The Stack

Playing The Humans requires keeping the CD-ROM in the drive. Which, okay, is normal for CD-based games. It just stands out for me at this moment because it’s the first game I’ve played this year that has such a requirement.

Although I played the prior games from CD-ROM packages, these were after-the-fact compilations of games originally released on floppy disks. For the earlier ones, there was even a reasonable expectation that they would be played from floppies — in 1986, hard drives were optional. Wizardry and Might and Magic were entirely built around the floppy paradigm, prompting the player to insert the character disk and whatnot; their anthologizers had to rework them somewhat to make them playable from hard drives.

Now, if I’m not mistaken, The Humans was released on both floppies and CD-ROM. Certainly there’s nothing on the CD that couldn’t have been put on floppies — no voice acting or FMV or other enhancements. (Remember “CD-ROM Enhanced”?) And since its installer copies the game files fully to the hard drive (which was no longer optional by 1992), there’s no technical reason why it needs the CD in the drive. It’s purely a matter of copy protection. And it’s copy protection that basically doesn’t work any more. The emulator that I’m using to play the game at all is quite willing to mount an ISO image and treat it as a CD-ROM, and even if it weren’t, copying a CD is child’s play. But back then? What, you have a CD burner in your house? What are you, Bertelsmann Music Group or something?

Copy protection has sort of gone in waves. Early games were effectively “key disk” games simply because they tended to be self-booting floppies that didn’t use a conventional filesystem, but this more or less ended with the rise of hard drives and subsequent player demands that games be playable from them. So instead you got “key word” systems, as we saw in the Gold Box games with their code wheels, but this is an inconvenience for the player, and relatively easy to hack out. (In any key word system, there’s got to be a point in the code where it compares your input to what it’s expecting and decides whether to bail or not. Find and remove that conditional jump and you’re golden.) Then came the CD-ROM, and key disk was suddenly practical again. But now, games tend to come without any disk at all. In the age of digital distribution, copy protection — or DRM, as the kids call it these days — becomes networked as well. I imagine the pendulum will swing back to key disk at some point, but it’s far too early to say how.

This game is going to take longer than I first thought. I often breeze through puzzle games, and I breezed through the first 20 or so levels here, but I’ve encountered a few levels that dished out extended stuck. And not the sort of stuck where you stare at the board uncomprehendingly, with no idea of how the configuration before you might suggest enough meaning to form a plan, but the sort where achieving your goals seems mathematically impossible. The solution to this sort of stuck always comes down to some unknown or underappreciated option, some edge case that you didn’t realize was both possible and useful. So let’s take a look at what this game lets us do.

All humans can move left or right, climb ladders, and form stacks that function as human ladders. Any additional capabilities come from the tools you find lying around. There are four kinds of tool: torches, spears, ropes, and wheels. These are not permanent fixtures to the human who finds them, but can be dropped for someone else to pick up.

Torches are mainly used as keys: there are occasional burnable bushes that are impassible until torched. This provides the level designer an easy way to force the player to visit point A before point B: put a bush at point B and a torch at point A. You can also wave a torch to hold off a wandering theropod, but this is a distinctly secondary use.

Spears can kill things, including your own guys if you’re not careful, and on some levels killing a dinosaur is in fact the goal. But you don’t get the spear back after using it this way, so it’s usually a waste of a spear. The real purpose of a spear is that it lets you jump across gaps by pole-vaulting — humans cannot jump unaided. One of the first tricks you learn in this game is using a single spear to get multiple humans across a gap by having each one use it to cross, then throw it back for the next guy. It should be noted that, unlike pole-vaulting in real life, jumping in this way does not give you any additional altitude. You can’t jump from a lower platform to a higher one.

Ropes are essentially portable ladders: standing by the edge of a platform, you can lower a rope to let those below come up to where the rope-bearer is, or conversely to let humans down farther than they can safely fall. Climbing to higher ground where there isn’t a ladder generally means making a climbable stack of humans, who get left behind in the process, because no one can climb himself. But if you have a rope, no one needs to be left behind. Sometimes the trick to a level is realizing that one platform is positioned directly below another, and is therefore rope-accessible — something that isn’t necessarily obvious, because you see only a fraction of the playfield at a time, and there’s no small-scale map to give you an overview. Also, it took me some time to realize that a human climbing a rope is capable of getting off onto a platform next to it. This is reasonable, because ladders follow the same mechanic, but ladders are wide enough to actually touch the adjacent accessible ledges.

