Game 31: Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor (1987)

        

The tough thing about playing Beyond Zork is resisting the temptation to go back and play Zorks I, II, and III. Actually, to be fair, I didn't resist. I downloaded the original Zork and played for about 20 minutes before I realized I still remembered the entire game by heart. I figured the time it took to type in all of the commands and win all three games--just as a prologue--would probably tax my readers' patience.

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

--Opening to the original Zork (1980)

I do love text adventures, though--not as much as good CRPGs, but I definitely have a soft spot for them. A world of commands at your fingertips, no images or sound except what your imagination conjures. The key to the Infocom text adventures (the Zork series, the Enchanter series, the Planetfall series, Deadline, and the inimitable Leather Goddesses of Phobos among many others) is that they were well-written. Playing them was like a combination between a good RPG and a good novel. They were also extremely funny; I don't know if Terry Pratchett ever played Zork or if the creators of Zork ever read the Discworld series (the games and the first books were published contemporaneously), but they both share a humorous subversion of traditional fantasy tropes.

     

Bumper sticker available from Zazzle.com

     

So to get properly into Beyond Zork, we should at least recap the previous games.

• In Zork, you play the role of an ageless, faceless, gender-neutral, culturally ambiguous adventure person (there is a "special topics" posting coming up on TVTropes) who starts out next to a house but soon finds himself exploring part of the once-flourishing, now-collapsed Great Underground Empire. The purpose of the game is to find 20 treasures and install them in a trophy case in the abandoned house. This grants you access to a tunnel that takes you to Zork II.
• Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz picks up where Zork left off. Here, you must recover 10 treasures while contending with the mad wizard of the title.
• In Zork III, you solve a series of puzzles to become the new Dungeon Master of the Great Underground Empire and gain access to its vast treasure chambers.

The seaman looks up and maneuvers the boat toward shore. He cries out "I have waited three ages for someone to say those words and save me from sailing this endless ocean. Please accept this gift. You may find it useful!" He throws something which falls near you in sand, then sails off toward the west, singing a lively, but somewhat uncouth, sailor song.

--The most rewarding moment in the Zork series. Trust me; you have to play it.

Throughout all of this, of course, you control your ageless, faceless, etc. character through the use of typed commands. Here is a transcript from the original Zork:

You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west and a dark staircase can be seen leading upward. A dark chimney leads down and to the east is a small window which is open. On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers. A bottle is sitting on the table. The glass bottle contains a quantity of water.

>TAKE ALL

Brown sack: taken. Glass bottle: taken.

>OPEN SACK

Opening the brown sack reveals a lunch and a clove of garlic.

>WEST

You are in the living room. There is a doorway to the east, a wooden door with strange gothic lettering to the west, which appears to be nailed shut, a trophy case, and a large oriental rug in the center of the room. Above the trophy case hangs an elvish sword of great antiquity. A battery-powered brass lantern is on the trophy case.

>TAKE SWORD AND LANTERN

Sword: taken. Brass lantern: taken.

>MOVE RUG

With great effort, the rug is moved to one side of the room, revealing the dusty cover of a closed trap door.

>OPEN TRAP DOOR

The door reluctantly opens to reveal a rickety staircase descending into darkness.

>DOWN

You have moved into a dark place. The trap door crashes shut, and you hear someone barring it. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.

>LIGHT LANTERN

The brass lantern is now on. You are in a dark and damp cellar with a narrow passageway leading north, and a crawlway to the south. On the west is the bottom of a steep metal ramp which is unclimbable.

>NORTH

The Troll Room. This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls. A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room. Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.

>TROLL, HELLO

The troll isn't much of a conversationalist. The troll pauses for a moment, perhaps thinking that you should re-read the manual.

>PET TROLL

Fiddling with the troll has no effect. The troll's mightly blow drops you to your knees.

>KILL TROLL WITH SWORD

Your attack is ineffective. The flat of the troll's axe hits you delicately on the head, knocking you out. The troll scratches his head ruminatively: might you be magically protected, he wonders? Conquering his fears, the troll puts you to death.

Thank God the troll killed me, or I might have just kept transcribing all the way to the end.

I didn't play the Zork trilogy as part of this project because they're not CRPGs. But Beyond Zork changes all of that. Although the interface is still controlled by text inputs, you have a named character--a named character with attributes like endurance, strength, dexterity, intelligence, compassion, and luck. You also gain experience points as you slay monsters. This is, to my knowledge, the only text/CRPG hybrid like this in existence.

