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Where Text Adventure Games Live.
Scott Adams Text Adventure Games
Scott Adams wrote his text adventure games to run on a wide variety of computers, using just 16 kilobytes of memory and a tape recorder to input the program. (editor's note: as a reference point, consider that this web page is larger than 16 kilobytes!) The memory limitations make the vocabulary and map small in comparison to many disk-based adventures, and filled with clever puzzles. Their main weakness is rather poor English usage and spelling.
While Infocom’s text adventures games are, by most measures, greatly superior to Adam’s, they are also much more expensive and time-consuming. The player who doesn’t want to spend 40 to 60 dollars on an adventure, and weeks on solving it, can find a satisfying alternative in this series. The real adventure fan will, of course, want to explore both series.
This series approaches things differently from
Adventure . Instead of treating you,
the player, as you the character in the story, the
Beyond a few lines of promotional material, no background material is provided in any of the adventures. Your character just appears in a situation and you may never find out why. In several of the adventures’ is means that you will have to spend some time just figuring out what’s going on,
Adams makes good use of repeated message fragments to pack more messages in, A given phrase, such as “ won’t let me,” may appear in several different messages whole taking up memory space only once.
Adventure International is in the process of releasing all these adventures in illustrated versions, called the S.A.G.A. (Scott Adams Graphic Adventure) series. No significant changes have been made in the text or problems; the only difference is in the display formant, which includes one illustration per location. Some of the solutions are more obvious than in the standard edition, since the pictures make the situation clearer the graphic quality is good, but putting up and taking down pictures makes the program rum more slowly. The INVENTORY command produces a sequence of objects being emptied from a bag; this is cute but tedious.
For frustrated explorers, Adventure international provides a “Book of Hints” that covers all 12 Scott Adams Adventures.
Adventureland
Adventureland, by Scott Adams, is the first of the Scott Adams series and the closest in sprit to Adventure.
You start off wandering around in an area filled with such hazards as quicksand, nasty chiggers, and a sleeping dragon with a keen sense of smell. Fortunately, there is also an item that can be put to a couple of good uses, one of which lets you get into an underground complex. From there, you have to face an assortment of hostile creatures, including a bear and a swarm of killer bees, in order to pick up the treasures they guard. There s also a helpful being around-but he can be pushed too far.
Even if you get killed, you’re offered another chance. You find yourself in Limbo; if you can find the exit, you live again. If you go the wrong way, thought, the comment that accompanies the next description puts your situation quite succinctly.
Hints are liberally sprinkled throughout the game. The descriptions are concise and often humorous, if not elegant. On the whole, this is one of the easiest adventures in the series.
Pirates Adventure
In Pirates Adventure,
by Scott Adams, finding a copy of
Since the island where you arrive isn’t the one with the treasures, your first task is to build a ship. This is simply a matter of bringing all the necessary materials together; once you’ve got the materials and the plans, the ship goes together with amazing speed. Gathering these materials makes up a large part of the adventure.
A lot of the fun involves the pirate, a tough-looking
character who is helpful enough if you play on these weaknesses. He turns up in
some outrageously unexpected places, and he’s ultimately indispensable to your
getting to
There are only two treasures in this adventure, so it’s very nearly an all-or-nothing proposition. However, finding them is easy enough to provide a good introduction for new adventure players. This is one of the easiest of the Scott Adams series, but the puzzles are still clever.
A full listing of the BASIC version is given in the December 1980 issue of Byte.
Adventure #3
In Adventure #3 (formerly Mission Impossible), by Scott Adams, your mission-should you accept it-is to stop a saboteur from blowing up a nuclear reactor.
The major difficulty is in getting through his reactors security system. A number of doors are locked and will open only if you show appropriate authorization to the automated camera about the door. You were originally provided with that authorization, but the saboteur has run off with some of your materials. That leaves you on your own to get the security badges you need. This system of using badges (called pictures), in which case it becomes impossible to tell the program which picture you want to take or drop. Fortunately, the command SHOW PICTURE always selects the right one.
While you have to be clever to work your way through this security system, there are also times when brute force is needed. Think of the objects that are available and considered which one might do the job.
The danger of the bomb blowing up adds to the excitement. Several actions that you have to perform will arm the bomb (as your surgically implanted bomb detector will warn you); then you have to drop whatever you were doing and run to disarm it. If you haven’t learned how to disarm it- well, your family will get a nice pension.
When you finally do find the bomb, timing becomes even more critical. You must take exactly the right actions and perform them in the right place, or you will set off a disaster of your own making, even as you prevent the one the saboteur intended.
