IFDB Spelunking 2 — 5 of 18

Sam Kabo Ashwell

Release 0

Part 2 - Notes and Links

startroom is a room. The description of startroom is "A randomly-generated section of the tunnels of IFDB: a tangle of the obscure, the ancient and the weird[first time]. As a Spelunker, it is your habit to delve into these less-explored regions in search of adventure, entertaining anecdotes and (above all) valuable loot. Bending the rules of the games ever so slightly is part of the unwritten code.[p]The following tunnels are readily apparent; you would be well-advised to examine them carefully before plunging in[only]."

A clicking hyperlink rule:

if the current link number < 500, now glulx replacement command is "note [current link number]";

if the current link number is 500, now glulx replacement command is "x ket";

if the current link number is 501, now glulx replacement command is "x samhain";

if the current link number is 502, now glulx replacement command is "x school of death";

if the current link number is 503, now glulx replacement command is "x pantin";

if the current link number is 504, now glulx replacement command is "x sixteen";

if the current link number is 505, now glulx replacement command is "x dracula";

if the current link number is 506, now glulx replacement command is "x creepy";

if the current link number is 507, now glulx replacement command is "x take one";

if the current link number is 508, now glulx replacement command is "x snowman";

if the current link number is 509, now glulx replacement command is "x escape";

if the current link number is 514, now glulx replacement command is "dismiss sixteen";

if the current link number is 520, now glulx replacement command is "open ket";

if the current link number is 521, now glulx replacement command is "open samhain";

if the current link number is 522, now glulx replacement command is "open school of death";

if the current link number is 523, now glulx replacement command is "open pantin";

if the current link number is 524, now glulx replacement command is "open sixteen";

if the current link number is 525, now glulx replacement command is "open dracula";

if the current link number is 526, now glulx replacement command is "open creepy";

if the current link number is 527, now glulx replacement command is "open take one";

if the current link number is 528, now glulx replacement command is "open snowman";

if the current link number is 529, now glulx replacement command is "open escape";

notenumber is a number that varies. notenumber is 0.

To say note (X - a number):

if X is an index listed in the Table of Footnotes begin;

choose a row with an index of X in the Table of Footnotes;

if there is a shownumber entry begin;

do nothing;

otherwise;

now notenumber is notenumber + 1;

now the shownumber entry is notenumber;

say "[set link notenumber][unicode 91][notenumber][unicode 93][end link]";

end if;

end if;

To say lady (X - a number):

if X is listed in the ladylist or X is listed in the done-ladylist begin;

do nothing;

otherwise;

add X to the ladylist;

end if;

Noting is an action out of world applying to one number. Understand "note [a number]" or "f [a number]" or "footnote [a number]" or "foot [a number]" or "notes [a number]" as noting.

Carry out noting:

take no time;

if the number understood is a shownumber listed in the Table of Footnotes begin;

say "[co][the response entry][/co]";

otherwise;

say "[co]There is no note with that number.[/co]";

end if;

