The Surrender of Social Capital

"a well-run tyranny is almost as scarce as an efficient democracy"

Robert A. Heinlein - Friday 

_________________________________________

"What makes me sick about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if THEY are against Communism, I have to be for it, and I don't want to be!"

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here, 1935

_________________________________________

"The property of [France] is absolutely concentered in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers, & tradesmen, & lastly the class of labouring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? [...] Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, & to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."

 

Thomas Jefferson - letter to James Madison, 1785

(note he was writing this shortly before Malthus provided the counter-argument to simply letting the rabble stake infinite claims for their infinite progeny) 

__________________________________________

 

 

Lookin' to get my culture on (as one does) I tried watching Das Lehrerzimmer, which turned out to be one of those movies every professional critic feels obligated to praise because if it's 'tackling issues' in a rudderless and stilted manner, it must somehow contain deep truths. While I'd normally welcome more criticism of modern interpersonal bureaucracy, that won't be found in a work which can itself manage no more than a tepid "careful now" as it merely confirms the existence of topics. Worse though, in order to advance such a plot without anyone playing the villain, all characters are forced to instead play the fool, making deliberately moronic choices at every step which fit neither into a realistic portrayal nor into the more consciously exaggerated old absurdist theater mold. It's hard to empathize, much less sympathize, with a bunch of clowns derping around worse than even your stupidest coworkers while the visuals and audio push you to feel invested and even anxious about their plight. I don't. I feel firing-squady about their plight.

 

One could, however, credit the flick with at least one brilliant impression on later reflection: that through that entire hour and a half of discriminatory implications and polite hand-wringing, nobody in the zimmer actually gets lehrered a single damn thing. Whatever's happening in that school, it ain't math, science and reading comprehension. And, as anyone who's met a GenZer can attest, that's all too realistic a depiction of past decades' cultural downshift.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, Bill Maher continued his descent from "tell it like it is" comedian to political mouthpiece recently with a New Rule attacking New York's newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani and the rest of America's few Democratic Socialist politicians. Now, granted, the U.S. only acquired a semi-official socialist movement in the past ~15yrs and much of what you hear from them resembles less a valid political platform than the same idiotic virtue signaling and moral purity tests which have already sapped the (supposed) left wing's credibility. It is also true that Mamdani will either prove a Trumpish charlatan with no intention of fulfilling his ludicrous campaign promises or an imbecile whose effort will crash and burn spectacularly in a year or two, as the changes he's promised cannot be effected at a metropolitan level, either because New York is too big or too small. Taxing companies and parasitic billionaires might work for a large, powerful country leaving them less room to run with the loot, but not when they can simply move their office half a mile outside city limits. Rent control requires a shitload of ancillary subsidies and regulation to ensure apartments are actually livable. As for fully free public transit? I don't know what the hell that is, because we didn't even have it under a literal communist regime! It works well for small towns with light and predictable demand, but for a metropolitan clusterfuck? For just one problem, how many extra cops do you plan to pay to kick all the hobos out of their now free dormitory cars?

 

But none of that explains why Maher felt a need to lie in conflating socialism with totalitarian communism (especially as he himself spent decades' worth of shows outlining the differences for idiots) and pull an argumentum ad North Koream, except to virtue signal as anti-socialist to all the redneck imbeciles still obsessing over the Red Scare.

 

Funny thing: when phrase searching that Jefferson quote above, for the second hit down I got "was Jefferson a socialist?" which, given he was writing three or four generations before it even became an issue, I'm gonna call a bullshit question. How about: he was smart enough to note the absurdity of infinite wealth accumulation and the needless cruelty of enforced poverty and six and a half years later the French Revolution more than proved his point. But the only question relevant to the average moron is that of tribal affiliation: was Jefferson an "us" or a "them" either a dirty godless commie or a filthy decadent capitalist pig and should we mindlessly attack or mindlessly defend him while never bothering to understand what he said?

 

It's easy to forget that communism did originally address quite real imbalances of power like the 19th-century robber barons, sadistic fucks like the Carnegies that kept their workers under a slaver regime and could order a bought-and-paid-for private or state military to violently crush any dissent. So what will you do to prevent sadistic fucks like Bezos and Musk from starving the population to death on a whim? And what name will you append to such worker/consumer protection and individual rights measures other than socialism? Because there is none more fitting.

