#i’ll redraw this when i take my meds >_<< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[avis-fictional-world]

Bonus: Merichi is getting used to captivity.

I have a lack of concentration at the moment, but I just wanted to get this idea out even though my drawing is mediocre ^-^

[sp-ud]

And here's the bullet point list thats mostly the less negative tftsmp liveblogs missed when in post limit jail, and then some other various stuff here and there.

• At least I already have a tftsmp draft set up, hopefully I can still edit it under post limit

• Girl help, I'm in post limit jail

• Who is "miss lemons" ash (tubbo) has mentioned twice

• BABABOOIE

• hahaha I'm trying to open a Gmail with 63 images. It's shockingly not working /s

• I have broken my tablet I think. I just wanted to redraw reaction images

• They won't let me download the reaction images

• Karl always flirting with sapnap

• Spud breaks her tablet thru memes (not clickbait)

• I'm actually glad there isn't much to crit this episode, cuz im already critiquing the revival arc happening

• Ekgmekfna is my tablet broken? Or just the downloading

• NO THEY SEPERATED THE TWINS

• WELL AT KEAST THEYRE TOGETHER

• Oh I just noticed we can see the usernames in the floor

• Oh ash is back I guess, aite

• AHAHA HE TRIED TO GET TUBBO TO PLAY THE PIANO LIKE HE DID TO KARL

• Wait. Oh no. I looked back up. Why did that part look like The Egg.

• I think I fixed the tablet

• PH MY GOT THE LORE GOT INCOVETED AHAHAHAHAH

• This is starting to bore me.

• Inbetween, you beautiful build but horrible lore

• That was a disappointment of a tftsmp.

• "I'm going to take my adhd meds so I can do school work" *proceeds to critical*

• Anyway that wasn't worth the hype

• I can't focus on my school work. I'm suffering. Fucking minecraft youtuber hyperfixation fucking my grades. "I'll do it later" and then I don't.

• I honestly can't figure out how to get brain yo do school work. Adhd meds Broke. At least it's unlikely I'll sleep so I guess I'll do it then.

• Haha I'm going to fail my classes.

• 20 mins. Actually doing school work. Let's go... but I'm catching up and not doing the graded stuff. But that's because I don't want to fail the graded stuff

• Rmaboo stream :D, and I didn't get here late. Hope chat isn't cringe metagamers

[beesmygod]

2018

every year i make an end of the year post talking abt how i changed during the year, so its Time Again for this check in on my life. and, honestly, this is probably one of my happier entries on tumblr (as well as my life). a big struggle i had this year was reconciling how happy and satisfied i am with my current situation with how uniquely awful the world is right now. 

i am happy! i can say that with confidence. i am really happy with the choices ive made in my life. im finally doing things for myself that benefit me instead of running anxiety based simulations of how im inevitably going to disappoint everyone. i’m finally not dangerously underweight (i gained 20lbs!), i dont vomit from stress unless im actually doing something stressful (and the strides made in THIS category are getting better and better every day) and im finally beginning to feel like a person again.

in 2016 i felt like i was waking up everyday to put on a human suit to go out into the world only to come home, unpeel it and melt down from the stress of having to be “in character” for so long. i haven’t felt that at all in 2018. i feel like im finally developing an identity of my own. i think the problem is that who i am is, tbh, pretty obnoxious, but its my obnoxiousness. i’ll get it under contol eventually, but for right now its nice to finally realize and be okay with who i am. even if who i am is a work in progress. 

if ive improved this much in one year, then next year will be better. from “human” to “good human”. therapy helped so much. meds helped a lot too (gotta have my ‘zac). my therapist told me i need to also ive myself some credit for my improvement but also adam helped too. and my friends! 

art-wise, within the last month, i finally feel like i got over an art plateau. for a long time i felt kind of stagnant and it was hard for me to get excited about making the comic. i felt like i was throwing myself against a wall i built myself. in may, after a visit to adam that was so good it made me depressed to go home, i had my least productive month and only made 5 pages. this really kicked my butt into gear and made me realize i had to do SOMETHING to change.

so i started to redraw the first chapter of my comic. which was a killer idea; being able to see 5 years of progress side by side is so heartening. absolutely not perfect at all, but so much better. in the last few months ive started a bad movie review/database type thing (with the first edition ready in january), drew a long overdue poster for the previous chapter of AGS and maintained all my current patreon goals. im still volunteering in my free time at the library, which i love and will be sad to leave in february when i move to RI.

