VIDEO GAMES PLAY AND GET MONEY

Japanese developers asked to turn American movie licenses into video games sometimes take a few liberties with the source material.  This is certainly the case with Die Hard, published by Pack-In Video in 1990 for the Japanese PC Engine, apparently under a sublicense from Activision.  The game was never released in the US, for reasons that become obvious with a closer look.



In truth, I suspect this was a generic Ikari Warriors-style shooter that had the 20th Century Fox Die Hard license thrust upon it late in the design process.  Its a HuCard-format game, but that didnt stop the designer, Hiroaki Kawamoto, from wasting precious cartridge space on lavish movie-style intro credits, starting with... himself:



Brief flashes of competence can be seen here and there -- the sprites and scrolling are solid and flicker-free, looking as good as many mid-1980s arcade games, and enemies drop a variety of weapons for the hero to pick up and use.  But the music is mediocre and generic, without so much as a nod to the films soundtrack, and there are some strange design choices.  Our hero can take quite a few bullet hits before he collapses, but he falls to his instant death if a hole opens up beneath his feet or he accidentally steps into one during his travels.  He can pick up a bullet-proof vest to protect himself for a while, or heal himself by picking up medpacks; he can also recover part of his health by picking up... little brown bottles of something... beer, maybe?  That would make as much sense as anything else in this game.


Considerable HuCard space is dedicated to digitized images, though poor Bruce Willis looks like a badly-abused bootleg toy version of himself in this victory screenshot:




All of this Hollywood hoopla leaves precious little space for the actual game.  As a result, each stage is fairly short (under five minutes if we know where were going) and highly repetitive.  Background and sprite graphics are recycled over and over, and the maps arent very large either.  And the tie-in to the movies plot is... a bit loose.  There are ten stages crammed in, according to the manual, but only the third one appears to bear any resemblance to the film, and its laid out as a maze to challenge the player  stretch out its meager real estate in a vain attempt to fake play value.  We know somethings wrong as soon as the world map is displayed, prior to the start of the first level:




Remember the famous scene at the beginning of the movie where New York City Detective John McClane, home for Christmas, takes time out to fight his way through the jungle, taking out enemy soldiers?



And then the awesome sequence where he wades through hip-deep waters, bleeding profusely from bullet wounds?



And then the thrilling scene where hes trapped in an office building thats actually a huge maze, and if he doesnt pick the right exit, he gets directed back to part of the building hes already been through?



And this thrilling scene, where the deceased Mr. McClane is replaced by a new character, apparently played by... Edward G. Robinson?  Ben Vereen?  Ah, Ive got it -- Harpo Marx!



Yippie-ki-yay, Marx Brothers!

---

I cant recommend this one, but its certainly an unusual foreign licensed tie-in for Die Hard fans.  Interested collectors might be able to find a copy for sale here.

This week, Im returning to the early portable TRS-80 Model 100s small library of adventure games, to tackle Steven Neighorns The Nuclear Submarine Adventure, probably published around 1983 when the Model 100 was the new tech toy on the block.  Im not sure if this game was original to the Model 100 -- versions exist for the IBM PC and Japanese MSX computers as well, but it runs well on Radio Shacks proto-notebook.  Im playing it using the VirtualT emulator.




This is the only TRS-80 Model 100 BASIC game Ive played to date that adopts a Scott Adams style interface, with location and objects at the top of the screen and commands entered at the bottom -- the dividing line means were down to 7 lines of usable display, but it looks very nice.  The game is the usual escape-the-critical-situation plot, with no treasures to find or complex objectives -- we just have to get ourselves and our fellow crew members to the surface alive after our sub experiences an impact of indeterminate origin.


Interested adventurers are always encouraged to try these games firsthand before reading my comments below, and this one is freely available at the Interactive Fiction Database.  The Nuclear Submarine Adventure isnt difficult, though time constraints are tight, the SAVE/LOAD commands arent fully implemented, and theres one sticking point that tripped me up near the end.  But Ill let you make that decision, dear reader.  Beyond this point, there are certain to be...


***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****





We begin in a bunk, with nothing of interest visible and nothing in INVentory.  While were exploring our surroundings, something hits the ship and were sinking!  GET UP yields only Thats not here.  UP yields You dont know how to UP.  U (or GO UP) is the only way to climb out of the bunk.

