Tout au reals

I should play something new, maybe in a genre I've generally avoided like shmup or action RPGs or whatever we're calling that third person hack/n/slash routine these days. But golly, how could I ever decide which one? There are so many! No... really. There. Are. So. Damn. Many. Ever since Diablo 2, these things have been like romance novels for twitchy thirteen-year-old boys with no attention span: they are endless, they unjustifiably pretend to be one step above porn or FPS slaughterfests, they ceaselessly retread the same damn formula, and their audience never gets enough.

But there are a bare handful of interesting departures as well, and in trying to make a selection I decided it might be interesting to compare three examples' initial presentation, not only for what it says about the game itself but what it says about the role of tutorials or introductory levels in an industry whose conventions have become common knowledge as it closes on half a century of content.

 

Torchlight 2

Start up an engineer with a wolf pet. In lieu of tutorial, kill fifty ratmen toward your starter NPC. The Torchlight games are as straightforward a Diablo clone as you can get without inviting a lawsuit, so this is exactly the mindless grind I expected it to be, right down to the interface. Lotta colorful, bouncy kiddie appeal, notta lotta preparation or planning or anything to be explained.

Weird West

Ugh, I'm not a fan of premade characters. Apparently I'm playing a bounty hunter. A female bounty hunter. Just like they all were in the old west! Aaaand the sheriff is female too. Riiiiiight. Welcome to Femtasia. The sad part is there would've been something so satisfying about playing a stalwart frontierswoman, shotgun on the porch and all that, stepping up to defend her family... if you hadn't so ridiculously overplayed your desperation to present her as absolutely superior to all men everywhere (who need to trip over themselves to make her look good) right from the start, just like every single other damn politically correct story, movie and game of the past decades.

Exanima

I... what? What is this? Where am I? What's happening? I'm in a room? And it's empty? There's nothing to interact with? Clicking the door does nothing. Clicking anything does nothing. Oh, it's click-and-drag. Grab the torch, open the door, now I'm in a long dark branching hallway. Oh and there are axe-murderers. Or maybe zombies? What? But it's okay they're friendly? What?

Even though I can't interact with them? Until one of them murders me. What!?!

Weird West again

Alright, bury some bodies, stock up on corn, travel to town (shooting some meat-e coyotes on the way) aaaand the very next scene has the two women interrogating a male villain about his male boss, threatening to break his fingers. Making sure to mention a villain named "pa" because of course. The town at least also offers some casual examples of theft, infiltrating a boarded building via a window, etc. Then a stopover to demonstrate shopping, then a stealth and ranged cover demonstration. Then of course after killing a dozen men you're helped along on your quest to save your useless husband by a supernatural female.

Torchlight again

I have a healbot now! Which is good. Healing is good. And right-clicking is gooder than left-clicking. Ooooh, skeletons instead of ratmen. Fancy. Click-click-click. Stuff dies. I get loot. I am amazing. I leveled up! I'm even more amazing. Click more monsters, loot comes out. I leveld up again. I AM SO AMAZIN OMG!!! wait-wait-wait... OMG boss fight! Click it MANY TIMES untl the lot cmes out. OMG I AM SO MAZNG SO AMZNG OMG!!!1

clickclickclickclickclickclcikcckcilckcicklcikckcikcklilcickidlckcidkcklclickmydick

Ooohh, bigger boss fight, it hurts me, now I have to click both the monster and click to run away. Click-n-click and click-n-click and click-n-click

I AM NOW A FAMOUS HERO SMZNGOMG!!!

Maybe I should actually allocate the past four levels' worth of stats and skills?

Weird West again

Cannibals' camp. Sneaking exercise. Unconscious bodies mean never having to say you're sorry. I try to poison the well, but a patrol spots me so I end up shooting my way through a few anyway. Let a prisoner out of a cage who comments he's glad to get out... because his wife must be worried sick about him. Okay, I was annoyed at the feminist idiocy at first, but now it's getting hilarious. Can we get this bitch to spontaneously break out into a Disney princess song about the medicinal virtues of estrogen? That'd just complete the package.

I am starting to enjoy the environment interaction elements though. Like the very intuitive cover/aiming system, or the rain refilling water barrels you can use to heal yourself. Hate the severely limited inventory though, especially as I don't have a chance to hit town in the middle of this quest.

At least one, maybe two of the enemies you kill finally turn out to be a Karen, though of course she's also a miniboss, had to be more important than the male mooks.

You rescue a female prisoner, who instead of "my husband must be worried sick about me" brags she has eagle eyes. She's, like, sixty. No, I'm sorry, she has eagle bifocals.

Exanima again

I spend some quality time leafing through the manual, then try the combat arena. Holy hell this is infuriating! It's supposed to be a physics-enabled slasher setup. I'm familiar enough with that from two decades of Mount&Blade, but the mechanics here are more than unresponsive; they directly interfere. You're supposed to carefully time and throw your weight into attacks or dodges, orienting yourself with the mouse. Your body parts have individual rag-doll physics, so you might try moving forward only to have your leg catch on terrain, trip and fall. In practice, this plays as your character interpreting any mouse motion as motion altering or preventing other motion, changing your direction, swinging your arms around, or tripping over the littlest loose cobblestones because turning involves moving your feet. And if you try stepping off an ankle-high ledge in combat, you will fall flat on your face. Moreover, while attacks require deliberate mouse-holding and directional swings of the pointer, blocking is automatic and triggers some kind of global action cooldown, so overall it's neither here nor there, neither manual nor auto, neither quick nor decisive, with the AI constantly interrupting your own motions with your arm or leg catching on some random object.

