Eclipse

Eclipse
By Laurence Creighton
Published by Zenobi Software
Release Year: 1992
Version Played: ZX Spectrum

Eclipse is yet another text adventure game for the Spectrum by my nemesis, Laurence Creighton. After Meltdown! almost certainly began the timer on the embolism that will eventually burst in my brain and end my participation in existence, you'd think I'd be smart enough to stay away from another game by this jerk. You'd think after ending my review of Meltdown! by saying, "This was the worst Sunday of my life," I'd know better than to attempt another one of his sadistic virtual escape rooms. But that Sunday was way back in July! I no longer have any emotional or logical attachment to the me from way back then! That idiot was just too stupid to solve one of Laurence Creighton's terrible games! But this is me four months later! I'm so much wiser than that masturbating monkey that failed to defeat Meltdown! I can do this!

In 1991, Eclipse could be purchased for £1.99 by some soon to be frustrated and disappointed young British lad or lass. Although how upset could a kid be when a game only cost two pounds? Even if every text adventure game for the ZX Spectrum was shitty and unfair (which they are!), I'd still probably fork over another two pounds if one came along with an exciting name and some bright colors printed on the folded up sheet of paper acting as a manual and stuff into the stapled shut sandwich bag it was being sold in! I'd be all, "I can go a few days without any Smarties or Toffee Pudges or bags of bird seed from the smelly old lady on the steps of a fancy public building!" Then I'd slap down my cash, spend the time walking home imagining how much fun the game would be, stick it in the cassette player hooked up to my ZX Spectrum, go watch whatever the British equivalent of G.I. Joe was while it loaded, and then hate myself for the next few days for having wasted my money on another text adventure that broke me because I missed a critical item when I "looked behind" and "examined" and "looked in" and "looked at" and "searched" the wardrobe but I forgot to "look under" it (Spoiler warning from future me: this is called foreshadowing!). Fuck you, Laurence Creighton! Shove all the fucking Clangers up your ass, you fucking jerk!

Anyway, let's get started! This should be fun!

This introduction leaves me with a lot to unpack.

I have a few problems with the premise of Creighton's game (but then, don't I always? Critiquing somebody else's ideas makes me seem intelligent and not at all petty and unlikable!). Sure, it probably would sound super exciting if I were an eleven year old boy who had yet to learn to hold lifelong grudges against creators who have betrayed my trust one single time. "An adventure in thpace!" my naive and innocent brain would have forced out of my cherubic and virginal face. "Thith ith going to be tho exthiting that thomething weird ith happening in my panth!" But as an adult who has grown into an Actually Nerd who has spent a non-zero amount of time arguing about flavor text at Magic the Gathering tournaments, I have a few questions for Mr. Creighton and his premise.

I'm assuming (which maybe I've heard you shouldn't do but here we are) the alien race chose Earth because it's the ideal biome for their anatomical needs. So, Mr. Creighton, why then would they force it into an ice age? Couldn't they have used their fancy pants space faring technology to find an ice planet to live on if that's what they needed? Why change the climate so drastically that it will kill of the last great defenders of Earth? Won't it also drive the aliens to the brink of extinction as well? Or did the aliens simply remember to bring their space cardigans?

And what about this whole Britain being the aliens' last remaining obstacle bit? I suppose the solar screen could just be changing the weather enough so that Britain becomes covered in ice and the aliens have all decided to live in Florida. I suppose, being science fiction, I can continue to provide answers to my own questions that all make enough sense to justify Mr. Creighton's lazy premise so maybe I should just stop doing that. I don't need to defend him simply because I'm trying to show the audience that I'm not so stupid that I can't play Devil's Advocate against myself as well as against Laurence Creighton.

Why can't Devil's Advocate types just all get stuck in some kind of infinite loop where they constantly question the reason they just thought up to question the person who stopped listening to them fifteen seconds after they began talking?

Um, anyway, Britain as the last obstacle to the alien's plot of world domination? That seems a bit preposterous, especially when Britain doesn't even have the GDP to maintain a space program (according to the premise!). And even if they did have the money, nobody in Britain knows how to build or fly a spaceship (Again! According to Laurence's premise! I can name tons of British astronauts! Like Tim Peake! And the other ones! Some probably named Laurence because talk about a nerdy name! I bet Laurence Creighton has seen the bottom of more than one toilet! (Bullying is bad kids! Don't bully! Be best!)).

But let's say Britain did have at least one person who was smart enough to build a spaceship and fly it into space to destroy the solar screen. How will that defeat the aliens? At this point, I think Laurence convinced himself that the aliens needed the Earth to be nice and chilly to inhabit it. But that gets back to my argument about choosing Earth in the first place!

And, if I'm going to be horribly critical about the premise (which I am!), how the fuck did the aliens take out the USA and the USSR but they couldn't defeat Britain? Is it because the Queen is actually a David Icke lizard creature who has access to interdimensional weaponry? And if that's the case, can't the Queen loan the protagonist a ship to destroy the solar screen?

But my biggest worry about this premise is that I'm not actually going to spend much time in space. I'm going to spend most of the game getting the British Aeronautics and Space Administration up and running by organizing pledge drives and hiring space mechanics to build me a ship. Most text adventures from this era advertised an exciting premise to their game when, in actuality, it was just a scavenger hunt in a fairly mundane setting. Or worse.

"DRAGON BATTLE! A new game from Zenobi Software in which you are a dragon slayer battling dragons to save the world! But first you need to earn enough money for a sword and a suit of armor. This game was previously marketed as Lemonade Stand."

"SUPERHERO SHOWDOWN! Battle the evil villain Arch-Nemesis Nemi-arch for the fate of the world in this exciting game where you are the hero! But what kind of superhero will you be?! Anticipate the moment you become a hero as you go about your normal life waiting for some crazy cosmic accident to strike you down and give you super powers! This game was previously marketed as Paperboy."

"SUPER SPY! Defeat the mad scientist by using crazy gadgets as you explore the entire world to find his secret lair to disable his megabomb! This game was previously marketed as Mastermind."

In other words, a scavenger hunt!

The game begins in the foyer of the newly re-opened British Centre for the Exploration of Space (or BCES. What a lousy acronym. No wonder it was shut down). Blocking my way inside is a doorman. Because even if the world is on the verge of collapse, you can't just throw away all the regular staples of a polite society! Somebody has to maintain order and man the doors!

The doorman does his job as well as any doorman. He simply assumes I'm allowed into the building, gives me an ID pass and a remote with a shitty battery, and fucks off to tea. I'm in! And all I had to do was offend every doorman by saying a shitty doorman does his job as well as every doorman ever! The first puzzle has been solved by simply hitting any random key! Fuck you, Laurence Creighton! I'm defeating your shit this time! If I don't get beat up by an angry doorman first!

It's at this point in the game where a twelve year old playing it is almost certainly not thinking, "Who is the protagonist that I'm playing? Why was I chosen to go into space when I know nothing about space travel or destroying solar screens? As in Meltdown!, why wasn't I given all of the resources needed for my mission since my mission is to save the world?" I bet I was chosen because of my obsessive need to "search" and "examine" every single place, item, and person that I come into contact with (although sometimes I can get a bit distracted and forget to search one time and then it's "Bye bye, world! Hello cardigan wearing alien overlords!").

Later in the game, that same twelve year old also won't think, "Why won't the security guard let me past him so I can get to the rocket to save the world? Doesn't he not want to die? And why won't that gardener just give me the batteries I need for the torch so I can find stuff in the dark cinema? And why won't the pharmacist just give me the pills I'm going to need to reduce the vertigo from lift off? And couldn't somebody have inspected my space suit to make sure the helmet wasn't cracked so that I wouldn't have to learn the cryptic voice code that would get me into the laboratory so i could glue the crack in the helmet? And didn't somebody think to test the space laser that all of humanity is relying on? And why the fuck is that asshole trying to eat the last cheese sandwich on Earth before I can eat it for the sustenance I'm going to need on my voyage into space? Does he want to die too?! And while we're speaking of assholes, why the fuck is the lunch lady so insistent that I pay with a pound coin instead of a pound note? Does she not respect all images of Queen Elizabeth while also secretly wanting to die in a new ice age?! Can't anybody just help me the fuck out please?! I'M TRYING TO SAVE THE GODDAMNED WORLD, YOU STUPID FUCKING CUNTS!"

Sorry! I'm sure some twelve year olds thought those things. But most of them were probably thinking, "I thought this stupid ZX Spectrum cassette was going to have Strip Poker on it!"

The world is going to end so that you can satiate your Goddamned lust for cheese sandwiches!

Certainly creating characters with an inability to help the person saving the world is a critical flaw in the premise of this game. But even worse, I have to learn all about being an astronaut by reading a magazine in the BCES library. Luckily there are only five steps, so it's not as difficult as everybody told me it would be when I was twelve and pretty insistent that I wanted to be an astronaut. It wasn't too hard to destroy my dreams and dissuade me from trying though. All it took was some jerk-faced adult mentioning that the best step on that career path was to join the Air Force. Ugh. Fuck that shit! I'd rather mop floors!

