Case Eight — The Smell of Fear (1991). Act II, full colour. Five rooms, 100
points, verified at 100/100 with two verified deaths.
The puzzle is identification: Meinheimer has an eidetic memory, so the double
cannot be caught out on a fact — he can be caught out on a manner. Ask him two
questions and he answers "about four hundred", "roughly", "give or take", and a
man who remembers everything never says roughly. The catch is gated on having
heard the approximations, so the player has to earn it. Accusing him without
that is a death. Also in: the Blue Note, the SWAT tank through the wall into the
zoo (which arms the lion that kills Hapsburg two rooms later), the mariachi
infiltration, and a nuclear device disarmed by tripping over its power cable.
tools/lint.py: three of the four bugs that cost real time here were the same
class, and I walked into sets_flag-on-a-takeable twice — once in Case Ten, then
again in Case Eight after documenting it. So the rules are a linter now, not a
paragraph. It caught two live instances of that trap (case-08 blueprint,
case-10 wig) and a scoring mismatch on the first run. All five cases lint clean
and all five still win.
play.sh is now a case picker: bare invocation lists the cases and asks, or pass
a number.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act I, monochrome. Five rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end at 100/100 on
the first pass, plus three verified Sierra deaths.
Frank goes under as fight manager "Frank Deacon" to break a fight-fixing racket.
The procedure gag from the bible finally has teeth: Form 22-B, the four-page
application for an authorised cover identity, is filed in Act 1 by a clerk in
Sacramento who never learns anything about it — and that form is the only thing
standing between Frank and a very short career. At the promoter's licence check
the "I'm licensed" reply is gated on having filed it; skip the form and the
single visible option is the fatal one. Bureaucracy as the thing that saves you
is the exact inversion the campaign is built on.
Act I cases now share a sprite set: 18 PNGs copied from case-01, 14 new ones
generated. tools/sprites.py skips keys beginning with "_" so sprites.json can
carry a note about which sprites are shared.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act II, full colour EGA. Six rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end headlessly
at 100/100 with the win firing, plus two authored Sierra deaths.
The mechanic: Drebin is fired, so he has no power to search anyone — but a home
plate umpire can crouch beside a professional athlete, take his bat off him and
inspect his equipment, and nobody in a stadium of sixty thousand thinks twice.
So every frisk needs an umpire-legitimate pretext, in order: brush the plate,
inspect the mitt, check the bat for pine tar, then Number 44. Announcing
yourself as police is right there, and correct, and fatal.
Matching inversion at the reception: tackling a head of state is correct
procedure, it ends your career, and being fired is the only way to progress.
Two authoring traps found and documented for future cases:
- Object names must not be prefixes of each other — 'ludwigdesk' shadowed
'ludwig' in the loose parser match, so 'talk ludwig' addressed the furniture.
- Flag-gated edge exits need walkable floor into the trigger zone (y<=21 for
north); the upper deck sat behind a painted Wall band and was unreachable on
foot. Walk every exit to verify — goto_room hides this.
tools/sprites.py now retries farm 429/401 with backoff (that status is the
guest concurrency cap, not auth) and honours MB_POOL.
LoRA finding recorded in DESIGN.md §9: the farm's style LoRAs are FLUX.1-dev
architecture and are a silent no-op on the only ungated model, and the pixel
look comes from the nearest-neighbour downscale anyway, not the model.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Sierra-style adventure in the Police Squad!/Naked Gun universe, on MRPGI —
which reimplements AGI, the engine Sierra shipped Police Quest on.
The premise: Police Quest's pedantic procedure x Police Squad!'s farce. The
game grades you on correct procedure with a straight face, and the reward for
perfect procedure is catastrophe anyway. Per John, the famous Police Quest II
bugs are shipped deliberately as canon gags.
- RESEARCH.md — all six Police Squad! episodes, all four films (incl. Neeson's
Frank Drebin Jr, 2025), the recurring cast, and the ZAZ comedy grammar.
- DESIGN.md — the joke engine, the two Drebins across three eras (Drebin Sr's
1982 cases render in a monochrome EGA subset for the 1950s M Squad look),
an eleven-case campaign, and the PQ2 glitch-to-feature table.
- cases/case-01-substantial-gift — playable. Five rooms, 100 points, full win
path verified headlessly at 95/100 plus four authored Sierra deaths.
Procedure gates, dusting for latents, and Miranda rights in the correct
order are all pure JSON; no engine features were invented for it.
- tools/sprites.py — all 24 sprites generated locally on MODELBEAST
(flux_local -> bg_remove_local -> trim/downscale), reproducible by seed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
