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Now what does this remind me of? Oh, yes, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V_EmG0jsuY
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May 24, 2020 23:32
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Something I noticed when I took my own stab at this maze that you may want to show off: If you open the help menu after picking up loot you get a list of everything you're carrying... including some things that aren't exactly objects.
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May 25, 2020 00:18
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Part 49.5: Still working on the goddamned Last Treasure Okay, where were we?  right. We still have to get past:  And there's still a silver door and golden door that are locked. And the main thing blocking us right now is a noisy sprite we've just run into, so we need to explore more. At least defeating the Ogre opened up a new path to explore, and we find:  Okay, a quartz crystal. Who wants that?   And the silver cross should get us past the vampire.  OW OW OW OW OW i dont think that's how its supposed to work OW gently caress gently caress Argh. Okay. Only two paths this time. What's here?  Parsley? What the hell can... wait, that's not the 'rare' herb that the Spirit is looking for, is it?  I have no idea why I'm surprised by this. Okay, well, three paths, so let's explore.  aaarrrrgh remind me never ever to play a D&D game that Cliff Johnson runs. Okay, but we have three pearls. Let's go take those to the... sweaty dwarf?  Ugh, not looking forward to this. oh man i hope that isn't a euphemism Okay, let's make like a tree and figure out what's in the rest of this passage.  Nice! Time to go open that Silver Door, then.  Yeah, I think we know what to do with this one.  And then we walk out to freedom? No, of course not, but we have to try to keep moving forward.  WAUGH okay that was a bit more than I expected. Fine, fine. But we know how this goes - with the sprite away, there's a new place to explore.  Really? Another pine cone? Sure, whatever. That's only four coins so far; so I guess someone wants the daisy? With only three blockers remaining, it doesn't take much trial and error.  I guess presenting flowers at first meeting is a polite thing, sure. Okay, what's left here?  ... words fail me. Cripes. Only a few more to go. Piece of bark, must be for the Nymph.  You know the drill.  And that's the fifth coin, so our last visit is to the troll.  I mean, in finest heist movie tradition, we did all of the stupid work and he's running off with the winnings, so I can't blame him for laughing. Anyways. Only one branch to search behind him, and if you haven't fallen asleep, you'll know what it is.  Okay, off to the Golden Door to get the last scroll to knock away the Demon, because humans are good at pattern recognition.  There. Everything's done and we can go trudge back to the demon and get out of here.  THE gently caress HE WASN'T IN THE CENTER ROOM BEFORE okay, okay, calm down, let's try that again.  Yup. He's in the center room now. In fact, to be specific, he occupies this line:  Any movement into that red area just gets you a little flash and tossed back to the west. But there's a way to the east around him. Maybe that might help us?  And it turns out that, from behind him, we can cast the spell of Disruption.  Sure. That was well explained and foreshadowed, I'm perfectly happy with all of this puzzle and resolution. It was very satisfying.  Okay, let's see if we can leave now.  Huh. That seems important. ----- Before we jump off into solving that, let's show off the last bit of the Maze. Sillyman posted:Something I noticed when I took my own stab at this maze that you may want to show off: If you open the help menu after picking up loot you get a list of everything you're carrying... including some things that aren't exactly objects. Absolutely! It's actually very helpful, as you may pick things up without seeing the notifications, or you may be running around thinking you have one answer and forget that you have another answer picked up as well. At the end of the game here, we can open up the help screen and this is what we're left with:  And then when we leave: 
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May 25, 2020 00:27
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inflatablefish posted:Now what does this remind me of? This makes me desperately envious of British kids!
