Solasta: Crown of the Magister

"Disarm the swordsman or punch like Bruce
Sunder or bull rush or trip 'em
Grapple or pin or maybe seduce
It's all in the way that you grip 'em
Get more advantage from AoOs
Take a feat called combat reflexes
Only one blow on each of your foes
How many? Depends what your DEX is"

 

Mary Crowell - Opportunity Tango

 

 

After buying Solasta, I gradually remembered perusing its Kickstarter page several years ago and finally deciding against it. Yet another gaggle of starry-eyed fans aspiring to creators, thought I, with more enthusiasm than talent or expertise, who'll just pocket my money and slink off into the sunset. I guess I was... partly wrong-ish... about this one? The not entirely hostile yet still tepid release made me put off buying it even then. Certainly Solasta screams "low budget" from the surprisingly <not> algorithmically generated music to the stilted animations surprisingly <not> having been churned through the old Aurora engine, limited original campaign, limited models. Skim the credits. Note the main team features exactly one name in every category, with the rest outsourced to disinterested third parties. Still, despite its weaknesses, Solasta actually shows the most potential of recent tactical RPGs, and it's worth discussing from several angles.

Compounding the problem, this is my first exposure to DnD 5e rules, and I'm constantly struggling not to blame Tactical Adventures for the limitations inherent in the system they unwisely chose to adapt instead of the more complex 3.5e / Pathfinder. (Hint: complexity is good.) But, it's not like their own creative input drips with creativity. If the basic "thing of the stuff" title didn't tip you off, expect a standard "Tolkien with more explosions" high fantasy world. Once upon a time there was a magnificent empire but then magic(k?)(a?) done explodered all over, so now the usual humanoid kingdoms are picking through millennial rubble for ancient mystical artifacts, one of which (the aforementioned Crown of the aforementioned Magister) your rag-tag quartet of misfits trips over near the start of your adventure. Also, insidious shapeshifting reptiloids from beyond the moon!

Forced to single-class with no prestige options, I might as well opt for a flexible Sylvan Elf Druid (of the Land) Philosopher, with personality traits Cynicism, Pragmatism, Egoism and Cynicism again... because duh, it's me. Proficiencies Nature and Arcana - (edit: turned out to be a must-have for crafting)

EndGame Me

Decided to run with it: a whole party of heavily cynical wood elves.

- My Jungian Shadow, a Stealth/Acrobatics focused Rogue (Shadowcaster) -  (edit: enemies use very little AoE, so just as in Wasteland 3 where my Shadow had 55% evasion and nobody bothered targeting her, here with 20DEX, Blur, Shield and Uncanny Dodge she became my most resilient character)

- Quiver, a Ranger (Marksman) (no point in a wood elf team without archery) with Animal Handling in case I can't pick it up on my druid later on. (edit: not that I ever got to use it; 0 checks)

- Sway, a Barbarian (Magebane) with 13 starting Charisma. Face it, teh chixz0rz always dig a bare-chested prettyboy beating up nerds. (edit: but I only encountered one Intimidate check)

Even if my beastmastery went almost completely unused (landed two control spells of four or five attempts the entire campaign) the team's aptitude for stealthed ranged opening volleys served me quite well indeed. As probably its greatest fundamental selling point, Solasta makes a big show of implementing tabletop mechanics normally ignored by D&D computer adaptations, like spell foci taking actual equipment slots, keeping a hand free for spells with somatic components, or knocking enemies back/prone. Surprise rounds are fully enforced including the barbarian ability to rage free. Climbing or jumping ability facilitates three-dimensionality across heavily fragmented battlefields consisting of many platforms, towers, pits and towering forests. There's a lot to be said for brawling with nimble pillar-clambering goblins while slowed by a rushing river atop a waterfall, or summoning a flying snake and turning into an eagle to bumrush spiders spitting venom at you from the treetops.

 

But while a couple of the more interesting puzzles make you think three-dimensionally, and fighting wall-climbing enemies throws a welcome wrinkle into your tactics, 3D mechanics are hard hit by the developers' limitations.

Lack of special animations makes wall-climbing look plain stupid, you'll reload quite a few times due to inconsistencies in what can or cannot be climbed/jumped due to arbitrary restrictions to retain the "fly" spell's utility, and even good gimmicks get overused: "OK, platforms mean an ambush crawling dramatically toward me up from the fiery deeps" and yup, there it is right on cue like those patches of different-colored wall in old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

The Crown of the Magister campaign just falls short of its aspirations in too many individually minor but collectively rankling ways.

- Skin tones look like they came out of a crayon box. Some gear suffers from same, with wands looking like strips of red licorice.

- Lacking the assets to decorate the adequately proportioned maps they wanted, every town/fort street is littered with piles upon piles of the same boxes, barrels, carts, bales of hay, barrels, boxes and more barrels.

- Every cutscene begins with the same "last guy enters from stage left" animation.

- Movement checks are all athletics, no acrobatics.

- Detect magic detects nothing.

- One puzzle offers underwater loot by draining the water - but doesn't my athletics check mention swimming?

- Dialogue at the start of the last zone introduces fire spiders as dramatic new foes... except you've been fighting them all along.

- No screen edge mouse scroll is a weird omission these days.

- The camera simply doesn't zoom out far enough to take in the battlefield, not to mention the lack of tilting.

- I am fucking sick of interface timesinks and every low-budget "indie" game abuses them to no end. Aside from readying your weapon and lowering it for every single attack, some of the death animations (spiders and elementals especially) are just insultingly overextended. And the dice... ugh, the fucking... never mind, later.

- Main campaign, albeit well paced, runs only to level 10. I was technically 11 in the screenshot above, but the last zone lacks rest points.

