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Sunday, 1 September 2024

Inca II – Won!

By Ilmari

Now that was easy! But let’s not be hasty, since we still have things to do.
Breathtaking landscape, part XVI

My next stop was a planet resembling Tibet (it is a well-known fact, attested by many fictional works of scientific nature, that most planets in our galaxy have only one type of biome). In yet another cutscene, I saw Eldorado searching a rundown temple and finding a monk stuck under fallen beams.
Apparently soldiers had come and destroyed the temple and imprisoned the guru to a fort further down the valley. It was my job to free the holy man.
Eldorado, this is a family blog
When I was finally given back the controls, I had to find a way to get up a wall of stone. I tried throwing a rope to the root you see in the picture, but alas, it was too heavy. Ballasted thread did the trick, but wasn’t sturdy enough for climbing. Still, I could tie the rope to the ballast and pull the other end of the thread to raise the rope to the root. I also hammered a peg I had to a big rock with my mallet and tied the other end of the rope to it (and the other end probably to myself).
Like this
Now, kicking the rock down lifted me up to where the guru was held prisoner.
So, was his cell just beside the cliff?
Before the guru was willing to get out of here, he wanted me to pray.
You couldn’t pick a better time?
Praying here meant just choosing random praying scrolls, which let out notes when pressed, so I guess I was playing music. I have no idea if there was any logic to this exercise, but after hectic clicking and going through all possible combinations, gods rewarded me with a conch. (Addendum: Checking the internet aftewards, apparently there was some logic. Some of the praying scrolls turn left and only few of them turn right - and the latter are the right to use.)
And then we were here
And then I was alone
It was time to do some random clicking. Within the hole in the small building I found a chain. Connecting it to the point at the top of the building did something.
So is this a lightning rod or something?
Well now it’s broken
So, I guess the metal of the ball shaped point at the top of the building melted into the tray at the ground.
Or this is what is surmise from this picture
I just had to use my crowbar to detach the tray/shield from the ground.
And now I am again elsewhere
Hidden under the ice? You wouldn’t have any matches with you? There were some logs, so maybe I am supposed to make fire?
No, a gong (that’s the tray/shield I just made)
So, I had to give the conch to the guru to blow it like a horn and hit the gong with my mallet, and the ice broke.
You took the words right out of my mouth
I was now in the place where I was supposed to place the second Inca power. Again, I had to find a way to destroy a transparent globe. Let me see what we have here: an icicle that I can break with my mallet, a ray of sunlight and a goat skin…
Yep, melt the icicles with the sunlight and collect the water in the goat skin
The filled goat skin could then be put as a weight to the cup, which opened up the crystal egg and let me insert the Inca power. It was time to go to the last planet!
Great
Before getting to the space battle I was treated to some exposition. Kelt Cartier appeared and told me that the space conquistadors knew our plans, since Doña Angelina (the woman who at the beginning of the game convinced Eldorado’s son to get himself killed) was actually a mole and had revealed everything to Aguirre. And had vanished. And had taken Eldorado’s wife with her. And took her as hostage to the last planet.
All this travelling around the galaxy for nothing
And my decisions come to bite me back
It took me something like six tries to get me through the battle. The trick was, of course, to change the DOSBox cycle to ridiculously low numbers to make everything very slow. Then, as the evil forces were very close together, it was easy to destroy the majority of them with my megabombs. Then it was down to tracking down the two or three remaining ships and hoping they didn’t get me first. Getting the final enemy vessel killed was one of the most boring 39 minutes of my life.
Here I come!
Is the guard in the picture off duty or did I clobber him? Who knows. What I do know is that this guard had a necklace with three geometrical figures, which I could take after first cutting the necklace with my shaver.
And here’s the panel where I’ll use them
This was the first puzzle where I really couldn’t just click my way through. First, putting the figures in the holes was not enough, since they kept dropping: I had to hammer them in with my mallet. After placing the figures in their places, the sliding doors opened and revealed a new interface.
You’d think that I should now press the buttons to light the whole key. Well, I did that and the result was that the sliding doors closed and the three geometric figures dropped from their holes.
Not the result I expected
Checking the place more closely, I noticed that putting the figures in their places opened up another panel with similarly shaped holes in a different part of the cave. The problem was then to get the three figures back to my possession. I could get them by returning the first panel to its original position, but then the second panel closed again.
Lucky I got my trusty crowbar to hold the second panel open
After this, it was pretty easy to get the three figures and place them in the holes at the second panel. I had now managed to free Eldorado’s wife.
Another puzzle?
Apparently not
Leave? Why? Will the asteroid take a holiday from killing? Are you sure you didn't mean destroying it?
Is this the next puzzle or action sequence?
No, it wasn’t!
The game is ending already! Did they run out of money? Well, it’s time for Final Rating in the next post.





What’s that you are asking? You want resolution? Did the Inca energy destroy the asteroid of the evil conquistadors?
No. It found better things to do and literally left the scene
The end.
Yes, really. It’s just credits here on. I guess we'll return to the story of the new planet-god in the Guardians of Galazy 2
Session time: 3 h
Total time: 7 h

10 comments:

  1. I think I reached the ice cave puzzle .. that must be where I got stuck in that sunday day that I already told the story in the last posts.

