King’s Quest 1 (AGI)

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Pix

Now I finally have my house back again, I’m seriously overdue a little retro gaming to make up for the enforced 7 month hiatus. This should mean a load more posts in the near future. Above all else, I wanted to have a go on that relatively recently acquired Tandy 1000 EX.

Since posting about that previously, I managed to find a memory expansion for it bringing the RAM up to the giddy heights of 640K. It also adds a DMA controller making it slightly more PC compatible and in theory speeding up load times off floppy. The Tandy has an interesting expansion system where a slot opens up in top of the machine and expansions have to be slotted in on top of each other. This means you have to unscrew the blank plates from all 3 before you can put a card in the bottom. Lining up the slots proved quite tricky since I had absolutely no way of telling where they are in relation to each other. This system is entirely unique to a couple of specific models in the Tandy line making these cards difficult to locate even if the demand isn’t exactly sky high.

Having got that working (and even though I don’t strictly need the extra memory to play it), the first game had to be Sierra’s King’s Quest.

Sierra pioneered the graphical adventure game starting out with Mystery House on the Apple II all the way back in 1980 and continuing to release ever more ambitious titles throughout the early 80’s. When IBM wanted some software to show off the gaming capabilities of their forthcoming PC-Jr, Sierra were certainly one of the obvious choices to create it and the result of that deal was King’s Quest.

IBM’s attempt to enter the home PC market with the PC-Jr would prove to be a dismal failure, largely due to the price point and the famously horrific keyboard. King’s Quest on the other hand would become a staple of PC gaming, managing nearly as many games it’s in main canon as Ultima. Despite the nature of that IBM contract, Sierra were wise enough not to put all their eggs in one basket. They created a whole new engine (AGI) which ran the game on a virtual machine and allowed for easy porting to other platforms. The PC-Jr format would still see much success ultimately in the form of Tandy’s clone which fixed most things IBM had got wrong the first time around.

My copy of King’s Quest isn’t the original release which was a PC-Booter but it is the one I bought back in the late 80’s as a trilogy pack with the first 3 entries in the series. This later version used a more advanced AGI engine (requiring twice the memory), had quite different box art and most importantly for me at the time I played it came on both disk formats and not just 5.25’s.

The box isn’t exactly stuffed full of goodies but does have quite a nice manual with an embossed King’s Quest logo and the story that sets up the game. All the King’s Quest games are based on fairy tales and the manual is very much written in this vein. In brief, King Edward (the ruler of Daventry), manages to give away the Kingdom’s greatest treasures which are a shield that makes his armies invincible, a chest with everlasting treasure, and a mirror that tells him the future. This is clearly why we shouldn’t have a hereditary system of rulership. It’s about what you should expect when you name someone after a potato I suppose. In the game, I’ll be playing Sir Graham, bravest of King Edward’s knights, who has to sort this mess out.

The game starts with a rendition of Greensleeves (apparently not in the original booter version) and then I take over control of Sir Graham. This is a traditional text adventure game in one sense with a prompt at the bottom to type commands. The big innovation was being able to walk Graham around the world with the cursor keys. This added a minuscule amount of arcade gaming to the experience avoiding all the monsters roaming around the countryside. We hadn’t got as far as pointing and clicking yet, but this was the dawn of that style of adventure gaming.

Job #1 in this game is to go and see King Edward who despite the apparent poverty he has put Daventry into, still lives in a castle so large it won’t fit on one screen of the game. He’s kept safe from marauding peasants seeking social justice by a crocodile infested moat which probably explains the sparsely populated nature of his Kingdom.

Graphically, the game looked impressive back in 1984 despite only being in an unusual 160×200 resolution when the Tandy was capable of the full 320×200. I didn’t realize it when I first played these games but the backgrounds are entirely made up of filled polygons and on the booter version, you can actually see these being drawn to the screen. This saved on disk space and kept loading times to a minimum.

Speaking of which, I played this off the original 5.25 disks and the loading times really aren’t too bad considering the hardware. They would have seemed positively speedy at the time with 2-3 seconds to load each new room. What I didn’t like was having to swap disks to save my game.Many of the screens have random monsters that mean instant death if they catch you. They aren’t capable of chasing between screens at least so you soon learn to stay near the edges of screens in this game and save often.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. Before I can explore the countryside, I have to go and get my quest from King Edward. I have to retrieve the 3 missing treasures and in return will get to be King.

