*Back to Atari for this one and it’s a game created specifically for the 2600 console. It wasn’t ever an arcade game.
*The gist of this one is pretty standard. An enchanted chalice has been stolen and the player must find it and return it to the castle while avoiding a handful of enemies. But there’s a lot of innovations here.
*I think the enemies here are one of the biggest innovations. There are four of them, three dragons and a bat. They all behave differently and will chase you, not just on the screen you’re on, but into different rooms and different screens. It’s rudimentary, but this is the first game where I encountered enemies that seemed to have, even if at a very, very rudimentary level, AI. As well, those enemies continue to move even when they’re off screen. So, you can’t just go into a room and see there’s no dragon in it and then come back to it later expecting to be safe. The dragon might have entered that room while you were gone. Again, I know this is all super simple, but it feels like a more dynamic kind of enemy.
*The other thing this game kind of broke new ground on was the use of items. There are various items you can find and use in this game. I’ll talk more about what they are when I get to them. But you can actually find an object, pick it up, carry it with you, use it and then leave it. You do only have one slot in your inventory. You can only carry one object at a time . . . well, no, wait, actually that’s not even true. But I’ll get into that later. Still, the idea of interacting with your environment to that degree feels kind of ground breaking. It brings in a kind of rudimentary “strategy” element. For instance, you might have to carry an object somewhere and leave it, knowing you’ll need it there later and then go get another object and bring it . . . this will all be more clear once I actually start getting into gameplay.
*Regardless, you can kind of see how this game was intriguingly different from a lot of other games that had come before it. It’s got quests, items, dynamic enemies, strategy . . . it’s considered the first game of its own genre: the adventure game.
*That said, this is still 1979, so things aren’t mind-blowingly awesome yet.
*Oh, I forgot one other strange innovation. This is the first video game to have an Easter Egg! There’s a secret room that the player can stumble into that included, in the game’s first release, the name of the designer Walter Robinette. It’s the first hidden credit!
*You know, that thing they spent a Godawful amount of time looking for in Ready Player One. Because nothing is more visually dynamic and viscerally thrilling than a long line of people playing an ancient video game over and over.
*So, there are three levels, all with the same quest: find the golden chalice and return it to your castle. The levels get progressively harder and bigger.
*That’s what she said.
*Well, anyway.
*OK, so it’s basically top down and I’m a tiny square. There’s a gold castle, where you start, and a black castle and a white castle which you have to journey to and unlock.
*So help me God, first person to make a Harold & Kumar joke . . .
*Okay, so the goal is to get a gold chalice and return it to the gold castle. So you have to go find the key to get into the white castle and get the chalice in there. To get there you have to go through a maze that stretches across several screens. You can’t always tell what’s going to happen with the path you’re going down, so you might follow a path across a couple of screens and then on the third screen hit a dead end. It’s . . . not hard.
*There is a dragon you can wake up that is near the labyrinth and if he’s chasing you, you’ll probably get killed because of all the doubling back you have to do if you’re trying to hurry through the maze.
*Can we just talk about how horrible the dragons are in this game? I mean, they look like ducks. I mean, I don’t even know how they’re supposed to resemble dragons.
*If you are eaten by one, your little square literally shows up down in his stomach area and you can still move the square. Which is super dark.
*If you find the sword, you can carry it and then use it when you run into a dragon. Rather hilariously, if you are carrying the sword and physically hit the dragon, you will still die. You have to put the sword down and then get the dragon to impale himself on it.
*So, I died a couple of times, once in the maze because the dragon was chasing me and I got trapped in a corner and once because I thought if I had the sword I could just hit the dragon with it. But I still finished level one in like five minutes, even including the brief runs where I died. It’s a very easy level.
*Let’s move on to level two. Did I say there are three levels? There are. All the same objective, find the chalice & carry it back to the gold castle. Difficulty level and set up supposedly change. Let’s see.
*Okay, so my comments will kind of make sense, let me just walk you quickly through what you have to do on Level 2 in order to win.
