Game 275: SpurguX (1987)
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Title : Game 275: SpurguX (1987)
link : Game 275: SpurguX (1987)
A friend once sent me a copy of a first-person role-playing game set on the streets of Detroit. You played a homeless person, and the goal was just to find some food and a warm place to sleep for the night. You could explore buildings, walk realistic streets, talk to NPCs, and the like, all while trying to avoid gang members and security guards. It was a great idea, but it was written by social workers to make a point, not game developers, and gameplay suffered accordingly. You couldn't grab a stiletto and level up by killing those gang members, then solve your homelessness problem by looting their corpses and pawning their guns. There might have been some other issues, too.
SpurguX attempts a similar plotline, though more comically. You play a drunkard (my understanding is that spurgu is a slang term meaning the equivalent of "wino") on a quest for a special bottle of cognac, "accompanied only by a great thirst." The "levels" are neighborhoods of the city, and the "anti-hero" must contend with policemen, pickpockets, bouncers, proselytizing priests, dogs, and yuppies with a variety of realistic weapons like chains, batons, and switchblades. He has to keep himself fed during this process, and more important has to keep his blood alcohol concentration high lest he die from a hangover. I didn't plan it this way, but how great is it that a hangover is the central foe in a game for which I'm publishing the review on January 1?
This is all done with roguelike conventions, including permadeath. The author, Petri Niska, was clearly familiar with Hack (link to my review) and kept many of the former roguelike's commands even when they didn't make sense in translation. The "e" key is used for "eat," for instance, and not "s" for sÿo.
(Aside: A Finnish commenter recently offered that he had learned English so well from entertainment media, including RPGs, that he prefers it to his native language. This shamed me a bit, because before launching SpurguX, I honestly couldn't have offered a single Finnish word. It occurred to me that I've probably never heard anyone speak it. I watched a YouTube video of a native speaker and it never would have occurred to me that this was a language spoken in Europe. If anything, it sounded Asian to my (admittedly untrained) ears. This led me down a rabbit hole of research into languages and language trees. I now know that Finnish is one of a small number of non-Indo-European languages spoken in Europe, belonging instead to the Uralic family. Cousins are Hungarian and Estonian. I wondered why a language with such a non-Latin root would be written with a Latin alphabet, and it turns out that nobody really bothered to write down the language until about the 16th century, so there was never a "Uralic" alphabet.)
Character creation consists only of a name. Every character starts clad only in overalls, at Level 1, with no money (markka), 10 strength/hit points, and a 0.2 BAC in promille (per thousand), which would translated to 0.02% as we do in the U.S. If that's enough to stave off a Finnish hangover, I should have gone to college there.
Every screen in SpurguX looks basically the same: a wide-open city block with two buildings in the north and three to the south. You arrive on the west side and find a stairway down on the east side. In between are any number of people and objects.
Some of those objects are points, represented by periods. There are a number equal to the level number you're on, and you have to collect them all before hitting the stairs. That's usually not a problem except that you're trying to conserve movement (to keep the BAC from going down too much) at the same time.
The people are the most interesting part of the game. Many of them are clearly meant as a social commentary on, I guess, Finnish cities of the 1980s, although they could really apply to just about any city. Some of them are offensive today; some would have been offensive even in 1987. I suppose that was the point. Among the characters you encounter are:
Other straight enemies include dogs, gorillas, and snakes. They typically die in one or two blows and aren't much of a concern unless you have low health. The help file lists gypsies, politicians, and bootleggers among the other encounters that I never experienced. There are object-based threats, too, including rotten apples and piles of feces that you can slip in.
Successfully negotiating these encounters gives you experience points (1 per kill, generally, though sometimes you don't get any). Your hit point maximum increases during this process, quite rapidly, though it appears to be more of a function of dungeon level than experience. I couldn't quite work out the formula. I think maybe the dungeon level affects the maximum and the experience level affects the rate of recharge. Either way, that's all the game offers as "character development."
There is a small selection of inventory items, each slotted to a different inventory space, so you can only have one of each. You need food to restore hit points and alcohol to keep your BAC up. The only weapons seem to be stilettos, batons, and chains, though you can throw a bunch of other items. You find "Camel-Boots" (this is in English), often on soldiers, but I don't know what the context is.
The buildings include markets, liquor stores, restaurants, pawn shops, police stations and jails, metro stations, graveyards, and pharmacies. The market is called "Isku," after a Finnish chain, but it's always closed; I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a joke. One thing that I think is a joke is the word "PECTOPAH" representing restaurants. There's no such word, but the Russian word for "restaurant," which would be rendered as restoran in the Latin alphabet, looks like it says "pectopah" when seen in Cyrillic. Then again, maybe the confusion is so ubiquitous that they're actually called that in Finland.
