Just saying this has been a very nice reproduction of the text adventure game. I can still remember how to get the 350 points in the original... took me half a dozen attempts this time, but most of that was because I got killed by dwarves who always seemed to get the first throw.

(It took a bit longer to get the "explore every region" achievement because of the number of regions - including all of one maze and most of the other maze - missed in a perfect run. But 11 hours got me all the achievements.)

Just to say that, in the original, dwarves did not always throw first - sometimes they would appear but not throw a knife until you'd thrown the axe first. However once they started throwing knives they'd never stop till they were dead.

(And in at least one version, this may however have been a hacked version, they always missed with the first throw unless the player had taken an action after the dwarf's appearance, even if this action was neutral, such as to pick something up or drop it, or attempt to leave the area, which the dwarf would block.)

Nice, thanks. Does this update include the left handed support for VR (motion controller inputs)?

It's getting cool enough for VR again, is this more a pancake mode or VR mode? So I can make sure to get the best of it. :)

I should have mentioned this, but this 2.0 release is desktop only. We're working on the VR version of it, but struggling. The problem with VR is that you have twice the work to do (you have to render each eye independently) and a much more complicated interface. The SteamVR version is quite different from the PC version. Inventory works completely differently and there are three modes of Locomotion.

We're solving all the issues and our SteamVR version is by far the best, but it's also been the biggest challenge. We were going to hold the PC version to wait for SteamVR, but SteamVR has been week to week for months. My current guess is that we are within two weeks of releasing it, but I would have told you that in August, so ... we shall see.

Bottom line: SteamVR 2.0 is coming soon, and even if you played the 1.0 version it is well worth diving in again. (Note: The 2.0 version is a no-charge update. )

@jle30303 Hmmm... We have the source code from the oldest version of the game we could find, and the dwarves always get the first crack at you. They have a 90% chance of missing. You need to vanquish them whenever possible, otherwise their odds of hitting you go up, and they start teaming up and following you. I forget the number, but if you don't vanquish them you can get up to five attacking you at once, effectively ending the game. Once you vanquish one, that particular dwarf never come back, and there are a finite number, each unique.

Overall, it is intended to be a puzzle game, not an action game. The fun is discovering how to rid yourself of the dwarves, not to fight them. Plus, we felt it was important to exactly replicate the original game. There have been dozens, perhaps over a hundred clones of the game where developers each put their own mark on it. We wanted this to be the "original" as it was intended by Crowther/Woods.

A high point of the project for me was having Don Woods personally play the game. He is an impressive guy! Everyone of his emails nit picking the game were cherished by the team. We treated the game like a history preservation project. Our hope is that we'll give another 50 years of life to the game that was so important to the birth of the industry.

I can only say I'm really impressed at how well it was done. I played the original for the first time back in 1984... when I was 8 years old... on my dad's work computer in the original offices of Oracle UK, at the Thames Link House in Richmond, London... when the UK branch of Oracle started off in one floor of an office block, before Oracle UK grew kind of exponentially :-)

Have you checked out the Colossal Cave Adventure's "official" site at https://rickadams.org/adventure/? It's got a huge amount of Adventure-related resources and even links to a number of the different versions...

Don Woods himself produced one of the expanded versions, which he gave the version number 2 (later revised to 2.5) but is better known by its final points tally of 430, thus as "Adventure 430". I've played it (and also wrote the spoilers for it that exist on the Colossal Cave Forums on Delphi Forums, at http://forums.delphiforums.com/xyzzy/start ). It had a time limit so stringent that there is no existing documentation of anyone actually finishing within that limit, including Don Woods himself - it was *just* possible to finish before the lamp ran out (I have done so), but not to do it without points deductions for going over a turn limit.

(PS. His version requires that the bird stays around after scaring the snake away.)

