[monstrous wail] [*dunk*] When I hear “90s’ dungeon crawler”, I usually think of “Eye of Beholder”, or “Dungeon Master”, or, of course, “Ultima Underworld”. It also reminds me of a lot of adults worrying about Satan. So I wasn’t playing a lot of these games until years later. Even still, I rarely see “Pathways Into Darkness” brought up. It’s pretty ambitious for a game that was only developed by 3 people. “Wolfenstein 3D” had only come out a year before this, in 1992, and this would be a combination – first-person shooter and dungeon crawler. Originally, it was going to be a sequel to the designer’s previous game – “Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete”. Well, that didn’t happen, and “Pathways” is now its own thing. As for its obscurity – well, this was a Mac-only game. And, if you did jump the hoops to play it, the game would look like this. Saying this studio had enough developers to be called a team was generous. They’re not getting an “Ultima Underworld” interface. Fortunately, it now plays on Mac, Windows and Linux, thanks to an excellent Aleph One port. This is all thanks to the work of Worken… Workencankentor… Workencacketer… W’rkncacnter! Oof, hope I don’t have to say that again. Anyhow, this will make your game playable, but you’ll really have to read up on the controls. Though, if you’re playing a dungeon crawler, that should already be on the itinerary. But, for example, here, the microphone button will open your inventory, so you’ll need to read carefully, binding everything up right. That leads to the actual manual and what this is all about. Spring, 1994, the Pentagon. The American president is in a meeting, being briefed by his staff. They’re interrupted by a hologram from an alien race called the Jjaro. The alien diplomat informs them they have barely over a week to save the world. Its name is Ryu-Toth, and it tries its best to break down the situation into Bill-Clinton-friendly terms. It turns out the object that killed the dinosaurs remained intact after impact. It was buried thousands of feet underground, and, after some millennia, it began to dream. The object is a member of a race so ancient that it was formed before the Milky Way was dust. This particular one, whose name no human throat will learn to pronounce, fought in a war that formed the Magellanic Clouds. It died there, though Ryu-Toth specifies that it’s more like it came as close to dying as it can. The dead god’s dreaming had been warping reality beneath the surface of the planet, but, over the past century, the changes have begun appearing in the jungles above – including a sporadic appearance of a strange pyramid. The elder god is awakening. There’s only one hope now. The pyramid leads down into the earth near the god’s body. The Jjaro have researched human technology and found that using a nuclear device at that depth will bury the god further and send it back to sleep. The Jjaro themselves are on the way, but it will take them two years. When they arrive, they’ll get rid of it properly. So, Bill Clinton sends a Spec-Ops team to kill god. This sentence alone sounds more like a “Persona” game. You play as one of these commandos. Your parachute didn’t deploy, most of your equipment is damaged, and your team is gone. All you can do is set off alone into the pyramid. This is where the game begins, and there is no telling what waits in there. ["Prometheus" siren] Taking the first steps in, and the pyramid doesn’t look TOO eldritch. The game is completely silent, and there is a skeleton in the corner with a copy of “Mein Kampf”. It says it won’t make good reading, because I don’t know German. Once again, gamers are thwarted by bad localization. So I’m gonna shelve that for now and talk about the graphics. The environments are pretty simplistic. Different levels can have different wall patterns, but, sometimes, the colors are just swapped around. But there are still some details like strange growths or pillars or bones and debris scattered around. There are some distinct areas and there is some environmental storytelling to be found. By its nature, it still is mostly very repetitive, but corpses are very important in “Pathways”, and they do make those hard to miss. The art they do for the characters is colorful, detailed and stylish. And, yes, these ARE characters. This especially goes for all the monsters you encounter. They have a lot of personality to them, with some designs I haven’t seen in another game. For… better and worse… Even with the generic enemy like a Slime, “Pathways” has its own unique spin on it – instead, giving you ooze men with giant gaping maws in their chest. Like the environments, there are some recolors of these too, but they usually indicate having a new special ability or needing some new way to deal with them. The only things in the “whatever” territory are the lightning orbs. I don’t remember what they’re called, but they exclusively live in the labyrinth of shocking ball torture. And, frankly, who gives a shit? [Marv sc-] [-arv scre-] [-eam]
[gunfire] Considering all the graphics in the game are credited to a single dude, it’s pretty cool just how much there actually is. What you’re fighting can be a strange mashup, but they’re colorful and appealing. It is a dead god’s dream, so, who am I to question? As for the music – there is no music. No ambient sound here either. HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" You mainly hear things trying to murder you and the sound of you murdering them. It is the kind of thing you can just put your own music on for, but a lot of times you may not see an attack, but you will hear an attack. You might stop for a moment and take a break, when suddenly a bone explodes out of the darkness, like a John Wilkes Booth Marowak is lurking there, waiting for you. The ambushes are near constant, and the sound has aged poorly. It gets better lat- HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" It gets better later, but the beginning will involve a lot of those things squealing. HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" COMMANDO: "Ah!" HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" x2 HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" x3 COMMANDO: "Ah!"
HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" x4 HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" x5 There are SO many Headless… I thought this was the whole game at one point. HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" x6
There are SO many Headless… I thought this was the whole game at one point. HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" x7 HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" x8 It is weird going from just dead silence to pure chaos. It gets better later, when you can drown them all out with your own gunfire, but in the beginning, it can drive you crazy. SKELETON: “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” SKELETON: “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" SKELETON: “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” There’s really only one sound effect of note, which is the sound the elder god makes if you fail your mission and can’t kill it in time. I think I’ve heard it before, but I’m not sure where. [monstrous roar] It’s mainly a bad, compression-filled nightmare. I do like the sound of those exploding. [*pop-BOOSH*] So here’s how you play it. As far as dungeon crawlers go, item management isn’t too crazy here. Most of your equipment was damaged, but you have a few things starting out. Thankfully, you do have a map in “Pathways”. It’s an auto-map that fills out where you’ve been, and even marks important locations, like exits and corpses. This by itself saves a lot of headaches, though there are levels where it can reset to throw you off. Though, these areas aren’t the most convoluted ones, so it’s fine. If you’re paying attention, it might even show you where a false wall is, though it doesn’t always do this. Still, many of these games gave you NO map. You’ve also got your trusty watch, since the entire game is timed. The manual says the nuke should be detonated before 2pm on Friday 13th. Though, strangely, the god doesn’t actually awaken until a little bit after 6pm. It’s progressing in real time, too, so you have a little bit over 5 actual days to do this. The catch is that you heal by resting, and when you rest – that’ll speed things up. So you can take the watch off, to not always have the clock staring at you, but it’s always ticking down. Your flashlight will last the whole journey, but there are some times when you don’t wanna use it. And you will miss that visibility. Finally, you have your canvas bag. This is where some people can be thrown off. See, in the vanilla game, the weight of all of your items was tracked in the UI. So, based on this, and some other containers you find, you would think you have to do some item-juggling. Well, the Aleph One port doesn’t track weight at all, because the weight is meaningless. There may be a Bag of Holding, but the points don’t matter and never did. This may have been something more at one point, but was likely cut in development. They probably realized that deciding what items to keep from Aphoom-Zhah’s increasingly cryptic garage sale wasn’t worth that extra layer of torture. Knowing how to use a container is important for beating the game, but, really, you can grab everything you see. And you should. Finding treasures and special items increases your maximum health. It won’t heal you right on pickup, but, after a good sleep, you’ll survive some more assassination attempts. As for the weapons, there are a few to find, but ammo is frequently scarce. Along with Hitler’s live journal, one of the first items you find in the game is a Walther P4. Using Nazi technology is a long military tradition here, so of course you grab that. However, you’re not familiar with any of the weapons you come across. But the more you use a weapon, the more experience you gain in it, which translates to dumping out more damage. This is about as far as actual RPG mechanics go. There are wearable items, like rings, that can buff you, or maybe hurt you, but you’re not rotating through new armor or equipment like that. You can experiment to figure some things out, but a lot of it remains cryptic. At one point, I found an equippable gas mask, and I had no clue what it did. After beating the game, I looked up the official hint guide, which was also vague, and it turned out it’s supposed to protect me from something I would not have guessed, and, apparently, it doesn’t always work for everyone, for reasons unknown. Oh, right, there is spellcasting! [*grunk*] Yeah, see? He’s frozen forever. Magic mainly acts as you secondary weapon. Mainly elemental effects, like freezing, lightning or fire. You gain a new spell by finding and equipping an appropriate crystal. As you’d expect, there’s still an element of mystery here. When you cast a spell, the crystal recharges through methods unknown. It will then recharge slightly slower after each use. Eventually, the crystal will shatter, and that is the end of that spell for the rest of the game. The crystals don’t have the same number of uses either. What ramps up the paranoia here is that there are some enemies that are immune to conventional weapons. So, instead of obliterating every skeleton on sight, you have to be more selective. This idea makes sense by itself, but “Pathways” is a mish-mash when it comes to combat and resources. For one, this is a very slow-moving game. The Aleph One version does support mouse look, but it’s even more hyper-sensitive here than some other games. Some titles get