Of the game's challenges, staying drunk is probably the hardest. You lose 0.1 BAC every 100 moves, and if it reaches 0.0, you only have about 30 moves before you die. You sometimes get lucky by finding liquor on the ground, but most of the time you have to save up money and buy it at an Alco. Regular beer restores 0.1 or 0.2 and what I'm guessing are "hip flasks" (lonkkaa) restore 0.3. Keeping your cash reserves high can be difficult with pickpockets, technology students, and bouncers (who sometimes guard the stairways down) constantly relieving you of funds. I frequently had to pawn stuff at the divari, which I'm still not sure how to directly translate, to pay for booze.
Levels get harder as you go down, spawning more encounters and requiring you to pick up more points, which can be insanely impossible if a "point-eater" is bouncing around. The coveted bottle of cognac is found on random level after 50. Dear reader, did I brave permadeath through multiple games and legitimately make my way to that 'nyak? Of course not. SpurguX is an amusing romp but not interesting enough to sustain dozens of hours of gameplay. It lacks the extensive, detailed equipment lists, magic systems, and combat tactics of other roguelikes. I wasn't about to treat it with the same intensity as Nethack.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the objectionable content. It's not like I feel that it's okay for a game to feature overly-affectionate homosexuals who transmit AIDS with a hug, or to encourage murdering wandering "Negroes" or old women for their money. But it's hard to get too upset when the whole thing is abstracted at the ASCII level, the author was a juvenile, the game wasn't commercially released, and there might be layers of commentary that I don't understand given the location and the era. I certainly don't mind hearing about such things in the comments.
When you finally find the bottle, the game tells you Korkkaat konjakkipullon! Aave hakkaa sinua!, which Google Translate renders as "Uncork the bottle of cognac! The ghost will blow you!," which I suspect means something closer to "the spirit will blow you away!" Other than that, you don't get a special winning screen or anything. You just get another bottle of cognac on every level after that.
If you really want to see the GIMLET on this, check the spreadsheet. I would have been loathe to leave a blank line in there. Trying to rate the game fundamentally misses its point, which is to make fun of society 30 years ago in a country that I'll probably never get to visit. Onneksi olkoon to Hr. Niska: I probably learned more from SpurguX than any game so far.
You are now reading the articlel Game 275: SpurguX (1987) with link address https://reviewgameupdate.blogspot.com/2018/01/game-275-spurgux-1987.html
Title : Game 275: SpurguX (1987)
link : Game 275: SpurguX (1987)
Game 275: SpurguX (1987)
 |
| I played version 2, but like version 1, it had a 1987 release date. |
SpurguX
Finland
Independently developed and published
Released in 1987 for DOS and Unix
Date Started: 28 December 2017
Date Ended: 29 December 2017
Total hours: 4
Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 15
Ranking at Time of Posting: 34/276 (12%)
A friend once sent me a copy of a first-person role-playing game set on the streets of Detroit. You played a homeless person, and the goal was just to find some food and a warm place to sleep for the night. You could explore buildings, walk realistic streets, talk to NPCs, and the like, all while trying to avoid gang members and security guards. It was a great idea, but it was written by social workers to make a point, not game developers, and gameplay suffered accordingly. You couldn't grab a stiletto and level up by killing those gang members, then solve your homelessness problem by looting their corpses and pawning their guns. There might have been some other issues, too.
SpurguX attempts a similar plotline, though more comically. You play a drunkard (my understanding is that spurgu is a slang term meaning the equivalent of "wino") on a quest for a special bottle of cognac, "accompanied only by a great thirst." The "levels" are neighborhoods of the city, and the "anti-hero" must contend with policemen, pickpockets, bouncers, proselytizing priests, dogs, and yuppies with a variety of realistic weapons like chains, batons, and switchblades. He has to keep himself fed during this process, and more important has to keep his blood alcohol concentration high lest he die from a hangover. I didn't plan it this way, but how great is it that a hangover is the central foe in a game for which I'm publishing the review on January 1?
 |
| Arriving in the game. What does the iin suffix attached to the game's name signify? |
This is all done with roguelike conventions, including permadeath. The author, Petri Niska, was clearly familiar with Hack (link to my review) and kept many of the former roguelike's commands even when they didn't make sense in translation. The "e" key is used for "eat," for instance, and not "s" for sÿo.
(Aside: A Finnish commenter recently offered that he had learned English so well from entertainment media, including RPGs, that he prefers it to his native language. This shamed me a bit, because before launching SpurguX, I honestly couldn't have offered a single Finnish word. It occurred to me that I've probably never heard anyone speak it. I watched a YouTube video of a native speaker and it never would have occurred to me that this was a language spoken in Europe. If anything, it sounded Asian to my (admittedly untrained) ears. This led me down a rabbit hole of research into languages and language trees. I now know that Finnish is one of a small number of non-Indo-European languages spoken in Europe, belonging instead to the Uralic family. Cousins are Hungarian and Estonian. I wondered why a language with such a non-Latin root would be written with a Latin alphabet, and it turns out that nobody really bothered to write down the language until about the 16th century, so there was never a "Uralic" alphabet.)
