The Idiot's Guide to Dawn and Dusk

"And by the way, N'Sync, why do they sing?
Am I the only one who realizes they stink?
Should I dye my hair pink and care what y'all think?
Lip sync and buy a bigger size of earrings?
It's why I tend to block out when I hear things"

 

Slim Shay-Dee - I'm Back

 

 

Continuing my years-overdue wrap-up of Skyrim, I'm pleasantly impressed by the Dark Brotherhood storyline, with its twists and turns and ups and downs and ups again outshining RPG quests' predictable standard trajectory. I was as counterpoint unimpressed by the Dawnguard expansion and its clutter of forgettable, redundant filler NPCs, loot ranging from chores (soul husks) to cheesy (Arvak) and exaggerated build-up to a lackluster boss fight, etc. The high point of it all came shortly before the end:

 

The Forgotten Vale plays expertly on its Lost World appeal through everything from playing cosmetic changes to monsters right for once (symbolic evolutionary divergence in an isolated environment) to a satisfyingly unsatisfying little dip into Falmer history to the terrain... but especially the terrain. Adventuring across a melting glacier scratches this wolfe's extremophilic itch. In the spirit of exploration, they even reward you for thoroughly exploring the various crevasses with minor but otherwise rare rewards like bird eggs.

That spirit of exploration was banished from the game industry over a decade ago in favor of focusing entirely on keeping customers addicted via "kill ten rats" random loot drops in otherwise as inoffensively bland a casino as possible to house said slot machines. When I first tried Skyrim, one of my first complaints was being ordered to the map's best vantage point as soon as the main quest chain started, instead of being allowed to seek the mountain myself because it's there. Especially jarring in The Elder Scrolls which offer landscapes and exploration as chief selling points. And yet...

 

Azura's statue at dawn

After finally making my way down to Blackreach, I came up through a lift I hadn't used before, which placed me relatively high on the northeastern range. About to transform into mule form and run to Dawnstar to begin selling my dwarvish loot, I noticed another possible path upwards, to the east. While from up close it's too large to appreciate, this little vantage point leading from the lift seems to have been positioned specifically to view the statue of Azura in its full glory. That I exited the cavern just in time to witness the statue of the deity of dawn and dusk outlined against a breaking sunrise was just icing on the cake.

Please, sirs, I'd like some more.

Fast forward to Solstheim. If Dawnguard ultimately disappointed, the Dragonborn expansion builds more successfully on TES' strengths and was obviously given more attention. Voice acting, architecture, quest structure, everything has improved... slightly. Apocrypha alone is a nerd's delight. As is my wont, I set out exploring before running through the main quest. After unraveling the mystery of the exploding spiders I noticed an accessible slope running slightly northwards, suggestive of a map location... but with no marker. Sure enough a glance at my map confirmed an unmarked gap in the mountains.

A hop and a skip later I found myself looking down on a barrow opened to the elements, sarcophagi overgrown with a layer of Skyrim's newest, most wonderfullest ersatz mithril, stalhrim!

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it ain't no trick to get rich quick if you dig-dig-dig with an ancient nordic pick, in a mine, that's all mine, where a million molars... shiiiiiiine!

 

I thought it would've been a nice touch to have all the draugr aggress just as you finish chiseling the last of them out of their mineral cocoons, but must admit it feels even more right climbing back out with my treasure to leave them largely as I found them:

- windbeaten atop their lonely but peaceful mountaintop. Rest easy, noble warriors of yore. This humble lizard-wolfe thanks you and bids you a-dieux.

The stalhrim mine felt perfect: a remote unmarked location with a modest reward, enough to show recognition, conveying an air at once of secrecy, solemnity, giddy discovery and that vague nostalgia for heroic ages past on which high fantasy is built. I immediately minimized to jot down a few notes... and this is where the story turns sour. I had originally intended this as unequivocal praise of the Dragonborn expansion's return to open-world exploration, not only for this episode but for the many chests hidden under waterfalls, the carefully sculpted terrain tempting you with forking passages, the more witsful Morrowind-reminiscent music tracks, all the little gimmicks which make immersion, which make a world out of a plaything. However, in looking up the correct spelling of the word "stahlrim" I ran across a little detail. There is indeed a quest and a marker appended to this barrow. They just don't show up until you've advanced the storyline. Otherwise there's nothing special about the location. You're dragged there by your nose-ring a.k.a. map marker like a good little domesticated, castrated farm(ing) animal, as you're dragged everywhere in Skyrim. Instead of a self-driven discovery, a shared secret between the player and the makers of the universe, a personal challenge to the unknown, it's degraded into a gaudy little tourist attraction complete with folksy tour guide and economic incentivizing.

Why?

Why did this place need a quest and a marker?

As I said before, both the terrain as you exit the hatch from the spider lab and the map itself suggest that cleft in the mountains was intentionally level-designed. Intent = content. Investigate.

