Well this was a pain in the backside and no mistake. I couldn’t quite get my head round DOSbox so ended up playing it in a browser at an abandonware site and used cam software to isolate the gameplay. The big issue with this is that I can’t quit any of the rooms – the control for that was CTRL+ESC which just brings up the Windows Start Menu.
Anyway here we are, Bother’s Bar Plays The Crystal Maze On An MS-DOS Abandonware Site Badly. Enjoy!
Just like the TV show, I am screaming at the screen watching this!
Having played this a million times as a teenager, the key with the ’21 all ways’ is to put whatever the ‘middle’ number of the sequence is in the middle. So because you had 3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11, you need 7 in the middle. Otherwise you can’t do it. Similarly with the ‘no adjacent colours or symbols’, the key is basically to make diagonal stripes of colours, and then shift the shapes around (or vice versa).
I do remember the difficulty level across different games being so variable. Some are very easy, some (particularly the physicals) are near enough impossible, even when you move the difficulty level to 0. It’s also a shame so many games are ‘one mistake and you lose’, as it doesn’t give you enough time to learn, at least not without playing the whole game tons of times.
In fact, in case this ever helps one day, the middle number is always one-third of the magic number.
I think at one point I tried to work out the average by going 21×3 and then dividing by 9, which is completely correct but I sort of gave up.
Heh, I tried the diagonal thing with the symbols first.
For some reason I found working the range of the magic square numbers quite hard!
The version I have seems OK, but I did remap controls, which is a bit tricky, so I didn’t have the problem you did. The Collection Chamber has a reasonably nice installer, but it’s still a bit of a brain bender.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer a shameless plug for the arcade version, also available:
https://mrbabbageslockup.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/arcade-crystal-maze/
News from Italy:
Nicolò Scalfi, 87-times champion of the Italian “Who’s Still Standing?” couldn’t defend his title and went home with all of €651,000 the highest sum won on the show.
https://twitter.com/httplew/status/1147568637022068736/video/1