Titanic Mystery: Ao no Senritsu
75 days until the vernal equinox
This is a Famicom Disk System game, which means I’m going to have to do some tweaking. You're treated to an animation of Mario and Luigi jumping around while the game loads.
Later on, improvements in the NES cartridge meant that larger games were possible, and they were never going to get the disk system to work with the American NES anyway. Games that were imported to the US such as Castlevania and Metroid were imported as cartridges. There is at least one game that makes use of the extra sound channel offered by the disk system and was therefore never released here. It’s called Otocky. I’ll get to that eventually.
Titanic Mystery: Ao no Senritsu
Which translates to “Blue Shiver” or “Blue Shudder.”
This game was released in 1987. The Commodore 64 game it was based on was released in 1986. Robert Ballard found debris from the Titanic wreck in September of 1985 and the hull, which had broken in two parts, soon after that, after taking care of a few other matters involving wrecked nuclear submarines for the US Navy. In July of 1986, Ballard conducted a study of the wreck bringing along Alvin and Jason Jr, which could peer at the ship’s interior.
And with that expedition died any pipe dream of raising the ship.
He published a book on the Titanic in 1988. I’m not sure how many of said facts were common knowledge by the time of this game’s release.
The Titanic sunk off the Newfoundland coast and while the continental shelf extends pretty far out, the Titanic didn’t quite reach it. Had the collision occurred a few days later, it would be sitting on the continental shelf. Had it sunk 100 miles south, it would be in a deep valley and may have never been found.
That's the name I picked for myself.
You get your choice of three characters. Reika.
Momoko.
Marlene.
No matter who you choose, it's all the same, right down to the sprite.
She takes three (in game) minutes to walk to the frigging door.
The $ door lets you call your investors, which includes a bunch of people unethical enough to support this expedition: the Overseer of Saudi Arabia, Josef Stalin, and a few really suspicious looking guys in sunglasses, or you can trade treasure to the scientist guy for important equipment.
The second door lets you talk to the press. You answer questions to build up your reputation in a whole bunch of cities.
Unfortunately, it’s all in Japanese. Fortunately, you can beat the game in seven days, which is all the time you have if you don’t sell those priceless artifacts away to collect dust in some rich guy’s basement. If you don’t save, anyway. And by "Don't save," I mean, go to the last door.
The moon door would save your game and would move time forward by one (1) day. The game appears to lock up when I try this. Supposedly you can walk off the bed but also supposedly the message disappears but it never does.
So I've decided that I'm going to play as long as possible before I have to quit through no fault of my own.
Diving also makes you change from side A to side B and even a real Famicom Disk System is awfully fickle about that. Just keep mashing the swap disk button or if you're using the real thing, keep
For whatever reason, it doesn’t take time to go down to the bottom of the ocean. I’ll accept this break from realism, given that time is of the essence.
The ship looks relatively intact. In reality, softwoods like pine, along with any papers, textiles, human bodies, or food that weren't inside of leather bags or suitcases (the tanning process discourages bacteria) would be the first to rot away. Most of the paneling and framing was made from those woods. Hardwoods like teak and mahogany fared a lot better.
There doesn't seem to be an English translation out there so I'm using a guide on Gamefaqs with a few explanations of the text and a playthrough on Youtube.
The guide explains a few things and also gives a description of a few plot points but I have no idea what these messages mean.
The first object we need is a safe.
Water down there is a fairly uniform 0-3° Celsius away from steam vents, which can attain temperatures of up to 400° C (the immense pressure keeps it from turning to a gas).
In what she's wearing, this would result in death by hypothermia but there exist drysuits to mitigate this.
I understand that these doors have been sitting at the bottom of the ocean for 80 years but there is no reason they should be this difficult to open.
We have to use the safe to break the door down.
ERFUCKER BASTARD WANKJOB SON OF A MOTHERLESS GOAT!!
The problem is that this game uses the same command for drop that it uses for action. Now, that’s not what I was thinking. I was thinking there was a grab / drop button and an action button. If you press the enter door button and there isn’t a door, you slam into the wall and fall down to the ground. Also, if you hold a directional button while pressing the enter door button, you’ll rotate the room.
