Game Review: Spy Trek Adventure (Commodore 64, Americana)

I’ve been playing text adventures pretty much all my life across a wide range of systems and apart from RPGs and arcade shooters, I’d say it’s one of my go-to genres. Even though I’d already tried this out on the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad, it was a no-brainer that I was going to be drawn once more to Spy Trek Adventure on the Commodore 64 and see if the Americana original release was just as playable on the C64…

Spy Trek Adventure – The Story Begins

With all the glamour, action and excitement, it’s no wonder why the spy/secret agent genre has endured for so long. With the likes of James Bond, Mission: Impossible and The Man From UNCLE and many more, there’s always been something for everyone on screen let alone the endless books, games and everything else. Spy Trek Adventure fits nicely into this although in this instance you’re closer to being a Temu version of Ian Flemming’s legendary agent.

Taking on the role of one of the government’s top you’ve been assigned to recover some “secret plans” that are somewhere in Europe. Your mission is to find and retrieve the plans and bring them back home. Your predecessor was the last one to be in posession of these, but failed to bring them back – meeting his untimely end. He managed to hide them safely and it’s your job to follow the clues left behind, track them down and bring the plans back where they belong.

Getting Started

You start out as a corpse. Well, sort of. At the beginning you’re being pursued by enemy agents so your death has been faked. You’re still alive (obviously) but you find yourself inside a closed coffin and somehow you’ve got to find a way out. It’s a fairly simple puzzle to be solved and more a case of finding the right words to use, and once you’ve figured that out you discover that you’re in ther back of a funeral car on the way to a secret location. Eventually you discover that you’ve been given a new identity to carry out your mission – Mike Rodot (say it quickly) – even though the game calls you Mike from the very beginning!

From there, it’s standard text adventure fare, exploring your surroundings, examining everything you find and moving your way through the locations in your hunt for the secret plans.

This Looks Strangely Familiar…

As I said at the start, adventures are on of my favourite game genres and as soon as it loaded up the look and feel of Spy Trek Adventure felt quite familiar. The author Peter Torrance developed it using Incentive Software’s The Graphic Adventure Creator and it has to be said that using GAC does give everything a certain look and feel. The package did the same for his other titles Subsunk and Seabase Delta – but it does take away the hard part of adventure creation allowing writers to focus on the plot and puzzle development rather than worrying about the coding side of things.

While there are those that are dismissive of adventures produced with packages like this, The Quill and so on, it is an incredibly powerful package and capable of creating some complex adventures. It has a great deal of scope in terms of what it can offer to both the author and the player.

Getting Interactive

One advantange I found as a player with games designed using the Graphic Adventure Creator is that the descriptions for each location not only mention the location name in UPPER CASE (making mapping much easier), but also the key items that you can interact with as well. This may seem like a minor thing, but when it comes to trying to figure out puzzles, you don’t have to think about what items to look for or use.

The parser is also more complicated than you might expect, allowing multiple commands to be entered at once and while it’s not quite on the level of Infocom’s parser it’s impressive for an adventure creation tool.  The only thing I did find disappointing was the lack of some of the commonly used abbreviations found in other adventures. For example, it doesn’t recognise I as a shortcut for INVENTORY, but it does accept INV. This is more on the developer than anything else though as you can create a list of words with a shared meaning when you create a verb list. The same applies to objects so you could have CASE/BRIEFCASE and so on.

You Can Look, But You Can’t Touch…

Now, there’s a reason why I mentioned how the location descriptions work in Spy Trek Adventure.  On a number of occasions you’ll visit locations where the descriptions will mention things that you can see but you can’t interact with them. One of the most notable I encountered was early on in the game. Shortly after your trip in the funeral car you find yourself in a storeroom and while you are told a few objects are visible, the illustration also shows a wastebin and a ladder up against a wall. You can examine both and are told that you don’t see anything special, but if you try to take them the game doesn’t recognise that they exist.

This is really a combination of two problems. First, the graphics themselves have been designed with items that are not physically present in the game to be interacted with (presumably to add atmosphere and add depth to the locations). But the way the game has been written with many visible items simple not being included on the list. If something isn’t on the object list then the player should be told that they can’t see it, not be given the response that they are, or even better just not be included on the illustration at all.

Broken and Unbeatable?

