Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai

I have so many guilty pleasures that I'm in a permanent state of mortification, and one of my pleasures is a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl. It's not because I love killing monsters and collecting treasures; the actual BULK of a dungeon crawl game is incidental to me. What I REALLY like to do is to EXPLORE.

I've always gotten a thrill out of mazes, tunnels, and imaginary digital worlds. Unfortunately there are few games that are simply about exploring...pissy monsters are always attacking you and you have to solve anachronous "eight queens" puzzles at every second step. I'm of the opinion that the world (the real one) is waiting for a computer simulation of a rich landscape that doesn't necessarily have anybody else in it. The fact that I'd enjoy such a thing is creepy, really.

But anyway, my favourite games as a teenager were the ones where you could wander around a maze and map it, and then stare for hours at the map wondering what sort of cool place it would be to live in. Unfortunately back then I had a very low threshold for frustration, so I rarely succeeded in finishing the games that were so fun to explore: Ultima, The Eidolon, Alternate Reality, and...

...the Dunjonquest series, considered to be the first dungeon crawls for the 8-bit home computers. Originally developed by Jon Freeman (who is most idolized these days as being one of the creators of Archon) for his fledgling Automated Simulations company (likewise most idolized for later becoming Epyx), these games were all about wandering around mazes, killing monsters, raising your stats, collecting treasures, and running from Antmen who apparently used a vanilla-scented body lotion.

The Dunjonquest game that most people remember is "Temple of Apshai" and its two sequels, "Upper Reaches of Apshai" and "Curse of Ra." These three games -- like the "Hellfire Warrior" trilogy that followed them -- presented you with a very basic depiction of your surroundings, requiring you to actually read the room descriptions from the accompanying manual (or "Book of Lore.")

Originally written in BASIC in 1979, the first games required a great deal of patience and imagination, and the subsequent games -- with the exception of "Gateway to Apshai," a very different arcade-style adventure -- used the same engine. Even when the Apshai games were eventually released as a re-written, integrated, machine-language "Temple of Apshai Trilogy" -- the way most people remember them -- you still needed to shuffle your little character along featureless corridors, bumping into walls and slaying barely-animated 4-colour monsters.

So Dunjonquest games don't have a lot of appeal to gamers these days, and they've slowly faded away from the eyes of even the most nostalgic 8-bit fans.

Until now!

I'm happy to say I'm not alone in my love of these games, and I've been collaborating with Robinson Mason -- and scrounging the darkest corners of the internet -- to reclaim the programs. And not just the programs, but also the even more rare "Books of Lore" which are both essential for play and a delight to read.

While my compatriot tirelessly unearths more of the games and materials, I've been concentrating on reverse-engineering the BASIC code and mapping all the levels. I've discovered some interesting things buried in the convoluted rats-nest of oddly-ported BASIC, but that will come later. Right now, here are maps for the four levels of the first game, "Temple of Apshai."

I decided not to include room numbers, traps, or treasures -- that would not only clutter up my tiny drawings but would also spoil more of the game. And I make no claims to the 100% accuracy of these maps; they are complete and fully-connected, but their proportions may be slightly off. Click on an image to see a larger version.

Temple of Apshai - Level One


Temple of Apshai - Level Two


Temple of Apshai - Level Three


Temple of Apshai - Level Four


The maps for the next game ("Upper Reaches of Apshai") are coming soon (along with playing tips), and I expect there'll be a resource site starting up eventually. Until then, spare a thought to all those digital worlds that are locked up in decaying floppy disks in attics and basements, and consider rescuing them for one last time.

Dwarf Fortress

I loved "The Sims." I loved "Zangband." I also loved "Sim City" and "Alpha Centauri." I have a thing about games that let me build and micro-manage a situation, especially on a microscopic level.

But rarely does a game possess me so entirely that I can literally spend an entire weekend (and perhaps more) playing it, dreading even the thought of MAKING DINNER or doing anything else that might take precious minutes away from The Entertainment.

