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Missed Classic: Hollywood Hijinx - Won! And Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back to Hollywood Hijinx. When I started this series ages ago, I intended to play and document each game in three posts, with an allowance that I would let fun or important games breathe more. I rarely managed this, especially as I got into the groove of doing research and describing the puzzles. Hollywood Hijinx joins this exclusive club of three-posters with my victory today and I'm glad to get it behind me. I had hoped to reach Beyond Zork by Christmas, but that seems unlikely now, especially with the detours and interesting things that crop up. Still, it is the journey and not the destination and I am just glad that I haven't bored you all to pieces with the twenty-somethingth Infocom game.

When we left off last week, I was stuck. I found eight of the ten "treasures" but two others were elusive. I have only three more items on my "unsolved puzzles" list: the underwater passage, mysterious hatch, and the computer. I was unable to find either a waterproof light source or the final punch card to solve two of those, and I have no leads on how to open the hatch. To make matters worse, it's just now 7:00 AM and I have only two hours left to find them all and win the game. I can restore or start over to play faster, but I'd rather not. (I already saw the "losing" scene last week when I tried to wait out the candles burning.) One of the things I detested about early text adventures was the "do it again, but faster" mechanic. That is not the kind of retro charm this game needs.

After much screwing around and searching, I needed to take a hint. The answer was a doozy: I needed to waterproof a match by dripping wax on it. I had never considered that this was possible, no doubt because I never made it beyond Cub Scouts as a kid. With that solution in hand, I'm back to the grotto to try again.

Isn't "see-saw" one of the strangest words in the English language?

Working my way through the grotto with the match isn't difficult, although I do have an "oops" moment when I dropped the flashlight on the beach before remembering that I could not return to get it later. I stash everything off at the house, ski down the stairs, and swim through the tunnel. Just like last time, I emerge into a dark room. I'm stymied immediately because you cannot light the match while swimming, but I discover that we can climb out onto the bank in the dark and then light it. That reveals a tunnel to the north. I start my way up, but the match goes out immediately, I realize that I'm still carrying the candle so I restore and light it before coming up the tunnel.

On the other end is a bomb shelter and one of the more blatantly complex ones that we have seen so far. It looks like something out of Looney Tunes:

Bomb Shelter
With its concrete walls and floor, this room looks like it could be a bomb shelter. A heavy-duty sawhorse has a heavy wooden plank across it. Suspended above the left end of the plank by a rope is a safe. The rope stretches from the safe, through a pulley in the ceiling, to the floor where it's tied to a pipe running along the wall. In the ceiling above the right end of the plank, there is a closed hatch. A long chain hangs down from the hatch. Just beneath the hatch, there is a pair of heavy-duty metal hooks protruding from the wall. There is a doorway leading south.

There is a ton going on, but the end result is obvious: we have a catapult that will be triggered by the safe dropping onto the left side of the plank. Just above the right side is a hatch; presumably we'll be able to fire someone or something up through the hatch by cutting the rope and releasing the safe. This takes some trial and error, but I pull the chain to open the hatch, prime the catapult by pushing down the hatch-end, use the candle to slowly burn through the rope, and then stand on the "down" side to rocket myself up and out of the shelter. We emerge on the cliff at the northern edge of the property where we saw the closed hatch and ladder earlier. The hatch is no longer closed. I climb back down into the bomb shelter and hang the ladder on the hooks so I can come and go as I please.

Upper Sandusky, Ohio Circa 1900-1910.

I hoped that the safe would break open when it crash landed, but that was not to be. It is a combination lock again, but not the same combo as before. The safe has a cute plaque which appears to be a Leather Goddesses of Phobos in-joke:

LEVY, REGAN, LEBLING

SAFE COMPANY

UPPER SANDUSKY, OHIO

1936

I'm sure that this isn't a hard puzzle if you are in the right state of mind, but I spent too much time thinking that the plaque was just a clever nod to a previous game rather than something important to this one. I recognized two of the three names as people critical to Infocom: Jim Levy was the CEO of Activision when the company was purchased and Dave Lebling was one of the founders, but I had to dig to work out who "Regan" was. He appears to be Harry Regan, the "Division Controller" (finance person) for Infocom under Activision, although a fun enough guy that he participated in some of Dave Anderson's antics according to his mentions in The Status Line. Players in 1987 are unlikely to be as intimately familiar with Infocom history as we are now.

I took another hint and I'd like your opinion on whether the puzzle was "fair" or not. The solution is that the three names make up the combination. They begin with "R" and "L" so we know it's to turn the dial left or right, but we can work out how far to turn by counting up the letters. Levy is four, for example. That makes the final combination left four, right five, then left seven. I pop open the safe and am rewarded with another treasure: a film copy of A Corpse Line, Uncle Buddy's final film that had been mentioned several times in the game and the manual. Apparently, he died while working on it and the print disappeared. Fortunately, we have a screening room in the house!

This doesn't look so bad… (or very good)

I head to the home theater and pop in the film, expecting to learn of another puzzle. What happens next is something else entirely. I don't think I can do anything but quote it in its entirety:

Immediately the projector begins to roll. The film starts to run through the projector and a stream of colored light shoots out of the lens onto the screen in the screening room.

Your eyes are immediately drawn to the screen. You quickly realize why "A Corpse Line" could never be released: From the back of a large theatre the camera slowly pans in. The camera moves forward and you are able to make out a dozen or more figures lying side-by-side on the stage in glittering top hats. Then the music starts and the figures rise to their feet. The camera is now close enough to see more detail. The figures are corpses, some badly decayed, clad in top hats. They begin to dance in unison as the music swells. For a moment you forget they are corpses and begin to enjoy their mastery of the art.

