UnderRail

I want to like this game, I really do, but its underlying expertise is just snowed under in too many layers of awkward, amateurish fumbling. As a case in point, take the song-and-dance you need to perform to even vendor any loot:

NPC vendors' demands for various items are limited and changing. This would be great, except there's no way to know what those demands are at any one time. This is not a multiplayer game where you can get a price check on phenolic composites in the next constellation from another player. Also, the vendors are all in separate zones. Also, your inventory's limited, so you can't just load everything you think you might sell and do your rounds. You have to go back and forth between your stash and each NPC, checking current demand then going back to grab three or four items to sell, then zoning again to sell them. Do this several times over, through at least two loading screens at a time, after every quest.

UnderRail is a Fallout copycat. We've been getting a lot of those recently, mostly from Fallout's own former developers, which is fine. Fallout should have been much more of a trendsetter than it was in its own time. Unfortunately, would-be copycats tend to zero in on a few superficial details like the setting or action points or weapon reloading and ignore how these meshed together. UnderRail actually contains an impressive number of features which larger developers refuse to implement. Individually, each of these features can even be said to work. The main issue concerns one of my favorite topics revisited year after year here in my little den: world building.
UnderRail has none, either from a storytelling or level design perspective.

Oh look... rats. Rats which are also dogs, because that makes them more interesting? Then later you also run into actual, regular dogs, for extra redundancy. And I can hit them with my single-target magic missile psychic skill, which stuns, or a bouncing magic missile skill which stuns its first target. Your second destination is called Junktown, a territory disputed by two gangs of lawless thugs. Will you have to run missions between them? Possibly! The entire adventure takes place in caves, with such distinguishing names as "lower caves" or "upper caves" or just to change things up a bit "lower passages" each subdivided into a dozen little maps in which you'll meet a cluster of enemies.

Now, the basic ideas here are solid:
A stat / skill system with synergies and advancement through exploration, not killing. Crafting, sneaking, vent crawling, status effects, ammunition, durability loss, pocket-picking, lock-picking, all those golden oldies are included.

Unfortunately, the whole thing stumbles into Arcanum levels of frustration. To re-iterate my comment about Icewind Dale's difficulty, tough enemies are fine as long as they don't also ship in swarms. Then, difficulty turns into a grind. UnderRail has you fighting alone against groups of enemies, which makes those aforementioned status effects hideously overpowered. Stuns are perfectly valid in group-based RPGs inspired by Baldur's Gate (just means shifting some more weight onto your remaining party members) but for a solo adventure, getting stunned for a round means skipping a round. No options. Amateurish implementation.

In fact the whole combat system seems completely unmanageable without grenade-like consumables to whittle down and separate NPCs to avoid getting zerged. Otherwise, you'll easily get knocked out in the first round of combat without ever firing a shot. The fact that most cleared maps tend to respawn only multiplies this frustration, especially as your character advancement depends on exploration, meaning repeatedly crossing hub maps in search of that last exp point. The game as a whole appears to depend on foreknowledge of what skills you'll need and where. Lockpicking requirements and enemy difficulty jump by at least two-fold between maps. Crafting skills are pointless unless you know you'll have access to the appropriate materials.

All of this might have been mitigated by some inspired map-making and storytelling, but UnderRail fails most by being an aimless grind. LotRO makes a good counterpoint, as it is itself a much more mindless grind (being a WoW-clone) but its level design has consistently stood out. You're always treated to sweeping vistas, foreshadowing and nostalgic looks back at your own path. UnderRail seems to consist of exactly two tilesets. Even that might have been salvaged by some clever arrangement, by some sense of escalation or progress. Instead, most of its maps may as well be ten-by-ten rooms.

The storytelling is, if anything, worse. You arrive at a station. You're given task after task with only the vaguest sense of either present or past context. Given the mutants and undergound living arrangements, presumably there was some kind of nuclear war, not that it's ever clarified. There's a "protectorate" and some stations which function as independent militias, but flavor text and backstory are otherwise conspicuously missing. First you're sent into some caves to the north, then some caves to the west, then some caves to the south. Enemies get tougher with rare warning and you spend half your time zoning back and forth between the painfully small map segments trying to figure out which way to go.

