Valhalla, I am Coming

Tags

Alfred the Great, Bernard Cornwell, Led Zeppelin, left-handed mouse, Mount & Blade, Viking Conquest, Vikings

So far, the closest I have come to feeling the stories of The Saxon Chronicles is the Viking Conquest conversion for Mount & Blade: Warband. I am almost ashamed to say it, but it is my story and I’m sticking to it. Viking Conquest is also, for me, a very addicting game; much like Patrician III and for pretty much the same reasons. The campaign games for both the original and the conversion are open ended worlds where one must build power over time. The necessary money can be made by trading between cities or by taking on quests (which often involves fighting). The grind gets very repetitive but for some reason it is difficult to stop.

I watch in admiration as my warband delivers a beat down to some nasty highwaymen.

Mount & Blade was a long time being developed. After it finally came out, it was a long time before I broke down and bought it. Even after buying it, it took until now for me to even try the Viking Conquest version of the game.

The first beta versions of the game were released in 2004. At the time, the concept had me very excited. The idea was to create a realistic, first-person game of medieval combat; no magic or fabulous creatures – something historically plausible. A particular emphasis was to be placed on mounted combat. I recall, first, my thrill with the whole concept but then I lost track of it as development drew on. I may have even tried an early beta-build and couldn’t quite get the hang of it.

Each town on the map has a detailed layout with residents wandering to and fro.

Eventually, the full release came out and the mixed reviews delayed my decision to buy. I really should have started on this article back then, because I don’t remember what my concerns were – only that I had them. Even at release, some of those free pre-release builds were still around, which made the price point for the release version seem even more expensive. Did the game look all that much better than the version that I had downloaded for free? The original game was released in 2008 and an upgraded version in 2010. One impression I had of that second release is that, once multiplayer was supported, this seemed to de-emphasize the single player experience. Some critics complained that single-player was under-developed. For myself, I was only interested in single-player.

More years slid by and eventually versions of the game got discounted to a point where I couldn’t say no. By then, another expansion had been released, called Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword (2011) as well as total-conversion mods for the Napoleonic Wars and the Viking Age. I think I bought the base game when it went on sale as a teaser for the DLCs and then a packaged version when that went on sale. Confusingly (for me) my licenses for the games are split between GOG and Steam so that I have to be sure to install from the right source, depending on what version I am after.

So now I had the full 2010 release of Mount & Blade: Warbands copy in hand and it was time to try it. The game has you take on the persona of a wandering warrior in a mythical medieval land. There is a tutorial to teach you the combat system (more on that later) before you begin your campaign. In the campaign portion, you can wander from town-to-town taking on quests, buying high and selling low, or just fighting people and taking their stuff. It is an open-ended environment you can use to build your own story as you collect wealth, followers, and status against a background of politics and warfare between kingdoms. On several fronts, the game didn’t completely thrill me, but these were all minor issues. The killer was the mouse configuration. While the assignment of the mouse buttons to in-game actions is configurable, the defaults for the game override your Windows settings. I played for a few hours (I can see the records in Steam) and then never went back.

Sometime after this experience, I had a chance to pick up the Viking and Napoleonic DLCs cheap. I think, at that time, the Napoleonic one was something I had read some good stuff about and I figured it was worth the price. The horrific trauma of the left-handed mouse problem had either softened with time or was forgotten. Yet, the opportunity to buy didn’t translate into an urge to play. It didn’t help that I would have had to delete my existing installation and reinstall from another source, one of those things that just makes me nervous.

And so it sat until I read that Viking Conquest had a historically-interesting representation of the Battle of Ashdown. I also know how to switch the mouse buttons in the hardware controller, so I was ready!

Viking Conquest moves from a mythical medieval land to the real England, Ireland, Scotland (plus the coastal area around the Low Countries) shortly after the Viking conquest of Northumbria. Beyond that, the premise is pretty much the same as the unmodified Mount & Blade. The campaign opens with you traveling with your mother to get her some medical attention. Before you arrive, you are ambushed at sea by a minor Viking warlord. In the attack, you to lose both your mother and all your worldly possessions. This sets you on a journey to avenge her death while trying to make your fortune in the England of around 870.

As I indicated at the outset, the gameplay is similar to many multi-faceted strategy games based on an open world and user-driven (somewhat) stories. You move from town to town so as to engage the key people you can locate. You need money, which you can obtain through trading or by performing quests. You can also attack other forces on the map and, upon defeating them, take their stuff. Depending on whom those forces were aligned with, it popularity among the factions on the map will shift with your actions. Thus you gradually make friends as well as enemies.

You have plenty of ways of spending that money. You can upgrade your own gear or recruit a body of armed men, which then allow you to engage ever the larger groups of warriors that are also wandering the map. You can also build your own fortune, buying land, wooing young women of nobility, and forming alliances with the powers that be. It is, as I said, reminiscent of other economic/empire building strategy games except that the lowest level interface is a first-person control of your own character.

That first-person system gets points for the attempt but, for me, the result is a little on the clumsy side. I’m not all that familiar with the genre the Mount & Blade developers were trying to improve upon – Elder Scrolls has been cited as an inspiration – so I don’t know how others might have done it the same or better. To me, the control scheme of holding down a mouse button and then moving the mouse (right button to parry or block, left to attack) has hints of the gesture system of Black & White. In other words, it seems to be one of those promising but dead-end concepts of early-aughts UI. While mouse-gesture-based combat would seem to be a way to immerse the player by focusing on movement rather than keyboards and control panels, this type of control is simultaneously imprecise and hell on the wrists. It makes me wonder how they’ve translated the control system to the gaming controllers for their console ports, but I’ll not dig that up right now.

One nice bit of depth to this gaming system is that while its a first-person interface, it does kind of feel like a fully-populated world. As you’re attributes develop, you can lead more and more men, very quickly bringing 100+ fellow soldiers with you into the fight. Unlike some first-person semi-strategic implementations, you’re not required to personally defeat the opposing hoards in hand-to-hand combat. In fact, you could easily win most fights by hanging back and watching your men take the lead. Besides simply your druthers as a player (isn’t the reason you’re playing so you can, you know, play?), there will be some advantages to actually leading your army and being out in front slaughtering enemy. I believe it will help with their morale to see you winning fights and the experience you gain in a fight will increase your leadership skills going forward.

I’ve earned enough street cred that one of the Earls explains how to use group tactics in battle.

In addition to first-person control, you also have battle commands to order your followers. Like the first-person control system, I’ve so far found the command system a bit awkward to use. Also like that first-person control system, I’m not sure how I would do it better. In this case, it is similar to other first-person tactical command interfaces. Specifically, I have ARMA in mind. Function keys pop up submenus which allow to to give formation or movement instructions to your followers. The commands can be given to your force as a whole, or to the unit-types separately (horses can be held back while the spearmen are ordered to charge, for example).

While the interface is simplistic and a tad difficult, it also more closely approximates the level of control a warlord might have had over his troops much better than your typical RTS interface (or even, let’s say, a Field of Glory battle). Simulation-wise, it isn’t completely unrealistic but, in particular, it fails in approximating the earlier stages of a battle. In my gaming experience, battle lines close quickly after only a brief exchange of missiles and the shield infantry don’t stand for very long. However, my experience does not include two veteran shield walls facing each other, so the program may handle that better than I am anticipating.

Historical chrome. I pay a visit to Hadrian’s Wall.

As I started off with, this game has been both the most immersive Viking experience I’ve so far found as well as the most compelling Viking gaming experience. Both of these results surprise me. Not only does one expect first-person games to be among the sloppiest at getting the history right, but given the generated-world substrate, it is surprising that it can still approximate a historical feeling. Of course, a good chunk of that is my own good will. I can be generous when I want to be, willing to project my own storytelling on top of what the game provides me. Generous I must be because there are plenty of shortcomings. Like plenty of other games, there is really no room to let up – if I’m not slaughtering a couple of bands of thieves per week, I’m not going to have enough money to pay my followers. (At least, in this case, I do have to let everyone sleep.) The greater world, also, seems to be hurtling forward way too fast. I have less than a year of in-game time behind me and yet I’ve seen nearly a dozen wars started and stopped throughout England and Scandinavia. It seems like the NPCs feel compelled to keep as busy as I do.

By way of contrast, what has become far less immersive than it was the last time I wrote about it is Vikings. Causing the show’s issues (especially Season 5, Part 2) to stand out is that its narrative has entered the same territory that is cover by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and, perhaps more significantly, by Bernard Cornwell’s historically-based embellishment of the existing sources. So while it was charming to have a semi-mythological person like Ragnar Lothbrok depart on various flights of fancy, it is considerably less charming when it is a relatively well-documented figure such as Alfred the Great. Pained, I watched Alfred’s (ahistorical) mother Judith kill his older brother, King Æthelred I, who, in the show, never became king because… oh, never mind.

Also the epic/hero treatment of battles is taken to further levels of unreality. We see Saxon England saved, not by Alfred’s leadership, but by the fact he is joined by Ubbe and Björn Ragnarsson to defeat attacks first from King Harald Finehair and then from Danes-by-way-of-Ireland. Note it is the physical presence of this handful of individuals (shieldmaidens Lagertha and Torvi also figure) that alters the winds of war; they have come from Norway as refugees, arriving alone in a single boat. Ironically, there is a scene where Björn announces his intention to dethrone his brother from the rulership of (again, entirely made up) Kattegat. He is reminded that he doesn’t have an army. Nobles supporting a King (or a pretender, for that matter) were of value because of the men and resources they brought with them, not for their skill with the sword in battle.

Then there is this weird religious thing going on. Old Norse, Christianity, Islam, atheism, and even Buddhism all vie for the souls of Floki and the sons of Ragnar. Religion is a critical facet in the transition of England from a backwater of the Roman Empire to the global Ruler of the Waves. It’s something that Cornwell handles so well in his series. This is just goofy.

I’ll keep playing Viking Conquest and finish watch season 5 of Vikings, but I do the latter under protest.

Evil Product Support

Tags

Cold War, Evil Genius, James Bond, left-handed mouse, management simulation

I never played Dungeon Keeper.

I recall playing a version of Sim City, probably a mid-1990s version such as the one linked. I don’t remember playing it much, so I may have had a demo version. The concept of a economic simulation definitely appealed to me, but I’ve come to realize that simply creating a cool economics simulation doesn’t necessarily make a great game. Or even a good game. The execution is important. When not designed well, such games become a frustrating morass of micromanagement. Done right, well, one need only look at the success of the genre over the decades.

While Sim City never got far with me, I did get myself into a few of the more focused games that followed using the Sim City formula. Capitalism and the city-builder series (Caesar, etc) were some games that I did get into around that time. The focus on economic factors (in the former) and history (in the latter) were what aspects that caused these games to jump out of the crowd, at least for me. Quite a crowd it was, I might add. This was a time when the the management sim was branching out in all sorts of directions. Theme Park and the various railroad simulations tempted developers into finding new and innovative subjects upon which to lay the template. And in its time, Dungeon Keeper seemed to do just that.

The big concept behind Dungeon Keeper was not simply to create another variation on the management sim template, but at the same time, create an upside down look at the role-playing genre. Instead of managing a band of adventurers, setting out to sack a dungeon and to gather its treasures, you would be in charge of the dungeon itself and so need to repel those awful intruders. While none of this was exactly new, the combination of them all together seemed rather novel. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that it came at the height of developer Peter Molyneux’s popularity. Another key to its success was its emphasis on humor and the twist that you didn’t play as the good guy but rather as the master of the baddies.

But I never played it. While a great idea, I had other games on my mind. It was successful enough that it spawned its own sub-genre of games. I actually bought Ghost Master, finding it in a bargain bin (an actual, physical one), which is an obvious nod to its Dungeon Keeper predecessor. Ghost Master is, however, another game that I never installed and never played. To this day, I feel guilty about it. I feel like I am a part of the target audience for these games, yet I am not biting. I wanted to play this game and I wanted to like it. I feel like I’ve let those ghosts down.

Let’s jump ahead a few more years as the industry produced even more variations on the theme. One 2004 take on it was Evil Genius, which got its share of attention in its time. It is very cast in the Dungeon Keeper mold, but instead of the Dungeons and Dragons, swords and sorcery theme of the original, this one is based on the world of James Bond movies. Note that it also came out after the Austin Powers film series and, perhaps, draws as much from the parody of James Bond as it does from the (albeit tongue-in-cheek) movie originals. It may not have rated as high as Dungeon Keeper, due to bugs and other problems, but it had its share of admirers. It also went on sale (a virtual bargain bin, this time) pretty recently.

I bit.

Evil Genius illustrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of today’s massive supply of classic gaming experience. I don’t remember how I got it – most likely either a Steam sale or a Humble Bundle – but I really love how these classic titles have, largely, become easy to acquire and run decades down the road. Installing this one, however, I ran very quickly into problems. Once again, I found that the mouse buttons were reversed for me, requiring (as I do) my mouse to be configured for left-handed players. I found this lack of configurability to be intolerable.

To make matters a little worse, as I began searching for a solution, I came across something that confused me further. One on-line critique of the game suggested that the game UI was actually designed with the mouse buttons, in many cases, doing the reverse of what you’d expect from them. Essentially, the article said, for the game to function normally (as in, right-handed mouse) you had to reverse the mouse buttons in Windows. This does not actually appear to be the case. When following through the tutorial, where the mouse-button instructions are explicit, the mouse button matches the tutorial exactly (although, remember, I’ve already reversed them in Windows). I can’t imagine what this writer was talking about, but it cost me an extra hour or so of fiddling before I decided, what ever his experience, it didn’t apply to me.

