SEARCH RESULTS

We begin on a page of a book. I am using a rock to erase words that I can't read so that nobody else can read them, I suppose. Feels like a dick move. Also this rock erases better than any rubber eraser I've ever used. I don't know what that erasing had to do with anything but we're now moving on to the main game. We begin in the Year of our Lord 1518, Bavaria, in the Holy Roman Empire. The story starts in a dream scene where I'm choosing some dialogue options. It's a little jarring to have all these historical trappings and then have a character use modern internet slang. I am Andreas, an artist, currently finishing up some artistic work for the Abbott, and thereafter I shall go to marry a woman in an arranged marriage and live out the rest of my career.  Sexting in this era was a slow process. I am awake, and trying to get my bearings. I'm wandering around screens like it's a point-and-click adventure, but for some dialogue and hitting tab, the game will inexplicably do this: Normal Screen But we are also In A Book and we have A Long Finger Ahhh, it's a clever way to do definitions. Lady I'm not made of pfennings, be reasonable. Last time I played with groschen was in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which I think takes place around the same era and isn't that far away. Also this bitch isn't getting one more coin out of me than necessary, I am leaning towards going full Artist Asshole on this game. YES, thank you game - I can indeed be a jerk. My course is clear. I'm getting some character creation options now. I am at a loss as to which one is going to be helpful here or what the eventual consequences of this choice will be, but we're close to Italy so let's choose the one background that doesn't let us understand Italian. Italian's probably not that important in the Holy Roman Empire. Hedonist is also tempting, two great choices here, but if we're going full asshole then we like fights. And we like crimes! Clever detail - Claus is a typesetter and prints text, so his dialogue is animated as such an appears all at once. Other character's dialogue this far has been animated as though it is being hand written. It's a neat stylistic choice. Also the sound effect is of pen scratching / press stamping rather than voices. I opted to go with fancy fonts because it feels true to the period and I see they've made some stylistic choices about fonts and people, but the game at the start allows you to opt for more legible ones if you find them hard to read. The fancier the fellow, the fancier the font. Oh are we getting involved in Protestantism against the Catholics? I'm definitely up for agitating some religious strife. Another character creation option - it's interesting that they've spaced these choices out a bit. Let's get Biblical! The Law option is tempting for asshole potential but if we're doing a religion-heavy storyline we'll want Theology. This guy, the Noble Lorenz is also an asshole, as he dismisses the presumably righteous anger of a peasant woman. I'm down with being best buds with him. Another choice - there's a lot of different options for our hero. Oooh, let's go Occultist and get... non-Biblical! Also Orator since I probably need to lie. This is going well, I'm already contemplating making rent by stealing money from the church. If it helps, it's for a good cause. Mine. I hadn't really suffered tangible consequences for being a jerk so far but that seems like it'll change soon. The game features a 'This will be remembered' note when you make a consequential decision. The jerk options continue. The nice old monk Piero casually asks to see what I'm working on out of simple curiosity. "No, you may not see my work Piero!" Take your fucked up beard elsewhere old man! My objections notwithstanding, Piero comments on my efforts - a scene of November, with peasants leading their pigs to eat acorns before we slaughter them. Piero points out that this is no longer done as various lords about the land have outlawed it, but I persist in that the image is being copied from an older book. It leads to an insightful conversation ('But that is not how November IS anymore') about the truth of the book and the march of technology, and the concerns about writing and artistry no longer being the sole domain of monasteries, and the concern about what things will be like if many more people are able to read.  There's a interesting parallel there for this blog - who blogs a 'let's play a game' experience anymore? It's all videos now, right? In fact with the ubiquity of video media everywhere, people's literacy rate in the future may well decline. Wise words. Not that Andreas will acknowledge them as such. My first 'quest' is to retrieve some books that have been strewn about the abbey. The Librarian promises me more info on the Baron if I help. I was not given the option to just be a jerk and refuse this task, I will only be helpful when forced to. We get to see some of the books. This is now the sum total of my knowledge about the Aenid. Seems dark. Dido appears to have simultaneously stabbed and burned herself. Lady, there's other fish in the sea - and they're right there! Books that have been missing from the library for years are mere feet from the librarian's door. Who's the real asshole here, me or the monks that haven't been returning these library books? The last book is interesting - it's a French book (which my language helped recognize and read some of) that was ordered destroyed by Bishops 200 years ago. The librarian is going to destroy it on the Abbott's instructions. The whole being an asshole thing proves to be a detriment in my ability to persuade her. The sound effects for this scene are great; A windswept and creaky, desolate and eerie vibe frames the conversation. In this case at least, the problems caused by being an asshole can be solved by being more of an asshole. Fuck you Sister, I'm keeping it. All right! Time for Sext! Sext is not nearly as fun as it will be if you wait 500 years. Since everyone's busy eating it's a good time for a little reverse-tithing. Yes I absolutely would have stolen all of it if the game had let me. Wandering around the Church a bit I found a secret entrance to the Library! Andreas just says 'I'll remember it' when I try to use it, so I guess it's for later. The Ruffian background choice is paying dividends, I'm having a great time with it. Heh. Hahaha, well played Brother. Looks like there may be some puzzles to be solved. I do wish I could attempt to fiddle with it even though it's clear I don't have enough info yet. Dinner at the Abbey! I managed to stand-up a different dinner date in town to be here. The Baron brings up Martin Luther and the 95 theses, which is a sore subject with the Abbott. I chime in on the side of Luther / The Baron and help make the whole event awkward, plus I think the asshole Nobleman Lorenz will like me more now - I'm not at all concerned about angering the Abbott (even though I suppose he could interfere with my work here). Some guy named Otto asked me to give their regards to the farmer's daughter that I'm housed with. Which means I won't say a word from him and will try my luck instead! I'm not married yet! Hah, being a jerk finally pays off when persuading another burglar. Takes one to know one. And more importantly, we got in good with Lorenz, the Noble jerk. Assholes Attract Each Other Skullduggery! Murder, murder most foul! I show up for work in the morning only to hear screams! Everyone gathers in the chapter house and we find Baron Lorenz like this. Don't blame me, I'd leave fellow jerks alive. 'Hurt' is not the word I'd have used on finding the scene, and that turns out to be the right call. The Baron is dead. Margarete is useless. The Abbott on the other hand is all about making this go away and sweeping it under the rug. This doesn't necessarily mean he's the murderer - the Baron had powerful friends that could shut down the abbey - but it's still very suspicious. This doesn't seem very Abbot-like - maybe he's also an asshole and I should have been nicer to him. Y.. yes? Is that an option we can pursue? Mother Cecelia points out that the Baron's wife is arriving today and he has a servant waiting for him, so a coverup is not a good option. Mother Cecelia talks some sense into the Abbot. Now they are accusing Piero, the kindly old man with the insane beard, of the act! He wouldn't hurt a fly! Plus there's zero blood on him and lots on the victim. Als if a 4' 6" 80-year old actually manages to violently murder you, you weren't trying very hard to live were you? The best arguments are those that insult the innocent. That argument falls on deaf ears. Piero is taken into custody and the Abbot kicks me out of the Abbey until tomorrow. The other monks sympathize with my view and also think Piero is innocent. I'm told to come back later discretely to examine the body. Time to wander around the town a bit more. Ha ha, what a joker. How did this guy ever fade from history? I'm off to investigate the murder. This lady is happy about it and seems to have it out for everyone else at the abbey, she's great. Mother Cecelia reveals that the Baron did 'Irreparable Harm' to one of the sisters last time he was here but then claims that this person could not have killed the Baron. The Baron was even more awful than I initially assumed. She won't reveal more than that but I do find out that records of it are in the library, so now I have a couple reasons to go there - I should also be able to decipher the puzzle I found earlier. I get to sit in on the Baron's autopsy. It's a very detailed autopsy. We find that the Baron was killed with a blunt object, back of the head. Even though he was stabbed, Florian believes the knife didn't kill him. Someone comes in and interrupts the Autopsy. I'm not actually supposed to be there and Florian tells me to hide, but I refuse and just stand there instead and get sent away - probably missed out on some good info there. Time to sneak into the library. It looks like I only have so much time to do things before the game moves on, so you have to choose how to investigate the murder and prioritize what you're doing. If you cared about actually solving it, at least. I'm happy to just do stuff and see what ends up happening. Four eyes will never catch me! The library is very informative! I discover the secret to the puzzle I know about... ... probably a secret to another puzzle I haven't found... ... Sister Matilda is the one the Baron harmed three years ago! AND SECRET GAY LOVE MONKS Yours truly is of course fine with this, but our hero Andreas Mahler the asshole in the 16th century? Oh boy. I'm hoping that I can hold this blasphemous act over their heads. It works, they agree to keep their mouth shut if I do the same. I don't get much sleep because of the library thing AND the family's young child is up at 3 AM poking me in the foot with a stick. She can't sleep, so I tell her a story. A story about what happens to little girls who don't let visiting artists get enough sleep. I'd be a terrible father. A note in Prior Ferenc's house indicates that the Baron was trying to make him perform an occult ritual. I've stumbled upon something that seems like a motive. The puzzle-cypher from earlier reveals something about a recently deceased monk, and the dirt there has been disturbed. My character mentions something about getting permission from the Abbott but I have generally been pissing him off and I'm more of a 'seek forgiveness after the fact rather than seek permission before the act' kind of guy. Yes folks we are digging up a grave. But an artist has delicate hands, why should I dirty them? I lie and tell the brother that manages the cemetery that I have the Abbot's permission He's pretty dumb. A word from me and he's off to the races helping me with grave robbing. We are rudely interrupted by Mathieu.... who knew my blackmail was going to come in handy so soon? Mahler's persistent smirk is perfect for delivering these lines. We discover a cache of items, including a scepter that's the likely murder weapon. I think Brother Ferenc may actually be guilty here. But time runs out before I can confront him, it is evening and I learn the Archdeacon arrives tomorrow. There's another dream sequence where I can mentally summarize all I've learned. There is still a little time left. Matilda's shovel has blood on it, so I question her. I get the sense that there's multiple plausible candidates for the murderer. So this is interesting - she has a note from someone. Ferenc had a similar note delivered to him too. I'm beginning to think that whoever is leaving the notes is the real culprit and the other various threads are red herrings, but I'm rapidly running out of hours to find out who that might be. I spend the remaining time skulking around and seeing if other villagers are involved. The guy on the right, Lucky, goes to honor a secret grave... ... the grave of 'Two Innocents' referenced in these notes. So the Baron did a lot of bad stuff in this town, a lot of people have motive to kill him - and someone knows about just about all of it and has great handwriting. Hell-o ladies, investigation is on hold for a sec! I have lunch with the Charcoal-burner. You get the option to have lunch with various families over the course of the game and hear gossip about the town and other people's opinions. He talks about seeing a ghost, which I also saw very early on. Maybe the Red-Note leaver is also the specter. Also, he mentions seeing Ferenc do his occult stuff. The ritual involved Ferenc's own blood, explaining how it got on the staff - which removes him as my prime suspect. The hour has come, and I speak with the Archdeacon. I'm committed to the bit, but being a jerk here is not going over well. But hey, that's all right - I don't know who the killer is anyway, so someone innocent is probably going to hang regardless of what I do. I've got four people I can try to throw under the bus, and I think there's actually a fair bit of branching options within the game by this point - clearly the Old Angry Widow could also be a suspect but since I wouldn't do her damn chores for her I never found out more. Who am I gonna throw under the bus? How about everyone? Everyone is getting thrown under the bus today. Even the murder victim! Despite offending Judge Jacob here I might still be able to put the blame on someone. Being a smooth talker makes up for my many sins. Ferenc was a jerk to me and he WAS doing black magic stuff. Even if he's not the murderer he's more innocent than Piero. The Archdeacon ends up taking my advice and Ferenc is executed. Just remember that this is a form of justice - after all, Ferenc was rude to me. The abbot is unspeakably angry with me for everything I've done, including the grave robbery. What an ingrate, the Archdeacon could have had the Abbey closed down! Piero is grateful though. Act I comes to a close. Act II begins with an older Andreas returning to the small town after many years. Well Guy I never wanted to see your face again either. And you get another character choice about what Andreas has been doing in the meantime, cool. I would never be caught dead in Poland. Seven years is nowhere near enough time for me to change my ways. I have an apprentice now, Caspar. I work hard to break him of his hopes for his future. The issue at hand today is that the Abbey is heavily taxing the peasantry and they are sick of it. Otto assembles the town and speaks what has been whispered. Hear hear Otto, the Abbot especially deserves your wrath! Some people I didn't see last time I was here try to calm things down. They're concerned about the Duke getting pissed off if the town revolts against the Abbott. The thing about being a jerk is that seven years ago I greatly pissed off Otto because I flirted - a lot - with the woman who is now his wife. But I also mightily angered the Abbot by supporting Luther... and also grave robbery. Both sides in this dispute start off not liking me. It's an anti-moral dilemma - I believe the side of the peasantry is the more righteous cause than that of the Abbey oppressors, which makes me want to side with the oppressors. But a revolution against the Abbey could result in soldiers putting down the townspeople and still equates to being a jerk to the Abbey, and in fairness to the Abbot he didn't strike me as a super evil guy so I don't want to automatically side with him. In such situations I think it's best to anger everyone and see what happens. Back in my element, insinuating infertility. The Gertner family I used to stay with isn't doing well, the kid and grandpa are sick and they can't afford much food. Caspar and I are the only ones at the table who are given bread. I eat it last, let 'em stare at it for a bit. Someone left a note in my room overnight. The person that I presume is the original killer is not happy that I'm back. The Abbot has responded to the cries of the peasants by closing the Shrine of the Hand of Saint Moritz, which just pisses them off more. Those who pray here have to talk to the Hand. The Library and Scriptorium closed some time ago, ended by the Printing Press and the disinterest of the current Abbott. Things have changed, I wasn't allowed in here at all before. In the library I find a book that matches the handwriting of whoever has been writing the notes. Unfortunately it's partially burned and the sisters don't know who wrote it. Is this demon on the wall just helping out with the chores, churning some butter? I'd like to take an interlude from some of my jerkiness to praise this game's understanding of history and my enjoyment of it's large variety of different ancient texts that it's made mention of, it's a very cool way to introduce these works to people - this is a video game you can learn a lot from . And without the game ever explicitly saying so thus far, what's being depicted here is a 'slice of life' for people living through a major historical event . But for Andreas, it's full steam ahead. Some folks have had enough of me. Respect. The Abbot invites me to dinner, despite basically exiling me from the Abbey seven years ago. He wants to give me his side of the story about this whole Abbey / town situation. He is not at all good at making his case, he's being an asshole about things. The Abbey owns the forest, the peasants must shoulder the tax burden, while we're eating Pheasant and plum pudding up here. Act II is a lot more linear than Act I so far, it hasn't branched out into letting me choose to interact with different people and paths as much. Another dream sequence as the villagers celebrate some semi-pagan traditions. Otto wants to defy the Abbot's instructions tonight, but I'm going to sleep through all that and see what the sunrise brings. Sleep isn't easy. Mahler had - and lost- a child with his new wife in the intervening seven years. Andreas is dealing with his own demons. I wake up in the middle of the night and Caspar isn't home yet. I find him in the woods watching townsfolk in costume running around gathering herbs. The Abbot comes out to put a stop to it when we hear a scream from the town. Quick Caspar, grab some herbs for us while he's distracted! Otto is the victim. It looks like he was near a building under construction and a load of bricks fell on him. I think there is another murder to solve. Maybe I shouldn't visit this town, ever. Some people immediately accuse the Abbot of the deed. I point out that the Abbot was with us at the time and couldn't have done it. The peasants do not take this well. Eventually we're locked out of the library by the Monks and Abbot hiding in there, while Peter wants to burn everything to the ground. At least they don't seem to want to kill me anymore. The irate peasants agree to give me just one day to find the real murderer or they will come for the Abbot. Which I don't really mind, I did great last time on a short time frame. I decide to sleep in and burn through half the day before starting. Now there's a lot of threads and options for investigation. One of the options mentioned was to go listen to people's confessions, which I assumed would be the most dickish of investigation options, but I did so believing that the modern practice of private confessions was older than it may be. These confessions are somewhat less private than I expected. The segment is cleverly done, sometimes the penitent wants to whisper their confession so I have to go up and light a candle to hear what's said, and there's only so many to light, so I have to choose which three confessions I think might plausibly give me a clue. Listening to confession gets me a lead on Guy, one of the monks who was apparently cooking the books at the Abbey - and Otto found out! Even better, Guy is a jerk! I have found the possible culprit that I will pursue to the exclusion of other possibilities! Ah-ha! Stealing from the Church! What sort of MONSTER would do such a thing?!? Night comes quickly, and a man simply cannot get any sleep in this town. The irate peasants demand to know what I've learned and hold a midnight trial. But the Trial is interrupted! A representative of the Duke arrives and demands that the peasants release the Abbot and other monks. I get more time to figure out what happened. In the morning I'm down to buying a round of drinks for everyone to see if anyone gets drunk enough to spill the beans. I will accept anyone who gets drunk enough to admit they did the deed or anyone willing to pretend. Oh, this is intriguing - Martin Bauer, the little thief that I encouraged to steal in Act I, has been acting differently after 'traveling the world' and also returning to the village. I figured it was just because he matured, but the doctor here says that Martin no longer has a scar that he used to have. How interesting... perhaps it's not really Martin that returned? That thread is immediately interrupted by the prospect of gambling! I have no idea what game this is but I'm in! Haha, this is great, my background in skullduggery gives me the option to cheat at the card game. I will gladly do so! The house always wins, and this is my house. While I was playing cards the drinking got a little heavy and one thing led to another which led to a full-on tavern brawl. Caspar is quite wrong about how I feel about the result. I took this opportunity to join the fight and trying to sucker-punch a mercenary. Artists should not attempt to sucker-punch a mercenary. I decide to continue my murder investigation by going on a hunting trip. Ok, well, a hunting trip seems fun and you never know if you'll get a lead! As soldiers bear down on the town, some villagers abandon Peter's cause, fearing violence. Those that are left demand that I name someone as the murderer. Being a jerk to Caspar all this time proves to be really, really good for him right now as Andreas tries to make him leave before some potential violence goes down. Being an asshole is just the right thing to do sometimes. And now, time to throw Guy under the bus. Don't feel too bad for him, even if he isn't the murderer, he was still stealing money from the Abbey. Guy ends up hiding in the Mill, protected by my former hunting partner. Look Mr. Ten Second reload, only one person HAS to die, but you can make it two or three if you really want to. He has the gun trained on Peter and shoots, but he misses and and kills someone else. Looks like it's gonna be three. After all that, Peter agreed to not harm the brothers, but he has one last fuck-you in store for the Abbey and lights it on fire. He won't hurt you provided you get the hell out right now. Panic. Andreas tries to save the books and burns to death in the process. Frightened peasants and monks run outside right into angry soldiers which results in them attacking the peasantry in the midst of the inferno, and all in all a bad day for everyone. Did my choices lead here or was it inevitable? Thus unfortunately ends Andreas Mahler, but we get to see that Caspar managed to escape. Ironically I suspect that other players that were nice to Caspar may have gotten him killed here because he'd refuse to leave someone who was kind to him - so who's the jerk now? Act II ends, and Act III begins. Now, I'm playing as Magdalene, some years later based on her age. She was still a child last time Mahler visited the town. She's the daughter of Claus, the guy who runs the printing press. It'll take more than losing a main character to make me play nice. She finds a note in her father's house. The mysterious writer is still around doing his thing. More background choices! Magdalene has less going on in the 'asshole' department this time. I think these background options have been well thought out, Mahler's options played into some neat dialogue choices and results, most memorably when I was allowed to cheat at cards which added an entirely new mechanic to the card minigame. Maybe this will help me break stuff. This is more my style for this playthrough. We're off to a great start with our heroine. That didn't take long MURDER MOST FOUL Aw not Magdalene's dad! Even an asshole cares about their dad! Attempted murder anyway, Dad will live. Of course Father Thomas, I've never seen anyone steal anything in this town. The Doctor says that Claus has brain damage and there's no way to save him - within days or at most months, the injury will kill him. So... eventual murder. Instead of immediately investigating the attack like the last two acts, Magdalene takes on her father's efforts to complete a mural on the history of Tassig. This section of the game is operating on a different timescale. I'm tasked with learning the history of the town so that I can paint the mural, and this starts with writing to Sister Illuminata who is elsewhere asking her what she knows and what's in her books, and then waiting two weeks for a reply. We need the telephone. I'm trying to get into an old mineshaft and do it safely, so I enlist the help of two troublemakers in exchange for assisting with their old-testament related frog scheme. Sadly I didn't end up completing the frog thing and see it come to fruition, not sure what I missed but I definitely wanted it. Ah, safely inside an abandoned mine - which as places go is among the most dangerous. A very successful excursion so far, there's a carved Roman map of Tassig on the walls and I pick up a bunch of pottery shards, leading to this puzzle. Step 1: Wait 450 years for superglue. Someone tries to drop a rock on me just before I climb out! The real murderer still lurks within the town.... Random jerk in the forest murders random pig in the forest in front of me to show me who's boss. It's not my pig! Time to work on the mural! Since the peasants burned up their own history they deserve whatever I paint. I found out a lot for this piece and I have a lot of options! Thus is history depicted, the historian chooses what to show from among what they have discovered. One of our failures in teaching history is that many people don't appreciate that there's a lot of spin involved even with good history. Exploring the ruins of the old Abbey. It was never rebuilt after the fire and lies in ruins today. Someone who is... not artistically gifted.... has been sneaking in here and painted over the Dance of Death mural. This is a bit like that old lady with the Jesus painting. The people here accurately remember my first character. Christmas is a bit different in this century. Personally, I've come to suspect that this guy Werner, the town doctor, is the culprit behind the notes and probably the murders. J'accuse! The game hasn't given me many options to ever investigate him directly but he always seems to be involved, at least a bit. And being a doctor he's therefore educated and could have the amazing handwriting, though I guess that would break character for doctors. After the party I head home and check on Dad. He's not doing well, and asks me to get him some soup. I see the mysterious figure that nearly dropped a stone on me in the mine, but lose track of him. But he's still in the house... Wait, I can choose dialogue for him? Is this... Andreas? Maybe he didn't actually perish in the fire? Ah-ha! Assholes never die! Andreas has been living alone in the woods and in the ruins, he couldn't let the murders and deaths go. Skulking around mysteriously and abandoning his grieving wife means I've been playing Andreas the way he was meant to be played. Mahler thinks he knows where the killer goes to hide - through the old Roman aqueduct to the ruins of the baths. Dad says he's cool so I follow a crazy man into the sewer. And he is pretty crazy. But when he comes to his senses, we've found their hideout. The culprits are Sister Amalie and Father Thomas. Father Thomas has been getting her to write the notes, without knowing how they would be used. The village priest is responsible! I'm sorry I blamed the doctor. And that monk. And that other monk. He did it all to preserve belief in Saint Moritz. Some people stumbled upon the truth - that the Saint was derivative of Roman depictions of their gods found in the ruins. And the People can't handle the truth so they must be protected from it! He admits to the murder of the original Abbott.. but not to the murders of the Baron or Otto later. So wait - who killed them then? He believes it was all in service of the greater truth: That Christ died for everyone's sins. So he tried to stop Claus from completing the historical mural and discovering the truth in doing so. And now he tries to knock out the failing support beams and bury this room and its history forever. Thomas' final victim is himself and the room, the rest of us escape. Months later, Magdalene is ready to leave Tassig. Also that Roman room was underneath the church and its destruction also wrecked the building. Elias has a low bar to clear as the next priest. Andreas' time as a hermit - and out of my personal control - has made him less of a jerk. The game comes to a close, and we see the final mural in all it's glory. It's actually quite beautiful, even my version of it. A little human sacrifice to get the party started. Then Christians show up in the Roman ruins and the human sacrifice party is over. We like parties so we burned down the Abbey! Set in stone, we close the book. And that's how History is made.

