The Stack

I’ve once again taken to playing on a laptop during my excessively long commute. This is something I was doing for previous games this year, despite the inconvenience it made for mapping, but I had stopped with The Humans for three reasons. First, there was the installer, which, as you may remember, gave me problems. I couldn’t run it inside DOSBox, and that meant I couldn’t run it on my Macbook. But this was easily solved by installing it on my desktop machine and copying over the directory it was installed to — since it’s a DOS game, it doesn’t have registry entries or shared DLLs complicating matters.

Secondly, there was the key disk copy protection. This wasn’t a serious problem. The game recognized the CD in my laptop just fine. I just don’t like using CDs in my laptop. My reasons are minor and irrational: concern for battery life when moving parts are involved, fear of something untoward happening when the bus jostles the machine while it’s reading, distaste at the sound it makes. This was solved by copying the CD to my hard drive. (Which also has moving parts and is probably more vulnerable to jostling than the CD drive, but is also easier to forget about.) I couldn’t make an ISO out of the disc with standard tools, presumably because it has some kind of copy-protection bit set. I could probably find a more hackerly tool, but in fact it was sufficient to copy the files off and make a fresh disk image with the same volume name as the CD.

Thirdly, there was the sound. The sound works fine, but the bus is not the ideal place for it. Well, actually there are no sound effects in this game, so sound is not crucial. The only audio content is the background music, which I do think is an important part of the experience of the game. But after a week, I think I’ve heard enough of the background music. Even if the game is silent, I can hear it in my head.

So now that my installation is perfectly bussable, how is the experience? The graphics certainly don’t lose anything — if anything, they look better on my laptop’s screen, smaller size making the pixels finer — and, lacking mouse support and being essentially designed for a digital gamepad, the controls are basically unchanged. The one inconvenience it poses is that it’s realtime. It only occasionally requires any precision of timing on the player’s part (those occasions being the bits where you have to leap onto flying pterodactyls or make a jump on the loathsome wheel), but the clock is always ticking down. My commute is full of micro-interruptions where I look out the window to see how close we are to my stop (or even just to enjoy the scenery), and the typical level takes between five and ten minutes to play to completion, or even to fail. Really, it seems to me that the ideal commuting game is turn-based. It makes me wonder how Tetris on the Gameboy became such a hit.

But then, in a way, it’s the ideal kind of game for a bus, or a waiting room, or any other situation where there’s nothing else to do, but you don’t want to get so involved that the interruption at the end will leave you unsatisfied. Once you’re past the point where the designers run out of new tricks, gameplay is very methodical and by-the-numbers. It engages the higher brain just enough to distract, and not enough to enthrall.

Past level 100 now. Things are getting pretty repetitive. It looks like there are only so many tricks that the toolset here supports, or at least only so many that the level designers found, and they ran out a while ago. On most levels, there are some obvious sub-goals, such as getting to where the torch or rope is, or picking up an extra spear for the dinosaur blocking the way. Once these sub-goals are identified, all you need to do is find a way past the obstacles to achieving them, which may involve more sub-goals.

The only thing that interferes with this pattern is red herrings. Sometimes there are bushes that don’t need to be burned, dinosaurs that don’t need to be killed. In fact, there was one level where I spent a while trying to puzzle out a sequence that would make things possible, but it seemed like every crucial tool was locked away behind another tool’s obstacle in a kind of deadlock. It seemed completely impossible until I noticed that I in fact had enough humans at my disposal on that level to build a stack tall enough to reach the level’s goal without any of the tools.

The thing is, I’m not convinced that this is what the designers had in mind. It’s entirely possible that they intended some more conventional solution, albeit one that depended on a trick I hadn’t figured out yet, and that they simply failed to notice that their cleverness could be short-circuited. It’s hard to tell with the sort of puzzles found in this game. It’s not like a cryptic crossword, where each answer is self-evident when found. Perhaps the game only seems so repetitive to me because I’ve found general ways to avoid the clever solutions. I doubt that’s actually the case, but some lesser version could be.

