FRGR #14: Mr. Seek - Kaivosseikkailu (Teknopiste, 1985)

Written by Jari Paulin for the Spectravideo SVI-318/328 and MSX computers, and published by Teknopiste in 1985.

The cover picture here is a composite of two images, as an attempt to recreate a clean image of the original packaging as closely as possible.

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INTRODUCTION

Perhaps a bit unexpectedly, we have a review of a Finnish game to separate the April of Abominations' two comparisons. The area of Finnish game developing history that has always baffled me the most is for the Spectravideo and MSX computers. Basically, the two systems walked hand in hand, and were somewhat compatible, but had to have their own versions released, if the creator wanted to expand their audience a bit. This incompatibility issue didn't really occur to me, until I bought a bunch of SVI tapes for my MSX collection, and found out they weren't compatible - two of the games also being Finnish, the other of which I have already written about a few years ago - Space Satellite. The other game is Mr. Seek - Kaivosseikkailu (A mining adventure), which has taken me a few years to get to play on my MSX, which then helped me to get the game working on MSX emulators. By no means, Mr. Seek could be considered anything close to the best Finland has to offer for the MSX and SVI computers, but it is perhaps one of the more well-known ones, seeing as there are dumps and documentation of it available online. Anyway, let's see what this little oddity has to offer.

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THE REVIEW IN ALL ITS GLORY

First of all, before getting into the game, it has to be made perfectly clear, that this game was written in BASIC, so any gameplay problems can be attributed to that. Secondly, in order to even get to play the game, you need to load the tape with the command BLOAD"CAS:" without the ,R extension or BLOAD"MRSEEK". Using the ,R extension only gives the computer a command it's not supposed to wait here.

Title screen and preparations.

Mr. Seek is surprisingly complex for a BASIC game, since it's a graphic arcade-adventure of sorts. Its complexity can sometimes be its own downfall, either in form of severe slowdown or bugs that suddenly prevent you from making any progress. Even in the title screen, you will experience some lag to your prompted instructions. What you need to do in the title screen, is to purchase a number of oxygen bottles, food and water, with a limited budget of $1100, and with that money, there is no way to buy the maximum amount of each. I've usually went with one oxygen, and two of the other two items.

The true slowness of Mr. Seek is shown in the first actual action screen. The screens are drawn similarly to what you see in old text adventures that have some graphics in them, so it takes about 10-15 seconds for a screen to get drawn. No, I didn't time it, but that's what it felt like. Walking around is a matter of pushing the directional keys, and hoping that Mr. Seek will go as far as you want him to. If you're using the wrong sort of machine setup on your chosen emulator, or even real hardware, Mr. Seek can play insanely slowly, and moving your man around can in these cases be somewhat unpredictable. Happily, though, any enemies you might meet up in the game move in a similarly unpredictable manner, and have very little in terms of artificial intelligence. But because you need to keep an eye on your oxygen, food and water levels, you really need to make haste and try to find the next oxygen bottle or other item in the mines.

Screenshots from early parts of the game.

 

Right off the bat, though, the controls might get you in deep trouble. Moving left and right is self-explanatory enough, as it climbing up and down the ladders and ropes. Personally, it took me a few tries to figure out how to jump onto a ledge just beside you, because there is no diagonal movement in the game. The way to do it is to jump up when you're next to the ledge, and then move into the direction of the ledge, while you're floating. Using the ladders and ropes doesn't require any such maneouvers, just be careful not to hit a directional key too many times, if you have nothing but air next to a rope or a ladder.

The other keys in the game are Space bar for hitting your stick (although I'm not entirely sure it helps anything), O for taking an item (ottaa = to take, in Finnish), F1 for showing your inventory and status, and apparently, the letter A is supposed to be the key to open doors with keys (avata = to open), but for me, the command works better when you press the S key, or something else in the near vicinity of A. And even then, none of them always work properly.

Further down in the caves.

The primary aim of the game is to find a hidden treasure deep within the mine labyrinth, but I've been thinking, maybe the aim is to find your zen mode through the unpredictable controls and any lack of self-preservation by playing this game for more than two minutes. Picking up items has been made unnecessarily complex, as you could just as well walk over them, but I suppose in a BASIC game like this, it would have been more complex to make the game perform such an automated task. Making contact with a rat or a bat, or any other hazard are usually instantly lethal, but sometimes a rat bite only makes you ill, and as I said before, wielding your stick doesn't seem to do much, so I don't know how else to deal with the enemies but just to try and avoid them.

There is a nice bug in Mr. Seek, which enables you to gather more treasure more quickly. If you pick up all the gold pieces in a screen, then enter your status screen by pressing F1, then go back to the game, sometimes the gold pieces will respawn, and you can gather them again. I have included a demonstration of this bug into the video accompaniment further down.

Text bits, from left to right:
Inventory/Status, Dialog with a witch, High score entry.

It's such a shame, that Mr. Seek is unpredictable at best, because it looks surprisingly good for what it is, and there are ideas implemented into the game way more than absolutely necessary, considering the language it was written in. For example, at some point, you will come across a cross, which reveals a witch behind it, who wants something from you. According to Jari Paulin, as he tells on his website, in exchange for information, you can give the witch some money, but if you don't give her enough money, the information is bad.

In some ways, Mr. Seek offers a fair amount of adventure and challenge, and for having been written in Microsoft BASIC, it is a bafflingly complex and large action-adventure. However, it is completely overshadowed by its wonky gameplay, which wasn't even particularly well accepted back when the game was originally reviewed by MikroBitti. Still, the review had a very good score, with four stars in the overall rating. According to the two paragraphs dedicated to the game in Juho Kuorikoski's book Sinivalkoinen pelikirja (Fobos, 2014; English version "Finnish Video Games - A History and Catalog" published in 2015 by McFarland & Co.), Jari Paulin wrote the game on his Spectravideo in a year, while on 9th grade in school, and ported it to MSX in six months, and he didn't expect it to become more than maybe a cover tape feature on a magazine, but was surprised to find Teknopiste wanted to publish it properly. In all honesty, so am I, but glad that they did so.

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OVERALL + VIDEO + AFTERWORDS

Having said all of the above, I find myself curiously wanting to go back to the game, just to see if I could discover a little bit more about it than I previously could bother. Mr. Seek has a certain strange feel about it, that can get you somewhat addicted to it, even if it plays like a snail and looks like a drawing made of sugar cubes. It might have something to do with the knowledge of it being written in BASIC, but I have always been a fan of spelunking and mining games in general, so I guess I'm kind of weird that way. But still, here are the traditional scores, as fairly as I'm able to give the game:

GAMEPLAY       3
GRAPHICS       4
SOUNDS         2
REPLAY VALUE   5
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OVERALL       3.5

Not impressed, in other words, but oddly intrigued, which is always a good thing. Since I couldn't find any video footage of Mr. Seek on YouTube, I decided to record some little bits of what I could bother to play when the game decided to work properly.

Maybe I'll do more Finnish game reviews later this year, since this one was such a short one. But before I can even get to think of those scenarios, there's still one more abomination left to be posted this April. Until then, cheers!