Probably the best known expansion - certainly the version which has had the greatest number of ports and copies, other than the original - is "Adventure 550", sometimes referred to as "Adventure 3" but from a different branch of version numbering, by Dave Platt and Ralph Witt (yes THAT Ralph Witt, after whom Witt's End is named). Nobody knows what happened to *their* "version 2" of which this is the "version 3", except that presumably it was an earlier incarnation of the Platt/Witt branch of Adventure development.

Mike Arnautov's "Adventure 4", aka "Adventure 660" takes its version numbering of 4 from the "Adventure 3" of the Platt/Witt Adv550, which it uses as a starting point but combines with a now-lost "Adventure 440" (aka yet another "Adventure 2") by Peter Luckett & Jack Pike, whoever they were. Arnautov apparently found sufficient source code to recreate it. He has also subsequently written a further expansion on his own site, an "Adventure 770" which dispensed with a version number and just identifies itself by its maximum points (which has become something of a tradition in Adventure versions).

Meanwhile, yet another branch of development, by David Long, spawned an "Adventure 501", originally available as code that nobody has managed to get to work properly in decades, and its revision/expansion "Adventure 551" by Doug McDonald: which are known on the Rick Adams site by the version numbers of 5 and 6 but have nothing to do with the other version numbers...

Apparently there was once a 751-point version by David Long which was an expansion of his own 501-point version, but it is now lost. It is unclear how accurate a 1996 recreation of this, currently only available as source code, might be.

And there is also the rather large, buggy, fourth-wall-breaking "Humongous Cave", originally by Dave Malmberg, a version with no less than 1000 points, which takes the Platt/Witt 550-point branch (or arguably one of its copies by Matt Goetz) as a starter, but adds several more expanded areas to it (and scores more points for things that are simply doable but non-scoring in Adv550: so just completing the 550-point content of the game actually scores more than the original 550 points) but also badly nerfs all the mazes to just a few locations each.

Also... In some versions of the game, use of the magic words is allowed before they are legitimately "discovered" in-game. I believe in Woods's own Adventure 430, he allowed this himself as a Legitimate Shortcut (although you must actually unlock the cave to get the points for it)... but still never succeeded in beating his own time limit for maximum points.

However I believe this was not the case in the original version of the game - you had to learn the magic words before using them, as one does in your version.

And certainly in the Adventure versions which spawned the 550-660-770 branch (first Platt/Witt, then Arnautov), the dwarves did not always *throw* their knives immediately upon appearing - some of them would appear and throw at once, some of them would simply appear without throwing - though once you provoke them by throwing the axe at them, they started throwing, and then would not stop until either you or they were dead. If the dwarf hadn't thrown a knife yet, it would follow you from room to room but not throw a knife yet... though there was nothing to stop *another* dwarf coming in and starting the knife-throwing, forcing you to throw the axe (thus provoking the first dwarf, so if you missed, you'd have 2 knives thrown at you next turn).

I believe this was also true in the Don Woods Adventure 430 branch, where to get one of the treasures, you had to actually make a dwarf chase you into a room containing an ogre. When the dwarf came into that room, it would automatically throw a knife (even if it had not done so before), miss you and hit the ogre, causing the ogre to chase the dwarf out of the room so you could nick its treasure. The ideal strategy there was to hope to meet a dwarf which *didn't* start throwing knives at you immediately, so that it didn't throw a knife while it followed you all the way to the ogre's room.

To clarify, is 2.0 The Enchanted Edition an update for the previous version or is it being released as a new game that requires a separate purchase? I launched the game an dit seems to be the same. Thank you.

I bought this game from pure memories.

OK so I'm guilty of playing this game (during my lunch break) on a sperry-univac mainframe in the late 70' or very early 80's and in that version (and I suspect most of the really early versions) there was no requirement to know a magic word before using it. OK I admit being a programmer who knew such languages as Fortran, Cobal, Basic and more.

And in the game I played - the Dwarf never got the first hit with the weapon.

And in my next job - lunch time playing improved - Zork was available on Multics (add PL/1 to the list of languages) and not only did I use the debugger tool - but it expected me to and had extra content.

