Part 36: Episode 35: Locked and Loaded

Before we begin today, Speedball pointed out a neat little detail in the bunk bed room that I missed.


Examining this locker twice gives you the impression that it's just an odd background detail. Examine it a third time, however...


this is Parasite Eve 2, so you bet your ass there's more flavor text



: "There is nothing I need here. I leave now for a higher plane. Farewell to life's insatiable yearning for joy -- to death's love of lies. To fools who would be geniuses and fools who would be fools... Cheats ruled by base instinct, the sick ruled by baseless sensation."



: "Your existence is meaningless wanderings in mute darkness."




goddamn, dude

But the note goes on:


Good friend? Yeah, whatever, pal.


That was weird. What do you think, Aya?


yeah, pretty much

: Who wrote this? Who's Bowman? I wonder what he was trying to say...


What indeed.



Now, where were we?


Oh yeah, in the bowels of the Red October.


Naturally, it's locked. And we can't reach the bizarre ladder on the roof, so Aya has no comment on it.


But there's still more to see in this room, so let's just


wait a sec


just gotta mop up here


what keeps hitting me?


oh fuck you wall robots


Yeah, so I kinda forgot about that little encounter and ended up getting kind of beat up. It's not a particularly hard fight, it was just sloppy playing on my part.

But let's take a peek in that big window Aya's facing!


gross

: They're frozen. I can feel the cold through the glass.


Man, I keep forgetting about that guy. For our primary antagonist, the dude sure is camera shy.

: The monitor below looks like a cardiograph.




Odd that Aya identifies the bodies as corpses before noticing the cardiographs. Oh well, I'm sure this little horror show will never come up again. Moving on!


Even Aya doesn't know what this thing is.



: The upper door is so high I'd need some kind of stand to reach.

No crazy rambling note this time, at least.


This room is a dead end for the time being, so let's head back out into the central corridor.


I sure hope the next room is less of a bust.





oh my, yes


Annoyingly, these are all locked tight, so no free armor for us!


Before we go on, I'd like to highlight this post from earlier:





So thanks, SnakesRevenge, for making me giggle to myself the whole time I'm writing this update.


The game switches to third person narration for this one line. No idea why.



: The monitor turned on! Did it sense my BP counter...? It looks like I really can use this. What's going on here?


Now, I'd like to point out that this isn't completely out of nowhere. It certainly looks like Squaresoft just ran out of ideas of ways to get new items to the player and plopped a vending machine down, but remember what our old pal Ned said back in our last encounter:


Ned is clearly also a hunter of NMCs. So, it's possible he also collects Bounty Points and spends them to get all his neat toys. But aren't BP an invention of MIST? Why does he have access to them? And how? There couldn't be a mole in MIST, because we all know Aya's the only person who works there!


But, anyway, we can buy shit. There's not too much new at the moment.


There's the Hammer, which is essentially a lightning gun you attach to your assault rifle. That is all you need to know. I chose not to buy it at the time, but now I cannot think of a single good reason not to add more lightning to my arsenal. I'll be back for it.






There's also a whole batch of new armor! The PsySuit looks slick as hell, in a SciFi sorta way, but the Combat Armor is the most appealing of the three. Silence is a super annoying status to get hit with in the Shelter, since lots of enemies in here have severe elemental weakness that you can easily exploit with spells. Also, you kinda need spells to deal with the Blobs. The built-in Motion Detector is convenient, since it gives you the little on-screen radar in combat without actually having to equip your Motion Detector, giving you more space for healing items.

The NBC suit could be appealing if you really, really hate getting hit with status effects, but on a normal play-through you'll probably have at least one level of Metabolism, so status effects aren't that big a deal. Plus, NBC put Community on hiatus, so fuck them


In the end, I just ended up stocking up on Rifle ammo, because I'm boring.


I wish Barry Burton was in this game. Actually, that might be the only way for Aya's supporting cast to be less helpful.


I cannot get in this door.


I want to get in that door.


Here's one of PE2's most infamous ways to fuck yourself. Remember that Black Card we picked up back in Nakatomi Akropolis Tower?


That tiny black pixel against the slightly lighter background? The one that you could easily walk right past and never even know it exists? Yeah, that Black Card.




Yeah, so it opens this gate on the second disc, and if you miss it, it's gone forever. So, uh...don't miss that Black Card!


The Munitions room contains exactly what you'd expect: lots and lots of bullets. Only a few of the lockers are open, but it's still enough to make snagging that Black Card several hours ago worthwhile.




The first of three(!) infinite boxes of bullets contains the bog standard 9mm rounds. We can completely ignore this one.


The next one contains Hydra Rounds, which are the second best 9mm bullets if you had forgotten. Since this is an unlimited amount and Hydras are better in every way, I don't know why they even bothered with the first stash.


SMG and handgun fans rejoice!


There's also some gun lockers in the back of the room. Is that another rifle I spy?







Well, maybe we'll have more luck with that one.







At long last, we have a shotgun worth using! The SP12 packs a hell of a punch, despite being a bit on the slow side. The 7 shell capacity doesn't sound like a lot, but most foes you face will be dead in 2-4 blasts to the crotch, so reloading isn't as big of an issue as with the PA3 shotgun.

Plus, it's a SPAS-12, aka the shotguns from Jurassic Park. So, fuck yeah.


Even Aya likes it! Now where are gonna find some ammo for this bad boy...?


Oh, in this infinite box of 12 gauges right next to the 9mm boxes, of course!


Before we charge off on our rampage, we should probably find out what this big kajigger is.

: This machine looks impressive... [GOLEM Arm Switcher]


Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted to have a robot arm. I blame Star Wars.


This door loops back around to the locked door in the Food Storage room, so unlocking this creates one more shortcut back to our fountain of ammo.


We return to the central corridor for another little bit of shortcut unlocking.


We unlock this door to give us a quick trip back to the entrance lobby we first arrived in.




With all that done and our new instrument of murder in hand, we finally move forward.




Uh, this looks bad. Maybe we should get some protective gear out of one of those lockers.


Welp, time to get Ebola, I guess!








Next Time


Aya's so drunk, you guys