Harrison Bergeron

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"Hell emission
Sell emotion
Sick devotion
Down in the gutter"

 

Velvet Acid Christ - Caustic Disco

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It's news to me that (according to TVTropes at least) there have supposedly been various moves to read Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron backwards, as a parody of dystopian fiction. Sounds like a bunch of Lit. students ran out of thesis ideas again. ("See the cradle? See the cat?") I suppose his somewhat flippant black humor would be easy to mistake for parody if you'd never noticed he employed the same in even grimmer contexts.

 

If Vonnegut mocked anything in the field, it was the highfalutin' tone of standard dystopian villains, the bloviating political scholars masterminding the brainwashing of the populace via secretive and sophisticated technological and psychological methods accessible only to some reclusive aristocratic cabal. Here, on the other hand, the end of civilization is not a fiendishly plotting mad scientist. It's a thug with a shotgun, standing up for the average Joe.

 

While Fahrenheit 451 has distinguished itself among famous dystopian works by illustrating the bottom-up anti-intellectual nature of information-age social decline so long before it became obvious, Bergeron closed the gap last decade as the political correctness police began actively enforcing the handicapping of anyone they deemed 'privileged' in the name of 'equity' to the point forcing you to wear a weighted yoke no longer falls outside the realm of their political discourse.

 

But Vonnegut's vision warrants even more recognition vis-a-vis ramping technological invasion of personal attention like infinite scrolling following on the heels of pop-ups and other ever more intrusive advertisement, algorithmically tailored personal content feeds, Linked-In spamming messages that You Are Being Watched and of course, most recently, chat-bots. For a decade I was aware my own attention span was shrinking, that I am increasingly prone to skim rather than read, clicking thoughtlessly back and forth through browser tabs, picking up whatever game quest pops up next. But then I was assuming I'd kill myself soon, so it just seemed a natural part of my decline. Might I presume that mindset illustrative of our entire society's willingness to succumb?

In case you got distracted and missed the point, Bergeron's dystopia imposes never gonna give you up equality by weighing down the strong and fast, by masking the beautiful never gonna let you down, and most importantly by forcing anyone of more than a gnat's intelligence to run around and desert you wear headphones blaring random noises at random intervals, constantly disrupting the thinking of everyone deemed a danger to the peace of mind of peaceful minds. Methods as crass and primitive as befits the system's populist rhetoric. Why just limit, manipulate, subjugate and police thought when you can outright prevent it?

Those computer game random pop-up barbarian attacks I cited last Sunday made me think back to said headphones. In a strategy game, it's a given that some places will be safer than others, that you will define front lines, guarded flanks and pastoral backwaters, that you will shift resources according to a greater, long-term... y'know... strategy? As with other examples like Ixion or cRPGs' overuse of ambushes behind doors or any other system where anything can blow up at any moment, those barbies teleporting in from offscreen seemed to imitate the handicapper general jumping in from stage left with her shotgun.

 

[Kramer bursts in. Audience cheers]

But don't forget why we have this. Because it sells. Because this definition of "fun" which should amuse none older than an infant without object permanence is upheld by 9/10 of our fellow apes. Serenity now.

 

As a last point, it seems many cannot reconcile Vonnegut's socialist views with his egalitarian dystopia. Except of course imposing equality is by no means implied when preventing wealth from imposing inequality. By the way, the rich are robbing you faster than ever. In the end, it turns out the thought-erasing headphones were merely sold in stores, and bought up by an all-too-eager audience.

Glossing Over

While not germane to my point at the time, the illustration for this post did not depict a lake as might be assumed. It was the Mississippi, iced over.

The mist which yielded these lovely otherworldly views -

- had settled upon the already frozen landscape quite heavily one night, in between several days of deep freeze. The predawn chill froze it where it lay. Which was everywhere. Sure, I've seen (and slipped on) iced-over roads before. I've seen the odd tree wrapped in frost before.

But I do wish to emphasize: everywhere. Every tree. Every leaf. Every fence.

Every individual blade of grass was flash-frozen in a crystal coffin that would've made Snow White jealous.

Best of all, the fog bank had covered entire counties, heavy and uninterrupted. As I drove out to the river, save for the freshly salted roads I think you could find at least twenty square kilometers, grass, houses, trees, trash cans, everything encased in a single massive, contiguous, transparent layer of glaze. The world had been vitrified.

