Pathways into Darkness: Dead in the Earth

 

I'm getting sick of enemies who can't be killed.

        

I began this session by replaying "I'd Rather Be Surfing." As I had surmised, the solution to getting through the locked chamber was to don the Red Cloak and let time speed up for everyone but me. Eventually, the locked door opened and brought me to the ladder to the next level.

    

"Warning: Earthquake Zone" was aptly named. It featured a lot more of those ghasts, capable of causing damaging earthquakes whenever they raise their hands. I would open doors and find eight of them on the other side. I learned to spray submachine gun fire in a way that would interrupt them in the middle of casting their little spell. 

   

My typical "strategy" on this level.

     

Fairly early in the level, I found the dead body of another Latin American soldier named Juan. He told me he was part of a team looking for an "enchanted bottle." The squad was ambushed by "green, humanoid slimes." They killed everyone but Juan, who they completely ignored, but Juan later died of poison he had contracted on an earlier level. I had met the slimes earlier, when I tried going in a different direction, and I found them absolutely unkillable. I tried every weapon and crystal. But Juan's dialogue was a hint to deliberately poison myself (with one of my Thick Brown Potions), get past the slimes, and then cure myself with a Clear Blue Potion. Poison causes a small loss of health every few seconds, and you can't rest again until you cure it. Oh, and the only way to tell that you're poisoned is that the health bar changes colors in a way that I can't see.

 

It's pretty insulting when even slimes won't bother with you.

    

Juan had some AK-47 ammo on him, so I spent the rest of the level using up the rest of my MP-41 ammo while I used the Cedar Box to create replicas of Juan's magazine. Despite all the MP-41 magazines I had created on the previous level, I burned through them quickly here, as I had to spray every room like Rambo the moment I opened the door. I also had to fire down dark corridors indiscriminately in case there were ghasts waiting to be activated.

      

Speaking of doors, several of them closed behind me on this level, blocking access to the save rune and the ladder upward. I hope there's another way up later because I otherwise don't know how I'm going to get out.

      

Eventually, I reached another save rune, right in front of a door. On the other side of the door was perhaps the most difficult sequence in the game. Between the rune and the exit were about a dozen ghasts and this giant fat guy who belched fireballs at me. In a few tries, I was able to kill the ghasts (and make it to the exit), but nothing I did would kill the giant guy. Along the way, I picked up a Lead Box and a Ruby Ring.

      

Getting through this section.

    

The next three levels—"Don't Get Poisoned," "Please Excuse Our Dust," and "But Wait, That's Not All!"—are a blur to me. They all featured the same elements:

   

• Venomous Skitters. These spider-like enemies shoot wads of poison at you, which of course can only be cured with Clear Blue Potions. There are a fair number of potions on the levels, but still.

    

Venomous skitters.

     

• Greater Nightmares. These floating fish things are like regular Nightmares except their electrical missiles actually turn to hit you when you try to dodge them. Even ducking behind walls isn't safe.

    

A Greater Nightmare in the background and his homing missile.

     

• A lot more ghasts. The problem with them on these levels is that there are often many directions to go at once. I would get hit with earthquake damage and have no idea what way it was coming from.

• Teleporters. Some of them go to other places on the same levels; others go to new levels. All of them erase the automap every time you use them.

• Only one save rune (that I could find, at least) per level.

    

The enemies were relentless. I'd move three feet, and suddenly I'd have wads of poison and electrical balls crisscrossing from multiple directions. I burned through ammunition fast. I had to rest a few times just to copy magazines. Eventually, I gave up trying to explore systematically and just charged through. When I found a teleporter to the next level, I accepted it gratefully. If there were important items to find, I missed them. If there were alternate paths or additional levels, I missed them.

    

The levels eventually dumped me on "Where Only Fools Dare Tread." It had the same elements as the previous three levels, but in a long, linear fashion that made the level a little easier to navigate. The chief problem was that there were two save runes, oddly close together, early in the level, and then none until almost the end. It took me five tries to get through it.

     

The antepenultimate level.

     

More soldiers from the Latin American squad appeared in one of the rooms. One of them was the leader, Javier. He explained the team's presence: The German team had camped in a local village on their way to the pyramid in the 1930s. A young boy stole their maps and, 40 years later, gave them to his grandson and his friends. Javier was that grandson. They had been seeking a magic bottle, but when they opened it, the entity that escaped slaughtered the party.

