The Warm-Blooded Equations

"Now that we know for sure they're telling lies when they say

Noone gets hurt and therefore nobody dies

You know it's hard to believe anything that you hear

They say the world is round"

 

Garbage - Metal Heart

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"But when the Great Horde attacked our homeland in my grandfather's day, we moved into this region in force. We pushed the Vaegirs back, and made their fortresses our own.
Of course, you know how things go. My father's generation were hard warriors from the cold lands across the mountains, but this generation all has houses in the town and great estates and spend time as much trading as they do practicing archery. The next generation will grow soft on Velucan wine and will lose their lands to the next batch of illiterate hill-raiders to come over the mountains, just you watch. It's how things always were, and how things [will?] always be."

 

Baheshtur, one of your Tartar companions from Mount&Blade: Warband

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"Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the Prevention of Disease Only!' He had a whistle he wasn't going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.
[...]
The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary's hip pocket. 'What a lucky pony, eh?' he said. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don't you wish you were that pony?' He handed the picture to the other old man. 'Spoils of war! It's all yours, you lucky lad.'
[...]
Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls."

Pages 18, 24 and 90 of Slaughterhouse Five

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Once upon a time, there was a story. Actually, it was in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Magazine, to employ the more dignified precision befitting Scientifiction. But in getting an itch to re-read The Cold Equations now, I was unpleasantly surprised to find its Wikipedia article devoting all its commentary space to nothing but negative reviews and open attacks declaiming such things should not be said! Interestingly, for something published in '54 and considered a classic and added to the SFWA's best stories list in 1970, Wikipedia's critic reviews start in '77 and then jump straight to the '90s and 2010s. Back to why later, but mark that discrepancy. Moreover, the most valid point of critique makes no appearance: that it's poorly written.

 

Even by SF's lax wordsmithing standards as the no-frills genre of ideas, The Cold Equations is filled with dull, uninformative descriptions, unrealistic dialogue and repetitive restating of redundant rehashing. Oh, to have been an assistant editor at Astounding seventy years ago and taken a thesaurus and a pair of garden shears to that weedy typescript! But editing still saved it, its hard-hitting main point owing most to that magnificent bastard John W. Campbell's refusal to accept trite feel-good moralism. I'll leave you to read a synopsis, or better yet seek the story itself (come on, it's just 20 pages, you'll live!) and move spoilerly on to the unjustified criticism.

 

The standard bitching runs that nobody would engineer a spacecraft with zero margin of error in its fuel or other reserves so as to crash if it takes on an extra passenger. Very well, maybe it's not zero. Maybe you've got ten (or eight) kilograms of wiggle-room for your carry-on luggage. Make it twenty, keep the change. That still won't carry a teenage girl. Or, give it more leeway, maybe it can! Maybe the designers specifically feared some moron would march aboard and designed it with that many kilograms to spare... and then two extra morons march aboard. You'll still have to draw lots and space one. Or maybe it's just one really fat chick! Gonna start filleting her so the main bits can live? Or hey, maybe, maybe! -- the design couldn't even take one full-sized human and the pilot had to be a horse jockey who fasted for three days before embarking! Do you see how straining to move the goalposts absolutely misses the point? You will faceplant into an implacable physical law somewhere, and that's where the story is. One pilot and one stowaway make a good concise core cast.

 

So let's not pretend sincerity in those engineering quibbles. Fans would normally have no problem accepting that a frontier setting uses bare-bones equipment, Conestogas with no spare wheel, or that the shuttle is a purpose-built machine with a very limited scope, used in an emergency solely by trained personnel. Those D-Day landing craft don't look particularly sea-worthy to me either, but hey, they did their exact specific job well enough without worrying whether any divas wanted to take one cruising. Ay, there's the rub. The same audiences cheering openly or at least sighing in self-righteous approval for male sacrifices (remember the ending to Titanic? why didn't she make some room for him on that coldly equated raft?) revolt when the tables are flipped. Females' aristocratic privilege must be preserved. But an overentitled bimbo's hauteur is, to borrow an idiotic modern phrase for once in proper context "just a social construct" fed by her betters' willingness to bow to her demands until she believes trespassing signs don't apply to her, accustomed to smiling and giggling her way out of any trouble. Godwin and Campbell merely placed her in a situation where that illusion dissipated, and drove home the point with every repetition that had the stowaway been male, the pilot would have readily shot him without argument.

