Spellcasting 301 – The Party

 

Seeing this screen I can’t avoid by thinking about this

Allow me to start this post by saying that advancing is veeeeery slow. As I predicted in my last one, I have had to replay the first two days several times until I was able of doing everything needed to win the first competition of the tournament, and even then I am still left with the feeling that I am missing something.

It doesn’t help that I am constantly fighting the interface. Specifically, the look verb. I am playing mostly using the keyboard because I didn’t find the verb and item menu all that useful. The problem is that when you “look” in a location you don’t always get the complete list of items there in the description. The game expects you to look at the graphics to learn more, which is fine. With the only problem being that objects are not always depicted in the picture, or are only painted from a perspective from where you can’t interact with them. Case in point, you can see a board and a calendar from your jail in the police station but you can’t interact with them until you get out of the jail. At that moment, you stop seeing them as they are next to the door and the perspective changes to seeing things from the office door, hiding them. In the end, this means that I am getting into the habit of typing “take all” in every single location to see the list of interactible items.

 

Now you see us

But enough disgression, let’s get on with the game. In spite of my previous fight with the parser and the slow advances, I have to say I am having quite a blast playing this. Not because of the girls and/or the humour, those are like having a trip back to the eighties. Man, has humour evolved since then. No, it is because even in the face of the time limits and once you reconcile yourself with having to be restoring very often, the game is very open to exploration and experimentation. It gives you enough to be always thinking about several problems at the same time. So when you are stuck on one problem you might want to spend some time working on another one and there is never a dull moment and I haven’t reached the point yet when I run out of ideas or things to try.

The only problem with this is that I think it would be a very dull(-er?) for all of you if I simply wrote about how I am really playing, so I have decided to summarize my advances on the puzzles where I think I’ve made significant advances and how I got to those advances. Starting with…

The party
After having the weight lifting competition with the YUs at the beach, we are left there with one day and a half, a little less because you have to discount the hours you need to spend sleeping, before the next competition: the hot girls at the party (I know, I suck at naming things). Whatever we do, just one turn after this, Moe comes to us to ask for help. It is not as we didn’t know it would all fall on our shoulders but it is nice of the game to ask us so nicely.

 

No pressure

In my last post I commented that I didn’t know how to tackle this puzzle. And I think you are not supposed to. Not at least until the very next day. In my very first replay, I skipped going to the party, but in the next one I decided to be at 7pm Sunday in the hotel. Before getting to Moe’s room, you find a group of “bimbos” in the lobby, looking for action. And I was scared of having to work for my puzzles..

To be fair with the game, it does give you some clues beforehand. If you go to the lobby there is an activity board on Sunday saying that there is a Nail Polishing Seminar at 6pm, and you go there at 6pm the group of bimbos is about to enter the seminar talking about coming back at 7pm to see what to do. It is only that I was doing so much out of the hotel that I didn’t bother going back before 7pm the first time I discovered them.

 

I must be weird, as I usually prefer to change and finish dressing up in my room instead of in the middle of an hotel lobby…

But there is still the problem of getting them to Moe’s room (3313). Of all the items in the different shops in town, I have gravitated towards the ones in the hardware store and the pawn shop and they seemingly look the most useful ones. You can buy a hex bolt (used for another puzzle I will comment later on), a shovel, a studfinder and some pearl dust in the Hardware Shop. In fact, when you enter the Souvenir Shop one of the Pharts is there looking for a shovel, so it is a no brainer buying everything in the Hardware store. I was hoping using the studfinder as a short of metal detector, probably because I don’t know what the heck is a studfinder, but once I found the bimbos looking for men, something clicked in my mind (thank you Grease or otherwise I wouldn’t have known stud is slang for muscular boys) and I gave it to the bimbos. That worked, the only problem now was guiding them to the party, which I was unable to at that moment.

 

So, none of you brought any girls. It is nice to know I can rely on my brothers!

