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Helpful Tips and General Information for Beginners to Adventures A Document File with Operation Blue Sunrise written by Colin Campbell (c) 1990-1992 All Rights Reserved This document file is intended for the use for people who have never tried playing an adventure game before (or have done so and found it very hard going). Those of you who are experienced players need notread this file as any tips contained herein do not apply to this adventure specifically,but to all adventures. What is an Adventure? ===================== An Adventure game is like one of those role playing books by Steve Jackson or Ian Livingstone that used to be popular a few years ago. Like those books you can go your own way but,unlike those books, you can do whatever you want whenever you want to. What happens when you play an adventure is quite simple. Text will appear on the screen (which you read) and then you decide what you want the hero (or heroine) to do. You then type the command (i.e. OPEN THE BLUE DOOR ) on the keyboard and press return. More text will appear on the screen explaining the result of the command. You are supposed to use all of your cunning and inteligence to solve problems that your character in the game will face (i.e. how do you get past the werewolf without getting eaten???!!).The key to all adventures is the problems that you face. For beginners, they must start easy and become more dificult. Playing either a far too easy/dificult adventure is not much fun - you get fed up very quickly. The first Adventure game was written by Crowther & Woods and called Adventure or Colossal Caves. There is a reasonable (by today's standards) version of this available in almost all P.D. libraries. How the Computer Understands what you type. =========================================== Most of you reading this will know all about nouns and verbs. Nouns are names of things/people/events etc. For example: Car, House, Dog, Flamethrower, Aardvard, Paul, Turnip,Tuesday are all nouns. Verbs are action words. For example: Run, Hit, Jump, Wear, Eat, Open, Drop, Sit, Laugh, Shout are all verbs. The adventure game will undestand a range of nouns, verbs and other word types, depending on how complex the Parser is (the Parser is the part of the game which decodes what you type into something that the game can understand and act on). Good adventures can be quite flexible and can understand what you type rather well. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing what you want to do but the bloody machine doesn't understand what you type in and so you have to spend hours rephrasing the command. Here are some example commands that a good parser should be able to handle: GET BOOK - all parsers can handle this simple 2-word command but I've known some that only understand TAKE instead of GET. This command will only work if you are actually able to pick the book up. DROP is the opposite to GET, so if you don't really want the BOOK now that you have taken it you just type DROP BOOK. Simple, eh? OPEN DOOR - another simple command. The door should be opened if it is not locked or if there are more than one door where you are in the game. For example, if there is a blue door and a purple door in the room and you typed OPEN DOOR without specifying which door then the adventure would either ask you which door you meant (if the game was user friendly) or reply something meaningless like YOU CAN'T. To open the purple door you could type OPEN PURPLE DOOR. To close the door you substitute the word CLOSE or SHUT instead of OPEN. EXAMINE AARDVARK - the verb EXAMINE is very important in all adventures. It allows you to look closely at certain things and it will tell you things that you would not know with just a cursory glance. In the example, the game might respond THE AARDVARD IS MALE. You now know there is a male aardvark here... perhaps if you could get your hands on a female one something might happen..... EXAMINE can usually be shortened to EXAM or X. Many adventures will give you information about yourself if you type EXAMINE ME. Remember to examine everything as you play -it is invaluable! LOOK - this brings up the description of the room which you are in. You may wonder why I keep mentioning 'rooms'. Each individual location that you are able to visit is termed a 'room' to us programmers even if the 'room' is in the middle of a forest! LOOK can almost always be shortened to just L . ASK DWARF ABOUT AXE - the verb ASK or TELL is part of the vocabulary of interaction between people you can meet in the game. The other way of phrasing this example command could be DWARF, TELL ME ABOUT AXE or SAY TO DWARF "TELL ME ABOUT AXE" or even SAY "TELL ME ABOUT THE AXE". It depends on the type of parser (remember what that is?) which command you would need to type (some adventures understand all 4 types!). Of course, you can ask the dwarf about more than the axe. You could TELL DWARF ABOUT AMBUSH (if there was one) or SAY "YES" to his request that you kill yourself or SAY TO DWARF "SOD OFF YOU SHORT GIT" if you wish to start a fight. GIVE MONEY TO THIEF - the verb GIVE allows more interaction between you and the characters you may meet. In this example the thief will probably take the money from you (unless he's on strike) if he hasn't done so already. There is a very famous thief in an adventure called Zork I. This thief goes about stealing all of the 'treasure' that you have with you