Myth@Bungie.Org

Ahhhh! There is nothing like a nice blood red carpet to brighten up a drab outdoor picnic. All you have to do is pull Balor's head off and step back, quickly.

And while most of us have done this at the end of the Last Battle, pitchie has managed to do this almost before the battle got started. As he explains:

After playing "The Last Battle" level over and over again, and dying over and over again, I decided it was time to get rid of Balor early, rather than face all the hordes throughout the level. The strategy was simple, but effective. I noticed in other levels of Myth that the Fallen Lords can only use their special weapons on units that are a certain distance away from their position. Otherwise, they are forced to fight hand to hand. Counting on this, I surrounded Balor from 3 or 4 positions so that he could not use his lightning sword. Realizing that the initial attack would not completely take him out, I set an additional trap with satchel charges.

And so he did, before Balor even had a chance to go into his song and dance about the Myrkridian standard, pitchie had jumped him and killed him (and in the process lost every Dwarf and Berserk he had). And while all this was going on, did any of Balor's buddies try to help him? No, not at all.

While this behavior may seem strange to many, the explanation is straightforward. pitchie managed to derail Bungie's unit scripting on this level. For the game to progress naturally, Balor and Alric have to go through a set series of three speeches. Remove Balor for the game early and most of the scripts which control the Dark units will fail. In this case, all the dark units were waiting on Balor to do his thing, after which they would get triggered and the real battles would begin.

Bungie never added to code to check if Balor was killed early. Why? Probably because in the original 1.0 Myth, the lower difficulty levels were geared to be much harder. Even on Timid, Balor was no pushover. But when Bungie created version 1.1 they made the game much easier on the lower difficulty levels. It became possible to kill Balor even if he is whacking away at your units.

And what did pitchie get for all his trouble? Well, that bit of fun cost him the game:

The problem was that the level didn't end when he was killed! After killing Balor, I continued on to kill every last enemy unit on the map, including the group of Fetch toward the end. Even then, the level would not end.

Well, you takes your chances and you pay the price, don't you?

Here is the film [mac] [win] of pitchie's game, which I have appropriately named "Balorus Interruptus."

But there is more!

This level is just chock full of ways to confuse Alric and Balor and derail the level. Check out as Jeremy Hildebrand traps Alric and waltzes around the map killing everybody. In keeping with the theme of this page, the film [mac] [win] is entitled "Alricus Interruptus." Be sure to catch Balor's teleportation trick when he frags two innocent Archers whose only crime was they happened to be standing in his favorite spot!

OK, enough! We get the idea here. Alricht, let's not Balabor the point.

ODERINT DUM METUANT

"Let them hate, provided that they fear."

Here is some interesting writing on the floor of the ruins where Balor makes it rain body parts. Looks like graffiti doesn't it?

Thanks to the very literate Astyanax for the translation.