Locksmith(NES) FAQ/Walkthrough version 1.0.0
by Andrew Schultz
[email protected]
Please do not reproduce for profit without my consent. You won't be getting
much profit anyway, but that's not the point. This took time and effort, and
I just wanted to save a memory of an old game and the odd solutions any way I
could. Please send me an email referring to me and this guide by name if
you'd like to post it on your site.
================================
OUTLINE
1. INTRODUCTION
2. CONTROLS AND POINTS
3. WALKTHROUGH
3-1. THE BUILDING
3-2. THE PUZZLE
4. CHEATS AND BUGS
5. VERSIONS
6. CREDITS
================================
1. INTRODUCTION
You're this dude in a suspicious fedora, or something, and you go around
opening up safes or wire boxes and bombing them and getting out. Or maybe you
diffuse the bomb, only for a plane to come overhead and bomb the building
you're in anyway. I don't know. The story isn't clear. Apparently, the
instruction manual(according to Odino) says you diffuse the bomb, but then
why the plane overhead and the explosion? Is this a really bad attempt at
humor?
What is clear is the general progression. You start in the southeast of a
randomly generated 3x3 maze, and you have to move to the northwest, where you
find the safe. Then you move to a puzzle where you have 3 characters to place
in 3 rows. The levels then get bigger. The puzzles and maps are as follows.
L2: 4x4
L3: 5x5
L4: 6x6
L5: 7x7
L6-8: 8x8(I found the maps got a bit bigger but generally parts of them are
cut off)
You also are timed, and while you can gain it back for shooting enemies, it's
too much to expect you to get through with any sane strategy, even if you are
super-good at shuffle puzzles like the one at the end of the level.
2. CONTROLS AND POINTS
First, no points for shooting guards. 200 points for each minute left at
round's end and 10 for each second. You get no extra time to start the next
round.
You can move diagonally, and if you go south in a screen right below where
the north door should be, you may or may not find a south door if it's there.
For rooms without a north door, it's slightly right of center and you have to
move back and forth to find it. Searching for a south door is annoying but I
have a pretty simple strategy to avoid it below.
B button fires. You can have three shots at once.
The guards know if you are to the L/R immediately, even if they are not
facing you, which makes the whole charade of them facing ANY way a mystery.
Especially old as they look. Anyway, they turn and fire quickly too. Each one
takes one more shot per round to kill. So stay far away on later rounds.
There's probably little you can do at the start to avoid them, as well.
In the puzzle, U/D moves you along the side edges and flips you over the
corner. L/R behaves similarly for the top edges. Pushing A moves everything
in your current row/column in the direction it should go. You cannot push B
to make it move backwards. You can, however, pause the game with the screen
in full view, which is a big help and probably a huge bug, but it is the only
relief you'll get.
Moving the arrow takes longer than moving the blocks, so flip them 7 times
instead of moving around and try to leave the final rows/columns in the
strategies below at the edges.
3. WALKTHROUGH
3-1. THE BUILDING
You'll probably eventually stumble through this, but here's how to make it
less painful.
Assuming no cheats...for the maze parts, get as far away horizontally from
the guards as you can. You can walk out and in to retry. Guards pop up
randomly when you change rooms. They take more shots to kill after the first
level, and they're quicker too, so if you want to play honestly(you poor
sucker you) then you'll want to pile up time on the first level, at least a
half-hour, which is sort of unfair in its own way. Just keep shooting and
entering and re-entering rooms.
You need to make your way to the NW of the maze, and it is generally spidery-
-I forget the graph theory term, but basically there are almost never two
different ways to get from point A to point B, discounting backtracks.
Therefore you can pretty much go west as far as you can, then north when you
have to, and keep going west. Keep a map of this and of when you can go east
too, because on the rare off chance that you get stuck in a dead end with
this strategy, you'll need to work your way back. You may have to loop E N W
or, worse, S W N. Going south is a pain because the game never tells you if a
door is at the bottom. You need trial and error, unless you've been in the
room below. Starting off west means there's an even lower chance you'll have
to search the south walls of rooms.
3-2. THE PUZZLE
(sergeant voice) LISTEN UP YOU LITTLE NES PLAYING DWEEBS. I BET YOU THINK
YOU'RE CLEVER AND YOU'LL MATCH ONE ROW AND GO FROM THERE. WELL I WAS A YOUNG
PUNK ONCE AND I BELIEVED THAT AND IT GOT ME NOWHERE IN THIS GAME. NOWHERE! SO
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT TO DO, READ ON. IT MIGHT NOT BE THE QUICKEST
SOLUTION BUT IT WILL GET THE JOB DONE!
(calms down) Okay, basically what you want to get here is, if you have an (x
by x) square, (x-1 by x-1) right. It can be vertical or horizontal. Then, you
fill in the rest. If you want to save time, keep the cursor on one side of
the board as cycling the pieces is quicker than moving. It ultimately makes
no difference if you make columns or rows.
Let's go with 3x3 first.
aba
cac
bbc
There are so few colors you should be able to match a column/row right away.
Push c 1R and b 1R.
aba
acc
cbb
Now you want c on top of b on the left column, so you can push it down. This
already works, but if it didn't, you could push the c to the bottom(or, if
there was a different unmatched row, 1 above that) and then the b right. In
this case push b's row 2R, then push the left column 2D, and you've got it.
What I do for the larger ones is to look if there is a row or column I can
almost put together right away. There probably will be one with a lot in a
row. Then you can keep adding to that row or column. Let's look at the worst
case scenario, 8x8, and break it down so it is not intimidating. You can
probably locate 3 in a row. The actual probability is too much here, but
let's just say it's doable, and if it isn't, a few quick shuffles will line
things up--that's example 2.
Example 1
.a.....
.......
.......
.a.....
.......
.a.....
.a.a...
.a.aa..
Here you push down the single a 2x then push it right 6x. Push the double a's
down 3x and right 5x. That makes 7. To make things neat you may wish to push
column 3 down 4x. For other columns, you don't have to leave the left column
open til last--if something is there, drop it in.
Example 2
.......
.....a.
a......
...a...
a...a...
.....a.
...a...
.a.....
Here you can push the 3rd-bottom row 6R, then the bottom right 2, the 2nd-top
6R, and the 3rd-top 3R. Now you have 7 matched up. In this case it wasn't so
much if you had a bunch in one row/column as that you had them all in a bunch
of different columns.
Example 3
.......
.......
.......
.......
..aaa..
..aaa..
..aa...
.......
Just for fun let's see what happens if we have something we can't readily do.
There may be better colors, but this will illustrate we can work with pretty
much anything, and quickly.
Column 5 2D. Then column 4 5D. Row 5/6/7(1 as top) 2R and row 2/3 1R makes a
7-column. This breaks some of the rules for getting things done the dumb way,
but if you can find these shortcuts, you can save time. Also, once you get
one column in place, the rest fall quicker as there are fewer squares to sort
through. You just cannot touch certain columns, and you need to use the
"break" in the column you made more aggressively, shuttling pieces there and
moving them right. So if we have
.b.....
...a...
.b.a...
.b.a.b.
.b.a...
.b.ab..
...a...
...a.b.
Column 3 1D, 7 1D, row 1 4R.
Column 3 1D, column 6 3D, row 1 5R, column 3 5D.
Does the job.
So where does that leave us with the rest of it? First I'll leave an example
for you where you have the top column and row to work with, then a middle
one. The logic is the same either way, and it is the same if you use columns
or rows in general. I used columns because cut and pasting was easier
Visualize a board with:
.......
abcdefg
abcdefg
abcdefg
abcdefg
abcdefg
abcdefg
abcdefg
Let's randomly drop in blocks here.
