ST: TNG - Epidemic Space Amnesia

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Seriesdate: 4.05
Remember Me

Wesley and his fairy alien godfather spend some quality time orgasming his mother out of the hyperspace sphincter he "accidentally" shoved her into. A sphincter conveniently furnished with her very own alternate universe.

Just as the Enterprise is leaving a space station, Wesley's science experiment suffers a minor glitch. What is that, like the fifth time? Who keeps giving this kid access to the toolbox? Their guest of honor, Beverly Crusher's old mentor, disappears, and only she can remember he existed at all. Crew members continue to disappear. And only she can remember they existed at all. Finally it turns out she's the only one who got disappeared by her son's glitchy hyperthingamajig. The bulk of the episode happened inside an alternate dimension which she... automatically... fabricated... somehow... unconsciously... complete with walking talking humpable illusions because apparently getting squeezed out of the universe gives you magic genie powers.
Wait, hold on. How exactly would a human brain even retain the information necessary to reproduce an entire starship plus crew? I can barely remember my mother's birthday!
But hey, that's certainly in keeping with the scientific rigor of The Traveler mentoring Weasley Potter in the finer points of post-technological wizarding. Apparently closing your eyes, arching your back and gasping in ecstasy doubles as a form of hyperspace travel. Aha! That explains why my favorite porn stars keep disappearing.

Gratuitous mysticism aside, this script also suffers from the utterly irrational behavior of the crew. Never mind that nobody bats an eyelash when the super-powerful alien teleports on board. Who needs security when you've got faith in the kindness of strangers, amirite? The most egregious example comes as multiple crew members keep disappearing when nobody's looking and Picard's reaction (I could not make this up) is:
"Have security confine all non-essential personnel to their quarters."
... Been reading horror movie survival guides, have you Jean-Luc? Oh noes! They're picking us off one by one! We gotta split up!
The rest of the crew fare just as poorly due to the ease with which they buy into their plight. As soon as someone comes up with an idea, it's adopted as the only possible course of action. It MUST be Wesley's experiment that's to blame. It MUST be the Traveler, that one rando' dude from three seasons back, that can save everyone. It's all so obvious! One might be tempted to excuse their stupidity as being merely Beverly's tulpas and not complete beings, but then she herself seems to have just fallen off the short bus:
"Wesley. Where's Wesley" and she tears off through the corridors to physically search for the boy wonder... after we've just spent several scenes asking the futuristic ship's computer to locate crewmates.

This, folks, is why everyone hated Wesley Crusher. He wasn't just a smarmy, whiny, overentitled little snot, which would've been bad enough in itself. Wesleyitis tortured entire plots into knots of justification for Mary Sue's specialness.

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Seriesdate: 4.08
Future Imperfect

Riker gets incapacitated on the planet of fog machines only to wake up sixteen years into the future, where he commands the Enterprise and is about to sign a peace treaty with the Romulans as represented by recurring villain Tomalak. Apparently he's contracted space amnesia thanks to a space virus and acquired a space son along the way for good space measure.

As convenient contrivances and suspicious incongruities mount, Riker figures out that he's being tricked, possibly into revealing the secret location of the Federation's advance base guarding the Neutral Zone. He challenges Tomalak, who reveals they've been inside a holodeck simulation all along, then throws him into a cell with his space-son from earlier, who's supposedly a captive just like him. A slip of the tongue tips Riker off to this being only yet another illusion, and his little Rikerling finally reveals himself to be...

... one of the cheesiest, cheapest, Dr. Whoviest rubber alien masks ever to gild the ignominy of TV SciFi. But aside from that, his entire species was wiped out, leaving him to survive inside a simulation apparatus which can read minds. Unlike the previous episode, this one kind of... works. Frakes did an excellent job conveying both consternation at being catapulted into the future, subdued anger and suspicion toward the Romulans, gradual acceptance of his situation and dawning realization of being trapped, and a perfectly modulated tantrum toward the plot's climax. The nested holographic deception was also pulled off quite masterfully, with plot advancement relying on subtle verbal cues as in Allegiance.

Unfortunately, we're still left with the fact that the bug-eyed boy was in possession of an undetectable, mind-reading super-holodeck capable of producing actual food to sustain its occupant for years on end, which the Enterprise just... abandons on the planet of fog machines, without showing the slightest curiousity.
Exploration vessel my ass.


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Seriesdate: 4.14
Clues

After a holodeck prelude in which Picard explains to Guinan the human appeal of hunting down clues to solve a mystery, the Enterprise gets wormholed away from a planet it was investigating and its crew (minus the android <(important plot point)) is incapacitated. For thirty seconds. Or so they think. Just as in Remember Me, Beverly's the first one to point out their missing memories.

