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camwynNo, this is not the report in which I finish the game.
As I said in the previous Homicidal Evil Space Chicken Report, I managed to slug my way through the building full of alien pods and Vortigaunts and Snarks (which, while they have a fun name, are forever and ever Tiny Little Time Bomb Aliens). There’s a room right before the end of that level that features Marines and aliens slugging it out, and the simplest thing to do with that room is to wait until all the shooting and shouting stops. As much as I dislike being shot by the Marines, I really do have to appreciate them during the scenes where they’re fighting with anything that isn’t me. A, they’re usually good at it, and b, even when they’re not good at it, hearing them shout “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT?” *buddabuddabuddaBLAM* “THEN YOU GOT NOTHING!!” has its own appeal. Let them fight, then creep up to the door and kill whatever’s left before going inside, then deal with what happens when you try to make your way out of the room and into the hallway that takes you to Lambda Complex.
Unfortunately, ‘what happens’ is OH GOD MORE GREEN LIGHTNING, followed by OH GOD LASER HOWITZER, followed by OH GOD SPACE ALIEN HORNET HAND THINGIES, followed by DIDN’T I JUST KILL YOUR ASS because there’s three of the alien grunts in the next hallway, not just two. And if you’re like me, and I know I am, this translates to- Oh, wait, I forgot. Throw in AIEEEE, EVEN THE WALLS ARE TRYING TO KILL ME. Anyway, it translates to having about thirty percent health and no suit charge left by the time you reach the Shiny Yellow Button. And, y’know, when you’ve got save files, there’s no reason not to use them. So I went back a couple of saves instead….
Sometimes I think post-game Gordon has traumatic nightmares of every event the player puts him through that gets retconned out of existence by saving/reloading. Yes, I know how he gets to the sequel. Hush.
I reloaded from a game from the night before, and gave Gord the sniper crossbow. I am firmly convinced that shortly after he gets the crowbar early in the game, Gordon also finds a roll of duct tape, because I have no clue how he stores some of his weapons otherwise. I’m assuming the HEV suit has equipment storage capability for smaller things, like the pistol and the Manstopper, but when you pick up the shotgun or the M5 you start running into problems. Clearly, Gordon is using duct tape to create makeshift holsters for his weapons and sticking them to the outside of the HEV suit. The alternatives all involve some variant on the theme of Jack Harkness. Which: no. At least with the duct tape he can construct makeshift ammo bandoliers and grenade belts along with everything else.
Anyway. I reloaded from rather earlier and played through the TLTBA’s in such a manner that Gord had enough health and suit charge to satisfy me. I gave him the sniper crossbow. I got him started towards that room, and the music started. Atmosphere music in this game cannot mean anything good. EVER. I’m pretty sure that in-game, it’s actually Gordon developing a sudden horrible spontaneous earworm just as he’s trying to blank his thoughts and calm himself enough to continue rationally, although whether it’s what we actually hear in the game (hallo, guitar music!) or something like ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ that roars up out of nowhere varies. He managed to plug the last surviving alien grunt with the sniper crossbow, so I scotched him into the room for what must’ve been the eighth or ninth time. The words ‘the final apocalyptic battle of Gordon Freeman’ went through my head, even though I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t anywhere NEAR the final fight, and I realized that for the first time Gordon was admitting to himself he genuinely expected to die before he could accomplish the goal. He’d survived a lot, he’d seen a lot, he’d done a lot, he’d pulled off the freaking impossible…
But now he was looking at what remained of his task, and he honestly and truly believed that he was going to die.
I don’t think he even had enough mental energy left to have an emotional reaction to that. Just: I’m going to die. Master Chief or Samus Aran might have looked at an unrelentingly overwhelming situation- hell, even BJ Blaskiewicz- and snarled something about taking as many of these bastards with them as they could, or something similarly combat-poetic, but none of them are Gordon. He’s just a physicist. He doesn’t have a soldier’s spirit; he did what he had to do to stay alive, that’s all. And that was the point when he stopped and thought about it and said ‘yeah, I don’t think I can actually do this’.
And then he said, “but I’m going to do it anyway.”
