The Maltese Falcon

Written by Dashiell Hammett and published 1930, The Maltese Falcon started originally as a serial in a magazine, it has become known since as one of the greatest novels of all time and has had numerous adaptations to film.

The novel popularised the hardboiled noir-style of detective fiction and as such can be credited to inspiring a whole host of writing and particularly television like CSI since.

The novel’s main character is Sam Spade, a man whose introduction featured a lengthy paragraph or two concerning his ‘V’-shaped appearance and lank form, Spade is a private detective for hire and is in a partnership with a Miles Archer.

It’s here where I have to mention about the book’s sexism. It’s pretty impossible to ignore, as it is ingrained in the detective genre. The first example is of the secretary hired by Spade & Archer, Effie Perine. She is portrayed as a naive bint who has the hots for the main character and allows herself to be called angel and hip-handled nigh constantly. This sort of behaviour is in no means sexist if in isolation, however the whole novel is rife with this kind of thing, where the only time a female displays any kind of intelligence, she is made out to be some kind of hateful witch.

Soon a mysterious lady enters the office and asks for help with a problem she is having with her sister and some man that has taken her. The two detectives exchange some unwitty chauvinist banter about whose she is to be claimed before deciding to help her out, despite the supposed lies she was telling in the meeting.

However, disaster strikes as Archer is abruptly murdered, the man he was shadowing turns up dead and the lady client goes missing.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) is the greatest known adaptation to film.

The novel uses a very minimalist style in order to express the plot and characters, with the novel reaching a little over 200 pages, it all feels very compact, like a story that was shortened as if after written.

At the beginning of the novel there are very straight-forward and simple descriptions for the characters, with no emotive language used to describe the characters’ appearances, nor empathetic evidence to suggest how the characters are feeling about one another nor how the reader ought to be viewing them or the situation. It’s almost like a transcript of events even with no consideration for flair or dramatic, except in its absence.

The feeling of the characters is all shown through their language and the way they are descibed as expressing their pieces. It’s almost like a play. The language is very direct, with little or no tangents and not a single cut away from the main character and his arc. In all, the whole novel felt very blunt and although successful in effect, it is not without a dry and cheap quality about it.

There are some pretty odd omissions from the novel, in that despite the attention to the heavy description of a character upon introduction, neither does Hammett describe their clothes at all nor mention their characteristics outside of a single one that he devotes himself to. In the example of the main character, it is his ‘V’ shaped features and in G, it is that he is fat.

The pace of the novel is very fast, with quick dialogue and large events unfolding in a matter of pages, Hammett doesn’t spend any more time than necessary devoting himself to the characters or his own story. The plain and open nature of the language means that all impressions are received entirely by the reader, giving the plot an open-ended quality.

I guess that cat’s out of the bag about the ending of the novel. Brigett is named and shamed as the one who killed Archer at the start, she uses her wiles to persuade Spade into not handing her in but he doesn’t relent, noting a number of different and some flaky reasons why he shouldn’t, the main being that she is a user that wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to him. However when despair of the situation overcomes her, she is still able to care about him and not attempt to take him down with her or give him any grief. It’s hard to push the evil lady thing when you aren’t willing to write it into the character fully.

Although the novel feels a little… bare, it is easy to see why translations to the silver screen have become successful. The only way to move the fast talking aesthetic and the story dynamic to the screen would have been to make it over-stylised and by the sounds of it, this is much more impacting than the cold writing of Hammett.

In all, the hype for the novel and its status on the top 100 lists I believe is very overstated. The writing style isn’t refined enough to warrant lacking any significant detail and there are numerous issues with story and characters that are brushed under the carpet. Even for its time, the plot line and the themes feel like they were dated and couldn’t have possibly gripped anyone, however it’s a very short read and it will help to clarify some of the modern story tropes we see in television and literature today.

 

The Maltese Falcon

What a mansion! Getting around to Resident Evil

I have a confession to make.

It’s difficult as a certain series of posts of mine have been rather popular and still pull in most of the views of this site. So to have to say that the title that the most popular horror game of all time, I’d never actually played would be… well it would be absurd. Unfortunately it would be no less true in this case.

I have never played Resident Evil. Not the original, not 2 or 3, I’ve never even seen 4 being played. Obviously I’ve never played 5 and 6, I may be uncultured in the ways of the zombie, but I’m not that bad.

I have played; a little bit of Survivor, Code Veronica and Umbrella Chronicles.

