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Only a Prodigy could solve this MadMaze! [2400 Baud OK] Table of Contents Introduction: Weith Village & The Rules Level One: Into The Maze Level One: Sage Wisdom, Wicked Witches, & Internet Trolls Circa 1990 Level One: Where The Fantastic Beasts Find YOU Level One: The Vilest Beast Is Man...ners Level One: A Maze Of A Different Sort Level One: Break Time? But We Only Just Started! Level One: The Lady & The Lists Level One: The Elf-King & The Black Knight Level One: Beauty & A Beast Level One: Baby's First Logic Puzzle Level One: Gonzaga, Part 1 Level One: Gonzaga, Part 2 Level One: Castle Perilous, The Approach Level One: Castle Perilous, Within Level One: Castle Perilous, Valterre Level One: Castle Perilous, King Carlon Level Two: Recurrence Level Two: The Ghosts of Al-Mugabi Level Two: Meeting The Locals Level Two: The Second Voyage, Part 1 Level Two: The Second Voyage, Part 2 Level Two: This Will End Well Level Two: The Best Worst Possible Outcome Level Two: Temple Of The Mad One Level Two: The Wrong River Level Two: Multiplayer Features Level Two: A Plain Hint Level Two: One Bazaar Encounter After Another Level Two: Only One Right Answer Level Two: The Burning River Level Two: Separating The Sheep From The Goats Level Two: Dated References Level Two: Digestive Problems Level Two: My Cousin Is A Blacksmith, In Fact Level Two: Our Foe, The Whirlwind Level Two: Our Pal, The Whirlwind Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, Outskirts Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, Within Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, Mighty Hassan Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, Three Trials Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, The Talisman Level Three: Everything Old Is New Again Level Three: A Different Sort Of Snake Charmer Level Three: Trouble Brewing Level Three: Out Of The Geyser And Into The Fire Level Three: AirBnB Level Three: The Frozen Lands Level Three: My Dad, The Whale Level Three: Bears, Stars, And One Rat-Bastard Dragon Level Three: An Ice Wizard Level Three: Old Friends Return (Bearing Puzzles) Level Three: One Dumb Lizard, One Dumber Knight Level Three: A Dapper Proposition Level Three: Matilda's Final Task Level Three: Bugs, Berries, And Other Wildlife Level Three: It's Still Kinda Racist If They're Catmen Level Three: A Wizard Knight Intervenes In A Battle Between Pterodactyl-Riding Insects And Airship-Piloting Lizardmen, And This Is Getting A Bit Long But I Really Couldn't Leave Any Of That Out Level Three: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Herpetarium Level Three: Sugar Cravings Level Three: A Wizard (Of The Kitchen) Level Three: How The Prime Mother Got Her Groove Back Level Three: Our New Pal Level Three: This Place Is Rigged To Blow Level Three: Over The Edge, Into Madness Level Four: Its Own Little World Level Four: Catching Up Level Four: Getting Our Paperwork In Order Level Four: A Test Of General Reasoning Level Four: The Final Stretch Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Arrival Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Colors Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Unexpected Obstacles Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Never Meet Your Heroes Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, A Sacrifice For Sanity Post-Mortem: The Prodigious Question Of MadMaze Just What Is MadMaze? At the dawn of the 1990s, the online service Prodigy decided to branch out a bit. Prodigy had been trying to distinguish itself from other online services with its powerful (for the time) graphical user interface, which let them do something that others couldn't: Online gaming. Games were developed to use the Prodigy service itself as a user interface, providing users with games they didn't need to install to play and offering features like saves stored on Prodigy's servers. Most of these games were novelties. They didn't actually take advantage of the fact that they were "online" in the sense we understand today. With 2400 Baud modems considered high-end for the consumer market, there just wasn't enough bandwidth to offer features like multiplayer on Prodigy's service. These games were, in essence, proto-browser games, hamstrung by technical limitations and the service's UI. But then there was MadMaze. The game saw many thousands of players, proving itself quite a hit among Prodigy's then-impressive roll of under a million users. Nostalgia still follows the game, but it seems to take the form of vague memories more than a clear recollection, as the Prodigy service no longer exists and the game has been thought to be lost. I'd like to change that for the old crowd, and to introduce to everyone else one of the weirdest footnotes in adventure and online gaming history.  