E1M3:
Five doors. One locked, another the wrong end of a one-way door, and three mystery doors. The scientist is an informant, hopefully he won't walk all the way into a firefight. My choice of door leads me to a sewer-ish looking place, I think these are intended to be vaults. Its got regular guards, and doors that are rigged up to open when I walk past them. They contain turrets. I think that's a first too.
A secret from a computer room in this area leads to two body armor guards. After dealing with them, I come to the realization that this is a maze. Most of this floor holds a maze, full of treasure and quite a few plasma spheres. This proves more difficult to breech than it sounds, for I keep getting killed by the guards after I think they're dead. Their tactics are more effective than I credit them for, or by the spheres. And whenever I run off, the nearby cafeteria, the other open door, is a tricky mess of guards, oh, and Goldfire pops up in there.
I won't bore you with the details of the maze, suffice to say its quite long and contains a lot of plasma spheres. The idea is to shoot them with the PDU, with any other weapon you probably won't hit them in time. Nearly drains my ammo, takes most of the complimentary medipacks, but I make it to the maze's treasure room...containing a less powerful weapon. Nobody is going to make it that far without this stupid thing. Fortunately, in a secret in the cafeteria, the PDU exists. Not sure how you'd keep pistol starting these maps, but whatever.
The continuation of the non-secret portion of this map is not any less fraught with danger. Straight away there's a one-way door, naturally, no point in walking around normally. The low ammo supply I have because of the maze is not very helpful. Guards are no problem, but aliens are, and I pass by several Goldfire portraits nervously. Getting very low on ammo.
The real fun starts when I reach the plasma spawners. These spawn the big, ranged plasma entities. The kind from the first level that shoot many little projectiles. They're not the toughest enemy, but because of their relative place on the totem pole, they're the most evil. Although any monster that just pops up would probably obtain that moniker. The key I need is in the realm of these fun fellows.
I duck and weave out of there, and manage to not grab the key. Okay, find, I'll just stock up on ammo and health in these hallways. Just some guards and pod people...a lot of portraits here. Eh....Why did they have to have treasure in here? Quick dash through, good thing the PDU doesn't harm me.
The final leg of the level isn't that bad. Some turrets, some guards, and more annoying informants that get in the way. At least they aren't harmed by electrical barriers. What, is Stone the only one not wearing rubber clothing? Whatever.
Before I end this, let's show you the final treasure item. Money bags and gold bars are obvious, but these Xylan Orbs are a strange thing. For a good chunk of time I've just thought of them as fantasy thing. Looking them up...they're actually a very common biopolymer. In plants. These are the most valuable things in the game. Made from something far more common than plants. Or am I supposed to believe the process of turning it into an orb is difficult? Whatever, I'm sure I'm thinking about this more than JAM did.
This Session: 1.5 hours
Total Time: 5 hours
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