I was reading old friend Ian's blog and one of his first posts was about "Dwarf Fortress," described as the most complicated game of all time. I didn't want to delve into some hackneyed freeware game with a steep learning curve, but the premise was intriguing: you manage a settlement of dwarves as they build and defend their fortress.

So I downloaded it and started playing. Wading through the countless menus and options was daunting. I didn't understand what any of the symbols were supposed to mean. The manual was sparse and unsatisfying. I couldn't get anywhere. So I sadly closed the program and resolved not to play it again...

...until I discovered the Dwarf Fortress Wiki, and in particular the "Your First Fortress" page. I followed the suggestions and I began -- haltingly -- to learn the logic of the game's user interface. Each small step revealed another wealth of possibilities until -- as of yesterday morning -- I became totally hooked.

I've got this handful of dwarves, see? Each one of them has a unique and detailed personality, included quirks and religious leanings, along with a huge set of potential skills.

Then I've got this enormous, fractal-generated world full of realistic geology and overlapping biomes. I've got to dig this huge fortress, find a place to stockpile my stones and food and a place for my dwarves to throw their garbage. I need to cut down trees so I can make beds, I have to build their dining halls and kitchens, I have to organize them into military squads.

But dwarves don't like to be outside, so I need to get them to plant crops underground. Since they can't sow seeds into chert (one of the dozens of types of stone you're liable to encounter, each with its own uses), I need to dig channels from a far-off river, diverting the water so that it creates an underground lake under my mountain. Then I need to build floodgates and attach them to gears and levers, which my dwarves can pull in order to selectively irrigate my underground chambers. Then the dwarves plant the crops, harvest them months later, eat them or brew them into alcohol, save the seeds, weave some of them into fiber which can then be made into clothing, sewn with images, dyed, made into ropes which are attached to buckets and blocks to create wells...

...and your wood furnace can be used to make ashes, which can be mixed with water to create potash...or turned into lye and made into soap in the alchemist's workshop...but to build that workshop you need to create glassware, which means collecting sand and heating it in a glassworks...and on and on and on.

Meanwhile the dwarves are interacting with each other. Some of them fall in love and have children, who gradually grow to have lives of their own. They sit and chat, they wrestle, they play with the dogs, they go out to chase the wildlife or fish by the water. They grieve for lost friends, especially when those friends drowned in the water supply and started belching up great clouds of pink, corrupting miasma.

This description doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. I've been playing constantly for three days and I STILL don't really know what I'm doing.

My advice? DON'T PLAY IT. You will either hate it or you'll be unable to stop, so either way you lose.

ZAngband, My Guilty Pleasure

Every few years I dust off the old Roguelike and spend some time obsessively playing it. For the last eight years my personal favourite has been ZAngband, and I've spent a week joyfully hacking away at it.

What's so nice about a Roguelike? You can play it on any platform. The vibrant development base makes for frequent updates and tweaks. With no attention paid to spiffy graphics -- as you can see above -- all the code can go toward providing balance, interest, and surprise. At the best of times it's like playing randomized chess. At its worst it's an endless tapping out of the same command codes ("m4b*t, m4b*t, m4b*t...").

The BEST thing about playing a Roguelike, though, is that it provides a good opportunity to just sit and listen to a CD at the same time. Each time I sit down to play the game, I put in a CD I haven't properly listened to and then play along with the CD. When the CD's over I force myself to quit the game, because nothing kills your character like general game fatigue.

Another nice thing about it is the "code of game ethics" which states that when your character dies...that's it. Game over. You don't do anything tricky -- like back up your save file -- to resurrect it. This leads to a lot of reflection during the game and a reduction of potentially suicidal choices. It also leads to intense frustration when eight hours of your life go down the toiled due to "Yet Another Stupid Death."

What's so nice about ZAngband? It's the only Roguelike with a huge randomized wilderness full of towns, ruins, and themed dungeons. Its magic system is unparalleled. It also has a good sense of humour, having strayed from the traditional Tolkein influences to bring us Robin Hood and -- jeez -- Barney the chaos-spewing dinosaur.

