daguru@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Da Guru) (02/23/91)
A lot of the traps/puzzles in the DM games invlove buttons and plates and doors and stuff. It's often easy to manipulate the stuff so that the trap is nullified with little or no effort. Example: In 'What was Above...', each pressure plate in the floor sent a fireball at you from the opposite wall. For those of us who didn't want to dodge nimbly, (and I DO mean NIMBLY), we could always just drop something on the plate and step out of the way. The fireball would fly on by, and then you could walk over the plate with nothing to worry about. I covered one side of the floor with shrieker pieces and left it at that. (The other side took care of regenerating rodents of unusual size...) On Fusing Lord Chaos: He ain't all THAT bright. Build a fluxcage around yourself, (one behind you, and one to either side), then step out. When LC follows you, he ends up in an almost completed cage. You just back up one more, cage his, then fuse away. I didn't even bother to kill the demons before I nuked him. The Dragon Level in DM-II: I call this level the Broiler steak house. Sure you can dance around the dragons and hit them from the side; you can even fry them with fireballs. There isn't any easier way to kill stuff in DM-II than by using poison clouds, however. The dragons are REAL suckers for this one. Just hit the square they're stuck in with three full-strength clouds and wait. Fifteen seconds later, chow time. On those that aren't stuck, get them in a corridor. Dragons will always seek to move out of the square that's poisoned. You just pick the square, and they'll move out of it...then back into it...then out of it...then back into it... Feel free to smack them with the Executioner or Diamond Edge when the opportunity presents itself. Remember that a dragon will fireball you or bite you if the cloud is negligible. In General: USE THE SAVE GAME FEATURE! You can do a lot of exploring, screw up, and then restart. Remember that you can have more than one save game disk, and therefore more than one saved game. Your position after being leveled depends on what you will be restarting from. Wanna jump down that pit? Save first. Don't know what kind of monsters are behind the door? Save the game. Not sure whether you're gonna make that dash for safety? Save it. What about this lever? What's it do? Save and find out. Also, remember that there isn't too much that you can't handle in the way of monsters. Traps will kill you, but monsters are only hazardous in large numbers. The exception to this are the flying mouths of death. (I forget the name, off-hand, but it is truly apt...) They have three mouths, full of sharp teeth, and it is best to think of them as pirahnas. Hungry ones! If you're weak and out of potions, you can always run... Lastly, don't forget, IF YOU RUN INTO A PROBLEM, GO AROUND IT. You don't need to kill every monster, nor solve every puzzle the way it was intended. Step back, take stock, and see if there's a different way to approach the difficulty. -Nick