Let's Play The Dig - Spielburg Really Has a Thing for ET, doesn't he?

Been awhile, huh? Life finds a way to keep you busy, I guess.

When last we left Boston had just brought Ludgar back to life. Maggie continues to not care.

In a weak attempt at camaraderie Boston engages Ludgar in some idle chatter:







Catch that last bit there? It's going to become a theme... Well, with Ludgar back but not offering anything new Boston resumes his exploration. He did find a new rod, didn't he? Let's try it out on one of these doors! (It works on the closed one to the right of where Brink's body was.

Boston matches up the symbols on the panel with those on the red rod and:





Another tramway! Boston pushes the call button:



Alright. I suppose we aren't going that way... Back through the door we came and into a dark side tunnel. A cutscene must be something important:





And into an empty room with nothing for me to do. (I didn't take a screencap. I'm sure we'll be back here again though...)

Back to the main hallway. And this time Boston and Company head back to the area where we first found the life crystals:

The last time Boston was here he was unable to open this door by himself. Perhaps with Ludgar's help they can?





Those look familiar...





That can't be good.











What if you could just put your text in a box so that didn't take forever to convey the information to your audience?!

Ludgar and Boston talk on:

















Ludgar might be a pretentious life crystal lover but, he isn't wrong. Let's make sure Boston grabs a few more:



With the two men loaded up on crystals they prepare to exit the room. Boston notices something by the door:



Which he picks up and looks at:



How informative.

The two leave the room and head outside. Right near the exit Boston notices something:



A fossil of some sort? It's hard to tell... The continue down toward the water:





As Boston ruminates on just how long he'll have to live. Some sort of turtle like creature comes ashore:









What the hell did we just witness?! And what the hell happened to Ludgar?!

Maybe we'll find out next time?

This is as far as tiny baby Solitayre ever made it. Good luck with this next part, God help you if you aren't perfect at it.

This is a remarkably bad Lucasarts' game.

It definitely hasn't aged well.

Gee, Captain, these crystals sure are great! Everyone should use a crystal! Why don't you go ahead and get everyone to use a crystal? Nothing could possibly go wrong!

Great, a crystal meth addict.

Aw, I still like it quite a lot.
I specially love the dialogs, the characters have something to say for almost everything they find on the planet, and quite intelligent conversations at that, or so I seem to recall, at least in the first half or so or the game. Everything gets increasingly silly and linear towards the end though, less and less extra conversations.

The turtle puzzle is indeed quite bad, though. And so is the drone programming puzzle to turn on the power near the beginning.

ETA:
I even considered doing a video and/or text-heavy LP that showcased all these dialogs 'cause I think they add a whole lot of flavor to the game, but in the end I couldn't be arsed, 'cuz I'm lazy.
<effort.gif>

When last we saw our hero he was pretending to be David Attenborough in the middle of a nature documentary. While he was distracted by one large water monster eating a smaller one Brink seems to have wondered off.

I'm sure this is fine, everything is fine.







"A ghost tried to warn us, but Brink was feeling too cocky to listen," is my favorite line in this game by a mile so far. Ghosts never warn me of anything!





Finally, some reflection! Yes, noboday does want to stay with you Boston, because you are awful. That's okay though. They are also awful.



Nope!

Okay, so the puzzle here is a little weird and I don't know how, without a guide, anyone ever figured it out. Remember that fossil we found? Remember that tiny monster we saw get chewed up and spit out? Well, now we're supposed to take all the bones in that pile and arrange them to match the fossil! Yes, that fossil that was barely visible! There really is no way to know whether you got a piece in the right place or not!

Even with a guide and pictures of the completed puzzle it still took me forever to get this done! Apologies, I somehow don't have any pictures of the random bone pile.



This is it mostly correct. This is me thinking it is complete. (I'm very close. The "neck" bone in the upper right needs to be rotated 90 degrees)

So what good does arranging some bones do? Well, we are making a bomb!



