Enchanter

Enchanter
By Dave Lebling and Marc Blank
Published by Infocom
Release Year: 1983
Version Played: Apple IIe

I played Enchanter over thirty years ago and did not beat it. But I also owned The Big Book of Adventure Games by Kim Schuette. I knew I would never play most of the games listed within the book but I longed for many of them. I read the descriptions of the games listed in this book (and sometimes the solutions!) as if they were a new fantasy novel by Terry Brooks. Not that I still await fantasy novels or any kind of novels at all by Terry Brooks. But I was a stupid kid back then and reading thirty page chapters describing a few elves hiking through a forest was, somehow, my cup of fucking tea. One of the solutions listed in this book was for Enchanter and I'm sure I eventually broke down and used it to get by all of the puzzles that had me stumped (which were probably about 75% of them). So I'm replaying this game knowing that I once used a walkthrough to solve some of its puzzles even if I don't remember anything about the game except that there's a turtle. Having this information will not stop me from proclaiming I'm a genius if I manage to get all 400 points without revisiting Kim's book (which I don't still own but I can still access at the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History). I'm banking on my old person memory helping to make this seem like a brand new experience!

Charlatan
The Council of Elders in the Guild of Enchanters has sent me, a lowly Charlatan, into the lair of the enemy and I'm totally not bitter about it at all. Their argument that I won't attract the evil sorcerer Krill's malevolent attention because I'm a piece of magic shit didn't hurt my feelings one bit. I absolutely respect their authority and want to make them proud and it doesn't have anything to do with my lack of a father figure in my early years. But mostly I just hope to get rich like my cousin who explored the Great Underground Empire! Here I come, treasures!

Hopefully the Council of Elders can ignore how I BLORBed myself on the second turn and we can move on to ending the wicked reign of the vile Sorcerer Krill without ever mentioning it.

I don't like to criticize the Council of Elders because I don't want to live the rest of my life as a toad but what kind of sorcerous douchebags send an apprentice wizard out on a dangerous mission with just his spellbook? The entire beginning of this game is foraging for food and water so that I don't die of thirst or hunger before I die from Krill's lightning bolt or fireball. At least start me off with the BERZIO spell, you tightwads!

After loading up on supplies and learning the REZROV spell from some old crone in a deserted village, I REZROV my way into the castle. As I do so, Krill probes my mind. But sensing nothing but incompetence and a teetering house of anxiety built on a crumbling foundation of Impostor Syndrome, he shrugs his shoulders and returns to his dark work. Speaking of dark work, I FROTZ my battered brass lantern so that I won't be eaten by a Grue.

While stumbling around the castle, I discovered a beautiful jeweled egg that could be opened. Not by somebody as moronic and clumsy as me of course! So I just smashed it open to discover a damaged scroll inside. And because magic can solve any problem, I simply cast KREBF (which I found on a scroll just outside the castle) on the egg and the scroll, fixing them both. I'm perplexed that the KREBF spell wasn't the first spell taught to me by the Council of Elders, seeing as how I fuck up everything I touch.

For those uninitiated with magic, here are what some of the spells I mentioned earlier do.

Parlor Magician
After discovering the ZIFMIA scroll by KREBFing it and the egg, I found I was no longer a Charlatan! I was growing as an enchanter! Soon, I'd be powerful enough to be probed by my father and he'd have to acknowledge me! I mean Krill. Krill will have to acknowledge me.

My main goal as a Parlor Magician was to grow my book of spells. After adding the EXEX spell (make things move with greater speed) and the VAXUM spell (make a hostile creature your friend), I decided I had enough spells to solve another problem: a door so well guarded by magical creatures that I had no hope of ever getting through it. See, I had a dream about an idiot who was too dumb to see the illusions on the door and thus was safe from harm. And my cousin, the treasure hunting jerk exploring The Great Underground Kingdom, was just the dolt to open that door! I had seen him previously in a large mirrored hallway so all I had to do was ZIFMIA him, VAXUM him, and lure him to the door by showing him my beautiful jeweled egg! Then by motioning to the door, the moron would simply walk right past the danger, saving me the trouble of disenchanting the illusion before I could get through the door.

And with that accomplished, I was stronger than ever before! I was a Novice!

Novice Enchanter
At this point, I simply lost track of when I went up a rank which means I'll be fudging these headers. After becoming a novice, I think I helped give meaning to the life of some stupid turtle when I allowed him to help me find a powerful scroll (not the powerful scroll. Just a powerful scroll!). I thanked him like all good and decent people would do but I don't think I scored any points for thanking him. That was a missed opportunity to really confuse people by allowing them to win the game with 395 out of 400 points because they were rude and didn't thank the turtle. Speaking of winning with only 395 points out of 400, I have something to admit when I get to the end of this...review? Um, what do I call this thing where I sort of discuss the game but also sort of just act like it's a story I'm writing but then also tell stories about my personal life that nobody actually wants to hear?

Intermediate Enchanter
I probably leveled up after helping the turtle. It makes sense since you get points simply for eating and drinking in this game. I figured I was powerful enough to steal the powerful scroll (the actual powerful scroll!) from The Terror's weird lair at this point. So I found my idiot cousin and forced him to give me the map and pencil he'd taken earlier because he's a greedy dick. Using the magic map and magic pencil, I freed The Terror from his cell by drawing a line on the map but then trapped him again by erasing some other lines. Then I stole his scroll and he was super pissed. But I was probably a real Enchanter at that point!

Enchanter
I'd love to say that I became an Enchanter because I'm such a huge genius but in reality, I think I mostly remembered the solutions to a bunch of the puzzles in this game as I stumbled upon the items that could help solve those puzzles. That being said, the only part of the game I mapped was The Terror's prison maze so I easily recognized it when I found the map. And since the pencil is found with the map, it wasn't that much of a leap to figure out what to do. I also remembered what to do with the turtle as soon as I attempted to get the brittle scroll and was hit by a spear trap. Plus once I found the ZIFMIA spell and realized I had to summon a being, I knew I had to summon the adventurer to help with something. It wasn't until I had the dream of the simple guy opening the plain door that I figured out how to use him though. I also knew I had to memorize a spell or two for the next puzzle I was going to tackle: surviving getting sacrificed. That one was easy because the OZMOO spell tells you that it's the solution by being a spell that allows you to survive an unnatural death. I'm not sure if I needed to EXEX myself to do all the moves before getting sacrificed again but I did it anyway.

