Thief: The Dark Project

"Woke up in my clothes again this morning

Don't know exactly where I am

[...]

It can be no optical illusion

How can you explain?"

 

Sting - Shadows in the Rain

 

 

I was dimly aware of Thief's reputation back in high school but paid it no attention. For one thing, at the time I was busy with Half-Life and Starcraft. For another, I've never been a fan of stealth-based games, with the odd exception of truly atmospheric ones like Amnesia or Miasmata or SYABH. I prefer my enemies to see me coming, to witness my numberless armies descend upon them LIKE AN INEXORABLE TIDE OF DDDOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM !!!

 

Ahem.

Where were we?

Thief. Right. Thief made some waves at its release and is arguably the defining ancestor of first-person stealth gameplay in general. I'm trying it now (after twenty years) for actively avoiding Cyberpunk 2077 because it looks halfway decent and I'm deferring my inevitable disappointment. So I tried one of their earlier ouvres, The Witcher 2, which turned out to be crap for numerous reasons I'll get into at some later date. Given C77's inclusion of crouching, line of sight, noise, and hiding corpses to avoid raising suspicion, I decided to also check out the grand-daddy of such features' implementation into FPS.

It's not what I expected.

Alright, so in some ways it's exactly what I expected. In fact this floor puzzle with dart traps was probably as played out as the Sphinx' riddle by 1998... and has continued to persist in remaining outdated even as it's being reused today. Still, three or four missions into things, other aspects either diverge from Thief's spiritual descendants or from the expectations of its own time in interesting ways.

 

1) Oh, you mean it's the "thief" class

Being slow-paced by the standards of FPS with plenty of time to take in the scenery, later stealth-based games have tended to bank on memorable settings. Thief on the other hand seems a fairly generic mishmash of supernatural medievalism with random Van de Graaff generators and burglar alarms thrown in, a common ailment of even the better half of games until ~Y2K when more gamers started favoring more coherent, better-researched settings. Aside from zombies riding elevators, the tendency to fall back on Dungeons and Dragons is also evident in pitting your eponymous Thief against stereotypical sword-and-board Fighters and fireball-flinging Wizards and Clerics wielding blunt weapons. You're also obviously a "thief" peppering foes with arrows, instead of the later redesign of a "rogue" around overpowered backstabs.

2) Gettin' physical

More fighting than I'd expected, to the point it slightly undercuts the game's premise. Evidently its creators did not think they'd be founding a sub-genre and did not feel comfortable dropping most of the First Person Slasher elements.

On the plus side, the physics feel surprisingly realistic for something from '98, though inevitably dated by even early 2000s standards. Arrows and thrown objects follow ballistic trajectories but enemies lurch about barely moving their limbs, and sword / sap swings connect properly only about half the time and have a serious issue with verticality. (This problem was reiterated by some of its contemporaries and imitators.) I was nonetheless impressed by finding out I can accidentally kill an unconscious guard... by dropping him down a stairwell. (Ooopsie.)

3) Swash or buckle, at will

Action and stealth interweave to such an extent as to yield more freedom than you would normally find outside sandbox games. I ran the introductory (heist) mission stumbling in circles around the mansion at a dead run, trying to lose alerted guards and frustrated at exploring too slowly while sneaking; the jailbreak by murdering or incapacitating almost every enemy and setting off all the alarms just for sheer mayhem; the tomb raiding mission in uncharacteristically stealthy fashion, as I discovered I hate fighting the infinitely self-resurrecting zombies or the cave-lizard-dinosaur-dragon-whatevers. For the botched assassination I'm currently trying to clear a path as directly as I can straight through the front doors and middle of the mansion. Granted, I can do all this in large part because this first third of the game is on the easy side (on "normal" difficulty anyway) but just the fact it's not hardcoded to prevent you from doing things your own way is a breath of fresh air... from two decades ago.

4) Level-headed design

Underpinning this freedom of choice, level design should probably be considered Thief's most concrete accomplishment. Albeit sparse, the individual maps feel HUGE by late '90s standards and at least the first few are just convoluted enough to challenge while falling short of sheer frustration. Being denied a true map or detailed instructions is a cheap gimmick, and I won't deny I've cheated via a walkthrough, but it's mostly to save the time of backtracking rather than being truly stuck. The simple graphics can at once make for confusing Hanna-Barbera backdrop repetition and render the few noticeable landmarks even more noticeable. What seem dead-end corridors often loop back to an earlier point and even false paths usually reward you with some minor loot so that exploring each map so far is entertaining enough in itself.

