Part 5: † Corona 5:31 †

The corona has a different structure from the Comet. There are 3 rooms on each side, and an engine room. In the conference room…

The game presents this as narration over black, but I felt I'd remind you how the swordship looked. If you look up information on this game, most (that is, the guy who made the Wiki page) claim that Jesus is the sword ship, but that's clearly wrong and I don't understand how you could so deeply fail to understand this game.

.



I'll take what you don't need.

Despite the game only being half over, we may (er... will) never see Jesus again. Possibly a ploy by militant atheists to demean the good name of The Lord, the name was largely just chosen to make someone, anyone, purchase this game. Did it work? Surprisingly, yes.



Besides getting ports to two systems, Jesus sold well enough for a sequel, and I don't mean my fan project Moses: Incorrigible Robo-Machine. Sadly, the sequel's untranslated; we may never know why Anime gets a massage.

Just keep that in mind, especially as we play through the crazier half of the first. This game sold copies. ジーザス恐怖のバイオモンスター (Japanese Words) was a hit.

>Look
The usual..

>Search
Too much to search

>Speak Carson
I put the monster part in the lab.
I know. I put it in a case. Thanks.
I also put Balkas' report on Halley's gas in the lab.
Ah, didn't know. Thank you.

I'm not sure what he reported on in the three seconds before he died, but the report that a fluid was once in a flask will surely help whatever this mission was intended to do. Prove the existence of gas, I suppose. Good for us.

>Speak Milakov
I heard all I need.

>Speak Hoka
Any injury? I'll look anytime.

Is that a come-on? I'm only attracted to (preteens and) women with collars too big for their necks.

>Speak Eline
I'll return Fojii..
He suits you. Don't worry now, maybe later.

>Speak Fojii
I don't see Fojii…

>Speak Carson
The emergency siren! Something else's on board!

The problem lights having been designed exclusively for problems aboard other ships, there's no visual accompaniment besides Hayao staring left of the screen.

Where's Fojii?
I'm here.
I'll look around.
We'll go
Split up. And be careful!
I'll go too.



This new ship gives us a lot to explore, and, due to exhausting their gameplay budget with that walking stuff last ship, it's back to pure menus for us. First up: the cockpit, with a great view showing the arm of that chair. As before, these rooms were almost undoubtedly made before they knew they were making a "game"; it's completely unimportant to learn the names or layout of these rooms.

>Look
The same.
Let's move on.

>Search
Not here, I guess.

If on,y we had some systematic way of going about this. Say, a biosensor, or a device which registers unusual movement and sounds an alarm without immediately clearing data on where the thing is. Or a way to monitor the ship using all the cameras and displays. Or that chair. Clearly what's important is the chair.

>Speak
Not a good place.



This is the laboratory, clearly discerned from the lab-type equipment around. One ship gets the manufacturing plant, the other gets a third of a window, and the ship that doesn't try to find life gets the doctor and Xenobiologist. Instead of trying to find some order here, I think the cards we passed out early on were just the casting of lots for who got to not be with Hayao.

>Look
No changes.

>Search
Too much to search.

>Take
Carson'll get mad, right?

>Speak
Not a good place.

Hayao isn't a fan of most rooms.



The Conference Room. During conferences, Gingrich, Hoka, Carson, and Fojii can sit in the chairs while Hayao sits on the bench and looks through the hole in the wall, I assume.

>Look
Not here. Where is it?

>Speak
Anyone?

Alright, the same meaningless reactions happen wherever we go; let me expedite the tour.



The Capsule Room.



The Airlock and Large-Scale Gyromite Room.



The "I learned shot composition from Battlefield Earth and am drunk" room.



And, finally, another Machine Room. Unlike the last ship, there are no more rooms to unlock, so our 100% exploration is complete.

>Look Ceiling
Lots of pipes here.

I see about three. Hayao continues being easily overwhelmed.

>Look Floor
Stuff's scattered… On top, a tarp cover.

>Look Wall
A control console.

>Search Pipes
A rope hangs from a pipe.

>Search Console
So many switches here.

>Search Floor
Too much to search now

So, now that we've seen the whole ship, any bets as to how to progress? The answer is not just "Have seen the whole ship", though of course that's one factor. Just for fun, guess.

Really.



You need to search the floor twice.

>Search Floor



>Take enepack
Now we can use your gun.

