Robot Odyssey: The sewers and subway

Don't you hate when this happens?

Hope you did the tutorial, noob.

 

Robot Odyssey's campaign unceremoniously dumps you into the sewers of Robotropolis and dares you to escape with the aid of three robots, which later versions name Sparky, Scanner, and Checkers.

All three are found in the room to the right.

Sparky has a module that acts as a simple wall-following maze algorithm. He will also grasp any objects in reach as long as no key is in the room.

Checkers is wired to propel right at all times, and to bounce up and down between horizontal walls. The antennae will also send a high signal if a crystal is in the same room.

 

Scanner is simply wired to bounce left and right between vertical walls, and also to grasp objects if the key isn't in the same room. The key is also stashed inside him (this doesn't count as being in the same room, neither to Scanner nor Sparky).

 

To save battery power, I shut off all of the robots' engines, and then stashed Sparky and Checkers inside Scanner so that I could easily bring them all with me.

One room beyond, I found, unlocked, and mapped out a non-Euclidean sewer maze.

 

There's a few things to pick up here; a mysterious chip marked '1', some sensors, a magnet, and a crystal, and the latter objects are guarded by sentries who will forcibly remove you should you get too close, but can be retrieved by the appropriate robot.

After catching them all, Checkers deftly gets me through the sewer grate patrolled by a sentry.

Hope you remembered your key. This is gonna be one of those games where you can't leave anything behind.

Before teleporting to the next level, I did a bit of logic analysis on the '1' chip, using inverters to test the pins, and I think I determined its function -  a simple output selector. Pulses to pin 1 light up pins 3 through 8 in sequence, and a pulse to pin 2 resets the state.

It's not clear how this chip helps me, but I have it.

The teleporter goes to the next level of Robotropolis - the BART (Bay Area Robot Transport).

 

A loose '3' chip here, next to a big robot-catching magnet, appears to be blank (erased by the magnet, perhaps?), but this is the only thing I can collect for free in this mazelike subway station.

The first real challenge is to steal a guarded subway token.

Better save. Don't want a badly-programmed robot to get irretrievably stuck in there.

None of the robots are quite equipped right for this job. Sparky, with his wall-hugging chip, can get in and out, but by wall-hugging, won't get close enough to the token to grab it, and my attempts to modify this program with token-sensing override behavior failed; adding any additional logic gates slows the output down enough that he fails to get through the narrow opening.

The solution I settled on was dumb but worked; modify Scanner to bounce around up and down as well as left and right. 

And also to grab the token and only the token.

 No thinking means minimal delay, and he'd find his way out eventually.

I'm sure there's a more optimal way.

The token opens the turnstile (but only for a few seconds!), and once past I summon the tram with Scanner's help.

From here you can travel to any of the stations, but it's a one-way trip, and to ride again you'll need to make your way back to the central subway area and steal another token. You can save to ensure you don't wind up somewhere useless and waste your token.

• Picadilly Circuit Station has a crystal recharging station nearby. I don't really need it at this point.
• Seer's and Robot has a '4' chip which appears to be blank.
• Jack in the 'Bot leads to the exit, where a ticket must be inserted into a slot to leave.
• The Laundrobot holds the ticket in its maze-like confines, guarded by a sentry. Sparky can't solve this, as the narrow corridors just confuse his wall-hugger brain.
  

IM STUCK

 

It ain't elegant, but pinbot logic gets the ticket and (eventually) returns it.

Ticket retrieved, I returned, got another token, and went to Jack in the 'Bot where the exit ticket unlocked the escalator to town.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds version 3.0

 

Version 2.1 of Wizardry for the Apple II came out just over 41 years ago, and even though it's been ported and remade a dozen times over, many of its bugs, quirks, and limitations persist in any available format.

Last week, Eric Labelle, aka Snafaru, author of longtime Wizardry & CRPG fanpage Zimlab, released an unofficial version 3.0, after months of painstaking effort fixing, rewriting, and recompiling ancient data tables and Pascal code, with information, ideas, feedback, and some testing by myself and a few others. Over 100 bugs, data errors, improvements, and even bits of restored missing content are present, making v3.0 practically the new definitive way to play.

