Part 12: MISSION 11: Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Stupid

I never cease to be amazed at how this game can take a perfectly sound concept and COMPLETELY fuck it up.

MISSION 11: Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Stupid



So, in case there was any doubt last time, we are LITERALLY summoning dudes from the future. I've got all my fingers and toes crossed that it's a giant shirtless Vladimir Putin.

Also, we're destroying slimes. However, fans of the Intelligent Slime can commence gnashing of teeth...you're never seeing that clever fucker again.

Also also, why can't these shitfuckers get their text to cut off in a reasonable place? It's not like this is an isolated incident.



You can tell we're near the end of the game, because these donglickers can't even be arsed to bang out another shitty Photoshop. And if there's one enemy that's not going to get me psyched about playing another enthralling mission of Stalin vs. Martians, it's your bullshit space iguanas.



Right, wormhole to the future. If we can't keep it open wide enough, Gorbachev can't get his freakishly-birthmarked head through the portal. As you can see, we have another motley crew of useless infantry, awesome supertanks, less awesome other tanks, and double-plus awesome Kitties.



...Which are immediately beset by hostile spore growths, techincolor amphibians, and aggressive dessert toppings. It's awfully nice of the designers to go ahead and lay out our forces in an ideal defensive pattern...all I have to do is hotkey the Katydids and mark targets for them.



These bounding booming bitchspores look like they need a liberal dosing of indiscriminate rocket fire.



With wave 1 down, wave 2 breaks onto the scene with a huge horde of Kif-looking domeheads.



Turns out they're deathly allergic to rockets. WHO KNEW?



One of my shitty tanks volunteers to hoover up the funds hemorrhaged by the greenskins. Thanks for taking one for the team, deadweight.



Looks like some tri-eyed infringementators are coming down the pipe. Even I'm not enough of an asshole to leave a good tank to die at their...vomit?



I pull back, and somehow a squad of Hypnodurfs is the next to show up. I guess these guys can just spawn in wherever.



It's all the same to tank shells and blind-fire rockets. Just give me something to shoot.



See, there you fuckers are. Don't be shy! There's plenty of the people's justice for everyone!



While I was busy taunting the wildlife, a mix of Cacodemo-things and creatively-colored geckos started hitting my other front. That just won't do.



You dickholes deserve some rockets. No, no, don't feel bad. I've got more than enough to spare.



Treasure this moment. This might be the only instance of a three-eyed spherifuck launching a visible attack you may ever see in your lifetime. Seeing this shit coming is about as rare as a total eclipse.



It's Mission 11, and the developers still haven't figured out that suicide units aren't scary unless there is any possibility whatsoever of them getting close enough to detonate. And that's assuming they do significant damage. Which, since I only care about my supertanks, they do not.



I guess that last guy doesn't count. Fine with me! We defended the "wormhole" for an arbitrary amount of time, and now we get to assault the "sources of slime". Which, if you remember your Stalin vs. Martians alternative bullshit made-up history, means blowing up scowly trees.

Yawn. Whatever. What about our promised reinforcements from the future?



...Oh.





This game finally finally FINALLY delivers on a briefing promise, and in a way that does not disappoint in the least. This thing is just as impressive as it looks, with tons of HP and a legitimate 2x rate of fire over normal tanks (because it has two main guns!). And we're going to need it, too...



Sure enough, we're felling trees again. If the game insists on being monkey-cheese wacky, couldn't we have gotten lumberjack agents or that insane tree-felling tank from Ferngully or something?

No problem, we'll just roll our FUTURE TANK up and



FUCK ME SIDEWAYS



To the 's credit, it manages to tank this absurd opposition while my supertanks and Kittyhawks roll up for support. I'm not sure how this would be possible without it.



In fact, I'm not sure it's possible with it. These things are doing a number on the FUTURE TANK, and I foresee needing it later in the mission. Now seems like a good time to try out our last untested special power, RED MAGIC



And hooray, we win! Our is down to 1/4 of its HP, but the rest of our forces are intact. Hopefully, with some creative rotation of frontline units, we can pull this mission off.

What's that, you ask? What did RED MAGIC do? Why, I'm glad you asked! It did ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING. Oh, wait, I'm sorry, that's not true. It took 150 StalinBux from me and THEN did ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING.

I may go back to a previous mission to try and figure out what it does...after the confusion over Rage, I'm pretty sure it does something...just nothing that has any bearing on anything in this particular situation. Alternatively, Paingod can chime in with what it does and how it helped him beat the last mission, because anything that gets me out of playing this game anymore makes me happy.



Rolling on to the next slime-spewing arboreal horror, we find a much more agreeable mix of otherworldly weirdos. Namely, sprinkles and suicide shiitake. Supertanks should be more than a match for these losers.



...Or they would be, if one of them didn't decide this is the PERFECT time to go driving off into the middle of I DON'T KNOW THE FUCK WHERE.