Her pet pink space mold grew an entire day's worth. Also, Worf's wrist was broken and healed. Also, the ship's clock's been tampered with to mask that an entire day has passed. Also, Data seems to be going all HAL9000 on them. Finally, as they return to the scene of the crime, Troi gets daimonically possessed (as one does on Star Trek) by a super energy being and declares in the voice of the legion that the Enterprise is to be destroyed for stumbling upon some reclusive super aliens a day prior. The amnesia was induced to give our heroes a chance to escape with their lives, with Data as accomplice, but they've screwed themselves by nibbling at the forbidden fruit once again. Cue another reset and a happy anti-intellectual ending glorifying willful ignorance.

Like any good detective story, this one is delightfully self-contained, making use of existing Star Trek justifications to both present incongruities as illogical, and to explain them. Much hinges on the dawning realization that Data, the crew's most honest representative, has been lying to his superiors, and of upping the stakes on repercussions to his lies, culminating in a callback to his brush with vivisection in season 2. However, we do have to wonder what gives the godlike aliens, the Paxans, such faith in the probity of our heroic androic. Maybe they're just robophiles?

Also, please don't ask what's going to happen when the ship's computer synchronizes with the nearest starbase and discovers its clock/calendar app's three days off for no particular reason. Or when anyone tries to timestamp an e-mail or text their grandmother. Back in 1991, the popular mental image of the word "clock" was still a round dial on which you could physically move the minute hand.

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Godlike super-aliens were a dime a dozen in the 1960s original series. Producers love them. They can take human shape (i.e.: don't require much make-up) they can manipulate their environment with force blasts (i.e.: don't require much props budget) they can communicate by telepathically controlling existing crew members (i.e.: don't require hiring new actors) and establish clear superiority without the need for complex technological precepts (i.e.: keep things simple; the audience is a bunch of morons.) Amnesia plots, in addition to ramping up the pathos for a particular character and justifying a bit of overacting, are similarly budget-friendly and light on new information that might confuse the moronic masses.

Nevertheless, it's odd to find three episodes so close together in season 4 (which otherwise boasted some of TNG's best content) abusing the stupidest gimmicks from the first season or original series. Was 1991 a good year for amnesia? I forget. But they do provide a great reminder that art is as much about execution as ideas. Remember Me probably has the best basic plot hook and denouement of these three, but as a Wesley episode... it's a Wesley episode. 'Nuff said. Clues, on the other hand, was widely praised and remembered as a fan favorite despite lacking in technobabble or special effects.

Remember Me's plot twists are entirely dependent on overblown mysticism, completely out of frame with the mechanics of the Star Trek universe. Both the older Crusher fabricating her own pocket universe and the younger Crusher yanking her out of it via seance had simply zero relevance to anything else aboard the Enterprise. They shed no light on futuristic life, do nothing to expand on either the crew's modus operandi or the politics of the galaxy, present no new ideas or discoveries.

Future Imperfect suffers from a slight deus ex machina problem toward the end, but otherwise it does a much better job of centering the action in the physical universe, with Riker's perspicacity latching on to actual clues in order to break the magic spell. The plot twists fit well into the audience's existing knowledge of Romulans, with the mind reading clue priming the audience for the Mind's Eye episode toward the end of the season and thus building continuity instead of shattering it.

Clues fares best for keeping its action within the show's purview. The Paxans are an advanced civilization but nowhere near the reality-warping divine power of the Traveler. The clues to the crew's missing day are actual physical events, measurable and verifiable, with no telepathy necessary to fabricate an alternate reality. Leaving aside the two major glaring plot holes mentioned above, the story is driven by sentient, purposeful, independent actors with rational agendas, up to and including Data's initially inexplicable deception.

I've been told more than once that I tend toward "high concept" stories (hence my preference for SciFi) and I'm much likelier to praise a story for a good idea than for its production values. Yet here is proof that even if you're going to start with a cheesy old idea like amnesia or deals with the devil, it can at any point be further doomed or salvaged by proper execution, by either building a logical framework around it... or handing it over to Wesley Crusher.

It's a little known but totally almost true fact that Tolkien continued writing many books about the halflings from The Lord of the Rings, each growing increasingly comical, with more and more outlandish social situations. There was no particular reason for writing them, but by then it was just a farce of hobbit.

