The world is others'. You intrude.

Homeworld 3

"Cause I know how it feels
Filling in the blanks
Looking on the bright side
When there is no bright side"

 

Metric - Poster of a Girl

 

 

I wanted to like it, I really did...

 

The original Homeworld is a true classic and one of my fondest gaming memories... for its time. In fact I was playing it as New Year's Y2K rolled over (yes I mean 19-2000 and not 2001) since I've never cared much for such demarcations and wasn't buying into that end of the world hype. But #s 1.5 and 2 got derailed from the original fleet combat concept and two decades later I regret having preordered #3, demonstrating the phrase "nostalgia project" deserves its derogatory context.

 

Yes, my mothership looks cool sliding over that massive expanse of space-ice.

On the other hand, I gave my strike craft an order to dock with the mothership, not the iceberg...

 

I suppose I should let Blackbird Interactive off on one major point: multiplayer genres have mostly died to player idiocy, to cheating and griefing and intentional imbalance and most of all microtransactions. Homeworld made an impression not least as multiplayer in the LAN and cybercafe era. I'm judging HW3 as single-player. But still, for all the warnings I've given on that point over the years as a rando' blogger, you'd think a team of seasoned professionals would've handled the transition better.

 

Let's start with the painfully obvious though.

In '99, the sensor manager overlay elegantly handled gigantic space-worthy distances because any 3D game would not have run without a very, very close fog horizon. But a quarter century's worth of polygon-counting pissing contests later? We've had seamless zoom-focusing since at the very latest Demigod in 2009, probably earlier if you dig around, and any ideograms can be hotkey-toggled or mouseover-faded on the main playing field itself. But they didn't implement this solely for their customers' nostalgia. It also gives them an excuse to limit zooming to horse-blinder levels in the main battle screen, which both imposes a lot of extra camera rotation to see what's going on, and more importantly from Blackbird's point of view attempts to preserve the massive screen-filling grandeur of those big dumb objects their design team's so eternally erect for: space icebergs, space tunnels, space plazas, etc. constantly interposed between you and whatever you're trying to look at.

 

If only their ship AI could actually navigate around large objects... or at all.

Yes, that's a trajectory.

If you're inclined to protest I used the M-ship as an easy or unrealistic example and pathfinding has been a constant issue in games...umm, no. HW3 doesn't have pathfinding issues. It has random stumbling issues.

 

I ordered my first three assault frigates back to mommy. Two of them took up standard positions. The third is apparently trying to ram it. Or maybe it's trying to dock? Except no, it's not, it's just hovering there, out of position and misaligned like a cat pondering the mysteries of the can opener. And good luck trying to get your ships to... just... fucking... SHOOT! at the enemy.
 

(sorry, mistakenly circled the bottom group; them's turrets)

They'll spontaneously split into wings, with some maneuvering to flank the target. Sounds fancy, until you realize it just puts half your fleet constantly out of position and closer to the enemy force to get focus-fired into oblivion, and that's ignoring the fact it just takes them longer to position when they could've already turned their guns at the enemy full-bore if they'd stayed on the same side. And please, let's not pretend this is an issue with large formations alone.

That's three destroyers ordered to attack the enemy mothership. They're in delta-wing formation. I couldn't figure out what looked weird about their weapons fire: only the front ship was actually shooting its cannons because they're staying at max range for that ship alone. The other two are... I believe the nautical term is "chillaxing" - ?

 

No I am not being unfair and no I am not nitpicking. Fan discussions abound with such complaints, and you might notice the backgrounds here all look similar. That's because all but 2 examples on this page come from a single 19-minute skirmish, and I wasn't even trying to find them!

 

Even this ship-level tactical fumbling might've been borderline bearable, were the greater strategic angle better considered. It's not. I said multiplayer in general is dead, and the RTS genre deader than most due in large part to everyone realizing how ridiculously it rewards button-mashing over any pretense of strategy. Where the newer generation of turn-based strategy games like AoW4 or Old World or even Gladius show themselves capable of coherent objectives and concerted pushes, and even Northgard's real-time combat prepares big invasions and retreats in unison, HW3's AI sticks to the old strategy game AI fallback of micromanaging you to death, spamming a constant stream of ships at you, each individually targeting wherever it'll do most damage with no greater rhyme or reason, and if I bitched out that routine in Spellforce 3 six years ago you can guess how thrilled I am to see it in a title of much higher profile and expectations now.

 

Ship classes and abilities fare just as poorly. You can research castable abilities for each of them, except hotkey-spam got old with Warcraft 3 twenty years ago and pretty much every strategy game now allows for unit customization instead of a baseline list of standard units to be churned out as-is every game. The one new-ish gimmick would be turrets you can stick to surfaces, again playing up the supposed importance of those big dumb objects (and turning a space game even more into a standard surface-oriented RTS) and those are indeed impressively effective... largely because the AI fails to prioritize/avoid them and lets itself get chewed up at close range, probably because the developers wanted to encourage use of their brand-new RTS invention of... tower defense. IN SPAAAAACE!

 

Die-hard fans might even have forgiven all this (they shouldn't but they would have; define: fans) if the campaign had managed to recapture the grandiose star trekking SCIENCE fiction feel of the original. Instead it redoubles on HW2's mystical babbling trying far too hard to copy a Dune-like feel of prophecy and warring clans and funny hats and so on. And I could go on. But really, I've lost interest in even complaining about it.

 

The nostalgia-driven flaws appeasing old fans' demands are bad enough. But the rest speaks of a design team which haven't played a strategy game in 20yrs and are still stewing over their obsession with supposed advances (like big dumb objects) which the state of the art has long since trivialized.

Dunce Macabre

"He walked aft, whistling Danse Macabre, off key again, and began to fiddle with his space suit."

Robert A. Heinlein - Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

 

 

My recent mention of 2005's Corpse Bride reminded me the central musical number, Remains of the Day, featured not just skeleton versions of Bo(n)ejangles and Ray Charles, but title-dropped a book from 1989 and acknowledged its debt to a quite famous Disney cartoon from 1929, The Skeleton Dance. While dancing cartoon skeletons were new at that time because animation was new, musical morbidity had run in parallel via pieces like Camille Saint-Saëns' 1875 Danse Macabre, which I assume Heinlein's all-American boy next door was whistling while fighting space-Nazis on the moon just after WWII. Some of these dates are from my own youth or childhood, others from my grandparents' or from their grandparents in turn. The theme persists, art continues. But of corse that dude Cammie did not invent rib-cage xylophones either, but was inspired by the centuries-long tradition of the death dance throughout Europe, and look what I ran across at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples:

The ancient Romans didn't just coin the phrase "memento mori" but handed it out as party favors. With legs retracted, that jolly fellow's about the size of your pinkie. Bronze was probably more common and commonly articulated... so they could bonejangle it up with state-of-the-art special effects on dia de los muertos. And hey, we could keep chasing this theme both sideways and back if you like, through all of human history, a psychological artifact of our intellect's limitation within mortal bodies, of generational cycles, decay and impermanence.

