Tuks Mind Sports

Tuks Mind Sports is going through the motions of putting together a shiny new committee!

Tuks Mind Sports is also updating the information on the Tuks Sport page, and setting up participating in a University league (with MSSA).

If you would like to be part of the committee and the club's legacy send me a message/comment with your year of study, the degree you are studying, and which one of the following positions you are interested:

(a) Club Chairperson
(b) Secretary
(c) Treasurer
(d) Administrator
(e) Marketing head

This is great for your CV when you are done studying as well!

Happy gaming!

Johan Uys - johanuystuks@gmail.com

Tabula Rattata

You could say this all started back when I met Professor Oak in Pallet Town. My story doesn't start out much different from the stories of many other young aspiring Pokémon enthusiasts. The idea to build a Pokémon preserve and sanctuary came to me much earlier, of course, but I didn't start working on it in earnest until after a very long discussion with the original Pokémon Professor. His research on the natural relationships between humans and Pokémon, particularly his work on shared habitats and habitats in close proximity, really inspired some of my early ideas of building a park that people and Pokémon could both enjoy.
I had wanted to meet Professor Oak in person for quite some time, but travel to the Kanto region was quite expensive for me as a teenager. I was seventeen when I first read some of Professor Oak's articles in current Pokémon journals. I learned that the professor was working on a revolutionary new device that was capable of recording and studying Pokémon both in the wild and in captivity. We know this device today as the Pokédex, and back then it really ignited my budding desire to capture, catalog and build an environment in which Pokémon could thrive and people could come study or otherwise spend time with them. The Pokédex is exactly what I felt I needed to set things into motion and so I began corresponding with Professor Oak several months before we actually met in person.
Through our correspondence, the professor was more than happy to keep me up to date on his progress with the Pokédex. When it was finally ready for field testing he sent me a personal invitation to Kanto. The idea was to form a mutually beneficial relationship where I helped him test the Pokédex while he and the Pokédex itself would help me begin my arduous task that lay ahead. I spent almost all I had saved to get myself to Kanto, but it was completely worth it looking back. The Pokédex proved to be invaluable to my task, and Professor Oak himself was an amazing mentor.
The day I arrived in Pallet Town, Professor Oak and I spoke about Pokémon passionately for several hours. I understood the fundamentals of catching and battling Pokémon, of course, but the professor was shocked to know that I'd never caught or trained a Pokémon myself. During the course of our talk, he convinced me that in order to build my Pokémon Sanctuary, I would need to know all I could about Pokémon and that there was no less certain way than to begin my journey as a Pokémon Trainer. He entrusted me with one of his earliest versions of the Pokédex which was rudimentary compared to what we see nowadays, but still unbelievably advanced at the time. Then he took me out to a field just beyond the boundaries of Pallet Town where we waited patiently for an opportunity to catch my first Pokémon.
While we were sitting out in that field, Professor Oak told me that he had recently given away his last remaining Pokémon, so we would have to wait for a Pokémon significantly weakened and unable to resist capture. He also told me that if I were successful at field testing his Pokédex in Kanto, he would make sure to acquire the three beginner Pokémon that he'd recently given away to young Kanto trainers from Pallet Town. The Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur native to Kanto were extremely rare and Professor Oak was one of the few ways to get ahold of such unique Pokémon. It was a rare opportunity for me to get some exclusive Pokémon into my Sanctuary when I was able to open it. Sitting there in the tall grass with Professor Oak, I knew that this was one of those important moments in my life where everything was about to change forever. I took a great risk coming to Pallet Town with my life's savings, but I would eventually leave with my first Pokémon companion and the very tool I would need to catch, catalog, study and care for every new Pokémon I could find. It felt amazing.