 

Sure, it's not unique. But as rare as eclipses. Ah, when they make days like this, they break the mold. Literally.

Cutting through the Treacle: Raiders of the Leisure Park

"He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular point in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls"

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"The more you suffer

The more it shows you really care"

 

The Offspring - Self Esteem

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"There seems a broad consensus not even so much that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he'd like at something he doesn't especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief."

[...]

[Citing an interviewee] "it is one of the guiding principles of social relations here: if you're not destroying  your mind and body via paid work, you're not living right."

David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

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"He had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work. [...] There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion."

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

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I still play Northgard occasionally. While hardly the best strategy game, it continues to bait me into reinstalling every year or so. Then I end up uninstalling it for annoyance at its combat mechanics and the computer cheating as it usually does in such games. I especially hate it including a designated griefer class.

As the raven clan represents The All-Father himself, you might excuse a bit of overpower. The problem being they gave it a lot more bit. Its main gimmick is sending boats of mercenaries to raid any player at any time. Attacking without risking its own population would be a powerful enough ability in itself (the lynx clan gets by well enough with that alone) but the mercs are dirt-cheap, roughly match the growth curve of a faction's military by themselves, and give only a three-second warning when they're about to hit, giving the defender no chance to relocate his army which is probably at the other end of his territory since the shore is every player's starting zone. Sure, you can relocate your workers and let the raid complete, but simply losing access to that resource production for the duration is, again, a hefty punishment in itself. Most relevant to my upcoming point, these attacks can be spammed. You'll likely get hit more often by raven raids than by every other source put together.

 

But of course there's more to it than just giving Odin his due pomp and circumstance bonus. To game designers, the spam is a goal in itself.

 

Old World, another strategy game, turn-based this time, reminded me of this while bashing my head against it trying to actually finish a match with Hatti. The principal issue being that sometime during the past year, Mohawk ramped up one of their more annoying features I'd previously held off on disabling, distant raids. Basically, cities at the edge of the map (which would otherwise be relatively safe) get randomly hit with barbarian invasions from offscreen. Stronger ones, in fact, than you would encounter when fighting an actual barbarian city present on the map. Note the five units coming in at the top of the image, the devastation from the previous five units I'd wiped out during the last two turns, and if you check the minimap, five more little red dots below the visible area. What was once an occasional three-mook digression is now forcing you to divert all your military forces, if you can even afford it. A fifteen-mook pile-up is more or less... a war.

For a bonus, when I hit the main menu to disable the stupid raids, I discovered this previously separate mechanic had been folded into the general "difficulty" setting, making it impossible to, say, play under the harsher resource handicap without also accepting the pop-up barbies. Note they actually went out of their way to remove that setting after implementation, to restrict players' options years after the fact. This also came at the same time that raider AI was tweaked to have them prioritize causing random damage instead of trying to beat your defenders (a.k.a. griefing) and soon after disasters were implemented, which also break random improvements requiring reconstruction. Triple redundancy, all toward randomly breaking your shit with no recourse.

 

A quarter century ago, or certainly by the era of Civilizations 3 and 4, developers had gradually begun phasing out the old '90s "whack-a-mole" mechanics (like the series' nuclear fallout requiring individual cleanup) in favor of rarer events more threatening individually but less of a constant chore. Now it appears the moles are back in town.

Why?

 

I mean, sure, from the company's point of view, never ignore the timesink factor. Every designer, every screenwriter, every Dickens loves 'em sum filler, and the raids increase the number of clicks required to get through the middle portion (expand > exploit) of a campaign. Also, the newer generation of strategy games all introduce a limiting resource which cannot be increased by normal territorial/economic expansion to put the brakes on players' steamrolling. Old World's answer to AoW4 / Stellaris' influence or EU4's monarch powers is Orders, and nothing eats up orders faster than fighting. Problem being this so artificially yanks that choke-chain around players' necks that one would think they'd protest the change. Do they?

