Tubular Fluoride

"Despite his protestations to the contrary, the young man showed a small but very promising streak of sadism. Accordingly, the Hermit had Swapped him into the mind of a dental assistant on Prodenda IX. That planet, just to the left of the South Ridge stars if you come by way of Procyon, had been settled by a group of Terrans who felt strongly about fluorine, despising this chemical group as though it were the devil itself. On Prodenda IX they could live fluorine-free, with the assistance of many dental architects, as they were called."

Robert Sheckley - Mindswap (1965)
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"Far out," he said, which was the way he talked in those days. The counterculture possessed a whole book of
phrases which bordered on meaning nothing. Fat used to string a bunch of them together. [...] "I can dig it," he
prattled away as they walked. "Out of sight."

Philip K. Dick - VALIS (1981)
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"The video arcade is a modern day drive-in. The obvious difference is that the video arcade can be a solitary experience. That is, the arcade does not require social interaction as the drive-in once did. Spontaneous verbalization is frequently found in the player talking to the machine."

Review (year??) by Anthony D. Meyer, M.D. of Mind at Play a book about video games by Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus (1983)

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I wanted to find a reference in Mind at Play for a post touching on gender roles in video games, but I can't get at the local library's copy because of China's pandemic gift to the world. That old review caught my attention due to the fact that: -what the hell were you smoking, doc?

First off, granted, I've never been to a drive-in movie theater, but for all their reputation as make-out spots I doubt they were exclusive to car pools. One could just as easily drive in to a movie theater on the way home from work and pay the fee alone as walk into an arcade and drop a few quarters into a machine. Neither business model "requires" interaction.
Second, while drive-ins were a bit before my time I am just old enough to barely remember arcades, which bustled with teenagers taking turns at machines, looking over each others' shoulder, cheering each other on or heckling each other. Whether they "can" be a solitary experience, they just as often weren't.
Third, was spontaneous verbalization so distinctive a feature of arcades? Did people at drive-ins never yell at the screen? Granted, it's been a few years since I've set paw in an indoor movie theater but even in that more public setting one could hear occasional mumbled comments of "oh no, don't open that door!" or shocked gasps, grumbles and laughter from the audience. Even now in 2020, playing computer games behind two closed doors and a set of headphones, I find myself exclaiming "oh, fiddlesticks and poppycock!*" whenever I lose a city, miss a shot or stumble off a ledge. At the other end of the spectrum, I was also kicked out of online game guilds in the past for complaining about players spontaneously verbalizing over voice chat. Even other species of ape, if taught sign language, will sign to themselves!
Fourth, if I were disposed to put myself through the hassle, I don't doubt I could find fifty-year-old reviews about the drive-in movie culture of the 1950s and '60s which deemed such venues less social than traditional movie theaters and theatre-theaters because the audience were separated from each other in their cars instead of fighting over armrest space and struggling to best ignore each other for an hour and a half... just as Gawd intended!

For a society which has supposedly become less social and more isolated every decade for the past century or more, we seem unusually chatty.

Back in the '80s Pip K Dick referenced "the counterculture" and its slang as an amusing historical anomaly from two decades past - which I'm sure his readers with their neon-spiked mohawk hairdos found totally "rad" and "fresh" and "tubular" until a decade later when my own mopey generation upgraded it to mad wicked sick. And if you think fabricating in-group solidarity via meaningless slang just came about after the second world war, then by all means look up some flapper or hobo slang. Or do we need to review the Artful Dodger's banter for reference? Degree of popular involvement, demographics and fixations vary, sure, but I doubt any urbanized society goes more than two decades without fomenting a few new sub or counter or under-the-counter cultures in its underbelly. If there were no counterculture churn, we'd be hard-pressed to recognize any culture at all.

Every new medium, every new fad in entertainment and social interaction, every new generation renews the chorus of discoveries about demographic differences... which might be more impressive if they weren't constantly rediscovering that apes are still apes! In fact, Mind at Play is remarkable largely because while its references to information technology are comically dated after nearly four decades, its commentary on games' psychological underpinnings remains valid, to the point I'd re-iterated a couple of their conclusions here in my den before ever reading the book. The problem isn't that our world is changing, but that we ourselves are not, and for that you only have to look at some of our most recalcitrant obsessions. We poke fun at the people scared of water fluoridation now, sure, but it was already a decade-old running gag by the mid-60s (everyone repeat: Precious Bodily Fluids) and the conspiracy theorists won't be letting up any time soon. This despite no-one agreeing on what exactly the fluoridation conspiracy's supposed to accomplish... or how... or whether after 3/4 of a century we should've seen some effects... but that's just what they want you to think... whoever they are... maybe... or not. Bigfoot?

And if all that weren't bad enough, consider that even I, right at this moment, am repeating myself about such repetition!



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* Funny that "poppy-cock" sounds so much dirtier now than it did a century ago. See? Progress!

Age of Wonders: Planetfall

A few months ago I was intrigued enough by Age of Wonders 3 so as to buy the newly released SciFi spin-off Planetfall. I suppose there's something to be said for a series which manages to leave fans begging for more despite consistently falling short of its potential for five iterations and counting.

That right there is a light unit taking cover... behind an allied heavy unit. In broad strokes, Planetfall initially comes across as a cosmetic mod of AoW3, but in fact it's filled in a great many missing details among its gameplay mechanics. The series' strongest point is its tactical side, and Planetfall adds more options for unit modification, damage types with associated status effect procs, mildly improved terrain with explosive hazards, destructible cover of different heights and a few other tidbits.

