Archive for the ‘crime-stopper’ Tag
I probably should have checked help sooner. Unusually for Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games, it discusses possible bugs in the hints themselves and even mentions a late action only working on two of the six playthroughs. I wasn’t able to get the ending to happen so while I came close, I can’t show the grand finale.
You may want to re-read from the beginning for story points before moving on.
Via eBay, with someone’s hand-labeled disk and hand-made map.
First off, I had something close to the right actions last time.
I had missed the fact in the room with the receipt at the hotel, the phone rings. I did have the sound on, but you need to pause in what appears to be real time; if you’re typing commands too fast it doesn’t turn up, and even after I knew about the phone potentially ringing, I wasn’t able to get anything to happen until a second attempt.
“It’s all set, Beau. She shoves off tomorrow.” They hang up.
Now, you’re supposed to follow the receipt to the red herrings, just as I did. When I did so I had nothing happen and left, but if you wait — by just WAIT or LOOK — eventually someone will spring a trap on you and trap you in a locker.
The locker has a ticket stub (needed for the cinema) so you need to get in here. To escape is the only real item based puzzle: the cigarette and lighter from the desk are needed. You stand on the desk and set off the smoke alarm.
To the game’s credit, I figured out the parser commands here fairly quickly. With ticket stub in hand we could visit the cinema, and there Beau (the fiancée) arrives (I think probably this would not have happened had we not caught the phone call).
However, when we go in, we find the man… dead!
We can take the invitation if we like; whatever happens, it seems to be scripted that if we arrive at the platform where our office is we’ll get a message that tells us to wait at a phone.
We can then follow that phone message over to the (previously not-useful) museum, and have an encounter which results in another dead body.
Now we get into serious bug territory. According to Kim Schuette, the body has a key (according to the source code) but no way to access it in the game. The key then works on a locker in the stadium which opens a duffle bag with barbells, but there seems to be no purpose in this anyway (since neither he in the past nor myself now were able to see any of this in-game).
This encounter is the last you can have before picking up the ransom money, as you were informed about way back at the penthouse; you were supposed to pick it up at 7 PM, then drop it off at the lockers at the bus station at 9 PM. This part of the game is a matter of typing WAIT a lot or just I since that’s a quicker command.
I dutifully rode the clunky subway system back to the bus station, did the drop off, waited nearby for the pickup (as Mr. Schuette explains in his book) … and had nothing happen. The person that is supposed to do the pickup is Livwell (that we learned about via bribery in my last post) but he never shows.
West & 21st St.: Wait and watch for Crowded Corridor. If no one comes by 10 PM (the courier is Livwell), he won’t come due to a bug in the program. (On six near-identically played games, he appeared only twice. Perhaps a flag wasn’t set by doing something which seemed to have no bearing on the game, like not getting the Hanky or going to the “wrong” bank.)
The ending at least sounds dramatic. You’re supposed to follow the man (Livwell) with the suitcase all the way back to the Sizemore building (??) and then sneak in the elevator and shoot him. Then, arriving at the roof for the drop off, you encounter J.J. (the basketball star) and Cartier (the allegedly kidnapped person), shoot the man, and “pull lever” (which I assume stops Cartier, who was in on the scheme all along).
Ugh. I won’t recount my time valiantly trying to play the game for real and getting nowhere. I think the authors had some interesting scenes mapped out, but didn’t have a good way of putting them together that made both narrative and ludic sense at the same time. There wasn’t any learning that happened from the man at the museum, nor with the death at the theater, and no sense of a gradually untangling mystery that requires thoughtful deduction. Simply a sequence of events happened which eventually led to what would be a conclusion (if the game wasn’t broken).
You’ll be glad to hear I am already part-way through my next post, so I hope it won’t be nearly as long a gap before you hear from me next time.
The map from The Book of Adventure Games.
Nothing terrible earth-shaking this time: I visited all the subway stops and mapped everything out.
The key in the top is now fixed, with W and E going the appropriate directions.
We’ve seen the starting office, the penthouse, a museum, and an ATM, but a brief tour of the rest:
Sports Complex:
Mainly seems to be there for a locker, which I assume we get a key for at some point.
The NOISE MAKER seems tempting for some puzzle where we have to distract bad guys, but I haven’t come close to any related scenario yet.
Unfriendly:
There might be a scene later, but this was the most bare-bones of the destinations I could find. It just is described as an unfriendly part of town, with no buildings to enter.
Broken Arms Hotel:
We can see from the registrar where Beau McBride is staying (that’s the new fiancée of our kidnappee), and visit to see a shipping notice.