And there you have it! Now you too can fly a spaceship!

Don't think that all you have to accomplish are these five things before you can fly into space and destroy the solar screen! Pshaw! It's like you've never played a text adventure before! I mean, sure, the pissing part is pretty easily accomplished. We're all 1/5 astronaut every half hour! Is that too often to pee? And should it always smell so strong?

Anyway, we also all eat! That's 2/5 of the way there! And being that it's just past Thanksgiving dinner as I type this, I could fly about five spaceships right now! I'm so full of mashed potatoes and mac and chees right now!

Heck, if you go down to a Halloween costume store to pick up a spacesuit, you're now 3/5 of the way to being able to operate a spaceship. And who isn't constantly aware of the possibility of vertigo?! Why would any adult have tried to dissuade me from being an astronaut?! This shit is fucking easy!

Never mind. Flying a spaceship sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

Getting your hands on that final cheese sandwich in Britain before the fat-ass computer chess nerd gets his disgusting mitts on it is the hardest part of the game. I tried everything to stop him: swirlies, wedgies, purple nurples. Nothing worked! Time and time again, he'd easily elbow me out of the queue and take the sandwich from me. It started me thinking, "Maybe this guy should be Earth's big hero!" But then I also remembered by looking at his blob-like chess playing figure that he totally weighed more than 70 Kg! More like 85 or 90, I bet! Ha ha! Fatty!

On the flip side, I only weighed 75 Kg! So svelte and lean and sexy! But not quite emaciated enough for the rigors of space travel.

How do you lose 5 Kg quickly, you're probably asking? You find a feather duster, dust the dirty table in the game room where the obese cheese eater ruins the chances for survival of all life in Great Britain, discover the key to the gym's sauna, and then go sit in it for a bit. Easy peasy! After that, you're practically in space saving the world!

Except first you have to navigate the always present text adventure maze. Some mazes are more difficult than others. In this game, I found the two objects hidden in the maze in three moves. Shove that up your expatriate ass, Laurence Creighton!

That insult was for all the Laurence Creighton fans out there that know he was born in Great Britain but wound up living in South Africa.

Eventually, I made it into space and saved the world. Here's the proof:

Ha ha! What a droll ending, Mr. Creighton. I applaud you!

Grade: B-. Yes, I beat the game. But I didn't do it without resorting to one hint (two if you include the in-game hint that I stumbled on by typing "help" in a certain location. It wasn't a hint I necessarily needed so it doesn't actually count). It's true that my main rule for ZX Spectrum games is to "examine" and "search" everything constantly. But eventually I grow lax in my disciplined approach because it's less exciting to type those commands every few seconds while getting no response except "You find nothing" than it is to explore a new room where you might encounter a hungry nerd barring your way to world saving fame. I was pretty proud of myself when I discovered the button in the gym by typing "examine gym" and then, later, when I realized I still needed a weight and there was only one fucking place it could be, I found it by typing "search gym." You can bet I did a little jig on Laurence Creighton's grave over that accomplishment (if he isn't dead, he should be. His games are hackneyed crap that rest not on real puzzles but on the player finding the items hidden behind search and examine commands). But eventually, not searching in one specific place was my downfall. Of course I should have searched in the half-full cinema of people who decided their last hours on Earth should be watching War of the Worlds instead of helping me save the world. But once I got the torch working and the coin immediately showed up in the room description, I was so overwhelmed by thoughts of sticking it to that fucking cheese eater that I forgot to also search to find the disc I needed to get the spaceship's computer ready for lift-off. Duh! Hats off to you, Laurence Creighton! You bested me once again!

For those people still wondering about how much time I got to adventure in space: about five moves. You launch, realize nobody fixed the laser, fix it, aim it, and fire it. What a hero! Of course if you didn't play the scavenger hunt part of the game well, you won't have the wire needed to fix the laser. If you don't have the wire, you have to sit through dozens of turns until you die of space gas. But what kind of an idiot would wind up in that critical situation? A moron, that's what kind of idiot!

So, in the end, some really picky people might still think of me as a huge failure and a colossal disappointment. But you try beating a Laurence Creighton game without stumbling at least once, Mom and Dad! Fuck you both! I was glad I didn't eat Thanksgiving Dinner with you! I enjoyed it with people I actually care about! I bet Laurence Creighton's parents encouraged him! I bet they were all, "You write really good text adventure games, Laurie. Don't let anybody tell you that your reliance on hunting for items is any worse than a reliance on logical puzzles! Anybody can spend hours thinking up fun, outside-the-box solutions to puzzles to make a rational game that gives a player that 'A-ha!' feeling of finally cracking a tough problem. But you really shine at hiding a needed item behind the search command and then obfuscating that by giving the player something they've desperately been looking for right before they should search! You are my blessing, Laurence. After we had you, your father and I both decided to only fuck using birth control because how could our lives have gotten any better? You're the brightest star in this infinite universe, my sweet, sweet boy. Now go wash that shit out of your hair and please remember to be more careful when using the loo at school. Maybe 'search' and 'examine' the location more carefully to ensure those bullies aren't lurking about, wot?"

Meltdown

Meltdown By Laurence Creighton
Published by Zenobi Software
Release Year: 1993
Version Played: ZX Spectrum

Meltdown was created by Laurence Creighton in 1993 which means it was written about eight years after everybody had stopped playing text adventures. I mean, obviously that's an exaggeration and a hyperbolic obfuscation of the actual history of text adventures because I'm currently playing a text adventure and it's 2018! Except now the target audience of text adventures calls them "Interactive Fiction" because they like pushing their glasses up against their greasy faces and correcting people. But in 1993, Infocom's text adventure department had been long dead and the renaissance of interactive fiction had yet to take place. But this game was written in the United Kingdom which means I should completely start over because the history of text adventures in that country is completely different than the history of text adventures in the United States which is the history I'm basing all of my "facts" on.

So, um, starting over in a way that is probably going to be insulting to my British readers: Meltdown was written by Laurence Creighton in 1993 for the Spectrum and almost certainly sold as a cassette tape in a sandwich bag in the back ads of Crash. Unless it was published by Zenobi Software whom I'm going to assume sold all of their second rate text adventure games in the back ads of Crash (sealed in sandwich bags). Text adventures remained popular in the United Kingdom for a long time after the market was essentially dead in the states because most people in the United Kingdom could only afford games which cost two to five pounds. Those games tended to be text adventures sealed in sandwich bags and sold out of the back pages of Crash. This is, presumably, due to having to spend most of their income on the NHS and television taxes. Although 99% of all Specy text adventures were low quality parodies of The Hobbit and Colossal Cave Adventure, they remained popular for years, gobbled up by loads of coal miners and chimney sweeps looking for an escape from the realization that Margaret Thatcher existed.

If you're interested in learning more about the Spectrum home computer, I'm sure some lonely twat has made a nostalgic documentary about it and uploaded it to Vimeo or YouTube. Being that I am interested in learning even more than I already know about the Zed Ex Spectrum (which, to be fair, consists of believing that all Spectrum games were sold in the back ads of Crash and sealed in sandwich bags), I just did the search I suggested. There's a teaser for a documentary called Memoirs of a Spectrum Addict (which is basically the title I came up with: Some Lonely Twat Has Made A Nostalgic Documentary About the ZX Spectum). It's full of 80s style blurred imagery of computer game boxes interspersed with scenes of the nerds from About a Boy and The Inbetweeners. Not literally, of course! But if you watch the trailer, you'll think, "Oh yeah! Those scenes looked like they were right out of About a Boy and The Inbetweeners, just like Grunion Guy jut said and which probably didn't need to be repeated in the sentence immediately following the statement."

Here's the basic premise in the author's own words. I think my own words have already caused enough harm to the British people.

From the outset, I'm skeptical about my mission in this game. I may just be an overweight writer who sometimes moonlights as an underwater superhero but I can also pretend I'm a nuclear expert by asking cynical rhetorical questions that sound critical. Like this one: "If they're worried about a bunch of plutonium rods exploding, is it safe to put them all together in the same box? I don't think lead magically stops fission!" Or this one: "Isn't the 'going critical' part the bad part? And if so, the game states it has already happened! Am I just being sent to my death by government officials who have an axe to grind with me?" Or this: "What if my bosses are wrong about where the plane was thought to have crashed? Will I just wander around a barren landscape for this entire game, earning no points and never becoming a hero?"

You know what? I'm getting ahead of myself. There's no way I'm going to come anywhere close to beating this game. And since I'm apparently mankind's last hope, that'll be the end of the world! Or at least the end of the small field in North Hampshire that will soon be a nuclear wasteland full of radiation and gas pirates.

This is probably supposed to be sweet but it just sounds like Laurence has been picked on a bunch.

