DOUG the Eagle's Anti-Walkthroughs

[Jasede]

That was the most depressing site I ever read. And It's a good one, but still.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.it-he.org/dxhr.htm

Human Revolution #9

Or, How I Learned To Stop Whinging And Love Being A Cyborg

Spoiler

I didn't ask for this.

I asked for a pony.







With body armour and titanium fangs and claws.

My Little Jensen





A short rant about trying to make it work
Okay, Human Revolution is 2011's entry in the Deus Ex series. Set 25 years before the original game, it suffers a severe case of "Bad Prequel Syndrome" in that it has a considerably higher level of technology than the original episode, which as mentioned, comes later chronologically.
I didn't get on with it at first, and that's not counting the hours of horrifying frustration trying to make the horrible online part of it work, that thing you may have heard of that would be more aptly titled 'Scream' made by a company named after vacuum tubes. It's not like I was trying to run it on an exotic platform either, just the current 64-bit windows, i.e. their primary target platform in this day and age.

My respect for this particular piece of software and those responsible for its creation was not increased when it balked during a later reinstallation (after Windows destroyed itself yet again), and for some reason attempted to download the entire 8GB game instead of installing it from the DVD in the drive.
A system designed for human use should perhaps ask before committing the user to downloading such a vast quantity of data, or at least provide a way to cancel it afterwards, hmm?



Human Revolution
But for the sake of my blood pressure I will digress (and digression happened an awful lot while writing this walkthrough thing). The original Deus Ex - and also System Shock 2 - started with nice training areas where you could play around and get to understand the game mechanics without any rush or danger.
Instead, DXHR starts in the office of your ex and she gets increasingly whiny and frustrated if you don't do exactly what she says, when she says. This proved exceptionally difficult for me as my graphics card - while more than a match for Oblivion - wasn't quite up to the task and until I had turned the detail and resolution down it was like a slideshow where Jensen staggered drunkenly around the room and was impossible to control.
The net result was that Ms. Reed stood in the corner constantly complaining while her ex-boyfriend was spinning around on the spot staring at the ceiling and going "Woo! Look! I'm in the future!"

Living on the Ceiling
The next problem was opening the door. I ran up to it, looked for a button, nothing. Tore the office apart looking for a keycard or panic button. Nothing. Meanwhile, Reed was becoming more and more impatient, utterly ignoring the fact that her friend was obviously either suffering from a stroke or a very bad acid trip.

In desperation I went to ask her how to open the door, at which point she opened it herself and the game chugged into a sort of cutscene-stroke-tour where Adam whinges about the military tech they were developing. Reed is then about to confess something plot-critical to Adam when the rather obnoxious sysadmin appears and ruins the moment forever.

Eventually Dave Sarif - your boss - sends you to investigate a fire in the labs (which look eerily like the medical level in System Shock 2), and that is when things fall apart.

In order to avoid possible detention, and execution, please respect, the will of The Many. Have, a nice day.
As mentioned, Deus Ex had a nice training mode where you could learn to shoot, open doors, climb ladders and other skills which might perhaps be vaguely useful later on. Human Revolution does no such thing and instead shoves you straight into a deadly situation with no explanation nor aid and the result of this was that Adam would turn a corner and suddenly be shot in the head by the enemy before he had quite figured out how to fire his own gun.

This happened with horrifying frequency, dragging the 'tutorial' out over a period of several hours of frustration and why-am-I-playing-this-anyway while I struggled to come to terms with the fact that one or two shots from the enemy would kill Adam dead, while it was only possible to kill an invader by emptying an entire magazine of ammo into their head and hoping the other guy wouldn't kill you while reloading.

Finally, after having been shot in the head on more occasions than I care to think about, Adam somehow reached the final room of the labs, only to be greeted by a cutscene where he was shot in the head yet again. This might have had a little more dramatic impact had it not already happened three dozen times before, but after that the intro credits run while a rather gruesome surgical procedure occurs before the game starts proper and you are finally allowed to see how many health points and bullets you have left.



Act I, Scene I - Detroit

You start outside Sarif Industries with Reed apparently dead. Immediately, your retinal display crashes so you really want to get that fixed before seeing the boss. I'm not quite sure what happens if you don't, and I'm not that eager to find out since it is particularly annoying.

You're then sent off to one of the factories (which hasn't been outsourced to the third world) where the employees have been taken hostage. You're offered the choice of being allowed to kill people or not, and whether you want a long-range or short-range weapon.
Remembering Deus Ex and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I said 'long range' expecting a lovely sniper rifle with which to slaughter unsuspecting terrorists from a distance. Instead I got the combat rifle, which looking back was one of the major sources of my woes.

Since there was no tutorial on the game mechanics, the first proper mission was significantly harder than expected until I finally worked out how to make Jensen climb down ladders without falling off and breaking his head.
As in the "tutorial" mission, the terrorists show a disturbing refusal to die when shot between the eyes, much like the creepy French guy in Tomb Raider who had to be shot point-blank in the head with two magnums no fewer than 42 times before he finally keeled over (yes, I counted).

At this point I should probably mention two things which may help explain this curious phenomenon. Firstly, the combat rifle does about as much damage to someone as throwing a metal bolt at them, even when fully upgraded. Secondly, the difficulty levels are radically different from the original Deus Ex. This is why.



A short treatise on Difficulty Levels
Some time in mid 2010 I was looking for games to try and break, and I was recommended Dragon Age: Origins and the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game by two of my friends (one game each). Of Dragon Age there is little to be said except that I stopped playing in disappointment when my hopes for an awesome werewolf army to crush the undead were finally dashed.
I might write a short article about that game later, but the mean reason for this digression is because of STALKER, which at this rate I'm never going to finish at all.
STALKER has several difficulty levels, so I chose the second easiest option, a strategy which has served me rather well for the last 27 years or so when playing a new game for the first time. One of the things which I have been quietly bitching about for some time is the fact that a head shot should take someone down pretty much straight away, which it only does in precious few games, such as Deus Ex.

STALKER takes this to the opposite extreme in that the enemies also have this power, and so you will die very, very quickly if you try to play it like practically any other game I've ever seen. STALKER seems to do a pretty decent job of simulating this kind of warfare, the problem being that it's no actual fun, not least because you have about three rounds of ammo and if you do what I did first time around, no other means of combat at all.
The guy in STALKER cannot punch people and if you don't do exactly what the game tells you to begin with you miss out on the knife - and so I was reduced to throwing metal bolts at my enemies which is just as effective as it sounds. Needless to say I have become a lot more forgiving of unrealistic guns, except where it's completely around the twist like in Human Revolution (e.g. shooting someone in the hand or foot can kill them instantly - a shot to the crotch will often work better than a head shot too).

The main trick with STALKER is that the difficulty levels are very deceptive. You'd think that "Novice", "Stalker", "Veteran" and "Master" would map to something like "Easy", "Medium", "Hard" and "Expert" like any sensible game. Instead they represent "Hard", "Expert", "NIGHTMARE" and "Dies of a heart attack before he even leaves the bunker". Ren, who suggested the game, later remembered that he always plays it with a mod that seems to rebalance the gameplay slightly - but which only works on the original Russian version.

But back to Human Revolution. You don't get "Easy", "Medium" or "Hard" in this game either, you get the cryptically-named "Tell me a story", "Give me a challenge" and "Give me Deus Ex", each of which has a description associated with it.

Anyone who has played 'Fate of Atlantis' will know that that game too has three options, and each one is almost a different game with the same theme and outcomes, but is otherwise entirely different.
"Intelligence" is a very hard point-and-click adventure centred around Indy that I got terminally stuck with, "Fists" is something like a beat-'em-up which I can't really be bothered with, and "As a Team" is a point-and-click adventure where Sophia tags along as Indiana's sidekick, and that is how I usually prefer to play the game.
Finally, anyone who has played System Shock will remember that its difficulty levels can reduce the amount of storyline in the game, an idea which fills me with dread.

The descriptions given in Human Revolution heavily imply that it goes the same way as Indiana Jones, and as "Tell me a story" sounded like it would be a sequence of cutscenes all strung together, I chose "Give me a challenge" instead. This turned out to be "Medium" in the STALKER sense, i.e. "You enter the room and suddenly fall dead for no satisfactorily explained reason".

To cut a long story short, I restarted the game in "Tell me a story" mode at Bas' suggestion and promptly had a much better time of it - with no other apparent differences in gameplay. It's entirely possible that on subsequent playthroughs I will run through on "Challenge" anyway and wonder what the problem was in the first place, but c'est la vie.



Act I scene II - Detroit
So. You very slowly and carefully kill off or otherwise incapacitate the terrorist guys. Like the STALKER guy, Jensen can't punch or stab people in the conventional way. What he can do is trigger a cutscene where he beats the shit out someone, but it wears him out so he has to recover afterwards. It's particularly fun to do this to someone in a crowd since the other terrorists will stand there like lemons and watch.
It is possible to speed up the recuperation time by consuming granola bars in a similar fashion to BJ Blazkowicz in Wolfenstein 3D, who was able to heal by stuffing himself with enough hot meals to feed the entire Third Reich. Meals which were often locked in the vaults along with the gold, I might add.

BJB gets rotund
But I'm digressing again. Takedowns are achieved in DXHR by pressing 'Q'. If you tap it once, Adam will knock them out or throttle them into submission. If you hold it down too long, he will instead gruesomely murder them with his metal blade thingy. You get more bonus for knocking them down without killing them, but it must be borne in mind that if someone finds their unconscious body they can revive them. It is amusing to do this to a partially-invisible foe.

In this game it is shockingly easy to accidentally shoot your unconscious foe in the head or leg while trying to loot them - chiefly because it uses the same control for 'fire' as it does for clicking on 'Take Everything'. Fortunately it is also possible to press 'E' instead and this will avoid unpleasant scenes. It is interesting (and slightly disturbing) to note that the game doesn't care if you kill someone after KO'ing them - you still get to keep the mercy bonus.

Anyway, you will probably find a bunch of hostages, and hopefully prevent them all being killed by the death-trap inside. The foreman mentions that his wife has been taken as a human shield.
Then, once you have bumbled your way into the server room, you will meet someone strange who kills himself. It's almost painfully obvious that they were acting under remote control or otherwise against their own volition, but somehow Adam Jensen misses it. However, he does notice certain other things which he mentions to Sanders later - which I still don't understand myself.

As mentioned, you will ultimately find your way to the hostage situation, where Colonel 'Zeke' Sanders has taken the aforementioned employee as a guarantee. I talked him down and let him go. Given Adam's apparent track record with hostages this seemed the far better approach, but somehow Sarif is unimpressed and you don't have any option to point out that virtually all of his staff survived the attack and he should be Very Grateful.



Detroit, Act I scene III - Led astray
So, back at Sarif Industries. You speak to Sarif, who is disgruntled about the Colonel escaping, and tells you that he wants you to commit a particularly serious crime, i.e. burgling the local police station.
Adam can point out that this is ever so slightly illegal, but I chickened out of directly saying I had a problem with it (which causes him to lamely finish with "Uh, just saying...").
AFAIK it's not really possible to remind him that the media are trying to dig up as much dirt as they can about SII and that actually going out of your way to commit crimes does not make good PR in that scenario.
So, as you turn to go, you are paged by reception and told to report to your office where someone is being blackmailed. This eventually leads to you promising to break into someone else's house in order to steal the evidence they were using to blackmail them.

Finally, when you leave the building, you are collared by Mrs. Reed senior, who is less than satisfied with the official reports about the death of her daughter and wants you to perform yet another break-in. Sigh, add it to the list.



Let's play... Blackmail!
I dealt with the blackmail first, it's fairly straightforward and I promised to try and secure a legal supply (but never figured out how, maybe I missed it). While trying to locate the appropriate place I accidentally found an arms dealer, who proved to be a very handy person to know. For all my bitching about DXHR not allowing you to blow people into kibble and having very odd ideas about weapons damage, the fact that you can now sell your ill-gotten gains is astonishingly useful and something I really missed when playing the original again afterwards.

Dealer of the Year
Note also that you can buy weapon mods here, and I strongly suggest you do so. A silenced 10mm pistol with full damage mods is truly awesome for killing people and was still my default choice even at the end of the game.



Tape: Oops, I just broke into the wrong person's apartment
Ren: ?
Tape: I was trying to burgle Tindall's apartment, so I blew the door off
Tape: I thought it looked a little different
Tape: His one is downstairs, I think
Ren: I'm sure their insurance covers that.
Tape: Perhaps.
Tape: It looks like whoever it belonged to was running some kind of clinic
Tape: The apartment is full of medical equipment.
Tape: Oh FFS
Tape: That wasn't his apartment either
Tape: It was someone else in the same building I should be burgling later

Tape: I was eating something with my mouse hand, and moving Jensen around the
apartment building with the other hand.
Tape: Because of this I couldn't steer, so he was walking backwards.
Tape: Each time I turned a corner there was this metallic crash and clunking
sound as he knocked yet another fire extinguisher off the wall.
Ren: Hehehe
Tape: The only evidence of my intrusion will be the fact that all the apartment
doors have been blown off and there is a trail of fire extinguishers

Tape: Hoo boy
Ren: ?
Tape: When you raid Tindall's apartment and check his computer, someone
comes along to murder him
Tape: They go "Hey! This door is all busted up" because I used plastique to
enter, but once I'd knocked them out, I decided to have a little fun
with them
Tape: Turns out, the physics engine doesn't seem to like it if you try to
squish someone with Tindall's fridge.
Tape: They start to twitch and squirm until either their body pops out from
under the fridge or the entire thing topples over.
Tape: Incidentally, the fridge makes a wonderful sound when you drop it.
Ren: Hehe. I think I've seen stuff like that in some games.
Tape: Yes, GTA seemed to be really bad for it

Tape: Just now the unconscious guy just kicked the fridge off himself
Tape: I might have to try some experiments now
Tape: See whether the fridge can survive being thrown off the top floor
Tape: And whether the junkie is still unconscious if he is thrown off the top
floor.
Tape: Oh, that's beautiful
Tape: I'll have to double-check, but I think I can throw people
Tape: I'll have to see if I can blow up some of the police cars by throwing
unconscious or dead gangers at them
Ren: *snrk*

Tape: Damn, I forgot to check whether the junkie was dead before I threw him
Tape: He was definitely alive before I dragged him up six flights of stairs by
the legs. Whether he was alive by the time I'd reached the top floor
I don't know
Ren: Hehehe
Tape: Damn damn damn
Tape: The street people realised he was dead and killed me before I got to the
police cars. I think this might be a problem
Tape: Incidentally, Bas told me that he was able to kill people with cardboard
boxes. Three boxes and they die, apparently

Tape: You can't set off a car with a person
Tape: However one person can kill another person


Reed Between the Lines
As part of Cassandra Reed's crime, you will need to break into a storage lot in a back alley behind the police station. It is possible to jump over the fence if you wish to stack oildrums, as the fence is low enough that they should remain stable. For some reason the police won't stop you to find out why you're taking a stolen oil barrel through the metro at past midnight.
Otherwise you'll have to go through the maintenance tunnel, which is a problem because it's both flooded and suffering a severe electrical fault. I'm not sure if there is a way to turn it off early, but I solved the problem using a crate and an oildrum to cross until I found the breaker in the middle.

At this point I decided it would be fun to assault a few people outside and lead them into the tunnel where they could be roasted by flipping the circuit breaker back on. In practice, the police and other victims of minor assault are reluctant to enter and will instead camp outside the entrance so that they can shoot you as you leave. Whether this is an artifact of the 'easy' difficulty level is an exercise for future study.

Hot death at the touch of a button
I should also note at this point that along with the lockpick device I was given a number of packages of plastic explosive as part of the preorder version. This proved a rather entertaining way of chivvying the authorities, since in true freedom fighter style, you can drop a package of plastique either under or next to a police car outside the station and detonate it from a safe distance. It seems to be random as to whether the police can work out that it was you wot dun it.

For some mysterious reason this will cost you the O'Malley mission, however.
Anyway, having burgled the police storage unit and reported back to Cass, I received a call from Alex, an old acquaintance from Jensen's police days, who wants you to, well, commit yet more crimes. This mission is rather fun and consists of several stages.



O'Malley's Bar
You must find a crooked ex cop who is trying to get someone murdered, find a stash of weapons and then beat up the member of the Motor City Bangers who was going to be murdered for good measure, or something along those lines. The latter part is fun because the MCB have lots of guns which can be sold to the weapons dealer who lives just downstairs.
A word of warning, though - you can only carry one of each model of gun at once. If you don't have one, Adam will pick the new gun up - assuming it fits - and it can then be sold. If you do have one, he will extract the ammo from the new gun and destroy the precious, salable chassis through some kind of mass-energy conversion.
Since your own gun will tend to be heavily modded and practically irreplaceable, your best bet is to find a safe place to drop it while you ferry the guns to the dealer, one at a time. It is not considered a good idea to sell the murder weapon as Alex will ask for it later.

Once the dodgy cop and his victim are out of the way, the next part of the Crooked Cop bonus mission is that you must go into the territory of the DnR, whose proper name I can never, ever remember so I either refer to them variously as "Drum'n'Bass" or the "Detroit Democratic Republic" which somehow gradually morphed into "The People's Democratic Republic of Detroit".
Whoever they are (and whether they are in fact communists), the important point is that they despise people with augmentations, unlike the Bay City Bangers who thoroughly endorse them. This is a bit of a problem, since it has been fairly well established that Adam Jensen did not in fact, ask for his.

People are dying on dead-end street
You must break into their squat, an old factory building, and locate a stash of weapons, which conveniently enough includes a full-fledged rocket launcher. In addition, you must not be detected and if you do, you will fail the bonus mission.
Fortunately, the game is exceptionally lenient as to what "Being detected" actually means. You simply mustn't be seen. Shooting them in the back of the head is acceptable, since dead men tell no tales. This does get rather inconvenient when there are two of them together, but it's not a major problem, particularly if you have three packages of plastique that you're not quite sure what to use on.

In a manner resembling the 'How Not To Be Seen' skit in Monty Python's Flying Circus, it is quite possible to blow the pair up and ensure their silence that way. Funnily enough, the explosion will cause all their friends to become extremely upset and run around like ants looking for you, but because no-one actually saw who did the deed, it still counts as 'being undetected'.

How Not to be Seen

What blows up, must come down
Around this time, I complained to Bas that there was something very wrong with the Combat Rifle, and that shooting someone in the back of the head only to have them say "Ouch," turn around and kill you was perhaps not terribly realistic.
Ever helpful, Bas told me he had found a sniper rifle in the roof of the garage where the other arms dealer lives. Several very happy hours were spent trying to construct a tower of oil drums in order to climb up there.
Better success would have been achieved by using wooden crates, as a tower of oil barrels will start to teeter when 3-4 drums are placed and enters resonance and collapses when the fifth one is added. Reluctantly I eventually gave up and broke in using a special lockpick doodad which is only available in the preorder version of the game. On the second playthrough I used crates and dumpsters instead and all was well.

Fun, but not very practical
I should also mention that if you've played the game before, you will probably recall the transmission tower. It is possible to deactivate it at this point, which will cause a rather interesting dialogue between Pritchard and Jensen along the lines of "What did you just do?!" "Uh, I found this transmitter and it looked bad so I shut it down..."

You will also need to loot O'Malley's apartment for clues and stuff in general. I find it's amusing to throw his fridge off the top floor of the building as well. The final part of the Crooked Cop quest is to go to Alex, and after you've given her as much evidence as you can, she'll ask you to arrest O'Malley in person. This is fairly anticlimatic as you can simply Q him the moment he finishes talking. Never asks you about the fridge, though.



Under The Mortuary
Anyway, once I was done there, I decided that the main quest could wait no longer and began to plan my assault upon the Detroit Police station, where I had to break into the morgue and steal the implant from the dead hacker. There are at least two covert entrances to the building, accessible via the fire escape in the backalley where the storage locker was, but on different floors.
I had no idea where the morgue actually was, but it seemed to be nearest on the top floor of the building. My intention was to sneak down there unseen and pilfer, but this worked out very, very badly indeed as there are too many people wandering around and laser grids inside the air vents, which I couldn't find the control for at the time.

What inevitably happened was that someone would spot me, and attempt summary execution of Jensen, since DXHR has no concept of arrest, unlike the Ultima games or Morrowind/Oblivion, where you could end up in the clink. Jensen would then fight for his life, with particularly messy consequences.

"Now this is what I signed on for!"
To make things even worse, Detroit's Finest have obviously been taking notes from Saddam Hussein's death squads since they will call out to you things like "Come on, we can discuss this!", "Don't make this any worse than it is... give yourself up!" and other entreaties to surrender - only to shoot Adam in the head if you are foolish enough to heed them.



Tape: I found the morgue, which is good because now I need to make a deposit.
Basilisk: oh?
Tape: About half the Detroit police force.
Basilisk: *facepalm*
Basilisk: really?
Tape: Frankly this has been such a disaster I'm not going to save it
Basilisk: XD
Basilisk: oh, well that's good
Tape: But at least I know where I'm going now.
Basilisk: i'm playing more like how i think Darkshine would be at the moment
Tape: Oh?
Tape: Sneaking and sniping, I'd guess
Basilisk: trying to get in through stealth until something goes wrong...
then kill every witness ever
Tape: That's essentially what I was doing.
Tape: It's just that there were an awful lot of witnesses.

"Jeeze, this guy's nuts!"
...needless to say, I didn't keep that particular savegame other than as a rather gruesome trophy.

If you're particularly bored, a fun game to play is sneaking into the middle floor of the building and sniping all the Picus TVs without being spotted by the police. This has some particularly interesting results as the police will often yell "We got a man down!!" for no discernable reason, unless the TV itself technically counts as some kind of corpse. This will take place against a background of whining and pleading from the civilians who had previously been helping the police with their enquiries.

"In other news, there has been an upsurge of petty vandalism inside the Central Detroit Police Station..."
Anyway, finally knowing where the morgue actually was, I discovered that it was accessible via the sewers and promptly tried that approach instead.
This resulted in a perfect score as Jensen crept into the back of the station, evaded all the automation and was detected only by the pathologist (who was not, this time, cringing in a corner of the morgue). He assumed Jensen is a government agent and was easily swindled out of the goodies.
Jensen then crept back through the sewers, so completely undetected that the game awarded me the 'Ghost' bonus - and was then assaulted in the street by the entire police force for no apparent reason.

You are then sent home by Sarif - who has wisely decided that stealing from the police has made you too hot to handle for now - where you can upload the schematics of the device to Pritchard via a VPN setup. Pritchard tells Jensen at this point that the hacker person was being teleoperated, which somehow comes as a surprise.
Looting Adam's house at this point is a good idea, and while it's tempting to 'Q' the racist janitor downstairs, this will probably make things more sticky later on, particularly when you come to trial for the rest of the night's work.
AFAIK, Diane Gonzales is not in the office, which is probably best for her as she would definitely get the same (or worse) for killing your dog. You could probably set up a mine trap in her office, though.

Anyway, once you're done there, you'll be sent back to the DnB building to either destroy the transmitter, or if you have already done so, you'll be meeting Malik there instead. Either way, you'll be sent more-or-less straight to the next part of the game, another abandoned factory in a completely different part of Detroit that is accessible only by helicopter.



Act I scene IV - Highlander Park
Outside the building you may meet an MCB leader, who is friendly and willing to sell you ammo. This friendliness may be in part because he's heard that you singlehandedly knocked out six of his soldiers (and singlehandedly murderered about three dozen DRB members) and wishes to stay on your good side.
From here you massacre your way down into the basement, where you eventually get into a fight with someone extremely nasty who is exceptionally resistant to being shot in the head.
Next you get a slim lead given by the dying bad guy, who in an attempt to kill you, somehow blows himself up with a single frag grenade after surviving three plastique blasts and my entire stock of rockets between his eyes.

It is worth mentioning that on the second playthrough, I was mortally afraid of Barrett and had in my possesion nearly every weapon known to man except for the rocket launcher, which seems to fire nerf balls for all the good it does. For good measure I installed the Typhoon upgrade as well and maxed it out - something I was a little reluctant to do because I was trying to roleplay Jensen in the 'I will retain my humanity' vein. Nonetheless, it paid off - Barrett died fast, requiring only two hits of Typhoon and a candy bar.

At this point, during a brief visit to the office, Pritchard reckons that Sarif has personally compromised security so you have to figure out what the heck is going on there, which will result in the first clues as to where Reed got her magic DNA from, something which Adam - somehow - doesn't seem to be able to put together until he is told near the end of the game. It is somewhat interesting to note that his personal email address is 'Frenetic Pony' - evidently the My Little Pony fad is not going to go away quickly. At least he didn't call himself 'Rainbow Dash', though.

Next, I went to visit Thorpe, who gave me a discount on the MCB weapons dealer, which is much appreciated though very, very late. I also sold off the vast haul of weapons and ammo that I had looted from FEMA before heading off to China in pursuit of the aforementioned slim lead.

Oh, and before you go, it is well worth talking to the janitor guy cleaning the windows at the SI canteen. Make sure you talk to him twice.

Really? Oh, look, it's time for my flight to China.
Alex has nothing to say about this herself, simply insisting that "you've done a good thing" if you speak to her.



Act II, Scene I - Hengsha
So, you end up in Hengsha, where you must now cultivate relationships with a new set of arms dealers. One of these has set up shop in the local whorehouse, while the other is in a lockup somewhere and may only appear later in the game. Either that or I've forgotten where he was on the second playthrough.
Your main objective is to get into Windmill's pad, which is surrounded by Belltower paramilitaries. This is annoying for you and very bad for them, since the ones on the roof get knocked down via Q and have their weapons taken and sold. The ones lower end up getting their heads emptied and their corpses dumped inside some unfortunate local's newspaper stand while their weapons and ammo are sold off at the local whorehouse.

This heap of corpses will jiggle around as the physics engine creates energy from nothing
It is also interesting to note that if you know what you're doing, you can actually punch the Belltower guys off the roof in what Bas described as 'a mercy killing'.

Anyway... Windmill has fled, leaving only a creepy glowing lion doll and an extremely badly-protected computer. By hacking into the latter you get a clue that he's at The Hive, so you must go off and see Mr. Tong. This involves going upstairs and arguing with the bartender.
Aggravatingly, there is no apparent way to make Jensen realise that he's actually talking to Tong right there and then (which I realised myself about a third of the way through the conversation).

Once you're got the address from Tong, you should probably make your way there unless you want to antagonise any surviving Belltowers. You will run into Malik who begs you to investigate something for her, with the usual complement of breaking and entering.

Once you've read up on the details in pod 9, she'll want you to retrieve a report from some guy at the local LIMB clinic. This sets you back a grand, which as far as I'm aware, Malik never actually pays you back for.

Once you have built up a convincing case, you then have to bluff Lee into confessing and finally hack into the Hive in order for Malik to commandeer their data displays (which horribly enough seem to run on Windows XP).

Act II, Scene II - Alice's Gardens Massacree
Once Malik's pet project is out of the way, you'll find Windmill in pod 301. He'll contemplate your ass and then send you to steal someone's ID card so you can break into the headquarters of Tai Yuden Media, the multinational producer of CD-R discs upon which the world of 2025 is completely dependent.
I would make absolutely sure that everything else is in place before you bring back the card, because the shit will really hit the fan when you do. Try and make sure you have lots of space carrying capacity too.

Immediately before handing over the card, drop your 10mm special on the ground, and break into pod 544 which is also on level 3. Here you will find a more basic 10mm pistol and the owner won't be needing it anymore.

As you hand the card over to Windmill, Tai Yuden mercenaries will break into the hotel, shoot one person and then cause everyone else in the entire building (except for you and Windmill) to instantly drop stone dead through some mysterious, other-worldly means. Give Windmill the stolen pistol and then retrieve your 'special' before shooting all the mercenaries in the head.

Windmill somehow locks himself up tight inside his bunk and won't come out until you've left the building - it does not seem to be necessary to defend the floor from intruders to ensure his survival. The usual exit will be locked tight.

Once everyone else is dead, you'll have a lot of dead mercs and weapons they won't be needing anymore. In an ideal world, you would take a dumpster or a shopping trolley and trundle it around, filling it up with guns to sell later, but sadly the game won't have any of that.

The standard approach here of ferrying the weapons out of the building one by one is also doomed because the special door Jensen leaves through does not actually exist and he therefore cannot get back in after he's left - something I discovered to my absolute dismay. The best advice is therefore to take one each of the best weapons you can find and convert the rest into ammo to sell at the whorehouse.

Upon leaving, the Belltower Boys will take a severe dislike to you, and as such they will have to die. Any decent weapons they have should be left so you can ferry those to the whorehouse also. For the pistols, convert them to ammo as you can never have too much 10mm goodness.

Finally, once the opposition has been neutralised and you've sold everything you can find to the whorehouse weapons dealer, take the TYM shuttle and obtain elevator access by saving an unfortunate TYM employee from a horrible gaseous death.



Act II, Scene III - Tai Yuden Media
Once you've bluffed your way inside the facility proper, you'll be in the Cryonics pool area, trying to get to the lift. You can do this fairly easily with the help of the magic of the Icarus Device - just move the bridge once and jump down the ventilation shaft. It is also possible to do something like this with a cardboard box to break your fall, but otherwise you'll have to take a more dangerous approach.
If you can't go down the shaft, take the hidden air ducts under the walkway and sneak into the security control room. Here, two guards are moaning about the fact that they're going to be replaced with automation and since one of them has his back turned, you can knock out his buddy in mid-conversation and he won't suspect a thing.

"I'm telling you, we're gonna be- HELP! GET HIM OFF ME! Uck..."
"Nah, you worry too much."
From here you can shut down said security automation and make your way safely to the lift. There is a considerable amount of pumping and power handling equipment in this area, but sadly you cannot blow any of it up to sabotage their operations.

Upstairs, there's a room with another one of those nasty mixtures of electricity and water. Fortunately, by judicious use of the air vents it is possible to pull the breaker and shut it all down.

I should also mention that there is a dead guy at the bottom of of the ventilation shafts. If you have the Icarus device, you can go down and retrieve some weapon upgrades, a pass to the secret lab and various other goodies.



At The Core
Once you are in the public sector, you will find that you need a pass-card to get into the secret lab. There are many, many ways to approach this.
If you stole the dead guy's card, that's one way. Alternatively, with a little air-vent trickery you can steal another card from the security room. If you're feeling particularly vicious, you can murder the guard and blow the doors off with plastique (or indeed, by blowing up the security robot in just the right place).
What I did this time around was reprogram the security bot to kill all who oppose me, and then used the dead guy's card to sneak the robot into the secret lab where it could happily run amok. For good measure I took the spare access card as well just so no-one else could have it.

EXTERMINATE
Upstairs from the secret lab is the TYM data core, the heart of their operation. Given that TYM have done their utmost to screw Sarif Industries over, the sensible approach would be to blow up the data core and assassinate Zhao, putting them out of business for the foreseeable future. Sadly, there is no apparent way to do this.

Once you have murdered your way into the monitoring station inside the data core, you discover that your murdered researchers might not be as murdered as you were led to believe. Sarif will egg you on to confront Zhao herself. How he knows she has a penthouse suite is never explained, nor is the reason she has the same weird sculptures as the one in his office.

Zhao may sleep in a fantastically expensive palace, but she still has to live off takeaways


The Marvellous, Magical, Mad Madam Zhao
Once confronted, Zhao will go into full-fledged ham acting mode, fawning and pleading that she is just a puppet in a manner wholly unlike her attitude in the security tape. Finally, she attempts to seduce Adam Jensen in a particularly cringe-inducing manner.
Whether Jensen actually does fall for her pathetic ruse is impossible to tell since Adam has all the expressiveness and warmth of John Terry in Hawk the Slayer*. Either way - seduced or simply bored - Jensen doesn't do the sensible thing and deck her so that he can figure out the truth when she wakes up, instead he does the unthinkably stupid and turns his back on the lady, who immediately flees into her armoured panic room in a flurry of sneers and sexist remarks.
Dave Sarif doesn't quite seem to understand the gravity of this and makes the singularly bizarre remark that he has a panic room too. He does send Malik over to pick you up, though of course you still need to sneak or murder your way to the helipad and disable the guard robots first.

* Hawk the Slayer: an amazingly bad 1980 Swords and Sorcery flick set in a land where buildings are so expensive that blacksmiths are reduced to wandering around and plying their trade the middle of the forest on tree-trunks, and where the hero is so detached and unemotional that it's easy to assume he's the villain



Act II, Scene IV - Picus
On a hunch, Jensen heads off to Pikers, the media conglomerate fronted by their slut puppy, Eliza Cassan. Something like that, anyway.
When you get to meet her, a major cock-up occurs on the part of the writers since she is represented by a completely free-form holographic projection - a technology which apparently no longer exists 25 years later and is replaced by bulky and obvious holotanks. I wasn't terribly impressed with the fact that she was silhouetted against the window either.

What's wrong with this picture?
As usual, Jensen is completely taken in, whereas after the first sentence I had begun to suspect she was an AI simply by the mode of her speech, the closeup of the security camera and the fact that she's named after the first working chatbot program from 1966.
You then murder your way down to the mainframe room in the basement, where you discover that Eliza is roughly on par with Icarus or Daedalus, but 25 years too early.

An amusing diversion is the funicular, which when summoned, will call a bunch of extra enemies down upon you. The best approach is to subvert the turret and sit back inside one of the nearby hidey-holes while it massacres everyone else.

Anyway, your task is - as mentioned - to reach the mainframe room (named after the WiFi standard) where Jensen still naively believes that he'll find Eliza Cassan loafing around and eating takeaway in some kind of bunker - apparently he never saw Dr. Who and the Green Death when he was a kid.
At this point you'll run into Barrett's girlfriend, who again, can be killed dead with a couple of bursts of Typhoon before she's quite figured out what's happening.

ELIZA appears to be running on a gigantic supercluster of 2U rack units
Once she's out of the way, ELIZA will give you some kind of recording that you can't seem to play back and shoo you off to the helipad. You can - and probably should - help yourself to whatever you can carry from the weapons lockers which have been scattered around the mainframe area for no especially plausible reason. After you're done, head back to Detroit courtesy of Malik, who will drop you off at your apartment on the way.

Somehow, Adam never gets around to looking up Cass and giving her the news.



Act III, Scene I - Detroit
After a brief argument with the boss over the existence of the Illuminati, you go off to find Taggert's evil aide and beat the shit out of him or something.


Fight the Power
My first priority here was to find a dealer or two and offload all the goodies looted from Pikers and Tai Yuden Media. While the riots have apparently moved the police to arrest everyone found wearing leather as some kind of crime against fashion, they have left the local gun runners to their own devices.

"Are you crazy?! This is no time for chit-chat!"
If you're curious, it is possible to enter the old Derelict Row building via the side entrance where the crossbow was. In the absence of the DnB gang members, it has been taken over by many refugees fleeing persecution over their leather trousers.

With the ones that the police are arresting, it is possible to deck the policemen hassling them though in most cases they will continue to shout abuse at their now-unconscious captors.

I suppose this is police brutality... but not in the usual sense
At one point I found myself unable to resist freeing the subway from the tyranny of the fascist police. The newly-freed citizens of the subway didn't seem quite so thrilled about it - one of them running around like a headless chicken while the others sat whimpering on the floor or park benches.
When questioned, the breakdancer was all "Please, I don't know anything!" while his companion was outright hostile and so ended up unconscious along with the police. This was rather interesting in itself since he was tied up on the floor at the time - the game decided to free his handcuffs and stand him up for the privilege of being knocked out.

