Personal Appendix N: Atari 2600 Adventure

I look back on the things that influenced me and my thinking about Dungeons and Dragons when I was 8 or 10 and a few highlights stand out strongly.

There are the usuals: Transformers, Thundercats, He-Man, various live action TV shows... I wonder if the A-Team is a huge influence on the way I play D&D? I bet it is and does, and I wonder if other people have made that particular connection. I don't even remember much about the show, other than the various team-work and "make some deadly gizmo" montage stuff. BA Barracus and his poison cat milk, Mad Mog Murdock, Faceman, Hannibal Lecter, that Robot V.I.C.K.I. that we all know and love. The hideous panther cultists that imbued the doctor guy with the power of the jungle cats. A 30 story battle gundam that shoots lasers out of its mouth. Man, the A-Team was the best. Don't try to mess up my A-Team headcannon with your feeble takes on reality: my version is better and will remain so in the face of contradictory evidence. The earth is flat, CORONA is a hoax, the aliens are prepping us for invasion, and my own subjective memory of the 80's has little bearing on Reaganism, Thatcherism, and where we are now.

Case in point: Atari's "Adventure" for the 2600 system. In my view the 2600 is the most important of all gaming systems and at the root of the present day mass-dissociation from reality of which I am a merely minor player. Why? It was ubiquitous and easy-to-grasp, not like the infuriating personal computers of the day that required "patience" and "understanding". Slap that cartridge in, flip the switch, and Let's GOOOOOOO. Remind me one day to talk about my experience programming adventure games in BASIC on the C64 - later. Right now, we're talking about "Adventure".

Warren Robinette's opus was not only a tour-d-force of programming economy and subversive swindling of the managers-in-charge, it's also clever and beautiful and elegant and infinitely replayable! If you're naive, he pretty much invented not just visual CRPGs but also the Easter Egg as we know it. BUT! BUT! The manual for the cartridge ("what's a cartridge? today's kids will ask") - even though  it seems to me not even written by Robinette, it contains the structure of a pure, distilled fairy tale and perfect and complete premise for every adventure before-and-ever-after. Stolen from Arthurian legend, somehow better and more perfect and precise. The box art painting by Susan Jakael quite simply merges with the actual game to become something that is, in my 7 or 8 year old brain, better than any drug or movie or cartoon until I was introduced shortly thereafter to D&D by my teenage half-brother and some gawky older kids... (gary and brian, you weirdos, thanks for nothing!)

In the box art, foreground we can see a few people/players/elves(?) trapped in the hedge maze, where a coiling wyrm holds aloft a yellow key. Beneath the wyrm, the crown and a hand that reaches for it... In the distance, a few other elves march off on pilgrimage from the Golden Castle. The Golden Castle is a Camelot, a Magic Place, the Ur-Castle. Banners flying, portcullis, you know the drill. And that's about it. A tree, dead. The tree looms large in my young mind... Why is the tree blighted but the hedge-maze green and robust? Well, the tree is natural of course and the hedge-maze is MAGIC, of course. The manual names some dragons, tells us that the sword is a part of the Good Magic, that the Dragons are Bad Magic (the Bat, too). The Magnet is hand-waved in the manual, and the Bridge (perversion of  2D reality!) is not even mentioned. The manual takes great pains to explain away a hardware problem implicit in the game, namely that the more sprites there are on the screen, the less likely they are to work properly and this can even be used (for example) to get past the dead body of a dragon that  might block your way... I can dimly recall the feeling of wonder and perplexity when I first encountered this game, and the sheer awful terror of a struggling dot swallowed into the belly of a roaring beast. Trapped Jonah-like, as my Lutheran school brain clearly connected. Hit the button and he's/you're/it's regurgitated and you try again.

More later

 

 

Something about Sewers: Ultan's Door 3 Review

This is IIRC the second sewage-related thing I have reviewed in the hoary life of this blog, the first being Daniel Bishop's commendable and filthy thing which you may find here.

I am generally weary and leery of Kickstarters. It's too bad, because it does seem (despite my anxiety) an ideal way to get a nice thing made in our byzantine capitalist system. A great list of the things i've kickstarted shows many amazing projects, a very few merely modest ones, and only one (that's right 1!) failed Kickstart: a beer that didn't get made for WayneCon a few years ago. Why my distrust? I don't know. Politics or summat

Before I begin the review, I'd like to state very upfront that I do not condone nor glamorize the use of REAL drugs and other substances, nor do I wish to demonize people in the real world who suffer from substance abuse disorders. I myself am beholden to two or three substances for my tenuous, dreary real-world existence and without Carbamazepine, Fluoxetine, and Caffeine I would be a juddering, shuddering shell of a man - incapable of joy or focus or safely operating heavy machinery.

