Martian Dreams, Day 4

The first hour or so today was spent killing time, waiting for my pod to grow. I went hunting for the lab at the north pole, never being able to find it. The dream-world martians told me to go up there and look for it, and finally asking one of them about "icecap" resulted in her telling me that the lab is sometimes frozen over. Aye carumba. I then repaired the three ruby lenses which use the sun to melt the icecaps, or rather, I repaired one of them--the other two needed help from the currently-posessed occupants of Elysium.

Eventually, I broke down and slept in my tent for the next five days. With the pod ready, I went to the dream machine and sucked in Prektesh, I think, the leader of the Hellas martians, currently living in the dream world. He was thrilled to have a new body until he suddenly whithered and died. He told me to take is corpse to Tekapesh, the leader of Elysium (whose occupatns are currently posessing a number of people I need to talk to) to earn his trust. I did so, but Tekapesh refused to free the bodies so I could melt the ice--i spent another half hour or so looking for the lab again. Eventually I gave up, and consulted a walkthrough, which told me to ask Tekapesh about "plans"--This didn't work because he interpreted it as "plants." A less incompetent walkthrough gave me the word better. Good grief! I hate wasting time when I was supposed to just say something to someone. I was told to show him the body and I did so, and I simply assumed that the fact that it didn't work was a bug. Ahhhh.


This led to a few more activities--first, freeing more dream world occupants. Wyatt Earp required me to buy him, in horse form, over a normal horse and the infamous Smith (too bad he did not show up in Savage Empire). Melies, the guy most famous for his silent movie where the moon gets a rocket in the eyeball, was rescued simply by dodging some panels that shrink walls, while Lowell's rescue involved finding Pluto. No wonder I remembered him as discovering the (former) planet! The hardest was Clemens, who required me to navigate through a void filled with invisible shoals and collect manuscript pages for him. Once they were all freed, I got a dull cutscene and a surprisingly long and angry seres of threats from Tekapesh.

From thee, it was easy to fix the pieces of the lenses to melt the glaciers (man, I bet this is getting confusing to those who have not played the game) because the relevant people, such as Tiffany and Carver, were free. Why were both of those stuck in the dream world associated with Hellas anyway, when they went into the dream machine through Elysium? Whatever. With the ice melted, I was able to find a sexy golden robot in a lab, and give it a heart.

This is where I began suffering from "one more quest" syndrome. To get the heart, I needed a gemstone; Hearst has it, but demands the safe return of a camera held by a nearby corpse. I fetch the camera from the very dubiously named and very dead Boringstoke, and gave it to hearst, who had feared for the life of his precious camera...But then I had to get the picture developed, which meant going BACK to Meleis! Finally! I was able to suck the feminine martian Cheshket's soul into the robot body, but to my dismay she is upset that she's a big golden robot and I have to make her pretty.

AHHHHHH! Stupidist quest ever!

Ahem.

That otherwise worthless actress in Olympus is willing to give her some make up...But fist I have to go retrieve some berries...And give Cheshket a shower in the pumping station (...). Fortunately, I had to do that anyway--meling the glaciers was not enough to get the canals filled, it appears. In fact, long before I ever made a big gold robot, Sherman told me to go visit that station, and I did, only to discover that you needed a robot to get through some steam. Incidentally, I am pretty sure you can really screw up some game flags by using the equipment in the pump room before you have Cheshket the Golden in your party...I seem to recall doing that the first time I played, towards the beginning of the game, and this big golden head popped out of nowhere telling me to put some rubber in the machine, or some such.

Anyway, that's about where I quit for today. I expect I will finish Saturday, making this game just a bit longer than Savage Empire.

Or maybe Andrew Carnegie will make me go rescue his poor kitty cat or something before building the rocket to take everyone home. Grumble. On a side note, I got a freeze ray gun, but it is not so cool as to turn people into ice cubes. I used it to murder Hearst and try to steal his gemstones, but apparently he had them hidden and not on his corpse.