Originally posted by Rabbits:

To clarify, is 2.0 The Enchanted Edition an update for the previous version or is it being released as a new game that requires a separate purchase? I launched the game an dit seems to be the same. Thank you.

Hi Rabbits. It's an update to the game you've already got. Same game, but with A LOT of improvements, from real-time lighting to better animations, more sound effects, etc. There are also some technical additions like auto-save, added tutorials, and more. Same game, but ... different. And, better! I hope this helps to clarify!

Originally posted by jle30303:

Don Woods himself produced one of the expanded versions, which he gave the version number 2 (later revised to 2.5) but is better known by its final points tally of 430, thus as "Adventure 430". I've played it (and also wrote the spoilers for it that exist on the Colossal Cave Forums on Delphi Forums, at http://forums.delphiforums.com/xyzzy/start ). It had a time limit so stringent that there is no existing documentation of anyone actually finishing within that limit, including Don Woods himself - it was *just* possible to finish before the lamp ran out (I have done so), but not to do it without points deductions for going over a turn limit.

"Well, actually..."

About a year ago, I decided it was high time I finally played through Colossal Cave, the text adventure. (I had played a version back in the 80s, but it must have been buggy because a treasure that wasn't supposed to be a puzzle was impossible to pick up.)

This time, I picked the "open-adventure[www.catb.org]" re-implementation of Adventure 2.5. And since no one told me that getting a perfect score was apparently impossible, I assumed it had been achieved by lots of people. So once I had found what I figured was a reasonably direct path through the game, I set out to optimize it using every trick I could easily find in the source code.

It helped a lot that it was possible to specify a random seed at the start of the game, to make every playthrough behave the same way. Because not only did my solution depend on both the pirate and a dwarf showing up at the right time, I didn't even bother to pick up the axe. Don't get me wrong, the dwarves did show up from time to time. But always around the time I was making my way back outside with another armful of treasure.

Finally, I managed to get it down to 349 moves, and submitted it as a test case[gitlab.com] for the game's suite of automated tests. Little did I realize that I had accidentally taken advantage of a bug not present in the original game, so my playthrough wasn't valid after all. (Though from a testing perspective, this was actually a good thing!)

Fortunately, Ryan Sarson then took it upon himself to pick up the slack, and he's been posting updated walkthroughs to that issue. Apparently his latest is down to 328 moves.

Not to brag, OK, I'm bragging; I've managed to finish in 278 turns. I can post a screen shot but I don't know how to do so.

Having said that, and with my previous posts, I really enjoy this game. I continue to explore and try new ideas and techniques.

I too played the early text version when I was in college back in the late 70's on a Sperry mainframe at the University of Vermont. I spent many an hour in the computer lab on terminals in the Cook Science building, and even mapped out the game then on a piece of graph paper. I still have the map I made way back then but I don't remember if I actually completed the game then. The idea of the repository and lobby at the end doesn't come to mind from those days. This iteration from Ken and Roberta Williams really brings to life what I could only imagine back then. Thank-you.

Originally posted by jas500:

Not to brag, OK, I'm bragging; I've managed to finish in 278 turns. I can post a screen shot but I don't know how to do so.

If it's the 430 point version, I'm extremely impressed. I mean, just getting the ebony statuette (one of the treasures added for it) has you walking through about ten empty rooms, and then back again. And that doesn't count the detour you have to make first to be able to go there at all.

If it's the 350 point version, that's probably still very good!

I think the main reason people said it was impossible to get all the points in the 430 point version is that there's a point near the end where you do nothing but sit and wait for something to happen. And that's bad since you start losing points at 350 moves, but there's a way to shorten that wait quite a bit. (I don't know if that also applies to the modern remake.)

I need to find one of the alternative versions and take a crack at it. Curious to see what's in store!

I was referring to the current (new) version, not text. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Having said that, I believe the text version I played in college went beyond 350 pts but I see no mention of an ebony statuette in my original notes. In those notes, there were 3 additional magic phrases not in the current version.

I would love to see the current version expanded to include the additional areas for exploration. Thanks.