First things first; we head to the Desert Nomads to pick up the toaster we found over there. Then, we pick out a likely candidate for the Toaster Repair skill. Mad Dog Fargo is one IQ point away and has four skill points to waste, so he's the lucky man. We hand him a proton ax and head down into the Vegas sewers for some grinding.
A few more screens of this...
So... so epic. Sniff.
Er... not so epic. The second toaster (from the Citadel museum) holds a duplicate of one of the Citadel keys we already have, along with a few power packs. I guess that's a bit better. Regardless, our bros don't feel too enthused to seek out the others, and head along to Base Cochise. If we have any trouble, we'll reconsider.
Here we are. Rangers, ITZ calling you... do you feel it?
I love this pose. It looks like he's standing with his hand on his hip. He's either the campest robot I've ever met or he's going "yeah, I'm shooting you with a bright green laser. Deal with it"
Either way, it doesn't avail him much.
You can probably guess, but after beating the Night Terror, Grunker is pretty much a machine. chzr can only glare in envy, remembering her glory days and weeping when nobody is looking.
The Cochise grounds are pretty well guarded, after all. We don't have
too much trouble, between our power armah and our meson cannons, but it's pretty close.
flashy bastard.
The only weapons that reliably pierce the enemies' defences here are the meson cannons, so pretty much all the kills go to Grunker and Ulminati. The others help out with RPG-7s sometimes, but that's generally more effort than it's worth.
It can withstand a nuclear warhead, but can it withstand... Alex?
Nope
Interesting. So who is the master of this dark place? Could it be... he again?
That'll be a no.
We ask about Finster immediately, of course.
Hmm. Mission!
Hm! Cochise.
Well, we really can't have that. Come, bros. Let's find our way into the heart of this base, and finish the monster once and for all. Bros for one, and one for bros.
What do you do when you encounter hollow walls, dear reader? I'm worried that, after playing this game, I will find myself irresistably throwing heavy explosives at them until I am institutionalised.
A chute! Oh, how frivolous.
The force field takes us back to the base entrance. For now, we elect to explore further to the south.
We didn't expect much of this fight...
...and then they turned out to be the toughest enemies in the game. Hey, they
seemed unremarkable.
Nonetheless, the bros persevere.
We extend the bridge, and proceed across cautiously.
We encounter no opposition, until we reach the single locked room to the north. Alex lets us in, and...
Yes.
Thankfully, these foes are not quite as deadly as they might seem, for being the last (generic) enemies encountered in the game. They certainly have nothing on those damn cannons.
This should keep us going to the end. Hopefully. If not, there's 15 power packs back at the Citadel waiting for us.
The door to the south cannot be opened, so we head to the east. It turns out to be a... trial of sorts?
Our most agile character is (surprise) Grunker. Well, excluding the NPCs, who can't be temporarily disbanded, only dismissed. We split him off from the party and send him across.
I took an educated guess and opened it. Just a guess.
This room is fairly simple...
chzr's perception lets us detect the minefield with relative ease.
We hit a few mines as we move on, but any injuries are quickly healed by the majority of the party that survived intact. On to the next chamber!
After the welcoming party in the hallway, of course. Fuck, I'm getting to hate these things.
Poor Ace. I should probably give enough of a toss to give him power armour at some point. He started off so cool, but quickly became... well, a bit of a butt monkey.
There's not much clever to this room. Move across some hazards, and if you get hurt... well, keep going and heal anyone who's wounded beyond unconsciousness. We initially try to send our luckiest/constitionaliest bro (chzr) across alone, but quickly resort to the former method. On to the fourth and final trial.
A combat trial. Bet I know what's going to come up in here...
We take the time to radio in before the slog begins.
Heh, Sergeant Argent.
Yep. Here we go. There's at least twelve of these.
Annoyed with the fact that only meson cannons really pierce their defences, I decide to close the gap, and take it to them with chainsaws and proton axes. This approach works surprisingly well.
And we're done. Into the final floor of the game. Will our bros survive? Will they figure out the devious puzzle of Base Cochise? And when all is said and done... will they live to fist pump another day?