ZAngband has so many character options -- race, class, magic types -- that it can be a bit daunting to the beginner. So I have only one (nerdy) thing to say: Mindflayer ranger with Death magic. You'll spend the first hour or so running away from everything, but once you hit your stride...

Armchair Caving

I'd like to say "put me in a cave and I bravely explore the smallest crevasse," but the truth is more like "put me in a cave and I scream 'help, I'm stuck, there are bugs, get me out!'"

No matter my reluctance to actually squeeze through the dark, buggy confines of a real-life cave, I love to read about OTHER people going into them, which is why Roger Brucker's book "The Longest Cave" is such a treat.

It's the story of the Mammoth/Flint cave system, and in particular the attempts of the authors (and many others) to survey and connect them. I've always thought that the grueling nature of caving was just about "squeezing through that tight spot" or "ducking under that stalactite," but Roger Brucker brings the truth home. Have you ever spent five hours crawling on your belly through a dusty passage only slightly bigger than your horizontal body, trying to find the end of a mysterious, extended tunnel, occasionally sleeping, rarely given the opportunity to turn around?

No? Well you're not alone, because apparently nobody's ever gotten to the end of that passage (called "Left of the Trap"). And therein lies some of the beauty of "The Longest Cave." It describes in a matter-of-fact way the places that humans JUST CANNOT GO, because even the most acclimatized of us simply do not have enough stamina. And that's incredible.

Although Brucker's style tends to be of the "We walked through the passage, Clive kept on singing, we told him to be quiet" variety, he really does maintain the tension until the very end: the connection of the Flint and Mammoth systems to create the world's longest cave. He's not a great author but his passion and his first-hand experience more than make up for his stylistic stumblings.

As an aside I've discovered that it's almost impossible to actually see a MAP of these caves; the maps in Brucker's book are not very detailed, and there don't appear to be online sources for ANY Flint/Mammoth cave maps. I wonder why? I bet they're kept pseudo-secret to prevent people from wandering into them and getting lost.

Shamus 2

Ah yes, give me a game I can map and I'll be happy for hours. I didn't care much for William Mataga's "Shamus: Case II" back in 1983, but thanks to the joy of emulation -- and the instructions here -- I can finally enjoy the game. And win it. On the Novice level. By saving it an awful lot.

I couldn't find any online maps or spoilers for Shamus 2, so here are mine. I'm sorry the map isn't very pretty (click for a larger version).
And here are the spoilers: there are 38 rooms, the devilish "sliding ladders" start to appear in room 27, and the only way across room 20 is to fall down into the ingenious "hidden room" (17).

Room 38 contains a "detonator." After you've armed it you need to get back to room zero (which you can do in ten moves), at which time you're told that "The Shadow is dead on this level" and you start at the Intermediate level. The instructions say that you actually DO BATTLE with The Shadow, so I assume that eventually you do get to meet him.

It's a nifty game with neat cross-genre appeal, but the real joy for me is the joy of mapping. The higher levels are probably the same, maybe with different obstacles...YOU can find out!

Interactive Fiction Research

Dennis G. Jerz has spent the last several years researching an obscure but fascinating subject: Will Crowther's "Colossal Cave Adventure." Considered to be the real forerunner of modern interactive fiction, the game has been glossed so many times that it has become obscured by its own mythology.

Finally, Jerz answers some of the questions and dispels some of the myths have surround the game. With new interviews, an partial exploration of the Bedquilt caves, and -- most shockingly -- the original 1976 source code, he has written (and illustrated) a sprawling and intricate piece of scholarship: "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky."

I.F. fans are going nuts about this, and rightly so. It's a beautiful thing.

The Wumpus 2000 Blip

Many of the little projects I work on end up disappearing without a trace. They're sort of like elaborate paper boats that I spend years playing with, and then I launch them down the stream, and that's it. The only person who cares about the boat ends up being me.

I get particularly gratified when somebody finds one of my boat projects to be useful. This doesn't happen often...but it DID happen this month.

