Tesshi-e game: Escape from Mr M's Room.

This is gonna suck, cos it's a paid game, which means none of the usual ETR players are around to help.

Then again, it sucks that the people who would pay for Tesshi-e's very high quality games are very few.  She's put out 88 free games, everyone loves them and she gets 4 and 5 stars very consistently, but when it comes to paying a pittance (231 yen = appx $2.35, 1.75 euro, you can't get one cup at Starbucks for that), no one's stepping up to the plate. I've even seen people say "I never pay for a game on principle" -- what principles, pray tell, are those?

Anyway. This is not a walkthrough but just notes I took while playing, which make decent hints.

There are a ton of clues. I've found a TV remote, a slingshot with no ammo, a piece of paper, and a bottle opener.

The TV got me a slingshot.  The TV displays a green man puppet on 2 different channels, and the positions he stands in correspond to the 4 buttons where the actual puppet is sitting. Just concatenate those two sequences and you have the answer.

The 3 Mr Birdys on a 3-letter safe correspond to the pillows of the same colors. Each Birdy has a number. That corresponds to a letter in the word on each pillow.  That got me the corkscrew. I sure could use a bottle of wine right now, but I haven't found one yet.

Ah. totally missed seeing a bottle to the left of the TV. A knife now, and with it a spade key, and with that the SD.

Took me a while to assemble the equation for the 4 digit box. You have to cut the paper and place it over each of the pictures on the wall, then reorder the shapes. You get the equation 16 x 5859 / 12, which is 7812.

Used the camera to flash into the dark space. There's a picture showing which corners to click on the rotating picture, and a key. Key gives a handle (box under the sofa).

Handle used on the machine on the floor. Got a ball. Ball goes in the slingshot for a windup key.

Windup key used on the akebekos, 231133, used in turn on the other akebeko. Have a key.

Opened the panel above the bed. Using the card-suit panels I get equations for their value. Also used the cork to slingshot the last panel high up above the sofa. Now I've got more math to do.

Got the equations; they need to be arranged in the same vertical order as the pictures.

Happy coin: check the key.

Fiddling and tweaking

Since releasing MapTag I've made a number of minor adjustments to the UI in response to comments.

However, it doesn't work in IE8 and that will not change.

The more fun part has been adding a visual index of saved games and previously played games which players completed in less than 10 minutes and less than 125km from the target. Click the "more games" tab to view that. It would be nice to dynamically adjust the criteria, but App Engine doesn't allow an inequality query on more than one field. It's a bit of a struggle to understand why it cannot do something that's elementary to any SQL query, until one considers its intended scalability.

So instead, I had to add a boolean field for 'successful', and if I want to change the criteria I have to run a bit of python script* to run through all the records and recompute it.  One hundred twenty-five kilometers is a pretty broad definition of success, but I wanted it a bit broad for countries that don't have a Roman-based alphabet, which is hard for us Roman alphabetters to Google for. For someplace like Thailand, if you get the right country, you still have a chance of "success."

* the server side I originally wrote in Java, but since Python is faster for certain datastore operations, the boyfriend recommended we switch to that. Did I mention I didn't know any Python? or hardly anything about server side programming?