 

It does help knowing which cycles, which artifacts you're actually observing, and how far they stretch. If you told me Remains of the Day's a song about two love triangles, black musicians and the jazz age, you'd be less than half right. There are older and more pervasive influences at work.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, it's well established that many signs of physical attractiveness are actually stand-ins for a mate's viability. Clear skin or fresh breath for instance pretty obviously indicate your intended's resistance to disease, and such environmental threats are always changing. As Richard Dawkins summarized in The Blind Watchmaker:

"If females really could successfully choose males with the best genes, their very success would reduce the range of choice available in the future: eventually, if there were only good genes around, there would be no point in choosing. Parasites remove this theoretical objection. The reason is that, according to Hamilton, parasites and hosts are running a never-ceasing cyclical arms race against one another. This in turn means that the 'best' genes in any one generation of birds are not the same as the best genes in future generations. What it takes to beat the current generation of parasites is no good against the next generation of evolving parasites. [...] The only general criteria that successive generations of females can use are the indicators that any vet might use -- bright eyes, glossy plumage, and so on."

 

Such divination also implies the criteria themselves are mutable, can be faked or cheated and can outweigh the animal's actual fitness due to the importance placed on them by instinct, valid or not. My old point that intra-tribal status symbolism can be considered such a runaway adaptation for humans would get me laughed out of any biology department (for one, it's entirely too wide a category) but I maintain there's something to it. Sapience threw a kink into selection. As females grew able to actively interpret new stimuli as markers of status and males able to establish new means of competition, that cyclical arms race melded into fad worship, with every new fashion or badge of moral superiority a new peacock tail in its own right. And women's own pecking order proceeded, to a lesser extent, in parallel but with the same caveat: status trumps the means by which it's acquired. Corsets, bustles, crinolines, men in pantyhose, war-steeds or sports cars, piety or patriotism, all that matters is that if you have one, you're better than those without.

 

That trend, that theme, that unending parade of self-important, self-righteous glory hogs, divas, powermongers, fops, pulpit-pounders, attention whores, etc. etc. etc., has shaped and colored the entirety of human history, globally. In fact, you can make this prediction for the future with unerring accuracy: that no matter how destitute or aristocratically bloated a human society, no matter how backward or advanced technologically, every new generation's primitive instincts will lead it to jump on new fads where available and inflate them as holier-than-thou badges of superiority.

 

Now, remember, the adaptation can easily outstrip its original, practical meaning so long as it's reinforced via status.

 

So take a phenomenon like the rise in LGBTQOMGWTFBBQ "minorities" (along with pervasive media pandering) during the 2010s, especially as the most glaring example, transsexualism. You might see two obvious explanations:

 

1) This was always the real proportion, even though it has never shown up anywhere in human history to such proportions (even the ancient Greeks in all their gaiety still mostly fantasized about knights charging to the rescue of fair damsels) and was just being repressed until now. This is not entirely without merit, especially in a chronically and comically sexually repressed society like Puritan America. But it's not exactly supported by historical and social context.

 

2) You made it a fad, made it a badge of social superiority, and youth jumped at the chance to join the ranks of the new nobility, of those who cannot be criticized, must only be portrayed as unimpeachably angelic and favored in all social interactions by mass consensus. And for fad worship, for narcissism and self-promotion, we have endless examples, globally and multimillennially! It's a thread and trend far more reliable than the danse macabre.

 

Chopping your tits or balls off is certainly counterproductive from a sexual fitness angle, but for a species whose status obsession trumps all else it still feeds into the race for legitimacy driven by an instinct far older than any culture war. If the gender Lysenkoism of the 2010s were valid, if explanation 1) more reliable, then when the restrictions on gender identity were supposedly lifted*, you should have seen a tidal wave of long-suffering gender-counterfeiting old or middle-aged individuals coming out of various closets. Instead it's been attention-seeking adolescents overwhelmingly driving the shift.

 

So what do you think will happen once fascism becomes the new genderqueer? The danse macabre has an endpoint.

 

_____________________________________

* They were in fact enforced to fit a new postmodernist cultural grand narrative.

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alternate title: Dead White Shemales

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edit: The cult of Cybele in ancient Rome, whose followers would occasionally castrate themselves in offering to the goddess, is strongly reminiscent of the past decades' glorification of transsexualism in the wake of feminism's takeover of pop culture.

Race the Ennui

On one hand I hate the retro game fad. I already went through the '90s once and once was enough, thanks, I've done my time, not interested. Go pixel yourselves. On the other hand, I'm always intrigued by little garage projects that try to do more with simple elements, even if it means letting myself get ripped off by blank polygons passed off as "stylized" artwork. So methought fine, five bucks for something that might give me a couple hours of entertainment, and I haven't played a racing game in so long, let's give Race the Sun a try. At least its catchy visual gimmick of racing west as the light dips toward the horizon makes it palatable enough at first.

Zoom-zoom, swish-swish... that's about it

Then it sat uninstalled in my collection for years because I remembered I hate racing games.

 

Hey! Hey, it's not just because I'm terrible at them! Sure, for a guy who's spent his whole life clicking I have remarkably poor reflexes and always did even as a teenager. Not the point! Race the Sun's fog barrier admits only two or three obstacles ahead in your field of vision and obstacles can often obscure each other, especially with its exceedingly fast pace. Thus much of my successfailure so far is based not only on reaction speed but also a need to memorize the algorithm's propensity to chain certain map elements after each other (horizontal barriers after long corridors for one obvious general gimmick) and that takes lots and lots of mindless repetition. And given this is a retro "hardcore" arcade game knocking you back to level 0 for every crash as a timesink... well, I got through two levels, that's pretty good, right? Sure. So I'll be uninstalling it now. Bye.

 

Interestingly though, I don't experience the same revulsion on getting war-decced three hours into a TBS campaign and having to start over.

