Come and Take Your Medicine (fists only)I wasn’t sure I’d get this one today, but I was sure it was within my grasp if I kept practising it. I was determined not to fire a single shot in this level, because, as far as I’m aware, this level’s only usable munitions in solo games are an alien weapon and a handful of magnum clips. It was basically a baptism by fire, but I emerged much better at fist-punching Troopers to death, as long as I have sufficient space to do so. It’s still utterly beyond me how to deal with them in cases like the sniper ledges in “This Side Toward Enemy”, though.
The last few minutes of this video are probably fairly boring, as there’s a lot of wandering around trying to make certain I’ve cleared out the whole level. This winds up being for the best, because I encounter a Trooper underwater somewhere near the end. I have absolutely no idea how he got there. It’s probably best not to think too much about how the enemies on this level get where they do; it’s practically random each game, given how gigantic the level is and the fact that there are respawning drones for the first ≈20 minutes. (There’s a finite limit to the number that respawn – according to Weland, it’s seventeen if you add up all the different varieties – but the respawn rate is low enough that it takes awhile to run through them all. I should note that I’m not exaggerating about the “practically random” bit. This film took about a dozen attempts to make, of which around five ran long enough for me to have seen most of the level. In no two of those attempts did I encounter all of the Troopers in the same place each time.)
I think I killed all the enemies. I should note that I don’t count the Compiler with the terminal (F’tha, if memory serves) as an enemy. You have to either fire at him/her/them or come into physical contact with them, and the S’pht are slaves. But other than that, I’m fairly sure I killed everything. It’s possible there’s a respawning drone I missed, but given how long I spent wandering around the map, I kind of doubt it. Regardless, I didn’t make 100% certain – I wound up leaving for a bit, and I decided to finish the film and leave it encoding while I stepped outside.
In any case, I’m quite pleased with how this one turned out. There’s still room for improvement, but I doubt I could’ve pulled this off even a couple weeks ago.
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Should I start publishing any of my films in the main playlists? If so, just the ones I’m really happy with, or should I just put my best version of each level up regardless of what I think of it?
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As far as other people’s films, I’ve decided to encode Michio Hashimoto’s M2 films for now, because a lot of them are very long (he often put several levels in one film, so the later ones aren’t really Vidmaster films, but they’re still pretty interesting), so they’re nice to leave encoding while I sleep or wander off to work or what have you. I think I’m also going to try to get as many of the vid tips encoded as possible, since most of them are quite short.
I’ve been incredibly busy lately between vacation, looking for and then starting a new job, and various other real-life tasks, but there’s a chance I may finally be able to take a serious look at getting an emulator running this weekend. Don’t set your clock by it, of course – I’ve made this prediction several times before and been proved wrong. I’ll also look into generating a resource fork for the
Rubicon map, which sounds like it may be a lot less time-consuming than getting an emulator running.
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ETA: I added a poll requesting feedback about what videos to encode next. You can select any or all options, though I’m not sure how meaningful it would be to select all four. (I guess it would mean you’d be happy seeing whatever I posted.) If you select the third or fourth option, please explain your selection. For that matter, if you select the first option, if you have a preference as to which player’s films (and which of their films) you’d like to see, that’s worth an explanatory post as well.