Game Review: Questprobe – Spiderman (BBC Micro, Americana)

While I’m usually drawn more to arcade shoot-em-ups when it comes to retro gaming, I’ve always had a soft spot for RPGs and text adventures. I blame this on Scott Adams and his early games that were released for the Vic 20 including Adventureland which was the first I owned for the system. So it was no surprise that I actively sought out all of his games no matter what platform I owned. As a sci-fi and comicbook fan, I was overjoyed when he launched the Questprobe series, linking in with Marvel Comics, especially the second chapter focused on my all time favourite superhero, 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, author Scott Adams developed the idea to create a series of 12 inter-connected games with an overarching storyline, each with an accompanying comicbook. Sadly only three games and comics made it to retail before his company 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

Moving on to the game and just with the first instalment, 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 making use of your various abilities. 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. Unfortunately, as with the Atari and Commodore 16 versions I looked at recently, one of the more useful commands I found during the game – GET ALL, which allowed you to pick up several objects at once is no longer present.

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

For those of you who have been playing text adventures for some time, or are quite experienced with the genre, you’ll know that while most puzzles need a little logical thought to solve them, they’re not impossible to figure out. Unfortunately that wasn’t always 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 natter energy 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. However, this egg explodes regardless of what you do, even when you just leave the room doing nothing and in the process destroys the gem and it doesn’t respawn meaning that you can’t complete the game.

So this basically leaves you with no alternative but 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 start the game without any web fluid so need to make some and it’s easy to wander into that room by accident. 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.

Once you solve the initial puzzle to get into the vent system, you’re offered 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. After experiencing the same issue with the other versions of the game, I tried an experiment with the BBC Micro version and went North eight times, then South the same number of moves. That should have taken me back to my start position but it didn’t.

I then wandered around aimlessly for a while, including going Down probably 15-20 times if not more as well as every other direction possible. At no point was I told that a move wasn’t possible. But then a single move Upwards took me back to the start point. There was no logic at all to the map and it just seems to wrap continually and I got the feeling that even mapping these ducts wouldn’t have helped at all.

Playability

If you can get past the lack of logic with the puzzles and the aforementioned issues with the exploding egg and air ducts (and making sure you have a map nearby), 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. This a text only version, just like the C16 and Atari release but everything is easy to read with good use of the BBC’s palette to distinguish between location descriptions, objects, commands and everything else on screen so it’s always relatively easy on the eye.

Making The Cut

As you’d expect, compromises had to be made to get this to run on the BBC Micro in a single load and in this case the decision was made to drop the graphics completely. There is a slight change to the game’s parser, removing one or two of the commands that I mentioned earlier, but one thing I did notice is that the location descriptions seem to be closer to that of the Commodore 64 cassette version than the extremely cut-down descriptions seen on the other 8-bit versions.

This also has the same problem seen on all the other cassette versions of the game and that there is no mention of the destruction of the gem by the energy egg which is referred to specfically in-game while playing the original disk versions (you are told of an off-screen explosion on the disk version). Here it simply disappears once you leave the room. You only know that the egg explodes if you try to get the gem manually.

Overall

Growing up, I loved playing this even if I never managed to get anywhere although I’d put that down to being a Spiderman fan more than anything else. Looking back as a more experienced adventurer I’ll be honest and say that it’s definitely aged. This is one that really relies on the player to have some love for the superhero genre, and Spiderman in particular, and if that’s not there you’ll struggle to get anywhere with this or get the most out of it.

While it tries its hardest to stay true to the comics that’d also one of it’s biggest flaws as it limits its appeal to a wider adventuring audience. As a whole, Spiderman does struggle to overcome the flaws with the logic in its puzzles and basic design issues but if you’re willing to perservere you’ll discover a fun game lurking inside. It’s certainly a much welcome improvement on the first chapter in the saga.

* * *

You know what we think but why not share your thoughts on this game! Let us know what you think of it in the comments below, or add your own score using the slider in the summary box at the top of the review!