Exile for the BBC Micro; some elegant solutions

[Prelude: sorry, this has nothing to do with security whatsoever. Feel free to bail now if you're not interested in a classic 1980's game, and rest assured that non-security posts to this blog will remain extremely rare.]

The BBC Micro game Exile, released in 1988, has a realistic claim for the best game ever. I lost months of my youth to this game. I also lost a fair few days recently re-playing the game under emulation in 2014!

What the authors were able to do with just 32KB (for everything, including video RAM) was amazing. The art of coding in this way has simply been lost. The game features:

• An enormous map featuring fairly open-ended exploration.
• A full physics engine (gravity, momentum, conservation of momentum, buoyancy, friction).
• Dozens of fiendish puzzles, characters and objects, with many interactions between entities.

There's even a great disassembly online. I was quite surprised to see that the game really is powered by real 6502 opcodes, and not unicorn tears.

The claim for "best game ever" isn't just about packing so much into such a small resource. Completing the game, even if you know what you're doing, is hours of immersive play that alternates between solving very varied puzzles and arcade-like blowing stuff up. Given how free-form the game is, there are also different solutions and orderings to to the game, so you can put your own personal spin on things.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, the best emulator is probably B-em (part of a webring, remember those??) and the Exile game image can be readily found. And do feel free to stop reading to avoid the spoilers that now follow.

There seem to be two solutions published on the web. Unfortunately, both have triggered my OCD. Both have solutions for some of the more interesting problems that rely on abusing the limits and corner cases of the game engine, such as:

• Using the built-in viewport scrolling to sneak around with the viewport scrolled to the extreme so that an enemy or obstacle does not "see" the player.
• Abusing the fact that the physics engine "forgets" objects that are offscreen, causing corner-case and clearly unintentional behavior. (Give the poor game a break, it's trying to fit everything into 32KB!)
• Proposing solutions with low reliability.

More significantly, these problems have such beautifully elegant solutions that once you see them, it's clear that you've worked out the authors' original intent. So without further ado, here is a small collection of videos that illustrates some elegant solutions as well as an easter egg:

Getting the alien weapon

The game features a tricky-to-get alien weapon! In fact you can get it from two different places. Generally, you can feed different types of imps different "gifts" and then they might later throw you a gift in return. In this video, these cyan imps will accept a blue mushroom. Later in the game, dark blue imps accept piranhas. I had found this later exchange, but this earlier exchange was a complete surprise to me -- I only noticed it reading the disassembly referenced above.

It's a real boon to get such a powerful weapon earlier in the game. It never runs out of energy and it has good destructive power for some obstacles that are otherwise annoying. Just watch out you don't burn yourself and that you don't blow the weapon up, it's destructible.

Getting the first coronium rocks out of the alcove

There's no need to try and force the rock past the blowing bush. Speedy throwing and viewport scrolling are not necessary. There's a simple, elegant sequence that will rescue it reliably and without dubiousness.

Blowing open the rune door

The first two-thirds or so of the game are building up towards opening a very important door into the bad guy's lair. This door is blown open with a nuclear explosion between two radioactive rocks. Given the importance of the door, it's not surprising that the final puzzles towards opening it have beautiful solutions.

Both published solutions transport radioactive rocks via a route that is clearly not supposed to be an option, and the route only works on account of abusing game engine quirks. Tut tut! Here's a less hacky way of getting the required rocks, in three parts:

There's a lot going on here:

• In part #1, the use of the maggot to "wake up" the nest of green slimes is fun. Note that this doesn't always work! Game design bug? This is a very busy area of the map and the game engine often decides there's too much on-screen to spawn creatures from the nest. I lost a day stepping through 6502 assembler to understand this.
• Then, the green slimes appear attracted to sound. So we made some noise!
• The use of buoyancy to avoid the sucking bush is the first and only significant usage in a puzzle. Wonderful.
• In part #2 and #3, the presence of the big fish prevents the (very dangerous) piranhas from coming out the nest and ruining your day.
• In part #3, the piranha is actually immune to damage from acid drops -- I believe the only creature in the game that has this trait. (You can even check the disassembly :-)

Getting the mushroom immunity pill

Again, this puzzle involves blowing a door open with radioactive rocks. The published solutions suggest all sorts of hacks here, but there's a really neat solution with the "blaster" weapon that has been recently collected at this stage in the game. Previous weapons were projectile based but this one is force based and it can be used variously: at a distance to gently deviate the course of an acid drop, and then at close range to reliably launch a rock past a problem area.

Happy exploring.