No, we had never been in this room to lose it, the enepack was explicitly said to have run out of ammo last update, and we need to pick it up to do anything else. Now that we have a thing we apparently lost (and have seen all of the "Nothing here" options, without which this won't open up), we can go back to the lab and stare at a observation device.



By which he means a window. We have to make the game sound more sci-fi.

>Look Rm
Sample case is still here.

>Search Ceilng
A microscope is here

It's duct-taped to the ceiling. A cruel and science-disrupting practical joke.

>Search Case
Oh… The cover's slid off.

>Search Case
Huh. The sample from the Comet isn't here. How?

Tune in next lines for the exciting conclusion of Inspector Hayao & The Mystery Case, the program for which its fiendishly clever double meaning title is slightly more inventive than the trick that you can things from a... But I really shouldn't give away the end.

>Speak
Carson's error? I'll ask him later.



As were walking around, note that this isn't one menu. When you choose Go from a room you come back to the hallway, though nothing ever happens in this hall. The only choice in the hallway is also "Go", which gets you a submenu of places to walk. In other words, you decide to go somewhere so you can decide to go to a menu of places to go. The cleanest interface of any game.




Fire now!
Eat ice, you monster!

Also, apparently Gingrich and not-him were with us and not sitting up. Or they were just watching this scene and didn't call for help despite Gingrich being the best character in games. Anyway, that terrible mess of brown is currently enacting its dreadful plan of making telemarketing solicitations through its headset without paying rent for the Space, so Property Rights and Consumer Protection upholding Hayao is about to make it pay in the most amazing sequence ever made:


(Watch this clip)






Showing he's grown from his last adventure by changing which shoulder he guards, Hayao!!!(!)! plays the role of Anime Grizzled John Wayne and, unaware of how five-o'clock shadow works but hoping to look old and gruff, applies sand on his skin in some perfect rectangular chunks. Meanwhile, Eline stays content as just Anime, preparing to sing the operatic Jesus Theme™ (Eline, you're a mezzo-soprano; it's out of your range) as Hayao shoots his rather cold light with the encroach that really shouldn't work. I'm pretty sure this is the objectively best scene made for the not-NES and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

For now, lock it in. Hayao, let's go.
Understood… But with whom?

>Eline


You know what sucks? My coworkers being alive. Man, isn't that a drag?

>Alone
How can a soldier think that way? She may yet live.

>Hoka


A needlelike thing.. extended and poked my finger.. took some cells.. and injected something. We can explain the deaths now.

Wouldn't I be taking some cells just by touching you? Your fist is tiny; perhaps it's you who has the smallest mugs. I'm glad we made this Green Swoosh Room to have sad conversations under the swoosh. Sorry about all the death.

You're getting so pale.

>Speak
Hayao…

>Speak
Don't… forget me.

>HldHnd
Hang on
Thanks

>HldHand
Your hand's… warm

Alas, there goes my theory that Hayao's a snake. Responding to playtester feedback (ha) that needing to choose Speak fifty times seemed unneeded, last minute updates refined so this so now we pick Look.

>Look
Hold on
I'm a doctor.. I know when..

>Look
Don't…
What's… I'm so tired… Please..




Works grow back from being cut in two. Maybe this thing works the same.
So..?
I asked you to bring a piece of its body. Could it regenerate?
So it can liquify and split…
I asked for it, I'm responsible. I'm a xenobiologist. I'll find out its weakness. I'll be in the lab.

I wish Jesus got an ill-conceived live action 80s adaptation just to hear an actor say those lines, probably storming out of the room with each one only to come back and try to leave even more definitively and by the end he's wearing eight pairs of shades. I'll start the Kickstarter for the film.

Until then, what to do?
Only the freeze rays work that we know of. Hayao brought one so we have 3 total.

Besides shooting a probably-toy pistol and giving up when it didn't immediately die, we've been lax on trying bullets and bullets are a weakness things have. In fact, we know full well that the freeze ray won't kill it and even liquid oxygen only made it kind of annoyed. I want Gingrich to use a space rail gun, or just a space Uzi, or wrestle it into submission through sheer force of will. All of that will also occur in the film.

Good! Carson, keep working. Hayao and I are soldiers, we'll take 1 each. Carson, you take one too.

Also Hayao is a soldier. A scathing critique of the military industrial complex societal exploitation of unwitting men into murders story in MGS2 .

...

A scathing critique.

May I go with Hayao?
Me too!
Good. Better that than separate. I'll give you a a transceiver, Hayao.
You are not a consistent space captain at all.
I'll be back soon.



