Afoot is, apparently, the game

Mentioning foot fetishism twice in the past several posts got me wondering why it's so popular a reference for symbolic naughtiness. After all, I'm sure we could all cite sexual fetishes more morally questionable, or non-sexual transgressions far more harmful than those. So on one hand, maybe that's what makes it safe to reference. On the other, I do think it's also just too comically... random! I mean, come on, feet? Mouths, buttholes, abs, shoulders, hair, napes and thighs, okay, fine, plenty of spots carry some sensual implication by transgression, proximity or suggestion. Feet though? It's like saying "oooh, baby, that patch of skin a hand's breadth below your right shoulderblade gets me so hot!"

 

... and now thanks to Rule 34 I've probably invented "just down the right shoulder" fetish porn. 

Sinking Dagon

Marilyn Manson - Thaeter

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Oh, it was island, not city, d'oh!

 

When I dug up the Lovecraftian FPS detective mash-up The Sinking City from my unplayed back-log and realized it wasn't what I'd mentally pictured, I'd apparently confused it with Sinking Island, the 2007 adventure game published by Microids. So now I remedied that misfire. I needn't have bothered.

 

The first Syberia game earned its status as a classic for its melancholic meander through scenic early 20th-century vignettes, but his other work seems to confirm Benoit Sokal's limitation to that one talent. As soon as you load it, Sinking Island manages to make even the pre-menu splash screen more annoying (much like Metro 2033 did) then needlessly complicates the save/load routine with user profiles. But we all suffer through such nonsense if a game's actual content proves good. Here it proves not.

Your name is Jack Norm, and wow, are you ever. Granted, Kate Walker was a bland everywoman protagonist as well, but such a role better fit the requirement of an audience viewpoint in Syberia's exotic clockwork locales. Sinking Island's tropical paradise attempts to recreate that feel, but all the elements are simply telegraphed: quaint natives and their pagan beliefs, the hated old Scrooge, girlfriend with a bad slavic accent, sumptuous yet repetitive resort with many, many pointless rooms and walkways. For something made in 2007 the graphic detail is both expansive and fluid, albeit stiff and stilted like anything from that era. But bland aural and visual decor aside, it's the writing that really kills the whole mess.

 

I'm trying to make some allowance for a possibly worse English version (though I cannot seem to change the language in any way) so maybe the French cast took a better stab at pronouncing Battaglieri than bat-a-glee-airy or bat-tag-leery. But them's small potatoes. The script, overall, attempts to flesh out an interactive whodunit by putting you through all the steps of an investigation, ignoring that all those steps are in fact painfully dull. For one thing, there are too many of them. Literally. Locales are split into several redundant screens each, which you'll need to traverse every time you want to triple-check whether you've pixel-hunted some patch of screen or a character acquired another line of dialogue. For another, the phraseology could stand to be far more terse. For yet another, your very professional investigator repeats the same questions to everyone.

"Good morning Mr./Mrs. Xyz, I am Boring McEveryman; I'm here to be very beige about this police investigation. Do you like billionnaires YES/NO? Now show me some FEET, BABY! Oooohh, yeeaaaaaah!"

Just kidding. I wish it were that entertaining.

Well if this ain't five kinds of awkward.

I especially like her boyfriend just placidly going through his idle animations while some rando interrupts their dinner to photograph his gal's feet. But for the most part the text's just... bad. Wordy and devoid of substance or flavor, choked with clumsy filler like "too bad the weather is so bad" and repetitive exchanges like

"Do these pearls mean anything to you?"

"No, not really, they don't mean anything to me."

Does that prose mean anything to you? Because it does not mean anything to me. 

 

I suppose a less cynical wer than myself might qualify it all as an attempt at naturalistic dialogue instead of obviously entertaining spicy fiction, but even as such it plonks. You'll find none of Syberia 1's charm here. A few quaint ideas like comparing clues in your inventory can't rescue this hopelessly boring paint-by-numbers routine. No point in continuing past the intro. Worth at most the 79 cents I paid for it, and not a centime more.

 

On the other hand, I also picked up a complete freebie called Dagon (which, the title assures us is "by H. P. Lovecraft" - thanks, here I was afraid I'd picked up the Dr. Seuss version by mistake*) which turned out not to be a "game" at all, stretching even the definitions of "walking simulators" and "visual novels" by merely having you click to advance screen by screen. And yet... I cannot believe I'm even saying it, but this one I really would recommend.

It's an illustrated, well-narrated, full read-through of Lovecraft's short work, word-for-word with some interesting historical background and character notes you can right-click here and there. A half-hour's read and listen and watch. A museum curator's notion of a video game... but it works. It is what it is, its few features handled both professionally and with dedication to the source material. Oh, and the irony of Dagon, of all stories, being illustrated by makers of DLCs for Ultimate Fishing Simulator is almost too precious. Had some 3D models left over, did you?

