The Stack

I’ve explored all four slopes of the mountain now. Sure enough, the last one contained the Single Quest I had been missing. This was the Wizard’s quest, so it’s a good thing I went to the trouble of levelling him up.

This quest involved defeating a sequence of seven boss monsters, each alone in a separate chamber of a dungeon. Each chamber had a large kanji inscribed on the floor, possibly a hint about what sort of spells you’d need: 土 (chi/tsuchi, soil), 火 (ka/hi, fire), 電 (den, electricity), 血 (keshi/chi, blood), 気 (ki, spirit), 空 (kuu/sora, void or sky), 水 (sui/mizu, water). (The order may be randomized.) It’s a peculiar assortment. Fire, water, earth, and electricity are the four elements of the game’s magic system. Fire, water, earth, and void are four of the five classical Japanese elements, but air/wind is pointedly absent. Why blood and spirit are included is anyone’s guess, but I’ll note that both 土 and 血 can both be pronounced “chi” in Japanese (depending on context), and 気 is pronounced “chi” in Chinese.

I’m definitely overanalyzing this, but thinking about the element systems, it strikes me that the overall architecture of the game, like the classical elements, is in fours and fives. You’ve got four clans, each with its own castle, in a ring around the castle of the demon-possessed overlord Tsunayoshi. It’s tempting to declare that the four clans correspond to the game’s four elements, and that the central castle, on the mountaintop above the others, corresponds to kuu in the sense of “sky”. Well, okay, there’s one castle that’s surrounded by marsh, and which thus naturally corresponds to water, but that’s about as far as I can take this.

Reading the descriptions of the four clans in the manual, however, I think there may be a different base-four architecture at work. I hadn’t mentioned this before, but you can play any of the four clans, and presumably your choice affects the quests you get: the more noble and altruistic leaders will get quests to save surviving villagers, the more ruthless ones will seek out powerful foes solely to seize the sources of their power. From the manual:

Mori Motonari, the youngest Daimyo, is by far the most capable ruler of the four daimyos… He is currently under the impression that if Kira Tsunayoshi can be saved, they have every obligation to save him…

Seething with ambition, Oda Nobunaga leads a group of men who will stop at nothing to ensure he takes the throne. This attack has become a prime opportunity for Oda Nobunaga to destroy any obstacles, while having a legitimate reason to commit regicide… Oda’s ruthless tactics and heavy-handed rule are nevertheless brilliant…

A realist, Tokugawa Ieyasu has not only planned the entire offensive against the Dark Warlord, but has also created plans for his eventual attainment of Shogun himself… Although he will gladly join forces with any of the other Daimyo to increase his personal power, Ieyasu will be quick to exploit any weaknesses shown by the other clans…

Hideyoshi is a boisterous leader, and well liked by the normal troops because of his farming roots… Hideyoshi became known as “Hanuman.” … [H]e is called this for both his cunning and whimsical nature (like the monkey god’s namesake)…

In short, the four daimyo are respectively:

• Loyal and honorable
• Cruel and destructive
• Scheming and machiavellian
• Good-natured and whimsical

Which is to say, they are Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Good.

I haven’t mentioned that objects in this game tend to have Japanese names. That is, you don’t get a two-handed sword and a full helmet, you get a nodachi and a kabuto. I was pleased to see the word “kanmuri” used for one of the weakest helmets, as I had seen this word before in a completely different context: in writing Japanese characters, a kanmuri is a radical that goes on top. Apparently it means “crown”. It’s all a little reminiscent of playing the Samurai class in Nethack, with its name substitutions for items, but in Nethack only a few items are covered, and here it’s nearly everything.

Some of these words have already percolated through gamer culture (is there anyone who doesn’t know what a shuriken is?), others have not. (What on earth is a shinjyu? Or a ka-ho? ¹Answers: The “shinjyu” in the game, an enchanted string of beads, is probably 真珠, which means “pearl”. There’s also an item-enhancement component called a “pearl”, but I think that’s just a result of the developers not paying much attention to translations when they were choosing names. “Ka-ho” in the game is a gem that enhances your stats, and is probably 果報, “good luck”. ) Some may be made up or misapplied: the strongest armor in the game is called “kunimichi”, which googles primarily as the name of a famous swordsmith. I suppose that there aren’t any famous armorsmiths, and they ran out of real armor terms. (They ran out of monster names too, but solved that with the time-honored gimmick of shoving prefixes in front of everything: Forest Oni, Fire Oni, etc.)