Our bunk is in the after crews quarters; the room is full of bunks, and theres a red locker here.  We cant EXAMINE anything, apparently, and OPEN LOCKER indicates we dont have the right key.  So well head F(ore) to the main passageway.

Here theres a water-tight door, which were not strong enough to open, and passages to port and starboard.  Port is the maneuvering room, with a depth gauge and ballast control.  READ GAUGE suggests, You cant read anything... yet.  Interesting.  Do we need our glasses?

We can travel down from the maneuvering room to the lower aft section of the engine room, where we see a steam turbine engine and a drive train.  Is the steam engine powered by nuclear fuel, then?  We can LOOK ENGINE -- which works like EXAMINE, I now see -- to observe that its turning but not operating properly, most likely because the drive train is broken.

From here, we can F off to the fore section of the engine room, and see that the electrical generator isnt working and the ship is operating on its batteries.  Going U takes us to the upper deck of the engine room, fore of the maneuvering room, where theres a hatch You cant even begin to open.

Closing the loop and returning to the maneuvering room, LOOK GAUGE indicates were at 108 fathoms, and LOOK CONTROL indicates its set for DIVE.  Im not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, so Ill leave it alone for now.

On the starboard side of the main passageway we find a laundry room containing nothing of apparent interest.  The main passageway continues forward to a warning sign.  As Im exploring, we hear a ** claxon** [sic], so were probably going to run out of time while were mapping out our surroundings.  But well keep going as long as we can.

The warning sign suggests that an ANTI-RADIATION SUIT MUST BE WORN before we head below.  We can open the water-tight door here, despite the warning, but we dont have to go down there yet, so well CLOSE DOOR.  (I always appreciate adventure designs that allow closing things weve opened; its rarer than one might suppose.)

Heading forward some more we discover the missile compartment, with a panel reading .  Forward again is the attack center, with a remote microphone and a passageway leading down to the main control room, where a push-button control regulates the reactor.  North of the control room location is the radio shack (tee hee), with a complex radio that isnt so complicated we cant tell it is broken, but is so complicated we cant readily FIX it.

Fore of the attack center (the sub runs quite a distance lengthwise) is the periscope room, with two periscopes, one for search and one for attacking.  Im about to head upwards from here, when the reactor melts down and my adventure is over.  The briny sea claims another victim...  fortunately, this game implements a SAVE feature, so well use that in the future.

Returning to mapping, we find an access passageway above the periscope room, with a hatch that cant be opened until the ship surfaces.  Fore of the radio shack is a main passageway area with passages in every direction but upward.  Downward is the infirmary, where we can GET some smelling SALTS.  To port is the captains stateroom, with a combination-locked wall safe that isnt even hidden behind a picture.  We have to enter three numbers to open the safe, and since Im just guessing Im not able to open it yet.

Returning to the passageway, to starboard we find the officers wardroom, empty, and the main passageway continues fore again.  Port here leads to the crews mess, where we at last see our fellow crew members... all unconscious in front of a videocassette player and television; perhaps they have been watching Down Periscope.  We can WAKE CREW with the smelling salts.  Theres no tape in the VCR, and we cant ORDER CREW, so well leave them standing around for now.

Oh.  Actually, we cant leave the crew behind, as it seems they are bent on following us around now.  The galley features a stove, and we can go down to the main stores and the frozen stores room, where a single frozen T.V. dinner is available.  We can PUT DINNER -- Into what? -- STOVE, and then COOK DINNER so we can FEED CREW... no... OFFER DINNER... no... GIVE DINNER... no... well, now the klaxon is going off again, so it probably wont matter in our lifetimes.

Starboard of the crews mess, on the other side of the passageway, we find the health room, with a weight training set.  And they must have some of that Captain America technology here, as we can LIFT WEIGHTS to become incredibly strong in a single turn.  That may come in handy.

Fore again leads us to the chiefs quarters across the hall from the galley, where a white locker waits for us to find the right key.  The ship overheats at this point, and when I try to LOAD and the filename I specified earlier doesnt seem to work, we find ourselves in a kind of limbo.  The crewmen are unconscious but continue to follow us around.  Well take advantage of the extended play to do some more mapping, anyway.

The main passageway continues fore to another bunk room with a blue locker, locked awaiting the right key, of course.  We can go D into a bunk, where we find a decoder, with a plug in it -- Im not sure what that means yet.

Fore again -- this is a very large map by Model 100 standards -- we find the forward torpedo room, with one tube labeled and the other .  We can continue F into the empty torpedo tube, though this doesnt seem like a safe place to hang out.

