Achievement Help Please

[Jazzy]

Hi, I don't know how to pay off Ozzy without giving him pills. Could someone nudge me in the right direction please? Thanks!

[Starmaker]

There's a clickable button in the meds vendormat interface. See what it does.

[Jazzy]

Thanks, I must have totally missed that! I'll check it out today.

I may have other achievement questions that I'll post here, as the first time I played I didn't look at what the achievements were beforehand but got quite a few. I'm playing through again and I know I have to figure out how Ray is sort of rude. I figure it's when he and Bennet are together as they're quite a pair, lol.

[ZX497]

Wait, are you talking about the achievement with a description "Ray's kind of a jerk"? The achievements are basically listed in order at which you can get them, and that's one of the earlier ones.

[Jazzy]

Yes, that one. I must have missed it in my "blind" playthrough because whatever I did or didn't do, the choices I made didn't trigger that one.

[ZX497]

Well, that's odd. This maybe means I'm missing some point fairly early on, since that achievement is worth one point O_o

[Jazzy]

That's probably one of my missing points, then. I haven't gotten an achievement in so long that I didn't realize you get points from them. Well, darn...

Ok, but so they don't meet up with Ray until the baseball field, so I know it's after that. I'm confused, lol.

Edit: If Wired and QuickEscape give points, then I'm screwed, lol.

[ZX497]

You get points for some of the achievements. They're not really tied together at all, it just happens certain actions give you both points and an achievement

For example, exposing the "No Smoking" -sign doesn't give you a single point.

[Starmaker]

I'm playing through again and I know I have to figure out how Ray is sort of rude.

No, he's "kind of a jerk". There's an important difference, because you can only be rude in communication, but you can be generally nasty all by yourself, too.

I somehow overlooked that option and only found it by thinking about the game while on the subway: "There totally should've been a way to... whoa!"

[Tropxe]

I take it you've figured out the really easy way to get the achievement to do the box puzzle without any viewing aids? As in, save before it, do it with the x-ray thing and make a note of what you did, load the last save, follow your own instructions, then save again and repeat it for each side of the puzzle. I guess there'd be no other way apart from extreme luck and/or perseverance.

I actually naturally did the "Ray's kind of a jerk" achievement straight away, since as soon as Emma mentioned writing a rude email but not sending it, I thought "I bet you can send it when you hack into the PC" since there's no other reason for her to mention it, from a meta viewpoint, and it seemed like a kind of Deux Ex assholish thing to do when hacking into a computer. I love how it plays out later on, too.

[Jazzy]

Yes, to the box puzzle, when I was looking through the achievements last night (early morning, lol) so I figured that one would have to wait until I got some sleep. I'm playing on Steam, so I know what the achievements are when I look them up.

[SamCarterX]

I take it you've figured out the really easy way to get the achievement to do the box puzzle without any viewing aids? As in, save before it, do it with the x-ray thing and make a note of what you did, load the last save, follow your own instructions, then save again and repeat it for each side of the puzzle. I guess there'd be no other way apart from extreme luck and/or perseverance.

I actually naturally did the "Ray's kind of a jerk" achievement straight away, since as soon as Emma mentioned writing a rude email but not sending it, I thought "I bet you can send it when you hack into the PC" since there's no other reason for her to mention it, from a meta viewpoint, and it seemed like a kind of Deux Ex assholish thing to do when hacking into a computer. I love how it plays out later on, too.

There's another easy way to solve the puzzle box without the viewing aid too. There's a walkthrough on Gamezebo which features screenshot "maps" of the correct path to solve each side as seen through the viewing aid. Just view the walkthrough alongside the game (in window mode or something) and follow the path.

[Jazzy]

Thank you, I found the page and will read through it to see if there was something I missed. Don't know if this walkthrough is mostlymeant to help you finish the game, or has more achievement/point tips, but I'll certainly check it out. That will make it easier than reloading save files to get the puzzlebox achievement anyways.

[Starmaker]

I guess there'd be no other way apart from extreme luck and/or perseverance.

There is. You plot the movements as a decision tree, up-left-down-right,  and do a breadth-first search on it as you go.

Random example:
Move up. Success! Mark the move as valid. Restart. (You can experimentally deduce the side button restarts the puzzle by watching the movable thingy return to its location, plotting a new tree after it returns and realizing they are identical.)
Move right. Success! Mark the move as valid. Restart.
Move down. Failure! Record the move as prohibited, put a big fat dot at the end of the line, restart (we don't know that restarting isn't necessary).
Move left instead. Success! Mark as valid, restart.
Move up again, then left. Failure! Mark as prohibited, restart.
Move up, then right. Success! Mark as valid, restart.
Move right, then up. Failure! Mark as prohibited, restart.
etc.

It hinges on the assumption that the sides are independent, but we know they are because they revert to starting position on switching.

I can't help but boast I've completed harder math puzzles: for example, in a certain unfinished game that I'm forbidden to link to, there's a hilly area with apple trees, and I had to collect apples from those trees by using a hovercar which consumed fuel according to a fairly complex formula depending on the distance and height moved (it hovers a fixed distance from the surface however high the surface might be). The task was to use up as little fuel as possible.

The movement occurred on a 15*15 grid (so, 225 points total). The game provided a tiered map (6 tiers in total I think) which I thought might lead me to the intuitive solution. But no! Turned out it was a "natural" terrain with completely arbitrary heights. So I had to collect 812 data points (yay diagonal movement!), then learn a programming language because I didn't have access to MatLab anymore (I chose Python), import the data and run two algorithms on it.

I actually naturally did the "Ray's kind of a jerk" achievement straight away...

I have an excuse! When I first saw this sequence, I was hacking government computers and citizens' mailboxes via USB drives and form history respectively in real life. Rule #1 of casual hacking is not to leave tracks! So I was totally focused on my inability to delete the password request email from the boss' inbox and on Ray doing a lookup of himself. BAD MOVE, DUDE. Depending on how magical the totally-non-PCR DNA analyzer was, he could've swiped just about anything belonging to the secretary. At least try it before signing off "Ray Abbot was here".

There's another easy way to solve the puzzle box without the viewing aid too. There's a walkthrough on Gamezebo which features screenshot "maps" of the correct path...

[Jazzy]

I still can't blackmail Tortoise. I gave him the will and death cert., talk about the picture of Amul breaking in, and everything I can think of. Please help!