 

At least in this "Gold" version, no area feels perfunctory or ignored, with multiple routes the norm rather than the exception. Slowly crawl up a ramp or time the perfect second to climb up a ledge. Blow a zombie up with holy water or sneak past it or lure it to a far corner and cut it down or simply run past its pathetic shambling. Pickpocket a guard by leaning around a corner or lure him away from his post with a little noise and sneak past or sap him, or arrow him to death from afar. You'll find most options, the corners and shadows and silence and verticality and occasional firepower, have somehow been provided for, either in your mission gear or your surroundings.

Granted stealth games are still not my cup of tea so I likely won't suffer the dated combat mechanics much farther into the campaign, but as with System Shock (and unlike most oldies) I can at least see how Thief advanced the possibilies of its creative medium.

Worth its renown.

"mindless group euphoria"

"[Charles Manson's psychic powers] were believed by people with at least a primary public school education in the enlightenment of the space age, and these beliefs were repeated about a man who is still alive today. So if this had all happened two thousand years ago? With every exaggeration or alteration accepted as gospel by people who are determined to believe whatever they're told without reservation? Then I could see an alternate timeline where my now-Mormon family might instead be attending the Church of Charles Manson, of Latter-Day-Saints"

 

AronRa - Mythical Man, St. Louis, Missouri, 2017/07/30

 

 

Witness Yuletide ritual among the Nacirema.

So, yesterday was Christmas, that most magical children's holiday when a fat old livestock rustler in an unregistered vehicle squeezes his toy collection up and down your hot dark chute. (If I die before I wake, give it hard and fast to my brother Jake.) So noble and respectable an occasion prompts one to reflect upon... just how the mountains of bullshit we call religion spring up.

While faith in general is both stupid and insane, I do find the more recent faiths more perplexingly so, due to the abundance of countervailing evidence. Take two of the more quintessentially American inventions, Mormonism and Scientology for example. Most religions' founders sit comfortably shrouded in conveniently unverifiable, multimillennial folklore. We know little to nothing about their deeds and character except that proclaimed by their own adherents. No wonder Christ is such a Christ-like figure! In the cases of Joe Smith and the bard, Elron Hu, on the other hand, we have endless sources both outsider and lapsed from among the faithful to provide context. We know that one was a dime-a-dozen confidence artist who tried scam after scam in town after town until one of them (the faith scam) stuck. We know the other was a struggling scribbler who bragged that the best way to make money would be to start his own religion, and eventually did exactly that, in as cold-bloodedly profiteering a fashion as possible.

This knowledge has not been passed down by some folkloric telephone game reiterated through the centuries, but in dry, dull, extant stenography. No indescribable states of heavenly bliss and inspiration here, no alien spirits or deities conveniently unreachable for comment or unreplicated miracles or oneiric whispers atop clouded mountain peaks. No, these men's lives are chronicled via the most mundane historical data imaginable. We have court records and sales receipts and the first-hand kvetching of contemporaries who saw nothing Messianic in either case, who merely got ripped off trying to find gold on their property or happened to attend the same fabulists' social club. Man oh man, wouldn't historians give their right hands for a glimpse at the same kind of information about the older religious founders? Wouldn't they love to sit down for dinner with Jesus' old drinking buddy or see Lao Tzu get sued over a bar-room brawl in stentorious courtroom officiousness, or Siddhartha or Mohammed get their mules pulled over on a routine hashish possession charge, or Moses losing his copyright to the ten commandments on a technicality?

For all the social damage they can do, these latest but far from last rising religions offer invaluable in vivo observations of human gullibility and the transition from roadside shrine cult to megachurch. If any of their claims stand up to scrutiny, it is this: they are as worthy of the title "religion" as any other creed in history. Their demonstrable weirdness appears to us outsiders as a caricature of ritual and mythology... but then caricatures by definition over-emphasize features. They do not invent them. The new faiths use old tactics, from sotto voce promises of betterment and community spirit used in proselytism, to fabricating an invisible spiritual poison and withholding the imaginary antidote in some form of salvation attainable only by adherence to the one true faith, to the gradual monopolization of their subjects' lives to wring more and more service out of them, to the social isolation and threat of disconnection and all too mundane ostracism to limit heresy and apostasy, to banding together against outside critics in tactics of intimidation and outright violence.