Mouse buttons are clearly not configurable through the in-game menu so, having found a similar solution recently, I began searching through the undocumented configuration files. There I found a mouse invert configuration that I thought might help me. Once again, this took me quite a while change, test, and verify, so I lost another good chunk of time. Further on-line searching backed up my experience. There is an analysis about what in that configuration file, and how only some of it actually works while some of the configurations are actually dangerous to mess with. The mouse setting was not on the “works” list, so I figured it is not just me.

I also found some other write-ups; instruction on how to get the game patched. Now this part baffled me a little, considering this is a Steam game that I’m working with.

I still considered Steam-purchased software to be a case of paying to buy a game when, in reality, I’m only renting it. If Steam ever decided they no longer wanted to let me use a particular game, they could just take it away. In exchange for less-than-total ownership, however, I not only have access to games (and prices) that I wouldn’t otherwise, I also don’t have to store locally the games that I’ve purchased on line. The bargain should also mean that I’m not hunting for patches and mods and the like. Steam automatically installs to the supported patch, so everything should be up to date. It also has a less-than fully supported system for user-made modifications. While not ideal, this should get the player around the days of research that otherwise is required to bring an older game up to its best available version.

With Evil Genius, however, the version available is the originally-shipped version, version 1.0. While the game was still being supported, the publisher did ship an official patch, but this is not part of the Steam package. To make it more confusing, there was a user-made patch that came out after the developer studio closed (happening only about a year after the game was released). Both sets of patches are available on-line, but there were several versions of the game (and thus the patches) and, apparently, no one version quite matches the Steam release. After chasing some dead links, I finally downloaded a version that seemed like it should work (and so far seems like it does). Part of me hoped that a patch would fix the mouse configuration problem, but it didn’t.

In the meantime, one more possible solution occurred to me. In fact, I don’t know why I never thought of it before, given how long I’ve gone in circles with this mouse-button issue. I guess sometimes you have to be pushed past some mental limit. Anyway, what I realized is that I use a “gaming” mouse and, while I never actually reconfigure anything on it, it is in fact pretty configurable. So back to searching the internet to find the configuration package from the manufacturer. Finally, now, I have a solution where I can swap my mouse buttons before starting the game, using not Windows but the mouse driver, which results in the mouse behaving correctly when I am in-game.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. Finally, I can play the game as it was intended.

I stand, surveying my control room, while a conference table awaits me in my inner sanctum.

It is a hard game and, I think, it was meant to be. The intention is not to give the player the thrill of world domination whenever they can spare an hour or so of fiddling. This style of game is one that you play night-after-night for months on end. The instructions are rather open ended and, obviously therefore, open to mistakes. Should I kill every non-friendly that I see? Is there are way to boost my chances at completing a given mission? These things, I think, are meant to be discovered by trial-and-error. Recall that I am playing on easy and, on top of that, you start out in an introductory mode meant to gradually introduce components of the game to you. Even having all these advantages, it sometimes seems hard to make any progress.

In searching for the fixes to my above problems, I came across some other bits and pieces about the game. I saw that, when the game was being actively sold, there was a “strategy guide” available for it. For those who don’t remember, many of the more popular games had third-party hints manuals that would help you optimize your gameplay, provided you had some extra bucks to burn. There are also (or at least there were, many of the links are no longer active) free guides in the form of Wikipedia sites and forums that were made to help bring you up to speed on how to effectively play the game. Clearly players were prepared to invest significant amounts of time and energy into this title.

I also came across some of the original reviews of the game. One that stood out compared it, and not entirely favorably, with Dungeon Keeper saying that, more than anything, Evil Genius made the reviewer want to break out their old copy of Dungeon Keeper once again. I gather that, while Evil Genius was 5 years ahead in terms of graphics and interface (at a time when 5 years meant a lot, mind you), the gameplay package doesn’t quite live up. This I can’t speak to as, like I took pains to say at the beginning, I haven’t played the original.

Just the other day I heard of… some Indonesian junk that’s going ’round.

Evil Genius does have its pros and cons. It does a reasonable job with its atmosphere, making it feel like a Bond-esque thriller rather than just a management-sim grind – at least much of the time. The way the game is split between your underground lair and “the world” does give it a different feel than, say, a sim-hospital. The humor is not bad, given them medium, and often subtle. Little finds, hidden in animations or within the text of the missions, and actually entertain more than a more obvious “here comes the joke” style. I do wonder if I may be reading a bit too much into the above screenshot, though.

On the other hand, the game struggles to live up to expectations, especially when viewing it 15 years on. One aspect of a well-designed game is that it keeps you engaged while you play. While often hidden behind the nifty animations, behind the scenes of Evil Genius are a series of timers so that, once you initiate an action, you have to wait a certain amount of time for it to complete. In many cases, there are a series of times that are all interdependent. For example, to complete a mission, I may have to hire a number of “workers,” train them to be specialists, transport them to a particular corner of the world, and then apply them for a certain amount of time to a given mission. Even in fairly uncomplicated assignments, it doesn’t seem uncommon to have to sit for 5+ minutes watching little people meander around on the screen, with no real in-game possibilities until all the tasks, one by one, complete. Is this really the way I want to spend my gaming hours?

Some gratuitous violence leave bodies everywhere. I particularly appreciated the empty casing flying out of the rifles during the shootout, although it is difficult to see in a still image.

Hours it can be, indeed, is meant to be. This game seems to be a major life-choice for some. By contrast, what I am looking for, these days, are games that I can pick up quickly and put in a few hours when I’m in the mood for that particular style or subject. I can admit the game is clever but it may be asking for more from me than I want to give it.

 

In ’65 I Was 17

Tags

Cold War, FPS, Jackson Browne, left-handed mouse, Men of Valor, MoH, Vietnam

And in ’65 I’m on my seventeenth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

Men of Valor is a First Person Shooter set in Vietnam. It was released in 2004, two years after the wildly-successful Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Men of Valor is an adaption of that game (which had, itself, already released two expansion packs and one follow-on: Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault) and, perhaps, a bit of an upgrade*.

Medal of Valor begins its story (once you progress through the obstacle course/training sessions of the tutorial) shortly after the initial deployment of Marines to Da Nang. I played through, so far, the first “Operation”, which takes you up to the start of Operation Starlite.

Just like the Medal of Honor titles, each Operation is broken down into several Missions, separated by cut scenes and (usually) some down time. Within a Mission, progress is saved a number of check points.

Déjà vu. I am about to take out a heavy machine gun position with a difficult SKS shot, although I feel like I’ve done this before.

With this, I am reminded of what I don’t like about this genre. The check points are there as the place you will return to when you are inevitably gunned down. The checkpoint system was original forced upon games by the console world, where “saving to a file” wasn’t an option. It persisted in the PC world in a large part to provide more of a “challenge” to the player, who might otherwise beat a game by saving seconds before a difficult part and then retrying rapidly until you succeed. Because playing typically consists of getting killed, figuring out what killed you, and then figuring out how to get past what killed you, when reloading from the last checkpoint you are punished with the added tedium of working your way back up to where you were. Besides playing to the masochistic instincts of the player base, such a format is necessary to increase the amount of gameplay that you’ll get from the game.

Although the player is meant to feel like he is in an open, three-dimensional world, the game itself is pretty much linear. You are working your way along a pre-determined path and the obstacles you face along the way are fixed, reacting to certain triggers. If it were reasonably doable to make it through the game without being killed, that would severely restrict the amount of play that the game provides. Or to put it another way, once you can successfully complete a portion of the game, there is no reply value. Much of that time-in-game comes from reloading and retrying a difficult portion over and over.

Which then brings to me another source of frustration. I’m sure I’ve encountered this when playing Medal of Honor, but I had mercifully forgotten it. The checkpoints are only “saves” within the context of restarting after being killed. If you decide to wrap it up for the night and play from your save point some other day, you must load from the beginning of the “map” or “mission.” In the screenshot above, I had finally finished the section of the game where I had to clear this village and, as I was thoroughly sick of it, I had no desire to come back to it later. However, right after that, I got myself stuck in another trap. Feeling like I’d already wasted enough time on this for one night, I shut down. Imagine my horror when I was placed back at the beginning of the section that I had finally gotten myself through, only to do it all over again.

Once I calmed down, I could think a little more rationally about the pros and cons of this game. Here and there, I actually feel like I’m playing Medal of Honor with slightly different graphics. For example, in the screenshot above, I find myself using scavenged commie weapons. For whatever reason, I went out on this mission without an M-14 and lacking sufficient ammo for my M-1 Carbine. When the ammo ran out, I had to choose between a wildly inaccurate PPSh submachine gun and the accurate-but-ammo-limited SKS. With the SKS, I had flashbacks to Medal of Honor‘s M-1 Garand with its tormentingly-slow stripper-clip reload. So much so, it really felt like some kind of cosmetic upgrade of the previous model. Likewise, there are places in the game where I feel sure I’ve already done this exact “mission,” but set in Europe, 1944.

Does this look like the bridge in Apocalypse Now? A little?

Another similarity is the reliance on the existing cultural reference points to create familiarity. A bridge looks straight out of Apocalypse Now. Other scenes reference Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.

I was somewhat pleased to see snipers in the treetops, having read about this tactic in We Were Soldiers Once… and Young. But only somewhat, as they kept killing me.

A somewhat strange choice (or artistically interesting choice, depending on how you take it) is to include a strong current of racial conflict throughout. Perhaps evident from the screenshots above, I am a black man. This is emphasized in the cut scenes. My unit is also mostly black and some of the casual dialog in-game has the black soldiers harassing one of the white soldiers in the unit. Perhaps the statement it is trying to make will become clearer to me as I progress further. Or perhaps someone is just trying to be astute, clever, and politically correct all at the same time. Let’s include racism, but let’s make it reverse racism! That way, white players can see what it’s like to be… oh I don’t know.

I noticed, in particular, two “upgrades” over the Medal of Honor play. For the first, I draw your attention to the medical icon in the bottom-left corner of the screenshots. Like Medal of Honor, each bullet hit you receive will knock a percentage off of your health unit, upon hitting zero, you are dead and the game halts. The difference this time around is that some hits will result in “bleeding” damage, where your health level continues to drop until you give it attention. If bleeding, you have to bandage yourself by holding down the ‘F’ key until the health loss stops. Bandaging is most effective when you are still and not doing anything else and, of course, it makes it that much harder to shoot at the charging enemies when you are trying to stop the bleeding. Ignore it completely and even a small injury could, fairly quickly, wind up killing you.

The second difference is in the way the “permanent” injuries are repaired. Maybe I’m misremembering Medal of Honor, but I recall that all injuries were repaired by medical kits, either scattered around a map or “dropped” when an enemy went down. In Men of Valor, the random smattering of medical kits is still a part of the game, but most of the healing (and ammo resupply, for that matter) comes from “searching” downed enemies. Finding that an enemy was carrying canteen can give you a small boost in health and finding a medikit on a fallen foe gives you a large one. As I said, maybe its bad memory, but it changes the feel when you have stop and deliberately search the enemies rather than just charging through a room sucking up “loot” as you go.

Also one shout-out of appreciation. The mouse-button issue is, while not quite non-existent, very easily configurable. My current version of Medal of Honor also works in this regard, but you never know with some of the aughts titles. I was really happy not to have to fight with this particular problem before I could get started playing.

So overall, is this game a waste of time or not?

It is a frustrating game. There are certainly places where, over and over, you have to go back to the check point and try again, only to do even worse on the retry. However, at least so far, the obstacles can be overcome – the game is not impossible. It is also, of course, not realistic. Even a successful run through a village may have shot and injured, almost to the point of death, three or four times but, courtesy of your enemies and their unused medikits, you can completely patch yourself to full health. All this in a matter of a few minutes.

On the other hand, and focusing on the time frame of this Operation, it illuminates a part of the war that, so far, no other game has captured. In the early months after the invasion, “nothing happened” at least from the standpoint of significant operations. That didn’t mean that Marines were idle. They went on patrols, engaged in firefights, and men were injured and killed. This may not be the best representation of this period of the war that I could come up with, but its just about the only one I’ve got.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. For another first-person view of the war, this time from the cockpit of an airplane, you man want to read on to the next article.

*I’ve not played Pacific Assault, so I can’t really compare features between the two titles. What looks to me like a new feature in Men of Valor may be old hat.

I Didn’t Want to Do It But…

Tags

Armageddon, Billy Joel, Blitzkrieg, Cold War, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath, global thermonuclear war, left-handed mouse, Real Time Strategy, RTS

…there is this thing called the Steam Summer Sale.

Lurking on the edges of Steam’s recommendations for me is a title called Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath. No, not that aftermath. This is a 2005 game, published by 1C and created by independent developers G5. The game was added to Steam in 2015, and so sort-of shows up as a “new” title, depending on how you’re looking at it.

Obviously, the game has some appeal to me, based on the other articles I’ve written recently. The game is sparsely played on Steam and so doesn’t have all that many reviews. The reviews are “Mostly Positive” (in Steam’s own terminology) with both very positive and very negative reviews. When the Steam sale came upon me, the game was discounted to $1.24 with further discounts available if purchased in conjunction with the games sequel (Cuban Missile Crisis: Ice Crusade). Hard to say no to that.

The game might be considered a follow-on to the Blitzkrieg series, taking the World War II combat into the Cold War. Both games have been described as extensions of Sudden Strike, a game originally released in 2000 by CDV (the German publisher of Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood, to whom I referred albeit indirectly). Looking at screenshots of Sudden Strike, it is certainly easy to imagine Cuban Missile Crisis as a reskinning of that World War II title. However, the development of Sudden Strike, Blitzkrieg, and Cuban Missile Crisis have all proceeded independently and concurrently, with different developers working on them, despite the commonality among the publishers.