The hallway in front of the tank promptly got loaded up with all of his blue laser tripmines, and a satchel charge for good measure, and he climbed up on the tank and blew the door open- then crouched as small as he could behind the tank’s opened door while the ‘splodeys happened. The strategy guides and walkthroughs all had lines at that point to the effect of ‘use the tank’s other gun to take out the incoming enemies’, but I gotta say that I tried doing that with other fortification weapons earlier in the game, and I could’ve gotten better results by having Jamie Lee Curtis show up and drop an Uzi by mistake. As soon as the splodeys went off I set off the satchel charge and switched to the laser cannon, because it’s precise and relatively easy to use even when you’re a spaz like me, and then started a rousing game of run-around-the-tank with the surviving invaders. (I will admit that in one of the earlier attempts on this room I used the RPG launcher. Satisfying as it is to use a rocket propelled grenade on a single entity, the reload time makes this one impractical.) And somehow at the end of all of it, I was still standing, and had nearly all of my health left.
What do you do in a situation like that? You find the bag of squirmy squiggly time bomb aliens and start throwing them down the hall, that’s what you do. The trick is getting an angle for them that doesn’t expose you to the laser howitzer but does give them a target, because otherwise we’re back to the Looney Tunes scene as Gordon runs around the big empty room until WE JUST WANT TO HUG YOU AND ASPLODE becomes WE SPLODE NOW BYE. And then there’s the part I think of as Gordon going, “Oh, la la la, look at me! I am about to walk into a hallway from which my enemies have been eliminated! I am safe and confident and surely nothing could stop me!”, then running like a bunny, because he’s taunting the wall into falling down. (It’s a scripted event. Go past a certain point in the corridor and a hefty chunk of wall will fall. Your job is to not be there when it does so.)
He was still in kind of a daze, I think, when he finally got into the Lambda complex elevator area. On the way down, though, there was a familiar ka-squeekit noise, so I went to the crowbar. I don’t think Gordon’s ever been so happy to see a headcrab in his life. Beating that thing to a pulp was practically a return to happy fun joyful times, for him. It marked a definite switch from I expect to die to I’m not going to think about whether I’ll make it out or not, that’s for sure. Most of the rest of the next part is a blur, except for two events: one, spotting that GODDAMNED !*&(!&)! AGENT K WANNABE teleporting out of a room with headcrabs in it (Gordon shot them through the window, since, well, he’d probably end up in there later himself). And two:
"Were you in weapons research too? I built the gluon gun, but I just can't bring myself to use it on another living creature. You don't look as if you have any trouble killing things."
By now, Gordon’s got guns taped to most of his torso. He’s got blood on every conceivable part of his suit, both alien and human- and the human blood’s both his own and that of I don’t know how many Marines. He’s probably got ichor spattered across his glasses that he hasn’t bothered to wipe off, because the only accessible cloth at this point is the uniforms of Marines he’s killed. And here’s this snotwipe of a senior scientist who’s built the PROTON PACK OF SPLODEY DEATH (because that’s totally what it is- the fan base’s named it the Egon Gun, and I see no reason to argue), being all ‘I just couldn’t ever use my instrument of death!’. I’m pretty sure ol’ Gord just looks at the guy, resists the urge to flip him the bird, and stomps on the Tom Lehrer song “Werner Von Braun” as he starts rearranging his taped guns to make room for the backpack.
That was the point where I saved the game for the evening. If the ASCII game NetHack has taught me anything, it’s this: never never ever game when you’re tired, because you will make stupid decisions and even stupider mistakes. And NetHack is turn-based, so you have plenty of time to think. I wasn’t about to waste the Egon Gun on an exhausted brain. We’ll test it out tonight at Danii’s; I feel that since I’ve played up to Lambda Core on my own computer, I’m allowed to cheat-code my way to that point in the game now elsewhere. I kind of want to see if the Egon Gun can take out that *!&(!&)! Helicopter at the Taliban cave.
As I said in the previous Homicidal Evil Space Chicken Report, I managed to slug my way through the building full of alien pods and Vortigaunts and Snarks (which, while they have a fun name, are forever and ever Tiny Little Time Bomb Aliens). There’s a room right before the end of that level that features Marines and aliens slugging it out, and the simplest thing to do with that room is to wait until all the shooting and shouting stops. As much as I dislike being shot by the Marines, I really do have to appreciate them during the scenes where they’re fighting with anything that isn’t me. A, they’re usually good at it, and b, even when they’re not good at it, hearing them shout “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT?” *buddabuddabuddaBLAM* “THEN YOU GOT NOTHING!!” has its own appeal. Let them fight, then creep up to the door and kill whatever’s left before going inside, then deal with what happens when you try to make your way out of the room and into the hallway that takes you to Lambda Complex.
