The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz by Jack Lockerby
Published by Zenobi Software
Release Year: 1995
Version Played: ZX Spectrum 48K

My concern for Dorothy's health and well-being begin almost instantly when she has to clarify what Uncle Henry meant by his use of the term "a big one."

"How difficult can a text adventure based on a popular series of books and a lauded movie be?" ask the fools who have never played a text adventure in their lives. No wait. Sorry! The fools are the people who have played more than one text adventure. I apologize for my wildly inaccurate use of the word "fools."

I'm already a little bit angry at this game and I don't know anything about it. That's the proper way to approach playing a non-Infocom text adventure. You non-fools might be wondering what the difference is and I can explain it if you're a nerd who's into comic books. An Infocom game is like a comic book written by Alan Moore (but with less rape). A non-Infocom game is like a comic book written by Ann Nocenti.

You know what? That probably only clarified the difference for like five people. How about this? An Infocom text adventure is like playing a game that was created with love by competent and talented people who knew the puzzles they were making would be fair even if nearly impossible to figure out. A non-Infocom text adventure is like stepping in dog shit thirty times in a row because you can't figure out the correct verb-noun combination to not step in the dog shit.

In this text adventure, I play Dorothy. But I'm not playing the Judy Garland version of Dorothy or the L. Frank Baum version either. I'm playing the version of Dorothy from Blues Traveler's "Run-Around" video. Ooh la la!

My first attempt ends with me wasting too much time so the cyclone knocks me down and I die.

Oh no. I don't die. I just get a nasty bump on my head. I guess I need to fall harder next time so I wind up in a coma so I can dream about Oz.

The next attempt, I waste no time wandering around the farm. I enter the farmhouse to find a locked trapdoor into the cellar with no idea where the key is. Is it possible Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are already in the cellar trying not to giggle and whispering at each other, "Shut up or she'll hear us!"

While searching for the key, I remember that I'm playing Dorothy from the Blues Traveler video.

Does the game not allow it or is it one of Aunt Em's rules?

Oh, but I can remove my sandals?! This game sucks.

Now to get to Oz! It's not as easy as in the movie where Dorothy just runs around looking for Toto instead of sheltering in the cellar. In this game, you have to get into the cellar! So already the game is asking me to do things that weren't in the movie and maybe weren't in the book but I can't remember because the last time I read the entire Oz series was in 4th grade. To get into the cellar, you have to find the key to unlock it. That wasn't too hard because you can find it the way you usually find things in text adventure games: you search and examine every single object in the room. Finding the trapdoor was harder because you had to type "search room" (unless it was "examine room". Basically they're the same thing). But getting into the trapdoor was the real puzzle because the handle had been broken off! And once you're in the farmhouse, it becomes too dangerous to leave so you can't even explore the surrounding farm for items to help you. But did that deter me?! I mean, no, of course not. I'm a fool and I wasn't allowed to take off Dorothy's dress so what else was I going to do?!

The trick was to leave Toto tied up so you could enter the house, get the pot of stew, take it back to Toto, untie Toto, and spill the stew all over the barn. Toto finds a bone in the stew, runs off to bury it, and returns with a crowbar. Obviously! That puzzle couldn't have been more obvious or fair! It was like stepping in shit only fourteen times in a row!

Once in Oz, I leave the wreckage of my farmhouse and begin to explore Munchkin Land. The first person I stumble upon is the Mayor. By "stumble upon," I mean I found the location outside the city council, examined the building, found a flag pole, examined the pole, saw the flag needed raising, raised the flag, and he waddled out asking if somebody needed his help. I then typed "Mayor help me" and got the following screen.

Oh great. A number puzzle. Should I just quit now?

Don't worry! I'm just kidding! This puzzle couldn't have been easier! I say "fairy" to the Mayor and he hands me a diploma. I'm a smart now!

After getting the diploma, I wander off to talk to some other Munchkins who tell me the mayor loves flags and I should tell him "help me." Um, thanks guys but, being a certified smart, I already handled it!

The Good Witch appears and kisses me. Now I'm really upset that I can't remove my dress. I guess the kiss is supposed to protect me from injury so the rest of the game should be a yellow cake walk.

Oh, and the Munchkins told me my house landed on and killed a witch so even though I examined the house after landing and found nothing, I head back now to examine it and guess what? A dead witch with some silver shoes! Hoo boy, this game was written in 1995, six years after Activision shut down Infocom, and yet the author is still acting like hiding objects behind examine and search commands count as puzzles. Jack Lockerby should be embarrassed. Is there a stronger word than "embarrassed" that isn't "fucking embarrassed"? I'm trying to swear less in these stupid reviews.

A few moves later and I've got the scarecrow and the tin-man hanging around with me. It was easy to convince them to come with me. I just examined the Yellow Brick Road and I examined the cottage and I examined the corn and I examined the tree and I examined the fence and I examined the shelf and voila! I solved all of the puzzles. I hope getting the lion to come with me isn't so difficult!

