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Tour of Duty: Rise Robot Rise
Posted By: VikingBoyBillyDate: 2/16/14 1:10 p.m.

Last time on Tour of Duty, we explored an abandoned space station orbiting L'Howon, listened to a desperate Durandal's musings of his own mortality, and got teleported out via an omninous terminal.

We get a new chapter screen:

Despair... what does that remind me of? It's synonymous to a certain word that begins with an M... it's right on the tip of my tongue, but it sounds like melons or melody. Isn't that a step or a phase of something? Meh, it probably has no underlying meaning to it. Just forget. Forget. Forget.

Since infinity has no soundtrack, I'm playing this map to the New Pacific remake by Chibi Usa. Listen along to it with this writeup if you'd like.

We find ourselves at the bottom of a lift, our weapons gone, making us wish we used that shotgon back on Ne Cede Malis if we didn't. If we're not careful, we probably will, because this starting area is tricky. At the top of the lift are many openings and we'll get fried by a patrolling enforcer if we don't take the southern exit and grab the magnums on the pedestal. There's a wandering pfhor here, too. If we leave him be, we'll soon realize that he's not attacking us. Curiouser.

By now we realize we're in a Pfhor ship with a texture set that doesn't want to make us want to claw our eyes out. Say hello to Infinity's Pfhor textures.

They are M2's pfhor textures with a change of color scheme that is much more subdued. After Ne Cede Malis and now this, we are grateful for the art direction Infinity has taken so far.

If we climb the pedestals to the southern end of the room, we'll find a button that... is inactive. Okay. We climb up the pedestals and enter one of the two doors at the northern side of the room, revealing they both access the same room. The first thing we'll notice is a Pattern buffer at the center of the wall. The second thing we notice is the 2x charger on the pillar behind it, so we fill up our shield before saving our pattern. The third thing we notice in this room is a pfhor terminal:



Tycho? But he's dead, right? Okay, maybe it's one of those clones the last end screen talked about. So, we're aboard a pfhor ship after being kept in stasis for a long time. Tycho here talks about the humans transition into conditioned units... which gives us a hint that we're not when we think we are because that already happened years ago. That line "if you're a little lightheaded," nails how the first time player is feeling at this point.

On a thread on the pfhorums I made some time ago about the misconceptions players have when they first play marathon a few people thought the terminal image meant we have become a pfhor on this level. That idea isn't too far out of the realm of reality as we find out how surreal this scenario can get.

I always found the revelation that pfhors have a second brain in their... uh... head flap really trippy. At least, I assumed it was a second brain, but I think that might be the pfhor captain with his "control glands" hooked up to the ship. I used to think this was an average pfhor fighter in it's inactive state, with a whole wall lined with these holes for them to plug into. Your theories are as good as mine.

Now we know why that pfhor wasn't attacking us, but the enforcer did. Our mission is to kill all enforcers with the help of some pfhor. Gotcha, Tycho. We go back to that inactive button from earlier to find that it is suddenly active. Looks like Tycho didn't want us to leave without briefing us first.

The map, courtesy of PS:

This is going to be a confusing map to cover. We start out by taking the doorway in the hall to the left, go through some cramped stairs and jump across a ledge into a narrow opening to find some hunters brawling out with the enforcers. We hang back and watch the skirmish until the enforcers dispatch our (?friends)(?allies)(?slavers) and kill them off with our pistols. Normally I would always use something other than the alien weapon to take on enforcers so they'll drop more alien weapons, but given the nature of this level, it might be best to use their guns against them if they are our only foes.

We go south to find some slime pool rooms connected by a large hallway. Down at the southernmost part of the map we'll see a narrow corridor with some stairs and enforcers at the end. As we enter, the doors close and we find ourselves stuck inside. The hall fills with slime and we have to swim up to an opening at the top with a 1x charger. On the other side is large, somewhat octagonal rooms with a lone enforcer and a terminal.


So this is the message to the pfhor Tycho mentioned. Heh. Notice that he told the Willful rank enforcers not to surrender under the penalty of treason. He likes the yellow bloodshed =) The captain's control "glands" are evidently in his fluids... so... he has special blood? I guess that yellow pfhor blood isn't all natural.

There's only one way out, and that's back to the big hallway. We're at the top, and the door here is jammed shut. We jump down and explore a bit. The only way out leads us to a wandering enforcer and up to the cramped stairs we were when we got started in this section.

We head to the western of the map. There's a platform with some enforcers fending off hunters and fighters. After helping them out a bit, I run out of alien gun ammo and switch to the TOZT I got from... somewhere. I think it was near the second Tycho terminal. I forgot to mention it. Anyway, this TOZT is clearly begging us to use it right now. There's some stairs to get us up on the platform so... you know what they say: All TOZT-7 Napalm Units toast enforcers!

We head up the stairs down south and find ourselves in a room with a long bridge over a slime pool. When this room is cleared, the door we find at the end is jammed, so we go back and hang a left and...

