The Let's Play Archive

Blade Runner

by Scorchy

Part 23: Act III - I Love Me Some Onomatopoeias




Act III - I Love Me Some Onomatopoeias

Here we are again.



After getting a gun pulled on him by a stripper, our protagonist got beaten up by some phony cop and tied to a torture chair. I'm think the game's adherence to the book carries over to the idea that most of the smart people left Earth already, and only the degenerates and idiots were left. That's the most plausible explanation for Ray McCoy I can think of.



As was mentioned, the inspiration for the whole sequence was from the book; Deckard goes to retire a Replicant opera singer named Luba Luft, giving her a VK test first. She gets annoyed, grabs his list of questions, most of which had to do with sex and abortions, and concludes he's some sort of pervert who found his way backstage. Which wasn't that far off from the truth.



I'd never heard the term 'harnass bull' used to describe a cop before, and in fact I don't really know what the hell that is. But Philip K. Dick uses that word ten times in the space of like 3 paragraphs for some reason, so I guess it made an impression on whoever wrote this game.













After Deckard gets arrested by the phony cop in Electric Sheep, they interrogate him at a fake police station that's somehow staffed with Replicants, which is what I guess this whole sequence is trying to pay tribute to. It sounds really dumb, but in the book's defense, the line between banal and bizarre is a fine one.











Guys, I know Ray is incompetent and a terrible cop, but he makes up for all of it with that one liner, right?





Notice the whole electroshock therapy setup is wired to the cap on the chair... which isn't on Ray's head. So turning it on wouldn't have done much anyway.

Actually I was looking up how electric chairs worked, and the history of how they came about was completely hilarious, in a morbid way. Neither Edison or Tesla wanted their currents (DC or AC) to be chosen as the method of current delivery to the chair, so Edison started publicly executing animals with AC electricity just to prove how dangerous it was. It worked, and they decided to use AC as the current of choice for killing people.

Then there was the story of the very first guy who got executed that way. They didn't really know what the fuck they were doing at the time, so they kept shocking him over and over again, it took like 8 minutes to finally kill the guy, and his blood vessels had burst so he was bleeding all over the place. Oh and his body caught on fire.











This is the part where the cinematic goes from pseudo-gritty to completely over the top.

Like, how did she manage to blow a hole through a wall?























This is it for Ray. Crystal saw the Moonbus photo, found out he's really a Replicant, and now she's gonna to put a 12-gauge shell through his chest and collect the bounty.

Why else would she be aiming a shotgun at him?



...



...this game is retarded.





So much for those fake cops. Assuming Crystal hasn't already retired Dektora already, we'll need to go back there and finish her.

If Ray doesn't fuck it up again.