Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Monday, September 21, 2020
Lost Secret Of The Rainforest - Branches
Written by Reiko
Adam's Journal #2: "It's another adventure! Some otters found me and told me that Forest Heart, whoever that is, needs my help. Now I'm deep in the rainforest with a wooden amulet trying to find this Forest Heart. Those otters that pulled me here were really cute, but the monkey wasn't so nice. I hope I meet more nice animals while I'm here!"
When I climb the huge tree, I emerge onto a screen with several brightly-colored birds, including a pair of toucans making an awful racket. I scan the screen, of course, and find out that I've encountered these seven items: Epiphyte, Toco Toucan, 3-Toed Sloth, Orchid, Scarlet Macaw, Hyacinth Macaw, Ruby Topaz Hummingbird [7]. The hummingbird is particularly tricky because it's moving around the screen and sometimes even off the screen.
I look around and finally determine that somehow there's a lit cigarette butt in the toucans' nest, which is threatening to set the entire nest on fire and cook their egg! I have to do something about it, but what? I can't pick it up with my bare hands: if I touch the nest or the egg too much, the toucan parents might reject the egg. I can't just recycle the cigarette because the recycle bag isn't really fire-resistant. I have no water. The sticky leaf isn't going to help.
I try talking to all the animals, but none of them are any help either. I talk to the toucan pair twice [3] and try to reassure them, but they're still just as alarmed, which is fair, since I haven't actually done anything yet. There's a young toucan perched nearby who seems to be a previous child of the toucan pair. He's concerned for his potential sibling [1]. A sloth hangs nearby, but doesn't say much beyond mentioning that the "yellow hats" caused the fire [1]. The hummingbird comments about how he doesn't like orchids but does like purple flowers [1]. Six macaws of two different species also sit nearby, none of which say much more than "Fire!" or "Danger!" Yet I can still talk to each one individually [6]. I suddenly also find a snake, an Emerald Tree Boa [1] wrapped around a branch near the top of the screen, who complains that I smell disgustingly human [1], even with the sticky sap on me.
I can't find anything here to help with the fire, so I try climbing higher. The top of the tree holds more birds. When I scan, I find these items: Hoatzin, Emergent Tree, Yellow-Ribbed Cacique, Cock-of-the-Rock, Pitcher Plant [5]. The hoatzin, a large golden-yellow bird with a tall crest on its head, speaks immediately when I appear, warning about the end of the world. All the other birds appear to dislike the hoatzin and complain about him when I talk to them [1]. When I examine him, I find that his kind usually lives by riverbanks, so he shouldn't even be there. And he's really stinky for some reason.
I talk to the hoatzin [1] and quickly find out that he lost his whole family to human machinery down by the river. The birds all call the humans "yellow hats". Meanwhile, the hoatzin rants about the sky falling and everything being consumed by machinery. I'm not sure I can do anything to help him, but I do see pitcher plants nearby, which hold water. That should help with the toucans' problem.
I try interacting with the nearest pitcher plant, which causes a splash of water to pour down. I don't think it's in the right place, though, and indeed, if I go back to the previous screen, I find I've splashed the young toucan instead of the nest. Oops. But if I try to get to the other pitcher plants located over the nest, I find I'd have to go past the stinky hoatzin, which Adam refuses to do. So I do have to do something about the hoatzin before I can help the toucans, apparently.
I wander around for a while and eventually find another exit off the left side of the lower screen, along a thick bough. (I can't return to the forest floor because when I try, Adam hears the sound of some unspecified animal below and won't climb back down.) I scan the new screen and find these new items: Darter, Canopy, Liana [3]. The darter is a black bird with yellow wings and a loud call who complains that hummingbirds are lovely but dangerous [1]. I also find some purple flowers with a strong perfume, which I pick [5]. The orchids and other flowers on the other screens all had very little scent.
I climb back up to the area with the hoatzin and use the flowers on myself [5]. Adam holds the flowers to his face, so now I can have him walk past the hoatzin over to the other pitcher plants and dump one down onto the nest below [5]. When I return to the nest area, the flame is out and the egg is wiggling madly. As I watch, it suddenly hatches into a baby toucan [10]! I can talk to each of the pair again as well as the baby (who just says "Chirp!") [3]. The grateful toucans tell me that I'm near the village of the Grove People. I expect I'll have to go there soon. I start talking to the other birds (and the sloth) again [7], and suddenly I hear drums, which the birds say are the drums of the Grove People.
The birds at the top of the tree don't say anything different, but for some reason I get points for speaking to them all again [3]. The darter to the left says [1] that the Grove People (or their drums, probably) say that "One From Outside is coming". I suppose that means Adam, although I don't yet know how to get there. There's a maze of tree branches and lianas in front of me, and I can't get Adam to move along it anywhere.
However, when I go back to the other screen, I realize that the snake has mysteriously disappeared. I can now move along its branch to get to a different place on the darter's screen. I watch as a bright red lizard moves along the various branches. I can't scan it, but it shows me that there's a way behind the thick trunk in one place, so that I can move Adam along its path and get to the other side of the screen to the next exit [5].
On the next screen, I think I see someone disappearing off the bottom of the screen. It looks like I'm in the trees overlooking a village area with round structures. I scan the screen and find the Village and Drums items [2]. The branch I'm on looks like it will reach the next one over, so I walk along it. Suddenly it bends under Adam's weight; he slides off it onto the branch below [5]. At the end of that branch, there's a carved drum. Adam wonders if that's the one we heard before.
So I walk over to pick it up, but the same thing happens, and this time, after he grabs the drum [5], Adam falls off the branch, down to the ground, and lands in a pig wallow, getting covered in mud. A nearby pig (which turns out to be a peccary, a wild pig) sounds like it's laughing at me.
I scan first before I do anything else (how is the ecorder still working in all this mud?), and find just two more items: Long House and Peccary [2]. Then I look around. I fell almost right next to the large open hut I'd seen from the tree. Unfortunately, I'm quite stuck in the mud and can't get out. I find a pile of vines and fruit and broken pottery within reach, however, so I take both the fruit [5] and a vine [5].
There's nothing to tie the vine to, but if I try to use it on the pig, Adam makes a lasso and tosses the end toward the pig. It's much too far away, though. So I toss some fruit toward it to get it to come closer. Then if I lasso it quickly enough, I catch it and it drags Adam out of the pig wallow [5] (and he magically ends up looking completely normal in the process, rather than covered in mud).
Now I appear to have a choice. A path winds off into the forest, and the clearing with the longhouse stretches off to the right. I decide to go right first. On the new screen, I scan for Weaving and Agriculture [2]. A woven cloth is stretched over a frame inside the house, and next to it there's a plot of tended plants. A drum sits on a stand next to the house. Adam won't do anything with the weaving or the plants, though, so I continue on to the right.
On the next screen I find the smaller hut near the waterfall, as well as the Paint, Thatching and Shaman's Stool items [3]. A long, sturdy vine hangs near the stream, which Adam can use to swing across [1]. The Paint item referred to a bush full of bright red berries. I can get there by swinging across the stream and climbing up and over, but when I try to pick them, I'm told they aren't ripe yet. I swing back across [1] and check out the hut instead.
It's too dark inside to see what's in there, and when Adam tries to go in, some kind of huge spider or something appears at the top of the doorway, startling Adam and preventing any entry. I guess this isn't where I'm supposed to be yet. I return the way I came and take the other path instead, which leads to the base of an enormous tree. I find no new items to scan on this screen, but I see what looks like a large opening in one side of the tree.
