One Legged Man in an Alien Wrestling Contest: Let's Play Hybrid Heaven

[Timrod]

Summary

: After the fight with Kevin, we wind up back in his office, where there’s an easily-missed key item on the desk.

: To get it, you have to shoot the box and then jump on the desk, which is a little awkward to do.

: It’s hard to capture in stills, but there’s a flat blue light orbiting the president in a clockwise fashion.

: “The enemy is trying to remove all of the President’s memories. They probably intend to move the information into the false President above ground. As you can see, they’re right in the middle of the process.”

: “I’ve been trying to reverse the device flow and rescue the President.. but it looks as though it’s locked against access unless you have the memory card.”

: If you missed the card, the game will make you go back and get it.

: That’s not how the actual cloning devices work. They back up brain copies to these big tape-like things that are made of lasers.

: It takes days and has to be precise or else the memories get all screwed up, like the four months one of Superman’s clones spent where he forgot how to speak English and spoke entirely in backwards Kryptonian.

: “Good! I have access now. I am channeling the President’s memories back to him.”

: The light turns yellow and starts spinning counterclockwise.

: “The memories that were momentarily removed should be back as well. Our hideaway is nearby. We should head there first. It’s possible the enemy is already aware of its existence, but it will at least be safer than here.”

: “The President is all right. He’s suffering from temporary shock, but he should be fine very soon.”

: The gargatuan hideout has a bunch of chests in it we want to open before going back into the room with the president. This is because they refill after the next cutscene.

: “It looks like we’re the only two people from above ground here - there’s no need to be formal with me. I heard pretty much everything there is to know from the aliens - I mean the Gargatuans.”

: “To have a clone of myself, a fake President, seize control of the United States in this critical period just before this peace agreement with Russia.. I suppose the enemy chose this time intentionally.”

: “But we must somehow, no, we must at all costs return to the surface. Is there any way to combat this extraterrestrial terrorist force seeking to gain control of Earth?”

: It’s funny how this sounds like something you’d hear post-9/11 when 9/11 was still two years away.

: “Johnny - you may think us self-centered, but we must ask you for your help. We would like you to use your abilities to return us our Navigator. Once the Navigator has been rescued and returned, we can activate the ship, compress and store the subterranean shelter, and forcibly salvage the situation.”

: “And if this succeeds, we would like to remove ourselves beyond the atmospheric envelope in order to avoid inflicting further damage on this planet..”

: “Hrrmm… Johnny, what do you say?”

: Not shown: Johnny having a brief vision of Holly.

: “Let’s fight alongside them. It won’t only be for them - not only for them and ourselves. We will fight for the people of the United States..”

: “The problem lies in the location of the Navigator’s prison. He is imprisoned in the deepest level of this subterranean shelter, directly under its central tower.”

: “Not only that, but there is only one entrance leading to the place where the Navigator is imprisoned. It seems there are elite guards positioned there.”

: “Unfortunately, as far as we know, this entrance is on the opposite side from where we are. Therefore, you must pass through enemy facilities to get there. The enemy will probably tighten security against your coming. Be careful.”

: We’re now in World 4. There’s a save point and a couple of harmless drones that exist solely to drop healing items in case you need some.

: This part of World 4 is a big ring broken up by enemy encounter rooms. Our goal is to find the path to the center.

: The first of the central rooms has a new enemy in it. This is a Capella, and is generally pretty harmless compared to the wide variety of poison and gun users from World 3.

: Are they called that because they don’t have battle music?

: We kick it so hard that it explodes.

: This room isn’t the right one - you can see that the door to the center is locked.

: The outer ring has lockers in it that are blocked off by a laser wall. These rooms have either a Man in Black or a Peggy in them.

: If you go one room to the right of where you start, there’s a code key machine in front of the locked central door.

: And on the other side of the ring is a code key door.

: We then go down two elevators. I’m not sure why the developers felt the need to do this when they pretty clearly could’ve just used one, unless it’s something weird with the N64’s load speeds.

: The second elevator brings us to an annoying filler room. The drones in the middle drop items when killed.

: This area has two hallways, each of which is blocked off by a series of laser walls. You have to go to one side, find the switch to lower the lasers on the other side, and then repeat.

: Each one has a Man in Black at the halfway point.

: The best way to fight these guys is to wrestle them to the ground and then use any remaining power stomping them out. Stomps do around 100 damage compared to 75-90 for our usual kicks.

: At the end is another drone hallway that drops items.

: We then go down a second elevator to..

: A second ring-shaped area that is identical to the one we just passed through.

: The first room has a Man in Black in it, and you’ll notice that we now have access to four-hit combos.

: We’re going to use this combo until we reach the maximum of five hits. The only reason I have it laid out this way is because I want to make sure L Low Kick reaches maximum level.

: You can see that we’ve long since capped out the two Middle Kicks and R Low Kick, so all we have left to cap is L Low Kick and the two High Kicks.

