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Tour Of Duty: Poor Yorick
Posted By: VikingBoyBillyDate: 2/26/14 5:44 p.m.

Last time on Tour of Duty Martin and I took a detour into a pfhor training facility. Now I'm back on track on Tycho's orders, and Martin was left behind in that training area since it was impossible for him to run fast enough to the Terminal before the platform closed.

I forgot to recommend Chibi Usa's rendition of Rapture last time on Robot World Arena, but I didn't actually play that track during gameplay, so fair enough. On this map I played resurrection album.

The name. It's a quote from Hamlet. Tycho referenced hamlet in Rise Robot Rise when he said "like Hamlet and his uncle, only I'm not crazy." Yeah, sure you're not, Tycho buddy. The men in white coats are just here to defragment your static-state hard drive so your planet-sized brain will be even smarter. (Yes, I know that static state drives don't need to cycle through it's data sequentially and have no need to be defragmented (but I just know some smarts'pht is going to correct me))

We start off overlooking a walkway with some patrolling troopers. The dual pistols take care of them (the violet one dies, and the green one jumped off presumably to drown in the river below). Some ammo zaps in behind us near a terminal:




You can't see it here, but Tycho has a secur.feed.seg7 below his header and purge.reborn.seg7 at his footer. That second one describes in two words what the pfhor did to him.

I would take a guess that the ^69101bfabrctecleul and ^69101wapconqciqbon commandlines authorized tycho to kill the troopers here, but the same lines appear again at the end of the terminal, so I have no idea what to mean. I won't try to analyze them. Interesting thing here is that Tycho doesn't want to kill R'chzne for his control glands for the ship just yet. He wants to negotiate a higher rank out of him first... and then I guess Tycho will backstab him like a moustache twirling, card carrying villain. Do I have Tycho figured out?

Also, he feels bothered to tell us we don't need to spare any of the troopers. He sure doesn't have us figured out.

The last line, "Isn't beauracracy beautiful?" is disturbing. It's humorous, but that's just it. It's very Durandal-ish. Tycho is a rebuilt clone of Durandal. In the beginning of the Pfhor attack on the Marathon, Durandal called the pfhor because he wanted their technology and revenge on the humans that enslaved him. He turned around and saved the BOBs in the end, but that was only when it became convenient to him.

Is this "Tycho" what Durandal would have ended up being like if he allowed the pfhor to win?

The map:

The two doors here are unoperable, so we take a dive out the window here. On the surface of the water we see... this.

According to the shapes file, this thing is called a Potato Anus. Really, Bungie? This isn't a violent monster. It's just a thing that exists for atmosphere. Chances are you've never seen that last frame where it looks squashed. That's it's death sequence bitnap, but according to PerseusSpartacus, the thing cannot be killed. *shrugs*

There's one of two ways we can go, so we decide to go right first. We walk up some stairs to see troopers duking it out with some of Tycho's hunters below. The distraction helps us TOZT them all unscathed. We fall down below and are ambushed by more troopers and some drones.

A winding staircase leads us up to one of the two buttons tycho told us to find, a pattern buffer, an AR, and a Terminal with the same message from Tycho verbatim in case we jumped down too fast at the beginning and missed it.

There's a decoration in the corner here that looks like a gun.

Did a BOB drop that? I think the decoration may have been used elsewhere back in M2, but this is the first point I stopped and noticed it.

Also, in the middle of the room, theres this:

I always called this thing a Lh'howon frog (correct spelling?), but the name in the shapes file is Grendel. A subverted satire? Beowulf is rolling in his sunken tomb ship. Just like potato anus, it has an unused death sequence. It sits still until I shoot it to prompt it to start hopping around. It hops over to a door overlooking a ledge and we attempt to land on the partial staircase around the corner. Having been successful, we are attacked by drones and continue forward. We find a small room with a 2x recharger, but I'm still in the yellow from RRR.

The staircase continues winding around the level, passing around the other side of the hunters we helped before. We hear the iconic door opening shwwip and turn around to find that a secret passage opened in the wall, revealing a pattern buffer.

Going further, there's a large room with a trooper to TOZT and a wall opens revealing this:

Meet the KKV-7 Fletchette, or as the shapes file calls it, the Superthrust 9000TM (or SMG in the spoiler guide). This thing was tacked onto infinity, because why the s'pht not? It's like the AR, but it's range is a bit more narrow with no grenades. This thing's main selling point is that it can be used in vacuum (even underwater!!!). It's more useful in netgames than the AR, but so is everything else. Ironic how the AR is the most used weapon in single player and the least used in multiplayer.

That reminds me, all the guns Durandal provided us in M2 were redesigned and mass produced by the s'pht to aid us. Where did Tycho get the pistols, TOZT, and AR in our possession now? Is this fletchette another gun Durandal had, but we ain't got one until now? Did the pfhor steal these guns from the Marathon and make the s'pht reverse engineer them specifically for us to stop Durandal? I don't imagine the pfhor themselves using any of these but the AR clones.

The other door is another secret entrance from the outside ledge. We go back on course and find ourselves in the room with Tycho's terminal where we first teleported into the map with both doors now open (we just walked through one of them). As we move out the other door, some troopers teleport behind us destined to be cooked extra crispy. Pfhor teleporting in behind us hasn't been a trick used much until now (Kill Your Television is noteworthy for the jump scares and paranoia by those cyborgs), but the going will get rough as we venture further through Infinity and other scenarios.

We find a nice looking "bridge" over the water.



note: got an all-in-one imac for sale, cheap, so I can run all these HD plugins on infinity without lag in performance.