With that accomplished, I now had a sharp sacrificial dagger to cut the ropes on the jeweled box that enabled me to get another scroll I needed! I don't remember what scroll that was because at this point I was really flying through the game and didn't want to stop to write about it. I'm writing this a day or two later because I simply assumed my memory would be up to the task of recounting the story accurately. This won't be the last time an assumption has made a fool out of me! Although I think it was the MELBOR spell that protected me from evil beings. It makes sense because you need it to get to the final puzzle where you face Krill. If you're not protected, I think you just keep getting caught by hairy jerks whenever you enter Krill's tower.

Oh yeah! I also ranked up again! Probably!

Master Enchanter
Finally, I had everything I needed to defeat Krill! I KULCADed his illusory staircase, IZYUKed myself so I didn't fall into the bottomless pit, and headed into his evil lair with all the correct spells memorized to defeat him! Obviously I couldn't know beforehand what spells to use because I'm an enchanter and not a psychic. So I had to die a few times before I figured it out. Also I had to realize I didn't yet have the GONDAR spell (which I didn't know existed but after being burned to death by dragon's flame a few times, I began to suspect I was missing a spell to protect me from fire). It took me almost no time to discover the spell because I hadn't gone into the library that game and thought, "Oh, isn't there a scroll with the Dusty Book?" There wasn't. But I did investigate the rat tracks which lead to a hole in the wall which led to the GONDAR spell which led to Krill's inevitable defeat!

After defeating the dragon, I turned Krill's next henchman into a lizard with the CLEESH spell. Then Krill shit himself as I began to recite the GUNCHO spell. That's a spell that banishes a creature to another plane! I succeeded with the spell or maybe he teleported away. It was hard to tell for sure. In any case, I won! I scored a full 395 out of 400 points! Oh. Shit.

Candidate for Membership in the Circle of Enchanters
Yeah. I fucking tanked it, dude. I mean, I was now about to enter the Circle of Enchanters but with a huge stain on my permanent record. How could I have missed five points?! How embarrassing! I checked out Infocom's Invisiclues to see where I could have missed five points and the only five point puzzle was KREBFing the shredded scroll that was inside the egg. But I'd done that! The Invisiclues also said you get ten points for opening the egg. I began to suspect the Invisiclues were wrong and had those two point totals mixed up because I never actually opened the egg. I just broke it and then fixed it with the KREBF spell. I reloaded and experimented a bit and, yep, that was the five points I missed. Some Enchanter I turned out to be!

SCORES

Game Title: Succinct and to the point. I would have preferred Zork IV because I love when game designers become mired in a world that was so popular they find they can't reasonably abandon it, at least not for economic reasons. It's why Terry Brooks wrote five thousand Shannara books!

Puzzles: Terrific! I really wish I hadn't played this game when I was younger because I feel like they were fair enough that I would have figured them out now as an adult. It's also possible that if I hadn't had Kim Schuette's solution at hand, I would have worked harder at solving all the puzzles before diving into the clues. It's pretty much the only reason I beat Trinity back in 1990. Because I was a freshman in college with two games on my Apple IIe that I'd brought with me, Trinity and Dragon Wars. Also because I wasn't distracted by things that we're all distracted by today, like the Internet and more Internet and other things that are pretty much just the Internet. I could say I was too distracted to beat Trinity because I was drinking so much beer and getting laid all the time. But I'd rather tell the truth and brag about having beat Trinity without any clues, no matter how big a hit my sexy rock and roll reputation takes.

Gameplay: The only weak bit with Enchanter is the part where you need to eat and drink and sleep. And it's made even worse because it's implemented so weakly! Sure, I guess I like that a loaf of bread lasts the entire game and I don't have to worry about dying of hunger. And I don't have to worry about thirst because I can always refill my jug. But if they don't really matter and only provide a limited number of turns so high that nobody probably ever died of hunger in this game, why bother? The sleeping I liked though because the dreams were a really nice way to provide hints to puzzles that might not have been so obvious. Like the dream that points to entering the Gallery without a light source. Quite clever, really.

Graphics: It's an Infocom game, dumby! Although they did eventually get into graphics so maybe I should apologize for expecting modern readers to know Infocom mostly ignored graphics. Except in games like Infidel where one of the major puzzles was translating ASCII hieroglyphics!

Concept: The best concept! I love pretending I'm a magic user like Gandalf or Fonzi.

Fun Time: Like Border Zone, I think I may have spent about six hours total on it. That might not seem like a lot for an Infocom game that I beat and you might be thinking, "That Grunion Guy is a fucking genius!" And you should keep thinking that instead of remembering how I had already read clues about it thirty years ago. Hopefully when you think about this review later, like when you're excitedly telling your significant other about this great blog you've been reading, you only really remember the part where I typed, "Grunion Guy is a fucking genius." "Grunion Guy is a fucking genius" has a pretty good ring to it, doesn't it? Just listen to it: "Grunion Guy is a fucking genius." Hopefully you just said "Grunion Guy is a fucking genius" out loud. And hopefully there were other people nearby to hear you and reply, "Is Grunion Guy a fucking genius? Yeah, yeah. I guess Grunion Guy is a fucking genius, isn't he?!"