I don't disagree with this game's philosophy of mankind.

Before going to look for the lion, I again remember I'm pretending to be Dorothy from the Blues Traveler video and it's probably time to fuck the scarecrow.

Cock-tease. Or whatever the male version is for a woman. Clit-tease?

The Lion arrives and I punch him across the face. He's a total sub so he stuffs a rubber ball in his mouth, puts on a leather body suit with the groin cut out, and joins our crew.

My team adventures down the Yellow Brick Road, leaping chasms in the road caused by earthquakes, felling trees to cross even larger chasms, and running from deadly creatures (even though I was kissed by the Good Witch and am supposedly safe from harm (I am absolutely not)). We wind up next to a fast flowing river with a broken bridge. It's the first time in the game that I feel stumped for any amount of time. The good news is I knew what to do! The Tin-Man is described as a master craftsman so I keep trying, in various places, to have him build me a boat. It never works. So I figure, maybe there's a boat I missed because I didn't examine everything! So I reloaded a save in Munchkinland and examined every single thing mentioned in every location. No luck. Oh, are you wondering about the bad news since I mentioned good news? Remember that dog shit I told you we'd be stepping in forty times in a row? This was that moment. Because apparently I needed to make a raft and not a boat. The Tin-Man is a literal motherfucker.

I do have some other good news though! I didn't need a hint to solve this problem! I just happened to be standing in the correct spot where the Tin-Man will accept the command to make a raft and I typed, "Scarecrow help me." And he did! He told me to tell the Tin-Man to make a raft! Have you ever been joyfully ecstatic and super fucking angry at the same time?! If you said yes to that then you must play text adventure games or live life as a premature ejaculator. Congratulations!

And just like after cumming too quickly and being super fucking angry with this curse the universe bestowed upon you (unless it was just too much masturbating too quickly) you can't wallow in your anger because now you have to deal with the disappointment of your partner, text adventures keep the fucking hits coming. Because now I couldn't get the Goddamned raft in the river! This time it didn't take me too long to figure out I had to tell the Tin-Man to launch the raft. But it's still annoying when you know the raft needs to go in the river and if this were real life everybody would help get the raft in the river but in a text adventure game everybody just stands around stupidly going, "I don't understand how to do that." Oh well, at least I'm a sexy fucking Dorothy.

After me and my weird fucking cohorts cross the river, we have to cross a field of poppies. The lion runs off to nap and I have to send the Tin-Man to find him and wake him with a potion I received from a mouse whom I saved by having the Tin-Man murder a wildcat that was hungry. Sorry wildcat but I have an adventure to solve and if I have to kill dozens of tiger headed forest monsters, a couple of witches, forty wolves, forty crows, and you, well, you know. Fucking suck it. I'm getting back to Kansas even if I have to murder every last Munchkin.

Next it's on to the Emerald City where the Wizard of Oz hands me a telescope and a useless permit before telling me to fuck off forever. I never see him again. Which makes sense because if the scarecrow had brains all along and the lion had courage all along and the Tin-Man had a heart all along, I was the Wizard of Oz all along. So I shouldn't be upset when, after I kill the witch, I'm the one who has to hand out to my new friends all the trinkets representing their wishes. Fuck, do I even need to kill the witch if I have the diploma, watch, and medal as soon as I meet the lion, the scarecrow, and the wardrobe?

No, yeah, I still need to kill the witch. I guess my friends are too dumb to understand the metaphor of the items I'm giving them until the Good Witch explains it to them.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was failing to cross the desert because of the Wizard's useless permit to enter the desert. So I look through the telescope and see the Wicked Witch sending dozens of wolves to kill me. I ask the Tin-Man to murder them for me and he does so, without question. Then the Witch sends dozens of crows to kill me. I ask the scarecrow to murder them and he does so, without question.

Wait. Somebody tell me why I want to go back to Kansas when I have my own loyal murder squad here in Oz?!

After the slaughter, a bunch of flying monkeys carry us to murder the Wicked Witch. I suspect they knew I was going to kill her so they were nice and polite when delivering us to her castle. I throw my bottled water on her, dissolve her into a brown smudge, and take her Golden Cap of Flying Monkey Command. Now I also have an army at my disposal! Fuck Kansas. Can I just quit this game now and remain in Oz?!

The monkeys fly me back to the Emerald City where the Wizard of Oz is nowhere to be found. Why the fuck is this game even called that then?! He didn't do shit for me! The Good Witch of the South waits to tell me how to raise the confidence of my friends.

It's at this point that I realize I'm almost entirely covered in dog shit. Because I don't fucking have a medal for the lion or a watch for the Tin-Man!

