Announcing Eamon #255: Tenement of the Damned

I'm very happy to announce that Eamon #255 "Tenement of the Damned" has been completed and an initial copy can be downloaded here. [Edit: In preparation for the official .DSK being posted, the download link is removed.] Frank Black was able to recover the entirety of the French program and I, in turn, translated it into English using the 6.2 Dungeon Designer Diskette. ("Maudit" is Version 6 and I felt that the English version ought to approximate the French experience as much as possible.) Finally, a menu was put in giving players the option of playing the game in either French or in English. 

Now, "Tenement of the Damned," an adventure oriented towards looting a crumbling public housing block, is not exactly Sam Ruby-caliber. (Indeed, that Frank Black salvaged the MAIN PGM was a bit of an anticlimax as there is no special programming to speak of.) The most it musters by way of puzzles is a pair of secret rooms, a hidden artifact, and some hunting for keys. The goal is simply to find friends and lay waste the the rest of the tenement... there isn't even an introduction at the beginning of the adventure.

On the other hand, it's certainly not "Sam"-caliber either. While it is effectively the French analogue of the "Beginner's Cave" and its premise and execution are similarly simple, the descriptions tend to be rich and witty and the map, though relatively small, invites exploration. The characters and artifacts you'll encounter are all colorful and wacky. The general mood, tending towards the absurd, is most similar to the charm of the great, old Jim Jacobson adventures such as "Cave of the Mind." There are bouts of self-reference, fourth-wall-breaking, and Monty Python-esque humor, making for a consistently enjoyable adventure.

An official .DSK of the dual English/French version ought to be posted soon. I plan on writing a more lengthy review in the next issue of the Eamon Deluxe Newsletter. Who would have thought that brushing up on one's French (or English, as the case may be) could be so much fun? 

Glimpse into "Bird's Paradise," a Lost Eamon...

The internet-trawling I've done in search of lost Eamons this past year has been rather fruitful, with quite a few disk images recovered. Sadly, sometimes "lost" really means "lost." But I find that in focusing on the recovery of disk images, it's easy to miss the important feature of Eamon: the stories that are told. Truth be told, I think being told about the content of a lost adventure is just as good as finding it.

Paul Balyoz has been kind enough to share his recollections of such an Eamon, an adventure he wrote titled "Bird's Paradise," and has graciously allowed me to share it here:

As I recall, playing Bird's Paradise went sort of like this: You started in your apartment up high in an apartment building, and in one room there was a bird cage with a bird, like a Parrot. He was... [a] "friend", so he would follow you around throughout the game and not attack you (unless you attacked him first). Exploring your house you realize there is an open window, so you go out the window and onto the ledge. Walking along the ledge you can go in the open window of the apartment next to you, and there's a different bird in there - I think it was a Toucan. The Toucan is your friend too, and follows you around. Now you have two friends.

At the end of the level you confronted the enemy - an Evil Bird King and four ravens, I think, who immediately start attacking! It's a giant epic melee, you and your four friends attacking the evil birds alongside you... [S]ince you have friends who are attacking the enemy, the enemies would not just focus on you - everyone gets one "swing" per turn, and so you'd be swung-at about 1/5th of the time (because you have 4 other pals). The odds were in your favor, but you could still die, just due to random occurrence of being attacked more than normal; or being too novice of a character. 

Paul was also generous enough to provide a related anecdote which will be humorous to any veteran Eamonaut:

I was all proud of my Eamon adventure and played it a few times before unleashing it on the world. A day or two later I invited a friend over to play it. He had a pretty advanced character that I felt would probably survive the end-battle that I didn't tell him about. He had fun playing it - then, when he got to the epic battle he did something I never thought of - the room happened to be a four-way intersection, so he typed "flee" and fled to another room! He did that over and over again, until only one enemy was in the room with him - then he'd attack that monster until it was dead, go back and do it again! "Hey," I said, "that's cheating!" Later I realized, no, it's just an advanced strategy when playing Eamon adventures. 

Paul's blog can be found at paulio10.wordpress.com and is filled with interesting reflections on myriad topics. In particular, the original post that led me to contact him is a charming and sincere meditation on memory and is well worth a read.