MadMaze is a game in two parts. In one part, the player navigates a series of mazes, presented in a faux-3D format. Periodically, the player encounters a "Place of Power," which provides a text-based continuation of the storyline in a Choose Your Own Adventure (or Visual Novel, I suppose) format. Navigate the encounter or solve the puzzle presented and one can proceed. Do especially well and a clue might even be presented for later Places of Power. Fail and die miserably, requiring a reloaded save or starting all over. Starting all over was bad. MadMaze is not a short game. MadMaze has all the same limitations that other early "online" games did. There's no multiplayer. The graphics are weak even by the standards of the era -- this game is the same age as the original Warcraft, but looks ten years older -- due to the limitations of the graphical protocol used by Prodigy at the time. There's only one feature that takes advantage of the fact that the player has an internet connection. Why would this game provoke nostalgia where similar games did not? The biggest reason is that, for all its limitations, the game is remarkably well-written and well-made. Though simplistic in design the game is long and varied, with well over a hundred Places of Power filled with fiendish puzzles, quirky characters, gruesome deaths, late 80s memes, and wit. The story is a sort of generic fantasy journey, epic in scope, that grows on you (and itself) as you go. The art by Mark Zweigler, who regrettably passed away shortly after finishing, has a certain weird charm to it that helps it transcend the obvious limitations of the medium.  But perhaps more important, the game's concept and script come from the team of Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan. Goldberg and Costikyan had previously worked on a pleasant role-playing adventure about hapless clones and Friend Computer. Yes, Paranoia. Perhaps it has now become clear what kind of game this is. I did mention "gruesome deaths," didn't I? Costikyan (who has been critical of the game since) also worked on West End Games's Star Wars roleplaying game, and developed TOON for Steve Jackson Games with... Warren Spector. Everything I do seems to come back to Warren Spector, doesn't it? MadMaze is a game that is nostalgic for me, and I'm not the only one. The game regrettably was discontinued by Prodigy in 1999, but survives as a Java-based browser game (nicknamed MadMaze-II) through the efforts of the late Russell Brown and Vintage Computing admin Benj Edwards, whose site hosts the only working build of the game that I know of, for a certain definition of "working". I also possess a copy of MadMaze-II, but Brown intentionally obscured everything to make it difficult to cheat and I'm not a Java wizard to have the slightest idea how he did it, so I have no idea how to make it operational and am using the data solely to grab the art and such. Thanks to Brown's work in saving the game, I'm able to present this bit of ancient PC gaming history in its entirety (minus a few quirks, which I'll explain as we get to them). This will be a comprehensive screenshot LP. While a lot of text will simply be transcribed (as most of the game is text), we'll see all the graphics, all the Places of Power, every maze, every puzzle, and most idiotic demises. And there're a lot of all of those. Spoilers should be tagged if possible, but if I ask for information or clues that might've been forgotten by all means feel free to bring them up in devising a solution to a puzzle. The game can at times be quite obscure in offering hints one time many hours before they become relevant. And here's the first two posts! Introduction: Weith Village & The Rules Learn how the game works, and why we're engaged in the act of mazing madly. Level One: Into The Maze How an idiot solves rudimentary mazes, and how this idiot already did that for you. Join us next time when we solve an actual puzzle... if we're charitable in even calling it a puzzle. The game gives us a softball or two before hucking a fastball directly at our faces. Oh, and when I say "we're" solving a puzzle, I do mean that. You will be expected to show your work. For everything. Nakar fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 16:07
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This looks like an interesting part of gaming history, one I've never even heard of until now. So consider my interest suitably piqued. Will definitely be following and hopefully solving a few puzzles along the way!
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May 28, 2018 16:45
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Oh cool, glad to see you're tackling this now! The game concept piqued my interest when you first floated the idea, so I'll be interested to see what all the hype was about.
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May 28, 2018 16:52
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The font instantly reminds me of back when my family used Prodigy for early online stuff. I never played the games, though. Mainly because... wait. Was this back when Prodigy still charged by the hour? So if this is a long game, you're actually investing a fairly large monetary amount to play.
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May 28, 2018 16:54
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Geomancing posted:The font instantly reminds me of back when my family used Prodigy for early online stuff. I never played the games, though. Mainly because... wait. Was this back when Prodigy still charged by the hour? So if this is a long game, you're actually investing a fairly large monetary amount to play. Mercifully, MadMaze-II is free, which is how I rediscovered it in college.
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May 28, 2018 17:03
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Somehow it's not quite the same without the ponderous screen loading.