So I get to the end of the game missing two items. The good news (yes, here we go again with this shit) is that I almost certainly know where the items are and I even already made a plan to get them (before I knew I needed to because I'm just that awesome). The bad news is that I figured they were buried back on the farm in Kansas so I'd have to start the entire game over. SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH SPLOCH.

The watch and the medal do wind up being buried on the farm in Kansas and it's not too long before I'm back standing in front of the Good Witch with all the junk I need to make my friends happy. I bet the real ending is that once they get what they thought would make them happy, they discover it wasn't what they needed after all. Hell, that might even be the actual plot of the books following this one when the scarecrow becomes mayor of Emerald City and realizes being smart and in power is just a fucking curse. Not as bad as being dumb and in power, amirite, Trump?

And then I simply step into the final huge mound of shit. Because fuck Jack Lockerby. Fuck him so hard his grandfather feels it. The fucking watch doesn't work and I forgot to check that and it needs a new spring and the only spring in this game happens just as you leave Munchkinland with "a spring in your step" so now I have to fucking start all over again because I suck at making various save states when I think I'm doing my final run through! Seriously, you asshole? "A spring in your step"?! Fuck you, motherfucker. You're lucky I'm the kind of dumb stubborn son of a bitch who won't rest until he finishes every stupid fucking text adventure he plays.

Motherfucking fucker fuck.

Me realizing I'm going to have to start over again.

Well starting over did let me discover one new thing.

You can't pet the dog in The Wizard of Oz.

So I make it all the way back to the end, give out all the trinkets, and speak to the Good Witch. She tells me how to get home and fuck me if it works.

Okay. Let's see. Knock my shoes together. Say, "Kansas." Seem easy enough but fuck me if I can get it to work!

Finally, covered in more dog shit than I ever would have realized, I stumble upon the exact right phrasing to get me home: "knock heels together kansas." Yeah. Fuck you, Jack Lockerby. Although maybe not. I mean, I did best your stupid game without any hints! Even though it was a complete pain in the ass because you knew people would have to play it at least three times all the way through because of your clever traps. I suppose the first text adventure I wrote, "Trollslayer" (sometimes found under the title "Dwarf Lover." The TADS version is the definitive version but I did program it in Inform as well. That version's Baby Troll doesn't really work though), was designed so nobody would probably beat it on the first playthrough. Although nobody would probably beat it on their second playthrough either since the actual goal was to befriend the Elf and not just murder the troll! How many people succeeded in doing that, I wonder? No, I don't wonder. I know it's zero.

As you can see, I didn't get 100% score and I have no idea why. Perhaps I took a shortcut on my 3rd playthrough and didn't examine something that gave me those 2 percentage points. I bet that 2% was earned by fucking something.

SCORES

Game Title: Derivative.

Puzzles: Were there almost none? My brain is insisting there were nearly none. To me, a puzzle takes a certain amount of imagination to come up with a solution. The solution of all the puzzles in this game were fairly obvious almost immediately. The problem was figuring out how to implement the solutions. There's a cupboard that's too high to open with a chair nearby. Stand on the chair! But getting the chair in the right position was a guessing game. Getting the master craftsman Tin Woodsman to build a raft was as well. Getting the raft in the water. Invoking the shoes to get home. And if the puzzle wasn't completely obvious, you had to resort to violence. Kill the wildcat. Hit the cupboard. Kill the wolves. Kill the crows. Kill the Witch. And then there were the puzzles which weren't puzzles but just items hidden behind the examine or dig commands. I suppose getting the spring for the watch was a puzzle!

Gameplay: The game was fairly linear which helped to make solving the "puzzles" easier but also created hard boundaries where you couldn't return to previous areas. That meant a lot of reloading once you realized you were missing something that had to have been found earlier. This didn't happen a lot and I was able to keep save states in each area to keep from stepping in too much dog shit. Right up until the end, of course. Also, I beat the game without any hints so I have to admit the gameplay was fair enough, although Jack was a bit sadistic in the way he wrote it so you'd almost certainly wind up at the end missing important items.

Graphics: It's called a text adventure because there are no graphics. It's all text. Please try to pay attention!

I know, I know! I shouldn't be mean to readers. It's not like y'all chose the "Graphics" category for reviews in which I mostly review text adventures! I will eventually get to some with graphics, like Gruds in Space or The Coveted Mirror or Masquerade or The Mask of the Sun. I think those are all graphic adventures from the 80s.

Concept: I'm not sure it's appropriate to be murdering witches and their familiars in this day and age when everybody has decided the villains are only villains for spurious and unjust reasons. We've all read Grendel and sung our lungs out to Wicked! I can't wait until somebody writes a Broadway play called Javert: We are the Stars!

Fun Time: I spent a few hours over the course of two days playing this game. The first few hours were fun but the last hour was a total drag. That was the hour where I had to play the entire game all the way through twice in a row because Jack Lockerby is a fucking jerko.

Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels

Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
By Bob Bates
Published by Infocom
Release Year: 1987
Version Played: Apple IIe

While getting the publishing information for the game from CASA, I noticed two previous players had left comments on the game. Richard Bos said, "True, and unlike so many adventures set in 'London', this one's topography actually works out as London's. So many games get that wrong, which is jarring if you've been there and love the city. Sherlock gets it right, which is pleasant." I resisted responding with "Ooh la la! Look at Mr. Fancy here! Been to London and knows it so well a stupid fucking text game's topography can ruin the entire experience for him! What a fucking twat!" But I didn't resist typing that response here and including Dick's name so that if he ever Googles himself, maybe he'll see my reply! Well, if he ever does do that and continues reading past the part where he felt insulted, I should probably tell him I'm fucking joking. It's a fucking joke, man. Calm down! Don't try to find out where I live so you can punch me in the face! Don't you think I get punched in the face enough with this kind of attitude?! I was just being whimsical! Oh, sure, at your expense! But not really at your expense, right?! If it were really at your expense, I'd have commented on CASA! I know you're never actually going to see this and get your bloody Teaboo feelings hurt! Unless you're the kind of prat who does indeed Google themselves.

Just a second! Now I want to Google "Grunion Guy"!

Wow! The second hit is for the text adventure game I wrote, Trollslayer. Other than that...um...sheesh. I've left my scat all over the Internet. This is kind of embarrassing. Don't bother Googling my name. Egads.

Okay, I'm ready to talk about this game now! If the game is a treasure hunt and I just need to find the various crown jewels, I'll probably enjoy the game. If it's a mystery where I have to question suspects to figure out clues before I can call Scotland Yard to come and arrest the culprit, I probably won't enjoy the game. If I can fuck Sherlock Holmes as Doctor Watson, I'll just stop playing and consider the game won because how can it get any better than that?

Oh yeah! You play as Doctor Watson because Sherlock Holmes is a lazy bastard who just wants to sit around smoking opium and pretending he's smarter than Moriarty. I've never read a Sherlock Holmes mystery because I have better things to do with my life. Okay, yes, I did recently just reread nine of the Xanth novels so let me amend my previous statement. "I have different stupid fucking things to waste my precious finite life on." Are you happy now? Because I'm not! Thanks for reminding me I'm going to die, jerko.

I'm glad I have this blog so I can pretend I'm not having arguments inside my own head with myself because I'm arguing with people on the Internet!

Solving my first puzzle while simultaneously being told I have a fat head.

I don't have high hopes for this game if the first puzzle has Doctor Watson finding the stethoscope he stored inside of his hat. I'd better make sure I don't have any other hidden objects on my body which I'll need later.

Regular readers of my blog might be starting to suspect that I have an infatuation with hiding things inside my asshole. But I ask, "How many text adventures have you won, hunh?!"

I knock on the door to Holmes' flat and his housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, lets me in. She's quite worried about Sherlock because he's apparently stopped eating and drinking and smoking opium. But since he's currently indisposed, maybe there's a little time for some hanky-panky!

This answer is amusing but it doesn't bode well for getting my dick inside Sherlock Holmes.

I find Holmes upstairs staring at a vial and a syringe. He's sickly and almost certainly going through withdrawal. Sure, he'll probably tell me he's worried that Moriarty finally laid a trap too ingenious for even Holmes to avoid. But more likely, he just lost his opium source to Lestrade's handcuffs and he's freaking the fuck out about where he's going to get his next fix. Fucking hell. Do I really want to work with this bastard anymore? Holmes' gun lies on the mantle so, I mean, why not, right?

Lestrade gets me.

Instead of killing Holmes (or Mrs. Hudson), I wave the newspaper in his face and he lights up over some news about London Tower being closed. He then throws his opium into the fireplace and perks up, ready to solve the riddle of the crown jewels! Some government official meets with us, gives us some riddles, and takes off. Holmes gets dressed and tells me he'll wait outside while I go about picking up all of the things he's forgotten to take with him, like his pipe and magnifying glass. It seems most of the points I earned are from doing grunt work like an undervalued and barely thought about sidekick.

Now imagine between the previous paragraph and this one there's a gif of the sun rising and setting about three hundred times because it's basically a year later! No, I didn't stop playing the game immediately after leaving 221B Baker Street. And also no, I haven't been playing the game for a full year.

On a side note, who lived in 221A Baker Street? I'm sure Author Conan Doyle covered it in one of his boring Sherlock Holmes books.

