A Elbereth Gilthawny'all

Quite a few game companies, when looking for a bit of aural atmosphere over the years, have fallen back on just sticking a microphone in their workplace's break-room. Properly edited, the indistinct rustling, clattering and mumbling of a busy cafeteria or lounge can indeed supply a charming everyday-anytown backdrop. Improperly, you end up with too-distinctive noise jogging the listener's attention, like a gaggle of women with southern U.S. accents.

Worse yet when lines can clearly be dinstinguished, like "how're y'all doin'?" sounding more and more like a Blanche DuBois audition.

Worse and worse when another voice clearly states: "I'm from North Carolina"

But worst of all when the game in question is supposed to be The Lord of the Rings Online!

Unscrew the Taboo

"Take my wife. Please!" - Rodney Dangerfield (edit: apparently originated with one Henny Youngman)

________________________________

"How many weeping eyes I made to pine with woe

How many sighing hearts I have no skill to show

Yet I the prouder grew and answered them therefore:

Go, go, seek some otherwhere, importune me no more"

Faith and the Muse - Importune Me No More

(original text by none other than the virgin queen Elizabeth I)

________________________________________

 

 

I don't bother with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal much. The jokes tend to be a bit strained, especially when the "punchline" is obviously reverse-engineered to justify its own setup parroting some trendy reddit feminist fad or another. A couple of days ago the topic was apparently middle-aged women being invisible. I'm going to assume that means invisible to men for waning attractiveness, as per the endless such articles you'll find online. Which is of course evil and wrongwrongwrong you evil man how dare you be attracted to the people you're attracted to?

 

Wait, instead of launching into a whole rant, if I didn't like SMBC's joke, maybe I should just tell one of my own. Here's one from another boy way back in fifth grade:

"What's the difference between a pregnant lady and a lightbulb? You can't un-screw the pregnant lady."

Yes, yes, it's a very fifth grade sort of joke (I would hereby like to thank the Chicago public school system) but the discordant "lady" in that context rooted in my memory. Note the teller's requisite middle school naughtiness did not extend to a pregnant chick or pregnant bitch or knocked-up teenage sluts. Even in the course of deliberate transgression, females' moral high ground must be upheld. And he didn't even mention her "socket" to tie it all together!

In fact, the socket is oddly immune to mockery (George Carlin aside) even by comedians who otherwise fill entire sketches and monologues with nothing but jokes about light bulbs being too small, too dim or shorting out too fast.* Another webcomic, Grrl Power, at one point bemoaned the use of swear words based on female anatomy as a sign civilization's going down the tubes. A decade before that, I remember an online guild getting bitched out on that account by some bitch taking umbrage because she doesn't want her body parts referenced so negatively. Oh I'm so sorry, you gigantic rancid cunt, but have you ever in your life complained about the far more popular insults of pricks or dicks as impugning the dignity of men? And really, just try even counting how few times, comparatively, you've actually heard all those limp dick loving comedies and comedians mock the other half of the population as frigid bitches drier and looser than burlap sacks, who don't know which end of a cock to grab.

 

This is by no means a new disparity. By the late '90s comedy shows were forced to hedge even the slightest jab at the unfairer sex with excuses like "it is not anti-woman just to talk about women" even when addressing blatant mass insanity like the idolatry of "Princess" Diana. Now even comedians like Jimmy Carr, who've built careers around offense and abuse, will flip around into self-flagellating public service announcement mode as soon as the topic of women comes up, as all humor instantly dies on merest contact with women's absolute control over men, over morals, over media.

 

As for the crocodile tears shed by spinsters over losing all the attention they used to get in their youths, whatever entitled you to that attention in the first place? I feel absolutely zero pity for you losing something your male counterparts never had! Which you in fact presumed them duty-bound to lavish upon your own assuredly magnificent self! Aside from the 1% of rich&famous prince charmings at which women constantly throw themselves, the majority of men are always invisible to women, and openly mocked for loneliness, not when we hit middle-age but ceaselessly from puberty to death. Reference any comedy: there's no joke more guaranteed to get a laugh than a loser who can't get laid. Well, except maybe that same man falling over or getting kicked in the crotch. Because he obviously deserves it. He's a loser for not gaining women's approval.

Have you crotch-kicked a spinster today?

No, no pity. If my lifelong loneliness is subject to mockery, then so be your far lesser and well-earned measure of same bitterness. No pity just because your own refusal to accept any mate but an established, financially secure alpha male had you chasing forty-something men in your twenties. You never deserved a sugar-daddy in the first place. No pity just because you clung to the same rich frat-boy as ten other chicks until losing that melee. And then jumped on the same next one's dick as twenty other chicks. No pity just because the men you strung along and in whose faces you spat for twenty years running (because you preferred being the mistress of a banker rather than the wife of a young bank teller) are no longer falling at your feet to beg your favor. I don't believe poetic justice exists. The universe has no ethics. But I do appreciate the poetry of stuck-up cunts going all Sunset Boulevard after they've done nothing but abuse their undeserved star power up to that point to bleed men.

Roses were redder than you deserved

Violence was engendered by you

You ignored me from a crowded bed

Count your wrinkles you fat unfuckable shrew

 

 

  

__________________________________________________________________

 

* That is NOT an overextended metaphor. We do light up when you plug us in.

Shardlight

"Broken trust
Ideas lost
Burn in time
Laid to rest
Look at lies
Broken dies"

 

KMFDM - Craze

 

 

Maybe you've played too many adventure game puzzles if your first thought on seeing a blank piece of paper is "obviously I now need to find some charcoal to make a rubbing of... whatever's up ahead" (plan B: lemon juice)

Also, how am I not sick of Abe Goldfarb's voice yet?

 

Anyhoo, I thought in between gigantic open worlds or turn-based strategy campaigns, it might be nice to polish off another adventure title ambling through my Wadjet Eye collection. Cue post-collapse raven death cult. Turned out pretty decent, though the setting is more interesting than the line-by-line wordsmithing.

"Reaper be damned, I'll go out my own way" indeed, and hey, nice visual foreshadowing of reality crashing through superstitions. Like Technobabylon, Shardlight is an odd duck among detective adventures in primarily focusing on world-building, and rather adroitly to boot. The pervasive use of namesake fluorescent uranium glass shards as light sources may not make total hard scientific sense, but it's visually striking and obliquely suggests a post-nuclear hellscape without resorting to Geiger counters. Neither is this a standard postapocalyptic Earth scenario (nuka-cola reference aside) as the war seems to have been more localized, collapse coming from systems failure more than direct destruction. Even where I want to hate some little touch like Amy constantly pulling her hood up or down on scene transitions (such a waste of time, right?) it fits too well with living in a bombed-out slum to criticize. Mass manipulation via hoarding of necessities, class struggle with Napoleonic overtones, an incomplete collapse leaving much technology in place as both plot levers and symbols of inequality or decay, all form one of the best backdrops I've seen in a genre mostly devoted to quirky comic relief and illogical puzzles.

Speaking of which, that expertly crafted world unfortunately does not ring with the most scintillating repartee, nor tease the brain all that enticingly. Characters mostly skew toward the flat or archetypal (I kept expecting Nelson to grate "stay awhile, and listen") and puzzles toward non-sequiturs. Usually you're giving random objects to random NPCs who spontaneously provide you with your next MacGyver utensil. (Thanks for the massively life-saving gift, here's this random bit of string I found in my pocket. Riiiiight.) (Or the gossips.) The more complex can be outright obtuse, like the calligraphy nonsense at the start, or the much later requirement to backtrack a screen to grab a fallen object you didn't even know existed. In fact, for all the authors' talent in shaping a fantastic yet believable society, they frustratingly, repeatedy fail in conveying hints and cues to the audience or building emotional impact within scenes. (Boy, ain't that the way with SciFi writers?)

