Rise in Crime
Imagine a galaxy-wide civilisation governed as a federation. The vast majority of the inhabitants of this fat, sprawling union of stars are contented. There is virtually no crime; anyone who slips through the early conditioning is usually caught in his/her first misguided attempt at petty theft. Imagine no more, for this is your reality! You are one of the abnormal few: unconditioned, discontented, insubordinate! You have been penalised for more and more serious offences. After a badly executed attempt at shoplifting you have been confined to your bedsit by Securi-droids pending an investigation and almost certain application of the psychic lance! You decide you have nothing to lose and everything to gain! As you see it, a life of crime is the only way you can rid yourself of the shackles of this conformist, mind-imprisoned society. It could be that a Rise in Crime might benefit both you and the galaxy right now...
This is the introduction to "Rise in Crime", a Heyley Game for the Acorn Archimedes which was published through Robico Software which was one of the biggest names in Acorn adventuring. It was only the second game that Tony and I had written together. We both felt that "The Taroda Scheme" had been Heyley's best game so far and this was because we had written it together. The plot was better, the jokes funnier and the puns worse (which is a good thing, by the way). When I got my new Archimedes we immediately started work on a game which we had been planning for a while. It was to be based on the premise behind Harry Harrison's "Stainless Steel Rat" books..
The working title of this game was "Criminal Pursuits" but Robico felt that this was too close to "Trivial Pursuit" so we renamed it to "Rising Crime" and then "Rise in Crime". The idea behind these titles was that as you went on in the game, stealing more and more money, you were climbing the hierarchy of criminals until you are a master of the art of thievery.
We made extensive to the modified Adventurescape system which we had been using for our BBC games. We added graphics, multiple object descriptions and Tony wrote a truly excellent full sentence parser which understood sentences such as "GO NORTH THEN WEST, TAKE EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE BUCKET, WEAR THE COAT AND SEARCH IT". It is actually a huge game, with over 60,000 words of text, 400 locations, 1100 messages and responses, 150 objects and took us a year to write.
Download Rise in Crime
Rise in Crime (final Archimedes version)
Rise in Crime (source code)
Rise in Crime (raw data)
The source code is here for you to play with and do whatever you like with. If I knew who owned the rights to the game and the original AdventureScape system then I would contact them and then try and put this out under a Creative Commons license. However, at the time of uploading this here, I have not managed to contact the author of AdventureScape (Jonathan Evans) or the guys who ran Robico (Mike and Rob O'Leary). If you are one of these people or hold the rights to these programs and object to this data being here please contact me and I will remove it.
To look at this raw data then you need to use an Archimedes emulator and mount the source code disc images as disc 0 and the data as disc 1. Then you need to boot from disc 0 and follow the on-screen menus. Make backups of the disc images as you are actually editing the game data itself.
See here to find out how to run these games.