Perhaps in 2000 (for reference, this is the same time as the release of the original Total War) the mechanics of Sudden Strike felt novel for the RTS genre. Building bases, mining resources, and purchasing/upgrading units were no longer part of the battles. The games were intended to be much more “realistic” and were lauded for the effort. From the beginning, terrain was important both for sighting and cover. At some point on the way to Cuban Missile Crisis, the terrain itself became destructible, adding to this sense of realism. Of course that’s relative. None of these games are reasonable simulations of small unit actions in World War II or otherwise.

There is a closer link between Cuban Missile Crisis to the Blitzkrieg series. The former uses the latter’s Enigma engine as the basis for the games graphics and physics.

As I said, looking at all the riffs on this theme, a key motif was the praise about the increased realism. The combination of the addition tactical factors (line-of-sight) and the removal of classic RTS features (base-building) meant that this was considered more of a hard-core “strategy” title than your typical RTS. But as I said, this by no means translates into a realistic depiction of combat. While some of these factors might combine in ways to reward realistic strategies and tactics, you have to suspend quite a bit of belief before you start to feel that you’re in command of actual units in a historical war.

Cuban Missile Crisis makes a big jump away from even that tenuous hold on “historical war” with its setting. The game assumes that the U.S. did invade Cuba and that during the (mostly successful) invasion, some of the Soviet launchers attacked the continental United States before they could be taken out. That further escalated into a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia. The game begins after the nuclear war has completed and has you fighting a conventional war in the post-Armageddon world.

There were dozens of ways that World War III might have played out and, while games usually start with a conventional war with the risk of going nuclear superimposed on top of it, the reverse is also possible. We can imagine leading with the nuclear strike and then whoever is left has to squabble over the rubble. A compelling and imaginative back story can add depth to a game. In supposing such a scenario, it also frees the developers from having to adhere to any historical plans, make-up of armies, supply issues, etc. The units on the battlefield are whatever they want to say they are, because the narrative is created from whole cloth.

In this spirit, the various campaigns assume some re-alignments of the major powers, post-destruction. The U.S. is closely aligned with England such that units of the U.S./U.K. mix the unit types of the two nationalities. Likewise, Germany and France have united. Russia and China remain independent.

Lastly, the conceptualizing of a post-apocalyptic world allows certain RTS mechanics to be made part of the story. The idea that supply of your units comes about from seizing enemy supply dumps is a staple of the RTS world, but makes a lot less sense when trying to use it in a scenario based on reality. In this game, we have to accept that the nuclear war has created shortages in fuel, units, and ammunition. Any odd construct of a scenario – be it a mixing and matching of units or a goal to seize a fuel supply – can be attributed to this greater theme.

So enough blither-blather. How does the game actually play? Well, that’s the bad news.

It’s Not the Real Thing

First, some good news. Or at least, the news isn’t as bad as it looked like it was going to be. After the initial install, nothing worked. Clicking on buttons didn’t perform an action. I realized I had another hard-coded right-handed mouse game on my system. I spent a while combing through all of the options, but was unable to find any solution. I spent some time Googling for solutions, but I don’t think this game ever became popular enough to generate an on-line “community.”

Finally, I took a look at the installation itself and I realized there were *.cfg files, composed in XML, that contained references to controls including MOUSE_0 and MOUSE_1. Without bothering to look at all the setting in detail, I reversed every reference to these variables in two different files. Surprisingly enough, this seems to have no holdouts. Firing up the game, everything seems to play correctly. Absent a simple in-game interface, this would be the way to go. +1 for the developers.

Now I was ready to play the game.

In the review that I linked to above, the game comes under some heavy criticism. If I had read that review before I bought the game, I probably would have kept my $3. The criticism there pretty much aligns with my own experience, with a few notable deviations.

First of all, if you just figure that you know how to play RTSs and start playing (yes, I did this), you’re going to get walloped. Even experienced players are going to need to start with the tutorial campaign to understand what needs to be micromanaged and what needs to be delegated.

The tutorial scenario wasn’t bad, but it is pretty much without challenge. There is no actual battle to “win” using the demonstrated tactics. The scenario only takes you through how to use the controls for each unit. An intermediate version, where your hand is held while using different units in combination, might have been a nice addition.

The tutorials also highlight some fiddliness of the game. Even the simple selection of units can be difficult. Often I have to forgo clicking on them and “rubber band” whatever unit I’m trying to control, which itself doesn’t work when units are bunched together. Similarly it is difficult to be sure that you are selecting the target which you intend. To give one example, I’ll look at the part of the game where one manages the depletion of fuel and ammunition. An ammunition truck is provided in-game to transport resupply to fighting units. To make this work, you select the ammunition truck (left-click) and then the unit that requires supply (right-click). But just as selecting the ammunition truck can be hard, so can selecting the target, meaning I’m never entirely sure that my order is going to do something until after having waited to see if the ammo actually arrives at its destination.

Then there are other pieces that I’m not sure if I just don’t know how to use them or if they don’t work. Parked there next to the ammunition truck is a medical truck. The manual states “[t]hose who are seriously wounded lose the ability to move and shoot, and remain still in their places waiting for medical assistance.” Medical assistance, again per the manual, can be rendered by regular units or the medical truck. However, there is no command to order the truck to provide such medical assistance. I’ve also never witnessed that my injured soldiers are somehow recovering from their injuries. Is it working? Would it work if I knew how to do it right? Who knows.

While struggling with one of the early scenarios of the campaign, I have to admire the faithfully-dreary reproductions of 1960s mass housing. It’s almost as depressing as the nuclear war itself.

The linked review explains how the AI is instantly-deadly under certain circumstances. A unit which is creeping forward is suddenly blown up. By something. You now have no idea who shot at you or from where. The only way to find out is to move another unit forward to get blown up and hope the shooter is revealed. Maybe there is a certain realism to this, but it is not a fun game. The worst culprit may be, as the review explains, the enemy artillery. In this case, once your unit is spotted, artillery fire rains down until your unit is pulverized. In this case, there is no returning fire as the spotting unit is likely not even shooting and thus can’t be spotted unless you roll right up on top of it.

The tutorial teaches that one of the keys to this is to command your units to advance under an “auto-engage” setting. It’s not the default, so you have to be meticulous in making sure to choose the setting before each command. In this way, you leave it to the computer AI to identify and engage targets, which would otherwise destroy you before you realize what’s going on. On the other hand, when you are on the offensive, the enemy AI will still have a jump on the friendly AI, and can probably destroy you anyway.

After about 5 tries and realizing there was an “easy” setting, I manged to muddle my way through the first battle of the campaign.

Fortunately, there is one more setting that said review didn’t mention. The default setting puts friendly and enemy units on equal “toughness.” There is an easiest setting that gives the advantage to the player. For me, this tilting is necessary to win battles from the offensive (and also makes them a cake-walk while on defense). I can now move into the range of enemy fire and, while absorbing a few hits, identify the enemy and organize a plan to destroy him.

Another welcomed design feature is that the speed setting is very adjustable. By default, the motorized vehicles can whip around pretty fast and so slowing down the clock helps a non-RTS guy like me to take it all in better. Even still, I end up playing the game by hitting pause every time something happens. “Giving orders while paused” is a feature I pretty much require to make an RTS playable, but when I spend more of my time paused than running, I begin to question how much “fun” I’m having.

The strategic interface. Key positions are captured on the way to taking the operational objective (the circle with the arrows). Each “tank” is a Kampfgruppe of mixed units, the total being worth a platoon or two.

Fun or not, there is something oddly addictive about this gameplay. With the speed toned down, the balance on “easy,” and with constant hits of the pause button, I can make my way through, and even win, the scenarios. The offensive scenarios present themselves as puzzles that need to be solved. Given the initial unit mix, it seems like the only units that count are your main battle tanks. You move them forward to identify enemy locations and then hope they kill the enemy before he kills you. Sometimes there is a chance to bring up some artillery to help out, but do that within the range of the wrong enemy unit and you’ll lose it within a few seconds.

The connection to any kind of reality is tenuous and occasionally weird. Artillery on hills, as an example, remains unspotted by units on the ground (that’s a hill in the lower right corner of the middle screenshot). There’s a logic to it all, but as I said, the net result seems more to represent realistic factors rather than in any way simulate them. The game makes much ado about its physics simulation, but with the extremely short engagement distances (and even shorter spotting distances), it is not really a “simulation” of anything. It is just the way that spotting, trajectories, and damage are calculated internally. Now as I said, virtually any of the game’s mechanics can be rationalized as another effect of the nuclear devastation. If you are so inclined, you are invited to accept the game world as it comes.

As a simulation of anything to do with Cold War combat circa 1963-4, we don’t have much to work with here. As a pure RTS with some 60s period chrome, it has its charm. But most of the charm is drowned in the confusing interfaces and the walls of badly-translated text.

I See the Works of Gifted Hands

Tags

Age of Enlightenment, Ayn Rand, Bioshock, console port, FPS, John D. Rockefeller, left-handed mouse, objectivisim, Rush

Once again, I start my experience with a new (to me) game with a rude surprise.

After installing the game Bioshock and clicking on the opening menu, nothing. The mouse buttons had reversed from my left-handed mouse set up. Fortunately, the actual control which takes place through the mouse buttons (namely using your weapon) can be reprogrammed, so I could switch, for in-game use, to the natural (for me) set up. For the menus, however, I’ll just have to get used to it because, as a whole, the mouse is not configurable.

Having got used to that, I started the game with its opening plane crash. I hit the water and emerged, apparently, deaf.

There is a problem with the game installation, not just for me, that the sound doesn’t work. The sound during the intro worked fine, but once I was into the game engine – no sound. I tried fiddling with the settings to no avail and finally did a search on-line. Turns out, if you have a microphone connected to your computer, then the sound works. If not (at least with my setup), then nothing. There may be other ways to fix it, but I’d rather not dink around with settings if I can just plug in a web cam while I play.

Of course, The Zuck can listen in on me now, but its the price I pay for playing games.

It also turns out that the game is a lot spookier with the sound on. It’s an impressive game overall. Nice graphics rendered in the Unreal Engine (version 2.5, if you are counting) and, with the graphics/sound combination, an immersive horror movie ambiance. It may be fifteen-year-old good-looking, but when you’re used to looking at old games on an old computer, that’s still good-looking in my book.

Lookin’ good. By the way, there is a lot of water.

Bioshock imagines the world of 1960 wherein a wealthy industrialist creates an underwater city that will allow him and like-minded thinkers to prosper without the heavy hand of government. You, the player, start the game in a plane that is about to crash. You manage to get free of the wreckage and find yourself in the ocean near one of the access points to this city below the sea. Entering, you find that something has gone wrong and the city is in chaos. You need to navigate the city (Rapture), figure out what is going on, and (of course) survive.

The release of the game in August 2007 was a combined Xbox 360 and PC release. While making it technically not a console port, it was clearly developed targeted to the console world. Some initial criticism of the PC version, particularly around the SecurROM copy protection, probably bent initial sales towards the console version. Current sales, in excess of 4 million units, may well favor the PC.

I’ve never been a big player of the First Person Shooter genre. Up to this point, I can probably count the number of FPS games I’ve played on one hand. While I spent significant time with a couple of them, the only one I think I’ve ever “finished” is Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. So in many ways, what is old hat to the rest of the world is still new to me.

That in mind, I can see the DOOM roots of Bioshock’s gameplay. The gradual upgrade of weapons, the scattered first-aid kits – its a variation on a well-used theme. The trick for much of the genre is that the game has to shepherd the player through, essentially, a linear progression of events while at the same time making the player feel he is in a fully-developed world where anything is possible.

In DOOM, there wasn’t much of a story behind it. There are these monsters all around and if you kill them all, you’ll find your way to another level where there are – more monsters. Once I moved on to Allied Assault, there is a story story that starts to mask the linear nature of the gameplay. It took me a couple of deaths and replays to realize just how linear the game still was. Until then, I actually felt that I was rushing forward to complete my mission, fighting in some corner of the World War II. A game like Bioshock adds yet another layer, with a complex story underlying the shooting and the missions. There is a mystery to be solved. Who are these people and what went wrong? And what does that have to do with me?

True story. When I first started playing DOOM (handed to me by the same guy who gave me Civilization II), I spent a lot of time on the first level. It took me a while to get a handle on being able to find, shoot, and kill the zombie/marines. Then, at some point, I managed to clear the level and find all the hidden goodies. What I seemed to be unable to do was to find the door to the next level. I’m not even sure I knew there was next level, exactly, but I was pretty sure that the game wasn’t over. The funny thing was that, because the idea of a first-person view of a 3D, explorable world was so novel to me, I spent far more than you’d think possible simply wandering around that first level. Eventually I found the door to the next level, and progressed through a few more, but I may have had my most fun with that initial, introductory level, where I could enjoy the scenery and not worry about the game being too hard.

Similarly with Bioshock, as the game ramps up in difficulty I’m worried that it could come at the expense of enjoying the environment. Fortunately, the “easy” level that I’m now playing on seems quite manageable even for a non-FPS player with naturally slow reflexes.

Hacking the control system of some Rapture machinery.

One interesting aside in that environment that I’ve included in the above screenshot. One of the minigames is the ability to hack the control systems of various pieces of machinery. Entering that game, you are displayed what appears to be a sort of hydraulic computer. More ambiance, subtly placed to amuse those who look for it.

