The Journeyman Project - Justice - Won!

Written by Reiko

Agent 5 Journal #5: "My work is finally done here. Sinclair is neutralized and the timeline should be back to normal now. He'll be imprisoned, I'm sure, and justice will be done. After all, if I hadn't stopped them, his robots would have killed thousands of people. It's sad that such a brilliant mind turned out to be so unstable."

Last time I finished the third time period and returned to the present to find that all of the temporal rips have been resolved. I exit the time machine and start looking around for what to do next. We've got to stop Sinclair from carrying out his final plan to assassinate the Cyrollan ambassador, but where is he?

Oddly enough, I find that if I go back into the Control Center and check the computer, it still identifies the same discrepancies as before, even though the timeline shows no temporal rips. You'd think that correcting the timeline would make the current history the same as the previously recorded history again.

The objective files make it clear that the source is Sinclair...

Well, there's nothing more to be done at the agency, so I go back down the hall to the transporter to see if I can go anywhere. When there were temporal rips left, I wasn't even able to access the transporter, but now I can. After I enter it and put my transport card in, it gives me the same four transport options as at the beginning of the game. However, this time, if I try to select anything except returning to Caldoria Heights, I just get a message saying, "Agent 5: You must discover the source of the temporal rips." I guess it isn't really a choice, then.

Back I go to my apartment complex. Surely my apartment isn't interesting, and I can't access anyone else's apartment. The only interesting place remaining is the rooftop area, which is still closed for the alien procession. But, hmm. The door has a slot on it. (The transporter seems to have eaten my transporter card this time, so it's no longer in inventory and can't be tried on this slot. It doesn't do anything even if you try it at the beginning of the game, though.)

Sinclair should have shot me here when he had the chance.

I have something else that can fit into a slot and affect electronics: the access card bomb. I drop it onto the slot and it blinks a few times and then abruptly explodes, destroying the door and punching a large hole through the wall. Through the hole, I can see a man, Sinclair, holding some kind of gun. He turns to look at me and warns me not to interfere. Instead of shooting me immediately, he goes back to lining up his shot, which gives me a moment to act. I pull out my stun gun (having to painstakingly scroll all the way to the bottom of the inventory to get to it) and stun him before he can shoot the ambassador.

Final Score (non-peaceful)

And that's all there is to the endgame. Sinclair crumples, and abruptly I've won. The game dumps me to a screen with an ending message and a final score.

Winning message: "Congratulations, agent five! You've stopped Dr. Sinclair and assured humanity a place in the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings! A promotion is surely in the works for you. But a Temporal Protectorate agent's job is never done..."

My final score was 114187, with only one time period considered as having been solved peacefully (Mars). That was after crushing the NORAD robot in the high-pressure room, which is apparently the violent solution. It seems to have done more damage to the robot itself, anyway. I don't know why, but the game seems to think I visited 2310, the rally level, twice. I don't know if there was a glitch somewhere, or if it was because I saved after getting the antidote and reloaded, or what.

Final Score (mostly peaceful)

I also replayed the endgame from the other NORAD ending with the loader arm. Everything's exactly the same about getting to the rooftop and stunning Sinclair. For some reason, my final score there is a little lower, though: 106729. But my total energy remaining was actually slightly higher, so the penalty is all from the fact that now it thinks I tried the NORAD level twice as well. I didn't do anything except reload and use a different solution on the robot though. So I have to wonder if somehow the game is tracking when I restore a saved game? But I saved and restored at multiple places in the Mars level (the ore crusher is the most critical point) and it only counted one attempt for that level.

So I've finished the game, but I haven't achieved a fully peaceful ending. To do that, unfortunately, I have to replay almost the whole thing again, because I did the time periods in the wrong order. But since I know what I need to do, this doesn't actually take all that long.

I restore back to the point where I've done the comparison with the record disk and am ready to start dealing with the three main time periods. This time I go to Mars first. I make sure to pick up the maintenance key and the wire cutters in the transport, and I quickly dodge the robot, fill the oxygen mask, disarm the access card bomb, and thread my way through the mining maze. I carefully ride the ore crusher and chase the robot down in the extra shuttle, being careful to capture it rather than destroy it.

Last time, the rally level gave me Mercury and the Mars level gave me Poseidon.

This time, when I get the Trace and Optical Memory biochips, the memory biochip contains the Ares Objective file. I never got that in my previous playthrough. I think there must be some glitch with the memory cards if you do the levels out of order. I noticed originally that the memory biochip was supposed to originate from the Mars level, so that's a hint about that. The Ares objective is pretty straightforward: Sinclair gloats at how clever his plan is to destroy both the Mars colony and the alien ship and make it look to Earth like the aliens did it and to the aliens that the colony did it.

Shorting out the robot with the fire controls.

Next up is the rally level. I analyze the tranquilizer dart and synthesize the antidote as before. This time, when I face the robot, I use the wire cutters from the Mars level on the padlock for the fire control access cover. I open it and poke at the controls, which I think causes sprinklers or something to come on, again shorting out the robot but without doing as much damage as electrocuting it. I carefully pull all the biochips, including the Retinal one. As before, the memory biochip is updated with the Mercury Objective file.

Collected all objective files.

Finally, I redo the NORAD level. I use the shield chip against the robot's plasma shots, and then the retinal chip to bypass the retinal scanner on the Alpha station door. I play the minigame to deactivate the nuclear silos and thwart the launch. Then I use the loader arm to neutralize the robot. Its biochips are duplicates, but the memory chip gives me the Poseidon Objective file, so this time I have all three.

Final Score (peaceful)

I'm nearly done. As before, I transport back to Caldoria Heights, ride up to the rooftop level, blow through the wall with the access card bomb, and stun Sinclair. I win again, and this time I get the best result: all levels are peaceful and have one attempt (I was really careful, so I never had to reload), and I get a 25,000 point bonus for the peaceful finish. Mission accomplished. The replay only took about 45 minutes total, which means that, once you know what you're doing, the full game would only take about an hour to play through.

Credits with photos

Credits with names and titles

Each time, from the winning screen, I get an option to view the credits instead of the buttons to restore, restart, or go back to the main menu. However, the credits button from the winning screen very briefly takes me back to a screen that looks like the game screen but with a warning message about being out of energy. It's so brief that I couldn't even get a screenshot of it. Then it dumps me back at the main menu, which also has a credits button, and this one actually works properly. You can see Michel Kripalani, the originator of the Journeyman Project, in the bottom-middle slot. His friend Greg Uhler, the programmer, is next to him.

Final Maximum Score: 132827
Session Time: 1 hr 15 min (including 45 minutes for final replay)
Total Time: 8 hr 30 min

Deaths: 1 (total: 20)

In the crosshairs of Sinclair's gun

There's one more death available in the endgame: if I wait too long to stun Sinclair, he shoots the ambassador and then turns and shoots me. The ending is called "Shot by Sinclair". The message reads: "In killing the Cyrollan delegate, Sinclair felt he was ensuring the continued existance [sic] of humanity. You may have disagreed. If only there had been some way to stop him."

Next up will be the rating. We'll take a look at what this game did well and what it didn't. For one final opportunity for bonus CAPs, see if you can figure out what band produced the songs whose titles became my post titles for Journeyman Project. (The first one, Time Distortion, was just too perfect for the situation, so I ran with it from there.)