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? Genius

Solution to Space Quest III - by Peter Bienstman

A long period of time has passed since you (Roger Wilco) escaped
from Vohaul's burning space fortress. (SQ II) You lie undisturbed
in the sleep chamber of your survival pod, until the moment it's
taken on board a robot-commanded garbage freighter. A sudden
shock triggers the pod's revival mechanism to action. You wake
up...
You clamber out and the pod, having used all its resources, gives
a final hum and shuts down. You nearly stumbled over a high-tech
part of a ship, which you immediately identify as being a warp
motivator. Unfortunately, it's much too heavy and you continue
your exploring, hoping that you will find a way of getting out of
here.
After you've climbed through the broken eye of a battlebot you
discover a space ship, that isn't in the state of disrepair like
all the other ones on board the freighter. Unfortunately, the
ship is too slippery for you to climb on.
As you go on, you arrive at a bucket conveyer, which transports
trash to a horizontal conveyer, high above. Your curiosity forces
you to climb into the conveyer, but unfortunately, it leads to a
grinder. You realise that you should have known that. Luckily for
you, you were able to stand up just in time and you jumped on to
a rail, that's probably used by some kind of machine riding over
it. You wipe the sweat of your forehead and after a short, dizzy-
making walk over the high rail, you discover the machine itself
in the ship's control room. It's a grabber unit and as that kind
of stuff has always fascinated you, you climb quickly into the
unit, grab the forward-backward control and ride away.
You remember the much too heavy warp motivator, that would be a
very handy thing to have on board your ship. And yes indeed, you
manage using the claw to transport the motivator to the ship.
But how are you going to get off the rail again ? You seem to
recall that there was a chute in the control room, leading to
God-knows-where and you decide to take the risk to jump in it.
Fortunately, you come to land in a pile of soft debris and you
find yourself standing in a trash pit, dimly lit by some crusty
lamps, connected to cheap wires. Because the ship you're going to
use will obviously need some power, you take the reactor that
provides the electricity for the lamps, with you.
But on the way to your ship, when you enter a tunnel, you get
"mugged" by some kind of extremely large rat and after the fight,
you come to the conclusion that you've lost the reactor. All the
way back to the trash pit again, that is now brightly lit by
renewed lamps, ditto wires and a spare reactor. You take it with
you and also, remembering the slickness of the ship's surface,
the ladder in the room.
You walk carefully through the tunnel again and to your great
relief not a single rat falls from the ceiling. Don't forget to
pick up the wire in the tunnel!
At the ship, the ladder, the reactor and the wire come handy.
After a short security check, you plump into the pilot's seat,
start the engines, turn the radar on and with a sound that's a
cross between a heavy metal concert and a printer at 360 Dpi with
removed front cover, you take off. You activate your front
protection shield and shoot yourself a way out off the freighter.
(Don't forget to switch the shield off afterwards, otherwise
you'll find yourself in big trouble later on!)
Back in good old space again. You set course for the planet with
the poetical name of Phleebhut, hoping that Fate will be kind to
you...
As you wander aimlessly through the Phleebhut deserts, you
discover the "World o' Wonders" souvenir shop, famous all over
the galaxy for selling absolute junk to idiotic space travellers.
You suddenly feel like an idiotic space traveller and you enter
the little building. The shop-keeper is clearly use to deal with
people like you and he persuades you to exchange your glowing gem
for 425 buckazoids.
As you leave the shop, you're carrying a ridiculous Astro Chicken
Flight hat, a completely useless orat on a stick, Thermowave
underwear. And a deep sense a shame too. To make matters worse, a
fierce, angry-looking terminator grabs you and holds you up in
the air with frightening ease. He mumbles something about unpaid
bills and giving you ten seconds before killing you. You decide
not to wait for the rest and dodge out of his way.
At the Mog Memorial, a metal reproduction of a wild beast, that
used to populate Phleebhut a long time ago, you find yourself an
entrenchment and you wait for the terminator to discover you. As
he comes up the stairs, you decide in a ultimate desperation to
throw him a rope pulley in his metal face. He loses balance and
stumbles into some cog-wheels. After you've wiped his blood of
your teeth (you were smiling in triumph when he went through the
cog-wheels), you take a closer look at the mass of blood, bones,
60 pounds of muscles and 5 ounces of brains. Digging in the mass
that once was a terminator, you find his invisibility belt,
almost completely covered by his still moving bowels. After those
useless souvenirs, you're happy you can pick up a useful item.
After all those emotions, you've got very hungry and so you go
back to your ship and head for the Monolith Burger. There you
have the honour being served by Mister This Week's Employee.
Except for his big ears, you really can't find any reason why
they would give him such a title. Still puzzled, you order a fun
meal, sit down at an empty table, and you start devouring
something that can be only hardly described as food. To your
great disappointment ,your fun meal surprise gift turns out to
be a decoder ring. What a pity, you were so hoping that it would
be one of those very cute little slime devil puppets.(You're keen
on animals.) Your first thought was to throw the ring away but as
you already have lots of useless things, you decide that you
might as well keep it.