It should be a given feature of game development that games need to be developed, and UnderRail simply was not.

The Wonderful World of Superstition: Then and Now

"In finding direction and measuring time, the Egyptian had only the same clues as the hunters and food gatherers of a bygone age: the rising and setting positions of the sun, moon and stars, the shadow of the sun by day and the rotation of star clusters around the Pole Star at night. Years of careful recording, however, enabled the Egyptian to make far better use of these clues. [...] Here we have real science; but many of the priestly drawings of ancient Egypt show the gods busy controlling the points of the compass or the hours of day and night. Along with real science they trailed a heavy load of superstition."

Lancelot Hogben - The Wonderful World of Mathematics
(copyright 1955)

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First of all, let's acknowledge how totally rad and tubular a name like "Lancelot Hogben" is. If the kid's gonna get beaten up for his patronymic anyway, you might as well endow him with a pugnacious baptism to compensate.

I ran across the honorable Professor Hog-been's book last year while attempting to pick up my mathematical education where it left off around y2k and realizing I had to go all the way back to the dictionary like Homer Simpson. The Wonderful World of Mathematics proved a bit too basic, being a mere history of math aimed at junior high or maybe 9th/10th grade high-schoolers, but I was impressed with its delivery. It's one of those children's or young adult popularized science books so charmingly intoxicated with their subject matter as to draw young minds into unwitting edification.

It was published thirty years after the Scopes trial. (1955-30, come on, we're talking math here, do the arithmetic.) You've all heard of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, I'm sure. The one with Gene Kelly in it? It sent the Bible-thumpers reeling for several decades, until they re-grouped back in the '70s and '80s to once again try sneaking Creationist superstition into public education. They haven't let up since. Much fewer of you, I'd wager, have heard of the monkey trial's modern reiteration: the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania school district decision on so-called "Intelligent Design" or last decade's fashionable pseudonym for allah and brahma and ymir nose-twitching everything into being. The Nova documentary Judgment Day does a decent job of describing that courtroom drama comedy in its various lunacy (if you can stomach re-enactments; I can't) but I'd rather recommend the eugenial Dr. Scott's own presentations on the matter.

When I ran across Hogben's excerpt above, I did a double-take and immediately checked when and where the book was published, as I could not imagine such a statement about religion (even non-Christian religion) as "superstition" making it past editorial self-censorship in this day and age. In fact the usage of the term "superstition" (if Google is to be believed) has steadily declined since the Enlightenment. I'm somewhat encouraged by the slight rise in incidence since 2000, but half of that is probably just Bill Maher.
Well, I'm doing my part anyway: superstition!
(Have you insulted your fundie today?)

The Scopes trial was started (in true American fashion) for fame and fortune to "put Dayton on the map" with a media frenzy, and it worked. Boy howdy, did it ever work. Did I mention Gene Kelly? In its aftermath, authors like Hogben across the ocean could count on support for science from an American population which had realized it did not want to be portrayed as backward back-woods backbirths, as anti-scientific. For decades, the Scopes trial left the impression that the question had been settled: you can mumble whatever you want in church, but the res publica must be based in reality and public education reflected this.

The Dover trial had its 15 minutes of fame back in 2005 but was quickly eclipsed by the invention of funny cat videos, despite addressing pretty much the same issue in just as urgent a manner. Not only that but unlike in the wake of the Scopes trial, the fundamentalists quickly bounced back with new catch-phrases like "teach the controversy" (there is none, by the way) and other efforts to "wedge" science out of science education. More worrisome, while the Dayton challenge to education was a disingenuous, cold-blooded bid for publicity, the Dover school board seemed deadly earnest in its desire to burn evolution (literally; there was this mural, you see) and regress to the state of ignorant hillbillies.

