Always nice to see more people appreciating OR 2SP / C2C. One of my fave arcade racers.
I'm currently playing
Wrath of Earth with the intent of documenting it enough to do a walkthrough. It's an amazingly ambitious MS-DOS first person shooter that's a lot of fun to explore, even if it has some janky elements to it. It's hard to find any real discussion on it. While there's some videos here and there, there's a lot of disappointing Twitch footage of people who don't "get" the game complaining about how bad it is, and numerous "how do I solve X puzzle" posts that never got a response across the internet.
It turns out there's a detailed
Russian walkthrough but there's several inaccuracies, including that it complains that one of the later puzzles requires is bugged and requires brute forcing to complete. You have to turn 3 different valves on 3 different atmospheric processing pipes to one of 8 directions. It turns out this isn't true and no brute forcing or guesswork is required, the puzzle just requires a bit of thought and observation to work out what's expected of you (in part because there's no "you solved it" message, just a very slight hissing noise and moving machinery from one side of the room, and a big panel that now says "Atmopheric Processing" that lights up at the room entrance, which makes it a bit more obtuse):
There's an arrow showing which what the valve is turned. Because the pipes are atmospheric processing pipes and you're underground, and because all the pipes descend from the ceiling vertically with the arrows pointing up initially, you can deduce you likely have to turn the valves so the arrow is pointing to something else. If you look at the pipes, all 3 pipes exit at different angles, with two going into the floor and a third going back into the ceiling at an angle. The solution is to make the arrows point at the direction these pipes are going.
I also discovered a beneficial bug where you have to put 5 explosive charges in specific areas. Turns out you can place ALL 5 of them in one spot and then just leave the level, the only check for whether or not you've planted them all is if your inventory's empty. I accidentally placed 2 of them in one spot by accident and was worried I'd softlocked the game by not putting one in each of the 5 spots, but I tried beating the level and it counted it as a win! Oops! Speedrunners of the future will appreciate that info I hope.
edit: unfortunately this game has got a couple of soft lock bugs I've encountered later on in Aragon Satellite - Mining Complex (past the part where most complain or give up on the game!), one where a Lift Control Module you need to install failed to drop from the enemy that's supposed to drop it (I know where it's supposed to be because I used cheats to warp to that level to kill the enemy again and it dropped it fine the next time). There's also a mapping bug where an elevator only works one way, because they forgot to make sure you can operate the button from the other side (you can use the walk through walls cheat to get through it, the "elevator" is basically a teleporter behind a door).
edit2: Replaying this has reminded me how bad it ends up getting. It relies a lot on darkness to make things tough, but with corridors where there isn't room to dodge. Even on the default Easy mode, the later levels have mechs and aliens that can rip your shields apart in a few hits, and damage your HUD and weapon systems before you even take physical health damage. The major issues with the game don't really pop up until later, so I think it's interesting to see what the best looking FPS running on a heavily modified Wolfenstein 3D game looks like. But it's got some serious issues:
• Several bugs, including one that requires cheating to progress (!!).
• The shots of your main weapons are so big and centered onscreen that you can't see anything when firing.
• The lack of a spreadfire, or a hitscan weapon makes sniping unnecessarily tricky. Doom & Quake's shotguns were a great tool that's sorely. Catacomb Abyss lets you rapid fire for coverage, whereas doing that here with the Rapid Ion Cannon is a good way to sap your battery for minimal effect.
• The lock-on system is flaky and way too wide; you'll often lock onto an enemy behind a wall while trying to shoot one in front of you. The only non-battery weapon that doesn't lock on and thus works well in any situation are your very limited Dumbfire Rockets. The Plasma Cannon can be used on enemies that resist locks too, but it'll prioritize lockable targets, which is a problem if that's not what's in front of you!
• The strongest weapon, the Guided Missiles, can't be used on half the enemies in the game, including all the high tier enemies! You can't even fire it unless you have a lock on, which means you're often encouraged to use it first on fairly weak targets, just so you have other non-battery weapons to use on the mechs that resist lock ons.
• You really can't hold much in the way of ammo. It gives the game a very survival-horror kind of feel which is nice, until you get to the super dense levels that are sparse on weapon caches, and the larger enemy hordes that basically force you to play conservatively and hoard your ammo.
• The puzzles vary widely in quality. Some of them are pretty good, others feel a bit trial and error-y (the switch puzzle for the teleporter at the start of level 4, having to find the Laser Cutter to destroy the cables that can't just be shot for some reason.
• It takes way too long to recharge in lit areas compared to how often it feels the game wants you to escape and recharge at times.
• Levels are huge, so it's easy to miss that one key item an enemy dropped that you need, forcing you to explore everywhere with Search Mode to find it. Combining the Search and Attack modes into one honestly would have saved a lot of switching and headache. The first alien homeworld level is particularly bad about this; if you miss the blue key card early on you'll have to backtrack through a huge portion of the level through multiple trapped conveyor belts!
• Search Mode notably does NOT alert you to switches or keycard readers on walls. This is rather obnoxious because of their relative importance; unlike something like Doom or Quake, the various things you can interact with on walls blend in a lot to the rest of the electronics in the environment. It gets especially bad when textures are reused for unique, completely different devices. You have to set a self destruct trigger at one point after inserting various control rods, and the panel you interact with is a unique new texture you've never seen before... but it's used in the next level multiple times as a Red Card reader for some reason! You might not even realize this, because to try using the card you have to enter your inventory and manually use it.
I love the game's aesthetics and atmosphere, but man, the game has a lot of janky elements and I can't seriously recommend it to anyone.
Oh well.
Has the full game plus both Expansions, and some new stuff I've only dabbled in, but it's well-loved and the architecture at least is mind-blowing. Cheap too, at least when I nabbed it on JPSN.
her design is intact - jug-ears and all - but now with more girl and less monkey. Hats off all round.
), they're all gonna laugh at you! Consider Notepad when handling Very Important Posts (pwhoaar 
some of my favourite tactics are thoroughly unrealistic.
I love it when the internet gives older games new leases on life like that. Sounds like an ornery sonofabitch by nature, but less crash bugs is always good. 