Border Zone

Border Zone
By Marc Blank
Published by Infocom
Release Year: 1987
Version Played: MS-DOS

I've played a lot of Infocom games in my life because I didn't lose my virginity until I was eighteen. Maybe nineteen. Or was it seventeen? It depends on what lie I told you but I assure you I'm not a virgin now. I'm only playing text adventures because sex is so exhausting that I need something to do while my penis heals. Border Zone is not one of the Infocom games I played because just look at that box art. It's fucking boring, right?! Plus it's that weird green or khaki color so it doesn't even match up with all of the other gray on gray with more gray Infocom boxes. Who would want this buggering up the look of their computer game shelf dedicated to Infocom? Aside from that, am I supposed to feel the immediate tension by recognizing those flags and the border dispute it suggests? Probably not because I'm sure one represents the country of Fooblitzky and the other represents the lands of Lord Dimwit Flathead.

Ignoring the purely aesthetic reasons that turned me off from this game, I just wasn't into espionage stories. So if I'm not up on the genre and all of the genre's inherent cliches, how am I going to solve all of the puzzles that demand I know exactly what I'm supposed to do when the guards begin searching all the sleeping compartments on the train?! Am I supposed to put on the fake mustache or just shove the documents straight up my ass? What does the heroic spy usually do?

I have tried to play this game a few times in the intervening years (the ones between the time I was all, "What a suck ass looking Infocom game!", and now where I'm all, "Why am I going to try to play this suck ass looking Infocom game?!") and didn't really enjoy the idea of a timed game. At least I think it was a timed game. Maybe it just felt like a timed game because every move made me think, "Why am I wasting so much time on this game?!" Anyway, it's an Infocom game so I'll probably be hopelessly stuck ten minutes from now.

The main reason I'll probably need to pause the game is to masturbate when I meet the sexy double agent and type, "Fuck sexy double agent then fall asleep".

In the picture above, try not to read the three chapter titles because there's a spoiler in the third one that says "The Assassination." I'm going to forget that's a plot point and start playing "Chapter 1: The Train" because Marc Blank suggested that's what I do.

CHAPTER ONE
The protagonist (that's you! The person you play in the game! Or it's me! I'll probably go back and forth using first and second person pronouns so please don't be confused by my amateurish writing style) is just a regular non-spy person who does a little importing and exporting across the Iron Curtain. This game is from 1987 so nobody remembers what the Iron Curtain is anymore. It really wasn't that important anyway, at least not to those of us living on the Western side of it and never had to really think about its implications on the people trapped on the Eastern side of it. Am I supposed to have enough time and compassion to worry about the state of other peoples' worlds when I can barely keep my world from disintegrating?! If you want Levi's, people dumb enough to be born in countries annexed by the USSR after World War II, maybe you should have thought about that up in heaven when God was asking you what uterus you wanted your soul implanted in! Idiots.

The train story begins, as all good espionage train stories do, with a probably dying secret agent breaking into your compartment to hand you the documents that will stop the assassination if only you can get them to another secret agent by responding to a coded phrase with a coded phrase of your own. I think I've practically got this part of the game won! Except I've forgotten both of the phrases already. I should probably restart and make a note of them, right?

Okay, I've figured out what the secret agent will say to me and what I have to respond and I've even translated the sayings into Frobnian because I understand how Infocom games use their non-digital printed material as copy protection! Somebody without the phrase book that comes with the game wouldn't realize that the American agent is telling you the English codes but his contact is Frobnian! I'm so far ahead of Marc Blank right now he would say something like, "Whoa! That guy is super far ahead of me! And totally not a virgin."

As an experienced business man who has dealt with border control for my entire business life (the fictional me in the game! What, you think I actually work for a living?!), I know that I can't just keister the document. The searches at the border are brutal. And I don't have a fake mustache so I'm flummoxed already. Plus the wounded agent left a big blood spatter on the floor of my cabin. So to even make it out off the train so I can meet my contact, I've got to clean up the blood and figure out what to do with the document. The blood was easy but to keep the document, I had to get caught a few times to figure out where the evil trench coat wearing man's interrogation weaknesses lay! Or lie (I knew I should have phrased that differently. Stupid lie/lay is worse than who/whom). Because apparently even if you flush the document down the toilet underneath a huge nervous stomach shit, the border patrol will dig it out and bust you.

So I cleaned up the blood by doing all of the boring and inane steps like turning on the faucet and wetting the towel and turning off the faucet and scrubbing the floor and returning to the bathroom and flushing the towel. In Infocom games, it isn't enough to just tell the protagonist to clean up the blood and then, like a normal adult human being, the protagonist would think, "Oh yeah! I know how to do that! Let me get right to it!" I guess Infocom games are less about ordering some jerk around and more trying to pretend that you are that jerk and that that jerk is kind of stupid.

After cleaning the blood, I had to figure out what to do with the document. No matter where I tried to hide it, border control sniffed it out and traced it back to me. So the only thing to do was to tear it up and shove it up my ass! I mean throw it out the window. But that meant I couldn't complete my mission which really wasn't my mission anyway and why did I care if some ambassador was assassinated?! I didn't ask for this responsibility! It's not my fault if somebody dies today. It's the fault of the clumsy American agent who got himself shot, stumbled upon a useless dolt to complete his mission, and then fell off the roof of the train! I should just throw the document out the window and get on with my life! And maybe I will!

But before I did that — you know, just in case my conscience berates me continuously for the rest of my life — I figured I should probably keep some photographic evidence of the document. After doing so, I couldn't help worrying about how there was another picture left on the roll of film and I was probably going to have to completely restart this stupid game when I realized I needed to take one more picture before removing the film and hiding it up my ass from the border patrol. Stupid Infocom games always have me worried that I'm in a walking dead with a roll of film up my ass scenario!

Being the super chill American businessman turned spy kind of Lothario I am, I totally and easily complete my new mission and probably fuck a hot double agent too! But not the young girl I handed the roll of film to! The double agent was probably older than that!

I know this screenshot is different from the previous screenshot! But the Apple IIe copy I found crashed when you examined your clothes or photographed the document. And the Commodore 64 version seems to think people who play Infocom games are already wasting their lives so why not make every move take an interminable amount of time. So I wound up playing the browser MS-DOS version on Archive.org.