I wanted to rectify this, so I set out to play the first game and already problems start to spring up like sprightly zombies from soft turf.

What version do I play?

The answer seems relatively simple. Play the first one.

Oh, but there’s a director’s cut! You have to play that first, you wouldn’t tell someone to watch the theatrical cut of Blade Runner would you? Of course not, pedantic hipster brain of mine, I suppose I better play that then. But then apparently the game is vastly different so you should play the first one or the remake. In the end I went with Resident Evil: Deadly Silence.

Mmmm… Live action…

Deadly Silence has two modes; Rebirth mode, an enhanced version with added features optimised for the DS; and original mode, which is the original game with a couple of differences.

I played the original mode, which sports enhanced models for characters, skippable load screens, knife button and the all-important 60hz which isn’t in any of the other versions in the UK. These new features really improve the gamespeed, so that dying isn’t quite so excrutiating. This is good, because as it turns out, I am pretty bloody rubbish at this game

Luckily I chose to play as Jill, which is the easier of the two characters as she has more slots, something of great value in Resident Evil, whereas Chris is able to take more hits.

The game begins and we’re treated to the infamously cheesy intro video, sadly in black & white in the UK, and our heroes enter the mansion where things start to go wrong as everyone is presently split up. Jill’s story appeared to revolve a lot around Barry turning up and saving her as well as lip-curling scenes where Barry loses something or rather and cracks lame jokes. It’s like your mate’s dad has tagged along, convinced he’s in with the kids.

As the game progresses, more rooms are unlocked through exploration and adventure style puzzles, all of which are fairly easy, the only trouble being remembering all the items and making sure to check all the rooms properly before leaving. As it happens there are a number of items that can unlock the different endings as well as different choices impacting the fate of characters, this is sometimes a little arbitrary, but no more so than other games that employ such a mechanic.

Obviously the main reason we all play Resi is because of zombies and there are quite a lot in the game, however without respawning, corridors can become a little bleak and the scares are mostly underwhelming due to this. Being a self-professed ‘Survival Horror’, the majority of the thrills revolve the restriction of gun-use and knowing that enemies can cause you hassle and easily lose life. When there is a limited amount of saves this also means that you really don’t want to die, such is this that the game pushes you towards running away from enemies which are more often than not placed in the middle of areas.

With the majority of enemies being the slow-walking enemies, you can easily work out the best option to proceed, making them mostly obstacles in your path rather than sources for fear. Without specially-designed scenes involving enemies, most of them are quite boring and dull, even when there are moments that are quite tense, you can still run out of the door and try again, as the enemies’ positions will reset. The game is quite unlike Silent Hill, in that you are able to more easily weave around and avoid enemies, however they do respawn and retreading areas after fulfilling tasks means you can definitely expect some grisly wankers to be lying in wait. For the most part, in Resi nothing respawns apart from a couple of late game enemies and one shake-up with enemy types and appearances in corridors upon return to the mansion. That’s the problem, it’s almost entirely predictable, both mechanically and horrifically, the best example of a jump from me was a zombie popping out of a closet, at which I exclaimed shrilly, “Who shut the zombie in a closet?”.

The story was lacking. I know it’s about zombies but there really isn’t enough material or progression aside from one and a half treacheries (Barry’s is so half-arsed it doesn’t count as a full backstab) and about 3 different characters known only to us by indifferent diary-style entries peppered throughout the game. The immediate characters don’t seem to be experiencing the gravitas of the situation and everyone keeps wandering about and appearing at random intervals, with nobody questioning how nonsensical it is, except one bit at the start where Jill got stuck in a room and was saved by Barry, she asked why he was there and he gave a suspiciously non-committal answer. This was never expanded upon.

Overall I enjoyed the game and I’m sure the bits that I disliked were exacerbated by my having difficulty in playing the game. At the end of it I did actually have lots of guns, ammo and health, so it seems I was a little conservative with my playthrough, however I was a little unsatisfied by the overall ending which I had completed an extra sidequest to get.

It’s an integral game to not only the horror genre but the history of games in general, however the focus on survival leaves the horror element stuck at crashing through windows and loud noises phase of development and the ease and lack of puzzles means there isn’t much challenge outside of the action. If you are looking for good puzzles and scares than Silent Hill is more definitive, however if you are looking for an overall more fun and challenging experience or interesting management mechanics, Resident Evil is the way to go.