Anyway, I'm digressing again. As well as selling your haul of weapons and ammo, you can also aquire some "extra damage" weapon mods, and many other similar goodies and I strongly suggest you do, to beef up the 10mm pistol into a weapon of ultimate destruction. The exploding magnum rounds mod is also available - it works quite nicely against robots.

Once you've visited both Seurat and Grayson, it is also fun to knock out the crazy preacher outside Earl's Court, which makes his congregation cower and whimper for a minute or two, after which they snap out of it and just stand there idly staring in the direction of his unconscious body.

False Prophet


Rent Bradford
If you wander around near the gas station, Pritchard will tell you about Brent Radford, who lives just opposite the Motor City Ballers. You'll find an MiB type there, whom I tend to knock out first, and then later execute once I've found out from Radford how evil they are.
Radford is dying and although he could easily be saved with 2027 medical tech, refuses to allow it because he's afraid that having his spine repaired will suck out his soul or something.
Instead he wants to die a junkie's death, which I reluctantly grant him before dragging the MiB into the corridor and shooting him in the head as vengeance. Next time I went to visit the arms dealer after that, he had fled and was conducting business from a corner of the adjacent corridor. The game was not pleased at having to switch the camera between him and the terminal in the other room.

You'll be given a lockup code, and the lockup in question has a couple more MiBs who would also benefit from a magnum round between the eyes. The sound of shooting will upset the nearby police officers, but if you hide in the lockup, they will take a quick glance at the bodies and wander away again as if nothing had happened.

Alternatively, the city itself provides a quick and easy way to dispose of the pieces:

From here you get the address for Michelle Walthers, who is in a rather distressing state of senility. After all this, having practically had the information given to him on a freaking plate Jensen is still unable to connect the dots regarding Megan's magical DNA sample. Or perhaps he has, but is just scared to face up to it.



When I hit my early teens I felt like I did not belong
And I soon discovered my suspicions were not wrong
I don't belong here girl, I'm trapped inside a hating world
I don't belong here though there is another place where I can go
-- 'Another Place', The Orange Alabaster Mushroom


Augmentationcon and the Crazy Terrorist
Now it is time to break into Taggart's dressing room. I use the air ducts for this, as usual. You can plant evidence if you like, which is in a way, only fair because Taggart does seem to be far too involved in this for his own good - the conspiratorial chat-log on his machine pretty much sealed the deal for me.
Getting out again is harder and may require you to augment your legs so you can bounce up into the air-ducts. Barring a massacre you're going to have a tough job leaving through the front door, as his security team have no concept of taking people alive. Taggart is not a man you'd want to try and sneak an autograph from backstage.

Once you've escaped, you'll run into an old acquaintance who is desperate for you to help him find some crazy guy with a bomb. Said crazy guy is actually in the sewers under the detroit police station, but you probably want to check out the other places first anyway since you'll get the experience points for it.

The most dangerous parts of this are the bombs and the turrets, in that order. You can make short work of the turrets by throwing them into electrified sewer run, but make sure you do actually throw them as they go out with a very big bang. Also, make sure you grab the turret from behind as it can still thrash around in your arms and shoot you if you're careless.

Jacob himself can just be knocked out with your Q powers, so despite the heavy rifle he's a non-issue. The bomb itself you will have to defuse. Then you can report back to Nick at the convention centre and sell the rifle for an extra grand or so.



See you in the Sewer
In the apartment complex opposite Jensen's, the iron gate thing that you may have noticed before is now open, and this is where Taggart's aide is lying low. There are two folks on the stairwell whom you can Q out, and further along you can find Colonel Sanders, who is violent and will also need to be subdued with Q. That you've spared his life is probably the worst thing you can do to him because he hates being in your debt.

You will then need to demolish the bathroom (explosives are fun, but you can also punch through walls) to get at the secret lair. Logically there should be some means of getting in from the apartment which doesn't require explosives and re-plastering the wall each time they want to enter or leave, but if there is I've yet to find it.

Taggart's aide is through the sewer. And - apparently because I had tried to frame his boss - has now been thrown to the wolves and is suicidal. He gives you some valuable intel and then you're supposed to stop him from shooting himself, which took me several attempts.

From here you go back to SII, and then on to Hengsha again.



Act III, Scene II - Hengsha
Bamush
Things go bad during the approach and Malik attempts a crash-landing. Things get rather hairy now because many heavily-armoured goons will converge on the chopper.
Like with rescuing Paul, I was initially of the belief that the writers simply wanted her out of the way, since if you run she is dragged out of the chopper and graphically shot in the head while you watch helplessly.
If you don't run, the goons will reach the chopper and Malik will blow it up to avoid capture.

On my second playthrough I stayed roughly where I was and using my sniper rifle, graphically shot each of the goons in the head while Malik watched helplessly.

The sole exception was the evil death robot where I was forced to leave my perch and blow it up with explosives since it has no head to shoot.

"As you have deduced, Captain, we only require you for your knowledge.
All knowledge is stored in the brain. Therefore, we will simply remove all of your brains!"
--Kenny Everett, Captain Kremmen (radio series)


After that, it was a simple matter of picking off the remaining snipers in the towers, after which Malik magically fixed the extremely battered and shot up helicopter and flew away. Despite having her ass saved in a truly heroic piece of rescuing, she still doesn't pay back the grand she owes you.



As you go to leave the construction site, the game will ask you the following question:

Finding Sevchenko
Once you leave the construction site, everyone in the street suddenly has a systems crash. This being a game - especially one with a few plot holes and a ropey understanding of physics - I put it down to a bug and carried on. In actual fact, this is a major clue that the glitches are the result of an external agency. Of course, Jensen doesn't pick up on this - he's probably used to surreal and improbable things happening by now.
On the first playthrough I went into the clinic - and was appalled when Jensen (a wanted man) gave his real name immediately before being anaesthetised. While this doesn't ruin the game, it does make things harder later on and as mentioned, Jensen approaches the whole affair with a near-suicidal lack of caution, so I'd give it a miss and put up with the bugs.

The Belltower Boys are once again looking for you, probably because of the massacres that took place last time.

The second arms dealer has now opened shop in Youzhao district so you may as well find him and unload whatever wares you brought from Detroit or scavenged from the construction site. When you complete the transaction he has a tendency to say "I'll be right here" in a voice eerily similar to Zippy in Rainbow, but never mind that. While you're selling your ill-gotten gains, Hugh Darrow will call up and tell you to meet a contact of his who turns out to be on the roof.

She will give you a quest that involves knocking out many terrorists just outside the Alice Gardens complex. This is easy enough, though the woman will get pissy if you ask what's actually on the chip afterwards. It's also practically certain that the seller copied the chip first anyway, making the whole endeavour somewhat pointless. Darrow's agent will now vanish to avoid you decking her and stealing it back. It would be interesting to see what happens if you don't do this quest as it may have implications later when the shit goes down at Panchaea Station.

While you're on the roof, it might be a good idea to pick off Tong's Harvesters with your death pistol and sniper rifle since their tactics of becoming invisible and sneaking up on you will fall completely flat when you're hiding on a rooftop about 3 stories above them. The new arms dealer is conveniently just around the corner so you can sell off their possessions once they are all dead.

ASS-ASS-IN-ATE
Once they've been harvested, you'll need to break into the car park and carry out a few more murders. There's a turret that can be subverted - don't forget that you can carry it around and place it in more effective locations.

Eventually you'll come to a sewer. Remember that like in Morrowind, the sewer is in a different dimension to the car park. As such, your best strategy is to kill one man and then flee back into the car park until your health is regenerated since unlike you, the Harvesters cannot go through the portal to the other world.

Finally, you'll reach the basement, where if Malik died you'll find her corpse, ready to be chopped up and broken for parts. In the first run I dragged her body away to try and find a place to bury her. Somehow I dropped her while in the elevator shaft and she disappeared completely into some other dimension, which I figured was as good as I was likely to get.

Nearby you'll find Tong, and at this point it becomes clear that whatever you're homing in on it's not Sevchenko. Tong is kind of annoyed at your intrusion and killing spree and threatens to turn you over to Belltower. This is a particularly hollow threat since by this time you've either murdered or concussed all the Belltower folk on the streets, and his remaining Harvesters are only still alive because of the cutscene.

"Tell me, Mr. Jensen... Why shouldn't I just hand you over to Belltower?"
"Because they're all dead."
I'm not sure what happens in the stock game, but in the preorder version, you'll be sent off at this point to rescue his son from the forces of even-more-evil-than-Tong.



In the Dock
Rescuing Tong is fairly simple if the game does it, which presumably the stock game won't. You have to break into a noodle factory filled with goons and get Tracer Tong out by means of an invisibility device.
Once this is done, you have to go to the dock to catch a boat. This is of course more complex than it needs to be, since Jensen could easily sneak into a crate just like he does in the cutscene, but he won't until you've blown up Administrator Wang's office.

Your first task is, ideally, to simply massacre all the Belltower men. There are two snipers on different buildings so once the footsoldiers and robot are relatively clear, you should give them a taste of their own medicine via the sniper rifle. Don't forget to loot their corpses for sniper rounds.

You can also have fun in that there is at least one red barrel of boom and this can be thrown at enemies, slaying them pretty dead.

Once you've picked up the explosive device, go inside the warehouse. There are, of course, many more goons to kill and once you've taken down enough a helicopter will drop a death robot in through the roof (but I can't find the hole).
The death robot can be destroyed with a single round of Typhoon, whereupon it will self destruct after giving the enemy (you) enough time to get clear. Health and safety regulations, I suppose.

I must point out that unless I've missed something really big, there are no gun smugglers in the Secret R&D Lab or the Arctic so from hereon you will be unable to buy or sell weapons.

Finally, you place the bomb and a cutscene occurs where Jensen almost blows himself up (probably Tong getting back at him for harvesting his Harvesters) and then limps into a suspended animation pod, telling Pritchard that he has no idea where he's going despite practically every email in the entire dock mentioning that the ship is bound for Singapore.



Act III, Scene III - Singapore R&D Campus
This starts off straightforwardly enough, barring certain plot-holes like the fact that his pod was supposed to be empty and this went undetected, that it was carefully moved into the warehouse without anyone noticing him in it, and the fact that it spontaneously decided to defrost him instead of him being thawed out in a clinic somewhere, surrounded by armed guards.
Also, despite earlier protesting that he can't track the GPLs on their new frequency - and even having to actually get the military to do it for him as a one-off favour - Pritchard has now somehow been able to beg, borrow and steal the equipment needed to track the GPL devices.

However, there is some kind of jamming device in the area so we're back to square one and he can't track you anymore. Your second task will be to fix that, but since the R&D campus is surrounded by armed goons, your first task will be to wander around the perimeter and inside some of the overlooking buildings, killing everyone who wears dark clothing.

Once the coast is clear, the transmitter is nearby and one of the goons or bunks where the goons live has the code. Once it's shut down, go into the main building and kill or maim your way through until you reach the scientists. Faherty is eager to help, and helps devise a plan to escape. Jensen devises a signal by means of vibrating the GPL devices, but doesn't think to ask Pritchard if it can actually be done first.
Then you have to find the other two scientists - Colvin is a treacherous bitch who gets really pissy and doesn't want to go. Eric Koss is scared but will give you the virus you need to screw up the GPL tracking and protect them.



Secure Area
Once the coast is clear, you go to the security bunker and upload the virus to the computer there (Vasiliy never got a chance to actually test it , but it seems to work anyway). Before doing this it is advisable to subvert the two security robots so that they will kill your foes, and it might be an idea to snatch the laser rifle too if you can carry it.
Once the virus is installed, the scientists will immediately cause three explosions and guards will burst out of the secure area only to be cut down by your robots.

On the first attempt at the game, no-one thought to tell me where the door I was looking for actually was. The tunnel didn't seem to have a door in the end at all and the map seemed to be homing in on the security computer instead, so I spent about 20 minutes crawling through ducts and things trying to find some mysterious opening. When I finally realised where the door was, it had closed again.

Upstairs, you run into Zhao and Namir. If you did go to the LIMB clinic like I did the first time, you'll be in a bit of a mess when fighting Namir, since your systems will have crashed. However, three packets of plastique will settle his hash quite nicely, augmentations or no.

If you didn't get it fixed, two rounds of Typhoon and a candy bar will do it, same as usual. Bear in mind that he is fast, heavily-armed and full of EMP grenades so it's not quite as one-sided as the other two.

Either way, he should be dead and Zhao has slipped away again. Jensen should just have shot or Q'd her instead of actually stopping and talking to the woman.



The White Room
Once Namir's dead, you find that Megan is in fact alive and well and as such your reasons for killing the three Bosses are considerably diminished. Whoops.
Megan lives in a room entirely filled and decorated with white and grey things, including a murdered crash test dummy and a 78 RPM gramophone.

A dead dummy
A tiff breaks out with Megan but is then interrupted by the news, where Hugh Darrow has finally cracked and decided to make everyone else as batshit insane as he is, including all of TYM's goons. Somehow this doesn't affect Malik, who - if alive - comes along to rescue the scientists with her hastily-rebuilt helicopter. Otherwise the scientists break into a parked helicopter themselves and steal it.

Then you take the LEO shuttle to Panchaea, to find Darrow and beat the crap out of him for what he's done. It is not entirely clear why Sarif and Pritchard remain unaffected.



Act III, Scene IV - Panchaea's Shattered Surface
Things are really a mess now because practically the entire staff of the base are out of their gourds and extremely violent. Since they are no longer in control of themselves it seems a bit vicious to kill them so I tend to hide in air ducts and knock them out one by one. Interestingly they will tend to denounce you as a monster, so they may perhaps have seen Jensen's headwings. (If that makes no sense, just ignore it).
There are also number of emails from security system, which tend to end disturbingly, like something out of System Shock I or II.

Your first port of call is to get up to the control section and take the station out of lockdown. Mad Darrow is up there, and is apparently created as soon as you cross the threshold so you can't blow his head off from afar.
While he can't stop you from taking the system out of lockdown, he is the only person who knows how to shut down the security system in the basement, so the two of you get into an argument about whether he was right to do it. If you can convince him that it was all a big mistake, he'll give you the shutdown codes.

As you progress through the station you will encounter yet more loonies, and a message from Bill Taggart to come and rescue him.

Given the jump enhancement, it is possible to get up onto the ledge by means of jumping on the open door and crawling across the outside, thus leaving most of the loonies behind. You may need the Icarus Device to get down again, though.

While it is kind of amusing to pick the lock on his door and then simply kill Mr. Slippery with a sniper round, it is probably best to at least talk to him first, since the two default game endings suck.

It's only fair - Taggart would have you assassinated the moment you've got him out of danger
Once you're done with him, you should go and find Sarif as well before making your way to the control system in the basement, from which you cannot return.

It is also worth pointing out that while there are no arms dealers in Panchaea, there is in fact a LIMB clinic where you can still buy Praxis Kits if you have the readies.

To get to Sarif you jump down one of the vent shafts and land safely with the Icarus Device (and possibly the ventilation fans if you don't have one, I'm not sure). After that you should be able to roam around a little until you hear Sarif talk to you.

Once you have spoken to him, the main exit is blocked by some crates. Once those are out of the way the crazy engineers will all crowd about and try to kill you, which means you can drop them all with a gas grenade. They will all fall down in perfect sync.

A fine display of synchronized choking
Finally, it's time to take the main elevator down since the game won't let you jump down a one kilometer fall, Icarus Device or no.



The Insane Supercomputer Bit
Deep in the basement lurks the Hyron computer, which seems to be made of three women and a quantum computing engine. Arguably, Darrow's signal has driven these three insane as well, which probably explains why they scream disturbing things throughout this part of the game.
Zhao appears and tries unsuccessfully to link into it a'la Helios in the original game... shooting her in the head earlier would have saved so very much trouble...

In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true
In the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through
If you managed to wangle the security code from Darrow, you can just go right up to the central panel and type it in, which seems to do the bulk of winning the game quickly and easily.
Otherwise you've got problems and you're basically faced with an ending stolen from System Shock II, but making slightly less sense. I'm not honestly sure how you do win it - the first time I had the code but didn't know what to do with it and so just fumbled around pressing buttons and hacking security terminals until something happened.

Either way, once you've taken it down, the floor will start to be electrified, a number of apparently sane goons will appear and Zhao will continue to shout abuse at you.
You can if you wish speed things up by shooting her in the head once the forcefield is down, but just leaving her seems to work, and eventually she'll explode.



The End of the World
Now you're in the final room, with ELIZA Cassan. The implication is that she - spread over tends of thousands of rackmounted servers - has been physically transported to Pangaea for some mysterious reason, rather than being copied to local hardware or remoting in via a VPN.

Assuming you spoke to Taggart and Sarif, you will be granted four options.

The first option is to transmit Darrow's entire confession, plunging the world into a self-imposed dark age and preventing the original Deus Ex from ever happening in some bizarre and unhappy paradox.

The second option is for Adam to commit suicide, destroying Panchaea completely and with it, ELIZA, Dave Sarif, Bill Taggart and all the other people he was supposed to be saving. In short, losing the game.

Additionally, you have the Taggart ending, where Slut Puppet edits out all mention of the Illuminati and the entire debacle is blamed on Bob Page's company, VersaLife. This option is still available if you sneak back into Taggart's room via the air ducts and assassinate him with the sniper rifle.

Finally, you have the Dave Sarif ending, where the whole thing is blamed on Humanity Front and SII and Page Industries have free rein to do whatever they like. Ideally I would have preferred an edit which blamed it all on the Illuminati and TYM and painted SII in a more positive light, but this one is probably the most uplifting compromise.

Don't forget to watch the outtro at the end of the credits.



Appendix A - The Physics System Loses It
Improbable

Finely balanced

In perfect balance

Voyage of the Dumpster #1

Voyage of the Dumpster #2

Voyage of the Dumpster #3

Voyage of the Dumpster #4

Voyage of the Dumpster #5

...I had hoped that when the dumpster had bounced to the car it might set off the alarm and blow it up, but sadly it just sat there bouncing against it and very slowly rotating as it did so. Whatever force was moving the dumpster, placing another dumpster on top would not slow it down and they would both bounce together.



Appendix B - Down and Out at the Detroit Police Department
How many sleeping policemen can fit in the air vents?

Damage to the police station itself is a secondary concern

Have some coke

The plaque was carved from a JPEG file

Fun With Bombs

Appendix C - Odds and Sods
Malik's Resurrected Helicopter

"It's got chicken legs!!"

Dopefish lives (still)

Walking in the air

Flight of the Fridge

"I wanted Oranj"

Square Fruit

I won't read this till I've finished the game myself, but it should be funny.

 

[Oriebam]

As mentioned, Deus Ex had a nice training mode where you could learn to shoot, open doors, climb ladders and other skills which might perhaps be vaguely useful later on. Human Revolution does no such thing and instead shoves you straight into a deadly situation with no explanation nor aid and the result of this was that Adam would turn a corner and suddenly be shot in the head by the enemy before he had quite figured out how to fire his own gun.

This happened with horrifying frequency, dragging the 'tutorial' out over a period of several hours of frustration and why-am-I-playing-this-anyway while I struggled to come to terms with the fact that one or two shots from the enemy would kill Adam dead, while it was only possible to kill an invader by emptying an entire magazine of ammo into their head and hoping the other guy wouldn't kill you while reloading.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here.

I there

 

[Infinitron]

Strictly speaking, most of what he says is true.

The game doesn't give you a nice big training level with a shooting gallery like the original. There are those tutoral videos, but overall it assumes you know how to play a contemporary COD/Gears of War-style FPS. And you do get killed pretty fast if you don't play popamole (which as an oldschooler he probably isn't used to).

 

[Oriebam]

nobody said it isn't true... actually, I don't think I ever destroyed a object on my entire playthrough + DLC

p. sure you don't die "harshly" fast if you don't play Give Me Deus Ex though

 

[CreamyBlood]

I'm on the last level, I think. As I recall, the tutorial is a railroad. Or maybe he hasn't played FPS's before. I don't know, I never mapped a key to cover, I played on the 'Hard' level and got raped quite often. Judging by the screenshots all of his items were highlighted, I imagine he had his quest compass on too.

One of the better challenging games I've played in five years. How hard is it to work out how to use a ladder? How hard is it to hit Esc and look at your key bindings? I didn't read the whole thing but I made it through a few pages, it sounds like he has difficulty with most games so who gives a shit what this guy thinks?

 

[curry]

since when is it a bad thing that a game is difficult (which it is not) or not dumbed down (which it is)?

 

[CreamyBlood]

There's nothing wrong with games that are difficult and not dumbed down. Once I finish this last level I plan posting my thoughts in one of the other two DX threads. I imagine that depending on the difficulty settings, console features turned on or off and way you build your character, this game might have extremely varied experiences for different people.

I just know that I've done more reloading in this game than any other for many years. For me, many of the battles were challenging. The intro mission wasn't, figuring out how to use ladders or how to configure my key bindings wasn't. But then again, I've been playing video games since they came into existence so maybe some of these things aren't obvious to people unfamiliar with the way this stuff works.

 

[DraQ]

I've read all of itl

Strictly speaking, most of what he says is true.

The game doesn't give you a nice big training level with a shooting gallery like the original. There are those tutoral videos, but overall it assumes you know how to play a contemporary COD/Gears of War-style FPS. And you do get killed pretty fast if you don't play popamole (which as an oldschooler he probably isn't used to).

Well, you can survive and fight without popamole magick, but it makes the combat awkward for some reason - I guess it's because your non-popamole crouch might be well tailored for hiding behind objects, but is rather awful for shooting people without exposing yourself to massive volumes of return fire.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.it-he.org/starless.htm

Preface

As of this writing, I'm still stuck with half a walkthrough for Skyrim (and a third of a Fallout 3 walkthrough and half a RTCW walkthrough), and I figured it was time for a bit of Ultima again. After completing Ultima 6 I started feeling guilty about the Skyrim business and held off Ultima 7.

Coincidentally it turns out that my brother has been playing Ultima 7 (using the GOG version) and sent me a revised version of the anti-walkthrough, which you are about to read. At some point later this year I will have something for Skyrim, be it half-finished or no, but in the meantime, here's Ian's revised version of the walkthrough.

I remembered you telling me about a reader's suggestion for how to obtain the Ophidian Sword from Batlin in the Dream Realm and significantly shorten the antiwalkthrough thereby.
I've successfully done this and created a draft of a revised antiwalkthrough. Significantly it's no longer necessary to visit the Chaos temples, make soul prisms, free Gwenno or sacrifice Durpe, sorry, Dupre...

For the sake of nostalgia, the original version can be found here:
Starless - original edit

--DTE, May 2013

(more DOUG goodness can be found here: http://www.it-he.org/)

 

[felipepepe]

Fallout 3 walkthrough

WHY?

 

[Infinitron]

Fallout 3 walkthrough

WHY?

It's a perfect fit for him - sequence breaking in non-linear RPGs. I'd love to see him tear FO3 apart.

The real question is why RTCW.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Cast Vibrate on chickens. The meat and bones will be sucked out through the beak. Not a pleasant thought. The chicken however takes no notice and goes about its business.

These kind of comments are what make me read his anti-walkthroughs. I laughed hysterically while reading this, thanks for pointing it out to me.

 

[MicoSelva]

What is RTCW?

 

[felipepepe]

What is RTCW?

Return to Castle Wolfenstein Shit.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[felipepepe]

Ah, RTCW is the 2001...I got it confused with the recent Wolfenstein.

Goddamn same name reboots...

 

[Infinitron]

Fallout: New Vegas! http://www.it-he.org/fonv.htm

Fallout III - New Vegas

Riding through the burning hoop of doom
In an eight-wheeled anti-radiation tomb
Thankyou Dr. Strangelove, for going doolally
And leaving me the heritage of damnation alley
-Damnation Alley, Hawkwind



Content Warning
Fallout 3 and New Vegas are 18-rated, so there is violence and swearing and stuff. If you don't want to see that, you should probably stop reading now.

Spoiler

Part 1 - Finding My Way
Goodsprings
1. The game starts with you being shot in the head, much like in Human Revolution. You wake up in a small-time doctor's office in the town of Goodsprings, unfortunately without any cybernetic augmentations whatsoever. On leaving, it is suggested you talk to the local tomboy about some basic training and this is a good plan. It also gives you one last chance to change your character's look or name - I used this to rename him from 'Sierra' to 'Fiendish Dr. Wang' after an accident with the character face generator.
On talking to all the basic NPCs in the starting town, you learn that the place is about to be attacked by a bunch of crims calling themselves the Powder Gangers, led by one Joe Cobb, and you end up organising an impromptu militia. This is made more awkward by Chet the shopkeeper and 'Evil Pete' the dynamite man, who attempt to thwart your efforts. For entertainment value, it might be better to wait until you reach Novac before completing this quest, since there is a superweapon in the offing that will make short work of the gangers.

Anyway, once I felt ready, we got the posse together, and a number of hostile Gangers appeared on the road leading to the town, guns blazing. Armed with a 10mm pistol and a bag containging more stimpacks than the doc is legally allowed to prescribe at once, I went off to meet them, killing many and shooting them in the head. The Powder Gangers were greatly offended by this and began shouting things like "You murderer!".

Confronting Joe Cobb, I shot him in the head, which came off his body for no obvious reason. At this point a popup appeared saying that the community was so appalled by the beheading that they were kicking me out. This was initially very confusing until I realised that New Vegas supported some kind of per-faction karma, unlike Fallout III.



JM: I am totally not getting this. I somehow decapitated Cobb with my gun. The villagers just threw me out
JM: What am I supposed to do? Hand the gangers flowers and get them to join the love-in...?
JM: They're shooting me, for heaven's sake!
JM: What the fuck?!
JM: First they kicked me out as a monster, now they're worshipping me as a hero
JM: Ohhhh... I think I see it now! The Powder Gangers kicked me out as a monster, the villagers are worshipping me as a hero!

As punishment for not helping the war against the Gangers, I left Cobb's head on Evil Pete's favourite chair as a warning. Sadly this did not provoke any reaction and he simply sat on it. After that, I left it outside Chet's store.

What happened to Cobb can happen to you too.


Primm
The next stop is Primm, where the Gangers are once again making a dangerous nuisance of themselves. By now you should be strong enough to simply kill them and steal their weapons fairly easily, making yourself stronger and earning you cold, hard, bottletops in the process. Going in the Bison Steve and murdering them all is the first basic step, but once that has been done (including the ones on the rollercoaster) you'll need to organise something more permanent by way of law enforcement.

My dog is augmented.


National Cash Register - a militant electronics corporation - have a camp here so my first thought was that might want to take care of the town, but they were too busy and didn't seem to care.
Instead, I went all around the houses to the Correctional Facility in order to recruit some psychopath which the townsfolk seemed desperate enough to want to make into their sheriff. This involved a wholesale massacre since the jail was filled almost entirely with murderous criminals, and I failed a number of incidental missions during this slaughter (pro-Ganger missions, fortunately, so no matter). In the end, the Sheriff wanted absolute power as a precondition so I told him I'd have to think about it.

In the meantime, I learned that it was possible to reprogram the protectron to become Sheriff, so I did that instead, leaving the jail with the psychopathic ex-sheriff as its only surviving inhabitant.

'...though that means all the people in the NCR Prison died for no other reason than "I hate Powder Gangers"'


Nipton
Reagan: "What did you and your buddies do in the evenings, when the day's fighting was done?"
Shaftoe: "Pile up dead Nips with a bulldozer and set fire to 'em. Then go down to the beach with a jar of hooch and watch our ships get torpedoed."
--Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
The reality of Nipton proved eerily closer to the faux WW2 interview scene than I had expected. While I was coming to grudgingly accept that each location the main quest required me to visit was engaged in some horrible drama that I had to solve before anyone would help me, the fact that its occupants had all been piled up and set on fire by a bunch of deranged live-action-roleplayers did come as a rather morbid surprise.

To make matters worse, their leader was clean-shaven young man with a pleasantly calm yet sinister voice, and a dead coyote on his head.

"For the coyote!"


After listening to him telling me that they were going to spare me so that I could warn others how deranged they are, I made his head explode and dealt with the other roleplayers using a grenade launcher which I had acquired from a dead Raider in a police station just outside of Primm.
This made fairly short work of them and got me some rather nice weapons into the bargain, though interestingly, if you can lead them close to the trailer park, the scorpions seem to like killing them too which may save you on ammo. The only survivors of the party after I was finished were a couple of dogs whom I simply avoided until they turned non-hostile a little while afterwards for no obvious reason. Going into the houses and waiting for about three hours will have a similar effect.

The other 'survivors' were a number of Gangers crucified on telegraph poles. The game didn't allow me to rescue them, saying that they were near death so instead I put them out of their misery, causing them to make indignant angry sounds. The game also branded me 'Lord Death' as if what I was doing was somehow unfair.

It is interesting to note that if you shoot the severed heads on poles you get a chunk of rock breaking off because they are apparently made of concrete.

The 'severed heads' are cleverly sculpted from concrete or marble


Inside the main building are a number of angry dogs. After you obtain the Animal Friend perk they will become friendly, and there isn't much of interest inside the building anyway so you may as well leave them be.
However, the Legion will be greatly angered by the killing of Mr. Doghead, and assassins will be sent to execute you once a day at inappropriate times, including yet more dogheads. While they tend to be loaded up with so much armour that shooting them in head no longer works, this is actually a blessing in disguise since once you have killed them (ganger dynamite or a thermic lance helps) you will be rewarded with a selection of expensive weapons and armour, possibly including said lance.
As a rule I tended to hold on to a set of armour from the hardest one to kill. Dressing as a Legionary is Bad, but if you put it on temporarily when they show up to kill you, the same forces that prevented them from dying easily will now be protecting you as well.


JM: Bear in mind my strategy is likely to involve a lot of running away, save-scumming
and chugging stimpaks until he thinks he's Jesus Christ risen
Helios
Strictly you're supposed to go to Novac next. And that is a good idea, but instead of proceeding with the main quest, I recommend stopping off at the Helios One power plant once you have visited NoVac to enable fast-travel back there after the errands have been done.
Helios One may require a little fiddling with your skills to convince National Cash Register to allow you to help, though you might just be able to slip in through a side entrance. Once you do get in, it's fairly easy - get the password from the Followers of the Apocalypse guy and the fraud. Both will try to convince you to route the power to their own interests.
Go outside and activate the two terminals and then proceed to the main tower to bring the systems online. The only difficult part is dealing with the robots and that can be worked around by not tripping any alarms and by hacking the turret controls.

Once you have brought the controls up, you must route the power to Archimedes II and no other. Do not activate the Arch-1 defence system, however - or at least, don't save afterwards. (It is very cool - it will just ruin your relationship with NCR and allow Caesar's LARPers to take over the site, which is Bad).

Do not stare into beam with remaining head


Once the array has been brought up completely, go back to the Apocalypse Follower and tell him you're all set. He won't realise that the power is being routed to a superweapon that will shortly be under your sole control, but is pleased that it's not going to NCR and this will give you kudos with the rest of the group.
When you're done with the power plant, go to Vegas. Yes, you're supposed to go to Novac and Boulder City first, but we're only going as far as Freeside and we're not planning to stay long anyway. Just walk there, (it's not a long trek from the 188 Trading Company) and go into Freeside. Next to Mick and Ralphs's shop is a derelict building where two children sleep. The boy has a toy gun, which you can relieve him of by various means (pickpocketing while he's asleep, barter, or 1000 caps which you can make fairly easily by selling the Legion Assassin goodies).

The gun - Euclid's C-Finder - is far from being a toy and actually forms the targetting mechanism for an orbital laser array. It will only operate if you routed the Helios power to the Arch-2 installation. Incidentally, if you held off on the Powder Ganger attack in Goodsprings, now might be a good time to go back and deal with them, since you can bring down hot death upon your foes once per day. This will also help you greatly against Caesar's assassins, which is the prime reason for obtaining it so early.



RG: How's it going?
JM: "Rex, what the hell are you doing inside that mountain...?"
JM: I can only find three of the latest batch of assassins
JM: The other one, I found his brain but I'm not sure where the rest is
RG: ...Oh.
RG: I thought he did a sensible thing and ran off.
RG: Well, you can still take his stuff through his brain, so it does not matter.

The only downside of the Arch-2 laser (besides its once-a-day charging) is that it is exceptionally buggy and will frequently become stuck in targetting mode. To fix this, I recommend downloading and installing the following mod: Euclid C-Finder Fix by Nekhanimal.
It does slightly increase the damage done by the beam and it sets the recharge time to 3pm every day instead of a rolling 24-hour cycle, but most importantly, it makes the damn thing work reliably.

While you're in Freeside it is also worth visiting The King, since doing so will open a chain of quests that culminate in your obtaining Rex the dog as a companion. This crosses over with the Followers somewhat, hence hitting off well with the power plant guy is a good start. Whether or not you pursue Rex at this point, I would recommend getting the Animal Friend perk as soon as is feasible as it will make your life a lot easier.



Novac and Boulder City
NoVac is a small town built around a motel. Occasionally traders stop there with their hideous cow-monsters. In Fallout 3 it was easy to destroy cows using plasma mines, but in New Vegas the game unfortunately seems to have cracked down somewhat and cows will not set off land-mines for some reason known only to the developers.

A cow attempts unsuccessfully to follow its owner (highlighted) up the stairs


JM: Yesyesyes
JM: I have found a plasma mine
JM: Now I can do for the cows
RG: Huh?
JM: Plasma mines and cows go together really well
JM: I need Fixer
RG: Why don't you have Fixer?
JM: I sold it to the FotA, but now I can't find the woman I sold it to
JM: As a rule I don't do drugs
JM: So I didn't think I'd need it. However I need it now for a side-quest
RG: "Don't do drugs"? Were you replaced by a doppelganger?? D:
JM: The thing is, in System Shock they had no long-term repercussions
JM: You could get high as the Pope and it didn't do anything damaging
RG: Ahh, yes.
RG: Augmented body does have that benefit.
JM: In the Elder Scrolls games and FO3 it tends to damage your character
JM: In any case I figured the FotA's need was greater than mine

However, that's beside the point, and more importantly, blowing up trader cows will not make you any friends. You really want to talk to the motel woman and the sniper in the dinosaur, but they will only really offer help to you after you've dealt with the Ghouls.

Moo


Dealing with the Ghouls is long, but not particularly difficult barring some unpleasant experiences involving crazed Nightkin. I managed to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion without killing too many people or being killed too badly myself, and eventually the Ghouls took to the stars.
After that you should be roughly idolised by Novac and you'll be sent on to Boulder City. In theory you can go straight into Vegas to see Mr. H at this point (assuming you have the readies for the credit check), but you may as well murder the creeps who helped Benny try to murder you. They are indoors so it is not possible to strike them down with heavenly fire, but a couple of sniper rounds between the eyes will have a similar net result when all is said and done.



Gallons of rubbing alcohol flow through The Strip and are set on fire
Before we go to The Strip proper, we will need to do a couple of thngs. For one, if you haven't already got the dog at this point, I strongly urge you do so - it will make life a lot more interesting when we go and see Benny. Animal Friend will also be useful too, so I suggest you stop and attend to those things if possible. I advise using Rey's brain from Old Lady Gibson's scrapyard, since the other available brains can only be obtained by killing Caesar's dog or Violet's dog (and this will probably require a massacre if you don't have Animal Friend).
If you do the side-quests at Jacobstown, definitely get Animal Friend before entering the cave full of hissy-pups.


