Video Game Tester Application‎

What exactly does “cracked” mean in this context?

I always look for “100% machine code” when purchasing new games. (Source: TheRetroCavern.com)

And that is where this game enters the picture. In 1984, Melbourne House released their “Merry Christmas” game through a magazine promotion. I have been unable to find an original ad for the game, but various sources describe that it was distributed inexpensively as a marketing opportunity, both to get players interested in their games as well as to advertise a few of their products in-game. The lead programmer was Grahame Willis who had previously worked on “The Castle of Terror”. This is the final game of his that I have been able to find.

Santa’s Christmas Journal 1984: Ho Ho Oh No! Some of my elves are in revolt and I am running behind on packing my sleigh. If I don’t get my jolly butt moving, there may be no Christmas this year!

Have you noticed that in any Christmas movie where they show the North Pole, it is daytime? Shouldn’t it be always night in the Arctic Circle in the winter?

As the game opens, I am standing outside the famous “Santa’s Workshop”-- my workshop-- at the North Pole. The workshop itself is quite small, but magic is always about suspension of disbelief. I notice a sign and a sad-looking snowman out front and the frozen Arctic tundra surrounding us in all directions. I can even see myself, Santa Claus, walking around outside in a bit of light animation-- although the on-screen Santa appears to be decorative only and cannot be controlled as in later adventure games. The sign, in addition to saying “Santa’s Workshop” also has another helpful message: “digging in the snow in lots of fun and very rewarding”. I’ll take that as a hint! I check out the snowman as well and discover why he is sad: he is missing his nose. One puzzle and one hint right off the bat, not a bad start!




You are in a maze of twisty little snow-drifts, all alike.

Back outside my workshop, I try to help the snowman first. I use “help snowman” and “use nose”, but neither of those commands are well understood. Fortunately, this game has a “vocab” command that gives you a list of understood verbs. In this case, “give” and “put” seem to be my best options. Just telling it to “give nose” does not do any good, but then I remember that this isn’t “Colossal Cave” or “Mystery House” so I type out “give nose to snowman”. That works! Obviously, the parser understands real sentences and I bet that anyone that had played Melbourne House games before would have known that. Either way, the snowman is happy to have his nose back-- but only happy for a moment because it falls off again and I am told that it is lost forever. What a downer. Is there a way to fix this later? Do I need to find glue? What would affix a carrot onto a snowman better? I have no idea, but I will keep my eyes peeled for a better solution.

•  To the north, a window from which I can see reindeer pulling a sleigh circling the workshop, apparently waiting for me. I can open the window and when I climb out, I end up back in the snow maze.
• To the east, another sleigh but this one without reindeer and only half-full. There’s also a Santa suit and boots.
• The the south, I find piles of completed toys, letters from children, and a star-emblazoned book. The book is particularly special as it is a catalog of excellent games by Melbourne House! I bet some of these would make awesome gifts.

Do you think any of these are “Missed Classics”?

I also read some of the children’s letters-- they are addressed to me, after all. The first one is from a little girl that would like a dollhouse, as well as her brother who wants a cricket bat. I wonder if they would prefer a copy of “The Hobbit” instead? I read another and that kid wants both a cricket bat and ball. Obviously, this is a UK game because I cannot imagine many American kids longing to play cricket, but to each their own. The modern player in me is a bit concerned about the sexist stereotyping of the toys that the children are looking for, but this was 1984 after all. I try to pick up the “toys”, but the game tells me that I am being greedy. I get the hint: instead of asking for generic toys, I ask for the items from the letters directly: a cricket bat, cricket ball, and a dollhouse. That works and and they have joined my inventory! I read a few more letters, but they seem to be repeating those two so I move on.

I also seem to have picked up another object: an “ordo felves”. I have no idea what this is or whether it came with the letters or when I helped the snowman. It does not have a description, so I am not sure what it is. I initially thought that it might have something to do with cricket (Google suggests not), but perhaps I will figure it out. I doubt it is coincidence that it spells out “ord of elves”, but what it does I have no idea. Do elves generally come in ords? Is that like a flock of elves?

Complete this line: “My other sleigh is a …”

I head back to the sleigh to try to solve what puzzles might be there. It does not let me enter the sleigh, or do much of anything with it at all, but I can pick up my coat. (The boots? No, they seem to be nailed to the floor or something.) I search the pockets and discover a whistle! I blow it and it does not seem to do anything here, but it is obviously important.

