November Eve

Gem Hunter returns to the action, escaping from the hospital only to realize the city's been deserted.

I do like how this scene is handled, animating the doors opening and the quick drive by of presumably Tyrone's police car just look plain nice.

What I don't like is that Gem Hunter is re-entering the story. He's not a bad character, but all the Parasite Eve roles are taken. His presence is just one more character to account for in a game that's already loaded with them. Keep him hospitalized and there's an easy out for dropping a character.

We cut to some random building. This is a rare moment where everything is told via a scroll window rather than flashing messages, and thank goodness because it's a massive amount of text that is pretty much meaningless to this game. Instead it tries to give it some connections to Gem Hunter 2.

It's okay to not read all of that. I promise.

Okay. Summary: Traffic sucked and everybody was tired so they all holed up in some abandoned building. We get to meet Reno and Anita Blue and they talk about "Austin Powers", as in the setting of Gem Hunter 2, not the film franchise.

Turn out Steve had a brother named Drew and a similar incident occurred to what's going on now in Puerto del Agua. His plan was to create the "Banana of the Heavens", the ultimate being.

The assumption is that Steve is looking to succeed where his brother failed. So far Kim has been able to stop that, but the giant ball of slime composed of former Novemberists is currently missing and there's no telling what Steve will do next.

It's only after finishing this article that I'm realizing that this gordita joke is consistent. Way back at the start of the game when you find actor Bobbery Smithson's diary it opened with an entry about feeling hot and blaming it on gorditas. I'm amazed.

The next course of action is to take advantage of the evacuation and loot the nearby pharmacy and gun shop for some supplies before... going somewhere else.

Strong agree.

This is one of those rare moments of getting to control the player, though there's still very little to actually do.

The pharmacy has a MediKit and a MediKit Pro which offer some healing in battle without using November energy. The small one heals 35 health, and the "pro" version heals for 65. For comparison, the November Energy heal ability restores 20 HP.

The gun shop meanwhile has another charred corpse, and Tyrone who can't be interacted with.

Kim can't take any of the guns, but she can get fire, ice, and continuous ammo. At least by giving three kinds of special ammunition at once, the odds that I might get to use one effectively have gone up.

Anita waits outside by the squad car, and once Kim's ready it's time to drive off.

And we return to cutscenes.Strangely, despite this board appearing to be identical to the last car scene, the shading on the sides is actually slightly different. It's an odd thing to redo.

Also the car doors no longer have visible handles. Continuity...

Back to the museum to run some tests! Poor Francine is stuck in the party despite having no need to be here.

Science gets done, and the crew gets to watch xamboxumbadria take over a cell.

Finally, the cast realizes what was obvious from the start, that Kim's immunity to Steve's attacks is because she's a different species from all of them. The idea of getting some other humans to help out is quickly shot down as they're out of town, and frankly there are enough characters already.

While this big long discussion is going on, nobody hears Hercules and Atom who appear on the board and return to their lab.

This is actually a pretty fun confrontation since neither group should actually be here. Tyrone is at least a bit more willing to not just leave when asked this time, although his argument seems to be "I will kill you", and he's only thwarted by Reno's knowledge of spoilers.

Francine's name being written somewhere raises a ruckus as well, but the player is given no context as to what she's looking at. In Parasite Eve, officer Daniel notices the name of his son Ben (this game's Francine) and raises a bit more of a fuss than Francine who is mostly just confused.

Once again though everybody just leaves peacefully.

And upon returning to the police station, Steve has attacked it and killed the majority of people inside.

I enjoy the dig at Testa, whose games are frequently loaded with dead bodies in pools of blood like this. I also enjoy the knocked over plants! There's not a whole lot that can be done to damage the station itself, but Tseng does his best to create a mess.

This board doesn't actually offer up much to learn. Poiuy is the sole survivor and all he can say is that the captain is missing and something's going on downstairs.

The briefing room has been properly trashed. The chairs being flung around the room and using angled characters to make them appear broken apart is a good touch.

If you have a sharp eye, you might notice this item box which contains more fire ammo. Except the game just handed Kim fire ammo in the gun shop and there's been no opportunity to use it rendering it pointless unless the player opted to skip exploring the Sowhocares area.

The lower level isn't looking any better, but at least it isn't actively under siege like Poiuy might have made you think.

Moving into the kennel area, Kim blurts out her best South Park line before Tseng regrets naming a character Voice once more.

