Dungeon Liberation: 40,000 Final Rats

"Do you remember lying in bed
With your covers pulled up over your head?
Radio playing so no one can see"

 

The Ramones - Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?

 

 

Looking for a new RPG I decided to try Dungeon Rats, the Fallout Tactics or Icewind Dale non-roleplaying spin-off of the role-playing game The Age of Decadence. Which is to say, a straight-up dungeon crawl. No exploration, no plot options, no mysteries or puzzle-solving, no moral or style decisions, just stat min-maxing and a linear series of scripted combats.

 

I'm less than enthusiastic about such pure party-management games to begin with. I can get the same party-based combat in strategy games like Age of Wonders with a lot more economic and empire-building goodies on the side... or in a role-playing game with role-playing choices on top. Dungeon Rats might be assumed to suffer less than others by this single-minded focus, because AoD already boasted anachronistically difficult combat as a selling point. However, it did so amidst a host of other difficult choices offering alternate paths to success. If a fight was too hard, you could go shopping / exploring for more crafting ingredients and better gear or advance in some other part of the city via a noncombat quest. While in AoD you might ocasionally have to repeat the same combat thirty times over, praying to RNGesus for the crits to go your way, Dungeon Rats makes this your only option! That. Is. TheGame. Moreover, being party-based unlike AoD only increases the frustration of randomization under such high damage / health ratios, as it only means I now have three characters instead of one to fumble a defensive roll and die (permanently, with no chance of recovery or resurrection and few opportunities for replacement) forcing more reloads.

 

Looking for a new strategy game I decided to once again try Final Liberation, an old WH40K game I abandoned twice before: first because it dates from the Full Motion Video era (a.k.a. spectator LARPs - 'nuff said) and second because it seems to lack any sense of scale or escalation. Before uninstalling it yet again, I still find myself unenthused by simply being handed huge numbers of redundant units to maneuver one by one across forgettable but oversized maps. But speaking of enthusiasm:

 

That's just a "detailed stats" pop-up info window, but the backdrop added a bit of flair, placing the unit in question in action movie context. It looks... what's that word I've been using again?

Enthusiastic.

Final Liberation dates from the "Betty Boop" era of computer games, when consumers more often expected to immerse themselves in the activity, to be consumed by this novel medium instead of merely consuming. Granted, it attempts this in fairly stupid ways (FMV and that intrusive, detail-obscuring, cluttered unit stats window above) but it felt the need to offer something. Not every game needs every sort of fluff, be it flavor text or mood music or lavish backdrops or voice acting or character customization or level design or world building, but each needs to put some effort into a few of these fields. Otherwise a game with "retro" aspirations risks bringing to mind not the more memorable titles of yore, but the mountains of decrepit shovelware churned out by formula over the past half century.

More than even its frustrating combat limitation, I think it's this lack of interest that puts me off Dungeon Rats. It is possible to build a game around combat while still interjecting background information, decision-making, humor or drama (see FTL) to pull the player into its world. The Age of Decadence had that enthusiasm in spades. Dungeon Rats lacks it, gives the impression it must've been a chore to make and so its makers, in retribution, inflict it as a blasé chore upon their customers.

How I Learned to Stop Filtering and Love the Spam

The organization currently pulling my strings sends out daily reminders to monitor our health vis-a-vis the Chinese virus currently depopulating the globe. At first I was annoyed and nearly opted out, but gradually I grew to enjoy the willful delusion that someone out there actually gives a shit about my health.

Next thing you know I'll be cheering in crowds.

Cosmetic Earjury

"All of my life I was very angry, until one day I just talked like this. All of a sudden everybody was smilin' at me and I was only doing good on this earth. So I kept on doin' it."

 

Leon Kompowsky, the Michael Jackson impersonator from The Simpsons impersonated by Michael Jackson

 

Let's say that tomorrow, a postmodernist social critic deconstructs every religious, legal and folkloric text in the history of humanity, feeds them through a magic Derridecoder ring, and finds a common chain: all the world's ills have been caused by people with detached earlobes. The media immediately latch on to this sensational (and thoroughly scientific) finding. It becomes a catchphrase, a fad, a common gimmick for made-for-cable movies of the week to pin all villainy on monsters with dangling ear lobes. Politicians pour gas on the flames in search of public approval, swearing to bring equity via the newly formed attached earlobby. Laws begin to squirm their way into the books declaring those with dangling earlobes (let's call them "danglers" for short) suspicious and deserving of summary arrest whenever in conflict with their assuredly innocent victims with attached ear lobes.