No zoom, little swish, lots more about it

It took a few re-picks and even more re-rolls to secure victory with my latest Stellaris empire, but I managed to screw myself in a different direction every time. Pissing off stronger enemies, overdrawing on my early exploration budget, over-colonizing until I couldn't support their unproductive early stages, unbalanced consumer goods flow, name a pit and I've fallen in it. So it gives me something different to consider every restart: planets, spacelanes, obstacles, resources, everything. So how is that different from, say, Darkest Dungeon 2, which pulls the same restart through newbietown routine.
 

1) First off, a strategy map is more cerebral than a racetrack. More factors to consider allow for more interesting combos (even before the game starts) than wondering which of two powerups will spawn in the archway this time.

2) In a more practical sense of time investment for a pay-off of game content, one longer replay at twenty times the length still gives you more time before returning to start.

3) With any sort of algorithmic randomization there's always the gambling factor to consider. The more linear the game, the more a bad start is a game over, whereas more diverse factors keep you imagining everything else that could go right. (Assuming you have the imagination for it.)

4) How does sunk cost play into this? All those character/faction creation options in a TBS/RPG are expected to shine at some later point. Race the Sun with its loot magnet (or DD2 regardless of offering more features, given how enamored it is of wrecking your presets) doesn't make you work yourself up into anticipating payoff for your assuredly brilliant theorycrafting and/or roleplaying.

 

In any case, the genre wasting more of my time on a loss also makes me less averse to starting over. Gilding the lily's not always a bad thing.

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 3

O, herro!

(One for Novil, I guess.)

I'm more of a Goya-supra-Giacometti

"A man does not insist on physical beauty in a woman who builds up his morale. After a while he realizes that she is beautiful - he just hadn't noticed it at first."

-from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

___________________________________________________

 

"Say goodbye to the one who's subordinate to the weak
Say goodbye to your fear and you finally will be free"

Aesthetic Perfection - A Quiet Anthem

___________________________________________________

 

Let's see, how does that old joke go?

A guy begs one of his friends for help:

"Man, my wife's always complaining I'm not romantic enough, I don't compliment her enough."

"Hey, don't worry, just tell her she's got the face of a Botticelli and the body of a Degas."

Excited, the first man runs home and blurts out:

"Honey, you've got the body of a Botticelli and the face of a Degas!"

 

DuckDuckGo associates that phrase with the movie The Pick-Up Artist from the '80s, but I have no idea if it originated with or predated. What's great about it as a joke is that it can be written both ways. Botticelli's that "birth of Venus" guy but being active half a century before Michelangelo and Titian and their ilk, mostly stuck to strict churchy themes and while his human faces can look angelically serene, his human proportions/poses are a bit unnatural and relatively tame. Also, back then voluptuous chicks usually ranked sexier. Degas painted lithe, pretty young ballerinas but being an impressionist didn't quite detail their faces. So body B and face D could mean a curvaceous broad with the angelic, innocent face of a young girl... or it could mean an awkward body with a big gut and a smeared face. Body D and face B could mean a slim youthful figure and composed, seductive womanly beauty... or it could mean fat face on a little girl's body.

 

But it doesn't matter, does it? The real joke is that the guy's wife's gonna put him in the dog-house for getting it wrong (laugh, damn you) whichever way he says it. That's the punchline we're all waiting for; cackle and point your finger at that other man, always that other man, to prove your own devotion, your own willingness to chase the goal-posts she keeps moving on you. How many such jokes do we produce, non-stop, about men failing to flatter women to women's tastes? Fire up any sitcom, any romcom, any stand-up routine, any impulse magazine on the checkout rack. More importantly, reverse the polarity: how many jokes do we circulate about women being put in the dog-house for failing to flatter a man? What's that? Sorry, I don't speak cricket. What could she in turn possibly say to insult him into making her sleep on the couch, as if he had the power in the first place? What insult will he not swallow? Insulting his mother, to double down on the self-righteous juxtaposition? A man is only permitted to tell a woman "hop off your broom for a second" in defense of another woman.

 

If every book and movie contained nothing but jokes about hindus desperately trying to flatter christians and failing because hindus are such idiots, would that indicate hindus are more respected than christians?

If everything mocked "darkies" struggling to flatter their way into the hearts of whites and failing because blacks are such idiots, would that indicate blacks have greater status in our society and control over its culture?

How many centuries of such evident one-sided servility and mockery and maligned self-abnegation would it take to suggest to you the balance of power lies very much in the opposite direction?

Erfworld

"When he came home with the skeleton of the marlin as his proof
Everyone was screamin' out: this is grandpa's groove!"

 

Parov Stelar - Grandpa's Groove

 

 

Don't go meta.

Just, as a general rule, don't. It was cutting edge in the '70s, it was mass entertainment in 2000 but since then an entire generation has grown up and paid off its mortgages, and trying to deconstruct the observation that stories have conventions or fairytales are unrealistic now merely sounds like grandma's home-baked gangsta rap. But if you'd like one of the most interesting examples done right, try a webcomic from 2006, Erfworld. A big fat dungeon master stereotype gets teleported into a turn-based strategy game. Hilarity ensues and rapidly gets its teeth knocked out by the macabre reality of living under such rules. "Battle. Again, and still, as ever and always."

 

On one hand Erfworld addressed a very niche audience, the obsessive internet junkies of the mid-2000s. Most of its early humor comes from quotes and parodies of then-popular catchphrases, viral memes and other flashes in various pans and storms in various teacups. Topical humor's dicey enough. Topical fad humor, more so. But even more lasting references (like Michael Jackson, Charlie's Angels and The Godfather) are beginning to fall by the wayside. An entire world made of pop culture only lasts as long as that culture stays pop. Or does it? Can Gaiman's new gods gain life in their own right?

 

That other hand comes in a velvet glove. Had the comic resigned itself to in-jokes it would not have stood out from a culture which, let's face it, was rather fixated on the meta-humor fad. The characters themselves are far more interesting than your average web serial fare. Big players and small, cannon fodder and opportunists, they rapidly grow into and surpass their roles. Bad guys gain dignity, good guys resent their compromises. Even if you miss the references, you need only to suss from the start whether a character or strategem should be considered paltry or pathetic, conceited or evil, to see it play on those expectations. After all, the comic as a whole plays on dramatic reversals.

 

Plays a bit too much, in fact. Though it ended prematurely due not to internal conflicts but trouble in the author's personal life, it had been obvious for years that its constant impetus to trump itself could not hold together. Explanations and character arcs became more and more convoluted, could not fit within panel formats and were relegated to text updates. Worse, the first installment had made a big deal of the hero's ability to exploit game mechanics or outright cheat. Instead of settling down after that and fleshing out the world's coherent workings, the author tended to double down with every new action sequence. As one player after another finds new ways to break the rules for yet another and another dramatic turnabout, the rules of the game, the rules of the world, become inconsequential. Everything gets resolved by yet another deus ex machina, another rabbit out of another hat. Except... when everyone cheats, you simply no longer have a game, and the plot did not move quickly enough to a grand finale to compensate for losing so much of the charm of unit stacks and hex movement and combat turns.

