Gateway 2 down

[firefyte]

#3421

Well, I went ahead and completed Gateway 2 as well.

Semi-OK to good continuation of the story. Worth the play if you liked the first one.

I died a lot, more than in the first game.

No real difficult showstopper puzzles either. Just a lot of reading comprehension and wits.

[Shattered]

#3438

Wow impressive, that means you basically lapped those of us still stuck on the first game. Do you think you’ll move onto the Gateway novels next?

[firefyte]

#3439

I actually talked with my mom, who’s a sci fi buff, and she said she didn’t really like Fredrik Pohl’s writing.
Having little-to-no time to read, I think I’ll skip.

I enjoy puzzles and it was much more fun vs. a parser game (KQ walking off a cliff) and more engaging than a pure text adventure.

[Pix]

#3493

Finished Gateway 2 last night as well. I thought the puzzles were well designed again but the plot got really hokey as the game went on. The Heechee could have easily been the squabbling aliens in an old Star Trek episode where Kirk has to go in and solve their problems for them. They were much more fun when unseen and mysterious in part 1. Adding the conversation system was a good idea but the writing just wasn’t as good all round. Still enjoyed it but nowhere near as much.

[Tijn]

#3494

Yeah, I also remember from when I played these way back than I was more impressed with the first game than with the second.

Kind of ironic they made the first one freeware, haha.

[rnlf]

#3495

I agree. The puzzles are better (or, more fitting) in Homeworld, but the story is worse and while the dialog system was a nice touch, I *hate* almost all dialog options. They make the protagonist sound like an unbearable dick.

The indirect “ask X about Y” or “tell X about Y” in the first game avoids that issue entirely.

[Shattered]

#3497

Did anyone else think dialog pretty awkward in the first game when someone was giving a long monologue and you had to enter a command to see the next part of the conversation? At first I was scared of typing something incorrectly and missing the next important part that I could tell was coming, so I would always enter ‘talk to <person>’ to make sure the <person> would tell me the next part. But even that was weird because the game would give a standard response to that command (eg. <person> is too busy to talk right now), then continue with their story.

What commands did you guys enter in those scenarios? I eventually just settled on ‘wait’ toward the end.

[rnlf]

#3498

Yeah, I ended up using wait, in the end. Before that I used “listen”, but that also gave a default response “you hear nothing special in particular” and then the thing the NPC said.

[Tijn]

#3500

You can say “listen to thom” for example to make it a little less generic, but it remains a bit awkward. I sort of understand why it doesn’t want to spit out 5 pages of dialogue in one go though. I guess the system from the second game works better for conversations.

[Shattered]

#3582

Finally caught up with you guys and beat Gateway 2, thanks to Firefyte for a few hints in IRC. I also needed hints on what to do with the magnetic clamps in the ice pit, but otherwise it was an honest playthrough.

I really enjoyed both games! I think I had fun navigating Heechee politics in the 2nd game, but agree that it was a bit disappointing to finally see them.

I was a little confused by the Gateway 1’s explanation of why the Heechee didn’t activate the shield generators themselves. It didn’t make sense to me that there was this technology to save them, but they chickened out using it at the last second. But Gateway 2 filled in a lot of plot holes from the first game, and I found the overall story more intriguing. I got some serious Dead Space 3 vibes at the beginning and later saw some themes Soma explored with uploading personalities to computers. Deep stuff!

But yea, what’s up with those dialog options, especially in the 2nd half of the game? The character would give an eloquent lecture on the nature of humanity, then 5 minutes later have all dude-bro dialog options that really didn’t fit.