V: tM(r) - Bloodlines(tm)2.00 - The Titular Adventure

Does nobody even remember what titles used to sound like? Was it "PG-13 Adventures of Huckleberry (approved by the Food and Drug Administration) Finn (no Irishmen were harmed in the making of this novel) a Twained trademark of the Markorporation, published in Calaveras County? (Clip our coupon for 15% off frog legs!)" No. No it was not. Fuck your trademarks. Official title and byline only. Do the likes of Paradox / White Wolf not realize they're actually hurting their brand by insisting on such forceful insertions?

 

Anyway, the last time I talked about Bloodlines 2 was back in... oh, wow... October '19. So long ago that Trump was still in office. I know the project's previous crew got fired but found myself uninterested in the details, as their early bragging revolved around social justice warring and thus inspired no confidence in the first place. I've deliberately avoided reviews, hype or teasers and I'm doing exactly as I promised and diving into it fully blind on release day, give or take a couple of weeks to let them patch the more heinous bugs. However, I did also make another promise back then. How did it go again? Ahh, yeesssss:

"If it's great I'm in on the ground floor, but let's face it, even if it does turn out to be crap then ninety bucks is a small price to pay for the colossal amount of bitching I'm going to want to do on the topic, and if they manage to fuck this one up I'm quite prepared to output an entire new canine subspecies' worth of bitch."

 

So hang onto yer The butts Chinese Room, because I already dislike your title screen. The previous two V:tM titles did well enough with a minimalist approach, relying on the music to carry the mood: vaguely religious chanting for Redemption's '90s goth romance approach, and a thrumming, threatening undertow for the original Bloodlines' more visceral approach. Here the music is background noise. Okay. A cityscape would indicate you're trying harder, but slapping a red filter on it is just not trying much at all. Maybe they'll salvage it by making the opening screen change somehow in accordance with your in-game path.

 

The opening cinematic confirms we'll be making a big deal of Seattle itself as a setting. Los Angeles offered a ready theme by Hollywood's glitz and sleaze and shattered dreams. Seattle... kinda lacks that same universally recognizable character conflict. Depending on how hard you lean into it I'm not sure how many Starbucks and Cobain references I can stomach. But okay, okay, we're in the city. In a warehouse/basement? Oh... no character creation, we're doing this in medias refuse? 'S coo', I can dig it. Or dig myself out of it. Die, perfectly innocent worker bees!

 

Ugh, no saving. Checkpoint system. Has this ever in the history of games not been a gratuitous timesink? Not that I'm fond of mashing F5 every few seconds, but I'm even less fond of mindlessly repeating the same sequence of fifty moves fifty times until the last move is successful. Or backtracking because I'm not sure if the save caught all my exploration and interaction.

 

Aaand I'm playing a premade biography, which I rarely like. And he's a fuckin' bishonen too. Stake me now.

 

Plus I've already got a telepathic intruder in my head. You're just dead-set on hitting all my favorite gimmicks, aren't you?

 

Fail a couple of times in the tutorial. Weird mix of heavier physics implementation but less interactive decor than other modern titles. Okay, I'll admit I loved Fabien's amused delivery of "Some of the old guard don't like the idea of the glitterati." No, Fait Bien, no we do not.

 

Finally! Picking a clan. Let's see. Wait, what? Brujah was predictable enough, seems the baseline for new players. Then fuckin' Toreador and Ventrue made it into the options but not my first choice of Gangrel? No Nosferatu?* Was it too much to ask for Tzimicztsche? Instead they give me an Assamite option? No thanks. So it's between Tremere and... oooh... Lasombra. Morbid dark-obsessed ghouls? Okay, okay, maybe I can live with this. (Figuratively speaking.) "Arms of Ahriman" yeah, yeah, this is sounding better and better. Ew, they've got mind control powers though. Guess I can just eat around those like the tadpoles in BG3. No kissing on the mouth!

(I've got no qualms against causing uncontrollable panic, at least.)

So my first power is a "don't look at me" and my second is a "stay away"? They've kinda got my number on that account, don't they? I do like the look of my haven.

