So, I played through the mod last night. Very impressive work with the map construction, and I thought the addition of RPG elements (currency, dialogue, etc) was excellent.
The transit system was great (no more cycling through four turtles to get where I'm going!) but the look could stand to be made more consistent with the rest of the game. Oh, also, bug: For some reason, I was offered all the turtle locations, from the time I had found my second turtle. (With only one, it told me I had to find more. But once I had two, all the locations appeared in the transit dialog*.) I never did try going to a location I hadn't unlocked, because I wanted to play through without "cheating". Could give it a try, if you want...
* I've just realized that my brain makes a distinction between "dialogue" (conversation between characters, or sometimes between people in real life) and "dialog" (a structured text interaction between a user and a computer). I'd never noticed before that I did that... Though I also distinguish between theatres (where you see live performances of high-culture stuff like opera or ballet) and theaters (where you see movies).
(Warning! Spoilery spoilerful spoilers appear below!)I agree with Ryos, though, that the ending was a let down. Probably a tall order, but it would be pretty awesome if you could actually get Mithala and first-form Creator fighting each other, and have Elena need to either stay out of the cross fire, or join the fight on one side or the other. (You'd have to mark one or the other as a valid target, depending on dialogue... I'm sure the code would be complicated, but it seems like in theory it ought to be possible.) In any case, in the last couple segments, I wasn't entirely certain what was going on -- how much of the end was real, how much was delusion induced by Mia, what actually happened to Elena in the end... It'd also, obviously, be pretty fantastic if you could -- if your dialogue indicated that you wanted to -- fight Vedha at the end. Of course, that would require a LOT of scripting, since AFAIK Vedha has no combat script in the original game. (Also, maybe if you indicate in dialogue that you're aligning yourself on Vedha's side, you could join her in doing some part of the final-stage Creator fight. You could even get Dual Form as a merge between Elena and Vedha, so that you could complete the final section.) In either case, after the fight, you'd have a cut-scene explaining that Mia/Vedha was badly wounded, the Creator was not destroyed but was sufficiently mentally impaired by the encounter to keep him from interfering too much with Naija, and Elena ended up either dead or trapped somewhere that kept her out of Naija's story...
I only found 5 of the 6 large crystals, in large part because the World Map view was not working. The lower-right corner minimap was fine (and allowed me to notice the wormhole entrance easily -- it's a big pulsating white dot in the minimap!), but double-clicking it, or using the keyboard shortcut that in the main campaign brings up the world map, was non-functional. My understanding is that this is a glitch in the application, not the mod? Very unfortunate. In any case, with no way to consult a map to tell where I'd already been, it was difficult keeping track of where I might need to come back to with a different form, what areas I'd failed to explore, etc.
I did have one crash. (In case it matters, I'm running the new OSX version, 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard.) The first time I visited Old Fred, I talked with him, got the "fetch the soup" mission, then busted open Young Fred's jar and talked to him a bit, then on a whim clicked Old Fred again. Instead of going to dialog, the game completely froze, to the point that I couldn't even Cmd-Tab or Cmd-Q to get out of it. I had to hold down the power button to shut the machine off. (Fortunately, I'd saved at the crystal in the Veil shortly before finding the Freds' house.)
Also, I guess maybe I'm in the minority, but I found Old Fred more irritating than entertaining... Funny at first, but excessive.
Clearly, we should be able to find the other half of Young Fred's brain and return it to him in exchange for a treasure.
Finally: Do you think Alec intended for Vedha and Mia to be the same person, or for Vedha to be her shadow form? Or was that just something you came up with completely on your own?