Imagery! for the Commodore 64

The first segment on Dr. Evil Laboratories' Imagery! has been posted on Kent Sullivan's Dr. Evil Labs blog.  (Readers of the blog will recall mention of Imagery! as the commercial Eamon cousin/port/upgrade for the Commodore 64.) The blog is very worth reading- it is simultaneously engrossing, thorough, well-sourced, and sentimental- even if one doesn't know a Commodore 64 from a Coleco Adam. The blog thus far reads like a script to a gripping-yet-intellectual buddy film and I can't recommend it enough. 

If the sheer reading pleasure of the blog doesn't provide enough impetus to check it out, perhaps the fact Kent has provided disk images for Imagery! on the blog will provide additional motivation. For the first time in over twenty years, Imagery! and its sole adventure Beneath Mount Imagery are available and ready to be played. Inasmuch as Imagery! is hands-down the best port of Eamon around (pace Jon Walker), the reader really ought to grab a copy, even if it means having to fiddle with C64 emulators. (I recommend CCS64, myself. It's a relatively painless experience.)

I plan to report more thoroughly on Imagery! in the next issue of the Eamon Deluxe Newsletter but don't let that stop you from checking out the Imagery! post today and drawing your own conclusions. 

HyperCard Eamon, In Pictures

I find the minimalism of Eamon appealing. I enjoy getting the essentials from the written word and manufacturing the rest in my mind. But a sizable population would disagree; graphics and sound are all the rage... why shouldn't Eamon catch up?

I'm going to let you in on a secret: Eamon did catch up about twenty years ago. In 1991, Whit Crowley brought the Main Hall and Beginners Cave to HyperCard on the Apple IIgs, providing adventurers a point-and-click graphical interface.

To acquaint the reader with this vision of Eamon, I've taken some screenshots of HyperCard Eamon in action. We'll start with the approach to the Main Hall, resting idyllically on the horizon.

The above is the screen meeting the adventurer on loading HyperCard Eamon (absent are any dragons!). Clicking on the Main Hall itself brings the player to the gates. Gates guarded by fierce warriors...

... or, better yet, extras from Beau Geste. The player reads the instruction "Click on the Door to Enter" and, presumably, ought to meet up with the Burly Irishman upon so doing. So what's behind the gates?

Well, I can't tell you yet. Either as a function of poor emulation or a buggy HyperCard stack, I'm not able to get beyond the doors. But we can venture over to the Beginners Cave to get a sense of how HyperCard Eamon plays.

And we're stopped by the Knight Marshall, whom I'd never pictured in a cowboy hat and bolo tie. He's kind enough to let us pass- this time- so let's venture forth.

Here is the entrance to the Beginners Cave. Navigation is handled graphically, with tiles corresponding to directions surrounding the image of the tunnel. Hitting "Command" yields a menu listing the familiar commands. Venturing further, unfortunately, we run into trouble in the form of some monsters.

We encounter three rats in full color, primed to attack! Now, here is the source of the trouble: since I'm running the Beginners Cave stack independently, there are no values for the player's stats supplied by the Main stack. So meeting monsters compels the program to ask for values not defined, consequently crashing the program.

Our tour thus ends prematurely. Should the reader insist on trying to get past those gates for himself or herself, HyperCard Eamon can be downloaded at www.apple-iigs.info (the site is in French) by searching for "HyperCard IIgs Eamon Stack." Emulating a IIgs... well, you're on your own on that one.

I'm adding the following warning: If you do try and run this on an emulator (or on a proper IIgs) and run the Beginners Cave without first passing through the primary Eamon stack, the above described crash will destroy the disk image. 

Two New PC Eamon Adventures Discovered

Now, it seems that everyone aware of Jon Walker's PC conversion of Eamon has given it a bit of grief, myself included. John Nelson called it "cumbersome," a "nightmare," and "too difficult to maintain" in the NEUC Newsletter and neither Frank nor I were all that much kinder ourselves. But griping aside, I'm confident that Walker's contribution was significant in bringing Eamon to the PC folks.

I'm happy to announce that two more original adventures for Walker's PC Eamon have been discovered intact, "Cronum's Castle" by Matt Ashcraft & Richard Tonsing and "Lord of the Underland" by Justin Langseth. They were the first and second place winners, respectively, in a 1987 "Write an Adventure

Module" contest held by PC-SIG, the company that took the reins for distribution of Walker's Eamon.

