"SCHUTZSTAFFEL!"
Oct. 19th, 2009 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynAll right, so, I’m awake. Given that last night I finally beat Halo for the first time and made the mistake of listening to the soundtrack to celebrate- and combined with the fact that I’d had a goodly amount of coffee soda earlier in the day- I was in no condition to sleep when I finally got to bed. Stupid adrenaline. The fact that I’m awake now is a bit of a minor miracle, but I’m up and I’m functional and I’ve been on the job for more than an hour already.
And now, as others have done before us, we return to Wolfenstein.
Now, like I said last time, I haven’t played a Wolfenstein game since Wolfenstein 3-D. I don’t know any of the characters except for Beej, I don’t know the plots, I don’t know the voice actors, whatever. I don’t even know if what I’m seeing counts as ‘nothing new’ or what. I just know that I’m on the streets of a very nicely rendered German city with lots of cobblestones and lots of doors with handles instead of knobs and lots of guys who appear to have mugged the Ninth Doctor for his jacket. Seriously, my Resistance contact had a black leather jacket that I’m almost positive he stole from Christopher Eccleston, plus a sour expression that I’d normally expect for ‘you just failed the last mission, American, don’t you dare bung up this one’. Apparently that’s his default face. No biggie, though. BJ loves bein’ a spy. He can put up with a couple of grumpy Germans if it means he gets to make Nazis unhappy. And by ‘unhappy’ I mean ‘dead’.
Anyway, Herr Grumpyjacket takes Beej to the Black Market before he takes him to Resistance HQ. Penny Arcade covered this way better than I ever could, but I’ll say it anyway: dude, the point of being anybody who isn’t a Nazi in a video game city full of Nazis? Is to not get seen by the Nazis. At least not until you’re killing them, anyway. So… the thing where there are a couple of brothers who’re masters of insinuation-fu in a rather nicely appointed secret underground basement area selling ammo and gun attachments and stuff in exchange for the random chunks o’ treasure I didn’t know I was supposed to be collecting? And they have a giant red ‘HERE IS THE BLACK MARKET’ skull with a dagger through it painted on their door in a helpful, friendly-to-illiterates fashion? Kind of makes me wonder just a bit about whether somebody hasn’t got a death wish.
Also I kind of have to wonder why I can very clearly see assault rifles or SMGs or something in the background behind the guy handling my transaction but he won’t sell me an actual gun, just the bullets and upgrades for the guns I’ve got. Or grenades- he won’t sell me grenades if I haven’t already found some. Is he some kind of weird Klingon who thinks I have to prove myself worthy of the weapon first? Is he a Dark Tower-class gunslinger with the weirdest set of habits and priorities I’ve ever seen? Is he just a colossal jerk? I dunno. Doesn’t really matter, though, I haven’t got much gold to buy anything with, so it’s back to Herr Grumpyjacket and then off to Resistance HQ.
The leader is a woman. She’s blonde and kind of pretty, and she’s dressed in a modest shirt and ordinary trousers. We will stop to boggle about that. I will stop to dread the inevitable romance subplot. (Note from the future: there isn’t one. Seriously. No romance at all. The Insinuation Brother in the Black Market implies that Beej ought to try for a little somethin’, but at no point does that prospect ever arise, which is kind of a nice change.) She indicates that the Nazis are getting their archaeological freak on outside of town and that I’d probably have to have a death wish to go in there but hey, my funeral.
Lady, given that you’ve got as big of a painted logo on your door as the black market guys, you are in no position to tell me I have a death wish.
I then have to go and find a truck to take me to the dig site. I’m good with that. I have to follow Herr Grumpyjacket again to do that. And here’s where it sinks in as we’re trying to stealth our way through the streets: I have the truck’s location marked on my compass, and a map of the city got added to things I can access when I talked to the Resistance. I don’t actually have to follow Herr Grumpyjacket. We’re operating in RPG time; he can say ‘we have to go RIGHT NOW’ until he turns blue in the face, but that truck ain’t goin’ nowhere until I show up.
I still have trouble with that. Unless I’m playing a turn based game, like Civilization or something, I always assume there is a timer waiting to run out and that the NPCs are not filthy filthy liars trying to hurry me along. Puttering off to sidequests tends to make me feel vaguely guilty about not charging ahead with exactly what I’m supposed to do. In this case, I decided to check out a house we were passing on the way to the truck, as there were things moving inside. Turned out it was Nazis. Also, turned out my contact could die. Who knew. Didn’t mean mission failure, though, so rather than reload and lose my progress I pushed on.
