The Stack

One thing about the keyword-highlighting system: it makes it easy to pick the keywords out, and therefore easy to take them out of context. When I see a paragraph of descriptive text with a few blue nouns in it, it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m going to type in those nouns, so I find myself often doing so before I’ve read the text around them. Entering an abandoned cabin, the first thing I notice is the word “skeleton”. Clearly a significant thing to find! Typing it in, I get the response “The skeleton, mounted on the wall, makes a large diamond,” — what? — “and must have once belonged to some flat, manta ray creature…” Not at all what I had been imagining from the word “skeleton” alone. Only at this point do I look back at the room text and notice that it was described from the first as a manta ray skeleton. It’s just that the words “manta ray” weren’t blue, and didn’t stand out.

Well, I’ve explored most of the island where Chapter 2 takes place, and I’ve finally found some puzzles. Really unmistakable ones, too: a complex bit of non-operational machinery with multiple components here, a locked door with a bunch of enigmatically-labeled buttons there. Finding the combination for that door seems to require going out and observing wildlife in various parts of the island. These puzzles all feel particularly Myst-like to me. Perhaps it’s just because that’s the kind of puzzle you get when you design for no inventory — the game still hasn’t yet admitted that it has an inventory at all, although it may introduce the concept in a later chapter.

But the author does acknowledge the Myst series as a strong influence, and it shows, even if you ignore the puzzles. The world-hopping is strikingly similar, both games using a mechanic where links are established by precise artistic depictions of the destination world. (Ironically, the graphical game uses books for this purpose, while the textual game uses graphic arts.) Chapter 2 Island has an ecology as diverse as Riven‘s, with lush descriptions that create much the same effect as Myst‘s rich (for the time) graphics, making it clear that this is a world meant to be savored. (The examine-all-the-wildlife puzzle encourages this too, of course.) And the particular situation of the wayfarer and Rume in the beginning reminds me a lot of Atrus and Catherine, living in voluntary rustic isolation, crafting their own tools and achieving the kind of comfortable lifestyle that usually requires more than two people to support it. It’s a bourgeois fantasy of life outside the city, reminiscent of 18th-century nobles escaping the pressures of court life by playing at being carefree shepherds, without the privations experienced by real shepherds. But hey, a fantasy is a fantasy.

Myst, for all its success, is reviled by a lot of people, and its imitators moreso. This is because the worst aspects of Myst are also generally the easiest to imitate. But Blue Lacuna does a good job of picking out the the things that are actually appealing, the stuff that kept the fans coming back. Obviously it’s not imitating the user interface, except perhaps in a very abstract way.

But even as it’s getting more and more Myst-like, it’s also getting more text-adventure-like. In my last session, I found a compass. If you’re holding it and its cover is open, exits are listed with their compass directions. The textual descriptions are there too, alongside the directions, like “Sand stretches south towards the center of the beach, and you could also head back southwest down to where the waves are breaking”, but it’s the compass directions that are highlighted in green, not “beach” and “waves”. This is a big change to how the game plays, and it’s completely voluntary, and can be switched on and off at will — which means that the author went to the trouble of writing two different exit lists for every room on the island. It remains to be seen how this will apply to other worlds. Since compass-direction listings are dependent on an object in the gameworld that wasn’t crafted by the player character personally, it should, according to the rules, be left behind when I wayfare.

I first became aware of Blue Lacuna from its amusing promo, which consists of a several paragraphs of text introducing its premise and protagonist. The amusing part is that the text is spread over a series of public-content websites such as Myspace and Flickr and Youtube, each fragment ending with the URL of the next fragment. It tells the story of a “wayfarer”, someone with the rare ability to move between worlds, and the presentation was clearly chosen to reflect this. The game content doesn’t really rely on this introductory text, but I’ve seen games before that rely on external websites, and it always makes me uneasy, because it renders content which could otherwise be archived and preserved subject to the web’s transience and volatility. But then, I suppose that even this works with Blue Lacuna‘s themes, which have a lot to do with abandonment and loss. Our wayfarer can travel to new worlds, but doesn’t have the ability to go back. To fare way is to farewell, forever.