The right wing has only grown more entrenched over the past century while the left wing, weakened by fifty years of post-modernist anti-intellectualism, can no longer put up a fight.

Come on, one more for the road:
Superstition!

With apologies to Sir McCartney

Blokes, birds, swinging in the deed of night
Take these broken wangs and learn to fap
You were always wanking for your moment to "arise"


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(original)

Secret Farmville Legends

Before I abandon The Secret World until their next patch, I'd like to address what I like to call the Tamagotchi Brigade.

TSW is quite a pretty game. It features immersive locales and character models both realistic and theatrical. Unfortunately, this may not make it the easiest program to work within, if its release schedule is any indication. Content updates are few and far between. Even by four years ago, I had remarked that Funcom was swindling its customers with simple text updates instead of working within the game engine for which they'd been charged.

This would be less of an issue if TSW had any replay value, but like any WoW-clone it's a painfully linear slog through a single-player gear farming grindfest. Creativity and unpredictability scare idiots. Content provides no incentive to log in for day after day after day of the same exact run through the same exact scripted instance. Companies need log-in incentives to just get their customers to fire up their game client... just for five minutes... so their addiction to the loot grind can kick in.

So, among other daily log-in rewards, TSW has implemented the "agent network" a minigame mixing trading card random drop collectability with Farmville babysitting. Like previously mentioned texted ventures it features no voice actors and takes place entirely outside the main game environment. Find mooks, equip them with gear and send them on missions. They bring back resources used to run higher-level missions.

That's the interesting part. High-level missions use up a lot of resources. The only way to get these is by having your agents run low-level missions, whose other rewards are utter trash loot, not even vendorable. Missions come in durations of eight, four, one hour or fifteen minutes. With enough agents, by far the most efficient way to gather resources is to constantly run fifteen minute missions... all day long, non stop.

So when your customers run off because your product's a mind-numbingly repetitive grind, your solution is a minigame which is... even more of a grind.
Hhmmm.
Yes.
Yes, this will work out well.

Paranoia Agent

"Build a fortress and shield your beliefs
Touch the divine as we fall in line

Destroy this city of delusion
Break these walls down"

Muse - City of Delusion


Satoshi Kon didn't amass a very extensive resume by his untimely demise but he did leave animation with a few raised bars. As much as I liked Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers or Paprika though, Paranoia Agent seems ultimately more memorable, beyond just the hypnotic repetitive screeching in the opening credits. Shonen Bat is after all a viral meme even in-universe.

For a mishmash of leftover plots that wouldn't fit into full-length movies it holds together surprisingly well, though it takes a second viewing to really catch the multitudinous characters' interconnection and cameos in each others' episodes. A graphic designer gets mugged by a tween boy with a bent baseball bat. Supposedly. The story goes viral. From there on through young, old, male, female, cops and robbers, every episode draws a tangent to this growing urban legend. The vignettes vary wildly in the objective seriousness of their subject matter though they all adopt a generally tragicomic tone, from schoolyard popularity contests to life and death decisions. In fact, by the end, you'll probably be wondering what exactly the show was even about.

But it's obviously about something. Even the most common recurring characters, the two cops investigating the bludgeonings, view Shonen Bat as something like a walking mark of torment seducing the tormented psyches of Tokyo. At least on a superficial level, the series' central theme might be Japanese workaholism, that obsequious shikataganai sarariman devotion to drudgery and putative success which drives so many into hikkikomorbidity. But that's not giving it enough credit. Like the other examples above, Paranoia Agent concerns itself with self-delusion and characters losing themselves to fantasy worlds.

Unlike the more sympathetic hippy-dippy "to each his own" personal empowerment attitude found in Paprika or Tokyo Godfathers, though, Paranoia Agent progresses toward a fairly strong statement in favor of intellectual integrity. It's not the crime, it's the psychological cover-up that gets you, and coming clean about one's faults, inadequacies, errors or transgressive desires would be preferable to fomenting an oncogenic deception. As Ursula Le Guin's character in The Dispossessed put it "Reality is terrible. It can kill you. But it's the lies that make you want to kill yourself."

