Prison Blues

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RWAC
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Prison Blues

Post by RWAC »

Has anyone played this? I'm 85% through and I'm stuck!
I can get passed the electric fence but not the razor wire.
Help!
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8BitAG
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by 8BitAG »

The Simon Avery text adventure?

Hopefully you have a completable version... the early ports to the Spectrum of Simon's games weren't done particularly well... bug fixed versions were released later, but I'm not sure that those versions necessarily exist in the archive.
Spoiler
You need to dig under the razor wire.
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RWAC
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by RWAC »

Yup that's what I thought I needed to do.
I don't seem to have the right equipment to do that.

It's a shame if it's not completable.
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8BitAG
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by 8BitAG »

We have the C64 solution over at CASA...
http://solutionarchive.com/file/id%2C7202/

...that may give you enough info to get past the last little bit.

If that doesn't work then I'll have a nose in the Spectrum version's database for you. It's been thirty odd years since I played it. And, having talked to Simon recently, I'm pretty sure he'll have forgotten the solution too. :)
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RWAC
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by RWAC »

Thanks, that's really helpful.
I seem to have done everything it says up until the point I have to dig, which it won't let me do. :cry:
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8BitAG
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by 8BitAG »

You need the spade.

Have you made the spade?
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by 8BitAG »

Spoiler
You need the broom and the sign.
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RWAC
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by RWAC »

Where is the sign?
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8BitAG
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by 8BitAG »

RWAC wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2019 12:15 amWhere is the sign?
Image
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by RWAC »

One of my pet peeves, letting you leave important items behind with no way of retrieving them.
But yes, I have now completed it!
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by 8BitAG »

RWAC wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2019 9:31 am One of my pet peeves, letting you leave important items behind with no way of retrieving them.
But yes, I have now completed it!
Congratulations. (I'll get that solution amended too so that it works with the Spectrum version... I'm guessing the command is needed in the C64 version too, but I will check)

Yeah, it is annoying when you can't go back to get something you missed but expectations were different back then. The sort of player who was playing one of Simon's games would have been quite willing, and quite used to, restarting games to check they hadn't missed anything earlier on. Nowadays we sort of expect to be able to complete text adventures without having to roll back our progress.

You'll often find "point of no returns" in Simon's games and other Quilled adventures, because Quill had a very limited number of flags available to the adventure author, so you needed to put in place one-way points so you could reuse the flags for other things later on.

It's also interesting looking back now to see the "trends" in adventure gaming, particularly in the homegrown scene. We went through a phase, for instance, where looking under, behind, and around things was quite common. Or the phase where examining or searching things more than once was necessary to retrieve every item. A lot of these phases can be quite frustrating when you're not tuned to the correct frequency.. even if you were the one that wrote the game. :)
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Morkin
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Re: Prison Blues

Post by Morkin »

I guess the 'point of no return' idea was common in tons of Speccy adventures. I'm less tolerant of games that do that nowadays - if you play in emulation you can save a whole bunch of snapshots I suppose, but if you miss something right at the start you may as well be starting again.

I remember playing Robin of Sherlock and being able to move freely between the multi-load parts of the game - not sure I'd have the patience for that now though.
My Speccy site: thirdharmoniser.com
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