Beardier than Thou

"Such men as he be never at heart's ease

Whiles they behold a greater than themselves

And therefore are they very dangerous"

 

Caesar describing Cassius, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act1Scene2

 

 

"Memento mori. You are parasites, and a parasite which kills its host is a doomed parasite."

Thus I admonished The Lord of the Rings Online eight years ago, that in light of its rapidly diminishing gameplay value and overwhelming reliance on its Tolkien license, shitting on Tolkien's corpse was a bad, bad idea. Stay tuned, we'll come back to that by the end.

For a while, LotRO benefited from Standing Stone Games' split into a separate studio. The new adventures centering on Northern Mirkwood, the Iron Hills and Misty Mountains more closely approached the "Middle Earth Online" the game should originally have been instead of "Rehash the LotR Plot Online" it was turned into in its middle years. The "legendary" item system (a whole gear farm in each weapon) was retooled into something less aggravating last year, along with a few other quality of life changes and more attention to detail like interweaving quests instead of polishing off one location at a time forever. There are even some new monster models, after a long drought. But, after over a decade of catering only to the stupidest possible clientele, it was too little too late.

 

Standing Stone got desperate enough last month to give free access to all but the last major expansion, Gundabad, which no company does except in extremis. So I've sunk some cost into Gundabad, jumped back in and have been struggling to catch up on the past couple years' content. Initially, several others from the guild I'd joined two years ago also popped their heads up, until it almost seemed we'd get enough for an instance run. Two weeks later they were gone again. Partly, this can hardly be helped, as LotRO features a tremendous amount of repetitive "kill ten rats" content to wade through before reaching the even more repetitive end-game of farming a single instance for gear upgrades - a problem compounded by timesinks like nearly instantaneous respawns forcing you to kill everything twice in each location. Running the game on what would appear to be the same servers from fifteen years ago doesn't help, as more than a dozen players in any location immediately weigh the network lag down into rubberband land. And, of course, it's hard selling slightly blocky mid-2000s 3D graphics on a more modern market of downright fuckable photorealism, no matter how inspired your visual artists may be. Before I get to my complaints, let me admit LotRo's old knack for achingly scenic landscapes remains solid.

The Wells of Langflood: beauty, branches, bears and boggarts

Even some of the Gundabad zones seemingly created (just as Moria) with a mind toward low decorative workload (noone questions cave walls textured uniformly mottled gray) make inspired use of repeating motifs.

The (rather Spartan) cradle of Durin

And, as always, it's somehow even worse to see good work amidst bad, because the storytelling filling the precipices and caverns of Gundabad has taken a sharp nosedive. This was somewhat a problem after Mordor, with professional writers having apparently split the other way from old Turbine. For a while the team broke even, resigning themselves to mediocre drama, unambitious yet also unintrusive, but whichever writers joined preceding the release of Gundabad last year have dragged the new zones so deep into the realm of SJW lunacy as to overshadow any recovery LotRO has made in the past few years.

One sure sign is trying to gratuitously redeem villains and recast them as oppressed minorities. Suddenly we need to focus on good dwarves from the canonically evil Dourhand clan (some of the first enemies you fought back in 2007) because you see it was only their leaders that led them astray. The Nuremberg defense apparently remains perfectly valid in Nogrod. Even orcs, fucking ORCS, are gradually going the way of Warcraft noble savage orcs, deliberately flouting Tolkien's established narrative of them as thoroughly corrupted body, mind and soul by Morgoth (a.k.a. the devil himself) back in the first age. But the most obvious change is relocating Middle-Earth, like every single other product of our propaganda-choked society, to Femtasia, that FEMale chauvINIST utopia where women are always more clever, wiser, morally upright, skillful, braver, stronger, faster and flat-out more bionic than those lowly disgusting males in every possible way.

 

As a side-note, as much of this involves dwarf-women, and one of my old posts on bearded ladies saw a slight increase in hits last year, I may have shared in the guilt of justifying (inadvertently and only by omission of proper context) the notion of sending original recipe Ardan she-dwarves out on adventures. If so, I do regret it, and I'll plan a post at some point in the future about the topic of evolution in fantasy.

Though, as all modern media, LotRO suffered from occasional bouts of virtue signaling (refugee themed plots, a female master of Lake-Town, etc.) they integrated these half-decently into the existing literature. Its current problems appear to have started with Amma.

Back when Erebor was first opened up, one of the quests casually introduced you to the first female dwarf NPC, and Mother Amma was in fact a good character in keeping with Tolkien's own guidelines on the topic. She was protected and hidden away deep within one of her people's most secure fortresses. Which didn't stop her from being portrayed as a respectable matriarch and noted expert in the fine craftsmanship which so obsesses the Naugrim. Cool. I'm down with that.

But of course it's never enough. Not for the fanatics anyway.

The War of Three Peaks and Gundabad proper saw Amma and a host of new females transported to the front lines, increasingly monopolizing the action. Remember Tolkien laid out the central problem quite clearly: dwarves not only breed almost as slowly as elves but only have a 1/3 female population. Much like loonies from Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, this naturally mandates a rabid, unquestionable protectionism as core cultural value, or dwarven demographics would've dwindled to nothing back in the First Age no matter how many Durins they bring back from the dead.

LotRO keeps dwarf females looking masculine (and bearded (you can tell them by their voices)) but while lower cuteness would indicate a higher female involvement in masculine risk-taking, female scarcity would easily over-ride these dames' hirsute valor.

But of course, that's logic, and who needs logic when you've got feminism?

 

For one of the more absurd examples, meet the dwarf lesbians:

One sends you with a gift to her "wife" - an absurd notion both for the reasons above and for this being an infamously traditionalist society. In preindustrial times everyone was a quiverfull by default, with infanticide quietly making up the difference in lean years. While various cultures formalized some form or another of what each other might consider sexual deviance, social justice warriors consisently miss the little detail that true sexual freedom is a virtue and privilege of post-industrial, medically savvy modernity. In a royalist, medieval, 2/3 male dorfopolis you might conceivably (pun intended) see male-male homosexual acts tacitly normalized to ease tensions, but lesbianism would by definition be extramarital, and a childless lesbian marriage would almost certainly be an actively enforced taboo. Dwarf lesbians on the front lines of battle doubly so; two dead wombs for the price of one. Might as well salt yourselves and hop in a pot for the orcs' genocidal ease. But of course, for the SJW who shoehorned this in, a couple of unmarried dwarf lads expressing a fondness for each other in the trenches (iffy but at least arguable) wouldn't go nearly far enough. Had to make a show of strength by vandalizing the source material as much as possible.

Naturally, running a mission with one of the lasses, you find her as idealized as you'd expect, dashing ahead of you to solo everything, explicitly stating she doesn't like fighting and just wants to feel useful and expressing sorrow at having to kill poor innocent bats who've just been trained for evil. Your presence in that mission serves no purpose but to absorb her sanctimony.