 

Now, of course once socialist protection measures advanced to communist state ownership - of everything - those states themselves even more thoroughly crushed the populace, because ANY human element, once allowed to reign unchallenged, will be a tsar, will be a khan, will be a Nero and Caligula and Torquemada, will gleefully bathe in the blood of innocents, will rehash every flavor of sadistic oppression soon leading to collapse. When it comes to the real-world game of civilization, if anyone wins, everyone loses.

 

But then we may simply be under an illusion that these sociopolitical transitions ever represented a discursive trade-off between publicly accessible ideologies, and that brings us back to schooling. The past couple centuries' industrialization created a demand for skilled labor and middle-class invention which forced rich investors to tolerate the lower classes' education in the interest of... interest. But they've always strained to restrict education solely to the skills needed to operate their machinery and the information age makes tighter control possible again, promises unlimited surveillance and forced consumer spending. The rise of copy-pasting artificial "intelligence" offers the rich an alternative. No longer must an educated middle class be tolerated to lead, entertain and indoctrinate so long as such functions can be automated by 1984's "versificator" and no longer need competent scientists be recruited if massive processors promise to brute-force technological solutions.

 

Thus public education must die a living death, so that the world can once again return to the perennial ape-friendly pattern of masters and slaves, and nothing in between. Kill phonics, kill multiplication tables, kill universities most of all, devote more hours to football, inculcate identity politics instead of reasoned social awareness, argue about capitalism vs. socialism while the rich get richer off corporate socialism, pick an ideology to make yourself feel big by participation and champion it to take over all of society. Crush any who would oppose your shibboleth. Much as in The Teacher's Lounge, this idiotic plot would never hold together if all the actors weren't bending over backwards to lobotomize themselves toward their primordial utility:

__________________________________________

"The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.'"

 

George Orwell - 1984

AoW4 Factions, 2

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

________________________________________________________________________________

After my elves I wanted something nasty and aggressive, but the material affinity actually made them more akin to slow-advancing zerglings, especially as they need to surround targets to overwhelm them. Very little recovery potential if the front line falls apart. Human overpopulation's creepy enough in its subjects' disposability, but how callous would a true r-strategist industrial society turn out?

Bloodlines 2.02 - Fuckin' Nuclear

This century gleams.

Above each doorway, beneath humblest eaves, upon a myriad stalks like sunflowers returning their gift, a brash future glares its challenge against the inheritors of darkness. The sparest tenement boasts electric candle-flare enough to shame the gaudiest palace feast in centuries past, each street aglow to the horizon with an ocean's conflagration of spermaceti. The City of Light dims in remembrance. Above, the Milky Way washes out to a milky pudeur at such garish displays, the stars I called my faithful guides across lifetimes of wandering blinking out in annoyance, mocked by fools lighting their own way to dusty death. This Promethean gift the kine take as their due, with such galling aristocratic detachment: 

Oh, little matchstick girl, will you sell me a whiff of phosphor? Your city of pitch footing and coal gas galloping chokes my senses, your gleaming metal facades scorch alive old fears of the witch-hunter's heated brand. And there, secreted in your coat, buzzing and chiming for your limited attention: what cacodaemon thought to wed a pocket Victrola to an ever-flowing gossip rag?

 

Had I foreseen this incandescent, screeching madhouse, I should have hunted down those fools Marconi and Tesla in their cribs and by hallowed leechcraft eased the world of this plague of buzzing fireflies, this insult to the mute eternal night beyond. 

__________________________________________________________

 

 

Feeling Bloodlines 2's tedium set in more firmly with every simpleminded fetch quest and slapfight against identical mooks, I'll set aside my many other complaints to ask: will any detail of my character or the setting ever prove relevant? Why force a premade player character on me if you're not going to give him any personality?

 

The culture shock of a creature four centuries old and a century absent is elided in a single paragraph of dismissive exposition, then ignored, begging the question of why an "elder" vampire was warranted in the first place. At every step, TCR's gaggle of sorry excuses for writers pass up chance after chance at colorful dialogues which would've taken no more development effort than voiceovers triggered by environment. The Christmas tree you see as you walk out your door the first time could've been a commentary on shifts in religiousity, a visit to Fletcher's bar with its speakeasy history could be punctuated with: 

"Ah, but those were gayer days."

"Oh. About that word..."