 

Why not leave it at that? Bethesda, you possessed a team talented enough to convey information with the elegance of a Sistine Chapel storyboard, yet you treated them like five-year-olds whose tangled crayon ouevres must be explicitly interpreted at every step. You just had to demean your grandest offering, to wreck the effect, to appeal to subhuman imbeciles who need to have everything spelled out for them.

The mass market.

What a mass.

Child, Get Acquainted

"If you live among [humans] long enough, one day you will see how funny we are – and you will laugh."

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

 

______________________________________

Spoilers gradually increase in severity down this page. Definitely read Stranger. If I can convince you of nothing else... just read it.

______________________________________

I don't mention this book nearly as often as I should. I love Heinlein's work in general (not to say he didn't have his weak points) but it was the reluctant hero's mentor Jubal Harshaw who, in my late teens, became first among the equals of Elrond Halfelven and Paul Atreides and Ender Wiggin and Spock and Hamlet and Professor Challenger and Rahan and all the other aloof or offputting, cerebral heroes so rarely given their due in popular entertainment.

 

Stranger is a book about understanding. Do not take this to mean sympathy, though it can incorporate it. It coined the term "grok" meaning immersion, imbibing of a concept to the extent of conjoining with it. Unfortunately the novel's storied past, from the apocryphal anecdote about it being written on a bet with L. Ron Hubbard, to its shocking the mores of polite society even to this day and onward, to the impact it had on '60s hippie culture in the U.S., to Heinlein's distaste for his fans' literalism, can easily overshadow the narrative's own beauty. Commentators will gleefully miss the forest for the myriad barbs Heinlein deliberately planted, from religious arguments to whether female characters are empowered / demeaned, to nudism or free love or authoritarianism or economics or anarchism or the rampant pacifist murders or the cannibalism, etc., etc.

It is a packed little novel, and it needed to throw so many elements at you precisely to put its characters to the test most readers fail. It epitomizes Science Fiction's mind-expanding attitude in focusing on individuals' intellectual ability to adjust their perception to a shifting reality. It should be required reading for today's degenerate snowflakes, our politically correct pro-censorship lynch mobs whose attitude is rather to outlaw reality because it offends their parochial sensibilities. Despite Jubal's rants as author's avatar, despite unabashedly bashing religion and prudishness and the human ape in general, Heinlein never failed to return to the topic of intellectual growth allowing Mike to transcend the human condition insight by insight. For all its intrinsic if muffled shock value, Stranger in a Strange Land pivots on its most deceptively innocuous passages.

 

"Nurse, have you ever seen that sterile laboratory at Notre Dame?"
"No. I've read about it."
"Healthiest animals in the world - but they can't ever leave the laboratory. Child, I'm not running a sterile laboratory. Mike has got to get acquainted with 'filth,' as you call it - and get immunized to it."
[...]
"They stood for quite a while in front of a cage containing a large family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom and swarm aimlessly around the cage, while Jill surreptitiously tossed them peanuts despite "No Feeding" signs.
She tossed one to a medium sized monk; before he could eat it a much larger male was on him and not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating, then left. The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; he squatted at the scene of the crime, pounded his knucks against the concrete floor, and chattered his helpless rage. Mike watched it solemnly. Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed to the side of the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a drubbing worse than the one he had suffered - after which he seemed quite relaxed. The third monk crawled away, still whimpering, and found shelter in the arm of a female who had a still smaller one, a baby, on her back. The other monkeys paid no attention to any of it.
Mike threw back his head and laughed - went on laughing, loudly and uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, tears came from his eyes; he started to tremble and sink to the floor, still laughing.
[...]
"Of course it wasn't funny - it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cageful of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about in the time I've been with my own people and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing."

 

 

Hilariously in retrospect, those lines on "filth" were prompted by a woman's outrage at a pornographic image yet followed just a few pages later by visiting a new-fashioned, feel-good megachurch. One can practically hear the author chuckling in the background: Filth? Let me show you some real filth!

More importantly, the discussion of laughter and filth sets up the Man From Mars' headlong dive into human culture to observe the animal in its self-imposed habitat, including a carnival and the zoo trip above, to wade in filth. While the start of the novel might prompt readers to expect Mike to impose presumably superior Martian values onto a backward humanity, by the end, having grokked his own people, he explicitly states his goal to avoid such a scenario. His closing act deliberately exploits humanity's worst tendencies for a chance at long-term logical reaction in the opposite direction to allow the species to expand on its better tendencies, not by redefining social reality but by understanding and building upon it.

In other words, this work of fiction so common to the development of left-wing thinkers over the past fifty years proposed the exact opposite of today's "progressive" head-in-the-sand attempts to rewrite the world by denying it. Reality hurts. And we must be able to laugh at it.

Once upon a time there was a Satanic cult who cleaned their chamberpots with a mixture of mayonnaise and mustard followed by rinsing until they overflowed. They were evildooers overdewing devilled ewers.