and honestly, one of the most heartening parts of this year was having solid, irrefutable proof that i dont have to choose a job or a relationship. adam and i split most things but i have been able to very significantly pull my own weight. every time i buy a plane ticket with my own money im like “HAHAHA I CAN HAVE IT ALL!!” financial independence is wild. it takes sacrifice but im so relieved to know that my career, which makes me ridiculously happy but benefits exclusively me, is not something that makes me a burden to anyone with the misfortune to love or friend me.

i hope 2019 is good too, but i also hope its better for everyone. 

except everyone who has ever wronged me. it would be funny if their lives continued to get hilariously worse. keep that part up

[udaitenma]

Tanaka these past few chapters is making my heart explode. I love this arc, even though I spend most of it in tears. Thank you, especially, for ch 264 and the way it flowed. It looked wordy and complicated the way the second years were hammering at Tanaka and he was trying to explain his feelings, so thank you for making it read so well. And now I'm going to reread and sniffle a lot. And also laugh at Tsukki trying to downplay everything - hahaha. Thanks again for all your work.

Yooooooooo thanks so much for still reading my version. It was quite wordy (unexpectedly), but I spent the past few weeks also translating a series called “Gin no Saji” by Hiromu Arakawa, and that series is wordy wordy, I felt like a chapter of Haikyuu has the text quantity of approx. 3 pages of Gin no Saji… (I’m both sad and relieved Gin no Saji has gone on hiatus again for now) so I pushed through it, telling myself it was still easier than getting through another chapter of Gin no Saji… ahha (didn’t help I was on cold and flu meds and coughing profusely ;_; ). I was really confused why the chapter was called “Broken Hearted”, and a lot of the time you have to read through the entire chapter to really be able to understand context choose the right meaning for the chapter title. However, this week’s chapter title was on the colour page, and logistically the cleaners and redrawers need to do work on first as it’s time consuming, and it’ll be troublesome to have them change the title once you’ve locked it in  so I just took a plunge and went for “broken hearted” and it seemed to work out (thank goodness). 

I loved the guys chit-chatting about Tanaka, especially because in fiction people like to portray this as something only “girls” did, and guys never do this but it’s like psh anyone should be able to talk about and roast whomever they want? :p it was really cute, just a group of good friends being good friends, healthy nice friendships between boys yay. Also the ennotana tho, no longer rarepair? heuheu  Tanaka is a brave brave boy for going in for that super inner spike, and what do you know, he scores. I hope the fox fleet realise how much they underestimated Tanka’s mental strength. Tsukki was really cute too, he had quite a few of those rare, wide-eyed innocent faces this chapter (of course, along with his kill-me-now faces). Also the tiny noyas!! Also did you notice, Kiyoko does notice things about Tanaka aaargh is Kanoka going to be okay, how will this go down?!!? xD Really, can’t thank you enough for taking the time to inbox me and reading my version of the translation. I saw some screenshots floating around on tumblr of the other translation that came out earlier, and I was quite disappointed because I don’t think the translator made much of an effort to restructure the sentences from Japanese to English so it flowed better in English (the few screenshots I saw were extremely janky to read) and some word choices seemed to fall quite flat (like chooseing “veterans” for 古豪/Kogou - Karasuno’s tag name given to them by the commentators (this word was literally stuck into a japanese-english dictionary and the translator put whatever the result was into their translation without giving thought to context in relation to the series they’re working on), when 強豪 (Kyougou) , a similar/parallel word is almost always “powerhouse” in the haikyuu-verse (ie. from ochita kyougou, tobenai karasu iirc - fallen powerhouse, flightless crows) making Kogou closer to something like “old powerhouse / ancient powerhouse / powerhouse of old a more sensible choice. Ah well, I mean our team has been late with the scans lately so I don’t blame the readers, but I’ll always try to make an effort even when sick.

edit: some perfect cute tsukkis 

[24339695-blog]

MED 1444 Animation                360 Degree Turn                                 “Room of Monsters”

Intro

In this project I’ll be attempting to create a short animation of a 360-rotation using the Post to Post technique and around 48 frames of animation. I am also planning on using the things I’ve learned throughout the week in my animation including; colour, space and composition and line and tones.   

