I faff in the face of danger!

Mister Drab-Pants

Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough vs. its Shivaree cover

 

As I wrap up Wildermyth's campaigns, I find myself looking ahead to which RPG I want to queue up next. Owlcat're dragging their feet with that last Rogue Trader DLC. Or... I've been wanting to replay Mask of the Betrayer for nostalgia' sake, but on firing up NWN2 on my more recent computer I find it utterly riddled with graphics glitches and lockups, so that ain't happenin' yet. Or maybe... Witcher 3's been sitting in my collection forever. I was afraid it wouldn't have enough stuff to kill but I hear it's been remonstered now.

 

To sweeten the deal, my ultra-exclusive-dooper-super edition is offering me fancy duds. The schmanciest! I mean, I guess I could do without the... frilly... feathery... leather flake crap around the neck, but aside from that, as fantasy armours go, it's a remarkably down-to-earth design. As fantasy video game armours go, even more so. Hell, it appears a strict requirement of interdimensional travel to get persistently kitted out in one flavor or another of absurdly baroque furry/ferric finery boasting enough frills to make me look like I've been swallowed by a turkey buffed to an eye-searing gloss. MMOs of course have been the worst offenders over the past couple of decades, needing to consistently bait their audience into the cash shop with statelier and statelier status symbols, but it's not like you could escape it in single-player either, likely thanks to the long tradition of fantasy story illustrations being an ergononic nightmare.

"Everybody got their pom-poms? Let's go tickle evil."

Flanges, frills, florettes, reliefs and embroideries, flared spikes and spiked flares, scutes, flutes and zoot-suits, oh my! Even plain cloth gleamed in the light like it was all triple-thick satin dipped in jewel dust. Flippin' hell, it was harder to find armour in Baldur's Gate 3 not dreamt up by a fifteen year old girl on a Red Bull bender. Let's not even get into Japanese games' costume design.

 

Much as I hate to admit it, there is some backing for this in our historic record, as advertising wealth and power has always entailed an inordinate degree of... well "bling" for lack of a better word. While visiting the treasury exhibition in Vienna, I did a double-take on seeing the so-called "sword of St. Mauritius" realizing it was the only piece on display equipped with an actual handle which might conceivably be gripped for more than five seconds, instead of some knobbly, slippery, jewel-encrusted eyesore. And yes, yes, I Get It, they're ceremonial pieces that were never meant to see more use than a bishop's bible.

 

... but then, is my game character strictly ceremonial? Because I was hoping to take him out for a spin. Maybe track some mud on an ogre's carpet. Maybe both pummel and pommel some bad guys. Maybe track down a dryad and check the armor rating on my codpiece, if you catch my driftwood. But whatever my adventures, one type of character I have no interest in roleplaying is the type of ditz worried about glitz over substance. Must everything be disco, my dear dancing queens? Has society gotten so feminized that our escapist fantasies no longer have room for the sort of grim Yojimbo With No Name who in real life owns ten gray shirts? (No that I!... okay, yes, yes I do.)

 

You really want to tempt me with a collector's edition bonus? Offer me rags! Sack-cloth protection over a comfortable plain beige linen shirt, a pile of mismatched furs and leathers, an unadorned verdigried hauberk dented with a thousand blows, scuffed, blatantly re-soled boots as shapeless as the badgers they were probably made from. And just to meet you art fags halfway, if you must embellish, I will admit there's a sort of busy visual design even wolf-men will abide:

thus, the lotus, from humble mud

The overgrown, the tangled and patchwork and decrepitly layered, the clanking, fluttering dregs of a misaligned loom and cross-eyed cobbler, the heavily downcast dross of a long-crumbled forge all stacked atop each other, the strength of entropy repurposed, portable exposed brickwork, let me clad at least myself as urban or verdant decay embodied, a crumbled brutalist temple tridiunal, and I'll forgive you far more of your foppish frippery.

I took a walk in gusty -20C weather last year and lucked out witnessing some unfamiliar behavior from these all too familiar dung factories, Canada geese. Until then I had never seen how their type handle a "to build a fire" situation.

Apparently they still fear predators more than the cold. Instead of taking shelter they were out on the ice, lined up uniformly, aerodynamically, crops against the prevailing wind like a fleet into the current, feet and head protected, letting it flow over them. Compare to a still protected but less orderly arrangement on a calmer day just a few degrees warmer.

I guess there are degrees of hunkering down in comfort even for a walking down comforter.

Kindred Not

I'd planned to summarize my thoughts on Wildermyth for tonight, but decided I'd rather run at least one more campaign (having finished 4/6) before doing so, and a common weakness instead reminded me of one of the internet's many dead webcomics. (So that'll be next week instead.)

 

Kindred Not tells of a motley band escaping not to but from their world's large militaristic superpower. How's that for a change of pace from the past years' news cycle? Similar to my comments on Tangled River, it opts for a drawing style more popular in the mid-20th century. Clean lines with characters realistically proportioned but somewhat stiffly, theatrically posed. (Dick Tracy always jumps to mind.) Except instead of using it to illustrate a subgenre popular in that era, it uses the previous century itself as setting.

 

The author went to some pains to reference appropriate decor in everything from wallpaper and lamps to cookware and haberdashery. Admirably so, and it makes every establishing shot a treat. But if reference images and preserved historic buildings serve well enough visually, when it comes to practical details she quickly runs into younger generations' difficulty in portraying a society still teetering between industrialization and traditional life. Feeding cow's milk to an infant without boiling it first? My grandmother would've twisted yer ears right offen yer head, girl!