I began the adventure outside of a small village without any possessions. You would think even if the government couldn't drop me at the exact location of the accident, they could have at least provided me with a lead box and a Geiger counter. Not providing me with the tools I need to save the world bolsters the theory that I pissed off somebody back at the main office and now I'm paying the price.

While doing my initial exploring of the area, I found a large portable fan. Being that "portable" is in the description, I decide to take it with me.

Due to the peculiarities of language, time, and country of origin, I had to check my inventory to make sure the response, "RIGHT", was not sarcastic. It wasn't. I now had a large portable high-speed fan!

The fan had a sign on it that it could only be used once. No wonder the shopkeeper couldn't sell it and stashed it in the basement. What a piece of shit.

It was in the basement where I began to feel proud of myself for solving some early problems following my book, The Adventurer's Guide to Successful Adventuring! Rule #3 states that a dead end isn't a dead end until you've searched and examined everything. After examining the wall, I detected a light switch. After turning on the lights, I tried searching the basement and discovered an iron bar (which couldn't be found until the lights were turned on). I wasn't at all angry or upset about this string of events because I'd only been playing the game for a few minutes. Besides, I'd bested the writer at his own game almost immediately! I almost began to believe that I could beat this game without any hints!

But there was a part of me that was also beginning to think my character in the game wasn't the smartest agent at MI6. To even find the basement, I had had to move a potted plant. When I suggested to myself (I don't know how better to describe the conceit of text adventure games where you're not really the protagonist but sort of a person suggesting ideas to the protagonist. It's like, I, Grunion Guy, am the brain of Mr. Not-Super-Smart-Secret Agent Man, my avatar in the game) that I "push plant," my character in the game pushed on the plant until it bent over. I had to specify "push pot" to reveal the secret entrance into the shame basement where the store owners hide all of their shitty merchandise that never caught on, like fans that can only be used once and crowbars that need to be bent into shape by the customer.

Eventually I solved enough puzzles that I found my way to the scene of the crash site (where I wasn't allowed without proper clearance. Could my bosses not have at least provided me with identification?!). Now, I say "solved puzzles" because that's what you do in professional text adventure games like Zork or Zork II or Zork III or the other games by Infocom that weren't a sequel to Zork. In those games, you were presented with problematic logistical situations which expected the player to think in unusual but logical ways to solve the problem. But in games like Meltdown!, "puzzles" are really just finding the right item uncovered by searching the right area or examining the right thing to get past some kind of obstruction. So if you find a locked door, you obviously need the key. Now you just have to examine everything until the key is revealed in an obscure place. That's not really a puzzle. That's pixel hunting in text.

So there I was. My youth fading but not so rapidly that I didn't mind spending a few hours playing an old Zed Ex Spectrum adventure game. I was chugging right along by using my own adventuring tips, a bit of swagger in every word typed. I had this Laurence chap beat! He might be able to hide a switch on a wall by not describing it in the room description or an iron bar in the dark by not describing it in the room description from some idiots. He might be able to fool other morons by hiding a briefcase under a dead body that I didn't have time to report to the police because those nuclear rods weren't going to go uncritical by themselves! And some people might not have tried grabbing a chair when the chair wasn't an obvious item in the room so they never got past the downed tree. Or maybe some other dolt missed searching the tool shed to find the potting trowel which is needed to get the spade which is needed to dig in places that aren't pots (which is, obviously, the only place you can dig with a potting trowel. Can you believe anybody would expect more than that?! Jerks!). But he couldn't fool this moron! My youth (fading but still semi-apparent!) and joy were still, more or less, optimistically intact!

Oh, sure! I knew there was something under the stack of papers in the office which I didn't know how to move. But how important could that be?! Surely if I couldn't move the papers or organize the papers or shove the papers or push the papers or transfer the papers or simply take the papers, it must be a red herring of some sort! Could I, the super spy whose superiors obviously trusted to save the entire world, have figured out how to get the bandage and where to wet it so that I could clean the window to find the first two numbers of the safe's combination while not being able to figure out how to look under a stack of papers?!

By the way, "look under papers" didn't work.

Surely whatever was under the papers wasn't that important! Besides, I knew the first two numbers of the combination to the safe which meant I could figure out the last number by trial and error! Surely that was the answer to this puzzle, right?! I mean, that's actually a clever thing. Give people the first two numbers so some people might think, "Well, I need the last number to open the safe!" But smart super spies like me think, "I can just try every other number until the safe opens!"

Oh. Um. Okay. I guess that isn't the solution!

It was about this time that I realized my youth was fading far more rapidly than I was willing to admit. I knew I needed to find something to hook the key to get it out of the tar to open the freezer to get the meat to put in the briefcase to feed the dog so I could explore the cave. And that thing had to be in the safe, right?! There was nowhere else to look! And I had the first two digits of the combination which basically means I have the fucking combination!

This might have been the first moment when I actually thought, "I can't believe Babs, John, Marion, Sue, and Tim put up with Laurence's shit for so long!" It's definitely when I finally cracked and thought, "I could just glance through the first few hints to the game until I figure out why I can't get the combination to work!"

Little did I know, the "How do you know that? YOU CHEAT!" reaction by the game was the game's way of saying, "You got the answer correct but you did so by blind chance. You have to find the third number of the combination by jumping through Laurence's hoops before you get your reward, chump." The game responds the same way if you "throw switch" to turn on the lights in the basement before you "examine wall" to find the switch. The game is a fucking harsh mistress.

So even though I always begin playing every text adventure by proclaiming to myself that I will not look at hints, I always wind up looking at hints after wasting more time than I realized I was going to waste playing the stupid fucking game. So I loaded up the hints from the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History website to see what I was doing wrong with the combination and almost immediately — it's the last command on the first line of hints — "lift papers."

FUCK. GOD FUCKING DAMN YOU, LAURENCE CREIGHTON. YOU PIECE OF SHIT SOCIOPATHIC PILE OF TEXT ADVENTURE GARBAGE OF A HUMAN BEING! THAT WAS YOUR BIG FUCKING PUZZLE TO MAKE A FIVE MINUTE ADVENTURE GAME LAST FOR MANY HOURS?! YOU DO REALIZE THAT A PERSON SEARCHING THE DESK CAN MOVE A STACK OF PAPERS REALLY FUCKING SIMPLY, RIGHT?! SOMETIMES THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE TO TRY! THE PILE JUST FALLS OVER FROM ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES! WHY DIDN'T YOU MAKE THAT THE ANSWER TO THE PUZZLE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT! I MEAN, I DID TRY RUNNING THE FAN IN THE OFFICE THINKING IT WOULD BLOW THE STACK OF PAPERS DOWN BUT NO! THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A SOLUTION TO A REAL PUZZLE, WOULDN'T IT, YOU CUM-STAINED SOCK JERKER! INSTEAD, YOU MAKE MY AVATAR LOGICALLY RETARDED (I CAN SAY THAT BECAUSE I'M NOT REFERENCING RETARDS! I JUST MEAN LOGIC THAT IS, WELL, UM, RETARDED! IF LAURENCE CAN'T THINK OF USING SYNONYMS FOR "LIFT," WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THINKING UP SYNONYMS FOR "RETARDED?!" YOU KNOW WHAT THE WORD MEANS! IF YOU'RE UPSET ABOUT ITS USE, THAT'S NOT MY PROBLEM! IT'S A REAL WORD THAT'S USEFUL IN SITUATIONS LIKE THIS!).

No, no. You know what? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be upset at you. It's Laurence with whom I'm really angry. I shouldn't have taken it out on my readers and I certainly shouldn't have used the R-slur. I mean, I still stand by the phrase "logically retarded." That's just logical! But I shouldn't have said the bit about "referencing retards" even if I'm desperate to call Laurence Creighton the R-slur right now. I can feel the temptation but I shouldn't give in to it. That's called being a decent human being, right?!

So, if you're wondering, "So, Grunion Guy, how was the rest of the game?", I can only say, "Fuck you. You play this stupid bullshit." I know you won't because you're much smarter than I am. You know better than to use the R-slur! There's a reason text adventures have mostly died out. And the ones that have survived — the ones referred to as "interactive fiction" — mostly follow updated and modern rules. Walking dead situations are now frowned upon. Being able to solve puzzles only after gaining clues from dying in the game is frowned upon. Making old school mazes that have simply been included to extend the length of play of a game is frowned upon. Hell, almost everything old school text adventure games did to make sure a game that cost somebody thirty dollars wasn't over in just a few minutes is frowned upon. And I can see why! I might die from an embolism sometime in the next twenty four hours thanks to Laurence.

