Torin's Passage Part #23 - Asthenia - Finding Easter Eggs To Distract Ourselves From Boredom

Part 23: Asthenia - Finding Easter Eggs To Distract Ourselves From Boredom

23. Asthenia - Finding Easter Eggs To Distract Ourselves From Boredom

We're about to experience the single most tedious section of Torin's Passage. Luckily, there are a bunch of Easter Eggs jammed into this section to keep our attention.

I've stuck this jingle here because a version of it plays as you over look the lava maze. This fanfare occasionally plays when Torin succeeds at something. In this case, landing face first in a pile of dirt.

Anyways, welcome to the lava maze. This part sucks. A lot. It's horrible. We are unable to right click on the map to have Torin quickly teleport to that area. The game has disabled it so we don't "cheat" through the maze. Thus, we actually have to click Torin through every step of the way.

Fun fact: the design of the maze was drawn up by Al Lowe's daughter. I don't blame her, though, I blame Lowe and the developers for deciding to put the maze in in the first place.

Note that if we look over to the right side of the maze there is a conspicuous sparkle on the ground. We're going to want to head to that first.

But before we go, I thought I'd show off one of the Easter Eggs in the game. At any point during the adventure, you can press Ctrl+P to activate "Psychedelic Mode." Pressing it again turns it off. I thought I'd save it for this point to make it more fun:

Anyways, let's check out that sparkle on the right.

If you don't grab this wrench now, you'll be kicking yourself later when you reach the exit and have to backtrack through the maze to get it. Now we head back to the entrance and try the left route.

See that spit of land to Torin's left that terminates at the game screen? That's actually an entrance to another Easter Egg. Jam yourself right up against the edge of the screen and you should be able to work your way down onto and invisible maze through the lava:

Follow that down to the very bottom left of the screen and you'll find the Easter Egg. What'll happen is Torin's sprite will change to reveal characters the presumably spell out "Sailor Moon." You see, some of the guys working on this game really like Sailor Moon.

Brain Wilkinson, Torin's Passage Artist posted:

Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 04:03:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bryan Wilkinson <uni@wolfenet.COM>
To: sos_comm@dau.physics.sunysb.edu
Subject: Torin's Passage Sighting explained

Hi, you might be wondering why Hotaru is hidden in Torin's Passage.

Well, that was the work of a Sailor Moon fan on the project, namely me.

At the time I was working at Sierra On-Line as an Art Technician (see my
resume at http://www.wolfenet.com/~uni if you are curious about what that
entailed). Among other things, I did the color models for the main
characters of the game and worked between the artists, animators and
programmers. A number of what we call "easter eggs" are often hidden in
Al Lowe's (creator of Torin's Passage, Leisure Suit Larry) games, little
things the creators of the game hide as in-jokes.

Near the end of the project, I was busy relaying correspondence between
the old Sailor Moon mailing list (back when it was the only one in the US
^_^, the newsgroup alt.fan.sailor-moon, and Janice Sonski, Sailor Moon
Co-Producer at DIC. She gave lots of insight into the US production and
told us ahead of time about many of the changes, and why they were made,
and later explained why the Doom Tree Series was delayed in the first run
(they had hoped to get it to run on a network as a miniseries). I and a
small number of other fans had made contact with DIC a few months before
the US release out of support for the importing of the series, and I had
been maintaining this contact since. (I'm a slight old-timer anime fan
myself, having been into anime since the late '70s--I first became
attracted to Sailor Moon through reading the original manga first ^_^.

Anyway, at this point, the background artist went and placed the figures
in the crystals you see in the foreground: Darth Vader, Yoda, Charleton
Heston from Planet of the Apes (the background artists, Bruce Sharp and
Don Hazeltine--the latter being the painter here, were making fun of this
movie a lot at the time...don't ask me why ^_^, and Al Lowe in front (we
had to put him in SOMEWHERE ^_^). On the left are characters from the
game's plot: Torin's parents, and his pet/friend, Boogle. When these
backgrounds came to me, I was merely supposed to reduce the color palette
and file it in the game database. However, I snuck in an image of Hotaru
I scaled down from a trading card before doing so. It was caught later,
but was allowed to stay in (after I explained what it was). There were no
other anime fans on the team, so I think they figured one anime in-joke
was harmless enough. ^_^

Actually there *IS* another Sailor Moon egg in Torin's Passage. But it's
nearly impossible to get to. You have to work Torin into a invisible maze
that goes over into the lower left corner of a lava screen. If you do so,
his legs will dissappear and as he walks in the corner, "Sailor Moon" in
Japanese will appear in place of his legs as he walks there. This was
something I put in for my own amusement and is almost impossible to do if
you don't know the spot where the maze starts. ^_-

Lastly, there's a slight Sailor Moon egg in Al Lowe's next game, the
adult game "Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail". There's a nude pool, and
one of the animators (Al Eufrasio) did a caricature of me in it wearing
Scuba gear and doing the "I Will Punish You" pose. But that one's not MY
fault...

I'm no longer working at Sierra, so please don't ask me to put more in
their future games... ^_-

Congrats to Adam for spotting my handiwork. That's a great image you guys
have of the shot, too--I may have to put a link to it on my page now
^_^;;;.

Warm Regards,
Bryan Craig Wilkinson

uni@wolfenet.com
http://www.wolfenet.com/~uni

It's kind of hard to see, though:

EDIT: 100% credit to Nidoking for discover the entrance to the Easter Egg. I wasn't able to locate it myself, so I checked out a walkthrough on YouTube for the location. As it turns out, it was from the video for his Torin's Passage LP.

Moving along...

(Hmm, this looks like a valve. But, I cant turn it with my bare hands).

Thankfully, we found that wrench!

Which leads us to another maze.

Only this one involves a bunch of entrances and exits that move Torin around the map, making it slightly more difficult than the last.

And another LucasArts Easter Egg (Indiana Jones, noooo!), to match the Sam & Max one we found in Escarpa. It's almost as if the devs realized this level was dull so they filled it full of distractions.

Is it just me, or does this area look like Heck from Earthworm Jim?

That's a big river of lava. Unfortunately, the exit is across the way.

Now we've got a jumping puzzle on our hands. This one's actually kind of fun. When you jump on a platform, you have a few seconds before it will sink back into the lava. Each platform sunk extends the bridge on the other side just a little more. You have to sink all of them to link the bridge to the phenocryst chamber. And if you don't jump fast enough?