The Stack

Robotron X is not a greatly redesigned adaptation, like Frogger (1997) or Combat (2001). It plays basically like the coin-op arcade game: you run around frantically on a rectangular playfield, shooting in eight directions, while robotrons of various sorts chase you. Your goal on each board is to clear it of all enemies other than the indestructible Hulk robotrons. Various members of the Last Human Family mosey around, oblivious to danger, and you can eat them for points.

The most obvious differences from the original are cosmetic ones: everything’s modeled in 3D, there’s a pulse-pounding techno soundtrack (in CD-audio format!), there’s a fourth Last Human Family member (an old man, presumably Mikey’s grandpa), and various of the robotrons look very different from their 2D counterparts. Hulks were, in the original game, rectangular slabs with legs and a tiny head; here, they’re less exaggerated and more humanoid, which kind of ruins them if you ask me. I guess the developers thought the original design was too silly, but that’s what made it awesome. Spheroids and Quarks, the carriers that emit Enforcers and Tanks respectively, always seemed sort of wispy and insubstantial in the original, like they were made of energy or just warped space rather than physical matter. Here, they’re definitely physical. Spheroids look like flying saucers, and Quarks are just cubes with a texture pasted on. Here, though, I’m more inclined to blame the graphics engine than the developers’ design sense. Everything’s made of textured polygons. You can only get so wispy with that stuff. A proper Spheroid or Quark would be made of particle effects or something. Similarly, the original appearance of the sinister Progs was kind of intrinsically pixel-based, and so Robotron X just makes up something completely new for them, a sort of glowing stick figure.

As for changes to gameplay, I’ve already mentioned that there are powerups and a finite set of levels with victory at the end. The powerups appear at random, and they’re pretty basic: shields, three-way fire, etc. You can get extra lives from powerups, which strikes me as a pretty significant change. In the original game, the only way to get extra lives was from scoring points, and the biggest source of points was the Last Human Family. As a result, going after the humans was generally your top priority. But when there are extra-life powerups, they take priority over that.

The original game had a pretty small roster of enemies: Grunts, Hulks, Brains that create Progs, Spheroids that create Enforcers, Quarks that produce Tanks. The manual for Robotron X tells me that there’s one completely new enemy, the Byte robotron, but I haven’t seen it yet. How does it create 200 levels of variety and increasing difficulty, then? By giving you increasingly powerful variations of the basic ones. Every one of the original robotrons comes in four varieties, with later versions being faster or taking more hits to kill or having special abilities. For example, level 2 Enforcers can lay mines. Level 2 Grunts have jetpacks, which seems wrong to me: according to the attract screen of the original game, “GRUNT” stands for “Ground Roving Unit Network Terminator”, and any unit with a jetpack is not ground roving. Level 2 Hulks are red, which, coupled with their more-humanoid design, makes them way too easy to mistake for Grunts. It’s an unending problem for game design: there just aren’t enough easily-distinguishable colors. Also, it’s a little weird how the system is based on the idea that the original robotrons are basic elementary types. I mean, really the original game already had a harder variant of the Enforcer. It was called the Tank. But X has to pretend that Enforcer and Tank are two completely different species.

But if you ask me, the most significant change is this: The robotrons don’t all appear at once. They come in waves, more teleporting in periodically as you clear the level. It’s not clear to me if waves are timed or of they’re triggered by progress, but either way, the effect is to keep you on your toes. You can no longer rely on the Grunts to all cluster together in a big pack that you can run circles around, because there will be more spawning in front of you. I think this is probably to the game’s benefit on the whole, but it can get a little exasperating when you think you’re on the verge of winning a level and all of the sudden another wave of robotrons appears and stretches things out.

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the difficulty faced by Robotron adaptations in the days before dual-stick controllers. This put me in mind of the one licensed Robotron game currently on the Stack, so I went and installed it. This in itself proved something of an adventure, so this is mostly going to be a tech post.

