The Stack

I recently chanced upon a post that reminded me that Cryo Interactive, the outfit best known for making loads of CD-ROM adventure games in the 1990s, once also made a game based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Ubik, and that I have a copy that I’ve barely played. On my first pass, I never even got through the first mission. I was blindsided by both its complexity and its clunkiness, and shelved it for a more patient day. This time around, I’ve at least gotten through that first mission.

But before I get into details, let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that Ubik is a really weird thing to use as the basis of a videogame, particularly one that, like Cryo’s Ubik, focuses on squad-based combat. The novel is probably the Philip K. Dickest of Philip K. Dicks’ works, based entirely around the sense of reality crumbling away. But it starts with a sort of fakeout involving battles between rival psychic corporate espionage firms, and the game seems to be based mainly on that part. In other words, it’s like how most cinematic adaptations of his works take just the part that can be used as the premise of an action flick and leave out the weird mystical stuff. But in Ubik, the weird mystical stuff is the bulk of the novel. I don’t think it’s going to entirely ignore the rest of the plot, because various liminal moments like the intro cinematic and the main menu contain images that only make sense in that context. But the mechanics, the stuff described in detail in the manual, are pure action-movie material. We’ll see how it goes.

(I’ve contemplated how I would approach adapting Ubik to a game today. One option that I find particularly amusing would be to have it start off as a modern game, with modern graphics and a modern UI, but then slowly devolve into the Cryo version.)

I managed to install the game off its original three CDs without problems, but it needed a patch to actually run under Windows 10, and some framerate and CPU limits courtesy of DXWnd to make it playable. Without those tweaks, you can’t go anywhere. If you try, you just walk in place without moving. I’m guessing it’s doing the distance-moved-since-last-frame calculation familiar to all game developers, but with an ungoverned framerate, it always underflows to 0. It was a bit tricky to balance this, to hobble it enough so that characters don’t get stuck on corners too easily, but not so much that the mouse cursor becomes distractingly laggy. Indeed, I’m not really sure how much I succeeded at fixing it and how much I’ve just gotten used to it being the way it is. I have to remind myself that I already found it uncomfortable to play even when it was new.

More tomorrow, probably!