 

How much more funding went into that tedious piece of catalogue filler above? How much better can you handle a worse concept if you don't go into it as a contractual obligation or a lazy, disinterested cash-grab?

 

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* Y'know, I meant that as an honest joke, but a lot of Dr. Seuss really is kinda... non-Euclidean, in a "Mimsy were the Borogoves" flexible young minds style. 

AoW4 Factions, 12

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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I wasn't quite sure what to make of the eldritch update's various gameplay changes, so just as when dragons launched I fell back on orcs as generic minions just as I did for my first dragon. Their aggressiveness worked well with the extra unit summons and crowd control, and a bit of order-affinity support kept it all together. Uninspired concept, but I like the way it plays. And nothing says faith in a higher power like chanting, gibbering, maniacal, bloodthirsty savages.

Pie Dreams Squared

"No denouement to the drama of the real."

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Fry: "How can you people be so blasé? Here you are in the year 3000 or so, yet you just sit around like it's the boring time I came from."
Farnsworth: "Boring? Wasn't that the period when they cracked the human genome and boy bands roamed the Earth?"

 

Futurama S03E15 - I Dated A Robot

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I became so enamored of webcomics to a large extent as work put forth by one or two minds, freer from interference, albeit not from comment section pandering. As a bonus, their slow pace often led to the subject matter outgrowing itself. The following two examples are both slice-of-life (slice of > pie, get it? huh? get it?) a genre that rarely grabs me, and to be honest I was never particularly jazzed about them at the time. Both started in 2007. Both have become more interesting retrospectively.

 

Punch an Pie

Queen of Wands was standard early 2000s fare, lots of generic "they can't censor us now" interwebz naughtiness which inevitably slid into twenty-somethings' dating dramedy as its other gimmicks (wiccan heroine, glorified feminist abuse, etc.) quickly revealed themselves to be going nowhere. After its end, though, the author spun off and handed off one of her characters to another writer for a more consistent slice-of-life routine solidly fixated on the inevitable post-school concerns of sex and taxes. Aside from that, it mostly concerns the heroine's character arc growing out of her lingering adolescent emotional fits and unrealistic expectations and taking more responsibility for her own actions.

 

Octopus Pie

"My everyday anxieties don't seem so unique anymore. They don't play out on this lonesome, poetic level." - mid-series turning point. 

Heroine Eve(rest) Ning (get it? huh? get it?) works a shitty grocery job and gets a wacky stoner roommate, hijinks ensue and then sort of waver and peter out. More interesting for its commentary on contemporary middlebrow yuppie/art culture and its pretentiousness, including a quick jab at what's now termed wokedom shortly before its end. I stopped reading sometime before its middle years, when it kept oscillating unstably between trying to maintain its original sitcom zaniness and increasingly indulgent navel-gazing filled with unrealistic stabs at subtlety and deep meanings or just plain art major fappery - e.g. in this strip according to the author's later commentary: "That Eve is laying flat while he's holding onto her is meant to signify that he's in need." Pardon my derisive snort. I returned when, to my surprise, she posted a couple of new chapters long after the fact, with the cast now aging, pairing off, starting families, looking back on their youth less with nostalgia than bemusement. 

 

Train Dreams

Wait, that's not a comic, how did that get in here?

It's not often I agree with film critics on artsy, slow-moving movies (especially concerning a befuddled everyman stumbling through life) but this one was just solid work through and through. If indeed the character-centered piece it superficially appears, it would be boring as all hell, its protagonist displaying all the charisma of mold. But the show's true star is the changing landscape, physical and cultural, personal and interpersonal. It packs the most detail you'll see in a movie about nothing.

 

I could never get into those pie comics while they were running, but they read much better on a binge. From '90s outrageousness to 2010s socially conscious posturing, from in-your-face cool kids to struggling to keep a middle-aged couple together, from the launch of World of Warcraft to smartphone addiction, it's not always easy to untangle the change in author or the author's personal growth from milieu. Futile efforts? Easily forgotten? Twenty years later, about as relevant as a lumberjack from 1920. But watch years' worth of panels grow into the realization that youthful rambunctiousness has stopped being cute or narcissism no longer satisfies a fading craving. There's a glimmer of hope in there for an entire culture to mature. Instead it feels like the end credits are about to roll. Someone did just launch some astronauts at the moon again. Whatever happened in between there?

Cutting through the Treacle: The Tabletop Fetish

"You said that irony was the shackles of youth"

R.E.M. - What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, 1994

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"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"

"I don't even know anymore."

 

The Simpsons, 1995

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On the lookout for any system to replace the increasingly obsolete D&D routine, I recently gave Gloomhaven a try.

If you get that character reference, you're too old.

