There has never been any private detective as cool as Sam Spade, and I mean that most sincerely. Dashiell Hammett based him on his own experiences as a Pinkerton detective, but unlike his other fictional detective, the nameless Continental Op, Spade isn’t just doing his job, he is the job. Hammett stated once that Spade was the detective that every detective wishes that he could be and occasionally approaches, on their best day. If you’re asymptotically approaching awesome then you’re just catching up to where Spade already is. He’s that kind of guy.
It’s also worth pointing out that you might not actually want to be him, since Spade is also really low-down and mean. In fact he is a colossal prick and not in that “jerk with a heart of gold” way. When his partner gets killed, his first action the next business day is to call the sign painter to get the guy’s name off his door – he reveals that he thought the guy was a dumb son of a bitch and was just waiting for their annual partnership agreement to expire so he could kick him out anyway. In addition, he was sleeping with his partner’s wife, maybe just to spite him, since Spade doesn’t seem to think very highly of her either.
The partner got killed helping out a new client, who in fine pulp detective tradition is a beautiful lady who walked through the door with a story of trouble. Which, of course, Spade and his partner didn’t believe, but they did believe in her cash, so they were willing to go with it. The name she originally gives is a fake; later she claims to be one Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but I don’t know if we’re supposed to believe that either. Spade doesn’t trust her and treats her pretty badly throughout, but she did get his partner killed. That doesn’t stop him from sleeping with her too, of course. But then whatever affection he might have for her also doesn’t stop him from strip searching her when he thinks she might have stolen some money from him and, towards the end, throwing her to the cops to face a capital murder charge. When she pleads for him not to, he seems genuinely surprised that she believes his personal feelings are going to have any bearing on his actions.
Along with O’Shaughnessy come a succession of oddballs and goons, including Floyd Thursby (killed offstage), the morbidly obese Gutman with his henchman Wilmer, and the unfortunate Joel Cairo, a man of undefinable Mediterranean ancestry who the narrative takes every opportunity to insult and degrade for his homosexuality. I guess in the movie version they couldn’t just explicitly come out and call him a “fairy” like the book did because of the Hays code, so they just cast professional weirdo (and real life all-around gentleman) Peter Lorre and gave him a perfumed handkerchief and let it go at that. Subtlety was definitely better in this instance. I mean, Cairo is a bad dude because of all the legitimately bad stuff he does, like murder and arson, his sexual preferences aren’t really relevant to that. It's rough reading for a modern audience, really.
Anyhow. This bunch of misfits is after the Maltese Falcon, which is a priceless, jewel-encrusted artifact. It could have just as easily been a suitcase full of money or a delicious cake recipe; all that really matters is that Gutman and the rest of these jerks want it. Gutman thinks that Spade knows where it can be found, since O’Shaughnessy and Thursby had stolen from him what he’d previously stolen from some Russian general who allegedly didn’t know what he had. But actually this unseen Russian dude is smarter than the whole gang of thieves from the very beginning. As Spade says, “Jesus God, have you people never stolen anything before?” And this is when he’s still trying to ingratiate himself with them. None of this motley crew seem to know what they are doing with regards to crime, only Gutman seems to have a reasonable fence for this treasure anyway, and their ineptitude would be funny, if it weren’t for all the murders. As it is, it’s still pretty funny.
Spade doesn’t personally kill anyone in this book, and doesn’t even carry a gun, for that matter. He does beat up a couple of people and take their guns away, though in one case it’s Cairo and probably wasn’t all that tough. In fact, that’s one of the best scenes – Cairo comes in, pulls a gun on Spade, and demands to search his office. Commence beating and gun-grabbing. After Cairo regains consciousness, they have a brief discussion and Spade gives him his gun back, which is a bad idea since Cairo then steps back a little farther, and searches the office at gunpoint for real.
The whole book is like that. These crazy people are going around doing nonsensical things, and Spade is always a little bit ahead of them. Towards the conclusion he gives a couple of hints that he might not actually be as bad as he’s making out, but I don’t know if it’s true or even if he believes that it’s true. For the ultimate detective, at the end it’s all about style.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Friday, August 16, 2013
Conqueror Trilogy by Conn Iggulden
There’s a scene toward the end of the third novel in this series that encapsulates the stakes of this work very nicely – a city hasn’t paid its tribute to Genghis Khan, and he’s ordered an example to be made. Consequently, when the Mongol army breaks the walls, they spend all day rounding up the 160,000 citizens that didn’t die during the siege and then spend most of the next day executing them all before taking everything valuable out of the city and razing it.
This is a bad day for the Mongols since it takes such a long time and all that hacking dulls up their swords.
What to say about a man who would order such a thing to be done? And this wasn’t his first turn at the massacre rodeo, either. The various Mongol conquests caused at least 30 million deaths and as many as 70 million deaths – an astoundingly modern-sounding total considering it’s the thirteenth century and all, and none of our modern efficiencies existed yet, so someone had to personally go out and stab these folks (except of course in the cases of mass starvation or disease in besieged cities). Admittedly some of this continued after Genghis himself died, but we’re still talking about a man who presided over tens of millions of killings of his fellow humans.
Iggulden’s trilogy, which is strong historical fiction, shows Genghis as more than an ordinary man. At the same time, it also shows him making mistakes, failing to see the big picture, and having the sort of ordinary family troubles that beset us all.
The first book in the series follows the future Genghis (called Temujin at that point) as he is a young man in a small clan in a tiny part of Mongolia. He’s a tough kid and he leads a hard life, and his ambition is to one day be the khan of this band like his father is. Since he’s the second son, this may prove difficult. But then his father gets murdered by his enemies, neither he nor his older brother are old enough to effectively assert control, and the new khan exiles their whole family to solidify his own power. Genghis ends up killing the older brother and growing to adulthood in an extremely hardscrabble and desperate way with his mother, sister, and three remaining younger brothers. According to history, that all really did happen. And then there was a spark, or there must have been a spark.
Genghis decides that all the tribes need to stop fighting among each other, but in order to do that realizes that they need an overall leader. Who better than him? And so he begins recruiting a band of men from other un-tribed and exiled men like himself, making a name for himself by raiding the enemies of the Mongols, learning strategy. Eventually he’s got enough men to take control of one clan, then his father’s, then a bigger one. The book ends with Genghis declaring his intention to become Khan of all the tribes.
The second book begins as this ambition is realized. Genghis has been absorbing more and more tribes into his army. Those remaining tribes that don’t want to give their allegiance to him realized that they couldn’t stand on their own, and made their own alliance against him. But it’s too late, the last battle occurred before the book even really starts and the focus is really on what Genghis wants to do next – attack the Chinese kingdoms to the south that he feels have been manipulating and marginalizing the Mongol people for centuries.
In the third novel, Genghis ignores China for a while since the Khwarazmian Empire has made a personal insult to him and he decides that this cannot be tolerated. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of the Khwarazmian Empire before, that’s because of what the Mongols end up doing to them here. This, like many of the other major events in these novels, is not fictional.
There’s a lot of brutality in these novels, like you might expect. People get shot with arrows, crushed by siege weapons, starve to death, covered in molten silver, and in one case just get chased until they drop dead of pneumonia. Genghis himself kills probably hundreds of people, with typical weapons frequently, but also with the sleeves of his armor, and in one memorable instance picking a guy up and breaking his spine over his knee. (This individual has always been described as scrawny, this isn’t an 80s action movie move exactly.) At the same time, Iggulden appears to have scaled back some of the atrocities just a little bit – Genghis is portrayed as having two wives, one of whom is a Chinese princess. In reality, Genghis had at least six Mongolian wives, numerous foreign ones, and spent so much time with other women that 5% of the current population of the Earth is his direct descendant. He is tactfully suggested to be raping various captive women on a couple of occasions, but in truth I’m just as happy to not read pages and pages of sexual assault, and probably Iggulden just didn’t want to put that in there.
The central paradox in this series is the fundamental problem of child rearing. People under harsh privation are often tough and awesome as a result, and they want their children to also be tough and awesome, usually in the same ways that they themselves are tough and awesome. At the same time, privation sucks. Intentionally raising your offspring under privation when you don’t have to is a dick move; removing the privation ensures that your kids will not necessarily share your outlook or your priorities. What is a great warlord to do? Adding to this problem for Genghis is that he’s not sure that Jochi, his oldest son, is actually his own son – his wife Borte had been kidnapped by Tartars around the time of Jochi’s conception and, well, you never knew for sure back then. He treats Jochi really coldly as a result and is oblivious to the fact that this harsh treatment has made Jochi into the ideal successor in most ways.
