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Text Adventure Playthrough #10: Bureaucracy
Nope. It just returns us to the enter ID screen.
Spoilery question for Luhr28 about possibly missing information: If I remember correctly, there should be instructions printed above the ID prompt - I guess that’s where you got the QUIT command earlier - but I don’t think you ever mentioned them here? Or did you, and I just missed it?
(Of course, simply answering that question could be a spoiler in itself! So maybe a screenshot instead?)
Not much in the way of instructions. If there were I would have mentioned them, or posted a screenshot.
But if for some reason it helps, here you go:
ID: all-spaces-are-hyphenated 
RANDOM-Q-HACKER
RAINBOW-TURTLE
Ok, that worked.
I’m-not-very-impressed-by-that-“puzzle”, if that’s what it was.
I’ll just post screens from now on.
Ok, that worked.
I’m-not-very-impressed-by-that-“puzzle”, if that’s what it was.
That was indeed the puzzle, though I misremembered the positioning of the instructions.
I don’t know if it was bad form or not, but I couldn’t see howy anyone could solve the puzzle without that crucial bit of information, so I just had to ask about it.
By the way, if you had made too many unsuccessful attempts at logging in, the instructions would have changed to “ABSOLUTELY-YOUR-LAST-CHANCE,-BOZO”.
>who
>dir
PROM, NAPOL, PROM! - The Rise of the Golden Idol
>typ all the .hak files
PROM, NAPOL, PROM! - The Rise of the Golden Idol
Whenever there’s an “interrupt” message like this, imagine a beep and a 2-second delay. That makes them really hard to miss, so I don’t think I’m giving any spoilers here.
Partway through the file listing (probably, but it’s a bit random), you would have seen a “USER RQH THROUGH WITH ZBUG.HAK” message, and shortly after this one you should see a “USER RQH ACCESSING AIRPLANE.HAK” message. Unfortunately, on anything faster than an 80s home computer those messages will be immediately overwritten by the next line to appear there.
I had to play through the game in DOSBox (it’s amazing how fast you can do that if you follow a walkthrough and only read the important bits of the text 
) and then turn down the cycles count really low (about 250-300 seems to work pretty well) for this part.
Edit: That cycles count makes the PRINT commands on the unlabelled cartridge slow as molasses though. Fun if you want to see how each command updates the screen - it is not all at once - but I don’t know how slow it was originally meant to be.
>typ all the .hak files
FIDUC.HAK
MENU.HAK
AIRPLANE.HAK
POST.HAK
ZBUG.HAK
TRAVEL.HAK
DVH2.HAK
ID: all-spaces-are-hyphenated
RANDOM-Q-HACKER
RAINBOW-TURTLE
NICE!!! I admit I am a horrible hacker so am useless
What’s your favourite hacking (scene in a) movie or tv show? I’m particularly fond of The Net with Sandra Bullock.
>RUN DVH2.HAK 
ERROR: INVALID-FILE-FORMAT.
What’s your favourite hacking (scene in a) movie or tv show? I’m particularly fond of The Net with Sandra Bullock.
The hacking scene in Jurassic Park comes to mind (and with the blue screen background reminds me of Buraucracy).
I don’t think I’ve seen The Net.
It has its moments, but the hacking scenes (and use of floppy disks) are a revelatory look at the 90s.
Is the scene in Jurassic Park the one where the the dude from Seinfeld asks for the magic word?
Segue into our current predicament.
>REN DVH2.HAK DVH2.EXE
>RUN DVH2.EXE
[CMD:]
[REN]
[FILE-NAME:]
[DVH2.HAK]
[FILE-NAME:]
[DVH2.EXE]
[CMD:]
[RUN]
[FILE-NAME:]
[DVH2.EXE]
ERROR: INVALID-FILE-FORMAT.
(After some additional attempts:)
Unfortunately, it would seem that the nerd has noticed that someone deleted a file he wanted to use and realised that you are there.
Doors slam shut all around you, and freon gas is discharged into the room. You continue to breath normally for a bit, and then you breathe abnormally. Then you breath normally again, just for a change.
Suddenly, a small hatch opens low in the wall and a horde of little tiny automatic nerds with dirty spectacles and greasy hair shuffle in, twitching and whining and fiddling with their little hex calculators. You briefly wonder why you have received a social call from the MIT freshman year, then realise that the little nerdlets are in fact the nerd’s private army.
Not a very good army, it’s true, but then they don’t have to be. The freon gas is killing you quite satisfactorily, thank you; all the robot nerdlets have to do is laugh at you, which they do. And all you have to do is expire, which (knowing your place in the scheme of things) you do.
The last thing you hear before you die is one of the little nerdlets saying “Hey, fellas, look! His stack is running into his heap!”
Death
You are dead.
[Your blood pressure is 0/0, in 717 moves. Your status is Defunct. Your score is 17 out of a possible 21, making you a Victim.]
Do you want to RESTORE a previously saved position, RESTART from the beginning, or QUIT?
[Type RESTORE, RESTART or QUIT.] >
Is the scene in Jurassic Park the one where the the dude from Seinfeld asks for the magic word?
That’s the one. I guess the hacking protections in 1993 had been tamed down since the tiny killer nerd robots of the late 80s.
The last thing you hear before you die is one of the little nerdlets saying “Hey, fellas, look! His stack is running into his heap!”
Or, if you had played as a woman, “Hey! Wait! Would you like to go out with me?”
He just doesn’t give up, does he?
Is the scene in Jurassic Park the one where the the dude from Seinfeld asks for the magic word?
That’s the one. I guess the hacking protections in 1993 had been tamed down since the tiny killer nerd robots of the late 80s.
For some reason, I assumed you meant the “It’s a Unix system, I know this!” scene. I guess that one stood out in my mind because while the fsn file manager turns out to be a real thing, a lot of people I knew at the time (who were using Unix at school) thought that line was hilariously wrong.
(Wikipedia has an article about fsn, but this forum doesn’t like URLs with parentheses in them. Not one bit.)
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