Children of Women

"gezeugt in Hass und ohne Samen"

Rammstein - Mutter

 

 

One scene from Selkie's current storyline (mind the spoilers if you flip forward or back) got me thinking about the role of fathers in webcomics, which albeit aging still count as one of our newer modes of expression.

It posted almost contemporaneously with a reader comment on page 707 of Soul to Call, which is among other things about a teenage girl seeking her father: 

"every time I see Avril sad, hurt or in danger on this mission to find her dad, I hate him more - but she doesn’t. It leaves me in the position of wanting to punch him in the head while also knowing that Avril would not want to see her dad hurt, so I can’t just want to punch him in the head."

 

Granted, reader comments being reader comments they're usually not worth the imaginary paper they're printed on (YouTube being the classic example) but this one does hit upon the central conflict. As readers are expected to identify or at least sympathize with the heroine, anything which frustrates her is by default placed in opposition. You are being primed, long before his appearance, to hate the man for failing to meet his daughter's expectations.

 

That brings us to Gunnerkrig Court which unfortunately deletes reader comments for all but the current post, so I can't pull the exact quote. On this page where the heroine magnanimously forgives her father (repeatedly established to be a very insular person by nature) for not displaying as much emotion as she demands, a reader hated the supposed message that every time someone hurts the heroine we should go easy on him just because his brain is broken. Skipping over the basic observation that regardless of narrative demands in a medium of fiction, persons do not exist simply to support a designated heroine's mythopoesis, even his supposed redemption consists of his daughter condescending to validate his existence, foisting an extraverted justification on an introvert as some act of beneficence.

These are hardly isolated examples. Unsounded doubles down with two fathers guilty of neglect, endangerment, treason, treachery and general criminality, and another character's defining conflict (at least until the impending religious revelations break) consists entirely of failing to protect his daughter in an impossible situation. I've never read Dumbing of Age, but supposedly it features a rather infamous paternal kidnapping scene. The Last Halloween pins much of its early humor on a sit-comically dense heroine's father - but his guilt is lessened by entering into a morally superior homosexual relationship. It doubles down with an abusive boyfriend who gets flayed alive so we can glory in seeing him beg his girlfriend for the mercy of death. Questionable Content, though it at least supplied a couple of minor counterbalancing examples, spent a decade building a central character's entire development arc on blaming her father's suicide for her problems.

... and these are just some examples centering on a father-daughter relationship. We haven't even gotten to the sons. Whomp makes Santa Claus into an alcoholic absentee dad. Weregeek had its stereotypical "sports-mad bad dad" as I once put it. The Order of the Stick gives us character after character (Nale/Elan, Roy, Haley, a certain goddess) stuffed to overflowing with daddy issues. Wilde Life has one young man arguing repeatedly with his nominally bad (never seen) father and another fighting with a physically abusive father. Paranatural has a gay son rebelling against his clichéd workaholic wealthy father and, once again, a stereotypically incompetent sitcom dad as punching bag in early strips. Daughter of the Lillies has a father condemning himself to Hell for sinning against his gay son.

Etc.

etc.

etc...

 

Stock bad dads as moralistic punching bags have become as much a cornerstone of webcomics as the strong woman glorified abuser. A few counterpoints do exist, like Girl Genius which supplies examples of both sexes, as does the Unicorn Jelly trilogy** or Angelique from Kevin&Kell or that old Dr. Laura parody from Sluggy Freelance... but even those last are a decade or two outdated by this point. Take note that:

 

1) In many such cases the father in question has not, in fact, done anything actively wrong... or done much of anything, as they tend to be blamed for inertia, for "not getting it" or not lavishing enough affection on a daughter (or homosexual son as a stand-in, amusingly enough) or in some other way failing to meet Procrustean feminine demands for attention. His guilt is almost always informed by plot contrivances or merely a protagonist's subjective condemnation... or the artist caricaturing him into the uncanny valley... and that's good enough for readers.

2) As a rule, there are no bad mothers in such comics. Anywhere. Ever. Some maternal figures might pop up on occasion to help establish a pattern of female omniscience, saintliness and all-around perfection in all things, but more often than not maternal mortality in webcomics is an order of magnitude worse than in the Middle Ages! Mothers in such works live just long enough to leave the protagonists with a few heartwarming, gilded memories viewed through a greased lens. No sooner do they perform for future flashbacks than they get swept away by a rampaging horde or an epidemic or simply languish to naught in decorous Victorian consumption, too good for this world.**

 

We are left to project all parental conflict angst versus the father alone as illustrative of a protagonist's plot-conveniently formative hard knock life.

^ That's not a bug. It's a feature.

I said this post began with Selkie, a comic about a late-twenties single man adopting an unusual young girl from an orphanage. Both male and female parents are shown as both capable of error and of learning from said errors and improving, growing into their roles and connecting with their young charges, and every positive character, male or female, upholds the conceits of social "justice" activism. All in all a laudable attempt at allowing male characters to demonstrate positive qualities (at least in the limited and insulting pigeonhole of SJW fatherhood) but it's missing the point so aptly captured by all those others: the public doesn't want fair examples. The demonization of men, fathers included, in every creative medium, exists because we want to hate men. These entertainment products fill a public demand for justification in abusing men which simply cannot be supplied within the real world. You might counter that all these aspiring artists must be drawing upon personal experiences, that they all had abusive fathers... but then did all their mothers also waste away in decorous Victorian consumption? Of all your acquaintances close enough that you can see past their public persona at least on occasion, how many truly, honestly, have nothing but praise for their mothers and nothing but condemnation for their fathers?

 

What you're seeing here is both a political need for justification to chime in on politically correct hatred of men and, more importantly, a deeply instinctive need to designate particular men, at will, as villains to be ostracized or defeated in ritual displays of solidarity with women. Note the eagerness expressed by readers to reach the cathartic cusp in the story when they can finally openly hate the father character. More tellingly, what you're seeing played out in these often young-adult-oriented works of fiction is also the fabrication of a Big Lie to suit our most traditional, reactionary social value as a species: females' need for psychological leverage over men, the need to inculcate guilt, debt and duty into men to force their subservience to female interests. Look at the narcissistic presumption linking most of the above examples: that the male (never as individual but only instrumental) in his role as caretaker just didn't do enough caring to supply an arbitrary demand!

 

There's a flip-side to this, that our social "justice" Newspeak vocabulary has by design deprived us of even the terms in which to portray feminine, much less maternal wrongdoing, but that'll have to await examples from other, more mature media.***

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________

 

* I do get the feeling that Jennifer Diane Reitz makes much of the newer generation of self-described transsexual or "non-binary" artistes uncomfortable despite having worked more than most to pave the way for them.

 

** At this point I should say, on the off-chance I have a female reader somewhere, if you find yourself performing for a future flashback... RUN !!!