Pretty soon, though danglers die younger and score lower in every metric of physical and mental well-being, though they do all the most dangerous or unhealthy jobs and can expect to be arrested and jailed far more often for the same crime than their angelic attached-lobe counterparts (let's call them attachés, or "ches" for short) they are only being vilified more and more as hoarding all of society's goods for themselves. Everything is the fault of the danglers and their fault only, from wars to economic downturns to religious repression and prejudice and anything bad that might happen to the attachés. Children grow up indoctrinated into considering danglers disgusting, innate criminals who can only be redeemed by a lifelong program of abuse by, and service to, their superiors in the natural order. Any attaché can point a finger at any dangler and claim to have rubbed ears unconsensually, and that dangler instantly gets ostracized with no chance to defend oneself. From cradle to grave, danglers hear nothing but their own vilification and the glorification of the ches, while still being expected to sacrifice themselves for the ches' benefit.

But wait! For the price of a small operation, a little nip and tuck and some hormone treatments, you can declare that you were never a dangler, that there was really a che inside you all along just waiting to be properly expressed. You're not one of the villains. You're one of the angelic elite! You can glue your earlobes to your head and convert to one of the righteous.

 

Would you do it?

Male-to-female transsexuals have consistently outnumbered female-to-male pretty much since recording began. The numbers I've seen usually range anywhere from 1.5:1 to 3:1 depending on definitions, place and time, but even the low end of that scale is off the charts to anyone familiar with male/female differences, which rarely break a 5-10% spread. Politically correct explanations tend to be formulated with the incentive to insult men at every turn, to declare this as proof that men really are defective in some fundamental way and the human ideal is female. In a way, yes, because in a species in which favors and sacrifice already flow naturally from men to women, from nuptial gifts to "with your shield or on your shield" the past half-century has only sweetened the deal further by constantly demonizing men and sanctifying women, by raising men to hate themselves and hold women up as deserving of all the world's good. We should remember that even the tropical fish everyone loves to cite as evidence of natural sex changes do so when socially favorable, and we have made femininity overwhelmingly favorable. Under such conditions, the surprise isn't the heavy skew away from dangling. It's that anyone would want to dangle at all.

And I hear you say "Werwolfe, you're pissing on the wrong bush! Ear lobes are one thing but I'd never dole my balls just to get out of a few traffic tickets! What kind of man do you think I am?" To flip an old joke though, we've already established that. Now we're just haggling.

________________________________________

P.S.:

You make me want to stop dangling.

The Unmarried Mother

"If you want, we're concerned with systems, and so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn't be a cowboy and you wouldn't have a handle, right?"

 

William Gibson - Count Zero

Though I generally avoid television, I finally cracked some years ago and made a Netflix account and have repeatedly re-activated it while lying to myself about the wasted money. Unless you're dying to watch Yet Another Zombie Movie or Dating Sitcom #4593 their lowest common denominator line-up has precious little to offer beyond classic Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes. However, I confess to being downright impressed by Dark, a low-key German Science Fiction series with a plot requiring several flowcharts to follow. Literally. As in, they're on Wikipedia.

 

Rounding the halfway point of the third season, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the finale to do it justice. This entails repeating two mantras:

1) Please don't pull a "Lost" - remain a Science Fiction show instead of retreating into facile supernatural excuses.

2) Cool it with the stupid sex scenes already.

I merely rolled my eyes at the pilot episode opening in medias ingress and wrote it off as a bearable attention-grabbing concession to mass appeal. But instead of leaving it at that and focusing on more relevant details, later seasons stubbornly waste more and more screen time showing us the central characters humping. Will the heroine's mathematically precise panting pattern turn out to decode a diary's cipher? Will the hero's swiveling his hips before thrusting unravel a causal paradox? If not, there's no excuse for continuing to include such scenes. By the second season, much less the third, either you managed to grab your audience's attention or not. You should be done with the gratuitous gimmicks.

