The One Who Flew Away from Omelas : Project Aho

Skyrim is still going strong. The energy is not just in the new Elder Scrolls Online. Some people, apparently, still want to life their alternate lives in solitary splendor.

And put an amazing amount of work into improving the experience for everyone.

Project Aho is a massive new adventure in the Skyrim universe, released as a free mod on March 22 of this year. There is much good to say about it and I intend to do so here, but that is not the main purpose of this mini-review. That purpose is to address an elephant that was in the room, and the way in which this elephant seems to be selectively visible.

First, the mechanical stuff. It plays smoothly and looks professional. That is a lot more work to achieve than you might think. It isn't enough to have nice-looking scenery; you also have to play-test the heck out of the stuff so players and AI's don't get trapped in intersections of the geometry or end up clipping out of the world entirely. Big budget AAA games have shipped with these kinds of bugs. I didn't encounter a single one in playing Project Aho.

The assets are not just well crafted, but artistically inspired. The characters are alive and interesting, the voice acting almost without flaw, the settings intriguing and unique as well as spectacular. The music is also outstanding, and it all works to support the core conceit; of this hidden community with its own bizarre ecosystem and rituals.

This is the greatest strength in play as well, but it goes hand in hand with the greatest weakness. Your existing Skyrim character is ripped out of their usual surroundings and deposited -- trapped -- in this new and confusing land and has to explore and interact and try to make sense of it all. The first third of the game is slow and almost meditative as you slowly learn your way around this strange place and begin to adjust to its ways and rhythms.

Here is the weakness; the way the writers chose to place you here is to kidnap and enslave your character. Which is manipulative, rail-roading, in a way that goes against the basic play style of Skyrim. Skyrim is an open-world game, where you can take off in any direction at any moment, explore freely whatever you can reach. And a game in which you always have choice.

It is built into the basic philosophy, a philosophy shared by the hardy Nords who call this region of Tamriel home; it is all about choice. About the freedom to make your own moral and ethical way, and accept the consequences of your own actions.

In any quest in Skyrim you may find yourself being asked to do random fetch quests, to trudge through tundra or tunnels in search of some random item just because someone else wants it and has asked you to get it for them. Making your character a slave, and the only path to freedom to complete these tasks, changes the perception of this process. You can't walk away, other than by closing the game.




Yes, this is only perceptual. This is a strange world, you don't even understand how it works much less how to escape. So you start doing favors for random strangers. That's how RPGs have worked, from well before KOTOR. It is just a little...odd...that you are doing this despite being, you know, a slave. It becomes more and more off-putting as people interact with you as if you are the ordinary wandering Joe adventurer. Instead of someone who was kidnapped here, is being actively threatened with torture and murder by their master, and is trying desperately to escape. "Could you help me find my wife's wedding ring? I think it fell in a haystack" takes on an entirely different flavor than the one the writers presumably intended.

The last two thirds of the game are epic dungeon crawls with tons of combat. This is a Nintendo Hard mod, with the leveled monsters being much, much tougher than their main game equivalents (let me put it this way; my mage was getting killed by mid-level enemies inside Project Aho, but after she escaped she polished off a leveled Dragon without breaking a sweat).

Which makes for an odd contrast, but anyhow. The quests are amusing enough and the build decent, although the quest markers could use improvement. Another quibble I have is that there is far too much loot. Not only is it unbalancing even within Project Aho, it is grossly unbalancing to the main game. But that's not even the worse of it; the worst is there's simple so much it gets in the way. You finally have to just ignore it.

Eventually you are brought to a moral choice. Of a sorts. And here is where the elephant becomes overwhelming.




Your murderous, largely-insane master is discovered to be embarking on a mad scientific experiment that threatens the entire hidden community. You didn't, of course, get to do anything at all, anything active, anything productive towards the revelation. But for some reason the powers that be announce they'd prefer to have you working for them anyway and offer you your freedom in return for stopping him.

Actually, its a little odder than that. They say, "Sorry for kidnapping and enslaving you. Here's your stuff back. You are free to go. But if you stick around to stop the bad guy, we could see about slipping a little extra cash your way."

The thing is...the thing is...

They are still a slave-holding culture. There are slaves in the room when they are making this grand offer. Which is twenty feet from where, while you were on the auction block, they murdered another slave before your eyes. This is slavery in one of the worst ways; the slaves (with you as an odd and rather unexplained exception) are voiceless and nameless. Literally. Their tongues and their names are taken along with all ability to resist (a control collar that, in game only acts on you as an invisible wall and the annoying inability of people like Dear Master to die when you firebolt them at point-blank range.)

This is where that selective visibility comes in. Because there's no dialog option to talk about it. No place to make a different bargain. No way to work to change that society. No option, ever, to free a single one of your fellows in bondage. Apparently, you are supposed to be happy that you got all your stuff back.

And the writers may not be wrong. I took at look through comments at the Nexus and Steam and I couldn't find a single person speaking about this. It is a sobering blindness.

It is a lovely place, of course. Almost a utopia. I can understand why the writers believed that players would be happy that they were free to leave, and would then be happy to jump right in to the community, buy a house there (yes, this is very much an option), go on all the remaining little fetch quests, hang out with the people there, etc. Their own private little garden tucked into a corner of Skyrim.

Yes, players just may be that selfish. But the writers should have been better than that. Leaving this status quo was unacceptable. Letting them get away with taking more people from their homes and freedom and stripping their very voice and name from them was unacceptable.

I went back to Dear Old Master and when he said, "I'm about to throw this Big Red Switch over here because I'm mad and evil and I want to see what happens," I said, "I'll help!"

...or a children's toy*

I found myself liking Rise of the Tomb Raider much more than I expected. Sure, there are problems. Many of the worst problems of the previous game of this reboot series have been fixed, at least.

One thing that you can say, though; not only is it a decent game, it is, finally, a Tomb Raider game. The puzzles are back. There's more archaeology. And the Mansion is back (in DLC only, but that's why you wait two years after release and get the GOTY version on Steam sale).

I'll write a full review eventually. At the moment, I just wanted to comment on a more nuanced understanding of archaeology that almost sneaks in through the cracks. Yes, Lara Croft is a tomb robber, no questions asked. What she does to ancient monuments, even Schliemann would be shocked into making some remark. And the games still push the artifact-centric view of the popular press (in addition to the underlying "Ancient myths are just the hiding places of ancient super-science.")

It is almost like someone in the developers is taking the piss, though, when "Loot" is the verb that pops up whether Lara is standing over either a can of rags (useful for making bandages and flaming arrows), or a sarcophagus. There, and in other small places, it seems to recognize how she's a worse role model than even Indiana Jones.

But here's the place where I really feel like an archaeological voice was in the conference room. The game still has collectable items. Like the previous entry in the series, these pop up with very nice rotatable 3D model (based on actual archaeological artifacts) while Lara talks a little about the find. Here's the interesting difference. In Tomb Raider 2013 she would identify the culture and date and often give a little note on usage. Basically she'd read the museum tag. In Rise of the Tomb Raider she is more likely to describe the object, like one would in a field journal, and make some educated guesses as to its nature. Sometimes, in fact, she is truly puzzled.

The same is generally true when she is reading inscriptions -- this is due to an underlying Language mechanic, but still, it is refreshing to see her unsure of her translations.

And there is less of a clear distinction between information that will advance the plot, and information that won't fit into the current project. Again this is meta-game; it comes from the way documents are collectable, and these documents are little snippets of text nicely voice acted for the player.

The place where this distinction is really erased is in the "Bloodlines" DLC, a mansion-based exploration in which both the plot-centric mechanical resolution and the emotional resolution are developed in parallel as two of multiple twining threads. The game goes out of its way to tell you to read all the documents, as you do not know going in which of the various threads you are following through them will lead you to the desired conclusion. This, then, is a heck of a lot closer match to field research than the "find the address to the next game level written in a prominent place right after the boss battle" structure.

The "Bloodlines" DLC also does the Language mechanic one better, in that it requires you, the player, to recognize and use several hieroglyphic characters! (The best is when you have to identify a similarity between the character for a district of ancient Egypt and the depiction of said character in a child's cardboard crown).

Spoilers, by the way!



*yes, and she does make the "children's toy" comment over one of the artifacts she uncovers. Again, I'm convinced someone over at Core actually did some reading.

A Bridge Too Far: MOH Airborne

Airborne is the 11th installment of the perennial Medal Of Honor series of first-person shooters, and joins a still remarkably small number of games with historical settings; this one being of course World War II.

The ravening horde shouting out unintelligible insults had taken over the FPS genre at this point; it has a rather short "campaign" mode to concentrate it's energies on multiplayer (and as with so many games, the servers crashed on opening day and there were weeks of game-crippling issues with that multiplayer mode).

For the single-player campaign, you play as a low-ranking (eventually buck Corporal) soldier in the 82d named Boyd Travers. And as his clone, as any time you get killed between checkpoints a new "you" parachutes in to take up where you left off.

An unusual and fun mechanic in the game is that you make a combat drop into each new map with a steerable parachute. Not quite sandbox, it still means you can chose what order to take objectives, or even land somewhere completely random and proceed to screw with the game a little.

In the usual FPS mode you get a choice of two long arms, a pistol, and grenades. You can at various times swap out either of the long arms with what you find lying on the ground. And here's my first problem; with the exception of the panzerfaust, all the weapons as depicted are so vastly similar there's little reason to care which you are using.

Older weapons in real life are a lot less consistent. Some are bolt action, some have detachable magazines, some are notoriously unreliable; there's a lot to learn and you really shouldn't be able to just pick one off the battlefield and start shooting. Or find the right ammunition just lying on the ground.

Case in point; at various points a Gammon Bomb (which the game calls a Gammon Grenade) is added to your armory. Which cooks off and throws just like any other grenade. Well, the Gammon had a unique fusing system in which an unwinding strip of linen cloth armed an impact fuse. It should at least look -- and really play -- different. Heck, the game doesn't (as far as I can tell) even give a range advantage with the potato masher, which is pretty much the point of that long wooden handle.

I don't know if you really want to be modeling having to, say, run the bolt with every shot, much less have to go through some multi-button routine to shove a stripper clip through the top -- but then, many FPS already have a gun mechanic where you have to hold down multiple buttons to go into sight mode and shoot. In any case, I'd like something to make the weapons more distinct than just having a different sound and a different HUD model.

This ties into the hands-off philosophy so many of these games have with history. The writers cared about the period, did their research, and had a good consultant. It all looks great. But you as player engage so little with it. At least it is appropriate for Airborne soldiers to be carrying a huge armory around with them. There's a particularly famous picture of one with anti-tank, at least three other guns, and a blanket and poncho as well. But basically this is the FPS mantra; whether it is historically accurate or appropriate to the setting the player must have their four basic weapons groups.