Paranoia Agent ran in 2004. How much more apt is it now (at least in North America) as snowflake mass hysteria has gripped civilized society? Look at all the kawaii degenerates claiming to be victimized by "institutionalized prejudice" and therefore to be immune from accountability for their own choices and entitled to retribution against their preferred targets of abuse. Observe their pretense of sainthood and martyrdom. Watch the mass hysteria spread, as more and more of the population becomes caught up in the oppression olympics and tell me these idiots wouldn't be improved by a bat upside the head.

 

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2022/12/19: edited out a common misconception

Undead in Joburg

Slight spoilers follow as to Secret World Legends' new playable zone, New Dawn.

Once upon a time, Penelope had a problem: her husband had gone off to war. (Some might consider that a bigger problem for the husband himself, but let's not be accused of mansplaining here.) In any case brave Odysseus, wise king of Ithaca, refused to chop his baby boy in two with a plow, so was deemed much too sane for politics and got drafted. Penelope was left home holding the baby, and had to wait a while before Ulysses sailed back. Then she had to wait another while, and a few more whiles after that. Now, when a king goes m.i.a. for two decades it inevitably prompts a few understudies to step up and claim the title, so Penelope had to keep beating suitors off with a stick (the poor dear) and stall 'til her bull came home. Her favorite trick was refusing to re-mary until she finished weaving a shroud for a relative's death. Every day she'd weave a bit more of the shroud to show the suitors her progress. Every night, she'd unravel it.
Heheh. Suckers.

Anyway, on a completely different topic:
Welcome to South Africa!

The Secret World put out its first real content update in three years yesterday. For those not in the know, this is a game which launched about seven years ago, promising to be a "different" kind of MMO (no classes, no levels, that sort of spiel) and proved to be pretty much just another WoW-clone in every practical aspect. It did earn an uncontested reputation as the best-written MMO (sort of like Neil DeGrasse Tyson being voted the sexiest astrophysicist; mu) and I would add also the best-acted and often most atmospheric. It easily outclasses most of the game industry in aesthetic flair.

Unfortunately, TSW had no replay value: invariable scripted mission grinding, a game engine woefully maladaptive for PvP, a skill system filled with redundancy and lacking satisfying customization. Like any other WoW-clone it also imposes massive amounts of replay on its customers though gear-farming timesinks. It's an old-school puzzle-solving, linear single-player adventure game with a multiplayer mode tacked on at the end to justify DRMing its customers to death and funneling them into a cash shop.
I happen to be a lifetime subscriber, so I'm in this thing to the bitter end.

Said bitter end should probably have come back in 2015 or 2016 by which time TSW had already become a ghost town fleetingly repopulated for a weekend at a time whenever the company announced some kind of event or promotion. Surprisingly, Funcom decided to reinvest in the project instead of dumping it. Last July it was relaunched as Secret World Legends, with an even more dumbed down combat system and much of its content actually removed, but at least it was in a more playable form, less of a chore. (Except for the chores.) The Legends relaunch eclosed in a hilariously, stunningly buggy form, filled with blatant cash traps and emptied of at least half its multiplayer elements while at the same time forcing players through a massive dozen-tier gear-farming slog as a timesink in lieu of content. Now, the bugs have largely been squashed and new content has finally arrived. How does it measure up?

Like a dwarf in the NBA. But, y'know, still, a sexy dwarf.
For a face-saving, job-securing band-aid on a chest-wound having long bled out, for a product several years in production, the South Africa expansion's laughably small. In fact you can see around half of it in that one screenshot. Aside from being entirely single-player, I suppose it doesn't help that half the list of new content reads "coming soon":

Jesus, who's paying these people?
Oh, right, me.
Well, I mean, you can't blame them. They only had a few years to slap twenty missions together.
However...
I have yet to get bugged. This may sound like a not-so-great expectation, but compared to TSW's history heretofore, it's outright miraculous. It took them five years to even get their rosters to display dates properly. Legends hit in 2017 with bugs still unresolved since 2011. A bug-free TSW expansion's almost like a bug-free Troika game. History balks at the very concept.

Also, while there's relatively little there, what's there is actually solid work. Nothing brilliant, mind you. A couple of interesting boss fights, a new gameplay mechanic for sabotage (read: stealth) missions which complements existing mechanics nicely, some good voice acting, some mediocre. The bidonville's scenic enough. I'll get into the writing some other time, but overall New Dawn looks promising.

Alas, TSW is still a mindless chore of a grind, overall. Amusingly though, a few of the missions seem meta-commentary on this very fact. You alternate your time infiltrating the cultist commune of New Dawn between day and night, between undermining them and earning their trust, with different quests available during each. Under cover of darkness, you sabotage some trucks and spray graffiti all over their tin shacks. Come morning, you're tasked with... repairing the trucks and cleaning up the graffiti which mysteriously appeared overnight. Wax on; wax off. If Funcom didn't consciously mean this as self-parody, they've just been at it for too long.

Of course, when Penelope kept unraveling her weaving, she knew the last cause of her temporizing. She had an Odysseus on the horizon.
Do we?
Or are we the poor deluded suitors?

Pick Out Your Intellectual Equals

"I never really hated the one true god
But the god of the people I hated"

Marilyn Manson - Disposable Teens
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"As a devout agnostic, Jubal consciously evalued all religions, from the animism of the Kalahari Bushmen to the most sober and intellectualized of the major Western faiths, as being equal. But emotionally he disliked some more than others... and the Church of the New Revelation set his teeth on edge. The Fosterites' flat-footed claim to utter gnosis through a direct pipeline to Heaven, their arrogant intolerance implemented in open persecution of all other religions wherever they were strong enough to get away with it, the sweaty football-rally and sales-convention flavor of their services - all these ancillary aspects depressed him. If people must go to church, why the devil couldn't they be dignified about it, like Catholics, Christian Scientists or Quakers?
[...]
So the Fosterites might be right. Jubal could not even show that they were probably wrong.
But, he reminded himself savagely, two things remained to him: his own taste and his own pride. If indeed the Fosterites had a monopoly on Truth (as they claimed), if Heaven were open only to Fosterites, then he, Jubal Harshaw, gentleman and free citizen, preferred that eternity of pain-filled damnation promised to all "sinners" who refused the New Revelation. He might not be able to see the naked face of God... but his eyesight was good enough to pick out his social equals - and these Fosterites, by damn, did not measure up!"

Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
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As a devout atheist I hold all beliefs in the supernatural, from Catholic frou-frou to modernly foppish "spiritualism" (whatever the everloving fuck that even means) to be equally moronic. But emotionally, it's religion's appeal to anti-intellectualism, to primitivism, gullibility and codependence which raises my hackles. If heavens are the province of punch-drunk sing-along ignorant rabble, then I'd rather share a sober discussion of evolutionary theory with The Accuser for the rest of eternity. If you must go to church, why can't you just sit quietly and mumble your nonsense in private with some scrap of decorum?

Hoppy Easter!
A nameless Roman redshirt named Longinus, passed over for a promotion, dipped an egg in lamb's blood and stick-magnetized it up Yaisuah's asshole. When it knocked up against The Most Holy of Prostates, it cracked, thus impregnating Yesu Grift-us with a killer rabbit doomed to have his adorable noggin' cracked only by the Holy Hand-Egg of Antioch. Thus, on East-Ur Sun-Dei, we crack colored eggs. We also traditionally bite the heads off cacao-and-cane-sugar lagomorphs, just like the twelve latter dolts say at the 501(c)3rd supper.
As for the palm fronds lining Jay-zus' entry into the New Jerusalem (Dollywood) it's a little-known fact that they were handed out by the fashion police as Edenically-appropriate garb. Fig leaves stem from a Dianitpicky mis-translation of the original Atlantean. In reality, they would've been much too small. Adam was hung like a unicorn. The palm fronds only landed on the road in front of Jesus when the city-wide flash mob honored him with a mass pantsing.
Now, pay attention, this next bit's important: the killer bunny emerged from Heh-sooth's dead thigh on the third day when the dry desert air had ripened both dermis and epidermis to tree-bark perfection. So the bunny had to rip out of the rotting corpse's flesh twice, gaining the name Deo-nebriatus, saint of this-sounds-more-plausible-drunk. Whence we derive the significance for both eating crusty wafers and getting vampirically tipsy. Judas was a biter. Of the Holy Spigot. It's how Jesus learned to hate gays.


