T w e n t y S i d e d

So we left behind the con man so we could hook up with Kahn, man! I feel really bad about how this episode turned out. This is where the game started doing all the things that really make me happy: Good atmosphere, psychological threats, mysteries, less reliance on combat, pretty particle effects, and a general policy of messing with the player’s head.

It’s so good, and yet most of us hadn’t even reached this point in the game and we made jokes over the whole sequence. Worse, now that Rutskarn has set the tone I expect the comments will lean away from critical analysis and turn into a non-stop parade of groan-inducing puns.

I guess we have the audience we deserve, not the one we want.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In this episode I mentioned one room where I died several times. Josh said he got cornered and killed in the same spot. I tried it again yesterday, but this time I was using the volt driver. I killed everything without taking damage.

And then I blundered into the radioactive canal and died. Damn it.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Metro 2033 EP5: You Could Climb Up”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I am now a convert to the Church of Volt Driver. I initially ignored the weapon because it takes a long time to reload, it has a slow fire rate, and it requires a six-week training course to reload the thing. You reload the bullets by tapping R, but you recharge its energy by HOLDING R and tapping the fire button until the meter is full, which is different from the meter of the OTHER electrical thing you have to pump to keep charged. If you don’t have the energy high enough it will still fire, but will do almost no damage. You can overcharge it, but the overcharge dissipates quickly.

It might not sound complicated, but in the context of fighting a swarm of foes this is about four more steps than I want between me and the point where I can murder things.

But based on feedback from a lot of you, I gave it another try. It has turned Metro 2033 into a point-and-click adventure. Just equip the volt driver and then click on the monster you want to remove from the game.

Did I mention how much I like the towns in this game?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I like how the second half of the episode is faithful to the books in that there are no visuals. This is the first place I noticed a kind of conflict within the game: Fighting “monsters” in the dark is great for the atmosphere and story, but fighting humans makes for more interesting gameplay.

At the twelve minute mark: See? THIS is why we shouldn’t take random manhole covers and use them as tables back in town.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.