     

Character creation in Beyond Zork.

       

Beyond Zork also reboots the story, making my summaries above a bit superfluous. The action moves out of the Great Underground Empire and to the land of Quendor, where the Age of Magic has given way to the Age of Science. To preserve their heritage from the future, the enchanters and enchantresses of the land have decided to hide away the Coconut of Quendor, a mysterious artifact that "embodies the essence of their wisdom." Your role in this quest is unclear at the beginning, as you start as a nameless peasant. Working through the winners of my "Guess the Game" posting, I named my character "Adamantyr."

I start at a hilltop next to a tree with nothing but a pack and a single Zorkmid (the game's currency) to my name. But soon I've ambled down the hill to where an old sailor is creating a painting on a canvas, and I've pulled a bit of driftwood out of the water to use as a club. Since "shillelagh" (what the game calls it) is too easy to misspell, I use the game's NAME command to dub my new club "Zink."

     
     

Note the little automap in the upper right-hand corner. It doesn't save me from having to actually create a map, but it helps to know what ways I can go.

Up the path a ways, I find a ledge with an inscription: "My tines be long, my tines be short, my tines end ere my first report. What am I?" Confidently, I answer "lightning," and in true Infocom style, I get my "reward":

Kerblam! A blast from the sky sends you sprawling over the brink of the ledge! You grab onto a rocky outcrop and manage to drag yourself back up to safety.

Oh, I know I'm going to like this game.

Alien Fires: WTF -- and Beyond!

I don't have the graphics editing skills to make this $&*# up.

   

[Edit from the future: Don't read this. Read instead my updated look at the game from 2017: Post 1 and Post 2.]

     

Normally, I like to save Barton for the end of a game, but I had to take a break from actually trying to play Alien Fires to see what he thought about this completely WTF game. I am gratified to see the word "bizarre" in the first sentence. He mentions the free-form dialog but also a number of features that I don't have, probably because they weren't included in the DOS port: a cool soundtrack, and a beating-heart effect that tells you when you're about to die. I wonder what year we have to get into before the DOS/PC version isn't the worst version of every game.

He goes on to say, "Alien Fires is an extremely difficult game...I certainly wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I've never played another game that had the same otherworldly ambiance." See, Barton has a way with words. He says "otherworldly ambiance." I say, "WTF?"

It's going to be a long six hours.

Since yesterday, I managed to find the pocket watch--the huge pocket watch--sought by our rabbit-horse friend, Mangle Tangle.

    

I'm late, I'm late...for a very important hernia operation.

In return for the watch, I got an "octo knife." It was nice to finally have a weapon because I kept running into Octo agents in the hallways and getting killed. Let's talk about combat for a second. Barton calls it a "furious affair." He's right. Once you engage in it, you have to keep mashing the "attack" key (in my case, the spacebar), hoping to score more hits than your opponent within the roughly 2.3 seconds that combat lasts. I have yet to win.

Never bring an octo knife to a sword/pulse rifle fight.

While I was happy to get the knife, it introduced a new problem: Mangle Tangle the rabbit-horse decided he didn't like me. I might have accidentally hit the space bar (attack) while standing in front of him. Whatever the cause, he kept showing up, blocking the hallways, and killing me. I was unable to use his own knife against him to any effect.

Feel free not to.

When you get killed the Time Lords resurrect you and send you on back to the beginning. There's some more WTF stuff going on in that screen shot. Do they have my soul in a test tube or something? Unfortunately, this doesn't make Mangle Tangle any less hostile, and I kept dying over and over. If there's a way to turn a character un-hostile after he attacks you, or skirt around him, I haven't found it. Ultimately, I had to re-start with a new character.

The next time around, I realized that I'd been neglecting the "examine" key, which tells you a little about the people in front of you.

That clears up the whole "droid" thing.

I also found another clue about the evil Octo corporation from a hand on a ship that the company had confiscated.

After retrieving Mangle Tangle's pocket watch for the second time and getting his knife again, I found the elevator to the second level, where Alien Fires made a reasonably funny joke:

"The jerk gets off at Level 2 and the elevator continues on."

Ominously, the game congratulated me for this achievement and warned me that the rest of the game wouldn't be as easy as Level 1. Oh, goodie.