without any way you can easily stop him! With interaction, you must make sure that the person you are dealing with is in the same room (or location) as you are, and that the object in question is being carried by yourself. GO NORTH - this allows you to move between locations (provided that there is an exit in that direction). You do not need to use the word GO as just NORTH on it's own will be understood. Other directions that you can 'go' are NORTHEAST (or NE), EAST (or E), SOUTHEAST (or SE), SOUTH (or S), SOUTHWEST (or SW), WEST (or W), NORTHWEST (or NW) and NORTH (or N). In most adventures you can also 'go' UP (or U), and DOWN (or D) and IN and OUT (and shake it all about, ha ha!). INVENTORY - this command lists what you are carrying or wearing. It can be shortened to INVEN or I. In some adventures you have to type the whole word out in full. HELP - some adventures may give you clues about certain obstacles/problems at early points. Typing HELP could give you a helpful clue about that door you wanted to open, for example. PUT DOG IN TOOLBOX - sometimes you will want to put an object that you have into another object.To do this we use the verb PUT (or INSERT).You will only be able to put things into containers that are big enough for them to fit into. This next example would not work: PUT ELEPHANT INTO CUPBOARD. Obviously! Loading and Saving. =================== At some point during play you will have to save your position onto a separate disk (not the game disk!!). For example, you may wish to sleep,eat or go to London for the weekend. If adventures didn't have a save facility then you would be running up a larger than usual electricity bill and probably burning out your TV/monitor and computer. When you save a position what you are doing is, in essence, taking a photograph of yourself and everything else that has happened during the game so far. The next time you wish to play the game you will load a saved position from your saves disk and everything will be as you left it. Two words govern loading and saving. These are (surprise surprise!) LOAD (or RESTORE) and SAVE. Some authors (myself included) have broken away from this and use other words for the same operation (eg. DISKSAVE and DISKLOAD in Operation Blue Sunrise) for reasons known only to themselves. Be warned that some adventures require a disk for each saved position -that means that you could have five, or more, disks for one adven- ture. Most adventures (eg. the Infocom series) allow more than one saved position to be on each disk. You simply give the name under which you want the position to be saved. Using these names you can quickly scan through all of your positions to find the one you want instead of loading everything. The Sierra On-Line range of graphical games allow a 60 character description for each saved position. So instead of a game position called,say, TROLL.SAV you could, if playing Kings Quest IV, for example, have it called THE BAD TROLL AT THE BRIDGE BIT PART THREE. Many of the newer adventures allow the saving of one (or more, as the case may be) game position in the computer's memory. This is called the ramsave. The words governing saving to the memory and loading from the memory are RAMLOAD and RAMSAVE (sometimes shortened to RS and RL). There is no need to specify which position you wish to load because there is only one there! Ramload & Ramsave are instant and will not wear out your precious disk drive. If you turn off the computer all positions in Ram will be lost. You must save to disk if you're going to switch off. Most people use saving and loading when they are about to do something risky in the game,or when entering the unknown. It is a useful tip to do so because it saves you an enormous amount of time. Death and Difficulties. ======================= Death is a funny subject in adventures. Almost all adventures allow for the event of death (some even make avoiding death their main problem!) in some form or another. You may be killed by a brutal hedgehog (really?) or you may jump off a very tall cliff. You can usually find more ways to die in an adventure than you see in a Michael Winner film, if you look carefully enough. Stupidity is certain to cause you inconvience (at least). For example, if you were to see an open lift shaft with no sign of a lift and you were to step through.... Ouch! Then again, you might try lowering yourself down the shaft on that handy rope you were carrying. Most adventures give some sort of warning of your impending doom (eg. In Operation Blue Sunrise you are asked whether you really want to leap out of your bedroom window!) If you get really annoyed with your adventure and you wish to stop playing and go do something else for a bit then you have 2 choices. Either type QUIT and exit the game that way or, more often, just turn the machine off at the mains! Say it again? ============= Adventures really get you referring to your Thesaurus. Most problems people face in this type of game is getting the command that they have in their head into a form that the game will understand. Take this example: Imagine that you are confronted by a fat troll in front of an old wooden bridge across a deep chasm. The troll sticks it's grubby hand out and demands a silver coin for you to pass. You are carrying a gold medallion, a rope, a burning torch and a banana skin. What you want to do is dangle the medallion in front of the troll's eyes, throw the torch at the bridge (thus burning it) then