Sick

Sorry Everybody,

I've been laid out with some mystery illness for the past little while (that and deus ex is long and enjoyable) and haven't been able to post. I went to the doctor for an ultrasound, of all things, today. Hopefully, I'll figure out why my gut is fucked soon and I get back to you, my adoring audience and enduring quest.

Nathan

Dungeon Siege

Well. it's been some seven hours of more or less continuous play and I daresay that I've had enough Dungeon Siege.

Oh yeah, ha-ha, the game actually ran, XP compatibility mode, no problems at all. Just cause I've been burned by this already, I didn't wanna risk exiting it until just now, but, I could go on with life with few regrets if I didn't play it again. Time for haiku:

Mediocre game.
like going on a date with
a homely nice girl.

Depending on your audience, you could change that to "boring" nice girl.

Misogyny aside, Dungeon Siege is alright. I mean, I haven't played Dungeons and Dragons since some friends drove down from college three months ago, so I'm jonesing for a fix. Sadly, as we can see from the title, Dungeon Siege is only about half of Dungeons and Dragons. Not in terms of length, though, oh no, my seven to eight hour investment probably netted me a quarter of completion. But characters only have 3 stats (STR, DEX and INT) instead of 6 (missing CHA, CON, WIS), there are multitudes of dungeons, but only one dragon, and wizards suck throughout the game, where as in D&D, they only suck at low levels.

It went for a little more actiony/exciting version of RPG style combat, it felt a bit more like World of Warcraft than Baldur's Gate. Wizard's don't have access to a really wide variety of spells, so they're more like magic archers, vomiting up sparkly balls of energy that do little in the way of damage at low in the way of speeds.

That problem is compounding when you realize that Dungeon Siege follows the curious design that experience is collected per hit. Near as I can tell anyway. But the result is that my archers, who got to fire jillions of quick shots, leveled at a faster rate than my melee fighters, who leveled faster than my mages, who spent most of their time mumbling lengthy incantations and missing their targets. The order changed somewhat as I became less interested in the game and spent my time petting my emotionally-needy cat during combat. Then I discovered that the AI would only have my characters attack if they were attacked, even despite options in the controls that would alleged to prevent that. Thus, my fighters would hop from threat to threat dealing hell on anyone that dare landed a shot on them while my mage and archers would pretty much stand around and talk about sports. The following is an excerpt:

Mage: My, that was exhiliarating. I threw a magic sparkle bomb at the enemy and it did impact him! The explosion even hurt some of his teammates as well as my own party members.

Archer: Don't exert yourself so much, Gerty! Here, we've slain the target that the glowing sword in the sky asked of us, let us stand and rest awhile.

Mage: Yes, I've used up an entire percentage of my mana, I don't want to strain myself.

Fighters: FOR BLAGAROG, KING OF DEATH!!!

Healer: Good fellows, I do believe that the combat does persist beyond the felling of the first foe. Look, yon generic tolkien-inspired-lizard-man-beasts-whose-language-includes-a-lot-of-k's-and-double-consonants continue to assail our fighters.

Archer: I'm not sure that they're a threat exactly. I think these fellows wish to pace up and down the hallway, grunting and flexing their scaly muscles. Not so different from ourselves really. Look, that Krugg Shaman is just standing there, swaying slightly. We have so much in common.

Fighters: WE HAVE SLAIN THE FOUL C-- WHAT HIT ME?! YOU, FOUL CREATURE! FOR BLAGAROG, KING OF DEATH!!!

Healer: Goodly combatants! You are standing amidst a mob of assailants. The next will attack you just as the first did!

Mage: Ugh, I do detest violence. Why can't the world be full of ineffectual balls of sparkly magic?

Fighters: WE HAVE SLAIN TH-- WHAT TH-- STRIKING ME FROM BEHIND, SNEAKING FIEND?! FOR BLAGAROG, KING OF DEATH!!!

Healer (muttering): Oh my god, he wasn't even behind you for chrissakes

FIGHTERS: WE HAVE SLAIN THE FOU- AH-- HAVE AT YOU!!! WE HAVE SLAIN TH-- FOR BLAGAROG, KING OF DEATH!!! WE HAVE SLAI-- FOR BLAGAROG! WE HA-- FOR BLAGA-- WE H- FOR BLAGAROG!!! FOR BLAGAROG! FOR BLAGAROG! FOR BLAGAROG! FOR--FOR--F--F--F--F--F--F WE HAVE SLAIN THE FOUL CREATURE!

Fighters have gained two levels from fighting using melee weapons.