Table of Footnotes

indexresponseshownumber
1"Either ketamine wasn't all that popular back in 1984, or R.A. McCormack lived a very sheltered life."a number
2"Pronounced Sao-wen, Samhain is the Celtic neopagan harvest festival that got syncretised (probably with a few intermediary steps) into Halloween. So this is either a smart neopagan talking about their religion, a schlocky Halloween game by someone who just thought the name was cool, or a schlocky Halloween game by a woo-woo pagan. Your best guess is option 2."
3"The Ket trilogy, comprising Mountains of Ket, Temple of Vran and The Final Mission, included an Incentive for the first player to score 100%: [unicode 8356]400 worth of video equipment (unspecified). Given that the publisher was called Incentive Games, you rather suspect that they staked their existence on this gimmick. Apparently a great many British games of this period were designed around awarding a prize to the first person to beat them, following in the footsteps of Masquerade. Jimmy Maher has written a fair amount on this, claiming that the trend had disastrous effects on British game design in the period, since the point was to produce puzzles that would take a long time for anyone to solve, and which most people would never solve at all."
4"Web sources differ as to whether the publication date was 1983 or 1984. Jimmy Maher would weep with joy at this discovery."
5"Your French vocabulary fails you here. Google tells you that [/i]pantin[i] means [/i]puppet[i], dashing your dreams of [/i]The Electric Panties[i]."
6"The strange and ? story of a thirty-year old (thirtysomething?) haunted by his mother. (At least, you hope that the literal translation is correct. Knowing the French, 'haunting' could be a euphemism for something unspeakable.)"
7"There are 251 Eamon games in the IFDB, and the Eamon guy posts continually to Planet-IF. Nonetheless, my entire understanding of Eamon is that it's really old and closely resembles a Paul Allen Panks game."
8"Wade Clarke is an enthusiast of old-school combat things, and a good-natured guy to boot; if he says this is crap, I'm disposed to believe him."
9"What, only four games tagged French? That can't be right. Man, tags are underused."
10"Oh boy. An AIF game from when you were three years old? You expect this to be both super-creepy and oddly prudish."
11"Creepy: check. Though not yet super-creepy, by AIF standards."
12"Laziest cyberpunk antagonist ever."
13"Wait, you went to school in a blue suede suit? The 80s were a strange, strange time."
14"You thought that what she was doing was smiling provocatively. Now I'm thinking of her as an endlessly zooming .gif of some sort."
15"Apparently your name is Spike. Or possibly your penis is called Spike. Or you both are, which would make more sense."
16"Clearly the game is as least as invested in brotacular douchebaggery as it is in the sex part."
17"Sex and cigarettes? Edgy contemporary artist? Yeah, you wrote this approximate game when you were a teenager too. Well, okay, there were more drugs and less douchebaggery, and it pointlessly namedropped the Wu-Tang Clan rather than Ozzy, but you're still very glad you never finished the stupid thing."
18"You were going to make a joke here about Relax With Heavy Metal, but then you went and Youtubed some Ozzy from about that period, and it doesn't actually sound like heavy metal. To your unschooled ear, pretty much indistinguishable from any given 80s hair band."
19"So far this is the premise to the most boring mystery ever."
20"Which is to say, [/i]Boy[i], [/i]War[i] and [/i]The Unforgettable Fire[i]. [/i]Joshua Tree[i] won't be released until next year."
21"sic. Also, do 22-gauge shotguns even exist? Isn't .22 a rifle calibre? Okay, the Internet suggests that they exist but are rare oddball antiques. You suspect that this was not the author's intention."
22"The placenames put us in South Side Chicago, in a diverse and well-to-do neighbourhood. What's the US age of consent, anyway? ...varies by state, all of them 16-18. But seventeen in Illinois, tsk tsk."
23"'Uh, so, like, my bros bet me $500 that I couldn't bang you. Wanna make $250?'"
24"The author has a website, principally concerning their amateur manga translations. They do not mention this game on the website."
25"A defunct link."
26"An author whose best-known work is the seminal [/i]Stupid Kittens[i]."
27"Joining the women drinking beer is, alas, not an option."
28"Wait, was this true even in 1986? (Yes, apparently it was.)"
29"No, this is absolutely a differerent room. Well, a distinct room. Identity-wise. It's pretty pointless, though."