Unfortunately, ‘what happens’ is OH GOD MORE GREEN LIGHTNING, followed by OH GOD LASER HOWITZER, followed by OH GOD SPACE ALIEN HORNET HAND THINGIES, followed by DIDN’T I JUST KILL YOUR ASS because there’s three of the alien grunts in the next hallway, not just two. And if you’re like me, and I know I am, this translates to- Oh, wait, I forgot. Throw in AIEEEE, EVEN THE WALLS ARE TRYING TO KILL ME. Anyway, it translates to having about thirty percent health and no suit charge left by the time you reach the Shiny Yellow Button. And, y’know, when you’ve got save files, there’s no reason not to use them. So I went back a couple of saves instead….
Sometimes I think post-game Gordon has traumatic nightmares of every event the player puts him through that gets retconned out of existence by saving/reloading. Yes, I know how he gets to the sequel. Hush.
I reloaded from a game from the night before, and gave Gord the sniper crossbow. I am firmly convinced that shortly after he gets the crowbar early in the game, Gordon also finds a roll of duct tape, because I have no clue how he stores some of his weapons otherwise. I’m assuming the HEV suit has equipment storage capability for smaller things, like the pistol and the Manstopper, but when you pick up the shotgun or the M5 you start running into problems. Clearly, Gordon is using duct tape to create makeshift holsters for his weapons and sticking them to the outside of the HEV suit. The alternatives all involve some variant on the theme of Jack Harkness. Which: no. At least with the duct tape he can construct makeshift ammo bandoliers and grenade belts along with everything else.
Anyway. I reloaded from rather earlier and played through the TLTBA’s in such a manner that Gord had enough health and suit charge to satisfy me. I gave him the sniper crossbow. I got him started towards that room, and the music started. Atmosphere music in this game cannot mean anything good. EVER. I’m pretty sure that in-game, it’s actually Gordon developing a sudden horrible spontaneous earworm just as he’s trying to blank his thoughts and calm himself enough to continue rationally, although whether it’s what we actually hear in the game (hallo, guitar music!) or something like ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ that roars up out of nowhere varies. He managed to plug the last surviving alien grunt with the sniper crossbow, so I scotched him into the room for what must’ve been the eighth or ninth time. The words ‘the final apocalyptic battle of Gordon Freeman’ went through my head, even though I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t anywhere NEAR the final fight, and I realized that for the first time Gordon was admitting to himself he genuinely expected to die before he could accomplish the goal. He’d survived a lot, he’d seen a lot, he’d done a lot, he’d pulled off the freaking impossible…
But now he was looking at what remained of his task, and he honestly and truly believed that he was going to die.
I don’t think he even had enough mental energy left to have an emotional reaction to that. Just: I’m going to die. Master Chief or Samus Aran might have looked at an unrelentingly overwhelming situation- hell, even BJ Blaskiewicz- and snarled something about taking as many of these bastards with them as they could, or something similarly combat-poetic, but none of them are Gordon. He’s just a physicist. He doesn’t have a soldier’s spirit; he did what he had to do to stay alive, that’s all. And that was the point when he stopped and thought about it and said ‘yeah, I don’t think I can actually do this’.
And then he said, “but I’m going to do it anyway.”
The hallway in front of the tank promptly got loaded up with all of his blue laser tripmines, and a satchel charge for good measure, and he climbed up on the tank and blew the door open- then crouched as small as he could behind the tank’s opened door while the ‘splodeys happened. The strategy guides and walkthroughs all had lines at that point to the effect of ‘use the tank’s other gun to take out the incoming enemies’, but I gotta say that I tried doing that with other fortification weapons earlier in the game, and I could’ve gotten better results by having Jamie Lee Curtis show up and drop an Uzi by mistake. As soon as the splodeys went off I set off the satchel charge and switched to the laser cannon, because it’s precise and relatively easy to use even when you’re a spaz like me, and then started a rousing game of run-around-the-tank with the surviving invaders. (I will admit that in one of the earlier attempts on this room I used the RPG launcher. Satisfying as it is to use a rocket propelled grenade on a single entity, the reload time makes this one impractical.) And somehow at the end of all of it, I was still standing, and had nearly all of my health left.
