His sleep has been fitful and restless and represented as a cheaply put together CGI cutscene of a space podule flying over a desert and arriving at a sort of moon base.
Blinking his little eyes our hero notices something unusual. Instead of being in his sleep-mo-bed unit in this cabin, he seems to be in a corridor. And instead of being stationary and laid down, he appears to be moving along and sort of almost upright. His legs are dragging along the floor behind him and he's being pulled along by a couple of conspicuously cold-to-the-touch men. And instead of having any skin at all, he appears to have no skin at all!
"What's happening? I was having the strangest dream..." he begins before a door slides open infront of him and he realises he's being presented - more naked than naked - to the ship's captain, the ship's AI's robotic body, his best friend Joe and a girl who looks so familiar, yet he hasn't thought about her or mentioned her for so long that he's forgotten who she is... wait... it'll come to him... That's it! It's his girlfriend! His girlfriend who gave up years of her life to live on this space ship with him when she could've been becoming a successful radio DJ back on earth. His devoted girlfriend somethingorother -who needs names when love is deaf?
"Oh this is just a dream isn't it" says Tom. "In real life you don't find yourself suddenly more naked than naked in front of a load of important people AND a girlfriend who you are somehow aware you have but don't know any details about. That's it, in a minute I'll wake up and everything'll be--"
"TOM! WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN YOU SLACKER? WE THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD?"
"Oh God! Captain, Sir!!! I'm... That is to say... We were... Me and Hoff"
Tom tries to stand up but his skinless feet just slip around on the polished metal floor and he staggers clumsily.
NED - the nattily-bearded robot body provided to the ship's super-intelligent AI as a way of talking to the humans on board the ship without freaking them out by asking them to talk to computer panels or a single red LED on a dashboard - locks its jaws open and a plays a message through the speaker revealed inside its mouth "He must be drunk captain".
"No wait! I have something important to tell you! The planet isn't just a desert! It's inhabited by -- snooooooooooooze"
"Oh look. He's fallen back to sleep. Supporting my drunkness theory entirly... Ignore the panel in my chest that is closing up again"
"...Are those darts sticking into him?"
There is the sound of a chest panel springing back open and a sort of *thwip* sound - not unlike the sound darts being fired.
"His friend Joe has fallen asleep too. This supports my drunkness theory also. They are friends. They must've been drinking together... Ignore the panel in my chest that is closing up again again."
"That doesn't make sense" chips in the girlfriend - whatever her name is - "since we've not been able to find--"
Clunk. Thwip. Slump. Snooze.
"I propose that this also supports my theory somehow. Please ignore the panel in my chest that is closing up again again again"
"I must say NED. This robot body of yours, though not as sinister as an LED in the wall, does have a lot of foibles. The locked open mouth. The deadly exhaust fumes. The frequent problems with the directional controls that leave you walking holes through the walls. And now there's some panel in your chest that keeps popping open? Honestly, it's enough to make a man wonder if you're really as benign and friendly as the beard suggests."
"ERROR: FRIENDLY REASSURANCE 1536 NOT FOUND"
"Easy for you to say."
Ned turns his attention back to the slumped Tom, still held sort-of upright by the guards.
"Secret robot attendees - please take this man to a holding-- I mean... Recuperation cell."
"What did you just call those men? Secret whatbot whonows?-- *slump, snooze*..."
"The captain is drunk. Nobody be alarmed".
Later:
"Crumbs! Such a vivid dream!" murmurs Tom Driscoll as he groggily wakes up. He's locked in a cell on board the Toronto but there's really nothing to do. Minutes pass and he spends his time examining everything that could possibly be a clue to the (presumably) puzzle of getting out of the room. Eventually though, Joe turns up.
"Tom! Sorry I couldn't get here earlier. I fell asleep for some reason and only just woke up. When I heard they'd put you in here I just had to come visit you!"
"Joe! You're NEVER going to believe what I've been doing for the last few months!"
"Sitting in a desert going mad and eating your own skin?"
"NO! I've been living it up on a planet of adventure!"
"Tell me it all. But keep it short."
At this point the game says that Tom explains everything that's happened so far keeping it "short and sweet". I can only imagine where he started on this - the intelligent cat people? The fact that pre-Roman European druids travelled here through space? The fact that the Christian "God" of earth is in fact Amoeka - the evil brother of lovely Albionian goddess Amoeba? The fact that God is using the Toronto as a way of effing up his sister's goody-two-shoes kids just to get her back for saying that naming stuff was lame?
Whatever the specifics of what he says, Joe is convinced.
