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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my god look at how adorable Bart is!

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

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

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

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

Thanks! I guess.

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

SCORES

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Desecration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does NASA stand for? Need Another 7000 Astronauts.

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

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

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

SCORES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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