I'm very excited about this one, I've heard great things. Edit after I played : If you yourself have not played Expedition 33 , I recommend that you stop reading now and do that first. I have tried to avoid the absolute worst spoilers but you owe it to yourself to experience this one as unspoiled as possible - I regard this game as a 'must play' and I think you will enjoy it all the more if you do that before reading further. Ok, now that you've either played it or disregarded my advice, let's do this! This is Gustave. With wavy hair and a faraway look, we meet our hero. He has a robot(?) hand, and I think we're in the future, year is unclear but we have some pretty cool 'ropes' which consist of suspended light, so we're either using magic or some neat tech. Gustave is about to leave on an expedition to attack the Paintress, some sort of entity that's slowly killing humanity because she's painting a number on her monolith. The Monolith is visible in the distance. When she paints your number, everyone of that age gets 'erased'. So aside from the first year or two people presumably saw this coming. There have been other expeditions (may as well send X-year olds every year, they're dead anyway otherwise) that have died, but they 'paved the way' for us. Gustav wants to give a rose to Sophie, who is also 33 - he has some unresolved love interest there. Sophie is about to go on her 'Gommage', which may or may not be the expedition? Could be something else. It involves lots of flowers. How many French flags died to make these outfits? There's also Maelle, who wants me to 'loosen up' before talking to Sophie. She does so via a 'friendly duel' which serves as the combat tutorial. That's a 'rope' in the background, which happily work much faster than normal ropes. THIS IS ME DUELING IN A FRIENDLY MANNER DIE DIE DIE The Paintress appears to have had a lot more effects on the world than just erasing people - there's floating islands, debris and buildings, buildings that have 'twisted', and lots of blue-green hardened goop around the town. The game is quite beautiful visually, and the music and voice acting are excellent so far. The fashion is older, 1800's? And there's been no electronics or possibly even electricity, so this is alternate universe with some magic. Florists must be he richest people in this society. We arrive at the harbor, and in a gorgeous piece of cinema, the Paintress stands, the world fades, and she paints the number. If you don't play the game, go watch this cutscene anyway . The 'Gommage' is basically if you're older than the number that's painted, you turn to ash and flower petals. The petals fly off into the wind to add an element of beauty to the horror. Sophie spends her last moments with Gustave, resigned to her fate. Imma make a suggestion for future expeditions: Set sail the day before  the Gommage, for morale reasons. I guess it does help if everyone is even angrier at the Paintress. So we're on an island (I think) called Lumiere. One of the conversations indicates that there was a 'fracture', I assume 67 years ago when the Paintress showed up (Or is she older and just started murdering people then?). Another expedition member at this mini-festival wonders if there are other survivor groups out there, apparently Lumiere got lucky with its placement after the fracture and had time to get a shield-dome operational. At this festival you can buy three things with tokens, you start with one and I obtained two more so I got all three things, a 'wierd picto' (spell?), an old key, and a hairstyle. Then it's time to go, and these cinematics... if you don't end up playing the game, they're worth seeking out and watching. I love these uniforms, they look so good. We arrive on the Paintress' island, which looks pretty bleak, with strange rift-lights in the sky. We couldn't find a better landing spot? And... what the hell? There's an old guy here from a prior expedition?!? How is he alive at all? This man is asking the right questions. By way of answering, old guy starts murdering us. Also many other things start murdering us. Like whatever is causing this explosion. And things from under the ground. And this... huge hand thing. Are those pants from a prior expedition? All of which is to say, Expedition 33 is off to a rough start. Hand-thing hits Gustave with a spell that makes his chapter start. He knocked me right out of the prologue. And... we wake up somewhere... Somewhere... beautiful? At first I thought it might be a dream, but I was still covered in dirt and blood, so probably not. This is a damn fine looking game. It's not all good though, this guy was not happy to see me. I ended up having to kill it, if it's even alive. A little further up, this is not quite so pleasant as the forest. Looks like 33 is not the only expedition that had a bad time. There's no numbers on the armbands so I'm not sure which expedition this is. Looks like the people have been turned to stone. I assume this expedition was entirely wiped out right here. Ever get a bad feeling about continuing forward? I would like to go back to the happy forest please. Yeah that's... that's a lot of bodies. At least some of them are Expedition 33. A LOT. At least some of them are Expedition 33. Most of us didn't make it off that beach. It's all too much for Gustave. Pull the trigger and the nightmare stops. But he's saved from himself by the appearance of Lune, another member of 33. Glad she showed up, I wasn't ready to stop playing just yet. And then both are spurred to action by the appearance of a powerful enemy. We've got a lot of team members we'd like to avenge, starting with you. Looks like each character has their own separate game mechanic for their special actions. The game never mentions 'Magic' but Lune's pretty much an elemental mage. After winning, Gustave sucks the thing up into a device he invented to turn it into a usable ability. I will turn your corpse into power! And then in just a few steps we're outside of the Cave of Death and back in a beautiful world - some really hard, abrupt contrasts in this game. Lune is barefoot but that may be by choice, she hovers during battle and moving around. And the transition between those contrasts is everything, not just visual - the hollow, fleshy gurgling sound of whatever the body-construct structures are gives way to lovely music, chirping birds, flowing water - the sound design and music are wonderful. Each character has their own entirely separate skill trees too. I would describe combat as 'flashy as hell'. Weapons leave mystical streaks in the air, characters move to attack enemies as though they were Cirque du Soleil performers, and it's fun to watch. There's a parry / dodge / hit harder system so timing some button presses will give you an advantage in combat. Nobody in this Expedition would ever do something so common as simply running forward and stabbing someone. Those who explore a little are rewarded with shinies. The 'rest' system works a LOT like a Soulslike game - you can rest and heal at these camps but doing so respawns enemies. You have life-refilling elixirs that reset at these camps but you can only carry one of each elixir at the start, I would not be surprised to see that capacity increased later. Actually, there's a lot going on here that reminds me of Elden Ring, those hand-monsters from the beach wouldn't look out of place at all in that game. The devs here were clearly inspired by it. A bonf... er, Expedition camp. I've found the Indigo tree! This is Expedition 33's rally point, where everyone was supposed to do if we got separated. Or massacred, I suppose. Giant glowing tree in the distance, check. A friend had me stream just to watch me die to this 'Chromatic Lancelier', unlike other enemies he'll insta-kill you at my level unless you can manage to dodge his attacks. He's optional, thankfully - seems like you can simply avoid the hardest fights if you want to. Feels like I'm not 'intended' to fight you yet, but if I can just get the timing right... Attempt 5 - so, so close. He won with a sliver of health left. When an enemy attacks, you can watch the animation and try to either dodge or parry it to take no damage. In either case if you do it correctly there's no damage to you. The reward for correctly timing parries, which are harder than dodges - is you get to unleash a powerful counterattack if you parry every one of the enemy's attacks in the series. I have you now! Nail the timing, nail the monster. The theme of paint and color is suffused throughout the game. The people who I thought were 'turned to stone' earlier have actually had their 'Chroma' drained, which is really just a fancy word for 'color'. An item that lets you respec a character is called a 'recoat', and itself looks like a cracked ball with fresh paint dripping out. Menus like this are painted over the background. And the game world itself creates endless works of art - I'm doing something I did in Elden Ring, where I'll just stop for a few moments just to gaze at a captivating world. Every frame, a painting. First boss isn't too difficult. He hits a lot less hard than the green guy did. At the Indigo tree we're supposed to rally to save survivors, but there's no other survivors there aside from another expedition member that the boss already killed to show us that he was dangerous. There's a message there that says Maelle is elsewhere, taken to a hut north of here among some weird corals. Lune wants to stay here and await other survivors, suspecting a trap. Gustave insists on going after Maelle, and since Lune can't stop him she decides it's better to stick together. Just past the boss battle is another area, and this one prompts me to bring up a map. I haven't explored much, not sure how big this will be. This could be a pretty big world. Given the expedition's losses Gustave just wants to find Maelle and go home. Lune still wants to try to finish the job with just the three of them, if necessary. Part of the deal for everyone here is that they're dead anyway within a year if they don't succeed, I'm with Lune. I love that the characters are constantly dirty, it's a little detail that adds a lot. Setting camp, the Monolith is still very far away from here. Is it... even farther away than when we were in Lumiere? the sun rises and we see our first dawn on the island of the Paintress. We should probably have a better name for the place than that but if there is one I haven't heard it yet. This 'overworld' section is slightly different from the 'level' sections, it feels more open with more places to go, the camera is zoomed way out, and you can't jump. Maelle is in the 'weird corals'? Looks like the place.  I head into Falling Water and we are most definitely underwater. This is not nearly the impediment to Gustave and Lune that one might assume. Just walking and talking underwater, it's fine. If only scuba diving were this easy. Gustave recognizes the boat and nearby deceased as Expedition 68. I'm glad someone knows their history. I've suffered a bit of a setback - due to a power fluctuation my computer turned off while the game was running and I lost my save file. Guess my battery backup unit is dying because it didn't manage to prevent the outage. One thing I've been wondering is - if the Paintress already has your number up and you turn that age, do you die immediately or do you live until she switches the number to the one under your age? I found a guy back in Lumiere who mentions that this is the anniversary of ALL their deaths, which would argue to the latter. Now my enemy is the game itself, or issues with it - it's now crashed twice after getting to where the expedition departs. You know how games always warn you 'Do not turn off the power when you see the saving symbol'? Those things are not kidding - you can really hose up a game! Expedition 33 won't even start now after a reboot. Verifying file integrity did nothing, I'm reinstalling it. Thankfully checkdisk didn't find issues with my hard drive. The reinstall worked and I'm now caught back up to this point in the game. Onward! The dark side of Falling Waters are mines, and a floating body tied to a chain. From a beautiful underwater wonderland to this, the contrasts continue. There are some fun enemies here that carry mines like balloons for you to shoot - boom! We come to an underwater hut with a door inside. Much like the Tardis, it's bigger on the inside. Maelle is indeed here, we found her! Nice to see you've been hanging out in an underwater mansion living in luxury, I was in a cave of bodies. And we found OH HELL NO Though he turns out to be quite nice. Back outside we meet Noco, who Maelle already knows. Noco is Gestral (a race of painbrush-people?), and a merchant. High on the list of 'don't try this in real life', you can battle a merchant to get them to sell you their best thing. This is the second time I've encountered a white Nevron ('Nevron' appears to be a catch-all for 'monster'). Like the earlier one, it isn't immediately hostile - does being white indicate that they've been drained of 'Chroma' or perhaps that they have too much of it? Apparently being drained of Chroma is a common fate for many of the prior expedition members. The white Nevrons give you quests but you can also choose to fight them. I've been doing the quests. This system of weapons having a 'rank' tied to your stats is a familiar Soulslike mechanic - I don't know if Fromsoft pioneered it but it's also in the Dark Souls / Elden Ring games. Agility D, Luck C means this weapon gets more powerful mostly based on Maelle's luck stat followed by her Agility stat. This means a high Vitality-connected weapon is going help a character that's very tough also dish it out. And since healing abilities are percentage based, it also scales how much health a character recovers. I've also noticed that you get increasing amount of hitpoints per stat point in vitality - the first one gives you like 5 HP, now they award over 10 each. The journal entries are nice so far but it's looking like there's one per expedition. This is a really unique world and I would love to see more written about it. Some Nevrons are big. Really, really big. I probably shouldn't try to fight that but the consequences for dying are relatively minor. The boss of this area only appears to be hostile due to us picking a flower on the sea bed. Gustave's efforts nonwithstanding, we let it live after defeating it. Maelle seems to feel a connection with this Nevron. Camping after the level, I find that we have a new fellow who's joined us in camp. Look, I'm not a face-ist, but I'm really not comfortable around this guy. Expedition 63's journal mentions that they brought cars with them, which is not a good idea given the state of the roads here (current state: there are none). Found one of the cars though, a very early analog to Earth cars. I've reached the Gestral Village! One of the Gestral kids out front mentions that they were just revived, so maybe the Gestrals have a way of coming back to life. They seem dumb but they're doing a lot better surviving on this island than humans are. The 'Chef' wants us to fight in their arena to prove our worth. There we find Sciel, another Expedition member, and the party grows to four. Fancy meeting you here! I suspect I met Sciel briefly in the prologue but she didn't stand out as much as Lune, who was both playing a beautiful guitar tune before the Gommage and was running some sort of magical experiment afterwards. Then Maelle... hallucinates? She sees the old man that wrecked our expedition and a woman with him. He tells Maelle to give up, go home - tells her she'll just make things worse. Old dude knows Maelle? How? On the advice of the Gestrals we go to find Esquie to help us cross the sea. He's big and friendly and seems to know Sciel, though she doesn't recognize him. Esquie agrees to help us after we greatly anger a turtle. There's been a lot of places on the map nearby that I've never visited, before we continue with the main quest I'm going to go back and check them out. The map is bright, colorful and helpful. Most of the unexplored zones are above my pay grade. This guy appears to want to be a sheep. He will utterly murder your party if attacked. Ask me how I know. I thought Gustave was joking around when we found a ferris wheel by claiming that expedition 50 was riding it around... nope, he was absolutely serious about it. It went as well as you might expect. Some of these expeditions were trying pretty zany things. After finding Esquie's swim-rock, a bunch of stuff happens, and a new character joins the party - Verso, from the first expedition. Apparently he and the old guy and others have stopped aging. This is why the old guy attacked us - he thinks the Paintress has made him immortal and wants to keep it that way. But now Esquie can swim! That unlocks more areas to explor, like this Gestral parkour course on the beach. Took about five tries, I got some swimwear out of it. Exploring these areas above my level and avoiding enemies results in a pretty significant reward - I found a Pictos much higher level than the ones I currently have. There's no level requirement for equipment so I can use this bad boy right now. There are a ludicrous amount of Expedition bodies at the 'Old Battlefield', apparently all felled by a single Nevron. Verso 'Hasn't seen it for a few years' so I'm sure we'll run into it at some point. And I thought there were a lot of bodies in the cave, this is ludicrous. As expected, the big bad Nevron comes for us. It stands no chance against attack posess like these! Did I describe the earlier amount of bodies as 'ludicrous'? That's left me with few adjectives to choose from here. These don't have Expedition uniforms, so maybe a bunch of people lived here before the Nevron attacked. We're through the entryway into the main continent. Verso wants to go recruit a friend of his, and then attack the Paintress' heart. It's neither attached to her nor will destroying it kill her, but it'll make her approachable - so it's more like the Paintress' shield generator. Even if we could it would be rude, we should ask permission first. After a rocky introduction, Verso has won Maelle over and she gives him a spare Expedition 33 armband. This is what the map looks like now, going after the heart continues our journey north. Verso's friend is Monaco! I'm not sure what he is - possibly a strange Gestral or a large Baboon? He can turn into monsters (sort of, he get monster-based attacks). Monaco and Verso are old friends and tease each other as such. This place also has a new race, the Grandis. They're big, rocky guys with hair. Who did he find to make a beret in this size? It's like a 2-meter beret.  So I've pieced together that the Grandis, Gestral, and humans all once lived on this continent - I'm currently headed to a place called Old Lumiere. The Fracture, coinciding with the appearance of the Paintress, split off our territory and sent it away, which I presume we renamed Lumiere afterwards. Unlike the Gestrals, the Grandis seem to have some grasp of history. The Gommage, which is a fancy word for 'The Paintress subtracts 1 and everyone that age or older gets subtracted' only seems to affect humans - these Grandis appear to be immune, and the Gestrals haven't mentioned it much but we know they can be reborn in a river so I don't think they're going through an annual vaporization ritual like we are. Since we stopped at the tailor to get clothing made we may as well put on bathing suits and try the beaches! It's another Parkour course, with more verticality than the last one. Someone on the dev team clearly enjoyed 'Only Up', Bennet Foddy, and similar rage games. Thankfully these are optional sections, I've only ever gotten cosmetics. One of my favorite things about this game is finding and reading about the other expeditions, all of these journals are voice acted by the way. Expedition 47 is best Expedition. I've reached Old Lumiere, the place where the Paintress' heart is located. Maybe the shield dome is to protect from all the glowy swords that fell everywhere. A screwup - for which he is appropriately remorseful - splits the party, so it's Monaco, Lune and Sciel as the party for now - the others are missing. But eventually we reunite, and find the center of Old Lumiere... a manor. THE Manor? Wait... is this THE manor where I found Maelle? I keep finding alternate entrances to it. But the old man, who I find out is named Renoir, shows up and stops us. Renoir has some crazy attacks. Together we're enough to give him a fight, and so instead he teleports the whole manor elsewhere - after he kills Noco, the bastard. The heart of the paintress was within, so it's out of reach now. The Expedition comes up with an alternate plan - to defeat powerful creatures called Axons to give the Curator (no-face guy) material to build a weapon powerful enough to penetrate the barrier. I don't hear any better ideas, Verso. Lune had a sister Stella and a brother Sol - guess her parents really loved astronomy. Thankfully there's not really a death penalty, as powerful, optional foes scatter the land. This guy? Absolute death for my party. The zone behind him? Perfectly doable, glad I checked it out. One of the Axons lives on the aptly named Visage Isle. Maybe we could bring a spare face back to the Curator. Dude could at least wear a mask. Some very cool themes in this area, there are masks you enter with various emotions that lead to places that reflect - outwardly - the emotion. 'Joy' is a place of green fields, Anger is a lava-fire theme. 'Joy' meaning the Nevrons are smiling when they try to kill you. This guy is WILD. He just continues attacking forever and never lets you have a turn! I've rebuilt my party specifically for parries to try to beat him. Nail the timing, nail the monster! Appropriately enough you get a better counterattack Pictos for this. The next Axiom, Sirene, lives in a coliseum with impressive architecture. Sing for me, my enemies. She dances and messes with your minds, Lune seems especially vulnerable to being whisked away in joyous abandon. Fortunately you, the player, can simply enjoy the music. Every so often I've encountered these 'Fading' people that seem like they're stuck mid-Gommage. They're generally up for a conversation but seem lost in their own world. I keep finding doors to the Manor that unlock additional rooms within it. I think my initial thought that this and the manor in Old Lumiere were one and the same may be wrong, because Renoir and the Heart of the Paintress were in the other one, and this one is uninhabited. I've also found a secret passage that I can't get into and a painting that's missing, there's stuff to do here. Did I mention the music in this game is top-notch? Just listen to it. I am about to fight a sewing-machine man. There was a debate within the party about whether to do this or not as it was not hostile, but destroying it will weaken the Axon Sirene and I was persuaded to choose the path of violence. I'd love to know what happens if you leave it alone. That's a hell of a status effect! I better kill it fast! Customization of your characters and abilities is high, so high that I've had some analysis paralysis settling on a build and actually choosing which weapons to level up - and the game hasn't been hard enough to necessitate that I actually make that optimization, so I've been muddling through and playing around with my options. One thing this game could really use is the ability to save a setup, there are specific fights like with Petanks that you just want to optimize your damage for because they just run away, and it would be nice to be able to hot-swap between configurations for those sorts of battles. There is always room to improve a game and this game would be improved by a 'Save Skill Configuration' option. We approach the Axon. Its beautiful singing only delays its demise. The Curator uses the Chroma from the axons to forge a weapon for Maelle. And with that, we're ready to face the Paintress herself. I decide to respec the characters for a more focused build. I have enough respecs by now to do it several times if I don't like this one. The main party is Maelle, Lune and Verso. Maelle is a defensive protector, using a skill that will take hits for the others and focusing on her defense to take hits, along with a weapon that will spread AP to the other party members whenever she gains any in defensive stance, making her both a tank and a battery for the others. The other two are glass cannons, focusing on damage output using the AP Maelle generates for them. It's not perfect by any means but it works well enough to take out some of the nastier enemies that I'd previously bypassed. There's a lot going on with character customization and therefore a lot of viable builds that one could try out... But what sort of madman would create a build that uses this? I wonder if there's actually a theme to the Pictos for a given area - I also found a 'damage all enemies on death' Picto in the same zone. At last we arrive at the Monolith and face the Paintress herself. For Lumiere! Our attacks don't affect her... and she doesn't seem to care. She's... not the real paintress. We go inside the Monolith. It's trippy in here. Really, really trippy. There things in here that should be unique in the world, like the 'Ferris Wheel' that one expedition brought, but it's here again inside the Monolith. Either things are duplicated in this place or some other expedition thought 'Let's try assaulting the island in a Ferris Wheel again... it didn't work for them but maybe, just maybe, it can work for us." Even a version of Lumiere is here. Sadly it did not recreate the nice people of Lumiere. Renoir appears to stop us. At first, to his credit, he tries to reason with us. But it ends in violence. With Renoir incapacitated, nothing stands between us and the Paintress, and we finally see her. At last, face to face with the object of every Expedition. The party is far from optimal for this last battle and I really have to muddle through it - having a tank doesn't help when the boss just hits everyone with their attacks. Muddling through it turns out to be just barely good enough and I win on the first try. Victory. A triumphant return to Lumiere! This ends Act II, and I simply refuse to spoil what turns out to be something incredible that I didn't see coming, but a lot of things in retrospect make a lot more sense now. It's brilliant, and honestly? Just play this game. It's excellent, and you need to see what happens here for yourself. The Paintress may be defeated, but the story continues.... Esquie can fly now! The whole map is open to me. With all the new areas that opened up, there's plenty of them that are still very dangerous to my party. The 'endgame' battle is clear (Renoir is still a problem at this point) but I want to explore for a bit first. This Crimson Forest area is barely doable for me, but the enemies keep killing my damage dealers leaving Maelle to slowly finish the battles. I'll have to revise builds at some point. Wandering the map proves fruitful as I happen across a tough but very doable battle where the Maelle-tank build works as intended, and the rewards are a huge leap in power from what I've got - the highest level weapon I had prior to this is 19 and I only had one other level 23 Pictos. The path to power comes from whatever you are strong enough to obtain. I muddle through a couple zones with Maelle stomping things and manage to get a serious boost in power from additional finds. I’ve decided to try a party build using a likely unusual configuration of Verso and Monaco as front-loaded ‘shock troopers’ - Verso got a really powerful sword that starts him at his most damaging rank, but he can’t be healed at all in exchange. So he and Monoco start the battle and their job is to just do as much damage as they can before dying, then a reserve of the remaining party members can step up with more robust self-healing builds that should be able to still dish out respectable damage while staying alive for longer endurance battles. It works well. Each of the characters are strong enough to get through this series of 1v1 battles (Monoco needs a temporary rebuild, his weapon is still quite bad as I haven't found one I really like yet). This was a cool area, each character has to individually fight something nasty. But on a boss battle like this Monoco and Verso can do a lot of damage before going down and sending the rest of the characters in, and by then I've had a chance to practice the boss parry timing several times. Verso and Monoco as suicidal shock troops works frighteningly well. I haven't been camping as much because the way to upgrade weapons is no longer in camp, but it turns out to be important - conversations with characters there lead to some third-act side quests, like visiting the final location of Expedition 46 - the one with Lune's parents in it. I tried to get in here before but I couldn't enter until a camp conversation unlocked the way in. Now we can... traumatize Lune. Maybe this wasn't a good idea. Love the monsters in this game! Lookit this guy! Back when we were hunting Axons, Verso dismissed going after one out of hand. The Reacher, which grew incredibly tall because it was always reaching for the stars. Verso's sister is at the top. We have a long climb ahead to meet her. Really long. Maybe we could just attack the feet? Pans-on-head will not stop me! I've modified the Verso build slightly so he always goes first and leads with a nasty multi-target attack. It's good enough to wipe out most standard enemy groups immediately, leading to very quick battles.  The Pictos (Skill) system is really well designed, each one has tangible benefits and there's interesting ways in which they can serve to customize your characters. This one starts to make me think a Gradient Charge (Ultimate attack) build may be viable. At the top, an encounter with Alicia and the third Axon. Verso is not happy with how this turns out. Verso finds some consolation in his friendship with Esquie, who remembers where one of his special rocks is! His special rocks give him powers, like the ability to swim or fly. It's in... Francois' cave, right next to where Esquie lives. Where we already got another rock near the start of Act 1. Great memory, Esquie. But this time we won't have to battle that dangerous turtle. We can offer him a bribe. The new rock lets Esquie dive to find things under the sea. Conversations with Maelle reveal how she survived the beach. Verso saved her. Camp conversations in Act III drive the story forward and fill in a lot of the mysteries from the first two acts, so I wonder if there are players out there who missed them because camping isn't strictly enforced or required. Plus, we decide to resurrect Noco, so we can see how the Gestrals come back to life. Monoco waxes poetic about bringing back his friend. Also I uh... repainted the monument. A little milestone - Maelle cracked a million damage with her best Gradient attack. Despite all this power, there are still enemies out there that destroy me. For example, this unspeakably evil Mime. Noco returns to us! He doesn't remember everything though. It's sort of him and sort of not. Wandered into a cool place, nice swords, kind of dark. Ah, Simon is here - my friend mentioned yesterday that he's the hardest battle in the game. May as well give it a shot. Got it with some build tweaks on the third attempt! Oh, well, that was just phase 1. Doesn't he look cool? He looks very cool. Phase 2 utterly and completely wrecked me. We'll call it a draw and move on. This is probably the best option for a Burn build, holy smokes. I've returned to where we began - the original landing point of Expedition 33, to take revenge on the foes that slaughtered everyone else. They stand no chance against this party. All along the game there have been these white Nevrons which don't want to fight, and give you small quests instead. You have the option to fight them afterward, but I never did since they weren't hostile. Such kindness is massively rewarded here. And finally, I figured out how to get to the center of the Painting Workshop and fight this thing. You may think you're badass but you're no Simon. It's been great fun romping around Act III, and I've at least visited everywhere. This party is ridiculously overpowered at this point. Renoir isn't going to know what hit him. I've greatly enjoyed my time in this game, and it's time to finish it. Welcome back.. to Lumiere. The denizens are a little different. Renoir's creations and Maelle's expeditioners battle in the streets. And now, the actual, final boss... I KNEW IT. I KNEW THAT GUY WAS SHADY. After beating up almost everything else in Act III and gaining unreasonable levels of power, the big bad bad ends up being a 1-round kill. Maelle has one, final, awful choice to make, but in my effort to avoid the worst of the worst spoilers I will leave it at that. Once again I will say that you should play it. For anyone curious as to what I did, I chose to save the world, with all the consequences that entails. I still don't know if that's the right choice. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Phenomenal music, an enchanting world, great combat, an excellent story that I have done my utmost not to spoil, and all the really difficult stuff is optional - Expedition 33 is a masterpiece and should rank among the greatest games of all time.

