The Mighty Shovelhead

It's Darwin day. I never bothered with it until I realized how much it cheeses off the fundies, so stroke your beards and let's do another evolutionary topic to make Jesus not roll over in his grave because he's been dead for two thousand years and long-dissolved skeletons don't do that.

 

I stopped watching Jurassic Park movies after the second (and that idiotic gymnastics scene) but corporations being what they are, they've apparently been cranking out increasingly pointless sequels ever since, with increasingly ridiculous dinos that have basically become either goblins or kaiju, it's hard to tell. Or maybe I just don't care to. They must be scraping the bottom of the barrel if at least one recent installment, Dominion(?) included Lystrosaurus of all things, and of course gave it an adorable pug face with humid baby eyes, chubby cheeks and expressive human eyebrows, because you can never say hello to too many kitties.* I assume they heroically murder a laser-armed T-Rex like the ewoks they are.

 

But, for the very same reason Lystrosaurus makes a ridiculous addition to an action movie, it's an interesting evolutionary emblem. Look at the damn thing. Just... look at it. Even without expert reconstructions, from gross skeletal anatomy alone you can guess the piggish little overgrown newt-moles lacked most any big ticket evolutionary adaptations like speed, reach, defense, weaponry, etc. It's one of the most stunningly unimpressive life-forms to have ever existed. And yet, for millions of years at the start of the Triassic, those doofy, quasimodoed stooges ruled the land.

 

For decades, countless learned pates appear to have bent over backwards trying to explain by reason or/of adaptation why Lystrosaurus took over so thoroughly. But so far, the best explanation remains the simplest and least flattering: the waddling clowns just got lucky! They're the classic example of a disaster taxon cranked up to eleven by the biggest disaster before we came along to destroy all of creation. The Permian mass extinction ("The Great Dying") wiped the board of their competitors and predators, and the few survivors reproduced out of control, filling that elusive environmental niche known as "mine, all mine" until reptiles and dinosaurs gradually outpaced and drove them into extinction.

 

The meek really did inherit the Earth, and then God fed 'em to giant salamanders. Ah, the grandeur of a perfect omniscient plan.

 

 

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* Looks like the movie also took some license with the shoulder joint and limb length to make it more action-oriented. Actual reconstructed skeletons look more splay-limbed and stubby. Then again, I'm guessing this is the least of what's wrong with the movie series.

 

By the by, Lystrosaurus wasn't a dinosaur or even any kind of "saurus" at all, but a therapsid cousin to our own proto-mammalian ancestors. Ugh, this was our champion? Man, we really took a beating back in the Mesozoic. Must be why we're destroying everything now. Repressed therapsid trauma.

+100 XP per fish knocked off bicycle

"They're gonna set you up
So they can take you down
They're gonna suck you dry
They've left the blood to be found
They're gonna rip you apart
You're gonna burn at the stake
Cos when it's time to collect
It's only heroes who pay"

 

Ministry - Hero

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"Men are more sentimental than women. It blurs their thinking."

from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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My recent jaunt through Black Legend produced a mixed bag of somewhat creative quest voiceovers alongside a now extremely tired, overused old plot twist and stock characters like the manic 'killumall' bombmaker NPC. So, yes, per obligatory tropes you also meet Stella, the dashing young heroine off to avenge her mother's death because her father's useless.

 

Naturally, like every other 'strong woman' example you meet in every game, she explicitly tells you she "doesn't need your help" right before you of course have no choice in completing the quest but helping her anyway, you filthy presumably male chauvinist pig, how dare you not lay down your life for those declaring you worthless? At least this time the burgeoning abusive relationship is not designated as a love interest.

 

Whenever one of these almighty action girls tells me she doesn't need my help (since every single fictional female can vanquish twenty men-at-arms at once with both tits tied behind her back) and acts insulted at my very presence, I should have the option to reply:

 

"Great then, fuck off ya bipolar tsundere bitch, why am I even talking to you?"

 

Then let me watch her Leeroy in and get her idiot head chomped off by a dragon like she deserves. That should be worth more XP than running slavishly after her to help her, and yield an achievement reading:

"Turns out the bicycle didn't need the fish, either."

Mystery and Drama on a Leaf

Okay, so the one on the left is a big dipper firefly, Photinus pyralis. Common enough, and not particularly interesting in the daytime. I don't think they're big leaf-eaters even in their larval stage though, and the adults don't eat, so... just sunning yourself? Cool, bro, you do you.

