Journal #7735

I just finished the mod, The Gate, an incredibly controversial WWII mod that was a real challenge to complete. I had to cheat three times during the course of my playthru which is alot more than my usual of 0-1 times. Most of you all will prolly never finish this mod anyway, so allow me to fill you in with all the gritty nitty details and whatnot.

This mod combines good (albeit cheesy) storytelling with badly-designed gameplay. Just imagine: the credits list the lead writer/director, but no mappers. Unfortunately, the biggest problem of the mod regarding the storyline is the fact that every single character is psychic: they can all speak without ever moving their mouths. I suspect that this is due to the modellers' not giving mouth controllers to the models, but that's not important.

I personally think that the gameplay fell flat for two reasons: the lack of clear objectives for the player (usually relayed by other characters in a single rapidly-voiced line) and the horribly unbalanced stats for the Nazi soldiers. I'm looking at the skill.cfg here: On Easy, the soldiers have 75 HP compared to 50 for vanilla grunts. On Medium it's 90, and 95 on Hard... what kind of weird stats are these!? As for attack damage, headshots on the the player do about 6x normal damage on easy. That means: a single MP44 bullet does about 18 damage on easy and 36+ on medium... three shots and you're dead. I know you're thinking this is supposed to be like counter-life in that damage is 'realistic' in that the player dies in a few shots, but this is ridiculous. Not only does the system NOT work both ways (takes at least 5 MP44 shots to kill a Nazi soldier on Medium), for gameplay this is nearly impossible. So I cheated here by changing damages back to the default values (3x damage per headshot only) With this change, the soldiers can still take me out fairly quickly, but at least I can take some damage and quick get in cover so I can stand a better chance.

LONG RANT ASIDE, let us dive into the mod itself. You are some retired old special forces veteran, Bob or something living in the mountains. That is, until Drill Instructor Sharpe arrives with soldiers all the way from Arizona to pull you out of your cozy retirement. Off you go to a secret American base, where the Commanding Officer is a chain-smoking hooker. Seriously. A chain-smoking hooker. She gives you a long briefing not unlike the one in Redemption except that nobody actually ever opens their mouth. Although it was hard hearing the voices; I wish the mod had subtitles, like Todesangst 2 did. Basically, Nazi's under Hitler's personal command in 1942 have discovered a stargate in Egypt. And it's up to you to stop them all by your lonesome, unarmed self. What an hero.

Anyway, Senior Drill Instructor Barnes and a platoon of fresh recruits salute you, brave soul, as you enter the giant, looming stargate about to take you to Nazi Egypt. So you start off in some Egyptian tomb looking for a knife. However, you lose said knife about 10 minutes after you find it, by falling off a waterfall. You must then fight a Nazi soldier completely unarmed, supposedly by trapping him in another room.

Soon you find a luger, which is ridiculously weak due to the buffed Nazi soldiers' HP, and the fact that the pistol had an accuracy nerf. As soon as you pick it up some soldiers attack you from across the room. But you know whats more annoying? There is a room immediately after this in which two Nazi soldiers are hidden amongst dense foliage (dense foliage in a tomb). The entire room is also booby-trapped by wall spikes, which are activated by light. It took me about 30 deaths to figure out that the traps are activated by walking into lighted areas. Why? Because the dam Nazi's in the dense foliage are nigh impossible to see, let alone shoot and avoid traps at the same time. And this is in the first dam chapter!

Another annoying part is right when you exit the tomb, there's like 3 or 4 Nazi's across the bridge, and one of them is manning a dam MG42. I swear, the dam MG42's are the bane of this mod! They are extremely accurate and have horribly high damage. Exposure to this baby for about 2 seconds results in many dead players! Unfortunately, they appear fairly frequently, including this one that is protected by an invisible func_wall... I swear, I tried everything against that one freakin MG42: MP44 spray, potato mashers, even panzershrecks, NOTHING WORKS! Because it was protected by an invisible func wall! What the frick. Turns out you were supposed to go into the sewers instead of trying to fight the thing.

Anyway, once you exit the tomb, you come to one of the most annoying sections of the mod, as if the other sections weren't bad enough. That's right you know it: the stealth section. There's a Nazi on a watchtower that whom you must make sure to be never be seen by. You can't take him out either: the springfield sniper (crossbow) cannot take out the buffed soldiers in a single hit. It's ridiculous, but this time I actually didn't have as much trouble in the first stealth section. The FIRST stealth section. However in the second stealth section, you need to escort this NPC to some door, and there are also Nazi's on watchtowers. It was really hard because I didn't know you had to escort the NPC stealthily. I went ahead, saved, and then had to go back for him. On the way I managed to trigger the alarm because I hit a box with my knife. A FREAKIN NAZI WAS IN THE BOX. WHAT THE F

In the next section, I escaped the Nazi compound, but some french Madame knocked me out. You get into this cutscene where the Madame orders the player character to do something really pointless, like blowing up two Opel trucks in the middle of a Nazi stronghold using a detonator. It was a fairly long walk thru the town, but in the middle of this large courtyard were the two trucks and the detonator all set up and ready to go. Oh boy.
You press the detonator, and BAM! 3 windows open up and a shitton of Nazi soldiers spawn into the yard via monstermakers. And the right window facing the detonator is covered by A DAM MG42. Freaking sadist mapper.