Then the horror begins, just as it must have for Uncle Buddy. The line does a kick, and several legs fly into the audience. You feel your heart pounding as never before. The corpses, gripping each other's shoulders, turn at the same time and a half-dozen arms are pulled from their sockets. You can't seem to catch your breath. It's as if a pile of bricks were stacked on your chest. As the number ends, the corpses (what's left of them) remove their hats to take a bow. The camera moves in close as they bend over and you see the tops of their heads have been removed. You begin to shake uncontrollably, then you feel what seems like an explosion in your chest. The last thing you see is the corpses' brains plop onto the stage as they take their bow. You collapse.

Fade to black:

**** You have died ****

Well… that was something. I restore and drop off the film in the Foyer with the rest of the junk.

Like this, but in Technicolor. 

It's now 7:40 AM and I still need to find the last punch card. There's not much time, so I ignore the clock and search the house, restoring back any time I get close to 9:00 AM. I poke in all of the crannies, prod all of the described objects in each room, and generally make a nuisance of myself. I eventually locate the missing card in the piano! I insert the cards into the computer slot in rainbow order and get the same phone number as before: 576-3140, except now I can read the bottom row. I use the upstairs phone to learn that it's Aunt Hildegard's answering machine where she sweetly tells us that she cannot come to the phone right now because she is dead. She also reminds me to "look in the hopper".

The hopper? I head back to the computer and see Uncle Buddy's toupee in a hopper on top of the computer, plus a wooden peg and a note. The note says to "come downstairs" for a surprise. I board the elevator and put in the final wooden peg, eager to claim my reward.

You put the chipped peg in the hole and the closet door slams shut. Without warning, the floor drops out from under you! You fall for several seconds then land with a bone-crunching thud, dropping everything you're holding. You slide down a twisting, slippery slide and are dumped into a room filled with props.

You look around the room and cannot believe what your eyes are seeing. There is Aunt Hildegard! She's tied to a conveyor belt of a whirring buzz saw and a man is standing over her. Aunt Hildegard sees you and screams. The man turns and you immediately recognize your childhood nemesis: Cousin Herman.

Herman doesn't seem like a monster yet...

We have reached the endgame! What follows is a battle of wits between two unarmed men. There are numerous props from Buddy's films scattered across the room. It seems that he even made a low-budget Zork movie, judging by the "elvish sword of great antiquity" included in the junk. There are also guns, a mop, and many other things. It seems that every turn, both I and Cousin Herman select an item at random and attack the other with it. Inevitably, we both learn that the weapon is "only a prop" and it breaks to bits rather than hurting either of us. Whether it's luck or designed this way, I eventually grab a prop that is "real" and knock Herman aside, allowing us to rescue Aunt Hilda. (Could he have grabbed it before I did? Is the ending just a roll of the dice?) Herman escapes and the game is over.

The conveyor belt stops and the buzz saw's blade begins to slow. As you untie your Aunt Hildegarde, Herman races toward the chute and jumps inside, disappearing. You hear his squeaky laugh trail off in the distance. Aunt Hildegarde gets up from the buzz saw rubbing the back of her head. Though a bit shaken, she explains she had been watching you while you searched for the "treasures."

"As I followed your progress I began to realize you and I were not the only ones on the estate. My suspicions were confirmed when I received a rap on the skull. The next thing I knew I was being tied to this buzz saw by your Cousin Herman," says Aunt Hildegarde. "I guess he couldn't stand to see you inherit the family fortune. Well, it's all yours now. I knew you could do it," says Aunt Hildegarde with satisfaction.

"I'm sorry I put you through all this, Pumpkin, but your Uncle Buddy and I had to be sure that whoever inherited the estate and the studio would be clever enough to handle it all. The only way I could be sure the stipulations in my will would be carried out would be to oversee it myself, so I faked my death," says Aunt Hildegarde, hugging you so tight she squeezes the air out of your lungs. "Tomorrow we'll go see my lawyer and he'll take care of all the paper work. I know you'll take good care of Hildebud and the studio. As for me, I'm sure it won't be long before the press discovers I'm alive. I plan to go to the south of France for a rest while the story leaks out. It will be great publicity for the studio," says Aunt Hildegarde. Then she adds, "And let's hope we've seen the last of your Cousin Herman."

Time played: 1 hr 30 min
Total time: 7 hr 30 min

Cutting Room Floor

Before I move onto the final rating, I'd like to take a quick detour into the source code. I didn't peek until after I won the game, but I discovered that Hollywood Hijinx (like Moonmist) has plenty of dead code and commented-out bits that describe a game that is a bit different than the one that we have played. There are no grand revelations, but these hints give us an idea how the editing process worked and what puzzles they made harder or easier as the game progressed. Of course, we only have one snapshot of the final source and there are certainly many revisions and details that are lost to us now. I'll do my best to recount what I find, but keep in mind that I have limited information and it is possible that I will jump to an incorrect conclusion. Caveat emptor, as they say.

The first thing I notice is the changed name: in nearly every file, the game is referred to as Anthill, short for Aunt Hildegard's Secret. Why they changed it, I can't say. People just liked it better that way? By this point, the Infocom rule of single word titles (for everyone not Steven Meretzky) had been long broken, but there's no trace in the code as to how or when the final "Hollywood" name was chosen.

The game also includes blocks of code or items copied verbatim from (at least) Enchanter, Sorcerer, Suspect, and Seastalker. I'm going to ignore these in my analysis because I don't see how "Belboz's Spellbook", the dungeon from Enchanter, or the exterior of the house from Suspect would factor into this one.

Impressive for ants, but it is unlikely to help copies fly off the shelf. 

Cousin Herman's Dark Adventure

Much like Trinity, we are fortunate to have one of the game's original design/pitch documents intact. This gives us a view into an earlier stage of the game which is notably much darker in tone than what we played. The design document starts with this set of quotes which nicely summarizes that Anderson knew that he was building something less "deep" from the start:

"If you were to wade into this plot's deepest complications, you would only get wet up to your ankles."
-- Aunt Hildegard
Analysis of Mid-eighties text adventure games

"So what, that's what they said about Suspended!"
-- Naked South American Indian Girl
on the postcard in Hollywood's office

The game would have begun just as our final version did, with our aunt's death, and the command to find ten treasures to claim her fortune. The text is explicit that "evil" Cousin Herman is next in line and that Aunt Hildegard isn't really dead (yet). Just like in the final version, this is all just a test to see if we deserve to inherit her fortune… until Herman shows up.

