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Tour of Duty: I Can Feel It and The End
Posted By: VikingBoyBillyDate: 2/21/16 5:48 p.m.

I can feel it

Hey, that map title isn’t “repository ten.” Where are we? Well, we must be back at the k’alima, in a part of the ship we haven’t been to yet, and there’s a hunter on a tower to be a huge phallic pfhor headflap and begin shooting at us while we’re at low health and there’s still no pattern buffer in sight.

There’s a door that won’t open, so the only way we can go is up a lift, and at the top is a sight for pfhore eyes.


(you have no idea how much relief is rushing through me)

On the other side is a terminal, and the s’pht explain the current situation.





Only two pages. Simple and to the point. Quite unlike the textwalls that have been thrown at us in the Repository maps. There’s nowhere to go up here, but there is a button, which opens the locked door below. Some blue fighters pop out, and I’ll just take a screenshot to show the wall lighting here.

Subtle attention to texturing is always nice. Behind the green door is a curvy corner and a fast enforcer, sheesh! But my shotgun to the face was faster than his fire rings. Behind him is a 2x charger, thank Jrro. The doors on the side don’t open… and there’s one wall that makes the inactive door sound. Secret area? Trap? Mapping flub? I guess we’ll find out.

For now, let's look at the map.

Yep, there's something behind there alright. It looks like we're in for one more big journey before the end.

Open the door and there’s a trooper to blast in the face! Behind the trooper corpse is an impressive looking room with a central pillar and a deep height, and some windows with hunters and troopers annoyingly shooting at us. There are more cylindrical structures beyond the first one, and we run into ammo laid about them, but we’re rushing because of all the drones and hunters in windows. We reach a door on the other end with some rockets and a 2x canister, but the door doesn’t open and it looks like there’s pfhor slime below, so where to go? Well, back in the room we came from (which the spoiler guide calls the charger room), one of the doors opened. Actually, it’s that secret wall that opened, and it’s only open for a limited time before it shuts again. Darn. What we’re supposed to do to open this door is step on the 3rd cylinder in the long room and rush back as fast as possible to get in, and there’s a huge stockpile, including the TOZ-T that has been lost until now.

(There were flechette rounds on the left side, but I accidentally took them before taking this screenshot)

What does the terminal say?





What, so this really was just a secret? What am I supposed to do to progress through this map? Diving under the pfhor goop leads to a discovery of a locked door and a 2x canister… not helpful in a liquid deathtrap. Where haven’t we looked? After throwing some missiles into the windows, we find a switch by the door that I missed.

This doesn’t open the door, but it does open another one down below.

This looks like a point of no return for some while, so we probably want to go into the secret room and grab one of those 3x canisters before jumping in. Inside is a big room with a MoaH, but we run past it to the door ahead to be met by drones getting in our way and pfhor flanking us on both sides to TOZT, but the cyborg is immune to fire! I got the cyborg to take an unusually long time to explode while being pushed back slowly in it’s death in this narrow hall… weird pfhor gravity? On the other side is a 2x charger, a pattern buffer, and a terminal:




So now it’s our turn to go ShadowEnforcer™ with a unit-portable invisibility device. We ride up a short lift, and hey, they actually gave us two!

It’s apparent from that terminal that this is the first time the s’pht have given us this powerup as a “gift” and we didn’t find this thing lying around in a secret area. Little do they know we found these artifacts dropped by their ancestors 17 years ago… sorry, more like 1500-ish years in the future at Tau Ceti. This is the first time I even considered the invisibility could be a s’pht-made, and not human-made object, but the question is whether or not that’s what Bungie intended as this scenario is not canon and they’ve never been acknowledged in canon text, not even implicitly. This also confirms that these are what the ShadowEnforcers™ are using to make them such a pain to deal with.

Unfortunately, the troopers aren’t stupid enough to blindly ignore us on TC. What a useless powerup, I guess it should just stay in netgames where it belongs.

