Previously on How to suck at videogames.
So we’re now in the Engineering block something or rather and not actually on the next deck at all. This game is so blinking huge it’s hard to know where you’re going or what you’re doing half the time. This particular area has the wonders of radiation and poor old Stiffy is having a pretty hard time of it getting from place to place. See what I did there? Cocks.
After much faffing about, and a fair amount of savespawning that I’m not too ashamed to admit, I finally figure out where we’re going, making use of the map is starting to become a bit of a priority.
After finding a storage area with some ammo in, I proceed onwards until I find some more capsuled corridors and had a lot of trouble with spawning enemies. As the game is a persistent world, when I turn it off it keeps on going and although there are some scripted enemies and such, most of them are just random. For me, here’s where the game started to show, just how persistent it wanted to be. It threw about 5/6 Manymen with Shotguns and a few more with poles, not to mention the spectacular new addition to the roster of things that prefer my insides outside are the serving robots, strange robots which like to follow you until it reaches you and then explodes although while uttering exclamations of how it wishes to help you. Nice.
As with Half Life, I have grown quite attached to the melee weapon and almost never use it against the baddies, this has made dealing with the robots a little difficult, however it is possible to ensure that you lose no health and bullets whilst expending this not-quite-servile enemy. The trick is to allow it to come close, then just as it stops to blow itself up, you try and get as far away as quickly as possible. I’m not going to lie, it’s a crap idea and it doesn’t work very often.
Continuing down the corridor, I enter a room and then all of a sudden, the screen goes white. Then everything goes all Half Life. A voice starts speaking to me about flesh and I go on a pretty uneventful floaty tour around a pulpy-looking room. The talk about joining the flesh reminded me of Videodrome, but with a good deal less boobs.
After the flesh got bored, they zip us back to reality, where Stiffy ventures on unperturbed. There’s a room with robot casings and bots in them. It’s quite obvious that they won’t be staying in them and sure enough they start jumping out like popcorn as soon as I walk past the designated points. It’s these mid-to-late 90′s games like Tomb Raider, Thief and this that I love where, through calculated insidiousness, you can exploit the game’s designs in order to make it past the challenge. In this, I rounded them all up and then jumped on a lift. They walk underneath me and, because their proximity explosions are only programmed in a 2-dimensional plane, they begin to detonate far beneath me out of harm’s way. Joyous.
A good bit of exploration and some keycards later, I’ve found a pretty nifty control room, however I don’t have the hardware thing they want. I return to all the doors which needed numbers and find a small room with a module, Ms. Politics tells us that we need to find a hardware device to bypass the security in order to turn on the power or something. To be honest, I see doors, and I explore until I find ways of opening them and the game is definitely in on this too.
Apparently I have to go back to the radioactive rooms, great. Some backtracking and finding of the right hardware and I am able to use it in the control room and get to the security module. The radiation’s gone so now I can go back to the very start of this area and get into an area that was blocked off. There are two areas on either side with switches in, neither prove much of a problem. After this I took to exploring one of the doors, which leads to a long room, at the end of which I found this beauty:
My, what a pain. As there was also a shotgun Manyman with her, I decided I would use my rifle-shotgun thing to take them out. Turns out that they’re bloody useless and I melee’d them after all.
With this I was finally able to restore power and quickly ran to the lift. Onto the next deck then.
I wonder what awe and beauty awaits me on the next deck? What wonders are there to behold, what incredible and unbelievable sci-fi techery is lying beyond the steely floor between us? Oh.
Tales from the System Shock 2 Pt.3
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