The Returns on Obscurantism

"Find us a trapdoor

Find us a plane

Tell the survivors

Help is on the way"

 

Metric - Blindness

 

 

Let us discuss That Which Shall Not Be Measured. By which of course I mean my dork. But before we expand on that, allow me to slip the meatspace for a swell peep at the private affairs of single-player adventures. Let's start with a positive example:

Pop's pops a-poppin!

From the first time I talked about Stellaris, I gushed "The interface alone should humble other would-be designers." Tooltips provide numeric data on pretty much everything in your galaxy, right down to getting down, to your loyal subjects' reproductive rate on each planet.

... fuck faster damn you!

one-two-three-hump!

one-two-three-hump!

Now, you may think procreative precision a minor detail, and in all honesty it doesn't come up often, but my current incarnation of the Feral Transcendence are Authoritarian Fanatic Xenophobes with the Syncretic Evolution background. I envisioned them as parasitoid bugs reproducing via an avian subject race.

one-two-three-oviposit!

one-two-three-oviposit!

With the advent of mechanical robots my Ferals no longer needed my Brooders in the workforce. Glancing at population growth allowed me to pick the most profitable time to flip their switch from chattel slavery to livestock, thereby tidily avoiding unemployment, new workplace construction, a labor shortage and a food shortage all at the same time. Care for a slice of Scroto?

The real lesson here: Bender the robot's got nothing on your average 4X gamer who'll Kill All Humans just for an appetizer.*

Back to my point: while I can appreciate adventure and role-playing, I'm a strategist at heart. I like to see the cards on the table, and then eat their babies. So with that in mind, I'm not too crazy about being denied information.

 

______________________________________

Tropico 4

 

User reviews tend to define it as "a city sim" and "you do all of the usual things" which just about sums up Tropico 4's practical side. Its real strengths are its unusual setting and its quaint aesthetics and humor.

 

I felt pretty good about my burgeoning bananaless republic until I realized I had no idea how I was winning. I was, in fact "doing all of the things" - placing housing and businesses and moving sliders and clicking "yes" on a lot of propositions but if you asked me whence and whither my money was coming and going I'd be as clueless as Penultimo. Even the most important routine financial event of all, the departure of a cargo ship, impacted the endlessly fluctuating budget only about 3/4 of the time regardless of what it was carrying. As for the current location of resources or when resource buildings "tick" or what exactly motivated drivers to drive at any particular time or direction, eh, fuhgeddaboudit. Most players seem to just blame traffic congestion for everything.

 

I'm tempted to classify this as merely a brilliant pastiche of the gormless managerial style of tin-pot despots... but still. In its ease and obfuscation (of bugs, likely as not) Tropico reminded me entirely too much of developers who idealize idle games which play with themselves while the player merely exists to execute scripts or click the singular appointed button unto infinity.

_______________________________________

This War of Mine

While CDProjekt currently seems to define game design as abusing its employees and disappointing customers, some of its former talent co-founded one of the most intriguing little teams since Black Isle and Troika, 11 Bit. I still think their Anomaly: Warzone Earth shot itself in the foot via anti-gameplay, but Frostpunk ranks among the best games of its decade. Its predecessor This War of Mine is a bit fuzzier around the edges.

 

 - and I mean that both figuratively and literally. It centers on uncertainty. Lost in a 2D war zone, you stumble among the rubble in search of food and construction materials for your home base, your perception limited to a cone of vision, your available destinations restricted by events outside your control. Though these same exploration, resource scarcity and base-building angles would later show up in Frostpunk, This War of Mine overplays them in an endless suite of loss conditions. Opened the wrong door? Game over. Built one wrong item? Game over. Didn't bring a gun to a location with only one guarded path? Game over. Didn't clear a location before it's rendered inaccessible by snowfall? Game over. Ended your day before the trader shows up? Possibly if he feels like it? Game over. Though it shares this harshness with roguelikes, much of what seems randomized in This War of Mine is in fact simply unexplained in the game itself.

Take character traits. "Fast runner" is fairly self-explanatory, but I defy you to guess what in-game advantage "good mathematician" or "talented lawyer" confer in the context of nailing boards to windowpanes. Also, given the strict limit of one foraging run per night, and the absolute need to maximize your resource acquisition early on to secure your infrastructure, you're apparently expected to restart the game thirty times over to memorize every single foraging location's peculiar loot breakdown and event triggers. Starting with character selection you're not told whether a particular group starts in the dead of winter or with one person sick, not to mention vices and hidden item values for trading or hidden guard bonuses.

For all its charm, This War of Mine is unplayable without cheating via online guides. It relies so heavily on secrecy as to negate it, especially considering the damn thing cannot be fast-forwarded or manually saved and has some inexcusably long loading screens, meaning every single time you need to restart you'll be looking at hours' worth of reiteration... only to lose again for being denied necessary information.

