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OK, I have

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gone to Primordia, knocked down the satellite and taken the blue pill, but none of this helps me get the ID card I need to get into the base. Yodo has it - apparently I have to find someone who likes to fight... but who? No one anywhere seems interested in talking to me about him.

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paolo,

Ok, I'll give it another couple of tries, just for you. With your tips I might make it, we'll see.

Thanks.

Edit: I made it!!!!

Yay!!! <jumps up and down and claps hands> Well done! I'm really pleased I was able to give you the push that you needed.

But

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did you note down your score at the end?

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Can you help me now with where I am stuck, please (see my post above)?

Not really a tip, but an explanation, for the benefit of non-Brits, of the in jokes surrounding the "copper box" as it has become known in this thread:

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The character in the bar who has lost his dog is called PhD Quis, which (I think) is Latin. In English, this "Doctor Who", a reference to the long-running sci-fi series of this name in the UK. The character in the game represents the main character in the TV series, who is known there as "The Doctor". This role has been played by many actors over the years, this being explained in the series by the fact that the Doctor is able to "regenerate" from time to time. Each regeneration of the character has had a distinct appearance and costume. "PhD Quis" represents the Doctor as played by the actor Tom Baker in the late 1970s.

The Doctor had a robotic sidekick in the form of a dog, called K-9 ("canine", get it?). K-8 in the game looks very similar.

The Doctor is able to travel through space and time in a device called the TARDIS. Originally, it was able to take any form in order to blend in with its surroundings and not to look like an alien spaceship. However, the mechanism to do this become stuck, and the shape of the ship became fixed as a police box. (Explanation: the series began in the 1960s. At that time in the United Kingdom, there were phone booths in the street from which the public could call the police as need be. These blue
boxes were called "police boxes". They no longer exist in the present day.)

Other Doctor Who references in the game: the TARDIS is larger on the inside than on the outside and has a console that moves up and down; the doctor has a sonic screwdriver that has all sorts of very useful functions. There may be more that I haven't noticed yet!

By the way, "copper" is British slang for a policeman, hence the text on the outside of the TARDIS in the game. In the TV series, the text is "POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX", but no doubt that was much too long to fit in

You can read more about Doctor Who on Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who

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Paolo

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I'm not sure but I think you have to dance close to her. Maybe even facing her.

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Thanks, guest, but that didn't seem to do anything. Can anyone else help?

Thanks, xander....just what the doctor ordered 

I've tried the death game on the desert planet but I can't win.
It's a shame that this type of arcade game has to be within a otherwise nice game. Not everybody is good at these kind of shoot-em-up types of games, I've always failed them and have to leave Charlie Foxtrot to his own devices....

Come on Eva, you can do it! It just takes a bit of patience. I'm not keen on these arcade-style games either, but I managed it after four or five attempts.

Here are a few hints that might help (some of them are fairly obvious so please bear with me if you find yourself thinking "Well, I knew that already!"):

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This will sound really obvious, but it's an important point. Because you have only three lives, it's really important to avoid getting hit. If you have the choice between getting a diamond and being hit by a rock, then always leave the diamond and get out of the way of the rock. There will always be more diamonds to come (there are more than 40) but those lives are limited and precious. You will find that you spend most of the game avoiding rocks, but be patient and those diamonds will soon start to mount up.

Because you need to get 40 diamonds and have only 3 lives, aim to collect 13 or 14 diamonds (= 40 divided by 3) at the very least before losing a life. If you can get at least this many without losing a life, you're more likely to get to the end of the game. If you manage to get, say, 20 before losing a life, then you know you stand a really good chance of making it all the way through.

Dragging your mouse well over to one side or the other is usually enough to avoid most rocks. A lot of the time, you only need move over a little to avoid them. Keep your cool.

If you see a narrow gap between two rocks coming towards you, it's better to round the side of both rocks rather than trying to get through the gap.

It's easier to click on diamonds when they are close to you. Again, that's pretty obvious. However, if you see a diamond heading off to one side and you move across so it is heading towards you, it will get bigger. Diamonds that go past at the edge of the screen don't get much bigger and so are harder to capture.

Keep practising and soon it will get easy! Remember it will take a few attempts to get through to the end.

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Please persevere and I'm sure you'll get there in the end!

Hm, I don't know what I should be doing now...

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I have played Quest for Death 2 (and I noticed that the score looked odd, so I've made a careful note of it), been across the desert and back and got the electrostatic screwdriver... presumably I need to get hold of the alien's bag to develop the film (and I know where I can do that) but I don't know how to. I've been on the dancefloor for a dance but nothing special happens.