JM: That's pretty weird
JM: I'm no longer in the desert, I'm in a mountain town with snow-capped peaks, lots of trees everywhere and grass
RG: Nice. :3
JM: But the soundtrack thinks I'm still in Freeside so there's a constant murmur of people partying and smashing bottles


RG: How's it going?
JM: I had to go into a cave filled with Nightstalkers. They suggested I bring Lily with me.
She's a bit mad, but said something like "Nightstalkers... always eating my Bighorners! I'll teach them a lesson!"
JM: By the time I got into the cave, I was still confused about whether it was full of Nightkin or Nightstalkers.
I got even more confused when it was full off hissing invisible things
JM: Then I realised that it was because the Nightstalkers were the dog-reptile things
RG: XD
JM: And I was an Animal Friend, so the entire quest was rendered almost pointless. I went into the cave, found the
item I needed and went out again. And Lily didn't get to teach a single lesson
JM: But I did come out of it with a super sledgehammer named "Oh baby!" or something
RG: XD

If you need more experience in order to get perks or persuasive powers, there are plenty of Fiends to kill in the ruins south of Vegas, raiders in the grassy hills between Nipton and Novac and Caesar's Assassins will tend to appear if you're in the Wilderness. I have found that a good strategy is to go to the Grub'n'Gulp - Caesar's men will lurk behind the overpass. One of them will always come out first, and since the others tend to remain put if you keep your distance, with a little care you can bring down the Judgement of Poseidon upon the other three while they stand there like lemons besides the pylon.
There remains the risk that the Assassins will assassinate the guy who runs the Grub'n'Gulch and/or any other locals, but that's considered Caesar's doing, not yours - sometimes even if they accidentally get caught up in your death-ray. On the plus side, once all the vendors are out of the way, you have free reign to deal with the cows.

Part 2 - Viva New Vegas
ZZ Tops
Given that Benny shot you in the head, it is only fair that we return the favour. Make sure you save in a new slot first. The guards just inside the casino will take your weapons, but it is possible to sneak handguns in by using a Stealth Boy.
Once inside with at least one gun, get as close to Benny as you can without triggering the conversation and murder him. Having Rex with you will aid immensely since Benny's friends will become rather angry on seeing his head blown off. Loot Benny's corpse for the Platinum Chip and then, once Rex has had his fun, leave for the Lucky 38. The doormen will still return your weapons, even if they are dead.

At this point, Vulpes Incultus' successor will approach you as you leave The Tops, saying that Caesar is willing to forgive your crimes if you'll go and visit him at Cottonwood Cove. This will, unfortunately, stop the Assassins from appearing (they are my primary source of income) but we will attend to that in due course.
Go to the Lucky 38. Inside, you will meet Mr. House (who is unfortunately not an AI), and explain the function of the Platinum Chip (which is unfortunately not a room-temperature superconductor). Then he will give you the chip back and tell you to visit an abandoned bunker in Caesar's back yard.

Now that the Securitrons know you're working for Mr. H, it is probably worth going back to the exterior of The Tops, and shooting Caesar's Envoy in the head. I would suggest saving first, just in case, but since the Securitrons don't seem to like him, they will normally remark "Homicide detected." and pay it no further mind. Murdering the so-called 'comedian' seems to have a similar result.



JM: I can hear the report about Benny being killed
JM: Something that amused me was that I heard that report while I was still in the Tops, trying to fight my way out again
JM: Clearly Swank had been planning for Benny's death for a long, long time
JM: Maybe I should have shot him too
RG: *snrk*
JM: "Hey, Rexie, how would you like to run a casino, boy?"

It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mr. H will give you a very nice hotel suite in the '38. You can make companions wait there if you need them to be out of your hair for a bit (e.g. when teleporting into the OWB add-on).
Outside the elevator there is a computer terminal which will allow you to upgrade the suite. Unlike Skyrim, and Oblivion, this is not done through conversation with NPCs, but the add-ons are purchased as if from a vendor. This has an interesting side-effect that you can sell it weapons.

...though how you push the guns into the VDU is never really explained.


Heil Caesar
I spent about a week trying to figure out how the hell you get to Caesar's Fort, attacking it from every possible direction until I suddenly remembered that Caesar's dead envoy wanted me to go to Cottonwood Cove. This was not something I particularly wanted to do because it involved going through a high-radiation zone. However, it is possible to obtain a rad suit from the corpse of "Mr. Radical", which can be found near the Clark Fields industrial estate, near Novac. Rex is radiation-proof, which is fortunate because the rad suit won't fit him.
While searching for a way to The Fort, I completed the 'Camp Forlorn Hope' quest. This must be done stealthily - while it is tempting to sneak into Nelson alone and play with the sniper rifles, this will make Caesar not want to see you, and that would be bad.

The game didn't like being reloaded in mid-redraw. Quite appropriate, though.


Instead, I followed the quest as intended, chumming up to the National Cash Register troops and then helping out so they got the blame for Nelson and not me.
Back at the Cove, I found a number of crucified people including one Anders. He seemed rather pleased to make my acquaintance.

On the cross in my death-trap, death-trap...


As another act of mercy I killed him and the other one since the game wouldn't let me take them down from their telegraph poles. From here, I made my way to the boat, and on to Caesar's Camp. At the camp my weapons and drugs were all removed. After a brief interview with Caesar he asked me to open Mr. H's bunker and destroy everything inside it. To achieve this task I was given my weapons back, which was a fatal mistake.
The bunker is straightforward. Inside is a computer terminal where Mr. House appears and briefs you. It can be amusing to tell him you're going to blow up the bunker.

Once the bunker has been dealt with according to Mr. House' plan, kill the guards inside the weather station. This will be hard, but if you can accomplish it relatively silently, the rest of the camp will not realise what has happened. Loot their weapons and load what you can into the dog for later sale at the 188 Trading Co or similar vendors.
It is worth noting at this point that Rex cannot carry Legion armour (or Brotherhood armour, or various other kinds). This is because the game is convinced you are trying to dress him as a Roman soldier and will refuse point-blank. However, instead of simply putting the armour in his... wherever Rex rex stores things... he will instead fold it neatly up (with his jaws?) and covertly dump it on the floor. I lost several expensive sets of armour because I did not notice this jiggery-pokery was happening.


JM: Found the Q-35 matter modulator, though I'm not sure what use it is
JM: It's probably part of some quest for interesting tech since it seems to be fairly useless as a weapon.
JM: I found a couple of dead Brothers too. I tried to make Rex carry their armour, but he threw it on the floor
RG: Damn.
JM: I mean, he's carrying a flamethrower, a missile launcher, a fatman and 94 sticks of dynamite,
the EMP gun, the minigun, the dog bowl and the spare cowboy repeater.
JM: So two complete suits of power armour on top of that is nothing, right?
RG: He does not want to be associated with the Brohood.
JM: Clearly

Next, leave the weather station, and go back into Caesar's Tent. Leave Rex outside, unless the Legion have realised you've gone bad, in which case it won't really matter. Once in the tent, save and introduce Caesar to your old mate, Euclid.

Atomic lasers falling from the sky... where's my umbrella?


In my playthrough I was of a sufficiently high level that this did not kill Caesar outright, unfortunately. However it did turn his guard into a pair of smoking boots and a sniper round was sufficient to finish the job.

"Whatcha got in the trunk?"
"Oh... You don't wanna look in there."


It is worth noting that while I was attempting to destroy Caesar, the targetting mechanism would sometimes get confused by the attacking guards and this would result in the orbital laser focussing inside the tent where I was standing. If I was pressed against the wall of the tent to try and get as far away from the fiery death as possible, the shockwave would blow me through the tent wall, which would make the game very, very unhappy.

Dr. Wang melts under the force of his death-ray. He got better.


Eventually, after quaffing numerous stimpacks, the scene inside the tent was still and I was able to loot things, leaving most of Caesar's possessions which were marked as hot. Never mind that I'd just murdered about a dozen people - the game can live with that, but if you take their books it will make you sorry.
Also caught in the blast were two Legion Mongrels. Fortunately they will return to life if you leave the tent for a few days. Caesar and his goons will not, however.

The next step is to get out of the camp alive. Rex will be out there, but there are lots and lots of LARPers who are very, very angry because you've just murdered their god-king. You can always come back later to massacre the survivors, but for now I would recommend you concentrate on getting out alive. Don't worry about Rex, who is probably unconscious by this point - simply getting to the docks will work, and this will cause Rex to teleport into the sea, lying on his side.


My Little Runaway
If we carry on like this, we'll win the game in no time flat, and like its immediate predecessor, FONV has a 'hard' ending in that the game will stop, as opposed to Skyrim et al where they player is turned loose to continue roaming around decapitating Thalmor Justicars and anyone else they take a dislike to.
So instead, I took a short break and decided to go exploring. Here are some of the things I did during that time.

While I suggested that you get Rex fixed up ASAP, I did not do this on my first playthrough. There are a couple of interesting things which came out of that. Firstly, while returning to Mr. H after visiting judgement upon Benny, the Securitrons advised me that the incident had been cleared up and that I should not be afraid to return to The Tops.

When I eventually did - now with Rex - it was a massacre. The doormen went mental the second I entered, and I was forced to shoot Swank and his friends in the head. On the plus side, they didn't take my weapons away.

Rex goes on a killing spree

JM: Oh! Earlier I went to the Tops Casino to have a chat with Yes Man.
JM: I distinctly remember Mr. House' robots telling me that it was safe to patronise The Tops
JM: Instead, the doormen tried to kill me, and then Rex went from table to table, killing all the card dealers (?!)
RG: Just a normal day in New Vegas!

Dammit, Rex, I can't take you anywhere, can I...?

Earlier, one of the errands I ran for The King was investigating someone who gets a lot of repeat business as a guard escort. It turned out that he actually had a number of shills pretending to be marauders whom he would defend you from by firing at them with blanks. This offers a lot of scope for entertainment, since while they are lying there pretending to be dead, you can shoot them, blow them up or call down the wrath of the ancients upon them. In some cases, when you reload they will get up off the ground and start to walk around:

No shit, Sherlock


This had an interesting side effect in that one of them escaped, went mental and began attacking the doormen outside The Kings' HQ. The doorman was shot dead and the other one, who leans at a wall, lost his brains. Later, when I came back into that part of Freeside, I discovered that the game had propped the doorman's limp corpse back by the door, so he keeled over as soon as I entered the cell.

The game rather optimistically places the murdered doorman back in position


Worse, in a fit of optimisim, it had propped the headless King up by the wall and balanced the brains carefully on top of his neck, causing them to fall off and roll across the street.
After I pushed the body around a bit the game gave up on it, but it still insisted on placing his brain roughly at head-height where he had been standing. This inadvertently solved another long-stanging mystery - the fate of Joe Cobb's head back at Goodsprings. You may recall that it was last seen resting on Chet's mailbox as a warning. Or was it sat on Evil Pete's favourite chair? Either way, I noticed later that it had disappeared, and some time later discovered it was lying besides his body (which the townsfolk had just casually left in a ditch), another victim of the game's overly-hopeful attempts at reanimating the dead.



JM: I have the dog, but I need to get him fixed
JM: Uh, that is healed not castrated
RG: XD

Aerotech and the Fiends
In the area south of Vegas, somewhere around by McLaren and the west pumping station, there is an office campus, latterly belonging to Aerotech, whoever they were. It has been turned into a refugee camp instead. One of the refugees is desperate to get word of his family, who were enslaved by the LARPers at Cottonwood Cove.
My last visit to Cottonwood involved fleeing for my life from a vast swarm of LARPers shotly after I had murdered their boss. On the return visit, I loaded up on rifles and the like, including a sniper model poached from a dead Legion Assassin. Hunting Rifles work well also.

Taking a similar approach to last time, I snuck into the camp and embarked upon a systematic extermination of all the Roman Legion roleplayers, using these weapons. With the Animal Friend perk, the Legion Mongrels will remain docile and watch with mild curiousity as their owners have their heads spread very thinly over a wide area.

A possible alternative would be to push the barrels of radioactive goo into the town (found in a truck overlooking the bay), but this would most likely kill the people you are attempting to rescue, and even worse, the dogs.

Back in Fiend territory it is worth checking out the area around by Allied Technologies Inc. There are usually some Fiends around whom you can shoot in the head and steal the goodies from. These Fiends often have plasma or laser weaponry which you can refurbish and sell on for bottletops.

Where things get particularly interesting is around the back of the ATI building, where the Fiends and National Cash Register troopers will intersect. This will often result in troopers being turned into little piles of green goo, and after that things get interesting.

Once a trooper has been reduced to goo, the pile will remain there indefinitely, but when the next set of troopers are spawned a few days later, the pile of goo will remain somehow linked to one of the soldiers. This means that when you attempt to search the goo with the trooper nearby, it will cause them to start talking to you.

"The Fiends shouldn't have messed with our great army!"


Once you have a sufficient reserve of stimpacks, it is worth visiting Vault 3, which is inside the Ruins area and full of Fiends. An early attempt proved to difficult but a level or so later, and I was able to walk in and exterminate them all. Having the dog helped as well. It is interesting to note, that like the Gangers, the Fiends will come at you with energy weapons and pool cues, promising to show you your own blood. As soon as you start fighting back, they will be appalled, uttering shocked comments such as "What have you done?!", and "Noooo!!!" upon finding the bodies, as if they were regular civillian NPCs. This does not stop them trying to kill you, however.
There are a number of special Fiends whom you are supposed to kill as part of an NCR quest. I just ran into them and killed them because I don't like Fiends. Because there is a bounty on them you end up carrying their heads around with you indefinitely (something my Skyrim character can only dream of).
Violet is probably the easiest. While she is good with a sniper rifle, and did on one occasion make my head blow up, it was a lucky shot. The rifle is her backup defence, after all - her primary defence is about a dozen fierce attack dogs. However, you have the Animal Friend perk, so they will ignore you completely while you go up to her and remove her head.

The other memorable one is a guy called Cook-Cook who is a complete psychopath. To me he was just another Fiend so I blew his head open and gave his flame thrower to the dog. As far as I know it is not possible to give the heads to the dog to carry, since they are quest items and so the game doesn't want to let go of them. It is not explained how the player is able to take Cook-Cook's head while the pieces of it are left lying scattered over the ground for the rest of the game (notwithstanding the game's occasional habit of throwing dead people's brains around).

Directly Northwest of Goodsprings Cemetery (often guarded by Cazadors) is a small tribal camp where a number of people have been killed in some kind of freak explosion, their corpses marked as 'Burned Body'. If you come back later, the corpses will rise up and try to kill you.

He is risen!


I should also mention Black Mountain. If you mosey around the foot of the mountains near Helios and the substation, you will 'discover' Black Mountain. This will allow you to fast-travel to it even though you have not actually found the way there.
There is a peaceful solution to this by repairing the robot and I found it the most satisfying. You also get Karma. The only downside is that it ends the delightfully bizarre broadcasts once you have freed Raul. He can fix anything though, so it is a worthwhile investment.



Vault 22
JM: Okay, this seems to have turned their corpses into some kind of SS2 monster
JM: One of them was on the toilet
RG: Huh?
JM: One of the plant monsters was in one of the toilet stalls
JM: I forget if it was the ladies or the gents
JM: I'm going to complain to the Overseer about all these plants
RG: The Overseer is also a plant, don't bother.

...there is little more to be said about this vault.

Though it does have the best rendition of ultraviolet lighting I've ever seen in a game.


Brotherhood of Steal
While wandering around near the Deathclaw-infested quarry, I ran across the Hidden Valley. Intrigued by the vents in the desert floor, I resolved to investigate this wonder. Entering one of the bunkers, three heavily-armoured men came out and demanded I remove my clothes. Their demands were frankly unreasonable, so I said no. This did not end well - for them.


JM: Oh, poor Brotherhood of Steel...
JM: They were very rude
KJ: the charter that exists in the Mojave is entirely different from the one in FO3
JM: They said that I was one step away from being erased from existence.
They clearly had no idea who they were dealing with
KJ: FO3's is eccentric in that they're geared toward helping wastelanders rather than alienating them
JM: I was expecting that they would put up a fight
JM: Mind you, I have just been battling deathclaws
KJ: ahahahaha
KJ: OH NO DID YOU KILL THEM
JM: I'm afraid so
KJ: They're kinda douchey
JM: They started shooting first
KJ: were you dressed in NCR armor? b/c that's why
JM: Then had the gall to be surprised when I made their heads blow up
JM: FWIW I saved before going into the bunker, so no harm done
JM: I'm just bewildered at how badly I outclassed them
KJ: ahahahaha
KJ: btw, if you actually do Veronica's quest, you'll probably be bewildered at their ...assholetry
JM: I mean, wearing some tatty metal armour and nothing on my head at all, I managed to kill six
people in power armour armed with lasers and gauss rifles.
JM: I took about two stimpacks for the whole battle
JM: And I was using a hunting rifle.

We will have peace, when you and all your works have perished


JM: I'd have liked to have just killed the two mooks and asked the paladin if he wanted to talk sense yet
RG: Let's hope they will implement aggressive negotiations in Fallout 4. If it is ever made.

At the end of the day I decided that it wasn't worth bothering them yet and went off to massacre everyone at Caesar's Fort instead.

The game does the 'brain thing' again. (The dog is caught in mid-respawn)


Part 3 - Back On Track
For the Benefit of Mr. House
Your next task is to befriend the Boomers, despite their numerous attempts to murder you as you approach the base. If you ask Mr. H questions, you can ask him where his power comes from, which will make him get irritable saying that it comes from the Hoover Dam - where else? There is no option to say that he might have a reactor in the basement (the fact that he actually does makes things all the more irritating later).
Getting to the base itself is a problem, and I think it was one of the single hardest tasks in the game. Your best bet is to sneak in through the railway tunnel, but you will still have trouble getting to the base itself. Tempting as it is to pop their crazy heads off - especially when they start threatening to kill your dog - you must grin and bear it. Or, as a compromise, save before blowing their heads off so you can undo it later.

Their leader will ask you to meet with several of her underlings and perform various tasks to ingratiate yourselves with these crazies. The Courier is not stupid and will say things like "I've done what you asked, even though I know you're trying to kill me." I purged the power plant of ants and then repaired the solar cells.
Because fixing technology is where it's at, and when you've taken over the Mojave and can safely eradicate them using the orbital laser array, the base will be far more useful with all the amenities in working order.

One of the Boomers will ask you to look out for missiles. On no account should you do this. Firstly, they're a bunch of dangerous crazies. Secondly, the missiles will be of more use to you.



JM: I'm going to fucking kill those Boomers
RG: ?
JM: Nellis Air Force Base. They keep blowing me up
JM: I have a set of instructions to help me get in, but it's not really working
RG: Take a shot of Turbo and JUST FUCKING RUN
JM: That sounds like a good idea
RG: Drugs solve everything.
JM: Turbo seems to last 1.5 seconds

JM: A mass revenge killing against the Boomers and the game doesn't blink.
Steal their magic 8 ball and the game penalises you. I think its priorities may be a little screwed up
RG: Verily.

Olde Wurlde Blues
Yes, we can make a few tweaks
Yes, we will create some freaks
-'Freaks', Threshold
Around this time, Keaton graciously bought me the Old World Blues add-on. For those not in the know it is sufficiently surreal that there is little to add. The setting alone is so trippy that it sounds like I'm making things up. If you haven't seen the add-on, maybe you should skip to the next section.

Basically, you begin the add-on up in a lab run by a number of crazy brain-people, who have allegedly removed your brain, replaced it with a Tesla coil and flushed it down the toilet. Your real brain is being held by Dr. Mobius in a red-illuminated dome. Mobius will periodically send psychotic threats to you and the brain-people.

Many otherwise normal objects in OWB have an AI behind them, such as the psychotic talkie toaster.

Aah, so you're a waffle man.


There is also a plot-critical stealth suit which keeps talking to you, and in stark contrast to my normal playstyle of hoarding stims but not actually using them unless on the point of death, it will pump you full of drugs the moment you graze yourself. This can be handy in places but it has an annoying habit of burning through Stimpacks like sweeties. It will also drown the player in Med-X, getting you addicted to the stuff in no time flat, which is Bad.
Meanwhile, the crazy brain-people have been de-braining other people prior, so once you exit the blue dome, you will be set upon by gibbering lunatics known as Lobotomites. While the brain-people claim that brain removal is standard practice, a few quick blasts of brush-rifle will prove otherwise. Similarly, if the Lobotomites manage to pop your head, they will be rewarded with a shower of meat - no Tesla coils here.

Also of note is the X8 Research Centre, where Cyberdogs are made. This includes a giant, drug-addled monster known as Gabe, who I did not kill and later protected from the rad-scorpions, which gives you some bonus dialogue with the crazy brain people. By collecting data tapes you also get the opportunity to create a new cyberdog known as Roxie, who gets her own slide when you complete the add-on. There are other possible permutations, though most of them are disasterous. Crossing a man with a dog, for instance, will simply leave you with a dead dog and a pile of meat.

At the end, you find a brain in a tank which Mobius will claim is yours, though that seems most unlikely to me. Mobius is sufficiently drug-addled that he's probably lost track of who it actually is.
Wherever the brain did come from, it is rather snotty and argumentative. Like Keaton before me, I fell out with the thing and left it to go soft in its tank. More to the point, if it was truly the Courier it would know to show respect, since people who give me lip tend to get their brains turned into little wet bits.

When talking to the brain, there is one conversation path you should NOT take, because it will cause the brain to ramble forever. Since behavioural loops are a running theme in the add-on, I thought they were just being cute at first, until I realised that there was no way to break out of the conversation short of console commands.

Helios One coming online... Jason Bright and his followers launching into the vast unknown...
Helios One coming online... Jason Bright and his followers launching into the vast unknown...
Helios One coming online... Jason Bright and his followers launching into the vast unknown...


120 Days of Gomorrah
I must confess that when I was bored I would sometimes use the hookers outside Gomorrah for target practice, particularly with the Fat Man. It was fun to dress the Courier up in their clothes afterwards as well.

Emily Ortal of the Followers watches in bemusement


This could sometimes produce interesting results:

On the one hand you've been really helpful and nice, but on the other hand, annihilating hookers with tactical nuclear weaponry is a bit... uncouth

Another interesting thing is that occasionally the hookers will walk around without moving their legs.
Anyway. There is one thing which you MUST know before entering Gomorrah. The doorman will remove your weapons, and also frisk your dog for weapons too. However, although your weapons are returned to you automatically upon leaving the casino, Rex will not be so fortunate.
You have two choices - either confiscate all Rex' weapons yourself prior to entering, or using TCL, break into the void behind the cashroom and steal them. More on this later.
I won't go into great detail in the quest, but it is rather interesting to note that the Omerta Thugs - i.e. gangsters providing security - will generally favour you when it comes to a conflict.



JM: What is wrong with the Omerta Thugs? They're gangland bodyguards. But they don't seem to give
a shit if I pick the lock on their bosses' suite and start rooting around inside their bedrooms...
RG: I find their lack of dedication disturbing.
RG: Ugh. I am torn. I want to play games, but I also want to draw. What do I do? D:
JM: Draw games
RG: I, uh, how
RG: CANNOT COMPUTE

JM: Heh. I just walked into the room, broke into the safe, stole the evidence, confronted one of the
Boss' friends with the evidence. He drew a gun, and the Omerta Thug murdered him.
JM: It's like I'm running the casino and no-one bothered to tell me.
JM: Thug! Kill that man.

JM: Hehehe
JM: I just broke into the suite belonging to one of the Bosses. He was in there.
JM: He just watched me until I stole some random shit from his dresser. Then he turned violent.
JM: The thug outside the door ran away.
RG: Haha

JM: In the final scene of this quest, you go to confront the Bosses in their office with your tame Boss.
You have a little chat then they try to kill you.
JM: Interestingly, if you go in there beforehand and throw frag grenades at them they just stand there ignoring it
JM: This time, when the Tame Boss opened the door, I was tagging along, cruising by a snooker table.
I idly stuffed one of the balls into my pocket. Everyone went apeshit.

Oops, they all died that time. I wonder who'll run the place now?


JM: Okay, that was fun
JM: I went in there and sat on the couch like they told me to.
JM: This is to put you at a disadvantage since they're standing there with machine guns and you're
sitting on the couch when they try to kill you
JM: So I just stayed on the couch and watched while the dog killed them both.
RG: "Rex, kill."
RG: "Good boy."

One final point was that while hovering around in the reception area of Gomorrah, I caught the tail end of a remarkable conversation the receptionist was having with my dog:

"Check out the girls in the courtyard. They have the hottest asses on the Strip!"

I was particularly bummed at not catching the subtitles as well (one day...). However, Rex clearly took this to heart:

You Robbed My Dog
JM: Mr. H told me to destroy the Brothahood of Steel. After trying several strategies I found one
that didn't involve killing any of them.
RG: Oh?
JM: I felt a bit bad about blowing up their bunker (black smoke pours out of all the little ventilation
fans), but it looks like they skimped on the self-destruct mechanism anyway.
It caves in the front door, and that's about it
JM: If you tcl past the blockage, you can go back into the base and they're still all happily wandering around inside
RG: Hahaha
JM: Unfortunately, at this point I discovered that Rex no longer had any weapons. I kind of lost it at this point,
clipped back into the base and began yelling "YOU ROBBED MY DOG!" as I shot them all in the head with the anti-tank gun.
JM: ...afterwards I reloaded to before the entire fiasco and discovered that Rex didn't have the guns in the first place.
JM: Uh, sorry guys, my bad...

Having made periodic attempts at contacting the Brotherhood as described earlier, I hit upon a strategy that completed Mr. House' goals with minimal casualties and loss of Karma. First, make Rex wait, otherwise he will embark on a massacre of the kind we are attempting to avoid.
What normally happens is that the doors open up and three heavily-armoured men come through. Two of them guard the door, and the other one walks towards you and orders you to strip naked.

Stealth-boys won't work on him, but if you hide in the far corner, he will have to walk around one of the crates to get to you. As soon as he turns, slither around the other side of the crate and slip between the two guards. From here you can slither down into the complex.

Immediately you will be accosted by their second line of defence, Paladin Ramos if I remember right. Enable a stealth-boy immediately before approaching him, and crawl across the ground for good measure. This won't stop him talking to you, but it will help afterwards.
Ramos will ask you to surrender and be taken to their Elder. This will involve you being turned into a Human Bomb so we don't want that. Tell him no, and slither away. Ramos will turn hostile but because he can't actually see you, he will remain standing there watching the door.

Slither down past the turrets, into the L2 sector, through the library and into the control room where the blue self-destruct mechanism is. By this point in the game I had 100 points of science and was able to hack it - I am assuming that you have done similar.



JM: I still want to know what the fuck happened to the weapons I gave Rex, though.
I swear he had the FIDO gun
RG: The what?
JM: Imagine a gatling gun with little floppy metal ears, a nasal sensor and a
german shepherd dog's brain in a tank
RG: Uhhh...
JM: I never used it much, it made unpleasant gurgling sounds. It also whimpers when you switch weapon
JM: But I gave it to Rex since I figured they'd get along
RG: Too bad Rex cannot fire it.

Now slither out again. You will need to pickpocket Ramos to steal his key since he has locked the door somehow. Once you have slithered out into the top level of the bunker, the goons who tried to arrest you earlier will be gone so you can stop slithering. The Stealth Boy will have worn out by this point as well.
Get Rex to rejoin you and as soon as you leave the bunker it will go 'crump' and black smoke will pour out of the vents. As mentioned, this has merely caved in the entrance and if you clip past the rubble, the Brothers are still pursuing their normal duties, blissfully unaware of the self-destruct mechanism. But they can't get out, and that's all Mr. House seems to care about.

The one complication is if you exit the base during the dark hours when the vents are generating the synthetic sandstorm. If this happens there is a high possibility that four of the Brothers will spawn outside the base, and turn hostile. This will end poorly because although they are hostile, fighting back will lose you a lot of karma. It's probably best to save before exiting the complex and reloading if they appear.



JM: The Omertas! They robbed my dog!
RG: What?
RG: How??
RG: When???
JM: "When entering the casino, any companion's weapons will be removed from their inventory and will
not be returned after leaving, even if they are told to wait outside."
RG: Amazing.
JM: Bloody annoying. Now I'm going to have to break into the weapons safe and see if they are there

Part 4 - Oh Dam
Gyre and Kimball
When you get back to Mr. H, he will ask you to help NCR, in stark contrast to most of your previous orders. I thought that National Cash Register were mostly okay as a faction, so I had been doing a few quests on the side in the hopes that I might be able to broker some kind of treaty between messrs K and H come the end of the game.
Your instruction are to try and prevent the Live-Action Roleplayers from rendering unto President Kimball what thou hast rendered unto Caesar.

When I arrived at the dam, they were very pleased to see me, despite the fact that snuggling up with the crazy Boomers had made NCR rather jittery and not really wanting to be friends with me anymore. Dr. Wang was told to wait until morning, which he did by standing in the centre of the room like a statue for about 18 hours.

Once things are go, you will be given the opportunity to do a sweep of the dam complex. There is a young lady wandering around the visitor centre looking for her boyfriend. If you talk to her, she will mention that he's an engineer. Logging into the terminal (no-one cares if you crack it), you will discover that an engineer was assigned to look after the Prez' chopper.

If you examine the cupboard you will find some blood if you have a perception of 7 or so. Mentats will help with this, so if you feel like going inside the cupboard for a quick drug orgy, this may be the excuse you've been looking for.

Outside, if you talk to the head ranger, the Prez will touch down, apparently teleport from the helicopter to the podium and begin a long and dull echo-laden speech. If you get too close while looking for snipers, the guards will get antsy but because they only complain when you get sufficiently far into the forbidden zone, they don't provide you time to leave and the whole thing turns into a completely unnecessary shooting match.

Instead, I would climb up to the top of the visitor centre just as the Vertibird appears, and talk to the engineer. Tell him your dog doesn't like him, and then murder him when he starts to get angry.

"My dog told me to kill him"

It might be an idea to take the detonator as evidence, but no-one seems to care. The guards will all start running around like headless chickens, the Vertibird aborts its landing and goes away, and the head ranger will walk around in an agitated manner and not speak to you, leaving you completely clueless other than the status message saying that you've won the mission.

The Ends
Next, you'll be given a simple little mission to install an override circuit in the switchyard near Helios. If the guards see you they will order you to leave immediately.
Since this had already occurred while I was exploring the area around Helios, I was aware of this and solved the problems of any confrontation by sneaking around them using a Stealth Boy. I would recommend you leave the dog at the '38 since his presence is liable to be a bit of a giveaway as to who is responsible.
If you sneak in via the stealth boy, you may be warned to leave by the folks inside. However, you should easily be able to attach the device to the computer and slither out again before they get too angry.

At this point you probably want to save in a new slot as the game is basically complete. You could also at this point do a sudden about-turn and bring in Yes-Man to replace Mr. H, but I chose not to because killing a 250-year old man was something I didn't feel happy about.
It is worth saying you have questions, at which point Mr. H will go on about how NCR are a thorn in his grand plan to dominate the market in cash machines. He starts to sound a bit like Mussolini at this point which did make me have second thoughts.

Now hear me cry, I am in quest - of the key to my fate
I might be nigh to the key - in the Valley of Hate
-Key To My Fate, Edguy

Your final mission as given by Mr. H is to go to the dam (which he does for you by some kind of teleportation) kill everyone you don't like (i.e. the LARPers and most likely the Great Khans as well) and then install another override chip. The control room is guarded by National Cash Register shock troops. You can bluff them, or you can sneak past them with a Stealth Boy. Amusingly, they will utterly fail to notice the robot dog, the securitron and any other followers you happen to have with you at the time.

"Hello!"

Afterwards, you then have to go into some private little bit of The Fort and deal with the Legate. I made the mistake of not waiting until Arch-2 had recharged before embarking on the final assault which made things more difficult since he's probably the the toughest character to kill I've encountered in the game.
Using the Fat Man (found in a lake by the Deathclaw Quarry) is fun, but it does have a tendency to clobber you as well since there is only so much that drugs can do to protect you when you're standing at ground zero of a low-yield thermonuclear device.

Once he's dead, loot his corpse. It might be fun to dress as the Legate when The General shows up to see if you can pretend to be him, but I didn't try this. Again, you might also need to trip out on some mentats in order to talk The General into leaving. I suppose you could order the Securitrons to murdered everyone of course, but given how hard I tried to be friends with both NCR and House it seemed a bit of a waste.

Finally, Mr. H will remote into the area by Securitron and the credits will roll. For about 20 minutes.



Part 5 - Bonus Screenshots
My character is called Fiendish Dr. Wang

The weirdest bark scorpion in the game

The weirdest brick in the game

Perhaps they really did remove Dr. Wang's brain.

Soak'im in oil till he sprouts a flipper, earl-eye in the morning

Cazadors do not like being lured underwater

Possibly another Bark Scorpion

Headshot with clipping disabled

Rex learns to fly

Rex can sit down anywhere

Worst screenshot ever

 

[laclongquan]

Holy Bovine Wall of Suffering Text!!!

 

[SCO]

Well the best ones are still the ultima 7 ones. I especially enjoyed the ultima 7 guide to drugs.

 

[Infinitron]

Skyrim! http://www.it-he.org/skyrim.htm

Skyrim - A Game of Dragons

This anti-walkthrough thing was made with build 1.9.whatever-steam-decided-it-should-be
Dragonborn and Dawnguard were not installed as of this writing.
I don't know how well it will work on other versions, or with the expansions installed. That will come later.

Extras
Skyrim Part II - Uncivil War (2020)


Content Warning
This is Skyrim. It's a game about people who go around chopping each other's heads off.
If you don't like that, stop reading now.

Spoiler

Heads, you lose

The game starts with Mittens being carted to his death in a tumbrel, a sequence which seems to be impossible to skip.

While originally setting the game up under Linux, the graphics subsystem went mental and decided it had a 2GB graphics card instead of the 1GB unit actually installed. Skyrim greedily consumed everything it could, with the result that the game ran out of texture memory and quit as soon as the horse-thief was asked for his hometown. As a result I saw the execution scene approximately 14 times in a single day while tracking down the problem, and this has perhaps killed the experience for me.

Once at Helgen, they won't know who you are so the commander's lieutenant decides to have you summarily executed along with the others for no reason that is ever explained. The horse thief is shot and then you're led off to the block with the others.

Regarding the character creation itself, there is little to add. DMFA readers may find it amusing to create a female Khajiit and name her Destania (given the latter's predeliction for killing dragons).
Perhaps the most important point to bear in mind is that the 'weight' slider should have been called 'muscles'. It does not in fact turn your character into a tub of lard but instead makes them more buff - as a result of this misunderstanding I turned it all the way down when creating Mittens leaving him wasted and feeble-looking.

Unlike Rune where the protagonist actually does die in the first few minutes of the game, your beheading is interrupted by a gigantic flying lizard which somehow manages to sneak up on the executioner before demolishing the town. You then escape with either a Stormcloak or a Legionary, or in the case of Mittens, you follow one, get lost and separated and end up escaping with the other.

For reasons which I'll explain later, the Imperial Legion path seems to be the better of the two, strange as it may sound. For what it's worth, Mittens joined the Stormcloaks, but Lynx chose the Empire. Cuddles the Slayer is yet to choose a side as of this writing.