Mage: Unh. It is most unfair that they advance so quickly. I would like to gain access to higher levels of sparkly ineffectual magic.

Archer: Have faith in the glowing sword on high, friend.

Mage: Maybe if we participated in the battle just a lit--

Archer: No! 'Twould blaspheme the sword.

Fighters (distantly): FOR BLAGAROG, KING OF DEATH!!!!!!

Healer: Sirs, the fighters have accidentally engaged a much larger group of the enemy. If we are to succeed, then we must strike together.

Archer: Fighters? I do not know of what you speak, sir. I see no such thing.

Healer: They've moved 'round the corner, sirs, following the string of enemies that did give them battle. (aside) Am I the only one of these FREAKING morons that knows how to do their job?

(distantly) Fighters have gained seven levels from using melee weapons

Healer: Ugh, you know what, forget it. We'll just come resume the formation once we've killed everything that hits the fighters, ok?

Me: Oh, shit, kitty. I'm losing, hold on.

Archer: THE SWORD MOVES! TO BATTLE, FRIEND!

Mage: Oh dear! Eat level one pixie dust, fiends!

Healer: There is no god.

The game has been a lot like that except that there is no dialogue, sound effects or even much variety in stats to create an illusion of personality with these characters. Wolves snarl, monsters roar, rock beasts rumble, but my stalwart adventurers carry on in stoic silence. I started narrating it myself as the emptiness of my own life was laid bare in front of me, brought forward by the empty stares and inhuman obedience of my digital party mates.

Anyway. It was pretty good for a second there. Definitely slaked my need to play D & D a little bit, but sadly also aroused thoughts of playing World of Warcraft, in which case, I give someone permission to end my little existence.

P.S. Thanks Gas Powered games for making a tolkien rip off set vaguely in post-rome Britain. Somewhere on the comittee that writes your plots, there is a classics major. Next time, do him (and me a favor) and select a better name than "Empire of Stars".

P.S.S. Oh, on that note, since a clockwork orange was made into a movie, droog can refer only to gangmates in a dystopian future London. I don't care if its a nonsense syllable that fits in with your nonsense syllables. No milk bar, no dice. It's called blocking. Ask a linguist. Deal with it.

Non-Functionality

Ya'll may think that I've disappeared or given up, but I assure that is so not the case.

I've just got a job at Macy's and run into a slew of games that haven't worked. I was recently informed of the magic of "compatibility mode" but it's only been somewhat successful in staving off the effects of time on my gameplaying.

The ranks of the non-functioning include:

System Shock 2 - will run in compatibility mode but usually crashes a couple minutes in. I am disappointed, I've played all of the Thief series and think that Looking Glass Studios is/was a genius of game makers. Usually wildly imaginative and a great provider of seductively-immersive alternate realities. Also, this game was highly recommended to me by other game snobs for its novel-like quantities of text.

Metal Gear Solid 2 - I guess I never will get to complete the mission that began oh so many years ago on the eve of the gamecube release when I stayed up all night playing MGS2 at my friend's birthday sleepover. This game won't even open up, compatibility mode be damned

Battlefield 2 - No CD key, no love.

Prey - Same deal. This is what happens when you give some literally a game disc and not the box that came with it. Alas.

Did I mention already Sim Tower and Tomb Raider? Those also, but I'm looking into Dos Box, a dos simulator that will let me run the games. Maybe even on my new macintosh. That'd be nice.

And I'm installing Dungeon Siege, just for shits n' giggles, on the off chance that this game from 2001 will succeed where those from 2004 failed.

'Ere we go...

Metal Gear Solid 2: Subtance

Metal Gear Solid 2 doesn't work either. Damn. I really wanted to play that one. I've become concerned that we will be unable to access the games of christmas past when we finally are able to recognize their importance. I'm serious. I think these are very important works that would allow a historian an unique perspective into the time of their creation/play. I also thought that, due to the fact that they may be infinitely reproduced digitally, it would allow for an extremely democratic way to look into the past. Not to mention fun. But here I am, bamboozled by the advances of my operating system and unable to connect. Hum.

Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project

Uhhck. God. What a terrible game. I mean really.

Let it be known that I played Duke Nukem while I waited for my car to get repaired and exited the game when it was done, thereby violating the rule I established in the last post. When I returned home and summoned the grit needed to again submit myself to the pit of horrors that is Nuke Nukem, it wouldn't load, claiming that it couldn't find the requisite config file. Sure enough, following the file path yielded the requisite config file in exactly the place that it ought to be but let this stand as testimony to the fact that Duke Nukem is so bad that it can alter reality.