I'm not a huge fan of the standard Warhammer miniatures games (In no small part because I don't enjoy painting miniatures), but I do enjoy it's testosterone-soaked universe and I'm happy that it has produced enjoyable games like Space Hulk and Blood Bowl, as well as a variety of video games. I played a demo of Mechanicus a couple years ago and it didn't click with me on that initial encounter, but a friend has recently recommended the full game to me so here we are. The last transmission of Reshak indicates there's a tech-priest that he found a really cool world, Silva Tenebris, but it's also dangerous. This planet is super awesome and it sucks here Our journey there seems to have gone fine. We're gonna need someone who knows binary to figure out where the oil leak is. We start exploring a tomb we found on planet for the tutorial. I'm guessing that I'm playing as Faustinus? We have a motley crew of tech-priests here that disagree about how to do things. There's Scaevola who speaks like a programmer, I like him. let problems = 99, let bitches = 0 Khepra who seems to have some sort of role commanding the troops. I guess I don't need to give her orders, she just takes care of it. The ever-present in WK40K 'destroy all alien heresy' Crusader-type Videx. Who I will probably be pissing off a lot because alien toys seem like fun to me. It looks like we're exploring a discrete 'dungeon' with connected rooms. As you enter rooms you sometimes get interesting choices about how to react to encounters. We've found Necrons here, I think this is may be first WH40K game I've played where I'm fighting the 'space undead'. They're... oddly cute? Just look at his little green eyes! Grr! Also looks like we can add Rho to our cast of Mechanicus characters, not sure what their deal is but Rho has a cool hat. And curious Tiresus! It's like Game of Thrones on this ship. Add Captrix to the list! She looks vaguely like Santa with tits. Scaevola helpfully informs me that Necrons will re-animate if we let them. He's my favorite so far. More characters who talk in program-ese, please. Oh and I forgot about Reditus, he's a Servo-Skull. Or at least some variety of floating skull, maybe he's a Managerial Skull.  Battles seem to involve significant resource management (albeit of one resource, cognition points). You get CP from these green pillars and other various sources, and they're used to summon in your servitors, move a unit further, and even just to fire certain weapons. Thank the Omnissiah that the Necrons left all these green pillars around for us to think about. One cool thing is that you don't know the enemy stats by default, but you can use your servo-skull ability (with a cooldown) to analyze them and find out. You can summon non-tech priest Servitors into combat to help you, they're not as good as the tech priests but they can take hits and melee enemies - and they have an additional purpose. If the enemy hurts them you get CP! Having my servitors being hit be interesting enough to generate CP is great. They're both cannon fodder AND educational! Sadly HP does not regenerate between fights within a dungeon, so in a longer one I could see my force being worn down across encounters. Combat is fairly different than other tactical games, there's not a cover system that I can discern at this point, and I don't think attacks ever miss, they just do variable damage. Attacks that never miss is something I'm going to have to get used to. There IS an intriguing melee / ranged interaction in that if you're in melee combat you can't use a ranged weapon, and that goes for the enemy too - plus if you move out of melee range you take an attack of opportunity. Oops, we woke up someone we should not have. This multi-thousand-year old undead admiral has awoken after millennia, and he's easier to understand than my co-workers. I've got two tech-priests in this tutorial battle and we're gonna run like hell to try to escape, we're already beat up from the earlier battles. I have nothing but encouragement for you Servitor, you got this! He uh.... he did not got this. But the two Tech priests successfully escape! Albeit with none of their servitors, but they're expendable! If running in abject terror is a victory then I am a great General. Tutorial over, it's time to see the Strategic layer of the game. The Necrons are waking up, so I have a limited amount of time to complete missions and win the game. Looks like the gameplay loop is I'll select dungeons and try to complete them and make as much progress as I can before all the Necrons wake up. The missions tell you the rewards and I think this healing claw thing looks extremely valuable. I could have really used something like that to keep the party in better shape. There's a bunch of stuff to unlock! How does the Adeptus Mechanicus know so little?  The game also says that if I spend more time on a given mission then I'll have time for fewer missions overall, so there's a penalty for thorough exploration. I'll have to evaluate how worthwhile exploration is vs. trying to complete missions as quickly as possible. Looks like there's six skill poles for tech priests. You can choose your class but those skill trees don't branch. You can customize your tech-priest colors. White hooded robes is maybe not the best choice here. I'll eventually get six tech-priests and there's six classes so I'll probably do one each to try them out, but with two to start with I start one as a Secutor (troop leader) Manarius and the other as an Enginseer (healer) Jeremiah. A couple missions in and the first battle in this 'easy' dungeon I get into initially has a 'survive three turns' objective where it pours enemies in. I survive three turns just fine but the objective then shifts to kill all enemies, which if I'd known about I would have played differently. I manage it but this party is shattered, three servitors down and one of the two Tech-priests is a single hit away from dying. If I could simply abandon this mission now I would do so, but it seems I must press on. Thankfully there is no more combat and I still manage to complete the mission. This upgrades my Servitors to level 2, gaining a hitpoint and a taunt / armor ability. It feels like there's no clue for these 'choose a symbol' events and I just have to guess. I chose the left symbol. I chose poorly. Taking on a Necron Destroyer which is a beast of an enemy with good armor, I made a mistake in splitting up my guys to get a terminal that was worth some blackstone, believing I had a good enough plan to kill the destroyer with the remaining tech-priest plus Servitors. Blackstone is a between-mission currency that you can use to level up your guys so you want as much of it as possible. This plan went haywire when the Destroyer mashed Jeremiah before I put all the servitors out. Oops, I really needed Jeremiah to survive for this to work... The remaining Priest Manarius got the guy down to 1 HP before dying, and I failed the mission. Here's Manarius rolling the lowest possible value on his damage and leaving the Destroyer at 1 HP. These missions are not randomly generated as I originally assumed. They have their own failure message. Oh hey, the tech-priests that died are still alive! Looks like the consequence of mission failure is suffering additional progress on the Necrons waking up rather than permadeath. Welcome back guys I guess it's fine if I get you killed! I can't retry the failed mission, so we move on to other missions regardless of failure - I'm down with that though it means I've missed out on the mission reward. Khepra gives me a mission that will get me an additional Tech-priest! I better not fail this one! Success! Leonardus, welcome to the team. Let me tell you the story of the three little tech-priests. So far in the campaign I've completed five missions, failed one, and the Necrons are at 11% awake. Fun game so far, I'm definitely failing at optimal tactic for these battles as I keep forgetting to always shoot BEFORE I walk into melee - if you don't shoot first then you can't do it in melee range. Characters don't actually have 'action points', because as long as you still have CP you can keep doing things, though most weapons are once-per-turn I think the game will let you move as much as you want if you have CP to burn. Ugh, this whole time I didn't realize that I had to actually equip the 'body augments' I was unlocking in the skill menu. This probably would have made the difference in the Destroyer mission that I failed. The most important thing I’ve learned about this game is that the mission objective is actually almost always ‘Kill everything’. If the mission objective says ‘Survive X rounds’ or ‘Kill target X’, it is lying to you because as soon as you accomplish those the objective will change to ‘Kill everything’. The only time I didn’t have to kill everything was an escape objective in the tutorial mission - since then the game has fooled me several times with this bait and switch. We're going to make Leonardus a Lexmachanic since that seems it'll help with the resource economy. CPs are what wins battles, and Lexmechanics generate CPs. Oooh, an armor ignoring pistol that requires no cognition to use? This is a good find. I've discovered a new sector that I can do missions in, the 'Ubjao' sector. I'm not clear on how I'm discovering these sectors, maybe missions are just progressing until I stumble on them? Optimizing the party in this game is going to be a matter of making one that obtains significant amounts of cognition points and then finds efficient ways to spend them, so I'm on the lookout for 'damage per cognition point' weapons. This looks like a solid candidate for something big. I've been neglecting to mention some of the interactions of the bridge crew that are adding a lot of flavor to the game. There hasn't been as much conflict between Videx (Destroy all this heretical stuff!) and Scaevola (Capture and research all this fun Xenos tech!) as I originally anticipated, and as it turns out there are actual consequences to trying to understand the Necrons too much. I've found that trying to gaze at their star charts tends to have negative consequences, like morale / initiative hits or alerting the Necrons more on a mission, so rather than my usual inclination in a game to investigate everything I'm now actually concerned about possibly learning too much. At this point in events I'm generally choosing options that seem to favor haste and getting the missions done quickly. I'm also not thoroughly exploring the dungeons and visiting all the rooms - the more time you spend on a mission, the more the Necrons wake up, and the rewards I've seen from going on detours haven't been worth more than the mission rewards. Videx's mission rewards are very good, this weapon looks like a great CP to damage tradeoff. Oh there's a new twist- the Necrons just used this thing to obtain cognition points for themselves! That denies them to me, do they also use them for more powerful attacks? You bastard, I wanted my tech-priests to think about the green glowing pillar! In a mission you have a mix of Magos Tech-Priests which are your characters and Troops which are disposable minions (Though better troop types do cost some Blackstone to deploy, the currency you spend to improve your characters, so I'm being cheap and still employing the free Servitors as my troops.) In a battle your Tech-Priests start on the map, but you have to spend Cognition Points to summon in your troops during the battle. Against ranged Necrons I've found that I can charge a Tech-Priest up to them and then summon in these melee Servitor troops to surround them, which screws them over - the Necron can't fire his ranged weapon in melee combat and when he moves all three of us will get an attack of opportunity. He's in for a beating! This is well worth doing because the Servitors move pretty slowly, if you summon them at the start of the battle they're probably not going to help with the end of it. Also I've figured out that you get a significant refund on the cost of summoning the fancier troop types if you keep them alive and unharmed, I brought in a Skitarii ranger for 17 and was refunded 14 so I'll be less reluctant to take the troops that cost something for future missions. Captrix's missions appear to be the boss fights - I'm guessing that to beat the game I'll want to beat all the bosses. We're going to try to the first one now. Captrix has his eye on the prize. The team is starting to feel pretty powerful. I've upgraded both Jeremiah and Leonardus to top-level Engiseer and Lexmechanic, giving Jeremiah a ridiculously strong 'Heal all tech-priests or troops to full HP' ability and Leonardus is a CP-generating fiend. Manarius the Secutor is still mid-level but he still has a worthwhile 'make all troops attack a target' ability, I'll be taking three Skitarii Vanguard troops which have a ranged attack which does 4-6 damage, so if I can get them positioned to hit the Lord Astronomer he'll be feeling it in the morning. Unlike other missions this is a long no-branch path to the end. Jeremiah has several healing abilities now so I think we'll be able to sustain the party pretty well. Everyone's still alive when we reach the boss chamber. Things don't go 100% according to plan since the Astronomer has four bodyguards that he auto-swaps with when you shoot at him, but they're slow and melee-only so eventually all the enemies get gunned down. The boss' gimmick only serves to slow their defeat. Moving on to the next sector, enemy composition is different for different areas of the game. The Ubjao sector has a lot of the melee-only 'Flayed Ones'. The Flayed Ones threaten me with long fingernails. I'm now taking a firing squad of three Skitarii Vanguards with my Tech-Priests on pretty much every mission and they're gunning everything down, great range and firepower, and the Tech-Priests are sufficiently tanky that they can take the hits and Jeremiah can heal them to full. I've definitely out-classed the enemies at this point in the game and I suspect there are some multi-class builds which could get even more obscene. I'm doing one of Khepra's missions when these red guys show up on the dungeon map: An evil Necron squad? Let's go say hello. It turned out to be a relatively trivial encounter (3 enemies and an escape mission) and the reward was a massive -4 Necron awareness! Please send more evil Necron squads! This game has a huge amount of customization available to your party. You can mix and match classes and their respective armor pieces in a character build, and then take a variety of troop types with you on missions to compliment them - and a lot of the fun of this game is in that customization as the 'kill everything' missions are starting to be a bit repetitive. The downside of this customization is that you can relatively easily blow out the game's difficulty curve - I haven't done this but I could have made three full-level Engiseers at this point who's top-level ability is a 1-cognition 'heal all Tech-Priests to full', which with a 3-turn cooldown means your party can fully heal itself every turn. I've gone in favor of a party that kills everything as fast as possible, because the longer you take even within battles, the more the Necrons wake up and increase the waking percentage. Say hello to Tech-Priest #4, Magos Oriocus. Hello! He just joined and hasn't fought yet but I've been saving up Blackstone for him, so he's already a full Dominus (ranged damage) and a bit of Explorator (melee but also speed and has an 'avoid opportunity attacks' which will pair nicely with not wanting the Dominus to have a melee weapon). He'll go ham on ranged energy weaponry. There two damage types in the game, energy and physical, and both your troops and enemies have separate energy and physical armor values that you don't see until you analyze the foe. Most enemies have one or the other number at a low value so being able to hit them with the right kind of attack helps kill them faster. Oriochus can dish out the ranged energy damage and I've got the Skitarii vanguard for ranged physical damage, so as long as I can figure out which one is better for a given target I've got the firepower in the party to bring it down. You get to kit out your tech-priests on this screen, where you can install any of the equipment you've unlocked plus their class armor. Oriochus is going to try out these arc-pistols which only do 1-2 damage, but they turn into an AOE and they don't cost cognition to use. He has a pair of back-canisters that for 1 cognition each will boost his energy damage by 2, as well as gloves and a class ability that boost it by 1, so I'm hoping these pistols are blasting out 3-4 AoE damage for no CP and up to 7-8 damage each if I spend 4 CP (Enemies tend to have around 6-14 health plus 1-3 points of physical or energy armor). Weapons have a 'machine spirit' that works when you fire them X times (not sure what X is for these pistols) and he has an ability that will boost that by another 2 damage when that happens (and we'll make that boost 4 when I can get the same ability from Explorator when I can afford it.) Bottom line, he's designed to kill things faster than I already am.  First time in combat I discover he's an utter terror - to both sides, as it turns out I didn't understand friendly fire or the placement of these cones... but hey, I can heal all my damage. The new guy probably isn't going to get on the squad's good side. Through pain, we find wisdom. And we are certainly dishing out of a lot of pain. Agrolekh, the second boss and original tutorial terror, is dead in 1 round. Agrolekh was not prepared for a party that's figured out the game mechanics. Boss #3, Ubjao, also falls in a single round - I think you're meant to slowly work your way up to him killing his minions on the way which each increase his HP by 4, but after I killed one and saw the effect I just used all my CP to summon one vanguard and run a single Tech-Priest up to him and blap - you get one-use 'Canticles' per mission like +9 energy damage, so if you use them all on the boss you can inflict a lot of pain. The Necrons are at 45% awake and I've killed three out of likely six bosses, so I'm making good enough time. The next sector features these guys who I like a lot, they have huge physical armor and when you attack them they auto-walk to you and counterattack, making them a special tactical challenge. Learning how these sword/shield Necrons work was painful for the squad. Houston, we have broken through the 4th wall. The Final Mission has unlocked!  It looks like you have to fight the final boss plus every other boss you haven't defeated yet. With my current party I might be able to beat this right now but I don't want to stop playing yet. 4th boss Mhelob is at the end of a long corridor with these shield-walls that prevent you from progressing very far each step, plus he has a badass hologram. The walls delay me enough that the fight lasts a whole 2 rounds. Videx is growing on me as a character, in no small part because his 'religious rites' actually have positive effects, like deploying censers to clear out some toxic air. I unlocked a big ass robot to show to the Necrons. They are not going to like it. One of the things that the game could have done a bit better is the mission variety, for example story-wise I just went to rescue a group of Skitarii trapped behind enemy lines. The 'dungeon' events reflect this but the end of the mission could have culminated in a battle where you actually try to fight through Necrons to reach some AI-controlled troops that are holding a position, but instead it's another 'scan the things, kill the Necrons' mission - which are still tactically interesting to be sure, but it feels like a missed opportunity. I've acquired two more tech priests and unlocked all the troop types, and there's only two bosses remaining, and I have gobs and gobs of blackstone to upgrade the new trooper with. The endgame approaches! Architect Netfusk falls in two rounds - the Netfusk sector started to ramp up the challenge with its levels and you'll need a decently powerful team to beat them, but this group is still well ahead of the power curve. Time to take on the big guy. Hey big guy, I see you just woke up, wanna get coff.... OW FUCK OW Szaergon opens the battle by taking two turns in a row and dropping 2 of the 6 tech-priests before they can act at all, including the healer. The remaining 4 members (plus a robot) distinguish themselves by inflicting over a hundred damage and dropping him in one round anyway. Bye bye Silva Tenebris, we out. When will evil aliens stop inextricably linking themselves to one badass guy? The ending screen mentions that both Videx and Scaveola are pissed at me, I assume because I didn't complete their mission chains - I didn't see the need to get any more powerful than I already was. This was a solid game, thanks for the recommendation! I would play another made by this studio, it was an unusual take on the tactical genre and had a lot of customization, the tradeoff being that it's probably a bit too easy to customize yourself into making Necron-stomping trivial. By the end of the game the thing that slowed me down the most were these artificial forcefields that prevented me from walking all over a mission rather than the quality or number of the enemies I faced, and that's mainly because I had powers like 'heal the entire party' that were just too powerful. I also really liked the look into the world of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and their role within the Imperium - I don't think I commented enough about it but it was very well done.

We're going from the total sandbox of X4 to something a bit more linear. Well, probably a lot more linear. This is a remaster of a Lucasarts game, a studio which made many games that I very much enjoyed back in the day and were praiseworthy for their well-crafted worlds, but also like many point-and-click adventure games could result in some frustration as you tried to figure out what item solved what puzzle. Full Throttle is not one of the games that I played originally so this remaster will be my first look at it. Let's get on a bike and give this a whirl. Dat logo though, brings back memories. It's a really strange logo, it felt badly drawn even in the pixellated era. We open with a long cutscene. These two corporate guys are in a hovercar discussing their motorcycle business, and the guy on the left appears to be the owner who is totally down with the motorcycle gang that's about to (literally) run over his car. That's me, I have an excessive exhaust problem. The game apparently stars Mark Hamill? Not sure who he's voicing, the main characters sound too deep. Hamill is voicing this guy, Adrian Ripburger, who quickly establishes himself as the greedy villain that wants to take over the motorcycle company. It honestly sounds too deep to be Hamill so he's doing some solid voice acting, or perhaps your voice gets deeper if you have no neck. Main character's name is Ben. The other guy, Malcolm, is the current (old cool guy) owner of the motorcycle company and he wants Ben's motorcycle gang to accompany them to a shareholder meeting. Ben seems like just the sort of person you would want to bring to a shareholder meeting. Ben inexplicably refuses since the gang is short on money, so Ripburger takes Ben outside to discuss incentives. Ripberger's henchmen incentivize Ben into the dirt Ripberger then tells the rest of Ben's gang that Ben accepted the offer and 'went on ahead' to scout. The rest of the gang follow the corporate hovercar, and the game begins. I start by punching my way out of the dumpster I got tossed into. The options menu lets you seamlessly switch between remastered and original graphics, nice touch. The original still looked good! But I will be embracing the future and enjoying the full-width screens. Jesus Christ the interaction menu is terrifying! It genuinely scared me when this thing first popped up. The options appear to be touch / punch, eat / lick / talk?, and kick. My bike is still parked up front and puzzle #1 is that I have lost my keys. My bike still being here does not speak well for the intelligence levels of my biker gang. Ok, some questionable and frightening user interface design - the skull is actually two actions depending on whether your mouse hovers high or low - at least it animates differently as a clue. It would be better as a more distinct separate option, but from switching graphics styles I think this design choice dates from the original game. Lick... And Look! There's some nice character development you get even in failed attempts to interact with the world. Try to take a picture: "I don't have a home to hang it in." Try to walk down the road: "Nothing that way but a warrant." It took me quite awhile to find my keys, because I asked the bartender where they were and he said he didn't know. So I walked around the two available screens looking at / interacting with everything for several minutes. Turns out the bartender DID have my keys - the corp guys paid him off, and the answer to this first puzzle was violence. I'm getting the sense that I'll need to be a little more predisposed to anger then I normally am. Indeed, there is violence! No sooner am I on the road than I'm fighting this fat dude on a fat bike. He must have exhaust envy. I beat the shit out of him in an awkward battle game but my front wheel comes off seconds later. I crash and total the bike in flames. I wake up later and some reporter has taken me to Lady Doctor Mechanic. Her name is Moe. The game uses selectable dialog options for character interactions. Puzzle 2 is to help Moe fix up my bike, I need to collect several items from around the town for it. Here's the inventory: Just reach into the skull's mouth if you want something. Looks like there's only room for four items, which is a good thing in a game like this - keeps it from getting too complicated. This guy didn't want to let me into his trailer. Once again the answer was violence! I knocked on the door to get him to come to it and then kicked the door in. There's music playing in this trailer, which you can listen to here . I suspect it may be giving hints that this is a post-apocalyptic setting and we're not just driving around future Arizona. Also don't feel bad for trailer guy, turns out he stole Moe's welding torch for his shitty metal sculptures. One item down. Ah, sadly the inventory is not actually limited to four items, I could end up in inventory hell here. I am bring prevented from obtaining the other two items Moe needs by guardians. One are the hover police who guard this fuel tower: They open fire at the slightest provocation. And the other is this doggie! Good boy! He's just doing his job guarding the junkyard! I've been chased out a dozen times! --- THIS IS THE SOLUTION TO THE DOG THE DOG IS ACTUALLY FINE I PROMISE The gas / police puzzle is clever, ostensibly you're supposed to get gas from the nearby tower but I ended up tricking the police into landing and siphoned gas from their hover vehicle. If it were me I'd have just taken the police's hover vehicle but Ben 'Won't touch anything without wheels.' Bike is fixed, we ride! I catch up with the Genius Crew. Ripberger gets impatient and attacks Malcolm, but the reporter that saved me catches the act on camera. Is this Mark Hamill's most villanous role? Malcolm's last words are to find his daughter Marie and make sure she inherits the company. Ben realizes he's talking about Moe, I'm unclear on how he draws that conclusion. Moe survives an attack by one of Ripberger's henchmen before I get back there.  The game could have ended here if Mark Hamill hadn't gone cheap on the hired help. By the time I get back to her, Moe is gone, took her family picture off the wall. I gotta find her and be the antihero I was meant to be. I head back to the bar I started at. The news is on, and a reporter that looks alarmingly like Trump reports the death of Malcolm Corley... and the arrest of the vicious biker gang (mine) responsible. I shouldn't have left them back there! No, it's fake news! Now there's police roadblocks out there and I'm a (more) wanted man. I find this part of the game a little confusing and I get stuck for a bit at this point. I clearly want a ride from knife-guy in his huge truck out here but he won't go for it. I have access to the town and locations that I solved the 'fix the bike' puzzle in which feels odd, sort of felt like that was a 'completed' area. What am I supposed to do back here? I did find a photo at Moe's place but that alone has not persuaded knife guy to help me out (and Ben is reluctant to use violence on him due to his knife ownership status). --- There we go, I had to go behind the bar. While the game happily highlights interactable objects with shift, it does not highlight location transitions and you have to mouse around to find them. Miranda the reporter is hiding where I woke up and implores me to find the pictures she took of the murder. She gives me a fake ID to get past the police roadblock. The fake ID plan sounds great, Ben is clearly well suited for incognito work. I give the ID to knife guy so he can smuggle me past the police roadblock. It works for him because they turned him away earlier, but now he can pretend to be a Fed. This is much better than my initial assumption that highly-wanted Ben was going to use a fake ID to protect himself. Ok so... can I just hide in the back of the truck? The open road doesn't have the same appeal when you're riding it by hiding in an engine compartment. Also, how do you end up with a grown-ass man-sized empty space in your engine compartment?! Knife-guy gets me past the police checkpoint, but he drops off me and my bike and drives off with my bike's fuel line because he had a fuel leak. I'd have agreed to just give it to him in exchange for the help but he stole it instead. I'm at the Mink Farm where Moe might be and I've gotta fix my bike again! I quickly find a replacement in the nearby house when Moe peels out of the barn. She doesn't trust me! MOE WAIT I'M THE PROTAGONIST DESPITE APPEARANCES AND THE DOG INCIDENT LADY I'M ONLY CHASING YOU DOWN TO HAVE A CONVERSATION We ride into Cavefish (another biker gang) territory and they catch up with the trucker that dropped me off. Cavefish ride bikes in a matter that will utterly wreck their spines long-term. The trucker ditches his trailer to try to stop them but they blow up the cab anyway while he's crossing a bridge over a gorge, just after Moe crosses it. Instant karma for knife-guy Now I'm stuck on the wrong side of a blown-out bridge, Moe's somewhere beyond, and I've got a wrecked trailer full of green crap. Feel the adventure. This next part is very different, I'm mostly riding up and down the road and am able to get off at various exits where I find other bikers that I can fight. The changeup from point-and-click adventure to road warrior is both refreshing and a bit clunky.  If I win the fight I sometimes get their weapon to improve my odds in future battles. Sadly I lost this beauty a couple fights later, not sure if it gets knocked out of your hands or what but I would very much like this to be a permanent addition to my inventory. This bitch is worse than an Elden Ring boss, she destroys your weapons and I've hit her several dozen times without her falling. Go down already! A chainsaw would be a terrible weapon for this! I did figure out that I needed to hit this guy with a board when he had his head up and got goggles from him which a guy let me know is needed to find their hideout, so I'm working on that. This is all to jump the canyon where the bridge blew up.  Beating the Cavefish rider requires a very specific timed attack. Paydirt! Found their hideout with the goggles. I need that ramp to jump the gorge... That thing will get me about 20 feet across the 500 foot gap. The Cavefish do not want me to have the ramp. When trying to tow it out of the cave I hear them coming and hide, so they think the spirit of a stuntman took it and just move it back. Maybe they shouldn't anger the spirits and should just leave it alone! Managed to trick some bad guys into crashing and stealing their hover lift unit, and I beat all the various bikers on the mine road and acquired their weapons (Chainsaw lady turned out to be a 'use the correct item to beat her' thing). I think I have everything from this area and I've got the two items my bike needs to jump the gorge (a fuel booster and a hover lift), now I just need to solve the ramp / religion thing.  The hover unit come from getting some of some of Ripburger's goons to crash their car. Soooooo Cave Snakes have sensitive eyes, they wear the special goggles to see the road, because normally the road has these reflective things on it. Without those they might not see a curve in the road in their cave and they might die, they really need those reflectors! Random facts about how you might trick blind people into falling off a cliff have no bearing on why the ramp is here now. By the spirit of Evel Knievel we have made the jump! I like the remastered art, in zoomed-out shots like this you can still see a man and his bike vs. a pixel blob. Welcome to the next scene: Welcome to the Corley Motors factory. Oh, Corley, Harley..... I'm slow on the uptake. Wandered around for a bit but I couldn't find any items or do anything that felt like progress. Eventually tried to leave and found a Vulture (rival gang but Moe is one of them) hideout nearby. Unfortunately there's a minefield between me and the entrance so I can't go here yet. I'm having trouble just getting started on this section of the game. This guy has stuff but I have no money so he won't give me anything. I DID see him turn around once so maybe I can swipe something. He lets you 'test drive' the green car but it ran out of batteries in seconds. There's a box of bunnies behind him which is a plausible method of dealing with a minefield.... Ah, ha! I have stolen a bunny! Yes I am a protagonist, why do you ask? Come on bunny, we're going to take you to all the zone screens and try to use you on everything! --- I don't have a bunny anymore... but the bunny's battery survived the explosion! Ben could have just taken the battery out but that's no fun. Proooootagoniiiist! Ha, delightful! However there's actually more thinking required than just releasing the bunnies - you need to grab the bunnies once they're out of the box and strategically place them one by one to clear a path for you. My reward for making it to the Valkyrie base is to get drawn and quartered... I admit to not considering the possibility that Moe thinks I killed her dad because the news said so. But I talk my way out of that, she realizes I'm on her side and I let her know what Ripburger is up to. I'm treated to a convoluted plan involving faking our deaths so the shareholders meeting can take place involving me running around while on fire. A demolition derby is a fun concept, but oh boy is this an awful control scheme. May I never ever have to control a vehicle this way again. To make matters worse it's a difficult segment, I cannot get past blue car 42 here to do what I'm supposed to, which is hit the yellow car. Hey Moe maybe YOU could work a little harder on getting around him. Finally got it, this was a puzzle more than an action driving sequence, which does not make me feel any better about the controls, but at least it's over. I'm gonna call out this segment as an opportunity for the Remastered version of the game to have stepped up and improved on the original, either by changing it entirely into an actual fun little demolition derby game or just making the car controls not terrible. I do love how the two henchmen have stuffed themselves into the same one-seat car for no reason. Ok, finally got past the blue car and crashed into the yellow car and exploded in a fiery wreck. All according to... plan? Moe uses the wrong thing as a distraction to steal what she's after. Back at the ranch, Moe and I make a plan to break into the factory and get into her father's safe. She disassembles the bike she stole from the Derby claiming there's a key to the safe, but all we find are parts with numbers. Great job Moe, now it's broken. The nice part about screenshotting these games is now I can look back at this and reference it when I figure out what the numbers mean. In the factory Rip is giving a big presentation to the shareholders. Hi Rip, I expect we will shortly be ruining your meeting. Got into the control room! Ah, and we've got the reporter's original film, let's see here... Ripburger awkwardly has to try presenting his murder of the CEO to the shareholders. We also have the deceased CEO's will! With Ripburger disgraced, Moe is in charge! And then Moe and I get to ride off into the sunset. Except for the part where Rip escaped the meeting and decides to come after us in one last act of vengeance. Rip escapes, and finds us on the road later. The final sequence is some crazy shit! And that's Full Throttle! I had a blast! Die Mark Hamill, Die!