I walk in [1] and get an inset view where Adam can walk back and forth. The opening is covered with vines, and nearby there's a drum stand with room for two drums, although only one is currently placed. I place the one he's carrying onto the stand [5] and get a close-up view of the stand with both drums. Together, the two drums have five different tones available, which can form melodies when put together. I don't know what the correct melody is, though. I don't remember exactly what the drum sounded like before.
I look around a little more and determine that there are actually three openings into the tree [2], all covered with dense vines, but only the first holds the drums. Not knowing what to do, I go back to the longhouse screen and finally remember the other drum stand over there. I realize that Adam seems to have taken the drum with him when I left the tree, so now I place it on this stand [5] and try playing it there [1].
This time the stand shows me the melody to play. I try following the melody exactly as shown [5]. Nothing happens there except that I'm told I did it right. Now I need to play it over by the tree (screenshots help a lot here...). The drum is still placed when I go back, but that seems to be a minor bug, as I can also take it [1]. I think the intent was that I should take it when I want to move it between stands, but it seems to work either way.
Anyway, I go to the tree's stand and play the melody again [10]. The tree stirs and pulls back its vines from the opening. I walk inside and discover a huge open area with paths winding through. A soft feminine voice says, "Welcome, child." (This line is voiced but not the rest.) This must be Forest Heart. She continues, "It is I who sent for you. Come closer that I may speak to you from my heart. Indeed, the Grove People call me Forest Heart." On this screen, the only thing I find to scan is the Seed Pods item [1], which is in an inaccessible area, so I can't get them yet. I also see a bark cup off the path on the other side of the screen.
I walk along the path and find a sort of branch-formed seat at the end. I sit on it [5] and immediately Forest Heart speaks to me again. She is the huge tree all around me, but she is dying and needs me to find a seedling so that the forest will still have a guardian after she's gone. She had one, but it didn't survive a recent earthquake. Now we get the explanation for the little intro scene with the bats and the flattened seedling. She drops a small branch on the path as a gift for us in our quest, which I take, of course [5]. After I go back out, I also try the other two entrances, which now open for me. They lead to the side areas where I can pick up the seed pods [5] and the bark cup [5].
Now we really have our main quest, with nearly a third of the points collected. This section was more fun than the previous one, with more interesting puzzles and interactions, but I'm still struggling a bit with the way exits aren't shown on-screen unless I move the cursor to the edge of the screen while in movement or hand mode. If I'm in object or eye mode, the exit arrows won't appear, and the graphics are lush enough that it's really easy on some screens to overlook a possible exit.
Now that I have all these new items, I can probably do more in the village, so next time I'll go back there and see what else I can find.
Score: 284/1000
Scanned items: 36/82
Inventory: passport, Ecorder, Forest Heart amulet, leaf with sticky sap, branch, seed pods, bark cup
Session Time: 2 hours
Total Time: 3 hour 15 minutes
Adam's Journal #2: "It's another adventure! Some otters found me and told me that Forest Heart, whoever that is, needs my help. Now I'm deep in the rainforest with a wooden amulet trying to find this Forest Heart. Those otters that pulled me here were really cute, but the monkey wasn't so nice. I hope I meet more nice animals while I'm here!"
When I climb the huge tree, I emerge onto a screen with several brightly-colored birds, including a pair of toucans making an awful racket. I scan the screen, of course, and find out that I've encountered these seven items: Epiphyte, Toco Toucan, 3-Toed Sloth, Orchid, Scarlet Macaw, Hyacinth Macaw, Ruby Topaz Hummingbird [7]. The hummingbird is particularly tricky because it's moving around the screen and sometimes even off the screen.
 |
| Why are you sitting right by something that's burning inside your flammable nest? |
I look around and finally determine that somehow there's a lit cigarette butt in the toucans' nest, which is threatening to set the entire nest on fire and cook their egg! I have to do something about it, but what? I can't pick it up with my bare hands: if I touch the nest or the egg too much, the toucan parents might reject the egg. I can't just recycle the cigarette because the recycle bag isn't really fire-resistant. I have no water. The sticky leaf isn't going to help.
I try talking to all the animals, but none of them are any help either. I talk to the toucan pair twice [3] and try to reassure them, but they're still just as alarmed, which is fair, since I haven't actually done anything yet. There's a young toucan perched nearby who seems to be a previous child of the toucan pair. He's concerned for his potential sibling [1]. A sloth hangs nearby, but doesn't say much beyond mentioning that the "yellow hats" caused the fire [1]. The hummingbird comments about how he doesn't like orchids but does like purple flowers [1]. Six macaws of two different species also sit nearby, none of which say much more than "Fire!" or "Danger!" Yet I can still talk to each one individually [6]. I suddenly also find a snake, an Emerald Tree Boa [1] wrapped around a branch near the top of the screen, who complains that I smell disgustingly human [1], even with the sticky sap on me.
 |
| Here we have a bird with PTSD. |
I can't find anything here to help with the fire, so I try climbing higher. The top of the tree holds more birds. When I scan, I find these items: Hoatzin, Emergent Tree, Yellow-Ribbed Cacique, Cock-of-the-Rock, Pitcher Plant [5]. The hoatzin, a large golden-yellow bird with a tall crest on its head, speaks immediately when I appear, warning about the end of the world. All the other birds appear to dislike the hoatzin and complain about him when I talk to them [1]. When I examine him, I find that his kind usually lives by riverbanks, so he shouldn't even be there. And he's really stinky for some reason.
I talk to the hoatzin [1] and quickly find out that he lost his whole family to human machinery down by the river. The birds all call the humans "yellow hats". Meanwhile, the hoatzin rants about the sky falling and everything being consumed by machinery. I'm not sure I can do anything to help him, but I do see pitcher plants nearby, which hold water. That should help with the toucans' problem.
 |
| Sorry, you just happened to be in the wrong place! |
I try interacting with the nearest pitcher plant, which causes a splash of water to pour down. I don't think it's in the right place, though, and indeed, if I go back to the previous screen, I find I've splashed the young toucan instead of the nest. Oops. But if I try to get to the other pitcher plants located over the nest, I find I'd have to go past the stinky hoatzin, which Adam refuses to do. So I do have to do something about the hoatzin before I can help the toucans, apparently.
I wander around for a while and eventually find another exit off the left side of the lower screen, along a thick bough. (I can't return to the forest floor because when I try, Adam hears the sound of some unspecified animal below and won't climb back down.) I scan the new screen and find these new items: Darter, Canopy, Liana [3]. The darter is a black bird with yellow wings and a loud call who complains that hummingbirds are lovely but dangerous [1]. I also find some purple flowers with a strong perfume, which I pick [5]. The orchids and other flowers on the other screens all had very little scent.
 |
| Aww, baby toucan! |
I climb back up to the area with the hoatzin and use the flowers on myself [5]. Adam holds the flowers to his face, so now I can have him walk past the hoatzin over to the other pitcher plants and dump one down onto the nest below [5]. When I return to the nest area, the flame is out and the egg is wiggling madly. As I watch, it suddenly hatches into a baby toucan [10]! I can talk to each of the pair again as well as the baby (who just says "Chirp!") [3]. The grateful toucans tell me that I'm near the village of the Grove People. I expect I'll have to go there soon. I start talking to the other birds (and the sloth) again [7], and suddenly I hear drums, which the birds say are the drums of the Grove People.
 |
| A little maze of twisty branches, all alike. |
The birds at the top of the tree don't say anything different, but for some reason I get points for speaking to them all again [3]. The darter to the left says [1] that the Grove People (or their drums, probably) say that "One From Outside is coming". I suppose that means Adam, although I don't yet know how to get there. There's a maze of tree branches and lianas in front of me, and I can't get Adam to move along it anywhere.
