I've covered the apparent history and general character of the series in earlier posts, so without further ado, let's get to the details of this game. I haven't seen a published walkthrough online, so I'll include two walkthroughs of my own below -- an honest version, and a sneaky cheat-laden version.
*** SPOILERS AHEAD! ***
As the series has no SAVE GAME feature at all, there's no existing record for the second game to read, but there are story dependencies in this chapter based on the first one. So White Palm starts off by asking the player a few questions about two critical items (rope and water) that the player needs to have brought along from the first game. For purposes of finishing this game, it's advisable to answer Y to both prompts -- and only Y counts, YES is not recognized and actually equates to "no."
As in Pharaoh, most of the puzzles are solved by wandering around and finding useful items laying about. There's an amulet in a tent, and if we LOOK WAGON, YOU FIND A GEM! A characteristic bug from the first game persists -- if we TAKE it, then LOOK WAGON again, the item is pulled out of inventory and returned to its original location.
It's interesting to test the navigation when mapping, as Mr. Nash apparently did not -- for example, a south exit from the White Palm room is not mentioned in the room description, but takes us to the stores room in another area of the map. The same thing happens if we attempt to go S of the fortress entrance, so this is likely a bug.
One nice touch is the "people running around" in some rooms as they panic in the face of a djinni attack -- we can't interact with them, as they're just window dressing, but it's still a pleasant change to see some human activity surrounding the customarily lonely adventurer.
As in the first game, blatant and sometimes useless clues are provided -- there's some writing in a battleground area, and the game tells us IT SAY'S [sic] 'THE PASSWORD IS 'CLOUDSKATE'!!!', though I never found a place to use said password. Similarly, a found map has a message on its back indicating we should give it to a trader, but we can't GIVE MAP or GIVE MAP TO MERCHANT, we have to DROP MAP in the general vicinity of the merchant. (And, actually, it turns out we can DROP [anything] there to get the merchant to transport us to the second area of the map, a desert fortress.)
Immovable objects aren't handled by Nash's engine, leading to some comical results -- we can freely TAKE and carry around the white palm, a water pool, an unwieldy statue, a fierce lion, and the friendly merchant, which is convenient but, like, totally cheating and also not very useful.
As in the first game, we SAY SCORE in the Fortress Entrance Chamber to receive our score... and end the game, whether we have scored all the points or not, so soliciting evaluation is not an action to be taken lightly. And the treasures are a little harder to find in this one -- there are six of them. The hardest ones to find, in my experience, were the final two: * A BRONZE LAMP and * A GOLDEN IDOL.
It was while playing this game that I first discovered the game-breaking bug that makes it possible to play the entire Pharaoh trilogy in under eight minutes, load times included. I was able to LOOK WAGON, get the * MO-PELAR STAR discovered as a result (YOU FIND A GEM!), then LOOK WAGON again, DROP GEM, then find and pick up the * TO OSIRUS GEM. I thought this behavior was by design at first, until I realized that DROP [treasure], or indeed any object, causes it to materialize wherever the player happens to be standing. What happened was this -- the Mo-Pelar Star is referred to as a GEM in the description, but as a STAR in the dictionary, so when I DROPped GEM I actually retained the star and caused the gem to appear in the room. This works with any object in the game and saves quite a bit of time, if one is in the mood to cheat; the gem, for instance, is intended to be found by drinking from the pool near the white palm.
There are some loose ends in White Palm, though not as many as in Pharaoh. We can HIT LION and kill it with the scepter, but the lion didn't seem to be getting in the way so I initially saw no reason to do so. But eventually I found myself stuck, and dove into the code to figure out what I was missing. I discovered the existence of a mysterious room 14, per the game's data structure, and subsequently that HIT LION causes a door to the east to open which I hadn't noticed the first time. This leads to a new room, rather buggily described, assuming of course that the adventurer has not suddenly become an author putting would-be readers at considerable risk:
Here, PUT ROPE is not the same as DROP ROPE - PUT ROPE allows us to travel down the dangling rope, where we find the remaining two treasures.
As the game's climax approaches, a high-pressure situation develops -- if we spend too much time wandering around the fortress, the building collapses. We only have ten moves available after freeing the efreet -- and we don't actually have to free the much-talked-about princess, just deliver all six treasures to the entrance:
Martec's Tomb is indeed a bit tougher, but still suffers badly from the DROP-materialization bug. I'll cover that third game in the trilogy in the near future. If you wish to experience White Palm in low-impact fashion, you can rely on the following information, below the fold, that is to say...
*** WALKTHROUGHS! ***
Here's an honest walkthrough in 43 moves:
Y
Y
S
GO TENT
GET AMULET
E
S
GO STORES
GET MIRROR
W
GET MAP
S
DRINK WATER
GET GEM
N
N
W
S
W
U
LOOK WAGON
S
GET SCEPTER
N
DROP MAP
E
HIT LION
E
PUT ROPE
D
D
GET LAMP
E
HOLD MIRROR
N
GET IDOL
S
W
U
U
W
SAY SCORE
And here's a cheat-laden walkthrough, in 22 moves:
Y
Y
S
W
S
W
U
DROP MAP
E
DROP IDOL
DROP GEM
DROP STAR
DROP LAMP
DROP AMULET
DROP SCEPTER
GET IDOL
GET GEM
GET STAR
GET LAMP
GET AMULET
GET SCEPTER
SAY SCORE
Enjoy!
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