Part 4: Chapter 1, Levels 4 & 5

"Gideon got away, but he's still on the run. You'll put him to rights and turn out his lights soon enough. Meanwhile, he's left behind some of his rotten friends for you to deal with. These pestilent meat-chunks do remind one of the undead things that the Cabal used to churn out in the old days... except for that weird stitching on their chests. Something's different about these particular walking-carcasses. But hey, gibs are gibs."

Right around this point is where things start to take a turn for the weird. The Cabal seems to have gone the way of the future and is content to just send regular people after us - better armed and armored as we go along, but still regular people. These things we'll be seeing this level are... different.

In a sense it's also about where the game starts to take a down-turn and never quite recovers, at least to me, because bone leeches still creep me out, even if I sort-of intentionally let one start face-fucking me for the purpose of demonstration as to why that is. On the plus side (or another negative if you absolutely hate the idea of backtracking) we see the game attempting a hub-style level, as while it's technically a different map we'll be seeing quite a few of the same sights we saw on the way to the museum. Main difference is a bit more rubble and junk, blocking off the way we left last time, but a new path having opened up. Don't get used to levels being reused in interesting ways like this, we're coming back this way one more time and from then on every time we see a level again it's the height of laziness. Chapter 2's start is pretty apparent, but a late portion of the game is going to turn into a fucking slog because of it.

And on that note, since we already saw this level in a manner of speaking, let's go ahead and make this the first double-feature update.




"Man, do you hate sewers! The smell is rather appealing, but all-in-all slogging through the Floaters gets old. When you finally get around to ruling the world, it'll be time to declare the place a no-sanitation zone. The perks of an open-sewer society include not having to budget for pipe repairs. The stuff can find its way to the oceans on its own. Either way, even with the local fragrance, you can smell Gideon's nasty stench. The coward's probably headed for a Cabal safehouse."

And the obligatory sewer level, already. Yeah, we probably hit the high point for this game when we grabbed the shotgun in the museum. It's not an immediate downturn, but man, it's certainly not pulling any punches either. On the plus side, there's more shotgun shells than I remember (I must have forgotten my "destroy all crates on sight" instincts during my last playthrough, between newer games making crates only openable with credit cards and the fact that I can never trust shit in this game to not blow up in my face and kill me when I break it - an issue I'm finding much easier to deal with now that I'm past the "wasting bullets on crates" stigma and just use the MAC-10 to do it quickly), we get the remote-detonated bombs, and there's a reference to Unreal (and Aliens and Predator).

Also, this whole deal with trying to change up my editing process has been "fun". I wanted to save time and effort by skipping a few steps, and it turns out the old way is actually still faster overall. And if I actually bother changing the bitrate, I get comparable quality for a still-small filesize (the final videos through the old method are only one-fifth as big as with the new method) and the same color settings I actually recorded and edited at. Well, no harm done so long as you learn something from an experience, even if that something is "this free software fills a specific niche far better than an official and more generalized paid product does, again". The irony in this revelation is that I have to use paid software for actually recording this game because it crashed three minutes in every time I tried to do it with OBS.


The Weapons

Remote Bomb

The command-detonated version of the proximity bomb, and as such the best version. Otherwise, these bombs differ primarily by the red coloration on its electronics, compared to the proxy bombs' green. Utilized in the same manner as the other bombs, other than that detonation is triggered by a separate button press (default D - fortunately, this game somehow supports side-mouse buttons).