See, Cyberpunk? This^ is a modern lair worthy of an ancient beast. Bit of decrepitude, bit of decay, cozy chaos, pervasive intellectual endeavor and melancholy. Bonus points for vascular-looking ducts. And it comes with a housepet!

 

The family portrait, the stop sign, the Bet of Night, the first music track shallowly remixing the nerve-jangling dualist Hollywood track... do you think me so pathetic an old fanboy that you'll win me over by showering call-backs on me? Do you think I'm so easily taken in by nostalgia?!

 

Well... maybe. A little bit.

*Sigh*

Alright, alright. There's stuff I like and stuff I don't like. So far the former outweighs the latter. It just doesn't seem particularly ambitious or inspired. Guess I'll keep playing. Next time: I should probably figure out the deal with these blood flavors or whatever.

 

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* Guessin' Malks, Gangs an' Nossies were deliberately held back as future DLC fodder at $30 each. This is published by Paradox after all. 

Do jockeys call their sponsorships enhorsement deals?

Disco Elysium

"Come down

Hurting

Learning"

 

Billie Eilish - Xanny

 

 

It's hard for a game to impress me these days, but Disco Elysium's very opening had me boggling at the screen wondering: who the hell wrote this? And for once I mean that in the best possible way! Its mechanics offer little new, a largely text-based affair testing that permeable adventure/RPG hybrid borderland where so many ambitious indie developers flounder. No grinding mobs, XP awarded for task completion and exploration. No grinding loot, just a reasonable cash flow. Quite a bit of stat keeping but no combat system. For a litmus test of its successful execution though, consider a much later cutscene, boating across a stretch of water... gradually, very gradually, at realistic speed, without any fast-forwarding.

Sad FM indeed

It's the sort of scene I've criticized a hundred times over as uninspired filler, yet here its uniqueness, timing, pacing, framing, atmosphere all contribute to a meditative effect rarely equaled. And the campaign hovers quite consistently near that level of quality, whether its mood is humorous, macabre, farcical, exploratory or diving deep into convoluted dialogue trees. The wealth of background exposition which slightly choked Technobabylon goes down smooth here, even if you won't feel pressured to memorize it. The introspection which tripped into irrelevant navel-gazing in Sacred Fire is here differentiated into varying attitudes your internal monologue can adopt. The RPG detective schtick that sputtered into irrelevance in Gamedec here gets true skill implementation and opportunities for failure depending on your stats and past choices.
 

This is itself to gain a modifier in an "authority" check

This includes some wildly divergent paths for your campaign as a whole. I refused to cooperate with certain NPCs, which led to me never finding a particularly important piece of loot, which led to failing the climactic event... yet nevertheless going on to solve the case by the weight of evidence and reaching a rather positive ending. I avoided all political ideals, as none of them aligned with personal freedom and intellectual progress... but they did give me lines like "Chaos is my method. I am its scion." to compensate. When starting out I even huffed in indignation that this is very much not a game for a teetotaling shut-in, given its heavy emphasis on substance abuse and popular movements. (I kept expecting someone to be selling a Perky Pat diorama set.) But though a handful of skill checks prompted me to save-scum a bit, their sheer density written into the script exceeds even Baldur Gate 3's staggering gamut, albeit in a shorter campaign.

Come on, a game where you can die by stubbing your toe kicking a furnace can't be all bad, right? Not to say it's all good, either.

The inventory system could've used auto-sorting by skill boost and slot.

24 stats do result in some unnecessary redundancy (endurance and pain threshold? savoir faire and hand/eye coordination?)

The "find the bullet traces" quest is incredibly poorly worded (2/3 parts are triggered by other events) and too many others rely on stumbling upon a solution in unrelated locations.

Displaying unsolved skill checks on the map is a great quality of life interface improvement, but not updating them when they become unavailable by opting out of them in dialogue (e.g. don't play along with Plaisance's ramblings) veers back into uselessness. 

I love any system in which not only do you gain XP by action and not grinding, but time passes by your own actions. That being said, openly standardizing/listing time requirements for various actions would let you plan out your day better, immersion aside.

