The Stack

Now that I’ve completed all six episodes of season one, I’m wondering if mine was the best approach. Is it better to actually play the episodes episodically? Playing them as they come out undoubtedly lets you participate more in the Sam and Max fan community, speculating about things to come, even influencing the later content (as Merus points out in comments to my last post). But playing through the season all at once probably makes for a meatier experience. At one point in episode 6 (the last of the season), Max plays a videogame within the game, and complains “It was too short and not hard enough. I want my money back!”, an obvious dig at complaints in the forums. I haven’t followed the forums, but it’s inevtiable that people would make this complaint, as each episode takes just a few hours to play.

But I suspect I wouldn’t share that complaint anyway. I’m accustomed to short adventure games, thanks to the Interactive Fiction community and the annual comp in particular, so these episodes struck me as about the right length. Or possessing about the right amount of content, anyway. The episodes actually take longer to play than a typical comp game, but only because of the time spent walking Sam around from place to place — something I grew impatient with at times, and wished for a faster way to travel. (There’s a “warp drive” checkbox in the options menu, but apparently that’s just Telltale’s version of silly clowns.) So I may be one of the few people who wanted the episodes to take less time.

I wonder how much the folks at Telltale are aware of modern non-commercial IF? The Sam and Max games certainly show an awareness of their text-adventure heritage. Episode 5 features a whole scene set in a text-based environment, with Sam and Max themselves as the only graphical elements — a very stylish effect, I thought. It even uses that perennial only-possible-in-text gimmick, treating abstractions as tangible. Plus, there’s a sly shout-out to Zork in the beginning of Episode 4, subtle enough to pass unnoticed by the uninitiated. But the main influence on these games seems to be the classic Lucasarts games. Which may seem too obvious to point out — the first Sam and Max game was Lucasarts, after all, and Telltale seems to have quite a few Lucasarts refugees on staff. But what I mean here is the little touches, like the way responses to significant actions get shorter on repetition, and the way dialogue is used to provide hints disguised as jokes.

That last point reminds me a little of something John Cleese said about writing Fawlty Towers. The audience of a comedy show, according to Cleese, knows that anything that doesn’t lead into a joke immediately is a setup for a joke later on, and this robs the later joke of some of its impact. So he tried to make sure that all his setup material also yielded immediate humor, so that the viewer would be surprised at what was referenced again later. The principle is similar here, except that the goal isn’t (solely) an unexpected joke, but a moment of realization, when the player suddenly understands something’s significance without it having been shoved in their face.

Speaking of disguising your material, I notice that episode 5 keeps the whole business of doing things in threes (despite what I said before about episode 4 breaking the patterns), but tries to hide it by inflating numbers: there’s a group of four machines, of which one is useless, and a quest to obtain five gold coins, of which three are found together.

The threes come back with a vengeance in episode 6, though, with a very satisfying pre-endgame that puts Max in the center of a story. It seems pretty important to me that this happens. Of the two main characters, Max is the more emblematic of what they are, more gleefully chaotic, more disarmingly cute. If you see one of the duo alone in any context, it’s pretty much always Max. But these qualities also make him a difficult player character, and so for most of the story told by these games, he plays the role of Sam’s wacky sidekick. Even after he becomes president of the United States in episode 4, he’s Sam’s wacky sidekick whose wacky features include the presidency. But in episode 6, he becomes for a while the focus of the player’s attention, the thing that the puzzles are about.

By now, I’ve played enough of Sam and Max, Season One to notice some overall patterns. Most obviously, all the episodes share a certain amount of content. There’s always Sam and Max’s office and its neighborhood, including Bosco’s Inconvenience Store and Sybil’s, a storefront that changes in purpose from episode to episode, but always has the same proprietor. Episode 1 takes place almost entirely in this environment, leaving it only at the very end, while the other episodes treat it as a kind of home base that you return to once in a while for help with the puzzles in the episode’s main area. Episode 4 seems at first to break the pattern by starting in a completely new place, but the player returns to the old neighborhood before things are far advanced.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, let me make it clear: re-using content like this is not a bad thing. I’ve written before about how adventure games benefit from establishing a sense of routine, and the same basic idea applies to series. Repetition establishes a theme for specific puzzles to be a variation on, and helps the player to follow the author’s thought processes. Every episode here contains a car chase puzzle of some kind, but no such puzzle is ever repeated. Bosco always has some ridiculously overpriced gadget behind the counter, and the player comes to anticipate discovering how to get the necessary money from the episode’s new content. Even outside of the puzzles, the shared environment is used as a way to illustrate the progress of the plot: the office closet accumulates trophies of every episode, and there are multiple changes to the decor and its descriptions in the aftermath of episode 4.

