welcome. everything I write here is something I felt to be important to some degree; game reviews, life updates/vents, and philosophical musings. I do my best to make my statements truthful. everyone is welcome to post comments, provided they are relevant.

5.31.2003

WORD.

specifically on the Hydro Station. Thank you, Fredric Mora!

"Those missing isotopes you are talking about was a problem that even the testers for this game had a hard time finding. Generally the isotopes the testers had missing were in the underwater cave mazes you had to swim in before you had to do the mission where you destroy the submarines, but here's the even funnier part.....you'll hate the designers for this:

"As hard as it is to navigate within the maze, some isotopes were "accidentally placed" too close to the walls or the floor so that you literally had to scrape along the wall (or the floor) to get it. You had to rotate your camera to a certain view to even begin to see it.

"This problem happened because designers generally placed their isotopes in the world in a haphazard manner, but sometimes artists would change the art of a level and the designers (being the geniuses they are) decided not to make a note of where all of them were placed and could not fix it.

"Some people may say they have found them all and it could possibly be true because this is the situation that happened: A couple of versions before the game sent off to be mass produced, no tester could still get every isotope, but I think (and this is a big "I think") that one version was sent out, the isotopes were fixed later, and then another version was sent. It is possible for there to be two versions of muto out because MIDWAY is EXTREMELY NOTORIOUS FOR DOING THIS. They did the same for Gauntlet Dark Legacy and Rush.

"Also, when this design issue of missing isotopes was brought up, the producers told us that "Hey as long as the player gets 80 percent of the total in game isotopes then that's all they really need. There's nothing if you get 100.00% of the isotopes. It's still the same reward as getting 80.00% of the isotopes." I know this sounds lazy, but they were pressed for time and just wanted to ship the product."

so that's the deal.
Fredric Mora was a product analyst on the Dr. Muto team, but has sinced stopped working for Midway. So, don't expect any support from Midway regarding this issue.