I started this weekend somewhat over halfway to level 80 in The Humans. New tricks were coming less frequently. The only unknown functionality I discovered lately was that you can change the angle at which you throw something by pressing the left/right buttons between selecting the “Throw” action and actually throwing it. This isn’t mentioned in the manual at all; I checked. But you pretty much have to figure it out on level 51. Aside from that, there was one new non-obvious technique to pick up: getting an entire group of humans down from a platform by using a rope, then building a stack under the guy holding the rope to get him down with everyone else rather than leave him stranded. Intuitively, one thinks of the human-stack as a means of ascending, not descending, so there’s a bit of a mental trap there.

So most of the second forty levels were a straightforward application of techniques already learned, and the only real challenge was in execution — particularly on levels involving the loathsome wheel. So I made good progress, and, as is often the case, the perception that I was close to the end made me redouble my efforts. Even the level passwords started ratchetting up the sense of anticipation as level 80 neared: “getting there”, “now its done”, “im out of here”, to name a few.

And then, after level 80 — a suitably climactic design, using every sprite in the game — just when I was wondering if there was going to be any sort of special victory sequence, something peculiar happened. There was one more level. It had the same password as level 1, so for a moment I thought it was just looping back to the start, like an old coin-op game. But no, it was a new level. A bonus level? Would the game end after this one? I played through it, and found myself on level 82. The game was clearly ending at level 80, but at the same time showed no sign of stopping.

Confused, I turned to the internet. That’s where I had learned there were 80 levels in the first place. The documentation doesn’t say anything about how many levels there are. (The game comes with a nice thick manual, but it’s mostly useless, and consists largely of pseudo-humor about cavemen.) I found the explanation at Wikipedia, of all places. Apparently the CD-ROM version isn’t equivalent to the floppy version after all. It contains both the original Humans and an expansion pack, variously titled The Jurassic Levels or Insult to Injury depending on country, which adds another 80 levels.

And so I end the day as I started it: a little more than halfway through the game as I know it.

Playing The Humans requires keeping the CD-ROM in the drive. Which, okay, is normal for CD-based games. It just stands out for me at this moment because it’s the first game I’ve played this year that has such a requirement.

Although I played the prior games from CD-ROM packages, these were after-the-fact compilations of games originally released on floppy disks. For the earlier ones, there was even a reasonable expectation that they would be played from floppies — in 1986, hard drives were optional. Wizardry and Might and Magic were entirely built around the floppy paradigm, prompting the player to insert the character disk and whatnot; their anthologizers had to rework them somewhat to make them playable from hard drives.

Now, if I’m not mistaken, The Humans was released on both floppies and CD-ROM. Certainly there’s nothing on the CD that couldn’t have been put on floppies — no voice acting or FMV or other enhancements. (Remember “CD-ROM Enhanced”?) And since its installer copies the game files fully to the hard drive (which was no longer optional by 1992), there’s no technical reason why it needs the CD in the drive. It’s purely a matter of copy protection. And it’s copy protection that basically doesn’t work any more. The emulator that I’m using to play the game at all is quite willing to mount an ISO image and treat it as a CD-ROM, and even if it weren’t, copying a CD is child’s play. But back then? What, you have a CD burner in your house? What are you, Bertelsmann Music Group or something?

Copy protection has sort of gone in waves. Early games were effectively “key disk” games simply because they tended to be self-booting floppies that didn’t use a conventional filesystem, but this more or less ended with the rise of hard drives and subsequent player demands that games be playable from them. So instead you got “key word” systems, as we saw in the Gold Box games with their code wheels, but this is an inconvenience for the player, and relatively easy to hack out. (In any key word system, there’s got to be a point in the code where it compares your input to what it’s expecting and decides whether to bail or not. Find and remove that conditional jump and you’re golden.) Then came the CD-ROM, and key disk was suddenly practical again. But now, games tend to come without any disk at all. In the age of digital distribution, copy protection — or DRM, as the kids call it these days — becomes networked as well. I imagine the pendulum will swing back to key disk at some point, but it’s far too early to say how.

This game is going to take longer than I first thought. I often breeze through puzzle games, and I breezed through the first 20 or so levels here, but I’ve encountered a few levels that dished out extended stuck. And not the sort of stuck where you stare at the board uncomprehendingly, with no idea of how the configuration before you might suggest enough meaning to form a plan, but the sort where achieving your goals seems mathematically impossible. The solution to this sort of stuck always comes down to some unknown or underappreciated option, some edge case that you didn’t realize was both possible and useful. So let’s take a look at what this game lets us do.