vastly improved from mouse aim, but this isn’t one of those. Keyboard aiming is the way to go here, and it’s not like you can look up and down anyways. You can bind some numpad keys for panning and some quick-turn buttons on the center. Otherwise, you’ll be turning a lot more quickly than the game thinks you should, and it will be jittery and disorienting. It takes time getting used to this again, but it’s perfectly fine. Fighting has a very deliberate rhythm to it. In the beginning, you’re typically waiting for the enemy to make the attack – either dodging out of the way, or blocking it off with an obstacle before going in for the kill. It sounds simple, and it is. The thing is, moving at the pace of a sloth with life alert really changes up how you interact with the game. You’re not playing on your feet, reacting to high-speed plays – you’re reacting to a flying walrus slowly rolling around the corner. Dodging shots can only happen if you have room to do it, and frequently you won’t. More than anything, your positioning is the key to success. Checking for an escape is a constant, and you need to be wondering what will happen if an enemy comes around. This makes advancing down a long, barren hallway a death trap. If the enemy attacks first, you near guaranteed to take some damage. But your guns do less damage at long range, which means spending more ammo. Not to mention, this is one of those magical games where enemy attacks can come through solid corners. Ugh… I’ll come back to you again one day, Kain. Still, you can get the enemy patterns figured out, and, when you have room to move, you can start going through them with ease. At first, it seems like the difficulty is coming from the claustrophobic, tight spaces, but, as you get more resources and new enemies are introduced, the maps will begin to open up a little more – relying on distractions and surrounding you. You can see what they’re trying to do, and sometimes, it does gel together, but I’d mainly call it “awkward”, “inconsistent”, “kind of shitty”. [a long sequence of repeating grunting] Now, there is a turning point where this becomes a lot more fun. Once again, this is mainly due to our old friend Kalashnikov. The issue is, it’s possible to miss out on AK nirvana, and, in fact, it’s possible to miss out on a lot of things. Some are fair expectations they expect you to investigate – others feel like failing a hidden test you didn’t know you were taking. In other words, “a 90s’ dungeon crawler”. For example, playing the first few levels, you might swap between your pistol and your knife – not playing wastefully, but using your pistol like a fly swatter if an enemy is in an awkward position. You feel like you’re playing conservatively, until you go up a ladder into the Bone Zone. SKELETON: “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” xထ HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!"
SKELETON: “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” xထ HEADLESS: "Squee, squeerr!" x2
SKELETON: “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” xထ SKELETON: “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” xထ You might think this is the test for saving ammo, but it’s not this floor. The floor above it is the real test. In a simple layout, you face down hordes of enemies. I’ve encountered some silly clown car spawning before, but this is starting to creep into “Serious Sam” territory. I can’t help but wonder how this sequence actually ran back in the day. It might have been fine, which could explain the simple level layout, but… man… If you didn’t stock up for this portion, you might have to go a few saves back. Speaking of which, saving is done on points, so no quick-saving. It can be dangerously easy to miss an item you’ll need to go back for later, or go back some saves, because your current situation is wasted. This kind of thing is not uncommon at all for the genre. It’s not the most egregious I’ve played, and I got through with relatively few headaches, but it’s so easy to see where a player could have overlooked something. Like, was there someone out there who beat the game, who didn’t find the box that magically prints you ammo? Who are you? What is your destiny? You can switch out types of ammo, and this makes all of them. I truly hope you’re theoretical, and not watching this. Living in a world where you can’t obliterate the earthquake skeletons on sight isn’t one I want to be a part of. Once they’re locked onto you, you’re in for the shake-and-bake no matter how many walls you put between them. It never ends with them. I haven’t even gotten to the story – the game’s just so weird enough without it. I’m not sure what the elder god is really… Who the fuck are you?! I’m not sure what this is about, but I cannot pass him… If anyone asks, he ran at me with a weapon. [sounds of justified self-defense] I… [one for the road] Oh, this is perfect… [thunderclap] No magic either. Well, I- Oh my God… [two for the road] Oh, this is like a… tag-team kind of deal. [exchange of pleasantries] You know what? He wins! I’m gonna take the hallway out… One of the most important things you can do in figuring out how to progress is mastering the yellow crystal. Unlike the others, this one isn’t for combat, and it has unlimited uses. This special rock lets you communicate with the dead. As long as their head is still attached anyways – I’m not sure how that works. Some corpses don’t understand