You get a purple ring for your efforts. Since this isn't Legend of Zelda and there aren't any enemies and I'm trying to beat this game as quickly as possible, I'm just going to leave it behind. It's what the passengers would have wanted.
Ah, it's just a bunch of moldy old bears.
Moldy! Old! I'm gonna get something to eat.
The bear is talking to you and asking you to take it with you.
One of the disembodied spirits is trapped within the door.
Talk to him and he says something like "on the first day, the Titanic was destroyed."
"on the second day, I died."
A lot of the puzzles in this game involve locked doors.
We find a hacksaw that is miraculously in useable condition in the control room.
It turns purple.
Guess what we're going to do with that fork.
That's right. We opened a door with it. And since it's made from the same material as keys in Zelda, it vanishes into aether.
The hacksaw also rusts away to nothing when we cut open a second chain.
I can't seem to pick this thing up.
That’s not even a battery, that’s why. It’s a float bladder. In the backstory to the Commodore game, a previous expedition placed a bunch of them down there and then forgot about them. Or maybe the overseer funding their expedition was paying them in reptile skulls.
Having a dead battery in your possession causes an earthquake that opens up the way to the Marconi transmitter. You can also bring the dead battery back up to the surface, exchange it with presumably Dr. Light, for a live battery, use the battery to operate the float bladder, and then activate three more, two of which you need the electric cutter to get to.
Activating them gets you a bad ending. There's a mysterious nuclear explosion in the Pacific Ocean and I'm sure someone meant "Atlantic." I don't know if this is different in the Commodore version because I only just found about it today and have not the time right now but I promise you that I will one day report on my findings.
All I know is that it looks a hell of a lot worse than the Famicom version, that maybe it won't lock up when I try to save, and that you control a robot rather than the world's greatest deep sea diver.
Bringing the Marconi transmitter to Dr. Light gets you a electric cutter.
We're going down to E Deck, the lowest level in the game, presumably to save disk space.
This is incredibly annoying. I got the first door open relatively quickly, which is to say, eight minutes minus the time it took for me to get from the first door to the second door.
The guide on Gamefaqs that is pretty comprehensive and there’s a playthrough on Youtube that has almost been helpful with the dreaded pixel hunt. I’m doing the exact fucking thing she does but the video on Youtube just so happens to blur just at this point.
PIXEL HUNT FUCKERY BULLSHIT ARGH FUCKING PIXEL HUNT LUCK-BASED MISSION FUCK SHIT PIXEL HUNTING FUCK EVERY PIXEL HUNT IN EXISTENCE JESUS MARY AND JOSEF STALIN NOT EVEN SIERRA WOULD DO SOMETHING THIS ASSHOLISH!!!!
AND THE MOLDY OLD BEAR YOU RODE IN ON!
LANDLUBBER!
Half an hour later. And I get it, not by trying to match my position to the one in the youtube playthrough exactly but by rage-mashing.
You never need anything on C deck. There’s “radioactivity” down there. Also the Captain’s Log. Since it’s all in Japanese, I won’t be bothering with any of that.
This might be a reference to the book and movie Raise the Titanic! which had a plot revolving around byzanium, a radioactive power source better than uranium or thorium or plutonium that just so happened to be on board the Titanic. Of course, in that, there is no byzanium.
You can find some rad-away along with Captain Theoden’s corpse.
If you press the action button when you're too low, the game calls you a pervert.
You get Pamela's necklace. Now we have to back up to the surface again. And there's no quick way to get back to D deck.
There are at least twelve screens of Japanese text and I didn't bother to screenshot all of them.
Just keep selecting the first option and you'll end up with a photograph.
Now give the photograph and she'll give you an engagement ring. Why, yes, you have to make your way all the way there all over again. Good thing you have more than enough oxygen. And you can stay down there until whatever time you want, but if you surface past 17:00, you immediately go to bed.
This is Mike. Give him the engagement ring so he can be reunited with Pamela in the next life.
This is the Power Shield. It doesn't show up in your inventory.
The Power Shield allows you to use the Titanic’s onboard teleporter (!)
What… the… fuck?
I think I just ended up in the Event Horizon.
At least the music’s different. For most of the game, you get this irritatingly catchy seven second loop and when you’re on the surface, you get that irritatingly catchy seven second loop played at half speed.