Of course, the way back to Madame's little hovel is filled with Nazi soldiers and their pet rottweilers. The little doggies are quite easy to take out by a headshot (50x dmg FTW), but the dam soldiers are immune to headshots. They also seems to have taken COD2 to heart by spamming they dam grenades like sprinklers. With about 30 tries I managed to make it back to Madame's hovel with satisfactory HP. (And just to troll you, Madame has a storage room with medikits that cannot be picked up). Whoever did this map is freakin sadist, dammit.

Oh, but it gets better. You meet this one eyed dude who is actually a custom playermodel for the mod Specialists. He is known only as Agent X. I hate this guy. Seriously. Basically all he does is order you to go on ridiculously dangerous and difficult missions with no point. His first mission: I am to make my way across the desert into a clearing covered by 3 bunkers (yes, just like in Beach Party, except there's no pickups and loads of Nazis). The bunkers are of course MG42's with the inhuman accuracy so I had to hug the left side of the map (because the right side was a minefield for some reason). I manage to take cover in one of the bunkers, but guess what? The dam Nazi's began spamming grenades at me. I couldn't really move around much because ohohohoho! In the corner behind the bunkers is fugging tank! Wut? The tank fires at me who is crawling around in a trench, so there's no way for me to move away! Dam dude! This map makes Beach party look easy! Took me well over 50 tries to beat this map, since I have to walk back to the Agent X after blowing the bunkers, by which more Nazi's have spawned out of nowhere to block my path. This is getting old.


So the basterd, seeing that I'm still alive from that other map, sends me into a completely pointless venture into an old abandoned mine. Which wasn't really abandoned. But what's krazy about this one is that it's a dam minekart ride! Classic! Except there's a dam MG42 around the corner.
There are trackswitches that you must shoot to activate but I highly doubt you can aim well at a trackswitch when ur in a speeding minekart and there's an MG42 spraying your ass to oblivion! After that there are some planks of wood specifically designed to crush a standing human riding a fast-moving minekart! Isn't that swell.

I miraculously survive the minekart ride. With like, 3 HP. I walk into another area and the thudding of footsteps tells me that I get to be randomly captured like in the Apprehension chapter of Half life.

Wake up in a train with Madame. Train is taking us to some French Nazi prison. Wake up in a prison cell. Wait for about 10-15 minutes. Then this Nazi opens the cell door and tells me, an American pigdog, to wash my stinking body in a shower specifically designed by them. A shower with flammable signs everywhere. Boy, don't you see where this is going.

I enter the shower, and instead of water, steam comes out. Luckily there are six valves in the shower room, so that, once I turn off all the valves, the Steam disappears completely. But then, a Nazi soldier opens the room and gives me another shower... of lead. What a douche.

Anyway you're supposed to rush past him to a munitions closet filled with ammo and a luger. Thus begins the second half of the mod: escaping from this French Nazi prison. It took a while, but I managed to make it to the prison yard, which had watchtowers. And one of the watchtowers... yes, ANOTHER DAM MG42. This one took me about 40 tries. Then I found I can't proceed. SO IT TURNS out that there was a locked door whose key I never found. So I noclipped thru it. A bunch of Nazi's later, I get to this rear gate. This is where the backtracking really takes the cake. Basically, you have to go down this complex, find a key, come back up to the gatehouse and use the key to open a case with a fuse, then take this fuse back down to activate a generator, then find a gear that will activate the gate. It wasn't a very fun experience, particularly in one corridor that involved the words 'PEEKABOO' and 'MG42'.

Eventually I make it to the sewers where I encounter the French resistance. There I reunite with the Madame. We spend the night together offscreen because here model only has an idle animation and not much else. After that she sends me off to some Nazi Sub Pen to blow up a submarine. Backtracking is atrocious here too. Gotta go downstairs to find a key in a hidden vault, then take it back up to open the explosives room, then take the explosives back down to blow up the sub. All the while Nazi's respawn on the way to make your life difficult. After a LONG time I meet up with Agent X with my getaway boat.

Except, he doesn't help me get away. He takes me to this giant battleship loaded with Nazi's and rottweilers. I have to take on a whole boatload of Nazi's including two suckers high atop a balcony toting rocket launchers. I made liberal use of my panzershreck's laser pointer. Fail coding FTW.

In the captain's room of the battleship is the big man himself: The player character calls him 'Adolf Fucking Hitler'. He's a monster generic that stands around doing nothing, except calling for those guards that I already took out. There is this gate switch next to him, but for some reason you can't pull it until Hitler's dead. But once you pull that switch, a German announcer starts a countdown (so that if you don't speak German, you won't know what's going on. Heck, earlier there was a number code in German that's required to get past a door)

I somehow made it to the Stargate before the countdown was up! It was tough, mind you, since Nazi soldiers and rottweilers appeared all over the dam place while I was rushing. I think I jumped thru the gate with a measly 14 HP. So then back to my little cabin in Denver and the Madame anachronistically shows up at my door. I suppose she wants to do some thing offscreen. Oh well, credits do take a while to roll through.