L33t Sk1llz0rz

"You carry on 'cause it's all you know
You can't light a fire, you can't cook or sew"

Garbage - Butterfly Collector


I try not to toot my own tinny and untuned horn, but I've gotten pretty good at micropipetting. See, when you're concocting some unholy microbiological abomination in a 1.5mL microcentrifuge tube (as one does by and by) the dozen odd individual samples and reagents get so small as to require mechanical precision. Hence the advent of micropipettes. But, once you get down to, say, 20 microliters and below, even the precision-machined plungers of Eppendorf cannot save ye! It takes a bit of practice actually centering the tip onto the liquid you want without aspirating any of the surrounding air or jamming it too deep and vacuum-locking yourself out of a sample. So my instructor taught me as her instructor taught her, to practice grabbing tiny droplets of water off Parafilm, where they bead up into a cohesive mass, without losing any volume (except inevitably to evaporation.) Which, come to think of it, is beginning to sound suspiciously like being made to walk on rice paper without tearing it... combined with "wax on / wax off" ... maybe she just didn't like me much? In any case, I now possess a +2 circumstance bonus to sucking. As technology and automation improve, I could see this highly specialized skill drifting out of common use, just as manual phenol-chloroform DNA extraction is now largely a professorial reminiscence of ages past. Humanity's fate certainly does not hinge on the populace's ability to steady a pipette tip.

On a completely unrelated topic, a few of you younger folk might be scratching your heads as to the title of this post. Back in the '80s and '90s quite a few people got sick of chat filters policing their online speech and thus began purposely mis-spelling words by inserting numbers and symbols and fabricating their own unintelligible patois, instantly adopted by the adolescent gamer crowd as an exclusivist badge of in-group pride. Like any other slang. Bro.
Thus "elite" speak was born. Or should I say 7|-||_|5 13375p34k \/\/Uz 80r|\|!!!11(one)
Much like viral polymerases (sorry, I'm on a biology kick today) its very inaccuracy was its greatest selling point, as its lack of conventions made it impossible to pin down, with every group adding their own preferred spellings and catchphrases from week to week. Conversing in 1337 was less a fixed procedure than a personal skill in l1nguist1ck flimflammery. With millennials replacing and rebelling against GenX-ers' brand of coolness, l33t went the way of the d0d0... though the word "pr0n" managed to stick. Go figure.
Aaaand somehow the world neglected to grind to a halt. Good riddens. Maybe it was never that valuable a skill to begin with?

On another completely unrelated topic, sometime last decade one of my uncles complained about modern college students' terrible penmanship and increasingly slow note-taking, bemoaning their lack of skill with a ball-point pen, much less the stately fountain pen of yore. I retorted (smirking superciliously as is my wont) asking why he doesn't also decry our lack of skill in writing with goose quills, or, why not, chiseling clay tablets at breakneck speed. Oh, those heroic Sumerian stenographers! Pencils and pens are just one more technology whose convenience or worth must be judged against necessity and alternatives.

However, there is an underlying skill there, the symbolic representation of phonetic speech, which is indeed utterly indispensable to any society. Illiteracy is deadlier than most diseases at this point. (If you don't believe me, read it on WebMD.) Only the wrist-breaking habit of taking notes in class (mandated by student poverty and expensive printing) has now become obsolete in the face of easy copying and distribution of information. We no longer need an entire population of stenographers to jot down whole chapters out of textbooks. It's a specialized skill put to very limited and specialized use. But writing, which is to say the basic ability to reproduce written language, is still absolutely crucial to each and every one of us. Do it slow, do it ugly, but you still gotta do it, baby! (Wait, how did we get back onto pr0n?)

And unfortunately, the more technologies we accumulate, the more we lose our ability to distinguish between critical and non-critical techne, between the superficial application of a skill and its fundamental roots which help us find our way in the world. Self-driving cars sound like a wonderful idea, and maybe we shouldn't all be forced to operate an automo-car, that very specific and limited mechanism which defined the 20th century. But being able to read a map and possessing a basic idea of roads and the getting around on same, that... sorry, that's not something we can allow to die off like quill pens. A couple of years ago I took my car in for servicing and spent the intervening hours at a nearby mall. When they called to tell me my car was ready, I told the driver of their complimentary shuttle he could pick me up at the mall's North entrance. I would've guessed he was about ten years younger than me, young enough to have gotten his driver's license in the post-GPS era. When we got back, his boss (about ten years apart from me in the other direction) pulled me aside conspiratorially: "you know I had to show him which way North was? And explain to him in which directions the streets run?" This is especially jarring in American towns, which being developed post-industrially by planning commissions and not growing around medieval ruins and meandering trade roads, have the vast majority of their roads laid out in square grids aligned to cardinal points. It seems impossible for any American to get to twenty years of age without learning to "go east on 12th street" but there we have it... Google Maps by the way isn't helping matters by not showing parallels and meridians.

