Game:

Repton Infinity (1988)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 3:49

401 views

2

Repton Infinity was the last and most ambitious Repton title produced on the BBC before it became obsolete. The level editor introduced in Repton 3 was taken to its logical extreme, a game creation workshop that included its own language, Reptol, for programming the behaviour of game objects. Four games were included in the package as examples: a recreation of Repton 3; a new Repton game, Repton 4; this game, Robbo; and Trakker.

In this video I play through the first level of Robbo, perhaps the most interesting of the four games. According to the instruction manual, Robbo has been placed in a "time-space puzzle vortex" to test his logic circuits; if he fails to solve the puzzles he will be consigned to the scrapheap. Well, I'm glad Repton Infinity doesn't have a time limit, because I was stumped for fifteen years on this level, and now that 2009, my first year of posting videos on YouTube, is coming to an end, it seemed a suitable time to get this one out of the way once and for all. Jonathan (reptongeek) has written a guide to the Repton Infinity levels that is available from Stairway to Hell (http://www.stairwaytohell.com/gamehelp/faq-reptoninfinity-jp.txt) but my pride would not let me look at his solution until I had completed it myself.

This game was made, as the narrative voice of The Princess Bride would put it, before difficulty curves; the first level contains some decidedly difficult puzzles involving kettles (which always move right) and the octagonal "Things" (which move up). The behaviour of other objects is made apparent in the video, except for the fish. This, when I push it into the transporter, is taken to where it blocks a pipe, so that an orb being whisked around in a cycle of pipes is diverted to where I can pick it up.

Interestingly, Reptol handles the player character's movement before moving other objects, which means that in all four games (and any game you could create in Repton Infinity) you can move out from a square and return to it before other objects can move. The last puzzle on this level requires taking advantage of this behaviour in order to clear the "Things" out of the way without getting stuck.

Probably due to the complexity of the tasks involved in scanning the screen and reading each object's behaviour from its Reptol code, Repton Infinity plays much slower than the other Repton games, so this video is played at exactly double speed. This does make the twinkling of the orbs seem rather frenzied compared to the actual game.

The music for this video is Beethoven's "Für Elise". For whatever reason, I have always associated this piece of music with Robbo; something about the mood, I think, is a perfect match for the mood of Robbo's topsy-turvy world.

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