The Stack

Another couple of levels in. I’ve hit the episode’s major plot revelation: that the world-dominating Mishima Corporation is using their prisons as a source of meat for their fast-food restaurants, in a process you get to witness over the course of multiple rooms of conveyor belts and automated butchering machines. ¹There is a real Mishima Foods, Inc. They manufacture various Asian sauces and soup mixes sold in grocery stores. I wonder if they reacted to this? And as juvenile-gross as it is — or attempts to be, anyway, as there’s only so much you can do in this engine — I have to admit that it’s more integration of plot and gameplay than I was expecting. Heck, it’s more plot than Doom or Quake ever had.

Probably in part because the in-game models don’t make it sufficiently clear what the machines are doing, the game provides some running commentary from the player’s sidekick, a large black man named Superfly Johnson. (He also sometimes spontaneously says things like “Suck it down!”, which is a little embarrassing.) I rescued him from the prison’s torture rooms a couple of levels ago and he’s been tagging along ever since — the game doesn’t let you leave him behind. Mr. Johnson helps you out in fights, and, while he doesn’t always act in the ways I wish, sometimes getting in the way of my shots or whatever, it’s well within the range of behavior you’d expect from a human teammate. I was expecting a lot worse. Back in the day, the NPC behavior was often cited as the worst, jankiest part of the game. He’s supposed to be always getting stuck on level geometry and firing rockets at my back and so forth. What happened?

What happened is that I installed the latest patch. And to be clear, Patch 1.3 is an unofficial patch, created by fans of the game rather than by its creators or publisher. I installed it mainly because I wanted to play in widescreen, but “updated and greatly improved AI paths and nodes” is part of the package. And that raises a question: Should I be playing the best version of this game? If I’m playing it mainly to see what everyone found so disappointing, shouldn’t I be experiencing it at its worst?

I don’t think so. Any flaw that can be fixed in a fan patch is a superficial flaw, not worth commenting on. I’d be more concerned if it made major changes to content — but even there, I willingly installed a patch that added some encounters to Temple of Elemental Evil. And anyway, I think for now I’ll trust the game’s fans to tell me what is and isn’t true to the spirit of the thing. They approve of this patch — they made it. I should trust it too.