: Enjoy your weekend away from the internet! XD I hope it makes for a decent
: read, I shall await your thoughts anxiously while I work on "Aie Mak
: Sicur."
Yeah always fun, but one does quickly realise how much one relies on Internets these days! "What year was this film made? The DVD box doesn't say - oh I'll just look it up!" NO. "Was that actor in x film as y? I'll look it up!" NO. Discussions about geography, music, film, books, ANYTHING ... it's good to get back to receptionville :).
The level writeup was great. I'm not sure I ever realised that where we come back in to the first terminal area was previously a dead-end from that side. It seems like we just weren't supposed to realise that was the same terminal we had already seen - it is just odd that on a level so strange, the "success" condition, in terms of skipping the failed ending at least; not in terms of the terminal, as we know, is just incomplete exploration. That's just not how 'thonners work, especially when they've seen the other way to go. It is much more secret-like in the later dream levels!
Another thing about the dream levels is that it is a really bad idea to find yourself low on health when you are leaving - and here that is a serious problem, as the monsters in this dream may be slow ... but they're hungry, and there is no recharger (and to go along with that reference, no rest button ><). Either exit we take really demands a good amount of health, which makes the level all the more annoying. Still. I find things are worse in Eat the Path, where I have twice managed to save with too little health to even fall to the lavabed and get the recharge pills. In the current case, Aie Mak Sicur affords one good advantages for Acme Station - fusion and shotgun ammo, and 2x health! A good reward for failure, I might say!
The map image looks quite a mess - there are some areas that exist beneath us, only to make things that bit more scary. Again, I only knew that otherwise from Volunteers, but we get phantom radar signals, and if I recall, phantom grenade sounds? Some dream! Its dual functions of allowing us to foresee the end of the world and giving us a new alternative suggest to me that this is perhaps the SO's experience in the timejump, his mind's reaction to it, and perhaps some AI's/AIs' input, helping him out the other side - one seemingly wanting him to see the outcome of destruction; the other wanting to give him the chance to fix it / stop it. It could even just be Thoth on both sides - his internal struggle with what balance really means, and how it might be achieved - though the price
may number in the tens of thousands of stars - or in this case timelines.
Is balance a concept that stretches across timelines as well? If so our experiences are rather on the negative side, but then again, I guess that we have examples of where one sizeable act of goodness is seen to restore balance, however much has been lost under the auspices of evil ... thinking Star Wars here, I guess. All this is new and off the cuff, but I like how it has come out :). I guess we'll have to see where the dream takes us.
