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 What is La Mulana? In short it's an action platformer with a heavy emphasis in puzzles and riddles. You play as not-Indiana Jones looking for your father in the ancient ruins of La Mulana. It starts off innocently enough with the only plot hook being 'search for Dad' but it expands more on this as it goes. Notably however the game is balls to the wall difficult in the puzzles that it expects you to solve. I don't know anybody who has 100% beat the game without the help of walkthroughs though I'm sure within 10 posts somebody will show up to talk about how they totally did. The reason I'm doing this LP is that this is one of my favorite games of all time, one of those games that the second I played it I knew I had to LP it. When I beat the game in the first place I used a guide for much of it and often times just following what the guide told me to do I had no idea how I was supposed to figure out this stuff on my own. So I went back through the game again and this time just tried to figure out why i was doing the things I needed to do. This turned out to be as much, if not more, fun than the first playthrough, so I decided that a proper LP should not just show off the game but the way you are actually meant to solve the challenges it throws at you. With no further ado here is La Mulana The Let's Play Episode 1 - Youtube Episode 2 - Youtube Episode 3 - Youtube Episode 4 - Youtube Episode 5 - Youtube Episode 6 - Youtube Episode 7 - Youtube Episode 8 - Youtube Episode 9 - Youtube Episode 10 - Youtube Episode 11 - Youtube Episode 12 - Youtube Episode 13 - Youtube Episode 14 - Youtube Episode 15 - Youtube Episode 16 - Youtube Episode 17 - Youtube Episode 18 - Youtube Episode 19 - Youtube Episode 20 - Youtube Episode 21 - Youtube HELL TEMPLE - Youtube Hard Mode My friend Olesh decided that he would do some hardmode videos to show the difference between the two. Episode 1 - Youtube Episode 2 - Youtube Episode 3 - Youtube Episode 4 - Youtube Episode 5 - Youtube Episode 6 - Youtube Episode 7 - Youtube Episode 8 - Youtube Episode 9 - Youtube Episode 10 - Youtube Episode 11 - Youtube Agent355 fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Oct 26, 2014 |
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Mar 31, 2014 19:19
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| # ? Jun 10, 2023 07:38 |
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Reserved for future use maybe I suppose. Also I will likely be expanding and improving upon the OP as I think of more things that should be included. Agent355 fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Mar 31, 2014 |
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Mar 31, 2014 19:20
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I got this game from a sadistically inclined friend of mine, never had enough patience with it to get past the second boss; the combination of clunky movement and fast attacks just frustrated me way too much. That being said, I was always interested in how stupid the puzzles and bosses get, so I'm going to watch this with great interest.
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Mar 31, 2014 19:30
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Since this is the first area, it's really what? It's really what?? I must know.
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Mar 31, 2014 22:22
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Suspenseful, obviously. (it's really close to town)
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Mar 31, 2014 22:30
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This is a legit great game. I wouldn't completely agree that the clues are ALL in the game (there one very specific thing you have to do I just can't see a single hint for, but that's way in the future so talk about it then, and it's only one thing) but it is very well designed, just not in a very friendly way. Also I was already listening to the music when I saw this thread. It's amazing.
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Mar 31, 2014 23:30
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This is one of those games that's sitting on my desktop daring me to pick it up, but I'm too drat scared. Thanks for taking this one for the team, Agent355
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Apr 1, 2014 00:38
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I love La Mulana. I've used the walkthrough for about a third of the puzzles, but only after i failed trying it on my own/situations where I didn't even know what I was doing wrong because the puzzle was so cryptic I didn't know it existed.
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Apr 1, 2014 01:07
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Are you going to go through "that" temple? (if that's too spoilery I will remove it... tried to make it as vague as possible)
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Apr 1, 2014 02:09
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La Mulana was not made by one guy. I believe there were three developers on the original and considerably more on the remake. I enjoyed the first video!
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Apr 1, 2014 02:21
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shalafi4 posted:Are you going to go through "that" temple? (if that's too spoilery I will remove it... tried to make it as vague as possible) I wasn't thinking about it but I just might, depends on how things are going as we get closer to it.
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Apr 1, 2014 02:29
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Agent355 posted:I wasn't thinking about it but I just might, depends on how things are going as we get closer to it. Oh come on, you pretty much have to! It's certainly not for our sick pleasure or anything... 
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Apr 1, 2014 05:02
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Good to see you back Agent, but I have a blood vendetta against you due to how you finished your Blood Bowl LP. Won't stop me from following this LP of course.
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Apr 1, 2014 05:26
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SimianNinja posted:Oh come on, you pretty much have to! If nothing else, I totally want to see how "finding your way into that place" fits in with this thread's theme of "find it on your own through in game hints." I'm finally to that part of the game and gently caress it, walkthrough time to get into it. The path to enter is one of the most obscure puzzles in any game I'm familiar with.
