The Story of War

Text adventures have largely fallen out of favor in the decades since their heyday. When computers barely could handle color, let alone any kind of visuals, simple text adventures let players have fun in games while providing most of the visuals in their own head. The joy of reading was paired up with a game that actively fed you story details on the fly. It was a weird time, a period of gaming that would be impossible to recapture now because there is little point in trying to go back to that bygone era. Even as some writers are still cranking out text adventures for a small but adoring audience, most players have moved on and never looked back.

For a time, though, these adventures were the biggest kind of gaming you could get up to, and there was a small set of years where text adventures were huge business (or, at least, huge compared to the amount of time and work required to crank one of these out). Original stories could sell well, but obviously licensed adventures came with a built in fanbase and allowed companies to quickly get money back from people wanting to relive the experiences of their favorite show or movie. Couple that with the fact that in the early 1980s home media wasn’t a market that had truly developed yet, and for many players the only way to go back and relive their favorite movie was to do so in related projects, like comics, novelizations, and, yes, text adventures.

We’ve already looked at some text adventures before, such as the two different James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. adaptations, the unofficial Shaken but Not Stirred as well as the very official James Bond 007: A View to a Kill. Now we can turn our sights elsewhere to a different license, one that you wouldn’t think would lend itself quite as well to text adventuring: Rambo. This being an adaptation of an action film, conveying all the events in a text format does tend to lose some of the immediacy of the storytelling. There are still gunfights and action moments, but all of it is in text, which you read, at your own pace, which conflicts with that same action. It’s weird, and doesn’t always work, but at the very least, if you were a Rambo fan, you could sort of relive the first sequel’s story once more.

Rambo: First Blood Part II, the text adventure, is a pretty close adaptation of the 1985 film of the same name. You start as John Rambo, dropping into the jungle to investigate a POW camp that might still be in operation and might just still have prisoners, despite the Vietnamese swearing up and down that all their prisoners had been released back to the U.S. Once you land, you have to explore your way up, find Agent Co, who will help you get to your target destination, and then find the camp and figure out not just how to get into it but also get the prisoners out of it. Many expected twists and turns from the movie then occur, and you’ll have to think your way through puzzles to make your way to the end of the game.

The adaptation is close to the film, although not exact. Some of this comes down to providing items to collect, such as needing to trade a camera (which you might not realize you were carrying unless you spend time examining your own character via text commands) so that you can get a canteen (which you’ll need much later when your character is dying of thirst). Other times it’s simply adding traps or tricks that you need to avoid, and if you fail to do so, well, you die. And yes, as this is a text adventure, there are plenty of ways you can die, all leading you back to the very start of the game where you get to experience it all over again.

Some changes, though, were made to the story. For instance, John Rambo is dropped into Vietnam at the very start of the game, with all the introductory scenes from the film having been dropped in this adaptation. Since this is about getting Rambo to the camp and finding the POWs, this makes sense. Most adaptations of Rambo: First Blood Part II put the emphasis on the POW rescue, ignoring everything else that happens in the film because they detract from the “good bits”. Action is more important than storytelling normally, and since Rambo is pretty passive in the early going of the film, it does make sense here to trim the story to the points where the hero is the active decision maker.

The game, developed by Mindscape, Inc. (who made a lot of text adventures back in the day) does also take liberties with what Rambo has to do on his journey. Doing things like collecting that canteen, or picking up a random branch, or grabbing vines, should all be expected because your character is going to have to do some pretty random tasks to get through the tricks and traps of the game. It’s not as bad as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game where just getting the babblefish so you can venture further into the game past the opening hour requires collecting three different random bits from Arthur Dent’s house, using them in incongruous ways, and then being quick about grabbing the fish lest it gets swept away by a multitude of different cleaning drones, leaving you completely unable to progress… but it’s also at times not that far off.

Did you realize you had to pack away your parachute into a random log at the start of the game? If not, you’re dead. Did you remember to shoot a sniper you might not have realized was even waiting for you? If not, you’re dead. Did you place a random branch across a spike pit so you could then cross that pit and continue into the jungle. If not, yep, you’re dead. And that says nothing about the fact that oftentimes your best actions are to wait or hide so that you don’t get caught, and if you don’t even realize those are options in the moment, yep, you’re dead. The game can be pretty unforgiving, which is annoying when there’s so much text to get through on a pretty linear storyline.

Of course, there’s also the fact that the text parser isn’t all that great. Take, for example, that bit with the branch. If you don’t phrase the command exactly the way the game expects you to, the game will reply back that it doesn’t know anything about the branch, even though it understood you putting the branch down but now is clueless about how the branch works or what you’re supposed to do with it. And there are plenty of instances like this, where because you said something slightly wrong you can’t progress. And while it’s a text adventure and you can retry as many times as you like, the game also puts pressure on you, having roving patrols and helicopters moving around, such that if you are stuck in one place for too long you’ll get shot and killed, back to the start to try again.

This kind of penalty for experimenting actively hurts the experience. You’ll get frustrated battling the text parser, and that’s even if you actually know what you’re doing and you remembered to collect everything. If you have a guide open in front of you to get through the game (if you can even find one) you better hope they didn’t typo anything, and if you’re trying to do it yourself you’re going to spend a lot of time redoing the same scenes over and over as you work to get back to your last spot to try again. All assuming you even want to.

It really is an unforgiving game, which doesn’t really aid the title in keeping you immersed in the story. Once you figure out a path up to the next trick or trap, you’ll end up typing the commands quickly on your next “life” to get right back to that spot again, skipping past all the story and development. It becomes more of a chore than a fun experience, especially considering how linear it is, and at a certain point, I expect, most players will give up and go play something else. There were other text adventures at the time that were more willing to let players experiment, to try new things or, at the very least, be sarcastic and silly when they tried and failed (such as the aforementioned The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which was at least hilarious even when it was punishing you).

Rambo: First Blood Part II is just a vindictive, mean game that doesn’t know how to have fun. As an adaptation of the movie it’s okay, but you’re best off playing it with an accurate guide you can trust. I feel bad for anyone that tried to work their way through this game back in the day before the internet let players collaborate on guides to help clearing titles like this. This Rambo adventure is actively cruel and simply not worth your time.