30"In the magical land of Ket, you have to pick people up before looking at them. There's a weak joke about online dating here somewhere."
31"Oh, what the balls. You can only examine things you're actually holding?"
32"Cartography is not a very advanced science in Ket. You'd expect there to be more than one cluster of boulders at the edge of a mountain range."
33"Aww, shit. You'd really hoped to have a freakin['] horse to ride into inappropriate places with, and now it looks as though you'll have to leave it behind."
34"The Ket author almost never puts spaces after periods. In the already-ugly Spectrum font this is only mildly excruciating, but you refuse to inflict it on anyone else."
35"Not going to tell you what it is. Sure is strange, though. Boy howdy."
36"Given that you're working in an industry where connections are everything, and that you've apparently managed to hire and speak to your lead actress without remembering her name, you're not looking all that brilliant yourself."
37"So we want to do this in one shot? We're trying to pull some Hitchcock nonsense on this archaesploitation flick we haven't even bothered to read?"
38"Since when is -a an insufficiently feminine ending? You have to slap a diminutive on there as well?"
39"Wait, wait, do we not even know the title? The working title? You know excessive drug use is pretty common in the movie industry, but this is ridiculous."
40"For a cod-fantasy game, there's an awful lot of O.K. going around. "
41"Nnnnnrgh. That's really, really beginning to grate. "
42"Sadly, a rhetorical question."
43"See, when a male archaeology professor walks around with a bullwhip on his belt, it's a functional tool and in no way an affectation. When a woman does it, it's a fashion accessory."
44"So the CGI work is being done in real-time, concurrently with the action? I'm having trouble figuring out the rationale here."
45"You keep thinking that, chuckles."
46"This is getting annoying. Artifacts should be capitalised. Because they've got proper names."
47"The delivery here is so profoundly flat that you suspect our narrator is not merely drug-addled, but anhedonic."
48"Apparently that USE X ON Y trick with the whip was just string-matching. Jesus fucking christ, ADRIFT."
49"Do we have to use the full name of the character every bloody time? It was kind of grating the first time around."
50"All right, all right, we know what her name is by now, can you just cut it down to Indy? Please? Indiette? India? Indii?"
51"OH GOD MAKE IT STOP"
52"You can't accuse this game of excessively subtle pointers, at least."
53"So she has to wear a stupid sexy-Halloween outfit; is working with a director who can't remember her name, hasn't read the script, has only a hazy idea of what he wants out of the scene, and holds her in total contempt; has to perform the entire scene in a single seamless shot; has to react to a CGI monster without a stand-in; and, within that seamless shot, does her own stunts. And she gets it done in [the gamecount of Take One in words] take[if the gamecount of Take One > 1]s[end if], without getting despondent or angry or asking any questions or kicking the director's face in? That is a freaking [/i]professional[i]."
54"I am in my truck, hastening to Castle Dracula!"
55"At last I will find my true destiny!"
56"Quickly we reach the great heights of the mountains. Views are abundant!"
57"Occasionally we see the castle, upwards, vigilant for the transit (travel?) of newbies. Vigilant? Why would it be like that? The castle is not an actual person!"
58"I want to go and have an impression constructed in the style of the great French castles: a half-Klingon engineer, tall and pointy. Probably [/i]towers[i] tall and pointy. Okay, probably not [/i]I want to go[i], probably more that we're getting glimpses of it? Something something urgency that something."
59"A mother is sitting - sentado must be sitting, gotcha - okay, you recognise asiento but don't know the meaning, and opposed? Opposite? A mother is sitting opposite."
60"I wait for your instructions."
61"She is dressed in black. A... shawl of black lace? covers her head? something freely something dudes. She is not free with the men? Except that [/i]sus[i] should be [/i]her[i]. She is free of her man? But surely [/i]hombros[i] is plural, and [/i]libremente[i] should be an adverb. Anyway. Her something is barely visible."
62"The coach rumbles."
63"The coach gallops and gallops at a great velocity, traversing the something."
64"We are going very... something, climbing more high in the mountains."
65"The... tumbling? like a tambourine? rattling coach continues implacably."
66"My hands are pale, with big suave fingers. The hands of a musician, like... alone? something."
