All's fair...

If you head back Wahlstatt to lick your wounds after the ZR2 battle, you have to do the ZR2 battle all over again. Then you head on toward the Taurus base, where you will be wiped out.

The first Taurus battle is so-so, no trouble if you stay on your toes about depleting HP. The second one looks like the first, but the second ship in line is a ringer. That's the one that gets you. Ugh.

I have a fairly high tolerance for levelling up, which is both repetitive and sort of meditative, so I've been heading back to the restricted airspace (spacespace?) of realms that used to be wide open weeks ago, and grinding up Junkyards, Sodalities, Fellowships, and so on... The shock comes hours later when you head bad to Mensa, the staging planet for the assault on ZR2, realize too late that you've overlooked the tiny hidden back-door starlane discovered by the Bad-to-the-Bone pirates (and Kira, at the appropriate moment), that gets you back to Mensa, which isn't there...! You overshot your destination! Which is when the ZR2 gang use you for target practice. Again.

Hours of grinding, back to rust in nothing flat. The nice thing is, I thought the game had glitched and forgotten the way back, but no, you can take your time, level up, and whack the wumpus when you get around to it... (It's a game.)

Chapter 7 grinding on...

Prerequisites, prerequisites... I'm thinking of changing majors. Lost once at Monarho, and looked up the trick to getting past Michijo Abato. About ready to try again...

On the bright side, my dentist had a cancellation this morning, so I got in early. Mouth should starting working in another couple of hours.

Spetses Blockade

For all my griping, I'm still playing Infinite Space. The battle at Spetses Blockade turned out to be trivial^† after all — retreat to the left, play defense (including unleashing your AA and fighters if necessary), wait for SPC1 to flicker on, then advance. When your (carefully) targeted ship unleashes a Normal attack, hit it with SPC1. Rinse, lather, repeat.

With Kira in the First Officer slot, SPC2 will also light up. If you've taken damage, use it, but be cautious about raising Dodge almost immediately.

That's Phase 1.

Phase 2 begins at Alonnisos, where'll you have to take down the reserve elements of Cadmus' elite forces. Basically, this works the same way, but... There's a weakness! You're facing five ships. Ship 1 is MIDDLE. Ships 2 and 3 are FORWARD, and ships 4 and 5 are BACK. In other words, you're only facing two ships and the flagship, not all five! So take out 3, 2 and 1, and the last two vanish when you take out the flagship.

(Of course, if you do that, you've also lost a chance to recruit Belenko, Cadmus' unenthusiastic but duty-bound admiral, according to one of the fan-contributed faqs. I took the easy way out, myself. So Belenko didn't like Cadmus? Neither did I.)

After the action progresses beyond these two bottlenecks, the business with Cadmus is over quickly, and full immersion resumes.

†Yeah, sure. "Trivial." Apologies if you're still stuck there. It took me 61 hours to get by.

Infinite Space

Rated T for nerdboy fantasy about hot babes who pick up twelve year old n00bs and give them their own space ships, the learning curve on this one is so insanely steep Sega actually published YAUG.

That aberration aside, I'm finding it pleasant to waste a little time with, and a little desultory snorkling around the web has turned up the unlikely information that it's actually based on Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, so who knows? Maybe it'll be more than a time waster. The game was released this Spring, March 16, and by April 13 it had vanished into desuetude. Maybe Amazon has it. I was lucky to find a not too distressed "pre-owned" copy at GameStop. I'll sell it unless I get past Chapter 2...

UPDATES... What's with all the Russian names? Also, the main clue (aside from the right-to-left Japanese ordering penchant) appears to be staying alert for hints. Get the big guns.

Confirmed! Russians have spread through the Magellanic Clouds. Pirates harass what little order there is in such a small universe. Some pirates are bigger and badder than others. Their shoulder pads stand a foot high... (uh huh).... Anyway, build up your fleet, pay attention to small cues and signals from the good guys, be curious, fight pirates and discover Chapter 3. If you can't figure out where the missing strategist is the first time he's mentioned, you are beyond hope and should be doing your homework.