 

The meta comic got bogged down, appropriately enough, in its own metagaming.

 

So I honestly don't know whether it remains palatable over a decade after its heyday. My gut and logic both tell me that, sadly, Erfworld will not stand the test of time. It's a butter sculpture, a sand mandala. Still, as such, its ripple effect through its rather devoted audience at a time when the internet itself was still growing likely stretches significantly farther than its overt obscurity might indicate. How much reconsideration of sacrifice, cheating and personality did it fuel?

Moins de sagesse que les "quatre-mains"

"We're on the mend

Where to begin?

We've got your soul in vises

The brave the bold the righteous"

 

Kidneythieves - Fist Up

 

 

For quick, concise proof that the entirety of the human species deserves to be tortured to death, play League of Legends. There is a role officially labelled support. I'm pretty much the only one actually supporting others. To the rest, it's just another opportunity to hide behind your teammates waiting for them to die so you can pick off an occasional weakened enemy. But more than that, watch the dickless little bitches constantly panic and run from teamfights for fear of being the one sacrifice that wins the fight for the rest of their team, hell, go into any team game and watch every single other player try to game the system to pad his personal score... and watch companies gleefully encourage this griefing at every step. LoL changed its rules a while back to only let you advance your characters by getting high grades during matches. Great. Except it's blatantly obvious that the two biggest criteria for this are death count and outscoring your own teammates (to prove who "carried" the team). The more your allies die, the more you profit. The less you help, the more you sabotage, the more the authorities reward you. If that's not apropos of current politics, I don't know what is.

 

The first grade under a B I ever got in school was back in 8th grade writing&composition and it wasn't a C, it was a D. If you think it's because I was an immigrant still learning English, think again. I was already sitting pretty in the 99th testing percentile and convinced I still wasn't good enough.* No, it was a group project. Four of us. Me plus a wise-cracking little girl from Indochina. Plus I forget the third. Plus one piece of degenerate all-American slum trash that could barely sound out words at a second-grade reading level. Guess which one turned up having done zero work on the last day. It could've turned out alright still, since work had been assigned officially and the teacher knew who did what, and most of our grade depended on our individual contributions... until she took us aside and started telling us how much fairer it would be to split all the points for the project four ways evenly, worked us over until we nodded along and accepted sacrificing ourselves for the undeserving troglodytic waste of oxygen that had already harmed us. That was in about '95. Compound it with thirty years' worth of both religious revival and social "justice" insanity and I honestly cannot imagine what kind of education any child's getting. All of modern society has degraded into nothing but an incubator for subhuman cretins.

 

Idaknow, maybe it was better in the caveman days. Maybe Grog 'n Grug could discern superior minds better than my retarded cunt of an 8th-grade teacher.

 

"Le baton du chef" definitely ranks one of Rahan's weaker adventures, blatantly written to order to justify that month's feelie shipped with the magazine, a replica of the titular baton. Yet another volcano's erupting (seriously, this comic had a massive hard-on for lava) and our hero must convince a local clan to evacuate. Problem: their chief enforces his hereditary authority telling them to stay because the spirits will protect them. When they finally cross the gorge to safety he's too weak to go on, and with his last breath passes the symbol of leadership to the worthiest of his clan, the one sane man who had immediately agreed with Rahan on seeking a practical solution instead of a religious one. Classic enough plot, but heartwarming as the shift from hereditary nobility to meritocracy may be, it reminds me of Galileo's exhausted reply from Brecht's play, when told "unhappy is the land that has no heroes":

"Unhappy is the land that needs a hero."**

Yes, it's nice you decided to recognize decision-making as more valuable to leadership than a rich daddy or the biggest thug around... but how much damn leadership should you need in the first place to figure exploding mountain = GTFO? Come on, Grog, you're embarrassing yourself.

 

Whom doth noblesse oblige in a democracy?

As a sequel hook, Kingdom Come: Deliverance let one of its villains escape at the end, bargaining his freedom as part of a truce. While rolling my eyes at the plot gimmick, I was better impressed by Warhorse doubling down on it when the brash young hero wants to break said agreement and hunt down their target anyway: don't! because that societal norm's reliability is all that made a deal possible in the first place. It's bigger than your personal grievance.

Do you remember, growing up, how your parents would ease off doing things for you? First you get to hold your own spoon while eating, then you're allowed to cross the street, walk home from school by yourself, get some pocket change, a cellphone, stay out after dark, have a boy/girl in your room without chaperone, start driving, etc.? Every such step is predicated on the assumption that you're growing-the-fuck-up and can be trusted to make weightier decisions responsibly. The same principle can stretch to societies.

 

"This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a confession, not a diary. It was--nothing definable. It went into no conceivable covers. It was just, White decided, a proliferation. A vast proliferation. It wanted even a title. There were signs that Benham had intended to call it THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE, and that he had tried at some other time the title of AN ESSAY ON ARISTOCRACY. Moreover, it would seem that towards the end he had been disposed to drop the word "aristocratic" altogether, and adopt some such phrase as THE LARGER LIFE. Once it was LIFE SET FREE. He had fallen away more and more from nearly everything that one associates with aristocracy--at the end only its ideals of fearlessnes and generosity remained."

H.G. Wells - The Research Magnificent

 

In ye olden days the only ones considered responsible (albeit unreliably) were the scant few princes, dukes and barons owning everything and keeping it running in their own interest. Nobody expected anything good of a common "villein" and it took millennia for control of society to gradually expand toward lesser nobles, landed gentry, the bourgeoisie and finally common men in the 19th century. (At which point women demanded overt political power too and got it in just two generations, but let's not dig into that disparity for the moment.) By his time Wells' magnificent researcher was weighing the death of aristocracy*** against the death of aristocratic quality.

 

Back around 2010, Bill Maher joked about the need for an extremist left-wing movement to match the MAGA crowd's precursors, the Tea Party, to be used as leverage making more moderate leftists look like a safer alternative. And we got it. Holy hell did we ever get overdosed on politically correct insanity in the 2010s! And he was wrong. It did not act as an umbrella for saner choices. All it did was feed the reactionary, theocratic, authoritarian backlash. Now he's half-joking for the Democratic party to prop up some everyday schlub who can relate to the idiot masses as an alternative to Trump's populism. And he's wrong. Forty years of imbecile populism is what already sat our asses onto this greased slide into societal collapse. Wokeism has championed nothing but the shallowest crass populist rhetoric, powermongering on the pretext of powerlessness, and its abject failure proves the other side will always do it better. The lowest common denominator embodiment of the people will always be the most ignorant possible superstitious backbirth hicks.