More importantly, it addressed AoW's blatantly lacking strategic side.
Terrain is now divided into claimable territories instead of relying on city radii to cover all resources, with each city able to expand to four surrounding territories, just complicated enough to make you plan out your expansion mentally without having to break out the graph paper.
Contrary to previous years' trend in strategy games (GalCiv3, Spellforce 3, etc.) toward removing static defenses or rendering them irrelevant to force the player to send armies to every single threat by way of busywork, building up your bases in Planetfall also builds up their defenses, and a fully operational city has little to fear from anything other than a major offensive until the end-game.
Geography has greatly improved, with climes flowing more smoothly and consistently instead of being randomly interspersed.
Map locations are more diverse, ranging from loot crates to spawners to dungeons which only one army can enter, to mini-quest locations which might offer different solutions depending on your alliances and class choice.
Neutral faction favor currying replaces buying neutral units at inns.
The best feature would have to be the reliable combat automation letting you personally address only one out of ten or so fights and greatly cutting down on the tedium of clearing a large map (and I do so love large maps) with a manual combat retry option in case of unexpected catastrophe.

Unfortunately, everything still feels a bit rushed and incomplete. Character creation puts you through a point-buy system with only 3-4 options in 3 categories, with little long-term impact. The economic side of things mostly revolves around maximizing your secondary resource (you always require more vespene gas "cosmite") to upgrade your units. The technology trees are paced well enough for beginning and mid-game, but are quickly exhausted during a long campaign, with no reiterative resource point sinks a la Stellaris. In fact, given Planetfall was published through Paradox, quite a few of its lackluster features beg the comparison "this worked better in Stellaris" most notably diplomacy. While AI leaders have grown a bit more complex (harder to simply bribe into complacency) they lack quite a few logical options, like telling an ally to stop attacking one of your vassals or prodding them toward allying with a particular native faction. Also, the good / evil reputation system is largely irrelevant and much too easily flipped from one extreme to the other.

In part that's understandable, as AoW's very involved tactical side draws focus away from its grand strategy angle. But, to compensate, as it started as a copycat of Heroes of Might and Magic, AoW implies much the same reliance on immersion and a bit of role-playing as opposed to abstract strategy. You'd think after twenty years they'd actually get good at that.

Character creation still relies on a race / class pairing, though in this case your class is called a secret technology. My first avatar choice is still my favorite. I went for Assembly / Xenoplague, meaning basically the Borg with Xenomorph pets. Which I'll admit is absolutely ridiculous and exactly the sort of cheesy pulpy derivative crap I routinely ridicule on this blog... but at the same time held an irresistible coolness factor. The Dvar, a "40K" version of fantasy dwarves are interesting enough with their rough-hewn Slavic industrial aesthetic and their penchant for terrain deformation, and the obligatory insectoid aliens might be interesting if not for their psychic angle, but that's fodder for a whole 'nother post.

Unfortunately, by the time you scrape down to the amazons riding dinosaurs with laser cannons, that's about as dignified as your options get. The more technological aspects of your technology trees revolve mainly around dropping the words "quantum" and "nano" into random sentences and the rest, sadly... is telepathy. You've got a good psychic superweapon and its evil psychic counterpart and psychic space insects and psychic space fish and psychic space mummies and psychic space capitalist mafiosi, and psychic vampire space ghosts because by this point sure, why the hell not? To me it just reinforces my oft-reiterated observation that telepathy is a dead end for science fiction. Even allowing for Planetfall's looser definition as science fantasy, the "science" angle's even flimsier than usual and its developers had no idea how to slap together anything but a high fantasy game with space wizards.

Worse yet this incompetence is generalized to most of the game's thematic elements. The visual artists actually did some decent work. Voice acting, however, wavers below convincing with some amusing flubs here and there. Antares, by the way, is not usually pronounced as "ant-arse" - although that would explain why I can never find the damn thing. The writing is uniformly bland and forgettable, punctuated only by some feeble attempts at humor about penguins and BBQ sauce which fall completely out of place in Planetfall's grimmer setting.


Being a TBS game about planetary conquest a comparison with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri seems inescapable (and I dare say deliberately sought by Triumph Studios) but Alpha Centauri put a lot of effort into remaining balanced and even plausible despite its telepathy and other hand-waved space wizardry. Its base-building was built on materialistic explanations about solar reflectors and moisture gradients, the physics behind its weapons and armor researched to a level satisfactorily above pop culture level, its political arguments cleverly balanced to give even the more evil factions their good points and vice-versa.

I'm reminded of something I noticed about the webcomics Dominic Deegan and Star Power, respectively fantasy and SciFi superheroics both by the same author. The same flighty rationalizations and characterizations which endeared the first to its readers rendered the second laughable, and the same is true here. While it remained a fantasy series, Age of Wonders' notion of building factions and political alliances among elves and goblins added a layer of intrigue to fairytale antics. The same treatment in a nominally "sciencey" setting looks slapdash and lazy. I'm certainly enjoying Planetfall's steadily improving strategic and especially tactical elements, but this whole series desperately awaits more intelligent world-building and characterization. We really don't need more half-assed clones of Shadowrun or Warhammer.

The Madness of Darkness

"Out from ruins once possessed
Fallen city, living death"

Metallica - The Thing That Should Not Be

At the Mountains of Madness does not feel like an H. P. Lovecraft story. After a chapter or two I half thought I'd picked up John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? by mistake, and not just because of its Antarctic expedition setting... or the shapeshifting monsters. In fact, Campbell's version (published two years after Lovecraft's and one year after the latter's convenient death, in the same magazine which Campbell had taken over as editor, and which horror tale would go in to inspire several movies and an entire subculture of alien doppelganger fiction) draws a suspicious amount of apparent inspiration from Lovecraft's. But as this blog post concerns itself neither with the letter nor the moral spirit of the rules surrounding plagiarism, let us skip trippingly along.

Lovecraft primarily banked on our fear of the unknown. Most of his tales hold the monster out of focus until the last moment, dangling only a few hints of its physical attributes before the reader. Their tone approached Romantic-era thrillers in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Lovecraft seems to have idolized. His mythical sunken city of R'lyeh resembles Poe's The City in the Sea much more than any of the endless myths and adventure stories about Atlantis. Purple, mythical, mystical, unknowable, indefinable, oneiric, suspenseful Gothic horror for a new century, this was my impression of Lovecraft from the twenty or so short stories I'd read. At the Mountains of Madness in contrast was obviously written with both a geographic atlas and a paleontology tract in hand. Not that this makes its scientific literacy all that impressive from my futuristic vantage point. If nothing else, the altitudes at which the heroes were working should've had them gasping their lungs inside out within five minutes from the strain of sitting, much less racing around an entire city copying murals.
But still.
The story provides more rationalization by far than his previous fare, makes exhaustive references to Antarctic geography, catalogues the Elder Things' alien morphology and physiology, tracks their civilization across major geological periods with references to the continent's climate changes, and most importantly sets up the beginnings of an overarching framework integrating the Elder Things' history with R'lyeh and the Mi-Go. Speaking of which, the story he wrote immediately preceding this one makes me think his switch in tone wasn't a one-off.