This is a long circular hallway around an inaccessible red room that looks like this:

There’s two locked doors, and one door that opens. Behind it are a couple pfhor fighters and another ammo stash of rockets and flechettes. One of the mappers must have really liked the flechette. Apparently it’s a trap, as a big door opens with some hunters and a cyborg to blast. Maybe using rockets as the bait for your trap wasn’t such a good idea, eh guys? But wait, there’s more! There’s a trap within the trap, and this one actually got me. Just use rockets until there’s nothing left but the MoaC, then use whatever you want to finish him.

And… what are we supposed to do in here?

This must be another one of the scenario’s stumpers. Guess we gotta explore everywhere (or consult the spoiler guide). Are we supposed to rocket our way up? It’s pretty unconventional to make rocket jumps mandatory, but there’s a 2x charger down the hall and plenty of rockets, so…. *hops* the door at the top actually opens, but there’s a trooper behind it to gun us down with the sliver of shield we have left. Was this intentional? Like the mapper said to himself, “oh, lol I know the player’s going to be scratching his head and try to jump up here, but instead of nothing, they’ll get a surprise ambush. Lol this is deconstructionist post-modernism.” (okay, that last sentence might not have been uttered at the time this scenario was made)

Okay, if we pull out the TOZT, we can torch that trooper, but at the top we get… this?


So, nothing? How do we get over there? The map suggests there’s a lift below that needs to be activated… somehow. I’m really tempted to look at the spoiler guide. After, like, an hour, I found the button on the red wall we have to grenade hop to.

That leads us up to the trooper door the proper way, and now there’s bridges at the top for us to progress.

There’s a 1x canister in the room beyond and a button that doesn’t open the door next to this room like we expect, so we jump down and look around in that circular corridor. Sure enough, one of the doors opened, but be careful with that SPNKR, because there’s an enforcer mixed in with those troopers (but if you don’t care about alien weapons at this point in the scenario, that’s fine). There’s a MoaH down the corner and another button on a pillar. Pressing it opens a closed door that’s so small we might have missed it walking in.

The corridor we enter here is very M1-ish in it’s claustrophobic and labyrinthian design. We get a choice between going up the stairs or down the hall… what do we pick first? BTW, it’s not just M1-ish in architecture, but Marathon-ish in texture, as in far removed from the maps on the pfhor-ship. What did the s’pht do with this place, make it more boxy and less curved? I just don’t think our three-eyed enemies would be inclined to make anything boxy. The hall is a dead end (with an obvious inactive lift), so we’re going upstairs.

There’s a button up here, and this is obviously the other side of that door above the other room that couldn’t open before.

So why would we want to go in that room? All that’s in it is a grenade clip. It looks like there’s more to explore, but it’s just another dead end with a lift tbat needs activating, and a dropoff where we were down below. Well, there’s actually a button in that small room that wasn’t visible from the window. Pretty clever design, eh?

Well, that “lift” on the other side we just activated was really just a drop, and this definitely feels like the ducts in Arribal. There’s no way back up and drones are waiting up ahead.

So we end up… here.

Why? Is there a button in that pillar to shoot? Actually, yes, there is, we just can’t see it unless we run out at it and have to run back up again. Successfully grenading the switch opens the last door in the circular hallway. Inside is a MoaH and MoaC, an another invisibility surrounded by ammo. I actually ran out of rockets fighting these guys. We get up by finding some narrow stairs and climbing on boxes, and there’s another very Arrival-like duct up above. We can go down a drop of no return, or go up the stairs. I chose the stairs, and there’s a fork in the middle. Taking the right path leads to a dead end, and taking the left path leads us to some dropoffs back into the main room. If we look up, we can see the ducts we were walking through. Nice touch!

So I guess we have to drop down the shaft. Hey, we can finally return from the first drop off of no return!

There’s more in this path, but I’m gonna grab that other 3x canister in the secret room first and come back. There’s a button down here that looks like it’s going to lower the lava/pfhor slime.

Umm… I guess I wasted my time grabbing that 3x canister. There’s a button on the other side of the shaft that turns on the lights in the big room, and turns on a lift for us to get back up. I accidentally fell down the emptied room before I could upload my pattern, but I’ll forge ahead.