The author has gone to some lengths to make the game accessible to beginners. Travel by means of compass directions, that old bugaboo, is abandoned in favor of destination nouns. Important nouns in the output are highlighted (blue for objects, green for exits), and nouns are accepted as complete commands on their own, like in Ferrous Ring. In fact, we’re told in an early bit of interstitial tutorial that you can complete the game without ever typing a verb. Playing entirely by choosing highlighted words in the text you’re reading can make it feel more like a website than a game, even if the act of selection consists of typing rather than clicking. Still, you can use freeform IF commands if you want, and there are things you’ll only see if you do. There is in fact more adventure-game stuff under the hood than is at first apparent. I wasn’t even sure that there was an inventory until I tried typing “i”. The tutorial text never mentions it. Likewise, compass-direction movement really is still there, but if you want to use it, you’ll have to find exits by trial and error.

The game further accommodates both the old-school hardcore adventurer and the newcomer by offering a choice of “story mode” or “puzzle mode” at the beginning of chapter 2. I’ve chosen puzzle mode, but it’s not yet obvious to me what the effects of this choice are. Anyway, this isn’t the first momentous choice in the game. At the very beginning, you’re asked to select a gender for both the wayfarer and Rume, the soon-to-be-left-behind love interest (heteronormativity off!), but I’m guessing that this mostly just affects pronouns — I chose male for the PC and female for Rume (and will use pronouns that reflect this in these notes), but, having made that choice, Rume seems to me like the more traditionally masculine one in the relationship. But of course this is a matter of opinion. People managed to make cases in both directions for the obvious genders of the two leads in Jigsaw. No, the more interesting initial decision, when you don’t yet have any information about its significance, is that you have to choose “love” or “art”.

Love or art! Usually they’re portrayed as allies, but this is not the first work to suggest that they’re opposites, or at least rivals, both demanding the individual’s exclusive attention. What’s more, within this story, love is what makes you stay and art is what makes you leave: painting scenes of other worlds is the means by which you travel to them. As such, it’s clear from the start that art is going to win out in the short term, just to get the story going. There comes a point where you’re given a clear choice: heed the Call or refuse it? And if you refuse it, it’s just a matter of time before you heed it anyway.

But this matter of time is a matter of unexpectedly long time — within the game, long enough to bring a daughter into the world and raise her to young adulthood, and for the player, encompassing several screenfuls of text. I certainly wasn’t expecting this when I experimentally made what I considered to be the wrong choice. (After all, I want the story to advance.) The years with Rume pass by in a slightly-interactive stream of consciousness, which prompts the player periodically to type in a word to finish a sentence. Once I realized that it would accept any input at all, not just things that make sense, I started typing in increasingly inappropriate things, flippant and dark. This suited the story of a relationship’s inevitable decay so well that I can almost believe it was what the author intended. At any rate, even if the choice to stay ultimately had no mechanical effect (which I’m still not certain of), it produced enough variation in the text that it really makes it feel like a different story. Choices can actually be significant in this game. It reminds you of this whenever you type “score” (another standard adventure-game command not mentioned in the tutorial) — there’s no point system, but it gives you a report along the lines of “You’ve made it to chapter one (out of ten), exploring one region (out of twenty-two). And never forget that at first you chose art.”

Well, it’s that time of year again. The judging period of the 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is underway, with a lean 24 entries, well within the power of any interested person to play through before the November 15 judging deadline.

Me, I’ve decided to sit it out this year. I’m somewhat soured on the comp-judging experience for the moment, what with the lackluster and buggy entries of the last couple of years. I was planning at one point to submit an entry of my own, which would disqualify me from judging, but the year proved to be a busy one, and in the end I had to admit to myself that being disqualified from judging was in fact my main motivation for my planned entry. If that’s all I wanted, I could spare myself the effort and just not judge.