Robotron X, released in 1996 on Windows and Playstation, is one of the earliest examples of the circa-2000 Classic Arcade Game Remake genre, and fits the basic expectations of the genre perfectly — that is, it adds 3D graphics and powerups. It also adds winnability, with a final level of some sort, but looking at the files, it appears to be some 200 levels in. That’s the reason I didn’t beat the game back in the day, and also my main memory of the experience: that it’s as much a test of endurance as of skill. It does support saving progress, but you have to take your fingers off the gameplay keys to do it, and it’s difficult to convince yourself that’s a good idea in the heat of battle — particularly if you’re unsatisfied with your life count. Robotron is famously a game where lives are cheap, quickly gained and quickly lost, but how many will I need stockpiled for the final battle? I won’t know for a while. I had a notion that this would be a quick game to get through if I just devoted a day to it, but that day is over, and I’ve only survived through about 15% of the levels.

Mind you, it should get easier now that I’ve corrected the worst of the bugs. Without limiting the framerate, the game has a number of problems, including the camera shaking violently every once in a while, Enforcer robotrons being unreasonably deadly, and a few things, such as the bullets fired by Brain robotrons, simply not getting rendered at all. Some of this stuff, I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not until I watched some gameplay footage of the Playstation version on Youtube, confirming that yes, the Brains do actually shoot at you and the Enforcers don’t shoot that often. If for some reason you’re thinking of playing this game and don’t have a copy already, I strongly advise getting the Playstation version instead of the PC version. Play it under emulation if you have to. It’s identical, but must be easier to get working properly.

In fact, just getting it to run at all on a modern PC took some doing. Running it directly off the CD, as it was designed to do, throws an error and exits immediately after the opening logo movie. Copying it to local storage and running it in Windows 95 compatibility mode gets it a little farther, but it still hangs before displaying anything 3D. Remembering my recent discovery of DxWnd, I tried running it there, and it managed to display some 3D intro animations, but got stuck immediately before showing the main menu. Now, DxWnd has a UI of commercial-airline-console-like complexity, with oodles of settings to tweak, and I tried randomly tweaking the ones with promising-sounding names, but ultimately had to seek help online. And for the most part, the internet doesn’t even know that a PC version of this game exists. Not even PC Gaming Wiki, my old standby for help running old games on modern systems, didn’t have so much as a stub of an entry for it. The one place that was of help? A four-year-old thread on the DxWnd forums, which told me that the magic setting for this game is “Palette update don’t Blit”. I’m starting to think that DxWnd is going to be my first and last resort on these matters for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and as for the twin-stick problem: Robotron X‘s controls are idiosyncratic. On PC, it lets you move and shoot from the keyboard, with two sets of keys, which default to ESDF and IJKL, plus optionally some weirdly asymmetric keys for diagonal movement that you can ignore if you’re accustomed to pressing two keys at a time for that like any modern gamer. Well, after all, this game predates the ascension of the WASD standard. It doesn’t support arbitrary key rebinding, but it does support a handful of alternate key combinations, all of which are worse. The closest it comes to WASD is WADX, combined with 2468 on the numeric keypad, which is just painful to contemplate. I’ve considered avoiding all the control layouts by running some software to make my trusty Logitech F710 emulate keypresses, but I’ve been getting used to the default keys, and they’re not so bad once you’ve had some practice.

(Added 7 Nov) Actually, it turns out that I wouldn’t have needed to install anything else to produce keypresses from my gamepad. DxWnd can take care of that too.

Stepping back a bit, I spent a substantial amount of time this fall on UFO 50, a collection of fifty retro-styled games written by a team of established indie auteurs over a span of years. There’s a Tolkien-like conceit to it, a pretense that the authors didn’t write the games, but discovered them — they were all supposedly created by a fictional company called UFOSoft, and each individual game has credits listing the individual fictional developers who worked on it. The game’s intro screen, which looks like an old crack loader, shows a series of photos of the dev team finding the fictional LX 8-bit console and its cartridges in an abandoned storage space. (The LX, by the way, has a built-in screen, handily explaining why games supposedly written in the 1980s run in 16:9.)

Although the games are retro-styled, their design sensibility, their mechanics and UX, are decidedly modern. Although many of them are clearly based on well-known games of the period, they always put some unique twist on them. And several of them draw from genres that hadn’t been invented yet when they were supposedly written, like idle games or tower defense. I’ve seen it asserted that it’s not actually appealing to nostalgia for 1980s console games, but rather nostalgia for the 2010s indie scene. And there’s something to that, not just in the content of the individual games, but in how they’re presented: as a smorgasbord. Those of us who were children in the 1980s remember games of the period as unitary things that you played monogamously until you had sucked all the entertainment value from them, because you probably weren’t going to get another until Christmas. Here, instead, you have a variety of games that you dip into as the mood strikes you, with no great commitment to finish all of them. So the overall experience resembles a games site like Newgrounds or Armor Games, or alternately, with its added framing UI, the various compilations that authors of Flash games have put on Steam since the death of Flash in the browser. It also resembles my Steam library, except that it’s of a manageable size, there’s a possibility that I’ll finish it all someday, and all of the games are highly distinct from one other, even when they’re a direct sequel to another game in the collection.