Thanks.

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I see. Thank you for the clarifications and explanations. It's obvious that you did your homework when writing the game, so please excuse me if I seemed to be too critical.

Please also see the final paragraph I have added to my posting above.

It may well be that everything I am about to comment on has already been said, so apologies in advance if this is the case. I finished the game just over a week ago but have been away.

Here are my comments, mainly on the language in the game, and my bug reports.

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The language

It's tricky to get archaic English right because most people are not very familiar with it these days. I'm no expert, but a few errors were glaringly obvious to me:

* The inflections of "thou" are very similar to the inflections of "I": you can pretty much change the "m" to "th" to go from the first- to the second-person singular: hence "me", "my", "mine", "myself" in the first person are "thee", "thy", "thine" and "thyself" in the second person. In particular, note "thine". This means "yours", not "your". So, for example, "thine name" is incorrect - this should be "thy name". Similarly, "thine self" is incorrect - this should be "thyself". However, "thine" can be used instead of "thy" before a vowel, so "thine eyes" is correct (as is "to thine own self be true"). Perhaps this usage led to the authors thinking that "thine" can always be used instead of "thy".
* "Regale" does not mean "recount", so you don't regale a tale to someone. It means to entertain (see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/regale). Hence you regale someone with a tale, you don't regale a tale to someone.
* "Vagabond" comes from the Latin for "wandering", so in "a wandering vagabond", the word "wandering" is redundant.
* There is no such word as "o'threw" - it should be "o'erthrew". ("O'" is a short form of "of", not "over".)
* I take it that the blue cup's misuse of archaic language ("Thou appeareth to be playingeth...") is deliberately incorrect.
* The changeling struggles with his thees and thous, calling them formal, but the formal form is actually "ye" (see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ye).
* "Avast" is a nautical term, so, unless he used to be a sailor or pirate, why does the monk use it?
* "Shall" is occasionally used as if it were a formal form of "will" (eg, "We shall crush you"), but it is not. "We shall crush you" means "We are going to crush you"; to say "We are definitely going to crush you", you would need to say "We will crush you". See the usage notes at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shall - while the distinction isn't really made these days, it certainly would have been in the era in which the game appears to be set.
* The use of US English clashes a little - British spellings would have given a truly quaint, olde worlde feel.
* The contractions "'tis", "'twas" and "'twould" should have a capital "t" when used at the beginning of a sentence (compare "'Twas the night before Christmas...")
* "Loathe" is a verb meaning to detest. "Loath" (or "loth") is an adjective meaning "reluctant". Hence "The fox seems loathe..." should be "The fox seems loath..."
* "tidings will turn" - tidings are news; should this be "the tide will turn"?
* There is no such word as "antromorph" - shouldn't this be "anthropomorph" (= humanoid)?
* A common mistake when quoting poetry is to put a comma at the end of each line. Poetry should be punctuated in exactly the same way as the text would be if written as prose. Consider the following lines taken from the game and converted into prose: "Careful, he might be tempted to bite or put up a fight." Note that there is only one comma, and none after the words that come at the ends of the lines in the equivalent poetry. In poetical form (the slashes separating the lines are not needed when the lines are given one at a time) this becomes: "Careful, he might / Be tempted to bite / Or put up a fight." No extra commas should be added. See for example the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet for a good example of punctuation (or its absence) at the ends of lines of poetry.
* "Have need for" and "in search for" should be "have need of" and "in search of", respectively.
* "Fae" is fuel-air explosive (see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fae) - should this be "fay" or "fey" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fay, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fey)?
* Does a harp have snares? A snare drum does, certainly, but aren't the strings of a harp just called strings? There is no mention of harps at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/snare nor of snares at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harp
* "Rise" is intransitive; "raise" is transitive. Hence "...would make Theylinn rise once more..." (not "raise").

On the plus side:

* Thumbs up for the correct use the archaism "an", meaning "if".
* Double thumbs up for the amusing motto on the shield in the smithery - a nice little joke for those who understand Latin.