"Looks like we've been conned then!" he explains "Since the only bit of this planet that any of us have seen with our own eyes is the desert, we all assumed it was ALL desert. Additionally, NED said it was all fine and none of us thought to ask. I mean, there were all those monsters we had to kill when the mining started. I mean, LOADS of monsters. It was almost like the planet itself wanted to stop us mining. But we thought that really, since they didn't seem intelligent, we'd just blast their faces off with our shotguns and it'd all be fine..."
"I wonder who knows about this!"
"Well it's probably just NED. Think about it - remember snoopy beagle getting exploded by that space phone panel? It was definitely the panel exploding that killed him. Well the ship's AI could've short-circuited the panel and caused it to explode! Trust me, I'm a technician with access to all parts of this ships complex machinery - even super high security ones - so I know how these things could get done by a rogue AI that's gone rogue and exploded a panel that was definitely the thing that killed Snoopy Beagle. Oh, just on an asside, I think I've lost my space blaster... if you see it around anywhere let me know yeah?"
"'course mate. So what about the scanners telling everyone the planet's uninhabited?"
"Well I think someone could quite easily put scan data into the computer that makes it show up scan results that are actually taken from a different, totally un-inhabited planet if they had super high security tech-clearance. Or were, infact, the AI! See! It MUST be NED!"
"Wow! That's pretty bad news really isn't it!"
"Well yes. And if NED is a bad news cupcake, the disaster-cherry on top is that... NED isn't the only robody under the AI's control on board the ship! According to what I've seen, the AI has HEAPS of bodies. To the point that almost anyone on this ship might be a robot, piloted by the Toronto's super brainputer. Anyone, except me naturally. You can trust me Tom!"
"Cripes! Ok, so how do we sort all this out then?"
"Well here's my theory. The AI's superbrain is in a tamper proof, space proof, external booth that no one can get into no matter how high their clearance - to the point where if we wanted to take control of it, the only way to do that would be to feed it bad information through - for example - fake scanner info that can be input via a separate unit. Oh, but naturally we don't want to take control of the superbrain - ha ha ha ha ha. I'm getting all mixed up... in the excitement!"
"Hold on... Do you think that it might've been the AI that sabotaged me and Hoff's space podule when we set off to the planet all that time ago? You work in the podule dock a lot of the time so you'd know if it was possible to do it..."
There is a pause. "Yes. Yes I think the ship's AI could've done that thing."
"I suppose it wouldn't want us to report to the captain what we'd found - otherwise the captain would spot that the scan data of the planet was fake..."
Another pause. "Yes. The podule was sabotaged so that the CAPTAIN wouldn't receive data that conflicted with the readouts of his scanners."
"Anyway, what was your plan?"
"We should go to the fusion reactor room and try to work out a way of cutting off the power to the super-brain. There-by preventing it from ever finding out what's REALLY on the planet's surface..."
"Wait... no, the ship already KNOW'S what's on the planet's surface. It's just lying to get everyone to co-operate with the mining."
"...Oh! ha ha ha! Yes Tom. Yes. That's what I meant. I got confused because I'm a simple human! Oops! What a silly billy! We'll shut down the superbrain to kill it so that we can tell everyone to stop mining the planet. Yes."
At this point Joe joins the team! This is awesome - I love that the game has come back round and started re-introducing people you could casually chat to before setting off on your space mission at the start. It's like the stuff on the mono-rail in Half Life. You go past all the things that you don't think twice about initially, but that you'll later realise were significant and important.
Tom and Joe's route to the fusion chamber will take them through the servant's passages of the Toronto again - just like when Tom snuck into the space-phone room earlier in the game. They thieve the password for the access hatch from someone's bedroom and are able to scramble down the ladder into the first-person-perspective maze below stairs.
Joe explains to tom that they'll probably have to use some "strange" devises to navigate the maintenance passages. And he's not kidding! You know how you sometimes wonder how Bowser gets anything done living in a castle where all the corridors are populated by timed lava traps and angry ghosts? Well it's not much different in Albion land. Sure, these corridors aren't deadly, but how exactly anyone gets any maintenance done in them is beyond me!
Firstly we have to open a door. But we can't just use a security pass to buzz our way through, instead we have to coax a cuddle-bot to come out and stand on a pressure pad for us.
In the next corridor we have to do the beep test from gym class. Press a button at one end of a long hall then run down to the other before the timer runs out to press the other button at the far end. Wouldn't one button at one end be a better way of letting service engineers through?
In another room there is an array of pressure pads that light up when you step on them. presumably this next door is opened by lighting up the correct pattern? Can you imagine mentoring a new technician in this place? "Yeah, pretty soon you'll notice that none of the doors in this place work the same way as any of the others..."