- Worst of all, zero roleplaying.

That last one's a major issue in a story-based ROLEPLAYING game.

- No alignment implementation whatsoever.

- No practical impact of backgrounds (aside from some trivial and badly-written two-room side quests) or personality traits.

- The one time you're set up for a moral decision (killing a defenseless cultist foot soldier) he pre-empts the choice by spontaneously dying.

- Four factions introduced as competing with each other, mutually exclusive, but really you can just level them all at once. They're thematically identical anyway.

 

And even the linear storytelling and dialogue hardly leaps off the page by its literary genius:

Surprisingly good voice acting can't compensate for characters written as gamers struggling to stay in character, especially your own party whose banter is too obviously exactly that: banter. Pre-chewed snarks, put-downs and stating the obvious, especially when randomized (my barbarian wanderer giving me a history lesson? or better yet, an etiquette lesson? WHAT!?) can't but come across as fake and shatter the little immersion you managed to scrape together.
 

I've griped enough on this blog about bad storytelling that I shouldn't have to reiterate the point, but specifically in the case of tactical RPGs I have to once again ask: what can you give me that Planetfall doesn't? If all you can offer is party-based tactics on a grid, the market is increasingly saturated with competitors more capable of algorithmically generating that with more character/gear/ability options, and even within D&D rulesets, Low Magic Age makes a better bare-bones dungeon crawler. I'll skip my gripes about 5e for another time except to say I'm NOT a fan of it dumbing absolutely everything down and relegating combat outcomes almost entirely to dice rolls and an advantage/disadvantage system even more dependent on dice rolls.

Which brings us back to the dice.

The fucking dice.

The motherfucking dice fetish.

Instead of fleshing out its many practical and aesthetic lacks, Solasta dazzles you with customizable colored dice in thirty-one flavors rolling at the bottom of your screen with every single action. Dice rolls are born of necessity on tabletop, and one of computers' best advantages (aside from not having to interact with a bunch of flesh-and-blood imbeciles around a table) is automating that necessity in the background and leaving you to focus on actual gameplay. With, yes, a breakdown of each die roll in the combat log if you should so desire to look into the details.

 

There you have Solasta's biggest problem: it doesn't focus on good content per se but on fetishizing the hobby, the form devoid of content, the "feels" of sitting in front of a vinyl placemat rolling dice, in keeping with your party's banter sounding like a bunch of socializing apes stuffing their faces with pizza around a dinette set. And, in keeping with interface timesinks, even if you turn off the stupid dice roll animations the interface still pauses every single action as if it were displaying the dice!

 

So why, despite this combination of overstretched budget, 5e idiocy and gamer fetish idiocy, am I standing behind my initial statement that Solasta looks more promising than its competitors? Well, the basic mechanics, ignoring the over-randomization of d20s, are solid. Tile movement, targeting, verticality, hit dice, overland travel and restricted resting complete with quick rests, reactions and quick actions, surprise rounds and difficult terrain, status effects and dialogue prompts, faction rep and light levels, all this fundamental framework simply works, more clearly, reliably and comprehensively than you find in the likes of Original Sin or Wrath of the Righteous. Tactical Adventures even paid attention to some long-standing quality of life issues like a quick travel option in town that doesn't skip encounter triggers, automated trash loot hauling, cutscenes not breaking you out of stealth or repositioning you in your enemy's crosshairs, etc. You do get gratuitously boosted to lvl2 in the tutorial, but at least generally speaking, both levels and gear come slowly enough to feel far more significant than usual. Even the AI is pretty good: runs around / out of damage AoEs about half the time, weighs this against keeping up the pressure on you.

 

Microsoft having destroyed North American cRPG development, that vacuum is begging to be filled. Crown of the Magister may be a mediocre campaign at best, but Solasta as an underlying system has raised the bar for basic gameplay and left TA plenty of room to grow, should they feel inclined to write better content.

If only it weren't in 5e.

 

Oh well. They did release their first expansion campaign, Lost Valley, so I guess we'll see if they persist in wasting their potential.

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edit 2022/08/20:

Continued for the Lost Valley campaign here. Long story short, disappointing.

3022 Cloverfields

"It's got a vampire AND an explosion!"

- Futurama

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Spoilers for the movies 3022 and The Cloverfield Paradox, though both are weak enough flicks to come pre-spoiled.

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If you were wondering what Omar Epps did after House, 3022 displays his talents fairly enough... and that's about all it does. The rest of the acting isn't bad either (though co-star Kate Walsh normally stars in TV series I'd only watch as part of some Clockwork Orange aversion treatment) but Wikipedia qualifying it as "movies set on space stations" comes across as a tongue-in-cheek assessment of its overall worth. I liked it well enough, but again I'm predisposed toward stories about extinction-level events, as a quick perusal of my pathetic attempts at storytelling will demonstrate. Anyway, in the year 2190 the Earth blows up. No alien motherships, no extra-juicy hurricanes, no extra-flamboyant solar flares; the Earth just spontaneously, inexplicably... blows up. The crew of a refueling station for ships bound for Europa has to deal with being left all alone in the universe, and deals with it badly because space agencies apparently select crews from the most compromised, mentally unstable stock our species produces. Don't expect scientific literacy to shine any brighter in the details, from planets that apparently don't planet to "shockwaves" in space, to smoking cigarettes in a filtered closed atmosphere to what exactly are you refueling ships with and where are they getting their reaction mass and while we're at it doesn't stopping midway to anywhere in frictionless space simply waste momentum, to mission control possessing the only electromagnetic transmission device in existence, to giant glowing computer displays of life support and the crew's health... expressed as percentages. Don't fart or you lose half a point.