For an Infocom game, that first chapter was simple! All you had to do was act like a boring idiot who totally wasn't involved in political espionage at all and you succeeded! I bet every nerd who tried their hand at this game beat Chapter One. But the next chapter will be different because the player takes on the part of the American spy! What greasy nerd knows how to act suave and sophisticated and super sexy? I mean aside from me! I was born to play this role!

CHAPTER TWO
You begin the story of the American Spy after he falls from the roof of the train. He claims he jumped for it but when I was the businessman, I know what I saw! I'm a clumsy oaf! I mean he's a clumsy oaf! No, wait. I guess I am the clumsy oaf! And I'm not clumsy at all! I totally jumped for it and looked hot doing it. Now I just have to survive the freezing weather and try to get past the border patrol or else I'll die out here in the ... BORDER ZONE!

Hopefully I'll also get another chance to fight my rival Viper to the death! Ew, I'll show him! Or her!

Or not! After playing this chapter for about ten minutes, I realize it does every single thing I don't like in text adventures: time limit, characters that go about their business while you're off in other areas, and a puzzle that relies on knowing so much about the timeline that you have to play the scenario dozens of times to work it all out. I feel like I've got the gist of what you have to do (although I'm probably wrong on one key point because I haven't played more than a handful of times) but I'm not sure I'm willing to keep at it. After you bail from the train, the border guards begin searching for you. So you've got some guys in a vehicle driving around and a pack of dogs (not to mention the searchlights and fences at the border) hunting you down. Early on, you have to get to a small house because it has a parka in it to keep you from freezing to death. You have to time this with when the guards arrive to talk to the owner so he's distracted while you sneak in the back. There might be more to do inside the shack other than gather up all the crap in the storage room but, as I mentioned, I haven't really explored the scenario yet in multiple ways.

As a spy, you have an explosive pen on you. It has a timer which means I have to figure out how long to set the timer for and where to stick the pen to get something further in the story to happen. I feel like I have to stick it on the guard's automobile so that it explodes near the border, distracting the guards at the spotlights so I can make a run for the other side. Realizing that that might be the solution is what has really made me dread continuing with this game.

Another puzzle is to get the dogs to stop following you. I'm fairly certain you do that just by putting on the work boots and trudging through the swamp a ways before leaving the swamp in a new location and leaving the boots behind.

If there are any other puzzles (aside from staunching your bleeding gun shot wound), I haven't found them. I suppose the biggest one is sneaking about to get the pen on the guard's car and figuring out how long to set the timer for. Do I want to bother with that? I feel like that's the big puzzle that allowed Infocom to tack on hours and hours of gameplay to Border Zone. Because now I have to follow the car around to see where it goes and how long I'll need to set the timer for and where I'll need to be when the pen blows up. I have other things to do with my life, Marc Blank! I mean, they're not very important things. But they're things I'd rather be doing than messing around with the timer on my imaginary explosive pen! I'm not cut out to be a spy, especially when that spy has to know things he couldn't possibly know on the first playthrough of this game. Does Marc Blank know how real life works?!

Oh, your argument is that this is a game and not real life and that maybe I should chill out about it?! Well if this game is a game and not real life, why the fuck does everything keep moving along even when I'm not entering any commands?! Who wants to play a text adventure like that?! Even Bioshock doesn't demand that kind of effort out of the player. Bioshock is the only other game I could come up with. It isn't even a fair comparison. If Border Zone were a first person shooter, I'd absolutely finish this chapter! I could see the guards moving and physically hide from them. I could observe how everything moves in the game by following them around. But in a text adventure, it's fucking impossible. Sure, the game tells me if the dogs are to the north or the west. But when I'm hiding behind the shack, it sure would be a lot easier to figure out what I'm doing if I could see the guards interacting with the owner of the shack and milling about searching the premises! I don't think my imagination is good enough to handle this bullshit tension. I'm so fucking stressed out right now!

Apparently you can get close to the border without doing any of the stuff I previously mentioned except stealing everything from the storage room.

It doesn't seem like I've done enough before getting to the border but I guess I should explore this area a little more before writing Marc Blank a letter about how terrible some of his decisions were early in his career. I suppose I need to use my explosive pen here to blow a hole through the fence which I won't be able to climb through because the guards will hear it. Unless I time the explosion to blow when both guards are at the same spot, killing them? Then can I rush through in the chaos?! Figuring out the answer to that means doing math, I bet! That's because you get a timer and a little ASCII display of the guards' motion as you watch them. This is way too hard! I miss the Infocom days when you could just type "kill thief with sword" and hope the random number generator gave you a good result.

Once you get through the fence, you can climb up a guard tower where there's a bolted ladder leading up to a locked door with a guard inside. But even if you can hide on the metal bit bracing the ladder, knock on the door, and shove the stupid guard off of the tower, you still can't jump across the border from the top of the tower. You just wind up dead. Which is when I thought, "Hey! I need the exploding pen for this part! I bet I can just climb over the fence and save the explosives for this scene!" And I was almost completely and absolutely right except for a few small details which would have frustrated the fuck out of me if I hadn't gotten completely lucky on restarting Chapter Two to try out my new solutions.

You see, there's a small shed in the forest near the shack. A small shed that is almost impossible to find due to my apathetic attitude toward mapping Border Zone and the way every location is described as "You move 100 yards north and find you're still in the snowy forest. What did you expect, jerk?!" Sure, the shed has been drawn on the map that came with the game so that people who actually purchased Border Zone would have explored long enough to find it. And I have access to that map because everything is free on the Internet. Right? Am I making a terrible assumption there? Um, anyway, when I restarted, due to not having mapped, I couldn't remember exactly how to get to the shack before the guards got there. While stumbling around lost, I found the shed with the rubber gloves and bolt-cutters inside. And like in most text adventure games that aren't Infocom, the main puzzle was simply finding the right items where they were hidden. Because as soon as I found the bolt-cutters, I knew I had this chapter beat.