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Apr 1, 2014 05:31
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PotatoManJack posted:Good to see you back Agent, but I have a blood vendetta against you due to how you finished your Blood Bowl LP. Sorry! Life got hard. Me and Yapo are going to play his LP norse vs my LP skaven and record/commentate it at some point. So we can have something resembling a conclusion. Besides johnny was dead, there was no LP anymore 
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Apr 1, 2014 05:42
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Agent355 posted:Sorry! Life got hard. But no one will ever get to see the amazing bits of the last game played by your rats. You know, the one against Underworld that had a TTM and a pair of twins dying in the same turn. But I'll stop hijacking this thread now. La Mulana looks cool - I think I might get it on Steam
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Apr 1, 2014 06:59
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I solved about two of the Gate's puzzles on my own.  I never thought to try whipping those blocks multiple times, especially with lasereye watching. Since I was terrible at this game, I'm looking forward to your approach.
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Apr 1, 2014 07:21
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I love La-Mulana! I played the free version a lot (with a guide by my side of course). In fact, La-Mulana got me into watching LPs! I used some DC video to get me through a part in the game, and from that I started watching LPs in general and found this forum. One thing is that I accidentally did my first playthrough on hard mode. Whoops. Was fun anyway. I have the PC version (bought it as soon as it reached Steam), but haven't played it much because I'm a more casual player these days.
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Apr 1, 2014 09:04
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You'll get a much better encode if you scale your video to at least 720 lines before uploading to YouTube. If you're recording at 480 lines then scaling to 2x will do.
jawbroken fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 13:31
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jawbroken posted:You'll get a much better encode if you scale your video to at least 720 lines before uploading to YouTube. If you're recording at 480 lines then scaling to 2x will do. The first video was done on camtasia, but now my free trial is up so the second video is getting done on premiere. It's going to take a bit for me to figure out the programs, luckily the beginning of the game doesn't require heavy editing. I didn't notice a particular problem with the quality of the first video (yah it's standard def but the game looks about like that anyhow) but I'm making sure to scale up episode 2 and see how it comes out. Should be up ~friday.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:50
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Oh man, I love this game. I'm glad it's finally being done! Would anybody care if I made some effortposts about the various archaeological stuff you can scan?
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Apr 2, 2014 07:36
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SourceElement posted:Oh man, I love this game. I'm glad it's finally being done! Please do, then I can edit them into the second post and pass it off as me doing my homework and being informative and stuff. What is that thing you see when you first fall down into la mulana, some sort of tower things, I examined it in the video but I've never heard of it before. Also this is unrelated but I learned something about hard drives today. My video was encoding way slower than previous LPs I've done and I wondered if the external hard drive was the problem. I'd never really thought about it before but apparently they're slow as balls, I'm currently transferring the 33 gb raw video file to an internal one since it's still quicker to transfer and then encode than it is to encode directly. It's going to take 11 hours to move the file and it goes at less than a mb per second. I never would have guessed.
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Apr 2, 2014 07:52
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Gonna have to reinstall the game to play alongside the LP to look at all the various scannable background images!Agent355 posted:Please do, then I can edit them into the second post and pass it off as me doing my homework and being informative and stuff. Lore post moved below! DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 08:19
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I loved this game and even backed La-Mulana 2 but think that I would have had a lot more patience for the puzzles if there was a better way of recording and referencing scanned tablets. Sure, there's a way to do that in the game but it's kind of clunky and annoying to do if you're looking at them a lot. I really hope that they improve the interface in the sequel so you're better able to type out notes (instead of doing it all freehand) and reference tablet hints. Then again, something tells me that might just have been a design decision on the part of the developers and shouldn't expect a change  .
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Apr 2, 2014 09:09
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SourceElement posted:Gonna have to reinstall the game to play alongside the LP to look at all the various scannable background images! Agent hasn't show it off yet but you can scan archaeological objects in the background with the hand scanner.   e: Actually he did show that off. 
uPen fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Apr 3, 2014 |
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Apr 3, 2014 05:02
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Oh La Mulana, I've tried getting into this game several times but there was always something (probably my ineptitude.) holding me back. I was able to clear out the first area with relative ease but after that it just felt too cryptic for me to continue. It'll be interesting to see how the game plays out.
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Apr 3, 2014 06:30
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Oh hey, my favorite game on Steam right now! I bought this for myself and anyone who wanted it in my circle of friends, and the feeling of having a group of people figuring the game out was awesome. Now I can nearly get myself going on a speedrun of the whole game, so watching this will be fun.
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Apr 3, 2014 07:35
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Hey who wants a new episode? Episode 2 This time we're going to finish the first area up proper.
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Apr 4, 2014 18:04
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One thing you seem to have missed in the first video is that the first time you enter La-Mulana there's a short intro to the normal background music, as if to say 'the true La-Mulana starts here'.
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Apr 4, 2014 18:21
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It kinda irks me that the ankhs don't look like ankhs. At all. I mean, there's a lot of archeological trivia in there and they mess up something this basic.
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Apr 4, 2014 19:26
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anilEhilated posted:It kinda irks me that the ankhs don't look like ankhs. At all. I mean, there's a lot of archeological trivia in there and they mess up something this basic.  The original game was aesthetically in the style of games from the late '80s, which naturally includes getting some religious symbolism completely wrong.