See, this cannister? It is a bomb! Yup, how did we know that? Because we used a guide. I'm sure without a guide you'd end up killing yourself somehow with the item in order to discover that. Boston puts the cannister in with the bones:



Okay, so now you've got a nice pile of bones and bomb? So what?

Watch the magic!

Boston brought a space turtle back to life with a bomb in its insides. Only, so it could be immediately consumed by a space plesiosaur and explode inside of the larger beast killing both of them.

And, he doesn't understand why no one wants to hang out with him?! And why did he do all that?

How many more lives muse be lost to satisfy you're idle curiosity?!







Another rod, which means another "key" to one of those doors!



And on the weird pedestal?



Maybe, if we find all of them here it will helps us get out of it? Boston takes it.

That's everything in the cave! And everything in this area for now so Boston heads back to the tram and the central hub:





And this door. Which is you squint is orangish, our new rod is orangish too!



Opening the new door leads us to...




Another tram.:



And where that will take us? We'll find out next time!

I'm afraid you did miss a couple more videos/screens in the museum - one of them is precisely the one that teaches you that the mysterious three-pronged artifact is a bomb... ^_^;;
(don't remember what the fourth is about. Sth very minor, I think)

When last we left Low (awhile ago, I know. Sorry.) he'd just finished killing the first two alien lifeforms he'd ever seen. By implanting a bomb in the body of one and then feeding that one to a larger one.

So much for NASA catching pyschopathic tendencies in the preliminary testing... Anyway, once he was done with that he got a new rod (an orange one) and opened a new door. Where will it take him?





Please never try this at home. I've done something very similar in Hawaii and all you end up with is shredded skin.





Moving past the chasm we come across another one of those devices we saw back on the other spire. The one that generated the 'light bridge.' Low will come back to it in a second...



In the area behind the bridge device we find some unknown, broken machinery and a space rodent!





Said space rat just stole some machinery and closed a door. Low will also deal with that in a second. Let's have him explore the rest of this place first...



At least grab that blue rod thing behind you at least.



Alright, with the area explored let's fix that bridge.



But it doesn't work. Maybe it needs to be tweaked.



Perhaps a little more than tweaking...

After multiple attempts altering the lens and playing with the console Low eventually gets the light bridge working.



With that done. Best to find out what that stellar mouse made off with and how to get it back.

First step collecting everything not nailed down:





Now to cobble it all together!





With his 'trap' set. Low gets down to harassing the creature out of its hole. The idea here is to chase it out and then to retreat back to the left until it moves towards you and past the trap and then you herd it into the pole and into the trap.







That's an easy one Low! By using the alien technology we just found and barely understand!



Attach a bracelet here. Let you go and then track you with that blue orb we picked up way back!



Where did the thing head off to? That crack Low mentioned while giving the rodent room. To the left of the wheel ruin. The poor creature no life is safe from Low's rampaging!

Damn, this rat's got a bigger place than I do! Wonder what the rent is? Anyway, Low whips out the blue orb and it directs him right to the spot:





A little digging later and the bit the rodent stole is found. Low heads back to the door. Puts the piece in and then cover the open panel:





Some sort of chamber? First things first, steal everything!





With everything in Low's voluminous pockets he plays with the rods, he found on the altar.





Huh, this must be some sort of planetarium? But what do we do with it? Eventually, I figured out that you can use the two rods (bright and dark) to set where you want the two moons to be. The idea is to set them all up in a row for an eclipse.

I think... We just caused an complete conjunction of this alien solar system?! And Low can't even read the language! Take that alien plan!





Dammit! Stupid space rat locked us in forever!

Except there is a button right by the door...



With that done. Low heads back to the light bridge, and back to the museum spire (where we learned about those life pill things) and then back to the Nexus.



Back at the Nexus Low heads back into the dark tunnel. We explored it at one point if you recall. We couldn't get very far it was too dark but now?