Unusually, as a Commodore fan I actually played this conversion of Spy Trek Adventure last out of all three versions of the game… and I’m glad I did. As after about 30 minutes of play I came across what ended up being a game-breaking bug that guaranteed that the adventure couldn’t be completed. Now, at this point I have to say that – like most of us on the team we use emulators to review the games so we can get screenshots and test on real hardware if needed but I’ll come back to that in a moment…

In the case of this bug, you find a wallet that has a small amount of cash in it. Or it should have. For some reason, on the C64 version it’s empty. The problem is that you need to use some of this money part way in the game to solve a puzzle, which then gives you two other objects that help you solve two more puzzles later on. I tried several different files and only one of them worked perfect which was marked as being “fixed” so it would transpire that every copy including the original cassette was impossible to complete. So what happened?

The Tech Stuff!

Normally I’d shy away from going all technical in a review, but in this instance I’m going to make an exception primarily because this bug has such a major impact on the game, and frankly it shouldn’t have happened at all. When creating games using Graphic Adventure Creator, everything is built up in the game engine using lists – verbs, nouns, objects, rooms and so on. For example, each room is assigned a number, and within that you can set what rooms it connects to, the description etc.

Objects are the same – you can set its starting location, description and even its weight. Verbs are probably one of the more flexible aspect as you can set alternative options for every word in the game so you could define GET and TAKE to have exactly the same meaning.

GAC Scripting

At the core of the Graphic Adventure Creator is its scripting language. The game is controlled by a BASIC-like script. Each location is driven by a series of conditions, which checks to see what actions need to be performed, what items the player might be carrying, what actions you have taken to solve puzzles and so on. There are three priority levels that, some of which are location dependent but that’s not important.

As well as that, there are “counters” (variables for the rest of us) that can be used to track items in the game. Some are basic on/off toggles such as whether a door is open or not, but some track values that may increase or decrease. Now this is where the bug crept in.

A Missing Byte

For the unitiated, GAC can be a little confusing to work with as all of the rooms, objects, words, messages and everything all use numbers to refer to them. It means planning out on paper is essential to keep track of what all your numbers and variables relate to so you don’t lose track of everything. And in the case of Spy Trek Adventure, this is what went wrong on the C64. At the start of the game, as I said before you have a wallet and this should have contained 10 one pound coins. Everything is fine for the Amstrad and Spectrum versions, but for some reason the C64 version shows that your wallet has 0 one pound coins when you examine it.

What seems to have happened at the scripting stage is a single character was missing at the start of the game that set up the coin counter! It should have read “10 CSET c” (where c is the number of the counter the developer used) but it would seem that the actual code used was “0 CSET c”. And that mistake was enough to break the game!

Show Me The Money!

One thing I found interesting with the discovery of this bug is how the rest of the game was developed in relation to the puzzle that is dependent on the money. When you get to the first airport terminal you encounter a tramp. You need to give him seven pounds, but to do it, it has to be done one coin at a time. I don’t think it’s possible using GAC to add to one counter and subtract from another in a single command and this is where the issue really arises with the C64.

On the other versions, it would appear that the counter checks to see if your own money drops down to three pounds (rather than checking to see if the tramp has seven pounds). For the Commodore 64 version, it will let you give him a pound repeatedly without returning an error message, even though you don’t have any at all so no checks are carried out in the scripting to actually confirm you have any!

Can It Be Completed?

Bearing that in mind, is it actually possible to play and complete Spy Trek Adventure with this bug? Using the original cassette as released, no, which is why I’ve scored it the way I have. I will talk about the game in more detail going forward though, as there is a fixed version available online for use with emulators which you can get here.

Deja Vu?

So moving back to playing a working copy of Spy Trek Adventure and even though my first foray into gaming was with a Pong clone in the 70s, my first computer game was Adventureland from Scott Adams so it was that entire genre that drew me into computer games which is why I’ve got such an affinity for them. However, there are a some things that I always found frustrating with them and unfortunately these are both present in Spy Trek Adventure. One that happened early on in this (and something I noticed recently in Questprobe: Spideman and The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) was the need to repeat commands a number of times to solve a puzzle. When you encounter any puzzle like this it does make you wonder what the author was thinking when they wrote the game. After you enter a command once and nothing happens, you immediately think you need to do something else to solve the puzzle and you just end up wasting time or screaming out for a hint or two – which most games aren’t willing to offer. Then there’s the other issue…

Save Me!

