the symbols that were supposed to represent the chemical make-up of gasses. Or the entire computer set-up once you get it running. Although the computer doesn't really do anything. Do you even need to fix it to beat the game? Does it turn on the Control and Drive systems?

Concept: Being tested by aliens was already a trope by the time this game was published. Finding alien artifacts left by aliens to help the other aliens who found them was what 2001: A Space Odyssey was about. Wasn't it? Was that what it was about? Seriously, I have no idea. Did the monkeys at the beginning solve the Monolith's riddle or were they like the weasel aliens and the spider guy? So confused by it that they just quit trying to understand it? Oh! Was I like the monkeys at the beginning of 2001 in that I was so confused by it that I quit trying to understand it and just threw a bunch of shit around my room?

Fun Time: You won't believe this but, once again, I forgot to keep track of how long I spent playing this game. It couldn't have been more than five or six hours of actual time typing in commands. But my mind definitely thought about the game constantly in the background while doing other things. Even when I didn't know I was working on one of the game's puzzles, my mind was whirling away until suddenly I'd think, "Oh! Maybe I should try that!" Too bad my brain was too stupid to come up with the solution to the one puzzle I never solved, even though I was about 80% of the way there! I was never really bored while playing this and never so stuck that I wanted to abandon it. If I had been playing this in the pre-Internet days on my Apple IIe, I probably would have solved it in another week or so. The simple fact that you could slide the teleport pad under the globe was indication enough that that was going to be part of the blue rod solution.

The Map!

The Return of Bart Bear: A Stroll in the Bleak Forest

The Return of Bart Bear: A Stroll in the Bleak Forest
By John "The Rochdale Balrog" Wilson
Published by Zenobi Software
Release Year: 1989
Version Played: ZX Spectrum

I don't know who Bart Bear is and I don't know why he's returning because I wasn't a British lad growing up in the 80s spending every free hour on my Zed X Spectrum. He's probably one of those characters middle-aged British gaming nerds look back fondly on, the way middle-aged British comic nerds look back fondly on Hungry Horace. As you can see from the comic strip above, he was a besotted bear down on his luck (even though he just saved the world). The way the rest of the comic book pans out, I'm guessing Bart Bear accidentally saved the world and didn't actually deserve to be seen as a hero. Probably why he began drinking so much. But he wanted to improve his image so that everybody would think he was a hard bear. No, not a bear with an erection! British hard! As in tough! And it worked out so well that when the horrible Mega-Brain which had threatened the Earth turned out not to be dead, everybody expects Bart Bear to destroy it and save the world again! That's all in the comic which I read over at the Museum of Computer Game History. At the end of the comic book, there's some directions for how to play the game.

Wait a second. This sounds suspiciously like an arcade game! AAARGH!

As you can see from the "Controls" card which doesn't give a list of verbs and nouns that the game recognizes but instead gives joystick controls, I've stumbled onto another non-text adventure game. But you can hardly blame me! The game was by The Rochdale Balrog and published by his company, Zenobi! I thought all they did were text adventure games! Shows how much I know about the history of the ZX Spectrum and its myriad small publishers.

Speaking of The Rochdale Balrog, I've got some bad news.

The bad news is that he died last year. You're probably thinking, "Yeah, I guess that's bad news because death sucks but I didn't even know the guy." To which I'd say, "Have some fucking respect for his family, you twat!" But, no, the bad news is that if this game sucks, I'm going to feel extremely guilty trashing it. Although I've played it a little bit already and how can I trash a game with such a cute (I mean hard!) fucking bear?! It's practically the British version of Crystal Castles.

Get it? It's going to be easy! Like a stroll in the park!

As Americans, we're probably more apt to say, "A walk in the park." I wouldn't trust an American who used the word stroll! Although we call the thing we push babies in strollers while the British call them prams. Is that some kind of shortening of perambulate? Oh look at that. The Internet says that it is. Who's a genius? I'm a genius! I'm glad I wasn't just now typing, "Who's a brave man?" Because in the middle of "Who's a genius?", I felt something on my leg and freaked the fuck out. I don't know what it was but I haven't taken any anti-toxin pills so I'm probably going to die later.