Plus, this seems to just be an unusually rich year for IF outside the comp — or at any rate, at least one of the editors of ifwiki.org seems to think so. The current featured article there is a list of this year’s significant non-comp releases. The only thing on this list I’ve gotten around to trying before now is the first chapter of Blue Lacuna, so my intention is to play and blog them in lieu of the comp games. If you want comp comments, I suggest you hop over to Emily Short’s blog; not only does she provide thoughtful and articulate commentary of her own, she’s keeping a list of other blogs with comp reviews.

I think I really have to declare TF2 to be off the stack by now, if only because I haven’t been posting about it. Completion was a difficult concept with this one from the beginning anyway. Also, I have an unofficial policy that work-related gaming doesn’t count, and arguably TF2 as I’ve been playing it fits that description. At one point, when discussing the day’s tasks with a manager, he explicitly included TF2 in the schedule. It isn’t mandatory, I objected. He replied that it kind of was: for the sake of morale, we have to take advantage of the lulls in an otherwise frenzied schedule. And, due to my machine’s illness, I’m still not playing it at home at all.

And anyway, I really have met my initial goal of playing every class for a substantial period of time. The one that I took to last was the Engineer, whose main means of attack consists of building an automated sentry gun and then sitting back and waiting. I had found it very difficult to do anything useful as an Engineer on the King of the Hill maps: sentry guns don’t last long when all the action is concentrated in one place. But we’ve been doing some Capture-the-Flag maps lately, and those are positively ideal for the Engineer. In CTF, the general pattern seems to be a raging battle somewhere in the middle of the map, with an occasional solitary player (usually a Scout) slipping through the cracks and penetrating the base where the Intelligence ¹In TF2 CTF mode, the “flag” is a briefcase full of important documents. is kept. So there’s a place where enemies will inevitably eventually show up, and when they do, they’ll most likely be alone.

I’ve managed to get First Milestone with only one class since my last post: the Spy. It happened quite unexpectedly, when there was only one other person on the server, which makes some of the Spy’s Achievements a great deal easier. The one that pushed me over was the one you get for killing the player you’re disguised as. Well, when there’s only one other player to be disguised as, that’s not hard. I have some misgivings about this — I’ve been adamant about getting my Achievements honestly over the course of normal play, and we were just messing around at the time, not actually playing the game per se. But “messing around” is playing, no?

Anyway, I’m mainly playing Scout lately, because that’s where I’m lagging behind in Achievements. There are a couple of Achievements that you basically just get for playing a Scout for a long period of time, but most of the Scout Achievements depend on playing well, and the Scout actually requires skill to play well. Its chief strength is being able to move fast and dodge fire, which doesn’t happen automatically. (This is the opposite of the Heavy, which basically can’t dodge anything but also has less need to dodge anything.) I’ll say one thing for it, though: after you’ve played as Scout for a while, all the other classes seem unbearably sluggish. In fact, pretty much all of the classes have specific virtues that the player can acclimate to, and then miss when switching to another class; I get the impression that a lot of people just play one class exclusively as a result.

Let’s talk about the Team Fortress 2 scoring system for a moment, if only because I had a couple of paragraphs typed up already. (I was intending another “Five Things” post.) TF2 has a scoring system. (In fact, in a sense, it has two. See below.) This was not obvious to me when I first started playing, because the score is irrelevant to winning and losing. You get to see the individual players ranked by score at the end of a match, and the players on the winning team tend to have more points than the players on the losing team, but that’s because the things that get you points tend to be the sort of things that help you win, not because there’s a direct cause/effect relationship. (I can imagine a game mode in which the winning team is simply the one that scores the most points total, but if such a mode exists, I’ve never seen it.) Obviously you get points for kills, but if that were it, it would be unfortunate for the Medic. You get half a point for assisting a kill, which usually means doing damage before the killing blow is struck. Medics get credit for kill assists just by healing the person actually doing the killing. That’s a pretty good bit of design: it gives the medics a way to get points that requires them to be involved in the battle like everyone else, rather than hanging out where it’s safe and waiting for people to come to them. Some other classes also get points for being played the way the designers want them to be played when it’s difficult to do so: Spies score extra for backstabs, Snipers for headshots. Getting a Revenge kill — that is, killing someone who’s killed you three or more times — is worth a point. Working directly towards your mission objectives is worth points: capturing a control point is worth two, defending one by killing an enemy in the process of capturing it is worth one, etc. It’s all rather complicated, which is why it’s fortunate that you never actually have to think about it.