For many years now (ever since playing The Witcher) I've been meaning to write more on the issue of gratuitous sex scenes and romantic subplots, and the medium does not particularly matter. For the purposes of this post, it's the endless repetition of sex scenes, episode after episode, which lowers Dark's value and which I struggle to explain. Time and again, apparently, the audience must be permitted to transpose themselves into the form of limber, photogenic adolescents mindlessly reiterating mammalian pair-bonding rituals, to identify with the characters on screen via the basest, lowest of all common denominators, "young love". For my own part, the character whose lines even remotely echo my own conclusions so far is Adam. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, let's leave it at that.

I do not easily identify with either fictional characters or the personas of others. As far as games go, the mere existence of Twitch TV turns my stomach. Granted, I was never big on old-fashioned spectator sports either, but "e-sports" in particular make me want to strangle you cretins with your mouse cords. For actual sports, real-world sports, sports which merit the designation of sports, at least doing and watching were separated by a significant gulf in activity level, but I cannot for the life of me fathom the mindset of sitting in front of the same screen at the same keyboard yet watching some degenerate mouthbreather across the world play the same game you yourself could be playing right now at the same moment on the same machine... I... how? What? Huh?

 

The answer once again looms in this mystical "identifying with" the object you observe, that in passively devoting your attention to the perfect tragic romance or the perfect rocket jump you somehow feel yourselves included in, invested in, profiting from, the perceived value of the act. While not immune to this mental disease, this spiritual communion and prayer unto higher realms of base commonality, I cannot imagine a life of endlessly repeated enrollment, of being caught up, constantly, in shared experiences. So many times I've sat amidst a crowd and felt a communal action flow into being around me, whether it's a chant, a peal of laughter, a pattern of motion, a round of applause, yet I can no longer discern either its origin or its beachhead upon your herd psyche. What can it be like, to live one's entire life as a vehicle for others' thoughts, to have notions, impulses, scenes, continually enter and exit one's head unaltered, unanalyzed, to be ridden with and by memetic cacodemons, to have forsaken one's existential foundation as an individual pattern of information processing. Processing, not absorption and automatic reiteration.

Fads are bad enough. Slogans are worse. But cyberspace handles have perplexed me more and more. I took it for granted, when I started playing games and posting online, that I was taking the reins of my personal fable, a far greater control over my own becoming, a knowing means of "making a soul" as Ursula K. LeGuin's characters might say, wandering in introversion among a planet full of introverts. I became a symbol of myself as naturally as breathing. I have been Werewolf, Werewolfe, Werwolfe, for two decades now. Imagine my consternation every time I see anyone using throwaway aliases or worse still, some variant of real-world names like "SuperBob1234" - how do they avoid collapsing into miniature black holes under the negative pressure of their own inactive synapses?

Thus, with black holes, we return to Dark. I've repeatedly made a distinction on this blog between Science Fiction and Fantasy based on personal agency. Fantasy, clinging to the supernatural, hinges on top-down cosmologies, power flowing mysteriously down to supplicants from an ultimate source of its own accord. Science, on the other hand, is a bottom-up process in which rational agents construct solutions via materialistic means. The show indulges in some heavy religious symbolism via names, but in the end it could go either way. Adam and Eva could master their chosen roles or be subsumed by them, could "identify with" their tulpas or define a mythology unto themselves.

Robert Heinlein, an early master of such stories saw the potential in foreknowledge and framed the temporal paradox not as a trap but as the ultimate opportunity for self-determination.

"I know where I came from -- but where did all you zombies come from?"

RimWorld

Hark ye to the tale of Captain Kaleun

A former cadet on a three-hour-tour

A doughty old hottie of much-guarded poon

Faceplanted on <planetname> one fateful moon

 

 

She found herself whistling Robinson's tune

With a hermit called Alistair who hated to rassle

And a doting wife Fletcher who thought fights a hassle

So they all nearly died to a guinea pig hustler.

Kaleun then recruited some muscle to aid her

By beating them senseless and shooting their brethren

But the idiots died to wolves, goons or weather

Leaving more work to their glorious captain.