To be fair, I did attempt to go on with the game after this. But once you've looked at the hints, there's almost no reason not to keep looking at them. And while I did find the last number to the combination, I still couldn't open the safe. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I "cheated" earlier and the game was punishing me. But what truly killed my enthusiasm for continuing with Laurence Creighton's masterpiece was when I saw in the hints that the ID badge to give me clearance to the crash site was found by typing "look under car" at the base of the funicular. I had already examined and searched it so why would I look under it? Besides, Laurence created a verb specifically for this game — lin (to "look inside" something) — which made me think, "That must mean you can't use an expression that has three words in it. So why the fuck would I ever have thought to type "look under car"?! I know in my heart that I *should* have typed that! I know "look under" and "look behind" should be added to my list of verbs to use on every noun encountered in a text adventure. So, you know, maybe that was my fault for not being an experience enough adventurer.

No. You know what? Fuck Laurence Creighton! He may have taken a few precious hours of my finite life with his bullshit game but he's not taking my self-esteem as well! I did everything in my power to try to navigate this game honestly and logically. But it just can't be done! The only people who have ever done it were people who played this game before the Internet existed and also didn't have a subscription to Crash magazine and people who don't give a fuck about their limited life span and who have no self-worth! I refuse to let Laurence beat me both in game and out! I'm a smart person who totally could have moved a stack of papers if this had been an escape room in real life! Fuck me if I'm to be blamed for a stupid nitwit avatar who can't fucking interpret the intent of my commands and needs to literally be told exactly what to do with his useless fucking head and hands!

This was the worst Sunday of my life.

Grade: C+.

Ship of Doom (Adventure C)

Ship of Doom
By Charles Cecil
Published by Artic Computing
Release Year: 1982
Version Played: ZX Spectrum

There's an elephant in the previous information dump that I only want to discuss so that nobody thinks it was a typo: the publisher named themselves "Artic Computing." Wait. What? Just in case I'm dumber than I thought I was, I decided to Google the word to see if it actually means anything. Dictionary.com says it's short for "articulated vehicle." Okay, great. I suppose I can see practically nobody ever talking about articulated vehicles so much that they need to shorten the word to "artic" while then never having to explain what that meant when the people they're talking to say, "Wait. What?" On the other hand, Dictionary.com goes on to give a "historical example" of "artic" being used in Parrot and Company by Harold McGrath: "'And fifty quid for me,' added Warrington, smiling, though his eyes were as blue and hard as Artic ice." Well then. That's cleared that up!

I might not be in the right mood for this.

As the protagonist of the titular Ship of Doom, I must release my ship from the "graviton beam" that sucked it onto a battle cruiser flown by aliens that use other sentient races as slaves. A "graviton beam" is simply a more serious tractor beam. To help me with my mission, I have a "pet android" named Fred.

If that's the case, why did the documentation say Fred was a "pet android" and not a "fuck toy sexbot"? Anyway, I can't wait until later!

This game was published in 1982 so the locations are bare and the parser is terrible and descriptions are practically non-existent. It's what I would expect from a 1982 game even though my brain is screaming, "Zork I came out in 1980! This game came out two fucking years later! How was there still an audience for this minimalist garbage when Infocom was out there swinging its huge fucking dick in everybody's faces?!" My brain is an asshole who ruins everything good in my life so just ignore it and let's try to stay positive with this one!

Getting through the first level of the ship didn't take long but not because it was easy. I think I got extremely lucky. At one point you find a sonic screwdriver. Not being a Doctor Who fan (mostly because the theme song scared the shit out of me as a kid (opening credits of another show that scared the fuck out of me: Tales from the Dark Side)), I had no idea how it was meant to be used. But I did assume that to use it, I would say things like "use screwdriver" and "smell screwdriver" and "insert screwdriver." It's what I would do if I had a fat kitty. I would say, "Kitty! Come eat more food!" But according to Charles Cecil, he would say, "Fat! Come eat more food!" Because in his game that my brain wanted to describe as "fat and stupid" but which I'm currently above calling it, Charles wants the player to refer to the sonic screwdriver as a sonic. So you have to say "drop sonic" or "lick sonic" or "remove sonic."

Some of the smarter readers might be thinking, "Well, shouldn't that have been obvious when you tried to 'get screwdriver' and couldn't? Didn't you realize you had to refer to it as a 'sonic' when you typed 'get sonic'?" And to them, I'd like to say, "Astute point, person who doesn't yet know the whole story but still feels the need to gotcha me." When you find the sonic screwdriver, it's just a rod in need of a battery. So you say 'get rod' and then 'insert battery' and now you've got a sonic screwdriver in your inventory. I think I realized I had to refer to it as a 'sonic' when I tried to drop it for some reason.

Once you've figured that out, it's just a matter of getting even luckier and discovering that to use the sonic screwdriver, you have to type 'point sonic.' I'm sure all of the Doctor Who fans are now rolling their eyes and snorting, "Obviously!"

Apparently, I'm in a Japanese horror movie.

For now, I'll ignore the little girl because while you can kill her to keep her from strangling you, you can also apparently fuck her later, according to Fred. I know that's wrong and disgusting! I would never actually do that if I were a humanoid trapped on a slave ship who just thawed a little girl from a block of ice! But this is a stupid text adventure from 1982 that responds to me attempting to fuck things with a response that I find hilarious! Plus the little monster wants to kill me! If we can't do terrible and depraved things to psychotic murder children in a fictional situation like this, I don't want to live!

I'm really beginning to find Fred disturbing and gross!

Moving on from that unfortunate digression, it's time to explore the second level of the alien ship with Fred, the horny android! Luckily for Fred, he's about to get his nut on. Maybe then he'll stop thinking about fucking freshly defrosted little murder girls.

You know what I'm about to type next, right?!


Oh, so now we're suddenly going to start referring to it as a "screwdriver"?!

The second level introduces a few new characters: the fuckbot, an android repairing his ship, a human strapped to a table, a barmandroid, and a hostile little prick of an alien who chases you around trying to shoot you in the face. The best way to deal with everybody you meet in this game aside from the barman is to kill them. Yes, you're only the hero of this story because the story is told from your point of view. You're actually a monster whose android sidekick constantly reminds you that, later, when you get home, you can fuck all the little girls you want. Your character is a real shining example of humanity in this one.

The little alien that tries to kill you sometimes does. It's completely random. And even if you kill him first, he'll return to take shots at you over and over again. While that doesn't affect the experience of a player using a Spectrum emulator in this day and age, I imagine it truly pissed off kids who had to reload the Goddamned game from cassette after every time they died.

The final puzzle in the game is a lift activated by three buttons. I don't think anything clues the player into what order to press the buttons to arrive at the control room where you can release the graviton beam but it didn't really matter. Using the only math I remember from calculus, I know that means there are only six combinations. Also maybe I learned factorials in Algebra. After pressing the button, you have thirty moves to escape because the button was apparently a combination anti-graviton and self-destruct mechanism. One of the other combinations on the lift gets you pretty close to your ship so even that wasn't much of a puzzle. In the end, I escaped with Fred the Android to continue pursuing our depraved machinations across the solar system.

What sort of adventure is Adventure D? NAMBLA Meeting of Mystery?

SCORES

Game Title: If the actual title is "Adventure C", then it's a rubbish title. But if it's "Ship of Doom", it's also a rubbish title. I would have called it "Fred and His Master Fuck the Solar System."
Puzzles: Most of the puzzles are easily solved due to the small amount of inventory objects you can find. I suppose realizing you needed to refer to the "sonic screwdriver" as a "sonic" was unfair but I somehow figured it out. After that it was just a matter of deflecting a beam of light with a torch and melting some laser bars with the fuckbot's vanity mirror and you were pretty much done!
Gameplay: This game is probably how most people familiar with text adventures of this era remember them. Sparse descriptions and a lot of guess work to figure out the correct "verb noun" combination to use inventory objects. Most of the rooms are described with one word that doesn't affect the game at all until you're in the "pit room" and you guess that maybe throwing the grappling hook you've made might work there. Also, murdering the poor android who just wanted to work on his ship to get a necessary object helped me realize my character was inherently an evil jerk and it wasn't just me and my suggestions that he fuck the little murder girl.
Graphics: None!
Concept: I don't think the concept was really thought through too much. If Paul Hollywood were judging this text adventure, he'd slice it in two and then poke the middle to show that it was still raw inside. I mean, it's a slave ship that captures your ship and the first room you enter upon boarding the slave ship is the reception room. The aliens are just all, "Welcome aboard, soon-to-be-slaves! Have a nice look around! Please don't thaw out the murder girl or release the madman strapped to the table. Unless you get off on strangulation! But then if you get off on strangulation, why not just visit the Android Pleasure Room? Fuckbot 2000 knows sixty-two ways of pleasuring her suitors!"
Fun Time: I think I beat this game in less than an hour. Most of that hour was enjoyable because of all the characters I met whom I could try and fuck.

