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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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