The Stack

Not a lot of time to post today, and not a lot of play-time to post about, so I’ll just briefly introduce our next item. Dino Crisis is another one of those games with an easily-stated high concept: it’s Resident Evil with dinosaurs instead of zombies. I’m playing the PC version, but it’s blatantly a port from the original Playstation. A surprisingly robust one, too. I’ve more or less skipped past the PC’s first fumbling contacts with 3D graphics hardware here. By 1999, Direct3D was on solid enough ground that the game works effortlessly on my current system, albeit at a maximum resolution of 640×480. However solid their foundations, though, the 3D objects themselves are quite wobbly, especially when the camera is pitched at an oblique angle, as happens a lot in Resident Evil imitators. But I’ll tack this up to faithfulness to the original experience.

The survival horror genre, like the rhythm game, is primarily a console phenomenon. There really aren’t any survival horror games native to PC other than proto-example Alone in the Dark, which is sort of like the genre’s Pete Best, a franchise that left before the genre became famous. As such, I think I felt almost obliged at the time to pick up what few PC ports there were, once they became cheap. It wasn’t until Silent Hill 2 that I found one that I unreservedly liked. Resident Evil itself confounded me: here it was, staggeringly popular, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. When I bought Dino Crisis, it was in part in the hope that another data point would help me to understand. This is a point I’ll return to.

One other thing: I don’t like to talk about my professional life on this blog, but readers who know me will recognize that choosing this game at this time was really no choice at all. Playing this game is essential research.

Arguably, I shouldn’t complain about the gratuitous sex scenes interrupting the psychological mystery in Tender Loving Care. In a sense, they’re my own fault! Now that I’ve reached an ending and no longer fear spoilers, I’ve taken a more thorough look at the alternative tracks using VLC, and I find that, in several cases, the only difference between two versions of a scene is how explicit they are. I still think the game was mistaking my intent, though. I’m a completist. If I kept going back to that book on erotic art in the bathroom every chapter, it’s because I wanted to see everything. And so the game… showed me everything.

But not all possibilities, of course. The story seems to always follow a single track, hitting the same key points: Kathryn seduces Michael, someone poisons the dog, Michael becomes increasingly unhinged, and finally Michael contacts Kathryn’s agency to express his displeasure and have them call her away, leading to a confrontation that leaves someone dead. The variations are in the details. Take the scene where Michael contacts the agency: in all variants, he storms into Dr. Turner’s office only to find Dr. Turner absent, then yells at the receptionist until she calls the agency so he can talk to them. The bulk of the scene proceeds exactly the same way in all variants until the call is over, at which point he can continue to be rude to the receptionist and storm out, or calm down and apologize to her; if he apologizes, she either expresses sincere hope that things get better for him, or (the variation I got) warns him not to get in Kathryn’s way. That’s all the variation you get in that scene. Just little things that change what it all means.

Kathryn’s stated reason for seducing Michael is to keep him from dismissing her (which he’s perpetually on the brink of doing), because she can’t let him jeopardize the work she’s doing with Allison. Frame-tale Turner is outraged by this violation of professional ethics, but we’re given reason to believe that similar “unconventional techniques” underlie her tremendous success in prior cases — if successes they truly are. There’s a scene where Kathryn confronts Michael with what she believes to be his own role in Allison’s illness: that he doesn’t really want her to get well, that he was keeping her in the semi-catatonic state that we see her in at the beginning of the game out of a sort of psychiatric Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, because playing the caregiver was his penance for his unprocessed guilt over Jody’s death. That he sees Kathryn as a threat because she just might be able to cure Allison for real. There are at least two versions of this scene. I got the one where she seems to have a point, and where Michael is clearly just as messed-up as Allison, even if less obvious about it. The other variant makes Kathryn seem more like the crazy one, vindictively accusing him for no good reason.

I think the point where I started regaining faith in the game was when the dog died. The dog was a new addition to the household: Allison tells Michael at one point early in her therapy that “Jody” wants a dog, and Kathryn thinks it’s a good idea (get her caring for something real), so he grudgingly gets one, and immediately comes to hate it. He complains that it makes too much noise, but presumably really hates it as a sign of Kathryn’s machinations. “Jody” names the dog Punky, the same name as another dog they had had previously, which had eaten rat poison and died. And the new dog dies the same way: Michael finds the poison deliberately poured into its food bowl. He assumes that Kathryn did the deed as part of her sick mind games. If Kathryn is in fact responsible, she never lets on: even when alone with Michael, she insists that he did it. The question-and-answer segment afterward asks who you think did it, and I fingered Allison, because both Michael and Kathryn seemed sincere, and I kind of suspected that Allison was more than the passive victim she seemed. But the story never provides any definite answer.

