Ellis Island

Another competition game and another short one, packed into 4k of code. This adventure was submitted to Reset 64 Magazine’s ‘Craptastic’ 4kb Game Competition in 2018 (where it achieved 18th place overall) but it was written earlier, although never completed, for a competition run by the late Paul Panks over on Lemon64. Endurion finished the game almost a decade later and dedicated it to Paul.

This is not the first adventure I have played that starts off in a pitch-black room with no obvious exits or objects. However, it might be the first where I can’t move in any direction or see anything that might help. I am truly stuck in a dark room surrounded by walls.

Anyway, eventually, I pass the first test and I have light!

Now I get very confused and am at a loss for a little while until I try a few things, but at last, I pass the second test and can actually move to another location. In fact, I move into a labyrinth of corridors, some with sockets, one with a code lock, and it is here a map comes in very handy as it is easy to get lost.

A bit of trial and error and several moves and I pass the third test and escape the room!

Endurion has managed to create a real sense of achievement in a very small game and you need to work out what to do with very little information. I have to say this one, so far, has been the most fun and I felt I earned my escape.

As I say, a map is vital…

A fun game, limited in ways that having to keep it to 4k would do, but the parser is actually fine and while room descriptions are kept to a minimum that just adds to the sense of mystery. 

You can find and play the game here.

According to CSDb, Endurion has released a load of games and graphics utilities between 2007 and 2020, some of which look like text adventures, so more Endurion to come I think. Incidentally, Paul Panks appears to have been pretty prolific too, and there are a lot of games credited to him in the database, so it will be interesting to play these as and when they make the list.

What’s next I hear you ask? Well, the next two games are unpublished but are included in the GB64 database, so I’ll play through them both. The first will be The 64-Scene-Adventure, and that will be followed by AAS Masters. Yes, people, we’re into the A’s !

First of all, you’ll notice this isn’t 1990 by SpectreSoft – the game simply can not be found and it is highly likely it was never released. So we move on…

Here we have another short game written in the Inform 6 system by Admiral Jota in 2001. This time it was submitted to the Speed-IF 17 competition. I’m playing release 1 of the game. In fact, Admiral Jotter organised Speed-IF 17!

The premise for Speed-IF 17: Your game will be set on one or several floors of a thirty-story building in Manhattan. At the beginning of the game, it’s ten in the evening on December 31, 2002. On every floor, the New Year’s bash is going on — the people in their high-rise apartments, the rented-out function halls, even the office workers stuck here late. Fireworks are scheduled to begin over the water promptly at midnight. Unfortunately, the building will be taken over by terrorists at eleven-thirty — they’ve infiltrated the maintenance staff and have been surreptitiously placing bombs in various locations throughout the building during the past few months, all set to go off at different times later that evening if their demands aren’t met.

So, the title 2604 refers to an apartment number here, not, as I thought initially, a year! We are told right at the beginning that we are to meet up with a Mr Reginald Halvers at a New Year’s Eve party where we hope to provide him with a prototype microchip worth a lot of money on the black market.

Off we go then. We start in the 26th floor lobby and can immediately see signs pointing the way to various room numbers. We already know (or at least it should be obvious) that we need room 2604, so now we know we need to go East from here. Nothing too tricky so far! But probably best to see what we’re carrying and check this microchip out.

Ah! So after inspecting the papers it seems we are playing as Reginald Halvers – that wasn’t too clear at the start. Better check the envelope out.

The game leads us to room 2604 quite quickly, and it is here we see people milling around, drinking, enjoying food, all the stuff you’d expect at a party. There is a lot in the descriptions of these rooms set as pure backdrop, and most are red herrings – so be careful not to spend too much time looking at stuff that isn’t required. You may not know what is relevant, of course, on your first play.

Our target is soon found and the envelope can be handed over and your payment collected. Job done, and our score is increased by one whole point!

Well, job not quite done of course. The usual exploration and logic solving is required now in order to escape the hotel with our prize, and it isn’t easy. Everything you need to escape is provided, and you will need to examine a few more things on your way out of 2604 and back again, but it took me quite a few play-throughs to do it in 39 moves and score my very healthy 2 points!

Time is of the essence here, and if you spend too long looking at things you don’t need to look at, or doing things in the wrong order which requires you to travel back and forth along the corridor, time (moves) will run out and you will lose the game. Oh, and you’ll die.

All in all 2604 was a fun game – much more of a puzzle than previous games, and much nicer to play for many reasons. The parser is typical Inform 6 and the atmosphere and gameplay are certainly entertaining.