Of course, what I'd really want is a game where you could talk to locals, go on pass between operations, swap stories with your buddies, spend time in hospital. But that's not going to happen, not even on AAA budgets. Mostly. I mean; Skyrim allows you to explore, engage in conversation (stilted as it can often be), even set up as a shopkeeper and put the sword down for good. I'm not asking for a game where you play as Anne and spend the war in an attic, but I do wish for more engagement.

In any case, the ruins are fun and look appropriate (but then, MOH have had eleven games and about as many years to learn how to model and render good-looking debris). The AI are mildly more interesting, as they seem more aware of their surrounding and even give hints of cooperating between each other. But alas, they fall prey like any other to my favorite FPS/3PS game of "confuse the AI." Just like in Tomb Raider, I could leave cover, sprint into their lines and cause the AI soldiers to spin in place as their tracking and pathfinding routines clashed.

And then beat them up with a potato masher. Amusingly enough, you get skill points for kills with a weapon even if you are doing melee with it. I think I got my first marksmanship badge with the pistol by pistol-whipping Italian irregulars behind their own barricades. Oh, right. After completing the main campaign once I went back through the first parts of the game determined to rely on the pistol and ignore the rest of the weapons. And also run around the battlefield like a maniac, which is how I got so intimately familiar with the respawn system.

It is a cover shooter, after all, with a rather cute "lean out of cover" mechanic that, alas, doesn't help against the increasingly skilled enemy shooters. As has been found in real war, the majority of bullet strikes are hands and head (the only parts exposed when you are trying to shoot from cover). The AI is aware enough to make sniper duels nicely challenging and give you a good sense of accomplishment.

The game somewhat goes off the rails in the later maps. Eventually you are fighting in a fantastical concrete warren that looks like a James Bond set against gas-masked black-uniformed super troopers who can take three shots to the head without going down and who advance on you terminator-like carrying a dismounted heavy machine gun. Accompanied by other gents who think a panzerfaust is an indoors weapon.

This is perhaps inevitable. You the player get more skilled as the game progresses, plus it has a skills system that does...something (weapons upgrades are most noticeable). So to make the later levels more difficult something has to be added. More enemy is the usual. Tougher enemy is the other. In the real world, the elite troops are elite because they know what the heck they are doing. They use cover better, they support each other better. Well, the AI is already running at its peak in the early game. The enemy can't get more skilled. So all they can get is weirdly armored. No matter how realism-breaking and un-historical that might be.

(They also in the real world get the better gear, but this is a negative advantage in the FPS world because anything they have, you can have for the price of a few bullets).

This is the sad truth of FPS, and the tired old AAA model. Time is money. To make a player spend money on a game you need to give them playing time in return. And the cheapest playing time comes from the variety and sort-of emergent behavior of AI opponents. Even an extensive dialog tree is only really novel once, and it takes a lot of time writing and recording voice talent and animating actors to achieve. Making a sprawling set that supports multiple strategies of engagement and then filling it with AI opponents is a mature technology, well-honed by the industry and familiar to the player.

Still, it plays well enough, looks fine, and there's at least a little sense of a past place and time.

Dawnguard: Adventure Found Me

This is not my Skyrim review. I hope when I get to that it will be a little more organized than this. This instead is an exploration of ludonarrative in the emergence of a character arc from meta-textual elements.

Or, in short, how a young Breton with dreams of becoming a bard was pulled into a conflict she didn't even know existed, became a legendary hero and saved the world.

After the battle

I've been trying to learn "Far Horizons" from the game Skyrim and that's led me to muse on a contrast.

In both Skyrim and Tomb Raider 2013 there are lethal encounters with the locals. In Tomb Raider, when the fight ends there's a brief quotation of the character theme; muted and tinged with the melancholy of all you've lost, as with every other piece of music in this particular Tomb Raider, but nonetheless a horn flourish celebrating a moment of triumph.

The only time you hear the "Dragonborn" character theme in Skyrim (outside of bardic performances in taverns) is when you are being attacked by a dragon. What plays at the conclusion to most encounters is something more wistful, even elegiac. It is a piece of music that invites one to contemplate the fragility of life and the shared humanity of you and those you've just slain against this harsh, bleak, starkly lovely landscape of steep rocks and chilly snow.

(It is in fact one of the generic wilderness travel snippets -- the piece I opened this discussion with -- but it is scripted to always show here and I can't believe the emotional impact of that choice was not considered).

Im Tomb Raider  the bad guys are somewhat humanized before the fight; if you sneak well enough you can hear snippets of conversation. Unfortunately there is no conversation allowed during the fight; once guns are drawn there is no negotiation allowed. Following the fight, all that is left is to search the bodies for more ammunition.

In Skyrim, you also search the bodies. Such is the stock mechanics of AAA games. But in doing this you are also led through their campsites and rooms and shelters. Where you find bedrolls tucked into a niche of the rock out of the rain, personal possessions tucked away in drawers, a couple books beside a table, a meal on the fire, a chair set up for no other purpose but to relax and take in a vista of distant mountains. These material goods are so particular and homely they give a mute description of their owners, a more sharply drawn and more universal one than any dialog snippet.

You can not help but place yourself shivering in that bedroll, warming yourself over a rude meal on that campfire (as often enough, you do in the course of the game) and greeting the day sitting in that chair looking over the vast snowy land of Skyrim. It invites you (sometimes literally) to put yourself in the hide shoes of those you were forced to kill. (Of course, in this game there is also no great distance between you and them. Your background is similar, your adventures similar. You aren't some well-equipped American stand-in mowing down foreign hordes, not in this game).

Even the nature of the encounter is different. In Skyrim you largely chose to engage; you can leave the bandit camp alone, or even run away. In Tomb Raider you are largely scripted in. It is an extremely linear narrative and often the next door will not even open until you've performed the sacrifice the game demands. Once combat is joined, of course, most AAA games are alike. There is no parley, no quarter.

Except not even this is absolute; Skyrim has a third-party mod that can be installed that allows your enemy to surrender instead of fighting to the death. And, sure, this is not a creation of the original designers. But the original designers did permit the end users to change the story and make this possible. Tomb Raider will not even allow the player to look in a different direction than that which the script requires.

(The only AAA game I've played in which quarter is possible in the base game is Batman: Arkham City. In that game, psychological warfare is all-important. The Batman is, after all, shaped to be a figure of fear to the cowardly and superstitious. So if you do well enough in striking from the shadows and otherwise appearing as an unstoppable phantom, some of the bad guys will drop to their knees to cower in place instead of continuing the fight. It ain't much, but it beats having to flatten everyone).

Am I reading too much into this contrast? Perhaps. Skyrim is intelligently designed by a company that knows how to search out a specific and nuanced emotional tone.  Tomb Raider 2013 is a lumpen creation-by-committee where every decent emotional arc sputters out in ludonarrative disconnect against the brainless mechanics and an insulting restriction of any player choice.

(I have to go a little bit further here. This isn't just a contrast between open world and linear narrative. The Half-Life series is also a linear narrative, and restricts exploration just as much. But Half-Life is designed by people who knew what they were doing; it leads the eye and hides the choices rather than forces them on the player. It shows that a linear narrative and even tightly scripted events can take place without making the player feel like a passive observer of the game being played).

Reading with a hat

I have been reading a new series and in the middle of it discovered I had my writing hat on.

This doesn't happen to me often (and it only really happens with writing. I've studied cinematography* and the methods of telling a story in comic book form** but I almost never find myself in analytical mode when experiencing either of those art forms.)



The book of the moment is the first of a series called "Sword and Starship." An amusing setup; Gibbon has struck again (can we blame Isaac Asimov for this? At least he actually read Decline and Fall) and a high-tech interstellar culture has fallen, individual planets descending into barbarism amid the ruins they can only dimly comprehend. This is a well-worn piece of SF furniture, as easily employed as the concepts embodied in the similarly familiar phrases "Generation Ship" or "Psionic Powers."

Actually, this one fell twice; a second empire came and went but left behind an imposed feudal structure, (mostly) common language and laws, some remnant multi-stellar governments, and a college/guild system that keeps alive an abridged user manual for the ancient technology.

Well, sort of. Taking Clarke's Dictum literally, the "Shipbuilder" technology is grasped in terms of magic; operated via incantations, rituals and spells. Except for our protagonist, who is one of a small number who treat technology in rationalistic fashion and who bend their efforts towards understanding the actual principles behind it.

I caught a flavor in this interaction early on, and was unsurprised when I reached the author's bio at the end to discover Ellis Morning got her professional writing start contributing to the "WTF Code" tumbler. That flavor being that of clueless end-users who can only interact with technology by slavishly following routines they've memorized (aka incantations) versus, well, the people who are writing code and keeping servers running and answering tech support calls.

In the case of the "Sword and Starship" series the magic analogy has become literal, with the "Shipbuilder" technology treated as innately inscrutable and investigations into its nature -- or the nature of anything else of the proclaimed invisible world full of curses and demons that surrounds the remnant iron-age cultures -- is heresy. To be stamped out by the well-supplied and well-supported cadres of Acolytes and Adepts (aka, the equivalent of Script Kiddies, who know enough about how to run the ancient technology to be dangerous.)

Setting up for a central conflict between rationality and the demon-haunted worldview spoken of by Carl Sagan and so refulgent in this recent landscape of pseudo science and alternative facts. In the first book, the protagonist struggles to investigate a crop failure on a smaller world that has failed to be resolved by mumbling prayers over it. Struggles, because any hint of applying a rationalistic method brings accusations of heresy with the close attendance of pitchforks and torches.

Well, to be fair, the conflict is really against the power of the church, who regardless of the extent of their understanding or its mode have good reason to want to be seen as the only source of knowledge. It is in a sense guild control over most advanced technologies (and there is specific mention of guilds operating in other areas, as well).

Already I have many questions about the world building, and possible quibbles with some of the choices, but the series shows no sign of adhering to a status quo with the next book expanding the scope greatly. And they are cheap on Kindle.




Back to the topic. For some reason, reading this book, every time a character was introduced I found myself asking what role that character was to play. Whether they were there to provide conflict or to provide aid, to expand upon a question, to elucidate a viewpoint, to illuminate world-building or to form the bones of the plot.

Thankfully, the author has been competent enough to not make it obvious in most cases. But it was still a fun exercise.





*I read a book on cinematography once.

**I read a half-dozen books on the techniques of sequential art. And on the recommendations of one of them, a book on cinematography.

Climb Every Mountain : Skyrim

Wine released another patch, and suddenly the copy of Skyrim I installed a while ago became playable (the joys of gaming on a Mac. Wine works pretty good for older games, though).

Skyrim is an open-world role-playing-game released in 2011. The setting is an iron-age fantasy culture in an epic, stark, chilly mountainous region. Bethesda delivers again on this one; like many of the best games, the setting is not just expansive, not just detailed, but it is flavored. There is a particular kind of harsh, hardy, pseudo-Norse theme going on here that goes well beyond just people wearing furs and horned helmets riding shaggy horses across high plains and tundra.