I'll quote the document for what happens next:

At first his plan is to simply scare you out of the house. Then really kill Aunt Hildegard (making it look like she died by accident setting up a puzzle for you). Or make it look like you did it. But if you aren't easily scared, by the middle (?) of the game things heat up and he tries to kill you. (Things that were harmless in the beginning of the game change, with some type of warning, and are now deadly.)

Herman kills our aunt and turns her cute little collection of puzzles into a House of Horrors where we will be lucky to escape with our lives. The document ends with Anderson not yet having decided whether the lawyer is on Herman's side, whether it is possible for you to save Aunt Hildegard (such as "trying to free her from a buzz saw"), and whether or not Herman will be dead by the end of the game.

This scenario is more menacing than the game we played, but perhaps too ambitious. If Anderson needed to build two versions of every puzzle for this twist, I doubt the game would have fit into memory. In a way, this reminds me of the light vs dark worlds in Wishbringer, but we will never know what was really planned. It could have been fun!

"A palatial palace, that was my home."

Editing the Game

Anderson appears to have massaged the opening text of the game several times as multiple versions appear in the code. None of the changes are significant, but two at least are fun: in one version, the lawyer's name is "Bob Jones", the real-life husband of co-designer Liz Cyr-Jones; in another, we find out that the house is "haunted". Given that Moonmist just did a haunted house, it seems best that was left on the cutting room floor.

It also appears as if the game would have started earlier in the day. The current version starts at 9:00 PM, when it is already dark, and ends at 9:00 AM. However, multiple sections of code have logic for handling sunset, such as having a room be lit at first and then turn dark as it gets later into the evening. We also would have had a message when sunset fell. The implications of this are that we could begin exploring the house in the daylight, with one of the actions potentially being to locate a light source before nightfall. Could this have connected to the "Evil Herman" plot from the design document, such as having the traps become deadlier after dark? Possibly, but there's also no evidence for it. This feature may have been excised simply to keep the number of descriptions down as it meant that they would not need to write daylight and night logic for everything.

As for the remainder of the puzzles, almost every one has some little nip or tuck that we can find in the source. Some puzzles became a bit easier and some became a bit harder. I found these changes:

• Elevator/Bucket Puzzle - An original version of the puzzle was a bit easier as water was still turned on in the house. This meant that you could fill your bucket in the sink rather than having to discover the pond. There were even lawn sprinklers outside!
• Projection Room Puzzle - We do not have all of the pieces, but an earlier version required you to assemble the film using a film splicer, probably requiring it to be done in the correct order. The final version was simplified and the 3-second loop of film is already in the screening room.
• Grotto Puzzle - An earlier version of the grotto was larger (by at least one room) and had skeletons in the water. One engineer left a note in the comments that the skeletons may have been a bit much, plus wasn't the water supposed to be dark?
• Maze Puzzle - Getting the yellowed paper to find the maze map was at one point much more difficult. The paper was hidden in a chandelier in the dining room, but there was no way to fish it out. We would have had to take a fireplace poker (from the "Living Room") and use a harp (found someplace) to fire it like a bow and arrow. If we did so, we could knock down the chandelier and retrieve the paper. Considering that we could just throw the poker to have the same effect, I can see why this one might have not passed the test.
• Computer Puzzle - The computer puzzle was mostly the same, but there is code that would have made the call to the answering machine quite different. A code block for the phone includes the "ask about" logic that was used in the previous mystery games. From what I could tell, the idea was that you could get someone on the phone and ask them questions. That was changed to just an answering machine message. As an easter egg, there are also code snippets for calling many of the phone numbers from previous Infocom adventures, such as the costume shop from Suspect.
• Tokyo Puzzle - One small adjustment to the Tokyo model puzzle was that the buttons may have initially been labeled for easier understanding. The final version requires you to work it out by trial and error.

There is only one "new" puzzle that I discovered in the source, but the data is fragmentary enough that I'm not clear what was going on and it may have been nothing. There would have been a suit of armor in the Foyer, plus a collection of movie posters elsewhere in the house. The only poster that this version of the game details is for a movie called Melts in Your Mouth. Here is the synopsis:

Scientists discover that people who crave chocolate can actually get more pleasure from human flesh, but the acne is much worse. Soon the word leaks out and one brave chocoholic takes a bite out of her brother. The next ninety minutes are a frenzy of munching while scientists and candy makers race to find a cure. Morticians, sensing they are sitting on a gold mine, begin to market bizarre products like [??]. Soon the forces of good rally, with the aid of chainmail armor, rounding up the mis-guided flesh eaters along with anyone with a bad complexion.

Does that make any sense to you? It's possible that the armor relates to a puzzle involved in that movie or perhaps is one of the props itself. It may also be a coincidence. Other posters mentioned in the code (without descriptions) include Grapefruit Diet from Planet 9, and Plan 9 from Marketing. I'm not sure what either of those would have entailed. I also found a reference to an additional Aunt Hilda note with a "magic number" on it, but I do not find a clue where the note or number would have been used.

That looks painful.

I'm not on completely solid ground, but reading the code I have a feeling that the endgame with Cousin Herman and the buzzsaw was added relatively late to the process. My evidence is flimsy, but there is a significant amount of code in there for an endgame sequence where we drop off the treasures in the Living Room. The lawyer comes and counts them up, with different messages depending on how many you found, whether you found them but didn't leave them in the living room, and whether you were somewhere where the lawyer could find you at 9:00 AM. There is a lot of code for this, none of which most players would ever see because they would follow the instructions in the note and head downstairs. None of this is commented out and you can still trigger it by simply waiting around until 9:00 AM, although even if you "win" this way he scolds you for not following the note's instructions. I admit that it may be a stretch to conclude that just because this section was well-written, that it was intended to be the original end. It could just as easily have been that (like in Zork), a new path would open up to Aunt Hildegard only after the treasures were collected.