 

I caused a bit of indignation on an MMO guild forum some 15-20(?) years ago when some cretin demanded to know "you think you better than us" and I replied "yes, because I make things harder for myself" and in my defense I did not in fact consider this so heinous a departure from mundane gamer braggadocio. Every schmuck brags about having beaten difficulty level N+1. Was it so different from me refusing to use an overpowered item in order to beat difficulty N? Because I'm really quite good at making my own life harder; you don't have to help me with that. In Old World, in fact, I roleplay and self-handicap by establishing perennial Platonic philosopher king rule. (One reason I hatey Hatti is that it lacks a researcher family, but I make do with bureaucrats.) This blocks me from what gameplay options Scholar heads of state cannot undertake (like proposing alliances) and imposes a constantly mounting relations penalty from the two families whose purpurous keisters shalt never toucheth the ivory throne of academe, eventually resulting in rebel units spawning at their cities. In other words, I make my own distant raids.

 

I don't doubt that if I shop around I will find more examples of random spawns and other busywork being re-added to various genres. It fits too well with other idiot-friendly trends of the past few years like the decline of online FPS back to deathmatch or the final replacement of ever-shrinking MMO raids with individual Diablo-clone loot grinding.

 

So sure, idiot-friendly simplification is one issue, and those same idiots tend to interpret hyperactivity as excitement, and repetition can be addictive... but is that all? Because I think Old World has finally elucidated the real outrage I caused on that forum back around 2009. It wasn't about who's playing the more difficult challenge. It's the 'for myself' that rankled most. Playing an unoptimized build, giving my fighter 14 STR instead of 18, denying the desirability of the supposed 'best' status symbols for which others struggle. Smashing their tablets of virtues. All so evil.

 

Because to the average retard, all definitions must be imposed from above. The value of effort in a game is no different from the value of effort in real life, that is to say a reflection of one's affiliation with the apes at the top of the tribe's power hierarchy. So just as in real life 'work' does not count as such unless it is servitude to multibillionnaires, playing a game gets defined not by an objective weighing and multifaceted combination of advantages and handicaps, of what would make for interesting gameplay, but by ticking off lists of achievements and top scores arbitrarily defined by the marketing department. At the same time, note the powergamer outrage at anyone refusing to take every obvious advantage (e.g. min-maxing stats) despite such advantages again being defined and handed out by authority and not a reflection of the player's creativity. They want to be made to work at the game just as they play at working the job they are made to keep in meatspace. It's Nietzschean slave morality at its basest, defining oneself by the master's goals, and it's hardly the first time I've cited this tendency in computer games. *

 

It's funny, when MMOs first came out shortly before Y2K with their initial subscription models, the sheer effort involved prompted many to decry "that sounds like a second job more than a game" yet a quarter century later the only facet of online games which remains is the job aspect. Gone are forty-man raids and organization and complex character builds and malleable playable worlds. Now just do what you're told. Punch the clock religiously for your daily log-in rewards. Kill ten to the tenth rats for an achievement unlock. Cheat and sabotage your coworkers. Powerlevel. Grind the single easiest instance for constant loot. After a brief revival of more interesting gameplay around the mid-2010s, the same pattern is reasserting itself in single-player. No complex morality, no complex narratives, no complex goals. Goblin pops up. Smack it with a mallet. Get a LEVEL UP! message.

 

Sure, it's only one facet of our society-wide decline. Humans are less and less self-directed in their thoughts and actions, led by the nose by religious indoctrination and state propaganda and advertising and more recently social media echo chambers and even more recently copy-pasting chatbots. But observing how thoroughly it pervades even our escapist fantasies gives the lie to accusations of nefarious manipulation from above. It sells. It's the rabble dragging us down. It is the human animal, the naked ape which does not want to think and continually retrenches in mindless reaction of its own accord. Subhumanity kills.

 

 

 

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* If you don't think games reflect the morality of our corporate overlords, lemme ask ya this: have any of your Civilizations ever hit a crisis of overproduction? Or is maximizing profit and extracted labor always the right answer?

(There is one golden oldie which slightly bucked the trend, Alpha Centauri and Planet's revolt against industry.)

Long pig. It's what's for Donner.