One thing I can’t stress enough with Spy Trek Adventure is that the save feature (or save state if you want to speed up loading on your emulator) will quickly become your best friend on your quest. While I didn’t encounter any locations where just walking into them lead to instant death (one of my pet hates with interactive fiction), there were numerous instances where player demise happened very quickly if you couldn’t solve a key puzzle quickly enough. In fact, once you solve the game’s first puzzle you only have a few moves to figure out what you need to do to solve the next one or it’s game over.

Now, I don’t mind games that kill players off if you do something that really warrants it, but taking a couple of moves too many and having events take place that are beyond your control just makes the game punishing when it doesn’t need to be. Each time you enter a command, it’s classed as making a move and if you’re struggling to find the right words to do something and die as a result it’s simply not fair.

Playability

Until now, most of my issues about Spy Trek Adventure have been technical ones and have had little or no bearing on the gameplay itself. Once you get a working copy of the game, despite the odd spelling mistake here and there, the descriptions are well written and give you a good sense of what’s going on in each of the quite varied locations for the game. In fact, I’d say they’re strong enough that you could even opt to turn the graphics off if you wished (which it has to be said would speed the game up considerably as it is somewhat sluggish).

Even though some of the puzzles are repetitive and a little frustrating, especially where unexpected death occurred too frequently, it’s a fun and challenging adventure and you’ll find yourself eager to keep playing to see what awaits, especially as the game shifts between countries and you begin to explore the globe. Truthfully, I think this variety in the locations really helps there as well so you don’t get bored of the clichéd never ending corriodors, open forests, roads that seem to go on forever, and so on that seem to fill other adventure games so often.

The parser does let things down every so often though and you’ll be fighting against the game more times than you need to, trying to figure out exactly what words you need to type, wasting valuable moves in the process. One example is at the start of the game when you’re sitting in the back of the funeral car. To avoid an early demise you have to close the curtains so passers-by can’t see you. You’d think that trying CLOSE CURTAINS or DRAW CURTAINS would be suitable options, but the only thing that works is PULL CURTAINS.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only time you’ll be struggling to find the right words you need to use and for some reason these occurances always seem to happen when time is of the essence and you only have a limited amount of moves before certain death!

Presentation

As with all of the other versions of Spy Trek Adventure, the Commodore 64 conversion follows the same format as most other games in the genre. The screen has the illustrations at the top, with the text displayed underneath but rather than adopt a split-screen approach seen in the Questprobe titles, as you interact with the game the images scroll off the screen until you refresh the location by using the LOOK command or exiting and returning.

Each image is limited to just a handful of colours and are fairly basic as you would expect from art produced with the Graphic Adventure Creator and some have been duplicated with just slight colour changes. One thing I did note is that the C64 version has an extra image at the start of the game that isn’t present on the other versions as well as extra in-game artwork, presumably because there was enough memory free to add them in.

However, it must be said that the graphics are incredibly slow to draw, taking 2-3 times as long as they do on the Spectrum and Amstrad, slowing the game down considerably.One thing that might have sped things up was to have limited the use of dithering in the artwork and made more use of solid areas of colour. Much of the art has shaded areas instead of single colour blocks and I’m sure this can’t have helped matters.

In fact every aspect of the game is slower, even responses to your commands seem to take a much longer, making the game a chore to play when it shouldn’t be. Turning the graphics off speeds things up slightly but you shouldn’t have to resort to doing that to enjoy playing it.

Overall

It’s really difficult to know what say about the Commodore 64 version of Spy Trek Adventure but truthfully I have to be fair and consider the physical release of the game and nothing else for the sake of this review. And bearing that in mind, this is one to avoid at all costs. While you can solve enough puzzles to get on the plane and make your way out of the airport and get to Paris, that’s where the game grinds to a halt as you find that you’re no longer able to solve any further puzzles making the physical release a wasted purchase.

Which is a shame. If you’re able to use an emulator and play the bug-free version while it’s not as good as the Amstrad or Spectrum versions, you’ll find that it’s an entertaining but flawed game. As such it’s worth tracking down and giving it a go. But that’s not the point of this review and it’s the original release I’m looking at. And in that respect this is one that should never have been released in this broken state. It’s clear that it was never play-tested before release and is only worth buying if you need to own every Americana title and have no intention of every loading it.

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