Back to Gem Hunter as power fantasy, we learn he killed a bunch of doctors for daring to treat his serious injuries. We also learn that there's a mutant dog now. That is going to be the next thing for Kim to deal with.

Checking in on Voice (yes, THAT Voice) and Blackwell there's an admittedly pretty humorous death scene here.

Voice, though technically fired, can't be stopped from giving Kim a new gun. It's no "Quad C Launcher", but it's a start.

Returning to the conference hall, Nacut has been hurt as well, opening up the way forward to give chase to the doberman.

The previously unseen upper floor is starts off poorly, with yet another instance of an item that can't be collected since Kim already has it. So much for the ice ammo.

I wonder if there was a scrapped battle intended between the fight with Lemmer/Scissorman and here since the duplicate items is a trivial thing to catch in testing.

Also I just realized the room with the item in it is supposed to be an interrogation room with a one-way mirror that's kind of defeated by having the entrance to the room on the other side of it being in the same room.

SUDDENLY TRADITIONAL ZZT GAMEPLAY.

Yes, after all this time Tseng decides maybe to have some combat that isn't done as an RPG boss battle. This caught me incredibly off guard. I just wish there had been moments like this throughout the game to break up the monotony of it all.

Of course, since you're fighting these monsters in a crowded room and they fire bullets, they'll mostly end up shooting each other.

Once defeated Kim can check out the blue door, only to discover it has no knob and can't be opened. It's another instance of a special New Game Plus only item.

I think the representation of a police station in ZZT starts breaking down around here. On the second floor there's an interrogation room which makes sense, but here the rooms are just there to stuff some corpses in.

The captain is fine at least. He's just hanging out in what I only know to be an evidence room because of its parallel in Parasite Eve.

Rounding the last corner, Kim comments on the destruction, but there's nothing of the sort. It looks like there are just some papers scattered around on the ground. The first floor looks way more wrecked than this one.

In Parasite Eve this is a tense scene where the mutated dog is about to attack Daniel's son Ben who is corned in this room with the police chief.

Here Tseng just takes the player directly to the fight with what at first glance I thought was a giant spider or something instead.

Vindication.

With the unexpected encounter earlier, I was nearly dead and quite thankful to have an inventory full of items.

The player needs to manually switch weapons, which should absolutely be done before bothering to perform a regular attack. The selected weapon doesn't alter the damage dealt by special ammo (not that we've seen special ammo do any damage yet). It does deal double the damage of the starting gun at least, helping to speed things up a little bit.

It's just a dog. Fire's got to work.

I hate this so much.

The fight with the doberman swings wildly with its difficulty by giving it one attack which cannot be dodged at all where two columns of bullets come out the sides of the walls, and then a trivially easy to avoid bite attack which is avoided by not just staying lined up with its fangs.

(Technically, you can dodge it by exploiting the all too common bug these engines have where by moving before the Kim object gets a chance to process that it's been shot, the object will just jump to and execute its movement code instead. So it's actually not difficult if you don't want it to be.)

You cannot pet the dog in November Eve.

This is of course followed by a cutscene of Kim rescuing the trapped Gem Hunter and Qwerty. Has Qwerty been in this game the whole time? I know Poiuy's been around. It's difficult to keep track of all the background characters.

We get our "coming out of the closet" joke, and a whole lot of drivel before finally discussing something important: the motive.

Gem Hunter catches on pretty fast, proposing Steve is trying to keep them all distracted so he can do his thing undisturbed, but then incorrectly assumes that he's working for one of the main antagonists from the Gem Hunter series.

But then Gem Hunter series villain Espionage shows up, adding still more characters to this game that's got more than I can count.

Lord it keeps going. In addition to Espionage, we also get Cubed Ice and Dr. Erd to join everybody as well. I think some folks are still out of town and have yet to arrive as well. It's killing me how many people are in this game.

There's at least a lead in having seen Steve at the local hospital that Gem Hunter casually admits to having killed somebody in earlier that day. The police, of course, laugh it off.

Have I mentioned this game is actually three files long? (Don't worry, file three is extremely short.)

The end of day three marks the end of the game's first file, and this seems like a nice spot to wrap up the first part of writing about the game as well.

Things end with another character who thankfully isn't actually added to the game's cast, the earlier mentioned Master Walnut himself. If you can bring yourself to read this whole thing, you'll pick up on Tseng's interest in pro wrestling pretty quickly.

Remember! The password is warcraft.