 

 

 

 

 

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(if you're not in the U.S., a reference may be in order)

(maybe two)

(maybe three) 

See You to the Door, Space Cowboy

"A knight without armor in a savage land"

Have Gun - Will Travel theme song

 

Nothing much has come of any of the four? five? amateur MMO projects which sprang up in the wake of City of Heroes' closing, partly for the MMO genre collapsing and the reveal of fan-run CoH servers, but also because 'make Paragon City great again' never amounted to much of a business plan or creative direction in the first place. Even when straining for a bit of originality, Ship of Heroes for instance came up with "The new Superhero Sci-Fi MMORPG with Magic"* which... I suppose just about covers it? All of it? Maybe throw in some elves, killer clowns and xenomorphs and start intoning "tha voyd" just to top off the old pop culture grab-bag. After all, superhero comics have a long tradition of repackaging even longer traditions, slapping a cape on everything, be it Atlanteans, witches, Norse gods, extraterrestrials, and selling it to ten-year-old boys as a "new" copyrighted crime-fighter. A less defined genre there never was. But then, popular entertainment has always suffered from knockoffs given a perfunctory spackle to fit the ignorant masses' latest fad.

 

(Exemplifying the gratuitous, look over the past century's accumulation and stop me if you've seen this movie scene, comic page or book cover:

Back to a wall, squaring his broad shoulders, hefting his weapon, the hero leans his head toward a corner behind which approaches a menacing figure, at his other arm the requisite plucky yet palpitating damsel legitimizing his violence. He might be a cowboy, a noir detective, a barbarian, a space-man in a bubble helmet. His glorious tool of socially-acceptable carnage may be a sword, a pistol, a laser phaser blaster; the enemy a robot, mobster, desperado or dragon-goblin-zombie-pirate. Whatever.)

 

Of course, we can't really blame 'the-kids-these-days' for such superficiality, as I rather pointedly had to admit to myself a year or two ago when I finally decided to try reading one of 'Science' Fiction's most famous reference points, the Lensman books. I could barely struggle three quarters through Triplanetary before deciding I didn't really need to find out whether the hero gets the girl. Now, alright, lest I sound too unfair to E.E. Smith, maybe I should have started with Galactic Patrol (the real earliest story) instead of the officially less scientific prequel about space wizards gallivanting about entire galaxies for bajillions of years, conveniently locked in their own version of medieval stasis in perpetuity. I'll also admit I was instantly put off by the heavy emphasis on telepathy (especially as heroic) which made the novel's other events appear rather irrelevant. But the point remains that Smith's space opera could only count as more scientific by comparison with the truly absurd pugilism of the Barsoom books or other planetary romances preceding the 1930s. Lensman often gets cited for the dramatic escalation in destructive power the good guys and bad guys hurl at each other, but after a bit of Triplanetary I began to suspect this was motivated more by Smith's failure to maintain perspective or think through any ramifications of the poweroverwhelming space-stuff he wanted to hurl back and forth and merely jumping to the next and next cozily familiar scene of grimly determined heroes delving dark dungeons on solo missions to foil dastardly plots. Then more explosions.

How Robert A. Heinlein could apparently idolize Smith was beyond me until I realized the latter author made good on his predecessor's babbling by dragging the superman routine back to reality with scientific learning and practical applications. The Heinlein story most slavishly copying Smith's style (aside from a couple gun nut superspy novels) would have to be the ludicrous early effort Lost Legacy, with its emphasis on brain magic conveniently bypassing rational thought and the same breakneck rush through grandiose yet unanalyzed plot points. Of course, it doesn't help that by the time Smith re-tooled his early '30s serials into a supposed novel series it was ~1950, and a lot of James Bond -like early Cold War rhetoric was seeping into what may have already been heavily colored by the Red Scare of the early 20th century. It's hard not to read the supposedly physical villains being beaten by more 'spiritual' heroes as a jab at godless Bolsheviks' rapid industrialization. (Overcompensatingly insecure at that.)

 

But whatever else it is, it's poor Science F.

 

A fabulist as an "honest liar" must be judged partly on the parsimony of his fabulism. A good one will openly and honestly ask the audience to suspend disbelief for the necessary amount of phlebotinum to drive a plot. A bad one will counterfeit all aspects of a story, gratuitously, whether from incompetence or intellectual laziness or for pandering to the audience's more primitive emotional responses, and will demand you swallow the whole mess despite its incoherence. For comparison, try a novel I've mentioned before, H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon. It required a phlebotinum, an invented material which blocks gravity, to get its dynamic duo to said moon. Once there they meet a race which proves mostly benign, except that in acting toward their own security the selenites find it necessary to play the antagonist. Now switch back to Lensman with its angels vs. devils dichotomy following no natural motivations, its ever-growing slag-pile of technologies and superpowers, its Siegfried braving various dragon lairs to prove his superiority. At least 13th-century peasants marveling at Robyn Hode's marksmanship weren't pretending to have just invented bows and arrows.

