Mindshadow is a relatively new release from
Activision which follows the tried and tested format of the good,
old-fashioned illustrated text Adventure. It comes on a double-sided
disk for the 8-bit Ataris, but I believe it is also available for
the ST. I played the 8-bit version, but I have no doubt that the ST
version is similar.
The concept of the illustrated Adventure should not
be new to long time readers of this column, as I've covered many
illustrated Adventures in the past. The basic format was pioneered
by Sierra On-Line, but has since been refined by the big name
companies like Datasoft, Sirius, Penguin and Broderbund.
Improvements have generally been in the areas of graphics,
vocabulary and the all important parser. The complexity of the
puzzles has never really expanded beyond that of the early games and
has certainly not reached the sophistication of some of Infocom's
best puzzles. This doesn't mean to say that the games are easy. Some
are. Some aren't.
I would personally put Mindshadow in the easy
category. It only took me a day to solve, but don't be disheartened
if it takes you longer. One reviewer said "the puzzles certainly are
tough – I wouldn't have made it through the game without the cheat
sheet Activision provided" (Atari Explorer Winter 1986 page 76). I
can't understand anyone finding it THAT tough. I guess the degree of
difficulty is proportional to your previous Adventuring experience.
The reason I found Mindshadow to be easy was that it
was so well written. It's the sort of game that you can slip into
very easily. You don't have to wrestle with a poor parser or a
limited vocabulary. You feel comfortable within minutes of starting
the game. It does a good job of predicting the type of actions the
user will try to carry out and it provides plenty of clues. Let me
give you a sample transcript from the opening moments of the game.
All text provided by the game is in lower case. The prompt is a
simple colon. User input is in upper case and my comments are in
italics.
You are on a beach with a marvellous and intriguing
view of the ocean. You see a hut to the north. You see a shell. You
are presented with a picture of a tropical beach. In addition to the
items mentioned, you can also see some palm trees.
:EXAMINE BEACH
You see nothing unusual
:EXAMINE HUT
You see a tiny hut in the distance
Hmm. You decide to get closer as soon as you've examined
everything else on the beach.
:EXAMINE SHELL
You see nothing unusual
:GET SHELL THEN EXAMINE IT
A shell taken
It is a colourful shell
The picture is redrawn in a flash, but without the shell.
:LISTEN TO SHELL
You hear Lorne Greene narrating an ocean series
Huh? Is this a hint? Is it even relevant?
:EXAMINE THE OCEAN
Could it be? Yes, a ship is sailing along the horizon
Aha! Already you have an idea of how to escape the island.
:EXAMINE SHIP
The ship is too far away to see clearly
You decide to attract its attention somehow.
:BLOW INTO THE SHELL
You blow till you're blue in the face, but nothing at all happens
Notice how well the program predicts your actions.
:CLIMB TREE
Boy! Those natives make it look easier than it is. How to climb
these palm trees is a mystery
:EXAMINE TREES
There are some monkeys playing in the trees
:LOOK AT MONKEYS
The monkeys seem to be enjoying themselves
:GET MONKEY
The monkeys are far too nimble to be caught
Wait a minute! You get a better idea...
:SWIM
Hey! This is great! Warm water, blue sea, mean sharks...sharks?!?!
It seems that the game has ended.
Would you like to try again? (Y/N)
So much for that idea! Next time, you decide to check out the
hut...
And so it goes on. The parser is not as
sophisticated as (say) Infocom's, but it does allow the inclusion of
definite and indefinite articles and some adjectives and
prepositions. When these are included, they are generally ignored.
Hence LOOK AT THE PALM TREE becomes LOOK TREE. The parser also
understands conjunctions (THEN, AND) and at least one pronoun (IT).
This allows compound commands such as the one used above – GET SHELL
THEN EXAMINE IT.
Other useful commands are GET ALL, DROP ALL, THINK
(more about this under 'Game Playing Strategy') and HELP. HELP is a
bit unusual. If you type HELP (or any of its variations) or press
the HELP key on the XL/XE, then an odd bird called the Condor will
sometimes help you. His help is readily available early in the game,
but he becomes less generous with his help as the game goes on.
