/-/S'pht-Translator-Active/-/


PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4
Posted By: Lion O CyborgDate: 4/19/16 8:17 a.m.

WARNING: CORE OS (AF44+2DEB) MOD DATE LATER THAN CURRENT
DATE/TIME

< Error Unknown>

< Transfer Durandal>
< Error Unknown>

< Interior Error>

***MESSAGE RECEIVED***
Eddings, and his parents lived alone in a small town on a hill. Eddings kept to himself; drawing pictures, watching subbed anime and playing his video games while his parents worked their separate jobs to support the family.

Life was simple, and they were all happy. That was, until Mirai came XX amount of time ahead of 20XX, and Eddings was subjected to the horrors of the Nazi remnant, 1.20.15.19.

Eddings was already cast a sinner in the eyes of his lion goddess through an unfortunate misunderstanding.

Both his higher functioning mental disability (which served as an enhancement to him) and his ability to hide his inner turmoil, made him easy prey for 1.20.15.19, who were stalking the families of their victims online, trying phish their pocket money, remove their support and send them to labour sites rigged to injure or even kill them in their vulnerable states as a secret, illegal “ethnic cleansing” campaign against the disabled.

Over time, over the course of Mirai, Eddings was hunted by the 1.20.15.19 secret police, his bridges between his current dimension and the many others being more of their targets.

One day, he found one of their victims dying in the street, carrying a mysterious knife whose hilt was as chilly as Antarctic water. It was then the 1.20.15.19 death squads revealed themselves, while the Time Sweepers and Sailor Soldiers fought back, giving him the time he needed to take the knife and escape.

Instead of the subway which they were expecting, he fled into the woods on the road to Wave Ocean. Running through the darkness of forest in the September morning trying to find a hiding place, he found an abandoned temple ruin near a swamp. He pushed open the door and ran inside just as the black suited 1.20.15.19 men started firing shots. The door closed behind Eddings, locking him inside.

He spent the next several hours climbing to the apex of the building to find an alien flute, which he took back down to the doors leading to the basement. On a symbol in the floor, he played a sound code to open the hatches just as 1.20.15.19 started to break through. Without waiting a moment longer, he ran into the open cellar door and threw himself down the ladder into the unknown depths below.

END MESSAGE

Chapter 4: The Unknown Depths Below

Last time on Tour of Duty, we finally reached the top of the pyramid and retrieved the Alien Pipes before taking the warp zone back down to Lock and Load, and then returning to the Ground Floor. It is now time to descend into the catacombs of the pyramid and find the bomb to continue the mission.
Loading my savegame on the Ground Floor where we left off months ago and with a cold to boot, I return to the blue rune in the middle of the floor with the pipes.

And on the subject, here is the entire Ground Floor.

Now to open the doors: Double click on the Jjaro Flute i.e. the Alien Pipes and press Forward Cursor, Left Cursor, Forward Cursor, Left Cursor, Space, Right Cursor, Space.

Isn’t that Addicus from Thundercats? (the good one that is) While it isn’t a hairy Drinniol, it is a Ghoul.

Ghouls are supposed to be zombies under control of the vampire that bites them who have had sex at some point in their lives, and/or are the opposite sex to said vampire. If they are the opposite sex but are virgins, they instead become a vampire themselves.

The ghouls in PID look more like tall skinny apes that behave like the skeletons. Unlike skeletons, they throw rocks instead of bones which do as you’d expect but are particularly vulnerable to the knife. I took a couple of hits trying to deal with them and the skeletons that were there though as they can get shots in before the knife animation cycles again.

You can alleviate this by quickly drawing your pistol and shooting them to cancel out their throwing sprite. I like to think that they drop their rocks on their toes when I do this.

Anyway, I can’t remember which path leads where so I’ll take this one opposite Mr Amnesiac’s body.

Agghhhh! Peee eww! What is that nasty stink? The walls are dripping semi liquid brown slime out of those weird crystalline shapes and the floor is a soggy mire.

Hang on; what’s that thing behind the left corner?

Oh god no! I WENT THE WRONG WAY!




Well, I guess that way smelled like shit for a reason. They are the oozes referenced waaay back in Chapter 1 when I made a toilet flusher joke about the two chains on Never Stop Firing.

In other words, monsters made entirely of wet crap with gaping mouths in their chests and who throw pieces of themselves as projectiles. After reloading, I take the other path instead, killing the ghouls and thankfully no cosmic anvils descend from on-high.

