Part 3: Chapter 1, Level 3

"CabalCo's Lafayette Museum of Antiquities announces a new featured exhibit: Cults and Rituals. Take a remarkable and informative guided tour through the histories of some of the world's most bizarre fanatical organizations, ranging from the cursed Sect of the Barking Tree Frog to those dreaded fez-wearing Shriners. Also, do be sure to stop and sacrifice a moment of your day to visit our new Animatronic Dark God Exhibit. Scary!"

This level always gave me trouble back when I first got this game and I'd always get stuck. Not least because the difficulty in this game isn't balanced all that well and going from Genocide (easy) to Homicide (normal) is kind of like playing classic Doom and going from I'm Too Young to Die (lowest difficulty) straight to Ultra-Violence (fourth of five; not to imply I'm a master of this game, but my first playthrough on that difficulty in preparation for this LP was hell), but also I had a hard time figuring out where I was supposed to go because of all the lasers blocking various paths. In hindsight I think the latter was only a problem because I was kind of an idiot, because that shit's definitely not giving me problems now. The difficulty balance is almost certainly gonna bite me sooner or later, though, but we'll kill things on that bridge when we get to it.

Honestly without my own stupidity getting in the way, this is a pretty decent level for a variety of reasons. If you're a nerd like me it's interesting because of some actual info you can get on real ancient civilizations, even if it's the kind of thing that you could have learned from glancing at the Wikipedia pages for Egypt's Third Dynasty or the religion of the Inca Empire for about fifteen seconds just three or four years after this game came out. From a gameplay standpoint this is also our introduction to dual-wielding with the SMG and the return of the favorite of every old-school shooter arsenal, the sawed-off shotgun. Granted, both are kind of mitigated, because while dual-wielding is the only real way to use the SMG, the SMG itself is going to be rendered obsolete in another two or three levels once we get the assault rifle, and the devs kind of forgot to put more than one or two boxes of shotgun shells per chapter anywhere past this level, but it's the thought that counts*.

_{*(Kadorhal, Inc. note: thought on its own does not actually count all that much)}

Also on that note, this is the third time I've rendered this video in full - I did so once to get more consistent quality on the clip from the previous episode in the start (basically for reasons I didn't have the raw footage from that recording easily available), then again to bump the subtitles up a size (thanks your evil twin for the suggestion) and redo some parts of the commentary I wasn't 100% satisfied with while I was at it. What with having already rendered both of the previous episodes twice (a complete rerecord of the first episode entirely and redoing the commentary with my new microphone for consistency on the second) I'm hoping this doesn't become a trend. I did the third render slightly differently - normally I save losslessly to .avi then run that through Zarx264 to slim it down into .mp4, though as a test I basically cut out the middleman and rendered straight to .mp4 to see how well Vegas Pro handles that. It looks good, but the filesize is... well, it's a lot bigger than the final videos for my old method. And they've been unreasonably dark for no reason when I save them that way, too, and I'm having a hard time finding brightness and contrast settings that fix the issue that shouldn't exist - call me crazy but the first-party .mp4 renderer may possibly not be all that efficient (shocking, I know). At this rate we're looking at, at most, one more ridiculously-dark video (I'm going to have to redo at least one either way, though since the other one is less than half as long I'll probably redo them both anyway) before I go back to the two-pass .avi to .mp4 thing and just bump up the bitrate in Zarx264.


The Characters


Gabriella
The first of Caleb's old "Chosen" buddies to come back to life through CabalCo's use of the Singularity Generator, and the only one to have... rather odd side-effects from that resurrection. For example, not having been a black lady who's taller than Caleb in the original game. Little is known about her early years, other than the old website claiming she was "born out of vengeance" and groomed for battle since a young age, giving her a bloodlust comparable to Caleb's. How she joined the Cabal is unknown - given the "groomed for battle" stuff, she may have been born into it for all we know - but her skillful service to the cult eventually lead her to become one of the elite Chosen. Unfortunately, this meant she was eventually betrayed as part of the dark god's gambit to take control of Caleb's body, captured and cocooned by the mother spider Shial. And then, a century after Caleb's own resurrection and the death of Tchernobog, Gabriel's back too. As Gabriella. It's a long story.

