Garfield: Winter's Tail - Fixed and finished!
 

I usually keep all my Octotiggy posts in one thread, but I thought some might find this interesting outside of our usual videos.

Last Xmas we played Garfield: Winter's Tail on our YouTube channel. It's not the best game, but the graphics are pretty good. I made my wife suffer through it, only to be met by a huge glitch in the ice skating level that was always present when I played this as a kid.

For anyone who knows this game, the ice skating level is basically a big maze of snow on a frozen lake, and the obstacles include water and thin ice. As you progress through the maze, you eventually come to a section of garbled textures that behave like unpassable water. This always confused me as a kid, as I figured either a) this was an intentional dead-end and I just wasn't navigating the maze correctly, or b) that my copy of the game was glitched. Because of the garbled textures, I could never finish the ice skating level or see the game's ending.

11 months later, @RoePipi contacted us on Twitter and said that he was going to dig into the game's code to see what the deal with the garbled textures was, as it had bugged him as a kid too. He found that the proper ice skating level map was actually on the disk, but was loaded incorrectly by the game, garbling the whole bottom half of the level. Though it seems like a bug, RoePipi posited that this could actually be intentional copy protection.

Either way, he managed to create a WinUAE game save that features the ice skating level loaded correctly, and also drew out a level map. We played the level again, though I still got stuck in the maze (due to me trying to play it without the map). RoePipi also created a version of the level where all the snow "walls" are replaced with passable tree shadow textures, which means you can go absolutely everywhere. This was the most interesting to me, as it meant we could look at a few items on the level that we'd never seen before.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CT3qOk0U8AAN40c.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CT2kJgnWIAExBjm.png

Once we found the exit, we could finally watch the game's ending. I've already seen the C64 version's ending on YouTube (and the ZX Spectrum version too, I'm pretty sure), but never the Amiga version (which obviously looks much better). The game isn't that great, and the ending is short, weird, and doesn't make much sense, but I'm glad to have finally seen it. I'd be happy to hear anyone's interpretation of it! :D

Here's RoePipi documenting his process.

Click here to see the ending of Garfield: Winter's Tail!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUHpbYJWoAALLbm.png

That's interesting story :)

Well, you surely are a patient person. Sheesh what a boring final level! So boring in fact that the dev apparently didn't bother to play-test it till the end :)

Kudos to RoePipi for figuring it out. Quite some technical wizardry.

made me laugh whos saying what the fuck is this:lol

Haha, that's my wife. When we played Garfield last year she didn't think much of it (and fair enough), so she was surprised when I brought it up again this year. It was worth it for that reaction alone.

Garfield surprised me many years later; when I was a kid I couldn't get it to do much more than walking around picking up stuff and kicking the dog around. The only reason I kept playing it is because at random moments I did keep discovering new things that you can do, like grabbing the bird in the park or breaking through a hole in a wall in town. That and it has a catchy tune.

It was when I saw a longplay of it that I discovered there is actually a purpose to many of the items in the game and that there is a whole sequence of events that you go through in the game to get to an actual end. Blew my mind.

Oh right, I meant to say that I put her through Garfield: Winter's Tail last year. I'll definitely be putting her through Garfield: Big Fat Hairy Deal later too :D

Derp, crossed wires :) BFHD is still the better of the two, but such weird gameplay mechanics :)

can you please indicate which ADF (cracked) i suppose was used and had this corruption on tiles ?

All I can say is don't use [Garfield - Winter's Tail (1989)(Edge, The)[cr OCL].adf]. The map disintegrated on me half way down. There was a disk good enough to ferret out a map in one of those whd packs though.
http://hol.abime.net/2698/gamemap

Also Garfield - Winter's Tail (1989)(Softek)[cr Oracle].adf. That's the ADF we used originally, though I do remember seeing this same bug on disk when I was a kid (though it was most definitely a cracked disk too).

I wonder if there is more to see in that "HELP" message in the top-right corner. Even in the HOL game map version I can't make out any further words close to it.

Ok, the error must be reported to the guys correcting the TOSEC then.

Have not tried the game. But are you sure that the level can't be completed? What I can see can the level be completed if you go your own way and don't follow the trails.

You do not mind uploading the fixed ADF to the Zone? I'm to lazy hex-editing it myself :D

This is what happened when they played it

https://youtu.be/a1fLl7GGjfk?t=13m57s

Aw man, I wrote out a big reply last night but I must've forgot to submit after previewing.

The whole bottom half of the level is glitched, and the exit point of the maze is within that bottom half. Even if you could get to the other side of the maze by carving out your own path (which you can't; following the tracks that head east at the beginning of the level is about as close as you can get), you still wouldn't be able to get past the glitched textures to reach the exit. As far as I can tell from playing and looking at the map RoePipi put together, you have to follow the tracks that head south from the beginning of the level to get anywhere near the exit. I'm happy to be proven wrong!

All the files we used are linked in the comments of our YouTube video. We loaded up RoePipi's .uss files directly in WinUAE. After the level is loaded, you have to swap in a Garfield: Winter's Tail ADF before you finish the level, otherwise it will just fade to an eternally loading black screen. This worked for us, even using the glitched ADF. I'm not sure if that's the "right" or sensible way to do things, but it worked for us in as much as we finally got to see the end of the game!

If you have any other questions, it might be best to ask @RoePipi on Twitter, as he did all the heavy lifting on this one!

The WHDLoad version I made years ago does not seem to match the corrupt data shown in the screenshot. It might be where he extracted the good data from?

From what I gathered from our conversation on Twitter, RoePipi was still able to pull the good level data from the same ADF. I could be wrong.

And hey, NZ!

Very interesting Mister Octopus :great

...a fixed .ADF would be much appreciated ;)