Wall jumping for Queen and Country.

We Come in Peace / Shoot to Kill by Superbrothers. (Totally random; I only got back into N after seeing a screenshot on the Superbrothers website.)

Time again for another N tour. Today we're looking at the last two episodes of the third column, with each episode consisting of five levels. N saves your progress after beating every fifth level. If you quit out without passing that fifth, you start from the first level of the episode when you come back. Cool? Let's go!

Episode 28

Domestic disturbance
Looks more complicated than it is. This level is generous with providing cover, springs, and other little things that result in a fun, simple progression of exploration and quick mastery of each component. You string these together, and you're done.


Covered
We've seen the double laser drone stages before. This one is not bad at all. A decent rhythm, some finesse in jumping, and we're out of here. (I'm probably just not accurately remembering the amount of dying it took to clear.)


Plummet
Very tricky. Climbing up the chamber on the left is easy enough, but the moment you enter the bottle-neck the rocket fires, requiring you to clear the hall immediately, which ends up being very problematic. I managed to snag the coins above only once, and died in the descent following. The fall in the right chamber looks complicated, but I just free fell down the right wall, walked off the white bounce brick further down, and moseyed into the exit with the rocket right behind. The bottleneck was where all the pain was collected.


Death star
This stage was a show stopper. Even after you've determined the optimal order to hit those four switches, trying to contend with this many gauss turrets is brutal. You're simply constantly surrounded by targeting reticules, some of which will occasionally solidify and discharge. There's little you can do to avoid getting shot down, making this level a matter of attempt after attempt until fortune smiles and allows you to squeeze through. It took a long, long time, and I was glad to be out of there.


Bespin
Very tough. Getting out of that tiny pocket containing the exit switch is a nightmare, with the rocket right on you, and a high enough height that dropping directly to the ground will kill you. I ignored the mines (getting out of the left just seemed simpler) and the gold (the gauss turrets were completely harmless at the speed I was going, and I didn't feel much incentive to give them or the rocket more opportunity to kill me), concentrated on getting it done, and eventually did so. Those laser drones ended up being all show, and never really played much part. Very fast and reckless level; a blast.

Episode 29

Crossfire
After Death star I was expecting this one to be impossible, but the size and openness of the room made it not terrible. The biggest issue is figuring out a method of getting back down without killing yourself falling.


Hounds
Another segmented design. I think I was mostly lucky in evading the gang of zap drones, and that was it. (I ignored some gold that probably would have been fairly easy to collect, which began putting pressure on the clock for the rest of the episode.)


Skating the edge
We have a new winner for my least favorite level. I hate this level. That kind of irrational, animal hate; teeth gritted, fists clenched. Here are my reasons. This stage is frustrating. There is no strategy to the room. Basically, this room says, "We will cripple you, to the point where we can kill you barely trying." That lone laser drone, its behavior made extremely erratic and unpredictable by its shifting line of sight. And then, just when your fingers manage to touch the door switch, the gauss turret just lazily pecks you out of the sky. Or your descent velocity is insufficiently slowed by the angle of the shards, and your legs break on landing. Even after skipping down multiple consecutive shards as you fall. Nope, dead.

Just the agony of climbing those first four shards. It's indescribable. This level is meant to punish you. Up until now you have been nothing but an airborne projectile. This level is about making it hard (near impossible) to jump.

After beating it I can admire how unforgiving it is, and how devious. Even those springs littered along the ground transform into something deadly, since they can easily knock you up into the laser, and also constrain you on the ground, making you vulnerable to that high, lazy gauss turret. Good riddance.


Bombshelter [remake]
This is the one that broke me. It took two, massive sessions to figure out the rocket room on the left side. Two huge sessions, just on that alone. It was that impossible. I probably dreamed about it. In my head I envisioned (in B&W) a dark, smoke filled room of scientists and tactical planners, like what you'd see in an old movie (I think in this fantasy I was some kind of NASA/Air Force guinea pig, head shaven, eyes twitching). I had to sit there and deconstruct each move. I had to explore the area to the right ahead of time, again, because I knew that when I finally cleared the rockets I would want to be able to finish the stage with some degree of certainty. I don't know if other N players do this, but, honestly, it became a question of statistical probabilities. I considered my chances of clearing the rocket room so remote, so slim, that to die on the exit (which is quite a thing in itself) would simply break me too much. So I learned it first. Fairly early. And then just died in the rocket room like an automaton. Eventually, what did it for me was collating outcomes from both sessions, learning to link those maneuvers together, and learning to reset the rocket room between those maneuvers. Which I know doesn't make any sense. I'd have to show you. Slowly. Because it must have taken over four hours to figure out. That's kind of sick, now that I think on it. (Briefly, it was what I [rather embarrassingly] labeled a "surgical entry," bouncing in along the left wall, wall-jumping down to the thwump room, then I had a path to the coins [rehearsed over 100 times], reset the missiles by entering the tube again slightly, then out and up the right side, wall jumping to the angled "exit platform," which I found through what I labeled a "mirror point," a place in the rocket room where I could enter and exit at will, hence supplying the final step in the progression of moves that would result in my clearing the room. Working in reverse, simply. Hence the eventual "string it all together" strategy. Make sense? Of course not.)

Easily my greatest N achievement to date.


Patrol
I used a tool that is utilized so infrequently in N that it's often easy to forget it exists. Time. Or my time limit, life-span, timer bar, however you want to think of it. The center of the room, where you need to be, is full of things that will kill you. The typical double teaming laser drones, but also a chaingun drone for good measure. After about 30 deaths, it occurred to me to try something. So I stood still, and waited for those three to leave, and be replaced by a sole chaingun drone. Which is still more than adequate to kill you (another half-dozen deaths or so), but in the end a breeze compared to the initial line-up. It's not a leader-board positioning strategy, but I still felt clever as hell for figuring it out.