 

Stop whining about bad presidents. The elected is a product of the electorate. You're asking for a finer-crafted puppet, a glossier figurehead, presupposing some appreciable proportion of legitimate, intelligent communal will backing it, a public hand to work the puppet. Y'ain't got that! You've got a bunch of cavemen waiting in confusion for a hero to tell them to run away from an erupting volcano.

 

Trump is not an aberration. His dishonesty, greed, ignorance, narcissism, vandalism all reflect the audience which made him a game show superstar when he was just as crass, abusive, egotistical and infantile as he is now, and all your latte-sippin' urbanites cheered on a champion of anti-intellectualism for a decade alongside the hillbillies, all the suburban middle-class housewives creamed their panties at his he-man act firing others because he's rich. The current state of affairs is a cumulation of every scam and lie and petty power-grab that hundreds of millions of voters perpetrate on each other every day.

 

He's you. All of you. Every time you cheated on an exam, ducked out of work early letting your coworkers finish your share, brown-nosed for a promotion, shouted down someone making a more reasoned argument than you, every time you cut in line or drove on the shoulder, dumbed down the curriculum or defended your friend when in the wrong, took a bribe, gave a bribe, cheered your favorite sports team even though you know they're all on steroids, spouted lines like "all's fair in love and war" or "second place is another word for loser" or claimed the right to lie, cheat and steal 'cuz your lot's harder than everyone else's, you created a robber baron government, and any populist figure will be produced by the same alchemy.

"for one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors, he must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him." - George Eliot, 1868

Let's not pretend you're constrained to such vice, either. You're not stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family. The simple fact that it is impossible to play any game, from cards and dice to online twitchfests to FIFA and the Olympics, without constant and tacitly accepted cheating and sabotage, demonstrates you're not brave, bold and righteous. You're living the world you've made, apes playing with your own shit. So don't act surprised when it's thrown in your face.

 

You didn't need populist leadership but an elite electorate. Democracy could only ever have worked if the public had raised itself to expectations of nobility which the old nobility itself failed to uphold, not dragged high-mindedness down to the gutter. It has now failed. Not because you're being held down but because you drag your betters down for sheer unthinking animal competitive instinct, and have been doing so for generations.

 

What in this undifferentiated simian cesspit should inspire any better mind to action? Stop imagining you'll somehow rally and save the world from itself. There remains no-one worth working with. No plucky rebel alliance. No Terminus on the fringes of the empire. There is nothing to strive for and nothing to live for. Nothing remains worth preserving. Only dissolution. The subhuman vermin have won. Hell, I'm doing more than I should bother: a vast proliferation.

 

 

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* Yes, yes, I'm well aware that I really am not good enough, that I'm a worthless waste of oxygen, thanks for pointing that out, screw you too, internet.

** Technically the original line uses "unglucklich" unlucky or unfortunate - call it a sadsack land, whatever, it works idiomatically.

*** Wells followed a similar theme in The World Set Free, gently blurbed in that later paragraph from above.

Budget Losses

"Fuck catchin' lightning he struck it, screamed "shut up" at thunder
Then flipped the world upside down and made it rain upward"

 

Eminem - Cinderella Man

 

 

Rogue Trader's next expansion's supposedly "springing" in 2025, and I'd rather not finish my campaign without that extra content. May as well shelve it to give them a few months to iron out the inevitable slew of bugs to come with that. (Seriously, it's an Owlcat game. Months may not suffice.)

Most companies don't need a keyboard shortcut...

But I won't deny the warhammerin' itself remains enjoyable enough, and I've been mixing it up with snipers, swords, strategems, shotguns and 'sychic stuff sufficiently satisfyingly. For one, I was intrigued at characters' "ultimate" abilities being castable both when you've built a bit of momentum in a fight and as "desperate measures" when you've fallen behind, say by a squadmate getting dropped. It's made for a couple of snap recoveries, and you've gotta love those opportunities to turn a liability into an asset.* Turn the tables. Saying "No, you!" sounds lame. Playing it out? Badass.

If you don't recognize that scene, you should first of all watch Corpse Bride. While it's been done elsewhere and a corpse has nothing to lose by parrying a saber with her ribs (though it is symbolically re-enacting her own worst moment) the unflinching conviction with which she then turns the captured blade against the aggressor yields an exemplary such heroic resurgence. Durn fine animatin'. The effect could easily have been watered down by belaboring the point, a routine to which mass media has treated us far more often with each inspirational tale of disabled athletes set to stirring string music. As one example you could try an old episode of ST:TNG called Loud As A Whisper, where even saying the phrase "turn disadvantage into advantage" deflates the hero of the week's comeback finale by sheer motivational poster corniness.

 

The interactive equivalent is instituting a sacrifice mechanic for its own sake, simply because making the player give something up or take a dive goes against the grain, sounds original on its face. In Warframe's rescue missions for instance your NPC will ask for your sidearm so he can help you fight. Except it wasn't thought through and is more likely to get the idiot killed for drawing aggro or standing instead of running, something anyone! ever! having played any! video game escort quest could tell you would happen.

 

More common in strategy genres, which make a selling point of cost/benefit estimates. Contrast Iratus, which forces you to sacrifice a unit for certain buildings but where putting that unit to any other use would be a pointless waste of XP -versus- Northgard's Nidhogg worshippers or Gladius' Chaos cultists sacrificing workers or bottom-tier soldiers to keep their economies running. Iratus' version is just a pointless extra step, whereas the other two balance the sacrifice against work or combat utility.

 

Age of Wonders 4 provides an even better example. The rush-focused Chaos tree rarely works for me as I play slow games on large maps. It took me several runs to even figure out how you're expected to compensate for hyperaggressive demonic units' relative squishiness and lack of sustaining spells. Simply put: fuck 'em.

The "fight for power" spell would seem wasteful at face value. In most situations one slightly better unit is still weaker than two lower ones... unless they're wounded, and their ensuing hatefuck produces a full-health hate-baby. Which makes fiends quite adept at maintaining a headlong push before your enemy has a chance to retreat and heal. Churn those inferno puppies!** Like zombie or sacrifice decks in MtG. The more you filled your own graveyard, the deadlier you'd get.