   

Javier had AK-47 ammunition on him, but oddly it was different from the ammunition I'd been using this entire time. I had been using something called "AK-47 SABOT" rounds, whereas Javier had "AK-47 HE" rounds and just regular AK-47 rounds. I'm not sure which is best. I kind of understand what a sabot is, and I think "HE" means "high explosive." Javier also had the gold key to the door many levels ago. I don't know how I'd get back there.

     

I don't know if I'll be using any of this.

       

After a save rune, the level ended with a teleporter maze. There were four rooms with four teleporters, each with an enemy or two in the middle of it. The final teleporter took me to the last level, "OK, Who Else Wants Some?," and boy did I memorize the path, because there's no save rune on the last level.

   

This last level ends my experience with Pathways into Darkness for now. It immediately starts you in a room of maybe a dozen headless, which haven't been much of a threat since the first level. In the middle of the level is a floating red demonic creature with no face and a blue stone on his chest. Maybe he's the thing that was in the bottle? Anyway, it doesn't seem possible to damage him, and he doesn't do any damage himself. He just floats there.

     

Killing the headless activates a teleporter, which takes me to another room, this time full of zombies. Again, not much of a threat. By now, however, the pattern has become clear. There will be a sequence of rooms, one for each enemy that I've faced in the game. I think there are 12 of them. You cannot rest in these rooms; if you try, enemies spawn immediately. None of the rooms have save runes, so if you can't complete the sequence, you have to start over.

     

Clearing the first room.

       

The third room is nearly impossible for me to pass. It's full of phantoms, which cannot be hit with physical weapons. Back when I was encountering them one at a time, I could kill them with blue or orange crystals, but in a room full of a dozen of them, the crystals don't recharge fast enough to avoid massive damage. Even the black crystal, which I found on some recent level, and which recharges almost instantly, isn't fast enough. It also breaks after just a few uses. The problem is, I later learned from the hint book, I was supposed to find a violet crystal in "The Labyrinth." The violet crystal affects multiple enemies in front of you and works great on the phantoms.

 

Through a lot of frustration (and, of course, having to fight the rooms full of headless and zombies multiple times), I learn that if I enter the room at near-full health, immediately use my bubbling red (time-slowing) and pale violet (damage reduction) potions, use all the charges in the black crystal, heal a couple of times with clear blue potions, and switch the orange crystal when the black crystal shatters, I can clean out the phantoms. But that only leads to the next problem: in the subsequent rooms full of ghouls, nightmares, oozes, and so forth, there's almost no way to avoid at least some damage, so you need a good stock of clear blue potions to get through the entire sequence. I have three, and I need at least two of them for the phantoms.

     

I wonder what this guy's story is.

      

The hint book makes it clear that you really need to arrive on this level with as many resources as possible. Fortunately, I still had all the crystals (except the one I didn't find) because I'd been under-prioritizing their use, but because I rushed the last few levels, I didn't find a lot of the clear blue or pale violet potions that I could have. It's frankly not clear to me that if I had spent more time on those levels, I would have ended up with a net potion gain.

  

Because of closed doors, I don't think there's any way to make my way up to previous levels. In fact, I don't think there's a teleporter on "Don't Get Poisoned" that goes back up to "Warning: Earthquake Zone." At least, I couldn't find one. My earliest save is from after that. Well, technically I suppose I could dig out my backup drive and restore the disk image from a week ago or so. I'd probably lose about 8 hours' progress. I'm more likely to just "take the L" as the kids say.

    

Any other suggestions? If not, I'll watch a video of the end and prepare a summary and rating.

   

Time so far: 23 hours

Realms of Darkness: Rogues' Gallery

 

The graphic artist just never runs out of imagination.

        

When I last blogged about Realms, I had journeyed through a three-level dungeon to discover a new part of the world. I only explored it long enough to find an inn and save the game. As this session opened, I explored the town and boundaries of this new world.

    

The town, Baddel, is a lot smaller than Grail, which was hardly a metropolis to begin with. Grail at least had a square of streets, whereas Baddel just has a single street. It has no guard outpost or adventurers' hall, just an inn, pub, armory, and equipment shop.

   

The armory has breast plates and war axes. The war axes seem to be the best weapon in the game by literal damage done, but so many enemies these days require magic weapons that I'm not sure the war axes would be a good investment even if I could afford them. Breast plates would clearly be a good investment, but at 121 silver pieces each, I'll have to do some grinding first. 