Enough spelunking! Let's rate this thing.

But wait, there's more!

Final Rating

Judging by the discussion on the introductory post, I expect that there is some disagreement as to where this game will land. I have second guessed myself more than once! Our rating system is not perfectly objective, but I will do my best.

Puzzles and Solvability - Hollywood Hijinx lives and dies by its puzzles. The "Atomic Chihuahua" sequence is utterly fantastic. It is not particularly difficult, but I cannot help but to keep thinking about it with a smile on my face. I'm smiling now! Other puzzles ranged from "good" to "okay" with the grotto having two of the worst puzzles strung together right in a row, plus the maze was a near-complete waste of time. My score: 5.

Interface and Inventory - This game sports the usual Infocom parser with no issues. It uses more ASCII art than most previous games, but not enough to change the score. My score: 4.

Story and Setting - Anderson was correct about the plot "only going up to your ankles", but it works as an old-fashioned scavenger hunt. The backstory that was revealed about Cousin Herman makes more sense in retrospect and I almost want to replay the game just to see the times that he was mentioned again with full context. The setting is fine but we've explored a lot of mansions in Infocom games and this one doesn't feel special. My score: 4.

Sound and Graphics - No sound or graphics. The game's limited ASCII art does not warrant a point here. My score: 0.

Environment and Atmosphere - The grounds were fun to explore, but I never felt scared or tense or even came to understand why our character loves this house so much. It all comes across as superficial, no matter how many celebrities are name-dropped as living nearby. My score: 3.

Dialog and Acting - Really great writing for much of the game, including the lovely-written Cousin Herman interludes and the amazing Atomic Chihuahua. I wish Cousin Herman had been a more interesting or well-rounded character in the end, but this game had fun prose. My score: 5.

Let's add that up: (5+4+4+0+3+5)/.6 = 35 points!

This score puts the game in line with Seastalker and a bit above Infidel and Cutthroats, but still in the bottom half of the canon. (It's also the same score as Zork I which I look back on now with some disappointment. I should have scored that game higher just based on how well it did what it did, but playing it immediately after the mainframe version was a bit of a letdown.) Looking over the scores, this game just succeeded in being a consistent game with some good puzzles and not being spectacular. But it is good and those who thought that this is one of the worst games in the set may be surprised by my answer.

Your average score guess was 35 so I'd say that the wisdom of the crowds was successful this time. Andy_Panthro guessed 36 and is our winner. Congratulations!

I'm currently doing research for Bureaucracy, but I might need a gap week to get that sorted out to get the history portion of the post in decent shape. Happy adventuring!

CX 2694, Pole Position!

Hello there, I hope that you all are safe and sane during this weird and difficult time. Today's episode is about Pole Position, the Namco arcade game that was ported to various Atari systems by General Computer Corp. (GCC if you're nasty). Coming up next is the wonderful Frostbite, by Activision's Steve Cartwright. If you have any thoughts on Frostbite (and I know that you do), please send them to me at 2600gamebygame@gmail.com by the end of the day on May 3rd. Thank you so much for listening and please take care of yourselves, I love you all!


Pole Position on KLOV
Pole Position on Random Terrain
Pole Position on Atari Protos
Pole Position on Atarimania
Betty Ryan Tylko profile on Atari Women
Atari Age thread about GCC credits
Atari Age thread, Undocumented Pole Position loaner cart
Atari Age thread - Pole Positn orange end label
1983 Atari Booth at CES video
Terry Hoff's web site
Marc Ericksen's web site
John Mattos' web site
Nerd Lunch Atari 2600 Retrospective
Batteries Not Included on Amazon
Imperial Scrolls of Honor Podcast
Nerd Noise Radio podcast

Nibbles & Kiwi

The early days in Kanto were tough. I didn't have enough money to survive on my own for long. What little money I did have I spent on food, lodging and a meager collection of Pokéballs. Aside from my companion, Rascal, that's all I had. Even though I had a Pokédex on loan from Professor Oak, I was still a long way off from building the Sanctuary and filling it with Pokémon from all over the world. I remained in good spirits, but I had to make some tough financial decisions. I knew that Pokémon trainers dealt primarily in PokéDollars which were universally accepted, but in order to earn some I'd need to find other trainers interested in competitive battling for prize money. Losing was not an option, because the risk of losing money to another trainer would doom the entire adventure. Winning a competitive match certainly meant bolstering my team, so while I waited patiently for the Viridian Pokémon Gym to reopen its doors to the public, I set out to capture new companions.
Rascal was really thriving due to our training. He had grown much stronger from our first encounter in the fields beyond Pallet. His progress filled me with confidence. West of Viridian City in the foothills of the Indigo Plateau, we encountered an aggressive, little Nidoran. As absurd as it may seem, I think the Nidoran was weaker than Rascal when Professor Oak and I first caught him. He was puny and feeble, but he made up for it in sheer enthusiasm. I named that little fellow Nibbles and we began training as soon as he was rested. Nibbles was always eager to train and never shied from a challenge.
Now, I do recall the Pokédex made the distinction that Nibbles was male. I remember clearly because I pondered this several times throughout my journey in Kanto. Pokémon gender at the time was nothing more than hypothetical conjecture. There was no definitive study on the subject, and Professor Oak's Pokédex entry on the Nidoran species compiled by me and other contemporary Pallet Town trainers would spark a more conclusive investigation in the near future. I used the computer in the Viridian Pokémon Center to email Professor Oak several times about Nibble and the Pokédex entry. He requested I find a female variant of the species, but in all my searching of Kanto that year, I was never able to capture one. The closest I came to a female Nidoran was in trainer battles which collected a good amount of data, but unfortunately not as much as I'd be collecting on Pokémon directly in my care.

