The Stack

Well, that didn’t take long. It seems that all it really takes to motivate me to keep playing a game without pause until I reach the end is continual tangible progress. As in, the kind of progress that doesn’t happen when you’ve got the difficulty set too high.

I should mention that part of the reason it took me less time than I was expecting was that I made some discoveries about the user interface that got things going faster. It turns out that you can skip most animations by pressing the space bar, which I apparently hadn’t tried before. Well, it’s a highly mouse-driven game in most other respects. In most of my sessions, I didn’t even touch the keyboard, and I probably still wouldn’t have tried it if I weren’t recently involved in some space-bar-skippable animations in a different context. I knew that Etherlords lets you turn animations off entirely through the options menu, but I had found this to produce glitches, and besides, I didn’t want to turn them off entirely. Watching the animations is part of the charm of the game. At least, it is the first few times for each type of monster. But I was stuck for ages on a level where I was playing Team Black, which has Mech Worms as its basic starting unit, and not only do Mech Worms have a frustratingly slow crawling-forward-to-attack animation, they automatically attack every round (that is, they have the “berserk” attribute). So I was very glad to not have to sit through that again.

But even with that assistance, I couldn’t have breezed through the remainder of the game in the span of a day if I hadn’t been unexpectedly close to the end. In my last post, I was on level 5. It turns out that there are only 7 or 8 levels, depending on how you count the end boss.

Map 6 shakes things up a little by giving you no castle, and thus no way to cast overland spells, such as the spell that summons new heroes. So, you’re stuck with what you start with — a traditional variation found in strategy games of this sort. Usually such levels derive tension from the slow attrition of your irreplacable troops, but since Etherlords heals your heroes completely between battles, that’s not really a factor here. The map does limit the resources you need to cast spells, but you can pick up more stuff from monsters, and at any rate, it just doesn’t feel the same.

Map 7 is where the alliances finally break apart. You’re on the threshhold of the grand prize, so it’s every etherlord for himself. I’ve been playing the red/black campaign, so at this point I had to choose red or black. I chose red — that’s the team that has my O(n²) kobolds, which proved quite useful. Ultimately, though, I didn’t need my heroes to defeat my three computer-controlled rivals. This is a really big map, with a lot of mines and ether nodes scattered around, and once you have above a certain threshhold of spell fuel coming in every turn, you can destroy the opponent castles with overland spells alone. You don’t even have to know where the castles are, which is fortunate, because even after I had destroyed them, it took me a while to find them. At any rate, the real bosses of the level are the level 12 dragons, the most powerful beings in the game up to that point, who guard the entrance to the Temple of Time, where the final challenge awaits.

The final level doesn’t even have a map. It’s just a duel against the White Lord, holder of ultimate power over the cosmos. It is this power that the etherlords crave; your goal is to kill him and take his place. He’s level 15. But for the final fight, you get a level 15 character as well, and you get to choose whatever assortment of spells you feel like, provided of course that they’re your color. (The White Lord is not limited to one color.)

Now, this was clearly going to be a high-powered fight. High-level characters have more hit points and get mana faster than low-level characters, and these were the two highest-level characters I had ever seen. So I figured I should try the Mana Burn trick. Mana Burn is an enchantment that makes unused mana hurt. It cuts both ways, though, so if you use it, you have to be sure you have some kind of mana sink — something that has a power-up effect that can use arbitrary quantities of mana — so that your own excess mana doesn’t damage you. There are a couple of “wall”-type summonables (things that can’t attack but can block attacks) that fit the bill. Anyway, it seemed like this approach would be a good fit for a long fight with lots of hit points, because the number of open mana channels just keeps on increasing, and there’s only so much an unprepared opponent can do with them.

Apparently the designers of the game came to the same conclusion: the White Lord also used the Mana Burn strategem, but did it better than me. I couldn’t even imitate what he did, because of the way he mixed colors. It took me five or six tries to catch onto a winning modified strategy, mixing in some Cyclopes and some Disintegrate spells. (The advantage of Disintegrate is that it removes creatures from play entirely, so they can’t regenerate or rise from the dead. The White Lord had some things that kept coming back.)