Turns out you can stage a minor Indiana Jones movie in Germany proper. Who knew? All you have to do is have a cutscene with a spooked-but-still-relatively-brave youngish Russian working for an occult society called the Golden Dawn point you at the piece of supernaturally empowered bling the Nazis are after instead of a religious artifact. (His name’s Sergei. He’s a little weird-looking, but given that Beej looks like an animated cross between Eli Roth and Kurt Russell it’s kind of hard to talk.) The bling is ‘the Thule Medallion’, and it’s essentially a match for the thing that pulled No Skin For You, Mr. Nazi in the opening cinematic. You have to find it before the Nazis do. As usual.
La la la, off to the tunnels, la la llllll oh hello mister red barrel, will you be my friend? Friends take out four or five Nazis at a time when their friends ask them to explode.
Oh, you’re a good friend. Thank you so much! Ooh, that one had a rifle!
And here I must explain something. While I appreciate the appeal of MOAR DAKKA as much as anyone else, I’m not really a big fan of machine guns or automatic weapons fire in these games. I want to be able to pull the trigger once and have my enemy go down. Maybe twice if he’s really tough. The Kar98 rifle that you get has a little bitty iron sight on the front, but it still lets you zoom in a good bit for your shots, so you stand a pretty decent chance of using it to make headshots on Nazis at a distance. I’m fine with the iron sight concept. It was good enough for Simo Hayha, it’s good enough for me. As long as I have bullets for the rifle I will be using it as my weapon of choice. It makes me happy in ways that the mow-em-down models of gun never could.
*ahem*
Anyway. Off through the tunnels you go, and there are quite a few of them. I really have to wonder about the décor; it looks like the reconstructions of Mesopotamian temples at the Met, although most of the art is a little more primitive than what they had painted on the walls. The sculpture, however, is of… things. Things that look vaguely like sand crabs, but bendy in the middle, and with a lot more pointy bits. They don’t look like any supernatural menace I’ve seen in myth before, which is kind of disturbing. Fact is, they look a little Lovecraftian, and I’m not sure I’m prepared for this to turn into Wolfenstein: Delta Green. Not that I really have a choice, though, because someone ahead of me is chanting in nasty-sounding Latin.
Here’s a tip, folks. If there are Nazis running around, the only, ONLY possible way Latin chanting can mean anything good is if the Nazis have cornered a Jesuit.
This wasn’t a Jesuit.
It was a shaven-headed goggle-wearing guy in a long black coat surrounded by shiny blue energy evilness- yes, I'm SURE he wasn't a Jesuit- and standard Nazis of a couple of different uniform types. Since I’d just seen a couple of statues of bitey-looking arthropodal things the size of large dogs on the way into the room I was kind of afraid I’d interrupted a summoning, and started shooting before he could actually get anything to show up. Unfortunately I only hit the standard Nazis around him (lots of gurgling, maybe one cry of “SCHUTZSTAFFEL!”) and he started throwing balls of evil occult fire at me. Those HURT. Beej ran back the way he had come and waited for the bloody bloodishness to fade from his vision (it appears when he gets badly injured, and fades when he’s had time to heal- there aren’t health packs or turkey legs any more). When he started back into the room he suddenly had NAZI SORCEROR. IN HIS FACE. I did some screaming, I don’t mind telling you, but eventually I managed to get a grenade hucked into the right general area and kill him despite his magical shielding. The other Nazis in the room died too but c’mon, they’re just standard Nazis, take it as given.
So. Here’s me, here’s the dead guys, here’s the dead sorcerer with nothing interesting on his corpse (the jerk), here’s a pillar in the middle of the room with bling on it- oh, hey, cutscene! Hi, Sergei! Wow, you followed me all the way through the tunnels? … well, I guess I did leave a trail of corpses a mile wide…
Sergei is grumpy that Beej has the medallion and won’t give it to him, but Beej has the gun, so Sergei doesn’t press the case. He does tell Beej how to use it to see invisible stuff and climb energy ladders that aren’t there in the physical world and move faster (like, slow down time for everyone and everything except him, kind of faster) and find hidden doors through walls, stuff like that. The Nazi dig here is partly to get the crystals that make the mojo work, and partly to do something about a big structure or portal or something, and Beej should totally go check that out now. YAY FOR FURTHER NAZI KILLIN’.
It took me a while to get through the next part. There were sorcerers. They can do the faster-than-anyone thing too. They can do energy shielding. I’m not that good with the concept of ‘cover’. You do the math.