However, when I go back to the other screen, I realize that the snake has mysteriously disappeared. I can now move along its branch to get to a different place on the darter's screen. I watch as a bright red lizard moves along the various branches. I can't scan it, but it shows me that there's a way behind the thick trunk in one place, so that I can move Adam along its path and get to the other side of the screen to the next exit [5].
 |
| That branch is awfully narrow... |
On the next screen, I think I see someone disappearing off the bottom of the screen. It looks like I'm in the trees overlooking a village area with round structures. I scan the screen and find the Village and Drums items [2]. The branch I'm on looks like it will reach the next one over, so I walk along it. Suddenly it bends under Adam's weight; he slides off it onto the branch below [5]. At the end of that branch, there's a carved drum. Adam wonders if that's the one we heard before.
 |
| Surely the ecorder is also covered in mud? |
So I walk over to pick it up, but the same thing happens, and this time, after he grabs the drum [5], Adam falls off the branch, down to the ground, and lands in a pig wallow, getting covered in mud. A nearby pig (which turns out to be a peccary, a wild pig) sounds like it's laughing at me.
I scan first before I do anything else (how is the ecorder still working in all this mud?), and find just two more items: Long House and Peccary [2]. Then I look around. I fell almost right next to the large open hut I'd seen from the tree. Unfortunately, I'm quite stuck in the mud and can't get out. I find a pile of vines and fruit and broken pottery within reach, however, so I take both the fruit [5] and a vine [5].
 |
| Being dragged along the ground is the perfect way to clean off all the mud, right? |
There's nothing to tie the vine to, but if I try to use it on the pig, Adam makes a lasso and tosses the end toward the pig. It's much too far away, though. So I toss some fruit toward it to get it to come closer. Then if I lasso it quickly enough, I catch it and it drags Adam out of the pig wallow [5] (and he magically ends up looking completely normal in the process, rather than covered in mud).
 |
| Adam doesn't know what plants are being cultivated here, but that drum stand looks useful. |
Now I appear to have a choice. A path winds off into the forest, and the clearing with the longhouse stretches off to the right. I decide to go right first. On the new screen, I scan for Weaving and Agriculture [2]. A woven cloth is stretched over a frame inside the house, and next to it there's a plot of tended plants. A drum sits on a stand next to the house. Adam won't do anything with the weaving or the plants, though, so I continue on to the right.
On the next screen I find the smaller hut near the waterfall, as well as the Paint, Thatching and Shaman's Stool items [3]. A long, sturdy vine hangs near the stream, which Adam can use to swing across [1]. The Paint item referred to a bush full of bright red berries. I can get there by swinging across the stream and climbing up and over, but when I try to pick them, I'm told they aren't ripe yet. I swing back across [1] and check out the hut instead.
 |
| That spider thing does not want me in the hut. |
It's too dark inside to see what's in there, and when Adam tries to go in, some kind of huge spider or something appears at the top of the doorway, startling Adam and preventing any entry. I guess this isn't where I'm supposed to be yet. I return the way I came and take the other path instead, which leads to the base of an enormous tree. I find no new items to scan on this screen, but I see what looks like a large opening in one side of the tree.
 |
| Vines block the opening into the tree. |
 |
| Close-up on the drum set. |
I look around a little more and determine that there are actually three openings into the tree [2], all covered with dense vines, but only the first holds the drums. Not knowing what to do, I go back to the longhouse screen and finally remember the other drum stand over there. I realize that Adam seems to have taken the drum with him when I left the tree, so now I place it on this stand [5] and try playing it there [1].
 |
| Matching the shapes on the drum to the melody. |
This time the stand shows me the melody to play. I try following the melody exactly as shown [5]. Nothing happens there except that I'm told I did it right. Now I need to play it over by the tree (screenshots help a lot here...). The drum is still placed when I go back, but that seems to be a minor bug, as I can also take it [1]. I think the intent was that I should take it when I want to move it between stands, but it seems to work either way.
 |
| We meet at last |
Anyway, I go to the tree's stand and play the melody again [10]. The tree stirs and pulls back its vines from the opening. I walk inside and discover a huge open area with paths winding through. A soft feminine voice says, "Welcome, child." (This line is voiced but not the rest.) This must be Forest Heart. She continues, "It is I who sent for you. Come closer that I may speak to you from my heart. Indeed, the Grove People call me Forest Heart." On this screen, the only thing I find to scan is the Seed Pods item [1], which is in an inaccessible area, so I can't get them yet. I also see a bark cup off the path on the other side of the screen.
 |
| The explanation for the scene in the opening sequence. |
I walk along the path and find a sort of branch-formed seat at the end. I sit on it [5] and immediately Forest Heart speaks to me again. She is the huge tree all around me, but she is dying and needs me to find a seedling so that the forest will still have a guardian after she's gone. She had one, but it didn't survive a recent earthquake. Now we get the explanation for the little intro scene with the bats and the flattened seedling. She drops a small branch on the path as a gift for us in our quest, which I take, of course [5]. After I go back out, I also try the other two entrances, which now open for me. They lead to the side areas where I can pick up the seed pods [5] and the bark cup [5].
Now we really have our main quest, with nearly a third of the points collected. This section was more fun than the previous one, with more interesting puzzles and interactions, but I'm still struggling a bit with the way exits aren't shown on-screen unless I move the cursor to the edge of the screen while in movement or hand mode. If I'm in object or eye mode, the exit arrows won't appear, and the graphics are lush enough that it's really easy on some screens to overlook a possible exit.
Now that I have all these new items, I can probably do more in the village, so next time I'll go back there and see what else I can find.
Score: 284/1000
Scanned items: 36/82
Inventory: passport, Ecorder, Forest Heart amulet, leaf with sticky sap, branch, seed pods, bark cup
Session Time: 2 hours
Total Time: 3 hour 15 minutes
Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Character Developments
Roll Player had intrigued me for some time, but it's done by a small publisher who primarily uses Kickstarter so availability has been spotty since it came out in 2016. I finally got a chance to play it at a convention earlier this year, and was instantly hooked, so much so that I bought a copy right then and there.
The game features a game board for each player denoting one of the standard fantasy races such as elf, dwarf, or halfling, plus a few more esoteric choices like minotaur or cat person. From there players are dealt a random set of character class cards from which they choose their profession, a backstory, and an alignment.
Game play revolves around randomly choosing 6-sided dice from a bag, rolling them, and then taking turns choosing which ones to add to the different statistics on your character sheet. The number rolled on the dice is important, but so is the color -- your profession tells you what range of numbers you want, and your back story (as well as other factors) tell you what color and where on the sheet you want to place them.
After dice are chosen, players choose from a row of equipment cards which further enhance their characters, with specific equipment and skills being more or less suited to specific types of characters. Among the choices are skill cards that adjust your character's alignment (their moral compass) when used, as well as trait cards that give a point bonus at the end of the game.
These two phases are repeated 12 times, at which time all the players will have a full player board. Points are awarded based on how well optimized the character is, with bonus points for placing the the right colors of dice in the right places on your sheet, acquiring equipment and traits best suited to your character, and getting your alignment marker placed in a way that suits your alignment card.