Genghis also suffers from a certain lack of vision. He’s certainly not stupid, he’s a master of warfare and leading his men, and he quickly realizes the importance of certain practical skills, like siege engineering. And his men aren’t out of control barbarians, either, their environment has made them into disciplined warriors. At first, Genghis’ plan is simply to kill everyone who’s not Mongolian, but then his advisors persuaded him that living Chinese can pay tribute, and he also realized the utility of sparing people that quickly surrender. But in truth he doesn’t need the tribute, and by the end his people are carrying around literally tons of silver and gold that they don’t have any particular use for. Genghis doesn’t need money, since he just takes whatever he wants, and he doesn’t really want anything more than to have big feasts, go hunting, ride fine horses, sleep with women, and fight. Silk is useful since he can use it as armor, iron’s good for weapons, but he doesn’t really understand what people want with gold.
Since he doesn’t care about or have any use for cities, he’s not a very good administrator. So it’s sort of a shame that he conquers so many of them. His advisors and sons recognize that the Mongols are going to need to make some philosophical adjustments if they’re actually going to rule an empire and not have to go around re-conquering every city every few years, but getting Genghis to agree with that is more difficult. He didn’t get where he was by listening to people. And in that sense this book is a tragedy, since you can see the seeds of the Mongolian Empire’s dissolution in the decisions that Genghis makes. He makes it hard for his successors to have orderly transitions of power and he isn’t really that interested in making their jobs easier.
It’s also a tragedy, of course, that so many other people had to die for Genghis Khan to achieve whatever it was that he was trying to get out of life. It’s a strength of the series that Iggulden manages to make you feel a little bad for Genghis, and showing some of the Mongols’ genuinely amazing deeds, without dehumanizing their opponents.
This is a bad day for the Mongols since it takes such a long time and all that hacking dulls up their swords.
What to say about a man who would order such a thing to be done? And this wasn’t his first turn at the massacre rodeo, either. The various Mongol conquests caused at least 30 million deaths and as many as 70 million deaths – an astoundingly modern-sounding total considering it’s the thirteenth century and all, and none of our modern efficiencies existed yet, so someone had to personally go out and stab these folks (except of course in the cases of mass starvation or disease in besieged cities). Admittedly some of this continued after Genghis himself died, but we’re still talking about a man who presided over tens of millions of killings of his fellow humans.
Iggulden’s trilogy, which is strong historical fiction, shows Genghis as more than an ordinary man. At the same time, it also shows him making mistakes, failing to see the big picture, and having the sort of ordinary family troubles that beset us all.
The first book in the series follows the future Genghis (called Temujin at that point) as he is a young man in a small clan in a tiny part of Mongolia. He’s a tough kid and he leads a hard life, and his ambition is to one day be the khan of this band like his father is. Since he’s the second son, this may prove difficult. But then his father gets murdered by his enemies, neither he nor his older brother are old enough to effectively assert control, and the new khan exiles their whole family to solidify his own power. Genghis ends up killing the older brother and growing to adulthood in an extremely hardscrabble and desperate way with his mother, sister, and three remaining younger brothers. According to history, that all really did happen. And then there was a spark, or there must have been a spark.
Genghis decides that all the tribes need to stop fighting among each other, but in order to do that realizes that they need an overall leader. Who better than him? And so he begins recruiting a band of men from other un-tribed and exiled men like himself, making a name for himself by raiding the enemies of the Mongols, learning strategy. Eventually he’s got enough men to take control of one clan, then his father’s, then a bigger one. The book ends with Genghis declaring his intention to become Khan of all the tribes.
The second book begins as this ambition is realized. Genghis has been absorbing more and more tribes into his army. Those remaining tribes that don’t want to give their allegiance to him realized that they couldn’t stand on their own, and made their own alliance against him. But it’s too late, the last battle occurred before the book even really starts and the focus is really on what Genghis wants to do next – attack the Chinese kingdoms to the south that he feels have been manipulating and marginalizing the Mongol people for centuries.
In the third novel, Genghis ignores China for a while since the Khwarazmian Empire has made a personal insult to him and he decides that this cannot be tolerated. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of the Khwarazmian Empire before, that’s because of what the Mongols end up doing to them here. This, like many of the other major events in these novels, is not fictional.
There’s a lot of brutality in these novels, like you might expect. People get shot with arrows, crushed by siege weapons, starve to death, covered in molten silver, and in one case just get chased until they drop dead of pneumonia. Genghis himself kills probably hundreds of people, with typical weapons frequently, but also with the sleeves of his armor, and in one memorable instance picking a guy up and breaking his spine over his knee. (This individual has always been described as scrawny, this isn’t an 80s action movie move exactly.) At the same time, Iggulden appears to have scaled back some of the atrocities just a little bit – Genghis is portrayed as having two wives, one of whom is a Chinese princess. In reality, Genghis had at least six Mongolian wives, numerous foreign ones, and spent so much time with other women that 5% of the current population of the Earth is his direct descendant. He is tactfully suggested to be raping various captive women on a couple of occasions, but in truth I’m just as happy to not read pages and pages of sexual assault, and probably Iggulden just didn’t want to put that in there.
The central paradox in this series is the fundamental problem of child rearing. People under harsh privation are often tough and awesome as a result, and they want their children to also be tough and awesome, usually in the same ways that they themselves are tough and awesome. At the same time, privation sucks. Intentionally raising your offspring under privation when you don’t have to is a dick move; removing the privation ensures that your kids will not necessarily share your outlook or your priorities. What is a great warlord to do? Adding to this problem for Genghis is that he’s not sure that Jochi, his oldest son, is actually his own son – his wife Borte had been kidnapped by Tartars around the time of Jochi’s conception and, well, you never knew for sure back then. He treats Jochi really coldly as a result and is oblivious to the fact that this harsh treatment has made Jochi into the ideal successor in most ways.
Genghis also suffers from a certain lack of vision. He’s certainly not stupid, he’s a master of warfare and leading his men, and he quickly realizes the importance of certain practical skills, like siege engineering. And his men aren’t out of control barbarians, either, their environment has made them into disciplined warriors. At first, Genghis’ plan is simply to kill everyone who’s not Mongolian, but then his advisors persuaded him that living Chinese can pay tribute, and he also realized the utility of sparing people that quickly surrender. But in truth he doesn’t need the tribute, and by the end his people are carrying around literally tons of silver and gold that they don’t have any particular use for. Genghis doesn’t need money, since he just takes whatever he wants, and he doesn’t really want anything more than to have big feasts, go hunting, ride fine horses, sleep with women, and fight. Silk is useful since he can use it as armor, iron’s good for weapons, but he doesn’t really understand what people want with gold.
Since he doesn’t care about or have any use for cities, he’s not a very good administrator. So it’s sort of a shame that he conquers so many of them. His advisors and sons recognize that the Mongols are going to need to make some philosophical adjustments if they’re actually going to rule an empire and not have to go around re-conquering every city every few years, but getting Genghis to agree with that is more difficult. He didn’t get where he was by listening to people. And in that sense this book is a tragedy, since you can see the seeds of the Mongolian Empire’s dissolution in the decisions that Genghis makes. He makes it hard for his successors to have orderly transitions of power and he isn’t really that interested in making their jobs easier.
It’s also a tragedy, of course, that so many other people had to die for Genghis Khan to achieve whatever it was that he was trying to get out of life. It’s a strength of the series that Iggulden manages to make you feel a little bad for Genghis, and showing some of the Mongols’ genuinely amazing deeds, without dehumanizing their opponents.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Papers Please by Lucas Pope
There has been a lot of ink shed (of both the real and virtual varieties) about how much “moral choice” systems in video games suck. Often you’re given the opportunity to be either the paragon of virtue or a monument to vice, without much in between, and usually the “evil” choice involves going around murdering everyone you meet, even when there’s no particular reason for it or direct benefit to you from doing so. There’s really a paucity of nuanced evil in the world of video game design. And that’s why all those AAA game developers need to sit down and take a page from this independent developer who’s managed to put together the best moral simulator that I’ve ever seen. Seriously, if you can get through this and not have an emotional reaction then you need to turn in your Homo sapiens card, no joke.