I've been thinking about whether to move on from X4 and decided to give it one last hurrah. I'm playing 'hardcore' (in the sense that I won't just reload after dying) mode because in my first playthrough, surviving struck me as not that hard to do - and considering I've only died twice in 60 hours of gameplay, I think that's true, but when it does happen it happens suddenly and unexpectedly. I don't know what particular brand of masochism afflicts me, but I've become enamored with the idea of starting from almost nothing - like not even having a ship to begin with. So this is my third and final hardcore X4 attempt - we're going to start off with something like taking the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a little too literally. --- Name's Jimmy Two-Toes - Jimmy knows that ain't your run of the mill Split name, but hey, Jimmy's foster parents were Humans, what are you gonna do? You may be wondering how Jimmy Two-Toes ended up here Well see, Jimmy got real drunk, signed on with from Free Families to fight against a Zyarth fleet. Thing is Jimmy's commanders ain't so competent, and maybe Jimmy's not sayin' too much but maybe Jimmy ain't all that as a gun loader on a destroyer. Whatever, doesn't matter - Jimmy's ship is space dust and so are most of the chumps Jimmy was serving with. They got a little scout rescuing folks but you know? Screw that, they'll just stuff old Jimmy back in a gun turret to die somewhere else. Jimmy's done with that life, Jimmy is out for Jimmy.  But hey, some luck for Jimmy - this freighter gots what you call the kindness of the heart and picks poor old Jimmy up. Real big of you to save Jimmy, friend. Jimmy wants to ask the Captain to head somewhere but Jimmy realizes that Jimmy don't know where shit is. Jimmy ain't got no map. Jimmy's at the mercy of wherever this freighter captain wants to go. Still, beats deep space. Jimmy offers to help as freighter crew until the next port, wherever that may be. Captain Ra't pulls into some station and lets Jimmy off. Jimmy's his own Split now - 15K creds in the account and nothin' else. Gonna need to figure a way to earn enough to buy a ship. Trader's got some Micro-Gimbals that look cheap.... Maybe Jimmy can sell 'em somewhere else. Also Jimmy doesn't get a map while riding around on a ship or walking around a station. Gotta take a little spacewalk, let the suit look around and get some telemetry. Jimmy's on a Free Families claytronics factory. Jimmy hangs around for a couple days and scrapes by on Jimmy's remaining funds for food, sleeping behind shipping containers. A few days later another freighter docks, time to hit the road. Cap'n Soa runs a tight ship and Jimmy gets the worst jobs, like scraping space barnacles off the hull. Still, the view is something else. The next station the freighter docks at is under attack! The Captain spooks and decides to fly on, much to Jimmy's regret - Jimmy tried to get out in a suit to go look for salvage but the freighter's wake carried Jimmy off and nearly left Jimmy stranded in deep space again. Jimmy fumes at the lost opportunity. That was free stuff just floatin' around that Jimmy coulda had! Jimmy spends all his cash on cheap bandages and other goods at the next trader, then waits around for a ship. This time it's a little food trader, it's cramped but at least the meals are free. The captain refuses to talk to Jimmy, there may have been a miscommunication about free food. A small pocket of air ensconced in a thin metal shell carries our Hitchhiker through the void. Jimmy's luck takes a turn for the better at the next station, where there are two traders selling some of the same items at different prices. Jimmy works the two of them over for all they're worth. Give Jimmy every Interface Unit you got, the guy over there will pay 30 creds more for each of 'em. By the time Jimmy is ready to move on he's up to 42K credits - sadly just shy of the deal of a lifetime, one of the traders is selling a 45K laser and the other is buying it for almost 70K! But nobody will spare Jimmy just a few creds, even if Jimmy will pay you back with interest - nobody's buying it though. Jimmy learns that you've gotta have money to make money, and Jimmy still made some money today. Another day, another station. Jimmy walks in with a pile of credits from the last score and hitches a ride aboard an agricultural freighter, captained by one of them scaly folk. Jimmy got some contract work to conduct some repairs at a station Jimmy was just passing by, but Jimmy ain't got no way of getting there - it's one of the few missions Jimmy might actually be able to accomplish without a ship. Jimmy likes the larger freighters, there's more things to see and more crew to talk to on a trip. Dropping out of character for a second: I have inadvertently made this part of the game more difficult than it already is, because I've got a game bug (I suspect it's because the initial ship from the starting 'get rescued mission' still wants to rescue me) where if I'm floating in space I cannot call for help from other ships anymore nor can I ask ship captains to take me to a location like you normally can. I'm completely at the mercy of where these ships already want to go. The agricultural freighter is the slowest vessel Jimmy has ever seen, possibly slower than some terrestrial life forms. The journey takes weeks, and when it is over Jimmy hopes he never ends up on a ship like that again. Jimmy find himself in good company with other day laborers on a Scruffin farm, even gets a job there for a brief period of time - enough time to learn that Jimmy is allergic to Scruffins. Jimmy hops the next Water Trader back into the void. Hitchhiking eventually takes Jimmy back to the trading station with two traders on it, and Jimmy arrives to find it under attack! Jimmy won't let this opportunity slip by a second time! Seconds after the freighter docks, Jimmy shoots out of the airlock in his suit. And there, just free-floating in space, is the score of Jimmy's life. An intact Flux Capacitor, valued at 130,000 credits. Battle rages all around while Jimmy secures it and brings it back. Jimmy has to find a good buyer, but this is a huge step towards being able to afford Jimmy's very own ship. Jimmy leverages the additional cash from the flux capacitor - they won't pay top creds for it here - but temporarily selling it gives Jimmy cash to take advantage of every other deal Jimmy can get between the two traders and then buy it back. When Jimmy leaves the station he has the flux capacitor along with 90k credits - this is getting into ranges that might purchase a small ship, but Jimmy has never seen a Wharf, which is where he needs to go to buy one. Jimmy's next ride is another small food trader - Wharfs need food too, maybe he'll get lucky! Jimmy's a lucky guy - not lucky enough to find a Wharf right away, mind you - but the next station Jimmy winds up on also has two traders, and one of the forks over 150K for the flux capacitor. Jimmy gets some fancy spacesuit thrusters with the cash - Jimmy's earned it after all, and who knows how long it will take Jimmy to find a ship? Jimmy's confident he's got the funds now to afford something that flies.  Jimmy's been thinking - how does he get to a wharf? Not too many non-freighter ships have docked at the places Jimmy's visited, so it's almost certainly gotta be a freighter. He's just gotta get on one that might carry parts like hull places or sensor arrays - probably one of them high tech jobs, but Jimmy hasn't seen too many of those visiting the stations he's on. The chance to catch the ride he needs might be pretty hard to get. Jimmy needs one last big break. Jimmy lands a job to fix up a station 35 klicks away... can the spacesuit O2 last that long? Jimmy's going to find out. That's a long way to travel when your vehicle is your suit thrusters... The O2 is down to about a quarter capacity as Jimmy approaches. trying to breathe real slow. It's a little close for comfort but Jimmy makes it and makes an honest wage for once, patching up stray station signals. The problem with fixing things is once the work is done they ain't broken no more and nobody wants you to fix 'em again. Jimmy catches a ride with a delivery ship, who knows where this one will go. Landed a good one this time - Jimmy finds himself taken to a major Teladi trade hub. All sorts of ships are going to park here, and there's three traders! What a sight, she looks like profits. It's many times bigger than anywhere Jimmy's ever been. Once Jimmy arrives someone here actually invites Jimmy down to chat. The Teladi calls Jimmy a pilot - not yet buddy, maybe he's got the wrong Jimmy Two-Toes? Also Jimmy ain't fallin' for no fee-to-join pyramid scheme. Jimmy barters his way up to 300K credits and scores a ride on a high tech freighter. She sure looks the part! It's a Paranid freighter so plausibly will be working Paranid space. Jimmy don't mind them despite their kooky beliefs - Zyarth have it out for Jimmy's blood, so the further Jimmy can get away from them, the better. Jimmy's map looks like this patchwork, which has to be fairly unusual. --- Jimmy walked by the freighter's nav console. "Was that a Wharf?" he demanded as a symbol on the radar caught his eye. "Sure was" said the navigator. "Not where we're headed I'm afraid." "How exactly does Jimmy get back there?" "I mean, here's the coordinates, maybe you could hop off at the next station and ask a ship..." the navigator turned around to the whooshing sound of Jimmy flying out of the airlock. Jimmy finally finds a Wharf, it's now or never. The ring road was built a long time ago - not a true road, but instead a strange, self-maintaining warped curvature of space. For many years ships great and small used it to vastly cut their travel times throughout the gated systems. As Jimmy approached he wondered whether it was entirely safe to use with only a suit protecting him, but aside from a tingling feeling and objects whizzing past at breakneck speeds he felt none the worse for wear as it carried him towards the end of his hitchhiking journey. Turns out you can indeed ride the ring road in just a suit, lucky for Jimmy! The Wharf is 30 kilometers from the road - and from experience Jimmy's already confident he can fly this far. He makes it with O2 to spare. Jimmy pointedly ignores the 'Not Intended for Interstellar Use' warning on his suit thrusters. The first stop is the trader - Jimmy cashes in everything he has that isn't credits, including the fancy spacesuit thrusters that carried him here. The ship dealer is stop number 2. He appears nonplussed at Jimmy's worn-suit smell and the sheer variety of station credits in the pile Jimmy drops on his desk. "What can Jimmy get for this?" Well, the dealer was never one to pass on a sale. "You're in luck, friend. I just acquired several ships newly commissioned by some 'Orthogonal' fanatic, he bought a bunch of fighters for his subordinates to form some sort of mercenary group, then got himself killed on their first training mission along with half the guys he hired. Two of the survivors came back here, sold 'em, took the creds and ran. For what you just dumped on my desk I'll let you fly one out of here. It's barely used." Jimmy's eyes light up. Jimmy's very own ship. Given by no-one, beholden to no-one, able to fly wherever, whenever Jimmy wants. Jimmy... earned this. "I can tell you're interested sir!" The salesman quickly fudged some numbers on his tablet to bring the total up to what he estimated the money pile to be. "Just imagine it, the 'Back'... no, you should re-name her. What do you want to call her?" "Mine." said Jimmy. Jimmy is surprised when the Hatikvah league reaches out to him to offer him some work - he's got a ship but no money, so hey, sounds good to Jimmy. After spending months wandering the shipping lanes to afford his own ship, he's shocked when Hatikvah's representative immediately give him a small freighter in exchange for nothing more than delivering its current payload. Hatikvah may be an up-and-coming nation but they've definitely earned Jimmy's loyalty for the time being. After a little work for Hatikvah and some odd jobs around the sector, Jimmy's got enough to commission a cheap mining vessel - it gets to work in the Reach and it's not long before Jimmy can afford a second one. Now people work for Jimmy. Jimmy's the boss of his own small organization - he could get used to this. Then this Bozo shows up and just hands Jimmy a whole space station, because hey, Jimmy maybe deserves that too. Jimmy keeps earning money with his small mining fleet and working for Hatikvah. It's all going smoothly until Hatikvah wants him to help play dirty against a competitor - and Jimmy finds himself planting a bomb on a Scale Pact station. But hey, Scaleys never did Jimmy no favors, and Hatikvah's been real good to Jimmy. Mostly nobody got hurt, and the money was good. Jimmy's work for Hatikvah and his mining fleet pay dividends - he saves up a cool five million credits and spends it commissioning a large Helios freighter - the type that took him near the Wharf to get his first ship. Jimmy used to work on freighters like these, now he owns one. The new freighter is great - he names it the 'Respectable'. She starts making profitable trades but it takes awhile to pay for the up-front investment. Meanwhile, Jimmy's thinking about Hatikvah - look how big they got from being small-time, but they did it by being pretty rough. Maybe Jimmy oughta play rough too. Jimmy decides to commission a little ship off the books - not tied to Jimmy's organization officially, see? He takes the License Please out to independent space and finds an Argon miner working alone. Jimmy's on great terms with Argon, they love him, fine upstanding citizen. Respectable, see? Jimmy hopes Argon won't find out what happens out here. 'Attention mining vessel, please show your license to work in this area or face confiscation of your ship.' That oughta do it , thinks Jimmy, but the miners laugh him and his little ship off, so Jimmy opens fire. Jimmy attacks the miners until they bail. They put up a valiant effort but in the end the crew abandons the doomed and damaged freighter, and Jimmy captures it - a whole new ship for only the cost of repairs and crew. Jimmy decides to lay low for awhile to see if there are consequences from Argon, but they never figure out who's responsible. What happens out here stays out here, capiche? Jimmy's piracy doesn't end up amounting to much - ships are hard to find in independent space and some folks won't bail on their ships. Jimmy plans to revisit this after he has people that are willing to be a bit more aggressive in seizing vessels. In the meantime, the trade fleet is earning significant credits and Jimmy discovers a lucrative opportunity in shipbuilding contracts - at first it's just a couple Teladi freighters, but Jimmy finds he can just order the construction of the freighter at any shipyard and then immediately hand it off to Teladi at a 50% markup. Every two ships sold is equivalent to a whole ship's income - word gets around that Jimmy is good at this and eventually he starts taking on contracts to build expensive military ships. Jimmy doesn't see why he shouldn't be friends with just about everyone - even the Zyarth who had it out for him, some careful planning and diplomacy and his organization gradually makes inroads with every major faction Jimmy is in contact with. One day out of the blue, Jimmy's personal ship get's blasted to pieces by Xenon while he's minding his own business and trying to control his empire near a station. Fortunately teleportation lets Jimmy survive, but he's badly shaken by the near-death incident - he needs a tougher ship. Financially he's doing incredibly well - he just signed a massive multimillion-cred contract for constructing a small Argon fleet. Jimmy pulls over ten million credits worth of profit on a fleet construction contract. Jimmy splurges on himself - he really likes the Zyarth ships and he gets talked into purchasing a pair of Dragon corvettes and five Cerberus escorts as his personal squadron. He expands the mining fleet such that he has miners working in every major faction - spreading it around keeps relations high with almost everyone, as insurance in case he does something that they might not appreciate. He also buys two additional large freighters and some blueprints, and begins trying to build out his home station (Jimmy's Place) to produce refined metals with a full production chain - miners gathering ore, energy cells generated, and then processed into refined metals for the freighters to sell. Jimmy still likes to do favors for Hatikvah, seeing as how they helped get him where he is today. They want him to lay a minefield somewhere he's never been - 'Sure thing, I'll take care of it'. The Hatikvah representative assures him it will be easy and the call ends. Jimmy is inspecting the newly formed Chimera squadron and but sends his reserve pilot in the Mine off to take care of it - and later gets word from observers that the Mine was destroyed attempting to lay the minefield directly around a Ka'ahk station! That's a real dangerous place for a minelaying mission Even though Jimmy upgraded his personal craft long ago, the loss of his original ship hurts, as does the pilot that helped him fly it. He's furious at Hatikvah - was it a mistake or were they trying to set him up? Jimmy tries to organize a rescue operation but he's new at this and it takes too long - the floating suits run out of air by the time his ships enter the sector. Blinded by rage, Jimmy takes his newly formed squadron on a vengeful attack run at the Kha'ak facility seeking some vengeance - he has no illusions that he can destroy the whole thing with what he's got, but perhaps he can smash one of the defense platforms. He cannot, the attack run is a disaster. Jimmy's ship is badly damaged and one of the novice Chimera pilots is killed when they crash into the platform. They have only inflicted minor damage on the target. Ruefully, Jimmy retreats with the survivors. Hatikvah has much to answer for. Jimmy seethes with rage as he contemplates his next move. Frustrated with the performance of his pilots, Jimmy takes them out on patrol - perhaps cutting their teeth on easier fare would help them gain combat experience. They do well enough when they encounter a Xenon destroyer that is under attack from a large amount of Teladi craft. Sensing an opportunity Jimmy leads his squadron to assist. They lose another Chimera in the fray, but this time they help bring down a huge menace. Meanwhile, in the company, there's growing concern among Jimmy's top subordinates that the boss is taking too many risks - he'll eventually get himself killed trying to run a small squadron out against galactic threats. They convince him that all the stress has gotten to him and he should take a break. Jimmy actually listens. He leaves them to run the business and heads out on a galactic vacation. First stop is Tidebreak Station, where you can relax and watch the sun send out wave of destruction every hour or so. Then he spends some time visiting the newly-discovered Pioneers at their 'Spacelab' that his scouts sent back word of. They have some intriguing ship designs so he spends some time there making friends and getting to know people. He even takes a cooking class. Jimmy's seeing a whole new way of living, something... different than the endless drive for more. Jimmy blows through cash on his vacation and hires Kaori, a fascinating human woman who claims great expertise in boarding ships. Jimmy's got an idea for how he can obtain more ships very cheaply. This guy thinks he's Hot Shit. Jimmy hires him on the spot. He also buys himself a new personal vessel - a Terran-made Katana Corvette. It's pricey but it's got all the bells and whistles. She is a thing of beauty, and Jimmy experiences a moment of regret that no space architect of any race in any system of the galaxy has thought to place a catwalk nearby, looking down on the ships so that they can be easily seen from a better perspective. Jimmy names her Masamune , after a famous human sword. Jimmy ends up liking the Katana so much that he orders six more, and calls the squadron the Seven Samurai. Kurosawa likely would not approve. Later Jimmy goes asteroid-spelunking, and discovers a Yaki (Pirate) ship hidden away. Jimmy quickly secures the abandoned ship. Top Mind Bozo proclaims their interest in the Yaki ship and Jimmy puts his vacation on hold to bring it back for analysis. The Yaki ship has the incredible ability to... appear as a Yaki ship. Bozo looks at it for 30 seconds and deems this to be an advanced technology that cannot possibly be reverse engineered. Despite how flummoxed Bozo is by this, the capability to pretend to be a Yaki proves immediately valuable - the Xenon are apparently not hostile to the Yaki and it lets Jimmy safely explore Xenon space, as well as making missions like laying satellites in Xenon territory and scanning a Xenon station much more feasible. Jimmy takes a close look at a Xenon station. Xenon stations are strangely beautiful. Jimmy wonders if maybe they're simply misunderstood. Jimmy ends up on the Yaki station and finds their leader surprisingly reasonable - and ethical. These people have learned to co-exist with the Xenon, which would be an invaluable lesson if everyone could also do so. Jimmy leaves, promising to keep the Yaki's secret. They took a great risk in trusting Jimmy with the location of their base and letting him go, and Jimmy appreciates that. Meanwhile, the Terrans who are hunting for the Yaki won't even let Jimmy visit the human homeworld of Earth! Everyone already knows where it is, what's the big deal? Jerks. Jimmy returns from vacation. Some of his subordinates aren't happy he's been gone so long but they largely keep their grumbling to themselves. There was a serious incident in the Reach while Jimmy was gone - the Ka'akh attacked Jimmy's miners there and destroyed them. Jimmy's organization sent replacement miners with escorts only to see those miners and an escort destroyed. The Reach is profitable, and dangerous. Despite that however, they've kept the company running and profitable. There are mining operations in numerous sectors throughout the galaxy generating regular income as well as keeping relations good with various factions, and Jimmy's Place is now producing refined metals from mined ore in its system. "All right." says Jimmy. "Things happen. The Ka'ahk suckers are gonna pay for what they did - if Argon can't patrol the Reach and keep it safe for our operations then we're gonna use our own ships to get the job done." "Furthermore boys, we're gonna expand our manufacturing operations. What's the main thing that's been holding up our military contracts?" "The... weapons sir?" "That's right Dal, weapon components. Maybe they just ain't makin' enough, maybe it's because our contracting business is putting out a lotta demand, whatever, don't matter. Point is, there's always a shortage of the things, so we've been fillin' it by buying 'em at high prices, and sellin' at even higher prices than that. But if we make 'em ourselves..." "Profits?" "Big, fat profits. We're goin' into the arms dealing business boys - everybody's fighting somebody so everybody needs 'em."  