#ANCIPITAL

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[everygame]

Ancipital

Developed/Published by: Llamasoft Released: 10/1984 Completed: 12/05/2024 Completion: Collected GOATS and all camels on easy, no quicksaves, only allowing myself to rewind if I walked into a wall because dying because you walk into a wall is absurd. 1,567,999 and 62%. Version Played: Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

The final game of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story’s “The Hairy Years” section, after my first game of Ancipital I thought “well this is another overdesigned, confusing, flawed bit of Llamasoft nonsense that I don’t get at all.”

Because I’m a professional, I kept playing, and I’ve ended up thinking that Ancipital is a overdesigned, confusing, flawed bit of Llamasoft nonsense that I… kind of love???

Ancipital is not especially easy to explain, but I’ll have a crack at it. It’s essentially Jeff Minter’s attempt to take on the multi-screen adventures that ruled the home computer era–your Jet Set Willys and the like. There are 100 connected screens here, but rather than jump around them avoiding enemies and collecting items, your hero, a wee goat man, is able to change gravity to move to each side of the screen, and you have to survive on each screen until a timer runs out before you can go to another. But not only that. Each room you go to has up to 4 exits (one on each wall) and the only way to open those exits is to perform the action required in the screen to open them.

Generally, this means shooting enemies. In the simplest examples (like on the first screen) if you shoot an enemy, their corpse falls onto the side of the screen you are standing on (so if you’re standing on the right, they fall right.) Each time you get some screen shake feedback, you know you’re doing it right, and you’ll see the indicator in the HUD update to let you know that the wall has been damaged (you can tell which walls have doors in each room because the HUD marks them. So don’t waste time firing from a wall that’ll never turn into a door.)

Of course, it’s not all that simple. In other screens, you might have to shoot particular enemies. Or collide with them. Or not shoot them at all. To help, in a surprisingly generous fashion, Minter has ensured every screen has a hint that you can pause the game to see, which helps significantly. And, if you’re completely stuck or about to die, you can fire your “body bomb” which kills you but opens all the doors on screen, rather handily.

Your goal, then, is to complete all 100 screens, but to make it more of an adventure, the map isn’t fully open and you have to collect seven coloured camels–each of whom unlocks some doors on the map that can’t be opened otherwise. And you also have to collect five goats to spell G-O-A-T-S, which grants you the power to open doors on walls just by leaping on them. It’s necessary, apparently, to 100% the game, and is the only way to open doors after you’ve left a screen once–because if you leave a screen once the timer is up, the screen is cleared of enemies, so it’s impossible to perform the actions that would open any doors.

This is… surprisingly complicated, but once you get it, you get it. Get into a room. Work out what you need to do to open doors. Do that, opening every door in the room, leave as soon as the timer is up, repeat. With the idea that across multiple runs you’ll start to find camels, goats, and work out the optimum path.

It is, as I said, still somewhat flawed. The C64 screen is cramped especially with the amount of information the HUD has to convey, and so most screens are absolute chaos as you find it incredibly hard to actually avoid taking damage from enemies. Like Revenge of the Mutant Camels, then, it ends up an endurance shooter–you have a long health bar, and revealing doors actually gives you some health back. There are some tactics here for super-players, I think–if you can survive to the point where you get the GOATS power opening as few doors as possible, then you can keep a bunch in your back pocket to heal when you need. But I suspect most players never got that far, although on easy you’re given loads of lives. The system ends up, as in Revenge of the Mutant Camels, just feeling kind of sloppy and unrewarding, which is actually disappointing, because your wee goat man controls surprisingly well. You have to master mid-air gravity changes to switch to perpendicular walls, and it just feels good, but no matter how responsive he is there’s many a frustrating moment as you find yourself unable to get away from an enemy before it’s sapped most of your life bar–worst on a room where all the doors are already opened. There’s also the terrible decision that if you simply walk into a wall, you die. I think it’s a quirk of the collision related to mid-air gravity changes–if you turn too late and slam into a wall on your side, you die, so if you walk into one you’re technically on your side so you die–but it’s so annoying that I immediately started rewinding when I did that. I feel no shame and you shouldn’t either.

Despite these flaws, Ancipital got its hooks into me. Learning how to complete each room was enjoyable, and my first few games ending in dead ends made me understand how to play the game. It came with a manual featuring a blank map, and it’s clear that filling it in with details, essentially writing your own guide for the game as you go, would be part of the fun.