More importantly, I thought bumblebees eat nectar, so what is that bumbler doing to... whatever the third thing is? A soldier beetle? If anything, that's supposed to be the predatory one. Really wish my image quality was better so I could tell what's going on underneath it. Is that its abdomen bent under, or an egg mass or what?

 

Anyway, have you checked your dandelions for drama lately? 

Black Legend

(bam-a-lam)

Welcome to the low countries, ca. half-past... oooh... awk-waaaard.

Ummm, I didn't do it.

Yeah, we're in that period of European history. Bring your own bier.

 

I wanted less cartoony team tactics after Inkulinati and Elemental Evil, so Black Legend's grim, low-key aesthetic drew me in. The average gamer's age may be in the thirties now, but you wouldn't know it from the chibified, bubblegummy, bright and cozy kindergarten atmosphere developers adopt to go along with their sappy plots. But I digress.

 

If you're looking for actual role-playing, with moral decisions, branching quests and so forth, you won't find it here. What Black Legend does offer is an immersive, if linear, meander through the byways of a musket-era low fantasy setting.

I like that everything's been knocked over except the two-story-tall pillar of floppy sacks. Also, how is everyone in this town starving? There must be grain in at least some of these. Add a dog steak and you're living large. Anyway, visit scenic Grant, home among others to Christiaan Huygens (who for some reason does not use a telescope as a weapon) and to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, cozy among his vats of animalcules. 

(You looked less... fermented, in your official portrait.)

Those pips around our character icons represent "unbalanced bodily humors" which comprise the alchemical combat system's main damage source. Stack them on your enemy, cash them in with a special attack scaling with adjacent combos. And they do work, the difference between a basic attack and triple combo being from single digits to triple, up to the thousands by the end-game. Technically there's also a large variety of buffs and debuffs, but since you couldn't address them individually even if such mechanics existed, functionally there are only humor stacks and a generic "debuff" category you can safely ignore. While interesting, it also means the quality of the mobs you fight matters little compared to whether they outnumber you, stacking more counters than you and triggering them before you can even act, and conversely that boss fights are trivialized by you outnumbering the boss 4-1. Flanking gives a nice damage bonus, but the lack of zones of control jumbles combat, especially as mobs are coded to act a bit too randomly to make for interesting tactics.

 

If you're noticing a pattern of interesting but flawed features, you can probably guess most of what I'm saying will fit "indie game" caveats. Some good ideas, some talent, but visibly over-stretched past the developers' means.

 

In a way Black Legend is a less ambitious but more playable take on Mordheim's urban scavenging, and though the interface doesn't interfere nearly as much it's once again a main source of frustration.

- moving takes an extra click

- chugging a pot requires a gratuitous submenu

- a "helpful" feature to speed up turn ends can cost you your last action

- you can speed up animations but as usual the problem is the prep and cleanup phases taking longer than actual motion

- ability icons get re-arranged on your hotbar or inexplicably appear/disappear from class selection

- attack lines occasionally fail to predict range and line of sight

- tooltips do not provide some critical info, like minimum/maximum range

- you initiate fights by entering your foes' field of vision... except when entering the rough area of a boss, whereupon your character automatically walks over to him initiating combat, preventing you from pre-fight preparations

- you get a map and a minimap but only the mini version displays your position

- clicking a portrait just zooms to that character instead of selecting it in the pre-fight screen

 

Individually, such little flaws can be ignored, but a dozen clunky interactions will begin to wear on you after the three hundredth repetition. Then some stuff is just bugged, even years after release, like tiles falsely appearing as occupied or out of range.

 

All in all, you get the feeling someone had planned a piece of period fiction and suddenly decided to make it a video game despite lacking the requisite programming or design expertise. As with Wartile or We Happy Few for example, quite a few mechanics feel tacked on after a design lead read a listicle on "the 10 top ways to keep players' interest" most notably the numerous loot boxes:

- and the constantly spammed "LEVEL UP" behavioral reinforcers. Black Legend uses a combat system I can't remember having tried before, where your ability scores determine your damage and your weapon your available abilities. 

Why yes, ladies, I am happy to see you.

