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From: librik@netcom.com (David Librik)
Subject: Re: Ancient TRS-80 Text Adventures
Message-ID: <librikDCruyz.JyG@netcom.com>
Organization: Icy Waters Underground, Inc.
References: <MERRYMAN.6.000C6B3A@medtronic.com> <3vrcbm$lnj@fountain.mindlink.net>
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 1995 05:52:10 GMT
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Sender: librik@netcom20.netcom.com

Dale_Tudge@mindlink.bc.ca (Dale Tudge) writes:
>I have Raaka-Tu on cassette.  It was one of Radio Shack's attempts to market 
>software.  I remember it was a terrible adventure. I don't remember the whole 
>thing anymore, but it paled to the Scott Adams adventures.

>Other good adventures were Crowley Manor, San Fransisco 1908, Paradise Threat, 
>Lucifer's Realm, and the rest of that series.

Ah!  The work of Jyym Pearson.

Pearson had the best sense of plotting I've ever seen in an adventure author.
You were taken through a story and things happened to you, yet you still
felt like you were playing an adventure, not a Choose-your-own-path game.
Part of the reason for this was his interface -- which was incredibly
frustrating in some ways.  It would override your commands when something was
happening to you:  whether you pressed ENTER or typed a command was unimportant
when a horrible force was shoving you up a wall.  This was actually a good
idea; it gave the player a feeling that his character was not as much of a
"totally isolated, independent actor" as other games do.  You really felt
more a part of the story when you couldn't necessarily always do "examine"
or "inventory" and get the same old results.

Pearson made significant inroads onto the problem of believability in non-
player actors in a very simple way: constrain *everything* the player can do,
so he gets used to it -- then the "flimsiness" of most NPCs doesn't become
quite so apparent.  And keep NPCs and players *busy* when they're together.

His games:

Escape From Traam was a fairly typical escape-the-alien-planet scenario,
but it was enhanced by Pearson's imagination, which created small but
memorable eccentricites -- an alchemist's shack, a huge underground stone
hall, a statue of an alien politician -- that made everything more interesting.
(Compare this to William Denman's Forbidden City, or even a lot of Scott
Adams' games, where alien worlds could be downright monotonous.)

The Curse of Crowley Manor was the only adventure game that actually
scared me while I was playing it.  Something has killed Mr. Crowley
and begins to kill other people; as the game progresses you encounter
more and more of its influence.  While I was exploring a crypt, I knew the
creature had to be nearby, and the urge to stop playing right then was
overwhelming.  Here again there are little evocative images: a dusty piano
room with faded wallpaper in the farthest part of the cellar, for instance.

Lucifer's Realm depicted your adventures in Hell as you joined with
Satan to battle Hitler's attempted takeover.  Very very weird and some
of the best imagery and significant characters he ever had.  Jyym Pearson
really seemed to feel trapped by the limitations of 16K TRS-80 machine
language -- he wanted to tell stories, not just present puzzle worlds,
and he liked dreamlike sequences.  Early in Lucifer's Realm, you descend
from a ledge above a pit of fire, to find yourself in a tilted, pink-tiled
bathroom half-filled with water and rubble.  Weird.  The sequel to
Lucifer's Realm was called The Paradise Threat, but other than the cool
front cover (a rifle viewfinder's cross-hairs on an angel), the game was
mostly outtakes from Lucifer's Realm.  I guess he didn't feel up to
actually presenting Heaven in a computer program.

The only other game of Pearson's I know of is Saigon: The Final Days,
in which you are a POW, escaped and making your way to the site of the
American pullout.  The thing I remember most about this game is the
way it showed the worst problem's with his whole approach: (1) sudden
death, (2) difficulty figuring out what to do next, and (3) need to
go back and look at everything again as the game progresses.  That is,
the white cliffs are only covered with "chalk" when the plot has gotten
to the point where chalk is required for the next step; the VC patrol only
leaves its campsite once you find a puzzle that is solved with the
dogtags they've left behind (of course, you don't know that it's solved with
the tags, nor that the VC have them, nor that they're going to be leaving.)
This is Pearson's method for cutting down the combinatorial-explosion problem
of adventure games: how to handle the fact that, normally, *everything* can
be used with *everything*.

I'm told that Jyym Pearson also wrote a game called "The Institute."
The plot of this one is: you are an escaped mental patient.  You find
where they keep all the drugs, crawl into the closet, and spend the
whole game stoned out of your gourd.  I like that premise.

Where is Jyym Pearson?  Someone get him a copy of TADS!

- David Librik
librik@cs.Berkeley.edu