67"Tell me what to do."
68"I hope for - anticipate - your orders."
69"What now?"
70"Other happens more close to... eternity..."
71"The coach goes something travel something the day."
72"The... woman? old woman? looks at me with open eyes... Oh, such profound and obscure eyes, and she turns her head and recommences something..."
73"An old piece, ... strong like for a big voyage. Ah! And it has uncomfortable seating."
74"My travelling companion is single. Okay, that's probably not it. She is only my travelling companion."
75"The door is Eva Perón! Or closed. Probably closed."
76"My teeth, those are obscure eyes... Part-illuminated, but always sombre... I don't see the coach and horses, or your face! In a profound something you imagine you see your destination! An obscure habitation... Three people in something white, chilling with a something and a something (female titles?)."
77"These young women... laugh nervously intermittently? Not in the voices of young innocents, it's much more sinister... No idea about that next bit. Something red... they have a something there. Yes, a something, ... something something meat?"
78"The women rise.... Slowly they revolve. God, no! Their faces! Fear of the evil of Satan! Their white, dead faces are covered with blood! Saint Hysteria, Come For Me!"
79"Press any key to continue."
80"You simply see the face of an old woman... Hope! You see something new. In her face is a life of suffering. She divulges the appearance of a something sunrise."
81"You see nothing but the horror!"
82"My heart beats a martial rhythm in my fish. Chest. Like pectoral, probably."
83"Like a band of something somethings me... How gloomy!"
84"It's hard to breathe! Oh my agony."
85"My head evanesces... The beats of my heart cease their parade... Peace now... Images of evanescence. I cannot be helped now... Images... of evanescence."
86"The trance is broken! Everything is newly focused in my vision. Everything assumes a tranquilizing reality. The old woman sees with... weak sunrise. 'Sir, there is nothing secure in the future... only possibilities. This is for something in your future adventures.' She gives you a cross of silver on a something cord."
87"A simple silver cross, of rectangular cross-section."
88"A triumph of the erotic imagination. We are in awe, sir. Golf clap."
89"Indeed. You love the totally vague thing she's done with her hair."
90"Oh, man, triangle-of-identities shenanigans. These things always make you nauseous, as though you're shouting orders at your own lurching body from across a room."
91"It wouldn't really be a dive into IF without a toilet. Usually they're more nicely-furnished than this, though."
92"You're pretty sure that this is one element of an inventory-limit puzzle. You may not be able to get by with muscle and hitpoints, but at least you don't have to worry about [i]that[/i] kind of bullshit."
93"Actually, you can, but only with the right thing, in the right place."
94"This is important for an inventory-management puzzle, which you don't have to worry about quite so much."
95"He won't follow you around unless you carry him, though. Lazy beast."
96"Aie! Who the fuck is this Edgar guy?"
97"Said footnote: [/i]'How [']Lectricity Cook Food', by Jeffy C. Much more popular with the judges than the science fair's only other experiment-entry, 'A Time Machine That Actually Fucking Works, So Screw You, Mr. Frauhenhoer, Who Said I Would Never Amount To A Goddamn Thing'.[i]"
98"Said footnote: [/i]DESIGNATED VICTIM, an obscure jazz band from the 1930[']s and the cheerleader's favorite group, regrets the use of footnotes in this game, and implores the author to stop ripping off Infocom games (Footnote Two[note 99]).[i]"
99"Said footnote: [/i]Hitchhiker's Guide, specifically. Thppppppppppppppt.[i]"
100"Said footnote: [/i]Nick Cave did an album called *Murder Ballads*, on which he did a duet with PJ Harvey. For more information on PJ Harvey, consult www.bluetavern.org[note 104].[i]"
101"Said footnote: [/i]Bjork, of the Bjorg. From the Kitten-Mover Quadrant.[i]"
102"Said footnote: [/i]For Special Edition Director's Cut alternate endings, try KISS BJORK and TASTE BJORK.[i]"
103"Said footnote: [/i]Ed's a chronic wanker.[i]"
104"So dead, it's not even domain-squatted. Or possibly its non-existence was the joke in the first place?"
105"The coach goes more slowly in travelling something of the day."
106"Does this mean [i]Myst[/i], or the Stephen King novel [i]The Mist[/i], or what?"
107"You count seven ellipses and four exclamation marks in this intro text. It feels like about a million."
108"Obtuse angles. If they were all acute, it'd be a triangular box."