At which point it turned out to be one of those two-stage boss fights, with the real White Lord showing up encased in some kind of robotic life support tube or something. This time he’s level 20, and uses a completely different strategy, involving creatures with the special property that they can’t be targetted by spells, which rendered my lovely Disintegrates useless. Nonetheless, I managed to get past this part on my first try, although it was a close thing.

And so I hand over ultimate power to the Chaots, the fire-and-bloodhshed faction. This isn’t going to be a pleasant eon. Of course, eventually the stars will align again and someone else will come to challenge the new White Lord — it’s that sort of ending. I suppose that if I don’t actually sympathize with the player character, there’s at least some consolation in knowing that he’s going to be locked up in that temple for a few thousand years.

At this point, you might be wondering about the other sides. There are two separate campaigns — or four, once you’re past map 6. Can I really say I’m finished with the game if I’ve only completed one? This is really something tha varies from game to game. In Starcraft, for example, playing only one side would be ludicrous — you’d be missing out on 2/3 of the gameplay, not to mention 2/3 of the plot. But Etherlords is much more symmetrical than that. From what I’ve seen of the campaigns, it’s clear that they really only differ significantly at the tactical level, in combat mode. I’ve seen what campaign mode has to offer, and don’t need to see the same thing from the other side. But I am kind of curious about the end boss. The Mana Burn gimmick is something only available to the Chaots. How do the other sides deal with it? Does the White Lord, in fact, choose different decks depending on who invades his sanctum? If I ever decide to play this game more, it’ll be to satisfy my curiosity on those questions.

Well, if I’m going to play a game where I’m stuck, it might as well be one where I can get myself unstuck fairly easily. Turning the difficulty down a notch in Etherlords has given me the ability to smack down the enemy heroes without undue difficulty — at one point I was surprised to take down a level 5 enemy with a level 2 hero who hadn’t even yet had a chance to purchase better spells. I still haven’t completed map 5 yet, due to occasional crashes (thank goodness for autosave!), but I’ve destroyed all of the enemy castles and don’t have to worry about being attacked at all, and thus can take my time upgrading a single hero to take on the actual mission objectives (destroying some “war altars” guarded by powerful elementals).

What we have here is the effects of very strong positive feedback — that is, the winners tend to keep on winning and the losers tend to keep on losing. Each side has only one or two heroes of significant strength. If you can attack the enemy’s strongest heroes and win, there’s nothing they can do to stop you; if you can’t, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. The weird thing is, this is a strategy game with multiple sides, and that’s usually a recipe for strong negative feedback, with anyone who seems like they’re pulling ahead suddenly finding their allies turning against them. But the alliances in the single-player campaign here are set in stone. (Or so it seems so far, anyway — there’s a whole Diplomacy interface that might come into play at some point, but currently I’m thinking it’s solely for online multiplayer play.)

So, the fact that the designers aren’t playing to their design’s strengths here hammers home the point (for which I’ve already noted other supporting evidence in previous posts) that the pseudo-multiplayer aspect of the game wasn’t the focus of their attention. And at this point, I’m willing to conclude that it therefore shouldn’t be the focus of my attention either. If I keep the difficulty set where it was before, I’ll spend the majorty of my play time on a fraction of the map, replaying the first few turns over and over in the hope of surviving to the midgame. If I turn it down, my assailants turn into a mere inconvenience to be faced as I roam about seeking treasures, fighting stationary monsters, levelling up, and generally treating the game more like a traditional RPG than a strategy game. The latter approach holds more appeal to me. Let the map be my enemy.

Even taking full advantage of my infinite continues, I can only manage to get to a level somewhere into the early-to-mid 40’s. At that point, I simply stop making progress.

To understand this fully, you have to understand a bit more about the game than I’ve yet described. First of all, dying even once means you have to start the level over from scratch. Things you killed before you died are resurrected along with you, and any powerups other than warp tokens are lost. (On the plus side, dying recharges your superzapper, the kill-everything weapon that can be used once per life per level.) Thus, the only way to make lasting progress within a game is to actually finish a level, and, although you’re given three lives (to start with), you have to do it within the span of a single life. To make progress within a series of games, however, you have to finish two levels (not necessarily with the same life). This is because of an odd limitation on the levels you can continue from — that is, you can only continue from the odd levels.