She quarried and sculpted, brought home the bacon

She hammered their steel into helmets and guns

She scienced technologies odd and arcane

But with each caravan her strength lastly waned

An arm lost to robots. Leg? - rabid bisons

Confined her to researching better prosthetics

Which Fletcher attached with stiff analgesics

In time for their captain to hold off the formics

Yet giddy with victory, the grizzled corsair

Tarried too long outside of their lair

Not sensing the fallout that dusted her lungs

Scanning and mining for wealth uncompared

Her sanity waning, her faculties faltering

She wanders forgetting, negotiates slurring

Yet the slayer of bandits and beasts beyond counting

Clings to her shotgun and stares down contenders:

"If you try to replace me, I'll buckshot your nethers!"

 

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If Northgard reminded me of Lords of the Realm, RimWorld reminds me of The Oregon Trail. Slightly off target, as RimWorld's closest relative is obviously Dwarf Fortress: digging, seasonal changes, room designations, animal breeding, materials of varying value, finished goods of varying quality, happiness metrics by the Stepford, more ways to die than you can shake a scythe at, etc. with the major caveat of a lack of three-dimensionality. It compensates for that lack by letting you mount expeditions outside your starter zone, which only partly accounts for my Oregon Trail comparison.

 

You start your adventure with only three colonists instead of seven and expansion is much slower, with ideal colony size seeming to peak around ten, one-twentieth the size of a dwarf tribe. They don't breed and while you can occasionally buy a slave or rescue a crashlanded survivor, you'll do most of your recruiting by capturing prisoners from the frequent raids sent against you and feeding them until Stockholm syndrome takes root. This can lead to some amusing situations down the line:

 

I built a monument to me kicking your ass. Best buds?

In fact it's lucky that scenario doesn't register as an official insult, because RimWorld encourages an almost Sims-level micromanagement of your colonists' moods. With so few workers, having even one drop into a depressive funk can prevent finishing a project on time, and lashing out against each other can quickly steamroll into crippling your colony's production until they're barely feeding themselves. The situation is even more grim for your original three, with any relevant gap in their skillsets rapidly becoming obvious. I wasn't joking when I said Kaleun's colony, with the other two incapable of combat, was almost wiped out by a single guinea pig. I have to reiterate my observation vis-a-vis Into the Breach: small numbers and randomness do not mix. If one of your first three dies you may find yourself lynchpin-deprived and might as well quit.

 

Of course, once you hit your stride, get some fields planted, climate-control your compound, set up barricades and traps, tame some livestock, you're much less susceptible to individual events. They may eat their weight in meat, but I've found a phalanx of mountain lions to be every bit as effective as the phrase "phalanx of mountain lions" suggests. Then, every time like clockwork, the events get tougher. Here's where we have to address RimWorld's official main selling point, the "storyteller" AI, really just a way of saying the algorithm spawning new objectives, hazards or enemies for you adjusts to your colony's success. A.k.a. level-scaling for a base-building game, a.k.a. treadmills, a.k.a. leveling sideways.

 

No matter the usefulness of such mechanics in keeping the action flowing, I still bristle at having an algorithm arbitrarily decide at exactly which time I should be punished for my success. In RimWorld it comes across as contrived as being notified that some occupant of my Oregon Trail wagon has spontaneously contracted and just as spontaneously succumbed to dysentery. Randomness is bad enough without edging into preordained calamity of a random nature. I'm getting a bit sick of killer robots raining down from the sky whenever I hit eight or nine colonists. I'm supposed to be playing the game, not vice versa; I'm supposed to be the one driving the action, not merely providing fodder for an algorithm to run my life. Though I don't play tabletop games, RimWorld's "storyteller" AI feels like playing with a G.M. who arbitrarily spawns a lich to attack you because you've looted your thousandth gold piece. Less storytelling and more like a jealous toddler throwing a tantrum.