 

Could The Nomad comment that The Great War was good eatin' and such fruitful catastrophe could never be duplicated? Maybe give us an aside about women's suffrage or flapper fashions vs. modern ones? Something about the damn dirty commies? It's bad enough our protagonist has zero opinion on new technologies, but could he not show some passing interest in the improvement of those he would have encountered in more primitive forms, like the velocipede or motor carriage? Sure, piling on too many such asides could sound goofy if they're not properly spaced out and interspersed with more serious, plot-relevant content.... but come on... nothing?!

 

Even when their own script sets up an obvious opportunity, they fail to follow up on it logically, like the fact a vamp sleeping since 1920 should react with confusion at Benny's "nuclear" comment. Maybe you could insert short information age training dialogues at the start of each night in your haven. Or imply the PC speed-read a few books like Armand in Interview. Or hell, yes, try to imagine how modern light pollution would look to someone who went nappy-naps back when street lamps still ran on oil. Take advantage, in some way, any way, of the backstory you so thoughtlessly spat out. Have a reaction, an opinion, of some kind, beyond "give me quest!" It's not as though game design is lacking in examples to follow. Your ghost buddy is even a direct counterpart to Joey Mallone from Blackwell, where he played so much more fruitfully off the heroine. Or hear how much mileage Gabriel Knight got out of its protagonist and narrator snarking at the much sparser pixelated scenery back then.

 

Bloodlines 2 is an astoundingly lazy product in many ways, but this becomes especially obvious in facets of development where even a minimal effort and interest would have easily borne proportionately far greater fruit.

The Engines of God

"Grabbed a book and read the cover
It honestly was beautifully done
Like trying to hide the daylight from the sun"

 

Modest Mouse - Fire It Up

 

 

Having spent much of my fiction reading the past decade on Wells, Heinlein and other duddies of venerable fuddiness, I've been meaning to catch up on more recent (relatively speaking) science fiction. Thus, based on the authors' recommendation below some page or another of A Miracle of Science I picked up Jack McDevitt's The Engines of God, the 1994 opener to what is apparently a rather lengthy series starring the same protagonist. That fixation dampens my further interest, but the first installment was palatable enough.

 

Aside from the necessary phlebotinum of a warp drive, the story sticks to fairly hard science basis. Heroic archaeologists are struggling to discover why a now-extinct alien culture got knocked back to the stone age before a bunch of rich fucks pave over the planet to breed more mindless wage slaves. Also, why would aliens visit our solar system without stopping by to say hello? And most importantly, what species in its right mind would plan construction projects on a boring geometric grid?

 

The core puzzle concerning various alien civilizations works out quite well in fact, slyly teased and corroborated just gradually enough to let the reader keep guessing, and delivers a memorable finale. Problems arise mostly with the stuff in between. It may seem a bit harsh to dredge up Ambrose Bierce's old witticism that such-and-such novel's covers are too far apart, but here we pretty clearly have a shorter novella interspersed with two or three short stories to pad it out to 400 pages to fit the mass market publishing paradigm.

 

As a flaw common to SF writers, characters take awkwardly long to differentiate, and some have little personality beyond filling a set piece like romance subplot or tragic death or disposable redshirt, which gimmicks as we all know all fiction must include on pain of conciseness. A Miracle of Science would actually serve as good counterpoint in looping its apparent digressions back into the main plot, which The Engines of God repeatedly fails to do with its designated comic relief and heroic stand and so forth. To fill the supposedly critical human interest components, an unnecessary proliferation of characters are given an unnecessary quantity of page space, which they by necessity spend engaging in various hijinks in parallel to the main attraction as a way of - supposedly - maintaining readers' interest.

 

But it's those humanizing elements which in fact feel more artificial, included to satisfy a lowest common denominator of social acceptability. The story needed a more tangible, physical conflict for its climax, plus an injection of tragic sacrifice, and it needed exactly 1.35 units of empowered modern heroine who must be supplied with a love interest as per subsection A, paragraph three of the storyteller's chewed cud of conduct, and we simply must have <A WHIMSY> by which to showcase her free spirit.

 

Too bad all that monkey-friendly storytelling is tainted by a legitimately interesting cosmic phenomenon and a well-paced intellectual, exploratory effort to unravel it, or it might have qualified as "literature" instead of lowly genre fiction.

Z-ray vision

I stared at this light pole for a good half-minute one winter -

- before realizing I must be seeing the precise route of the electrical cable inside, which gave off exactly enough heat to allow windblown snow to stick without melting it.

Bloodlines 2.01 - Bouncing off the walls

Disappointing playthrough. Spoilers unmarked. (edit: Wow, did this go downhill fast after the tutorial.)

