Game Review: Questprobe feat. The Hulk (Electron, Americana)

Growing up in the 1980s, if you loved interactive fiction you can’t have avoided the name Scott Adams. With his company Adventure International he developed a vast number of text adventures released across a wide range of systems. From his first release Adventureland, his games captivated a generation and still has countless fans across the world today. But some of his most famous works were the Questprobe series that were licensed from Marvel comics. Originally planned as a 12-part saga, only the first three were released and the first two made it to the Americana label and the first of these featuring The Hulk made its way to the Electron. I’ve looked at all of the other conversions and while only the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum had graphics and as such were regarded to be the best, how did this Electron port fare?

So What’s It All About?

If the game’s title didn’t give it away, in this first game in the Questprobe saga you take on the role of Bruce Banner and his alter ego The Hulk. You’ve been abducted by a strange entity known only as the Chief Examiner. Trapped in an unknown realm, he wants put your abilities as The Hulk to the test, alongside your mental skills while in your relaxed state as Bruce Banner. To do this, you’re tasked with collecting a number of gems while trying to avoid various traps that have been set out for you. To help you along the way, there are signs around the realm giving you subtle and cryptic hints but apart from that you’re on your own.

If you couldn’t guess from the screenshots, it’s a text adventure and as with all of the releases from that era from Scott Adams commands are entered using one or two word commands. Movement is handled with basic one word commands North, South etc (or abbreviate to n, s and so on), but for other commands you can end up struggling to figure out exactly what words Adams would have used to describe the actions you need to do. and in a way that can make the game frustrating.

As with many of his adventures, The Hulk is certainly not for beginners. The limited parser here really does make the game much harder than it needs to be. Text descriptions are also often quite brief and don’t help give you any clues as to what you might need to do. More often than not the puzzles themselves defy logic and I found myself wandering around aimlessly and then dying apparently without warning. Fortunately even though there are hazards where you can get “killed”, it’s not permanent as I’ll cover later on…

How does the Electron conversion of The Hulk Compare?

As I said at the beginning, only the Apple II, Commodore 64 and Spectrum releases featured graphics of any kind with just the C64 and Spectrum being released in the UK. All of the others released on the Americana label were text only, and cut down to fit in the more limited memory available on those systems. In the case of the Electron version, it was only natural that it was going to be based on the BBC Micro version and the porting duties were handing over once again to Mak Jukic. Fortunately, on first impressions it appears that only the graphics have been removed and all of the text seems to be left intact and the gameplay remains the same as the other versions.

Presentation

The big difference you’ll notice when playing The Hulk on the Electron when compared to its BBC Micro counterpart are the visuals. With the BBC version it took advantage of it’s strength when it comes to text displays and made use of both standard and double-height text as well as different colours for location descriptions, commands, responses and so on making everything incredibly easy to read. In fact almost all of the other versions did this with the exception of the Spectrum (which made up for this with the graphics) and the Atari.

Unfortunately, the Electron only uses a single colour for everything and while the text itself is fairly easy to read for short periods of time, prolonged play could be hard on the eye so you’re going to need to save the game more often than you’d like out of comfort if nothing else.

On a positive note, one thing I did notice is that unlike the BBC, the text formatting seemed to be handled much better. On that version of The Hulk I found instances where some words were split over lines when they reached the right hand side of the screen but here if it became apparent that a word wouldn’t fit on a line completely it started on the next line so the game just looks cleaner.

Gameplay

But what about the game itself? On playing this extensively, I found it to be almost identical to the BBC version with all of the puzzles, text and location descriptions recreated exactly as you would expect with the two systems being closely related to each other. So expect the same level of frustration while you explore the illogical map and try to solve the frustrating puzzles while you play.

One thing I was pleased to see was the retention of the limbo location which was removed from the Commodore 16 conversion. This is probably one of the most vital location in the game and for some reason it was taken out of that port of the game. It’s essentially a respawn point where you’re sent to any time you are “killed” in the game. Fortunately you keep your current inventory and any puzzles that are partially completely remain in that state so when you leave limbo you’re taken back to the starting room and can continue where you left off.

It’s a feature I haven’t encountered in any other adventure and while it may not be important to many players, but in a game that is prone to placing you in life-threatening situations with no escape, a respawn feature like this is essential.

Overall

It must be said that while I’m generally a fan of his work and have been for over 40 years, The Hulk is an incredibly frustrating adventure and isn’t one of Adams’ strongest games. As with most of his games, the map defies all logic, the parser can be somewhat restrictive, and you will find yourself wondering more often than not if it’s the parser that’s stopping you solving puzzles rather than you not being able to figure them out.

But all that aside, there is a fun game lying underneath screaming to get out. Considering the hardware limitations, it’s a faithful conversion of the original and still worth considering for Marvel fans.

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