Train DLTK Comments

I had quite a bit to say about Train DLTK when I finished it, and my comments wouldn't fit in the description of the YouTube video. So, I'll put them here instead.

Dark License to Kill (DLTK) is the made-up fifth difficulty in GoldenEye. In DLTK, you maximize the enemy statistics in 007 mode:

Enemy health: 1000%

Enemy damage: 1000%

Enemy accuracy: 100%

Enemy reaction speed: 100%

With these settings, enemies take about 10 headshots to kill, they usually kill you in one hit, they rarely miss, and they react quickly.

Higher quality version:

http://www.gamefront.com/files/20650904/train_dltk_1_05_37_abridged.mp4

I cut out most of the karate chopping for this video. An unabridged version is available here:

http://www.gamefront.com/files/20650652/train_dltk_1_05_37.mp4

This is by far the hardest DLTK level I've beaten. There are body armor guards, ZMG guards with ridiculous reaction speed, lots of randomness, and potential ammo shortages. Although Caverns also has BA guards and ZMG guards, there are plenty of places where you can shoot them safely.

In the first room, there are four white BA guards. It's not too hard to kill them, but in order to do so without wasting a lot of ammo, I blow up two of them. You need to take off their BA before you can blow them up. The boxes produce small explosions centered at the point where your last bullet hit, so you have to aim carefully to make the explosion reach the guard you're trying to kill. It's better to miss the box than to hit it in the wrong place. After blowing up two guards and shooting one to death, I sneak over to the last one, watch laser his BA off, and chop him to death. He doesn't take many chops, but I cut out the chopping anyway (as mentioned above, an unabridged version is available if you need your karate fix). Guards have trouble hitting boxes right next to them, so this method of killing him is reasonably safe.

There are two black guards in the second room who spawn in random positions. They have twice as much health as normal guards, but no BA. Sometimes, one of them runs into the first room, so I wait a little while for him. If he does run in, I can blow up a box to kill him easily with only three laser units. No one came in, though, so I had to kill both black guards in the second room.

The doors to the second room open from right to left, but it's safer to approach the room from the right. What this means is that I have to manipulate the doors a little every time I want to open them. If I were to open the second door and back up while moving to the right, I would probably get killed.

In the first part of the second room, there are four white guards. The one in the middle and the one in the back have BA. After blowing up the first non-BA guard, I take off the middle guard's BA and attempt to blow him up. Ideally, the explosion will kill both the middle guard and the remaining non-BA guard, though it usually only kills the middle guard. Strangely, it seems to have only killed the remaining non-BA guard in this run, so I had to finish off the middle guard by shooting him. I usually kill the back guard by chopping him, but he was standing so close to the boxes on the left that he was just begging to be blown up.

In the second part of the second room, there are four white guards, one of whom has BA. One or two of the aforementioned black guards might be there as well. For some reason, the guards saw me before they usually do, but I didn't get shot. While I was approaching the metal crates, one guard was killed by an exploding box (listen carefully to hear his groan), but I didn't know whether he was black or white. You want to blow up the black guards because they have twice as much health as normal guards and saving ammo is important. Depending on where the black guards are, this can be easy or hard. Sometimes, there are no nearby boxes and you just have to take the ammo loss of shooting or lasering them to death. I was able to blow up one of the black guards, but the other was in a weird spot. I couldn't blow him up and I couldn't hit him. Thankfully, he moved a little and I was able to laser him. The remaining white guards usually aren't too tough. The last one was in an annoying place this time, though, and it took some time for him to move.

There are six guards in the next room who will come after you if you stay in a certain area close to the door long enough. I don't know exactly how it works, but it seems like there is a trigger zone and each guard waits until you've spent a certain number of frames there before coming after you; they don't necessarily come all at once. There are several situations like this in the level, and I handle each one more or less the same way: spend a little while in the trigger zone, then run to safety, wait for the guards to come, and kill them. Repeat until you've killed as many as you want to. This can take a while, so you won't miss a whole lot if you skip ahead to about 23:45. At that point, I had killed four of the six and I considered it relatively safe to wait by the door for the rest. The sixth usually doesn't even come through the doors. This run was no exception; I killed him while he was still in the third room.

There are two remaining guards in the third room: one in the bathroom near the entrance and one in a side room down the hall. I don't know exactly what causes the bathroom guy to come out, but moving back and forth a little seems to help. Sometimes he shoots at you, but I don't think he can hit you through the door. Once he's dead, I have to lure the last guy toward me. In this run, though, he was already most of the way down the hall, so I chopped him to death. I then went back through the second room to pick up any ammo I missed and make sure that I destroyed the first two brake units.

There's a group of four guards in the fourth room who run into the third room when activated by a trigger zone like the one I mentioned above. I take them out from a side room with windows and a glass door.