It's a well-designed engine-building game, and I find it a bit more compelling than empire-building games like Race for the Galaxy because I'm building and individual character and equipping him (or her) for adventure, rather than a more abstract empire of planets and starships. An expansion adds the ability to fight minor monsters, building up experience in order to face off against a big bad at the end of the game, but honestly I find that addition a little distracting; I would rather just spend time building my character.
Rating: 5 (out of 5) a terrific game that's compelling but reasonably simple to play and not overly competitive, making it a great choice for a casual game night.
- Roll Player official website
- Roll Player on BoardGameGeek
Infocom Marathon: Leather Goddesses Of Phobos (1986) - Part One
Written by Joe Pranevich
Sex sells, but few things market a product better than controversy. Throughout much of the 20th century, it was an adage that a book or a play "Banned in Boston" was guaranteed to sell well elsewhere. Oscar Wilde once said that, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." Barbara Streisand discovered that the fastest way to get a lot of people interested in taking photos of her house was telling them that they could not. So it was in that spirit that Steve Meretzky penned A Mind Forever Voyaging as a controversy-magnet, guaranteed to get the conservative pundits wagging their tongues about his leftist pollution of young minds. The controversy never materialized and that game flopped. Unperturbed, he pushed for yet another game that could "go viral", but this time he aimed to incite the ire of the pundits (and the libido of the players) by embracing sex. Could an assault on decency succeed where AMFV failed?
Whether it was the sex, the return to traditional puzzle-based gameplay, or something else, Leather Goddesses of Phobos garnered enough attention that it became Infocom's final true "hit". TBD reviewed the game in 2017 and so I will look at this game through a different lens. Instead of a sequential playthrough and review, I am going to focus on the game's puzzles. This game is rightly credited as having some of Meretzky's most clever mind-benders, but does he put them together in a satisfying way? I will also place LGoP in the context of Infocom's broader story as we progress towards the end of 1986.
My original plan had been for this to come out as a single post, but it turns out that I have more to say about his puzzles than I thought. Rather than cut it down, I've decided to split the work into two. Today, we'll cover the introduction and collect the first four key items. Next week, we'll conclude with the final puzzles and some thoughts on how the game comes together as a whole.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos began as an office in-joke that got out of hand. As early as 1982, Steve Meretzky, still only a game tester rather than designer, scrawled the name onto a whiteboard with a list of upcoming titles before a press event. It was erased quickly, but it became a bit of a catch phrase around the office and would be mentioned whenever a hypothetical game was needed. This repeated meme wound its way into an official Infocom product in 1984 with the re-release of Starcross. As previously discussed, the shift to standard packaging as part of the "corporatization" of Infocom led to changes in all of the earlier titles' game documentation. The earliest titles, such as Zork and Starcross, received expanded backstories although even later games saw changes. For Starcross, this backstory included a set of the player character's diary entries that highlighted his boredom before his date with destiny. Tucked away in one such entry is the first public mention of the Leather Goddesses:
The mass protests never manifested, but Meretzky still managed to garner a few complaints and a computer store or two that refused to sell the title. Still others were unhappy that a game sold based on sexual content wasn't pornographic enough. Whether or not the controversy helped, Leather Goddesses sold more than 50,000 copies in the first year and ended its run at 130,000 units total, making it Infocom's sixth most popular title ever. Not bad for a game released so late in the company's history! This success guaranteed that it would receive a spinoff, the Infocomic Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen in 1988, plus a proper sequel in 1992. Sierra would even parody the title in Space Quest IV.
Activision may have eventually become a bit squeamish about the title. Inexplicably, they did not include it in either of the two Lost Treasures of Infocom sets from 1991 and 1992. Purchasers of the second set could order the game via a special coupon, but at $9.95 (roughly $19 today), that was no small sum for a six-year old text adventure. It was also not included in any of the 1995 compilation box sets, but would finally be included in the Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom (1996). That box set was also the first to include non-Infocom games released alongside Infocom ones, but that will be a conversation for another day. It was not until 2012 when Leather Goddesses was finally included in an official Lost Treasures set, the much-loved but now dead release for iOS. I am still angry at Activision for refusing to update that app for 64-bit devices.
Much like their other titles, Leather Goddesses included "feelies" including a Lane Mastodon comic, a scratch-and-sniff pad, and even a map of one of the game's dungeons. As usual for this period, the comic is required reading as it includes copy protection solutions for several of the game's puzzles. The comic was drawn by Richard Howell, known for stints at both Marvel and DC as well as helming his own independent comics company. He may be best known for his work on Vision & Scarlet Witch, a series that serves as one of the inspirations for the upcoming WandaVision TV show. The comic was converted to 3-D by Ray Zone, a pioneer in commercializing red-blue 3-D art and who produced many such works during the 80s and 90s. Howell also produced illustrations for the hint book.
The manual tries to place the game in the Zork universe, at least in a tongue-in-cheek way. There are references to Zorkmids and even Dimwit Flathead. While the two previous games that mentioned the Leather Goddesses (Starcross and Wishbringer) were "Zork universe" games, I just cannot buy the technology in this game making sense in the sci-fi worlds of Starcross or Planetfall. I'm going to hold my personal head-canon that Leather Goddesses is popular fiction in the Zork universe and you can all snicker at me that I would even think about this enough to care. There is also a mail-away coupon in the manual for self-help books like you would find advertised in old comics. The address on the coupon is in Somerville, Massachusetts (the next town over from Infocom's offices near Boston), but the street name doesn't appear to exist. I'm at a loss to explain what they were doing here as they should either have gone with a very fictional address (so that it was obviously fake) or a real one (so that they could sell some unexpected "feelies"); an address that looks mostly real but doesn't lead anywhere is very strange. It is also possible that Somerville renamed that street in the last three decades.
Our game begins-- after a warning that the software we are about to play should not be played by the prudish-- outside of Joe's Bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. If you are a child, as I am, of that part of the midwest then your mind immediately went to just how awesome a place Sandusky, Ohio always seemed. On the shores of Lake Erie, Sandusky is the home of Cedar Point, one of the oldest and greatest amusement parks in the United States. Pittsburghers know that Kennywood is even better, but Cedar Point was still a pretty cool place. However, Meretsky fooled us: the game takes place in Upper Sandusky, a town along the Sandusky River a bit more than an hour south and completely devoid of amusement parks.
The primary purpose of the bar is to give us a chance to customize our Leather Goddesses experience. After a night of drinking, we have to relieve ourselves and to do so we have to select whether we are going into the Ladies' room or the Men's room. Inside we find a stool which we'd better grab and then do our business. That will set our gender for the remainder of the game. I've played through as both male and female, but other than swapping the genders of our comrade-in-arms (either Trent or Tiffany, always the same gender as you) and a few other (ahem) partners along the way, it doesn't change much. A few turns later, the Leather Goddesses abduct us and lock us in a cell on their spaceship.
Escaping the cell is simplistic as the Goddesses simply left the door unlocked. They also left behind a surprising number of adventure game provisions (including a painting of a cat, flashlight, blanket, metal tray, and piece of chocolate). From there, we can explore their ship, easily rescue a ditsy-but-genius new friend from the cell across the hall, and teleport ourselves towards adventure. A couple of seconds after rescuing her/him, Tiffany/Trent will have an eureka moment and work out a plan to build a device that can defeat the Leather Goddesses and save the Earth, but we'll need to find eight surprisingly mundane objects to complete the task. These consist of: a common household blender, six-feet of rubber hose, a pair of cotton balls, an eighty-two degree angle, a headlight from a 1933 Ford, a white mouse, a photo of Douglas Fairbanks, and a copy of the Cleveland phone book. Why these items? We have to play the game to find out.
