Game Review: Questprobe – Spiderman (Atari, Americana)

I’m a huge Spiderman fan. There – I said it! So before I even loaded this up first time around back in the 80s it had my full attention. Spidey has always been my all-time favourite superhero (when we used to run our Transformers convention, Auto Assembly we even brought over one of the actors who voiced Spidey in one of the animated shows) and I’ve even made a cameo appearance in one of the UK comics…

But back to this game. I thought things could get any better when the second game in Scott Adams Questprobe series was announced. I’d been a fan of his games since I bought Adventureland for the Vic 20, so combining my love for Marvel Comics and Spiderman along with his games sounded like a match made in heaven. But was it…?

Enter Spiderman

The Questprobe series of adventures was one of the most ambitious projects planned in the early 80s. 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 leaving the series unfinished. This time the game centred around Spiderman, and was the second to be re-released on the Americana label 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 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 location 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.

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 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.

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.

Only 16k??

For some strange reason, this cassette version of the game was cut down to run in 16k and sadly it shows. As with a lot of the Adventure International releases that have been squeezed into systems with more limited memory capacities, compromises have had to be made. Understandably, there are no graphics at all, but that’s not the only thing that has been sacrificed from the other 8 bit releases.

The original text descriptions for locations were sparse (unless you played the original disk versions), but these have been shortened even more. Sometimes it’s just one or two words that have been removed but when you are reliant on these descriptions to help you visualise the game world in your imagination it makes a huge difference to the game. In addition, a few of the game commands are missing – none that are essential, but ones that did improve the gameplay mechanics so the game does suffer as a result. Truthfully, by the time this was released originally, the 800XL had been on sale for a year and with the 400 and 800 having the capability for memory expansion there was no reason why this couldn’t have been developed for a higher spec system.

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 the Atari conversion either. The colour palette used for the screen display is relatively easy on the eye during play though so it’s quite comfortable to use for lengthy adventure sessions. But beyond that there isn’t really anything else that can be said about it.

Overall

Like so many games from the 80s, I had fond memories of 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 in the game and 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.

One of the biggest problems I found with the Atari version was that the cut-down location descriptions really do affect the atmosphere of the game. The whole point of location descriptions in text adventures is to paint a picture of what locations look like so the player can imagine where they are and what the game world is like. But when you get descriptions like “I’m in a hall” or “I’m in a small office” it doesn’t bode well.

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 other versions instead.

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