All humans can move left or right, climb ladders, and form stacks that function as human ladders. Any additional capabilities come from the tools you find lying around. There are four kinds of tool: torches, spears, ropes, and wheels. These are not permanent fixtures to the human who finds them, but can be dropped for someone else to pick up.

Torches are mainly used as keys: there are occasional burnable bushes that are impassible until torched. This provides the level designer an easy way to force the player to visit point A before point B: put a bush at point B and a torch at point A. You can also wave a torch to hold off a wandering theropod, but this is a distinctly secondary use.

Spears can kill things, including your own guys if you’re not careful, and on some levels killing a dinosaur is in fact the goal. But you don’t get the spear back after using it this way, so it’s usually a waste of a spear. The real purpose of a spear is that it lets you jump across gaps by pole-vaulting — humans cannot jump unaided. One of the first tricks you learn in this game is using a single spear to get multiple humans across a gap by having each one use it to cross, then throw it back for the next guy. It should be noted that, unlike pole-vaulting in real life, jumping in this way does not give you any additional altitude. You can’t jump from a lower platform to a higher one.

Ropes are essentially portable ladders: standing by the edge of a platform, you can lower a rope to let those below come up to where the rope-bearer is, or conversely to let humans down farther than they can safely fall. Climbing to higher ground where there isn’t a ladder generally means making a climbable stack of humans, who get left behind in the process, because no one can climb himself. But if you have a rope, no one needs to be left behind. Sometimes the trick to a level is realizing that one platform is positioned directly below another, and is therefore rope-accessible — something that isn’t necessarily obvious, because you see only a fraction of the playfield at a time, and there’s no small-scale map to give you an overview. Also, it took me some time to realize that a human climbing a rope is capable of getting off onto a platform next to it. This is reasonable, because ladders follow the same mechanic, but ladders are wide enough to actually touch the adjacent accessible ledges.

Ropes, spears, and torches can all be thrown or dropped off ledges to pass them around in ways that the humans cannot directly follow, including getting them onto a slightly higher platform, although you really can’t throw very high. The throwing mechanic is a little peculiar. First you press a button to select the “throw” action, then you press it again to start up an oscillating progress bar that determines the strength of the throw, like in various golf games, or the bonus-round minigames in the original Mortal Kombat. Jumping with a spear uses the same mechanic. I really don’t care for this system. Watching the bar means that your attention is on a UI element, not on the character it governs. We’ve had better jumping mechanics since Super Mario Brothers, but I suppose they generally rely on using the height of the jump as visual feedback, and, as mentioned, jumps in this game don’t have height.

Unless, that is, they’re done using the wheel. Wheels are the rarest of tools, and the only one you don’t pick up: you ride them, like in B. C. Wheels let you go faster, but this isn’t really an advantage — it just means it’s harder to avoid falling off of things, which is particularly troublesome because wheels can’t be carried back up ladders. They can, however, jump. Wheel jumps are most easily executed when there’s a downslope followed by a ramp, but this is not absolutely necessary. In fact, one level seems to rely on the fact that, even from a standing start, a wheel can be used to jump from a lower platform to a slightly higher one. Which is weird, because wheels are heavy — heavy enough to trigger pressure plates on their own. As such, there are sometimes puzzles developed around getting a wheel to a pressure plate, and understanding how wheels move can be key. Wheels have momentum. Wheels can be pushed without riding them, if you actually want to drop them farther than you can survive. Actually, if you time it right, you can drop farther than you can survive and still survive: all you have to do is dismount before the wheel hits the ground. I haven’t seen any puzzles that rely on this, though, and I hope I never do.

Now, most humans are identical, but there’s one special sort: the witch doctor. Witch doctors can’t use tools, although they can climb ropes, participate in stacks, and even push wheels (as proved key to one puzzle). Instead of using tools, they provide them. And they do it through human sacrifice. After selecting a victim and a type of tool, the screen goes into silhouette (on a pretty color-gradient background) and a human is transformed into a tool in a swirl of pixels, permanently reducing the human population of the level (unlike normal deaths, which yield replacements). This is a big part of why I think of this game as mean-spirited: I’ve always found the whole idea of transforming a human into an inanimate object distressing — moreso than merely killing, which at least leaves them recognizably human. To turn a person into a thing is to deny their humanity, or to deny that humanity was ever worth anything, to assert that they’re more useful as a rope or a torch. And, in the context of this game, that’s often true.