Someday I'll write a series of posts about the web stats for my site, but for now I'll say that I noticed a huge uptick in downloads of my Wumpus 2000 game. I finished the game in 2004 and released it to the world, but other than a few baffled comments and a sort of ambiguous review in SPAG #41, the game disappeared without a trace. The only people liable to notice it -- fans of Interactive Fiction -- were bound to be turned off by its compulsive, repetative, largely plotless nature. Wumpus 2000 was an unapologetic "cave crawl," and cave crawls aren't considered the cream of the IF-crop...especially not the sort that I made.

But now, three years later, Wumpus 2000 has made an online blip. Somehow Anna at Dessgeega Blog picked up the game and wrote a complimentary review about it, and I think she summed up its potential appeal:

wumpus 2000 - too vast and random for memorization - asks the player to devote that bit of attention and labor - in this age of flash games designed to be played and forgotten during a lunch break - and to reclaim the rewards of mapping a virtual world by hand: the written record of a game and the ownership of an experience.

As somebody who loves MAPPING games even more than I enjoy PLAYING them, I can't help but agree. I was particularly thrilled to see a smidgeon of a Wumpus 2000 map drawn IN SOMEBODY ELSE'S HANDWRITING! Not to mention the subsequent comments from people who have actually played (and even finished) the game.

Simonc over at GameSetWatch picked up on the Dessgeega post and actually said:

[Wumpus 2000] I suspect is the kind of experimental text adventure which can influence wider game design concepts from its odd niche.

I LOVE my odd niches! And apparently Wumpus 2000 is "old skool," like, even older skool than its two close companions -- Roguelikes and IF -- because of the complex, randomly-generated map and total lack of graphics or cardinal directions.

Picking up from the Dessgeega and GameSetWatch posts, Maggie Green of Kotaku wrote "Back to the (Hand Drawn) Future? (With Wumpus 2000)," and this post got splashed all over the place on RSS feeds. She expressed what the average player probably thought: "Cartography not being my thing, I can only envision hours of frustrating game play." Somewhere around there, Vash posted an ENTIRE transcript of a Wumpus 2000 game (click here and type "prev" if you're feeling brave), and it looks like he found the game almost as annoying as I find his blog navigation system.

So here's hoping that Wumpus 2000 DOES find its niche. I don't have hopes for a new genre of W2K clones, but I suppose stranger things have happened! I mean jeez, people still collect ASCII sigs, for goodness sake.

Wayout

Whenever I'm feeling particularly bored or aimless I find myself playing Paul Edelstein's 1982 game "Wayout." It's annoying -- endless featureless corridors, a map-stealing "Cleptangle," deliberately confounding mazes, and windy areas that seem to serve no purpose but to make the game longer -- but I'm a sucker for labyrinths and it's a good time killer.

If anybody can tell me how to use the fireflies to find the exits, that would be much appreciated.

Memory Spill: Westmount Place

It's difficult for me to figure out when -- and for how long -- I hung around Westmount Place Mall. It seems like I was always there, forever, but the period I'm remembering probably only lasted two summers at the most.

My father was a welder during the construction of the Bruce Nuclear Plant, and he spent most of the week living in Inverhuron (since the construction site was so far from our home). Meanwhile my mother worked full-time at the Zacks Ladieswear in the Westmount Place Mall, so during the summer -- when I wasn't in school -- she had no choice but to bring me to work with her.

This probably started in 1980, so I was eight or so. I don't remember the drive to or from the mall, but I have vivid memories of what I did when I was actually there. It was huge and it echoed, there was always quiet muzak playing, the decor was entirely earth tones and burnt oranges; somehow those colours -- coupled with the stifling air-conditioning and lack of skylights -- didn't seem depressing back then. It's just the way malls were designed at the time.

I'd spend eight hours a day there. Sometimes I'd hang around the back room at Zacks, a tiny, dirty, smoke-filled area. I'd bring papers and pencils and draw mazes, and label them "TEMPA," which was my very own maze organization ("Totally Excellent Mazes Produced (by) (my name)"). There was a desk in the back room, and its drawers were filled with plastic condiment packages from fast-food restaurants. I became accustomed to the company of women.