Map here, behind a spoiler as it gives quite a bit away.

Spoiler

Given the game was speed coded in 2 hours, and there was a scenario that had to be followed, I think this shows that Admiral Jota has an adventurer’s brain!

It’s not clear if the Admiral himself ported 2604 to the Commodore 64, but he has done several more adventure games (see the link in the opening paragraph) and I am hoping some of them at least made it across, so this may well not be the last we see of him on this blog. And going by the quality of this short adventure, I hope our paths meet again.

2604 is included in the GB64 database v 18.

A quick one over coffee this morning, the 10Lines Adventure by Marco Spedaletti.

Obviously, not a complex game, but very clever to pack in a parser, rooms, and objects into 10 lines. Clever enough, in fact, to win first place and FRATZENGEBALLER’S SPECIAL AWARD at the BASIC10Liner competition in 2020!

You can solve it in about 10 moves, but working out the exact order and logic takes some doing. I enjoyed it, and it really shows how just a few words and a bit of thought can create an atmosphere.

Nothing much more to say. The game can be found on the GameBase64 database or direct from Marco here, where you can see readme files and images, as well as the source code and full solution if you need it.

We move on to 1990 by SpectreSoft – until next time!

Here we go then, part 1 of the impossible mission to play all the available Commodore 64 text adventure games.

First up is the innocent sounding 1-2-3… a public-domain text adventure developed by Chris Mudd for the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition, and sitting right on top of my GB64 list. It’s written with Inform v6.21 Library 6/10. The release I am playing is release 1.

Spread across 2 floppy disks, the first disk asks if you want to load your story – a good sign! Obviously, I choose no and the story loads……slowly……very slowly.

A bar of asterixes counts down and takes a good couple of minutes before asking for disk 2, and then we’re almost instantly into the game.

And yes, straight in, to a screaming woman who is obviously in pain – the quite verbose background or preamble is painted with a young woman, distressed, and a caesarian birth carried out in a trauma room. The lady is less than happy to receive her baby!

And so we start off on a City Street. A damp, dark street by all accounts with not much to go on. Streetlights cut through the air, and the atmosphere is already a little on the dark side too.

Quick Review

1-2-3… is a short game which falls more under the category of Interactive Fiction than true Text Adventure. It quickly becomes a little disturbing and a bit too graphic for my liking and is very definitely an 18+ offering.

I wasn’t expecting much from an entry to an IF competition, but the parser was very basic and annoying at times, and the movements are so guided that you can’t really get lost or confused. There is some good use of quotations, from people such as Herman Melville for example, in between scenes about the madness of man and so forth. Having said that the short story is, if not exactly fun, at least gripping, and the writing is good and descriptive. A little too descriptive! And there is a good ending, even if the scoring system hasn’t been implemented.

Read on below for more in depth thoughts…I’m not sure how these reviews will evolve over time, but we’ll see how the format plays out across longer, more difficult games.

Summary Scores out of 10

Longer Review & Maps

There is obviously something amiss here…dark thoughts keep creeping in at various times and locations. From the opening street, the game guides you by way of dead ends to outside a cafe where, disturbingly, you stare at a woman’s form through the glass.

In we go, and it is here we find Riessa, our, what, prey? We talk and, I think, flirt a little with Riessa, but it is not clear at all what to do. NB, worth mentioning here, there is no help system!

Here the description of Riessa goes into detail about her hair and her lips, but they do not exist if you try to examine either of them. There are other, earlier examples of this too (You can’t enter the cafe as it ‘doesn’t see a cafe here’). I get the complications and frustrations of a parser and game design, but that just brings you right out of any immersion in the story you may have managed thus far. You could argue that is part of the fun – guessing the right verbs and adjectives to accomplish what you need. You could argue that, but you’d be wrong.

No matter, we soldier on. And after several failed attempts, the next move should have been fairly obvious.

Spoiler

I think everything from now on should go behind a spoiler alert as the game takes, shall we say, a bit of a turn…

Spoiler

Thanks for reading. The only place I have found this game available in its C64 disk format is on the latest version of GB64, which can be downloaded here.

Appreciation and acknowledgement to Chris Mudd – it was a fun way to spend an hour or so.

Next on the list is 10Lines Adventure, another Public Domain game submitted to the Basic 10Liners competition, and then, if I can find it, as it seems to be missing on my version of GB64, on to 1990 by Spectresoft – our first true 1980s adventure game.

Until then, adventurers!