On a hunch, I head out to the front of the workshop again-- through the window, of course-- and blow the whistle in the front yard. The reindeer which had been circling land! I get in the sleigh and tell the reindeer to go “up” and just like that, the game ends. I win!

After a brief victory screen, the game informs me that I scored 75 out of 100. Not bad, but there are obviously things that I missed. Has anyone discovered any items or puzzles that I passed up? I’m especially curious about the “ordo felves” and whether there is a puzzle related to it that I might have missed.

Time played: 30 min
Total time: 30 min

Ho! Ho! Ho! Tell your parents to buy our games!

I have a feeling that someone reading this will find the love of cricket as this game’s best quality

This elf is not on strike.

I have to admit that I am disappointed, but it’s entirely Melbourne House’s fault. The inset documentation talks about an elvish “industrial action”, leading me to expect a game where I would solve a pay dispute or get the elves working again. There are some excellent plot ideas there, none of which the game seems to be aware of because this “industrial action” plot is entirely absent from the published game. The game also cannot decide if you are Santa or if you are helping Santa-- somewhat understandable given the fourth-wall breaking, but yet quite distracting. The combination of these two elements makes me suspect that the game is incomplete, or at least did not live up to its expectations.

The gameworld is also a bit “broken”, is the best way I can put it. For example, when you enter Santa’s Workshop there is no way to leave by the door. None. I tried every command I could think of, but the only way I could leave was through the window. The one nice touch to the gameworld was that since you are at the North Pole, you should be able to get back to the Workshop by going north-- even though it only worked in one part of the maze, it was clever and I like clever.

Given both the missing premise and the broken gameworld, I have to go with a “0” in this category. Sorry!

Noises and Pretty Pixels

This elf is thankfully not on a shelf.

 Here’s a challenge: how many times can you listen to “Jingle Bells” before you turn off the sound? That’s pretty much how I felt, and I could only listen to sounds when my wife was out of the room! There are no sound effects that I noticed for anything else in the game.

Graphically, the game is mixed. The art is not terrible, but the colors inside seem washed out and the art is very busy. The few touches of animation are nice, but by 1984 that sort of thing should have been expected.

In total, I think this is a “1”.

Overworld and Environs

So much undeveloped real estate!

When you think of the North Pole and Santa’s Workshop, so many awesome things come to mind. Maybe you are imagining a factory setting where row after row of elves are diligently making toys, perhaps while singing Christmas songs. Perhaps instead you are imagining Santa’s reindeer and their stables, with little reindeer practicing flying in the background. Maybe even you are thinking of Ms. Claus who is always worried that Santa will get cookie crumbs on his newly pressed winter suit. No matter which of those you imagined, this game is a bit disappointing.

What we get instead is a tiny environment: outside, a wintry maze, and four rooms inside. There are no places for the elves or Santa to live, no stables for the reindeer, and nothing else that helps to make this world feel real. The game feels like Christmas, that is certain, but the environment is not particularly special.

Let’s give this a “1” as well.

Gregariousness and Thespianism

The game text was well done throughout with meaningful descriptions on items and there are a few nice little touches, like the hints when you are in the maze, as well as the game chiding you to hurry up and find your way out because “Christmas is coming”. There is still a bit of ambiguity whether you are playing as Santa or not, but I covered that elsewhere. I’m going to give this category a “2”.

Total

Let’s sum it up and see what we get!

1+2+0+1+1+2=7/60 = 12

This is a very low score, but that is perhaps to be expected. “Merry Christmas from Melbourne House” is less a full game and more a Christmas vignette, and one that feels slightly unfinished at that. It was still fun for the 30 minutes it took to beat it, but ultimately not quite a forgotten gem. Still, you have to give them credit for making what is essentially a marketing piece somewhat playable and to that end it did it’s job perfectly: I think I’d like to play another Melbourne House game, eventually. (Most likely, “The Hobbit”.)

I sincerely thought about giving this game the “Still Better than Emmanuelle” award for +2 points, but perhaps that is a bit much. On the bright side, it is better than “Psycho”! Besides, the short duration of this game gave me extra time to play a real holiday classic:

He’s like a ninja turtle, except he never orders pepperoni on his pizza.