Now, there’s a substantial luck factor in this game, and not just because the granularity of crucial events is beyond the ability of humans to control, predict, or perceive. Powerups are very important, and (apart from the first one on every level, which always gives you a “Particle Laser” ¹OK, actually it’s a little more complicated than that. If you manage to grab a powerup while sliding down the web on completing a level (the “Avoid Spikes” phase), your first powerup in the next level will be an AI Droid.) completely random. And some of them are much more useful than others. If you manage to get an AI Droid powerup, it’ll wander around shooting things for you so you can concentrate on defense, and on picking up more powerups. Even better, the rare Outta Here powerup simply ends the level immediately.

So, even when you’re out of your depth, there’s some chance that you’ll have an easy time of it, but it’s a crapshoot. In fact, since the entire state of the level resets when you die, each life can be regarded as an independent trial with the same probability of success. If it weren’t for the odd limitation, the number of lives you have would be unimportant. No death would have any impact on the next life’s ability to result in permanent progress. If you have a 25% chance of passing a level, it’ll take an expected 4 tries, and so will the next level, more or less (the difference in difficulty between successive levels being insignificant), for a total of 8 tries — more than you get in a single continue. But since you need to pass two levels at a time in order to get anywhere, it makes a big difference whether you have 8 lives in reserve or only 3.

Now, in the early part of the game, at the easier stages, one tends to accumulate lives. This gives the player a certain momentum. You eventually reach a point where you’re losing lives faster than you’re gaining them, but your reserves catapult you onward. Consequently, when the game finally ends, you’re not at the limit of your ability, but well past it.

Probably because of what I’ve been reading lately, I keep thinking of Tempest 2000 as some kind of experiment into human visual perception. There’s always a lot going on, only some of which is visible at any given moment. In extreme cases, you can lose a life to something that hasn’t even been displayed yet.

This isn’t even just because of particle effects covering things up, like I described before. Unlike the original Tempest, the camera moves around a little to follow the player, but doesn’t move as quickly. Sometimes part of the web is offscreen. Some of the webs are crinkly, with segments folded tightly around each other, so that, depending on the camera placement, some segments will be hidden from view. In either case, you can actually be on part of the screen that’s not being shown. On the other hand, when you get killed without expecting it, it’s hard to tell exactly why. Maybe it was something that was hidden from view by a crinkle, maybe it was hidden by an explosion, maybe it wasn’t hidden from view at all and you simply failed to notice it.

So, you basically never have complete visual information. On the other hand, that’s true anyway. The human eye isn’t nearly as perceptive as it seems; only a small region of the retina, covering about 6 degrees of arc, has the acuity we associate with normal vision. We get the illusion of a larger visual field from involuntary movements of the eye. The brain is really good at piecing together the fragmentary data obtained this way, and at extrapolating from it. If it weren’t, playing this game would be pretty much impossible. Tracking things you can’t currently see is a big part of the game, and I suspect that with enough practice, one might learn to see important objects in the game even when they’re completely obscured.

On the other hand, the same phenomena work against the player too. The reason that the brain is good at filling in the gaps is that the eye doesn’t see everything even under normal circumstances. I think the most striking experiment I’ve heard of in this regard is one that involved a system that tracked a person’s eye movements as they looked at words on a computer screen. Whenever the subject’s eye was moving, the words would change. To anyone else observing, the screen was in a constant state of flux, but to the subject, it looked completely stable, just like the words you’re reading right now. Now, think about what this means for a fast-paced game with incomplete information. Obviously the screen isn’t tracking your eye movements, and appears far from stable, but given how much is happening, and how fast, some of it is bound to occur in ways that simply slip past conscious experience, even for a well-trained player.

But that’s what extra lives are for, and the game is pretty generous with them. It’s like Robotron in that respect, only less cerebral.

At level 17, the background music changes and the web changes color, from blue to red. Since there are 16 blue levels, it seems likely that there are 16 red levels as well, but I haven’t confirmed this. All I know is that the next change (to yellow) happens somewhere past level 30, and when it happens, the level shapes start repeating from the beginning, but with more difficult enemies. Obviously 100 is not divisible by 16, so what happens when you approach the end? Does it just continue in the same pattern, or are there four special levels? I don’t know yet, but I kind of suspect the former. There’s some indication in reviews I’ve seen online that reaching level 100 doesn’t even end the game, but just switches it automatically to excessively difficult mode (which is unlocked thereby) and keeps on going.