Now it seems weve mapped the submarine out pretty well, and solved a few puzzles along the way.  Lets see if we can use our super strength to open that door near the start of the game.  (On the way, I discover that the LOAD command does work, it just throws a false alarm error, so we do die shortly as the subs reactor overeheats, and I have to LOAD again.)

We can indeed open that water-tight door now, to reach the ships can (our group of unconscious crewmen still in tow -- they remain unconscious as described after a restart and restore, but theyre still dragging themselves around with us somehow) where we find a Navy repair manual.  It contains instructions for repairing the ships radio, also handy.

Our first order of business, however, would seem to be stopping the reactor from melting down.  We cant open the hatch in the upper engine room.  But we can PUSH BUTTON in the main control room to switch the reactor to COOL mode, and the warning klaxon ceases.  Easier than I expected!  Pushing it again sets the reactor mode back to hot, and sets off the alarm again, but we can switch between modes at will so thats no longer a big problem.

Now that we can explore with a little less pressure, lets see what else remains to be done.  If we lift weights and then read the Navy repair manual, maybe we can FIX RADIO.  While Im working on this, though, it turns out were very hungry... and then the ships batteries run down and the lights go out!  Its dangerous to move in the dark, but if weve mapped well we can still get around -- we can even read the manual in the dark.  But one wrong move in the pitch black, and were dead of a broken neck, so wed better restart and play more efficiently.

On the next try, I discover that just reading the manual isnt enough to let us FIX RADIO.  We probably need some tools or something.  So lets see if we can get the ships generator working again, as that seems like a more pressing matter.  Its not going to be as simple as START GENERATOR or FIX DRIVE TRAIN, though.  Can the crew help out?  I dont know, because I cant figure out how to EAT DINNER or OPEN DINNER when we start getting hungry again.  Ah, we can only EAT DINNER in the crews mess -- its impossible to consume it anywhere else!  This game is going to be fastidious about its rules, it appears.

The ships batteries have run out again, but lets see if I can fake my way through in the dark to see if the crew can fix the drive train.  Nope.  We need something to open the hatch in the engine room, I think.  We can die by entering the nuclear reactor without protection, but thats not going to help.

We arent strong enough to open the hatch or the door in the torpedo room, even if weve lifted weights.  Hmmmm... ah, if we have the crew in tow (and conscious) they will help us to open both.  We can access the forward access and escape trunk now, to find a wrench, and a repair and work compartment below the torpedo room to pick up an electronic repair kit.  Now we should be in better shape to get the sub working again!

Well stop to prepare and eat the TV dinner on the way, just to have that puzzle out of the way, since we can probably navigate in the dark if we need to.  I get to the engine room just as the lights go out, but with the wrench, we can now FIX TRAIN to restore power.

We cant just PUSH BUTTON to change the subs direction in the maneuvering room; presumably well want to switch from DIVE to SURFACE at some point, but we cant yet, at least not with any commands I can come up with.  We can use the wrench to open the hatch in the engine room, finding a key labeled WKEY -- probably good for the white lockers in the chiefs quarters.  Yep!  Heres the anti-radiation outfit.

Lets fix the radio before we go too much farther -- with the repair kit and the manual, we can get it working.  We can now USE RADIO -- but a coded message comes through that we cant make sense of, and then it blows up!  We must need to use that decoder we found in a bunk earlier.  Restoring our saved game doesnt restore the radio to its pre-smoldering state, however, so we have to QUIT and LOAD to get it back into a fixable state again.  This time, we LOOK RADIO to see that it has an empty plug -- and we can PUT DECODER -- Into what? -- RADIO before we use it.  The message we receive now indicates weve been hit by a Soviet anti-submarine weapon, and gives us the combination to the captains safe: R 36, L 7, R 46.  The radio still blows up after we use it.

We can now open the safe -- the spaces in the coded message are significant, so typing R36 doesnt work but R 36 does -- to obtain... a videocassette?  This better be worth it!  GET VIDEOCASSETTE doesnt work, but GET CASSETTE does.  We can put the cassette into the player, and then... hmmmm... USE PLAYER and START PLAYER dont work, and WATCH T.V. just shows a HEAVY film?  Ah, wait, maybe thats a hint -- "the ups and downs of life in the submarine corps" might mean this is a training film.  Yes, now we can PUSH BUTTON in the maneuvering room to shift the ballast into service to help surface the sub.