First, the mechanics. The game takes place in the early 1980s in a fictional shithole Eastern European Communist dictatorship. You have won a labor lottery and been assigned to work as a border control agent. When you open up your shop, a stream of pathetic sad sacks will file into your checkpoint and present you with various documents so they can enter the country. Personally, you’ve got some family members dependent on your salary for food, rent, and heat. You need $55 per day to cover your basic expenses, and you get paid $5 for everyone who gets processed through the checkpoint, so you need to see 11 people per day in order to not draw down your savings. If you run out of money, your family members will get sick, raising your expenses as you need to get medicine for them. If you can't come up with the cash, they'll die. If you go seriously into the red you may be imprisoned for debt yourself.
The interface is claustrophobic and well-designed to never give you quite enough room to spread out. You have sufficient but not ample time, and although the documents start out simple enough, your bosses at the start of every day tend to throw in various requirements and by the end of the game there will be twenty or twenty five different failure points for documents. If you let in someone with a discrepancy in their paperwork, you get cited. If you turn away someone without a discrepancy, you get cited. More than two citations in one day and you start getting substantial fines, meaning you can’t beat the clock by just letting everyone in, or turning everyone away. Your superiors are apparently omniscient about this since if you make a mistake, you will be cited. And you won’t get paid for your last “client” if you go past 6 p.m.
The gameplay itself is pretty simple; the would-be traveler presents you a passport and supporting documents, which you check for internal consistency and accuracy. Do they look like their passport picture? Appropriate identifying information? Does the information on their passport match their visa? Are any of the stamps or seals forged? Have any documents expired? Did they get their polio vaccination within three years? Do they happen to be on a most wanted list somewhere? Did they get the right kind of permit? Okay, proceed, citizen.
All of that said, it doesn’t necessarily sound all that fun. In fact, if you were me, you might say that sounds a lot like that summer job I had in the business office of a tile factory where I had to keep cross-checking dates and SKUs on a bunch of triplicate forms in an ancient computer system. And maybe you’ve had a job like that too. But the presentation is amusing enough that you really get to make a puzzle out of it – it’s satisfying to spot the minor error and hit that red stamp. And then when you do approve someone you tense up for a minute while you wait to see if you made a mistake.
Now if that was it, I wouldn’t have made that statement about “moral choices”. The fact is that this is one of the most interesting game ideas that I’ve ever seen. You are a cog and a peon, and that’s about all you’ll ever amount to, regardless of what choices you make. And right away you start getting to make them.
In addition to the randomly generated wretches in line, you’ve got a fair number of scripted encounters. Some of these are desperate people who need asylum, or want to visit their loved ones, or need surgery, or so forth. These people will inevitably have paperwork deficiencies. Do you want to let them in anyway, despite the fact that you’ll get a citation for that and it may take food out of the mouths of your family? Or do you deny them, in deference to the arbitrary rules of your superiors, who are a bunch of dicks and treat you like a dog? It’s up to you, and while most of these choices don’t have long lasting repercussions, some of them do, and they aren’t immediately obvious.
You also have the opportunity to take bribes to let undesirable sorts such as drug dealers and sex traffickers into the country. You can make your own rules about what you will and won’t tolerate; you sometimes even have the option to take the bribe and then deny the people anyway. At one point along the game you gain the ability to detain suspicious people; this is not necessarily better than just denying them, since it takes longer and interrupts your work flow, but one of the guards offers to split his detainee processing fee with you, which makes it profitable to detain everybody you can, even when they are probably innocent of anything more serious than not catching a clerical error. Is it worth sending people to the mercies of the secret police for minor offenses to pad your own wallet? Up to you.
And this secret society of revolutionaries – do you help smuggle their members through the checkpoint? Do you accept their huge bribes? Can they help you if you are caught, and are they in fact any better than the current regime? Will you help out your friend the border guard and allow his girlfriend through the checkpoint? Will you hang the artwork made by your son on the wall, although it’s against regulations? Are you prepared to refuse your bosses’ girlfriend admission although she has neglected to get anything close to the proper documentation?
Up to you.
This is a rare game where you’re not going to really “win” anything and all of the endings are, fittingly, ambiguous at best. In one path you keep your head down and stick to legitimate graft, and are rewarded with the opportunity to enter an endless game mode, where you can keep analyzing paperwork forever or until you screw up enough. In other words, a pie eating contest with a prize of more pie. Way to go, comrade, I’m sure selling out all your ideals was worth it. Of course if you don’t sell out your ideals it may end up going much worse for you personally, and who even knows about the general population.
In short, this game has managed to encapsulate the typicality of bureaucratic evil. Instead of grand acts of malice for little discernible reason you have the opportunity to engage in petty acts of tyranny for totally understandable, if ultimately futile, reasons, such as if you decide to go ahead and take the citation to reject the perfectly valid visas of people who lip off to you.
If there’s anything negative to say about it, it’s mostly that it’s made by a single developer in a couple of months, so it’s pretty short and I’m not sure that it has all that much replay value. Still, if there were elements like this in bigger titles it would increase the sophistication of video game plots by a huge degree. And you will actually get annoyed at people who hold up the line by forgetting to give you the paperwork, and how you have to keep telling people to check the back of their ticket for the passport phone confiscation hotline. Seriously, don’t these people read the bulletins? I’m trying to do my job here.
First, the mechanics. The game takes place in the early 1980s in a fictional shithole Eastern European Communist dictatorship. You have won a labor lottery and been assigned to work as a border control agent. When you open up your shop, a stream of pathetic sad sacks will file into your checkpoint and present you with various documents so they can enter the country. Personally, you’ve got some family members dependent on your salary for food, rent, and heat. You need $55 per day to cover your basic expenses, and you get paid $5 for everyone who gets processed through the checkpoint, so you need to see 11 people per day in order to not draw down your savings. If you run out of money, your family members will get sick, raising your expenses as you need to get medicine for them. If you can't come up with the cash, they'll die. If you go seriously into the red you may be imprisoned for debt yourself.
The interface is claustrophobic and well-designed to never give you quite enough room to spread out. You have sufficient but not ample time, and although the documents start out simple enough, your bosses at the start of every day tend to throw in various requirements and by the end of the game there will be twenty or twenty five different failure points for documents. If you let in someone with a discrepancy in their paperwork, you get cited. If you turn away someone without a discrepancy, you get cited. More than two citations in one day and you start getting substantial fines, meaning you can’t beat the clock by just letting everyone in, or turning everyone away. Your superiors are apparently omniscient about this since if you make a mistake, you will be cited. And you won’t get paid for your last “client” if you go past 6 p.m.
The gameplay itself is pretty simple; the would-be traveler presents you a passport and supporting documents, which you check for internal consistency and accuracy. Do they look like their passport picture? Appropriate identifying information? Does the information on their passport match their visa? Are any of the stamps or seals forged? Have any documents expired? Did they get their polio vaccination within three years? Do they happen to be on a most wanted list somewhere? Did they get the right kind of permit? Okay, proceed, citizen.
All of that said, it doesn’t necessarily sound all that fun. In fact, if you were me, you might say that sounds a lot like that summer job I had in the business office of a tile factory where I had to keep cross-checking dates and SKUs on a bunch of triplicate forms in an ancient computer system. And maybe you’ve had a job like that too. But the presentation is amusing enough that you really get to make a puzzle out of it – it’s satisfying to spot the minor error and hit that red stamp. And then when you do approve someone you tense up for a minute while you wait to see if you made a mistake.
Now if that was it, I wouldn’t have made that statement about “moral choices”. The fact is that this is one of the most interesting game ideas that I’ve ever seen. You are a cog and a peon, and that’s about all you’ll ever amount to, regardless of what choices you make. And right away you start getting to make them.
In addition to the randomly generated wretches in line, you’ve got a fair number of scripted encounters. Some of these are desperate people who need asylum, or want to visit their loved ones, or need surgery, or so forth. These people will inevitably have paperwork deficiencies. Do you want to let them in anyway, despite the fact that you’ll get a citation for that and it may take food out of the mouths of your family? Or do you deny them, in deference to the arbitrary rules of your superiors, who are a bunch of dicks and treat you like a dog? It’s up to you, and while most of these choices don’t have long lasting repercussions, some of them do, and they aren’t immediately obvious.