The Labours of Hercules

The Labours of Hercules
By Terry Taylor
Published by Zenobi Software
Release Year: 1987
Version Played: ZX Spectrum

Having once been an eleven year old socially awkward extremely nerdy boy on the verge of becoming fat during junior high school, I should ease through this game! I first read the twelve labors of Hercules in sixth grade, possibly between reading Elfquest Book One and The Amityville Horror (if those haven't painted a thorough picture of the awesome kid I was, I was also reading Piers Anthony's Xanth books and his Incarnations of Immortality series. I was also just getting into Dungeons and Dragons! (And don't forget my interest in text adventure games!)). But I don't remember them all that clearly because that was a long time ago and I don't think Disney's Hercules remained too true to Hercules' story. Although if it had, would it have been the first Disney movie where the tragic family death scene that begins the film was caused by the star of the film?

Having not thought about them for several decades, here are my guesses as to the twelve labors (in totally random order):

1. Kill the hydra.
2. Skin a lion.
3. Tell some cranes to fuck off.
4. Clean some horse shit.
5. Fuck a bull.
6. Bake a perfect Genoise sponge.
7. Take Cerberus for a walk.
8. Don't rape anybody.
9. Punch a harpy.
10. Eat a golden apple.
11. Help Jason steal a sheep's skin.
12. Torture a stag.

Let's see how many I guessed correctly as I play . . . THE LABOURS OF HERCULES!

How the game begins:

Greek heroes out there with origin stories like this and it took over two thousand years before Gail Simone would come along and write "Women in Refrigerators"?!

How the fuck did Disney make a movie about this guy? What was the pitch meeting like?

Joe Haider: "Hey guys! Hear me out: Hercules the musical!"
First Disney Exec: "Hey! I've heard of that guy! Sounds great!"
Second Disney Exec: "Doesn't that guy kill his wife and children?"
Joe Haider: "But that's the beauty of it! Disney films always begin in tragedy! It's built in!"
First Disney Exec: "I can see the big murder musical number now!"
Second Disney Exec: "I don't think so. I mean, technically, Hercules is also a product of rape. So will that come into play as well?"
Third Disney Exec: "But if you think about it, was it really rape?"
Second Disney Exec: "You're fucking lucky this is 1992 with comments like that, you pervy dope."
Joe Haider: "Maybe it needs some tweaking. Get rid of the rape and the murder. Jam in a love story and maybe a sibling betrayal with Hercules as the pawn. Have him fight lots of monsters!"
First Disney Exec: "Look, how many of our viewers have ever read about Hercules? We can portray him however we want. As long as they've merely heard of him, they'll flock to the theaters!"
Second Disney Exec: "Can we fire this other guy? He's really creeping me out."
Third Disney Exec: *puts his penis away* "Wait. What? Is that not allowed anymore?"

Drunk, temperamental men really, really need you to believe in religion.

Hercules goes to the Oracle and is told to submit to Eurystheus, King of Mycenae, which makes me think Eurystheus spent a lot of money lobbying the Oracle at Delphi. "Send as many lost losers my way as you can and there's more drachma where that came from, baby!" It's like getting free slaves who feel they have to submit to your twisted machinations because it's their destiny!

Instead of one more page of introductory text that could have gotten Hercules started with his labors, the game begins outside the gates of Eurystheus's citadel. I hope the entire game isn't just trying to get an audience with the King of Mycenae! Even if it isn't, I hope I can solve all of the puzzles barring me from the audience so I can attempt the twelve labors. This is stressful! I spent like two theoretical pounds on this game!

If anybody is curious about my first three moves of this game, here you go:

I expected a pleasant olive smell not a "Phew!" Where the fuck have I been sticking that thing?!

Look, when you get a response like that, you have to pursue it, don't you? Figuring it was just an automated response to "smelling" anything, I decided to smell my finger and my balls. They both elicited the "Phew!" response which tells me, as Hercules, I'm a rank motherfucker who loves to finger his own asshole.

Also, this game might be racist.

Or would racist actually be my reaction: "Masturbation is Greek? I thought that was anal!"

Upon entering the gate, I realize this isn't even the gate to the citadel or castle or whatever. It's just the gate into the town of Mycenae! So now I have to waste time finding the castle before finding the king before telling him how the Oracle of Delphi sent me to him to provide free labor and before he, upon hearing that, acts surprised!

The royal throne room isn't hard to find and Eurystheus doesn't even feign surprise. I knew this whole Eurystheus/Delphic Oracle thing was a fucking scam.

The first labor: Bring Eurystheus the body of the lion of Nemea! Why? I don't know! I guess he's into hipster taxidermy.

Labor I: Skin a Lion.

After bumbling around the countryside for a bit because Hercules doesn't own a map, he arrives at the den of the Nemean Lion! Trying to kill it simply results in Hercules getting mauled. Some demi-god! Being that there are items littered all over the landscape which might possibly help in this situation, I'm beginning to think this is less a game filled with puzzles and more a quiz to make sure you've done the reading.

So, I decide to do the reading. I thought Hercules defeated the lion by wrestling it while naked but that didn't work. I mean, it didn't work to defeat the lion. It did work to get me aroused! But then I remembered I'm not a furry and stopped being aroused rather quickly. So I checked out Wikipedia which was no help at all because it said, "Hercules eventually shoots it in the unarmored mouth with an arrow!" Oh, does he now? This game would beg to differ! Fucking Wikipedia. Nobody gets any smarter by relying on a bunch of self-appointed know-it-all nerds in charge of keeping all of the facts straight. So instead, I turned to GreekMythology.com to discover Hercules strangled the lion to death. So I did that! Stupid lion!

Was this cheating? This feels like cheating! But I guess it's the nature of this game. Maybe like the jerk who wrote the Three Musketeers game to honor Dumas, Terry Taylor wrote this game to honor the Greeks. It's not like I'm going to come up with the exact way Hercules solved all of these problems without rereading the myth. I'm not as creative as an Ancient Greek storyteller! The only one I remember is where he diverts the river through the stables to clean them. Oh, and using fire to defeat the hydra.

Upon delivery of the Nemean Lion, Eurystheus doesn't act impressed at all. He just gives me my second labor: defeat the hydra!

Labor II: Kill the Hydra.

This one should be easy! I know I have to cut off its heads while my sidekick cauterizes the neck so that more heads don't sprout out of it! But I don't have a sidekick so I'll probably just cauterize the wounds myself. The only problem is that I can't get the hydra out of its lair where I'll have room to decapitate it nine times. So it's time to do my reading!

Trusting Wikipedia this time, I discover that Hercules fired flaming arrows into the hydra's cave to lure it out. No problem! I have access to fire and arrows! This will be a piece of Greek cake!

Except I guess the Greek's don't have cake because fuck if I can figure out how to shoot a flaming arrow into the cave of the hydra to lure it out. I guess I'll have to do more reading! Except this time, it will be the solution to this puzzle!

Hercules is apparently too incompetent to ignite anything except a rag tied to an arrow. Stupid me trying to light rags and arrows separately to cause a fire to force the hydra from the cave when what I needed to do was "tie rag" to the arrow before Hercules could figure out how to light it. I'm such an idiot!

After forcing the hydra from the lair, it's a simple matter of cutting off its heads, cauterizing the neck wounds, dipping the remaining arrows in the hydra's blood (because I remember that bit!), and fucking off back to Mycenae.

To complete the task, you have to approach King Eurystheus and type "give head." Fuck! If I knew the labor could be accomplished that easily, I wouldn't have bothered with the hydra!

Labor III: Torture a Stag.

First thing I try when the King gives me this labor is "give head" but the game responds "That is not possible!" I guess Hercules ends his blow jobs by biting off the recipient's penis.

Finding the stag is easy enough. I just mapped the forest maze and sat in a tree until it appeared. But how did Hercules capture it?!

With a net, of course! Good thing I already mapped the entire game so I know where the net is. I drop the net on the stag, tie it up, and take it back to Artemis's temple. Because Eurystheus isn't as huge a douche in this game as he is in the myth.

Labor IV: Bake a Perfect Genoise Sponge Capture a Boar

How many innocent creatures did Hercules have to fuck up to repent for killing a few innocent humans? Isn't this just like mankind?! I mean, maybe the hydra wasn't exactly innocent but can the hydra help the way it was made? It was born of monsters so it was just being true to its nature by being gross and poisonous and deadly. And the Nemean Lion probably mauled a careless jogger in the Nemean countryside, so of course it had to be put down. That's the Law of the Edge of Suburbia! Mankind can encroach on nature but fuck if nature can encroach on mankind! Stupid animals! Although I bet it's only a matter of a few years before the raccoons come riding into the suburbs on the backs of mountain lions whipping opossums around their heads like the scariest fucking flails in history.

Since I'm mostly just finding the location to complete the next labor and then reading about that labor online and then reading the solution to the puzzle because I'm too stupid to figure out how to implement the solution in the game, why am I not just following the walkthrough step by step? I can just pretend like I'm figuring them out and save a lot of time! Like how I caught the stag! Nobody knew I couldn't figure out how to net the stag on my own!