Photo of Panels and Oil Pastels 

Planning and Preparation

It took me a while to try and figure out what I was going to draw. I decided early on that I wanted to do an animation of a 360-degree rotation of my surroundings, instead of focusing on one object like I did with hand sanitizer animation. I felt like this would give me more opportunity to take advantages of a variety of different subjects instead of just the one.

I stated shooting some footage in different locations around Wales but had not much luck with something I felt happy to animate. They were either; too complicated, too dark, unfocused or the footage sometimes just couldn’t play at all. I was in my room in the hostel wondering what I could do when I realized that it was the perfect place to set it. The space is visually interesting, it has plenty of things to use in the footage and I knew it wouldn’t be too difficult to stylize for animation.

Paused Film of Hostel Room

Drawing and Colouring

When I started out drawing out the first panel I realized early on that I was already putting in way too much detail into the bed frame, this meant that it made it unnecessarily difficult to redraw in each frame at different angles and it also meant that I spent too much time drawing it. So, I decided to rub out the detail and use a straight line instead. (Which actually worked very effectively especially after the other parts of the bed and room where added.)

After a while of drawing I then realized that all the lines where hard to keep track of and work out which was which, so I had the idea to start colouring it in to make it clearer to myself what I was drawing. This worked very well and made it way easier to work out while I was drawing each frame.

When I got to the point in the clip where there was a clear person in frame I had the idea of using the figure but changing it into my own character to add intrigue. Their hair was already over their face, so I had the idea of turning them into a green hairy monster in my animation, as it used the figures main outline and made it much simpler to draw out each time. I then did the same to my coat hanging up on one of the pegs and my own reflection in the mirror. 

One of the Panels from Room of Monsters

Paused Film of Hostel Room

Evaluation 

As it’s own enterty I feel happy with the way the finnished product turned out, it is viberant, characterful and the frames run into each other smoothly. Although when compared to the breif and the targets I set for myself it doesn’t deliver the way I wanted it to, I’ll go in more detail later. 

As I said before visually speaking I am very happy with the way my animation turned out. I decided for the colour scheme I wanted to use bright simple colours that would stand out as it was moving but also work well together to create a pleasing image to look at. To do that I decided to use the oil pastel colours as they where without blending them too much so I could get the raw colours. I’ve noticed through practice that once you start blending too many of the colours together it dullens the brightness of the shades.

I then decided to use complimentary colours for the first few frames to give it a visually appealing start. Through the rest of the animation I looked at the thing that where directly next to each other and took time working out which colours look nice close together and which colours stand out more against one another when I needed parts to stick out. For example, I use the complimentary colours red and green for the shot of the monster filming it. Because I knew he wouldn’t be i shot for long I wanted him to stand out against the background, so he’ll be easily spottable as soon as he goes into frame.

I also feel like the animation itself is very smooth and flows from each frame to the next seamlessly. I took extra care when drawing each frame to keep looking back at the one before it to make sure it fitted in and moved naturally to each shot. I realized as I was drawing the key frames that because it was 360 rotation as things went around they gradually go in and out of a tilt from different perspectives. I felt at this point it was a good job I was using Post to Post animation over Straight Ahead Animation as it gave me more opportunity to figure this out and made it easier for me to understand how the pictures would rotate while remaining the same dimensions.

I’m also very happy with the style of the animation, not so much the individual frames but more so how it all looks together. I’m happy with the character that I put into everything even including the inanimate objects, they have a slight wackiness about them compared to their real life equivalent and their simple designs make them have a childish appeal to them.

Besides this I still think I made quite a lot of big mistakes for example I misjudged the time I had to complete it, so not only did I not give myself I enough time I also gave myself to much of an ambitious task to get it done before the deadline and there for missed it completely. I didn’t realise it when I started but there were a lot of components to the animation even with its simplified design and using colour (although it’s helps in distinguishing the lines) also added on time that I didn’t have. It’s absolutely crucial when working on any kind of project that you understand your limitations and work and plan alongside them and I think that time was one of the main ones and I ended up overlooking it and there for missing it completely. 