The Whisperer in Darkness starts out much like Lovecraft's earlier stories, with hints and portents of raptors in the night. But, halfway through, it ramps up to detailed descriptions of the Mi-Go and exposition as to their origins, material nature and policies vis-a-vis the naked ape. It's especially noteworthy for its ambiguity as to the Mi-Go's motivations, with its unreliably narrated conversations toward the end wide open to interpretation, where in earlier stories the inhuman monsters were almost universally malicious or at least wantonly destructive. In the larger context of his career, you can almost see Lovecraft transitioning thematically from superstition to science fiction as Whisperer progresses. On one hand, this renders his later repeated references to Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym in Mountains of Madness all the more touching, as though Lovecraft couldn't help but reaffirm his admiration of his bygone hero even as he himself outgrew the horror/mystery style of a century prior and took the first steps toward stitching together a coherent cosmology for future works. It also shines a new light on arguably Lovecraft's most accomplished tale, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, one of only two of his major works written after this period, which was carefully composed to allow for materialistic explanations despite the demonic air with which its narrator perceives events.

Then Howard died.

In 1936, five years after it was written, At the Mountains of Madness with its rationalization of worlds beyond into ersatz science was finally published, and a year later, a few months after Lovecraft's death, the magazine was taken over by John W. Campbell, the godfather of hard Science Fiction. In 1938 Campbell published the acclaimed Who Goes There? and Lovecraft remains known to the public as a writer of supernatural horror and not sci-fi.

So here's one of those "what might've been?" questions. If Lovecraft had not died at the age of 46 in relative obscurity, if he had continued his later career's shift toward SF and cobbled together an overarching cosmology for his works, if he had ridden subsequent decades' shift into hard SF alongside Campbell's other golden age writers like Heinlein and Asimov, how would our popular fiction look today? What would Middle-Earth be without The Silmarillion? A couple of romantic, nostalgic adventure stories?

Don't Bother

Cole: "He did a great job on the story. Members of my clan have been disappearing and I've been sent to investigate why we're not hearing from them."
Brent: "So what happened to your clan members?"
Cole: "I can't find out. Every time I get close Francis possess[sic*] an incredibly powerful NPC and kills me. He's not a very good storyteller. Damn!"
Francis: "Whoa! That was close. You almost solved the mystery. I killed you real good that time."

PvP - 2000/06/15 (back when it was still worth reading)

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Here's a screenshot from Sir, You Are Being Hunted:

Most patrons of The Robotic Arms Tavern, Inn and Brothel will remember those damn balloons with some warranted degree of tooth-gnashing. SYABH revolves around putting obstacles between oneself and all the marauding brit-bots, and the balloon's searchlight negates ground cover if it hits you.... and sets every 'bot within earshot onto you. And it might happen upon you when you were already pinned down and waiting for patrols to pass.

However... you have several options for dealing with it. Its appearance does not signal an immediate game over. You can simply avoid its spotlight. You can shoot out its spotlight (or the robot robo-manning it) as I'm preparing to do there. You can set off a distraction far away from your objective so that any nearby robots will be too busy to immediately reach you even if the spotlight hits you. If you're nearly done with your current island anyway, you can throw caution to the wind and make a mad dash for your objective then for the escape boat, alarm calls blaring and shots whizzing around your head. Ah, good times... good times.

SYABH is a survival game. Map out your environment, sneak past most enemies, grab some weapons to kill the few you really need to, and... find some food so you don't starve. So I was hoping for a similarly enjoyable experience from the other, contemporary survival game actually entitled Don't Starve.
In a word: No.

I avoided it for a few years when I saw the moronic chibis. "Cartoonish" can have its uses, but as a rule anything cutesified is almost guaranteed to be dumbed-down garbage passed off under the conceit of being child-friendly. I was right. Even buying it during a hefty sale is a waste of money. Overtly, these two examples would seem almost identical. Both rely on randomized maps and "survival humor" rather than survival horror. Both have a similar health / hunger mechanic and severely restricted inventory space with no pause for sifting through it. Don't Starve's just centered on base-building and permadeath instead of exploration and save points. Given its cheaper, more malleable graphics and lack of physics it also features more content (items, monsters, etc.) than SYABH.

But those charred remains of what used to be my incipient base up there are the result of a single lightning strike. Ten playthroughs and storms I kept building a lightning rod every time I built a base. The one time I didn't... of course Murphy's Law kicks in. And that's it. I've wasted too many resources to make it through the winter. Game over.

Most problems in Don't Starve (aside from basic food and light) present a similarly one-to-one solution - if X happens, equip item Y. Also, somehow it manages to be even more of a point-and-click chore in 2D than if it had boasted FPS mechanics. Items constantly occlude each other (like my skeletons there) and your character gets stuck on trees and rocks even as you try harvesting them - or worse yet, gets burned by fires you yourself set because their hazard proximity radius is smaller than your activation proximity radius. Your inventory slots constantly re-arrange themselves as you swap items in and out of your hands, which you'll need to do in preparation for every single action you undertake - equip axe to chop trees, equip pickaxe to mine, equip razor to shave buffalo... no I'm not joking. And of course each item wears out... leaving an emtpy slot... which will cause the next items you shuffle in and out of your hands to switch places so that you never know where anything is. Most of my deaths occurred while I was indeed properly equipped but my spear or armor or torch or rope had mysteriously disappeared from where I'd put them. Not to mention the aforementioned proximity / hitbox issues cause persistent mis-clicks during combat. To top it all off, I already complained three posts ago about the deliberate lack of in-game information forcing you to endlessly restart through the same exact routine of running around picking berries and flowers and scrambling for flint and gold.