What else?  We havent used the anti-radiation suit yet, so lets go try it out.  We can WEAR OUTFIT, OPEN DOOR by the warning sign, go D and observe that the reactor is running normally.  Fortunately, the crew has the good sense to stay behind; the only reason we need to come down here, apparently, is to pick up the blue key in the aft section of the reactor room.

Going back to the crew quarters near the torpedo tube, we open the blue lockers to recover a Captains uniform.  We can WEAR UNIFORM, but to what end?  Ah, the microphone in the attack center is the captains microphone upon a closer look.  We can SAY FIRE -- Fire what? -- TORPEDO, but cant do that yet; SAY SURFACE returns a similar result.

Trying to LOOK through or USE the search and attack periscopes proves fruitless, as does UP SEARCH or UP PERISCOPE.  The captains microphone is portable, it seems.  What about the red locker at the start of the game?  Ah, the RKEY is available if we just LOOK BUNKS -- the locker contains a book called "The Submariner" that just gives us basic navigation tips for the game.

Maybe we can mess with the torpedo tubes.  LOAD TORPEDO doesnt work, as it just invokes the game restore command.  And while Im trying to fire a torpedo from the torpedo room using the captains microphone, to no avail, we run out of time for surfacing the sub, and the game is over again.

What do we have to do here?  Im going to break down and take a peek at the BASIC code.  Were on the right track -- line 174 specifies a lot of conditions for giving the order to surface.  We have to be wearing the captains uniform; ballast setting has to be set to SURFACE; and we have to be at a depth other than 0 fathoms.  Check on all those counts.  Ahhhh... what I was missing was that we have to be in the main control room when we SAY SURFACE, or our orders are ignored.

Now we can go there, SAY SURFACE, and the sub surfaces... and now we can open the hatch above the periscope room and make our way past the bridge to the open air on the main deck, where we see rescue ships in the distance!  Man, its a good thing we never figured out how to fire that torpedo.  Victory is ours!





I enjoyed playing through The Nuclear Submarine Adventure -- the tight timing made for a bit of a challenge over and above the straightforward puzzles, although the final puzzle seems unnecessarily opaque; why make the captains microphone portable at all, if it has to be used in a specific place?  But Ive definitely run into more aggravating requirements in vintage adventure games, and this one had some nice moments of discovery.

Let’s start from the beginning shall we? In 1982, Bruce Carver formed a video game development company called Access Software with his brother Roger and friend Chris Jones. They immediately set about creating titles for 8-bit computers, including Neutral Zone, Beach-Head I & II, Raid Over Moscow and the golf title Leader Board. The first DOS game out of Access was a tenpin bowling game called 10th Frame, which was quickly followed by another golf game called World Class Leader Board. By this stage, the majority of Access games had been fairly simplistic affairs, designed and programmed almost entirely by Roger and Bruce, but 1987’s space combat simulator Echelon attempted something more complicated.


Designed by Bruce, Roger and Brent Erickson, with a story by David Brown and Chris Jones, Echelon combined wire-framed graphics based space combat simulation with a puzzle based mystery to solve. It also showed off Access groundbreaking PC audio technology called RealSound, a technique that used the PC speaker to “generate high-quality digitized sounds such as speech, music and sound effects without the use of additional hardware.” Unfortunately, Echelon sucked, but it inspired the team to have another shot at a similar game in the future. The team therefore set out to develop another flight game, only this time they would incorporate a film noir detective story that had been formulated while filming a homemade movie in their spare time.


During the development of the game, more and more adventure game elements were added to the mix, and the eventual result was an odd hybrid called Mean Streets. Set in San Francisco in the year 2033, Mean Streets follows a private investigator named Tex Murphy as he tries to solve a case, being the death of Dr. Carl Linsky, the father of a beautiful woman named Sylvia. The game was directed by Bruce Carver and the story was written by Chris Jones (who would go on to star as Tex Murphy himself in future games) and Brian Ferguson (who has no other credits as far as I can tell). I’ve read an interview with Chris Jones where he stated that his biggest influences for the Tex Murphy series were Sam Spade novels, the movie Casablanca, Blade Runner and The Twilight Zone TV series, which explains the mix of film noir and sci-fi.


