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Monday June 1, 1951 10:00am - The First Sighting

June 1, 1951 was a Friday, not a Monday. Couldn't they have set this on the 4th if it had to start on a Monday? would that be so difficult? I guess Cinemaware couldn't be bothered to buy a calendar.









The game really does flash this option. It's a way of telling you that if you do something else, that option won't be there again.

I guessed I should answer the door - no-one would bother me if it wasn't important, I wasn't exactly the social hub of the town.



I was not greeted by a beautiful dame, as I had been hoping, and my morning got a little bit worse. It was Geez, the prospector who had agreed to help me find samples of the meteorite. He was a bit of a drinker, but wasn't a bad sort. He offered to show me where he found the samples.



Unfortunately Marty McFly is nowhere to be found. The naming in this game sucks. Geez? Biff?

Biff was my other acquaintance here in Lizard Breath. He was at the local college, and was helping me out in exchange for extra credit to keep his GPA above 2.0. Since I had no idea why I was interested in Geez's donkey, I decided to talk to Biff instead. Geez would probably make some stupid pun about his donkey being as stubborn as a mule.

He also mentions that the donkey won't go near the south west volcano since the meteorite struck. Not a CLUE at all. Nope, no CLUE why that's in there.



Surprise, surprise. O'Riordan's was the local pub - Geez practically lived there. In fact, I'm not sure where he does live since my house is the only one in town. Seriously. Check the map later.





I ignored his lame wolfman impression which sounded more like a pig sneezing. I did however take note of the stories, meaning to investigate later. I had always wanted to be an amateur ghost investigator, but had never been able to get into the spirit of things - this was the perfect opportunity. My job as a geologist had become boring, and I took every opportunity to go off on unrelated tangents.

In the meantime, I took a look at the sample Geez had brought in





The idiot was right, one of the rocks did seem to be glowing. I find it curious though that he failed to mention the other rocks which were greener than my sofa.

Either way, I wanted a closer look at the rock. I knew it must be safe to handle, since Geez must have picked it up by hand, and it's been in a leather bag and now on a wooden table. I thought about asking Biff to hand it over..





We'll be seeing much more of the hospital later, but for now I'm skipping over it.

Out of interest, it is actually possible to put out the fire with a lot of luck, if you know exactly what you're doing. The game then just dumps you at the map screen.


I decided that might be a bad idea - it could start some kind of water-proof fire. Instead, I asked Biff to measure it for radiation. Biff was pretty skilled at this, being able to read radiation levels on objects without even taking his hands out of his pockets, and without looking at it. It was kind of a neat party-trick actually.



The game actually offers you an option to send the rocks off to a government lab before measuring the samples, but we get this option right now, so I'm not sure what the point of it is





I should get the results mailed to my house in a couple of days. In the meantime I decided to head out and try and catch Geez.

Now we get to the map, which we can usually get at any time we choose an action by selecting 'Go to Map'





Click to see it full-sized.

Annotated version here

I'm going to explain a couple of game-mechanics here.

We can click on most of these places here to go straight to them, but a few are inaccessible from the map directly.

This map doesn't give you any sense of scale, which is good because this town lives in some kind of spatial rift. When walking around on foot, these things are really small and close together. When flying the plane, these things are even smaller and crammed together, but as you will see in a minute, even going between two buildings in the centre of town there can take up to half an hour. Maybe we just drive below walking speed, I don't know.

We'll need to move around places in this map a lot, and the amount of time taken between places matters a lot. A lot of these places we can go will have different events and people available depending on where and when we go. A lot of the options for encounters in this game are almost random - if you're in the right place at the right time, you're lucky, but otherwise you're screwed. Luckily for you, dear reader, I'm going to be figuring this out.

We'll be going to a couple of these locations a lot, so you'll soon get a feel for where everything is on the map.


I checked my map to make sure I remembered where the pub is. I can't quite see it from my window, so I needed to double-check. Then I headed off to O'Riordan's.





Remember that time - 15 minutes. You'll see later just how ridiculous this is

It was about 10:25 when I decided to leave, but by the time I had gotten everything ready and got there, it was 10:43. I didn't have much to do today, so I wasn't too worried about lost time.

It was no surprise that Geez was in the bar. Like I said - alcoholic to the bone.
I asked him about where he found the samples, since heavily radioactive rocks don't just fall out of the sky, you know.



You've got to be kidding me. He even said "liquid refreshment". Why don't these people ask for money or something? I mean, he's obviously got plenty of drink already. I decided to fuck with him a bit.



Take that you bastard. Club soda wasn't what you had in mind, was it?

He refused to answer me at first, but then I give him one of my funny looks (the ones which I emphasise by taking my .45 out of my pocket), and he relented.



Hmm, everything seemed to be pointing south west. Except my compass. It's pointed south east ever since that incident with the crop circles in Iowa.

Since Biff's stories about the wolfman were related to the headless cow they found in J.D's Farm, I consulted my map to figure out where it is.



It was in the south west, so I headed down there. I figured I could maybe talk to some of the locals and figure out if they've seen any ghosts recently, or frankly anything. Rocks can get really boring at times, even radioactive ones.





Well yes, it'd be pretty stupid if I was a scientist who knew nothing. Seriously, is this guy stup-? Oh wait, farm hand. Never mind.

I asked him if he had seen anything strange or unusual in the neighbourhood, and if he would know who to call in that case.



Noodle brain? I was about to give him another of my funny looks, but it seems something beat me to it. He looked over my shoulder, screamed like a little girl and ran off.



I decided the best course of action was to remain looking forward, and take out my .45 again, just in case any of these ghosts were tangible or were afraid of bullets.



Hell yeh! I got that fucker, with just a pistol. I went over to take a look at the corpse, when I heard that fucking shrill noise again. I turned around.



Shit.

Next update: More ant fighting, this time with grenades!