*** ... most likely including Hannah Nielsen from Dark.

WitcherFall: 2 Greedy

Heap big buyer's remorse, renaigse.

 

(Working title: GreedFall: the Divorce)

(first part here)

 

According to GoG's "achievement" list GreedFall loses half its players somewhere between "unlock a new skill" a.k.a. level 2, and "empty 100 containers" a.k.a. level 10-ish. Granted, the sandbox or turn-based strategy games I so adore fail to entice 66% of their customers even to level 2... but after that they retain them much more successfully. "The very notion of a mass-market RPG contradicts itself" I said just a couple of weeks ago, and GreedFall seems as apt an object lesson on that point as any, ironically falling prey to its own greed in snatching at an unrealistically wide market share. We should all really stop buying games designed by art or business majors. Don't get me wrong, it still looks gorgeous:

 

Whatever their other faults, Spiders clearly has access to some exceptionally talented visual artists. Take the images above, two views of the same room from the entranceway and the upper gallery of the Inquisition's local offices. The statue is clearly meant to shock and awe visitors, but if you take the time for perspective it's obviously a cheap and quite common trick of lighting, and a biting comment on religious orders' inspirational smoke and mirrors through the ages. Keep in mind it would've been much easier for game designers to make the statue's head literally glow than pull off such a deliberate multi-part effect.

Yet sadly, as I had guessed three posts ago, the substance underlying this laudable aesthetic gloss leaves much to be desired. Let me backtrack to last year for a simile.

I'd wanted to catch up on the Witcher games before diving into Cyberpunk 2077, but The Witcher 2 proved such a wash that it could at best supply a negative example of RPG crafting implementation. The entire series seems to sell on nothing more than gratuitous sex scenes for teenagers too stupid to figure their way around internet parental controls. Increasingly bored of the sequel's piling on of cutscene after cutscene after minigame after cutscene, exasperated at finding no game to play in any of its gameplay, I was relieved at diving into the first wilderness area for some adventuring... then finally uninstalled when I saw what the adventuring consisted of. The zone itself was hopelessly cramped, with quest mobs literally popping up out of the ground, in infinite numbers, at random spots. The boss bugs pictured above proved a surprisingly challenging fight after some laughably easy ambushes in town... until I realized their stat advantage could be negated by fighting them on top of a zone line two steps away, constantly whittling them down and taking a step back to de-aggro. I have to wonder how many retarded little shits patted themselves on the back for "winning" facetiously difficult fights by being handed obvious exploits.

GreedFall applies the same lack of logic to large groups. While individual mobs heal to full if they lose aggro they also leash very close to their spawn locations, making splitting seemingly overwhelming packs trivial. Also, the game includes a "balance" stat which is supposed to prevent knockdowns, but its relevance was forcibly overcompensated. Every nonhuman mob, bats included, has charging knockdown attacks. Every. Single. One. The superbears and the supergoats and the superbats and the other superbears and the superlizards and the super-land-sharks which kick like goats for some reason, and the other other superbears, all of them knock you down with every attack. Humorously, due their pathetically short leashes they've knocked me out of their own aggro radius on several occasions.

 

It also lacks aggro management. Mobs (and especially bosses) focus the highest incoming damage source (a.k.a. you) forcing you to run in circles while your hirelings whittle down the threat without danger to themselves. This by no means makes the fight harder (without a stamina bar, chasing your tail for five minutes is as simple as five seconds) but it does make it longer, which is the whole time-sinking point, of course. Also, the whole point of target assist is that it allows you to focus on timing and sequences of events - but enemies tend to attack instantly from a dead stop with no wind-up animation. Instead of enemies dealing damage via explicit, counterable attacks, you tend to simply take damage, instantly and constantly, whenever in range, followed by some largely irrelevant animations. Quite often you find yourself being hit despite having dutifully mashed to dodge button because all the actual gameplay has already been decided by the enemy's target lock calculation, irrelevant of what's happening on screen. So far, though I've died quite a few times for getting three-shotted, the only truly difficult fight has been the Forest Guardian, a boss which simply telefrags you with pinpoint accuracy from a screen away... and if that's your idea of good gameplay, may I suggest Russian roulette?

But that's not even the most aggravating bit.

GreedFall touts its exploration theme as a prime selling point already undercut by subdividing the map into zones. On closer inspection, every zone map's further subdivided into tiny rooms and corridors (ironically, the towns are the least linear) and do you see those question marks in the fog of war? Those are points of interest. They're already marked for you, all over every map.

Yeah.

"Explore uncharted new lands."

yeeaaah... Bullshit.

 

The exploration angle's certainly not helped by all the locked gates and walls blocking off about a fifth of locations, which cannot be explored unless you have the related quest. Skyrim at least knew enough to limit such obstacles to the tail-end of a handful of dungeons, and allowed you to pick up unique items before they're required for a quest, without running back to some NPC for permission to do what you were already doing. I'm also feeling much less inclined to "explore" the constantly reiterated single-tileset terrain consisting of the same ravines opening into the same loosely forested meadows and banks, especially once I realized this island adventure features not a single beach or shorebird and fails to include water in any way besides the faction of pirates who never sail anywhere.

 

And the idiot-friendly main plot is not helped by the mediocrity of its writing. You're given a massive, map-spanning quest to gather Professor SummutFancy's lost research notes and gradually unveil the island's ancient, deep, dahk and tewwible seecwets. Too bad that by level 10, the second note I found (of sixteen!) outright tells you the grand metamorphic reveal and your wannabe Boadicea's quest location immediately reveals the rest. Sooo... we're done here, right?

 

I did have a passing thought that after thirty years of experience I should've played on hard instead of normal difficulty... but doubling mobs' hit points and damage will not fix their one single endlessly reiterated character model or their re-redundant combat styles. Spongier damage sponges will only render an idiot-friendly excuse for a game like GreedFall even more pointless.

 

There's the crux of the matter: idiot-friendly.

GreedFall has its good points, besides just graphics.

Guns and heavy weapons can shatter enemy armor, a necessary step before slicing and dicing away with roguish light blades... or you can opt for armor-bypassing magic missile attacks with a limited mana pool. Magic supplies at least some minimal crowd control, and skills combine into new abilities, such as magic missiles and alchemical compounds yielding an AoE knockdown skill helping ranged characters to disengage from melee. The entire system, however, is undercut by the idiotic knockdown mechanics which make combat success entirely dependent on constantly mashing the dodge button between attacks (regardless of what or where or how you're fighting) instead of planning and executing conscious series of actions.

 

There's a stealth mode for sneak attacks, but in the absence of an actual incremental stealth skill, anyone can walk up to and backstab at least one or two mobs in broad daylight, often wiping out whole packs with impunity. Even Skyrim's infamous stealth archery focus demanded a couple more steps in the process than free kills with no investment.