       

I just noticed the "press space bar for more items" message. I wonder what I missed.

     

The pub looks pretty nuts from outside but is otherwise the same pub from Grail, selling only food. The equipment shop has a "blue sky potion" that I've never seen before.

      

The very odd pub.

        

The first time I visited the equipment shop, which for some reason looks like a circus tent, there was a sorcerer doing tricks out front. It was Stealth the Thief's brother. I gave him Stealth's letter, and he took off, rewarding us with a couple of magic staves, a healing scroll, a magic long sword, and a four-leaf clover.

      

My reward.

      

The area surrounding Baddel was 27 squares and included a couple of interesting encounters:

   

• A temple.

• A star inscribed on the ground that I couldn't figure out how to do anything with.

• A "skulking thief" who offered a tip for 75 silver. That was pretty pricey for us, but I paid it. The tip: "I learned from my fellow thieves that there exists an elevator whose descent is controlled by how many people are inside it." 

     

Sounds like a job for (N)ew Party!

       

• A dwarf sleeping on a tree stump. When I woke him up, he said: "Know this, my friends. The Rogue Alliance is protected by charms. These charms prevent normal weapons from affecting them. If you wish to destroy the Alliance, you must find the bones of dragon." I don't know that I particularly wish to defeat it, but perhaps that's the next quest.

• Some swampy squares that don't have anything in them but are a little freaky.

      

Behold.

      

More importantly, there are five ladders, chains, and stairways down to five different dungeons. This game is just getting started.

    

Do you suppose this guy is an elf or a dwarf?

      

No one had given me a new quest, and I still had a mysterious stairway down in the last dungeon I explored, so I decided to wrap that up first. It turned out to go nowhere; it dropped me above a pit (that I had already mapped) on the level below. But I took the time to travel all the way back to Grail and the first adventure disk to see if there was any follow-up on Stealth or any new quests. The answer should have been obvious: information is not traded between disks, so Stealth was still in his cell, no one gave me a new quest, and it was clear I wasn't supposed to be on this disk anymore.

      

I've got some bad news, buddy.

     

I made my way back to the other world and decided to explore the new dungeons from the top down. My first selection led me to a single 16 x 16 level with a lot of one-way walls. Encounters here:

     

• In the first hallway, I found a machine gun, "a shiny new Gatling gun capable of firing 3000 rounds per minute." If it's "new," I guess this world has entered its Industrial Age. I gave it to Cadoc, who has no trouble wielding it despite the real Gatling gun weighing close to 200 pounds. It does modestly more damage in combat than a sword. The game had nothing to say about ammunition, so perhaps he's just hitting enemies with it.

• Two places had buttons on the walls. One of them caused the word "suicidal" to flash on the wall, which then greatly increased the odds of a random encounter each step. The other one flashed "normal" and returned the dungeon to normal. I barely made it out alive after pushing the first one. I guess it would be good for grinding.

• A bunch of squares in the southeast corner had one-way walls, pushing the player inextricably to the southeast. After all that, there was nothing there.

       

My map of the dungeon.

     

• A "mild-mannered man" wearing a t-shirt that said "War is hell." He told me that I would need to strip myself of arms to pass, so I split the party and gave one party's weapons to the other. It was an annoying process. The man opened a secret door for the unarmed party, which had to run from every battle.

• In the area beyond the secret door was a misty figure who asked, "What am I a part of?" I tried ROGUE'S ALLIANCE and MIST to no avail. Maybe the answer is in one of the other dungeons?

    

I don't even know who you are.

       

• A gnome architect was studying blueprints. "Seek the shapes of things to come," he advised. Okay.

    

Enemies got harder and harder, and I had to leave the dungeon a few times when my priests ran out of "Restore Sight" and "Restore Senses" (cures stunning) spells. I still don't have a reliable way to cure poison, just to weaken it, so a lot of my money goes to the temple. Characters started leveling up again at 32,000 experience points, so it does appear that the interval is going to remain 8,000.

     

One of my favorites from this session.

     

The second dungeon I tried was a few squares north of Baddel and two squares east of the dungeon that had brought me to this area. An early sign announced: "Rogue Alliance Headquarters." I thus suspected I didn't want to be here, but I explored anyway, mapping out a small 10 x 10 cube full of pit traps. If the game has given me any way to avoid these, I've overlooked it. I just have to fall in, cast "Neutralize Gravity" to get out, and heal.