I could cite other minor gripes, mostly having to do with colonists' skewed priorities, like running around hauling rocks with a gaping chest wound or going to sleep in a freezer because their last task happened to be storing food. However, I'm wary of unduly bashing RimWorld simply because it fundamentally grinds against my lycanthropic, hermit-past-the-edge-of-town mentality. To me, city simulators are about grand works, not citizens and the "Sims" precept of insinuating oneself into the private lives of others and manipulating their thoughts has always been inherently... creepy. I can certainly enjoy the propensity of simulators to fabricate personal or social dramas (exhibits A, B and C). I've been well amused by the antics of Captain Kaleun, the man-hating, half-senile, brilliant researcher, crafter and sniper, as well as the dashing young power couple (animal tamer / planter) who ruled my previous attempt at a colony... but building a base should still be about objects, not people, grand works and not the filthy workers.

RimWorld sticks laudably to its space western theme, and it truly does excel at weaving personal NPC narratives, but its main effect on me is rekindling my desire to fire up another Dwarf Fortress world and build my legendary monuments on the hundred-fold corpses of disposable nobodies.

 

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* Apparently I've reached that Grandpa Simpson age where everything reminds me of an interesting story. (Actually, it's not so much interesting as it is long.)

Northgard

"Sola vendar hausten sendar

graset gulnar, blada fell

lyse dagar er på hell"

 

Wardruna - Jara

 

 

I stand by my statement that "real-time" strategy games are largely a fad of the '90s and fundamentally pointless, consistently devolving to button-mashing instead of strategic planning. Still, I retain a soft spot for Homeworld, I do plan to try at least one of the Total War games at some point, and when Northgard came up on sale I bit the bullet, gave it a chance and was pleasantly surprised.

The basic Settlers-reminiscent gameplay presents a weird compromise toward turnstile mechanics: tiles, but no turns. Units move freely within discrete territories with fixed construction capacity and hard boundaries restricting events to one tile at a time. A few effects can be global, like healers able to reach your other units anywhere within your own boundaries. The basic resources, food, wood and gold, are both produced and consumed continually for upkeep, making you scramble to maintain threshold values, while the stone and iron you'll need for upgrades come in finite deposits and a very slow availability in the marketplace. You'll likely struggle most to maintain high happiness, as you only gain more workers (to be recruited into the military) via a slow trickle of immigrants.

All in all, this is an RTS with a very strong managerial emphasis, to the point it feels like a more fluid version of Lords of the Realm. Conquest is in fact the least likely victory scenario, as you can also win via research, gold production, sheer expand&exploit or capturing "king of the hill" terrain tiles depending on map. Charmingly, much like Dawn of Man, your gameplay is heavily marked by the yearly summer / winter cycle, your greatest enemy looming in the severe upkeep hike incurred by winter weather. Interestingly this also makes winter raids a risky but potentially devastating proposition. The various clans (added as paid DLCs per current marketing dogma) also alter basic gameplay in a surprinsgly fundamental fashion, heavily shifting your economic balance or the utility of your units, especially your army's hero(es).

So I've already played more of Northgard than I would have ever guessed just looking at screenshots... but entirely in single-player. Despite it obviously being developed with multiplayer in mind, the core flaw of RTS, button-mashing, still renders combat too much of a nuisance. While you need to control far fewer units than usual (your army will rarely reach a dozen) and don't need to spam activated abilites, your success still relies on pulling individuals out in a timely fashion as their hit points drop and gaming the zone line system to instantly escape to safety. Incidentally, zone lines also result in counterintuitively building defensive towers as far back behind other buildings as possible. Northgard is an admirable and surprinsingly immersive attempt at reconciling RTS with the word "strategy" but the genre's core flaw remains insurmountable.

Translation: LOLWUT

"My Love! thou mock'st my weakness; and would'st steel
My breast before the time when it must feel.
But trifle now no more with my distress,
Such mirth hath less of play than bitterness"

 

Lord Byron - The Corsair

Ah, that verbose old-timey English writing. Gotta love it.

Avant-Guard-'Er

I haven't written much on the topic of webcomics this past year, largely because I've been reading fewer of them. The medium seems to have run its creative course for the time being, awaiting future decades' kick in the ass to escape its current mire of milquetoast, politically correct dating dramedy. Ignoring the newer, snowflake cartoonists who largely came by their idiocy honestly via the rapid decline of universities' LAS education since the '90s, most of the active authors predating the current era have also been drinking the Woke-Aid.