Luckily the music and decor picks up some of the slack. I am hardly immune to melancholic piano/guitar twanging, and some of the tracks recall STALKER's famous fireside interludes. There are a couple of weird, random digressions, like a vision quest or a back-of-taxi childbirth which looks like some aborted female empowerment morality play, and we spend a couple of repetitive exchanges praising a female leader, but overall Shardlight is less "wokey" than even Technobabylon, which itself was not too horrible in the context of our past decades' insanity. And while it's a bit blandly conveyed, the basic plot is in fact quite interesting. The uniforms are enough of a hint that revolutionaries aren't necessarily the absolute good, and the plot consciously doubles back against the usual fall into mystical nonsense by reinstating sanity after the (still gratuitous) vision quest.

 

For a cherry on top, the ending resulting from my Chaotic Neutral disdain for both sides of a revolution is designated Free Will.

 

Well, now I suppose since it shares most of the same voices, I may as well go for the full stereophonic experience of hitting Lamplight City soon.

The Barsoom Project

"Fantasy, it fills my mind
To leave this place before my time
Release myself from earthly care
My dream may be - your night-mare"

 

Blue Oyster Cult - Take Me Away

______________________________________

"'Soap operas in Hell' Bowles mused. 'The mind boggles.'"

______________________________________

 

One of Science Fiction's unique charms has always been laughing at outdated futurism, be it Verne's moon cannon, The Jetsons' flying cars (which still somehow got stuck in traffic) or any depiction of space-age thinkatrons as gargantuan beeping calculators with no memory storage or graphics.

If I hadn't heard of the Dream Park books, it's apparently because I don't LARP. (I don't even ARP.) (though I occasionally urp) They tell of industrially staged roleplaying scenarios with post-Disney advanced animatronics and holograms and professional NPC acting on gigantic sets. It's actually an interesting take on material which would normally be relegated to cyberpunky virtual reality. Nevertheless the supposed verisimilitude of such methods does strain credulity at times, and in the internet age we do seem to be moving in the virtual direction instead of a holodeck. I also have a bigger core gripe: having spent my whole life wishing I were a mad scientist author (and achieving only one of those qualities) I resent seeing the superior breed of published writers demean themselves by the interests of their lessers (like myself) or by acknowledging readers as participants. Which is to say I know nothing about Barnes but Niven shouldn't be writing about RPGs. He inhabits higher realms of purer thought.

(Please don't spoil my abnegation by reminding me how many fans of original flavor Star Trek wound up writing for or acting in TNG - or how many professionals in general prove themselves inferior to their audience.)

Which of course doesn't mean I won't bitch out said superior breed at every opportunity. Being a worthless nitpicking bastard makes me no less of a nitpicking bastard. ("so naturalists observe, a flea" etc.) As I remarked about The Integral Trees and Niven's other collaboration The Mote in God's Eye, the characters here take a while to differentiate. The core few only gained personalities for me at the paija fight. Some never do even by the last chapters when you find yourself wondering "which red shirt was that again?" Also, this may just be my prejudice against humans, human interaction and the performing arts, but there's something inherently creepy about GMs and technicians directly manipulating a game's participants' emotional reactions and metabolisms, treating them like clay to be molded, implicitly talking down to the audience even as you pretend to include them. The action scenes run into constant difficulty maintaining dramatic tension even as we must acknowledge the play-acting and ridiculous storytelling conventions, and the supposedly interweaving real and imaginary action tend to just alternate without melding.

Still, plotting and wordsmithing aside, for being printed in 1989 The Barsoom Project has aged remarkably well. Its main claim to fame (along with the rest of the Dream Park series, presumably) is partly foreseeing, partly inventing LARPing at a time when even tabletop RPGs were still a quite narrow niche, though the Society for Creative Anachronism gets more credit in that.

It also comments on pro wrestling fakeness just as the jokes about it were starting to hit mainstream.

It predates Kim Stanley Robinson's space elevator on Mars idea by three years.

Continued muslim terrorism turned out to be a depressingly safe bet into the future.

It dives into Eskimo lore in a way few wannabe multiculturalists have done since, somehow didactic without sounding too preachy.

They even managed to nail the obesity crisis, of all things, with "fat ripper" games cranking up the inherent exercise of live action, mixed with cheesy earth magic life lessons about healthy diet. Nothing like a toothy monster or marauding horde to get those legs pumpin'.

And sure, it ladles on a few too many pop-culture references, and plays up quick-fix psychological revelations, and the foreshadowing's a bit blunt, and too many digressions fail to acquire any plot relevance (though, weirdly, the gratuitous romance kinda works for once with the heroine's psychosis) but it nevertheless grows more engaging as you read. Geekiness is engagement by definition, and it's hard not to cheer along with the techies so devoted to making magic happen, or the pudgy foam axe brigade celebrating their boss battles, or maimed, steadfast Sedna welcoming her strange liberators. A book like this can easily come across as exploitative. Instead I found the whole mess oddly charming.

Or at least it gave me another glimpse into some of the non-electronic gamer crowd's reference pool.

___________________________________________

P.S.: I know it's a minor point, but I also can't forgive them for failing to call skinny Kevin a "hunger artist" when the fatties resent him. Come on, 300+ pages of mind screw and not a single Kafka reference?

(Sorry Mr. Keats)

Booty is toots, toots booty - that is all

Ye nose on earth and all ye need to nose

A Week of Fallout 3

I'm finally managing to win a campaign with my noxious clone descendant soldiers in Stellaris (long run? the noxious habitability penalty is a big issue) and spurred by the release of Stalker 2, queued up something with an FPS interface as a change of pace. But instead of jumping back into Cyberpunk 2077, whose surface I barely scratched when it came out, I thought I'd polish off a backlogged alternative. In the interest of seeing what the hype was about fifteen years ago, I alighted on Fallout 3.

 

Let the record show that no matter my rapture toward Morrowind when it came out and my inexcessive yet stable acceptance of TES4&5, I've always hated the idea of Bethesda's Fallouts on principle. Replacing turn-based tactics with FPS twitch-gaming is anti-intellectual vandalism and I've never forgiven them for it, flatly refused to play the series after #2, so I jumped into things now ready to tear this thing to pieces and... and... ah, crap. It's not terrible?

Stickin' with my elf wizard routine.

First impression? There's more of Half-Life than Fallout in this tutorial. The many, many close-ups of emotive scientist and Barney faces to compete with that famous Source Engine demo of destructible environments and the G-man smiling and frowning which made such a splash in 2003 don't feel quite like the Elder Scrolls tutorials, where you'd get one or two NPCs asking you questions. I get the feeling Bethesda

OMG IT'S FRIGGIN LIAM NEESON!!!

didn't treat their new intellectual property like a SciFi Oblivion, but as their edge into competitors' genre. (And hey, it certainly worked.) Plus the vault computer deliberately sounding like Half-Life 1's trolley intro. All of it drags on a bit though. By the time I off the boss, I'm itching to get out into the big wide open world. Which, accidental the effect may be, works as a sense of vault-dwelling claustrophobia.

Anyway, the more I played the more I found myself immersed in something very much a product of its time. Side-note for the younger generation: despite (or because of) skyrocketing sales, for about fifteen years from the early 2000s to the mid 2010s, computer games just plain sucked. (This is how sites like GoG or Abandonia got off the ground: the oldies they peddled truly were better than contemporary fare.) Every company focused almost exclusively on the graphics arms race replacing artistic merit, online games broke into the mass market mandating idiot appeal and forcing every developer to promise investors another Counterstrike or World of Warcraft success story, and before Kickstarter offered an alternative, everything revolved around big publishers (e.g. EA) pushing the sports shovelware assembly line approach even in narrower niches, cranking out superficially "new" versions every few months.

So while not thrilled with Fallout 3, I'll admit most of its flaws, where it skimps or splurges unnecessarily, were market-wide trends, including the push for a full 3D FPS interface. If you don't want the full play-by-play, feel free to skip down to the conclusions.

Thursday: some light megatonnage

Once you get out there, the world is fairly empty and monotonous. The Half-Life feel fades rapidly, but neither does the architecture quite have the same retro-futuristic look as in 1&2. More generic ruins. Less to interact with or explore. Impressed by the work put into some of the unexpected but logical results like the Megaton sheriff getting himself killed if you tattle on the dangerous enemy in town, or your informer upping the price if you turn him down once, but such surprise penalties have also generally proven counterproductive, giving no incentive to stick with a negative outcome instead of reloading.

 

Combat datedness shows in enemies' sliding along the ground intertialess and the almost complete immunity you get from melee by climbing a waist-high boulder.

Portal having come out the year before, Mount&Blade being a several years old open beta, Fallout 3's relatively little attention paid to physics or pathing is a bit odd. I get rapidly annoyed at the nonsensical movements until finally figuring out what "VATS" is (while exploring the supermarket, two dozen fights in, laugh at me if you must for being so slow on the uptake; I kept trying to activate it out of combat.)

Otherwise, knowing Bethesda's tendencies I was expecting "difficulty" to be a nonsensical mix of instadeath and cakewalks, and that's what I'm getting. By level 3 I've already got my house, accumulated 30 stimpacks (a.k.a. health potions to the uninitiated.) Also: wait, so stealing tanks my karma meter, but murdering the junkie hooker in order to gain access to her house to steal from is A-OK?

 

Friday: mostly about chewing

Fix some pipes to reach level 4. The wasteland's inexplicably full of gunslinging raiders instead of Fallout 2's more appropriate mix of spears and makeshift weaponry. Nobody throws rocks anymore, sadly. I end up with two free laser rifles and power armors (which I can't use) by running into some outcast Steel Brosevskis

 

chewed apart

- letting themselves get torn to shreds by lvl2 mobs since their AI just stands there not fighting back.

On the other hand, here's another nice touch:

chewed up

The visual artists actually seem to have remembered that roads are composed of multiple layers, not just the visible asphalt. Too bad such detail work is still repeated far too often to cover the entire landscape. You will get so damn sick of rebar and girders after a while.

Also, swimming increases your radiation level, which is actually fairly accurate, since rain washes radioactive dust like any other contaminant into waterways. I was planning to bitch about roleplaying until being sent to the vampire cult.

refusing to chew

Sure, Vance's take on the issue, taking only blood, doesn't make them sound all that less threatening. Fun fact: most people need their blood to live. But much like encountering the necromancer in Arcanum, I always like these half-surprises in RPGs when you're sent to slay a villain who turns out to be reasonable. Much as I dislike full reversals to heroism (the "witch that doesn't witch" approach) an evil or neutral character who's actually reasoned through his stance is far more interesting, and their self-aware enforcement of mythopoesis is refreshing. Even better, the rank-and-file are written less philosophical than Vance himself, making clear that his leadership is in fact reining in cannibalistic petty thugs, plus his reasonable solutions both to the town and the new recruit... ok, kudos to whoever wrote this quest chain. (Except for Ian's cheerful attitude once he settles in back home, so shortly after he murdered his own parents.)

The practical side of gameplay is a bit shakier. Using spare weapons as spare parts for repairs is always a nice feature, though doing it instantly in your inventory obviously serves more as an encumbrance aid (which my 4 strength admittedly mandates.)

I'm already encountering super mutants at lvl 5?! Near newbietown? Sigh, power creep and villain decay strike again.

I was angry about the change to food (everything's irradiated) but I'm increasingly liking the idea of popping a Rad-X to chew up my food supply all at once at half-penalty, saving both stimpacks and inventory space, a more deliberate use of resources rewarding foresight.

Saturday: of ants and pants

Both the main quest and Moira's chain coincide so I'm graduating to the big city!

Oh, wait, never mind, this rando' kid wants me to kill some fire ants.

Which turns out to be a both time-consuming and supply-consuming quest. Best way to deal with the ants (without wasting a ton of ammo) would be to buff up with their resistance glands and some +STR and bat away at them in melee, but my base strength doesn't make that particularly viable. Weak writing too with a standard annoying nerdling mad scientist. And the other incidental quest has you delivering lingerie for bonus nonsense points.

That, some assorted exploration and several trips to loot Minefield house by house make a dull installment.

Sunday: lurkin' 'n luggin'

Get distracted by the Anchorage Memorial. Hit Lvl 7. With plenty of frag mines, a hunting rifle and a ripper, the giant mutant lobsters are less trouble than the giant mutant ants were, but still an ungodly slog.

I will say this though: having grown up amidst urban decay I can appreciate a healthy gray bleakness, and Bethesda's level design has always sagely provided for scenic vistas and anticipatory or meditative vantage points.

 

Exiting the memorial at its top to gaze across the... Potomac, I guess(?) (I dunno from DeeCees) immediately brings to mind exiting Blackreach through a mountaintop to witness dawn breaking over the statue of Azura. Same gimmick with three years' graphic improvement. Still works, damnit.

Breeze through the mole rat dungeon only to be ambushed by assassins on the other end, in an obviously recycled TES routine. And apparently there's no other way up into the city proper? Why? I do like the dungeons with multiple entrances interconnecting the overland map, but this is pushing it. Glad they toned it down for Skyrim.

Dukov's place... a suspension chamber used to chill booze... Wadsworth... a teddy bear factory... naughty knickers... while less nonsensical than #2, this series is still leaning too hard on the forced goofy lolrandom comedy angle instead of building coherent postapocalyptic societies.

Heh. Moira sends me to peacefully infiltrate the lobster lair. No problem at-all ma'am, since I've already brutally slaughtered every single thing in that place, and their little dogs too.

Only now do I realize I'd skipped the newbie dungeon, Springvale school. The length of everything is quintupled and septupled by constantly checking a wiki to see which "miscellaneous" items will be needed for crafting later, and teleporting back home to Megaton constantly to haul in the loot. All these positive rewards are making me feel negatively punished for playing. At least in Skyrim I could use infinite-strength lycanthropy for muling, and it didn't force teleportation on you.
(+1STR booze ish my beshtesht fren'!) Level 8 aaaand good night.

Monday: busting a cap in your economy

Money is surprisingly hard to come by with no barter skill, unlike most games where I'd be swimming in cash regardless. Not that I particularly need it except for shack upgrades, since you loot more than enough of what you need. So I guess I'm still swimming in cash.

At least I got a chuckle out of activating a guard bot in the metro which takes my ticket and tells me to move along. See? That's context-appropriate, in-character humor. Why is that so hard? And surprise!

- this is apparently the route to my next destination anyway. Slick level design when you put your mind to it Bethesda. Wolfman approves.