And, most importantly, for a game so heavily dependent on narrative immersion, either openly advertise your biases or check them at the door. No concealed carry bigotry.

 

Coming out in '19, Disco Elysium carries some obvious politically correct baggage. The only word they censor is "faggot" and an inordinate amount of page space is dedicated to otherwise irrelevant racism. Naturally, negative traits are overwhelmingly concentrated in male characters while females are always wiser, kinder, more competent or clever, etc. than the men around them. The selective outrage is visible enough in examples like Kitsouragi portrayed as victim of racism, valid yet painfully naive given Japan's own entrenched racism, and the white mercenaries killing blacks can't help but mirror H.G.Wells' hand-wringing about "the negro police" in When the Sleeper Wakes in 1900. A tone shift doesn't make you any more enlightened... but 120 years should have.

 

Sure, they tried making the racism less unidirectional with Measurehead, they tried giving a woman a wrong opinion or shady motivation here and there, but in overall effect it's like seeing a Klansman trying to lighten the mood by telling self-deprecating jokes about his WASP friends... while burning a cross on your lawn. They went out of their way to justify women's duplicity or other misdeeds and to ensure no female character is ever verifiably guilty towards a lowly male. You can walk from one end of the game map to the other going straight from one dialogue to another and another all bashing men as stupid violent drunks while glorifying women as superior beings, and the protagonist's personal history includes no option that doesn't paint him as at fault and a complete loser... for being disregarded in the first place.

 

Still, that predictable brainwashing aside, Revachol's dashed hopes and tarnished ambitions make it one of the best backdrops for moral development since Planescape: Torment and Tyranny, and the decor and ambience flesh it out expertly. Normally I scoff at full voicing (and have criticized it as a waste of development time in Obsidian/Larian's products) but at least in Disco Elysium's "final cut" rework, everyone from Kim your calm and reasonable sounding board to your inner voices' self-conscious theatricality to Evrart's oleaginous bonhomie to Cuno's manic posturing go a long way toward making the otherwise limited campaign feel like a world. And the sheer wealth of detail, while sometimes indulgently derivative (I do believe they even managed to squeeze in a reference to Coma White and Coma Black) is expertly paced over the course of your adventures.

 

It would be fruitless (and spoilery) to anatomize all Disco Elysium's melancholy, but its recurring theme of intoxication, by substances, by ideas, by ambition, by emotion, and the absurdity of human behavior thus fueled carries through the smallest details of your decrepit surroundings, your grating conscience, the careful word choice drawing you into both despair and mockery of same, the grandeur and pettiness of idealism, the nobility or self-annihilating madness of devotion, the futility of existence and the conscious decision to fill or at least bridge the void. You could argue the game's validity from any number of points, but the very terms in which it must be described to even formulate such arguments cement its advancement of a still childishly fumbling creative medium.

 

Despite its flaws, a brilliant piece of work.

Ding-dong, the Dick is dead!

Which old Dick?

The dickish Dick!

The one who instigated a war which ended up bringing ISIS to power, all so that his criminal business cartel could profit from reconstruction and oil contracts employing the U.S. military as mercenaries to destroy a country for private sector gain, a lesson by which the U.S. voting public learned absolutely nothing, which is to no small extent why his Republican Party twenty years later has now brought those same lessons into domestic politics, burning down America itself so they can loot the ashes.

 

Sorry, I suspect the rhyme scheme might've broken down there at some point. Lyrical criminal the wolfman be, investigate me, castigate me, don't hesitate to fact-check me.

 

Wave to the soldiers outside your window. 

Like every other piece of content on teh internets, this blog was being scraped constantly over the past years (especially this summer) as not only commercial brands but every possible organization has been sending its pet chat-bot out to bite anything it can get its bits on. I can only assume it's still going on and google's just masking the hits from me. Now I'm almost sorry to lose all that white noise, not just because it made me seem almost successful, but for the humour value in wondering what exactly some of these organizations hope to achieve by training their bots on the random ranting of no-name bloggers. Like getting scraped by, of all things, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

 

We're paying you for a completely different kind of navigation, you clowns!