What I didn't know was that the border fence I'd previously blown up to get through was electrified! Luckily, I had found the rubber work gloves right there with the bolt-cutters. Marc Blank practically gave that puzzle's solution away for free! Idiot. He should have hid the gloves somewhere in the forest where you weren't ever clued in to dig in the snow. That's more like a proper 80s text adventure! Of course, that's not Infocom's way! Infocom wants you to succeed! They want you to realize you wasted the pen explosive and needed a new solution where you use the pen to blow up the tower so that it falls over the border fence with you inside of it! But at least in the actual solution, you still get to push that stupid Frobnian Nazi off of the tower. Eat snow, grumblebutt!

I'll accept my Champeen of Infocom crown now.

Chapter Three
The first two chapters were way too easy for Infocom games so I'm really nervous about this third chapter. Have I just gotten more brilliant as I've grown older or did Marc Blank save all of his dreadful Infocom ingenuity for this final chapter?! Hopefully this chapter doesn't have dozens of NPCs whom I've got to track across multiple playthroughs just to figure out where I should be every minute of the scenario. I really do prefer text adventure games with static environments that simply react to the things I do. I'm already stressed out thinking about my race against the clock to save the ambassador! Remember when I didn't even care if the ambassador died during the first chapter?! Why am I suddenly invested in saving that asshole?!

In this chapter, I'm the sexy double agent!

The sexy double agent is also — and this is a huge spoiler for all you Infocom fanatics who just haven't, for some reason, gotten around to playing all of the Infocom games — Viper, the man in the trench coat trying to get the documents back from the importer/exporter in the first chapter! If that's the case, you'd think I could just go to a coffee shop and hang out for the rest of the game. If I'm trying to stop the people trying to stop the assassination, then can't I just stop trying to stop those people so they can stop the assassination?! Maybe if I just hit "z" and "enter" until this chapter ends, everything will work out for the best!

Seventeen in-game minutes later, the ambassador has been shot and killed. What the fuck?! How incompetent are the American spies? I guess that's why I'm a double agent. Because I'm double the agent all of these other jerks are. I guess I need to get to work saving the day all by myself! If only that stupid American businessman had given me the documents, I could have saved the day myself. Except when I did get the documents in Chapter One, the game still ended with the ambassador getting assassinated. I should just get on with saving the day already. I bet when I'm done, I'll run into Topaz (that was my secret agent name in Chapter Two, apparently) and we'll share a deep, passionate kiss.

I do run into Topaz chilling at a coffee shop exactly like I was planning to do!

I guess Topaz doesn't feel the same way that I feel about him.

Topaz is probably still important to the story, so I decide to leave him alone for now as I got about my double agent business of stopping the assassination that I put into place. It's actually not too hard to do if I don't mind sacrificing the rest of my double agent career. I meet my contact, learn the sniper's password, figure out what window he's sniping out of (by checking the apartment directory, you just have to find which eastern facing apartment is empty on the fifth floor (maybe other floors sometimes but it always seemed to be the fifth floor on my multiple restarts)), and go shoot him in the back. But that puts a lot of suspicion on you and you wind up pushing papers in Siberia. Better to trick Topaz into stopping the assassination! I guess that's why you have to save his life in Chapter Two.

To do that, you have to get him to chase you back to the sniper's nest without getting caught by him or the local police. At one point, you get to push over a hot dog vendor's cart so it really feels like you're in an action movie and also that you're a fucking prick. Once you lead Topaz back to the sniper, the difficult part was not also being killed by Topaz. After making him a huge hero, he kept shooting me in the face because he's a huge bastard whom I wish I never helped cross the border now! At first I thought, "Well, this is an Infocom game. It was bound to get difficult at some point! And I guess one or two moves away from completing the game is as good a time as any to get stuck." But then I thought, "Well, even though the sniper doesn't let me move or do anything, and the sniper's apartment is completely bare, maybe I can try to hide so Topaz doesn't fucking murder me when he kicks in the door?"

Oh fuck. Easy as that, was it?!

And with that final move to hide in plain sight, I fucking defeat Marc Blank! You stupid son of a bitch! You thought you were so clever, didn't you? "Oh, look at me! I'm an Infocom imp! I write the hardest text adventure games in the world and I only mattered for like four years in the early to mid eighties because I hitched my star to the most boring entertainment ever! Only stupid virgin assholes would keep playing the games I wrote, the dumb bastards!"

Hey! Fuck you, Marc Blank! How did that Marc Blank imaginary soliloquy get away from me so badly?! Anyway, suck on this, Marc:

Seriously though. I can't believe I beat this game without any hints. I'm fucking chuffed.