 

But the sapphidwarfies are just barely scratching the surface. Back when taking stock of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's endlessly reiterated anti-male chauvinism, I noted their main gimmick of juxtaposing good women with bad men in order to drive home (consciously or subliminally) female superiority with every zone, every encounter and every dialogue. Here, three or four years later, we see avid students of that technique at work.

 

There's Hersegg, the young, sparsely-bearded librarian also inexplicably accepted as an experienced explorer and combatant. At least she at one point admits "I was too eager" but a lot more lines have her stuck babysitting an older male scholar Spall, presented as dead weight for being a nerd in a warzone.

There's the dwarf who pissed off his wife by appearing too protective of her. And instead of talking to him about it (you remember communication, that skill supposedly higher in females?) she puts him in the dog-house (gossiping about the problem with Mother Amma instead) until he redeems himself with a present of a show of fireworks.

 

Unjustifiably angry wife = prezzies! Yay equality!

 

Then you've got Elta, who sends you bounty-hunting after beasts with the twist that "I simply name my targets after folks I don't like" and yes of course all three inspirations are male, with the pretexts that they were "lazy to the bone" or "hovered over my shoulder" or had "a very cold personality" - hey, we introduced a female character whose only purpose is killing her male acquaintances in effigy. Cute, right? Adorable. Just like all those times Aragorn's long-lost brother Man-a-born sent you to kill disgusting pigs, slugs and worms named Galadriel, Arwen and Eowyn. Fucking adorable, right?

 

The next one took a slightly longer introduction. First we need to meet a male artisan who's introduced as too greedy and putting on airs for working up his ambition to recover his people's treasured gems and get his name in the history books, and writing convoluted contracts to lock others into servitude. His current servant, one Eskil Bloodthumb, is introduced as a worthless fuck-up -

- and after serving his purpose in feeling dejected and ashamed, instead of learning and growing into his role is immediately replaced with his hypercompetent sister Fastrith, who then starts a romance with one of the Moria dwarves from ten years ago. When debating whether to advance into a dangerous area, he staunchly defends her honor, proclaiming her great ability... and she retorts she might as well come along... otherwise her hapless new beardybeau will dumbly stumble into danger. Answering praise with mockery. Lovely. Definitely not an abusive relationship in the making. And completely different from the guy insulting his wife by (mistakenly) appearing motivated by protectiveness.

Oh, but the brother's not completely forgotten. Fastrith repeatedly quips "Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!" as a catchphrase during a fight. (see below)

Then you've got the two dwarf rogues, Ausma and Muta, who can't seem to go two steps without either being given a heavily scripted mission with more dialogue than half a dozen other characters put together or some other NPC randomly chanting "she is quite clever" or proving themselves superior to males. Note, it's a common trait of Mary Sue characters that the rest of the established cast must suddenly be twisted into helpless idiots or villains to justify Mary Sue's specialness. To the point here, the war hero Nain the Slakeless has to suddenly and inexplicably Rambo into a cave full of orcs by himself, to justify a rescue mission by one of the females, and he ends up shaved as a penalty for his male stupidity. Which stupidity somehow wasn't narratively necessary before females stepped into the picture. For bonus points:

 

Olivorc Twist, everyone. Or maybe Jean Valjorc?

This same mission chain ends with Nain forced to apologize to his orcish informant for mistrusting him and some orcs set up in a cozy little deluxe apartment in a dwarf skyscraper, as a deprived minority getting their due. In a delightfully Freudian slip, we see a glimpse of the dirty little secret behind women's criticism of men. The same quest chain at once tears down and symbolically castrates a respectable male while propping up and idealizing a murderous, ethically incapable replacement, redeeming the most brutal, sadistic, primitive brutes in reach.

No matter how hard you try, you will never be good enough, because what they want isn't "good" but reliably murderous and stupid and easy to manipulate into suicidal aggression. Girls want orc boys.

But if you think they stopped at dwarves, you've got another thing coming. And more things after that. One of Ausma's missions leads you to the game's first female orc NPC:

 

Loknashra... who is of course far better than the males around her (sexist male orc immediately cowers in fear of her) and badmouths her chief with impunity (the menfolk are doing everything wrong, y'see; and she's only stepping in 'for my people' and not for aggression, to prop up her inevitable moral superiority) earning the explicit admiration of the female dwarf for bonus interspecies sisterhood points.

But wait, there's more!

The hill-folk of Angmar make their return, in the conspicuous form of a plucky and inventive young female:

- whose quest chain leads you to confront and kill her evil father. Because of course.

 

But wait... there's more!

What, you thought they'd stop at humanoids?

 

You run across a warg asking you to rescue her pups from evil sorcerors sticking crystals in them for whatever reason. Of course, the same crystal treatment that drives her "mate" rabidly aggressive turns her into a lucid, noble paragon of virtue. How could it be otherwise?!?

I wasn't deliberately recording these from the start and I haven't even finished the damn expansion but I'm willing to bet it'll be more of the same. I'm stopping examples here for the sake of this already over-lengthy post remaining borderline readable, and for exhaustion at trying to track anti-male proselytism on its own moldy turf. See, that's one thing about fanatics: they never have anything new to say. Just as a Christian will answer everything with either "Jesus" or "Satan" a feminist's interpretation of every scenario is preordained by their holinesses MacKinnon, Steinem and Dworkin:

"Oh, honourable font of gyno-knowledge, might I borrow a moment of your time?"

"Yes, you filthy pig?"

"Half-dog, actually, but never mind. I was wondering what you think of elves."

"Female elves are better than male elves!"

"Oh! Follow-up question, any opinion on dwarves?"

"Female dwarves are better than male dwarves!"

"What a coincidence. Have you given any thought to librarians?"

"Female librarians are better than male librarians!"

"Interesting. While we're on the topic, what about apprentices?"

"Female apprentices are better than male apprentices!"

"How insightful. And what about hill-folk?"

"Female hill-folk are better than male hill-folk!"

"Curiouser and curiouser. What about orcs then?"

"Female orcs are better than male orcs!"

"Fascinating! Ah, but this might stump you: how do you see wargs?"

"Female wargs are better than male wargs!"

"Wasn't expecting that! Dare one inquire as to your opinion of dragons?"

"Female dragons are KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen!!! KillAllMen!!!!!1"

 

But to fully understand their motivation here, you have to remember fundamentalism includes not only monomania but active hostility against outside creativity, especially if it is admired, if it steals admiration away from the hagiography of the one true faith. Sidetrack a bit, for reference, to the iconoclasm of official religions, like christians' destruction of pagan art or conversely muslims' destruction or whitewashing of churches. Recent examples include the Islamic State's attempts to erase all history before themselves. Twenty years before that, younger viewers might not remember the international outrage at the Afghanis' destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001. Even I did not remember, until a recent refresher, that the (tragicomically incompetent, involving... shooting at the statues... with guns) demolition was undertaken for sheer spite, because foreigners has offered to help restore them.