We can laugh at an E-meter and "auditing" but are they any different from rosary beads and confession, save for being invented within a society with a much higher baseline for technobabble and psychobabble? Laugh at Mormons' magic undies all you like, but that figurine of a zombie rabbi around your neck isn't warding off any more demons than their cushier talismans. We can watch, in real time, the deformation of these cults' folkore, from self-help book to vague spiritualism to supernatural doctrine, or watch them drop practices like polygamy which cause friction with society at large, then remember mainstream Christians used to toss bags of cats into bonfires under suspicion of being witches' familiars. (Next time Mittens pukes in your shoes, remind her of that.) Read just a Wikipedia-grade smattering of the myriad bits of folklore condensed into modern Christmas rituals, from giving pointless Saturnalia gifts for the sheer pointlessness, to chimney-delivered sweets, to wooden clogs to 19th century cartoons and 20th century advertisements, and realize how many of these elements would look just as insane as planet Kolob if viewed at the resolution provided by the lens of modern mass-media sensationalism.

 

Most importantly, the newer religions can illustrate the shift from merely proselytizing to outright breeding second an third-generation adherents, as apostates' testimonies demonstrate. When the answer to how you came to believe such things is more often than not "was born into it" you have to realize that the venerable patina of Saturnalia, mangers and Sinterklaas itself lies in the clouded eye of the beholder. The seeming immutability of more mainstream religions comes from indoctrination performed on us when were were at our most defenseless, before the time we even formed permanent memories. "Give me the child until seven and I'll give you the man" quipped Ignatius in a display of cynicism that would make King Lycaon look like an amateur - but it would mean nothing if so many mammals did not prove utterly willing to hand over their infants to memetic predators spewing the infectious miasmas of mindless belief.

We are all born into some strain or another of endemic mental disease.

Immunize your children instead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________

edit 2023/06/26: few typo fixes

edit 2024/04/08: As the phrase appears in the process of being purged from search engines (at least it's still up on Wikipedia... for now)  "a temperate zone voodoo, in its inelasticity, unexplainable procedures, and mindless group euphoria" was the apt descriptor used by Dianetics leader Helen O'Brien in 1966 for Hubbard's shift in '53 from Dianetics' origin as a quack cure-all to openly supernatural claims or "the religion angle" in Hubbard's classicly crass scheister wording. O'Brien herself quit after being beaten and robbed as part of Hubbard's push to establish totalitarian control over Dianetics, as confessed by Hubbard's son in 1982.

If You Believe

"Here's a little agit for the never-believer

[...]

Here's a truck stop instead of Saint Peter's

[...]

Moses went walking with a staff of wood

Newton got beaned by the apple good"

 

R.E.M. - Man on the Moon

 

 

Like everyone who's anyone, I spent my solstice evening watching the Greatest of all conjunctions! (- and I am very much including "but" for "and" "or" other junctions) yet it wasn't until I zoomed the image in to its full pixelated glory that I noticed a couple of surprise appearances.

 

I thought at first the flattening on the left of both planets might be their night side, but other reference photos and the planets' positions relative to us and the sun make this out to be just an artifact of my jittery hands.

 

Also, they don't line up with the light's angle on the moon and all these fancy space rocks are supposed to be roughly in the plane of the ecliptic, but then again what do I know from optics and axial tilt?

Nothin'! - that's what.

Still, for a snapshot taken freehand while shivering on a clear but windy winter evening, I'd say I caught a decent one. And no, I did not howl at the moon, thankyouverymuch. These days nights the discerning lycanthrope just snaps his fingers a few times with an air of solemn detachment, beatnik style. Diana digs it.

 

More startling, I was not expecting the little clusters of pixels around Jupiter, which though distorted vertically just like the two planets are a bit more solid than the usual amateur photographic artifacts. They seem to be at about the correct distance for me to brag I managed to accidentally photograph two of the Galilean satellites. Io and Europa, maybe?