 

Here we come back to Wikipedia's critical summary, with opposition to The Cold Equations seeming to increase the more society has been feminized, the more that demented entitlement grew to dominate our social mores until even the fundamental truism that the laws of the universe do not bend to your whims (no, not even if you're cute and nice) became anathema to modern narcissism.

 

Well, if you don't like that, for the love of fainting couches stay away from one Cyril Kornbluth. And most of the public have. Though very much an honorable peer of golden age SF, his is not a name frequently mentioned among the field's greats. At least not these days. I had of course read The Marching Morons, but did not remember until picking up a short story collection now that he was also behind The Little Black Bag, loosely set in the same universe and a lauded classic in its own right. So I kept going. His writing is most obviously, most deeply marked by WWII, with questions of the application of power and violence, and the distaste and necessity for such, cropping up again and again, in more direct or more fanciful ways. If you'd like the more brusque culture shock version, sample Two Dooms, and keep that fainting couch handy.

 

Not that he was by any means a one-trick-pony. You could try The Silly Season for an immersive take on the mercenary mindset of journalism, even if much of its period jargon has fallen into disuse since the heyday of late-industrial "wire" networks. The Rocket of 1955 is a cynical couple-page flash-fiction smirk toward the chest-puffing can-do attitude of the early space race - one having regained its relevance with Musk/Bezos and the like's corporate parasitism of the space program. Shark Ship is an especially memorable, if slightly disjointed, musing on censorship, perversion and the potential of hijacking both instinct and civilizational values.

 

But there's a certain brand of Kornbluth yarn spun along The Marching Morons' spindle, which belies fantasies of human nobility, human progress and the virtue of naive benevolence, the type of SF apt to be written by bitter war veterans and perhaps most famously brought to the public's attention by Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Try The Luckiest Man in Denv if you want military-industrial complex power fantasy human interest. Try The Adventurer if you want a classic plucky downtrodden rebel pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

 

But especially try The Only Thing We Learn, the tale of a mighty space empire celebrating its rich and noble cultural heritage. After the first few pages I thought I'd gotten the gist of the story, some ultraconservative, might makes right, macho glorification of ruthless warmongering, the only civilian, the only intellectual in the flashback being after all a fat, drunken boor. Lucky I didn't toss it aside. Turns out there's plenty reason to let yourself go and give up once you see clearly the arc of history leading your society to its demise. I found myself re-reading the set-up and conclusion. The "winners" are explicitly no better, no mightier or more deserving than their victims; conversely the rich and noble heritage is a gilded revisionist slant on the undeserving. *

The linking tragic flaw here is intellectual dishonesty, misapplying artificial, ossified ethics intended not to address problems but to maximize the speaker's grandstanding, to polish useless sidearms. Again, the civilized do not lose for weakness or fundamental incompetence, but for refusal to face reality. In The Cold Equations, that reality is hard vacuum and gravity. In Kornbluth's various stories it is more often the human animal. He acknowledges, occasionally (which is more often than most) that human behavior operates by animal rules, that it repeats itself unto stagnation and self-destruction, that we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes, that the vast bulk of the species is a subhuman herd of marching morons. That mentalities are physical properties of the physical world, not negotiable social niceties. And any workable solutions to whatever intrigue you find yourself plotting or plotted into will have to be based in observation of such reality, not well-wishes and prosocial platitudes. Crooks, liars, tyrants, slaves, parasites and marauders, all are no mere aberrations which can be stamped out by heroic opposition. They are logical outgrowths of animal nature and opportunity, and will continue arising until either the latter, or better yet the former, are eliminated as roots of the problem.

 

Boy, that's a tough sell these days!