After declaring that I'll just the walkthrough, I manage to capture the boar without even reading about Hercules's fourth labor! Not that anybody will believe me since I just declared I could cheat and nobody will ever know! Stupid past me putting doubt into the accomplishments of future me. What an asshole.

Labor V: Clean Some Horse Shit.

What the fuck kind of labor is this?! I guess Eurystheus and Hera have decided Hercules can't be killed and now they just want to humiliate him.

Being that I remembered how this was done, it's the easiest of the tasks. I mean, I knew how the hydra was to be killed and I couldn't figure that one out, so maybe I'm not as smart as I want people to believe I am.

Labor VI: Tell Some Cranes to Fuck Off.

Oh come on! This was the easiest labor yet! I just made some noise and shot the dumb birds full of poison arrows! I don't think King Eurystheus is trying anymore. Also, more poor animals have just suffered for my repentance. At least cleaning the stables was a reasonable chore for a person trying to make amends. It was hard work, helped out the community, and maybe taught Hercules a bit of humbleness. Except Hercules didn't actually do the labor he was supposed to and instead changed the local environment by diverting a river, almost certainly, causing a lot of fucking problems for the surrounding ecosystem and communities.

I don't think Hercules is actually repentant.

I just realized this was the first twelve step program.

Labor VII: Fuck a Bull.

Doesn't everybody?

To fuck the bull, Hercules had to navigate the ocean and make his way through the labyrinth. After that, I just played some sweet music for the bull to get it in the mood and it became docile (which I think must be a synonym for "down to fuck").

I can't believe how easy these got once I insisted I was going to cheat! I haven't even Googled any of Hercules's labors since the Stag!

Labor VIII: Punch a Harpy Steal Diomedes' Beautiful Mare

I think Eurystheus has an addiction to fucking livestock. Now I'm wondering what the hell he's doing to that hydra head behind closed doors.

Hercules has been tasked to complete these labors to repent for murdering his wife and children. To complete this labor, he murders Diomedes and feeds Diomedes to his own man-eating mare. How many labors is Hercules going to have to complete to redeem himself of this new murderous deed?!

Labor IX: Don't Rape Anybody Steal Hippolyta's Girdle.

Is it actually funny that somebody with "hippo" in their name wears a girdle or am I just stupidly immature?

That was a rhetorical question! Obviously it's hilarious.

My guess is that the wine and cake are going to come into play during this chore! Also some fucking!

I meant consensually!

Well one of my guesses as to Hercules' labors was to not rape anybody, so I think this must be the labor I was thinking of.

Reading up on this myth didn't help solve the problem at all. I kept trying to lure Hippolyta into her bedroom with wine and cake and my cock but she just wasn't interested in any of it. Like, who isn't interested in cock? I mean cake!

The solution to this puzzle, which nobody would have ever gotten correct in a million years, is to leave the Amazon village and wait until night falls. I tried waiting inside Hippolyta's hut and inside her bedroom but that didn't work. So why the fuck would I think night would fall immediately if I wandered a little ways out of the village to wait? Fuck you, Terry Taylor! I knew it was only a matter of time before you completely betrayed me! I might not have guessed some of your earlier bullshit (like typing "tie rag" to prepare an arrow to be lit. At least I can somewhat conceive of having come up with that if I were twelve years old and didn't mind this game lying around unsolved for months while I occasionally dipped back in to try new things) but this solution was fucking ridiculous. You could at least let me wait creepily underneath Hippolyta's bed! Now that would have been a reasonable solution!

Labor X: Help Jason Steal a Sheep's Skin Steal Geryon's Prize Ox.

More fucking theft! Let's hope I can accomplish it without killing Geryon but I'm not fucking holding my breath.

Who's the real monster in this story?!

So now I'm back to consulting the walkthrough because the in-game help system is no help at all. Having created this game before the Internet existed, I guess Terry thought the only book on Hercules was whichever one he had read before writing this game. So whenever you type "help," the game says, "Brush up on your mythology!" And I respond, jauntily and full of pep, "Okay!" Then I delve into the Internet and discover seventeen different versions of the Hercules myth that all suggest he did something different. Most of the myths have Hercules killing Geryon with the poison-tipped arrows so it's a good thing I hadn't read the myth before deciding to kill Geryon with the trident. And none of the myths have Hercules catch the ox in the way the game does. Of course, the game does give a more direct hint in this case. I'm really thinking about other labors like getting the girdle from Hippolyta. "Brush up on your mythology!" the game says as I read all seventeen different versions, none of which are "Hercules hid outside Hippolyta's bedroom until she fell asleep and then sleep-creeped all up in her shit to remove the girdle and run awkwardly back to his ship with a huge boner."

Anyway, I got the stupid ox for Eurystheus to fuck. Next!

Labor XI: Eat a Golden Apple.

The apple really is solid gold so Hercules refuses to eat it. It's not like that would be much harder than most of his other labors. Gold is a pretty soft metal, you super strong freak of nature!

I don't know why Eurystheus wants the golden apple since he's rich as fuck. I guess it's one of those rich people things. He just has to have one because no other rich dudes have one. Or it's nature's perfect butt plug.

Hercules travels to the end of the world, kills a dragon, and drinks from a mysterious pool which he'll probably regret in the endgame causing me to restart the whole stupid adventure from the beginning. Oh well. Next!

Labor XII: Take Cerberus for a Walk.

To successfully capture Cerberus, Hercules has to enable an alcoholic which, I suppose, isn't the worst thing he's done so far. He also has to feed Cerberus cake which doesn't make any sense, does it? Was that in one of the legends? Or is it common knowledge that dogs fall asleep after eating cake? I'm beginning to feel Terry is just taking the piss.

Once Eurystheus gets a close up view of Cerberus, he becomes too terrified to fuck it. He forces Hercules to take it back to Hades. Once that's done, Hercules has atoned for killing his wife and children! Now everybody can live happily ever after! Except for Megara. And Hercules' children. And Geryon. And Diomedes. And the Stymphalian birds. And the Nemean Lion. And the Lernean Hydra. And Hippolyta (I mean, not in this version. But a good number of versions have her dying at Hercules' hands).

It was all worth it in the end!

SCORES

Game Title: Straight to the point. Every twelve year old nerd knew exactly what they were soon to be about.
Puzzles: What's weird is that the puzzles that followed the myth nearly exact were the easiest puzzles to solve. They were logical and straightforward even if you didn't know the myth. But too often, the "help" command directed you to brush up on the myth which only then confused the puzzle. Take getting a ferry ride from Charon as an example. In the myth, Hercules doesn't pay. He either sneaks on or intimidates the Ferryman (although I didn't read every fucking version, so maybe he does pay in the one version Terry Fucking Taylor based this game on). So when the game says, "Brush up on your mythology," I brushed up on my mythology and spent way too long trying to force Charon to let me cross. In the end, you actually need to sell some wine to a drunk centaur to get the coins to pay the fare! On the whole, I wouldn't say any of the puzzles were more unfair than any other late 80s/early 90s adventure game that needed a way to extend the life of a game with no replay value.
Gameplay: Most text adventures have mazes. Most of the mazes are a simple matter of using inventory tricks to map. This game has several different mazes with various methods of making them more difficult. In this single moment of my life where I feel charitable, I'll say that I appreciated the effort. One maze was made tougher by having a movement limit before you die (the best and most interesting one by far. I enjoyed mapping it (which is probably a first for a text adventure maze)). One maze was on the ocean so you couldn't drop items to indicate which rooms you had been in (this one I never mapped and just navigated it by feel since most of the islands lay in different compass directions. I'm still surprised, without mapping, that I found all the different islands). And one maze had you find an important item well before you find the central location which might make players think they'd searched the entire place. For a game that had you travel to a wide variety of places to do all twelve tasks, it was handled elegantly.
Graphics: This was a pure text adventure. The only graphics were when you died and the screen flipped out in concentric squares of various colors.
Concept: Come on! Any young nerd would have enjoyed taking on the role of a guy who murdered his wife and children and then turned to religion to make him feel better about it!
Fun Time: I keep forgetting to keep track of how many hours I spend on these games. Let's just say I spent too much time on this one, an hour or two a day over the course of a week. I really should have just used the walkthrough!

King Solomon's Mines

King Solomon's Mines
By Brian J. Betts
Published by Mountain Valley Software
Release Year: Nineteen Eighty Something
Version Played: Commodore 64

I couldn't find any documentation on this game so I'll just have to dive in blind having no idea what I'm doing. So I'll be in the perfect state of mind to role play a text adventure protagonist. While searching for box cover art and a manual, I did learn a little about the publisher, Mountain Valley Software. It's all anecdotal but those are the best kinds of facts, right?! This was my favorite fact about Mountain Valley Software from the website Alphaworks:

"The main thing that makes [Mountain Valley Software] adventure games so good is that they are easy to solve, you won't find yourself spending months on end trying to crack these adventures."

