Game 51: Rise of the Dragon - Wire is Blue

Written by Ilmari

Blade Hunter’s secret diary, part 3: I feel like I am getting so close with Karyn after our night together. It’s good that my case requires me going and asking her for information. It’s so nice to bask in her radiance frequently!

The game is going like a blaze and I seem to be progressing quite nicely! I am just hoping I haven’t lost an crucial item… But now I am getting ahead of myself. A brief recap of the plot thus far: some bad drugs killed mayor's daughter, Chandra, who had a best friend called Jake, who knew Chandra had been hanging with a guy called Chen, who was then turned into slimy goo by a guy with an eye patch. An eventful first day, I'd say!

Last time I had just returned to home from my nightly adventure with Blade's girlfriend, Karyn. I decided to head down to her office right away, since she had said she might help me in analysing stuff - and I had plenty of stuff I had got the previous night from Chen’s apartment. I started by giving Karyn the drug patch, which she promised to give to lab boys to investigate. The analysis wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow, so that didn't provide me anything new to do yet. I also gave her the paper I had found in Chen’s safe. Karyn didn’t recognise the symbols, but suspected it was some archaic dialect of Mandarin Chinese. She also suggested visiting some Chinese scholar and I knew right away who to call!

Bearded, underpaid fellow, who has no idea of references to modern world-- yes, clearly a scholar!

My Chinese friend in the warehouse complex could translate the paper, which told that Rise of Dragon was soon about to happen and target was Hollywood water reservoir. The paper also contained a reference to Bahumat, who according to the scholar was an evil magician living in year 3000 BC. Bahumat could turn himself into a dragon and he tried to rule the world. Bahumat was killed by a white magician Gin-Su or Knife (I can see where this is heading…), who banished Bahumat to netherworld for 5000 years, but got himself killed in the process. The old Chinese knew also a prophecy of the return of Bahumat:

“In the Age of Decay,
Marking the Dawn of Darkness
The Dragon will arise
His evil will become an addiction in the soul of mankind, and death shall be a blessing to those he has touched.
Many will fear him
Many will fall before him
One will sacrifice all to destroy him.”

The Chinese scholar gave me also a talisman, a book of ancient wisdom and a fortune cookie. A more practical gift was a Kevlar vest, which I immediately put on.

Great song, but I fail to see the relevance

I bet this is some kind of code

I now had one more place to visit on my map, the Hollywood Reservoir. Unfortunately, there appeared to be nothing to do there.

But Mr. Tarantino said there would be some dogs here!

With nothing else to do, I went to visit Jake again. He was pleased that Chen was dead and told me that Chen had had some connection with Chinese mafia, who was working in some warehouse right under the nose of City Hall. I tried to show him the evidence I’d collected, but nothing useful came out. He did take one of my chocolate bars for safe keeping. I hope this act of charity will not come and haunt me in the future.

I then wandered around aimlessly for a while and even saw the next “Meanwhile” -sequence, which was nothing special, just another reminder of the imminent deadline. I then noted that I hadn’t shown one item to Karyn: Chen’s ID. Cursing myself for not doing such an obvious thing, I went immediately to Karyn, who could easily pull out some info on Chen’s known accomplices.

I knew eye patch meant no good

Bingo! Now I’ve got the address of Johnny Qwong, the henchman

I went straightaway to Qwong’s house. It was a huge villa, guarded by armed patrols walking on the roof. I couldn’t get in, but I could go down the sewer, although the local bum tried to warn me.

Rats? Great, I can start grinding!

The only thing I could access in the sewers was a locked box.

What’s that on the box? A treasure map?

Oh for Pete’s sake! I guess I should have studied electronics!

The lock went out with one of my explosives and I was not too happy to find out a mess of wires waiting me.

Yes, a minigame! Just what I was expecting!

I knew that this is where my wire tester was going to be handy. I had to tap into Johnny Qwong’s phone line and listen to his Vid Phone conversations (wireless technology must have been forgotten by then). The manual had pretty good instructions. I had to make three connections: red wire to positive, blue to negative and yellow to ground. My first attempts were not successful.

I guess I should leave changing the light bulb to more capable hands

It went on like this for almost an hour and I was already planning on rants of how bad puzzles developers could think of. I had noted that I could connect the wires, whenever both the meters were pointing on green area, and when the pointers went back to red, I was fried. My first idea had been that I had to be quick enough - the wire tester had three wires, and I thought I had to plug them all in before the pointers returned to red zone.

Then I finally managed to connect one of the wires, without getting fried when the red zone was reached. I knew at once that no electrocution would happen, if I just had plugged the wires to right places. After that it was just simple to test for the correct position of each wire, and beating the minigame became incredibly easy.

It’s good that Blade knows, when this contraption is ready, because I sure don’t

Getting back to Blade’s apartment, I took a look at what Mr. Qwong had been chatting with his buddies. He had received one call from “voice of Bahumat”, who now revealed his name: Deng Hwang. Qwong was told to stop all further delays in the production schedule and to check progress in the warehouse. I then remembered Jake telling me about Chinese mafia having a warehouse near City Hall, where I traveled now.

I don’t know if I had been too lazy before or if the warehouse doesn’t exist before the plot progresses forward, but I found the place quite easily. Only thing I could do there was to get a close up of --- well, I don’t know what it is!

Any suggestion what these might be?

I tried using one of my explosives with it and the results were far more satisfying than I expected.

If his career as a detective doesn’t work, Blade could become a demolition man

Getting back to the main map, I noticed a new place: Deng Hwang’s corporation headquarters. This proved to be another dead end.

But I was just going to sell these fine leather jackets!

I then returned home to see if Johnny Qwong had been notified of the explosion. Indeed, the news had reached even Deng Hwang, who reprimanded Qwong for failing to do anything to prevent the damage. He also asked Qwong to visit him in the headquarters. Soon I watched a cut scene.

He sure doesn’t like mistakes

Nice to know they care for me

The ingame clock was getting late, so Blade went to sleep. I am also stopping at this point. The plot appears to be moving forward almost by itself, with more and more dead people every day. One thing I am getting a bit worried is, whether there won’t be more challenging puzzles. Until now, the wire tester has been the only true brain teaser and otherwise everything has been so obvious..

Session time: 2.5 hours

Total time: 4.5 hours

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