Shadow of the Comet – Development Hell

Written by limbeck

So, the last session finished with me recovering from last night's events and Dr COBBLE prescribing me some pills to stop a heart attack. As I get off bed and put on my clothes, I have two goals for the day: get these pills from the pharmacy; and develop the plates from last night, again at the pharmacy. So, without much delay, I gather the prescription from the desk and head out. Oh, I also have a look at the parchment from the ritual, but I cannot read it. Maybe JUGG will be able to help later. Just to be on the safe side, I try to use it very near the desk, but it doesn't work.

Maybe I won't come across Miss PICOTT this time

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...

Missed Classic: Trinity - Fly Me to the Moon

Written by Joe Pranevich

Trinity continues to impress and depress me. Last time out, we witnessed the unexpected destruction of New Mexico thanks to a more powerful than expected nuclear test at the Trinity site. My guess was that we had finally found the “plot” of this game: to find out what interfered with the original test and put it right again. Do we have a time-traveling saboteur? Could he be related to that voice that keeps whispering bad “gnomon” puns in my ear? I have no idea, but it feels good to finally be discovering the plot after so much semi-random exploration.

At this point, I am most of the way through. I’ve solved (perhaps) four of the seven areas including Kensington Gardens, the South Pacific atoll, the Siberian steppe, and Nagasaki. Still to be conquered are an outer space segment, an unknown area, and the Trinity test site itself. I also know that I need to find a lizard for a magic potion, recover a magnetic meteorite from an impact crater, and maybe even deal with an injured wight. When we do these “Missed Classics”, we aim to close out games in three posts. I hope I am not disappointing too many people when I say that we will have this one and at least one more, depending on how writing about the endgame goes.

Shadow of the Comet – Miss PICOTT's Dominion

Written by limbeck

The town of Illsmouth is quaint, but what about the forest surrounding it? I am curious to scout the forest, in case there are any locations I was missing. I am wrong. The forest consists of a sort of a maze, with only a handful of different screens, that I believe are connected in the same way. So if I went left in location A, I would always end up in location B. I could have been moving west for ten screens only to go east once and end up in the town. Anyway, in my hikes I pick up three branches and a creeper for no apparent reason other than that my lasersight identified them.

Having wasted about twenty minutes trying to map the forest, in vain for the reasons explained above, I decide that I need a map, so I head back to my room to see if Boleskine's map would be of any use. But while I am passing through the town square, it is occupied by a troupe of gypsies, fully staffed with guitarist, dancer and bear. While I listen to their music, a policeman (Sgt BAGGS) arrives and does what policemen do according to my experience.

Bully some easy targets

The Journeyman Project - Last Impression

Written by Reiko

Agent 5 Journal #4: "I’m almost done. All three robots are destroyed, and now the last thing to do is to catch up with Elliot Sinclair. My impression of him is that he’s unstable and very dangerous. I was almost flattened by his robot, after all. He may be a genius, but his intelligence does us no good if he’s going to interfere with the history that he helped make accessible."

Only one mission left to complete, and we come full circle back to where we started. For the second time, I jump to the NORAD base in 2112. This time, after the robot taunts me, I immediately put on my oxygen mask, and I'm no longer gasping or in any danger from the sleeping gas. I look around again, but this time I'm more careful about what I touch.

Those people didn't have oxygen masks handy...