Ropes, spears, and torches can all be thrown or dropped off ledges to pass them around in ways that the humans cannot directly follow, including getting them onto a slightly higher platform, although you really can’t throw very high. The throwing mechanic is a little peculiar. First you press a button to select the “throw” action, then you press it again to start up an oscillating progress bar that determines the strength of the throw, like in various golf games, or the bonus-round minigames in the original Mortal Kombat. Jumping with a spear uses the same mechanic. I really don’t care for this system. Watching the bar means that your attention is on a UI element, not on the character it governs. We’ve had better jumping mechanics since Super Mario Brothers, but I suppose they generally rely on using the height of the jump as visual feedback, and, as mentioned, jumps in this game don’t have height.

Unless, that is, they’re done using the wheel. Wheels are the rarest of tools, and the only one you don’t pick up: you ride them, like in B. C. Wheels let you go faster, but this isn’t really an advantage — it just means it’s harder to avoid falling off of things, which is particularly troublesome because wheels can’t be carried back up ladders. They can, however, jump. Wheel jumps are most easily executed when there’s a downslope followed by a ramp, but this is not absolutely necessary. In fact, one level seems to rely on the fact that, even from a standing start, a wheel can be used to jump from a lower platform to a slightly higher one. Which is weird, because wheels are heavy — heavy enough to trigger pressure plates on their own. As such, there are sometimes puzzles developed around getting a wheel to a pressure plate, and understanding how wheels move can be key. Wheels have momentum. Wheels can be pushed without riding them, if you actually want to drop them farther than you can survive. Actually, if you time it right, you can drop farther than you can survive and still survive: all you have to do is dismount before the wheel hits the ground. I haven’t seen any puzzles that rely on this, though, and I hope I never do.

Now, most humans are identical, but there’s one special sort: the witch doctor. Witch doctors can’t use tools, although they can climb ropes, participate in stacks, and even push wheels (as proved key to one puzzle). Instead of using tools, they provide them. And they do it through human sacrifice. After selecting a victim and a type of tool, the screen goes into silhouette (on a pretty color-gradient background) and a human is transformed into a tool in a swirl of pixels, permanently reducing the human population of the level (unlike normal deaths, which yield replacements). This is a big part of why I think of this game as mean-spirited: I’ve always found the whole idea of transforming a human into an inanimate object distressing — moreso than merely killing, which at least leaves them recognizably human. To turn a person into a thing is to deny their humanity, or to deny that humanity was ever worth anything, to assert that they’re more useful as a rope or a torch. And, in the context of this game, that’s often true.

There should be a name for works that imitate another work but completely miss the point, taking the superficial details while leaving out the basis of the original’s appeal. As Sleepwalker is to Sandman, as Ai Yori Aoshi is to Love Hina, as most bad fantasy novels are to Lord of the Rings, so The Humans is to Lemmings.

To someone looking at The Humans for the first time today, it may not be clear that it’s a Lemmings imitation. It was very clear in 1992. Lemmings was in the ascendant, and would be on the mind of anyone making (or purchasing) a level-based puzzle game with a 2D side view. Add to that the “save the tribe” aspect, the control over multiple identical and undifferentiated beings, the puzzles based around sacrificing some of your guys to save the rest, the music — ye gods, the music. Lemmings had this gloriously cheesy pop music that would be embarrassing in any other context, but seemed like just part of the fun there. The Humans does something similar, but with more of a cartoon caveman style, which is to say, a boogie beat and an emphasis on simple percussion such as hand drums and xylophones (or synthesized approximations thereof). It’s odd that this style says “cartoon caveman” so strongly, especially since our most culturally prominent caveman cartoon, The Flintstones, doesn’t use it at all, but there it is.