swinging across the chasm on the rope. How do you get the computer to understand all of that? You could type SHOW MEDALLION TO TROLL or TELL TROLL ABOUT MEDALLION or SAY TO TROLL "I HAVE A MEDALLION" or GIVE MEDALLION TO TROLL or THROW MEDALLION AT TROLL or WEAR MEDALLION or POLISH MEDALLION or... etc etc etc etc. All of these commands will attract the troll's attention to the medallion but which one do you use?? Try the most obvious (i.e. SHOW MEDIALLION TO TROLL). If that doesn't work then carry on down the list. If you can't get any of it to work then you will just have to assume that to get past the troll you will have to give him a silver coin (gold not good enough,eh?). Many adventures will allow many ways to do the same thing. Keep trying! Here is a list of the most common synonyms (i.e. words that mean the same thing): GET, TAKE EXAMINE, EXAM, X, SEARCH, LOOK AT LOOK, L THROW, CHUCK, BUNG KILL, HIT, KICK, PUNCH TEAR, RIP, SMASH, PULVERIZE JUMP. LEAP SHOUT, SCREAM, YELL PRESS, PUSH, DEPRESS CLOSE, SHUT FIRE, SHOOT WEAR, DON, PUT ON REMOVE, TAKE OFF LOAD, RESTORE, DISKLOAD, DISKSAVE, DS, DL RAMLOAD, RAM LOAD, RAMSAVE, RAM SAVE, RL, RS WAIT, WA, Z But What do I Do in this Adventure? =================================== All adventures have an objective (i.e. what you are supposed to achieve). Some might be: to rescue the damsel in distress from the evil wizard; escape from Count Algebra's dingy castle; uncover a murderer; kill a mad professor;amass a large wod of money; steal everything that isn't nailed down; photograph secret plans in a high security building etc. etc. Most adventures tell you your objective at the start (or in the printed or on-disk instructions). The odd adventure (like Operation Blue Sunrise) allows you to do what you want until a mission of vital importance to whoever crops up. You can accept it (or not) depending on what you feel like at the time. You can tell how well you are doing in an adventure by asking for your SCORE. You will be told how well you are doing either with a percentage (i.e. YOU HAVE COMPLETED 42% OF THIS GAME) or a fraction (i.e. YOU HAVE SCORED 400 OUT OF A MAXIMUM 3800). If typing SCORE does not give you what you want then the game will probably tell you once you are dead, or if you QUIT the game. Don't type SCORE when playing Infocom's Leather Godesses of Phobos in lewd mode!! You can rack up the points by getting nearer to your objective or by doing certain things that the programmer put in that are not directly one of your objectives. You can also lose points by doing dumb things or by swearing (in Snatch 'n' Crunch,in the P.D.,the game will automatically quit if you repeatedly swear at it!) And what about these Mazes? =========================== Many adventures like to throw in a complex maze (or three) for the poor adventurer to get bewildered by.I think that all Infocom games have a maze in them! The worst mazes I have come across are the Oddly Angled Room (in Zork II) and The Dimensions (in Fish!). The trick with mazes is to make a map of them. The best way is to enter the maze with lots of objects which you drop (one at a time) in each new location you enter. That way you can see whether you've been there before. Eventually (if you're lucky) you'll get through the maze. Some mazes do not allow you to drop objects in them or sometimes you don't have enough objects to accurately make a map. What should you do then? All I can suggest is that you carefully look around and see if you can discover the mazes secret - e.g. a certain exit is missing from each location or some other small thing. If you spend too long trying to map the maze then you should really try approaching it differently - i.e. do you really HAVE to go through the maze, after all, it could be a wopping great big red herring! (Some programmers are really sadistic!) Final Word. =========== I hope that you have learned something from reading this document. If you wish to disagree with me over anything I have laborously re- searched and typed then please get in touch with me at the address below. Similarly, if you wish to chat, ask any additional questions, give me advice or whatever, then write write write, right? You needn't enclose any SAE's because I shall reply to any, and all, letters received. Thank you for your attention. Enjoy the game! Colin Campbell 21 Aldbury Mews Edmonton London N9 9JD Tele: (081) 364-3982 (at weekends only,thank you) Legal Footnote. =============== The files comprising Operation Blue Sunrise (viz., SUNRISE.PRG SUNRISE.DAT SUNRISE.NEO SUNRISE.CIP README.DOC BEGINNER.DOC VERSION.DOC REGISTER.DOC HELP.TOS and TERMINAL.TOS) are the sole copyright of Colin Campbell and may not be sold for profit, nor separated or altered in any way or used, or included, with any other software. The author (Colin Campbell) can not be held responsible or liable in any way for any damage (direct or indirect) that may be caused from the use/misuse of this software. This software is released as shareware, and the usual conditions apply: If you wish to play the game after a 30 day trial period then you are required to register... please read the document file called REGISTER.DOC for details. The registration fee isn't that much and seeing as how much you will enjoy playing the game, is it too much to ask of you? I thought not. The characters in this adventure game are completely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons,living or dead, is purely coincidental.