To be fair there's quite a bit of potential there, but it's still fairly primitive with a tabletop version apparently not even a decade old. Leaving most of my bitching for some future date, I'm just amazed at how hard the computer adaptation works at preventing me from getting into it with an utterly bewildering interface feeling like it was designed by whichever librarian won the "most anal-retentive" award in 1973.

 

Sure, you've got the usual amateur designer pitfalls like the camera turning on its own or overextended animations for mundane actions like bending over to pick up coins.

 

Then it makes you pause to confirm the beginning of a new round like Battletech and lacks context-sensitive single-click shortcuts or double-clicks, making you separately confirm every action. And you can't click your other card to change action, have to manually un-click your current one. And you can't just spacebar-end a character's turn; must officially pass your remaining card and confirm. And you can restart round on your character's action but not if you're in the 'thinking' step of selecting an action.

 

But even beyond all that inexcusable stuttering, Gloomhaven's design enters a Very Special Boy category few others have managed to crater their way into. You kinda have to see it to believe it.

Yes, it makes you manually confirm your armour soak on every damaging attack. Wait! Oh god, oh god, oh god, did I remember to breathe and perspire this round?!?

 

So screw that, instead I've been devoting more time to Wildermyth, which will warrant more discussion of its greater creativity (even if it does stumble a bit in execution)

If anything even lower-budget and lower-tech than Gloomhaven, invoking 2D construction paper visuals much like Shelter did, and for the same old-timey storybook atmosphere. Or maybe its creators just watched The Secret of Kells one too many times. Look, at least they ain't chibis. It's a rare "back to basics" game which successfully revisits the core interactivity of the medium, placing heavy emphasis on your pieces clacking from square to square on a board and units and buffs being represented by "cards"

- but it's also significantly more playable than the first example, with more informative tooltips and more fluid commands.
 

On a completely unrelated topic, though I've been burned by Kickstarter projects several times (fuck Mark Jacobs) I got two e-mails in the past month from games I'm currently backing. One gaggle of fringe developers lamented their publisher deals all fell through and they're strapped for cash, laying off part of their team. The others bragged they've now implemented dice in their game. Colored dice! Rolling! Sparkling! Rolling sparkling colored polyhedral pixels! Never in the history of the Arr Enn Gee hath The Number been graced with such grace and gravitas!

 

I shouldn't have to reiterate my distaste for retro games, but they overlap so heavily with the turn-based or narrative-driven genres I favor that I keep running into this utterly shallow in-group appeal. I'm not buying a game about spaceships or fireball slinging to pretend I'm sitting around a table with a bunch of other apes. I'm not in it for the hipster meta-enjoyment of pre-post-ironic non-content. I'm not buying an escapist fantasy to pretend I'm pretending, but to pretend. That shouldn't be so fine a distinction. No cards. No dice. No placemats. No putting my little soldier figurines on plastic bases. Get that shit off my screen. 

It's like fetish porn. You know when you've hit the paraphiliac threshold because a minor detail begins replacing the core activity, be it humping or clicking. You expect a pornstar to have feet, you'd find it odd if they were missing, but you can also spot a foot fetish video if one pops up. Both extremes veer off the mark. Something in Gloomhaven's basic design philosophy emphasizes the wrong visual or interactive elements, consistently and intrusively. It makes you pause for cards to flips over, makes you backtrack through actions as if you're taking the time to physically put a card back in the deck, makes you confirm every sub-step of every step of every action every round as if the mechanical manipulation of imaginary cardboard and plastic were in itself your dungeoneering adventure. Wildermyth places you on a table with cards as well, but after that no longer belabors the point. It's still gratuitous, you can tell the fetish element has been included, but at least there's more to it than feet!

 

Yes, grids look like game boards. So? Yes, the small number randomization or random action drawing of tactical games obviously originated with dice and cards before it was electronic. So? An adaptation can never be a carbon-copy. You're making something that has to function here and now, on the screen, by the rules of electronic interaction, not by the rules of drunken munchkins smearing pizza grease onto cardboard. In 1993 Solitaire may well have been the most played game on Windows. There are reasons thats no longer the case!

 

You hit peak absurdity when you see start-ups on a shoestring budget selling Kickstarter stretch goals of dice animations and plastic feelies mailed to its audience. Could you have paid one more programmer for one more month with that cash? Three months? Look over at your neighbours packing their bindles and tell me again if you can afford to deliver a non-functional product for the sake of a handful of foot fetishists, when your entire industry's already in danger of getting automated into irrelevance.

The jerkiest

Turns out pineapple juice, when heated and (I assume) well aerated, will punch little bullet holes in an aluminum pan. At least I hope it wasn't the chicken that did that...

Oh,

Though many tobys yuk on terry oi once tried to sass katchewan but they were having nunavut.