Desmond S4

Desmond Sequence 04

Just as an objective observation the security measures that are cropping up in this level remind of the sort of thing used in bad spy movies...  You know, moving laser beams?  Right... So anyway as the memory begins you once again find yourself standing in a long hall and the familiar wall opens as you approach it, revelaing the aforementioned moving laser-beam security scheme, which is seems is a reaction to the memory leak that the Animus detected in the core.

The trick to getting past it is to go right through the center of it, and the same is true with the next one, though with the third one the timing is a bit tight so you will want to ease right up to a point where you are almost touching it and, when it is opening as soon as it is wide enough to admit you, run like hell through it!

At the other end you will as you pass through the hall and into the maze of horizontal laser bars instinct will have you turn to the right and follow the obvious path -- do not do that.  First, turn to the left and left again and grab the first Multi-Player Emblem that is secreted here beside the entrance behind the left-hand set of beams.  Now you can follow the path and your instinct to the other side, where the beams blocking the exit will drop allowing you to pass through!

-- The Pit of Laser --

Seriously you encounter a pit with a bunch of the laser-beam grids in it.  Time your drop to miss as many as you can and then when you reach the bottom ignore the pair of well-lit to the left and right and head instead into the darkened passage ahead of you.

At the end of this passageway is a light bridge and another set of grids -- work your way over the bridge (which by the way is built on top of one of those fields that collapses your blocks), and on the other side you will trigger a trap that shuts off the bridge and drops some of the laser grids giving you access to the data stream...

-- Navigating the Data Stream --

The important thing for you to remember is that getting caught in the laser beams is death.  Falling into the data pit below is death.  But you need to negotiate around the outer edges of the room in a counter-clockwise direction, avoiding both types of death while efficiently managing to move...  So, begin by testing the stream to see in which direction it flows and then start on the side that gives you the most leeway and cross to the corner ahead which is a defacto safety zone.  Once you reach it, drop down and start the process over, rinsing and repeating (as they say) to get to the next corner, and so on...

The bitch to this is if you screw up and get dead, you start from scratch all the way back on the other side of the bridge.  Sorry...

Desmond's Fourth Memory: Life in NYC

The third set is a little more complex because it is bordered on both sides by the collapsing zones, so if you go too far to the left or the right, you die and have to start again...  And yes, this has serious potential for being frustrating but you will not allow it to get to that point, right mates?  Right!

Halfway across on the right is the landing for the door we originally entered through that you can use as the safety point and, if you do step onto it the game checkpoints there, so if you end up dying you restart from there there instead.

Once you get to the corner the last bit to the glowing hand is cake and, once you activate that the light bridge returns with an extension to the platform with the hand so it is all that much the easier!

Finding the Portal

-- The Way Out --

After you activate the glowing hand you get another brief chat from Desmond -- this time about girls -- and the forcefield has now dropped allowing you access to the exit down the light bridge extension and to the right.  As you enter this new area you are confronted by a turning and complicated laser wall...

Remember coming into contact with the laser is bad for you so do not do that, right?

As you enter this final chamber if you look straight ahead through the laser wall you will spot the second (and last) Multi-Player Emblem hovering just below the large black beam in the center of the chamber a bit to the right.  That is our priority for the moment, so work your way into the room and around to the left so you can insert yourself through the flow and under the beam, making it a simple matter to collect that Emblem.

With the Emblem collected your priority now shifts to getting the hell out of here without getting hurt -- but even if you do make a mistake and fall or get fried remember that when you collect items in the game it auto-saves afterward, so you only have to collect them once.

With the moving wall being somewhat predictable you should view the view the tops of the beams that run through the center of the room as logical waypoints and safe zones, so instead of targeting the exit as your destination, target each of the beams, and work your way through the room that way.

Once you reach the exit head in along the path and things get a lot blurry -- but that is supposed to happen.  In the Portal Chamber there are some moving lights -- it is not clear if they are dangerous or not but avoiding them anyway is not bad logic.  Pass through them to the portal, step inside, and you have completed yet another Desmond Memory!  Well done!  Good on ya!  Congratulations!   That is four down and one to go, two more Emblems unlocked in Multi-Player, and you have unlocked another Achievement -- this one called "The Rotten Apple" (20 GS) for completing Desmond Sequence 4 (of course) and how about that?

You know the addition of Gamer Score to the LIVE environment and our Gamer Tags was a brilliant idea, so brilliant in fact that it is difficult to comprehend the truth of it...  For example did you know that originally both Achievements and Gamer Score were an after thought and not part of the primary design for Xbox LIVE?  Or that they almost canceled both when they ran into complications with the database that is used to keep track of them?  How about the fact that at launch the developmental beta launch when the system was presented to the developers and games studios Microsoft had not even bothered to formalize the Achievements Program?

Seriously, there were no rules!  You can actually sort of see that when you look at the Achievements in the launch titles and the ones that followed in that first year, as some did not include any Achievements and most of the games that did either had them all lumped into a tiny group or spread out into a huge pile, and the process by which they were unlocked was both boring and predictable...  The sudden and pretty much totally unexpected way that gamers glommed onto both Achievements and Gamer Score ended up forcing the gnomes at LIVE to devise the basic rules and then enforce them, which is how we ended up with the system that is in place today!