Eventually I did find my way to the portal doodah that Sergei was talking about. Did you know the Nazis watched Stargate? I didn’t. I mean, the portal wasn’t active or anything but it looked like a big ol’ stargate to me. Maybe with only about four chevrons, but dang, man, a big stone circle that positively reeks of JUMP THROUGH ME AND YOU WILL GO SOMEWHERE WEIRD, found at an archaeological site with creepy provenances that might or might not be Mesopotamian? Stargate. So of course Beej has to slap some dynamite on it and blow the thing to kingdom come.
There’s seismic happy fun time on the way out. Dynamite underground probably does that kind of thing. I wouldn’t know. I was trying not to think of just how big this cave complex was supposed to be and how the people in Isenstadt had missed its existence so far. Also I was trying not to laugh at the Nazi who insisted on yelling “That man is a spy!” Pal, by the time you’ve seen B.J. Blazkowicz, don’t bother denouncing him. Just shoot. It’s already too late. Mind you, it’s better than some of the other yelling; if you’re not charging straight at them with guns blazing the Nazis will occasionally call out, “What’s ze matter, American? Are you friiiightened?” That or ‘Come out and fight!’. Pfeh. See my earlier comments about Simo Hayha. And hold still. I want to see your helmet fly three feet up in the air when I put my bullet through your skull.
(They change what they yell about you based on what gun you’re using, by the way. I didn’t realize this until a later mission. I just thought they were yelling “Sniper!” because the guy next to them had just had his head spontaneously explode.)
It’s mostly a matter of battling to the entry area where you met Sergei after that. The seismic happy fun time keeps going on the whole way, but I haven’t yet been killed by stuff falling from the ceiling, and I’ve played through the level several times. Earth itself is apparently afraid to crush BJ Blazkowicz, possibly because he’d dig his way out and it would hurt. Fortunately for Earth there’s an elevator big enough to haul all the dig site equipment nearby, so that’s Beej’s ride back to the surface, and the truck to take him back to town with his shiny new bling.
Which I still kind of wish really was half the Orb of Aldur, but I suppose one can’t have everything.
And now, as others have done before us, we return to Wolfenstein.
Now, like I said last time, I haven’t played a Wolfenstein game since Wolfenstein 3-D. I don’t know any of the characters except for Beej, I don’t know the plots, I don’t know the voice actors, whatever. I don’t even know if what I’m seeing counts as ‘nothing new’ or what. I just know that I’m on the streets of a very nicely rendered German city with lots of cobblestones and lots of doors with handles instead of knobs and lots of guys who appear to have mugged the Ninth Doctor for his jacket. Seriously, my Resistance contact had a black leather jacket that I’m almost positive he stole from Christopher Eccleston, plus a sour expression that I’d normally expect for ‘you just failed the last mission, American, don’t you dare bung up this one’. Apparently that’s his default face. No biggie, though. BJ loves bein’ a spy. He can put up with a couple of grumpy Germans if it means he gets to make Nazis unhappy. And by ‘unhappy’ I mean ‘dead’.
Anyway, Herr Grumpyjacket takes Beej to the Black Market before he takes him to Resistance HQ. Penny Arcade covered this way better than I ever could, but I’ll say it anyway: dude, the point of being anybody who isn’t a Nazi in a video game city full of Nazis? Is to not get seen by the Nazis. At least not until you’re killing them, anyway. So… the thing where there are a couple of brothers who’re masters of insinuation-fu in a rather nicely appointed secret underground basement area selling ammo and gun attachments and stuff in exchange for the random chunks o’ treasure I didn’t know I was supposed to be collecting? And they have a giant red ‘HERE IS THE BLACK MARKET’ skull with a dagger through it painted on their door in a helpful, friendly-to-illiterates fashion? Kind of makes me wonder just a bit about whether somebody hasn’t got a death wish.
Also I kind of have to wonder why I can very clearly see assault rifles or SMGs or something in the background behind the guy handling my transaction but he won’t sell me an actual gun, just the bullets and upgrades for the guns I’ve got. Or grenades- he won’t sell me grenades if I haven’t already found some. Is he some kind of weird Klingon who thinks I have to prove myself worthy of the weapon first? Is he a Dark Tower-class gunslinger with the weirdest set of habits and priorities I’ve ever seen? Is he just a colossal jerk? I dunno. Doesn’t really matter, though, I haven’t got much gold to buy anything with, so it’s back to Herr Grumpyjacket and then off to Resistance HQ.