Now, catching that first Pokémon was not at all what I was expecting. It's safe to say that my first Pokémon was quite possibly the most feeble and sickly Rattata within three miles. We saw many healthy Pidgey and Rattata soaring through the air or scurrying through the grasses, but the professor assured me that we'd only be wasting our Pokéballs on them unless they were weakened. It was a daunting test of patience, but finally the most pathetic Rattata the world has ever known crossed our paths and was easily captured. He was scrawny and weak, but he was mine and I really did adore that little fellow. I named him Rascal and we were instant friends. Once I was armed with my own captured Pokémon and a Pokédex, Professor Oak and I parted ways. He told me to head north towards Viridian City - a bit of a sleepy hamlet compared to the cities I was used to back home. Along the way I could train Rascal and I would be able to find a gym in Viridian where I could continue the training.
Some of my toughest challenges as a trainer were those first few days with Rascal. He was honestly much too weak to face a full strength Pidgey or Rattata, so again we had to choose our battles carefully. I made sure he was well fed, rested and groomed, but actually getting battle experience and building up his strength was a tedious job. Although your first Pokémon is intended to keep you safe from wild Pokémon that have a tendency to be territorial, Rascal couldn't really protect me from much of anything on that initial trip up to Viridian City. We made our way very slowly and carefully avoiding unwanted attention. I took the time, hiding in the long grass, to sketch Rascal and wild Pokémon alike, but we did everything in our power to avoid unnecessary battles. They could have been a disastrous and premature end to my Pokémon journey.
Rascal and I did come stumbling into Viridian City sometime after dark that day, if I recall. I was broke having spent everything I had just getting to the Kanto region, but what little I did have I spent on Pokéballs and some lodging there in the city. I spent at least a week in Viridian City. Part of the reason was waiting for the Pokémon gym to reopen after a mysterious closure some time before we arrived, but part of me was also taking the time to slowly build up Rascal's strength and endurance. Alongside Rascal, I carefully studied the Rattata and Pidgey found along Route 1 which connected the city to Pallet Town. At first, Rascal could only confront other Rattata that we found alone and vulnerable, but slowly - painfully slowly - he built up enough strength to defend against healthy Rattata and Pidgey as well. It was a harrowing week of hiding and running from the strong, and building up Rascal's ability and confidence on the weak, but we managed to persevere.


Current Team:

Missed Classic: Spellbreaker - The Incredible Shrinking Man

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! Last week, I was able to puzzle my way past a splash-down with a hungry fish, bring a statue to life just long enough to steal something from its mouth, shrink a snake, and insult The Phantom Menace. As I have mentioned before, the game seems very random with sequences of puzzle vignettes that are connected through teleportation rather than a contiguous world. In all of this, I was able to snag my fourth cube and I am approximately 1/4th of the way through the game. I will have to pick up the pace or you will be reading about Spellbreaker forever, but it is a hard game to rush. Besides, if this is the final "original" Zork game, I want to savor the experience… or at least to give it the best possible shake.

I know I was a bit down on this game when I started, although it may have had as much to do with my own mental place while playing as anything else. I've taken a pause and a reset and am approaching the game with refreshed eyes. I've replayed the entire game up to this point and can better see the connective tissue. We'll see how it plays out as I approach the finish.

Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place...

The Bazaar
You know, before I begin I need to give credit where due. We haven't had a ton of comments on this set of posts, but Lisa has implied that my pattern of naming the cubes after letters in the Greek alphabet is stupid. And, she's right! Not only is it inconvenient, an original player was unlikely to do that because they would have been visiting the locations before realizing they needed to write on the cubes. And then Torbjörn said that you can change the names on the cubes… so I did. I am now using reasonable names such as "earth" and "air" and using quote characters to refer to them because the game isn't quite smart enough to know when I am talking about a cube and when I'm not. This actually helps quite a lot to keep things organized and I am indebted to them for pushing me on this one.

In any event, I start today's session by "blorple-ing" the cube that I extracted from the idol. I called it "delta" before, but now I'll call it "air" because it takes me to an air-themed room. I am literally walking on a cloud with exits to the north, south, west, and down. That's plenty to explore so I start to explore at random… I pick west! That direction lands me in a vaguely middle-eastern bazaar, just outside a carpet shop. Despite an entire city to explore, we really can only go inside. A salesperson inside tries to sell me two rugs: a blue one with a design of cubes on it and a red one that is worn and ugly. Which one am I supposed to buy? Is the trick that I need to come back later when I know the answer? Or is this a puzzle I should be expected to solve immediately? For obvious reasons, the carpet with the cube-decorations seems like the right approach given the cube-hunting aspect of the game. Maybe there will be a spell later that extracts the cubes from the fabric? On the other hand, it could be a fake-out and the carpet we are less inclined to pick may be the best one, a "diamond in the rough" to steal a quote from some old Disney movie. Either way, they are 800 zorkmids each and far beyond my price range. He doesn't accept the 500 zorkmid coin I have as an offer, but he will take the opal. Even though I tried to buy the blue one, he handed me the red one instead. While I thought at first like it might be a bug, it seems the shifty salesman was trying to pull one over on me. That makes me suspect that the blue one with the cubes is likely to be the correct one.

