Part 38

That sounds like an incredibly safe and wise thing to do!

So here's Tartaros, a factory type place with tons of mecs running around. Which means ample opportunity for absorbing programs.

ZEKE picks up an awesome and suicidal technique. It does a lot of damage, but he loses 1 LP every time he uses it (of course, he's got 15LP since he's a mec). It combos pretty well too.

After some "push the switches to open the door" nonsense, we get to the back part of Tartaros, which is a big ass mine.

YAY MORE SWITCHES

Here's another.

Number two of three. I forgot to screencap the last one, but I'm sure you all can imagine the scenario in vivid detail. More importantly, check out the green mec sprite in this image (it's in between the guncarts). These are BigDiggers, really powerful mini-bosses. They're also way too powerful for me to reliably defeat, as I forgot that Leonard wisks us over here immediately after you recruit him, so I didn't grab the JetBoots I needed to avoid their quake attacks.

I do manage to kill one, after many reloads and kamikaze attacks from ZEKE. They each drop an item after defeat, and I managed to get the weakest one of all. A ZenGun is actually weaker than a LethalGun. Nifty prizes I passed up include a PoweredSuit, an OctopusBoard, and a fucking HyperionBazooka.

It's worth noting that the always-wrong BradyGames guide lists BigDiggers as having around 9000HP. Three of the four BigDiggers you can find here have far more HP than that, probably around 30k or more. The one holding the OctopusBoard is even stronger still. You don't encounter these guys anywhere else in the game, so I have to wonder where the hell the guide got that number from. I only keep the thing around for the maps nowadays, I know more about the game than it does.

After Switches 2: Electric Boogaloo, we find an elevator.

It's powered by glowing.

Leonard starts hacking their gibsons and whatnot.

I really hope he actually stood there and read each number aloud (there were even more of them than what's here) while HeavyG and Gen stood waiting.

We're special.

Well, we can get to HQ now, but we'll save that for later.

First, there's some fun stuff we can do in Koorong.

In the backstreets, we come across a dead end.

Or maybe it's...

A secret passage.

Don't do drugs, kids.

He sells us a SecretBoard, which is an item that mecs can equip for some nifty stat boosts. There's plenty of other boards out there, such as the OctopusBoard I mentioned earlier and MemoryBoards, one of which is found here in the sewers (making this a nice place to stop off at if you need to pump up a mec early on in a quest).

There's a little store further on in, as well.

The owner's a Bud fan.

Hey, Leonard knows him.

Even with the physical resemblance, I'm kinda surprised he could recognize Leonard, what with the species change and all.

Random hidden shopkeeps wanting to join up? Unusual!

We take him, of course.

I sure do love free stuff.

Yeah. His name's PzkwV. Dunno how that one came about, but it sure is .

And finally, in the silly category...

I believe he can fly.

Indeed.

We're heading for HQ next update.