Catch That Haggis!, Or, Working Around the Restrictions is a Glulx interactive fiction game written with Inform 6 and is © 2001 by Adam Biltcliffe. It was an entry in HighlandComp where it took 2nd place.
In this small silly game, you play as a green tentacled alien. You and Xurg need to pick up an indigenous lifeform from the Scottish Highlands to take home.
This solution is by David Welbourn, and is based on Release 5 of the game.
SPOILERS AHEAD. Reading a walkthrough prematurely can sometimes diminish one's enjoyment of an interactive fiction game. Please make an honest effort to play the game before reading this walkthrough.
Blasted heath
> about. premise.
> x me. x Xurg. i. x knife. x paper.
> x heath. x saucer.
> n. s.
Xurg suddenly points north and you see a three-legged creature who looks at you and bolts. Xurg cries, "Catch that haggis!" and runs after it.
> n.
Chasing the haggis
> x haggis. n. n. n. n.
You have wounded the haggis, but it keeps running.
> n. n. n. n.
The slope of the hillside gives the haggis an advantage and you lose sight of it.
> SPACE
More blasted heath
Xurg arrives and drops a turnip that he tripped on.
> x turnip. break turnip. smell turnip.
> cut turnip.
You carve the turnip into a fake haggis and return to the ship.
*** You have completed your mission ***
Mentioned:
This is the response to ABOUT or CREDITS:
This game was designed and coded and stuff by Adam Biltcliffe when he was still on an IF authorship high after Speed-IF 2001. He thought the premise was kind of silly, but couldn't resist the chance to write a game with space aliens once the idea occurred. Further bizarre improvements and countless bugfixes were added as a result of Mona Wuerz's merciless beta-testing. Matthew Murray also took a brief look and was confused.
Thanks to Graham Nelson for the original Inform compiler and library, to Andrew Plotkin for the modified Glulx versions of each and to John Cater for infglk.h.
This is an entry in Graeme Porter's HighlandComp. For details, type PREMISE.
When you begin the game, the response to SCORE is:
In one and a half Solar years, you and Xurg have collected 2,047 samples of Terran life out of your quota of 2,048. This gives you the rank of tired out and fed up.
When you win the game, you're told:
In that game, you and Xurg collected a total of 2,048 samples of Terran life out of your quote of 2,048, in a total of one and a half solar years. This gives you the rank of Interstellar Researcher Biologist Extraordinaire and ensures that you and Xurg receive a hero's welcome upon your return home, complete with shiny medals, boring speeches and paychecks sufficient to retire on immediately. Reunited with your respective families, you both live very happy lives until the brief and bloody war with Terra some time later, in which the biological weapons your scientists developed prove disastrously ineffective against the legions of haggises, and your entire civilisation is destroyed as a result.
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