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While we're all contemplating The Space Bar, I'd like to reminisce about another vital key on the keyboard. I'm talking about the Scroll Lock key. This vestigial appendage was added to the standard PC keyboard in 1961, an invention of Sir Edmund Scroll Lock XVI, to occupy the gap between the Pause and Shutdown Without Saving buttons so that junior programmers wouldn't keep filling it with stick-on novelty "uck" function keys while his back was turned. It was subsequently removed when the standard datacart format increased to 600 TB, as the major keyboard manufacturers needed to make room for a Bitcoin Mining button and, while Scroll Lock was judged to be more useful than the tilde, it was in a less conspicuous location. While its main function was to verify that the keyboard was attached to a functioning computer WITHOUT PRESSING A KEY THAT MIGHT HAVE ANY ACTUAL IMPACT ON THE COMPUTER, the Scroll Lock key in its prime did serve two very specific functions:
In short, I hope you have one of those. I'm surprised to hear that there are no walkthroughs, since I relied extensively on hints to get through most of the game. It's definitely impossible to search for, given the title. But I know the game enough to be a useful source of information if you need it. If nothing else, I can probably rattle off the various time-critical events, approximate times when they happen, and what you need to have prepared before then. When I wanted to LP this game, my plan was to save at the end of the "canon" portion of each video and then spend some time exploring the parts of the bar that don't have anything useful, because there's a lot of great stuff hidden in places I'd never bother to go otherwise, and at least one of them is voiced by the late, great Alan Rickman. I love and hate everything about this game, at the same time, and without contradiction. It's so great. Also, this is the only sci-fi story I can remember that actually put some thought into how alien toilets would work.
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Aug 19, 2022 02:58
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 18:35 |
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The time limits in this game aren't so much invisible as not well advertised, which makes sense. You've got to remember that the reason you're in this bar to begin with is that there's a thief and a cop-killer here, and they're probably not going to wait around for 400 ticks to see whether you can find them. This is the sort of game where I think you're expected to explore, learn some things, take notes, and then restart to take advantage of your knowledge before it's too late. (Heck, one flashback literally doesn't give you enough time to gather all of the information you need, so you have to play it multiple times.) Anything with a listed time is important and means something will happen that you need to deal with. Other than that, there are plenty of things you can just do whenever you have the time, and once you know what you're doing, the optimal path has a LOT of waiting. But like I said, there's tons to do that doesn't necessarily help you progress. You also want to look at everyone's PDA. Thud's is the least useful, since his entire mission is "Take the cup and walk outside," but it's probably for that reason that his is one of the most amusing to poke around in. Most of the others will have vital information, and one of the best gags in the game takes some digging to find, but is totally worth it.
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Aug 19, 2022 12:35
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I make it a habit to include as much chaos as I feel has entertainment value. Sometimes, that includes creative editing or gimmicks.
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Aug 25, 2022 00:36
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The game seems to have a problem overall with tracking whether time passes when you examine things using the magnifying glass icon. It seems to pass for some events, but not for others, which gets the bus's presence out of sync with its schedule. Waiting always seemed to resolve the issue for me eventually. This is actually one of maybe two flashbacks in the game that I managed to complete without leaning heavily on a hint guide, and I think it's one of the high points of the entire game, technical issues notwithstanding. There's a nice, iterative loop of failing, figuring out why you failed, and doing things correctly the next time. Saving is, of course, preferable to restarting, although I recommend that anyone looking to play the game from CDs today copy the contents of discs 1 and 3 into the install directory so you don't have to switch discs. I don't think you need to switch if you just get kicked back to the chat interface and go right back in, but it's been a long time since I played without having everything local. Probably the biggest jerk move in this part is the nav-dial setting. When I played, I was convinced that I needed Thud to set the nav-dial to the correct number, and calculated what number I needed to give him to make that happen. Then it turns out that the driver follows the nav-dial incorrectly, and Thud's mistake compensates perfectly for that. There are some things you just can't possibly predict. No idea what's up with that plane, even after all this time. It flies by after a certain amount of time and shoots at you, apparently just as a reference.