SCORES

Game Title: Not great since it basically drove me away from this game for years. I suppose if you're into espionage stories, it's a great title because it's so evocative of crossing a border! That's like the hardest challenge in the espionage genre! I think. I'm not a fan so what the fuck do I know? My favorite espionage movie is Run, Lola, Run. Does that count as espionage? I guess that's more heist fucks time travel while fingering romance's anus.
Puzzles: As far as modern day Interactive Fiction "rules" go, the puzzles in Border Zone are terrible. Nearly all of them rely on playing through and losing dozens of times to see how the NPCs react to different situations. It's the only way to learn how they behave so you can act accordingly. But compared to a non-Infocom game, the puzzles were generally satisfying. Because of the way the game works, I'm not even sure some of the things I did were solutions to puzzles or just wasting my time. Did I have to go through the swamp to lose the dogs or could I have just done everything quicker? Were there alternate ways to solve puzzles or were things like the binoculars and the wood saw in Chapter Two just red herrings? Generally, once I saw the way the other characters reacted, it wasn't long before I figured out how to thwart them. I believe Marc Blank was relying on some puzzles to be difficult due to the player losing track of the story. Like in Chapter One, you can get all the way to the end and still get caught when you try to pass the documents to your contact because you were wearing the stupid white carnation the entire time. But once you realize you seem to have done everything correctly and some guy on the platform is still following you, it's not hard to realize you need to not stand out and to keister that stupid flower until you actually need it.
Gameplay: Fucking annoying. I hate adventure games where the story continues no matter what you do. I hate timed adventure games. Border Zone decided not only to use those two aspects I hate but to invent a third one that — Hey! Guess what?! — I hated even more: time passes even when you're not typing! Is there a word that means both "innovative" and "Goddamned fucking annoying as fuck"? Whatever it is, Marc Blank should copyright it.
Graphics: Normally for a text adventure, I'd say none and be done with it. But this one did have graphics! It had a little ASCII bit to show two guards marching around the base of three towers! And it absolutely did nothing for me because the dumb guards barely even notice you when you cut through the fence silently instead of blowing a huge hole in it. Hell, even after blowing a hole in the fence, the idiots keep to their regular patrol only slightly more alert due to hearing an explosion.
Concept: I think I more than adequately covered my apathy toward the concept. I will compliment Marc Blank for his work in making a game about a really stressful experience into a really stressful experience. Good job, jerk!
Fun Time: I keep forgetting to track the amount of time it takes me to play these games. Maybe I'll get better at it eventually. But I think I spent maybe six hours (at most. I might even drop that to four or five) playing this game over the last week and a half? I did think about it more than that though. But not a lot more. And the third chapter which I thought would be dreadfully hard took the least amount of time of all. Probably not even an hour. The good news is that the amount of "fun time" I had with this game is equal to the amount of time I played it. That doesn't often happen. Usually the "fun time" gets expended quickly and I force myself to trudge through the rest of the game, adding the experience to the long list of things I'll regret when a doctor finally says to me, "You have three months to live due to your malignant finger cancer caused by typing."

Beyond El Dorado

Beyond El Dorado
By Laurence Creighton
Published by Zenobi Software
Release Year: 1995
Version Played: ZX Spectrum

Some astute readers with actual reading comprehension may have noticed that the previous two reviews were older reviews: Meltdown! from July 2018 and Eclipse from Thanksgiving 2018. But I had to publish them before reviewing my next game, Beyond El Dorado, or else readers wouldn't understand why this review seemed so biased, as if it were written by a bitter asshole who has never learned how to let go of a grudge. Some readers might now be thinking, "Hey dumbfuck. Why keep playing Laurence Creighton's games if you have such an anti-hard-on for him?" And I would answer that non-existent and moronic reader with this: "The games are chosen randomly for me by Random.org. And for some fucking reason, the random number generator at that site wants to see my head explode. I'm beginning to suspect it's mother was that Commodore 64 I fucked when I was sixteen."

Oh come on! I didn't really fuck a computer! Although do you remember how beefy those disc drives were? And slow! No way they were optimally programmed just for reading discs. I'm fairly certain they were the fleshlights of the 80s.

The one page instruction sheet that came with this game ran a competition for Zenobi Software fans. In the description setting up the premise, a bunch of inventory items were mentioned. The first person to send a letter documenting what game each item was from would win a ten pound note! It's almost like Laurence understood that everybody who purchased his games deserved a fucking refund. I've only played two of his previous games but I'm pretty sure four or five of the eleven objects named came from Meltdown! and Eclipse. I wonder if anybody won that ten pounds? I should send in a letter!

Let's begin a Laurence Creighton adventure the way I begin all Laurence Creighton adventures: by tearing his premise a new plothole.

First off, the tribal chief must be a fucking idiot because I've never solved a Laurence Creighton adventure in my life! I don't think I'm the guy he should be pleading to to save his "impoverished people." I'm not even sure I should help this chief and his people. If the key to a fucking treasure vault has been missing for "eons," maybe break a hole in the fucking wall. Hell, if I take his statement that "eons" have passed seriously, he could have simply left a hose running on top of the treasure vault and erosion would have opened it up for him. There, asshole. I solved your problem! Next!

Second off, now I need to come up with a second off because I began the last paragraph with "first off." Oh! I have one! This game begins in the protagonist's living room. If I fucking have to book tickets with a travel agent and pack all the correct gear in a suitcase that's too small (thus creating a boring inventory management puzzle) after which I'll arrive in the unnamed country which will be a maze I'll have to navigate before even getting to whatever exciting ruins hide the Golden Key of Klef, I'm going to fucking not be surprised at all!

In Meltdown!, Laurence created a new verb so "look inside" would become just one word, "lin." Because he didn't do that for "look under" or "look behind," he completely fucked me. As an interactive fiction author, you don't set the rules for the game — in the case of Meltdown!, two word "noun-verb" statements — and then suddenly accept a three word statement of "look under trolley" unless you're an unrepentant twat. Why the fuck would I type "look under trolley" when Laurence implied pretty fucking heavily with his stupid "lin" verb that his program couldn't accept three word commands?! Well, he must have realized he was being a complete asshole because now he's invented two new verbs for this game, "lund" and "lind." Those stand for "look under" and "look behind."

My god, I hope the playtesters put Laurence in his fucking place. I might actually beat this game!

The game does not begin in the protagonist's living room. It begins like this: "You are standing at a crossroad of paths." Well fuck. That's a bit too far in the opposite direction, Laurence. How the fuck did I get here?! Are the paths in the jungle? In a park? In an underground tomb?! I have no fucking context!

I also have nothing in my inventory. I know the game said that I'll be going on this adventure with nothing but my wits as my inventory but I didn't think it would be serious. No, no. I knew it would be serious. Adventure games almost all stick to two major tropes: the protagonist suffers from some kind of memory loss and the adventurer begins the adventure ill-prepared. The first trope sort of explains the second trope. Why aren't I prepared for this adventure?! I guess it's the same reason I have no idea who I am or why I'm on the adventure! But when the protagonist purposefully sets out on an adventure, he could at least bring along a few fruit roll-ups.