Fortunately, you probably won't need his help very often. If you do,
you may find that the advantages are outweighed by the
disadvantages. Firstly, you will have to flip the disk over to get
the help you need. Secondly, you are only allowed three HELPs per
Adventure. And thirdly, the help that Condor gives you is sometimes
so obscure that it's probably of little or no help anyway! Here's an
example:
The Beaked Bird sits high above in his island
mountain lair. Turning my head from side to side (to alternate
eyes), I peruse the coastal real estate. Land values are up. SHIP
SIGHTINGS are way up. Get down to where you woke up, Crusoe; it's a
choice lot, 10% down, lease-to-buy, 30 year balloon payment.
Does that make sense to you? If it does, then you'll
enjoy reading the rest of the hints! Here's an interesting exercise.
When you've finished the game, play it again from the start, but
this time, your aim is to read all the help screens. In doing so,
you will have to work out what conditions cause the help screens to
change. For example, will the help screen change if you are carrying
the shell? (Answer: No.) I found about nine screens of help. See if
you can do better. (Hint: Type QUICKSAVE before HELP, then do a
QUICKLOAD immediately afterwards. In this way, you can see more than
three screens per game.)
Mindshadow allows you to save up to seven different
games numbered 0–6 by using SAVE GAME. These may be restored using
LOAD GAME. This was one thing that really bugged me. Why can't all
software houses use the same commands for carrying out the same
functions in an Adventure? What's wrong with the simple and
established standard – SAVE and RESTORE? Perhaps we should get the
International Standards Organisation onto this...
The QUICKSAVE and QUICKLOAD commands mentioned above
are a quicker way to save a game without having to assign a number
to it. Very useful. Regardless of whether you use SAVE GAME or
QUICKSAVE, the data is stored on side B of the disk. If you are
worried about writing to your master disk (as I am), then you can
probably use a sector copier to make a backup of side B only. I know
I made a copy of mine and I don't remember encountering any
problems. Side A, however, is copy protected, so don't bother trying
to copy it unless you've got one of those fancy disk drive
modifications. Needless to say, you can only make a backup for your
own personal use. Selling or giving away copies is a criminal
offence.
Mindshadow contains one unique feature that I
haven't encountered in an Adventure before, and that's softkeys (or
function keys as Activision calls them). If you press SHIFT and a
number from 1 to 8, then a whole command is printed on screen ready
for you to press RETURN. For example, SHIFT-1 is SAVE A GAME,
SHIFT-3 repeats the last command and SHIFT-7 is QUICKSAVE. I didn't
find these very useful, because by the time you look them up in the
instructions, you could have typed the whole command for yourself.
However, what WOULD be useful in future would be macros. Macros
allow you to define your own softkeys. For example, I could define
CTRL-D for DROP, CTRL-E for EXAMINE, CTRL-S for SAVE and so on,
whereas someone else might prefer CTRL-D for DIG, CTRL-E for ENTER
and CTRL-S for ... well, who knows?
A few
bugs
Despite my generally favourable impressions of
Mindshadow, there are quite a few bugs and/or design flaws which I
feel you should know about. The one that stands out most in my mind
is a rather nasty bug in Luxembourg which actually works to the
player's advantage. If you wear a certain item, the program appears
to set an internal flag. However, if you drop the item, the flag is
not cleared and the program thinks you're still wearing it. When you
enter a certain room later in the game, the item you're wearing
(which, of course, you are no longer wearing) saves you from certain
death! Strange.
Another interesting bug was in the GET ALL and DROP
ALL routines. I found myself getting and dropping items that I'd
never even seen! Try it.
Talking about bugs, the review of Mindshadow in
Antic January 1986 page 42 mentioned a bug whereby the program
crashed if you forgot to flip the disk at one point in the game.
This bug has apparently been eliminated. I tried all sorts of
combinations of having the wrong side of the disk in at the wrong
times and the program merely told me to insert the correct side.