I also messed up with the sixes of the boxes, although this seems like a small detail it ended up having a big effect on the overall film. As I went along tracing over the box in each frame I didn’t realize and ended up making them get bigger and bigger with each frame, meaning that when it came to me taking the pictures on Dragon Frame of each individual panel the ones with bigger frames ended up having a lot taken out of them to fit the size that was determined by the first frame. I then had the opposite problem with some of the last few frames by making them to small. This ended up being worse than the ones that were too big as it meant that the boarder ended up showing in the shot and made it look less professional. In future I will take better care with the size of each frame and making sure they all stay the same. Although if this ever happens again I think I will adjust the focus of the camera to the smallest frame instead of the first so at least I won’t have the problem of the drawing being too small for the shot.  

[ciathyzareposts]

Missed Classic: Asylum – (Almost) Lost (My Mind)

by Will Moczarski

Med Systems Marathon Overview: (a) 1980 Summary (b) Reality Ends (1980) (c) Rat’s Revenge / Deathmaze 5000 (1980) (d) Labyrinth (1980)

Map of the World

My next session is devoted almost exclusively to mapping. I try the silver key, the brass key and the inmate with all of the doors and get caught several times because only guards are allowed in the offices, I leave too many doors open or I walk into a trap. The offices are not even recognizable – whenever I go to the northeast (I assume) corridor, that’s apparently where they are. I soon figure out that wearing the guard’s uniform lets me walk that corridor unharmed but I don’t find anything new apart from four more doors I cannot seem to open. The inmate can pick one of the locks there but it’s only a trap: “Come in! Lobotomy time!” says a voice from the inside, ending my game once more, telling me: “You are now very calm.”

Am I really? I wish! There’s another obstacle posed by my friend, the lock-picking inmate. Whenever I start feeding him cigarettes at varying rates, he will turn on me and call the guards, that little traitor. After a while I notice that the building is somewhat asymmetrical, consisting of five corridors in the main part and a small loop in the east (I assume). The five corridors link into one another, making it impossible to map the construction by using generic tiles. I painfully redraw the whole map and try to make it fit somehow but maybe it’s just for the best to let the corridors coexist without linking them to some kind of non-functional structure. Or could it be…a pentagram? That seems likely but so far I cannot really get it to work. I’m not the cartographer I thought I was, obviously. At least I find a new room with another inmate. An ugly face appears at the grate and when I let the other inmate (my chain-smoking friend) pick the lock, he tells me that I sure am ugly and offers me his glasses. The glasses, however, turn out to be a novelty nose. I imagine something along the lines of the nose glasses from Zak McKracken and a hundred thousand junk stores.

As I don’t seem to be able to discover anything else, I set out to mapping the maze. This poses a problem as I’ve already hit the inventory limit (although the screen doesn’t look like I should have) and need to decide what I want to take with me. Because I get pushed into the maze with no means to go back, I need to carry everything I might need. I decide to leave everything that I’ve used at least once already – the hand grenade, the newspaper, the coat – but still cannot carry all of the keys. I’ll have to gamble a little more, but maybe I’ll see what I would have needed once I’ll need it.

What I get for being nosey.

Horrible Mazes

And it’s back to mazes. While Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth consisted only of those, Asylum has so far provided a more attractive framework. The maze proper is endowed with all of the niceties of its predecessors, as I will soon discover. Mapping this beast is nothing short of frustrating, and it doesn’t take long until I feel that maybe I belong in an asylum after all. The starting section is not too bad. I can map a small area but then I hit an invisible wall in the middle of a corridor. SPLAT! At least it’s not an invisible guillotine this time, and I get a chance to work on this puzzle. As my inventory is rather empty at this point of the game, it’s simply a matter of trial and error. And pretty soon I attempt to wear the novelty nose, as I still remember distinctly how the inmate described it as glasses. Maybe the mix-up is really down to a bug and the glasses will allow me to see something I otherwise wouldn’t be able to see? And that’s exactly what happens. Wearing the nose makes me see a small keyhole of sorts. It appears in the middle of nowhere but I won’t complain. Unfortunately, none of my keys seem to fit. Should I have brought the pin from the grenade? I resort to some more trial and error before restoring again, and I get lucky although I’m none the wiser for it. PUT PEG IN HOLE makes the invisible wall disappear and a box containing a bucket appears in front of me. The game also tells me that the mirror disappeared and that the water can flow freely now. What mirror? What water? Is it inside the bucket? Was it…oh right, the vanishing cream. Despite all these twisty little passages looking alike, I didn’t even think that the invisible wall might in fact be a mirror. Did I shove the peg up my own novelty nose then? If so, why did it accomplish anything? Am I doomed to be an invisible ageless, faceless, gender-neutral, culturally ambiguous adventure person forever?