What do you do in a situation like that? You find the bag of squirmy squiggly time bomb aliens and start throwing them down the hall, that’s what you do. The trick is getting an angle for them that doesn’t expose you to the laser howitzer but does give them a target, because otherwise we’re back to the Looney Tunes scene as Gordon runs around the big empty room until WE JUST WANT TO HUG YOU AND ASPLODE becomes WE SPLODE NOW BYE. And then there’s the part I think of as Gordon going, “Oh, la la la, look at me! I am about to walk into a hallway from which my enemies have been eliminated! I am safe and confident and surely nothing could stop me!”, then running like a bunny, because he’s taunting the wall into falling down. (It’s a scripted event. Go past a certain point in the corridor and a hefty chunk of wall will fall. Your job is to not be there when it does so.)
He was still in kind of a daze, I think, when he finally got into the Lambda complex elevator area. On the way down, though, there was a familiar ka-squeekit noise, so I went to the crowbar. I don’t think Gordon’s ever been so happy to see a headcrab in his life. Beating that thing to a pulp was practically a return to happy fun joyful times, for him. It marked a definite switch from I expect to die to I’m not going to think about whether I’ll make it out or not, that’s for sure. Most of the rest of the next part is a blur, except for two events: one, spotting that GODDAMNED !*&(!&)! AGENT K WANNABE teleporting out of a room with headcrabs in it (Gordon shot them through the window, since, well, he’d probably end up in there later himself). And two:
"Were you in weapons research too? I built the gluon gun, but I just can't bring myself to use it on another living creature. You don't look as if you have any trouble killing things."
By now, Gordon’s got guns taped to most of his torso. He’s got blood on every conceivable part of his suit, both alien and human- and the human blood’s both his own and that of I don’t know how many Marines. He’s probably got ichor spattered across his glasses that he hasn’t bothered to wipe off, because the only accessible cloth at this point is the uniforms of Marines he’s killed. And here’s this snotwipe of a senior scientist who’s built the PROTON PACK OF SPLODEY DEATH (because that’s totally what it is- the fan base’s named it the Egon Gun, and I see no reason to argue), being all ‘I just couldn’t ever use my instrument of death!’. I’m pretty sure ol’ Gord just looks at the guy, resists the urge to flip him the bird, and stomps on the Tom Lehrer song “Werner Von Braun” as he starts rearranging his taped guns to make room for the backpack.
That was the point where I saved the game for the evening. If the ASCII game NetHack has taught me anything, it’s this: never never ever game when you’re tired, because you will make stupid decisions and even stupider mistakes. And NetHack is turn-based, so you have plenty of time to think. I wasn’t about to waste the Egon Gun on an exhausted brain. We’ll test it out tonight at Danii’s; I feel that since I’ve played up to Lambda Core on my own computer, I’m allowed to cheat-code my way to that point in the game now elsewhere. I kind of want to see if the Egon Gun can take out that *!&(!&)! Helicopter at the Taliban cave.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-02 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-02 05:24 pm (UTC)... and since when do the pistol and the MP5 use the same ammo?
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 12:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-02 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-02 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 12:15 am (UTC)The answer was "Our individual atoms go on separate vacations!" About that kind of thing?
no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 05:55 am (UTC)Speaking of, in the first level, you can shoot aircars out of the sky. Creepy.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 01:01 am (UTC)If you get a chance, find a copy of Illegal Aliens by Nick Pollota and Phil Foglio. There's a gun that's introduced in the story, called the Atomic Whirlwind Pistol (well it starts as a pistol; they have a rifle and a cannon later in the book). Very similar premise to the Gluon Gun. Although the Stop That cannon is much more amusing.
(Full-on, telepathic blast downrange of "STOP THAT." Pollota and Foglio wrote it in all caps, no quotes, boldface, and three times the size of the surrounding text. It does its job very, very well.)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 09:20 pm (UTC)And then there's the Shut Up gun...
no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 05:53 am (UTC)Especially fun if you turn on the surreal bits of games, like the 'infinity' bikes of Road Rash 64 and go sailing for a mile half a mile up over dozens of surburban houses.