Part 18: Episode 18: Killing Chance
It seems most of us are curious to know how the battle with Loki and Raven will turn out. Too bad for us, because the game has a quick chore for us to work through first: the Rank 4 boss named Chance.For whatever reason, the game informed us about the Loki/Raven boss mechanics when Chance is still bumbling about. Is this evidence of well-crafted foreshadowing with foresight, or just another haphazard goofy result of poor planning? We'll never know!
Like most of the other bosses, we can interview him at the DOASys.
Number Five - interviews - Chance
(When you show up, Chance says: )
Chance: "Speak not ill of your neighbor,"
Chance: "Nor covet his position."
Chance: "For the Perfect 1 will suffer"
Chance: "Neither greed nor ambition."
Number Five: "What Is: Perfect?"
Chance: "The one mind from which we all spring forth to do his bidding."
Number Five: "Where Is: Perfect?"
Chance: "In front of you, above you, and around you. All is Perfect and all is one."
Number Five: "What Is: The Garden?"
Chance: "The pure source of life. Our perfect world."
Number Five: "Where Is: The Garden?"
Chance: "Here. Where we all come together as one."
Number Five: "Who Is: Perfect 1?"
Chance: "He who is apart, yet always within. The one who sees all, and reckons our fate."
Number Five: "Where Is: The Garden?"
Chance: "He is unseen, and untouched. But sees and touches all."
Number Five: "Who Is: Chameleon?"
Chance: "She is the invisible one, moving in darkness and shadows. She is of the dark, and to the darkness she will return."
Number Five: "Where Is: Chameleon?"
Chance: "Seek not those of the darkness, lest you become of the dark yourself."
Number Five: "Who Is: Chance?"
Chance: "Know yourself, and you will know me."
Number Five: "Where Is: Chameleon?"
Chance: "Look inside yourself, and you will see from whence I come."
He's an odd fellow for sure.
We've heard what others had to say already, but there was plenty of info on Chance already:
("Who Is: Chance?") Chameleon: "Bad priest Chance! Worships the evil once who brought us here, he does!"
("Where Is: Chance?") Chameleon: "Ugly tall church! Full of devils! Wants to go there, yes?"
("Who Is: Chance?") Tork: "Chance is the anti-Perfect. He's our only hope for getting out of here. His rank is 4th."
("Where Is: Chance?") Tork: "He lives in the church. I'll take you there."
("Who Is: Chance?") Venus: "He's a priest. Ranked 4th. He's trying to convert us all to his brand of Perfect religion. I think he's insane."
("Where Is: Chance?") Venus: "The church. Watch out if you go there. He's got a lot of Goners for disciples, and he's converting more every day."
("Where Is: Nukeya?") Venus: "I don't know. But if I ever find one, I'm going to try to take Chance out."
Chance's lair is just a few paces to the west:
To fight Chance we simply walk up to the Gong.
The Battle of Chance
Chance hits pretty hard as it turns out. The boss fight is actually the result of 5 tries.
Watch the Battle of Chance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzfHcmVUtA
We mash the Gong and the race is on!
Chance has an infinite supply of white Goners at his disposal. For this reason he's one of the most interesting boss battles. As far as I know it's the only battle where you don't face simply the boss himself (although maybe you count Balkan).
I'd mentioned how I only succeeded on my 5th try. It got a lot easier once I realized that he starts off in the building with the blue spire in it. In my attempts before that realization, I'd pratted around while the smaller enemies here chipped away at me for a good 5 minutes. Eventually I'd finally spot Chance and blew myself up with Hex. It was not the epic showdown I had hoped for.
In some of my attempts, I get rather bored looking around for Chance, so I let Nukeya fly to try it out.
It's just what you'd expect, an extra big-ass nuke. It sure uses a lot of "ammo" (Offense, the red bar).
Here we see chance floating around aimlessly. Just like the other bosses, he doesn't really seem to mind whether or not I'm around.
I guess the game would be much too hard if the boss went straight for you like they should. Most of the time you're fumbling around with the controls too much to be a real contender against the bosses. Let's just assume that the bosses are being given an identical, simulated handicap. The bosses are just as incapable of mastering the slow turning speed, and odd slippery controls.
Speaking of slippery controls, I don't think I'd mentioned that movement in this game is not typical. In most games, you're holding "up" then let go of the "up", you'd stop moving forward. Not so in this game. If you press-and-release up, you keep going forward. It's almost like driving a car, since holding up accelerates you. You can press L+R to make a full stop, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were just a serendipitous bug.
He takes a few shots at me, of course. He has his own unique shots! I'm not sure why I included this screenshot, so you're welcome.
And he's dead! As usual, here's the typical static field after the battle. I killed him elsewhere in the video, but you get the idea.
One Hex and one Nukeya seemed to be enough to take him out. We've lived out Venus's dream by nuking Chance!
It occurred to me in this fight that playing this in an emulator is giving me a couple advantages I wouldn't normally have. The game is usually run at 320x240, but thanks to the joy of emulation it can run at 640x480. This game can also be emulated at higher frames-per-second than the 3DO hardware by adjusting the clock speed (not all games behave well with this adjustment, but this game does!). Both of these factors are probably contributing to the fact that the boss fights are so easy! I'm no purist about these things; choppy framerates really kill my buzz in a game.
Even so, no emulator can save me from the pain of finding the damn guy, which was the main difficulty with Chance.
Our victory video involves Chance's "church" burning away.
Chance's lair is removed from the map. The last remaining dot is the Arena, where we'll be facing Loki and Raven!
Lab Visit #12
After the fight with Chance, the geeks at the lab chime in with some extra information.
To watch this as a video, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9nKO3R_lvY
Doctor: "Congratulations, Five. We're on the home stretch."
Doctor: (to off-screen people) "Could you excuse us for a moment?"
Doctor: "I saw what Raven told you in there. I never thought it would come to this Five, but if you don't huffman Raven, everything we've worked on until now, every life spent, will have been wasted."
Doctor: "It is possible that you can defeat Perfect 1 quickly enough to save Raven. But don't let trying to save her deter you from your objective. The mission comes first. Remember that."
The Doc's gone all soft on us, he's not being himself. I get the feeling there was some dramatic debate going on at the lab that the Doc lost, and now he's all humbled. Mommy and daddy must be fighting again.
Even so, this is intriguing new information. Apparently there is some way to huffman Raven and yet save her if we're quick about things. I remember this mechanic mentioned in the game, but I've never seen the failure case, if there is one. We'll be putting that to the test.
Next time I could potentially just cart us off to the Arena to face Loki and Raven, which puts in motion the final events of the game. However, I haven't really shown what most the items do (especially the single use ones), so I figure I'll go through those and show what they're all about. If this sounds excruciatingly boring, let me know, but I believe this is our last chance. I'll also interview Loki next time.
Next episode: Item Inventory and Loki Interview