One restore later to just after having the weight-lifting competition I immediately went to the Hardware store, bought everything and spent the day with the studfinder turned on going around. And what do you know, it activated in one location I had already described in my previous post.

When you enter The Tourist Trap restaurant, a group of spring-breakers breaks through the wall and when you exit the restaurant the sheriff detains you and sends you to jail. But before that, the broken wall leaves two wooden two-by-four in the floor of the restaurant which make the studfinder go nuts. Incidentally, I also discovered that you can eat the bisque you can order at the restaurant to find a very heavy shell.

But then, if you eat the bisque how do you plan on getting out of the jail? Well, it turns out you can give anything edible to the rat. And even better, you don’t lose it. So this scene in jail is completely pointless except for presenting you the sheriff, which I am guessing right now is Ernie’s stepfather, Joey Rottenwood, the bad guy from the previous games.

 

If you really wanted that to be true, maybe you should not have left the magical prince turned rat that can open doors inside the jail

At this point I have to make a comment on the stupid inventory limit. I don’t know if it is a thing with an internal weight/size assigned to every item or if it is simply the number of items you are carrying, but inventory is limited to a very low number of items you can carry. I figured that since you should probably sleep in your room that would be the best place to store items, but I found out that’s very impractical, so I have made the Plaza at the center of the tourist section of the map my treasure hoard. Still, I have to continuously go there and back to drop items and it gets annoying, so I make sure to only leave the plaza with the absolute minimum, namely the gold, the spellbook and whatever I think could be useful for my next experiment.

Going back to the party, the solution is quite obvious then. Go to Moe’s room beforehand, drop the two-by-fours and then wait until seven to give the girls the studfinder.

 

Or be an asshat and carry the two-by-fours with you…

That happened because the action is not immediate. That means, you give the studfinder to the girls but they take their sweet time getting to the party. So I started getting nervous and tried to guide them there. But as in many things in this game, you simply have to wait a little. In the meantime I discovered that if you carry around the beer keg I dropped from the carpet and that you can find just lying around at Cliff Bottom, just before the party in a public area, a group of “plain-looking women” will start to follow you around and you can get them to stay at Moe’s leaving the keg there.

 

Now, that’s a less sucky party

With the plain-looking girls and the bimbos there, I was sure this round was going to be for us. And it was, eventually. If you think the bimbos took their time, the judge is not better. It is not until 10.15 that she arrives to give points. You have to wait almost three hours of the Pharts being amazed with the bimbos and girls. One of them even seems interested in Ernie, but I didn’t manage to get that to come to anything.

One of the boys even wonders how the YUs are going and what kind of girls have they managed to get into their party. Well, you and me bud, because I don’t even know where they are staying. There are two hotels in Naughtytail Fort: ours, the Royal Infesta, and what I assume must be theirs, the Coral Reefer. However, none of the receptionist at either hotel is able to tell me where the YUs are staying. The Coral Reefer is even harder to navigate, as in the Royal Infesta you get to choose from an elevator button panel and a map of each floor which room you want to explore so you could potentially get to a yet unknow location simply by brute force/luck. The Coral Reefer works differently and you have to type in the parser the number of the room you want to go.

 

Totally rad now

Anyway, in the end, I didn’t manage to get to the YUs party, but the judge ended up coming to ours and granting us 80 points and 60 to the YUs. Yay us!!. I also found a kaleidoscope in the party, but no idea how that got there…

Expanding our spellbook and meeting hotties
Do you recall us finding this old fellow in our previous wanderings?

 

The one with the trusting smile

Well, he is travelling with his wife, which is also a known associate of Ernie. A visit to their room shows that the lady is having her own spring-break. A very long and exhausting spring-break.

 

Move along!! Move along!! This is an adventure gamer trying to complete the game!! Move along and let me in!!