I haven’t yet managed to get into the yellow without using continues. I’m not considering continues to be dishonorable in this game, but it seems to me that seeing how far I can get without them is a reasonable way to gauge my skill. I’ve managed to get pretty close to the yellow, getting past level 30 at least and possibly up to level 32, just short of the expected transition. But I’m not sure just how far I’ve gone, because the game doesn’t display level numbers, and even when I try to keep track on my own, the bonus levels confuse the issue.

So let me talk about the bonus levels. Here’s how they work: One of the powerups in the normal levels is a “warp token”. After you collect three warp tokens, you get a bonus level. Thus, they have no fixed place in the level sequence, although the content of the bonus level seems to be determined by what level you were at. Bonus levels are unrelated to Tempest gameplay, except in that they seem to all keep the flying-down-a-tube motif in one way or another. For example, the first few bonus levels involve flying through a series of rings. Each ring you fly through gives you a certain number of points, which I frankly wouldn’t care about except for the fact that points give you extra lives. Miss one ring and the bonus level ends immediately. If you manage to get all the way through a bonus level, you get another large bonus and skip ahead five levels.

It’s that “skip ahead five levels” that makes things unclear. Does it mean “add five to the last level you played”, or does it mean “add five to the level you would otherwise be playing next”? I could figure this out by taking notes about the web shape on each level, but I haven’t bothered.

Now, I’ve said before that there’s a distinction between completism and perfectionism in games. I haven’t really articulated that distinction. In most games, it’s pretty subtle — a completist and a perfectionist will, in most cases, pursue the same goals. But this skipping ahead strikes me as one of the few game mechanics that separate them. To play perfectly is to clear every bonus level without making a mistake, which means skipping levels, which means not playing completely. Of course, the fact that the game repeats webs affects this — you’d have to be a pretty extreme completist to complain about skipping content that’s basically identical to something you’ve already seen. But if there actually were 100 distinct webs, and I skipped some towards the end, I wouldn’t be completely satisfied.

Tempest had a knob. Rotary controllers of this sort weren’t uncommon in videogames of the day — why, the very first videogame to hit it big, Pong, used a pair of knobs. But they’re not common on today’s home computers or gaming consoles. (As far as I know, the last console to provide knobs as a standard feature was the Atari 2600.) I suppose the steering wheel controllers sometimes used for driving games are effectively a knob variant, but that seems cumbersome for the purpose. (If you’ve actually tried using a steering wheel to control a non-driving game, I’m curious about how well it worked.)

The usual way to compensate for this on a PC is to substitute the mouse, which works pretty well — like the knob, it’s effectively an analog device, allowing quick and precise movement by mapping motion on the screen directly to motion of the controller. It doesn’t work quite as well as for Tempest as it does for Pong and its ilk, though. Pong maps the rotary motion of the controller to linear motion on the screen, so switching to a controller that uses linear motion actually makes the mapping a little simpler and more direct. Tempest, on the other hand, has genuinely rotary motion on screen. Any mouse-based control scheme is going to wind up either (a) moving the player in the opposite direction from the mouse motion some of the time, or (b) being more complicated than the simple two-direction spinning of the original.

Now, Tempest 2000 has the additional handicap of having been developed primarily for the Atari Jaguar, a machine that had no knobs, no mouse, not even an analog joystick. It was built with a digital D-pad in mind, and the port supports nothing better. I might as well use the keyboard; switching directions is slightly faster that way. It’s probably not as bad as it sounds, though. The art of using digital controls to simulate analog ones is well-developed by now, and probably familiar to most gamers, if only subliminally. But it does suffer the inversion problem already noted about mouse controls. Pressing left moves you clockwise and right moves you counterclockwise, even when you’re at the top of the tube, where clockwise is right and counterclockwise is left. One gets used to this, but it’s easy to get momentarily confused, and every moment of confusion is a potential death.

