Sunburst Contamination

This is an old 1988 basic game ported to Z-machine. It has a simple plot of you trying to … Well, it wasn’t entirely clear from what I played. You have to save your crew from contamination? It has some good puzzles, such as the videogame one. However, as it does resemble a Scott Adams game, there are many parsing issues, and backspace doesn’t work, instead outputting what I assume is a space. Which confused me, but it didn’t affect me largely enough at all.

There was parsing problems, such as what seems to me as no way to turn on and off things. I tried TURN ON FLASHLIGHT, which responded “What’s the use of turning that?” So I tried ACTIVATE FLASHLIGHT. It didn’t understand. So I attempted TURN ON LIGHT, which responded again with “What’s the use of turning that?” Then I tried TURN FLASHLIGHT. Same thing. Then, finally I tried TURN HHH, and I was still given “What’s the use of turning that?” Which was confusing, since every other verb I tried it would go something like “What in space is on flashlight?” If I typed X ON FLASHLIGHT.

As well as this, a fountain and pond that are the main attraction and take up the most space in a room description are not implemented at all, yet some benches which take up half a sentence yet are vital to the game are implemented.

I did spend a lot of time trying to talk to something that was not implemented, and then I got it after about 15 different failed attempts.

Overall, there were some problems. Many directly listed objects weren’t implemented, and I couldn’t get very far into the game. If the game changes halfway through, I couldn’t get there because I spent so long walking around and trying different things.

While at 43 I often find myself feeling like a bit of a graybeard, my contemporary experience with vintage-era IF is actually fairly limited – I played a few Infocom games that I was a bit too young for, and outside of a few low-rent BASIC adventures that was pretty much it until Photopia got me into the amateur scene. I’ve managed to go back and patch up several of my biggest lacunae, but I’ve never felt especially tempted to check out the Scott Adams two-word parser games; I understand their historical relevance in cramming an adventure game experience onto the earliest microcomputers, but by reputation and upon first inspection they seem to have bare prose, a primitive parser, and obtuse puzzles, which aren’t exactly a cocktail that gets me excited.

Thus, I groaned when I saw that Sunburst Contamination was a Scott Adams homage from 1988, then given an update into Inform in 2007. And indeed at first blush it mostly lived down to my preconceptions: there’s the simple moon-logic plot overcomplicated with dream logic, for one thing, in which you’ve taken your employer’s spaceship on an unauthorized joyride to visit your girlfriend and now need to get back to base, except there are hungry toads who’ve gotten loose, and you need to run around the ship finding inexplicably-hidden ration packets to prevent the toads from eating them while in transit. There are the frequent typos, the unimplemented scenery (one of the first locations is named “Fountain,” with a description that spotlights the eponymous water feature – guess what response X FOUNTAIN gives?), the inevitable inventory limit, a nonsensical title, and then there’s the stuff that’s really baroquely terrible, like the “insignificant button” that can only be interacted with by calling it INSIGNIFICANT, rather than BUTTON, or the switched-off flashlight I spent a solid ten minutes guess-the-verb-ing in an ultimately futile attempt to activate.

I managed to struggle through the first half hour or so, by sheer force of will solving the initial couple of puzzles that gated access to the ship and collecting one or two of the seven ration packs, but pretty quickly hit a wall. There’s no included walkthrough, so I scoured the IFDB page and saw that the BASIC source code was available. I was bent on finishing the game – let it never be said that you don’t get value for money in a Mike Russo review-a-thon – but I figured I’d glance at the other reviews while I girded my loins to start back-tracing GOTO statements to discover what I was missing. And lo and behold, what did I see but a SPAG review from 2008 crowing about what a funny parody of Scott Adams style games the authors had pulled off.

Reader, the light dawned, and my good mood was further strengthened by the realization that CASA had a full walkthrough available and I didn’t need to go source diving after all.

Having played the game to completion, I can say I now kinda get the joke and see how it could be enjoyable? The flashlight bit is legit pretty funny, I have to say, and it is notable that the game is mostly merciful (I hit an issue where fumbling around with the cargo-crane controls got me in an unwinnable position, but I think that was due to a bug rather than intentional design); likewise careful trial and error, paying close attention to the verbs the ABOUT text tells you are implemented, will get you through most of the puzzles, even though the game’s humor extends to messing with the verb list. I think this is an attempt to make a game that sends up the extreme difficulty of those Scott Adams games, while still providing enough modern conveniences to be player-friendly.

