A magazine about old school video games
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Alright, here goes "Wonderland" by Magnetic Scrolls. While arguably less famous than #infocom, their titles were quite highly regarded. They came with a fancy windowing system of their own. We start off playing Alice, accompanied by her sister on a meadow.
#retrogaming #commodore #amiga500 #interactivefiction
@[email protected] oh nice, this looks a bit like Legend Entertainment's UI
@[email protected] yes, to be honest it is a complete clone of X11 and twm. I wonder if it is REALLY X11 or just a lookalike.
We wander off into the pear grove. We pick one of the pears, and suddenly all pears turn to lanterns, as does our pear. How handy. A rabbit is hopping by...
After some more exploring we finally find the rabbit hole. And you all know how the story goes. We fall down the well into a very different world. Interestingly, the graphics here are animated.
We land in an interesting marble building with many rooms. Most doors are locked. But one room isn‘t, it‘s a musical room. It contains a grand piano and some musical chairs (haha!). This is the first room with music! This is a first for a text adventure… the graphics, again, are animated.
Two keys can be found here, which will open some doors.
We walk around a bit more and discover a broom cupboard behind the C door, which fittingly could be opened by the C key from the musical room (get it???).
There’s a card shoe here, which I have never heard of before and some overalls and a coat hanger.
In another room we find two items: a potion that makes one smaller, and a cake which makes one bigger. This is straight from the book I‘d say.
We use the potion to become smaller, climb on the chair, then on the piano in the musical room (remember musical chairs!). This lets us fetch another key.
Going back to the long hall, we use the new key to open the tiny door. The rabbit makes another appearance. We saw him earlier when he lost some stuff, which we immediately nicked (a fan and gloves). He is looking for his maid, and I think we have the maid‘s overall…
Now the next step took us QUITE a while to figure out. We can use the blue fan to make us a bit smaller. Then we fit into the maid overall. And only then the rabbit will mistake us for his maid and take us to actual wonderland. Well he opens the door.
#magneticscrolls #interactivefiction
In Wonderland we meet the Knave of Hearts. I guess that’s just an odd word for Knight? He wants a Tart from the Queen’s kitchen. So we will add that to our list of chores. The rabbit wants the fan and gloves. Let’s see what else is wanted from us…
I must say the auto map is coming in really handy.
Sorry for the retrace shadow in the image.
The game is full of puns. Just like the literary original.
We start exploring Wonderland, which seems quite substantial. We start venturing towards the palace. The tailor‘s cottage looks nice. But sadly it’s locked and currently deserted.
As the tailor isn’t home we approach the palace. It seems to be massive. However guards are here, so I am not sure how far we will get.
We manage to get into the Eastern Hall of the palace. But the guard here wants to see some ID, or it’s choppety-chop, off with your head. So we better leave…
So we backtrack a little and come to some woods with a maple tree and a house. We also find a poster announcing some festivity by the Queen. Maybe this will count as an invitation into the palace?
Back in Wonderland with #magneticscrolls
We continue our exploration and find a well. We can’t take the rope, can’t use the winch, so why not climb down the well? Guess what: Alice doesn’t climb. She just falls. And yes, you can „die“ in this game. Well, you wake up, but the game is still over.
#interactivefiction #commodore #amiga
The game is puntastic. You have to take many thing a quite literally. And were it not for the „items in room“ feature, we would miss a lot of things!
We finally arrive at the Duchess’s House. The illustration here is superb. It is a very nice animation of a fish delivering an invitation to the frog butler. How odd.
Carefully exploring the Duchess’s house, we find another playing card. But this one is stuck under a very heavy table. How could we get it out…?
Also, the duchess and the cook are battling it out in the kitchen, which involves a lot of pepper. So we can only stay a couple of moves at a time inside, before sneeze and are discovered.
In the Duchess’s bedroom we at least find a pair of slippers. Not sure what we need them for, but let’s take all we can get!
The cook‘s room gets a huge, detailed picture. However the only thing of note is a dumb waiter, through which we can enter the kitchen. However doing that unprepared will get us caught, ending the game. So we need something against the pepper…