Ophidian Dragon blogs his way through the entire Ultima series, from beginning to end.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Savage Empire, Day 3

Well, the gaming continues in Savage Empire, though my Internet has been down all day and I'm unsure when I will be able to post this! I forgot about gorillas and T-Rex's for awhile whie I went and finished two quests for two other tribes--The jukari chief wanted a hide history back, so I zipped over some lava made hard with a fire extenguisher to get it, while the Neanderthal leader needed a shield from a spider den. Dealing with spiders, of course, requires some fire to burn their webs, and making the torches required a rather tiresome process of cutting cloth, wrapping them around sticks culled from trees, putting tar in a bucket, and then using the tar on the cloth and the tarred cloth on a branch. Yowza. The spider cave additionally has an enterance to what appears to be a big series of Myrmaadex caves, which are not terribly appealing and I died very quickly, attacked by endless drones.

My next quest was the one I started the game with--rescuing Aelia, the warrior princess of the Kurak tribe whose clothing does not protect her breasts very effectively. Once I found out where she was held (The theiving tribe, the Urali, hid itself and had to be acessed through a cave--long story), it was a matter of creatively avoiding a Tyranasaurus, and then avoiding huge numbers of guys with poison blowguns. Aelia was in a cage in a cave, and as I saved her, Darden the Huge came in--but a couple of bullets to the face prevented him from doing much to prevent my rescue. Humorously, ow that Darden is dead, it seems my attacks from random villagers increased! Though I can talk to them, and they thank me for killing Darden, when I say goodbye they go back to shooting me with darts.

I decided to give them some time while I took Aelia's giant crystal across the valley, stuk it in a slot, and got an underground stairway to open. That's where I am now--Kotl city! I remember from my last experience with Savage Empire that it is big and mostly boring. I am debating whether to map it, or to simply try to rush to that power generator and shut it off, so that I can go back to the valley and solve another quest.




I spent a brief period with the Frobozz statue, which is a glowing-eyed spirit thing I am supposed to bribng out of the cave to the center of the city for the Urali tribe to talk to. However,it's unhappy without any light. Trying to move the thing directly, as well as trying to attack it and pick it up and so on, was ineffective. I might consider trying to get some sunlight to it, but the villager was pretty specific about me needing to bring it out, and I am unsure how I will do that since none of the obvious solutions (dragging it and taking it apart, piece by piece) seem to work.

Paulon gave some tips with respect to the gorilla-saving and T-Rex killing quests, but unfortunately they did nt bear fruit. I asked my party members about things including boulder, waterfall, gorilla, dinosaur, tyrannasaurus, rescue, unite, lever, push, cave, cliff, climb, rope, ladder and pole, with little succcess. Rafkin did tell me to ask Nahuatla tribesen about poles, but none of them seemed to care. I suppose I might try building my own raft to use on the river, since one tribesperson said I needed to tie together four logs--a plausible in-game action, I guess.

The game has grown on me a small amount, but I am tired of random Myrmadex attacks (these happen all the time, often with no warning) and the fact that going up in level seems to be a pretty worthless exercise.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fabozz, not Frobozz. The latter is from the Zork series. You can blog those next. ;-)

You may have missed it when he joined, but Rafkin does a once off suggestion that if necessary you ask him about rifles and bombs. Yes, you CAN make them both, though you need to go to his lab with the materials for the rifles. He can give suggestions on a lot of the manufacturing steps needed to get specific resources.

Anonymous said...

If you reached the Kotl city, you can save yourself the trouble of making grenades. There are some devices that can prove to be a nice substitute. Make sure you explore the city well and pick up all you need before powering off the generators.

Jeff said...

Yeah. GRENADES ARE VERY HANDY. THEY ARE GOOD FOR MAKING EXPLOSIONS. EXPLOSIONS OF CONCUSSIVE FORCE. HINT HINT.

Jeff said...

Really, any time a native says "I don't know how anyone could possibly do this thing we're asking you to do, all our best and brightest have tried and failed," that's a strong hint.

Anonymous said...

*Spoiler* for Fabozz



In Rafkin's lab, I think, you can obtain a camera. You can then use the camera flash to bring light to Fabozz. That's how I got through this part a long long time ago. :-)

Jay said...

I remember thinking that using the fire extinguisher on the lava to make it passable was the coolest thing ever.

Anonymous said...

There are a lot of hints in the manual itself. It's worth reading just for those.

Anonymous said...

Using a fire extinguisher on lava is also one of the less physically plausible solutions in the game. Fire extinguishers work by smothering the fire and depriving it of oxygen. Lava isn't a chemical reaction that requires oxygen to keep going. It's just rock that's hot enough to melt. Spraying carbon dioxide all over it won't make it significantly less hot.

Anonymous said...

Burning magnesium also produces a bright light.

I was actually learning about such things in school just when I was playing SE. :-O