The next part of the maze is much more challenging. I find a spot that feels like a teleporter but I can’t put my finger on the point where it actually begins to drop me elsewhere. Also, I don’t know anything about the dimensions of this maze – Labyrinth and Deathmaze 5000 were more outspoken about the features of their levels, if I remember correctly. Another obstacle is a revolving door. This one at least notifies me of its presence, and it seems to take me both ways which is a relief. Still it makes me erase and redraw more often than I’d like to. The only item I come across (apart from the bucket) is a bat. I assume that there will be monsters in the asylum, too.

Beyond the revolving door

After some more careful mapping, I come across a note. When I read it, it tells me to LOOK UP! If I try to do that, a piano comes falling out of nowhere and I’m dead. This is one of the many slapstick elements that the previous two games also contained – they appear to be part of the Med Systems corporate identity, or maybe William Denman was just a huge Laurel & Hardy fan in the 80’s. Not too far from the note I find some flies. My hands are full although I don’t seem to have reached the inventory limit yet which is odd. Looking at the inventory screen, I notice that there are three types of items: I carry the BAT in my hands, almost everything else in my pockets, and I can wear the coat and the nose (“being worn”). If I drop the bat, pick up the flies and then pick up the bat again, I can get around this little problem. Maybe it’s even supposed to be realistic: While my hands are full, (carrying the bat) I cannot pick up anything else.

Moving on, I spend some time figuring out how the revolving doors work. It seems that they are actually made up of four tiles and revolve both ways. If I enter from the left, I end up on the other side of them; I can also turn back which is unusually convenient for this game. Entering the doors in the same direction twice gives me access to a new area containing lots of corridors, nooks and crannies as well as a ball. As I already have the bat, this seems consistent. I really hope that there won’t be any Zork references like, say, a baseball maze. The section doesn’t contain anything else but the last part of the maze is packed with action. When I enter the revolving doors from the right I can reach the northeastern quadrant of my map which I was previously unable to enter or explore. Moving east, a “carpenter builds a wall” just behind me. Isn’t it enough to be shoved into the damn maze, game? Do you have to wall me in, too?

As if this wasn’t challenging enough, suddenly I’m being chased by a murderer. I can’t attack him, evade him, talk to him or bribe him. Because this is slapstick country, I find the solution quite easily: showing him the note (just giving it to him is not enough!) prompts him to look up, and he is crushed by a piano. How I manage to jump away without jumping away, I don’t know. At least the murderer is out of my hair. Also, he conveniently drops an axe in front of the newly built wall. Watch out, carpenter: Heeeeere’s Johnny!

A reference to The Shining makes sense in a 1981 game, as the film was released the previous year. However, the parser refuses to be my film buff companion: hitting the wall with the axe does not work, neither does hacking it. I have to BREAK the wall with the axe which seems a little odd but at least I’m not stuck anymore. Searching the section nets me a hat and a steel key. Could this be my ticket to freedom?

Indeed it is. After mapping the final sector (and not finding anything else), I go back to the entrance and unlock the door with my new key. I get back to the asylum proper but there may be some new doors I previously wasn’t able to unlock. As I’ve got way too many items at this point, I once again put the ones I’ve already used into my stash house. Let’s see where the steel key will take me!

We’re stealing the towels!

If all of this seems straightforward, just take a look at my session time after you’ve finished reading this blog post – this game is HARD and I have omitted much of my trial-and-error gaming. Also, my save feature did not work up to this point. Treading through the whole first maze every time I die slowly became unbearable, though, and trying another emulator finally gave me the opportunity to use the game’s original save feature.

The steel key lets me access seven new rooms. In the first one, there is a guru meditating. He uses the mantra “Omm!” which is nice and all but I’m trapped. I try to MEDITATE, SAY OMM(!), use my items, turn around, LEAVE ROOM, you name it. Nothing works, so I have to restore. The next room is empty. The third room has an inmate called Renfrow who mutters that he needs flies. Wow, what an easy puzzle! Giving Renfrow (is this an anagram? CAPs if someone finds out!) the flies works, too, but he just eats them and gives me nothing in return. How do I know that he eats them? Just wait! Instead of dropping an item, Renfrow gives me a hint: “The room next door…” Ahhh, the empty room? I know: something must have materialized over there, right? Is that my reward? I take a heartening (but shortish) stroll there and get pushed from behind (by Renfrow?), then that little traitor calls the guards. “Never trust one who eats flies!”, the game says. Right. As I was curious, I played through the whole scenario again, and figured out that if I lock Renfrow in his room before heading to the empty room, nothing happens. This is a very nice touch but I’m still not getting my flies back. Let’s take a look at those other rooms.