The Marathon pick-up noise tells me I just become an expert at the Walther P4 when shooting a ghoul to stop him throwing his rock. Eat your heart out William J Blazkowicz, except you didn’t have to wear lead ice skates when you killed Hitler, and all the Nazis here are already dead.

After several reloads without actually dying, I finally manage to kill the ghouls and skeleton at the bottom of the ladder without getting hit. (it’s a timekeeping thing)

The level name tells us we’re going the wrong way but I already saw through their shit after I got my face plastered with it on Feel the Power. The walls and floor here seem waterlogged and crystals shine murkily on the walls. Maybe there is a lake above us seeping down through the rock and the gunk from the nearby swamp is flooding the other path.

The German here got his skull crushed by a ghoul after seeing Muller knifing a couple when he used his SMG on three others. Hmmm, sounds interesting. Unfortunately, the rest of the group took his when they left so we can’t use it. No grenades either as they wasted them all on headless, tut tut.
Turns out he is Behrens. Like the others, amnesia is a common trait of dead people.

Just like Flynn Taggart until you hit Space and Marcus Jones, Vincent Callaghan etc. until you press E. (Tab for others) Makes you think if that is what it is like in real life. Maybe that’s why some people and cultures prefer cremation over burial, cryogenic storage or embalming; their brains slowly lose data over time as they rot or otherwise get any damage from ice or the chemicals used to preserve the body.

Fire would prevent them from being salvaged for when we finally invent pattern buffers and cure death by old age as well unless they merely copy and paste people and their minds rather than restart the old copy, but at least they would suffer long after death.

Maybe our minds get extracted to another dimension by the gods (the alien species who may have guided humanity’s evolution) upon death by composers and placed into invulnerable cyborg bodies in the duat. That or we get turned into beings of radiation and become free to roam the cosmos and time like David Bowman, HAL 9000 and Heywood Floyd.

Really bad people like Hitler, terrorists and 4kids and Atos employees would either go to hell like all those religions say, only being given cyborg bodies that are designed to feel strong pain and having their hardware wiped at the end of their sentence, or in this and the latter scenario, just not saved from death at all.

Anyway, the ladders down are made of blue crystal while the one up is a normal wooden one. Taking the crystal ladder beside Behrans, I end up in a collection of damp hallways leading off in several directions.

I came to this hall just south of the ladder. More ghouls hide in the alcoves to the sides of the passageway along with some clips. More ghouls and a zombie or two ambush me from behind as I walk up the hall. I’d eat the tasty looking mushrooms on the floor if the game let me, but I don’t want to end up with my head through the ceiling like that mealworm and other nasties conveyor belt room in Fort Boyard and there are no sponge cakes.

The only other path out leads northwest to another set of ghoul and skeleton infested alcoves to another ladder back up. I take a quick nap beforehand to heal from the recent concussion.

Back on Wrong Way, I follow the passage south, fighting more Ghouls, stopping to save in the southwest corner. Our goal is the other ladder at the diagonal opposite to where we re-enter the floor. I forgot to mention that the centre square is connected to the outer halls by two sets of thick silver doors at each wall. They don’t open yet because we need a key, in true FPS and RPG fashion.

I’ll spare you the journey to the ladder as it’s pretty much more of the same. Good thing I find some repetitive tasks cathartic due to my AS.

One floor back down, we take the north path from the ladder through more alcoves and a couple of antechambers with lovely blue crystal pillars.

I wasn’t expecting to find this guy in the key room, though I knew he was on this floor somewhere.

Behind him is the silver key we need to open the doors upstairs. While they are called nightmares, they don’t actually look that scary; more like a flying obese koi fish that spits ball lightning and explodes when it you kill it due to its gasses escaping.

The key gives me some XP bringing me up to 12 XP and 12 health points.

I backtrack to the ladder in order to take the other path. Now, I’ve recently been giving you the gist of the conversations like the early Tour of Duty’s for the Marathon trilogy in order to save space but you need to see this, even if you already have several times.















Did anyone else notice that there were 7 dialog lines here?

This guy appears to have gone native and now worships the dreaming god. Maybe he always did but there is no indication of the Wrk’s approval. His skeleton doesn’t shed its clothes and start hurling pieces of fibula at us when we leave so we now head on down the passage.