I did find the crate, which I’ll show off in a moment.
“Executive Row”:
Where broken-down executives go to self-medicate.
There’s a person who indicates they know something that you can bribe. I am quite unclear what it has to do with the case — I feel like I’m seeing something out of sequence. All I can clean is someone named Oliver Livwell exists and was acting suspiciously.
Bus Station
Rather like the Sports Complex, this seems to exist for the purpose of providing a mysterious locker that we can unlock. Again, we seem to be out of sequence:
Warehouse
There’s a steel door that we can’t get through (and where I assume more drama occurs) but also the crate I promised would come up again. It is full of red herrings.
Cinema
There’s a cinema that is currently playing a movie, and it doesn’t let you buy a ticket; however, if you have a stub, you can see a movie in progress. So this is just a matter of waiting for the right item.
Apartment
You can visit your own apartment, which is very messy. There’s a picture of your mother with a safe behind it.
The combination hidden in the office (from a few posts ago) works, although it took me a while to get the syntax. You need to TURN DIAL LEFT or TURN DIAL RIGHT, and then a real-time interface happens where a number rapidly increases and you have to push a button when it hits the right spot — almost a mini-game.
The statue contains a statue which appears to be a reference to The Maltese Falcon.
It’s a statue of a bird of some sort. This is a family heirloom, handed down to you from your great grand-dad. On the bottom of the base it reads, “Made in Malta.”
If the statue shows up in the plot, I haven’t seen it yet; at the moment it appears to be just a reference.
Bank
Nothing exciting about this. I assume this is simply another location the bankcard works at, but maybe a future event happens here.
Summary
This seems to be the sort of game where I’m supposed to find clues in a specific sequence, and various people and events will show up at the right intersections once I learn about them; alternately, I’ll get a key for one place, which then has a key for the next one. In a ludic sense, I don’t really feel like I’m investigating anything, but let me save any design conclusions for the end of the game.
The locations end up not being large so I suspect once the progression really gets going unless there’s some difficult puzzles along the way, I might blaze through what remains of the plot. So hoping for a win next time?
Other than my life-delay, there were a couple aspects going for Crime Stopper making it hard to get moving on progress:
1.) The variant-versions fiasco I already wrote about; anything where I have to switch emulators or disk versions or the like can take away my momentum.
2.) The ALL CAPS block text, which hasn’t been a pain in other Apple II games but is here. There’s a fair amount of reading giant chunks.
I’ll give the non-blocky version of this shortly.
3.) The way travel on the map works, which I have only touched on briefly.
Each of the circles shown is a subway station. You go into the subway, buy a token, then wait on the platform for subway cars to come by. If you’re trying to go a particular direction, you have to wait for that particular car. The directions (as partially indicated by the compass) are Uptown (right), Downtown (left), East (down) and West (up). (And yes, if you check against the map, east and west are reversed for some reason compared to the compass guide.) I found it very easy to go the wrong way, and every time you use the subway you have to buy a token (hope you didn’t max out your inventory, otherwise you need to figure out what item you want to drop), wait for the right car (which takes a while), enter, and wait while in the car (which also takes a while).
You start at 2nd and 90th and the telegram asks you to go to 2nd and 50th (one stop uptown). Even figuring out this fact took a while of parsing the subway system.
If you go downtown instead of uptown, you end up at this museum which is at the far upper left of the subway map.
So from here (unless I run into a specific problem) I’m going to pretend I’m fluently flying around the subway system, although I’m also running into inventory capacity problems and having to dump things on the subway platform hoping that I won’t need them four stops away and have to do tedious backtracking. I will say in a theoretical sense it is interesting how simulationist the authors went here in their world-modeling, but in a practical sense I was pining for a fast-travel.
Rewinding a bit now, just because it’s been a while you may have forgotten the plot–
A newscaster appears on the set. “There is still no word on the demands of the kidnappers of construction heiress Cartier-Blanche Sizemore. Miss Sizemore disappeared today from the plush 2nd Ave penthouse she shares with her mother, Millicent-Hyacinth Sizemore. Mrs. Sizemore herself made headlines last October when she announced her divorce from her husband, the internationally known gambler Henri Louis Chevron. So far the police have issued no official statements except to confirm the kidnaping. We will have more information for you as it develops.”
That’s from your office you start at, where you can turn on the television and CHANGE CHANNEL. You get an urgent phone call at 7 AM with a “trembling female voice” saying “they are coming to get me” with loud noises, and there is already a telegram from Sizemore’s mother asking you to come to the 2nd Ave penthouse regarding a strictly confidential matter.
