brian_s
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After completing the roach maze level 25, the last few rooms in which I had to chase the Neather were a serious letdown. Does anyone else agree with me on this?

masonjason
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Well, let's see: there's 1S, a cleverish room with a fairly unexpected solution. Then 1S 1W, which is just an empty hallway. And then, of course, the famously anticlimactic final room. So I'm more or less inclined to agree.

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agaricus5
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So... You were cynical enough for the last room?

For myself and quite a few other people, our feelings actually made it almost the hardest room in the hold. I couldn't figure it out until I decided to treat the room as an experiment and try every combination.

I think it's a nice way to end the hold - the 'Neather's run out of traps and puzzles, so he tries to escape to his hidden stronghold, and you chase him there. Then, you have the final deathmatch in that room where it is a test of the mind to defeat him.

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masonjason
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Yes. To be fair, it took me longer to figure out than 1S, but that was because of the puzzle's slightly tricky solution, not the 'Neather's pleading.
That room was, as you say, the 'Neather's final stronghold, but I would rather have had a real "final boss" room, which would at least make an attempt to be one of the hardest and most interesting rooms in the game.

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DiMono
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Of course, there is a simple solution to all of this... have stabbing the 'Neather trigger a second part of the game, where DROD suddenly loads up the Quake engine and you have to defeat him in a Deathmatch to continue with the game. You could even need to figure out where a special weapon is to defeat him, which would retain the puzzle aspect of the game.

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joker5
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Which Quake? And there might be copyright issues... personally I prefer Quake 2, that was just classic.

~joker5

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Drizzo
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joker5 wrote:
Which Quake? And there might be copyright issues... personally I prefer Quake 2, that was just classic.

~joker5

I was hoping Timequake myself

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Zmann
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DiMono wrote:
Of course, there is a simple solution to all of this... have stabbing the 'Neather trigger a second part of the game, where DROD suddenly loads up the Quake engine and you have to defeat him in a Deathmatch to continue with the game. You could even need to figure out where a special weapon is to defeat him, which would retain the puzzle aspect of the game.

Well, there is a freeware open source deathmatch first person shooter: Cube. Of course, you would have to mod it a bit, but I think it would work.

RoboBob3000
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That final Neather room had me completely stumped for at least a day. I guess for those of us not bright enough to figure it out, it made for an excellent final room. It was a clever use of manipulation and enough of a change of pace to the other rooms that I think it could be considered the "boss room".

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Phweengee
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I think you're looking at it wrong; look at it in terms of a wholistic puzzle. Most puzzles in the dungeons are just one room, but just a few of them span multiple rooms. Look at the last level this way: the Neather really does tie all the rooms in the last level together. After you've faced his onslaughts, he throws just couple more twists at you for you to figure out before the end. For my own opinion, it wasn't a letdown at all. I admit though, some sort of puzzle boss battle might have been pretty darn cool too.

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jdyer
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I found the ending viscerally pleasing. I thought of it more as plot than puzzle. (Even thought it *was* a puzzle, I didn't feel like I was chugging my brain cells like with the tar baby room.)

rowrow
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Here's my question: In the ending it says that

[Edited by rowrow at Local Time:10-28-2004 at 03:14 AM]

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Mattcrampy
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But aren't the happy endings the one where the good guy wins, not the ones where the bad guy gets away to cause more death, destruction and mayhem?

There's a whole load of argument that you could say here for why DROD ends as it does. I'm not really going to go into it, because I've gotta pack, but I will say that the ending we have is more appropriate to the game's theme than one where everybody wins, even though it's a little darker than it could be.

Matt

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wackhead_uk
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Why all this toil over the last room? I...



...and I didn't see how it was hard...but that's probably just me.

[Edited by wackhead_uk at Local Time:10-28-2004 at 06:14 PM]

agaricus5
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wackhead_uk wrote:
Why all this toil over the last room? I...

... Removed secret.

...and I didn't see how it was hard...but that's probably just me.

Please can you avoid putting the spoiler on the board so openly? You can hint about it, but even in a secret box, this explicit spoiler just spoils the fun of the last room completely.

With reference to your comment, it's hard if you let your compassion get the better of you. You may not be the particularly emotive type, or you may even have an aversion to expressing it, I don't know, but for myself and some other people, it was quite the challenge to look at it from a different perspective.

It was harder in Webfoot DROD, though, since the lightning wasn't so obvious.

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eytanz
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Well, I think that the title of this thread is a giveaway to the fact that it spoils the last few rooms.

In any case, with JtRH coming up this won't be a big issue anyway since KDD will cease to be the official hold. Though, of course, it's still more fun unspoiled...

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rowrow
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Mattcrampy wrote:
But aren't the happy endings the one where the good guy wins, not the ones where the bad guy gets away to cause more death, destruction and mayhem?
Matt

Yeah but maybe he could have changed the neather. My question is how did he survive?

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Mattcrampy
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I've been wondering that myself.

Thankfully, I'm in a position to invent a reason, and I've got a good one. It won't be in JtRH, unless there's a sudden change, but it should make it into the next one, so if you want to find out, buy lots of copies and tell your friends to do the same.

[/marketing]

Matt, who feels it's unbecoming for a mod to use the word that should go there

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eytanz
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Wait, how did who survive?

Beethro survived because he cleared the dungeon.

The 'Neather didn't survive, because he's dead.

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agaricus5
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eytanz wrote:
The 'Neather didn't survive, because he's dead.

Well, we assume he dies, but the ending does leave his death as rather debatable.

And, if I quote from the old Webfoot DROD Demo...

DEATH CAN BE FATAL

But not in DROD. Every time Beethro gets killed, he comes back to life just a few seconds later. Even monsters can be resurrected just by starting a new game. Therefore, DROD is a fatality-free game and nobody has grounds to be offended by all of the temporary death that is occuring in it.

So...

The 'Neather may not exactly be dead.

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gamer_extreme_101
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Well, they could just make the "Ghost of Neather" so that L25 in KDD would still be as cool. However, the ghost would just be stupid and not cross pits and walls.

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DiMono
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Actually, "Ghost of the 'Neather" could be a good official dungeon in case JtRH ends up suffering a severe unforseen delay of some sort.

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gamer_extreme_101
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Why? How close is it to being done, Mr. Beta Tester?

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rowrow
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eytanz wrote:
Wait, how did who survive?
Beethro survived because he cleared the dungeon.
The 'Neather didn't survive, because he's dead.

I meant how did the 'neather survive all those years in the dungeon before beethro came? Did the roaches bite him and he turned into something like spiderman?

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Muiff
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rowrow wrote:
I meant how did the 'neather survive all those years in the dungeon before beethro came? Did the roaches bite him and he turned into something like spiderman?

The 'Neather, being evil, befriended the monsters. We must remember that there were few (if any) monsters there at all when he got down (according to the legends). But exactly how this happened must be a well-kept secret, or else smitemasters all over the Eight would use it to clean out dungeons.