______________________________________

 

Friday

A'riiight, my first quest as a vampire is to sniff out the voice in my head. But this being me, screw that, let's run around aimlessly a bit. And I do mean aimlessly because the game lacks a compass or minimap.

 

My god... it's full of... hobos. Should I bite one? Wait, do I need blood? I don't see a health bar (unless it's marked with a crown for some inexplicable reason?) or blood pool. Avoid the po-po paddock and instead climb up an air duct. Nothing up here except a graffitid smokestack. Let's try this gliding thing. Can I make the jump?

(Seattle) gamers never look up, luckily

Yup. Easily. Except there's still nothing to see or do on this block of rooftops either, except another graffito. Drop down to street level and I've already hit the northern edge of the map. Well that was a significantly duller exploration mission than my last hike north. Can I break into a car? No? Pick up a trash can and throw it? No? Can I at least kick the bucket? No bucket. Fine. Guess I'll do the stupid quest after all. Sniff-sniff, meet the sheriff, sniff-sniff, and I'm already across town. Wow. This can't be the entire overland map.

Can it? It's just about the same size or smaller than the combined zones from twenty years ago!

Destination's guarded, stealth-kill a couple of ghouls, sneak past the rest. I'll admit the parkour elements aren't too bad for providing alternate routes.

Except they just get called over by the door guard if I bypass them anyway aaaaand, I'm dead. Knocked back to the beginning of the sequence because of the stupid checkpoint system. Why the fuck is your combat copied from third-rate shovelware like ELEX, enemies bouncing around you instantly, randomly, inertia-less. On my fourth attempt I finally make it in. Hell with it though, I'm soured on this game for tonight.

 

Saturday

Fine, let's talk to some Anarchs. Except no, it's just more of this idiotic punch-drunk slapfest. The combat physics were admittedly terrible in the original Bloodlines, but at least they were merely primitive and underdeveloped, not purposely dumbed down and infuriating. I would assume TCR wanted to emphasize supernatural speed and power, with punches strong enough to knock enemies around. In effect it instead produces rubberized rag dolls bouncing back and forth like Tom and/or Jerry and every single mook instantly dashes behind you after attacks. Twitchy and boring at the same time. And what idiot thought it a good idea to remove the PC's inventory?

No weapons? What? My only option is to make improvised weapons out of what should become my own arsenal and throw them away? Okay, pro tip you cretins: THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN RPG!!! As in the genre most dependent on empowering the player to create a personal identity! To build up a multifaceted array of choices as he advances. That means class choice, skill choice, appearance choice, moral choice, combat/stealth/diplomacy quest solution choice and yes, included among all that, choice of weapon, my trusty gluon gun or fire axe or Mourning Frost or even a simple slingshot! Because it's mine and I-call-it-Vera!

 

Moving on. Find Fait-Bien's corpse in an unexpectedly flat scene. How? How do you manage to turn such drama as discovering you've murdered your now closest companion into a monotone snooze? Will every character in this game continue delivering nothing but the same vaguely bored, vaguely annoyed, unrehearsed line reading in every single dialogue? Where is the humour, the pathos, the tension which elevated A Machine for Pigs a dozen years ago past its simple walk-and-click mechanics? I try stopping by the pawn shop and am summarily placed back onto the plot rails without the mooks even introducing themselves.

Will this whole affair remain completely linear?

Yes I'm lonely because your supposed game offers no gameplay! By this point in the original I'd already eaten some rats, picked up some loot, slotted more than one skill point, met Smiling Jack, Deb, Trip, the scared guy I mugged for his watch, Heather, Mercurio and Lacroix each with vibrant, expressive personalities and divergent takes on your situation.

At least in Lou-Lou's case the voicing fits a bit better as restrained Ventrue aristocratic hauteur. Not that she has much to say:

Yes, let us dryly exposit the fact that we don't even have anything to dryly exposit.

Seattle: is a city.

Conflict: exists.

Player character: acknowledged. 

Continue plot? <YES>

End perfunctory speed bump.

Compare to "You will go to Santa Monica" where the emphasis told you more about the big cheese's personality in five phrases than these idiots struggled to squeeze out of five paragraphs. Here's the thing: Nines Rodriguez? His very first line "Yo, this is bullshit!" was as generic a stock phrase as they come, but properly contextualized it actually did some narrative work, pushed characterization and faction politics along, before you even officially meet him. Here I've repeated the same "I am old, anarchs are attacking" set-up three? four times over? 