The standard-bearers of modern fantasy sold to the past generations in their youths, the Nimonas and Wesleys and Harrys and the like, proclaim a far more upbeat message: act as stupid as you like because you're special and the universe will reshape itself to suit your tantrums, and social influence is everything. That insanity is itself a matter of physical science, of ape hormones and kin recognition instincts and codependence. You could've addressed it. The naked ape simply decided to look at its own navel instead of looking at itself in the mirror. When reality does hit, you may find yourself forced to reach all the way back to the greatest generation for a dose of smelling salts.

 

"I wish I wasn't flesh and blood

I would not be scared

Of bullets built with me in mind

Then I could be saved"

 

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* For a bonus, notice how closely the old rebels match anglophone ancestors. For another bonus, I'd bet someone at Games Workshop decades ago was a Kornbluth fan. The self-assured militaristic pomp of The Only Thing We Learn's armada matches too closely the 40K Imperium of Man, and the rebels pilot a fair suggestion of Orkish kludges.

There Wolf's Jalopy

Last week it occurred to me to look and see if Google Maps photographed my car parked in street view. Not that I haven't used street view extensively ever since they implemented it, and I've looked at my parents' house on it, travel destinations, my old grade schools (holy shit, so many massive metal bars on their windows now!) and other stuff. But I don't do vanity searches, and it sort of never occurred to me to indulge in this variant until now, either. But maybe I'm weird.

 

I almost "get" the concept of vanity searches now, seeing myself represented in this objective, disinterested compendium. Sure enough, there my ride sat, in my usual parking spot, jammed up against the curb as I usually park it subconsciously trying to avoid others in this as in all respects. There's a sort of validation in seeing my influence on physical reality thus captured. There, see? I really do exist!

A republic, if you can keep educating it

"When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school."  But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township.  The United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly."

 

- the villain from Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here

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"And your body is a temple
And the temple is a prison
And the prison's overcrowded
And the inmates know it's flooding
And the body politic is getting sicker by the minute
And the media's not fake
It's just very

...

   ... 

inconvenient"

 

Amanda Palmer - Drowning in the Sound

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"they could have disposed of you as quietly as flushing a dead mouse down a toilet. But they didn’t. Why not? Because they knew their boss didn’t really like for them to play that rough and if he became convinced that they had (whether in court or out), it would cost their jobs if not their necks.”
Jubal paused for a swig. “But consider. Those S.S. thugs are just a tool; they aren’t yet a Praetorian Guard that picks the new Caesar. Such being, whom do you really want for Caesar? Courthouse Joe whose basic indoctrination goes back to the days when this country was a nation and not just a satrapy in a polyglot empire of many traditions … Douglas, who really can’t stomach assassination? Or do you want to toss him out of office [...] and thereby put in a Secretary General from a land where life has always been cheap and political assassination a venerable tradition? If you do this, Ben - tell me what happens to the next snoopy newsman who is careless enough to walk down a dark alley?”

 

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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Funny how "Trump Derangement Syndrome" has fallen into disuse compared to his first term, as our news cycle and talk shows both are saturated more than ever with his sickening presence. Which, for a consummate narcissist, is very much a case of throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch. You might say our reporters, pundits and comedians are not merely trying to spite him but bringing his crimes to public consciousness, as is their role in society. But even his actual crimes are rarely emphasized for their worst harm caused. Does he hate illegally imported Mexicans? Bad, but you'd still have a government if that were the only issue. Realistically, you could fire every wetback over Rio Grande again out of a circus cannon and, some messy hedges and a severe strawberry shortage aside, both countries would survive just fine. But the methods employed by the Republican Party, the random hooded street thugs driving around in unmarked vans disappearing random pedestrians off American streets? The paramilitary abduction of minors from their beds in the dead of night and zip-cuffing them as leverage against their parents? When the government throws due process and equal protections out the window, then you're into banana republic dictatorship tactics. But then, the last couple of Democratic administrations were already gleefully ignoring any process in declaring the entire male half of the population criminals by birth and promoting the racist rhetoric of identity politics, so let's not pretend you weren't always headed in this direction.