I found myself getting rather philosophical during it. Which hurt my gameplay a little, actually. If you've just attacked a bandit camp, you then end up walking through the small treasures of their hardscrabble existence. Rough tables and split log chairs and a little rabbit on the camp fire. A wooden flute, some hides tented up to keep the rain off. Not that the villagers have it much better, with simple dwellings and crude utensils.

When you talk to the villagers, you hear stories of their life choices and their philosophical take ending up a farmwife in a small town distant from her home city, or a merchant trying to make ends meet. And the evidence of industry -- the simple blacksmithing setups, the hunting camps, even crude mining operations -- show a similar "getting along at the life you have" attitude among the bandits. Even the giants, although easily spooked, are content to stand peacefully among their herds of mammoth.



One always puts a little of oneself into a game. Even the simplest game still leaves a space for the player to read personality and backstory where perhaps it isn't there. In the case of two runs I made at Skyrim (with two different characters to try out different career paths), what I got out of the game was as much driven by chance and glitch.

It really started with my housecarl, Lydia, who the Jarl sent to me after making me a thane (kill one little dragon, and they just won't shut up about it). Anyhow, the voice acting of this character made her sound very sad and resigned when I told her to stay in the house while I adventured. And I had to sympathize. After all, this is a warrior in a warrior culture. It wasn't exactly that she wanted excitement, it was that in her mind the only proper way to live was to die in battle.

So I brought her along despite misgivings (misgivings because artificial intelligence is not exactly there yet. The AI's tend to run in front of your bow in the thick of combat. (When they aren't standing in the middle of a doorway you are trying to pass through, giving you a blank "can I help you?" stare.)

And I got suckered into helping a goddess clean her temple of an infestation of undead magic-users. A very pushy goddess. With all those spells flying about I really had to work at it to keep Lydia from running herself killed (although to her credit, the enemy AI in Skyrim is very bow-aware and does not make it easy for you to snipe them from cover).

But we won. And a cutscene was forced on me where the goddess "thanks" me (pushy goddess, did I mention?) and then dumps me unceremoniously outside the temple. And Lydia glitched. She was alive last I saw her, but she never left the temple. In my head canon, my warrior woman, servant and friend had found the destiny she was seeking. But that damn goddess better be treating her right!



I'd become intrigued with the crafting system. This is an exceptionally deep game, with almost too many stories to explore and multiple play styles are possible. Within crafting, you can do Alchemy (which is basically herbalism; you gather ingredients from the wild as you travel, then experiment with mixing them together until you find recipes that work). You can do Enchanting, which is intriguingly different and not a little disturbing.

Magical items in the Skyrim world are driven by captured souls. With a bit of training you can do this yourself; absorb the soul of a recently slain wolf, say, then use it to power up a flaming dagger that you can then hand off to anyone (or, more usually, sell). The actual enchantments are, in the game, entirely arrived at by reverse engineering; you find another flaming artifact and rip it apart to see how it was done.

The third crafting system is Smithing, with encompasses basic leather work and jewelry as well. This is nicely if sketchily illustrated with various simple forges and smelters and grindstone and anvils and so on, complete with animations as your character takes an item through the various processes.

You can in fact mine iron ore, smelt iron (or with a slightly different process make steel), hammer it into a sword, and rework the sword to be finer. This being Iron Age tech, you also need to take a hide (which could even be a pelt from the wolf mentioned above) turn it into leather, and cut it into strips to wind about the hilt.

The weird part, though, is that this is not value-added. It is a little hard to see the numbers clearly because in the early game merchants pay 30% book value on goods and mark them up 300% to sell. But basically, a sword is worth less than the processed materials that went into it. And if you are buying the raw ores from a merchant instead of mining them yourself, you basically lose money on the deal.

So basically you need external funds. And you don't learn enchantments (to really value-add the items you are smithing) unless you have magical loot to tear apart. All in all, it is extremely difficult to just sit around learning crafting. You progress vastly faster if you adventure.



So the first character I played was an Argonian. A lizard-man from far away. Who I played as so completely outside he had no idea what anyone was talking about, had no interest in the politics, and in any case couldn't tell the faces of all these humans apart anyhow. Or remember their weirdo names. I eventually ended up playing him as a sort of linebacker/scholar; on the one side, the first weapon he picked up was a two-handed axe and there wasn't a lot he couldn't deal with just by bull-rushing it and swinging away. But on the other side, he really, really loved books (that's why I bought a house; the books were getting too heavy to keep hauling around.)

This is actually common among Skyrim players, I found. A web search for "Bigger bookshelves in Skyrim" turned up easily dozens of threads on the subject.

My second was also outsider to the local politics. I made her as small as the sliders would let me go, and wanted her to be geeky determined to become the greatest smith ever. Except the game throws you into combat in the introductory scene, and pretty much forces you to get involved with a dragon.

Even the mining is complicated by the fact that there are bandits living in the mine you want to use (and wolves on the path). However, unlike many RPGs, Skyrim does not have a stat system. Whether you are a buff lizard or a slender Breton you kick ass exactly the same. And I had learned a little something about the magic system since my Argonian and at Easy settings beginning-character magic is insanely overpowered.

(There is also no class system in Skyrim. Anyone can learn anything. Most characters, NPCs as well, know a little about magic and fighting and crafting and, well, everything else.)

The problem I ran into with Moly the tiny Breton blacksmith, though, was that I'd installed the Hearthfire DLC (additional content for the game). Which allows you to customize the houses you buy. And expands a little on the craft-able items. And, oh yes, adds a few orphans. And I thought Lydia made me feel bad! No, now there was this sweet little child following me about whenever I visited town, and...

Turned out crafting was just too darned slow. I couldn't stand little Breccia (or whatever her name was) being out in the cold even one more night, so I picked up the best sword I'd made so far and struck out towards the most dangerous haunted barrows and troll-infested mountain peaks I knew about this early in the game.

Turns out I couldn't take in the poor kid without owning a house. And I had to have it furnished, too. On the second or third trip back to pay out yet more of the loot I was risking my neck for up on the mountains, and fulfill yet more obligation, I started to feel like I was dealing with Children's Services.

But I finally managed it. Took Lydia (Lydia2 if you are counting -- different me, but same game story, same dragon, and same overly-generous local Jarl) up the side of the mountain* to visit the monks for one last adventure to tell the kids. And closed the game -- at least for this four day weekend -- sitting in contented silence by the fire in my rustic home, watching the little girl play with her new doll.



*Yes, that is literal. Borrowed a couple of horses from the Stormguard. Skyrim horses do not give a fuck. Physics is their plaything. This is pretty much a glitch they kept because all the players loved it, like the fact that one square hit from a Giant's club will send you thousands of feet into the sky. People have been killed by meteorite-mammoths. The horses will ride up anything that isn't vertical. And make a pretty good attempt at that, too.

Thing is, I could never find the damned road up to where the monks were. So the well-honored alternative among Skyrim players is to find Comet the Wonder Horse and point her towards the cliff face.

10,000 Fleece

I've made the first major error on a PCB. The drill holes are too small for the LEDs. I can ream them out easily enough, but I'm using the through plating as a via in several places. With luck I can solder top and bottom and restore connection...but that also emphasizes that I completely forgot I was going to increase the size of the annular ring on several of the pads, too.

Ah, well. It is going to take weeks to laser-cut enough Holocron kits to even use up the first set of PCBs. The lasers are booked nearly solid, and even on top of it being cold and dark and often raining when work ends I've been feeling sickly and not up for the trip to the shop anyhow. And besides, I have enough parts to build one full production model, so I'm doing that first (in case I discover something new that needs to be adjusted).

And as for the boards? The v1.1 revision was just a stop-gap, mostly improving the silkscreen and adding a resistor to the resistor ladder. The next revision I suspect strongly I'm going to go for a "larger" CPU chip (but do it in surface mount instead of DIP). I'm also tempted in the direction of taking off the USB socket and replacing it with a microSD socket. Except the controller chip for above is a thirty-six pin SMD that can't be hand-soldered -- that's a big jump up in my SMD skills.



Made a breakthrough on the fiddle. Apparently the beginner is supposed to play detaché, separating each note. I've been practicing legato since the beginning.

Well, immediately on hearing that I tried putting a slight pause in the bow between notes. Wow. All that struggle to get clean string crossings in a slur has really paid off. With that little pause it is downright simple. Oh, and I can dial the pause down to barely perceptible and still get the benefit.

Similar really to my fun with shoulder rests. It was far too hard to handle the violin at first. Shoulder rest allowed me to progress. A better shoulder rest allowed me to move to the next stage. But now that I'm so much more comfortable moving about the fingerboard and keeping the violin balanced, I can omit the shoulder rest and play nearly as well.

So now I throw in a "naked" practice session at intervals. No shoulder rest, no Snark tuner; just ears and meat (and a thick shirt...yes, it can hurt without that padded rest!) So I can get through Hava Nagila without stumbling...but I still have squeaks and some other finger noise to clean up (and my intonation will continue to need work. Especially as the string crossings are just horrible in the C part and I've been playing that in third position as an alternative).




Trying my first audiobook now; listening to a free reading of the Anabasis I found online. Which means I'm avoiding spoilers for a work that came out 2,300 years ago.

Also read a couple more Kindle books. Both were oddly alike in having a very breezy tone; short sentences, short paragraphs, simple construction. Also both alike in having fairly poor description. One is (more or less) in first person and eschews scene breaks or other real organization, letting changes of space or time roll right past, moving in and out of dialog or action without pause or even change of pace.

The other at least has some of that helpful organization, but uses the increasingly rare third-person omniscient. Which I think is a horrendously poor choice, but could perhaps be excused or at least explained as a larger choice that may not be that of the authors.

To explain; this is a Tomb Raider book -- a proper printed book for all that I read it on Kindle -- and it features the 2013 "reboot" Lara Croft and is explicitly set immediately following the events of the 2013 game.

This game is basically subtitled "Birth of a Survivor." It takes Lara as a young, inexperienced student on her first serious expedition, and drops her into a hellscape where she is beaten down to her essence; becoming both dogged survivor and (as necessary) brutal killer.

Which means any work featuring her, and particularly one that pretends to follow the events of the game, should be about her struggle to return to the normal world and come to terms with what she was forced to do. And indeed, the book -- The Ten Thousand Immortals -- shows her having panic attacks and flashbacks and struggling to re-define her belief system after being confronted with the reality of nigh-immortal weather-controlling undead queens on the haunted island of Yamatai.