109"How can there be more strong profanity than profanity? Isn't... well, okay, it's probably just Poster staggering around, fighting-drunk on his own self-righteousness and deploying the strong profanity tag at first sight of the word 'peener'."
110"What the hell is the deal with this pond-as-vagina metaphor? I mean, okay, ponds are a cavity of sorts, but that's a pretty low standard. Ponds suggest... anaerobic mud, and frogs."
111"Debts with bros apparently hold good in the afterlife."
112"Truly, a gift for the obvious."
113"Gyah. WE KNOW. It's in the room heading. STOP WASTING SPACE."
114"You're unable to parse the significance of any of this, really. Were U2 edgy and hip in 1986? The amount of interest the author's showing in them suggests approval. But aren't A Flock of Seagulls interminably drippy? How is this all meant to figure into the PINK BED OF PINKNESS BECAUSE SHE IS A GURL?"
115"Real subtle, dude. Reeeeeeal subtle."
116"The common theme here seems to be un-macho, folk-influenced bands. So maybe that does fit in with the pinkness?"
117"This after-school-special tone weirds you out as much as the game's creepy premise, honestly. In theory it makes sense that porn games can involve a certain kind of suspension of standard ethics and consequences and so forth, but that justification kind of falls apart if you decide to get all schoolmarmish about unrelated topics[first time][creep][only]."
118"Really? Never would have guessed."
119"Flinch."
120"Which, coincidentally, is the name of your new band."
121"That name seems vaguely familiar. Hmm. Also known as Mystery, edited InsideADRIFT for a little while. An ifWiki check suggests she was fairly prolific, releasing eighteen games in the first half of the aughts. Four of them have ADRIFT in the title; the only one you've played is... one of the Shadrick games? Which for some reason you associate with Introcomp even though neither of them were entrants?"
122"Boo dinosaurs contemporary with cavemen. Where is your meticulously researched-in-one-hour hominid game[note 124], dammit? Also, turkiosaur? You suppose that 'about the size of a turkey' is one of the more overused phrases in popular dinosaury writing, but this seems... over-literal[note 127]."
123"Either we are made of bark and twigs, or this is some kind of flesh-rending dire beaver."
124"You suppose when the premise is that you're a caveman in caveman prison, you should suck it up and assume that this is basically going to be the Flintstones. But... dammit, you can't have a prison system without a hierarchical social order and the basic concept of impersonal justice and other things dependent upon a complex, populous society grounded on a preservable food surplus. Where is your Jared Diamond-approved hunter-gatherer band[note 125]?"
125"Also, newsflash, having wheels is pretty pointless unless you also have domesticated beasts of burden, which, sidebar, is why the Mesoamericans only used them as toys, end sidebar, so wheels show up around something like 3500 BCE, pretty much around the same time as bronze and proto-writing and stuff (albeit in slightly different regions), and about seven thousand years after agriculture, so definitely Not Cavemen. God, you're such a pedantic asshole. Enjoy the fun little caveman game[note 126]. Also, one hour."
126"ALSO sixty-six million years after the Cretaceous extinction event OKAY STOPPING NOW"
127"Unless by 'turkiosaur' what it means is actually 'turkey', since those are technically dinosaurs. You sort of doubt it, though."
128"So... a tiger-skin skirt-and-bikini combo, only with a little Red Cross motif? Kind of struggling here."
129"A pet peeve: object descriptions that effectively just reiterate what you know from the object's name."
130"Not implemented. And you'd briefly hoped there might be something that could arguably count as treasure in this game."
131"Seriously, where did the whole director frame go? This makes absolutely no sense if we've got the director's POV and the demon is a CGI thing that's going to be edited in later."
132"Hm. If we got points for this, does that make it a treasure? The maximum score here is 2, for the record."
133"Of both figurative and literal varieties, if that wasn't clear. One advantage of not being an australopithecene is the ability to be smug about double meanings."
134"This is, in fact, a well-formed and important command, but the game will pretend it isn't until you're in just the right situation."
135"Someone needs to spend some more time in the right kind of bookshops, plainly."
136"Do not be fooled here: Ket [/i]does[i] allow you to examine a few things, and at several points doing so is essential."