 

But the media have certainly sped up the process, haven't they? Diverting attention. Throwing a fit and obsessing for days or weeks over every single one of the Trumps' distractions like renaming everything after themselves, staging bum fights on the White House lawn or hammering down the walls of what is, in an objective summation, a building, a propagandistic symbol, a Versailles, Forbidden Palace or Sublime Porte to glitz yokels, and not in itself the functional institution it should represent. But the tax he wastes on every single triumphal arch in his own nonexistent honor is peanuts compared to the billions destroyed every day by the corruption running rampant with the destruction of protections against corporate fraud, of public services, plus multiple industries' subversion by and open bribery of government officials, especially the Trump crime family itself, plus the warring for military contractor profits, and for a cherry on top the proposed tax-funded bankrolling of insurrectionists against his own government. You think he's given up on that?

 

Tell me, instead of frothing at the mouth about Epstein, of every competent professional thrown out of a government position to be replaced with some subliterate hick whose only virtue is taking marching orders from the "republican" cartel. Or every department budgeted into nonexistence, and the myriad ways I'll be getting poisoned, run over and thrown out of my home as a result of the government no longer governing. That's the stuff that'll kill you. Literally. Like, a bullet through your head from a knuckledragging thug handed license to kill in the name of establishing a theocratic dictatorship. And that's if you're lucky enough to find them in too much a hurry to have their fun with you. Pointing out where the murderous thugs are lurking? That would be relevant information.

 

But it'd be boring. Everyone knows nothing gets social media channel hits (or sells rap albums) like starting a feud, beef, inconsequential but highly visible slapfight. Preferably one that goes on forever, so both sides can keep posturing as heroes of their respective cause, rioting regardless of whether the home team wins or loses.

 

There was a sudden moment of clarity back around 2017-18 when newscasters discovered, en masse, that the best way to mock Trump is to let him speak for himself and merely repeat his mindless gibbering with the same dignified, deadpan seriousness they'd adopt in reporting a bus crash. "The President issued an official statement declaring the terrorists having recently murdered scores of innocents are... bad dudes, very bad dudes." I had assumed, somewhat naively, that this approach would generalize to our entire political discourse and at last drive into full consciousness the monstrous gulf between what a statesman should be and this overgrown babbling infant pointing a gun at our heads.

 

But it was already too late. The tribal virtue-signaling outrage machine was already in full swing and every criticism could only be voiced if it doubled as championing the privileges of those self-appointed superior breeds among us, the rich in melanin or poor in testosterone. Thus the media, from YouTubers with thirty followers to the biggest names in television, settled into a cozy, mutualistic relationship based on the old comedians' running gag that even if the wrong candidate wins, their profession also wins by being fed more material. Once the public lost all standards, it's all advertising. Once the public stopped caring that they're putting subhuman cretins in charge, insults are no longer inconvenient to those selfsame empowered cretins. So long as they're facile, so long as they merely reinforce the major players' ability to bleed their fanatical followers.

 

So feed the newsies easy headlines to blurb. Knock down a monument, insult a war veteran, grope a debutante, and they'll ignore you looting the public coffers. After all, since the country started electing movie stars, the presidency has been more and more of an entertainment product, a freak show distracting from the depredations of corporate investors. And media's sole remaining purpose is to sell tickets to the show.

 

I did not declare the '24 election the end of the world merely for one incompetent and crooked house-flipper's rise to power, but because it demonstrated his brand of capitalism is how the voters choose to do business. Lie for the hell of it, cheat at every opportunity, mug grannies, take bribes, hire thugs to murder anyone who stands in your way, then rush to church to have all your crimes washed clean for declaring belief in a fairytale. What does one charlatan matter after he's installed a million just like him in every position of power? Except, perhaps, more competent in their villainy.

AoW4 Factions, 19

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 wanted to make some bugs. I made some bugs. Other than the hive mentality I was weirdly uninspired by them. Imperialists, adept settlers, etc. made for explosive early expansion. Powerful, but not my style. Never played them again.

The Prince-and-Page Matched Set

"I need attention from someone I don't care about to keep caring about those who don't care about me!" 