My first reaction was: "Oh Alphaworks! Using a comma where you need a semicolon?!" My less judgmental reaction (but still judgmental!) was, "Who spent months on end trying to crack a shitty 80s text adventure?" I understand spending a lot of time on an Infocom game because that Shakespearean jizz was full of puzzles that mostly made sense. Just about every other text adventure took place in a jungle (or traveling to a jungle) and 95% of all puzzles involved examining the right thing or searching in the right place to find the obvious item to use on the thing barring forward progress. They mostly all suck (which doesn't say much about my character and personality that I actually enjoy playing these stupid fucking wastes of time). I suppose "spending months on end trying to crack" an adventure really just means playing an adventure game for ten minutes before shoving it angrily on the shelf where it would sit for three more weeks before you saw your sibling had found it and somehow gotten past the point you were stuck, after which you went down into the basement and rocked in a dark corner for forty five minutes.

I may have needed to use a semicolon somewhere in that previous mess of a paragraph.

Having no documentation means having no backstory. But do I need backstory? Of course I don't! I'll just pretend I'm another amnesiac time traveler with zero executive function and a desperate need for a duffel bag.

This is how the game starts. And no, my first move was not to shove the beads in my ass. That was my second move after picking them up.

Oh. And this is how the game ends:

I never did get the beads shoved up there.

The Alphaworks website was exactly right. I didn't spend any months at all cracking this adventure. I don't think I even spent a full hour on it! I wonder how much they had the gall to sell this game for?

And that's the problem with 80s text adventures right there! If it's unreasonably difficult due to nasty tricks by the writer like accepting only one obscure verb when multiple synonyms should work, or designing a seemingly dead end area where the solution to the final puzzle is hidden in a direction that's a primary intercardinal direction after the game has taught you through example after example during the main part that the game only accepts cardinal directions, or creating a wisdom system that won't let you complete the final puzzle unless you've done exactly everything right in a way that's more right than the official solution that came with the game, or the documentation creates the verb "lin" for "look inside" which says (to me!) that the parser only accepts two words (or why the need for such a lame creation?) when you have to eventually "look under trolley" at some point (so why not create the verb "lun"?!), I'm going to criticize the shit out of the game and point out how it's the worst garbage in the universe and I'm worse than that for willingly playing the stupid piece of shit. Or it's going to be so easy and over with in an hour or less, I'm going to be pissed off over how much money I spent on a game that has no replay value! Thankfully, the Internet has established a practically God-given right to play these games for free without compensating anybody for their work! So I don't mind when I actually play an easy-to-beat game!

That's about it for praising the game though. "It was beatable! -- Grunion Guy." Slap that on the back of the box that I can't find any evidence of! But the worst offense in this game isn't that you trade anal beads with some pygmies to get the axe they probably depend on to live in the jungle. No, the worst offense is one that many text adventure games of the day perpetrated on young, unsuspecting, dull-witted boys and girls: the titular location isn't actually part of the game! These fucking adventure games loved to proclaim "KING SOLOMON'S MINES!" or "AZTEC ADVENTURE!" or "AZTEC ADVENTURE II!" or "FRANKIE GOES TO JUPITER!" (fucking Jupiter man! Doesn't that sound super exciting! Well fuck you! Because what it actually is is searching a crashed spaceship to rebuild your stupid Commodore 64 computer, sucker!). The covers were exciting paintings showing some archaeologist or astronaut or colonial capitalist tomb robber having the greatest adventure as they discover treasure after alien treasure! And then the game usually starts in a fucking living room somewhere with the parser saying, "Oh boy! Time to get to Aztecipiter's Mine!" So the game becomes mostly about preparing for your journey, the troubles you have on the journey, and your eventual arrival at the exciting place the game promised where you discover nothing but the end screen. "YOU FOUND THE PLACE YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO BE ADVENTURING! GOOD JOB, STUPID!"

Being that I have no cover art or documentation for this game, it might be unfair to label it one of those games. It might have been completely honest about the mission. "Find King Solomon's Mines but don't think you'll be adventuring in them! Oh no! You know how the journey is like 80% about the journey and 15% about the destination and 5% trying not to eventually hate your travelling companions? Well this journey is 100% about the journey! So, like, you know, 20% more than usual! Fuck the destination. Only idiots care about where they're headed."

Oh wait! I forgot I had more praise! This game doesn't even understand the verbs "examine" or "search" so it was truly a unique experience! Although most of the "search or examine" puzzles were just replaced by "look or dig" puzzles. I should probably put quotation marks around the word "puzzles" too but I didn't want to overuse them more than I already have. You still had to move the occasional thing to find the occasional other thing though. So, really, the puzzles were still about locating the hidden thing you needed that wasn't too terribly hidden and extremely obvious where to use after you found it. Probably the toughest puzzle in the game was having to look in the box twice to find the bullets under the fish. That one had me stumped for like three minutes.

SCORES

Game Title: Misleading. You're in King Solomon's Mines for maybe two rooms. And you don't even get a picture of the treasure!
Puzzles: You feed things, kill things, dig for stuff, move stuff, and look at stuff. I guess you use some clues to get through the desert areas. But that's not solving a puzzle. That's following directions.
Gameplay: The user interface was pleasant. The map was fairly linear so the solution to each puzzle was fairly obvious.
Graphics: Surprisingly effective for the limiting pixel sizes. But then the Commodore 64 was the computer to beat when it came to graphics for many years.
Concept: A favorite among interactive fiction writers. Why write a story that can take place in an exciting location when it can take place on the journey to that location!
Fun Time: About an hour. It never grew old and the art was cute to look at. I particularly liked the skeleton that I kept thinking was a flashlight.

Nightwing

Nightwing
By Clive Wilson
Published by Zenobi Software
Release Year: 1989
Version Played: ZX Spectrum

The story of Nightwing begins on the single sheet of instructions that probably came wrapped around the cassette tape and held on by a thin rubber band. I'm not sure if the story would make less sense if you didn't have the instruction sheet since the story told in the instructions makes zero sense.

Who is the protagonist? I guess it's just you being interrupted in your daily routine of gobbling Pop Tarts and furtively masturbating every chance you get.

So instead of beginning the game saying, "You awaken in the far distant future confused and covered in Pop Tart crumbs and love juice," Clive Wilson thought it would be more exciting to have a giant time traveling bird transport you to the end of time? Okay, no, I see that. It is more exciting. But that gigantic bird had better be a significant part of the story since it's probably the Nightwing.

At least being transported to the future provides the suspension of disbelief needed to keep me from complaining about how my character doesn't know what a distorter is or how to properly wield a Phasex. My first thought was that it went up my butt except that merely proved to be a minor distraction.

I guess my character isn't really into it.

Amnesia is the most common text adventure method of providing suspension of disbelief to understand why the protagonist is such a complete idiot. I suppose the protagonist can have amnesia in this game as well. They almost certainly have schizophrenia. I mean, transported to the future by a gigantic bird? Am I supposed to believe the giant bird represents aliens and the unknown? What is this, Twin Peaks?

Oh man. I wonder how many amateur text adventure games have been created based on Twin Peaks?! I need to dig up those lost gems!

Early on, I see Clive's big trick to make the game more difficult. He sections off areas so that once you move on, you can't return. So if you didn't happen to search the tableau in the first room before heading down the elevator, you're fucked because how are you going to distort stuff later without the distorter?! Not that any seasoned text adventure player would see a tableau and not think, "Fuck. I have to not misspell that when I try to examine it?!" On the second level, you have to make sure to find the power pack up the droidkin's stovepipe before you read the secret scroll that somehow calls the elevator back to the floor you're on.

Hmm. Maybe this is Twin Peaks.

The most difficult part of games like these other than trying to remember to "search," "examine," "move," and "search" again because did I try that yet? is trying to picture the objects you find lying around the environment. I mean, what am I supposed to assume a "distorter" does when all I'm told is "this is a lever shaped unit. One end seems to contain electronic contacts." Okay, so I should probably plug it into something? But what? A toaster? A toilet? Something more ridiculous than a toaster or a toilet but really vulgar? Oh! Like a fuck machine! I know I'm just a traveler from the past with no sense of memory and a condition that makes me think giant birds can deliver me to the future but I could use a little help here with the descriptions. If the character knows the object is called a "distorter," shouldn't the character also know what a fucking distorter does?!

Through way too much trial and error, I eventually discover the distorter attaches to the teleporter. And not only does the teleporter need to be turned on (which is obvious because it has a switch), the distorter must also be turned on (which isn't obvious because it doesn't have a switch or a button or any indication that it should be turned on). Once the teleporter is activated, you can "enter the teleporter" to discover the next clue.

It's becoming less Twin Peaks and more Schoolhouse Rock.