Oh my god look at how adorable Bart is!

From all the various screen shots I've seen of ZX Spectrum games, isometric games have always looked high quality. This one doesn't disappoint. The only trouble I'm going to have is probably controlling this guy. Backwards to shoot?! At least the arrows are all clustered together unlike The Desecration's terrible controls. It also looks like I'm going to have to map! So that will satisfy some of my text adventure needs.

Bart the Bear travels around from square to square trying to avoid Spiders, Shooters, Standers, UFOs, and Bouncers. Movers and Dark Movers won't kill you but they get in your way (although you can ride on them if you can control your jumps. Hell, you can even ride the Spiders although I think that's a mistake that just us pro-jumpers can handle because it sends Bart way up the screen until he falls as if he were on the close side of the screen which he absolutely wasn't). You can also ride Bubbles but it's difficult. The good thing is you never actually have to ride Bubbles. There are also a variety of blocks which you sometimes need to move around and jump over. There are Blockers, Breakers, Melters, Conveyers, Risers, and Sliders. Yes, I did in fact name all of the objects in the game myself.

This is a good example of one of the challenges Bart faces. He can't touch the Standers sitting between the Blockers. So he must push the Breakers around (without breaking them!) so that he can jump on them and over the Standers.

The map is approximately 16 by 16 with a lot of empty squares. I didn't map the entire thing because there really wasn't any need. I just mapped enough until I discovered the Mega-Brain and killed him. At least I think that's what happened. I eventually wound up on a purple screen with eight Spiders and a bunch of Breakers and Bubbles blocking me from the Spiders. I couldn't move and the Spiders just kept self-destructing until they were all dead. Then the screen turned blue and this happened:

Thanks! I guess.

This is probably how the first Bart Bear game ended because it's ambiguous. Did I kill the Mega-Brain or did it flee so that there can be another sequel? I don't know! Probably time for Bart Bear to get fucking blitzed again.

SCORES

Game Title: It gets right to the point. Bart Bear has returned and he spends his time strolling through a bleak forest. That's the entire game! You don't even have a big boss battle at the end. You just end your stroll and game over. It could have been more exciting, maybe something like Bart Bear Versus the Evil Mega-Brain but then the final confrontation would have been anti-climactic. With this name, when the game ended without me doing anything but walking into the correct square, I felt completely satisfied. "Yeah, I strolled the fuck out of that bleak forest! Well done, me!"

Puzzles: This is basically a platform puzzler without the platforms. Except there are some platforms, sort of. So while there aren't puzzles in the same sense as puzzles in a text adventure, there were a few areas where you had to figure out how to get by. Mostly it consisted of pushing blocks around and jumping over them. A few puzzles felt like you should have jumped on bubbles which lift you way up in the air before popping. But you never really had to use the bubbles. The most difficult areas were the ones with a bunch of spiders. You can't kill the spiders so they just surround you and try to trap you in a corner. If that happens, you just have to restart. The toughest puzzles were trying to figure out how not to get trapped by those bastards.

Gameplay: This was a well-programmed and entertaining arcade game. Some screens did lag quite a bit when there were a lot of enemies on the screen but everything slowed down so it didn't really affect the player negatively. The movement was smooth and only rarely did you wind up walking onto a screen and getting killed immediately by something you couldn't have avoided. If you wound up in a situation where you had to restart, you simply hit the 'A' key and the game would immediately return to the start screen. I enjoyed discovering all the little secrets and ways you could interact with the creatures and the environment, especially when I finally managed to jump on a Bubble and realized you could ride it to the top of the screen.

Graphics: Fucking adorable. Bart Bear never looked hard at all. He was smiling and jovial and constantly had the cutest expression on his face. And he had a cute little tail that looked like a little penis sticking out of his butt. Just look at his cute little face in the blue screen above. And his little belly button! He was probably drunk the entire time.