Sluggy Freelance 1998/03/28 

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"Real niggas do what they wanna do
Bitch niggas do what they can"

 

2Pac - Staring through My Rear-View

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"Mother, did it have to be so tall?"

Pink Floyd - Mother

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Disney's old 1940 Fantasia is mostly remembered these days for Mickey's brief stint as Sorcerer's Apprentice, but a longer and more elaborate of its segments set an ancient Greco-Roman mythscape to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Unicorns, pegasi and fauns caper through technicolor meadows, leading up to a ball of centaurs and centaurides, headed by Bacchus and crashed by Zeus. It's a marginally more sexualized affair than you'd expect from Disney, animation not being yet relegated to pure child's play in the interwar period. While deprived of visible nipples or genitalia, the horseyboys and horseygals were very clearly naked, and this being a bacchanal, there's zero doubt we're leading up to a whole mess o' horsey-humpin'! First though, the alluring quadrupedal, hexapodal debutantes must be attended in their primping.

A male for every occasion

Many were apparently scandalized in subsequent decades by a centaur with stereotypical exaggerated old-timey negroid features acting as servant brushing a centauride's tail and carrying her train. Okay. But most of the work is done by flights of Cupids/cherubs applying make-up, providing hats and garlands and choreographing dramatic stage entrances for the gals to look as regal as possible... to their intended mates, the far more butch centaurs. And that part has apparently not scandalized anyone in the past 86yrs.

 

So here's my question: did anyone ask the cherubic attendants if they'd like to fuck?

 

Considering that one little cupid peeks between the curtains he's just helped close on a centaur couple gettin' intimate, I'd call the answer quite obvious. But it's funny how even if we've become sensitized to the unfairness of dark-skinned servility, no-one has ever bothered questioning the females' entitlement to be served by flights of castrated, easily-dismissed males for the express purpose of then throwing themselves at higher-ranking males. Were such distinctions presented in any other context, if the centaurides were splitting the populace into worthies and serviles based on racial or national markers, well... let's say Disney's had some editing to do on such topics over its history. But fabricating a eunuch caste for the use of females is as wholesome, as natural, as righteous a proposition as we can imagine.

 

It's a regular feature among the entertainment of modern, polite society to decry and demonize the various pick-up artists conning desperate men with promises of no longer being in the loser category and getting laid, or the various hyper-masculine social media superstars surrounded by bimbo brigades as emblematic of success. But their critics conspicuously refuse to acknowledge that such snake-oil salesmen only promise transition between the categories of loser and fucker. The categories themselves predate our media figures, enforced as always since before the dawn of the species by females as part of their own reproductive instinct, along with the requisite conflict.

 

If you'd like a taste of just how unquestioningly this degradation pervades our species' social mores, try yet another of Bill Maher's semi-regular segments bashing men in service to the Democratic Party's habitual, overt misandry. This time he took a swing at young men still living with their mothers, giving up on starting families. I won't comb the segment phrase by phrase for the endless double standards placing all responsibility on men and all entitlement in the hands of women, but do note, first off, living with their mothers is something women themselves have always taken for granted, including going back if they leave their husbands. I could cite example from traditional village life, and "I'm going back to mother" was a pretty standard female threat by the Flintstones era of television. Only for men has the social safety net always been rescinded at puberty.

 

More importantly, reverse the polarity on the scenarios Maher describes. Imagine hordes of women living with their single fathers into adulthood and middle age, to the exclusion of other inter-gender relationships except for the father's circle of friends, waiting table at their gatherings and keeping house for the father. Even the more repressive Muslim societies where such behavior is directed toward the husband would raise an eyebrow at a father keeping his daughter an old maid for such purposes, especially an unmarried father. In the West, we would reflexively assume an abusive relationship.

