Monday, February 20, 2023

Live-a-Live Remastered, Pt 7 - Space Madness


Fresh off of a Tarantino movie chapter and an Akira chapter, now we get a James Cameron chapter with some Stanley Kubrick mixed in.


I hope the cargo isn't Deus. Is this the Xenogears prequel we never knew we had?

Regardless, the chapter takes place on a spaceship, slowly making its way to Earth.

We've also got a bit of Alien here as The Company is intent on getting this mysterious specimen back to Earth, crew safety be damned.

We also have a creepy AI overseeing everything.

The ship itself isn't very big, but it is VERY confusing without a map. Luckily this remake supplies a map, making this chapter about 1/10th as tedious as the 16-bit version was.

The crew wake up from their hypersleep, as is tradition. In this one you play as Cube the robot, who is incidentally a sphere.

There's an arcade machine in the lounge, and this gives us our only actual combat of this chapter:

Captain Square, the arcade battler. You control Captain Square and beat up terminators. It doesn't really affect anything or do much, but at least it's some action.

Here's the aptly-named Kirk, who is a real scoundrel.

"Among other things" says Rachel as the camera views her through a glowy cloud 60's-style.

Darthe is the mandatory out-of-place military guy on the craft, who is terrified of The Cargo. What is this monstrosity, you ask?

It's a Behemoth. They've got it imprisoned in a cell currently, and apparently it's the apex predator of some other world they visited.

Technical difficulties abound, and...

...the crew is becoming increasingly hostile as they drift along.

One big mistake they made: There's only one girl on the ship and she's pretty hot, which means all the men on board are twitching and losing their minds. She's dating one of them, while another is her ex. Who staffed this thing?

Also their space suits seem to not be working that well. Is someone sabotaging the ship?

Accusations fly! This is why women shouldn't be astronauts!

Even the AI is flipping out because Kirk hasn't communicated with it in a bit. Also, the AI is also in love with the one woman on-board, probably.

During all of this space madness, the Behemoth breaks out of its confinement. As the resident robot, Cube has to go and check the area. Also, he prefers "synthetic human".

The Behemoth leaps out from behind a crate! GET OUTTA THERE!

Darthe is infuriated at the ship administration for not addressing this breach of security. He wants to see the captain, NOW!

Except the captain is already dead, and signs are that it happened a while ago. So then...who were we talking to?

Elsewhere, the AI gets orders from home base. It's what we already know. So home base sent this crew to capture an extremely dangerous lifeform, AND they put a woman on-board? This mission was a death trap!

Eventually the AI reveals itself to be behind a lot of what's going on, and declares that it is now in control.

Also, there's an old Cube milling about. So we've got elements of The Black Hole here as well.

Darthe gets trapped in a corner by the Behemoth and goes down swinging.

Cube confronts the AI and we find out that its name is OD-10. Damn that Odio! He's converted himself into The Cloud!

The final battle is against the AI itself via the Captain Square game. Never mind that it has a giant creepy Terminator head, the really scary part here is that Cube has very limited resources and can't level up in this chapter. Still, going all-out against the side-pods with Maser Cannon works out well.

Actually, Maser Cannon is probably the best move any character in this game starts with.

Looks like Darthe survived, and I guess the Behemoth is also defeated, to wrap things up in a bow.

"I've seen attack ships on fire off the shores of Orion" he says.

Then our heroes have coffee. I guess they're the only ones who survived.

Thump. Thumpthump.

No, no The Thing here, the story's over.

I guess they got back to Earth. Nice ending screen, kinda feels like the whole game is over. Wonder if anyone ever turned it off after this, thinking they were done, without seeing the new Middle Ages chapter spring up on the character select.

More on this later.


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