Bugs and other errors (some or all of which have or might have already been reported)

* When you pick up the squirrel while it is sitting on the roof, you are told that it climbs down the tree (which is one bug). It then does not move at all until you interact with it again, at which point it instantaneously moves from the roof to the ground.
* If you walk across the bridge in the righthand half of Thierna na Oge, the others follow you and hem you in, meaning that you can't move or do anything else. Presumably there is some sort of character collision detection in the program that gets stuck at this point.
* You can talk to the guard outside the castle while you are a rabbit, ask to see the princess and even tell him who you are, and he doesn't turn a hare... er, a hair. Maybe he saw you being transformed, however.
* It is a hare, isn't it, and not a rabbit? I don't remember which word the game uses.
* If you attempt to cross the bridge northwards whiel you are a hare, you are told that the fox runs off in search of less elusive prey. Two bugs here: no fox is present; and the game repeatedly displays the message, getting stuck in an infinite loop.
* "You feel uncomfortable crossing the river" - I am guessing that there is some scripting here that draws a straight line between your current and intended positions and tests to see whether it crosses water. The problem here is that this message is displayed even if you happen to clip a tiny bit of the river, which is silly as the hare is going to walk along the bank regardless. I think the test should be updated to test whether or not the start and end positions are on opposite banks, which would mean the hare would definitely be crossing the river.
* You need to hop around inside the faery ring, not just around it (I hopped around the stones for ages before I realised this) - perhaps the game can make this clearer.
* Apparently the walls of the city are too smooth for footholds to allow you to climb them, but you are able to scramble down them easily enough when you use the plant to get in. Of course, this is essential for the game, but it's inconsistent.
* The inner wall of the castle is much higher than the outer wall... is the interior of the castle set into the ground?
* There are several places were the name of an object does not appear in messages when you look at the message - these include the following, some of which have already been mentioned: the statue on the stairs in the castle; the plant to the left of the gate in Thierna na Oge; the rope ladder in the cave.
* In Chapter 8, all the doors in the castle are locked but the leftmost. When you try the leftmost door, you walk towards it and the guards spot you when you are halfway down the corridor. Unless you tried opening the other doors by remote control, would the same not happen when you tried, say, the second leftmost door, which is way beyond halfway down the corridor? The character should really walk to each door that is tried, not just to the leftmost one. You'll still get caught, but hey, that's the way the game goes.
* If you play the flute again in the castle after the guards have left, you get disembodied comments from the guards and the game crashes as it attempts to move the non-existent guards out of the room: in Room 90 script (line 486) - Error: MoveCharacter: character not in current room

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Apart from that little lot, the game was great. Congratulations on the Herculean effort your team put in. It is a masterpiece and you deserve to be very proud.

PS: In case it seems I'm being overcritical about the language in the game, I should add, as I forgot to when I posted this, that you've done a damn good job on the archaic English. All too often people think you can just scatter a few thous and thees about without any consideration of whether they are used correctly, and just tack "eth" on the end of every verb (when in fact it should only be used as a third-person singular ending). So congratulations on your EXCELLENT WORK on the old-fashioned language in the game!

Three more rabbit bugs, alas:

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After speaking to the druid, I hop back north to the screen with the bridge in. Two bugs happen from here:

1. If I try to cross the bridge northwards (not that I need to at the moment), the following message appears "The fox seems loathe to cross the bridge with its many human smells, and runs off in search for less elusive prey". There is no fox in sight.

2. Far worse than this, after closing the message, the scene advances one frame and the message appears again, getting stuck in an infinite loop.

3. I hop over to the faery ring (where the entrance to Thierna na Oge is) and go round it any number of times withershins, but nothing happens.

Edit: Ah, I see - I need to jump around in circles *in* the faery ring, not just loop around it (and the stones outside it). All OK now.

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Regarding the bug reported by someone else,

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namely that you can talk to the guard outside the castle as a rabbit, I don't think this is a bug. Didn't the guards see you get transformed into a rabbit? Even if they had already left, perhaps the guard at the door saw you being transformed. However, being able to ask to see Rhiannon and go back into the castle certainly does look like a bug.

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That sounds like a bug.  You're doing the right thing.

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Make sure you're not standing -in- the pond.  And have you returned the comb to Blossom yet?

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I got it to work. I think it might have been

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because I was standing right by the right-hand exit of that room. Yes, I had already returned the comb to Blossom.

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Thanks.

Hm, if I use

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the comb with the water, which reflects me like a mirror, I can't move any more... what is going on?

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Thanks, Lyaer.

Yes, I'm in chapter 5, alas

According to a hint on page 3 of this thread,

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in order to defeat the giant I need the healed pigeon. To heal the pigeon I need to speak to the druid, but he's not there (not in his house and not in the woods.

Is there another way to heal the pigeon, or another way to defeat the giant?

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Thanks.

Aha -

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I see I can disguise myself as a goblin if I use the comb. I'll see what I can do with that.

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This might already have been mentioned (I think I remember seeing something similar reported somewhere) and might even have been fixed by now:

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When you get into Theirna na Oge, if you look at the green roots to thel left of the door, the name of this object is omitted from the text that is displayed. For example, you might get "You examine the , but see nothing special." or "It is a perfectly ordinary ."