 

But the sons in such a situation are themselves blamed as though harming others instead of being victims of a lifetime of psychological abuse from mothers who have had decades to torture them into dependency, who have retained direct and unitary control from infancy, uninterrupted and unscrutinized, propped up by a legal system which glorifies single motherhood as morally superior based on the unchallenged dogma of feminist lobbying. Somehow when discussing older women and younger men it's not the adult in the relationship that's at fault, ever. And even when we deign to glance at this dynamic, the men are not viewed as deprived of living their own lives, but condemned as insufficiently servile toward women at large. The question of the man's own independence is not even raised; only his presumed duty to provide for and protect a wife presumed slightly more entitled to him as a servant than a mother might be.

 

Moreover, make no mistake, this is among other things a form of sexual abuse suited to female instinct. Women who divorce their husbands and wrest solitary control over their sons then construct a sexless marriage to this dependent, obedient animal over whose psyche she has secured unchallenged gaslighting privileges. A mock-husband who will never dare step out of line. A castrated, darling little cherub perpetually flitting about her, helping her primp and choreograph her self-aggrandizement. A male to be denied to make herself feel superior and in illusory control over her own unanalyzed instincts.

 

For peak perversity, consider how much of this state of affairs follows economically from the generations-long practices of denying men university scholarships or social aid in favor of women, and throwing them out of education and work on women's accusations of <SOMETHING SEXUAL> automatically and without recourse. Only to then have media channels like HBO lambaste you as a loser for it by every invective and scatological sputtering they can imagine.

 

All this is normal, Disney-safe, wholesome. Does not every woman deserve both a prince to fuck and a neutered cherub to carry her train?

 

Marrying? It's a wonder men will have anything at all to do with you sadistic cunts.

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 9

I was walking home through a blizzard when I spotted this little guy scampering around the gutter.

Imagine my surprise when it actually started running at my leg. Then when I moved my foot slightly, it panicked and sprinted full-tilt in the other direction. It had probably just headed for the nearest heat source not realizing it was declaring war on King Kong. In a couple of seconds it had burrowed into the soft, shallow snow lining the gutter.

If it was that desperate and disoriented though, I doubt it lived much longer. A big downside of being a minuscule mammal with a hypercharged metabolism is your energy reserves being basically nil.

Fallout: New Vegas

"There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –"

 

Emily Dickinson

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Y'know, they had a saying back in the old days:

- but I don't remember it because we don't really remember all that much from back then. Who wants a history of plenty and gleaming safety when you're dodging shivs and stingers around every corner and hoping you haven't inhaled enough radioactive dust to make your skin slough off? But they also say Vegas was a big deal before the war. Still is. Money-pit back then. Still is. Crooked and run by crime families? Well, yeah. And maybe that's what everyone likes about the place. For all the monsters looking to chew our limbs off, for all the poisoned landscape and contaminated water, the xenophobic cults and sadistic tyrants looking to enslave us, for all the world's changes and our own mutations, everyone, and I mean everyone, can look to that idiotic cap-trap burning pointless electricity through every night and feel reassured, yes, reassured in this universal kinship, that we're all still the same dumbfucks that blew up the world in a pissing contest.

 

This message brought to you by Cram!

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After bashing my head against Bannerlord's Artificial Stupidity a couple of posts ago, I decided to switch to some other looting, roving, first-person RPG, and methought instead of Cyberpunkin', it's been a while since I've fallen out. Or in. Next stop: 2010's New Vegas, farmed out to Obsidian as soon as Fallout 3 demonstrated the 3D adaptation could turn a profit, presumably so Bethesda could focus on the then upcoming Skyrim instead. Could it be anything more than a cheesy cash-grab sequel easily tossed aside after a few hundred rat kills?

I initially started an early level play-by-play as I'd kept for #3, but soon realized their shared technology and interaction would force me to repeat myself on too many minor details. Then I kept expecting to suss out some through-line of incompetence in mechanics, atmosphere or writing which I could mock from beginning to end. To my dismay, then delight, I discovered I couldn't. The more I dove in, the more it drew me in. Though hampered a bit by bugs, clunky motion, industry-standard grindy resource stockpiling and a few terrible decisions (e.g. damage threshold, STR as must-have stat, Bethesda-standard terrible inventory timesink interface) overall New Vegas proves an impressively well-executed game.

