The kink in your neck is from sleeping in a chair in the corner of your hotel room: don't do that again. Sleeping in a chair is from coming back last night so dead tired from an all-night stakeout that you basically managed to fire the keys onto the night table and collapse into the nearest non-floor object. The all-night stakeout gig was an act of desperation. The desperation is from being so short of negotiable currency that the subject of rent became such a sore point between you and your recently ex-landlord that you now find yourself living in this hotel. The lack of cash is due to, well, let's call it poor financial planning. That and about a dozen or so really bad wagers on the ponies.

So here you are, stiff neck and all. And a couple of resolutions. One: No more ponies, at least until they shape up and start pulling their weight. Two: No more all-night stakeouts. Especially not like this one: your meager excuse for a client was so uninformed that the woman whose apartment he had you watching--his soon-to-be ex-wife--wasn't even in Los Angeles. And hadn't been for two months. Of course you didn't find this out until sometime this morning. Right before you found out that said client had also skipped town without exactly leaving a forwarding address.

"Go back to sleep," you tell yourself. That's solid advice. But when's the last time you listened to solid advice, particularly your own? "Things will look better in the morning." Except it is the morning, and things don't look exceptionally better.

Although this is L.A. And in L.A., somebody's always in trouble. There's always something new happening. Something new popping up.

Like that envelope under the door...

Like adventure games but can't help but feel you're missing something? Tired of "puzzles" that consist of rolling the mouse around until something under the pointer lights up? Or simply clicking on everything in sight until something happens?

In Guilty Bastards we made up the rules--you make up the rest. Everything in the game has "rules" associated with it that are pretty much what you'd expect: containers can hold smaller items, ropes can be tied to other things, doors can be opened and closed, large objects can be looked under and hidden behind, whatever you want to try. Because of that, you can do things that the author never even thought of. In fact, your means of solving a puzzle or overcoming an obstacle might be completely different from what was originally imagined.

Guilty Bastards lets you ask anyone about anything. Or, if you like, you can tell them what you've found out and see where that gets you, what kind of a reaction you get. And of course people--guilty or not--will sometimes lie to you, or at least hide the truth, depending on what their personal motivation is. If that happens, you can trick people into telling the truth or read between the lines or confront them with evidence to prove they're lying or...well, it's really up to you.

You can download Guilty Bastards now.

Support

For hints and playing tips, a good place to start is the newsgroup rec.games.int-fiction. Unfortunately we cannot respond directly to all hint requests; please do not email The General Coffee Company with hint requests.