Now for another fun game of "Do everything to progress", in other words exactly what we just did with more things. First, we'll head back to the cockpit.

>Search ComDev


Presumably, the ComDev is running Space Microsoft Bob, where you click on a cat to see data material and ask Carson for anything else. Everyone else can use a command line, but Hayao's the guy who finds Netflix too complex and demands all new tech stays compatible with Netscape 0.3.

>Speak
Can we win?
Stop whining. I'm scared too…
Me too.

>Look Wall
Ship control instruments

>Use ComDev
It's ready now.

This is all the ComDev ever says.

>Look Ceilng
Vent opening

>Search Ceilng
Vent opening

I want to stress yet again (still being less annoying about it than Jesus) that everything I'm doing is needed to progress. I've played this game twice; once with Cymbal after we heard it exists, and once for this LP. The first time we played it, we followed a guide and made sure to do everything we could. After that "battle" (poor doctor), during our second pass through these rooms, we spent 18 minutes stuck, going back and re-examining every single thing, because we forgot to search the ceiling and read the same two words a second time. The ComDev: user friendly unlike this game.

See, Jesus, named for the most common word uttered when playing it, is a horror game not for the monster but for its unfriendly design. In the grand untradition of games that would be made in fifteen years, Jesus breaks postmodern ground by integrating its story with its players'. Like Hayao!, we feel prepared for this mission because of our video games; MGS was way behind the times.

Hayao! sees technology the way we see this game; parsing a menu requires command of some moon language, and the assurance that nothing can go wrong only increases frustration. Everyone else can manage just fine, but everything from printer setup to turning a switch exists in an upside-down world that fails to actually help. In a familiar situation to anyone who's helped old people learn what an email is, we're saying "Just hit the button called Continue" while the technophobe asks if he has to search the roof. Ultimately, Jesus bridges this gap and allows us to understand the disquieting feeling when too many switches exist, a sober reminder of the hardships we face in an overwhelming world and why record companies tend to make few games.

>Search door
The door's closed.

Fucking doors. Let's move on.




>Look Ceilng
It's an aquarium.

>Look Wll
It's the broadcast console.

>Look For
Table and chairs.

>Search Water
Fish are swimming.

Had we failed in discovering the comet seeded Earth, we planned to at least do something related to those words and seed the comet with Earth life, namely with fish. It was neither the best nor the worst thought out part of the mission, though it did cause some ire due to the need to get a ladder to feed them in space.

>Search Consle
It's off now. I'm sure Captain turned it off.

>Search Consle
Hmm, a cassette.

I love playing old science fiction and seeing the ways even guesses as to the future were stuck hopelessly in the past. Come on, we have laserdiscs now; Jesus, get with the times.

>Search Tape
Oh, this is Eline's cassette.

Alternately, maybe Eline's just a hipster who thinks amplified light's killing music, and whose one finished song is meant as a nostalgic callback to Top Man for playing on IBM punch cards or the like. That way Hayao couldn't play it; there are too many switches involved. I feel I've gotten ever so slightly off track.

>Search Tape
It's scratched..





>Look For
4 bedlike capsules are here.

Back in the other ship, we mentioned that Huyler had an old fashioned bed, so maybe this is how kids are all sleeping these days. Space efficient and extremely easy pun worthy replacement or failed (?) modern chastity belt kind of deal? (?) Hard to say.

>Search Pipes
The pipes're only used for Cold Sleep. 1 pipe is broken. I wonder how…

"Brr… It's so cold at night." / "What do you want, Warm Sleep capsules? I'm not made of money. I assume."

>Search Capsule
Air and watertight, with a display.

>Speak
Hoka's capsule is open.
Weird. Who used it? Since Hoka's gone..
Hmm. Only Hoka can use it, but…



Take our word for it.

>Search Floor
What? Hamburger bits everywhere.

Again, take our word for it.

>Search Wall
The monster scratched it up.

Once again, really, take our word for it.

>Search Box
Oh, a box is broke.

We aren't very good at making games.

>Speak
Who could eat all these? No one on this ship…
Balkas might've been able to but..

Bringing food no-one could eat was just one of the every bad planning decisions, but anything seemed reasonable after they acquiesced to the fish.

>Search Blood
Hoka's… too bad.

>Search Blood



Hm.. Maybe the monster's sputum
Sputum?
Saliva.
Oh drool.
..? Sort of like that.