Jimmy gets all this started by buying the bluprints for and building the weapon component production as well as production modules for its precursors. The only thing he can't produce on this station appears to be Graphene which requires mining Methane. He can start by purchasing it from other stations but he would like to set up an operation to supply his own - ideally Jimmy's organization can control the entire supply chain from basic mined components all the way to the weapons. Jimmy's place is about to undergo significant additional construction. "Jimmy we got a problem, we gotta source Coolant too! It's gettin' too hot in here!" Jimmy heads out to resource Methane for Graphene and spends a lot of time on trading stations talking to miners who know the area. One thing he'll never understand are the elevator systems which change the order of where station locations are listed for selection depending on where you happen to be. It doesn't simply keep them in a listed order like #1, #2, #3, etc. This means that just to visit every trader on a station even with only three or four traders Jimmy has to carefully note which ones he has already been to so that he doesn't revisit them. To deal with the situation in the Reach, Jimmy produces a single, large tough Teladi mining ship, names her the Suck this, Ka'akh! and assigns the entire Seven Samurai to protect it. Just try attacking this miner, Jimmy dares you. Jimmy thinks the best prospect Jimmy can get for Methane is back out in Free Families territory. His organization works to establish a self-sufficient mining operation there, to wit: They invest in a massive construction ship ( Union Buster ) so they no longer have to hire outside help to build modules for Jimmy's stations. The construction vessel looks more intimidating than most warships. They construct a Graphene-production station in Tharka's Ravine VIII, relying on the Free Families stations present there for system security. Graphene needs both methane and energy cells, so solar panels on the station take care of producing the energy cells. Jimmy's figuring out logistics! Two new mining vessels scour the system for methane gas, bringing it to the new station. Now supplied with the prerequisites the station produces Graphene. Finally, Jimmy commissions a new large freighter dedicated solely to making trips between the new station and bringing the Graphene it produces back to Jimmy's Place. Speaking of Jimmy's Place, it has expanded by adding new production modules, storage, and habitation. People live here now, breadwinners support their families by working for Jimmy in several industries all geared towards weapons production. Jimmy's teleportation technology (which he has kept to himself personally and not sold for a trillion credits) is great except nobody believes Jimmy can do it! Jimmy was hanging around a server room just because it was left open and the guards got all testy but Jimmy cleverly escaped by just teleporting away - problem was his employers didn't believe he had gone to the station and insisted Jimmy go back into a firefight with another ship just to undock from the station he already escaped from! This was an annoying mission bug - if your players can teleport you need to anticipate that! There are some unexpected difficulties with expanding weapons component development - people on the station want food and meds which introduces its own additional infrastructure if Jimmy doesn't want to just pay for 'em (the first tangible 'upkeep' costs Jimmy has had to deal with). Also he comes back to his place to find a whole line of ships just waiting by it! There's about a dozen ships just waiting around! Jimmy bursts into a meeting - "What the hell are all these ships doing lazing around Jimmy's place? Ain't they got places to be?" "Yeah Jimmy" says Dal. "Thing is, see, we only got one dock, they gotta wait..." Jimmy nearly blows his top. "ONE DOCK? YOU SEE THIS LINE OF SHIPS COMING TO BUY WEAPONS AND YOU DON'T BUILD A DOZEN MORE DOCKS? DOES JIMMY GOTTA DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE?" Then, Jimmy goes silent. A fragment of an idea begins to form in his mind. Dal and the rest of the high-level folks glance at each other nervously when Jimmy just turns around and leaves, muttering "More docks... more docks..." --- Jimmy likes to take things at his own pace. Back when he was hopping ship to ship he did a lot of waiting around, and now as construction orders go out to make Jimmy's place a mass weapons manufacturer, he finds himself waiting again while construction ship drones create module after module and freighters continue to ship in the materials necessary for their construction. And then, out of the blue, Dal takes him into a private communications booth. "Jimmy, it's the Yaki, they gotta talk to ya right now." "Jimmy!" Kendai Orcanic popped onto the screen. "Something bad's happened and the Xenon have started attacking us. We're not sure what caused it but we're being swarmed, we don't have a lot of friends so I'm hoping you can send something." Jimmy hears the faint sound of weapons fire impacting the base in the background. "Sure Kendai, Jimmy will be over shortly." Jimmy terminates the call just as Kendai starts to say something else. "Be nice to pay her a visit, eh Dal? Been awhile." Jimmy hops in the Yaki ship he found in the asteroid and heads into Xenon space, using its fake identity system for cover. The Xenon he encounters on the way leave him alone, but he learns to his surprise that Kendai may have been underselling the situation. A pair of Xenon destroyers and several Xenon craft are assaulting the Yaki base. "What the hell happend Kendai? Jimmy thought you and the Xenon was on good terms, live and let live, capiche?" "We don't know Jimmy, all we know is that this batch of Xenon just started attacking us, please help!" "Fine, it ain't like Jimmy can't tangle with the Xenon." Jimmy blasts in and helps the Yaki defenders and drones engage the attackers. The fight is furious with casualties on both sides - Jimmy's ship suffers damage as well, but with the aid of the defenders and station turrets they take down the attacking craft and smash the two Xenon destroyers. Beauty in death. "That oughta do it." Jimmy said. "Thanks Jimmy, but we're not out of the woods. It's not just those ships, it's the entire Xenon shipyard nearby that's marked us as a hostile target. Maybe some pilot got drunk and took a shot at it." "Aw hell Kendai. You can't think what's left of the Yaki can take down the shipyard, what if you piss all the rest of the Xenon off?" Kendai sighed. "We discussed it here. If we don't the shipyard will just keep manufacturing and sending ships at us until we're dead. We're going to attack it with everything we've got left." "That's suicide!" "That's life out here Jimmy, we're surviving on the knife's edge and we do it or we die." If anyone has any ideas about why the Xenon and Yaki started fighting I'd love to hear them. "Wait, Kendai... just hold off, Jimmy's got an idea. You and Jimmy better hash this out face to face." Jimmy landed on Yaki outpost, flying past blast marks and twisted metal to one of the undamaged pads. "Fix her!" he yelled at a nearby mechanic, gesturing at the ship as he rushed towards Kendai's office. "Make it fast Jimmy, we think the Xenon are preparing another assault." "You can't win against the Xenon with what you have left Kendai. Your only chance is... the contingency." Kendai's eyes widened. "That's for insurance against the Terrans... Last time we spoke you told me you wouldn't do it... but if we survive this, we still need it." Jimmy nodded. "Your lives weren't on the line last time you asked Jimmy. It'll help you survive this too. Maybe. Maybe the only chance you got, anyway." Desperate times call for desparate measures. Everyone who knew about it within the Yaki simply referred to it as 'The Contingency'. Kendai's people had taken control of a Xenon amplifier station months earlier and believed they could direct Xenon anger towards certain locations with it. Given that the Terran high command considered the Yaki a thorn in their side the Yaki were sure that if the Terrans ever found them it would be a very one-sided battle, but this gave them a chance to use the Xenon against the Terrans - provided someone laid a series of specially constructed navigational beacons within Terran territory, including the human homeworld of Earth. When Kendai first proposed this to Jimmy, Jimmy balked - he wasn't going to turn the Yaki's location over to the Terrans, he knew that much (and indeed Terran security had contacted him asking for details when they noticed Jimmy flying around in a Yaki fighter - Jimmy suspected that someone less rich might have ended up in an interrogation chamber). But Jimmy also wasn't going to just help the Xenon attack someone. Jimmy just let it sit so he could think on it. But now things were different. The Yaki's existence was at stake - the only people to ever figure out how to co-exist with the Xenon, however little they understood how they'd done it. And Terra was strong - probably strong enough to defend itself, surely? Some of Jimmy's military contracts had helped see to that. Come to think of it, a Xenon attack might well prompt more demand for military ships and weapons.... "Here's Jimmy's plan, Kendai - Jimmy will get some ships to lay the beacons so you can set that thing off. When the Xenon go after Earth, maybe that gets them off your back - Jimmy's gonna call in all his favors to get a fleet made. When it's ready, you set off the amplifier, Jimmy will take the fleet through Xenon space and come here, and smash the Xenon stations in this sector while their ships are gone." Kendai nodded. "We don't have a better plan than that - we'll go with it." "Hold out as a long as you can. Jimmy knows battle fleets don't come quick. Oh! Before Jimmy goes, give Jimmy your ship blueprints." "In case this doesn't work?" "In case this don't work, yeah. A little piece of the Yaki will live on." "What are you doing to our accounts?!?" screamed Dal as over a hundred million credits were transferred to huge shipyards in a matter of minutes. "Jimmy's accounts Dal, don't ever forget it." Jimmy replied in an icy tone. "Right boss, sorry." --- "Kendai, how are you holding out?" "We just beat back the fifth attack. The damn robots are persistent. Our pilots are exhausted, and we lose more every time. Is the Contingency ready yet?" "Jimmy just got word that the last beacons are set, transmitting the data now." "Data received... thank you Jimmy. Thank you so much." --- Jimmy pulled together six Osaka-class Terran Destroyers, three Argon Behemoths, the Seven Samurai, and every single other armed vessel in his employ. There was no time for training and he was hastily sending battle manuals to the newly commissioned destroyer captains. "Think this is enough to save the Yaki sir?" "What, you think Jimmy knows? Jimmy don't know shit except we're going to try." Jimmy was on the bridge of the Salvation , the Osaka-class he had made flagship of Salvation fleet. There was no time for sophisticated tactics, so the standing order to the entire fleet was to follow the Salvation and shoot whatever it shot. Jimmy was going to have to take untrained crews through Xenon space, avoiding enemy defenses as much as possible, to reach the Yaki base. Jimmy didn't even know whether the Xenon would really clear out when the Yaki used the amplifier. At least the fleet might be powerful enough to defend Jimmy from angry shareholders once they saw what he'd done to company accounts. "Jimmy to Kendai, fleet's as ready as it'll ever be. It's now or never." Kendai came on the screen in a helmet. The base had lost pressure, or was in danger of it. "Actually Jimmy... it's over. The Xenon just stopped - someone here was trying signals and managed to calm them down, we think. Don't risk the fleet just to piss off the Xenon again." "What the hell? Jimmy's headed back there." Jimmy arrived in the Yaki ship to find immense carnage in the aftermath of the attacks. If anyone knows why the Yaki and Xenon spontaneously stopped fighting I'd love to hear it.  Xenon and Yaki ship and drone wreckage littered in the space between the warring stations. Jimmy requested docking clearance from the Yaki station but only got an error in response. "Sorry Jimmy, you can't land here anymore. The Xenon destroyed the docks." "Aw hell. Can you even recover from that? That means you can't build ships anymore either." "I'm not sure myself." Kendai replied. "Construction crews are somewhat reluctant to operate here. But we'll figure something out. We always have. We did today. And thanks to you, Jimmy, we have everything we need to hold off the Terrans, too." Jimmy's brow furrowed. "Awfully strange for the Xenon to just stop like they did... not long after Jimmy helped you set up the Contingency... you didn't actually set Jimmy up, did you?" "That's rude of you to insinuate considering the damage, Jimmy. We lost a lot of good pilots today. You're not wrong that what you gave us in terms of leverage over the Terrans may well make their sacrifice worthwhile." "Jimmy noticed you didn't say no." "That's true. I do mean it when I say thank you, Jimmy. You helped us immensely today and you were prepared to do even more. We'll always be grateful." --- "Are we not going into Xenon territory after all boss?" The young captain's relief was palpable, which irritated Jimmy. "No, Jimmy thinks that's a bad idea now. All dressed up and no place to go. Jimmy maybe got set up, spent tons of money - tons  of money that Jimmy maybe didn't need to spend, and maybe put an entire planet at risk." "You seem frustrated sir. If I might make a suggestion?" "What?" Jimmy snapped. "We just had a Xenon destroyer pop through the gate onto this side, probably to scout. They do this every so often, usually Argon takes care of them, but... we're the biggest force in the sector right now." "Huh. You know captain, Jimmy thinks that's not a bad suggestion. Considering how much this all cost, it would be real a shame if we didn't blow something up with it." "Couldn't agree more, boss." --- Liam Felden watched the freighter Call my Lawyer dock slowly. It looked like it had been in service for a long time and was not well maintained, but the fact that it was here at the Argon Weapon Components Factory attested to the fact that she could still fly. He was surprised to see that it was apparently registered to Jimmy's organization - their freighters usually looked more modern than this piece of junk. "Welcome" he said as the ship's rep walked into his office. "We haven't had the pleasure of seeing one of Jimmy's ships in quite some time, since you guys started competing with us. Got a big order you can't fulfill?" "Somethin' like that." The representative grinned - he actually had a tooth missing. Argon would never allow that in any position that required interfacing with other interstellar organizations, even one staffed by lowlifes like Jimmy's. "Name's Bodega, nice to meet you Liam, I bet we is gonna get on real good." "I'm sure." The fellow's breath did not smell great. "How much are you buying? Price per crate is currently 332.6 creds." "Nah." said Bodega. "We was thinkin' maybe a thousand crates, for a trillion spacebucks." Liam laughed. "You're serious? You're going to give us a trillion credits for a thousand crates? Well I can certainly...." "No no, ya don't get it Liam. We want a thousand crates and you pay us a trillion bucks to take 'em off your hands." Liam was already tired of this. "We have a standard price you can pay per crate or you can shove off. Unless you're robbing us we're not paying you to take our product. Don't waste my time." "We ain't robbers, we're big-time negotiators! You'll come around, it's a good deal for you!" Liam was morbidly curious. "How, exactly, is that a good deal for us?" "Because then we undock with our money and weapons and we go away! You'd be helping the good of the people, see?" Liam sighed. "You're not getting squat from me, and that freighter's unarmed - unlike this station - so you're not getting away with robbery either. Shove off and take your bullshit somewhere else." "No. We're gonna keep negotiatin'." Bodega replied, grinning. "What? We're not doing a deal, you will get nothing from us. Leave this station and take it somewhere else." "See, you can't order us to do that." Bodega pulled out a datapad and showed it to Liam. "See here? It says we don't gotta undock our ship while there's negotiatin' goin' on - it's a Union thing. You don't have to do a deal of course, no obligation, but all the same we ain't obligated to leave while we is discussin' these things - speaking of which, I'm lowering the price of taking them crates down to 100 billion bucks, ninety percentile discount for you Liam, because I like you - and I got a feelin' we're gonna be spending a lotta time together, eh?" Liam took the data pad and was trying to parse all the legaleze on it when Tyler walked in. "Hey Liam, there's a problem - got some freighter captain at Dock 3 says he won't leave unless we  pay him  to haul away product! Can you believe this joker?" Realization began to dawn on Liam just as the AI over the loudspeakers said "Docking permission granted for Dock #2".  --- "It worked Jimmy! Operation Parallell Parking has every weapons factory except Jimmy's place locked down." Jimmy grinned at the lawyer, Tk'cha. It was expensive, to be sure - stations could have three or four docks for large freighters and the 'cheap' ships he'd gotten his hands on for this still cost 2.5 million, but that meant that for 5-10 million he could choke off a given weapon's factory's entire large shipping capability. And for over 100 million, Jimmy had done it to every weapons factory in the galaxy. "Jimmy still ain't sure they ain't gonna just shoot us off. That's what Jimmy would do, no more bullshit." "Jimmy, we're fine. We're within the law on this, you have a sizeable fleet that'll make them think twice, and we made sure the freighter crews are all real diverse - so if someone blows a gasket they're gonna kill Split, Teladi, Terrans, Argonians, Paranid choir boys - they'd be risking open war with you AND everyone else just to clear a dock? Not a chance." "And Tk'cha don't think they can make up for it with little guys?" "They can still service the small freighters via their general docking bays but those could carry a paltry 23% of what the big ships can and there aren't a ton of them to go around. They'll sell a few weapons, sure, but it'd take a month for them to ship enough to build a destroyer. The galaxy is waking up to a new reality today Jimmy." Jimmy's eyes brightened. "Nobody builds a real warship without Jimmy." Operation Parallel Parking brings the defense industry to its knees. --- Jimmy's celebration was rudely interrupted by the news. "Jimmy!" Dal said breathlessly. "We found a Ka'akh station!" "Maybe send yer mother there Dal, she'll handle it!" "I'm serious Jimmy. It's in OUR sector!" Jimmy put his glass down. Those sneaky little cubic bastards. "That explains why them Ka'akhs keep showin' up and raidin' ships around here. Jimmy thinks it's time to see what the Salvation Navy can do. Let's go Salvation them Ka'ahks real good." The Navy formed up, coordinating its attack. Small ships flew in to assault the station while the destroyers formed a battle line. The combined firepower of the destroyers proved decisive, smashing the station piece by piece. The Ka'akh unleashed a huge wave of small craft that devastated the Salvation Navy's fighters and corvettes, but their effectiveness ended as they failed to even penetrate any destroyer's shields, let alone damage the hulls. Smaller Ka'akh fighters flew around for awhile until they were picked off one by one by secondary turrets and defensive drones.  The Ka'akh station was smashed, but every corvette and fighter was lost in the battle. No destroyer even suffered a scratch. Capital ship resilience wins the day. "More like the 'No Samurai' now eh?" Dal quipped. "It ain't like those little guys is cheap!" sighed Jimmy. "Jimmy can't be buyin' a whole squadron after every scrap! From now on, Jimmy wants capital ships for fightin', and nothin' else!" --- The infestation in Heretic's end doesn't stop however, and eventually Jimmy's scouts find a second Ka'akh hive. This one is stronger, with more defense platforms protecting it. By the time it is located Jimmy has designed his own variant of the Osaka-class destroyer, with upgraded shields and beam turrets. He commissions ten and forms them into a second fleet, Jimmy's Finest. It is led by the Flagship I got nothin' to do with it The new fleet assembles and attacks the station along with the Salvation Navy The destroyers out-range the defense platforms and they're mainly only effective against small craft anyway. The new beam weapons make short work of the smaller vessels that the hive sends out to defend itself. All the additional defenses manage to accomplish is to let the Ka'ahk station hold out for longer. In the end it, too, is reduced to space junk. The destroyers come through unscathed. --- Jimmy realizes that his freighters don't automatically carry the weapons out to stations beyond three sectors away from Jimmy's place, (It's a Union thing). To solve that problem, Jimmy sets up distribution centers for his weapons and sets up dedicated freighters to ship the goods out to every major power in the galaxy. Jimmy is simultaneously pleased with the distribution center idea and annoyed that his Captains can't navigate the galaxy on their own very well. "That's it boys!" Jimmy threw out the latest balance sheet. "We got this! We's dominatin' weapons production everywheres! Even if the ratfink lawyers is eatin' up half the budget." Indeed they were. Jimmy's organization had supplanted most major weapons manufacturers who had still not managed to remove Jimmy's ships from their docks. "Now..." says Jimmy, "We gotta really make 'em want it. It's time to make some moves that secure our place and make sure nobody messes with us." "How we gonna do that boss?" "Well Dal, we ain't. We ain't gonna have nothin to do with it, see? It's just gonna happen, real bad things, serious accidents, species not able to come to the negotiating table and slipping into open warfare. But we ain't got nothin to do with that. It's just gonna happen, see?" Jimmy ain't got nothin' to do with how that cryo-ark fulla Paranid wise guys blowed up and made their civil war go round the bend. And Jimmy don't know nothin' about how his good Teladi friend was so unfortunately attacked and violently killed by unmarked ships. And Jimmy was most certainly locked up at the time 'cause of a misunderstandin'.. and had nothin' to do with that unlucky science teleportation accident that just disintegrated an SCA tech factory, oh my that was unfortunate, such a tragedy. Bozo asks if profit is really more important than leaving a lasting and positive mark on the galaxy? Yes Bozo, it is. Jimmy had nothin' to do with... ah who is Jimmy kidding, Jimmy absolutely had everything to do with the head of the Vigor Syndicate sleeping with the space fishes on account of Jimmy's fleet destroying his station. Destroying the station whilst he was on it. Jimmy and that guy had a beef, see. The next guys in line was very reasonable, gave Jimmy control of a coupl'a stations and sectors and turned over a solid 70 ships. Real stand up guys, the remnants of Vigor can hang around what with makin' deals like that, payin' a very reasonable price for Jimmy's protection. Being given this much stuff at once is a quick way into Jimmy's good graces. But some guys is not so reasonable. Like the Ministry of Finance. Them MOF guys had a problem with some of Jimmy's friends. Jimmy's friends here may have been pirates but friends is friends. They would not make a deal so Jimmy says let the Legal Department handle it. The Legal Department consisting of the destroyers Tied Up In Court, Acceptable Collateral Damage, Contempt of Court, Settlement Litigation, and So Sue Me. Well-argued litigation is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately the MOF had somethin' to say about Jimmy's distribution center after the courts shut down their Shipyard. Jimmy's weapons distribution center turned out to have a lot of legal liability and inadequate defenses. So Legal had to take things a step further with MOF using some real clever legal strategies, up and down the legal system. Jimmy had high hopes for this attack plan. Unfortunately the destroyers attacking from up and down didn't work so good on account of the ships not wanting to point in that direction, it's a Union thing. Wouldn't want to angle a ship too many degrees up or down. In space. Things can get messy with a court battle and MOF lost big, but something real dangerous starts brewin' - some Teladi ships (but not all and not the Teladi as a whole) turn hostile and threaten to attack Jimmy. Jimmy's a bit taken aback. Jimmy's beef wasn't with the Teldadi, why they gotta beef with Jimmy?? Jimmy's gotta protect his property from these MOF thugs, some Teladi get caught in the crossfire... Things just got a little out of hand, you can't pin this on Jimmy. With MOF forces largely defeated, Jimmy sends his fleet to mop up various enemy fighter groups that continue to harass and destroy Jimmy's freighters. These groups are sometimes embedded with Teladi and relations between Jimmy and the Teladi have been decreasing as Teladi attack Jimmy's ships and are destroyed. Then, the Matrix Incident happens. A lone Teladi destroyer captain has had enough of Jimmy's antics against their MOF allies and attacks Jimmy's fleet. This turns the entire Teladi squadron of five destroyers and dozens of support craft hostile and a full scale battle breaks out. The battle is massive - Jimmy's force of 35 Osaka-class destroyers smashes the Teladi. Jimmy's forces are not unscathed - the Teladi take down two destroyers and damage several more. I offer my kingdom for a free camera mode! The battle is the final straw for the Teladi corporation which declares open war against Jimmy's fleet. The fleet suddenly finds itself in hostile territory. Relations with the Teladi are beyond repair - Jimmy is going to war. Jimmy orders the fleet to to escape the sector containing most of the Teladi military forces. The fleet rests and refits in Free Family territory. Refurbished, Jimmy's fleet goes after the Teladi shipyards in Profit Center Alpha. The Shipyard here was occasionally producing Ministry of Finance destroyers after the destruction of the MOF shipyards, so its removal will both hamper the Teladi and hopefully shut down MOF production. Hit the enemy where it hurts! The Teladi have hardly any ships in the sector and fail to recall their forces from the Xenon front to face the new threat. Teladi shipyards pay the price for military incompetence. With ship production destroyed, Jimmy proceeds to punish the Teladi by wiping out the rest of their stations in the sector. Do not fuck with Jimmy. Let's make this crystal clear: Do. Not. Fuck. With. Jimmy. At first Jimmy think's it's a good idea to split his destroyers up and attack separate stations, but stations take so long to kill that it turns out to just be safer to have the whole fleet fly around as one massive death squall. Ostensibly there are fleet formations but they all end up as this clusterfuck. Guess we never trained the Mob guys in battle tactics. Toward the end Jimmy notices that the Xenon are moving more freely through the nearly empty sector. Not Jimmy's problem! As the last stations in Profit Center Alpha fall, the Vigor syndicate takes this opportunity to stab Jimmy in the back and renege on their deal. Jimmy is furious. "They think they can try this with us while we're focused on the Teladi? They won't know what hit 'em!" Jimmy's fleet remains combat capable. Jimmy diverts the fleet from its attacks on Teladi to go deal with Vigor. Vigor has almost no capital ships but tries to make up for it with a LOT of small craft. The battle is a hell of a light show. Chaotic. Confusing. Utterly Incomprehensible But in the end the Vigor craft just aren't very adept at taking on capital ships. One by one they fall, and Jimmy destroys the Vigor wharf and shipyard. Turning back towards the Teladi, his scouts have found another Teladi shipyard in the sector with the best Teladi military forces. It's time to take on both. The Teladi military is incompetent and divides its forces during the battle. A fair chunk of these enemies just pulled out of the initial fight. Despite the Teladi having numerous destroyers at hand, Jimmy's fleet loses fewer than 10% of its ships. Teladi's military capability is smashed. Their last shipyard suffers the same fate as their other stations. Still, the Teladi refuse to surrender or come to terms. Jimmy is initially at a loss. "What the hell, they want us to destroy everything? Because we can destroy everything they have, it'll just take time. Hell the Xenon will probably come in and destroy it for them eventually." But there's no reasoning with the Teladi Management Board. Jimmy's fleet finds itself at the arcology / trading post that hosts the Board and prepares to attack. But when Jimmy sees it from the bridge of his flagship, he's taken aback. "Hey... I remember this place..." "I was there back when I was hitchhiking across the galaxy, caught my last ride there. Beautiful freighter, can't remember the name... last ride I had before I bought my first ship." Jimmy's minions stand around looking confused. Did the boss just refer to himself in the first person? "Sir, the plan is to attack in fifteen minutes." "No." "No, boss?" "No, Jimmy doesn't want to do that anymore. There's a little place there see, serves these noodles? Great noodles, guy that runs it is a good guy. We ain't gonna blow that up. Hell, I got enough money and a fleet that'll take on all comers. Jimmy can do whatever Jimmy wants, and this? Jimmy doesn't want this. Leave 'em be." "And the Teladi Board?" "Fuck 'em, let 'em rot." "Ok... well Jimmy, what is it you want?" --- Komankatslot hadn't been having a good day. He was down to his last few credits and he'd just been fired from working at the trader's in the stockroom at a station that primarily farmed snails. That changed when a Split walked up to him and said 'Yo three-eyes, you wanna ride outta here? This place is a dump. Courtesy of Jimmy himself." "S.. sure?" the Paranid replied. "Come on, I got a real sweet ride." "Where are you going?" "That's the beautiful thing." Jimmy replied. "I don't care. We'll go wherever you want, no charge. There's a whole galaxy out there, and my retirement package is damn good way to see it. I pick up someone, give 'em a free ride, and I do it again at the next place." "You're not just going to force me into slave labor or something like those Holy Order freaks?" "Probably not but don't be a dick about it, I do what I feel like - actually just dropped one of those 'freaks' off here. Nice guy but you all gotta lay off this Pontifex stuff, what's it matter?" Just then Komankaslot knew where he wanted to go... somewhere where it actually didn't matter. The war had raged for months now with no end in sight. "Sure, I'll go with you." "Wait'll you get a load of Jimmy's Retirement Package , you're gonna love her. Beautiful ship." Hours later they were underway, stargazing.