In other words, for all its potential for interconnected resource harvesting and base-building, this is ultimately a game for hyperactive cretins who learn procedures by rote. It's all about mindlessly building search images for your various tools so you can twitch your way through a million item swaps to waste as little time as possible while scrambling to gather and build the same exact base items and getting knocked back to the start every time even a single thing goes wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I love the survival routine. Dwarf Fortress has as many ways to die as it has game elements and I've thoroughly enjoyed trying to build twenty-level glass aquaria in the middle of my base while my dwarves risked life and limb fishing for their dinner on a rocky seashore. I've praised Amnesia: the Dark Descent, where you can't fight at all, and even Miasmata, a game in which you can die by literally tripping and falling! But none of them forced a permadeath mechanic for single events, or deliberately complicated inventory management or obfuscated game mechanics all to feign greater complexity than they offered. Don't Starve is a deliberately obtuse chore with randomized failure states. Whether it's challenging or not is moot. It's like trying to play chess with a third-grader. You stop worrying whether the game is good or not, because you just know at some point the drooling little shithead's going to randomly throw a fit and flip the board over.

Aaaaand - uninstall.
Done.

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* Yes folks, it's still misspelled after 20 years.

Mindswap

"Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high"

The Beatles - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

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Spoilers for the book in question follow. Long story short: if you're into Role-Playing Games, you should suffer through this moderately entertaining abortion of a narrative.
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You've probably never heard of Robert Sheckley despite his half-century career and enviable doses of both talent and publication... at least from where I'm standing as a tongue-twisted blogger with five minus a half readers. He was quite adept in science fiction's prime modus operandi: quick, biting short stories centering on a particular effect, conserving more detail than they provide. Unfortunately for him, short stories rarely become famous enough to be remembered individually or lend their author name recognition by association. And, fortune aside, he also seems to have occasionally fallen into the habit of shitting where he ate.

The novel Mindswap came out in the mid-'60s when dropping acid was assumed to somehow unlock the secrets of the cosmos and deconstructionism was just ramping up from a moderately legitimate critique of communication's ability to twist concepts to the all-purpose anti-intellectual vandalism we know and love today. (In fact, Sheckley was both born and died within a couple of years of Jacques Derrida.) The book starts out intriguing enough. A small-town lad yearns for adventure, but as he can't afford to physically travel by spaceship he opts for swapping minds with a Martian, only to find himself defrauded of his human body and unable to return. From there, he swaps to another alien body hunting for talking eggs, and then to another alien too polite to refuse the gift of an exploding nose-ring. That takes us about halfway through the relatively short novel. Most of the second half is masterfully-wordsmithed crap.

"Marvin stared at this man transformed; then bowed low and exclaimed. 'Milord Inglenook bar na Idrisi-san, first lord of the Admiralty, Familiar to the Prime Minister, Adviser Extraordinary to the King, Bludgeon of the Church Rampant and Invocateur of the Grand Council!'
'I am that person,' Inglenook responded. 'And I play the hunchback for reasons most politic; for were my presence even suspected here by my rival, Lord Blackamoor de Mordevund, all of us would be dead men ere the frogs in the Pond Royal had chance to croak at first ray of Phoebus!'"

The hero Marvin's brain, overloaded with novelty, succumbs to "metaphoric deformation" and begins seeing all the aliens around him as humans engaged in stereotypical pulp adventures, from a risque pickup bar / brothel scene to a wild west romance, to an amusingly detailed pastiche of Alexandre Dumas and his many ghostwriters and imitators in later centuries' historical swashbuckling throwbacks. Or it would be amusing if that paragraph above weren't tortured and disarticulated into several dozen pages' worth of more of the same to pad out the book's length.

It bears mentioning that SciFi during the early and middle 20th century languished in the grip of pulp appeal, churning out piles upon piles of interchangeable swashbuckling pistoleer space pirate space rebel space commodore space-girl-getting space heroes like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, James T. Kirk or Luke Skywalker. If Sheckley wanted to highlight the shameful lack of creativity in copying such cliches century after century, he certainly succeeded. However:

1) That point could have been made in five pages just as easily as fifty.
2) Other authors of the time did it more elegantly (e.g. Robert Heinlein in Space Family Stone's asides about writing for a pulp SF TV series)
3) Sheckley himself was well on the way to demonstrating a better take on the hero's journey in Mindswap... before instead opting to merely posture as a literary rebel.

There is still one demographic for whom Mindswap should be considered required reading: roleplayers, whether you just play cRPGs like me or you actually get together around a table or you nerf each other in the park, or especially if you nurture ambitions of GMing or even writing material for such settings. Mindswap's ending takes escapist "immersion" to its logical self-defeating extreme. It provides apt examples of quick and illustrative world-building even while parodying formulaic adventure-worlds. Perhaps most importantly, this term should be remembered in any discussion of speculative fiction:

"'No,' Marvin said. 'Why is it called "Panzaism"?'
'The concept is self-explanatory,' Blanders said. 'Don Quijote thinks the windmill is a giant, whereas Panza thinks the giant is a windmill. Quijotism may be defined as the perception of everyday things as rare entities. The reverse of that is Panzaism, which is the perception of rare entities as everyday things.'
'Do you mean,' Marvin asked, 'that I might think I was looking at a cow, when actually it was an Altairian?'"

If your Altairians act like cows, then you should be writing cow fiction, not SF. We should all gain the cynicism necessary to spot the myriad hacks who fail to follow through the logical consequences of their futuristic or fantastic set pieces, who drag wonder into mundane muck.

Co-Starring...

Y'know, I wanted to talk about Science Fiction tonight, but sometimes reality is just stranger than. I have to remark on how thankful I am that in light of the mounting COVID-19 pandemic, Bose has sent me a thoughtful e-mail about their infection-related store closures and service policies. That is of course just what I was waiting for: epidemiological updates from the schmucks charging me twenty dollars for twenty-cent foam pads for my headphones.