But, thinking of my numerous and vociferous readers, I actually reinstalled the motherfucker, thinking that I ought to do another real review, and, since I had it muted while I played at the car repair shop, maybe that it would be better with the sound.

Boy, was that fucking wrong.

But I get ahead of myself.

As we all know, Duke Nukem is a paragon of cheap video game thrills. He's an stereotypically muscular, machine gun-wielding action hero and he shoots mutants. The premise is in fact so typical that for a moment I entertained the idea that it was satire. How wrong I was.

Duke rescues big-titted women who, as they break free of their bonds, stretch and display their pixelated goodness for all to partake of. They'll usually thank Duke in a vapid or suggestive way and Duke will insult them with one of his "infamous" one-liners. More on that later.

Don't get me wrong, I think its funny to portray women as sex objects. But for Christ's sake, do it well. There was just no energy in any of these shenanigans. It felt as if the 8th grader in charge of making this game actually thought it would be cool to have whip-flicking dominatrixes as enemies.

Duke's one liners. I understood that I was going to dislike almost all of this game, but I had long heard reference to Duke's succinct wit in the video game community. What a disafuckingppointment. "Don't get your panties in a bunch" ?! Really? This is comedy? Upon dispatching a female foe, "what a pussy" ? I'm not sure if I could write anything so juvenile if I tried.

One thing that the one liners were good for (aside from purging) was to immerse me in a total sense of the late nineties. This is really the one redeeming feature of this iteration of Duke, the nineties time capsule. The game is peppered with references to pop culture happenings I had totally forgotten about. "Put it in a lockbox," for example. Is that from some SNL skit lampooning Gee Dub? There was even a lame joke where Duke tapped into a phone conversation between Bill and Monica wherein Bill invited Monica to come look at his cigars. That line is really the game in a microcosm. Nineties beyond belief, having someone do a mediocre Clinton impersonation, but all to deliver a joke that's so bad that's its caught uncomfortably between so-bad-its-good and so-bad-it's-just-fucking-dumbfounding.

It's also kind of an interesting peak at where video games were at in this point in time. The game really offers no exposition for its action, a few paragraphs of text quickly inform the reader that Duke has been asked by the Mayor of New York to kill the mutants who are attacking the city. And then inexplicably, Duke is platform-jumping around ledges and porches of the Manhattan skyline, shooting mutants who have decided to pace in these unlikely locations and fire guns at semi-random intervals. (The mutants are bipedal boars in cop's clothing. Duke's take on the situation: "I hate pigs") None of it makes any sense, and no where did it feel like it occurred to anyone that it ought to. It's a "game-play game". I think the difference is now that "game-play games" are flashy as fuck and at least have a well-told if horribly cliched storyline to follow.

Not that this duke game didn't look pretty flashy for its time. Even I found its 3d-sidescroller angle fresh, though it was maddening to see Duke come up against a "dead end" that could easily be circumvented if he would take two steps toward the camera and walk around the pile of indestructible boxes. I guess we should just thank our lucky stars that his pig-cop enemies were all on the same plane as Duke's machine gun, or the trip through this nineties nightmare would have been even shorter than it was.

Too bad, too bad indeed...

Max Payne 2

I apologize for my recent hiatus. I am now behind in my goal, but not by as much as you think I am! Notice that the title of this post is not Arcanum, Of Mystery Magick and Bladeeblah, but instead the succinct Max Payne 2. Arcanum wouldn't run after I exited it for a time and Tomb Raider won't run at all. Somehow I can run that in DOS, tips anyone? But lesson learned: if a game does run, don't exit the game until you've powered through the entire thing. If anyone finds my corpse amidst a pile of stinking feces and walnut shells, you can blame Arcanum.

But Max Payne 2, Max Payne 2, how little I thought I would care for you and how much I turned out to adore you. I took your noir/action setting and hard-faced noir cop protagonist and let my imagination run wild with the terrible pack of cliches that I believed you to be. But I forgot the magic of genre fiction, (and I can hear my masters-in-english, Gertrude Stein-loving, pinko-commie sister choking on bile as I say this) you take these tired old cliches and make them work, make something beautiful. Perhaps my limited experience with noir tropes makes this interesting to me, but I loved Max's twisted recounting of his own sordid past, his requisite descent into gloom and paranoia, the beautifully cliched lines. What is so riveting about the weathered cop who alternates between growled metaphysical haiku, terse reflection on the passage of time, and masculinist love poetry? Death, the past, fate, the slippery nature of reality, these are the things on Max Payne's mind. Just try and imagine these with that voice the archetypal father figure had before his first cup of coffee in the morning:

“All this time, we got the fable of sleeping beauty wrong. The prince didn’t kiss her to wake her up, no one who’s slept for a hundred years is likely to wake up. It was the other way around. He kissed her to wake himself up from the nightmare that has brought him there.”