 

This same mindset dominates social justice warriors' revisionist agenda. The harm inflicted against Middle-Earth with every XenArwen and Tauriel and Hollywood-pretty dwarves is not just a bug. It's a feature. Returning to LotRO and its newer writers' competence pay attention to the scintillating banter during one scripted encounter:

Fastrith says, ''If we were to find the stolen stones that made up the mosaic...''
Bróin says, ''...we could restore it!''
Bori says, ''That sounds hard.''
Bori says, ''You are more likely to find the lost Zabad'ibîn, I think.''
Fastrith says, ''Perhaps we will find both! Bróin will help me!''
Bróin says, ''I will!''
Imák says, ''Hmm... do you hear that?''
Imák says, ''There could be more. Do not relax your guard!''
Hobgoblin Prey-catcher says, ''They're in here!''
Imák says, ''There will be more of them. Let's return to the others and prepare!''
Bori says, ''What happened? I heard shouting!''
Imák says, ''Hobgoblins.''
Fastrith says, ''Hobgoblins! How exciting!''
Bróin says, ''How many are there?''
Imák says, ''Does it matter?''
Bróin says, ''Spoken like a Longbeard, Imák!''
Imák says, ''Hmmph.''
Bori says, ''Here they come!''
Bróin says, ''I will fight, if I must!''
Fastrith says, ''Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!''
Hobgoblin Prey-catcher says, ''Take this!''
Fastrith says, ''Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!''
Bróin says, ''Fastrith, are you all right?''

Does any of that sound like Middle-Earth to you? I think the "that sounds hard" coming out of the mouth of a canonically perseverent race is what truly gets me.

*Sigh*

No, Broin, Fastrith is very much not all right. She's a product of hijackers far more interested in giving all new characters B-movie gypsy fortuneteller accents than trying to adapt their dialogue to Tolkien's general style. Other scenes echo even more generic children's cartoon one-liners like "you won't get away with this" or "you underestimate us" or "you've bitten off more than you can chew" and even the dreaded "drat" until you start to realize the fanaticism is a smokescreen. This petty, infantile abuse is as much born of incompetence as it is of brainwashing. Directly mirroring the devaluation of the elves themselves in recent decades, those attempting to adapt good authors must feel a desperate need to vandalize. Faced with superior intellect, creativity, talent, they hunger only to deface, defame, destroy, for how well the other's ability reflects their own inability back at them... and feminism makes as good a pretext as any. A pretext and shield from warranted criticism, because as I noted with regard to both Deadfire and Wasteland 3, "Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent. [...] unskilled hacks shielding themselves from criticism behind the unbending bulwark of constantly repeated politically correct mantras. My crap promotes people of the correct skin color or sex, so if you call my crap crap then you're a sexist, racist, child-molesting nazi pig."

 

It's not as if LotRO had not demonstrated, in its long years Online, that it is possible to insert new characters, including female ones, into the narrative while respecting Tolkien's original style and framework and even building upon it. Anyone remember Ellen Fremedon?

Aside from the geek cred inherent in her very name, bitter Ellen, in her far shorter appearance than Muta or Amma or Ausma, demonstrated both female leadership and interpersonal conflict stemming directly from the situation in which she and her social rival, Eowyn, find themselves. Conflict against another woman. That happens. Not that you'd know it from feminist iconography pitting the valiant sisterhood always vanquishing those disgusting hairy beasts guilty of all the world's ills - like "lazy to the bone" or "hovered over my shoulder" or had "a very cold personality". Ellen's criticism is both warranted (absent her secret wraith-slaying fate, Eowyn would do far more good as royal representative organizing an eventual exile than as another fresh recruit on the field) and slightly overstated for envy at her rival's higher standing, and your aid leads her to eventually relent enough to cooperate with the warrior princess - a perfectly natural social conflict resolved just as naturally, without the need to degrade either side. In fact, much of the Rohan expansion (though far from brilliantly written (e.g. Thrymm, oy vey)) dealt with the women left behind while the men went to war, the ladies of each fief coordinating defenses, stockpiling for the coming hardships, leading townsfolk to safety, one pining for her husband or father, another cursing him for leaving her, another struggling to fill his shoes or just keeping her mind on more pressing matters, another filling them quite adroitly, or yet another growing into her role independently, quest by quest.

 

I have to wonder, as Standing Stone watch the rejuvenating potential of their gambled freebie content trickle away to nothing, log-in by daily log-in, are they even asking themselves if, among other mistakes, they should've hired better writers? You know, instead of paying some brainwashed imbeciles to spit insults in your customers' faces? More so, to cut the literary branch out from under you with the pretext of the noble cause of spitting insults in your customers' faces? How much salary did you waste on those desperate to use an adaptation in an effort to destroy the original work, when all that's kept you afloat for a decade has been your Tolkien license?

Coincidentally enough, they seem to have posted a Lead Content Designer job about five days ago, just as I got angry enough to start taking notes for this post. Maybe I should apply? Whaddayasay, Fallen Stoners, are ya desperate enough?

'Cause I think you might find yourselves beyond desperation by this point.

Despite my inconsistent commas, action verbing and typos, I do think I've already done better in a page of fan fiction from ten years ago than your current employees in their official contributions. And I didn't need to deliberately shit on Tolkien's corpse to get my amateurish point across.

 

If that's your professional standard, then what the fuck am I <no longer> paying you for?

Rocket Ship Galileo

"They were headed skyward, out and far."

 

They're gonna fight Space Nazis! In space!

 

Having missed out on reading the so-called Heinlein Juveniles as a juvenile, I initially hesitated picking them up in my thirties. Luckily, for the most part, the 'young adult' slander doesn't stand up to a comparison of Heinlein's writing to anything that passes for mature popular entertainment, either then or now. Start with anything with a laugh track and work your way to reality TV, with a stopover in FiftyShades-ville, all set to a soundtrack of dime a dozen 'oooh baby baby I love you baby' pop songs. Aside from their consistent viewpoint of a clever young small-town lad exploring the universe, these novels are more thoughtful, more scientifically literate and more transgressive than a Star Wars audience can stomach.

Rocket Ship Galileo, though, stands as a noteworthy exception deserving of its 'juvenile' condemnation, more similar to his loosely affiliated boy scout story A Tenderfoot in Space than the wider collection in its plot and moralistic simplicity. Written in 1947 at the very start of Heinlein's career, it also mirrors By His Bootstraps in displaying far more outside influences than the author's own personal style. The gentleman scientist cobbling together his own means of transport to the moon can't help but recall Jules Verne, as does the cannon-like phlebotinum of atomically-volatilized zinc to justify a rocketship the size of a recreational vehicle with no necessary infrastructure, none of the mad scramble for funding tying together the more realistic plot of The Man Who Sold the Moon.