In addition to the in-game score system, there’s a fairly popular server mod called HLstatsX that tracks your lifetime performance on the server where it’s installed. It was recently installed on the server we use in our office sessions, which, since I’m still having problems with my home box, is the only place I’ve been playing lately. You can see my stats here. It tracks many things, but the one thing it makes you aware of during the game (via in-game messages) is its own point system, which persists from session to session. HLstatsX points are usually awarded for the same things as TF2 points, but in different quantities. In particular, kills yield a number of points determined by the ratio of the the killer’s and victim’s point totals; killing someone who has more points than you gives you more points than killing someone who has fewer points. At the same time, the victim loses half as many points as the killer gained. It seems like the intent here is to make the points system into something like the ranking systems used in Chess and Go, but those systems are designed to make the ranking depend solely on the player’s skill, whereas in HLstatsX, it’s not. Because the victim loses only half the points gained, killing isn’t zero-sum; each kill increases the average score. As do the points from other sources. So the number of points you have is only partly a measure of your skill; mostly it’s a measure of how much time you’ve spent playing. (When someone captures a control point, their entire team gets two points each. So it’s possible to get points just by sitting in your base and waiting.) Thus we see the variable score for killing as mainly a way to let newer players catch up to everyone else faster.

Anyway, looking at my experience of the game so far, I find that in the heat of battle, when the mind is focused on pursuing a goal, it’s easy to forget to notice the game’s absurdity. Every once in a while we try a new map, and sometimes that’s enough to bring the absurd back to my attention — many of the maps are based around rustic or decrepit exteriors as a facade over secret bases, where you can see gleaming boardrooms and computer banks just out of reach (and of course the secret bases of the two enemies are usually separated by just a few dozen yards) — but sometimes it actually takes me a while for this to penetrate my consciousness, which is otherwise occupied with trying to figure out the lay of the land. But I suppose that it all affects the experience of the thing even if you’re not paying attention to it, as architecture always does. (Are there people with training in architecture working in level design? It seems like a relevant skill.) And besides, the developers have made it clear in commentary and interviews that they, too, put the gameplay first and the absurdity second — that, in fact, the absurdity was developed as a way of enhancing gameplay. The bases are unrealistically close together because that makes for a better game, and once they do that, they might as well play it for laughs rather than make excuses for it. The broad caricature in the character design was adopted to make it easier to recognize different classes from a distance. Rocket-jumping was inherited from Quake ²In a sense, even Doom had rocket-jumping. You couldn’t use it to jump upward, because you couldn’t aim downward, but there was at least one map where the only way to get across a pit was to fire a rocket point-blank into a wall, propelling yourself horizontally fast enough to clear it. , where it was an unintended consequence of the physics model, and didn’t really fit the fiction; in TF2, it comes off as not just unrealistic but downright cartoony, which makes it fit in perfectly. I was recently shown a Youtube video of a Demoman using explosions to launch himself long distances like a missile. There are similar videos for other games — Halo alone seems to have dozens of “Warthog Launch” videos, where players try to get a vehicle up on top of an unnavigable cliff by detonating a piles of grenades under it — but this is the first time it’s seemed like a legitimate part of the game, and a viable tactic.