In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs, maybe he clouts her on the back of the head with a hammer. Maybe he calls emergency services to take the body away, maybe he just buries her in a shallow grave in the backyard — I saw the latter, but I didn’t get the follow-up in which Dr. Turner visits the house with a couple of policemen and sorts everything out. (When he’s burying her, he says things like “Your cab has arrived, allow me to help you in!” (thump of body dumped into hole). I had assumed this was just gallows humor on his part, but the Dr. Turner ending has him actually confused about what was happening.) In the most twisted variant, we see Michael and Allison tucking the body (or is she still alive?) into Jody’s bed and saying goodnight. There seems to be only one ending where Kathryn survives: she hits Michael with the hammer instead of the other way around, and then takes his place, in control of the passive and once-more-semi-catatonic Allison. That ending makes Kathryn into a being of pure malevolence, but really, none of the endings are kind to her. Even in the best of lights, where Kathryn had Allison’s interests at heart and had accurately identified Michael’s malign influence and had a solution that would have worked if given enough time, the authors see the need to punish her. Such is the fate of independent-minded and sexually powerful women in this sort of entertainment. (Have I mentioned that Michael, the person directly responsible for her death, is the movie part’s viewpoint character?)

At any point in the exploration phases, you can bring up your personal psychological profile from the main menu. (In a nice bit of confusion-of-levels, you can also get it from your file in Dr. Turner’s office, in the few exploration scenes set there.) The profiles at those points are short, giving about a half-dozen canned points that are obviously generated from the last round of Q&A. Once it’s all over, however, you can get your full evaluation, which turns out to be multiple pages of wishy-washy generalities reminiscent of Astrology columns. But what do you expect?

The endgame menu also gives you the opportunity to watch your entire personally-generated movie from start to finish. I’ve seen it claimed online that, in addition to the CD-ROM and DVD-ROM and branching DVD-Video versions, there was a release of TLC as an ordinary non-branching movie. I’m not convinced that this is true, because there’s a lot of confusion among the few people who have even heard of TLC, but if it is, I have to wonder what branches, what ending it chose. At any rate, without the exploration bits, it does seem to have something like the right length for a feature film. One review I saw complained that even with the exploration, it only takes about five hours to play. Obviously I took longer, partly because I was so thorough in sweeping the rooms for new text items, partly because it’s been a busy couple of weeks and I only played a chapter or two at a time. I submit that this is the better approach for this piece, as it leaves time for contemplation. This makes it unlike most movies, which benefit from staying immersed in the experience.

It’s with some trepidation that I approach the ending of Tender Loving Care. If there’s one thing that TLC does a lot better than its predecessors and enginemates The Seventh Guest and The Eleventh Hour, it’s provoking a sense of dread. It’s better at this because dread is the anticipation of something bad to come. T7G and its sequel wear horror on their sleeves, putting ghosts and skulls and spiders everywhere like a haunted house in a carnival. There’s nothing to dread, because you’ve already seen how bad things get. TLC puts you in a beautiful house on a sunny day, and tells you that it’s all going to go horribly wrong. It’s sort of like Hitchcock’s famous example of the ticking time bomb, except that it doesn’t even tell you what’s going to happen, which gets your imagination involved.

But then, the closer I get to the end, the more the story takes shape and denies imagined possibilities. For example, for a brief time, I was imagining a cheesy third-act twist where it turns out that Jody is alive and Michael is actually the delusional one. There was some slight evidence for it at the time, such as a minor character claiming to have seen Allison with a little girl in a wheelchair. The whole possibility was pretty thoroughly ditched shortly afterward, and good thing, too, because it didn’t really fit in with where the story had been or was going. But the important thing to note here is that I was imagining a cheesy third-act twist.