Luckily, the MSN homepage has my back, with all their helpful tips and articles. Because when faced with a potentially deadly virus, who needs the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control or Doctors Without Borders? You know I go straight to Microsoft for advice... to the people who can barely keep on top of virtual viruses.

Pandemics make sense. It's the rest of our society I can't understand.

The Civilopedia Is Not Optional

There are two games I want to talk about in the next week, and they both turn out to have something not-in-common. See, I've been trying my hand at Not Starving. Which is actually working out fine. It's the "Don't Get Blindsided By An Enemy I Had No Way Of Knowing Would Spawn On Top Of Me"(TM) that's giving me more trouble. Or the fifty-odd game mechanics that are explained nowhere at all in the bare-bones tooltips.

OK, here, look at this:

That's Age of Wonders: Planetfall's in-game "Imperial Archives" - information on game mechanics, damage types, units, buildings, everything you could want. It's a pretty standard feature for turn-based strategy games, as well as for the the more cerebral RPGs. There is no reason why it shouldn't be a feature of games. All games.

Sure, I get it, the spirit of adventure is a major part of computer games, wondering what's around the corner, hanging on the edge of your seat for every new plot twist, getting knocked off a cliff by a random dragon. Good times. But it has to be counterbalanced by the knowledge that playing this one game should not take up your customers' entire life. You could meet halfway, for instance, and only reveal a monster's stats after the player has killed a certain number of them, or reveal each building's particular numeric values after it's been operational for some time, reveal item stats after the player has used it for a certain amount of time. You could hint that "something" bad will happen every three days. But simply dropping a bridge on the player is generally considered cheap, amateurish game design no matter the genre.

I've seen Don't Starve applauded for having a "steep learning curve" which is simply not true. That phrase is commonly applied to games with a heavy strategic element, where you're given mountains of information which you have to balance and rationalize into a coherent plan of action. Games in which you die repeatedly simply by being randomly killed by features you were never warned about, where you're never allowed to see the numbers behind the events on screen, well, those games don't have a learning curve. They have a mindless repetition curve. They have a fake longevity curve.

Neither is this a responsibility to be pawned off to an online wiki (and Don't Starve has a rather extensive one) not only because people might want to play it offline but because that information is logically part of the game. Unsurprisingly, the more I've learned about Planetfall's real numbers, stats and mechanics, the more interesting it's become trying to game the system. The more I've read up on Don't Starve's actual numbers, the more linear it seems, and the less inclined I am to try getting the same retarded chibis to rebuild the same base fifty times over. Even Dwarf Fortress at least had a pause button to let you look in detail at what's happening on screen. When a game's main selling point is hiding its own simple-mindedness, you have to wonder why it ever sold at all.

"Will It Play in Peoria?"

"She checks out Mozart while she does Tae Bo 
Reminds me that there's room to grow"

Train - Drops of Jupiter


I got a haircut today, and the shop was full of chatter as usual. I will never understand why trimming a bit of excess keratin is presumed to entail so much conversation (or why "just shorten it" apparently sounds like Sanskrit algebra to hairdressers and requires endless explanation and details, but that's a whole other topic.) Anyhoo, one of my fellow victims a few seats away was commenting on this latest little pandemic China has so thoughtfully provided (they really do manufacture everything these days) and complaining "we all out here's payin' for it" concerning the preventive measures being put in place in large cities.
Relax.
This isn't yet another commentary about COVID-19, or about hairstyling. I take some pride in generally being neither topical nor stylish. His phrasing "out here" amused me because despite its quasi-rural trappings, our abode happens to abide very near the center of the United States of America.

It seems one of America's odder oddities that it lacks a true cultural core. Unlike most countries which (at least in the modern age) spread outward from some socioeconomic trendsetting population center surrounded by provinces and provincial attitudes, the U.S. has its various capitals split along both coasts, framing between them a continually provincial "flyover country" dotted by only a few cities cosmopolitan enough to boast a respectable art or natural history museum. Instead of diffusing outward, America's provincialism sinks inward and condenses, seething into a slurry of watered-down beer and sugared-up meat. While geographic and cultural gradations don't necessarily coincide, maybe this uninterrupted stream of unconsciousness at least partly explains why the backwood ignorants of 48 different states feel a closer kinship to each other than to their nearest cultural centers. And, people in this "out here" at the core indeed feel left out and lash out against the increasingly alien others at their periphery. Bill Maher ran a "new rule" segment last year commenting on the tech sector's need to invest in the cultural development of the nation's forgotten provinces, because the alternative is increased cultural, legal and physical vandalism by its abandoned relatives.

There's a problem with that idea. It reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with an online acquaintance who tried countering my anti-Midwest rhetoric by reminding me that many of the creative minds in New York or Los Angeles were born and raised in small midwestern towns. At the time I failed to voice the correct retort: "yeah, and the point is they left." Cultural centers become such by the accumulation of intellect(s), and for any future intellects who wish to develop, the solution is to move to the place which can provide intellectual interaction, furthering the shift. I've been appalled over the past couple of decades to hear of my birthplace's anti-intellectual backslide into primitive superstition, wondering how my own generation could degenerate so badly as to build new churches instead of turning the old ones into astronomic observatories or gastronomic dispensaries, or really, anything other than monuments to charlatanism. Then it hit me: here I am, an atheist born there... and I'm not there. I'm here. I left.

Still that doesn't quite describe the process, because small provincial towns (anywhere in the world, not just the U.S.) put a great deal of active effort into driving out any intelligent, creative individuals from their midst, cleansing themselves of the infection of mental superiority. Bill Maher wants tech companies to bring some class and culture to Podunk, but Podunk doesn't want class and culture. It wants to be paid both money and compliments for remaining the same cultureless vacuum it was a century prior. In a small town, to espouse an appreciation for any pursuit (be it Wagnerian opera or LARPing or meditation) other than the handful ratified by the lowest common denominator of mass appeal is, much like Aristides, to sign one's own ostrakon for the perceived crime of superlativeness. For a company to move its headquarters to Podunk doesn't just mean its owners and investors might take an irrelevant hit to their profit margin. You're asking dozens or hundreds of educated, urbane individuals to relocate to a place where if they're not actively shunned and harassed, their only acceptable interests will be reduced to church rallies, football rallies and rally beeg truhcks. Neophiles leave Podunk in the first place because it leaves no room for creativity. Their return will not usher in a golden age, except inasmuch as pitchforks and torches might be made of gold.