 

Avoiding abusing the paid cheat items from the DLCs I heft my varmint rifle and stumble my way through the first few levels in my own ass-backward way, hitting Sloan's easier quests and then Primm (leaving the robot in charge, though, truth be tol', I got no time for any man (or bot) named Slim, 'less 'is last name be Pickens) and even the border outpost (where I have the dubious honor of being sent to kill ten rats or six ants, whichever comes first) before returning to newbietown's newbiequest. Then I spin out for some exploration and random violence: geckos, ghouls, goats, scorpions, coyote dens, a cave here, an irradiated valley there, a ridiculous ghoul rocketeer cult jetted off to anywhere-but-here.

 

By the time I sight the solar farm I find myself pausing every once in a while to admire the windblown dust. Something about this game is beginning to feel very... right. After the random nonsense of #s 2 and 3, the atmosphere seems to have found its footing again. The entire wasteland's not immediately crawling with super mutants. Characters stay in character, which doesn't exclude the occasional bit of in-character humor.

Desperate for desperados

Sure, sure, the theft/morality mechanics still make no sense even within the... let's say lax, limits of video game logic. While Powdering that gang at the hoosegow, how the hell is it still stealing to take any of the convicts' junk? I'm their sworn enemy, I've betrayed their trust and doomed them all, declared open war on them and I outright gain karma by hacking them to ribbons with my machete while they wail in agony, but taking a bottle of beer still costs me karma? Then you've got poor Boxcars who will never again kick a tumbleweed. My condolences. And also my morphine. Apparently feeding dope to a murderous bandit counts as a karmic gold mine. Hurray morals. Even the big supposedly two-sided conflict between Republic and Legion is played much too shallowly, but I'll have to revisit Caesar's Legion when I discuss villains.
 

A few little absurd moments had me rolling my eyes right from the opening cinematic. Headshots do not work that way, the couple of times my dialogue read "I'm not a delivery boy" had me wondering how else you define "courier" and I'm hoping the bottlecap quest won't wax Pythonish in its silliness. I've also been skipping any card/gambling minigames in the interest of time. Then you've got the more severe stumbling.

 

The overly-narrow inventory margin forces me into abusing teleportation just as in Fallout 3 despite having piled on three more strength points - sure, I could avoid picking up trash loot but look, I just assume I'll need thirty pounds of dog meat, four hundred empty bottles and fifteen toasters at some point in this campaign; this is an RPG after all. And, if anything, even my thirty years' worth of metagaming experience underestimated old Obsidian's dedication to making you pick up every piece of litter you run across. I've spent half my time checking the wiki for fear a junk item might have some obscure use, which it usually does. With a better interface, this could've been very entertaining. With Bethesda's gigantic linear list-scrolling timesink and zero tooltips, I'm leaning more toward annoyed. On a related note, as in Fallout 3 interior spaces often feel too "realistically" large and repetitive, but I'll spin that off into a separate topic.

 

It also has its share of more technical issues. The mottled dustbowl aesthetic's a mixed blessing. It allowed them to camouflage a large number of tripwires, land mines and other nasty surprises managing to reintegrate trap-disarming as an RPG staple after moving to FPS. On the flip-side it also turns many quests into pixel-hunting nightmares.

I don't care if you're Hawkeye himself, I simply will not believe you hunted those pixels without cheating and looking up the location on a wiki.
 

Also, entirely too many quests or rewards become unavailable if you clear a location before getting the corresponding marching order from some mook you never knew existed. Quest markers glitch out and mislead you, save files refuse to overwrite and the game still crashes and locks up on zone transitions. So I couldn't explain why none of those very real flaws put a dent in my drive to advance through Fallout: New Vegas' world and encounters until I finally set my mind to enter the city proper. I climbed a rise overlooking the Colorado River. Up ahead was a friendly camp. Might meet a giant mutant fly or two on the way. Farther in the distance was the dam. Nice detour on my way north, and a chance to skirt the bandit-infested ruins. My pack was still fairly light, so I might make it all the way to the city and advance the main quest. By a step, just a step. Plenty of mysteries to uncover on the way. Some dangerous, to be avoided. Others tantalizing. Progress to be made, but not an infinite power trip. Wealth to be gained, but not constantly. Colorful characters, but with interesting motivations.