The primary thrust of the game will be to explore Mars and Venus, as well as a bit of Earth and other locations, as we track down the key items. The design of the planets are heavily influenced by the work of astronomer Percival Lowell who, in the 19th century, popularized the idea that Mars may have been an arid landscape cross-crossed by canals. This was then used and reused, perhaps most famously by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his John Carter series of books. This game's depiction of nations on Mars in a state of decay may also have been inspired by Burroughs. Most of this exploration is done by locating and using "black circles" which are scattered literally everywhere; entering one will take you to some other location, usually with no immediate way back. In this way, the game keeps up tension and you are forced into situations where the only way out is to progress forward until you can locate the next circle. Gradually, we develop a network of such portals that allow us to explore at will. Once on Mars, we will eventually discover a royal barge that can be used on the still-intact canals to float downstream. Passing by each canal dock only once (until an alternate method of transportation is discovered near the end of the game), we again feel the tension of needing to do everything and explore everything carefully because there is no way back once we leave. While I may not love the setting, we have to give Meretzky credit for building a not-quite-open world in a new and interesting way and unlocking new areas to explore incrementally. It's well done. Let's dig into the puzzles.
Puzzle #1 - Venus Fly Trap
One of the two black circles that we can discover on the Leather Goddesses' ship leads to a jungle on Venus and our first real puzzle. It also happens to be one of my least favorite, an example both of how clever Meretzky can be and also how he can overdo it. I suspect that playtesters had difficulty with this one because they added a second solution that is at least more straight-forward than the first.
Immediately after we arrive, a Venus flytrap approaches. It blocks a path to the west, so you know going west must be important. As it chases us east, we quickly reach a fork in the road where the path circles around a pit in the ground. My thought is that we are supposed to get the pit between us and the flytrap, perhaps lure it to the other side then sidle around so that we can go west without it catching us. That idea was completely wrong. If we hide in the pit, the plant will go away, but she comes back when we emerge. How are we to get past her?
At the beginning of the game, we found a piece of paper with a grid of letters on it in Tiffany's cell. She claimed to not know what it was and that she wrote it in her sleep. Converted to a spreadsheet for easy editing, the grid looks like this:
My first guess was that it was a code, especially as one is mentioned in the Lane Mastodon comic. Unfortunately, that is a dead end. My break came when I noticed the word "HEADLIGHT" in the second row from the bottom. When we first discovered the paper, Tiffany had not yet had her "eureka!" moment, but by now we know that a headlight (from a 1933 Ford) is one of the key items that we have to find. Searching carefully, we realize that this matrix is a word search puzzle and some variant on the names of each of the eight objects can be found inside. If we find and remove them all, a secret message is revealed:
The message reads: "HISSING FRIGHTENS FLY TRAPS". I follow its instructions to hiss at the flytrap chasing us and it is destroyed, allowing me to reach the western edge of the jungle. There, we find a can of "untangling cream" and a circle leading to the hold of a mysterious spaceship. More on those later. If we had not worked out the word search, we could eventually discover a wooden trellis and a bag of leaves. By combining those over the pit, we create a flytrap trap that has the same effect.
I wish I loved this puzzle because the idea of a word search isn't terrible, but it doesn't make any sense in context. Tiffany wrote it before she designed the anti-Leather Goddesses weapon and it's strange that she would have embedded a solution to a completely unrelated puzzle inside. Tiffany's subconscious may be clever, but this feels a bit too clever. If there had been a hint somewhere-- perhaps Tiffany remarking about a dream that she had while we were running away from the flytrap-- it would have worked better for me. As it is, I solved it on my own but it wasn't as easy as it looks.
Puzzle #2 - Weird Science
The second major puzzle on Venus is easier but requires trial and error as we navigate a tricky scripted event. We stumble on a mad scientist's lab in the jungle and are led inside and forced to participate in one of his experiments. We are taken down to the basement where we discover a cage with two gorillas inside (one male and one female), next to a slab covered in strange equipment. We also notice that the cage contains a six-foot length of rubber hose, the first of our key items. We are quickly strapped to the slab and the scientist presses a button. We immediately find ourselves in the cage, in a gorilla's body, with an amorous gorilla of the opposite sex nearby.
While the scientist watches carefully, we are given the choice whether or not we want to "frolic" with our gorilla counterpart. Is it bestiality to have sex with a gorilla while you are a gorilla? I have no idea. Regardless of how we choose, the scientist notes our response with excitement and leaves us in the cage.
Escaping is the most difficult part. We do not have the strength to bend the bars, but the game implies that we almost do. How can we get a little more strength? The answer relies on us figuring out the properties of one of the items we found earlier: the chocolate bar delivered with our food way back when we arrived in the Leather Goddesses' cell. If we had eaten it at any point, we would have received a bit of a "buzz" thanks to the sugar. If we eat it right now, the added sugar and energy it provides is enough to allow our gorilla-self to bend the bars. Unfortunately, the bar is being held by our human-self so that means that we need to quickly put it in the cage during a brief window (1-2 turns) after we are brought downstairs but before we are strapped to the table. Once we are free, we can push the red button to return to our own body, but we should not do so until we (as a gorilla) take the hose out of the cage and untie our human-self. Otherwise, we just wasted time and the game is unwinnable.
This is a fun "on rails" puzzle to solve, but it's all trial and error and passing items into the cage during that brief window. I worked it out but honestly thought that gorillas (like many other animals) were unable to eat chocolate. Once we get the timing down and do everything we need to do, it's a fun sequence.
Before we leave Venus, we'll need to finish exploring the jungle. There's a coin hidden in an old phone booth, a "Tee Remover" that can be bought off of a traveling salesman, as well as a black circle that gets us back to the main ship. Experienced players may have more difficulty with the traveling salesman than it would appear since he will only accept the flashlight as trade; I was very reluctant to trade my only light source in fear that there would be other dark areas to explore and so only did this when I was stuck elsewhere.
Puzzle #3 - King Mitre
Mars is the largest explorable area of the game, although we will have to navigate some puzzles to get to much of it. The area that we are dropped into initially consists of several ruined castles and deserts, surrounded on three sides by a martian canal system. There's a canal boat north of King Mitre's castle-- more on him in a moment-- but the canal is a one-way trip and can land us in an unwinnable state. The first puzzle we find is perhaps the most famous puzzle of the game: King Mitre.
When we arrive in Mitre's throne room, we get a long infodump where we learn that the Earth legend of King Midas who turned all that he touched into gold is just a corrupted form of the story of King Mitre who turned everything he touched into forty-five degree angles. The game itself admits that this makes no sense, but we go with it for the sake of the puzzle. Much like in the legend, the now depressed king has turned nearly everything, including his daughter, into a forty-five degree angle. He needs some help. What are we to do?
The answer lies in the odd machine that we bought off the salesman on Venus, the "Tee Remover":
Elsewhere on Mars, we can discover a marsmouse on "Hickory-Dickory Dock". As a mouse is one of the key items, we try to pick it up and fail. Despite the name suggesting that this puzzle would have something to do with a clock, the actual solution is trivial: show the mouse the picture of a cat and it will become stunned enough to pick up. It's a bit of a letdown really, but that is two key objects in just a few minutes!