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Aug 25, 2022 21:01
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I don't think any video can properly capture how painful this particular flashback is. It's not just a matter of doing everything correctly, but a matter of timing. As far as I've ever been able to tell, when the egg is in motion, it moves in some semblance of real time, jumping to predetermined checkpoints each tick. If you stand still long enough and don't do anything, it will reach the next checkpoint on its own and you won't have enough time to do what you need to do. This is at its worst in the mine tunnel, where you need to get in front of it. Fail to find your orientation quickly enough, and you'll get that cutscene without the last-second dive out of the way. I believe that cutscene will play if you just get to the door in time, and when I played this, watching the cutscene rather than clicking to skip it often made the difference between getting to the bottom of the shaft in time or getting there just to watch the egg disappear down the flooded shaft. Any kind of real-time interaction in a turn-based game like this is really jarring to me, and this isn't the only place where it happens, but I think it's the most difficult to deal with. Add to that the constant background chatter (which repeats far too often, and yet contains just enough clues to be Too Important To Turn Off) and the default Zzazzl-vision, and you get a perfectly fine set of puzzles that are a bit painful to play through. And I don't think anyone actually enjoys mazes of twisty passages, all alike. Maybe there would be some interest if you needed to switch which doors were open at different times to get to places you need to go, but no. Just open the correct doors, and you're done.
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Aug 31, 2022 17:28
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I knew this was coming when you said you wouldn't be moving in this flashback. It's uncanny how featuring only one location doesn't stop this flashback from having the absolute biggest dick move in the entire game. And I'm including the fact that, by my reckoning, you may already be behind schedule for one of the critical path things you need to do. I think, if you'd been at the bar when the H'Poctyl shuttle arrived, you would have seen an actual movie of the passengers entering the bar. There are a couple of places you can be standing to see them - Seedrot's table doesn't happen to be one of them. Also, let us not raise our mugs in tribute to at least one Fruufnid voiced by Alan Rickman. I suspect he did both of them.
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Sep 3, 2022 02:53
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The biggest dick move, as I remember it, is that in fact THREE of those four numbers are on at the same time on three different channels, and all four channels loop over the same interval. So it will take at least three full loops to get all of the numbers, and if you try to get them all without breaks, Curvystem will interrupt you and tell you to stop watching so much TV at exactly the tick when those numbers come around the second time. The TV won't play during that tick, so you need to wait another full loop to get the number you were after. As for the critical path, I could be completely wrong. We'll see. I remember being in a situation when I didn't have enough time to do everything I needed to do, and it started about when the H'poctyl shuttle arrived, but it's very possible there's something I didn't know, or some random element I'm not accounting for.
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Sep 4, 2022 15:00
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To answer at least one of your questions from the first part: It's not that Parker has a lot of expensive stuff despite them being poor. You have the cause and effect reversed. They're poor because he has all that expensive stuff. Conceptually, the idea of a species with three biological genders has a lot of potential, but I feel like they really squandered it here by going with "Alpha Male" and "Beta Male" and splitting human gender stereotypes between them - Females are good with technology, Betas have all the domestic skills, Alphas are obsessed with their appearance and spending money, etc.
