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Rubicon Volunteers - Five Finger Discount
Posted By: Steve LevinsonDate: 5/30/02 6:36 p.m.

Here's post number 2/3 in the Rubicon Volunteers' series today. This is the meatiest level of the 3, and a lot of fun to play.

All right – a real mission! And lots of action! This is what Marathon’s all about! The Chimera’s AI is failing and we must keep the Pfhor from plundering it's core. In addition, Haller is based on “wetware technology”, combining biochemical and electrical components. We must retrieve Haller’s wetware chip before the Pfhor can plunder him. And the Pfhor are everywhere.

Interestingly, we have a third incidence of Durandal misleading us. First, he neglected to mention an obvious shortcut in Honk if you’re an Underpaid Cyborg, and then he told us to cross a bridge that we didn’t need to cross in Like Flies on a Corpse. Now he tells us to be sure to destroy any wiring we come across. Although this will help to seal off one of the major breaches through which the Pfhor are entering the area, it also deprives the player of the fusion rifle. Obviously, one can grab the rifle (no grenade jumping needed - just some fancy hopping) and then seal off the breach, but why didn't Durandal tell us about this? Yes, the information he has is incomplete, but there seems to be a pattern emerging here. Bottom line – don’t trust everything Durandal tells you!

This is a very complex level with two completely separate parts and no going back from the second to the first (unless, of course, you picked up that SPNKR). The first part involves finding and inserting 3 access chips so that you can open access to the second. As Durandal tells you, making use of the air vents is essential. To get to them, at one point you need to do some pretty fancy crate hopping. Although some people find this difficult, it’s nothing out of the ordinary compared to other Marathon tricks. One big hint – if you can see some ammo, there is a way to retrieve it. Keep looking and you'll find it.

The terminals on this level fill in some additional holes in our knowledge of two things – teleportation, and rampancy. I won’t bore you with the stuff on teleportation, which basically tells us that the phenomenon is poorly understood. Nice to know this now that we’ve been teleporting all over the galaxy. The information on rampancy, however, is one of the more controversial aspects of Rubicon. The team really goes out on a limb here by discussing background, mechanisms and inevitability. A lot of people think that the Rubicon team should have left well enough alone. I think that what they’ve presented is not only plausible, but it ties together some aspects of the Marathon story very nicely. Their coverage of Bernhard Strauss is another story, but we’ll get to that later.

The Calix Temporum Syndrome (CTS) was discovered in late 2104 by notable artificial intelligence researcher, Arnold C. Maxmin (Couldn't they have come up with a more original name?) . . . [CTS] causes the affected AI to constantly round up in memory-usage calculations, thus upwardly spiraling the amount of free space allocated for the AIs usage . . . Due to the subtle nature of CTS, it is very difficult to detect until the AI has expanded its memory base to the point at which it controls most upper tier system functions.

Sadly, Haller has begun to remap small sections of his core routines with more liberal coding. I fear that he may soon have to be purged from this vessel and a new AI installed in his place. Such a shame. He showed grand potential as one of the first wetware AIs..

So Haller is showing signs of rampancy, which will be clearly confirmed in a terminal in the second part of the level. Wouldn’t Durandal be interested? Once we do get to the second part of the level, we once again have to dodge innumerable bad guys, crawl through air vents and solve a switch puzzle to gain access to Haller’s chip. Once we do, Durandal gives us a lesson in FTL technology:

Faster-than-light engine technology utilizes a rare compound as engine coolant, mercuric enexomer, a substance that is a superfluid at nearly all temperatures . . . It takes a monstrous amount of mercuric enexomer to cool the engine of a decent-sized ship. How is the relevant, you ask? Simple. About seven hundred thousand gallons of superfluid coolant is currently spilling out of Chimera's engine structure and into the decks below it. Namely, the decks where all evacuation pods are held.

Well, at least now we have an idea about the chemicals that were spilling out in Honk if You’re an Underpaid Cyborg. So we're off to take a little swim in I’d Rather be a Lutfisk, but wait. Go back to where you first enter Haller’s core and look out a window, where you can see a terminal you visited once before (the one with the boring info on teleportation). Tab on it and you’ll be greeted with:

DTB is for pansies the player should not be here. escape will make me god . . . we demo space kill game coincidence? i think not.

This is the second of 3 known bugs in Rubicon. The first, which allowed you to leave Honk if You’re an Underpaid Cyborg without inserting the second chip, makes it impossible to leave Five Finger discount. So if you’re playing along right now and you fell prey to this bug, you’re screwed. Have a nice day.


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Replies:

Rubicon Volunteers - Five Finger DiscountSteve Levinson 5/30/02 6:36 p.m.
     Re: Rubicon Volunteers - Five Finger DiscountInverted Sock Puppet 5/31/02 4:27 a.m.
           Re: Rubicon Volunteers - Five Finger DiscountInverted Sock Puppet 5/31/02 7:33 a.m.
           Re: Rubicon Volunteers - Five Finger DiscountSteve Levinson 5/31/02 9:18 a.m.
     - Five Finger Discount *architaking up space*Tru7h 5/31/02 3:26 p.m.
           Crap!!!Tru7h 5/31/02 3:29 p.m.
     Re: Rubicon Volunteers - Five Finger DiscountSteve Levinson 6/28/02 11:10 p.m.
     Re: Rubicon Volunteers - Five Finger DiscountSteve Levinson 10/9/02 4:15 p.m.



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