This adventure shows how different people may perceive the difficulty of an adventure and shows why I haven’t tried to assign difficulty ratings to the adventures in this book. The Adventure International catalogue rates this one as advanced in difficulty, going so far as to say, “ If you survive this challenging mission, consider yourself a true Adventurer!” However, I had less difficulty with this one than with any other adventure in the series. Personal difficulty is very much a matter of how well your mind meshes with the situation.
“Count Cristo’s been CURSED! There’s
one way for him to flee! Find it, and he’ll go FREE!” Not very good poetry! But
there are some fine puzzles to solve in
Eventually the pieces start coming together, letting you discover the magic ritual for breaking the curse. Different kinds of magic are thrown together freely; the spell uses a couple of European good-luck charms along with voodoo’s traditional doll stuck with pins. At the climax, there are lots of dramatic effects and thunder. The only catch is that along the way, you’ve shrunk yourself to four feet in height, and you seem doomed to live the rest of your life that size. Oh, well, at the least you’ll be able to get through low doorways in your next adventure.
This adventure isn’t very careful about making you specify which tool to use for a job. As a result, it’s possible to go around with a double handful of items and get things open without really solving the problem, or even realizing that there ever was one.
In a couple of places, items are listed in capitals to call attention to them. This is rather uncalled for; hints should be something you look for, not something that the adventures reality throws in your face. It’s not that hard to realize that two sapphires have something to do with each other without being told that the door has “a SAPPHIRE in it.”
The Count
In The Count, by Scott Adams, your enemy is Count Dracula himself. Your object is to destroy him from within his house. If you don’t succeed in time, you will turn into a vampire, too. But if you overcome the obstacles, you have the satisfaction of typing KILL DRACULA as the past command of the game.
The Count predates Infocom’s Planetfall and Enchanter in providing a cycle of day and night. The adventure runs over a period of days and you have to sleep. This causes problems, since Dracula takes that opportunity to do all sorts of unpleasant things. When you sleep, you have strange dreams, which appear in the form of a screenful of messages flashed for a fraction of a second; if you’re quick, you may get a clue from them. There are some things that you have to do at night. In order to get them done, you need something to overcome your tendency to doze off right after sunset.
The way you find the coffin is a bit unusual, to say the least. Let’s just say that where there are coffin nails, a coffin can’t be far away.
There doesn’t seem to be a guaranteed route to success, since on several occasions you have to engage in an activity with a certain probability of a fatal outcome. This makes it a good idea to save the game at several points as you progress.
The lack of documentation is irritating in this game, as in some of the other Scott Adams adventures. When you first start playing, you have no idea where you are or what you are supposed to do; only by exploring the house (and perhaps getting killed by angry villagers if you try to leave prematurely) do you learn what your quest really is. It doesn’t take very long to figure out what’s going on, but a little information on paper would have made for a more well-rounded adventure.
Strange Odyssey
Strange Odyssey, by Scott Adams, puts you aboard a spaceship that has apparently suffered from a bad landing, since you can’t blast off again. All that you can do is explore the planetoid in the hope of finding something that may help you. Fortunately, this is rather unusual planetoid. A little exploring leads you to a hexagonal room, apparently constructed by aliens, with a portal to several different worlds. With all these options, you should be able not only to repair your ship but to return home richer than you were before.
There is an obvious Star Trek influence in this adventure. Your weapon is a phaser, with stun and destroys settings. One of the treasures is a bottle if Saurian Brandy. The reason you can’t take off is that the crystals in your ship are damaged.
The events also show an interest in the physical requirements of space travel. The space suit has a limited air supple and should be used carefully. Where there’s breathable air, you don’t need to wear it, but many areas have either no atmosphere or one without oxygen. Gravity pm the planetoid is light, a fact that makes it possible for you to get started; but in another place the gravity is so strong that it will kill you unless you have special equipment.
A number of details are included that help you develop an idea of what the aliens who created the gateway are like. The ease with which the controls move suggests that they are a physically weak race compared with humans; the nature of the treasure suggests that they have strong artistic tendencies, but that their eyes see in different spectrum from ours. Their technological advancement goes without saying.
This attention to detail makes Strange Odyssey one of Scott Adams best. It’s a pity he hasn’t done more science-fiction adventures.
Mystery Fun House
In Mystery Fun House, by Scott Adams, you explore a very strange fun house in which a secret is hidden. This one is short on motivation but long on fun, even though it’s quite difficult to solve. First, you have to get into the place, and the program has some fun at your expense before you find the right kind of admission payment. Next you have to figure out why you went there; this requires you to pay some attention to oddities about yourself, As usual, there is no documentation; you just appear without any idea of who you are or what you’re supposed to do.