Sputum is very much not saliva, being a mixture of mucus and bile that ideally contains little spit, but Hayao's read a page of his word-a-day calendar and is determined to sound more intelligent than he is. That said, he's limiting it to only when Fojii's around; the captains threatened to ban him from space if he kept calling crews "ecumenical" and saying "a crepuscular day".

>Take Spit
We'll take it to Carson.

Didn't we establish this monster's insanely venomous, given its ability to kill with a pinprick to the finger? Touching venom likely wouldn't cause problems except irritation at worst (thanks, Cymbal!) but it's been on the floor and that's gross. Did we bring paper towels? Oh god it's all over our hands.



Time for some world-building. This game is set in an alternate timeline where catapult tech increased exponentially but lifts never got off the ground () . You know: "I want to get to the top of the ship" / "Oh, here's the trebuchet." And that's why the Burger King space club didn't bring paraplegics to space.

>Look Ceilng
Sirius's on the lift there.

>Look Flr
Inaduma's down here.

>Look Wall
A crane is here.

>Search crane
The crane's for repair and launch.

>Search Sirius
The engine sounds iffy. We need to repair it.

>Search Sirius
Synthesizer here.

>Search Indma
Nothing monsterish.

I would hope, given it's a ship.

>Search Indma
It's now fixed and ready to depart.




>Speak
The pipes are damaged.
All scratched. Sturdy pipe.

>Search Cover
Too much to search now.

Why yes, this is a required flag. We're looking for an alien who will probably do nothing kill us and all of the crew, but lifting a tarp would be far too much trouble, indeed.

>Look Floor
Lift goes back.



Finally, anything has changed; the lab is now more than a window. Carson gets his best deer-in-the-headlights look going and awkwardly rotates his arm for high fives, but he also avoids eye contact by assuring himself he put the valuable equipment up high where Hayao couldn't reach.

>Search Ceilng
An electron beam scope.

Yes, that. Let's confer.

>Search SmplCse
No way that…

>Take
Carson would get mad..

>Speak
Carson, this seems to be that thing's saliva.
This'll be useful!

>Speak Papr
Have you found anything?
These cells can multiply faster than anything I've seen.

He says staring right at Hayao, in a "You don't have sex" joke that simply goes over his head

>Speak Spit
And the spit?
It's a sedative, lethal in high doses. It probably killed the others. Just a guess, but it may attack us just to get our DNA.

How did you figure that out in the last 2 seconds? You sure did a lot of tests looking kind of at us the whole time. Maybe Carson's got super eyes. Nanomachine stuff. Sci-fi.

What's DNA?
You know about genes?
They determine traits, right?
Right. Hair color, facial features, etc. are passed to children from their parents.
I see.
This info is contained in DNA

>Speak
But it liked heat. Why go for DNA?
Self evolution. By taking DNA, it can evolve itself. From what I can tell, it hides after killing. Not so much hiding as evolving.

You know, it hides, but not in the hiding type of way. Remember how when Liquid Snake did his not-researched infodump about genes and Kojima at least retconned it to just Liquid having never seen a Punnett Square? We won't get that luxury, and I hope you're prepared for what is literally and without figurative component the worst misuse of science I've ever seen in any form of media gorgeous like a flower in the sun.

I encountered it 3 times on the Comet, but it looked no different.

Note that we're now into pure historical revisionism, utterly ignoring the times that we said it had changed.

Maybe it was 1 evolve and hide cycle then?

A good explanation based convincingly on evidence such as

>Speak
It was trying to hide in the warehouse?
Yes. Oh, and it seems that it's sensitive to sound.

The only way I can think for all this to make sense is to assume Carson's making things up to see what we'll blindly accept. To recap, we went from a pool of liquid to "Oh, well it's probably spit" to "It's a sedative maybe" to "It's killing us to get DNA" to "It's guiding its own evolution. I just played space Chrono Trigger^* so let's go with that." Our evidence for all this, ignoring everything it contradicts (so it jumped out three times and attacked us because it was trying to hide…?), is some liquid on a floor and the hope that "Xenobiology" might be a thing. Carson could have been a real biologist and gone to an actual med program, but he felt it would be easier if a class boiled down to "There's probably carbon in stuff" and no-one could call him on getting things wrong.

*Or (wait for it)... Corona Trigger. Eh? Eh? I am writing jokes in my LPs.

I see.. Sorry to have bothered you.

Yes, sorry we (pretend to) know everything about this creature. Terribly sorry to disturb.