 

Yes, it's an author's job to be unrealistic to some extent (otherwise you could just watch C-SPAN for fun) but the whole point of the super-normal is how it interacts with the normal. Otherwise you rapidly hit Robert Sheckley's Panzaism, where the weirdness grows mundane. You're spinning the elfemism treadmill, substituting superficial specialness for itself. A space cowboy with a laser pistol and a personal rocketship becomes just another cowboy on a horse with a pistol. Limiting such tech excuses makes for a better Spike. Conversely, it's one thing to have a cowboy call himself Paladin to deliberately evoke worlds and ideals past or imagined and question their congruity with brutal reality. It would've been quite another to fill the Wild West with plate armor and swordfights in the name of round tables.

 

Note, not only is such excess unbelievable but also unwieldy. It violates Poe's one effect, Chekov's gun and conservation of detail in general. The two problems can be encountered separately. Poe himself, despite being a solidly Romantic writer, channeled a great deal of fascination with (for the time, cutting-edge) forensic science into his Auguste Dupin stories. Here's one of the more extreme examples from Marie Roget:

"Now the human body, in general, is neither much lighter nor much  heavier than the water of the Seine; that is to say, the specific gravity of the human body, in its natural condition, is about equal to the bulk of fresh water which it displaces. The bodies of fat and fleshy persons, with small bones, and of women generally, are lighter than those of the lean and large-boned, and of men; and the specific gravity of the water of a river is somewhat influenced by the presence of the tide from sea."

No space cowboys here. That is a solidly realistic argument relevant to the story's plot and setting. However, the fact it drones on for three pages demonstrates that authors can always get lost in the weeds, especially when trying to provide background information. (To me, an even worse offender was Melville's wealth of sailing vessel minutiae in Moby-Dick.)

 

Now just imagine how much worse it would be if he were describing an imaginary magical property of an imaginary species in an imaginary fluid. The Florgles float in the Grimble unless it be the season when the mome raths outgrabe. That's what substituting a laser for a pistol does.

 

Sadly, the vast bulk of audiences will in fact demand meaningless detail precisely so that it can be ignored in favor of the same old limbic pay-offs, so they can pretend to engage with storytelling while merely seeking yet another fix of "hero punches villain; saves world" to the point the setting can be forgotten altogether. But as this has run on long enough, I'll get to The Dying Earth in a couple of weeks. (Then perhaps tear into Clarke's third law.)

 

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* Y'know, there's this old story called The Argonauts. It's public domain and everything. Superheroes on a ship. There for the taking. Just sayin', unoriginality need not be so wholly undignified.

AoW4 Factions, 5

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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I was in the mood for some evil factions after my first dwarves and halflings, so some rampaging barbarian gobbos really hit the spot. I do remember I avoided the necromancy side of shadow magic with them, but went heavy on banshees as support every time. Now I keep picturing them tossing that trader in a big stew pot like in old cartoons.

Temple of Elemental Evil

I briefly considered going back to the first Bloodlines to wash the sour taste of its misbegotten sequel out of my fangs, but so as not to spin my wheels too badly opted instead for the next "best" thing, its stunted and hobbled older brother, the second and possibly buggiest Troika title: The Temple of Elemental Evil. Not even bothering with its baseline version I installed the Circle of Eight modpack, then crossed my fingers and... it actually loaded on a first try!

(Don't look at me like that; if you know anything about Troika Games...)

It's called Temple / Elemental / Evil, so let's guess I'll be fighting lots of clerics, elementals and evil. I feel like doing something other than my usual elvish wizard. Problem: these old cRPGs hadn't really grown into roleplaying yet. No matter how many options you see in character creation, pretty much any other function besides hitting shit with a stick might be purely cosmetic. So no point in anything too outlandish like an all-rogue party. I'm getting plenty of evocation, illusion and enchantment spells in C77... but that reminds me how disappointed I've been by 5e throwing out familiars and animal companions. I may as well play up the summoning. And... half-orcs! Yeah... a half-orc summoning-themed party! Conjurer, cleric, druid, even a ranger instead of a rogue. (Then I ran into the Chaotic Neutral introduction's stupid locked chest and had to finesse their stats a smidge.)