Back to the front note, here's a problem with reviewing text adventure games: what do I do when I get stuck? How long do I let a review languish because I'm stuck on a problem? Do I look up a hint immediately just to get the review over with or do I power on for weeks unable to figure out how the author put together an unfair puzzle to extend the length of the game? Well as you may have seen in most of my previous reviews, I'll look up a hint in a day or two. I give myself enough time outside of the game world to let my mind percolate and then if nothing came to me when I return, I'll look up the hint, see how close I was to solving it (or, more likely, not close at all, thank you very much Lawrence Creighton), and then rant about how terrible the game was, blaming the author for my failure of imagination.

But Infocom games are special! I really want to be able to beat as many of these games as I can without hints. I know it's an impossible task but I previously beat both Border Zone and Enchanter without hints so why not all of them?! Okay, Enchanter definitely needs to be "beat with an asterisk" since I had read the solutions over thirty years ago. But if you've read any of my comic book reviews, you'll know my memory is pretty fucking horrid. But I feel like Enchanter's puzzles were so fair that there's a pretty good chance I could have beaten that game as an adult without remembering clues from my boring childhood of reading the solutions to text adventure games that I didn't own.

So why a year pause in playing this game? Well, I'd managed to gain possession of three of the four initial gems whose locations were clued by the riddles given to Holmes and Watson by the government guy. The only one I couldn't get was the opal hidden in the clump of moss underneath the London Bridge. Every time I knocked it down, it fell into the Thames and sunk immediately. I tried throwing various things at it but could never catch it before it sank. I tried hitting it with the oar. I tried standing up in the boat. I tried getting Holmes to hit the moss so I could catch it. I tried draping my coat across the Thames to catch it before the coat sank. In the end, I decided to leave the game be and think on it. So I did. And I never came back.

But this week, I finally did come back! At this point, having tried a bunch of the same solutions again, I decided, as I thought might be the case a year ago, that the next problem I needed to solve was the one which needed the supplementary materials (or Feelies) that came with the game. Infocom's form of copy protection was to make one puzzle unsolvable without the Feelies. I thought maybe I just hadn't gone to a location that could only be reached by cab but was mentioned on the map that came with the game. That didn't work. I thought maybe the password to the Tower of London was hidden in the newspaper that came with the game. That really didn't work because the newspaper is super long and boring. Which was super clever on Infocom's part because by the time I got to the section that listed the high tides of the Thames, I was too bored to notice or realize that that was the solution. You just had to wait until high tide so you could reach up and simply grab the moss. What also makes this solution so clever is that there's only a short time around high tide when you can grab the moss, so you're unlikely to get it by accident. And when you are under the bridge trying to get the moss, you have to keep reloading your game when the opal falls in the Thames. So time isn't going to pass at all while playing around for solutions. And you're not likely to wander around wasting time and head back to the bridge after you found nothing, giving you another random chance at being their for high tide. No, of course not since it's a limited time game! You'll just restore your previous save in the boat under the London Bridge and start throwing shit at the moss again in frustration.

Being fairly convinced that I needed the opal to get in the bank, and reasonably sure that the Tower of London's password would be revealed after that, I figured the opal problem was the copy protection problem and I wasn't going to figure it out by constantly scanning the PDF versions of the most boring Feelies in any Infocom game ever. So I looked up the hint. Luckily in this game, the Invisiclues are built right in. And so I learned I should have actually read the entire newspaper instead of scanning a few entries and thinking, "This fucking sucks."

After getting the hint, I believe I finished the game in an hour or so. Everything was pretty linear at that point and the final confrontation with Professor Moriarty simply takes a number of tries to figure out what you can and can't do. And Sherlock basically tells you the way to solve the puzzle early in the game when you ask him about his ampoule of ether; he tells you to "keep it under your hat."

The winning screen. Proof I completed the game but not proof that I didn't cheat. Which I didn't do. Except for that stupid tide clue that expected you to read that boring fucking paper.

Overall, the game wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I was expecting to solve a mystery and I hate text adventures which expect me to solve a mystery. It's why I won't be playing Deadline or The Witness. But this game was really just a scavenger hunt where the list of clues were riddles to be solved. To be fair, you didn't even need to solve the riddles. Even without any of the clues, you'd eventually map the entirety of the game and accidentally discover every gem. And it's not like the time limit forces you to rush. When I was ready to meet Moriarty, I had to wait around outside of his sleazy bar for more than 24 hours! And that was after having to wait half a day for the high tide! I must have missed the den of iniquity where you could spend most of the game rutting with prostitutes while Holmes stands nearby saying, "You must draw your own inferences, Watson," and then winking lewdly.