Don't get me wrong, I see huge potential here in the sheer amount of physics detail provided, but in execution it's still very, very aggravating for my character to simply not do what I tell it to do. Hyper-realistic limb motion isn't playable when the player cannot (barring some haptic suit getup) control those limbs!

Well, let's try this again. Apparently there were weapons in my starting cell I missed the first time around. You can grab a barrel lid as shield, a board as club. That part I love, interpreting utility just from appearance. I get a few rooms farther before dying again, tripping over a wall corner while fighting two goons.

Best part?

It's a "hardcore" type of game with no save option, so you get to start over every time your character flails aimlessly face-first into an enemy's weapon.

So, class, what have we learned?

I mean literally, have you learned to play?

 

In the most dumbed-down variety like Torchlight, there's simply no information to convey beyond the instantly intuitive "click all the things" and thanks to MMOs, RP-lite mechanics like putting points into skills when you level or selling loot at a merchant were grade-school-level universal even back in 2012. With no explanations necessary, what would have been a tutorial is instead repurposed to hammer the player's subconscious with those operant conditioning kill>loot>level reward stimuli: lots of rats between you and your first NPCs, just waiting to make you feel successful and powerful.

 

For Weird West, the gradual pacing of aiming, healing, sneaking, etc. is more complex and worth stretching over several small maps, but not too outlandish, so it also repurposes the campaign's tutorial stage to market its political pandering. It's hardly the first game I've seen do so (e.g. Wasteland 3's "patriarch" giving away the ending by level 2, or Wrath of the Righteous' ridiculous "I live with my lesbian wife" dialogue) presumably in a bid for uncritical acclaim from professional critics eager to score social justice points. ( - and who probably won't bother playing further than the first levels before reviewing.) I'll bet that, ironically, that posturing will likely slack off a bit after the "impress game journalists" phase.

Oddly, Exanima, the only one of the three which would truly benefit from a gradual, carefully descriptive introduction to its rather novel mechanics, is also the only one lacking such. (Its in-game manual is actually pretty decent, both concise and informative, but not my focus.) The key here is marketing to the "hardcore" gamer crowd, who resent hand-holding or being made to sit through lengthy explanations. But I'll warrant it overshot its frustration / satisfaction ratios even by those standards. Being made to start over fifty times in the same 10x10 room due to obtuse controls and environment interactions, unable to discern if we're even inputting the correct commands, is not the sort of learning experience for which we gratefully pay money.

It's interesting that even as the strict need for tutorial levels has declined, they persisted as a controlled environment in which developers can showcase their product's strengths... however those may be perceived... even when, paradoxically, the very lack of introduction is implied to be a selling point.

Man, was that asshole a no-show to his own birthday again?

At some point we've gotta stop throwing parties for him...

Can't go forward without a leg to stand on

The winter solstice. Deepest night. Frozen hope. The best moment to throw a party and delude yourself that you might see another spring.

We needed no time travel to reach the final shore

Sam Harris titled his latest podcast episode The Way Forward - after last month's election. Haven't listened yet, at least to the half I have access to since he paywalled the site. But what is there to say? There is no way forward. We're done. It's over. Democracy has failed. Know all those times we've all said "it's not the end of the world" - well, this time it is. Even if the U.S. manages not to descend into some banana republic kleptocracy, which is where it's expressly headed with only one layover at church, its government will be both diminished and utterly choked with redneck incompetence for the next four years at the least, realistically several decades; that sort of damage isn't repaired quickly even in a best case scenario. And with the rest of the free peoples of midgard already themselves under siege, with China arming for WW3 and nature itself crumbling under our feet, this will very likely precipitate a total collapse.

 

And please, don't think that even the best of us with the best of intentions can do anything about it. The ready availability of troglodytic street trash eager to make a quick dirty buck means there will now always be a knife at your throat, whether hired by Trump or Bezos or Xi or their innumerable lesser imitators. But more importantly, the bulk of the species desperately wants this disaster, or really as much disaster as possible. The human animal is continually befuddled and threatened by technological advance, by refuge from instinctive drives, by individuality. It wants the stone age back, the only place it felt comfortable and competent. It wants to be beaten down, riddled with parasites, enslaved by its clan, starving, superstitious and desperately ignorant. Humanity is subhuman.

If nothing else, the 2024 election here in the states should prove once and for all that any attempt to educate the overwhelming bulk of humanity had always been doomed to failure. No politics, no technology, no literature, no high-minded ideals could ever elevate animals incapable of personal choice, imagination or basic arithmetic. Subhuman genetic scum are incapable of rational decision-making. You wanted equality with the vermin? Now choke on it. You were never going to get anywhere without selectively breeding for minds capable of thought, and now it's too late. The only possible salvation for sapience would be our extermination by true artificial intelligence, and we've run out of time to arrange even that.

You're witnessing the answer to the Fermi paradox: the self-destruct coefficient in the Drake equation. There's no point in trying to stop it.

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 distinguished, 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.