But, eventually, I made it to the hamlet of Hommlet, to meet Burne (read "burny") the mage and Smyth the smith. Ugh.

 

 

Level 1

 

I set off to lend my martial, tactical and metaphysical prowess toward all Hommlet's bucolic enterprises... which, near as I can tell, mostly consists of getting half the town laid. Verily, a worthier use of Charisma and grapple checks there never was, but still, couldn't they have come up with something besides pining milkmaids for low-level intrigue? They also seem to have overextended themselves on some of the decor and fudged the detail work as was the style at the time.

Yes, visit scenic Hommlet with its double set of twins lined up at attention in front of their beds. Come play with us. For ever. And ever. And ever. Animations, rudimentary as they are, still don't function for minor actions like livestock bending their necks. 

On the interface wrangling side, nuisances don't take long to accumulate.

Encumbrance mounts stupidly fast, with 3/5 characters unable to even keep all their gear equipped without hitting that dreaded -3 skill check penalty, and the constant juggling between inventories is made far worse by a lack of auto-sorting.

Casting through the radial menu is nice at first, but you quickly find yourself wishing for a hotbar. At least it has keybinds. (edit: though whether you'll be able to bind a key is up in the air)

Information on spell duration, active modifiers, weapon ranges, path your character will take in combat (quite crucial if you want to avoid AOO) and other topics is either absent or buried in submenus.

The pathfinding algorithm is at least better than Arcanum's but still takes a second to compute longer distances and leaves some of your party behind if you click on a small space... as defined by invisible walkable terrain boundaries.

Obviously my bimbo nun Deianeira does most all the talking. Lucky I cranked up her turning and relevant stat too, as Hommlet imposes a helluva lot more diplomacy checks than I thought it would. But the character selection defaulting to my party leader after every dialogue has already caused a few reloads.

(edit: Later on, it got even worse as dialogues initiated by NPCs default to whichever character is closest at the moment.) 

At least one first-level quest (Jay's sheep) already appears to have bugged out even two decades and who knows how many patches later. 

And of course at the interface of interface with quest design you've got the old idiocy of pixel-hunting. One quest depends on performing a "miracle" to heal some moron's more moronic brother. "Heal" meaning (as you discover by trial-and-error) not the "heal" skill or a cast of "cure plot-relevant wounds" but the "heal" spell which at level 1 lies far beyond your reach. But worry not, walkthrough-perusing adventurer!

In the multi-room, multi-floor temple where you got the quest, one of the many, many pieces of furniture has one clickable book among many, revealing an entire collection of level-inappropriate scrolls among which you'll find (assuming you luck out and identify the correct one before you need to rest) a Scroll of Heal! Apparently "read forum" is also an indispensable spell. (And sticking this in the middle of a quest chain, preventing you from proceeding, just about triples the misdesign.)

 

Still, through the various frustrations, I can't deny this is growing on me a little bit. Worldbuilding's zilch compared to Arcanum, but content mix is decent for 2003. Hommlet is reasonably sized, with just enough exploration and noncombat activities to fill your time without either stalling you or powerleveling you to 3 as NWN2 did. Plot hints begin to drop as to your eventual destination without the usual "chosen one" tripe about your grandiose destiny. It doesn't dump +1 and +2 loot in your lap as other RPGs do, making you look forward to masterwork items.

 

On the stupider side of things, I consider hiring an NPC until reading online that they not only split a share of your party's XP (which has been done in other games) but steal part of your loot. There's one for the 'what the hell were they thinking' category. I'll do without the doing without, thanks.

 

Itching for a bit of action, I choose to get my last few XPs through combat. Repeat the spiders after noticing the second one doesn't aggro to due game engine limitations(?) Repeat the frogs along the moathouse approach after noticing the direction of their ambush. And since braining a frog is apparently far more informative than sussing out a plot to sabotage castle construction:

 

 

Level 2!

 

With a few extra hit points under my various belts, I try the courtyard bandit fight as well, and on the second attempt (not counting a sneak range failure) barely squeak through with only two bits on my gander.