Fortunately, both men happen to live in the same village of Riverwood, so whoever you end up with, you get sent there to ask for help. Mittens had a confusing time there as the guy's relatives were so happy to have their son saved from the Dragon, that they offered Mittens baked potatoes each time he moved, something which made it very difficult to actually get any sense out of them and continue the quest.

Eventually you're sent to Whiterun to ask Jarl Bogroll for help. You then get sent to retrieve a stone tablet from Bleak Fall Barrows. This was relatively uneventful for Mittens aside from the fact that he was discovered to be either illiterate or chronically short-sighted, with each book displaying as a mass of coloured lines and no text (a common bug at the time).

Fortunately, notes and letters were legible but I was left with the awkward task of having to look up books on the UESP website using a second machine and reading them there, particularly annoying for those Snake-Fish-Doggie puzzles where the code is embedded in the text. By the time 'Lynx' was created as my second character, the problem had resolved itself and even Mittens was able to read properly.

The Jarl will now send you to the Western Tower, which is being attacked by a dragon. On the grounds that you're one of approximately six people who survived the attack, you're sent there to show them how you defeated the dragon.

The fact that Helgen was razed to the ground in the process is kind of glossed over, and it's only when the dragon actually appears that Mittens is finally given the chance to explain that his technique for dealing with a dragon consists of running like fuck while it's busy eating everyone else. Of course, by then it's too late.

It turns out a minor modification of this technique can greatly assist in actually killing the dragon so that you can continue on with the rest of the game: It consists of attacking like fuck while it's busy eating everyone else.

Once the dragon has finally had the shit kicked out of it, Mittens will devour its soul, which everyone nearby seems to think is really cool.
It should be noted that, as with tigers, dragon bones and reproductive organs command fantastic prices from alchemists and other practitioners of herbal medicine, so make sure you have enough carrying capacity to snag them as some other bugger will take them if you leave the corpse too long.

"I love you, Dead Dragon Carcass."
"I would kill for you, Dead Dragon Carcass."
"I would do anything for you, DDC."
--Dink Smallwood


When you return to Whiterun there will be the sound of a massive explosion with no obvious cause, which I wrote off as a bug in the game and ignored completely. All three times.


The 39 Steps
Jarl B will make you a Thane and then send you off to meet the Greybeards, which you have to do by going via Helgen. In theory it should be possible to take any route southeast of the mountain, but the game has other ideas and goes to great lengths to bar you from entering anywhere else south of the mountain for no obvious reason.
Once you arrive at Isengard or wherever it was, you will need to climb the 7000 Steps, a gigantically long and twisting path. There are lots of places where the path peters out so whether there are still 7000 steps is a mystery I don't have the patience to solve. It's quite possible it used to be the 10'000 steps before some of them fell down the slopes of the mountain.

The way is relatively clear. There will be a couple of wolves, who seem unable to resist attacking badass warriors with sharp swords in preference to the tasty, docile and defenceless goats and sheep which are scattered throughout. Wolves are easy to outrun anyway. Where things do get unpleasant is when the white snowy thing jumps down from the cliff. Unless you have bunked off the quest to do some kind of fitness crash-course, the thing will be able to slaughter you with two blows. Fortunately it is possible to escape by climbing on the mountain the other side of the path, assuming you're relatively adept at fancy footwork.

Once you arrive inside the monastery, the Beards will teach you loads of shit, including pieces of the magical shout of 'Fus Roh Da', which all my characters somehow pronounce as 'Fus Bach' although it has the same effect in practice. One of the first things they explain is that you can directly absorb knowledge from Dead Dragon Carcasses. Master Einarth is 'volunteered' to demonstrate how this kind of direct transfer works, though you do not get to eat his soul into the bargain.

An interesting fiddle you can pull off here is that when Borri - one of the dwarves from The Hobbit - teaches you the first word for Whirlwind Sprint, you can quickly unlock it with a dragon soul before absorbing his knowledge. This has the awesome result of giving you level 2 sprint instead of level 1.

Once the masters have taught you all these powers, they tell you that you're not supposed to use them, before sending you off to fetch a horn from a cave that can only be accessed using the special powers they tell you not to use.

The cave is in the bowels of the Ustenov tombs complex. I think the most dangerous part was the Frostbite spiders, which tend to attack you immediately after you've been burned. Fortunately, the spiders are not very bright and with only a little encouragement will set themselves on fire for you.

Instead of a horn you find a note, somehow left by Delphine in the cave which only the Dragonborn can enter. Delphine is a highly dangerous and fanatical innkeeper from Riverwood, who set the note up as a lure to help her find the Dragonborn. Exactly why she does this is not entirely clear since she doesn't seem to believe you're The One once you do arrive.



Mortal
Ustenov is conveniently close to Morthal, so you should probably stop off there afterwards to sell your loot. In particular, you'll have a lot of Black Mage robes which Falion The Angry will be happy to purchase after shouting at you about how much the town hates him. Morthal is just across the swamps, the chief annoyance of the area being that Mittens tends not to be able to wait or fast travel near bodies of water like this, just in case the slaughterfish somehow climb out of the water and kill him.
It's probably also worth doing the vampire quest while you're there, solving a murder mystery and then rounding up a posse to dispose of Movarth the Vampire and his friend, Evil Alva. I've never quite got the hang of the whole vigilante business - inevitably the lynch-mob only turn up at the cave after I've done Movarth in, and I'm not sure if this is by design or not.

In an interesting twist, Alva turned up at the cave still in her Morthal Citizen guise, and was not only friendly to me - indeed, attacking her gained me an assault bounty of 40 gold coins - but also began to attack her buddy Movarth. This help proved invaluable in killing him because he was extremely tough. In any case, no matter what happens, even if you cut off his head, suck out his soul and then turn his body to ash using a reanimation spell, he will still be back in his cave again a couple of weeks down the road.

Once this is done the Jarl - a delightfully weird old lady who can see the future - will offer you another Thanehood if you can help her citizens on two more occasions. It is worth making friends with her since it will make the later quests rather amusing.
Probably my favourite person-in-need is Bennor, whom you 'help' by beating the shit out of him and destroying his reputation, after which he goes away happy and keeps saying what a good friend you are.



Money
Money will be something of a limiting factor to begin with. I find that the best way to get yourself a steady income is through a combination of blacksmithing and enchanting. There are some startup costs - you will need to be able to trap souls, and you will need to obtain a few enchanted weapons of just the right type. If you have the money to start with, Falion (Morthal) should be able to sell you a soul-trap spell. Finding the enchantments is harder, though - keep looking out for them and try to beg, borrow or steal something an with Absorb Health enchantment upon it.
Once you have this, you'll need to decompile it on an enchanting altar. Fortunately the infamous coin slot has been removed since Oblivion or this would not be a viable method of earning a living. Once you know the spell, start mass-producing iron daggers at the most convenient forge, usually Whiterun. You will need to obtain iron bars, but these can be purchased, or if you're really hard up, manufactured from raw iron which you can obtain at lower price, or for free if you're happy to mine it yourself.
You will also need souls, and some means of trapping them. Soul gems can be found scattered throughout or purchased empty - petty ones will do, at least for now - Skeletons, Mudcrabs and suchlike will work and there are lots of these.

Once they are filled, you can start enchanting the iron daggers. I was able to sell them for about 230 gold a pop (list price 700), which was a significant profit over the materials. Eventually, if you can find a weapon with a Banish Daedra enchantment, decompile that, and you'll be able to churn out daggers you can sell for nearly a grand a throw. At this point the biggest chokepoint becomes finding people who can afford to purchase them in bulk, though since you're likely to be buying ingots on a fairly regular basis anyway, things should sort themselves out.

This is a dagger I see before me. Sadly it won't fetch the Recommended Retail Price, though.
This is also a great way to improve your smithing and enchanting skills. Amusingly, with the latter, I kept the skill book in Riften aside until I had 99 Enchanting points, and was so able to make myself into a Master by reading the beginners' book of enchanting.

On the subject of shopping, I should also mention that you should regularly stop in at the alchemists to see what they have. We are particularly interested in building up a massive stockpile of Abecean Longfin, Cyrodilic Spadetail and salt, since fish is the key to the universe. I would also recommend going for a brief swim now and again since Longfin and Spadetail do appear in ponds and rivers.



Merchants
A fairly important thing to note about Skyrim is that the merchants have a relatively static list of items, which means that you have to wait a week or so before they will restock, and this can get rather annoying.
Saving before you enter the shop won't help, and in fact makes things worse because the amount of money the merchant has left is not stored in the savegame. For example, say you sell loads of stuff to the merchant and take all their money. If you accidentally sell something you didn't want to lose, reloading the game will cause the merchant to have no money left after you reload, regardless of how much there was when you saved. And no, you don't get to keep your money.
However, there is a way to fix the problem. Both problems, in fact. As with most things in this game, it involves beheading people.

This trick is something I discovered it by accident in Windhelm, after the blacksmith didn't have the ebony sword I wanted and I flew into a rage and lopped off his head as punishment.
When I reloaded, I discovered that he'd restocked with a completely different set of new items, and a full purse. Still no sword, though, so I killed him again and reloaded. After a few more decapitations I was finally able to buy the ebony sword from him. This trick is particularly handy when trying to get fish and other precious alchemy ingredients from the vendors, but be very, very careful not to save after the kill.

Cuddles haggles with Belethor
As mentioned, this can also be used as a shortcut way to sell lots of things very quickly, since decapitation will refill the merchant's purse as well as their stock cupboard.



Meridia
At this point I did a little questing to make money and to level up a bit before going to see the mad innkeeper. During my wanderings I accidentally found Meridia's Beacon in a chest of drawers in a vampire stronghold. Meridia is the Daedric Princess of light and stuff. In the 200 odd years since Oblivion, she has relocated from Scotland to somewhere in the American Midwest and in doing so has acquired a pleasant twang in her accent that wasn't there before.
The move probably also has something to do with her only just noticing that her temple has been neglected for the last few centuries and is in a bit of a mess, acquiring that distinctive interior that most quest-related dungeons in Skyrim possess
Anyway, when you get to the temple, she manifests as a glowing orb and levitates you into the sky. When she stops talking you start to fall, and supposedly the game is sometimes too slow to catch you, leaving you a spread across the temple as a thin red stain.

Assuming you survive the conversation, you have to go through the temple, activating a series of pedestals to link the glowing beams of light together. Be careful not to stand in the way of the beam as it's dangerous stuff. Finally, in the basement, you get to meet some Necromancer guy who is pretty nasty (I was level 15 at the time) and is able to blast you with ice on an almost continual basis. When he dies, he turns into something almost as nasty again.

Once you've sorted him out, grab the sword and you're teleported into the sky again for a performance review. Again, this can end messily if she fails to catch you before you hit the ground.



Rannveig's Fast and the Forsaken Cave
At some point fairly early on, I suggest you visit Rannveig's Fast, an ancient burial site type thing which is populated by ghosts who keep warning you to run away because they can't control what they're doing.
The main entrance leads to a trap where you're supposed to step on the plate in front of the empty chest and fall into a cage. However, it is perfectly possible to go around the trap or even jump over it. The principal treasure here anyway is the Word, part of the extremely useful Kyne's Peace shout which makes wolves and sabrecats walk peacefully away instead of attacking you.

Alternatively, as I discovered on the last playthrough while trying to escape from a sabrecat, there is a back entrance balcony in Rannveig's, which is accessible from the mountains. So you can in fact, sneak in there, pick the lock on the inner door and smack the deranged warlock on the head with a minimum of fuss.

On the subject of ancient burial site type things, it's also worth visiting Forsaken Cave in the north when you get the chance, but since it is filled with Draugr, make sure you go armed with plenty of soul-gems to fill. I aborted on entering the burial chamber proper because I ran out of soul gems. When I returned to finish the job, the Draugr had become particularly fierce and by about Level 33, Curamil was flanked by several Draugr Druglords which was not the case previously.

Forsaken Cave also has one of the Death Words, though sadly I have never found those particularly effective unless you're trying to shout a chicken or rabbit to death.



Mammoth tusks the easy way
At one point I found myself in need of a mammoth tusk. Mammoths are hard to kill early on in the game, but I found a workaround. If you fast travel to and from Sleeping Tree Camp, or Bleakwind Basin, you should find that one of the mammoths will eventually spawn in mid-air. This can also happen when two of them collide, causing one to jump about 100ft into the air. Either way, it will crash back down to its death, thus allowing you to loot the goodies.

Dumbo this is not.
Why you can't cut the tusks off the skulls you find lying around is never explained.

I should perhaps also mention that giants do pack a most impressive punch.

Over the rainbow and into the light
I'm orbiting slowly, I'm high as a kite
-Threshold, 'Sanity's End'


Heads Missing In Action
About this point I went around buffing myself up in swordsmanship until I could decapitate people. For the uninitiated, this requires 50 points of Two-Handedness skill in order to obtain the 'Devastating Blow' perk. There is a counterpart perk for one-handed swords, and the 'Dance of Death' mod is also useful for fine-tuning.
By default, you can only kill folk messily if there are no other enemies nearby and the mod can disable this limitation. It balances out in that the other enemies will still be able to attack you while you're carrying out the execution, but it does give you a lot more flexibility when you're, say, trying to make a statement to the Thalmor.
It should be noted that this ability is available to your opponents as well - Bandit Chiefs and similar bosses (Orcs especially) are particularly good at removing your head for you, which has a certain poetic justice about it when you consider the Dragonborn was supposed to be beheaded at the start of the game.

Lose pounds fast with this one weird trick
So, around the time Cuddles became qualified to chop off heads, I happened to be wandering around Whiterun and ran into some little old lady who was understandably concerned for her son in the war. Talking to her kicks off the Missing In Action quest, which is fun.

As you probably know, her son is one of the Stormcloak sympathisers who has been 'disappeared' by the Thalmor, presumably along the lines of those other unfortunates you occasionally run into on the road. He is being held in Northmoor, a secret illegal plutonium reprocessing facility in the north west corner of the map.

The quest starts proper when you go to the old lady's house and speak to her, but you can make things rather easier for yourself by going there ahead of schedule, and chopping the heads off everyone in and around the facility. This will net you a substantial amount of Elven armour which you can lug back and sell on, though I prefer to keep the helmets as trophies in a chest in my house. Almost as importantly it will allow you to kill off the Thalmor Inquisitor, who is very nasty and would otherwise make life difficult during the rescue.

Once the Northmoor facility has been completely cleared of Thalmor, it's time to actually start the quest by visiting the Grey-Mane house, where you will be asked to investigate the disappearance of Thorald Grey-Mane. This investigation is complicated by a feud between the two rival families of Whiterun. You'll end up stealing a book from the BattleBorns, and once it's been pilfered, the Greymanes will ask you what to do about the rescue mission.

Tell them to wait, and head back to Northmoor alone. The Thalmor outside the building will still be dead, but a percentage of the ones inside will have respawned or been replaced. Once again, single-handedly massacre the entire complement of Thalmor warriors and gather up yet more Elven armour, before rescuing Thorald, who will say absolutely nothing about the dozens of stripped decapitated corpses scattered around the complex.
It is also worth unlocking the other cells in the jail, even though the prisoners will tend to remain put, either telling you to go away or saying that they have to get out - without actually doing so.

At the exit, Thorald says that it's not safe for him to return, but gives you a password to say to his mother, which will allow you to complete the quest in his absence.

While Thorald chooses to ignore the carnage, the Thalmor will not, and in fact go mental, unlike the NPCs in most games of this kind. Shortly after returning to Whiterun, a guard commented that I'd given the Thalmor a black eye, and a day or so later a Thalmor execution squad turned up in the wilderness with orders to dispense with me.
This is not a bad thing by any means, since it provides more armour to sell and more helmets for the box. What did trouble me slightly was how they knew it was me, since there were no survivors save Thorald and the prisoners, who probably don't know who you are anyway.



Party Time
Occasionally you may run into a band of revellers, I found them particularly common near Markarth. The party ends the moment you try to join in, but if you have a bottle of Honingbrew Mead about your person, it will earn you a Charmed Necklace (with the incredibly useful Fortify Carrying enchantment).
As such, it's a good idea to make sure you have a bottle of said Mead about your person at all times, just in case.

Of course, you could simply murder them and take the necklace, but considering they're the only happy people in the entire game, that would be rather harsh.



The Black Star
At some point you'll likely be told about the statue of Azura near Winterhold. This kicks off the quest for Azura's Star, as you will probably know if you played Morrowind.
Rather than speaking to her direct you are supposed to go through an intermediary (-> What happens if you don't?) Her agent will tell you that you need to find an Elven Mage in a place that has been threatened by water but untouched by it. This might be Ilinalta's Deep, or it might not, given that Ilinalta's is pretty leaky. Either way, the agent thinks it's Winterhold, so you have to go there.

Winterhold is, as Ren delicately put it, 'a hole'. It is your typical university town, with basically nothing else of note beside the College. However, it does also have a mage we need to talk to who lives in the inn. Whatever Azura actually meant, and whatever the Agent thought, the mage is pretty sure it's Ilinalta's Deep, so you end up going there anyway.

Ilinalta's is a good place to go for snagging soul gems and souls and the like, a leaky underwater castle full of skeletons, necromancers and their ilk. It contains two sections and the upper one of these is mysteriously caved in until the Black Star quest has been bootstrapped.

The Star will be found lying broken on a desk or on the floor next to a book, which describes how the soul-gem has been 'remastered', an anachronism dating from the last two decades of 20th century Earth which should have set off loud alarm bells with the game's proof-reading team.

Once you have the thing, you can take it back to Azura, which I did on the first playthrough. This was the most virtuous course of action, however, if you take it back to the mage guy in Winterhold, he can turn it into an endlessly reusable black soul gem, and this can be very, very useful when you want to go on one of those psycho rampages where you don't save afterwards.

Whoever you present the Star to, Malyn Varen is still kicking around inside it and you'll have to eat him. Malyn is not an easy kill, and his accent keeps changing depending on how angry he is.

It is worth returning to Ilinalta's every so often since most of the necromancers will respawn and often have empty black soul gems about their person. AFAIK you cannot make these yourself as was done in Oblivion, though you can buy them from Falion the Angry, or mine the geodes from the glowing patches of rock in Blackreach.



Losing the plot
Once you have got sense out of Delphine, she will send you off to Kynesgrove where Alduin is raising another dragon from the dead, and after she's watched you devour the unfortunate creature's sentience, she will tell you that you have to crash a party at the Thalmor HQ near Solitude disguised as a partygoer and learn whether the Thalmor are controlling the dragons.
This sounded such a fantastically bad idea that while Delphine ran off to prepare, Mittens ran away, holing himself up in Winterhold and signing up for a 5-year master's degree in practical and theoretical magic.

Arniel Gane had a strange hobby
Collecting clothes, moonshine washing line
They suit him fine.


Back to school
While Winterhold College comes highly recommended, it does have a rather low number of attending students, only just edging out Dhark's Hero School with a student headcount of approximately 10, including you.
The courses are fairly comprehensive, and the class will be immediately sent off to do some fieldwork in Saarthal, possibly in an attempt to get away from Ancano, the rather unpleasant Thalmor state school inspector. At the site, Mittens gets collared by someone from the legendary Psychic Monks demo group and the slightly eccentric Tolfdir discovers a magic ball and goes into raptures of delight.

Once he has informed the arch-mage and been interrogated by the Thalmor school inspector, Mittens is sent off to Fellglow to retrieve some books about the Eye. Once this is done the school inspector drags you to the Arch-mage's chamber where the Psijic does some cute temporal magic and then leaves saying there was a mistake.

Ancano is furious, and this is a good time to use the KILL command on the console. Since he's essential he can't die, but it is fun to watch him crawl about the floor in obvious agony while the Psychic Monk leaves, brutally kicking him out the way as he goes.

Eventually, after going to see The Oracle, visiting some paranoiacs in a Dwemer ruin at Mzulft and helping set up their magic detector, the school inspector will go completely mad and try to take over the world using the magic ball. The Arch-mage is rather annoyed about this and attempts to reason with him. Something happens and you wake up slumped against the wall. The deputy head tells you to find the Arch-mage, which may take some time as he has been scattered over a wide area.

The deputy head then sends you off to grab the Staff of Magnus from Labyrinthian where it turns out that the late Arch-mage had secretly murdered several of his friends and used their souls to trap some horrible thingy which you now have to kill because it still has the Staff of Magnus.

Once everything else is done, you'll be intercepted by another Thalmor school inspector, who offhandedly mentions that he's going to kill you. Apparently he hasn't appreciated that you've just massacred countless undead fiends, a wispmother, a skeletal dragon and a very powerful liche, so snicking the head off an uppity High Elf is trivial in comparison.

Back at college, the situation has gone critical and the deranged school inspector has generated a forcefield around the entire campus.

On the third playthrough this got very, very ugly because the entire faculty were trying to kill some of the magic anomalies, one of which had materialized inside the forcefield, preventing the staff outside from being able to reach it, while leaving them in a frothing rage and impossible to talk to until the thing had been destroyed.
To make things even worse, a dragon attacked the campus, and once beaten to a state where it could no longer fly, peformed an emergency landing in the courtyard, i.e. within the forcefield.

After cheating my way through the forcefield to kill the two opponents, Tolfdir - who had apparently fallen off the bridge and was somewhere near the bottom of the ravine - finally told me how to get through the forcefield, while also dropping the bombshell that the rogue school inspector had killed again, leaving the school without a deputy head either. To make things worse still, Phinis Gestor was injured by my attempts at killing one of the stray magical anomalies, and decided that I had to be turned into a pretty rug if it was the last thing he ever did.

Inside the lecture hall, Anacano has become invulnerable to harm, a situation which can only be remedied by using the Staff of Magnus to close the Eye up, and smacking him about a bit before he can open it again. High on the power from the Eye, he is a ferocious opponent and the situation was made worse still by Phinis' attempts to asssassinate me, until I clouted him over the head with an artifically-sharpened Daedric Greatsword (see the section on 'Fish' later if you'll like to try this at home).

Once Anacano has finally been dispensed with, the Psychic Monks turn up to dispose of the Eye (hopefully in an environmentally-friendly manner since it is probably not RoHS compliant). Having attended the school for approximately three days and turned up to one lecture, you get put in charge of the college by default since most of the senior staff are now dead and the others are too scared to take the job.
Phinis apparently did not agree to my being promoted and promptly redoubled his efforts to kill me.



Diplomatic Incident
Once you finally go back to Delphine, she'll tell you that the plan is to pretend you're some VIP so that she can get you invited into a party at the Thalmor Embassy.
Things can get a little interesting here if you've already completed the civil war quest in favour of the Stormcloaks, since the Thalmor will have been sent packing and the Embassy shut down, but in that case they do manage to get together one last time for some kind of reunion.

It is also worth noting that you can rename the player with console commands, with entertaining results for the invitation letter.

They're just letting anyone in these days...
But I digress. First you must meet a contact in Solitude, a charming city where they chop some poor sod's head off without trial the moment you enter.

Roggvir's execution is something that's been covered fairly extensively on Youtube. As soon as you enter, Roggvir will be executed. It's not possible to keep the guy alive, since even if you protect him to the best of your abilities, he will drop dead of a heart attack around the time he would otherwise have been beheaded. However, you can teach the authorities that public executions are a very bad idea.

My favourite approach is to stop at the gate just outside Solitude, and then slap the guard in the face, quickly nipping through the entrance before he can recover and arrest you. When you enter the city, the angry guard will follow and the crowd will disperse in a panic, including Roggvir, who you will probably find dead in a doorway some time later.

However, it is also well worth taking Roggvir down with the KILL command prior to his execution.

The execution will proceed thusly:

Capt. Aldiss: "Roggvir, you allowed Ulfric to escape after he murdered the high king. You are guilty of treason."
Crowd: "Boo! Don't let him speak!"
Roggvir: ...

I don't think he's going to say much.
At this point, Captain Aldiss will try to shove Roggvir's corpse down onto the block. This doesn't work, and he just lies there gazing at the dirt.

"That made the execution a little awkward. In fact, they're still stood around like lemons."
Then, dead Roggvir uses the last of his strength to say:

"On this day, I go to Sovngarde."
Then they will all stand there without dispersing.

If you play the execution scene normally and then resurrect him afterwards, Roggvir gets a little confused and starts playing with the grindstone.

The DISABLE command can also be fun. If you make the executioner disappear, Roggvir will make his own head fall off like Toran can in Pagan.

I managed to get Roggvir executed three times in a row by enabling and re-enabling him at the appropriate moments. This had the interesting effect of starting the execution slightly further on each time, so on the last occasion they attempted to cut off his head even though it was already lying on the floor.

As an attempt to prolong Roggvir's life I once entered Solitude by killing a horse and getting arrested, thus dumping me outside the jail at Castle Dour. However, the execution scene will kick off as soon as you approach it, and the inn where you need to meet your contact is immediately opposite the execution square.

Incidentally, if you did win the civil war in the Stormcloaks' favour, it is possible to make it this far without ever seeing the execution, since by doing that the first time you'll be entering Solitude is as part of the liberation army. Sadly, everyone will still talk about Roggvir's execution so it must have taken place shortly before the city fell.

From Sofox' playthrough, it appears to be theoretically possible to protect Roggvir long enough for him to make it to the exit opposite Castle Dour, the one leading down to the docks. However, I've not yet attempted that.



Coup
On one occasion, I decided to avenge Roggvir, running amok and slaying all who had watched the execution. Eventually I made my way into the Blue Palace and decided that a spot of armed revolution was in order. Once those who opposed me were slain, I installed a new High King.

Bow before your new master
...it would certainly be more decisive than Elsif at any rate.



Infiltration
Anyway. To recap, prior to entering the Thalmor embassy, you need to meet your contact in Solitude, who will offer to smuggle in any items you need during the mission. I wasn't sure what I'd need, so to make things maximally awkward, I gave him various contrabands such as stolen jewels, moon sugar, skooma, black soul gems and a soul-stealing sword to smuggle in, just for the hell of it.
Realistically I'd suggest smuggling in some good armour, the best sword you have and perhaps some black soul gems too, depending on just how much you hate the Thalmor.

Once this has been arranged, Delphine will provide you with some party clothes. No other outfit will do - even the Archmage's regalia won't see favour, which is a little dim since being introduced as the new Archmage would certainly give you the street cred needed to enter the party in the first place.

Once inside, look for Idgrod, Jarl of Morthal. If you did as I suggested and became friendly with her, she will take great delight in ruining the party by making an alarming prophecy and giving you the time you need to break into the rest of the complex.

After that, it's mostly a matter of murdering your way to the Ambassador's private quarters, and then the dungeon where you can interview some poor wretch before releasing him, rescuing your contact and slaughtering all opposition.

It may at this point be worth mentioning that said contact turns up later in Windhelm, shadowed by a Khajiit assassin named J'Datharr, who loiters around outside the city pretending to be part of the trade caravan and doing such a horribly bad job of it that he'll still be hanging around on his ownsome even when the real traders are gone.

What I did on my most recent playthrough was to pickpocket the assassination orders, and then amputate his head.

Things got a little interesting a few days later when a trio of thugs turned up to 'teach me a lesson'.
That didn't go quite go as they had intended, but as I rifled through their corpses, trying to figure out who I'd pissed off this time, I discovered that the hit had somehow been arranged by J'Datharr during the 3 seconds or so between my stealing his orders and his head coming off.

"It was clear from the start that we weren't going to Learn anything and it was equally clear that we'd be crazy to try any Teaching."
-- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas


Intermission - Fish
As has been hinted at, the secret of the universe is fish. Specifically, potions brewed from Abecean Longfin or Cyrodiilic Spadetail with a liberal helping of salt will produce a mind-expanding drug that allows you to perform the sort of miracles the Dragonborn should rightfully have been able to do in the first place.
There is a trick to this and you'll have to be a decent alchemist in the first place. You will also need two enchanted items - a circlet or something of Fortify Alchemy, and a necklace or something of 'Fortify Restoration'. The Fortify Restoration enchantment can be hard to get hold of, but occasionally 'Helmet of Minor Restoration' or something will show up. Try and make sure it's a pure fortify restoration spell and not one of the combined enchantments, as I'm not sure those will work.

The basic idea is this - you stockpile somewhere between 50-75 of the appropriate kind of fish and ideally as much salt as you can possibly get. Any combination will do - Longfin and salt, Spadetail and salt, or Longfin and Spadetail. I would personally suggest fish and salt because salt can be had at any inn or trading caravan, while the fish have to be caught in the wild or obtained at great expense from an alchemist who will usually need to be beheaded a few times before they have any in stock.

You will also need to have ingredients for other, more useful potions, such as Fortify Enchanting (Snowberries, Spriggan Sap, Hagraven Claw, Blue Butterfly Wing) or Fortify Smithing (Blisterwort, Glowing Mushroom, Spriggan Sap, Sabrecat Tooth).

So. What you do is make a couple of Fortify Restoration potions, drink one, take your enchanted items off and put them back on again, and this will increase the power of your potions. Handled carefully, and with suitably powerful alchemy perks, this will allow you to create a feedback loop, resulting in potions of astonishing power and thus making Mittens the foremost alchemist of the age, and probably most of the ages which came before.

The secret of the universe IS fish.
In earlier builds of the game, this was easier because you could simply drink, brew, drink, brew and assuming you had a high enough alchemy skill to begin with, the system would go into overdrive very rapidly. In later 1.9 builds they cracked down on it, so you must be very careful to drink the potions in ascending order of power, e.g. 12%, 15%, 20%, 25% or whatever. If you break the sequence it will actually reduce your alchemical prowess, so be careful. I found the best way to proceed in this restrictive new world was to save, drink a potion and then reload if it didn't boost your powers suitably.

Once you are able to make potions of suitable strength, run off a batch of Fortify Restoration potions in case you need to restart the process quickly at some later date, and then start churning out Fortify Smithing and Fortify Enchanting potions. Be very careful with the Fortify Enchanting potions, by the way - I would not suggest going much above 100'000% since if the effect is too powerful, the universe will crack open (i.e. the game will lock up) when you use the enchanting altar.
I would suggest your first creation be a Circlet of Alchemy, since this will allow you to create powerful potions at a later date. Be aware that you can throttle the effect of the enchanted item by using lower-end soul gems, which can be useful since a too-powerful enchantment can be awkward in certain circumstances (e.g. you may end up with an item which can't be recharged because something has overflowed internally).

Fortify Smithing is more tolerant, but again, be very careful. One of Mittens' first creations was a suit of armour which had more than 2 billion armour points. Those who know their two's complement math will probably have seen this coming - the thing effectively had -2'000'000'000 armour points, which meant that if something scratched Mittens or he stubbed his toe, the armour would enter some sort of resonance and destroy him instantly.

Note that the damage only displays the first 3 digits.
One of my other notable creations was a Poison of Slow, one of the more expensive potions in the game. Given the way the merchants mark up their goods, I was able to sell it for all the merchant's money (taking a big, big discount since the list price was about 800 million gold pieces). Once they offered it for sale, the amount had again wrapped around and I purchased it for about -1 billion gold coins.
Sadly, someone had put some degree of protection in against this eventuality and although I got the potion back for free, the game balked at conjuring up the billion gold pieces I was owed out of thin air.

Regardless, Fish Potions will allow you to sharpen swords so that they can cut through dragonscale like pudding. This is very handy for instantly removing the head of someone you have taken a strong dislike to, and you can balance it out by skimping on the armour. Even with enhanced armour, attacks like lightning or fire will tend to go straight through it making certain foes a challenge while still allowing you to run rampant.

Which leads us neatly on to...



Intermission - Thalmor (and other road-users)
As you must have noticed, you will occasionally run into Thalmor death squads, a trio of Thalmor Justicars who roam the land, kidnapping Nords and night and then marching them to some secret prison camp where they can be tortured to death or quickly and quietly disposed of. The Imperials are also in on this game too, a fact I took into account while trying to pick a side for the Civil War quest.
This kind of thing is not something I take particularly kindly to, so my usual approach is to come up to them and remove their heads before they've quite figured out what's going on. These death squads are especially prevalent on the road between Whiterun and Rorikstead, and I have been known to run up and down that stretch of road for the express purpose of finding them and freeing their souls and their prisoner.

This approach occasionally has the eye-opening effect that once the death squad is dead and their prisoner freed, said prisoner will scuttle off and inform the local authorities that you have just murdered an innocent band of Thalmor in a senseless and unprovoked attack. This was a particular problem in earlier builds of the game, and if you're worried about it, the safest option is to free the prisoner first (causing the Thalmor to turn violent) and then killing in self-defence. This doesn't always work out too well since unless you have a fish-enhanced sword the prisoner is often dead by the time the Thalmor have been done away with.

Dead Nazi Elves
At one point after the main questline was completed, I took down a bunch of Thalmor, with no witnesses or bounty. Unfortunately the event had happened too close to the Western Tower near Whiterun, and while I was officially crime-free, the guards somehow intuited that I was responsible for some kind of atrocity - even though they had no idea what - and attempted to kill me as I rode past.

This was particularly inconvenient because if I attempted to defend myself that actually did count as a crime. Eventually I summoned Odahviing, who happily incinerated the lot of them, and at the same time provided a hefty measure of plausible deniability.

It is worth noticing that other NPCs on the road will also react adversely to your secretly murdering people - it's like they can smell it or something. Mercenaries, Imperial escorts for noblemen and so forth will all go into a frothing rage over something they're not quite sure of.
This happens with disturbing regularity to Talsgar the Wandering Bard and about half the times I've met him, it's been because he's come bounding over the hill with a sword in his hand and murder on his mind.

I've heard better songs from him.
As your level increases you will also run into crazy violent people and drug peddlers. The latter are particularly entertaining if you point out that drugs are illegal, since they'll turn violent and you'll be completely within your rights to behead them and get the drugs for nothing.

Unless you have kicked off the relevant quest already, you will also tend to come across a pair of redguards hassling a redguard lady. This can get amusing if you decide to go all head-choppy on them, though I wouldn't recommend saving afterwards - it's a bit mean, after all.
Taking out the lady, for example, will cause no reaction except that the redguards will stare at you with a sort of 'What did you do that for..?' expression.
Killing one of the two brothers will result in a similar lack of action except that the other brother will usually go over to the corpse and say something like "I'm going to find whoever did this...!" completely ignoring the fact that 'whoever did this' is still standing over the corpse with a freshly bloodied sword.

Finally, it's worth mentioning the nobleman on a horse. Horses in Skyrim are very odd creatures, especially the ones carrying noblemen. What you usually see is an Imperial guard acting as an escort, and following him a horse with the nobleman on it. This is all very well, but the nobleman is a shit and threatens to have the guard kill you if you get within range.

If, as above, you've done something which has driven other folk into a frothing rage despite the lack of bounty, the escort will tend to come for you anyway. If the escort is killed for any reason, the Nobleman will see or otherwise determine what has happened and you'll have a 1K bounty for murder. At this point things are going down the pan so I generally take out the rude and aggressive nobleman too.

What a charming bloke.
Now things get really weird because the horse is now the last witness, and unlike most animals is quite capable of presenting the authorities with an accurate account of the crime plus a detailed description of the murderer. This is unfortunate because it means you will now have to kill the horse as well in order for the bounty to be cleared.

At this point the horse will likely be trying to kill you to avenge its master and escort, kicking and screaming and biting. The game doesn't check for any of this when trying to use the horse, so this is a quick way to subdue them. Climb on the horses back and the conditioning will take over, the beast will become docile and happy to carry you all across Skyrim. That's until you get off again, at which point it will remember that it was trying to kill you.
It is worth noting that if you are riding a horse that has seen you kill, although docile it will somehow alert the authorities to what you have done.