 

Only then did I consciously articulate NewVegas' charm: it's honest work. Not the more cynically pandering, low-brow, condescending fluff like Fallout 3, Wasteland 2 or BG3, not focus-grouped to death; neither is it the self-indulgent posturing of fresh college graduates imagining themselves "disruptors" upending an entire industry by some sophomoric big idea. It neither strains to keep you mindlessly busy with constant action nor denies the necessity for same in moderation. It neither drags you everywhere by your nose-ring like a domesticated beast executing fixed orders, as Skyrim did, nor purposely punishes you with "rocks fall, everybody dies" GM omnipotence abuse. Nor did it outright settle for mediocrity.

It built on its premise.

 

Where in, say, Wrath of the Righteous or BG3 most NPC companions outright infuriated me by their infantilism, in this game from a decade prior I couldn't find even one I outright disliked. (Though their idiot combat AI had me gnashing my rotten fangs.) I'm enjoying the added immersion of the survival elements, chugging Nuka-Cola and irradiated water, stocking up on doctor's bags, planning on visiting the Doc for an anti-rad treatment, taking time for a good night's sleep. Persistent but not insistent implementation. Vegetation and resource spawns follow different biomes with smoother gradations than Skyrim. Even more importantly, NV downplays the MMO grind mechanics which plagued TES 4&5 and Fallout 3. It throws out level scaling (aside from a noticeable mid-game bump in mob types) in favor of reasonably tiered challenges, renewing that impression of monomythic escalation and distinct transition between the mundane and mystical which the original Fallout so perfectly captured, and which 2&3 threw out. It even dares to weaken the loot&scoot core loop. In contrast to Fallout 3 or Skyrim, you might spend highly variable durations away from Goodboing (or wherever you keep your stash) and some of the most interesting locations, like Vault 22, might not offer much in the way of loot at all.

 

But most important, it prizes its immersion and does not sell it out for cheap gags. NPCs learn your name and reward your past efforts. The wilds feel spot-on bleak and vaults perversely claustrophobic. Mobs cluster around dens and hideouts and other likely spots, not just interspersed statically over the landscape, and occasionally mount half-hearted attacks on civilization - and civilization responds in kind!

I made a lucrative scavenger trade early on when discovering I could follow caravans around and loot their targets as they defend themselves during travel. (Makes me wonder who's running around after my comitatus in Vagrus.) There's even a coherent sense of marching history to the collapse of tribal/raider culture in the face of larger, organized factions like the NCR and Legion, of civilization very gradually rebuilding after a now long-past nuclear war.

 

But I can't help noting all of NV's best features were Obsidian's departures from Bethesda's strict formula. Slight ones. Working within the series' limits. Eventually you feel that formula dragging you down again. I'd post a screenshot of my character's progress, but by level 31 you probably know how that goes. Most skills already at 80 points, a mountain of loot, a brewery's worth of bottle caps even after maxing out my implant quota. Grandmaster of every guild, as usual. Every quest pushing you toward a golden ending. Simplistic good vs. evil conflicts with obvious correct choices. Not much role to play.

 

Yet still. It's a world you don't want to leave. Boots scraping the sun-baked clay, an objective on the horizon, a glance between the foothills for interposed threats, a chug of sarsaparilla, a nod to your companion. Onward. NV falls into that second tier of classic games. It lacks the real oomph of a trendsetting Fallout 1, Morrowind, Starcraft or Half-Life, the artistic flair of a Bloodlines, Tyranny or Torment to fuel roleplaying memories. But, like Dragon Age: Origins or the first Pillars of Eternity, it stands out as a rare, self-respecting, dedicated project all around.

 

I grudgingly admitted Fallout 3 was less of a shit-show than it could've been. I'm wholeheartedly enjoying New Vegas.

 

 

 

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P.S.: Kicking tumbleweeds around is weirdly fun...