Download the disk images and read the full notes here:

https://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/proving-grounds-v3/

A partial summary of what's new:

No more passwords! Something had to go to make room on the disks for all these fixes. We figured that nobody password-protects their characters any more, and removing all of the password-related code freed up some space.

Restored content! For quite awhile, bad disk images of Wiz1 were missing the miniboss encounter on level 4, and the infamous Deadly Ring you'd win as a prize. This is, of course, restored, but so is another miniboss on level 7, which to my knowledge has never been enabled in any official release! Also restored is an area of level 4, which now requires the formerly useless gold key to enter, and an Easter egg on level 6.

Maze tweaks! Nothing major here, a useless door removed here, some object placements adjusted for consistency there, one monster spawn table tweaked, some escape hatches added to pockets of empty space in case you accidentally MALOR your party there without a spare. We see similar tweaks going from earlier versions to v2.1, so these are much in the spirit of things.

Greater Demons are not your friends! We've all been there, encountering a group of "friendly" monsters who by all rights should want to rip your throat out. Some players have even encountered a friendly Werdna, which can ruin your game if you don't stab him in the back. No more of that nonsense - turns out this is a coding bug, and now some monsters will just never offer you a truce, as was intended.

Revised ninja class! Ninjas were meant to be glass cannons who could fight unarmed and unarmored with devastating results, but in practice, the bonuses from going zen just weren't worth it and you were much better off equipping with full gear, effectively becoming a low-HP fighter with critical hit capability. So we improved the incentives - the armorless AC bonus is tripled, the unarmed attack damage is doubled, and gains an initiative bonus that scales with level. Snap Werdna's scrawny neck with your bare hands before the round even starts! The stat requirements are lowered too, from 17 points in everything to 15. Equipping your ninja is still a valid choice; the boosted damage and AC rivals Boltac's finest gear, but even stronger gear can be found and can be equipped at the expense of the initiative bonus.

Spelling and grammar fixes! Many items and monsters' names had wrong or inconsistent spelling, or pluralization, or punctuation use. These have been extensively corrected, as well as errors in the script such as "mourge->morgue."

Corrected treasure tables! This is subtle, but the treasure tables always had an offset error, preventing some items from dropping and enabling some items to drop in lower treasure tiers than intended. We fixed these.

No more round 1 surprise slaughters! Getting surprised by spellcasters no longer means certain death, as spellcasting is disallowed, as in Wiz3 and most Wiz1 ports. So are breath attacks! But watch out for ninjas.

Fixed and rebalanced spells! Latumapic now identifies all of your enemies. Mamorlis lowers all enemies' AC. Haman and Mahaman have all seven possible effects. Montino's silencing effect now wears off over time - that goes for you and your enemies. Manifo paralyzes instead of just inflicting sleep status, and has an improved chance of working. Loktofeit's pathetic escape rate has been upgraded to work as often as it does in Wiz3.

More feedback! The battle engine now displays the names of spells being cast on you. Hit probability is displayed, too. Did you lose the treasure because your inventory is full, or because there's a limit of one per party? Now the engine will tell you instead of silently discarding the item.

The Bishop Bug fixed! Remember identifying '9' to grant millions of XP? Too bad! That won't work any more.

Stacking regeneration! Got two healing items? Now their effects stacks and heal you twice as much. On the flipside, the negative healing effect of the Deadly Ring actually harms you now instead of doing nothing. Poison is treated differently from negative healing, and poisonous attacks won't stack and make you more badly poisoned, but poison needle and gas bomb traps do.

Save vs. Wand fixed! Elves, bishops, and ninjas had an invisible saving throw bonus that did absolutely nothing. Now it saves against gas bomb chest traps.

Rear echelon monster protection! Aggressive monsters in Wizardry 1 can advance to the front rows, typically shielding spellcasters, but this actually makes them more vulnerable. This is reversed now.

There's more than the things I listed above - read the notes at Zimlab for the complete details. Or you could just download and play it, whether it's your first time or a replay.