This can be done in third person omniscient. It is just in my opinion much harder to do it right. Because what matters to the reader is not the clinical dissection of Lara's inner life. It is not the unwrapping of the complexities of a psyche in the way of Joyce's Ulysses. What the reader wants is to feel along with Lara. To be invited in, to even experience this vicariously -- the way the game allows you to do. Third person limited, or first person, are better narrative choices.

(Something which even one of the game development team seems to have misunderstood. But never mind about that now!)

And this is even a good point from a mechanistic story-telling direction. Much of the story has Lara possibly being followed, not sure who to trust, wondering if she is surrounded by enemies or if she is merely letting her post-traumatic stress drive her to unwarranted paranoia. This confusion on her part is completely undercut by an omniscient point of view that at any moment can and does cut to the very person who actually is following her, and listen to their interior monologue about exactly why they are following her and who they work for and what the whole mystery is about.

A more limited perspective is perfect here. Seeing only what Lara sees is a better mechanical way to present the mystery and suspense of who to trust and when to be wary (as well as being a vastly superior way to let you empathize with her situation emotionally). This shades all the way down to the small tricks; a detached omniscient observer makes Lara look foolish in those rare moments when she lets her guard down. Seeing the scene through her POV, the narrative can subtly guide both where you are allowed to look and how you feel about what you see; presenting open, clear vistas or presenting menacing shadows, and make her reactions feel justified and rational to the reader.

So the escape hatch I alluded to earlier is this; perhaps the authors were asked to provide an adventure, told not to actually develop her character any because all that would be in the games, and basically were led into presenting the bones of a story without most of what allows for proper emotional involvement. It is Saturday Morning Cartoon stuff; lots of running around and shooting and that all sounds exciting on paper but there is so little tangible about any of it -- especially the inner life of the people involved -- it is not terribly thrilling.

But there is more here. One of the two authors involved has a more recent book featuring the "Classic" Lara Croft. And three paragraphs in he threw me right out of the story by featuring a "20mm steel-kern climbing rope."

Okay, sure, the movies (and many books) will always get the details wrong of that thing you yourself are expert in. And maybe the non-expert will never even notice, although to someone who knows anything about climbing, that description is ridiculous as specifying a "Diesel powered laptop computer with a 74" screen."

But no. It takes less than a minute to do better than that. This story was written within the last few years and yes Google and Wikipedia were available. Heck; Lara Croft is using both constantly within the story itself! If the author did enough research to find out what kernmantle construction is, then he damned well would have learned the difference between static and dynamic, and as well been presented with examples of appropriate diameters.

Even going from first principles, a basic understanding of the physical universe would clue you in that something was off. As my friend put it, Lara Croft must be tough stuff if she nonchalantly ties a knot in a half-inch steel cable.

(And, no, you can't get out of this one by assuming a typo on the number. Because pretty much every single other detail about this rope and how it is used is wrong.)

In any case, 10,000 Immortals (the previous book and the one under discussion) doesn't make quite such obvious errors. The archaeology is terribly simplistic, and I think that too is a mistake. The games may not give that much detail, but there's good indication there's a contingent of the audience that does want to see more. What bugs me, though, is the ways the book looks like it is getting wrong things that people with even a smattering of a classical education will already see are wrong.

The title is one. It is referring to the Persian Immortals. Sort of. It is about half-way through the book that it becomes clear there is a group that calls themselves "the ten thousand immortals" and has based the name on the so-called "Immortals" of Persepolis et al. And the book correctly at that point explains the legend that there were 10,000 of these elite soldiers, exactly; as one died, another would be sworn in to take his place.

Except that this is another one of those many, many places where Herodotus...well, you know the drill. And even the name is quite possibly a mistaken translation. So the book jars once in that Lara doesn't seem to know who the Immortals are (despite apparently having that good Classics education) and that makes her look like an idiot. And the book doesn't correct her at first, making it look like an idiot. Only eventually does the truth out, finally making the title seem less awkward -- but it does this a few chapters in and never moves past that "revelation" that is probably within the first hour on Persia in your History of the Ancient World 101 class. (And what is especially ridiculous is that at some point the writer provides the name "Anûšiya." So he almost certainly knew and was choosing to either ignore or withhold the more complex real story.)

The Golden Fleece is an even better case, reeling out the bit about gold-panning with sheep wool about five chapters in, but never moving a step beyond that not particularly obscure revelation. This book has either a frightfully low opinion of its audience, or is written by someone a lot less educated than he thinks he is. One keeps hoping there will be something about the Argonauts that goes beyond what appeared in the Harryhausen film. In vain. The story actually moves the Aegean and an archaeological expedition and a rock-cut cliff dwelling and reveals -- damn-all. Again, what little is revealed on the subject happens less than half of the way in. The rest of the book spins out chases and shootout with nary a new bit of historical information or archaeological clue from then on out.

I am tempted to blame the usual process of "Decide on the plot first, then pick and chose the historic and/or scientific details that support it." There is also some hair-thin evidence that the bad-guy group are the ones who are making the stupid errors; that they are essentially Foucalt's Pendulum-ing themselves. There's a bit of business, for instance, with a derringer that is claimed to be but is as likely not to be the one used by John Wilkes Booth. (A derringer which is never fired, despite being on that damned mantlepiece at least twice). So one can half believe the bad guys were meant to be idiots who didn't understand who the Persian Immortals really were, or know anything more than a teenager (and from the evidence, a poor student at that) does about Jason and the Golden Fleece.

There's another oddity there. The reviews on Amazon fall into two categories; long, carefully written reviews that lay out in detail the literary offenses, or one-word reviews with five stars. The suspicious take here is the latter are spammed to drive the rating up. A different view, though, is potentially illuminating. Maybe the breezy, error-filled, childishly simplistic writing is all these particular reviewers needed or even wanted. The ones that have a word or two other than "Amazing!" talk only about how cool it is to have the character from the games be in a book. It would be informative to introduce these reviewers to something like the deeply psychological fanfic "Easier to Run" and see if that opens their eyes to how much more a story can offer.



A few words now on the other Kindle find. I've now read the first and second books of the "Athena Lee" chronicles and I doubt I will read any others. The premise is promising; a young woman is marooned amid the wreckage of a space battle that went well for nobody. Her thing, however, is engineering. Survive until rescue? Deal with the changes in politics back home, threats on her life, pirate attacks, treason..? Whatever it is, she's got a spanner and a slide rule and she's going to engineer the heck out of it.

The character has an engaging voice and what can be seen of her personality is amusing. There are some cute touches elsewhere (although a little 1990's pop culture goes a long way). The problem is, the author doesn't seem to know how to describe engineering. Actually, the author doesn't seem to know how to describe anything. Well, actually -- the author doesn't seem to have much of a grasp of how to write. I read a free excerpt from Book 8 and he seems to be just starting to learn how to handle POV changes and exposition.

These books, too, have many short (as few as one or two word) reviews praising them highly. Again I have to wonder if someone is gaming Amazon's rating systems. But the unsettling and more likely answer is that there are people who have read so few books they have yet to discover that they get a hell of a lot better than this.

Like the Tomb Raider story above, it should not be enough that a character you like is on the page. Or that people are shooting at stuff and so it must be exciting. Those can be, should, usually are a given in a piece of genre fiction, but said piece is also generally expected to bring a minimum standard of craftsmanship with it. To leave one with a sense of place, to portray characters well enough one can speak of them as if you had met them in person, to immerse the reader in the experience and smoothly and seamlessly carry them through transitions and exposition and all the other necessary stage machinery of an unfolding plot.

Ten Thousand Immortals is a madeleine offered in excuse of a full meal. The Forgotten Engineer is a handful of granulated sugar offered in excuse of actual food.

Pathetic Fallacy

I fired up Tomb Raider 2013 recently just to play the hunt-for-your-food sequence again (and try out some DLC -- like a warm jacket, finally!) And I couldn't help noticing this time around that no matter how long you spend wandering around the woods, the rain starts the very second you shoot a deer.

But I've also been playing other games, and reading reviews, and a lot of what impressed me earlier no longer impresses me. There is the core of a nice little story there and the voice acting and motion capture support it well. But ninety percent of the game is a stock first-person shooter with stock mechanics, graphics tricks, game assets, character AI, etc. As nice as some of the shrines and other scenery are, the majority of the art assets are the same tired variations of room full of boxes and cluttered alley between cookie-cutter buildings.

The new game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, ups the graphics, adds a little more variety to the combat options and improves the crafting system, but basically is the same routine. Of which an absurd amount is still the barely-interactive scripted sequences.

Really, what happened with games? So many of them are striving for spectacle. Sure, with modern graphics cards you can do spectacle, but Hollywood can do it even better. The peculiar strength of gaming is that it is interactive. And spectacular action sequences that force the player to be an almost completely passive viewer are not playing to this strength.

I've said this before. There's one sequence in Tomb Raider 2013 where a scared (but determined) Lara has to climb to the top of a rusted, shaky, and very tall radio tower in order to send out a distress call. On the first play through, this is nail-biting, seat-of-the-pants scary. But on a second play, a terrible truth becomes obvious; the entire sequence is so tightly scripted you can not fall even if you try. In fact, the only action you as a player ever take over the entire five-plus minutes of this sequence is to hold down the "go forward" key.

And so many games do this. They put in pre-rendered cutscenes. They put in quicktime events (which stab themselves in the back, as they force the player to not get involved in the spectacle but instead focus narrowly on whatever symbol has popped up that requires that corresponding key to be hit). They don't even make it possible (in far too many cases) to skip through this junk on a second play-through. So they sacrifice playability in that way, too; they force the gamer to do things that aren't interesting (like waiting through a Quicktime Event) instead of letting them, well, play.

Interact. Be involved in the material. Be immersed, in those ways that games permit and movies do not.



I also just played one of the old Call of Duty games -- a World War II setting, in keeping with my current interest in history. And the biggest problem I have with this game is a similar one to that which I have with Tomb Raider 2013. I want it to be more about the purported subject, and less about generic mechanics.

Not that I think this would be easy to achieve. Or even necessarily sell well. Call of Duty is very much a "twitch" game. Now, it does focus on events -- such as the Normandy Landings -- which were incredibly fast-moving and chaotic. But I've taken part in military exercises and outside of the last moments of a banzai charge the pace is a little slower.

The first sequence, for instance, places you as a Soviet peasant conscripted into the defense of Stalingrad. It actually frames pretty well, with such cute bits as having you practice how to throw a grenade with a bucket of potatoes, that the Soviet army is poorly equipped. But then combat begins, and for all intents and purposes the only reason to ever conserve ammunition is because the reloading animation takes so long. Really, like practically every other first-person shooter, you are encouraged to hose the landscape.

I made a point of going through even large parts of the Normandy sequence with a rifle, and choosing to look through the sights rather than firing through the hip. And this slowed down the breakneck pace just a little, but it is still far from a realistic experience.

