The Beverly Hillbillies - Won!

By Ilmari

Diary of Jed Clampett 3: “Weeelll, doggies! I like-to-of freed granny, but I liked some thangs: roas’n’ears, dried flare, pole cat worter, a skift of sugar… I don’t care to go fixing to buy ‘em, but first I ort to get my money from that bank feller who is tighter’n Dick’s hatband!”

Special thanks to this blog for helping me get my hillbilly vocabulary more authentic. I know, it’s Appalachian, not Ozark English, but it’s close enough for my purposes.

No, have you seen the sheep in the library?

The game had turned into a fetch quest, as I had to gather all the ingredients to granny’s secret tonic:

• Corn mash
• Dry brellsbane
• Squirrel fat
• Skunk water
• Bear paw
• Weasel hair
• Sugar

Of these, I already had a squirrel in my possession. I also had some corn and Elly May had told me that there was a corn masher in the kitchen, but I had no idea what item there was supposed to be the masher. Without any clue, I just clicked the corn everywhere in the kitchen, and at some point I managed to hit the right spot.

Sugar was also easy, since it happened to be one of the only words I could see in my Spanish dictionary. I knew that one of the mansions had a Spanish maid, so I just drove there and asked for sugar.

I knew where to get some Brellsbane, since a lady in one of the mansions had mentioned it. I used some scissors to cut some of it into my pockets. The only problem was to make it dry. This was pretty easy to do when I noticed I could hang the Brellsbane to a coat rack and let it dry there.

Finding bearpaw was similarly simple, since there was a bear rug in the mansion. The only problem was to separate the paw from the bear, but the bolt cutter came handy here.

Skunk oil was trickier, since I had no idea where to look for it, and I really solved it through pure accident. You see, there’s this one mansion, the owner of which has a strong perfume. Jed can ask Elly May to visit this mansion, and the owner then confuses her with an employer, who is to take the perfume to be sold. When I was finally mixing the ingredients and missed one, I then tried all the possible inventory items and the perfume worked. I think I don’t want to be near that perfume.

Like kryptonite to Superman

That left only the weasel hair. Elly May told me that a weasel skin coat was the latest fashion and that I might get one from the shopping street. The problem was I had no money to buy anything, even though I was a millionaire. I knew that my bank manager had locked my assets into a safe in Clampett mansion, but only he had the combination to that safe. I also knew the bank manager had a phobia about the IRS and I happened to have an IRS notification in my inventory. Next step was obvious. I showed the notification to the manager, who promptly fainted. Searching his body, I discovered the combination and could open the safe and get my money.

Pure discrimination

Of course, buying the weasel skin coat wasn’t that easy, since no shop clerk really wanted to sell me anything, because Jed had too long hair. The problem was that I couldn’t find any barber. After a bit of panicking, I happened to speak with a shoeshiner at the shopping street. Earlier he had had nothing of relevance to say, but now I noticed I could ask him about the barber.

The shoeshiner had two things of interest to tell me. Firstly, he indicated that I could walk through the shops. This was a possibility I had completely missed (well, I’ve rarely seen shops where the customers were allowed to use the backdoor). What I had thought to be just one street with few screens and a couple of shops in a screen was more like a maze. I could leave the original street through any of the shops in it and arrive at a completely new street with its own set of shops.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to start mapping this maze of shops in search of a barber, since the possible combinations of streets and shops would have soon risen to unmanageable levels. The shoeshiner told me, secondly, that the barber, The Carlotti Brothers, could be found by going through shops with similar names. This meant that I had to find on the first street the shop with a name with most resemblance to Carlotti Brothers - this was evidently the Kissing Cousins, brothers and cousins being both family relations. On the next street I had to walk through Papa Guido’s and on the third street through Madre Mia’s to arrive to a street with the Carlotti Brothers. A nice puzzle!

Blame the inflation

And the game developers seemed to agree with me, since they decided to repeat this same puzzle three more times, taking all the fun out of it. Since the procedure was always the same, I’ll just list the important parts:

• I had to get a new suit from Armani’s. Here I had to check for shops with a male name in possessive form (like Alfredo’s).
• I had to get a new hat from Palomino. This one I struggled to understand, but apparently palomino is kind of a horse. The puzzle was made even more difficult by the fact that the first shop was Colt 45 and I for a long time thought only of the revolver. Furthermore, the penultimate shop was Unicorn, which is a bit of a leap from the horse theme.
• I had to get new shoes from Sunny’s Bootery. This time I had to find shops with two-word names, first word having double consonants (like Natty’s Books).

After all this busywork, I just had to look for the shop where the weasel skin coats were sold. I noticed that one particular shop on the first street had changed its name from a Hillary’s Balloons to Hillary’s Fine Furs. The coat was mine!

Hulk time

I probably just don’t understand American economics well enough, but could someone explain how tax receipts would make anyone rich?

The final steps of the game were simple. I took all the ingredients to a still in the kitchen of the Clampett mansion and tonic was produced. With the power of the tonic Jed was able to open the bank vault and release granny. A short end animation followed, where the kidnapper tried to escape and granny hit her with a frying pan. That’s it!