Training Nibbles was a lot of work. In those early days, he was pretty useless in a battle. We relied heavily on Rascal to teach him how to handle himself and get him ready for competitive battling in the future. Some days we were out in the south training against wild Rattata and Pidgey. On other days we made our way into the shadow of Indigo Plateau to the west and were fighting Rattata and other Nidoran. Eventually, Nibble's aggressive and enthusiastic nature paid off and he was able to protect me from all the wild Pokémon we encountered. He was ready, but unfortunately the gym was still closed. So we ventured to the north side of Viridian City for the first time to see what we could find, capture and study there.
On Route 2, Nibbles pinned down a Pidgey which I expertly captured. Kiwi was a welcome addition to the team. Kiwi was the strongest wild Pokémon we'd subdued so far, possibly stronger than both Rascal and Nibbles combined when I first met them. This made him a lot easier to train. He was able to steadily hold his own against wild Pokémon right away. The four of us continued to train around Viridian City until my two weeks worth of paid lodging expired. At that point, it was time to move on. There were no trainers to fight in Viridian City and I had given up on the gym reopening in time to rescue me from my financial crisis. I would have to take the team north through the forest to Pewter City and hope the competitive Pokémon scene was better.
I packed my meager supplies into my backpack and headed out the north gate. I would have been well on my way down Route 2 toward the Viridian Forest, except I had happened to overhear a conversation between two children. They noticed the Pokéballs holstered to my backpack and began excitedly chatting. They found it coincidental that I happened to be leaving just as a new trainer was arriving. I casually approached the children, trying to pretend I wasn't eavesdropping, but soon was crouched down beside them. With wide and eager eyes and perhaps a hint of desperation in my tone, I asked them where I could find this new trainer in town.
They began jumping up and down in excitement, asking if we were going to battle. Laughing, I told them it would be up to the other trainer, but I was hoping to challenge him. The next thing I remember, all three of us were rushing through the city streets toward Route 22. My heart was pumping at the thought of my first trainer battle. My finances were completely forgotten, too. My brain was a complete blur. The only thing I could think about was the challenge and the thrill. Despite building and training my team for two weeks, I really wasn't prepared for what we would find on the road to Indigo Plateau.

Current Team:
Attacks in Blue are recently learned.

Ep 43: Undercoat It Black Is Live!

Ep 43: Undercoat it black

https://soundcloud.com/user-989538417/ep-43-undercoat-it-black

Neil Schuck and Jay talk about gaming the Vietnam War.

Follow Neil on Twitter! @mandmpodcast

Jay's Mission Analysis Article http://henrys-wargaming.co.uk/the-tactical-tutor-part-1/

Empress Miniatures FNG Indo-China Range http://www.empressminiatures.com/userimages/procart60.htm

Charlie Don't Surf - Too Fat Lardies -  https://toofatlardies.co.uk/product-category/charlie-dont-surf/

Charlie Company Rules - Rafm - http://www.rafm.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RAF&Product_Code=RAF00015&Category_Code=CCR

Charlie Company Miniatures - Rafm - http://www.rafm.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=RAF&Category_Code=CCM

Fireteam Vietnam - Buck Surdu https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Team-Vietnam-John-Surdu/dp/1889584096

Ambush Valley - Ambush Alley Games - http://www.ambushalleygames.net/force-on-force-core-rules-pdf/ambush-valley-pdf-version

FNG - Two Hour Wargames - http://www.wargamedownloads.com/item.php?item=556&Site=BGG

Men of Company B and AK 47 Republic - Peter Pig - http://www.peterpig.co.uk/rules.html

Carport Gaming - Chain of Command DMZ Blog - http://carportgaming.blogspot.com/

Full Moon Jacket - Strangley Games - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/266751851/full-moon-jacket/

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Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed: Collapsing Choices

It doesn't make any difference.

         

I pressed ahead and won Matrix Cubed last weekend, because at some point it became clear that if I stopped, I probably wouldn't start again. The game managed to go from seeming like an improvement from its predecessor to "meh" to actively pissing me off. After overcoming the bias I had built against it in the last session, it lost almost all that good will in this one.

     

When I last wrote, the Venusian scientist Leander had agreed to oversee the Matrix Device project. Needing a high-gravity environment, he and the science team departed for a laboratory in the orbit of Jupiter. Meanwhile, my next step was to find a PURGE scientist named Dr. Jerod Malcoln, who had invented an explosive radioactive gas that we need. He was probably at PURGE headquarters on Santa Catalina. SCOTT.DOS, our ship's artificial intelligence, had also identified an electronics scientist on Luna named Dr. Coldor. Buck Rogers gave us a passcode to enter a building in Losangelorg and find an agent named Red Carrin so that he could tell us how to get to Santa Catalina.

      

Buck reminds us of our current tasks.

        

We returned to Losangelorg and poked around the downtown until we found the right building. Carrin was supposed to be in Suite 5403, so we took the elevator to the 54th floor and found his suite. (The game allows you to take the elevator to any floor between 1 and 85, but most of them are just generic hallways with no encounters.) On Carrin's door, we found a note saying that he'd be in the Sparkhouse Cafe on the 85th floor, but this was crossed out and replaced with "Smoking Gun Slots on the 13th floor."

    

The 13th floor had several rooms we could enter and gamble. We tried our luck at "One-card Monte," an unsophisticated game that consists of everyone drawing one card, making a round of bets, and awarding the pot to the person with the highest card. Somehow I won almost $5,000 with my queen of hearts.

       

"War" was too complicated for you fellows, huh?