Example 1:
hahbhehc
fabcdefg
habcdefg
gabcdefg
habcdefg
dabcdefg
habcdefg
habcdefg
You need a column of h's but you also need everything else in the right
order. First note if anything is in order on the top. You want
abcdefgh
You have a...e..
So maybe you should move the b. Column 1 5R, Row 1 1D(you don't have to push
1D, only make sure you don't catch up anything in the column other than the
one shape still left, unless it puts something in order.) Column 1 1R, then
row 1 7D.
bhhehcha
fabcdefg
habcdefg
gabcdefg
habcdefg
dabcdefg
habcdefg
habcdefg
You can repeat with the c, pushing the top row 3R, column 1D, top row 4R,
column 7D. That gives chehhab at the top. Now to bring stuff from the column
into the row. Push right so e is on the right, then push down so the f gets
caught. Push so f is on the right, then push the g's down. Push so b is on
the right of the top row, then push the c's down. Push right. You will win.
Example 2:
fdcahage
fdcfhage
fdcehage
fdcdhage
bbbbbbbb
fdcghage
fdcchage
fdchhage
Here we are cycling row and column 4. We have to do everything here, it looks
like, but actually it is pretty easy. The simple-stupid way is to push column
4 down so c is in row 4, then row 4 1R. Then bring 4 down so d is left of c,
then 1R. That is a d. We want to push column 4 down so the f is left of the
d, then row 4 1R. Then C4 down so e is left of the f, R4 1R. C4 down so g is
left of e, then R4 1R. Again C4/R4 so a is 1L of the g, then 1R.
All situations are a combination of 2 and 1. If worst comes to worst you can
just cycle the remaining junk into row 1(in stuff like example 1) and spit
the right stuff out 1D at a time, starting at the bottom and working out.
Just notice what's next to the last column/row to fix and start working from
there.
You have 8 levels of this. Level 1 has an orange triangle, pink circle and
blue square. Level 2 adds a green +, level 3 adds a pink star, level 4 adds
an orange arrow, and I am sorry to say level 5 adds a blue swastika, which is
just a bad idea even in a game that were actually good. Level 6 adds a green
star, and levels 7 and 8 are the same as 6, but they seemed a bit more
scrambled.
4. CHEATS AND BUGS
Thanks to odino for the seconds and hearts cheats.
x056A = # of seconds. I recommend setting this to 2 in fceu
0x56B = # of minutes. Set to 50 or so if you want to play a semi-honest game
where you have a decent chance of winning. The downside of doing so is
committing 50 minutes to this lukewarm game.
NOTE: if using the seconds/minutes cheat on FCEU, where you can freeze
values, I recommend you set them to 7 and 0, respectively, then un-set the
seconds. This means a lot less tedious waiting for the bonus to pile up, but
of course you will want to re-set it once the next level screen appears. 7
gives you time to. If you forget to unset the seconds/minutes, the game
scrolls and gives bonuses permanently.
x0573 in memory = # of hearts. Set this to 3 or, well, anything above 0
A funny bug here is if you complete a level with 0 seconds left, it thinks
you really have 65536. It's only funny in theory, though, because in practice
you have to wait a while. But hey, you break the high score!
End of FAQ Proper
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5. VERSIONS
1.0.0: sent to GameFAQs 11/17/2007, complete
6. CREDITS
Thanks to the usual GameFAQs gang, current and emeritus. They know who they
are, and you should, too, because they get/got some SERIOUS writing done.
Good people too--bloomer, falsehead, Sashanan, Masters, Retro, Snow
Dragon/Brui5ed Ego, ZoopSoul, War Doc, Brian Sulpher, AdamL, odino, JDog and
others I forgot. OK, even Hydrophant in his current not-yet-banned message
board incarnation. I am not part of his gang, but I want him to be part of
mine.
Thanks to the NES Completion Project folks for keeping it going.
Special thanks to odino for notifying me about this game. And for the cheats.