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May 25, 2020 00:28
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And converting XLPFYVX ENPAZGZJ with one of the letter ciphers gives us a DIAMOND BRACELET which should just fit into that final space on the board! (I maintain that the true Gift of Wisdom is the art of letting other people do the hard work while you nip in and finish off the final easy bit at the last minute.) inflatablefish fucked around with this message at 01:00 on May 25, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 00:57
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Part 50: Finale Okay, we got a code phrase from the Maze of Thorns (cursed be its name) and there's only one code left unused, so let's plug Obvious Tab A into Obvious Slot B and see what we get. inflatablefish posted:And converting XLPFYVX ENPAZGZJ with one of the letter ciphers gives us a DIAMOND BRACELET which should just fit into that final space on the board!  And with that, we can enter the last treasure into The Book of Thoth.  Gloomy Rube posted:It's THE GIFT OF WISDOM, pretty sure. And we can confirm that Gloomy Rube is right - our final treasure is:  Whoa, hey, hold on, something's happening   Less a trick by the High Priestess and more a limitation of Mac computers and Johnson's programming to not be able to include the finale movie in the game itself. Well, it's a simple thing. (Or, it would be, if it hadn't dropped the file into the folder I created for the lp saves and I couldn't find it and panicked for like an hour.) We click the file, and the Finale is ours to behold. It's too big for gifs, so I've uploaded it to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaeHASplwUo Enjoy! ----- And once you've watched it, read the below and check out the last scene again! I've played this game a bunch and had no clue about it! Zandar posted:There's one last "puzzle" in the finale which I think is a great touch (spoilered in case people want to solve it themselves). -----  And with that, we've finished up The Fool's Errand. Thank you to all of you for coming in and watching, for trying to solve puzzles or for just throwing in snarky comments, and for providing corrections and helpful hints for my first LP. While cliched, I do hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed putting it together. It's okay if you enjoyed it more than that, though, especially when I was wrestling with the Maze of Thorns. skeleton warrior fucked around with this message at 03:31 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 01:13
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I loved this LP, thank you! And that finale was pretty spectacular, especially from an era where the best you could usually expect was a screen saying "Well done you win" - you can really tell how much of a labour of love this game was.
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May 25, 2020 01:28
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Thanks for showing the game off! And thanks everyone in the thread who helped to solve the puzzles!
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May 25, 2020 02:01
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There's one last "puzzle" in the finale which I think is a great touch (spoilered in case people want to solve it themselves). The Fool incorrectly solves the High Priestess' puzzle by simply taking an anagram of all the letters, but the words in the bottom-left seem like they should be used too. What if we replace the capital letter in each first word with the one in the corresponding second word? We end up with a different set of letters, TTTAHHEOOFODEL, which can be anagrammed to... DEATH TO THE FOOL. Hmm. Maybe it was indeed wise of the Fool to get it wrong. Thanks for LPing this, it's one of my most fondly remembered games and it's nice to see other people enjoying it.
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May 25, 2020 03:33
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Thanks for showing that off so that we don't have to play it.
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May 25, 2020 04:36
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No really you all need to go back and click on stuff. Echoing the thanks for this, really good LP of a pretty good game  It was fun.
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May 25, 2020 05:26
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Congrats on finishing the LP! I had a lot of fun reading along, and by the end I ended up playing along with it again too, for my... fourth time through it, I think.
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May 25, 2020 05:28
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This game was really just a great time. I'd never made it to the main high priestess puzzle so it's great to finally get to see the entire back half of the game and the ending finally. Thanks a lot!
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May 25, 2020 06:36
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Zandar posted:There's one last "puzzle" in the finale which I think is a great touch (spoilered in case people want to solve it themselves). So did the Book of Thoth zap the High Priestess because the fool DID give a correct answer (as it was an anagram) or because she explicitly told it to kill the Fool, as opposed to turning him into a Tarot?
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May 25, 2020 11:03
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So, don't use https://anagram-solver.net/, it couldn't find "death to the fool" from that puzzle. Or if you straight up give it DEATHTOTHEFOOL as an input.Randalor posted:So did the Book of Thoth zap the High Priestess because the fool DID give a correct answer (as it was an anagram) or because she explicitly told it to kill the Fool, as opposed to turning him into a Tarot? I think the implication is the second. Although I wonder if something similar would have happened if he'd solved the priestess's puzzle "correctly", as it implies her trying to use the book's power to kill him regardless? Anyway this was great! I loved the weirdness present through the whole thing. The broken story timeline, the bizarre glitches blindsiding the player every so often (I guess photosensitivity warnings weren't as prevalent back in the day), and especially the weird meta-puzzles - both in terms of strange UI exploits and clues scattered throughout the game. Crazy Achmed fucked around with this message at 12:58 on May 25, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 12:52
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Thanks for the LP! I may have only chipped in at the end, but it's been a fun read the whole way through.
