The Stack

The first mission (of fifteen) in Cryo’s Ubik is taken from the novel, more or less. That is, it’s about going to a kibbutz in Topeka and recruiting a powerful psychic named Pat Conley to work for Runciter Associates (the protagonist’s employer) before the Hollis Corporation, Runciter’s rival, gets to her. But the bit where Conley demonstrates alarming reality-warping powers is left out, and in its place is a series of firefights against Hollis agents. Well, it’s the tutorial level, after all. It has to demonstrate all the mechanics.

Mission 2 is, as far as I can tell, wholly original to the game. Where mission 1 used Hollis agents as obstacles to your goal, in mission 2, they simply are the goal. They’ve taken over a factory by force, and the police, ill-equipped to handle psychic powers, have requested Runciter’s help. It’s worth noting here that the game goes to a lot more effort to paint Hollis as unambiguous bad guys than the novel does: they’re blatantly criminal, they’re only allowed to operate because they’ve got government officials in their pockets, they force their employees to get cybernetic implants that render them virtually inhuman. Presumably it’s all to help justify the way you kill them in droves.

I had been hoping to finish the mission before writing this post, but it turns out to take a sharp upturn in difficulty. Mission 1, you can get through without entirely knowing what you’re doing. Mission 2 might actually require me to read the manual. In addition, every time you fail, you have to reload the mission, which is discouraging, because loading a mission can take as long as two minutes on my system. If I have to wait that long, I’m more inclined to just shut off the game and do something else for a while.

I wonder what it’s doing during those two minutes? My first thought was that it must be the latency of my CD-ROM drive, but, through the magic of DXWnd, I’m playing entirely from virtual discs on my SSD now, and it hasn’t made a difference. Maybe it’s to do with memory. I’ve got about a thousand times more RAM than a typical 1998 machine, so it could be taking a thousand times longer to do something with it. Alternately, the memory size could be overflowing some variable and leaving the game thinking I have a lot less memory than I do, causing it to free caches and reload them more than necessary. Experimentation is required.

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!