The Crimson Crown: Won!

Welcome to the bottom half and finale of this game. We gathered the magic artifacts the sage foretold of; Erik's royal sword, an onyx signet ring, and a magic scepter, as well as a "sphere of annihilation" and a few other doo-dads. We helped the wizard Zin drive away some haunting spirits and recovered an ancient tablet, we befriended an owl, and learned some magic words. But none of that helps right now; the vampire has us, and our stuff. Sabrina and I are imprisoned, and Erik is about to be dog food.

Lack of inventory and places to go means there aren't many things I can try doing. I'm in no condition to summon the owl with a whistle, but Sabrina is, once I splash some water on her face, and it brings us a beehive. This plugs the drain, letting water fill the pit, and we float to the surface.

I wake up Erik and we explore.

Oh, come on. A literal maze of twisty passages? In 1985?

My stuff is scattered throughout the dungeon, and I gradually recover bits of it as I explore and solve whatever problems I can as I encounter them.

A magic seashell turns into a magic shield

The sphere of annihilation does its job

 

A cave troll's got a lantern and our bag, and now our scepter too.

A rare encounter with natural life, but I'm not sure if there's a purpose.

 

Gotcha!

 

I can't seem to get the sack or lantern, but I am able to retrieve my scepter, which impresses a dragon roosting in the eastern side of the maze.

His name is "Fury" and promises to answer if we call.

The next part has me stuck, and I need a walkthrough. There's a darkened room nearby, and I thought for sure that the troll's lamp would get me through, but you can't get ye lamp (and I'm certainly not going to tell thou why). Nor does the dragon answer here.

Instead, you wear the onyx ring.

The sage had hinted that I'd need a pointy weapon dipped in blessed water to defeat the black fiend, and I indeed had encountered a basin of it in the maze, where I had immersed the centaur's arrow. But finding the right verbiage here is the real puzzle; SHOOT MAN and SHOOT ARROW prompt me that I am forgetting something. Also, he kills you after three incorrect actions.

The correct actions; LOAD ARROW and SHOOT ARROW. He dies, and behind him, a massive set of iron doors yield only to Fury.

Enter, and observe an epic monster duel.

I'm helpless, but Erik isn't. Unfortunately, Erik is useless, and refuses to fight the vampire, claiming we just need to escape. But he also refuses to leave without us. The game hints that I must find a way to break the vampire's charm, but also refuses to let me wear the crown, since only the heir to the throne can do that.

The solution? I had to look this one up. GET ERIK.

Is this supposed to be a Samwise Gamgee situation? I don't buy it.

 

We simply leave, and return to the seaside cove, where our ride home meets us.

 

GAB rating: Average.

It's... fine. A casual, mostly solvable adventure, with adequate graphics, adequate writing, and mostly free of the genre's traditional annoyances. Mostly. But it doesn't feel as fresh, exciting, or atmospheric as the first game, whose only noteworthy fault was being very short. I'd say the first disk side in The Crimson Crown is about as long as the original game, but the second side just feels like an epilogue. The werewolf and time limit of the first game might have been annoying, but they respectively contributed a sense of danger and gravity that just isn't here in the sequel. And while it goes out of its way to ensure the game is solvable, with ample clues and not very many ways to die or softlock yourself, there wasn't a single satisfying puzzle in the whole adventure; all of them are either obvious immediately, obviously signposted, or solvable with brute force, with the exception of the endgame which I just found dumb.

My Trizbort map:

I went back and played the pre-release version for comparison. It is incomplete, and ends at the disk flip.

An intro scene unique to this version

 

It's familiar, but cruder.

This sequence is not illustrated yet.

The Griffin's riddles are in the game, not the packaging.

The zombie's fate is grislier.

A very different depiction of Karel Thurg

Whoopsie.

Some different banter. The grating is pre-opened for you!

Zin, sans silhouette

The end!

I kind of wonder what the Comprehend engine was even doing.

The Crimson Crown: Critters of the night

The first step in the chain of Crimson Crown's unsolved problems is to light the candle, found in the attic of the abandoned house, and then burn the zombie in it. Your reward is a mouse and a burlap sack, containing an ebony ring and a flute. Don't ask me to explain the logic behind any of this. The sack also expands our inventory limit, which incidentally has already been hit by having a scepter, a candle, and a sword.

I also try typing "LOOK IN CRATE" and am told "There are no mushrooms here." Um, that was a weirdly specific denial.

Next, there's the owl, who doesn't speak HOOT, but speaks English perfectly, once you give him the mouse. 

Nope, that didn't work.

 

He tells us to whistle if we need aid. Before I can figure out how this helps, I figure out how Erik can. By letting him drink the witch's potion, I can toss his transmogrified form into the lake, where he finds a silver coin.