Not every level in the game actually involves a closed curve — about half of them have endpoints, and are equivalent to lines. They’re lines bent into various shapes (one of the early ones is in a V shape that always makes me think of the Videlectrix logo), but motion on these levels is essentially linear rather than rotary. Does this make it easier? Not always! Context and perspective are important here. Some of these levels put the line above the middle of the screen, so that the monsters are below you — think of the normal tube-like view, but with the bottom half of the tube cut off. Or rather, don’t, because if you do, you’ll expect the controls to be inverted, like they are on the top half of a full tube. They’re not: left means left and right means right, just like you’d expect. The fact that I find these levels so confusing shows something about how quickly intuitive expectations can be changed.

I had intended to get back into Etherlords his weekend, but I just didn’t feel like it. Sometimes the brain wants a rest. And so I choose a game that the spinal cord can play by itself. Tempest is of course the original fast-paced shoot-em-up-in-a-tube, and Tempest 2000 is its by-now-also-retro remake with a toe-tapping techno soundtrack (played directly off the CD, olde-style).

There was a brief but substantial wave of these remakes of “classic” arcade games around the turn of the millennium: re-imaginings that took advantage of 3D hardware and new innovations in game design, or, to put it another way, attempts on the part of the new IP holders to cash in on nostalgia by bolting on texture-mapping and power-ups and rudimentary storylines. Tempest 2000 wasn’t really part of this trend, having come a few years too early — despite the name, it was originally released on the Atari Jaguar in 1994, and its PC port in 1996. Because of this, it doesn’t quite fit the template. It has the powerups, sure, but it thankfully avoids spoiling the abstract purity of the original with a storyline. And (outside of the bonus levels) it doesn’t have texture-mapping — it uses Tron-esque solid-filled polygons instead of the bare wireframe of the original, but that’s as far as it goes.

Instead, the graphics technology it wants to show off is particle effects — there’s a constant spray of rainbow confetti in the background, and there’s often enough explosion debris and floating word residue on the screen that it’s hard to see what you’re doing. Seriously, check out the screenshot. The thumbnail doesn’t do it justice. It all reminds me of the complaints about Space Giraffe, a game which I’ve never played and don’t know much else about. Well, as you may already know, but I did not, Space Giraffe is in fact a remake of Tempest 2000 by the same designer. I’ve been vaguely aware of Jeff Minter since Llamatron, but somehow didn’t notice that he was involved with this game, probably because it doesn’t have some kind of quadruped in its title.

Filtering out the visual noise is of course a skill that you can learn. Some have gone so far as to call it the fundamental videogame skill. And this is very much a skill-based game. The day’s practice has seen me make substantial improvement already — I can now consistently clear level 20 (out of 100) from a standing start — but it’s not because I’ve made discoveries or varied my tactics or anything like that. I’ve been hesitant to start games of this sort since starting this blog, because they provide no guarantee that I’ll ever be able to complete them. With an RPG, there’s always the option of level-grinding until it’s easy. With a FPS, you can generally get through the hard bits by saving more often. With an adventure, there’s always walkthroughs, or, failing that, reverse-engineering the data files. But if a level in a twitch game is beyond you, there’s not much you can do. Tempest 2000 effectively provides infinite continues — within a session, you can always start a new game at or near the level you died. I expect I’ll be needing that.

Spoilers strut about boldly in the daylight ahead.

It turned out that I had only one major set-piece battle to go before the end of the episode, against a tripod in an enclosed area full of boxcars and other obstacles. The tripod is too large to follow you as you wend your way through the maze-like environs, but its weapons are strong enough to physically alter the environment in ways that must have taken a good deal of careful planning on the part of the designers.

After that, Gordon and Alyx set a train in motion, hop into the caboose, and watch the city explode noiselessly in the distance. At least, it’s in the distance at first, as you see the ships flying out of the towering citadel just in time to escape and speeding off in all directions. Then the fireball (plasmaball? otherworldly-dimensional-energyball?) engulfs the places your train has just sped through — it’s sort of a “Yee-haw!” moment, staying just ahead of the wall of white in your wake, until you have the dismaying realization that you’re not going to make it.