Gameplay in King’s Quest is extremely non-linear and these treasures can be obtained in any order. There are usually several solutions to every puzzle with some solutions worth more points than others (non-violent solutions usually being the more valuable).The main world consists of roughly 20-30 screens in a grid that rolls back around to the opposite side at the edges, and there are further sub locations, inside houses, below ground, etc most of which are on the second of the two floppy disks.

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Apart from the 3 main treasures, various other valuable items are scattered about which can be gathered for points. These tend to be hidden in tree stumps or logs and the like. I don’t think I’ve ever managed full points in this game so there must be one somewhere I’ve never found.

The first main treasure I stumble into is the magic mirror, which is through a cave at the bottom of a well. It’s guarded by a dragon who I disable by throwing a bucket of water in its mouth.

The world map is large enough that I never really did learn my way around. I do notice that some of the screens in the game appear to be a whole lot better drawn than others as I roam around Daventry. E.g. the bush on the right of the screen above looks like something I might come up with, were I to try to draw the outline of the UK with a ball mouse that hadn’t been cleaned out for 10 years. It’s a completely nondescript room with nothing whatsoever to do on it but you’d think they could have tried a little harder

The most infamous puzzle in Kings Quest involves guessing the name of a dwarf who lives on a little island near the castle. You get three goes and the only clue is a note in an unrelated part of the map which says “Sometimes it is wise to think backwards”. I only solved this one when I got the Official Book of King’s Quest which didn’t give the answer but did have a crossword puzzle that gave me enough of a clue. I won’t give away the answer but suffice to say, not many people would have guessed it and the puzzle isn’t exactly fair.

The game can be completed without solving this to be fair and the only reward other than some points is an excruciating climb up a beanstalk with little guidance on exactly where is safe to tread. It took much disk swapping and reloading before I made it up to the clouds. Once there I’m set upon by a giant but thanks to the games limited pathfinding capabilities, it’s possible to position myself behind a tree and avoid him. Eventually, he gets fed up, falls asleep and I pinch the chest he was holding which is the 2nd missing treasure.

Curiously on the Tandy, there is a snoring sound effect when the giant falls asleep. It’s not exactly impressive by modern standards but the noise channel on the Tandy is definitely ahead of what I’d have got from the PC speaker in this game. The use of music and sound is very limited though with little more than a death theme and a couple of seconds of warning music when a monster shows up.

The final treasure is under the ground. Reaching this place requires finding a passing eagle who only occasionally appears on one of the games screens, and then using the games “jump” key (which is entirely useless otherwise) at just the right time and location to catch onto the eagles claws. I knew what to do through bitter experience the first time around but how I guessed it as a kid, I have no idea. I expect trial, error and a whole lot of free time.

At any rate, this eagle flies me to a little island, I drop through a hole in the ground and thanks to a fiddle I took from the only two people left in Daventry I’m able to make all the leprechauns that live down here dance away and retrieve the final missing treasure.

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All that is left to do is head back to the castle (which took me at least 10 minutes to locate again). King Edward grants me the throne before keeling over dead. Showing all due respect to the ex-monarch, Graham heads straight for the throne to claim his prize while Edward’s body still lies on the ground. There is one final rendition of Greensleeves and some brief credits.

I was reminded a lot of Zork playing this again all these years later in some ways. King’s Quest is a very traditional treasure search as was so common in early interactive fiction. It doesn’t have the puzzles or complexity of Zork of course.

I usually ask myself if a game has held up when I finish it but I’m unconvinced that King’s Quest was all that much of a game in the first place. It’s extremely brief and without any particularly memorable puzzles or plot. Comparing it to contemporary offerings from Infocom such as Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, it’s ridiculously simplistic. Compared to most other publishers of the time, it holds up far better I suppose with the added attraction of the graphics.