But as ridiculous as that all sounds, it's still in a league beyond The Cloverfield Paradox. I actually tolerated the original Cloverfield well enough, and back in 2008 the notion of a first-person, ground-level view of a kaiju invasion came across as a fresh take on an old premise, jittercam abuse aside. Clinging to that conceit, Paradox takes so freshly as to have nothing to do with the original premise. An alternate-reality Earth suffering from energy shortages (but where nobody telecommutes or uses public transport) tasks a space station with creating infinite energy. Needless to say science is evil so the particle accelerator malfunctions and sends the station to an alternate universe, swapping it for the kaiju from the original movie, which is the exactly one connection between them comprising three seconds of air time. (Turns out JJ Abrams tacked that on as an afterthought to a completely unrelated script.) The rest is interpersonal drama between highly trained scientists with less creative or analytical ability than your average post office crew, backed by some TwilightZone-grade science. Where the original accepted kaiju biology as a necessary divergence from physics but otherwise kept the action realistic, here we rapidly depart "science" fiction altogether for the realms of horror movie mysticism. The station-ary object that needs a fancy gyroscope to navigate (to where?) starts phasing random parts of itself between realities and teleporting objects with the directed malice of a poltergeist. Combined with the constant angsting about family members, the brief medical drama and gratuitously contrived spy movie sabotage subplot, one can't help but arrive at the impression of a script cobbled together from every possible genre in the hopes it'll magically make sense somehow. It doesn't. At any point. Did I mention the inexplicably sentient disembodied arm writing prophetic messages? Let's not.

Studios seem to love stories set on small isolated spaceships / space stations. The enclosed environment excuses its own limited scope, variety or props budget, and the small population saves them from hiring extras or bit players. For a bonus, they can abuse the pretext of claustrophobic mental trauma to write characters making idiotic decisions or filling air time arguing with each other, and for a bonus bonus fill more air time with long, wistful takes angsting over their loved ones they left behind... although you should probably have been aware you'd be far away when you jetted off into space. Did noone inform you that space is big?

Still, there's at least a distinction to be made between badly researched, badly plotted SciFi movies which nevertheless show some dedication to their genre (3022) and the baser, more cynically profiteering breed (Cloverfield Paradox) which just slap together fifty cliches and set them on a spaceship because I guess space is weird so anything might happen in space oOOooweeEEEWooo have I suspended your disbelief yet? No? Well obviously we just need more lasers or whatever.

 Been uppin' m' tersin'.

Lolarelai

"I wish I was a princess with armies at her hand"

Wish (Komm zu mir) Lola rennt soundtrack

 

You should not exist. Your life is a waste and your every failure, every failing, reaffirms that reality. But don't expect that analyzed here.

Playing The Cat Lady basically put me off adventure games for a while (not that it's my favorite genre to begin with) not because it was bad (though it had its flaws) but because its insightful grasp of its central theme of depression hit so hard that it became a tough act to follow. Still, The Wolf Among Us, Primordia, Strangeland and Gabriel Knight helped ease me back into old-timey story-based puzzle solving over the past couple of years, so I thought I might as well bite the bullet and try The Cat Lady's sequel, Lorelai.

In terms of game design, Lorelai does improve upon its two predecessors' amateurishness in many ways, from having a decent save system to improved graphic quality to scene transitions and slightly improved voice acting. The old women still sound painfully fake but I was surprised at not wanting to strangle the ever-chipper Maria. Even its pacing and jump scares are brilliant in some spots: "can't wait, coming through!"

 

On the other hand the music is weaker, and though The Cat Lady's puzzles were certainly lackluster, here they're so reduced in both scope and complexity as to be painfully obvious, and further spoiled by too many obvious hints and outright giveawaways like "you belong in the sea" leaving very little game to be played. And, unfortunately, the same shallow approach mars Lorelai's chief psychological storytelling selling point, with one of the more deliberately aggravating characters hitting upon the underlying problem:

Quickly rebuffed, quickly forgotten

Originally I'd assumed I'd be quoting Metric's Lost Kitten for Lorelai's epigraph, thinking it would delve into the psychological foibles of teenage runaways. But more and more while playing it I was instead reminded of watching Run Lola Run. A decent flick from a technical perspective, snappy and stylish and captivating enough within its unambitious premise, but at least Tom Tykwer didn't make the mistake of mandating moral entitlement for his protagonist: a spoiled little princess of no particular qualities screaming for attention until the universe itself bends to her demands.

 

At least Susan Ashworth had the decency to hate herself. It was never even clear how much of her ugliness was real, self-inflicted by neglect or outright imagined, as what we saw on screen was arguably her self-image warped by extended, gnawing depression. Her personal needs and desires were deliberately shown impacting her milieu negatively (e.g. playing the piano at night to summon the neighbourhood's pests) and constantly snapping at others, since yes, suffering, whether physical or psychological, externally or internally originated, real or imagined, does not make you a nice person. Lorelai in contrast lacks any such internal conflict or insight forced upon her by her trials. She never questions her evident prettiness, does the right thing by default and has "nice" options in every conversation for sheer doggoned niceness, and your adventure even starts with "I deserve a better life" a line so crass it could only be redeemed if by the end it turns out she doesn't.

It doesn't help that the storytelling has taken a severe nosedive into triteness, with moral lessons like be nice to animals and don't sass your elders, a tediously overextended sappy love story and a hero's mentor straight out of shoujo manga. From the very start when you're introduced to a household of three females and one male, you know with 100% certainty who the villain will be, and at no point does Michalski even try to surprise you or throw any nuance into their dynamic. To top it off it seems damn near impossible to get anything resembling a "bad" ending no matter how obnoxious, stupid or harmful you act, with Lorelai's final fate running a rosy gamut from safe cozy neutrality to "heroine saves day for everyone by not even her own efforts" sound the motherfucking trumpets.