In order to gain more abilities, you constantly need to swap each character to different class/weapon combos every few fights. Less chaotic than it sounds, as you'll still want to follow a general archetype (tank, melee and range DPS, healer) for each of your four, but get more wiggle room for cross-class combos. Interesting. But though this individual skill leveling pretty much removes the need for traditional character levels, the devs decided to keep those in as well. You'll LEVEL UP!!! ~120 times per party member during your campaign, with zero choices to upgrade, each time gaining a minor attribute boost, the whole routine obviously serving as no more than a dopamine drip.

 

Other features also seem tacked on per "industry standards" like map encounters randomized every time you re-enter zone, plenty of recruits even though they're all interchangeable, a few mid-campaign fetch quests to make you trudge through random respawns again (admittedly, less than in other games) infinite loot rendering the unsortable item list at the shop irrelevant. Like the interface issues, none of these would be too severe in themselves, but their self-conscious implementation as operant conditioning does more harm than good.

 

Because there really is a nice game under there.

The decor is solid, the mood grim without becoming maudlin, enemy abilities decently varied, the grand total of two character models (human and dog) reskinned and animated just enough to keep you entertained for twenty hours, weapon and armour both varied and recherche and scaling nicely from basic to ornate, the music, meh, just sounds like bot-generated whooshing, but the voice acting would sound surprisingly good even for a richer project. And the writing, while not taking itself too seriously and having some fun with random Dutch references, manages to stay in character

Yup. We're in the slums.

even in its more tongue-in-cheek moments. 

You think this is a game!?

The loot boxes, if a bit excessive, do keep you exploring the convoluted zones' scenic nooks. Fifteen playable classes add up to a bit of redundancy, but for the most part offer a lot of chances to mix-and-match damage sources for combos. Me being me, I could always cite more minor quibbles like why would you call your incendiary devices "molotovs" when "Greek fire" would have better fit the alchemical setting?

 

But in the end, I enjoyed wandering the canals, alchemisted and guisarmed to the teeth, reading street signs for directions, inflicting Science! upon flagellants. I find myself hoping Warcave made enough cash off this stumbling but promising first effort to stay in business. I'd like to see more from them.

AoW4 Factions, 7

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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Ah, my first dragon. AoW4 rulers need not be the same race as their factions, and in the case of later ruler types like dragons, giants or eldritch abominations, they flat-out cannot be. So it was a nice chance to play an evil orc faction, ignoring Triumph's trendy noble savage reinterpretation of orcs for some good old-fashioned death cult stuff. As with all these early factions the flavor text was added long after the fact, but I like the way it came out. I've done this sort of call-and-response cult leader routine for a couple of others. It suits the "awakened ancient evil" pretty damn well if I do say so myself. All-out necromancy also meshed well with dragon powers making up for the early weakness of relying on skeletons, once I learned not to bankrupt my mana pool raising too many of them.

Hie Thee to Space, Cowboy

"Now I'm lost in a sea of sunken dreams
While the sound of drunken screams echoes in the night"

 

Brandi Carlile - Dying Day

 

 

Continuing my thoughts on space cowboys, I chanced a sub-genre which should have been right up my apocalyptic-minded alley, Jack Vance's Dying Earth books. From the very first couple of short stories I was surprised to find his influence quite palpable in role-playing games -- and only then remembered the D&D spell memorization mechanic is indeed occasionally called "vancian" magic. Not to diminish the touch of Tolkien's fantasy races and Moorcock's chaos/order conflict and even older works, but the general feel of D&D, of "you all meet in a tavern" and the confused mix of tech and magic and quest hooks and magic devices and the adventuring party and bluff checks appears to owe most and most directly to Vance. He may not have originated all of them, but a surprising number of little details like, say grues and de(m)odands, prismatic sprays or the imprisonment spell and such-and-such-wizard's such-and-such-spell made it into game lingo over the decades. Which is not to call these, in themselves, detailed.

 

I've only bothered with the first couple of volumes, and am unlikely to continue. Being published decades apart ('50, '66, '83) those first two at least each read slightly different. The eponymous first is a collection of random short stories and has a more general fairytale atmosphere with alternate worlds, gigantic gods embodied, fair maids riding horses through meadows, a character shrunken and put in a jar, etc. The Eyes of the Overworld is another string of disparate chapters only slightly held together by featuring the same picaresque protagonist, but feels more consciously post-LotR in its more down-to-earth themes. In both cases though it takes very little time to spot weakness after weakness in the writing.