 

(At least now I know why my weather forecast yesterday was just a review of a Taylor Swift concert, a picture of a puppy with human hands and congratulations on my writing being the best in existence.)

The Crowd

 "Right now, I want to throw that word 'escape' out the window. In speaking of these stories, these fantasies, I would like to emphasize instead their contribution toward growth and responsibility, small as it may be. Stories can ony be labeled "escapist" if they solve problems by ignoring or destroying them. Mickey Spillane's characters, for instance, in another genre, shoot first so they will not have to ask or answer questions later.

Thoughtful men find many things in our civilized order worth—not escaping—but growing away from: the preconceived notion, prejudice, bias, dogma, of any kind whatever. Through our creative arts, including fantastic literature, we can return to the raw stuff of environment for re-seasoning, for an understanding of the wilderness, the animal, the death which tempts us to solve problems with annihilation. Seeking help from literary sources, we often appear blasphemous and "escapist" to those still in the temple, political gymnasium, or school. Actually, we are only 'standing off for a long clear look at the human situation, preparing to doff old burdens in order to assume the new.

[...]

Man lives by creating and creates by alternating wonder with criticism followed by new states of wonder."

 

Ray Bradbury - 1956 editor's introduction to the fantasy collection The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories

______________________________________

 

 

When did I buy my copy of The October Country? Early teens, early '90s. The '80s paperback version was still on the shelves. It expanded my understanding of the word "horror" beyond slasher flicks and creature features to those more diffuse fears I had been taught to ignore. Fear of being ugly and despised, subverted by your own body, of being trapped and tethered, of loneliness, of the slow grinding passage of time. Hopes lost and the self dissipated. But though Uncle Einar, The Emissary or The Cistern made more of an impact on me, The Crowd maintained a background fascination for making much of so little.

 

"The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.
The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man's agony by their frank curiosity."

 

It was only after moving to Chicago that I learned one of the most infuriating terms in the lexicon of mob stupidity: gaper's delay. Highways bottlenecked not by traffic accidents but by moronic hordes slowing their cars to gawp at the wreck. ("Rubberneckers" they also call 'em - cause even if you hung them from the nearest branch like they deserve, they'd bounce up and down endlessly blocking your way.) More infuriating are those who try to excuse such behavior by saying that "they're just people" or "it's only human" because of course they're right. It is human. Normal human behavior. Reiterated behind millions of windshields. An overwhelming, pervasive tribal ape need to participate in the suffering of others.

 

"It was like a great rainstorm, with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly, expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked.
The crowd was there.
He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum."

 

I had not appreciated, reading The Crowd so young, why it stuck with me, that it is not a story about traffic accidents at all, its events almost irrelevant when compared to the language in which they're described, the dripping disgust at compulsive group participation. This is a night for storytelling, and to most that means dissimulating and externalizing. The stories we tell ourselves keep us safe from deeper horrors. Chief among these the cozy belief that the monster is an alien thing, lurking out there in the dark beyond the safety of our campfire.

 

Except we killed those monsters a thousand, ten thousand years ago. The Nemean Lion's bones have long since rotted away, and the rest of the biosphere is following. A million species which took fifty million years to develop must die, not so that sapience might adventure to the stars or rise above the limitations of flesh, not for great works of art, philosophy and science, but so that billions of sacks of redundant simian flesh can hold hot-dog eating contests and bow for the ten thousandth time at a meteor or an elephant-headed statue or drawl patriotic songs into half-empty bottles of vodka or praise The Party while it grinds them into five-year plans. And any individual who disapproves of this grand nine-billion-fold pinnacle of creation must be silenced, effaced, erased, unmade, made one with the herd or the ground beneath its hooves. Don't you dare tell them they could or should be better.

 

The monster is ever-encroaching normalcy. It is every subhuman degenerate whose personality is the logo on its t-shirt or purse and the slogan on its throw-pillow or baseball cap. Is that not what every fanged and goggle-eyed mask would reveal if dropped, the very necessity for masks, for costumes, for uniforms and business casual attire? To camouflage the shame, the filth, the degeneracy of humanity? Enforced ignorance.