I received the hard copy of the first "Through Ultan's Door" zine a few years ago, I think. The envelope came and I was surprised because I did not clearly recollect kickstarting the thing. And I downloaded the PDFs and my favorite things about it were: 1) portal-bility - there is a door to the land of Zyan, a dreamland, which you can use as is (that being, it's in Ultan's shop) OR you could pop the door anywhere you like. 2) the art - I am a longtime fan of the works of Russ Nicholson and his work appears therein, and also the other artists have striven for a similar feel: reminiscent of musty Fighting Fantasy books and John Blanche and the Fiend Folio - speckled and black and white and sort of 'gauzy' and C) also the setting of Zyan and its inhabitants are more 'implied' than entirely given freely, thick and cloying prose and many adverbs and adjectives and pleasing consonance. D) The ramshackle feel of the place - rundown, poorly maintained, sinister in disrepair. Rotten? Corrupted? yes, yes I think so. Not to give too much away, the encounters in TUD1 are delightfully weird - not weird in a bullshit sense like HOW THE FUCK CAN I PLAY THIS BULLSHIT but weird but real-enough in an unsettling fashion, as if in fact plucked from an unhealthy dream.  Masks are everywhere, the law of Zyan is ominous and alienating, and trickle-down economics are a literal thang. Plenty of rotten loot to steal, enemies to make, and hinted-at worlds to explore if only you can get there...

Well, in Through Ultan's Door 2, you really CAN get there. there's much more at that point to travel along and see and do. I love much of the setting of the second one, and the art is again fantabulous, Huargo and Nicholson and all them really sell it. I might critique that the second book strays slightly-but-not-irredeemably into the "arthouse Grant Morrison bullshit with lots of scribbly titties" thing that Zak peddled so hard, and overall the tone and feel is nicely brought over - maybe Dream is more concentrated in this zone? But the second issue begisn to give full access into the Sewers 'Neath Zyan, which (to my mind) is maybe the most chock full of potential yet of these.

I dimly recall, as if through secondhand opium smoke, that the city of Bastion from "Into the Odd" had a great sewer beneath it that was ripe for adventuring in and it was oft' played in and blogg'd about. Our own variant of the city had stretch that was so enormous that you could fly a rented dirigible-taxi through it in a action-packed chase. Zyan's Sewers as described in Through Ultan's Door #3 are full of danger, rotten things, hallucino- and entheogens, secret passageways and grottoes; all the usual things you might expect in a fantasy sewer. I've not ever partaken of opium  - well, codeine a couple of times during some rough illnesses a few years back - but TUD#3 gives me that same uneasy, cloud-headed feeling of cozy familiarity - languid? yes! fervid? yes, that too? Wan? most definitely.  Drifting in my tin trading-kayak down the sewer river, I espy a fat clutch of crab eggs and a handful of coins secreted to a pylon, there, and the grip on my gigging-quant grows slippery with sweat! What has been a lackluster venture marked with legal entanglements and an unrequited crush on a courtesan in the city above could now turn into a profitable expedition. But hark, what heaving mass of catfish-faced flesh approaches from beneath the foetid current!!??? And is that a barque of masked pirates coursing toward me yonder the next rapid?

Yeah, kind of like that. I mean, it's nice. There is a nicely-rendered character option/idea about a real-world protagonist drug-shifted into the imagined play-world, and I worry about the glamorization of heavy tragic drug use - I would probably not allow my kiddo to delve into TTRPGs with these zines, and of course I do not believe one ought to make light of real world problems like opiate addiction or sexually transmitted illnesses or narcissism-driven petty legal feuds that can only be won by the wealthiest party! But there is much to plunder from Zyan should you brave what is beyond Ultan's Door! Most of it would not even require combat

In my mind's eye, I have inserted Ultan's Door in a pawn shop in our local Tours-en-Pays (from Castle Xyntillan) and of course there is a spell-scroll somewhere that will allow entry into The Gardens of Ynn, and in one desolate corner of a dungeon, a wraith peers into a bottle that contains a dungeon that contains a labyrinth that contains a city that contains a spaceport, and above in the night sky there is a station wherein travel to any point in the galaxy is provided and that is how my brain works.

incidentally, Gus L has vaslty expanded one of the piratical encounters given only a few paragraphs in the secret-sewer portion of the first volume. When I say 'vastly', I mean Gus ably turns an entry about sewer pirates into a 40-odd page excursion with lore and factions and legal intricacies aplenty (Gus is a lawyer, hisself, if I recall rightly and so knows the tedia of it and also i think he's a pirate probably)

Also, weird and fun diseases, nuns, automata, lurid candies, startling monsters, interesting magic items and spells, and more sewage-coated fun than you can shake a punting-pole. There is much more than what i have merely hinted at in my impressions, here, and I've not yet scratched the surface on the second part of this issue (yes, two volumes in this issue, and a separate 40-page scenario, a handout of additional diseases, and a separate confectionary-based adventure-scenario-possibility)

So much for relatively little moneys! If you did not Kickstart the thing, then I urge you to hasten yourself and find Through Ultan's Door #3, and also 1 and 2. The whole crew of artists, layout persons, and editors (many people that have esteem for anyways!)  have done a bang-up job, and much cheaper than an opium problem, I imagine