And, yes, there are nice models of appropriate settings, uniforms, equipment, There are little set-ups in film reel style, and short diary entries. Just enough to where I did sort of get the sense of being a British soldier at El Alamein (or whatever). But really the mechanics trump any need to pay attention to specific details; grab any weapon you see on the battlefield and pull the trigger whenever the cross-hairs turn red, run in the general direction of the big arrow and keep shooting until the next cutscene begins.

Now, I'm not asking to have to study a topo map and strain to understand static-swamped radio messages in order to figure out the next objective, any more than I'm asking to have to spend three hours scraping a one-meter grid with a trowel to find the next artifact in Tomb Raider. But I think there's room for a lot more context.

And I think the standard model of the first-person shooter was sufficiently exercised by the time Doom II came out. Playing as an Army Ranger at the cliffs of Point du Hoc should not be essentially identical to the experience of playing as a young archaeologist shipwrecked on an island filled with savage cultists and an ancient mystery. Let's not be afraid to tinker a bit. Especially, lets find a way to support game length other than spawning a truly ridiculous number of essentially-identical targets.

Dancing about Architecture: Arkham City (GOTY)

This is the second game in the "Arkham" series, released in 2011. Primarily, you play Batman in third person, swooping around the scenery, solving relatively simple puzzles, and getting in a whole bunch of fights. The Game of the Year addition collects most of the DLC in one place, unlocking several other playable characters; Catwoman becomes part of the main storyline in this addition, providing a prologue and a couple of later episodes.

And, yes, the fights are amusing. And you have a lot of "marvelous toys" to play with -- batarangs and smoke bombs and so forth (no Batmobile in this one) -- but really the high point of the game is swooping around the city, gliding silently into alleys or grappling-line upwards to perch on a gargoyle.

And what a city. The back-story to the game is that Gotham City, failing to keep their increasing crowd of colorful, powerful, and generally psychotic baddies behind the bars of any traditional prison or inane asylum, has chosen to wall off part of their equivalent of Manhattan Isle and let the crazies run loose (and hopefully, one gathers, kill each other off.)

So basically it's Escape from New York, only without Snake Plisken. Okay, ridiculous idea from any kind of legal basis, penologically, financially, or even practically. I mean, really -- if Hannibal Lector style restraints can't keep a character like the Joker down, how does a high wall and some guards with guns do it?

And what is this supposed bit of low-value real-estate? One that has police headquarters (well, the cop shop is often in some part of town no-one else wants), a decaying amusement park/district (shades of Coney Island), some waterfront, a nice old theater, the courthouse where the premier District Attorney of Gotham tried some of his famous cases, a massive natural history museum, a lovely sprawling subway entrance/mall in Crystal Palace style art nouveau...

So, really, the old part of town, the one-time center before the outside investors moved in and the big financial buildings and multinational headquarters moved in. Central Boston with the old State House. Old Philly. "The City" in London. Basically, the kind of historic district even a financially desperate metropolis would be loathe to lose.

Older buildings, brownstone and brick, tall narrow windows, heavy cornices and plenty of gargoyles. Some massive statuary, too, but not taken to the extremes of the Tim Burton films. And it is all littered, half-abandoned, some boarded up, lots rusted...and add to this barricades and other modifications made in the course of the ongoing gang wars.

Several of the major figures in Batman's rogue's gallery have set up little empires and they are waging a violent turf war. But this, too, as atmospheric as it is, begs all sorts of questions. Are any of these characters, from Two-Face down to the Penguin, going to let someone else set the rules? Let outside society set the rules? Hell with entertaining their captors with a self-imposed cage match, these are the kinds of people who would team up to break out. And maybe the game designers did mean for this to come across as lobsters trying to escape a pot by climbing over each other, but it doesn't read that way in game. It reads as if many of these major figures in Batman's history are content to play king of an artificially constricted hill.

Oh, and when you leave the rainy rooftops and perch-handy cornices you discover the street layout makes no sense at all. Blind alleys, meandering streets...even the barricades and the giant wall and the broken bit of freeway (very Oakland post Loma Prieta) aren't enough to make the street layout rational. In fact, once you've been down to street level a few times, a lot of the allure of the setting wears off; you realize that these are mostly empty facades and for all the seeming size and variety of the place there's really nothing more you are going to see.



So the basic plot works out as a whole set of fetch quests/boss battles. You end up visiting the same sites multiple times, as you go across town to get something (and fight the owner for it) then back to try to deliver it (and fight against the not-unexpected betrayal by the person you fetched it for.)

Like Snake, Batman is early on cursed with one of those medical conditions with a handy countdown timer, and is working as much as anything else to save his own life. The details, of course, make no sense biologically. Basically, the Joker took Titan Serum in the last game, and the side effects are poisoning him -- he hasn't long to live. So he injects Batman with his tainted blood, which gives Batman (despite his larger, more robust physique) exactly as long to live. And to rub it in, Joker makes anonymous donations to the blood supply of several of Gotham's hospitals, putting upwards of thirty thousand patients in the same dire straights.

These people never met Paracelsus. This is practically homeopathic (except that the weaker dose is exactly, down to the minute, as efficacious as the stronger.) Indeed, Batman gets a temporary cure from Ra's al Gul (partially answering how he can be fighting and grapple-swinging like he is if he is supposed to be a few minutes from croaking) but at the climax the Joker -- an un-athletic bantam-weight with a pre-existing medical condition -- very nearly out-survives him.

Which leads us to one of the odder moments; at the conclusion of the main story-line a sombre Batman carries the dead body of the Joker out and lays him almost reverentially on the hood of a police car. This sequence is so much "elegy for the honored dead" it's amazing they resisted the urge to stage a Pieta pose as part of it. I guess we sort of forgot Batman's one-time lover Talia, Ra's al Gul himself, a number of slain cops and medical people, and several thousand dead crooks thanks to Protocol Ten. Plus any number of living but brutalized people Batman personally delivered concussions, compound fractures, and a strong need for reconstructive surgery to during the course of the game.



Fighting is both simple and deep. A very nice touch is that it is (barely) possible to complete the game doing nothing but button-mashing. The novice is not penalized by not being able to see through to the end, instead, what rewards the expert player is better action, more balletic moves and more interesting options. Batman can fight very well if you have the skill to bring it out, and that is its own reward. The game's answer to heath is simple; you don't gain back any health during a fight, but you get it all back as soon as the field is cleared. This means you have to be relatively careful to counter blows and use stealth around well-armed opponents, because you can't just duck around a corner to recoup or drink a handy Bat-potion to heal up.

One downside to unlocking Catwoman as a playable character is that she is so much quicker. After fighting with her, Batman feels like a muscle-bound tank. And after watching Selina's slinky walk, he sort of looks like he is in need of a Bat-Laxative.

On the other hand, he does have the grapple gun, and a cape to glide on, and a lot of gadgets. In the mode of many modern games, several of the gadgets are necessary to move in certain special places; sometimes you need to make a hole with explosive gel in order to proceed, for instance. Or there is the only thing that stumped me enough to look for help online; to cross an underground river you toss a freeze grenade to make a temporary ice-floe which you can perch on.

There are both elite mooks and boss battles, with the most difficult fights being those that combine both. All of the above require special techniques to take down; you can't just hit them. The most difficult pure boss battle in this sense is Mister Freeze, who needs to be stunned before you can approach him and do damage. And he learns from each encounter; if you manage to stun him for a moment by activating one of the handy electromagnets just standing around the room (just go with it), on recovery he methodically freezes the rest of them, ensuring they can no longer be used against him.

The game is decent about informing you what you need to do. The two strongest errors here are ones I've seen before; first is an inability to name anything either properly or even consistently; you simply have to figure out that "Control Room" and "Monitor Bay" both refer to the same thing, and both of those mean the place that looked like a receptionist's desk. The second is more annoying; it is the way the game will prompt you insistently about the wrong part of the problem. Aka "I need to get to the Control Room," the Batman mutters to himself. "The other key must be in the Control Room. The clue to this mystery is in the Control Room." Yeah, I got that the "Control Room" is where I'm supposed to be, game -- my problem is figuring out which damned room you intended that to be!



Estimate for completing the main campaign is a mere twenty-five hours for the average player. Other campaign material adds another ten hours or so. Then there's the usual garbage of collectables; various "Riddler Puzzles" which you basically solve for raw points. Really, the major replay is to hone your combat and try to get higher combo scores, as well as trying out more inventive fighting methods.

And maybe fly around the city a bit, stopping on a gargoyle or two to brood in the rain. Because isn't that what you came to the game for in the first place?

Review of KOTOR : May the Force Serve You

Another oldie (which is seeing new life through both Steam release and release for iPad and Droid), Knights of the Old Republic is an early Bioware creation and perhaps one of the first role-playing video games set in the Star Wars universe. Rather famously, this is also a leverage of Bioware's existing "port" of paper-and-pencil Dungeons & Dragons mechanics into a video game. Lurking under all the weapon stats and Force skills is a "D20" system; critical actions are determined by rolling a 20-sided dice against a calculated value.

In D20 fashion, you have character classes (which control your starting points, which skills you are allowed to take, etc.), you have characteristics (the old Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, Charisma etc.), you have skills (which unlock certain options and add bonuses to various rolls), and feats (which do the same, only generally more globally; a feat might give bonuses to a half-dozen different skill rolls).

Oh, and of course you have magic...err, Force powers.

It is role-playing, with early iterations of what would evolve to become the (in)famous Bioware Dialogue Wheel, and the superimposition of a sliding scale of morality (Light side versus Dark side, naturally). A great many of the critical decisions in the game are made via dialogue choices, and these will truly shape the game -- and in more than determining whether you stay Jedi or turn Sith.

An interesting aspect to the dialogue choices is that you generally have equally "light" and "dark" choices available. Which gives you more options in each encounter, and gives you more of a feeling of freedom, but I think this mechanic gives you something else as well (perhaps unintentionally); even when you are playing at the lightest of the light, trying to be the kindest most helpful boy scout of a Jedi possible, there is always this temptation to just tell the squabbling couple to shoot themselves and save you the trouble of dealing with them anymore.

And I'm not giving away any spoilers (probably) to comment how appropriate this lurking temptation is for the character you will be playing!



The dialogue is generally strong; but above even the voice acting, there was someone on the development team who could really, really write dialog. I am humbled. I could not write some of that dialogue. And I'm talking not about the necessarily formulaic set-pieces of the grand plot, I'm speaking of the banter that occurs with several of the stand-out characters.

Jolee Bindo: imagine Morgan Freeman doing a True Neutral version of Ben Kenobi. A master of snark, a true guide, and refuses to admit he is teaching you or get into any of that mentor foolishness. Exasperating and warm all at the same time.

Canderous Odo: taking the Extended Universes' fondness for the Mandalorian to the ultimate extreme, he is a Manly Man doing Manly things. It is the voice acting that sells this one; he is so over the top (yet so utterly committed and serious) it is totally worth spending the time to talk to him. Frequently.