As the backstory goes, Rapture’s founder Andrew Ryan, left regular American society some time in the 1940s. In 1949, back in the real world, a computer was constructed using hydraulic logic circuitry (MONIAC) as dedicated economic simulator. One must imagine, I suppose, that Rapture’s development into the 1960s, isolated from the rest of the world, has perfected computer design much faster than on the surface (obvious, we have intelligent, autonomous machines about), but followed a completely different path from the surface’s electronics evolution.

Point being, it is a good game and an engaging world in which the game takes place.

Inspirational/Demotivational

Th origin of the Bioshock concept came when project director Kevin Levin was visiting Rockefeller Plaza. He took the art deco style of the plaza and the statue of Atlas that resides there and began to build the game around it. The story of Andrew Ryan is very loosely based on John D. Rockefeller and his private funding to create Rockefeller Center. In game terms, that turned into Andrew Ryan’s construction of the underwater city of Rapture as a Galt’s Gulch stand-in.

It is worth noting that this theme-epiphany merely put the chrome icing on an already baked cake. Levin, a key player on the System Shock 2 team, had been working on a sequel to that game. Already developed was the three-way mechanic. The first leg of the trio are the low-level attackers, always after you and, while easy to kill, also carrying a valuable resource. Next is a defenseless harvester, who collects the resource. The third is a powerful protector that exist only to guard the harvesters.

Nonetheless, reviews of the game (which were very positive) often focused on the political dimensions of the game. In interviews I’ve seen, Levine has made statements about drawing from works such as Atlas Shrugged, 1984, and A Brave New World. But one of these things is not like the other. While dystopian art often (perhaps necessarily) draws on the dystopian works that preceded it, with Atlas Shrugged, the script is flipped. The dystopian portion of Atlas Shrugged is caused by government intervention. It is Ayn Rand’s proxy and heroine of the story, Dagny Taggart, along with her friends that are out to save the world. In Bioshock, Ayn Rand’s proxy, Andrew Ryan, has created the dystopia. So far, so artistically-licensed.

The press, however, glommed on to the anti-Rand angle with a gusto. As I said, the “political” component of the game was praised and the relationship to Atlas Shrugged was emphasized in many of the written reviews. The first article or two I read, back when the game was new, lead me to believe it was actually a straight telling of the Rand story.

Atlas Shrugged is ripe for ridicule. Upon its release, it received many negative reviews both for its writing and for the content. Even positive reviews admitted that the book was “no literary giant.” It is an extraordinarily long book consisting of unfathomably long soliloquies. Despite all that, it was immediately popular. Three days after its publication, it was #13 on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Within a few months, it had risen to its peak slot, #3. The publication of the novel also launched, for Ayn Rand, a life of expounding up the them of the book as a new philosophical theory. Throughout the 1960s, she gave lectures and published newsletters endeavoring to develop Objectivism as an influential philosophy.

I, personally, have a hard time taking the “scholarly” component of Rand’s work too seriously. Attempting to derive all human interaction as laws formed from first principles doesn’t seem to be a productive activity, particularly when few are going to agree with that derivation in the first place. While many of the ideas are sound, and find broad acceptance among libertarians, the various Objectivist groups somtimes seem to elevate interpersonal drama over actually improving society.

I don’t know how much one should really blame Levin for this. It is an easily defensible proposition to say that if a John Galt were to form a Galt’s Gulch, it would become a utopian paradise but if an Andrew Ryan were to form a similar Rapture, the result could be a societal and technological collapse. Some folks on the development team may have relished skewering Rand more than others, but I’m not sure that the game is explicitly saying Libertarianism = Somalia.

That said, Bioshock was released in 2007 (I know, I said that already). In that same month, it became apparent to the world that the subprime lending market was in serious trouble. In September, the Federal Reserve began lowering interest rates in an attempt to stave off crisis and in October the Bush administration announced a program to assist subprime borrowers. Following both of these announcement, there was a huge spike in purchases of Atlas Shrugged. So huge was this renaissance that the book hit the #1 Literature and Fiction spot Amazon.com in April of 2009.

Within this new world of Tea Partiers and anti-Obama sentiment, it would seem like a mass-media attack on laissez-faire capitalism was just what the Obamacare-funded doctor ordered. Before the backlash election of 2010, it seemed that if I mentioned libertarian politics, I first had to explain that I wasn’t talking about the John Birch Society. Post 2010? I recall hearing a teachers’ union activist outside a polling place railing about how Republicans were bad enough, but at least you could deal with them. “But those Libertarians!!!”

Will less government turn Galt’s Gulch into Rapture or turn America into Somalia? Do even the most zealous of progressive activists really believe that? I have to doubt it. My guess is it is simply political rhetoric meant to influence the less committed who, nevertheless, might take their side with the right prodding. Particularly in that context, the glee that one might greet a mass-market media anti-Capitalist indoctrination makes a lot of sense, if you are a reporter on the left.

But as it always must, that pendulum may be again swinging the other way.

The events at the end of the aughts made common cause between many conservatives and libertarians. All could largely agree that Obamacare, Federal Debt, massive stimulus, etc., were what needed to be stopped in order to save the country. Whether one came about that through American tradition, a belief in free markets, the Non-Aggression Principle, or “A is A” seemed fairly immaterial.

Recently I’ve seen a couple of conservative attacks on Libertarianism as an inferior basis for guiding principle, vis-à-vis conservatism.This is not so out-of-the-ordinary. Even at its best, the alliance is an uneasy one. Add to that the surge in third party support as a result of the 2016 election, and conservatives start to see a threat in Libertarian candidates throwing close elections to the Democrats.

This past weekend, I read an article in the Wall St. Journal* attacking the Enlightenment which, to me at least, is a new one. The article is meant as a riposte to a new book by Steven Pinker and a year-old editorial** by David Brooks, the latter criticizing the Brexit movement and the political support for Donald Trump. This is the first I’d encountered, second hand as I did, the argument that The Donald and Brexit are anti-Enlightenment movements. Such an thesis, if I am understanding it, is that modern conservatism no longer has its roots in the Enlightenment Age which founded this country, but that it must be the progressive left which defends this foundation of the modern world.

Of course I’m reading a lot into some specific arguments and generalizing the sentiment, which has its dangers. The point is not to set up a strawman just to knock it down. However, this argument from the left is merely and extension of the Science! exclamations; the assertion that conservatives are fundamentally anti-science and anti-logic. That is, I think I see a coherent part of a larger narrative.

The counterargument in the Journal claims that when pinning all that is good onto the lapel of the Enlightenment you are, quite simply, wrong. In what, in some other political climate, might take the form as an urge toward moderation, the article describes how the glories attributed to the Enlightenment have their roots in pre-Enlightenment conservatism; “a blend of tradition and skepticism.” While America’s Enlightenment experiment produced 200+ years of prosperity and happiness, France’s did not turn out so well. (Echos of the Galt’s Gulch versus Rapture outcomes here). The author (Yoram Hazony) follows the logic of Enlightenment thinkers through the French Revolution, Karl Marx’s theories, and the massive slaughter of Communism.

I guess I am too underdoctrinated in leftist theory to automatically translate a critique of Kant, Descartes, and Locke into a knock against feminism, linguistic philosophy, or other standards of the left academic elite. What I do see within Hazony’s criticism, however, is a reflection of several of the libertarian philosophies, including Objectivism. Furthermore, it would seem that Libertarianism is much more the heir to the Enlightenment than Progressivism. Even the Brooks article cites Marxism and the governments of Lenin, Stalin and Mao as an anti-Establishment force.

So is this actually a criticism of libertarians? Or more of liberals? How about just of Pinker and Brooks, and one shouldn’t read too much between the lines? For myself, my mind immediately jumped to those other critiques of libertarians as unsuitable allies for the conservative cause.

She was low down and trifling and she was cold and mean. Kind of evil make me want to grab my sub machine.

After all this cogitating, I come back to the thought that maybe I should take Levine and his creation on face value. Maybe he has just developed a narrative that combine various vintage, dystopian stories into something new for his video game. Maybe all these political layers were created by the reviewers and commentators, who wanted to see more to it than there is. Playing the game, I am not overwhelmed by moralizing***. Yes, there is a backstory, but I’m more focused on shooting my enemies while trying to solve the mysteries than mull over the role of government in society.

*The Wall St. Journal articles are generally behind a paywall. In this case, I was able (using Google) to get a version that is available in its entirety, without a subscription.  The link, above, is that result. If that doesn’t work, perhaps Googling the article name would work. It is called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, not to be confused by the book with the same name.

**The New York Times payroll can also be pretty strict. The same caveats apply from the previous footnote.

***The Little Sister mechanic (see last screenshot) in the game is, in fact, an attempt to introduce morality into the game. The play must make a choice (SPOILER ALERT) as to whether to kill or save the little girls in the game. In saving them, you forgo some of the reward. But will doing the “right” thing be better in the long run?

Benevolence of the Butcher

Tags

Adam Smith, city builder, Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, left-handed mouse, Patrician II, Patrician III, Patrician IV

The game Patrician II was released in 2000. It came at a time of popularity for trading games.

The favorite setting for such games seemed to be the Caribbean and the colonial period. The various towns in the Caribbean, controlled by their colonial masters, provided an economy connecting by shipping. You played as a ship’s captain, capable of “buying low, selling high” to make a steady income transporting goods between nodes. This was integrated with a possible career as a pirate, either stealing goods from merchants or engaging in the various colonial wars as a privateer. Sid Meier created his Pirates! in 1987, but by 2000 there were a number of similar games based the then-modern “strategy” interface.

Patrician II was a variation on the theme that moved the setting to the north of Europe during the 1300s. Obviously, it is a sequel. The original Patrician was a similarly-themed game, but with a very different looking interface, released in 1992. I’ve never actually played it. The focus on Northern Europe means you now are one of a number of competing merchants in the Hanseatic League cities of Germany, the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The open warfare of the Caribbean is gone, but pirates remain in play. Just not for the player.

In 2003, Patrician III came out in the U.S. The Patrician series was developed in and original targeted to Germany. What was released as Patrician III in the U.S. was actually an expansion to the Patrician II release in Germany. Patrons (heh) not paying attention could easily be deceived into thinking they had a new game on their hands, whereas at least one review described it as a glorified patch. Looking back some 15-18 years later, however, it is the Patrician III release that we consider relevant.

So how does the game hold up?

Games like Patrician III promised to be a departure from the RTS fare of the day. Still played in “real time,” there is copious room for leisurely decision making (at least for the most parts of the game). The “build buildings to construct units to conquer territories” is jettisoned in favor of the economic underpinnings. This means that the martial “theme” of most games is replaced with a more peaceful structure. Being by and for Germans, it has a unique look and feel that I will always associate with the German-produced games circa 2000.

The “game” is in the model that underlies the system as much as it is in the player interaction. There are several layers of interaction. First is that dynamic market model, where prices rise and fall with the law of supply and demand. Cities sell cheaply what they produce and can pay high prices for what they demand. Arbitrage between the comparative advantages among cities is what allows you to make a steady profit. But this is mitigated by the fact that you aren’t the only trader in the northern seas. Between the time when you see a shortage (e.g. that lack of whale oil in Lubeck) and when you actually go and collect those goods to sell them, an AI opponent may have already supplied the needed product and reduced the opportunity for profit.

The basic interface. The ship is in port. Trade can be either with between the ship and town, or the ship and office.

The second level is the interaction between the town and the player. Townspeople respond to the availability of goods, or lack thereof, by coming to or leaving a town. Thus, keeping the full range of goods in supply has the effect of nurturing the town and growing the population. That population is divided between the poor, wealthy, and middle class, all of which respond to different incentives and goods. As you please the people, your reputation in the town also can grow. This can mean the prestige of “promotions” or inclusion in the town government. In this, he game borrows a bit from the “city builder” genre. Your cities are populated by little sims-like people, that can be clicked on for color commentary. Keeping all of them happy is the key to city growth.

Yet another level is that you can build the supply chain infrastructure. While the town and your competitors are building structures, you can too. So not only can you profit off of trading but you can help drive the market and profit from the production end as well. Similarly, as you grow your town, you are also growing the consumption end of the equation. You can further support the population by creating additional housing for them. Going further, you could expand beyond your original towns into others.

Once you shift your focus from trading to building, you’ve also got to refocus your trading. In order to build a building, you need a sizeable supply of the raw materials (bricks, wood, etc) to construct that building. You can always simply buy those materials on the local market, but the law of supply and demand says if you suddenly make a massive purchase on the open market, you’ll pay through the nose. So your ships need to be changing their focus from turning a profit to one of gathering those needed supplies from the four corners of the Baltic Sea, thus bringing down the average price.

One final piece to the game draws from pedigree of the pirate game genre. As I said, there are pirates in the Baltic and North Seas as well. When they set upon your ship, you are put into a real-time, sailing game where you manage your ships sails and cannon. At the time it came out, there were a number of games trying to perfect the Age of Sail experience, and this has the components common to that effort. You have a range of different armaments, each having their own reload times. You need to be aware of the importance of wind gauge. As you progress in the game you gain access to ship upgrades that increase speed, maneuverability, and firepower. In the end, though, the naval combat piece of this game underwhelms; not only in retrospect, but it was considered the weak point at the time. It is a departure from the rest of the game, transforming a leisurely and thoughtful process into one where you are now forced to click-click-click over and over until you win or lose the battle.

Pirate fight clicking aside, it’s a model that is complex enough that it would seem a player can only grasp small snapshots of it at any given time. So, perhaps, given a handful of favorite goods, you could learn to recognize the right price points to buy and sell, getting pretty efficient at moving that product around. Or you focus on production and consumption of a particular set of goods in your home town, enhancing that ability. It seems unlikely that anyone could keep it all in their head at any one time. So the model is complex enough to be just out of the player’s grasp, at least in its entirety.

Harder than it looks.

The result is a game that is strangely addictive. You might wonder how much fun it can be, buying pig iron at 956 and selling at 1415, and then repeating that process over and over. But once you get going, it is difficult to stop. Maybe just one more port of call before calling quits for the night turns into just five more, or ten more, or twenty. I think I played a lot of this when it was new, and it remains addictive.

Facelift

Ten years on, the original developer was out of business. Enter the developer Kalypso (of the Tropico series, among others) who purchased the intellectual property and developed a new version of the game, I would assume using their Tropico 3 engine.

The opening screen. It does look pretty.

Right from the starting gate, things go bad. The first red flag was when Steam started to install the game, a pop-up warned that there was a product key that needed to be entered later. This turned out to be fairly seamless, although I recall having a problem with another installation. But it is a warning that there is a sort of double DRM involved with the purchase, both the Steam system itself and the the self-rolled DRM from the developer.

Having passed that hurdle, some button (hard to read, as it was fighting with the Steam popups) said something about installing an update from within the Patrician configuration system. I’m assuming this was just whatever patch was pushed through by Steam, so I said OK. But then it required that I enter an email account and password.

So now I’m looking at DRM level 3. Not only do I have it on Steam, and had to enter my product code, but the game is unplayable unless I register for Kalypso account “to receive product information!” What am I going to do? I signed up for the account, got my confirmation, and it finally allowed me to see the “play” button.

So far so bad, but the worst is yet to come.

I get to the main menu and nothing is working, and I realize why. The right-handed mouse configuration (I use a left-handed mouse) is hard-coded into the game. There are some minimal reconfiguration options available, but nothing to remap keys or correctly configure the mouse. I can tell now this game won’t be long for my system.

So we finally can get to the game. From appearances, this is the same game as Patrician III, with the primary update being to the interface. One assumes there are some difference in the events and economics engine as well, but I would also assume that this is nothing game-changing. The interface is “modernized.” The “table of numbers” style interface in the original game is replaced with more icons and graphics. International marketing of games does favor graphics over text, so the impetus for this is clear. The result is less so.

The interface looks nicer, but doesn’t work so nice. Instead of click-to-buy, purchasing is done through holding down and moving a slider. Not fun, especially with the mouse buttons reversed.

The graphics and updated interface seems to keep more information hidden. In the old game, the market conditions were readily available just looking at the screen (see the topmost screenshot to compare and contrast). Goods with short supply or high demand show a large gap between buy and sell prices. Clicking on the price to buy (or sell) seems intuitive and natural. Contrast to that above. There is now only a single price (which may be a difference in modeling – I haven’t got out the manual), so until I learn “the market” I have no way of knowing that price is high or low. Dragging the slider is awkward and easy to make a mistake. The icons will also take some learning, now that beer isn’t “beer” but a picture that may or may not be so obvious at first. Finally, notice that unlike the original, there is a slider to show the rest of the market goods. Whereas the original allowed to player to see the entire market at one glance, the Patrician IV player is forced to scroll up and down just to get the full picture.

Patrician IV lacks the tutorial that began Patrician III. That may be a factor in the longer learning curve, but with the original once I got into it, I felt I had a handle right away on how to do everything that I needed to do. With Patrician IV, the interface seems harder to grasp. Especially since almost half of my clicks are with the wrong mouse button, I end up confusing myself more as I go along. Where is that button to go out to the “world” view? I know I found it once, but I forget where it was. Some of this would be overcome with some playing time, but as I said, this one is not going to be staying on my hard drive.

One feature I stumbled across that does look like an improvement is better auto-management of trade routes. At some point, chasing every ship around the North will get tedious and moving to the game’s next level (politics and such) would benefit from pushing the lower-level stuff onto the computer. I’m not going to be playing long enough to get there, but it looks like a good addition. I also wonder how much improved the pirate-fighting interface is after ten years, but again I dread trying to manage a mouse-heavy fight with the buttons reversed.

Overall, the promise that this game held out wound up being majorly disappointing. My only consolation is that I got it with a really, really deep discount.

Vote for Me and I’ll Set You Free

One review that I looked at (of Patrician IV, although it probably applies across the board)  said that the best part of the game is at the highest levels – when you’ve built up enough power and influence to enter the political game. There are new features to play games of intrigue against your rivals. In addition, the market itself can become a weapon. Want to destabilize a mayor of some other city? How about sailing in and buying up all the meat, driving his market into chaos and causing riots in the streets? That review, however, pointed out the downside that you’ve got to play through hours of “leveling up” to get to that part of the game.

In 2013, Crusader Kings II entered this historical space with a new DLC called The Republic. It allows players to game as part of a merchant republic rather than a feudal hierarchy. While Venice is probably your key player in this regard, Lübeck and the Hanseatic League are also one of the playable factions. However, true to the Crusader Kings scope, you do not play as a merchant with a handful of ships. Instead, you lead one of five merchant families who are all attempting to expand their influence in the burgeoning markets of Northern Europe. Essentially, you start out as the end-game “Patrician,” already active in politics.

Management at a much higher level. Things are about to go very wrong.

Rather than controlling a county, the player’s base is a really nice house somewhere in Lübeck. The plus is that you are protected from envious counts in neighboring territories from coming to conquer your palace – it commands no territory. The down side is that, well, it commands no territory. While you can upgrade your palace, it is just a matter of pay-the-money and wait. There is no opportunity to rise through the ruling class by obtaining titles. In addition, each merchant family can building trading posts in eligible cities with which they will trade. For the Hansa, these are coastal cities in Northern Europe. Other merchant republics have different rules, including land-based trade routes. These too are pay-the-money-and-wait affairs. Of course it all interacts; more trade posts means more income which means more prestige which means the ability to control more trade posts.

The five patrician families also elect one as a Lord Mayor of Lübeck, allowing that player to also control the county, in a slightly more traditional style of play. Election has to do with building up prestige, which comes mostly with age, and being the most popular at election time (when the previous Lord Mayor dies). Again it becomes mostly a waiting game. As a side complaint, I did get myself stuck in a glitch of sorts the first time I took held the higher office. Having won the election, I still remain mortal. Upon death, one would presume, I again take over the merchant family as my own heir while another more prestigious patrician wins the next election as Lord Mayor. The game seemed to have a lot of trouble with the succession, losing track of the heir and deciding that, in fact, I had no successor and the game must be over. With lots of saving and reloading, I did manage to get past it. It seems an obvious bug, so perhaps it will be repaired soon enough (if it hasn’t already).

I’ve mentioned it before that when it comes to the standard Crusader Kings, and Europa Universalis as well, it often seems to pay to do as little as possible. Avoiding wars, grooming your family, and trying to increase income is a lower risk way of slowing gaining power. Pouring money into frequent wars was generally a bad strategy historically and that can often show up in the game. But avoiding all the fighting and backstabbing also means a less exciting game. The Republic seems to take that to another level.

As a merchant prince, there is little productive to do except invest in your operations and slowly watch them grow. While there is the occasional fighting, removing the incentive to capture titles through warfare means that battles are high risk, low reward. There is some chance of gaining skill and prestige, of course, but there is also the chance of being killed or maimed in battle. That means thinning out the number of heirs, which also hurts on the operations side. The ability to control more trade routes is, among many things, a function of how many males their are in the family.

In the screenshot above I am about to be thrust into a much more tenuous position. The early 1300s (in game, at least) saw the Black Plague sweeping through Northern Europe. As a result, I lost a good chunk of the male members of the my merchant family. Following this, I find myself playing on the thin edge of extinction. I seem only to manage to keep the last male member of my line alive long enough to have a single male child, setting up a decade or two of new succession crisis while we wait to see if he can produce an heir before dying. While there is a game here, it is a long game played over generations rather than in weeks or months. Building up a trading empire ship-voyage-by-ship-voyage in Patrician III just seems to connect with the period a lot better than sitting around waiting for one’s wife to get pregnant.

So surprisingly, it is the oldest of the games that still has the most addictive qualities. Just last night I was up an extra hour making just “one more” trade before I went to bed.  It’s a different gaming style than most of what is successful in the gaming market, but at least for me, it works. Crusader Kings inclusion of merchant republics is a nice change of pace from the original, but also doesn’t really compete with the original in its appeal.

And as to Patrician IV? Frankly the mere fact that it exists makes me a little angry.

Right Is Good; Left Is Evil

Tags

1-line review, actor's age, BBC, Child Ballads, Francis James Child, Howard Pyle, Kevin Costner, left-handed mouse, Robin Hood, Robin Hood - The Legend of Sherwood, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, taxation is theft, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

A friend used to say that. It was during Dungeon and Dragons games when he would come to a fork in the way. “Let’s go right,” he’d say, “because right is good and left is evil.”

I doubt that it every made a lick of difference during those games. But for me, when it comes to mouse buttons, I wholeheartedly endorse the phrase.

I am right handed, but I have all of my computers configured for a left-handed mouse. I’ve found this to be a very effective solution for staving off carpel tunnel syndrome while engaging in extensive computer use. I don’t know why it works – and maybe it is 2 parts psychosomatic to 1 part physiology – but it does.

But not all games support a left handed mouse. I’ve not tried to be analytical about it, but it seems like there is a particularly bad period in the early aughts. Before that and games will, assuming they have been adapted to run on a modern system, simply carry through the system configurations. Move closer to today, and games are more tightly integrated with the operating system, also avoiding gaps. In that middle is where the concept (first) of using hotkeys to enhance gaming and (second) allowing the reconfiguration of those hotkeys to the user’s pleasure came in. Perhaps it has to do with the nature of the programing to go straight to the keyboard and mouse and redirect the inputs, but configuration of the mouse is often left out. The more intensive the configuration needed for a style of game, it seems, the more likely that the mouse buttons are hard-coded to the righty mouse. So Flight Sims, CRPGs and First Person Shooters from a certain era probably have the best chance of being wrist unfriendly for me.

The problem does not skip over strategy games, though. I’ve mentioned the Shrapnel offerings before. I will remain eternally bitter over the strategy game Salvo!, which was exactly the game I wanted to play when I bought it (tactical Age of Sail). It was also unplayable for me. Not only does it hard code the right-handed mouse, but the UI is filled with mouse-down gesturing. One or two games in, and I was afraid I’d have to give up computers for good. (Much better now, though).

Da ‘Hood

Shift gears for a moment, and let’s go back to those early aughts. The game Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood was released in 2002. It rode on a wave of the, by that time, popular “stealth” genre of game play. I recall being introduced to stealth games with the 1998 release of Thief: The Dark Project. At least in the reviews I was reading, Thief was touted as a “more intelligent” alternative to the first person shooter genre. Rather being the fastest with your click and twitch, success would flow from careful forethought and NOT engaging in the high speed slaughter of your enemies. Also in 1998, an RTS version of the genre was available in the form of the game Commandos.

By 2002, much had advanced in graphics and game play, particularly in the RTS genre. Robin Hood came out, was fairly well received, and moved into a 2nd or 3rd place spot on my game wishlist. I don’t remember what kept it from the top, but I do recall giving it some serious thought, and then a pass, a number of times over. It has an aesthetic that I’ve come to associated with being “European.” Or perhaps, to be more specific, German. The graphics portraying medieval Europe are, to my mind, very attractive. (It’s a similar style to what I recently praised in Legends of Eisenwald). The game wasn’t as cutthroat as some of that time’s more popular titles, whether from the “real time tactics” genre or the “stealth” genre. The developers promised more of an emphasis on “fun” rather than “challenge.”

I never did wind up getting it, though. I’m not entirely sure why, but there it is. Until, that is, some time last year when I found it on sale and finally picked it up.

Imagine my horror when I opened it up and realized that none of the buttons worked because the game is coded to use a right-handed mouse only!

It is a shame the game hates me so much right from the get-go, because the design has a lot going for it. In addition to the aesthetic, which I mention above, it combines features from a number of other genres. First, the “missions” are encapsulated within a strategic layer. For each mission, you choose a subset of Robin’s band to go, and other stay behind, performing various tasks while you are gone. The missions themselves are selected from a map, providing a certain amount of variety along with advancing the game’s story line.

Second, it is one of the early, and good, examples of the “stealth” tactical game. Playing it successfully means avoiding just fighting your way through the levels. The missions have strong puzzle-like elements, where you need to discover the pathways that allow you to sneak past or behind the enemies. Unlike Commandos, where almost immediately I find myself getting stymied by the difficulty, the puzzles seem not only simpler but have more room for trial and error. Even when spotted by the sheriff’s soldiers, it is often possible to run, hide, and make another go at things. In the worst case (and this is on the easiest setting), it is generally possible to forego the stealthy method and fight your way through the level. Points-wise, the player is punished for slaughtering too many of the enemy when a less lethal strategy is available, but it is not an automatic loss.

Despite its age, this is a very attractive game to look at.

A third genre represented is the “pixel hunt” -style puzzles that were popular, particularly at that time. That’s not necessarily a plus in my view, but it does add some variety. After dispatching with all the enemies; the money, extra-arrows, and other goodies are hidden within the terrain. Some screen-hunting is necessary to maximize your haul for a given mission.

The last innovative feature that stood out for me is that, once a character is engaged in fighting, a mouse-gesture based fighting system is activated. It isn’t a necessary part of combat, but adds one more feature – popular at the time – of adding special “moves” to the combat system. As with the last feature, it’s not one I would look for in the games I generally play. In fact, I seem more likely than not to invoke roundhouse smashes that do as much damage to the friendlies surrounding me as to the enemy. As a game-design feature, though, it seems like a nice extra that adds to the appeal of the package.