Moreover, there is no action without reaction. Even if one were to succeed in deliberately migrating modernity, this could only be achieved by impoverishing its source. The majority of the vermin are simply not capable of advancing. Drag all the musicians out of Seattle and Seattle's left with nothing but occasional banjo duels. How bountiful a crop do you think your educational system has managed to harvest that you assume suffices to seed the continent?

Chaff, dross, jetsam, dregs.
Humanity.

Penumbr-aaarrRRGH !

Y'know, I was going to do a political thing tonight about "the two Americas" blah-blah-blah but being annoyed by Don't Starve led me back to some better survival alternatives, like the Penumbra games I'd meant to try after enjoying Frictional Games' more successful later title Amnesia: the Dark Descent. Now, remind me again, preferably in the most infuriating way possible, why I didn't get very far into this years ago?

About two dozen deaths later it strikes me: oh, right, because Penumbra had one of the most aggravating, convoluted excuses for a combat system I've ever encountered in the hundreds of games I've played in my life! And I've played Arcanum!

You have three hit points. You get a melee weapon. To attack you need to hold down LMB then swipe across the screen in the direction you want to attack. It occasionally fails to register your swipes correctly. It over-rides your mouse movement meaning you can't turn while attacking... unless you also hold down RMB at the same time... which prevents you from attacking... all of which might not be so aggravating if the main enemies in the game, those zombie dogs (zombogs? dombies?) didn't attack by lunging at you and landing behind you. Hit detection fails half the time if your target is moving, which again might not be so bad since a solid hit usually knocks your enemy down. Except... if you do manage to land a hit you need to wait for your target to get back up again because, much as being unable to look down in Arena, you can't seem to land your hits vertically no matter what the visuals say. So you need to allow your enemy to get back up, which might give you a chance at another hit... or it might run away faster than you can chase and call more dogs to help it.

Even when you're not hitting monsters the system fails miserably. In one sequence you have to break down stone walls while being chased by spiders. Holding down LMB and swiping repeatedly seems the way to go... except the system will sometimes interpret your swiping back and forth as wanting to change direction and not swing at all... so you'll have to un-click and click again. Yes, they managed to make repetitive hammering more complicated than it actually is in real life!

Oh, and did I mention you can't open doors while holding an item?

And ok, technically you can also sneak past enemies' backs while they patrol, and even bait the zombogs away by throwing beef jerky. I've killed one so far and snuck past the rest. You can also kill them by baiting them into explosives, but given their ludicrous speed, your own sloth-like alacrity and the unbearable clunkiness of the whole system, that goes about as well as expected. Combat is obviously meant to play a significant part in your playthrough, all the more annoying because Overture would actually have made for perfectly enjoyable survival horror without its First-Person-Slasher element. It's got some nifty little box-stacking environment interaction puzzles, the usual item gathering and sequential assembly you'd find in any adventure games, even an example of Morse code decoding short and slow enough not to get obnoxious (and you're provided with a key in-game, unlike say in TSW) and the whole Gothic horror angle's played rather well, including some surprisingly decent voice acting for such a low-budget title.

To me, what makes the combat system's "what the hell were you thinking!?!" stupidity especially jarring is Overture's supposed release in 2007, two or three years after Mount&Blade had gone into open beta banking on its bar-setting, physics-enabled FPSlasher combat including directional attacks. Not to mention Rune was seven years old, or that Oblivion had come out just a year prior. Overture was not a pioneering attempt at new mechanics. It could have followed many other, better examples of varying complexity for melee FPS combat. How did it seem like a good idea to wreck Half-Life's crowbar a decade after the fact?

Adrift on a Too-Long Lake

"Don't give me choices 'cause I can't decide
[...] 
You're kinda cool but I know better than to break the rules
Of messin' with a lesson that I'll never learn
I'll go from bad to worse and later back to better
But I'll never mend the bridges that I meant to burn"

Anna Nalick - Consider This


It's been two years since my last Lord of the Rings Online posts. Time flies when you're having more fun with other companies' products. But, in fact, I never uninstalled or quite entirely gave up on LotRO.

When I last wrote about it in any detail, the game's production team had split off from its parent company and been bought up, along with other aging MMO titles, by Russians sniffing around for old account data to exploit. Which is fine. If geopolitic upheaval is the price we pay for keeping Middle-Earth online, then I'm all for it. Fuck the real world. Give me hobbits. At the time my response vis-a-vis LotRO's continued expansion was "wait and see" because it's creators were likely to find themselves more motivated. As part of Turbine or Warner Bros., LotRO had been only one of many products, valued after its initial stumbles for nothing more than its cross-promotional value with WB's disgusting Hobbit maladaptations. For the unknown "Standing Stone Games" on the other hand it would be their only product, their breaded and buttered lifeline, and thus likely to be treated more seriously, Easterling overlordship aside.

Since then I've been dropping in now and then, sitting in a dead guild (or a guild full of brain-dead zombies who never organize a single instance run, which is the same thing) and spinning my wheels through Northern Ithilien, Dagorlad and Mordor's various zones while never quite catching up to the latest content. (I was five levels from the level cap this November when they raised it another ten levels.) As far as I can tell I'm about four zones behind everyone else and feel little impetus to catch up, due to reasons I'll discuss later. But! I've now finally reached some content unambiguously developed independently after the transition period, aaaand (drumroll please)... it's moderately improved! Huzzah!

