Part 26: 20b. Bomb Bloopers

Bonus: Bomb Bloopers

Let's rewind time a bit. Last time, we'd successfully sorted through a bunch of purses and defused a bomb with the powers of luck, eyesight, concentration, and friendship.

But let's talk about how that could've gone differently.



Well, the bomb puzzle hasn't even started yet, so there's no way we could screw up here, right? Well, the Saturn version lets you bounce the old woman, incredibly. Doing so sets off the bomb.

Hey, what happens if we set off the bomb after all?

Well click here and find out!!!

Internally, the bag portion of the bomb puzzles is not in real time - You get 649 "ticks" and every time you decide to leave a bag alone, you lose 10 ticks. This means to get the maximum time possible, you actually have to be lucky and never encounter the bomb at all - you'll discard the first 20 bags you encounter.

This isn't likely though, and there's a nice touch if you fuck up the bags a second time:



Okay, let's skip ahead a little. We do our 20 fakes, Meryl tells us there's no backup and it's up to us to defuse the bomb.



I think the video covered what it needed to, but yeah - the first trick is that there's an optical sensor and we have to look at the bomb with (infra?)red light. Snipping the two wires on the left is the necessary part. Attempting the vibration sensor early, or unscrewing the upper left panel (or the vibration panel screws) will blow up the bomb.

Generally speaking, almost everything has to be done in order. By the way, this section IS real time, but every time you blow up and try again, the game gives you an extra 10 ticks.





Game over, etc.

Alright, let's pretend that never happened.
We'll be fine this time, let's go.

Well, actually let's say we're really bad at this part and mess it up three times. The game decides it's had enough and will sorta help you out. So we clip the optical sensor wires...



You okay?
Yeah. Still here, right?
Next we have to take out the vibration sensor.
You look like you've got something on your mind.
Lemme do this part, Jonathan. This is getting ridiculous.
No, I'll do it this time. Just gimme another chance.
I got an "A+" in removing vibration sensors at the academy. Thing's so difficult there are some people who specialize in doing that. Even a lot of vets find it hard. Let me do it.



Well, okay.

Have Ed do it <---- Hey that's a video!


































Fuck.... FUCK! Why didn't I see that coming. A fail only you could deliver.
Gimme a break. Shit happens. I'll do it this time. I won't mess up again.
Excuse me if I don't get my hopes up.

Ed vs. the Bomb, Take Two <--- Hey that's another video!












So yeah, if you let Ed mess it up the first time, you get the easy maze. Just for the record, the maze looks like it normally does at the start no matter what and "changes" when the camera goes back to Jonathan/Ed after you cut the optical sensor cords.

But let's say you do the easy maze, and screw up afterwards - like on the screws or something? Well if you insist on doing the maze yourself, then you get:



Wait, wait, wait, what's with the maze? Look at this. Some kinda bug in the game?
No, the maze changes depending on your ability.
You... think I can do this?
I know you can.
I don't know about this. ...Here, you do it, Ed! We can still change, right?
-zzzzz-
Wake up, Ed! I don't believe it. Fucker's asleep. God dammit! I gotta go through this myself? Alright, I'm gonna do it... I'm gonna do it!

I've never actually done the hard maze successfully, and going through the text dump, you don't get anything special if you pass/fail it. Also if you do fuck it up, the game goes back to just giving you the easy maze and Jonathan/Ed don't comment on it anymore. (So you only get one shot at the hard maze.)

There's really only one other weird thing: there's a panel in the upper left. Once you get the vibration sensor out, you can unscrew it.



It takes a very long time as it's loaded with screws. Do it enough and...





Bah, another smaller panel with even more screws! This one takes even longer and...



That graphic was originally "Hazure" written vertically in Japanese. Plus the bomb graphic... remember in the last ROMhacking writeup when I said there was one Contiguous/Non Contiguous RLE graphic in the whole game that used positive and negative numbers, unlike everything else?

It's this one. I GIMPed up the new English graphic, but since I'm not an artist, there were many revisions.











That graphic was annoying to encode, and since it ended up smaller than the original, I increased its size to make it fit in the same space on purpose by extending a couple "runs". Basically, I made some data that said "4 pixels of black" into "2 pixels of black, 2 pixels of black."

Oh by the by? Since the bomb graphic gets loaded into memory pretty quickly, guess what I had to do to test if I'd managed to package the graphic correctly?

The purse puzzle.

Over.

And over.

And over.

Anything else about this scene? Apparently the game uses one extra variable just for the "Have Ed Do It" part which I collided with because my first draft of the game's assembly, I was just looking for registers the game wasn't using in specific functions, which messes this scene up. No big deal.

Also, the final twist of the bomb - when the timer goes faster?

It actually got me. I don't know if it was I'd tested the previous scene so much that I was exhausted, but I thought it'd end at the Poggendorff thing, and when the timer goes faster, I went "Ah! ...Shit, uh, Red for Redwood!" So at least I got it right.

For all its annoyances, I really do like this puzzle.