The Clue! - It Belonged in a Museum

Written by MenhirMike

Last time, we ended up with no car and a cancelled date because of Sabien's father passing away. We can't do anything about the latter, but we have over £25,000 to deal with the former. My first stop was the tools store where I bought every available tool. Afterwards, I went car shopping and ended up with three new cars.

The first one is the boring one, a 1951 Standard Vanguard, to replace the Morris Minor. 4 seats, 68 horsepower, 120 km/h top speed, no worries if it gets confiscated. Next, an Opel Olympia van since it boasts a much bigger carrying capacity. Not sure if I need a big van, but I was worried about the big statues the last time around. Its main issue is that it's extremely noticeable, with the giant “La Pizza” decal (that’s not removable). The third car was a vanity purchase - a 1952 Cadillac Club. It's fast, 160 horsepower for 160 km/h, and it's one of those cars that I would love to own in real life. It's unfortunately also pretty conspicuous, but not as much as the Opel.

As much as it pains me, I spray paint all three cars grey because that makes them less conspicuous. In grey, the Cadillac is 71%, in beige it's 83%, and in yellow it's a whopping 98%. While it does make sense, it's unfortunate that the game offers ten colors per car and grey is the only sensible one. I also spend money to fully repair each car.

About to commit a real crime…

Almost as good as new!

One thing that I wondered about before was why there are multiple different variations of the same car. For example, the basic Morris Minor exists in nearly identical 1948, 1950, and 1953 versions. After losing two cars to the police, it dawned on me that this is likely another protection against softlocks. Seized cars are gone for good, and by offering multiple cheap cars the player is more likely to be able to recover from setbacks.

I am left with 2,738 pounds and wonder if there are other uses of money in the future, other than buying new tools and cars/repairs. Up until this heist, money was meaningful and I had to juggle a bit with the acquisition of tools and even sell some to afford others. Looking back at my accomplices, I think I got lucky with finding Justin White. The game puts Frank Maloya onto Holland Street where no player should miss him, but he takes 90% of the cut, rather than Justin's 47%. That would've made money so much more difficult. The game doesn't remove heist targets from the taxi list, so another option where money could have been an issue is if I went for easier but less lucrative targets (instead of the Jeweller as my fourth burglary). 

Trying to build some common wealth by robbing this place

For today’s target, I've initially set my eyes on the British Museum, containing the Rosetta stone and two specimens of the Magna Charta [sic]. It's here that I learned how guard strength works. The museum has a "Guards" rating of 82%, and any attempt to fight the guard with an accomplice that has a fight skill less than that fails. The best accomplice I could find was Serge Fontane, at 78% fight skill. I've tried reloading a few times, tried different plans, tried a different accomplice (with an even lower fight skill), but every attempt ended in failure.

We did not defeat Sheng Long first, so we do not stand a chance

I've spent a few in-game weeks scouring the two bars for other accomplices, but couldn't find anyone better than Serge. The game adds more accomplices after every heist, so someone with a better fight skill might show up next time. I could have taken Serge along the last time to raise his Fight skill - another example of how the game has great replay value.

With the British Museum being a no-go, I ended up at the Victoria & Albert Museum instead. Wikipedia says that the V&A is "the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design". The information blurb says that there's 65,000 pounds worth of loot in it, and that the guard strength is only 54%. The main gimmick here is a spotlight in the top area that rapidly shifts between each showcase, while a guard is patrolling the same area as well.

The top area - Room 4 - is the main challenge.

Looking at the alarms, only A1 is relevant because it protects the pictures and one alarm locked showcase. A2 only protects the front windows. Switchbox S1 only powers the single spotlight in room 3, while S2 is the one controlling the spotlights in the top area and main room.

The guard route is blue. The blueprint continues to be important to see what’s connected to what.

The plan is to enter through the steel doors at the bottom, make my way through the top room without walking through a spotlight, and find the right place to take out the guard.  The fast moving spotlight in the top area (room 4) limits options to the little alcove next to the alarm-secured showcase, the top right corner when he exits room 5, or wait until he's in room 6 and break into room 5 to fight him there. I still don't know how exactly line of vision works, so this is a great opportunity to try out a few things.

I found that as Matt’s skills improve, the accomplices want a smaller share of the loot.

For my team, Serge Fontane is a must because I want to train his fighting skill, and he's also the driver. The other two accomplices don't matter much because Matt can do most of the work. Still, I decided that it's time to say goodbye to early game MVP Justin White. Heists are becoming more challenging, and I want to raise the skills of accomplices with electrics and lockpicking skills. So I invited Mike Seeger and Neil Grey along.