To the extent that they refer to unknown things, the Japanese names are an obstacle to understanding. I’ve noticed before that I generally have an easier time getting used to the relative power of things in fantasy games than in sci-fi games, because “dragon” and “unicorn” are extremely clear and distinct ideas in my mind, while “photon cannon” and “tachyon beam” both get filed under technobabble. Similarly, even though I’ve studied Japanese a little, this game is full of what I can only see as Japanobabble. To someone learned in traditional Japanese martial technology, the difference between a “shibata” and a “nisun nobi” might be obvious. Me, all I have to go on is the pictures. They both look like bows.

But I suppose it’s educational. At least, in those cases where they didn’t just make up the words or assign them arbitrarily.

The second floor of Castle Tsunayoshi ends in a transition from traditional Japanese decor to Hellmouth, complete with pointy teeth. And climbing the stairs to the third floor brings me to another one of those points where my party is slaughtered swiftly and mercilessly. In part, this is just the nature of stairs. When you climb stairs, you wind up in the middle of an unexplored space; there’s no safe area to fall back to. The archer and wizard can’t hang back in the rear if you’re surrounded. But also, it’s just that the monsters are suddenly a lot harder again.

So I left the castle and gave a thorough explore to the southeast slope of the mountain. This was a pretty meaty chunk of adventuring, with two small optional dungeons (in addition to the big one that leads into the castle, which has entrances on all four mountain paths). Several of my samurai gained levels, and my ninja has maxed out his skill in the “Fire Kanji” spell, effectively making him as powerful as my wizard as long as I keep buying him mana potions. My current plan is to keep on doing the slopes until I run out, then assault the castle again.

The general RPG design concept of making areas available before the player characters are actually ready to tackle them is one that I’ve praised in the past (Wasteland is a good example), but it doesn’t work quite so well at this moment. Mainly because of the way the game leads you around the gameworld by assigning quests. For the most part, just following the lead of the quest system takes you through the game in optimal order. There comes a point where the mountain trails become available, but your assigned quest is to continue to the next castle in the proper sequence; ignoring your quest and charging up the slopes quickly proves suicidal. But here in the endgame, that’s reversed: obeying orders and continuing into the castle is suicidal, and the sensible thing to do is to wander around in the wilderness, which makes no sense in the story.

I mentioned recently that the most numerous game genre on my stack was adventure games, but RPGs are a close second, thanks largely to anthologies. I’ve got the majority of the Wizardry and Final Fantasy series ahead of me, as well as the entire Might and Magic series. (Ultima I finished some time ago.) So, I think I should try to finish up Throne of Darkness so I can start a different RPG without feeling like I’m neglecting it.

When last we left our band of intrepid samurai, they had just gotten through the dungeons under Tsunayoshi’s castle, and were getting killed a lot. They’re getting killed somewhat less now, due to a combination of more XP, better tactics (I’m swapping out wounded characters sooner, and trying to make sure I always have a combination of melee and ranged characters out), and better equipment. Some of the equipment is crafted, but I’m finding crafting to be something of an exercise in frustration at this point: the moment I make myself an Ultimate Weapon, costing half my gold or more, I find a new previously-unseen component that would make it even better if there were any free slots left. Perhaps the better approach to crafting in this game is to just make little improvements to whatever you find.

Even though I’m within spitting distance of the final confrontation, I’m taking things slow. This seems to be the best way to approach this game: going through the castle level by level, room by room, taking the time to process your loot after each room you clear and at the same time letting everyone heal. Impatience gets you killed. I’ve even toyed with leaving the castle to explore the unexplored paths down the mountain, since the last Single Quest is presumably out there somewhere.