*Go into the dark catacombs (which are just like the other maze I talked about, except that you can only see where your character is, not the entire maze on the screen. Find the gold key; take it and unlock the gold castle. Then go into the light catacombs to get the white key. Take the white key to the white castle and unlock it. Go back into the catacombs and get the bridge and take it to the white castle. You have to have the bridge to cross to the area in the white castle maze that has the black key. Take the black key to the black castle and get the grail there and take it to the yellow castle. That’s the puzzle part of the game, more or less.
*The game play difficult, of course, is because the dragons are chasing you and the bat is constantly moving items.
*The bat is an interesting AI development, actually. It’s the first video game enemy to continue moving when off screen. By which I mean that sometimes you come into a screen where you left something and the bat will have already been there and moved it.
*So, this second level is one of the most intense difficulty ramps I’ve ever seen. It’s essentially impossible to complete. I beat level one on my second try; it took less than five minutes all told to beat. I played level two over several days and ended up clocking in more than five hours and I never even got the grail out of the black castle.
*More on that later.
*So, you can actually pick up the bat, if you manage to run into it. This is insane stuff.
*There’s nothing in the world like the feeling of sprinting through a maze that you can’t see while a dragon is chasing you and you’re holding a bat that is itself holding an entire bridge that is bigger than all three of you put together.
*The physics? Dicey.
*The maze that you can’t see is a real difficulty. Because the dragon isn’t bound by the walls of the maze, so it can just fly through all the obstacles which makes it very, very hard to get through the maze once a dragon has spotted you. You’ll just constantly run into a dead end that stops you or else it will just take too long to take all the twists and turns and the dragon will for sure kill you.
*Also, the bat will occasionally pull off a downright hilarious move and pick up ONE OF THE DRAGONS and fly around with it. I was going through the maze once and the bat flew through the screen clutching the dragon and when he went over me, THE DRAGON ATE ME. When the bat brought the dragon to me. It’s called synergy.
*The bat quickly became the bane of my existence. It was near impossible to find the items as the bat would just constantly move them. And, for whatever reason , he could actually drop items in the walls of the mazes, which means that the only way to get them is to have the magnet WHICH YOU ALSO CANT FIND BY THE WAY
*I ended up in a loop more than once over this kind of thing. The most infuriating was when I had to have the sword to get into the black castle, because the dragon in there just camps right on the grail, so you have to kill him to get the grail. But the sword was inside a wall, so I needed the magnet, but it was in an area of the map I needed the bridge to get to. And that area had the white dragon camping it, so I needed the sword to get the bridge which I needed to get the magnet which I needed to get the sword. That’s ****** up. I’m not signing off on that ****. That’s absurd.
*One of the best things about the more sophisticated inventory systems of later games is clearly the ability to carry multiple items. Even when it’s limited, trust me, it’s GREAT. You want to get really frustrated, try playing a game with items that only lets you carry one at a time.
*Anyway, I messed around with level two for hours and then I decided to just give level three a try. Level three is the randomized level. The objects are placed randomly on the map instead of being placed in the specified positions from level two. Thus, level three has the opportunity to be everything from incredibly easy to literally impossible. The game might, for instance, place the gold key and the grail right next to you at the starting point so that you can win immediately without even leaving the opening screen. On the other hand, it might put the grail inside the white castle, but also put the white key inside the white castle, meaning that the key is locked inside the castle and you’ll never be able to open it to get the grail.
*Level three immediately gave me an easy situation. The grail was not on the start screen, but it was on the very next screen. I bolted back to the opening screen and placed the grail in a corner, hoping that the bat wouldn’t carry it off while I looked for the gold key. I found the gold key in the second screen of the labyrinth.
*I was literally terrified as I sprinted back to the opening screen. I hadn’t even seen a dragon yet and I was suddenly terrified about what would happen if I died before getting the key back and winning the game.
*And by “what would happen” I mean that I probably would have put my foot through the damn wall.
*Luckily, I made it back, the grail was still there and I WON!