 

In his notion of preindustrial manners and mores Vance seemed content with mimicking Alexandre Dumas, with every single possible character from wizards to fishermen, priests to scullions and princesses to rat-men discoursing up and down, from phrase to phrase and page to page in nothing but the pompous, flowery boasts and imprecations of ancien regime dandies. His world-building is in fact... none of such. The geography could as easily be flipped upside down and jigsawed backwards. Grues, deodands, demons and other monsters are all the same breed of nondescript boogeymen. He may as well have called them all goblins or vampires. Per pulp fantasy routine, impressive-sounding place names and ancient empires lie strewn through the text, most forgotten by the next sentence, and even the few recurring ones no more developed than "place hero visited" with, if they're very lucky, precisely one colorful custom.

 

But to me the most infuriating part was the title: The Dying Earth. You'd think that would have something to do with it. No it does not. About once every other short story, a character might toss in a phrase like 'in this time when the sun is dying' to remind you what the setting should ostensibly concern. "Turjan of Miir" begins with the notion of preserving humanity before devolving to generic spell-slinging and "Guyal of Sfere" manages, by its last couple of pages, to scrape up a thematically appropriate concern for the preservation of knowledge in the face of decay. Aside from that, the entire opus may as well have been set at Scarborough Fair for all it matters. There's nothing to it but the same utterly generic sword-and-sorcery tripe supplied by a thousand other contemporaries. Even the few repetitions of "the sun will go black" make no sense. How often do you think about the sun eventually going orange? Or having shone brighter upon Snowball Earth? Societies which display no other notion of time or history, each isolated tribe utterly unmoored from its global context, somehow all uniformly know and believe this one token scene-setting sound bite, an event so slow they would have no way of tracking it. And it affects their lives not in the slightest.

Had these books not been picked up by DnD, would anyone remember them? Hell, considering even I was willing to try a second volume (more than I did for E.E. Smith) maybe Vance did something right after all. Look at the Numenera setting taking up and running with the 'use magic device' skill displayed by characters pointing tubes of blue whatever at each other in Eyes of the Overworld. Look at the roguish thieving Cugel disarming traps in a wizard's mansion (albeit by poking random furniture with a stick) and it's not hard to see how among the budding pastime of role-playing games in the '70s, players could let their imaginations fill in what became class features. The very vagueness of Vance's random babbling, the half-assed name-dropping of imaginary locales and featureless monsters, invites 'this would read cooler as:' extrapolation. (And probably explains why so many of his fans try to emulate such nonsense sensibilities.)

 

That's probably the best influence bad writing can hope to exert.

 

For comparison, though (so as not to rehash my overused reference to The Time Machine) try a very brief 1949 story by Arthur C. Clarke called The Forgotten Enemy. Here we have, just as the central point unjustly claimed by those Dying Earth buckle-swashes, Clarke's human remnants dwindling in the face of a cosmic shift. But this time the plot stays true to the central theme, the protagonist's circumstances changing according to logical ramifications, the conclusion fully in keeping with the premise.

 

More than other factors, that separates true speculative fiction from space cowboys, space operas, unresearched historical fiction and fantasy worlds whose characters are indistinguishable from adolescents of the writer's own social milieu. Is the setting in fact relevant? Or did the writer substitute the supernatural for incompetence in conveying both the super and the natural?

 

But, conversely, this also demonstrates our need for speculation. Fine, yes, send your cowboys to space. Just don't forget to make the space count for something. Even slapped together as a superficial pretext, the fantastic can spark activity in other minds who will complete the original half-baked idea, in a way that yet another war story or domestic drama simply will not. Half a century of dice and character sheets may not necessarily count as a writer's saving grace, but it's at least a saving throw.

AoW4 Factions, 6

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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Those like myself who grew up reading The Lost World and watching The Flintstones still hold a sense of amazement at the confirmation of the dinosaur>bird lineage. It helped that dragons were put into the game around this same time for an extra big lizard tie-in. On the battlefield, these are some nasty hard-hitting pretty pollys too, so long as I time the first strike salvo correctly. Muskets and astral nuking. Big badda-boom. For a bonus, the dragonkin transformation (extra crits as they lose health) also rewards a death-or-glory charge.

(edit: Looking back on this now, I don't like how much the flavor text ended up sounding like my elvish factions. Oh well. It's probably the antiquity angle skewing my affectations.)