Concept: Video game concepts in the 70s and 80s were all pretty ridiculous. We lived in a whimsical world where anything could wind up as a video game, like shooting teeth attacking you from space or swinging on vines through a jungle. So having a cute bear wandering around another planet riding bubbles while avoiding gangs of spiders to find an evil brain was just par for the course in 1989. Nowadays, video games need to be pretty serious or else the toxic masculine crowd who buys most of the games won't touch it. You can't call somebody derogatory names anonymously while romping about as a fucking teddy bear. Teabagging somebody you just killed doesn't have the same intimidating aggressiveness when you're fuzzy and cute.

Fun Time: I spent about two hours playing and mapping the game before finding the end. As the map got more complicated, I started to use emulator save states instead of starting over completely. Back in the day, you were probably loading this game from cassette tape after each death so by the time you did beat the game, you'd feel like you'd gotten your money's worth out of it.

The Desecration

I couldn't find any box art so this advert from Moby Games will have to do.

The Desecration
Published by Mind Games
Written by Greg and Gil
Release Year: 1982
Version Played: Apple IIe

I've never heard of "adventurecades" before so I'm guessing this could also read "The last in a series."

I'm a bit nervous about my ability to defeat an adventure game which boasts that it is also an arcade game. Not that I'm notoriously terrible at arcade games! But I'm on a laptop and I'm too dumb to set up a modern controller to work with the AppleWin emulator. Luckily, I've made it as far as the menu following the above title screen and it looks like you can choose which chapters of the game you want to play. Which means after I become frustrated trying to "survive the unyielding bombardment of the Pykronian Air Command" and fail to "escape the crossfire of the deadly Android Patrol," I'll simply choose to enter the "high resolution adventure dimension" after which, I presume, I'll sit at my keyboard for three hours frustratedly trying various synonyms to get my character to open a window.

Sleep probably doesn't come easy for me because I'm sitting in my living room. Go to bed, you idiot!

This game starts like a lot of 80s adventure games (most recently among the ones I've played, Beyond El Dorado): sitting in your front room doing fuck all. Back from my mission to save whatever I was trying to save (probably a cool sci-fi planet), I apparently let a little girl die rather than risk failing my mission just to save some useless little shit. That totally sounds like me! I've killed plenty of kids so far in previous text adventure games! Sometimes it's necessary; other times it's just fun.

Holy crap! Finally a game that probably won't scold me when I try to kill somebody! In your stupid face, Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels!

As I'm about to fall asleep in my chair like the old man I guess I must be playing, my "videophone" startles me awake! Imagine thinking there'd be crazy technology like "videophones" in 1982's far-flung future! Ha ha! So naïve to think they'd be a boon to civilization rather than a curse that would let your handler get hold of you after just getting back from a mission and trying to avoid work for a bit. At least with land lines, you could pretend you were taking a huge dirty shit and couldn't answer!

The author of this game was in love with the totally heavy meatal name he came up with, wasn't he?

My mission is to travel to Pykron 9, breach the air defenses, assassinate Dunmark Pykro, and escape the planet. If I can accomplish that, I'll get 10,000 Sovereigns! I hope those are worth 1 million dollars each or I'm getting hosed.

Oh, I guess my video phone is stuck in the wall so it's no better than a landline. What a lack of imagination the writer had! "Imagine if we had a phone that could show the person on the other end. But of course it would have to be on the wall. Walking around with it would be ridiculous!"

This game gives my character a back story that he actually remembers (90% of Adventure Games either ignore the player character's past or give them a major concussion right before the game starts) but I still feel like my character is somebody who just woke up from a coma and has to learn how to live all over again. My character doesn't recognize any nouns I use in regards to the hi-res image: no table, chair, videophone, computer, or window. The only response I get is, "Am I see'in things again?!" So, I have a history of psychosis! That's pleasant. The game also doesn't recognize cardinal directions nor does it tell me the exits to the room. I manage to stumble out of the living room by going "right" and find myself in the only other room in the house (which explains why I'm trying to sleep in that uncomfortable looking chair): the transporter room.