Putting my mystery hat on, there’s already something very bizarre here: the kidnapping is supposed to have already happened. What is with the phone call seeming to be the event occurring on the spot? While you can’t read the telegram first, it is already sitting at your desk when the phone call happens. Is the telegram about some different thing that then changes because by the time we arrive the kidnapping has happened, or is there some kind of setup? The television program clip also can be seen immediately after the phone call, which doesn’t make much sense with the timing.
Going outdoors, we can buy a newspaper (I already showed a screenshot of part of it, but here’s the whole story converted to more readable text, for both your benefit and mine).
Cartier-Blanche Sizemore, daughter of construction magnate, Millicent-Hyacinth Sizemore, was abducted from her 50th floor penthouse apartment at 10 AM this morning. Two masked gunmen forced their way into the Sizemore building, captured Miss Sizemore, and escaped in a black limousine. The police are puzzled by the gunmen’s apparent familiarity with the Sizemore building’s layout, as hell as their unconventional getaway vehicle. “there are no firm suspects at this time,” said Detective Frank Sanderson, who is in charge of the investigation, “but it is still early.” Over the years, the Sizemore family has received a certain amount of notoriety for their frequently turbulent personal lives. Miss Sizemore made news several months ago when she spurned her fiancée of two years, megabucks basketball superstar J.J. Johnson, in favor of Beau McBride, a Bristol’s department store clerk. Mrs. Sizemore and her husband at the time, Henri Louis Chevron, were stunned by her decision and threatened to disinherit her.
Several weeks later, the social circuit shaken by Mrs. Sizemore’s stormy divorce from Chevron, an internationally-known gambler, Chevron was reported to have filed for bankruptcy following his removal as acting head of the corp.
Although Detective Sanderson has made it clear that there are no real suspects as of yet, Mr Chevron could not be reached for comment. Mr McBribe also could not be reached at his room in the Broken Arms Hotel.
Yes, the fiancee’s name is written McBride, and then McBribe. This might be an intentional typo.
(…skip by subway transport shenanigans. grr this is annoying…)
Arriving at the Sizemore building, there’s a letter from the mother explaining there had been “treats two weeks prior” and that “now it is too late”. You get a account number (10-28-81) and a bankcard in order to make withdraws, and are informed that there is ransom money being prepared that we can pick up by six o’clock.
According to the map we can head “Downtown” back to where we started, or “East” in order to go down on the map. Going “East” we get to a bank and can use the bankcard we just acquired.
That is, as long as you make sure you use the syntax correctly. Typing 102881 or ENTER 102881 or ENTER 10-28-81 all fail; you have to type exactly 10-28-81 for the withdraw to work.
And even if you get through that, the transaction might just fail anyway! This happens if you exceed $100 in-hand, and I was holding $10 of my character’s personal money, and I tried to get $90 which seemed to be possible. Argh!
I’ve gotten a little farther than this, but I think this gives enough of an idea what I’m struggling against for now. Update on all the map locations next time, and then maybe we’ll see a dead body.
I haven’t had a lot of time to play, unfortunately, but I still wanted to make a post as Matt W. in the comments last time skillfully sleuthed out the issue: I was using a bad disk.
Specifically: I had been using this version of the game from the Internet Archive (added 2018-08-08 by 4am) but I should have been using this version of the game from the Internet Archive (added 2019-09-29 by 4am).
Apple II preservation history is long and complicated as the first emulator goes back to 1990 (!) and the emulator I typically use, AppleWin, goes back to 1994. Early files were in DSK, PO, or DO format, which copied file content but not necessarily their exact layout on the disk; much later, technology was developed to dump the disk as a whole including disk structures that don’t port over with DSK (NIB files). In 2018 things went even further to allow dumps at the individual magnetic flux level and the WOZ file format.
Visualization from AppleSauce of the Crime Stopper disk.
The big catch here to all this which makes Apple II emulation tricky is copy protection. Piracy was rampant (as well as methods of circumventing copy protection) but copy protection bypasses also sometimes broke the software in subtler ways. The most amusing I’ve encountered is how The Queen of Phobos has the nuke in the game get set off right away if you’re running off a disk sector other than 000.
You can generally expect early dumps to be based on cracks from the 80s — especially since some of the dumps genuinely go back to 1990 — while WOZ files are based on “fresh cracks” on current technology and the ability to account for subterfuge like what disk sector a program is running on. This means that WOZ files are usually preferrable to DSK, although in Kabul Spy I had the opposite: there was a bug present in the newer WOZ dump not in the DSK format.