There is even a ticket dispenser, and the ticket you get varies with time, with the queue being longer and longer the more you wait before going there. However, if you wait a few turns, a guy will come looking for his friend and the friend will sell his ticket for 30g. Once inside, Hillary does seem in the mood for some action, I didn’t manage to do anything other that steal Otto’s suitcase, containing a RATANT spell box and a spare tie.

The RATANT spell is one of a kind. It is the only spell I have found that works on other spells. It mutates spells into other versions. So, for example BIP (produce soft music) becomes BIM (produce soft mucous). I will list at the end all of the spells and their counter-parts, and although I still haven’t found a use for the alternative version of the spells, I am pretty sure this will come handy.

One thing of notice is that you can mutate the RATANT spell itself to become RATTAN (shell mutation). Once used on the conch from the bisque, it transforms into a couch with a soggy-looking seahorse in it. However, as this makes you lose the RATANT spell permanently and I still don’t know what I could use that seahorse for, I prefer not to make that change yet or otherwise I will be trapped with whatever versions of the other spells I have mutated.

There are three other spells I have managed to get my hands on. The UPPSSY spell (spell of opposites) can be bought from the Souvenir shop for just 99g. A Steal. From the shopper I mean. The PEAWEE spell (regression) can be bought from the Pawn shop for 40g.

 

I don’t know Rick, seems fake to me

The last one is the SPURJ spell (enlarge tree root) that I found lying in the ground at the Mansion Grounds. The south part of the island leads to a fence that blocks the access to a mansion. The curious thing about this fence is that everything inside its grounds is blue. And that means everything, even the trees. There are three screens where you can see the fence: the Deserted Beach, the Dead End, and End of Road. The only gates, locked, at sight are in the Dead End.

 

Ok, I admit that line about the Fatally Wounded End got a chuckle out of me

It seems like there is no way in, but in the End of Road there is a hungry dog barking from inside the fence. I tried giving him any of the many food items in my inventory but none seemed to satiate him. By pure luck, I entered the screen with a hellhound carrion you find lying around in Mouth of Cave and the dog became nuts and started digging a hole. I tried to help him with my shovel but to no avail. Tried to FRIMP (levitation) the carrion to him, but that only made me drop the carrion. However, the carrion was then painted into the screen, and that gave me the clue to leave it there and see what happen.

 

I almost expected the dog to break the fence to be honest. Kind of disappointed.

Lo and behold, when I returned the next day, the dog had digged a hole that allowed me to enter the mansion. Once inside, there were several items in the Mansion Grounds, the spell I mentioned earlier and the case full of tan lotion we were carrying in the carpet. A button allowed me to open the gate to the mansion, although if you exit that way the gate closes behind and you have to walk all around the town to get to the mansion again. Climbing a statue also allows Ernie to exit to the deserted beach by jumping over the fence.

An exit to the west takes us to a maze. But a very special one, not the kind you have to navigate. It is a mini-game about getting the whole maze blue. You start with the center in white:

 

Everytime you select a color, the center changes to that color and grows by “eating” squares it is in contact with of that same color. The goal is to turn the whole maze… blue. Of course.

 

Anyway, there are three difficulties and a way of skipping the whole thing (which must be very useful for daltonics). I only managed to beat it in Medium, but didn’t find any difference apart from the cost of playing between beating it in Medium (5g) or Easy (10g). The reward is always a golden seahorse. Just so you know, Hard is only 1g and skipping the mini-game is 100g.

To the south of the Mansion Grounds there is the titular Mansion, and inside we can find Azure.

 

Casually wearing a night dress and perfect makeup to spend the day in a blue room…

She is quite sad and… well… blue. She is the daughter of Milton J. Blueberrystains, the founder of Blueberrystains Industries, the largest producer of spells. If that should ring a bell, it doesn’t.