The plan:

1. Open the Steel door, open the door to room 2, deactivate switchbox S1. (Matt)
2. Walk in behind Matt and unlock the door to room 3 while Matt works on S1. (Neil)
3. Unlock the door to room 4, walk across, unblock the door to room 5. (Matt)
4. Ambush the guard in room 5. (Serge)
5. Disable A1 (Matt) and S2 (Mike), then disable A2 (Matt - purely to raise Matt's electronics skill some more)
6. Start looting cabinets (Neil, Serge, Mike, eventually Matt)
7. Get out cleanly in about 25 minutes.

My first attempt goes off without a hitch... until the police investigation shows that both Matt and Serge got caught in the spotlights, which leads to their arrest and a game over.

A photo booth would’ve been better and cheaper even in 1953.

The good news is that I know that ambushing the guard in room 5 is the way to go. The patrol route has him exiting room 6, walk to the bottom of room 5 and stare at the southern wall for a bit. One challenge is that because of the small visible area, I have to walk around and make notes where and when to strike, then undo all that and plan properly.

Figuring out the correct time and place in planning mode before reverting and committing for real.

With this, I know that I need to take out the guard at about 11:10 minutes, which requires making my way through room 4 at a good pace despite the fast moving spotlight - I make sure to fully walk to the top wall to avoid the spotlight and only stop twice on the way, unlocking the door and taking out the guard at the 11:24 mark. I love it when a plan comes together!

The game shows both a great strength and great weakness here: It is genuinely fun to try to figure out solutions to this puzzle and time it right. But the interface is a bit clumsy and slow, and it's not exactly clear what the hitbox of the spotlight compared to the character is. The latter might be harder because of the isometric perspective of the Amiga version (vs. the top down perspective of the MS-DOS version).

I need to take a moment here to talk a bit about the experience on the Amiga. I am playing the AGA version on an emulated Amiga 1200 with its original 68EC020 CPU, 4 MB Fast RAM, and a hard drive. This would have been the way I would’ve played it back in the day. I've already talked about a hard drive being a necessity - if you play from a floppy drive, especially if you only have one or two drives, the experience is miserable due to constant disk swapping. Playing the 32-color Amiga 500 version even on an AGA machine would legitimately be better because it's one less disk. But the CPU speed is becoming a bit of an annoyance now. With 4 team members and plans spanning over 25 minutes in-game time, swapping between characters takes several seconds while the game rewinds and replays plan actions to set up the state at the correct time.

Out of curiosity, I've changed my settings to emulate an Amiga 500+ (the minimum requirements of the ECS version), and it took 30 seconds to switch between characters. I remember that it was normal for complicated games (like Civilization or Chess) to take a long time, but I think that it hurts the fun factor of the game on that machine. I'm not sure if and how I will handle performance in the eventual PISSED rating, but I've changed my emulator settings to a high-end 68060 CPU that 1995-me could only dream about and carried on with much better performance.

Another annoyance is that the game doesn't properly restore the state of spotlights when switching characters. The spotlight stays where it was before switching, until I walk around a bit and it snaps to its proper location, at which point I can undo the walk and carry on.

It does say a lot that I'm willing to fight the interface because it's really rewarding to try to optimize the plan a bit more. I feel tense and excited when I run the burglary and spend the next few minutes hoping that no patrol or alarm suddenly ruins everything, anticipating the guard takedown, seeing the escape, and hoping that there's not enough evidence to arrest a team member or impound the car. I'm enjoying this game greatly.

The rest of the second attempt goes well until the last minute, when Neil reports a police patrol. The heist continues, but the escape sequence shows a police car rapidly catching up. Thankfully, we escape before they catch us. For the chase sequence, the length and type of escape route makes a difference, as well as the top speed of the car.

My car started some way towards the left, which reflects the 7 km long escape route. The police car is much faster, but it worked out in the end.

The police investigation goes well, and I’m a bit surprised that they don’t even identify the car despite giving chase to it. Back in the hotel room, I get a phone call from Sabien telling me she’s back and not feeling well and asking Matt to come see her, which I’m happy to oblige. 

The romance arc isn’t very complex, but it’s very sweet

I stopped by the Walrus & Yellow Shades pub to see if there are any new recruits, and walked straight into my own birthday party. There were about 20 people all congratulating me. I don’t know if the date is relevant at all, but I very much doubt that September 15 is Matt’s canonical birthday.

Transparent images weren’t invented yet in 1953.

I sold the loot through all three dealers and have £42,484 in my pocket now. The tools shop does not have any new tools to spend money on, but the car vendor has a Jaguar for 10,350 pounds. I already have a Cadillac, so I don’t see much reason to buy it.

Almost up to £100k of stolen loot, which would be £2.5 million in 2026 money

I couldn’t find any other story events, so time to wrap it up here and plan the next burglary. Serge leveled up his fighting skill enough to take on the British Museum, but I’ve not looked at any new targets that became available. Tune in next time to find out!