And, really, taking things slowly is kind of the right way to play RPGs, MMO or otherwise. To rush to the end is to miss the point. Experience farming is a meditative practice, similar in a way to “casual” games like Bejewelled: simple, repetitive, only partly engaging one’s attention. It’s something you can rest your mind on.

This is pretty much the opposite of the attitude I took the last time I wrote about this game. What can I say, it’s spring now.

It turns out that VST is just some unspecified new cyberspace/VR technology, but one with side effects that kill people after a few months. Genesis, under the direction of Hugh Martens (your employer), is still trying to eliminate the problem, but they’re doing this by testing it illegally on prison inmates. Martens, meanwhile, has gone cartoonishly wacko about covering the whole thing up, and has been killing people left and right. If nothing else, this clinches the loyalty thing. If you completed your original assignment and brought Martens the truthmongers, he’d just kill you for knowing too much. Not that the game gives you a choice in the matter.

The final act of the game takes place on the prison island of Rocas Perdida, where the experiments are taking place. And it is at the very beginning of that section that I got very badly stuck. For the first and last time in the game, I resorted to a walkthrough.

This is something I really try to avoid doing. Walkthroughs are a necessary evil at best. The whole point of an adventure game is the pleasure of figuring things out, and using hints robs you of that. Worse yet, to cheat at all is to acknowledge that you’ve lost your trust in the author, that you don’t expect that you’ll be able to solve the puzzle. This lack of trust damages your experience of the rest of the game afterwards; once you’ve started down that path, it’s easy to give up on puzzles too early. I’m not even going to get into the problem of badly-written walkthroughs that give away too much, as that didn’t happen this time.

The problem, and to some extent the saving grace, of Nightlong is that I had a solid notion of what kind of unfairness I expected from it. As I’ve noted before, this is a game prone to tiny, all-but-invisible hotspots. I’d been temporarily stuck in the game many times before this point, and with only one or two exceptions, it was always due to failing to notice a hotspot. At one point, I was actually able to work backward from the expected solution to a puzzle, figuring out what sort of item I’d need, and then where I’d be likely to find it. And sure enough, it was there, and nearly unfindable unless you were looking for it specifically. This was far more satisfying than finding it by waving the cursor around at random would have been. But that was an exception. For the most part, finding something clickable in this game is a surprise. So when I got as thoroughly stuck as I was, I was fairly certain that there was a tiny hotspot that I was missing, despite repeated searching of all available rooms.

It turned out that it wasn’t a tiny hotspot. There were two hotspots with the same name close together, and I had somehow managed to avoid using the right action on the right one, despite revisiting them repeatedly. I probably should have slept on it and come back fresh, but I sometimes find it hard to convince myself of that when I know I’m nearing the end.

When I do resort to hints, my reaction is pretty much always the same, regardless of what they reveal: “That was it? What a gyp!” Even if I don’t cheat again, it can take a while for this minor sense of resentment to fade. Solving tougher puzzles later in the game helps, re-establishing the “you throw ’em at me, I’ll solve ’em” dynamic. That happened here. There was a nice convoluted unrealistic adventure-game puzzle (illustrated in the screenshot above), and the final puzzle of the game was a tasty little cryptarithm — arguably soup cans, but it hit the spot.

Anyway, it’s off the stack now.

At the end of disc 2 comes the twist that we’ve been expecting all along: the “terrorists” are not really terrorists and my employer has been hiding the truth from me. To be specific, the alleged terrorists are cyberspace researchers who stumbled on something called the “VST project”. They don’t know much about it, except that it involves virtual reality, that its chief architect, one Dr. Moreau (!), was recently killed, and that the Genesis corporation (and consequently the government and police) will stop at nothing to keep it secret.

The player character makes sympathetic noises and is accepted by the group. So either I’ve switched sides or the infiltration is a success. Either way, I’m still trying to get at the truth, and that involves going into cyberspace to see what Genesis is so eager to keep secret. Cyberspace is of course treated differently by different games. Seldom is the treatment at all sensible, but usually it’s more abstract and stylized than meatspace, with everything made of light and vectors. Not so here. The moment you uplink, you wind up in Moreau’s VR horror theme park.