Your character re-crouches automatically after a stealth kill, but stands up after placing a trap, which makes absolutely zero sense as part of pre-fight preparations... because you're not expected to possess the brainpower to prepare for fights. This is a game for console retards who just want to mash buttons, and traps are spammed during combat like any other magic missile.

Traps, potions, etc. can be fabricated from ingredients found out in the environment, but in direct contrast to the stringent constraints of, for instance, The Age of Decadence, mobs and resources respawn constantly (read: as soon as you turn your back) including loot crates in the middle of town. Infinite loot. Even by cRPG standards, the in-game economy's a joke.

Giving the natives a celtic / druidic feel put a welcome fresh spin on the usual "smoke-em peace pipe" nonsense, but their painfully repetitive vocalizations grate after only a few repetitions... and there are a lot of repetitions, on ol menawi.

 

Factions and companions technically have a reputation system, but so far it seems impossible to go wrong unless you deliberately lower your rep. As long as you quest, your rep increases.

Unlike most such games, companion quests are some of your most involved adventures, and fully integrated into the island's greater political events. Too bad the first three have about as much personality as mold and you only get the fifth when you're halfway through the game (unless you know to rush to her quest) and once again, you're not expected to choose between them but only slot them in and out for magic / physical damage convenience as interchangeable mooks.

Though its RPG skill trees gave me false hope and its talk of exploration prompts an immediate comparison to sandbox games, every single facet of GreedFall is, aptly, ruined by greedily aiming for an unrealistically wide market of subhuman cretins incapable of planning their own actions, who have to be handed ready-made loot without purposely seeking it, can't prioritize their quests or enemies beyond hacking and slashing at whatever's put in front of them, can't prioritize NPC companions or hold to a specific ethos or loyalty, can't even plan their own footsteps and have to be herded along canyons to every new location.

 

The marching morons are incapable of appreciating quality, and anything which markets to them will always turn out to be trash eventually, no matter the technical skill employed. This is not a cRPG. It's a Witcher clone, driven purely by hack'n'slash and gratuitous, nonsensical NPC romances, endless cutscenes foisting pre-chewed emotions and morality on you, and about as much relevant player choice as selecting between Dumb and Dumber. You teleport to where you're told to, hit what you're told to, click your way through linear dialogues and try to feel clever about it.

By level twenty, I feel like I've played a hundred levels of this crap. While I might cringe at the imagined frustration of replaying The Age of Decadence, at least it motivated me to finish the game and left me with a satisfying denouement. Retard fodder like Greedfall and The Witcher 2 get a mid-campaign uninstall.

Say "gadzooks" again motherfucker, I dare you!

About to give up on GreedFall, among my many major and minor complaints I'm getting sick of being called an anal-men-owie. There's a reason most RPGs which create a designation for the player (to facilitate voiceovers, usually) opt for some aggressively passive, forgettable term like "watcher" or "warden" or just address you as hero or adventurer. Don't try to get cute or clever with a term if you're going to wind up repeating it gratuitously a thousand times over during the campaign until players are ready to print it out and strangle you with it... ekera!

On-ol-menawi, ekera, a brillig nonsense word only gets mome outgribing nonsensical if you keep repeating it like an slithy renaigse, ekera!

at the seams

You know, there are legitimate problems which arise in every endeavor... and then there are the tiny hints the universe is screwing with your mind.

 

I had to drive between cities Thursday, four hours each way. In itself, not a terrible ordeal, except July is peak construction season and every single road was a minefield of closed ramps, choked lanes and sweaty men inhaling asphalt fumes in a male-dominated work field that no woman seems to want to equalize. I'd also wanted to make a minor car repair beforehand, and the garage first said it'd be done on Friday, which is when they called me to say Monday, which is when they declared the arrived part was broken, then by the time it got replaced it had to be painted, so Friday turned into... Friday. Then I made myself late rushing to renew my expired driver's license (fine, my bad) and due to a discussion with my father the night before wound up citing his weight instead of my own to the bored middle-aged woman at the counter, which means I'm now officially five kilos heavier. Then my spare car key dropped between the seats and managed to somehow vanish into some interdimensional void.

But first I had to gather a backpack's worth of whatsits and whatnots for the trip, including a phone whose charger had decided not to charge, a water bottle I couldn't find and turned into a part-filled Fanta bottle with extra water, a book I dropped and which of course fell slantwise, bending its cover. I bent to pick it up, which is, naturally, when the seat of my pants ripped.

Well played, universe. Well played.

GreedFall: the Honeymoon

Having polished off The Elder Scrolls for the foreseeable future and not particularly keen on lasering more rocks in No Man's Sky, (or its presumed copycat The Solus Project) I find myself spoiled for choice for a new open-world adventure. I really, really want to enjoy Bannerlord, so I'm giving TaleWorlds a year or two to add a bit of post-launch content before diving in. Kingdom Come: Deliverance sounds like it might just be M&B with a main quest chain, so that'll make a good prelude to Bannerlord someday. Cyberpunk2077 is apparently still fixing its monstrous parade of launch bugs, I'm not in a smiling mood for We Happy Few, not feeling particularly Fallen Out at the moment, and Elex is probably just that with less fall and more out... or something. Ditto for Metro Exodus.

Yes, these are all presumably 100+ -hour open-world games I've already wasted money on and won't have time to play for years to come. Learn from my mistakes, younglings...

Well, I might as well polish off a similar title which I presume I'll have cause to quit early on, GreedFall. Because it's French, that's why. Don't get me wrong, I'm the last to deny France's monumental aesthetic and stylistic contributions to world culture, and even French video game developers have consistently delivered artistically inspired decor. But, while it can work wonders occasionally, that Gallic flamboyance does not lend itself readily to intrinsically practical, object-centered media, and French developers more often prove pathologically incapable of prioritizing playability, challenge, personalization, complexity and in general the substance underlying aesthetics, the many facets of interactivity which justify producing a game instead of a movie or comic book. So, expecting to be initially enthralled and thereafter soon bored, I flipped a coin between this and The Technomancer, and off I go!

Sure enough, even GreedFall's menu screen looks jaw-dropping. Quaint, customizing your avatar as part of a cutscene about having your portrait painted. I'm forced to be a prince apparently, which as a scruffy ostracized beastman at heart, I hate... but the scene saying goodbye to your terminally ill mother already flaunts the dev team's artistic panache, by NOT ending on a close-up of her disease-disfigured face for redundant shock value, but thus:

 

That, mes amis, if not a direct copy of some actual famous painting I don't remember, is a bunch of art&design fops putting their encyclopaedic knowledge of emotional cues to good use. Skip past the obvious mood lighting or the lone sympathetic figure haloed and attended by ephemeral dancing dust motes, or the massively unnecessary amount of negative space in the center offsetting her to isolation. Look at the little details like her skirt curving under the chair contorting her otherwise mundanely seated figure, or the closest foreground objects looming opposite her in the bottom left. Yeah, the candles. The burnt-out, gutted, expired stubs of what were once light-givers. Memento mori, biznatches!