11Bit did eventually realize the absurdity of hobbling players to such an extent, as most these mechanics feature in Frostpunk as well, but in a more transparent fashion. You get a weather forecast instead of vague hints the temperature might drop, percentage values for productivity instead of a "handyman" character trait, timers for illness curing, tech and law trees revealed a step in advance instead of being blindsided by sadness and depression for arbitrary negative actions, exact values for outpost production instead of "some parts", etc.

__________________________________________

King Of Dragon Pass

One of the most interesting games you've never heard of. Seriously. King Oaf Draggin' Ass will require future discussion, as it's notoriously hard to even categorize, much less do justice to. Is it a managerial choose-your-own adventure? Adventure strategy? Boardroom role-playing with epic fable recitation? Low fantasy agrarian idyll? Bronze age diplomacy simulator? A DnD "wish" spell expanded to a tribe's entire history?

**

For the purpose of this post, where the previous two examples stumbled into or leaned too hard on obfuscation, this one is outright built on it. You will need to make decision after decision based on verbal descriptions of superstitious primitives' hunches, ancestral rights and pride, encounters with talking animals, divine inspiration, self-serving legal spin and yes, dreams... in a low fantasy world where any or all of this may or may not be real (or relevant) from case to case. Overall, the experience can prove both maddening and captivating.

Aside from basics like the number of people in your town and the number of resources you currently possess, King of Dragon Pass will rarely favor you with the numeric values behind events. You're never told exactly how little or how much of a sacrifice or bribe will satisfy or insult a deity or rival leader, the odds of a raid succeeding, the odds of discovering something via exploration, or the myriad bonuses conferred by magic spells. In the example above, regardless of your hero's combat performance you might have won or lost anyway and will never know. On your first run you won't even know whether certain events have repercussions at all, and might be shocked, years later, to deal with blowback from a bit of trash-talk you spouted once upon a time or welcome an exiled child back into the fold as a hero.

So how is it that KoDP's obfuscation grates so much less than the others'?

____________________________________

If I had to provide a positive counterpoint to Tropico 4 in this regard it would be another of Haemimont's games, Surviving Mars. While I've picked quite a few of its nits these past years, I was never left at a loss as to where my Martians' resources were disappearing or why production was fluctuating. Most events from equipment breakdown to crop failures to suicides in Surviving Mars can be traced through the interface from cause to effect. When unforeseen consequences do hit ("mysteries" for example) they are rarely limited to a single occurrence but built up gradually without interrupting basic gameplay. The unforeseen merely sets up a future challenge.

That seems to be the real issue: what am I getting, in terms of gameplay, in exchange for being denied certain information? In This War of Mine, the need for a space heater or a pistol on exactly day 12 or whatnot only becomes apparent when one of your characters dies or is incapacitated. A.k.a. Game Over. Rocks fall, everybody dies. In King of Dragon Pass, a diplomacy check can open up several future events each with their own decision tree. Good or bad, instead of being cheated out of gameplay by hidden information, you as often as not stumble onto further adventure. The same is true of Stellaris, where many of the event chains you stumble across among the stars prompt you with rather mysterious dialogues (just wait 'til you run into the Worm In Waiting) but unless you deliberately click the obvious End Quest button, those options will do <something> beyond merely set a failure state.

Games (in single-player at least) are not only about success or failure but about content. Information is content. Denying the player numeric values, process flow or precise definitions for his actions is denying purchased content, and must be compensated somehow.

 

Sadly, it appears we've expended our air time for today, but I do believe that by expounding yet again on the minutiae of strategy games, I fulfilled the requirement of dork discussion as well.

 

_______________________________________________

 

 

* - and then there's Dwarf Fortress...

** Oh, and if you think interpreting bird flight as omens is an exaggeration of Bronze/Iron Age mentalities, go ahead and leaf through something like the Iliad.

Adam's Stapple

"Back in elementary I thrived on misery

Left me alone I grew up amongst a dying breed

 

You wanna last? Be the first to blast

 

Don't trust my lady

'Cause she's a product of this poison

I'm hearing noises"

 

2Pac - So Many Tears

 

 

I made the mistake of catching up on some news the day after "international women's day" and naturally was unable to find even the few scraps of relevant information one expects from our propaganda outlets these days. Front and center was one of the staple Big Lies of the modern age: violence against women. "One in three" women are victims, we're told, supposedly this time by the World Health Organization itself. Apparently, either no men in our World have ever suffered violence, or their Health isn't worth mentioning. Take your pick.

Right below that, a report about Mexican women rioting against "femicide" which is just a lovely example of our time's tendency toward Orwellian linguistic re-framing. Yes, of course we need a separate term for the killing of a woman, to distinguish actual crimes from the more mundane disposal of those born the wrong sex. What's funny is that, journalistic spin aside, the World Health Organization collects statistics. Like, a shit-ton of statistics, freely available on their site. Death, interestingly enough, counts as a health issue. So let's look up the actual killings in a few countries around the world by sex.