Being a future-tech fantasy of VR, it looks just like the game’s reality. The content is different from the main gameworld — fewer video monitors and flying cars, more floating castles and giant spiders — but the graphical presentation is the same. Even the player character’s cyberspace avatar is indistinguishable from the player character. Also, objects in the VR sim have the same physical and even chemical properties as the real objects they’re simulating: at one point, you mix up some simulated gunpowder out of simulated sulfur, simulated saltpeter, and simulated charcoal. (Which isn’t a surprise: the moment you see saltpeter in a game, you know that the gunpowder is inevitable. Just once, I’d like to see a game where you use it to make nitric acid or something. Not even Chemicus did that.)

Maybe there’s an good in-story reason why the sim is such a good representation of the real world. Maybe the VST project is about doing a brains-in-vats/locked-in-the-holodeck scenario, where people don’t know that their reality is virtual. But then again, maybe this is just a case of the writer deciding that virtual reality is essentially just a parallel universe, and should naturally follow the normal physical laws. Which is stupid, but not uncommon in potboiler sci-fi.

I’m well into the second of Nightlong‘s three discs. Infiltrating the terrorists seems to be mainly a matter of locating their hideout. Currently I’m exploring an abandoned zoo on the basis of the slenderest of leads. Well, it’s called a zoo, but it’s really sort of a cross between zoo and museum, with a few robotic animals still in their enclosures. And the leads are only slender in terms of the in-game plot; as a detective, I’d think I was going to too much effort with too little justification, but as a player, I know full well that you have to go where the puzzles are.

I’m also starting to hit errors in a big way. I wrote last time that I had figured out how to get the game to run without immediately exiting with a fatal error saying that it wasn’t installed properly. It turns out I was wrong. I still get the fatal error on startup sometimes, apparently at random. Also, I have now experienced the audio problem in cutscenes that other players described. Or a mild form of it, anyway: it’s just a half-second pause in the audio component every once in a while, which isn’t a terribly big deal, but it wasn’t happening before.

The one problem that worries me the most is descibed at ntcompatible.com as follows:

Game crashes on CD 2 once you go to the left of the entrance to the zoo. Setting compatibility mode for Win95 buys you a little more time, but still crashes. Read that there is a workaround for this, but you miss a chunk of the plot.

Now, I’ve experienced this crash in exactly the location described, and I’ve enabled Win95 compatibility mode, and I’ve gone back to the same location without crashing. It’s not clear how much “more time” this should “buy” me, but I didn’t experience any more problems until I actually quit the game, at which point it gave me a fatal error dialog. I hope I can get through the game without crashing, or at least past the “chunk of the plot” that the workaround skips.

It’s a delicate balance sometimes, timing when to play PC games. Generally speaking, you don’t want to play them with the hardware you have when they first come out. You want to play them with a machine that takes best advantage of the game’s capabilities. But if you put it off too long, you’ll wind up with a machine whose hardware or operating system is incompatible with it, or that’s more powerful than the programmers planned for. This has been less of a problem under Windows than it was in DOS days, but it still crops up sometimes. Of course, I do still have a number of DOS games on the stack, so we’ll be seeing all kinds of problems in the future.

Time for another adventure game! They’re the most numerous thing on the Stack, due to my tendency to put them aside when I get annoyed with them. Today’s selection is Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy, a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure from 1999. The subtitle always makes me think of Union City, New Jersey, but I don’t think that’s what the authors intended; the setting, a future megacity ruled by amoral corporations, could be in New Jersey, but isn’t really that specific. The player takes the role of a private detective assigned to infiltrate a terrorist organization that’s been attacking the Genesis Cryogenetic Enterprise. I fully expect that Genesis will turn out to be the real bad guys, because that’s how these stories go.

I didn’t get very far at all in this game when I last played it years ago, and I haven’t yet spent the time to get much farther. The chief obstacle here is hunting for minuscule hotspots, which in some cases are contained inside other minuscule hotspots. The first puzzle in the game involves an elevator with a panel containing a fuse. The crazy thing is that the game contains close-up graphics of the panel, which would make it easier to interact with its components if it let you, which it doesn’t. The close-up is shown briefly when you examine the panel, then taken away. You can only interact with the fuse in the normal full-room view, in which it’s a few pixels in size (at 640×480). The saving grace of this interface is that the game makes it really clear what the cursor is hovering over at any moment by displaying a name next to the cursor.