Or, at about the same time (since I've spent so much of this post blurting out biology) I recall a graduate student who, when asked to divide 2 by 0.5, stammered and wavered a bit then had to do so by calculator. Granted, nerves played some role in this as it was a first lab session, but still... you're a Master's student in a hard science discipline. We do numbers here. You may not need to integrate curves or multiply polynomials in your head, but basic two-digit algebra is not up for debate!
And she wasn't even one of the stupid ones. Bright young woman and very engaged in the subject matter and eager to give all the right answers before anyone else, hand always up in the air swatting at those extra credit points, making the rest of us look like chumps. Girl was l33t! When even the good ones aren't showing good skills, it's the system as a whole that's failing them.

Forget institutions, laws or funding. On an interpersonal level, we are no longer challenging each other to rise above the lowest common denominator.

We have to realize that no matter how helpful the technology around us becomes, some mental tasks are simply too intrinsically valuable to ever abandon. Situating oneself in the world, understanding proportions, simple ethics, the laws of motion, a basic familiarity with manipulating numbers or manipulating language. For eight years now I've been babbling about random nonsense on this blog. And, as a surprise to myself, I've been gradually, ever so gradually, improving at it. Weird huh? My posts have become more organized, more evocative and logical at the same time, better able to convey ideas. Who'd'a thunk it, when all I initially wanted was to howl into the void for a month or two? "Blogging" is a figment of our contemporary social fictions. I could take it or leave it, and in two centuries' time I doubt it'll be any more relevant than Sumerian stenography. But improving the techne of wordsmithing transcends my screen and keyboard, and I would not have gained in this intrinsic mental ability if I'd stuck to posting Youtube comments or 140-character flame wars like most of you are doing, or if I'd limited myself to penning a gamer blog or SciFi blog or an anti-religious or anti-feminist blog or some other, more crowdpleasing, limited format. Such subcultures are prone to defining the world in their own very limited j4rg0n.

Why let your clay tablets rule you?

Cutting Through the Treacle: Super- { }

"I'm the Arch Dandy no-goodnik and I'm headed for Crashville"
Marilyn Manson - The Bright Young Things


Now, as I've of late laid waste off and on (and often below) the third Age of dubious Wonders, its weirdly uneven creative side has begun to grate a bit.

I ran across an Arch Angel. So what, I hear you retort, those overgrown pigeons are a dime a dozen in these sorts of games. Can't swing a dead manticore without hitting a whole murder of cherubs. Nonetheless it did take me by surprise as to that point I had never encountered anything simply named <Angel> in AoW3 ... and I have yet to do so. In fact, it mostly avoids Abrahamic mythology. So I'd love a chance to ask that haberdasher's whore in that picture what exactly he's an "arch" of ; if you're a ruling angel where are all your ruled angels? I'd even settle for college ruled angles, and that's allotting you a pretty wide margin.

In fact, judging by various other notes in their books, whoever scribbled and dribbled the flavor text for this fantasy wonderland ever-so-slightly abused appending "arch" to random things. The conquerable undead dwelling, the Necropolis, is stuffed with several kinds of undead "archon" units (supposedly for narrative purposes from the campaign... but still.) My first character was an Arch Druid, which sounded like, oh emm gee, totes awesomesauce until I consistently failed to discover any regular old Druid Druids. By this point I'm wondering why they didn't just go whole arch-hog and name every class and creature an arch-sorcerer, arch-necromancer, arch-warlord, arch-pikemen, arch-knights, arch-etcetera.

Games are highly prone to such... let's call them "orphaned superlatives" in their constant bid for coolness in the eyes of teenagers. To some extent it can be harmless flamboyance. We expect that our heroes will have Big Guns and Big Spaceships with EVEN BIGGER GUNS!!! But you have to draw the line at gimmicks meant to look impressive specifically by comparison to a mundane alternative - yet which lack that point of contrast! It's especially hypocritical in Age of Wonders' case, as its dev team retained the wherewithal to poke fun at DnD-inspired RPGs' fetish for appending "dire" to any wild animal to make it seem more threatening, by implementing the Dire Penguin. Henceforth known as the Arch Penguin Archon.

Neither is this only a linguistic issue. Trebuchets have become the most gratuitously overused piece of large medieval equipment by a considerable margin, both in Hollywood movies and video games. They look mechanically complex, with more moving parts than most fabrications of the castle age, and their verticality registers as more imperious to our tree-climbing primate instincts, thus making for a more impressive visual. But just chucking them into a medieval-ish setting out of context, while ignoring the fact that such devices were basically "arch-catapults" or the mere tail end of an eclectic lot of projectile throwing devices, saps them of their rightful victory over their peers. If you want some rock lobbers in your game, start with the basics, then add a special case superlative in the form of a trebuchet or a cannon.

Straining so hard to impress that you lose track of context and contrast is a great way to (paradoxically) end up looking and sounding flat and mundane. And hey, I'll be the first to admit my RPG characters and parties tend to follow a fairly strict "no filthy hu-mons" rule, but that routine's so exquisitely satisfying precisely in contrast to the filthy humon NPCs around me. Super-man is a lot less impressive if you fail to establish the baseline of "man" and many a game has made a name for itself by reining in its rising action to properly contextualize heroic apotheosis.

The alternative can be best summarized by the endless proliferation and meaningless escalation of magic items in RPGs, especially in WoW-clone MMOs and their loot grinding treadmill. When "rare" blue items describe your lowest, basest, most uselessly common gear tier, I think your brainwork's sheared a few cogs. To reiterate that ethically muddled yet still apt line from The Incredibles, "when everyone's super, no-one will be."


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edit 2019/09/23
I should mention that AoW3 is indeed "uneven" and not a bad game, and handled other examples much better. Navies for instance consist of tier 2 frigates and tier 3 galleons, with only the Dreadnought leader class having access to the tier 4... ironclad (a.k.a. Arch-Frigate) as part of their steampunk motif. How can the same game manage to present both the best and worst ways to handle an issue?

Spacetrawler Sequelitis

"Man steps in with a terminal grin
Blue skies turn to gray
Young men die
Children cry
Why is it always the same?
(Hang your head!)"

Devo - Some Things Never Change
 

One scene early in Spacetrawler's second full installment features Veff, a space pirate designed as an easy opening antagonist against whom the heroes can demonstrate their skills, returning to take revenge on them in his designated comically incompetent fashion. The author played up the humor in having Veff do a sitcom-style walk-on, blurting "hell-llllooooo!" to the deadpan weariness of the other cast members putting up with his antics. While it could've been a funny moment of whimsy, it dipped uncomfortably into self-parody in light of the sequel's more telegraphed, largely inconsequential plots and increasing reliance on running gags.

Christopher Baldwin has never been as popular as he deserves. His earliest major work, Bruno, while inspired and rather unique, was doggedly lacking in universal appeal if you ignored the occasional "artistic" boobies. After that he fell into running one project after another past critics with an eye toward syndication, and when one of those finally stuck he wound up writing a cutesy, mildly amusing family-friendly comic about a little girl lost in the woods with her animal friends, for several years.

The original run of Spacetrawler starting in 2010 marked a return to more interesting topics, a space opera centered mainly on character growth. It was also a surprising shift in subject matter for an author who'd never quite shown a taste for sci in his fi. Given Spacetrawler's success, it was somewhat less surprising that his two following webcomics followed suit: the more "young adult" oriented exploration story Anna Galactic and One Way, a first contact story which achieved the unusual feat of setting a stage play (restricted cast, props and environment) to comic panels. Given he backtracked after that to a Spacetrawler sequel, it's safe to assume those two projects didn't rake in the mega-bucks.* And the sequel... is a sequel, checkmarking superficial resemblances to the original while making no effort to rebuild its more substantive bits.

For one thing, while Spacetrawler never attempted any greater verisimilitude than the softest of soft SF, science fantasy for most purposes, the heroes in the first adventure were still bound by the limitations of outer space technology. Now, the new cast need only twitch their noses at a problem to solve it. In a single panel, with no need for preparation, the clever girl will pick any lock and steal any macguffin, the strong woman will intimidate any negotiation into a favorable outcome, the spring-tailed Pulcinello will slapstick any foe into submission, and let's not even get started on Magic Girl Sailor Eebongbong.

Unfortunately this lack of coherence or repercussions within their physical reality also makes them much less interesting. Much of the first cast's charm lay in their unpredictability. With the exception of Dusty, nothing about the way they were introduced could prepare fans for the trajectory of their development. Their replacements' inexplicable near-omnipotence instead yields a predictable routine of vacillating a few panels before saving the day via their singular superpower each and every time. Long before the halfway point, their adventures are sapped of any real tension and we're left with the tedious chore of watching them declare fee-fees at each other page after page, interspersed with a perfunctory press of the "I win" button here and there.

Which is not to say the sequel doesn't have its high points. Baldwin still pulls off a few triple-stacked punchlines ("Dude, is your mom.") and a decent amount of escalation. But still, the degeneration into sitcom drama and humor is unmistakable. Game-changing discoveries like telekinesis or dragon breath are simply taken at face value or glossed over in the rush to have characters elaborate on how they fheeeeeeeel about each other. Comic relief characters like Nogg or Zorilla, who were initially accorded at least a token share of dignity, are now reduced to the author's punching bags to a greater extent than even Dusty ever was. Plotlines are left dangling all over the place...