A full workweek of lunchtime TF2 (and one evening session), and no post! I really have been remiss. To make up for five missed days, here’s five paragraphs on unrelated topics that summarize my week.

I’ve achieved First Milestone with the Heavy class. I had been hovering at 9 Achievements of the required 10 for a while; the one that finally put me over was for killing five enemies in a row without spinning down my minigun. See, the Heavy’s gun takes a moment to spin up before it starts firing — it’s a manifestation of the class’s slow-but-powerful theme. What’s not obvious at first is that you can keep it spinning without firing by holding down the right mouse button. While in this mode, you can start firing instantly, but at the cost of moving even more slowly than the Heavy does normally. The notable thing about this Achievement is that it’s essentially a tutorial: it draws the player’s attention to the possibility of not spinning down, and encourages one to give it a try. By the time you’ve got the Achievement, you’ve got a good handle on why, and when, keeping your gun spun up is a good idea. There are other Achievements like this, such as the Scout’s Achievement for executing 1000 double jumps, or the Spy’s Achievements for backstabbing an Engineer and sapping his buildings (in both orders), or the various ones for killing opponents with Taunt moves.

I’m getting the hang of playing as a Demoman. As with the Medic, it’s all about the secondary weapon — the stickybombs, which can be strewn about and then detonated on your signal. At work we mostly play King of the Hill maps, which makes a Demoman partcularly powerful: there’s just one important spot, and if it’s covered in your stickies, it’s very difficult for the enemy to take control of it. An enemy facing a bestickied hill basically has two options. First, they can send one guy on a suicide mission to make you detonate your bombs, then rush it with the rest of the team to capture it before you can set up them the bomb again. This involves more coordination than most ad-hoc teams are capable of. Alternately, they can just send someone to kill you before you can detonate your bombs. There are maps where there are battlements overlooking the control point that are hard to reach from the enemy’s side — ideal for Snipers, but also, I’m realizing, for Demomen, provided they can lob the stickies to where they’re needed. Even so, given the significance of the Demoman in keeping enemies off the point, and the general difficulty of killing people at close quarters with Demoman weapons, it seems like it would be a good idea for the Demoman’s teammates to station someone more melee-capable (a Pyro, say) on the route to the battlements to protect him. Either way, there’s an opportunity here for chess-like gambits involving multiple players, but ones that the gameplay (including the Achievement system) doesn’t explicitly encourage. Consequently, the opportunity is generally wasted.

I spent a little time playing the original Half-Life recently, for reasons I won’t go into, and I was struck anew by how different the feel of TF2 is. By and large, single-player FPS games live in the wake of Doom, which is to say, they’re horror games. (Even Portal, which is about as far from a typical FPS as you can get while still viewing things in first-person and using a gun, has a strong sense of nightmare.) The dominant mood in such games is the adrenaline rush. And that’s something that’s strangely missing from TF2. The cartoony style is a factor, but a relatively minor one, in my opinion. In a game without an exploration element, the sense of of anticipation is blunted, and with it any possibility of dread. Death is swift and frequent and often comes without warning, all of which also works against dread, but more importantly, death is inconsequential. I don’t mean that the only consequence is respawning back at your base — similar things could be said of conventional FPS games, where dying just means respawning at the last save point. I mean that things don’t stop happening just because you’re temporarily tagged out. If you started capturing a control point before you got killed, there’s a good chance that one of your teammates is still there finishing the job. You can even watch it happen while you wait to respawn. As a result, death doesn’t feel final, but like just one of those things that happens. That is, it doesn’t feel like death. Which probably contributes to the sense of exaggerated slapstick I described earlier.

