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>SCARE BEAROur hero posted:I don't know how to "SCARE" something What an unimpressive hero. >SHOUT BEAR Our hero posted:I don't know how to "SHOUT" something Can't even raise his voice. >YELL BEAR Our hero posted:Bear is so startled that he FELL off the ledge! Does he really think... oh. OH!
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May 10, 2018 00:04
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Now I just feel bad for the bear. Well, get the mirror and store it away.
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May 10, 2018 00:34
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Also the crown in the next room.
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May 10, 2018 00:38
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>GET MIRROROur hero posted:OK Uh-oh. >GO THRONE Our hero posted:OK Uh-oh. >GET CROWN Our hero posted:OK 
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May 10, 2018 00:41
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Can't we just SAY AWAY twice to get to the lit meadow with the dragon?
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May 10, 2018 01:24
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bbcisdabomb posted:Can't we just SAY AWAY twice to get to the lit meadow with the dragon? I was hoping you'd remember we happened to be carrying the rug. >SAY AWAY Our hero posted:Something I'm holding vibrates and... >SAY AWAY Our hero posted:Something I'm holding vibrates and... Daylight, baby!
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May 10, 2018 01:39
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Well, I think that's everything. Drop all our treasures in the stump and SCORE. EDIT: Wait, first, do we still have the oily slime around? If so, let's refill the lamp and go check the bottom of the chasm to see if the bear is there.
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May 10, 2018 01:48
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Zereth posted:EDIT: Wait, first, do we still have the oily slime around? If so, let's refill the lamp and go check the bottom of the chasm to see if the bear is there. We don't. But I'll give you a tour of stuff we missed afterwards. >GO SOUTH Our hero posted:OK >ENTER STUMP Our hero posted:I am in a damp hollow stump in the swamp. Visible items: >DROP MIRROR Our hero posted:Mirror hits floor and shatters into a MILLION pieces ...I'll be right back. I swear, I did not intend for this to happen. Okay, so after replaying the entire game since I didn't bother making a recent save... Our hero posted:OK >SCORE Our hero posted:I stored 9 TREASURES. On a scale of 0 to 100 that rates: 69 >INV Our hero posted:I am carrying the following: Worth noting is that I never once bothered turning the lamp off during this playthrough, and the only reason it reached the countdown is because the bees kept dying as I tried bringing them to the dragon. The lamp lifespan is extremely lenient for a game that actually provides a way to refuel it at no cost, and I think most people never realized the slime can be used as lamp oil because there's seriously no need to ever refuel it. Let's check out the bottom of the chasm, though. >SAY AWAY Our hero posted:Something I'm holding vibrates and... >GO DOWN Our hero posted:OK ...oh.  That's surprisingly sad for a game with this little text. ...let's just move on. >SAY AWAY Our hero posted:Something I'm holding vibrates and... >SAY AWAY Our hero posted:Something I'm holding vibrates and... >GO SOUTH Our hero posted:OK >ENTER STUMP Our hero posted:I am in a damp hollow stump in the swamp. Visible items: >DROP RUG Our hero posted:OK >DROP MIRROR Our hero posted:Mirror lands softly on rug, lights up and says: >DROP HONEY Our hero posted:I am in a damp hollow stump in the swamp. Visible items: >DROP CROWN Our hero posted:OK That should be everything. So now what? In Colossal Cave, finding every treasure eventually teleported you to the final room of the game for one last puzzle. In Acheton, finding a certain amount of treasures and depositing them in the safe gave you access to a small area with a couple puzzles that were more like interactive brainteasers than adventure game puzzles. In mainframe Zork, finding and depositing all the treasures gave you access to the pretty lengthy and tough endgame area. But these were mainframe games, made on systems that had room for all this. Zork's endgame alone is so big it wouldn't be possible to run on a TRS-80. So what does Adventureland give us?
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May 10, 2018 02:39
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>SCOREOur hero posted:I stored 13 TREASURES. On a scale of 0 to 100 that rates: 100
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May 10, 2018 02:41
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That's seven years of bad luck for breaking the mirror, Adamant.
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May 10, 2018 02:43
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May 10, 2018 02:43
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 This was fun.
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May 10, 2018 02:45
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So how do unlit dark rooms work when trying to move?
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May 10, 2018 02:58
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If we'd dropped the dragon eggs in the lava could we have upgraded them from (very rare) to (hard-boiled)?