When I head north, I discover a rusty turnstile that impedes my progress until I find a coin. There's nobody about but the protagonist still won't hop it. I guess my alignment is lawful idiot. Also, I'm fairly certain this rusty turnstile is in a jungle because if I head east, I discover a witchdoctor making a potion. He has a bone in his nose because Laurence Creighton was born in an imperialist country (England) and then moved to an even more racist one (South Africa).

Just in case you were wondering: no, you can't fuck the witchdoctor.

The first rule one must follow when trying to defeat a Laurence Creighton boredventure is to examine every single noun mentioned in his room descriptions. But you can't just stop there. You have to also search every noun. And since Laurence made up three new verbs, you must also lin, lind, and lund them too! After doing this in every location and discovering a knife and a pacifier and a swatter and a piece of flint and a wick and a broom and a spider and a grappling hook, Laurence decides to make this comment in his game:

Oh fuck you, Laurence.

What kind of fucking attitude is that?! The only puzzles in his stupid fucking games are finding items hidden behind search, examine, lin, lind, and lund commands! How dare he fucking take a shot at me because I'm playing his game by his rules and his lack of fucking imagination! I swear to God if I knew where to find Laurence Creighton right at this moment, I'd go punch him in the fucking mouth! I swear to fucking Christ! How dare he?! So far in this game, I've been to a cottage which is generally thought of as a location. If you want to look behind the cottage, you would use compass directions to go behind the cottage. But not in this game! In this game I "looked behind" (that's what "lind" means if you need a refresher!) the cottage to find a fucking besom. What's a besom? An old fashioned broom, apparently. So why the fuck wouldn't I "lin" the fucking kennel even though you've purportedly told me everything that was in the kennel?! I can't fucking trust you! I mean, there was an oil lamp in the cottage as well that I had to "lin" to find the wick. Was I fucking desperate then too, you asshole?!

What's really annoying is that I was thinking last night (I've played this game a little bit every day for the last few days), "Normally when you walk away from a text adventure, you spend a little bit of brain power thinking about the puzzles you might be able to solve with the inventory items you've discovered. But when you walk away from a Laurence Creighton text adventure, your brain keeps asking things like, 'Did you look behind everything? I mean EVERYTHING! And don't forget to search everything! Even the road if the description says,"You are in the middle of the road." Because there might be some roadkill that Laurence didn't mention. And don't forget to search that too!'"

But wait! I'm not done hating Laurence Creighton and myself! Because check out this shit:

Oh double fuck you, Laurence!

I got stuck for a little bit and I was beginning to think, "Am I unable to solve one of Laurence's puzzles?!" before I remembered there was probably still some things to look behind or look inside. And the jar I got from the witchdoctor had some gum in it! Well, that meant I was nearly through the turnstile because everybody knows that coins can be recovered from deep holes with chewing gum on the end of a stick! And there was a convenient hole in a tree where the game would respond, "Good thinking, but how do you grip whatever's there?" whenever I typed "insert wire." Well, with the sticky gum, of course! I'll be past that turnstile in the amount of time it takes me to type "attach gum" and then probably "to stick" or something!

Who knows how the fuck much time has passed since I declared I would soon be through the turnstile but fuck me if I can figure out how to get this Goddamned gum onto the end of this fucking wire! While I was trying to come up with the correct verb/noun combination, I decided to type "Hello Laurence" into the command line.

I don't think I've ever discovered an Easter Egg on my own before!

Of course the next thing I had to try was "fuck ellen." That wasn't an Easter Egg.

It was at this point that it all fell apart. The game, my life, my mental state. Everything just tanked. Because once I get stuck on a game, I remain stuck for as long as I can, trying all sorts of stupid things I know won't get me any further (often repeatedly, as if the program has a line that ignores your command the first twelve times it's typed before responding, "Oh, you mean to stick the gum on the wire! Okay, yeah, we can do that!" Although that's not as ridiculous as it sounds since Laurence uses that tactic a number of times in this game). So you must be thinking, "When you're stuck on a text adventure, all you need to do is find that one thing you were missing and then you can get back on track, right?" And that might seem like a reasonable thing to think. And it might actually be true if the problem you're stuck on has a reasonable answer. After finding out the answer to the problem, you would think, "Aw fuck! Why didn't I think of that?!" And then you just continue the game solving all of the problems logically and rationally.

But that's never how it goes. In this game, I was stuck in a few places: there was a dog on a parchment I needed, there was a patch of quicksand I couldn't pass, and there was a hole in a tree whose contents I couldn't manage to extract. So I figured if I scan the walkthrough, I'll get to the first of these that needs solving, feel a bit bad for needing a clue, and then continue on with the game in the same state of mind I'd been in before. That is, not fucking irrationally angry. But that wasn't the case. It's never the fucking case, is it, Laurence?

Let's talk about the dog. It's sleeping on a parchment. You can wake it and then it seems to be waiting for something. Perhaps the bone in the witchdoctor's nose? I gave up on that fairly quickly because the game didn't really seem to acknowledge that the bone was an actual object in the game. So I thought, "Maybe the hoop? Dog's like distractions like fetch and hula hooping, right?!" So I tried throwing it and dropping it and rolling it but nothing worked. Because, of course, what you needed to type was "show hoop."

Why shouldn't I have expected this to happen? The dog showed all the signs of being a trick dog: growling, biting, killing me! Of course it was just waiting to somehow escape the kennel as soon as it had the opportunity to leap through a hoop! Fucking brilliant solution, Laurence!

I would have used a sarcasm tag on that previous sentence but I'm all out of them. Also, every sentence would probably need one. What I should do is just tag the sentences in which I'm being earnest! It would be a lot less work.

I suppose I should have gotten this solution but I just haven't gotten back into the right state of mind for text adventures. My rules for exploring text adventure worlds should be on a huge poster right next to my computer. And one of those rules should be "show everything to everybody." It's just as important as examining and searching everything. But it was enough for me to think, "Fuck this! What's next?!"