Addendum to my post about cutscenes: don't waste my time with cutscenes unless you're at least this capable.

 

In keeping with my usual support caster schtick I'd intended to level both trapmaking/alchemical "technique" and magic with zero investment in melee, but it seems the political conflict's setting up an Arcanum-style magic vs. tech clash. Newbie Island, a.k.a. Sérène, is impressively detailed, with several short quest chains immersing you in gameplay mechanics like information gathering, dialogue and other skill checks, combat and faction reputations, all complete with a surprisingly tough boss fight at the end, all before you even get the majestic GreedFall title screen sailing off to the main game area. Then again, most games tend to be somewhat front-loaded, by necessity of making a good first impression.

 

Given the magically-enhanced period setting with an emphasis on stealth, stealth kills, stealth macguffin retrieval and stealth looting, I'd have to guess this game's mostly copying the Assassin's Creed series... which I've never played.

I did play about a third of the first Thief game though, so I'm set.

I'll be fine. I'll be fiiiiine...

By the time I reach the game proper, I've started noting some cracks.

Both the halting, keyboard unfriendly movement and the limited inventory view (lists instead of draggable tiles with mouseover tooltips) blatantly pander to console retards with gamepads.

Cutscenes triggering on walking across random patches of empty ground are getting annoying, especially when one forces you to replace an NPC companion, on the presumption the devs can guess which quest you'll want to do next, once again pandering to console retards who can't direct their own progress.

Also, meeting a native "princess" who'll obviously ride around on a moral high horse all game would grate less if my second line of dialogue with the little bitch weren't to ask her whether she considers me attractive. Don't even get me started on the first line of dialogue with your fencing instructor forcing you to ask him whether he's lonely. There's two pointless humpable NPCs I'll be tossing by the wayside as soon as I can. Certainly doesn't help that the male love interest's introduced as your obedient guard dog while the female one plays an abusive tsundere card from the get-go.

Come on, this is a magical setting. Bad enough I have to play one, but can't I at least get some companions who aren't filthy hu-mons?

Weirdly, it lacks French audio, despite all the names being either French or... Dutch, maybe? I applaud the consistency (if not exactly artistry) of the voice acting. Still, Cockney English is bad enough, but Cockney French? *shudder*

I'll admit for the most part, by the time you break out of starter areas it holds up well. Call me shallow, but the gorgeous visuals certainly help:

They really managed to convey that pre-industrial scramble to establish a colonial foothold, a busy hive of scum and villainy.

 

Factions, if not particularly creative, are fundamentally both intelligible and open to intrigue: the mercenary sleazebags, the theocratic totalitarians, the clannish cut-throat shipping guild, the amoral technocrats... and presumably the nauseatingly idealized noble savages, but I'm not quite there yet. Individual characters are forgettable but at least not too cheesy yet, aside from the romance angle.

Quest design is, once again, unambitious but solid, linear chains offering alternate completion options at various steps. While I'm not fan of "action" RPG combat, the third-person-slasher mechanics are bearable so far, with an emphasis on parries and stopping power setting up multiple attack combos. Sadly, the first few nonhuman enemies I've seen so far seem universally centered on overpowered charge / knockdown attacks to the point of already feeling repetitive. At least it's difficult enough (for my customary unoptimized, non-combat character style) that I've needed to consume about a third of my accumulated consumables on normal difficulty.

I'm also impressed by the very gradual introduction. By level 7 I've yet to see magic beyond a single character's healing spell. I've spent 6/7 levels exploring towns without getting bored, learning the layout of large, livable buildings offering lots of nooks and crannies and alternate entrances with seamless transitions. The environments seem very well proportioned, certainly moreso than Skyrim's... though I am disappointed at a facetiously exploration-themed game being broken up into zones.

Next stop:

GreedFall: Happily Ever After

or

GreedFall: the Divorce?

The Egypt Trail

I snagged Predynastic Egypt and its sequel Egypt: Old Kingdom during some sale or another. In terms of mechanics, they're fundamentally managerial: assign workers to various resource-producing tiles, advance through a tech tree and leverage your production toward major projects. In practice, however...

 

... their admitted potential's muddied in an unsatisfying mix of whack-a-mole and rote memorization.

As their major selling point, they try to stick to the general timeline of events in Ancient Egypt, and thus like most "educational" titles fall into the common trap of ignoring the importance of mammalian play (the experimental, interactive, malleable patterns within a specific ruleset) for the didactic condescension of putting a student through fixed paces. A comparison might be made to that famous old success story of educational games, the Trail series.

The Oregon Trail was nearly ubiquitous on classroom computers back in the '90s, used by teachers as a carrot to reward good behavior and surprisingly appreciated by students (even as its primitive pixelation got out-graphicked by Mortal Kombat and Doom) for its sweeping sense of adventure somewhat lacking in the 8-16bit eras. We learned that wagon axles can break and there's such a place as Oregon (shut up Portland) because this knowledge fed into the greater goal of making a successful journey.

Of its sequels, The Yukon Trail put you through a somewhat slow introduction and over-played its fancier graphics at times, but nevertheless benefited from an over-arching goal (gold! yeee-haw!) achievable by juggling various choices. The Amazon Trail, on the other hand hinged on a nonsensical time travel plot with a magic talking jaguar meant to sell Captain Planet levels of moralistic grandstanding. Its wildlife and fishing minigames eclipsed any coherent point to your journey, and the whole thing made about as much sense as an Oregon Trail consisting of hunting squirrels while Ratatosk sends you to meet Erik the Red.

The Egypt games both pelt you with random events and nail you to a specific historic timeline. In the screenshot above, lions suddenly appeared on one of my tiles, in the middle of an otherwise wholly domesticated Memphis, requiring me to re-assign a worker to exterminate them. While this sort of event can certainly spice up a strategy game (see Alpha Centauri's fungal blooms) if either rare or scaling to playing style (if I'd deliberately chosen to anger Bastet I'd understand) they should always be balanced against the constructive angle. A base of operations, by and large, is supposed to function as established by the player from that point forward, but here randomized events constantly force you to revisit tile by tile to put out fires, exterminate lions, rebuild houses, etc.

