Graphic Adventure Games from the Eighties 101

As I play these old graphic adventure games, I'm trying to learn something from each one that might help me along in the next. So these are a few things the games I've played have taught me.

1. Alien Research Center: A relatively simple game which I thought I was going to win on my first attempt. Getting from beginning to end was fairly simple although one exit from one room remained blocked to me. After realizing I still had more things to find, I attempted to pass the pool blocking my way with no luck. It turned out there was a half-corroded floor in one room that you needed to kick to open up more of the ship. Thing I learned: When a Wall, Floor, or Ceiling has a special note, mark it for later. You may have to try a whole bunch of verbs useless in the rest of the game on the wall or floor or ceiling to continue on your quest.

2. Master of the Universe in Terraquake (unless it's really Super Adventure!): This game had a lot of Red Herrings which made me waste a lot of time. But it is possible to realize specific areas of a map that you don't need to fiddle with. But Terraquake's Red Herrings were mainly there to distract the player from the dead end under Snake Mountain with a wall that didn't have anything interesting about it at all. Of course, that was where a secret door was! Thing I learned: When a Wall, Floor, or Ceiling has no special note, you're fucked. You may have to try examining every wall and floor and ceiling in every location until you find one that says more than "Looks like an ordinary wall to me."

3. Frankie Crashed on Jupiter: Saying Fuck replaced the Drop All command in this game. But it did so by moving your entire inventory into the room you are currently in. This had the advantage of things that would normally break when you dropped them individually to not break! Very handy, indeed. Thing I learned: Saying Fuck can be very useful.

4. The Very Big Cave Adventure: If you say Fuck in this game, the female narrator breaks your arm and ends your game. But if you say Shit, you are transported to the Swear Box where you must Wash Mouth to leave. When you leave, you end up near the Wellie House where your treasure is stored. This can be very useful when you don't want to cross the entire cave to put some treasure away. But what is more, one of the major puzzles in the game (possibly the only real puzzle in the game!) can be avoided by swearing! In Gotham, you have to steal two treasures while That Man is in the bathroom. But you just don't have enough time! But you can steal both treasures and swear before going back to the heart of Gotham! You still need to get a ride back from That Man if you want his utility belt. But that's no problem! If you head back to Gotham, everything is reset! You can help That Man foil the Jester again and this time just hang out until That Man is done in the can. Game Won! Things I learned: When programmers try to get cute, they often fuck up the shit in their game.

5. Aztec Tomb Revisited: This game was a big fat programming turd. How it ever made it onto shelves is a mystery. But the worst part of the game is that the instructions outright lie to you. They tell you to look at rooms and examine things. But early on, you need to look at things while examine does nothing. Oh, what a clever ploy! Fuck you, Brandon James. I will never forget your name, Brandon James. Things I learned: Brandon James is a dick who can't program worth shit.

The Very Big Cave Adventure

Those must have been some really heady times, those halcyon days of the eighties. When you could write an adventure game and it would be published no matter how poorly thought out it was. Where people were in such need of computer entertainment that they would shell out 8 Pounds for a less than funny parody of the Grandfather of all text games.

Oh, to be a kid back then! When you could write a game where all of the action took place on the surface of Jupiter and nobody seemed to care. When you could insult the player constantly because they can't quite guess the verb to solve the nonsensical puzzle you placed in the first few moves of a game to make the game seem to last longer. When mazes were standard fare and the only thing standing in the way of someone figuring out all of your puzzles in a couple of hours.

"See, what I did here, was I made most of the map available. And you can see there are six main puzzles that the player needs to solve to move on. But! The player can't solve any of these puzzles until he finds all the correct items at the end of this dastardly maze I made where no direction ever takes you to the same place twice and there is only a 1 in 100 chance of finding the correct route!"

Oh, such beauty! Such innocence! No wonder I long to go back and replay all of these horrible, horrible games! Their allure is just too, too sweet.

Click on The Very Big Cave Adventure for my latest review.
Click on The Very Big Cave Adventure for my latest Walkstory.

Places & Predators

Places & Predators is the name of my website. I thought maybe I would list updates here with some notes on each project. I'm hoping that Blogger has better spam protection than the P&P Forum I'm currently using. Registration for the forum now needs authentication by me since at least one spammer per day was logging on. Usually, the same spammer but with a different name. He kept using a yahoo.uk email address and tacking two random capital letters onto he end of all of his random names.

Triage

Nearing forty and it's really beginning to dawn on me how little time I have to get in everything I want to do every day. I haven't been reading much the last few years because I've been spending that time writing. Or playing video games. Or sleeping. Or watching Netflix streaming. Or leaving the house for various reasons. Or who knows what else. But I read two books in the last week (Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams and Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke) and would like to keep up that kind of pace. Maybe one book per week. I have a library within walking distance, so maybe I should get a card before I start spending tons of cash at Powell's on Hawthorne.