Puzzle #4 - Cleveland Rocks!
In a desert east of Mitre's castle, we discover a fountain and a black circle that has been drained of color. If we use the black stain that we discovered on Venus, we can re-power the circle and are transported to the mythical land of… Cleveland!
Cleveland is, literally, a joke. After the sprawling expanses of Venus and Mars, we suddenly find ourselves cramped in a tiny suburban area that is somehow cut off from the rest of the world. Meretzky pokes fun at this, but the minimalism of this area feels jarring compared to the dynamic environments elsewhere. I'm sure that was deliberate:
Inside the house, we find a bedroom with a window open to a neighboring street. Just outside is a 1933 Ford with an intact headlight-- one of our key items! If this had been a real location, it would be simple to just go around to the public street where the Ford is parked and pick up the headlight. Instead, we can only get there by climbing out a second-story window. How can we do that? Searching the room, we discover a sheet on the nearby bed. We can tie it to the bedpost, but it's not long enough to reach the window. We cannot move the bed or tie the sheet to anything closer. The solution is to make the sheet longer by ripping it into strips and then tying them together to create a makeshift rope, then tie the assembled rope to the bed. We are too heavy for the rope, but Tiffany will agree to go down instead. Doing so seems like a mistake:
My biggest issue with this puzzle is how unnecessary it seems. We're in Cleveland. The car is parked on a public street. It breaks my sense of immersion in the game to have such a clearly constructed puzzle only make sense within the realm of a game. Had Meretzky had duplicated the exact same puzzle in a motel on Ganymede, I am certain I would have enjoyed it more. Either way, we have picked up our fourth key item. Only four more to go!
But… we'll just have to wait until next week for our shocking conclusion.
Sex sells, but few things market a product better than controversy. Throughout much of the 20th century, it was an adage that a book or a play "Banned in Boston" was guaranteed to sell well elsewhere. Oscar Wilde once said that, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." Barbara Streisand discovered that the fastest way to get a lot of people interested in taking photos of her house was telling them that they could not. So it was in that spirit that Steve Meretzky penned A Mind Forever Voyaging as a controversy-magnet, guaranteed to get the conservative pundits wagging their tongues about his leftist pollution of young minds. The controversy never materialized and that game flopped. Unperturbed, he pushed for yet another game that could "go viral", but this time he aimed to incite the ire of the pundits (and the libido of the players) by embracing sex. Could an assault on decency succeed where AMFV failed?
Whether it was the sex, the return to traditional puzzle-based gameplay, or something else, Leather Goddesses of Phobos garnered enough attention that it became Infocom's final true "hit". TBD reviewed the game in 2017 and so I will look at this game through a different lens. Instead of a sequential playthrough and review, I am going to focus on the game's puzzles. This game is rightly credited as having some of Meretzky's most clever mind-benders, but does he put them together in a satisfying way? I will also place LGoP in the context of Infocom's broader story as we progress towards the end of 1986.
My original plan had been for this to come out as a single post, but it turns out that I have more to say about his puzzles than I thought. Rather than cut it down, I've decided to split the work into two. Today, we'll cover the introduction and collect the first four key items. Next week, we'll conclude with the final puzzles and some thoughts on how the game comes together as a whole.
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| Another in-joke that got out of hand? |
Leather Goddesses of Phobos began as an office in-joke that got out of hand. As early as 1982, Steve Meretzky, still only a game tester rather than designer, scrawled the name onto a whiteboard with a list of upcoming titles before a press event. It was erased quickly, but it became a bit of a catch phrase around the office and would be mentioned whenever a hypothetical game was needed. This repeated meme wound its way into an official Infocom product in 1984 with the re-release of Starcross. As previously discussed, the shift to standard packaging as part of the "corporatization" of Infocom led to changes in all of the earlier titles' game documentation. The earliest titles, such as Zork and Starcross, received expanded backstories although even later games saw changes. For Starcross, this backstory included a set of the player character's diary entries that highlighted his boredom before his date with destiny. Tucked away in one such entry is the first public mention of the Leather Goddesses:
M.C.S. STARCROSS 03-28-2186
Underway less than four weeks and I'm about to go crazy! First, the entertainment tapes were mislabelled. It's all highbrow stuff like operas and lectures. Leather Goddesses of Phobos was really something about the history of the Terran Union. What a rip-off! I suppose I can always talk to the computer. I can't stand those tapes. I'll save them for later in the voyage when I'm really desperate. I'll play games with the computer to keep amused that way.Although this furthers my suspicion that Meretzky was the uncredited author of some of these new materials, it wasn't long before Brian Moriarty got into the swing of things as well. The pleasure arcade in Wishbringer featured a Leather Goddesses of Phobos arcade game. While we never got more than that title tease, the idea spread around the office enough that when Meretzky-- just off of his failure of A Mind Forever Voyaging-- suggested making the game "for real" that it may have felt fait accompli. Their soon-to-be corporate overlords didn't object and before long Infocom had its official twenty-first adventure game!
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| Infocom struggled to find consistent sales from the earliest days. |
The mass protests never manifested, but Meretzky still managed to garner a few complaints and a computer store or two that refused to sell the title. Still others were unhappy that a game sold based on sexual content wasn't pornographic enough. Whether or not the controversy helped, Leather Goddesses sold more than 50,000 copies in the first year and ended its run at 130,000 units total, making it Infocom's sixth most popular title ever. Not bad for a game released so late in the company's history! This success guaranteed that it would receive a spinoff, the Infocomic Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen in 1988, plus a proper sequel in 1992. Sierra would even parody the title in Space Quest IV.
Activision may have eventually become a bit squeamish about the title. Inexplicably, they did not include it in either of the two Lost Treasures of Infocom sets from 1991 and 1992. Purchasers of the second set could order the game via a special coupon, but at $9.95 (roughly $19 today), that was no small sum for a six-year old text adventure. It was also not included in any of the 1995 compilation box sets, but would finally be included in the Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom (1996). That box set was also the first to include non-Infocom games released alongside Infocom ones, but that will be a conversation for another day. It was not until 2012 when Leather Goddesses was finally included in an official Lost Treasures set, the much-loved but now dead release for iOS. I am still angry at Activision for refusing to update that app for 64-bit devices.
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| Also note the first appearance of the "Infocomix" branding! |
Much like their other titles, Leather Goddesses included "feelies" including a Lane Mastodon comic, a scratch-and-sniff pad, and even a map of one of the game's dungeons. As usual for this period, the comic is required reading as it includes copy protection solutions for several of the game's puzzles. The comic was drawn by Richard Howell, known for stints at both Marvel and DC as well as helming his own independent comics company. He may be best known for his work on Vision & Scarlet Witch, a series that serves as one of the inspirations for the upcoming WandaVision TV show. The comic was converted to 3-D by Ray Zone, a pioneer in commercializing red-blue 3-D art and who produced many such works during the 80s and 90s. Howell also produced illustrations for the hint book.