Grassing you up to the authorities isn't the only trick horses can do. While it seems to have been toned down a little in later updates, horses are well-known for being able to climb slopes approaching 80 degrees and similar feats of levitation.

Physics? Fuck THAT, I'm a horse!


Riften
Once you have the data from the Thalmor files, you will need to go to Riften to rescue some crazy old man. You don't have to do this immediately since the Thalmor want to time their kidnap operation with your rescue operation and will gladly give you as long as you need to prepare.
Riften is a dump, which is wholly in the palm of a collective of immortals known as the Thieves' Guild. It's so scummy that the guards will actually charge you for the dubious privilege of entering at all, even if you've just saved their town from a dragon attack. Mind, it is possible to sneak up behind them and pickpocket the key while they're distracted by the monster is having its fun.

It is also possible to persuade the guard that asking for money is corruption and that he could lose important bits of his body if someone accidentally told the Jarl. All the same, Riften is particularly run down and besides a couple of useful characters such as Balimund, not really worth the money to visit.

Once you enter the town, you will run into a number of unsavoury characters. One of them, Maul, is standing by a wooden support post, and calls out threatening comments. He gets very angry if you brush him aside. If you've found any of the Unusual Gems, he will accuse you of stealing them (even if you found it in a cave or inherited it upon becoming Archmage). 1 star, would not talk to again.

On the bridge, another thug named Sapphire is threatening a harmless stable hand. She appears to be a rookie, and as such is still mortal, so you can take a two-handed sword and lop off her head right there on the bridge in the middle of the conversation. Indeed, the plus side of Riften being so seedy is that things like this are considered perfectly normal by most of the inhabitants of the town.

While the guards couldn't care less about some low-level thief being killed in what is basically gangland violence, the Thieves' Guild will get extremely pissy about your casually beheading one of their own and any Guild operatives in the vicinity will come after you with a view to returning the favour.

This can go badly because most of the Guild operatives are immortal, as mentioned. Maul can be subdued for a short time by beating the shit out of him, but the odious Brynolf is totally immune from any harm you can mete out short of the DISABLE command. Fortunately, if you jump onto the roof of the well in the middle of the market square so they can't get at you, they will eventually calm down and go away, a handy trick since this is a fight you cannot win.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the game has the same blithely optimistic attitude towards murdered NPCs that New Vegas had, in that when you enter or leave a building such as Mistveil Keep, it will gather up the body parts and carefully move them to their usual location for that time of day. Hence, you will occasionally come across Sapphire's severed head lying in the middle of the street, or bobbing in the canal for no obvious reason.

Besides Balimund - a decent enough guy who can train you up to 75 in smithing - one of the few noteworthy folk in Riften is the Argonian jeweller named Madesi. If you talk to him, he will offer you a quest whereby you retrieve for him a set of various gems and precious metals and he pays some kind of reward for your efforts.

On the first playthrough, it took a month - realtime - before I was able to find the two flawless sapphires he wanted, and once I had done so, the scaly bastard offered a 200gp reward for the pair of them.

Considering they had a list price of 500gp each, this was extremely insulting, and it is fortunate for Madesi that he's essential (thus invulnerable) because otherwise his head would have gone straight into the canal to keep the late Miss Sapphire company.

Fortunately, two can play the swindling game, and it is possible to scam him instead. To do this, initiate the quest and when you return to him, make sure you have exactly two flawless sapphires in your possession. First, ask what he has for sale, and sell him both sapphires, which should net you around 400 gold pieces.

Once this is done, without exiting the conversation, tell him that you found the sapphires, and he will give you an extra 200gp reward for the two gems which you no longer possess, thus proving that you can eat your cake and still have it afterwards.

End of the World is nigh
While the game really, really wants you to talk to Brynolf and become some kind of small-time con, it is probably better to ignore him completely and just ask the staff in the Bee and Barb. You may need to pay them a tip, but it's worth it to avoid having to talk to Brynolf.
From here you just have to go into the Ratway, removing important body parts from anyone who objects, until you get to the Flagon, an underground pub largely full of people who cannot be killed. Fortunately they tend to be non-hostile. You might need to give the barkeep some money before he'll tell you where the crazy old man is, or if you've played the game before you can probably just ignore them and head straight there.

The crazy old man will tell you that the world is about to end, but agrees to come with you anyway. Then the Thalmor start attacking.

After meeting up with the innkeeper again, you head off to an old ruin in Forsworn territory.

Since I don't believe I've mentioned them prior, the Forsworn are a bunch of terrorists attempting to reclaim the western third of Skyrim. Their method of achieving this is a little unorthodox and mostly seems to consist of decapitating deer, giant rats and other defenseless animals who have no political agenda whatsoever.
It is also interesting to note what many of them will yell "Forsworn forever!" - which actually means that they don't want their realm back and would prefer to play the victim card for the rest of eternity.

Forsworn camps are made up largely of rank-and-file Forsworn, Forsworn Villagers, and then some nastier ones such as the Ravagers. At the top of the heap there is invariably a Hagraven overseeing everything along with their deputies, the highest-ranking human members of the Forsworn - the Briarhearts.

Originally I assumed that 'Briarheart' was simply some kind of rank or moniker like "stone-hearted" or something, but it turns out that they are literally briar-hearts, in that each one has had their heart replaced with a vegetable. One of the sites around Bards' Leap actually has a pair of Hagravens performing this delicate operation.

Unfortunately for them, this resurrection technology appears to stop at cardiac replacement - there is no such thing as a Briarhead.

Furthermore, as Ren points out, if you're able to pickpocket a Briarheart, you can actually steal the vegetable from his chest cavity, causing him to drop stone dead.

Once you have wiped out the Forsworn in their camp and any passing dragons, you'll make your way into the complex and open the door by cutting your wrist, a feat Cuddles somehow managed to achieve without removing his ebony armour.

Inside you look at a pretty carving, figure out that you need another shout in order to save the world, and then the two crazies will reluctantly decide that you will need to ask the Greybeards because they don't know what it is. So it's back to the mountain again, and the mutual antipathy between the two groups of crazy old people will make itself felt.

However, it turns out that they don't know the shout either, so you will need to go up to the top of the mountain to meet their extremely ancient and very big leader, Mr. Paathurnax. Like in Fallout 3 I had a pretty good idea what was coming, and would have been crushingly disappointed had their leader just been yet another crazy old man.

Mr. Paathurnax is a lot like Treebeard in most decent adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, speaking slowly and deeply and frequently regressing to his native tongue. While you can have some rather interesting discussions, he doesn't know the shout either because it was designed to drive dragons mad and he kind of falls into that particular demographic.

However, he does have a suggestion - steal an Elder Scroll from somewhere and hope. Having played Oblivion, you may know that these are, or at least were, kept in the bowels of the White Gold Tower and tended by a bunch of blind monks. Logically the thing to do would be to go there, since all you'd really have to do is head south over the Gerbil Mountains and murder anyone who tries to stop you.

However, we can't do that, since having Cyrodiil as well as Skyrim would have doubled the size of the game and only made it work on decent computers instead of the underpowered boxes it seems to have been built for. So we'll have to try and find one inside Skyrim itself.

No-one knows where one of those might be found, and it didn't seem to show up on the magic detector in Mzulft either, but it's worth checking Winterhold College, just in case they happen to have one.



Smooth scrolling
Despite the fact that you're in overall command of the College and have been very helpfully bringing him a constant flow of incredibly rare books and scrolls, the librarian is not especially polite when it comes to the subject of Elder Scrolls.
However, he does have a couple of books about them, including one almost as deranged as 'In Watermelon Sugar' by Richard Brautigan. Smitten by the strange yet endearing prose, you head off to find the author, who has excavated a cave in the middle of an iceberg, and takes the crazy old man theme to even greater heights.

It turns out that the Dwemer, whose information technology is orders of magnitude greater than it was in Morrowind, have made a device not unlike the magic detector, which is capable of electronically decoding an Elder Scroll without the usual side-effects, such as becoming a blind monk, a crazy old man or both.

So, the guy gives you a blank Dwemer USB stick and sends you off to find the machine, which is somewhere in Blackreach, a vast, Falmer-infested underworld hidden beneath most of Skyrim which the gold, iron and silver mines all seem to have missed somehow.

While there are many entrypoints to Blackreach, my preferred one is at Raldbthar, which is more-or-less directly west of Windhelm, or East Northeast from Valtheim Towers. The game does not like this at all and is very insistent on your going via Alftand instead.
This makes things a little annoying because the game refuses to tell you where the machinery is, pointing instead to the nearest exit from Blackreach because it wants you to go all the way back out of the underworld so you can come in via the other entrance and end up in exactly the same place anyway.

If you're wondering why I'm being so stubborn about this, entry via Alf generally involves decapitating a fellow catperson, so I try to give it as wide a berth as possible.

By exploring the Dwemer ruins in Blackreach you should eventually find the right building anyway. If I remember right, it's close to (but not inside) that large complex lit by a huge glowing ball suspended from the roof of the cave. You should normally be able to find it by following the Northwest wall in a southwesterly direction, where it curves off to the west.

Once you get there, you are supposed to perform two tasks with the machinery - programming the USB stick with the decoded contents of the Scroll, which can be achieved by randomly stabbing buttons until something happens, and finally, opening the podule up so that the Elder Scroll inside can be removed.

This seems a bit of a shame since something that can get sense out of an Elder Scroll without breaking the reader would be a world-changing discovery, so rendering it inoperable strikes me as being a wee bit irresponsible. That said, unless Alduin is stopped, there won't be a world left to change, but maybe we can put it back in the machine later, eh?

Once you've got the Scroll, you don't strictly have to return back to the mad old man. To be honest, it's better for him if you don't, since opening his magic box will prove rather terminal to him. You can if you like, but I won't be dealing with it here.



Back to the mountain
Back on the mountain, Mr. Paathurnax shows you where to read the Scroll, at which point you'll have some kind of acid flashback, see the secrets of the universe and watch a couple of very ancient heroes duff up Alduin by yelling at him and reading one of the Scrolls.

Up, down, sideways, forward and back
Our children submit to lysergic attack
-Threshold, 'Sanity's End'
Afterwards, Alduin, who has been busy stuffing himself with dead people's souls, shows up in person giving you a chance to practice yelling at him yourself. Once he's been shot down, you can beat him up with a sword, but don't overdo it.

While it is possible to just sit there whacking Alduin like a pinata, it won't get you very far because you can't actually kill him and the plot won't move any further while he's still on the ground. You certainly won't get any candy out of him and reading the Scroll like the Ancient Heroes did doesn't seem to be much use either.
Rather unhelpfully, Mr. Paathurnax will urge you to keep hitting him anyway, when what you really have to do is stop attacking so that Alduin can limp off into the distance.

After that, the question of exactly how Alduin has been doing his soul-nomming party trick crops up. Mr. Paathurnax suggests imprisoning one of Alduin's friends at Dragonreach Tower in Whiterun and torturing them until they confess.

This is a bit of a hard sell with the Jarl, who understandably doesn't want a full-fledged dragon attack on Whiterun, so he makes a few excuses, one of them being that the civil war will get in the way. This means you have to do something about the war first, which Jarl Bogroll is probably betting will be impossible.

Naturally, this excuse won't fly if you've already won the civil war first - like Lynx did - in which case you'll go straight onto the Dragonreach part. Otherwise, you will need to broker a ceasefire using the Greybeards as intermediaries.



Ceasefire and cease singing
Arranging the ceasefire was every bit as annoying as I'd remembered. First, you have to get both The General and Ulfric to agree to go into the same room together, which they don't want to do. They get particularly shirty if you don't join their respective causes there and then, although telling them that the world's about to end does seem to help.
It is interesting that as soon as you enter the respective HQ, one of the guards will tell you where to find the local inn, as if you'd somehow blundered into the seat of power by mistake.

In the case of Ulfric, I decided to go and visit the inn anyway, to try a few experiments on the local bard.

Inside most inns there will be a resident singer, who stands in the corner and plays music or sings songs. It can be fun to slay them in mid-song, e.g. "We're the children of Skyrim, we fight all our lives... and when Sovngarde beckons, every one of us " -SNICK-

The other patrons react in an interesting way to your silencing the bard - they will actually clap their hands.

My next song is called 4'33...
Shortly afterwards they suddenly realise that the bard hasn't got a head anymore and at that point things turn ugly. That said, if you're able to defeat the oncoming guards, some of them will eventually start clapping again, presumably because the bard has finishing singing. Using the KILL command also works well because there are fewer repercussions.

There is also a song about Ragnar the Red, whose words offend a warrior maiden and she casually beheads him for no satisfactorily explained reason. The song ends at this point with the maiden apparently getting away with murder. However, applying this exact same form of censorship yourself is not looked upon as favourably, and if it's the bard's ugly red head rolling around in the floor, the patrons will be after yours too.

Anyway, once you've rounded up representatives of both sides, you then go back to the mountain to hold the peace conference. This is annoying since everyone seems to hate each other. There doesn't seem to be an opportunity to say anything like "I'm the fucking Dragonborn, so shut up and agree to a temporary truce or I'll throw you all off the mountain" so you have to pander to them and try to find a solution which both sides will grudgingly accept for the time being.

"We will have peace... When you and all your works have perished!"
Markarth generally gets pawned off to the Stormcloaks during the ceasefire agreement. This kind of political shift can be handy for you since the change in administration will also clear your bounty for that region.

"If you tell me it's a package, I'm out of here."
While in Windhelm, it's worth mentioning that the 'Harsh Master' quest in the docks is an interesting one, in part because the quest giver promises you a year's pay.
This turns out to be 1500 gold coins. It is not clear how this is supposed to work out economically, since at the regular market prices this allows them to eat a single apple every two days, and that's assuming they don't want anything extravagant like clothes, shoes or drink.



How To Torture Your Dragon
Once the ceasefire is agreed, the Blades will give you the name of a dragon to summon, and then present their own demands, in that you kill Mr. Paathurnax. At this point I'd just back away slowly and head to Whiterun as quickly as possible. By the time you get to Dragonsreach, the Jarl will have got everything ready for your magic trick.
And so, Mittens went out onto the balcony and summoned Odahviing, who duly arrived with a hail of fire. After that, things got a little hairy, because unlike Lynx and Cuddles, Mittens had not yet discovered the secret of making fishion-powered swords and Odahviing was being particularly uncooperative.

Things were just about getting under control when something very bad happened.

Okay, men... hold him down... hold him down!

Mr. Mittens? I have a letter for you!

RAWRRR

At this point, Odahviing broke free and slew everyone present. This happened many times because owing to some terrible, terrible fluke, the Courier's entry precisely coincided with Odahviing's own arrival. Since the Courier forces you into immediate dialogue with him, and since combat now carries on in the background, the dragon had free reign to slaughter and kill while Mittens was distracted.

It was only by tapping through the conversation as fast as possible and a lot of luck that I was finally able to grab the letter and finish beating the dragon into submission before he could massacre everyone.

Anyway, once Odahviing has had suitably large amounts of shit kicked out of him, he will surrender, unlike the other dragons who will keep on fighting and killing with no thought of retreat. For all that the dragons are ancient and wise, you'd have thought that by now they might have realised this is a bad idea since everyone who tries it ends up with their soul destroyed, but sadly this never seems to click.

I suppose it's possible that they insist on attacking the Dragonborn at any opportunity because they're sacrificing themselves in a desperate bid to take me down so the souls of their comrades may live on, but there's a bit too much random violence against other people for that explanation to really make sense.



"I am a man and quarry to no one. If a wild beast attacks me I will kill it.
If the Dirdir wish to act like wild beasts then they must suffer the consequences."
--Jack Vance, The Dirdir (Planet of Adventure quadrilogy)
But I digress. Odahviing promises to be your best buddy and to show you how Alduin has been breaking and entering into Heaven, just as long as you promise to let him go.

There's not much more to be said about that, except that you can, AFAIK, only ever get to Skuldafn once, so while you're there, make sure you go everywhere, see everything and kill everyone, especially that creepy guy with the mask if you are collecting such things. You will also be able to learn one of the words of Storm Call, which can be useful (as long as you don't have a follower - it tends to zap them too).



Heaven
"How do you feel? You look sick!"
"I'm the Kwisatz Haderach. I don't get sick."


Okay, so now you're alive, but in the afterworld. Or at least, the afterworld that Alduin has been visiting, since like Skyrim itself, Sovngarde Belongs To The Nords and outsider scum like you aren't welcome. Now, this does pose certain interesting questions like whether the Dragonborn can also chow on the souls of the dead, and whether Alduin has been breaking into the Altmer, Argonian, Khajiit afterworlds also, or whether he's going to deal with those later once he's done eating all the Nords.

If you have done the Civil War quest, you will find the losers from that adventure kicking around. Ulfric, for instance, will be all broody and repentant. On the Imperial side, General Tullius is not there because he's not a Nord, but his sidekick is, which strikes me as a bit shitty if they were best friends and are now separated forever. Ah well, maybe there's some kind of exchange trip scheme.
Dead King Torygg is also wandering around in the mist, though like most of the dead dudes he doesn't say much.

Once you're done checking out the mists, next stop is the big castle thing in the distance. It's guarded by a guy with the very un-nordic sounding name of 'Tsun' who will only let you across the bridge if you beat him up. Running past him won't help, since lightning will zap you dead - even in god mode or with the Become Ethereal shout.
Similarly, jumping off the bridge or the waterfall will also kill you outright - you'll plunge through some kind of death zone which will cause you to die in mid-fall since otherwise you'd survive and the game doesn't want to have to deal with a mess like that. Plonking you back at the start of Sovngarde like when you fall through the floor might have been a better solution, though.

Inside the castle, there are comparatively few Nords kicking around, protected from Alduin by their demi-god, Shor, who you don't get to meet because apparently 'he's too bright'. The game won't let you go around slaying the folk inside Shor's Hall - not even the bards - so your sword will be permanently sheathed and you can't shout either.

While most of the folk you're likely to meet are simply cookie-cutter folk called 'Sovngarde Hero' or something, there are a few notable figures such as Ysgramor, Jurgen Windcaller, Olaf One-Eye (whose shade is also at the barrow in Dead Man's Respite, somehow) and probably one or two more. Roggvir is nowhere to be found.

Anyway, the three legendary heroes who were the last to smack up Alduin want to have another crack at him. If you spend too long interviewing famous dead people, they will get bored and run out of the castle without you. It is worth noting that you only get to go into the castle once, ostensibly for the purposes of recruiting these three, and as soon as you go out again they'll lock you out.

The Three Heroes don't seem to understand the concept of speaking in turn and will instead speak simultaneously in a confused babel of voices which is impossible to understand.

Outside, the four of you stand in a row and yell at the mist for a bit until it disperses. This takes quite a lot of work, causing one of the heroes to have doubts - after all, if you can't even win against some droplets of water, you're going to have a tough time with the biggest and baddest dragon of them all.

Finally, Alduin shows up, at which point you can yell Dragon Rend at him again and then start smacking him up like a pinata. This time he will actually break apart, but you still don't get any candy.

End of the world - indefinitely postponed, sorry for any inconvenience
Once Alduin has been defeated, you're free to run around Sovngarde for a bit, though now that the mist is gone you'll find it's a lot smaller than you thought. The heroes will do the 'Praise them with great praise!' bit stolen right out of 'Return of the King' and then Tsun will prepare to send you home.
The offer does seem to be open to return upon your death despite your not actually being a Nord at all, but I dunno how good an offer that is - being the only Khajiit in Sovngarde doesn't sound at all fun.

Once you return you'll be back on the mountain, where Mr. Paathurnax and Odahviing will say hi, while the other dragons do some kind of flypast in your honour. Mr. Paathurnax is kind of despondent because apparently Alduin was his older bro. He decides to try and teach the other dragons to behave sensibly so that you won't have to crack them open and feast on their delicious souls.

The praise you get for saving the world seems to diminish with distance. The dragons are ecstatic that Alduin won't be bossing them around anymore, and Odahviing promises to come if you call. The Beards are all very impressed and pleased.

Back at Whiterun, Jarl Bogroll doesn't give two shits and won't acknowledge that you've saved his soul at all... while at Karthspire, the Blades are having a strop because you've only killed Alduin and not Mr. Paathurnax as well, and promptly 'thank' you by telling you to go away.

The Blades really do want Mr. Paathurnax dead, even after his repentence and quite refuse to budge on the matter. Quite why is never adequately explained, though they will attempt to argue that all dragons are evil, and that even if they weren't, Mr. Paathurnax must still be executed because he committed crimes before he redeemed himself.

This line of reasoning might carry more weight if not for the fact that Mittens is himself half-dragon and was sentenced to execution at the beginning of the game. Being a hero tends to be a very messy business and Mittens has killed an awful lot of people while trying to save the world.

So yeah - today the Blades only want Mr. Paathurnax dead, but the "he must die for his crimes" argument says all too clearly that tomorrow it'll be Mittens head rolling across Solitude square because of the crimes he's committed too.



Golf
While in Riften, I manufactured a stupidly powerful bow as an experiment. In the market, just next to the forge, there was a cabbage sat on the wall. Shooting it proved a good way of testing the bow's power level, and with suitably fishy potions I was able to get the bow so it could project the cabbage from one end of Riften to the other in a single shot.

So I took the bow to the tundra outside Whiterun and decided to play golf.

Cabbages work really well for this, though I haven't yet tried smaller objects such as tomatoes. I imagine they'd be harder to find afterwards.

Before you ask, the heads of your enemies don't work.

Looks like he hit the tree, Jim.


Markarth
Since we've now completed the principal plotline, it's perhaps worth looking at some of the other outlying towns which we didn't have to visit during the main quest.
Let's look at Markarth first.



Karthwasten Mine
Before we go to Markarth itself, it's worth a quick detour to the village of Karthwasten. This is a small mining town, one of the few in non-Nord ownership. Partly because of this, a number of sellswords have occupied the mine in an attempt to make the owner sell up to the corrupt, monopolistic Silverblood family in the city proper.
This could have been better programmed. While the chief sellsword has a full set of lines, his followers appear to have been lobotomised, every one of them saying "We are in control of the mine... No sudden moves..." in a flat, robotic voice as they trudge into the mine.

NO... SUDDEN... MOVES...
While it's possible to slaughter the lot in the village itself, it's more fun to wait a while, talk to the village head, and then follow them back down into the mine and then kill them all.

Once you've reported that the mine is safe to enter, the miners will go back in. If you want a laugh, go back into the mine quickly and wait a while. As the miners slowly percolate through the caverns you will hear the occasional "What happened...?!" and similar exclamations as they encounter the remains of the sellswords.



Markarth II - The Forsworn Conspiracy
Markarth is the one place which makes Riften look like a paradise in terms of corruption and general living standards. For example, as soon as you enter the city proper for the first time, bad things will happen, to whit, some guy will attack a woman in the market.
If you save before entering the city it's trivial to mark who it is and then behead them immediately before they've had a chance to draw the dagger. In most places this would be foul murder, but this is Markarth, so everyone makes up some story about how the murdered man was actually a Forsworn agent who nearly stabbed a passing shopper.
Some guy slips you a note, a guard comes along and does the "Nothing to see here" routine, and the Forsworn Conspiracy quest begins in earnest.

First, as the note instructs, you'll need to go to the Shrine of Talos. This will be a bit of a head-scratcher unless you've read up on the history of the town and discovered that Talos worship has been grandfathered in after Ulfric beheaded most of the town.
I did not know this - even on the third playthrough - but I did know that there are lots of Talos shrines scattered around, and since Imperials have banned Talos, , it didn't occur to me that there would be a shrine inside the city so I figured they meant one somewhere in the wilderness until I checked the location marker in the map.

There you will meet Etrys, the guy who slipped you the note in the first place. He'll send you to do a bit of snooping around, up to and including Thonar Silverblood himself, who is the real ruler of Markarth.

Most of the investigations are dull, but Thonar is interesting because you'll need to pick the lock on his room to see him at all, after which he gets understandably annoyed, until someone else sneaks in and murders his wife. Things get rather hard to follow at that point because the attacker will generally try to reanimate the murdered wife, causing her to disintegrate when he is killed in his turn. Having a follower only makes things worse, since by the time you get downstairs all you'll have is a bunch of corpses and a heap of ashes, with no clue about what happened and your companion refuses to tell you. Thonar gets very pissy and blames it on you, regardless of the fact it would have happened anyway.

Afterwards, you go back to the shrine and find the body of Etsy, and the guards who have just murdered him in front of Talos himself.

Framing the Dragonborn might not be the smartest move.
They will then attempt to pin this murder on you, stating to your face that they're framing you because you know too much. Openly conspiring to pervert the course of justice, they had to be replaced, purging the city of their corruption by fire and the sword. In any case, when your only prospect is spending the rest of your life in a silver mine, you don't have a lot to lose. So I decapitated them all and calmly left the building.

Q.E.D.


To say it's a frame-up wouldn't be fair or right
I was then accosted by more guards, who attempted to arrest me on the same trumped-up charge. They lost their heads too, without Mittens even breaking a sweat. This went on for about half an hour, the streets of Markarth running red before I finally thought to look at the journal and discovered that the only way to continue the quest was by turning myself in. None of your enemies ever surrender in this kind of game so it quite simply hadn't occurred to me.
It is interesting to note that if you have a companion such as Kharjo, they will get off scot-free, no matter how many guards they have helped you kill during the romp through the city. Realistically he'd most likely end up beheaded with Mittens forced to watch - something which has precedent in Markarth since this was done to Braig's daughter prior to his incarceration. She hadn't done anything, whereas Kharjo has killed many men.

However, for reasons the game doesn't even try to explain, Kharjo is permitted to keep his head, doesn't end up in the mines (vaguely sensible as you'd want to keep the two troublemakers apart) and is in fact allowed to roam the city freely without so much as a parking ticket. Furthermore, he has great confidence in your ability to escape since he'll be waiting outside the secret exit to the jail the moment you do emerge, despite the fact you've been given a life sentence.

Back inside the silver mine, Mittens got chatty with some of the other prisoners, and found that Borkul was the only thing standing between himself and the mad old man who was behind the Forsworn Conspiracy. While there are presumably less violent methods of approaching the quest, I was less than pleased with my lot and in no mood for any bullshit. So I had Mittens kill Borkul by breathing dragonfire on him until he died.

Borkul originally played guitar with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band.
Unfortunately this upset the other prisoners who were now after my blood, and I had no health potions or similar items to replenish myself. Should you wish to try this at home, I suggest preparing healing spells and running round and round the main chamber in a loop, running up the scaffolding and jumping off, healing yourself as much as possible while the other prisoners are a suitable distance away.

Once I was finally able to retrieve the key from Borkul's corpse, I hid inside one of the cells in sneak mode until the other prisoners calmed down and went away. However, they never really forgave me and would again be incensed to violence and murder if they so much as heard Mittens moving around.

The Mad Old Man was of a similarly brutal frame of mind and proved extremely difficult to kill, not least because he had a very powerful lightning spell and I had a small screwdriver.

Putting the 'mad' into Madanach
In a fair fight, Mittens would simply have lopped off his head as was done to the guards, but his combat skills had all been ploughed into two-handed swords of which there were none to be found inside the mine.
Things went very badly against the psycho old man until I remembered that Khajiit have claws, took off the gauntlets I'd found and by a combination of healing spells and ripping his face open I was finally able to take him down.

At this point the game became rather confused. There are supposed to be two basic ways of completing this quest - the first is by killing the mad old man, in which case Thonar will be invulnerable when he appears after you leave the mine. He will thank you for solving his problem, pardon you and give you all your stuff back for your trouble.
The alternative option is to join forces with the mad old man, in which case Thonar will appear as an ordinary mortal and attempts to kill you himself. Since the old man had had a psychotic reaction to Borkul's death and was unable to talk, this was a non-starter for me.

However, in my case the game had quite literally lost the plot. The old man was dead, so Thonar appeared in his invulnerable form, but he was in a killing rage because he apparently thought I'd helped the old man and this made things rather awkward. I finally sorted out the problem by casting calming spells on him until he stopped attacking, at which point he was able to thank me and return my stuff.

Still angry after this ordeal, I went straight to the Jarl to demand some form of compensation and/or kill him. I was promptly made a Thane, which was good because by this point, not only was I able to decapitate the entire legion of guards, I could also summon storms, dragons and long-dead heroes to wreak a terrible vengeance on the city and I would have done so had the Thanedom not been forthcoming.

That said, being made Thane of Markarth is a bit like being made Prince of the Bog of Eternal Stench. It is, after all, a city whose wealth is derived entirely from prison labour and repressing the poor. The only bright side is that now the primary quest for Markarth has been completed, Thonar is no longer flagged as Essential, so you are finally free to lop his head off.

Incidentally, I am told by Ren that if you do side with the mad old man, the Forsworn will cease to be hostile should you meet them in the wilds, at least in one location.

Apparently Madanach is also a racist.


The Wreckoning
An interesting thing may happen to the Forsworn quest if, instead of entering Thonar's house normally, you sneak in, and stealthily pick off the inhabitants with, say, a +1000000000 Daedric Bow of Killing. The barmaid first, then the wife, and finally Granny Forsworn and the guy sweeping the floor.
Thonar's wife is now dead, but because we've stealthed it and eliminated any witnesses, nobody knows who dun it. Speaking to Thonar will cause him to jump straight to his "The forsworn murdered my wife!" routine, without having done the initial conversation. In fact, the conversations will happen in reverse order and in my case, the plot skipped a few gears. When I went to the Shrine of Talos, I found Mr. Etrys dead. As I approached the corpse, the guards stopped me - and invited me to join the Imperial Legion/Stormcloaks. This left me with a quest marker that can't be triggered - even murdering them all and getting arrested was treated like a normal criminal infraction and the conspiracy plotline was dead in the water.



Leftovers
The only other Markarth-related thing which immediately springs to mind is the Nchuand-Zel excavation site, one of the quests kicked off by the Jarl's court wizard. This will involve cutting your way through a spider-infested cavern, the way through being blocked by an imperial legionary, recently deceased.
This has an interesting side-effect in that to get through you must first move him out of the way, since otherwise Mittens will keep slashing and mutilating the corpse in preference to hitting the spiderwebs blocking your way.


Falkreath
Doggy!

Falkreath is a medium-sized town chiefly noted for its graveyard. It has several Daedric quests, the more annoying of which is for Clavicus Vile, and relates to his dog. The guards will pester you endlessly about the dog, stopping you as you walk down the street, and it's almost worth doing the quest just to get them to shut up. It is also one of the few towns which is open-air and therefore exists in the real world, as opposed to Markarth or Whiterun which are sequestered in some other dimension.

Kharjo starts to get tired of the guards' ceaseless questioning
The other quest is kicked off by visiting said graveyard, at which point you will come across a priest and two parents mourning their child, who has recently been murdered.

Bizarrely, when talking to Mathies in this time of his greatest loss, your first dialog option will typically be "I have cabbages to sell!". This will trigger some kind of reflex action and Mathies will forget his bereavement for a few moments while processing the transaction.

Honest coin for honest work.
If you do wish to talk about his daughter, he will become sombre again, and imparts the important knowledge that the murderer was a guy called Sinding who is currently holed up in the jail while they figure out what to do with him.

JP (to Sofox): "You've killed the priest, you've killed the grieving husband and now his wife has gutted you like a fish."

Sinding is actually a nice guy who just has this problem that he occasionally turns into a monster. If you agree to help him he'll go all doggy and break out of jail, which makes the guards suspicious.

Eventually, after beating up a particularly large deer, you'll need to go to Bloated Man's Grotto, which will have been specially tricked out for the occasion.

Immediately inside, you will see a dying Khajiit warrior known as J'Kier, who says his piece and then expires. Ignoring him will cause him to die very loudly just as you get out of range, so the 'survival-through-neglect' technique doesn't work here.
Resurrecting him by means of the console does have interesting effects in that he will be happily walking around again, hale and whole, until he says his piece, at which point he will collapse and sit there nursing his wounds as before. Then he will say his piece again, but this time not expire. Talking to him repeatedly will cause him to go through his lines over and over again.

Then you'll come across Sinding again, who is in dog mode. His catchphrase is "Never thought I'd see you again!" which he will say each time you approach him.

Incidentally, when talking to Sinding at this point you are supposed to choose between killing him and helping him against the other hunters. It is possible to duck out of the conversation by pressing TAB instead of selecting "I've been told to kill you", which will cause Sinding to simply say "Hmm hmm."

Note that doing this will not actually help - the place will be entirely devoid of hunters except for the initial two corpses by the fire.

If you go back around the loop again, Sinding will intercept you as before, hailing you again with his favourite greeting. If you then choose to kill the hunters, they will finally spawn and you can go around killing them. If you have one of those fish-enhanced swords, be very careful since it's possible to both agree to help Sinding and then accidentally kill him.

Once the hunters have had the shit kicked out of them in a suitably terminal manner, Sinding will say he's grateful and will stay in the cave away from other people. This is a half-truth, since he has a tendency to suddenly remember he was supposed to be in jail. Indeed, you may sometimes run into him as he treks back past Whiterun. Fortunately they don't seem to be quite as rabid about werewolves as they were in Bloodmoon, and people will usually just ignore him and pay no mind.

For some reason it is not possible to tell Mathies that Sinding was possessed by an evil Daedric Prince and therefore not in control of himself when their daughter was killed.

It is occasionally possible for the hunters to have problems dying. For instance, the last surviving hunter in the 2018 playthrough was Ra'Kheran, who I decapitated, only to have him climb to his feet once more, hurling insults.

"What seems to be the problem?" "Death."
Beheading him a few more times didn't slow him down, and I suspect it was the combined efforts of Sinding and my follower, Inigo, who finally put him to rest. Ren reported a similar situation on one of his playthroughs.



Paranoia
Another possible quest involves the paranoid ex-Jarl of Falkreath, who asks you to steal a letter from the local blacksmith, the one who wants a dog so badly that he'll get the guards to pester you endlessly about it.
On one occasion the Jarl had locked himself in his own home, so to show him the letter, I had to pick the lock and break in. I figured he couldn't complain, given the circumstances. As in The Prisoner, the Jarl is convinced it must be in some form of code, but without a Honeywell minicomputer to decipher it there's very little to be done.

After this, the Jarl will tell the deep, darkest secrets of his ancestry, and how his grandfather is a vampire. If this happens inside his house, Kharjo will stand there just looking all around the house, bored out of his mind by the shocking revelations. However it is also possible to have the secret conversation in the pub, surrounded by half the town.

The vampire has a nice castle with an icy arena inside it. The throne room has has a sort of arena filled with wolves and dead things. On the first runthrough I didn't yet have the Kyne's Piss shout and Kharjo kept trying to kill the wolves so I made him wait outside.

When I finally entered the arena, the vampire's right-hand-woman said something like "And who's this...?", to which the master vamp replied "Nevermind, he will do well for the next event."

At this point he released the wolves, so all he got to see of the 'event' was me leading the wolves off into the depths of the complex and returning later once I'd locked them in the store cupboard, which was like herding rabid cats.