The areas that are open to patrons don’t pose too many hazards. The fun-house format gives Adams an opportunity to bring in a lot of intriguing situations. There are machines to operate, knobs to fiddle with, a merry-go-round to ride, clay pigeons to shoot, and a small maze to wander through. One are provides an entertaining take-off on the Loud Room in Zork I; a calliope is playing so loudly that your puppet has trouble hearing your commands! Fortunately, this puzzle has a more logical solution than its counterpart in Zork.
As long as you carry your ticket and jeep your shoes on you can’t get into too much trouble in these areas. But if you are trying anything violent, a bouncer will promptly escort you to the exit. The house rules are something of a nuisance, since the shoes and ticket cut deeply into your carrying capacity. Add a watch and a stick of chewing gum, and you’re bent over with the load- although you can carry a trampoline as easily as the gum. This adventure illustrates the shortcomings of treating all items as being equally burdensome.
Luckily, the bouncer doesn’t enforce the “Authorized Personnel Only “signs, which you have to ignore in order to find the secret. Once you venture beyond these signs, you can find yourself in real danger; but being a well-trained adventurer, you can often get out of a tight spot with your athletic abilities.
One of the toughest adventures in the series, this will provide experienced players with a good workout,
Pyramid of Doom
Pyramid of Doom, by Scott Adams, puts you in an Egyptian pyramid where you hope to find the treasure of the Pharaohs- but you have your work cut out just to get in a live in the first place. In the course of searching the nearby desert and oasis for something that will get you through the entrance, a small desert nomad may appear. Be careful of him; he might be waiting for the first opportunity to do you in. Once you enter, you can start your treasure hunt. But how do you get past the hostile mummy? What can you do about the mundane but equally dangerous rats? Can you get the oyster to provide you with a pearl? Oyster? What’s an oyster doing in a pyramid?
One of the puzzles is figuring out what to do to get credit for the treasures. This requires putting some information together, and you can’t get any points at all until you’ve figured it out. It’s vital to SEARCH everything in order to get the necessary hints. Better yet, SEARCH everything twice. Being so thorough will, perversely, gets you killed in a couple of cases, but there’s nothing to do about that except save the game frequently and go back to where you left off. This adventure, like many others, has the flaw or requiring knowledge from a “previous life” in order to anticipate traps.
A flashlight is necessary for exploring the pyramids passages, but one room is so filled with mirrors that your flashlight becomes worse than useless. Here, you must explore in the dark- carefully! Be sure to turn your light back on at the first opportunity.
Once you get past these early problems, you find you’re real for: an iron statue of Pharaoh that comes to life when you approach it and ends you’re unless you do something fast. Only by learning how pharaoh’s heart has grown dark with evil can you find the way to defeat this juggernaut. Even then your job is not done; poisoned traps, disease, or the dreaded purple worm may kill you before you can reach the top of the pyramid and gather all treasures.
Words are abbreviated to three letters, which cause confusion in at least one case. You can FEED creature and FEEL some objects, but both commands are stored as FEE. FEEing may transfer food to the object or let you know what it feels like. It may also leave you wondering why the nomad thinks you’re weird when you offer him food.
This is not one of the series’ easiest adventures, but the puzzles are logical enough so that it shouldn’t be impossible.
Ghost Town
Ghost Town, by Scott Adams, puts you in an old western ghost town that might still contain valuables. This particular town also has lively population of late lamented-residents, who as about as frightening as Disney Lands “Grim Grinning Ghosts.” They can often help you. The puzzles are up to Adams usual standard of ingeniousness, and there is even more than the usual dose of humor.
This isn’t to say that the area is entirely safe. A rattlesnake endangers you at one point, and you are likely to blow yourself up trying to solve one of the puzzles. Besides, the game goes through a cycle of day and night, and stumbling around in the dark is as hazardous here as in any adventure. In fact, the nighttime is when the ghosts are likely to be most active, so think twice before dropping off to sleep!
Your spirits might start to decline when a ghostly voice keeps whispering “Vain…” in your ear. But that voice isn’t necessarily talking about your efforts. There is a way to get the towns only other living being to do something for you. And there is a complex solution to the problem of how to get the safe open. Star Trek fans may have a sense of déjà vu as they discover this solution.
It’s especially important to make sure you go to every place that can be reached. This requires getting over natural obstacles, taking a ride, and even changing some of the natural features. In some cases you need the right equipment, but elsewhere simple know-how is all that is necessary.