It also plays a lot like Lemmings overall, and not just in good ways. Most of the time, your attention is on the problem of getting multiple beings from point A to point B. Doing this usually involves multiple stages, where each stage is an opportunity to screw up. When you do so, you have no choice but to start over from the beginning: there are no save points within levels. So on the tougher levels, you wind up repeating the earlier stages a lot — a common pattern in action games, but not so much in puzzle games, where the pleasure is in figuring things out. But it serves to pad out the time required to play it to completion. Even worse, both games feature time limits on levels. While this can be part of the puzzle, challenging you to figure out how to complete your objectives as efficiently as possible, mostly it’s just a way to make sure that you don’t complete a level successfully on your first try, even if you don’t do anything wrong.

One of the more overlooked innovations of Lemmings is that it was one of the first games to figure out how to take advantage of the mouse in a realtime context. There had been games that used on-screen buttons to awkwardly give the player’s avatar orders at one remove, and there had been games that used the mouse to control the player’s avatar directly as a kind of joystick substitute, but the makers of Lemmings were clever enough to realize that the very concept of “player’s avatar” was an unnecessary assumption, a by-product of joystick-centric gameplay that a mouse-based game could do without. Instead, it took an approach similar to what would later become the RTS genre. At no point in Lemmings did the player assume direct control over a lemming’s actions; you could switch them from one mode of activity to another, but they were fundamentally autonomous beings that would march ahead without instruction. The result was an active world, one where things were always happening, sometimes more things than the player could easily pay adequate attention to.

And this is the part that The Humans gets wrong. It’s still plugged into the joystick paradigm, giving you direct control of one human at a time while everyone else just stands there and waits. Actually, that’s not quite true: when you pick up a torch or a spear, you can switch to a mode where you stand there waving it to fend off enemies, and remain in this mode when you switch control to someone else. This is the most Lemmings-like of the actions you can perform, and has obvious precedent in the “Blocker” role from that game. It’s also the least-often-useful thing you can do with a spear or a torch. It’s understandable why they did it this way: they were aiming at console ports, something that Lemmings always did awkwardly, and heck, even on PCs, not everyone had a mouse back then. But the end result is the opposite of Lemmings‘ active world. It’s a passive world, one that’s reluctant to even shoot at you.

And finally, we get to something that isn’t a RPG: The Humans, a 1992 cavemen-and-dinosaurs-themed puzzle-platformer. Although it isn’t the oldest game on the Stack, it’s probably the game that’s been on the Stack the longest — which came as a surprise to me when I compiled the list; for years, I thought that honor went to Bloodnet (a 1994 cyberpunk/vampire adventure game with some RPG elements). I suppose Bloodnet weighed more heavily on my sense of backlog guilt, because I abandoned it so near the beginning: for a time, when the Stack was much smaller, it was the one game that I felt like I hadn’t even given a serious try. (Today, I have over a hundred marked as not even tried at all.) Whereas I was fairly advanced in The Humans when I shelved it, putting it into extended I’ll-get-back-to-this-soon limbo.

I abandoned the game the first time around due to frustration over its pixel-precise demands. And yes, the game does make the gaps I have to jump uncomfortably wide sometimes, so that my first attempt falls short, and my second attempt falls down before jumping as a result of trying not to fall short. But in truth, it wasn’t just the game’s demands that caused my frustration, but my own demands on top of them. In those days, I was not just a completist, but a perfectionist. The game provides you with a limited number of lives — okay, it’s not quite that simple. The game puts multiple cavemen on each level, and lets you switch control between them Lost Vikings-style. If one of them dies, he ¹I use the masculine pronoun because there don’t seem to be any females, which makes me fear for the future of the tribe. is immediately replaced by a spare, but you can run out of spares. The number of cavemen you have available persists from level to level, and only increases if you rescue a captive on the occasional level where that’s an option. So, to my younger self, part of the challenge here was to make my tribe as large as possible — that is, to do all the rescues and never let anyone die unless a puzzle demands it. (Sometimes the only way to sneak one caveman past a hungry dinosaur is to take advantage of the delay while it eats another caveman. This is not a very good-hearted game.) Note that this doesn’t really affect your ability to finish the game: you can jump in with a full set of lives at the beginning of any level. There’s a scoring system that would be affected by this, but I didn’t care about that even in my perfectionist days. No, hoarding all those lives was just a self-imposed challenge that I’m willing to forgo today.