Where The Cat Lady hit so hard for deconstructing self-destructive behavior and justifications, Lorelai just shallowly reinforces adolescent girl narcissism with the conviction that the prettiest heroine in the room deserves her happy ending. She deserves to have her beau sacrifice himself for her because he loves her. She deserves the help of random strangers taking her side. What's truly scary about it is how aptly yet naively it captures feminine sociopathy, and glorifies it, most evidently in killing Al by whispers in his ears "because I'm a survivor" with no repercussions because he's a loser, with not even a mention of guilt for this in the final monologue. We are left to assume that Lorelai deserves to drive a male recovering alcoholic to suicide by poisoning every aspect of his life, because she's young and pretty and especially female. Young men exist to serve her. Older men are either villains to be defeated or unworthy sacrifices on her altar.

I loved The Cat Lady (and have no intention of replaying it in the near future) and related to its protagonist but hated its forced happy ending. I-as-Susan wanted to be treated worse by the end because it would have been more fitting to my projected persona. Here, aside from some good, if brief characterization in the nursing home and alchololism chapters (where Michalski likely drew once again from past work experience) we're treated to that gratuitous happy ending stretched the length of the entire game, a constant primitive simian reassurance that pretty young females are just better and more deserving than everyone else. As if they need anyone to feed their endless overentitlement.

Didn't get your way? Just scream your head off until the universe rearranges in your favor.

All Should Be Lost

"Just a moment of peace

The white spot in the black"

 

Ellen Allien & Apparat - Leave Me Alone

 

 

It says a bit about the current state of our culture that I found myself wondering "when's the last time I saw some piece of self-proclaimed entertainment that didn't just bash straight white men... oh yeah, 2013!" And even then simply because it only had the one character.

Anyone summarizing All Is Lost will inevitably shrug it down to "there's this guy on a boat" and then struggle to convince you that yes, you should definitely watch a hundred minutes of this guy on a boat... with its ten lines of monologue and extended spackling interlude. So yeah, there's this guy on a boat, and he plays with plastic bottles and you should definitely see it. As deservedly as one-man plays are usually mocked as the facetious posturing of stultified narcissists, the Sundance Kid's reaction shots more than make up for the lack of other reactants. Still, remembering Redford mime and grunt and occasionally curse against the wind and waves makes me wonder why we don't see more of this in various media. Robinsonesque adventures upon closer inspection tend to fake you out: the protagonist just thinks he's alone until Friday shows up, or some pirates, or a love interest or space aliens or whatever. Pure PvE stories are rare indeed. Into the Wild was largely poisoned by being twisted into a prosocial moral. And while movies will occasionally toy with the idea (Tom Hanks got quite a few late night comedy appearances out of' Cast Away) such an attempt will still invariably be discussed as a freakshow, as The Movie That Should Not Be.

 

There is of course some cause for this, as people who see no reason for social interaction tend also not to bother creating fiction, implicitly a method of communication. But if this logically limits supply, it does not necessarily limit demand. Modern entertainment is a vast and wonderous market, and after the 500th zombie movie for the summer, can't we get at least one about some random schmoe struggling to build a lean-to out of a bear skin or a hydroponic farm out of computer cases?

In video games of course we do have the survival horror genre, and survival-themed spins on other genres like Frostpunk. Still, even when limited to the player protagonist with no direct social interactions, the survival theme will be gratuitously pinned to some meta-plot about finding a plague cure or solving two brothers' mysterious conflict or your father's mad science or some other external motivation. While I stand by my criticism of Don't Starve's gameplay, thematically I did like it simply hand-waving the question of why your character would be on that haunted desert island to let you focus on the survival/exploration/basebuilding themes for their own sake.

 

After all, the only motivation you should need to be alone is "the hell with all y'alls, I'm out!" and the main problem with that idea is that your boat would eventually get rammed by a shipping container.

Lockstep 4: Banner+Lord= Bannerlord

"She's a bit whimsical, loves a romance

She sponsors comebacks, gives just one more chance

His is the tension, the plotting, the strife

He smiles as he writes, like the edge of a knife"

 

Mary Crowell - Pas De Deux

 

 

Having secured the Eastern marches for the Northern Empire unto the Southern comfort of a Best Western, I turned my Bannerlord's attention to securing my clan's succession only to discover goin' a-courtin' with charisma as your dump stat doesn't warm the sheets in any particular hurry.

Having struck out with my most promising prospect, I turned my attention to the ruling family's two youngest princesses. And struck out again. But! Third time's the charm (especially when you cheat a couple times by reloading) and I finally wooed the lovely young Gala of the Osticos, grand-daughter of now-defunct Emperor Lucon. I repaired with my blushing bride to my own territory, eager to begin producing heirs. First order of business: plant a few javelins in Gala's uterus in a tournament.

A-yup.

Them's sum medieval romance, alright.

(Hey, at least I won the tournament.)

 

There's a favorable comparison to be drawn between this amusing situation growing out of otherwise disparate game elements (marriage and tourneys) and in counterpoint a much worse game called ELEX. Both are ostensibly open world adventures but where Bannerlord owns its sandbox, ELEX tries to copycat Skyrim's winning formula of mixed open world and nannied questing. Too bad that implies talent here absent.