Welcome to the Dale-Lands, shortly post-Sauron. Aesthetically, pretty much everything's better. New music tracks are nothing outstanding individually but pleasing in their variety and apt to their context. The content itself is more appropriate to a derivative product, less prone to gratuitously interposing the player into the original LotR narrative, less infested by D&D-ish devils and spiky fire-orcs. Pointless cinematics are eschewed in favor of fine-tuning mission intros to hit that sweet spot between "go kill big uglies" and tedious walls of text. It seems that after a decade and a half the game is finally getting back on track to being "middle-earth online" and paying more attention to developing its world rather than merely feeding its customers' self-importance. Even floating quest markers have been improved: now when you're searching for an NPC, the glowing ring will sometimes only show up when you get near, forcing you to be slightly more aware of your surroundings. It may not sound like much, but for an activity as idiot-friendly as a WoW-clone MMO, it's significant progress.

But if there's one feature in which LotRO has always outshone the rest of the industry, it's in providing scenic locations, and with the Dale-Lands they've certainly played their strength. Though the individual models and textures are shamelessly recycled from earlier zones, they've been arranged to give every corner of the map its own personality. Mirkwood looks appropriately mirky, with its one lonely path fading in and out of the groundcover. The Dale-Lands transition from marshes at the lake's southern end, to grass and scrubland, to the bare slopes of the Lonely Mountain. Each town feels unique, from the dendritic cathedral halls of Felegoth, the relaxed trade town of Loeglond, Lake-Town and its multi-tiered carved wooden construction, the sturdy but convoluted trading town of Dale with its marketplaces and the Dwarves' monolithic halls. And, as in the screenshot above, most locations were positioned within sight of at least one other, carefully suggesting visual contrast and mental recapitulation. Where Rohan and Gondor were mostly pointless repetition, I now find myself actually turning around to take stock of each new location again, as I did in Eriador.

Unfortunately, it appears I was right about one thing. Dumbed-down WoW-clone gameplay attracts dumb customers, and once you've cemented that subscriber base you've got little to no chance of re-assembling a core of curious, creative individuals willing to band together to take on serious challenges. Standing Stone has been putting some effort into avoiding the "kill ten rats" routine, but they themselves obliquely admit this has so far only amounted to a lot of redundant running back and forth as timesinks, and "click ten boxes":

Cute.
Well, the first step is admitting you have a problem... but that phrase in itself presumes further steps in addressing that problem. What are you actually doing about LotRO's main downfall of oversimplified gameplay? Because no matter how breathtaking its level design and how apt its music score, a game still fundamentally needs to qualify as a game. As a holiday in Middle-Earth, LotRO has benefited from staggering amounts of leeway in this respect from people like me willing to show up just for sightseeing, but for one my continued support has implied a demand (albeit little expectation) to return, sometime in the future, to the cooperative PvE mechanics which made this so intriguing a class-based game at its launch. Leaving aside soft and hard crowd control, genus-specific monster debuffs, class-specific status cures, single-target tanking and offtanking, semipermanent point-buy skill builds instead of perfunctory trees, meaningful damage types and immunities, resource management including depletable mana, a crafting-based player economy and everything else you slashed from your product to make it appeal more to degenerate retarded filth... let me ask you one question:
Have you brought back conjunctions yet?

Battletech

"Once in love it's more like a habit
Guess that's what I need to feel like me"

FC Kahuna - Machine Says Yes


If you don't know what Battletech is, think of it as Into the Breach but with fewer Mothras and more pixels... or Titanfall except they're not called titans and you have to work pretty hard at falling... or Gundam if the giant robot suits were all senior citizens with bad hips. Anyway: giant robots. Good, clean fun.

Among the various tabletop games the likes of which have greatly influenced computer games (D&D, Warhammer, Magic: the Gathering, etc.) Battletech's influence is the hardest to estimate. The board game and its fiction spin-offs racked up a respectable base of followers almost immediately in the late '80s and '90s, but while it's stayed afloat over the decades it never quite racked up the popularity of other brand names. Thematically, it might be called the antithesis of Shadowrun: where the latter's marketed as a genre-blender of high fantasy, cyberpunk (itself already rather blended) and party-based roleplaying, Battletech seems to have stuck to its guns (which mostly consist of literal guns) as a low-SF space opera with Newtonian physics, centered on the idea of stomping around in fifty-ton bipedal war machines. It rather decisively staked out its niche market, to my admitted respect in an entertainment industry mostly defined by fads and trend-hopping. Implicitly, although most gamers have never played a 'Mech game, the nerds who go into game design quite likely have, and have been inspired by it.

In terms of computer games, most of us who've encountered Battletech did so through the Mechwarrior series. Mechwarrior 2 and Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries were both wildly popular for a brief time in the '90s, cresting both the advent of 3D graphics and that of graphics-based online gaming. Unfortunately, Mechwarrior 3 left most of us unsatisfied and #4 was mostly known as "better than #3" and the later Mechwarrior Online seemed to limp along with a few thousand users for a few years but mostly got "meh" reviews. The entire series was continually hampered (just as Baldur's Gate and other adaptations) by attempting to translate tile-based, turn-based tabletop tactics to real-time twitch-gaming. Even their most strategically interesting outgrowth, 1998's underappreciated Mech Commander, a squad tactical game, was still presented in real-time and rather limited in its interactivity.

Battletech is largely what Mech Commander should have been, retaining its managerial features while adding turns/tile mechanics and therefore making great use of the series' most interesting gimmick: locational damage. Each of a 'Mech's body parts has its own armor and structure rating, and not all need to be destroyed in order to disable it. Thus, much of combat consists of rotating and revolving around each other like game cocks to try punching through one particular flank on your enemy, which combined with line of sight, elevation, cover and other modifiers makes for some very satisfying feats of concentrated firepower. Though, notably, this does not prevent the intrusion of UTTER AND COMPLETE BULLSHIT!!!

I'm also pleasantly impressed with the unusual attention to physics in a non physics-based game. Your pilots get hurt if their mech gets knocked over, since yes, if you're sitting atop a 10m tall robot when it falls over, then you fall ten meters. Playing on airless planets imposes a penalty to dissipating heat from your weapons, due to low convection, and yes, amazingly enough machinery in the deathly cold vacuum of space can often be damaged faster by heat than by cold. You get an evasion bonus based on how far you've moved during a turn, something which will instantly beg the question "why the hell doesn't every TBS have this?" Even visually, mechs can be seen to accelerate and decelerate as they move... but that's also where you run into problems.