The bear wants you to interact with this thing.
You get a key.
As far as I’ve researched, said pressure would have a negligible effect on the human body. Hypothetically, say, if James Cameron financed Titanic with Mafia money, if he failed to pay it back and was fitted with a pair of concrete galoshes and thrown overboard at the titanic, he’d drown long before he reaches the bottom. If he was fitted with a pair of concrete galoshes and some scuba gear with the standard N2-O2-Ar-CO2-Ne-He-CH4-Kr mix, he’d die from narcosis at about 100 meters. Either way, he’d be a relatively intact corpse once he hits the abyssal plain. A bit nibbled.
I’ve heard stories about divers trying to give their oxygen to passing fish.
My guess is whales and seals are resistant to the adverse effects of breathing dense air.
Taking the Titanic model sends you back to the Dark World.
I don't speak Japanese but she sounds as confused as I am.
The bear remarks about its real body being nearby and it was just using it as a vessel.
At the end of this small maze, we come across this chrysalis.
Interact with it and it will change color.
Aliens.
I suppose you could go down there if you had some protection from the numbing cold and a hypothetical gas mixture that didn't cause narcosis. Although I think it might be hard to actually breathe.
My theory is that this entire game is a hallucination caused by Rapture of the Deep.
In my rush to get through this game, I completely forgot to post about the more bonkers efforts to raise the Titanic. In 1914, a Denver architect by the name of Charles Smith, proposed attaching electromagnets to a submarine to find the wreck and then attaching electromagnets to a fleet of barges to pull it to the surface. And somehow, it would once again be seaworthy. World War I put a definite stop to that plan.
Other proposals involved pumping vaseline, molten wax, or millions upon millions of ping-pong balls. Ping pong balls would be crushed by the pressure far before they reach the bottom. Benthos glass would be too costly. Encasing it in ice would involve half a million tons of liquid nitrogen.
It'd be more practical to drain the Atlantic.
The ending screen is in Engrish rather than Japanese. No idea why.
Burning Question: Whose brilliant idea was it to have the same button that uses an item also drop an item? In a game with pixel hunting?
This is a Famicom Disk System game, which means I’m going to have to do some tweaking. You're treated to an animation of Mario and Luigi jumping around while the game loads.
Later on, improvements in the NES cartridge meant that larger games were possible, and they were never going to get the disk system to work with the American NES anyway. Games that were imported to the US such as Castlevania and Metroid were imported as cartridges. There is at least one game that makes use of the extra sound channel offered by the disk system and was therefore never released here. It’s called Otocky. I’ll get to that eventually.
Titanic Mystery: Ao no Senritsu
Which translates to “Blue Shiver” or “Blue Shudder.”
This game was released in 1987. The Commodore 64 game it was based on was released in 1986. Robert Ballard found debris from the Titanic wreck in September of 1985 and the hull, which had broken in two parts, soon after that, after taking care of a few other matters involving wrecked nuclear submarines for the US Navy. In July of 1986, Ballard conducted a study of the wreck bringing along Alvin and Jason Jr, which could peer at the ship’s interior.
And with that expedition died any pipe dream of raising the ship.
He published a book on the Titanic in 1988. I’m not sure how many of said facts were common knowledge by the time of this game’s release.
The Titanic sunk off the Newfoundland coast and while the continental shelf extends pretty far out, the Titanic didn’t quite reach it. Had the collision occurred a few days later, it would be sitting on the continental shelf. Had it sunk 100 miles south, it would be in a deep valley and may have never been found.
That's the name I picked for myself.
You get your choice of three characters. Reika.
Momoko.
Marlene.
No matter who you choose, it's all the same, right down to the sprite.
She takes three (in game) minutes to walk to the frigging door.
The $ door lets you call your investors, which includes a bunch of people unethical enough to support this expedition: the Overseer of Saudi Arabia, Josef Stalin, and a few really suspicious looking guys in sunglasses, or you can trade treasure to the scientist guy for important equipment.
The second door lets you talk to the press. You answer questions to build up your reputation in a whole bunch of cities.