No actual ending to this story can compare to what the imagination conjures up from mere suggestions. But more than that, my expectations of a 90s interactive movie are not high. The appearance of a bit player in an Eleventh Hour t-shirt provoked fresh worry by reminding me of the work’s lineage when I least expected it. I want it to live up to the promise of its unusual and intriguing beginning, but the more it becomes concerned with piling on the gratuitous nudity, the more I come to regard it as just another gimmick title pandering to the stereotypical teenage male gamer. And so I approach the ending with trepidation — not just the dread of what’s to come in the plot, but of how far the aesthetic experience will descend in the pursuit of cheap thrills.

The question-and-answer sections of Tender Loving Care come in two types. After the video sequences, you’re quizzed about your impressions of what you just saw, as I described before. The transitions into the video sequences are done through the game’s approximation of a Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT. This is a psychological evaluation tool along similar lines to a Rorschach test: the idea is that you’re shown a picture, and have to fill in details, tell a story about what’s happening in the picture and why. Except of course that here you’re not filling in the details yourself: you’re picking answers from a list, which means your evaluation and its consequences can only go in a limited set of directions, like one of those personality quizzes that used to be (and possibly still are) so popular on the social networking sites — “Which videogame character are you?” and so forth. (I should make a quiz like that using Michael and Allison Overton and similar obscura.) And like those quizzes, the answers I want to give are frequently not among the options available. You often get a scattering of odd replies, none particularly close to what you’d have chosen on your own, as if the game is trying to make you come off as unhealthy. And really, even without the answers, the questions themselves are often leading, spoiling the exercise’s real usefulness as a TAT.

But that’s okay, because the game isn’t really a psychoanalyst, and the point of the TAT questions isn’t really to act as a TAT. Rather, it seems to me to have two purposes. One is simply to provide some variety in gameplay, to provide a buffer between exploration and movie mode. (This is even more apparent when you consider the occasional alternatives, like the one time where it has you guess at Zener cards instead.) The other is thematic. It’s there to make the player aware of the idea of a TAT and how it works, so that they can later have the realization that, in a sense, the whole game is a TAT. That the investigation into the mystery of what happened chez Overton is just a pretext to give you ambiguous data and see what you make of it. Which is, of course, obvious when you look at the game from outside, but the game wants you to recognize it even as Dr. Turner questions you. In case you don’t get it, a magazine in the game makes it more obvious: it contains an interview with Dr. Turner, in which he describes his ideas for a kind of electronic TAT, perhaps to be distributed on CD-ROM.

This isn’t the only written matter in the game. The exploration sequences are pretty much all about finding stuff to read — and after the first few chapters, the finding isn’t such a big deal, because it pretty much uses the same objects in the same locations over and over, only varying from chapter to chapter which bit of text you’re shown. Michael and Kathryn both have computers on which they’re keeping journals, the biggest source of information about their inner thoughts, including secrets not mentioned in the movie. Allison has a hand-written diary that looks and reads like the scrawled ravings of a lunatic — probably the most ham-fisted touch in the whole work, and frankly insulting to the character.

Even when not directly about the main plot, in-game texts often deal with it obliquely. There are an unusually large number of mentions of people who have lost their children. Television content seems to always involve psychiatrists, nurses, or both. Like in a dream, the whole environment is obsessed with the same few themes. In the bathroom, there’s a book on erotic art — something the whole game certainly qualifies as — that starts with a lengthy discussion of the place of voyeur figures — which is essentially what you are, if you prowled around this stranger’s home enough to find the thing.

Some things are less definitely connected to the main plot, but highly suggestive. In Michael’s study, there is a large volume titled “Women Who Kill”, a history of prominent murderesses. The first chapter, made available piecemeal over the first several chapters of the game, is about women who killed their children to spite their husbands. It even describes a woman who did so by means of an auto accident, the same way that Jody died. There’s really no suggestion in the main story that Allison deliberately killed Jody, but after reading that stuff in the context of so many things that are commenting on the story, one naturally starts to wonder. The second chapter of the book is mainly about poisoners who provided beleaguered women with the means to do away with their oppressive spouses. This seems more like Kathryn’s role, but again, there’s nothing to suggest a definite and literal connection in the plot, except perhaps for an unusual emphasis on food and cooking throughout, which might possibly be leading somewhere.

Of course, all of these suggestive and biasing tidbits mean that the game as a whole isn’t any better as a real TAT than the explicit TAT segments were. But at this level, I’m willing to regard it all as primarily a work of fiction, and my persona within it as part of that.