*Okay, THAT COUNTS ALRIGHT THAT COUNTS AS ME BEATING LEVEL TWO ALSO BECAUSE ON LEVEL TWO THE OBJECTS GET MOVED BY THE BAT, SO THEY COULD ALSO BE RANDOMLY PLACED, SO ME BEATING LEVEL THREE IS THE SAME AS ME BEATING LEVEL TWO I’M NOT PLAYING LEVEL TWO ANYMORE OK I’M GONNA GIVE A CLUE HERE THIS COUNTS AND I BEAT THE DAMN GAME
*So, anyway, that was fun.
*So, I feel like I need to get into a larger topic here which is my philosophy on hard games.
*As we all know, I’m not the best gamer in the world. Some games are too hard for me that other people probably don’t have an issue with. But let’s just talk about hard games.
*It’s totally a game designer’s prerogative to make a game hard. All games are like this, whether you’re talking about sports or board games or casino games or whatever. Some are easy, some are hard. Some are very hard. And while it kind of bums me out that I’ll never be able to play their games, I can even respect a group like From Software where their very obvious intention is to create a very hard gaming experience in a curated way. I even respect when game designers don’t include difficulty toggles and say that the game is the way they want it to be and you will either have that curated experience or you’ll have nothing. I can respect that.
*I’m of the opinion that games shouldn’t be impossible. Now there’s a class of games now called rage games which you’re familiar with if you’re on YouTube very much. They’re games that are so difficult and purposely structured in such a frustrating way that their entire purpose is to make people angry. There’s even one called The Impossible Game. It’s not though. People have beaten it. A lot of people have. I’m not sure how I feel about rage games. Except I know that I’m not going to play them; I’m just not interested in that emotional experience from a game. But these games aren’t impossible, nor are they intended to be. Rage games, like non-rage games, are built to be winnable, just incredibly hard.
*But there’s a point at which a game gets too hard for me and I’m just going to, you know, give up and go watch a walkthrough. Well, I mean, I may go watch a walkthrough to get help on getting through a hard section and then go back and move on with the game. That’s one thing and I guess that’s “cheating” but I don’t really care.
*But the worse scenario is when even that doesn’t really help and it’s just that the game is too hard mechanically for me to do. And I’ll give up at that point.
*But I don’t like to do that. Here’s what game designers need to know about making games hard if they actually want people like me to continue playing them until they can succeed. Now, again, some game designers don’t care; I respect that. If you care about casual gamers, here are a couple of tips. The mechanics need to be fun. Number one. I hate games that expect me to just grind away at something that isn’t fun until I get good enough to get past it. If I’m going to have to do something over and over until I get good enough to get past it, make it fun.
*Second, there should be a noticeable increase in skill. If I’ve played something over for an hour and I’m not any better at it, that’s a goodbye for me. If I feel like a game isn’t actually building a skill that I can use . . . say, if it’s going to eventually just come down to luck if I get past this point, well, I think that’s a cop-out. Let me get better and use those skills to move on.
*All this to say that Adventure has neither of those things. The mechanics, which involve just sort of steering a small square from screen to screen, are not fun. There is also no real skill involved in winning. It all comes down to luck, even on level two, which is supposed to be the level where everything is placed in the same place every time, because that damn bat moves things around randomly. When I won, it was because I got incredibly lucky with the chalice placement. Period. That’s the only reason I won.
*All this to say that Adventure is a horrible game and you shouldn’t play it.
*I get its wonderful place in video game lore and, yeah, the Easter Egg, which I did not even bother attempting to find, by the way, and it literally named the genre it’s part of. But, at the end of the day, it’s a pain in the neck to play and I hate it.
*Is this the first game I’ve given a full non-recommendation to? I think it is. Prior to this, I found Combat to be the worst game and I still recommended the Tank levels, even though I said not to play the Plane levels. So, yeah, this is the first one that just doesn’t hold up enough to play. I had fun playing everything else so far, unsophisticated as they may be. But Adventure is just awful as an experience. Screw it.
*Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend playing this at all. If you have an itch to do something historical, then play through Level 1, which is the easiest of them. Venture no further. Here be dragons. Or ducks. Or something.
*Okay, join me next time as we journey into the depths of space again. It’s another true icon: Asteroids!