There are also some less concrete patterns at work. The first few episodes established a very strong pattern of subtasks that come in threes. Most of the time, you have one major obstacle to overcome and three explicitly-enumerated things you need to overcome that obstacle. It’s a strong enough element that when I was told, in episode 3, that there were two tasks Sam needed to perform to infiltrate the Toy Mafia, my first reaction was “Wait, two?” (A third task was added before the conversation was over.) There’s even a threeness in the architecture of the core neighborhood, with its three sub-areas (the office, Bosco’s, and Sybil’s). But this starts breaking down in episode 4: I noticed a three-part task there, but it wasn’t the chapter’s major goal, and the subtasks were far from explicit.

The season has an overarching plot involving hypnotic devices supplied by an unseen mastermind; all the episode villains are either victims of hypnosis or using the devices against others. Each episode links to the next with a little foreshadowing of the next villain at the very end, and links backward with continuity references and a few preserved inventory items. The first three episodes don’t make any large changes to the status quo, and end with Sam and Max in pretty much the position that they started in, but that ends with episode 4. By now, you’re probably noticing a pattern yourself: episode 4 is the point at which the established patterns break, because the escalating wackiness can no longer be constrained.

For all that the characters of Sam and Max are emblems of the later point-and-click adventure, they’re not a terribly natural fit to the genre. If Steve Purcell (the creator of Sam and Max) hadn’t been doing art for Lucasarts at the right time, I doubt that anyone would have seriously considered them as potential adventure heroes. The original comics are driven by randomness and non-sequiturs. True, adventure games can and do get away with this sort of thing in the situations they present to the player. But the actions of the player character have to make some kind of sense if the game is to be solvable by any means other than exhaustive guesswork, whereas Sam and Max in the comics were just as unpredictable as their surroundings, and seldom did anything that could be expected to help their situation. Coming up with situations that let Sam and Max act like Sam and Max but still provide motivations for the player must have been a challenge. Some of the puzzles in the 1993 game were criticized for being too arbitrary, which is to say, for being too close to the spirit of the comics and not adapting to the new medium enough.

Season One has fared better so far. To the extent that it keeps the protagonists zany, it does so in ways that don’t require player involvement. For example, at the beginning of the first episode, Max has filled a closet with cheese, for no reason other than “you can never have too much cheese”. This is something that happened before the game starts, so it’s part of the premise, something that the player reacts to. But it’s also something that a player character did, and revealed in response to a player action (opening the closet), so the effect is similar to a player-initiated non-sequitur.

The dialogue is another big risk for an adventure adaptations. A lot of the humor of Sam and Max comes from the off-kilter tone of the dialogue, and the contrast between the the plush-toy appearance of the title characters and the casual and cheerful way they discuss horrors and mayhem. Examining an electric fan, Sam comments “Max almost lost a finger in a fan like that once,” and Max replies “Yeah, but it wasn’t my own finger.” This would cross a line if it were depicted visually. We know that Max is a furry little psychopath, and Sam isn’t much better — for all that they’re “freelance police”, they recognize no law beyond their own whims, and there are puzzles that hinge on this. But mainly we know it from their words, not their actions.

