The infamous sewer level. Not one of the best parts of the game.
There are other combat-heavy parts of the game, particularly in the end game (which is a bunch of combat sequences stringed together), but none of them are as long as the Hollywood Sewers (if you take it as a single instance and not three divided by those breaks I was talking about.)
This really is a slog. Even cutting through it and skipping most of the combat, we still spent 15 minutes at this. Playing through it straight, it’s about a half hour, if you know where you’re going. The first time I played through this took me two hours, wandering around, getting lost, and thoroughly exploring every branch (in return for no loot).
But there’s not a lot to talk about here, so let’s just wait around until anaphysik shows up and makes fun of my pronunciation again. As a bonus, he’ll almost certainly use IPA, which means I still won’t be able to pronounce anything correctly because I understand IPA less well than I understand Greek (and I’ve only studied Latin.)
Next episode will be the Nosferatu warrens, which will be far more interesting.
You probably did the right thing to no-clip through.
CHEATERS.
I’ll give you a break and prevent anaphysik from giving you IPA… by providing the IPA myself: “Vozhd” is actually pronounced /voʂtʲ/
Heh. Okay, I’ll give you another break and say the closest American English equivalent is “vosht.” (pronounce the “o” like in “bode”). It’s an archaic Russian word for “master,” particularly common in Old Church Slavonic. (Yay Wiktionary!)
If done “properly,” the position of your tongue in /ʂ/ is more like how about half of English speakers pronounce “r” (if you stick a toothpick in your mouth while saying “rrrrrr” and hit the bottom of your tongue, you’re among that half; otherwise, congratulations, that half will wonder why you find it so easy to pronounce “r” the French way!) Ignore the superscript j; that just means the /t/ is palatalized, which is something English speakers in general have a lot of trouble with, and the commonness of which in Russian is a large part of that “cottonballs-in-the-mouth” aspect of a Russian accent.
And now that the useless linguistic information is out of the way, I’d like to mention that I did once pick up a crossbow in one of the earlier patched versions of the game (back when there was only one unofficial patch, and it was almost exclusively bugfixes. I only played the unpatched version for about a week, before I hit a game-breaking bug, although I don’t remember what it was). I don’t think I ever got one in the Ash Rivers quest, though; it was with a Gangrel who I purposely kept on the edge of a Masquerade-breaking game-over (mostly through high-level Protean), and I got a couple of crossbows from the Hunters all over L. A. It was a pretty rare drop, though. Now, the katana, that I didn’t get till I bought it in Chinatown.
Whoops, forgot to mention, “pruning hook,” not “billhook.” A billhook is an actual polearm (kind of a stripped-down halberd, although historically it was more likely a predecessor to an actual halberd), while a pruning hook is basically a saw on the end of a long stick. Yes, sorry, I’m very pedantic.
Oh, also, an “edit comment” feature would be nice (although I can certainly understand the difficulties in implementing it). Or is that only available if I sign in with WordPress or Facebook?
It’s probably not available because WordPress doesn’t make it available. I’m not running my own site with a WordPress plug-in; this is just a domain registered with WordPress itself.
Though it might also have been because you weren’t an approved commenter yet, though that is no longer the case.
I’ve never been able to edit my comments on your site, so it’s probably the first (just isn’t available).
I didn’t say anything because /I’d already covered it/ in the comments for Episode 30 http://krellen.net/2013/03/04/vtm-bloodlines-episode-30/
More importantly, for vozhd I *skipped the IPA* and went straight to things krellen might understand.
I also didn’t respond because I can never tell if krellen is being a playful jerk or if he’s just being a jerk <_<
Always assume playful. Unless I pull a knife on you.