The earliest major and most infamously virulent example was of course Tatsuya Ishida of Sinfest, but others like PvP or El Goonish Shive or Something Positive or Questionable Content gradually degenerated to rewriting or introducing "special" character after character, all as blandly idealized as Disney princesses, to enforce the superiority of non-heterosexuals, non-whites and especially non-males. Who needs a plot when you have conceit? Even my perennial favorite Christopher Baldwin has fallen prey to the fad, and Tailsteak, whose ideas were always threatening to run away from him, may or may not be feeding or deliberately bucking the trend with his newest serial Forward. Time will tell.

 

Feminism, commanding the largest baseline of inherent adherents, tops these former creators' compendium of unquestioned holy writs in their quest for unquestioning approval. Flip a couple of pages and you'll inevitably run into the endlessly reiterated ritual of a female browbeating or condescending to a strawMan. So when glancing at the authors' names one must at some point note that most such notable worthies are in fact male, self-flagellating over being born the wrong sex.

Funny that even in producing their own supremacist propaganda, feminists have fallen back upon the time-honored, all-purpose solution of torturing a man until he does it for you.

Seraphs sob at vermin fangs with [vermin] gore imbued

"When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys."

 

Edgar Allan Poe - The Masque of the Red Death

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"I could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in torture. [...] It was hope that prompted the nerve to quiver -- the frame to shrink. It was hope -- the hope that triumphs on the rack -- that whispers to the death-condemned even in the dungeons of the Inquisition. [...] There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors -- oh! most unrelenting! oh! most demoniac of men!"

 

Edgar Allan Poe - The Pit and the Pendulum

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It's Halloween, a night to shudder behind one's mask at the shadows dancing beyond the lights of civilization, to thrill at grotesque malformations lurching from house to house demanding plunder. Ah but this year the byways are silent, the porches unlit, the rustle of bedsheet spectres nowhere to be heard. A more tenebrous wraith stalks the border between life and death, the first of what will likely be many pandemics as the human population grows both larger and less stable, swarming mindlessly, ravenously, noxiously over the face of an overheating, defoliated, polluted globe. Poe's Masque of the Red Death prods insistently at our attention as we stumble from room to room in social isolation, our diseased ape minds cloaked in pretense and bravado to ward off the invisible touch of bodily decomposition. You will die. Dare ask the why? In response I would point you rather to The Pit and the Pendulum, remarkable for some of Poe's most visceral imagery while uncharacteristically eschewing the supernatural tinge of his other famous works. From start to finish it reminds its readers that all the narrator's torments are conceived and put into action (at great cost) by human superstition, human viciousness, human sadism and bloodthirst - then, even his deliverance, the deus ex machina in the form of a French revolutionary takeover of Catholic excess, serves only to remind us of the story's opening quote condemning the Jacobins.

It's Halloween, a night to shudder behind one's face mask at the shadows of duplicitous gods, mad tulpas dancing against the dimly lit walls of our caves. Tremble in fear at the latest Chinese plague inflicted on the world, then remember the barely contained "antivaxer" measles epidemics across the U.S. in which the Amish, fundamentalist Jews and California yuppies have all been doing their best to outdo the Chinese as plague rats. We move closer to dictatorship with every election, closer to theocracy with every panic prompting imbeciles to retrench in primitive superstitions, closer to mob rule with every cry of "defund the police", closer to feudalism every time landlords brand their serfs. Humanity has a death wish. Maybe it's time to give in to the imp of the perverse and just let them go through with it? Being alive now feels more and more like Poe's victim of the Inquisition, lashed down in the dark, feeling the innumerable gnawing vermin, insatiable, insalubrious, swarming over your body. No good guys and no bad guys, no right or wrong side anymore, nothing but drowning in an implacable tidal wave of eight billion degenerate cretins, all self-assured of their cannibalistic sainthood, all brandishing their shibboleths, their rainbow flags and swastikas, their racks and thumbscrews. Stuck between the Inquisition and the Jacobins. Shall we unmask the crimson intruder who lurked among us all the while?

So, what's your flavor? Pit or pendulum?