 

No choice but to follow the exactly one objective and do the next quest. At least a few more dialogues open up. Mrs. Thorn and Patience have a smidge more personality. Fight twice more on the way, against the same generic rubberized melee fodder. Okay, fuck it, I've had it with this idiotic combat system, drop it down to normal difficulty. And we have our first megamook, fatso over here. 

Except he does nothing different. Dashes into you like the others, hitting harder. At least I got to win a fight by using my shadow cloak passive, running out of his sight after eating his last buddy to set up a sneak attack. Of course the checkpoint system makes you trudge through the vents toward the fight every time as a timesink. And the subsequent climbing sequence makes me wonder if the developers didn't deliberately make every possible stupidest design choice.

This is not a physics challenge. No matter how many ledges or handholds you see, there is only one path upwards. If you try to grab or stand on something the developers don't want you to, you're simply knocked back down to the bottom, no matter how feasible your chosen course. Obey.

Characters are also getting more and more ridiculous. A fangirl scientist, a mincing Nos, don't get me started on the anarch cannon fodder very pointedly calling The Sheriff "they" or Niko's talk of good guys and bad guys. Great, at least they're not glittering, but is any of this in the least bit vampiric? Anyway, since the one single quest is sending me to bed, I might as well take that advice literally.

 

 

Sunday

Alright, let's give this dumpster fire another chance. I'm thrown into Fabien's dream adventure, because... I'd been spending too much time developing my own character? Was the point to emphasize the fact I can't actually play a Malkavian? And again we get walked through feeding, running across the city, and some painfully telegraphed dialogues introducing Malk mind control. Fabien's gratuitous narration of the obvious is getting on my nerves. Bounce from one NPC to the next as I'm told. Oooh, a flashback within a flashback. How thrilling. If only they'd put the same effort into combat mechanics as they did into whole separate sets and costumes for the prohibition era vamps. And I repeat, what the fuck is this 9th-grade passing grade degradation of the art of dialogue you fonts of soporific pablum?

"I'm sorry to disturb your sleep" - ?? You're supposed to be writing vampires, children of the night, inheritors of original sin, blood-drenched predators, ruthless embodiments of visceral, primordial terror, not a bunch of dickless little suckups cooing and whining at each other and afraid to whistle in church!

 

Again we repeat the same exposition about the mark and weakness. Still nothing to do about town so schlep across it again to exchange five superfluous lines of dialogue setting up the tediously foreshadowed next quest step of tracking down the wayward sheriff. More fights against the same generic mooks. "Your generation ain't your fault" says the pissant with the trendy face piercings. Again, *this* vacillating, pronoun policing, mini-microaggressing self-esteem wonderland is supposed to be the World of Darkness?

Aww yeah, move over Max Schreck, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, the new monster that haunts the darkness is a cringing, apologetic, pop-psychologizin' snowflake that becomes an angel by bleeding others.

Fuck this.

 

 

Monday

More of the same rubberbanding fights against the same basic enemies. At least I amuse myself by stockpiling some melancholic and choleric blood on the way, not that anyone's explained what that does yet. Oops, masquerade violation. Dodged it by running?

More of the same mooks. Even more of the same mooks. Then even more more of the same mooks. They're made to be easy to run/hide from, so the highrise fights turn into a lot of hit-and-run ambushes. Drop attacks at least spice things up a bit. Boss fight against Benny: pop a couple of potions, make use of third-party bait, he goes down eventually, but no matter if you extend the slapfight to three phases, it's still a slapfight.

My first RP choice. Give him to Katsumi. At least I can stomach her gruffer dialogue. 

The map opens up a bit after this, finally offering multiple quests.

Well, as introductions go, Bloodlines 2's is sort of incredible, and not in a good way. Everything from environments to the skills, mobs, combat, save system, character design, tedious writing, simplistic mission structure, every design choice prompts "what the hell were they thinking?"

 

And, glancing at the rapid double-digit attrition in achievement numbers between the tutorial and the first couple of missions, I'm hardly the only one disappointed.

AoW4 Factions, 1

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

________________________________________________________________________________

In case I didn't lay it on thick enough, this was my first faction right at the game's release, fitting my standard druid/wizard elvish mold. As such, it only had the blurb appended a couple years later, and other features like the ritualist class or attunement sub-category for mystic cultures were auto-added by Triumph's later patches, so it's not too minutely crafted.

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.

 

_________________________________________________________

 

* 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.)