The reason this is a risk is that it’s all too easy for reliance on dialogue to hurt gameplay. Far too many adventure games and RPGs devolve into click-on-everything-in-the-conversation-menu for large chunks of the experience. Breaking a large text dump into a bunch of menu options doesn’t make it less of a large text dump, and that’s not what people play adventures for. Fortunately, the folks at Telltale seem to be fairly sensitive to this, and keep the menus fairly trim and mostly optional, as well as using them for an unusually large number of actual dialogue-based puzzles, rather than just infodumps. In fact, most of the trademark Sam and Max dialogue doesn’t come from the conversation menus at all, but from responses to examining things, as in the electric fan example above. This is a point where having a sidekick unexpectedly helps: Max is an independent observer who can argue with Sam’s descriptions and comment on his actions even if you never talk to him explicitly.

Ah, Sam and Max: absurd and grotesque, snappy and cynical. Their humor is always at least partly grounded in their horribleness. I’m a fan of theirs from way back, even from before their first adventure game in 1993, or their cameos in various other Lucasarts titles. Back when they were an obscure indie comic book.

So you might think I’d be among the first to snap up the newer episodic Sam and Max games. But I didn’t, because I was wary of Telltale Games. I had played Telltale’s first adventure, an adaptation of the comic book Bone, and found it disappointing. The adventure content was minimal, as was the interactive detail: the bulk of the player’s time was spent on a series of lame mini-games shoehorned onto a story that didn’t really want them. And when I say “series of lame mini-games”, the part that bothers me the most isn’t the “lame”, but the “series”: the game was very linear, following the source material very closely. Most of the time, there was only one thing to do.

But the Sam and Max games aren’t adaptations of existing Sam and Max stories, and thus avoid a lot of the difficulties of adaptation. (Even the 1993 game, Sam and Max Hit the Road, which took a lot of its ideas from the “Surfing the Highway” comic, has an original story.) I’ve played through the first episode by now, and it’s got classical adventure game structure: after a brief prologue in a constrained area, it sets the player loose in the main game area with three major goals to pursue simultaneously and independently, followed by another, smaller set of three goals, followed by an endgame. And some of those subgoals provide good “Aha!” moments.

So, currently, I’m pleased. I’ll see if I can get through episode 2 tomorrow and try to spot common patterns. It really seems like each episode wants to be completed in a single sitting.

In my last post, I described a very effective combo using Kobold Elders and Kobold Shamans. By the end of map 4, I had two high-level heroes, one of whom was using this combo. The other, which had progressed around the map by a different route and had encountered different spells, was using a different technique, one that’s more elementary (so much so that I hesitate to call it a combo) but also quite effective: a deck made mostly out of rats and anger.

The common stink rat is the beginner’s monster for team red: it’s 1/1 and costs 1 mana to cast. Anger is an enchantment that gives all your creatures +1 to their attack power. This bonus stacks, so your damage potential increases with both the number of rats and the number of Angers. Of course, the same bonus applies to non-rats, and that’s important sometimes — I put a couple of bats into this deck as well, because a couple of the enemies had a spell called Flood that disables anything that can’t fly — but the rats were cheap and disposable, and the strategem works better with lots of creatures than with a few powerful ones.

Both of these decks have the advantage that they start damaging the opponent immediately: kobold shamans and stink rats both cost 1 mana, so you can summon them on your very first turn. But more importantly, they’re both O(n²). That is, your potential to do damage on a turn, barring interference, is roughly proportional to the square of the number of turns that have passed. Even though the amount of mana available to you increases with every turn, you still only get to draw cards at a constant rate per turn. So in the long run, the number of instances of a spell active at any moment is going to be linear on the more limiting factor, time. But the damage potential of these strategems is determined by the product of the number of instances of two different spells.

There are other combos with this property; it may in fact be a feature of every deck that wins at high levels. In fact, there’s one instance I’ve observed of a spell that’s O(n²) without a combo: Grass Snakes. Every time a grass snake hits the opponent hero for damage, its attack power (and health, but that’s not what I’m considering here) increases by 1. I suppose this means that a snakes-and-anger deck would be O(n³). [Edit: Not really, see comments.] (Actually, that combo is impossible: Anger is red, and snakes are green, and never the twain shall meet. But apparently there are a few rare green spells that have a similar buff-all-friendlies effect.)