My mother was always fun at Zacks, because she had fun co-workers: Wendy (who was tiny and spunky) and my aunt Marlene. Sometimes Marlene would bring her daughter Melanie, who was my age, and we'd hang around together. Melanie was flippant and funny but didn't share my interests...I wanted to play "Doctor Who" and she wanted to play "Beverly Hillbillies."

Once she confessed quietly that a teacher had read a story to the class, and that it had made a big impression on her...I encouraged her to buy the book, but she confessed -- even quieter -- that she wasn't able to read it. So the two of us sat in the huge glassed-in mall foyers with the orange rubber flooring, and I read "The Tell-Tale Heart" to her. The sun coming through the glass would heat those foyers up more and more and the rubber would start to give off a delicious gasoline smell.

Meanwhile there was "Billiards," the gloomy, grown-up pool hall in the basement of the mall. Besides pool and pinball they also had the first video games. Somehow I learned about slugs at Billiards; maybe my father gave me one to try out. I remember holding a donut-shaped slug -- heavy, unmarked -- and slipping it into a pinball machine.

Then came "Astropark," the REAL arcade, which my aunt jokingly called "Astroturf." Two sisters worked there, very pretty "rocker chicks" with crimped hair and bad attitudes. They used to give me free quarters to play the games. One day the sisters beckoned me into the back room, which was dark and full of greasy machine parts. In the middle of the room they'd put down a napkin, and on the napkin were three or four dead flies. They said they were going to cast a magic spell to bring the flies back to life. I don't remember what the spell was, but they sprinkled sugar on the flies, and some of them started twitching.

I think those women had a huge impact on my life. I wish I knew where they were.

The mall had a somewhat deshevelled Home Hardware where they sold two choice items: Mexican jumping beans (two per package and a paper "race track" for bean-racing competitions) and another product I have difficulty describing: a cardboard sheet with some sort of background on it, and a transparent sheet (similar to Letraset) with figures on the back. You'd position the figure on the background, then rub a pencil over the transparent sheet until the figure detatched and remained stuck to the background. If you were careful this worked perfectly, but if you were impatient then Wile E. Coyote would end up missing an arm.

Upstairs, the Sears department store had a computer section that always smelled like burnt wiring. The TI-99 was there, and Intellivision, and a large vector-based console whose name I don't remember...but the star was the Commodore 64. I'd spend hours up there typing games out of the book "More BASIC Computer Games" (which is still fun to flip through now and then). Just when I finished entering and debugging Hammurabi, the salesmen would need to use the computer for something, and in seconds all my hard work was gone. But it wasn't about PLAYING the games, it was about unravelling the mysteries behind them.

The man who helped me was somebody I remember as "Mr. Long Tall," a computer enthusiast who worked at Sears and who was always ready to explain things to me. He suffered the indignity of all effeminate men who are good with children: my mother warned me constantly never to go in the bathroom with him.

A short distance down from Zacks was a Bent's Camera store. The people who owned it had a son named Ian, and we became best friends. We were both literate nerds with overactive imaginations. He took me into the back room of the camera store -- you'll notice that many of my defining moments ocurred in the back rooms of stores -- and showed me what happened when you put a magnet under a work-table covered with iron shavings. He probably understood why it happened; I didn't. But our knowledge was pure give-and-take: one day he came up to me at W. H. Smith's and asked me -- secretly -- what "being stoned" meant.

Behind W. H. Smith's we'd sometimes come across boxes of discarded books, all of them missing their covers. We got a lot of books that way.

Dinner was Dairy Queen, and was always a super cheese-dog with milk. They had a jukebox, and I played "Whip It" and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," so I'm sure everybody hated me. I learned that if you put your thumb over the end of your milk straw and pushed it down into the inside of the hotdog, you'd end up with a hole in your hotdog and a straw filled with meat.