What a mansion! Getting around to Resident Evil

Life after 1984

The book that defined Britain under siege by its own protectors, 1984 written in 1949 by George Orwell, is frequently referenced when concerning modern socio-political matters surrounding surveillance and control of the population.

For the past 5 years, I can confidently claim that not a week has passed that I haven’t heard a practice or personage described as ‘Orwellian’ and as I write this, there is currently a new eruption in the NSA leaks scandal involving misuse of terrorist laws in order to seize journalistic information passing through England.

With the rise of the internet and the popularity of social media like Twitter and Facebook, the boundaries surrounding privacy and personal information is quickly loosening, a fact that some authorities have not hesitated to utilise in the fight against crime. International politics is playing a greater role in home security as espionage and terrorism is in full swing both east and west. Using information was a key part  of 1984, today we use disinformation on enemies to fall for military schemes and despite what some people believe, misinformation is hardly new, what with the skewing of crime statistics dating to New Labour’s fresh reign during the 90′s.

In 1984, criminals of Thoughtcrime and other acts that run counter to the Party’s rules were made into ‘Unpersons’, their very existence and history is wiped from existence, so that even friends and family couldn’t find anything more about them than what is left in their own faulty heads, indoctrinated with the hypocrisies of Doublethink. The UK & US don’t currently have such proceedings, but the effect is apparent in today’s sentencing Bradley Manning, a military serviceperson who leaked documents pertaining to military operations in Afghanistan, Baghdad and Iraq. He received a 35 year prison sentence with a parole after 8.

Guardian’s computer equipment which held some of the information that Snowden leaked was ordered destroyed by the UK government.

The newspapers are livid, on both wings we are seeing outrage at such a base violation of freedom of information and press, the shocking sentence of Manning is the US making an example of whistleblowers and a sinister message to members of the government at what happens when one thinks critically or individually.

But the truth is, is that no matter the insidious nature of our government, I can’t help but feel that it’s just simply too incompetent to enact a true regime against British-folk. Which is far worse.

I have often been called a cynic and my own views on most conspiracies often end with sad lament that “It’s probably not true, because that would be rather too exciting”. Life, and particularly England, are just too bloody boring to actually have the methodology and planned-ness that a conspiracy would need. Things are too chaotic, and the government is just, well too damned stupid to be able to pull anything off. I mean, you’d think that of all conspiracies that it would be easy to get away with, one in international waters about a group of people that, quite frankly nobody notices even when they are desperately cloying for your attention while walking under the bridge in Southend High Street, that would probably be an easy one in comparison to say, destroying one of the world’s largest buildings in one of the world’s biggest cities in broad daylight. You would indeed.

No. It’s just not plausible. But that’s not to say I don’t believe that things won’t end badly for us.
When Eliot said “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang” it should have ended “but a series of yelps indicative of one falling down the stairs from treading one step too many”.

Life after 1984

FTL: Faster than Light

A spaceship simulation roguelike-like, that’s what the developers FTL call it. It’s taken me a while to get round to this talking about this one, I didn’t think it was possible to have enough to talk about, but I was wrong.

The game is like many a-roguelike and has been described as Spelunky by way of Firefly, except without the rabid fanbase. The game lasts only an hour or two leaving you enough time to wash the plates or whatever it is normal people do of an eve. The aim is to deliver a message to the Federation of the oncoming rebel fleet and reach the end point and partake in a battle to defeat them.

“It’s just so bloody beautiful”

Strangely enough, as soon as you arrive and let the bosses know of the crappy news, the fleet is instantly behind you leaving no-one able to prepare or anything, just another wonderfully pointless thing the game likes to dig at you.

The game originally started off as a Kickstarter, because, what doesn’t these days? You could probably crowdfund your own breakfast at this bloody rate. FTL began with a modest goal, however it gained a large momentum, carrying it past the $10,000 to over $200,000 with many changes and enhancements as a result, although why they didn’t get some evil ship-controlling AI in on this ride with that money I have no idea.

You will die, a lot.

The gameplay involves managing the power supply of your ship and winning battles to obtain scrap, the currency of the game, in order to purchase more weapons and upgrades for your ship. Although this is much more exciting than pulling plug sockets out of the wall and digging through the rubbish bin, as you are able to customise almost all aspects, so that when you go into a spacefight, you will use all of the stuff you’ve earnt and directing the crew around the ship makes you feel a right champ. These upgrades will be needed to tackle the ever increasing difficulty of the rebel fleet and other enemies you will face, which are mostly pirates, because they’re all the rage right now.