This next section I write up at My Own Private Lh’owon which is now open again. :).

There is a side passage with some monsters and ammo in It where I take a quick rest before coming to a columned room with a ghoul in it. The way out is to the right and it leads to a save rune guarded by more ghouls and at least one zombie.

More delicious looking mushrooms line the wet floor and there is a silver door in the corner.

Like other games such as Doom or Rise of the Triad: Dark War, the metal our key is made from matches that of the doors it opens, so we’ll use the silver key on this one first. Please be the Sunset city please be the Sunset city please be the Sunset city…

>:(

Going through takes us back to the central save rune and ladders to Wrong Way. Climbing back up, I explore each of the silver door rooms in the level.
The east door contains two nightmares, a puddle and some mushrooms which make me hunger for some good soup.

The north door contains two more nightmares and a Walther clip. Going west gives us another two electric koi and a clear blue potion in a golden bottle.


Game Theory has taught me that this is colloidal silver, which was a real placebo. I’ve always wanted to try it but it isn’t sold anymore here. :( I like to think there is cinnamon in this particular type of silver, like in Goldschlager which is one of my favourite spirits.

We will save this for when we really need it because silver bottles are rare. The south room doesn’t open onto the centre square, but there is a corner room by the south wall outside the centre with your daily two nightmares and a couple of pistol clips.

This nightmare is one of four or five in the south room with a ghoul and skeleton.
We also find a most welcome treat.


It looks more red than orange if I do say so myself. It gives us 2XP when picking it up. I’ll stick with blue for now but I’ll draw it when I need it. The remaining corner rooms just contain 2 to 3 nightmares at once and some ammo.
Back on Welcome Tasty Primate, I take the other path away from the outer save rune leading westward to another ladder.

I’ll take a lunch break here as my watch reads 1153 so I’ll see you in a bit.

***



I’m back. Continuing down the ladder, I find myself on a floor called “We can see in the dark, can you?”. Now, I know what is coming here but let’s try and scurry along.

Can’t sleep in here; if the smell of this musty bedroll doesn’t make you sick, then the sound of the rats chewing inside the walls will keep you up. You’ll wake up from your dreams to their little chomping. Sometimes I think that they are chewing me…

That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness over the plump, half eaten body of Rei-san with Luna leaping and tearing at my throat.

Now they have blown up the pyramid and taken my Usagi-sama away from me and shut me in this barred room with fearful whispers about my sanity and experiences. Ami’s voice comes from this room but I don’t see anyone. They are trying too, to suppress most of the facts concerning the pyramid.

When I speak of poor Hino Rei, they accuse me of a hideous thing (whether she somewhat deserved it after her treatment of Usagi-sama or otherwise) but they know it was not me.

They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the demon rats that race behind the concrete in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear: the rats, the rats in the walls.

After reloading, I switch off my torch like I’m meant to and the draw distance becomes worse to simulate darkness.

I return to the German soldier who warned me about the rats. Since he didn’t mention they’re attracted to light, (I couldn’t ask him at the time due to rodents scraping at the eyes) I call him a stupid poopy pants.

Didn’t even ask him about his name dialog answer but we more or less know the story.

He has death amnesia too but does remember his dad was a Nazi too and he joined the expedition thinking they were going to invade North America from Central. That may well have been a cover up for coming here.

The rats killed him before he could turn his flashlight off and it’s a good thing we’ve done the same.

In a room in the south east of the map, there is another canvas bag guarded by a nightmare. It has some more pistol clips in it which I empty out and refill with my Colt 45 and the Nazi items like Mein Kampf.

Not you again.

I take my revenge quickly by giving him two pistol rounds at close range and then use the red crystal.
After some more slogging across wet ground in the dark fending off nightmares and the weird pale guys throwing rocks, I finally get a nice drink that makes everything slow down to the point of bullet time and gives me a right buzz.
It sounds exactly like the time I had pizza and several glasses of coke at the Italian restaurant near the Outsider festival in 2007.

Any ideas what this potion could be? I assumed Red Bull or a Yeager bomb because everything else happens in slow motion when you drink it.

I save my game on the save rune in the northeast corner and continue past the pile of poo that used to be an ooze before finding the ladder down to the next floor.

This is far too dark to see anything. Oh hang on.

That’s better. We are now on Happy, Happy Carnage, Carnage where the German Nazi group finally died off. The ladder in front of us leads to the infamous Labyrinth but we aren’t going there just yet; there’s still a whole branch of the Catacombs left to go.