Oh quit acting smug, your wolf did most of the work.

I sense upcoming annoyance, as usual, with enemies spawning out of thin air to fake "difficulty" just by denying the player necessary information. Well, we'll see how long I can go without rage-quitting. After a well-deserved rest back in town, I take another well-deserved rest over at the moathouse after a spider and some rats. Giant rats. And more giant rats. And a giant spider. And a giant snake. And a giant tick. And a giant lizard. Witness the nuanced and elaborate worldbuilding of TSR's glory days!

 

After failing the bandit leader fight a couple (dozen) times I instead hit the zombie fight a level down. By which I mean Deianeira rebukes them into irrelevance. Ah, the one-step D&D guide to fighting undead: let the cleric handle it. Unfortunately it appears all those 'attack of the 50-ft whatever' fights saddled most of my party with diseases I can't afford to cure. So... resting it is then? Just do nothing and let the dice resist it for you?

 

Found a modded-in bag of holding. How the hell did anyone suffer through this game without the mods? Anyway, I decide not to bother infiltrating the moathouse. There's probably more XP in combat.

 

Next up is an ogre, which turns into another series of repeats until he rolls a 1 on an attack so I get enough hits in to drop him in the third round. Again, I feel like the mechanics are almost, almost good. Creatures with long reach getting attacks of opportunity on an approaching character? Excellent, and I made a meal of it back when playing my Age of Decadence hoplite. Sticking a creature with that ability at such a low level that it just one-shots any party member? Stupid reload timesink.

 

Rest again. What? It was a big ogre!

After another ten attempts or so, finally kill the brigand boss.

Rest again. What? That was a big brigand!

Aaah, bugbears! Wait, they're not so bad. No, never mind, there's a whole posse of 'em so it still turns into an unholy mother of a save-scumming slog.

Rest again. What? Those were superlatively mediocre bugbears! 

 

 

Level 3

 

Check the walkthrough for the fiftieth time and discover I had some NPCs to set free from a jail cell I couldn't even see. My Chaotic Neutralness doesn't seem to matter much past the tutorial. Neither does my half-orcishness. Roleplaying options are so far almost entirely absent. Do-gooding is not optional; either do the quest or lose XP. Anyway. Puppies! The Gnoll fight is a perfect example of terrible old encounter design. You can pay to bypass them, and could even pass a dialogue check to pay half... to be rewarded with zero XP or loot. No thanks. Pound puppies!

The fight has an obvious solution: hard-hitting melee enemies, choke point, done deal, right? Not if the game is endlessly ambiguous about what counts as walkable or blocked terrain or where AOOs are triggered, which is why it ends up taking me another twenty tries to both block the doorway adequately and 5-ft.-step Nessus back for a potion without letting the puppies loose on my ranger and wizard. At least Enlarge Person is really paying off letting my druid or cleric melee over the barbarian's shoulder, much like reduce person paid off for my WotR Lich-Witch.

Rest again.

On page 37 of our fantasy biodiversity textbook we have a giant... crayfish.

Sure, why the hell not, keep 'em coming, we haven't even gotten to giant nematodes or giant lungfishes yet.

Cheese the damn fight from range, since it's too fat to climb stairs.

Pause for a moment to wonder why there's a duplicate corpse of my druid's pet wolf at a location I'd never visited before, which is somehow my enemy and keeps me stuck in combat until I hit it once.

 

Then some ghouls, easily dispatched.

Then, at long last, Lareth the Beautiful.

 

Now, dear readers, you must understand: there are buggy games, and there are poorly designed games. Then there's the truly infuriating breed where you can't even tell whether the weirdness stems from bad coding or bad GMing.

- Lareth infinitely casts infinite range sonic bursts, through infinite walls.

- I can maintain visibility of an area (for ranged attacks) even after the summon I used as a spotter dies.

- Doors sometimes close when reloading saves... and sometimes they don't.

- Half the time enemies act as if I'm invisible if standing in obscuring mist, the other half they rush me.

- A random proportion of enemies will follow you if you back out of sight.

- I can flee combat with a knocked out companion that was technically left behind. But after I rest and try to re-enter, the game crashes to desktop and the saved game turns up corrupted.

- Then the program starts stalling perpetually when enemy AI gets confused around corners.

