Dog Star Adventure (1979)

Play: 9/10 A lot like Colossal Cave and Adams adventures a la Strange Odyssey in particular. Compared to Adams' adventures (which were essentially contemporary as far as I know), I prefer how this one used the guards/stormtroopers like the dwarves in Colossal Cave as the challenge, rather than how many turns you used and otherwise you're screwed. I liked how successful shooting was, which was an improvement compared to that darn axe and the dwarves success rate--the only limitation was ammo instead of some arbitrary "you're screwed if you got lost in that maze, might as well start over" mindset. I definitely like the idea of ammunition being your limiting factor and the ability to return to the Supply Depot for more (I never wound up doing so, because I ran out of ammo close to the end, but I assume you can reload in the Supply Depot). Anyway, as mentioned, the guards remind me of the dwarves in the original colossal cave, but they also gave flashbacks to the beasts that roamed the jungle in adventureland, etc. Oh wait lol the hound was in the jungle of Strange Odyssey, so indeed, this and Strange Odyssey have a lot of similarities. Both released the same year too. Just exciting to see the Colossal Cave formula I love, but with a different author than Adams. I tried Lafore, and I wanted to enjoy the mystery-focused, more literary style quite separate from the Colossal Cave put-treasure-in-a-room formula, and though I have respect for the Lafore games, people who compare the difficulty of “knowing what to say” for Colossal Cave-derived games to the difficulty in Lafore’s mysteries are silly: once you get to know the terminology from the original Colossal Cave, you’re mostly set… while the mysteries was just a battle of making the computer realize what evidence I was noticing. The biggest battle with Dog Star Adventure was getting the actual original version -- and once I did, it was much more enjyoable! There are so many different versions, because he released the source code for others to build their own text adventures off of. It seemed most derivative games stuck to the original formula, sometimes adding more explicit Star Wars references, other times just tweaking things. Anyway, surprisingly, I got a Resident Evil 1 and 2 vibe near the end, with the quick brutal deaths if you don't notice a guard and the I.D., which you can acquire early in the game, but don't use till the very end. That gave a nice cozy feeling of the PS1 era I can't wait to get to, but seems it will be years before I'm there in my chronology project heh. In the end, this was a quality early text adventure I will be returning to. Only sad thing is, even on a replay where I used a solution (for a different version, but still thought I maneuvered the differences), I didn't quite hit the full points. All the more reason to replay!

Feel: 9/10 This is slightly boosted up mostly because the code was released publicly, before even Adams did that (as far as I know), and I respect that. Not a fan of navigating all the versions because of it, but love that Micklus did that. Anyway, I love the fundamental adherence to the bring treasures to a spot and completionism concept (yay for the return of telling your points out of a total at the end, I'm such a sucker for that! Tho I know you can check your score along the way, it feels so rewarding at the end.) It was rather difficult getting access to the original as opposed to the countless copies, “ports”, etc. that often changed basic stuff, not really unique games. I should've known IFDB was the way to go... I like how functional the writing is (tho wouldn't have minded some more descriptive/epic stuff), and love the space setting like with Strange Odyssey. I love that the code was publicly released in I believe 80, maybe even 79, so obviously it inspired a lot of other people to build off it hence the countless ports and pseu-dogstar adventures. Not sure how the release date compares to Strange odyssey within 79, but I liked both’s space focus (tho not a big Star Wars guy, so I wasn’t all giddy about the references in this one; I bet others might enjoy that, tho!). Oh, and gotta love the big mac/mcdonalds hamburger part lol. Like I said, I'm not a big Star Wars guy, which is probly what would have earned it 9/10, but instead it was Micklus' decision to release the coded (which I really shouldn't credit the game for, but like with Wander being bumped up for allowing game creation so early, it's hard to resist acknowledging Micklus doing that to some degree too).

Attachment: 9/10 I definitely will be returning to this, not only because I didn't quite get 100% completion and this is the best example of a not-Adams post-Colossal-Cave text adventure I've played so far, but also because there are other version I might wanna test out. The game was clever enjoyable, arguably brilliant. I don't know how I missed this during my first run of earliest text adventures. On par with Scott Adams easily! Give it a try if you're into early text adventures, especially space-themed ones, and if you're into Star Wars games! I'm curious if Micklus has made more (looks like he mostly made gambling games otherwise, but may be a couple other adventure games it seems).