In the fourth room, there are two guys in the hall whose positions seem to be a little random. There can be situations where it's hard to shoot the first in the head without standing in range of the second. In this run, though, I had no such trouble. There's another group of trigger zone guards ahead: two in a side room next to the one I hide in and one in the bathroom at the end of the hall. If you have to deal with more than one at a time, it's easy to waste a bunch of laser units on them. This time, though, they came one at a time, so I was able to conserve ammo pretty well. The final guard in the fourth room can be chopped without much difficulty.

In the next few rooms, there's a lot of randomness to deal with. There are several non-BA black guards whose positions can vary. According to Adam Bozon, there are always four. Each guard can have either a D5K or double ZMGs; if they have ZMGs, their reaction speed is very high. There are also two sets of trigger zone BA guards: a set of three and a set of one. One of the four non-BA guards can also behave like a trigger zone guard if he spawns in a certain place.

In the fifth room, there were no guards. It's better to have a guard here so there will be fewer in the following rooms. For some reason, you can open locked doors through walls; I use this glitch to take out a trigger zone BA guard before even reaching his trigger zone (he's the set of one I mentioned). He gave me double ZMGs, which are useful in this section since the black guards have lots of health.

I need to be very careful when dealing with the guards in the sixth room. I was reluctant to move out and shoot the first guard because there might have been a guard right next to him. Thankfully, the first guard came into the fifth room and I was able to chop him. There was another guard in the sixth room in a very unfavorable position. You can't creep around the corner to kill him because he can shoot you through it. So, I peeked in and out of his line of sight until he fired, then rushed in and killed him. I used a lot of ammo, but one of the reasons I was so careful to conserve ammo earlier in the level was so I didn't have to be stingy while fighting the guards in this section.

Once the sixth room is clear, I have a set of three trigger zone guards to deal with. They can have D5Ks or ZMGs, and their amount of BA and underlying health seems to vary. I use one of the side rooms with windows to kill them. Their AI is strange; they will pursue you and shoot quickly, but once they've shot at you, they start moving slower and reacting sluggishly. They eventually snap out of it and start moving and reacting quickly, but their dazed state is still useful because they rarely open doors while in it, making them easy to kill through the glass. It's hard to know how many are after you because they sometimes take a long time to reach the fourth room, so after killing the first one, I waited a while before going back to lure the others.

Once all three trigger zone guards are dead, I use the aforementioned door glitch to open up both bathrooms in the little hallway after the sixth room. I had never made it past this part before, so I was very careful here, but it turned out that there were no guards in the next room. The remaining two were in the hallway with the second-to-last brake unit, where they can be killed easily. After doing so, I take out the lone white guard near the final brake unit.

As soon as all the brake units are destroyed, two blue-hat BA guards (the toughest kind in the level) will come out of the final room and start looking for you. I save the brake unit in the fourth room for last so that I can get to my safe spot behind the glass immediately. I kill these guards the same way I kill the trigger zone guards earlier in the level.

I got the idea to destroy most of the locks on the floor in the final room before Trevelyan sees me from an old post on the-elite by Spider Waffle. I initially planned on using his suggested strategy of killing the three guards outside, coming in and killing Ourumov, and leaving just after Natalya cracks the password. The problem is that because Ourumov has 1000% health, he takes a little while to kill. Natalya doesn't start working until a certain amount of time after he dies, so she's likely to die in the explosion. I was able to get her out in time by using the weapon combination glitch to use a ZMG and the watch laser at the same time, but this method was too difficult to rely on at the end of such a hard level. I decided to check Adam Bozon's run to see how he did the end. It turns out that if you are far enough down the side of the train, Natalya won't realize that you've left and she'll keep working. You can trigger the ending so that the screen fades before the explosion occurs, magically saving Natalya. So, the strategy is to go outside and start working on the guards, go back in and kill Ourumov before he shoots Natalya, go back out and finish the guards, then get far away so Natalya completes the objectives.

With this strategy, the ending isn't hard. I was a little low on watch laser and had plenty of ZMG ammo, so I shot some of the locks instead of lasering them. There are three guards outside. The left and rights guards have BA and will stand still. The middle one doesn't have BA and will run toward you. The strategy for the first time I go outside is to shoot the right guard until the middle guard starts running, then shoot a box to blow up the middle guard, then finish off the right guard. If I have time left (and I often do), I take off the left guard's BA. When I went through the floor, I was so nervous that I could barely find the double ZMGs among my weapons. Then, after killing the right and middle guards, I panicked and came in a few seconds earlier than I needed to. I killed Ourumov and went back outside, then started shooting the left guard. My hands were shaking at this point and I felt like I was running out of time, so I left before I was really sure that the left guard was dead. I was afraid he was going to shoot me in the back, but I guess one of my last bullets killed him. From there, it was just a matter of entering the loading zone at the right time, which is easy to do.

I've now beaten every level except Silo and Streets on DLTK. I'll probably do Streets next. I haven't tried it, so it's hard to gauge whether it will be easier or harder than Train. I have a hunch it will be a little easier, though.