If those stray pixels really are the real deal, then I have to wonder how Galileo and Kepler ever managed to spot them though primitive telescopes of 8x-30x magnification and foggy focus and probably worth a house to boot, the pinnacle of scientific equipment back in 1610, with Ottoman pirates hounding the coasts and the West Indies a largely unexplored shore, and inquisitors breathing down your neck lest your new toy with the stacked lenses catch Yahweh with his pants down.

 

Millions of better images were produced yesterday, of greater magnification and clarity than my own feeble attempt, but this one remains noteworthy by its very feebleness. I do not work at an observatory. I don't even own a telescope. I did not drive up to a mountaintop in search of clear, rarefied air or torture the digital image through a quadrillion clock cycles' worth of post-processing. Ignorant and unmotivated, possessed of no specialized knowledge whatsoever, I took a five minute stroll, two hundred meters away from my apartment complex to an empty field, aimed vaguely in the direction astronomers pointed out, and clicked the shutter on my $160, off-the-shelf, mid-range consumer-grade autofocus camera. The same instrument I use to snap pictures of the family dog and funny-looking birds and the forest at sunset and a selfie for my senile grandmother, this half-kilo plastic, glass and copper lump in my coat pocket, can bring into mundane reach aspects of the universe which puzzled and frightened better men than myself for millennia. There was a time when the existence of other planets' moons was denied, because nothing could revolve around any astral body other than the Earth.

We most often hear scientific advance described either in terms of abstract, specialized projects like supercolliders or of technological intrusion into our social lives like cellphones, but somewhere between those extremes, between the abstruse and the vulgar, lie endless straightforward, accessible means to verify reality for ourselves. This is a golden age for autodidacts.

Now flip the channel to current events.

There's the astrology section, going as strong as it ever has. There's the state lottery raking in tens of millions. There's another stampede at Mecca. There's a million Flat Earth conspiracy nuts calling the moon landings hoaxes, and dust-caked sadhus with million-dollar Swiss bank accounts claiming they eat cosmic rays, and Bigfoot lurking in every blur, and Jehovah's Witnesses scared of turning into Dracula and presidents farting from the strain of trying to disbelieve the existence of methane, and Deepak Chopra curing your quantum autism by squinting at you, and neon-haired attention-whores claiming their gonads are a social construction, and grunting, hooting creationists missing as many links as they can, and Alex Jones defending us all from gay frogs and feminists defending us from rapist ducks and flood "geologists" whitewashing all the rock strata, and separatists goose-stepping in protest against "the government", and the political correctness police crying "defund the police", and tarot decks prophesying the fifth or sixth Mayan apocalypse this year alone, and bored widows with university educations paying through the nose to speak to the ghosts of their dead poodles, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, idiots, morons, cretins, imbeciles, retards by the billion, by the billion, a never-ebbing tide of simian degeneracy choking the life out of the world...

At some point you have to realize it's not just stupidity but neurophobia. Terrified of their own inadequacy, of being outpaced by reason, the masses take refuge in denial, in as ludicrous an idea as possible, the better to define themselves by their dogma. Their goal is not to seek alternate interpretations of the world but to find allies in anti-intellectual vandalism, to band together under the standard of a shibboleth in defense against an incomprehensible reality. Apes huddling in the darkest cave they can find, blinded by a few points of light giving the lie to the center of their universe.

"Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

Pacing Mars

"The trap that holds you down
The safety of your net
Creates a yearning to regress"

 

Chiasm - Delay

 

 

I'm finally ready to uninstall Surviving Mars. GoG claims I've spent 359h,45m playing this good game which could have been a great game. Of course, this being a city simulator, at least 4/5ths of that is AFK time, cooking dinner or playing Dwarf Fortress or Darkest Dungeon or clicking through unemployment pop-ups in Stellaris while my Martians monetize more technologies and plant more trees.

 

Welcome to Nyctimus, 356 sols (days / years) after its founding, viewed from its initial landing site now known as Lycanthrope Loch. Technically, the atmosphere has been breathable for at least fifty sols, but I kept the domes up because, well, I decided I like domes. So there.

(they look like shiny boobies... heheheh...)