Also, we've seen these before, but I want to point out these corpse decorations:

Is that a pfhor head without the respiratory face attachment? Then why is the blood red? There's some yellow blood and a staff next to it, so that definitely came from a pfhor, but this "head" in a pool of red blood with something that looks like an amulet or a necklace is bewildering to guess at.

Anyway, on the other side of the 5D tunnel we see a terminal and the other button we should press, and a trooper zaps in to get baked. There are some more rooms with water to explore here. One of them has nothing but a F'lickta and a potato anus, but the other is filled with shotgun shells and a path lined with more shells back outside. We go back along returning to the opposite end of the map and jump into the waterfall. Some ammo and an oxygen tank teleports in there. In the room where we pressed the first button, a door that was locked has opened.

Inside is a terminal, which is just Tycho telling us to do our job:


Through another door we're in a small room with a pit full of F'lickta climbing up to us to test our new toy, the Fletchette on. They're brought down quickly. We walk over the pit and out to a large outdoor area filled with hunters and troopers fighting. There are a few places to go from here, but in a door on the right, we'll find a room with two inputs for computer chips. From what I've been told, these were originally meant to unlock the entrance to a secret level, but that method of entry was ditched later in design and the inputs were left here. The idea was Martin and I were supposed to each carry one chip from Robot World Arena and bring them here, but we didn't find any chips there, so either this was retroactively gutted from RWA or we just didn't look hard enough. The other paths just lead us to areas we've already been, so we go back into the pit room and explore the pit.

It is a sewer of sorts, with fl'ickta waiting for us on the other side of a door. The water rises and lowers in an awkward way that your weapon is just barely above the surface at times. Pistols are easy enough to handle, but one benefit of the fletchette is that it can fire through water and hit it's mark. After swimming a bit we surface into an area with a terminal of Tycho repeating himself. What's with this level having more terminals than needed?

Nothing here, so we go back and find another door in the sewer to a button that activates a lift up to a terminal where Tycho has something new to say:


Weird misconception here... the first time I read this (and I mean both the very first time I played and just now today as I'm writing this) I thought he was talking about one of the bridges in the area behind this terminal, but of course he means R'Chzne's ship. There aren't any enforcers here, and why would they need to be vacuum enabled? Silly me. Another factoid for the misconception thread.

Well well well, it seems Tycho knows more about the pfhor than they think he does, and he supports our suspicions (or at least mine) that the pfhor are incompetents. Sorry, guys, I know you'd love to believe your Gary Stu battleroid is the most badarse super warrior vidmaster near the galactic core, but in reality, the pfhor just aint what they used to be, and they're a wee smidge too dependent on the s'phts that will make their empire crumble. Also, a certain terminal art this foreshadows will be hilarious.

A hallway leads to some shotgun shells and overlooks the area containing the previous redundant terminal. There seems to be nothing left to explore, and we haven't found the power source to destroy.

After some fumbling and bumbling I won't relate, we find the source in a room we forgot to explore next to the uplink chip room. We blow away those wires, jump into the water, and jump back out when we realize there's nothing there but an angry f'lickta.

The first two terminals we found on this map have been replaced with this:

The worst generals that were sent here for punishment are being recalled from this area, soon to join forces with battle group seven to make Durandal's cybertronic existence miserable, and Tycho removes all doubt that we, conditioned unit 7, are enslaved to the pfhor.

Go to one of the two nagging terminals, and Tycho will tell us this:


I told you it would be funny.

This terminal takes us to confound delivery, but there's more to find on this level. We go way over to the pool in the most "the southeast part of the map" as the spoiler guide calls it and grope the walls. One wall in the pool opens up leading to this terminal:


More Shakespeare? I won't even attempt to analyze this. Oh.. huh? Martin linked me to a story page about this. I should read his emails more closely before writing these (and I should keep writing his name in violet to troll him). It says this:

...Shakespeare's Sonnet No.131 is displayed here; it's part of a series dedicated to "...the Dark Lady of the Sonnets"...."...

Off we go to a small, boring level I'm betting I'll write up in less than 24 hours from the timestamp of this thread.

But first, an unused terminal:

Martin informed me one of the pattern buffers replaced it. It's not very interesting, anyway. Except we now know there's rabbits living in some kind of Lh'owon Watership Down in the mountains and the name Rr'rpt, which sounds like a burp and is a pfhor combatant leader that I'm sure will never be mentioned again.

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Replies:

Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickVikingBoyBilly 2/26/14 5:44 p.m.
     Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickVikingBoyBilly 2/26/14 5:51 p.m.
           Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickPerseusSpartacus 2/26/14 7:52 p.m.
                 Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickVikingBoyBilly 2/27/14 2:40 p.m.
                       Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickPerseusSpartacus 2/27/14 4:37 p.m.
                             Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickPerseusSpartacus 2/27/14 5:52 p.m.
                                   Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickVikingBoyBilly 2/28/14 4:15 p.m.
     Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickMartin 2/26/14 11:26 p.m.
           Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickPerseusSpartacus 2/27/14 8:44 a.m.
                 Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickMartin 2/27/14 9:01 a.m.
                 Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor Yoricktreellama 2/27/14 9:05 a.m.
                       Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickDispatcher 2/27/14 10:35 a.m.
                             Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickVikingBoyBilly 2/27/14 1:15 p.m.
     Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickGodot 2/27/14 12:13 a.m.
           Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickMartin 2/27/14 12:50 a.m.
                 Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickHokuto 2/27/14 6:43 a.m.
                       Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickMartin 2/27/14 9:24 a.m.
                             Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickHokuto 2/28/14 8:04 a.m.
                 Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickGodot 2/27/14 8:53 a.m.
                       Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor YorickMartin 2/27/14 9:26 a.m.
                       Re: Tour Of Duty: Poor Yorickyaco 3/26/14 9:37 a.m.
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