58471b6a8e
Eight cases playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end. John asked what 1950s bumbling criminals Drebin Sr could look good against. Clouseau is the wrong shape twice — 1963, and a bumbling detective rather than a criminal. The right seam is the Ealing comedies: The Ladykillers (1955) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). Done as archetype parody, never character import, which is exactly what ZAZ did to M Squad — take the form, not the people — and which lets the gang be tuned to make Sr's twist land. Five lodgers calling themselves a barbershop quartet, and in eleven weeks nobody in that house has raised the arithmetic. A mastermind who is nought for eleven and blames personnel every time. Muscle brought for the violence who offers you an aniseed ball. A driver who cannot drive and came with the goggles. A safecracker who is the best in the state and has been deaf since 1943, and has been asking about that since August. An inside man who works at a different company on a different street and has raised it four times. The twist: they tunnel eleven feet through Victorian brick for eleven weeks to reach a vault Frank Drebin Sr emptied five weeks earlier — legitimately, on his own written recommendation, signing the transfer manifest at both ends. Arrested inside an empty room. The paper calls it the finest detective work in the city in twenty years and every word of it is true. This is why he has never been caught: the visible criminals are loud and his own crimes are silent. The case is actually cracked by a seventy-nine-year-old landlady who took a bus to the police station to complain about the noise, and she never learns it. New lint rule, from a real 10-point loss here: two DIFFERENT objects awarding points for setting the same flag — points fire on the false->true flip, so whichever runs second silently pays nothing and max_score goes unreachable. Same object paying via `use` or its own dialogue is fine; those are alternatives. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
81 lines
6.6 KiB
JSON
81 lines
6.6 KiB
JSON
{
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"name": "Central Division — Monday Morning",
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"enter_text": "Monday. Somebody has put the newspaper on your desk with the front page folded outward, which is not something anybody has ever done before.",
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"music": 1,
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"strokes": [
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{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 160, "h": 168, "color": 8, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 160, "h": 58, "color": 0, "meaning": "Wall" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 58, "w": 160, "h": 110, "color": 8, "meaning": "Floor" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 56, "w": 160, "h": 3, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 96, "y": 10, "w": 50, "h": 36, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 100, "y": 14, "w": 42, "h": 28, "color": 0, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 120, "y": 14, "w": 2, "h": 28, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 100, "y": 27, "w": 42, "h": 2, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 12, "y": 12, "w": 44, "h": 34, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 16, "y": 16, "w": 36, "h": 5, "color": 0, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 16, "y": 25, "w": 26, "h": 3, "color": 0, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 16, "y": 32, "w": 32, "h": 3, "color": 0, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 16, "y": 39, "w": 20, "h": 3, "color": 0, "meaning": "None" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 4, "h": 168, "color": 0, "meaning": "Wall" } },
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{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 164, "w": 160, "h": 4, "color": 0, "meaning": "Wall" } }
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],
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"spawn": [24, 148],
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"exits": [null, null, null, 3],
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"objects": [
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{
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"name": "newspaper",
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"sprite": "casefile",
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"x": 60,
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"y": 132,
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"look": "FIVE HELD IN MERIDIAN ST TUNNEL PLOT — 'FINEST PIECE OF DETECTIVE WORK IN THIS CITY IN TWENTY YEARS,' SAYS CAPTAIN. Column four carries a photograph of the hole. Column five carries the sentence that will follow you for the rest of your career: *Detectives had the premises under survey since September.*",
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"synonyms": "paper press news front page headline",
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"use_text": "You read it twice. Everything in it is accurate. You had the premises under survey since September. You wrote nine pages. You made one recommendation and the company took it, and four million dollars went to Steelton on the 9th of October under escort, and you signed for it at both ends. There is not one word in this newspaper that is not true."
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},
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{
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"name": "captain",
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"sprite": "captain",
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"x": 108,
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"y": 126,
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"look": "Captain Sturges, holding a commendation form he has already signed, waiting for you to finish reading the paper so he can make a speech he has been working on since Sunday.",
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"synonyms": "sturges boss skipper",
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"use_text": "He tells you it is the best week's work he has seen in eleven years and that he is putting you up for the commendation and that he has already signed it. He asks whether you would like to read what he wrote. You say no. He laughs, because you always say no.",
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"dialogue": [
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{
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"says": "Sturges: Frank. Eleven weeks they were in that cellar and nobody in this city looked at it but you. Sturges: A noise complaint. A noise complaint off a seventy-nine-year-old woman on a bus, and you took it, and you took it seriously.",
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"choices": [
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{ "text": "Mrs. Pargiter did the work, Captain.", "goto": 1 },
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{ "text": "It was the rookie's, Captain. He saw it first.", "goto": 2 },
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{ "text": "Anybody would have taken it.", "goto": 3 }
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]
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},
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{
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"says": "Sturges: I'll see she gets a letter. She does get a letter. She frames it. She dies in 1971 with it on the wall, and it is, by a distance, the truest thing anybody says about this case.",
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"choices": [{ "text": "She'd like that.", "goto": 4 }]
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},
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{
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"says": "Sturges: Kowalczyk? Sturges: Frank, he's nine months out of the academy. You tell him the boy read a noise complaint twice and found four million dollars in it, and that it goes in the boy's file in the boy's name. It does. Kowalczyk makes detective in 1962 and never once works out why he was so fast.",
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"choices": [{ "text": "Put it in his file, Captain.", "goto": 4 }]
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},
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{
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"says": "Sturges: No, Frank. They would not. Sturges: Nineteen years I've had you and I have never once had to check your work. Not once. Do you know what that is worth?",
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"choices": [{ "text": "It's the job, Captain.", "goto": 4 }]
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},
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{
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"says": "Sturges: Get out of here. Go home to your boy. On the way out you pass the noticeboard, where somebody has pinned the front page next to the duty roster, and somebody else has drawn a small arrow to column five.",
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"choices": []
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}
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]
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},
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{
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"name": "typewriter",
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"sprite": "typewriter",
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"x": 34,
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"y": 128,
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"look": "The bureau typewriter. The Meridian Street report has been in it since eight o'clock. Eleven pages. It is the longest report you have ever filed.",
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"synonyms": "machine report paper keys",
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"wins": true,
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"use_text": "You finish the report. You put in the noise complaint and the bus fare. You put in the gramophone and the eleven bars and the worn place in the record. You put in the parrot. You put in the diagram the Professor gave you and the nineteen minutes he spent explaining it, in full, unprompted, to a police officer he had known for four minutes. And on page nine, under PREMISES — PRIOR KNOWLEDGE, you put in the survey. You put in that you wrote it. You put in the recommendation, and the date the company accepted it, and the transfer on the 9th of October, and that you attended it, and that you signed the manifest at Meridian Street and again at Steelton, and that the vault those five men came through eleven feet of Victorian brick to reach had been empty for five weeks and you were the reason it was empty. Eleven pages. Every sentence in it is true. You sign it and you put it on the Captain's desk. He signs it on Tuesday without reading it. In eleven years there has never been a reason to read one. Five men go to Chino for a robbery in which nothing whatsoever was taken, and one of them keeps saying, all the way through the trial, that the plan was immaculate and that it has never once been the plan. He is right. It never was. You go home. The porch light is on. Your boy is at the kitchen table with his exercise book, and he asks you what you did today, and you tell him all of it, plainly, because you have never in your life told anybody anything else."
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}
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]
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}
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