There should be a name for works that imitate another work but completely miss the point, taking the superficial details while leaving out the basis of the original’s appeal. As Sleepwalker is to Sandman, as Ai Yori Aoshi is to Love Hina, as most bad fantasy novels are to Lord of the Rings, so The Humans is to Lemmings.

To someone looking at The Humans for the first time today, it may not be clear that it’s a Lemmings imitation. It was very clear in 1992. Lemmings was in the ascendant, and would be on the mind of anyone making (or purchasing) a level-based puzzle game with a 2D side view. Add to that the “save the tribe” aspect, the control over multiple identical and undifferentiated beings, the puzzles based around sacrificing some of your guys to save the rest, the music — ye gods, the music. Lemmings had this gloriously cheesy pop music that would be embarrassing in any other context, but seemed like just part of the fun there. The Humans does something similar, but with more of a cartoon caveman style, which is to say, a boogie beat and an emphasis on simple percussion such as hand drums and xylophones (or synthesized approximations thereof). It’s odd that this style says “cartoon caveman” so strongly, especially since our most culturally prominent caveman cartoon, The Flintstones, doesn’t use it at all, but there it is.

It also plays a lot like Lemmings overall, and not just in good ways. Most of the time, your attention is on the problem of getting multiple beings from point A to point B. Doing this usually involves multiple stages, where each stage is an opportunity to screw up. When you do so, you have no choice but to start over from the beginning: there are no save points within levels. So on the tougher levels, you wind up repeating the earlier stages a lot — a common pattern in action games, but not so much in puzzle games, where the pleasure is in figuring things out. But it serves to pad out the time required to play it to completion. Even worse, both games feature time limits on levels. While this can be part of the puzzle, challenging you to figure out how to complete your objectives as efficiently as possible, mostly it’s just a way to make sure that you don’t complete a level successfully on your first try, even if you don’t do anything wrong.

One of the more overlooked innovations of Lemmings is that it was one of the first games to figure out how to take advantage of the mouse in a realtime context. There had been games that used on-screen buttons to awkwardly give the player’s avatar orders at one remove, and there had been games that used the mouse to control the player’s avatar directly as a kind of joystick substitute, but the makers of Lemmings were clever enough to realize that the very concept of “player’s avatar” was an unnecessary assumption, a by-product of joystick-centric gameplay that a mouse-based game could do without. Instead, it took an approach similar to what would later become the RTS genre. At no point in Lemmings did the player assume direct control over a lemming’s actions; you could switch them from one mode of activity to another, but they were fundamentally autonomous beings that would march ahead without instruction. The result was an active world, one where things were always happening, sometimes more things than the player could easily pay adequate attention to.

And this is the part that The Humans gets wrong. It’s still plugged into the joystick paradigm, giving you direct control of one human at a time while everyone else just stands there and waits. Actually, that’s not quite true: when you pick up a torch or a spear, you can switch to a mode where you stand there waving it to fend off enemies, and remain in this mode when you switch control to someone else. This is the most Lemmings-like of the actions you can perform, and has obvious precedent in the “Blocker” role from that game. It’s also the least-often-useful thing you can do with a spear or a torch. It’s understandable why they did it this way: they were aiming at console ports, something that Lemmings always did awkwardly, and heck, even on PCs, not everyone had a mouse back then. But the end result is the opposite of Lemmings‘ active world. It’s a passive world, one that’s reluctant to even shoot at you.

And finally, we get to something that isn’t a RPG: The Humans, a 1992 cavemen-and-dinosaurs-themed puzzle-platformer. Although it isn’t the oldest game on the Stack, it’s probably the game that’s been on the Stack the longest — which came as a surprise to me when I compiled the list; for years, I thought that honor went to Bloodnet (a 1994 cyberpunk/vampire adventure game with some RPG elements). I suppose Bloodnet weighed more heavily on my sense of backlog guilt, because I abandoned it so near the beginning: for a time, when the Stack was much smaller, it was the one game that I felt like I hadn’t even given a serious try. (Today, I have over a hundred marked as not even tried at all.) Whereas I was fairly advanced in The Humans when I shelved it, putting it into extended I’ll-get-back-to-this-soon limbo.