However, if you’re like me, you’re going to admit that you don’t have time for that, and probably start hunting around to see if there are any guides or anything easily accessible online. Well, there aren’t… or weren’t!

You see, I remembered that Ancipital was featured in Retro Gamer #253, and there’s an aside in the article that mentions that legendary games journalist and developer Gary Penn attributes his start in the industry to being the first person to complete Ancipital, and sending a guide in to Personal Computer Games magazine, where it was published.

Again, I have to give props to archive.org for coming up with the goods, because it was with some quick skimming through their collection I was able to find it. And here it is!

My heart sank when I read that he’d sent a mega-map and tips for every room of Ancipital and that they’d only printed a small selection (although surprisingly they do print some of the handiest tips, for ? and 1st Phagorian, which are both troublesome) because I imagine those are lost forever. But this is still a superb resource for anyone who might actually want to give Ancipital a shot. I suggest for anyone who likes the sound of it that you start playing, get used to the controls, mess around and get lost. Then, when you want to take it seriously… just use Gary’s map! You’ll still have to solve nearly every room, and survive them in the first place. It’s almost like a curated tour of the game, and it’s one I enjoyed very much. I’ll admit that eventually the game got too much for me–there are too many rooms where I feel taking damage is impossible, and you eventually just run out of lives–so I was quite satisfied to give it up having seen 62% on my best run. But this is a great wee game for those willing to give their time to it.

Will I ever play it again? I don’t intend to, but one of the nice/interesting things about this is that it just about splits the difference between a score attack and an adventure. Taking on my current high score would take a fairly ridiculous amount of time, but it’s not like I wouldn’t be interested; just get better on the rooms you can avoid damage on I guess…

Final Thought: Speaking of, one of the most amusing and revealing things Minter admits in his writing on Ancipital is that on launch he had only ever managed to see 89% of the game on a single run. One has to assume that he had tested every screen and confirmed that you could actually get 100% before it came out, but he must have felt a relief when that letter from Gary Penn dropped through the letterbox…

Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! If you read this on ko-fi, you'd have got an exclusive Ancipital poster that you could use as your phone background. You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[interretialia]

Novem Sententiae Quas Alienissimis Insusurres I. “Consilia habeo. Habesne adamantem?” II. “Arachides salsae! Arachides salsae! Arachides salsae!” III. “Gorilla clam sum.” IV. “Cohaerentne tibi haec? Dico, ulla pars eorum?” V. “Simula nos testudines Lutherum atque Aemiliam nomina habentes esse, quis utrum nomen habeat mea non interest.” VI. “Tuine quoque sinus pleni maccaronum caseatorum sunt?” VII. “Elephanto pervectus sum.” VIII. “Panis verus est.” IX. “Si mehercule res se aliter haberet, credo nos dominos sepulcretorum esse potuisse, ambos aemulatione certantes et descendentes ad magis magisque temerarios ac, sine me dicere etiam hoc, ancipites atque, immo, non legitimos modos quibus comprehenderemus, ut ita dicam... incolas perpetuos.”

Nine Things to Whisper to Complete Strangers 1. “I have the plans. Do you have the diamond?” 2. “Salty peanuts! Salty peanuts! Salty peanuts!” 3. “Secretly, I am a gorilla.” 4. “Does this make sense to you? Like, any of it?” 5. “Pretend we are turtles named Luther and Emily, I don’t care who’s who.” 6. “Are your pockets full of macaroni and cheese, too?” 7. “I arrived by elephant.” 8. “Bread is real.” 9. “You know, under different circumstances, I believe we could have been the owners of rival graveyards, each resorting to increasingly desperate, not to mention questionable, nay, even illegal, means to secure, how shall we say... permanent residents?”

(Versio Anglica.)

[alittlefrenchtree]

Thanks to the lovely @lfg1986-2, Timmy’s introduction speech for Armie in Austin has popped on my dash and I didn’t expected the small shock that came with me hitting play on the video.

Maybe it’s because I’m currently writing a 7 chapters story taking place in the 12-15 hours following this scene (in a fictional way (maybe, I don’t know, I wasn’t there) but I hadn’t ancipited how much I have to see the whole video/speech again and being very attentive to it.

2018!Timmy sounds and feels SO DIFFERENT than today!Timmy. And I’m not saying this in a bad kind of way like *it was better before* or *i don’t like who he is now* but in a *wow, he has really grown for better and for worst*. I hadn’t seen anything that old for a while and looking at it from today, the difference made in more or less 4 years feels gigantic. I don’t know if I making a lot of sense right now but I’m a) a bit emotional about it but b) mostly pensive and contemplative about Timmy and human beings in general.