You also have the opportunity to take bribes to let undesirable sorts such as drug dealers and sex traffickers into the country. You can make your own rules about what you will and won’t tolerate; you sometimes even have the option to take the bribe and then deny the people anyway. At one point along the game you gain the ability to detain suspicious people; this is not necessarily better than just denying them, since it takes longer and interrupts your work flow, but one of the guards offers to split his detainee processing fee with you, which makes it profitable to detain everybody you can, even when they are probably innocent of anything more serious than not catching a clerical error. Is it worth sending people to the mercies of the secret police for minor offenses to pad your own wallet? Up to you.
And this secret society of revolutionaries – do you help smuggle their members through the checkpoint? Do you accept their huge bribes? Can they help you if you are caught, and are they in fact any better than the current regime? Will you help out your friend the border guard and allow his girlfriend through the checkpoint? Will you hang the artwork made by your son on the wall, although it’s against regulations? Are you prepared to refuse your bosses’ girlfriend admission although she has neglected to get anything close to the proper documentation?
Up to you.
This is a rare game where you’re not going to really “win” anything and all of the endings are, fittingly, ambiguous at best. In one path you keep your head down and stick to legitimate graft, and are rewarded with the opportunity to enter an endless game mode, where you can keep analyzing paperwork forever or until you screw up enough. In other words, a pie eating contest with a prize of more pie. Way to go, comrade, I’m sure selling out all your ideals was worth it. Of course if you don’t sell out your ideals it may end up going much worse for you personally, and who even knows about the general population.
In short, this game has managed to encapsulate the typicality of bureaucratic evil. Instead of grand acts of malice for little discernible reason you have the opportunity to engage in petty acts of tyranny for totally understandable, if ultimately futile, reasons, such as if you decide to go ahead and take the citation to reject the perfectly valid visas of people who lip off to you.
If there’s anything negative to say about it, it’s mostly that it’s made by a single developer in a couple of months, so it’s pretty short and I’m not sure that it has all that much replay value. Still, if there were elements like this in bigger titles it would increase the sophistication of video game plots by a huge degree. And you will actually get annoyed at people who hold up the line by forgetting to give you the paperwork, and how you have to keep telling people to check the back of their ticket for the passport phone confiscation hotline. Seriously, don’t these people read the bulletins? I’m trying to do my job here.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson
Most of the science fiction that I grew up reading was from the 50s-80s, and quite a bit of it featured hyperdrives, interstellar empires, and the uniqueness of humanity. I guess it said something about the cultural mood of the time; most of it was written by men (and I do mean men) who figured they’d beaten the Axis and conquered the atom and that we’d get to the laws of space and time in due course. Now that said, we live here in the year 2013 in an environment which is in many respects vastly more technologically advanced than the worlds proposed by some of these authors, but we remain distressingly Earthbound with nary a space empire in sight. Perhaps as a response to this, perhaps for other reasons, there’s been a surge of stories about what happens when we just can’t get off this rock at all.
There are a couple of approaches to this. Some of the SF examining this question simply involves humanity going extinct over time, but some other works deal with technological fixes. Vortex is something along those lines.
Vortex is actually the third book in a trilogy, the first two being Spin and Axis (I refer to them as the “Angular Momentum Trilogy” but they may have a more official name, I don’t know.) Spin was a Hugo Award winning novel and one I enjoyed quite a bit – the setup for that one was that one day, all of a sudden, the entire Earth gets enveloped in a membrane that separates the planet from local space-time, so that time is passing much, much faster outside the membrane than inside it. It turns out that there are vast networks of computing machines in the depths of interstellar space and they do this to worlds with intelligent biological life.
As to what they do, it’s complicated. The life cycle of tool-using intelligences is short compared to the Hypotheticals (as they are called by some of the humans, although they are very real) and in order to maximize the time they have available, the Hypotheticals use singularities to create warp gates and allow the biologicals to colonize other planets, something that is otherwise infeasible. The Hypotheticals connect Earth to another planet (dubbed “Equatoria”) which is a great place to live. There’s another gate on Equatoria that’ll take you to yet a third planet that people can live on, although it’s not quite so nice. And another gate on that world as well. It takes the Hypotheticals a couple of billion years to set all that stuff up though, which is why they use the time-disrupting membrane to allow them to finish this project. And, I suppose, they’re doing this sort of thing all the time.
All of this is revealed by the end of Spin. You may have noticed that missing from the above paragraph is the question of why the Hypotheticals go to so much trouble to help out alien intelligences that they barely know. Well, first of all, it’s not clear so much that it’s a “favor” since you don’t exactly get to opt in to this project, it’s something that gets done whether you want it or not. And it’s also not entirely clear that it’s for anyone’s benefit at all. There’s a guy in Spin who finds out somewhat more than he wants to about the Hypotheticals, and a whole sort-of-cult in Axis that ends up not necessarily liking the answers they get either.
There are two parallel stories in Vortex, one of which follows Turk Findley, a major player in Axis who has been removed from the galaxy by the hypotheticals for the past 10,000 years. The other story is more of a frame story and involves the planet Earth somewhat before the events of Axis, but after Spin. And although it does tie the story together, I liked Findley’s bit much more, and will be discussing it more.
Findley finds himself disoriented and recovered by a group of people who believe that he’s been touched by the Hypotheticals and will be the key to what I guess I’d describe as apotheosis. They also snag Isaac, a young boy who was packed to the gills with Hypothetical technology back in Axis and who’s also been gone. So they head to Earth back through the gate despite the fact that no one’s been there in a while and things weren’t going so well when they were, and find that it’s been rendered inhospitable to human life. Or, for that matter, multicellular life of any kind. Effects of climate change due to burning all the fossil fuel reserves of both Earth and Equatoria; it seems that caused eutrophication on a massive scale, poisoning the seas and filling the atmosphere with hydrogen sulfide gas. Pretty rough.
Now, this isn’t necessarily the end of humanity since there are still plenty of people left on the various other planets, but the question does arise as to why exactly the Hypotheticals would go to so much trouble to ensure that humanity has the opportunity to expand to other planets but do not take any action whatsoever to either prevent humanity from wrecking its planets, by either technological or more brute-force means. The people that Findley has fallen in with originally believed that the whole point of the Hypothetical exercise was to eventually uplift humanity to god-like status, and this particular problem of evil sort of throws a wrench in that interpretation.
I would remind the reader that one possible solution to the problem of evil is that god is not omni-benevolent, though.
At the same time, the Hypotheticals aren’t mustache-twirling super villains, either. They’re really above most of that nonsense, or possibly aren’t even capable of villainy as such. Way back in Spin one of the characters explained that their computational networks are so vast and so necessarily slow that they had a hard time noticing or even comprehending the life of a single organism, and even that character didn’t really understand what they were doing. Toward the end of Vortex we do finally get an explanation, of sorts, of what precisely the Hypotheticals are up to and why, and the last twenty or thirty pages of the book are amazingly grandiose and spectacular in the absolute finest tradition of SF. Both the time scale and the epic scope are pretty awesome indeed.
That said, some of the middle portions of the book do kind of drag on a bit. And as I said above, I didn’t necessarily enjoy the frame story that much, since it tended to get a little preachy at times. Nonetheless, if you read Spin and enjoyed it, I’d say the last part of this one justifies the admission.
There are a couple of approaches to this. Some of the SF examining this question simply involves humanity going extinct over time, but some other works deal with technological fixes. Vortex is something along those lines.
Vortex is actually the third book in a trilogy, the first two being Spin and Axis (I refer to them as the “Angular Momentum Trilogy” but they may have a more official name, I don’t know.) Spin was a Hugo Award winning novel and one I enjoyed quite a bit – the setup for that one was that one day, all of a sudden, the entire Earth gets enveloped in a membrane that separates the planet from local space-time, so that time is passing much, much faster outside the membrane than inside it. It turns out that there are vast networks of computing machines in the depths of interstellar space and they do this to worlds with intelligent biological life.
As to what they do, it’s complicated. The life cycle of tool-using intelligences is short compared to the Hypotheticals (as they are called by some of the humans, although they are very real) and in order to maximize the time they have available, the Hypotheticals use singularities to create warp gates and allow the biologicals to colonize other planets, something that is otherwise infeasible. The Hypotheticals connect Earth to another planet (dubbed “Equatoria”) which is a great place to live. There’s another gate on Equatoria that’ll take you to yet a third planet that people can live on, although it’s not quite so nice. And another gate on that world as well. It takes the Hypotheticals a couple of billion years to set all that stuff up though, which is why they use the time-disrupting membrane to allow them to finish this project. And, I suppose, they’re doing this sort of thing all the time.
All of this is revealed by the end of Spin. You may have noticed that missing from the above paragraph is the question of why the Hypotheticals go to so much trouble to help out alien intelligences that they barely know. Well, first of all, it’s not clear so much that it’s a “favor” since you don’t exactly get to opt in to this project, it’s something that gets done whether you want it or not. And it’s also not entirely clear that it’s for anyone’s benefit at all. There’s a guy in Spin who finds out somewhat more than he wants to about the Hypotheticals, and a whole sort-of-cult in Axis that ends up not necessarily liking the answers they get either.
There are two parallel stories in Vortex, one of which follows Turk Findley, a major player in Axis who has been removed from the galaxy by the hypotheticals for the past 10,000 years. The other story is more of a frame story and involves the planet Earth somewhat before the events of Axis, but after Spin. And although it does tie the story together, I liked Findley’s bit much more, and will be discussing it more.
Findley finds himself disoriented and recovered by a group of people who believe that he’s been touched by the Hypotheticals and will be the key to what I guess I’d describe as apotheosis. They also snag Isaac, a young boy who was packed to the gills with Hypothetical technology back in Axis and who’s also been gone. So they head to Earth back through the gate despite the fact that no one’s been there in a while and things weren’t going so well when they were, and find that it’s been rendered inhospitable to human life. Or, for that matter, multicellular life of any kind. Effects of climate change due to burning all the fossil fuel reserves of both Earth and Equatoria; it seems that caused eutrophication on a massive scale, poisoning the seas and filling the atmosphere with hydrogen sulfide gas. Pretty rough.
Now, this isn’t necessarily the end of humanity since there are still plenty of people left on the various other planets, but the question does arise as to why exactly the Hypotheticals would go to so much trouble to ensure that humanity has the opportunity to expand to other planets but do not take any action whatsoever to either prevent humanity from wrecking its planets, by either technological or more brute-force means. The people that Findley has fallen in with originally believed that the whole point of the Hypothetical exercise was to eventually uplift humanity to god-like status, and this particular problem of evil sort of throws a wrench in that interpretation.
I would remind the reader that one possible solution to the problem of evil is that god is not omni-benevolent, though.
At the same time, the Hypotheticals aren’t mustache-twirling super villains, either. They’re really above most of that nonsense, or possibly aren’t even capable of villainy as such. Way back in Spin one of the characters explained that their computational networks are so vast and so necessarily slow that they had a hard time noticing or even comprehending the life of a single organism, and even that character didn’t really understand what they were doing. Toward the end of Vortex we do finally get an explanation, of sorts, of what precisely the Hypotheticals are up to and why, and the last twenty or thirty pages of the book are amazingly grandiose and spectacular in the absolute finest tradition of SF. Both the time scale and the epic scope are pretty awesome indeed.
That said, some of the middle portions of the book do kind of drag on a bit. And as I said above, I didn’t necessarily enjoy the frame story that much, since it tended to get a little preachy at times. Nonetheless, if you read Spin and enjoyed it, I’d say the last part of this one justifies the admission.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Shogun by James Clavell
Yes, really.
I first read this book several years ago, on vacation, but was interrupted by a pretty severe case of food poisoning and didn’t really pay that much attention to the last third or so. So I recently decided to give it another shot without the horrible disease, and also in the interim having learned more about the time period and the writing itself. You know what? It’s pretty good for a forty-year-old doorstopper.
That said, it’s also slightly strange if you know anything about the context. It’s sort of like if a Chinese author wanted to write about the American Revolution, but didn’t want to necessarily commit himself to 100% complete historical accuracy if it got in the way of telling an entertaining story as he saw fit. So you end up with the totally fictional character of “Joe Rashington” who is a Virginia planter leading the Continental Army while his associates “Jake Addams” and “Hamilton Frankleen” are over in Europe trying to get allies. And they do pretty much all the same stuff as Washington, Adams and Franklin did at the same time period, but stopping to have long conversations with a Chinese man who happens to be in America at the time and who turns out to be critical to the Revolution, and who also has an affair with someone who is clearly, I don’t know, Betsy Ross. You can see how American audiences might be a little annoyed by it, and it explains why Toshiro Mifune caught flak in his homeland for agreeing to be in the television miniseries.
Anyway, this novel deals with the late Sengoku period, which in real life was concluded by the famous Tokugawa Ieyasu starting a dynasty that would last over 250 years. In this novel there’s some guy named Yoshi Toranaga who accomplishes the same feat. (It’s said that he’s the head of the Yoshi clan, which would imply that Yoshi is his last name, but everyone calls him Lord Toranaga, also implying that Toranaga is his last name, and is just one example of Clavell probably knowing better but just throwing it in there anyway. There are a lot of these issues with Clavell’s handling of the language, but I just have to take that on other people’s word since I don’t really know enough to have my own opinion on it.)
But maybe even that is getting ahead of things a little bit, since the book really focuses on one John Blackthorne, who is the pilot of a Dutch flagged ship that runs aground in Japan. The ship is the remnant of a small fleet that was looking to circumnavigate the globe and harass the Spanish while they were at it. As it turns out there was an actual sailor by the name of William Adams who actually did many of the things that Blackthorne does in this novel, including becoming a samurai, although I doubt he was quite as much of an arrogant hothead as Blackthorne is, and hearing about him was actually what inspired Clavell to write this novel in the first place.
From a storytelling hook angle, the shipwrecked sailor thing is golden. Since the audience for the book is primarily English-speakers, here’s a British guy who has something of a backstory we can appreciate without having to go into too much detail about it. There aren’t any fellow English speakers in thousands of miles, of course, but Blackthorne is a polyglot – most of the conversations that he has in this book are probably in Portuguese with a couple of forays into Latin, but he’s reasonably capable of speaking Japanese himself by the end. And he doesn’t know anything whatsoever about the customs, the language, or the political mess he finds himself in, which means that other characters spend inordinate amounts of time explaining this stuff to him, and by extension, us.
Blackthorne only landed in Japan because he didn’t have any other options, and as it turns out the inhabitants aren’t exactly friendly. He finds, to his surprise, that Catholic missionaries are already there. This is bad, since he’s a Protestant and this is after all during a time of religious strife; however, it’s also perversely good in some ways since this means there are other Europeans that he can talk to, and they’ve also taught some of the locals to speak Portuguese. He also finds that the local samurai are used to being obeyed quickly and without question; one of his crew members gets boiled alive at the whim of a particularly unpleasant local nobleman. Then he quickly ends up in prison under suspended sentence of death as a captive of Toranaga, who’s having some personal difficulties of his own at the moment.
Toranaga’s difficulties stem from the fact that the land is suffering something of a cold war succession crisis. A man by the name of Nakamura (a pastiche of the real-life Toyotomi Hideyoshi) had managed to unite all of Japan under his personal rule, but he’d had a son late in life and died not too long afterwards, leaving the country under a council of five regents until such time as his son could inherit. The regents, including Toranaga, were all powerful and ambitious men, and it was Nakamura’s hope that their mutual dislike would keep them balanced. Nonetheless, just as Blackthorne arrives, the other four regents have joined forces against Toranaga and it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to keep his position or, for that matter, his life. This, too, is more or less the situation as it occurred in real life.
In many ways, Toranaga is portrayed as a total dick (one of the first things he does is order the death of a man along with his infant son for a relatively minor infraction). But as the book progresses it focuses less on Blackthorne and more on Toranaga. And while he really doesn’t think that much about breaking his word and doesn’t really regard people as having too much value apart from how they can help him achieve his goals, he also does show genuine affection for some people and does at least enjoy life. His duplicitous nature and harshness are actually pretty typical of the regents and the other major lords, so at least he has style going for him.