 

The rest is fairly generic, with space nazis as blatant stand-ins for desperados or pirates (substitute "terrorists" in the present day) and the three eager young space cadets' personalities overlap to the point you'll be confounded in recalling which one of them has the camera and which one's the pilot and which one... is also there. (Was he the one working the radio?) The grand reveal of a long-dead Lunar civilization (unlike the similar moment handled as a heroic denouement in Farmer in the Sky) is here just glossed over as a de rigueur Scie Fie gimmick, immediately forgotten in favor of duking it out with the aforementioned Space Nazis in space. The supposedly moon-shaking realization that moon craters come not from meteorites but from a long-ago nuclear war comes across as gratuitously paranoid for Heinlein, usually reluctant to trade verisimilitude for drama or treat worthy topics as shock value one-liners.

Still, though much like For Us, The Living this early effort remains of interest only to Heinlein's established fans, it contained enough germs of his future style to remain recognizable. Written in the immediate memory of the threat of Nazi rocketry, with the ENIAC as front page news, it peaks somewhere around the story's midpoint, after the initial western themes of defending their rocket-ranch from banditos and before getting bogged down in a by-the-numbers conflict with Space Nazis in space. Scenes of the first test flight, their voyage, the initial moon landing and base camp sneak in a few technical details on interplanetary courses or line of sight for broadcasting, and emulate old adventure stories not only in their cheesy worst but their hopeful best. The boys' dogged insistence on braving death to go where no man has gone before, the grand old theme of physical and intellectual exploration by personal agency and independent enterprise, captured that feeling you might more recently find fictionalized in Kerbal Space Program, when one of your launches breaks out of atmosphere, shedding the clinging, oppressive pull of gravity second by second: freedom.

Old World, New Tricks

"Well my kind's your kind I'll stay the same

Oh say, say, say

Wait... they don't love you like I love you"

 

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps

They said I was daft to build a kingdom on my swamp of ignorance, but I built it anyway, just to show 'em. It sank into the adjacency bonus swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the enemy empire swamp. So I built a third one. That revolted, got hemmed in by under-expansion, then got trampled into the swamp. But the fourth one... also sank, into a barbarian swamp. As did the fifth and sixth swamp castles. But the seventh! .... was less lucky than advertised, and also fraught with internal swamp strife. Anyway, around the eighth or ninth try I finally made it. Possibly tenth or twelfth. In my defense, it's a fairly convoluted swamp.

I impulse-tagged Old World some months ago for reasons long forgotten, and just as impulsively confirmed the purchase upon release. After thirty hours played in three days, I'm both burned out and loving it, having jumped right in and despite my not inconsiderable experience with such games, found myself flailing helplessly... but, y'know, the good kind of helpless flailing!

 

I gave Civilization 5 and 6 a pass after hearing some of the (largely idiot-friendly) changes they made. Though still pulling in hefty sales numbers, they noticeably lacked the enthusiastic support of a series whose second showing redefined the genre, 2.5 became an unmatched classic for its integration of story with mechanics and number four topped turn-based strategy gameplay for up to a decade depending on which nerds you ask. When Civilization 4 did gradually get eclipsed in critiques, it was more by a shift back toward Master of Orion copycats than by its own descendants, and by Europa Universalis' surprising success at pushing abundant historical references.

Enter Old World. When after a day of breathlessly shepherding the Alcmaeonids' fortunes I checked who the hell crafted this gem, I was somehow pleasantly unsurprised to see it advertised as 'by the lead designer of Civ4' - and it certainly shows. Old World is in many ways Civ4's Beyond the Sword expansion lent dominance over other mechanics, plus a heavy influence from the EU series in its emphasis on internal politics, NPC proxies and historical references to rival even Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

 

Smaller and denser than its competitors, Old World thrives on fewer cities, fewer military units (but then endlessly stacking redundant goons was always one of Civ 4's more criticized features) and a smaller timeframe (at least for now; expansions will tell) covering classical antiquity edging toward the Byzantine era instead of the full span of human history. Game length is only 200-400 turns with wonders taking ~12 turns to complete, but far more happens each turn from truly random events to your dynasty's various ongoing personal growth to fallout from political decisons you took ten turns prior. It relies heavily on "orders" as a resource literally limiting the number of actions you take per turn, be it workers' construction, units' movements and attacks, political maneuvering or tutoring your eventual successors. It's a bit ironic that the Civilization games, considered by most to epitomize 4X gameplay, actually tend to limit expansion far more than the Master of Orion spin on the genre, but Old World's orders play into its Civ inspiration by focusing gameplay on fewer actions per turn, in contrast to Stellaris' vast sweep or Age of Wonders: Planetfall's focus on strategic / tactical class-based interplay.

 

In fact, Old World impresses by how shrewdly it carves out its place among more established competitors, lacking for instance Age of Wonders' integration of tactical battles or Stellaris' freeform roleplaying options, adopting instead some of EU's focus on personalities and running with it. Your family members breed, grow, learn, plot rebellions (seriously, watch your back around Alexander the would-be-great) apply their stats to governance or pacifying the populace, and eventually die, and you'll find grooming your next generation of leader, generals and governors always on your mind as you navigate their charming little soap opera events. While the writing isn't particularly poetic or ambitious, it is far better than computer games' norm and adheres to its historical setting aside from some standard politically correct digressions like equal opportunity military leadership. The game oozes atmosphere despite its unassuming production values, from licensed music encompassing everything from airy instrumental mood pieces to folk songs and prayers directly recalling Civ 4's medieval / renaissance soundtrack, to pop-up events illustrated as oil paintings relating everything from exotic pets at court to treating with tribal powers like the Thracians or Danes to the expressive but not caricaturish portraits and nifty little gimmicks like having to discover the Drama technology before your music starts playing.

Strategically, Old World has all the old elements of Civ map occupation, but interwoven far more tightly. For instance terrain production overlaps quite a bit so the best choice (e.g. mine on hill) is oft overtaken by your need for a particular resource. Event choices rarely have a single best choice and even bad choices might fit your intentions for developing a character or city. By all means turn your general cruel by having him kick a puppy, even if it counts as a weakness. Most production buildings are initially built by workers on landscape tiles and funnel resources through the city skimming some for specialist training for MOAR POWAR and/or border expansion, compounded by the need to maintain a balance between urban and rural tiles, compounded by forward planning for adjacency bonuses, compounded by each city (and even the units it produces!) belonging to one of three factions whose attitude determines their productivity or combat effectiveness. Luckily you do get quite a few quality of life features like undoing orders, a grace period for improvement reconstruction, cities which can withstand a fair bit of early punishment instead of instantly being lost to a single mangy tribesman, and while I've seen complaints about the interface as cluttered, as with Stellaris the sheer amount of information you need to track at any one time makes even its abundance of text a boon, as you'd have a devil of a time tracking everything by ideograms alone, struggling to remember what twelve different wheel icons represent.

