From: xeno@iastate.edu (Gary L Snethen)
Subject: Re: Asylum (was Re: Top 10 Adventures)
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 03:02:35 GMT

In <librik.717979171@cory.Berkeley.EDU> librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik) writes:

>wms@ssd.intel.com (William Shubert) writes:

>>Thinking about my top 10 favorite adventures, I couldn't come up witha  list,
>>but I did think of an adventure I havent seen mentioned yet...does
>>anybody out there remember Asylum?

>YES!  Written by Frank Demmett of Med Systems Software (later Screenplay).
>Demmett's games were primarily huge and complex mazes; your task was to
>explore and map them.  There was about as much "adventure" element in them
>as in any other 16K adventure, but it seemed like so much more because of
>the complexity of the maze.  Fog, rotating squares, walls dropping from
>behind you, insane teleportation and utterly nonEuclidean geometry (one
>area had scrawled on the wall BEWARE THESE HALLS).  Deathmaze 5000 and
>Labyrinth were his first two games, and they were primarily mazes.

Corrected again...  Ok, Deathmaze 5000 was first... ;)

>Asylum and Asylum II took place in a nightmarish insane asylum, which
>was a series of pentagonal buildings filled with cells of strange characters,
>linked by those infamous mazes.  There was a fellow who joined you for a
>while, a master lockpick with a certain craving for cigarettes.  Denying
>his requests was unwise.

>Med Systems produced several traditional text games as well.  One I recall,
>but I never played, had an utterly brilliant idea I'd love to see re-used:
>you were imprisoned in an insane asylum being run by lunatic guards and
>semifascist doctors (a common theme in these games).  You broke out of

Oh my gosh... this is starting to sound really familiar!

>your cell, broke into a doctor's pharmacy, grabbed a bunch of drugs, and
>locked yourself in a closet.  The rest of the game consisted of you dosing
>yourself with psychedelics and hallucinogens, locked in that closet.
>(Eventually you were able to deduce enough from your "trips" to find your
>way out of the asylum.)  The promotional picture showed a grinning, stoned
>figure slumped on the floor.  (I suppose UU1 used a bit of this theme.)

'The Institute' ---  Yes... I solved it!  *ponder*  I remember it had a
different sort of interface.  I recall a pagan ritual, the titanic, and
several other of the hallucinogenic mini-adventures.  Wow...  Never
thought I'd find any one else who had ever heard of it... ;)

>I've never seen any of the Med Systems graphical games for any modern machines.
>I don't think they'd be as easy to port as the Scott Adams games (which
>were just an interpreter and some data), nor would they be too thrilling to
>a world which expects more from its graphics than simple mazes.  But they
>were great for a teenage student home from school for months and months during
>the summer with nothing else to do but spend days slowly mapping those mazes.

>- David Librik
>librik@cory.Berkeley.edu
>...who never did solve Deathmaze 5000, and thus does not have a free
>promotional "drooling madman with an axe" T-shirt.

<sigh>  Don't think I ever got past the damn calculator...

To everything, there is a season...

Turn... Turn... Turn...


---Xeno

Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction