Ashwalkers: a Quintessence of In-Your-Face Timesinks

Attention Hermes Conrad: you are about to receive a letter from the central bureacracy.

 

I mentioned Frostpunk's more amateurish predecessor This War of Mine for its unfortunate obfuscation of so many game rules as to force you to play it via wiki cheating. Not to say it lacks quality. In fact I wish I could want to play it more.

My elite 17-inventory scavenger mule got depressed and abandoned my refuge, which almost made me uninstall right then and there, as halving my loot intake has pretty much doomed me. Still, with the spring thaw, a grandfather and a little boy washed up on my doorstep and I'm impressed by the amount of work 11Bit put into differentiating children from adult survivors, down to idle animations. Where adults just stand or shuffle around, this little kneebiter's rushing to and fro all day excitedly, from his own desginated hopscotch and other play locations to bugging the adults at their workstations. While he starts with no skills, you can have any adult call him over while performing various mundane tasks (as in the image) until he becomes an adept little routine maintenance worker who moonlights in the psychotherapeutic role of hugging people and telling them not to be sad.

Despite its game design faults, This War of Mine still manages to emphasize the right points of its "civilian in a warzone" premise artistically. Unfortunately, its faults include an inordinate amount of padding for time. Every day starts with three unnecessary and unskippable splash screens / cutscenes, you're not permitted to save game, relying on daily autosaves, cannot fast-forward even if all you can do is wait 'til mid-day to see if visitors show up or wait six in-game hours for your residents to catch up on their beauty rest. Yes, you heard me, watching people sleep is an unskippable activity in this game! Can I not get some grass to grow and paint to dry to break up the routine at least?

This was hardly the first game I've criticized in recent years for padding its campaign time with interface timesinks. At first I assumed it was merely a matter of building addictive anticipation in games like Battletech, but in its incarnation into lower-budget randomization like Battle Brothers, Urtuk and Darkest Dungeon it seems to at least as much fill the role of good old-fashioned filler. The worst offender I've seen so far however has to be Ashwalkers, a twelve-dollar game that would be overpriced at six.

I rarely jump on new releases but in this case I sniffed an aesthetic successor to This War of Mine and hoped someone had smoothed out the wrinkles. While still a survival game, Ashwalkers takes a more traditional adventure game approach as you linearly traverse zone by zone making not one, not two but several! choices along the way. A walking simulator with occasional randomized foraging tacked on. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against minimalist visuals and sound (others I've named here pulled that part off at least) but sadly it ramps up the interface timesinks to such an extent as to become an exercise in waiting to be permitted to act. Here's how half a zone (about a tenth of the campaign) plays out:

 

- After an inter-act intermission, you graaadually zoom in to your party standing on a dusty road. Then zoom in some more. Click to continue.

- You try to move.

- Pop-up message: we need to find medical supplies - Yeah, I know, I'm the one who decided to use the last one, and the party inventory is clearly visible. By all means, tell the randomizer to give me one.

- Move to an unidentifiable glowing spot of interest on the bare ground.

- Pop-up full-screen message: You find a giant black feather. Okay, nice foreshadowing, but why did that require pausing the game? Why can't you pop that up while I walk? Click to continue.

- You try to move.

- Pop-up full-screen message: Your team needs to find the next beacon. Yeah... I know. There is a macguffin. Neither surprising nor news. Click to continue.

- You try to move.

- Pop-up full-screen message: You just need to find its exact location. What... no shit? Wait, could I have solved my mission before now just by declaring the macguffin's "somewhere on this continent"? Like, dude, it's all cool bro, I swear I saw it around here somewhere. Click to continue.

- You wander aimlessly across twenty meters of bare dirt.

- The camera zooms out dramatically.

- You wander aimlessly across thirty more meters of bare dirt.

- The camera zooms in dramatically.

- You wander aimlessly across forty more meters of bare dirt.

- You see a giant vulture (shock and amazement!)

- Pop-up full-screen message to inform you that you have just seen a vulture. My god! It's from the Central Bureaucracy! Click to continue.

THIS IS THE SPOT WHERE SOMETHING HAPPENS > - You decide which of your four companions' approaches (brains/brawn/sneaking/diplomacy) to use against the vulture. < THIS WAS THE SPOT WHERE SOMETHING HAPPENED. Click to continue.

- Pop-up full-screen message informing you your party has taken the action you just told them to take. Several lines of text gradually appear one after another. A ticker appears. The ticker then displays a number. The ticker then gradually subtracts the two resources your action required. One resource. Two resources. The bottom line of the ticker dissapears. Click to continue.

- Pop-up full-screen message informing you your designated action took effect. Line. By. Line. Of. Text. A ticker appears. The ticker then displays a number. The ticker then gradually adds three resources to your total of supplies. One resource. Two resources. Three resources. The bottom line of the ticker disappears. Click to continue.

(...but by this point, do you really want to?)

 

You know, naming one party member "Nadir" seems self-deprecatingly on the nose for this game. While This War of Mine was a flawed but honest attempt at challenging and immersive gameplay, Ashwalkers is scraping the bottom of the self-indulgent, facetiously artsy "indie" barrel, padding every action with an extra second or five of downtime, and I do mean every single action. Even dialogues are broken up by watching your squad meaninglessly pace forward in between paragraphs, and within paragraphs every comma is used as pretext to pause for nonexistent dramatic tension, yielding hilarious moments like:

In the distance [DRAMATIC PAUSE]

or

In it [DRAMATIC PAUSE]

How fucking long do you think it takes your audience to read the words "IN IT" !?! It's nearly as invisible a phrase as the word "said"!

Leaving aside little verbal flubs like a savage's drawing being described as "rusty" instead of rustic or an area being described as damp "yet" verdant, as though it's a surprise that life needs water, the writing on which this entire choose-your-own-adventure depends is... not terrible, but hardly up to the task of compensating for the endless interface timesinks masking the fact you only have about a dozen decisions to take in total. The information you run across or suss out via companion conversation around the campfire merely amounts to exposition. For instance you at one point discover that Kali is the youngest member of your group. Full stop, end paragraph, and you will never need to remember this information ever again. Worse yet, those little touches personalizing survivors in This War of Mine like a kid begging his grandpa to play with him or party members interacting in some meaningful or practical fashion are utterly absent here.

Ostensibly, this game's meant to bank on replay value, but the irrelevance of its writing and the absolute monster of a mountain of time it forces you to waste clicking through interface pauses beg the question of why you would ever give a shit about even one ending achievement, much less want to collect them all.

 

As a final note, why did these completely linear levels employ 3D models and environments when Ashwalkers so sorely needed to devote more time to fleshing out its narratives and interactions instead? Especially since the completely locked camera obviates even visual three-dimensionality, meaning this product's sole purpose appears to be padding some pissant graphic design major's resume as having "professional" experience with 3D models.

Fucking rip-off.

Snuggle Futures

"Jordan: Some people like reliability.

Cox: In a sedan, it turns out it's terrific."

Scrubs - My Last Day

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“He said, ‘I am a man,’ It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman’s soul knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god"

 

John Steinbeck - The Pearl

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"Look I'm standing naked before you

Don't you want more than my sex?"

 

Tori Amos - Leather

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Ummm... do you actually have more to offer than your sex?

 

I've been blogging here for almost a decade now and this blog has never had any subscribers. In terms of regular visitors (people who probably have it bookmarked or whatnot) it's hovered between twenty and five. Even fewer now because I badmouthed Star Wars. Granted, while it's not my goal to drive people away, I frequently take action to that effect. I ramble, I insult you, I never stick to a schedule or a single narrative or even topic from post to post, and I just recently decided to look up how to remove the social media "share" buttons. This is anti-social media, thank you. Still, if after a decade I've garnered no wider readership than your average gas station toilet graffiti, I should probably jump to the conclusion that I'm a transcendent literary genius beyond the ken of mortal linguistics just a boring writer. (Not that it'll stop me from continuing to howl into the void.)

So here's my question to any / all / everywoman: have you considered that you may be a boring person?

I ask because last week I ran across some article or another by a man bemoaning and apologizing on behalf of all males for the unspeakable crime of being "emotionally distant" or "emotionally unavailable" toward the females yanking their sexual leash and not showing enough interest in a woman's day-to-day life. Damned if I can find it now, but simply substitute any of the million articles over the past half-century by men self-flagellating or women condemning them for being born the wrong sex and you've got the gist of it. The world's hardly short on checkout magazine questionnaires to the effect "ten sure-fire reasons why you're a perfect angel and he's a filthy pig deserving of your abuse" - but I digress.

It reminded me of the movie Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a woman's moral punching bag for a hundred minutes while his CGI childhood stuffed toy repeatedly and garishly illustrates the dogmatic presumption that all interaction between men and all of men's interests are mere destructive childish folly to be overcome by subsuming a man's imperfect existence to a woman's greater wisdom. Half a billion dollars in profit for a piece of abject propaganda which, genders flipped, would've never made it past the elevator pitch.

In fact you can't take a step in the modern world without being beaten over the head by this tired old precept of women's moral imperative to "civilize" men, the any-color-woman's burden. Concomitantly, if any man should find immersion in female interests akin to a rancid, stagnant, stifling bog, he himself is blamed for not seeing the transcendent brilliance of her splendiferous soul. Hey, maybe he's not showing an interest because you're not interesting? I mean, one Hugh Grant movie is bad enough but there is never just one Hugh Grant movie... and while we're at it: unholy mother of crap woman, what in the multiverse makes you think I want to hear about the valiant exploits of your knitting circle?

Now, I'm perfectly aware that an amazing critical hit in a video game can sound equally irrelevant. Let this blog's unpopularity stand as evidence. But overall, men tend to have more active interests, a wider gamut and more driving passion than women do, and it can safely be chalked up to the overall greater variability in male genetics. To deliberately over-simplify: we're nature's gamble; you're the safe investment. We're the crazy ones. You're the boring ones.

This is not actually good for men. It lands a lot of us bleeding in the gutter, and it's become a running gag that the Darwin Awards predominantly go to dudebro attempts at ridiculous stunts. Men do some stupid shit, and I'll gladly argue against men's desperation to assume Steinbeck's mantle of demidivinity* for their own benefit, but the fact remains a man's interests are his own. "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" has fueled half the comedy in the world's history, but as feminism rewrote it to "men are from Hell, women are from Heaven" we've also tacitly accepted that anything men enjoy by extension must also somehow be broken, defective, evil or just plain wrong by definition. So of course any man who refuses to concede the intellectual pinnacle of watching The View gets blamed by default as shallow and closeminded.

In the interest of time, let's gloss over the instinctive underpinnings of all this, the courtship displays of material devotion in perpetuity, to sexual relationships as interactions between supposed equals. In any other context, the presumption that condescending to one activity entitles one party to the other's participation in a hundred others would easily be recognizable as slavishness, narcissism or a host of other psychological disorders... except when we're faced with women's presumed right to control their mates.

 

Why exactly should I want more than your sex? If you think I should want your "sitting on a bench at sunset" then by all means, gimme your best elevator pitch for the activity in itself. If you want to sell me on the high concept of "wandering the aisles at Pier One for five hours on a quest for the knickest of knacks" I will give it due consideration on its own merits. Maybe your literary critiques are less insightful, your singing less melodic than you assume. Female hobbies, more often than not, are so incredibly dull because they're just pretexts to talk regardless of having a topic or not. The stereotypical courtship ritual dinner date provides a quintessential example. Sex itself, however, mandates nothing other than sex and we're long past due to deny women their most fundamental and undeserved entitlement: sex as an act of condescension to be remunerated by indefinite service. **

Finally, per my usual distaste for dishonesty, I have to point out:

"and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man"

Men's willingness and even eagerness to throw themselves into activities beyond the sphere of female interest has greatly increased their value as work-horses for women to yoke throughout history. Being the quiet guy in the back of the room does not get you laid. (Trust me.) The desperation with which men peddle their hobbies (as opposed to passive interests) on dating websites*** can't help but call into question the Kafkaesque sadism of females seeking out this trait in potential mates only to immediately condemn, vilify and smother it for the sake of control.

 

 

 

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* As might Steinbeck if that book's ending is any indication. Apropos of nothing, I'll get around to the ever-useful insult "faggot" some other time.

** Yes, I do realize it is completely unrealistic for men to pull a reverse Lysistrata. For as long as humans are human, men will continue to throw themselves on women's questionable mercy.

*** Seriously, I barely graced them with my presence years ago, but I'm guessing you can still visit any dating site and count the "dude with fish" or "dude with musical instrument" pictures.

Goal: de-Locks

"It's hard to win, easy to lose

We play a game we cannot choose
As steady as a rocking horse, as subtle as a bruise"

 

Oi Va Voi - Waiting

After Knights of the Old Republic, I didn't want to jump straight into another oldie so I installed Low Magic Age on the assumption it would turn out to be some amateurish rip-off like Sanctus Reach or ATOM RPG which I could uninstall before the first act's finale, providing me with a couple hours' worth of entertainment mostly from bitching about it. But damnit it's a surprisingly decent dungeon-crawler in a half-implemented landscape, a lamentable case of wasted potential given it's still listed as "in development" in 2021 after a 2017 launch. Unlike some of its competitors it makes a big show of sticking to D20 combat rules... in both good and bad respects.

 

I slapped together an all-elven chaotic neutral (not that it matters) party: a barbarian and a versatile rogue/fighter as front-line beef, a squishy duel-wealding rouge (Shadow, my recurring backstabbing Jungian companion) and a cleric (the noble Bann D'Ayd) covering the flanks, plus bringing up the rear the only chaotic neutral character in the stock henchman roster and myself in my usual role as support wizard, this time specializing in necromancy.

Thus I set out on my first exciting adventure.

Thus I started my first combat of my first exciting adventure.

Thus the first enemy I encountered took its first action:

Game Over.

 

And sure, sure, I didn't have to turn perma-death on, and I could've hidden behind my barbarian or put Lobby (he lobs things) in front of myself if I were more careful, but even that would've only shaved what, 5-10% from my chance of instant death. Low Magic Age spawns your party and your enemies randomly on each randomly generated map. Bottom line: no matter what I did, that goblin shooter would still have been in range of me and there was nothing I could do to stop it from critting me.

 

Now, given my preference for playing support casters, this is not even the first time I've died in the first round of an RPG's first combat. For the sake of my already brittle self-worth, let us not keep a tally. Still, even taking into account my gluttony for punishment, I would contend there's something fundamentally wrong about a system whose first message to the customer after half an hour's worth of party creation and tutorial is: Game Over.

On a completely unrelated topic, KotOR's companion roster was more bearably written than I expected, so I took quite a shine to Canderous the stalwart warmonger and the casually biocidal HK-47... only for the last act to force me to use other, plot-centric NPCs instead.

Wrong.

In a multiple-character single-player RPG, fleshing out your adventuring group is as much an expression of the player's personality as choosing between light and dark sides. Except for companion side-quests you should never force me to use a particular NPC for any mission, especially not for the grand finale. This is supposed to be my moment of glory not your writers', and by extension it's supposed to be the moment of glory for the party I've gradually developed, the loyal minions who've bled (and leaked motor oil) for me, not for your pet diva whose existence I've barely acknowledged so far.

 

Games are not movies; conversely, games are not dice.

In an interactive medium, no matter how clever you think a feature or plot twist might be, tread exceptionally carefully if you run any chance of invalidating the player's choices.* This is not a pitfall, but a narrow middle ground between pitfalls. You can choke a player by exerting too much control, as with KotOR's narratively-integrated companions**, or fob off too much decision making via randomization as with Low Magic Age's combat maps. Properly subtle balancing of player choice against a solidly playable environment can make or break an otherwise mediocre title like Fallen Enchantress.

Try to remember you're making a product to be used by others, not just to show off your algorithms or shiny plot-rails.

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* Yes, it can occasionally work wonders, but keep in mind Faust Capital shone precisely as a calculated, dramaticaly precise counterpoint to an otherwise ironclad rule.

** Other Black Isle / Bioware / Obsidian games did a much better job of lending your companions their relevance and stature within the game world without anchoring them too fixedly into the PC's main plot. Take Durance from Pillars of Eternity as one brilliant example. Freakin' Avellone, man...

The Magic Mountain

While I normally discuss SF stories here, one piece of official high-brow "literature" has been nagging at me lately for a timely mention. Timely, because like H.G. Wells' later works, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain can't help but find inauspicious parallels in modern culture.

 

Hans Castorp flounders about for a few hundred pages in an era of masked concupiscence, overt sexual condemnation and repression yet also widespread monetization of sexuality, of popular activism proliferating with little impetus from or anchoring in reality and based instead on critical theories, of incoherent "personalities" babbling their audience into submission and a terminally insecure crop of youth desperate to be conscripted in any conflict which might lend legitimacy. Are your ears burning yet? That the whole novel takes place in a sanatorium, an emblematic safe space, is just the icing on the cake.

I won't bother with a synopsis or general impressions. The book's been inexorably analyzed into zombiehood by a century's worth of Lit. majors across two continents. You'll easily find theses on its significance to everything from spaceships to corn futures. I will, however, encourage you to read it, and keep in mind at all times that it seats its various tongue-in-cheek philosophical diatribes in a nucleus of sickness estranged from reality, a fantasy land of malady and contagion, choking the very breath from your lungs. If its various characters' seductive promises of agency by enrollment echo too closely the indulgent feel-good, empowering popular philosophies of today, try to remember where the spread of such memetic infection led the society of Mann's time.

In fact, he'll eventually remind you.

Star Wars: Knights of the Eighteen-Year-Old Republic

"Focused, driven, certain (the way it's got to be)
Crooked (no trust)
Liars (conman)
Drunk with (power)
Mentor
Taught me everything that I know
So wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong"

 

Mudvayne - Determined

 

 

Back in high school, another boy asked my opinion of David Lynch's Dune adaptation. My answer? "I'm just glad I got to see sandworms." This seems the appropriate tack in reviewing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic too, as it addressed an action flick audience incapable of rational analysis, presumed to respond only to Pavlovian stimuli in the form of gimmicks from Star Wars movies. This is a product intended to make drooling yokels feel included.

 

Not to say it didn't have its good points (quite a few in fact) but quality had to be snuck in under the radar or floated above generic Star Wars set pieces. I'll admit I really got into the game haflway through Manaan - only place featuring moral ambiguity - but I get the feeling the writers pretty much had to invent their own planet and alien culture to stretch their creativity a bit instead of toeing Lucas' crap line by line. Other planets mostly crammed as many movie gimmicks as possible in every single zone: Twi'lek dancing girls, beeping droids, protocol droids, blasters with 0.5% precision, banthas, the famous cantina scene cut and pasted a dozen times over... and of course since LucasArts wanted to bank on those execrable prequels, it needed to include pod racing and dual lightsabers (two of the one-half things I could stomach about Phantom Menace.) I'm also annoyed by the third-person-shooter interface for a target-lock RPG which would've functioned much better in strategy view, another concession to the flicks' mindless "action" feels.

However, for anyone who's played BioWare's other games, I can't but note this is likely the hardest they ever tried to knot all their cliches together. They even worked in a zombie plague at the start, copied and pasted Aribeth (thankfully with slightly less hammy dialogue) and recycled music from Neverwinter Nights right in the tutorial, plus the prison break via a companion, later rehashed for DA:O. Feels. Lotsa feels. All of the feels, feel by feel.

*Sigh*

So why am I not completely bashing what should by light of its concepts qualify as sheer adaptational shovelware?

Execution.

Where not deliberately dumbing everything down to the tastes of Star Wars fans, the design team showed unquestionable expertise. The over-riding problem concerns a lack of choice, but let's take it aspect by aspect.

 

 

1) Character progression

Humans are degenerate vermin and I should never have to play one - galaxy full of little green men in 31 flavors but you make me play a retarded plains-ape. Also, I don't know how fleshed out the D20 Star Wars tabletop mechanics are, but KotOR manages to give an overall vibe of NWN in spaaaaaAAAce! - but with fewer skills, fewer feats, fewer spells, fewer everythings. I deliberately "gimped" myself by avoiding the obvious swashbuckling space-knight routine, and was pleasantly surprised to find my robotics and hacking prowess coming in handy throughout the campaign. Good thing I avoided lockpicking (a.k.a. "security") as in another NWN throwback, you can just bash open almost every container and door. Boss fights were marginally difficult (took me two attempts) as they often force you to solo and presume you'll want to play a simpleminded brawler. I mean, why else would you be in a nominally Science Fiction game but to hit shit with sticks?

 

Nevertheless, I found the EnergyRes. / ForceImmunity/Breach / Plague / Kill spell combo took care of pretty much everything, with grenades sufficing for the remainder of brute force (pun intended) occasionally defaulting to laser-sabers for passive bonuses merely because my trusty rifle was canonically useless against jedi.

So: zero race choice, class choice limited to a couple feats' difference, plus you're locked into your jedi prestige class before level ten. So much for strategic "role" playing. At least the game's balanced enough that none of your few choices are rendered useless.

2) Gear

Medieval cutlery gets phlebotinized by Dune-like personal shields, all the more redundant in being told from the start everyone has armor and weapons which lightsabers can't cut, sapping their mystique (for obvious balance reasons) down to the level of ten foot laser poles. Though technically you get a choice of ranged weaponry, all blaster flavors... blast things. You'll merely level up different skills among your characters to avoid overlap for the best weapons from each category. In keeping with the movies' theme, glowstick swashbucklers are just flat-out <better> than everyone else... but I will admit balance-wise my blaster rifle remained useful up to the end, jedi duels aside.

As usual in Bioware / Obsidian games, resource management is trivialized into irrelevance. You get free healing in town, infinite force healing, can afk to regenerate and are handed so many freebie consumables you can't even burn through them all. A very simple game all-told, again presuming a degenerate audience.

3) Campaign progression

Decent amount of freedom. Each planet's combat zones are linear but theres a healthy dose of side quests and you can complete the four planets in your preferred order. Also, each planet's given a slight (thematic) spin, with Manaan rewarding noncombat finesse the most, the Sith academy offering a predictable bounty or minefield of Dark Side choices depending which side you're on, Tatoooine some extra robotics opportunities and Kashyyyyyyyyk the jungle planet lots of fights against biological enemies.

 

Of course it might've been nice to hint more at what themes await you in various zones beforehand so you can make a half-informed choice - BioWare later improved on this in the DA:O campaign.

4) Quest progression

Yes!

Pleasantly surprised to find most missions have 2+ solutions, whether between light / dark sides or combat / noncombat. By the standards of 2003, KotOR was staggeringly... bushy, in its branching.

 

Skillful level design, well paced, with usually just enough filler combat to make you feel like you're working toward the more involved encounters. Honestly, though it may not register on customers' consciousness, level design above other factors likely made the game a success. Aside from the infuriating minigames (get to that later) the core content is beautifully dosed for cinematic appeal, minimal grind, a few puzzles to break up the combat sequences and just enough divergence and recursion to give the impression of nonlinearity.

On the downside, many noncombat solutions require you to expend consumables and appear to yield fewer experience points than blasting your way across the galaxy. Not a huge problem since you'll have ample opportunities to level up and by halfway through the game I was swimming in parts and spikes... but still, you're basically being asked to spend money to lose EXP.

 

5) Companions

A must for games treading in Black Isle's wake, though in this case KotOR's pared-down D20 system and faux-third-person-shooter idiocy limits you to a party of three, and even that feels cumbersome at times. Unfortunately, I didn't feel like putting in the effort to explore all of their dialogues and personal quests. Some are pathetically cheesy (the plucky little girl plus lovable big lug pair) while others felt surprisingly ambiguous and multifaceted (Jolee and Juhani) but I dropped both of them as soon as I ran across the amusingly murderous HK47. (Helped that I could instantly upgrade it to maximum efficacy due to my INT / robotics focus.) Canderous' attitude lent a welcome bit of integrity and dignity to the otherwise cartoonish Light/Dark blather.

Here I also have to criticize the various times you find your party selection forced on you, but I think that'll grow into its own post.

6) Alignment

Last and most involved. While moral alignment was central to Planescape: Torment and impacted some major decisions in Baldur's Gate, it fell by the wayside in Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights, meaning KotOR could've gone either way based on customer expectations. They opted for heavy and pervasive implementation of Light vs. Dark roleplaying into most quests and integrated your overall tally into the efficiency of Jedi spellcasting, making you feel the consequences of your actions. It certainly makes the game stand out among its contemporaries like Morrowind which hand-waved morality in favor of exploration/completionism, and especially among the rise of "action" RPG Diablo clones and the amoral powermongering of early graphical MMOs.

Sadly, alignment gains scale so heavily with your depth in either branch as to deny choice. (Contradicting your current alignment shifts you massively in the other direction; conversely, continued gains appear diminished.) A primary spellcaster like me at least needed to maintain mana efficiency, which means you take one alignment decision early on and can never again stray from that path, even momentarily. Here's a rather egregious example:

I ranked full Dark Side before a late-game dialogue in which I gave a single answer contrary to my villainy, instantly rubberbanding me back to almost perfectly neutral. Worse yet? The line in question was voicing apprehension that my apprentice as a Sith Lord would betray me... which seems a perfectly valid concern given several examples along the campaign's length, including the main chapter of the main plot itself! How is declaring my intent to preemptively murder [REDACTED] worth half a campaign's worth of light side alignment shifts? Especially since it explicitly contradicts the Jedi stance against killing, painstakingly and repeatedly exposited earlier on! Mind-blowingly stupid mission writing at the very climax of the story.

 

It doesn't help that "light" and "dark" in the context of a simpleminded action movie adaptation translate into either cartoonish sweetness worthy of a Disney princess or equally cartoonish moustache-twirling, puppy-kicking evil. This pretty much determined my decision to go Darkseid.

If you limit my choice between schmaltz and bombast, I choose bombast.

 

 

Aside from all that, production values were predictably impressive given the LucasArts tie-in.

The unmistakeable blocky 3D, low-polygon early-2000s graphics look dated now, but for their time leapt far beyond the game engine's previous showing, NWN. Just the look of my character's face once I dove deep into the Sith end of the alignment pool was impressive in itself. Nice enough music, exceptionally good voice acting, fully fleshed out dialogues even for minor characters. On the flipside, many overextended, unskippable cutscenes. Thankfully you can save between... some of them and combat, though KotOR's also guilty of some standard cheap fake longevity tricks like cutscenes dropping you straight into an exposed position to force more reloads. I'm ambivalent about the "dubbed" alien voices. Appropriate but too restricted not to seem repetitive: dung-o' bungo cheata puta shoota poot-poot-poot gets old fast, listening to jawas makes me pine for the golden age of dial-up modems and an entire dialogue in Shyriiwook groan-speech starts sounding like the galaxy's most awkward porn dubbing.

Aaaaaaand then there's the minigames. The goddamn idiotic minigames.

The space invaders minigame between planets.

The pod racing minigame.

The "vingt et none" minigame, which as a bonus is obviously rigged.

You rarely see such infuriating, blatant timesinks in RPGs, moreso because they're the only reliable way to get all the money you'll need for the best gear. Racing is bad enough due to being unable to save and the overextended dialogue and cutscenes (the after-race cutscene on Manaan drags longer than crashing the game and reloading) but Pazaak really takes the proverbial cake. Leaving aside that starting a match always requires an extra line of dialogue, the computer blatantly cheats... even though reloading between matches means it's not your character being punished by losing money and gear but you yourself by wasting your time.

Pazaak makes one of the greatest object lessons in terrible timesink implementation in video game history.

In closing, I have to mention a plot element which may be spoiler-ish, but I'll try to keep things vague. At one point you're presented with your grand moral quandary... which was completely invalidated for me by the involvement of telepathy. I *LOATHE* mind control - even when I dabbled in blood magic in DA:O I refused to ever utilize Blood Control and only embraced dementation in Bloodlines because it's basically the exact opposite of "controling" anything. Watching my enemies writhe in agony as I boil their blood? Legit. Frying them with magic lightning? Cool. Freezing them into loser-pops? Delicious. Riddling them with plasma musketballs? All in a day's work. But it must be their own minds, intact, which shatter before mah awesomah powah! So, once again, the choice was no choice at all.

Also, though some reading this may find it hard to believe, I had never looked up KotOR's big plot twist in the nearly two decades it's been out, so it came as a surprise to me... that it came as a surprise at all. Thanks to two famous movies such a twist was already clichéd by 2003, but somehow they played the hints lightly enough to allow you to predict but also discount its probability, and justified it well enough as force powers taken to their logical extreme.

Kudos. (Though Ursula K. LeGuin did it better.)

 

Overall a decent game even after all this time, and very interesting for anyone curious about design choices in general. It seems to have cemented Bioware's RPG stylings.

ST: TNG - Silicon Worship

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Seriesdate: 5.11

Hero Worship

 

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a band of brave adventurers find a derelict ship, its crew mysteriously murdered, with a single shell-shocked survivor mumbling gibberish whose deciphering holds the only key to survival. Dun-dun-duuuuuuUUUNNN !

 

Data shows off his android strength by lifting a beam to save a young boy from a burning house exploding spaceship. (You have to wonder how the artificial gravity still worked.) The kid veers into idolatry and emulation, especially once he hears androids aren't afflicted with emotions. Suspicious yet?

Overall, though they obviously skimped on special effects by filling the episode with banter between Data and his Mini-Me, this worked out well. The child actor (who grew up to work as a producer) played surprisingly well by TV standards. The plot sucessfully fakes viewers out twice before the climax with sensor blips and Timothy's declaration he caused the disaster. On a show like Star Trek, he was as likely as not to turn into a reality-reshaping space god, so it honestly comes as a great relief when the plot is instead resolved via technobabble about gravity waves and resonance. In TNG fashion it lacks a villain, with the environmental hazard being ultimately resolved thanks to the boy acting as hero of the week.

I'm of two minds on Troi's decision to encourage tiny Tim's pretense of being an android. From what I remember of my psych courses, modern psychotherapy in general frowns on a therapist actively engaging with a client's delusions, and the potential emergence of a "folie a deux" always threatens to confound the direction of treatment. Not sure about the case of a child though, being malleable enough to shrug off a period of heavy character acting instead of canalizing it into permanent insanity. Also, patient interaction being removed to Data would lessen the emotional pollution of Troi's observations.

 

I'm of exactly one mind when it comes to Data reiterating his desire to degrade his superhumanity to the level of overemotional plains-apes. I hate it. I won't reiterate my previous statements on his perverse Pinocchio quest, but I do have to note one justification used in this episode:

Data: "I cannot take pride in my abilities. I cannot take pleasure in my accomplishments."

 

Oh, what a pile of electric bull shit!

We know Data can set goals for himself, is driven to achieve them and derives satisfaction from meeting said goals. In fact, his Pinocchio schtick is itself one such goal! He writes terrible poetry, he plays poker, he gets "intrigued" by interstellar phenomena on at least a bi-episodic basis. Are we supposed to buy the invalidation of all Data's personal experiences simply because they're not muddled in the limbic morass of quasi-rationalized ape instincts?

 

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Seriesdate: 5.04

Silicon Avatar

(I'm impressed by the title for once; when this show was filmed, the word avatar was a decade from entering popular parlance and still mostly a semi-obscure Hindu term; within the plot it also pulls a dual reference to both the alien and Data)

 

Anyhoochie, Riker's about to make it with a daring, saucy pioneer woman!

 

Oops, never mind, she's vaporized from orbit, Jim.

 

In contrast to the previous episode, this one ladles on more than the average special effects (by early '90s standards) including that jagged Christmas ornament known as The Crystalline Entity, an interstellar locust swarm of one which seems to have a taste for small defenseless human colonies for no adequately explained reason.

The Crystalline Entity... really should've been given a better name if you intended to bring it back... but ok, TCE zaps the colony Riker's currently helping to pitch their tents, setting the Enterprise off on a wild glass chase aided by a new old biddy sniping at Data in replacement of Dr. Pulaski. Turns out "xenobiologist Ahab" had her son killed by TCE when Data's br(other dr)oid Lore lured it to lower property values on the androids' homeworld. Cue interpersonal drama.

They certainly put more work into the technobabble than usual, but otherwise the script's a bit weak. Picard's decision-making seems obtuse at best, insisting Marr the xenobiologist work directly with Data with no-one to buffer her antagonism, flatly declaring he wants to talk to the space-snowflake with no apparent contingency plan, putting Marr directly at the controls on his ship's bridge (something any military in history would bristle at) at a system with no failsafes and pretty much ignoring evidence all episode long to allow the drama to unfold. The sentimental scenes with Data reciting from Marr's son's diary drag too long to retain their punch. At least the one-shot character was played by an actress capable of some nuance, or the whole thing would've flopped badly.

The denouement deserves special mention. After shattering the space-snowflake to death, Marr asks Data (having gone loopy enough to talk to him as her dead son) for validation in her decision. Data bursts her bubble, but crucially not by some long-winded speech about the sanctity of life. (That's Picard's job.) Instead he mentally reviews her son's journals and concludes he would be sad at his mother throwing away her career and legacy by her act of vengeance. And he says so. Openly. Honestly. Flatly. Beautifully.

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The sight of the old scientist's hands falling away from Data's face, her righteousness crumbling before his indefatigably logical, objective summation of her relationship with her own son serves as an excellent counterpoint to schmaltzy scenes of Data bemoaning his superiority. It's a rare acknolwedgement that a superhuman intellect would be capable of analyzing human behavior externally, as animal behavior, as a set of... data... settling into predictable patterns and not some mystical vital force beyond the grasp of mind or reason. It shows us exactly why Data's sick quest for humanity would yield a fate worse than death, a vastly superior mind crippled by primate primitivism.

Not that the show's writers would ever acknowledge this. They operated by the lowest common denominator of glorifying emotion (that pervasive tool of social manipulation) in all popular entertainment.

More to the point, TNG expanded Star Trek beyond a handful of stock characters vanquishing villains of the week to a universe. To this purpose it needed to flesh out rival empires, some baseline technological level with limitations, but also give the audience a taste of life beyond the bridge, whether in Starfleet (was tempted to include the episode Lower Decks here but I'll save it for a discussion of shipboard discipline) and in the Federation at large. It didn't really pull this off until peaking in seasons 4-5 but in doing so raised the bar for TeeVee ScieFie after it.

Both cases here deal with life on the fringes of space, on either a budding colony or a minor exploration vessel. Instead of the migthy Jimbo Church sweeping all opposition before him, we're given evidence of the fragility and fallibility of human expansion embodied in a bereaved mother and son, both paired in turn with Data (as conveniently blank sounding board) and both with their own position within society at large, beyond a shipboard rank and serial number. They both had family connections and a place of habitation, personal motivations, guilt and regrets. Neither get superpowers by which to ex a divine conclusion to their plots but machinate within the constraints of physical reality via technological tools. Both ultimately create a sense of the Federation as a dynamic, risk-taking, expanding society of free individuals and not a stagnant military autocracy, an impression one could easily get if all talk was merely about captains and ensigns.

 I'm starting to get the feeling that most of humanity is subhuman.

Stick it up your Lookass

Thinking to knock out another leaden oldie before moving back to newer games, I decided on Knights of the Old Republic, which I skipped the first time around largely because I'm not a Star Wars fan and the praise around it felt more like LucasArts marketing and fanboy hype than honest evaluation. Still, while Star Wars in general has never struck me as more than lowest-common-denominator science fantasy drivel (first movie was fun enough but after that... enough!) Star Wars video games ever since the '90s have distinguished themselves as adaptations which don't trash their source material. Sure, that source material is very "fire laz0rz, pew-pew" video game friendly to begin with, but still... Jedi Knight, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, KotOR... no matter the genre, LucasArts have generally been either inspired or lucky to pick crews who'll treat them well.

 

Long story short, a full discussion will have to wait until I finish, because KotOR's not as bad as I thought it might be.

 

I'm doing my usual back-row support schtick, deliberately making minimal use of lightsabers. Suck my iconoclasm. Blaster rifle and disabling force powers, with the infinitely regenerating Canderous as melee point. Made my way through Taris, Dantooine, Kasssshhyyyyyyyyykk and Tatooine. After killing my three dozenth Sand People... sand person? sillycoid-American? exited Sandman? something finally struck me as odd.

Or for that matter, wicker baskets?

Why not gaffi flint or gaffi obsidian or gaffi glass or gaffi bone or gaffi leather whips or gaffi giant scorpion tails or gaffi tire irons or gaffi golfi clubby? But anyway. Yeah. Sure, it's not hard to come up with some bullshit explanation for where they got the wood, or maybe they're made of metal... but why use the word "stick" at all? No more thought seems to have gone into it than that they're a primitive tribe and primitive tribes hit things with sticks, end of story.

Could you have fired up just a few more neurons to light up your world-building? Or was insulting your plebeian audience just that much more important a marketing device?

Singing Until the Midnight Hour

"His dreadful counsel then they took

and their own gracious forms forsook;

in werewolf fell and batlike wing

prepared to robe them, shuddering.

With elvish magic Luthien wrought,

lest raiment foul with evil fraught

to dreadful madness drive their hearts;

and there she wrought with elvish arts

a strong defence, a binding power,

singing until the midnight hour.

 

Swift as the wolvish coat he wore,

Beren lay slavering on the floor,

redtoungued and hungry; but there lies

a pain and longing in his eyes,

a look of horror as he sees

a batlike form crawl to its knees

and drag its creased and creaking wings.

Then howling undermoon he springs

fourfooted, swift, from stone to stone,

from hill to plain - but not alone;

a dark shape down the slope doth skim,

and wheeling flitters over him."

 

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lay of Leithian, Canto XI? XII?

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"Lenny: 'at the moment, I'd rather have a cup of coffee than self-enlightenment. In fact, if I had it, I would not even know what to do with it'

Bruno: 'Might you try drinking it?'"

Christopher Baldwin back in 1997

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"I said I want to be alone.

I know but I -

Alone means alone

If you need anything, just -

Hellllooooo?!! Allloooone! 

How's he doing?

He said "I want to be alone. Alone means alone. Hellllooooo! Allloooone!""

 

Christopher Baldwin's apparently shriveling speech center in 2021

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Tolkien's mid-stage draft for Beren and Luthien's story from the Silmarillion shows some improvement over his earlier attempts, but concedes much too much function to form - and I mean that literally, as in there is much too much padding, line by line, straining to meter 'n' rhyme an often tedious play-by-play of the various banquets and battles. Still, a few passages of The Lay of Leithian manage to evoke the Silmarillion's drama more vividly than even the eventual prose version.

Admitting my own bias toward skin-changing and the redundancy of that second "batlike" and the "dreadful" madness beat-filler, etc., still, "creased and creaking wings" or "skim and wheeling flitters" illustrate the scene better than a thousand pictures. The pain and longing in Beren's eyes at seeing the realm's most beautiful creature vampirically metamorphosed, by inserting us briefly in his lovestruck viewpoint concisely prompts a figurative indrawn breath, a narrative cusp before the Orphic climax. Such density of imagery in an otherwise overly-verbose epic poem brings to mind the old issue of padding. How wordy is too wordy?

To be honest, I'm more driven to write this having attempted to watch the first few installments of The 4400, one of the many, many attempts by various studios and networks to cash in on the post-X-Men movie superhero craze fifteen years ago. Four episodes into things, while I won't deny it had some potential, it's rapidly degenerating into an incoherent soap opera. In addition to the formulaic politically correct plots, the gratuitous police procedural gloss (sans procedures) and the characters straight out of after-school specials, everyone from directors to actors to editors were obviously ordered to pace the show for the dull-witted masses. You're eased into each and every scene by anxious/sappy/heroic/sad musical cues. Characters telegraph every single gesture and vocal inflection. Just to triple-seal your correct emotional reactions, every plot point gets reiterated verbally at least twice after you've seen it play out. After witnessing what a show like Dark did with a time travel plot a decade later, standard idiot-friendly TV fare like The 4400 feels among other faults excruciatingly slow and ironically enough... repetitive.

 

However, such distinctions are clearer among an individual creator's works. Twenty years ago, Christopher Baldwin's Bruno was an archetypically "talky" webcomic: one panel at a time in which literate, urbane, contemplative talking heads vied for speech bubble space. While he's improved a bit over time at distinguishing his characters' voices (Lenny as I remember was supposed to be a working class small-towner, not that ya'd notice) this has mostly meant relying on dumber characters with a more restricted vocabulary. That newer passage from the recent Spacetrawler re-iteration struck me as portraying the same interaction as Bruno did two decades earlier... except saying less with more words, replacing grudging verbal sparring with sitcom "attitude" the louder and more redundant the better to gratify the audience for noticing an obvious pattern. While I've already acknowledged he's just milking his most profitable intellectual property, there are less insulting ways to do so.

 

Where one cartoonist declines with age, another improves. Michael Terracciano's Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire was never exactly the pinnacle of the webcomic field back in the day: indulgent high drah-mah with low humor... yet somehow both ingenuous and energetic enough, dedicated enough to building on its formula to make it work. I've praised the recent sequel's protagonist for avoiding some obvious pitfalls the author had previously been prone to tripping into. Granted it's not all brilliant. He's abusing "artistic" nudity much too desperately to the point of detracting from his work's more legitimate appeal and yes, we get it, the mystery dimension is "a cenotaph" - the only mystery being whether it's dedicated to the demon knight or the alien with the breather. Still, look at this. In a commentary on the merits of tracing (a.k.a. lazy cheating) Mookie states one of his goals with the sequel was to avoid having characters exposit against a blank canvas (a valid self-critique)  by presenting the story through a deaf-mute's viewpoint.

 

Among other issues, his old world-building leaned too hard on generic Dungeons and Dragons gimmicks, with all the incoherence implied. One was never quite sure whether Callan and its neighbouring kingdoms' social structure was that of feudal monarchies or some kind of Renaissance trade network of city states or steampunk magocracy or modern investment economy, from chapter to chapter. Now look at that image with the books again, specifically the covers. He has learned how to do more with less. Stylized, eye-catching covers imply a mature printing industry complete with marketing, which in turn imply a large enough middle class to demand such appeal, as opposed to commissions to aristocrats and churches. An elegant point conveyed without a single word.

 

Do characters sound more realistic when speaking in smaller words, as opposed to sophomoric erudition or archaic bombast? That depends on the information conveyed. If word choice tells you something about their personalities, fine, but monosyllabic babbling for its own sake can't help but feel like filler. And as for painting with words, I find it odd in retrospect that the posthumous prose Silmarillion did not insert more illustrative stanzas here and there from earlier drafts, where their emotive impact would have obviously improved upon the infamously off-putting epic walls of exposition.

Fool's Comedy Gold

Stay tuned; I will definitely be posting an April's Fools' gag later today, like "I've found religion" or "I've fallen madly in love with a feminist" or "I can't stop playing Madden NFL CXVI" or "I just got a job in public relations" or some crap, because nothing says spontaneous cleverness quite like performing a symbolic act on an appointed day on a yearly basis, along with every other schlub you know.