The manual tries to place the game in the Zork universe, at least in a tongue-in-cheek way. There are references to Zorkmids and even Dimwit Flathead. While the two previous games that mentioned the Leather Goddesses (Starcross and Wishbringer) were "Zork universe" games, I just cannot buy the technology in this game making sense in the sci-fi worlds of Starcross or Planetfall. I'm going to hold my personal head-canon that Leather Goddesses is popular fiction in the Zork universe and you can all snicker at me that I would even think about this enough to care. There is also a mail-away coupon in the manual for self-help books like you would find advertised in old comics. The address on the coupon is in Somerville, Massachusetts (the next town over from Infocom's offices near Boston), but the street name doesn't appear to exist. I'm at a loss to explain what they were doing here as they should either have gone with a very fictional address (so that it was obviously fake) or a real one (so that they could sell some unexpected "feelies"); an address that looks mostly real but doesn't lead anywhere is very strange. It is also possible that Somerville renamed that street in the last three decades.
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| Downtown Upper Sandusky, circa 2009. |
Our game begins-- after a warning that the software we are about to play should not be played by the prudish-- outside of Joe's Bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. If you are a child, as I am, of that part of the midwest then your mind immediately went to just how awesome a place Sandusky, Ohio always seemed. On the shores of Lake Erie, Sandusky is the home of Cedar Point, one of the oldest and greatest amusement parks in the United States. Pittsburghers know that Kennywood is even better, but Cedar Point was still a pretty cool place. However, Meretsky fooled us: the game takes place in Upper Sandusky, a town along the Sandusky River a bit more than an hour south and completely devoid of amusement parks.
The primary purpose of the bar is to give us a chance to customize our Leather Goddesses experience. After a night of drinking, we have to relieve ourselves and to do so we have to select whether we are going into the Ladies' room or the Men's room. Inside we find a stool which we'd better grab and then do our business. That will set our gender for the remainder of the game. I've played through as both male and female, but other than swapping the genders of our comrade-in-arms (either Trent or Tiffany, always the same gender as you) and a few other (ahem) partners along the way, it doesn't change much. A few turns later, the Leather Goddesses abduct us and lock us in a cell on their spaceship.
Escaping the cell is simplistic as the Goddesses simply left the door unlocked. They also left behind a surprising number of adventure game provisions (including a painting of a cat, flashlight, blanket, metal tray, and piece of chocolate). From there, we can explore their ship, easily rescue a ditsy-but-genius new friend from the cell across the hall, and teleport ourselves towards adventure. A couple of seconds after rescuing her/him, Tiffany/Trent will have an eureka moment and work out a plan to build a device that can defeat the Leather Goddesses and save the Earth, but we'll need to find eight surprisingly mundane objects to complete the task. These consist of: a common household blender, six-feet of rubber hose, a pair of cotton balls, an eighty-two degree angle, a headlight from a 1933 Ford, a white mouse, a photo of Douglas Fairbanks, and a copy of the Cleveland phone book. Why these items? We have to play the game to find out.
The primary thrust of the game will be to explore Mars and Venus, as well as a bit of Earth and other locations, as we track down the key items. The design of the planets are heavily influenced by the work of astronomer Percival Lowell who, in the 19th century, popularized the idea that Mars may have been an arid landscape cross-crossed by canals. This was then used and reused, perhaps most famously by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his John Carter series of books. This game's depiction of nations on Mars in a state of decay may also have been inspired by Burroughs. Most of this exploration is done by locating and using "black circles" which are scattered literally everywhere; entering one will take you to some other location, usually with no immediate way back. In this way, the game keeps up tension and you are forced into situations where the only way out is to progress forward until you can locate the next circle. Gradually, we develop a network of such portals that allow us to explore at will. Once on Mars, we will eventually discover a royal barge that can be used on the still-intact canals to float downstream. Passing by each canal dock only once (until an alternate method of transportation is discovered near the end of the game), we again feel the tension of needing to do everything and explore everything carefully because there is no way back once we leave. While I may not love the setting, we have to give Meretzky credit for building a not-quite-open world in a new and interesting way and unlocking new areas to explore incrementally. It's well done. Let's dig into the puzzles.
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| Second game in a row with a killer Venus Flytrap! |
Puzzle #1 - Venus Fly Trap
One of the two black circles that we can discover on the Leather Goddesses' ship leads to a jungle on Venus and our first real puzzle. It also happens to be one of my least favorite, an example both of how clever Meretzky can be and also how he can overdo it. I suspect that playtesters had difficulty with this one because they added a second solution that is at least more straight-forward than the first.
Immediately after we arrive, a Venus flytrap approaches. It blocks a path to the west, so you know going west must be important. As it chases us east, we quickly reach a fork in the road where the path circles around a pit in the ground. My thought is that we are supposed to get the pit between us and the flytrap, perhaps lure it to the other side then sidle around so that we can go west without it catching us. That idea was completely wrong. If we hide in the pit, the plant will go away, but she comes back when we emerge. How are we to get past her?
At the beginning of the game, we found a piece of paper with a grid of letters on it in Tiffany's cell. She claimed to not know what it was and that she wrote it in her sleep. Converted to a spreadsheet for easy editing, the grid looks like this:
My first guess was that it was a code, especially as one is mentioned in the Lane Mastodon comic. Unfortunately, that is a dead end. My break came when I noticed the word "HEADLIGHT" in the second row from the bottom. When we first discovered the paper, Tiffany had not yet had her "eureka!" moment, but by now we know that a headlight (from a 1933 Ford) is one of the key items that we have to find. Searching carefully, we realize that this matrix is a word search puzzle and some variant on the names of each of the eight objects can be found inside. If we find and remove them all, a secret message is revealed:
The message reads: "HISSING FRIGHTENS FLY TRAPS". I follow its instructions to hiss at the flytrap chasing us and it is destroyed, allowing me to reach the western edge of the jungle. There, we find a can of "untangling cream" and a circle leading to the hold of a mysterious spaceship. More on those later. If we had not worked out the word search, we could eventually discover a wooden trellis and a bag of leaves. By combining those over the pit, we create a flytrap trap that has the same effect.
I wish I loved this puzzle because the idea of a word search isn't terrible, but it doesn't make any sense in context. Tiffany wrote it before she designed the anti-Leather Goddesses weapon and it's strange that she would have embedded a solution to a completely unrelated puzzle inside. Tiffany's subconscious may be clever, but this feels a bit too clever. If there had been a hint somewhere-- perhaps Tiffany remarking about a dream that she had while we were running away from the flytrap-- it would have worked better for me. As it is, I solved it on my own but it wasn't as easy as it looks.
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| Science! |
Puzzle #2 - Weird Science
The second major puzzle on Venus is easier but requires trial and error as we navigate a tricky scripted event. We stumble on a mad scientist's lab in the jungle and are led inside and forced to participate in one of his experiments. We are taken down to the basement where we discover a cage with two gorillas inside (one male and one female), next to a slab covered in strange equipment. We also notice that the cage contains a six-foot length of rubber hose, the first of our key items. We are quickly strapped to the slab and the scientist presses a button. We immediately find ourselves in the cage, in a gorilla's body, with an amorous gorilla of the opposite sex nearby.
While the scientist watches carefully, we are given the choice whether or not we want to "frolic" with our gorilla counterpart. Is it bestiality to have sex with a gorilla while you are a gorilla? I have no idea. Regardless of how we choose, the scientist notes our response with excitement and leaves us in the cage.