Gameplay terms, interestingly, see Gabriella as almost an exact duplicate of Caleb. She's as strong as he is, allowing for stronger attacks and a high amount of ammo carried at once, but she has the same low intelligence granting little use for magic on top of being slightly slower in return for higher damage resistance. Personally, I think I like her skillset the best, sometimes Caleb feels a little too hard to control at full speed (though the walk function not working at all is probably partly to blame). When left alone, Gabriella will occasionally crack "yo mama" jokes.

Gabriella's voice in this game is Lani Minella, a former radio personality turned voice actor who founded and owns the voice-acting agency AudioGodz and is perhaps the most prolific of the game's vocal talent by a wide margin. Like Stephan Weyte, she's best known for her video game roles, starting from 1996 on with roles such as the title character of the ill-fated Bubsy 3D from 1997, the title character of the Nancy Drew games, Anne Knowby and several Deadites in 2000's Evil Dead: Hail to the King, the English voice of Soulcalibur's Isabella Valentine from 2005's Soulcalibur III onward, most female voices in the Unreal series (particularly the standard and "sexy" forms of the female announcer for Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004; note though that some sources are split on whether these voices are Minella or one Sioux Blue), Sindel and Sheeva in the Mortal Kombat reboot from 2011, and Pesta in the 2018 God of War. Amusingly, she's also responsible for another famous Build engine-era protagonist's distinctive voice - one of her first works in video game voice acting was as the voice director for 1996's Duke Nukem 3D, having first met Duke's now-famous voice of Jon St. John when she was cast to voice for a commercial he produced in San Diego. The story goes that John was impressed by Minella's vocal abilities, then demonstrated his own ability to imitate those voices, after which Minella asked him if he'd ever acted in a video game. From there, she managed to get him into a telephone interview with one of Duke 3D's producers, George Broussard, and from there John was ultimately cast as Duke Nukem's voice.


The Weapons


Sawed-off Shotgun

Caleb's signature weapon and, like in most Doom clones, the overall most useful weapon in the game... in the original Blood. Here it's received a noticeable downgrade - it shows up later, and it fires and reloads more slowly, including still requiring reloads while used akimbo. And basically no enemies use it, which sounds good from an "avoiding buckshot to the face" angle (which was the only problem it had in the first game) but conversely proves just how important and necessary an ammo source enemies are when you get to the last chapter of the game and realize upon thinking back that you only had enough ammo to really go to town with the shotgun in three or four levels across the entire goddamned game. On the plus side, pairing them up doesn't require a rare, limited-time powerup, so you can pair it up as soon as you find a second one; I remember being able to get one of the enemies standing around the first pickup to drop one at least once. And my current playthrough is already showing more shotgun ammo than I remember, so there's that. Primary fire fires a single barrel, snapping the weapon open for a reload after two shells. Secondary fires both barrels at once for greater damage but also greater spread and an overall slower rate of fire due to the recoil and reload; like with the other akimbo-capable weapons, you can't use secondary fire while using two shotguns at once in the unmodified game, but since akimbo weapons both fire at the same time anyway, in this case it's more like you get a permanent upgrade to secondary fire only with the spread downside mitigated. Uses shells, which Caleb can carry 150 of in total.



Proximity Bomb

Updates to the various thrown explosives of the first game, replacing ye olde bundles of TNT and a lighter with square packages of C4 or some other variety of modern plastic explosive. As the name suggests, the first version acquired utilizes a proximity detonator which sets the bomb off whenever an enemy gets close. Primary fire tosses the bomb, how far determined by how long the button is held, while secondary drops the bomb at your feet. Ultimately, as with all motion-sensor bombs in first-person shooters, it's pretty much entirely worthless as the game is never a defensive affair; at best it's good for saving ammo in an extreme pinch where you don't want to use the knife and are able to funnel the enemy you need dead into a tight hallway or something. The bomb varieties are treated as inventory items rather than true weapons, thus are accessible through their own hotkeys and the inventory list rather than taking up any of your ten weapon slots; the limit for each bomb type is 10 each.



Gabriella's version of the knife: a larger, apparently military-style blade.