Thursday, June 11, 2020

Catacomb Apocalypse: Blinded by the Light

It occurs to me that Softdisk does that one thing that everyone finds annoying. You know how solo company efforts tend to put themselves into every role they can? Softdisk does six screens of saying, "we made this".
Portal 2, portal of fire. Enemy, nice, thanks Jim and Mike...wait, he's running away...oh...no...
You're having a maze level...on the obnoxious eyesore of a level that is the token hellscape? Screw atmosphere, I need to give ten points to games that don't do this. He comes back as I just stare away in shock. I can still see this in the corner of my eye. So I follow the guy, I know I'm going to miss something now. Right, this level is going to be fun.
New enemy number 1, cyberdemons. Another thing Catacomb did first. Not as impressible, mind, these are just the demons from earlier, now robotic. Okay, I vaguely travel in the direction the eye went and see enemy number 2.
He's about as strong as robo-mages. Not too tough, but as a tank, I was expending something more interesting design-wise. The rest of the level proceeds swimmingly. Follow eye, find exit, with key. Not the right key. Follow eye again, shoot eye because he's stupid and goes in front of the enemy's that are hostile. Find other key, successfully find my way back, leave. Also, if I awaken any of the nemesi heads in the hub area, they go back to sleep when I return. So, portal 3.
The ancient node...more like the ambush node. Four freaking wizards. They're not difficult, I just hate this kind of start. They can't shoot through the barriers, but there's like four of them and two old demons there. I miss skeletons and zombies. Behind a corner, even a few more of them. At least Jim and Mike are generous with a whopping two chests!
An unlocked door. Nice. The dusty passages are...okay. They exist. I wish they had more than two enemies, but that's what I say about every level at this point. Nothing of note here.
Another barrier area. Great. These seem tough at first, they were a bit during the last game. But here you basically put them into a choke point and then hammer Ctrl and hold the down arrow. How can you tell if someone plays this game? They don't have Ctrl keys anymore. That's it, that's the rest of this level. Open area, hammer ctrl, afterward collect any treasure.
Portal 4. That's an alien from Commander Keen. What the...? Since when did Softdisk own the rights to anything in Keen? Surely that's not the entire enemy?
Oh...scary. Big-ass alien. Boring. They explode in a non-health damaging way. More out in the only way out. Joy. Fun. How many of these bad boys am I going to have to fight?
Every hallway has at least four of the guys. They're not necessarily difficult to fight, just really tedious. They come up and down at random times. There's a million of them, and when they die they still take up visual space for a short time. Oh, and during this level it crashed on me. Wall explodes, game crashes. Hope that area isn't necessary...oh, I have to kill all these things again!
A million years later, I make it back to where I was. Okay, don't shoot that direction in the long hallway, and phew, problem solved. Key is next to the exit portal, don't even really need to kill all these guys, but whatever.
Right, I got all the keys I need, no problem going forward. I have a spare red though, curious. The question is, will I be able to resist the temptation to use it going forward?

This Session:1.5 hour

Time:2.5 hours

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