    

Oddly, there wasn't a single random battle, but at the end of my explorations, I ran into a fixed battle with 59 "wizard wasps." As the sleeping dwarf warned, they were immune to my weapons and barely responded to even my most powerful spells. I wasn't able to flee, suffered a full-party death, and had to reload.

    

This feels a bit unbalanced.

     

The third dungeon, just a couple moves west of Baddel, made a strange shape, as if to suggest some kind of vise or . . . cradle, maybe? I can't think of the right word. Like something was meant to fit between the two arms.

    

It bothers me that they're not equal heights.

      

Anyway, the only fixed encounter was on the tiny second level, where I ran into a message that offered "instructions for assembling a teleporter." Specifically, I'm to "combine the 3 shapes of arcane power," stand at the magic star on the outdoor map, and say "SPELLBINDER." Good to know—now what are the shapes of arcane power?

   

I spent a little time grinding in this dungeon against phantoms, zombies, magicians, dwarves, "wheretigers" and "theretigers," doom birds, scorpions, hulks, and other creatures. I so want to show you all the images. If there's one thing I admire most about this game, it's the diligence with which amateur graphic designer Alex Duong Nghiem dedicated himself to these dozens of monster portraits. They're all deeply flawed, and with an earnestness that somehow compensates. And they all come charging out of the screen, inexplicably breaking the borders of the game window. I swear that some of them even break the borders of the emulator window. I need to capture more of them when the game shows them in full portrait, before the bottom window appears in front of their legs. There are times I physically sit back in my chair as some new enemy comes tearing out of the screen like the Kool-Aid man.

       

Oh, yeah!

     

The next dungeon was shaped like a pyramid with a 30-square base and a 15-square height. Its only encounters were part of a stupid puzzle. To get to the final room, I had to cross a lake. (And the magic carpet couldn't do it, apparently; dungeon solutions are always entirely self-contained.) As I explored, I found a boomerang. Later, I came to a ledge with an object on it. "Neutralize Gravity" and ropes weren't enough; I had to THROW BOOMERANG to knock the item off the ledge. It turned out to be a cane. I had no idea what to do with it until I found a radio, which I turned on just in time to hear a broadcast about Dr. Nositall's fabulous new cane, which can freeze any body of water by tapping on it.

       

As known from the 1979 disco classic, "(Won't You Assemble My Radio in) Funkyville."

           

Sighing, I returned to the lake, typed TAP CANE, and crossed it. The final room had a riddle similar to the one in the first dungeon: "What am I a part of?" All the talk of shapes made me think the answer might be TRIANGLE, and it was! I received a pyramid object. I guess I need to return to that first dungeon and say CUBE or something.

 

Oddly, the game specified that the lake was to my north. I mapped it to the east, as I always map assuming the way I'm entering is facing north. If I'd mapped it correctly, it wouldn't be much of a "pyramid."

     

I entered the fifth dungeon but I didn't have a lot of time to explore before I had to get this posting out. In lieu of a longer entry, below are some more of my favorite monster portraits.

      

Time so far: 31 hours

    

******

    

"Flame demons." I love that they wear uniforms.

"High priest." I think the artist could have tried a bit harder on the belt.

 

The hulk's arms appear to end in stubs.

 

This guy's from last time, but I don't think I showed him. Look at that arm-to-head ratio!

"Vlads," one of many enemies whose graphics break through the top border of the game window.

BRIEF: Journey into Darkness (1986)

Isn't that adorable: their tails are linked!

   

Journey into Darkness

United States

Earthware Computer Services (developer and publisher)

Released 1986 for Apple II

Couldn't play because: Technical issues, no documentation

    

Well, it would have been fun to have three Darkness games going at the same time, but it is not meant to be. My attempt to play Journey into Darkness suggests that it is:

   

1. Unplayable without documentation.
2. Perhaps unplayable even with documentation.
3. A game I am unwilling to spend more time on even if #1 and #2 turn out not to be true.

   

The game presents itself as an Ultima clone in which a single character adventures in a tiled landscape hoping to (according to advertisements of the era) "defeat the pernicious and despicable lord of Dragongate." Character creation is a process of choosing a name, after which the game rolls values for strength, reaction, kipower, endurance, semblance, and money. Every character that I rolled was a "rouge," which an inspection of the game file suggests is a level rather than a class.

 

[Ed. Commenter PK Thunder turned up this document which tells a different backstory. It is an unnecessarily complicated tale that boils down to: A warlord named Trimexion conquered the land and now sacrifices people to his evil god while his minions roam unchecked. The PC is a warrior of prophecy who must search for the artifacts of one of Trimexion's defeated rivals, Mardiux the Black. The rest of the document just describes the different characters and enemies in the game.]

    

Starting out.

     

The game has a Japanese veneer. Weapons include shurikens and tiger claws (along with more pedestrian daggers, sabres, and staves), and ranks include "minor samurai" and "major dynamo," which I suspect is supposed to be "daimyo."

       

Let's deal with #3 first: The game is completely controlled by a joystick. But even worse, it uses the joystick as a mouse. When you want to do anything with your inventory, for instance, you have to press a joystick button, move the cursor to the menu, pull it down, select an option, then move the cursor over to the inventory panel and select the item. Making a joystick the sole control method is obnoxious; using it as if it were a mouse is completely unforgivable. And even if such a control worked well with an original Apple II, it doesn't work at all in the emulator. It takes me a good 30 seconds of moving the cursor around to get it to stop on the precise command or object that I want without overshooting it. I could slow down the speed, but that would make the rest of the gameplay sluggish.

        

This should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

    

Even if the control system were tolerable, the game is even more primitive than the original Ultima. There is no NPC dialogue, for instance. Towns have a couple of shops and a mix of NPCs and enemies. Both, when they get adjacent to you, occasionally offer you an item, but none of them offer any dialogue. Yes, even enemies occasionally say, "Would you like something," while they're pounding away your endurance. I'm guessing there's a hidden experience statistic that governs your rank (rouge, pathfinder, mystic, seer, archer, quester, etc.; there are 32 of them), but I never saw any changes to my statistics.

     

A yeti offers me an item while killing me.

     

Combat happens by pointing the joystick towards the enemy and mashing one of the mouse buttons. You periodically get messages like "just grazed it," "you struck it," and "a deadly hit." If you kill an enemy, you get to loot his body, and your inventory fills with items, most of which you then have to drop—which you do by painstakingly going to the "Thing" menu (yes, it's called "Thing"), choosing "Drop," moving the cursor to the item, clicking on it, then clicking on an adjacent square of ground.

       

Fighting an orc in a dungeon.

     

Speaking of inventory, you may notice that the items don't really look like much of anything. If you want to know what they are, you have to activate the menu, click on "Examine," and then click on the item. However, in shops, there's no way to do this until you've already bought the item. 

  

You can hold one item in your hand and wear another. If you want to pick anything up off the ground, you first have to un-equip the hand item, which is yet another annoyance.

   

Now we get into the documentation and/or possibly technical problems. Combat saps endurance directly. I have not been able to find a way to restore endurance. There is no command to rest or sleep. There are no temples in the towns I visited. You do occasionally find food and drink, but they do nothing except, oddly, occasionally add a few points to your money. Every character I started was thus time-limited to about five battles.

    

Finding a dungeon in the outdoor map.

     

Other notes:

     

• Exploring the land, I found a couple of towns, dungeons, and shops. Dungeons are presented in top-down view just like the towns. I never found any clues or directions.

• One of the shops is a bank. I don't know what items it's selling. The game crashed every time I exited the bank.

    

These might be spells.

       

• Text in the game file suggests that it has spells, but there's no command to cast, so I assume spells are inventory items that you "use."

• There doesn't seem to be any way to tell what weapons do the most damage.

• Using torches doesn't appear to have any effect.

   

It's possible that the game's documentation, assuming it had any, cleared up some of these issues. If it surfaces, I may think about giving it another shot. I can already see a few of you opening a new browser tab, so let me suggest you direct it here before going anywhere else. 

    

A treeman kills me.

   

Earthware Computer Services is an interesting company founded by Gordon Goles, a renowned volcanologist from the University of Oregon. Accordingly, its first game was Volcanoes (1981), written by Goles and his wife, Donna. The game challenged multiple players to predict volcanic eruptions in their regions of "Wrangelia." The company also published two early games (1983's Zoo Master and 1984's Black Belt) from then-University of Oregon student Kevin Ryan, who went on to a career with Dynamix. He programmed Sword of Kadash (1985) and Rise of the Dragon (1990) and created puzzle games like The Incredible Machine (1992) and Puzzle Poker (2006).

     

A screenshot from Volcanoes.

     

You may note that the title screen gives the author of this game as Ed Goles. Edward R. Goles was aged 16 or 17 at the time Journey was published, so I assume he was Gordon and Donna's son. I tried to track him down but did not have any luck. Journey sold for $12.95 via ads in magazines like Computer Gaming World. The endgame message for Journey promises a sequel called Out of Time, which was offered for sale in magazines.

Pathways into Darkness: Io Non Morii, e Non Rimasi Vivo

 

This was less of a big deal than I thought it would be.

       

To recap, I'm in this multi-leveled dungeon in the Yucatan because some aliens told the President of the United States that an ancient evil had awakened. My strike team's mission was to take a nuclear bomb to the lowest level of the dungeon, set it off, and get out. The explosion, the aliens told us, would stun the evil entity long enough for the aliens to arrive and deal with it permanently. Unfortunately, I got separated from my team due to a bad jump, and I entered the fortress long after they did. On the way down through the levels, I've seen plenty of signs of an old Nazi party that came looking for artifacts to help the war effort, but no sign of my own comrades.

     

(Note: I have virtually no screenshots for a while because I thought my recording was running when I accidentally had it on pause.)

     

That changed on the "Plague of Demons" level I was having trouble with last time. The level is swarming with invisible ghosts. To see them, you have to equip a pair of infrared goggles. There is a pair on the body of an American soldier just to the left of the arrival ladder, which would have been great except my standard pattern of exploration is to go right. So I kept running out of ammo firing blindly at invisible ghosts, dying, and reloading. To make matters worse, the level also has those evil, barely-visible phantoms from higher in the dungeon. These creatures only die if you use a crystal, but I had already forgotten that, so they kept killing me while I assumed I just wasn't hitting them enough.

    

"When / a demon bites my head / and I shoot it dead / I see la vie en rose . . . "

            

Eventually, I tried going left, and I soon found the body of John, one of my companions, who (when I spoke to him with the yellow crystal), didn't understand why I didn't remember his name. That's a good question. I had to repeat the same incredulity with the other members of my party on a later level. This is just like those Ultima games where the only word that initiates any conversation topics is JOB, but half the NPCs tell you how ridiculous the question is: "What do you mean, 'JOB'?! I'm in jail!" or "I'm a child; I don't have a job." As if it's the player's fault for asking the only keyword available.

   

John was surprised I had gotten so far by myself. He told me about using the goggles, but the ghosts had killed him anyway. His M-16 was broken. He urged me to go on and find the others, but he warned me that Steven had changed the passcode to the bomb.

   

The problem after this point was ammo.  No matter whether I went right or left, I kept running out. There was this one room with about 20 of the ghosts where I had to spend three magazines. The previous floors had offered magazines here or there; this one didn't seem to offer anything. But multiple comments had suggested some game-changing artifact would be found on the level, so I kept going different directions until I finally found . . . a wooden box.

    

I'd better get this to Lord British.

         

Muller and commenters had both suggested that this was some game-changer, so I fiddled with it until I figured out what it does. It helped that Muller had told his soldiers that once they had the box, they would need only one gold ingot.  It duplicates things left inside of it. It takes about 75 seconds, but fortunately I rested after putting an M-41 magazine in there and saw the effects almost immediately. You might think that would result in unlimited ammo, but a minute is a long time in this game and there are a lot of enemies to shoot. I think at one point I had five magazines, but most of the time, I struggled (without excessive resting) to have more than three. Is that what the cloak is for? Speeding up the clock so you can get more ammunition? I don't know that I'd risk it. Even though it's only Monday night, I'm still a bit worried about running out of time, but I have more of an incentive to at least explore every part of a level.

   

The rest of "Plague" wasn't too difficult after I could use ammunition more freely. (I should note that you have to be careful not to leave two magazines in the box after the first is duplicated, because it stops until you take one out.) I didn't find anything else of interest, though.

