Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail, Part 8

The story enters its final act as Dust's origins are explained.



A couple stills of Dust with his hat off (spoilertastic captions, so don't click if you haven't watched the video yet).

Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail, Part 7

Treasure huntin'

Let's Play System Shock 2, Part 4

System Shock 2 is now available on Good old Games.  Get it!

We take orders from a new source as we head into the dawn of the spiders. Also, Cyborg Assassins.



I went and got another wrench off-camera because having to kill monkeys and worms with grenades is just silly. Also, something I didn't note earlier:

This vending machine is one of the most useful in the game, as it sells both psi hypos and health hypos. You also have quick access to it from almost anywhere on the ship - it's located right outside the elevator on Deck 1.  Deck 2 also has quick access to upgrade units and a vending machine with Rad and Toxin hypos (just outside the entry into Medical) and Deck 3 has a battery charger two rooms away from its elevator as well.  So don't hesitate to do some backtracking if you're running low on supplies or energy.

Oh, and be sure to pick up the recycler by hacking the vending machine outside the Deck 4 armory.  It's one of the most useful items in the game!

Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail, Part 6

Having leveled up significantly since our last entry, the Sorrowing Meadow suddenly becomes a cakewalk. Also, more sidequests.

Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail Part 5½: Quick Level Grinding

I found a good spot to grind out a level every five minutes or so. Right before the midpoint of the Sorrowing Meadow, there is a cave with a beehive both outside and just inside on the next screen. Just go back and forth slaying bees and zombies with Fidget's lightning and Dust Storm.  The hives are worth over 1000 experience each, you'll get hefty experience bonuses from the large combos you rack up as you destroy them, and through both of those you'll very quickly gain levels.

Equipping a Ring of the Apprentice or Master Ring of the Artisan (or two) beforehand will further increase your gains.*

*The blueprints for these items (and indeed, nearly all items) don't seem to drop from any specific enemy; rather, they just seem to be based on your current level and/or your Luck stat.  I eventually got blueprints for both of these and numerous other pieces of equipment just by killing a lot of bees and zombies...

Let's Play System Shock 2, Part 3

Fun times on the Hydroponics deck. Midwives, worms, spiders and plenty of pain.




Oh, and if you're wondering why there's some continuity errors between parts, it's because I hit an annoying bug that corrupted my save files. But after running the latest version of SS2Tool and a quick speedrun, I got caught back up to where I was with a significantly more optimized skill set. Including:

• Skipping Psi Shield because it sucks. I went for Cyber-Affinity instead while building my character since it's infinitely more useful. 
• Buying Hack 2 and looting a few more boxes that I skipped before.  This gives us a few more hypos to spend later, and allows us to find handy loot like French-Epstein Devices on later floors.
• Getting Standard 3 so I can use an Assault Rifle as soon as I find one.  The extra boost it gives to shotgun and pistol damage in the meantime is no bad thing either.
• Getting the OS upgrade on the Science deck - something I seemingly always skip after I've been away from the game for a while. This is downright dopey of me since OS upgrades are incredibly useful, permanent upgrades. Well, some of them, anyway. I went for 20% more benefit from Hypos to stretch my Psi points out as far as possible.

Off camera, I also spent a few points to get a third point of Strength, then returned to pick up the Powered Armor, which is the single strongest armor in the game.  The only downside is that it requires you to keep its battery charged in order to provide protection, but that shouldn't be a problem for us.

From here on out, we're mainly going to be concentrating on Psi powers - we are playing an OSA character, afer all.  Though I may buy a level of Heavy Weapons just so we can play around with the Grenade Launcher and all of its fun ammo types...

Miscellaneous Screenshots

• From some angles, the dead guy isn't visible through the glass on the pod...
• The OS upgrade I overlooked...
• The security room I overlooked on the Engineering deck.  Nothing too exciting, but the surgical unit comes in handy.
• The research data for the Annelid Worm eggs, which also yields another useful thing I'd forgotten about:  The egg organs are somewhat rare, but will either restore your HP or Psi points to full.
• ...And for something completely different, one of the novelty oversized wrenches aboard the Von Braun.

Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail, Part 5

We head for the Sorrowing Meadow, but reach a bit of an impasse as I'm (or more specifically, Fidget is) not actually strong enough to defeat some of the enemies there. So much of the video is just spent traveling around collecting treasures and attempting to level up a bit.

 So, poll time: Should I just do more milling around and leveling next video, or should I just grind out some levels off-camera to make the next entry move faster?