In any case, in one of my previous shopping sprees, I remember buying a color bomb (150g) from the Pawn Shop. After using it on the shop to see what that was, it changed the colour of the whole shop from a brownish thing to green. I immediately wanted to see the effect of that bomb here…

Meet Scarlett, the red version of Azure. She takes us to his father’s lab through a secret door. I didn’t manage to do anything there, but there is a vat with lemon juice that could be interesting but I don’t know what to use it for. The case we got in the Mansion Grounds contains several tubes of lotion that say that their effect is lessened by contact with lemon juice and you can put the tubes inside the vat to soak some of the lemon juice. There is a tan contest up the line so I am guessing this is a dead end until then.

 

More like “torture basement” than lab

Final remarks

This has ended way way longer than I intended but I will try to recap the other threads I am following:

• Stream of Consciousness has a workman lamenting having lost a hex bolt needed to repair the bridge there. Once I gave him the bolt from the Hardware Store, he starts lamenting not having a left-handed ratchet and I have no idea how to get that. Maybe in the Employees Only door at the Aquarium. On the other hand, drinking water from the stream recovers you some vigor, which makes you less tired at the end of the day so maybe it is possible to spend the whole night doing things without sleeping at the cost of frequent trips to the stream to drink.
• I have tried my luck at the casino but I always lose. There is one game that is about guessing the door a mouse will appear in which seems like it could be cheated. I also realized that you can sell some things in the Pawn Shop, so maybe the money problems won’t be that hard.
• The mine at the north east part of the island is pitch black. I will need to find some kind of light source or maybe repairing the lighthouse will solve the problem
• There is a jellyfish sitting on top of a chest at Cliff Bottom. My efforts to remove it have shown no results.
• Bothering a lobsterman in the Wharf for a brief time produced a boot.
• There is a seahorse trapped under a root in Windswept Road. This is a job for the new SPURJ spell or the golden seahorse, but haven’t tried anything yet. What’s the deal with all of these seahorses?
• Just a turn after being in the Guild Hall, an apprentice will come around and drop a treatise that talks about the irreversible state of spells and how to counter it. Apparently you have to mix a Loosexa Wingus Maxima (a goose maybe?) with some pimento moss, that I found inside a cannon at the Fort. Damn me if I know what any of that means.
• I found a blatant copyright infringement BATMAN!!

 

Holy game, Batman!!

• One correction from my previous post. Chapter 2 starts just the Sunday morning, the day of the party, not the day following the party
• Ok, I am officially an idiot. Just while writing this post I realized that I was playing in Nice mode. In Naughty mode you can score Hillary, although it serves no purpose other than seeing her with even less clothes. I am wondering if Scarlet would be the same.

 

Just for the sake of comparison. It even includes some sounds. yay?

And that’s everything for now. See you on the next contest: sand castles!!

Inventory:

• 63 pieces of gold
• Bathing suit (worn)
• Glasses (worn)
• Spell book
• #40 hex bolt
• Golden Seahorse
• Case (auburn tube, umber tube, sienna tube, brown tube, tan tube, beige tube, sepia tube)
• Kalidoscope
• Studfinder
• Two-by-fours
• Empty sack (had 200g)
• Instruction Sheet
• Confirmation Letter
• Trophy
• Cloak
• Sid’s book bag (text book, nose shield, deflated pool float)
• Otto’s suitcase (spare tie)
• Pimento Moss
• Some suction cup-covered gloves (left by Batman)
• Package of breadsticks
• Shovel
• Conch
• Boot

Potential items:

• Diamond ring (1500g from Pawn Shop)
• Pulverized pearl (15g from Hardware Store)
• Strawberries (6g from Grocery Store)
• Laxative (39g from Grocery Store)
• Bread (3g from Grocery Store)
• Rust Spray (10g from Souvenir Shop)
• Roc Caller (79g from Souvenir Shop)
• Greasy food (5g at Beach by Snack Bar)
• Slimfish (33g from Fish Market)

Spells:

Map:

 

Score: YUs – 100, Pharts – 125 (yay us!)

Session Time: 3 hours
Total Time: 7 hours

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!