There is really quite a lot of the white-guy-culture-shock, as you might expect, some of which is handled well and some of which is a little “meh”. Clavell does occasionally veer a little bit too far into the whole “mysterious and inscrutable Orient” thing, but at the same time it’s pretty clear that a lot of the cultural differences are just different expectations around the same fundamental experiences. Blackthorne is stunned by how composed some guys are on his ship in the middle of a storm, and most of the Europeans discuss how the Japanese don’t seem capable of fear. But we find out that these characters are secretly terrified, and hoping that they don’t shame themselves by revealing it. So there’s a sense of shared humanity there, which is nice. It’s also pretty clear that the best aspects of Japanese culture as Blackthorne experiences it are limited to the aristocracy and the samurai class, and that he’s basically enjoying himself on the lifeblood of peasants. His increasing embrace of the culture is not portrayed as entirely a good thing, although his flexibility to be able to is (unlike his surviving Dutch crew, who are a bunch of superstitious ghastly wretches that could be extras in a Monty Python short).
There are a fair number of action scenes in this book (one of which, a boat chase, is just perfect, and another, a ninja attack, which goes on way too long) but in many respects this is a non-action work. Since there’s technically no state of war, the major parties can’t officially attack each other. They do anyway, of course, but through proxies, via technicalities, by holding hostages, etc. There’s a surprising amount of time discussing safe conduct passages and who can leave where when. A bunch of Toranaga’s allies’ relatives are held hostage in an unassailable castle by one of the regents, but since hostage taking is forbidden they aren’t technically hostages. At the same time, if they ask to leave, the regent will think of a reason why it’s probably not in their best interests to do so, and if they try anyway there may be an unfortunate accident. You might think that one of them would just flat-out demand to go, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. In addition there’s a lot of written threats, and questions about who is under whose orders, and whether they’ve adequately completed the orders, and a lot of minutiae.
Anyway, I liked it. Although parts of it are kinda overwritten and repetitive, the actual cloak-and-dagger intrigue stuff is worthwhile. I can see how it was a phenomenon, for a while, especially at a time when less was known about the time period. It’s definitely not the sort of thing you’d see written today, for good or for ill. The seventies were weird like that.
I first read this book several years ago, on vacation, but was interrupted by a pretty severe case of food poisoning and didn’t really pay that much attention to the last third or so. So I recently decided to give it another shot without the horrible disease, and also in the interim having learned more about the time period and the writing itself. You know what? It’s pretty good for a forty-year-old doorstopper.
That said, it’s also slightly strange if you know anything about the context. It’s sort of like if a Chinese author wanted to write about the American Revolution, but didn’t want to necessarily commit himself to 100% complete historical accuracy if it got in the way of telling an entertaining story as he saw fit. So you end up with the totally fictional character of “Joe Rashington” who is a Virginia planter leading the Continental Army while his associates “Jake Addams” and “Hamilton Frankleen” are over in Europe trying to get allies. And they do pretty much all the same stuff as Washington, Adams and Franklin did at the same time period, but stopping to have long conversations with a Chinese man who happens to be in America at the time and who turns out to be critical to the Revolution, and who also has an affair with someone who is clearly, I don’t know, Betsy Ross. You can see how American audiences might be a little annoyed by it, and it explains why Toshiro Mifune caught flak in his homeland for agreeing to be in the television miniseries.
Anyway, this novel deals with the late Sengoku period, which in real life was concluded by the famous Tokugawa Ieyasu starting a dynasty that would last over 250 years. In this novel there’s some guy named Yoshi Toranaga who accomplishes the same feat. (It’s said that he’s the head of the Yoshi clan, which would imply that Yoshi is his last name, but everyone calls him Lord Toranaga, also implying that Toranaga is his last name, and is just one example of Clavell probably knowing better but just throwing it in there anyway. There are a lot of these issues with Clavell’s handling of the language, but I just have to take that on other people’s word since I don’t really know enough to have my own opinion on it.)
But maybe even that is getting ahead of things a little bit, since the book really focuses on one John Blackthorne, who is the pilot of a Dutch flagged ship that runs aground in Japan. The ship is the remnant of a small fleet that was looking to circumnavigate the globe and harass the Spanish while they were at it. As it turns out there was an actual sailor by the name of William Adams who actually did many of the things that Blackthorne does in this novel, including becoming a samurai, although I doubt he was quite as much of an arrogant hothead as Blackthorne is, and hearing about him was actually what inspired Clavell to write this novel in the first place.
From a storytelling hook angle, the shipwrecked sailor thing is golden. Since the audience for the book is primarily English-speakers, here’s a British guy who has something of a backstory we can appreciate without having to go into too much detail about it. There aren’t any fellow English speakers in thousands of miles, of course, but Blackthorne is a polyglot – most of the conversations that he has in this book are probably in Portuguese with a couple of forays into Latin, but he’s reasonably capable of speaking Japanese himself by the end. And he doesn’t know anything whatsoever about the customs, the language, or the political mess he finds himself in, which means that other characters spend inordinate amounts of time explaining this stuff to him, and by extension, us.
Blackthorne only landed in Japan because he didn’t have any other options, and as it turns out the inhabitants aren’t exactly friendly. He finds, to his surprise, that Catholic missionaries are already there. This is bad, since he’s a Protestant and this is after all during a time of religious strife; however, it’s also perversely good in some ways since this means there are other Europeans that he can talk to, and they’ve also taught some of the locals to speak Portuguese. He also finds that the local samurai are used to being obeyed quickly and without question; one of his crew members gets boiled alive at the whim of a particularly unpleasant local nobleman. Then he quickly ends up in prison under suspended sentence of death as a captive of Toranaga, who’s having some personal difficulties of his own at the moment.
Toranaga’s difficulties stem from the fact that the land is suffering something of a cold war succession crisis. A man by the name of Nakamura (a pastiche of the real-life Toyotomi Hideyoshi) had managed to unite all of Japan under his personal rule, but he’d had a son late in life and died not too long afterwards, leaving the country under a council of five regents until such time as his son could inherit. The regents, including Toranaga, were all powerful and ambitious men, and it was Nakamura’s hope that their mutual dislike would keep them balanced. Nonetheless, just as Blackthorne arrives, the other four regents have joined forces against Toranaga and it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to keep his position or, for that matter, his life. This, too, is more or less the situation as it occurred in real life.
In many ways, Toranaga is portrayed as a total dick (one of the first things he does is order the death of a man along with his infant son for a relatively minor infraction). But as the book progresses it focuses less on Blackthorne and more on Toranaga. And while he really doesn’t think that much about breaking his word and doesn’t really regard people as having too much value apart from how they can help him achieve his goals, he also does show genuine affection for some people and does at least enjoy life. His duplicitous nature and harshness are actually pretty typical of the regents and the other major lords, so at least he has style going for him.
There is really quite a lot of the white-guy-culture-shock, as you might expect, some of which is handled well and some of which is a little “meh”. Clavell does occasionally veer a little bit too far into the whole “mysterious and inscrutable Orient” thing, but at the same time it’s pretty clear that a lot of the cultural differences are just different expectations around the same fundamental experiences. Blackthorne is stunned by how composed some guys are on his ship in the middle of a storm, and most of the Europeans discuss how the Japanese don’t seem capable of fear. But we find out that these characters are secretly terrified, and hoping that they don’t shame themselves by revealing it. So there’s a sense of shared humanity there, which is nice. It’s also pretty clear that the best aspects of Japanese culture as Blackthorne experiences it are limited to the aristocracy and the samurai class, and that he’s basically enjoying himself on the lifeblood of peasants. His increasing embrace of the culture is not portrayed as entirely a good thing, although his flexibility to be able to is (unlike his surviving Dutch crew, who are a bunch of superstitious ghastly wretches that could be extras in a Monty Python short).
There are a fair number of action scenes in this book (one of which, a boat chase, is just perfect, and another, a ninja attack, which goes on way too long) but in many respects this is a non-action work. Since there’s technically no state of war, the major parties can’t officially attack each other. They do anyway, of course, but through proxies, via technicalities, by holding hostages, etc. There’s a surprising amount of time discussing safe conduct passages and who can leave where when. A bunch of Toranaga’s allies’ relatives are held hostage in an unassailable castle by one of the regents, but since hostage taking is forbidden they aren’t technically hostages. At the same time, if they ask to leave, the regent will think of a reason why it’s probably not in their best interests to do so, and if they try anyway there may be an unfortunate accident. You might think that one of them would just flat-out demand to go, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. In addition there’s a lot of written threats, and questions about who is under whose orders, and whether they’ve adequately completed the orders, and a lot of minutiae.