The leader is a woman. She’s blonde and kind of pretty, and she’s dressed in a modest shirt and ordinary trousers. We will stop to boggle about that. I will stop to dread the inevitable romance subplot. (Note from the future: there isn’t one. Seriously. No romance at all. The Insinuation Brother in the Black Market implies that Beej ought to try for a little somethin’, but at no point does that prospect ever arise, which is kind of a nice change.) She indicates that the Nazis are getting their archaeological freak on outside of town and that I’d probably have to have a death wish to go in there but hey, my funeral.
Lady, given that you’ve got as big of a painted logo on your door as the black market guys, you are in no position to tell me I have a death wish.
I then have to go and find a truck to take me to the dig site. I’m good with that. I have to follow Herr Grumpyjacket again to do that. And here’s where it sinks in as we’re trying to stealth our way through the streets: I have the truck’s location marked on my compass, and a map of the city got added to things I can access when I talked to the Resistance. I don’t actually have to follow Herr Grumpyjacket. We’re operating in RPG time; he can say ‘we have to go RIGHT NOW’ until he turns blue in the face, but that truck ain’t goin’ nowhere until I show up.
I still have trouble with that. Unless I’m playing a turn based game, like Civilization or something, I always assume there is a timer waiting to run out and that the NPCs are not filthy filthy liars trying to hurry me along. Puttering off to sidequests tends to make me feel vaguely guilty about not charging ahead with exactly what I’m supposed to do. In this case, I decided to check out a house we were passing on the way to the truck, as there were things moving inside. Turned out it was Nazis. Also, turned out my contact could die. Who knew. Didn’t mean mission failure, though, so rather than reload and lose my progress I pushed on.
Turns out you can stage a minor Indiana Jones movie in Germany proper. Who knew? All you have to do is have a cutscene with a spooked-but-still-relatively-brave youngish Russian working for an occult society called the Golden Dawn point you at the piece of supernaturally empowered bling the Nazis are after instead of a religious artifact. (His name’s Sergei. He’s a little weird-looking, but given that Beej looks like an animated cross between Eli Roth and Kurt Russell it’s kind of hard to talk.) The bling is ‘the Thule Medallion’, and it’s essentially a match for the thing that pulled No Skin For You, Mr. Nazi in the opening cinematic. You have to find it before the Nazis do. As usual.
La la la, off to the tunnels, la la llllll oh hello mister red barrel, will you be my friend? Friends take out four or five Nazis at a time when their friends ask them to explode.
Oh, you’re a good friend. Thank you so much! Ooh, that one had a rifle!
And here I must explain something. While I appreciate the appeal of MOAR DAKKA as much as anyone else, I’m not really a big fan of machine guns or automatic weapons fire in these games. I want to be able to pull the trigger once and have my enemy go down. Maybe twice if he’s really tough. The Kar98 rifle that you get has a little bitty iron sight on the front, but it still lets you zoom in a good bit for your shots, so you stand a pretty decent chance of using it to make headshots on Nazis at a distance. I’m fine with the iron sight concept. It was good enough for Simo Hayha, it’s good enough for me. As long as I have bullets for the rifle I will be using it as my weapon of choice. It makes me happy in ways that the mow-em-down models of gun never could.
*ahem*
Anyway. Off through the tunnels you go, and there are quite a few of them. I really have to wonder about the décor; it looks like the reconstructions of Mesopotamian temples at the Met, although most of the art is a little more primitive than what they had painted on the walls. The sculpture, however, is of… things. Things that look vaguely like sand crabs, but bendy in the middle, and with a lot more pointy bits. They don’t look like any supernatural menace I’ve seen in myth before, which is kind of disturbing. Fact is, they look a little Lovecraftian, and I’m not sure I’m prepared for this to turn into Wolfenstein: Delta Green. Not that I really have a choice, though, because someone ahead of me is chanting in nasty-sounding Latin.
Here’s a tip, folks. If there are Nazis running around, the only, ONLY possible way Latin chanting can mean anything good is if the Nazis have cornered a Jesuit.
This wasn’t a Jesuit.