Except, well, this is a game from 1988, so player-friendly by those standards still winds up feeling pretty forbidding today; meanwhile, the tropes being parodied have sufficiently receded that I suspect it’d be hard for most modern players to tell the difference between a sincere and a satirical implementation. The overall effect is like one of those jokes in Chaucer you need the footnotes to understand; now that I get what Sunburst Contamination is up to I appreciate what it’s doing, but I’m too far away from the target audience for the gag to truly land.

Played : 7/19/24
Playtime: 10min, 1hr of setup/source code reading

There are games, in IF a LOT of games, that hearken back to the golden age, dawn of IF. Successful examples can match the tone, humor and idiosyncratic fussiness to make for a warm experience. Thanks to the dynamite efforts of heroic fans across the years, a lot of original games are still available to modern audiences either through emulators or explicit porting and of course the legendary Z-machine legacy.

History has crowned some classics in the field, some games that even in their own time rose above their peers in gameplay, drama or humor, that delighted legions of fans and are rightly revered to this day. What we might forget is that for those games to rise, there was a veritable deluge of games from which they rose. Games that didn’t capture the imagination, whose opaque puzzles didn’t generate the mass-mind engagement, maybe whose limited platforms never got the market purchase to showcase their offerings. Thanks to computer literacy and pioneering efforts of motivated fans, we still have access to some of those today, too.

Sunburst Contamination is one such afterlife-gifted game, from the ranks of the lesser-knowns. Originally a Commodore 64 game, it was ported to ZMachine for its own stab at immortality. For me, it was the wrong kind of nostalgia. Nevermind I needed to install Frotz just to play it (which, honestly, why didn’t I do that sooner?), because modern interpreters like Gargoyle, Lectrote and Parchment can’t run it. Once I did fire it up in Frotz, it just kind of lay there. The game itself didn’t give me any clues what it wanted me to do, though thankfully the IFDB page did. I navigated its limited vocabulary, its largely empty spaces of unimplemented nouns, its wildly uneven implementation horizon, its bugs(?) - in one area I was able to bypass a gatekeeper without solving a puzzle, just using a different directional command. Then I got stuck on a door I couldn’t open, which, in fiction, I CERTAINLY would have known how to. I battered myself against it for enough time to know this was not where I wanted to be spending my time and quit. UNPLAYABLE is a hard word, and certainly back in the day, with expectations of frustrating trial-and-error would not necessarily apply here. Against modern standards, I found it so. Not all wine ages gracefully!

If you consume a lot of nostalgic IF, it is hard not to appreciate modern evolutions. By buffing down the cruelty and subtly expanding from the opacity of early efforts the FEEL of early IF can be evoked without the frustration that peppered so much of it. Interestingly, it has also reduced the need for online communities to trade hints and discoveries just to make progress. Between robust hint systems and walkthroughs, that forced community pressure is all but gone. Yet, here we are anyway!

My first stop after being stuck was to parse some existing reviews for hints. I didn’t get any, but I DID tumble onto a generous review that likened its gameplay to a Scott Adams spoof. What a bold, ephemeral choice! The reviewer claimed, which I have no reason to doubt, that the ‘bad’ gameplay, seemingly buggy implementation and even typos were all spoofing that particular style of IF. If you were deeply conversant in that playstyle, immersed in that zeitgeist back in the day, maybe this would land a lot better. Maybe its Adams-ness would trade on some cultural knowledge that clued its gameplay better, and made its frustrations funnier. Cultural Comedy often has the shortest shelf-life. 40 years on, gameplay norms have evolved significantly and what might in fact be hilariously cutting subversions of well-known tropes, now is just… unworkable. Like, if there was a SIDE-SPLITTING joke written in Aramaic - I totally wouldn’t get it, and may not even recognize it as writing.

My second stop after being stuck was so much more rewarding. I downloaded and started to parse the source code. My initial motivation was to parse the code directly to find the solution to my blocking hatch. I quickly lost myself in the sheer, willful majesty of the Basic code. What a treat that was! Spoiled as we are by modern languages with innovations like named variables and object orientation, even the code itself was a puzzle to understand! The mechanics of its primitive parser, the spaghetti of its gotos and gosubs, where puzzles were organized BY THE VERB USED TO SOLVE THEM. You may not know exactly what I mean here. What I mean is for objects that, say, need you to attach something, across the entire breadth of the game, ALL of it is implemented under if/else trees under the ATTACH verb! Authors were adding puzzle solutions inline, disconnected from all context! I didn’t get quite there in decoding my specific puzzle, but what an astonishing insight into those old author mindsets. How insanely motivated and lateral logic-mired must those authors have been?!? I love, love, love that this was preserved, and that I dove into it. The game itself left me pretty cold, but the IMPLEMENTATION was mesmerizing.