We are a warrior, we pilot a warship for the Godrealm of the Paranid. This may be a short run. No guided start here - I'm just somewhere in space in a cool-looking cockpit after a short intro screen proclaiming the righteousness of the Godrealm against the heretical Holy Order. I have faith, I must figure out what is going on and help end this war. I really dig this cockpit. I've got a badass looking ship with a badass color scheme. I'm not yet actually friendly enough with the Godrealm, the faction I purportedly serve, to join their military operations but we'll start by correcting that with some missions for them. After just one mission to destroy criminal traffic, so many criminals show up at a single station that I end up killing at least a dozen, and the Godrealm now wants me to join after just a single mission. I am dubbed a Friend of the Godrealm and am inducted into the war. I rename my vessel the Acolyte, and name my faction Acolytes of the Godrealm. NOW I am a holy warrior. The Paranid have great looking conference rooms. The heretics we're fighting, the Holy Order, are also Paranids, so this is something of a civil war. They must submit, and I will throw the whole of my efforts into doing so until this war is ended. I begin to have my first doubts however when our war coordination headquarters turns out to be... a snail farm. Perhaps this is simply what God intended. Or Gods? I'm fuzzy on the details of our faith beyond 'Kill the Heretics'. I found an NPC that gives quests! I'd searched stations for these in my first game before giving up, I missed that there's a little map icon indicating that such an NPC exists on a station. This human claims to be an artist - and all he needs for inspiration is some Majaglit. Personally I never touch the stuff, but it's legal and available at the traders right here on the station, so one shopping trip later he pays me very well. This satellite deployment mission has become a difficult geometry problem of how one should efficiently cover a spherical area with smaller spherical areas. I probably shouldn't have been such a cheapskate and just bought more advanced satellites for this. I haven't yet taken a mission that involves directly attacking our foes - I'm shoring up our war effort instead - and that pays off when I'm asked to go behind enemy lines and scan a module. There's a whole damn fleet of Holy Order ships hanging around on their side of the border gate! I'd never be able to scan a module and get out alive if they were actively hostile! I take a moment to trigger Boso appearing and giving me the station like I did in the first game - the event is in the same place so it's appears to be a standard quest line. It was very handy last time just to have a place to safely store any illegal items I happen to pick up. Speaking of Illegal, part of the Godrealm war effort involves keeping the population pure and clean - one of my missions is to scan ships until I find one carrying Spaceweed so we can monitor the usage of the drug. I presume this means they want me to patrol Godrealm space and look for traders carrying the drug, but after scanning some random ships I realize it could take a long time to find a ship carrying Spaceweed. I have the brilliant idea to find a spaceweed farm and lurk there and wait to see what traders show up and scan them after they leave. I find the farm but nobody shows after a few minutes, and then I get another idea.... It's just for personal use I swear! I bought one spaceweed and put it on my ship, then exited into my spacesuit and scanned my own ship. The Godrealm saw this and said it was good enough for a mission reward. There's a lot of deployment missions in the war-related missions that I'm able to do, so it occurs to me that my first additional ship should just be something small that can conduct those deployments for me - something cheap and bare bones, and if it dies it dies and the crew go to Godrealm Heaven anyway. I stop by a Wharf and that small mining ship I didn't get to use last time is only slightly more expensive than the cheapest scout so I pick that up - it'll do deployments when I need it to and I can see how well it does mining when it's not in use. Your employees don't need great equipment when you have faith. The miner might not be ideal for deployables... it did fine for a couple missions but on this one it laid five out of eight mines outside the target area. I guess you get what you pay for. Also, it hasn't actually been mining anything at all despite having an automine command for ice and there clearly being ice present in the sector it's supposed to mine. Ahh.... Turns out I didn't put mining lasers on it... I suppose they were just flying around staring at all the minerals they couldn't mine and praying for them to be transferred into the hold. It's mining a bit now but I still have to manually tell it to go sell the minerals it collects. The only automatic command available to the captain now is a 'local automine' which mines just one sector and then tries to sell the product in that one sector, which means it'll only really work if I can find a sector with good resources and a station to sell it at. I had similar problems with the Asimov in my first game, there are automatic trading commands at low levels but they don't work very well and the 'better' multi-sector ones are unavailable until the captain gains skill ranks. This happens over time or with the use of purchasable 'Seminars', and raising crew skill takes long enough that I think that those seminars may well be worth the high price you have to pay for the bigger ones. Anyway, I got a couple missions to destroy some Xenon ships from two different factions for a half mil credits each, so I'm off to Argon space trying to safely pick off Xenons. There's a Xenon destroyer in the area which I'm trying to be appropriately wary of. Some of the war missions I've been getting against the Holy Order ask me to destroy one particular ship, but the Holy Order are massing for war like you wouldn't believe - these single ships are accompanied by about ten of their brethren and I don't think I have a reasonable chance of killing them and getting out alive, so thus far I've been abandoning those missions when I get to them. There was a quite a bit of carnage left over from the Xenon incursion, looks like hulks from multiple capital ships. (edited) new So the choice facing me now is... focus on passive income or simply use mission income to start recruiting wingmen? Since I'm a holy warrior, let us prepare for war. Once we have enough money we'll hire some wingmen and try to make a militarily-capable strike force to fight the Holy Order with. Oooh, that was interesting - after I and the Argon forces shot down enough of them, the Xenon incursion appeared to suffer a morale failure as their remaining ships all retreat back through the gate them came in. The Terran forces (pink) that were fighting them are shown here pursuing the fleeing Xenon back through their gate. I'm going to stay here and try to collect all the things that dropped. I've got 2 million, so it's time to get another ship. I realize that if I do end up floating in space again when I go to war my chances of survival increase a whole lot if I get that teleportation tech, so first thing is that I do need a freighter to supply my home station (Named Sacred Geometry since the Godrealm worships the 'three-dimensionality') The Devout looks like it could please a woman but that is definitely not allowed in my faction. This ship that looks like it got attacked by an overheated circuit board appeared and said something about being from the 'Federation' and then went on its merry way. Oh hey, all that Xenon hunting put me in good stead with Argon and they're also in conflict with the Holy Order! I don't see why I can't try to bring both factions to bear against the Heretics so I will definitely seek to develop this further. The enemy of my enemy is my friend! I've constructed a solar module on my station - it's a production module that makes energy cells for free, so hopefully traders come and pick them up, or I can use my freighter to sell them when there's enough to bother with taking them somewhere. It's making them very slowly, and station construction is pretty expensive (for me) since it requires obtaining all the resources to build the modules. On the plus side it just makes Solar Cells from nothing, and doesn't cost money to run. This game tries to simulate a lot of what's going on, but one thing it doesn't simulate is the process of transferring crew members. This is Station Manager Korahmasomethingorother, and he's piloting my ship right now because I wanted to give him a training seminar but I couldn't communicate with him because I was several sectors away. Solution: I told him to work on the ship and he immediately appeared - he's already got teleportation figured out. I remain astounded that everyone loves having a random ship come in and blast their 'criminals' to space dust whenever you want to. Thanks to universal endorsement of such vigilantism, this is one of the most fun mission types in the early game. Got weapons? Drop on by our interstellar snail farm and kill whoever we'd like you to kill for some cash! I have researched teleportation again! Ugh, my freighter was accosted by pirates and I told them to escape. They failed to do so and the pirates destroyed them. She had a full hold of expensive goods, so this is basically a million+ credits lost. Some of her crew survive in space suits. I'm thankfully able to rescue them but one by one as they get rescued I have to fire them as I have no additional place they can currently be employed. Surely the pain of losing your unpaid job is mitigated by being saved from suffocating to death in space. This unconscionable pirate attack happened in Godrealm space, by the three! Why must terrible things happen to good Paranids? There were many more crew on that ship that did not survive the attack. My fellow Paranids died because of my failure, my lack of foresight. I will not repeat this mistake. I will not rely on the callous whims of the X, Y and Z to protect my people. I will commission another freighter - but first, I will obtain another fighting ship so that it may be protected at all times. Using all my cash, the Penitent will be my new vessel when it is constructed (Part of the economy simulation is this station needs sufficient items including hull parts to actually build the ship), the Acolyte will take on escort and other duties. Now to run missions so that I may once again obtain a freighter. Some good economic news - producing energy cells at my station has resulted in some sales in what may be my first actual passive income source. At last! Free money, the dream is realized! The Argon Holy Order war coordinator welcomes me aboard whilst assuring me he's not racist. Speciesist? I suspect he thinks I'm one of the 'good' Paranids. The Penitent is built and ready! Also a very nice cockpit. I like the Paranid ships. May the Up and Down forgive me, for I have sinned. I was performing engine research by racing, a noble goal I swear. On completion I went to the race organizer for a prize, and he had this gorgeous ship parked there, captivating me with her beauty. No purple-blooded Paranid would turn their eyes away. I was merely going to compliment the owner on their taste, I swear by the Back and Forth! But by all the volumes when the sly Scaled one offered to sell her to me, I could not resist.... I have dubbed her the Indulgence Even so, I'm getting pretty good at earning money from missions - I've got enough to also purchase the Devotee and get a freighter back in my service. Welcome aboard, please don't ask what happened to my last freighter crew. My various efforts at shoring up the war effort pay off and I am inducted into the Honor Guard of Xaar - the Priests must have overlooked my transgressions in favor of my honorable (mostly logistical) service thus far, but I feel the need to prove myself in combat. I have seen that the Holy Order has entire fleets at is disposal, and I have but a few small combat ships. This must change. How do I get the job where I stand under the fancy lights all day? Ok, rant time: X4's user interface is a huge pile of dogshit, much to the detriment of the rest of the game. The list of nitpicks you could have about the UI would get very long and tedious, so I'm just going to highlight what I think are the main issues: To find Personnel Management, navigate to 'Player Information', then.... They've packed too many functions into too few top-level menus. For example, the 'Player Information' menu has some options you would expect, such as your personal inventory and in-game messages, but it ALSO has important empire information, like your personnel lists and empire-wide transaction reports. Managing your faction absolutely warrants a separate dedicated menu, I would think. The game is still being fully rendered in the background while in these menus (you can see my cockpit view in the screenshot above), and you will be spending a lot of time in these menus (especially the map). It's not like the faded-out view of the cockpit is useful so its bizarre to me that they didn't try to save some framerates on these menus by just turning that off while you're in them. They have tried to do way too much in the map. If player + empire management is a bit much for one tab, they have tried to cram damn near everything else you can do into the map. I long for a tab just dedicated to the business of trading - a very important task in an economic simulator! - that would help me with the essentials of what you want to do in trade, which at its core is just 'buy low, sell high'. To wit, a single page that just lists every trade good, its known highest selling price, and its known lowest purchasing price, and a link to the station locations of each would go a very long way towards making trade easier to manage without changing anything about how the game mechanics work. But no, instead you get this: Windowception You get a series of free-floating windows that only show five (randomly selected? I don't even know the default criteria for which goods are displayed) bought and sold goods for an area contextualized to whatever map area you have happened to zoom in on. The windows can bump into and overlap each other, and to see other trade goods you might be interested in you either need to zoom way down to the level of individual stations or you can use the trade filters and manually type in the trade good you want these floating windows to highlight.  So just to browse through the trade goods I'd either need to zoom in and randomly pan around or zoom way out, or I could repeatedly filter via this checkbox list. Filtering by manually checking or unchecking each of the options here Heck, just now while getting these screenshots I realized that I haven't been seeing a lot of trade offers at all because I had a minimum volume set on these filters - that's been present for this entire game, probably as a left over setting from my last game . I've been repeatedly searching for Smart Chips and not finding any despite knowing of various stations that produce them, and this leftover filter is responsible. The poor UI is magnified by the fact that you need to use it a lot - in this early game I mostly can't 'set it and forget it' with my ships to any good effect, so I'm manually managing trades with my freighter, and I've got my miner mining ore in a really ore-poor system but it's the only one I found which has an ore processor he can actually sell the ore to, and local automine only works within a single sector. How might you manage and organize the fleets of your mighty empire? Is that a top level item? Ha ha, you fool. You can manage fleets via Map -> Property Owned (Second button down on the left side) -> Fleets (Third horizontal button). Can you create a new fleet via this fleet management menu? Absolutely not, you uncultured boob. That is, of course, performed by first selecting a ship that will NOT be the leader of the fleet and then right-clicking on the ship that WILL be the leader of the fleet and choosing 'Create Fleet' - ha, got you, there's no option on the menu that says 'Fleet' anywhere. You choose 'Defend Commander' or some other 'Role' AND THEN you can select Alpha, Beta, all kinds of Greek letters! That's how you make a fleet, you imbecile. All of this is to say that it's insane that this franchise got to its fourth iteration with the UI in this state, and that more than anything X5 needs to vastly improve on it, because its primarily responsible for the steep learning curve and has undoubtedly discouraged many prospective players. I couldn't honestly recommend the game to someone else without plenty of forewarning about this. Ok, rant over. Back to the game. I've decided it's time to start taking the fight to the Holy Order, but I can't do it alone, and I'm poor. Thus, I am recruiting a small squadron. Since we worship the dimensions there will be six to represent all of the Holy Directions - the Up, the Down, the Left, the Right, the Back, and the Forth. Each ship is a bare-bones fighter with cheap weapons. Alone, it would be suicidal to battle in this - but together with me this squadron will be able to bring over 20 of those weapons into a battle, and even at lower damage individually that's respectable firepower. If this works, the ones who survive and become better pilots will also see their ships upgraded as we can afford to. Earn your upgrades, my acolytes! The new freighter, Devotee , was attacked by a pirate.. but things went very differently than last time. The freighter's escort, Acolyte , did its job and attacked the pirate. I happened to be nearby so very shortly after that we arrived as reinforcements. The pirate realized he stood no chance, and he abandoned his damaged ship and launched an escape pod. This pirate bit off more than they could chew. The damaged fighter was left adrift in space, and I was able to tell one of my ships to claim it. It launched a boarding pod with a spare crew member. They probably stole this ship in the first place. Mine now! And now I have added a captured ship to my growing fleet. It's more of a scout than anything else but it's very cool that I can capture ships this way. Not one I would have purchased but you can't beat free. Now that I know that ships can sometimes be abandoned like this, I keep my eye out and quickly spot another abandoned ship back near where I've been fighting the Xenon - not sure when that happened but nobody has claimed it yet. I salvage and restore this crippled Xenon Heavy Fighter. I might fly it myself given that it has four weapon slots, but some of its tech (like its shields) aren't compatible with our tech so I'm not sure how much better I can make this. I would love to be able to fully arm this thing. Still a very cool addition to my ships. There's some nice touches to make the Xenon ship feel different, I actually can't find a way into it until I figure out there's a drop-down elevator to get in rather than the ladder every other ship I've seen uses. Getting into and out of the Captain's Chair produces an insane sound straight out of 80's sci-fi. Sadly only one of the four weapon slots are filled and I can't mount non-Xenon weapons on her, so I think she sits in space dock or is used for minor tasks unless and until I can access Xenon tech somehow. I considered selling her but strangely nobody is interested in paying much for captured Xenon tech. My streak of luck with enemy pilots abandoning ships continues when I take a mission to get a guy's wedding ring back and my target both gives up the ring and bails from his ship! This Minotaur Raider is a big corvette! Fully repairing and equipping her is brutal on the budget however and I really want to assemble my fighter squadron, so I sell her. I like the Paranid ship aesthetic since they have a better grasp of Dimensional Divinity. There's an order to sell a ship but it doesn't tell you how much money you'll get.  Well, here goes. Oh wait, it does tell you in a dialog box after selecting the option. 1.1 million for her, that'll go a long way. That's enough to finally get this squadron off the ground! Behold, the Orthogonals! Myself as Center, with six faithful Paranid each representing one of the cardinals directions. Together, it is time to take the fight to the Holy Order, and begin our contribution to the righteous efforts of the Godrealm in conquering the heretics. May the true Pontifex be ascendant! I decide to take the Orthogonals through their paces via having them attack some laser towers, so I start assembling the ships into position just off the station. Suddenly as I'm messing around with ship formations I get a missile warning? What? Brief glimpses of a bounty hunter, missiles, guns. One of the other Orthogonals is shot down, and so am I - the others scatter in confusion at the surprise attack. I realize I can teleport out of the situation seconds too late. The unknown attackers blast my suit before I can reach safety. I'll never know who they were, the fate of the pilots I just recruited, or the outcome of the Holy War - my story is over. Guess I pissed off the wrong entity.