Unfortunately, it’s all in Japanese. Fortunately, you can beat the game in seven days, which is all the time you have if you don’t sell those priceless artifacts away to collect dust in some rich guy’s basement. If you don’t save, anyway. And by "Don't save," I mean, go to the last door.
The moon door would save your game and would move time forward by one (1) day. The game appears to lock up when I try this. Supposedly you can walk off the bed but also supposedly the message disappears but it never does.
So I've decided that I'm going to play as long as possible before I have to quit through no fault of my own.
Diving also makes you change from side A to side B and even a real Famicom Disk System is awfully fickle about that. Just keep mashing the swap disk button or if you're using the real thing, keep
For whatever reason, it doesn’t take time to go down to the bottom of the ocean. I’ll accept this break from realism, given that time is of the essence.
The ship looks relatively intact. In reality, softwoods like pine, along with any papers, textiles, human bodies, or food that weren't inside of leather bags or suitcases (the tanning process discourages bacteria) would be the first to rot away. Most of the paneling and framing was made from those woods. Hardwoods like teak and mahogany fared a lot better.
There doesn't seem to be an English translation out there so I'm using a guide on Gamefaqs with a few explanations of the text and a playthrough on Youtube.
The guide explains a few things and also gives a description of a few plot points but I have no idea what these messages mean.
The first object we need is a safe.
Water down there is a fairly uniform 0-3° Celsius away from steam vents, which can attain temperatures of up to 400° C (the immense pressure keeps it from turning to a gas).
In what she's wearing, this would result in death by hypothermia but there exist drysuits to mitigate this.
I understand that these doors have been sitting at the bottom of the ocean for 80 years but there is no reason they should be this difficult to open.
We have to use the safe to break the door down.
ERFUCKER BASTARD WANKJOB SON OF A MOTHERLESS GOAT!!
The problem is that this game uses the same command for drop that it uses for action. Now, that’s not what I was thinking. I was thinking there was a grab / drop button and an action button. If you press the enter door button and there isn’t a door, you slam into the wall and fall down to the ground. Also, if you hold a directional button while pressing the enter door button, you’ll rotate the room.
You get a purple ring for your efforts. Since this isn't Legend of Zelda and there aren't any enemies and I'm trying to beat this game as quickly as possible, I'm just going to leave it behind. It's what the passengers would have wanted.
Ah, it's just a bunch of moldy old bears.
Moldy! Old! I'm gonna get something to eat.
The bear is talking to you and asking you to take it with you.
One of the disembodied spirits is trapped within the door.
Talk to him and he says something like "on the first day, the Titanic was destroyed."
"on the second day, I died."
A lot of the puzzles in this game involve locked doors.
We find a hacksaw that is miraculously in useable condition in the control room.
It turns purple.
Guess what we're going to do with that fork.
That's right. We opened a door with it. And since it's made from the same material as keys in Zelda, it vanishes into aether.
The hacksaw also rusts away to nothing when we cut open a second chain.
I can't seem to pick this thing up.
That’s not even a battery, that’s why. It’s a float bladder. In the backstory to the Commodore game, a previous expedition placed a bunch of them down there and then forgot about them. Or maybe the overseer funding their expedition was paying them in reptile skulls.
Having a dead battery in your possession causes an earthquake that opens up the way to the Marconi transmitter. You can also bring the dead battery back up to the surface, exchange it with presumably Dr. Light, for a live battery, use the battery to operate the float bladder, and then activate three more, two of which you need the electric cutter to get to.
Activating them gets you a bad ending. There's a mysterious nuclear explosion in the Pacific Ocean and I'm sure someone meant "Atlantic." I don't know if this is different in the Commodore version because I only just found about it today and have not the time right now but I promise you that I will one day report on my findings.
All I know is that it looks a hell of a lot worse than the Famicom version, that maybe it won't lock up when I try to save, and that you control a robot rather than the world's greatest deep sea diver.
Bringing the Marconi transmitter to Dr. Light gets you a electric cutter.
We're going down to E Deck, the lowest level in the game, presumably to save disk space.
This is incredibly annoying. I got the first door open relatively quickly, which is to say, eight minutes minus the time it took for me to get from the first door to the second door.