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May 25, 2020 13:06
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Crazy Achmed posted:I think the implication is the second. Although I wonder if something similar would have happened if he'd solved the priestess's puzzle "correctly", as it implies her trying to use the book's power to kill him regardless? I think the idea is that she wouldn't have used the Book of Thoth if he hadn't mentioned it; presumably she has other ways to kill fools.
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May 25, 2020 17:41
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This was wonderful to read along with, thank you for sharing it.
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May 25, 2020 19:15
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This was wonderful, thank you! I didn't read the Maze of Thorns and the Finale as I wanted to see them for myself. I loved the Rogue feel to the Maze and I thought for sure the letters of the creatures you met would mean something. I've been clicking on the Major Arcana and the Aces, but tonight I'll need to go back through each post and keep clicking. 
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May 25, 2020 21:05
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First off, thank you all for all of the thanks yous! This and Balance of Power were the two reasons I stole into the computer lab every chance I could to play on the Mac I didn't have access to otherwise, and it will always be one of my favorite games, even if sometimes it's hard to love. As Crazy Achmed said - it isn't just that it's puzzles, it's that there's so much with the meta of how you play with the game, and the larger puzzles that require you to stitch everything together in the right order and understand the clues. But I couldn't solve it in high school - lack of time and lack of puzzle-solving smarts; it wasn't until years later that I found a PC version and could finally finish all of the puzzles, so I'm especially glad I got to give closure to a few of you. And again - it's hard to do an LP without response or input, so I appreciate everyone who showed up and threw a solution down or even just chatted - this wouldn't have worked without all of you. And special thanks to ManxomeBromide for neat information about the Tarot itself, and for occasional asides of "oh, I remember this part, and you're going to love it!" inflatablefish posted:I loved this LP, thank you! And that finale was pretty spectacular, especially from an era where the best you could usually expect was a screen saying "Well done you win" - you can really tell how much of a labour of love this game was. Yeah - Johnson worked professionally as an animator, including at Nickelodeon in the early '80's, and a lot of that skills comes through very well in the prologue and finale. Zandar posted:There's one last "puzzle" in the finale which I think is a great touch (spoilered in case people want to solve it themselves).  That is amazing - I had never gotten that! I assumed it was largely nonsense added in to make it look tougher, but that makes so much sense and seems absolutely like what Johnson would do - slip one last puzzle in to the last bit. I'll add that in to the final post! Bregor posted:This was wonderful, thank you! I didn't read the Maze of Thorns and the Finale as I wanted to see them for myself. I loved the Rogue feel to the Maze and I thought for sure the letters of the creatures you met would mean something. I'll hopefully save you some time - only the Major Arcana and the Aces are urls, up until the Maze of Thorns, where the maze picture at the beginning of each post is also a url. I'm glad you enjoyed them! I figured that a game about secret puzzles could use a little bit of its own secret puzzle.
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May 26, 2020 03:29
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Yeah I didn’t realize the bit about the hidden urls until I read one of the posts on the mobile app.  After that I tried all the Tarot cards and was very glad I did.I still want to try finding more Easter eggs, like the finale puzzle. This has been such a joy to play though, thanks again!
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May 26, 2020 03:53
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skeleton warrior posted:In all cases, the first (Courier) row is the letter entered, the second (Mac font) row is the letter received. Was this another secret easter egg? I honestly didn't recognize Geneva at that size, since you never see it blown up so big (or so crudely aliased unless you're emulating). The second is of course Chicago. Both by Susan Kare, who did all the original Mac fonts.
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May 30, 2020 03:59
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Many thanks for an excellent LP! I regret I wasn't able to participate!
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Jun 6, 2020 11:33
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Kangra posted:That fact that he made this while learning to program it puts me in awe of his raw ability to teach himself. Not to rob him of his accomplishment, but he must owe a wee bit of the success of the game to just dumb luck. Hey man just reading through the thread and it looks like people missed what you did here, but I just want you to know that I saw it
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Jun 17, 2020 10:08
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