Next up - a game one of my friends has played and replayed for a truly ridiculous amount of hours, so I've decided to see what all the fuss is about: X4 Foundations . X4 describes itself as 'A living, breathing space sandbox... thousands of ships and stations trade, mine, and produce, all realistically simulated.' Let's jump in and see what it's like to be a small fish in a big pond. The tutorial ship looks like a fine vessel. There's a walk-around mode and a fly-the-ship mode, and happily you can seamlessly switch between keyboard and controller for this. I suspect that 'travel technology looks very pretty' is a universal trope of space media by now. Basic tutorial done, I see there are a lot of starting options and I appreciate that they list how much 'help' and guidance you get with each. Based on the descriptions I think 'Stranded' sounds great! We're going with the 'Stranded' start: 'You have always been a trouble maker, so it is not unusual for you to find yourself in the occasional sticky situation in the pursuit of easy credits. This time, however, it seems like your schemes have maneuvered you into a total dead end, and you will have a hard time getting out without help.' Our story opens in a jail cell - I have obviously made someone angry. Isn't this is more of an 'arrested' or 'captured' situation than 'Stranded'? My cellmate however lets me know that the previous occupant was already planning to escape, and had made some preparations to do so before she was 'disappeared'. Someone named 'Axiom' is helping me out. At least I have a room with a view. Normally in a prison you wouldn't want to include a window that appears big enough for a prisoner to crawl out of, but I suppose that's no longer an appealing escape option in space. Escaping consisted of lightly pushing aside a grate and flipping a switch just behind it which opened the cell doors. Unless the prep-work involved someone installing a whole electrical panel for the prisoner to access needing only a screwdriver, this is a poorly designed jail. I meet Axiom, my cell neighbor, and he offers to help me if I can get him out too. Some lucky alien species get extra arms, Axiom got extra knees. In the halls nearby there are no guards or other security measures besides the retractable bars of my cell - the doors are already unlocked. This is not a maximum-security facility. The game says I should get into a spacesuit but I don't see one to get into. I mess around with the airlock until I can go outside anyway and it turns out that I'm already wearing one, thankfully (Which means they really shouldn't have put me in a cell with a window!). I do a little spacewalk and some light repair work on a panel causes Axiom to be released from his cell. There are minimum security prisons, and this ranks somewhere below that. Whoever runs this place has clearly contracted out to the lowest bidder. Searching nearby cell blocks I find a laser weapon just sitting out on this desk, unattended, right outside the prisoner cells. There's another prisoner here but Axiom urges me to leave them, we can come back later and don't want to risk being caught. I'm very unclear on who might catch us, there's been no guards of any kind. With the hand laser I can cut my way out of the structure and drift into open space where Axiom's friends have a ship waiting. Someone just happened to innocently park their vessel right next to a prison. I get on board, Axiom joins me and hops in the pilot seat, and we've escaped without incident. The real hero is the subcontractor mismanaging the prison. People in space are trying to murder each other nearby when Axiom warns that we are 'about to enter' lawless space. What good is 'lawful' space if people are already killing each other there? We arrive on what I assume is a capital ship and disembark. Axiom says I should go talk to Maestro, the captain, and then offhandedly mentions that I can have the getaway ship as a gift. I'd probably have been loyal just being given a lowly position on the crew. The view from the bridge is pretty cool, we're in an asteroid field. Some distant people on comms sound like they're probably fighting, I'm pretty sure I heard someone tell someone else to 'Eat Space'. I meet Maestro, who refers to himself in the third person as 'Split'. He claims they're a band that want to achieve independence and need folks who don't mind breaking laws - guess I fit the profile. He wants me to smuggle spaceweed. This might sound like a risk, but let's keep in mind that last time I was caught and jailed for something illegal I easily escaped and someone gave me a spaceship. Sounds like a win-win situation. He's leading a pirate group called the Empyrian Curs. He refers to both himself and possibly his entire race or civilization by 'Split', bringing to mind the Marklars of South Park. This is my gun with a small ship attached to it, the 'Misfit'. I need to figure out the map and mission objectives, which the tutorial didn't cover. I need to bring this spaceweed to a HAT defense platform but it's unclear where that is. My name appears to be 'Emry Sloan'. I manage to figure out that the fuzz is already closing in on me so I get the hell back out of the system though a jumpgate, but there's no indication on the map where this defense platform is so I'm going to head for the highway in Silent Witness and cruise around looking for it. There's a lot going on in the map interface and I'm trying to figure it out. Ah, my radar has a bright yellow line showing where to go - I didn't see it at first, either because my ship hadn't found the platform or when I entered the system the delivery location might have been very close. Help me glowing yellow line, you're my only hope. After successfully docking by accidentally afterburnering my ship into the defense platform while trying to target it, Maestro lets me know that he's set the deal up real nice for me. By attempting to dock I learned that X4 is very forgiving when it comes to collisions. Mission complete, I just earned 50K credits - which is 50K more credits than I had. I explore the station a bit before leaving - there's nobody I've found to talk to but there are terminals with some intriguing hacking options for the sort of folk I is. Nobody in this Universe takes security seriously, anyone can just walk up to terminals that control essential station functions. Maestro says the Curs don't do names and decides that I should be called 'Chipmunk'. Delightfully I find that I can actually change my name in my profile, so that's going to stick. Leaving the station, there's a space battle nearby - Xenon ships are coming through a gate piecemeal and getting absolutely crushed by about 10 defending fighters. I decide to fly over there and help attack the Xenons, they're already hostile anyway. The defending vessels thank me for the assistance and some of the Xenon ships drop stuff I can scoop up - I find some spacefly eggs and the game lets me know I can make caviar with them. Some of the stuff I picked up is illegal so I hightail it away from the patrol ships. I'm not sure if the enforcement vessels I just helped would be willing to overlook my illegal salvage but I'm not sticking around to find out! I return to the Arcadian Endeavour (The Empyrean Cur's capital ship) and their ace pilot (Ace) is waiting for me. Ace wants to find out if I'm any good at straight-up piracy. We tail a freighter after it picks up a load from a station and when it's alone we pounce. After shooting it for a bit it drops its cargo and I load up my ship with stolen microchips. I find a place that looks like it will buy said microchips and proceed to offload the goods. The autopilot is very nice in this game, you can set it and forget it. I check out a ship dealer to see what else is out there - the cheapest is way out of my price range but this one only appears to sell large ships, nothing like the one-man fighter I'm flying. Welcome to McChonk's Custom Freighters, we only sell the chonkiest! Looks like these are built-to-order, they have a limited selection of equipment options they can pre-install for you. Feels very much like a dealership, actually. Maestro now wants me to do go make some black market connections with him. Since this is a space sandbox where you can choose your own way to play, I was considering being a pirate of some sort before I even chose this start, which is pretty harmonious with how it's playing out. The Empyrian Curs are my kind of Aliens. The universe doesn't feel very populated, there's just stations to visit and there aren't a lot of people / aliens on them. At this bar there's no patrons or bartender, just my mission contact. Also for some reason I can't figure out, sometimes when I'm walking around a station I get warped back into my ship, which is pretty inconvenient when I'm trying to go somewhere on it. Back with the Curs, we're moving up to the big time! I've been running errands and now you want me to take a station for 'all it is worth'? I'm so ready! Unfortunately, I'm not ready - this mission requires some AGI thingamabobs that I don't have and don't know where to get, so I fly off to explore the galaxy a bit. I figure out that I can ask random people where things are and find an equipment dealer, giving me my first opportunity to spend the cash I've earned so far on some upgrades. The shop system could do with an overhaul - each piece of equipment has a link to take you to the in-game encyclopedia if you want to read about it rather than have the equipment info at hand, and you don't get a running total of the purchase you're making until you add the whole thing to your 'shopping list'. Could we maybe just have all the things I just clicked on go on the shopping list when I clicked them? Now I'm flying around, accepting random missions for cash until I happen to score some AGI things. I took a mission to deploy a minefield in the space around a station - it paid a bunch but I wasn't aware I'd need to buy the mines myself - my fault for not reading the contract requirements, so I ponied up. I assume they probably wanted the mines 'around' the station but it turns out that that volume of space includes the station's flight deck, where I just left the mines in a vertical stack - their fault for not writing it into the contract requirements. Mission Accomplished. I flew through a warpgate and on the other end ran into a guy being attacked by Vigor pirates and asking for help. I tried to help out but my weapons aren't nearly beefy enough and I ended up fighting three enemy fighters vs. just me - the guy asking for help was hardly able to damage the enemy and the pirates all switched their targets from them to me. Try as I might I couldn't break one off from the group or get a nearby station mad at them so it was all I could to just to stay alive - I fought them for ten, fifteen minutes before they all just disappeared and it said I failed the mission. There's a lot that's not intuitive about this game and maybe I just need to look stuff up a lot more. For instance, I took a mission to find some items left over from an attacked freighter. I went to a volume of space but was unsure about what to do once I was in it - do I turn on scan mode to look for debris or just fly around? The latter eventually worked but it was a significant volume of space so I was at it awhile. Then I find this lockbox, which needs to be unlocked (why can't I just grab the box and fly off with it?) There's a right-click menu for interacting with targets which lets you do things like scan ships, it would be nice to put up something like 'Unlock (requires key)' on this menu. I have no idea if I need an item or whether to shoot it open. There's nothing in the mission briefing that says how to open it. My attempt to shoot it open destroyed it and failed the mission. As it happens, I'm damaged from the battle earlier and I need to repair my ship. Not sure how to do that either but I'll try docking at the places that sell me stuff. I found a casino! I'm gonna strike it rich! The place is a little smaller than I anticipated given that the entire station seems to be dedicated to the idea. At least there's almost a half-dozen people here, including me. There is an actual bar as well, but no bartender. Unfortunately there appears to be no way to actually play any of the casino games, which is especially disappointing considering the game put me into a little cutscene when I got near the station advertising said games. If you upgrade a ship you need to wait for the station to actually perform the ship upgrade, which is a nice touch of realism but I would like it more if the stations had more things available to actually do on them while you wait. Just sitting in my ship on the bay, watching the timer tick away. This three-paragraph encyclopedia entry on the Vigor Syndicate has more lore in it than anything else I've found in-game so far. I would love to know why  water, food, and ice are illegal in Vigor - are they enforcing a monopoly and it's only illegal for non-Vigor Syndicate to have? Are they on a religious fasting holiday? I'm not making a lot of money from the few missions I can find and am actually capable of doing so I load up my cargo full of food rations that sell here at this food ration factory for 4% off market value, we'll see if I can get anywhere trading. The trading screen is exclusively in your cockpit, there's no trading post on the station itself. I find the best price I can for them and end up selling at a loss even though I bought at 4% off market price and I'm selling here at 1% off from market price - not sure how that works. If I do more trading I'll have to get better info on the buying / selling prices of the wares. I don't want my hold to be full of goods and unusable for anything else so I sell and eat the loss. At least there's no fuel / maintenance costs for the ship, so even though I'm hardly making any money I won't go broke. I leave the station and spot this guy - looks like he's a criminal! Anyone else seeing this? Just me? Maybe if I attack I'll get a reward. How dare this guy be a criminal in space! I did get a reward! I got some equipment and 500 bucks. I'll take it. Ok, now we're talking. I scored a couple missions for the Argon faction and now that they like me I'm seeing more offers from them. You have to get your foot in the door, so to speak. The Argon would be down to pay me to help fight the Xenon, which I'd previously been doing for free. The Argonians seem nice enough, and if I'm going to do piratey-things it probably wouldn't hurt to get on their good side. I'll meet with the representative, take more missions, and see how things go. I see they're at war with the Xenon who appear to just be hostile robots. I meet with the Argon faction representative and she deems me to be a 'Friend of the Argon Federation'. She says there are many benefits that go with this without listing what they are, but it does flash that I can purchase a police license. Cerise Giorno used to be one hell of a pilot before they put her behind a desk. This place also sells ships so I'll see what sort of vessels Argon sells - probably better than my scrap-heap Kyd fighter. The ship dealer's "Showcase" are these blobby, indistinct holograms of ships - maybe invest in some plastic models instead? I don't like the look of any of the Argon ship designs, but on my way out someone lands this baby next to me, an ECS Vanguard. Where can I get me one of these? There's a lot more life outside the stations than in them. The stations have all these small craft flying around in their vicinity. I took an Argon mission to 'restore order' and it wants me to scan these small craft and immediately just shoot any criminals I find (In fact, I have to shoot 4 criminals - always good to give a murderous enforcer a quota) Argon Federation are not big on the 'Due Process' thing. This criminal tour bus stands no chance! Not sure what happened but after blowing up an entire tour bus (that was clearly marked criminal) the station security got mad and started shooting at me. Maybe I accidentally hit the station or was supposed to ask the tour bus to surrender first? I flew around for a bit and shot down one last criminal for the mission before running away. Argon Federation at large don't seem mad, thankfully. I realize that since the Xenon are intelligent robots, it's likely that destroying their ships might yield the AGI units I'm searching for to continue the Empyrian Cur missions. Argon has a 'Guild mission' to join the fight against them and I feel like I can both improve my standing with Argon and find the AGI things at the same time. I meet with Argon's Xenon war coordinator (She must be very busy if her duties include recruitment of individual pilots) and I finally get to hear some in-game lore about them - ancient machines invented by the original Terrans to help them expand throughou the galaxy but as AI is wont to do, they turned on us. The Xenons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. Ummm... they apparently painted my ship in Argon military blue while I was agreeing to fight them. I didn't even think this was my ship at first when I came back. Also, props to the ground crew on their efficiency. Interesting, these Xenon-hunting missions reward you with parts in addition to money. Oh it's all fun and games on the Argon side of the warpgate, where there's half a dozen friendly ships at any given time attacking the few Xenon ships brave enough to come through and you can just fly in and steal their kills. Unfortunately, Argon wants intel so they send me to the other side... Xenon city. This mission which asked me to infiltrate Xenon space and operate behind enemy lines had an 'easy' rating. As soon as I come through the gate I slam on the afterburner and run like hell. I don't get anywhere near where I'm supposed to deploy a satellite before interceptors catch up with me.  I turn around and, badly damaged, manage to escape. "Easy" mission my ass. I abandoned it since that isn't happening anytime soon and headed back to Argon space - I'm going stick to normal missions for now. On the plus side it looks like participating in the war has opened up military equipment, so I try to upgrade my ship but it looks like they don't have parts in stock for the weapons I want - it feels like this game has a fully functioning economy and I'd have to wait for a freighter to actually deliver the weapon parts to build the weapons. Ok, I ended up looking out how to get into lockboxes. Turns out you have to directly shoot and hit what are sometimes extremely small locks on the boxes to open them without destroying the boxes themselves - there's no in-game indication that this is how they work like target-highlighting the locks or mentioning it in the lockbox mission briefings, nor is there an encyclopedia entry on lockboxes. In the process of looking this up I also found out that you can go into 'Long range scan' mode and then hit the 'L' key to launch a scan pulse, none of which came up in the initial tutorials and there's no in-game indication that you're supposed to actively do something while in long range scan mode (also why have an entire mode for it, why not just be long range scanning while in that mode, or just let the user hit 'L' whenever?) Anyway, based on this I've decided that the game simply isn't intuitive enough for me to figure out a bunch of this on my own, so I'm going to do all the rest of the tutorials first and be more willing to look stuff up online when needed. All right, all tutorials done except for station construction and management, and it let me know a bunch of stuff I wish I'd known, lockboxes and long range scanning included. I wish the game had encouraged me to just do at least all the 'Intermediate' tutorials before starting, but we're here now.  The most important thing I learned is that I can set things up so that I can hire ship crew and commission my own ships, so I save up for a couple missions worth of credits and use it to commission a medium-sized freighter. Argon space has been relatively safe to be in so I suspect it can survive with just a couple defensive turrets and a basic shield. We'll set her to start trading on her own and see how it goes. My first freighter can haul a giant hotdog anywhere in the galaxy. I start scanning stations for secret messages now that I know about that. I get one that says I should contact 'The greatest scientific mind in the galaxy'. I assume it's an ambush, but hey, what the hell. The coordinates take me into deep space and I arrive to find this: My god, it's full of stars. An entire space-station comes in through the rift and self-proclaimed 'Greatest Mind' Bozo Ta invites me to come aboard. Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here's my station, come aboard maybe. The station looks very cool from the outside. Sadly the inside looks like all the other stations. The Greatest Mind in the galaxy apparently just decides that he'd rather be sciencing, so he transfers control of the entire station to the first rando that visits him - which would be me. I haven't experienced an unearned promotion this big since they made me Archmage in Skyrim after like three missions for Magic University. Guess I shouldn't have skipped the station management tutorial after all. A true cause for celebration - my new station has a safe deposit box - I've been carrying around random illegal stuff all this time and sometimes it makes station security mad when they happen to scan me. I was minutes away from stuffing all the illegal things into a lockbox and leaving them in space. Brainiac has also given me a research tech tree, nice. I think maybe I needed these techs in order to hack station terminals. Ugh. The Asimov (My freighter) has been puttering around doing fine under general 'Fill Shortages' orders for all materials. Unfortunately I got a mission to deliver 10 antimatter to a ship that just appeared in the system with my new station, and the Asimov helpfully decided to go buy some antimatter to fill that shortage. Problem: NOBODY ELSE WANTS ANY ANTIMATTER AND THE ASIMOV CAPTAIN FILLED HIS ENTIRE HOLD WITH THE STUFF. With this much antimatter you could blow up a planet. Alas, terrorism isn't profitable. It would be nice if sci-fi games treated antimatter as something super-dangerous, then I could make a bomb out of it or something. Since it' s just another commodity I'm going to have to dump it into a container in space and hope there's a use for it later so I can let the Asimov get back to business. All right, antimatter dumped in space near my station. Once the station has some storage I'll actually put it there but I'm having trouble getting said storage built - I just delivered the resources for it and I hired a construction ship to do the work but it's not happening, will have to figure out why later. In the meanwhile, I found an illicit signal from a guy asking for some unstable crystals, which require you to do a little mining. While the money was just OK, the long-term reward may prove invaluable: I've made a black market contact! He (she?) sells some of the AGI parts that I've been unsuccessfully trying to obtain by shooting down Xenon ships, which has thus far yielded less than a third of this guy's entire supply. In addition, he buys drugs, so if I can find a cheap source I can start getting into the drug smuggling business. Also, I've hired someone to fly my own ship for me. You don't appear to actually pay salaries to people you hire, they're apparently happy with an up-front fee, and for an inexperienced crew member that fee is very affordable. This is super convenient because if I just want to go somewhere or do some simple trading it's actually easier to use the map commands to order this person to handle it rather than do it myself, and while they're piloting the ship I can be ordering the Asimov around on the map. I'm getting the sense that much of the game is more about mainly using the map to control ships you own rather than personally flying your own ship around to do stuff. My pilot is completely happy to work 24/7 in exchange for a signing bonus and zero salary. The game feels a bit like Kenshi in that I don't really have a clear overall objective at the moment, so I should just decide what I want to do or accomplish - and what I want to do now I think is pick out my own personal vessel for the future - something that looks good and is fast so that when I want to get somewhere - or get away from something - I have the speed to do it. All ships seem to be able to use universal sets of fairly generic components so looks actually play a prominent role in this selection, I'm going to visit the various ship dealers I've found and see what's out there. If it's a military ship I want, we'll see about getting in that faction's good graces. Before I can find my first ship dealer however I stumble across an anomaly in space. I fly into it (because that's absolutely the first thing you should try when encountering an unknown space anomaly) and I get warped far, far away into a sector I've never been to before. I lay a nav beacon assuming it's a two-way portal and fly back into it to go back to where I came from, but nope - I go somewhere else unknown. Great, now we're lost in space. This is the known universe so far. It all consists of whatever I've personally explored at this point - you can't buy maps from the factions, and it's pretty odd that Argon wants me to help their military but won't give me a map of their own territory! Nobody sells a map of known space? Can I go into the cartography business? I'm going to keep flying through these anomalies and drop a nav beacon at each one so I can map the anomaly network. One takes me near civilized space so I take the opportunity to stock up on nav beacons. I found a derelict station - I would love to be able to land and explore it but I can't find anywhere to do that. I'm really hoping it's more than just eye candy. I found a similar abandoned structure elsewhere called 'The Aqueduct' but I couldn't get into that one either. There's a little 'Shady guy' icon for the black markets that I've got access to but sadly the map doesn't allow you to filter by them, so it requires some effort searching the map to re-locate them. Solution: Drop an inconspicuously named navigation buoy that I can find easily nearby. 'ILLEGAL BLACK MARKET HERE' During ship-shopping I find this beauty - she's fast as hell. I'm hesitant to make it my personal ship only because a single weapon means it won't be able to fight well, and I'm still occasionally doing combat missions, but I outfit it for speed and it will make an excellent scout. I will definitely have to try it personally at some point. Speed is life! Ok, I think the ship I want is a Teladi military fighter - it's got three weapon slots but I'll have to make Teladi happy with me to be allowed to buy it, and I blew my cash on that scout, so before that happens I'm going to go back to the Empyrian Curs missions. Hi Axiom, been awhile - how have I been? Well, I started a small trading business and am owner of an entire space station, how about you guys? Time to learn about station hacking. Unfortunately it's a Teladi station they want me to hack, so I hope I don't get caught and hurt my reputation with them. Hacking different terminals in a station has different effects but this one will cause the station to eject some of it's goods, and the Arcadian Endeavour is standing ready to grab the stuff once I cause it to be dumped into space. Once you have the proper item for hacking, its as easy as pushing a button. The Arcadian Endeavour sends drones to grab the loot and escapes under fire. Axiom asks me to defend the ship as they run but that wasn't part of the plan and I don't want to make enemies of the Teladians so I refrain - I think the Endeavour can handle a couple fighters and that proves correct. The Curs are still very happy with me and want me to sign up for more missions, but since those could also be against the Teladians I'm going to wait on them until I have the ship I'm after first. Also, for the first time I'm accosted by pirates in the sector containing my station when I fly there to drop off some supplies. Once I get some capital I'm going to have to see about establishing order in my home system. En route, I was checking the map when something bad happened with the ship. I popped out of the map to find myself repeatedly colliding with a freighter under autopilot control. The autopilot noted that it had 'epically failed'. I think I figured out why collision damage in this game is low. I've found a Split faction called the Free Families that has a ship that looks better than the one I was aiming for. It's fragile as hell so I hope that means it's also fast. I'll try for that one instead of the Teladi. Success! The Free Families welcome me to the party. And here's the new (under-equipped because I'm broke) ship - it has minimal shielding and armor so if it gets me killed we'll try to find something more robust, but as suspected it is quite fast. I love how it looks, it even looks fast! I initially thought that equipment was generic because they're all named more or less the same - you go to one station and there's 'Combat Engine Mk 1, Mk 2, Mk 3', etc for all sorts of equipment - but statistically they are different, and I have learned this because Split shield generators, which only go up to Mk 2 and don't even have a Mk 3 variant, are complete and total ass. If I ride this low-hull ship around with the best Split shield I can buy I am confident that I will suffer my first death at some point, so I head back to Argon space to get a real defensive shield installed to mitigate the low hull. I set my old ship, the Misfit, to follow my new ship, the Hermes, around - hopefully this means it will assist in combat. I had to use the 'Follow' order instead of a 'Defend' order because for reasons unknown to me, the game wouldn't let me select my new ship as a valid 'Defend' target. One immediately apparent problem with having my old ship play wingman is that it can't keep up at all - I leave it in the dust. I'll still do it for now because if I end up in a fight or stay around a local sector it'll still help, but I think getting ships that can keep up with me will be worthwhile. I get the shield and some of the lowest-quality weapons (I forgot to arm the ship when I bought it) and I'm really broke, time to earn some cash via missions. The Asimov's trading is helping but I'm having to manage it manually for best results and it's definitely not able to keep up with my financial needs.  And then I happened across a Xenon 'Defense platform construction site'. I figured, hey, why not attack it and kill it while it's still a construction site? Sadly, it was not without some protection. The extra shielding did not hold up, and it has ended in disaster. In hindsight I should have listened to my own concerns about fragility. This being the first time I've lost a ship, I discovered that you don't just die - you get thrown into space in your spacesuit. By the time I figured out that I could instruct my fellow ships to help me, the Misfit (My original ship) had arrived and was also destroyed. Fortunately, you can call out to random nearby ships and ask them to help! The captain of this drone carrier was willing to come to my rescue under fire! After picking me up however, the captain apparently felt like taking out some vengeance on the nearby Xenon destroyer. I don't want to tell you how to run y our ship ma'am but maybe we should run like hell? It is I, floating once again in space. I had just figured out that you can ask the captain to take you somewhere and my rescuer's ship was destroyed about one second later. Total casualties for my hubris so far are two of my ships and one good Samaritan. That scout ship I bought awhile ago? My last hope - she runs across several sectors to rescue me, and after some very touch-and-go attempts to get on board under fire, I get away. My salvation. It's been a bad day for my bank account and employees. I use the last of my cash to get a new ship. This Nova Vanguard was all I could afford. Between me doing missions and the Asimov finally finding some lucrative trading opportunities, I rebuild my cash reserve and complete my first research project - teleportation. Boso Ta said something about coming back to the station to show me how it worked but I did that and he didn't respond, I eventually found it in a right-click menu. There's a lot of things in the right-click menu and it snuck in there. I want to increase my income generation so I'm going to try out a mining ship, I have enough to outfit one now. Hopefully it'll work better on autopilot than the trader has been, there's no way I want to manually manage a large trading fleet. Teleportation is pretty nuts, you can teleport to any ship / station that you own in the same sector or even in nearby sectors. This would have made my recent ship destruction a lot easier to survive (albeit much less exciting). Oooh, I got an insanely lucrative mission (700K!) from Argon to open a lockbox. My current ship has lasers mounted way on the sides, so they don't work well for shooting the locks off. I decide to go in my spacesuit and use my hand laser.... BUT SOMEONE PUT MINES IN IT In space nobody can hear the mines explode you. And spacesuits do not stand up to mines. Chipmunk died doing what he loved - trying to steal something. Rather than reload a save I'm going to start anew. and try out one of the alternate starter scenarios. I learned a lot from this attempt and I'm sure I can do better.

Full Code Medical Simulation is arguably not a game, it's a browser-based thing that purports to be a real medical simulation tool for real medical professionals. Medical Professionals... like me! EMS Report: Send in from urgent care via private vehicle. Triage Nurse: 29-year-old male send to ED from urgent care with abdominal pain since yesterday. +nausea, no fever. This patient's life is in my hands, unfortunately for them. The reason I'm playing this is that they've put in an AI chatbot so you can have a conversation with the patient, like so: The AI patient remains unconcerned even when informed that I'm not a real doctor. Patient: Thanks for seeing me today: Me: What the fuck is wrong with you? Patent: I'm not sure what's going on, but my stomach really hurts and I feel nauseous. Do you have any questions for me? Me: Do you think I'm a real doctor? They just let me in here. Patient: I don't know, but I'm just here because my stomach is hurting. Can you help me with that? (Note to medical professionals - this means you can tell your patients that you're not a real doctor and they will respond with nonchalance). Me: What did you eat? Patient: I haven't really felt hungry, so I didn't eat much. Just some regular stuff before the pain started. Do you think that could be causing my symptoms? Me: Regular stuff like what? What's the last thing you ate? Patient: Um, I think it was just a sandwich or something, I'm not really sure. Do you have any idea what might be causing my stomach pain? Me: WHAT WAS IN THE SANDWICH Patient: I think it was just turkey and cheese. Sorry, I'm not really sure about all the details. Can you help me with my stomach pain? Me: YOU ARE ALLERGIC TO TURKEY Patient: No, I don't have any allergies. I'm just feeling really uncomfortable right now. Can you tell me what might be wrong? The interface is indeed for medical professionals, I guess this is why lesser people need to go to medical school. How do doctors do any of this? Me: Has your bowel been making sounds? Patient: Yeah, I think so. My stomach feels weird and noisy sometimes. What do you think that means? Ah-HA! His LLQ is fucked up! Me: I think your LLQ is fucked up. Patient: I'm not sure what that means (You and me both, buddy!) , but my stomach really hurts. Can you help me figure out what is going on? Where's the goddamn X-Ray machine? Time to order diagnostic tests to get to the bottom of this! Nurse, let's do a Doppler, Urinalysis, Urine Tox Screen, and X-ray his chest and pelvis, feels like the stomach is somewhere in between those. Cool, you get actual X-ray images to look at! I can see inside him but where's his stomach? I don't see a stomach on either of these. Things are looking grim for the patient. I try to talk him through the diagnosis. Me: I don't think you have a stomach. "Can you help me, please help!" I'm already tired of all the whining and it's only my first patient. Patient: I definitely feel pain in my stomach area. Can you help with that? Me: I want you to throw up to prove you have a stomach. Patient: I really don't want to throw up, but I do feel nauseous. Can you help me with my symptoms? Me (Typing with a surgeon's precision) : Please true. Patient: I'm not sure what you mean. My stomach hurts and I'm feeling nauseous. Can you help me? Me: Please try to throw up. Patient: I really don't want to do that. I'm just hoping you can help me with this stomach pain instead. Me: Think of gross stuff. Patient: Um, I guess that might make me feel worse. I'm really just hoping for some help with this pain in my stomach. Can you assist with that? Me: Go 'BLEUGH'. Patient: I don't think I can do that. I'm just feeling really uncomfortable and hoping for some help with my symptoms. --- Oh wait, his pain is on the right side. I might actually know what this is. Time to head to the OR my friend! Patient is hereby ordered to have his appendix removed. Hopefully the surgeon has a better idea than I do of where that is. The patient returns from surgery and I get a score telling me how well I did. Given my actual level of medical knowledge combined with the level of effort I put into this, this is a frankly incredible score. I'm frankly not sure why it's anywhere north of 10% unless 'not killing the patient' gives you a whole lot of points, let's see if I can figure out the math here. What is Unnecessary vs. Neutral doing here? What do you mean consulting with the Gastro-guy was unnecessary, this was stomach pain! OH! My score was good because I fucking actually got it right - HE ACTUALLY HAD APPENDICITIS AND DR. PLAY ALL THE THINGS, M.D. OVER HERE KNEW HOW TO HANDLE IT Being a doctor is easier than getting to the top row in Breakout , I know that much.