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May 10, 2018 03:11
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So, a couple final thoughts on the game. First off, I have to say it's surprisingly atmospheric for what it is. There's no room for any lengthy room descriptions or all that much text of any kind, but Adams manages to work with what he has and creates a pretty cool little world that's genuinely fun to explore. There's also a surprising amount of puzzles spread across the little world - there's the dragon, the golden fish, the ox in the bog, the cypress tree, the bees, the maze, the bricked window, the lava, the firestone and the bear... it's almost enough to rival Colossal Cave. None of the puzzles are all that difficult - we never even touched the HELP function, which would've provided hints like "You might want to use a magic spell" in the bog and "Remember the sign in the meadow" in the bee room. The only bits that aren't hinted towards is the fact that you need to rub the lamp twice and that you need to drop the mirror on the rug twice to get the two hints from it. I know some people got really stuck at those bits, while others had zero trouble with them, and it's very individual whether it occurs to you to try repeating an action that gave you a treasure/hint to see if it has a different effect if done again. Adams clearly assumed this would come natural to most people, so there's no hint towards it in the game at all. As far as the individual puzzles go... I already talked a bit about my thoughts on some of them, but I have some comments on a few of the late-game ones as well. The maze is clearly just there because at the time, mazes were as synonymous with adventure games as finite light sources and "collect all the macguffins and store them in a specific location" style gameplay were. If you look at the map, though, this one is far less annoyingly designed than most - a fairly straight line of rooms where each room is easily recognizable and most exits make you progress through the maze rather than send you back to earlier rooms. The only room that doesn't do this is the final room, and that one has a nice arrow pointing you to the correct exit. Adams clearly put some thought into designing this thing, and it ends up being one of the better adventure game mazes out there as a result. It may not be as iconic as the twisty little passages, all alike, but let's be honest, nobody actually enjoyed mapping that thing after they realized how it could be done. The dragon puzzle is another well designed one. It's one of the first things you see in the game, but it's really unlikely you'll be able to figure out how to defeat it without the mirror, so the eggs end up being one of the last treasures you get. You constantly find yourself returning to the meadow thanks to the AWAY spell, you keep seeing the dragon, and you keep wondering how you're supposed to defeat it. Using the HELP command here will tell you there are three ways to wake the dragon, one of which is lethal to you. We discovered two of them, but it's also possible to wake it by blowing up the gas bladder in the meadow. This will turn the dragon into a "Smoking hole" and "Pieces of dragon and gore", but since you don't actually benefit from this in any way (and lose the bladder in the process - and it's not exactly difficult to realize you need to use it to blow up the bricked window), it's clear this isn't the solution. The actual solution to the dragon puzzle isn't the best thought-out one, though. Getting the bees to the dragon is ridiculously frustrating, especially considering the dragon will most likely kill you if you have the mud on you when you warp to him, so unless it randomly falls off after you get the bees, you'll need the bees to survive five turns - GET BEES, SAY AWAY, DROP MUD, SAY AWAY, DROP BEES. Half the time they don't even survive one. The fact that you have to get the mud to the bees as well just makes it even more frustrating. Likewise, the position of limbo doesn't seem that well thought out. If you die with the mud on you, you're stuck on the other side of the dragon and need to either wait for the rng to make the mud fall off or wait for the rng to decide the dragon doesn't wake up when you pass him, all of which seems really unnecessary. Finally, there's the bear/mirror puzzle. Some people don't like it, but I think it's really clever. When you first find the bear, it seems obvious that feeding him honey might work, but since the honey is a treasure, it doesn't feel like it's the right solution. Still, it's so unlikely you'll ever think of trying to yell at the bear, and nothing else seems to work, so you eventually cave in and give him the honey. Since this gets you access to not only one, but two treasures, it even feels like it might BE the actual solution... until the mirror tells you outright that there's another way to get rid of the bear, and hints you towards what this method is. It's a puzzle with two solutions where you need to solve it the wrong way to get the necessary clue towards solving it the right way. I can understand how people might not like games that require them to fail in order to learn how to win, but it's done really brilliantly here. Well, that's Adventureland. I'll see about doing a let's play of the sequel Pirate Adventure at a later date, a game that has no mazes, no crazy puzzles that need to be solved the wrong way to be solved the right way, and a bit more of a focus on telling a story over just walking around an open world and collecting treasures. It's a worthy sequel.