Therein lies the problem. I feel no particular incentive to open up the domes. Terraforming adds a much-needed end-game stage, it's true, but its interplay with the rest of your colony-building is shallow at best, and also brings to the forefront one of the myriad small problems I cited back when Surviving Mars first released:

Pacing.

Surviving Mars is an object lesson in poor pacing.

Remember this?

A rover caught in a dust devil.

At the game's launch, this was one of your nightmare scenarios. Not just drones but rovers required both electricity and cleaning. Your colony's early stages amounted to teleoperating without a net, struggling to maintain a functional mechanical work force long enough to establish the various life support functions for human settlement. Having one of your rovers dusted into malfunction halfway across the map meant deliberately shifting your priorities to a power / repair expedition, all the while hoping you weren't throwing good machinery after bad.

These mechanics could certainly drag out past their plot relevance until they became pure drudgery. Once your priorities shifted to human settlers, rover maintenance rapidly grew onerous. But, instead of being shortened, this first colonization stage via teleoperation was removed altogether. Rovers are now self-cleaning, you're handed more powerful wind turbines for power, right from the start, and instead of consciously weighing your oxygen / water / power needs you can just plop down a self-sufficient habitation dome and immediately start your colony.

 

At the other end of the story, every run-through of Surviving Mars featured a randomly-generated "mystery" or long-term challenge, usually alien contact or some kind of political event requiring massive resource investment. Unfortunately these trigger a bit too early (usually before you fill your second dome) and did more to break up the rising action of colony building than to provide a satisfying boss encounter. By the time you finish a "mystery" you'll still be faced with half a campaign's worth of reiterating shiny boobies all over the landscape.

 

Terraforming would seem to fill that end-game void, but in practice it's merely a separate minigame. I decided to quit when I discovered that vegetation stops spreading at 40% completion, with the remaining 60% being doled out by the game itself at its own convenience as "special projects" artificially inflating the campaign's timescale. So where two years ago I'd run a colony about 50-100 sols after a mystery ended before losing interest, terraforming merely doubled that timespan while eliminating the last remaining challenges like disasters (cold snaps, dust storms, meteor showers) which might have spiced things up. I finished building space stations for Gene Roddenberry's imaginary counterpart in sol 123. This is basically what would happen if Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star thirty minutes into the movie then spent another hour farming moisture for your entertainment.

To reiterate:

Vanilla Surviving Mars suffered from a slightly overextended micromanagement first act and a rushed final act leaving you building redundant domes to fill your time.

The new and improved version of Surviving Mars deprives you of the first act altogether, stretching the dome building routine in both directions by demanding you stick around to wait for "seeding" special project availability... all the while failing to address and even worsening its premature expostulation problem.

The sad part is that, as I said two and a half years ago, there is a lot to like about Surviving Mars. The resource management and infrastructure maintenance are as good as any other city simulator, and the exploration and disaster angles add both proactive and reactive incentives. It banks well enough on its retro-futuristic, hopeful vision of exploration, plays smoothly with intuitive controls, offers a variety of side projects into which you can sink resources. But, aside from my smaller quibbles about writing quality and whatnot, it lacks an overall vision for proportional escalation. And, instead of realizing the problem, its developers have only further flattened their plot diagram after release.

Buying Time

Why can't I hate this comic?

Buying Time uses Flash animations, which glitchy, resource-gobbling mess of a plug-in would normally put me off from the start. It's a slice of life comic, most of which I find rather dull. Its characters' codependence grates. It abuses nudity for cheap appeal. Worst of all, it's about gay guys dating, which given our modern milieu immediately rang my "snowflake social justice warrior" alarm. So why can't I hate it?

It's set in a hundreds-deep underground vertical city in which social stratification naturally flows downward floor by floor from proximity to the surface, in which all interpersonal contact has been commodified, with the panopticon automatically charging your account for anything from saying hello to a hug to a night of passion. Also, cyborgs. Then again, lots of similar webcomics from the past decade started with workable or even intriguing premises only to get hopelessly bogged down in pronoun policing and other petty narcissism.

