Month: August 2020

I finished it without cheating!

Like Pirate Adventure before it, this one was pretty good in terms of it being a cohesive setting. Who you are and why you’re there isn’t given any time of day but who cares about that stuff! We’re on a mission! And it’s impossible! (Not really.)

This time I was determined to get through the game without looking at any walkthroughs.

There were only two places where I got mildly stuck. In the first instance, I eventually looked at the dead saboteur’s card again and figured out what was required.

At another point I lucked out because I just tried something random with a certain door and it worked. Later, when I looked at a walkthrough, it was interesting to note they had used a totally different verb noun combination. Nice that Scott put in enough verb noun variations to make it work.

So after about 2-3 hours I won through without resorting to cheating – not even looking at an online map! Yay me!

I wonder if maybe I’m getting used to the way Scott thinks. I’m enjoying these cheesy, small adventures.

Anyway, I could only find one map online and again, it looked kind of weird, so here are mine.

This first map has just the room names:

And here’s the one with item names included:

I may take a break before I do the next one.

So I decided to play the next Scott Adams adventure, Pirate Adventure (also known as Pirate Cove).

This one was much more cohesive than the first. Where Adventureland was a jumble of stuff thrown together, this one pretty much stuck to its theme. I say “pretty much” because the first part where you start in a London flat is a bit odd.

Anyway, I tried my hardest this time to not cheat.

And failed.

I eventually succumbed at two frustrating points after wandering around for far too long without any progress. “Where do I find a damn empty container?! And how can I unlock that door?” The answer to the second question relied on a description I’d long forgotten. The answer to the first was kind of ridiculous. Oh well, at least the rest of the game was fairly straightforward after that.

Herewith are two maps. The first one is just the locations, so it’s kind of spoiler-free in some ways.

The second one includes all the items in the rooms, which in a couple of cases is a giveaway. So if you want to try solving it yourself, look away!

On to Mission Impossible!

I recently decided to play some classic text adventures that I tried when I was younger but never finished.

First up I had a go at Zork. Still got stuck and had to use maps and a walkthrough. Then listened to the great podcast about it by Kay Savetz and Carrington Vanston – Eaten by a Grue

Then I decided to play the first ever microcomputer text adventure – Adventureland by Scott Adams. This time I tried my hardest to finish without cheating (I had to get a few hints in the end). As part of this effort, I decided to do my own mapping – even of the maze!

To do the mapping I decided to figure out what the current state of the art is in digital mapping tools and found http://trizbort.io. It’s not a perfect tool but it’s pretty damn close. The important thing is to learn the keyboard shortcuts.

Anyway, after looking at the other maps for Adventureland online, none of them seemed to capture everything. So I thought I’d share mine. Herewith is my map:

I played the SAGA version with graphics on the Virtual II emulator.