 

But of course it's most satisfying when such situations emerge from other game mechanics. In Rimworld, for instance, a space-bug infestation is usually terrible news. They spawn plentifully, reproduce quickly if not immediately extirpated, run fast and hit hard and worst of all burrow in at the back of your base far beyond any defenses, destroying walls as they go.

... except in this case they initially broke into tunnels I was using to expand my base, largely free of sensitive objects, far enough from my colonists not to aggro on them. Their burrowing itself actually did a lot of mining work for me, a little messy but nonetheless a time-saver. So I let them breed for a couple of generations, then finally set up a defensive line at the batteries and ended up farming up a massive quantity of edible insect meat and jelly.

Score.

My more recent colonies attempt to move my primitive tribe up to the tundra. Some details:

- Less than one full growing season per year. Almost no vegetation.

- 20% research speed. It takes a year and half to get refrigeration going. But you can keep food fresh by leaving it outside under a rock overhang.

- The grazing herds inhabiting the biome still need to eat. Result?

Rudolph's raidin' the rarebit!

I was angry at first and rushed to complete indoor storage, but then realized how much time this saves on hunting. Even if a cariboob does manage to eat a meal before I shoot it, that's 10 food lost for a payoff of 90, prep time notwithstanding. And they're usually so fixated on the food they'll stand still and keep eating even as they'll being peppered with shortbow fire. Half the time they'll do this even if they enrage! (Before you say it, I don't have the resources for constantly triggered snap-traps.) Wuddentchooknowit, I've reinvented bait!

 

Now, there is of course a proper context for all this and it's loot. Risk and reward, cost-to-benefit, the primordial sweet tooth suckling on non-zero sums. Loot fundamentally turns loss into gain, expending some arrows and healing potions (and, more broadly speaking, your time as a player) to get your enemy's more valuable gear. Problems arise when either the cost or benefit drop out of the equation.

Games in which failure=permadeath or where you're knocked back to the start of a level fifteen minutes ago (i.e. old '80s/'90s fare or anything "retro" to that effect) punish risk-taking and creative solutions too heavily, devolving to mindless repetition of one winning move. Remember that mentality largely stemmed from arcade games whose profit came from eating the player's quarter to make you pay for more lives.

Conversely, games which dangle loot as an operant conditioning reward stimulus in front of the player at every step, where there are always ten more rats to kill for yet more magic shoulderpads (i.e. where the industry has been stuck for the past couple of decades) eliminate too much of the risk or loss coefficient. There's no point in doing anything new if doing anything at all still gets you rewarded.

WHICH IS WHY GIVING KIDS PARTICIPATION TROPHIES WAS ALWAYS JUST AS  DAMAGING AS FLUNKING THEM GRATUITOUSLY ON A SADISTIC TEACHER'S WHIM, IT GOES BOTH WAYS YOU UTTER IMBECILES!!!

Sorry, I seem to have gotten distracted there for a second BY THE END OF CIVILIZATION but the point is: sometimes taking a hit gets you a shiny new sword, and a loss can be turned into a gain. But don't try to force such opportunities to arise. Don't try to fake it. You can code a good game but you can't code good gaming.

 

 

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* Like getting free publicity from people bitching your company out about its buggy code.

** Actual unit name. Inferno puppy.

I Vhant to Suhk Your Regulatory Agencies

"When he tried to steal our sunlight, he crossed that line between everyday villainy and cartoonish super-villainy."

The Simpsons S07E01, Who Shot Mr. Burns

 

 

Here's a funny story:

When I was five, my mother took me in for a fairly routine medical visit. I was poked and tested a bit, had some kind of injection(s) then the nurse told my mother she didn't need to be present for the last few tests and could wait outside, she'd just take a blood sample and bring me right out. A bit confused at the sudden change in procedure, we nonetheless complied.

I won't pretend I understood the event completely back then (hence my not discussing it with my parents until decades afterwards) but some details will reliably make a five-year-old take notice. Like big needles. The nurse was telling the technical truth, she did take blood from me. First though she swapped out the syringe for one she hadn't let my mother see, a much, much larger implement (I didn't know from ccs but remember it was as long and wide as my tiny forearm when placed next to it) with a thicker needle... and pumped it up. My mother, slightly worried when she got ousted, put it out of her mind when she saw no obvious pain or fear from me. In fact she remembered me being very calm as I was led back out, even a bit dopey for the rest of the day. Calm. Yeah, no shit. Hypovolemia will do that. (In her memory, she suspected the nurse might've given me something (to keep the kid still) not taken.)

See, while I regret feeding all the various blood libel conspiracy theories, there is a demand for children's blood, and I don't mean emergency rooms. One of rich fucks' classic spa treatments involves large-volume blood transfusions with that of little children, supposedly untainted by the recreational narcotics and other aftershocks of wealth and power. Clean 'n pristine, y'see? A literal infusion of youth and vigour. Whether effective in a practical sense or mere superstition, the result is still that rhinos get their horns sawed off and my erythrocytes probably carried oxygen for some Swiss or British banker.* (Tho' personally I prefer to think it was the likes of Mick Jagger or Ozzy Osbourne, so I could claim to have been a rock star in my dating profile.)

Many of the Americans who've voted to tear down their own government and let theocrats and robber barons take over would list the broken health care system as a chief concern. Of course, when your biggest problem is pharma, doctors and hospitals setting whatever sky-high prices they want, a small-government and anti-regulation stance is not so much a bandaid as a chainsaw applied to a gaping chestwound. Trust me, you don't know what a broken government looks like (yet) (cf. Trump's dozens strong failed business record) and if you think any market, black, white, gray or whatever, can "self-regulate" per the delusions of libertarians, go ahead and ask my near-comatose five-year-old self about it. While stories from failed states tend to focus on wartime atrocities for the biggest shock value, you'll suffer first and longer from the sheer infinite variety of harm that can be perpetrated when no public authority has the power to demand to know the provenance of your food, your car's parts, the paint on your walls or that little red bag in the fridge.

 

There is a rancid gulf in the behavior of respected professionals Americans will soon be crossing en masse between getting price-gouged and such comic-book malfeasance as stealing preschoolers' blood!

 

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* Of all the bits from Plucky Seven that could've been autobiographical, I bet you wouldn't have guessed it's that one!

Paws for Shelter

Fear me, for I am bane unto all bird and frog-folk! Mew!

 

Aside: I find it hilarious that after 25yrs of 3D games, we still can't decide which mouse direction is "up" for any given 1st-person/3rd-person camera control. I'm not inverted, you're inverted, shut up!