Sierra’s more forward thinking approach would ultimately be proved correct a couple of years later as the traditional IF market died off and the graphical adventure game started to come into its own. In the meanwhile, King’s Quest wasn’t without its charms but Sierra would do far better with this engine in later efforts. The King’s Quest series is no doubt aimed at a young audience and as an introduction to adventure games this serves quite well with the open structure limiting dead ends and multiple solutions offering more chances to get past each puzzle. I’m still not sure it’s a title I could honestly recommend to a new player with so many better adventure games available. It did get a remake a few years later and then a fan remake some years after that, both of which I may well look at eventually.

That will have to wait as in the next post, I’ll be almost getting back on topic and looking at a curious entry in Warren Spector’s early career.

The Tandy 1000 EX

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Pix

It’s hard to believe it’s been two months since the last post but time has been scarce and it’s been hard to do much in the way of retro-gaming while my house has been getting fixed up after the Xmas floods. 6 months later, repairs are still ongoing but I expect to be back in residence within a couple of weeks. It’s been a long time coming but the place will at least be considerably improved at the end of this. On the downside, I’ll have to redecorate the next floor up to get it up the same standards but that can wait for a while.

So to get back vaguely on topic, I haven’t entirely stopped collecting and something I’ve fancied getting hold of for ages is a Sinclair PC200. For the majority who no doubt haven’t heard of this, it was an 8088 PC released at the end of the 80’s by Sinclair (after purchase by Amstrad). It was a CGA PC in the form factor of an Amiga/ST with the keyboard and PC built into one unit and a TV out on the back so you didn’t need a monitor. I was one of the very few who owned this at the time, mainly because of brand loyalty having owned the Spectrum before. The Amiga or ST would have been a far better choice for any gamer as the PC200 was a pretty terrible machine for its day. As a result, hardly any were sold and it was the last computer to carry the Sinclair brand. These factors have combined to make it something of a collector’s item these days. After my latest attempt to get one at a reasonable price failed by some margin (it ended up selling for £200+), it occurred to me that if I were to get an old PC, it would be far more fun to have a Tandy 1000 with its enhanced sound and graphics, not to mention a whole lot cheaper. So after some shopping around I got this:-

It’s a Tandy 1000 EX, first sold in December 1986. It was a more affordable all in one version of the original Tandy 1000 which in turn was a clone of IBM’s ill-fated PC-Jr. This particular version has a miniscule 256K of RAM, CGA/Tandy graphics support, an 8088 7.12Mhz processor, a 5.25 360K drive built into the side and a whole lot of dirt on all the exterior surfaces.

I never let a bit of grime put me off buying anything if it is solid enough underneath and this certainly needed some cleaning. It brushed up well after a little effort and as luck would have it was already in great shape internally.

The PC-Jr/Tandy 1000 had a couple of things going for it over a regular IBM PC. The first of these was a sound chip capable of 3 channel music + a separate noise channel. This wasn’t the most sophisticated of sound devices when compared to the SID on the C64 but it was a massive improvement on PC beeper. All of Sierra’s games were famous for supporting this throughout the 80’s and it was the best available for a DOS gamer prior to sounds cards coming into play with Kings Quest 4 in 1988.

The other thing it had going for it was support for Tandy’s proprietary 16 colour graphics mode. This was actually a clone of the 16 colour graphics mode introduced by the IBM PC-Jr but with that being such a dismal failure commercially, Tandy dropped all mention of it from the start. The Tandy does include a composite out which should let me see these graphics on a TV but I imported this from the US. This means the output is in the American NTSC format which leads to black and white for me trying to run it on a UK PAL TV. I’m sure Tandy 1000’s were around in the UK but only in small numbers so importing was definitely the cheaper option, especially when I already have a voltage converter for the IIGS.

So I had to come up with a solution to get colour graphics. CGA PC’s used a 9 pin monitor connector (identical to many joysticks of the time) which sends a simple digital RGB signal to build the picture. The colours are built using 3 on/off RGB lines to create the first 8 colours and a fourth pin controls the intensity of these colours giving lighter/darker shades to make the full 16 colours.

One of the advantages of being in the UK is the SCART connection we have on all our old TV’s comes with RGB support built-in so it is in theory possible to build a little circuit board to convert one to the other. My early attempts at this are pictured above.