HK-47: A droid with an attitude that has to be heard to be believed. Where Jolee is an artist of the snarky retort, HK-47 employs them like a stiletto.

Carth Onasi: every conversation with him goes haywire, until he is left practically unable to form words. Someone studied at the feet of the great playwrights here, because the dialog scenes with him have that avalanche in motion effect of an argument in a Neil Simon -- everything each of you says ends up coming out wrong, he takes offense, tries to apologize for taking offense and only digs himself in deeper...well, I just can't describe it. Like I said; this is the sort of thing I wish I could write (and can't.)

And, yeah, I turned to Mission Vao a lot of the time, as her Rogue skills were essential in cracking computers and disarming mines. She was the first in my party with good sneak stats, too, so I more than once sent her out alone. And since I hated to break up the pair, Chew.., err, Zaalbar usually went with her. Although the wookie was practically useless in combat until I figured out I actually had to equip him with a decent sword before he'd stop trying to pound everything with his furry fists. Why he never uses the bowcaster he's dragging around, I don't know. It's probably somewhere down in some nested menu.

Although you are eventually traveling with up to nine (depending on choices you made, such as whether you both spare Juhani and turn her from the Dark Side), you can only take two at a time. And it is often worth taking specific ones (like bringing Zaalbar to Kashyyyk), even when the game doesn't explicitly require you to.

One major change from, say, Mass Effect is that your own dialog isn't voiced. This made for me a small emotional disconnect. I didn't always feel as if I was part of the conversation. Over half the dialog is in various alien tongues (subtitled) which is very cool and adds to the feeling of the Star Wars universe -- but the aliens also always speak long. It takes Zaalbar longer to say "no" than it apocryphally does for Wotan to sing it (Wagnerian opera joke there). And if you page through, you risk hitting the key just as the dialog ended and accidentally selecting a response on the next screen.

Related to this is, once again, major fights and, worse, mini-games that are placed directly behind an un-skippable cut-scene. Worst is one where you take off in the Ebon Hawk (really?) and there's a long scene on Darth Malak's flagship...and then a scene on your ship...then you are trying to win a frustrating and quirky turret mini-game. Which means if you miss, it's back to fifteen minutes of cut scenes for you before you can try again.




I started my game as a Scout with no intentions of being dragged into the whole Jedi thing. I specialized in blaster combat, meaning to keep my enemies at a distance. Well, you get that lightsaber whether you want it or not. And it did so much more damage than anything else I had, I quickly found the best combat option was to place myself in front, soaking up enemy fire, while my buddies Canderous and HK-47 poured down blaster fire from a safer distance. Making lots of gleeful comments all the way -- the fun with these characters, really, with all your potential party members -- is not just in your interactions with them, but the way they comment, butt in, and otherwise act out in public.

And, yeah...with Blaster Deflection droids and mercenaries and the like are a little less of a drain on your health packs. And Blade Throw is even better than grenades for doing area damage; an incredible leveler for when you have close-packed enemies. But for all of that, it is a bit annoying to be forced into lightsaber for everything. Thing is; over half the baddies are animals or Sith or otherwise things that close to melee range. Sniping at them from a safe distance only really works when the path-finding AI can't figure out how to get to you (I had Mission shooting a Rancor in the ankle for about ten minutes once until I finally figured out how to take it down.)

So embrace the lightsaber. The Force? Not so much. Force Whirlwind and Force Push are a lot of fun -- the latter was exceptionally useful for getting distance to use a lightsaber throw -- but pretty soon everyone you meet is Force resistant. For that reason, Force Persuade is totally useless (plus always seemed to me a pretty horrible thing to be doing to people). Sink your points in Charisma et al instead.

Oh, yeah. And using the Force to heal. This is very much video game in that who wins a nearly-equal battle basically hinges on who has the most health packs available. Although you can cheat a little in this game; you can instantly zap back to "camp" (aka the Green Pigeon) and have health fully restored, then zap back to wherever you were. And if you want to really abuse the camp mechanic, go around the Canary Canary and sponge extra grenades et al off your crew. Zaalbar will groan and roar for five minutes but at the end of it will have created a brand-new grenade out of spare parts. And you can keep going back until he gets tired of it.



The sound design is excellent. On the few minuses, background sounds sometimes come close to covering up dialogue. Tweaking the sliders didn't seem to help. On the plus side of the ledger, the music is excellent orchestral simulation with a very strong John Williams flavor (including direct quotes, which fortunately are not abused). It is subtle as well as martial; there's an great little bit that plays sometimes when you are heading to a new world that combines something very much like the famous opener in the skies over Tatooine with a subtle shimmer of glockenspiel that evokes the "here we are at a new planet" opener in original series Star Trek.

Graphics are decent for when they were. Kudos for bringing so many of the creatures from Star Wars across, although I did tire eventually of seeing Twilek everywhere. Limitations of the number of character models did lead to some odd moments of the "Wasn't I just talking to you on Dantooine?" moments and sometimes the face really didn't match the voice actor. One oddity that may be a artifact of the number of models and the color space or may actually be a refreshing choice is that unlike Billy Dee William's practically solo performance, a seeming majority of the human characters are dark-skinned. Perhaps one of the developers had been reading Ursula K LeGuin's essays?

Another graphical amusement was a bar scene where I presume they either couldn't spare the polygons for drinks or even chairs, or hadn't written an animation for drinking, because all the patrons could do is bob up and down "drinking bird" style -- so much so the first one I saw I thought was trying to throw up.

The planets were generally excellent -- the forest floor of Kashyyyk being the major disappointment (but how could any game match up with the lush complexity of the Star Wars Comic Book?) There is also in the Steam version of the Mac port way too much bloom being used to demonstrate the hot deserts of Tatooine...quite enough bloom to hide any number of Tusken Raiders, whether or not they chose to ride in single file.

But otherwise the settings were distinctive, and I welcomed each new world and the chance to immerse in the deep, surprisingly subtle stories (the wookies, in a clear echo of the Ivory Coast, are selling their own people into slavery in trade for weapons to use in local conflicts), and all the little stories and problems you will find yourself involved in (basic RPG tip; don't turn down any side quest. It might just get you a couple credits, but it also might be the only way to get the key you need to complete the mission).

Reviews, Ridiculous to Sublime

Finally got around to watching the first Tomb Raider movie (saw some of it once, on a transatlantic flight...and fell asleep in the middle of it). Odd. It does a lot right, has a great look, a good energy, and there's a strong sense that everyone involved was enjoying themselves. But despite all of that, it is oddly...boring.

Perhaps it is the lack of strong music. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider had various problems coming up with a composer and the man who finally landed in the hot seat had only two weeks to work. Under similar conditions James Horner came up with Aliens, but Tomb Raider sounds as if made drop-needle from whatever euro-pop was lying around the room. It lacks grandeur, it lacks a linking theme, it lacks development. This is a film that could use the leit-motif treatment (as well as the rest of that Wagnerian grammar).

Jolie is wonderful. And the film does extremely well at translating the feel for the games, especially the kind of gymnastic action, without resorting to wirework and CGI and otherwise breaking (as so many action films do) the suspension of disbelief. Obviously she can't leap about like her game avatar, but although more realistic and plausible the physical stunts are still strong and entertaining.

The plot, on the other hand, also suffers from a lack of clarity. In this case I think it isn't so much a lack of focus as a lack of the concrete. Odd as it may be to say, there is more archaeology and history in the worst of the games than there is in the movie. The Illuminati are named. That's about it. There's not even a name given, much less a culture or history or religious tradition for the big temple set-piece (using some real places in Cambodia as background). Nothing is seen of Venice but the interior of a building. One bit of some script is translated by Lara (or rather, pretty much read outright in situ by the light of a chemlight) but there isn't even enough to define what language it might be.

In astronomy the movie does far worse. A grand conjunction is an important part of the plot, is shown from space, observed via telescope on Earth, and diagrammed by a giant orrery...except in none of these depictions do the film-makers appear to know which planets are involved, how many planets are in the solar system, or even what they look like. In all these depictions, they are a line of nearly identical yellow balls, with the sole exception that one has a ring.

(There is a vague moment in the orrery scene where some character interacts briefly with what might be a group of satellites arrayed at 90 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic, which is oddly suggestive of Uranus... but even that is giving the set design, as wonderful looking as the contraption is, too much credit).

Similar incoherence follows the McGuffin; what does it do, how it works. With the stakes so nebulous, the way to achieve the goal so ill-defined, and the map and clues non-existent, the entire struggle is pretty much, "Stuff happens, then some other stuff, then Lara wins."

Here's hoping the second movie is as much better as word has it is.




On the other side of the First Century silver boar-horse C type, I'm in the middle of the second Samantha Sutton book by James Jordan and they keep getting better and better. Cambridge and its surrounds are the setting for this one, and it is a Cambridge with all the hoary traditions and strange characters and long murky history of Douglas Adams. And a mystery and struggle over an archaeological site being excavated in haste ahead of a construction project; a struggle that pits not just cultural heritage against modern development, archaeologists versus looters (rather, the semi-respectable metal-detectorists of the English scene), and antiquities department against the upstart and more anthropologically-minded barbarians who study home-grown, pre-Roman cultures.

Jacobs does push, of course, allowing access in places his heroes really shouldn't have, bending rules they really should know better than to bend, and throwing in a few narrow scrapes that more should really be made more of (by local law enforcement, among others). But he really, really knows his settings, and he knows his archaeology, and he presents an honest appraisal of how the field works and some of its conflicts and hot topics as well as some of its problems...while keeping the narrative within range of a young reader.

I am all for these books, and hope I can find the third (and fourth, when it comes out).

Dust

Never been on the playa. But the playa is on me now. I've been tearing down some speakers that were loaned out to the last Burning Man, and I've gotten more familiar than I want to be with that super-fine, abrasive, and surprisingly desiccant dust. My hands still feel dry after just brushing the stuff out of electronics for a few hours.

Delivery date for Imperial Highway has been moved back. Might even be time to experiment with laser-engraving detail (the basswood model is coming along, but I am concerned about how clean details like the seams between stones are going to be).

I'm still going slow. Three months ago, it was too hot to concentrate after I got off work. Now, it is too cold to want to do anything but wrap up in a quilt and try to get the baseboard heater to do something other than make the air go all dry. But then, last week I worked on the new prop, mixed a show, and built more of my LED stage marker lights for the same guy that talked me into building the first one. However: the last two really cut into my sleeping hours, and catching up during the weekend pretty much nixed me getting anything done then. Got a week off coming up, though. Maybe I'll get something built then.