(Wait, D.C. actually has a neighbourhood called Chevy Chase? wtf?)

Also, I know the steel bros call themselves "paladins" but when did they start talking like cops out of a golden age Superman comic? Where's that aloof technocrat edge?

Oh and look, our next monster's a super-super-mutant. A giant giant. How... creative.

On the other hand, I'd expected Three Dog to annoy the shit out of me, but much like Moira he owns his quirkiness.

Sloppy level design when you don't put your mind to it Bethesda.

Wolfman disapproves of featureless multiple dungeons of featureless multiple levels of featureless concrete corridors filled with endlessly repetitive identical empty rooms. This one's a school, this one's a store, this one's a sewer, an office building, a government office, an apartment building, this one's uuhhhh no, acktchelly I think they're all called "copypasta template 083"

The Outcasts act more like the Brotherhood I knew and loved to hate, but their stupid "game within a game" quest doesn't pass muster. Feels like Goldeneye. Am I being Goldeneyed? While it's got decent production values (this was one of the DLCs) it's still a looong teeediouusss grriiiiiiind disjointed from the game I actually wanted to play.

And the payoff is so high that I'm basically set from now on... as soon as I do several more boring loot runs.

Lvl 12, two and a half of those levels all in the simulation. Blatant paid DLC cheat.

Tuesday: FAATHEEERRRRR!!!

Spend some quality time in the flooded sewers, then the library. Not much to be said about them. Same lobsters and mobsters with higher stats and better loot. The introduction of rocket launchers into fights does change positioning a bit.

Swim to Rivet City. For the price of one rad-away, it's much better than grinding my way along the coastline. Finally get to finish that stupid giant ant quest, and open up some new shops to dump all these assault rifles I've been looting.

Interestingly, this little bit of orphan-driven exploration has allowed me to skip Three-Dog's quest step. But, given Anacostia station routes straight up to the national mall, I decide to go through with it anyway. Ten mines/grenades, twenty motherfucker cells and five hundred rounds of assault rifle ammo later (seriously, that was a LOT of super mutants) I decide I've had enough of this game's grind and un-go-un-through with it after all, skipping to the Jefferson memorial.

(So I'm guessing "purity" will eventually turn out to mean dad's racist against mutants or something?)

Why doesn't Pinkerton's lair have an easier way out after you've reached him?

Gotta say I'm likin' the Rivet. At least some of the world-building so conspicuously absent from the rest of the game was included here, plus the broken aircraft carrier with a medieval drawbridge makes a memorable location you don't see in every RPG, plus the automatic social stratification down through the decks is just icing on the cake. And of course it comes with a crow's nest for sightseeing. Lovely.

The "underground railroad" quest was telegraphed though.

 

Bum around the streets a bit, but the combat's not getting any more entertaining (hunting rifle VATS headshots being my ammo-efficient mainstay despite having acquired some more interesting guns) so let's strap on some talon armor, outcast helmet, laser rifle, some refreshing ice-cold nuka-cola and move this story along. A long relatively uneventful slog across the barren wastes later... aaand we're in Pleasantville. Another game-within-a-game. How creative. The trial-and error (or musical?) puzzle to exit without playing along makes me realize

OMG IT'S LIAM NEESON AGAIN!!!

how little puzzle-solving I've seen so far.

And then! He seriously just runs out into the wastes in his overalls to fistfight giant radscorpions! Across the entire map! WHAT!? Is this the stupidest escort mission ever or a brilliant meta-commentary on the stupidity of escort missions in general? ... OK, teleporting to the destination seems to work too.

I try to detour through Girdershade but it's apparently built around some random goofiness about Nuka-Cola. Never mind. Blunt object indeed.

Meanwhle, back at the Jefferson memorial, fetch this, fetch that, flip this switch and finally the bad guys show up. Generic Schutzstaffel fare, because Mr. Bond, I expect you to regurgitate.

OMG THEY KILLED LIAM NEESON! YOU BASTARDS!!! (for being too cheap to hire him for an entire game) (at least he lasted longer than Emperor Stewart in Oblivion)

Wednesday - Thursday: Vault Ache

After a daring sewer escape, the Steel Bros' base should probably impress me, but mostly it looks like a whole lotta redundancy and extras whose life stories don't particularly interest me. But since they're sending me to another vault, and those seem to be the most interesting things in this game, let's upgrade to power armor and top-tier weaponry and skip over to those.

Vault 108; clonetopia. Gary heads crippled. No explanation anywhere as to what happened, aside from mass inasnity due to critical Gary mass? Just Garys. Lotsa Garys. Narratively unsatisfying, yet weirdly effective in its creepiness nonetheless.

Vault 92; don't stop the music. You're sent there to retreive a violin. Fine, thinks I, they can't all be winners. The actual story, though, using background music to pipe murder-memes subliminally through the sound system, is interesting enough. Though it hardly justifies the rando' gigantic pile of lobsters you need to wade through as a timesink. Why not at least write them in as being lured by music or something?

Vault 101; return of the native. Disappointing. Go in, one-shot the baddy's skull off, go back out after wandering around aimlessly looking for information which apparently does not exist? If the vaults were psych experiments, what exactly was 101's gimmick? Or 13's for that matter?

Vault 106; are you on the drugs? Yes, all of the drugs. Not very experimental, is it? Could've just stuck some cameras in a college dorm, saved cash on inhalants and you'd get your "girls gone wild" tape as a bonus. Plays like a less interesting version of the Garys.

Slight detour for Moira's last quest. Goes pretty much like I assumed.

Vault 87 - requires multiple more steps to enter, so fuck it all, I'm burned out.

Conclusions?

I had expected to get annoyed and quit much faster. Most of Fallout 3's aggravation was just state-of-the-art in 2008: the meta-humor, the paid cheats in the form of DLCs, the Diablo-ish farming of endless swarms of mobs. Some, like the emphasis on loot, loot and more loot, I'm still complaining about in the likes of BG3. I did however find some surprisingly good or mixed points.

 

- The radio stations provide some much-needed immersion.

- Aesthetics: fundamentally solid for their time, yet pathetically under-developed. (At least it's not relying on Oblivion's bloom effect to smooth out model blockiness.) I like the bleak look of the irradiated landscape, and there are times when the sun breaks out over the pasty wastes, ruins looming in the distance, which hit just the precise note of humanity's dusk I was looking for. But the landscape and structures vary so little that pretty quick you're staring at lots of the same old samey sameness.

- Dungeons with multiple exits across the landscape interweaving with soft natural barriers are something I wish I'd see more of in RPGs, even if this game overdid it. A bit more than Skyrim, a bit less than Fallout 3 would be ideal.

- Bethesda's always been pretty good at giving you the ability to skip around by exploring, both geographically and in plot (lobster lair, main quest) so I'm still happy with that.

- Makes better use of radiation than Stalker did (again: love popping a rad-x to gulp down all my irradiated food) but undercuts it with too-easy fixes.

- Putting in the work for FPS mechanics only to then slap on a pausing auto-targeting system sounds laughably counterproductive at face value, but given the rudimentary physics and character motion, VATS feels more and more like a saving grace. As a bonus it maintains playability now the twitch-combat mechanics have aged so noticeably. Also likely did a lot to bridge the gap with those like myself who resented the shift to FPS. But running in circles and hiding to wait for action points to recharge is boring, so I'm guessing many over the years arrived at my compromise of generally opening with a VATS salvo then finishing off a target manually. Still, I'd rather have a functional true FPS system.