I recall attempting the game again some years later and finding that it disagreed with my newer sound hardware. The sounds here aren’t anything special, really — just a bunch of looped tunes that play in the background — but I deemed it to be an essential part of the experience anyway (for reasons I may elaborate in my next post), and reshelved it again. DOSBox takes care of that, of course. But for some reason, DOSBox crashes the installer. I seriously thought for a while that I wasn’t going to be able to play this game: it refuses to run until it has a config file telling it about your sound and video hardware, and the only way to generate that is with the installer, which brought down DOSBox in impressive manner, with ill-formatted double-wide text and a completely unresponsive prompt. Fortunately, I was able to run the installer natively, even though the game itself balks at this treatment.

It sometimes happens that readers of this blog see me point out something interesting-sounding or overlooked about a game, and decide to play it for themselves. If anything in my writing has tempted you to play Heimdall, let me be clear that this is a seriously mediocre game. The lack of clear separation between quest-important inventory and ordinary RPG-level objects is just about the only interesting thing about it, the player’s attention is too often focused on coping with the user interface rather than on the game content, and, as foreshadowed by the character generation system, the game’s four main modes (sailing, dungeon exploration, combat, inventory) seem to all have been designed separately, without much consideration towards making a unified whole in either design or functionality.

Let’s talk about the inventory interface a bit, because that’s the one mode that I haven’t described in detail. Actually, the game calls it the “options” interface, and it does indeed contain the save/load buttons, but personally, I think of an “options” interface as something external to gameplay, which this definitely is not. So I’ve gotten used to thinking of it as the inventory interface, because that’s what you use it for most of the time. I’ve spent a substantial fraction of my playtime just shuffling loot around among my characters’ limited inventory slots. Most of the scrolls I pick up, I discard after Heimdall identifies them, but before he can do that, he has to have them in his personal inventory, which often requires freeing up an inventory slot taken up by something else he just picked up. Possibly because he’s the one doing the fighting, Heimdall is always the first to pick things up, which means his is the first inventory to get clogged. Money stacks, as do keys (with a separate stack for each key type), so it’s efficient to give each stacking thing to a single person. I decided early on that I’d just keep them all in Heimdall’s inventory, so that they’d automatically stack when he picked them up and minimize the amount of shuffling needed. But the number of distinct key types grows over the course of the game, to the point where this approach may be backfiring: Heimdall doesn’t have many inventory slots left precisely because he’s loaded with keys.

One big problem the inventory interface has is a lack of feedback. There are no rollover effects of any kind to let you know what’s clickable — no highlighting, no changing text field, not even a change in the shape of the cursor. Perhaps this concept only gained traction with the advent of the web. Since web pages freely mix clickable text links with unclickable text, they have to provide as much feedback as they can, and indeed have provided all three of the mechanisms I just mentioned since day one. And yet, there still exist people who don’t understand hyperlinks, and who never click on a link that doesn’t explicitly say “Click here”. Such a person would be utterly lost in Heimdall. It takes some flailing at the beginning to figure out that the action buttons that require objects (such as “Use”) require the object to already be selected before they’ll do anything, especially since some of them still don’t do anything if applied to the wrong sort of object. It also takes a while to get used to the fact that “Give” is only used to give items to NPCs (an action I’ve only had to perform explicitly once in the entire game so far; usually they ask for what they want and you agree via a confirmation dialog), while swapping items within your party is done with “Distribute”.

The worst part is that the parts of the interface that look the most clickable — the word “Options” in the top left and the word “Items” attached to each character — aren’t. They’re on beveled plates that look like buttons, but they’re just title text. This may be a matter of modern expectations coloring things, though. I don’t know when beveling of UI elements was invented, but it certainly didn’t become a prominent part of the user experience until Windows 95.

Ultimately, all my complaints come down to the same thing: this is a game that expects you to read the manual in order to learn how to interact with it. This was a much more common assumption in the old days. I remember that time, and it wasn’t a good assumption then either. People have always treated the manual as a device of last resort. It just took the games industry a while to realize this, and to understand that the solution was to accommodate players, not to retrain them.