Followed some random links and discovered an odd relative of Poe's Law. I watched two hilarious parody trailers for a "A Wrinkle in Time" movie (the Madeline L'Engle children's classic), and then a third...which may have been an actual trailer for an actual movie. Because the kind of company that would make a movie of this odd, slightly orthogonal, but also terribly life affirming and blatantly Christian (in a quite non-denominational way) and also Newbery Award winning fantasy is going to pour on the Disneyfictation and emphasize the fantasy adventure and the wish fulfillment "power of love" stuff and make the Christian subtext even more blatant and a lot less sub...which all ends up in an overblown, Hallmark glossy, "In a World" trailer that it is so perfectly a self-parody it becomes impossible to sort from the real thing.

Also on the parody side... I'm 20 Kindle pages in on the first one and I'm already totally hooked on the Samantha Sutton stories. These are far enough on the side of real archaeology that a not-so-veiled reference to the Tomb Raider games is being played by the protagonist's annoying brother. 

Not that Lara Croft nor Daniel Jackson were ever exemplars of the working archaeologist (who is probably doing CRM in any case, there being little funding for full excavations these days). And I've already underlined this in my fanfiction. In fact, I've been tempted to go a little further. It might be an interesting direction to take Daniel Jackson; the universe has been just a little too agreeable, in that every old legend he investigates turns out to be true, and even more, every theory he comes up with turns out to be right.

So I could have him fall too far into woo, falling for all the Pakal's Spaceship nonsense. Or since the plots in the show usually involve the existing back-story he could start seeing Goa'uld and Stargates where there weren't any. 

(Really, this exposes even more how stupid that universe became by the time the series ended. They discover that all the major figures of the Arthurian mythos -- Merlin, Morgan le Fay, et all -- are Ancients. Err, what? What is encountered in the show are practically the modern Cliff Notes versions of the characters of Malory, who descend from Geoffrey of Monmouth's, and we know he was drawing from Welsh and Breton sources -- among others -- but you think that we're going to see Mynyddog Mwynfawr show up during Season Nine? It's not just that there are Ancient Astronauts, it's that the Secret History is also the Theme Park version of history; nobody that you didn't hear about in High School.)

Well, that might be an interesting direction to take Daniel, but I'm in need of something stronger. I made an error over the last couple chapters. I closed off the main internal conflicts. It has been convincingly argued (by who?) that internal conflict is as necessary as external conflict, and powerful writing can ensue when the two support each other. Except I've already brought Lara to a place where she can launch into the events of the third Crystal Dynamics game (Underworld). I don't have a convenient catharsis for her before the conclusion of my story.

And the SG1 crowd -- taken as they are from an open-ended multi-season television show with a stable core cast -- don't have available major emotional arcs I can tap into. Sure, I could break into their characters and take them on journeys the television show didn't. I don't mind going a little OOC, or even a lot OOC (Out Of Character, a frequent phrase in critiques of fan fiction).

But there's nothing obvious right now. So I'm reading up on Gilgamesh and Sargon of Akkad and Geothermal power generation and Decade Volcanos and Lemuria...and hopefully at some point an idea or two about some nice emotional conflicts will occur to go along with the external grapple-line swinging, pit trap escaping, and gun shooting.

M3D Micro

I'm borrowing an M3D "Micro" 3d printer this week. Finally threw together a CAD for the "10x24 caseless armor-piercing" the M41 Pulse Rifle is supposed to fire; the 3d print represents the "Nitramine 50" solid propellant and a flat-nose .40 FMC bullet is shoved in the front in a semi-telescoping format. The total length of the round is the same as the .45 ACP chambered in the M1A1 Thompson the prop weapon was build around.

In any case!

The Micro is very cute. A cube less than 8" on a side, and around $350 new. Unlike other printers near that price point it is not a kit; it goes in fact in the other direction trying (but not always succeeding) to be a plug-and-play experience.

In this lies the majority of its real flaws. The build area is small but this is not of consequence for a home printer; large builds are simply too time-consuming to attempt all in one chunk (and tend to distressingly fail right in the middle). It is slow, but that comes from the price point; you get the hot end you pay for.

What are actual issues is the firmware uses non-standard interpretation of G-code, making it almost mandatory to use the provided software. That software hides much of the functionality behind a light-weight interface, giving you idiot lights and a handful of buttons instead of diagnostic tools. And this pipeline also stands in the way of using external slicers to better tailor your g-code towards a specific print. In short, it is Macintosh-like in approach; hide the scary options behind a friendly facade.

But it fails to provide the other part of that equation. The software doesn't just run (well, it doesn't on a Mac!); it required a certain amount of under-the-hood work to get it working. However. Once I'd sudo'd the right directory links and gotten used to drag-and-drop around the broken file selection handler, it functioned without problem.

Physically, it gave me good prints right out of the box. Well; I wasn't the one that opened the box. But when I got my hands on it, I ran the calibration routine, and after solving the software the first print was good. So far, none of my prints have failed.

I am, however, currently printing out new filament spool brackets. The original design of the Micro puts the filament reel inside the base of the machine itself, which would be very neat if anyone could figure out how it works. How it actually sits isn't documented and more than one person has fiddled with it for a while without figuring out how to thread it. So never mind that.

Fortunately, this special undersized filament spool -- which M3D sells in their store -- doesn't mean this printer has taken the lamentable course of some other printers I could name, and made it so attempting to use third-party filament places you in potential violation of the DCMA. No; this printer is filament-manufacturer agnostic.

And of course Thingiverse has several pages of spool brackets (and other accessories) that you can print out to mount on top of the machine either the smaller spools supplied by M3D, or standard-sized spools. It was literally a one-click search to find them, and I'm printing one now.

I am told that it can handle other materials other than PLA, but this is apparently right at the margin of what the hot end can deal with. There is also a third-party software solution that front-ends the clever (and free) Cura (the same slicing software, actually, that is hidden and inaccessible below the Micro's hood). That software is as I understand currently in command-line format and has some bugs itself, but it is a good sign.

Another thing M3D sells is BuildTak Sheets. These also look at first glance as a "make more money from the customer" toy, but they work very well. Other users report having problems with prints pulling up, and retreating to the old standby of blue painter's tape (TechShop has moved on to glue sticks, which work very well once you get used to them) but I've completed a half-dozen prints now without a single problem with the first BuildTak sheet from the package.




So it is a decent printer for someone who doesn't want to deal with a lot of start-up complexity. It will more-or-less print out of the box, and aside from some minor software and hardware issues it will do the job of plug it in and just print. And the print quality and speed are acceptable. Support could be better; it took an hour of reading the forums to solve the Mac compatibility issues, and that's something M3D really should have fixed themselves if they want to offer it as plug-and-play.

As for me? Well, this printer is getting me through a current project (the M41 Caseless) but I have the MakerBots at TechShop for most quick turn-around printing needs and of course Shapeways for the bigger stuff (and stuff that needs either higher quality, different materials, or things that can't be achieved without more support structure than I'd like to be printing on a PLA machine).

Incidentally, several test M41A Caseless printed now, but the tan color isn't working for me. I'm going to try Tamiya's Olive Drab 2 again. Of course, this shot was taken in Rosco #22 and quad layers of Rosco #65, so green doesn't render well....

Half-Life (Black Mesa)

Half-Life was the first game of the series, probably the first game of the second generation of First-Person Shooters and responsible for many aspects of the genre today, and so seminal the history of FPS games has been described by more than one commenter as "Games before Half-Life, and games after Half-Life."

And I've never played it.

What I have played is Black Mesa, a massive fan-made upgrade and do-over of the original game, using Valve's shiny new(ish) Source engine.

Origins

There were FPS games before Half-Life. One can't describe the history of games without crediting John Carmack's Doom. Doom (and before that, Castle Wolfenstein 3D) laid out many of the basics of the First-Person Shooter.

Doom presented a 3D environment, and the player is essentially an animated camera that moves through that environment. Important information for play is presented around the corners of the image, in what is generally known as a HUD in reference to the "Heads-Up Display" of informational graphics projected on a clear slab in front of the pilot of a combat aircraft.

The basic FPS structure is present here; player avatar and enemies are given an aggregate value of "Health," which is metered or indicated and when used up causes an enemy to be replaced by a corpse or the game to restart at the latest available save point. Player health can be re-stocked from "Medkits," which like refreshes of ammunition and armor, the addition of new equipment, and various (usually temporary) special abilities, appear as objects of a stock (and easily recognizable) type which the Player needs to go to in order to pick up.

Play progresses from Room to Room, Level to Level; Rooms being artificial demarkations (usually but not always architectural) that limit the number of entities and other resources the game engine has to deal with simultaneously, and Levels being completely new data which is read in from permanent storage (usually over some kind of loading screen).

Movement is generally WASD: a set of keys that are more-or-less arranged for convenient forward/back, left/right, with the direction the Player Avatar/camera is pointing controlled by the mouse. Weapons point to the center of the visual field; you aim like you aim the cannon on a fighter plane. Clever players figured out almost instantly that you could in fact fire forwards while walking sideways (holding down Left or Right movement keys) and thus confuse enemy return fire. Thus was born Strafing, and it has had a long an honorable career.

Another stock element introduced back then was the weapons mix; you could generically call the classes Pistol, Assault Rifle, Shotgun, Machine Gun, Sniper Rifle...and add to these different options melee weapons and grenades. Doom offered two melee attacks; the chain saw, and if all else ran out, the Doomguy could defend himself with his fists. The usual trade-off is that the more powerful weapons have less ammunition available, requiring you to strategize which weapons you use at which moments. Add this to strafing, running, sniping, and cover options, and you have a good mix of evolving strategies that keep combat interesting for the length of a game.

The Next Generation

The innovations of Half-Life were not the improved graphics per se. Although they were improved, and this is no slur on Carmack; Doom did extremely clever things mathematically, perceptually, and artistically to get that real-time rendered 3d universe with textures and animation and even (simulated) shadows and lighting effects on those older processors. The Quake engine was the ancestor of the custom code that went into Half-Life, and it permitted polygon characters instead of pre-rendered sprites, real-time lighting effects, and other innovations.

Half-Life2 made huge changes to what became the Source engine, folding in physics originally taken from the Havok plug-in. Graphics upgrades are the name of the game, and one of the big selling points both in the console wars (which are in my opinion largely a forgotten issue as desktop machines outdo them in processing power) and in showcase reels at E3. With HDRI being the most recent flavor-of-the-month; the ability to simulate the high dynamic range of the real world realized both in a higher-contrast image on screen, and rapid changes in gamma as the player moves about.

In any case, Half-Life's major contribution was in story. To have a story, a complex story that unfolded over play. And a story that was presented in-game. This latter part of the lesson is one too few games have learned from. We seem to have reached a point where two disparate philosophies are fighting it out (sometimes within the same game); one is gameplay at all cost (including unrealistic, suspension-of-disbelief breaking, and outright invasive elements in order to provide more control of the gaming element itself), and the other is story, but with an unfortunate twist.

