phoenix/hints/solutions/Doom_BBC_walkthrough.txt

                               Walkthrough for

                         Countdown to Doom (BBC version)

                              by Peter Killworth

                            Written by Richard Bos


A few notes, first.

One, and most importantly, this is a very hard and tightly timed game. You can
die easily. You can lose or destroy a necessary tool just as easily. At least
in this version making a typo does not seem to cost a move. Still, save often,
and keep _all_ your save files until you've finished the game. I don't know
whether saving costs a turn; I've only played this game under emulation, and
saving a state file is, of course, always free.
Two, the parser is limited, but reasonable. I have not found any place where
using prepositions ("hit tree with axe") is necessary or even possible. By
contrast, the games are good at giving you less to type. If there is only one
object, simply "get" will take it; if there are several, it will assume the
first one listed. Ditto for "drop", which will drop the first object in your
inventory; and ditto for several other verbs. "Get all", however, is
unfortunately not provided. As far as I can tell, words are significant to the
usual first four letters.
Third, I'm not taking you past all the sights and clues. Also, this game
(unfashionably, these days) expect a lot of experimentation and learning-by-
dying to solve them, none of which can easily be done in a walkthrough. Because
of this, before you resort to reading this walkthrough you might want to try
the official hints. Floating about the 'net is a PDF with the original hint
booklet for this game. Note, though, that the hints for the MS-DOS version
available on the IF Archive don't work in this version, and in any case don't
reliably apply here.
Finally, this walkthrough (including the above notes) is for the Topologika
BBC game which is available at the IF Archive. This is rather drastically cut
down from the MS-DOS version also found there, which is why its hints do not
apply to this version. There is also a tape version of this game floating
around the web, which seems to be identical except for the medium.


So, let's be off, then.

You start in your space ship, locked in, with only some explosives for company.
Take them, go north, light the fuse, drop the explosive, then immediately go
south and wait a move - don't try the reversed order. Now go north, push the
door (try pulling if you're feeling suicidal already), and go northeast. We're
out.
First, into the jungle. Go west. This is a maze. In fact, Countdown has three
mazes. Luckily, none of them is large, and this is both the smallest and the
easiest to solve. Go west again, and note that the room description changes,
just as in the "passages, all different" in Advent. You could, if you wanted
to, map the jungle using just these descriptions. There are only four
locations, of which this walkthrough will show you three. From the second
jungle location, go east, then northwest. Take the goggles, then go back
through the jungle: east, north, east.
Now into the swamp. Wear the goggles. One exit into the swamp will look
different; go that way. Keep taking the different-looking direction (four times
in total) until you find yourself on an island. Take both objects you find
there, then go north back to the landing area. Go sw, drop the goggles and hole
(but keep the can), and go ne.
Next go south twice into the desert. Take the net. Make some noise: shout or
jump. You end up in a city. Take the monopole generator. Go south, throw the
can, go south again, take the diamond, and go north twice. Go west and
northwest, and take the vine. Go east, north, east and sw. Drop the diamond
and generator, and go ne.

Go east. Catch (use that word - if you use "get", you will die) the blob. Don't
waste too many moves or the poor thing snuffs it. You are now back in time, and
quite a bit, too. However, you have a limited, cough, time (sorry!) to spend in
this state, and it will just suffice to do what you have to do. So no straying
from the path.
Go north, southwest, and up. Get the box. Go north, and get the suit. Go west,
do _not_ take the crystals yet, but go west again (if you try going past that
monster in the present, it will eat you) and take the spices. Finally, go east,
and now take the crystals.
You are now back in the present, but the tight timing is not quite over yet,
thanks to those crystals. They'll kill you in a few moves, and you can just
make it to the hold with them before they do. Go north, southwest, and
southwest again, and drop the crystals.
You're still getting messages about feeling queasy, but it's not doing you any
real harm now. It's annoying, though. Let's go off to do something about it. Go
northeast. Wear your suit. Now go off into the swamp: go north, and if you
happen to luck upon a solid patch, just keep walking until you do sink under.
Once you're down, take another step in any direction.
You are now in the second maze of the game. It's somewhat larger than the
first, but still smallish. It's dark down here, and there is no portable light
source in the entire game, but you can still map this maze using the standard
method of dropping objects. Instead of seeing which object is there as soon as
you enter, you have to "get" without an object, which, perhaps surprisingly,
work as well in the dark as in light, in this game. If you can't be having with
all that palaver, just go east, get what's there (it's a life support system,
which is one of the components you need for your ship), then go south, east,
and southeast.
Take the medikit. This, too, is a ship component, and it rids you of those
irritating messages as well. Go up. The machine will beep. Picture a clock face
and a compass, with midnight being north, and go in the direction indicated by
the number of beeps: east for three beeps, south for six, and so on.
Go up twice, then sw, w, nw, e, d. Pull the lever. Some more manoeuvring is
needed now, but this time not of the single-turn variety. We must, instead,
make the right amount of actual traveling moves to get the platform into the
hold. For this, we need a slight detour. Go up, sw, se, w down the slope, and
now n and sw. The platform will collapse at exactly the right moment. Drop
everything you're carrying.