"Boss, how do we know what pattern to make on the pressure plates?"
"Well you have to find your way through that maze over there and make a note of the pattern on the matching pressure plates somewhere through there..."
"And then the door opens?"
"Well, no... Once you've done the pressure plates, the force-fields between the buttons over there are deactivated and you have to run around and press them all within a certain time. THEN the door'll open."
"And then we'll be able to get to the fuse box for the meeting room?"
"Yeah... Well... Nearly..."
"Nearly?"
"Well as good as."
"Boss..?"
"Well ok. So then we might have to hurd hug bots around the place in a huge chamber to get them to (possibly) stand on the pressure plates in order to open the next set of doors into the fusion chamber."
"And the hug bots will follow us just like the last one did?"
"No, the rules for these hugbots are different. They're sort of random. I think it's something to do with bumping into them."
"So... We sort of stand around in a room full of randomly moving hugbots until the doors open for some reason, possibly to do with pressure plates, and then we can proceed?"
"Yes. Welcome to the team!"
This kind of stuff you can just about get away with in a "dungeon" setting. Y'know - if it was a prison style set up, or well-defended crypt, you can imagine that someone would set up fiendish trials and traps to prevent people getting in or out if they're not meant to. But you'd've thought that in the future, people would've sussed out that when a bulb needs changing somewhere it's a good idea to get the technician to the right place as conveniently as possible. Having Joe quip "I'd love to know what screw ball came up with all this" while you're working your way through it all only draws your attention to the ridiculousness of it all even more.
I'm bad-mouthing this section, but it was actually pretty fun. It was a really nice puzzle dungeon where you weren't under threat ever - you were just solving things to progress. Plus, it had quite a nice structure to it where you were solving a new puzzle in every room PLUS looking for the secret side chambers (none of them were TOO secret, but they were secret enough that you had to keep your wits about you and your eyes peeled) so as to gather all the pieces of scrap paper that no-good mechanics with their terrible memories had left about the place to remind them of the access code for the FINAL door into the reactor room.
After not too long you find your way into a really massive chamber - in the centre of which is the towering reactor operations room.
Stepping inside we flip back to third-person view and can have a good ooh-and-ahh at the reactor itself. A glowing yellow panel at the north end of the room, it pulsates rhythmically. It is the beating heart of the invincible planet eating organism that is the Toronto and Tom and Joe comment on how wondrous it is (although in reality it's nothing special).
Back to business - we saunter over to a control console.
"I'm going to suffocate the computerbrain now Tom... Just give me a minute since it's a bit complicated"
"STOP!!!" comes a voice over the loud speaker. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
"We have to stop you mining this planet!" Shouts Tom - recognising the voice as that of the Toronto's AI.
"WHY WOULD YOU EVEN DO THAT? THE COMPANY NEEDS TO MINE THE PLANET! THAT'S WHAT WE'RE ALL HERE FOR!"
"There's living people on this planet you heartless computer! We can't let you destroy Amoeba's children!"
"YOU'RE DELERIOUS! DON'T DO ANYTHING AND WE'LL COME AND GET YOU AND PUT YOU INTO CARE AND LOOK AFTER YOU! I CANNOT ALLOW YOU TO WASTE THE WHOLE TRIP HERE!"
"It's a trick Tom! If we stay here the AI will send it's hench-bodies to come and kill us! I don't have time to kill it either! It's too complicated! I couldn't kill the brain without ruining all the mining equiptment!"
"Oh, but we could do that! It'd be fine 'cos we wouldn't want the mining equiptment anyway..."
"No, we'd be better off running away."
"...No, honestly, kill the brain AND the mining stuff! That's be best possible result, Joe!"
"Too late! Here they come! We've got to go all they'll DEFINITLY shoot us!"
"But the AI said it'd just look after us... maybe we could talk it round..."
Tom says this last while Joe is pushing him bodily out of the door - at which point he concedes and they run away.
Weirdly, they aren't accosted by the swarms of guards you might expect. Instead they're able to run all the way back to the dock where Tom arrived at the start of this post and the only person who tries to stop them is NED the robody.
"Tom. You cannot leave. We've only just rescued you once! Where will you go?"
"You know full well NED! Don't try and stop us!"
"I'm sorry Tom. You're clearly mental..." a panel on the front of the robody starts to open but Tom's too fast!
He pulls out a special magical bead that (aparently) someone gave him earlier in the game. I have no memory of this bead, but according to Tom it was a major plot point some time previous and he's been holding onto it ever since. Anyway, he uses it to eff NED up with a fire ball before he can attack!