Yes, in the fine tradition of "lesser magic missile" and goldfish named Goldie, their small healing plants are called: "Small Healing Plants" which should give you an impression of their overall creatvity. Granted, just last year as I wrapped up my old playthrough I criticized Skyrim itself for imposing scripted quest status on what should have been freeform exploration, but at least Bethesda's flavor text tasted less rancid. ELEX's unimaginative lore has you fighting painfully generic mutant rat-dogs as an even more generic mercenary-super-mutant-spy-rebel-psychic-soldier-wizard-cyborg in a science fantasy mishmash of all the usual fireball-slinging, boomsticks and space lasers given no particular rhyme or reason. I can't even explain the need for a named protagonist, as "Dax" had all the personality of a freshly divided amoeba. All this wasn't as bad when just running around the landscape, but every scripted quest just focused your attention on the Bollywood-quality scripts, and ELEX was utterly obsessed with denying the player control over the action, in everything from quests to camera angles to randomly teleporting enemies to stepping on a knee-high boulder.

In much the same vein, my recent complaints about Ancestors Legacy focused on its undue focus on fixed construction sites, scripted story missions and over-the-shoulder action scenes, despite it being an inherently fluid, top-down RTS. But hey, don't take this to mean I'm in any way opposed to story-based gameplay, when properly executed. Narrative-driven adventure and RPGs have provided many of the most memorable titles in computer games' short history. The skillfully penned Tyranny, for instance, with its more mature setting, multifaceted characters and complex interactions, managed many instructive counterpoints to the above two's intrusive control.

Technically, the above is just a minor reputation event, allowing you to cozy up to your snarly bolverk, Kills-in-Shadow. Despite being entirely top-down scripted, its ultimate effect grows naturally up from the situation at hand and the player's overall grasp of beastwoman mentality. Unfortunately, rare is the computer game with the literary talent to back up a preset plot.

 

Both scripting and random generation have their limits, but in both cases you're supposed to be fueling interactivity, not just making a show of your artistic/programming prowess. Draw the line too far on either side and you end up tripping over it. I've also been trying my hand recently at ADOM, a text-based dungeon crawler from thirty years ago given an RPGMaker-ish graphic interface.

 

It's a quaint reminder of why, despite some charm, I've never considered those old roguelikes worth my time. Over-reliance on randomization results in either:

1) Giving the algorithm too much freedom, resulting in random deaths, inaccessible locations and otherwise broken content.

2) Giving it too little freedom, resulting in everything feeling suspiciously monotonous despite a few pieces being shuffled around.

The end result being that it's boring until it just kills you for no reason, and given roguelikes' obsession with permadeath you're also expected to get bored all the way around again, every time, until the dice go against you. Aside from the one monster type that seems immune, (floating eye) I've crawled my way to level 10 so far using exactly one spell (magic missile) against everything. Appropriately for a game made the same year as Arena, the randomized combat prompts much the same summary: "as you trot about [dungeons] at night, figures jump out of the shadows at you: rats, goblins, thieves, wolves, orcs, swashbucklers, mages... it doesn't particularly matter, as excepting the odd fireball toss, they'll all perform identically" - and in ADOM I've yet to see a fireball.

 

Still, you'll never quite get away from automatically generated content in games, because when it combines properly with other elements or player choice, the result is usually more memorable than mere preordained storytelling. Take RimWorld's encounter-generating AI, which normally pisses me off for its inherent level-scaling nature. One of its dirtier tricks is teleporting enemies into your base past your defenses, in one case dropping through my roof into the artificially lit, indoor corn field at the back of my base.

I rallied a panicked defense and reloaded a couple of times until I noticed the attackers had managed to light the corn aflame with their crashlanding and first explosive volley... in a space that, apart from their own hole in the roof, was nearly unventilated. Pull back, close the air vent, and every raider simply died of heatstroke, cooked to death by their own stupidity. Given my foresight in positioning a fire extinguisher in the middle of the field, I even lost less than a third of my crop.

 

Or take my last Stellaris run as a Void Dweller Fanatic Xenophile and Pacifist, a combination I just could not make work for several attempts due to a combination of scattered habitat inefficiency, low population capacity during early game and the near impossibility of capturing territory. Even when I wheedled my way into the galaxy's most powerful federation, my allies kept declaring offensive wars (pacifists can only claim territory when defending) and getting rich at my fleets' expense. I almost threw my hands up in despair until noticing the fatter my federation mates got, the more their political influence was worth. And these people liked me. Trusted me. It was easy to get favors from them via espionage.

With my huge tracts of land cordoned off early on, xenophile mixed breeds providing well-adapted population boosts late game and most importantly a slew of political favors and a dozen emissaries tripling my votes in the Galactic Community, I simply outvoted the rest of the known universe and crowned myself Galactic Emperor, dissolving the federations providing my competitors with economic and score bonuses. Shah mat, biznatches, long live the new eternal shah!

 

And while we're talking about tracts of land:

 

Pons Aelius is under attack by dastardly Persians! How shall we reinforce it, your adorable majesty? The Apennines funnel reinforcements from the south into a desert pass which cannot be improved with a road. The Carthaginians are more than happy to allow faster passage... to both Rome and Persia. We keep getting weakened by those damnable sky-darkening Persian archers behind their lines and can't break through on the main front, with reinforcements either slowed to a crawl or whittled down before they reach the action.

Luckily, in order to ambush our reinforcements the enemy also has to circle around the volcano of Thera... and their archers, being closer behind the mountain, are quicker to take the bait. Solution? Let my front line crumble while baiting their ambushing archers into exposed positions, then rally a cavalry charge to flatten them. Without support, their infantry's now easy prey.

Responsiveness. It's a beautiful thing.