what’s happening, and others are more caught up. They always respond to asking their name and how they died, but going from there, you’ll need to use more context clues. You only need to put in simple, one-word responses, so asking about places, people, events and objects allow you to dig further from there. This “guess the word” mechanic was in a lot of games from this era, and could be incredibly convoluted. This isn’t one of those, and it’s actually very straightforward. You just need to keep asking about things brought up, and sometimes go back to the beginning and find a new tangent. This is how most of the story is told in “Pathways”, and it opens up a lot of mystery. There are a lot of corpses to talk to, and some will outright lie to you. For example, the remnants of the Nazi expedition had some soldiers who didn’t know what they were in for. They’re confused, or cooperative, or outright hate their commanding officer. Talking to said officer, he might try to get you killed. Even as a rotting bone pile, he might still have his own skeletons to hide. Putting together the deeper details of the story and what really happened will mean that you’ll have to thoroughly interview a bunch of dead guys and then piece it all together. Beyond that, they can be more helpful on the surface level too. Yeah, sometimes, they spit out “try not to die” hints. But they can also reveal where extra ammo or useful items are hidden. Though, most importantly, they point you in the direction of what you need to do next. The first German that you encounter in the game tells you that the expedition leader was named Muller. He tells you about how shitty Muller was, but also that the door next to him opened up after he played on a strange instrument. So now you know what to look for and what to do with it, rather than aimlessly wandering the halls, shanking noodle people. You still need to do that – it’s just no longer aimless. Levels can mix up the challenges, but these conversations will give you a load of insight. There can also be additional hints, like the map name itself being a clue. The game does make earnest attempts to help you out, but a lot of it still remains obtuse or possibly meaningless, so you can still end up stuck or lost or wanting to look up a guide. “Pathways Into Darkness” can be incredibly dickish to you, but, unlike some of its peers, it doesn’t feel like it’s actively trying to be this way. Again, if you’re playing this kind of game, you know the kind of pain to expect. Operating inside of that madhouse scale, this one is pretty generous. That said, there are moments like the level where you need thermal goggles to see invisible enemies, which then make regularly visible enemies… invisible. Times where you need to take poison, areas that drain all your ammo out, whatever the hell is happening in the cursed IED tomb… But, beyond those specifics, you’re mainly kept concerned by the unknown. If you rest in a bad area, an enemy can ambush you. I mean, resting itself is something I kept avoiding. Any healing items I have I might need later. How much time will I need, and how far down do these pathways actually go? It does a good job keeping you anxious for what’s next – making you stay on your toes and carefully manage your resources. The actual balance is all over the place, and, starting out, you’ll still probably die a lot. Looking back after having beaten the game, it’s not as cruel as I expected. It’s just that the start of the game is the hardest part to get through. You’ve gotta be careful, but you can figure it out. [sound of crushing defeat] That leaves us with the details of the story. If you don’t want spoilers, go to here: GHOUL: “Ow, my shoulder!” So, we start in 1938. A Nazi military expedition was sent to the pyramid, because they’re always looking for occult objects to give them an advantage. What they were told they were looking for and what they were actually looking for are pretty different. Assuming the grunts even knew a fake reason. Those who thought they were in the loop believed it was a treasure hunt. They were looking for artifacts and gold (which are here, to be fair), but, after enough info gathering, you find he was looking for a box and a vial of immense power. The vial contains the essence of a demon that will help the Nazis win the upcoming war. How it’s supposed to do this isn’t clear. However, the small cedar box has much more obvious power to it. Any object placed inside is duplicated after a few minutes. That could be a game-changer, but it does tie into the gold somehow. Muller orders one of his soldiers to find the gold. Because the box can duplicate anything, you should only need one ingot, which is exactly what Muller says, but he’s also adamant they’ll need twelve to do… something. It seems like it had a purpose beyond just finding loot, but what that could be I have no idea. Gameplay-wise, you do get a ton of health from it, but the game is basically over at this point. I can only guess it was needed for some kind of puzzle that got cut – maybe involving the Bag of Holding. Lugging around a “Minecraft” amount of gold sounds like something that would make a weight system matter. So, just add it to the pile of Nazi gold mysteries. Confronting Muller on what you know is no good, since he can’t stop lying. What he actually knew you have to put together from what the other characters tell you. Muller is clearly incompetent, but