For all its gameplay features, most of your time in Battletech will be spent staring at that damn symbol, the loading symbol, and taking several minutes to load each mission map's only the tip of the iceberg. More aggravating are the terrible design decisions which could easily have been prevented with some playtesting feedback. For instance, trying to buy items or train your pilots means scrolling down through the list to each pilot or item. Fair enough... except the list resets each time, making you scroll again and again, only compounded by that damn loading symbol every time. What are you even loading? A dozen 100px 2D images, each with a paragraph's worth of text? Mechwarrior 2 could've done that faster!

More egregiously, in combat Battletech insists on freezing the interface while every single animation plays out, even for something as trivial as a mech falling over or some smoke billowing, or a chunk of an explosion bouncing around the ground until finally... gradually... painstakingly... settling to rest and immediately disappear. Even more infuriating, this is even true of audio chatter, because apparently nobody told the good folks at Harebrained that voiceovers are meant to be voiced OVER other events and not to pause the action.

Sure, I have other quibbles. It would've been great to field more than one lance late game, giving you more wiggle-room to include lighter and medium mechs instead of banking on sheer tonnage. Waypoints are suspiciously absent despite being a staple of strategy games and despite the Mechwarrior series featuring them extensively, and despite mechs in this game building up those all-important evasion points as they move, logically mandating the ability to "waste" some movement ("run in circles, scream and shout") before attacking. Is zig-zagging really an alien concept to the military masterminds of the 30-whateverth century? Plus, despite the UI being rather loaded with information, it would be nice to see an actual text combat log with what damage was applied where, or which mechs are capable of moving during which combat round, etc. Also, it seems a few corners were cut when it comes to map design. Somewhat glaringly, there is only one (1) lunar convoy intercept map (and it's been coming up more often than you'd think) and the convoy escort map with the stripmine operation routinely gets your APCs completely bugged out and unwilling to move. Including, might I add, in my very first mission after the tutorial!

The campaign mode is a bit over-fluffed as well with redundant filler missions and pointless exposition for obvious set-ups. You're completely railroaded in terms of your allies, with no warning that this will happen. Spoiler alert: I picked the Taurians and pirates to ally with from the start... guess who your main storyline ally has you constantly fighting. They should at least not fake their customers out with the pretense of choice. Also, while Battletech implemented a promising system of RPG-inspired background traits and dialogue option unlocks, they're used as pure fluff except for adding an occasional modifier to one of your pilots. Aesthetically, while models sport a laudable level of detail for a strategy game, and explosions certainly look funkily chunky, I would've been perfectly happy surrendering some of this detail for more variation in decor or wider arrays of map scale / diversity. (It was apparently only in an expansion pack that the game even got urban environments.) I'm also somewhat unimpressed by the music, which can occasionally sound engaging but gets somewhat jarring when it indulges in faux-latin marches better suited to fantasy games. Yes, I know technically these mech-warriors are all honorable space-samurai locked in dynastic struggles, but that's not what we see on screen and MW2:Mercs' memorable electronic soundtrack qualified as much more appropriate to its giant robot setting.


But, despite being willing to overlook all that, I'm writing this before finishing the main campaign and wondering if I'll even bother finishing it for one reason: I am sick of sitting around waiting for animations to complete! Which is sad, because underneath its particular brand of incompetence, Battletech is actually a pretty good game. It could have been a great one. It could even have revived multiplayer games... except that pointless waiting, once again, just happens to be one of the top detriments in PvP content, no matter the genre. I'll even declare myself impressed by Battletech's AI. Computer opponents will mercilessly focus fire onto your weakened mechs, angle their mechs to spread your damage out, run away when damaged or to brace themselves, make use of cover and high ground. If only every single one of those actions didn't take two seconds too long!

I've been deriving some enjoyment from my campaign so far, but it's mostly happening here:

The Mech Bay has options. So many beautiful options. This mean little melee ambusher has certainly been paying off lately. I also invested in a Banshee assault mech early on, slotted it with an AC20 and some machine guns for close-range heavy-hitting and used it as an RPG "tank" for lighter teammates. Bombardiers with low armor hiding behind terrain, direct-fire sniper setups, mid-range mid-weight grunts spamming rockets and laz0rz, scouts with harasser weaponry or suicidal short-range setups for one-time usage. What more do you want? Because you can probably get it. It's been a great deal of fun putting together dream teams, but still... one can't entirely praise a tactical squad game by saying its managerial side works better.

I could see, a year or two from now, reinstalling Battletech when I have a new computer and it's received some more patches to streamline its resource loading and cut some of its redundant pop-up notifications and trim its animation lengths. For now, two years after release, it's just frustrating to see what could have been the pinnacle of its niche so hopelessly undercut by inexcusably amateurish implementation of its most basic gameplay features.

depleted

Wake up abruptly. No gradual slide and deepening breathing, no memories of dreams fading, no broadening awareness. Be awake, suddenly, your heart pounding, your breaths strained, your shoulders tight, and know without realizing that you know it's yet another day. Know your incapacity, insufficiency, weakness and stupidity, all your lacks from yesterday and the past ten thousand yesterdays weighing on your sternum, the light prodding at you, revealing you to the universe standing in judgment. You are unfit to occupy your space in bed, much less to force your way through the alien air. Wake up to stale regrets, wake up in fear that nothing has gone awry, wake up above all tired, tired, tired, every single day, every single day, every single day, decay, decay, decay, wake up longing for unconsciousness and knowing your cowardice will keep you from the solution for yet another day weighing you down, every, day, every, each, and, every, day, your chest tight and your heart strained, not even a comfortable nightmare to regain, nothing but the day, another, day, another, day, awake to yet awake to ache another dull day by day by day by day an ache a fear a dread expectant to day by day a wake, a wake, a wake, a wake, a wake