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May 28, 2018 17:16
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Obligatory fanboy statement: Nakar, reading your Ultima 4-7 LPs in the archive is the primary reason I got an account and started participating in the LP forum.  LP-related content: I remember the 2400 baud days, although I was always more into the BBS and text-based games (e.g. MUDs) than the graphical stuff. With that said, there are games that have (I'm pretty sure) the same effect Nakar is talking about. I keep an archive of really REALLY old games kicking around - I'll see if I can find one that has a similar sort of graphics loading method that's actually freely available (and not just  )I never played this game - my $400 phone bill moment was spent chatting on what, I realize in retrospect, was IRC charged at $6.95 an hour. 
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May 28, 2018 17:17
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I wonder what message you're carrying for that Moraziel fellow, prolly something along the lines of 'hey, you're doing a pretty bad job, step it up guv'
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May 28, 2018 17:29
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“I hear you need a new sacrifice to power up your ritual to stop the bad guy. Here, have a volunteer”
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May 28, 2018 17:33
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Oh, man, I remember this thing. There were a couple of puzzles I felt really proud of myself for solving as a lad.
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May 28, 2018 17:34
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Fat Samurai posted:“I hear you need a new sacrifice to power up your ritual to stop the bad guy. Here, have a volunteer” I'm voting for this one. 
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May 28, 2018 17:36
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Looks interesting.
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May 28, 2018 17:41
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Zanzibar Ham posted:I wonder what message you're carrying for that Moraziel fellow, prolly something along the lines of 'hey, you're doing a pretty bad job, step it up guv' It's a grocery list. That's our Wellan! 
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May 28, 2018 17:50
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Level One: Sage Wisdom, Wicked Witches, & Internet Trolls Circa 1990 In which we die once, then put ourselves in a position to probably die again, because we're Remember: I'll count an alternate solution as valid if it gets us through the PoP without a game over. Zanzibar Ham posted:I wonder what message you're carrying for that Moraziel fellow, prolly something along the lines of 'hey, you're doing a pretty bad job, step it up guv' Fat Samurai posted:“I hear you need a new sacrifice to power up your ritual to stop the bad guy. Here, have a volunteer” idonotlikepeas posted:Oh, man, I remember this thing. There were a couple of puzzles I felt really proud of myself for solving as a lad. Really Pants posted:Somehow it's not quite the same without the ponderous screen loading. Nakar fucked around with this message at 18:01 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 17:58
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Nakar posted:Level One: Sage Wisdom, Wicked Witches, & Internet Trolls Circa 1990 Note that the troll said "ARRRR!" conversationally. I suggest we SAY HELLO, and if the opportunity shows itself, ask Mr. Troll if it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
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May 28, 2018 18:15
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Obviously, we need to dare the troll... to ARM WRESTLE us! The witch said that trolls can't resist a dare and can't swim - obviously we dare him to jump in the well.
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May 28, 2018 18:19
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Clearly we should jump in the well. Trolls can't swim, so we'll be safe!
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May 28, 2018 18:25
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I just tried the game out and played through the first 3 or 4 sections of the maze. There's some pretty fun puzzles in here, and I can see them getting rather nasty. Lots of general knowledge quizes too. This one was simple enough - trolls can resist a dare, trolls can't swim, so dare him to jump into the well and watch him drown, yo. Also, are you able to ask the crone about the troll if the sage didn't tell you about it?
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May 28, 2018 18:31
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Adamant posted:Also, are you able to ask the crone about the troll if the sage didn't tell you about it?
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May 28, 2018 18:47
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Nakar posted:Yes. There are (almost) no instances in the game of the game "remembering" things from one PoP to the next. If you're trying, you can abuse this to do things you shouldn't have the knowledge to do, but the game will throw some tricks at you later to ensure that you can't do that unless you're committed to trying every single option available, which is designed to be more time-intensive than just figuring out the right answer. Yeah, I made it to the tournament where you have to pick a spell from a rather long list, with no way of guessing the answer unless you were given it earlier. I've seen similar games just plain not including the correct answer as an option unless you trigger a flag elsewhere, though.
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May 28, 2018 18:52
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Say you just want a drink of water. But only the freshest water from the bottom of, perhaps, a well.
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May 28, 2018 19:04
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The right answer is to try everything except daring him to jump down the well, falling back on that only when all else has failed. Reason: this will maximize the amount of horrible, needless death we suffer.