Pounding my new wife's uterus with javelins? Freakin' hilarious, and not a scenario you'd find written into official content. She even congratulated me on my win afterwards. Fattening my allies up for a galactic coup? Only one cRPG I can think of in recent years toyed with such a plot. Enemies roasting themselves by setting fire to their objective? In a story-driven game that would actually be anticlimactic, but when it arises organically from a player being able to respond to threats in multiple ways (like closing a vent) it's a completely novel experience. Sure, you could write a convoluted plot about Roman legions getting bogged down in a sandy mountain pass or baiting Persian archers onto an exposed volcanic flank for a heroic cataphract charge, but it can also grow out of the middle ground between customization and randomization.

 

You'd think game designers would more often remember their product's principal advantage over other media: adding player creativity to the creators' own.

Stop prompting one right answer. It's supposed to be a dance, not a recital.

If you want to control every challenge, then you'd damn better have access to some Tyranny-quality writing to make it interesting, or you'll strangle every plot by every damn trite, predictable twist (super Greedfall spoiler: noble savages are noble.) If you try to randomize everything... then once again you end up needing to control the parameters so tightly that you just end up with fifty breeds of interchangeable melee mooks to be magically missiled in a mundane monotone. Talented writers can do better than algorithms, but good writing remains taboo in an industry still refusing to acknowledge any other audience besides shithead tweens. So at least put some effort into giving players the tools to make their own fun, and let the interesting scenarios you're too incompetent to orchestrate... orchestrate themselves.

Ooooh, ooh, new euphemism!

She didn't get raped, she got "socially constructed" !

The Ones Who Seek Omelas

(Working title: Retards Must Suffer)

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"And he - wore a hat

And he - had a job

And he - brought home the bacon

So that no-one knew"

 

Devo - Mongoloid

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"Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!"

H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness

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"The problem of specifying the criteria for inclusion in our moral community is one for which I do not have a detailed answer -- other than to say that whatever answer we give should reflect our sense of the possible subjectivity of the creatures in question. Some answers are clearly wrong. We cannot merely say, for instance, that all human beings are in, and all animals are out. What will be a criterion for humanness? DNA? Shall a single human cell take precedence over a herd of elephants? The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals -- intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on -- will equally differentiate between human beings  themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren't more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and woman(sic) with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral community. Find an orangutan that can complain about his family in Borneo, and he may well displace a person or two from our lifeboat."

Sam Harris - The End of Faith

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"But dolphins are intelligent!"

"Not this one! He blew all his money on instant lottery tickets."

Futurama S2E18: The Problem With Popplers

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"A phone can talk and respond. A mannequin looks human. Not all humans can talk. You have to take a number of factors and add them up and if they go above 100 percent, the A.I. treats the target as human."

---

"Why do you think [he] is human?"

"He reads. He writes and programs. He's aware of himself and others"

Freefall, comics 2547 & 2588 (MAJOR spoiler alert!)

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"What we are is semi-civilized beasts with baseball caps and automatic weapons.

[...]

Nitwits, assholes, fuck-ups, scumbags, jerk-offs and dipshits... and they all vote.

[...]

If you isolate one of them, you sit them down rationally, and you talk to them about the low IQs and the dumb behavior and the bad decisions, right away they start talking about education. That’s the big answer to everything. Edjacayshun! They say “we need more money for education. We need more books. More teachers. More classrooms. More schools. We need more testing for the kids.” You say to them: “Well, you know, we’ve tried all of that and the kids still can’t pass the tests.” They say, “Don’t you worry about that. We’re going to lower the passing grades.” And that’s what they do in a lot of these schools now. They lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass, the school looks good, everybody’s happy, the IQ of the country slips another two or three points and pretty soon all you’ll need to get into college is a fucking pencil."

George Carlin - Life Is Worth Losing (2005)

"The public sucks. Fuck hope."

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I was having trouble picking a starting point here, but luckily both a webcartoonist and a cable TV celebrity have conspired to feed me apt material recently.

 

Tailsteak pissed me off below his current comic Forward's latest page 248, by upholding the rampant idiocy that is multiple intelligences, one of modern psychology's more destructively marketable conceits placing physical aptitudes on the same level as reason, reassuring "that immortal ass, the average man" that brain-dead jocks, grinning bimbos and subliterate crooners should count as equally intelligent to canon-shaping authors, nuclear physicists and medical researchers. If bouncing around a jungle gym is intelligence, then by all means try getting a chimp to explain the reasoning behind that - but wait, even your chimp's newfound personhood will be usurped by the merest housefly's transcendentally convoluted aerobatics!

 

Then there's Bill Maher, whose recent New Rules have decried contemporary gullibility by pointing out misinformation is as much the fault of liars as of an audience stupid enough to swallow such lies, then just a week later despaired at growing criminality... after having demanded of his audience to gracefully welcome back to reality Donald Trump's increasingly disenchanted former voters instead of calling them the gullible, criminal troglodytes they have been... and still are. But embracing gullible criminals will not reduce criminal gullibility, regardless if you're talking about Trumpists or their "defund the police" counterparts.

Both of these faults in perception reflect on a couple of other recent issues here in the States. First up, the unending attacks by Christian groups against abortion rights. If you drive through flyover country, you'll see endless variations on the same billboard: a picture of a chubby, cherubic baby face next to the slogan "heartbeat starts at X weeks/days" most frequently 18 days for bonus dishonesty. Some force is circulating fluid in there, but calling it a human "heart" is nearly as hyperbolic as calling that lump of inert matter in anti-abortionists' skulls a "brain" and doubly funny because in their bid for unthinking sympathy, none of those billboards show you what an 18-day embryo actually looks like. Hell, even newborns don't look like that, as the pictures they use are obviously taken at several months old. I always chuckle at the thought of some hick slag on her first birthing, who's grown up on such propaganda, having a panic attack at the hospital upon being presented with the wrinkled, wobbly, lumpy Carboniferous monstrosity she just extruded. (My own mother keeps reminding me: "you. were. blue!")