: After going through a second identical floor, we reach another elevator and a save point. We’re about to go up against an extraordinarily annoying mini boss.

: This is Muhlifain, and it is INCREDIBLYannoying.

: Muhlifain’s AI has two phases. In the first phase, it walks around aimlessly and occasionally uses a rocket punch. In the second phase, it tries to get up close and punch.

: If you try to hit it while it’s moving aimlessly, it will dodge almost everything barring the last hit of a combo.

: You have to wait for it to get close, at which point it’ll probably get a hit off before you can hit it.

: After yet another elevator, we run into the final robot of this area: Pherkad. Pherkad is effectively Muhlifain without the rocket punch.

: You can see from how much HP I’m missing that this thing hits really hard, and it’s also almost impossible to get a hit off on it without getting hit first.

: If I was on the development team, I’d have made it so that you can stun the robots with the defuser in order to get hits off without them running away.

: You can see on the minimap that there’s two exits from this room. We want the one that goes to the long, thin hallway. This is even more kind of pointless busy work.

: The hallway is full of flamethrower traps, which can’t be destroyed. You also can’t jump the flames, because they’re placed in such a way that jumping over one will almost certainly cause you to jump directly into the next one in line.

: The solution is to simply walk through the traps themselves.

: That actually kind of makes sense.

: You wouldn’t think so when you realize how much heat those things are probably radiating. Thermodynamics is scary.

: Aren’t you immune to physics?

: Of course. That’s thermodynamics though. Completely different thing.

: Thermodynamics is a branch of physics.

: Have you tried telling that to the fire and lasers?

: This hallway is really long even on fast-forward. KCEO invented the Metal Gear Solid 3 ladder climb.

: At the end is a room with another robot in it. You can see the orange switch in the background - I abused savestates to not fight the robot.

: Now that we’ve gone all the way around that bridge just to shoot a switch, we need to run all the way back across and go through the other door.

: This leads to a lava pit where the camera does the Crash Bandicoot thing and has you run toward it. The steam jets coming out of the walls do 200 damage if they hit you.

: At the other end is a code machine. If we hadn’t destroyed the yellow switch, there would be a laser wall right behind it.

: The door we need is in the room with that robot. We don’t need to run all the way back because there’s a shortcut.

: Surprise, there’s another robot. I dodge this one too.

: We then need to go through a second steam room to get to a switch.

: The two lockers have an Offense Raiser and Defense Raiser in them. These are permanent stat buffs.

: And now we can progress to the only thing that could possibly be more annoying than melee combat against a robot.

: This is a shoot-em-up fight where we have to use the defuser.. with tank controls.

: I understand why this fight exists, and the reason is because KCEO wanted to do something approximating the Metal Gear REX fight from MGS1.

: The thing is, this fight sucks. It’s far from a save point, you have to be up the robot’s ass to shoot it, and you have to actually aim at it.

: It also has very short windows where you can actually hit it. The red bullet attack you saw up above is one of those - you can hug the left wall and shoot it during that.

: You get a short window before it starts launching rockets, but that doesn’t usually end well because it fires a homing projectile with the rockets.

: This feels like a Resident Evil boss fight in a game about wrestling aliens.

: As a final fuck you, the robot shits out a few dozen homing mines when it dies.

: We get a save point which really isn’t going to help much. You’ll see.

: First, the game throws another Man in Black at us. These are less overwhelming than they were, but still really annoying to deal with.

: This is another series of copy-pasted hallways, and now I’m starting to understand why I dropped this game the first time I played it.

: More flamethrowers, except these ones track your movement.

: And then we get to these. These are rocket pods, which fire masses of homing rockets that are nearly impossible to dodge.

: They also respawn, so you can’t kill them and then save to restore all the HP you lost killing them.

: There’s a Man in Black here that I kill offscreen.

: This is the last part of World 4, and is also the most annoying.

: We have to do a full lap (or two laps, if you want all the items) of this place, which is navigated by crawling on these conveyor belts.

: Each of these rooms has a Muhlifain in it, and I’m not fighting any of them.

: These two lockers have guns in them, but the switch to turn the lasers off is on the other side of this loop.

: The game loves stacking drones right near doors.

: One of these robot rooms has more lockers in it.

: We could skip the green switch altogether, but I wind up fighting a couple of the robots anyway so we’ll just keep going ahead.

: That green panel to the right controls the conveyors. You can leave it alone, or you can switch it to make your trip back more annoying.

: The code key machine and the red switch are in this room. We’ll hit the red switch because there’s a shortcut to the red laser room from here.

: Back in the green laser room, we get a Flame Shot SP. These are like normal Flame Shots except they fire three times.

: Thank fuck that’s over.

: Next time, we’ll do World 5 and part of World 6, which is another long one. We’ll also get access to the full five-hit combo and I can finally explain that really well-hidden mechanic you have a roughly 1 in 43 million chance of discovering normally.