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May 28, 2018 19:13
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Adamant posted:Yeah, I made it to the tournament where you have to pick a spell from a rather long list, with no way of guessing the answer unless you were given it earlier. I've seen similar games just plain not including the correct answer as an option unless you trigger a flag elsewhere, though. Ultima 7 did a lot of that. Also the answer is obvious that since the troll won't resist a dare, we should dare it to do something, and since it can't swim, we should dare it to jump into the well. Alternately, the Sage and the Crone are both kind of... shady, the Sage seemed awfully eager to get a nice young man drunk and the Crone would've eaten us if we weren't useful. It's entirely plausible that they're both assholes and the troll is nice enough if we talk to him. So I'd say talk to him. It's great to see you LP'ing again, Nakar! Loved your old Ultima LP's, they hold up for re-reads and are some of the best this forum's ever seen.
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May 28, 2018 20:09
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Daring the troll to jump in the well seems obvious, but what do you think that corpse will do for the water quality, huh smart guy? 
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May 28, 2018 20:32
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Nakar posted:It really isn't. I'm not even kidding, that loading stuff was magical. Hopefully Epsilon Moonshade can find a good example. It's really not a GOOD example since the graphics are so primitive (and small,) but Moraff's World has this sort of loading for its graphics. Crank the CPU cycles down on DOSBOX, get it running (which I recall being pretty drat fiddly even on contemporary computers* - sound familiar? ), create your character, get into the game, and watch the elements being drawn letters and pixels at a time.Not sure if it's exactly the same sort of drawing as this, since I've never played this game before (as I said before) - but it should be close if I'm reading Nakar's description correctly. I'll get a gameplay video tonight after work if I can figure out how to get FRAPS to play nice - it's been literally a decade since I've messed with it. * Fiddly for different reasons, though. U7 was memory management - Moraff's World just has 200000 different video modes you can use, and only some of them work as expected.
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May 28, 2018 20:57
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DGM_2 posted:The right answer is to try everything except daring him to jump down the well, falling back on that only when all else has failed. I'm convinced.
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May 28, 2018 20:59
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kw0134 posted:Daring the troll to jump in the well seems obvious, but what do you think that corpse will do for the water quality, huh smart guy? I would love for this to backfire for exactly that reason despite it being the obvious choice, but I assume a reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely. Maybe we could FLEE past it, but somehow fleeing never works like that.  Since we're told the Mad Maze makes no sense, though, it's probably going to do something like make dissolved troll parts be the necessary ingredient for its function as a hangover cure. EDIT: Epsilon Moonshade posted:It's really not a GOOD example since the graphics are so primitive (and small,) but Moraff's World has this sort of loading for its graphics. Crank the CPU cycles down on DOSBOX, get it running (which I recall being pretty drat fiddly even on contemporary computers* - sound familiar? The early Sierra graphical adventures worked like this too, more or less; I have not-very-fond memories of King's Quest II on the PCjr painstakingly drawing out each screen. The memories might have been fonder if I didn't know that nearly every save I ever made in that game was in an unwinnable situation. I'll give MadMaze this; this PoPs have no memory, it seems like unwinnability is impossible. If FRAPS misbehaves, I've had excellent results lately with OBS Studio. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 21:02 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 20:59
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Oh wow!!! Thank you so much for LPing this! I played parts of this with my Dad as a small child and it is hugely nostalgic. I had vague memories of it and went searching on the web a few years ago to figure out what it was and how to play! I look forward to reliving this classic through your LP!
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May 28, 2018 21:10
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ManxomeBromide posted:The early Sierra graphical adventures worked like this too, more or less; I have not-very-fond memories of King's Quest II on the PCjr painstakingly drawing out each screen. The memories might have been fonder if I didn't know that nearly every save I ever made in that game was in an unwinnable situation. I'll give MadMaze this; this PoPs have no memory, it seems like unwinnability is impossible. What I was hoping is that I could find something which wasn't "Abandonware*" (which I'm pretty sure Moraff's World is unless its status has changed since I last looked) and which would run on a fairly common emulator (which I think DOSBox is.) I've got a crapton of old games sitting around - I'm bound to find something that'll emulate, and a lot of it is shareware so I can distribute it. The FRAPS/.gif/recording bit is for if I can't find anything else. I'll keep the OBS Studio thing in mind though - I'd like to avoid paying for FRAPS if I can help it, because I'd basically never use it. Unless I start doing LPs or something. Not out of the question, but not terribly likely. * Abandonware in the sense of, once again, - it's technically a copyright violation, although most of the time the owner doesn't give a poo poo anymore. But some of the oldschool games like Castle Of The Winds (a roguelike published back when Epic was still Mega,) Reaping the Dungeon (also a pretty cool roguelike,) or Stellar Conquest 3 (by NecroBones, currently modding KSP,) have been explicitly released as freeware. I'd prefer either those or something that's Shareware.