I'd have to say all of the puzzles were particularly fair because I solved them all. Except that one that wasn't fair but still fair in the Infocom copyright protection way. I knew a puzzle would rely on the Feelies! I just couldn't be bothered to deal with this game's shit Feelies. Even the part where you did rubbings in Westminster Abbey after which you had to discover the invisible clues on the paper must have been fair because I figured it out without even needing the hint from the museum. I only got the hint later when I couldn't figure out how to get the opal and realized the museum was a new location. That was a pretty satisfying puzzle because you get to tell an old man to shut the fuck up. That's one of my favorite kinds of puzzles because I didn't figure it out by logic; I figured it out from pure frustration. It's like when I couldn't get past the sleeping bear in Scott Adams Adventure when I was a kid and out of pure frustration typed, "Screw bear!" The response was "The bear is so startled it falls off the ledge." I think I stared dumbfounded at the television (I played it on my Vic-20) for five minutes and then burst into laughter. Even Leisure Suit Larry never resorted to bestiality for a puzzle's solution.

My favorite part of the game was dunking the urchin Wiggins into a keg of ancient wine. I suppose it was more like commanding him to get in which he did. That's probably even more humiliating. But he did say he'd do anything for Mr. Holmes! He's lucky I was done trying to kiss things after being told a dozen times previously that I was too horny for the Victorian era.

SCORES

Game Title: I suppose it had to be called Sherlock so the Sherlock Holmes fans would purchase it but Sherlock doesn't do much. He says it's because the only way to thwart Moriarty is to not think like Sherlock Holmes but I expect he's still fucked up on opium. The Riddle of the Crown Jewels might be too accurate because the game is half riddles and half crown jewels. The other half of the game is trying to kiss everybody.

Puzzles: They were all pretty fair. The gist of how to solve most of them was usually evident and then it was just a matter of trial and error to figure out the correct solution (okay, so maybe I didn't immediately think "I need to rent a homing pigeon!" when I saw the ruby in Admiral Nelson's eye. But eventually it all comes together). Except for the puzzle where the solution was "read this super boring newspaper where the bit you need is about three-quarters of the way through which you'll either never get too because the rest is so boring or by the time you do get to it, you're not paying attention anymore." In a way, it was the most clever puzzle of them all! Two other puzzles relied on reading the example gameplay in the manual because they teach you how to summon the cab and how to haggle. Those are more fair because the example puzzle was short and interesting rather than long and tedious. One of the puzzles was knocking a bung out of a bunghole which allowed me to cackle like Beavis for five full minutes. I shot it with a pistol instead of using the mace because I was a reckless maverick who totally didn't try to take advantage of Wiggins in the Tower of London dungeon. Who's going to believe a street urchin over a wealthy and famous doctor?! I mean, as long as they don't read my other text adventure reviews where I try to fuck every NPC I encounter.

Gameplay: It plays exactly as you'd expect an Infocom game to play except with less descriptive areas and less descriptive objects and no Elvish sword. It has a time limit but the time limit barely matters (except for knowing when the high tide is in). Technically, Watson remains awake for forty-eight hours before solving the case. Except for the brief nap he gets after being blackjacked outside the bank when Holmes is kidnapped. While it seems like this game should be about solving a mystery, it's just a hunt for a bunch of gems. This game could easily have been renamed Batman: The Riddler Hid Some Crown Jewels.

Graphics: It's an Infocom game! Doesn't that speak for itself?! How old are you that you don't know Infocom games don't have graphics?! Oh, don't give me any of that later stuff where they tried to add graphics! If you were old enough to know Infocom games didn't have graphics, you'd be old enough to hold the opinion that those later games with graphics weren't really Infocom games! You don't get knowledge like that from Wikipedia!

Concept: I suppose for companies that want an instant fan base for their merchandise, it's a great concept to use a famous literary character. But since Bob Bates chose to write a game that was in actuality a treasure hunt instead of a mystery, couldn't he have used a character that was in the public domain at the time?! Wouldn't Infocom have saved a bunch of money if they'd just made Gulliver: The Riddle of the Houyhnhnms Hay Bales?

Fun Time: The amount of time I spent playing the game minus the amount of time I kept knocking the opal into the Thames was probably how much of the time I was having fun. Since there was an entire year between my playing the first half of the game and the second half, I can't even remember how much time I spent on it. After getting the clue for the high tide, I don't think I spent more than an hour working through the Bank of England, the Tower of London, and the endgame with Moriarty. But before that, I probably spent four or five hours? Probably an hour or two on Westminster Abbey, an hour at Madame Tussaud's, an hour exploring London, and an hour split between Big Ben and Trafalgar Square. That seems about right! And I wasn't really bored of the game until that damned clump of moss and it's infernal need to keep falling into the Thames, taking the opal with it.

Super Spy

Super Spy by Richard Shepherd
Published by Richard Shepherd Software
Release Year: 1982
Version Played: ZX Spectrum

Most of you have probably only heard of the ZX Spectrum from my previous text adventure reviews for ZX Spectrum games (if you even read those! Why would anybody not completely bored by their life spend any time reading a review for a decades old game from a dead genre?! I mean, obviously you read them because I have such an elegant way with words and my turns of phrase sometimes turn into sexy stories about doing it!). The ZX Spectrum was a squidgy little computer created by the man who tried to kill everybody in Britain with his three-wheeled electric "car." That man's name was Clive Sinclair and he wanted to be Jack Tramiel so badly that you're now thinking, "Who the fuck is Jack Tramiel and when are you going to tell a doing it story?"