But the bad ideas tend to outnumber the good:

- Hacking minigame: while you can sometimes get a hint, it's still a luck-based timesink.

- Inventory: unsorted, unsortable, narrow focused, endless scrolling timesink.

- Key remapping: only halfway, some like "take all" not rebindable, I can never understand why companies go halfway on this.

- The first Fallout was a marvel of dramatic escalation, and this game largely throws it out the window. Multiple guns right away, super mutants at level 5, and though (edit: I have NO idea what third thing I was about to list here. Proofreaders earn their keep, damnit.)

- Loot runs with a small inventory, hermetic landscape barriers and entirely too many ambushes force teleportation on you. The ambushes spawning right on top of you when you teleport to a discovered location are particularly dumb.

- Was crafting actually intended to be useless? I stopped gathering those way-too-heavy materials when I saw I was already getting access to top-line gear as drops, and never looked back.

- Home infirmary breaks economy. Not that the economy works in the first place. Way too much loot. Mostly I stopped even gathering it the last few dungeons.

- Mobs even less diverse than Oblivion two years earlier

- Level scaling less blatant than Oblivion, but still hard to miss the same mobs I'd been fighting all game gradually becoming damage sponges as I hit level 14-17

- Overpowered DLC rewards, pay-to-win

- Let's ask ourselves: how many more creative locations or monsters could we have developed with Neeson's thirty-line paycheck? Not to mention the other big names. There's a difference between hiring professional actors for quality or famous actors for publicity.

- The lack of Stalker Zone artifacts, TES reagent gathering, noncombat encounters or similar incentives takes some of the zing out of exploration, regressing the overland map's purpose to D&D-ish transitions between the real action. This is a big one. Fallout 3 just doesn't feel like an open world.

- Good voicing, bland writing. Moira and Three Dog make good on their ridiculous set-ups, but otherwise it's pretty much all downhill after Vance. Simplistic good guys vs. bad guys conflicts (I still say my idea for daddums to turn out to want to "purify" genetics was better than throwing in generic Nazis, you so painstakingly telegraphed the "purity" line and everything) and most characters are obvious comic relief or filler. Hard to take any of their problems seriously. Not nearly as bad as #2, but let's admit among Skyrim's many improvements was coherence around its central motifs.

So buy Fallout 3: it's less painful to play than anticipated!

"His Brain is Squirming Like a Toad"

The Glitch Mob - Starve the Ego, Feed the Soul

 

What's better than driving out to the forest in honor of the first snowfall of the season? Seeing that snowfall turn heavy and blustery just as Riders on the Storm queues up in your car's stereo.

 

That sync synced up for me with an increasing lack in a slightly older game I've been playing (try to guess which by Wednesday!) and gives me a good opportunity to illustrate my usual complaints about game music via three composers who've worked repeatedly for the same series/studios: Mark Morgan, Inon Zur and Jeremy Soule

 

While wandering around my newest latest, I was intrigued enough by the ambient music to make a note to look it up. Yet the more I ambled about, that note turned into a desire to know who this composer was who kept sapping his own work of its expected, more attention-grabbing complements and sweep. And of course it was Inon Zur. I think I have one to three of his tracks saved up, compared to over a score by Soule and half that by Morgan.

I actually can't actively dislike Zur's stuff, but he's mostly seemed to operate on the assumption that "ambient" is "Ambien" in accordance with its status as background. Smooth transitions, smooth gradations, universally recognizable tonality, nothing to jar you out of your adventures even at its heaviest metal. Slick stuff... but you do lose some ground when you can no longer tell whose back it's grounding, when it no longer evokes the world of the game, when playing his tracks fails to set off any memory cascades. It's not just my '90s industrial fan taste for bombast speaking (though I do love my imperial marches) but the frustrated active expectancy of something more, a dip, a soar, a counterpoint, a... payoff of some kind, whose immanence never breaks into full consciousness. It's your eardrum tensing in anticipation of the other shoe that never drops. You so rarely feel like you're riding the storm.

 

Morgan's work might be the least melodious of the three, but it will never fail to call up the very moment when you first walked up to the gate of Shady Sands or saw the robot army marching along, and even as I criticized Wasteland 3 in most respects I couldn't help praising its apt and striking sound work. As for Soule, you don't even have to reach for that thunderous viking chanting or Nerevar Rising with its hint of Khachaturian's Spartacus. Try Peaceful Waters, a deliberately sedate backdrop for low-key beach-combing, yet which by offsetting minimalism with hints of orchestral grandeur actively invites you to just... breathe... for a moment... while still looking forward to your upcoming trials.

Damnit Zur, get off your respectable composer high horse and cut loose more often!

_________________________________________________________

P.S.: I do also prefer Beethoven to Mozart, The Rolling Stones to The Beatles and The Dead South to Mumford & Sons, if you're wondering.

Ran across this on an unusually chilly late summer morning, before all the poikilotherm chumps had had a chance to warm up for the day.

As far as I can tell it's some species of robber fly, though I wouldn't venture to guess exactly which. The colors, hairless thorax and blunt straight abdomen don't fit most photographs.

Anyway, interesting things, robber flies. That cage-like straddling position for their spiny legs isn't accidental. They hunt other flying insects by snatching them out of the air, then liquefy their innards and slurp 'em out. And look at those halteres! The order Diptera, two-wings, are named so because two (of the usual insect four) of their wings are atrophied into that pasty yellowish dumbell shape you see on this one right above its middle leg, though they're not usually so noticeable. Counterweights for maneuvering. They're one reason you so rarely catch a housefly. Also useful when you're trying to Red Baron a bee straight out of the air.

(You might notice a bit of convergent evolution between them and the similarly predatory dragonflies as well, especially in thorax shape.)

P.S.: I keep wondering whether this one had a wing ripped off or I'm just not looking at it right because it's a bit askew. That looks like a broken attachment point above the haltere... or are the wings just overlapped?

A Brothers Are Soldiers Moment

"Je vois ma femme en esprit; son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête,
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard.

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun."

Baudelaire - Le chat (Les fleurs du mal)

_____________________________________________

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

_____________________________________________

"During a rest stop in northern Florida in 1965, Graham and her sister went into a café without their father.  A white man demanded the two to give him their seats.

"He said, ‘You ain’t hear me? I told you to get up so I can sit down!’” Graham recalled, mimicking the man’s derisive drawl.

They left, not telling their father why.

Once their group arrived in Miami, Graham said she saw the possibility of change. A white family cut ahead of their group – only to be directed to the back of the line by the maître d."

 

Reuters special report counterposing Trump's white racist support with pre- civil rights testimonies 2024/10/26

_____________________________________________

 

 

Pro-Democrat media ran endless slews of articles like that before the 2024 U.S. election, still playing up the identity politics shame tactics and feminist paranoia angles all the way to the finish line. It's all they know how to do any more. Maybe the fact you lost ground even with all of your target demographics* by such martyr posturing might, as some are saying now, constitute a wake-up call as to just how fucking sick everyone's gotten of your antics. But maybe it's also not too much to hope more readers are spotting the forced myopia necessary to swallow one-sided perfect victim narratives and the social justice pecking order. Even if they can't verbalize the cognitive dissonance, more might now chafe under your liminal manipulation of our instinctive favoritism.

 

Can anyone spot the unspoken bias? What reflexive outrage Reuters' above example seeks to evoke banks only half on rejecting the antiquated expectation that blacks should cede precedence to whites. The other half comes from our persisting expectation that males should cede precedence to females, that it was A MAN daring to demand WOMEN surrender their place. When everyone knows the reverse is the righteous stance. Everyone. Knows it.