At the beginning of the game you can choose what type of ship to use, one that is able to use drones and is feck-ugly or the awesome aerodynamic one that focuses on missiles and is called the KESTREL, which is damn sight better than being called TORUS.  You can also name your ship if you just aren’t that into birds and the three characters you start with can also have their sex changed and what not if they are human. For some odd reason, the male characters have blue hair, I assume that they’re male characters anyway, because really they are just the same models, but one has long brown hair and one has short blue hair.  The characters in the game repair the station they are at and also can be moved to other stations in order to power them up, each character has health and this can be depleted from constant fire to the rooms they are occupying, enemies boarding the ship and physically fighting them or because the oxygen is running out. I’m not sure about other people, but lack of O2 is the most common cause of death for my folk. After fights (and winning obviously, unless you lose, which means starting all over) the ship then proceeds through the areas, each randomly generated so you could arrive near an enemy ship, a trader or just nothing.

Option A: Be evil
Option B: Be evil

This all sounds really complex and incredibly nerdy, but this game is beautiful. I can’t stop playing it. Over and over because I can’t beat the bloody thing.

As it is randomly generated, every playthrough is different, except that because of the huge sense of progression, the exciting battles and the overall good design, you never feel cheated by this. There are lots of different ships for all the different races, knowing the weakness of some of the races and can sometimes help with defeating the enemy. Sometimes you can acquire new members for your ship or even buy them from traders (ooh-er) and some have some useful traits like reparation.

The graphics of a game are not something I usually talk about, however the aesthetics are continuous and evoke a real spacey feeling, utilising digital looking 16bit for characters and text, but smooth modern lines for the ship. The music is electronic and fairly minimalist, there are two sets based on general exploration and battle themes, I think it really suits the game and is one of the reasons you can dreamily sit playing the game for hours.

Ant, Booby, Crab, we did it yay! Oh, what? There’s MORE?!?

For the first time I ever, I want a franchise for a game. I want to see enhanced sequels and extra downloadable races and ships and stuff, I haven’t even unlocked anything on my game as I am so rubbish.

I would like to see this series branching out to other game styles, like a first person hybrid puzzle/adventure/godsim to a third person X-Com styled tactics/strategy game or one where you play as the commander of the ship a bit like Mass Effect but with less fratty and more… science-y. Oh hey! I want to see a first person game where you play as individual crew members, doing various roles around the ship, like maintenance and spacewalks and what-not and during battles you get to go out in individual bomberships or man the blasters or handfight alien intruders Arkham Asylum-style but there’s a mechanic like in Driver: San Francisco where you can ‘shift’ between people on the fly, oh Christ, you could even work it into the story, like that everyone is linked because there’s a large ship-controlling AI and… we’re back there again.

I would still like to see more, not because FTL is lacking in any way, but because it’s just so bloody beautiful, from the mechanics down to little sprites and everything. I want to see more varied experiences where I get to live out my Space commander fantasies and this game has opened the door to this like no other game has. So if you haven’t already played this game, then you sir, are quite simply a masochist.

Yeah, I play on easy mode. I figure if I can’t be it on easy, I may as well not bother on normal.

FTL: Faster than Light

Paranoia Agent

Animé. What a divisive subject, one which many people say I am not qualified to discuss as I frequently mention my dislike of animé tropes. That is not to say that I don’t like animé. Like this one for example.

Created by Satoshi Kon from ideas he was too attached to from earlier films, he instead decided to blend them together into this little gem. Known for his fantasy-blent dramas, Kon doesn’t let up with this, his first ever animé series, the opening in all its typically swirling animé glory features the cast of characters laughing gleefully at nothing while staring at the camera. At you. They’re laughing at YOU. Probably for watching such a tacky intro. But there’s some Susumu Hirasawa music, which eases it all somewhat.

The animé follows the events surrounding a mysterious assailant known as “Shonen Bat”, a young boy who attacks victims seemingly at random in the streets. He wears a baseball cap and uses a large golden metal baseball bat which is bent in order to hit people with and escapes quickly by zipping off on his golden skates. The show begins with a young, meek woman who, after a tough day working on a follow-up design for a character she is famous for creating, leaves for home of a night and is attacked after dropping her stuff on the floor.