You know what? I don't need to guess at all. I just do the whole mess twice and buy each carpet. The red one appears to be broken, while the blue one allows me to fly when I sit on it! This opens up a "whole new world", so to speak, since I can seemingly explore a vast space but I don't actually see much. I start above a wilderness to the east of a mountain range. Landing is right out since we are killed immediately. I can fly to the mountains in the west, and even beyond them to another wilderness. I can fly up into the clouds where I cannot tell what direction I am traveling in. By some random moves, I happen to stumble on the roc's nest again but even this doesn't help me because the mother roc is home and I still cannot take the cube. I may have to be more thorough in my exploration later, but this is a good start.

I am still concerned that paying with the opal is a mistake. I replay that sequence with the salesman over again and try to offer him lots of things, usually resulting in him being quite offended. One more strange aside: you can "blorple" the carpet (because it has pictures of cubes on it?), leading to a "Nondescript" room with one exit back to the bazaar. Will this matter later? I have no idea.

Walking on a glacier can be dangerous...

Mr. Freeze

I blorple my way back to the Air Room and head north. This teleports me onto a frozen glacier in the Flathead mountains. Conveniently, there is a white "tinsot" scroll on the ground which allows you to freeze things. Exploring the glacier is impossible as there are cracks hidden under the snow and traveling in any direction kills you. We can't even fly on the carpet here for some reason. Actually, there is something up with the carpet that I don't understand yet. After restoring, I can't even fly it out of the bazaar for some reason. I'm going to not buy the carpet immediately and explore further into the game. I can always pick it up again once I have a strategy that requires it.

The south exit from the Air Room drops me back in "mid-air", the same as the down exit in the Earth room. Is that significant somehow? Just as before, the roc picks me up and takes me to its nest. The game is clearly showing that the roc is important given that I have three separate paths to its nest (two falling-from-a-great-height exits plus the carpet from the bazaar), but I still do not see a solution.

Now that I have a "freeze" spell, I need to find something to freeze. The water in the ruins room doesn't freeze, but the water in the oubliette does! I have to cast the spell twice, but I can completely ice over the outflow pipe and fill the room up with water. I soak my spell book again, but I restore back and just stash it in the zipper. This means I have to memorize any spells that I might need ahead of time, but I work it out in short order. If I freeze over the pipes, the room gradually fills with water over several turns and I am able to swim to near the ceiling, but not close enough to reach the trapdoor. I can't reach it by jumping like a dolphin or anything fully like that, but casting the freeze spell a third time creates an ice floe that we can climb on. With a bit of careful timing, we can climb on it when the water is at its height and escape from the cell. I am rewarded by another cube on the ground and a couple of directions to explore.

But life in a dungeon can be dangerous too.

Off to the east is a dungeon cell with the door blown off its hinge, apparently by some powerful magic. Should I infer that it was the previous home of the magician that I have been chasing this whole time? I head inside to find an oak cabinet (which I can unlock using "rezrov") and a moldy spellbook, damaged beyond all repair by the damp conditions. Fortunately, I have a spell for just this occasion: "caskly", to cause perfection. I try that on the book and it recovers it… a little bit. I can now read a single spell: "snavig", to change form. Is it possible to "gnusto" a spell from one book to another? Yes! It works just like a scroll and the spellbook disappears. I try playing with that spell, but I do not see how it can be used immediately. It allows me to change into another form, but I need to have an example nearby. If I "snavig me" it doesn't do anything. I'll be on the lookout for places where I can use this.

A stairwell out of the dungeon leads to a guard tower high in the mountains. In the distance, I see a small dot in the air. As I watch, it comes closer and closer, eventually revealing itself to be my friend the roc. This is beyond hinting now. There doesn't seem to be a way to "snavig" the roc to become one, nor does "espnis" (sleep) help much from this angle. I'll have to keep looking for solutions later.

  

I blorple the cube we found in the dungeon and I find myself… dead? No! I'm just teleported to the "Boneyard" room, the same place where we go when we die. There's an exit to the west that I cannot go through yet, while north takes me to Belwit Square. In the square, I momentarily manage to surprise our dark-cloaked figure that I have been chasing all this time. Exactly why he would have gone back to the scene of the crime is unknown. Is he a street rat? I don't buy that. I would try to look closer, but he's gone before I can do any investigation. This is the first reminder in a long while that our "chase" is still on.