And the next thing I needed to do was to "insert hand" into the hole in the tree which caused me to look up the word "apoplectic" to see how it was spelled before using it in this review. It's possibly the second worst thing about text adventure games (after the authors): not completely being able to visualize what is being described. The hole in the tree was described as a "small hollow." I guess a hole the size of a person's fist can be considered small. But then I'd also expect the protagonist to not say "Good thinking, but how do you grip whatever's there?" when I suggest inserting a wire into it. Rather, shouldn't the protagonist say, "Why don't I just stick my hand inside it, if that's what you're fucking getting at?"

The next thing on the list was that I had to "sweep ashes" with the "besom" to find a pencil which, in any other non-Laurence game, would have been a reasonable puzzle. But Laurence offers so many ways to search things already that I often forget that, sometimes, Laurence hides items in regular text adventure game puzzles. After realizing that, I now had to learn what level of anger and frustration comes after apoplexy.

But that's not all! After getting past the quicksand, you have to dig. But you can't just dig once! Remember how I said Laurence hides some actions behind typing the same command over and over? Well, you have to dig three times! But not only do you have to dig three times! You have to dig three times before leaving the location or else you're fucked. So when I went back to dig some more because, knowing Laurence, he forces people to type the same shit more than once (like when you find the knife in the junkyard by searching junk a second time after being told "You don't find shit, dick."), I couldn't find the calumet. Why would I think, "Maybe I needed to dig all at the same time?" Oh, that's right. I should have thought that because this game was written by my nemesis, Laurence Creighton!

By the way, he uses the dig more than once trick again a bit later. And that's the main problem with Laurence Creighton games. Far too much of the game is simply tricking the player into missing hidden objects. First off, there's the "examine/search/look in/look behind/look under" wall of commands that you'd better try on every noun Creighton put into the game. Then there's hiding things behind commands that don't seem to work on the first try but sometimes work on the second or third or fourth try (or more! Like finding the spider under the rock which is totally random if it ever shows up after lunding the fuck out of the rocks!). His games are generally 5% puzzles that need to be solved logically and 95% simply finding every fucking item in its hiding place. In the first half of the game, I'd say the only puzzle Laurence actually created was the one where you have to squeeze oil out of the wick to lube the rusty pocket knife open. And maybe the parchment map but that one just seems obvious once you've found all the items. His games really are just a scavenger hunt.

Anyway, I'm going to take a little break from this game before attempting the second half without clues. First I should probably get a physical to make sure I'm not going to give myself a stroke from playing text adventures. If I die while playing this, I hope Laurence Creighton can be brought up on charges of manslaughter.

Okay! It's a new year and I'm back at it with a new kitten on my lap. Stupid fucker probably won't even have any good suggestions for solving the two puzzles I'll probably encounter in this second half of the game. She's just going to hang there on my arm sleeping and stretching occasionally and making me think, "How the fuck did I get so lucky to exist in a universe with fucking kittens? FUCKING KITTENS, MAN!"

The second half is far easier than the first. It's linear so you know to solve any puzzles, you have to use the few things you've found along the way. Once again, that means a hunt for items. The main trick Laurence pulls on this half is making a lot of timed situations. You have to discover the proper move before the ledge breaks or the rod runs out of power or the canoe sinks. This would have been a terrible inconvenience on the Spectrum when you'd have to load and reload the cassette tape (although this game had a RAM SAVE command that would have helped. But it still wouldn't have been as fast as quick saving on a Spectrum emulator). The only place where Laurence almost had me pulling out the hints was when I hadn't discovered the black rod by the time I needed it (as seen in a vision). But I just went back to the Beating a Laurence Creighton Game Playbook. I revisited every location and searched, examined, looked inside, looked behind, and looked under every noun mentioned. The rod was hidden on the dusty path you walk down to get to the shrine. I guess the fact it was "dusty" was the hint to search it.

If Laurence had given me access to more locations and given me all the objects at once, I would have had a much tougher time with the back half of this adventure. Was it entirely logical that I had to kick the football under the ledge so that it would dislodge the boulder which would roll down to the river and block it so I could cross? Not at all! But since I couldn't cross the river and all I had was a single football boot and the ball, it was easy enough to accidentally figure that out. I think maybe Laurence ran out of steam on the second part of this thing. Although he did allow Ellen, the secret message girl, a cameo! Realizing there's a slight chance that I might come off as a chauvinistic pig, I won't wonder aloud if Laurence at least scored a handy for his efforts.

Proof that I beat the game! Well, I beat three-quarters of the game, I guess!

SCORES

Game Title: Evocative of an exciting location to adventure in but ultimately misleading. Who knows where I was, really. By a lake near an old abandoned amusement park where some kid lost his soccer cleats and ball, I suppose. Although the quicksand makes me believe I was in a jungle. But then the junkyard and kennel make me thing I was in an urban environment. Although the witchdoctor and tribal chief were probably proof that I was somewhere exotic beyond El Dorado. But then I ran into Laurence's friend Ellen, so what the fuck conclusion am I, ultimately, supposed to draw?!
Puzzles: Laurence came up with one puzzle that I feel was reasonably logical and difficult: using oil on the rusty pocket-knife. It was so logical and complex that I never would have figured it out. Laurence's games dumb me down to idiocy as I just go from location to location simply examining and searching and lining and linding and lunding every stupid word he uses.
Gameplay: Typical Speccy text adventure. If you've watched Bandersnatch on Netflix, don't believe that anything as complex as the game Bandersnatch was ever fucking programmed on a ZX Spectrum. But it was nice to see the kid using that awful squidgy little keyboard.
Graphics: None.
Concept: It was so postmodern! The protagonist was actually the protagonist from all of Laurence's text adventures! Which means the world of this game is one where England almost went nuclear and the planet was once invaded by an alien species that tried to block out the sun. That also means that prick that kept trying to destroy the world for the sake of the last cheese sandwich is still out there somewhere. Fucker.
Fun Time: I don't know. Zero minutes? Just reading the name "Laurence Creighton" spoiled my mood from the beginning. I suppose I enjoyed the time spent with a kitten on my lap.