But more importantly, I really need to remember that I’m currently writing a 2018!Timmy and not a 2022!Timmy. Poor thing was definitely a lot less confident.

[tipsypixel-sims]

Finley Robinson - Founder

Aspiration: Popularity/Knowledge

LTW: Become Mayor

Zodiac: Virgo

Traits: Eco-Friendly/Daredevil/Ambitious/Social Butterfly/Charismatic

Hobby: Science/Weather

Turn Ons: Adventurous/Bookish Turn Offs: Bad Rep

Diploma: Political Science

Growing up in a hippie commune, Finley didn't have the most conventional upbringing. While she did and still does value a lot of her parents beleifs, she always dreamed of another life. One thing she got from her parents was her avid political activism, which led to run-ins with the police more than once in her teenage-years. At university she found her passion in political sciences as well as new living concepts, which was the subject of her thesis. She is excited to lead Pinaccle Peaks in setting up basic infrastructure. But, while she does love a challenge, governing a town full of knowledge-Sims might prove more difficult than she ancipitated...

[marareblogs]

Wake up in a world so digital

So rigital it’s physical

You take me for an ancipital individual

I’d have to agree if I wasn’t so clinical

Thank you for the typical theoretical

[lucianopagano]

Irrompere nell'immaginario con visionarietà

Bisognerebbe avere la forza di irrompere nell’immaginario con una visionarietà eclatante, debordante, deragliante, al di là di tutto ciò che è stato immaginato in precedenza. Così soltanto si può costruire in quella zona di un’eventualità creativa che fa nascere il nuovo facendo percepire il precedente come remoto, e non solo passato. Allo stesso tempo facendo percepire il presente come già gettato in avanti, giano, ancipite, di un futuro anche esso denso di remote conseguenze. Un’immagine che può tradurre questo concetto è «Underground» di Emir Kusturica, di quasi trenta anni fa. Chi poteva attendersi una metafora di questa portata, in tal senso, una rivoluzione?

[gertlushgaming]

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review (PlayStation 5)

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review, 42 of the weirdest, trippiest, sheepiest games ever created. Enter the mind of Jeff Minter, the legendary creator of Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner, and Tempest 2000, in this interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse.

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review Pros:

- Graphics are from every generation. - 3.97GB download size. - Platinum trophy. - You get the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5 versions of the game. - Interactive documentary gameplay. - You work your way along the timeline of events. - Videos can be fast-forwarded, rewound, and paused. - Subtitles can be turned on and off with a button press. - High-quality video. - Simple controls. - You can turn menu music on and off. - Clear crisp and clean menu system that is just so good to look at. - An excellent time capsule. - If you have played the Atari 50 The Anniversary Celebration you get that again but for the one game. - Thumbnails for the games show the original box art and original scans of the floppy discs. - There are four chapters to the documentary and each has a completion percentage. - Original scans of paperwork, notes, concept art, letters, and more. - All images can be zoomed in and out and pan around. - Attack the documentary in any order you like. - Such high production value. - Full games list - - Sinclair ZX81 - 3D3D - Centipede Commodore VIC-20 - Abductor - Andes Attack - Deflex V - Gridrunner - Hellgate - Laser Zone - Matrix: Gridrunner 2 - Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time - Ratman Commodore 64 - Ancipital - Attack of the Mutant Camels - Batalyx - Gridrunner - Hellgate - Hover Bovver - Iridis Alpha - Laser Zone - Mama Llama - Matrix: Gridrunner 2 - Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time - Psychedelia - Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Revenge of the Mutant Camels II - Rox 64 - Sheep In Space - Voidrunner Sinclair Spectrum - City Bomb - Headbangers Heaven - Rox III - Superdeflex Atari 8-bit - Attack of the Mutant Camels - Colourspace - Gridrunner - Hover Bovver - Turboflex Konix Multi-System - Attack of the Mutant Camels '89 Atari ST - Llamatron: 2112 - Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Super Gridrunner Atari Jaguar - Tempest 2000 Reimagined - Gridrunner Remastered - A real joy to experience. - It's such a fun amazing insightful trip into the mind of one of Britain's most popular and famous Developers. - You get a glimpse into how the British gaming scene was in the early days like events and the art of selling. - Play all original and concept games. - High-scan images of the cassettes and box art with all of them in 3D. - Each timeline has an explored percentage and makes a noise to say you've done it. - Handy just play the games option. - 43 games to play including the different versions of the same game. - You can launch games from the timeline. - An excellent mix of games and mini-documentaries laceEvery game has a fast save/load feature. - Each game has a screen mode, filter, and border settings. - Stick settings can be adjusted – Invert the axis and sensitivity sliders. - You can reset games. - All games can be quit and returned to the main menu. - This shows again why Digital Eclipse is the team to deliver these exceptional museum pieces. - You get to see how devs used to show off and introduce their games to the public. - Full history of the Llama obsession? - Shows how the game used to be whacky, fun, a bit out there and dare I say experimental. - Gameography shows each game in a list. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review Cons: - No cheats or adjustments are built into any of the games. - Doesn’t have any online leaderboards. - Uninspiring trophy list with nearly half of them being for one game. - The background music is not great. - Timelines in this one seem a bit more subdued with a lot of images and only a few videos per chapter. - Doesn't include the newer games like PSVR games and Atari branded games. (more an FYI) - Needs a physical release. Related Post: Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft Review (PlayStation 5) Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story: Official website. Developer: Digital Eclipse Publisher: Digital Eclipse Store Links - PlayStation Read the full article