My latest random acquisition in the game is the Sandman, a special baseball bat that the Scout can use. Its special virtue is that, unlike normal baseball bats, it can be used to hit baseballs. Baseballs that hit an opponent leave them temporarily stunned and very likely to get killed by whoever’s nearby. This is very annoying when it happens to you — as always, unexpectedly taking control away from a player creates frustration. But I have yet to actually hit anyone with a ball, as it’s a difficult skill that has to be mastered. Difficult to pull off, annoying to others wen you do — in other words, it’s kind of like playing a Spy. It strikes me that a lot of the special items have the effect of letting one class take on attributes of another. A Pyro with the Backburner becomes more lethal when attacking from behind, like the Spy. A Spy with the Ambassador can do headshots to kill instantly from a distance, like the Sniper. A Sniper with the Hunstman can be effective in melee, like most other classes.

I complained a while ago about my inability to find documentation for this game. Well, I really should have looked for a wiki earlier than I did. Blame it on my retrogaming habits — I’m not used to playing games where the wiki is an essential feature, rather than an afterthought. (Although the ancient Spoiler Files for Nethack come close.) You can call it laziness on the part of the developers, but when you come down to it, no one documents stuff as thoroughly as fans. So, given that people were probably going to make a wiki anyway, why bother with any other docs? It would have been nice if either Steam or tf2.com linked to it, but I can understand why a company, with legal obligations, would want to avoid linking to something so unaccountable. The wiki led me to the tf2.com Movies page, which I really could have noticed before, considering that there’s a link to it right on top of tf2.com, but it’s a link that, paradoxically, is too prominent to be noticeable: it’s part of the page’s banner image, which is something I generally ignore. At any rate, the Movies page is particularly significant, because that’s the one place where you can actually find a summary of the game’s premise. It shows something about the game that I’ve playing it for so long without missing that.

Playing TF2 at home continues to pose problems. I mentioned before how playing the Developer Commentary caused my machine to shut off. Sometimes it does this during a real game as well. Other times it doesn’t. There is one new development: sometimes, instead of shutting the machine off, it just gets stuck for a while, looping a second or so of sound and puting some garbage pixels on the screen before popping up a system dialog stating that the graphics hardware stopped responding and it’s had to reset them. After this, I can resume the game as if nothing happened except the loss of some valuable time during which I naturally got killed.

What’s more, I’ve now seen this happen outside of TF2. It also happened in Darwinia — a game I finished some years ago, but I gave it another look simply because it was in that Steam Indie Pack. Anyway, it’s a pretty clear confirmation that the problem isn’t just in TF2. It really seems like a malfunction of the graphics card, and I turned all my graphics settings down to the minimum during today’s session to see if that would help. It seemed to, and I had a nice crashless session (during which I managed to get one more Achievement as a Heavy), but I still got a crash when I tried Developer Commentary mode.

Well, the one real difference in Developer Commenty is the voiceovers. And in fact I had voice chat turned off in my online session — it seems to get turned back on automatically sometimes, and I specifically turned it off while I had the Options menu open to change the graphics settings. So my working hypothesis at this point is that the real cause has to do with sound, and that the reported graphics problems are just a symptom. We’ll see how that works out.

More failure to fulfill the Oath here: I’ve got three days worth of lunchtime TF2 (plus a certain amount of evening play) to report on here, and I’m late even for the third. The only really notable thing that happened, aside from the halos belatedly showing up on the server at work, is that I reached the first Achievement milestone for the Pyro class.

The Pyro is probably the easiest classes to play. The basic Pyro weapon is a flamethrower, which doesn’t have much range, but it covers a largish area and fires continually without reloading. It’s like the opposite of a Sniper: if you can get close enough to the enemy, you’ll probably win. But the main reason that I’ve been playing Pyro so much is that it’s the one class that’s really useful against Spies. Spies have this irritating tendency to turn invisible just when you start firing at them, but no one’s invisible while they’re on fire. So whenever I’m having trouble with Spies, I switch to Pyro for a while.