“The genius of the hole: No matter how long you spend climbing out, you can still fall back down in an instant. ”

"The past is a gaping hole, your only chance is to turn around and face it. But is like kissing the lips of your dead love, darkness waiting in the hole of her mouth."

"You try to run from it, but the more you run, the deeper, more terrible it grows behind you, its edges yawning at your heels."

"If you think nothing can get to you, you’re lying to yourself. At best you are temporarily dead. A lighting bold can reanimate you without a warning."

But Max's inner psychological life was always interwoven with the action. Typical "thoughtful" games seem as if they hired a guy with a liberal arts degree to write some musings for the voice actors after the game had already been made. Not so with Max-- Max's running monologue drew inspiration from the environment, making metaphors out level design and interactive objects.

Another aspect of Max Payne 2 that set it apart was its many deviations made from conventions of the shooting genre. Typical of shooter is a large and conspicuous cross hair, in a practical, highly visible color, smack in the middle of the screen. If the game-maker leans toward the realistic, he may have it bob as a character runs, but never does it seem to occur to him that maybe a huge cross hair floating over the otherwise highly realistic tableau detracts somewhat from his goal of immersion. Obviously, it would be unacceptable to have no indicator of where you are aiming, it would make the game rather frustratingly difficult to play, "cheap", as the saying goes. But in Max Payne 2 is a rather beautiful compromise between gameplay and screenplay. I never even noticed the lack of crosshairs to be honest, so taken was I with the cinematic panoramas on my screen, In my typically humble style, I just assumed I was shooting well without it. But on closer examination, in the middle of the screen, there was a single white mark, a whole pixel in size that acted as my crosshairs. Ingenious.

The game is speckled with sequences, typically in Max's surreal dreams, where he navigates an environment and he has no access to weapons. With your inventory gone, and the lack of crosshairs, the sense of game is further stripped away, leaving you with a total sense of immersion. Max typically will navigate an environment his dreamscape until he comes into contact with another character that will merely expose narrative, a sort of interactive theater. Sometimes you are required to answer phones or activate other objects in the environment, but there is a conspicuous absence of the titular shooting in this shooting genre game.

But that's not the height of genius. The height is, after having become accustomed to these weaponless, threat-less scenarios, you go to a funhouse to seek out your hard-boiled love interest. There, you have access to all the weapons you did at the end of the last level, as normal. Using the knowledge acquired from years of game playing, you thereby infer that you will have to fight somebody or something in the funhouse level, even though there is no obvious room for such a conflict in the plot being that the funhouse is the secret home of an ally--no conflict should possibly occur here. But you have your guns, so you know that must have something against which to defend yourself coming up, and so you tense up and prepare for the game maker to try and spring something on you even though the game maker has already tipped his hand by giving you access to your weapons.

And so I went, through the level, awaiting the inevitable ambush... and it never came. I proceded to the ending cutscene of the level, letting go of the tension that had been building in my stomach that I did not even realize. And I thought for that moment that I knew what it was like to be wary, paranoid Max Payne.

And so I doff my cap, because in that moment, the game maker had reached from beyond the computer screen and played with me, instead of me with his creation.

So I recommend the game, obviously, and could write a lot more about it, but someday when I'm teaching classes on video games, I'll hopefully get to say everything about this game that I want to.

Duke Nukem, coming up!

Max Payne

Max Payne Loaded the start screen, but would not play. So I'm working on Arcanum. I have to say, at this point, I had more fun playing Max Payne.

Blue Stinger

I swear to you that I'm not fabricating this, and this time I even tried to pick a game that looked like it would work, but Blue Stinger (which is apparently a Dreamcast game) would not work in my dreamcast.

So, my streak, by my reckoning, goes unbroken.

Tomorrow, Max Payne!

Clive Barker's The Undying

That's it! I've had it! No more Undying. I simply can not take any more. It's not that I'm sick of the game or that the game is particularly awful, I'm calling this one for mental health reasons. I just saw some lights outside that I thought were LED flashlights or headlamps. Now, normally, I would dismiss such illogical fears, but since I've been playing a game where I'm constantly on edge for the sound of DEMONS FROM FUCKING HELL DROPPING FROM THE CEILING AND LEAPING TEN METERS TO KILL AND DECAPITATE ME, it didn't seem so unreasonable. So, instead of dismissing those fears and going on with my life, I grabbed my billy club from where it lay beside me and moved somewhere else in the house so the ROBOT ASSASSIN FROM THE FUTURE WOULDN'T PUT A SPEAR GUN THROUGH MY HEART AND BAY WINDOW.