As the robody fritzes out, jittering and spinning round, Tom and Joe make good their escape
"How did you do that?" asks Joe as they jump down from the hanger door to the sandy desert below
"Oh yeah - magic is real on this planet. Did I not mention that? So is telepathy, teleportation and resurrection."
"Do you think we should've stopped to let your girlfriend know we were running away again?"
"My whatnow?"
> That's it! It's his girlfriend!
ReplyDeleteAt this point I was actually surprised that there was a girlfriend. I had completely forgotten her appearance at the beginning of the game and didn't remember until much later when I restarted the game from the beginning.
> The fact that the Christian "God" of earth is in fact Amoeka
I think that's the first I hear of it. Was the relation to Christanity explicitly stated somewhere? That might have interesting implications, seeing how the Christian god usually isn't really close to technology of any kind.
> Whatever the specifics of what he says, Joe is convinced.
Ha, yes, that was pretty easy, wasn't it? Could at least have demonstrated the fireball bead he later uses to escape.
> Oh, just on an asside, I think I've lost my space blaster...
> ...if they had super high security tech-clearance.
> Anyone, except me naturally
Now Joe is both behind everything _and_ an android pawn of the AI which is behind everything? Wow, you might be writing yourself into a corner there, but it sounds like fun :)
> cuddle-bot
> hug bots
Careful, they might just try to cuddle _you_ someday!
> "No, the rules for these hugbots are different. They're sort of random. I think it's something to do with bumping into them."
I wish. Eventually I resigned to keep loading save games until a bot that was close to one of the plates happened to randomly step on it.
> reactor
> Tom and Joe comment on how wondrous it is (although in reality it's nothing special).
Well, apparently they can see the fusion reaction happening through that special glass. That just might look impressive :)
(I imagine flowing plasma that sort of looks like a very bright yellow lava lamp)
> He pulls out a special magical bead that (aparently) someone gave him earlier in the game.
I had wondered why you hadn't mentioned it back then - it was sort of a welcoming present when you arrived on Holiday Island. I think it merged with Tom's skin somehow.
You've had it all the time since then and could have used it in battles as a magic item. It only creates a small fireball, though. The only good thing about it is that it doesn't ever run out of charges (and now you know why it needed to be like that ;) )
> "Do you think we should've stopped to let your girlfriend know we were running away again?"
> "My whatnow?"
Perfect :D
Well, when the Celts give you all the back story about how they ended up running away from planet earth, they describe how they were being indoctrinated with a new religion where there's just this one god and he's the boss and there's nothing else. Since (in real life) this indoctrination was the christianification of the Celtic folk, I'm working on the assumption that the game is saying "God is the baddy and is using humanity to develop a way of effing up his hippy sister."
ReplyDeleteI suppose I should've talked about this as my reading of the game more in the actual posts. I certainly meant to at the time because it struck me as quite surprising that the Devs were taking such an agressive anti christian angle with their plot. But not in a modern hyper-atheist way, just in a dodgy wishy-washy spiritualist way.
As with everything, my reading of the game might well be a LONG way off from what was put in there. But then again, Dirr might not be a woman - how ridiculous would THAT be?
As for Joe - oooh! I hadn't thought that he might be an android! His motivations were definitely suspicious in the extreme as far as I'm concerned - but I think he genuinely wanted to kill the Toronto... He's like the smoking guy in the X-Files. You know he's important and of ambiguous motivation, but you're never sure what he's ACTUALLY up to (until they explain him too much in later serieses that I didn't see but would sort of like to...)
As for the randomly wandering snuggle-droids, I just wandered round the room looking at them and trying to push them until eventually (through no apparent connection with what I was doing) the doors all opened. Weird puzzle - and a bit of a shame 'cos I was actually really enjoying the dungeon up to that point...
There is a robot in a side chamber that can be lured into the big room, so you don't even have to release all the other robots.
ReplyDeleteThe fireball stone Tom uses has 255 charges. I never tried what happens, if one exhaust those before entering the Toronto.
My fighting still is letting Sira and Khunag freeze and electrocute every foe then finishing the (few) survivors off with the crystal throwing axes (of which I found 4).
Wow! Sounds like you were much more organised in the fights than I am!
ReplyDeleteI don't have Sira any more and I never took on Khunag so I guess I'm making my life harder for myself. Maybe I'll look into taking someone new on soon (which I guess would have to be Khunag) but I like having just the four guys now. Siobhan still feels sort of like the new girl to me, but she's probably my fave. Everyone else is nicely established :D
I bet if you run out all the charges on the fireball stone it just cheats you an extra one for that sequence. When I arrived at the cut-scene to get onto the ship Tom was dead and the game just cheated him alive again so that he could run up to the podule and get in.