Dark Brotherhood
As you probably know, the Dark Brotherhood quest is kicked off by visiting some kid in Windhelm, who is praying to the Dark Brotherhood to murder Grelod, the head of an Orphanage in Riften. You can visit the kid and talk to him, in which case the murder becomes a quest objective.
My preferred tactic for this is to walk calmly into the orphanage, and take the abusive old crone's head off with a Daedric Greatsword. In a modern society this would traumatise the poor orphans, but fortunately this is not a modern society, this is Skyrim, where people are publicly beheaded for entertainment value, or because they boasted in a tavern. As such, the children are used to seeing people's heads come off and in fact think it's really, really cool. Indeed, they will typically go over to Grelod's corpse so they can point and laugh.

The assistant staff do not think this is cool at all, and will rush around the building like headless chickens, no pun intended. In typical Riften fashion, Grelod will not be missed and there will be no bounty for her murder.

It is definitely worth mentioning that there is nothing stopping you murdering Grelod prematurely. Should you do this, the Windhelm Kid will be even more impressed because you've terminated the victim before even being asked to do so.

I could write reams about how losing Grelod could screw those orphans over completely, since if the orpanage does close, the kids will be reduced to pickpocketing on the streets and finally being hanged or beheaded for theft, which was the traditional solution to the problem of juvenile delinquency prior to the late 1800s.

If you are curious as to what their future may be like without Grelod - cruel as she was - look up 'The White Slaves of England' by Robert H Sherard, a gut-wrenching look at how the young and poor were exploited during the Industrial Revolution, and a fascinating example of investigative journalism in the 1890s. The text and images are out of copyright and there are scans of the series floating around the 'net.

Anyway, enough of reality. We're playing this game to escape from that, right? So. What's supposed to happen next is that, once you've spoken to the Windhelm kid and killed Grelod, the Dark Brotherhood will want to hire you. The next time you sleep, you'll wake up in a hut somewhere for the job interview.
However, there is a certain problem in that Mittens doesn't need to sleep.

If you go too long without sleeping, the Dark Bros will realise that something is amiss and try a different tactic. And so, about a week or two later, long after Mittens had forgotten about Grelod, a courier arrived bearing an ominous note that contained just the words "WE KNOW."

This confused me.

"We know"
While I figured it was probably about my having killed someone, I had been assailed by Thalmor execution squads, assassins, necromancers pissy about me eating Malyn Varen's soul, vampires pissy about my killing Movarth Piquine, bounty hunters sent to remove my head, Forsworn, drug peddlers, more necromancers pissy about me eating Malyn Varen's soul, random psychopaths at the roadside, Dragons, undead fiends, mercenaries, dead Thalmor assassins pissy about my stealing their orders, more necromancers pissy about me eating Malyn Varen's soul and gods alone know who else.
Add to that the deaths of several hundred bandits, dozens of Thalmor and Imperial Justiciars, and a couple of passing Orcs who called me a 'milk drinker' and some more necromancers pissy about me eating Malyn Varen's soul, and I was at a loss as to exactly which killing the mysterious writer was concerned about. Given the Dark Brotherhood hand, I figured they were most likely mad about the large number of assassins they had been sending after me, now recently decapitated.

Anyway, as and when you do go to sleep, you'll end up in a shack somewhere, even with Kharjo and your House-Carl du jour watching over you. Astrid the female brother (?) will mention Grelod the Kind, and say that you killed her. She does this even if you asked Kharjo or another follower to kill Grelod for you, though for some reason they don't wake up in the shack.

You are then presented with a couple of prisoners, bound and ready for execution. Someone in the room has had a hit called on them and you have to decide who needs to be killed. It didn't take me long to decide that the one person who most needed to die was Astrid herself, and pleasingly, this is a valid answer. A quick blast of 'Fus' will knock her off her shelf and get her in a position where her head can be removed quickly and easily.

Once the prisoners have all been freed, you'll be able to pick Astrid's pockets at your leisure, and remove the pretty armour.

There is a mod which alters the lustre of the Dark Brotherhood armour, arguably going overboard since it attains a smooth PVC sheen like some kind of medieval Catwoman costume. While this can be quite pleasing on the eye it does make the Dark Brotherhood look like some kind of freaky BDSM club.

"Fool, none may know our secret!"
Anyway, after this has been done, you will gain the ability to go up to the guards in, say, Whiterun, and proudly announce that you've murdered the leader of the Dark Brotherhood. This will have you sent to an Imperial outpost at Dragon Bridge, where you are asked to break into one of their safe houses and slay all within, just like I wanted to do in Oblivion but wasn't allowed to. This remains true even if Skyrim has become an independent state - the Imperial outpost remaining fully functional even under Ulfric's rule.

Incidentally, Ren highly recommends the Dark Brotherhood quests, so I'll certainly try joining them one day, but today is not that day. IMHO it doesn't seem a terribly safe career option since they've already promised my soul to Sithis and the Night Mother. I can easily imagine the name on my third contract simply reading "yourself".



Hag's End - Quest for the Shinies
If you want to get hold of some Dark Bro'hood armour but don't want to get involved with them at all, this is also possible.
For example, you might like the bent appeal of dressing up as a Dark Brotherhood member when killing Grelod the Kind and talking to Aventus the Windhelm Kid, or perhaps you want the armour but would still prefer to keep your options open about joining/killing the Dark Brothers.
There is, you see, a set which you can obtain from Hag's End at more-or-less any point in the game. The only prerequisite is that you visit the Ritual Stone east of Whiterun, since you will need its freakish powers for this to work. When you're ready, Hag's End is in the northwest, more-or-less directly south of the Northmoor reprocessing plant.

Hag's End is accessed via a Forsworn-infested complex known as Deepwood Redoubt and usually you'll need to fight your way in. However, I have noticed that by climbing around the side you can drop down off the mountain and land just in front of the entrance, in which case the Forsworn will assume you are one of them and say things like "Need anything...?" as you walk past. I'd still hurry if you can since this confusion won't last forever.

The complex will exit into a closed valley - Deepwood Vale - which contains the entrance to Hag's End proper. It may be possible to climb over the mountains and get in directly, or it may be dimensionally isolated like the inside of cities such as Whiterun. This is left as an exercise for the reader to determine.

'Scuse me, are you a hag...? You are...? Right, in that case I'll have to end you.
Inside the complex itself you will find a number of hags or witches, backed by a Hag-Raven who has the annoying ability to teleport when you attack her, causing her to reappear in various locations as if to taunt you. The power is not foolproof, though, and if you've been making strange weapons that can do 600 damage points or more, you can take her out before she has a chance to go anywhere.

Note that death will not actually stop her from teleporting, and you will find her corpse dumped outside where the final confrontation would have happened.

Anyway, fighting hags and the like isn't really why we came to Hag's End, though it can be entertaining and you'll need to behead your way through at least the first few rooms before you get to the throne.

Behind this throne is a secret door leading to a dead assassin with the Brotherhood gear. Supposedly a lever will open this door when the right quest is enabled, but since I've murdered the Dark Brotherhood, that's not going to happen. The lever itself is disabled and does not appear until the quest is actually running, but there is a way to get the armour out.

As mentioned, you'll need to visit the Ritual Stone, so if you haven't done that yet, do it now. Stand on the dining room table and use the Ritual Stone power, which will reanimate all corpses in a wide area that are suitably intact (headless corpses are very sensibly ignored by the algorithm underpinning the spell). Now the dead assassin has become an undead assassin.

This isn't the end of it because he's still trapped behind the door which cannot be opened. Indeed, it was a casual blast of the Ritual Stone power and the subsequent "where the hell IS that corpse I reanimated...?" that keyed me into this at all. Anyway, the point is that he's technically a follower, so if you quickly head out of the building, he'll magically pop up outside as well. Then it's just a matter of using something suitably sharp to end his life again and you can help yourself to the pretty armour.

Knight in Shining Armour
What this will do to the actual Dark Brotherhood quest I wouldn't like to say.



Trevor's Watch
After becoming Archmage, I took up a hobby of finding books for the librarian. One of these was 'Last of the Ayleid Kings', which at the time was located in a fort known as Treva's Watch. I was a little unsettled by the prospect of massacring everyone in the fort over one book, but I figured they probably can't read anyway.
When I got to Treva, I discovered that the true owner of the fort, Mr. Stalleo, was outside and the place had been overrun by villains. Stalleo believed that Mittens was one of the Companions, something which Mittens did not bother to correct.
Once the former occupants were all safely dead, I had a terrible trouble getting the gate open - it was night and I simply could not find the lever and the Clairvoyance Spell took me to some other location entirely.
This difficulty was probably to do with the fact that the lever was on the opposite side of the complex and had no possible mechanical linkage with the gate. For your records, it's in the hut where you emerge.

After that, Stalleo was extremely happy to get his castle back, though the very next time I came down that way he'd been kicked out on his ass again. I was half expecting to receive a letter from The Companions saying "We Know.".



To Be Continued...
That's all I have for now. Eventually I'll add a subsection covering the Civil War quest and various other things which weren't included initially.

 

[Infinitron]

Holy hell, this site is still alive: http://www.it-he.org/fallout3.htm

Fallout III - Capital Punishment

Walls that no man thought would fall
The altars of the just
Crushed!
Dust... in the wind...
-Karn Evil 9 - 3rd Impression, Emerson, Lake and Palmer



Content Warning, apologies etc
Fallout 3 is 18-rated, so there is violence and swearing and making people's heads explode and stuff. If you don't want to see that, you should probably stop reading now.
For those wondering where the Fallout 4 page is, it won't yet run under WINE. Once that happens, I will play and hopefully write something for that. Until then I can't justify spending hundreds of pounds on the software/hardware combination needed to make it go, not when that money could go into the recording studio and commissioning starving artists.
Sorry about that - Skyrim ran out-of-the-box on day one, so this came as a rather disagreeable surprise.

While I'm busy apologising I suppose I should also mention that I had a bad case of writer's block trying to finish this page anyway - I had originally aimed to have it done by Easter 2016...

Thanks go out to Keaton, Ren, Sofox and Merlin for getting me to play it, proof-reading and other contributions.

Spoiler

Beginning the in
JM: I am stuck in this fucking hole in the ground, ten years old and apparently
being forced to relive sucky parts of my childhood. Please send help.
KJ: Am I like Lassie or something?

Where to begin? I suppose I should begin at the beginning, with the birth of my character, Aniz. He was named after a minor villain in a certain webcomic, with the expectation that his wicked deeds would be infamous throughout the land, but as Mr. Gabriel once said, things don't run the way I planned 'em.


JM: I have this moral compulsion to be a good little boy.
I just can't be evil as a kid. I think that's why I hate it so much.

Merlin: I like giving my fallout characters inappropriate biblical names.
I always play a female, so it's usually some lady named Moses or
Jesus (or my current New Vegas character, Job).

I picked a blonde, long-haired guy for Aniz, with the result that his father, James, became the spitting image of Colby in Dr. Who - Image of the Fendahl.
For some reason I have a fear of small children and the 10th birthday party scene, rather than having me bond with the cast in any way, shape or form, convinced me that playing the game at all was a Very Bad move.

MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP


About the only thing of note is my solution to the sweetroll problem, refusing to give it to Butch by means of eating it the moment it's been given to you. After that, I resolved to claw my way out of the Vault as quickly as was humanly possible.


JM: I didn't get the helmet this time, though.
KJ: Don't worry.
JM: I took Jonas' glasses, though. Will they help protect my eyes from the
sun, as it says you need to in the manual?
KJ: Uh, no
JM: Bollocks.
KJ: CONGRATS
YOU JUST LOOTED YOUR DAD'S FRIEND'S CORPSE.
JM: And how else was I supposed to get the message Dad wanted me to hear?
Okay, so I took them in memory of all the good things he did for me as
a kid. Happy?

Leaving the Vault didn't necessarily make things much better, despite my impending execution, since I immediately found myself in a shattered landscape filled with the ruins of a once-proud civilisation. Until I became immured to it, this was horribly depressing as I read far too many post-holocaust SF novels during my actual childhood... during the tail end of the Cold War when a nuclear holocaust was a very real possibility.
This, again, left me wondering why I was playing it at all.
Of the many things which irked me about this game, the one which even now pisses me off is the fact that in 125 years, our civilisation went - with no prior knowledge or experience - from horses and gas streetlamps to quantum encryption, ion drives and a global information network accessible via battery-powered supercomputers able to fit in your pocket.
In Fallout 3, the wastelanders - who are surrounded by working AIs, computers, instruction manuals and countless other high-tech artifacts - have spectacularly failed to restart civilisation, having done little more than sit on their asses for more than 200 years.



Megaton
KJ: I hate navigating Megaton. It took me god knows how long to find the fucking saloon, and then I was hopelessly lost.
JM: Oh, I found that easily enough.
KJ: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF! You jerk, it took me forever to find it
JM: It's called the saloon, anyway. I haven't been in it yet. Then I broke him.
KJ: What?
JM: He fell off one of the buildings and died.

Basically the first thing you come across after leaving the Vault is Megaton, a tiny hamlet thing which is built from a conglomeration of scrap metal, mostly sourced from airliners. At its centre, a small fission device is worshipped by a bunch of lunatics. You are not able to discuss phenomenology with the bomb.
You will, in the Saloon, get approached to help detonate the bomb for some crazy old man named Mr. 10p or something. The stated objection is that he can see the town from his tower, which is impossible since it's far outside of visual range.

Megaton, as seen from Tenpenny Tower. Or not, since it's completely invisible, even with a sniper scope.


Megaton is also the nearest place to the Vault where you will be able to buy medicines. Since merchants in this game exhaust their supply of money quickly and replenish it slowly, you will need access to as many trade locations as you can so that you can cycle through them. As such, it is advisable to keep the town around rather than evapourating it. Defusing the bomb as soon as your skill allows will also give you a handy place to stay and keep things in.
The principal drawback of defusing the bomb is that Mr.10p and/or his associates will not take kindly to your refusal, and hitmen will be sent to execute you in the form of the Talon Corporation. This is no bad thing, since they usually carry combat shotguns, and an individual found near the Arlington Library also has a sniper rifle. Since employees of the Talon Co. will respawn a few days later, this makes them a very good source of spare parts for both weapons.



JM: That... bastard... hitman got his hands on the Alien Weapon...
KJ: WHAT
JM: I was by the crashed UFO. I thought the alien had come back to life
JM: I thought there were three Talon people, but I only found two.
The other one evidently raided the UFO because when I next went there,
he was shooting me with an immensely powerful weapon that turned me to
ice and destroyed me. It was bizarre. I was walking down the road,
minding my own business when I was suddenly destroyed.
This happened a number of times before I was able to pinpoint
where the blast was coming from.

Getting Wasted

"I seem to have been roped into being a guinea pig for this mad woman in the shop."


One of the principal quests centring on Megaton is the Wasteland Survival Guide, which is a collaborative project with Moira. This is very handy for levelling up, gaining monies and reputation. Among other things, you will need to irradiate yourself, and then gather landmines.
The landmine quest was interesting and was about the time the game was starting to come together for me as something worth continuing with. To begin with, I decided to take a quick detour and followed the pylons trying to find a power station in an attempt to single-handedly restart the entire national power grid.



JM: I found a power plant. Doesn't seem to have any generators in it, though.
KJ: I'm not quite sure what to do with those. You just find goodies in there, like skillbooks or Nuka-Cola Quantum...
JM: Actually it was full of things which nearly killed me.
KJ: What was in it?
JM: Things.
KJ: When you see your first Deathclaw, you are going to be SO unhappy.
JM: I was too busy running like hell to take note of what they were.
JM: I think one of them was glowing. At a guess they were ghouls, but I'm not sure
KJ: Was probably a Glowing One, then. They're bitches.
JM: Basically they seemed to be ex-humans who go around making gollum-like noises and trying to shred me.

KJ: Ghouls are severely irradiated humans. Gob in the Saloon was one of those.
KJ: They have it rough because of discrimination. Everyone assumes that a Ghoul is going to be like their savage counterparts.
JM: Yes, that figures. Currently Aniz is balanced on a windowledge while I work out what to do.
KJ: Moira wanted you to go inside the power plant?
JM: No, she wanted me to step on a landmine, I think.

Minefield is an interesting place. It is, believe it or not, full of mines.
However there is also one lone maniac with a sniper rifle, which gives you a quick path to one of the most kickass weapons in the game.

Minefield, as seen by lone maniacs with sniper rifles


One thing to bear in mind, though, is that weapons deteriorate, and the sniper rifle deteriorates very rapidly. To fix it, you have two choices - either finding another weapon of the same type for donor parts, or paying someone like Moira to fix it. Sadly it's not like Morrowind or Oblivion where you can fix things by smashing them repeatedly with a hammer.
The other aspect is that as you level up, the weapons will lose their effectiveness anyway, as with Oblivion.

The times have been, that, when the brains were out, the man would die, and there an end;
But now they rise again, with twenty mortal murders on their crowns,



JM: Shooting people point blank in the head doesn't seem to be working anymore.
KJ: Could be your weapon's power D:
JM: It's a fucking magnum .44. Time to hit the sniper rifle again, see if that has what it takes to kill these raiders.

An interesting thing about Fallout 3 and New Vegas is rather messy death which a sniper rifle can inflict upon unsuspecting victims. At first I wrote it off as simple gratuitous violence, but by the time I'd completed the game it had proven to offer a number of amusements and also sound gameplay advantages.
For example, if you shoot someone in the head with a sufficiently powerful weapon, it will cause their head to rupture and cover the area with lots of horrible red wet bits. So far, so good.

When you come to loot the corpse, any chunk will do - much the same as with Skyrim. In particular, you can root through the grass until you find the pieces of your not-so-innocent victim's skull and open them up, allowing you to extract a rifle, bottletops, a full set of armour and with the right perks, a finger from a hemisphere of the deceased man's brain.

Where this really comes into its own is when dealing with snipers. All too often they will perch themselves on a flat surface with no way to get to it, which makes frisking the corpse very difficult, and you will want their gun for parts. Fortunately, a sniper round to the head will - as mentioned - tend to rain down a shower of cerebral matter which can then be looted to your heart's content.

But back to the matter at hand. As mentioned in the exchange above, Moira's addled plan involves gathering landmines and for an extra bonus, stepping on them so she can see how much damage it does to you.
If you have karma to burn, it is possible to complete this by bringing the mines home and stepping on them in front of her, which doesn't go down too well but does technically complete the mission. And to be honest, if she really wants to know about landmine injuries, best she learns first-hand, hmm?

After this, you'll be sent to forage for food in a disused supermarket by the insanely over-optimistic Moira. The supermarket, of course, has nothing to eat but is instead filled with maniacs who will try to eat you. The sniper rifle should help prevent this.
It was only at this point that I discovered that the game's currency of 'caps' actually referred to bottletops from Nuka Cola bottles, not caps as in ammunition. From this point on I made doubly sure to take all the bottletops I found.

JM: I left the supermarket. The food supplies appeared to be limited to rusted-through bean tins.
JM: I was going to tell Moira that the supermarket thing was a bust because the raiders had eaten it all over the last 200 years.
KJ: Wait
JM: There were a couple of bottles of coke and some drugs, but no food that I could discover.
KJ: Open the refrigerator.
JM: All the freezer units had been emptied, I didn't see any refrigerators.
JM: I should have told her she was out of her fucking mind anyway.
KJ: You just open it like you open any other thing and grab up everything inside, then you find the pharmacy key which you probably did and steal all the precious drugs.
JM: Would you eat something that had been lying around for 200 years...?
KJ: I don't think she wanted to eat the food...
JM: That was the whole IDEA! She wanted to find out if there was any food, I'm sure that was her excuse.
JM: If I can sneak around the evil death scorpion I can probably get back into the supermarket.
JM: I ran away like a little girl and it didn't kill me.

Perks
It is perhaps time to look at the perks before we get too far into the game. I am not going to outline all of them, but I will list some of the more useful ones.


Animal Friend

'Animal Friend' is dead handy. As many people will have guessed by now, I have a soft spot for animals (*). I am particularly fond of some of the ones which would happily dismember you and feed upon your remains, which presents a certain conflict of interest.
Fortunately, the Animal Friend perk comes in handy here. Not all animals are affected, but among others, the moles and Vicious Dogs will pay you no mind which is something of a boon.

One of the best parts of this perk is that it affects Raider's dogs as well, causing them to sit back and watch with supreme disinterest while you splatter the contents of their master's head over the nearest wall.

(*)Except for cows, the horrible, horrible two-headed abominations that should be executed on sight. Deathclaws aren't much fun either.



Nerd Rage

This allows you to carry more stuff when severely injured, though it seems to max out at 300. Which means that if you've got a character that's really strong already, it may do nothing at all.
Otherwise, it's extremely handy for looting and for this reason my characters usually run around half-dead just to be able to carry more shit.


Mysterious Stranger

When you are able to, get 'Mysterious Stranger'. When you're in VATS mode and fail to kill someone, this supernatural gunman will sometimes turn up out of nowhere and finish off your foes before disappearing again.
Side effects include the game occasionally playing a short tremolo guitar riff when you've killed someone, and the Stranger occasionally killing you by appearing in the middle of a minefield and blowing everything to Kingdom Come.

It is worth noting that the Stranger appears in bullet-time, and so everyone else stops moving a'la The Matrix or Radiohead's Street Spirit video.
This means that when fighting with energy weapons, an Enclave soldier will fire at you and the Stranger will casually walk through the laser beam in order to murder someone.

Putting the Strange into Mysterious Stranger


Part of the Mysterious Stranger implementation seems to involve him being spawned nearby, but invisible, so he can magically pop into existence if the game decides he should do something.
This means that if you're really, really, lucky (or unlucky?) you he will get in the way and end up with his head blown to pulp. Apparently this doesn't have a permanent effect, i.e. it is not possible to murder the Stranger, but even so I'm not sure I'd recommend saving afterwards. In my case, I was trying to slay a Deathclaw, which promptly ate me because the Stranger had selflessly taken the bullets intended to kill it.

"Are you saying we have a dead angel on our hands...?"


JM: I'm starting to call him the Mysterious Vulture, because apart from just now,
when he did something actually useful, he mostly seems to turn up to finish
off the job after I've virtually killed them myself. It's like he's trying
to steal the credit.

Lawbringer

The 'Regulator' perk is an interesting one. It's a fairly high-level perk, but once obtained you'll gain the ability to cut off someone's finger. After they're dead, that is.
In principle you're supposed to visit a shack in the middle of nowhere and periodically turn in the fingers for a reward, but since you get just shy of fuck-all per finger and they don't actually weigh anything, it's far more amusing to simply carry them around as a keepsake.

As of this writing I have more than 700 fingers about my person.

Fun With Cows
"A cow is much more exposed to quarrels than a man." - President Eton
In Megaton, there is a Brahmin next to the clinic. Much fun can be had here by taking a plasma mine and throwing it out from the roof above. This should give the plasma device enough time to go into proximity mode before it falls in range of the beast, thereby converting the cow into several large chunks of roast beef. This will upset the locals, however.

Brahmin are also fun with the sniper rifle - I had originally hoped to shoot the beast in just one head to see if I could end up with a half-dead cow. Sadly this tends to result in both heads falling off the cow for no satisfactorily explained reason. Again, this will cause the inhabitants of Megaton to howl for your blood. And if you do succeed in exploding one of the cow's heads, the other skull will also burst into a shower of brains. Human brains, no less.

An interesting trick - with one of the aforementioned perks - is to find a vantage point where the cow is mostly obscured. Fire twice, reloading the game if you hit.

If you miss both shots and are very lucky, you'll hear some tremolo guitar and a vaguely angelic man in a white trenchcoat will turn up out of nowhere and blow the cow into pieces, apparently for shits and giggles.

It should be noted that the locals do not seem to be equipped to deal with divine retribution against their livestock, and the world will end mere moments after the inhabitants of Megaton have spotted the dead cow.

Dead City Radio and the New Gods of Supertown
Radio has changed our lives, and possibly saved our lives,
It took me a while to leave Megaton properly because I spent all of my time trying to buff Aniz up so that he wouldn't die the moment anyone looked at him funny. Once you're ready, there are a number of places you can go next.

If you follow the approximate plotline, you will be directed from Megaton to the DC ruins themselves, in quest of a radio station which James apparently went to visit for some reason.

There are several ways to get to the GNR building. Traditionally, this has involved me flailing around the metro, for example going to Vernon Square, and then entering the Dry Sewers through the basement of Our Lady Jyraneth hospital. From here you can go to Dupont Circle, Metro Junction, Chevy Chase and Mornington Crescent.

Another route from the west starts with the Tepid Sewers, and then goes via Georgetown, Soggy Bottom and from there to Dupont Circle, after which the last part of the above route completes the journey.

However, there is also a much shorter route. North of the DC complex, heading more-or-less straight East from the SuperDuperMart, you can find Friendship Heights station, which can take you directly to Chevy Chase and thence the GNR complex.

Things there take a bit of a downhill turn, but you do get a neat little tactical nuke launcher out of it.

Superbeast


The Brothahood won't let you into the building until the giant supermutant has been destroyed. After that, they'll unlock the complex. The person we're looking for is ThreeDog, the resident DJ of GNR which either stands for Galaxy News Radio or Guns 'N Roses, depending on your preference.
I was particularly keen to find him, not just because of the plot, but also for reasons of my own. I figured that someone able to broadcast in that manner had to be living in a shining, state-of-the-art complex, representing the cutting edge of those who were working to rebuild what had been lost. He turned out to live and work in a rather shabby broom cupboard.

DJ Dog, who is unfortunately neither canine nor in possession of any discs, was almost entirely useless and is memorable chiefly for telling me that the Brotherhood of Steel had saved my ass (immediately after I killed a giant supermutant almost single-handedly) and refusing to tell me anything about my father for no satisfactorily explained reason.
Sadly it is not possible to hit him with a baseball bat until he puts on some Les Paul/Mary Ford, Gershwin, Dave Brubeck or anything.

I am told by Merlin that if you actually murder him, the radio station will be voiced by the janitor, who you cannot kill. But I have not actually tried this since Mr. Dog has never annoyed me sufficiently, and besides, I assumed he was invulnerable.

Anyway. As a rule, Dog will send you off to fetch a satellite dish in order to repair his transmission relay. On the face of it this seems pretty weird, but what you're most likely doing is fixing the line-of-sight microwave link between the main transmitter and GNR HQ. Once this is done he will be able to broadcast clearly to the entire capital wasteland instead of just a few locations around Georgetown.

It is particularly interesting to note that if you cheat very slightly and repair the relay before being asked to, DJ Dog will take this very badly. It is perfectly feasible to obtain the dish beforehand, which he does have special dialogue for, but you can't normally enter the relay compound early unless you use TCL to break in.

If this happens, that you get the satellite dish, repair the relay and only then enter the GnR compound, Dog will fold his arms, deliver a completely blank dialogue...

...


...and then go into panic mode, running as far and as fast away from you as he possibly can.

WITCHCRAFT!!!


20 mortal lashes of grotesque audio
While we're talking about GNR, it is worth pointing out that while the radio station has a fair amount of crackle until the relay is fixed, the transmissions are not supposed to jump and stutter, which happens on every platform except early versions of windows XP.
The problem appears to be caused by Bethesda relying on some unusual behaviour in Microsoft's MP3 decoder which was subsequently fixed in Vista (and remains fixed in Windows 7-10) and isn't present under Linux either. In Windows, it is possible to fix it by installing an alternative MP3 codec and disabling Microsoft's, which will then bring the game soundtrack back up to snuff. Playing under Linux, make sure to install l3codecx via winetricks.



The Actual Plot and All
Rivetting Stuff
All being well, Mr. Dog will send you off to Rivet City. I had heard tales of this, and indeed, in the first playthrough I went straight there, bypassing the GNR sequence entirely (which may account for Mr. Dog's general uselessness and utter refusal to speak about James once I found him).
Like the G'N'R studio, I had hoped that Rivet City would be the cradle of the New Civilisation, which it kind of is and kind of isn't.

It is interesting to note that when you first approach Rivet City, the bridge is closed. The stated reason for this is to protect the complex from supermutants and bandits. However, the real reason seems to be to keep you out, since they will never close it again after you have initially entered the place, despite the very real threat from nearby supermutants.
While it has a very useful ammo store, I came away from the city as a whole somewhat disappointed. This was exacerbated by my meeting Li Madisson, who lambasted me for having the gall to escape the Overseer's justice, apparently believing I should have stayed in the vault and meekly accepted my sentence of death by firing squad.

I did use the Alien Blaster on Zimmer's bodyguard when he got abusive and started threatening me. Unfortunately he seems to be essential, so he just lay there for a bit and got up again. Zimmer, Dr. Li etc ignored this entirely - apparently it's Just One Of Those Things.

One of the more interesting things about the rusting tub that makes up the city, is the Museum of American Tat. There, you can accept a quest to locate the Declaration of Independence, which will involve entering the ruins of one of the museums in a place known as 'The Mall', where you will encounter someone named Sydney who is after the same thing.

Inside the museum, I came across a generator that I needed to disable. For some reason it required 67 repair skill points, and at this point I only had 59.
I decided to go home and grab some mentats, because having him do maintenance on a running generator while high on drugs had this certain appeal to it, y'know? However, this meant battling my way out of the complex, which caused me to level up and suddenly I didn't need the drugs anymore.

That said, I still want to know why I need a repair skill of 67 to hit the EMERGENCY STOP button.

Way of the exploding head
Dogmeat is a dog found in a scrapyard, as many of you will already know.
You will encounter him fighting off a number of raiders, and on closer inspection you will also find his former master, a scavenger missing a head.

Curious, I used the RESURRECT command to see if the guy had any dialogue or would otherwise object to my stealing his faithful companion. The result was quite spectacular.
First he stood up.

Then his head spontaneously exploded for no reason.

Doolittle: What is your one purpose in life?
Bomb #20: To explode, of course.

After trying this about five times, with Dogmeat making no visible reaction to his master exploding, I gave up and took the dog to my home in Megaton.


112
During my extended search for James, I hit upon vault 112, which is shiny and pretty-looking unlike basically every other vault in the game (the starting vault 101 being the only real exception).
112 is, unfortunately, another one of those areas where your suspension of disbelief starts to crack and you wonder whether the writers forgot that the game is supposed to be set 200 years after the war ended. You're let in by a team of servitor robots, who escort you into a VR chamber where James has gone in search of a 270-year-old professor who is apparently still alive for reasons never adequately explained.
(Or even inadequately. Though to be fair, James didn't expect this either and was only looking for his notes and recordings.)

When you enter the VR environment (in tasteful black and white), you find yourself trapped inside the body of a small boy in some kind of horrible 1950s suburban utopia thing.

In one scene from Neuromancer, the protagonist is pumped full of psychoactive drugs to try and break him out of his VR coma, unfortunately the same thing does not seem to work in Fallout 3. Turning into a meth addict prior to entering the sim does not seem to result in your cravings intruding on the simulation, which is probably for the best because you have no way to pop any more until after you leave.
Your companions include a psychotic little girl who blasts you with lightning if you hit her. This is a good clue that she is actually the Prof, and is one of the only instances of being able to kill a child in Fallout 3.
There is also a dog named 'Doc' and various other people, one of whom actually seems to know what is going on.

Struck by lighting! Struck by lighting!


The girl will order you to interact with the folks in increasingly bizarre ways that deplete your precious karma. I very, very quickly tired of this and restarted the scene from a previous savegame.
I had a nagging feeling from the very start that the dog was probably Dad (a combination of the name and the sheer perversity of it), but couldn't easily prove this so I figured it was time for a Census.

Initially I used my fists, punching the dog until he collapsed (which is actually pretty funny to watch). That he couldn't die basically sealed it for me, but to double-check, I switched into God mode and destroyed everyone I could find using the kill command. It was no great surprise to discover that only the dog and the girl were invulnerable to this and therefore plot-critical.

After that and my seeming inability to locate the Abandoned House - which is pristine-looking and not the sort of tumbledown ruin that an abandoned house quickly becomes, the rest fell into place. Unfortunately there is no way to guess from the get-go that James is the dog - which granted, would spoil it for people who didn't guess, but is kind of a limitation of the medium.



Merlin: I wonder if the doc doesn't exist in a weird state of being inside the simulation while simultaneously being outside of it.
Because he will comment on a number of things you've done that he couldn't possibly know about (killing 3Dog disappoints
the poor fellow). He's in the vault for the entire game, if you go there immediately you will always find him.
And yet you can kill 3Dog at any time too... Schrodinger's dad.

Merlin: There's also that weird spookyvault were the ghost of your dad haunts you, hallucinations or something.
It was not coded properly though, so if you are using a non-white character it's just some old white doctor in vault clothes,
which is rather confusing and not actually spooky.

Homeward Bound
Once James was freed from his doggy prison, he lambasted me for leaving the vault, and once again "But they were gonna execute me!" isn't considered a valid reason to leave. Unpleasantries aside, we went on to one of the moments I found most heartwarming, a trek from Vault 112 to Rivet City.
Well, mostly. I tried to fast-travel at first, then discovered that James couldn't do that so I went back and accompanied him the whole way as an escort. Sure, he's invulnerable, but now that I'd finally reunited with him I figured we should spend the time together.

This, wandering through the wasteland and committing untold acts of murder together, was truly one of the most memorable and heartwarming parts of the game. In particular the point at which dear old Dad produced a rocket launcher and obliterated several people with it is one I will not soon forget.

Alas this reunion is all too short, though I suppose the voice acting for James must have cost a small fortune.

"I've been hearing good things about you, son. Fixing GNR's transmitter, defusing the bomb at Megaton... I've very proud of you."
"Thanks, Dad."
"However, I've also heard that you like running around Washington DC shooting black people in the head while listening to 1930s jazz. We might have to... talk about that later."
"They were bad people, Dad."
"Did you have to sift through their brains and chop their fingers off? I mean, call me old-fashioned but that's not the sort of thing I'd usually associate with the Saviour of the Wasteland."
"Well, what about your antics with the sledgehammer then, Dad? You ran up to the corpse of that guy I killed to save you, and splashed his head everywhere like an over-ripe melon! Is that virtuous?"
"I had to make sure he was dead. Besides, I'm not the Saviour of the Wasteland."

Stop. Hammertime.


"Son... if we get separated, just follow the mushroom clouds."

Jeeze Dad... what are you doing now...?


More children, and Meeting President Eton
Once the business at the Jefferson Airplane monument is concluded and you are left bereaved. Li Madisson takes command and orders you around like cattle. A reasonably good way to relieve your stress is to 'accidentally' shoot her in the back of the head with various deadly weapons since although she cannot die, it will annoy the hell out of her and besides, the old bag deserves it. I found it rather gratifying to see her have some kind of breakdown outside the Citadel.
One relatively big consolation is that the folks at the Citadel will train you in the use of power armour, which means that you can then dress up as an Enclave shock trooper. While the helmet reduces your charisma slightly, the stuff is pretty good and since the land is now crawling with Enclave troops, spare parts are readily available off-the-shelf.



JM: I now have nice Enclave armour.
KJ: How're you enjoying that?
JM: It looks evil and has dog-ears. What's not to like?

Next you will sent off to retrieve the GECK, a device apparently made using the interstellar drive technology from the Von Braun in System Shock 2.
Unfortunately this can only be readily accessed via the Lamplit Mines, which are full of horrible horrible children. To rub salt into the wounds, the game will confiscate your weapons. Why I am not sure - if the little bastards are old enough to blow your head off, then they're old enough for me to turn theirs into plasma. Fair's fair.

One fit of the heebie-jeebies and several attempts at getting through the 3300 rad back entrance later, I bit the bullet and finally attempted to go via the caverns. A prerequisite was murdering enough people to gain a level and get the 'Child-At-Heart' perk, but it did cut out a lot of hassle.