What qualifications can a first-trimester proto-ape present as to its personhood? Or even second-trimester? Does it compose music, solve equations, analyze plot diagrams, theorize on the evolutionary divergence of passerines, split bosons, invent fusion dishes, breed rhododendrons, or at the very least farms ten thousand zombies in a video game? What exactly qualifies it as existentially comparable to a female ape which, even situated at the rancid nadir of subhumanity, could at least recite the misadventures of the Kardashians! It has a heart? Does it have heart-beating intelligence? So fucking WHAT! Lots of things have hearts. Shrimp have this weird-ass half-vascular, half-diffusive circulatory system at least as functional as our embryonic version. Are you going to sue every baleen whale on the planet for the mass krillicide committed with every gulp? Are antiabortion activists suddenly on vegans' side now claiming every popcorn shrimp is a murder? Functionally, what could you equate to the developmental level of a pre-human at three weeks? At three months? At six months? At birth? At six months after? Does it have the intelligence of an earthworm? Of a mouse? Of a rat? Of a raccoon? Can it conceive of its own mortality at conception?

Stop legitimizing this inherently dishonest argument by engaging antiabortionists in goalpost-shuffling about the validity of persons based on their circulatory, excretory or other random organs. It's a smokescreen. One single overwhelming motivation drives the anti-abortion movement, and that's the subhuman idiocy of supernatural belief. It's the prescientific caveman notion of immortal souls, which that lump of protoplasm supposedly acquires on conception. Stupidity is their only virtue. Antiabortionists need anything human to count as a person because they themselves are subhuman vermin with the intelligence of walking abortions, who cling to fairy tales as moral justification to attack others. But you wouldn't know it from press coverage.

For decades, the Democratic party line (as represented by its mouthpieces at MSNBC or HBO) has portrayed antiabortionism as the work of stodgy, easily hateable old men deliberately harming women, to drum up votes by grace of our unthinking, reflexive protectiveness toward the unfairer sex, with demagogues like Rachel Maddow screeching about a "war on women" despite the endlessly observed fact that half of those waging the war ARE women. For as long as it has existed, entire generations, activists within the anti-abortion movement itself have consistently hovered around a 50/50 male/female split, with occasional spikes to 60% female, and the pattern plays out the same in the populace at large, with greater oscillations based on other conservative/liberal affiliations. Makes sense once you see how many antiabortionists are married couples with children. Meanwhile, if you really want the answer to abortion demographics in the U.S., you can find endless polls showing 80/20 mirrored splits between educated atheists and agnostics on one side and fundamentalist backbirths on the other, especially evangelical Christians a.k.a. rednecks.

But, again, you wouldn't know that from press coverage.

I tend to oscillate between various news outlets, from Wikipedia's current events to the AP, BBC, CNN and even NPR on days when I'm feeling masochistic. Recently I've been relying more on Reuters, which seems to retain a greater degree of sanity in the face of world events. A week ago, they chose to illustrate news of protests against America's rapid back-slide into conservative primitivism with a picture of what looks to be a transsexual holding up a placard with the slogan "remember in november VOTE" accompanied by a woman having decapitated a man (spoofing Perseus and Medusa?) during last month's pro-abortion protests. This came only days after Reuters itself also ran another article showing a picture of Christian anti-abortion activists, three of which happen to have their faces visible front and center: two women and one man. Nope, sorry, Castrato McHatchetson, aside from your #KillAllMen propaganda being so inherently unconscionable that it would prompt piles of lawsuits if attacking anyone besides the one social group forbidden from self-defense, objectively speaking it would not solve the issue you're protesting! In fact, expanding our scope to the superstition fueling the anti-abortion movement (as well as anti-homosexual and anti-most-things) women cling to reactionary, anti-intellectual, religious primitivism decidedly more than men do. Mrs. Grundy remains solidly female, thanks. So why is Reuters contradicting its own evidence by promoting that murderous, delusional cretin with the "behead men" placard as the embodiment of the fight for personal rights and freedom?

Why does nobody ever protest stupidity?

Another lengthy media circus here in the states at the moment is the House of Representatives' committee investigating Donald Trump's laughably amateurish coup d'etat attempt on January 6th of last year. While some of the testimony is amusing (Trump physically trying to grab the wheel of his car when his security detail refused to chauffeur The President into a heavily armed riot of murderous fanatics) I'm bothered by the constant emphasis on whether or not he or the murderous imbeciles in question knew of the falsity of the claim of stolen votes.

The claim had not been demonstrated. If they chose to act on a flimsy claim with zero evidence backing it, that is entirely on them. Ignorance might be excused but willful ignorance, motivated thinking is your own damn fault! Their internal state of mind is irrelevant because no reasonable person would have considered a handful of tweets from blatantly biased parties as justification for armed insurrection.

So it appears we need to define "person" because we can no longer rely on the antiquated definition of any beast possessing human features to process the information necessary for rational decision-making in modern society. Ever notice the people on Star Trek tended to be smart? The redneck hero with a shotgun doesn't play well in that setting. We know, intuitively, that retards wouldn't live long on their own in a century when half the mundane devices surrounding you can disintegrate you in an instant, when even your pants can teleport you straight into the nearest solar corona in retaliation for passing a wet fart. Modern humans can barely handle automobiles and electric ovens... and you want to give them teleporter-armed spaceships? The general population is still functioning on the mental level of a tribe in the savanna, when decision-making never stretched beyond an endless game of "fuck/marry/kill" and the prevalence of our myriad blind faiths (be it in the supernatural or the moral superiority of females, trickle-down economics or critical race theory) just proves our stagnation. You cannot reason with those incapable of reason, who prefer to make-believe that biological sex is a "social construction" or the world is being run by fairies up in the clouds.