Stupid pfhor... These guys are as bad as BOBs. We punch one so they'll move out of the way, and the bugger hits us back! Even the pistol bobs wouldn't shoot us if we gave them one little punch to nudge them out of our way. Maybe the rest of you don't notice this stuff because that's the way I play, while other cyborgs have less patience and just kill everything in sight without discrimination. These pfhor are jerkwads.

You could have simply gotten out of our way, but you decided to chase us, so it's off to the big TOzT-7 pfhor hell for you. Anyway, there was nothing to gain from going there. It was just a roundabout circle back to the way we came.

We head up to the northeast corner of the map we left unexplored. An enforcer jumps us at the northern door we haven't entered in the slime bridge room. Inside we find some burnt fighters and dead hunters. I guess we know who to thank for taking care of them. To the right are a pair of buttons. Pushing one does something we'll get back to later, but one opens up an elevator where we came from. Down below is a very dark, creepy, and claustrophobic area that reminds me of Marathon: Red.

After killing some enforcers and finding another elevator, we head up to a big room with a new terminal and a skirmish between hunters and enforcers.

Ignoring the terminal, we find a window with some nice scenery:

and a pattern buffer! Okay, now lets look at that terminal:


Under the false pretense that you are ignorant of everything in Marathon Infinity: Yes, he said L'Howon command. No, wait, he said Lh'owon Command. I guess I was spelling it wrong all these years. No, the sun has not been set into early nova by trih xeem (yet). We've entered a crazy alternate universe where Durandal left for LH'owo... Lh'owon without us and we got snatched up in the 2nd pfhor attack. It's interesting to see Tycho's side of the story here. We now know he's been following Durandal for eleven years, which is dated on the timeline at year 2800. We also know that, with Tycho on board, they have no need for the S'pht compilers they've been so dependent on. I'm not sure who this R'chzne is, but it seems Tycho has motivations to stop him since he's jamming his signals and sending us to slay his troopers.

*checks through notes*

Oh, R'chzne is the pfhor captain. He escaped planetside before we could reach him. Tycho really wants those control glands. Also, he can detect signals from Thoth even though he should be dormant. Has Durandal begun to reactivate him?

Tycho can't help but wax poetic about his ultimate goal: DURANDAL MUST
DIE! Tycho wants to get revenge on Durandal for the deaths of the humans at Tau Ceti at the hands of the pfhor by using the pfhor that captured him to kill Durandal and his humans. Tycho is a little bit insane, isn't he?

That Durandal's true self-awareness was a fluke is made clear by Tycho's obvious insanity, *even* though the S'pht attempted to duplicate the progression of Durandal's rampancy exactly.

Quite. But this isn't about revenge or justice anymore. It's a race to be the first AI to escape the closure of the universe, and there can only be one winner.

I suspected that there was a failure message if we hadn't killed all those enforcers, but according to the story page, we get the same message no matter how much we've done before (I think). Instead of teleporting out, we head back to the 2x charger at the beginning for a recharger, and if we read the first terminal again, we notice it's changed:

I guess I was right about finding the TOZT-7 in that room that's circled. But
why does he show us an image of an (?infravision)(?Extravision) and a conditioned grenade cyborg? Were we meant to find an infravision there, too? Anyway, heading back to the exit, you must have noticed the two pillars rising in the elevator, right? Well, I'm not sure if I've ever done this (my memory is foggy), but according to the spoiler guide, if we stand on one of these pillars before it rises, it will take us to a secret alcove full of ammo.

Remember that mystery button I glossed over earlier? It opens a door in this alcove to a secret terminal, but alas, the door closes too fast for us to access it in time. Even though we keep referring to ourselves using plural pronouns, we are alone and cannot reach it without another cyborg to open the door for us.

Lucky for us, Martin has joined me to vid the map on co-op and open the terminal! This is what it says:

Martin and I are teleported off to what is presumably a training area of the ship, which has a striking resemblance to a certain netmap from M1...

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseVikingBoyBilly 2/16/14 1:10 p.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseGodot 2/16/14 1:29 p.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseMartin 2/16/14 1:54 p.m.
           Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseVikingBoyBilly 2/16/14 3:18 p.m.
                 Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseMartin 2/16/14 3:45 p.m.
                       Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RisePerseusSpartacus 2/16/14 5:16 p.m.
                             Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseVikingBoyBilly 2/18/14 7:32 a.m.
                                   Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseVikingBoyBilly 2/18/14 7:36 a.m.
                                         Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RisePerseusSpartacus 2/18/14 7:41 a.m.
                                               Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseVikingBoyBilly 2/18/14 4:23 p.m.
                                                     Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RisePerseusSpartacus 2/18/14 5:51 p.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RisePerseusSpartacus 2/16/14 5:19 p.m.
           Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RiseMartin 2/16/14 5:53 p.m.
                 Re: Tour of Duty: Rise Robot RisePerseusSpartacus 2/17/14 9:11 a.m.

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