 

Would Rosa Parks have garnered as much sympathy has she been male? No. Let's just say... no. By the time I was eight years old I was already surrendering my seat on buses for adult women, and please let's not feign that I somehow invented that all on my own while still replacing my milk teeth. (Never mind that I actually have flat feet and a slight circulation problem, making it rather more painful for me to stand in place for long periods of time.) When they lay into you that young it's indoctrination plain and simple, and I'm not inclined to pretend it serves any less of a purpose than forcing blacks to make such concessions to whites: inculcating the precept that you are less deserving, that you in fact are simply *less*, that your comfort, health and safety are to be discarded in favor of one born the correct demographic.

On a completely unrelated note, let's remember Donald Trump's failed coup on January 6th 2021, when some rioters from among the fifteen thousand traitorous, degenerate hick filth dragged a cop to the ground:

""We got one! We got one!" Mr Fanone said he heard people shout, with others chanting:"Kill him with his own gun!"

The "kill him with his own gun" meme took off immediately, and is still remembered. Not so the very next line in the article:

"Some members of the crowd protected him after he started yelling that he has children, the father of four told CNN."

To me, it immediately recalled six months earlier during the George Floyd riots when one of the more remorseful rioters recounted seeing his fellows shoot someone and thinking something along the lines "man that ain't right that's somebody's grandpa" though for the life of me I can no longer find the article, as most any contemporaneous criticism of the twenty million looters, terrorists and enablers rampaging that summer is gradually being expunged from our communal memory.

But in both cases, just try reversing the polarity. Try to even imagine a woman publicly beaten, cop or not, a woman shot in the back or dragged down to the feet of a stampeding herd of murderous lunatics. The question becomes whether to finish her off, and the best moral argument anyone sees fit to raise concerns not her own rights as a person but:

"Wait, hang on, is anyone using her? Maybe let's not murder her if she's useful to her betters."

Witches get a stay of execution if they're pregnant, right? An attitude you would equate with the Taliban is mirrored instead toward all men, anywhere, unquestioningly, among whites or blacks, rich or poor, on the left or right wing. We have all grown up cheering in primal bloodlust at movie screens where male extras about to be butchered must protest "I have a wife and kids" to justify their own existence.

A black man can say he is abused for being black, but never for being a man. The Tuskegee study on syphilis, where four hundred persons were denied treatment for a treatable disease for decades on end, is rightly condemned as racist abuse, but none dare call sexism. They weren't rounding up laundresses and seamstresses though, were they? Even though a female cohort would've lived longer for a longitudinal study. They shopped for all-male guinea pigs. In the most famous female medical counterpoint, the cancer cells taken without her knowledge, consent or remuneration from Henrietta Lacks (and which everyone still uses today, to the profit of any who's ever invested in the medical industry) were taken while she was at least being treated.

Feminists have had themselves a party complaining that so much medical research has always been done on men, claiming women have been ignored due to sexism. Fucking bullshit. Nobody wants to treat women like guinea pigs! Male victims can be swept under the rug, but corporations and other governments always shy away from even one headline revealing they poisoned some woman to death to develop some new treatment. Even the racist pricks perfectly comfortable lying to a man's face for decades on end, telling him he's healthy, watching a treatable infection eat away at their patient day-in and year-out until it kills him would've balked at treating four hundred women the way they mistreated four hundred men. (They were fine with forty women and nineteen children being infected by proxy, but at least they weren't abusing them directly; less emotional involvement.)

 

Hell, I'm not black, but I could certainly complain about being insulted and demeaned as an immigrant and sent to the back of the line, and social justice warriors would coo and fuss over me**. But the moment I speak about the far more abuse hurled against me as a man to put me in my place, having to listen to feminists in high school proclaim me genetically defective per Solanas' rantings to the approving nods of teachers who spat the phrase "little boy" in my face while calling girls "young lady", being denied access to college scholarships in favor of girls despite colleges' female predominance from 1980 onwards, being pre-emptively chided like an ex-con when applying for work on the presumption of guilt as a rapist, and being put to harsher physical work, the moment I dare complain against my superiors in the scala naturae as proclaimed by her holiness Andrea Dworkin, then I become an enemy of the system. You wonder why nobody's buying your bullshit anymore?

 

Bill Maher wanted Harris to display a "sister souljah moment" before the election, referring back to a '92 Bill Clinton refusing to align himself with extremist statements, specifically in the form of a black musician claiming that if blacks kill each other in gang shootings all the time, they may as well kill some whites too during the Rodney King race riots.

 

Well, forget blacks; count the number of men killing each other, not just in American inner cities, but everywhere, always, while women sit on the sidelines placing bets and preparing to rake in the winner's spoils. I'm not hearing a violent call echoing Sister Souljah's with regards to sex instead of race to be repudiated. I would however say the unthinking acceptance of this status quo represents a far more extremist viewpoint, but one within which we find ourselves so thoroughly, primordially entrenched as to have never even discerned a center to the issue.

 

 

_____________________________________________________

* - while ironically I, a straight white male antifeminist voted for candidate anything-but-Trump (consumer protections and secure housing sound good too)

** Until they find out it was by a black checkout girl.

"The Wizzer of Ooze" would make a horrible, horrible title for a porno, so I really can't explain why it hasn't been used yet.

Darkest Dungeon 2

"Down on the boulevard, the children are sold
To pave the way for your streets of gold"

 

Machines of Loving Grace - Golgotha Tenement Blues

 

 

Like FTL and its later companion Into the Breach, the first Darkest Dungeon surprised me by putting a meaningful spin on roguelike randomization, which I generally dismiss as mindless slot-machine gameplay. DD2 instead pretty much reconfirms my old prejudice against the subgenre. I do have to temper my disappointment though. It's not all bad.

The voiceovers are still quite good. Music... doesn't quite match the old Color of Madness tracks unless I just haven't gotten far enough to be treated to the good stuff yet. Production values have otherwise obviously risen. My complaint about the cheap two-frame animations was addressed, and some of the new moves like the zombies dragging their swords along the ground look engagingly... hefty. Without surrendering the original's art style, character models are now better proportioned, no longer bobbleheaded, making the more monstrous monstrosities stand out in turn. The new 3D out-of-combat enviroments look engaging, and their arrangement on a lattice succeeds where the likes of Slay the Spire failed in creating relevant choices, through a balance of combat encounters, loot pickups and depletable wagon stat pools. In practical terms, replacing permanent %miss chances with stacking armor/dodge counters is more responsive to player input, and a decent way of taming the randomizer... in that one small respect.

 

But the moment you move past that, even the good bits are offset by nuisance.

- Zig-zagging your wagon to run over potential minor loot reminds me of the rapids sequence from The Oregon Trail: a nonsensical twitch-gaming element tacked onto otherwise tactical decision-making for the arbitrary reason that all games apparently need twitchiness. The coach's finicky steering doesn't help.

- Combat consumables are now tied to individual heroes. Good in a sense for making you slot context-appropriate gear. Bad because this now subjects consumables to variability in turn order, stuns and the like, so you may not get access to them in the order you need.

- Positioning defends better against attack now, with fewer enemies hitting your 3rd and 4th spots and fewer shuffles in the starter zones. But then you realize positions are less fluid in general. By the time they do start knocking you around or debuffing you, you'll find you have few or no options to deal with that.

- This also negatively impacts skill viability, as you'll be clinging to the few cure/reposition skills you can get.