I abandoned the game the first time around due to frustration over its pixel-precise demands. And yes, the game does make the gaps I have to jump uncomfortably wide sometimes, so that my first attempt falls short, and my second attempt falls down before jumping as a result of trying not to fall short. But in truth, it wasn’t just the game’s demands that caused my frustration, but my own demands on top of them. In those days, I was not just a completist, but a perfectionist. The game provides you with a limited number of lives — okay, it’s not quite that simple. The game puts multiple cavemen on each level, and lets you switch control between them Lost Vikings-style. If one of them dies, he ¹I use the masculine pronoun because there don’t seem to be any females, which makes me fear for the future of the tribe. is immediately replaced by a spare, but you can run out of spares. The number of cavemen you have available persists from level to level, and only increases if you rescue a captive on the occasional level where that’s an option. So, to my younger self, part of the challenge here was to make my tribe as large as possible — that is, to do all the rescues and never let anyone die unless a puzzle demands it. (Sometimes the only way to sneak one caveman past a hungry dinosaur is to take advantage of the delay while it eats another caveman. This is not a very good-hearted game.) Note that this doesn’t really affect your ability to finish the game: you can jump in with a full set of lives at the beginning of any level. There’s a scoring system that would be affected by this, but I didn’t care about that even in my perfectionist days. No, hoarding all those lives was just a self-imposed challenge that I’m willing to forgo today.

I recall attempting the game again some years later and finding that it disagreed with my newer sound hardware. The sounds here aren’t anything special, really — just a bunch of looped tunes that play in the background — but I deemed it to be an essential part of the experience anyway (for reasons I may elaborate in my next post), and reshelved it again. DOSBox takes care of that, of course. But for some reason, DOSBox crashes the installer. I seriously thought for a while that I wasn’t going to be able to play this game: it refuses to run until it has a config file telling it about your sound and video hardware, and the only way to generate that is with the installer, which brought down DOSBox in impressive manner, with ill-formatted double-wide text and a completely unresponsive prompt. Fortunately, I was able to run the installer natively, even though the game itself balks at this treatment.

It sometimes happens that readers of this blog see me point out something interesting-sounding or overlooked about a game, and decide to play it for themselves. If anything in my writing has tempted you to play Heimdall, let me be clear that this is a seriously mediocre game. The lack of clear separation between quest-important inventory and ordinary RPG-level objects is just about the only interesting thing about it, the player’s attention is too often focused on coping with the user interface rather than on the game content, and, as foreshadowed by the character generation system, the game’s four main modes (sailing, dungeon exploration, combat, inventory) seem to all have been designed separately, without much consideration towards making a unified whole in either design or functionality.

Let’s talk about the inventory interface a bit, because that’s the one mode that I haven’t described in detail. Actually, the game calls it the “options” interface, and it does indeed contain the save/load buttons, but personally, I think of an “options” interface as something external to gameplay, which this definitely is not. So I’ve gotten used to thinking of it as the inventory interface, because that’s what you use it for most of the time. I’ve spent a substantial fraction of my playtime just shuffling loot around among my characters’ limited inventory slots. Most of the scrolls I pick up, I discard after Heimdall identifies them, but before he can do that, he has to have them in his personal inventory, which often requires freeing up an inventory slot taken up by something else he just picked up. Possibly because he’s the one doing the fighting, Heimdall is always the first to pick things up, which means his is the first inventory to get clogged. Money stacks, as do keys (with a separate stack for each key type), so it’s efficient to give each stacking thing to a single person. I decided early on that I’d just keep them all in Heimdall’s inventory, so that they’d automatically stack when he picked them up and minimize the amount of shuffling needed. But the number of distinct key types grows over the course of the game, to the point where this approach may be backfiring: Heimdall doesn’t have many inventory slots left precisely because he’s loaded with keys.