That last sentence is the kind of sentence that gets you punched in the face by an editor! I'll never forgive nor forget, Susan!

Maybe Sinclair didn't want to be exactly like Jack Tramiel since a lot of people didn't like the way Tramiel did business. Sinclair, being British and prone to wearing jogging shorts that were just a little too short in that way that people from the 70s thought, "These shorts will do nicely since they're the perfect length to not quite contain my junk!", was probably more concerned with being liked. And if not liked, then definitely respected. Or if not respected, then at least noticed by his father? But he definitely would have liked to have sold a lot more units of the various Spectrum computers. Not to say he didn't sell a lot of computers! They were so cheap that parents on their way home from the coal mines couldn't help picking one up for their nerdy child.

I know what you're still thinking: "Who the fuck is Jack Tramiel?!" He was the guy behind the Commodore computers! Duh! He was also a survivor of the Holocaust. Just think about that! All those young white supremacists in the 80s were using a product from a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust when they wrote their first racist program!

10 print "Hitler was rad! ";
20 goto 10
30 end

I know the last line of that program isn't technically needed but you should always do things the proper way when you're trying to impress your racist dad!

That's probably enough history since I'm really running out of stuff I know. Also I'm almost certainly getting perilously close to saying something offensive.

The box art for Super Spy. I don't know if I'm currently titillated by the woman in the bikini or the images conjured in my mind by the name "Dick Shepherd."

Judging by the cover, I'm a left-handed, colorblind, Vietnamese super spy who may be as tall as Godzilla. My mission is to defuse a nuclear missile stolen by Jack Kervorkian.

According to the game, Dr. Death is a well known "meglomaniac." But even with a name like Dr. Death and with the knowledge that he's a narcissistic madman, the police couldn't arrest him until he broke the law.

As you can read on the cover, this game doesn't profess to be a text adventure game but a chase and a maze crawl. So why am I reviewing it? Because I was fucking tricked, that's why! Goddamned Internet text adventure lists aren't as accurate as you'd expect from a source with no oversight that anybody can add to. It's almost as if repositories of knowledge get worse as more and more anonymous people add to it. Almost as if the majority of people are fucking morons who think they aren't fucking morons. Listen, fucking morons. Leave everything to your betters. And if you don't think you're a moron, you probably are a moron. I understand that equation equals "everybody is a moron," so just trust me that it makes sense. I'm not a moron!

I don't know why I'm acting as if all the morons in the world are reading my words. The only people who read my text adventure reviews are veritable geniuses who can probably recognize when a writer is pandering to them so maybe I should just move on.

Non-text adventure aside: My 81 year old uncle went and saw Alice Cooper with his fifty-something year old daughter about a year ago. It's not because he's into Cooper's music but because he's seen Alice on several Fox News programs and wanted to check him out. So Fox News got my uncle to an Alice Cooper show meaning Fox News has done exactly one good thing for the world. Back to the review!

As you can see, the game is divided up into four non-text adventure parts. I'll review each part separately and then explain how the entire thing, together, was terrible.

Part A: The Round the World Spy Chase

As the super spy, your first job is to locate clues which will reveal the location of Dr. Death's lair. You do this by entering names of different cities into the input field. This causes a random event to take place. You might get in a fight with your spy enemies or you might find a clue. There are two types of clues. The first type of clue takes the form of a letter of the name of the city where Dr. Death is hiding. The second clue reveals a cryptogram of the name of the city so that you know how many letters are in the name and how many letters are repeated and in what position. In the first game where I managed to avoid death and find Dr. Death's hideout, the letters were something like PQSWNAN. I discovered two letters, a K and an O, which led me to guess Dr. Death was hiding out in Bangkok. When you type in the name of the city where Dr. Death is hiding, the game moves on to Part B.

But before we get to Part B, I should probably provide a screenshot for historical purposes. Early on, I realized that you could type anything and the game would accept the input as a city. It didn't fucking matter because the game simply gave you a random situation in which you might find a clue if you did the right thing. So from nearly the beginning, I put my super spy in appropriate situations.

I was undercover! To stay undercover, I had to smoke the crack and suck five dicks!


Okay maybe it wasn't totally for the investigation!


Who doesn't like to eat fresh fruit whilst fucking?


I could do this all day!

You get the idea: I'm easily amused! Anyway, I try going to Bangkok again (even though this is a new game and the location definitely changes) and I find Dr. Death's secret lair!

This game wasn't kidding about the 80 second intermission. I guess that was how long it took the next section of the game to load from tape.

I forgot to mention the Super Spy Gadgets part of the game. Before the game begins, like a good Super Spy, you pick three weapons out of a list of five.