- Trinkets are generally more useful, but since you can't keep them between runs (see below) it doesn't help character-building much.

- Enemies might seem either creative or nonsensical depending on your mood:

Yes, you fight a respiratory tract as a major boss.

- More emphasis on your team's interdependence than on countering enemies (befitting the squad tactical angle) but that's poisoned by the randomizer. Your foursome constantly attach negative or positive (usually negative) relationship modifiers to combat actions or the route you choose. While this softens the blow of DD1 characters refusing to be healed etc., constantly watching for that blue debuff warning every time you click a heal/guard/whatever order is more fiddly and micromanagerial.

- The more detailed visuals seem to have eaten up more development time, if the dearth of content is any indication. There's too much an air of a cash-grab sequel to DD2's fewer playable classes with a $10 expansion pack consisting of just two "new" ones. No thanks. On the other hand, if you really were strapped for time to animate all those character models, how do you justify sinking development hours into separate models for each hero's personal quest? Every asset you developed solely for one character's backstory (which every player will see exactly ONCE) could have been one spicing up gameplay in general. Yes, it's nice you took my advice and made your cutscenes more interactive, but you didn't need so many cutscenes in the first place! Your concept worked fine without them. We loved it with voiceovers and splash screens. Remember that? Remember us loving it with voiceovers and splash screens?

 

But the worst of it concerns linearity. DD1 downplayed roguelikes' obsession with "hardcore mode" permadeath. You might lose a hero now and then, but overall you could build up whole teams, and choose where to adventure to prevent repetitiveness from setting in. DD2 instead brings that mindless grinding back in force, knocking you back to the start every time, forced to re-equip items and rank up your heroes' skills and relationships all over again.

 

You not only lose the continuity of build-up. Being able to switch up decor and strats at will between the four basic dungeon types was much better than grinding newbietown quests until being permitted to advance, and forcing you through the whole start-up sequence every single time only grows more ludicrous with every repetition of that first zombie fight before the first inn, waddling your wagon through interactive dead air. When PoE2:Deadfire pulled the same stupid stunt with its character creation routine, it at least had the sense to listen to the playerbase's outrage and scramble immediately after launch to implement a "skip intro" button.

 

Compounding that, the "candles" you need to get more hero classes, improve base stats and even unlocking new tilesets are tied to endlessly grinding until RNGesus smiles on you. Instead of low level quests for low level heroes, you're pushed to run the same foursome through the same grind in order to unlock content, the exact opposite of DD1 where you could entertain yourself with new low-level combos for variety while still acquiring useful resources.

Say "timesink" everyone!

 

Over-randomized. Fewer options. Flashier even where it didn't need to be. Massive timesink to content ratio. Gratuitous complete restarts. Cosmetic options as rewards instead of actual playable content. If DD1 demonstrated that the rouguelike routine can sometimes offer engaging gameplay instead of just a glorified slot machine, DD2 reminds that it almost always is simply that, a slot machine. And a $10 DLC for content which should've been in the base game.

A-yup. Despite some good features, that's a cash-grab sequel.

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________

P.S.: Minor quibble, but a nunnery would have an abbess not an abbot. I know you called her a vestal technically... but that really doesn't help the issue.

More orb weavers, this time of the Spiny variety.

 

 Weird how many things in our daily environs actually look like aliens from beyond the moon.

Shecrets of the NeandHerthals

I ran across a Netflix documentary called Secrets of the Neanderthals. Despite the dumb "what they don't want you to know" clickbait title it's not the worst thing I've seen, much as re-enactments make my skin crawl. Decent update on some old debates about caveman culture like the flower burial. Compared to older treatments of such subject matter though, you might be surprised at the pervasive and explicit emphasis on Neanderthal women, with a finger-wagging overtone of how dare you have been so sexist as to only ever present them as male all these decades. Except it was women and especially feminists who enthusiastically hurled "you neanderthal" as an epithet at men (Tim Allen on Home Improvement alone...) in every medium the past century.

So what really changed?

 

Simply put: molecular biology and especially genetic testing came along. Back when we thought Neanderthals the unworthy brutes our noble ancestors had conquered and replaced, we loved mocking the losers as male hairy masculine bearded men all the way. Now having discovered we (and especially Europeans) are in fact partly descended from a few Neanderthals, we feel a sudden urge toward sympathy with them... so all of a sudden must needs render them as female to elicit that unthinking, primal sympathy.

We instinctively favor women over men, always have. Yet in the same breath as we leverage this favoritism to manipulate each others' instinctive responses, in marketing and advertising, in documentaries and public relations, we still maintain the insane pretense that women are disfavored.

Void the Void

"We transmit on all frequencies
Talk show panic gossip queens
Racing into ruin
Racing on to our demise"

 

Aesthetic Perfection - Into the Void

 

 

Before complaining about Darkest Dungeon 2, let me sidetrack to say the validity of any fad is inverse to the extent to which it is, in fact... a fad. An idiotically and endlessly regurgitated meme. A refuge for the unimaginative and simpleminded. An idiot-friendly set piece. Vapid filler. Dross.

 

Anything can be dragged down to that level if enough of the braindead majority pile onto the bandwagon.

So first off, everyone give Lovecraft a rest. He's getting as played-out as Tolkien elves by last decade. Likewise, as everyone willfully misinterpreted elves as mere spindly prettyboys while ignoring the poignancy of cursed pride, doomed creation or waning nobility, "lovecraftian" has been debased to "tentacled fish monsters" increasingly ignoring the persistent theme of human insufficiency, immeasurably vast antiquity or creeping decadence which elevated his stories past the usual creep show. When The Secret World did it, the reserves had not yet been tapped dry. This ain't then. Come now, horror's not my preferred genre, but there must be other sources of inspiration you can channel. (Just don't fall back on red horny devils or googly-eyed oni.) (Or vampires.) (Or ffs, anything but zombies!)

On a related note, stop spouting "the void" for a bogeyman catch-all. Even as a teenager back in '97 I had no trouble calling bullshit on Event Horizon's standard trappings of a burning hell being called a "dimension of pure chaos" ... which would in fact mean a whole lotta nothing at all. Certainly not a force obsessed with attacking humans. Yes, yes, the certainty of nonexistence is the core under-riding anxiety of any sapient, but you're hardly plumbing those philosophical depths by constantly spouting "the void" as highfalutin' smokescreen for generic goblins. I'm sure you all want a slice of Games Workshop's pie, but a setting designed to peddle fifty-dollar toy soldiers to fanatical collectors is just too obviously a make-work pile of warped pretextium crystals with no depth worth tapping. There's nothing there to copy. The setting really is... a void. You won't steal away Warhammer's fans unless you can slap the Warhammer logo onto your product. Even Blizzard didn't manage it.

Also, as appealing as "the void" sounds to any writer desperate to leave all options open for future sequels / expansions cramming anything and everything trendy into that kitchen sink, you do know you're not the only ones who can spot that cop-out from coherence and a proper worldbuilding framework, right? If it's everything, it's nothing. I'm not sitting here in front of my screen awed at infinite possibilities when I hear your voice actors intone "kay-oss" or "the aether" or "Tha-Voyd" * with all the gravitas of fifth graders reciting a book report on a book they didn't read. I'm thinking "yeah, mmkay, so there's maybe a 5% chance whatever rando' shit these rando' scheisters pull out of their asses next might not bore me to tears." The suspense is not killing me.

