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Lasering the shark
Sep. 1st, 2009 11:02 amSuture me with a pitchfork, I've just passed the X1 Kyriaki mission of Trauma Center after having battered myself ineffectually against it for a week. And this on the attempt when I only started it to pass some time and was thinking up all sorts of titles to say I was giving up. This post was almost called "A strange game - the only winning move is not to bother".
Before I had even thought of trying this game, someone made the rather extravagant claim on one of the boards I read that Trauma Center was far more difficult than going through medical school. Naturally, I replied to the effect that if I ever fell over from a heart attack and someone shouted "Don't worry, I've S-ranked the Sin missions twelve times", then I wouldn't fancy my chances of waking up again. But I can sort of see what he meant now - I went into the game thinking that I was a toughened games player over 20 years that could take on a game that was known not to utterly spoon-feed you, but I was very wrong and found that Atlus more than deserved their diabolical reputation. In fact, I was first struggling through the last chapter of the main game thinking "Oh, this run of operating on creepy bald children is quite a nice way of tying the bonus really hard missions into the plot of the game" before realizing that those were what the game's makers considered to be the ones of medium difficulty.
( Write-up where I went on a bit more than intended - about as exciting as Arnold Rimmer's Risk campaign book )
The mission pretty much cements my view of Kyriaki as my least liked operation in general, but it's also taught me that it really isn't that bad at all in the main game compared to what I thought of them when I started. I went back to the mission where you have to treat five separate people with slightly less aggressive forms of the same parasite, where I initially managed to get up to four patients before the time ran out (it lets you continue to the end of the one you're on when time is up) - this time I could zap and heal everything in about a minute and a half each and finished with two whole minutes left to spare and an operation score of 9999. Which still only earned me an "A" rank.
The next X-mission is Deftera, which I've tried and failed only a couple of times. I think that a bit of that strain depends on luck - you're meant to herd opposite-coloured clouds together, but you never seem to be able to point them in exactly the direction you intend and it's down to chance whether it's easy or difficult to keep everything where you want it. It also feels strangely like I'm just not putting any effort into it, after the frenzy of X1 - without flames coming off the tip of the stylus as I frantically go from antibiotics to scalpel to stabilizers to laser, I keep on thinking that there's something else I should be doing.
Before I had even thought of trying this game, someone made the rather extravagant claim on one of the boards I read that Trauma Center was far more difficult than going through medical school. Naturally, I replied to the effect that if I ever fell over from a heart attack and someone shouted "Don't worry, I've S-ranked the Sin missions twelve times", then I wouldn't fancy my chances of waking up again. But I can sort of see what he meant now - I went into the game thinking that I was a toughened games player over 20 years that could take on a game that was known not to utterly spoon-feed you, but I was very wrong and found that Atlus more than deserved their diabolical reputation. In fact, I was first struggling through the last chapter of the main game thinking "Oh, this run of operating on creepy bald children is quite a nice way of tying the bonus really hard missions into the plot of the game" before realizing that those were what the game's makers considered to be the ones of medium difficulty.
( Write-up where I went on a bit more than intended - about as exciting as Arnold Rimmer's Risk campaign book )
The mission pretty much cements my view of Kyriaki as my least liked operation in general, but it's also taught me that it really isn't that bad at all in the main game compared to what I thought of them when I started. I went back to the mission where you have to treat five separate people with slightly less aggressive forms of the same parasite, where I initially managed to get up to four patients before the time ran out (it lets you continue to the end of the one you're on when time is up) - this time I could zap and heal everything in about a minute and a half each and finished with two whole minutes left to spare and an operation score of 9999. Which still only earned me an "A" rank.
The next X-mission is Deftera, which I've tried and failed only a couple of times. I think that a bit of that strain depends on luck - you're meant to herd opposite-coloured clouds together, but you never seem to be able to point them in exactly the direction you intend and it's down to chance whether it's easy or difficult to keep everything where you want it. It also feels strangely like I'm just not putting any effort into it, after the frenzy of X1 - without flames coming off the tip of the stylus as I frantically go from antibiotics to scalpel to stabilizers to laser, I keep on thinking that there's something else I should be doing.