   

I was happy to take off the goggles for "Beware of Low-Flying Nightmares." It wasn't a bad level—very linear, lots of big rooms but with many pillars, making things feel tight and cramped. Enemies reverted to ghouls, nightmares, and oozes. I found a diamond necklace (you get points for treasure, remember) and a gold door I couldn't open. I assume it blocks the hoard of gold ingots that the Germans told me about. Supposedly, there's a gold key around here somewhere.

    

Below that was "The Labyrinth," one of the more annoying levels in the game. True to its name, it was a twisty maze. I don't know whether it's a feature or a bug, but my automap didn't work reliably. If I left the level—which I did, frequently, because I couldn't find a single save point on the level, the automap reset.

     

The level was full of these balls of electricity. No matter how carefully I tried to clear each area, they always found a way to sneak up behind me and start shocking me. I think perhaps they just spawn randomly as you explore, so you can never see them coming.

   

I don't know if there was anything important to find on the level, but I didn't finish it (or, at least, I haven't yet). If I stuck to the outer walls, it wasn't hard to get from ladder to ladder. There was one ladder in each corner, the two northern ones going up to levels I'd already explored, the two southern ones going to new levels. 

      

"Labyrinth" was easy when I was just trying to get from one ladder to the next.

     

I took "Need a Light?" first, and it was without a doubt my favorite level of the game so far. It was a simple level, with large, mostly wide-open areas where I could see enemies (ghouls, nightmares, oozes) coming for miles and easily dodge their attacks.

    

I would love it if the rest of the game were just like this.

     

Near the entry, I found another member of my team, Ed. In the southwest corner, I found four more: Jason, Steve, Sean, and Darren. They were surprised that I made it, as the doors on "Ground Floor" had closed behind them. (I guess they had remained open after the Germans used their alien pipes, then later closed after my team went through?) They had all been killed by some "blue grinning thing" that "torched them all." Only Greg, who had the nuclear bomb, managed to get away. They warned me that the code for the bomb had been changed after I was lost: the first three digits are now "658" instead of "287." (The manual gives the full code as 2870334.)

      

The team is helpful and confused.

     

The soldiers had M-79 grenade launchers and 40mm grenade cartridges. I had already found a few, so by this point I had four or five, which seemed like a lot until I realized each cartridge only holds one grenade (duh). They also had more broken M-16s, empty M-16 magazines, and radio beacons (for extraction later). I wonder if I'll ever find a live M-16 in this game (or, for that matter, ammo for my Colt .45).

   

The "big blue grinning thing" soon made himself known. I think he's the first "boss" creature in the game, although I might be misremembering something from an earlier level when I barely understood what was happening. He fires twin fireballs. He takes so much damage that I would have thought it was impossible to beat him, except that a) Jason insisted, "you can kill it," and b) there was no other way out of the area. Doors had closed behind me. Those doors posed the biggest problem. If I could have led the blue creature to the wide-open area, it would have been easy. Instead, I had to kill him in the space of the corridor before he backed me into the locked door.  

     

If not friend, why friend-shaped?

        

Reloading meant replaying the whole level, which I had to do twice before I was able to kill the thing with a combination of three or four grenades, half a dozen M-41 clips, and maybe 10 uses of the blue crystal. He self-immolated when he died, which I unfortunately didn't get a clip of. There was another brown potion, a bubbling red potion, and an amethyst ring in the chamber behind him.

     

There was no way down from this level, so I had to go back up to "Labyrinth" and across to the ladder down to "Lasciate Ogne Speranza, Voi Ch'intrate," a quote that anyone with a classical education will know from Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy. Specifically, it ends the first stanza of the third canto to "Inferno," which recounts an inscription above the gates to Hell. Even if you're never read it, you've heard it in its English form: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

    

This was an appropriately creepy level: Satanic, runic writing on the walls; twisted columns of dead vines; and new enemies called ghasts and skitters. Ghasts looked like zombies but were capable of damaging me from a distance without actually throwing a projectile (they raised their arms and caused the ground to quake), so it was important to kill them immediately. Skitters were gray sacks that waddled along on two spiked legs and spit some kind of fast-moving projectile that was nearly impossible to dodge.

     

The level, looking appropriately hellish.

       

Even freakier were these naked ascetics sitting cross-legged in the middle of corridors. I couldn't kill them. If I tried to walk into them, I got shocked (for no damage) but couldn't pass. They blocked a decent part of the level. I did find a red velvet bag with a blue (healing) potion in it.

     

I couldn't just step over him?