Not to say Old World is perfect:

 

The end-game has a deliberately incomplete "insert expansion pack here" feel to it, and victory conditions or capstone projects (like a spaceship to Alpha Centauri) are sorely lacking. The time threshold of 200 turns is already barely long enough to accomodate a huge map, and the (uncustomizable) point threshold far shorter than even that, to the point after one win I've already turned it off. At the other end, cities can only be built on a few locations fixed from the start, resuting in quick, brutal and slightly unsatisfying Xploration and Xpansion (in direct contract to the wonders of a thousand-star galaxy in Stellaris) though at least inserting an intermediate tribal category of NPCs between neutral barbarians and full-fledged civs allows for gradual military expansion after the initial land grab, without resorting to full-scale war. Military units are slightly limited. Oceans also feel empty and pointless, extending to naval units, begging for maybe some one-tile islands to colonize for resources or human resources? Or blockades or at least some random flotsam pick-ups? It could also use unit waypoints and multi-turn pathing.

But Old World is little diminished by its few flaws, and in an industry which insists on releasing everything as beta versions to lower customers' expectations and bleed them for DLCs, it stands out for its very completeness and professionalism. Directly contrasted to, for one example, Stellaris still patching core game mechanics six years after release, everything in Old World is feels fleshed out, measured and interconnected, with not even the orders limit limiting you as much as other titles' vespene gasses.

 

Marvelous work, and worth twice its price.

 

Well then. Next stop, Babylon!

I was afraid I'd misplaced my nail file but found it again soon after.

I suffered short-term emery loss.

ST: TNG - Genesis

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: 7.19

Genesis

 

In which Deanna Troi is a cold fish!

 

Mark well, Commander, the carefully scripted makeup-friendly mutations.

 

Lt. Broccoli's caught a cold, and in lieu of chicken soup Dr. Crusher decides to do something unspeakable to his genetickses. By the time Picard and Data get back from drag-racing a torpedo (it makes more sense in context) they find Barclay's squeezed his cells into his molecules and infected everyone with Mr.Hyde-ism... and that part makes even less sense in context. Anyway, Worf bites. Also, an iguana had kittens. Look, I tried to warn you: even less sense.

I loved this episode at twelve years old and it's still a guilty pleasure now. Objectively, I can admit the script's a pile of minotaur shit meant to prop up the excuse for body horror monster stories aboard the Enterprise but dedication to its absurdity (the actors certainly sank their teeth into it, and the make-up effects garnered some well-deserved praise) elevates Genesis to an irresistible campy charm... for some of us. Oddly enough, that same dedication also killed its plot in the eyes of most viewers, barely escaping "worst of" lists. Skipping over some one-liners like "ribocyatic flux" here's Data didacticizing the phlebotinum:

"a synthetic T-cell has invaded his genetic codes. This T-cell has begun to activate his latent introns [...] evolutionary holdovers. Sequences of DNA which provided key behavioral and physical characteristics millions of years ago but are no longer necessary. For instance: counsellor Troi's gill slits [...] the DNA has created an amphibious life form which became extinct over fifty million years ago"

OK... so... DNA does not work that way... and I'm only saying that calmly because millions of biology students have already yelled it at the screen over the decades. In Brannon Braga's defense, the notion of introns hiding past evolutionary superpowers (much like telomere elongation instantly making us immortal) was sort of just floating around in the '90s, to the point my high school AP Bio teacher had to address it in class. You could nitpick the problem from a few angles but one big issue is the lack of selective pressure on noncoding DNA to correct for deleterious mutations by deleting the host. The idea of functional information (to the tune of recreating every ancestor) sitting there untouched and unused for tens of millions of generations, just because, is a statistical gasser.

As with "subatomic bacteria" they got their matrioshkas inside out by claiming a T-cell "invaded" DNA. At least nobody turns unicellular; we see an early hominid, a Betazoid frog and a Klingon armadillo... and Barclay turning into a spider, particularly problematic because we branched away from arthropods' ancestors long before (Cambrian vs. Carboniferous?) anything resembling modern spiders, information readily available even in 1994. I guess Barclay as some nondescript filter-feeding wormlike thing wouldn't have been as exciting, though it would've pushed the body horror angle through the roof. Nor were cats ever iguanas, while we're at it. The less said about the physiology angle, the better.

 

But weirdly enough, all of this Brundlefly nonsense still ranked as better researched and up to date than much Star Trek science fare. Unfortunately Braga&Co. knew it, and went to town; after years of infamously nonsensical nonexplanations, here we have actual science, cutting edge, hot off the lab bench! Introns! I've heard of that who says I haven't! The result? Genesis is about 30% technobabble by volume. Just the above pivotal scene of Data expositing to Picard takes up four solid minutes, bracketed by two shorter segments, with several more preceding and following.

 

Therein I'd say lies to key to Genesis' criticism. For the severity of the mistakes aren't the problem so much as the overconfidence with which they're presented, diving so far into details as to draw attention to the flaws in their reasoning. A great case study in science fiction writing weighing the necessity for both literature surveys and hand-waving. Reminiscent of The Number of the Beast in that respect, though of course Heinlein did it far more consciously.

The Vile Scourge of Pinion-Centrism

"His value declined when he offered his name

Why did he offer?"

 

Metric - Rock Me Now

(Really though, Em, ever actually wondered why? Or is the slam a headier jam?)

 

 

Aside from fundamental stupidity one of the main problems with cult behavior, with obsessively pursuing a righteous cause based on blind belief, is forcing even the sane contingent to act insane for the sake of the cause. In academia, one of the more pressing questions concerns the degree to which SJW insanity has permeated even the hard sciences. Just how much "feminist math" is one forced to kowtow towards? Is every engineer designing an aerodynamic or hydrodynamic object in danger of getting fired for insulting social betters' finer sensibilities with phallocentric precepts of penetration?

Well, in biology at least quite a bit of damage has been done. As one of the battier examples, you'll occasionally run across both students and (inexcusably) professors decrying the horrendous sexism in animal naming, because so many animals are named after features present only on the male, e.g. Red-Winged Blackbird, Yellow-Winged Blackbird, etc. when the females aren't black and don't have yellow wings. Anyone who stops to think for even a second can easily point out the females don't just lack those features (prioritizing safe camouflage where males must risk their lives attracting female/predator attention or be bred out of the gene pool) but usually any clear distinguishing features altogether. If you named everything after the females you'd end up with a thousand species of Brown-Winged Brownbird!

 

Stag beetles aren't named that because they go to stag parties. Obvious features are obvious, and yes, we communicate recognizable information. I don't care how far the educational system has backslid, you cannot possibly reach doctorate level while still not functioning at a high enough mental level to follow that reasoning. It is only fanatical devotion, absolute irrational faith in the feminist core dogma of "man bad, woman good" which fabricates this desperate need to bash and condemn men for anything and everything, no matter how nonsensical, in order to reaffirm one's supplication before female moral supremacy. Once inside the faith, you'll never even feel your own fanatical momentum leading you over the brink, parroting insanity for the sake of it.

 

Sadly, even though many of us can spot such insanity, we do not believe ourselves in a position to answer it with sanity, for fear of being labeled misogynists and ostracized and/or knocked down a tax bracket for the rest of your life as unfit for polite society. The last thing you want in a university is critical thought, right?

Uprising: Join or Die Harder Another Decade

"Join or Die!!!"

Freakin' amazing marketing slogan right there. Sure puts John Romero making you his bitch into context, don't it? Anyway:

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"If you could flick the switch and open your third eye
You'd see that we should never be afraid to die"

 

Muse - Uprising

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Among WH40K: Mechanicus' better features, it nailed the parallel campaign structure, advancing each NPC's quest chain while weighing the risks and rewards against each other's offerings skewed toward higher level troops or extra deployment slots, etc. That division of campaign resources among hero, unit or logistic upgrades rang a bell all the way back to 1997.

 

Narrowly predating Activision's better publicized Battlezone (and presumably inspired by Atari's 1980 tank-themed arcade game Battlezone) Uprising was one of the first RTS/FPS titles, a hybrid genre which sprang up so quickly alongside its inspirations that it was clearly always the next logical step in expanding their potential. While this convergence of genres toward something greater petered out over the next decade in favor of MMOs' similar (and more promising) combination of RPG/RTS, MMOs' abject failure to live up to expectations over the past eighteen years now leaves room for an RTS/FPS revival, prompting me to reminisce about what made Uprising so engaging.

I did play Battlezone 2, and where its campaign was more heavily story-based, with all the cutscenes, lengthy voiceovers and combat encounter over-scripting that entails, Uprising homed in squarely on the combat commanding. Your tank is not only the most powerful weapons platform on the field, but a mobile teleport beacon calling in troops, tanks, dogfighters, bombers and satellite laz0rz of DOOOOM from a shared resource pool accrued by your bases like the one pictured above.

The teleport gimmick was largely mandated by primitive 3D graphics with their very close fog barrier and pathing algorithms that would make a first-generation Roomba look like Sacagawea. Nevertheless, while in close proximity to their objectives, units acted more independently that those of contemporary RTS or FPS titles, picking targets and chasing or circling around each other. Due attention was paid to balance, with infantry in their role as cheapest, weakest cannon fodder also being able to dynamite reinforced structures in place of more expensive bomber runs, or interceptors specializing in bomber defense but also making a dandy distraction for their evasiveness. The AI was also more proactive than you'd expect from its era, launching multi-pronged attacks and escalating its response to your presence.

 

While this "scatterwhelming" experience as I once characterized it overemphasized hyperactivity, it also made Uprising one of the early games to feel alive instead of just <YOU><THE-HERO> ambling from room to room shotgunning each baddie in turn or building up two dozen ogre mages to throw at the enemy's one dozen paladins. While simulation games (see Maxis' old run of SimFarm, SimAnt, SimEarth, etc.) always carried this quality, it took almost another generation for it to gradually seep into other genres (see Majesty for an early example; fights between marines and aliens were also one of the original Half-Life's more frequently applauded moments) and even now it's most obvious in city/village simulators where you set goals to be indirectly completed by NPC mooks.

 

To anyone interested in bringing back RTS/FPS hybrids, I'd say you can't copy that original formula from 1997; it's passé. A straight-up Uprising remake will flop and rightly so. Instead look at what captured players' imagination back then in relation to plain-Jane FPS or RTS:

1) that divergent long-term resource investment into troops, logistics, heroes, god powers, hovertank arsenal, what-have-you lending both continuity and personal choice to your campaign

2) take a page from city sims and let storytelling grow out of gameplay. Do NOT over-script a game like this, because you're in fact cutting into the player's relation to the wider action all around. The player should not be able to do everything, but should select where to throw his considerable weight upon a field of many other, interweaving battle lines, personally directing only some of the various potentially subordinate troops. You are "A" combat commander not "THE" combat commander.

To some extent games like Bannerlord already display de facto successful application of these ideas (buy yourself some lordly armor or fifty new troops, attack a new castle or rush over to save Saneopa because that idiot Lucon's about to lose a siege, man a mangonel or hold a stairway against enemy reinforcements, etc.) and many others besides, but I'd say the more focused RTS/FPS niche, maybe with a mission-based (randomized or not) campaign mode, might once again have some room to grow.

 

And, from there... dare we hope... multiplayer? I haven't tried Eximius (we should be outgrowing the DotA 5v5 limitation, which was only ever dictated by Warcraft 3's 6v6 (5+AI) multiplayer restriction to begin with) but this was always a genre perfectly geared toward teamwork... which is partly why it died out as multiplayer vaporized in favor of gear grinding and score farming. Will GenZ prove more capable of cooperation?

 

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P.S. While I'm linking GoG's version of Uprising out of habit, be warned it will simply not work on most modern computers. It took me dozens of tries on two different boxes before managing to get into the first mission for a screenshot. (And for nostalgia, damnit.)

Drop the Damn Masks

"Sick sick sound

All fall down
It is a necessary evil -yeaaah!
Just like highway gas stations and people - yeeaaaah!

I remember golden days when all this was a mystery
And you could write a letter then or god forbid come visit me"

 

Dresden Dolls - Necessary Evil

 

 

I've been getting more and more annoyed over the past six months, as COVID-19 mask mandates were loosened and finally dropped, at seeing some still wearing them as some act of defiance, to the point that I find myself on the opposite political side from last year's railing against antivax paranoia. Situations change. Just as the whole point was for ALL of us to wear facemasks two years ago, it's conversely pointless now just to posture as saving the world.

 

Don't get me wrong, plenty of people might wear one with cause. Maybe you just have some unidentified sniffle and you're using the mask for common courtesy in not infecting others with the common cold or flu either - let's remember those masks aren't antibody-loaded; they're all-purpose filters. Then there's young children, not all of whom have been fully vaccinated yet, and their parents who have to set a good example... BY VACCINATING THEIR DAMN KIDS INSTEAD OF JUST WEARING MASKS... or the elderly. I saw a rather antique female, masked, barely trudging behind a grocery store cart who looked positively terrified of the rest of us - maybe with good cause, I don't know what her last WBC count looked like, keep yourself safe gram.

But overall, life goes on, you can't completely up-end society for the sake of perfect bovine safety, most of us have been triple-dosed for half a year, and overwhelmingly the ones I see still sporting their badge of compliance are none of the above categories. They're perfectly healthy, twenty-something yuppies with nary a trace of respiratory discomfort, sipping their lattes through a straw, wearing masks as a fashion statement. Oh, fuck me. If it's not one set of idiots it's the other.