It took me a minute to figure out this is an airlock door. Push the button outside the room once. Enter and push it twice to get through:





If you say so Low. Not much in here though. Just those crystals in the center.



Low slides the blue rod he found on the last spire into the holes on the right



When he does two other rods rise out of the other holes. Next, he touches the blacked out crystal on the left. Then adjusts the three rods until the blacked out crystal lights up.





That seems to have fixed a tram? If you recall we discovered one that didn't work back when we opened the door with the red rod? I think we did at least...

It did! The button works now! Off we go!



As cool as this transport system is it seems highly inefficient and expensive to maintain. Low begins to climb the spire.



Ah! This seems familiar though. That's plate's got to go though!





What is all this though? More puzzles to stumble through. Probably more alien life to harass and/or kill. And what the hell happened to those other two?

Find out next time!

Man, I just love the environments in this game, in conjunction with the low key Wagner music they are the most zen/new age thing ever, they give me peace of mind.
And I'd give anything for a hamsterball tram system, specially if it travelled through the bottom of the sea as in here.

And although this is pretty well known I thought I'd point it out for anyone seeing this game for the first time: given that this is a Lucasarts game, check out the "alien language" for familiar (read: Star Wars) shapes:
A Star Destroyer and the Millenium Falcon to its left, anyone?

Another, smaller star destroyer smack dab in the center, and (although that might just be me grasping) a TIE fighter above and to the left of it?

One X-wing rolled 90� in the left and an A wing in the lower right?
(And a bit wonky Star Destroyer above it? Man, the SD must be a really common word in this language, like "the", or "to be" or sth XD )

I think part of why the puzzles in this game are so bad is that they seem to have been designed with clever solutions in mind. Like, resurrecting that turtle with a bomb inside it is ingenious-- so much so that most people would never think to try it! It feels very much as if someone thought of clever solutions first and then back-filled the actual puzzle mechanics to enable those solutions without stopping to think how players are going to make the necessary logical leaps. We're dealing with a real cat hair moustache situation here.

It's a damn shame, because like Sensenic I think the environments and atmosphere are aces. And at the time, I loved the novelty of a "serious" LucasArts graphic adventure (the Indiana Jones games came close, but couldn't help but indulge in a lot of goofiness).

This game is pretty damn goofy too. Lowe keeps his sanity intact by cracking wise about the world around him if you examine the world thoroughly and play around with your items.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, once you do the one-man-wave in the planetary spire, you can use the shovel with the big rock next to it to make a bridge, so you can go straight to the nexus, no light bridge detours needed.

I dunno, I played most of this game with a friend back when it came out and we managed just fine. We had troubles with the drone puzzle and the damn fossil that doesn't show you clearly enough how the bones go...
But beyond that it seems pretty clear to me, when you're playing, that you need to get in the water (if you look at it Low sees the cave with sth shining in it), thus get rid of the monster. You just learned that the green crystals give back life, that you have an infinite supply of them, that there is a corpse at hand... so you revive the turtle, just to see if you can, and see that the monster eats it again; on the other hand you know that the capsule is an explosive from the museum... 2 + 2 = 4.

Then again I completed the cat hair moustache puzzle without much trouble, so what do I know (the @#$%& anagram in Le Serpent Rouge is far harder).

It's, how do I put it... these are situations that are absurd in real life, so it's not sth you'd try to do logically and naturally, and that means they might be indeed poorly designed in that regard (specially the unnecessarily contrived cat hair moustache one XD ); but within the game, these are all cases where the solution can be deduced from the context and specially within the limitations of it: i.e. you need this, and to get it there are only these items, these characters and these locations available. Play with them, see what happens, adjust accordingly.

Yeah, the flavor text does bring a lot to the game.

We last left Low in what the game had labelled a 'tomb' though it just appears to be a room like any other he's explored so far.





After a little exploring and experimentation he gets the lights turned on. He also investgated that tile in the lower left. The one with the two 'C' marks on it.