... and that's really the point. Because from all the effort the author sank into establishing characters and conflicts and the utter lack of effort he put into plots or interactions, it becomes apparent that this is only the beginning. Having supplied himself with innumerable plot threads, he can continue spinning Spacetrawler yarns for years to come, milking his cash cow for all it's worth. He's already started spinning them off with the Bikkie / Wezzle buddy comedy functioning as epilogue to the current series.
And it's working, if his quadruple-pledged Kickstarter to print this degradation of his own previous work can be taken as any indication.
And, I don't seem to have a problem with that, surprisingly enough, as long as getting paid for trashing one of his previous intellectual properties frees him up to begin experimenting again, as long as the endlessly reiterated, episodic, unchangeable Spacetrawler sitcom will be bankrolling more creative projects.

I'll just look forward to the next big thing.










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* Which is quite sad, because even though I wasn't crazy about Anna Galactic, I did think One Way deserved a better reception than it got at the hands of a public incapable of accepting anything other than a Hollywood happy ending.

Age of Wonders 3

Age of Wonders is a fantasy TBS series which for a decade was seemingly fixed in a state of great expectations without ever touching its true potential. I was disenchanted enough with its earlier installments to postpone trying the third of the litter for a few years until it went on a tempting enough sale.

Like most modern TBS, it at long last delivers the vast scale of virtual worlds we all dreamed of inhabiting while playing the first HoMM, Civ or MoO titles back in the eighties and nineties. Unfortunately its resource and economic systems are still bare-bones gold farming and its political system nowhere near approaches the much more seriously developed Stellaris, for instance, rendering political decisions largely irrelevant. Moreover, its randomly generated maps dedicate too few tiles to every geographic location and lack any coherent determinants for terrain like latitude, altitude, humidity, etc., resulting in an unimpressive hodgepodge of ice bordering deserts bordering jungles.

I won't speak as to its campaign. I play TBS games (especially fantasy-based ones) to build my own empire, not to be built up by someone else's imagination. For all I know, AoW might boast the most enthralling storytelling in the history of gaming... but I doubt it. Its flavor text, while not terrible, deliberately sticks to utility while cautiously avoiding flamboyance.

Its greatest inspiration seems Heroes of Might and Magic 4*,what with the heroes on the battlefield, line of sight blocking, four-tier unit system, units roaming free of their heroes around the map and so forth. But compaaring it favorably to the HoMM games or Elemental: Fallen Enchantress would be unfair in itself. While less immersive, AoW3 brings so many gameplay improvements to older fantasy TBS formulae that in terms of round-by-round pugilism it truly does incomparably outshine its competitors. Look at this:

(The green dwarvish druid side's mine.) Five minutes into my first game I was ready to trash AoW3 for limiting its army size to six units. It more than compensates for this with its adjacent hex rule. Any armies bordering the tile being attacked participate in the fight. The mechanic kills two old roc-sized TBS birds with one stone. First, it allows for much more scalable battles, from 2-3 unit skirmishes to... well, that clusterfuck above, without just building up a single massive steamroller stack in HoMM fashion. Second, for truly epic fights it allows you to jockey for advantageous positioning to split your enemy's forces while maintaining your own army's numerical superiority. Here's the same exact fight from a different angle:

Even better, the AI can at times be jaw-droppingly ruthless in exploiting this mechanic to its own advantage, hunting down your flimsy exploration parties with multiple stacks of top-tier units.

Combat mechanics seem to have been refined from earlier games in the series:

Units have up to three attacks per round, with movement eating into these gradually instead of an all or nothing range game. The flanking system actually flanks your target making it turn to retaliate in addition to merely slapping a numeric damage bonus on the attacker. Tactical options like first strike or defense debuffs or disengagement attacks are all implemented to at least the quality of other TBS or tactical RPGs. Heroes are pleasantly customizable from a wide array of class-based (or not) abilities, with weapons adding even more relevant in-combat options. Morale bonuses, summoning magic, magic damage and resistances ranging up to total immunities, the combat system manages to incorporate almost all the old favorites of its genre nearly seamlessly.