Yes, I really have been keeping a billy club handy, it was recently presented to me by my grandfather, as it was made by his father-in-law. It is a beautiful, dark wood with a brilliant, shining varnish and is perfectly WEIGHTED TO DROP THE MOTHERFUCKING DEMON CREEPING AROUND MY COMPOST HEAP.

Yes, the game is a somewhat scary and the little references to religion and divinity to augment the potency of the terror, but let's not give too much credit to Clive Barker. I am also just an enormous pussy. I'm not talking Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead sort of thing. I mean, Half-life 2 scared me. Fuck, if Katamari Damacy had a zombie level, that would have scared the piss out of me too.

So, no, let's not give it all to Clive, I mean, I'm living in a big house by myself with a high-strung cat who that takes high speed circuits around the living room, pausing only to freeze inexplicably, tighten every muscle in his little body and stare out the window into the darkness. Is he just being a cat? Or is he alert to the FUCKING BODYSNATCHER THAT'S SECONDS FROM SMASHING THROUGH MY WINDOW AND UNLEASHING UNFORGIVING HELL ON ME!?

Or a burglar. I'm concerned its a burglar.

So Clive (whoever the fuck that guy is) had some help from context.

I'd like to give a succinct description of the plot but the opening cut-scene is so densely packed full of exposition that any attempt to wrap it up any tighter would create a super-dense mass that could puncture space time. In the span of 3-5 minutes, we learn that the protagonist is an irish veteran of "The Great War" (that's what they called WWI back before WWII, kids) who is part of a special unit that improves morale by debunking superstition in the rank and file. But it doesn't end there! His unit takes on a crew of saber-wielding Eastern European/Middle Eastern pirate/fiends. He defeats their leader and takes from him a glowing green stone as a meaningless "momento" (good thing that he did). He's wounded in the fight, wakes up in a hospital and is summoned to help his friend deal with a troublesome estate in Ireland. And that's where the game begins.

You tell me, Clive, did you plan to make some kind of prequel or did your development cycle run out before you were able to complete those levels? Not a terribly elegant solution, Clive.

Anyway, you meet your friend, he's dying, family curse, blahblahblah, his siblings have disappeared and the estate is being assaulted by monsters. You investigate.

And this motherfucker snoops around for awhile with nothing but a fucking six-shooter looking for trouble. Frankly, in this temporary moment of fright that I'm in here, I can't help but ponder the enormous differences between me the protagonist. He hears a bloodcurdling scream and goes roaring about to go find out what happened. Me? I saw the phantasm-hangman swinging on a light post at the entrance to the manor; out is the last place I'm going. Especially not in this manor full of the classic inexplicably unopening doors built along the blueprints drawn by an autistic toddler. And of course there is no fucking map, or any other method of finding direction.

And on top of that, as this Irish braveheart rolls around the manor, he interrogates the few employees of the manor that are unfortunate enough to be still walking aimlessly about the house. Usually, they will rattle off a cardinal direction to indicate where I should look for the next key, scrap of parchment, etc. Of course, this is totally useless because I don't have a fucking compass. Then they leave me, and, typically, are devoured by the horned and stooping monsters that prowl the mansion.

Now the first time I didn't really hold our hero responsible, but afterward, when he continued to waltz about the manor, talking to people and giving them NO WARNING OF THE DEATH THAT STALKED THESE GILDED HALLS, I was taken a little aback. I guess it says something about my gameplaying lately that I expect protagonists to behave like conscionable humans. But I believe that as he stands next to a bleeding corpse on the floor, talking to its co-worker, he cold offer a cavalier "look out for yourself" or something. No, I guess my protagonist is single-minded, Irish brogue-faking debunker and destroyer of the supernatural with no compassion for the drones that populate the manor's interior.

Anyway, you do eventually leave the mansion and walk through catacombs and ethereal nether-realms, and you slip into the past and the future and all that jazz though the enemies don't vary much from the horned grasshopper demonbeasts. You've got your cloaked and tentacled facesuckers, saberwielding swarthy types, shred wearing vixens etc etc (who, for all their supernatural power prefer thrown rocks for their method of damage delivery).

Maybe one day I'll be able to see how this games ends, but I've been carrying this intense fear of intense video games for a long time now. It's been real, Clive, but its on to the next thing.