I got some way with this but my limited soldering skill and lack of proper equipment was making the job go extremely slowly. This solution would also have got one of the colours wrong since the CGA monitors of the time converted light yellow to brown in their hardware which wouldn’t have been supported. The parts cost a couple of pounds so it’s no great loss and I’m sure I could have succeeded eventually but when the opportunity arose to get an actual CGA monitor instead, I decided to treat myself.

Coming at a considerably higher price than the computer itself, this is an IBM 5153 CGA monitor which is a little beat up on the outside but the picture is still as crisp as ever and gives my modern LED screen a run for it’s money.

The computer came with a single floppy disk with “The Tandy FUN-damentals”. This is a simple introduction to the PC with some 3 channel music and a load of instructions on how to use DOS and what the various bits of the computers do. This sort of thing harks back to the days when learning how to use a computer was educational in its own right. Just like back then, I’m only really wanting to play some games on this thing which is where the next problem comes in. I have plenty of old games on 5.25 disks but precious few of them are bootable which means I need MS-DOS on a 5.25″ floppy disk.

I debated for a while about how to do this. My first thought was that I could use my Kryoflux but it doesn’t actually support writing PC disk images for some unfathomable reason so I came up with a plan B. My Windows 98/DOS gaming machine has a floppy emulator connected to it (shown on the right above) which I got some time back from http://lotharek.pl/ . This connects to my modern PC with a USB cable and to my old PC via a regular floppy disk drive cable that I’ve routed out of the back of the machine. The upshot of all this is that I can load up a disk image into some software on my new PC which will then be readable as though it’s a real floppy on the DOS PC.

I found images of the original Tandy boot disks at http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/system.html, loaded them up into the floppy emulator and copied them to a real disk through DOS. I had to connect up an old 360K 5.25 drive on the top of the PC since the floppy cable was already routed out of the back. Finding standard density 5.25 inch disks was tricky but I had some hidden in amongst some of my old Sierra games.

This worked a treat and allowed me to boot up DOS and subsequently Ultima 1, and the original PC-Jr game Kings Quest 1 both of which do run amazingly slowly on a machine this old but look great in 16 colour mode. I’m seriously looking forward to playing a few games on this thing now it’s finally up and running.

Plenty of Origin games supported Tandy graphics but sound support was limited to a handful of games around the late 80s. The one that may benefit the most could be Tangled Tales since it has no sound card support. The snag is that just about all these games require more memory than 256k so I can’t actually run them.

The 1000 EX used a proprietary memory expansion which slotted into its unique expansion port at the back of the machine. Now I start to look for one, these aren’t exactly all that common or cheap. In fact, I expect it will ultimately be cheaper to buy a later model of Tandy with more memory built-in.

The moral of all this if there is one is to do a bit more research before you buy and don’t get into old computers unless you can throw a bit of time and money at them. I’m definitely going to have a bit of fun with this machine at any rate, even if it doesn’t run quite everything that I’d like it to. The first port of call has to be King’s Quest so expect a playthrough to follow shortly. Before that I really should have a look at the System Shock remake demo.

Lemmings – The Official Companion

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Pix

To go along with my recent playthrough of Lemmings, I’ve broken out the book scanner for the first time in some months and had a quick look at the Official Lemmings Companion.

This was published by Prima back in 1993 quite some time after the game was first released. It’s one of the largest books I’ve scanned in clocking in around 350 pages but doesn’t offer a whole lot more than solutions to all the levels. The main point of interest for me was the disk tucked into the back cover with 16 bonus levels. The disk was missing from my copy but included with my copy of Lemmings as a bonus disk. This despite the use of the phrases “exclusive game disk” and “not available anywhere else” in big letters on the guide’s cover.

There are 4 new levels for each difficulty and it has to be said that they aren’t of the highest quality. You can expect to play through this lot in about 30 minutes if you’ve made it through the main game.

The early levels are painfully simple. E.g.. the one above in which you merely have to dig down then mine across.

They do get harder but nothing like as much as the original game. Perhaps the most memorable involved making it safely across the Prima logo but it was more for the novelty than it being a well designed puzzle. The final level requires making your way across the letters of congrats. It’s just a case of sending a lemming ahead to dig and build with masses of room for error. The book solution mentions there being a hidden exit above the entrance but it’s easy enough to do it properly.