Pyramid of Doom, the preceding adventure in the series, featured a purple worm that had the nasty habit of eating adventures. In this adventure, you can get a satisfying revenge on the worm.
An interesting feature is that the program keeps two scores: one is the usual; score for accumulating treasures; the other is a measure of how fast you complete the adventure. This means that even after you’ve solved it, you can keep working on getting the highest possible speed score. Getting that score to be a positive number is a difficult trick.
Savage island (Part , #10, and Part 2, #11 ), by Scott Adams, is sold in two separate parts, but you must solve Part 1 completely in order to learn the password that will let you play Part 2. When you finish Part 2, you are given a code. By using it, you can decipher a card that provides the conclusion to the adventure. Without a doubt, this is the toughest of the series.
At the beginning, this seems to be a straightforward wilderness survival adventure-though surviving is anything but straightforward. You need shelter from a hurricane that soon strikes, but only available cave is occupied by a bear with a nutritional deficiency. The climbing that it takes to get there makes you sweat, and that increases the bear’s interest in you. Even if you manage to wash the perspiration off, being around a bear makes you nervous, and you start sweating again. But it’s possible to get the bear interested in something besides you.
You have to cross a lake to get to some places, but you aren’t an especially good swimmer. If you’re carrying anything at all, you find yourself in imminent danger of drowning. In fact, you are so inept in the water that the program assumes that you don’t know enough o hold your breath before diving beneath the surface; you die unless you first type HOLD BREATH. Fortunately, help for YMCA dropouts are available.
If you survive the hurricane and don’t drown, you can start gathering the materials you need to explore further. Only after you do this do you find out just how strange this island is. Why are there antennae coming out of the pirates head? And why does the cave drawing show a spacecraft landing among dinosaurs? Never mind the spacecraft, when did any cave dweller ever see a live dinosaur?
At this point, you have to do something with an artifact you find. The solution to this one borders on the ridiculous; so it’s only fair to advise trying every possible action on the artifact with every possible object. After this, things get a little easier, provided your transportation doesn’t fail you. It has become obvious by now, though, that this is not your everyday jungle island.
When you get to Part 2, a sign advises you: “Compared to what you’re about to go through you’ll think part 1 was a piece of cake!” In fact, you’re missing a few things by now: your clothes, some of your possessions, and air to breathe. There is more than one way into Part 2, and not all of them give you any chance of success. So don’t sell your story of Part 1 yet; you may want to replay it to a more useful conclusion.
Much of the difficulty comes from the fact that even if you do everything right, at several points you could still get killed by bad luck. This means that you will have to save and restore the game frequently, which is rather tedious if you have the cassette version. To make matters worse, the procedure for saving the game is disabled during one crucial stretch. You’re on your own to survive there!
This is one adventure in which a
better command parser would have helped greatly, in several cases; you have to
do something with a specific object something with specific object. If you give
a command that requires such an object, the program asks “How?” you must then
give an appropriate answer, such as WITH SHOVAEL. This method isn’t really
enough to handle the complex actions required, so in some cases you wind up
“playing the program” rather that the situation. Still
Any adventurer who has zipped though everything else and wants a real change should give Savage Island a try. It sets up its difficulties without being widely illogical, even if some of the puzzles are a bit arbitrary. No one can claim to be a master adventurer without having solved this one; I hope to solve it myself someday.
Golden Voyage
Golden Voyage, by William Demas and Scott Adams, could very well be Sinbad’s eighth voyage, as a dying king commands you to find the remedy that will save his life. He proves you with plenty of gold, so you have no problem buying a ship and supplying it. You must search the neighborhood islands for a cure, and there are problems enough to overcome. An animated statue with a sharp sword hinders your access to a temple; a mysterious fountain provides a liquid which may or may not be useful; broken stones contain fragmentary markings to be deciphered.
The ship is fully automatic and you have no trouble sailing where you want to go, even without a crew. However, you don’t have a map of the islands, so you have to be sure you’ve found them all by the thorough exploration. The ship includes a crow’s nest to facilitate spotting land masses, as well as a cot, which makes a good refuge when it gets dark. But time does pass, and you have only three days to save the kings life.
A staircase on one of the islands presents a problem, since the UP and DOWN commands don’t work on it for some reason. The commands to use here are WALK UP and WALK DOWN. It’s nice to know this in advance, since you’re likely to get attacked the first time you step on those stairs.
There isn’t quite as much flavor here
as in many of Adam’s adventures.
Only a few situations give the sense of Middle
Eastern adventure that you’d expect.
The dark passage, animated statues, scorpions,
buries implements, and secret entrances give a sense of reused formulas.
Perhaps