But I doubt that such a deck would actually function as O(n³) in practice, because the bonus on the snakes is per-snake, which makes it vulnerable. Every time a snake dies, any bonus it built up dies with it. The other decks I described are more robust: if you kill my rat, the next rat I summon will be just as angry. Catching up to where you were is linear (that is, O(n)) on the number of rats killed. For snakes, in the worst case it’s linear on the number of turns the oldest snake was alive… which, now that I think about it, makes it also linear on the number of snakes killed, because both the maximum age and the number of snakes are linear on the number of turns played so far. I guess big-O notation doesn’t tell us everything.

Here’s a better analysis: If you can kill my (oldest) snakes at the same rate as I can summon replacements, my damage potential from snakes will never increase. Whereas in the rat/anger deck, a rat equilibrium will just slow me down from O(n²) to O(n), because I’ll still be casting Anger at a constant rate. Unless you have spells that remove enchantments and we have equilibrium there too. I suppose what I mean by “robust” is that disrupting it completely requires more things.

Probably the biggest joy in CCG-style play is coming up with combos. By “combo”, I don’t mean the kind you get in, say, tile-matching games, where the rules explicitly grant bonuses for things that are not valuable in themselves. I mean emergent synergy, the special properties of different cards combining in a way that makes them more effective. This is the essence of deck construction.

For example, in Magic: the Gathering, there is a card called “Lure”. (Or at least, there was when I was playing it. A lot of cards were removed in subsequent revisions.) Lure is an enchantment that you cast on a creature. When a creature with Lure makes an attack, anything that can block it must do so. By itself, this would typically mean that the creature with Lure is met with overwhelming force and dies, but in the process, it lets your stronger attackers go unblocked for that turn, because blockers can only block one thing at a time. But if you put that Lure on a creature with Regeneration, it can survive the onslaught and play its part over and over, or at least until the opponent kills it with direct damage spells. Alternately, you can put it on a Thicket Basilisk, which has the special power that anything blocking it dies at the end of the combat round, and wipe out all the opponent’s creatures in one turn. Put all three cards (Lure, Regeneration, Thicket Basilisk) in your deck and you have a three-card combo with the potential to wipe out your opponent’s army every turn — but only if you happen to get them all in your hand and manage to cast both of the enchantments on the basilisk before the opponent kills it. With a minimum deck size of 40 cards, three-card combos can be hard to pull off.

The dynamic is a little different in Etherlords. For one thing, the 15-card deck size makes it almost certain that any combos you put in will come up. Also, some combos are more explicit than what I’ve just described. Each type of creature comes in multiple subtypes, with different levels of strength and different special abilities, and sometimes those special abilities are pretty clearly linked. Take the Kobold Elder: its power is to untap all Kobolds in play other than Kobold Elders. This is an ability that can only be used in combination with a rather small set of other cards. If you ask me, the only other kind of Kobold worth having in your hand is the Kobold Shaman, which is the Etherlords version of M:tG‘s Prodigal Sorcerer: you tap it to do 1 point of damage to any player or creature. Thus, if you have both in your deck, you get to do (number of Kobold Elders times number of Kobold Shamans) points of damage every turn, without even making an attack or casting any spells. This is potent. In one encounter late in map 4, I was routinely killing things with 8 or 9 health (that is, the hardiest creatures I had yet encountered) the moment they appeared.

Both of these effects — the smaller deck size and the signalling of likely combos through creature type — serve to make combos easier. The former makes them easier to execute, the latter makes them easier to discover. I can’t know if this was the result of a deliberate policy of combo-friendliness on the part of the designers or just a happy accident reinforced by playtesting, but that’s how it turned out. The downside, I suppose, is that it makes the combos seem very planned, and leaves little scope for the player to make genuinely new discoveries. But this is OK for a computer game with fixed content. Real CCGs take advantage of the combinatorial explosion to create an impression of infinitely variable gameplay. But campaign modes in strategy games are more about introducing you to gameplay elements one by one, and typically end when they run out of new things to show you. I expect that’s how it is here.

