The Longest Journey 6: Getting Past the Borked Part

Oh dear. I though I wasn't going to be able to proceed. I hit a nasty glitch that turns out to be extremely common in this old game.

At one point you need to try to enter the city police station. But when you enter, the cutscene turns out to be corrupted somehow and the game crashes completely. I ran in. Crash. I walked in. Crash. I tried over and over again hoping to get lucky. Crash crash crash crash crash.

Corrupted cutscene

So I looked on the GOG community discussion board, and found out that lots and lots of people have encountered this problem. Sadly, none of the solutions there worked, but one commenter said that there was a workaround.

So I went to the walkthrough and found out how you're supposed to get into the police station anyway. The only reason you need to enter where the game crashes is to talk to the cop there to find out that only prisoners and garbage can get in. Then you go out into the street again, and:

I'm going to reveal the solution. I don't think this is a spoiler, because it looks like this is such a common problem that people need to know it.

The real way in

1. Go back to the street, to the screen where you enter from the subway. Touch the roadblock. April will read a number on it. Now look at the street sign and touch it. April will read a number on that.

2. Put your hand on the roadblock again. April will change the number on it, and the roadblock will move.

3. Climb into the dumpster that was behind the roadblock's original position. April automatically will be transported into the police station.

The only reason to go into the front door of the station, where the game crashes, is to find out that garbage can get into the station. Therefore, the puzzle becomes getting the garbage to be picked up by the automated system to get a ride into the station.

Whew!

It's a shame, though. The YouTube walkthrough I'm using for these screenshots has the whole scene with the cop in the police station. It's quite funny, but those of us with corrupted files can't see it.

Meanwhile, before that, I had another extremely long conversation with Cortez.

AND! I finally read April's diary. You access it not in the inventory screen, but on the main menu page (where it says "April's Diary." Ahem.)  Turns out to be a really useful item. Not only does it give some nice backstory for April, but when the Control Icon briefly flashes throughout the game, that means that her diary has been updated. It's a really handy way to keep track of what you're trying to do in the game and why. Really handy.

So this is serious progress! I really thought I was done when I kept getting that crash.

Also, I'm going to be fairly busy in the coming weeks. If I have time over the weekend I'm going to try to get through as much of the game as possible, but things that are out of my control could slow me down considerably. Just a heads-up about that! (I did get though the door to the police locker room at least. I will pick it up from there when I can.)

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