 

If "human" means an ethically and rationally competent being, then we are not the same species, and I can demonstrate it to you by a single example. The growing, decades-long revulsion many of us feel towards Donald Trump is only reinforced, not engendered, by his many, many... many acts of demagogic, economic and executive vandalism. On a basic, monkey-in-the-mirror application of theory of mind, it only takes a few seconds of his endless verbal diarrhea for anyone with more than half a brain (yes, even those of us white and male and heterosexual) to spot the utter lack of a rational filter on his impulsive, instinctive behavior. That ape at the podium clapping its paws in self-adulation is quite simply sub-human, incapable of basic recursive self-awareness. This is why all the attempts to explain his popularity via political trends or economic ones, activist subversion or platform-building, history or memetics, have all come up short. His supporters' stated motivations are irrelevant. It's just a matter of subhumans promoting one of their own on a subhuman kin recognition instinct level, just as they're subconsciously pressed by the unrecognizable divergence of intellect from themselves.

 

Good ideas cannot flourish among bad minds. Unless you improve the public itself, any other improvements will always be poisoned by the public's virulent stupidity.

Opting to run your trolley over a live person instead of three corpses because the corpses possess human DNA does not make you either an open-minded liberal or a down-to-earth conservative. It just makes you a moral coward clinging to arbitrary rules instead of standing on your own judgment. We need to admit that humanity is insufficient. Not human vermin but mentally superior human persons created all the technology and social institutions allowing for the far better lives we live compared to our ancestors. We are thought within bodies, not the bodies themselves, the proverbial tail attempting to wag the dog, and intellectual superiority is existential superiority. As the old schoolyard joke goes, be racist against stupid people. You might justifiably cringe at past misapplications and abuses of eugenics and realistically predict that any open political movement of that sort will rapidly be subverted and co-opted by special interests of one tribal group of another... but what's stopping you from applying your influence as an individual toward improving the breed?

Every political group favors its own, from racial to sexual to religious. Why do we draw a taboo against the only favoritism which might improve our collective situation? Why are you ashamed and even afraid to promote a certain person simply for being a better mind, for writing more poetically, creating more creatively, analyzing more cleverly than the vermin? Charity is meaningless if it doesn't breed something besides more charity cases. Stop giving money to organizations saving bodies and start promoting those saving minds - if you can find any. Put as much effort as possible into extracting worthy individuals from the dung-heap that is society at large. The primitives want unwanted children, they want endless reiterations of the idiot child which will spend its early years getting slapped around in an orphanage only to get adopted out to be ass-raped by religious "family values" until growing up as yet another miserable, uneducated, brain-damaged career criminal ready to believe primitive superstitions about a magic sky-daddy. They deal in quantity. You must counter with quality.

 

Are you afraid of hurting the feelings of those left behind?

Well, tough.

No action without reaction. To value intellect, you must de-value stupidity. No terminology short of death or sex is more prone to the euphemism treadmill. Moron, imbecile, cretin, retard, mongoloid, have you not figured out yet that you can't make sub-humanity sound neutral? Do me a favor and count the years before "cognitively disabled" becomes just another slur. Maybe cog-dog? Cogable? Or just "cog"? A hundred million schoolchildren are pondering the nomenclature as you read this, because even if absolutely nobody will admit it openly, we cannot escape the fundamental truism that intellect, abstract rational thought is the central, insurmountable measure of existence itself and to be less intelligent is to be less.

 

Stupidity is not a disability. Dis-ability means the person lacks an ability, but retards, whether acknowledged as such or not, are deficient in the quality of personhood. You cannot promote the better without acknowledging the worse, and they will inevitably feel bad about their own inferiority. It's not nice, it's not pleasant, it's not seemly... but it's real. You cannot dodge acknowledging this necessity in our communication. Stupid is bad.

But hey, don't worry about it. I've been talking your ear off for the past fifteen minutes for no reason at all. This is all moot anyway, because it's too late.

 

Global warming is inevitable. The United States will descend into theocratic primitivism. Europe will fragment into a myriad Brexit-style tribal mass suicides. Pandemics will continue to rampage from ghetto to favela to tenement to bidonville, heightening social tensions and facilitating further fragmentation. World War 3 has been coming for decades, inherent in every upward sweep of the world population clock. China will over-run the globe, enslaving and genociding as it goes, and then the Chinese world state will itself dissolve in the usual pattern of over-stuffing its parasitic aristocratic and servant castes until it becomes so top-heavy it collapses, like every empire always does... and that will be the end of civilization. There will be no second industrial age, no recovery, no fossil fuels to harvest, no large swathes of stable farmland, no lack of dormant infections waiting to demolish any rising city-states, no conveniently predictable interglacial lull in climate extremes, no way for nerds to prove their worth and lead the vermin with human faces out of their natural state of superstitious sub-humanity.

It's over. Because twenty-three centuries ago, four hundred, two hundred, a hundred, seventy, fifty, twenty years ago, those who walked away from Omelas, from the necessary sacrifice of the worse in deference to the better... chose not to know where they're going, chose willful ignorance. Don't whine about losing your rights. You chose this degeneracy, this dissolution with every passing grade handed to every pinhead. This species deserves its death because even its best chose the worst.

All I want now is enough escapism to tide me over until your lynch mob beats down my door.

Rot, vermin.