 

In Predynastic an eclipse event even gives you a -99% production in all resources for a turn, which makes every bit as little sense here as stuns did in UnderRail. "Skip a turn" cards have their place in group / multiplayer games where they change the dynamic between players or characters, but in a single-player game they merely amount to randomly penalizing the player without justification, to the point where in a playthrough with two missed turns, I lost by exactly one turn's worth of food production. Then I uninstalled. It's Oregon Trail's most mocked feature "family member XYZ has died of dysentery" rehashed on a strategy map.

Paradoxically, both campaigns are both unduly ranzomized and unduly restrictive. To adhere to historical events, you'll always be playing on the same map of Egypt / Hierakonpolis / Memphis (giving the feel you paid $5 for a custom map) minimally randomized in tile production, with major events (like conflicts between Upper / Lower kingdoms) occuring at the same fixed turn. Dramatic as it may sound, this merely amounts to repeating the same scenario a dozen times to memorize exactly when you'll need extra food or production or soldiers, or which events are worth attempting and which (like the Saharan exodus in Predynastic) are better failed intentionally. Also, while technically you do have access to a tech tree, individual techs customarily give +0.3% (actual figure from Old Kingdom) bonuses, piling onto each other sequentially with no incentive to dive down any branch more than one or two steps ahead. Instead, much like fishing the Amazon and losing track of the trail, most of your playthrough gets bogged down in shuffling new workers repeatedly to the same exact tile every time they get washed away by a flood or eaten by lions.

Or, worse, watching your number of soldiers graaaaaadually fluctuating in randomized battles.

Games like Civilization or Stellaris prove so infinitely replayable because their randomization opens new opportunities for a player otherwise free to follow a personal style. The Egypt campagins instead give you the worst of both worlds, dictating your priorities while randomizing your success. Not terrible for their price, but do yourself a favor and look up the scripted events beforehand on some online cheat-sheet.

Twatmaturgy

"When one world ends

Something else begins
But without a scream
Just a whisper because we just

Start it over again"

 

Marilyn Manson - The Fall of Adam

 

 

I sort of flaked out of writing an anti-religious Easter post this year, partly because I never stick to any sort of schedule anyhows, and partly because there's simply very little worth saying about faith. It's stupid. I can only repeat that observation in so many ways before getting bored. In fact, as the Antichrist Superstar readily demonstrated, religious behaviors serve better to illustrate the flaws of other human endeavors by analogy. For instance: strength of conviction does not alter the physical laws of the universe. Two thousand years of mandatory celebration have not managed to produce the Zombie Jesus and never will, and no amount of chanting or torturing of infidels will ever turn a church's tap water into bulletproof baby gloss or blood into wine. You can practice yer prostratin' 'til it wins Olympic medals and it will never make that Pinot taste any more like AB-positive.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I've been watching a lot of Last Week Tonight (-'s YouTube-published content) over the past couple of years. As comedy edutaiment it impresses by how often its writers manage to poke fun at otherwise very dry topics... like pennies... or flood insurance... or Britain. On the other hand as a major tool, of the Democratic Party's rabblerousing apparatus, John Oliver makes an ideal case study in the hypocrisy of America's self-appointed left wing and right side of history. Take for instance his 2016 commentary on the Republican National Convention (before the fateful election which stuck the U.S. with 4 years of President Caligula) and the irrational faith in blatant falsehoods displayed there:

 

"what is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true, because if anything, that was the theme of the Republican Convention this week. It was a four-day exercise in emphasizing feelings over facts."

 

This is certainly a valid criticism, but:

 

1) Oliver's scripts in each episode have him constantly decrying "that is amazing!" or "that is disgusting!" or "that is horrific!" outright commanding his audience to toggle the switch on its reflexive limbic reactions to every new stimulus every two minutes. Last Week Tonight banks more on selling its audience the cozy feels of a nominal moral high horse than it does on facts, or even humor.

 

2) The Democratic Party's populist rhetoric for the past decade has consisted of posing as saviors by ginning up irrational feelings of oppression. If you'd like to see the doublethink in action, in a segment about America's ill-advised vigillante-friendly "stand your ground" laws, they were perfectly able to identify a problem with basing justified firearm use on fearing for one's life. As Oliver put it:

"it all comes down to perceived fear. Whether you legitimately saw someone as a threat. And that is definitionally subjective. What I am afraid of (snakes, clowns and Tilda Swinton (Jesus Christ!)) might not be what you are."

Their argument further down the line is that white people are more likely to get away with shooting black people by citing fear than the other way around, which is supported not only by a bit of empirical evidence but on theoretical grounds by neoteny. Oversimplified, we have evolved to protect, forgive and favor whatever approaches the appearance of our own species' offspring. The cuter, the more babyish you appear, the easier it is to get away with shit. Africans, broadly generalized, are far down the scale of neoteny within our own species, and the "scary black man" stereotype sells so well as to fund the entire industry of rap music and then some.

Of course, while Last Week Tonight is perfectly capable of using this argument (in all but name) when it comes to white / black relations, they avoid ever naming it outright because they prefer to deliberately ignore its implications within male / female relations where women and men are even farther apart on the neoteny scale. In that arena, the show's writers are perfectly willing to condemn men of anything and everything (evidence and reason be damned) based on women's subjective interpretation of a male threat or oppression. Won't even bother with an example; half of Oliver's jokes consist of mocking a doctored photo of a white male transgressing some arbitrary social norm.

As the show increasingly radicalized over the past couple of years, it ramped up its racism in segments on, for instance Asian Americans which I gave up trying to watch at being told the term "encompasses a vast group who can trace their heritage back to more than 20 countries" - yeah, no shit. Anti-white racists have proclaimed whites' ignorance of the diversity of other geographic regions for decades, all the while ignoring their own ignorance in lumping "white" people together in defiance of several millennia of variable interbreeding with North Africa and western Asia. "Even old New York was once New Amsterdam" as the song goes, but the gleeful butchery among European peoples and their descendants, not to mention the mistreatment in America of German, Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish and other immigrants is all too easily ignored when the banner of "diversity" can be raised as a political prop against those born the wrong skin color. The life experiences of a Parisian socialite, a quarter-Tatar Latvian lumberjack, a Greek tour guide and an Irish-descended sorghum farmer from Buttfuck, Alabama can be presumed identical with no fear of being labelled racist so long as the exercise serves a limey propagandist in bashing "white" people as demoniac oppressors. Bleedin' "continentals" wot?

 

But if you'd like to see some real "emphasizing feelings over facts" try transgender rights, a common Democratic Party posturing point on which Oliver has dutifully lost sight of the shores of reality altogether, spewing social justice warrior party lines like "transgender people have a gender identity that differs from the one they were assigned at birth" in the same condescending tone a born-again Christian might inform you of his newfound moral perfection and your damnation as a lowly sinner. Check the by now all-too-familiar lobbyist phrasing:

"people have an identity" as though this subjectively constructed personal identity were immutable, falsifiable and verifiable

"assigned at birth" as though the blatantly observable testicles or ovaries were an alien, arbitrary imposition on the obstetrician's part

By the same rationale, and given sexual reproduction predates human racial divergence by several hundred million years, it would be utterly uncontroversial for Rachel Dolezal to "have a racial identity that differs from the one she was assigned at birth" or for me to claim I'm born-again Taiwanese or the second coming of Timur Lenk. Note, this does not concern rare, verifiable cases of trisomy etc., or the social practices of adopting the dress, habits or mannerisms of the opposite sex, all of which we should be able to accept gratis under the umbrella of personal freedom. Historically, there's nothing particularly unique about eunuchs or viragoes filling various social roles. Society will not crumble for it, no matter if a few evangelical hicks get the vapors.

 

But simply by declaring oneself "transgender" one does not gain the moral or scientific authority to rewrite evolutionary, genetic and embryologic history, to fabricate the "fact" that altering superficialities by cosmetic surgery and hormone shots* can fundamentally (and retroactively!) alter physical reality. No matter how convincing an illusion is, it is still an illusion. The strength of your conviction does not retcon ontology on this point any more than you can bleed Jesus into your cognac snifter.

And on each and every one of these tenets of intersectional faith, if faced with the question of why a particular politically favored group should get to redefine realitity, propagandists like Oliver will fall back on emotional appeal, on emphasizing feelings over facts. It is amazing! It is disgusting! It is horrific! The pain of those born the correct sex or the correct race or the correct sexual orientation or "identity" is presumed more important than lower orders of humans'. The saved are just better than sinners. After all, it is also a simple fact of our naked ape existence that a single "femicide" is more important than the mudane elimination of at least eight disposable males.

We believe it without ever questioning it, and belief makes it true.

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* - and let's face it, many of the more opportunistic modern day incarnations put in a lot less effort than that.

Harebrained Mead at the Elders' Ragnarok

"You must know life to see decay

[...]
And now I cling to what I knew
I saw exactly what was true
But oh no more"

 

Mumford and Sons - After the Storm
 

 

I've finally finished TES5: Skyrim, to the extent one can finish an endless game.

I feel so good I feel so numb, yeah!

Ironically, it's because I've never found it quite exciting enough to breathlessly dive into it that I got this far. Since I finally gave in and bought it six years ago I've kept getting bored then returning to it time and again, telling myself each time I'd get around to the main quests at last, only to realize each time that I enjoyed Skyrim more as a more playable incarnation of Morrowind, for the basic Elder Scrolls atmosphere, than for its dumbed-down content. It also filled the gap left by Mount&Blade, turning every outing into a trade run around the map, selling enchanted loot in each town and loading up on more soul gems and elvish/ebony gear as I passed by new dungeons. That this makes more entertaining use of the game than storming Valhalla speaks rather damningly of the series' decline. Oh well, at least along the way, young Alesan and Lucia got the most wholesome upbringing a drow and a lycanthropic lizard can provide:

You know what really ties that whole image together? The obviously unused broom in the back.

Anyway, though I've played Skyrim far more than I ever played Morrowind, it's always been a matter of improved graphics, physics and controls. An uninspired imitation with better production values is still uninspired.

In other news from last year around this time, I also finished Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Unlike Oblivion, which convinced me to hold off on buying Skyrim for several years, and Skyrim which has convinced me to wait until TES 6 lands in the dollar bin, Shadowrun: Dragonfall left me with such a pleasant impression that I immediately dove into the third game in the series.

I did manage to break myself out of my usual elvish support role by playing a melee bruiser for once and enjoyed seeing SHK improved over its two predecessors from any technical standpoints.

The environments are more lush, level design more careful with less wasted space, character skills better integrated, gear and enemies more varied. Most importantly for a story-based RPG, the writing was both expanded and clearly went through more rewrites. Dialogues flow more naturally, instructions are clearer, descriptions more vivid and characters' backstories expounded more smoothly. Yet... though more fleshed out than Dragonfall, Hong Kong is a worse story.

The one outstanding character (though I never tried Racter) was Gaichu.

 

 

Take his comment before the finale: "I have the opportunity to kill a god. I cannot allow the opportunity to pass unanswered." It's the essence of roleplaying which characterized Dragonfall's tenser moments but mysteriously vanished from SHK, that extra layer of awareness which makes a worthy companion defined by internal choices instead of circumstance. Unfortunately most others dove headlong into that trap, like your supposedly hyperintelligent hacker chick suddenly taking an utterly nonsensical strawman skeptic position to fill that perceived narrative role of a rationalist being proven wrong, despite living among mages all her life and the fact her best friend summons rat demons!

 

Worst of all though, Dragonfall's moral ambiguity also vanished. SHK presents almost every situation in simplistic good vs. evil terms, up to and including the ending complete with a shallow act of redemption through martyrdom. Harebrained Schemes pulled the usual bait-and-switch of sequels: using praise from nerds like me to try pushing the next installment into wider appeal... by dumbing down what made the previous one great to begin with.

 

Fortunately it didn't work for them; unfortunately it worked for Bethesda.

Solstheim, as Skyrim's last expansion zone, shows a fair bit of nostalgia not only for Morrowind itself but for the more interesting design which should've gone into Skyrim.

I ran into this little ceremony of rieklings worshipping a frozen cart and horse in some random cave or another and got more joy out of it than any of the big dramatic quest chain endings. I don't know whether they're referencing something specific and it doesn't matter, because the joke works perfectly as in-universe humor, something the crazy little goblins with the most randomized loot tables in the game might actually do. I required neither a quest marker nor a barrel of loot to enjoy this. It's a sponteneous self-directed discovery, the accepted great selling point of open-world adventuring and TES' claim to fame... so why was I outright surprised to actually find such a surprise?

 

Gameplay complexity is often the most obvious victim of a company's attempt to dumb down a series for wider appeal, but this goes hand in hand with blander storytelling, characters with more conventional attitudes and less varied environments. While TES started out as overambitious in Arena and Daggerfall, straining too hard for massive (and monotonous) environments and first person slasher combat that didn't particularly function, it hit a sweet spot with Morrowind, which if I recall the chatter, turned out so well precisely because the company was in financial trouble and its developers took a chance on actually making something good, not just marketable.

 

One of my recurring complaints about Skyrim concerns its generic medievalish towns. Even the ones with more interesting terrain like Markarth and Riften were themselves copied after each other's notion of an island in the center and castle at the far end. The rest might as well be interchangeable. Compare that to Morrowind's variety, from clusters of yurts to Dagon Fel's bucolic thatched roofs to Vivec City's monolithic cantons, the Telvanni's absurd mushroom houses, the martial rectilinearity of Imperial outposts, or Ald'ruhn hunched out of the ash waste like a monstrous half-slumbering swarm in congress with itself. Bethesda deliberately chose to be less interesting than that for TES4 and 5, to restrain themselves so as not to scare away more mundane customers. When you aim for mediocrity, everything suffers.

 

Role-playing games distinguish themselves from genres which simply present players with pre-chewed tasks by enabling individual choice. They cannot retain their best features, whether it's the spirit of exploration or post-conventional morality or what-have-you while being marketed for mass appeal, to the subhuman degenerates incapable of individual thought. The very notion of a mass-market RPG contradicts itself.

Well, maybe we need, once in a while, to observe failure in success to be reminded to renew our expectations.

 

A toast, then, at the end of all things, for what should never have been, to make us pine for what might be.

Live That Fantasy

"I held my tongue as she told me: 'son

Fear is the heart of love'

So I never went back"

 

Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Follow You into the Dark

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"We'll ditch you in the harbour if we must
But if it all works out nicely
You'll get the bonus you deserve

From doctors we trust.

That's what we're paid for here"

 

Brian Eno - The Fat Lady of Limbourg (Shivaree cover for those who prefer voice to instrumentation)

______________________________________________________

 

"I come along, but I don't know where you're taking me
I shouldn't go, but you're wrenching, dragging, shaking me
Turn off the sun; pull the stars from the sky
The more I give to you, the more I die"

 

Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug

______________________________________________________

 

"Let me be your ruler

You can call me queen bee

And baby I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll rule

Let me live that fantasy"

 

Lorde - Royals

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"I'm trying to figure put what's so wonderful about the women of Basilica that a man like Elya keeps coming back here when he could live in one of those places where men have their way all the time."
Only now did Issib answer. "In the first place, Nafai, there is no place where men have their way all the time. There are places where men pretend to have their way and women pretend to let them, just as women here pretend to have their way and men pretend to let them."

Orson Scott Card - The Memory of Earth

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"he knew that there was a filthy secret at the heart of power, and that that secret was in a sense a pornographic secret: that some people don't even need the excuse to wield power. They won't say we're doing it for your own good, or to civilize your colony, or to save you from communism, or to save you from fascism, or to liberate you from capitalism, or anything from this kind, not even an excuse. We're in power 'cause we like it. We're in power 'cause we enjoy punishing people. We're in power 'cause we enjoy owning people. We enjoy telling them what they can do. We enjoy telling them when we feel like having sex with them and when we don't. We do this for its own sake."

Christopher Hitchens - speech on Why Orwell Matters, 2002

______________________________________________________

 

"The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. [...] The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were largely successful."

 

George Orwell - 1984

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"All men are playing with five fouls now. As they should."

Bill Maher meeting feminists halfway to unconditional surrender

______________________________________________________

"Ben, why should anybody want that sort of power?"
"Why does a moth fly toward a light? The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge... and stronger."

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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"Certainly a bloodthirsty character, without a doubt. I also told you that the character is romantic — so he is, as far as women are concerned, and erotic."

 
Christopher Lee in 1990 describing his seven-film(!) recurring role as Dracula *

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Sandra and Woo proves difficult to praise because it's difficult to define. From month to month and year to year it might give its readers a puzzle to solve, racoon domestic comedy, art student in-jokes, pop culture humor, parodies of genre fiction like detective stories, etc. It's remained one of the few palatable webcomics after their descent into self-righteous anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight fundamentalism.

 

Three months ago, they ran a poll on the tired old issue of chainmail bikinis: if you don't like underdressed female video game characters and overdressed male ones, would you prefer both sexes sexy or sensible or both options? The results showed that women and men agree almost perfectly, as expected given they're both playing to each other. Most would like to have both options open, or if not would prefer the sensible adventurer garb option. However... aside from the common pitfalls of self-reported samples, this was not a sample of the human population, but of Sandra and Woo readers. Footnote citation humor fans can hardly represent the human norm, and men responded to the poll at an eight-to-one ratio compared to women.

Of course, an opinion poll is ill-suited to explain how we've arrived at a particular opinion. In Sandra and Woo's case, we can assume thirteen years' worth of comics featuring a clever female protagonist but refusing to toe the anti-male female chauvinist line have narrowed readership accordingly to a set knowingly dodging sartorial clichés. A more interesting question is how the populace at large have arrived at the inescapable consensus of sexualizing absolutely every single damn piece of entertainment while at the same time wailing and moaning (not in a good way) that sexualization can only be the result of evil, sadistic men foisting their inferior, demonic lusts upon pristine, angelic, innocently suffering women.

The answer, though Heinlein missed it and Orwell skirted it, is that the drive for power is synonymous with the sex urge, doubly so for women. While females display their fertility/willingness to mate, these are rarely in question for a man. His reproductive worth is instead weighted most heavily by the resources or protection he might provide in the future, during the cripplingly extended period of pregnancy and infancy. The overdressed male's layer upon layer of status symbols, the knight's shining armor, are as sexual a display as the underdressed female's breasts and buttocks.

The feminist claim that female beauty if a tool of male oppression is readily falsified by any number of real-world observations, but here's a fun one: the U.S., where feminists are among, if not the most vocal on the planet, is by pure coincidence also the most profitable cosmetics market. And the most profitable fashion market. Why would you expect virtual worlds to be any different? I reiterate my challenge from last decade: ladies, if virtual attractiveness be such a burden, by all means let's all make our avatars as deformed and disfigured as possible, and we'll see who cries "uncle" first, auntie. **

Returning to the more salient question of why men are being condemned on a fabricated accusation, let me suggest it's not a bug; it's a feature. The accusation of the male gaze exists in order to provide ammunition against men, and that goes back to the question of how females secure men's service. The particular means hardly matter, because once our offspring's survival began to favor paternal self-sacrifice, any and all tricks a female can pull to keep a man contributing amplified that advantage. Sex appeal works, though subverting protective instincts via neotenized cuteness is more insidiously reliable, but for the purposes of this discussion it's more interesting to consider female victimhood in light of Ayn Rand's comment on government control:

"when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt."

So yes, of course women rail against sex appeal even as they ransack the discount racks for tube tops, sun dresses and bikinis. Whether you're wearing a burka or cleavage down to the southern hemisphere, either way men should be made to feel guilty about it! Guilt is leverage. Guilt can be monetized. Guilt is power, and power, psychological control over a man translated, for hundreds of thousands of years, into more viable offspring. We have inherited those instincts. If you think I'm painting the fairer sex in an unfairly Machiavellian light, remember instinctive drives require no premeditation. Much like the drive to rut, the drive to control need not be spelled out, defined or "socially constructed" - it exists because it's been reproductively favorable, and it will persist in each new generation regardless of having never been verbalized.

A woman is not lying to you when she presents you with such a Procrustean demand as praising her sex appeal while demonizing sex appeal. She is merely acting out a belief as firmly rooted in our psyches as our love of sucrose and sunlight. A female nitpicking a man believes her bullshit as fervently as every male who finds himself acting on the unanalyzed belief that if only, if he only kicks the ball across the goal line one more time, if he only brings home one more paycheck, if he can just manage to afford one more pair of earrings as a present, if he just vanquishes one more foe in righteous trial by combat, then at long last he will find himself loved and respected instead of merely grudgingly tolerated as a filthy draft animal in his own home, as a utilitarian extension of his family unit's social status. She believes her own personal fable just as you believe yours. She quite likely honestly believes, without ever having considered it, that by enslaving you she is benefitting you, that she is civilizing you, that you will be happier by acceding to her demands. She's doing it for your own good. It feels like she's making you a better person, fitting you to the familial ideal.

 

It feels right and fitting to us that men should live in constant fear of female condemnation, indebted from birth.

And if she thinks even less about it, she probably just enjoys the rush of power, sitting in judgment of you, constantly finding more crimes of which to convict you, even as she herself selected you as mate based on your criminality. Because let's face it, if you had not taken the even chance of getting kissed or slapped in response to coming on to her, you'd never have been permitted to bask in her august presence in the first place.

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* A comment intriguingly predating the '90s popularization of Interview with the Vampire (1994 film adaptation) and the swooning gaggle of Twilight fangirls the following decade(s). Christopher Lee knew his craft

 

** Seriously, how many female fans does an aggressively grotesque game like Urtuk have?

Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves

With my King of Dragon Pass long-play proving... long, I decided to get back into my adventure game backlog on the side. While I'm at it, I may as well chance a werewolf-styled story, The Wolf Among Us having at least made it clear that lupine themes need not always be handled badly. So let us brave the Canadian wilderness for a bit of Sang-Froid. However, what I thought would be an adventure game with a couple of strategic elements tacked on has turned out to be equal parts hack'n'slash and strategy, with a few adventure-style cutscenes tacked on. Bottom line: laudable concept, but imprecision and repetitiveness render it only borderline playable at best.

 

First reaction to the menu screen was: OK, we've got two men and one bedridden female. There is zero chance of the woman doing anything wrong, 100% chance that anything bad happening to her will be the fault of a man, and about a 96% chance of the two guys being brothers, with maybe one of them having to "Old Yeller" the other at some point. The story, six missions in, proves every bit that trite and then some, cackling moustachioed devil in a top hat included. And yes the protagonists are brothers and three sentences into the script the chick's already running from a rapist priest. Called it.

 

Passable art, but what's the point of scripting 2.5D cutscenes which look worse than the game's actual 3D graphics? Also, ugh... horrendous voice acting. Even in the first dialogue, in the sister's second line, the singular should be "candelabrum" and even if it weren't it still wouldn't be pronounced "candle-a-bra" - this ain't the '60s. Other such awkward moments crop up with some regularity, to the point I'm finding it difficult to discern the mistakes from the deliberately low(-brow) expectations. On the up-side, surprisingly apt music. While I thought the merry jigs an odd fit for "tales of werewolves" they do suit the 19th-century setting admirably.

As for the practical side, it's a survival game letting you set traps for your enemies before every level, tower defense style

 

- then having you play out the attacks in third-person-shooter mode:

 

 

The interplay between game mechanics (so many I'm still getting tutorial messages half a dozen missions in) is impressive... in theory. Enemies can be delayed with bait, have to work up their courage to attack you, and you can light a bonfire or shout to delay their attacks. Noise on the other hand can aggro as-yet passive mobs. Melee attacks require stamina and can build a rage bar for power attacks; shooting on the other hand requires severely limited ammunition and a long time to reload your one-shot musket... and you'll often need to use your one shot to set off rock drops. Headshots count and there's an aim assist feature. Mobs get staggered by your hits, and walking into melee range of them triggers autoattacks. The economic / roleplaying angles of shopping for equipment in town and specializing in guns, axes or traps add a fair bit of customization to your playthrough as well.

In practice however, the game boils down to midlessly repeating the same exact mission, fight by fight, several times over hoping for a one-pixel or split-second difference to play out in your favor: one wolf randomly wandering within melee range of you while you reload, another pathing out of your rock drop's radius before the others, autoaim refusing to lock onto a headshot, etc. It doesn't help that wolves turn on a dime, reversing their heads' position instantly, or that the definition of "melee range" is fuzzy at best, or that collision detection seems to detect or collide according to its own whims, or that the game failing to register you pressing your CTRL key to reload will result in wasting your power attack, or... well, you get the idea. Glaringly, you also can't save during missions, not even between the discrete waves of enemies, forcing unnecessarily long re-loads for fake longevity.

 

Great concept with a surprisingly wide array of features for a small indie title, but could've used another thousand work-hours of finessing. Doubt I'll bother finishing it, but I'm glad I gave it its fair shake.

the playground of the world

"And we used to sleep on the beach here - sleep overnight. They don't- they don't do it anymore. Things changed... see?

They don't sleep anymore on the beach!"

 

- that heartrending monologue from the start of GY!BE's Sleep

 

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It's the 4th of July here in the States, and for the past three hours this one-horse town I live in has resounded with at least one firecracker every half minute, culminating in twice-hourly grand cannonades the likes of which make half the dogs in the county piss themselves... and they're still going. Ever since the 2008 economic crisis, Americans started cutting back on some forms of conspicuous consumption, like Holiday decorations. Few places now cover their lawns all through winter in inflatable, permanently lit snowmen and light-garlanded fiberglass deer as they did in the 2000s, or drape entire neighbourhoods in false cobwebs interspersed with animatronic witches for Halloween. The national holiday celebrations, however have only grown more conspicuously consumptive, as though one puffed-up display of symbollic defiance can compensate for the year-long tightened belt, as though by a single evening of fire, King Canute might deny the coming flood.

This overcompensating attempt at self-hypnosis, this running with a rattled saber, cannot bluff away the growing reality of the phrase "service economy" any more than could Colossal bloodbaths. After less than a century, the American Empire spirals surely in the time-honored pattern of decay: increasingly bloated aristocratic and servant castes increasingly ensuring that nothing gets done.

One question remains: whether this particular culture is capable of scaling down, gritting its teeth through a respectable senescence and retaining sufficient relevance in uniting with others to survive the coming Sinocracy's assaults, or whether it will ride its denialism into complete collapse. I can't say for an absolute certainty which option Americans will choose... but listening to the still-booming self-reassurances that we're still scary (at least for one evening) instills in me a very strong suspicion on the topic, and I certainly hope I can make it out before suffering too many powder burns.