Don't think this character represents me! I totally know how to fuck stuff!

There wasn't currently an alien present when I typed that but there will be one later in a jail cell but I don't think it's appropriate to try to fuck one in that situation. Anyway, I was supposed to be figuring out how to use the transporter. You can't enter it or turn it on or change the destination or look at it. But you can kick it to make it work! You're probably thinking, "How the fuck did you figure that out, you gorgeous genius?!"

Your character tells you to kick it to make it work when you enter.

After you kick the transporter controls, you teleport to the airfield with the ship you need to steal.

It would probably be even easier if you'd properly maintain your teleporter so that you could teleport more precisely. Like directly on the ship.

If you decide to go backward from here (because you need to explore all directions when playing a text adventure game (or a hi-res adventure game but I use the terms interchangeably)), you wind up escaping from prison. I guess the author never thought a player would head away from the airfield immediately. But now I guess I'll be getting captured by the guards soon!

When the game starts, your character just wants to kick back and relax. Then he kicks his transporter to make it work. Later at the Airfield, he wants to kick himself for not reading up on how to fly Ship #2. I don't think this assassin watched an innocent little girl die at all. I'm certain he kicked her to death.

It doesn't take too long to borrow the ship and fly to Pykron 9. You do wind up in jail when you try to board the ship the first time but once you get out of jail, you can easily board it. If that's the extent of the Adventure Game part of the Adventurecade, it would explain why this game was nearly impossible to find on text adventure review sites.

Once you steal the ship, you need to battle the Air Defense of Pykron 9. It's sort of like Space Invaders except you're the Space Invader. It's also really fucking hard. I had the emulator cranked way up which made it impossible. So I lowered it to the Apple IIe's original speed and it was still too hard for me. So I played it at half speed and it made it a little bit easier but it was still impossible. You have three lives to get past two waves of alien ships which line the entire ground and often shoot all at the same time leaving you no room to avoid getting killed. It really sucked.

Here I am on the 2nd Wave with my hopes up because I still have all of my lives!

And then my hopes weren't dashed like all of the previous ten thousand attempts!

It wasn't as easy as this asshole makes it sound.

The next chapter is also based in the arcade part of the Arcadeventure genre. At first blush, it doesn't seem like it's going to be as hard. The main problem is the controls. You move up and down with the left hand on the A and Z keys while you move left and right with your right hand on the left and right arrows. My stupid modern mind keeps trying to move up and down with the up and down arrows because that's what I'm used to. I guess in 1982, the WASD cluster wasn't yet the go-to? Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord came out in 1981 and it used the WASD cluster! It's where I learned the convenience of it. Perhaps it was play-tested and the creators of The Desecration found it too easy. Based on how easy the text adventure portion of this game was, the arcade bits were meant to be the real challenge. Or the creators were piano players.

After about four or five attempts, I turn the speed down as low as it can go and easily defeat the robots.

At first I thought "Send me some real men" was some patriarchal toxic masculinity shit but then I remembered I just slaughtered a bunch of robots and this assassin simply meant it literally. That's still no excuse for saying things like, "Silly solar eclipes!!!"

After two action sequences, I figure the fourth one must be more adventure. But that's why I'm terrible at text adventure games. I can never guess what the author is thinking. Turns out, it's my turn to be Air Defense and I have to destroy a bunch of space shuttles trying to land.

What does NASA stand for? Need Another 7000 Astronauts.

Being the easiest of the three arcade sequences so far, this one had three or four waves to attempt to make it challenging. I still managed to succeed on my first try.

Based on the yawn, I'm assuming my character is being sarcastic and even he realized this chapter was ridiculously easy.

And that's it! I successfully assassinated Diddymac Packrat without ever seeing him! That's too bad. I was hoping the Adventure parts of this game would be much stronger. It's not bad for an arcade shooter with three well-implemented and challenging games. But the adventure part was lackluster, if I'm being charitable.

