: And then your post last night Steve
: had a tone of "arrogance" to it, as though any "idiot"
: should be able to see how one can get trapped. I honestly and frankly
: assumed that Ian expected the player to hop over to that hallway leading
: to the exit room. I did not even know about the NW switch until Mark
: mentioned it. There is no ammo up that way, and since the hop over to that
: hallway is simple, I saw no need to visit that part of the map.
My apologies for my arrogance - the term is well-deserved. I can understand why you might have skipped exploration on this level, given the lack of an early PB and the lack of shield power-ups/rechargers. I generally explore everything and so I flipped that switch and had assumed that it was necessary to proceed with gameplay. I did not even think that there might be a way to play without raising the platform, so I couldn't understand why you didn't see the problem here. In this case I was in fact the idiot.
: Anyway, however everyone wants to fix the problem is fine with me. On another
: matter, I still say it's a bit of inconsistency when we plan to have two
: recharge stations on the previous level and none on this one, when the
: previous level is nowhere near as hard as this one. IMO
Although this level may be harder than Duct Tape, there is no comparison in terms of the physical sizes of the levels and the amount of time required to play them. Duct tape requires a lot of exploration and the player could easily spend a half-hour before finding the control room with its recharger. Death after prolonged exploration is a real possibility. Further, replacing infinitely regenerating 1X power-ups with a recharger is not much of a change - making the PB always active is the real change there. With Why Did It Stop, completion or death shouldn't take nearly as long. You can play it several times over in the time it takes the novice to complete Duct Tape. Death therefore does not involve nearly as much wasted time. Yes, I would love to have a recharger, but I also want to remain as true to Ian's original design as possible. I'm with Mark - let's try it first with the extra power-up.