Here is the end of our current path:

There is a German body near a save rune and an irritable ghoul. He doesn’t know who he is either but tells us that Muller and his group never came back from the tunnel ahead of us. None of them wanted to continue with the mission but A. Muller forced them to stay and B. the exit was locked and they had no gemstone spoiler alert.

He does say that the others had MP-41s with them and he used his to kill a nightmare but he was standing too close. All I have to do now is find their bodies and take their weapons like the trigger happy kleptomaniac I am.

There are mostly Nightmares and Ghouls here in several square rooms off the intersection.

This floor has green crystals in the walls and emerald columns. The floor and ceiling also appears to be made of green beryl. But why is some of the supporting stone stuck in the wall like an MC Escher painting in the south west room?

Yes. There is another Warp zone on this floor but I’m not taking it. You can easily screw yourself if you do as you won’t yet have the items needed to escape let alone the ammo required to defend yourself.
However, given I’m writing this in my Easter holiday and my brother is coming back tomorrow at time of writing this sentence to join us for a belated Easter, I think I’ll go see what is down here. Heh heh…

There is a cheeky ghoul hiding round a corner in the warp zone and I pass three alcoves with tears in them. I do not remember what floors they lead to but I’m sure they all contain skitters and maybe a ghast or two.

At the end, I find a delicious looking pudding for dinner this week:

This Easter egg is made of elemental gold and chocolate, both milk and white. As a bonus, it give me 2XP when I pick it up, giving me 16XP total and 10HP!

Unlike the let’s player of a video walkthrough of PID I saw, I’m taking this with me because you seriously need the HP to stand a chance on the lower floors. I’m not sure if I should eat it later on or carry it to the end as it’s very tasty with a bottle of silver and goldschlager and that second gemstone is very tempting…

Why isn’t this in someone’s top 10 best game Easter egg lists? It gives you bonus XP and teleports you the final boss when you eat it but you need to fight your own greed so you can fight your own greed on Need a light and take any other items and ammo as well as open the escape door on I’d Rather be Surfing.

Exploiting a glitch with it will gives you an even higher end score from Treasure and monster kills so I think this should be added. I hope Ross Scott includes this in a game dungeon episode on PID and Marathon.

Wolfenstein has Arrdwolf

Doom has John Romero’s head

Marathon has all sorts of things in secret terminals

Halo has Marathon references up the arse

Quake 1 has the Dopefish

ROTT 2013 has classic ROTT themed special stages

Shadow Warrior 2013 has hidden zones themed on the classic game

System Shock 2 has its traditional basketball court from Thief and later Deus Ex

Sonic Adventure 2 has a 3D Green Hill Zone act 1

Tomb Raider 3 has a cut campaign level as a reward for completionists

Tomb Raider 2: Golden Mask does something similar by letting the player play around in a fancy hotel

Super Meat Boy has special stages and a glitch special zone in honour of Sonic and Mario respectively before it

The Binding of Isaac has the return of I AM ERROR along with several other Zelda and Devil’s Castle references (What a horrible night to have a curse)

Pathways into Darkness is a sponsor of Willy Wonka’s holiday brands.

Can you guys think of any more I’m missing from this list? An example of this being Halo’s Siege of Madrigal secrets and Halo Reach’s Covenant Disco.

Leaving the Easter Egg warp zone, I come to an open bronze door guarded by an ooze and a couple of ghouls and nightmares, the latter of which I take a hit from as I kill a ghoul but can’t dodge in time.

The door closes behind me and I continue on to a rectangular room at the north end of the map with an ooze in it.

What a mess. Muller really didn’t know to ask them to tidy up in time for guests arriving did they? I loot all the bodies for their SMGs, ammo and the resulting XP.

The guy by the entrance is scared meatless by the monsters behind the three bronze doors. Freidrich has a canvas bag of SMG clips I pilfer. He tells me that Muller came down here looking for a “small glass vial of immense power” which is meant to “contain the essence of an improsioned demon”.

An imprisoned demon? You don’t mean the W’rkncacnter we came here to stun? Well, it sort of is but I’ll reiterate that previous forum post when we find it.

What’s all this about gold? Turns out Walter was given a gold key by Muller to find a treasure trove of gold and a small cedar box used to duplicate anything put inside it but we aren’t told that yet.

