1st April 1995Following John McHugh's excellent complete solution to Exile, note that it's possible to cut down on all the travelling around during both the beginning and middle of the game's solution, by observing the following:
Just below the door under the surface of the planet's first gun-droid (the one everyone can get to), there are two strange half-circles on the wall in red. After you have blown up the door with the grenade, drop through it and remember your position near to this ornament then turn and face the vertical door which separates your cavern from the grenade droid, icer and protection suit.
This door is not all it appears to be and even with all passes collected, it can never be opened with the RCD. It can however, be passed through, with a little patience, force and luck. So, if you get through it at a very early stage, you can fill your pockets with grenades and get the icer and protection suit. Hence you avoid many of the problems you face in the earlier EUG solution where you wander the first caves unarmed and with a limited supply of grenades.
Okay, getting through said door. It's not tough once you've done it a few times but having said that, it can be tricky if you're not too good at flying directly into a particular pixel. What you need to do is hover off the ground and thrust right so Finn lays down. If you're at almost the right height, you will just glimpse one of the streams from the jetpack floating dead centre of the top semi-circle of the red ornament.
Thrust right as hard as possible treating the very small (one horizontal black pixel) gap at the top of the door as a crack that Finn can get through. If you come up fast enough (although don't use the booster as this can really confuse your ability in such a short space to hit the target directly) and your head goes into the pixel space, you'll see Finn squeezing slowly through the space. Don't let go of the thrust key in your excitement or he will just as quickly come bouncing back out again. Once through, remember your location a few times then go get those grenades!
On the subject of Exile, players might notice that Triax seems to have a little schizophenia about him when he tackles Finn. In point of fact, this is because there are two Triaxes; one which cannot enter water and is not affected by the grenades and another who can swim under the water. Notice also that the robot Chatter only ever fires at one of them. Weird, isn't it?
Dave E, EUG #19