 

 

Hooooly mother of fuck!

(And I'm appealing to the holy mother here because the holy father's probably already face down in a ditch.)

More modern, peaceful places are managing to butcher "only" twice as many men as women. Ummm... yay? But I swear to all that's testicular, the next guy who tries to sell me on the merits of machismo's getting a one-way bus ticket to Mehhicoe! Mexican women are getting killed eight times less than men, but yeah, obviously it's "femicide" we need to worry about. To contextualize this further, let's look at mortality statistics by age, including all causes of death:

You can basically see the death curse of the Adam's apple bulging those numbers. Here, boys skyrocket from a presexual death rate of 120% that of girls to 250-300% from their mid-teens onward. While I'm using Mexico's data once again (because... well, you pissed me off today, Mexico (seriously though, worse than Nigeria?)) you will find the same pattern across decades and continents. At the age when boys stop being cute, they die.

THIS IS OUR SPECIES' "NORMAL"

We are descended of mammalian societies consisting of a core of reproducing females clustered around a murderous prince charming and a periphery of hopeful (hopeless) males cast out at puberty. Moreover, the peculiarity of our clawlessness and fanglessnesss and our debilitatingly prolonged infancy has selected for females best able to secure the help of others and males willing to sacrifice themselves to provide said help. If we no longer automatically exile men, it is only so they can provide labor and protection to women, and this precept of male instrumentality occludes even basic physical reality to the point we will gleefully prance over eight male corpses to weep for one female.

 

Man, this is getting depressing.

Screw it, let's just watch a movie instead. I'll grab myself a Leffe, you find something bearable on Netflix. What's this? An apocalyptic cross-continental adventure with... Forest Whitaker, hell yeah! How It Ends how it begins with a woman packing her fiancé off to inform her own parents of their impending procreation and shotgun wedding (not in that order) despite the fact her father hates her boyfriend. Then [something happens] and the groom and father drive off from Chicago to Seattle to rescue the damsel in tectonic distress. (Don't look at me like that, this spoiler was painfully obvious from the rumbling noises.) Driving into several sunsets, they rake in a death toll in the double digits (all male) and get browbeaten for it by a young female of a morally superior race, get aided by another woman and reassured by yet another that women can do no wrong except when forced by men, and the two heroes bond over the noble thought of a man taking the blame for a woman's mistakes. Then Whitaker suffers the usual heroic mentor's fate so I kinda lost interest (apparently so did the writers given how slow the scenes get) but eventually the hero justifies his existence by pistol-dueling a rival male to the death and whisking his lady love out of danger on wings of [product placement] four-wheel-drive. The End. Thankfully.

You might wonder at this trite choice of example. How It Ends is the basest summer action/disaster flick dross, churned out by the dozens every year, albeit duller than most. This is our normal. This is universal. Every human tribe in history has thought little of shoving men out into the wilderness to secure resources and prove their worth, to slaughter each other in inter-tribal conflicts for the coveted position of provider and protector of a female and her brood. And, while women will voice perfunctory outrage over men's animalistic violent tendencies, they've also never had any compunctions against raking in the spoils and pensions and loving a man in uniform. Or in gang colors. Any harm incurred by men is normal, mundane, beneath notice. Any risk to women sends us into an overcompensating frenzy, lest we be branded anti-woman. Don't believe me? Let's ask Wikipedia.

 

The latest mass kidnapping in Nigeria's Muslim north follows an increasing trend: bandits, religious or otherwise, have evidently figured out they can get more international press-ure on the government to negotiate if they target girls. So that's what they do - and said international press is only too happy to collude in providing months-long paroxysms over violence against women. Specifically women. Hey, here's a fun exercise: Nigeria was one of the countries whose homicide victims I looked up earlier. Why don't you scroll up and... yeaahhh. For a bonus, riddle me this: do you imagine those bandits don't have wives and girlfriends? When the government finally catches up to them, who do your think will be left sitting on the pile of proverbial bacon they brought home before being bested by higher-ranking males? Do you imagine all those Mexican drug runners aren't contributing their take to their local tribe's females? How does a guy get laid more easily - by stuffing a rolled-up sock in his crotch, or a bag of cocaine? Yet if those same women turn around and denounce their accomplices, their suppliers, their hired muscle, the world will treat them as saints and martyrs.

 

This is our normal.

