October | 2025 | Renga in Blue
10 posts published by Jason Dyer during October 2025| Renga in Blue
To explain today’s game we need to go back to 1982 and a company from the London area, Rabbit Software, which I’ve written about before. To recap: they were a mail order company that spun off from a computer shop early in 1982, quite quickly filling their catalog with solicited content. They had some drama […]| Renga in Blue
I’ve finished the game; my previous post is needed for context. The creatures here all very standard-issue (troll, dragon, minotaur) and the author even has in the title (“Odysseys” plural) the implication that this is a mash-up of sorts, but at the very least I think we can pin him on thinking of Clash of […]| Renga in Blue
This is the follow-up to Herrick Venture #1: Escape. Unfortunately, I have not found any more historical material since last time, so I generally just have to hope Richard E. Herrick Jr. is alive and tries to Google himself sometime (which has happened before with other authors!) Unlike the first game, this only has a […]| Renga in Blue
Bedrooms all over the country were becoming overwhelmed by battered boxes of early computer equipment, bought under the dubious auspices of “helping with our homework” before being turned over full-time to the more pressing task of completing 3D Monster Maze before morning registration. — Bob Fischer Upon the release of the ZX80 and ZX81 computers, […]| Renga in Blue
I’ve finished the game, and as I suspected, I was running into a single small issue (a problem with the parser, really). My previous posts are needed to make sense of this one. Last time I had the issue of needing to replace two cables. I could replace one of them (with a wire scavenged […]| Renga in Blue
(Continued from my previous posts.) I’m likely extremely close to the end, but given I still need to tackle the “strategic” layer (and check the alternate difficulty levels) I’ll have enough content for a long final post next time even if I’m only a turn away from victory. My big break — taking me almost […]| Renga in Blue
(Continued from my previous post. The official WordPress reader has a bug with Soundcloud embeds, so if the last post seemed strangely short you might want to check it before moving on.) Be prepared, this is going to be a long one. Rather than laying out the territory first and then tackling puzzles, I’m going […]| Renga in Blue
A bicycle can get you from New York to LA, so will a jet plane. In one sense they are the exact same thing; in another they are nothing alike. In one sense we are working within traditional genres — mystery, fantasy, science fiction — and in another we are still teaching ourselves, laying out […]| Renga in Blue
Engine Failure is a type-in that first appeared in Personal Computer World (April 1983) and then in the spin-off Personal Computer Games, the same as Adventure in 1K. Personal Computer World was ve…| Renga in Blue
Today’s post you could think of as a “bonus game”. It appears in the April 1983 edition of Personal Computer World, followed by the first issue of Personal Computer Games that summer (same publisher) and is directly next to the game I was going to be writing about next. To explain in context, when the […]| Renga in Blue
(Continued from my previous post.) The thing I’ve found most fascinating studying the various incarnations of Adventure is the almost philosophical difference in approaches to where the expan…| Renga in Blue
This post assumes some familiarity with the original Adventure; if you haven’t yet seen, my series on the Software Toolworks version (the only one that paid the authors Crowther and Woods) is…| Renga in Blue
Back when we were first exploring early British games in 1981 we came across Trevor Toms who made a “Create Your Own” adventure system and wrote a game to go with it, City of Alzan. Bot…| Renga in Blue
(Continued from my previous post.) I have only made a little progress, but I thought I’d at least give an update. I went through my verb list and found only a very small list… READ, OPE…| Renga in Blue
3 posts published by Jason Dyer during September 2025| Renga in Blue
Scarthorpe is the sort of town where even the dogs carry flick knives, where there’s only one road in, and it’s a one way street!!! This is the second adventure game by Pete Cooke, afte…| Renga in Blue
(Continued from my previous posts.) While I’ve made a fair amount of progress I’ve also hit two points that make me wonder if the game is too buggy to complete. Updates to the map are s…| Renga in Blue
(Continued from my previous posts.) I have the One Ring to rule them all, that means the rest of this ought to be easy, right? My count otherwise is unchanged: 4 out of 9 Man-Rings, 0 out of 3 Elf-…| Renga in Blue
(Continued from my last post.) The grey-rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise. — Re…| Renga in Blue
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor w…| Renga in Blue
Today, we move back in time to 1975: personal computers were only starting to become real; the Altair wasn’t out until the very end of the year. This means if you wanted to play a coin-op gam…| Renga in Blue
(Continued from my previous post.) Last time I left off having trouble with getting both the ring (for the girlfriend) and a diving suit (apparently needed due to the kidnapping). The solution is o…| Renga in Blue
Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project| Renga in Blue
10 posts published by Jason Dyer during February 2025| Renga in Blue
Bonus surprise post! Yes, I arise from my slumber for at least a little while. This is the sequel to Japan’s first graphical adventure game, using the same first-person-with-directions view a…| Renga in Blue
Posts about the-sands-of-egypt written by Jason Dyer| Renga in Blue
Here we embark on the final part of the trilogy from the ZX81 Adventure Tape 1 as published by Phipps Associates and written by Mike Farley (see previously: Greedy Gulch, Pharaoh’s Tomb). The…| Renga in Blue
Shockingly, this game’s name does not clash with one I’ve already played yet; we had Pharaoh’s Curse and King Tut’s Tomb but never put the two together. CASA has one other g…| Renga in Blue
In 1988, a contest was run by the Adventureland BBS out of Lexington, Kentucky called The Great American Adventure Search. ADVENTURELAND, the largest public domain Adventure base in America, is loo…| Renga in Blue
Apologies for the radio silence — I had some major work things to get to pushing up to the end of the year, and my brain just hasn’t gotten back in gear yet. The Project will continue n…| Renga in Blue