Next, the flute found in the sack enchants the cobra, giving me a few new areas to explore.

 

I offer the demon my coin, and get a.... sphere of annihilation? The sphere has the images of a man and a horse on it, giving me a clue to its purpose, but no clue on what to do next.

But eventually I find the grate in the cemetery can be pried open with Erik's sword. 

An incense burner is found down here, but the way out is obscure. So obscure that the parser actually interjects pretty quickly and offers to give you a clue, but only once. Initially I declined, but when lighting the burner and waving it around didn't do anything except make this smelly pit even smellier, I had to reload and accept.

A word will do. It is the only way out.

I'd been teleported with a word before - Windmill - and it works here too.

The incense is useful in the wizard's castle; it drives away the spirits in the high chamber, letting me enter the wizard's tower. 

After speaking to the wizard, I find that although I still can't take his magic laughter scroll, Sabrina can. This is exactly what we need to deal with the witch and take her tablet.

The wizard helps us cross the chasm to the fortress, as promised, but this gets our adversary's attention.

 

To be continued, on side 2!

My Trizbort map of Transylvania:

Game 454: The Crimson Crown

Read the manual here:
https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=crimsoncrown

 

There's an obscure, possibly unfinished early version of The Crimson Crown floating around the Internet. It's so obscure that I can't even find a version that has the title screen intact (edit - it was there all along), where it is simply called Transylvania II. This one has an engine very similar to the first game's 1982 release, but was very soon afterward remade with Polarware's new Comprehend engine, and later in 1985, the original game was also remade in Comprehend and expanded.

Despite what many resources online (including Digital Antiquarian) state, neither Comprehend remake appears to use the Apple II's 128KB double-resolution 16-color mode. This seems to be conflating them with Transylvania's earlier 1984 re-release, which did.

Comprehend. There are five colors here, including black.

Normally, I would cover the earlier version first, if not exclusively, but as it seems to have never been released or indeed intended for release, and I don't know how complete this one is, I'll play the complete commercial edition of The Crimson Crown as consumers would have experienced it for the first and only time back in the day. After all, you're probably going to get more enjoyment from a finished novel by reading it fresh than you would by reading the author's foul papers first.

Still just four colors.

 

Polarware stepped up their package game, now including a manual, a map, a sealed envelope, and a booklet entitled "Journal as chronicled by His Majesty's Loyal Chamberlain Mikkail" in old blackletter. 

The plot is all in the journal in this version. The princess Sabrina is returned, safe and sound, and the people rejoice, but there are evil tempers in the air, and the king seems afflicted by an almost spiritual fatigue. Fatigue advances to madness, and then death - a vampire's curse. Now the Crimson Crown is missing, stolen by the vampire (sorry, Vampyr), who is using its magic powers to terrorize the land. We, the adventurer from the first game, are summoned and sent on a quest to destroy the monster and recover the crown, and are accompanied by the princess and crown prince, which is allowed for some reason.

The sealed envelope contains three riddles, which seem pretty abstract. I'm thinking the answers to the first and third might be fear and dream, guided partly by the prominent eye motif on the parchment. The second, I don't know... pollen? That's probably wrong. I may have to brute-force it and possibly the rest of them too when the time comes to solve.

Let's start.

 

I get Trizborting, as always, but the attempt doesn't last long.

We're dumped into a crypt, where Erik opines that Sabrina should magic us out, but she isn't powerful enough for that yet.

There's an inscription on the wall here - a riddle that I can't figure out.

"I do not breathe, yet I need air, true."

 

I continue trizborting this new area, which quickly opens up to a new, open area of crossroads and several caves. One cave holds a crystal ball, through which we see the vampire (and he sees us!).

Another is the lair of a gryphon, who challenges us to answer his three riddles; my first guesses are correct, and I eventually brute-force the last - there's no limit on guesses - it's cloud, which I have to call foul on, especially for misleading us with the literal image of a teary eye when the other two examples of this motif weren't metaphorical. Our prize is a scepter.

This eventually circles back to the tree stump, where we now know to walk around the trap door. We'll just have to ignore the fact that the exit from this underground crypt is a twenty-foot flight of stairs leading down that somehow returns us to the same topographical height from where we started.

Good to know

Sabrina can HELP if you get bitten

How thoughtful!

This guy just shows up out of nowhere and offers clues/spoilers to puzzles I haven't seen yet.

Many of the landmarks from the original Transylvania are present and accounted for here - there's the stump, the castle, the abandoned house, and cemetery, but the geography connecting them is different.

While exploring the castle, now renovated and apparently home of a short-tempered wizard, we're whisked away back to the crypt.