 

"that's the way it's been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn't know it was dangerous"

 

And for the proprietors of the apocalypse, a more refined torture: knowing you cannot escape the unknowing. What use is your prepared folder of evidence and reasoned argument when they have brute impact? They will make you one of their own, clean up your ragged frills of analysis and argumentation, smooth out the wrinkles in your brain, make you happy, make you excited at the prospect of the spectacle of the crash. No wonder, no criticism, just the mob and its appetites.

 

And the crash. 

Day 3 in Disco Elysium

"Du hasst mich"

 

On the third day he rose. Wearily. Achingly. On the third day he descended from on high to speak with the carpenters' guild, only to find two powers of his own distant principality enthroned among the hungry masses. Yet knowing them not and fearing they may have consumed more of the primordial fruit than himself, he spoke "no li me tangere" only and walked on, his sole apostle dutifully trailing. He stepped into the great emptiness of being, and the waters and air spoke to him of immensity:

"At least the world has the decency to rain today" *

Wolf: A pretty self-indulgence. Gonna save the world, are we?

Man: If it asks eloquently enough. But who am I to modulate these echoes?

W: Indeed. If it asks more eloquently than yourself, don't bother answering.

M: If these shadows have offended -

W: - admit that all was already mended, for offense is all you can offer in the shadow of your betters.

M: You paint with a broad brush. There's always room for a bit of detail work.

W: Detail? You? The grandiloquent do-nothing? Reflecting gods make poor acolytes of the machine. They've got you pegged, escapist, awakening into a new world from the stupor of self-destruction. Fine, then. Go on. Feed your head.

M: It's finally Wednesday. Across the pond.

W: High-speed chase!

M: Dead in the water. Anticlimactic.

W: The downward spiral is its own climax, apocalypse cop. Everything's blue in this world.

M: I want to stay here with the seagulls. Let me rust in peace.

W: But you'd disappoint Kim. He praised your police work.

M: Like you'd care.

W: Fine, he praised my unconventionality. Saw us coming a mile away. A little backhanded flattery will get you a good review.

M: Shacks. Corrugated asylum. I always knew the bidonville awaited me.

W: Don't get too cozy. They don't make 'em with matrix decks.

M: Why is it always fishermen though? Nobody grows barley in these alternate worlds. Nobody puts a scythe to its original use. Nobody picks grapes.

W: That can't be right. What sloshed your brain if not hops and half a yard's worth of vines? Besides, fishing and hunting offer a satisfying narrative opposition in microcosm. Man versus minnow. Hitting dirt with a stick just lacks that same tension.

M: Flagellating our dear mother?

W: You patriarchal brute. There, the wistful swords-dame'll teach ya some manners, boyo. Supplied as she is with untold suitors deserving of stabbing.

M: Oh, but she's a kind stabber she is, condescended to marry one of her victims.

W: Conveniently supplying her with a spouse she can look down on. All the way down to the bottom of the sea.

M: Lucky she wasn't actually relying on the fish he'd bring in for her sake -

W: - and lucky it was never her and her stabbing that drove him to drink, lucky it wasn't the fairness of love and war-wounds that lingered and needed dulling, lucky she never profited in his decline or she might've accidentally shared in a hint of guilt for their lifestyle and his demise. Luckier still as she could find no men in the world except a dumb pile of drunken muscle to marry, or we might've wondered at her own life choices.

M: All know such other men do not exist. All averred you cannot kill the bird that makes the windbags to blow. What a poor, lucky gal. So rich in pluck and pathos. 

W: Good thing he's not worth missing. We might've made the mistake of feeling sorry for the element in this equation who can no longer feel sorry.

M: The wrong element. And then we'd be an even sorrier drunk whose better half was right to leave him. The right half, the right element.

W: It's elementary, my dear what's-a-son. Never factored down by that other term, such evil multiplies only itself. Answers your question about the fishing, too. Harder for the requisite stupid brute of a husband to drown in barley -

M: - though some have tried -

W: - even female ones. At least in other worlds. Those worlds not amenable to detective skills. But hark! Another, and this one's old. How many stupid, useless, drunken, violent husbands can she boast, I wonder?