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May 10, 2018 03:34
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Zereth posted:So how do unlit dark rooms work when trying to move? They work the exact same way as the lit rooms. All the items are there, all the exits are there, everything is just hidden behind a "Its too dark to see!" description. It's perfectly possible to beat the game without ever picking up the lamp as long as you know where everything is. When you're in the darkness, there's a tiny, tiny chance you'll trip and break your neck, getting sent to limbo, but it's so rare an occurrence I didn't even remember it could happen. RNG in this game is weird. It's possible to get out of the maze without the rug this way, though. Also, one final note I had absolute no idea was possible until I looked at the source code: Remember how the game let us throw the axe, and only the axe, but we could never find anything it could be thrown at for any kind of positive effect? Turns out you can throw it at the locked door at the bottom of the stump. It's a weird alternate solution considering getting the keys isn't exactly difficult, but that's what the command is for. Adamant fucked around with this message at 03:53 on May 10, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 03:40
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Bravo, Adamant - you managed to eke untold enjoyment out of a very limited source! I thought from the initial description that it was going to be a Crowther/Woods Adventure clone, but it turned out very dissimilar. As expected, and in common with all early adventures, it’s mainly a battle against a very basic parser. I mentioned before that I grew to love text adventures mainly through the British company Level 9 (who the OP is not a fan of) and they started off with a full rehash of Adventure called Colossal Cave. They extended it somewhat and even added a bit of an endgame, then proceeded to turn it into a rather good trilogy. They became more famous for their next project, a seemingly* massive sci-fi epic called Snowball, which also became a trilogy. *”Seemingly” as it was advertised as having “more than 7000 locations!” - but it turned out that 6800 of those were identical... All through this development, the Level 9 parser was becoming more and more efficient, introducing such things as “all” (“get all” is such a time saver), “again” (repeat last command, works with the shortcut “a”), “oops” (undo last move) and eventually full sentence parsing (“get all except axe, go south and kill dragon, then climb tree.”) If anything, towards the end they made their parser do too much. In one game (I think it was called Scapeghost,) there was a puzzle in which a wall had to be pushed over. You had befriended several ghosts and you needed to get them to accomplish this task. In order to get all (let’s say 8) of them to push at the same time, you had to use a sequence of “wait” commands, so the outcome was something like this: >Tom wait,wait,wait,wait,wait,wait,wait,push wall >Dick wait,wait,wait,wait,wait,wait,push wall >Harry wait,wait,wait,wait,wait,push wall >Moe wait,wait,wait,wait,push wall >Larry wait,wait,wait,push wall >Curly wait,wait,push wall >Stan wait,push wall >Olly push wall I poo poo you not. It was around this time that I began to tire of text adventures - fortunately, the likes of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder were not too far distant! (Er, sorry for the ramble - reminiscence, don’t’cha know)
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May 10, 2018 03:52
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Adamant posted:They work the exact same way as the lit rooms. All the items are there, all the exits are there, everything is just hidden behind a "Its too dark to see!" description. It's perfectly possible to beat the game without ever picking up the lamp as long as you know where everything is.
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May 10, 2018 04:22
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Zereth posted:Huh, I would've sworn there was a time we were moving around blind and ended up in a different place than the map said we should've. That was when we had first entered the maze and you thought the "It's dangerous to move in the dark" message meant the character stayed put, so you thought we were in a different room than the one we actually were in when we lit the lamp and moved a second time.
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May 10, 2018 04:43
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snograt posted:Bravo, Adamant - you managed to eke untold enjoyment out of a very limited source! I thought from the initial description that it was going to be a Crowther/Woods Adventure clone, but it turned out very dissimilar. As expected, and in common with all early adventures, it’s mainly a battle against a very basic parser. When I tried playing some of these a few years ago, I found that Level 9's parsers were dumber than they looked, at least in their later, more elaborate incarnations. Looking into it, I found out that the parser "cheats". For an example pulled entirely out of my head, imagine that you wanted to strangle a sleeping troll with a garden hose. You type "Garrote Troll With Garden Hose", but the parser doesn't recognize "Garrote" as a verb. An Infocom game would give a response such as "I don't know how to "garrote" something, or "I don't understand what you want to do with the hose." A fair method of explaining the problem. A Level 9 game might pick up the words "troll" and "garden", and assume you want to convince the troll to go nap in the garden you got the hose from, and spit out "The troll doesn't want to look at the flowers." Leaving the user completely clueless as to what the problem is.
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May 10, 2018 05:28
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I played this back in the day, most of the puzzles were somewhat forgettable but the answer that stuck with me best was for the bear puzzle. >SCREW BEAR
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May 10, 2018 05:30
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Way to go goons, we did it! Thanks for the LP, Adamant. Looking forward to the sequel!
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May 10, 2018 06:25
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That was a super fun ride. Very entertaining LP, can't wait for the continuation! Shame there wasn't a real end-game but it's impressive the game even exists.
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May 10, 2018 07:55
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That was a neat little game, thanks for showing it off.
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May 11, 2018 22:49
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Very neat for less than 32kb! Thank you for showing this game off!
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May 15, 2018 15:37
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