It was a shaven-headed goggle-wearing guy in a long black coat surrounded by shiny blue energy evilness- yes, I'm SURE he wasn't a Jesuit- and standard Nazis of a couple of different uniform types. Since I’d just seen a couple of statues of bitey-looking arthropodal things the size of large dogs on the way into the room I was kind of afraid I’d interrupted a summoning, and started shooting before he could actually get anything to show up. Unfortunately I only hit the standard Nazis around him (lots of gurgling, maybe one cry of “SCHUTZSTAFFEL!”) and he started throwing balls of evil occult fire at me. Those HURT. Beej ran back the way he had come and waited for the bloody bloodishness to fade from his vision (it appears when he gets badly injured, and fades when he’s had time to heal- there aren’t health packs or turkey legs any more). When he started back into the room he suddenly had NAZI SORCEROR. IN HIS FACE. I did some screaming, I don’t mind telling you, but eventually I managed to get a grenade hucked into the right general area and kill him despite his magical shielding. The other Nazis in the room died too but c’mon, they’re just standard Nazis, take it as given.
So. Here’s me, here’s the dead guys, here’s the dead sorcerer with nothing interesting on his corpse (the jerk), here’s a pillar in the middle of the room with bling on it- oh, hey, cutscene! Hi, Sergei! Wow, you followed me all the way through the tunnels? … well, I guess I did leave a trail of corpses a mile wide…
Sergei is grumpy that Beej has the medallion and won’t give it to him, but Beej has the gun, so Sergei doesn’t press the case. He does tell Beej how to use it to see invisible stuff and climb energy ladders that aren’t there in the physical world and move faster (like, slow down time for everyone and everything except him, kind of faster) and find hidden doors through walls, stuff like that. The Nazi dig here is partly to get the crystals that make the mojo work, and partly to do something about a big structure or portal or something, and Beej should totally go check that out now. YAY FOR FURTHER NAZI KILLIN’.
It took me a while to get through the next part. There were sorcerers. They can do the faster-than-anyone thing too. They can do energy shielding. I’m not that good with the concept of ‘cover’. You do the math.
Eventually I did find my way to the portal doodah that Sergei was talking about. Did you know the Nazis watched Stargate? I didn’t. I mean, the portal wasn’t active or anything but it looked like a big ol’ stargate to me. Maybe with only about four chevrons, but dang, man, a big stone circle that positively reeks of JUMP THROUGH ME AND YOU WILL GO SOMEWHERE WEIRD, found at an archaeological site with creepy provenances that might or might not be Mesopotamian? Stargate. So of course Beej has to slap some dynamite on it and blow the thing to kingdom come.
There’s seismic happy fun time on the way out. Dynamite underground probably does that kind of thing. I wouldn’t know. I was trying not to think of just how big this cave complex was supposed to be and how the people in Isenstadt had missed its existence so far. Also I was trying not to laugh at the Nazi who insisted on yelling “That man is a spy!” Pal, by the time you’ve seen B.J. Blazkowicz, don’t bother denouncing him. Just shoot. It’s already too late. Mind you, it’s better than some of the other yelling; if you’re not charging straight at them with guns blazing the Nazis will occasionally call out, “What’s ze matter, American? Are you friiiightened?” That or ‘Come out and fight!’. Pfeh. See my earlier comments about Simo Hayha. And hold still. I want to see your helmet fly three feet up in the air when I put my bullet through your skull.
(They change what they yell about you based on what gun you’re using, by the way. I didn’t realize this until a later mission. I just thought they were yelling “Sniper!” because the guy next to them had just had his head spontaneously explode.)
It’s mostly a matter of battling to the entry area where you met Sergei after that. The seismic happy fun time keeps going on the whole way, but I haven’t yet been killed by stuff falling from the ceiling, and I’ve played through the level several times. Earth itself is apparently afraid to crush BJ Blazkowicz, possibly because he’d dig his way out and it would hurt. Fortunately for Earth there’s an elevator big enough to haul all the dig site equipment nearby, so that’s Beej’s ride back to the surface, and the truck to take him back to town with his shiny new bling.
Which I still kind of wish really was half the Orb of Aldur, but I suppose one can’t have everything.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:05 pm (UTC)We still need to play.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:08 pm (UTC)And yes. We do. I'm looking forward to it.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:25 pm (UTC)ETA: You and I are going to hide places and shoot things from a long distance, right?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:28 pm (UTC)And, yes, I have the soul of a sniper when it comes to these games. Hanging back and shooting things from a long distance is what guns are for.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:39 pm (UTC)Have you found...I think it's called a Gravity Hammer? I call them Boomsticks or the I Win Stick. Because you hit ANYTHING with one and it dies. It's a melee weapon but really good for brutes.
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Type-2_Energy_Weapon/Hammer
no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-19 04:32 pm (UTC)I'm like, Shaddap, Nathan, and take it like a man. ;)