Once again, it's not really explained how the Lamplit Caverns work. Like some cross between Lord of the Flies and a certain Star Trek storyline, the cavern is populated entirely by the under-16s.
This isn't a problem in and of itself, but keeping that situation stable for 200 years requires an act of God.
While the children are expelled from the caverns when they reach 16, the game does not explain where the new children come from, instead requiring us to assume that they either have some serious pre-teen pregnancy thing going, or to accept that lost children in their pre-teens periodically wander in past the Super Mutants, Deathclaws, Giant Radscorpions, 3300 rad hotspots and countless other hazards which are more than capable of taking down a healthy adult.

When you've got into the vault itself, you need to find the GECK. This is kept in a radiation chamber peaking around 500 Rads/sec. It is possible to go in and grab the thing by wearing a radiation suit and taking an obscene quantity of drugs, but it's probably better to get Fawkes to do this for you.

After this, you'll be captured and taken to finally meet President Eton.



The Prez
JM: I met President Eat'n by the way.
KJ: EDEN
JM: He does not say 'Eden!' he says 'Eton!'

During his broadcasts, the President sounds pretty normal aside from his bizarre claims about being over 200 years old and suchlike. However, when you're actually in his home turf, his voice is suddenly full of high-frequency ringing and other digital artifacts, again for reasons never fully explained.
Once you're free to leave the cell, it's probably a good idea to slip into some Enclave armour since in my experience this seemed to confuse people and made them less likely to arrest or shoot me (as compared to the first attempt where I suddenly realised I was running around the base in my underpants).

After a lot of bumbling around and chiding from the Potus each time I got lost, I finally made it to the mainframe room by error and trial, there to finally meet President McDowell or whatever he wants to call himself.

I had already seen Dr. Who and the Green Death and was therefore pleasantly unsurprised when we came face-to-face. The Lone Wanderer pitched a fit, however, claiming that artificial intelligence wasn't possible, despite having grown up with a Mr. Handy.

"Steven... process."


Down the Dolce Vita
...all the while, his hand was on my shoulder
I was scared of being easy prey,
Gonna find a way
To make it alive....
--Down the Dolce Vita, Peter Gabriel


The chief downside to Fallout 3, at least in its stock version, is that it is not possible to actually win the game. The closest you can get is to lose it by varying degrees.
On my first attempt I spoke to the nice Mr. Eton, who convinced me that it was necessary to kill all the evil supermutants, ghouls and other nasty mutated shit in order to bring about the Second Coming and lead everyone to the Holy Land.

This seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, someone who's been around for over 200 years must be doing something right, yeah?

Realising that Fawkes might take exception to being exterminated, I ran like hell as soon as I left the complex before he could ask to join my party, and carried out the plan as best I could. Come the end of the game, I volunteered to go into the radiation chamber.
While this sounds suicidal, it only had a level of about 2 Rads/sec and I'd already proved in the 500-rad GECK area that I was reasonably radiation-proof given a decent suit and enough Rad-X to put the entire Capital Wasteland into a drug coma.

The plan looked pretty good on paper, but the net result involved me dying for no obvious reason and the entire wasteland being sterilised since, like in Paranoia, everyone is an illegal mutant.



Merlin: I just decided that I hated this wasteland and everyone in it and since the wastes
were surrounded by those dang invisible walls I guess death was the only way out.

You guys are crazy!
On the second attempt I tried to convince Fawkes (who is radiation-proof) to go into the chamber in my stead, but the bastard refused. Dogmeat was also strangely uncooperative. Rather than allow that evil hag Madison to steal all the glory for Dad's wonderful creation, I opted for a System-Shock style viking funeral using a copious number of bottlecap mines.
The resulting blast not only turned me inside-out, but did the same to both Dogmeat and Fawkes causing the game to dock karma from my corpse and interrupt my spectacular demise with two popup messages informing me that my followers had also ceased to be.

He died as he had lived... headbutting anti-personnel mines.


JM: Fawkes told me it was my destiny and not his. Dogmeat wouldn't go into the purifier either.
JM: Though fortunately he didn't say "No" or talk about destiny. I simply couldn't ask him.

KJ: That's why it's best you avoided that and finish the ample stuff you have yet to complete.

JM: That doesn't matter. As long as I don't enter the final room, nothing matters.
JM: Fuck, I ran away from the entire assault to rescue a lost dog from a scrapyard. No-one cared.
JM: How many companions can I have, anyway?
I want to bring them all into the final room at once. Surely ONE of them will agree to commit suicide.

To make it alive
On the third attempt I compromised, not only forgetting to feed Eton's virus into the machine but also tripping up and 'accidentally' pushing Sarah into the radiation chamber in my place.
Look at it this way. I went slogging around the Wasteland doing hundreds of selfless good deeds and becoming the saviour of humanity, so I'm surely entitled to at least one or two acts of selfish evil.
It should also be remembered that the only thing Dad loved more than Project Purify was me, and my death, ending both his and mother's line can't possibly be what he wanted.

This course of action did resulted in my surviving, only to be airbrushed out of history by the narrator who promptly eulogised Sarah instead and pissed over all my triumphs.

If anyone can tell me where to find the stupidity bobble-head, please let me know.



Ends and Odds
The Unfortunate Demise of Mr. Tenpenny
A medium-sized side quest at Carol's Place in the Underworld is 'Shoot 'Em In The Head', where Crowley the ghoul offers you money to murder a number of people he doesn't like. It is necessary for you to kill them with a head-shot, since that's the cliche way of killing zombies.

One of my guilty pleasures in Fallout 3 is shooting people in he head with as large a calibre of weapon as is practical, so I figured I'd be good at this. Unfortunately, this was not the case.
It seems that to qualify, you have to shoot them in the head just a little bit and no more. Doing a proper job so that their skull bursts open doesn't seem to count where Crowley is concerned, and he will make comments like "Not very good at this, are you...?".

One of the targets is the notorious Mr. Tenpenny, who you may remember wants Megaton destroyed for no satisfactorily explained reason.

I spent some time trying to murder Mr.10p without actually entering the tower. This is difficult, probably impossible in the normal run of things.
My first approach was to use a missile launcher, but it seems that he's immune to such weapons while he's sitting in the chair, and sadly the splash damage isn't enough to make him get up (I did try multiple shots in succession).

The closest I've come is by using the DISABLE command to remove his balcony (this includes the entire facing wall of the building).
This alone doesn't help as he'll still be sitting in the chair, which is not affected by the pull of earth's gravity for some mysterious reason.

Next, you will have to DISABLE the chair. Again, Mr. Tenpenny will remain sitting in mid-air, but now you're in a position to take him down. Using a sniper rifle, shoot him in the foot or some other appendage and he'll get out of the chair, which will cause him to realise that he can't fly and send him tumbling down to earth.

Unhappily he doesn't splatter (as would be the case for a living person in Deus Ex) but he isn't very alive afterwards either.

It is worth noting that using DISABLE on other people's chairs while they're sitting in them (Herbert Dashwood for example) has some rather entertaining results.

Dashwood in particular tends to fall backwards, curl up on the floor and writhe around for about 15 seconds before picking himself up again. This is not something I recall seeing in Oblivion, though paralysing a Khajiit so that they land on their tail comes somewhat close.


Fun with the Enclave - pushups
Occasionally, after the Enclave has been unleashed upon the realm, you will come across a group of them training. Typically they do this in threes - an Enclave Officer watching while the two soldiers do push-ups.
This can happen in various locations, I've seen it occur in car-parks and also random locations in the wasteland where they have set up a presence.

Exactly why they do push-ups is unclear - given that they are wearing power-assisted armour - but nevermind. It makes for a really fun target.
For instance, if you can do a stealth shot to the Enclave Officer's head, the two men in training will usually fail to notice, and will stoically continue their push-ups forever since there is no-one to tell them to stop.

No brain... no gain.


For bonus points, a really fun game is to see if you can blow the soldier's brains out in mid push-up. I should also point out that the surviving soldier won't notice this either, even if pieces of brain land on him. Perhaps that's what usually happens to people who don't push fast enough and he's trying his best to ignore it.


Fun with the Enclave II - internal weapons
While happily wandering around the wasteland, brutally executing people I don't like, I came across a squad of Enclave troopers.
What made this encounter unusual was that they were completely unarmed and unarmoured.
The Enclave Officer barked orders, while his two soldiers ran up to me and started punching at my power armour with their fists - something which would in reality have broken their hands.

Lock and load your fists


This was so pathetic that I couldn't bring myself to kill them and just walked off to the nearest place of interest. Then things started to get freaky.
After dispatching the local raiders with Heavenly Force, I began looting the farm they had occupied. At this point, the ill-equipped Enclave soldiers reached the farm.
Only now, instead of fists, they were armed with built-in machine guns like the Nazi Zombie People in Wolfenstein 3D.

EX-TER-MIN-ATE


To make things even weirder, the Officer became invisible. Funnily enough I don't have a screenshot of that...


Fun with the Enclave III - Unhappy Landings
It is worth mentioning briefly that the Enclave will occasionally drop in troops via a Vertibird, a VTOL aircraft that appears to be some bastard child of a helicopter and the V22 Osprey.

A fun game is to quickly run up to the landing zone and drop a large quantity of bottlecap mines so that the shock troops explode the moment they leave the vehicle.

...it is also possible, given suitable equipment such as a missile launcher or tactical nuclear weaponry, to shoot down the vertibird before, during or after it touches down. On the other hand, given the post-apocalyptic nature of the game, destroying some of the few surviving technological artifacts strikes me as a pretty nasty thing to do.


Those!
JM: The kid in Greyditch or Greymarsh or whatever it was called, is his dad already dead or did I fuck up?
KJ: His dad's already dead.
JM: Can I just blow up the kid and pretend this whole quest never happened?

If you hang around the supermarket too long, a child will run up to you asking for salvation. The ruins he lives in have been invaded by giant, fire-breathing ants and he is trying to find his father.

The Greyditch Kid arrives


On a more recent playthrough, I actually did try blowing up the kid, shooting an abandoned car as he drew close to beg for help. As is usually the case with children, it's impossible for him to die, but it did cause him to flee and never bother me again.

The Greyditch Kid leaves. Rapidly.


KJ: I like this quest anyway. You probably won't. Especially when you have to kill the Fire Ant Queen.
JM: That's easy; I played Sim Ant. All you have to do is take a rock and block her tunnel so she starves to death.
KJ: If you try casting a spell in Fallout 3, the Mirelurks will rape you.

Arlington Driver
...it's a good job the BoS don't seem to be able to hear your radio.

Radio: "The Brotherhood of Steel is nothing but a bunch of boy-scouts in antiquated power-armour!"


Blooooood
JM: How are you doing?
RG: Not bad.
JM: Up to much?
JM: Oh gods, that's horrible
RG: ?
JM: It really is horrible.
JM: One of the items in Fallout 3 is a blood pack, which you occasionally find in first aid boxes.
JM: I just used one to clear space in my inventory, and judging by the sound... he drank it.
RG: ._.
JM: I've got used to making people's heads explode messily and rooting through the bits. For fun I arrange severed heads and limbs into piles. But somehow the idea of him drinking blood makes me feel queasy.

 

[Infinitron]

WTF! http://www.it-he.org/wolfno.php

Wolfenstein - New Order

I feel so extraordinary, something's got a hold on me
I get this feeling I'm in motion, a sudden sense of liberty
- True Faith, New Order



Content Warning, apologies etc
As with many of the games I've taken apart recently, Wolfenstein: NO is 18-rated, containing violence, swearing and the alt-right. If you don't want to see that, you should probably stop reading now.
I draw particular attention to the fact that the game includes the Swastika, which is illegal to display in Germany as part of their continuing attempts to avoid Germany going off the rails like that ever again. While I can understand where they're coming from, I'm not entirely convinced that blotting out the past is a good idea, since it will prevent future generations from being able to learn from history.
Still, rather than run the risk of having the whole site blocked in Germany over one game, I shall therefore be replacing the Swastikas with symbolism commonly associated with LSD.

One last point of note is that this review thing (Autopsy? I'm not sure it qualifies as an 'anti-walkthrough') was written linearly while playing the game. I have decided to keep this format, partly because it's funnier to see how I responded as things developed throughout the game, but also to avoid undue spoilers.

Spoiler

Begin at the beginning
"People who do things are people who get things done" -Bill Nelson
Unlike Fallout 4 - which still doesn't work - the game ran perfectly as soon I realised that it needed a 64-bit windows emulation and opened with a memorable (if quiet) opening theme. I'm told that the audio team used valve equipment and tape machines to try and get a late 1950s or early 1960s vibe for the soundtrack. In that sense they failed utterly, but did manage to produce some rather pleasant 1990s shoegazer rock. Besides, anyone still recording to tape gets kudos from me.

I'll scoot through very first part of the intro where you're aboard the plane as there is little to say. It is mostly an irritating montage of WW2 battle scenes, where you are given a series of tasks and about 15 seconds to accomplish each one before you die.
Were it really BJB doing it, this would not present a problem since having been trained in this kind of aircraft he would know exactly where everything is and precisely what to do. Instead, we have a 'Human Revolution' situation where the protagonist has apparently had a stroke and suddenly wakes up with his eyes rolling everywhere and no recollection of how to perform basic tasks such as opening his office door or in this case, knowing where the cargo bay or gunnery hatch is located.

Who am I? Where am I? What am I?


The Nazis have advanced jetfighters, AT-ATs and robotic dogs. This is not something which fazes me particularly since this kind of fantasy tech has always been a mainstay of the series, and indeed some of it comes straight out of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. That said, it is worth keeping in mind that one of the reasons the Nazi war effort failed was because they kept bickering over which projects should receive their limited resources, so even if they had had this kind of technology in the lab it is unlikely that they would have been able to mass-produce any of it.
After that, things start to get more fun and significantly more Wolfenstein-like in that you actually get to run around and shoot Nazis in the head without the game constantly grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and dumping you somewhere else like a wayward kitten.

Things start to get irritating again when you meet up with your retarded companions and decide to do a head-on assault of a castle run by the SS. Among other things, you get a motorcycle-sized rock dropped on your head with no ill effects whatsoever. Once inside the castle, Fergus teaches you how to hotwire locks by shorting live and neutral together, thus popping the circuit breakers or fuses and leaving the door totally inoperable.

Do NOT try this at home. Ever.


Finally, after wrestling with the most badly-designed incinerators I've ever seen, you get killed by a Star Wars garbage crusher only to wake up again and be forced to decide whether the useless, incompetent Wyatt with the spice-blue eyes or the experienced but rude and sarcastic shithead Fergus should get the chop.

The Spice must flow!


While I can kind of appreciate that this is the game's way of saying that life isn't fair and that you will be forced to make choices you'd rather avoid, this kind of moralising is annoying and when push comes to shove, the purpose of the game is to entertain the player, not piss them off.
After that, the room explodes and you get lobotomised in the same old way as DX:HR and Fallout: New Vegas.



Don't arrange to have me sent to no asylum
"Let me get this straight, you play a brain-damaged inmate in a lunatic asylum...?"
Now things really take a turn for the worse, as BJB is washed up somewhere and brought to a hospital. While he may have survived having his skull smashed by a large rock, the little chunk of metal in his head has left BJB comatose with a head full of scrambled eggs until the year 1960.

Let's take a step back. Before they started going after the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other 'undesirables', the Nazis had been perfecting their extermination techniques on another segment of the German population as a sort of trial run.
The object of this exercise was to allegedly improve the health of the German people as a whole, by culling the sick and the insane in a sort of Darwinistic purge. To facilitate this, hospitals were combed for the disabled and the incurably mad, so that they could be put out of their misery in the same way we might kill a sick animal. This was known as "Action T4" should you wish to do your own research.
It is poignant to note that when the 1971 film of 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' was filmed in Munich, the Oompa-loompas had to be shipped in from abroad because all native Germans that size had been exterminated.
While the game loosely touches on this, in that Death's Head's men constantly turn up to get more meat for his experiments, the elephant in the room is BJB himself. The fact that they frequently visited the hospital and yet somehow allowed BJB to sit in a wheelchair drooling for fourteen whole years without putting a bullet in him beggars belief, and is a mystery which the game does not even attempt to explain away.

Finally, the Nazis decide to close the hospital, bringing about two dozen storm troopers for the comparatively simple task of shooting a handful of lunatics in the head and escorting the staff off the premises.
This goes astray as an over-enthusiastic Nazi murders the staff against their orders, before devolving into a systematic execution of all within. BJB manages to evade this by attempting an ISIS-style beheading on the Nazi using a butter knife. After a brief spell of dizziness, he gets up and starts running around athletically despite the fact that he's in his early 40s and hasn't moved his legs for nearly 15 years.
BJB commits a few more murders, kidnaps Anja, the only survivor of the Mental Hospital Massacre, and then escapes in a car.
Incredibly, nobody stops an obviously-stolen high-ranking vehicle being driven too fast by a mental patient in a blood-spattered hospital gown who's never driven a vehicle with a synchronized gearbox before.

"Hey kid, shake a leg - maybe you're crazy in the head. Baby."
'Drive' - REM


Eventually BJB slips into some kind of flashback coma and nearly crashes the car, at which point the Nazis finally realise that something untoward has happened. A few more people are given ISIS-style executions and the car is driven onwards to Anja's grandparents.


Maybe you'll see things my way, before we get to Grandma's place
"I'm sorry, but this game is just bollocks."
Eventually, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf turn up at Granny's house. For some inexplicable reason Anja's grandparents are outside and awaiting their arrival, which either means that they had some form of premonition, or that the whole world and his dog have heard about the Mental Hospital Massacre and the Nazis will shortly be arriving to execute the lot of them.

In the car boot, a live Nazi is found. Once he is extracted, the grandparents beat the shit out of him, apparently as a scapegoat for the fact that their child was murdered by a completely different Nazi who would have been shot for insubordination if BJB hadn't disposed of him first.

So. It's 1960. The Nazis made it onto the moon 10 years early and now have technology which we do not. The game stated in the intro that even in 1946 they had extraordinary technology and nobody knows how this happened, so it is likely that this discrepancy will eventually be explained.
Meanwhile, in the farmhouse, BJB is incapable of comprehending that the war is over and that there isn't a US Military anymore. This is excusable, since a 15-year coma patient is likely to have had large parts of his brain atrophy.
The atomic bomb was a military secret until it was used on Japan, so whether BJB would have heard of them in this timeline (and thus understand the explanation he was given) is an open question.

BJB reacts by going down into the cellar while his friends put on some music and try to pretend everything is awesome. Once downstairs, you can steal Anja's grandfather's gold watch and then interrogate the nazi guy with a chainsaw that doesn't start.
True to his brain-damaged state, BJB does something totally moronic and threatens to behead the guy if he doesn't give an answer that he likes. Anyone remotely sensible would cut off parts of the guy so that he can still answer if he needs any initial persuasion.
Eventually the Nazi gives a satisfactory answer, at which point BJB murders him anyway for shits and giggles, thus leaving his hosts to have to find a way to dispose of a very, very messy corpse.

Supposedly the Nazis are keeping the resistance members in a prison, which makes me suspect that the writing team has also just awakened from a 15-year coma with heads full of scrambled eggs.
A more plausible explanation is the guy is giving BJB an answer that he'll LIKE, even though it isn't true. This is one of the reasons torture doesn't really work. More to the point, BJB won't be able to come back for more questions if it turned out that the guy was lying, because he hasn't got a head.
As a reality check, the whole thing about the resistance members being imprisoned is astonishingly unlikely. It is historical fact that resistance members would either be shot on the spot, or given a short trial in a kangaroo court with a 90% conviction rate, followed almost immediately afterwards by the guillotine. Such fates befell Helmuth Hubner and later Sophie Scholl of the White Rose group, who did little more than propogate ideas which the Nazi Party disapproved of.

There is no valid reason why the Reich would stop doing this, barring some weird sort of Nazi apologism on behalf of the game (this is not helped by the "We are not trivialising genocide, honest!" splash screen when the game starts).

The way the Nazis are portrayed is rather ham-fisted. It focuses almost entirely on the evil deeds of a select few which take place at a personal level, and thereby misses the wider point completely. The true horror of Nazi Germany is not that some people were extremely evil, it was the mundane bureaucracy of it all, the banal way in which the whole system was geared up to systematically locate and destroy certain groups of people on an industrial scale, and that most normal people were just kind of okay with it, or provided with a mental scapegoat.



Let my people go!
Once your pet Nazi has been safely beheaded, everyone (else) performs what appears to be a seance, and collectively head off to try and rescue the resistance folk.

Is there anyone out there...?


The checkpoint provides a slight problem, but nothing that can't be overcome with a suitably large amount of murder.
According to the game's notes, Anja's grandfather lives by one rule: 'do to others as you would have done to you'. He promptly demonstrates this by blowing someone's head off with a shotgun, and then shouts his genocidal plans to you so loudly that they literally echo around the complex.

"Is that Margaret Thatcher?"


JM: "You know what... I think I've been looking at this game all wrong. I've been bitching about it because
the plot is bollocks... actually that's EXACTLY what I need for a new anti-walkthrough. I HAVE to buy it!"
SF: "Oh?"
JM: "Yeah, it's hard these days, the QA is so better than it used to be, it's really hard to bend a game backwards."
SF: "Have you ever considered getting a job doing QA for games?"
JM: "Not really. Bugs are fun. If I reported them, they'd get fixed! I mean, yeah, crashing ones are a problem.
Ones where you can do something the designers never intended? That's fun. One of the reasons I loved
Goat Simulator was because it was their policy to only fix the crashing bugs and leave the rest alone."
SF: "Yeah, QA is a really big focus these days."
JM: "Well, they don't seem to have done any QA on the writing."

After a little bit more fun popping heads, you'll come across a large, open area where some random guy impassively watches your murder spree from the gantry.
Shortly afterwards you'll end up in some kind of control room with what appears to be an early 1970s Ford Cortina bricked up on cinder blocks.

Getting in the car gives an amusing reminder of BJB's status as an absconded mental patient.



JM: "That thing that looks like a computer. What is it?"
SF: "It's a computer. Is that from 1960?"
JM: "No. That's 1978 or later."

SF: "I hope I didn't destroy the only computer I needed to use."
JM: "Doesn't matter. It's not like he can use a computer. He won't even have a WORD for computer."
SF: "I hadn't thought of that. Though, they did HAVE computers in the 1940s.
They broke the Enigma code."
JM: "They were a state secret, at least in the UK."

"Sssss.... the Future Machine sickenssss usssss..."


There will be one final part of the checkpoint. Again, Anja's grandfather demands a blood sacrifice of all within. Killing just the humans is not sufficient, as he will refuse to move the car until you have also dispatched the robo-dog sleeping on the porch, making its dreams of electric sheep considerably more permanent.
Finally you will have to destroy a couple of honest-to-god robots, although since the Nazis have clearly mastered the art of fabricating LSI semiconductors 20 years early, this is hardly surprising and continues the game's bizarre narrative that we would be in a technological paradise by now if only Hitler had prevailed.



SF: "I'm just killing these... robotic dogs..."
JM: "NO...!"
SF: "I'm sorry, you don't like that, do you?"
JM: "The only thing better than a dog is a robotic dog!"

Afterwards, you catch a train, despite not having any papers. The game very abruptly cuts to BJB banging Anja in what might be a poorly-handled attempt at some kind of romantic subplot.
Normally I'd be all for making love not war, but there's a time and a place for everything, and randomly cramming a sex scene into a game about shooting Nazis makes about as much sense as having the Doom marine sneak off into a quiet corner of Hell to crack one off.


Tommy's Holiday Camp
"This game is one big plot hole."
BJB then tries to get into the prison. This means crawling around a couple of buildings and stealing an experimental laser welding machine which is just lying on someone's workbench. Given that LASER is an acronym for 'Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation', it is unlikely that the Nazis would refer to it as such, even if they stole the technology from some other continuum as I am starting to suspect.

You will at some point need to sneak through some kind of local commmand centre, filled with large 1940s-looking computing devices that contrast strangely with the late 1970s DEC terminals or late 1980s Solbourne workstations seen back at the checkpoint.

Annoyingly, BJB has lost his silenced pistol by this point. This is somewhat sensible as bringing it on the train is unlikely to go down well, but unfortunately it does mean that BJB is reduced to messy ISIS-style killings since he only has a knife and a welding tool.

On the less sensible front, the prison itself constantly echoes with Big-Brother style appeals to not cause any trouble and to serve your sentence. Once again the game shows us a rose-tinted vision of the Nazi regime where dissidents are treated like naughty children instead of being guillotined or shipped off to death camps.
Once in the cell block you will find your colleagues apparently being brainwashed. Fergus, who has somehow avoided the fallbeil for the last 14 years, asks BJB what he's been up to. Rather than tell him the unpleasant truth, BJB makes shit up and boasts about committing a number of unprovoked murders, leaving out various bits like the chainsaw beheading and shooting dogs in their sleep. That said, "Drooling in a wheelchair for 14 years" is perhaps not a particularly uplifting story.

By any sensible measure the escape attempt ends disastrously since only Fergus and BJB get out alive and the Nazis, convinced that a full-scale rebellion is in progress, actually do something evil for a change and order the mass execution of the entire prison population.

Hence BJB's actions have resulted in the deaths of about a thousand people, in order to rescue one man who constantly hurls insults at you throughout the entire venture.

JM: "Some of the White Rose got lucky, mind. Roland Freisler wanted to guillotine a bunch of them as a present for
Hitler's birthday. However, he forgot to bring the evidence folder containing the case against them and the
trial had to be postponed. Someone else presided over the next trial, and most of them were acquitted.
The one who wasn't ended up in jail but the trial kept getting postponed until the war ended."
SF: "Poor Hitler never got his birthday present, then..."

Tomorrow Belongs To Me
Fatherland, fatherland show us a sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come when the world is mine...
Tomorrow belongs to me!
--Cabaret (see also the Sensational Alex Harvey Band for a de-Nazified version)
Shortly afterwards you'll end up in the Resistance HQ where the last vestiges of the Clouseau Circle are hanging out. BJB promptly makes an idiot of himself and rubs most of the rebels up the wrong way, but the fight is quickly interrupted by a mad old lady in a wheelchair who rolls up and exhanges injuries with BJB.



SF: "So, do you remember where we got to?"

JM: "You were climbing around buildings, while the PA was blaring authoritarian slogans at you in the style of Soviet Russia,
which makes me think that the designers have confused Nazism with Stalinism. You found a newspaper cutting which described
how one of the robot dogs killed a bunch of people by mistake but they were only rapists so that was okay. Then you found
another one describing how you broke out of prison and that described YOU as a rapist as well at which point you realised
you'd completely fallen for their propaganda."

BJB is given the option of having a nightmare, which brings up the opening level of the original Wolf3D, complete with 8KHz sound samples, but sadly he wakes after reaching the exit.
The game does not emulate such oddities as BJB's uncanny ability to run much faster sideways than he can forwards, and it doesn't have the gold artifact hoards either. This is slightly disappointing, since the Nazis did hoard artifacts in castles to keep them safe from allied bombings. It is also confusing given how Wolf:NO tends to scatter such things in completely bizarre and improbable locations despite attempting to be more realistic game.


A Night at the Museum
"Oh it gets better. Wait until you see the Hebrew deathsphere." -Turnsky
Your next mission involves going to London where the Houses of Parliament have been converted into a gigantic eyesore containing their top-secret R&D facility. Unlike with the train, you need to present your papers this time. Once there, your dickhead companion promptly goes full terrorist, blowing up the car park and preventing you from entering the building.

Once you have scrabbled around sufficiently to breach the walls of the fortress you discover the appalling truth - the top-secret weapons facility has a museum and visitor's centre, and you could have gained access simply by paying a couple of Reichsmarks at the front door.

After a number of improbable incidents involving attempted suicide via the elevators, you find yourself in a laboratory where a cutscene takes place, but instead of using voiceovers, the screen splits to show each speaker until your field of vision resembles a sliding block puzzle.

Documents are found describing various high-tech devices. BJB grabs all the papers he can find and also loads up with about 30 kilos of what appear to be Polywell fusion reactors and accessories.

Robert Bussard woz 'ere


BJB says that they are ancient technological artifacts which is slightly depressing because the earlier games have generally involved ancient magical artifacts. Counterintuitively, the magical version is actually more realistic... some of the top-level Nazis actually were deeply into the occult. The Nazis really did have the Spear of Destiny - later returned to Vienna following their defeat. Whether this artifact ever did pierce Christ's side or has any magical powers is debatable, but the Nazi Occult trope has a significant basis in reality.
By contrast, New Order leaves reality entirely, instead going with the Clarke Von Dungleberry school of thought that the pyramids were built by aliens, the Holy Grail was a fusion-powered bioreactor, Sodom and Gomorrah were nuked and so forth. It becomes very difficult to reconcile these two concepts without falling down the "ALL the conspiracy theories are true!" rabbithole, and that way madness lies.

As a consolation prize for laying this tripe on you, the game does let you steal a really cool laser welding device from the top-secret research lab. (Perhaps 'let' is the wrong word - you can't leave without it)

Finally, you end up fighting a couple more robots. BJB, in true WW2 Make-Do-And-Mend fashion, is able to gather up pieces of robot as they fall, and somehow grafts them onto his body to repair his armour. This works even if the pieces of random metal are bigger than him, although for some reason he is not able to pocket the cars in the car-park and use those as armour, which would have made things a lot easier.

Swastika Eyes
I see your:
autosuggestion psychology, elimination policy
A military industrial
illusion of democracy
Swastika Eyes, Swastika Eyes, Swastika Eyes
-Primal Scream, XTRMNTR
Once you have liberated the three helicopters, thereby telling central Berlin 'THE REBEL BASE IS HERE!', Anja makes the staggering claim that the Jews were responsible for the success of the Nazi regime. You are asked to find a brick in order to help prove this.

BJB promptly falls into the sewer thanks to the Clouseau Circle's utter contempt for health and safety, presumably some kind of reaction against the rules and regulations of the Nazi totalitarian regime.

"What's that, Lassie..? Billy's fallen down the well?"


Aktion-T4 is finally mentioned, albeit in relation to Klaus' child. The fact that BJB and Caroline somehow evaded it is once again glossed over and if anything, it makes things worse because it means the writing team knew what they were doing was stupid, but did it anyway.
Fergus, meanwhile, lapses into survivor's guilt and gets even more hostile towards BJB. Presumably if you rescued The Kid instead, he would be moping about being useless and inexperienced instead of being too old and frail.

Once all the tasks are completed, BJB's colleagues betray him and he is sent to a concentration camp. The pretext given is some cock-and-bull story about finding a Jewish concrete engineer who has somehow escaped the Nazis elimination policy for the last 20 years. However, the resistance group wanting to dispose of BJB seems a far more plausible explanation.

BJB is singled out by the Nazis as being exceptionally well-built despite 14 years as a vegetable, and is promptly stuck in front of the controls of a cement mixer. Exactly why they even have manually-operated cement mixers when they have AI systems and late 70s computer technology is not explained. The job BJB is given could have been automated even using 1940s technology.

BJB hits off with the old engineer about as well as can be expected from a multiple murderer who's recently escaped a mental hospital.

Through judicious use of the word 'fuck', BJB persuades the old man to abandon his lifelong ideals in exchange for a couple of favours that should, theoretically, grant him absolute control over the concentration camp, and, also theoretically, free all the inmates. BJB doesn't mention that the last prison break he did ended in thousands of deaths and the old man doesn't ask.
BJB then breaks into the forbidden areas of the complex, but without obtaining any kind of makeshift weapon first, so he is unable to pick up the crowbar or saws left lying around. Predictably he is immediately mugged, beaten up and murdered before coming back to life in the incinerator, after which you get to go on yet another ISIS-style killing spree.

Rise and walk, my son!


To its credit, the game does actually start to convey the horrors of Nazi Germany for once, instead of the sugar-coated cartoon version it's largely been feeding us until now.
Just like last time, the escape attempt goes horribly wrong and the entire wing is sent to the firing squad by someone who looks very much like Margaret Thatcher.

The Engineer saves the day, and Thatcher vows to hunt you down, which she does, appearing just as you escape and shooting up most of the people you were trying to save.
Back at base, The Engineer says he's part of some weird cult that has been building machinery centuries ahead of anything else. The game hedges its bets by saying that some of it is 'so advanced it appears to be magic'. This might have been more convincing if not for things like the Spear of Destiny (in 'Spear of Destiny' funnily enough), or the many undead fiends, demonic manifestations and full-blown summoning rituals in RTCW.

Like Nikola Tesla, the cult doesn't do anything sensible with the technology once it has been created, simply inventing things for shits and giggles and then going "That's cool, what can I make next?". Roth says that this is their way of worshipping God, by making cool shit for Him.

Unless God is also telling them how to make the stuff, this explanation is total bullshit and an insult to engineers everywhere. After the low-hanging fruit is gone, technological progression does not occur in a vacuum but by building on pre-existing technological infrastructure.

Consider building a VLSI device. The machine you're reading this on probably has a dozen VLSI chips in it. Designing one requires specialism in a large number of fields which only exist because people are actively using or researching those technologies. Writing it all down only gets you so far - people who have actually worked with the technology are also necessary to keep it alive, since the written medium tends to be a lossy, imperfect record of one's experience.
Once the chip is designed, we need to fabricate it, in a factory about the size of the Elgin industrial estate in Swindon. The immersion lithography machinery alone is unlikely to get much change from a billion dollars or so, and depends on there already being stable power infrastructure and a supply of exotic materials such as isotopically-pure silicon - which in turn requires another factory about the size of the Elgin industrial estate to purify it to the required level.
The only conceivable way to produce semiconductors in a garage workshop is by some kind of advanced molecular deposition technology, which will require computer control, which will require exactly the kind of VLSI device we're trying to make in the first place.

In addition, a lot of progress is incremental, e.g. "how can we improve on this?". Semiconductor features sizes have shrunk down from multiple microns to under 10nm over the course of decades of gradual process improvements and discoveries in the field of materials science, not through theoretical work by a handful of crazy old mystics.

Even if we accept that this is vaguely plausible, the game does not explain how the Nazis, having found a cache of advanced technology, have managed to reverse-engineer any of it at all, let alone 23rd century technology. If someone from 1760 tried to reverse-engineer a smartphone, they wouldn't even have a proper grounding in electricity, let alone the theory behind radio waves, semiconductor technology, quantum mechanics, digital logic, stored-program machine code, operating system design or Fast-Fourier Transforms.

It is interesting, in a train-wreck sort of way, to note that by doing this, the writing team has inadvertantly justified the Nazi's anti-semitic goals, since in the Wolf:NO universe there really is a Jewish conspiracy to secretly control the world, and the Nazis were the only thing standing in their way. The Engineer says as much himself, by mentioning that they attempted to bolster the Allies by providing them advanced technology (but too late to turn things around).

But back to the game. The Engineer promises to help your friends access a large cache of divine technology, but for this they have to capture a U-boat, since the cache is in the bottom of the sea. BJB is sent to fetch more equipment to help build something, and he once again falls into the sewer, opening up yet more avenues for the Nazis to locate the hide-out.

"This never would have happened if the Nazis had been in charge" -Sofox


Down in the Sewer
After another quick shag, BJB is given a mini-sub and told to go through the sewer into the most heavily-fortified part of Berlin. During this escapade he has a significant mental breakdown and starts rambling about leeches a'la Raoul Duke in 'Fear and loathing in Las Vegas'.