It's not as though Buying Time ever veers off its focus on interpersonal claptrap. From start to finish, panel by panel, it inextricably concerns itself with a short, dumpy, shy gay musician / welder's attempts to woo his laddie love. Yet, while the characters themselves remain motivated by their personal concerns, the SciFi setting never fades either, limiting and defining, skewing and intruding into every interaction. I suppose this is what made me ultimately enjoy it. It remains true to Science Fiction's exploration of technological developments' effect on sentient life, from living in a postapocalyptic crater to something as seemingly mundane as SMS charges run amok. Its characters are shown acting both emotionally and rationally on a scale consistent with their social position as little fish in a mind-bending pond, adapting to their environment instead of merely navel-gazing.

All in all, surprisingly good job.

[blue] Butterfly [wing] Collector ['s edition]

"As you carry on 'cause it's all you know

You can't light a fire

You can't cook or sew"

 

Butterfly Collector by The Jam (or alternately, Garbage)

 

 

So, as I said, forestalling my dive into Night City's fluorescent wasteland I've installed The Witcher 2, having been insufficiently impressed with the original to buy its sequels on anything but the hefty sales preceding Cyberpunk 2077's release. Not that they're terrible games, but CDProjekt seems incapable of putting out a real RPG, instead marketing simplified "action" third person slashers to the braindead gamepad crowd. For the moment I'll just stick to bitching about loot and crafting, but let's backtrack a bit to a thematic counterpoint first.

 

The Age of Decadence seems fairly... controversial... even among the old-school RPG fans it targets, with its low-budget, low number of very difficult encounters and skill checks forcing you to navigate a maze of life or death choices. It can be a bit of a chore at times. Nevertheless it stands out in a crowd, not least because its resource scarcity makes you latch hungrily onto the few pieces of loot you can grab and manage your finances more carefully than Scrooge. Every mushroom, every scrap of leather grows more significant. Most games, even modern ones, go the other route of showering you with piles of useless trash loot, doing nothing to reward careful oikonomia, an insult to their better customers.

So I ran through The Witcher 2's tutorial, and its tiresome, lengthy and cutscene-choked prologue, and its first actual mission or two, relentlessly snatching up every piece of trash loot and scattered crafting ingredients I could and hoping for a payoff when I finally find a seamstress to turn all these bolts of cloth into belts for clods, or something. Imagine my disappointment when:

- crafted goods turn out to sell for a mere fraction of their manufacture cost, rendering my piles of dutifully amassed ingredients little more than unlabelled trash loot. Much as in the Original Sin games, crafting seems a tacked-on timesink, good for little more than interposing an extra, perfunctory step betwen players and their exploration rewards. If that.

And, while The Age of Decadence rewards your crafting investment in a much more satisfying fashion, I'd argue there's still very little difference between the good and bad way to handle a feature extraneous to the genre in question.

Crafting has little place in story-based RPGs.

In sandbox games, sure, the player can deliberately manage the cost/benefit analysis of bending over to pick up every penny off the sidewalk or every dandelion from a field, or of taking a trip out to the dandelion field or sidewalk in the first place. Trade runs can be planned, as in Mount&Blade, with supply and demand estimates in mind. However, in a game with a fixed number of zones with a fixed number of resource spawns and a fixed number of encounters demanding resource expenditure, gathering ingredients is simply a foregone conclusion, a chore, and the more ingredients the bigger the chore. Either grab everything before leaving your current zone or you lose money, you loser.

I could think of a couple of good arguments to be made in support of crafting during a scripted campaign, both sorely undercut by a glance at how such games handle the feature.

1) Crafting is a character skill, a measure of one's roleplaying. It can require an investment of skill points. Therefore, it's not just a "feature" but a valid route of character advancement and personalization.

[Unfortunately, in most cRPGs crafting is a freebie, a separate minigame, requiring no balancing act with other skills.]

[Even when properly implemented, it requires foreknowledge of the campaign to know what resources will become available and when. My AoD loremaster / alchemist had a devil of a time finding black powder, yellow powder and white powder for late-game encounters.]

2) Resource scarcity during a campaign can force players to choose gear upgrades more carefully, therefore becoming a roleplaying choice.

[As with investing in a crafting skill, investing in a crafted item among a fixed pool of resources depends on foreknowledge of the campaign so you don't waste your future +5 sword ingredients on a +3 sword right before +4s come into play. It's not like an endless game where you can shift your priorities to compensate.]