• A Spell of Christmas Ice (1984)
• The Elf’s Christmas Adventure (1987)
• Crisis at Christmas (1987)
• Humbug (1990) - A text adventure game by Graham Cluley, later better known as an network security blogger
• Santa Clause (1991)
• Paranoia (1993) - A “choose your own adventure”-style text adventure game, based on a 1987 gamebook.
• The Twelve Days of Christmas (1994)
• The Ice Princess (1995)
• Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina (1999)

Ah, Haunted House.  This was actually the first text adventure game I ever played, and as far as I recall the only one that would work on my bare-bones, entry-level 4K TRS-80 Model I with Level I BASIC.  It was programmed by Device Oriented Games and published by Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack in 1979.  I wrote about Haunted House in passing several years ago, before I started my regular adventure game series, so Im going to cover it properly now.




Because memory was so incredibly tight, Haunted House features minimal descriptive text and a very limited parser dictionary, and even then it had to be loaded in two phases, with the second half of the game running largely independently of the first.  Im running a later "fused" version of the original cassette version created by TRS-80 hobbyist "Lord Apollyon" in 1999, using the TRS32 emulator with 16K of memory.  This early microcomputer game design has no windowed display, just simple scrolling text like the mainframe teletype interfaces that spawned the earliest adventure games.


Interested readers are always encouraged to play these games for themselves before reading my comments below -- but be warned that, while Haunted House is necessarily short, it can be aggravatingly obtuse.  The simple engine provides no list of available exits or any feedback as to whether weve actually gone somewhere or just stayed where we are, which makes mapping a bit of a challenge.  So, dear reader, you have my usual urging to play the game, but also my full encouragement to save yourself some frustration and jump straight into the...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****



The game starts without much in the way of orientation -- the title announces itself as "HAUNTED HOUSE!!" (the tight memory budget allowing for two exclamation points, it seems) and we are then informed that were standing outside the house, with a closed front door and a crumpled piece of paper on the ground.  The parser is limited to just a few verbs -- TAKE PAPER fails, but GET PAPER works.  READ PAPER yields, "MAGIC WORD - PLUGH" -- an homage to the earlier Colossal Cave mainframe text adventure created by Crowther and Woods.

Because memory is tight, room exits are not described, but its not too hard to discover that movement in any direction at this point only brings us back to the same location in front of the house.  We have nothing in inventory other than the crumpled paper, so SAY PLUGH is the only available option, and so doing, we now materialize inside the house, at the foyer.

We can go south to the empty den, then east to the kitchen, where we find a bucket of water on the floor.  We cant EXAMINE anything in this limited game, but we can GET BUCKET.  We can POUR WATER anywhere we like, but the bucket magically refills after wetting the ground.

South of the kitchen is the breakfast room, where AN ANIMATED SUIT OF ARMOUR THROWS YOU OUT! and were back in the kitchen.  North is the dining room, from whence we can travel west to the living room, where we see that A KNIFE IS LEVITATING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GROUND, with a mysterious scroll lying on the ground.

Avoiding the knife for the moment and returning to the foyer, we find we can travel west to the east end of the hall, and further west to the west end of the hall, where A LOCKED DOOR BARS THE WAY SOUTH.

North of the west end is the Blue Bedroom, where this sparsely-detailed game mentions that THERES A PANEL ON THE EAST WALL.  This appears to complement the panel on the west wall of the Green Bedroom, north of the east end of the hall.  We PUSH PANEL and we find ourselves in a secret passage, with a rope nearby.

Now what?  We can try to DROP ROPE in the Living Room, but SUDDENLY THE KNIFE WHOOSHES DOWN AND SLITS YOUR THROAT!  YOU ARE DEAD.  So while this game may be introductory in size, its by no means player-friendly.  (This bit of graphic violence raised no public objections at the time, the obscure world of microcomputer games being far removed from the mainstream in 1979.)  When we die, the game just freezes and has to be reloaded from scratch (or, more conveniently, from a save state using a modern emulator.)

Trying again, I take a chance (based on faded memories of playing this game more than three decades earlier) and find that, yes, we can just GET KNIFE before it attacks.  Now we can READ SCROLL to learn that "THERE IS ESCAPE FROM THE SECOND FLOOR!"  So well need to find a way upstairs.

Returning to the breakfast room to see if we can deal with the suit of armour, we are pleased to discover that A SUIT OF ARMOUR HERE FLEES WHEN IT SPOTS YOUR KNIFE.  Now we can reach the SERVANTS [sic] QUARTERS, where THERE IS A CABINET ON ONE WALL.  But OPEN CABINET notes that its empty, and we cant move it or enter it or even close it.