As a mystery with somewhat  fantastical elements added, the character of Shonen Bat starts to become an almost legendary figure as the show continues, as more people are being attacked, the similarity of the crimes begins to warp the perception of Shonen Bat into somewhat a saviour. Satoshi Kon is known for using psychological horror and the esoteric to line his stories, it can be seen in his earlier films, Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers.

Almost every episode follows a new character and their present situation and events leading up to an eventual attack or encounter with Shonen Bat, unlike other vignette style works though, the chronological continuity is pretty consistent and the characters are directly referenced by one another in other episodes. Also when other characters appear in a scene, it doesn’t feel like we’re looking at the former star of an episode from the new main’s eyes, instead it feels like it drops the main character whenever other people become involved, opting to tell the story in a more coherent and objective fashion than to attempt to cling to the current temporary protagonist like a jealous lover. I like that, as it shows that despite Kon’s artistic leanings, he clearly knows when aesthetic is just getting in the way of a good thing.

The flow of animé has always been something that I have had many issues with, to the point where I end up over-praising a series simply because it didn’t screw up the end or just managed to fulfill the promises that addictive, progressive plots and episode direction often make and then toss to the side when it’s satisfied it’s had enough of your attention. Paranoia Agent doesn’t do that, but it doesn’t exactly excel either. Despite being a psychological mystery which are wont to air on an episode-by-episode basis, so each one has a twist or an exciting ending to make sure you tune in again, PA doesn’t do that, it’s pretty constant and doesn’t become really more-ish, nor does it bore you at all. Each episode is fulfilling and the further you go on, you realise that the drama is more important and well developed than the core plot.At only 13 episodes, it’s really short, making it odd that there are what could be considered ‘filler’ episodes cropping up at the half-way mark, laying waste to the little tension that is built between episodes and distracting from the plot.

I tend to watch most foreign language work in it’s native, being a big old hipster purist, me. The Japanese voice acting was great and the subtitles were all very good and typo-free, the only issue being in the first episode where they use ‘dub-titles’. All dubs by nature of language are less accurate than sub counterparts, however dubtitles are just the translations of the dub being put underneath and is really lazy production on the publishers part. As a result of the first episode’s dubtitles, Shonen Bat is called ‘Little Slugger’.

The mirror has censorship capabilities!

The music outside of Hirasawa’s opening is pretty mild and electronic, with a glockenspiel sounding ending theme. The animation was high quality considering it is still a series, albeit a very short one.

Main complaints were some of the overarcing themes were repetitive of early work and laden in terrific animé tropes, however each episode’s insights is more than enough to make up for it. I’ve always thought that Kon’s work was good to show to people who aren’t into animé and Paranoia Agent is no exception. The intrigue is great for regular television addicts and the fantasy elements are good for people who love excitement. There’s just enough sillyness to ease people into the world of Japan, but a good deal of serious concepts and beautiful imagery for those intellectual types you inevitably get too.

Not the finest of its genre, but is fun and short and does the job nicely where magic realism often falls so flat in other animé of its kind. Rather on the expensive side to purchase so is probably best borrowed from someone else. If you like this than Paprika and Perfect Blue are a must.

Paranoia Agent

Getting stuck in my head

You know the feeling. You wake up in the morning and you have a song stuck in your head.

Not the Hollywood kind, like “I’m walking on Sunshine” or practically anything by Louis Armstrong, no, it’s not something normal.

It’s the theme tune to the Smurfs or a jingle from a rather eye-twitchingly irritating advert on telly. I even have soundtracks to my day at work, usually the whistle song in Robin Hood or one of the various cheesy songs in the Japanese Dragonball and Dragonball Z series, the latter of which is the musical version of a persistent itch located in an area of your back you can’t reach satisfyingly enough as the song is in Japanese, so I’m not even able to sing along.

If ever there was an ‘on-track’ version of this, it’s starting to go a bit off.

Well, I get videogame equivalents of the perpetual song-in-your-head.

It’s not quite as chronic as its counterpart, however it is infinitely more aggravating, partly because it is unfulfilling when you are at work or in the shower, but mostly because it’s usually something that you’re stuck on.

In my current case, it’s the start-up of Prison Architect.

Prison Architect is a game currently on Steam early access, where you manage a prison, namely the architecture and utilities, it’s a cleverly named game as you can see, no room for confusion there. At the start of the game, you are tasked with meeting the initial requirements for just keeping a few prisoners and, with grants and funds, you increase your features and size to accommodate more.  This all sounds relatively simple, eh?

