Part 20: Episode 20: Loki + Raven... Battle?
So, we're all hoping to see what tricks Loki will pull on us today. Raven's made it clear what we have to do: Kill Loki, then kill Raven. Easy, right?Excited? You should be. In fact, I promise you that today's update has come with few surprises!
Okay, let's head off to the Arena!
The Arena
The Arena is the last remaining red dot on the map.
For whatever reason, the Arena does not disappear during a storm. This seems to be the only boss lair this occurs with.
Loki and Raven Battle... kind of
Watch the Battle of Loki and Raven: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRSgbIap7R4
A metal shutter opens, and we enter the arena. Some crowd is cheering us on! They thirst for blood!
In the middle of the Arena, we see Raven.
In fact, we see only Raven. Things are getting a little confusing.
Raven isn't doing anything, either, she's just standing there.
Eventually Raven starts shooting at nothing. So, we start shooting where's she's shooting. Then, suddenly Loki materializes out of nothing, but he's already in his static-field dying animation.
This is confusing for sure, so I go ahead and Huffman through Loki's field.
Next we're supposed to Kill Raven. Easy enough. I kill her, and Huffman her too.
But now it's clear that something's definitely going wrong, because the game doesn't warp us out of the battle. We're left to wonder what exactly went on.
Loki's huffman field sticks around for some reason, and it simply won't dissipate.
What the hell?
I could lie and say this is all part of some mind-bending lore, but in reality we're victim to another bug. The game won't acknowledge that we've killed the bosses, and we're stuck here.
I looked around at the scenery for a while when trying to figure out what to do about this. There are Goners in the field around us, along with logos for Electronic Arts, 3DO, "Five Miles Out" (the company that made this game), and "Tork Cola". It'd be more funny if we weren't being screwed over by the game.
We have one Ace up our sleeve to outsmart this bug, though. We can always just kill ourselves with Hex!
So I walk us up to the stands and blow ourselves away with the blast radius.
Hah! Take that, game!
Luckily, the game registered the fact that we won the battle, so it assumes everything has proceeded normally. Killing ourselves has forced another visit back to the lab.
Lab Visit #13
To watch this as a video, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV0X0k8bIGs
Doctor: "This is it, Number Five. It all comes down to this."
Doctor: "Time?"
Gal: "T-Minus 19 minutes."
Doctor: "That's how long you have before Raven's life support goes critical. We're going to try to add a timer to your heads-up display."
Doctor: "Whatever you do, you must defeat Perfect 1 before you can shut down the system. Accomplishing that frees everyone inside. We don't know what you're up against, so keep your eyes open."
Doctor: "Good luck, Number Five."
Okay, so we'll have 20 minutes to kill Perfect 1.
Once again, we get to see our stats.
Argh! Here's a mechanism to the game that we haven't really seen until now. Because we "crashed", the game lowered our stats and removed some items from our inventory. This mechanism can seriously counteract any leveling you attempt to do. Usually, if I crash I just sigh and load the game.
We don't have much of a choice here, though, since we had to kill ourselves to get out of the Arena. We aren't given any chance to regain these stats, either.
Let's review what we saw:
* Loki never shoed up, but we killed him somehow anyway.
* We killed Raven, but the battle didn't end, so we killed ourselves.
* Ol' Doctor back at the lab didn't seem to mind our methodology one bit. He patted us on the back as if we're off to play in our first T-ball game.
* Because we killed ourselves, the game lowered our stats and took away a Chaff item.
That Loki battle bug is certainly getting the last laugh! And Raven was on the left for crying out loud!
Not to worry. Certainly the final battle will redeem the game to a level of venerable quality.
Next episode: The Final Battle