SCORES

Game Title: The definition of desecrate is "treat (a sacred place or thing) with violent disrespect; violate." This doesn't make any sense. Yes, yes, as an assassin, I have just treated Dickmar Parklo with violent disrespect. But was he really sacred? I'd argue no or else I just desecrated him by getting his name completely wrong (you might think I was just being disrespectful but I definitely typed out the incorrect name by banging on the keys harder than I had to). Naming this game The Desecration and then designing it to be a knock-off Space Invaders and Berzerk clone was shocking. I was excited to play a game where I was surely going to be pissing on graves and blinding children with hedge clippers. Now I'm just upset that I had to use my dexterity statistic instead of my intelligence statistic to defeat the game. And I'm super pissed that I didn't even get to kill Dagmar Pyrokles.

Oh wait! I just re-read the advert at the top of the page and saw that I was supposed to stop the Pykrons from doing the desecration! See, the Pykrons are attacking some planet and the other planets are all, "You know, they're probably going to attack us if we don't stop them." They understand appeasement is only for idiots and the British. Although the advert also suggests that the Hi-Res Adventure part takes place after the arcade sections when you land on the planet! I knew the writers Greg and Gil just got bored and gave up! I bet Greg was in charge of the text adventure and Gil was all, "Are you done?! I got my arcade game finished!" And Greg was all, "Some bad news. The text adventure isn't as long as we thought it would be." And Gil was all, "No problem! I'll just make a second arcade game!" And Greg was all, "A little more bad news, buddy!" Although there might be a 2nd disk with more chapters out there somewhere. That's possible!

Puzzles: The text adventure part of the game had three puzzles: use the teleporter by kicking it; use the mirror to escape the jail cell; and figure out to type "launch" to get Ship #2 to take off. And I'm not sure any of those were difficult enough to be described as puzzles. It feels like a major piece of the game was missing. There should have been at least two more adventure areas: one after landing leading you to the robot battle and one after the robot battle where you figure out how to kill Daddbar Prickoo.

Gameplay: I'm pretty sure the authors of this game came up with the genre of "Adventurecade" because they quickly became bored writing a text adventure and then slapped a few arcade games onto the end of it. The adventure portion was negligible and not even that well done. Sure, the images were top notch for Apple IIe Hi-Res graphics. It even did that thing where you could see dropped inventory items in the image. Although there were only ever two inventory items: the I.D. which is never used and the mirror which you pick up, use, and lose. According to the briefing, the writers of The Desecration really seemed to be planning a bigger adventure game where you'd meet a contact on Pykron and smile at him after he gave you the code word. The verb "smile" was even implemented in the game but when you smiled, the game would just say, "You can't do that here." The problem is you never get anywhere where you can smile (or use your I.D.).

The arcade portions of the game were fleshed out much better. The action was smooth and, with the speed turned way down, not entirely impossible. They were challenging although maybe for a primitive computer user, they would have been easier because you didn't take key clusters for granted back then. You just used whatever stupid key combinations the programmer was used to using and you fucking liked it.

Graphics: For a game from 1982 using the Apple IIe's four color Hi-Res system, the graphics were superb. I especially liked the background mountains and moon of the first arcade game. The pictures for the brief text adventure were as good as any Hi-Res images of the time. And there were some nice tricks as the images loaded in to give a little cinematic effect. I may have been disappointed by the actual text adventure but the graphics made up for it. Except the picture of the jail cell. It was just all white. I don't think it was meant to be that way.

Concept: Original! Who has ever heard of an Adventurecade game?! So original that nobody every made another one! That's quite the concept! And what writer would make a game where the player takes on the role of an assassin and then never gets to assassinate anybody! What nerve! What chutzpah!

Fun Time: I think I spent about an hour actively playing this game. The longest part was the first arcade sequence as I fiddled with the emulator's speed until I could survive the initial assault (at the setting I had AppleWin, the arcade game would begin, all the ships would fire, and I'd have nowhere to dodge. Fun!). The game kept me interested even though I don't normally care about arcade games. Mostly it was because I thought I would eventually get to another text adventure bit where I got to kill somebody. Sadly, that never happened. But the anticipation of doing it was fun!