Another game which has been stuck in my head is FTL. I like my characters to all have some level of continuity, it just so happens that on this particular playthrough I named some of my characters after people in Alien, and the first crewmember I got was called Jones. Spooky nerdism.

Well it’s not bloody easy. Given only a modest sum, you are expected to make this stretch across to a multitude of duties, all of which are mostly done half-arsed, either by me or by the people in charge of said duty. For a start, I was warned to build a fence around the prison, as obviously keeping prisoners in is kinda the main objective of the building, apparently this can be easy to forget in all the exuberance of playing this game of fast-paced ecstasy and excitement.

With this in mind I set out and built a fence straight off-the-bat, and not finding any entrance and exit point more suitable and cost-effective, stuck a Jail door on it. Well this is pretty secure already, I thought, There won’t be any prisoners clocking out of here any time soon. Well, not unless my jailers  just let them out that is.

I am not sure why my guards decided that knocking about the doors while prisoners are clambering to get out was a good idea, but do was exactly what they did. Within minutes of starting up the game and grappling some sort of understanding out of the inept and under-done tutorial, I had already had a great escape consisting of about 7 people. My TWO guards (hey, this isn’t Alca-deluxe-traz here) managed to wrangle 6 of them back, albeit with a great deal of blood and unconsciousness happening.

Not having the facilities to deal with any medical mis-happening, the guards and the prisoners both had to just lump the wounds until the next grant, which didn’t happen until many days too late.

So stuck in my head all day, and indeed also part of the night in the form of semi-coherent dreams, I have been wondering about Warden’s offices, supply cupboards and Prisoners’ showers, with little luck on the definitive solution to my criminal problem.

Oh well, I guess… cha-la! head cha-la! nah nee no naa nee no nane na…

Getting stuck in my head

Tales from the System Shock 2 Pt.3

Previously on How to suck at videogames.

So we’re now in the Engineering block something or rather and not actually on the next deck at all. This game is so blinking huge it’s hard to know where you’re going or what you’re doing half the time. This particular area has the wonders of radiation and poor old Stiffy is having a pretty hard time of it getting from place to place. See what I did there? Cocks.

After much faffing about, and a fair amount of savespawning that I’m not too ashamed to admit, I finally figure out where we’re going, making use of the map is starting to become a bit of a priority.

So why didn’t he?

After finding a storage area with some ammo in, I proceed onwards until I find some more capsuled corridors and had a lot of trouble with spawning enemies. As the game is a persistent world, when I turn it off it keeps on going and although there are some scripted enemies and such, most of them are just random. For me, here’s where the game started to show, just how persistent it wanted to be. It threw about 5/6 Manymen with Shotguns and a few more with poles, not to mention the spectacular new addition to the roster of things that prefer my insides outside are the serving robots, strange robots which like to follow you until it reaches you and then explodes although while uttering exclamations of how it wishes to help you. Nice.

As with Half Life, I have grown quite attached to the melee weapon and almost never use it against the baddies, this has made dealing with the robots a little difficult, however it is possible to ensure that you lose no health and bullets whilst expending this not-quite-servile enemy. The trick is to allow it to come close, then just as it stops to blow itself up, you try and get as far away as quickly as possible. I’m not going to lie, it’s a crap idea and it doesn’t work very often.

Continuing down the corridor, I enter a room and then all of a sudden, the screen goes white. Then everything goes all Half Life. A voice starts speaking to me about flesh and I go on a pretty uneventful floaty tour around a pulpy-looking room. The talk about joining the flesh reminded me of Videodrome, but with a good deal less boobs.

Definitely not Half Life.

After the flesh got bored, they zip us back to reality, where Stiffy ventures on unperturbed. There’s a room with robot casings and bots in them. It’s quite obvious that they won’t be staying in them and sure enough they start jumping out like popcorn as soon as I walk past the designated points. It’s these mid-to-late 90′s games like Tomb Raider, Thief and this that I love where, through calculated insidiousness, you can exploit the game’s designs in order to make it past the challenge. In this, I rounded them all up and then jumped on a lift. They walk underneath me and, because their proximity explosions are only programmed in a 2-dimensional plane, they begin to detonate far beneath me out of harm’s way. Joyous.

Yeah, yeah, I know your game.

A good bit of exploration and some keycards later, I’ve found a pretty nifty control room, however I don’t have the hardware thing they want. I return to all the doors which needed numbers and find a small room with a module, Ms. Politics tells us that we need to find a hardware device to bypass the security in order to turn on the power or something. To be honest, I see doors, and I explore until I find ways of opening them and the game is definitely in on this too.