What?
Whaaat? What're you lookin' at me like that for?
Like any of this is worse than the crap you morons worship as respectable religion. I may be talking out of my ass but at least I'm not trying to make you believe in a literal talking donkey. And even if you don't entirely buy that, you are still following the dictates and upholding the social control apparatus of those who would have you believe in talking snakes and donkeys! Every last bit of insanity and idiocy becomes possible once you accept the basic notion of an almighty shaper of all there is. If you're stupid enough to buy the circus, then you own all the animals inside it.

And what a menagerie you are, oh you happy few, you band of boneheads, you saved at the expense of all the rest of us: from self-mutilating Hindus and spaced-out Buddhists to snake-handling Appalachian Chreeshchuns and Scientologists worshipping a pulp SF novel. Who could hate you? Oh, right, all the other yous.

Take your holiest of men speaking his holiest wisdom in the incomprehensible million tongues of Paradise. Does he really sound so different from me congealing wordsicles in my stream-of-consciousness rambling?

So your priest wears a gold-embossed white or black robe. So what? I've got a polyester blend hooded sweatshirt. Is every chav pope of the universe?

You touch your forehead to the floor every time you kneel to Mecca? I slap my forehead every time I see you cretins do that. I maintain that my forehead slapping is holier than thine.

You like burning incense? I prefer the smell of pizza, and I'll take pepperoni over communion wafers any day.

If by this point you're thinking "holy shit" then yes, thank you, you're finally getting it. Holy is shit, and frankly it turns my stomach to see you eating it. What does it say about your intellectual abilities that you're so easily impressed by fancy robes, rations and rituals? Not much needs to be said. You can see the same conditioned emotional responses from other lower animals like yourselves, in every cat worshipping the holy incantation of the Covenant of the Can Opener and dogs praying at the door when their master's about to come home from work. Every day at 5:30 your dog witnesses the second coming of its god... just like Seventh-Day Adventists.

I cannot imagine sharing an eternity in the sort of three ring circus designed by you degenerate ass-clowns who fawn over such garbage. If heaven's an eternity of rednecks and other drooling primitives chanting "puh-raise jay-zusss" then I would either find my way to hell or make one.


Easter seems especially ludicrous, what with the cutesy-wootsie bunny wabbit celebrating a gruesome execution by crucifixtion, but it's really just another card in the tarot deck, more hollow make-work symbolism. Yeah, I could've used the fact that it fell on April 1st as a hook for this post, but honestly? You're fools year-round. Sure, sure, we can hand-wave the whole thing, saying that eggs are just a symbol of reincarnation (which is totes legit) but if you buy that, then you must admit your whole faith was puled out of a hen's cloaca. Once you agree to buy the basic notion of supernatural forces based on no evidence whatsoever, then you might as well buy into the whole ass-backwards lunacy. If you actually believe there are superhuman intellects out there who dedicate their existence to tabulating the number of times you masturbate and fart in elevators, all to justify themselves in keeping you alive for the rest of eternity... just so they can torture you... then you're a moron.

We are not the same species. Reason and superstition began to diverge at least half a millennium before some poor deluded schmuck of a rabbi was tortured to death for telling rabid apes to love each other. Minds capable of reason must learn to shed their attachments to the Allzumenschliche filth choking all life out of the world. As thinking beings, the faithful do not measure up.

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Edit 2018/04/03:

Added several middle paragraphs, as I was unhappy with the lack of detail I provided.