RPG of Life - Boss Battle: CRANE FLY

My last playthrough of this level took me about 6 or 7 in-game hours, mostly because my items on hand were limited at the time and so I went for a stamina defeat rather than trying to kill the CRANE FLY outright - bad idea. The first thing you should know about the battle with the CRANE FLY is that there is no effective way to defeat it by draining its stamina; as long as the LIGHT is on, it will keep coming back, and you will get tired of chasing it back out of the room before it gets tired of creeping back in. If you can't summon the CAT but really, really want the no-kills achievement, your best bet to defeat the CRANE FLY is to wait until night, chase the CRANE FLY out of the room with the BROOM item, then turn on a LIGHT elsewhere in the house and make sure the room you are in is in total darkness. When your character falls asleep and wakes back up, you will have won the battle.

Other, much faster strategies include:

1) Middling strategy: Summon an NPC to deal with the CRANE FLY. I don't recommend it, as while waking up MOTHER and/or FATHER for this battle will result in a dead boss, first you'll have to sit through a series of long cutscenes in which they try to convince your character that he or she is overreacting to the presence of the CRANE FLY.


2) Good strategy: smash the CRANE FLY with one of the items in your inventory or in surrounding rooms. Try the BROOM item hiding in the BASEMENT. The BOOK or SHOE item may do just as well if the CRANE FLY is sitting still and within reach. Note that this approach won't work if you took the INSECTOPHOBIA hindrance.


3) Best strategy: summon the CAT NPC by going to the BASEMENT and opening the door. If the CAT is awake and in range, he will think he is being fed and come running. Pick up the CAT and carry him to where the CRANE FLY is, show it to him by pressing the Action Button, and put him down next to it. If the CAT catches the CRANE FLY before he becomes bored, he will eat it and you will win the battle without this counting as a kill. You may have to either summon the CAT more than once or shut him into the room with the CRANE FLY if the CRANE FLY can evade him for longer than his attention span lasts.

On this playthrough I had the CAT unlocked and was able to deal some damage to the CRANE FLY with the BOOK item before summoning the CAT, who caught and ate it immediately. The whole thing lasted less than twenty minutes. Lesson learned!

--Veronica--

Yeah, but is it tasty?

I'm not a big gamer, but for the last few weeks I've been following Simon through Metal Gear Solid 3 and acting as his spotter. MGS plays like an interactive film, which I love, and divides itself pretty fairly between things that make perfect sense (e.g. if you blow up the enemy food supplies, the soldiers you encounter will be weaker) and things that are perfectly absurd (e.g. if you eat the glowing mushrooms, all the batteries you're carrying will be recharged.) I really recommend the series for jumpy types like me who tend to panic when things charge out at you: much of MGS 3 focuses on survival and sneaking around rather than on direct firefights. The radio game's main method of transmitting information to the player is through often-hilarious radio conversations with NPCs back at headquarters, and if you're curious about whatever new food the PC Snake has just caught, you can just dial up Paramedic. She'll happily reel off a veritable encyclopedia entry on Garials or Russian Inkcaps, while Snake just wants to know how the darn thing tastes.

I'm also not a big cook, but every now and then I get the urge to make something, and the results can be a little...hit-or-miss. Oftentimes I leave it to Simon and his barely-functioning nasal passages to finish the leftovers since he can't taste much anyway. Such was the case last week when the amount of spice in the chicken curry left my mouth in pain. I thought I'd heard the last of the Disastrous Thai Chicken Curry of '12 until Simon brought it up today and then asked me what the leaf in there had been. "Uh, that was a bay leaf. It's just there for flavoring, you're not supposed to eat it." Naturally, he already had...sigh. I quickly went to look up what happens if you eat a bay leaf, and we proceeded to have the following conversation.

"Well, it says here that it's not toxic, but it's not exactly good for you..."

"Hey..."

"...they're just really crunchy. 'The sharp edges may be painful to stomach linings, intestinal walls, and mouths'..."

"Hey."

"...but they're a good source of antioxidants. What?"

"But is it tasty?"

"...Snake."

"What?"

"(sigh.) Yes. The Yahoo!Answers entry says it should taste pretty good."

"That's all I needed to know."

Why do I have a feeling I'm headed for Snake and Paramedic cosplays next?

--Veronica--