It’s not full of stars.

Apparently I have to go back to the radioactive rooms, great. Some backtracking and finding of the right hardware and I am able to use it in the control room and get to the security module. The radiation’s gone so now I can go back to the very start of this area and get into an area that was blocked off. There are two areas on either side with switches in, neither prove much of a problem. After this I took to exploring one of the doors, which leads to a long room, at the end of which I found this beauty:

My, what a pain. As there was also a shotgun Manyman with her, I decided I would use my rifle-shotgun thing to take them out. Turns out that they’re bloody useless and I melee’d them after all.

With this I was finally able to restore power and quickly ran to the lift. Onto the next deck then.

I wonder what awe and beauty awaits me on the next deck? What wonders are there to behold, what incredible and unbelievable sci-fi techery is lying beyond the steely floor between us? Oh.

Tales from the System Shock 2 Pt.3

Foundation Saga: Foundation

The Foundation Saga is Sci-Fi’s most well known collection of novels, principally as Science Fiction isn’t wont to create sagas, a habit propounded by Fantasy.

Written by Isaac Asimov, known as one of the three SF giants along with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein, The Foundation Saga begins with the first installment, Foundation, published in 1951 and originally started out as a collection of short series, then later a trilogy, and then was finally expanded into a full series, with preludes and everything.

No series is complete without some discord in chronology.

The novel is set on many worlds, over many years and with many characters, with the overarching plot concern ‘the Foundation’. What started as a group of scientists exiled to a distant uninhabited planet in the periphery of the moribund Empire, soon expanded into its own power vying to rival and overthrow the Empire, whose technology is waning and the economy lapsing into a steady decline, predicted to destroy itself inside of 500 years.

The world’s cheesiest first edition. You can already see physics defying rocketry going on!

The initial creation of the Foundation begins with Hari Seldon, a professor of Psycho-history, a teaching which is not widely known or practiced, which deals in calculated prediction of future events governing a large group of people. Seldon uses this skill to predict the destruction of the Empire and decides it is time to take the situation into his own hands.

He begins by playing off the Empire’s central planets court systems against itself, using his own predictions and stabilising of events, he manages to direct himself into being exiled from the Empire under the guise of creating an Encyclopaedia, designed to slow the effect of a long reign of technological lull resulting in his proposed decline of the Empire, the very idea of which is considered treasonous. Instead he wishes to be secluded and left alone with a group of like-minded individuals to start a new order.

This genre of Sci-Fi, which can be described as a Political Space Opera, is bit of a turn for Asimov, the creator of the 3 laws of robotics. As a Bio-Chemist who frequently writes about Sci-Fi mysteries about Robots and morality, mostly in the form of short stories and small novels,a long running series is a bit of a dive into new territory, so much so that I was incredibly surprised about the content of the book completely lacking robots, opting instead to focus on human drama and religious themes.

Religious themes?   I know that a lot of people are very wary of the term “Religion” when it comes to Sci-Fi, I never really understood why as surely it is one of the most interesting themes to explore whatever your own religious beliefs. Foundation employs a very cynical view of religion, where it is used for financial and economic gain, a tool in politics. Politics is one of the biggest parts of this book. From the creation of the Foundation from the ashes of the Empire, to its own struggles against rivalling planets, each character from the different eras are faced with their own problems they must face and succeed in using the ingenuity to overcome for the sake of Foundation’s future.

The Panther edition is one to avoid as it is full of typos.

The story is weaved around interpersonal and inter-spacial politics, the twists and turns from his mystery-styled robot works still makes an appearance here, with the plays from the characters being  obscured and the reasons for apparent nonchalance kept secret until the final scene, where all is revealed. The plot is full of intrigue and makes for very addictive reading. If I had to compare this to another book, then it’s a little bit like Game of Thrones in space.

There were some notable omissions from the novel, for example, the main city of Trantor at the very beginning is treated to a paragraphs of descriptive immersion, however the lack of technological explanation or even some general idea of architecture for the subsequent cities, planets and ships was extremely lacking. The first of the main characters is also made to feel very much like he had purpose and was going to last. I was rather confused and kept wondering whether we would be going back to first timeline as it seemed so over-characterised for what little pagetime it ended up getting. Pagetime = Like screentime, but in a book. The characters were great and the dialogue, like in most Asimov work, drives all of the plot, but the lack of female characters and diversity made some of the novel cramped and stifling. It seemed there were only 3 kinds of people in the book; stupid, angry or intelligent. Which is all very well for the set up of a novel and storyline, but I can’t see it working in later novels.

