Solution to Blue Bomber

The answers to the clues fit the number of squares in the polyominoes and should be entered in standard book order. All of the answers have unique first letters A-Y to help resolve any ambiguities.

Abe’s language	JAPANESE
Adept	SKILLFUL
Aerospace, construction, entertainment, or finance, say	INDUSTRY
Baby goats	KIDS
Card novel	XENOCIDE
Crafty	WILY
Elvis’ genre	ROCK AND ROLL
Evil or No	DOCTOR
Final	ULTIMATE
Handheld anti-personnel weapon	GRENADE
Journey	QUEST
Knight’s protection	ARMOR
Loud dynamic	FORTE
Occasional eruptor	VOLCANO
One knob on an equalizer, maybe	TREBLE
Outscore	BEAT
Place of research	LABORATORY
Places where you might find cheap used goods	YARDSALES
Precipice	CLIFF
Router’s milieu	NETWORK
State of the sun?	PLASMA
Tom Cruise, in a certain 80’s film	MAVERICK
Vedder who sings “Jeremy”	EDDIE
Well-armed cephalopod?	OCTOPUS
What a ram may do	HEADBUTT

Sort these alphabetically, and then as suggested by the grid, place these polyominoes in 6x6 grids using groups of 5 consecutive answers. The first 5 polyominoes make a 5x5 grid instead.

ARMOR BEAT CLIFF DOCTOR EDDIE	FORTE GRENADE HEADBUTT INDUSTRY JAPANESE	KIDS LABORATORY MAVERICK NETWORK OCTOPUS	PLASMA QUEST ROCKANDROLL SKILLFUL TREBLE	ULTIMATE VOLCANO WILY XENOCIDE YARDSALES

Or more cleanly:

           

As hinted by many of the answer words, these are passwords from the original series of Mega Man games, specifically Mega Man 2 through Mega Man 6 (the original Mega Man did not use passwords, and later Mega Man games used numeric passwords). The first 5x5 grid (using answers A-E) is from Mega Man 2, the second grid is from Mega Man 3, and so on.

The next step is to decode the passwords according to their respective games, either by inputting them directly into the games or by using one of the online password generators, such as from www.mmhp.net. The exact orientation can be deduced because only one orientation yields a valid password.

Reading down the diagonals of the completed grids in game order yields the clue phrase DEFEATED ROBOTS CCW TOP LEFT ASCII. The level select screen of each game has the 8 robots arranged around the border of a 3x3 grid. Taking the game state from each of the passwords and reading the defeated robots as 1’s and the undefeated robots as 0’s, one ASCII letter can be read out of each game state. The defeated robots are:

• Mega Man 2: Heat Man, Crash Man
• Mega Man 3: Snake Man, Hard Man, Top Man, Gemini Man, Magnet Man
• Mega Man 4: Dive Man, Pharaoh Man, Bright Man, Toad Man, Dust Man
• Mega Man 5: Gravity Man, Charge Man, Wave Man
• Mega Man 6: Flame Man, Plant Man, Tomahawk Man, Yamato Man, Centaur Man

Decoding these yields the final answer HUMAN.