Graphics
At last we come to the graphics – and very nice they
are too! Mindshadow's graphics are fairly typical of the genre. The
bulk of the screen is used for pictures of the various locations in
the game and the remaining four-line text window is used for user
input and the program's responses. The picture can be toggled on and
off by pressing RETURN on an empty input line. Every time you enter
a new location, a new set of picture instructions is loaded from the
disk. Once the new instructions are in memory, the old picture is
erased and the new picture is drawn. This whole process is very
fast.
The quality of the drawings is very good apart from
an occasional glitch in the fill routine. In fact, the pictures have
a sort of cartoon feel to them, especially those with people in the
scene. However, the one thing that really impressed me was the
colours. The selection of colours is fantastic! I particularly liked
the bright greens and blues on the tropical island. This makes it a
real thrill every time you discover a new location – and with over
80 locations, you're in for a lot of thrills.
As though all that's not enough, a few locations
have been spiced up with some animation. The bits I liked were the
birds flying over the second beach and the pirate ship, the shark at
the London docks and the snoring man in the alley.
Game
playing strategy
Now, let's take an abrupt change of direction and
get on to the game itself. The following section includes some game
playing strategies, so don't read any further if you're worried
about making the game easier than the designers intended.
Once you've booted the game, progressed through all
the obligatory title screens and eventually flipped the disk to side
B, you'll find yourself standing on the beach of a tropical island.
You are apparently suffering from amnesia and do not know who you
are, where you are or how you got there. The aim of the game is to
find your identity. In doing so, you will pass through four regions
– the island, a pirate ship, London and Luxembourg.
The first three regions are entirely independent.
Each has its own series of puzzles and all the objects necessary to
solve the puzzles are found within the relevant region. You might
like to think of these as mini-Adventures in their own right. In the
first region, your aim is to escape from the island. This was
probably my favourite because of the colourful graphics, the clever
intertwining of the puzzles and the novelty of a new game. In the
second region, your aim is to get off the ship – not surprising once
you've seen the crew. In the third region, your aim is to get a
plane ticket to take you from London to Luxembourg, although you
don't know why.
You'll note that the aim in all three regions is
essentially the same, i.e. solve all the puzzles to allow you to
progress to the next region. However, there is a further aim common
to all three, but possibly not obvious until later in the game. You
must find an object in each of the three regions that will somehow
help you solve the puzzles in the fourth and final region. Once you
know this, the respective objects will probably be obvious because
of their uselessness in the region that they are found.
Examine everything ... and that includes items in
the pictures that aren't mentioned in the text. I know I say this
all the time, but it's amazing how often people get stuck because
they haven't examined something. Every object has a use, so hang
onto it until its use is found. On the other hand, don't worry too
much about THINK. The instructions overemphasize its importance. You
can only think about people or places and you won't discover any of
these until London and Luxembourg. When a person or place is
mentioned, then by all means think, but otherwise don't worry.
Once you have found all the objects and solved all
the puzzles in any given region, there is no need to return to it.
In fact, you CANNOT return to the island or the pirate ship, so save
a game just before leaving these regions in case you find that
you've forgotten something.
Sooner or later, you will find yourself in
Luxembourg. If you've solved all the earlier problems and brought
along the objects mentioned above, you will be able to solve all the
puzzles in this region and ultimately find your identity.
Hints
Activision offers a hint sheet for US$1.00. I don't
know the best way to send a small amount of money overseas or how
they would respond to your request, but it's certainly worth a try.
Details are in the instructions packaged with the game.
Alternatively, you can always rely on yours truly.
The usual coded hints are at the end of this article. Just look for
the area where you're stuck in the list of questions, then match the
numbers for that question with the words in the accompanying list to
create a hint.
Summary
Well, that about wraps it up for Mindshadow. I found
the game to be very easy, yet satisfying and hence would have no
hesitation in recommending it for beginners. The parser is good, the
vocabulary is good, the puzzles are good and everything's logical.
It's also got pretty good graphics.
Other published reviews haven't been as favourable
towards Mindshadow as I have, so maybe it's not everybody's cup of
tea. You might want to try it before you buy it, but for my money,
it's highly recommended.