"What the fuck is a secret cyanide gun?" thinks the player who is maybe role playing a little too deeply.

The only thing that matters about each weapon is how often it can be used. I suppose this is a method of choosing the difficulty setting. But if you aren't an eleven year old kid in 1983 who should probably be doing something more rewarding with their time anyway, I'd recommend choosing the Luger. I'm not saying you can't waste as much of your precious life attempting to beat this game by choosing the bomb, the watch, and the knife but I am saying you're a bigger and more stupid asshole than I am if you think it means anything.While you're looking for Dr. Death's secret lair, you can always stop back in London to get three new weapons. You can only do this a few times but I don't think that matters since you're either going to immediately find the lair by trying "Bangkok," or you're going to die immediately through no fault of your own. In that case, the game starts over with a new location for the secret lair. At that point, you should try Bangkok again!

Anyway, the choice of weapons comes into play in Part B (yes, sometimes you are attacked in Part A (like when I was jumped by those moon thugs!) but it doesn't matter because you'll either find the lair immediately or be blown up by a package or murdered by a taxi driver or poisoned by the interrupting manager). In Part B, you wander around an island being attacked by one each of God's most aggressive and monstrous creations. Except the wasp. I don't think you ever have to fight a wasp. But just like every great spy movie, you wind up battling a shark! You also go toe-to-toe with a scorpion and a rattlesnake and an octopus and a boa constrictor and a timber wolf and a pack of wild dogs and a mountain lion and a mountain goat and the natives working at the local "bananna" plantation. If you still have a weapon, you defeat any attacker in one turn. If you've run out of weapons, you defeat them after losing most of your strength. One more attack after that and you're dead.

You can find the lair in fourteen moves (with the last move not triggering an encounter (also, you might be able to find it quicker than that but I didn't map it, so I can't be sure)). A random encounter can take place every move. So if you choose to play the game with just the bomb and the watch and the knife (the highest difficulty setting!), you need to hope that the Random Number Generator is kind to you or else it's back to trying to travel to Bangkok. Unless you're a glutton for punishment (which I am not, all evidence to the contrary), just choose the weapons with the most uses. Unless you're that eleven year old with seemingly all the time in the world to waste due to their precious youth and glorious future possibilities yet to be written who might be able to impress their friends at school the next day by saying, "I beat the fucking game with just the bomb and the watch and the knife!" My guess is that the eleven year old's friends will be suitably impressed by their friend's use of the word "fucking."

Aside from killing everything you meet, the key to beating Part B is mapping. If you're familiar with mapping text adventures, you can do it easily enough. If you aren't familiar with mapping text adventures, I'll save you the tedium of learning about it and just move on to Part C.

Part C: the 3-D graphic maze!
ASCII emoticons have completely ruined the term "3-D" forever. Sure, the preferable way to make a penis is with an equal sign. The dash is meant for the cum, really. But you can't tell me you don't think "penis" every time you see "3-D" in print. Sometimes it's just "3D" but then I'm like, "That's a fucking choad, man."

THUG was hired for his muscles, not his imagination.

The hardest part of this level was figuring out the controls. Once I accomplished that, I just took a screen grab of the maze's plan and zipped right through. THUG never had a chance!

Based on THUG!'s face, I think I know what his genitals look like: 3=D

PART D: the Breaking the Code and Saving the World Part!

This part is Mastermind. That's it. You play a game of Mastermind to disarm the missile. I accomplished it in five guesses.

According to the number of times I've played Mastermind in eighties text adventures, I've developed a theory: Mastermind blew the mind of everybody who grew up in the seventies. Oh, and also, it must be really easy to implement in programming languages.

Part E: the Part Where I Impress my Fucking Friends!
I did it! I beat this fucking game! I beat it so hard! True, it wasn't a real text adventure. It was four disparate "games" linked by the most tenuous of spy plots. I probably didn't even experience the most difficult part of this game which would have been the slow reloading times after you were killed randomly. In emulation, the game can be beaten in under a minute. I spent more time thinking up dumb phrases for Part A than the entirety of the rest of the game.

Oh thanks! I guess I should hurry this along if I'm going to make the meeting!

Grade: D+. This was four different logic puzzles that weren't text adventures at all. In Part A, the player solves a cryptogram slash anagram. In Part B, they must navigate a text maze while managing resources. This part most resembles a text adventure but in the most shallow of manners. In Part C, the player runs a timed maze. This part most resembles flight simulator if it were actually a rat simulator. And in Part D, you play Mastermind. Sorry, Dick Shepherd, but I've got to grade you on my Text Adventure scale. And since this was hardly a text adventure, I've no choice but to punish you. Sure, I enjoyed Part A but only because I brought the best part to the game: me! Although I might have to steal THUG! as my Text Adventure Review Mascot.