"Look," he said, "you've got to stop this talk about snakes and leeches and lizards and stuff. It's making me sick."


Meanwhile, Anja goes off the deep end as well and starts reading extracts from her psycho cousin's diary of serial killings. These entries appear in your inventory as reels of tape, but unfortunately are the American NAB standard and not the cine-hub or AEG pancake formats used in Germany.
After that you get to sneak around and murder Nazis, which should be what springs to mind when Wolfenstein is mentioned, rather than porn.

Once this is done, the writing team start to lose their tenuous grip on reality even more. Your so-called allies come up with yet another Wile-E Coyote scheme to try and dispose of BJB, namely hollowing out a torpoedo and putting him inside it - presumably in the hopes that he'll be fired at something. The fact that no torpedo is ever going to be designed to be opened from the inside is a problem the game does not acknowledge.

Left alone in a tiny, pitch-black enclosed space, BJB has another minor breakdown and then wakes up inside the submarine. The interior of the torpedo is now somehow lit up like a Christmas tree and you are able to escape.

The next task, obviously, is to overpower the U-boat through the careful use of applied murder. The captain offers you a fair trial according to maritime law if you surrender. BJB, of course, does not show him the same courtesy.

As an aside, a note in the captain's cabin relates how, after a skyscraper collapsed, an architect was given a kangaroo court trial and summary execution in a brief flash of lucidity from the writing team. It should be pointed out that the Engineer has blood on his hands for this, since he was the one fiddling with the concrete to produce bad batches of it and the architect was a civil engineer, not exactly a high-ranking Nazi.
On this note, the game does not, as far as I can see, explain what is so special about the super-concrete, aside from saying that it's made it possible for them to build things extremely rapidly. From this we can guess that it does not need to be cured. Concrete undergoes an exothermic reaction when curing, and large structures require active cooling to prevent it overheating and losing structural integrity. Without such cooling mechanisms, the Hoover Dam would have taken more than a century to set. If this super-concrete is able to skip that step entirely, the massive cityscapes and bridges featured in the game become eminently plausible.

Anyway. Once the crew have been exterminated, you have to install a radio device and raise some buoys to re-establish contact with your allies. The game does not explain how Anja has been able to transmit more episodes of her cousin's murder spree before this is done.

Once this is done, BJB has another relapse, laughing about the word 'buoy' and making deranged comments about drowning cats in the river.

Babylon Rising
"Two thousand years of looking for utopia
Two thousand years of Babylon rising
Don't be afraid: the threat's not for real
Be very afraid: you've made your last deal"
--Babylon Rising, Threshold (Psychedelicatessen)
After this, you get to go down into the cache. Set the Engineer, now appears to be out of his depth and makes a couple of minor mistakes, until eventually you get inside the halls of wisdom.

It is, unfortunately, not filled to the ceiling with knowledge as promised, but appears to be more the Broom Cupboard of wisdom - small, but with the occasional useful knick-knacks scattered here and there.

Fergus starts to go into the same kind of mental daze as Anja and BJB himself, rambling about how he's in Atlantis with a crazed wizard and a psychopath.

Meanwhile, in their apparent attempts to find BJB's breaking point where he finally puts his foot down and says "Fuck you, I'm not doing that" the team decide that BJB should be sent to the moon, so that they can start a nuclear war using the submarine.

This will be done by hijacking a train and impersonating a high official who is already booked to go to the moon. Set suggests using what Turnsky referred to as "the Hebrew deathsphere". The Engineer simply calls it 'spindly torque thing', so clearly inventing names for things does not get them closer to Yahweh.

At the scene of the crime-to-be, BJB launches the deathsphere and bizarre things occur which cause even BJB and Fergus to balk at the atrocity and go "WTF just happened? What did we do?!".

By sheer luck, the official you're trying to get at hasn't yet fallen into the sea, so BJB has to go and rescue him.

Getting there is difficult, but not impossible. I stand by my assertion from Return to Castle Wolfenstein that the Ubersoldat is not some tin soldier that Death's Head has cobbled together, it is BJB himself. No normal human being could kill the entire staff of a high-security prison complex using only a fruit knife and a pair of shoes, and the fact that he managed to reanimate himself after taking a jet-fighter in the forehead, having his skull smashed, his throat slashed twice and then being stabbed in the chest is only further proof.

As you approach the conclusion of the vertigo-inducing mission, the soundtrack switches to a lazy acoustic number in stark contrast to the massacres in progress. BJB then traps himself inside the rail car that the Nazi was trapped in, but manages to end up safely back in the base by sheer force of will.

"Think of it as Satan's dreidel" -Turnsky



We like the moon
After presumably having been briefed on what a computer looks like and how to use a text-based menu system, BJB takes a shuttle to the moon. This isn't an eye-opener in itself since the Nazis were extremely good with rocketry even in our timeline, and in this one they have also stolen some kind of Hebrew antigrav technology.
However, things start to stretch credulity a little once you get there. Firstly, BJB has to go through customs even though the Nazis have created a one-world state, but we also have problems with the communications.

Firstly, there's a time delay. That's not too bad, it seems to be a round-trip of about 2.5 seconds on average, real figure dependent on where the moon is at the time since the orbit is elliptical. However, you would need a fair chunk of power to send a signal to the moon, and that will be a great big finger pointing at the Clouseau Circle HQ saying "Here I am". It's even worse for BJB - anyone transmitting a signal strong enough to be received on Earth from the moon is going to be pretty easy to pin down.

Fortunately this doesn't happen, although the fact that the Nazis will inevitably discover you means that you won't be able to get back OFF the moon. Even if you remained undiscovered, the man BJB is pretending to be didn't have a return ticket due for several weeks or months.

Anyway, you make your way through the labs, past computer tape drives that don't have any reels of tape in them, and out onto the lunar surface.
I was a little suspicious at first because BJB's movements on the moon were clearly in Earth gravity. However, this is only the case within the complex - on the moon surface itself you get the proper 1/6th gravity. Presumably another example of the same gravitic engineering that allows the Hebrew Deathsphere to levitate.
Once inside the command module, BJB finds a scalpel and has another one of his psychotic episodes. This time we have a flashback to the concentration camp where he remembers an encounter with The Engineer which didn't have time to happen since we can account for nearly every second he spent with Set. This is followed by some rather gruesome self-harm on BJB's part. While I suppose cutting your wrists is one way to remove a tattoo, asking The Engineer if his advanced technology includes laser tattoo removal would at least have allowed BJB to keep using his shooting hand without waiting a month for it to heal. Set, after all, has the same problem.



Sofox: Of course BJB can self-harm and still fire weapons. He's the Ubersoldat.

Anja's stories about her psycho cousin continue, and it becomes increasingly likely that this 'cousin' is actually her - either through some kind of multiple personality disorder, or because she's scared that BJB will be turned off by the fact that she's a confessed serial killer. Either way she seems to be out of her gourd - which is perhaps not surprising since many slightly insane people go into psychiatry to try and understand their own condition.
BJB gets to the computer and haltingly figures out how to use it. This is made more difficult by the fact that the letters IOP and the number 0 are missing from the keyboards, which interestingly seem to be in the UK/US QWERTY layout instead of the German QWERTZ standard. None of the accented letters are available either.

Press '0' to continue


Finally he gets it to print the launch codes for the submarine onto punch-cards. BJB is then instructed to get back to the hangar so that he can hijack a cargo shuttle and land it in the Nautica facility. After the shuttle takes off, BJB goes insane once more, stabbing the pilot several dozen times. Predictably, this causes the Nazis to shoot down the shuttle and you crash-land in the middle of London.
At this point the Nazis finally realise where the Clouseau HQ is and attack it, while you are given the unenviable job of getting all the way from London to Berlin as quickly as you can. This is interrupted by a giant robot.

So sad, it ends - as it began
Somehow, BJB and Klaus manage to complete the 600 mile drive from London to Berlin while it's still daylight. Or more likely, it took them so long that it is now the day after the Nazis attacked the HQ.
Either way, you have to get inside. Frankly, the resistance HQ was a total deathtrap, with the electrical systems overloaded and sparking, dozens of untended candles on a wooden floor beneath a load of newspaper cuttings and half a dozen ways for civil engineers to accidentally stumble on the base by doing routine checks on the sewers. So the fact that the HQ has caught fire and been overrun by shock troops is of no surprise whatsoever - the bigger mystery is why it took so long for this to happen.

Fortunately the Nazi infestation is fairly easy to deal with, since there are relatively few enemies inside and they are mostly easy kills - especially for someone who just blew up a giant robot. Predictably, various companions die, which might have had more of an emotional impact if those companions hadn't been constantly hurling abuse at BJB for the entire duration of his stay there.
Finally, possibly in revenge for their fallen comrades, the surviving team members send BJB into Death's Heads's complex so that he can release the prisoners before they nuke it. Or more likely, to make sure that he's at the ground zero site when they launch.

BJB makes his way through the complex to an excellent arrangement of the title music, and discovers Death's Head's brain collection before being assaulted by Maggie Thatcher's friend. He drugs you and attempts to murder you but is then surprised when you recover unexpectedly, saying that there must be something very wrong with your cerebral cortex. Again, the theory that BJB is the Ubersoldat cannot be ignored.

BJB's meds kick in shortly afterwards but he manages to give some vague help to the captives before getting trapped in an elevator. Death's Head says 'hi', looks through his brain collection and locates Wyatt (or Fergus), whom he reanimates as a Cortex Reaver in true System Shock style. Wyatt begs for death and BJB happily obliges, melting his friend's brain with the laser cannon.
A few more atrocities are in order before Death's Head himself can be taken down...

...which all seems rather pointless since the plan is to vapourise him anyway.
Once the mad old man has finally been winkled out of his shell, BJB attempts to murder him only to be fooled by the old hand-grenade suicide trick.
Rather than doing something sensible such as knocking the thing out of the old man's hand or leaping over to the other side of his mech, BJB just stares at it and waits for it to go bang.

After this comes an ambiguous ending where BJB gives the order to fire while the escapees are still within flashburn distance and the credits roll. Given the crew's apparent track record of finding ways to kill BJB it is possible that they're breaking out the champagne having finally found a way to rid themselves of him forever.

On the other hand, given that BJB has been murdered several times during the course of the story, his return is pretty much guaranteed. For one, there is still some unfinished business with Thatcher. And the rest of the world, for that matter - the Glorious Leader is still out there ruling a Nazi world, with some kind of superweapon installed on the moon and there is NO plan for what to do even if the empire did just collapse with Death's Head.
In this future there is no powerful force such as the USA or the Soviet Union to manage any kind of de-Nazification process. The Resistance now consists of a number of terrorists armed with nuclear weapons and some extremely powerful technology, so there is a hell of a lot of scope for a sequel.

And of course, we have the sound of the helicopter after the credits. Most likely they have sent someone around afterwards to try and ensure that BJB is finally dead, and thereby providing him with a ride to hijack home. Wherever home is.

 

[Infinitron]

And RTCW also: http://www.it-he.org/rtcw.php

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Made using iortcw 1.5a for 64-bit and HD support



Intro, Content Warning, apologies etc
Return To Castle Wolfenstein is 15-rated, containing violence, some swearing and also Nazis in rather fetching leather catsuits. If you don't want to see that, you should probably stop reading now.
I draw particular attention to the fact that the game includes the Swastika, which is illegal to display in Germany as part of their continuing attempts to avoid Germany going off the rails like that ever again.
As with Wolf:NO, I shall be replacing the Swastikas with symbolism commonly associated with LSD, in order to avoid offending people, or at least to offend them in a different way.

Spoiler

Wolf3D
Before we get going, it is worth mentioning the original Wolfenstein 3D. I'm going to gloss over the even-more-original Apple II games because I've never seen them.
Wolf3D was revolutionary at the time and could also be quite creepy, with the music adding tremendous atmosphere. Despite having a solid-colour ceiling and floor and being entirely made from cubes, the game managed to instill a sense of revulsion at the atrocities of the era.

Somehow it also managed to sustain this, in spite of the bizarre legoland architecture, gigantic boss-monsters, and the fact that the hero could repair virtually all of his perforated organs with food and sticking-plasters. By rights he should have ended up like the Michelin man; rotund and covered in bandages. BJB will also quite happily eat dogfood (unlike the Michelin man, as far as I know.)

Many of these traits apply to RTCW as well, as we shall see.


The Knife-man: Impulsive Punishment
As usual, the game starts with you in prison, next to the corpse of someone you've just murdered. In RTCW, you do actually get to see this happen, unlike Wolf3D where you wake up with no memories, staring at a corpse like some kind of whodunnit movie where the protagonist has been framed.
Your initial weapons will be a pistol and a knife. In an improvement on Wolf3D, where the knife was virtually useless, BJB can now stab at around five times a second, like a gourmet chef on amphetamines. This makes a highly disturbing sound like shears or military-grade scissors. When combined with the kick - another new trick he's learned since Wolf3D - the result is devastating and many Nazis have been heard to shout 'Mein Gott!' at the mere sight.

I should also add that, as per Wolf3D, BJB has the remarkable ability to absorb food through his feet, and also armour. A flak jacket and helmet should put you up to full protection, which is sensible enough. Where it starts to get a little freaky is that he can have up to about 5 helmets on his head at once without looking like a complete tit, and somehow their protective powers are combined.
This uncanny ability is compounded in Wolf:NO and WOB where he is able to grab massive sheets of scrap metal from broken robots and somehow absorb their potency into himself through unnatural means.

Eat with your feet


Having escaped the first level, you'll be in the castle proper.
Two of the Nazis will have a chatter, and then one goes to stand by the window, while the other heads to the barracks. It is possible to drop down onto his head, which interestingly, does not alert him to your presence and you can hop down and slip away without him being any the wiser.
Once you have massacred enough people to permit entrance into the rest of the level, you will end up in the dining room, where the Captain is having his dinner. To your immediate right is a small ledge, and it is possible to jump onto this and get to him immediately without going down through the basement. This doesn't get you all that far because the gate is locked, but it does make things easier in terms of kicking the guy to death and eating his lunch.

You can also hide down by the gate and wait, while the others frantically jump around like morons, trying to get up into the dining area.

The fact that they're not very good at it means that they will generally come at you one by one, allowing you to murder them with impunity.

I Like Trams
Without doubt, one of the most entertaining sections of the game is the 'tram' level, which is actually about cable-cars, but who cares.
First, eradicate all resistance using the usual technique of kicking the Nazis in the balls and then stabbing them in the back. Do this to the mechanic, the guys in the upper section and then go downstairs to deal with the others. If you like, you can throw a few bang-sticks around for good measure.
Once they are all dead, save and activate the pulley mechanism. In a few moments two new troopers will arrive in the cable car, so make sure you run back upstairs to greet them.

There are umpteen different ways of dealing with the new arrivals, but be aware that they are all clairvoyant and know exactly where you are, so hiding up on the roof of the cabin with a big-ass sniper rifle will avail you naught. It is also worth mentioning that RTCW is one of the only games I've ever played where your enemies are able to climb ladders, so techniques that will save your ass even in far more modern games will get you into trouble here.

One possibility is to make your way to the very edge of the left-hand railings (facing outwards) and crouch, while simultaneously stabbing and kicking. For some unaccountable reason this will drive the oncoming troopers in the cable car into a frenzy, and they will begin to jump and dance inside the car. If you throw grenades at the cable car, their dancing can become so extreme that one of them falls out and is dashed to pieces on the rocks below.

"Just jump out and think of a wonderful thought."


What really seems to annoy them is this; stand on the furthest part of the railings and as the cable-car approaches, jump on the roof of it. Crouch there and they will not know what to do. Sometimes one trooper will shoot the other, in either case, one of them will usually remain in the car, so quickly jump down and hit the START button and wave him goodbye.
This will drive the trooper utterly insane, such that he will either jump out of the car on the way to #2 station, or on the way back to #1 afterwards.
Now that the troopers are out of harm's way and the cable car has been sent back from whence it came, go into the cabin and bring out the chair. Carefully throw it down into the space where the cable-car would be, and then save. Now jump down onto the chair (tricky), which will cause BJB to have a screaming fit.
You probably won't be able to get him out of this state so you'll have to reload, but when you've done it you'll see why it has to be tried.

Here's one I made earlier, as posted on YouTube:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HT6eXSVzXk&feature=youtu.be&t=375


Because of the aforementioned Psychic Nazis, you can't do clever things like sending the cable car empty to the next station and then recalling it when the Nazis enter to investigate, and although you can hide on the roof of the car, the Nazis are wise to this trick and will still try to kill you.
Finally you get to murder a few more Nazis before running into Kessler, who takes you home via a cutscene which is triggered as you enter the room. This is fun, because it has some scope for abuse.
For starters, jumping into the room causes BJB to freeze in mid-air, levitating gracefully while Kessler talks to him.
Alternatively, you can lob a couple of grenades into the room before Kessler seizes control, though this is limited in its applications since the game will end if he is killed, and unlike certain other games such as Doom or Deus Ex, it's reluctant to let you pass onto the next level if you're dead yourself.

Less 'killed', more 'reduced to little wet bits'


Where am I? In The Village.
On the following level, The Village, steal everyone's lunch. Cut up the Nazis, but not the barmaid.
Technically the barmaid is also a Nazi since fascist states tend to split neatly into party members, corpses and corpses-to-be, but whatever... she's a civilian and killing her will destroy BJB's positronic brain.
It is also worth bearing in mind that she's extremely fragile - a kick in the shins or a warning poke with the knife will slay her instantly, and by extension, you.
Interestingly, she appears to be immune to being shot by the (other) Nazis - stray shots and friendly fire from her own side will cause her to bleed but nothing more serious than that.

When everyone else is lying dead, make your way into the streets. Take the back approach, having first gunned down the people who are guarding it using the machine gun placement. Once they're dead, you can creep up behind the sole surviving guard and kick-stab him in the back.

Now you are free to visit the sniper tower. The best way to deal with him is to lob a grenade up through the ladder hole. He won't be able to kick it out of his tower because it's enclosed, and even if the blast itself doesn't kibble him, the shockwave will usually make him say 'uh!' and fall dead down the ladder to land at your feet. Retrieve the lovely mauser rifle, as it has got a gunsight.

Next we come to the Dig site. It is possible to kick-stab the seal blocking the entrance, so do that and save the dynamite for later.
Once inside, things get rather nasty with lots of horrible undead things crawling around and trying to eat you. I find that the kicking and stabbing technique works well here too, especially on the undead knight things. You just have to keep falling back when they swing with their axe. Once you find Zempf's journal, be sure to take the dynamite as well.

In the chamber where the firey thing is, I suggest lobbing about four grenades, one by one to the firepit while it is still hatching. That way it should be destroyed before it has time to burn you.

On the next level, the second firey thing is more of a problem, although if you run out quickly and then all the way back, the Nazis should take care of most of the other things for you.
Given what's at stake, the sensible thing would be to have some kind of truce against the common enemy, but instead they will divide their attention between killing the undead fiends and killing you, resulting in their own inevitable demise.
For the firey thing itself, I suggest dynamite as this will also destroy all other enemies in the vicinity (including you, so stand well back.)
Don't forget that those three traps guarding the levers work equally well on the undead and Nazis.

Jesus thinks you're a fuckwit
Now it's time to go to church. As we approach, there is a murmuring of discontent from the troops, who are discussing the grim fate of one of their comrades. Exactly which country all these Nazis came from is unclear since their private discussions invariably take place in slightly accented English.
Coming round the corner, one of the leather-clad Nazi death-bitches turns up and manages to utter the question "What are you gaping at?" before receiving a shotgun round between the eyes courtesy of BJB. Rather than celebrating their freedom, the death of their oppressive commander galvanises the troops into an inexplicable thirst for vengeance. This is a shame because it means they'll have to die too.

Alternatively, If you stop only to pick up some health, you can just barge past them while they're lamenting over Josef, kick the door open and blow the death-bitch away with a tommy-gun. If you run headlong into the other section of the building and don't hang around, the three Nazis will generally be content to stay in the other room and thereby avoid meeting the same fate as Josef.

Before you get to the church itself, you'll face two more death-bitches, who for some reason give away their ambush by saying 'Get ready!' in a stage-whisper.

"You realise you've just destroyed an extremely beautiful woman...?" -Chelmsford 123


Dynamite does a fantastic amount of damage and has a large blast radius, so it is quite possible to liquify both of them with a single charge.

"...And then their flesh and bones were strangely merged, forever to be joined as one..." -Genesis, 'Fountain of Salmacis'


Finally, you get to move into the church, where all the remaining surviving death-bitches are waiting in ambush. Unfortunately their AI is only designed to cope with this particular contingency, so we'll do something else instead.
Run into the church, fire two shots to wake them up, and then run back out, closing the portcullis behind you. They can't really cope with this. Take the sniper rifle and train it on the door. As soon as it opens, take their heads off. If they get through, they can't cope with the portcullis anyway and won't try to shoot you through the bars. You should wind up with four dead ladies. If not, you'll have to go hunting.

They may be able to climb ladders, but they can't figure out how to open a portcullis


Go to the altar (reading the note) and kill the death-bitch who is probably lurking around in the base of the tower. There is another bitch upstairs and she likes to play with grenades, dropping them down the ladder, but that's okay because it's one of our favourite games as well.
As with with the ex-sniper in The Village, throw a grenade or two up the ladder and she will be toast (or possibly go 'uh!' and fall on your head).
Now you can polish off the others. Downstairs there is another little ambush, but you can easily disrupt this with a grenade to flush out the death-bitches, and there's also another portcullis for you.

Stabbing them through the portcullis also works well


Finally, you must confront and destroy an unspeakable horror.


I like trees
What could be more pleasing than to run around the lush countryside of Nazi Germany committing random acts of terrorism? This time your task is to break into a secret missile base by stowing away on a truck. The catch is that you mustn't be 'detected' or BJ will be struck dead on the spot.

In practice you can do whatever the hell you like as long as you destroy the panic buttons first. I usually do the following: First, kickstab the people in the cottage and take the covert route as given on the map until you reach the sniper tower. Kill the occupant, smash the panic button, and use his Mauser to destroy the panic button by the roadblock too.
You may also wish to destroy the two by the roadblock, but you don't have to since they can no longer 'detect' you and that's all that matters. Now this entire segment of the level is safe.
In the second segment, hide up in the hills and blow the panic button out. You will have to be a little careful here because if the sentry in the sniper tower starts firing, the people down the way will hear it and they'll 'detect' you to death.
Once they are all dead, get the custom sniper gun and make your way back to the tunnel, there to kill the two sentries.

Now crawl up the hill and take down the sentry outside the complex, or at least his panic button, and also the panic button in the office upstairs. Whether you leave the guy upstairs alive is up to you and may make things more fun later if you do.

Now the entrance is safe, ye must do two things. Firstly, sneak around the side and go in the window. Pick up the sniper rifle and leave, since it has a 'scope fitted which is an optional extra on your stock Mauser. Then go back out through the window.

The second thing is to run in through the front gate and charge into the back of the van, which will leave with the guards all jumping up and down and firing at it. Not suspicious at all.
It is in fact possible - although not easy - to climb up the mountains near the final guard's hut, skirt around the complex and down into it, allowing you to smash his panic button. For that matter, you can also drop down from the entrance tower and run around the wall until you are able to shoot the panic button with the OSA rifle.
However while this prevents him from being able to 'detect' you, it tends to cause him to run away from the ending area, which is not good since he has to be there for the truck to leave.



Rockets and stuff
Now you have to get to the control room and abort the launch.
As you enter, several of Germany's brightest rocket scientists do the sensible thing and bow down in worship.

CORRECT way to worship a passing deity


Some of the less bright rocket scientists will attempt to shoot you...

INCORRECT way to worship a passing deity - note aggressive posture, discarded shells


...and end up decorating the floor as a lesson to all who refuse to do you worship.

"Grandma always told us that if we ever saw a god we should throw rocks to scare it away" -Latchkey Kingdom


The outer perimeter of the base is fairly straightforward, but it is worth noting that you can destroy the radar installation simply by kicking it.
The downside is that you have to run like hell afterwards to avoid being liquified by the blast, but it can be done and you will then be able to save the dynamite for less wholesome purposes in the next level.

Airbase
You should have a Mauser rifle with a scope by now, which means you can sit happily in the starting tunnel for a while, popping the heads of the people in the control tower and later the charlies who turn up on the runway.
The control tower is interesting, but in a bad sort of way.

What's wrong with this picture...?

Hint: Satellites haven't been invented yet


While it is more than possible to skitter down the slope to the runway, the usual route of entry to the complex proper is via a grille in the roof of the control tower which drops you down into a store room. Exactly why they have a grille leading directly into the armoury so the rain goes all over their ammo and weapons is not explained, but it's their problem, not BJB's.

Inside, you'll come across a guy behind a desk, notable for the fact that as soon as he sees you he kicks the desk over and starts shooting. That's cute, but the only person allowed to flip tables around here should be me.
Fortunately, if you can kill him first, either by a sniper round to the head or something utterly gratuitous like a Pantherfeast, you will find that the table is rigged and you can in fact knock it over yourself assuming he didn't do so first.

It is worth noting that if you lob dynamite into the guy's field of view he will flip the table out of panic, shortly before the explosive device disassembles him. Note also that the table must be flipped by hand or by kicking it; no explosives, no matter how potent, can do the deed on your behalf.
Note that it is possible to jump on the table before the guy flips it, which will send you on a fun journey across the room.
Finally, if BJB flips the table while he is standing on the edge of it himself, he will go on the Long Journey which will not be fun at all.

In order to get the rocketplane operational, you'll need to run through a pre-flight fuelling sequence, which fortunately for you, is largely automated. The instructions are written down for you - clearly BJB is quite good at reading technical German even if he can't speak it very well.
Alternatively, you can get a verbal description from a technician, who is even better at worshipping you than the rocket scientists.

"Oh Lord, you are so big..."


Note that when you leave the airbase and start the Secret Weapons Facility mission, you do get to keep all your weapons, so try to avoid squandering the pantherfeasts as they will be useful later.


The Gun Is Good
The next few levels, regarding the SWF are relatively straightforward exercises in applied murder, where BJB gets the plans for the Venom gun followed by the weapon itself. The project book makes interesting reading - again, BJB's command of technical German is admirable.
Note that when using the Venom gun, shooting Nazis in the nuts seems to make them explode, whereas shooting them in the head or chest merely kills them.

When going after the submarine, you may as well use up all the Pantherfeasts you have because you will not be allowed to bring them into occupied Norway, unfortunately. Customs, I suppose.


Death's Head's Sex Labs
The X-labs make wide use of 'Tesla technology' which is not wholly implausible given that Tesla's inventions - in particular the ability to transmit electricity long distance via AC power transformation - made our technological civilisation possible. Like Edison, Tesla went a bit loopy in the last few years of his life, and he died in America so it wouldn't have been all that easy for the Germans to get their mits on any kind of superweapon plans he may or may not have had.
Even so, unknown technology secretly invented by a known genius is a considerably easier explanation to swallow than the 'it was invented by some Hebrew mystery cult thousands of years ago' bollocks that Wolf:NO tried to sell us.
It is also worth noting that inside the X-lab complex itself, the Tesla fields will kill anything instantly. So, if you run out of the starting area, run back in and throw the switch, curious Nazis will bumble into it and destroy themselves. This works also for the Lopers and even the prototype soldiers.

Finally, you're locked in a test chamber with what Death's-Head calls the 'Ubersoldat'. However, this is a delusion on his part.
The only person or thing present which can accurately be described as the Ubersoldat is BJB himself. No normal human being could kill the entire staff of a high-security prison complex using only a fruit-knife and a pair of shoes. Then we have his freakish ability to absorb food and sheet steel by osmosis, so the fact that Death's Head's little toy will get perforated in short order is only further proof.


Paderborn
This, is Xerxes.
Following Operation Resurrection,
Any, unauthorised members,
Of the National Socialist Party,
Must have their brains, physically removed,
To prevent, possible re-animation.
Remember, a smooth operation, is,
Everyone's, responsibility.
Like the forest section and some of the more annoying missions in Thief 2, this mission sees you wandering around occupied Germany in a village full of Nazis and loose women, with the stricture that you must not be 'detected'.

In practice, there are exactly two panic buttons, one in the village and one by the chateau. It is very possible to stealth or rush your way to them and smash them, leaving you free to go on a murderous rampage once nobody is able to call for help.

Unlike the barmaid in The Village, the scantily-clad bedroom ladies are not made of glass and can withstand being kicked in the shins or given a warning poke with the knife without instantly expiring and causing BJB to self-destruct. Not that I recommend attacking sex workers of course - even Nazi sex workers - but it is useful to know in case you do accidentally injure one.

If you can spare a pipebomb, use one of them to crack open the locked cellar crawlway near the start. Strangely the explosion won't lead to your detection, but it will open up a passageway that leads, by a circuituous route, to the apothecary where The Alchemist lives.

Although he's dressed in a burgundy nightgown, has clearly been running his potion shop for some years, and in fact has nothing linking him to the National Socialist movement in any way, shape or form (other than happening to live in Germany during WW2), The Alchemist does carry a gun and the game will permit you to kill him without penalty. On my 2013 replay, I decided that he was sufficiently mental that I should just steal his gold and sneak out of his house, leaving him unharmed.

Later, when trying to locate all the secrets and reading that one of the 'loose women' had a large stash of gold in a chest by her bed, I headed back to the start of the level and encountered The Alchemist walking down the road. This got rather awkward.

The Alchemist is trying to kill me


Granted, he was standing by the corpses of some soldiers I'd murdered, and was now the last surviving occupant in the village besides a couple of whores and a barmaid. That would be enough to make anyone get a bit nervous, but all the same this did pose a problem because I didn't want to kill him.
Trying to sneak past him almost worked until he saw me out the corner of his eye and began firing rapidly (only a few seconds later thinking to ask "Vot? Who are you...?"). A bizarre chase ensured, which ended with the Alchemist backing away down the street and vanishing into one of the wine cellars.

If you end up trapped between The Alchemist and a moral dilemma not to shoot him because he's so weird, a handy trick is to duck behind one of the walls, get him to shoot at you and then duck back. When he runs out of ammo, you should be able to run past him while he reloads.



The Dig
I've skipped over the Chateau because while it's entertaining enough, there's only so much you can say about murdering beautiful but evil young women in leather catsuits.
Once this is all done and you've catastrophically failed to prevent the annointing ceremony, BJB will attempt suicide by jumping into a pit, to try and atone for his failure.

Instead he finds himself in yet another dig site, and is shortly attacked by yet another evil death robot.

After you've blown up the death robot, two soldiers will come out. I'm not sure why - perhaps they're jealous because the robot got some pantherfeasts and they didn't. We'll probably need to save the rest for later, but I'm sure a sniper round to the head will be an adequate consolation prize.

Once they're dead, you can go around to where the robot came from. There will be a couple more soldiers and a locked door.
A single pantherfeast can blow a man to little wet bits or utterly destroy a tank. Several can blow up a robot. But no amount of them can open a shed door made from rotten wood if the door has been locked.

Clearly they should have made the robots out of wood


Instead, you'll have to drop down a hole into the dig site proper, fortunately cushioned by a deep pool of water, which I think is the first proper pool we've seen since the X-labs.
In Quake, the lightning gun would make you burst when used underwater, or while standing it in. Lava acts in basically the same way since it's effectively boiling orangeade.
This trick, of firing the lightning gun underwater while in god-mode, can be abused to make Dimensional Shamblers explode too since the effect will somehow travel back up their own lightning stream.

...if that sounds bizarre or confusing, that's because it is. But I digress.
In stark contrast to Quake, the Tesla cannon works normally when immersed in water, somehow failing to fry the player, let alone anyone else who happens to be submerged. This is probably a bug, and is slightly disappointing because this map has a number of Nazis standing in a pool of water and it would have been fun to electrocute the lot of them like fish.

RTCW
Back in the castle again, you seem to be in a more-or-less untouched section which is full of ancient seals complete with the usual complement of undead fiends inside them and the occasional half-eaten Nazi.
Curiously there are a couple of ancient tombs which have been sealed for centuries. Inside these tombs are gold bars, but gold bars stamped with the Swastika and made from the gold teeth of concentration camp victims. It is not explained how they got there. Either way, BJB doesn't seem terribly fussed about the gold being made of dead people and stuffs them in his pocket anyway. Somehow.

Otherwise there is little to remark on about this level, although the church scene is kind of interesting.

"Blessed is the church, service, makes me nervous" -Simon and Garfunkel


In the final sector there is a large drop, leading to the exit but you can't just jump and flee the level since the door is locked.
There is also a small, locked room with a Nazi barracaded inside, and a murder-hole through which he occasionally shoots.

It may amuse you to post grenades through the window and watch him squirm. Dynamite is a particularly fine choice since the room is too small for him to flee.

A present from Joe


Heinrich
And now we come to the epic finale. You are offered a meagre selection of weapons including a complete Tesla gun just in case you somehow avoided bringing your own. Exactly why, I'm not sure - in my experience the thing is barely able to kill human foes, let alone death robots and supernatural fiends.
Also in stark contrast to Quake, where the end boss is a sea anemone that sits there waving its fronds oblivious to your presence, BJB has to fight the forces of darkness incarnate in a final confrontation in a steelyard somewhere near Grimsby.

At this point I think we're long overdue a few words about Madame M. Blavatsky, since I'm not entirely sure who she's supposed to be.
There was, in the 19th century, a very famous mystic known as Madame Helena Blavatsky, who wrote a number of books of weird shit before dying of a 'flu plague in 1891. Had she survived until 1943, she would have been 111 years old so we're probably not talking about the same person, notwithstanding Death's Head remark of 'Good Lord, is she still alive?' in his annotated project book.

Given that Madam H. Blavatsky was fat and ugly while her namesake in RTCW is young, beautiful and heavily into the Goth look, we'd probably be looking at Madam M. Blavatsky as the granddaughter of said famous mystic, leaving aside the fact that she died a virgin, may in fact have been a lesbian, and that her daughter would have taken a different name anyway.
But whatever... this is a Wolfenstein game, and they tend to play a little fast-and-loose with reality (or go completely off the rails, as in the case of Wolf:NO).

Whoever she is, Madame M. Blavatsky - now wearing opera gloves that consist entirely of body-paint - does her ritual and the fantastically dangerous robots are turned into those frail undead knights that are trivially easy to kill. As a reward for her faithful service, MMB gets turned into a sort of dead thing, which is arguably the most dangerous foe present besides Heinrich himself.

Madame Blavatsky has seen better days


Your task, then, is to battle a supernatural thousand-year-old maniac. This is left as an exercise for the reader.


Hitler: Well, Heinrich... you've spent over a billion Reichsmark on your project
to resurrect Prince Heinrich and usher in the new golden age. Did it work?


Himmler: Uh, yes and no, mein Fuhrer. Madame Blavatsky raised our spiritual overlord and master
from the grave, but before he could usher in the new golden age, the crazy American murdered him!

Hitler: Nonsense! The prophecy of Simon the Wanderer said that he could never be destroyed!

Himmler: Simon the Wanderer didn't have a Venom gun, mein Fuhrer.

After this, BJB is refused a medal, even though they could have made up a fake mission to reward him for as a cover, or given him a medal 'for valiant actions that must remain classified' or something. He consoles himself by indulging in his favourite past-time, murder.

 

[Infinitron]

Hey, DOUG is doing his Serpent Isle anti-walkthrough on YouTube now:



Nice! Bringing it to a new generation.