And now, a brief interlude. For July 4, American Independence Day, I couldn’t resist temporarily resuming my role as lackey to Josef Stalin. I had left off halfway through the Soviet campaign before, and I’m one level farther along now. It seemed like a fairly by-the-numbers level: start in one corner of the map, destroy all Allied units and structures, and while you’re at it, destroy the nearby village and massacre its inhabitants, because you’re evil. (Honestly, I don’t recall any other RTS taking such pains to remind you of this in the mission objectives. In Warcraft, the mere fact that you’re commanding orcs seemed to have been considered enough.) Presumably there were some new units introduced, but after three weeks without playing, I don’t know which ones they are. Perhaps they would stand out more if I hadn’t already seen every unit in the game from the Allied side.

Coming off Tender Loving Care, I’m amazed afresh at the difference that even as little as two years made to the quality of video playback. I don’t think I mentioned before that the video content in Red Alert is interlaced with black stripes, which is very distracting until you get used to it. This sort of interlacing was fairly common practice for early CD-ROM-based FMV titles, and in retrospect, I find it puzzling. I can understand the need to keep your video at a lower resolution than the already-low-res-by-today’s-standards screen, given the CPU speeds and CD-ROM throughput of the day. But surely once you’ve read a scanline-worth of data and decompressed it, slapping it on the screen twice can’t be much more expensive than once. Copying blocks from one place to another is one of those things that computers do really fast. So perhaps they did it this way because they felt it looked better? More like the then-familiar scanlines of a TV, concealing jaggies in the unused space? I have the feeling that an answer to this would have been easier to come by back in 1996, but at the time, I think I just took it for granted that this is how video on computers looked.

One thing that really struck me when started my first pass at Tender Loving Care all those years ago was how adult it seemed. I’m not talking about the nudey parts here; titilating the viewer with glimpses of boobs is more adolescent than adult. I mean that it was pretty much the only thing at Electronics Boutique ¹Remember them? with a story aimed at people above the age of 16. The whole thing revolves around the suppressed emotions of a married couple. The central question isn’t “How do I beat the bad guy?” but “What is wrong with these people?”

At the start of the story, we have Michael and Allison Overton living in the shadow of a traumatic road accident six months previously. Allison has become extremely concerned with caring for her young daughter, Jody, who was hurt in the accident. In fact, she’s got a one-track mind, turning any conversation toward concern for Jody, and the player quickly figures out that she’s not just obsessive, but delusional: Jody is dead. ²At least, you figure it out if you have the least ability to read between the lines. The game acknowledges the possibility that the player is dim. Several chapters later, just after a flashback to the accident and our first glimpse inside Jody’s unused bedroom, a question-and-answer session asks if you had believed that Jody was still alive. There are three choices: “Yes”, “No”, and “I still do”. Michael humors her, and does things like say goodnight to Jody when his wife demands it, but clearly would rather not have to deal with the problem. Compounding his frustration, the couple have not had sex since the accident.

Sex is a big part of the story, in part because psychotherapy is a big part of the story. Allison has been seeing Dr. Turner (the host character played by John Hurt), but he brings in a colleague, Kathryn Randolph, who has had success in similar cases. Kathryn moves in with the Overtons, masquerading as a nurse for Jody in order to gain Allison’s trust. And hoo boy does she get it. Allison was resistant to the idea of bringing in a nurse, but once she meets Kathryn, they bond instantly — leaving Michael feeling all the more more excluded and ineffectual. He lashes out at Kathryn, desperate to regain some measure of control (and, with it, self-respect), but it’s a losing battle. She has to do what’s right for Allison, and it’s wrong of him to interfere with that, or even to refuse to cooperate in every way, right?

Well, only if the therapy is working. Michael doesn’t think it is. When Allison joyfully announces that Jody has started sitting up and talking, it seems to him like she’s just descending farther into fantasy. Maybe he’s right, or maybe he’s letting his hostility get the better of his judgment. Either way, Allison notices that he doesn’t share her feelings, and makes her displeasure known. So as far as Michael can see, Kathryn is not only ineffective at getting Allison to face reality, she’s also driving a wedge between them. To make matters worse, when he takes his concerns to Dr. Turner, he basically tells him to stop worrying. (In the frame-story, Turner admits that it was a mistake to dismiss his concerns so quickly.)