Now for the final stretch. Go northeast, east, and then northeast thrice to a
curving metal corridor. There is a symbol in a niche, here. Make a note of it.
Go northeast. Note this symbol as well. Go northwest, and note the symbol; and
finally southwest, and note the last symbol. Then push the niche.
You are now in this game's third maze. As the room description indicates,
normal compass directions will not work here. You have to type "left", "right",
"forward" and "back", or "l", "r", "f" and "b". Of course, each time you move,
and enter a room by a different entrance, which direction corresponds to which
exit changes as you change orientation.
To make matters worse, you are not allowed to take any objects into the
artefact, so you will have to map the maze using whatever objects you may find
along the way, plus any distinguishing features of the rooms themselves. As for
objects, you have four discs, one of which is found in this room; apart from
that, there is the hole in the roof, in this room only, and another hole, in
the exit room.
Here's the kicker: there are eight rooms in total. There are six location
markers, and the exit hole does not tell you which way you're oriented. As it
turns out, it is just possible - with nothing to spare - to map the maze using
these resources. Feel free to try. In doing so, you will realise why almost all
interactive fiction has stuck to the illogical and unnatural convention of
giving the player an in-built, perfect compass: it may be unrealistic, but it's
a great deal less confusing to play.
If you don't feel like dealing with that (and I don't blame you), here's how to
get through. Take the pentagon disc that's lying here, go forward, get the
triangle, go right, get the hexagon, right again, get the square, right once
more, go forward, and take one last right turn. Go down.
Ignore the sword. It is only there to tempt you. Instead, go east (hooray for
compasses!) and take the reactor. Then go west and north. Enter "flezz". Clues
for why you would use that word are scattered through the game, but as this is
a walkthrough I haven't shown you any of them - serves you right! Go north and
northwest, and never mind the rat.
There is a computer here, and a slot. Clearly, it wants the discs you gathered.
But in what order? Well, if you remember that I told you to note which symbols
you found in the corridor, you'll know. First drop the disc with the symbol you
encountered first, and continue in that order. Note that the game needs you to
refer to the discs by their symbols - for example, if the symbol in the first
niche was a square, enter "drop square". Keep dropping symbol discs until the
computer coughs up an object.
As the computer explicitly tells you, you are now in yet another timed
sequence, so in the next bit, typos are (eventually) fatal again. Take care.
Get the conductor, and go down. You land in a room with four doors, marked with
(surprise) the same four symbols again. You need to go through these in the
same order as before; that is, if symbol in the first niche was a triangle and
the one in the second niche a hexagon, go south first, then east, and so on,
through all four doors.
You are now at the exit, so go northeast, then west, south, sw, east and north.
Take the gun. Go south, west, sw, up, and west twice. Fire the gun, then drop
it. Go west and take the drugs. Now back to the hold of your ship: east thrice,
se and sw. Drop everything you're carrying. Go south to your control room, and
- guess what? - press the button. Congratulations, you've escaped!


And there you have it. Countdown to Doom on the BBC Model B. There isn't nearly
as much of it as in the MS-DOS or ZCode versions, and more importantly, I don't
think the rest of the Doom trilogy was ever published for the BBC. If you liked
this game, I do suggest you look up the original, complete trilogy.