Character creation consists only of a name. Every character starts clad only in overalls, at Level 1, with no money (markka), 10 strength/hit points, and a 0.2 BAC in promille (per thousand), which would translated to 0.02% as we do in the U.S. If that's enough to stave off a Finnish hangover, I should have gone to college there.
Every screen in SpurguX looks basically the same: a wide-open city block with two buildings in the north and three to the south. You arrive on the west side and find a stairway down on the east side. In between are any number of people and objects.
Some of those objects are points, represented by periods. There are a number equal to the level number you're on, and you have to collect them all before hitting the stairs. That's usually not a problem except that you're trying to conserve movement (to keep the BAC from going down too much) at the same time.
 |
| I purchase alcohol at a liquor store on a screen that also has a restaurant and a subway station. Numerous characters and 10 points stand between me and my goal in the opposite corner. |
The people are the most interesting part of the game. Many of them are clearly meant as a social commentary on, I guess, Finnish cities of the 1980s, although they could really apply to just about any city. Some of them are offensive today; some would have been offensive even in 1987. I suppose that was the point. Among the characters you encounter are:
- Kake, a fellow drunk who asks you for beer. If you say no, he kicks you in the groin, causing the loss of a hit point, and then immediately asks again your next move. You can stave him off by just drinking all your available beer. I'm guessing the name comes from the muscled, leather-clad comic character created by Tom of Finland, known for his homoerotic art. I don't know if he has a particular fondness for beer in the comics.
 |
| If this guy walks up and wants a bottle of beer, I grant that perhaps you should just give him the bottle of beer. |
- Old Women, who you can kill in one hit for easy money, but doing so draws the attention of the screen's . . .
- Policemen. You can fight them (usually a losing proposition) or flee. If there's a police station on the screen, it generates more. If you want to avoid them and still kill innocents, you have to do it near the exit.
- Point-Eaters, which jump around the screen and steal your points. You have to chase them down and hit them to get them to drop them. They're not unlike leprechauns in NetHack.
- Gay Men (although I think the term, hinttari, might be more pejorative). They follow you around the screen hugging you. Killing them (which it's easy to do accidentally) draws no ire from the police.
- Black Men (again, I wonder if the term, neekeriä, isn't a bit more offensive before translation). I'm happy to say that they do not perfunctorily attack you. If you attack them (at least some of the time), it turns out he's a jiu-jitsu-neekeri and you're in trouble. Policemen do react if you kill them, but they have money.
- Recruits. They just run up and attack. When they do, the game says something that Google translates as "the swollen recruit rocks in the dirt" (hyytynyt alokas mätkii sinua turpaan). (And all the people who keep e-mailing me about DeepL being "better" than Google translate: it doesn't let you manually select your source language, and most of the time its automatic detection is wrong.) I'm curious what the historical context is here for overly-aggressive military recruits.
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| A yokel attacks me while a gay man hugs me. |
- Escapees. They appear on any screen that has a jail and immediately run up and attack. You can loot stilettos from them.
- Skinheads (which are called that--no Finnish term), who run up and attack with an "simian rage." (But why?) If you kill them, they generally drop "hints" which are read when you step on them. Things like "cash is king," "a hangover is the disease of the disease," and "if you drink, do not drive." See, the developer had some social conscience.
- Punks. They attack in packs of four with a leader. Fortunately, although there are 5 symbols for the gang, you only need to worry about the leader. When killed, he drops a chain.
- Yokels (that's what Google gives for juntti, anyway), who run up and attack you with hoes.
- Teekkari, which I gather is a technology student at a university. He runs up and sells you a copy of Äpy magazine, which you can't refuse and takes a decent chunk of your cash. I gather that Äpy is like The Onion of Finland, but I otherwise don't know the context of this joke.
- Pickpockets, who steal your money and disappear.
- Yuppies. They run up to you and "bluster" (uhota), but this is harmless. Police don't seem to care if you kill them.
- Sven-Olaf, a guy who runs up and, like gay men, hugs you. Unlike other gay men, he automatically gives you HIV. If you have the money, you can buy a cure in the pharmacy. I have no idea what the cultural or historical context is with that one. Googling "Sven-Olaf" didn't help.
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| I feel compelled to emphasize that you cannot catch HIV from a hug. Maybe that wasn't clear in 1987. |
- Hippies. They attack you with drug needles that cause you to hallucinate. I'm not sure the author really understands drugs.