knows a startling amount about how the pyramid functions. He knows exactly where a strange SCP object is buried, how to get it, and there is no trace of any other human entering the pyramid before. To top it off, they mention another expedition coming through, and you later find out that it was decades later. These guys were a lot more local than Germans – possibly, Cuban. When you talk to one of them, he reveals he got the information from his friend’s grandfather. So the Germans had more intimate knowledge of the Yucatan pyramid than even the locals did. There are also the instruments that open doorways, and they’re called the “alien pipes”. Muller already had one that he brought from Germany. So Nazi high command has intimate knowledge of the pyramid and an object that lets them break into it. They know exactly what they’re looking for, because they believe it will make them win the war. So the question is: how do they know all this? It is possible they had passed-down knowledge, or some lone wolf came to them with it. At the same time, there’s definitely a group that knows way more… and they briefed us on the mission. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and, in military technology, the United States was leading the way. But in 1938, the Jjaro might have thought the Nazis would be a good candidate for entering the pyramid. But now the elder god is waking up in a week, and they’ve been silent about it for 60 years then. Was a week’s notice really the best they could do? If they told the Germans, did they want them to have the vial and the box, or maybe they farmed dead elder gods for the objects created through their delusions? Maybe there is a reason the Jjaro don’t want to go into the pyramid. You could have been briefed on finer details, but you don’t remember what your squad mates look like. Some are insulted, but maybe you hit your head really hard in the crash. Either way, there’s something that doesn’t add up about everything. Oh yeah, there is also the Nazi who said it was 12 days ago. Or maybe hundreds. 16 Sundays. He’s been counting, and don’t worry about his name. He also won’t tell Him *your* name. You know Him – He, who rises with the tides, master of all things small and insignificant. No, no, not tides like that. It will all make sense. This guy is not dead anyhow. He’ll catch up with you soon. Pretty straightforward, I think. [*too-too-too-too*] Your squad mates are a lot more happy to see you. They don’t have any deeper insight for you into what’s happening, but they help you progress through the mission. For one, you have to find out where the nuke is, and, in an ancient DRM method, the code to detonate it is inside of the manual. However, by talking to your squad mates, you also find out that part of the number has changed. You can also find out who has the radio beacon, to call for extraction when the mission is done. The game can end in several different variations. If you don’t have a beacon, you can still escape on foot, but it will take some hours. The bomb itself can only be set for a max 48-hour timer. So you can complete the mission, complete the mission and die in a few ways, forget to set the nuke or the elder god wakes up. Again, it’s more stuff people might forget about on the way down. Or they don’t have the new arming code. Either way, you’re gonna be the only possible survivor. Your other buddies were picked off on the way down, and the rest were murdered by a bizarre-looking monster. [continuous gunfire] MONSTER: "OAUGHEUGH!!" The enemy variety you face is really strange. Besides the monsters, there are all kinds of flavors of undead. Most appear to be humans, but the phantoms are… odd. The Germans can call them “ghosts” or “phantasms”, but Muller specifically calls them “shades”. That’s a more specific ancient Greek term for an underworld spirit. While some manifestations are based on humans and the world we know, others clearly are not, since this god has been around. They get deadlier the deeper you go, and, before you get to the detonation site, you speak to a Cuban explorer. In a mirror story, they were also seeking the demon vial, being told it had great power. Unfortunately, one of them opened the vial, and the demon escaped. Well… shit. Interestingly, the old man who’d eavesdropped on the Germans calls it a “being” over a “demon”. Now, this could be “tomatoes” and “tomatos”, but that’s a very different connotation. When you do face the demon down, you have to go through rooms and rooms of monsters. You can’t harm it, but it also can’t directly attack you. So your final battle isn’t even directly against the elder god (which isn’t aware of you or actively even trying to fight you) – it’s whatever this shady bottle genie is. This is the part where I especially wonder how someone beats the game without the cedar box. You face a swarm of every enemy you’ve encountered, but, after that, it only takes one hit to banish the dude. [electrofart] Yeah, that weird electric beep is the sound it makes. It leaves behind an alien gemstone, which is the only way to open up the door back upstairs. It also drains your health, so, unless you picked up a special box on the way down to store it in, you’re still out of luck. After that, you can arm and leave the nuke, a copy of “Mein Kampf”, if you want, and, once you escape, you’re good to go. [*BOOSH*] You get your score and… not much of a debriefing. So, did the