One of my editions had a lot of errors and typos in, that’s the Panther 1985 version which is pictured, so I would avoid that one, but other versions are much improved. There are 7 books in the series total so it can always be a pain if your rather picky about getting a good-looking set going.

Foundation is rightfully considered one of the best Science Fiction novels written by one of SF’s greatest writers, wonderfully paced and uniquely exciting, it provides a great canvas for Asimov to extoll brilliant ideas of philosophy and the creation of civilisation. This book belongs on any bookfan’s shelf.

Foundation Saga: Foundation

Them's Fightin' Words! Card Game

A little while back I bought a game called Jazz: The Singing Card Game, a multiplayer memory game using bebop-style jazz words.

The rules were simple, players lay down a card from their hand and say all of the cards in the pile, with the amusing addition that they were words like “Bop!” and “Beedle!”.

It was a lot of fun, easy to learn and great for get togethers, you were even able to add your own words, however it was a little simple without making yourself additional rules.

This is where Them’s Fightin’ Words comes in, like its predecessor, Jazz, it is a multiplayer card game but this time it is set in the Old West.

There’s currently a Kickstarter for the game and I was lucky enough to get a proto-version from the folks at 7/5 games.

We don’t have the rules for the game but after watching the video, we had a pretty good idea for what we were doing. The rules have been spiced up since Jazz, instead of using a single pile for the game and a hand of 5 cards which you can pick to lay, Them’s Fightin’ Words, uses 3 piles and the player’s decks which the card for play is chosen at random.

Playing Them’s Fightin’ Words. The average game lasts only a few minutes making it great to play during lunch or if you’re trying to introduce people to card games.

The game is based on insults, the first of the card on the player field is the constant “You”, the second is the description and the third with the orange writing is the insulting noun.

For example, “You lollygaggin’ cur!” and if the next card played was “bushwhackin’” the next person would have to say “You lollygaggin’ bushwhackin’ cur!” and so on until someone can’t remember the cards, then that person takes those cards and a point is added, the first person to get 3 points, loses. The only card that stacks for you to remember is the middle card, whereas when you play a different final card, that just changes the insult for variety.

It really helps if you put on your best Old West accent, which for me turned into more of a hillbilly. Hearing someone stalling at remembering hilarious insults whilst doing a gruff voice is only beaten by tongue-tied insults resulting in tirades like “You lily livered lelly belly horny toad”.

It’s a very fast paced game, so is great for people who haven’t got the time for long-winded Netrunner-fare, the rules are simple yet the game is not easy, depending on who is playing. When on a streak the game can become very tense and exciting and on a losing one, you can still take solace in the fact that the winning player sounds ridiculous.

I currently have a prototype deck, so there may still be some changes before the final product, however there were some minor grievances, for example, the game didn’t come with DIY cards like Jazz did, also as the game is best suited to ‘across-table’ gameplay, the words for each card can only be read the right way by one of the players, but these are only superficial and don’t impede the flow of the game.

Jazz: The Singing Card Game.

I love card games and particularly like the potential for “Meta-game”, the ability to create new and varied experiences by using the same game but changing the rules. The most obvious one for this game is “Mexican Standoff” mode, where you include 3 or more people, however instead of having a deck which you

can only choose the top card, add in the rules of Jazz where you have a hand that you can pick, that way you can play different levels of difficulty card (the final insult card if you are being easy or the middle card if you are being aggressive) and when someone loses the order of play goes the other way around. This way you can choose whether you want to try to eliminate the person on your right or aid them, more like a choice in a standoff.

The other is “Finger Twitching Revival” where at each loss the losing player puts the stack of cards in their own discard pile and the final insult/noun cards into a shared discard pile, at the end of every set of 3, the mutual discard pile is given to the overall loser and the players reshuffle the discard pile back into their decks and continue to play until someone runs out of cards and is declared overall winner. This one could take a while.

The game is compelling and I’m looking forward to seeing what the final version looks like, however, it is not likely to have a far-reaching retail release, so the best bet on acquiring it would be to head to the Kickstarter, which is going quite strong.
I had a lot of fun with this memory game, especially as I tend to win a lot.

Them's Fightin' Words! Card Game