Anyway, I liked it. Although parts of it are kinda overwritten and repetitive, the actual cloak-and-dagger intrigue stuff is worthwhile. I can see how it was a phenomenon, for a while, especially at a time when less was known about the time period. It’s definitely not the sort of thing you’d see written today, for good or for ill. The seventies were weird like that.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode 4
I wrote about Part 3 of this game series when it came out, so it seems only fair to write about the conclusion here too, since it’s out and all. And at $4.99 they’re practically just giving it away for a new-release title; I have to say that I don’t have as much gaming time as I used to before I had a real job and responsibilities and so forth, but I am enjoying the new world of digital publishing and indie developers that sell new games at under the $10 price point.
If you played the third one, this one picks up right where that one left off. Gabe and Tycho managed to destroy the entire universe at the end of Part 3, or at least that was Tycho’s plan, his idea being that it sucked so badly that it should start over again, under the benign guidance of his niece Anne-Claire. Unfortunately the plan didn’t quite work, since only three of the gods have been defeated and there’s one more remaining, holding a teeny-tiny bit of reality together.
And that is why your party finds itself in Underhell, which is supposedly much worse than normal Hell.
I really liked the writing in this one. I mentioned in my previous review that the third game suffered from sticking too closely to the prose story that had been written when it didn’t look like the game would actually be made. Without similar shackles here, and being designed as a game from day one, there was a lot more room for actual Penny Arcade humor. I’ll be perfectly honest and say that not all of it works, but they keep it coming fast enough that it doesn’t really matter. If one joke falls flat, there's another one just behind it.
One of the quirks about Underhell is that normal squishy people can’t hope to hurt its denizens, so you actually do most of your fighting with summoned monsters, a la Pokemon. The monsters are assigned a trainer, and they get level up bonuses affiliated with the trainer’s stats, and one slate of abilities associated with them as well. For example, if Moira trains Brodent, then he’ll get extra speed on leveling up and will be able to use her Gumshoe abilities, but if Jim trains him, he’ll get extra magical defense and be able to use Necromaster abilities. He’ll still have his own slate of special attacks either way.
Like in the previous game, your characters return to full HP after each battle, your items can be used a certain number of times in every battle, and MP increases by 1 per round (subject to other effects), meaning there’s no reason to hoard items or not cast your best spells whenever you can. Your enemies also increase in attack power and speed after every combat round, so you need to take them out quickly or risk being overwhelmed. There are also a fair number of fights where you have additional combat restrictions or modifiers like I’ve seen in other tactical RPGs.
The game is also relentlessly silly. Like I said above, it’s got lots of Penny Arcade humor throughout, and they’re basically daring you to take it seriously at any point, such as when a super dramatic reunion suddenly gets stuck in Japanese language mode, helpfully back-translated translated by some sort of brain-dead Babelfish knockoff. Ostensibly you’re trying to go about destroying the entire universe, but it’s played for laughs throughout. By the time you’re stabbing an evil god in the spleen you’ll be thinking it’s a perfectly normal day at the office. I bet it’s also fun for the “real” Tycho to write for Tycho in this game, but I’m pretty sure in the first and second games he wasn’t such a raving psychotic. I guess we’ll never know. But everyone treats out-and-out murder as about as controversial as picking up a lotto ticket at the gas station.
I felt like this one was easier than the third one, or at least it didn’t kill me quite as much. This may have been because I got familiarized with the combat style previously, but I’m not sure. There are at least eighteen summoned monsters, most of which you will never use if you are anything like me. The combat system basically forces you to inflict as many status effects and repeating-damage spells as you can for long fights on pain of grisly death, and that means that monsters which can’t do that for you are not going to be part of your party. There’s maybe six or seven that have such abilities and I found a party of four that pretty handily took out everything the game threw at me, even the scary optional boss. The game design really emphasizes its stripped-down nature, but Zeboyd may have finally stripped down a little much in this instance. I found myself having the same fight over and over again and always winning, and by the end I was getting a little bored. At least you don’t have to grind, as such, as once again all the encounters are right there on the screen.
The game is also pretty linear. You will basically follow the plot for ten chapters and then get an airship, which you can use to access some secret areas and get some powerful items. Or you can skip that if you want and just go straight to Overhell. This is a one-way trip but you are warned about it, it’s not a surprise and it’s up to you. I got some of the bonus stuff, but I don’t think I got all of it. I’d say that the game is five to ten hours long, depending on playstyle. I also don’t think there’s necessarily any replay value unless you thrive on playing the increased difficulty levels. Perhaps I should have been on one of the harder modes, but I am essentially too apathetic about it to go back and see.
So I said that the third game was great, go get it. The fourth game is also good, with nice humor, good storyline, and all that jazz, but at some point I felt that I’d had enough of it and I was glad it was done with. Nonetheless, still a good show for Zeboyd and PA, and probably worth the $5. As far as I can tell there’s no plan for DLC, so this does appear to be the end of this particular endeavor. Congratulations to the PA guys on their first foray into game design, and maybe next time they’ll do something with a little more substance to it.
If you played the third one, this one picks up right where that one left off. Gabe and Tycho managed to destroy the entire universe at the end of Part 3, or at least that was Tycho’s plan, his idea being that it sucked so badly that it should start over again, under the benign guidance of his niece Anne-Claire. Unfortunately the plan didn’t quite work, since only three of the gods have been defeated and there’s one more remaining, holding a teeny-tiny bit of reality together.
And that is why your party finds itself in Underhell, which is supposedly much worse than normal Hell.
I really liked the writing in this one. I mentioned in my previous review that the third game suffered from sticking too closely to the prose story that had been written when it didn’t look like the game would actually be made. Without similar shackles here, and being designed as a game from day one, there was a lot more room for actual Penny Arcade humor. I’ll be perfectly honest and say that not all of it works, but they keep it coming fast enough that it doesn’t really matter. If one joke falls flat, there's another one just behind it.
One of the quirks about Underhell is that normal squishy people can’t hope to hurt its denizens, so you actually do most of your fighting with summoned monsters, a la Pokemon. The monsters are assigned a trainer, and they get level up bonuses affiliated with the trainer’s stats, and one slate of abilities associated with them as well. For example, if Moira trains Brodent, then he’ll get extra speed on leveling up and will be able to use her Gumshoe abilities, but if Jim trains him, he’ll get extra magical defense and be able to use Necromaster abilities. He’ll still have his own slate of special attacks either way.
Like in the previous game, your characters return to full HP after each battle, your items can be used a certain number of times in every battle, and MP increases by 1 per round (subject to other effects), meaning there’s no reason to hoard items or not cast your best spells whenever you can. Your enemies also increase in attack power and speed after every combat round, so you need to take them out quickly or risk being overwhelmed. There are also a fair number of fights where you have additional combat restrictions or modifiers like I’ve seen in other tactical RPGs.
The game is also relentlessly silly. Like I said above, it’s got lots of Penny Arcade humor throughout, and they’re basically daring you to take it seriously at any point, such as when a super dramatic reunion suddenly gets stuck in Japanese language mode, helpfully back-translated translated by some sort of brain-dead Babelfish knockoff. Ostensibly you’re trying to go about destroying the entire universe, but it’s played for laughs throughout. By the time you’re stabbing an evil god in the spleen you’ll be thinking it’s a perfectly normal day at the office. I bet it’s also fun for the “real” Tycho to write for Tycho in this game, but I’m pretty sure in the first and second games he wasn’t such a raving psychotic. I guess we’ll never know. But everyone treats out-and-out murder as about as controversial as picking up a lotto ticket at the gas station.
I felt like this one was easier than the third one, or at least it didn’t kill me quite as much. This may have been because I got familiarized with the combat style previously, but I’m not sure. There are at least eighteen summoned monsters, most of which you will never use if you are anything like me. The combat system basically forces you to inflict as many status effects and repeating-damage spells as you can for long fights on pain of grisly death, and that means that monsters which can’t do that for you are not going to be part of your party. There’s maybe six or seven that have such abilities and I found a party of four that pretty handily took out everything the game threw at me, even the scary optional boss. The game design really emphasizes its stripped-down nature, but Zeboyd may have finally stripped down a little much in this instance. I found myself having the same fight over and over again and always winning, and by the end I was getting a little bored. At least you don’t have to grind, as such, as once again all the encounters are right there on the screen.