Map 4 seems to be the point at which Etherlords really starts to be about non-combat spells, or, as it calls them, “Global” and “World” spells. The distinction between Global and World is unclear to me; it may have been clearer in the game’s original language (Russian, apparently). But the player starts the the scenario with a whole bunch of them, and the player pretty much has to figure out what they do by experiment, because the docs are so dismal. You can get pretty far in the level without needing any overland spells beyond the ones to summon new heroes, which are familiar by this point. I’ve explored nearly half the map by now, and only just started running into a need for more. This is because the opponent just started attacking my castle ethereally.

Normal, physical attacks on castles are pretty simple: you march a hero up to a castle, and every turn that the hero is there, the castle receives an amount of damage equal to the hero’s level, possibly with a bonus from skills or magic items. Eventually either the castle’s owner manages to kill or drive away the attacker(s), or the castle is destroyed. Ethereal attacks work more or less the same way, except for the “march a hero up” part. Any hero can attack any castle ethereally, provided you have enough mana to keep the spell going. Heroes can also be assigned to ethereal defense of a castle by means of another spell. The effect is that the attacker has to defeat the defender in combat before doing any damage.

The thing is, no one actually dies in ethereal combat. Whoever wins, both heroes just go back to their bodies at the end, without even gaining any experience points from the exercise. I can imagine attacking an opponent’s castle ethereally just to keep their most powerful hero tied up defending it instead of killing your guys. In fact, that’s almost what’s happening to me: the enemy is attacking my castle with a level 6 hero, and I have one level 6 hero that I want to keep leveling up, but can I afford to? It seems like it might be a good strategy to go on a counteroffensive here, send one of my weaker heroes against his castle to see if he switches the strong guy to defending it.

Come to think of it, ethereal combat is a lot like a strategic version of what normally goes on at the tactical level. In combat mode, you basically choose every turn whether each creature under your control should attack or hang back to block attacks from the enemy. There’s no movement, no map to wander around, just a basic attack/defend option and a hero (in combat mode) or castle (in map mode) with a bunch of hit points, which it’ll lose if you don’t defend it. I wonder if this analogy was deliberate, or if the designers just felt it was the natural way to design things after they had spent so much time on M:tG-style play.

The use of 3D graphics and animation in Etherlords is worth commenting on, because it illustrates some points about the use of these things in general.

For one thing, the gameplay requires a mere fraction of what the game does with graphics. Map mode requires a map, but all we really need is a fairly abstract 2D chart. Instead, we have a rotatable, zoomable perspective model of the gameworld, with buildings and the like, most of which are animated. Combat mode requires some way to identify specific creatures for targeted effects, and having all the creatures visible graphically is a reasonable way to do this. But this does not mean that the creatures need to be 3D models, and have movement and attack animations (and, in some cases, special-action animations as well), or that the camera has to dynamically switch around to the most dramatically appropriate position from time to time. Furthermore, I’d bet that if the game were written today, it wouldn’t use 3D graphics at all. 3D might have been a necessity for any game that wanted to be taken seriously in the marketplace of 2001, but I think we’ve more or less gotten over that, thanks to the casual games explosion. I wouldn’t say that Etherlords actually looks retro yet, the way that mid-90’s FMV titles do, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

So, from a certain point of view, the graphical frippery is unnecessary. The animations in combat mode in particular remind me of Battle Chess, or the Summon animations in the Final Fantasy games, in that they don’t affect the gameplay except by slowing it down. Etherlords is at least sensitive to the fact that some players will not want this, and allows you to disable combat animation. But you have to figure that not many people will do this. The person who plays Etherlords does so at least in part because they like watching the graphics. And I have no quibble with that — heck, sometimes I go to a cinema and pay to watch computer graphics that aren’t even interactive at all.

However, given that this is a game and not just a graphics demo, one can hope that the graphics wouldn’t actively interfere with gameplay — and one can be disappointed. Some inaccessable regions in map mode are represented as plateaux, and are tall enough to obscure the things behind them. Smaller bonus items can be rendered completely invisible this way until you rotate the view. And in combat mode, I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having the bounding box of a creature I wanted to click on be completely engulfed by that of my hero. When this happens, the player’s only recourse is to switch to manual camera control and shift to a better POV. It’s nice that you’re able to do that, but it’s a workaround for an unnecessary problem.

