: One of the
: first problems I have with the level is right at the beginning. We are
: told to free 4 elder S'Pht who are in stasis nearby. Remember, this is a
: Pfhor ship, so why would there be 4 elder S'Pht in stasis in the first
: place? Why would the Pfhor have had any interest in keeping these revered
: members of the S'Pht on their ship. It is doubtful that the S'Pht had time
: between leaving Lh'owon and traveling back to Earth to pick them up, so
: where did they come from? Sadly, I have been unable to save more than one
: of these when playing on TC. They are just no match for the troopers and
: you have to be really fast and tricky to save one at that. This is not
: what I would have expected from the terminal text - these S'Pht should
: have been much more aggressive and much more resistant to being killed.
Heh, when I just played this through for the first time today (on Normal admittedly...) I could only get one to appear! Maybe I did something wrong but it did seem a bit strange.
: This brings
: you to the first major bug in the series. You have an encounter with a
: contingent of troopers in the blue cooling tank area under the watchful
: eye of your blue hunter, who makes his escape before you can touch him.
: Too bad I wasn't doing beta testing back then. You indeed can kill the
: hunter at this point, only to see him resurrected later so you can kill
: him again. Rather than leaping into the cooling tank and corralling and
: killing the troopers, you can fire a shot into the cooling tank to get the
: troopers to come to you. It's a bit harder this way and you'll expend a
: lot more ammo, but after killing off the troopers, you can fire a fusion
: pistol shot at the blue hunter, who is now clearly visible at the other
: end of the cooling tank. This will provoke him to get off that raising
: platform so that when you do enter the cooling tank, rather than him
: being wisked away, he'll be fair game and rather easily to kill. There are
: so many ways the Nardo group could have prevented this. Oh well.
Hah, I managed to kill him before even touching the Troopers, and I wasn't even particularly trying. Still on normal but things should work and make sense on any difficulty. I did think he was a bit weak as well. The blue hunters usually take tens of fusion shots to kill on this difficulty level, but he took about three... both times. That even made me think that it wasn't him I had just killed. I ended up thinking the white hunter you find in the room with the floating 2x canister was him since he at least caught me a bit off guard...
: After battling the Pfhor on the bridge of the ship and restoring control to
: the S'pht (engaging a switch on the bridge that is unique and easily
: missed), there is a rather strange request made of the player - to replace
: the colors of the Pfhor with the S'pht's own colors. Since when do the
: S'pht have their own colors? Oh, I'm sure that they did at one time,
: before they were conquered by the Phor - in fact I'm sure that each
: individual clan had it's own colors and emblems - but when did the S'pht
: have time after the destruction of Lh'owon to "raise their own
: flag" over the Sh'aptide. Not that I don't think it would have
: mattered to the S'pht, but I just seriously doubt that they would have
: done so in the very short time between gaining control of their ship and
: their visit to Earth's past.
I thought that was quite a nifty little trick but rather unexpected based on previous experience with S'Pht behaviour.
: OK, now that I've thoroughly trashed this level, let me talk about what's
: right about it. The layout is very nice and enjoyable to play. The monster
: level is challenging without being overwhelming. To me, however, the
: really nice thing about Polygonium is that it is our first introduction to
: the new TI ship textures. Not the limited set that we already discussed in
: Ain't My Bitch, but a full, rich set with a great deal of attention to
: detail. This is one of my favorite texture sets in all of the Marathon
: universe, and it was nice to see them incorporated into Ben Potter's Fell
: as well. Most people think about the textures of TI strictly in terms of
: the Earth textures, but the Nardo Team did a nice job with the space
: textures as well, even though there was no real need to. TI is truly a
: groundbreaking scenario.
I must say I second that completely. The level of detail seemed so much richer than the original series' various sets, although a lot of it didn't really feel Pfhor-like. Contrast the metal edged data readout panels with the organic three clawed switches.