The game is also pretty linear. You will basically follow the plot for ten chapters and then get an airship, which you can use to access some secret areas and get some powerful items. Or you can skip that if you want and just go straight to Overhell. This is a one-way trip but you are warned about it, it’s not a surprise and it’s up to you. I got some of the bonus stuff, but I don’t think I got all of it. I’d say that the game is five to ten hours long, depending on playstyle. I also don’t think there’s necessarily any replay value unless you thrive on playing the increased difficulty levels. Perhaps I should have been on one of the harder modes, but I am essentially too apathetic about it to go back and see.
So I said that the third game was great, go get it. The fourth game is also good, with nice humor, good storyline, and all that jazz, but at some point I felt that I’d had enough of it and I was glad it was done with. Nonetheless, still a good show for Zeboyd and PA, and probably worth the $5. As far as I can tell there’s no plan for DLC, so this does appear to be the end of this particular endeavor. Congratulations to the PA guys on their first foray into game design, and maybe next time they’ll do something with a little more substance to it.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
Been a little slow recently because I’ve been reading some stuff that didn’t really excite me one way or the other and I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm either good or bad to write about it. So I went on vacation and decided to re-read some classics. And here we go.
Lord of Light won the 1968 Hugo for best novel and is one of the stranger works of the period. One of the things that I really like about it is how much is left unsaid and undeveloped. In this current environment of sequel after sequel, you’d expect a whole world like this to be the setting of novel after novel, but Zelazny wrote about it once and moved on.
In describing the plot you have to read between the lines quite a bit, but here’s the basic gist. On an interplanetary colonization ship, the “Star of India”, a bunch of human colonists left Earth some unspecified time before the novel begins. It’s probably been on the order of five hundred years, possibly longer. When they arrived at their destination, the crew members discovered that they had developed latent psychic powers, unique to each person, and they used those powers combined with technology from the ship to subdue the various hostile alien species on the planet and achieve a foothold there. They’ve also got the technology to grow cloned bodies and transfer their consciousness over so they don’t die of old age, although the process doesn’t work if you are already dead.
Rather than explain all this to the colonists and the descendants of their various bodies, the crew spreads the Hindu religion and claim to be various gods. During the initial desperate fighting this is one thing, but after things calm down there is something of a schism among the “gods” or the First, as they are sometimes called. One faction believes the time has come to abandon the charade and begin spreading advanced technology to everyone, and are known as Accelerationists. The other faction, the Deicrats, likes things just fine as they are and since they politically maneuver themselves into running the reincarnation machines there soon aren’t any Accelerationists left.
Except Sam.
The book itself is extremely vague in these specifics and has one of the strangest structures of any book that I can recall reading. The first couple of chapters and the last ones are the only ones that occur in the “present”. It kicks off right in medias res and doesn’t bother to explain a whole lot, with Lord Yama, the god of death, figuring out how to rescue Sam’s spirit from the planet’s Van Allen radiation belt where it’s been trapped for a while and to stick it back into a body. At that point Sam decides he needs to meditate for a while, and he thinks about his war with the gods and how he got into that state in the first place. This recollection takes by far the majority of the book, and when he’s done he gets back up, we get the final battle, and then it wraps up amazingly quickly.
Since the book starts toward the end of the action, as it were, you know that certain things are bound to happen and the only question is why. For instance, we’re introduced to Yama helping Sam out, but they clearly weren’t always allies, and we get to see a couple of occasions where Yama was either sent to assassinate Sam or was helping some other gods try to kill him. Tak wasn’t always in the body of an ape, and so on.
Sam’s revolt against the gods takes place over centuries and is a bizarrely interesting struggle. He’s got some supernormal powers of his own, which helps, but primarily he has his strong will and sense of moral righteousness. I like characters like this, although he is pretty terrifying as well. Early on he commits to doing whatever is necessary to break the reign of the gods, and keeps his word to do it, even when he could quit, even when he might die. If he has to kill, he'll do it, and if he has to make a pact with the aliens he previously trapped, he'll do it, and if he has to deal with the gods themselves, he'll do even that.
In some ways this is a pretty ahead of its time book, but in other ways it does jar a little bit. Unusually for the time period, it’s got some strong female characters, some of which are helpful to Sam, and some of which are actually primary antagonists. Its portrayal of same-sex attraction is pretty unfortunate, though. It was the 60s, and the typical portrayal in SF was characters like the depraved Baron Harkonnen at the time, so even that isn’t as bad as it could be (although the suggestion that lesbians would really prefer to incarnate in musclebound male bodies is pretty silly to a modern reader).
This is also a book that rewards re-reading, since so much of it is in flashbacks and reminiscences. The first time I read it I was enthralled, and on each subsequent reading I’ve picked up on something that I’d missed previously, and it will probably still be part of the SF canon after many of its contemporaries are not.
Lord of Light won the 1968 Hugo for best novel and is one of the stranger works of the period. One of the things that I really like about it is how much is left unsaid and undeveloped. In this current environment of sequel after sequel, you’d expect a whole world like this to be the setting of novel after novel, but Zelazny wrote about it once and moved on.
In describing the plot you have to read between the lines quite a bit, but here’s the basic gist. On an interplanetary colonization ship, the “Star of India”, a bunch of human colonists left Earth some unspecified time before the novel begins. It’s probably been on the order of five hundred years, possibly longer. When they arrived at their destination, the crew members discovered that they had developed latent psychic powers, unique to each person, and they used those powers combined with technology from the ship to subdue the various hostile alien species on the planet and achieve a foothold there. They’ve also got the technology to grow cloned bodies and transfer their consciousness over so they don’t die of old age, although the process doesn’t work if you are already dead.
Rather than explain all this to the colonists and the descendants of their various bodies, the crew spreads the Hindu religion and claim to be various gods. During the initial desperate fighting this is one thing, but after things calm down there is something of a schism among the “gods” or the First, as they are sometimes called. One faction believes the time has come to abandon the charade and begin spreading advanced technology to everyone, and are known as Accelerationists. The other faction, the Deicrats, likes things just fine as they are and since they politically maneuver themselves into running the reincarnation machines there soon aren’t any Accelerationists left.
Except Sam.
The book itself is extremely vague in these specifics and has one of the strangest structures of any book that I can recall reading. The first couple of chapters and the last ones are the only ones that occur in the “present”. It kicks off right in medias res and doesn’t bother to explain a whole lot, with Lord Yama, the god of death, figuring out how to rescue Sam’s spirit from the planet’s Van Allen radiation belt where it’s been trapped for a while and to stick it back into a body. At that point Sam decides he needs to meditate for a while, and he thinks about his war with the gods and how he got into that state in the first place. This recollection takes by far the majority of the book, and when he’s done he gets back up, we get the final battle, and then it wraps up amazingly quickly.
Since the book starts toward the end of the action, as it were, you know that certain things are bound to happen and the only question is why. For instance, we’re introduced to Yama helping Sam out, but they clearly weren’t always allies, and we get to see a couple of occasions where Yama was either sent to assassinate Sam or was helping some other gods try to kill him. Tak wasn’t always in the body of an ape, and so on.
Sam’s revolt against the gods takes place over centuries and is a bizarrely interesting struggle. He’s got some supernormal powers of his own, which helps, but primarily he has his strong will and sense of moral righteousness. I like characters like this, although he is pretty terrifying as well. Early on he commits to doing whatever is necessary to break the reign of the gods, and keeps his word to do it, even when he could quit, even when he might die. If he has to kill, he'll do it, and if he has to make a pact with the aliens he previously trapped, he'll do it, and if he has to deal with the gods themselves, he'll do even that.
In some ways this is a pretty ahead of its time book, but in other ways it does jar a little bit. Unusually for the time period, it’s got some strong female characters, some of which are helpful to Sam, and some of which are actually primary antagonists. Its portrayal of same-sex attraction is pretty unfortunate, though. It was the 60s, and the typical portrayal in SF was characters like the depraved Baron Harkonnen at the time, so even that isn’t as bad as it could be (although the suggestion that lesbians would really prefer to incarnate in musclebound male bodies is pretty silly to a modern reader).
This is also a book that rewards re-reading, since so much of it is in flashbacks and reminiscences. The first time I read it I was enthralled, and on each subsequent reading I’ve picked up on something that I’d missed previously, and it will probably still be part of the SF canon after many of its contemporaries are not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)