 

Anyway, the first Shelter came as a very welcome surprise back when everything was solely about having the biggest, baddest graphics requirements and fastest-paced action, with its wistful atmosphere, heart-wrenching immersion in the mundane struggle for survival and apt use of construction paper visuals. The sequel unfortunately got caught up in the "everything must be Skyrim" endless open world craze, and couldn't quite fulfill its ambitions. Paws is a standalone mission pack mixing elements of the two, and succeeds... decently, closer to the first, though its $20 price tag may depend on whether you feel like contributing to the arts. If you're looking for three hours of bittersweet fuzzy frolicking through lush meadows and don't mind sneaking past angry geese, go for it.

 

Everyone leaves eventually. Care.

My main gripe would be that it plays up platform-jumping more than the others, and the controls and collision detection can be slightly obtuse. It's also on the easier side, with some early levels literally completable by holding down the forward key. Nevertheless there's fun to be had bowling your siblings over and snatching at butterflies and looking for detours. If only they'd stuck to those natural elements. I still hate the immersion-breaking scrapbooking.
 

The original succeeded so well because our mythology roots in primal, instinctive anxieties. Nature itself is survival horror, and the ogres and fairies of our children's tales stand-ins for reality's harsh lessons. But trying to force that storybook feel with symbol-filled skies and magic star guides tends to kill it. The emotional impact is also less poignant than the badger's Jack London grade tooth and claw. Ah, well. That last longing gaze across the swelling gulf still hit home I suppose.

I have better heron pictures, but I just love how the exposure turned out in this one.

 

Lamplight City

"It's a dead end, I'm burning
Disillusion beats the yearning
Could be deaf or just not listening
Would you see a difference anyway?"

 

Solar Fake - This Generation Ends

 

 

Welcome to Lamplight City, major port of "Vespuccia" in 1844. Meet Miles and Bill. Don't get too attached to Bill. He'll do it for you. Long story short, this one of those times I'd like to give an "A" for effort, but can't really bring myself to overlook the project's more amateurish aspects.

 

I was pleasantly surprised at both the general tone and the pacing, which addressed one of my common complaints about detective stories and other subgenres concerning professionals in uncommon occupations: they tend to be the pirates who don't do anything. As soon as their occupation's introduced, the story suddenly and permanently fixates on the lead's personal drama, around which all occurrences mysteriously gravitate. The Blackwell series (whose ghost sidekick deliberately invites a direct comparison) largely fell into that trap. Lamplight elegantly avoids it, and like both Technobabylon and its closer relative Shardlight, serves as an interesting lesson on worldbuilding within the constraints of a linear adventure game. After the prologue/tutorial you go through a series of five cases, all except the last registering as different enough to stay fresh.

 

From a practical angle, it notably does away with a couple of long-standing genre conventions. First off: you only pick up two or three pieces of material evidence every case, and they're not hidden objects but logical parts of the decor. Well, I always hated pixel-hunting, so not too broken up about that one. I'm more ambivalent about the lack of combining items in your inventory, which could be nonsensical "rubber ducky" grade puzzling, sure, but often required you to think about logical interactions. In Lamplight, you're left with dialoguing as a means of plot advancement, and the dialogues are fairly simple. The few detectiving pitfalls can be summed up as "don't be mean" and more often than not you're left doing the rounds of every NPC after picking up a new clue to see if it's spontaneously opened new dialogue lines.

 

Then there's the subject matter itself.

 

Gonzalez is obviously a major fan of 19th century writing - more Poe tidbits than you can shake a premature burial at - and even I couldn't keep track of the endless stream of title drops, historical puns and casual references. But he does a lackluster job on the period jargon (presumably to save players the trouble of Wikipedia trips for every detail) and the voice acting sounds weirdly hit-or-miss. It's blatantly single-take stuff, the leads sound bland (despite your sidekick's often strained attempts at humor) and while some bit players are spot-on (like Solomon the stiff-necked Jewish tailor) others are painfully identifiable as voices far outside their gamut doing Donald Duck impressions - unsurprising given how many of them pulled quintuple and septuple duty.

 

It... almost works. Almost. The wealth of characters does a good job of immersing you in a steampunk setting rather decently authentic, with period-appropriate drug, invention and fad topics. Supernatural elements thankfully do not take over the plot, with even your central haunting being left up in the air as probably psychological in nature. But some inventions (e.g. "ferroduplicator") serve as too obvious plot crutches, and telling us Bill dies right in the game store page blurb negates much emotional impact, even if it is in the prologue. Also, the otherwise painstaking world-building is hampered by the author's desperate push for multiculturalism. Not sure where in Vespuccia New Bretagne might be located, but its more authentic accents sound more apt to Noo Yawk or Noo Joyzee, not N'rleans as its name and voodoo would indicate. You didn't need every minority in there for the sake of representation.

Which brings us to the usual problem of political correctness. Less pronounced than elsewhere (at least Lamplight doesn't come out swinging like Technobabylon) and most cases manage to dodge it, but the guiltless salt-of-the-earth slum trash begin to grate after a while. The unquestioning mass acceptance of subjects like homosexuality which could not even be discussed in 19th-century "Vespuccia" ruins the attempted period setting. Then, sadly, the whole thing faceplants its grand finale into a trite, gratuitous, bland repetition of the "man bad, woman good" mantra. Because of course. Why should this work of fiction not kowtow to every single other crime plot?

 

Pity. Could've been great.

 

In one aspect though Lamplight City still outshines its competitors: its handling of red herrings. The wealth of flavor texts frequently foreshadow developments in your current or future cases, if you're quick enough to catch them. I'd guess with the state of public education being what it's been this past generation, players' ability to spot those tie-ins varies to both extremes. Twitter addict Taylor Swift fans might get blindsided. Jonathan Swift fans not so much. If you're a 19th century fiction fan and pay attention to flavor text, it might actually come across as too easy. I guessed #2's perpetrator before she's introduced from one classical mention, #3's main theme from the first mention of the victim's characteristics, and #4's BEFORE the sister even knocked on the door, from the inter-chapter cutscene, simply based on the sort of thing my sort of people would stick in my sort of story... and I was right! But the main themes each time around are not necessarily the solution to the case. Multiple leads run a satisfying gamut of rapidly debunked, plausible yet unsupported, and gradually revealed truth.

 

Period research, naturalistic explanations, rational sifting through plausible leads, a halfway reasonable treatment of technological progress vs. humanism. Yup. Could've been great.

Variable Star

Milking a famous author's name after death seems almost inevitable (see "Herbert" and all the books which are very much not Dune) but even when done with the best of intentions and a modicum of talent, the result usually disappoints.