Most of the time Ian and I hung around Videos, which began as a VHS rental store but gradually turned into a (you guessed it) computer store. I watched "Watership Down" there and was ashamed of my crying. I was fascinated by the cover of "Driller Killer," and I always wondered why the movie was called "Happy Birthday Tome". I remember the police arriving to take "Snuff" off the shelf.

The best game at Westmount Place Mall, though, was to start at one end, pretend you were a rocket ship, and run all the way to the other end. The brown floor tiles were okay but the orange ones were meteorites.

Now the only part of the mall that remains is the Pharmacy; everything else has changed. It's entered stage three: Refurbished As Headquarters for Insurance Company (stages one and two are birth and decline).

"If I Were Queen of the PATH"

I don't make blog announcements BEFORE I go away on a trip, because I don't want y'all breaking into my apartment and stealing the few clean socks I have left. But now that I'm back...

Yes! Today was the day to meet with "Team Daily Muffy Toronto" to prepare and photograph our next adventure: "If I Were Queen of the PATH."

For those who don't know, "The PATH" is a huge network of tunnels and walkways which connect many of the buildings in Metro Toronto. Our mission was to start at the southernmost point -- the Air Canada Centre -- and zig-zag back and forth until we arrived at the northernment -- the Atrium on Bay.

For some reason this was one of the most exhausting experiences in our lives. It wasn't just the walking -- I think Craig guessed seven miles, much of that on slippery tiles -- but there's something soul-sucking about spending three hours in endless corridors, riding endless escalators, and walking past endless rows of closed and darkened stores.

What's more, my intense animal magnetism blew up the transformer at The Hudson's Bay Company, cutting off power to much of the downtown core. So our final walk through The Eaton Centre was sort of primitive and surreal.

When we got back to Jason & Craig's to download the photos we expected little more than unworkable dullness...but wow, these pictures are lots of fun! So this is the only time that I'll admit that it was all very hellish and monotonous...from now on, the official word is "it was a RIOT!"

Menaced by hockey players, gang bangers, and space-time vortexes...crashing an odious "get rich quick" convention...escalators, fountains, labyrinths and cold rain...we got a lot of mileage out of those miles!

We ALSO recorded a few high-quality video clips, so you'll get to see Muffy In Motion (and not on a carousel this time). I'll let you know when they're on YouTube.

And now: a shower and a sleep. There's only so much havoc we can cause in a single day!

Atari 2600 (Computer #1)

I get moments of gut-wrenching, heart-squeezing sentimentality when I think of the computers I grew up with. Not because I was a nerd (though I was), but because computers were a wonderful escape into new worlds and -- later, when they became more sophisticated -- they allowed me to created my OWN new worlds, which is something I still love to do.

The beginning, for me, was the Atari 2600. I was probably 8 years old. I vividly remember the smell of the rubber joysticks which everybody chewed but few admit it. I'd sometimes play unsatisfyingly abstract games of Breakout, but my imagination was held most by the maze games we had: "Adventure" and "Maze Craze." I must have been a bit autistic because I was ENTHRALLED by mazes, I used to draw them and imagine them and write about them all the time. To this day I still get a thrill looking at a maze, and I have absolutely no idea why. Someday, to illustrate my mania, I'll post a picture of the ridiculous multi-page maze I spent months drawing in public school. You'll understand why my mating pool is so small.

I also get a thrill thinking about the Atari 2600. I haven't played one in about 25 years, so -- after some depressing auctions of the original article -- I've settled on an "Atari Flashback 2." It's pretty much the real thing with all the original quirks, and it's certainly more tangible than an emulator. I want to play these games on my TV...while chewing the joysticks.

And now, with experience in broadcast signals and assembly language, I better understand the terrifying process that went into creating these 4K games. I also understand why the Pac-Man ghosts flickered so horribly, and why the playfields tended to be horizontally symmetrical.

I don't have it yet, and maybe I'll be bitterly disappointed when I get it, and it will probably sit unused after the first few weeks...but I'd rather spend a small amount of energy and money on a throw-away toy than continue feeling my heart get squeezed like this.