BRIEF: Around the World (1983)

 

I wonder what part of the globe this map-maker came from?

         

Around the World

United States

SUPERWare (developer and publisher)
Released 1983 for Atari 800

Rejected for: No character development

         

We had Apple II computers back in junior high school, and in some class that we took in the lab, we were allowed to occasionally play Agent USA (1984), a half-adventure, half-educational game in which you traveled around different U.S. cities battling a terrorist event. The player's goal was to destroy the "FuzzBomb," but the game's real goal was to teach geography.

   

Around the World offers a similar blend of genres. It's less explicitly scholastic than Agent USA, but it offers the same sense of being both fun and educational. The goal is to travel around the world, starting in London and heading roughly east, in as short a time as possible. The journey will carry you through a series of destinations from around 40 possibilities, with the specific routes randomized for each new game.  It has some RPG elements in that you acquire an inventory and fight battles during the voyage, but I don't think that there's any character development during this process. I wasn't able to find any instructions for the game, so it's possible that I missed some features.

        

From an ad in a 1984 issue of Computer Gaming World. The areas are "boundless" because they wrap.

      

During character creation, you select from six pre-made characters or name your own. The pre-made characters are named Sir Edward, Lady Nancy, Beggar Bob, Midas, Bruno, and Hero. I like to think that Sir Edward is a reference to Admiral Sir Edward Belcher (1799-1877), who wrote Narrative of a Voyage Round the World (1843) about his experiences commanding the HMS Sulphur from 1839-42, which included service in the First Opium War. Lady Nancy is named after one of the authors. The rest are goofy or generic and have no "around the world" associations. I would have named the default characters Sir Edward, Phileas Fogg, Victor Young, Amelia Earhart, Kay Kyser, and Sir Cumfrence.

       

Creating a character. Is Sir Edward strong? Is Bruno large? Who knows.

        

If you make your own character, you're asked to set his strength, intelligence, size, wealth, and speed relative to the other characters. Other than assuming that "Midas" starts with the most wealth, I could only guess at random; I assume the documentation had something to say about these attributes. Whichever character you choose, you start in London with 300 food and some variable amount of gold.

     

Each city map is 53 x 20, with graphical features iconic to the city. For instance, London has Big Ben; Venice has canals; and the Alps offers mountain peaks. Although the graphics sometimes make it look like you're in a side-scrolling interface, you can generally walk in any cardinal direction, and the world wraps. You can walk over most graphical features, though there are occasional blockages (walls, rivers, trees) to serve as puzzles. All action is with the joystick.

     

For Paris, they went with the obvious.

      

Each city has a general store, a food store, a transportation store, and a transit station. General stores sell a variety of equipment, including weapons, armor, and items that protect you against the game's various dangers. There are about 20 potential items to buy but only 7 slots to carry them. Food stores sell just food, and transportation stores sell horses, donkeys, camels, or whatever transportation is commonly found in your local area. Transit stations move you on to your next destination. These shops are found by walking on the doorways of the various buildings that you encounter, but there are typically more doorways than shops, so you have to search around.

    

While you're walking around, you are subjected to random encounters with creatures and persons both hostile and helpful. They include mad dogs, rats, thieves, travelers, cardinals, and princesses. The human encounters have names randomly drawn from a pool, so you might encounter a thief named Buck or a princess named Grace. I think there are a fixed number of these NPCs per game, because if you kill one, the game tells you that you "don't have to worry about JOHN for the remainder of the quest."

      

Looks like he's more of a robber.

    

When you encounter these enemies, you have options to fight or persuade. Fighting has the game automatically resolve combat based (I guess) on your hidden attributes and equipment. Persuading can get the NPC to leave you alone or to give you gold, food, or travel hints. Generally, princesses and cardinals are helpful and thieves are hostile, with travelers somewhere in between, but there's a small chance of thieves helping you and also a small chance of cardinals backstabbing you. There are no rewards for winning in combat, and a failed persuasion always leads to combat, so I think it's best to just try persuading with everyone.

       

This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps.

      

In addition to these encounters, there are also occasional perilous events, like fires, floods, avalanches, and plagues, which can "damage" you unless you're carrying something to prevent it--a raft for floods, medicine for plagues, a "jacket" for fires, and so forth. 

     

I think it's technically an "avalanche."