:salu-
Cadet?
Do I have my military ranks all wrong here, or...?
We open the door with the trusty secpass B. A couple of turrets impede our progress, but they're not even Xenon. We laugh them off, like they deserve.
First room. Cheating a bit here; I saw the radiation symbols, which disappear during the day, and figured I should tackle it before we hit dawn.
As you scan over the large, messy room you think to yourself,
"Early American pigsty Piles of dirt cover the long-lost floor. The earthen
smell of compost hangs heavy in the air. In the far corner of this indoor
barnyard you spot a square-shaped room.
At this point, whoever was responsible for the dialogue got blindingly drunk, as far as I can tell.
What do we do with barriers, children?
That's right... explosives!
Power? Power is good. I guess.
Trial and error with the four Citadel keys leads us to the right one. I can't remember which one it was. I don't care. And neither do you.
You've entered a room where dozens of drills and saws are singing
an ear-piercing song. Blue and white sparks jump from welders and cutters,
dropping to the ground to bounce out their brief lives. A robot torso passes
before you as it lumbers its way across the room on one of the countless
conveyor belts. Even the robot repair area looks in need of repair, with the
roof and wall supports laying exposed. In the far corner you notice a square
shaped room.
We figure it's best to avoid the conveyor belt, in the interests of health.
We don't try. Even you, Grunker.
Now that's the real man's approach. A quick bash and none of this nonsense will impede us further.
And again. Two out of four.
You're drawn into a large room filled from floor to ceiling with
countless computers. The flashing lights and video screens bring the room to
an eerie life. Through the glow of colors, you spot a small square room in the
far corner.
We... head straight through this room. Doesn't seem to be much else to it.
You see an empty room with a small square room in the corner. On
the floor is an intricate diamond pattern. You remove a magnifying glass
from your back pocket, get down on all fours, and begin to carefully study
the pattern of dots.
Last room. No idea what the dots are about. And this isn't my usual "recite what I was thinking at this point in my playthrough" conjecture, I honestly have no idea.
Okay then.
I... hate to disappoint, but he went down in two meson cannon bursts. I guess this isn't a final boss kind of game. Realism and fittingness be damned, I like boss battles. Ah well.
That sounds good. My philosophy with this game is "if it can be activated, use it". Not much has changed in 23 years. What has changed is that, in this game, it backfires half the time. Here, it... well.
Let's try that again.
We reload and split the party into four teams, sending one bro into each compartment (the last one dragging the bewildered NPCs with him). The way you're supposed to do it? Who cares. Something new-school developers could do with understanding is that games, and RPGs most of all, are about
you against the game. You should have to pull every dick move you can think of, every "exploit" you can conjure up, every AI flaw you notice, and after all of that you should be barely standing, bereft of resources, your dreams cut down to hoping against hope that there won't be another wave. There are no exploits; there are only tricks dirty enough that they didn't think to cover them. Don't get me fucking started on people who insist that x game is good as long as you
limit yourself and
don't do x game breaking common activity. Those people make me angry. Sorry, where was I?
Here we go.
The puzzle here is tricky enough that I should probably elaborate on it a bit.
The keys can only be used in one order; an order I followed naturally, so I didn't quite pick up on that. The "1342-666" message (I think) represented the order in which they need to be used. They were activated in clockwise order starting from the northwest, so the solution is NW, SE, SW, NE. As for the colours, you just need to remember what the colours were in the consoles' descriptions. Yes, I did resort to the screenshots to save me there.
Oh.
We have an hour. Every split character's move counts as a "turn" for the whole party. Our team is split into four.
This could be good.
Everyone joins up as quickly as possible. Knowing how pressed we are for time, Grunker steels his brane and leaps across a radiated square.
Though hurt, he survives, and together we make our way to... er, that thing to the north. Suits me.
Escape pod? Sure. Again, suits me...
Oh goddammit
We had to flee a few times to heal up in the course of taking Base Cochise, and this guy was one random encounter I just couldn't be bothered fighting; he was sitting right in front of the escalators on the ground floor, and one step would zoom us away from. But now he's just getting in the way. He dies, of course...