The art of propaganda has yet to find any justification more universal than a perceived threat against women. Whether you want to get rich quick, topple a regime, start a war, put yourself in command of a private army, land yourself a university sinecure, of all the myriad justifications in the world none shows up with such regularity as "save the women" from defilement by evil, evil men. You can justify anything by saving the women. From the jews. Or the krauts. Or the japs. Or the commies. Or the jews again. Or the blacks. Or the jews again. (... jeez, how many of those did they print?) Or the Trojans. It got particularly funny two decades ago at the start of the "war on terror": Americans attacking muslims to free women from the threat of headscarves while muslims were attacking everyone in reach to free women from the threat of miniskirts. If you're campaigning against marijuana in the 1930s, build your propaganda around a woman's attempted rape and murder. If you're campaigning against alcohol in the 1850s, do it by accusing men of beating their wives. No sturdier platform for self-aggrandizement than "save the women" and what gets me is the monstrous hypocrisy of it, the willingness of women to have any number of men slaughtered in their name just so long as they can retain their plausible deniability. The same women planning the best way to smuggle their sons across the Canadian border, should the U.S. reinstitute the draft, in 2008 would still be debating the possible merits of John McCain as presidential candidate, the guy whose one-stop solution to all the world's problems was bombing half of it into a fine powder. Well, yeah. That's what Prince Charming does. He beats others to a pulp in your name.

Hey, don't worry. They're evil.

 

For those of you still reading... thank you, and I congratulate you on your attention span. Turn to your friends who stopped reading in the second paragraph and ask them why they discount the statistics on male victims of violence unto murder. Odds are, you'll get some balderdash about "risky behavior", some variation on the theme of "boys are stupid" and blaming men for their own victimization. Never mind that in most cultures (including subcultures within Western countries) there simply is no alternative, and that it is women who validate these social norms by their consensus. Losers aren't sexy. A fourteen year old boy would be considered incapable of informed consent in most any context... unless he can serve feminists as a statistic. Then being press-ganged into your local tribal conflicts thus securing your mother and sisters' protection by proxy, whether in Chicago or Zamfara or Gaza, becomes entirely your own fault. As an American town gets poorer, you can count on four types of businesses springing up like mushrooms from the compost: loan offices, strip clubs, churches and military recruitment centers. All prey on the desperate, but only one explicitly deals in murder. And women love a man in uniform.

 

When I was eight, I was playing make-believe about being in Jules Verne's Deux ans de vacances. I would be the youngest yet most precocious and daring boy in the group. Sometimes, I'd also imagine an extra female character, maybe shipwrecked separately, adventure story islands being inevitable magnets for shipwrecks. I would defend her from a bully or mountain lion or the pirates, get hideously wounded in the process and she'd nurse me back to health. Sound like a familiar plot? Eight years old, and I was already holding my own life forfeit to female interests.

This is our normal.

Or maybe your friend has heard that androgens suppress the inflammatory response, explaining some of men's susceptibility to disease and therefore mortality. Which is well established, and not just in our loopy species either. Even on a physiological level, females' safety comes first while males are expected to remain active until they drop dead. You can read classic texts in biology like Robert Trivers' Social Evolution and see him flat out deny (somewhat embarrassed the issue even came up) the claim that men get a raw deal, because hey, it's just their hormones. Of course in other contexts, such a claim might spur us to alarm and action. Do you see anyone shrugging off osteoporosis because, hell, those women should've known better than to menopause themselves into brittleness? And even though men are about 20% more likely to get cancer, take a wild stab at the cancer research getting the bulk of the funding. Hint: everybody loves boobies - as the WHO's website proudly proclaims today, in honor of international women's day. I'm sorry, is there a day in the year when breast cancer funding doesn't dwarf all others?

It is a hangable offense, by feminist morality, to tell girls they're bad at math. Would you rather have that, or be taught by Forest Whitaker that you exist to die for the fairer sex? What is worse, being an inferior engineer or computer scientist... or being saddled with the instinct to lay down your life for your wife and daughter and indoctrinated, from the cradle onwards, that you are less deserving of life itself than a woman?

Man bad, woman good.

Repeat the mantra.

Short Swords in Long Scabbards

"I got married to the widow next door

She's been married seven times before

And every one was an 'Enery

She wouldn't 'ave a Willie or a Sam"

 

Herman's Hermits - I'm Henry VIII, I Am

 

I had planned this as a simple assessment of Warhammer: Forty Thousand: Gladius: Relics of Overextended Titles: Chaos Space Wallpapers: Tyranid Centerfold Edition, but its particular brand of mediocrity suggests wider observations and hell, I've never stayed on topic before so why start now?

 

Gladius is a simplified 4X adaptation of one of the most famous squad-management game systems and while I'd dreaded wasting my money even on sale, I can't entirely bash it. It does a few things right.

 

Hey, anyone remember that old game Starcraft? In addition to a surprisingly bearable pulp SF plot, full multiplayer support in the 28k modem era and a decent grasp of escalation, it also raised the bar in its genre with factions that were different not just cosmetically but also in significant details of their infrastructure. While this ran into constant balance issues (look up the original meaning of "zerg rush" - the six zergling rush) it was still more than its contemporaries could offer, or its successors dared to. Gladius is one of the few to rise to that long-standing challenge.

