To Guide or Not to Guide: Conquering Adventure Games (1984, Carl Townsend)

Look at the cover of this book. Check out the valiant hero, with his glowing broadsword. Witness his female companion, dashing along after her protector as they cross the stone bridge together. Don't they look happy, with their broad grins, despite the fact a fearsome green-skinned, club-wielding troll blocks their way? Combat -- short and brutal -- is only seconds away, but these two seemingly have not a care in the world.

It's all lies--lies, I tell you! These two wouldn't be so dang-blasted happy if they knew they were smack-dab in the middle of an adventure game from the early days of home computing. Adventures of this time period, many of which are listed on the cover, were head-scratching affairs. Devious scenario writers pit their cunning against that of the end user in a battle of wits. The payoff to solving the puzzles didn't always match the time invested into them, but if you ran up against a brick wall, there wasn't much you could do except ask friends, a member of your local computing club, or maybe the guy down at the software store for help. If you were among the elite of home users, you might have been able to dial up a local BBS and exchange hints with some of the other users, but this could be a slow process.

The point is, you might have started your journey as happy-go-lucky as our pals on the front cover, but sooner or later, you'd run up against a (virtual) brick wall, where your choices were to keep bashing your skull against it until one of you broke, or else give up in defeat. This, in turn, gave birth to the ludicrously lucrative market for solution guides, hint books, and walkthroughs we know and love today. Carl Townsend waded into this milieu in 1984 with Conquering Adventure Games. Let's see how he did.

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To Guide or Not to Guide?

Conquering Adventure Games isn't that large of a book, with a mere 146 pages between the covers. Despite this, Townsend takes time to pack a ton of information into his small work space, delivering an overview of what adventure games are, from where they were derived, who publishes them, the various types one might encounter on store shelves, and even how to get in on the action from afar by joining PBEM (play by e-mail) games. As if that's not enough, he also devotes two entire chapters to designing one's own adventures, everything from mapping out the story and designing the game world to selecting a programming language and building your dungeon.

Browsing the table of contents may give you the impression Townsend's about to spoil every game on the market, with entries on everything from ten Scott Adams games and the original Colossal Cave Adventure to a bevvy of now-classic Infocom text adventures, and even the limited graphical fare of titles like Wizardry and Temple of Apshai. This is not the case: while Townsend talks about all of the above and more, much of this information is highly condensed. Consider the entirety of his write-up on Scott Adams' Adventureland:

This is a good beginning point for the novice adventurer, as this game is easier than successive games of the series. The game involves a fantasy trip to the countryside with a bog, lake, dragon, and bear to keep things lively. There are 13 treasures, and 29 rooms, or locations, in the countryside. Some treasures are easy to find, others are very difficult. You will also need to figure out what to do with the bear.

That paragraph can't help you conquer boredom, much less the game itself. Fortunately, not all chapters deal with their respective games in this fashion. Conquering Adventure Games contains specific hints and tips for beating ten different titles:

• Adventure (both 350-point and 550-point versions)
• Witness
• Deadline
• Suspended
• Enchanter
• Zork I, II, and III
• Starcross
• Dungeon Master

It also contains full chapters devoted to Wizardry, Oubliette, and Nemesis, but it only gives basic overviews of these titles and some screenshots, with little actual assistance towards "conquering" them. Planetfall also gets a brief nod in the section with Starcross, but the tips given only pertain to getting you past the first area. If you need help with any games not on this particular list, you'll need to consult a different book. Conquering Adventure Games will not be of assistance.

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Not to Guide

I really hate ripping on old books, especially one like this which only carried a $3.95 cover price back in the day, but even taken at face value for the time it was written, Conquering Adventure Games isn't useful. That's not to say it's worthless; there's some nice historical stuff in here, and the sections on preparing one's own adventures is pretty cool, but if you bought it sight-unseen in the hopes of easily attaining the winning strategies for one of the games listed above, you just found yourself on a train bound for Disappointment Town, population: you.

Townsend's idea was that he didn't want spoilers to be immediately obvious if you were just flipping your way through, because your eye might catch something about a later puzzle or part of the story and give away the solution before you even had the chance to try it. That wasn't uncommon back in the day, but while other publishers used simple techniques like writing the solutions upside down or backwards so they'd have to be held up to a mirror to decode, Townsend layered his answers behind a substitution cypher that changed in every chapter.

How frustrating would it be to buy a book to help you solve the puzzle of a particular game, only to get it home, open it up, and discover that before you could solve that puzzle, you had to solve a completely different one to find the answer you needed for the first one? What's more, the book doesn't print the cipher keys anywhere -- you literally have to brute force your way through each substitution in each chapter, figuring it out yourself. So you're having trouble with Infocom's Witness (you're curious what the matchbook is used for, if anything), and you see this book on the shelf, advertising help for the game right on the cover. You get it home, flip to the proper chapter, only to discover this:

Is the matchbook useful?
Wyk poeg. Xyo phigk kdx ky mgywv kgv fdsjj lskwvdw.

You then vow if you ever get your hands on Carl Townsend, you're going to make him play a little game, Saw style, where you literally transform him into the proverbial "one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest" using your dad's power tools, a leather belt, and six friends clad in steel-toed boots.

If you want to own one of the worst computer game hint books on the face of the planet, the good news is that it'll only run you a couple bucks plus shipping. I can't imagine why you'd want to do this to yourself, but if there's one thing I've learned after a year on Steemit, it's that there truly are all kinds of people on this platform.