Going to sneak this one in and hope nobody notices. It should have come before Adventure Quest as it is (just about) a published game, albeit little known about.
Ray Hoffmeister coded this game (an appropriately beery retro name!) in CBM BASIC and it’s the only one attributed to him on Gamebase 64, but it is recorded as being published by Binary Zone PD who have been around since 1990. Binary Zone distributed public domain games on disk and cassette and are still around today.
On loading up the tape image we’re presented with the above screen before being told we have a limited supply of air and a back pack that will only carry 3 items. Putting the familiar sinking feeling one gets with these PD games to one side, let’s see what the planet Zeeble has in store for us…
This is one of those adventures that has minimum location descriptions, but reveals a lot more when you type ‘look’, so the key here is to move, map and look around. It’s a small adventure, and limited in terms of vocabulary and has a weak parser. It also isn’t particularly logical and gets stuck in some place. Having said that I quite enjoyed it.
If you look around and there is an object in your location, you’ll generally need to pick it up for use later on. Some clever swapping of items is required to keep within the pack limit of 3. You should eventually end up at a cave of ice and, ahhhh, there are Zeebs here! If you got here before finding the things you need (namely stones and a pistol) then run away and find them.
Once the Zeebs scramble and the ice door of the cave is melted, you move inside. Some annoying logic follows with dropping stuff and picking stuff up, but you should eventually end up in the cave, near a metal chest carrying a raft and a parachute.
Getting the chest open is a bit annoying. If you are using VICE or the C64 Ultimate save a snapshot as you can easily blow the thing up and you’ll need to start again. The key is to keep the chest ticking softly. If it ticks loudly then that press is wrong. Start with one colour, then trial and error until you get all three ‘softly’ options and the chest clicks open.
Once that’s done we want to go back to the high mountain where we first used the rope (you’ll need it again here) and drop the raft. Then a jump and a climb down with the rope lands us in an area where there is a radio waiting to be fixed with the wire. Do that, turn the radio on, and Bob’s your Zeeble.
And that is our reward, complete with spelling mistake.
This small adventure played ok, a little inconsistent and slow in terms of code and the parser really struggled at times depending on location, but it worked, it was fairly logical in that the player knows what they need to do. It reminded me a lot of PD games I used to be able to afford and although I can’t remember ever playing this one, I think it would have certainly provided enough entertainment in a late peanut butter sandwich and coke fuelled afternoon.
Back in sequence next time with Adventure Without A Name from The Guild Adventure Software.