        

Anyway, the crossed-out part of the note on Carrin's door was a ruse meant to lure unsuspecting victims into an ambush. A panhandler warned us of this after we gave him a few credits. We tripped the ambush anyway because no one ever earned experience for walking away from a fight.

    

After mopping the floor with the robbers, we went to the 85th floor and found Carrin in the cafe. After a brief conversation, he gave us a passcard that would allow us to take his boat from the docks. As we took the elevator back down, I couldn't help but think that in the 25th century, there ought to be some easier way for six people to get to an island twenty-six miles offshore.

      

I'd work for anyone, even the NEO, who could float me to my island dream.

         

We also, of course, pondered what calamity must have occurred to move Santa Catalina closer to the mainland, move it about forty miles north-northwest, enlarge it, and change its shape. 

    

Wilma Deering, Buck Rogers' girlfriend, approached the party as we landed, offering no explanation as to how she got to the island. It's a minor issue, but the phrase "offering no explanation" is going to become a big part of the Matrix Cubed narrative from now on, so we might as well ramp up. She said she'd been scouting the headquarters and had identified two ways inn: smooth talk the receptionist in the lobby and hack the security doors in the maintenance tunnel.

      

One also wonders why a secret island facility belonging to a terrorist organization needs a receptionist.

            

We chose to try the receptionist. Elias, who has the highest skills in persuasion, passed his skill check, and we got in. For a while, we wandered the first floor, listening in on PURGE conversations and meetings. In a conference room, some members were talking about broadcasting a subliminal message using a satellite signal. In another room, a printing press churned out PURGE brochures.

     

Eventually, we came across a PURGE Commander Sooth talking to a subordinate, and they recognized us as infiltrators. An alarm went off, and the game was on. We were attacked by a variety of PURGE forces in most rooms and intersections.

     

The beginning of another PURGE battle.

            

We continued to explore the base, eventually transitioning to a second floor. We rescued Dr. Romney, inventor of the Matrix Device, from a jail cell. We wiped out a squad in a control room and found evidence on a computer that a PURGE team was attacking a Desert Runner radio station near the edge of the desert. In Commander Sooth's office, we found a letter from Sid Refuge, the cyborg, indicating that he'd recovered from his defeat on Venus. A laboratory held evidence that PURGE had been experimenting with subliminal writing. Most important, a logbook described an "anti-personality" virus called Bug Nine created by PURGE engineers.

      

Every time I have to read something in the paper logbook, it feels like a little piece of my soul dies.

           

Finally, we wandered into a room and found Commander Sooth sitting in a chair with a bunch of electrodes stuck to his head. Technicians were transferring his consciousness into a computer, to make him an artificial personality like SCOT.DOS. They finished just as we arrived. After a few more battles, we came across Dr. Malcoln taking orders from Sooth's voice, coming out of a computer. Yet another battle ensued, in which we killed Dr. Malcoln.

     

This would be a good place to mention that battles from this point forward were fought almost entirely with explosives. I'd found enough rocket launchers, plasma-throwers, and grenade launchers during the last session that I didn't have to worry about scrimping. Since enemies all have explosives, too, it would have been irresponsible not to use them.

      

A rocket launcher blasts some technicians.

       

The problem is that you can only use these explosive devices once every two rounds. To operationalize this rule, the game makes the process of equipping the weapon take a full round, and it then un-equips it every time you use it. After combat, you have to remember to re-equip all the items or else you'll waste the first round of your next combat equipping them.

     

Combats soon fell into a predictable rhythm of all my characters blasting the hell out of the enemies in the first round, then mopping up what was left with regular weapons in the second round. In the few major battles in which a substantial number of enemies were left after the first round, I would usually have some characters throw explosive grenades. (You can only use the launcher, which has a much greater range, every two rounds, but you can throw as often as you want.) I still used chaff grenades occasionally, when facing a large number of enemies (particularly robots) with their own explosives, but for the most part the power of the explosive weapons made the game feel a lot less tactical, much like having eight or ten "Fireball" spells memorized ruins things in the Dungeons and Dragons Gold Box titles.
     
Anyway, we fought our way into a computer room, where Theta Sigma used his "Programming" skill to access the Bug Nine virus and send it after the newly-created SOOTH.DOP, killing the artificial intelligence in its first hour. (Given all the body parts in the rooms behind us, I don't know why this felt particularly mean, but it did.) With Sooth dead, we retrieved Dr. Malcon's notes about Efanite, the explosive gas needed for the Matrix Device.
   

Sooth is unfortunately wrong about both things.

        

This episode is the first of another trend that dogged me through the rest of the game: progress gated by skill checks. I don't know for sure that there's no way to finish this mission without someone with sufficient "Programming" skill, but I do know that I couldn't find one. I had to reload several times before Theta Sigma passed the necessary checks. Later in the game, I had even worse problems. Not only do many episodes require checks, many of the thresholds are quite high. Given all the skills that exist in the game, you'd have to have some prior knowledge that some of them were used at all before you would bother investing points into them.

    

The game makes the whole process difficult in a few other ways, too. First, you can only learn one new skill per level-up. So if you started the game with only, say, five skills, the most you'll ever get in Matrix is maybe ten, and you certainly wouldn't have time to build the last few to any reasonable level. Second, you can't choose skills for new characters; the game does that for you. So if you find yourself lacking in "Programming," you can't whip up a new temporary character with a massive focus in "Programming" to save the day. We'll see later moments were this issue got a lot worse.

      

A lot worse.

         

As we left the facility and took the boat back to the mainland, I decided to comprehensively explore the Losangelorg metro area to see if the PURGE raid in the Desert Runners' radio station was actually something we could intercept. I also wanted to see if there were any other encounters on the outdoor map. It turns out that there weren't many, but a slew of random encounters with various  "gennies" probably added one to our final levels by the end of the game.

     

This is feeling a lot like a Fallout game.