It moves. And lights up the roof. But, beyond that doesn't seem to do anything. Low leaves the tomb and continues up the cliffside.



Well, doesn't that look familiar? Another 'strange device' and 'lens.' We've done this enough times now that it should be a quick fix to get the light bridge up. Rotate the lens a couple of times, poke the panel and voila!



With another bridge connected. We make our way back down, on a tram, and back to the Nexus:



Not a lot of options left for us to explore, are there? We haven't used the green rod yet. Let's find a door. The one just to the right of here hasn't been opened yet. But, it's also not working.





Low jerry-rigs some power back into the panel. First, by popping the cover off and then by connecting the wire to the panel innards to the sparks on the ground nearby. And, it doesn't kill himself!



And he's back in business! Now just to match the shapes on the door to those on the green rod:



We're in! This station looks a little worse for wear... Where will it take us though?

Low is off again! I'm guessing to one of the spires we haven't been to yet. When do we find the one Maggie got to? And how did she get there? (Will we ever answer this question?)



I don't like this screen much. The orb doesn't move and you kind of just have to guess where you're going. (It's through the bright opening directly behind the orb. Not that difficult to figure out...)



Since I mentioned her. Let's check in on Maggie. I tried Brink but you know he is answering...



You can talk to Robbins about a bunch of things but she is universally unhelpful. Shocker.











See? Not helpful. Back to exploring this new spire I guess.





These rooms are neat looking but there isn't anything in them.

Until we get to this one!



That panel in the center there? It has the same 4 shape jewels on it:



I wonder what we do with it? How about we enter the shapes from the four rods we have: purple, orange, red, and green. So that's exactly what I do:



The panel seems to show us the area which each rod unlocks. Neat trick I suppose. So we run through them. That was purple. Next is orange:



Then red:



It's hard to tell in that image of the tomb (where we started this update) But it looks as if there is something in the center. Besides a triangle.

Green:



With all our rods used. We resume exploring this area:



Another light bridge device. This one is broken though. But, we can open the side of it:



Some sort of light refracting device makes them up. Clicking the crystals changes the angle of refraction. I think we're trying to light up the three colored ones:



It takes some experimenting but eventually Low figures it out and gets the device operating again. And using the light bridge Low returns to the Tomb Spire:





And the tomb. We already know that one tile depresses and lights the roof up. Maybe there's someway to keep it down?



We got back outside and notice to the left of the entrance some light emanating from the dirt:



Moving it reveals a window? Maybe the tile opened a skylight?



More lenses...

Back inside to see what he hath wrought:





But, what happens if we touch it?



I'm sure its fine. You've already mucked almost everything else you've encountered on this alien planet so far! Now that the statue isn't there though...





That seems a little excessive just to go downstairs. What's next?



As we approached the door one of those green life pills dropped from the wall onto the bone pile. Creating one big, and ugly, guard dog.



It does seem kinda late in the game...





Two can play that game! (The game of Life, get it? It's a terrible game don't play it. I was once a doctor but only making $40,000 a year. How is that even possible?! And how did I afford the mansion I found myself living it? Madness!)

Now there are two dogs in your way Low. Good job.





As long as no one tells PETA...



He's such a classy guy. Every form of life he's encountered on this planet so far has ended up dead, trapped or abused.

There's no way to open the door. But we do get a hint:



What did that ghost get us so long ago? The yellow rod!



Ta-da! The door opens!



I love how the game both shows and tells us everything.



Okay, what's in the pyramid?

Then they really shouldn't have built an express elevator that lead right to it.







In the meantime I'm just going to just open this thing up and to hell with any possible consequences!



That was easy. This next part should be even easier!







Some real searing insights from the first human to encounter sentient life in space.

Despite not understanding a thing that came out of what I assume is an alien mouth, Low plows ahead with some questions:



But, shockingly, that doesn't work. And as soon as he says goodbye the pyramid pops back and the alien dies?!



Not a bad idea.





How convenient!







How inconvenient.

Find out what happens next time.