It all comes together well enough for me to fight through the mouse issue and try a handful of the missions. The right mouse button (the real one, not mine) doesn’t seem to be that important, so just gripping the mouse a little funny and using it as if it were a single-button mouse seems to work OK. It’s alternatively intriguing and frustrating. Intriguing as I notice one special path where I can get through some guards by sneaking around and knocking a them on the heads from behind. Then frustrating as I stumble onto to another guard while trying to manage my clicks and get sucked into a 10 minute cycle of combat, and then carrying away the dead bodies.

Here’s where I’m stacking all the dead bodies. Let me see if it looks any less gruesome from the rooftop.

His Merry Men

All this Robin Hood stuff got me thinking back to my Robin Hood experiences as a child. As far as I remember, I didn’t watch any Robin Hood shows on television. I also don’t think I’ve ever seen the Disney cartoon in its entirety, although I know I’d watched a few scenes of it, probably as part of the Wonderful World of Disney weekly show. My Robin Hood source was part of set of volumes called Children’s Classic Books probably, from what I’ve been able to divine from the internets, from the 1920s. What I recall most vividly were the full-page color illustrations that accompanied the story.

The publisher of this book (I suspect) capitalized on the lack of copyrights on classic works such as this one, taking a well-known publication and, with some minor editing and touch-up, republishing it without any attribution for the original author. This Classic Robin Hood book only has a credit for the illustrations (and also one for the introduction). Since I no longer know where these books are, and the only examples I’m seeing of them are a handful of people trying to pawn off their grandparent’s collections on Ebay, I’m left very much to conjecture about all of this. My suspicion is that my book was based on the 1883 novel, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire by Howard Pyle. I’m currently reading my way through a copy of that so as to relive my childhood.

Pyle’s Robin Hood was very influential, shaping the popular conception of Robin Hood as a children’s tale. His book is written in an odd mix (particularly to modern eyes) of Victorian English, pseudo-Medieval English, and children’s prose. It tones down some of the sinister twists of the source material, making it more palatable as a children’s story. In doing so, he altered the image of Robin Hood as an (albeit lovable) thief and scoundrel to a noble hero, engaging in criminality purely in defense of the underdog in the face of tyranny.

Pyle’s source material is almost certainly Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a compilation of, and commentary upon, the traditional oral storytelling of the UK. I also am reading through some of Volume 3 of that series, which contains a number of the Robin Hood stories as lyrics and often map one-to-one with Pyle’s chapters.

Using the opening story, How Robin Hood Came To Be An Outlaw in the Pyle book, corresponding to Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham in Child’s, we can see an example of this. By the 50s and 60s, a common explanation of how Robin Hood became an outlaw is that he was outlawed by the evil powers-that-be to cheat him out of his inheritance. He is forced to join up with, and then lead, outlaws of Sherwood Forest in order to battle these obviously bad powers who are subverting the cause of justice. When reading Pyle’s description of how he became an outlaw, it is far less pure. Robin, at the age of 15, is goaded into illegally shooting one of the King’s deer on a bet. When his tormentors refuse to pay him, the situation escalates into the murder of the man who wagered (and reneged on) the debt. Because the man Robin shoots actually shot first, it may all be justifiable as self-defense. While Robin may be undeserving of the punishment for murder, he is clearly culpable (through his own hot-hotheadedness and pride, if nothing else) in creating the situation which sends him away from polite society.

But that version is far more gentle that the ballad from Child. In that one, having lost the bet to Robin, the band of some 15 foresters not only refuse to pay him, but continue to chide him for his youth and inexperience. They order him to take his bow and get out. Robin, laughing at the irony (he takes up his bow, for sure), slaughters the entire bunch. Subsequently, he may also maim a number of residents of Nottingham who attempt to apprehend him for his mass-killing.

Incidentally, Child is scornful of the attempts to place Robin Hood in a historical context. It was Ivanhoe, in 1819, that connected Robin with King Richard the Lionheart and there were plenty subsequent to that who wished to discover the story’s true origins, based on written records. Child points out that the “scholarly” references to a historical Robin Hood during the reign of Edward I are almost certainly drawn from the ballads, not historical documents. By the time we see actual records of the name “Robin Hood” in a legal context, it is well after the time when we know that the Robin Hood stories were popular. Any reference is probably do to the use of the the name “Robin Hood” as a way to refer, generically, to an outlaw. Any attempt to discover the nature of the “real” Robin Hood is, therefore, pointless, as the stories were likely just stories created to entertain.

Reading through Pyle’s version, I come to a couple of conclusions about my childhood. First, I’m going to guess that the 19th century edit “modernized” the language from what I’m reading now, and probably did so considerably. As written, Pyle’s prose would have been off-putting for me as a young teen. Second, I probably never read this book all the way through. I imagine I spent some time with the images, and probably read some chapters to put those images in context, but I probably took in the book piecemeal. Even if the book was updated to “twenties” language, I don’t think I could have digested it all. Given what I know about my young self, I believe I would have required, at least, some more contemporary styling.

Big Screen, Little Screen

Robin Hood again became a personal interest in 1991, when Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was released. This is the one staring Kevin Costner, at the time on a Hollywood hot streak. It came with a lot of expectations, many of which fell short with its audience. Personally, Sean Connery’s cameo at the end caused me to laugh out loud at the theater. It is hard to explain why, but that seems to summarize the film for me.

 

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: Sean Connery as King Richard? LOL.

a 1-line review

It did, however, reinvigorate the characters and we continue to see takes and retakes on this story to the present day. Another major Hollywood treatment was released in 2010 (with Russell Crow this time), although it was also received pretty negatively. I haven’t seen it.

To try to relive some of the screen treatments of this one, I pulled up two of the older TV series version. The Adventures of Robin Hood ran for four years in the 1950s. It was an English produced, fairly conventional treatment of the matter and was likely iconic for the generations raised on black and white TV. I also watched, or at least I’ve made an honest effort to watch, Robin of Sherwood. This was another English treatment of the show, this time for three seasons in the 1980s.

A fifties action-TV-show is going to fall short of modern expectations and there is practically no way around that. 1950s film-making holds up best when the focus is on drama and dialog. The “teleplay” style of the time makes everything seem a bit flat and confined. I also think I noticed, in one scene, someone bumped into the “castle wall” from the rear causing the whole castle to wobble a bit. It is played with fifties earnestness and style, and can be appreciated if taken within its context.

The second show has not been treated so well by the passing years. Robin of Sherwood seems to have praise lavished upon it from around the internet. A bit of copy that is used for the Amazon review, comes from a Role-Playing gamer’s website.

Robin of Sherwood is, for many people, the definitive modern version of the Robin Hood legend. Moody, atmospheric, superbly written and acted, with a haunting soundtrack by Clannad (later released as the album Legend), it was the inspiration for a generation of British fantasy roleplayers.

I don’t know if 1980’s D&Ders are a reliable source for television reviews. Imagine the typical BBC (circa 1984) camera work backed by an 80s synth soundtrack. Now mix in weird fantasy elements portrayed by cheap props and low-budget special effects. Put the iconic 1980s “male model” in long-haired, fantasy form in the lead and… there you have it, now you don’t have to watch the show.

It is said that this series was the inspiration for the rush of Robin Hoods in the 1990s. I can only imagine that many in the business might have taken a look at the raw material and say “I can do better.”

The moral of the story is that the Robin Hood of the day is a product of the times in which it is made.

Ivanhoe popularized the Norman versus Saxon cultural wars in a context of post Napoleon English-French relations. Another theory is that Scott (a Scot) was attempting to parallel the cultural enmity between the Scots and the descended-from-Normans-English which was prevalent in the politics of Scottish Independence of that time.

Growing up I heard that he “robbed from the rich to give to the poor,” which fit well within the 60s and 70s socialist/communist counter-culture movements. A better read of the Victorian version is more likely characterized as returning the taxes, taken by church and government, to the people from which they stole it. In the early versions in Child’s compilation, Robin Hood is a lovable outlaw that, while not completely disconnected from our modern understanding, is in many ways quite a different person. Rather than engaging in an active redistribution of wealth, it is more of a populist mentality that sees him picking on the privileged and pompous and sparing the simple, hardworking folk. He is admired for his religiosity, particularly his devotion to the Virgin Mary. At the same time, his penchant for murder never seems to wane and yet does little to dent his popularity.

The 90s saw many a Robin Hood treatment, both attempting to get more serious and ridiculing those attempts. It is both an attempt to root the stories in the “gritty realism” that has become popular as a style for historical dramas, while necessarily creating fanciful story lines out of  whole cloth to provide something with the requisite depth for he modern consumer. The Robin Hood story of my adult life has the addition of Muslim/Black characters, the implications of which I will leave to you, my dear reader, to reflect upon.

Bir Gifgafa

Tags

Bir Gifgafa, Command Ops, Divided Ground, left-handed mouse, Steel Panthers, Suez Crisis, The Arab-Israeli Wars, The Star and The Crescent, WinSPMBT

This is part of a series of posts on the Suez Crisis. See here for the first regular post in the series, here for the previous post, and here to go back to the master index.

In the last post I complained that, although the TOAW scenario gives a good overall picture of the encounters in the 1956 war, it does not convey the “feeling” of this fighting, and which would require gaming at a finer level.

Back near the beginning of this series, I dug out my Arab Israeli Wars (the board game) and set up scenario B-1. Apparently, I’m not alone as there are many games that look at that battle, several of them having been directly inspired by the Avalon Hill scenario. The board game is not designed for solitaire play, and this scenario in particular does not lend itself for playing without an opponent. Nevertheless, when I set it up and fiddled around with it for a little bit, it immediate began to look like an Israeli victory.

Being scenario B-as-in-Basic #1, you would think you’d find it a simple, well-balanced scenario suitable for new players learning the game. It does not appear to be this; my impressions of the scenario find it extremely tilted toward the Israelis. See this thread at Board Game Geek for a bit of discussion on the scenario. I suppose it may have another purpose. A section of the design notes begins with a story of an October, 1973 battle where 5 Israeli tanks are sent to engage 40 Syrian T-55s. After 45 minutes (a typical scenario length in this type of game), half of the Syrian tanks were destroyed and the remaining retreated, without a single Israeli loss. One wonders if part of the purpose of B-1 is simply to demonstrate the massive superiority of Israeli armored doctrine, even when “the numbers” suggest an advantage to the other side.

Divided Attention

The first computer version I played was for Divided Ground. As I mentioned in my previous look at Arab Israeli War scenario conversions, these scenarios contain extensive design notes. In those design notes, the author makes a comment that the purpose of his conversions are to implement the board game scenarios. If a player wants good Divided Ground scenarios, either versus the computer or to compete with an opponent, he says they should look to the scenarios supplied with the game. This conversion may be a good example of what he is talking about.

A turkey shoot. Despite the “light tank” designation, the superior gun (and doctrine) of the AMX-13 makes short work of the Egyptian T-34/85s.

The victory conditions, rewarding destruction of the enemy and the success or failure of traversing the board within the allotted time, are reproduced faithfully. But a problem in this conversion seems to be that the computer opponent doesn’t really understand them.

Assuming that the scenario is, in fact, winnable as the Arabs, the key would be to use terrain to ambush the approaching Israeli’s once they are in range. Using such a strategy, the computer version might make it possible for Arab units to remain hidden (via the fog of war feature) until they are close enough to neutralize the range advantage of the Israelis. Instead, the AI Arab player seemed to bunch up his units, leaving them in place to be destroyed at leisure from a distance. Even more glaring, the Arab player dealt with the exit conditions by stacking his units on the exit hexes, making them easy targets once good firing positions were determined.

As Inspired By

Scale Up/Scale Down

Divided Ground

Battlefield size: 8km x 4km
Game length: 1 hour 30 minutes
Unit: Platoon

Steel Panthers: MBT

Battlefield size: 5km x 2.5 km
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Unit: Single vehicle

The Star and the Crescent

Battlefield size: 28km x 19km
Game length: 2 hours
Unit: Single vehicle

 Command Ops 2

Battlefield size*: 40km x 12km
Game length: ~12 hours
Unit: Platoon

Moving on to the Steel Panthers version, we again encounter a scenario “inspired by” the Avalon Hill scenario, rather than being actually based off of it. The mix of tanks are about right, but there are far fewer (owing to the smaller scale). Here terrain doesn’t have the same feel. While the sand and rocky hills are still there, it doesn’t have the “hexside” ridges of the board game.

The inspiration does take one odd form. The map layout is with North to the left and a fairly narrow playing space West-to-East. On the top (that is, West) edge of the map is the Suez Canal, not used in the game. You might recall that the original scenario uses the Suez Canal mapboard to add extra playing space, but the canal features themselves are not playable. The battle took place quite a ways distant from the canal, and it is only in this scenario because the board game must create all of the battles using the same four mapboards.

One other oddity. The battalion commander has a jeep at his disposal. For some reason, when moved, the jeep makes horse noises. Fortunately for my sanity, the jeep got stuck in the sand within the first few minutes of play.

The scenario said to play from the Egyptian side. Maybe I should have paid attention.

The scenario played out much as the Divided Ground. Kills were made at long range with very little own-losses. In a similar way, the enemy bunched up around a couple of victory locations, where they were subsequently destroyed.

I Want to Love You, But…

The 2005 release from Shrapnel Games, The Star and The Crescent promises to be what we’re all looking for here. While primarily focused on later wars, it too has a Bir Gifgafa scenario for 1956. Immediately on start, we notice the increased use of realism in this version. Instead of randomly-generated desert or a reproduction of “Board D,” the scenario is played using a Soviet contour map of the battlefield. Unfortunately, it is a 1980s Soviet map of the battlefield so, for example, it has a airfield that didn’t exist in 1956. A hint of things to come.