- Priests. They run up and lecture you on the evils of alcohol. Like yuppies, they do no harm except the annoyance of acknowledging their proselytizing every turn.
- Social Workers. They attack you for some reason, but if you kill them, you get chased by the cops. It's no-win. I hated them the most.
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| Something about the social worker "shaking me into shame"? I don't know. |
- Prostitutes. They run up to you and try to sell you sex for $50. If you refuse, they just ask you again the next round, continuing to follow and pester you until you leave the level. If you say yes, you're out of commission for several rounds, and any nearby enemies get free attacks.
Other straight enemies include dogs, gorillas, and snakes. They typically die in one or two blows and aren't much of a concern unless you have low health. The help file lists gypsies, politicians, and bootleggers among the other encounters that I never experienced. There are object-based threats, too, including rotten apples and piles of feces that you can slip in.
 |
| The game's various enemies and objects. |
Successfully negotiating these encounters gives you experience points (1 per kill, generally, though sometimes you don't get any). Your hit point maximum increases during this process, quite rapidly, though it appears to be more of a function of dungeon level than experience. I couldn't quite work out the formula. I think maybe the dungeon level affects the maximum and the experience level affects the rate of recharge. Either way, that's all the game offers as "character development."
There is a small selection of inventory items, each slotted to a different inventory space, so you can only have one of each. You need food to restore hit points and alcohol to keep your BAC up. The only weapons seem to be stilettos, batons, and chains, though you can throw a bunch of other items. You find "Camel-Boots" (this is in English), often on soldiers, but I don't know what the context is.
 |
| The "I" key brings up the in-game inventory list on the left. |
The buildings include markets, liquor stores, restaurants, pawn shops, police stations and jails, metro stations, graveyards, and pharmacies. The market is called "Isku," after a Finnish chain, but it's always closed; I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a joke. One thing that I think is a joke is the word "PECTOPAH" representing restaurants. There's no such word, but the Russian word for "restaurant," which would be rendered as restoran in the Latin alphabet, looks like it says "pectopah" when seen in Cyrillic. Then again, maybe the confusion is so ubiquitous that they're actually called that in Finland.
Of the game's challenges, staying drunk is probably the hardest. You lose 0.1 BAC every 100 moves, and if it reaches 0.0, you only have about 30 moves before you die. You sometimes get lucky by finding liquor on the ground, but most of the time you have to save up money and buy it at an Alco. Regular beer restores 0.1 or 0.2 and what I'm guessing are "hip flasks" (lonkkaa) restore 0.3. Keeping your cash reserves high can be difficult with pickpockets, technology students, and bouncers (who sometimes guard the stairways down) constantly relieving you of funds. I frequently had to pawn stuff at the divari, which I'm still not sure how to directly translate, to pay for booze.
 |
| Arriving on Level 33. I've got to pick up 33 points and contend with a snake (S), Sven-Olaf (A), a hippie (I), and a yuppie (J). The jail will periodically release escapees. I can't attack that old lady (M) if I don't want to have to fight four policemen (C), plus the police station will generate more. |
Levels get harder as you go down, spawning more encounters and requiring you to pick up more points, which can be insanely impossible if a "point-eater" is bouncing around. The coveted bottle of cognac is found on random level after 50. Dear reader, did I brave permadeath through multiple games and legitimately make my way to that 'nyak? Of course not. SpurguX is an amusing romp but not interesting enough to sustain dozens of hours of gameplay. It lacks the extensive, detailed equipment lists, magic systems, and combat tactics of other roguelikes. I wasn't about to treat it with the same intensity as Nethack.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the objectionable content. It's not like I feel that it's okay for a game to feature overly-affectionate homosexuals who transmit AIDS with a hug, or to encourage murdering wandering "Negroes" or old women for their money. But it's hard to get too upset when the whole thing is abstracted at the ASCII level, the author was a juvenile, the game wasn't commercially released, and there might be layers of commentary that I don't understand given the location and the era. I certainly don't mind hearing about such things in the comments.
When you finally find the bottle, the game tells you Korkkaat konjakkipullon! Aave hakkaa sinua!, which Google Translate renders as "Uncork the bottle of cognac! The ghost will blow you!," which I suspect means something closer to "the spirit will blow you away!" Other than that, you don't get a special winning screen or anything. You just get another bottle of cognac on every level after that.
 |
| I grab the bottle of cognac |
If you really want to see the GIMLET on this, check the spreadsheet. I would have been loathe to leave a blank line in there. Trying to rate the game fundamentally misses its point, which is to make fun of society 30 years ago in a country that I'll probably never get to visit. Onneksi olkoon to Hr. Niska: I probably learned more from SpurguX than any game so far.
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