The chaos marines, for instance, need to sacrifice starter units for economic bonuses and their human contingent can get "rewarded" for scoring killing blows by being demonically mutated. Most of the time this results in side-grade cannon fodder... but when you get lucky, you get really lucky. I got that Daemon Prince, an end-game unit, on turn 12 and proceeded to mop up half the map. The orks in turn need to keep fighting constantly to secure the influence resource you'll need to expand and recruit heroes. Necrons regenerate constantly and require no food but are limited to building cities on a few select tiles, and tyranids use a highly simplified economy centered on food but need to expand more than others while maintaining tightly clustered armies. I've had quite a bit of fun failing to grasp each race's weaknesses. That incredibly lucky turn 12 boss summon? I still managed to lose it later on. To explain how, let's sidetrack to that quintessential 4X title, Stellaris.

 

While it seems in most ways the pinnacle of its genre, Stellaris retains a few annoying quirks. For one, long-term trade deals get cancelled automatically (with a disposition penalty) if you ever lack the necessary resource on the 1st of each month. Meaning you can lose your thirty-year influx of a critical resource for not having your 100 mineral payment on hand, even if you're raking in 200 net every month, simply because you momentarily spent to your limit. Of all the wrong lessons to learn from credit card companies...

 

Gladius doesn't have trade deals, but it goes even farther in permanently penalizing you for momentary inattention. Just as in Stellaris, any individual deficit will sap your income of all kinds, but Gladius taxes you to a near freeze and lacks the gross correction mechanism of an "interstellar market" with the result that if you ever dip into negative numbers for more than a single turn, you may as well quit. You will not recover for a hundred turns. Even if you have compensating resource buildings already queued, by the time they become active they too will be penalized. Moreover, Gladius' version of the city "happiness" metric, here termed loyalty, carries a disproportionate weight on every facet of your economy and is so heavily reduced by city sprawl that, once again, you can find your entire economy gridlocked in only a couple of turns.

Among other good and bad points, Gladius is a barely painted-over version of Proxy Studios' older 4X Pandora: First Contact, but it does show improvement in at least one area: the AI, which is now capable of mounting decisive offensives, will retreat its units to heal, focus fire and abuse artillery cover and even gradually switch priorities over the course of a game depending on who shows up near its cities. Unfortunately, it still cheats. Not by the same crass resource advantages as in Pandora (though their early armies still indicate a hidden starting bonus) but mainly by metagaming against you.

 

 

If you can't tell what's happenning there, the red and yellow computers are leapfrogging each other to reach my units and mine alone. In fact there's a third computer, blue, to the east on the minimap which was getting in on the action until I pushed it back. The whole dogpile was kicked off by neutral units spawning to attack me due to my quest, which makes this four factions at once launching a coordinated offensive against me in a game supposedly void of alliances. Granted, this is a rare occurrence, as they'll usually fight each other in the fog of war so long as you're out of sight and routinely eliminate each other, but the developers obviously still felt the need to lean on yet another crutch of artificial difficulty.

Of course, the AI might be said to be of little consequence, given Gladius is clearly built as a multiplayer game, and there's the rub. Much like Star Ruler 2, it trades away the strongest points of its genre-in-name to torture 4X strategy into a game of thumb war: struggling to stay on top from moment to moment with no long-term planning. It wants to leverage the grimdark "feels" of WH40K to become a new Supreme Commander: constant unit production, constant resource building production, constant spam of every kind... and there's so much wrong with that notion I barely know where to start.

 

In the first place, it's hard to think of a genre so poorly suited to multiplayer as 4X, which thrives on player management of increasingly overwhelming amounts of resources and units. Waiting for a dozen players to each manage a hundred cities and units for a thousand turns is a daunting proposition, and Gladius' strictures placed on expansion are obviously meant to sever end-game sprawl into just 3-4 cities and 20-ish units. But more than that, its hobbled interface and the severe penalties on resource deficit require you to give constant commands instead of planning a hundred turns in advance as a strategist should. Together with the lack of interface support for long-distance movement and long-term progression, this all points to deliberately removing foresight from the equation, rewarding reactive and not proactive gameplay. In other words a "strategy" title for those who don't want to strategize... too much. An attempt to bring turn-based mechanics down to the button-mashing real-time norm. A 4X bereft of three of its Xes: little or no exploration, expansion or exploitation but plenty of extermination.

So how well has this attempt at stealing Starcraft's spotlight worked out?

 

That's Gladius' multiplayer match list at what I can only consider peak hours, early evening in the Americas. Here's Stellaris at exactly the same time:

Amazing.

Turns out that crippling a 4X game into a petty, streamlined, custom-tailored, quick and dirty multiplayer version has about the same multiplayer success rate as building a full-size 4X game that can fuel month-long campaigns and just slapping a multiplayer option onto it as an afterthought. Buying a worse product for a specific purpose is the same as buying its fundamentally better competitor and repurposing it.