 

The last thing we needed was for a critical health measure to be degraded to just one more perennial, thoughtless SJW virtue signal. Drastic measures were needed in 2020 because of a new infection toward which we had no immunological defense, whether induced naturally or artificially. We needed to prevent 2% of the world's population, 160 million people, from dropping dead in one summer for lack of readiness. We've done that... badly... but it's mostly done, unless China cooks up some new menace, at which point have no fear, dead slaves are of no use to our corporate masters and they'll have their government patsies reinstate public health measures. The message was "flatten the curve" to prevent flooding hospitals not "be 3M's gimp for the rest of your life" and your pro-mask paranoia isn't helping matters any more than anti-vax paranoia. By this point the virus is obviously here to stay, and the measures against it really do approach those of the yearly flu.

 

I don't see world-saving heroes when I see masked yuppies. All I see is a bunch of fanatical braindead hicks expecting us to read their declaration that 'the south shall rise again' as some sort of heroism. Stop living in the past, hipsters, the masks are, like, soooooo last year. Quit posturing and just take your Listerine.

Burgher Quest

or: "Turn, Hellhound, Turn!"

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"Dein hässlicher Bruder, ein Schlag ins Gesicht"

Eisbrecher - Verrückt

 

"So how much easier would life be if nineteen million motherfuckers grew to be just like me?"

Eminem - Who Knew

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Anybody remember Galaxy Quest? Not whatever sequel or spin-off or remake Hollywood's bragging about making now, for fear of originality. I mean the original parody of Star Trek and by extension SciFi fandom from 1999, which turned out to be both funny and an unexpectedly engaging little SF adventure flick and contributed in no small amount to the public's increased acceptance of SF/Fantasy entertainment over the following years.

 

Long story short, actors from a defunct Trek-ish TV series get shanghaied by space aliens to Last Starfighter to death some green lizard space general. They learn to grow into their heroic roles, save the day, and one guy fucks a tentacle monster. As basic plots go, you've heard better. Execution was key. Among Galaxy Quest's virtues, it didn't skimp on the special effects just because it was a comedy. Glossy visuals prevented the audience from disengaging from the heroes' perils, hitting that dramedy balance point upon which our expectations can never quite settle into complacency. I've recently found myself thinking how much the film relied on the uncanny valley effect. Tim Allen for instance would normally make a terrible SciFi protagonist... until you realize he's actually playing William Shatner, now pretty universally recognized as a terrible SciFi protagonist. He's not supposed to be a good fit. But, more importantly of course, the Thermians in their ill-fitting human suits, while heavily feminized/neotenized to secure the audience's unthinking sympathy, also maintained enough rigidity in their movements and their taut, awkward facial expressions to remain offputting at the best of times.

It reminds me of a creative work far less appreciated by the modern public at large, Rodin's Burghers of Calais, who are not feminized or grinning babyishly at the audience. They're a bunch of unsympathetic, sour-faced curmudgeons dragging their feet and avoiding eye contact. It takes a bit of viewing to notice the almost imperceptible caricature traces in their features, most obvious in their slightly oversized, bony hands, but also, once you know what to look for, in their emaciated, siege-starved sunken eyes and senescence-enlarged ears and noses. If Rodin wanted to show human bravery with human features, he wound up more human than human.

If you've been paying attention to my bloggerin' here you probably guessed I'd somehow bring this around to video games at some point. Good for you, have a cookie, shut up and listen: the burghers are a team. A team, you got that? The town had wanted a single heroic figure symbolizing glorious martyrdom, a fairytale Prince Charming for viewers to look up to and pretend to identify with. Rodin gave them personal suffering and resolve marching alongside themselves. That should be the sentiment evoked whenever you queue up for a team game, not the false expectation of playing the hero but amor fati, that bitter plodding slide into the inimical fray, that embrance of a death worth dying, that "far, far better thing I do" raging into "cursed be he that first cries 'hold, enough!'"

This is far from the first time I've brought this up. I'll gladly support anyone in refusing the idea of innate debt or duty in real life. You owe the apes around you nothing simply for being born, or being born the wrong sex or race. But if you willingly and through no necessity join a group activity, like a game, you implicitly devote yourself to the group, and any behavior to the contrary should be immediately and mercilessly punished and exterminated. You exist to suffer and die taking as many enemies down with you as possible; that is your only worth and your only purpose, end of story. While parasitic vermin playing team games only to pad their own personal scores, using their teammates as props, plagued online games (as they do every human endeavor) from the beginning, the past decades' cultural devolution hitting rock bottom in snowflake narcissism has by now ensured such behavior drowns out any better alternatives. Every online game seems to consist predominantly of dickless little bitches running away from fights, taking the easiest way out, and bitching at their betters for not running away faster, condemning any 'tryhards' struggling toward the objective. Whether it's teleporting around the map looking for effortless captures, or spamming surrender votes as soon as it doesn't look like they'll get a free win, or letting your team fight 4v5 while you hit defenseless inanimate objects, or yet another life gain proc card deck, the idea that only the easiest option is worth taking mirrors only too well our real world popular politics, the spineless little twerps rallying behind the most widely accepted pablum they can trumpet like 'slavery is bad' or 'babies are cute' in abject terror of being forced to argue an unpopular point.

Say what you will about the youth of the nineties, but at least we remembered how to hate ourselves - not just our race, sex or sexuality, but our own personal failings.

Given that your role in a game can be more viscerally your own and that ideas are easier to workshop and play out in a virtual space maybe you should be trying a little harder to teach the up and coming generation to grow a fucking spine via online games. And sure, I'd try to make them tie nooses around their necks and accept their fates with grim determination. You are a shitstain on your team's asshole and your only worth lies in dying in its service. Any little retard who panics and runs instead of helping allies? Knock his teeth out and throw him off a bridge. The penalty for desertion is execution. No matter how much your score is suffering, keep trudging to the gallows like those burghers. I'd probably fail, but that's how I'd do it. Go for the throat. But maybe lycanthropy ain't for everyone.

So, okay, fine, you want a cheerier option? Self-sacrifice still hinges on seeing oneself as not entirely human, not heroic, not the nec plus ultra of the team's aspirations, not a woman or a child whose well-being comes first. We still desperately need some dwarven steadfastness. At least remember those plucky, sappy, dopey, lovable Thermians from Galaxy Quest, supporting cast in their own story, inhumanly awkward and imperfect, hopelessly out of their depth in an open conflict and seeking heroes... but also willing to stand by those heroes to the bitter end. If nobody can drum up a proper berserker rage anymore, at least make the new slogan of team activities that slightly off-kilter cry of:

Nnnevergiveup! NevER, surrENder!