After another lengthy flight, I’ve spent enough time waiting around to be well into the second of Heimdall‘s three chapters. I think I’ve pretty much cracked this game. As is often the case, the initial challenge is simply learning to think the way that the authors want you to think, figuring out what’s expected of you. Although the moment-to-moment details of this game are RPG-like, the larger goals more resemble a rather simple adventure game. Or, to put it another way, it’s a simple adventure game stretched out with lots of RPG-style padding. But the combination makes things somewhat more difficult than either would be alone.

And by that, I mean that there are items with non-obvious uses. Every once in a while, the game throws a quest item at you that you’ll need later in some special circumstance — but it’s not always obvious when this happens. Scrolls generally contain combat spells, but the more unclearly-titled spells have effects on the map level, like revealing secret doors. If I find a scroll of Revelation, I know from earlier experience that this is a part of a puzzle: somewhere, probably nearby, is something important and invisible. If you find, say, a ring, it’s less clear: it has no obvious use in combat (the engine doesn’t even provide a way to equip jewelry), but it might be something than an NPC somewhere wants, or it might just be a treasure that you can sell for food money. The wisest course is to hand it off to someone back on the boat and wait for more information. And that seems to be the key to the game. Don’t use stuff up if you don’t know what it’s for.

Mind you, the game can be forgiving even so. At one point, I found a scroll with an offensive spell said to be deadly against giants. I stashed it on the boat, thinking I’d pull it out when I started encountering giants regularly. It turns out that there is one giant, a singular boss monster, which I encountered while the scroll was still in storage. I beat it anyway. Heimdall’s stats are maxed out by now, so special encounters of this sort aren’t the problems they once were.

PAX is full of games, but it’s even more full of people. The show was simply oversold. I haven’t even really tried to get into any panels or events other than the IF-related ones, but even those, contrary to expectation, have had queues too long to fit in the room. Are there really that many IF fans at PAX? Not really. At one of the panels, someone asked the audience to raise their hands if they had played a text game in the last year, and only about half of them raised their hands. Even that was more than I was expecting after hearing people talking in line. Some of them had no idea what they were in line for, and just wanted to get into anything. This was a good half hour before the doors were opened.

After one such experience, I made sure to bring some entertainment on subsequent queues. This isn’t at all unusual, of course. A lot of people in the queues were playing on various handheld devices (mostly various forms of Nintendo DS). But I’m still trying to get get through Heimdall, which means using a relatively bulky laptop. If I can sit down while playing, I can of course put it on my lap, where it belongs. But the people in charge liked to keep shifting the queue around while we were waiting, to use space more efficiently. Standing up and holding the laptop in one hand, one has only one hand free for gameplay. But you know something? For a primarily mouse-based game like Heimdall, that’s enough. If I weren’t playing Heimdall, I probably would have been trying to play IF, that being more appropriate to my immediate context, and to play that standing up, you’d really want a harness of the sort seen in The Typing of the Dead.

Here I am at PAX East, surrounded by games both new and old, PC and console and tabletop. And yet, by my self-imposed rules, I have to focus my attention on Heimdall for long enough to write another blog post, because I played it a bit while waiting in the airport on the way here. It’s one of those moments that makes me ask myself why I’m doing all this. I suppose the traditional “because it’s there” will have to do.

The overall goal in Heimdall is to recover three weapons weapons of the gods, stolen and hidden by Loki: Thor’s hammer, Odin’s sword, and Frey’s spear. (The spear is something of a surprise to me, but a quick google turns it up in a few other games, if nowhere else.) The manual also mentions a three-tiered model of the world, with the human world of Midgard sandwiched between Asgard, abode of the gods, and an underworld whose name I don’t recall. (I don’t think the manual used the word “Niflheim”, but Norse mythology seems to have multiple underworlds.) So just from the point of view of symmetry, it seems likely that each weapon is hidden on one of the three worlds.

So far, however, I haven’t left Midgard. I think I know where the weapon on this world is, because there’s really only one island left that I haven’t explored thoroughly, and it’s the island that’s reachable last. The ordering of the islands is partial — there cases where you can definitely say “this island comes before that one” and other cases where you can’t. It’s definitely worthwhile to try to clear the islands in the order they become available, though. This was a mistake I made early on: on the first island I visited, a man asked for a sprig of hemlock, and I wandered far and wide looking for such a thing. It turned out to be found on the next island over, which I could have visited first. I just hadn’t explored it fully.