The guy across from Muller in the corner just spouts more of the same and only has a pistol plus 1 extra clip.

The man himself has another Jjaro flute and an SMG on him. Muller says that they already killed the monsters behind the rune doors so it’s safe to go in.

Liar.

He also says that he was sent by a Munich university to recover some lost Mayan artifacts from the pyramid catacombs. Oh, so you mean a certain Other God in a glass bottle?

,img src="http://68.media.tumblr.com/7e2bef44cd826d59e0e9fdba7bade315/tumblr_o5w0ofQxjH1t7bqfso5_540.jpg" height="200" width="400"/>

He then lies about the gold and the box so I call him a Yellow Ringed Poop Chute(tm).

What crystals? I didn’t mention any. Oh you mean these ones I have with me? Too bad you didn’t find them.
Now to open the doors and rack up some kills; the treasure inside is mine.

*glug glug glug*


LEERROY JENKINSSS!

Now is a good time to mention that this isn’t any Marathon or Strife; lighting monsters on fire with the red crystal only colors their sprites red and deals more damage than the blue crystal without stunning them as long because of the Torch engine’s technical limitations.

Maybe also because it would take too long to make flaming copies of the death sprites for every monster in the game considering the time Bungie had here and for Marathon.

Uuuuhhhh a red cloak and 1XP from iiiit raaddiicall maannn….

Sorry. The potion made me feel a little tipsy there. I’m lucky to have never been drunk once in real life; at most I have a small buzz but I ain’t gonna push it.

In the other corner past the yellow arrows that open the exit (I think) there are two silver bottles and one brown potion.

I’m just going to come out and say this potion is thick poo. It can’t be human waste due to the bitumen smell unless Muller had a seriously fucked up eating habit and the monsters bottled it after he expired.

I’ll converse my MP-41 clips just now unless they are required until I can make good use of the cedar box.


Ammunition may be scarce for a while so be prepared to fall back to your pistol.

As I kill the monsters on the exit path, I listen happily to the sound of pistol fire slowed down by the red potion. I love that sound, it’s so cathartic. The potion wears off by the time I reach the southeast room on the map.

After saving, I catch some well-deserved sleep until 20 to 1 and climb back up all the ladders to the Ground Floor again to the other path.

Thank you again to Perseus Spartacus for providing the maps.

I will tackle Feel the Power onward next time, so I leave you just now and will continue my journey underground in Chapter 5: the Dark Bowers.

[ Post a Reply | Message Index | Read Prev Msg | Read Next Msg ]
Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4Lion O Cyborg 4/19/16 8:17 a.m.
     Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4Lion O Cyborg 4/19/16 8:58 a.m.
           Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4Lion O Cyborg 4/19/16 9:21 a.m.
     Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4General-RADIX 4/19/16 10:07 a.m.
     Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4Martin 4/19/16 2:51 p.m.
           Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4Bob-B-Q 4/20/16 7:15 a.m.
     Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4VikingBoyBilly 4/20/16 10:37 a.m.
           Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4Lion O Cyborg 4/21/16 12:36 a.m.
                 Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4VikingBoyBilly 4/21/16 7:30 a.m.
                       Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4Lion O Cyborg 4/21/16 8:23 a.m.
                             Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4VikingBoyBilly 4/21/16 3:33 p.m.
                                   Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4Lion O Cyborg 4/22/16 12:59 a.m.
     Re: PID Tour of Duty Chapter 4xcalibur 4/24/16 11:12 p.m.
           While I'm here...xcalibur 4/24/16 11:31 p.m.
                 Re: While I'm here...Lion O Cyborg 4/25/16 6:16 a.m.
                       Re: While I'm here...Lion O Cyborg 4/25/16 6:21 a.m.
                             Re: While I'm here...VikingBoyBilly 4/25/16 11:40 a.m.
                                   Re: While I'm here...xcalibur 4/25/16 12:12 p.m.

[ Post a Reply | Message Index | Read Prev Msg | Read Next Msg ]
Pre-2004 Posts

 

 

Your Name:
Your E-Mail Address:
Subject:
Message:

If you'd like to include a link to another page with your message,
please provide both the URL address and the title of the page:

Optional Link URL:
Optional Link Title:

If necessary, enter your password below:

Password:

 

 

Problems? Suggestions? Comments? Email maintainer@bungie.org

Marathon's Story Forum is maintained with WebBBS 5.12.