Programming and design were handled by Roger Carver, Access regulars Kevin Homer and Brent Erickson (who would go on to design and write adventure game Noctropolis), and first timer David Curtin. Doug Vandegrift, John Berven, Zeke McCabe and Jon Clark combined the give the game its distinct visuals while Steve Witzel handled the sound. Mean Streets was the first popular PC game to fully support 256 colour VGA graphics, and it was also the first to support EGA, CGA and Hercules graphics modes with real-time quantization and dithering. I don’t know much about this sort of technology, but I believe this means they converted the graphics on the fly for each different mode rather than pre-converting all possible outcomes (which would have taken up twice the disk space). This was considered a big achievement at the time and along with the RealSound technology, shows that Access were really trying to push the technology boundaries.


That’s enough background information though; it’s time for me to play my first Tex Murphy game. That’s right! I’ve never played any of the games in the series, and I don’t really have any decent explanation as to why. I guess the early ones came out when I was playing whatever games were given to me by my friends for my Amiga (yes, pretty much all pirated, which I’m not proud of) and by the time the later games came out, I was switching between LucasArts adventures and every first person shooter game I could find. Anyway, I’ve got my GOG purchased Tex Murphy collection, so will be playing the game in DOSBox I guess. I’ve played the last few games in SCUMMVM because it makes it so much easier to take quality screenshots on the fly, but my brief attempts to start Mean Streets in SCUMMVM failed. I haven’t even Googled it yet, but if anyone knows if that’s possible, please let me know (Laukku recently informed me that it is possible to take decent shortcut screenshots with DOSBox, so Ill look into that too). The GOG collection comes with a Detective Information Chart, a map, and a manual, so I should be all set!

Last week I tackled the fifth entry in the long-running SoftSide Publications disk magazine adventure series, jumping ahead to game #5 due to a lack of free time.  I promised Id go back and cover #4, the one Id skipped over, before moving on, but I lied.  So this week Im jumping ahead yet again, to tackle 1981s SoftSide Adventure #7 -- Black Hole Adventure, again for the sake of playing a game with a published solution.  As it turned out, this was a straightforward adventure, and I did not need to reference a walkthrough.  I was able to finish it honestly in a couple of hours, a more pleasant scenario that also worked out fine for my schedule.

As was not uncommon in the wild-and-woolly early days of the game industry, Black Hole Adventure turns out to be a completely unlicensed and entirely unabashed ripoff of the 1979 Walt Disney science-fiction feature, The Black Hole, from a time when creators of these newfangled computer games could fly under the legal radar with some degree of safety.  The intro text sets up the basic plot, informing us that Deep-Space One, the Cygnus, is sitting at the edge of the black hole.  We land on the Cygnus in the USS Palomino, and as in the movie, we discover that the larger ship is now a ship of robots, a ship controlled by its only human survivor, Dr. Hans Reinhardt.  So this is an escape-the-domestic-spaceship adventure, for a slight change from the usual.



The intro text also introduces us to several robot characters -- the menacing Maximillian, the cute VINCENT, and the cute, vintage Old Bob -- just in case the Disney lawyers happened by and needed further evidence of this games "inspiration."

No author is credited onscreen, and the code comments indicate only that the final version was completed on 2-Jan-1981.  The prose style resembles some of the other SoftSide games, but the simple two-word parser is not very friendly -- no I or INV shorthand is allowed, INVENTORY must be fully typed.  And so must the navigational directions, so we cant simply N, but must go NORTH.  Once we get used to battling the parser, however, the game is straightforward -- there are few descriptive details to discover, the puzzles are simple, and its mostly a matter of collecting objects and using them in the right locations.

As always, I urge interested readers to sample the Black Hole Adventure before proceeding here.  In the interest of documenting the games design and quirks, there will be plenty of...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

The game starts out with a rather annoying issue -- I thought at first that some navigation directions are only in the room descriptions, and are not listed in the OBVIOUS DIRECTIONS ARE: section.  But this turned out to be a different problem at root -- a bad room description here indicates that the door to the south is OPEN before it actually is! 



So we start in a docking bay, where we find a small gun and an identification pin and a red button.  Its frustrating that we cant READ PIN or EXAMINE PIN or USE PIN or WEAR PIN; I dont know how to do that is the hapless engines only response.  We cant EXAMINE GUN either, so it seems we will not be gathering a lot of subtle details in this game; signs also prove unREADable, with their messages listed in the room descriptions instead.  So we have to rely on action more than our investigative skills.  As it turns out, PUSH RED doesnt follow the usual convention; we have to PUSH BUTTON, which initially yields There is no fuel for the palimino [sic].  The parts the palimino [sic] has are bad.  Therefore, I cant blast off.  It sounds like the program is checking a couple of flags here, and not providing any real detail, but our basic mission seems clear -- fuel up, and replace those darn ol bad space parts.