Though I'm still frustrated by the odd minor interface inconsistency (e.g. right-clicking versus left clicking for spells vs attacks, or negotiation window clunkiness) most all of these have been smoothed out to a satisfactory degree and the game's very easy to get into and make one's own. At long last, I can applaud Age of Wonders for outdoing its competitors at the tactical level, and from here I can easily see it Finally! taking HoMM's place as our go-to reference for fantasy TBS. In fact, being pleasantly impressed by its basics I decided to shill out another $15 for its expansions, and "building up" seems to be exactly what they've been doing, shoring up their weaker elements of immersion. A couple of the new music tracks are real humdingers, and new units show a true eye for artistic detail:

Cadavers are just skeletons, zombies, the basic, dime-a-dozen necromantic unit all too familiar to fantasy roleplayers. AoW3's version stands out by... crawling. Simple as that. They stuck more individuals into the unit, visually, than for other types, to get the undead swarm angle across, and instead of clattering or shambling, their idle animation has them crawling around in their filthy rags, a writhing mass of the wretched damned occasionally lifting a bony hand in feeble supplication... or hunger? Beautiful little piece of work, whoever worked on them. As I mentioned vis-a-vis Pillars of Eternity, once your product gets its basics right, it's these sorts of little details which will make or break your success as a truly memorable series.

I've already bought their next game, Planetfall, though I'm giving it a few months for the more obvious bugs to get fixed. Really hoping to see these games gain the strategic, roleplaying and immersive elements to match their very promising tactical side.



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* (or possibly Master of Magic, which I should really get around to playing)

Fie Tunes

Y'know, in an era of one-click in-app purchases constantly trying to bait or trick you into making a million microtransactions, I'm continually amazed at how hard iTunes works to prevent itself from taking my money. Quite virtuous of them, really.

Start with their password requirements, more stringent than those of major banks, which mandate a password of such arcane convolution as to guarantee I can never remember the damn thing and have to recover it every few months. Or the fact that I'm then forced to re-verify my billing methods every single time. Or the fact the verification isn't going through, for some inexplicable reason and moreover lacks any option to re-send the request. Or that lovely pop-up ordering me to "fix" the fact that it's not my default music player. Or that it's one of the last programs in existence which demands a full system reboot whenever it patches itself, which is, naturally... often... yeah, let's leave it at that. Or that Apple's auto-update shoves itself to the forefront at utterly random times. Or that patching this flimsy clutter of unusable features takes longer than most 50GB AAA video games. Even if I get it working, iTunes has the worst loading times of any browser, digital distribution platform or similar software, compounded by constant pop-ups demanding I verify my password because this is apparently the only piece of modern software which cannot check a damn IP address!

And hey, while all this might still be villainous, I could understand if it were at least calculated, Machiavellian villainy, if Apple could reasonably assume it had us all by the shorthairs and could treat us as badly as it wanted for lack of competition. However, music downloads are the perennially contentious poster-child of data distribution. Forget online radio or other official stores. There are several methods by which I could presumably be listening to music for free (like, idaknow... YouTube?) and yet I freely choose to pay, to support the industry, to make a charitable donation, only to be cockblocked by your idiotic gatekeeping device at every single turn. I could buy a bank-breaking car with a thousand dollar stereo system with less hassle than I can shill out ninety-nine cents through iTunes to blast Baby Got Back on that same stereo system.

In an era of online credit libertinism, let us raise our glasses to iTunes' puritanical chastity. Really, take a bow, thank you for working so hard to stop us trying to give you money. You're an inspiration to us all. Let it not be said that I can't appreciate the value of an inept parasite. I'd sing an ode in your honor but YOU WOULDN'T LET ME BUY IT !

Our Little Adventure

Webcomics make a creator's growth (or lack thereof) clearer than most. The lack of gatekeepers combined with a lack of editing ensure an overwhelming preponderance of utterly untrained (and usually unskilled) artists and writers, and with no risk of getting cancelled most such serial works will simply run until their author wanders off. Also, the endlessly reiterative succession of punchlines and action sequences can make it clear when a particular gimmick has been improved.

Our Little Adventure starts out as a seeming copycat of the long-running and deservedly successful DnD comic The Order of the Stick, with an adventuring party setting out to capture an ultra-powerful macguffin. In fact, superficial aesthetics aside, it begins in a much more rational manner than most RPG-inspired comics, avoiding the usual aimless fumbling or the over-reliance on jokes about game mechanics. Supposedly based on an actual campaign, it manages to throw a fresh spin on party composition and villains and keeps its pacing reasonable, refraining from the overeager "wouldn't-it-be-cool-if" escalation of say... Goblins.

Unfortunately it also confirms that having good ideas does not a good writer make. Seemingly every page is horrendously over-exposited, with quite a few redundant characters plus combatants declaring their attacks in utterly bland commentary adding no insights into the action. Overly formal sentence structure doesn't help matters, and the few attempts at humor tend to peter out without punchlines or drown themselves out in repetition. Stilted barely begins to describe it.

