Intermission: Pathways into Darkness #2

Intermission Continues

Cover Page

Hats are hard to draw.

We continue our foray into ancient Bungie Mac games.  I remember liking this cover page a great deal.  It depicts a wooden ladder leading up to a hole in the ceiling, with blood dripping from the edges.  I liked that blood a lot.  Spoooooky.

I realize that it looks more like a ladder or a pile of odd sticks supporting a bloody black oval or rock, but I didn't have time to turn most of the page into a textured ceiling, okay?  Besides, the ceilings in the game were basically these flat, blackish gray expanses; only the walls had notable texture.

Page 1

Page waste: 100%

This issue is entitled "Lock & Load," which was the second level or floor of the game.  The fact that we're still on the first level, and that I barely scratch the surface of the second level in this issue, baffles the mind.  As I previously mentioned, for all my fascination with this game I was also terrified of it, and could progress no further before I chickened out and went back to blowing up stamps in Kid Pix.

Anyway, we rejoin our nameless hero as he encounters his first monster of the game, a Headless.

Page 2

Slorg?

The headless bends over and spits a wad of green slime on our hero, causing him pain and discomfort.  In retaliation, our hero reaches into his backpack, and gets out his newly acquired WWII era german pistol.

I did my best to trace the visual design of the Headless.  They really did attack in this fashion, retracting their giant tongues and bending over awkwardly before firing slime at you.  It made a distinctive sucking sound as it did so; the best approximation I could come up with at the time apparently was 'slorg.'  It was more like 'ssleerrt.'  I don't know.  

Page 3

BLOOD FOR THE CORN GOD

The Headless is BLOWN AWAY, SUCKA!  Look at all that blood!  I was so proud of that blood.  Blood was the coolest.

Wasting three bullets on a Headless is a pretty extravagant waste of resources in this game.  Two shots will kill a Headless easily, unless they're very far away.  Whatever.  Our hero decides to name the thing 'Headless.'  Now we're all on the same page.

Page 4

'Ladder' spelled correctly 1/2 attempts.

Spotting a ladder, our hero ascends, while our author spells the word 'ladder' incorrectly despite spelling it correctly the first time... ARRRGH!

When you killed enemies in this game, their corpses stayed where they were, often piling up in gruesome clusters.  I thought this was really cool.  Whenever you walked over a dead monster, a little message would appear: "You see a dead X," where X was the name of the monster.  Some monsters didn't leave bodies behind, so the only way to learn their names was to be killed by them, and sometimes Bungie was pretty cheeky with the death dialogue.  

The second level begins with a choice of two doors, but we'll never know what's beyond them, since I gave up continuing this comic series after this.  Soak it in folks; this is the last installment of my unlicensed comic book incarnation of a Bungie game over two decades old.

Will we return to Sether in the Morff on the morrow?  Perhaps...