By the way - Welcome to the Blog! You're my third reader-turned-commenter! I hope you're enjoying it :D
ReplyDeleteI tried to post several times already but except the post above it was always the German version of 'system could unfortunately not handle your order'.
ReplyDelete---
A few short unconnected remarks:
It looks like the English translation has a lot of problems missing in the original German.
Drirr can use Bradir's Stiletto with his tail provided a stronger weapon is already in his paws (Sira can only tail Iskai knives).
You overlooked the treasure chest in the tunnel near the south (=Toronto) exit.
I see you have totally different ideas about the characters (although I agree that Rainer Hofstedt is totally useless except as bait and carrier of heavy loads like loot and hunting trophies). I usually drop Drirr in the final stages of the game for someone who can do more than just brawl (and who will spare you a very tedious sequence of unnecessary fights).
Arg! Spoilers!!!! ;P
ReplyDeleteThanks for the advice - HOWEVER, I'm going to try and forget I read it. It's not personal - I just want to play the game exactly as I would back in the day when it was released (since this was my first ever play through) so I'm not checking if I'm being as effective as I could or anything for the whole play through (I know for sure that Onety-three keeps spotting horrible errors I've made like missing whole parts of dungeons filled with treasure and forgetting to go to trainers for ages at a time...)
As for the English-to-German translation - I reckon it's not so bad really. There's a few places where characters seem to be going a little weird (there was a bit where they all decided that they were going to drop the formalities... but WHAT formalities?!?!) but I've not spotted any places where they simply don't make sense. It's not like when you get a knock-off dance mat from China and try to make sense of the translated instructions - so I reckon the localisation team did a pretty good job. Especially considering how much text there is in the game!
Given that Sira was always my pivotal party member and Mellthas comes with her, keeping her means necessarily kicking team members out at one time or other. So out goes the only one without special skills.
ReplyDeleteLet's see how far you get without heavy artillery support. ;-) Mwahahahahaha!!!!
Non-magic armor and weapons often impede fighting skills, so I usually do without (We are all naked apart from our magic helmets! Nobody has yet complained (and lived).).
I went from the start into exploring everything and talking to everyone. That way I collected a lot of valuables without having to fight for it. People in the street are sometimes sooo generous.
---
One part where the game is extremly consistent is that shops have/offer prices related to their owners/purpose (e.g. Iskai shops pay low for human items Iskai can't use). There's only one trader that makes an exception but it's not essential to the game.
You still have a long and dark journey in front of you (some parts of which you already guessed correctly).
Damn, I'm busy for just 2 days - and look what happens on this blog :)
ReplyDeleteOne thing I have to pick out:
> We are all naked apart from our magic helmets!
That... that actually works? My mind is blown :O
Also, I don't think I remember more than two or three magic helmets. Naked Rainer truly would love your crew!
And I don't think I've ever heard of somebody dumping Drirr for any other reason than having a special challenge. Very interesting.
Though, to be honest, 95% of the game aren't a challenge at all if you use Sira's and Melthas' big spells - so maybe it doesn't matter that much in the end.
> You still have a long and dark journey in front of you
Oh yes, I'm really interested how this is going to play out. That one dungeon (no spoilers) is a freakishly long hell even if the enemies aren't a challenge, so with Peter's no-grinding policy (AND no Sira/Mel) he's gonna suffer. A lot.
*fingers in ears*
ReplyDeletela la la
Not listening not listening!!!
;P
'Only magic helmets' may be a bit exaggerated but no item with negative influence on any stat is used by me after leaving the first island (that includes almost all body armor). Esp. the heavy battleaxe found in the old former building hugely reduces melee skills. At that point in the game that means it is a weapon that does massive damage but almost never hits. These items also tend to be quite heavy.
ReplyDeleteI see :)
ReplyDeleteI just always felt that the characters died too easily anyway, so I never really considered the additional hit accuracy to be worth dumping heavy armor (except for the heaviest one). Guess I might have been wrong about that!
The main problem in the beginning for me is that everything is faster than our characters, so taking enemies out before they can hit you isn't possible. That pretty much neutralizes the gun (if one managed to get it). Most of the cash went out for healing potions. That's also one of the reason why I concentrated on Krondirs, they can maul but not infect or poison you. The speed amulet is a major turning point in that regard in the game for me.
ReplyDeleteI followed Kikoskia's Let's play Albion on youtube and he deliberately did not use any advantages in order to keep the fights 'interesting' (that meant melee weapons only). Not may way, I follow the way of Khunag ;-)