I can't lay the fault at the feet of improved graphics and a market method (the demos and the reliance by most advertisement and game criticism media on eye candy for short attention spans) that make fancy graphics the cart dragging along the unfortunate horse of the game itself into a shiny mess of motion-blurred water-spotted HDRI-enhanced lens flares. Whatever the cause, the game itself plays like the advertisement; player control and even player input is sacrificed for the sake of getting the perfect animated image.

So for better or for (mostly) worse, the cutscene has come back. Whereas early games simply couldn't afford to do more than flash up a page of text explaining who you were and why you should be shooting everything in front of you, modern games treat you to up to twenty minutes of brilliantly choreographed, voice-acted, animated, directed (with all sorts of fancy camera tricks) and lit sequences of, well -- to paraphrase one reviewer, "...an exciting game I wish I was actually playing."

It can be done. Mass Effect, for instance, plays in third person and moves "in" to standard shots for the dialog sections -- mostly two-shots in medium, but there are some action shots. This works I think because you are still an active player; you have switched from WASD keys to Dialog Wheel, and the change in shot is acceptable to go with the change of play style.

Contrast with all the Tomb Raider games produced by Crystal Dynamics; as a general rule, if Lara is in anything other than the standard third person, then you are being a passive observer. The exception -- the Quick Time Events -- do not help. If anything, QTEs make you not even pay attention to the carefully arranged movie and look only for the display of which button you are supposed to mash next (to finish the QTE and get back to playing the game).

(And no, this is not interactivity. Better to call it "reactivity"; if there is only one button that progresses the game, then there is no actual choice being made, even the most trivial such as whether to use the pistol or use the rifle at some random moment of combat, or whether to walk down the right side or the left side of a wide corridor. And choice is what separates playing a game from watching a movie.)

As with Half-Life 2, the story unfolds in front of your eyes. Unlike Half-Life 2, there are not even lectures given by other characters. Well, only very short ones. You pretty much have to figure out what is going on by yourself. And there is an additional element of player choice here; you can figure out just enough to keep going and surviving, or you can listen carefully and look for subtle clues and pick up additional and far more mysterious (and threatening!) levels of story below the surface.

Black Mesa

Valve themselves ported the original Half-Life to the new Source engine, but it was just that; a plain port, without new textures or other additions to leverage new options within the Source engine (such as physics, or real-time lighting effects).

It was left up to a group of fans -- a group that expanded to hundreds of members and who worked at it for over seven years -- to make a version of Half-Life that was the equal in updated graphics and play to Half-Life 2. And more kudos to them because they resisted the urge to remake the game to their taste. It is more like a second draft, with some of that hindsight editing that various authors have found themselves doing when re-issuing an old book that had since turned into the first book of a series.

As in, there are some references that tie it more closely to Half-Life 2...all the way out to a subtle reference to Magnusson (who only appears in Episode 2) and a possible explanation for why he still hasn't "forgiven Gordon for what happened."

It is as I said a second draft. The game is still there, it looks and feels and plays like the same game. But the architecture of Black Mesa has been rationalized a little, some pointless episodes were truncated or removed, play flows a little better, NPCs are much improved in their rendering and in their activities. And there is simply more; more textures, more lighting, larger arenas, more voice acting for the NPCs.

On the negative -- and very likely because it was written by people who had played the original a lot, it is also harder than the original. Significantly.

The basic story is simple (yet enough to hold interest). You are Gordon Freeman, with a doctorate in Theoretical Physics, an interest in physical fitness, and with that and your position at the bottom of the Black Mesa facility's totem pole (being young and new) your job revolves around donning the heavy protective HEV suit and working in the test chamber at Anomalous Materials.

The first episode ("episodes" flow from one to the other with no more interruption than necessary loading time. Essentially, you play in real time, from the moment you enter the facility until the moment the G-Man comes for you at the end) is all introduction. You are free to wander parts of the Black Mesa facility, interacting with the scientists and guards, reading black boards, throwing ash trays -- whatever. In fact, the first five minutes of the game are nothing but a tram ride through the outer parts of the sprawling mostly-underground complex.

The test sample of the day, however, is anything but ordinary. Something goes wrong. The test chamber is severely damaged and aliens begin appearing randomly throughout the facility. Eventually you realize that the test opened a doorway to another universe and some of the local creepy-crawlies are coming out to play in this one.

These are the parts that feel to me like the heart of Half-Life. The almost indescribable loneliness, as you explore a workplace turned into a shattered ruin with only a few scattered, terrified, and very much temporary survivors. And things are appearing there that wreak their own hideous transformations. There is a profound alienation going on here.

This is the most Survival Horror the game gets. In the earliest phases you have no weapon at all -- perhaps some road flares you pick up. Soon enough you stumble on Gordon Freeman's signature weapon; the crowbar. And this is also an innovation, because it is not just a weapon, but it is also a key; it allows you to access places you could not travel to without it.



Eventually, of course, you find more weapons. But that is largely because they are being brought in from outside. After struggling so long to make it back to the surface, working your way through dripping maintenance tunnels and wrecked offices and elevator shafts with broken elevators, you are nearing the surface when "rescue" efforts show.

And begin shooting at the survivors. You grasp -- guess, really -- that the reaction of the government was to send in experts at covering up. The HECU troops that start piling in from the surface -- pinching you and any other survivors between them and the aliens who are still teleporting in from Xen -- mean to leave no witnesses of any species.

Thus the middle part of the game is a much larger mix of weapons and tactics and an ever-widening picture as you wage a one-man war of survival against the military, with the aliens an equal threat to both of you. Eventually the aliens get the upper hand on the military, and they withdraw to begin pounding the surface with artillery and aircraft.

But you've gone back underground for other reasons. The rip in space is getting larger and threatens the planet and some of the surviving scientists might be the best chance of stopping it. So this is the Act II/III break; you've changed from a selfish survivor to someone who is acting more as a hero.

Which eventually leads you to Xen itself, to stop the invasions at their source. Which sets up the rest of the series. But since the Xen chapters aren't present in the current version of Black Mesa, I'll say no more about them.

What Works

The levels are distinct in character (as well as spectacular). As with Half-Life 2, the game makes a point of breaking up the pattern. One section might be close-in fighting, one might be exploration or even (shudder) platforming. And each level and each section of game is distinct in not just looks and not even just play, but in the atmosphere; the chilly cleanliness and relative calm of the labs where Questionable Ethics happen, the hot desert sun of Surface Tension with its wide-open spaces of bare rock and sand the perfect place for the increasing numbers of the military to pound on you, the cubical warren of Office Complex that turns it into a hundred single encounters in close confines, etc.

There is a multiplicity of weapons and options, even more so then in Half-Life 2, and many have dual modes; rifles that fire grenades, satchel charges that can be thrown with one click and detonated with another. Too much wealth, in fact; in the height of the fight against the HECU one is sometimes getting killed through being distracted by wondering which particular mix of weapons and strategies will work best. (I managed to kill myself with trip mines multiple times by trying to get clever with them).

New wrinkles continue to unfold in the story. The combat and exploration is enough to stay interested in any case, but there are slow revelations throughout, strongly showing that neither Xen nor the Resonance Cascade itself were entirely unknown or unexpected.

Interaction is simplistic. Since you don't speak, all you can really do is press the "interact" key when near a character and see if they will talk to you. But this still feels better than some games. There aren't characters designated to inexplicably go into lecture mode and hold you captive while they explain to you who you are and why you are there and why you should care about the invading monsters. Instead the other characters all appear to have inner lives; they are going on about their own business and only glancingly and tangentially end up explaining anything to you.

One oddity is crouch-jump. There are perhaps two places in the game where normal jump (aka hit the space bar) is actually enough. Everywhere else, it is necessary to do a super jump by hitting the crouch command and immediately following with the jump key. So for all practical purposes standard jump could have been used instead; it is a wasteful extra key operation, with the only tangible benefit being certain YouTube videos.

Black Mesa also successfully reproduces something else about the Half-Life experience; and that is the difficulty of detaching from a ladder. You have to be positioned perfectly in order to move gracefully off a ladder. Anything less and instead of moving on to a catwalk, your command causes Gordon Freeman to hurl himself into empty space and die impaled on broken crates far below. It makes every single use of a ladder in the game a mini platforming game in itself.

I have to admit to save-scrumming through parts of the game. Not so much the combat parts (although the lobby fight is incredibly tough), but for the platforming sections. The Box-Smashing Room in particular, but also the cliff-side climbing (where you have to crouch-jump at an angle to a narrow target and immediately perform a second action to keep from falling to your doom.) Fortunately the game allows saving a game at any arbitrary point.

What should have been learned

An immersive experience is possible. A game doesn't have to mimic film, with the downside of turning the player into a passive viewer, in order to be emotionally involving. And it doesn't need these tools to communicate story; a complex and nuanced story can be put across in the same way most of us experience the stories we encounter in our daily lives; not as a presentation but as a collection of observations and small interactions.

The Portal series does this. But there's no reason it can't also be accomplished in third person. Mass Effect and Deadspace and Bioshock also rarely feel it necessary to cut away to a cutscene in order to communicate story beats.

Related to this is trusting the audience. You don't have to spell it out. Also, you don't have to force them to absorb the story. If all the want to know is "Aliens bad, Army bad, just don't shoot the guys in blue or the people in lab coats. Unless it's fun" then they can go right ahead and play.

You can constrain the path and create a linear narrative without making it blatantly obvious you are doing so. And, hell -- on of Half-Life's chapters is actually called "On A Rail!" I'm not entirely sure what makes the path feel open. There are alternate routes. There are dead ends that go for long enough you aren't just being told there's only one door. There are rooms large enough to move around in and explore for a while.

One way to make this work is lock-based or hub-based environments; there will be a key (an action, an item, a puzzle, an interaction with an NPC, a fight that must be won) before the door to the next level can be opened. But before that, you can explore and exploit and otherwise solve the level in whatever order you wish.

Paths are less annoying when the environment makes them logical. A narrow trail up a cliffside is understandable as being only one open path to proceed. A wild wilderness area is a lot less convincing, and the waist-high weeds that conveniently prevent you from moving off the designer's intended path are at best felt as an imposition -- at worst, they are immersion breaking (as yet, few games have managed to explain why your barbarian character with a sword that can cleave an iron-scaled dragon in two is stymied in her path by a flimsy wooden door).

Designing logical environments works. Players aren't all architects or civil engineers but most of us do have an innate sense of when an environment is functional and laid out in the way human spaces are laid out, and we lose belief in a game universe and lose some of that important emotional connection when presented with scenery that was clearly arranged only for the benefit of the monsters (or for creating a specific movement path).



When all is said and done, it is a good game, and via Black Mesa completely playable today without even having to make excuses about "the charms of a retro experience" or anything.