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Volunteers: Ain't Got Time Pfhor This
Posted By: Mark LevinDate: 10/2/01 6:36 p.m.

This is the living end, folks... Your last trip to the Pfhor ship in this game. All you have to do is plow through swarms of Wasps, a few squads of Troopers, and reach the exit.

You stat off next to a 2x health charger, which you will probably need very badly after the previous level. Do NOT clear your clip here, or a pile of Wasps will rise from the slime (to which they are apparently immune, as they are also immune to the lava on the Marathon) and butter your muffin. The network of slime canals they live in is actually quite complex, too bad there's no way to explore it (I don't believe there is ever enough space to grenade hop out of it).

The first room you reach has the first of the level's surprises: Troopers fighting Compilers. The Troopers will probably win, since the Compilers don't seem to want to move. This whole room strikes me as some sort of programming center, where the Pfhor would bring Compilers to receive orders or renew their telepathic bonds every so often. It would be here that the S'pht first realize that the Pfhor cyborg is dead and they are free.

The next set of corridors, with a drop, has a nasty deathtrap: Right around the corner from the ledge is a slime canal set at just the right point for you to fall in if you just run around the corner without looking. Step carefully sideways off the edge and continue jumping.

What's that assault rifle doing there? Sadly, I think we must chalk this up to gameplay. You do need grenades to complete this level, and it's been two levels since you've gotten any new ammo.

Make sure you take the right turn from the assault rifle first, and open the doors that let you out of the only suicide room in the game (not counting a grenade hop). In this room, I saw something new on this runthrough: One of the troopers had already gone bezerk, before I fired a shot, and was attacking the Wasps buzzing around him. Hmm...

Next stop is the... incubator, I guess. Much has already been said about the Pfhor egg, and I can't add anything to it, so go read the appropriate Story Page section. When grenading the switches, don't forget that on the Pfhor ship, the grenades will travel in a perfectly straight line. Also don't forget that the alien egg is bulletproof, when trying to shoot the trooper or the hovering wasps. Another interesting point about this room is that the rows of hovering wasps are divided exactly into Major ones on the left and Minor ones on the right (on Normal. On any other difficulty the game will interfere with the monster types and one row will end up mixed).

I must say that OS X made defeating this and the previous level very difficult. Large numbers of monsters and heavy projectile activity make Classic slow to a crawl, and even the greatest Marathon masters have trouble when running at one frame per second(!).

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Replies:

Volunteers: Ain't Got Time Pfhor ThisMark Levin 10/2/01 6:36 p.m.
     Re: Volunteers: Ain't Got Time Pfhor ThisHamish Sinclair 10/2/01 10:59 p.m.
     Re: Volunteers: Ain't Got Time Pfhor ThisJohn Sumner 10/3/01 7:06 a.m.
     Re: Volunteers: Ain't Got Time Pfhor ThisGrasshopper 10/3/01 7:45 a.m.



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