Oh, duh!

The password opens the iron doors, where we find a sword embedded in a stone, and naturally, Prince Erik alone can take it.

 

Unsolved problems:

• An owl sits in a tree near the start of the game. The sage advises us to speak to him, but the owl doesn't respond.
• There's a button in the crypt and I'm not sure what it does.
• Do the mushrooms do anything? Touching them is no good, but not fatal either, thanks to Sabrina's magic.
• There's a witch in the woods who has an important-looking tablet. Sabrina can scare off her cat, but Erik is useless and just wants to drink the brew, which (temporarily) turns him into a frog.
• Erik also can't kill the cobra, not because he refuses, but because he sucks.
• There's a zombie lurking inside a wooden crate in the abandoned house, and we're told that normal weapons have no effect on it.
• Knocking on the stump results in an explosion, rather than anything apparently useful.
• A scroll in the cellar is known by Sabrina to be a spell of laughter, but it is magically protected.

My Trizbort map so far:

Game 453: Winter Games

I had hoped to do this one in the winter, but organizing sessions for a multiplayer game isn't always easy. But here we are, in early August, and "B" and "D" return to the games, now hosted in Calgary.

There are only seven events this time, and two of them are basically the same thing. As before, we practiced all of them, and decided that five were worth doing in competition.

I play Ahab, from native Canada. "B" plays Otty, from the fantastic land of Epyx, and "D" goes as D, from the USA.

 

Hot dog aerials

I got my first and only 10 recording this gif.

Do stunts off a ski jump before the judges and make sure you land safely. It's basically the same game as Summer Games' platform dive except even simpler. Tricks are performed by holding a direction on the joystick and releasing to complete the trick - six directions correspond to six tricks including front flips and backflips. If your timing is very good you can transition to a second trick before you land, which guarantees you a good score if you can land it. But any imprecision and you will faceplant.

This was "D"'s favorite event in the game, and she actually got the best score of all of us during practice. But my double-backflip won the competition by a tenth of a point.

 

Biathlon 

IMO, this is the nicest-looking event.

Cross-country skiing alternating with rifle shooting. Alternate presses of left and right to stride forward - it's rhythm, not speed that counts - but watch your pulse, because the shooting portions become more difficult when it's elevated.

This was "B"'s favorite, though he missed enough shots to be relegated to second place. Overall, a pretty good event, but by far the longest one. It takes roughly three minutes to complete the course, and most of the other events are over in seconds!

 

Speed skating 

Another joystick-waggle event, like so many others. Rhythm and speed are both important here.

The skating does feel pretty good, and the SID-powered sound of your blades cutting through the ice is satisfying. This was overall a well-liked event, and "B" took the gold here.

 

Ski Jump 

An ominous overture warns you that this is Winter Games' most hardcore event.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to land safely. In theory, it should be simple enough; you use the joystick's four directions to correct your stance before landing. But I never seemed to be able to find the safe landing stance, or else my skis would just get crossed at the last second.

Despite this, I nearly won the gold on distance alone, which counts for a lot more than style, but then "B" snatched it on his final attempt with a 60m launch that landed awkwardly but safely.

As a side-note, for the final four events, you have to flip the disk before and after each event, for some reason! You need to be on side 2 to play the event, but you need to be on side 1 to see your scores. It's small, but it's annoying.

 

Bobsled

B: They should have you shoot guns from the sled. Call it an Alaskan drive-by.
A: We'll call it Cool Gunnings.
D: I want to divorce both of you.

Winter Games' final challenge is... kind of underwhelming? It's a race, but all you can do is lean into the turns to avoid crashing, which is not that hard once you learn to anticipate them. There's no pushing, and there's no controlling your speed, which seems like an important part of a racing simulation. I'm not even really sure what determines your speed, but we all came in within a fraction of a second of each other.

After the final event, we see the final standings and are dumped back to the main menu. No closing ceremonies this time!

 

Figure Skating

 

One event pretending to be two events. This one wasn't good enough for competition.

Essentially a long-form version of the hot dog aerials. Seven tricks are performed by pushing the joystick in a corresponding direction with the button pressed, and landed by centering the stick and pressing the button at the correct time.

You have one minute to perform a routine that incorporates all seven tricks, and points are lost for awkward executions and falls. A second, mode, "Free Skating," gives you two minutes and a more complicated scoring system that has no strict requirements about which tricks must be performed or how often but rewards variety.

I couldn't manage to get a decent score in this mode. "B" and "D" could barely even do the moves.

GAB rating: Average. I think we all liked this better than Summer Games II overall, and the events were pretty consistently okay. None of them are great, and personally I didn't think any were as good as kayaking or the javelin throw, but none of them were bad either.