______________________________________________________________

* Or worst of all by this point "multiverse"

Of Bathwater and the Contents Thereof

It's been getting trendy to bemoan the fact that we were lied to about recycling for decades on end, and it turns out every bag and cup we threw out just ended up dumped in landfills or in the ocean, where it became the microplastics we're now ingesting by the fistful. As the human ape is subhuman and cannot hold more than one factoid in its brain at once, this has rapidly been distilled by the public as "recycling sucks" with no further nuance.

 

Actually? No.

 

Plastic recycling has been a scam, and just like tobacco companies' half-century control over regulation, its persistence due to petroleum interests is further proof that profit in any industry or endeavor should always have been capped/taxed to prevent such centralization of wealth and power completely silencing critics of an industry, inducing wasteful planned obsolecence for a few more sales.

 

But other materials were recycled before petroleum completely took over our economy and never became any less recyclable. Glass and the most common metals (aluminum, iron, copper) can be quite efficiently recovered. Even paper, which is more debatable, can be worth the trouble if your local government's organized enough. And even with plastics, polyethylene is more readily melted down and reshaped than the rest.

 

Even under a communist regime in the 1980s, my school's fence bordered a scrap metal collection point and our teachers ran paper recycling drives, and the old Communists were pretty much openly anti-nature! They at least had the basic notion of avoiding waste for economic reasons. But now, you RETARDED SUBHUMAN TRASH, after you spent decades needlessly sorting out plastics to ease your consciences when you shouldn't have been buying so many disposables in the first place, are ready to throw out recycling programs altogether, because you're brainless fucking puppets of advertisers!

Fuck it. I'm glad the world's ending. You deserve to die, I hope you die, and I just hope I live long enough to dance on this species' mass grave.

Frostpunk 2

"The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold

And it's overturned the order of the soul"

 

Leonard Cohen - The Future

_______________________________________________

 

Damn, what a gorgeous piece of work!

Anyway:

Wrap. Up. Well... The. Frost. Is. Here. (... again)

Welcome to a game where your options are either "hurray we've got gas" or "help we've got gas!"

Welcome to my Stalwart ironfisted rule over a city of reason, progress and merit, in that order. (And a lil' bit of adaptation.)

 

Custodiet ipsos babbages

I never gave the first Frostpunk nearly the amount of praise it deserved. If you haven't played it (first off what the hell are you doing with your life) it ran on the premise that the world freezes over toward the end of the nineteenth century, and you must lead a merry band of survivors to establish a steampunk city atop fossil fuel reserves for warmth. Instead of rehashing that, Frostpunk 2 picks up where the main campaign left off, with your now established society expanding (beyond) its means.

 

The biggest change is a proportional shift in basic theme. Where the original primarily fed off the "man against nature" angle for conflict, this installment refocuses on "man against man" with your main task throughout the campaign being to keep various conflicting factions functional that they in turn may keep the city functioning. This has upsides and downsides, but the various pieces do coalesce into a laudably creative and immersive whole, worth every penny.

(From 11bit's point of view it also keeps the sequel from obsoleting the original, which I'm sure played a much bigger role in their marketing strategy than they'd like to admit.)

The emphasis on interacting masses of humans entails ditching some of the old steampunk appeal, downplaying dirigibles, prostheses or automatons as visual / plot elements. While replacement pathos is included in the package (my reason-first society features serial mating, draconian medical experimentation and triage, communal child rearing and a eugenics program complete with sterilization of criminals) the immersive aspects don't quite follow through on portraying these shifts in mores quite like the original's changes in aural and visual tone. The districts don't look different enough from each other. The music also has lost a bit of its oomph. They do put professional effort in flavor text for many techs and laws, but just a smidge too rarely.

City size increases by two orders of magnitude. Instead of individual constructions on a radial grid you now position entire districts on a hex grid, dwarfing all your original efforts. On the plus side this does cut down on some of the micromanagement. On the minus side it also eliminates some of the poignancy of shifting handfuls of workers to and fro hoping they don't freeze, and the decades-long timescale compared to months in the original also makes one less invested in their eventual fates. ("the death of one man is a tragedy" etc.) * Luckily the designers were well aware of this pitfall and played up the metropolitan heartless rat race through motion conveyed as timelapse light movement along roads. ("Fireflies" the artbook calls them.)  I couldn't help but be reminded of the poultry farm scene from Baraka.

 

In terms of gameplay, the scale-up manifests as less concern with precise numbers of resources than a Supreme Commander style balancing of influx to keep resource flow out of the red as much as you can. Deposits are by default depletable, both within your city and on the overland map. Combined with a heavy emphasis on district adjacency, this yields some captivating juggling of district construction / destruction while maintaining your workforce and coffers. Interestingly, your most basic resource of heat stamps (a.k.a. simoleons) remain difficult to farm all throughout the campaign, scaling poorly with city size and acting instead as your limiting resource (e.g. influence etc. in Paradox' games) and as you make more and more stuff from it advancing through the tech tree, you suffer an almost imperceptible but decisive reliance on petroleum to address every issue instead, black gold surging invisibly beneath your golden resource of manpower through the radial clockwork of city streets. An inspired and highly memorable effect.

 

I won't go too deep into the interplay between factions. Most of your biggest hurdles entail securing the bickering cliques' votes to pass new laws, whether by building whatever they want or openly bribing them or aiding in their constant backbiting between each other. Since their percentage of council votes scales with populace, you end up spending just as much time subverting your inevitable enemies as currying favor. They do have a decent bit of personality. I actually opened my campaign on the Frostlander / Pilgrim side for the sake of nature, but turned on the Pilgrims in a heartbeat when they started in on the mystical hocus-pocus, a change of heart interestingly even acknowledged in the ending summation. Much as in the original, the deeper you dive down one particular branch, the more controversy you encounter (not that I was particularly uncomfortable with the know-it-all prescriptive bent of Reason.) I hope I'm not giving too much away by confirming they'll eventually be at each others' throats, but if you don't mind a Spoiler \ / , I would like to praise one specific gimmick.

I'd originally intended to maintain a reasonably free society, but by the time the civil war rolled around I'd already backstabbed the Pilgrims and implemented some reviled (yet cool!) techs precluding reconciliation. Plus, when the devs openly warned me trying to seize dictatorial power is the more difficult route... well now, that's just throwing down an obvious gauntlet for me to pick up, isn't it? However, I got stuck for a solid decade unable to raise Frostlander opinion to pass the final laws needed to seize power. I felt like I was doing everything right. I had surpluses in every resource, had eradicated all sniffles and grime, was putting down Pilgrim revolts as soon as they appeared while keeping their faction at 1-4% power, and lowering my Stalwarts' fervor to keep the peace... so what was I doing wrong? Apparently I was doing too much right.

I felt like slapping my forehead when re-reading the fine print that it's in times of high tension that the factions grow more willing to vote you into absolute power. Because yes! Of course! Every would-be dictator needs to drum up mass panic over the threat of some make-work boogeymen so the populace cries out for a strongman to take control!** You need to make life shit for the lower classes in order to divide and conquer them. So let squalor build up a tad, wait until a couple of districts go up in flames, THEN bribe your way to success.

 

Brilliant!

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* As an aside, Settlers-inspired village simulators (like Banished, which kicked off the survival city sim trend which Frostpunk built on) distinguished themselves by scaling down from Sim City's megalopolis to more personal, close-up caretaking. It's funny to see the pendulum now swinging back toward RCI districts and milling swarms of population.

** No, this has absolutely nothing to do with orange hair, game shows and golf courses. Why would you even think that?