Games | Missives

Stuck on the final Maquette level

Last night I was playing Maquette and I got stuck on the final level (called “The Exchange”) for a really long time. I was at a place with some towers with crystals above them and I had opened the doors to the first tower; Inside was a switch. Flipping the switch made a bunch of arches appear, leading to another building.

But aside from that nothing happened. I wandered around for about an hour before getting ashamed that I couldn’t solve the puzzle and looking up the answer on the internet. But it turns out, I had encountered a bug! Flipping the switch is supposed to open a door! But instead I just got the switch sound and nothing else happened. I tried loading my last autosave but the same thing happened.

Finally I tried selecting the “Restart” option from the pause menu. I was nervous (restart what exactly? The Level, the Area, the Game?) so I hard saved my game first. Turns out it just reset back to the beginning of “The Exchange”. Within 1 minute I was back at the switch in question and this time I could hear (and see) it open a door when I hit it!

So, if you’re stuck in that section of the game and it seems like you’re just not getting it, it’s not you, the game is just bugged.

“An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect” or “Dungeon (Zork) Map in Duplicity”

Back in March of 2012 I was watching Duplicity and I noticed something odd about 28 minutes in:

In the top right corner there’s an 11×17 paper with an image on it that’s really hard to make out. I recognized it instantly. I first saw the image in question over 30 years ago when my dad brought home from work the November 1982 issue of a magazine called “The DEC Professional” that had the image in it. The image is a hand drawn map of Dungeon.

For the uninitiated, Zork is Infocom’s classic text adventure game. They renamed it to Dungeon at some point, but changed the name back to Zork when they started selling it. My dad had a copy of the Fortran translated version of Dungeon on his PDP-11. My friends and I called “Dungeo” since the filesystem only allowed 7 letters in the name—I didn’t get that it was actually called Dungeon until I was much older [Ed. 2022-07-08: I recently created dungeo.org in homage to the name, check it out!]. So when he brought the magazine home, it was specifically because of the included map and because he knew I loved the game.

Here is a scan of that map (from Tom Almy’s Dungeon page):

I must have stared at this map for days, cumulatively. My cousin traced it, enlarged it and hung it on his wall (and recently recreated and enhanced it). I currently have a black and white photocopy hanging in my computer room. I always thought it was a very good map (even though it lacked the “end game”). The point is, I’ve known and loved this image forever.

But it’s also obscure! How many people had PDP-11s and played Dungeon and happened to see the map in “The DEC Professional”? And how many of them had this map make an impact on their lives? To me it seems like that can’t be a very large number…

And so it was crazy to me that I’d happen to see that map that had made such an impact on me be in a movie that came out 27 years after the map’s publishing in an obscure computer magazine. Who was the set decorator that grabbed the map? Did he know what it was? Was it someone else’s and he just thought it looked cool? If so, whose was it? IMDB says the set decorator in Duplicity was George DeTitta Jr. But what it doesn’t say is, “why?”

Crysis 2–weapon stuck in semiautomatic mode.

So I was playing Crysis 2 and hit a random button on my xbox controller and my weapon went into semiautomatic mode. I could not for the life of me figure out what I had done or get it to switch back. Apparently I’m just dumb but it was so frustrating I tried to search google but came up empty.

Turns out later I discovered it was the “under barrel” option and that you can switch firing modes with the left d-pad.

So if anyone out there is as dumb as me, that’s how to get your Scarab out of semi-auto mode.