Yes, tank! Perfect! I absolutely wanted you to zip past the enemy fortification we're pounding away at, drawing the ire of foes we haven't yet incited to battle. Furthermore, I'm OVERJOYED that you encountered a second unseen unit of enemies and engaged them with reckless abandon. This is exactly what I hoped to do when I instructed you to move to a location that is SO FAR OFF THE LEFT SIDE OF THE SCREEN THAT IT CAN NO LONGER BE SEEN.



Oh no, the space lizards from the next encounter destroyed our adventurous little tank! How could this be??



I'm getting so sick of this fight already that I don't care if the 'shrooms fart all over my tanks. It's not like it does that much damage anyway.



The last line of defense in this slimehole is Blowbos. And luckily, the janky-ass fog of war makes it so we can't actually see them well enough to shoot them unless we get close enough to cause them to attack. Finally, the developers found a way to make these Fantasia rejects threatening. Yay.



Everything catches on fire. As long as they bad guys die, I can hardly be arsed to care.



These thing are such a pain to dislodge. You can't even see this last group unless you get this close to them. So much for tactical positioning.



A few more burning tanks later, we're left with only one slime bastion to obliterate. I think we're looking pretty good.



Just need to take a little detour to stop these bug-fuckers from remote-farting all over our tank columns.



The last tree is guarded by a horde of meatball bastard ripoffs. They do plenty of damage, but only if they don't get massacred by tanks first. Good thing I have plenty of tanks.



SPLORT

Okay, truthiness time. After I beat Mission 10, I went ahead and attempted this mission, because I really wanted to know what the future held for the U.S.S.R. Once I got ahold of the and was instructed to blow up the trees, I thought maybe I could cheese the mission by just torching them with the FUTURE TANK and ignoring the Martian forces. Imagine my surprise when the "Kill All Martians" objective popped up...hence my more conservative approach this time.



FUCK. Not that it's helping much! I had really hoped they would keep those damn artillery aphids in that one retarded mission, but of course they wouldn't be so accommodating.



A mess of Lagrange Lizards and oooOOOooohs stymie my progress before I can even find the fartbugs.



And there's a LOT of them.



Focused fire wins the day here. My tanks are taking a beating, but the main culprits are gone and I managed to locate those stupid goddamned bugs, at least. They're not going to survive the fight, unfortunately.



So, fuck it.



I ripped the page with "overkill" on it out of my dictionary.



And wiped my ass with it.



This is all I've got left to take on whatever aliens remain. I guess I have infantry, too, but they're about as useful to me as sprinkles are to the Martians.



Might as well see how far I can get!

...And this is where this mission falls apart. Getting a super-unit to combat overwhelming odds makes for a neat mission, right? Since there's one of it vs. tons of them, you still have to use it intelligently. That's what I failed to do, and I thought I was about to pay for my hubris.

And what should pop up in the middle of this fight, but a Full Health token.



DING! I win.

Without another concentration of Martians like the one that dragged my to a quarter life, I can't lose this mission. They were so, so, SO close to crafting a challenging, interesting mission, but forgot to account for their random-ass power-up system. I don't even NEED more than one Full Health token, but as long as they keep popping up around my FUTURE TANK, how am I supposed to lose?



Answer: I'm not. The Martian resistance disintegrates before my temporally-displaced treads. Make peace with your alien gods, bugtillery.



This might be important later.



I thought about checking down here for more aliens, but it turns out I'm not allowed to move units there. How the fuck am I supposed to divine THAT invisible wall, game? Fuck you!



It doesn't matter, because the rest of the assholes are up here.



Geico Psychos and Hopkin Weird Frogs. I roll my right into the middle of them, middle fingers held high. The FUTURE TANK has no machine guns, by the way. Just its 2x main gun.



Watch as the pitiful reptiles fight fruitlessly against their fate. Suffer for your insolence!



...Wait, we're still not done? Jesus.



Wow, you guys are assholes. Did your girlfriend dump you the night you designed this mission?



It's faster to trigger the 'shrooms than shoot them. Look at all the fucks I don't give!



Now it's just a matter of mopping up the pretty pink froggies.



I knew that thing would be important. Let's trundle on over.



...Okay then. Why even bother if you're not going to spawn a final battlegroup? Actually, why am I even trying to reason with such shitty developers?



I ACTUALLY CAPTURED THE VICTORY SCREEN

So, what have we learned? Those fucki


Click to lose seven minutes you will never get back

Are you still here? I barely made it through that bullshit myself. Anyway, what a pointless piece of shit that mission was. They ALMOST managed to make it interesting and challenging, but I guess they remembered that wouldn't really fit with the rest of the game. We're down to the final mission...and at this point, I'm not sure anything could surprise me.



NEXT TIME ON STALIN VS MARTIANS: