Game 212: The Adventure - Only the Fittest Shall Survive (1985)

 

The Adventure: Only the Fittest Shall Survive
Green Valley Publishing (developer and publisher)

Released 1985 for Apple II

Date Started: 9 February 2016
Date Ended: 9 February 2016

Total Hours: 3

Reload Count: 0

Difficulty: Easy (2/5), at least for the first scenario

Final Rating: 21

Ranking at Time of Posting: 72/223 (32%)

Green Valley Publishing only seems to have been around for about two years between 1985 and 1987, but during that time they managed to produce at least half a dozen games, including A PACAaLIPS Now, a ripoff of Pac-Man; Atomic Handball, a ripoff of Breakout; a C64 adaptation of a chess game that someone else made; a re-release of Sierra's The Wizard and the Princess; and The Adventure: Only the Fittest Shall Survive, a breathtakingly blatant ripoff of Eamon (1980). This was not a publisher with a lot of ambition towards originality.

   

I feel like we've seen this dragon before...

   

As you may recall from my March 2013 review, Eamon is an open-source adventure construction set from Donald Brown. Any number of adventures spin off from a central adventurer's hall where you start and end each quest. There, you can buy weapons, armor, and spells and perform a few other aspects of character management. The adventures are all text, but unlike the Infocom adventures of the time, they are proper RPGs, with a complex set of statistics to determine accuracy and damage in combat, including a system of critical hits and fumbles. Skills for weapon, armor, and spell use increase as you successfully use them, which I think is the first time this method of character development appears in RPG history.

Different weapon types adjust accuracy and damage formulas but are mitigated by developing skill.

Donald Brown wrote half a dozen adventures to go with the core program, then made it available to the world. Today, the Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online has cataloged 255 Eamon adventures, including several made within the last few years.

Brown apparently has a chip on his shoulder about his game, and he has refused to respond to requests for interviews, including mine. But he did try to commercialize Eamon as SwordThrust (1981), a variant I liked so much that I wrote my first walkthrough based on it. The engine has also been adapted to graphic platforms several times.

Unless Brown had some relationship with Green Valley Publishing that history has yet to be uncovered, The Adventure is a staggeringly unethical commercialization, in express violation of the Eamon license. It adopts the Eamon engine in its entirety and makes only the most superficial changes. The Hall of the Guild of Free Adventurers becomes the Guildhall of the Free Adventurers. The primary attributes of hardiness, agility, and charisma become strength, dexterity, and charisma. The skills of spear, bow, and axe become blunt, distance, and slashing. Idiotic word substitutions like this, fooling no one, permeate the game.
  

Chester fights a priest.

   

In almost all of its changes, The Adventure makes for blander text. For instance, when you first enter the guildhall and give the guildmaster your name (to load an old character or retrieve a new one), Eamon calls him a "burly Irishman," while The Adventure just calls him "a guard." When he can't find your name and wants to confirm that you want to create a new character, Eamon has him say, "Yer name's na in here. Have ye given it to me aright?" while The Adventure just notes, "the guard eyes you suspiciously and says he can't find you listed." Eamon's weapon shop owner is named Marcos Cavielli and says "well, as I live and breathe, if it isn't my old pal Chester!" when you enter. The Adventure just has a generic "weaponmaster" who "greets you warmly." I could go on for multiple paragraphs.

But the underlying engine--as well as major things like the main screen graphics--are entirely unchanged. This includes your amount of starting gold, weapon and armor prices, and spell names ("Blast," "Heal," "Speed," and "Power"). This also includes the name of the first adventure: "The Beginner's Cave." 

Beginning the first adventure in The Adventure...

...and in Eamon. Changing "entrance" to "mouth" really shows the former's originality.

  

Once you start the adventure, some changes in The Adventure interface become clear. The text is mostly the same--superficial replacements, I suspect designed to counter the most obvious charges of plagiarism--but The Adventure splits its screen so that the text occupies the right half and information about the character (which in Eamon you would need to return to the guildhall to see) occupies the left.

As with Eamon, exploring the adventure is done with simple commands, including the cardinal directions (unlike Eamon, The Adventure doesn't support abbreviations, so you have to type out NORTH and SOUTH), LOOK, TAKE, QUAFF, SAY, and ATTACK. The Adventure gets rid of some of the less-used but fun Eamon verbs, including SMILE and WAVE. Again, there are dumb substitutions: Eamon's GET, DRINK, and READY become TAKE, QUAFF, and PREPARE here.

Another comparison. This is Eamon...

...and this is The Adventure. Same rates, same treasure. By making its chamber "large" instead of "small," The Adventure corrected a glaring problem with the original.

I played a little of the game side-by-side with the Eamon version, and it appears that the map is identical, including the placement of monsters and treasures. The cave is basically just a long hall with rooms off to the side where you can fight monsters and pick up treasures. Charisma determines whether certain NPCs are enemies or allies. Again, the encounters are less interesting than in Eamon: a "grizzled old hermit who smells as if he hasn't taken a bath in forty years" is just "a hermit"; "a bottle with a strange potion inside" is just "a bottle."

Some of the changes make no sense. In Eamon, when the adventurer gets to the end of the hallway, the text says, "to your great shock are two doors on the east and west." This is a joke about the fact that the three preceding squares in the hallway have all had east-west doors, thus you are shocked--shocked!--to find the same configuration yet again. In its efforts to avoid tripping the alarms at TurnItIn.com or something, The Adventure missed the joke and changed the text to read, "you are mortified to see two sinister looking doors to the east and west."

The only thing The Adventure really adds is some nonsensical names. What was just a large chamber in Eamon is "The Hall of the Great Lord Gumby" in The Adventure. A jail cell has "Gumby hath no mercy" scrawled on the wall. A passage not found in Eamon leads down a hallway to the Temple of the Great Lord Galootie.

"Sir, we must put our own stamp on this adventure!" "Agreed! Just make sure it's stupid!"

   

There is one instant death if you read a book in a library: a giant fist crushes you. (In Eamon, you get turned into a fish.) If you can avoid that, the adventure culminates when the cave emerges onto a beach and you fight a pirate for some jewels. After that, you make your way back to the entrance, where the guildmaster converts your accumulated treasure to cash that you can spend on equipment and goods for the next adventure.

The final confrontation of the scenario.

   

Two other adventures were apparently released for The Adventure: Cave of the Mind and River Adventure, both "adapted" from Eamon adventures (Jim Jacobson's Cave of the Mind and The Zyphur Riverventure, respectively). I didn't find either, but I wasn't looking terribly hard.

The game poses a challenge for the GIMLET, because I ought to rank it almost the same as Eamon. The text changes don't make a huge difference. The interface is arguably a little better by having the "character sheet" on the left, although what it gains it loses via the inability to delete previously typed text, so if you accidentally type ATTAKC, you have no option but to hit ENTER, accept the error message, and try again.

Thusfar, I've avoided making adjustments to the GIMLET based on originality or moral judgments on the game development process (distinguished from moral judgements about content, I hasten to add), so I guess The Adventure gets a 21. But where Eamon has 252 more adventures to its name, there aren't many reasons to play this game over that one.

****

For more information on Green Valley and the potential authorship of The Adventure, see my later posting on The Realm of Angbar: Elfhelm's Bane.