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Apr 4, 2014 20:19
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  That gate is a candi bentar, a Balinese split gate. It's a gate used in Balinese temples to connect the outside world with the temple. It is exclusively found in the "nista mandala" zone, which is the outermost region of a temple. It being in the entrance to the ruins is actually pretty cool, because it is serving its purpose in a manner of speaking: it's depicted in the tunnel connecting the ruins to the outside world.    These faces seen all throughout the Gate of Guidance are based on the colossal Olmec heads seen in the La Venta ruins in Mexico. Wikipedia claims there are at least seventeen of them and they all are incredibly ancient. They were carved from basalt boulders in between 1500 and 1000 BC. Each colossal head has its own distinct headdress and they are all thought to represent powerful Olmec rulers.    The mural is found in the room where Agent355 killed the two red skeletons. Also, I know it's somewhat of a cop out, but there is a more appropriate place in the game to discuss this engraving.   This mural is in the background of the block puzzle room. It is an actual stele (a carved wooden or stone slab) found at the La Venta ruins in Mexico, and the developers of La-Mulana actually did a pretty dang good job translating it to the game. Archaeologists have given it the descriptive title of "La Venta Stela 19," and all wikipedia says on the subject is that it is the earliest known depiction of a feathered serpent in Mesoamerica. Pretty cool if you ask me!    This carving is found in the room with the one-way door and like six kangaroo rats. Also skeletons. Lots of skeletons. Anyway, Oannes is a being from Babylonian mythology with the torso of a man and the lower body of a fish. Except he also had legs under his fish tail. According to the mythology, he taught mankind wisdom, how to write, and "instructions in the various sciences." Alternate history buffs regard Oannes as being proof that aliens visited Earth in ancient times, while historians believe Oannes to be another name for the great Babylonian sage "Adapa." Honestly, this carving feels really out of place in this zone. There is a much better place in the game for it to be, and I'm not really sure why a Babylonian demigod is featured in the primarily Mesoamerican focused Gate of Guidance.     Finally, we have the boss of the Gate of Guidance, Amphisbaena. Now, this boss is interesting because not only is it a mythological being, but it is actually a real animal as well! On the mythological side, Amphisbaena is a beast from Greek mythology. After Perseus cut the head from Medusa, he felt the need to fly over the Libyan desert while holding the gorgon's head. When the severed head dripped blood onto the desert sands, this beast was born. It is said to be venomous, and either eats ants or corpses. No, really. Wikipedia says it eats both.  On the biological side, Amphisbaena is also a genus for a special kind of legless lizards, often referred to as worm lizards. Taking a few steps back, there is also a wider group (a clade) known as Amphisbaenia. Judging from the map on wikipedia, these lizard worms are a mostly tropical clade, living in and around the equator and a ways south of it. 
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Apr 4, 2014 20:48
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Diggin' the educational segments in this thread already!
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Apr 4, 2014 20:52
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I didn't expect to learn in my own LP 
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Apr 4, 2014 21:03
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Thanks for playing this. Looks cool to watch, but I can tell you I prolly would have already lost my temper with it and uninstalled it, moving it to my "Someday" file. And I am loving the educational segments. Just don't get carried away and pull a Skippy Granola on us.
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Apr 4, 2014 22:12
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Maybe i'm getting a bit ahead of myself talking about this so early, but isn't there a puzzle in the game, at least in the original version of it, that you had to look at a read.me file to even have a chance at understanding what it wanted? It was either that for using the crypographic stuff you were talking about to figure out the order to somthing. Also you have Episode 1 repeated twice in your OP, the link itself to Episode 2 is fine, but you have Episode 1 Episode 1
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Apr 5, 2014 06:19
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Not that it matters much now that you have the grail (or even before you had it), but once you climb back to the room above the split gate carving, you can whip the left wall to create a shortcut back to town. It saves a couple of screens of hiking in the early game.
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Apr 5, 2014 09:28
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Yah a friend of mine who got me to play La Mulana in the first place pointed that out. I've gone through the game twice without knowing it existed. An interesting thing happened while I was recording the next section of game. See now that somebody in the thread is talking about all the murals and things and how they were taken from real life ancient societies I've been paying a great deal more attention to them and I'm impressed at how subtle some of the world building aspects of the game are. I had never noticed them before.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:47
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I own this but the LP makes me pretty glad I haven't played it yet - it's so much more pleasant watching you breeze through it. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy puzzle/adventure games - but this looks a bit too convoluted for my tastes. The way you aren't just solving everything immediately makes it a nice experience.
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Apr 6, 2014 22:04
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| # ? Jun 10, 2023 07:38 |
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Kind of disappointed you killed Amphisbaena first, you can use that Ankh Jewel on much more important bosses and just use one of the later Ankh Jewels on snake face there. Also, any one of three areas could be considered "the second area," so I'll be interested to see where you go next.
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Apr 6, 2014 22:17
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