The Star and the Crescent itself the fifth game released on that engine, which started with BCT: Brigade Combat Team or BCT: Commander (depending on the version) from 1998. While I didn’t collect ’em all, as they say, I do have several versions of this system. This game system is the one that finally drove me over the edge regarding left-handed mouse issues in gaming. Much of the Shrapnel line has long insisted on making the mouse buttons non-configurable. In this series it was particularly galling to me because the interface is so mouse-click intensive.

Amazingly, there is a particular combination of installations and patches that solves the problem. My computer has both The Star and the Crescent and Air Assault Task Force, installed together and both patched up to the latest post-release versions. Running with both, and then launching the TSatC executable (with the current patch) presents a native windows interface. Launching from the AATF executable presents a custom GUI that defiantly eschews integration with Windows. The mouse buttons are locked, as is the screen resolution. Several times in the past I’ve gotten stuck on that interface, unwilling to try to learn the actual game. Fortunately, this time around, I stumbled upon the workaround.

But once the game starts running, we find other problems. It is not a pretty game, by anyone’s definition. But that’s OK. Pretty isn’t necessarily what we’re after. The game was sold as a hard-core sim for hard-core wargamers, so it must be judged as such. The problem is, again, the user interface. At start, all units are halted and without orders. Trying to assign those order tumbles one into a nightmare-like cycle where orders are given, wait, no they weren’t, try again. There, got it. Nope. Try again.

The blue highlighted in green is the lead company of AMX-13s. The black squares to my NW are the enemy that I dispatched, while losing two of my own (gray squares). The blue squares back up the road to the NE are so far behind because of trouble getting orders. Note the ghost-of-the-future airfield to my South.

Suddenly one vehicle out the unit starts moving… but not the rest. Oops, wrong click – try again.

I suppose I should be spending more time with the written manual. But every time I read the manual, the prose regales me with how easy and intuitive the user interface is, rather than giving me the secret to overcoming its hurdles.

Ultimately, once all the units have the right orders – the desired formation, a path plotted in roughly the right direction, and not halted, subsequent orders become a little easier. It is simpler to modify existing orders than it is to create new ones.

A section from a 1959 US Military map of the Sinai hints at what we are up against. “Very Sharply Undulating” terrain. Another section, closer to the battlefield, describes “Sand Dunes 30 to 45 meters high.”

The simulation certainly does seem to be well done. Modeling looks to be at the level of individual shots from individual vehicles. The control, however, can be per vehicle or at the higher-level commands using formations. The friendly UI isn’t at the level where units can take their own initiative, but the game is best played giving orders at the company level and leaving the computer to execute them. The modeling of the map seems to be well done also. The terrain modeling appears to be at a finer detail than most games at this scale, leaving a battlefield peppered with undulations and providing complex fields of fire to navigate.

Pretty much done. The red Xs are killed enemies and the blue Xs are killed friendlies. My units (the blue armor symbol) are headed towards the end of that objective arrow.

Results were similar to the other three versions of this battle. The Israeli armor dominated the battlefield, dispatching the enemy with minimal friendly losses. Engagement distances were closer than the previous versions, something I attribute to the finer-grained modeling of the terrain. I do also notice the max-range for all tank guns is set at 1600, shorter than in the other games and closer than some of the kills in Steel Panthers.

In digging through the statistics, I came across another issue I have with the scenario. The scenario puts a 90mm gun on the AMX-13. This is an upgrade that the French were rolling out in the 1950s, but if the Israelis had any at the time of the Suez Conflict, it was only one or two. All the information I’ve seen says the light tanks of the 7th Armor Brigade mounted the 75mm gun, sharing it with the M50 Super Shermans.

But wait, there’s more! Just as I was headed into the endzone, one more company of enemy armor appeared. Shouldn’t be an issue.

One big plus I’ll give this to the system. Once I killed a couple of the tanks in the above screen shot, the game ended. As the program described, it had now become impossible for the enemy to achieve its objectives. It saves the player from the unpleasantness of having to run out the clock on a scenario he knows is over.

The single 1956 scenario in this package may not represent the gaming system’s best face, so I’ll give The Star and the Crescent/Air Assault Task Force another look in the future.

Roll Your Own

The final look at this battle was using the editing tools of Command Ops 2 to recreate the situation. For an engine of its complexity, the scenario tools are surprisingly simple to work with. The game’s creator says his intention was that you could produce an interesting scenario in minutes, allowing you (for example) to imagine what a hypothetical meeting engagement between two arbitrary forces would look like. The details can be increased from there. There is a huge latitude for control of the AI (enemy and friendly) by setting the victory locations and this is a method that is vastly simpler than the scripted AI of other products. Under pressure from the users, everything in the engine is editable, allowing us to move from the WWII, Western Front setting to 1956 Egypt.

The most difficult part of the game to create fresh are the maps. Getting them right takes some time and effort. When I first started with some map creation, I was having trouble getting a non-Northern Europe based terrain. I decided to forgo it for this iteration, and used instead a user-created map for the battle of El Guettar.

Adding vehicles for the Arab Israeli War was fairly straightforward.

This was by far and away the best interface experience for playing this battle. I set the unit size for the battle to correspond to the board game/Divided Ground. Commands can be given at any level from that unit on up, including simply commanding the entire force. The typical game length for Command Ops tends to be pretty long. The larger forces and multiple objectives require several distinct planning/execution phases and, at least for me, it takes quite some time to play through. However, a small scenario like this plays out very quickly.

Engaged. Once again, the AI has clumped up their armor, this time at a choke point behind a Tunisian crossing. Judicious use of victory point location placement is what drives the AI in this game.

The battle went mostly as I’d expect. It ended up being a significant loss (although as I was haphazard assigning victory points, calculations of win and loss are probably not meaningful). The kill ratio was somewhat lopsided in favor of the Egyptians, and the Israelis failed to take the bridge. I’m left with a few conclusions about the use of this engine for post-WWII scenarios.

• It is well suited to this time and place. The use of post-WWII equipment was not a stretch for the engine. However, this scenario does show where the limits of this system might be found.

The map seems to be on the larger size for a typical Command Ops battle,  which as I’ve said tend to be multi-day affairs. Take a look the table near the top of this article. Granted the map was oversized for this battle, but we can see that this size battlefield is more like the multiple-hour versions of the battle rather than a multiple-days version (which would pretty much cover the whole war). While this might be the size of an area for an extended operation for a airborne assault force (using primarily foot movement) against a fortified defense, things are different when it comes to more modern mobile warfare.

As mobile warfare, including helicopters, continues to advance and modeling requires taking into account the improvements in communication and sensors in the 1960s and beyond, I foresee hitting big holes in what Command Ops can portray. And yet, there may continue to be a niche. Cold War era conflicts like the Iran-Iraq War also were also throwbacks to World War II weapons and technologies, so the engine might be a match for some other, later battles.

• While creating the map may be the hardest part of the process, it may also be the most important when in comes to immersion and the fun factor. In this version of the scenario, failure to take the crossing seems almost meaningless. In the real battle, there was no bridge and there was no river. The opportunity for the player to connect with the historical circumstance is difficult unless the battlefield itself is actually recreated.
• Clearly the advantage in Israeli gunnery and tactics is not property modeled. I used data for the German 75mm tank projectile, which does slightly outperform the Soviet guns. But it wasn’t enough. A good bit of tweaking is almost certainly in order here.

Hopefully I’ll find the wherewithal to work some more with this concept before I’m done. With a little bit of work, I think I could see much better results. Furthermore, the 1956 Arab-Israeli War in general is even more suited to Command Ops than this particular scenario. The use of paradrops to seize objectives, which then are rescued by mechanized forces, is very much the type of battle this series was originally designed to play.

Return to the master post or go on to the next article.

*Regarding Battlefield Size and Duration. Since I set this up myself, it isn’t really representative. The map I used is much bigger that shown, but the roughly 40km x 12km rectangle is where all of the fighting will take place. Likewise the battle would never last for 12 hours of fighting. But I needed to set start and end times, so I just gave it most of the day.

Take the Cannoli

Tags

action/adventure, console port, FPS, Grand Theft Auto, GTA, Hot Springs, Korean War, L.A. Noire, left-handed mouse, Logitech Wingman, mafia, Mafia II, roaming, The Godfather, Vice City, World War II

The Godfather is one of the greatest movies ever made.

From the story, to the casting, to the technical details, it manages to get nearly everything right. But it is more than that. Far from being a great telling of a story on film, it uses the medium to perfection. The piece is neatly framed between the two religious celebrations; the wedding and the christening.

It is also a practically unparalleled cultural phenomenon. It redefined the “gangster” cinema genre. No longer do we expect the exaggerated, one-dimensional villains played a la James Cagney. Instead, our mobsters are the deep, complex characters that, yes, they are criminals but they are also the heroes and protagonists of our stories.

Since then, any Mafia-related movie takes place in the shadow of Coppola’s work. We “know” how the mobsters of the 40s and 50s behave, because we’ve seen the film (and its sequels). It provides an implicit backstory to any new characters that are created.

Mafia II (Spoilers included, no extra charge)

The game Mafia II starts using some similar hooks, but is clearly not going to be a simple retelling. The main character (your character) is caught in the course of a minor robbery. Rather than serve jail time, he agrees to go into the Army to fight the fascists in Europe.

Similarities to the back story in my earlier article are present, perhaps because of the automatic game-goodness that comes with including some World War II combat in a game. Unlike L.A. Noire (and Hot Springs, for that matter), our character is not a hero (flawed or otherwise) returning victorious in the war against Japan, but a flawed-or-otherwise-hero* dodging future service in Europe. The war service seems to serve main three functions. First, it allows the introduction of the game world to the main character because, well, we’ve been away at war and missed out what’s been happening. Second, a gratuitous MG 42 level, a la Medal of Honor, can be included. Third, and rather weakly, our character is saved from certain death in Sicily at the hands of Mussolini’s soldiers by the local mafia Don, who convinces the Italians to surrender. Thus, we come to understand the power of La Cosa Nostra.

Returning from the war, the game begins a sequence taking place in the fictional city of Empire Bay (very similar to New York) in the final months of the second world war. The Mafia II begins taking place a few years before L.A. Noire. However, the majority of the story actually occurs in 1951 during the Korean War (which takes place via radio news reports within the game).

L.A. Noire and Mafia II were released within a month of each other. They are also broadly classified within the same action/adventure genre, in the style of Grand Theft Auto and its sequels. However, whereas L.A. Noire (as I discuss in my article) actually draws heavily from the puzzle/adventure style of games, Mafia II is a more straight up drive/fight/shoot game. Given the similarities, some compare and contrast is surely in order.

In terms of resource use, Mafia II seems to make better designed in terms of system resources. The facial expression modelling aside, Mafia II is probably the more visually impressive game, but runs with less apparent stress on the system. The games are similar. Fairly realistic, 3D characters in a fully-explorable city – what is sometimes referred to as the “roaming” genre. The fairly realistic Los Angeles/Hollywood of L.A. Noire is considerably bigger than the faux-New York of Mafia II. Whether this is an advantage is limited by the difference in game-play. In Mafia II, one could spend significant time earning money/cars, etc. throughout the city. In L.A. Noire, there doesn’t seem to be much point (a few minigames aside) from deviating too far from the script. In fact, the long driving distances sometimes got a little tedious, factoring in the sometimes-long waits a stoplights. (I did say fairly-realistic version of Los Angeles!)

I often make the comparison with Grand Theft Auto, although my own experience with that series is limited. Years ago, I had a copy of “Vice City” (faux-Miami) which I played for a while. In that game, I was far more interested in simply driving around, stealing cars and interacting free-form with the game rather than following the scripted missions (which were often leaned too much toward the puzzle). Mafia II seems to be designed for that kind of gameplay (includes mods that enhance the experience), but in this case I find myself playing strictly by the scripted story. In fact, it is even sometimes surprising when some of the GTA-style mechanics (changing clothes stops police pursuit) pop-up in the middle of an immersive story.

Suprisingly, the story itself seems more engaging in Mafia II. I would have expected that L.A. Noire, being more story dependent, would have won this contest. But its the Mafia II story that draw me in better. Also, unexpectedly, the Mafia II story seems to be more linear. It is also more dependent on the in-between-action-sequence cut scenes. By contrast, the “dialog tree” feature in L. A. Noire allowed the story to advance with more direct player interaction.

Can it get more real than scrubbing urinals? You can’t complete the level until these babies are clean.

Driving, again, is a major feature of Mafia II. Again I am using the steering wheel. In this case, the wheel is not supported out of the box. Instead, I found some XBox emulator software that interfaces a variety of controllers for a broad array of games. This solution works great, and almost “out of the box.” After installation, I had to do a little fiddling to get the pedals mapped, rather than the hand-held controller buttons.

That done, the driving experience is easily better in Mafia II relative to L.A. Noire. Overall, the wheel and pedals feel far more natural. In addition, different effects are added to the driving experience. Initially, the driving takes place in the winter on ice and snow. Sliding and spinning are included, of course, but so is the rotation effect that happens when you gun an rear-wheel drive vehicle on an icy road.

Other details are modeled. There is a noticeable difference when driving on cobblestone versus pavement, for example. In the more powerful 50s cars, the effects of a manual shift are built into the “feel” of the driving, even though you are not required to actually shift yourself. One example – when starting off going uphill, you initially slide back a little bit before the clutch engages. I wonder how many younger drivers, never having actually driven a manual, wouldn’t understand why this is happening? The different makes of car are noticeably different in their models. Better cars aren’t just faster and more controllable – they actually feel different. A truck has to be driven quite differently from a sedan which is different from a sports car.