On top of it all, Michael has the hots for Kathryn — something she may be deliberately encouraging, albeit while taking care to maintain plausible deniability. Why would she do such a thing? Perhaps because she’s attracted to him, perhaps to make him more easily manipulated, more reluctant to dismiss her. Perhaps to make him feel guilty, to punish him for his role in bringing Allison to this state. There’s even some suggestion that punishing Michael is a subconscious motivation of Allison. But that hasn’t really been gotten into in the movie segments yet. Rather, it’s hinted at in the materials you find in exploration mode. I’ll get into that in my next post.

Tender Loving Care is not the only interactive movie I’ve interacted with. My trophy case ¹The Oath defines the “trophy case” as the collection of games I’ve played to completion. I think this is the first time I’ve actually used that term in this blog. includes such titles as A Fork in the Tale and Psychic Detective, I’ve rented Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure (the only video DVD that’s ever made me google for a walkthrough), and I managed to catch Mr. Payback while it was still running in specially-modified cinemas. I frankly don’t recommend any of these, except perhaps as case studies in interactivity design. (Mr. Payback was particularly interesting as a UI experiment: by use of subtitles, it polled a roomful of people about what should happen next, reported the results, and applied them, all without ever pausing the action.)

In all of these works, the interactivity is obvious. You’re presented with options, you make a selection, you see the results. In most cases, this amounts to a cinematic equivalent of a “choose-your-own-adventure” interface ²Psychic Detective is a notable exception: most of the time, the choices there are about whose eyes you want to watch events through, and the player can just switch perspectives arbitrarily at any moment, like switching between cameras on a live feed. Even so, it ultimately adds CYOA-style choices when it wants to start branching the plot., with all the pitfalls that entails. Tender Loving Care isn’t like that. The connection between your actions and their effects in the movie are far from obvious.

I should emphasize here that there is definitely the possibility of altering what you see. I’ve peeked at the movie clips just enough to confirm that some scenes exist in multiple versions. Whether this constitutes a branching plot or just different presentations of the same events, I’m not yet sure. Once I’ve hit an ending, I intend to take a more thorough look. But regardless of how strong or subtle the changes you wreak on the story, you’re never explicitly choosing one branch over another. Supposedly what you see is dependent on your psychological profile, which the game has been building up through the interactive segments.

The obvious part of this is the periodic multiple-choice questions, but the exploration sequences supposedly play a role too. For example, at one point you can watch a grainy black-and-white striptease on a television in the house, and according to something I recall reading once, the game remembers whether or not you interrupted it. If you watched the whole thing, the game draws conclusions about what sort of movie you want to watch and has Kathryn get her tits out in a later scene. Now, that’s what I read, but it seems unlikely to me that the striptease is the only factor in the decision — certainly there are enough multiple-choice questions about your sexual attitudes, as well as your attitude toward Kathryn in particular. But, short of disassembling the executable or doing a whole lot of experimentation, there’s no way to know which inputs actually have effects. The result is, predictably, a lack of sense of agency — although the free-exploration sequences mitigate this somewhat. Even if you’re effectively relegated to the role of passive observer in a movie that’s putatively interactive, at least you can play hunt-the-hotspot between times.

Well, the MPEG2 driver that I installed to get the cinematics in Overseer working also makes Tender Loving Care work almost perfectly. I say “almost” because there still seems to be a slight problem with the sound. Sometimes the story pauses to give the player a series of multiple-choice questions, supposedly to create a psychological profile of the player. Each question makes the mouse cursor disappear for a little while, which puzzled me until I hit a question that was read aloud by a voice-over. I surmise that this is what’s supposed to have been happening for all of the questions. But that’s not a severe enough problem to keep me from playing.

Since my last posts about this game were nearly a year and a half ago, let me recap. TLC is an interactive movie produced at the tail end of the 1990s interactive movie explosion — the sort where it’s not obvious whether it should really be considered a game or not. It’s one of the few such works to ship on DVD-ROM, although there was also a CD-ROM version for people who hadn’t adopted the new technology yet. Apparently there was also a pure DVD version — that is, something that you could play in an ordinary DVD player — but I don’t know a lot about it. I can only assume that it leaves out features from the PC versions, but honestly, I think the interaction with this game is mostly the sort that a vanilla DVD could handle with the right scripting. Basically, you alternate between two phases: watching movie clips and poking around.