Still, I have to say that the graphics are an overall positive part of the experience here, because when I came back from my week away and started playing this again, something in my brain said “Yay! 3D graphics!” It isn’t the most sophisticated application of 3D graphics, of course, but I think that adds to the effect — the obviously handcrafted polygons, in that cusp between the slick and the amateurish, draw my attention to their artfulness, rather than simply looking like the things they represent.

I’m posting this several days late: again I’ve spent a week out of town, and that means Pokémon. I actually didn’t do much with the game this time, but I did make another trade attempt.

The last time I tried to trade pokémon between two GBAs, I had problems. To trade, you go (in the game) to the Cable Club, an area found in every Pokémon Center. If you’re connected to another gameboy via gamelink cable, the Cable Club receptionist tells you to wait for the other party to join; if you’re not, she sends you away. So it’s easy to tell who the system thinks is and is not connected. The Cable Club was consistently accepting one side and rejecting the other. Furthermore, when I unplugged the cable and plugged it back in the other way around, it switched which one it accepted and which one it rejected. I concluded that there was something wrong with the cable.

Well, now I’ve tried it with a different cable, and I’m usually seeing the same symptoms. Tantalizingly, the bad end occasionally manages to recognize the connection, but never for long enough to actually execute a trade, as if there’s a loose connection. Or maybe it’s just the wrong sort of cable for this game: some docs I’ve found online suggest that I have to hack around the middle socket (which wasn’t even present on the first cable, but whatever). I’m not completely sure if that’s what I actually need here, though. Like all other gameboy hardware documentation I’ve found online, it assumes more knowledge than I have. But what the heck, I’ll dig out the multimeter and soldering iron and give it a try. The worst that can happen is that I’ll lose a cable that was useless to me anyway.

Well, I’ve finally gotten past map 3 in the red/black campaign. I found it easier than the corresponding scenario in the blue/green campaign, but I’m not sure if this is because it actually is easier or because I’m getting better. The use of overland spells seemed important to my victory, but I don’t remember seeing the obelisks that you learn them from in blue/green map 3. Were they absent, or did I just not notice them because they look too much like normal terrain features? I’ll have to go back and find out at some point. If it turns out that I’m just getting the hang of things, all I can say is that the learning curve for the strategic part of the game is pretty steep. Probably the designers didn’t spend as much time on it as they did on combat mode, which is clearly the heart of the game.

Regardless, to a certain extent getting this far was luck of the draw. You might expect that to be the case for something with card-game-like gameplay, but that isn’t even the part of the game I’m talking about. Whenever a hero gains a level, he also gains a skill. Skills are things like Strength (extra hit points) and Resources (lets you carry more runes) and Concentration (draws extra spells during combat). Each can be taken up to 3 times with cumulative effects. There are 15 different skills, but you don’t get to choose from the full set when you level — instead, you have to choose from three that the game picks for you at random. Heroes of Might and Magic does something similar. It’s a nice compromise, if you ask me. If you let the player choose whatever skills they want, they’ll probably assign the same skills to every hero and not get much variation in gameplay, and if you just assign a skill at random without letting the player choose, the player will be frustrated every time they get stuck with something they don’t want and probably wind up loading a save and trying again (kind of like when hit point gains are randomized). Limited choice within a randomized field mitigates both problems.

Or at least it does if the skills are reasonably balanced. In Etherlords, there are a few skills that really help a lot. Gaining experience levels faster than the enemy heroes is important, so Learning (bonus experience) is a more valuable skill than most. Perhaps unintuitively, Mobility (move farther per turn) helps even more. The main source of XP is wild monsters, and a lot of the time they’re spaced out just far enough that a normal hero can almost but not qute travel between them in one turn. In such circumstances, Mobility effectively doubles the rate at which you gain XP. And if one of your heroes gets both Learning and Mobility at once, well, you’ll find it a lot easier to get through red/black map 3. I speak from experience.