A new standard for realism in driving simulation: pulling over to let your drunk passenger throw up in the street.

Another area where Mafia II outshines L.A. Noire is in the combat part of the action. First of all both shooting and punching is a little less wonky. In L.A. Noire, I frequently found myself unable to do what I wanted when hand-to-hand fighting, and having a terrible time aiming with the gun. Mafia II responds much more naturally. Further more, the degree of the modelling is much more in line with what is expected from big-budget action games. Punching combos are included, to add some “strategy” to the fistfights. Shooting includes a modeling of the inaccuracy of follow-up shots and the total inaccuracy of automatic fire after the first round. Clearly Mafia II emphasized the action end of things, where L.A. Noire was pushing the puzzle end.

Unfortunately for L.A. Noire’s scorecard, even in the depiction of the characters and social environment, Mafia II has the edge in a number of areas. I’ll admit that in some cases that facial expression modeling in L.A. Noire seems a lot more realistic. But for the most part, modeling of the “ambient” environment is probably a little more believable in Mafia II. One example that struck me was while I was driving down the street in a snowstorm, and passed someone shoveling snow onto the street. It just seemed like such a natural detail to include.

Consolation

It is also worth mentioning, although I won’t dwell on it here, that as another console port, it also has the same issues (and same mitigations) relative to the mouse. The game does not use the system mouse configuration, which is a pain. It does allow reconfiguration of all of the “buttons,” which include the fighting functions programed into the mouse buttons.

Can we get back to Korea?

Lastly, much like L.A. Noire before it, I put this game into my rotation at this place because it does take place (at least about 2/3rd to 3/4s of it) during the Korean War. In another neat little feature that stands out, the radio news has time-period appropriate news items on it, mixed in with local news perhaps related to your own play. In 1945, this includes news of the end of the Second World War in both Europe and Japan. In 1951, this includes reports of the fighting in Korea.

It’s a neat touch that nicely puts me in the mood to cycle back to Korea War gaming in one of my next posts.

*At some point in the story, the hero mentions that he earned a Purple Heart (obviously, he is back in the States due to a war wound) and a Distinguished Service Cross. Strangely, the backstory for what might have earned him such a significant award is not included, nor evident from the gameplay that is included. The character is cast much more as a reluctant conscript rather than a hero.

Between the Wars

Tags

action/adventure, console port, Earl Swagger, film noir, FPS, game design, gun porn, Hot Springs, L.A. Noire, left-handed mouse, Logitech Wingman, murder, night vision, Stephen Hunter, World War II

My History of Games series is intended to be an exploration of wargaming. Here I take a little diversion into some different genres.

L.A. Noire was billed as a major innovation in gaming at the time it was released. It had been developed using live actors and proprietary motion capture technology to use not only realistic looking 3D graphics, but to use the lifelike qualities of those graphics in-game. The player interacts with characters and can, indeed must, interpret their tone, body language and facial expressions to read between the lines of what is being said. A critical gameplay element is to observe suspects body language during interrogations in order to determine whether or not they are lying, and it is the motion capture that makes that body language realistic enough to read.

But in many other respects, L.A. Noire has the classic game elements that have been around for generations of PC games. Inside the overall L.A. Noire narrative, there’s the driving game, the the chase and shoot game, the button-mashing fisticuffs, and the pixel hunt. Even the “interview” innovation is probably very similar to many previous efforts – at its core, you are given a statement that you have to choose whether it true, false, or something in between.

So how do does one talk about this game? Is the focus on the facial reading? Is it on the “classic game?” Is it meant to be a “Grand Theft Auto” goes to Hollywood in the 40s?

Say Goodbye to Hollywoodland

One of my first reactions after starting up the game was wondering how much was made up. After all, they had replaced the iconic Hollywood sign with Hollywoodland! What I didn’t know then, but I know now, was realistic. Indeed the reproduction of Los Angeles paid meticulous attention to detail. The original sign was put up to advertise a new housing development called “Hollywoodland” and it did in fact still read that way in 1947, when this game is set. It wasn’t until 1949 when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce assumed responsibility for maintenance of the sign and, as part of that effort, removed the “LAND.”

The things you learn.

L.A. Noire has a minigame that involves spotting various landmarks in Los Angeles. When driving by a landmark for the first time, a key or button is pressed to glance at it, after which you receive some sort of bonus points for having found it. The rest of Los Angeles is also very detailed and varied, and the experience of driving from crime scene, to bar, to apartment, and then back to the police station does give the impression of being there. I don’t look for, and haven’t noticed, the repetitive scenery which often fills out games. It is obvious how much work has gone into the details. It does make me wonder about its accuracy. How close is this to a Google Earth from 1947?

Beyond the scenery, the style of the game is a mix between ripped-from-the-40s-headlines and the film noir of the period. Probably more the latter than the former. Any semblance of historical immersion, though, is pretty much limited to the visuals. Driving, shooting, as well as any other activities are meant to be gamey, not realistic. Dialog is meant to mimic movies, and modern ones at that. The story arcs are an exaggerated form of what we know to expect from this type of thing.

The Uncanny San Fernando Valley

So how about those graphics?

The game was some $50 million dollars and 7 years in the making. The concept of using live actors to provide realistic body-language in-game was heavily marketed in the development phase and meant to be a big new thing in the world of gaming. I don’t know much about video game marketing, and what constitutes a commercial success, but I’ve read it sold some 5 million copies. It sounds like it did OK.

On the other hand, I’ve yet to see any further use of this technology in any other games. There was initially some talk of a sequel, which I think people assumed meant more L.A. detective stories. Later, the developer announced a game taking place in China in 1936. That project was eventually shut down before release. One assumes that, whatever success of the original game, the costs of this style of graphical interface exceeded its value.

Back to the Basics

Putting all the rest of it aside, it isn’t a bad gaming experience, although for me not in that “best game ever” category by any means.

My impressions are marred by a few problems, mostly part and parcel of porting a console game to the PC.

One is the save and load system, necessary for console games but out-of-line with most made-for-PC games. Besides hardware and software limits on consoles, fixed save points can be used to up the challenge of a game – you can’t save right before a difficult task and then replay it until you get it right. Of course, it is frustrating have to go through a cut scene and some action to get back to the point that you actually want to play, because you couldn’t save where you wanted. It is also annoying to want to stop playing for the night, only to have to wait until the game decides it is time to save.

Another point of irritation is the lack of support for left handed mice. This game is hardly the worst offender, because some of the clicks can be remapped. But it forces me to think backwards with other menus. I plan to call out other culprits in future articles.

Speaking of key remapping, I’ve never been able to drive properly with WASD keys. I don’t have a console controller, so I dug out my wife’s old steering wheel. Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work either. Besides the fact that I keep reaching for a non-existent turn signal, the steering is designed around a controller, and doesn’t respond to the wheel in a natural way. I frequently find myself swerving down Ventura, as I try to get my steering back under control.

Then, to add insult to injury, with the steering wheel mapped in, some of the other controls don’t work as configured. In order to interrogate a suspect, I need to use one of the buttons on the steering wheel to interact with my notebook. I don’t know if it is a buggy port or just an unexpected controller fighting with other inputs.

Some of my issues with the game are not related to UI, but are baked into the design. As I said, despite all the 3D, the interrogation game comes down to a dialog tree with three choices. You can believe, disbelieve, or accuse them of lying (given proof found elsewhere). Choosing launches you into a further dialog. If you guessed right, you get additional choices or information. If wrong, the characters (you and the suspect) generally get mad at each other. The problem is, the apparent intricacies of the story don’t always fit this simple model.

I’ll give an example, hopefully without spoiling the plot. I am at the home of the husband of the victim, where I find a clue that would seem to indicate he had bad intentions toward his wife. However, other clues point towards someone else, yet to be discovered. In the dialog tree, I accuse the husband of killing his wife, which he vehemently denies. I believe him, but I do want to ask him about the clue. The problem is, the only way to bring up the clue is to accuse him of lying, bring up the clue, and then allow him to explain that it isn’t what it looks like, and he wasn’t lying after all. Not at all intuitive.

However, having learned my lesson, I’m faced with another suspect later in the game. Again, I’m pretty sure he’s innocent, but when I ask about his contact with the victim, he seems to be hiding information. So, this time, I accuse him of lying, referencing witness accounts of him being seen with the victim to back the accusation up. Turns out this isn’t the answer the game is looking for and the suspect gets all sullen and refuses to give information. Never did quite figure that one out. This guy, like a number of characters, seem to lie to the police for no reason whatsoever. I know they’re lying, but also know they have no involvement in the crime.

One part of the frustration is, unlike the traditional puzzle game conversation tree where you can generally get through all the branches eventually, in this game it is very easy to shut yourself off from the solution by picking the wrong choice. And when that choice starts to feel like a random stab at one out of three options, well, I don’t like those odds.

Overall, though, I can’t complain about the game. While it didn’t appear good enough to make it as a high-end development, top-tier game, as a bargain bin puzzle/action game with some very cool technology – it was worth what I paid for it.

Another Story about Night Vision

As it happened, the next book on my to-read shelf happened to be based in this same period. Once again, a fictional story based on real events.

Hot Springs by Stephen Hunter is a novel expanding out the story of his protagonist Earl Swagger. Much like L.A Noire, it starts with Earl’s return from the Pacific War, release from the (in this case) Marines, and beginnings as a officer of the law.

Rather than risk a review that might give away too much of the plot, I’ll offer a few impressions. However, if you want to know nothing from the book, skip ahead to the next section.

This book is what I would call a literary version of gun porn. Gun erotica, perhaps (although I’d advise against googling that)? The story describes firearms and their functionality in detail, including thorough and accurate descriptions of training and firefights. I suspect firearm aficionados love this stuff, and others probably don’t so much.

I was a little taken aback when I hit a point in the novel where an early version of night vision technology once again took on a major role in the plot development, as it did in several earlier novels by the same author. It became just one plot point of many that was built upon technical details of historic firearms models and tactics. And as I said above, this is good.

I do wonder how well the story holds on its own, without the “gun erotica.” I’m not sure it does, but I’m also not sure it matters. When we pick up an “Earl Swagger” novel, we expect a well told narrative peppered with guns, fights, and gun fights. It did strike me that this story would translate well to the big screen, and that may even be by design. If I were in the movie biz, I think I would enjoy paring this book down into a screenplay. It seems like it would fit just about right into a feature length film.

Día de Muertos

To wrap up this post, I give you Grim Fandango: Remastered.

Why? Why? Why? you may ask.

I started playing this at the same time I started L.A. Noire, in part to amuse my children around Halloween. And amused they are – they regularly ask to continue with the game. I also had never finished the game when I bought it in the CD jewel case, probably a year or so after it came out.

No, it’s not a wargame. It’s not even historical. It isn’t even an attempt to create a self-consistent reality. However, if I had to date it, I could see putting it sometime in the late 40s. The scenes back in the land of the living have a 40s look and feel, and the cars look shortly post war. Plus, the vibe of the game is, like L.A. Noire, that same film noir style.

At the time it came out, it was touted as one of the best of its genre – the puzzle game. The genre is one that I’ve generally avoided, although I have played enough to form the opinion that I don’t like it. At their worst, puzzle games involve hunting through the graphics for hidden hot spots, and then using the found items in non-intuitive combinations to “solve” the particular puzzle. I find it extremely frustrating. I suppose it would be one thing if the puzzles were truly brain teasers that could be worked out with some effort and knowledge. Too often, it seems to me, the only useful knowledge is a background in puzzle games, thus knowing what tricks tend to be thrown at you.

Grim Fandango was an improvement. It had a better story, better dialog and genuine humor. The puzzles themselves were supposed to be a bit easier than the norm for games at the time. At the peak of the puzzle games’ popularity, it was a game targeted a bit more towards the mass audience.

Back then, I was working on it at the same time as my wife. We would both try to do the same “level” at the same time, and help each other out if one of us figured it out first. Problem was, I’m not sure we very often figured it out. Eventually, she would crack and look up the solution on some cheat site. We only got so far. I decided that I was going to figure out the thing for myself, and I guess she lost interest to the point where she wasn’t looking up the answer. So we stopped.

At this point, I’m not yet back to where I’d left of before. Somewhere in Year 2, if you know the game.

It is worth making a gameplay comparison to L.A. Noire. The main difference between the two is that some of the L.A. Noire puzzle involve physical reactions – the driving, fighting, or shooting pieces. In Grim Fandango, all interaction (at least as far as I have seen) is simple moving and clicking. Unlike Grim Fandango, L.A. Noire has the ability to “fail.” However, if you fail on an action sequence or die in a gunfight, you’re simple given the opportunity to try it over. If you “fail” in an interrogation, you’re given a poor rating on the case, but you move on to the next case anyway. Effectively, not that much different than the keep-at-it-until-you-get-it mode of a Grim Fandango.

So in many ways Grim Fandango is an easier, “lighter” version of L.A. Noire. One drawback of Grim Fandango is that it can’t entirely get away from the puzzle game solution that is built of seemingly unrelated stuff you’ve found. L.A. Noire at least has you matching the clues in an intelligent way to the facts of the crime you are trying to solve.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the “Remastered” part of this game. It really does look and play great, post-facelift. In fact, a few UI anachronisms aside, I’d say the game could easily hold its own as a current title. Maybe not the A-list title that it was in its day, but its likely worth its full asking price of around $15 and definitely worth picking up on sale (as I did.)

And as I said, (quite unlike L.A. Noire), Grim Fandango is something that can be played with the kids.