       

We did eventually find the radio station, run by a Desert Runner named "Bad Dog." PURGE forces had thrown him out and were using his equipment to broadcast their anti-gennie propaganda. Once again, I have to emphasize that I don't know why we're against this. We just killed a few hundred gennies in the desert right outside the radio station door. Who is pro-giant scorpion? But we still defeated the PURGE forces and yanked their agent off the air.

       

This is feeling even more like a Fallout game.

              

We returned to Salvation, where Buck Rogers thanked us and said he'd send the Efanite files to Leander. That left our only mission to find Dr. Coldor on Luna. The Moon, if I haven't already covered it, is actually not a part of the New Earth Organization, but rather an independent colony with strict isolationist tendencies. To get there, I had to launch my ship, fly one square away from Earth, fly one square back to Earth, and choose to land on either Tycho or Copernicus. (Incidentally, half the time that you're on approach to a planet like this, the solar system suddenly rotates out from under you, putting your destination an extra few squares in front of you or even behind you.) It turns out that Tycho is just a menu town--we stopped in just long enough to get thrown out of a bar--and Copernicus is the actual destination.

      

I can only land at one place on Earth, which is four times as large, but the moon is parceled out.

            

As we arrived at Copernicus, we received a notice that our ship was impounded and that we should report to a Lt. Jenner. As we made our way to the police station, we saw Dr. Coldor getting into a jetcar with the "Tsai Weaponry" logo. We tried to approach her, but she said that "NEO has her services" and told us to get lost before we could explain that we were NEO and that whoever had her services definitely was not.

 

At the police station, Lt. Jenner explained that Luna is filthy with corruption, and that the police chief, Senator Koi, and the CEO of Tsai Weaponry are involved in a major conspiracy. He promised that if we could collect enough evidence against them, he'd help us collect Dr. Coldor and get our ship back. He gave us fake police badges to assist.

      

That was easy.

         

The rest of the map was a bit tedious, as we ran around from building to building--the offices and houses of the three major players--collecting intelligence. The process was annoyingly linear. For instance, the first time we visited Chief McKay's house, we found nothing. But later, we found a computer entry that mentioned a logbook. When we returned and looked again, we found the logbook.

    

So we had to visit the various places in the right order, then call the suspects to tell them we had dirt on them so Jenner could raid the subsequent meeting. I got sick of the whole thing in the middle of it and tried to just force my way into Tsai Weaponry, but automated laser cannons kept doing scripted damage to the party as we tried to explore the complex. These cannons weren't there when we did things "honestly."

     

Way to facilitate role-playing, guys.

        

So we followed the game's chosen path and got the police chief, senator, and CEO arrested for conspiracy, and Lt. Jenner gave us a pass to get into Tsai. We explored their headquarters (another 16 x 16 map) long enough to find Dr. Coldor consorting with Sid Refuge from PURGE. What is it with this organization? No one had heard of them two weeks ago, and now they have a headquarters on an island and have tendrils into every faction in the solar system.

    

Coldor learned at this point that she had been working for a bunch of lunatics. Apparently, Tsai had been creating some kind of chemical (confusingly called a "mutagen") capable of killing genetically-engineered creatures. Refuge had a little speech about it:

       

NEO's propaganda has served PURGE well. I recruited this scientist on your reputation. The pap of genetic mongrels living in harmony with the pure race fools so many people. They are blind to the inevitability of conflict. Either the pure strain will survive unsullied, or humanity will revert to packs of mindless animals!

       

I'm more confused than ever about PURGE's philosophy. Does Refuge think that humans are mating with gennies? Even if that were biologically possible, I haven't seen any evidence of it. Anyway, Refuge took off with Coldor, forcing us to follow them through the base. At various points, we were menaced by "plant gennies" that were just the same graphic as Bits o' Moander from Pools of Darkness.

       

They arguably make more sense in this context.

            

It became clear that PURGE or Tsai was about to launch a rocket containing the mutagen, somehow causing it to spread throughout the galaxy. We burst into the launch pad just as it was preparing to launch. While the party fought a big group with Refuge and his commandos . . .

     

This, like all situations, seems like a good situation for a rocket launcher.

      

. . . Dr. Coldor sneaked aboard the rocket and overrode the automatic controls. As we watched Refuge's cyborg corpse somehow escape yet again, we receive word from SCOT.DOS that Coldor had joined NEO and was taking the equipment and mutagen to the Matrix Device project at Jupiter. The police arrived to sweep everything up, and Luna officials thanked us while simultaneously inviting us never to visit the moon again.

    

As we blasted off from Luna, an explosion rocked the Maelstrom Rider, and radiation levels began to increase. The computer reported a 98% chance that the ship would soon explode. We couldn't seem to do anything to fix it, and the game clearly wanted us to escape in a pod, so we reluctantly took that option.

    

We get the hint.

         

As the pod sailed away, the party was surprised to see that the ship didn't explode, and instead flew "gracefully out of sight." Meanwhile, our pod was picked up by a ship called Rogue, captained by someone named Killer Kane. I was obviously supposed to recognize him from the game's setting, so I took some time to read up on him, which left me more confused than ever, because in no version does he seem to be depicted as the roguish "frenemy" of Rogers as he does here.

         

Well, I'm surely not going to call you "Killer."

         

Kane proposed an exchange: He would set us free if we agreed to infiltrate and help destroy a RAM cruiser called Deimos, which was transporting a "high-level Mercurian official" to Mars. This reminded me that well into the game, "De Sade" hasn't made a return appearance, suggesting all the intrigue on Mercury at the beginning of the game had nothing to do with the plot. This would turn out to be true; I never heard from De Sade again. Even the whole issue with Mercurian forces invading Venus turned out to be a mystery.

     

The game offered me the option of accepting Kane's offer, and I was feeling ornery by this point, so I said no. Matrix is the most linear of the Gold Box series, much more so than Countdown, which let you visit the planets and asteroids in almost any order. Here, we've had the choice of which of two missions to do first and second, but that's about it. This extends to not even providing alternate ways to solve puzzles that require skill checks.