WH40K: Mech Any Cuss

By the will of the Om-me-ssiah I declare this game middlin' tolerable!

 

Space-robo-zombies with railguns, taste my space-axe!

Warhammer's worst and best feature is its unsubtlety. If there is any plot to be found in Mechanicus' flavor text, it's blatantly laid out in the first ten lines of dialogue between your campaign's NPC quest-givers:

But while you do make a de facto choice between finishing Scaevola or Videx's last mission (easy choice for me - screw the reactionary, embrace new tech all the way, awww yeah baby, corrupt me like that) this is a squad tactical not an RPG and flavor text is just for flavor, focusing your decision-making almost entirely on strategy. To start with, Mechanicus appears the closest spiritual successor to Chaos Gate, a game remembered by surprisingly many for its very mediocrity... and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Graphics sometimes bleed over each other or disappear, I've had mobs teleport over the map's edge inexplicably, but at least four years after release bugs are few, far between and of little impact. Worse are the misconceived design choices. The game's main conceit is that you find yourself on a planet of rapidly awakening enemy cyberzombies and must run missions as efficiently as possible to build up your forces before you need to fight the big boss. In practical terms, this means you're timed by a grand total of combat rounds, each five rounds spent adding up to a percent of "awakening" with plenty of leeway in cancelling out spent rounds or being penalized with extra rounds for making the wrong choices.

 

Forty-six missions are subdivided into one to three combats of several rounds, plus an overland map phase advancing a few interlinked nodes (at two rounds a move) and making dialogue choices in response to various events. I found these enjoyable enough, written with enough ambiguity to make you weigh basic strategy against your role as cult leader, with just enough randomness thrown in to remind you the universe hates you, but not so much as to turn it into a luck-based game. This can't be said for the other type of map node, glyphs, which just make you choose randomly between some abstract symbols with zero meaning to be discerned. You might decide to roleplay regular node decisions, but the glyphs seem put there just to make you reload for luck.

Overall, it's stretched just slightly thin. Albeit not nearly to the extent of Sanctus Reach, you will run into some redundancy (reused map layouts, only seven skill lines for six characters with two-and-change specializations each) and some balance issues. Just as with the campaign's timer, Mechanicus' devotion to arithmetic comes through in basic combat as well

Damage boosts and Taming the Machine Spirit (instantly fills all your weapons' rage bars for bonus effects) can let you mop up entire fights in the first round, or even just one shot. That Heavy Grav Cannon sure clears a room, provided the room's big enough for your team to stand out of boom-boom radius. Your greatest tactical challenge is managing your team's shared mana pool (a.k.a. "cognition") as a finite resource of 5-10 with no passive regeneration, gathered from your environment. I wholeheartedly applaud any return of resource management... if only they hadn't undercut their system by handing you full mana refills. By the end I was running 4/6 Lexmechanic for Overcharge (+2 Tech-Auxilium for free casts) making a joke not only out of trash mobs but the bosses, even the big boss Szaregon who got K.O.d in the opening round - and I wasn't even specifically slotted for it. Some players have custom-built groups and one-shotted him and his paltry hundred HP for shits and giggles. In other words, on "normal" difficulty this is an easy game (though you do get quite a few unusual difficulty sliders to spice things up, not only in terms of damage but movement speed or limiting your ability casts) and only sloppy design makes it more of a slog than it has to be.

I ended up skipping Videx' last three missions, because I spent half the campaign incurring far more awakening penalty than necessary for not realizing the "scan or destroy" descriptor in combat should read "scan, then destroy" letting you finish many missions at zero percent penalty without surrendering combat loot. Still, it throws more tactical challenges at you than the singleminded Scooby Doo repetition of Mutant Year Zero for instance; surrounded or facing off over a bridge, swarmed or swarming a boss, slow and steady or speeding to loot'n'scoot, etc. It also gives you far more freedom than old Chaos Gate did in choosing your path forward by half a dozen mission options, of varying difficulty and tantalizing rewards, at any one time.

So why am I not giving Mechanicus a heartier recommendation?

Interface timesinks.

As per current marketing dogma, Mechanicus strains to pad out its run length by any means possible. You might blame it on unoptimized code slowing everything down (and there are some inexplicably slow loads) until you notice the odd skill like Refractor Field Generator insta-casting with no fuss. No, the issue here is that every single possible action and interaction has an extra half second tacked on to both its beginning and end, a timer ticking down, resource by resource ticking up increment by increment, weapons charging, weapons discharging, abilities being prepared, text boxes opening and closing, text scrolling, abilities casting, map paths lighting up, pop-ups popping up, manually removing items from loadouts instead of replacing them with something else in one double-click, clicking through the huge unsorted canticles list one by one, even clicking "save game" makes you back out manually through three menus afterwards. At three hundred mouse clicks per mission compounded over fifty missions, eating at barest minimum four extra hours' of your customers' time simply by extending the time to click a mouse is pretty unforgivable, and ironic in a campaign revolving around managing time investment.

So why am I not giving Mechanicus a heartier condemnation?

Strategically, player directed mission progression and unit choice (you get some disposable mooks aside from your priests; yay ruststalker!) and variable investment in each mission by navigating nodes all add up to unassumingly solid TBS gameplay. But, this being a French game, its aesthetic side manages to stand out even with relatively little budget. As I said, the WH40K universe is an unsubtle one, and the only real way to own it is to play it to the hilt. Back in the '90s Warhammer's "grimdark" stylings were easily lost in all the witches, xenomorphs, Crows, Terminators, general goth craze and heavy metal's death rattle. Now though, slogging through pop culture's stagnant, rancid forced politeness, a bit of kill'em'all skulls'n'flames badassery comes as such a breath of fresh air, and Mechanicus plays it up in everything from gory descriptions of slaughtered troops to the NPCs' modem demonic simlish conversations. I certainly approve of Scaevola's transhumanist bent being treated as a valid end choice, and though the various talking heads' stock dialogue wears thin by repetition (yeah, Faustinius, you're compartmentalized, you're very compartmentalized, we get it, can't you compartmentalize reminding us of your compartmentalization?) they fill their roles well enough. Visually, the Necron temples fit their scifantasy Minas Morgul routine better than most such imitations. Seriously, look at their freaking combat transition screen!

Metal. As. Fuck. (Also, ahre you Sahrhah Cohnnor?)

But, as with Chaos Gate, everyone who talks about this game will mention the music. Where Chaos Gate's choral soundtrack simply fit the setting perfectly in a "so bad it's good" way, Mechanicus' industrial pipe organ is objectively great stuff with pretty much everyone praising Dance of the Cryptek. Maybe Bulwark Studios will move on to great things, maybe not... but I do think we'll be hearing more from Guillaume David.

 

It's rare to recommend a game as both worth your time and a waste of time at the same time.

For the first time, it wasn't the last time.

Screw you, brain, not this year.