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Tour of Duty: Tower of Babel
Posted By: VikingBoyBillyDate: 6/26/18 12:39 p.m.

Last time on tour of duty, we explored a relatively simple map compared to the last two, stopped the reactor from exploding (I think?), and left with the invincibility still active. You do still have that invincibility, don’t you? Because it will be useful here.

We start out in a square area full of narrow crushers on all sides. With some invincibility leftover from Galactica II, we don’t take any unavoidable damage. Be sure to go on the right first to grab some AR ammo. In the next corner a bunch of fighters teleport in and there’s a hole in the floor that’s our only way out, but we should skip that for now and go around to the next corner to read a terminal (or not, if you’re re-entering and already read it):








Still failing to communicate with the y’gnoml, I see? Our goal is to get up top of this tower. Simple enough; the only problem is, as we’ll soon see, we just keep proceeding downward through this map.

We go back to the corner with the hole in it (possibly taking damage if our invincibility wore off) and walk through some long, winding, twisting, narrow corridors full of fighters — in an inward spiral pattern, so we know this is going to be another one with a useless automap.

Don’t believe me?

Tell me that’s useful. Don't worry about it too much, because this map is thankfully strictly linear and fun. No forced sequence-breaking through unassigned polygon trigger errors or annoying switch hunts in vacuum here; just point A to point B.

At the very end, we drop down another level onto a platform with drones firing at us from across the gap. This map is called Tower of Babel (are we going to meet a cyberdemon here?), and it’s easy to see this is going to be like Hard Stuff Rules. This is a tightly woven, compact mess of a multilayered map.

We jump across platforms, hot pfhor goo beneath us, firing down drones until we reach a dead end and a drop without goo. We could fall down the final pit with a button that lowers the platforms into a donut staircase, but doing this makes the goo inaccessible, with only square holes remaining that are too narrow to fall down, but this is a hint that these are drains into a central well. There’s a save coming up, but we have to swim under the goo before reaching that point to find the secret, and this was a tricky one for me until Martin spelled it out with a map snippet:

Several times I swam into the central area and found nothing but the teleporter out of here, but the south wall is actually a door that opens up when we tab it, leading to an elevator out of the goo with a 2x to recover our health, some ammo, and a secret terminal:






The only way out is to swim back to the teleporter, and three 2x canisters nicely teleported onto the teleporter (there’s a tongue twister for ya) to make sure we escape without damage, but it’s a bit redundant as a 2x shield charger is coming up immediately after this.

The stairs eventually lead to an outer square around the map, with a door at the north end opening to yet another drop. This map is all about points of no return, isn’t it? But this level has a yellow shield recharger, so hooray! Behind the door, a trooper-pirate teleports in just for me to gun him down. A couple more teleport in, and it looks like were going down another level of the tower from a staircase on either side. And… the stairs have the pfhor goo texture on their sides for some reason.

Blue Fighters teleport in on the bottom, and we finally get our PB. Behind us is a door, with a large central elevator, and we’re finally going up! So the whole reason we were going in circles around the center is because this big elevator was here. There’s a big room up top full of s’pht — I mean, Galaxans — and I wonder if there’s any 5-D space violations here. Killing galaxans just makes more appear, so what we have to do is dance around the room pressing buttons that opens up other buttons in sequence until we get the exit door open. I wasn’t paying attention to the sequence to draw a chart, so… you’re on your own. Just circle strafe and you’ll be fine. The door thankfully closes behind us, locking out the respawning galaxans, and there is a terminal:






Looks like we're getting out of here to aid our kindred humans in the fallout of a dogfight; and with that, we’re entering a new chapter: Retribution. What a fun and short map to counteract the frustration we've endured since we got on the Galaxan ship. Guess they wanted to cap it off with something nice to remember before we left it. There has been a slight deviation in this story from the M1 version: I believe in the original, there was no crash; the dogfight was still ongoing and we were going to fight off the pirates by boarding them in space. Join us next time to see where we end up in this version of events.

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Replies:

Tour of Duty: Tower of BabelVikingBoyBilly 6/26/18 12:39 p.m.
     Re: Tour of Duty: Tower of BabelGeneral-RADIX 6/26/18 3:59 p.m.
           Re: Tour of Duty: Tower of BabelVikingBoyBilly 6/26/18 4:10 p.m.

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