    Good job on ending the game. Seems like it was super rushed, wonder if they ran out of budget or just needed to wrap it up because of management.

    Since this is also the last entry in the Inca saga, I wonder if there were plans for more games

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    1. Considering that these puzzles seem easy to solve even if you just click everywhere, I'm surprised.

      Inca 1 didn't really feel like the kind of game that needed a sequel, and after playing this I can say that first impression was correct. That said, it seems like the kind of story like an old-timey space opera comic strip where the good guy and the bad guy are constantly at odds until it just sort of ends. Flash Gordon, but Ming the Merciless is Spanish.

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    2. well .. you know when you are a kid, there are games that I have no idea how I was stuck .. and games that were really easy then and I can't beat anymore.

      For example, Tapper on the C64, I used to win the whole game being 3 years old. Nowadays, I need a ton of focus to get past the 2nd world

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    3. Since this is also the last entry in the Inca saga, I wonder if there were plans for more games

      I doubt it. This was a budget release ($30-$35) and probably wasn't going to make them much money, and then it got lukewarm reviews. Eventually. I forget which commenter suggested we start including game prices in the reviews, but while it may not always be possible, in this case, it certainly does help put this game in perspective.

      Best I can tell, CGW didn't care enough to review it until 5 months after the CD version came out in 1994, and gave it a 2 out of 5 star review for many of the faults listed in these comments. Then, two years later, called it one of the worst games of all time.

      At the same time, Coktel was slowly being absorbed more into Sierra. I wish Ken's book had more detail on this, but a look at Mobygames shows they only released one new title in 1994? Then, by the time we get to 1995, their name is no longer on the front cover of the boxes, or so it seems.

      I read through the 1994 issue of QuestBusters that featured Inca 2, and it had a feature of the game companies at CES that summer. Dynamix and Sierra are featured, Coktel wasn't mentioned.

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    4. From that QuestBusters review:

      "If it's new on the market, it's CD format, and it's less than $30 — it's got to be another Coktel Visions game put out by Sierra. So now we have Inca II, and all my old trepidations of playing another Coktel game have come back to haunt me.

      It's not that I don't enjoy Coktel games: I've played every one that's come out. I'm never just quite sure that if the cost weren't so low, I would ever get the next one. My experience is usually mixed. I enjoy some of it, I'm really frustrated with other parts of it, and generally I just don't get some of the "logic" behind it."

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    5. yeah it was me who suggested mentioning the original price .. I think it should affect the review scores, very low budget games compared with AAA seems a little unfair if they fare exactly the same in the other categories.

      Some of these games are still being sold today, Veil of Darkness for example is on Steam, exact same game, no achievements, nothing new.

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    6. @Michael re: not getting the logic in some cases... my impression from reading various adventure gaming blogs is that there's something oddly "French" about certain games (see also Lost in Time or Another World) that seems to be hard for the non-French to grasp (including myself, here!)... maybe something like that is in play?

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    7. Regarding the price, it's possible that Coktel focused on the French sales and numbers, since that's what they cared about. While Sierra bought them, they were still independent enough to be intact to be sold a few years later. For years, the game Moby lists as being in 1994 isn't their game, they just distributed it in France, what they actually released in 1994 is Goblins 3, I don't think I say anything else that could have been released in 1994. (I did most of the research for the upcoming year list already, and that's all that seems to have been released in 1994) Still, one game compared to the ton they had this year or one year later isn't a lot, especially since it is a question as to what year it was published.

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  2. Most of the puzzles here are just weird, they're trying to do Myst-style logical deduction puzzles, but the way they're done is so weird it doesn't seem to make sense until afterwards. Like the rope puzzle, I understand it in retrospect, but just clicking around it isn't obvious. Which isn't helped by the scores of scenes which are basically entirely clicking around.

    That final space combat, how many of the nukes did you have? I went off for everything I was asked for, and I had only one. I was going to cheat to get more, but somehow I legitimately won. Honestly, despite understanding the combat system now, it feels worse than when I didn't. I just couldn't shake an enemy off, I was at the game's mercy as to whether or not I could escape from someone behind me. Not helping my feeling of no control were the random videos that sometimes happened, which showed the Tumi spinning around an enemy or the like, which I have no idea how or why happens.

    Incidentally, the CD version actually adds a final puzzle. It's really lame. You wander around an endless void trying to make a flower with three different color pedals, which by this point I figured was the puzzle since there was nothing else to do. It's weird.

    I still want to know what the hell Wiracocha had to do with any of the events that happened in this game. I really want to know if there's something here they just didn't put in or what, because this is quite possibly the worst ending I've seen in a game. It still has me with a what the hell was that?

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    1. Yeah, the puzzles were definitely not the major selling point of the game.

      I had five clean nuclear torpedos and three atomic disintegration bombs. Honestly, that was too much, since I had time to launch at most two of either, before the enemy ships were too dispersed for shooting them with the big guns. The remaining ships I dealt with the missiles and the disintegration gun.

      The ending does come out of left field. Perhaps they were trying to set a sequel up? Or then it was a homage to the end of 2001 Space Odyssey.

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