The levels do include additional graphics from Oh No More Lemmings with some curious new traps but I’m sure they were made better use of in the official expansion. The reward for beating them all is a bit of text advertising a game you would already have bought. The overall impression is that these levels were dashed off as quickly as possible to provide an extra for the book.

As such, I won’t recommend bothering playing it but I’ll put the disk image in the downloads section shortly if anyone wants it. It didn’t appear to require the original game to play. The book itself is already scanned and can be downloaded from here

Lemmings

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Pix

After beating Contraption Zack in an afternoon, I was still in the mood for another puzzle game and decided to revisit Lemmings for the first time since its original release in 1991. I just about remember buying a shared copy at the time for which I kept the 3 1/2 inch disks. The box and 5 1/4 floppies went to the other guy who paid the lions share of the asking price. Not sure if that counts as piracy or not but it was an obvious downside for publishers of games published on dual format back at the time when the only copy protection was on the disks themselves.

Back in 1991, I beat the game in 5 or 6 days presumably doing little else for that week. I can’t invest that sort of time these days hence the long gap between posts.

I’ve bought a full copy at some point since the 90’s so there is no question of piracy this time around. The box is certainly nice and colourful as you would expect from Psygnosis.

This particular copy is a slightly later release than the one I first bought coming with an extra bonus disk of levels that was also included with the official guide book (more on than in the next post). Lemmings is actually available for free these days in the Microsoft store in an updated version. I briefly tried this and it appeared to be fundamentally broken as I was unable to change the status of any Lemmings that I’d already given a task to. As such I certainly can’t recommend it but I presume it must work better on tablets or some other PC setup.

Lemmings was originally created by DMA design who would go on to become Rockstar and create the Grand Theft Auto series. The idea for Lemmings famously came whilst working on the game Walker which was an Amiga side scroller in which you would drive a giant Mech around blowing things up. The mech in question was supposed to be huge and in order to give it this sense of scale tiny people sprites were needed. It was questioned whether this would be possible in 8×8 pixels but programmer/artist Mike Dailly managed it in short order even managing to give some character to his miniscule sprites. This concept later morphed into a game in its own right, spawning one of the most ported and successful franchises in gaming.

Rather than sticking to one version of Lemmings, I’ve been swapping around between systems as I’ve played this. Instead of saving progress, a series of level codes are used meaning that it’s possible to swap around at will picking up where you left off. I must confess I’d prefer being able to save and not having to type lengthy codes in each time I returned to the game but it does have it’s advantages. I started out with the original platform of the Amiga.

The Amiga version has a nice little intro with Lemmings climbing around on the games title. This is entirely missing on the DOS version as is the two player mode which would utilise the Amiga’s ability to use two mice at once.

There are 4 difficulty levels in the game each of which has 30 levels. To beat Lemmings, you technically only need to beat the 30 “mayhem” levels but I decided to work my way through the lot starting at fun. These early levels gradually introduce each type of Lemming of which there are 8.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with Lemmings gameplay by now but just in case the concept is that all your Lemmings will fall out of a trapdoor and start mindlessly walking forwards. The goal is to get a target number of them safely into the exit inside the time limit and to do this you can individually transform any given lemming into either a climber, floater, bomber, blocker, builder, basher, miner or digger. You only have set amounts of each skill although these early levels are usually very generous on this front.

That’s the entire game in a nutshell. It’s an extremely simple concept and alters little throughout all 120 levels. There are techniques to be learned and mastered however. For instance a builder lemming will build a short staircase but stop building and turn around if he hits a wall while laying down tiles. You can use this to turn around a lemming by digging a small pit and then turning him into a builder to hit the wall of this pit. Provided the pit is shallow enough he’ll turn around, climb back out, and have changed direction. Figuring this particular technique out when it was first needed halfway through the game was where I was stuck the longest.

It’s possible to pause the game and look around the map to plan ahead but there is still a degree of arcade action mixed in with the puzzle solving elements. You are required to be quite quick with the mouse at times and pixel perfect in some later levels. I wouldn’t say it gets too frustrating but there are times where you rely on dumb luck and have to keep replaying levels when things don’t work out. This is mainly when dozens of Lemmings get tightly packed together and selecting one pointing in the right direction to bash through a wall or build a staircase is a 50/50 shot. Often it’s possible to plan around this in advance but not always.