The graphics are actually pretty nice. It’s all sprites on a prerendered background, but the backgrounds have a very comfortable level of texture and detail, neither too coarse to be believable nor too fine to be discernable. The downside to this is that every detail is a potential hotspot, so I basically have to roll my mouse over the whole screen lest I miss something important.

When I first tried running the game, it terminated with a dialog box stating that it was installed incorrectly. I had to rerun the installer and tell it to install the bundled version of DirectX, even though it told me that I didn’t need it. While researching the problem, I found various websites reporting problems running this game under Windows XP, that the sound stutters in the cutscenes and suchlike. I haven’t had any stuttering, probably because I have better hardware than the people who were playing it closer to when it came out. The only problem I’ve had with the sound in the cutscenes is that the dialogue is dubbed badly from Italian. Most adventure games released in America in the last ten years or so have been European imports, presumably because most American companies take it for granted that adventures are dead.

I have just passed level 5 of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. Level 5 culminates in the game’s first boss fight, against a huge wind god that throws tornadoes at you and grows larger as you damage him. When you deal the final blow, you wind up teleporting to a Babylonian ziggurat without your equipment. Clearly this is the end of one chapter and the start of another. Which is a little strange if you think of “levels” as the equivalent of chapters. From that point of view, this should be the end of level 1 (out of 3), not 5 (out of 12).

But of course, plot, theme, and bosses aren’t the only way to think of levels. In a geographically-based game like this, where your overall goal at any moment is essentially just to reach point B from point A (eliminating opposition along the way), it’s reasonable to think of a level as a distinct and unified chunk of the gameworld’s geography: “The Temple of the Moon (and environs)”, for example. In other words, the name of a level would be a reasonable answer to the question “Where am I now?” This doesn’t work either. The levels in this game are large, and just not all that unified. A typical one might start in a clearing in front of a pyramid, continue through the pyramid to the other side, exit into a large valley, cross the valley to an underground tunnel, and finally emerge from the tunnel onto a small lake. And the entire level might be named after the pyramid, the valley, or the lake.

OK, but there’s another reasonable definition, one that depends solely on the physical properties of the gameworld: reachability. If you can reach point B from point A and vice versa, they’re part of the same level. If you can reach point B from point A but not the other way around, then point B is in a later level than point A. This is an important sort of level to consider, because it’s really the essential geographical unit as far as gameplay goes, and defines the potential scope of any single battle. However, Serious Sam makes frequent use of doors that close and lock behind you. Each official level is in effect divided into many mini-levels.

When you come right down to it, this game’s levelization is completely arbitrary, and probably driven solely by hardware limitations. The only way that you can tell when you’re going from one level to another is that you get a “Loading” screen. If I had a special version of the game that loaded everything into memory at once, there would be no way to tell where the level boundaries are.

Still, beating the first boss is far from arbitrary as a milestone. And, having reached it, I think I’ll give Sam a little rest.

I have just obtained one of the most glorious things in Serious Sam: the SBC Cannon. Don’t ask me what SBC stands for. The point is, it’s a cannon. Not in the modern “vulcan cannon” sense, but in the sense of a cast-iron tube, rounded at one end and open at the other, used for launching cannonballs. The only abnormal things are that the cannon is handheld, and the cannonballs are somehow much larger than could possibly fit inside it. It’s hard to judge, because you can’t exactly stand next to them after they’ve been fired, but I think the balls are almost as tall as the player character.

Once fired, the cannonballs quickly fall to the ground, where they roll around like billiard balls, careening off walls, crushing anything in their way. Then they blow up. The explosion doesn’t seem to do much damage, if any at all, but at least it’s pretty. Firing cannonball after cannonball at a distant but rapidly approaching horde of monsters is not only the most efficient way to clear them, it’s also the most satisfying. It’s just joyously kinetic.

All in all, it’s a good example of the Serious Sam design philosophy: that fun gameplay is more important than plausibility. For that matter, so is gratuitous silliness.