The Pyro is presented as the least human character, his ¹I use the male pronoun here, but there is some debate about the Pyro’s actual gender. face concealed by protective rubber gear, his past and place of origin officially unknown. All the other classes have specific bios — for example, the Scout is “The youngest of eight boys from the south side of Boston”. Does this mean that if there are several Scouts in a match, each and every one of them is the youngest of eight boys from the south side of Boston? Best not think about it — this multiple instantiation of individuals seems to be just something that games take for granted these days. (See the species descriptions in Plants vs Zombies.) At any rate, such concerns don’t apply to the pastless Pyro. He’s also presented as the madman of the team, what with the occasional muffled maniacal laughter from under that mask. This is a little unfair, because when you come right down to it, all of the characters in the game are completely insane by real-life standards. This is something that really struck me on watching a Scout, the game’s designated weakling, charge out of nowhere and beat someone to death with a baseball bat.

I said that I’d consider Team Fortress 2 to be off the Stack when I had spent a significant amount of time playing every class. At this point, I’m tentatively declaring a less vague criterion: getting the first Achievement milestone with every class.

These milestones are Achievements that are awarded for getting a certain number of class-specific Achievements — the key numbers are 10, 16, and 22 for most classes, except the Sniper and Spy, which get them at 5, 11, and 17. At any rate, there always seem to be three milestones. Looking at the Achievements, it strikes me that they’re also easily divisible into three categories. First, there are the ones that are likely to happen eventually regardless of whether you’re specifically trying to make them happen or not — for example, the Pryo achievement which simply requires you to kill 3 enemies in a row in the same area, or the Scout achievement for running 25 kilometers. Secondly, there are the ones that are unlikely to happen naturally, but which you can deliberately pursue, such as the Sniper achievement for getting 5 kills with the Sniper Rifle without using the scope, or the Medic achievement for cooperating with two other Medics to deploy three simultaneous Übercharges. Thirdly, there are ones based on unlikely occurrences that are completely beyond your control (unless perhaps you have someone on the opposing team cooperating with you), such as the Medic achievement for deploying an Übercharge on someone less than a second before they’re hit by a critical explosive. To a certain frame of mind, only the second sort are really deserving of the name “Achievement”, but I’m willing to accept it as a term of art.

It’s debatable which of these categories a particular Achievement belongs in, but looking at the list, it’s pretty clear that the majority of them are in the first category — certainly more than enough to clear the first milestone. So really, if I keep on this daily lunchtime regimen, it’s only a matter of time before I meet my goal. Except for one thing: Two Three classes, the Demoman and Engineer [EDIT: Also the Soldier], don’t have mission packs yet! By complete coincidence, these are also my two least-played classes. I expect I’ll give them a larger try when their class-specific content is released.

After some more Single-mode practice and the purchase of another life, I have finally reached the proper ending of Everyday Shooter — and a proper ending it is, with a credits montage and everything. Mind you, since the game was developed by one person, it’s short on credits and long on montage. But it serves its purpose, which is to celebrate the player’s victory and enhance the illusion of accomplishment, one of my bigger motivations for playing games in the first place.

I also find the ending satisfying because of the way it breaks the midgame’s biggest drawbacks. It may seem strange to say this about a somewhat-old-school 2D shooter, but Everyday Shooter plays a lot like a CRPG. It’s the accumulative aspect. Instead of killing monsters to get XP that raises your level, you’re collecting points to buy additional starting lives, but the end result is the same: repetitive grinding makes it easier to survive the difficult bits. The problem with this isn’t just the tedium of grinding (if carried to excess), but also that it makes the difficult bits less interesting. But, as I described in my last post, the final boss in Everyday Shooter isn’t something that you can simply smother in extra lives.

Also notable is the delay between defeating the end of the final boss encounter and the end of the level. Regardless of whether you’ve defeated it or not, the song has to finish playing. The post-boss segment isn’t at all difficult, but if you won, it’s an excellent opportunity to get loads more points. (I had over 7000 by the end.) So there’s a cushion between the victory and the congratulations, giving the player time to process the fact that the long struggle is over, even as the game remains meaningfully interactive. This is an interesting effect, and one I haven’t seen in many other games.