Around halfway through those 120 levels, the novelty was starting to wear a little in all honesty. The early levels don’t always provide enough challenge and each level can start to look much like the last. There were some variations such as having multiple entry points or mountains that can only be dug through in one direction. The level on the left was curious having a hidden exit that had to be found by digging all over the map.

Once I got into the 3rd tier of difficulty (Taxing), the game started to get my attention again and become a lot more fun. The options here tend to be a lot more limited and it’s about figuring out the solution that’s possible with the supplied lemming types. Most levels involve finding a way to send a solitary lemming or two ahead of the pack to prepare the way but the solution is rarely immediately apparent. I also enjoyed the occasional level with just one or two Lemmings which needed to be guided around one their own.

Hidden among all the regular levels are 4 that are based on other Psygnosis games (Shadow of the Beast 1 + 2, Menace and Awesome). These use the graphic style of each of those games + the music but aren’t the most interesting levels in terms of gameplay. It’s pretty clear the art came first on those four but they did impress me back in ’91. The free advertising was a lost cause for us PC gamers since none of those games ever made it onto our platform.

I ended up playing the majority of the game in DOS as it’s more convenient at the moment. Pretty much all of the electric sockets in my house still don’t work since the boxing day floods and moving an extension just to plug the Amiga in is more grief than it’s strictly worth.

Having said that, the Amiga version is clearly superior in just about every way. The audio is vastly superior to the adlib only PC soundtrack. The game is also faster and supports more lemmings. The PC version has a maximum of 80 whereas the Amiga levels tend to have 100 of them running around. Most oddly of all, the gameplay is slightly different. E.g. the bashers on the Amiga will decide to stop bashing their way through the scenery at much smaller gaps than on the PC. This can make life difficult at times given that all these levels were designed for the Amiga and copied straight across.

The one place the DOS version wins out is that the function keys are mapped out to select the options at the bottom of the screen. This proves highly useful and is a lot quicker than having to use left/right arrows to scroll around on the Amiga.

I found that DOSBox didn’t especially like running Lemmings and after an attempt at a level would often throw me back to the title screen which would then immediately lock up unless I went in and out of full screen. As such I swapped over to my Pentium 2 after a while. It has to be said the game looks better on a CRT due to the dithered artwork so it’s a better way to play the game but I still prefer the Amiga.

It took me about 3 weeks but I eventually made it through all 120 levels. The last few levels were tough in just about every aspect but I’d say the difficulty was exceptionally well judged throughout and I would never call it unfair. What I would call unfair is the reward for all my efforts which was nothing but a paragraph of text. This brings back memory of numerous earlier ZX Spectrum games and I’d expect a bit more in the 16-bit era.

I swapped over to the Amiga and replayed that last level to see if Amiga owners fared any better. There is a little screenshot with some unconvincingly enthusiastic cheers and applause from the developers. It’s an improvement at least.

Lemmings certainly holds up better than most games from 1991 and I ended up enjoying it more than I expected after a slightly dull middle section. It wasn’t as difficult as I’d remembered but still holds a mammoth amount of game for a single floppy disk. It could do with some more variety along the way for me. It’s the same skills types, same music and similar graphics near enough the whole way through. While I wouldn’t say it ever got boring, I do like to know there is something new coming to give me incentive to progress.

The music is a mixed bag with some of it sounding awful on the adlib. I don’t ever want to hear that out of tune version of “She’ll be coming round the mountain” again if I can help it. I’d have liked to see SoundBlaster support really with some samples for the lemmings.

The level design is where Lemmings shines and for the most part this does a great job of gradually increasing the difficulty and offering original challenges. Looking at this 20 years later, there were a few copycat games at the time (e.g. Humans) but Lemmings is almost it’s own sub-genre. As such it’s certainly a classic but I can’t help but think that Lemmings 2 fixed most of my complaints and is the better game. It’s been so long since I played it, I’d need to give it another go to be sure though. Lemmings’ first incarnation is still worth playing in any of its versions and I’ll definitely be having a go at the first expansion “Oh No! More Lemmings” some time down the line.

