Locksmith(NES) FAQ/Walkthrough version 1.0.0 by Andrew Schultz schultw.andrez@sbcglobal.net 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 ================================ 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.