We're going back to some old games now: I picked up the Atari 50th anniversary collection. This will presumably be a LOT of Atari games so I'm going to play through a couple at a time and then probably come back to it every so often. This is cool, looks like they've grouped the games into historical categories? The menu sections put you into a historical timeline where there's historical videos, photos and quotes. This might qualify as a documentary in addition to being a games collection. Man just look at this thing! I didn't know Pong wasn't actually the first arcade game, it was 'Computer Space'. Pong was #2, but stole the spotlight because it was much more successful and launched the industry. Also the documentary narrator for the bit in the above screenshot mentions that the 'chips are combined to form a PC - a Printed Circuit board'. Did she make a mistake or was that actually the original meaning of the acronym? Naturally today we know PC as 'Personal Computer'. It's pretty cool that we live in a time where many of the creators of the earliest video games are still alive today. I wonder if they filmed this interview for this anthology. One inexplicable choice they made (to me) was to not also put the actual games on this cool timeline - you need to go to the game library and find them here. It wouldn't have been hard! Later Edit: They do let you, I couldn't figure out the UI here because I was dumb. Yeah I won't stop at one entry per game. Pong is Pong, there's not much to say about it. I think that putting this original arcade-y border was a good choice for keeping the original aspect ratio (It might look hilarious on a widescreen monitor). I will note that they did a nice job adapting it since I don't happen to have a 'wheel' controller lying around, I can either move both paddles up and down using either joystick on a single controller, or when turning on a second controller it seamlessly switched to a 2-player mode. Actually I should mention a solid options screen which lets you turn off the TV scanlines and make it widescreen if you want. There are 'Dip Switch settings', what are those? Huh, Dip Switches were hardware switches inside the arcade machines that operators could tweak to change things like (for Pong) how many points it took to win a game - essentially an options menu inaccessible to arcade customers. 'Realistic sounds of ball bouncing, striking paddle' is some real marketing bullshit bordering on fraud. 'BIP..... BIP.... BOOOOOP' I retract my earlier criticism, I missed the option to 'play' on the timeline here, the games are indeed linked from it. I apparently didn't see the word 'Play' right there under the picture. Ok, let's fire this up. Man, original Breakout didn't have sideways collision detection with the bricks - it's fine vertically but I've seen the ball pass through bricks horizontally without bouncing off them. My goal is to clear one screen. It's hard! Not sure if it would be easier with the original controls, but I think I've only played later clones - the ball tends to bounce off your extremely small paddle at a severe angle, and my nemesis so far is that when the ball comes down and hits a wall it can adjust its angle off the bounce in an unexpected way. This is harder than it looks! I think the ball has a possibility to just randomly adjust its angle after every bounce. There's still a degree of aiming depending on whether your paddle hits it on the left or right side but it's almost impossible to intentionally aim at something. The lack of horizontal detection means that so far I've only ever hit one brick per trip up. I've hit the orange brick layer and that feels like a big accomplishment. I used the dip switch settings to give myself 5 lives instead of 3. Check out this example of the no-horizontal hits thing. The ball slipped into the corner of the green and hit a brick on its lower-left corner while passing through and leaving the brick underneath intact. Also the ball speed ramps up pretty quickly. Oh, the speed of the ball is based on the level of the highest brick you hit. At the first orange layer it sets the ball speed to 'unreasonably fast'. The second orange layer sets it to 'apeshit'. I haven't survived long enough to hit a red brick yet, I don't know if I can clear a full screen of this. I am revising my goal to something that still feels plausible - to break just one of the top row of red bricks. I don't think I stand a chance of clearing the whole screen. Best score so far, still have yet to kill a red brick. Finally hit a red brick. Ludicrous speed, dead. YESSSS. Switching to the mouse helped a lot. I don't mind the game going to ludicrous speeds but I'm definitely missing horizontal and vertical-down collision, being that one of the best strategies in breakout-type games is to make a hole in the top and get the ball through it so it bounces around up there and takes out a bunch of blocks on its own - it's not actually possible in the original game!

Because 'Slay the Princess' was so damn good, I'm playing Black Tabby's earlier game, Scarlet Hollow . This is starting out a bit personal. And unlike Slay the Princess where your character is the same for each playthrough, you get to choose character traits! I'll go with 'Mystical' and 'Talks to Animals' Sadly there's no voice narration (at least so far), which really made Slay the Princess shine, but that's pretty forgivable being that it was their first title - voice acting probably isn't cheap. You're on a bus driving toward a funeral. This guy on the bus is a creep. You get a myriad of dialogue options! Virginia, eh? Did it take Burke and set the game in my state? We arrive, ditch the creep, and come to the family mansion. Nobody should be living here, the place is slowly falling off a cliff! Inside, my cousin Tabitha is about as welcoming as the house appears. May I stay at a hotel instead? I find a cat and attempt to use my ability to speak with animals. Alas, the cat only speaks French. If this game gives me the option to pay for a Hotel I'm taking it in a heartbeat. At least there appears to be toilet paper My Mystical trait helpfully lets me know that the Hotel is a great idea, a phenomenal, cosmically brilliant idea. Given how clean Tabitha keeps the place I'm surprised there aren't bones on the floor. All right, Tabitha leaves and it's time to explore on my own! Made myself a sammich before heading out to the town Eh, maybe my hotel options actually aren't great either. This town has seen better days I meet Stella and her dog Gretchen. Gretchen loves me, dogs are better to talk to than cats. She knows Tabitha but has lost touch and been worried about her lately.  My mystical sense is giving me warnings that something is up with her too, she may not be who she appears to be. It's fun to tell the truth knowing nobody will believe you. Stella's nice enough to welcome me to the town by treating me to a local diner. I like her far more than Tabitha. I feel like she's coming on to me but hey, I don't think my character's married so why not. She's a youtuber that hunts cryptids. So many dialog options! Much like Slay the Princess I get the impression there are a lot of paths one could take. I agree to come along on the 'Hunt for Skunk Ape' and she wonders if she can get one of her old pals, Reese, to join us. She calls him and I get her side of the conversation - something is up with Reese, he can't come, she offers to take easier trails but he ultimately declines. It feels both plausible and interesting and very human, I'm enjoying the writing here - this is a good game. I'm enjoying the art too, that look of disappointment as she hangs up. We run into Duke on our cryptid hunt, who comes with a change in the music - my lack of musical acumen would undoubtedly be a letdown when describing it, but I'm drawn in. Thankfully, you can listen to it here. Duke is out here hunting his own quarry - he thinks a mountain lion has been hunting his chickens. We don't get too many of them here in Virginia, but then again I'm hunting 'Skunk Ape' with Stella so it's not like I can fault him. I'm not sure if being Mystical is helpful or just scary. Stella and Duke argue about what could be out there when I feel the wheels of fate turn in a dark direction. I warn them. I'm probably goddamn Helen of Troy but I'm going to try. Goddamn it. We leave Duke and I assume that Stella will see reason but she refuses and still wants to go into the woods for her video. One thing Slay the Princess improves on is the displayed dialog is just white subtitles at the bottom and the dialog options are off unobtrusively on the side - there's a lot of good art to look at in both games but here in Scarlet Hollow the dialog box obscures a chunk of the image with the option to hide it. In StP I never felt the need to hide part of the user interface because your options never covered anything important.  Oh, hey, we found.... something! This is... not good. Stella didn't hear it, I think my talk to animals skill let me understand it. Gretchen the dog has been funny but some of the things the deer was saying hint at what I assume the larger picture is. In StP there's a really cool overall story that's not revealed until the end, and I didn't fully grasp until my 2nd-3rd playthrough - it's delightful to play through again because the game drops both subtle and overt hints of what's going on but you won't fully grok them until you understand what's happening, who you are, who the princess is. So I'm looking for those sorts of things now. Some hints are more overt than others, Mystical is giving me plenty. Stella that is a bad idea. The music turns ominous, oppressive while we try to find whatever it is. Glimpses and sounds. One of Duke's chickens, wounded, with another 'growth', like the deer. To my ears it's chanting like a cultist. Duke joins us while Gretchen the dog has some insights - it doesn't smell like an animal? Plastic seems like an odd scent to be picking up. Holy Moly there are Attribute Combination conversation options. You can only choose two attributes, how many dialog options are there? How many times would you have to replay the game to see them all? We shouldn't have come out here. I regret my life choices. To think I was complaining about a messy bathroom earlier... I don't think you can save everyone.... The choice here is pretty explicit. Duke's got a shotgun, right? Maybe he can take care of himself. I help the dog. The gun goes off behind me. A brief flashlight image on Duke - there are parts of this game that auto-advance after a short animation and don't give you time to linger, and the glimpse of Duke's body is one of them - still enough to see that the shotgun hit him in the head and it's not going to be an open casket funeral. Stella wants to follow the things, possibly because she's insane. I manage to convince her that it's time to go and call the police. Small town cops decide it's just fine to leave the body out there for the night. They at least drive us back to Stella's house. The cops seem suspicious of me even after seeing the footage. Stella wants to try to investigate these things more, in part because she's afraid the cops might blame me for what happened. Oh, we're out of the woods, but we're not out of the woods yet. Did this thing follow us to Stella's home? But then Stella's friend Sybil lets us in, a kind old woman, and the figure is gone. Oh ho, Stella is clever! The cops confiscated her camera for evidence, so I assumed the footage was gone, but she stashed the memory card. Kaneeka lives here (Sybil's adopted daughter?) and has a computer we can use.  Gretchen loves Kaneeka! I'm glad I saved the dog, sorry Duke. After viewing the footage, Sybil does seem to know something. Perhaps all of this has happened before and will happen again? Another set of combined-trait dialog options. I'm pretty sure I'll be playing through this again with different traits. I end the night at Stella's place - I don't feel like going back to the mansion and I assume Stella's bathroom is cleaner. That's... an odd message. What happens if I don't save the game? Oh right, a bunch of games were being made 'episodically' for awhile, weren't they? The Telltale Walking Dead games were like that. Scarlet Hollow now is a full game but these messages are probably left over from a time when they'd have been separate 'episodes' and you'd transfer your save to the next 'episode game'. So, looking that up - I'm right, and I discover that this game is still early access - they're not done with the game! I sort of assumed that since this was released earlier than the fully-formed StP that this one would already be finished and I blew right past the label. I don't regret that, episode 1 was really good and I'm very curious to see how many branching paths there might be in the future, but for now I'm going to put it down and return to it another time so that I don't just blow through the released episodes and then hit a hard stop for what could be over a year before they release the final part of it. Good thing is I understand StP was a commercial success so I'm optimistic that Black Tabby has the funds to finish this.

I am not a cybersecurity expert, but I think the main problem with trying to make anything online secure is that you have relatively few entities that make and maintain locks, and they are severely outnumbered by the many entities that are trying to break through those locks. Today we'll get to pretend to be one of the latter in Hacknet , a 'terminal-based' hacking simulator. I have a 'To Play' list of games which is a mix of games that I either obtained on sale and haven't played yet, or played for a bit and either didn't finish, or I did finish and want to play again. There are about 140 games currently on the list, which is an indication that I should stop adding to that list, but that resolution doesn't tend to survive the next Steam sale. Anyway, a couple years ago I played Hacknet for several hours but I don't remember much, so we're starting a new game of it. To finish the tutorial, I need to find the tutorial's process ID and kill it (which is something you can do on a real Unix / Linux system). The game encourages you to 'hack' via unix-style commands that you type in. There's also a graphical interface but not all commands are available by using it so typing is mandatory. That's a fun way to end a tutorial! I've been contacted by 'Bit', who wants me to start by getting some programs from Viper's computer. There's a netmap at the bottom of the screen which will expand as I find other computers to access.  This is fun, the red node on the map is actually the email (Jmail) server I'm using. I can see its filesystem and note that there are other accounts here, but I don't have privileges to actually read their emails. I'm hoping that I can hack into this later and read other people's mail. It's fun poking around in other people's personal files! My mission instructions told me to just go for .exe program files but my snooping around in the texts gets me an IP address, I try connecting to it and it's someone's test server. The curious are rewarded with information Your activities on a server leave log messages of what you did on there, like your IP address when connecting and what files you downloaded. You should always cover your tracks by wiping out the log directory when you're finished on a server Bit's first 'job' for me is to go delete some log files that he was too lazy to do at the time. Come on Bit, it's like two commands! On that server I check the logs before erasing them. Looks like 'Bit' accessed something called the Valence Dossier. It's not on the filesystem anymore - looks like they grabbed it and deleted it. Oh, I should mention that in the intro 'Bit' starts by saying that a 14-day timer has expired and he's dead, I'm getting these messages as a dead-man switch. Or so they claim. Bit sends me to an educational server so I can learn more hacky-things. Scored some new programs here! I get Shell which I can use to control remote computers to help me overwhelm a system and firewall analysis so I can bypass firewalls. It's also got information, and this entry on Traces seems important. I assume I'll have to deal with people trying to track me at some point. Hasn't happened yet, I've been deleting logs reliably. Bit left me with instructions to join a hacker group called Entropy. As a test for joining them they want me to remove some news articles from 'Slashbot' about them, and crash Slashbot. Done and done. Entropy directs me to their contracts server where I can get missions. I'm enjoying that everything in this game so far - including getting missions and reading your mail - all use the main system of logging on or hacking other computers and using them. We're not breaking into banks and stealing millions of dollars here. The first mission is (assuming I'm not being deceived by a jealous rival) relatively innocent. A gamer wants to re-play a clicker game but there's no reset button, so he wants me to delete his online save data so he can start over. I find it delightful that when you login to the server they actually did make a simple idle clicker game that you can play. So when you're hacking a server, on the left side you run programs that do a fun graphical thing and take up space in your computer's available memory. Here I'm running two programs and have a couple shells open on other machines (which take up a little space). One nutty aspect of the game is that text notes in this area use up as much memory as vertical space they require - if my computer had the Gettysburg Address open, I don't think I'd be able to run any other programs. On Job #2 I encounter my first security measure - a trace attempt. Looks like I have to finish the job within the time limit. Fortunately the allotted time is fairly generous  - those aren't seconds counting down, each integer is actually around 4 seconds so I had several minutes for this. I was done before the timer hit 60 Also, while the mission is to delete a mailing list that got stolen from another company, I decided to grab a copy for myself before I did so. It's encrypted and I don't know if I can decrypt it, but I figure it can't hurt to have a copy. I've been grabbing any stray files I find that look like they might be useful later and saving them on my machine. This game save file makes me want to play this game. Disney's 101 Huge Birds Violated did not do well at the box office. Another client is concerned that their X-C(om) scientist may be getting a little too familiar with alien tech. I don't recall this particular project from the original X-Com, maybe it was in a sequel. Next mission is to delete a file that another hacker stole. This one has a much shorter countdown, but even though I'm in and out before the trace expires... they got me. I'm being hacked! My machine reboots and the fancy interface is kaput - they messed up my computer! How dare you take my color scheme! Logs show they deleted my x-server.sys file and told my machine to reboot. So this is interesting - I've seen this file on other machines, and this feels a bit more free-form than the rest of the game. I think I need to use just terminal commands to connect to another computer that still has this file (it's been present on other machines) and grab a copy from them. Ok, got it. I grabbed extra copies of the files as backups in case this happens again. This ought to work? It.. sort of worked?!? I got a new interface, and new music (I ought to mention the music in this game is solid!). I'm gonna try getting some other x-server.sys files from different servers and see if they're different too. They are - I found this option as well, the majority of other computers are running it. I actually looked at the x-server.sys file and it's just a number. I tried messing with the number and using that for x-server.sys and wound up with a blank terminal again.  This time the terminal has music (which I didn't have when there was no x-server.sys file at all). Uhhh... I tried changing it some more and my modified x-server.sys straight-up actually crashed the game... I have hacked too greedily and too deeply I was able to fix it after restarting, I think I'll just use the green one and move on now... A couple more small jobs and I get an invite from another group, CSEC. Every hacker group's gotta have a hazing ritual After an initial straightforward test, they want me to discover the secret 11 Herbs and Spices of CFC. I bet the recipe strongly coincides with the 11 cheapest Herbs and Spices I've found something that feels like a exploit - if you get access to a computer and they start tracing you, it looks like you can immediately disconnect and then reconnect, maintaining admin access so you can complete the mission but the trace is immediately terminated. I wish the Netmap at the bottom was more organized or labeled, since it's just a bunch of circles it's not terribly helpful for connecting to a server, as there get to be more of them I have to click around to find the one I want. Eureka! I think I've found all four x-server.sys themes. I think I like the original theme I started with the best. CSEC's x-server file gives you a white interface. It just feels like home. It occurs to me that in a game about hacking and computer security it's very odd that you can't change your passwords. Oh that's a bit disappointing, now that I'm a CSEC member I'm not allowed to go back and complete the rest of the Entropy contracts that I didn't finish, they want nothing to do with me! CSEC contracts get more serious, including altering records of government systems - there's two that want you to change records of people on Death Row. We foray into morally questionable territory A couple contracts in I get the chance to find some decryption software. This mission is very involved and well done, I'm stuck looking at mostly encrypted files until I find one employee at the company that didn't bother to encrypt her decryption software - I grabbed that and all the encrypted files and now I'm busily decrypting / reading all the stuff they thought was safe. I also need to go dig up that other encrypted file I found awhile back after I open all these. This is not a good way to encrypt data. Ok, time to crack open that encrypted file I got way earlier. The big reveal! A decoy file! You bastards! I got cocky and tried to hack the jmail server... You have very little time for this hack! I got traced! I didn't understand what I was supposed to do here and the game closed to represent me getting caught. On restart I took a mission that instantly does this to you and I learned that to save yourself you're supposed to hack a mainframe terminal and use it to change your IP address so you can't be located before authorities find your real address. After a bunch of CSEC missions I get one to find out what happened to Bit. The music changes when I accept this mission. It's going down. Bit left a message on one of his servers mentioning that he was working with a company called EnTech and feeling pretty uneasy about it. This is a multi-part mission so when it's done I wait on another hacker for some follow-up info for the next mission. So let's see what else is on the CSEC mission board... oh. CSEC Wants me to kill a guy but they claim it's legit. This remotely accessible pacemaker will Beep Beep no longer. Just take CSEC's word for it - it's what he wanted! After that I get another mission on the quest to find Bit, and my benefactor hooks me up with a TraceKill program - would be great if this can just straight-up stop a trace. It uses a ton of memory so I can't be running anything else. It pauses a trace rather than stopping it entirely - still extremely handy. Trying to find what happened to Bit is a bigger job by an order of magnitude than the others - I've already found 10 machines and a lot of them use this new security that hasn't been seen before. I can't crack these so I'm looking for the machines that don't have it. Bit had a crisis of conscience over the power EnTech was assembling for itself. That power is what I'm using to hack systems right now - Hacknet, a collection of security-breaching computer programs in an easy to use interface. Bit created some of it. Now he's dead and we're left to pick up where he left off. Hah, I love this, an EnTech exec never intended to have Bit killed, he just wanted a goon to send a message, but the goon read a bit of slang that the exec used very differently. Looks like Bit ended up on the wrong side of a requirements misunderstanding. What do the police charge you with if you accidentally put out a hit on someone but didn't mean to? CSEC decides to take revenge on EnTech and enlists me to help. In a time-limited mission I crack through all the security we've learned to break through so far, get on the target server, wipe their Hacknet files, wipe the logs, and destroy everything Bit built for EnTech. One last posthumous message from Bit - he wants me to disable the program 'PortHack' that I've been using to hack everything, it's the last program you run once you crack various ports on a server with different programs. Without it, I'll be done as a hacker. This is a solid game with a good story but the terminal interface will not be to everyone's tastes. As for me, I've had fun with it. Bit's last, last message is a voice recording that wants me to delete the last copy of Hacknet - the one on my computer.   I think I won the game by uninstalling it.

And now for something bleaker than our current reality. While We Wait Here on Steam I'm Cliff, and I either own or work in this diner. Voice acting is decent except the southern fellow in the hat might be overdoing the stereotype. Looks like a hot day in possibly Arizona, Nevada. That's Nora, my co-worker... no, she's more than that, she's talking about getting a house together and wants my opinion, so either my wife or girlfriend. People glow like angels when I'm supposed to interact with them. That's my kind of choice! We're thinking of moving out anyway so I'm not taking shit from anyone today. Whenever a customer orders something Cliff will freehand-draw color pictures of the food with a pencil. Cliff is an incredible artist! There's a cooking element to this, a straightforward 'put things on grill and wait' mechanic. I'm not sure if I can screw it up or not. Ok what the fuck? Who are you and why are you suddenly in my freezer? What is happening. It's like I skipped time. Trippy. There was no scene transition for all this, it's just happening. I can't talk to anyone except my current interaction target, the police and ambulance showed up and are photographing things like a murder took place and I'm still prepping the same burger order. Is this an artistic choice? Is Cliff going crazy? Could Nora maybe serve a burger once in awhile? I am intrigued, at least. I do not appear to be able to screw up the orders, at least not now - I might still be in a tutorial. I will try again later. Switching to Nora's perspective, Cliff isn't looking so hot. This got dark quick. And running outside in terror, the world isn't looking so hot either. I just wanted to serve someone a burger.... And then the credits roll to start the game. Nice. And now I'm a woman named Alex outside a club. We're going places. Possibly none of them pleasant. Alex tried to help out her friend who is being cheated on by a guy and what goes down here tells me that this is very much not a game for children. Back to Nora at the Cafe, and the world is normal again.  I could wear food service gloves but since I'm my own boss, I choose not to. The 'can't burn food' mechanic means I can just leave these eggs and bacon cooking until someone happens to want them I think. We serve our eggs 'Well Done' UFO hunter Eddie shows up and asks me to turn on the TV. Subtlety is not one of Eddie's qualities. The TV doesn't work and he freaks out, going on a tirade about aliens about to attack us. Then we get a scene of what happened to Eddie in his trailer. So this appears to be a 'walking simulator' game where you're essentially watching a movie and you have some limited interaction. I prepare food in this game as well as occasionally get a dialog option but I don't get the sense that either one is affecting the story. When that's the game then whether the game is good or not mainly depends on whether the story / acting are good, much like a movie. Ah this is fun, we start the scene by getting to shoot some balloons and cardboard cutouts of government agents as Eddie while we listen to the diner conversation. Eddie is the sort of person I'd prefer not own a firearm but this is America! Also Alex and her pal Lisa have arrived at the diner. It's all coming together. I start to take more orders, and that entails going into the fridge to get ingredients. This is the fridge now. I like that this game uses the mechanic of going to start prepping food to surprise you with something. Ok, NOW I think my dialog options are affecting things - back at the start when I was Cliff, Nora asked me if I'd rather go for a place in the city or the countryside. I chose city, now we're getting into an elevator to go to 'our place'. Only, we never made it here, Nora notes. Hank (the old Southern guy in a cowboy hat) starts a story about the theft of his cattle but he gets hit on the head by the thief and the story diverges into how things was when he was a kid back on the farm. I think part of what's good about a walking simulator vs. something like a movie is that you are still participating in it in such a way that you're paying more attention to it - with a movie it's easy to zone out and let your mind wander if things don't grip you, it's much harder to do that when you need to fulfill customer orders to progress the story. Is it more fun to watch someone else milk a cow or to do it yourself? Hank's story involves him getting into his daddy issues while you're walking around in a cave. Hank is a very slow walker so I'm a little bored with the sequence when it gets to a point where metaphor-dad starts chasing you - if he catches you then you restart where he starts chasing you so I need to find some way to get away. Unfortunately for me I am bad at this and can't see a way out, and the 5th or 6th time this happens I experience a game bug and fall through the world, and I can't reset or progress. Hank: "And then as I was runnin' from my giant zombie Dad I fell into the infinite." Restarting the game loads you from the beginning of Hank's story, so I have to do the whole Hank's story segment again from the start. Frustrating. Time to re-milk a cow, re-shovel a haystack, and re-explore a cave. Back at the dad monster, he is pretty scary. The moment when you hope you're adopted. Ok, got away first time on that attempt. It shouldn't have been that difficult earlier since you just run directly away from him and click on a rock to climb up, but I swear I tried it before and it didn't take - I probably just missed the climbing rock. Back at the bar as Nora, I look like an utter fool for a bit wandering around trying to find a glass for the milkshake I just made. Turns out it's the SAME GLASS WE USE FOR SERVING STRAIGHT WHISKEY, which means we are either serving milkshakes that are too small or whiskeys that are too large. Maybe both. Here's the glass - you let me know if this is for milkshakes or whiskey. Or both, you freak. A new couple walks into the diner along with their baby. They mention that they saw a messed up car outside and were wondering if anyone here was hurt. Alex speaks up and says it's her and Lisa's car, explaining the damage as having hit an animal on the way here. Given the way Lisa seems freaked out I think I can guess what sort of animal. William here bears some resemblance to yours truly. The weather outside has turned for the worse... both in and out of game, as it happens, which is a nice coincidence that enhances the experience so long as I don't lose power. Annnnnd now everyone is dead. I think you've probably had enough to drink at this establishment, sir. I suspect that he killed Cliff. Everyone is alive! Why yes Mandy I'm definitely not having catastrophic visions, why do you ask? And now for something completely different. Eddie may be a nutcase but his stories are more fun than Hank's! You get to run around a spaceship and blast aliens, so I'm starting to see the appeal of being a conspiracy theorist. Back at the diner, Cliff is with us again. He's looking out the window at dark, people-shapes that wander through the storm outside. Having found my Inspection Grade, I would like to note that I have never once put on the food service gloves or washed my hands before preparing food. William's story - the guy that looks like me, with the wife and the baby - is that he's maybe not been super-loyal to his wife. Before you judge William too harshly, can you really say that you could resist a woman with terrible handwriting? Nora flashbacks to when she was running the diner with her dad, and we get to see the outside of it for the first time. The place could use a new coat of paint. At least I understand the milkshake / whiskey thing now, we can't be having multiple types of glasses in the 'Lone Glass' diner. SHE'S SO FRAGILE I HAD TO CHEAT ON HER DON'T YOU SEE Now having told the stories of our strangers, the narrative draws to a close. I was right about the murderous stranger - we see the scene of Cliff getting killed by him. We get a vignette with the outcomes for the various characters based on your dialog choices - and I suspect that includes Cliff. There was an offhanded question earlier about 'If you had to save Cliff or Nora, which one would you save?' and I chose Nora, so I suspect you can probably take the other option and get Nora killed instead, playing most of the game as Cliff. Eddie gives up on the alien thing. Hank finally takes a vacation after years of endless work. William tries to make things work in his marriage while pining for that illegible penmanship. Alex and Lisa end up going to the cops for the 'animal' they hit, and I hope Alex goes down on 2nd degree murder charges. Our heroine Nora decides to try to move on from the diner, the memories of Cliff and the guy who murdered him. What wonderful weather for putting the top down And the world may have ended but I think it was a metaphor.