None of this was actually relevant here! The two dumps were both in WOZ format, although one of them was more recent than the other. I’ve checked all the ways I can and they seem to be the same “version” (an early version of Oo-Topos was unfinishable) but yet something is different enough about the dumps that there is a signifcant gameplay difference.
In the 2018 version of the file, looking at your desk in your office says you see nothing special.
I also hadn’t found the secret behind the picture last time I played.
In the 2019 version, you find a drawer.
You can still refer to the drawer in the 2018 version dump (which is why I went hunting for version numbers first) but you just have to guess one exists.
(ADD: 4am confirmed on Mastodon it was different versions rather than different dumps. There isn’t anything visible to the player.)
Neither dump led me to realize the other issue, which Matt. W also pointed out: this game has a clue via sound. Specifically, there’s a loud obnoxious beeping sound at the start, which is supposed to indicate your telephone is ringing. This never gets mentioned in the text. (Sorry, I’m still not turning on Apple II sound otherwise except in dire circumstances.)
The message from the phone, combined with the telegram on our desk…
AL CLUBS- I REQUIRE YOUR SERVICES STOP STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL MATTER STOP COME TO THE LOBBY OF THE SIZEMORE BUILDING 2ND AVE. 50TH ST. STOP COME IMMEDIATLY STOP -MILLICENT HYACINTH SIZEMORE
…led me to the subway where I could use my newfound cash from the desk to be able to get on board.
I assume this means the game has 13 places in total we can go to.
Arriving at the Sizemore building, we are handed a ransom note and a letter.
So, as far as we know so far, we’re supposed to help deliver ransom money in order to get a kidnapped daughter back. Something tells me the plot won’t be this straightforward, but I’ll try to pick up the momentum from here next time.
This case has more twists than a Martini drinkers’ convention. You’re Al Club, private eye, and you’ve got to grab a beautiful heiress from the gang that snatched her.
Hayden Publishing company was founded in the early 1950s (trademark registered 1954) as a technical publisher, generally associated with electronics and mathematics, although they branched into other subjects including language arts.
From The Mathematics Teacher, March 1965.
They were well positioned to enter computers as well, starting in the 60s. As far as games goes they re-published what is arguably the first “commercial” CRPG in the second edition of William Engel’s book Stimulating Simulations, which includes the CRPG Devil’s Dungeon. (The 1977 self-published 1st edition does not include it but a self-published 1978 booklet does, which was folded into Hayden’s first version in 1979.) They also published non-books around this time like Sargon II and Sargon III, two of the most important early chess programs. Relevant for our purposes today, in late 1982 they published two Apple II text adventures by Daniel Kitchen, Crystal Caves and Crime Stopper, the latter also giving story credit to Barry Marx.
Crystal Caves was written first (people of this era tended to copy the fantasy of Adventure before branching out), but they don’t form a series, I’m not being that picky about chronology as long as I’m playing within a year, and I’m still needing a break from Adventure Quest, so: hard-boiled crime it is.
Dan Kitchen, a New Jersey native, got his game-design start in handheld toys, making Bank Shot and Wildfire for Parker in 1979. He obtained an Apple II that year:
I was a big fan of Microsoft Adventure and all of Scott Adams’ games … I fell in love with text adventures instantly and knew I wanted to make my own.
With his brother Garry Kitchen he co-founded Imaginative Systems Software and got a contract with Hayden (also in New Jersey) for six games.
The idea for Crime Stopper came from one of my brother’s friends, Barry Marx, a writer and a brilliant chap. He suggested he write the story and I would make it interactive using my Crystal Caverns engine. And he’s responsible for the Sam Spade pun.
You start in your stereotypical office, with a telegram urgently summoning you:
Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to the actual crime-solving part of the game. If you climb to the roof of the building your office is in you cand find a “hanky”…
…and if you go out into the street you can find an ice cream shop and a diner.
However, to get to the building mentioned in the telegram (2nd and 50th) we need to ride the subway, but the subway requires cash, and our protagonist has no cash.
I’ve very thoroughly examined every object described in every room, I’m still stuck with just the HANKY and the TELEGRAM. I tried GIVE HANKY in the ice cream parlor (…maybe they’d give me something I could get money out of?…) but the game responded I didn’t have any money, suggesting it thought I was trying to buy ice cream instead. To be fair trading a hanky for ice cream isn’t logical but when I’m stumped already I’m willing to try anything.
There’s hints out there — Crime Stopper is even a featured game in the Kim Schuette book I’ve re-visited in this blog many times — but I’d very much like to avoid spoiling the very first puzzle in the game, as that makes me much less likely to hold out for anything later which might involve solving an actual mystery.
My map of the city streets so far.
Renga in Blue 