As I already mentioned in another blog i am currently working my way through "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay". I am not planning to bore you with lengthy monologues on how much better than the movie this game is. Just trust me it's great. It has it's stuff together. I spent some quality time in Butcher Bay. One day feeling like an inmate in a grotesque futuristic version of OZ, the next sneaking through dark corridors killing off giant bugs. It was exciting. And one of the most exciting moments turned out to be nothing more than a display of my own stupidity.
One thing that I will tell you that the game does very well, is constantly giving you the impression that you are only a couple of load screens away from your goal. Then you get there. A cutscene plays, someone, mostly dumb ass bountyhunter Johnson, pops up out of nowhere and everything starts from the beginning. While in a movie this deus ex machina effect feels almost always like a stupid excuse for getting on with the story, in the game it worked very well. I had to grin each time I started again with no equipment and only one mission in my journal: escape from Butcher Bay. Riddick as a futuristic version of Sysiphos.
After my third escape attempt I found myself deep frozen in a strange prisoner storage facility. Basically it was a big hall in which the coffins containing inmates put to sleep build four huge pyramids. The atmosphere was breathtaking in all it's cold impersonal artificiality, contrasting very nice the other more dark and dirty areas of Butcher Bay I had visited yet. As soon as I woke up from a little nap on the ground I found myself surrounded by very lethal looking killer robots equipped with machine guns and rocket launchers. The cubic hall had an entrance at each side. So I did what everyone would do, I ran towards the next door. It was closed. “Shit”, i thought, “the doors can't be it. Too simple.” What followed was an intense trial and error session in this neon lit hall of mechanical horrors. I found out that I can kill several of the smaller bots with an iron-bar i found on the ground. But there were still three nasty big killing machines whose metallic footsteps echoed in my ears whenever I dared to make a move towards anything. Obviously the game wanted me to get rid of them. I found out that I was relatively safe on top of the pyramids, because the guys who designed the robots did for no reasons that makes any sense to me, limit the angle in which the deadly bot gun can aim upwards. After several failed attempts to sneak up behind them and jam their motor with the bar I decided to change my strategy. The only thing I thought, that can kill a kill bot - and i felt pretty clever thinking that - is a kill bot. Earlier in the came I successfully managed to circle hacks on my heels into shooting each other. Why not apply my circling skills to my new metallic friends? I spent an enormous amount of time hastily running through the hall and jumping back up on the pyramids like a rabid bunny whenever things got to hot. When mentioned things cooled down again, I retried. But to my discontent and although I had the impression that time to time the robots hit each other, no grave damage seemed to be done whatsoever. My cool facede of the yet undefeated champion of prison escapes began to crumble. And the shadow I casted on the walls as I crouched brooding on a pyramide started to remind me of a duck sitting.
That is mostly usually the moment in a game when I have to consult an online walkthrough, which I couldn't because the telephone company cut my connection due to open bills, or I stop playing, take a little pause from gaming and then start something new. It's the games point break. Maybe too frustrating, or too repetitive, it is the very moment when I decide whether I am going to finish this one or not. And boy did I want to finish Riddick (The next day it turned out that finishing it is very rewarding, because it unlocks the excellent and very original commentary mode, where neat icons enable you to listen to cast and crew giving away tons of information on the production of the game. A unique feature as far as i know, and hopefully something that will establish).
But I wasn't there yet. And I had grown very impatient and angry by now. And then in my total frustration, with nothing better to do, I rushed down the pyramid I sat on to brood, towards anything, something. It turned out to be one of the aforementioned doors. As I got close to it, a invisible mechanism was triggered, i heard a thick swoosh and it opened. That was it. Too simple. I should have just tried all four of them. But doing it my way I did spent nearly one and a half hours in that wretched Hall and there I was standing in an empty corridor feeling like a complete idiot. I shook my head as I turned off my computer. Ten minutes past 4 in the morning. That's at least 4 hours of sleep. I went to bed, my feet cold, my palms sweaty and killer robots in front of me whenever I tried to close my eyes. It sucked and proofed again why I hate gaming so much and for the exact same reasons love it even more.
Hias Wrba