/-/S'pht-Translator-Active/-/

	RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"
	Posted By: Mark Levin	Date: 4/15/04 10:37 a.m.
	Nice chapter screen. Take a look at the symbol on that stocky creature's shoulder, you've seen it several times before. Joshua has ordered you to crush the remaining humans, and then you're spit back out at the crash site of Ian's command ship. A squad of marines is fighting some Organics, but why do they turn your weapons on you? You go for your own gun, and then you see your hands... Turning the player into something else completely is a trick that very few games have pulled off, but it's the best part of RED. Joshua has completed his work and added the best qualities of his Organic monsters to your Jjaro technology and raw human marine badassery, creating a killing machine to destroy the two forces that keep him from controlling this planet and launching his assault on the universe. Your Reaver form is armed with most of the physical weapons the Organics have been using against you, as well as some new abilities that can only be described as psionic or magical. Unfortunately, the engine can't alter the HUD or weapons displays, so your new powers appear as the normal selection of weapons, even though they now do very different things. You don't have a complete set of powers yet, as you'll be evolving more over the next few levels. Let's see... Fists: Your puny human hands have been upgraded to huge claws, for a massive damage boost. The rate of punching (mauling?) has been greatly increased as well. The weapon-in-hand graphics imply that the claws are retractable; too bad the engine doesn't allow animation of this. Mercury: A growth on each of your wrists emits the small fireballs used by Omega-class monsters. These do a lot of damage, but they're not very accurate beyond a short range. Good thing they fire almost as fast as the original Mercury and you can't run out of ammo. Also, in what may be another physics bug, they are set as Bleeding projectiles, so when they hit a target you get a splash of blood instead of the "burst" effect. Shotgun:Let's see how those damn Turtles like a taste of their own medicine. Tilt your wrist slightly and a sort of gas bladder shoots a stream of flame. The shapes file identifies this weapon as "intestinal gas", but I don't know what sort of anatomical trickery would be required to connect the intestines to the wrists, so let's just assume it's a completely separate system. This is probably the best close-range weapon you have, and there's a class of enemies we're about to meet that seems to be vulnerable only to this. Conch: This is the first of the "psionic" powers you get. The primary trigger fires an energy blast that seems to ripple over the ground in front of you. This is actually done by firing a burst of projectiles with no horizontal error and a very high vertical error, so they impact in a straight line ahead of you. I don't use this much as I find it difficult to aim. The second trigger is much more fun: Hold it down to charge up some sort of gigantic explosion that will kill everything in a large radius up to and including a Spider Tank (Marathon's quirky explosion logic sometimes interferes, though, so get as close to the target as you want- you're immune to all your own weapons). You can use this to go through the levels very quickly, or as a "last resort" for any encounter that looks like it might be difficult. Speaking of difficulty, you do still have a weakness- you have the same amount of health as you did before, although Joshua was generous enough to give us a 3x charge before throwing us back into action. Fortunately, the Reaver form is still compatible with pattern buffers and shield chargers. And health will cease to be a problem very soon. Take out the human forces in this outside area; the Organics are on your side but will readily attack you if bezerked (of course, they're no match for you when that happens). Find a small crevice in the rock to the southeast and ride the elevator up to the top of the cliff. From here, you can jump down to a dark passage that leads to a broken hangar door in the crashed human ship. It looks like a very long jump, but you've also picked up a significant speed upgrade so you only have to worry about timing. Once you get into the hangar, use the Conch to take out the spider tanks; the blast will kill most of the marines and Raptors. There's a new hazard in the ship- Gun turrets cover important areas. They can be hard to hit with normal weapons, so use the Conch on them too (hell, use it on everything if you want, it has infinite ammo). Then, rampage through the rest of the ship. None of the terminals have anything interesting to say any more, so make your way to the bridge at the north end, gather up all your rage and frustration at the beginning of the scenario and hurl it at Ian (too bad he's only a hologram, but how many other games have you seen where you're allowed to kill the authors? :P). Read the terminal behind where he was standing; the last terminal in the scenario. As you read, the "camera" zooms in on Ian's glasses, a neat trick. Now that the most powerful combat unit on the field has joined the enemy forces, the human colony has been wiped out and the planet belongs to the brothers. And he finally tells us how we came to be in his employment when we found the infected ship way back at the beginning. We were found in the hulk of some ancient, abandoned ship, consumed with suicidal self-loathing after "failing the colonists". You are one of the other 9 Mjolnir Recon-class battleroids smuggled aboard the Marathon, who helped turn back the Pfhor invasion of the planet and were killed when Tycho returned a few years later- all but one. Tycho told the Marathon Marine he got them all, but he was probably insane at the time. (Just think... if the Infinity and Rubicon timelines were confusing, what do you think was happening down on the planet with NINE Jjaro-enhanced marines running around? :P) Or maybe Tycho did destroy your body, but with Joshua's "blessing" you simply didn't die and recovered from whatever he inflicted on you. Either way, you were incapable of normal function when rescued, so they erased your memory, disconnecting you from your true destiny for a time, and that's why Joshua seemed not to recognize you on Nothing's too big to Nuke. Ian gives you one last chance to make things right, hoping that Joshua's wrong and you can consider more important things than your next victim: Go back to the Pfhor ship and fight for the human side again. Teleport when ready... When I first encountered this level, I actually didn't kill Ian before reading his terminal, and was momentarily confused by the reference to the hologram. Later on, I came up with an idea to make the terminal determine whether or not the hologram had been destroyed. The trick would be very similar to my "exploding pipes" map in the Archives: Taking advantage of the fact that Ian never moves, he would be placed on a platform and made tall enough to completely block its motion. Killing him would free the platform to move slightly and toggle the terminal from the "alive" to the "dead" message. Just another thing for the mythical RED 1.1, I guess :P Looking at the map in Forge, we can see that we really dodged a bullet here: The entire map is "mined" with extravision and infravision powerups! However, they have all been removed by editing their spawn information. I know some people absolutely cannot stand the extravision powerup; I can put up with it but not for the entire rest of the scenario. I'm really glad this change was made, the Reaver form is "enough change" to keep the rest of the scenario very different but still fun to experience.

[ Post a Reply | Message Index | Read Prev Msg | Read Next Msg ] Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

	RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Mark Levin	4/15/04 10:37 a.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Dr. John Sumner	4/15/04 11:15 a.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Mark Levin	4/15/04 11:40 a.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Steve Levinson	4/15/04 11:45 a.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Dr. John Sumner	4/15/04 2:55 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Steve Levinson	4/15/04 3:30 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Dr. John Sumner	4/15/04 3:44 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Dr. John Sumner	4/15/04 4:16 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Steve Levinson	4/15/04 5:05 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Dr. John Sumner	4/15/04 5:37 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Dr. John Sumner	4/15/04 2:46 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Mark Levin	4/15/04 3:26 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Steve Levinson	4/15/04 3:32 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Steve Levinson	4/15/04 11:43 a.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	rampancy	4/15/04 7:57 p.m.
	Re: RED Volunteers: ...can we say, "MOSH PIT!"	Mark Levin	4/15/04 8:23 p.m.

[ Post a Reply | Message Index | Read Prev Msg | Read Next Msg ] Pre-2004 Posts