Because you haven't got the slightest idea how to spend all your
money, and you need to forget the heavy pains in you stomach,
caused by the heroic fight between stomach cells and rubber food,
you can't resist playing that new hot arcade game, called Astro
Chicken. (As I already said, you just love animals.) So you walk
up to the machine in the corner of the Monolith Burger and insert
a buckazoid. You're having a tremendous time playing Astro
Chicken, when the game's graphics are suddenly replaced by a
coded message. Lucky thing you didn't throw the ring away. The
message is written by two desperate programmers, who are by being
held captive by ScumSoft (Astro Chicken's software company) on
the little moon of Pestulon, that's surrounded by an impenetrable
force field. They are counting on you to save them. You feel
again the irresistible desire to become a real space hero and you
decide to start looking for the force field generator. For you
don't know where to find such a thing, you let your shipboard
computer calculate the course to the nearest planet, named
Ortega.
Ortega is a very hot, volcanic planet and you feel very grateful
you didn't throw the Thermowave underwear away, you bought at the
World o' Wonders. After walking along boiling lava rivers and
steep cliffs, you find yourself in the neighbourhood of a few
seismologists. They're armed with jelly-guns, so your instinct
tells you not to show yourself. (You don't like jelly.) You wait
until they're gone away and as you're very curious, you have a
look at the equipment they left behind. Most of them are beyond
your simple understanding, but a few aren't. After studying it
for a long time, you understand that the object in the corner
must be a telescope. Looking through it reveals the long searched
for generator. In your excitement, you nearly forgot to grab a
detonator and the pole of the anemometer. You enter the reactor
building, climb up a ladder, and throw the detonator into the
reactor. Unfortunately, the explosion causes an earthquake too
and it has made a piece of the road disappear in the lava. Using
the pole to jump over the cliff, you manage to reach your ship.
Now you can travel safely to Pestulon.
Your landing there didn't stay unnoticed for a long time. A lot a
guards with jelly-guns swarm out to find your ship but luckily,
you escaped and you are now hiding in front of the entrance of
ScumSoft, which is of course very well guarded. As you go through
your inventory, you notice that you're still carrying the
terminator's invisibility belt. You wear it and just before it's
completely out of power, you enter ScumSoft.
At the ScumSoft complex, the first thing important enough to
mention is a door, which is very well protected with a composite
face scanner and a card reader. There must be something very
important behind that door so you go in search for the things
necessary to unlock it.
Of course you have to find some kind of disguise and behind one
of the doors, there appears to be a janitor's closet. You wear
the uniform you find there and seize the opportunity to drop all
those useless things you've been carrying. In one of the pockets,
you discover an ultra-modern-hyper-sonic-turbo trash vaporizer
plus. You're extremely happy because as a young boy, you've
always dreamed to become a janitor once.
You enter the accounting service of ScumSoft and start
enthusiastly emptying all the trash cans. The accountants are
looking very suspiciously at you, for they've never seen anybody
doing his job with pleasure. But with the excuse "My mother-in-
law has just died" you take all their doubts away.
At Elmo's bureau (He's the fourteen years old manager and has
large monitor-shaped glasses that cover his cheeks and yellow
teeth) you see his access card lying on his desk. Empty his
trash can, wait until he's gone away and take his card. Now you
still have to deal with the facial scanner. Remove Elmo's picture
from a lonely corner in the accountant service, take a copy of it
with the machine in the room to the left and put the original
back into place.
Opening the door reveals the guys you've been looking for.
They're standing in the middle of a platform, that can only be
reached by using a retractable bridge. Simply push the right
button and use your vaporizer to free the captives from their
"jelly-prison".
You're about to give a hurray when you notice that Elmo
discovered you. He's extraordinary furious and gives his guards
the order to bring you and your friends to the ARENA. They force
you to climb into a huge destruction robot and the battle
begins... Good heavens, your opponent is Elmo himself. Luckily
his fighting capabilities are not as great as his glasses and as
you've watched all the 26 Rocky-movies, you cut down the energy
level of his robot with a few well-aimed kicks. You clamber out
of your robot and follow your friends to your space ship.
Of course, they don't let you fly away like that and a few
heavily armed ships take off to bring you back. But as you are a
great darts player and you're very fond of action, you shoot them
down easily.
After having dropped your passengers at that magnificent planet
called Earth, where the rain is wet and the grass is green, you
take off again, in search for more wonderful adventures...

Disclaimer
The text of the articles is identical to the originals like they appeared in old ST NEWS issues. Please take into consideration that the author(s) was (were) a lot younger and less responsible back then. So bad jokes, bad English, youthful arrogance, insults, bravura, over-crediting and tastelessness should be taken with at least a grain of salt. Any contact and/or payment information, as well as deadlines/release dates of any kind should be regarded as outdated. Due to the fact that these pages are not actually contained in an Atari executable here, references to scroll texts, featured demo screens and hidden articles may also be irrelevant.