The movies, which occupy far too large a portion of the total playtime to be considered mere cutscenes, tell the story of a human tragedy of some sort, involving a mentally ill woman named Allison, her husband Michael, and their live-in psychotherapist Kathryn. I don’t have all the details yet, because I’ve only played through the very beginning, but whatever happened in that house was dire enough that no one wants to live there now, according to the character who introduces the story, another psychiatrist, tangentially involved and now investigating what happened. This host figure is played by John Hurt, the work’s one big-name actor. Although he’s mentioned by the other characters, I have yet to see him interact with them. I kind of suspect that his bits were filmed afterwards, as has been known to happen in other FMV titles — probably the best-known example being Night Trap, which tried to spin a brief introduction by has-been actress Dana Plato into its chief selling point. At least Hurt is a bigger part of the game than that: he shows up at the beginning of every chapter, to comment on what you’ve seen and pose more questions about how you’re interpreting it.

The poking around is a matter of roaming freely through the house where the bulk of the action takes place, opening drawers and reading people’s diaries and the like. It’s all done in a first-person hotspot-clicking interface with FMV transitions between camera locations, kind of like The Seventh Guest without the puzzles. (As noted in my posts from last year, TLC and T7G both use the “Groovie” engine.) How exactly these scenes relate to the movies is a little mysterious. The frame-story presents everything except John Hurt’s commentary as taking place in the past and the house as currently unoccupied, but in the poking-around phases, you see the characters’ possessions as if they were still living there — and moreover, what you can find changes as the story-in-flashback progresses. The really weird moment comes if you walk into Kathryn’s room during the first poking-around segment: you meet Kathryn, who acknowledges your presence. “You’re the… viewer”, she says, a little flustered, as if unsure whether the word “player” is appropriate for a work of this sort. She then somewhat sarcastically invites you to rifle her belongings, noting that she can’t stop you. Suddenly the player seems a little more creepily voyeuristic.

Now, John Hurt’s second set of psychological profile questions asks, among other things, whether you trust Kathryn. It’s a nice little narrative trick, because once the question is in your mind, you can’t help but mistrust her a little, even if you didn’t before. In fact I did already mistrust her, if only on narratological grounds: her arrival in the house is clearly set up as the complication that pushes the story out of its ground state and into the rising action. Poking around her room afterward, I found some things that put a new perspective on what I had seen, but for the most part made her seem more trustworthy, or at least less blameworthy. For example, when she first arrives, she argues with her cab driver about the fare, claims that he’s overcharging her; ultimately, Michael pays. Reading her emails, we find a description of what happened beforehand that we didn’t see: the cab driver made some crude sexual remarks while driving, she objected, he got angry. So she wasn’t just being unreasonable with someone of a lower socioeconomic class; she had good reason to believe he was trying to punish her.

But then, given that she knows I’m there, and that I’ll be reading every email she writes, can I even trust what she says there? If she’s a manipulator, she might be manipulating me. But I don’t know yet if this is the sort of question I should even be asking in this game. If it is, I’ll be very impressed.

Somewhat miraculously, I managed to win Evolution without going any farther off schedule. My intelligent species was the Silurians Sleestaks Saurosapiens, which evolved somewhat after their time — I had managed to keep a fairly sizeable and diverse stable of dinosaurs alive after the Cenozoic extinction event, which actually doesn’t seem to be all that unusual for this game, despite the game’s arbitrary penalties on the feeding rate for for creatures that are out of their proper era. (It’s a pretty good system for keeping creatures from developing too far ahead of schedule, because getting a toehold is a struggle for any new species, but an established species that isn’t struggling any more is less affected.) But honestly, I think I could have pulled off a win even if my dinosaurs had gone properly extinct. Evolving a different intelligent species would have taken longer, but I was far enough ahead to take that time.

I think I was more or less primed for victory by my previous game, which was the first time I had actually played a game to completion. Well, not played exactly. Most of the Mesozoic era, and all of the Cenozoic, I zipped through at the maximum time scale. There wasn’t much point in interacting with the game at that point: I had failed to get a mammal population going, and the extinction event left me with nothing but a few stegasauri (more or less a dead end, good for a score bonus at game’s end but only capable of evolving into ankylosaurus and triceratops) and one single low-population dryosaurus unit. A dryosaurus can take you places — it’s a potential ancestor of both Saurosapiens and Psittacisapiens, not to mention all other bird species — but the catastrophe had left these particular dryosauri in a bad state, and they weren’t long for the world. Still, I let the game play out to the end, more or less leaving it alone once I had established triceratops and ankylosaur habitats. The ankylosaurs managed to survive to the very end, even as the virtual player named Darwin filled the world with bats and rabbits and thylacines, finally winning at the 57-million-years-ago mark by developing intelligent wombats.