...but did he cost us too much time? Did our bros, our Brothellos, commit the ultimate in brotastic acts... sacrificing themselves for the sake of all the people of the wasteland, bros and hos together?
Well... no. Would have made a good story, but no. My sheer skill tends to get in the way of my LPs' narrative convenience sometimes. I once did an X-Com LP, where I sacrificed one bro to destroy the Overmind thing and die in the blast, only to find out that the area of effect didn't hit his square. It hit the two to his side, so god knows why it didn't hit him. It was tremendously inconvenient. I guess I'm just too good. At everything. Anyway, I'll shut up here and let you enjoy the ending slides, as they are:
Er... about that...
Sorry, shutting up.
Could it be... Base Cochise used to the Bioware corporate headquarters?
Well, Rangers, you made a molehill out of a mountain, and you popped those moles with righteous fury. I'm proud of you all. Let's see what Taskmaster Cleve has to say.
This seems like sound reasoning to me.
And our reward... the equivalent of five levels to each bro.
And those are all the level-ups we got. Everyone got 10 points to spend, though, no fear. I'll cap this one off with a rundown of each character, and a little anecdote about the roles they played for me.
Grunker. What can I say about Grunker? Initially the one who seemed most likely to be a comedy relief character, dying out within the first few updates, he quickly adapted into a fine frontline fighter. After conquering his freudian demons, one could say this bro became the greatest and most courageous warrior of all the Rangers.
I hesitate to offer it, due to the harsh words he has spaked on Risen and his refusal to play Gothic 2 in full as should be a rite of passage in all hairy-chested man-tribes worldwide, but to our noble Feng-Grunker, I can only offer a
chzr, chzr, chzr. Without this disgustingly mutated greasy tranny supermutant, the Rangers would probably never have made it past Quartz. I had to reign her in just to allow the rest to keep up in levels. She may have paled before Grunker's glory in the endgame, but... does any more need said about chzr? She is my new fertility goddess. And if you know what's good for you, you'll bow before her too.
Also, her perception was a lifesaver through most of the game.
Alex. Alex, Alex, Alex. Alex's skill picks were probably the most useful of the whole team, particularly his lockpicking talent. His combat prowess and general disposable-ness...
...well, let it be said that if one bro were to make a heroic sacrifice on the field of battle, and if I were to accidentally forget to save before he reached fatal wound status and cleared a space for the next Codex character, it would be Alex. That counts for something, right?
Ulminati. My character, my diplosniper. Though, as it turned out, without the diplo. As the stat screens show, Ulminati and Alex were... pretty much the same character. Ulminati had a slightly better starting build, and I suppose I kind of favoured him throughout. Who you favour to begin with in Wasteland has something of a knock-on effect; they earn more experience to start with, thus when you discover new cool guns, you give it to them, thus they get more kills, thus they get more skill points and levels, thus... you get the picture. Rest assured, bros, I love you all equally
I'll be posting my full and measured opinions on the game in the next couple of days. I'll be away from home for most of that, so it's down to how much I can manage to type without having to explain to my girlfriend just why I'm doing this. I think she's been vaguely suspicious of me since I showed her Warriors of Diversity and had to explain that yes, PennyAnte was a real tranny... and so was one of the Warriors, which we didn't know at the time... and one of them is now in exile because he asked someone to shit on his chest. Look, if anyone else has an explanation as to why RPGCodex attracts such fucking weird people, let me know.
For now, I'll say this much; this game is far more enjoyable than I expected. The oldest RPG I'd played before this was Might and Magic 3, and I felt vaguely intimidated before playing; to me, that only inspired me to push on, but that won't be most people's reaction. But once I started playing, I could not stop. Wasteland is not a difficult game - not one of my main characters died, there was no save abuse here - and, frankly, if you consider it "unintuitive" or "too complicated", the only thing this signifies is that you entirely lack the ability to take a step back and consider the situation, and you are quite probably not deserving of the title homo sapiens. It's not difficult. It's not that complicated. It's a fucking great game. You have no excuse to try it, unless you simply don't like RPGs.