137"Hold up, hold up. When she does something right, it's because we told her to do it, but when she does something wrong it's of her own volition, and we tell her off for it?"
138"Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of Redundant Sentences."
139"Woo one-time actions in descriptions. Classy work, sir."
140"The most helpful failure message ever."
141"Holy shitballs, a player convenience? A player convenience that exposes some rickety-ass game logic, but still."
142"The implication here is that you need to BUY something. This may not always be accurate, in context."
143"'Wabe', a made-up word of Carroll's, either means the side of a hill or (as here) the grass plot around a sundial. Sundials and the odd names of their composite parts are a minor IF tradition."
144"The capacity of early australopithecenes for speculative planning of this kind was probably not all that great, nor is it very likely that they would have had a working understanding of an 'inventory' of useful possessions to be carried around against indefinite future use. Also it was probably more of a patchy light woodland or bushveldt than true savannah. Further, 'profession' suggests a specialised individual livelihood, something that we don't have evidence for prior to early [/i]Homo[i] hand-axe manufacture, about two million years later; and given that the acquisition and retention of possessions in one form or another has since become a near-universal human behaviour, it hardly qualifies as a profession. These trifling details aside, you feel that the rhetorical device stands up rather well."
145"A 7th-level cleric spell, you think."
146"Except that this camera was presumably shut up in the room sometime around 1927, but the first 35mm SLR, the Kine Exakta, came out in 1936. This camera is, therefore, either an unknown early prototype or evidence of time-travel, and priceless either way. A treasure, even.[p]Boom! Suck it, 1986, we gots Wikipedia."
147"Amnesia is to IFDB spelunking as chronic traumatic encephalopathy is to American football."
148"Wait, wait, wait. That gun's been inside a wood-fired oven for long enough to burn through a wooden box. How has the ammunition not cooked off? To the Internet![p]...wow, firearm forums are all frequented either by creepy cops, creepy survivalists or creepy Confederate re-enactors[note 149], but they do know their subject to the nerdiest technical specs. And, yeah, wood-fired ovens get really hot really quickly, and those bullets should be in pieces, and the one in the chamber should have left a hole in something. Thank christ for game logic."
149"It is a bad day on the Internet when the slavery apologists are the [/i]least[i] disturbing people you discover."
150"I suppose this is just about reasonable. But the bullets should be [/i]visible[i]."
151"This is the first time you've fired a gun, ever, you have no idea how guns work, and you're confronting an unexpected attacker. It should be weirder that that worked so easily."
152"A security Línea, whom you assume to be a short, robust and bored-looking Chicana with a bullet-proof vest and no-nonsense ponytail bun."
153"Varilla de Virtudes, third son of an impoverished Salamanca marquis, recounted his lurid yet morally instructive exploits in the New World in a series of allegorical novellas. He has an excellent moustache."
154"Which - thanks to Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian blog for this titbit of information - was the name under which The Quill was marketed in North America, admittedly without very much success."
155"Nova's father is, evidently, so hungry that he teleported the steak out of your inventory through sheer force of will."
156"And this, pretty much, nails down the approximate age of the author. Note that this isn't a fantasy about dragging a girl back to your own grimy wank-nest; it's more about having a friend whose [/i]big brother[i] has a grimy wank-nest, into which you might be able to sneak if you were very lucky."
157"Probably for the best."
158"It's probably not good that you find the sentiment less offensive than the lack of apostrophe before the 'cause'."
159"It's rare that someone manages to offend both pagans and rednecks in the same sentence, but this is a credible first stab at it. Also, the generally accepted spelling is 'y'all'."
160"Aleister Crowley, quoting Francois Rabelais. For Rabelais it was a satire; for Crowley a serious aim. Usually rendered 'do what thou wilt'; it's a bit odd to retain the archaic 'thou' but ditch the 'wilt'."
161"Oh, standard Inform parser, how little you know of the ways of smut."
162"It's a one-shot gag. Whether this is more or less merciful than the myriad pointlessly-implemented televisions that require SWITCH ON and WATCH, who can say."