[timidarimations]

Swordtember 4: Amphisbaena + Dragonslayer

~Ancipit~

This blade may enable you to take the dragon's life, but be wary of what it may take from you in return...

[bogology]

Pliny explicitly contrasts the more complicated multicursal form of the Egyptian (and, by extension, the Cretan) labyrinth with the unicursal design of mosaic floors, and early authorities agree that one could easily get lost in three-dimensional labyrinths. But an intriguing hint of confusion between unicursal and multicursal designs may be found in Pomponius Mela’s account of the Egyptian building, which has “one descent down to it, but inside has almost countless routes which are doubtful [ancipites] because of the many deviations, which turn this way and that with a continuous curvature, and entrances that are often dead ends [revocatis]. The labyrinth is entangled by these routes, which impose one circle on another; by their bending, which constantly returns as far as it had progressed; and by a wandering which is extensive but which can nevertheless be unraveled.” Mela seems to want it both ways: the building’s many paths, multiple internal entrances, and dead ends are sure signs of an inextricable, multicursal maze, yet at the same time he apparently envisages a single entry to the whole maze and a continuously curving path, winding back and forth, that eventually leads to extrication—a design that would resemble the unicursal pattern. Perhaps Mela simply blurred Pliny’s careful formal distinction in trying to describe the maze’s groundplan in words; but this uncertainty—or is it a tendency to see the maze as both unicursal and multicursal?—is characteristic of much classical and medieval thought and may reflect a reconciliation of the unicursal model familiar in art with the multicursal model of literature.

[freedomainnames]

ancipital-pelagian.com

[retrocgads]

UK 1985

[everygame]

Iridis Alpha (C64)

Developed/Published by: Llamasoft Released: 1986 Completed: n/a Completion: Played it so, so much and still only managed a measly score of 8740.

The thing that strikes me most about Jeff Minter after, by this point, playing nearly every game that he released until 1987, his most prolific period, is his contradictions. His games have wacky narratives and comical graphics, but also have complex designs. Then despite those complex designs, they lack strict rules to game feel, and can feel not just sloppy and frustrating but almost unfinished in some cases–like half-formed ideas, untested by anyone but Minter himself. And Minter would be quick to attack on being accused of this–clapping back in his newsletters, in a public spat with Zzap 64–but by all accounts otherwise an incredibly gracious person with a ton of time for his fans.

With that in mind, it’s kind of hard, frankly, to not be frustrated with Minter’s progress in this period. To not question if there’s some sort of unconscious self-sabotage in his releases from the high point of Ancipital, with Mama Llama and Batalyx simply incomprehensible. It feels like there’s a chip on Minter’s shoulder; that in his mind he’s showing that games are more than just action adventures where you pick up objects and take them to another room or shooters where you shoot everything you can see, but his designs are so uncompromising that no one can follow him where he’s going. And yet where he’s going often seems led by whim rather than reason.

Which brings us to Iridis Alpha. A second attempt at an overhaul of the Defender-a-like after Sheep In Space, which has all of the issues discussed above, Iridis Alpha pushes things even further than Mama Llama in terms of complexity, but is actually controllable at all, so it’s at least got that.

You play a pair of “gilbys” which are robots that either whizz around like the ship from Defender or which walk back on forth on land shooting bullets in the air like a popcorn popper if you land. Your goal is, ultimately, to survive all the waves of enemies on a level and then move to the next one.