Escaping is the most difficult part. We do not have the strength to bend the bars, but the game implies that we almost do. How can we get a little more strength? The answer relies on us figuring out the properties of one of the items we found earlier: the chocolate bar delivered with our food way back when we arrived in the Leather Goddesses' cell. If we had eaten it at any point, we would have received a bit of a "buzz" thanks to the sugar. If we eat it right now, the added sugar and energy it provides is enough to allow our gorilla-self to bend the bars. Unfortunately, the bar is being held by our human-self so that means that we need to quickly put it in the cage during a brief window (1-2 turns) after we are brought downstairs but before we are strapped to the table. Once we are free, we can push the red button to return to our own body, but we should not do so until we (as a gorilla) take the hose out of the cage and untie our human-self. Otherwise, we just wasted time and the game is unwinnable.
This is a fun "on rails" puzzle to solve, but it's all trial and error and passing items into the cage during that brief window. I worked it out but honestly thought that gorillas (like many other animals) were unable to eat chocolate. Once we get the timing down and do everything we need to do, it's a fun sequence.
Before we leave Venus, we'll need to finish exploring the jungle. There's a coin hidden in an old phone booth, a "Tee Remover" that can be bought off of a traveling salesman, as well as a black circle that gets us back to the main ship. Experienced players may have more difficulty with the traveling salesman than it would appear since he will only accept the flashlight as trade; I was very reluctant to trade my only light source in fear that there would be other dark areas to explore and so only did this when I was stuck elsewhere.
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| Poor King Midas! |
Puzzle #3 - King Mitre
Mars is the largest explorable area of the game, although we will have to navigate some puzzles to get to much of it. The area that we are dropped into initially consists of several ruined castles and deserts, surrounded on three sides by a martian canal system. There's a canal boat north of King Mitre's castle-- more on him in a moment-- but the canal is a one-way trip and can land us in an unwinnable state. The first puzzle we find is perhaps the most famous puzzle of the game: King Mitre.
When we arrive in Mitre's throne room, we get a long infodump where we learn that the Earth legend of King Midas who turned all that he touched into gold is just a corrupted form of the story of King Mitre who turned everything he touched into forty-five degree angles. The game itself admits that this makes no sense, but we go with it for the sake of the puzzle. Much like in the legend, the now depressed king has turned nearly everything, including his daughter, into a forty-five degree angle. He needs some help. What are we to do?
The answer lies in the odd machine that we bought off the salesman on Venus, the "Tee Remover":
'It's a TEE remover,' he explains. You ponder what it removes — tea stains, hall T-intersections — even TV star Mr. T crosses your mind, until you recall that it's only 1936.The "Tee Remover" is a small device with a door and a button. You place something inside, shut the door, push the button, and it will have all of it's "T's" removed. It's quite clever. Later on, we'll be able to turn a rabbit into a rabbi and many other fun jokes, but for now the key thing is to realize that the "untangling cream" that we discovered in the Venusian jungle can quickly become "unangling cream" when we remove its t's. If we apply that to King Mitre's daughter, she reverts to normal. The king becomes so overjoyed that he provides us with an eighty-two degree angle in reward. How he did this when he can only create 45-degree angles is left as an exercise for the reader. We take it and continue on our quest.
As you leave, you hear behind you the sound like a forty-five degree angle landing on a pile of forty-five degree angles. "Oh shit! Not again!", you hear Mitre moan.The joy in this puzzle comes from working out what the "Tee Remover" does and how we can apply it to the situation. Depending on whether the player went to Mars or Venus first, it's possible that this puzzle could have remained a mystery for a while. Unfortunately, this is the only case where the Tee Remover comes in useful; while there are other t's to remove for added humor ("rabbit" into "rabbi" is my favorite), there are no more where we need it to solve a puzzle. Overall, this deserves its reputation of being the most "fun" puzzle in the game, but it still doesn't make a ton of sense.
Elsewhere on Mars, we can discover a marsmouse on "Hickory-Dickory Dock". As a mouse is one of the key items, we try to pick it up and fail. Despite the name suggesting that this puzzle would have something to do with a clock, the actual solution is trivial: show the mouse the picture of a cat and it will become stunned enough to pick up. It's a bit of a letdown really, but that is two key objects in just a few minutes!
 |
| Pittsburgers call Cleveland "The Mistake on the Lake" |
Puzzle #4 - Cleveland Rocks!
In a desert east of Mitre's castle, we discover a fountain and a black circle that has been drained of color. If we use the black stain that we discovered on Venus, we can re-power the circle and are transported to the mythical land of… Cleveland!
Cleveland is, literally, a joke. After the sprawling expanses of Venus and Mars, we suddenly find ourselves cramped in a tiny suburban area that is somehow cut off from the rest of the world. Meretzky pokes fun at this, but the minimalism of this area feels jarring compared to the dynamic environments elsewhere. I'm sure that was deliberate:
You suddenly find yourself longing for the slime pits of Venus or the sandstorms of Mars. This particular section of Cleveland has exits to the northeast and south.We can explore two backyards and enter one tiny house. The yards have a bag of leaves and a wooden trellis that we can take, both of which could be used in the alternate Venus Flytrap solution. As it is, the sack is only useful for me as a way to ease the inventory limit.
Inside the house, we find a bedroom with a window open to a neighboring street. Just outside is a 1933 Ford with an intact headlight-- one of our key items! If this had been a real location, it would be simple to just go around to the public street where the Ford is parked and pick up the headlight. Instead, we can only get there by climbing out a second-story window. How can we do that? Searching the room, we discover a sheet on the nearby bed. We can tie it to the bedpost, but it's not long enough to reach the window. We cannot move the bed or tie the sheet to anything closer. The solution is to make the sheet longer by ripping it into strips and then tying them together to create a makeshift rope, then tie the assembled rope to the bed. We are too heavy for the rope, but Tiffany will agree to go down instead. Doing so seems like a mistake:
Tiffany climbs down the rope and unscrews the headlight. Suddenly, a truck barrels down the road and hits Tiffany, carrying her out of sight. Moments later, you hear an explosion. As the smoke drifts past the window, your eyes fill with tears. You hang your head in sorrow for a moment to honor your brave, loyal companion who gave her life that humanity might be safe from the terrible scourge of the Leather Goddesses of Phobos.Of course, she is revealed to have survived the blast a turn or two later after a misadventure with miners on Pluto or something similarly nonsensical. I could not solve this puzzle on my own and had to take a hint. I worked out that I could tie things to the bed and I was trying to use the sheet as a rope, but I never thought to rip the sheet into strips and assemble them that way. I suspect that I have not watched enough jailbreak movies. Tiffany also usually ignores you when you ask for help, but she leaps to it this time.
My biggest issue with this puzzle is how unnecessary it seems. We're in Cleveland. The car is parked on a public street. It breaks my sense of immersion in the game to have such a clearly constructed puzzle only make sense within the realm of a game. Had Meretzky had duplicated the exact same puzzle in a motel on Ganymede, I am certain I would have enjoyed it more. Either way, we have picked up our fourth key item. Only four more to go!
But… we'll just have to wait until next week for our shocking conclusion.
Friday, September 4, 2020
Chaikin Curves
Sometimes I want to draw Voronoi or similar polygons in a rounded form:
I use a process called Chaikin's Algorithm for this.
Start with a polygon:
Mark the midpoints of each side:
Then construct quadratic Bezier curves. Each original vertex becomes the control point of the quadratic Bezier, and the two adjacent midpoints become the two end points of the Bezier:
Super simple to implement! If you don't have a quadratic Bezier drawing function, you can use the De Casteljau Algorithm to subdivide the original line into smaller lines. Repeat this until you get line segments that are fairly close to the quadratic Bezier.
I used this for this project and this project.
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