The fourth room has a fisherman called Blake who is wearing boots. That description is somewhat suspicious and I get the sudden urge to steal Blake’s footgear. If I politely ask Blake whether he might give it to me, to my surprise the parser understands me perfectly: “What may I have for them?”, drones the merry fisherman. Impressive! As I have no idea what a fisherman who’s locked up in an asylum might be in dire need of, I decide to brute-force it and simply offer everything I have to the man. And I will be really glad I did that, too. After my encounter with Renfrow (and the game’s snarky comment) I normally wouldn’t have given the flies to anyone else but that is actually the solution. Indoor fly-fishing, I suppose – am I correct, Blake? Whatever the reason, Blake drops his boots immediately, wraps them in a nice box for me to pick up and I can strut around in them for eternity. Well, at least for a few in-game minutes.

The fifth room has water pouring out but the boots provide a firm grip, saving me from being washed away. This was probably supposed to be a puzzle that I solved accidentally. My reasoning was that the inventory limit may be linked to the items’ categories (in hands, in pockets, being worn) and that wearing the boots might save a slot. I restore to see what happens if I enter the room with no boots on, and the water still comes pouring out but now I am being washed away. With the boots, I can safely enter and retrieve an “ancient key”. Could this be for the guru? Maybe it’s not a physical key but some kind of koan?

After leaving the room, I am instantly confronted by three figures – at least, that’s what the parser tells me. I am informed that Exodor, lantern and burro are seeking truth. Good for them, right? They follow me everywhere and at first I think that I can’t interact with them in any way. It seems that this is another set-piece situation and I have to solve this puzzle to progress. I get the first hint by examining the three of them. When I start with Exodor, the parser comes up with its standard “nothing special” reply. Examing the lantern and the burro is more informative, as the game tells me that I am not carrying either one of them. So they are actually items in search of the truth? That’s odd.

It takes quite some time for me to realize that I need to bring out my inner Ultima IV player to get through this one. The solution is to return the stolen boots, at least that’s what I think might be the reason behind this. If I give them to Exodor, he drops the burro and the lantern and vanishes in the air. I always like me a good lantern in an adventure game but what is this burro? I know that it’s the Spanish word for donkey but am I really picking up a donkey? Did I unwittingly stumble into the Bloody Lip on Woodtick? (I know, that was a monkey.)

Not a mirror. Can’t you see the difference?

Two more rooms to go: the first one is pitch dark and I can’t light my lantern. The second one leads to a maze that seems identical to the first one. I start mapping and get stuck in front of the very same mirror, so I restore and bring my novelty nose. That trick does not work here, though, and I lost my peg in the first maze anyway. This is strange – why would they lock the same maze behind two different doors needing two different keys? Or does it turn into another maze after I have solved another puzzle? I decide to tackle the guru first. The game appears to unlock parts of its storyworld everytime I find a new key, so I should probably solve all of the open riddles before moving on. I also try the ancient key on the remaining doors, but that one doesn’t fit anywhere. As it’s so ancient, maybe I’ll need it for the endgame.

The next part takes a LOT of time. I go over all of my notes again and try anything that seems remotely reasonable. After taking a long break, I read it all once more with fresh eyes and one thing that previously eluded me suddenly appears in a different light. Time and again, I kept coming back to the strange phrasing of Exodor, the lantern and the burro all seeking truth. Surely the lantern is an inanimate object but what if the burro really is a donkey? Who could help him to seek the truth? The guru, naturally. Handing the burro over to the guru actually works and the wise man turns out to be a fakir, too, giving me “nails for a bed” in return. Better than the asylum bunks, I suppose. At first I think that I still cannot exit the room but I am just disoriented by the darkness, and after a few turns I can finally leave.

Any more puzzles inside the asylum proper? Renfrow, maybe, but honestly I don’t think so; it may be time to see whether the maze has changed.