I'm glad I'm not supposed to be undercover.

You might note that there isn't a single screenshot that doesn't have some glaring grammar or syntax problem. I know I make my share, too, but when I see them, I do recognize them as errors. No one on Jagware's staff could do that, apparently.

Aside from the grating text, the main problem at this point is that I just can't stop dying. Even with my knife, I've yet to win a single battle. I'm not even sure I've scored a hit.

Barton, I see you lurking over there in my "Followers" list. Given that I don't get to experience the sound effects, music, and atmosphere that you described in your book, is it worth continuing with this one? I ask because I haven't really enjoyed a game--really experienced that classic "addict" sensation where you want to stay up until 03:00 to play, and you even sneak in an hour or two at work, if the afternoon is quiet--since Starflight, and part of me wants to keep pushing through these interesting-but-dated titles until I get to something I know will satisfy this jones, like Phantasie III or Pool of Radiance.

No hurry. I probably have three more hours at least to satisfy my rules.

Game 30: Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. (1987)

[Edit from the future: Don't read this. Read instead my updated look at the game from 2017: Post 1 and Post 2.]

Can it be a coincidence that we have two sci-fi CRPGs, released in the same year, that have an anno domini in the title? And both used wrongly, with the "A.D." coming after, not before, the year? Maybe not, but in any event Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. owes nothing to 2400 A.D. It has a very different interface and plot. Also, it doesn't make any sense.

If a "time-transportation device" threatens the universe, one wonders what the "TimeLords" actually do to earn their titles.

The game's backstory is an obvious fusion of Doctor Who and Apocalypse Now. You play a TimeLord (one of an immortal race of beings responsible for protecting the temporal balance of the universe) given a quest by your TimeLord Elders to track down the brilliant and disturbed Samuel Kurtz, who has escaped to "a small planet at the edge of known universe" with an "awesome device" that "threatens to twist the very fabric of time itself."

My character is as slow as a snail crawling on the edge of a straight razor.

Character creation involves giving yourself a name and allocating 99 points among seven skills: fighting, marksmanship, diplomacy, dexterity, understanding, tracking, and quickness. The manual describes each of these skills, and they are about what you'd expect, but I love their description for "understanding," which includes: "generally, this will help your character point dangerous items like plasma rifles in the correct direction before firing them." Wow. I hope it helps with not walking into walls, too.

The game starts you off in the middle of a space station called Galaxy's End, with very little information about what to do except that you need to find an elevator to the next level. (I think the manual I've found is only a partial one, which doesn't help.) The game is in first-person view with wireframe walls (how retro) but--get this--continuously scrolling. We haven't seen this since Alternate Reality.

The other graphics in the game seem pretty decent, such as the various robots you encounter in the station.

Or maybe this guy isn't a robot. It's hard to tell.

Now, on the robots: you can talk to them, and the dialog, as far as I can tell, is completely open-ended. I don't mean just keywords here; you type entire sentences! Naturally, it must be scanning your sentences for keywords, but it still feels pretty cool. Here's a conversation I just had with what looks like a droid but might be a man. The horrible errors of grammar and syntax are the game's, not mine.

• TRISTAR: Hello. I hope you have come to help us, there is not much time - you must go to the next level and talk to angel, but beware - there are Octo agents everywhere.
• ME: Who are you?
• TRISTAR: I am Tristar, the chief and only mechanic of Galaxy's End.
• ME: What are you?
• TRISTAR: What do you mean, what am I? What are you? What is anybody? I am a sophisticated chemical composition comprised of about 76 percent water. So there.
• ME: What are Octo agents?
• TRISTAR: Octo is a scientific research company, they are very secretive. They often land here for supplies and shipments of Micalite from the mine.
• ME: Where is the elevator?
• TRISTAR: The elevator is in the elevator shaft
• ME: That was really helpful, thanks.
• TRISTAR: I don't understand what you mean.
• ME: Where is the elevator shaft?
• Tristar the mechanic leaves

It's like a combination of Starflight, when NPCs abruptly broke off conversation for no reason, presumably so you wouldn't learn everything in one sitting, and the open-ended dialog of the Origin titles.

The dialog isn't completely open-ended, unfortunately.

Alien Fires chooses to sacrifice what could be a pretty awesome dialog system with stuff like this, though:

I could have happily gone my entire CRPG career without a W.K.R.P. reference. Alas, it was not to be.