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May 28, 2018 21:17
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ManxomeBromide posted:I'll give MadMaze this; this PoPs have no memory, it seems like unwinnability is impossible. The game does take steps to avoid being brute-forceable, but it can't make itself actually immune to the process. You can beat the entire game not reading a word of the text if you're willing to just keep trying every option permutation until it works, but later PoPs get complex enough that you can't easily do that.
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May 28, 2018 21:41
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Clearly we should just faint.
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May 28, 2018 21:43
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Epsilon Moonshade posted:What I was hoping is that I could find something which wasn't "Abandonware*" The King's Quest games are still owned (by Activision) and actively sold (by GOG), so they aren't abandonware at all, just old. But YouTube came through! Here's the PCjr KQ2 drawing its scenes on the fly. It seems the other releases of KQ2 did not do this, based on the other videos I found along the way.
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May 28, 2018 21:58
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ManxomeBromide posted:The King's Quest games are still owned (by Activision) and actively sold (by GOG), so they aren't abandonware at all, just old. I was actually thinking more along the lines of "something I could link y'all to so you could experience it for yourself." It's simultaneously annoying and retro in a way that goes beyond the pixel art. I'll still post something if I find it in my big blob o' shareware, but at least I don't need to make a video/.gif now.
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May 29, 2018 01:24
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Level One: Where The Fantastic Beasts Find YOU Wherein we encounter the first, and oh God not last, pure logic puzzle. So! My insinuation of alternate solutions didn't necessarily mean there was an alternate solution, but as it so happens there was one, and someone nailed it: curiousCat posted:Clearly we should just faint. Note that playing dead will not work on the Questing Beast. God help us all, we need to actually answer its riddle.
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May 29, 2018 17:36
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If my basic math skills are right, then Brandisbane got 4/6 and Fenn got 2/18, therefore Brandisbane conquered Middlemark 6 times, whereas Fenn only conquered Norsten twice. I'm fairly certain that's the right answer, but I've just tagged it because it's a basic logic puzzle so this way other people can still try.
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May 29, 2018 17:54
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Nakar posted:Level One: Where The Fantastic Beasts Find YOU That one's pretty simple. If Brandisbane made 10 conquests and Fern 20, the hero conquered Norstein twice as many times as Fern, who conquered Middlemark three times as many as Brandis, then Fern must have only taken Norstein twice, while taking over Middlemark 18 times, for a total of 20, while Brandis took over Norstein four times (2*2) while taking over Middlemark 6 times (18/3), for a total of 10. So the answers in order are: Primus - 6 Secundus - 2 Probably helps that I played a Professor Layton game to 100% completion a short while ago. Also guessing/hoping there isn't some trick masking itself as a simple typo (the Duchy is referred to both as Norsten and Norstein)
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May 29, 2018 17:54
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Brandisbane conquered Norsten four times and Middlemark six times. Fenn conquered Norsten two times and Middlemark 18 times. My work: BN + BM = 10 FN + FM = 20 BN = 2FN FM = 3BM FM = 20 - FN 3BM = 20 - FN (substituting 3BM for FM) BM = 10 - BN BM = 10 - 2FN (substituting 2FN for BN) 30 - 6FN = 20 - FN (substituting 3*(10 - 2FN) for 3BM) 10 = 5FN 2 = FN 2 + FM = 20 FM = 18 BN = 2(2) BN = 4 4 + BM = 10 BM = 6 E: Curses! Beaten to the punch while I was typing out a full accounting of my work! nweismuller fucked around with this message at 17:59 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 17:56
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This puzzle is slightly ambiguous as it doesn't say that all the wars of conquest were successful. You have to assume that.
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May 29, 2018 18:10
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nweismuller posted:E: Curses! Beaten to the punch while I was typing out a full accounting of my work! DGM_2 posted:This puzzle is slightly ambiguous as it doesn't say that all the wars of conquest were successful. You have to assume that.
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May 29, 2018 18:13
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I'm getting the same answers as the other posters.
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May 29, 2018 18:56
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