Mindshadow hints
The island
1. Can't get off the island?
21 64 61 24 87
2. Missing fuel?
81 69 42 4 17 5 51 32 57
3. Missing a book of matches?
65 43 39 57 36 88 12
4. Missing steel?
81 38 48 58 60
5. Missing a rock?
92 62
6. Can't get down the cliff?
49 76 1
7. Can't light a fire?
85 82 19 84 18 19
8. Can't pay the captain?
93 6 13 14
9. Missing a bottle of rum?
65 66 53 29
10. Can't get past the quicksand?
31 52 4 84 73 10
11. Missing a map?
7 27 13 30 83
12. Haven't found the headhunter?
65 43 39
Pirate ship
13. Can't get off the ship?
37 79
14. Can't cut the chain?
36 8 19
15. Missing a cutlass?
65 43 39
16. Can't get past the crew?
85 72
17. Confused about the surgeon?
23 61 6
London
18. Can't get the debris?
36 78 46
19. Can't get the fishing pole?
59 32
20. Can't board the plane?
11 61 15
21. Don't know the byword?
47 15
22. Haven't got any money?
41 55 72
23. Missing a hat?
41 55 72
24. Getting poisoned at Rick's Cafe?
74 14 32 57 92 32 57
25. Confused about the tiny little man at Rick's
Cafe?
73 6
26. Missing an airline ticket?
59 32 44 40
Luxembourg
27. Don't know what to do here?
59 90 44 55 72
28. Don't know which booth to sit at?
92 28 89 54 32 52 28 50
29. Missing an account number?
26 25
30. Missing a leaflet?
50 22 56
31. Getting killed by dart?
86 88 45
32. Still getting killed by dart?
92 16 3 87
33. Still missing an account number?
36 63 61 7
34. Confused about the man in room 207?
71 34 52 75
35. Jared shoots you?
20 6 81
36. Missing a gun?
80 70
37. Still missing a gun?
80 33
38. Game's over, but you're still confused?
49 91 49 35 49 9 49 68 49 2 71 77 49 67
1 TARZAN
2 JARED
3 ON
4 HUT
5 MADE
6 HIM
7 DIG
8 SHARP
9 TYCOON
10 MAP
11 LISTEN
12 ELSE
13 A
14 DRINK
15 DERELICT
16 LIFEBOAT
17 WAS
18 ABRASIVE
19 ITEM
20 SHOOT
21 LIGHT
22 YOU
23 TALK
24 ATTRACT
25 LEAFLET
26 FIND
27 IN
28 HAT
29 BEACH
30 DARK
31 START |
32 IT
33 BANK
34 NOTE
35 ARCMAN
36 USE
37 LOWER
38 TOURIST
39 ONE
40 CLERK
41 SEARCH
42 PIG'S
43 ISN'T
44 FROM
45 THICK
46 POLE
47 ASK
48 LEFT
49 THINK
50 CHECK
51 OF
52 AT
53 ANOTHER
54 LEAVING
55 FAT
56 ROOM
57 !
58 SOME
59 BUY
60 BEHIND
61 TO
62 CLIFF |
63 SHELL
64 FIRE
65 THERE
66 IS
67 WILLIAM
68 BOB
69 LITTLE
70 POLICEMAN
71 READ
72 MAN
73 FOLLOW
74 DON'T
75 INN
76 LIKE
77 MESSAGE
78 FISHING
79 ANCHOR
80 TRY
81 FIRST
82 RUSTY
83 PLACE
84 AND
85 HIT
86 WEAR
87 SHIP
88 SOMETHING
89 AFTER
90 PICKLE
91 LUXEMBOURG
92 EXAMINE
93 OFFER |
Next
issue
Next issue I'll have a full rundown on The Slave. Is
it as good as the advertisements imply? Tune in next issue to find
out!
In the meantime, I can be contacted at the address
below if you have any comments or suggestions for the column. Note
that this is a different address to that published previously.
Please include a couple of International Reply Coupons if you expect
a reply and please restrict yourself to Adventure chit chat. It's
amazing some of the things I've been asked in the past, but rarely
anything about Adventures! See you next issue.
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