    

In response, Kane shoved us back into our escape pod and said, "Good luck drifting." Well, we hadn't been drifting long before we were picked up by . . . the RAM cruiser Deimos. On which Killer Kane was somehow also taken prisoner in the hour since we saw him last. So that turned out to be another Morton's Fork.

      

A whole hour! Noooooooooo.

        

In the Deimos's brig, we were contacted by a RAM agent named "Oiler" who let us out of the cell and gave us explosives to plant in the weapons control room. Deimos was five levels, all of them relatively small, but we had to backtrack a lot, finding a keycard in on one floor that would let us through a door on another floor, and so forth. If there were battles, I didn't bother to take any screen shots; my recollection is that RAM crew seemed easily fooled by our lack of outfits or any identifying insignia.

     

We placed the explosive charges in the right place, but I don't think they were ever set off. As we left the room, we found ourselves surrounded by RAM bots who offered us a choice of surrendering or not. Either answer (I reloaded to be sure) led to them blasting us with sonic stunners and us waking up in a prison on Mars, so that was another choice they need not have offered.

     

The sun being too bright is a good sign we're not actually on Mars.

        

We awoke in a prison cell. For the second time in the game--but not the last--we were stripped of all equipment. The cell was made to resemble the Martian surface and extended infinitely in all directions.

Buck Rogers soon appeared. He said that when our ship returned to Salvation empty, he blasted off in search of us, found our pod, but was knocked out by gas and similarly awoke in this cell. This story makes no sense, as Rogers is a commander and shouldn't be soloing on rescue missions, but nevertheless, there we were. Rogers had his .45 automatic because it's so old that our RAM captors hadn't even recognized it as a weapon. Moments after Rogers joined us, so did Killer Kane, whose appearance makes even less sense.

     

And we had no idea, when we rejected you, that we'd end up in the same party. Though in retrospect, maybe we should have.

       

After finding nothing in our lateral explorations, Rogers suggested that we explore vertically. We dug down and hit a metal floor. Rogers then suggested we try to reach the "ceiling" via a human pyramid, with him and Kane as the base and the most athletic person at the top. Unfortunately, my "most athletic" person lacked the "Climb" skill to make it to the top, plus the "Acrobatics" skill to make it from the top of the pyramid through a hatch on the ceiling.

     

Spoiler: he failed.

      

In multiple re-tries, he kept falling and taking damage, and because the game offers no way to heal characters except at the end of combats, I eventually had to stop trying and use my second-most-agile character instead. And so on from him to the third. After about 15 minutes of this, the game took pity on me and let me succeed. I know it did because the character who finally got through the hatch had no "Climb" or "Acrobatics" skill at all. Incidentally, Rogers and Kane both have decent skills at both, but they insisted they had to form the base of the pyramid.

     

It turned out that my problems were just beginning. On the top side of the hatch was a gennie guard dog with about 76 hit points, and all I had to fight him were my puny fists. Even Austin, who had the highest number of hit points and the best chance of succeeding at hand-to-hand combat, was unable to kill the creature. Defeat means the character gets kicked back down the hole, the pyramid collapses, and we have to start over again.

    

In case it's not clear, this is when the "actively pissing me off" stage began.

      

The obvious solution, which somehow didn't occur to me, was to take Rogers' handgun. But I later consulted several walkthroughs and videos, and none of them offered it as a solution, so I suspect Rogers won't give up the weapon. If I'm wrong and someone has done this, please tell me. Meanwhile, all the walkthroughs and videos offered the same solution that ultimately worked for me: lower the difficulty level so that the enemy hit points get lowered. I hated, hated, hated doing this, but the damned dog was simply mathematically unbeatable without it. I thought maybe a character who specialized in unarmed combat could do it, but later I checked and found that's not even an option.

      

With the difficultly lowered, Austin was able to defeat the creature and then drop a cable to haul everyone up. Our problems didn't end there, though. The two-level prison that ensued offered combats with more dogs, robots, and other prisoners, all of which we had to fight bare-handed except for Rogers' gun, which we no longer had after Rogers suggested that we "split up." Kane fled shortly after we got out of the cell.

    

Since you have the only weapon, that seems like a really bad idea.

        

This was the only area of the game that I mapped myself, and only long enough to test various paths and determine that they led to dead-ends, or unwinnable battles. We ultimately found our way to a storage room and our equipment. Shortly after, we freed a "Stormrider" named Natbakka. He had been an ambassador to the Amaltheans, but they sold him to RAM. This story sent me back to the logbook to remind myself about the backstory. Stormriders are supposedly genetically-modified humans (though they don't look much like it) who live in high-pressure cities above the moons of Jupiter. Amaltheans are humans living on one of Jupiter's moons; they created the Stormriders in the first place but are now hostile to them.

       

I shudder to think what my brain is overwriting in order to learn this lore.

      

We found a computer console that allowed us to reach SCOT.DOS, who told us that he had found evidence of a spy at the NEO. Then some virus started attacking him, and we had to try to stop it through some confusing menu process that I didn't understand, and for which Theta Sigma kept failing his "Programming" checks anyway. At the end of the process, SCOT.DOS was dead, which I'm not sure wasn't scripted. If so, they should have just made it seem like it was scripted instead of making it seem like a character failed a skill check.

        

To be honest, I only ever vaguely understood who he was.

       

Buck Rogers rejoined us; we fought one final battle against RAM forces; and a NEO ship dropped in to rescue us. Soon after, we were finally back at Salvation. I felt like I had been through so much that my entire team should be able to level up, but only one person could.

That gets us far enough that I should be able to cover the rest of the game in one entry. By this time, the false choices and linearity were getting annoying, the skill checks were getting infuriating, and the combat was getting boring. You can see why I just pushed through to the end.

     

Time so far: 21 hours