I can't attest to their content nor quality at this point (who- honestly- is able to get Walker's Eamon up and running without hassle?)  but they're prize-winning adventures so they've got to be good. This brings the Walker PC Eamon library to:

1. The Main Hall/ Beginner's Cave by Donald Brown (ported by Jon Walker)
2. The Ice Cave by Jon Walker
3. Assault on the Clone Master  by Donald Brown (ported by Jon Walker)
4. Quest for Trezore by Jim Jacobson (ported by Jon Walker)
5. Cronum's Castle by Matt Ashcraft and Richard Tonsing
6. Lord of the Underland by Justin Langseth

Of course, I'll try to get playable copies posted soon.

I'll also put in a word for Jason Scott's textfiles.com, where these two Eamons were lurking. The site is a wonderful service, archiving a great many files and programs that would otherwise have been lost to digital purgatory.

 As an update, I'm posting the links to the files themselves. They can be found at the below links.

• Cronum's Castle  

• cd.textfiles.com/pcsig08/701_800/DISK0720/

• Lord of the Underland 

 cd.textfiles.com/pcsig08/701_800/DISK0721/

As a second update, Cronum and Underland are now part of the PC Eamon Museum and can be played by going to www.eamonag.org/pages/pc_eamon_museum.htm.

Glimpse into "The Palace of Mirrors," a Lost Eamon

In trying to find disk images for the French version of Eamon (detailed in the last post to the blog), I ran across this alluring line from the site mensanator.com:

For the record, I was the author of DUNGEON #222 THE PALACE OF MIRRORS written for THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF EAMON in the early 80's. Although donated to the local Apple ][ user group, it never made it into the Eamon archives that exist today and is probably lost. Luckily, my Turbo Pascal port source code is still extant, so there is a remote possibility that it may be resurrected.

Now, while it may not be as compelling a task as, say, recovering the lost works of Empedocles, I've made it a bit of a mission in the past year to recover lost Eamons. Irrespective of the quality of writing or programming, each Eamon is a little fragment of its author's psyche, encoded in ones and zeroes. I have a difficult time thinking such things ought to be allowed to "go gentle into that good night."

So what's to do? Email the Mensanator, of course.

Unfortunately, the Mensanator was unable to locate the files. But he was kind enough to share the following glimpse into the work:

I always tried to put a unique twist in each of my games. In The Palace of Mirrors, the twist is how would a barbarian interpret the modern world (the Palace of Mirrors is simply a glass skyscraper with mirrored windows). Can he figure out how to use an elevator or a pay-phone? Can you imagine what would happen if he invokes the POWER command when standing next to a 3-prong outlet? Will he recognize that the "box of scrolls" is simply toilet paper, and thus worthless whereas he should take the piles of greenbacks?

This very novel approach certainly had the potential to have been a great Eamon and makes its loss all the more unfortunate.

The Mensanator also described a couple of Eamon-related adventures written specifically for PASCAL, The Land of the Midnight Sun and The Haunted Castle:

In the former, the adventurer starts aboard a ship frozen in ice in the arctic. In that game, I added a COLD function that would accumulate points each turn based on the weather (it was much colder climbing the glacier than walking through the forest. The adventurer had to accumulate burnable objects like twigs and pine cones to keep warm, otherwise, he would freeze to death. Assuming he found the flint and tinder before leaving the ship, he [this didn't come through in the email]... Your quest was to find a magic firestone to free the ship from the ice. If you found it, you could magically burn any object such as weapons or treasure (which you might have to do when lost in a field of snow while snowblind).

I also wanted to develop projectile weapons skills, so not only did I place a crossbow in the ship for him to find, but a novel way to use it. He encounters a monster in a cage. If you swipe at it with a sword or club, the blow simply bounces off the cage bars. The monster also has a crossbow and you quickly learn that a crossbow can shoot between the bars (of course, the BLAST spell would work in a pinch).

In The Haunted Castle, the adventurer is knocked unconscious and wakes up with his gold, armor, and weapons taken from him. His quest is to wander the castle and find them (and any treasure he finds along the way). Instead of COLD, there is an apparition that appears and casts a BLAST spell. If the adventurer makes it to the basement of the castle, he will find a head on a stake that will provide immunity.

Perhaps one of these will turn up eventually. The internet is a huge and tangled place, after all, in which nothing really disappears. Until then, at least we have some record of these lost adventures.

The reader is invited to check out www.mensanator.com as well. (There is a bit of salty language to be found, if you worry about such things.)