I seem to be stuck now... trying PLUGH again yields only SORRY, ONLY ONE PLUGH PER CUSTOMER.  And now an old, confusing bit of Haunted House lore resurfaces in my memory -- this is a deceptive part of the map, because the Servants Quarters actually occupies two rooms, one north and one south, and theres no way to distinguish the two onscreen.  OPEN CABINET in the south end opens an empty cabinet, but at the north end, its a different cabinet that contains a key.  (This isnt impossible to discover, as thorough mapping demonstrates that we cant go W from the north end of the room back to the breakfast room -- but I got seriously stuck here as a novice adventure gamer and had to call Tandy to get a hint way back when!)

Now we can go back to the west end of the hall and OPEN DOOR using the key, gaining access to the Master Bedroom, where A WALL OF RAGING FIRE BLOCKS THE WAY EAST.  POUR WATER does nothing, nor does THROW WATER or DOUSE FIRE or EXTINGUISH FIRE as none of these verbs are recognized.  What we have to do is attempt to go E through the wall of fire, and respond to the cagey "ARE YOU JUST GOING TO WALK RIGHT THROUGH THAT RAGING FIRE?" prompt with a simple YES.

Now were in the Library, where a hole in the ceiling allows us to DROP ROPE -- INSTANTLY THE ROPE UNWINDS AND LEVITATES TO THE HOLE IN THE CEILING!  We CLIMB ROPE, and were in Part 2 of the game, having conveniently dropped everything to get up the rope so that the game doesnt have to carry over any state variables from Part 1.




Were now in a dimly lit room with a magic sword, which we can readily GET.  South is another dimly lit room, with a ghost.  KILL GHOST actually works, as YOUR MAGIC SWORD ENABLES YOU TO KILL THE GHOST!  -- though the aftermath is a bit hard to visualize, as we note that THE BODY OF A DEAD GHOST IS ON THE FLOOR.  We can do the same in the rooms west and east of the starting point on this floor.  Going further west from the western one, we find another ghost -- and this time, THE GHOST IS IMMUNE TO YOUR ATTACK!

The immune ghost doesnt seem to bear us any ill will, but at the same time will not let us pass.  READ SWORD indicates AN INSCRIPTION READS, "GHOST KILLER" -- apparently a slightly hyperbolic claim.  And even if the immune ghost is not actually a ghost, we discover to no great surprise that YOU CANT KILL A GHOST WITH YOUR BARE HANDS.  PLUGH and even XYZZY are of no help.

I didnt remember this part of the game at all, and while there isnt actually very much to do on the second floor compared to the first, solving this puzzle is a bit of a meta-game in the face of the games wall of silence concerning movement.  I had to do some experimenting to notice that in the rooms where we can kill the ghost, the ghost WILL NOT LET YOU PASS in any other direction -- but in the room with the immune ghost, we can travel in any direction, we just cant KILL GHOST.  And apparently some of the ghosts beyond this room are illusory, as trying to KILL GHOST yields THERES NOT ONE HERE once were past all the real ghosts, even though the room description still indicates the presence of one.

So... we need to kill the ghost immediately to the west of the entry point to the upstairs, then drop the sword, and then do some exploration and optimistic mapping, with a bit of luck perhaps, given that there arent any objects we can carry and drop to distinguish the identically-described rooms.  We finally discover that we can go north, then west, then south from the immune ghosts location to arrive at yet another dimly lit room, with no ghost and a rusty sign on the ground.

The sign reads, "THERE ARE THREE EXITS FROM THIS ROOM. ONLY ONE IS TRUE. YOU MUST KNOW, BUT NOT BE BURDENED BY, THIS CLUE!"   This is a none-too-subtle hint that if we try to leave with the sign in hand, YOU FALL THROUGH A TRAP DOOR TO YOUR DEATH!  Dropping the sign instead and going in any direction out of this room leads to victory!



I once called Haunted House the worst adventure game ever, and having played through it again for the first time in a long while, I have to say that I still think its a pretty poor design.  The challenges are linear and rely largely on trial and error, and the engines limitations are too often used to hide valuable information from the player -- for example, not being able to "see" that there are actually two cabinets at opposite ends of a large room is an artificial constraint that doesnt feel like an honest puzzle. 

Still, cramming a complete adventure game of any kind into 4096 bytes (okay, 8192 with the dual-load design) of Z-80 code was a technical achievement in its day.  And my re-visit to Radio Shacks Haunted House was quite entertaining for me personally, if only as a bit of nostalgia.  Call it Prousts take on Sisyphus, if you will, and I hope to be back with something more recommendable next time around.