Since I am back at the beginning, I try "snavig" to turn into a frog, but the game doesn't let me and instead provides a very odd response: I "cannot change into Gzornenplatz". I didn't want to change into HIM, just a creature that could understand him. Oh well. It was a good thought.

I'm running out of options, but I remembered that I was going to check out the two water pipes (in the ruins and the oubliette) to see if they are connected. It's tough to tell. I shrink myself with "liskon" and climb into the pipe in the ruins, but that kills be immediately as I am dragged downstream. I restore and try the same in the oubliette and that let's be swim downstream. As I progress quickly down the pipe, I pass a hidden cube and grab it (how?) before being able to climb back out in the ruins. I have a new cube! Just as importantly, the pieces of this world are falling into place. The ruins, the roc, the guard tower in the mountains, and the bazaar are all in the same region of the world. I would not be surprised if the ogre cave and ocean are not that far from here, either.

Octagon Maze

Triggering the newest cube takes me to a strangely changing room, where doors and decorations are constantly changing. Exits are marked clearly, but shift from a bead curtain to a wooden door to anything else you can imagine. North from there takes me to a dead end with a compass rose on the ground. I pick it up, but with no exits I need to teleport out. The other working exit leads me to a room where there is a compass rose carved on the north wall. I press my newly-found compass rose into the carving and a northern passage opens. I grab the compass again and head that way, the wall closing in right behind me.

For lack of a better term, let me call what I wandered into the "octagon maze". In the interests of time, I will summarize a bit so that you do not have to read page after page of trial and error. We find ourselves in an octagon-shaped room with a rune in each of the eight possible directions. Some of the runes are made of lead (east, northeast, southeast, and southwest) while the rest are silver. Somewhat trickily, the description always gives you the list of lead ones when you actually need the silver ones. It takes some trial and error to work it out, but the walls that have the silver rune are the only ones that we can pass through: by placing the compass rose on wall, it will open up door to a new room. Just as before, once we go through we have no way back. These are all one-way trips.

When you enter the maze, you can travel in any direction
except north. Of course, this is with the benefit of hindsight.

After moving west, there are no more west exits in the maze. 

Moving northeast further reduces the available exits… Keep in
mind you don't know at the start where you are aiming towards.

Once I worked out the mechanics, I tried to work out the point. By trying out every combination of exits, I discover that I am in a 3x3 grid of rooms. The trick that makes the maze a maze is that you can only use each direction once: now that we've gone north once, there will be no more north exits anywhere in the maze. Instead, all of the north exits will be marked by lead. Not only do I need to figure out where to go, I also need a strategy for getting there. The trickiest room to reach is the one in the top-center since we have to go northwest->west->northeast or west->northeast->northwest. Once I make it there, I discover an alabaster plug in the west wall with a gold rune! That's clearly the way to go.

And this is where I completely went off the rails. For hours, I couldn't figure out a way to get past the plug. I tried to map out routes that would touch every room once before making it there (impossible), I tried routes that would deaden every direction so that when I got there I would only have west to go (doable but useless). I mapped out every possible route through the maze. It spent an incredible amount of time on it for absolutely nothing because the solution was to cast "rezrov". I'm going to slink away in embarrassment, but the next room contains another cube so that our adventure can continue.

I'm going to stop here this week, one more cube in hand and with a score that has just crossed the halfway point. How many more posts until I'm done? I have no idea. Next week, I'll play around with the magic carpet and see what I can find with a bit better mapping. Maybe a new exciting point of view? I'm hoping for a dazzling place I never knew. See you then.

Time played: 5 hr 50 min
Total time: 11 hr 50 min

Inventory: 7x white cubes ("earth", "soft", "water", "air", "bone", "change" and one I haven't labeled yet ), gold coin, zipper, smoked fish, magic burin, knife, spell book, pruning shears, gold box, bottle, opal, compass rose
(I also know how to get the blue or red magic carpets.)

Spell Book Contains: caskly, throck, blorpie, yomin, rezrov, frotz, gnusto, malyon, jindak, lesoch, espnis, liskon, tinsot, snavig
Score: 305 of 600 (51%)