M: Oh, be nice. She called you a black hound, lathspell, which I are. Her babushka is her sword.

W: Lucky she had nothing to do with that man that killed another and had to be dragged away by the police. Twenty years ago. When she was younger and more attractive.

M: And she gives free lodging. Lucky she doesn't need those coins the men tried hiding from their women. From the rightful owners -

W: - of? ...

M: Don't go there. They'll take away your observation license. Just trust Isobel to tell you all the ne-er do wells.

W: Opt out of the free-meat-market mindset though. We bite other things than coins. They're never as real as those claiming them by right. Sniff out the next wrong factor by its ethanol fumes, threefold and... no, wait, beg the story, hear the saga. 'Tis you, the fourth drinksketeer! And now we know your crime. You dared complain about women. 

M: This is getting old.

W: As the man and the sea, and no mention of the women eating the fish brought in.

M: Kim and I both know the alphabet now. Tee is for totaling. See is for child. 'Kay is how the kids are. The twin little boys are useless and stupid and the littler girl is articulate and helps you on your quests.

W: That's how the world works. They'll tell you who you are, before you can talk back. No reason to start drinking. No reason to seek escapism. Just accept your designation, man of war, man of the low brow, man of the bottle. It's official. You can't fight city hall.

M: So let's go to church instead.

W: Where you meet an honest, polite, artistic girl whose boyfriend sold her property, left out in the cold by the three idiot boys wanting to start a drug lab.

M: Inside the church must be something better.

Worship the Great Mother

W: Worship the woman. And the wise woman who first worshiped the woman. So sayeth the bestial man worshiping women.

M: He must be right. He's the only male not stoned, drunk, stupid, murderous, thieving, corrupt, not a complete waste of oxygen.

W: Erasing his own personality, the better to worship at the feet of women. We've heard this song so many times before.

M: Never so eloquently.

W: Yet always so limited. Always so base. All about the political base. Do you have enough evidence, lieutenant?

M: The hanged man -

W: - was a rapist who got what he deserved from a bunch of undeserving brutes whose only good deed in life was championing a woman's honor. Why?

M: Because men are filthy pigs whose only worth lies in beating down other men in a woman's interest.

W: Good boy. Goooood boy. You're learning. How many lessons did it take? How many characters were *man* and *bad* and how many *woman* and *good*? Don't keep count. Awareness would be unseemly. Now what about yourself?

M: I must be a filthy pig who needs to crawl back to his mistress begging her forgiveness, no matter the circumstances, and serve her ever-after.

W: Good boy. You're not like those drunken fishermen, are you?

M: No, no, I'm a good boy.

W: You're not like those bad boys, are you?

M: No, the girl deserves the warm tent and I should work to provide it for her.

W: Gooood boyy, see, the lessons stick after a while. You're not like those men hiding money from women, are you?
M: No, all my money belongs to them.

W: See now, isn't that better, is that not ever the more eloquent?
M: Woof.

W: Poetry and imagination. Conceptualization and an increased pain threshold and the tiny detail of a sensual alien frisson over-riding your logic.

M: Why did they bother with the four winds, I wonder, why bother with a world and a history, with politics and economics, with hopes and dreams, when a simple rolling pin or frying pan upside the head would get their intended message across just as well.

W: Oh! We forgot to save the world.

M: Got a temple to rebuild. Be there any world outside the rusted swings, waves and shore cries, she can damn well save herself. 

Wolf: Are you ever going to look in that bathroom mirror?

Man: I can see you just fine. Anything else would be just what they make of me.

 

 

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* In a depressing development, it seems one is no longer able to find the phrase "At least the world has the decency to rain today" through search engines. It's from the excellent first chapter of the never-to-be-completed webcomic Nowhere Girl from around Y2K. (Discussed here and here and here.)While we're at it, Acolytes of the Machine is a song by Mary Crowell and The Reflecting God is the Antichrist Superstar's finest work. I'll let you snipe other albatrosses yourself.