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Tour of Duty: Game of Death and Repository Nine
Posted By: VikingBoyBillyDate: 12/28/15 7:39 a.m.

Last time on Tour of Duty, we found a lot of exposition confirming that Leo's shadowy visitor is S'Bbhuth, who had shown him several paths to destruction... hmm... smells like Infinity... and begged Leo to assist him in designing an engine "through which time flows like water." We found the ninth manuscript, which must mean the s'pht found us and got us back on track and out of Tycho's derailing clutches. If we chose to be a lion and took Cosimo's secret exit, we ended up on this map, Game of Death.

Game of Death

We arrive in front of every weapon in the game (minus the enforcer weapon and TOZ-T) and I get back the SPNKR I lost back on Never Satisfied! This place appears to be an arena of sorts, so we shouldn’t dilly-dally. Let’s whip out the map.


Indeed a small place… surrounded by lava? The spoiler guide is not much help. I’ll quote the entirety of it here:

26 Game of Death


Tips and Secrets


No secrets, just a fiery ammo stash.

Map Making Notes


(Level name taken from the Bruce Lee movie, where difficulty increases as the player progresses from room to room)

Someone remind me to get into Bruce Lee. I have a feeling that spongebob episode “karate island” may have been a parody of this (how are there islands under the sea? Spongebob has a problem of forgetting its setting sometimes).

We take the lift in front of us and find a terminal. It would seem we shouldn’t be reading this now with pfhor teleporting in, but they’re uninterested in bothering us as we read Cosimo’s message.



Postscript? Is that what P.S. stands for? (Yes, Perseus Spartacus, we know you're back, too) At least it’s short, unlike Durandal’s terminals in Acme Station. The message is not to jump into the lava, but is it a ruse? Maybe Cosimo’s hiding more ammo in the fire. There are… yeeesh, TWO Juggernauts outside this ring-like path, but hey, there’s a 1x charger we can come back to if aliens aren’t chasing us =p

If we run across to the stairs on the other side, black fighters will try to get us stuck between them and juggernaut fire! Some SSM missiles and quick feet aughta take care of them! Except these guys are really, really fast. It feels like I’m playing PID on turbo now. Running around the ring and firing off missiles and flechettes will slay them all eventually… you just gotta be careful to not use the SPNKR when they get too close. We ran around a pattern buffer on the other side of the ring, and that 1x charger I mentioned earlier is actually a 3x; let’s use those! I think there’s actually 4 juggs out there; too many to waste ammo on.

If we climb up the stairs, another black fighter will teleport behind us, and another plus a trooper are waiting at the top. Thankfully it’s not a YTYBT trooper on steroids and periwinkle armor. Just regular old violet. At the end of this hall is a hunter and fighter waiting by a switch. Pulling it opens a window revealing an L switch to shoot, and a creaking-plank platform sound is heard after shooting it.

I obviously did… something, but it’s hard to find what it is. With some investigation of the ground arena, we find another L button that will get the center platform rising and falling, but to what?

More fighters and troopers begin swarming us and there seems to be nothing up there, but the choir ambient noise can be heard from within the pillar, so the exit must be in there. The nice thing about this map is the ammo by the terminal and pattern buffer respawns, so let’s pile up on that stuff while we’re here and blow those fighters away! Gahh, I fell in the lava from my own careless recoil, and Cosimo was quite right about there being nothing there for us. Oh, what’s this? A new staircase, and an ammo stash! (just look out for the trooper behind us)

Up the stairs we find a gold trooper and hunter, and this weird platform.

What is this? Walking on it does nothing, but there’s another switch that opens another window with a shootable L switch, same as the first. Another switch opens up in the arena, and that gets another platform in the central pillar going. So this map is wash, rinse, repeat until we climb to the top. When we get back up to the ring, fighters and enforcers and cyborgs, oh my! A new staircase opened up on the other side of the second one, with more pfhor and a new stash.


Hey, did that first staircase have a stash I missed? Remind me to check. This stash room has a switch in it. Pushing it opens a shortcut to the other side. Make sure to press it again to keep it open.


At the top of the stairs is –– you guessed it –– the same switches as before. By now we know to press another button in the arena and expect another ambush, but wait, there’s something I gotta check first. Hmm, well I’ll be a s’pht’kr, there really is no ammo stash up that first staircase =(

The last staircase is angled a bit differently, and there’s a lot of opposition up there, including a MoaH and a MoaC! They really don’t want us to leave, do they? Just one more of the same switch puzzle and we can get out of here. Apparently that last shootble switch was the last one, period, and we already got all the ones on the floor. There’s nowhere to go but up the pillar. Be sure to re-check the ammo stashes before leaving, it’s sure to have respawned!

Those juggernauts are annoying… I’m not sure I can get out of here without taking them down. The timing on those buttons was apparently Colony Ship-ish as we may be stuck waiting to lift up multiple times until the heights are aligned while open to plenty of juggernaut fire. We can sort of avoid them by wiglling around a bit. When we climb to the top (with just a sliver of red shield), the exit opens and we’re out of here!

Repository Nine

First things first, the 1x charger. *gulp*, that’s better. Too bad I could’t manage to keep a 3x from the last map.

Let's see the next mission the s'pht have for us.



Oh, right. The manuscript from Hang to Dry. *insert*







So you don’t want to inquire about Cosimo, Tycho, or anything?

Is this Infinity time travel where going back to 16th century Italy created a new timeline in which the pfhor will be written down as part of human history if we decide to not blow up the k'alima, or is this Eternal time travel where all of this already happened before we started and we made history what it is in some looping time paradox that we have no control to change? (a reality in which we might have to accept that the third eye chakra and the illuminati symbol may have had pfhor influence) I guess one of the terminals on Hang to Dry tells us this has multiple timelines like Infinity. Or is it that there's only one true path and all the doomed paths are just a bunch of stuff that didn't actually happen until we got it right, so Infinity and Eternal both operate on the same logic, and in our own reality we are living in a doomed timeline? ='(

Too hazardous? That’s the same reason Dr. Light can’t teleport megaman directly into the robot master lairs. But it's not a bad trope, because then we'd be playing a shorter scenario. There's a lot of instructions here, and they describe pretty much what we see in the next two or three levels, it's just hard to remember what they said here when you've been playing in them for a while. Ha'rar is interesting, as it introduces a concept that a pfhor can willingly join our side, and up to now we've been either fighting against all of them or being forced into one of their factions by Tycho in Infinity.

Join us next time as Martin attempts to rescue Ha'rar and destroy the core!

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Replies:

Tour of Duty: Game of Death and Repository NineVikingBoyBilly 12/28/15 7:39 a.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: Game of Death and Repository NinHokuto 12/28/15 8:01 a.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: Game of Death and Repository NinDurandal_1707 12/28/15 11:01 a.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: Game of Death and Repository NinGeneral-RADIX 12/28/15 6:18 p.m.

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