163"There's nothing quite so charming as blaming the player for your own stupid bugs."
164"Sorry, I don't understand that. Try with other words."
165"It takes ten seconds to pick up the stupid thing? Really?"
166"Okay, clearly somebody needs help, but that's not the kind you had in mind."
167"This message appears randomly, and if you don't happen to hear it your game will be irrevocably fucked later on. So, uh, it's a good thing that you did. Hooray."
168"Sound advice for IF in general. Well, maybe not [/i]Conan Kill Everything[i]. In this particular case, though, it's more to do with the log."
169"It is, indeed, a bad idea to just murder villagers. Though it's a bit worrying that there was a perceived need to point this out."
170"Although this is a generic message that appears in various parts of the village, there is, in fact, an important puzzle here, one necessary to advance to the next section of the game. The cartographer is cold, so you need to provide him or her with some heating fuel."
171"It may not seem like it, but you're on the right track. But the log is too big to fit in the Cartographer's fireplace, or something. This was not an era that acknowledged partial success."
172"Eeeagh. Agh. Um.[p]Okay, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the abrupt and unmotivated shift in Nova's attitude from suspicion, to flirtation, to will-less zombie seems like pretty good evidence that the author has never made it past 'suspicion', and is uncertain about how other female attitudes towards men might work."
173"Your llama, [guard dog], has your... who cares, you have a llama."
174"Ket has a moderately harsh inventory limit, and finding a place in the caves where you can safely stash things is a non-trivial puzzle in its own right. Fortunately, modern sensibilities have freed you from such annoyances."
175"This is pretty weak as a cryptic crossword clue, but you need a particular item to make it work as a password. For those without a basic knowledge of UK confectionery, Polo is a popular brand of mints, distinguished by their toroid shape. The wand has MINT written on it, although since it's one of the few items in the game that has any description whatsoever, it's not clear how you're meant to find that out."
176"An old something in a carriage finally rises to your young protagonist of the castle. After a night where you had a big talk with the Count, he makes you not only a prisoner, but puts your life in peril! Escape your confinement and your unique obsession. If you can exit, get some good Scotch and write to your friends in England to prevent your discovery. The castle contains terrors of which the someones do not speak."
177"Movement. Use the normal conventions of north, south, east, ouest for cardinal directions, and Up, Down. Important system commands: I inventories everything you're carrying, M admires your present location. Usually tripe soup, because the place can be... Cambrian."
178"Communication with people. To talk in a limited way and respond to demands from people, use the comand 'decir', for example 'decir si', 'decir no'. If the parser doesn't understand, include in your query who you're talking to, for example 'say yes to coachman'."
179"General. To use commands expressed in the normal form, always make the most simple thing the program can understand. For example 'look at the coach', 'climb into coach', etc. In the original game, there was a useful comand 'look carefully', which gave extra information about the location description. In this one it's omitted, and 'look' works exactly the same, and the information given is incorporated into descriptions."
180"Other single-word orders you can use: 'Z' abbeviates wait', 'sleep, 'Yes', 'No', etc. To quit like using a rope, 'ponte' or 'quitate' an object. To GRAB parts: 1. Write the GRAB command. 2. If your interpreter uses it... okay, this is perhaps SAVE, because the next bit is about charging a previously saved game, which is a bit like the French 'telecharger'. "
181"sic. Possibly it is a treatise about an inhabitant of the town of Leviath."
182"You probably want to use LOOK UP 2 IN MANUSCRIPT."
183"Music allows musical fun. Sadly, music is deactivated, so 'musica play' is not a permitted command. Similarly, with the comand 'style' you cannot change the game colours."
184"Undo, restart, quit, help, version, credits. You can email Mapache or Urbatain for help or bug reports if you like, unless you're a dude. The Ultimate In Terror Is Here something!"
185"It's rude, like an ill-educated pig."
186"You can't."
187"You carry nothing, dog!"
