Starship Adventure: Early Exit

(Continued from my previous post.) I finished the game (sort of) and then I finished it again (this time with more hints). I’ll explain what I mean in context– From the first issue of A & B Computing. One thing that helped was to realize, like Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker, a great deal of the action maps down to simply typing DROP. So the pass at the beginning you show to the guard can be dropped, as can the key that gets inserted right afterwards. This simplifies matters down slightly in terms of verb-hunting (although there’s a nasty one I came across early still). Even with this condition, the game was quite frustrating as the correspondence between object and solution was often tentative. Last time I called the Dalek being killed by a pickaxe “verging” on moon logic (weird weapon to pick, but ok); here I think the game embraces it fully. The SportsHall manager, who I thought might want something sports related, instead wanted the helmet with a lamp. This opens paths to the south and…