Since the button wont do anything, we can try to OPEN DOOR, which yields I dont have any key to unlock the door!  Is there even a locked door?  Its not mentioned in the room description.  We cant GO SOUTH through the apparently OPEN DOOR, nor can we ENTER DOOR, or GO DOOR, or S, or SOUTH.  Okay, now this is getting frustrating.  Fortunately, we dont have a lot of options yet, and I at last managed to SHOW PIN (I didnt need to reference the CASA walkthrough, but it was a close call) to get the door to actually open.  After doing so, the door is still (now correctly) described as being OPEN, but now there is an obvious exit available to the south.

To the south, if were carrying the gun, A BURST OF LASER FIRE WHICH COMES FROM AN UNKNOWN SOURCE DESTROYS MY GUN.  That didnt seem like a good thing when I was playing, so I restarted and left the gun behind; as it turned out, I didnt need that gun at all.

The map is quite open, and we are free to explore most of the ship.  Below decks, we find some humanoid robots ejecting body-like objects into space, which is disturbing but doesnt really come into play in the games plot.  A LARGE BEAUTIFULLY DECORATED DINING ROOM contains ALL SORTS OF FOOD.  We can GET FOOD and EAT FOOD here -- all of it in one go, apparently -- but this seems to be optional.  An Air Car travels back and forth in a long glass tunnel, but doesnt take us anywhere we cant otherwise reach -- the map is large but fairly circular, and most areas connect back to others, with no required routes, substantial mazes, or serious navigational challenges.

The main obstacle we encounter is that occasionally we are told: HOLY SMOKES! An armed robot just walked in!  And then, suddenly, ARMED ROBOTS ARE EVERYWHERE. IVE BEEN CAPTURED. NOW REINHARDT CAN COMPLETE HIS EVIL PLANS.  Another room contains AN EVIL LOOKING ROBOT, and suddenly we are captured again.  So we need to avoid these robots, it seems.

Fortunately, the crew barracks area contains two very useful items -- some ammunition and a blaster.  We cant GET AMMUNITION first, as I dont have a blaster to put it in, but if we do things in the designers expected order, we end up with a loaded blaster.  Now, or at least until we run out of ammo, we can SHOOT ROBOT whenever one shows up -- ZZZAP! No more robot!

Theres no SAVE GAME or RESTORE support for this brief adventure, but were free to QUIT at any time, though its a rather drastic decision, as the game informs us that I HAVE FAILED TO ESCAPE FROM CYGNUS.  I AM DEAD. before asking if wed like to play again.

Were free to visit the Cygnus bridge, which features the imposing crimson robot MAXIMILLIAN, the evil DR. HANS REINHARDT, and just so we know were playing a futuristic sci-fi game, a FLOPPY DISKETTE.  An attempt to SHOOT REINHARDT gets us killed by Maximillians whirring chest blades.  We cant SHOOT MAXIMILLIAN either, as the blaster shot just bounces off of his shiny, angular surface.  But as it turns out we can just walk through the bridge unmolested to visit the engine room.

The engine room looks like a maze, but we cant actually get anywhere except by going east to the HYDROPONIC SYSTEM room, where a humanoid robot carelessly drops AN ELECTRONIC KEY.  How convenient for us!  We want to GET KEY, but we dont want to continue east into the HYDROPONIC GREENHOUSE, because as soon as we enter the room, a huge meteor breaks through the glass ceiling, and I AM SUCKED UP INTO THE VACUUM AND I DIE.  Its best to avoid this location, which is also accessible from the south, as this fatal meteor appears to have it in for us personally, and wont impact the Cygnus unless it sees us wandering among the hydroponically-grown plants.  Perhaps its actually an alien ship on some sort of anti-marijuana mission.

With the key in hand, we can visit the ships only locked door.  However, we cant UNLOCK DOOR -- I dont know how to do that. -- but we can OPEN DOOR -- OK.  The door is unlocked.  This aggravating sequence of events gains us access to a SUPPLY ROOM containing ALL SORTS OF THINGS.  We cant GET THINGS or SEARCH THINGS or EXAMINE THINGS or EXAMINE SORTS or EXAMINE ALL, however, so its not immediately clear what were supposed to do here.