The main thing I got out of watching that session was an appreciation of the degree of multitasking needed to win. There’s something in the neighborhood of 200 species in the game, which is a drop in the bucket compared to reality, but still far more than it’s easy to manage in your head if you’re in a dominant enough position to have most of them coming to you. (And yes, you do want to develop every species you can, if only to keep them out of the opponent clades.) Being the loser is relatively easy: once you start losing in earnest, you only have to keep track of two or three species at a time.

Nonetheless, it’s a lot easier to keep winning than to start winning. The classic strategy-game positive feedback loop definitely applies here. You might think that the periodic cataclysms and die-offs would put everyone on an even footing, but no. The clade that’s most widespread before the event tends to have the most survivors afterward, and also is in the best position to capitalize on any extinctions.

All in all, I’d say this is actually a pretty good game. Seeing it on a store shelf back in 1997, you’d probably assume that it’s just watered-down educational fare, but there’s some real game here. The main thing I’d change is the UI. The game uses a sort of MDI interface, with various components of the game, including the main view and the various information dialogs, placed in distinct windows with their own title bars, which you can drag around and minimize and so forth (all within a parent window). This may have seemed like a good idea in 1997, when people were still figuring out how to best take advantage of Windows 95, but only one of these sub-windows can have focus at a time, and that’s inconvenient — especially when focus is taken away by a modal pop-up.

I’m still consistently losing. Or rather, consistently giving up when it’s clear I’m going to lose. I’ve started loosening up a bit with regards to deciding when that is, though. It doesn’t do to be too disheartened at the opponents beating you out to evolving a new species: in order for it to do them any good, they have to keep it from going extinct. And most new species have a bit of a handicap there, in that their ideal environment isn’t the same as that of the species that spawned it — that being more or less the point of speciation.

Environment has two components: terrain and temperature. The unit description window — the same one that indicates a unit’s population and how well it’s feeding — mentions the ideal terrain type and temperature for that unit’s species; more detailed information, including how well it survives in each terrain, is available in the species details. It’s easy to fall into the trap of paying attention only to the terrain type, because that’s highly visible: every tile on the map is decorated according to its terrain. But the temperature seems to be even more important to survival, and it’s displayed in a place that users tend to ignore: the info bar at the bottom of the window. It displays the temperature and terrain type for the tile currently pointed at by the mouse pointer — which is to say, it only starts to display useful information when you’re looking at a different part of the screen. It’s invaluable once you start paying attention to it, but I feel like the fact that the info bar is used at all, let alone for such a crucial feature, is a real sign of how new the idea of Windows as a gaming platform was. People didn’t really know how to use it, but they were willing to experiment.

So, when you get a new species, it’s a fragile thing, ill-adapted to its environment and in need of nurturing. Which is kind of the opposite of how evolution is supposed to work, but regardless, the top priority is to get it to its ideal environment before it dies out. Even once it’s there, the environment doesn’t last forever. Plains turn to desert, mountains rise, the climate changes — sometimes catastrophically, as in a major asteroid strike. About all you can do is send your creatures to as many different places as possible and hope for the best. Which you want to do anyway: you don’t want your creatures competing with each other for food. (In extreme cases, I’ve contemplated marching my obsolete creatures into the ocean to make room for the new guys.) No, you want them competing with the opponets’ creatures for food. My greatest competitive successes so far have not been a matter of out-evolving the opponents, or of fighting and killing them, but of driving them away by out-breeding and out-eating them. Which is how invasive species work in real life, so hooray for accuracy.

Spreading your population out isn’t trivial, though. In order to get a unit from one ideal feeding ground to another, you typically have to cross areas not suited to the unit’s needs at all, and while it’s crossing those zones, its population will drop. This is how oceans work, by the way. You can send any species on a trek across the water, and it’ll just walk on it like it’s a blue carpet, not even slowing down. But while it’s out there, it won’t get any food at all. Birds can colonize remote continents more easily than most creatures, but that’s not because they have any kind of in-game-modeled flight attributes. It’s because they can move faster, and thus can cross more ocean before starving to death.