Keyboard Component Crosswords

[decle]

For today's Keyboard Component software fun @Ron The Cat and I bring you Crosswords II.  This is one of three Crosswords tapes for the Intellivision.  Each tape contains 15 American style puzzles and, according to Mattel, they vary in difficulty with Crosswords I being described as "simple", II as "challenging" and III as "difficult".

 

Like Geography Challenge, the Crosswords tapes are written in Microsoft BASIC, and therefore, they're pretty stripped back affairs, with no real graphics or sound beyond the odd ding.  I've put together a couple of videos showing off the first puzzle in Crosswords II captured from Ron's K/C.  The first video has been edited to cut out most of the faffing about and has a bit of chip-tune Ragtime added to jolly things along:

The second video has my full game, complete with keyboard entry glitches, all 23 minutes of it in excruciating real-time:

 

Finally, I've previously published a video of Crosswords III being played from a tape, this one doesn't use video capture so you can get a sense of what's happening at the keyboard:

 

Enjoy!

 

 

[JohnPCAE]

I'm a lifelong American and this is the first time I've seen an "American style" crossword. I've only ever seen the British/Australian style ones in our local newspaper.

[+DZ-Jay]

21 minutes ago, JohnPCAE said:

I'm a lifelong American and this is the first time I've seen an "American style" crossword. I've only ever seen the British/Australian style ones in our local newspaper.

What's the difference?

    dZ.

[+DZ-Jay]

2 hours ago, decle said:

For today's Keyboard Component software fun @Ron The Cat and I bring you Crosswords II.  This is one of three Crosswords tapes for the Intellivision.  Each tape contains 15 American style puzzles and, according to Mattel, they vary in difficulty with Crosswords I being described as "simple", II as "challenging" and III as "difficult".

 

Like Geography Challenge, the Crosswords tapes are written in Microsoft BASIC, and therefore, they're pretty stripped back affairs, with no real graphics or sound beyond the odd ding.  I've put together a couple of videos showing off the first puzzle in Crosswords II captured from Ron's K/C.  The first video has been edited to cut out most of the faffing about and has a bit of chip-tune Ragtime added to jolly things along:

The second video has my full game, complete with keyboard entry glitches, all 23 minutes of it in excruciating real-time:

 

Finally, I've previously published a video of Crosswords III being played from a tape, this one doesn't use video capture so you can get a sense of what's happening at the keyboard:

 

Enjoy!

 

 

Great work, as always!

 

On the software, although I would have been interested in something like this when I was a kid (yup, I was a bit nerdy), I find the game-play itself unintuitive and clunky.  Perhaps in the 1980s digital landscape, such as it was, it would have been fine; but having to move around seeking clues rather than having direct access to a full list of them, seems to me a bit strange and cumbersome.

 

I do not know about others, but in my mental model of a crossword puzzle play (in classic newspaper ones), it is the clues that drive the word positioning, not the other way around.  I would go through the clues to see which ones I can answer, place them, then repeat.  Eventually, I would run out of clues to answer readily, or the board reaches a critical mass where there are lots of half-complete words, which I then proceed to finish off combining the clues and the visible letters to figure out the answer.  Still the clues are king.

 

Finally, when the board is complete, I would go once more through the clues to learn the answers to the ones I didn't figure out, but were filled up by consequence of solving other clues (nerd, I told ya').  Yet again, letting the clues lead the way.

It seems the Mattel programmer understood the key role of the clues intuitively, which is, I suppose, why you are forced to seek and complete the missing ones -- even though, from the perspective of this computerized version of the game, your job appears to be done the moment you fill out the last position on the board.  (The board and its positions have been driving your game-play heretofore.)

 

I would have found it unnerving to have to scan the board position by position, moving the cursor around one block at a time, to find any missing clues -- and then having to type in the already completed answers, in order to finish the game.  Bleh!

 

In any case, it's interesting -- nay, fascinating -- to see these programs in all their splendid glory, as they would have been played back in the day, and imagine what could have been.

 

I was telling my wife that, had the KB came out in 1980, as originally intended, it would have been a splendid personal computer.  Considering that these software packages you and Ron have managed to restore were merely the ones produced before it's launch, just think about the kind of sophisticated and advanced titles we would have seen had developers continued to gain more experience with the hardware capabilities and explored new models of interaction.  Oh well. *sigh*

 

In any case, fantastic job, guys!  Keep 'em coming ... 

   dZ.

Edited September 25, 2022 by DZ-Jay

[+GoldLeader]

56 minutes ago, DZ-Jay said:

What's the difference?

    dZ.

Click on the words American Style  

[carlsson]

I've seen the British/Australian type of crossword described as the "international" type of crossword, the one most common in rest of the world (as opposed to the "Swedish style" with clues inside the crossword). I can't recall seeing neither the American style or the very similar Japanese style, so probably America is not part of rest of the world.

[+DZ-Jay]

14 minutes ago, GoldLeader said:

Click on the words American Style  

 

Ah, I see now.  I never knew there was a distinction  I've seen American and British/Australian (and perhaps Japanese) style, but never really noticed that there was a difference in the layout rules.  *shrug*

 

To me the American style looks rather normal, I guess having been exposed mostly to American newspapers (New York Times crosswords are rather well known).

 

Thanks for the information. :)

 

     -dZ.

[+DZ-Jay]

8 minutes ago, carlsson said:

I've seen the British/Australian type of crossword described as the "international" type of crossword, the one most common in rest of the world (as opposed to the "Swedish style" with clues inside the crossword). I can't recall seeing neither the American style or the very similar Japanese style, so probably America is not part of rest of the world.

 

That's right, it's in the user's manual.  There is America, and there is the rest of the world.  "International" means "outside America."  😄

 

     -dZ.

[carlsson]

It reminds me that Carlos made some early mockups for Another World (Out of this World) in the summer of 2020.

[Intymike]

6 hours ago, carlsson said:

I've seen the British/Australian type of crossword described as the "international" type of crossword, the one most common in rest of the world (as opposed to the "Swedish style" with clues inside the crossword). I can't recall seeing neither the American style or the very similar Japanese style, so probably America is not part of rest of the world.

The Swedish style looks very familiar to me here in Germany.

 

The picture is from the current issue of the local newspaper over here.

Edited September 25, 2022 by Intymike

[carlsson]

Supposedly the Swedish style crossword actually origins from Denmark, the newspaper Berlingske Tidende 1948. They tried to patent it, but the patent was rejected in 1952. It was brought to Sweden in December 1954 by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and was prefaced with a text by Gösta Knutsson (famous for his books about the cat Peter No-Tail). The first Swedish crossword may have been created by Bertil Geijer, though it is not clear who may have invented the Danish one.

[+Lathe26]

On 9/25/2022 at 3:32 AM, carlsson said:

I've seen the British/Australian type of crossword described as the "international" type of crossword, the one most common in rest of the world (as opposed to the "Swedish style" with clues inside the crossword). I can't recall seeing neither the American style or the very similar Japanese style, so probably America is not part of rest of the world.

I've seen both American and British/Australian styles in the US.  The American is more common in general here but British/Australian is more common for kids, though this is not strictly true 100% of the time.

 

That said, the difference between the American, British/Australian, and Japanese styles is so small that they really aren't worth having separate names.  Ok, the black boxes are arranged in slightly different patterns.  Whoopie.  The placement already varies from one puzzle to the next anyways.