Eric Fry shot me an email the other night, in which he outlined an interesting discovery he had made as part of his ongoing work to implement Martian Dreams support in Nuvie:

I’ve just come across an interesting bit of code buried in the original Martian Dreams game.exe. It looks like Origin had originally planned to have a thing called “battle frenzy”, which I’m assuming the player would enter by eating the red berries.

I can see code in the game which handles this logic but it does not seem to be connected in any way. When you try to use the red berries, you just get a message saying that the berries aren’t edible. The red berries do have a quantity though.

The disconnected red berry usecode checks to see if you are in combat mode, if not then it prints the message:

“That would be a waste outside of combat.”

If the party is in combat mode it prints “<actor_name> enters a battle frenzy!” and sets a flag on the actor which increases their strength and dexterity by 3 points each. It also seems to last until the player exits combat mode.

I’ve attached a screenshot of the disassembly of the original logic.

I wonder if Origin were asked to remove the content to meet classification? Or maybe they had to change it in a subsequent version after the initial release.

I’m pretty sure it’s logic that isn’t accessible (I could be wrong) in the game which is cool.

Here’s the complete disassembly of the code in question:

As you can see, Eric’s assessment is spot-on; the conditional logic is all there, as are the bits of text that would in theory be printed out should the logic ever be triggered. Which, evidently, it cannot be.

And yes, before you ask:

Yes, I’ll be adding support for it in Nuvie. 🙂 I’m just not sure if I should make it the default behavior. I’ll also have a look to see how easy it is to get the red berries. I’m also just assuming that it should be activated by the red berries. I’m open to suggestions on how it should be or actually is used.

At least as far as the Codex of Ultima Wisdom knows, the red berries are useless and have no function in Martian Dreams. Which makes them something of an oddity, really, seeing as how every other berry type does have a function.

So this is a very interesting — very cool — discovery that Eric has made, and I for one look forward to seeing the effects of the red berries on combat in Martian Dreams.