We run past a MoaH behind a window and find a door with a button to open it. We’re way back in the room with two locked doors from the beginning, and the other door opened! A lot like Hang to Dry. There’s a teleporter on the end that takes it back to… that cargo room with the Arrival-like ducts? I guess we should push that button in the room before taking that teleporter. A lift animates next to the switch, but doesn’t come all the way down to the bottom. If we look at the map, we can see a barrier in the maze above was lowered out of our way in the same place, so we have to re-enter the maze.

On the other side, it appears we’ll drop off into that central red room we couldn’t get into.

There’s four terminals down here. Let’s read ‘em. First, the pfhor-terminals.











Well, that’s nice. Next, the s’pht terminal.





Okay, TychoUs wants to bring clones to the future from this ship, but the s’pht have a plan to shut down the core and erase him for good. After hitting a switch, the pfhor terminal changes.




After hitting them all, the rest of them change.







Now to press the switches on the inside. A door that looks like a lift opens in the middle, but nothing happens when we stand in it? The lights do turn on, and we get the final success message on this map.




Apparently, the rest of the terminals in this map also have their messages changed, but we (obviously) cannot access these easter eggs:














The End.

Whelp, we’re back in the repository room, and before entering the final manuscript, the s’pht spit out the same message we’ve seen nine times before.




After entering the final manuscript:





Limited understanding of human desires? I think that may be foreshadowing what’s coming up, and here is the ending screen.

Well, actually, we'll save the final screen for later, because guess what? There’s more! (and there's technical difficulties with getting the image of that end screen at the moment)

That complete map shows areas we haven't accessed on any of these repository maps.

Tabbing the back of the central column opens a secret path to the real final level For Your Eyes Only. Oh… but there’s dummy teleporters sending us back to the start. I’m getting tired of team Nardo’s tricks. Well, after learning that ALL of the teleporters are false and after some observation, there’s this obvious flashing wall in the back of one of them. This opens us up to where we need to go, a really slow lift, and we’re led to a room with the last terminal in the scenario.




A reward? How will more ammo help us now? That’s obviously not the kind of “reward” they have in mind for us. Find out next time on Tour of Duty!

Oh, and this terminal has a not-success message if you can somehow get to it without inserting the manuscript.




Wait… there’s something here in the map making notes. There’s something that’s been hacked off onto the cutting room floor.

Starting with the Ain't My Bitch map, I deleted everything not needed for this map, and then built on the new, secret stuff. Not much here that is all that tricky, map making wise.

The original plan for this was to have two "challenges" the player had to beat in order to reach the final secret level. The doors flanking the terminal lead to each of these challenges. The door to the left brought the player into a room with a deep goo pool, guarded by a very large, very pissed off Juggernaut. The trick was to make it around the room to the other side, open a door there, and flip a hidden switch which would crush the Juggernaut. A teleporter there delivered the player safely back to the terminal area. The door to the right brought the player into the single most annoying moving platform puzzle ever invented for a Marathon game - each platform moved up and down at a different rate, and the room slowly filled with goo. The player had to time each jump perfectly to make it up and across the room to reach the teleporter on the other side.

After crafting these challenges, Borzz alone play tested the map, since Your Eyes Only was a very secret level, known only to the two of us... the rest of Nardo team was in the dark until the very end of the scenario "build". He thought the challenges were unnecessary to "protect" the final secret level. So I removed the challenges altogether, the only remaining memory being the doors that lead to them.

(editors note: probably the most irritating room I've ever entered...had we not removed that platform puzzle, I'd still be trying to beat it - or warding off the mailbombs we'd be getting)

I’d really like to see that room that is no more. Alas.

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

Tour of Duty: I Can Feel It and The EndVikingBoyBilly 2/21/16 5:48 p.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: I Can Feel It and The EndGeneral-RADIX 2/21/16 8:21 p.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: I Can Feel It and The EndHokuto 2/22/16 5:43 a.m.
           Re: Tour of Duty: I Can Feel It and The EndMartin 2/22/16 11:46 a.m.

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