 

Variable Star was based on a seven (8-1) page outline discarded by Robert Heinlein in 1955. Its core plot recalls his other stories from that time to the point of repetitiveness, especially Starman Jones and Time for the Stars (and I already said one reminded me heavily of the other) but much of the rest reads like fan fiction. So if you're into dropping a lot of names and references from Heinlein's career, it's not the worst thing to spend a couple days on. But it's still, unmistakably, Robinson's book and not the master's.

 

Characters adopt a 1940s "wise guy" patter more than Heinlein's cowboy gentleman banter, military references are replaced with jazz, lessened social transgressions would freak out few mundanes and alien mindsets are not delved. Still though, it was nice to catch echoes of The Roads Must Roll and Farmer in the Sky and the core plot's individualism shines through and though I'm not crazy about his style, for the life of me I can't deny Robinson "gets" the old sailor so thoroughly that no digressions come across as insulting to his memory. If you go into it looking for an homage and not a recovered work, you'll probably enjoy Variable Star well enough.

 

But I do have to wonder at returns on time investment.

Though I've sampled a bit of each, I generally avoid the by-products of creativity: adaptations, fan works, biographies, comment sections, etc. They leave a sour aftertaste of idolatry, no matter how interesting the central opus or personage, a squelching muck sensation of group validation. Though I've spent far more time on The History of Middle Earth, its frequent tedium has been offset by added value, not that of fiction but of a study in the creative process itself. The same was to a lesser extent true of For Us the Living, which retained enough meat on the original bones to be contrasted fruitfully with the author's later approach to storytelling. Something like Variable Star, on the other hand, cannot help but feel watered down in its primary field (SF) for all the effort spent on referencing the original author, which references in turn serve no further purpose but fan service.

 

At some point it probably is best to let dead authors lie.

How did the cops tell their dog to find and catch a mentally ill Blackfoot religious convert when unsure of the nomenclature?

Seek, sic a sick Sikh seeker Siksika (sic)

Point of Ordures

"Forget-me-nots, second thoughts live in isolation
Heads or tails, fairy tales in my mind"

Green Day - Are We the Waiting

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Have you ever heard anyone speak the phrase "I have a meeting today" cheerfully? Me neither. So how did we end up with department meetings in computer games?

 

Rogue Trader got me onto this subject -

Chair recognizes the S&M zombie girls' representative

- though Owlcat in general has made a recurring theme of board meetings, given they've settled into kingdom-building as alternate cRPG game mode. By the third attempt they're even getting halfway good at it. But they're hardly the only ones. Mount&Blade has run with kingdom-making and companion advisors for two decades, King of Dragon Pass had its clan ring, Dead State its pow-wows in the high school gym, etc. and really the peanut gallery was popular from days of yore in the SimCity series for example. As more strategic or worldbuilding elements from outside the adventuring party make their way into cRPGs, council sessions feel like a natural part of that expansion from mere dungeon crawling to fleshing out entire fantastic landscapes. On a simpler level, an entourage makes social apes feel important.

 

Just like in real life, though, listening to your "respected" colleagues' self-important yammering on topics at best tangential to your goals can easily get boring. (Not sure why little miss stabalot gets included in deliberations at all, predictably solving problems with murder; Kibble doesn't have what you'd call a wide range of interests.) The most obvious problem can be loquaciousness, worst in Owlcat's previous title Wrath of the Righteous where you could return to the capital only to get stuck in your throne room for several pages' worth of accumulated meeting after meeting. Even Rogue Trader's best-written quest chain so far, Ablution in Blood, can bench you through a nigh-interminable dozen-participant dialogue chain if, like I did, you decide to let Jocasta handle the initial legwork. But "walls of text" are slandered often enough in user reviews for developers to beware sheer length of interlude. No, currently I see more stumbling on timing and relevance. Ah luvs me sum flavor text, but careful where you stick it.

 

Timing calls back to my comments on cutscenes. Dialoguing through an issue and getting your NPC companions' perspective before making a "mine, farm or road" development decision improves on plain, dry exposition or number-crunching, but let's emphasize it is not the game itself. Otherwise you're falling back on selling text adventures as video games four decades after their glory days. If it's not core gameplay, it must intersperse core gameplay. But those planetary development events pop up when you check on a planet's progress, which itself tends to happen as you're star trekking, that being already a diversion from your RPG party's ruin-combing.

Meetings between quests = great.

Scanning planets between quests = great.

Meetings between scanning planets = ... how long do you think you can get away with that before I start wondering what (mini)game I paid for? (KoDP for instance was fairly careful not to place clan ring sessions back-to-back, never letting you lose track of managing your population and resources for too long in a stretch.)

 

The time my characters spend discussing what to do or was done should be preceded or followed by doing something, but such interludes can too easily drift off into their own separate minigame. Again, viewing such meetings as playable cutscenes, they're basically an extension of the talking heads pre-mission briefings popularized by Starcraft (or, hitting even closer to home, Rogue Trader's immediate predecessor Mechanicus) which have direct relevance to your next mission objectives. But if you want a good example, try a very different RPG.

Warhorse Studios surprised me taking the risk of deliberately portraying a siege as frustrating and time-consuming, especially when you're hilariously forced to wait for trebuchet recalibration, and especially especially as this comes right before the grand finale. It succeeds for various reasons (not least doubling as a victory lap for the player toward the game's end) but for my purpose here it's also a big get-together of all the lords you've been questing for until that point. As they hand you different quests (supplies, messages, intercepting enemy reinforcements, recruiting talent, infiltration and pushing the proverbial big red button) the event basically stalls for days at a time, but you're never left just waiting for it to finish or go from convo to convo. The big discussions tend to lead into gameplay taking advantage of your existing skills, each feeding into a coherent over-arching narrative about trying to get into that damn castle.

 

When it came to the Pribislavitz DLC on the other hand, Warhorse did fall into the trap of letting you build multiple upgrades at once so long as you've got the cash, taking most all the heft out of seeing your town growing as you come and go, then getting hit with back-to-back legal disputes from your peasants.

 

Alternate elements, use them as lead-ins to each other, and always return to core gameplay. I've defended even simple walking so long as it's a meaningful part of a larger task. Puzzles or events handled through an alternate interface, like skill checks in dialogue trees can be great... but the point was they should incorporate existing character development choices and feed into further adventure (see the colossal cave adventure from Pillars of Eternity's White March expansion) not spin off into some separate 41st millennium Dilbert parody.

 

 

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P.S.: I miss Moe Biehl