The guide on Gamefaqs that is pretty comprehensive and there’s a playthrough on Youtube that has almost been helpful with the dreaded pixel hunt. I’m doing the exact fucking thing she does but the video on Youtube just so happens to blur just at this point.
PIXEL HUNT FUCKERY BULLSHIT ARGH FUCKING PIXEL HUNT LUCK-BASED MISSION FUCK SHIT PIXEL HUNTING FUCK EVERY PIXEL HUNT IN EXISTENCE JESUS MARY AND JOSEF STALIN NOT EVEN SIERRA WOULD DO SOMETHING THIS ASSHOLISH!!!!
AND THE MOLDY OLD BEAR YOU RODE IN ON!
LANDLUBBER!
Half an hour later. And I get it, not by trying to match my position to the one in the youtube playthrough exactly but by rage-mashing.
You never need anything on C deck. There’s “radioactivity” down there. Also the Captain’s Log. Since it’s all in Japanese, I won’t be bothering with any of that.
This might be a reference to the book and movie Raise the Titanic! which had a plot revolving around byzanium, a radioactive power source better than uranium or thorium or plutonium that just so happened to be on board the Titanic. Of course, in that, there is no byzanium.
You can find some rad-away along with Captain Theoden’s corpse.
If you press the action button when you're too low, the game calls you a pervert.
You get Pamela's necklace. Now we have to back up to the surface again. And there's no quick way to get back to D deck.
There are at least twelve screens of Japanese text and I didn't bother to screenshot all of them.
Just keep selecting the first option and you'll end up with a photograph.
Now give the photograph and she'll give you an engagement ring. Why, yes, you have to make your way all the way there all over again. Good thing you have more than enough oxygen. And you can stay down there until whatever time you want, but if you surface past 17:00, you immediately go to bed.
This is Mike. Give him the engagement ring so he can be reunited with Pamela in the next life.
This is the Power Shield. It doesn't show up in your inventory.
The Power Shield allows you to use the Titanic’s onboard teleporter (!)
What… the… fuck?
I think I just ended up in the Event Horizon.
At least the music’s different. For most of the game, you get this irritatingly catchy seven second loop and when you’re on the surface, you get that irritatingly catchy seven second loop played at half speed.
The bear wants you to interact with this thing.
You get a key.
As far as I’ve researched, said pressure would have a negligible effect on the human body. Hypothetically, say, if James Cameron financed Titanic with Mafia money, if he failed to pay it back and was fitted with a pair of concrete galoshes and thrown overboard at the titanic, he’d drown long before he reaches the bottom. If he was fitted with a pair of concrete galoshes and some scuba gear with the standard N2-O2-Ar-CO2-Ne-He-CH4-Kr mix, he’d die from narcosis at about 100 meters. Either way, he’d be a relatively intact corpse once he hits the abyssal plain. A bit nibbled.
I’ve heard stories about divers trying to give their oxygen to passing fish.
My guess is whales and seals are resistant to the adverse effects of breathing dense air.
Taking the Titanic model sends you back to the Dark World.
I don't speak Japanese but she sounds as confused as I am.
The bear remarks about its real body being nearby and it was just using it as a vessel.
At the end of this small maze, we come across this chrysalis.
Interact with it and it will change color.
Aliens.
I suppose you could go down there if you had some protection from the numbing cold and a hypothetical gas mixture that didn't cause narcosis. Although I think it might be hard to actually breathe.
My theory is that this entire game is a hallucination caused by Rapture of the Deep.
In my rush to get through this game, I completely forgot to post about the more bonkers efforts to raise the Titanic. In 1914, a Denver architect by the name of Charles Smith, proposed attaching electromagnets to a submarine to find the wreck and then attaching electromagnets to a fleet of barges to pull it to the surface. And somehow, it would once again be seaworthy. World War I put a definite stop to that plan.
Other proposals involved pumping vaseline, molten wax, or millions upon millions of ping-pong balls. Ping pong balls would be crushed by the pressure far before they reach the bottom. Benthos glass would be too costly. Encasing it in ice would involve half a million tons of liquid nitrogen.
It'd be more practical to drain the Atlantic.
The ending screen is in Engrish rather than Japanese. No idea why.
Burning Question: Whose brilliant idea was it to have the same button that uses an item also drop an item? In a game with pixel hunting?