One big problem the inventory interface has is a lack of feedback. There are no rollover effects of any kind to let you know what’s clickable — no highlighting, no changing text field, not even a change in the shape of the cursor. Perhaps this concept only gained traction with the advent of the web. Since web pages freely mix clickable text links with unclickable text, they have to provide as much feedback as they can, and indeed have provided all three of the mechanisms I just mentioned since day one. And yet, there still exist people who don’t understand hyperlinks, and who never click on a link that doesn’t explicitly say “Click here”. Such a person would be utterly lost in Heimdall. It takes some flailing at the beginning to figure out that the action buttons that require objects (such as “Use”) require the object to already be selected before they’ll do anything, especially since some of them still don’t do anything if applied to the wrong sort of object. It also takes a while to get used to the fact that “Give” is only used to give items to NPCs (an action I’ve only had to perform explicitly once in the entire game so far; usually they ask for what they want and you agree via a confirmation dialog), while swapping items within your party is done with “Distribute”.

The worst part is that the parts of the interface that look the most clickable — the word “Options” in the top left and the word “Items” attached to each character — aren’t. They’re on beveled plates that look like buttons, but they’re just title text. This may be a matter of modern expectations coloring things, though. I don’t know when beveling of UI elements was invented, but it certainly didn’t become a prominent part of the user experience until Windows 95.

Ultimately, all my complaints come down to the same thing: this is a game that expects you to read the manual in order to learn how to interact with it. This was a much more common assumption in the old days. I remember that time, and it wasn’t a good assumption then either. People have always treated the manual as a device of last resort. It just took the games industry a while to realize this, and to understand that the solution was to accommodate players, not to retrain them.

After another lengthy flight, I’ve spent enough time waiting around to be well into the second of Heimdall‘s three chapters. I think I’ve pretty much cracked this game. As is often the case, the initial challenge is simply learning to think the way that the authors want you to think, figuring out what’s expected of you. Although the moment-to-moment details of this game are RPG-like, the larger goals more resemble a rather simple adventure game. Or, to put it another way, it’s a simple adventure game stretched out with lots of RPG-style padding. But the combination makes things somewhat more difficult than either would be alone.

And by that, I mean that there are items with non-obvious uses. Every once in a while, the game throws a quest item at you that you’ll need later in some special circumstance — but it’s not always obvious when this happens. Scrolls generally contain combat spells, but the more unclearly-titled spells have effects on the map level, like revealing secret doors. If I find a scroll of Revelation, I know from earlier experience that this is a part of a puzzle: somewhere, probably nearby, is something important and invisible. If you find, say, a ring, it’s less clear: it has no obvious use in combat (the engine doesn’t even provide a way to equip jewelry), but it might be something than an NPC somewhere wants, or it might just be a treasure that you can sell for food money. The wisest course is to hand it off to someone back on the boat and wait for more information. And that seems to be the key to the game. Don’t use stuff up if you don’t know what it’s for.

Mind you, the game can be forgiving even so. At one point, I found a scroll with an offensive spell said to be deadly against giants. I stashed it on the boat, thinking I’d pull it out when I started encountering giants regularly. It turns out that there is one giant, a singular boss monster, which I encountered while the scroll was still in storage. I beat it anyway. Heimdall’s stats are maxed out by now, so special encounters of this sort aren’t the problems they once were.

PAX is full of games, but it’s even more full of people. The show was simply oversold. I haven’t even really tried to get into any panels or events other than the IF-related ones, but even those, contrary to expectation, have had queues too long to fit in the room. Are there really that many IF fans at PAX? Not really. At one of the panels, someone asked the audience to raise their hands if they had played a text game in the last year, and only about half of them raised their hands. Even that was more than I was expecting after hearing people talking in line. Some of them had no idea what they were in line for, and just wanted to get into anything. This was a good half hour before the doors were opened.

After one such experience, I made sure to bring some entertainment on subsequent queues. This isn’t at all unusual, of course. A lot of people in the queues were playing on various handheld devices (mostly various forms of Nintendo DS). But I’m still trying to get get through Heimdall, which means using a relatively bulky laptop. If I can sit down while playing, I can of course put it on my lap, where it belongs. But the people in charge liked to keep shifting the queue around while we were waiting, to use space more efficiently. Standing up and holding the laptop in one hand, one has only one hand free for gameplay. But you know something? For a primarily mouse-based game like Heimdall, that’s enough. If I weren’t playing Heimdall, I probably would have been trying to play IF, that being more appropriate to my immediate context, and to play that standing up, you’d really want a harness of the sort seen in The Typing of the Dead.