       

You also occasionally encounter chests, which might contain gold or deadly traps. In general, the game offers a weird melange of themes. You're traveling around the "real world" but opening chests, amassing gold, fighting combats, and encountering plagues.

        

Ah, Rome . . . where travelers routinely encounter locked chests of gold.

    

There's no health meter in the game. Generally, if you're "damaged" in combat, by opening a chest, or losing a battle, the damage is reflected in lost days. A plague might set you back 7 days or a lost battle 3. I'm not sure if there's a time limit, but the number of days it takes to complete your journey is reflected in your final score. Occasionally, an event does just kill you outright. If that happens, you "meet your maker" and can resurrect on the spot, but only twice. The third time, you're dead for good.

 

The game's primary danger is starving to death. As you move across the landscape, you consume an incredible 5 units of food per step. [Ed. It apparently depends on the character, ranging from 2 to 7.] Simply walking from the arrival square to the transit station can easily consume all of that. You need to build up food--and fast. The problem is, it's expensive, and you need gold for other things. You get most of it begging from NPCs. There's a strong incentive, therefore, to save when you arrive in a new location, explore to find key locations, and reload to do it "for real" so that you can plot a route that consumes a minimum of food. There's also a strong incentive to save after positive encounters and reload after negative ones.

      

London offers the best deals on food.

     

Transportation options--horses and such--save only time, not food, and they disappear when you transit to a new location, so they're somewhat useless.

      

The second major difficulty, and the primary "puzzle" of the game, is finding the transit station in each area. They start off easy. London's is a huge station, probably meant to represent King's Cross or Victoria Station or something. But as you get deeper into your journey, the transit stations are hard to find. Rome's is in a random house in a row of houses; Paris's is at the base of the Eiffel Tower; the one in the Alps is at the top of a mountain. Eventually, they get sadistic. Finding Moscow's station requires you to enter a completely black square in a wall surrounding a Soviet housing block. The one in the Black Forest requires you to navigate a maze through the titular forest, where you can't tell visually which trees are impassable.

     

The final major difficulty is figuring out the travel route, which changes every time you start a new game. The transit station in London only takes you to a single place in Europe, such as Rome, Paris, or the Rhine Valley. After that, most transit stations have multiple destinations. It's not always a matter of moving east. In my most successful game, I got caught up in a maze that never seemed to get me out of Rome, Venice, Athens, Paris, and the Rhine Valley--all destinations seemed to be within this group. Finally, I discovered that I could get to the Alps from Rome, to Moscow from the Alps, to the Black Forest from Moscow, and finally to the Nile River from the Black Forest. 

         

Sounds about right.

        

As you might notice from the last one, the destinations aren't always sensible. Based on NPC dialogue, if I had found my way to the origin points, I could get to Hudson Bay via Nome, Arabia via Bombay, San Francisco via the Incan Ruins, and--my favorite--the South Pole via the Yukon. So finding your way is more like a node map than an actual journey. I'm not sure what the destination is supposed to be. You'd think it would be to return to London, but an advertisement for the game suggests that the journey ends in North America somewhere. I never got any hints involving places further east than Chicago, so perhaps it's there.

I played to the Nile. There, the transit station is in the middle of the river, and to get there you have to navigate an invisible maze. It took me about 45 minutes to map the maze, frequently reloading when I starved to death in the attempt. Given that I was 5 hours into the game by then and had visited only about 10 of the 40 locations, I decided it wouldn't be a good use of a CRPG Addict's time to continue, even though I was enjoying how the authors had chosen to graphically depict each area. This game is ripe for someone to take up with a full walkthrough.

        

My map of the Nile area, including the hidden maze needed to reach the transit station.

        

The game window for the same area.

        

Around the World was written by Nancy and George Schwenk of Silver Spring, Maryland. George was a relatively prolific author of strategy games and other programs; he published through several companies before starting his own SUPERWare. The Wargaming Scribe has a good rundown of Schwenk's history in his coverage of After Pearl (1984), a wargame about the Pacific Theater in World War II. The Scribe also covered Schwenk's Dawn of Civilization (1984) in November. I was supposed to do some cross-blog synergy with the Scribe in November and let him down by taking an unexpected break, so I apologize to him and encourage you all to check out his blog, where you can learn some interesting things about history in the context of his well-written coverage.