Game Review: Questprobe – Spiderman (Commodore 16, Americana)

Even though I’m an arcade game lover at heart, I’ve always had a soft spot for text adventures. I blame all of this on Scott Adams, specifically Adventureland which got me hooked on the genre as it was the first game I ever bought for my Vic 20. So combining my love of text adventures and superheroes (especially Spiderman) made the Questprobe series a must-buy. When they were first released, I’d already moved on to the Commodore 64, but how well did this instalment in the series for the Commodore 16 fare?

Enter Spiderman

Even though he had an extensive track record when it came to developing text adventures from the start of the 1980s, no-one had seen anything quite like the Questprobe series. Scott Adams developed plans for a total of 12 inter-connected adventures, each centred around a different Marvel comicbook character and the mysterious Chief Examiner. With comics produced to go with each, Marvel writers and artists involved, it had the potential to be one of the most groundbreaking series of games released.

Unfortunately, Adventure International faced financial difficulties and the series came to a halt after the third game in the series was released so we never saw the conclusion of the series. Instead, we had to settle for The Incredible Hulk, this second part featuring Spiderman, and wrapping up with The Thing and The Human Torch.

The Plot

While each game in the series is a completely independent story in its own right, as before in The Incredible Hulk you have to prove that you’re worthy of your superhero status to the mysterious Chief Examiner. To do this you have to collect a number of gems scattered around the game environment. In this case it’s an unassuming office block (which you later discover is the Daily Bugle building). As you collect the gems you have to take them to an unspecified room (through trial and error you discover to be where Madame Web is located) and drop them and once you’ve collected and deposited them all you complete the game.

Playing The Game

Playing Spiderman is simplicity itself. You control our web-slinging hero by typing commands in trying to navigate your way around the Daily Bugle and solving puzzles, while encountering various characters from the Marvel universe along the way. Most commands use one or two words and are fairly easy to figure out. The instruction inlay helps out there with a list of the more common ones that are available for use along with the single letter abbreviations you can use for some of them to speed up play.

One thing you can do to speed up play is that many of the words don’t need to be typed out in full and can be abbreviated to the first four letters as the parser has been designed to work on these in most cases (presumably to save memory). For example, when you want to get the chemicals you find in one of the locations GET CHEM will work just as well as GET CHEMICALS.

As well as the expected commands you’d find in most adventures, there are a number that are more specific to our wall-crawling hero. I won’t say anything else here but I’ll leave you to discover these for yourself when you play it.

Defying Logic And Other Problems

If you’re like me and have been playing text adventures for a while, you’ll most puzzles just need a little logical thinking to figure them out and aren’t impossible to solve. The first Questprobe game, The Incredible Hulk, didn’t really follow that general rule though as many of the puzzles made little or no sense at all. And unfortunately the same can can be said for Spiderman and on more than a few occasions you’ll be left scratching your head trying to figure out just what you’re supposed to do. And without any in-game help beyond being told to buy a hint book it doesn’t make things any easier.

That would be bad enough, but there’s one puzzle in particular that needs to be solved that turns out to be a real game-breaker. As we saw in The Hulk, as well as the gems you need to collect, there are also mysterious enegy eggs that explode on contact or when you try to take the gems that are in their immediate vicinity. In the case of Spiderman, one of the rooms near your start position contains a gem and one of these eggs. As soon as you have left the room, the egg explodes destroying the gem and it doesn’t respawn meaning that you can’t complete the game. Frustratingly there is no indication that anything has happened and the only indication that anything has happened is that upon returning to the room you find that it is empty.

At this point you need to start the game again from the beginning and make sure that you don’t go in there again. The only way you can get that egg is to use your webbing and get it from the outside… but you don’t have any web fluid to start with. It’s an incredibly unfair puzzle to hit the player with, especially if you don’t realise until you have been playing for some time that the egg doesn’t return to its original position.

Not So A-maze-ing Spiderman

I’ve taked about some of the puzzles being frustrating, but none of these compare to one of the locations you enter when you move out of the upper section of the Daily Bugle and inteo a series of air vents that permeate the building. There is a puzzle you need to solve before you can access them, but once you get into these ducts, it sadly reveals of of the biggest issues I have with not only games from Scott Adams, but it a problem I have with adventures in general.

You are presented with a list of directions available to you in which you can move, but no matter where you go you end up getting lost in this seemingly never ending labyrinth of ducts. Going down an endless number of moves resulted in me going nowhere, and the same for going in other directions. Yet, a couple of moves later and I was suddenly back at my starting position – somehow several floors up from where I thought I had gone. There was no logic at all to the map and it just seems to wrap continually.

Playability

If you can get past the lack of logic with the puzzles and the aforementioned issue with the exploding egg (so I’d strongly recommend making a map so you can avoid going anywhere near that room once you know where it is), there is an enjoyable adventure lurking inside. Taking characters that are more suited to action games isn’t an easy task, but it works reasonably well and you’ll encounter plenty of familiar faces along the way.

Granted, the fact that there are no other characters that you’ll encounter in the Daily Bugle building beyond Spiderman’s arch enemies and Madame Web doesn’t seem to make sense, but if you can forgive that (as well as some of the other things you’ll encounter) there’s a fun and challenging game ahead of you and I found myself playing every version of this for quite some time and returning to them all over and over again.

A Cut Down Experience

As you can imagine, some compromises have had to be made to fit the game into 16k. As with the 8-bit Atari version, there are no graphics and once again the location descriptions have been trimmed slightly from other other 8-bit versions as well. The Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum versions weren’t the most verbose when it came to telling you what you could see, relying on the visuals to help convey your surroundings but cutting those down further really makes it hard to visualise the game world.

Again, as I mentioned with the Atari port, there have also been some compromises made with the parser with some commands being removed completely, such as the GET ALL command. I do understand why this has been done, but it’s frustrating nevertheless. Understandably, no dedicated Plus4 version was released (although a fan port of the C64 does exist).

Graphics and Sound

There isn’t really a great deal to say when it comes to this side of things for Spiderman. As a text adventure, it plays in total silence and as I mentioned earlier there are no graphics in this version either. One thing I was impressed with however was the choice of colours for the text as it makes good use of the C16’s palette to display locations, exits, your commands, prompts and responses all in different colours making everything easy to follow.

Overall

I had fond memories of Questprobe Spiderman playing it on the Commodore 64, but sadly this is one game that has aged badly. If you’re not a fan of the superhero genre, and Spiderman in particular, you’ll struggle to get anywhere as you’ll really need to know the characters to get to grips with some of the more obscure puzzles. While it does keep it true to the comics, that’s also one of it’s biggest flaws in appealing to a more general audience.

The real weakness with the Commodore 16 version was the cut-down location descriptions and this really had an impact on the atmosphere of the game. The whole point of location descriptions in text adventures is to paint a picture of what you can see so you can build an image in your mind of where you are. When this is abbreviated to something like “I’m in a hall” or “I’m in a small office” not only does it makes it harder to be drawn into the game, but also makes mapping a necessity.

Add to that the inherent difficulty of the puzzles and it makes it a game you’ll struggle to get in to. Sadly, this is one adventure that is in desperate need for visuals or improved descriptions to lift it above average. Stick to the graphic versions instead.

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