And then I got stuck. Back in the pre-Internet days, if you got stuck on a text adventure, you had no quick recourse to figuring out what to do next. You could either let your subconscious percolate on the problem or, if you were a huge nerd with no friends, you'd probably write a letter to Crash or Questbusters to get a clue on how to proceed. I once called the Sir-Tech tipline for the only clue I needed to beat Wizardry IV and I still hate myself for giving in to the compulsion. Especially since it was the part where you needed Werdna's ancient battle cry (or something) and I tried "Trebor Sucks" because that's what I remember it being. I'd forgotten it was "Trebor Sux." So because I knew how to spell, I now live with the shame of an asterisked "Beat Wizardry IV" as my life's biggest accomplishment. I hate myself for just telling this story! Fucking failure. No wonder I brought shame to my family.

That aside made me think about this aside: the CRPG Addict wrote this in his recent summary of Wizardry VII (which I fucking beat without clues! Fuck you, Sir-Tech tipline!): "Too much authorial presence breaks the fundamental illusion of a game, book, or even a blog. I've run afoul of this myself. Audiences want to be able to take what they read seriously, authoritatively, and they can't if they feel that someone ridiculous is feeding them the story." I read that and I've never felt more seen! He was definitely referencing me, right?!

The point I was beginning to make before my authorial presence whipped its dick into your face was this: how should I treat being stuck on a game on this blog? Do I immediately get hints so I can simply close out the review? Most of these old games don't have what Infocom (or most semi-intelligent people) would call "puzzles," so it's not like I can sit on the game while my mind thinks about what to do next. I almost certainly have simply missed "searching" or "examining" or "moving" the right thing. In this case, I'm fairly certain I know what I should be doing next but it's become a guess the verb situation where I just can't figure out exactly what Clive Wilson wants me to type.

My main concern is that if I set the precedent to dive right into the clues, I'll never truly beat any of these old games. But on the other and more rational hand, what the fuck makes me think it's possible to beat any of these old games without at least one hint?! Back in the frontier days of text adventure games, they were designed to pad play time so the purchaser felt like they were getting their money's worth. But is any game really worth even a few pounds if it mostly just took ten minutes to beat if you ignore the two weeks you spent not realizing that you could "frisk broom" to discover the key you needed?! Fuck you, Scott Adams' Mission Impossible!

Yes, I have grudges. So many grudges.

Fine. I won't look up a clue just yet. First, I'll systematically go back through every location to search, examine, move, frisk, poke, and molest every single thing. I feel like I've already done this multiple times so I guess I'm insane, or at least I hate myself enough to ignore the constantly dwindling good years I have left in my life. Somehow, I'll get to the point where I stop that mad droidkin from locking me in the lounge, probably by using the scrambler I can't figure out how to fucking use! Or else I'll find the key to the door it locks in some obscure place that makes no sense and wasn't even identified in the room description!

You know what? Not fine! I don't have any daddy issues driving me to succeed at everything I do! Besides, what daddy would be proud of his middle aged son successfully completing an unfair 80s text adventure game without using any hints?! Maybe a super drunk daddy which means I'm thirty years too late to make mine proud by accomplishing this feat! I'm doing it. I'm going to look at the hints! I don't care that I'll be kicking myself for weeks when I discover how easy the solution was! That just means I'll get to sublimate my feelings by eating loads and loads of Christmas cookies!

Okay, I've read the solution for the garden level and discovered I haven't missed anything there! That's a good thing! That means I have the means to solve the problem on the next level where I'm stuck! And now I've read the solution to why I was stuck and I want to kill myself because it was basically the exact same solution to not dying in the elevator when travelling from the first level to this level. Always remember to shut down extraneous operations you've initiated on every level, you stupid fucking idiot! Gah! It was so simple!

And yet nothing is as simple as it would seem in this fucking rigged piece of shit blasphemy masquerading as a computer game. Because I'll tell you a little something Clive Wilson just taught me from playing his computer game for a fair number of hours: Clive Wilson is a reprehensible cunt who can't fucking program a computer game correctly. Fuck you, Clive Wilson! I couldn't even beat your game following Dorothy Millard's walkthrough exactly! No matter what I did, I couldn't get to the final puzzle with enough wisdom to be allowed to take the final test! How the fuck does that happen?! I have a feeling Dorothy Millard never even beat this game which, honestly, makes me think less of Dorothy Millard, may she rest in peace! I didn't want to think less of Dorothy, Clive! See what you made me do?! She was an interactive fiction bastion of purity and now I'm doubting her text adventure sainthood because your game is unbeatable using her walkthrough! And her walkthrough is just a plagiarized version of the walkthrough that came with the game! How could you, Dorothy?! You were the one pure bright spot in Interactive Fiction (aside from Emily Short) and your reputation has been sullied by this demon from the Stygian depths! Fucking Clive Wilson. If you were on The Great British Bake-off, I would root for you to have a soggy bottom every fucking time!

Go to hell, you prick!

SCORES

Game Title: Makes no fucking sense. Stupid motherfucking title by a stupid motherfucker.
Puzzles: Mostly all search until you have the right items type or turn off that thing you needed on before you die from turning the thing on. Also a Wisdom Limit that breaks the game. Idiot.
Gameplay: Just like every other early text adventure. So redundant, rote, and boring that it increases my existential anxiety even though I began playing the game to ignore that.
Graphics: Average. Although when a room doesn't have a graphic, it shows that fucking cursed Wisdom Bar that haunts you until you wouldn't mind seeing the end of the world, just to know Clive got his.
Concept: Acceptable. Except for the bird. What the fuck, dude?
Fun Time: If you include the anticipation I always feel before embarking on another mysterious text adventure, I'd say forty seconds.

The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers
Published by Computer Novels
Release Year: 1986
Version Played: Commodore 64

The Three Musketeers was first published in 1844 but not as a computer game. People had to be bored with the regular book for at least another 150 years before they could be bored by this version. I couldn't find any of the documentation which may or may not have come with the game. I can only hope that it came with something because as it stands, the story is nearly incomprehensible. Perhaps you really, really, really need to be familiar with the book. But I was hoping that a game from a company called Computer Novels would actually feel somewhat like a novel. Or at least tell a comprehensible story. Because who wants to read a whole book before enjoying a lousy computer game?

The game is in the Choose Your Own Adventure style which means it probably isn't technically a text adventure. At least you don't need a walkthrough to beat it. Especially with today's emulators where you can quick save before every decision and then play out each possibility. Some of the decisions are timed although it hardly affects gameplay at all. Many of the choices end in either success or death, so you don't have to worry about a wrong choice haunting you later on in the game. One particular ending came about because I told a carriage driver he would get extra money if he got me to my destination quickly. We hadn't even left yet when he realized I had no money and killed me. What a jerk!

Perhaps whoever decided on this project thought that a game with the Three Musketeers would be packed full of action and excitement, even if it was just words. But that person was wrong! This game is so dull! You spend the first chapter recruiting the Three Musketeers for a mission to deliver a letter. You never know why you need to deliver this letter. You never know why the Cardinal is SO MEAN! But you do it anyway and you make it sound exciting so your buddies will come with you and off you go, excited by the prospect of sword fights and whatever other exciting things the Three Musketeers got up to. Making nougat?

The next chapter consists of a few decisions where you leave behind all of the Three Musketeers to never be seen again (until the super secret ending!). And to pad out your travels to England, you encounter the dumbest maze in text adventure history. It's just an 8 x 8 grid with no tricks at all. If you go east, you can always return to the previous location by going west! You just map it out and that's that. And why a Computer Novel needed a maze is a question I'm not capable of answering. I would have had more trouble if they'd forced me to read a few pages of the actual novel.

So now, by Chapter Three, you've reached England and lost all the Musketeers. In England, you just travel in a bunch of different directions until the Duke tells you what to do in Chapter Four.

And then Chapter Four comes along and all it is is traveling south and guessing which person you meet gets which item! Sure, there are clues to the way the Duke described them and the way the people answer the door. But with the emulator's quick save, I wasn't paying attention at all.

And, Spoiler Alert, you finally save the Queen somehow from some MEAN (no, not evil or ruthless or ingenious or sadistic. MEAN!) plan by the Cardinal. The game also describes an ambush where you're fired upon by guns as MEAN.

The game is riddled with spelling and grammar errors. The best parts of the game were the moments I ran into some horribly mangled word or a catastrophic turn of phrase. What a special way to honor a beloved author!

Speaking of honoring the author, the last screen of the game says, "This game is dedicated to Alexandre Dumas (1803-1870). May the memory of him live on through this program." Really? It's through this shitty little program that makes no sense and isn't any fun that you hope his memory will be kept alive? Yeah, forget the actual books. Too long! And they're probably filled with lots of intrigue and action and excitement! Just like this game isn't!

SCORES

Game Title: It's literature! When has that been fun?
Puzzles: If only there had been some.
Gameplay: Boring.
Graphics: Perfect for this concept.
Concept: Horrible.
Fun Time: Aside from laughing at the game's mistakes, not much.

(A version of this review was published on Places & Predators like a decade ago. Get used to some old material since this is the site I want all of these to be archived!)