If we wander around enough, we will discover that the blaster only allows us to SHOOT ROBOT a limited number of times -- and the codes event sequencing is odd, as when we run out of ammo, we are told My gun is out of ammunition.  ZZZAP!  No more robot!   Before that happens, we need to SHOOT the non-wandering evil looking ROBOT to gain access to some new areas.  We can GET VINCENT in this area -- if we DROP VINCENT in the supply room we cant see him, but we can still GET VINCENT again.  He doesnt do anything in this location, like, say, hunt for something useful, but I had to try it.

A DIMLY LIT ROOM contains a humanoid robot and an ID Bracelet.  We cant learn anything about it, of course, but SHOW BRACELET apparently does something somewhere, just not here. While we can carry VINCENT around, we cant GET ROBOT -- Hes too heavy to carry and too stupid to follow me.

At this point, it seems we are out of puzzles to solve and new areas to explore.  So are we supposed to be working on getting the Palomino running somehow so we can escape?  Yes -- if we try to do so, we readily discover that in the supply room we can simply GET FUEL and GET PART, and taking INVENTORY reveals that we now have FUEL SUITABLE FOR THE PALIMINO and SPARE PARTS NEEDED BY THE PALIMINO.  Hopefully these off-brand items will also be suitable for the PALOMINO .

With these critical, if vaguely defined, items in hand, we can go back to the docking bay, DROP FUEL, DROP PART and watch as VINCENT takes the fuel and parts and repairs the ship.  A final, more successful attempt to PUSH BUTTON, and we are victorious!










I didnt actually need to reference the walkthrough, as the game only took a few hours to play through to this ending.  But there seemed to be a few loose ends here -- I never did run into Old B.O.B., the floppy diskette seemed to have no purpose, and possessing the ID bracelet didnt seem to do anything (though I thought it might have protected me from running into further random armed robots late in the game.)  I took a look at the BASIC source code, and discovered something intriguing -- theres apparently a more dramatic alternative ending available, which involves piloting a ship through the black hole, riding B.O.B. to safety when the meteor crashes through the ceiling, destroying Maximillian with VINCENTs help, and ending the game successfully by beginning a new life in a new universe.  Or something like that.  But Id rather go home to Earth, personally, so Im glad the more rewarding ending is also the easiest one to achieve.

Black Hole Adventure is definitely one of the simplest adventures Ive played in a while, alternate ending aside, which was fine with me given my schedule of late.  Maybe Ill finally make time to take on something more challenging for next week.

Another week, another new wave of downloadable console games...


WiiWare -- One new game this week, which sounds like a bizarre mismatch of name and concept: Gnomz.  Its an E-rated... fighting game... with "25 action-packed arenas"... involving gnomes, flying elephants, rainbows, and glowing reindeer.   All thats missing is ponies and Jesus!


Wii Virtual Console -- Once again, nothing here.  Going twice...

DSiWare -- Two games this week: The episodic House M.D. series makes it to Episode 4: Crashed, with another T-rated medical mystery for Hugh Lauries skeptical Holmesian doctor and team to solve.  Also, 1950s Lawn Mower Kids, which follows up one of the freshest titles Ive heard recently with a stylus-driven game concept about careful lawn mowing in the McCarthy era.


3DS eShop -- The DSiWare games are also available here, of course, along with Balloon Kid, another vintage Game Boy title featuring 8-levels of airborne balloon-based action as Alice floats through the sky in search of her younger brother Jim.


XBox Live Arcade -- Just one new game this week: Burgertime World Tour, yet another new variation of Data Easts classic burger-building arcade game.


PS3 on PSN -- Three new titles up for download.  Max & The Magic Marker: Gold Edition brings the semi-successful multi-platform action/drawing platform game to the PS3.  Pinballistik is an attractive-looking pinball game.  Hydrophobia Prophecy is a first-person adventure with dynamic water elements -- its unusual in that its the latest iteration of the original game Hydrophobia, which received mixed reviews on release and has been continually updated; this edition contains a lot of new and reworked content compared to the 2010 release.


PSOne Classics -- Another quiet week here.

Before I get into anything fancy with my Tic-Tac-Toe Bastard game, I'm going to sit down and work through some basic game logic. I want to code the foundations in pure Lua with text output to the console, to get a bare-bones version of the game working for faster and easier debugging.  We should be able to reuse a lot of this material as we layer graphics, sound and GUI elements into the build later on, but there's quite a bit of groundwork we can do first and it's good to keep things simple while we create the core.