At least it wasn’t a banana that made the mighty Donkey Kong fall.

The maze to end all mazes

Spoiler alert: it hasn’t. Hence, I try everything with that stupid second mirror. Wearing the hat doesn’t work. Hitting the MIRROR does not work. Hitting the WALL does not work. Hitting the GLASS does not work, either. I try the same thing with the bat but – you guessed it – does not work. I play guess-the-verb for quite a while, poke the mirror, break the mirror, kick the mirror, you name it. I try to brute-force it by using (almost) every verb from the vocabulary. I also try to hit the ball into the mirror, throw the ball at the mirror, throw the ball at the wall and so on. After a while, my half-hearted attempt to hit the BALL with the bat … succeeds. Just like that. I curse so loud that a neighbour rings me up to ask if I’m okay. Oh brother, I’m not sure – I may be ready for the actual asylum.

Behind the “glass wall” which now shatters (oh, that’s what it was!) there is more mapping goodness. I assume that the second maze is the same size as the first one, meaning 20 by 23 tiles, and plan the map accordingly. I soon stumble across an anomaly that makes me suspect another teleporter. Apart from that, I find some gold, another wall is built behind me, I find some marbles and I encounter a gorilla. Nothing too bad, right? Right. The gorilla is not impressed by my bat and simply ignores me if I hit it with it. The nerve of that primate! However, he does not really attack me either, he just won’t let me through to whatever it is he is guarding. Having finished both Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth, I still remember that throwing things at foes is almost always a good strategy, and this one is no exception. After trying some more reasonable items, I finally throw the marbles and the gorilla slips, making himself vulnerable to my cold-blooded attack. Eat my unforgiving bat, you beast! (It actually took me a lot more time to figure out that I could hit him now that he’s not on guard but the story just works better cut short.)

Beyond the gorilla, there’s a copper key, presumably so I can leave the maze. But there are still some sections I haven’t mapped yet. I find two more puzzles, and both are set in very long corridors. One of them is a corridor of 11 squares containing some 20 doors. Upon entering the corridor, another worksome carpenter builds a wall behind me. For now, I am trapped here. If I enter one of the doors, I emerge into a twisty little passage with another door at the end leading back to the corridor. However, the doors don’t match up – this is a mini-maze. I set about mapping the entry points and the exit points but soon get confused as the newly-built walls make the two ends of the corridor look exactly the same.

The Door can see into your mind! The Door can see into your soul!

Adventure game trick #71 helps me out, of course, as dropping an item will provide a visible clue which side of the corridor I’m at. I systematically go through every door and don’t really get a feel for the maze, however that proves to be unnecessary. Behind the final door, there’s a box of matches (literally) and I can light my lantern now. The door at the end of the passage now takes me back into the maze proper but what about my item?! Oh no, I messed up. I’ll have to do it all over again but at least now I know the right door. Right? As I have last saved upon entering the maze, that is kind of a pain. And it turns out that I have to pass through every door instead of just the right one – there is no right one. This time, I duly pick up the dropped item (it’s the gold, in case you were wondering) before entering the last of the 20 doors – it works and I get out of there, matches and gold in hand, er, pockets.

The other puzzle is where I’m currently stuck. There’s another long corridor on the south end of the maze. If I move along that corridor for too long, a roadster races towards me and runs me down. There is nothing I can do. Of course, the obvious solution is to drop the nails and hope that the roadster will drive right into them. However, if I drop them in the middle of the corridor and turn the other way, the roadster simply approaches from the other direction. If I stay at one end of the corridor and drop the nails in front of me, nothing happens – I have to move to get the roadster’s attention. Now where is the gorilla when you need him? At present, I’m out of ideas. I’ll try to solve this puzzle for a couple more hours and if I don’t happen upon the solution, I shall consult the official hint sheet for the game. This is not a request for assistance (yet) but if you want to give me hints in rot13, I shall look at them if it turns out to be necessary. As I already have the ancient key (which doesn’t fit anywhere so far and sounds endgamish but maybe I’m wrong) I feel that the ending may not be too far away. I could be wrong, though, and Asylum could, like Labyrinth and Deathmaze 5000, contain three more mazes.

Evel Knievel got the best of me.

Session time: 8 hours Total time: 10.5 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-asylum-almost-lost-my-mind/