Game Review: Questprobe – Spiderman (Commodore 64, Americana)

If you were around at the start of the 8-bit era, the chances are that you will know the name Scott Adams. With his company Adventure International he helped to launch the text adventure genre with classics across most platforms including the likes of Adventureland (the first game I purchased for my Vic 20) and dozens of others. But some of his most well known was the Questprobe series based on the Marvel comicbook characters, including this second instalment in the series featuring my all time favourite superhero Spiderman…

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 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 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 although the interpreter has been updated for this to accept more complex instructions and multiple commands in a single sentence. For example, if several objects are visible in a room instead of typing GET A, GET B, GET C in succession, the game now accepts GET ALL 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 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.

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.

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, using the C64’s hires graphics mode to provide better definition, sacrificing colour in the process. 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.

Making The Cut

One thing I have to say about this version of Spiderman is that is is cut down from the initial release of the game. Originally, this was designed to run from disk and while that version runs slower that this cassette version, that’s for a very good reason. Each location features more detail and colour for the graphics (as you can see below) and the text descriptions for each location are significantly longer as well. One thing I did notice playing the cassette and disk version side by side is that the destruction of the gem by the energy egg is mentioned on the disk version (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

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.

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.

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