[Also, this does not require a crafting "system" per se. If only a few gear upgrade choices will ever be relevant, those few can be handled through dialogue or context menu interactions. For the rest, if every single player will acquire enough materials for exactly 37 rusty daggers, every single campaign run-through, then just cut out the middle-man and give us 37 rusty daggers to vendor. The only thing worse than trash loot is crafted trash loot.]

Cutting out the middle-man is probably the sorest point here. As I sit looking at The Witcher 2's gratuitous timesink of a crafting interface I can't but wonder at how many developer work-hours it must have eaten up, which wasted time gets passed on to customers, included in the program's price tag. I have to wonder how many more side quests, how many more dialogue options or monster types that "feature" cost us, or how many bugs could've been debuggered in that time.

_____________________________________________________

P.S.

The title was a Skyrim reference. I occurs to me now that enough time has passed since its release for not everyone to remember one particular crafting ingredient. Not everyone lives inside my own head, I keep forgetting...

Oh well.

Cyberpad Denominator

"Your life your strife your fear is clear
You're scared you dared to feel sincere"

 

Syntax - Tower of Power

 

 

I'd started a completely blind run of Cyberpunk 2077 but it's really not enchanting me right out of the gate so far. Granted I'm impressed with the size and detail of Night City as well as the well-polished combat mechanics (auto-leaning around corners, etc.) at least in the first fight or three. However, I'm quite annoyed that they wasted development time to implement customizable schlongs but not arrow / numpad key rebinding (always hated the WASD setup) and it seems much too console-friendly in general (a.k.a. idiot-friendly) so far barely hinting at an RPG side of things to lend its Grand Theft Auto routine more complexity.

I'll probably give it a pass for the moment and go back to play The Witcher 2 instead, see how that turned out. Still, a couple of quests past the tutorial, something bugs me.

, sample package mouthwash, tiny bars of soap, single-serving friends,

This is not my apartment.

Sure, I know, it's "V"'s apartment and I'm just playing V, this premade character with premade friends and premade life goals and premade aesthetic tastes. I've always preferred blank slates onto which I can project more aspects of my own personality, and my persona extends to my base of operations. Though of course a customizable, functional lair would be preferable, some games can manage to render the simplest digs homey. Your first apartment in Bloodlines, for instance, obviously could not be customized, but immediately established your newfound position in society, your bower, your extended phenotype as a bottom-rung parasite, a grungy, decrepit second-story gutter... where you belong. Cold iron, cold filmy glass, denuded furnishings, outdated electronics, a nearly contiguous layer of grime punctuated by a single overstretched, pathetic little rug failing to splash some color into the scene. Death and waste and degeneracy. Vampirism.

Customizability aside, V's apartment on the other hand is so generic as to express nothing at all, either about my own character's tastes or about my social milieu. Neither rebellious nor indulgent, primitivist nor futuristic, stark nor elaborate, carnal nor mechanical, physical nor cerebral.

 

I can only hope that its very lack of personality deliberately condemns prefabricated consumerism, employed to offset later, better defined environments by its mundane human hive tedium, a springboard for monomythic escalation.

I can only fear it rather reflects CDProjekt's target audience, a console game straining for mass appeal, afraid to threaten its customers' all too human expectations. No ode and no dirge, incapable of melancholy or ambition, mere human resentment toward the extranormal, metastasizing monotone mediocrity.

Come on, IKEA boy, I want you to hit me as hard as you can!

"Are we not men?"

Consider all the simple, spontaneous playground games which routinely crop up among human children... and among dogs: tag, tug of war, keep-away, wrestling, fetch (a.k.a. most ball games) etc. Do you find the similarity a heartwarming reassurance of our quadruped playmates' elevated sensibilities? Or can you admit the human norm remains hopelessly, animalistically primitive?

I got a new phone recently, and flipping over the quick-start leaflet noticed "Printed in USA" on the back. Sure, as far as the product itself goes, the components are made in China and assembled in Taiwan and the charger is made in Singapore and the patent's Japanese and everything's packaged by Indonesian eight-year-olds and it's all being marketed by some South Korean art and design studio and the paper and cardboard all come from some Madagascar bamboo plantation and the profits regardlessly all vanish into some offshore tax shelter... but! We can all rest easy knowing our leaflet printing industry's still going strong.

Whew.

Had me worried there for a second.