Hacker: Won!

During my first attempt at cracking Hacker since the last post, two mercies presented as a game over.

While exploring the maze, I very soon discovered the restricted area's location tunneling under Australia.

This ended the game, but upon restart I could use the password "Australia" at the initial login screen to skip the introduction minigames and go straight to the maze, where I worked to continue making maps of the underground, and of the spy trading matrix. And once the probes launched, I now had answers to all of their challenge questions - "Australia" being the final answer, they'd leave me alone forever and allow me to focus... until an invisible time limit expired, forcing another restart.

Even with this extended time limit completing the tunnel map was a bit annoying, and took several restarts before I could finish.

 

Mapping out the trade matrix was incredibly annoying. There are 21 items to buy and trade, and 10 different places to offer them all, giving about 190 possible trades to test. To find out, for example, who will accept the goods you can buy in China, first I'd have to buy the deed in France, go all the way to New York to trade it and buy Stocks & Bonds, then take another convoluted route to reach China and trade them in to buy their goods, and by then there's enough time left on the clock to visit maybe half of the remaining places to see if the Ming Vase and Jade Carving are acceptable there.

I had to restart so many times to finish this up, and of course each time you restart, you have to go through all of the incoming messages again, answer the probe challenges again, etc.

But I eventually finished it as much as it is possible to:

Location	Wants	Offers
France	Cash	Deed, Chronograph
England	Chronograph, Jade Carving	Beatles Album, Crown Jewels
Egypt	Deed, Chronograph	Emerald Scarab, Tut Statue
India	Chronograph, Tut Statuette	Star of India, Jeweled Lamp
Greece	Emerald Scarab, Tut Statuette	Ancient Artifact, Grecian Urn
Cuba	Deed, 35MM Camera	Spanish Doubloons, Treasure Map
New York	Deed	Diamond, Stocks & Bonds
China	Stocks & Bonds, Cultured Pearls	Ming Vase, Jade Carving
Japan	Stocks & Bonds	Cultured Pearls, 35MM Camera
California	Beatles Album, 35MM Camera	Gold Nuggets, 49er Tickets

Cuba: "I will accept a Swiss chalet or a Canon AE-1. Castro's tariffs are loco."

 

By process of elimination, I can logic out who gets what, though not yet in which order, except that France, who alone deals in cash, must come first, and D.C., who wants the completed memo, must come last.

Location	Give	Buy
France	Cash	Deed, Chronograph
England	Jade Carving	Beatles Album
Egypt	Chronograph	Emerald Scarab, Tut Statue
India	Tut Statuette
Greece	Emerald Scarab
Cuba	35mm Camera
New York	Deed	Stocks & Bonds
China	Cultured Pearls	Jade Carving
Japan	Stocks & Bonds	Cultured Pearls, 35MM Camera
California	Beatles Album

 

I optimize this traveling salesman-like problem as well as I can, and come up with this solution:

France->Egypt->Greece->India->New York->Japan->China->Cuba->England->California->D.C.

France to Japan

 

China comes next, but immediately after leaving, I get a nasty surprise - the robot's navigation unit fails! No longer showing my position on the map, I must navigate the last portion of tunnels blind, which includes a loop around the Australian death continent.

 

After reaching California and offering the surfing spy there a Beatles Album, I get my last strip of the shredded memo.

This tells me nothing I didn't already know!

I take it to D.C. where... the game ends!?

WaPo today: Saboteur delays Magma Ltd's 'Warm Energy' initiative

I guess I'd rather be done than have to solve another equally tedious puzzle, but the game still feels unfinished.

GAB rating: Below average.

This... is not what I was expecting. Hacker, in its initial screen of mysterious blankness, seemed like it might be neat, suggesting a direct ancestral link to hacking sims like Uplink, but it plays its hand in minutes and then you see what's going on; a weighted graphing problem which must be mapped out by way of countless attempts and failures before it can be solved. The scant bits of "hacking" involved here are trivial microgames which are figured out once and then become nothing more than nuisance tasks on all of your subsequent restarts.