The same thing happens with the rabbit.

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Em:

Thanks, but the goblins aren't there any more, so it looks like I missed that opportunity.

Faery's test: a question:

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Am I right in thinking that the door between two caves is the same (fire, cloud, etc) in each direction? In other words, if going from cave A to cave B would take me through, say, fire, then going from cave B to cave A would also take me through fire?

I ask because I've graphed the structure of the caves out on paper, and it doesn't seem to be possible to visit all rooms using only two objects if the doors are the same in each direction.

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Faery's test: SOLUTION METHOD that does not rely on trial and error (assuming what I say in the spoiler above is true):

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There are five rooms: purple (where you start), red, yellow, green and blue. Draw a large pentagon and join every corner to every other (so that you have a pentagram inside a pentagon). Now label each of the corners so each has a different one of these colours (the order doesn't matter). Take any two objects and pass through one of the doors in the purple room that you can get through. Note what object you used to get through the door and which room you end up in. Write the name of the object on the line joining the purple corner of your pentagon to the corner for the colour of the room you end up in. For example, if you use the feather and end up in the green room, then write "feather" on line joining the purple and green corners of the pentagon. Now go through the door you just came through to get back the purple room, and repeat for another door. (Be careful not to go through the middle door, which will take you back outside.)

Keep going until you have done as much as you can, then return to the purple room, speak to the faery and pick a different combination. Keep doing the above until you have written on each of the ten lines on your diagram.

Pick one of the objects. Lightly sketch out a new pentagram in a pentagon and copy on to it the exact arrangment of lines that are labelled with the object you have chosen. Repeat (on a new pentagon plus pentagram each time) with the other five objects. This gives you six new diagrams.

Now take these diagrams two at a time in all possible combinations (there are 15 ways to do this). If you find a pair of diagrams that enable you to trace a path starting in the purple room and visiting all of the other rooms, then the two objects in this pair are the two you need to choose to solve the puzzle.

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This method works. The first time I tried it I made a mistake.

Thanks, kestrel and player1, your hints are very helpful and have got me a little bit further. However:

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Presumably the wizard guy who lives in the woods can help with the injured pigeon, but where is he? He's not in his house (the goblins are hanging around outside and kill me if I go near) and he's not in the woods any more (he's already come out to warn me about the goblins.

How do I get to play dice with the goblins? They kill me if I talk to them, and I've already been captured once so I die if I go back to the camp.

Even if I knew how to get money from the tailor, I can't because he's shut up shop.

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Thanks. It's bloomin' hard, this game...

Update: Aha, the power of posting... I've just read an earlier response that has just got me a whole load of money

Further update: Boo! My wealth was short-lived! How can I avoid

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being robbed?

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I have the

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charm from the goblin village, but apparently I didn't need it after all...

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thanks for the reassurance, Meerbat.

So apparently I still don't have what I need to do any of the following... can anyone give any further subtle hints, please? Thanks.

OK, I'm stuck big time...

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* Princess Rhiannon is under a spell in the woods. The fox faery says I should be able to free her, but I don't see how.
* I can't afford the flute in the jeweller's shop (the miserly cow only gives me one ducat for the conch)
* I don't know where to light the lantern.
* I don't know how to get into the hole outside the ogre's lair.
* I don't see how to get a pumpkin.
* I can't get into the hole in the tree next to the ring of stones.
* I don't know how to help the pigeon with the broken wing.
* I'm not sure whether I can get the matches from the shop in the market.
* I've found the portal but can't get through it.

I have: sword; apples; acorns; parchment; love poem; conch; key; note from jeweller; unlit lantern; nail; self-bored stone; empty cider bottle; shovel; dagger; wounded pigeon; squirrel; bag of sand; horseshoe.

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Any hints please? (Hints, not solutions.) Thanks very much.

PS:

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I've got the matches but I need to use them somehow before I leave the city...

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In chapter 5

Bug report

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using dagger on rat it says something like "There is no need to stab the ." It doesn't say what.

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player 1, this is the wrong forum for reporting bugs. Post it in the thread for the game in the Completed Game Announcements forum.

paolo:

you don't have the item you need.

hint:

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you need to put yourself in a bad position to have a chance to get it.

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bigger hint:

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like walk right into the enemy's camp.

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Thanks for that. I take it you mean

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getting the charm from the goblins' camp. Unfortunately I was already captured once before, and walking into the goblins' camp a second time means that I die.

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I know there aren't supposed to be any, but is this a dead end?