However.

After the first 3-wave level, you’re doing this with both Gilbys at the same time, one on the top screen, one on the bottom, and you switch between them by flying through warp holes left by the enemies you kill. You have to switch between each ship regularly because if you don’t, you build up entropy in the side you’re not controlling, which leads to a death.

In addition to this, you can’t just blast wildly. Every enemy you kill gains health, which is good, because as usual you die if you take too many hits. However it’s also bad, because if you gain too much health, you also die. Meaning that you either have to take some hits or land on the ground so your Gilby can discharge some of their power (which eventually leads to a mini-game where you can gain extra lives.)

There also is an extremely complex level map that I will simply express to you now that I do not understand.

The thing that strikes any player of Iridis Alpha is that it honestly feels very good to play. Your gilby stays locked in the center of the screen; acceleration and speed feels good, the auto-fire is rewarding, and while it’s a little annoying trying to take off from the ground when you’ve landed, it’s not insurmountable. Within the first waves you’re only controlling a single Gilby, so you start to pick up the energy managing mechanics. You think–adding entropy to this won’t be too hard. I can do this.

Anyway then the next thing that happens is that the third wave features ships, "lickers", that stick to you and drain your health until you explode, and they seem to do this immediately, unfailingly and be nearly impossible to shake off so you lose all your lives and have to start again.

It is the closest, it feels, that Minter has come to straight up telling the player to fuck off.

The lickers appear. This person's game is already over, they just don't know it yet.

A game like Mama Llama is simply idiosyncratic; Hell Gate is simply pushing intensity as far as it can go. But this is naked contempt. Minter has created a hard game that requires optimum concentration, but he won’t actually even let you play it to the fullest unless you can beat a truly cruel difficulty spike that isn’t even fun in the name of making it brutally clear that he’s making a “thinking man’s shooter.”

You see, the trick here is that it’s a harsh lesson in that you can’t just use auto-fire the whole time. In order to survive this wave, you have to learn to manoeuvrer your gilby at the maximum speed you can manage, avoid the ships in front of you, and quickly turn and fire briefly to spawn lickers, who begin to track you, but die if they don’t touch you within a second. Fire constantly, you spawn them in front and too many. Don’t go fast enough, they get you. Go too fast and they fly off screen before they die.

It’s probably the worst brick wall I’ve ever faced in a video game. This isn’t, say, an exacting jump in The Lost Levels; this is having to track several things at once while having complete mastery of controls. Managing it with one gilby is a nightmare and I certainly haven’t reached the point where I can do it with two–once you unlock the “full” game they show up with regularity and you have to beat the third wave licker gauntlet for a second time upside down, providing a second difficulty spike and by that point, honestly, the game feels to chaotically unfair to want to push through.

It is astonishingly frustrating, because otherwise the game has an interesting design and feels good! You start to wonder if there’s some kind of unpleasant gatekeeping here; notably the number of enemies left in a level is listed in hexadecimal so it’d be gibberish to anyone except another programmer.

The message is clear: you aren’t part of the club. The question is how much you want to try to be.

Will I ever play it again? For me, there's a limit. The lickers are it.

Final Thought: Unusually, there actually sort of is a club for Iridis Alpha, unlike, say, Mama Llama, and the very few members seem invested in having you join it. You can read an entire book that goes over the assembly code of the game–I would argue possibly the least commercial book ever published–and there’s even a YouTube video from someone laboriously trying to explain how to play it that seems to be narrated by Jerry Springer (though he doesn’t make a point of explaining how to get past the licker ships, absurdly.) There’s even an unlisted video I found that’s another play guide too! 

I appreciate this kind of thing, but seeing a rare few putting this kind of effort to express the artistry of Iridis Alpha only makes me more disappointed in what it is, a game that no human past 1987, who hasn’t just stumped up £12.95 saved up from their paper round, is going to put their time in to get past the third wave in. Christ I played it for days on end and I can’t do it consistently and using rewind feels like a cheat.

There are more missed opportunities in Minter’s career, but this might be the most insane own goal. 

Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[elizabethanism]

Word of the Day: ANCIPITOUS (adj.) uncertain, doubtful

[clockworkcheetah]

havent watched this weeks taskmaster (probs wont til tomorrow) so i am just living in fear with what mike did

[theartofkama]

In August again, I went all out on old Maesty. I’d reworked him entirely, and even got into talk-sprites-