     

Unable to pass the weird guys, I took the only way down: a vine leading to "Watch Your Step." I was feeling pretty good for the first time in a while, so of course the game had to pull the rug out from under me. In addition to dozens of skitters, the level featured "violet pods"—basically landmines—on the floor. I couldn't find any way to destroy them without stepping on them, which caused a couple points of damage. Worse, there were more of those flying rats, but these didn't disappear when I turned off the light. The only way to get rid of them, it seemed, was to deliberately step on a pod. Nowhere else has the game forced me to take damage, but I suppose I might be missing something.

      

A violet pod and a bunch of dead skitters.

        

Avoiding the pods except when I (perversely) needed them, I made my way around the level, slaughtering so many skitters that I ran out of ammo for a while despite the Cedar Box. There were more ghasts, too, and more cross-legged guys blocking corridors. But eventually, I found a green crystal, which let me create my own earthquakes. This turned out to be the secret to killing the ascetics, which I guess are called "sentinels" (you get their names when you walk across their corpses).

   

In the northwest corner, I found Greg's corpse. He had been killed by a ghast. He told me he hid the nuclear bomb underneath a violent pod to the south, and I soon found it. I figured, screw it, this has to be low enough, and I tried to activate it. The game told me I wasn't low enough. Bastards.

      

It's a nuclear bomb. Does it matter that much?

      

I couldn't find a way down from "Watch Your Step," so I went back up to "Lasciate etc." and used the green crystals on those sentinels. Getting past them, I was able to find a vine down to "I'd Rather Be Surfing."

    

The level had the same textures and enemies as "Lasciate," just a lot of them. There was an especially long, wide, hallway in which I had to move slowly, doing figure 8s around the pillars, lest I activate too many enemies at once. After about 20 minutes, I got through that, past some more enemies, and into a room where the door closed behind me.

     

Despite fighting a billion of them, this is the only shot I got of a live skitter. And it's not even complete.

      

There was a corpse in the room holding an AK-47. He called himself "Pedro," but I don't know what nationality he was supposed to represent. Cuba, probably, but I believe the Sandinistas and FARC guerillas also used AKs. Anyway, he said he had suffocated to death in the room and said that would also be my fate: "Long after you've used up all the oxygen in this tiny room, the doors will open. Just like they did after I died. They will open and wait for someone else."

      

"There's no such thing as an 'assault rifle'!" -- someone, probably.

      

You know what's annoying? I knew immediately the solution to this puzzle: put on the cloak that makes time slow down for me and speed up for everyone else. But for some reason, I waited, thinking that I would start to lose health and then put it on, and instead I just died immediately after a few minutes. So I ended the session here, but I'll try the cloak next time.

     

Miscellaneous notes:

       

• I now have three weapons with no ammo: an M-16, an AK-47, and a Colt .45. 

• My inventory is a bit out of control in general. I should try to organize it with some of the containers I've found. The game makes a point about how much everything weighs, but I guess the developers never implemented an encumbrance system.

• I went from "Novice" to "Beginner" with my M-79 in two shots.

• Oddly, the Cedar Box stopped producing new M-41 magazines for a while. I panicked as I started to run low, but when I took the last magazine out of the box, it started generating them again. Something just occurred to me: does the box work with blue potions? Probably not. That would make the game way too easy.

• I didn't realize until I started timing the appearance of duplicate magazines that the game's clock operates in real time. If it weren't for resting, which speeds up the clock, the player would literally have 6 days to complete the game.

• As I wrap up this session, it's Tuesday at about 12:30. So I have a little over 3 days (I have to activate the bomb by Friday at 14:00), but I have to allow enough time to escape the pyramid, plus 20 minutes for the extraction helicopters to arrive and clear the area. It's the "escape" part I'm not sure about. If I just have to go from ladder to ladder and deal with a few respawning enemies, it shouldn't take long. But if the dungeon fills with enemies after you set the device (which is the sort of sadistic thing this game would do), then I might need hours.

      

A map of the dungeon as I have experienced it.

       

I had a better time this session than the last (there was a lot less reloading), so I guess I'll keep at it. Some of my commenters are correct that although the game isn't really much of an RPG in terms of character development (my primary consideration), it does offer a certain RPG feel in the dialogue, developing plot, puzzles, and dungeon design. For those reasons, I enjoy it. Thanks to everyone who offered assistance last time.

    

Time so far: 18 hours