Contraption Zack

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Pix

Contraption Zack is an isometric puzzle game published by Mindscape in 1992. I can’t say it’s a game I know much about but I saw it for sale fairly cheap and remembered playing a demo version many years back which was enough to reason to pick it up and several months later I thought it was time to play it.

The version I have was published by Slash who typically repackaged games more cheaply after they were slightly past their prime. I gather they are often avoided by collectors for this reason. The box exterior is nice enough at any rate although the materials are a little cheap.

The contents are where the real money has been saved with the manual looking like a cheap handmade photocopy. The entire game fits onto a single floppy with an equally cheap label.

As for the game itself, there is a nice cartoon intro on starting up. It’s Zack’s first day on the job working as an engineer in a plant of some description for Gadget Corp. His new colleagues take an instant dislike to him and decide to “borrow” all his tools only to not return them when duty calls. The graphic style is goofy but colourful. I particularly liked the panicked boss with the waving arms for some reason. Probably because he reminded me of a particular ex boss of my own. At any rate, he sends Zack off to fix a piece of machinery in the plant.That’s where the player comes in. You have to guide Zack around 6 levels retrieving his tools and fixing the parts of the factory at the end of each level.

The mechanics of gameplay are straightforward and introduced gradually starting with this room where each coloured switch will open or close the same colour of spikes. The trick is simply to head right instead of left here. If you go the wrong way, you will get stuck and have to start the level again. The designers had no qualms about dead ends so expect to do plenty of restarts when playing this. They do show an element of sympathy with a couple of save points per level.

The next room is a more complex timing puzzle. The grey gates open slowly one at a time trapping Zack behind them for a time if he goes in. All the coloured buttons only stay down for a short while when pressed meaning the key is not to step on the back buttons until the gate is about to reopen so there is time to get over the spikes before they spring back up again. Once more, it is easy to get trapped between spikes and have to restart.

Soon after this I get the chance to reclaim all my lost tools. Each tool can be used at specific points throughout the level to affect gates or machines. In this case, I need a screwdriver to turn the screw on the screen in the top right and reverse the direction of the conveyor belt and allow me to pass.

That clears my route through to the feeder. I step on the floor switch to get it working and that’s the first level.done. I’ve missed a good few rooms out here but the 6 levels in this game really aren’t very big. They do involve a lot of back and forth to make up for it.

Level 2 is much the same except with a couple of rooms more, lots more dead ends and a whole heap of extra switches to complicate matters.

And each level after that progresses in much the same way. The difficulty ramps up but the gameplay elements are all introduced early on. I’ll give particular mention to the room above on level 5 which was especially evil. The basic goal is to get to the wire on the red wall and back out to the bottom left. Each button at the edge of the grid will lower most of the spikes on that row one at a time with just enough of a gap to walk across before they raise again. It will also start the same sequence off on another row so it is possible to swap between the two if you are quick. Miss the gap and you are stuck and have to restart the room.

Completing the room involves going through everything in the right order, setting two buttons off at once at a couple of points, along with having all the coloured switches in the right position at the right times. It took numerous efforts to complete but the save point at the start of the room stops it becoming too frustrating.

Level 6 proves to be a bit simpler than the previous one if anything. There are plenty of switches but once I realise that most of them do the same thing, I’ve soon fixed the last machine and the plant springs into life.

After all these efforts, the plant erupts out of the ground creating a giant metallic skyscraper. Despite the size of this thing all it does is print and stamp letters.

Those letters turn out to be the end credits before a final epilogue in which Zack gets his revenge.

Contraption Zack proved to be a short, simple game that I finished in one sitting. It certainly wasn’t anything brilliant but I enjoyed it enough. The bright graphics offer plenty of character and the puzzle gameplay hasn’t dated at all. What has dated is the amount of replaying required which you wouldn’t normally see in a game these days. I wouldn’t say it was a game breaker though given the size of the levels. Provided you like logic puzzles, Contraption Zack offers a pleasant if unspectacular way to spend an afternoon. The MT32 soundtrack wasn’t the best so I’d be tempted to try the Amiga version if I was to play it again in hopes that it was an improvement.

Pix's Origin Adventures

Category Archives: Off Topic

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Contraption Zack

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