188"None of the actions of your commune are excusable (a popular rallying-cry of Franco's supporters)."
189"Don't be fooled - you're on the right track. You just need another item first."
190"Despite the default message, you've got the right idea - you just need to try it elsewhere."
191"Is this the author's idea of a broad scope of reading material, or does he just not know how that figure of speech is meant to work?"
192"The real name of Marc Valhara. Or the other way around. Or neither."
193"You can, in fact, but you have to open the door manually. It's a puzzle-timing thing."
194"In case it was not entirely clear - which it wasn't - this indicates a successful transaction."
195"You have everything you need to get past the village area, so I guess keep the random wrong-direction stuff up."
196"The horse allows you to access more areas, but you will also need some expert directions if you're going to get far."
197"The map was helpful, but the areas it shows are too far for you to walk to in a hurry. You'll need to find some transport."
198"While you need to get beyond the village eventually, you're going to need to find and use some more stuff from here first."
199"A bug in the original."
200"Beloved misquote from Adam Cadre's I-0; by normal usage, it should not be taken to imply anything about the gender of its subject."
201"Look, the author has chosen to draw a discreet veil over the exact nature of the bathroom stench. Let's respect their wishes, hmm?"
202"You apply yourself to some dedicated nippletending. Unfortunately, nobody knows exactly whether that is a medical procedure - perhaps a species of outpatient care for masectomy patients - or something involving nipples and mixed drinks, and by the time you're done thinking about it the verb 'to tend' has become a meaningless garble, and 'nipple' is fast approaching a similar status.[p]Okay, fine, you try to grab her tits. It doesn't work. Full points for seductive technique, though."
203"sic. 'Less you get your head blown off' may be the 1980s Chicago version of 'less than three.'"
204"Let's be charitable here and assume that the masks are not adjustable and that the slave driver's head is a different size than yours."
205"If you cannot translate this then you should probably just give up on this game entirely."
206"Zeno of Elea's burglary career faced similar problems."
207"You can't use the password unless you have previously heard it. This means that Mountains of Ket is now unwinnable. The eighties were a messed-up time."
208"If you had to specify a particular point at which you became convinced that the author is just uncontrollably blethering, this would have to be it."
209"This one will require the game's first instance of the wholly-lamentable USE X ON Y syntax."
210"In case you ever lose your unlikely bondage parephanalia, the Cabinet of Dr. Creepbag will teleport it back. Also convenient if you ever misplace your genitalia."
211"British English spelling, despite the oddly-specific US setting and the US-specific IF platform. Just a typo? Odd."
212"This clumsily combines a crappy IF technique - putting actions in the room description - with a hacky cinematic one. Glorious."
213"Ket goes out of its way to assist you in making the game unwinnable."
214"You're on the right track here, but you don't have everything you need."
215"So up to this point your reaction has mostly been 'what', but round about this point the random crazy not-quite-funny snarkage seems to have crossed the line into outright trolling. It's sort of like Panurge: he's a goofy fart-joke drunken clown, amusingly irreverent and inconsequential, and then he pulls something super-awful with every appearance of half-believing that it's just more goofy fart jokes."
216"It's weird which of the references in this thing feel super-dated, and which just feel like part of the language."
217"So... kind of like a stack, then?"
218"Because this is exactly what a human would do."

To say horsehint:

if horse is ridden begin;

if the old map is examined begin;

say "[note 195]";

otherwise;

say "[note 196]";

end if;

otherwise;

if the old map is examined begin;

say "[note 197]";

otherwise;

say "[note 198]";

end if;

end if;

Dismissing is an action applying to one thing. Understand "dismiss [something]" as dismissing.

Check dismissing:

if the noun is not a game begin;

say "[co]You can only dismiss games, and must do so from the starting tunnel.[/co]";

stop the action;

end if;

Carry out dismissing a game (called foo):

say "Triage is an essential element of the art of IFDB spelunking. You mark off that tunnel with your personal dismissal mark, and put it out of your mind.";

remove foo from play;