 

And that's the more pervasive issue: not just practical details like the milk, but the mundane tone of life in older societies which modern authors fail to grasp on an intuitive level: the casual acceptance of corporal punishment and other physical violence, the more or less strict separation of the sexes in both labor and leisure, the dictatorial work ethic, what has now become the world of yesteryear was not just furnished differently but acted differently in a myriad subtle or striking ways. I'll have to revisit this topic in wider detail elsewhen, but for Kindred Not's purposes, the very flavor of dialogue constantly torpedoes that visual immersion.

 

It's only looking at such newer works of fiction that it becomes apparent how unaware modern audiences appear to have grown of the officiousness dominating interactions as late as ~1990, much less 1930. The insistent "mister" this-and-that or various honorifics, the weight carried by a "miss" versus "missus" or the strict adherence to greeting formulae, polite society was a lot more... well, polite, in the old days. Politely violent, politely sadistic, but polite nonetheless, and if you're writing period fiction you really need to get into that mindset. There's a scene early in Kindred Not's second chapter where the teenage girl brings her new male acquaintance to a safehouse operated by a family friend. As soon as she opens the door, the new guy grabs her from behind by the shoulder to warn her from divulging too much information. Uhhh... no! Ronan would've punched Caden square in the mouth in that moment, no questions asked, I don't care what early 20th-century country you're emulating for your fantasy. And sadly, an inability to enter that mindset drags many new works of fiction down, Kindred Not included.

 

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Addendum:

A good comparison might be drawn to a page from Erfworld featuring, as its parody du jour, "chief healomancer" Pierce. You can practically hear Alan Alda's halting giggle and self-conscious smirk in every line of dialogue, a particularly interesting case because Alda's Pierce was himself a seventies' impression of fifties mores and the transgression thereof, mixed with roaring '20s stage comedy. Yet Rob Balder vaulted seamlessly across those more than a century's worth of generational barriers. It is never unclear where the lines of propriety lie and how deliberately they're being trespassed. The information age spy attempts modern seduction, feigns fifties pudeur, is teased in the tones of the sexual revolution and the punchline lands straight out of Groucho Marx' lips. Now that is a firm grasp of milieu!

Oh, no! I forgot to help McGruff take a bite out of crime!

Anoxia Station

Indie gaming. Sometimes you get burned.

Anoxia Station boasted an interesting enough hollow earth premise to con me into shilling out a few bucks instead of letting it inevitably drop to the fifty cents it's really worth at most. Whether it's a cynical asset-flip or sophomoric grandstanding, just don't bother.

 

I've already criticized its abuse of dim or no light, but that's the least of its crimes.

 

It tries to shoehorn real-time elements into what is obviously a turn-based base-building strategy game, like a turn timer or rapidly clicking buildings to extinguish fires. It works just as well as it did for M.A.X. 2 thirty years ago. What's that? You've never heard of MAX2? That's right, you haven't.

 

Its creative side has you chasing curios nonsensically in lieu of actual content. Its hollow earth vision is just a random "attack of the giant whatever" litany. Snail, moth, eel, worm. Yeah, whatever. It never makes good on such cheese like more expert approaches.

 

Then there's the interface wrangling, like the mouse pointer being slightly offset vertically. Or frozen mobs taking control of your camera for several seconds at the start of each round for dramatic effect, which then repeats every single turn they remain on the map, per mob. Or the timesink of reassigning leader passive bonuses every single turn. Or the over-exaggerated effects like a full-screen camera shake or flashing during disasters, which will be the first things you turn off only to discover they never completely go away.

 

Then there's its failures as a strategy game, like over-dependence on randomization making even D&D seem reasonable by comparison. Or monsters spawning on a particular tile but getting infinite-range attacks eliminating the relevance of positioning. Or upgraded buildings losing their lower tier's active ability or leader ability for no logical reason.

 

But the straw which finally broke this camel's back was the screenshot above, reaching the end of a mission and not being permitted to leave. I assumed it was because I hadn't finished an objective. Reload and try again, exhaust the damn reservoir, count my turns carefully for a dash to the exit, only to discover myself still blocked, with zero explanation for why exactly it won't accept my order to move onto the exit tunnel square. Do I need to be a turn early, do I need to discover something else on the map, do I need some upgrade? Fuck it. I just stopped caring. One more for the Bozo pile.

AoW4 Factions, 25

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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For the last of my four giants' elemental alignment I thought, rock, materium, crafting, man, I haven't made enough dwarf factions yet. Grumpy-ness lends itself well to a phlegmatic sort of evil you don't really get from the usual rampaging hordes, so this vignette was fun to write. Mind you, I've always hated the portrayal of necromancy in fantasy games, so let me also clarify it's not their magic that makes these jokers evil, but their acquisition of materials. Otherwise the use of post-conscious matter is inherently harmless, no matter if it breaks the moral majority's precious taboos. In practice, they turned out less dependent on necromancy anyway, since the armor bonuses of materium combine quite well with shadow's debuffs to make for some quite invincibly terminator-ish units requiring very little replacement with boney fare in the field. The perfectionist artisan stability/economy bonus made for slow but smooth growth and one of the most cheerful shadow factions you could wish. Maxing an evil alignment is actually harder than it should be given the positive pay-off for such self-interested actions as razing monster spawners. The one truly overpowered aspect though turned out to be the Cult of Tyranny's hostage diplomacy, which basically gives you free relationship growth with as many neutral towns as you can violently vassalize. On the large maps I favor, even with sparse neutral towns, it only takes one early war for hostages to gradually build you up into an economic powerhouse via tribute.