A lot of the items that I had found no use for before turn out to be quest tokens for the final island. Those scrolls bearing “runes of power”? If you’ve collected a full set, it lets you skip a fight. Whether it’s a fight worth skipping, I’m not sure. One of the islands exists primarily to provide you with a scroll that instantly kills giant serpents of the sort that guards the waters around the final island, but I managed to kill that serpent with simple melee before I found the scroll. It all really comes down to how much food and healing magic you carry to the final island with you. This stuff has been absurdly abundant throughout the game up to this point, and cheap to buy in stores, but it seems to dry up immediately once you’re on the other side of that giant serpent corpse. So you really want to carry as much as you can. But then, each of those power-rune scrolls takes up an inventory slot each. I’m loath to give up a collection subquest, but surely I’d be better off devoting those slots to food?

One of the five basic character stats in Heimdall is “Runelore”. This more or less means magic ability, which is to say, the ability to cast spells from scrolls. But it also means the ability to simply read runes. When you find a scroll, it’s described simply as “Scroll” in your inventory until you have a character examine it, and that character’s Runelore ability determines whether they can read it, identifying the scroll and changing its name in your inventory, or whether you just get shown a string of pixelly, low-res runes.

However, even the rune string can ultimately be used to identify the scroll, because the strings are consistent within scroll types, just like the randomized nonsense names in Nethack. Even better: a little observation reveals that the runes are just a substitution cipher. If you show a bunch of scrolls to a low-runelore character before identifying them, you can recover the alphabet pretty efficiently. Even just looking at the ciphertext and treating it like a cryptogram yields good results in my experience.

There are, however, runes that are immune to this sort of analysis. I’ve found scrolls that show a single “rune of power” and have no idea what to do with them. Attempting to cast them as spells like the other scrolls does nothing — perhaps they’re quest tokens? Some charms, similarly bearing a single rune each, are even more inscrutable, because I don’t even know what verb to apply to them. (The inventory interface somewhat unnecessarily provides distinct buttons for “Use”, “Use spell”, “Eat/Drink”, “Give”, and various other actions, even though I have yet to find an item that can be used in more than one way. In most cases, picking the wrong verb provides no feedback at all, not even an error dialog.) Perhaps charms are active just by being in your inventory. But if so, I haven’t figured out what their effects are.

And in some cases, at least, it really is a matter of figuring things out through careful observation. The one sort of single-rune item I’ve got down is the potions. I really underestimated those at first, thinking they would be like the potions familiar from other RPGs, providing replenishment or temporary buffs. But no, potions in this game grant permanent stat increases. Thus, potions are major finds, and rare. Sometimes a single potion is the ultimate reward for making it all the way through a dungeon.

The rarity of potions means that I can’t give them to all of my characters. But that’s okay, because there’s one guy who clearly deserves them the most: Heimdall himself, the god-hero, the game’s central character. Most characters have some kind of focus to their abilities, but Heimdall is the all-rounder, and not one of those almost-as-good-as-the-specialists sorts, but the Robin-Hood-like figure who’s better at everything than all of his underlings. As such, it seems a waste to boost anyone else’s stats. If I give Heimdall a potion that raises his Runelore stat, it improves my party’s ability to cast spells; if I give it to my wizard, the only result is that he can cast spells almost as well as Heimdall. And yeah, Heimdall’s stats depend on your performance in the three minigames back at the beginning, so it’s possible to have a Heimdall who isn’t as powerful as this. But remember, those minigames also govern which other characters are available to you, so it seems likely that the designers have it set up so that you never get characters better than Heimdall in any respect. So I have all these highly skilled specialists on my boat, but unless there’s a bit that actually requires a warrior or a druid or whatever, all I ever do with them is make them carry Heimdall’s stuff. I can only hope that they get invited to Valhalla at the end, even though they haven’t proven their valor on the field of battle, because they really deserve something nice for putting up with all this.

I haven’t mentioned this here yet: I will be attending PAX East this weekend. I will probably be spending a lot of my time at the IF Hospitality Suite. Any reader of this blog who is willing to trade pokémon is welcome to find me there.