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Sep 10, 2022 03:48
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I think this flashback was my favorite part of the game by far, just because of the overarching humor that characterizes it and how subtle (and missable) the punchline to the whole thing is. The basis of Vildroid society is that Vildroids were created a long time ago by beings who appear, from all the evidence we have, to be human, as simple service droids. As humans do, the Creators upgraded the Vildroids over time, but shortly after they created the Mark IV Vildroids, they all disappeared, leaving no record of what had happened to them. The Vildroids, left with no one to serve, had to fill in the roles that the Creators had formerly filled in society, without understanding why any of those roles needed filling. All they knew was that the Creators used to do these things, and now no one was doing them, so if they were going to be done, it would have to be the Vildroids that would do them. In the flashback, we're many generations later, and most of the Vildroids were built long after the Creators vanished. They continue to fill their assigned roles, still with no idea why they're doing them or what purpose any of it serves. If you paused to read what little was available of the rules of Veebleball, you'll see probably the best example of how that works. The originator of Veebleball as a droid that brought its owner snacks during portions of sports programs when it wouldn't be interrupting the game, and based on what it saw, it recreated the sport as you see it in the game, with events like Chalk Line Drawing, Zamboni Racing, and Water Cooler Tossing. The museum exhibit is also fascinating to me personally, since it's a race of beings that distinctly can't appreciate art acting out the appreciation of art. When you finally get the Mark IV chip at the end of the flashback, I think you can look in your Log and find at least some of the same menu items as Bettaker has in the present, including the listing of the code anomaly. It's an instruction to chop up humans, with a comment saying "Just seeing whether you guys in QA are awake." Apparently, they weren't, and the reason that the Mark IV Vildroids were the last ones to see living Creators is obvious.
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Sep 19, 2022 03:06
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It's been a long time since I beat this game, but silent credits doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. I don't think they expected anyone to watch them. The thing that strikes me about the whole experience, in retrospect, is how little of what you do actually pertains to solving the case. A single flashback yields all the evidence that there is to find (although, I believe that there IS a slightly different reaction if you attempt to arrest the Naphthaleens after watching the recording, as Alias knows that the culprit is one of them but can't identify which one), and one other flashback gives you everything you need to view that evidence. Other than that, you've got two flashbacks that give you the method and materials to prevent being poisoned, two and a bit that let you block the neural scan, and one that leads to a series of events that ultimately let you disable a jammer so you can use the voice printer, which I don't think actually ever does anything meaningful. Your residue printer is both useless and impractical, and there's a whole feature in your log for checking off names of suspects to no end. It's probably the exact opposite of Return of the Obra Dinn. Still enjoyable, but you need to go in understanding that 80% of the game is fluff, and 90% of the substance is also fluff. If you check out Winky Howdy's at various points in the game, the Wispowurwee will move from one object to another. I know it goes into the pot belly stove at some point. The terminal entry always made me think that if I was in the saloon at the wrong time, it would kill me, but I never made that happen. I also always felt like hiding behind the cardboard cutout at the right time would reveal something, but I can't imagine when that might be.
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Sep 26, 2022 13:14
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 18:35 |
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Giving the drink to the Napthaleens early doesn't make much sense, because Ni'Dopal hasn't turned into one of them yet. I think the timeline is that he's the band leader when you first arrive, then he turns into Arksh the repairman, and finally, into one of the Napthaleens. I don't believe there's a way to encounter him properly in any form but the last, so you don't get to, say, show him the datacart and see how he reacts. You could leave it on the table for him, but he'll kill you the moment you do. No watching to see who picks it up. You can use the residue printer on anything you can carry to a place where nobody will see you use the wand, but I think by the time you get to anything Ni'Dopal has touched, the DNA will be too old. You can get Seedrot's DNA from her fruit, for example, and I think there may be some DNA on the darts, but again, if it does give any useful results, they won't help you get through the game. Basically "Ni'Dopal touched this dart recently", but since the point of residue printing is that his DNA doesn't change to match his form, it doesn't tell you anything about the body that shot you. And Seedrot's DNA isn't useful either, since as the terminal says, Vedj are one of the few species that could be identified by voice print if Ni'Dopal were posing as her. I think you can rule out Borksh, the cook, and that's about all the usefulness you get from it. Gus probably doesn't start moving around until you meet him. If you pop in early to say hello, then leave and come back later, he'll probably have moved. Not that it has any bearing on anything - it's just another bit of flavor.
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Sep 27, 2022 00:51
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