I've been enjoying Gladius' interdiction-heavy tactical side, its multifaceted economics, some of its better music tracks, even its writing, as its quest flavor text is the first (maybe second) satisfying exposure I've ever had to Warhammer's young adult "big dudes with big guns" cheesetastic setting. I've especially been enjoying sussing out each race's particular economic and combat dynamics. But as I win a game or two with each race I find no reason to repeat the experience, whereas Stellaris and Planetfall are providing me with years' worth of replay value. Every new 4X, role-playing or squad management game now should be asking itself what it can offer that Planetfall doesn't.

 

Even unit customization is conspicuously absent from Gladius, considering that as I recollect from the one guy back in high school who collected space marines, customizing your units with new weapons has always been one of Warhammer's core selling points! Even the other computer adaptations which lack customization give you options between "ork wif blasta" or "ork wif choppa" or whatnot. I find this lapse most perplexing of all in light of Gladius being summarily pasted over the older game Pandora, as Pandora itself already featured a built-in modular unit design system inspired by Alpha Centauri! What. The. Fuck! You copied everything over to your new product... except for the biggest selling point they had in common?

The more I look at Gladius, the more misconceived it appears to the point of deliberate self-sabotage. I can see the appeal of computerized Warhammer multiplayer. It's a PvP game to start with. But turn-based games always suffer from the tedium of waiting for your enemy's moves. Why pile onto that with the slowest-paced strategy genre of all, 4X? Hell, strategy gamers of all people should be familiar with the precept of playing your strengths, not your weaknesses. Warhammer is synonymous in gamers' minds with squad tactics. So why am I not seeing a viable online version, as Magic: the Gathering has done with Arena, of bringing a bunch of customized Tyranids and Chaos Marines to the virtual table and duking it out turn by turn without tacking on any other genre's gimmickry?

Granted, Games Workshop seems to have tried repeatedly back in the '90s with flubs like Chaos Gate. Since then they've instead been licensing their IP to anyone who'll have it, acting like they're hoping to retire on a thousand seeping trickles of royalties. Their biggest success has been what... Dawn of War? Followed maybe by Warhammer Online. Granted, Games Workshop also suffered one of the worst rip-offs in the game industry from Warcraft and Starcraft - if Blizzard actually paid the royalties it logically owes, they'd be set. But I can't figure out why the WH/40K I.P. mainly serves derivative genre adaptations, with the most faithful representations being shoestring fare like Armageddon or slapdash nonsense like Sanctus Reach. Why not corner the market in your own squad management niche, where the only serious competition would come from XCOM?

The only explanation I can think of is that they're still managing to market so many $80 plastic toys that serious big budget computer adaptations would actually water down GW's main source of revenue. 

Which, if true... is frankly amazing in itself.

A Gloomy Power that Dwelt Apart

"Far in the North neath hills of stone

in caverns black there was a throne

by fires illumined underground,

that winds of ice with moaning sound

made flare and flicker in dark smoke;

the wavering bitter coils did choke

the sunless airs of dungeons deep

where evil things did crouch and creep.

There sat a king: no Elfin race

nor mortal blood, nor kindly grace

of earth of heaven might he own,

far older, stronger than the stone

the world is built of, than the fire

that burns within more fierce and dire;

and thoughts profound were in his heart:

a gloomy power that dwelt apart."

 

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lay of Leithian

(a.k.a. Beren and Luthien, beta version 0.571)

 

 

Continuing my leisurely drift along The History of Middle-Earth, I'm relieved at Tolkien having quickly dropped strict alliteration for something less jangly, but most of this version as well is simply forgettable, hobbled by its skaldic metre rather than sustained. The Middle-Earth we all know and love was evoked more eloquently in poetic prose than prosaic poesy. Except for that description of Morgoth above, which struck me as immediately recognizable, archetypal, almost inexplicably so... until visions by Gustave Dore flickered through my semi-consciousness. The Morgoth of The Silmarillion never struck me as "profound" but rather an infantile force of id, a deity of greed, envy and rot. Here though, just as I once chuckled to myself at realizing Robert Heinlein at the time of By His Bootstraps was largely channeling the literature of his youth, having not yet found his own style, Tolkien's mid-development description of Morgoth smacks of the recalcitrant Satan of Paradise Lost, a creature primarily of Pride.

Sure, as per the author's need to reconcile Christian and Nordic mythologies, Morgoth remained, inescapably, The Devil, but in a less literal sense and I find it interesting how the decadent noble's veneer of his description also fell away, only to find its way into others' characterization. In that comically alliterated version of The Children of Hurin, Morgoth even bloviates the role of fiendish tempter to his mortal captive (prompting the quoted incorruptible hero's rejoinder) a feature later downplayed and shifted onto his successor the saurian shapeshifter and his temptation of the Atlanteans to hubristic ruin. Morgoth's comparison to natural forces again was minimized, only for the relevant lines to be paraphrased by Galadriel (stronger than the foundations of the earth) and Mithrandir (servant of the secret fire) in meeting their respective fates. Pride, of course, has been later remembered more as the tragic flaw of the Noldor.

 

"do I repent, or change,
Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit"

-Milton