Game Review: Questprobe – Spiderman (ZX Spectrum, Americana)

Back in the 1980s, gaming was always seen as being hobby for nerds – and it generally went without saying that if someone was a gamer, the chances are that they were likely to be a fan of science fiction, fantasy, comics and anything that fell into anything that we’d now think of as part of popular geek culture. So it’s no surprise that Scott Adams looked towards the superhero genre for his most ambitious series of text adventures when creating the Questprobe series. What was planned to be a 12-part saga centred around Marvel comicbook characters, including this second chapter focusing on Spiderman…

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderman

It’s easy to understand why the Questprobe series of adventures was one of the most ambitious projects planned in the early 80s by any publisher. Working closely with Marvel Comics, the idea was to create a series of 12 inter-connected games with an overarching storyline, each with an accompanying comicbook. Only three games and comics made it to retail before Adventure International hit financial troubles and closed down, leaving the series unfinished.

Questprobe Part 2 saw Spiderman take the role as the central character, and was the second to be re-released on the Americana label following on from The Incredible Hulk, although the third featuring The Thing and The Human Torch failed to get a budget re-release.

The Plot

As with the first game in the series, 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 the Daily Bugle building (although you don’t discover that you’re there until later on). As you collect the gems you have to take them to Madame Web (although you’re never actually told this in the game, nor is it mentioned in the manual) 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 although the interpreter has been updated for this to accept more complex instructions.

One nice touch – and an improvement on earlier Scott Adams games, is the ability to enter multiple commands in a single line. For example if you saw several items in a room but only wanted to get two of them, you could type GET A, GET C using a comma to separate each instruction. 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 a text adventure veteran you’ll know that while most puzzles need a little logical thought to solve them, they’re not impossible to figure out. That wasn’t really the case for the previous title in the Questprobe series, The Hulk, where many of the puzzles made little or no sense at all. Sadly, the same can can be said for Spiderman and you’ll often be left scratching your head trying to figure out just what you’re supposed to do without the need for some assistance. And without any in-game help 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 leave, the egg explodes destroying the gem and it doesn’t respawn meaning that you can’t complete the game.

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 and air ducts (so I’d say making a map is essential), 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.

Graphics and Sound

The game plays in total silence, but this is generally expected from a text adventure and to be honest there are very few in the genre that do have sound effects or music in them. The graphics follow the same style as The Hulk and for the most part they do seem to be better defined than the previous game in the series, although there are a few that do seem to be somewhat basic. They do appeal to be converted over from the Commodore 64, but as these were created using it’s hires mode rather than its multicolour mode, they are ideally suited to be adapted to the Spectrum anyway.

Making The Cut

For the most part, this is almost identical to the Commodore 64 cassette version of the game. There are negligible differences to the graphics, the upgrades to the game engine have all been left intact and the only things I noticed is that there were just minor changes to a couple of the location descriptions where they were slightly shorter but only for the occasional location  But with the graphics accompanying each location, this wasn’t really anything to be concerned about.

One thing I did notice – and this is the same for all of the cassette versions of the game – is that the destruction of the gem by the energy egg is mentioned on the original disk versions (you are told of an off-screen explosion on the disk version) while it simply disappears on this release. You only know that the egg explodes if you try to get the gem manually.

Overall

I had fond memories from playing Questprobe Spiderman from my childhood but looking back on it now it’s definitely aged. 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 it’s also on of it’s biggest flaws in appealing to a more general audience.

As a whole, it struggles to overcome its inherent flaws from the difficulty of the puzzles. But perservere and there is a fun game inside fighting to get out and it’s a better entry in the series than The Incredible Hulk.

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