That goes on for a good, long while. Not entirely unpalatable for fans of RPG inspired stories, but there's nothing to really sell such a mountain of mediocrity either. And then the author begins to improve. It starts with characters gesturing more naturally and displaying more nuanced emotion, then around pages 400-500, the dialogue gradually drops some of its redundancy, characters begin slipping humorous asides into conversations more smoothly, and most importantly they begin to cut down on verbally describing every single action even as they perform it. The result still doesn't measure up to its more famous competitors but deserves a clap on the back for its consistent (if minor) self-improvement. It's a pity that, like most webcomics, Our Little Adventure seems to be on unofficial "hiatus" (a.k.a. deader than a twice-baked zombie) since last year, as all the hard work that went into its eventual ~700 pages was finally showing results.

The growth in quality is so slight as to barely be noticeable, but nevertheless the author improved his storytelling skills... and I hate him for it. Because in eight years of blogging, despite smithing my wording into a more solid form, after over a thousand posts and several more short stories than those which appear here, I find myself still incapable of scribing a decent narrative. My attempts at fiction still fall flat. And I hate those who've put in the work and improved themselves past their original station or especially my own ability, hate being leapfrogged, hate trudging through a comic archive only to see them grow over the years in ways that are, apparently, beyond me.

Automata Past and Future

"And I said you can't make everybody happy
He said you'd like to at least make yourself happy though
I'm not sure who I am
I'm not sure who I am
But I know who I've been"

Modest Mouse - Make Everyone Happy / Mechanical Birds


There should be some difference between golems and robots. Yes, I know they show up in different settings, but for that to be a meaningful distinction they should stand out by more than superfluities, more than just saying "beep-beep" versus... ida know, something in Hebrew, presumably.

I'll admit the few fantasy books I've read have not included such character-devices, but the many fantasy games I've played routinely do. And, just as wizards fell more and more into the role of scientists, golems acquired mithril circuitry and voice recognition programming and magic wand remote controls. Aside from the lamentable lack of imagination such gimmicks betray, blurring the lines between science fiction and fantasy saps much of both fields' charm. One genre looks forward to glorious futures, the other back to glorious pasts. Vulcans may be space-elves, but the distinction between wisdom and logic should not be so easily cast aside in desperation to cram every popular gimmick into every new intellectual property, the full gamut of emotions in every scene. We've beaten Clarke's third law into undeath, we've trolled the cyborgs of Shadowrun, we've implanted the three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and the steampunk appeal of magitek has had a couple of decades to play itself out. Science fantasy has gotten old. Enough with the beeping golems already!

On one hand, the confusion is justifiable. When Karel Capek coined the term, his robots recalled more than a little Mary Shelley's mountain-hopping daemon, and both echoed the Jewish myth of the golem escaping its creator's control. Long before that, endless mythologies held we humans ourselves to have been deliberately fabricated from baser components, usually dirt infused with breath or some kind of bodily fluids. (And you must admit, we do love gettin' dirty and breathy with our bodily fluids.)  But just as modern superheroes distinguished themselves from demigods (albeit not very decisively) by acquiring their powers via materialistic means, so robots were defined less by the process of their creation as by their potential as unbridled artificial consciousness.

I return once again to the distinction I always make between SF and Fantasy. Mythological plots rely on power handed down from above, doled out in trade for ritual and obeisance, whether the original source is divine or a wise ancient master of masterful ancient wisdom. Science on the other hand is a bottom-up process in which rational minds build up their understanding and means of affecting the world from basic elements. Two questions arise:

1) What is a golem, intrinsically, which a robot is not? What qualities are handed down to it by its creator?
2) What can a robot do which a golem cannot? Being technology, how does it advance the antientropic buildup of knowledge, the complexity of culture?

Both questions can be answered in various ways depending on the demands of the narrative. Your golems might house the spirits of martyred dwarves (though that tread upon the "free will" question of cybernetics) or your robot might help solve murders using his superior robo-logic. Maybe your golem is powered by The Word, held by its creator's charm on the line between truth and death. Maybe your robot interacts in novel ways with existing technology, like plugging itself directly into a network to hack it. Pick your gimmick.

But whatever the gimmick, golems should draw their power, purpose and limitations from above: the properties of their principal material, the will of their creator, the mystical domain of the divine force which sets them in motion. Robots, on the other hand, should find functions and purposes beyond their base attributes. Most crucially, a golem is defined by its origins and its conflict intrinsically defined by opposition or subservience to its maker. In that sense, Shelley's daemon, despite its displays of individual will, intellect and purpose, remained a mythical beast locked into its conflict with its life-giver Frankenstein. Now on the other hand a robot, in the progressive spirit of the best science fiction, should, given a long enough narrative, display transhuman interests and remake itself beyond its makers' ken, ideally growing into a ship of Theseus sailing the future. Capek, despite wording this fairly unimaginatively as "Adam and Eve" did hit upon such inevitability of automythopoesis toward the end of his play.