Act III, cold-palette EGA. Six rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end
headlessly at 100/100 with the win firing.
The homage John asked for is a register, not a costume. Nielsen played Drebin Sr
oblivious — the joke was he never noticed. Neeson plays Jr sincere: he notices
everything and means all of it, so his text is written straight and often
genuinely moving, and the comedy is what it turns out to be about. He gives a
Taken speech about his particular set of skills, chief among them paperwork. He
takes four armed robbers in eleven seconds dressed as a schoolgirl with his back
to the actual crime. Cane gets the same sincerity back at him from the wrong
face.
The three-era payoff pays off: the owl sprite is generated monochrome and placed
in a full-colour room, so Frank Drebin Sr is visibly lit by a different decade
than everything around him. The palette rule from DESIGN §2 doing the emotional
work at the climax.
Planned cases 10 and 11 merged into one folder — same film, same cast, no
duplicated sprite set, and the owl payoff lands in the same case as its setup.
Third authoring trap documented: sets_flag fires on use, never on take (points
does both). A takeable item silently failed to set its flag and the gate it fed
never opened; gate on `needs`, which checks inventory, instead.
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>