We'll represent the tic-tac-toe grid using a simple 9-cell table structure.  While our visual representation is a 3 x 3 grid, we really don't need to make the table that complicated; we'll just lay out the 9 cells in a single row, numbered as follows, and display the grid to the user in the expected manner:

1 | 2 | 3
---------
4 | 5 | 6
---------
7 | 8 | 9

(Note that Lua, unlike many computer languages, natively starts numbering at 1 -- this makes intuitive sense, but it takes some getting used to for programmers used to counting from 0!)

Each of these cells will start in an empty state, and will be marked by either the player or the CPU as the game progresses.  For readability, we'll declare three useful constants at the top of the routine -- the numeric values really don't matter, as long as they are unique:

EMPTY_ID = 0;
MY_ID = 1;
CPU_ID = 2;


Now we'll declare and initialize the tic-tac-toe grid accordingly:


gGrid = { EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID };

With this structure and the constants we've set up, all we need to do to record a player's move is set an element of the gGrid array to either MY_ID or the CPU_ID.


One of the logic challenges we need to deal with is recognizing when somebody has won the game.  We could do this heuristically, searching through the grid for patterns indicating a win, but there are a finite number of combinations to consider.  Our code will run faster and more simply if we just define all of the winning combinations in a table of tables, like so:


POSSIBLE_WINS = { {1, 2, 3}, {4, 5, 6}, {7, 8, 9},
                  {1, 4, 7}, {2, 5, 8}, {3, 6, 9},
                  {1, 5, 9}, {7, 5, 3} };


(We could also use this approach to impose rule variations on the player -- an "only verticals win!" round, for example, although that seems unlikely to be much fun in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe, so we probably won't do that.)

For reasons that may (or may not) become clear later, I'm going to treat the human player and the CPU as "players" by setting up another table:

   PLAYERS = { MY_ID, CPU_ID };


This approach makes the main game loop simpler -- we just need to loop through the players, giving each one a turn until somebody wins.  (This will also simplify our lives later on if we decide to add a player-vs.-player option, or a CPU-vs.-CPU exhibition mode, or even an online mode or a more-than-two-players mode.)


We will still need to distinguish between the human player and the CPU at another level -- when the main game loop looks for input from the current player, we'll want to solicit interactive input from a human player and call upon an algorithm for the CPU's move.  But the main game loop can just solicit a move from the current "player", however that is defined, check for victory, and end the game if that player has won.


My initial scripting goal for this installment is to establish the Tic-Tac-Toe grid, mark it up, and verify that we can detect a victory condition and identify the winner.  So I'm not going to implement any real user or CPU action -- I'll just let the code select a random number from 1 to 9.  In fact, I'm not even going to check for duplicates, so our players can just mark right over each other.  I just want to set things up so that the game can run until somebody wins a single match.

My main game loop logic needs some work at this stage -- it always forces the first player listed in the PLAYERS table to go first, and it's not even really using the PLAYERS table correctly; it only works because our indices {1, 2} happen to match the PLAYER_ID and CPU_ID values.  If we wanted to mix up the play order we would have to fix that, so that then we could just restructure the PLAYERS table to reorder the participants.  My code also breaks out of the for-player loop using a "break" command, which is less than elegant.  And there are some conditions it doesn't catch, like playing to a draw, which is entirely possible.  But we'll have time to refine this in a future installment.

The checkVictory function accepts a grid and a player ID, and uses the POSSIBLE_WINS table to see if that ID has occupied a winning set of squares on the grid.  This routine will probably not change much as we develop the game.  (Note that I could reference the actual game grid directly as a global variable, but passing it in as a table keeps the local code clean, and the ability to handle multiple grid instances might prove very useful for our AI implementation later on.)

For now, I've defined a getMove function that takes an ID from the main loop, and then decides how to obtain move input.  Right now, the supporting getPlayerInput and getCPUInput functions do exactly the same thing, picking a random number from 1 to 9, but we'll change that later.


I've also written a throwaway utility function -- doPrintGrid renders the game grid to the Lua console, in a readable text format.  This routine is handy for now but will probably be discarded later in the development process.


All we can really do with this initial version is run the code and see whether it stops when victory is randomly achieved -- which it does!  The code so far is below the fold.


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