I encountered these three entities within just a couple of minutes of wandering the initial corridors (by the way, if you swear at them, they attack you and you die; I know you were all wondering). So far, I've gotten that I need to talk to Whitey in the bar on Level 2.

Now let's talk about the game's problems. Aside from the story issues (and the seeming randomness of your starting point), the interface is horrible. Commands are through the function keys, which probably made sense on some keyboard but which is fairly impossible on my laptop without looking first. (Yes, I know DOSBox has a keyboard mapper. I don't know why, but I can't get it to work. Everything I do just ends up disabling the keys.) Second, even in DOSBox cranked up to some CPU speed 100 times what was available in 1987, the corridors take a few seconds to redraw each time you move. Since people and droids draw last, you usually find yourself blazing past them, and you have to keep stopping and turning around. The continual scrolling alternates between being unresponsive and way too responsive. I hit the right or left arrows and nothing happens, so I hold them down for a couple seconds and I end up spinning in place for five or six revolutions.

It may be that none of these things are the creators' faults, and just an issue with playing the game on modern platforms, but it still reduces my enthusiasm for slogging through however many hours of this.

I do have my first quest, though. I encountered this rabbit/horse thing smoking a pipe and told him I wanted a weapon.

There you have it. The fate of the universe hangs in the balance, and I'm off to find a pocket watch for the pipe-smoking rabbit-horse so I can defend all creation with a hunting knife. I'm sure you'll wait with bated breath for my next posting.

Constructing an Adventure: ACS Addendum

Alas, version 1.0 of this promising adventure was canceled in pre-production.

We CRPG fans like to complain about the cookie-cutter nature of many CRPG plots, which almost all involve starting off killing rats and progress to some big bad trying to take over the world. But the truth is, coming up with an original CRPG plot is hard. There are only a few that pull it off very well: Ultima IV, maybe some of the Might & Magic titles, Baldur's Gate II.

This is why I got excited about Bourbon Street Tango, the adventure I decided I would construct using the Adventure Construction Set. I started thinking about it when I saw that ACS offered a "spy/mystery" builder set. There are so few CRPGs set in the modern day, I figured I'd build one using New Orleans, 2010, as my canvas.

 

I worked out a fairly cool plot line involving terrorism. I don't want to say more, lest I decide to develop it using a different builder, but let's just say that downtown NOLA was going to be cut off from the rest of world and rife with bad guys. Fortunately, ACS provides an option for this:

"KGB agent." Isn't that cute?

One of the drawbacks of setting a CRPG in the "real world" is a lack of magic, right? Well, I had that covered. This is New Orleans, after all. My idea was that to solve the main quest, the protagonist was going to have to get into the heart and soul of the city, learning about jazz, Cajun cuisine, and of course voodoo! Why shoot terrorists when you can hex them?

A lot of the work that goes into constructing an adventure in ACS has to do with creating a gameworld and editing the terrain. My idea was to reconstruct the French Quarter, with entrances to the various clubs and shops.

I was about this time that I realized that the interface for Adventure Construction Set, while groundbreaking in its era, was far too much a pain in the neck for the modern gamer; that if I kept working on this, I wouldn't get to my next CRPG for weeks; and that even if I finished it, all I would have to show for my efforts was a module for a mid-1980s CRPG that almost no one would play. There are some things that aren't even worth the historical curiosity value.

So I'm going to keep my notes, and keep working on the idea, but probably save it for a later toolset. I appreciate all of you who said you'd play if I made it, but constructing CRPGs isn't what I'm addicted to, and it's not why you all come and read this blog. Let's move on to Alien Fires: 2199 A.D.

Adventure Construction Set: No Eternal Life for Me

I will eat, drink, and be merry--forever!

Man, I was truckin' along pretty good there with "Rivers of Light." After last night's posting, I:

1. Found a secret door that led me to a weapon called Repeller:

 
2. Used said weapon to defeat Yam the dragon.

 

3. Got from Yam's corpse the third of three tablets I needed to figure out how to survive the endgame. Here they are crudely pieced together in Word:

 

4. Followed Gilgamesh's path o'er hill and dale, and through a poisoned lake (that's where the cedar poles came in handy) to meet none other than Utnapishtim, the Babylonian analog to Noah:

 
5. Followed Utnapishtim's instructions to get a mysterious plant called a "Gray Grow Young."


 

6. Hiked back across the Sinai Peninsula and explored some pyramids, including one that took me into a mysterious valley called "Two Hero Valley."