elder god create the demon vial? Could an eldritch being like that seed new life on accident? Its main power seems to be that it’s able to control the god’s creations. Does it understand CHIM? Having limited control or even understanding of the god’s powers could be huge. That does give a good practical reason for seeking out the vial, and could explain why the Jjaro would want it, but how feasible could that idea be? Well, there was a mention of someone who had weird and frightening monsters under their control. You know, on the Illuminati terminal. In “Marathon”. Welcome, friends! Welcome… to hell! It’s one of Bungie’s first games, and it’s still a loose prequel to “Marathon”. “Destiny’s” reveal trailer was called “Pathways Out Of Darkness”. This now obscure dungeon crawler has remained very important to a select few. So, how does this tie into “Marathon”? Well, for one, the Jjaro will become very significant. The “being that’s buried in the earth” will also make more sense. It also establishes, beyond speculation, that, in this setting, there are elites who have made contact with aliens, or are at least aware of them. The fact the plan involved going to Tau Ceti specifically and that Durandal was even looking for aliens to contact might not have been so random. Some of the pyramid’s creatures have strange similarities to the S’pht. But the S’pht are mostly cybernetics now, so… what happened in their history? It could be their visual designs Bungie liked, or maybe there was something more. As for the player, who escaped a reality-bending pyramid with a bunch of valuable SCP objects – it’s not likely the government would ever allow that body to be properly buried. Those with a special interest might have had it preserved for study. And, in the far future, having you back alive at Tau Ceti, just in case, would make sense. Going in alone with a pistol against impossible odds and an alien threat did feel oddly familiar to you, but you can’t quite remember it. Maybe you did become the cyborg, but then… where are the Jjaro? “Pathways” itself leaves a lot unanswered, but some future games might be more enlightening. It’s just another page in this “House of Leaves” asylum. As for recommendations – it’s free, not TOO brutal, and not having too much inventory to manage could be appealing. It is great to see how much an FPS could be, even this early on, but a lot of the good gameplay ideas it has were expanded on, and a lot of them not too late after this game came out. You could point at any gameplay element, and someone else has done it better. Some of them being done not too long after “Marathon” came out, and some of them being done by Bungie themselves. When similar things came after, I ca- Sorry, I think I was repeating myself a little. The actual premise and idea of this game is awesome. It’s the kind of game that’s in prime remake or successor material. The combined mechanics of shooting, adventuring and talking to the dead is really unique, and absolutely could be done so much better nowadays. It also just goes to show how much just a little bit of interesting writing can elevate a game. This easily could have been “you have to go blow up a haunted pyramid”, and, mechanically, it would remain largely the same. By having a premise that’s interesting and strange, it completely changes the tone of the game. Sure, the monsters are glorified Halloween decorations by today’s standards, but it’s nice to have something more underneath it all. It’s a neat little game. I’ll see you next time. SnakesTaint: ““Silent Hill 1, 2 or 3”?” Definitely “2”. I also know that “4” doesn’t have the best reputation, and I don’t think I finished it the first time I played it. I was able to go through it recently, and there is good stuff in there. AmishMechanic: “What pulled [you] down the “Warhammer” rabbit hole?” One of my friends in school – she had a brother who was really into the tabletop game. So that was my first exposure into it, and then “Dawn of War” came out, and that sealed it. matrix_909: “What is [your] most unpleasant videogame experience?” Thinking of a singular moment, what comes to mind is the game “Ring”. A guy starts talking at you while music keeps looping, and it feels like you’re going crazy. It is hard to describe, but I might elaborate on it more one day. Sleepy: “Did [you] learn any skills from the boy scouts that [you] still use?” I did have a job where some rope skills came in handy, but nowadays I can’t remember how to even do a square knot. I think, out of anything, just having “Eagle Scout” written down helped with a lot of applications for stuff. Like, one early job outright told me that was why I got it. Other than that, I mainly remember the trips over any lessons. Murky: “Thoughts on “Sins of a Solar Empire”?” More on that hopefully this year, or early next – I still need to get to “Arcanum”. And “Deserts of Kharak”… I’ve got an outline somewhere. campingcarl: “Have [you] ever worked retail? [Your] voice sounds too jaded to not have.” Man, yeah… I feel like I’ve said this before, but some countries have mandatory military service. A period of mandatory food or retail service would probably improve things for the better. The wages are generally a little better now, but… interacting with customers will dramatically change how you interact with those places. Okay, I’ll see you next time. SKELETON: “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”
