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Comment by scioto | Hacker News Reader

I still have the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, complete with scratch and sniff card, and the 3-D (blue-red) glasses for the enclosed comic book. If you don't have VR or first-person, it was the next best thing: they told you when to scratch and sniff.

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Favourite part of this game: the untangling cream and the bonus joke about the rabbit.

Most hated part of this game: HOP, CLAP, KWEEPA.

Also funny how I recall this stuff vividly more than 3 decades later!

My first experience of IF was the tape-based Classic Adventure on the Amstrad CPC. My family bought the CPC late 1985, I bought Amstrad Action in December 1985 and saw the advert for it and new I wanted it more than all the other games that were reviewed with their flashy graphics and beeps and what-have-you.

I still have a couple of Invisiclues hint books. I wonder if the special markers are still available and if they would still work on these old books.

There were a couple of standard "invisible inks." [0] I assume Invisiclues used one of them--most likely baking soda given they didn't use heat to reveal. No idea how stable either of those were as inks.

[0] https://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/files/secretstoppers1pdf

It might be the same as the markers found in these "Yes & Know" books: https://www.amazon.com/Lee-Publications-Invisible-Know-8-88/...

I think that Invisiclues is good idea, and that UHS format can be used as a computer file with a similar use. There are FOSS implementations of UHS such as OpenUHS and FreeUHS. Maybe someone will be able to rewrite the Invisiclues in UHS format. (I also wrote a UHS writer program in uxn. And, I had written UHS parser in PostScript; if you have printer with invisible ink (or scratch-off layer) then maybe it will be possible to use this PostScript code to make a program that will print out with invisible ink, too.)

i had that back in the 80s - managed to move something like n,s,w and then gave up, good name for a game though, and about typical for me and infocom.

I've never been great at working my way all the way through games. I think I may have completed that one--mostly because I could get hints from the author :-)

with zero prior knowledge other than its title, should one approach the sights and smells cautiously..?

that smell is: pizza!

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