I’ve had nightmares like this. Dreams of near-escape, followed the realization that you’re doomed and powerless to do anything about it. The sense of doom can be surprisingly peaceful at these moments, because if there’s nothing you can do, there’s no need to react in any way. Being on a train isn’t completely necessary to the feeling, but it adds a lot to the sense that your course is beyond your control. And that’s Gordon’s life in a nutshell, isn’t it? Trains have been a major part of Half-Life all along, bringing Gordon to places he doesn’t want to be, literally railroading him.

Speaking of hardware modification, it turns out that I was right: all that I needed to pass the Point of Certain Crash in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 was a second gigabyte of RAM, which seems to cost about two cents per meg these days. So the stated “minimum requirements” of the game, which would have it running on a fraction of the RAM I had beforehand, are a lie. This is probably pretty common. There’s little motivation for game producers to tell people in advance that they shouldn’t bother buying their games.

I’ve mentioned before how the structure of Half-Life 2 makes me end most sessions in the middle of a difficult battle. The latest quit-for-the-night scene for me is one of those scenes where people start following Gordon around and get massacred for their trust in my ability to defend them. This time around, though, it’s not just a regrettable happenstance. Defending them is in fact my explicit goal: Barney has dragooned me into shuttling people from a safehouse to a waiting train, four at a time. (This seems to be a magic number for the game engine. Whenever NPCs are spawned dynamically, there are always four of them. New folks show up only as fast as you let the old ones die. If it were a movie, I’d suspect that they only had enough money to hire four extras.)

So, it’s an escort mission, that traditional bane of shooters. I don’t know yet if getting my charges killed actually makes any difference in the game here, and on the basis of precedent, I suspect it doesn’t. But for various reasons, I’m unwilling to let them die, and this makes the scene harder than it would be otherwise. The fact that it is my explicit goal is of course part of it. There’s also the fact that it’s my fault that they need to get on the train in the first place — the reason they’re fleeing the city is that it’s about to blow up, due to my own actions in the endgame of Half-Life 2.

But also, it just seems like discharging a karmic debt. The whole episode so far has essentially been one long escort mission — one viewed from the opposite side. Gordon frequently has to concentrate on things other than shooting, like operating machinery or pushing cars onto antlion burrows to block them. And whenever the player is occupied in this manner, Alyx covers him. There have been battles where I’ve hardly fired a shot. In one of the scenes shortly before where I am now, Alyx climbed up onto a high vantage point with a sniper rifle to pick off enemies while I ran ahead. I’ve played that exact scenario in several other games, but always as the sniper. So after being the beneficiary of so much uncomplaining protection, it would be ungracious to refuse the same to others.

So, I’ve finally done something about the Gameboy cable problem. It turns out that GBA cables are wired slightly differently than the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color: where the older model just has two of the wires cross over, the GBA does something tricky to accomodate plugging in another cable in the middle. Furthermore, the type of connection that a game expects depends on the hardware the game was created for, not the hardware it’s actually running on — so in order to trade original Pokemon on a GBA, you need an old-style cable. This is the sort of fact that’s easy to find documented on the web, provided you’re looking for it in the first place.

I’ve seen it suggested that an official GBC cable will fit in a GBA socket (although not vice-versa), which would solve the problem if I had an official GBC cable. But I don’t, and I’m not really willing to spend any more money on this problem (buying second GBA was about my limit for this project), so I took apart the GBA cable I had formerly called “defective” and rewired it. And it works great! I’ve pulled off my first successful pokémon trades trades in something approaching ten years, and stand ready to do more.

Of course, given my track record, I couldn’t justify asking someone to trade with me until I knew it worked. Which presents a bootstrapping problem. Fortunately, I had someone else’s Pokémon Red cartridge on hand — he wasn’t using it, so he let me borrow it. (With the stipulation that, once I got trades working, I had to take in his raichu. It’s the one pokémon that he wants to still have available if he starts over.) In short, I had to engage in some behavior I had spoken of derisively before: solo trading.

Still, this was a fairly satisfying conclusion to the whole problem, because I got to play with a soldering iron. I’ve played games where I had to read the data files in order to figure out how to win. I’ve played games where I had to read the source code, or even reverse-engineer the executable — it wouldn’t be exaggerating much to say that this is how I learned how to program. But how often does the pursuit of completion descend to the hardware level like this? Actually, pretty frequently, if you count the games that you can’t even start playing until your system meets the right specs. But this is different somehow.