Sometimes I think I need to start a time budget so I can make sure I actually get the writing and reading parts of my life in gear. I can't begin to imagine how people with full time jobs have any time to do anything they'd really like to do. Here's hoping that my 18 hour a week that pays like a 40 hour a week job never disappears.

Spoilers Ahead: Dragnet 1967

I think Joe Friday is a big liar. He's supposed to be showing us why policemen should be trusted but he can't even give us straight facts. In Episode 2, The Big Explosion, he claims that every day, 1000 new people crowd into Los Angeles and that 3 Million People were there before them.

Then in Episode 5, The Big Masked Bandits, he states that the city is home to only 2.5 million people and that only 5000 more crowd in every month as opposed to about 30,000 as he claimed earlier!

I'm starting to think he's just making everything up as he goes.

Super Dragnet Fact #1: The stories are based on true events. And you can tell that this isn't just some bullshit because of the high level of detail Joe Friday goes into about every aspect of the story, from the traffic routes to the time tables of events to the description of everybody involved. No writer could make up all of that great detail!

A Little Bit About Me #1

I love to sneeze.

I wonder how many people die every year from accidents caused by sneezing?

This is probably going somewhere

History is the hardest of all knowledge to hold on to. People record history with cultural bias and utilize descriptions crippled by the limited scientific knowledge of the current time. People hide disgraceful or shameful events so that future generations will never know of them. History is easily lost. Science and technology are used every day and improved upon from generation to generation, thus making it harder to lose the knowledge. History only records events. And when records are changed or destroyed, when the people living in the current time have long since gone and the history they knew never passed on to their progeny's progeny, history is forever lost, changed, or willfully ignored.

History has also been hampered by the ability to keep records safe. And those records that do survive can only be read through translations which can never perfect or bring forward the true, exact meaning or intentions of the writing. Much guesswork and supposition will be inherent in the translations of these documents, especially in cases where the transcriber of the recorded event did not have the words to describe that which he was witnessing. This leads to the writer tending toward the use of metaphor, simile, or his own assumptions and guesses and naive perceptions of events. Science and technology do not tend to have this problem. Even if advanced methods of doing something are lost for some time, they can always be rediscovered because math and science are not specific to culture, language, or time.

In this day and age, we have so many people meticulously writing about any current event that future generations will have the opposite problem. They'll have many differing accounts and opinions to wade through to try to get to the heart of the matter. But at least they should know what was happening to a greater degree than we have today of far past civilizations. Which is sort of what I was thinking about.

Most people would think it silly and unbelievable to think that aliens have ever actually visited out planet. But how would we really know when ancient South American Civilizations described the Spanish as Gods? How much myth and how much religion was created whole-cloth from the imagination in order to answer spiritual and metaphysical questions plaguing ancient people? And how much of it could be historic observations of alien civilizations visiting our planet during civilizations infancy?

Could not the idea of Angels have come about as the only way ancient man could conceive of humanoid beings who fly through space? The wings would be the artistic metaphor to show that these beings could fly and that they came from the sky as opposed to men who actually had wings. Could not creation myths and stories of Gods have come from beings who showed such strength and power and marvelous tools that the simple minds of earth's inhabitants had no way of describing exactly what they were seeing?

Could the idea of an end of the world conflict in which the divine creator comes done from the heavens to save the righteous and slay the wicked be a promise and not a prediction? What if alien beings had foretold that they would be watching and they would save the people of Earth if they ever grew to bring about their own destruction? Wouldn't that mean that the hastening of another world war (as many fundamentalist Christians and Muslims might see as a good thing) not bring about the descending of higher beings to the earth because it is predicted but because they promised to come if things ever got so out of hand that mankind was about to destroy itself?

What would be interesting is that this concept, over time, of a promise to help had become, to Man, a prophecy that will eventually come true. In this case, some might seek to hurry it along since they see no hope that it will never happen. And yet looked at in the view of a promise to help if things got that bad, we would see that we don't ever need to get to that point.

Perhaps all of the Egyptian mythology, if written with the scientific knowledge and technological language we have today, would become clear and understandable as something real and material instead of metaphorical and spiritual. Perhaps the Norse Myths are just telling the same stories but through their own cultural bias, environmental settings, and Nordic language. Maybe all ancient civilizations were visited by the same people but could only tell the tale in the only way they knew how.

Or perhaps all religious texts and creation myths, stories of Gods and ancient heroes, are all just stories.