Unfortunately, the name of the Valley didn't turn out to be a metaphor. You see, Adventure Construction Set allows you to have multiple characters active in the game world at the same time. I didn't see any point to it, but now it's clear that it's the only way to win the game.

 

Maddictra is stuck in her side of the valley now, and I need a second hero to come along and open a passage on the other side. Regrettably, this means creating a second character, and building him up enough to get the equipment he needs to cross the Sinai Peninsula to meet up with Maddictra. Am I willing to invest that kind of time? If it was a better game, maybe. As it is, no.

I tried looking for a walkthrough, but "Rivers of Light" seems to be the exception to the rule that every game has one. The best I found--and this is actually quite good--is a series of YouTube videos made by user "I Played a Thing." He's playing on an Amiga, so the graphics look different (i.e., better), but the gameplay is identical. (For some reason, he has chosen to call his character "Fire" and has an icon representing fire.) He reaches my stuck point at 06:26 in the video below. His reaction is identical to mine: "That is some bull$&%, Rivers of Light!"

He was willing to do what I'm not: take the several hours to make a second character and haul him over to the valley, so if you want to see how it ends, keep watching his videos. The summary is that you work your way through a series of gates in a valley-cum-dungeon along the Nile, ultimately meeting the Egyptian god Osiris face-to-face in his tomb.

Stolen from "I Played a Thing's" video.

 
There, you are reunited with the souls of your seven past lives and "born again" in a "land of milk and honey," according to the text anyway. In the game itself, it appears you are kicked unceremoniously back into the Fertile Crescent with no further talk of eternal life.

Well, sorry I missed that for myself.

Let me do a quick GIMLET on this game: I give it 7 points for the game world; it's the only game I know that draws on Mesopotamian mythology, and it's quite well-researched at that. (In fact, I should add an addendum to my "What Have You Learned?" posting, 'cause this game really fleshed out my knowledge of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian pantheon.) Apparently, this was a common modus operandi for developer Stuart Smith, who also created Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and Return of Hercules, neither of which I played because they didn't receive a DOS port.

Your presence doesn't do much in the game world, though--one character continues to whine about the various threats in Assur long after you've slain them all.

Chin up, buddy. You only have trolls to worry about!

Character creation is down at a 4; all you get to select is your name and icon during the creation process, but character development uses a fairly good skills-based system. NPC Interaction gets a 2; there are many NPCs, and you learn from them, but there is no "interaction" per se. Encounters are more interesting than you'd expect, with a variety of foes, some of whom flee when wounded. They respawn, allowing lots of opportunities for skill-building, but no real depth to the encounters. Let's say 4.

Magic doesn't exist, as such. You get spells, but they only work in limited circumstances to accomplish a particular thing; there are no real tactics to the combat, so we're going with a 2 on this category. There isn't much equipment in the game, and none of it is well-described. Having weapons and armor occasionally break is more annoying than challenging. The game is interesting for being one of the early ones to assign a weight-based movement statistic, but I wouldn't say this "adds" much to the game. I give it a 3.

The economy is based on barley, which you can't accumulate much of because it's too heavy, and there's not much to buy anyway (1); there are no side quests, just steps on a main quest that, while original, has no real fulfillment in the end. There's also only one potential outcome and no replayability (2). Graphics are not distractingly bad, but there's no sound, and at least for modern keyboards, the interface sucks (2).

The Fertile Crescent setting is unique, a least.

 

Finally, on gameplay, although you can theoretically explore the entire game map from the outset, in reality you need to visit the various cities and dungeons in a specific order to progress through the game. Until the moment it throws the "two heroes" curveball at you, the game is fairly easy but not overly so, and it is reasonably brief. But there is no replayability to it (3).

Final Score: 30. It was brief enough that I would have finished it if it hadn't been for the game's sudden surprise, but it wasn't enjoyable enough that I mind watching the end on someone else's video.

I'll play with the "construction" part of the software and then move on to Alien Fires.

*****

Nearly 5 years after abandoning the game because of "Two Hero Valley," I returned to it and won. I used the updated posting to discuss the totality of Stuart Smith's contributions. Read it here!