- Lareth is supposed to trigger a spider ambush at low health, but not if you crit him hard enough to bypass that HP range.

- Cosmetic items (gloves, boots, helms) still add weight toward your encumbrance, making me outright ignore them.

- Lareth's dresser has a placeholder blank square instead of an icon when open.

 

Bugs? Intended behavior? You decide! Because I'm pretty sure Troika never did. This is all in the first dungeon, mind you. After a solid decade of fan-volunteer bug hunting.

 

So anyway, the theme of this dungeon was crayfish-cultist-tick-lizard-zombie-slime-bandit-rat-ogre-gnoll-spider-ghoul-frog-drow-bugbear-snake! Snaaake! Oohhhh, iiiit's a SNAAAAKE! At least I get an infodump from Lareth's diary tying... some... of it together.

Back to Hommlet for some well-earned - AMBUSH!!!

Remember that "upcoming annoyance" I sensed? It came up. On trying to leave after Lareth's demise, you're jumped in the idiotic style every game abused back then. As soon as you walk through a loading screen the encounter starts (after making you click-through a few dialogue boxes to further lengthen reloads) and forces you into a fight without any chance at positioning. (Would detecting such ambushes not be a perfect opportunity for the listen skill? Could you not peek an eye out from safe darkness to "spot" the enemies standing in the light outside the cave?)

 

Between having to fight two rooms full of enemies at once and buggy reloads, Lareth took me dozens of tries. Infuriating, but also mildly rewarding. I could cut line of sight, web a long hallway, cast protective or summon spells sooner or later, etc. In other words try shit. Here? Obscuring Mist cockblocked their archers just fine, but the lack of tiles turns the melee portion into a hopeless clusterfuck. My formation proves utterly irrelevant as enemies run through any spare pixel between my front liners (apparently only doors impose an occupancy limit) to lock down my casters. Less infuriating, but also less rewarding.

 

 

At least I got my -

Level 4

- right? Right? 

 

So after winning my fourth attempt with two characters dead I say "fuck it" and decide to pay the Raise Dead fine in town. Half an hour later after selling loot piece by piece drag-dropping it out of the bag of holding and drag-dropping it into the shop window, I fork over the exorbitant 2000 gold...

...

... only to discover that not only have my rogue and druid not gotten XP for the fight in which they died, but this has completely wiped their accumulated XP, down to 2000, setting them back an entire level or more.

 

Okay, sorry, no. Screw this.

 

I've played many an infuriating slog for a good interactive tale. I've suffered plotless, generic hack'n'slash if the mechanics are good. But there's a certain brand of trash not worth the bother, in which everything's broken.

The GM's a showboating twelve-year-old dropping rocks on the player.

Your save files get corrupted.

Every interface interaction's a chore.

You're made to pixel-hunt.

Mechanics look complex on the surface but are overshadowed by rolling dice and cheesing single-pixel collision flaws.

When you try to play it honestly you're actively punished for doing so.

The roleplaying side is irrelevant.

You constantly need to consult a walkthrough for must-have information. 

Hell, you can't even poke fun at the damn thing because its setting, characters and dialogue are so unimaginative and shallow.

 

I've liked some aspects, like the tempered mob/loot/level escalation and your characters' gradual discovery of the main event instead of being thrown straight into heroics, and the true utility of oft-overlooked spells (e.g. Obscuring Mist) but there's only so much pointless punishment I'm willing to endure for so little positive. Temple of Elemental Evil shares every flaw of its Infinity Engine predecessors (clunky inventory, frustratingly ambiguous mobility, range and terrain interactions) and piles on truly insane mechanics that might work in tabletop (ok, if you lose XP on being raised, maybe the GM can toss you a solo side adventure to compensate) but absolutely do not for a computer adaptation, especially one that prides itself on knife-edge encounter stat margins. More perplexingly, Troika's saving graces of interesting content, be it the world-building of Arcanum or the engaging characters of Bloodlines, are vanishingly absent here. If I just want a dungeon crawl against giant whatevers, there are far less aggravating ways to get that.

 

There's a very slim chance I might pick my campaign back up at some point. At the very least I need a lengthy vacation from such an unrewarding chore. But really, I'm leaning toward "fuck this and the bugged horse it rode in on."