There’s some hint of a shared universe in some of the games, with recurring characters and reused assets and suggestively similar situations. Some of the links are pretty subtle, such that I wouldn’t have noticed them myself. It’s fun to overextend this and imagine that all of the games are linked, despite radically different genres: that whimsical kiddie fantasies like Magic Garden and Elfazar’s Hat exist in the same timeline as Fist Hell‘s zombie apocalypse and Avianos‘s post-human-extinction Earth. Apparently there’s an underlying mystery as well, a trail of clues that you can follow from game to game to unlock… something. I haven’t sought spoilers on this, since I found the entry point on my own and kind of want to follow it as far as I can independently. But solving the very first clue directs you to look for something in Mini & Max, a sort of adventure-platformer hybrid about exploring a closet while shrunken down to miniscule size, and this is one of the few games I haven’t made much headway in yet. It just has a level of complexity, of state you have to manage in you brain, that exceeds the threshold of what I can easily muster when I’m in smorgasbord mode.

But everyone’s going to find a different subset of the games grabs them. Here follows a list of the games that I’ve given the bulk of my attention to. The emoji indicate my progress. If you beat a game — whatever that means for that game — it awards you a golden trophy, and reveals an extra challenge that you can do, usually either 100% completion or some hidden secret goal. Beating this goal awards you cherries. Most of the games on this short list are ones that I’ve played enough to get cherries on.

🍒Party House: Probably my favorite in the collection. This is basically a deck-building game (a genre that didn’t exist in the 1980s) about throwing parties. Guests are drawn at random from the roster you’ve built, and most of them give you resources that let you buy better guests or expand your house, which lets you throw bigger parties. But some guests cause trouble, which can end the party without giving you anything. To deal with this, some guests have special abilities, like canceling out trouble or throwing out selected guests or summoning specific guests you select. You have a limited number of iterations to throw the ultimate party, which requires bringing in expensive “star” guests like aliens and mermaids. It all turns into an exercise in mastering a complex ruleset while adapting to circumstances, and, as with all the games, you have to figure it out without the aid of the manual which was presumably originally packaged with the game.

🍒Pilot Quest: Pilot is UFOSoft’s mascot character, their Mario, although this game plays more like a Zelda. It’s an action RPG, complete with Zelda-style dungeons, but it’s also the one with idle game elements, including a rudimentary ascension system, giving you special upgrades every time you complete the game. While you’re waiting for resources to accumulate, you can go exploring to find items that help with the resource accumulation. Or you can play other games! Time passes in this game while you’re not playing it, although not when you have UFO 50 as a whole closed. So it makes sense to try this one early so it’s advancing while you try all the other games. It’s grindy, but in a way that I found appealing.

🍒Warptank: An action-puzzler. In a side-view mechanized space-station environment, you control a tank that rolls left and right on whatever surface it’s on, and can additionally launch itself to the ceiling and roll around there. So it’s a bit like VVVVVV, except that you can also change your orientation by rolling over 45-degree bends in the surface you’re on. This one’s all about internalizing an unintuitive and disorienting movement system, while shooting at stuff.

🏆Overbold: This is a twin-stick shooter in spirit, even though the LX didn’t have a dual-stick controller. I remember this being a problem for console adaptations of Robotron back in the day. Like several other UFO 50 games, Overbold takes the fairly elegant approach of letting you shoot and move in two different directions by not changing your shoot direction while you have the fire button held down. The interesting thing about the game is that it’s really all about bidding strategy. The premise is that you’re being forced to fight in an alien gladiatorial arena. Winning fights earns you cash, which you can spend on upgrades. But also, the amount of cash you win depends on how many enemies you choose to fight at a time. To survive the final round, which is the only one where you don’t get any choice about what you’re fighting, you’ll need a whole lot of upgrades. So there’s pressure to make your fights as hard as you think you can manage, to earn enough cash for the upgrades you’ll need in the end. But it’s very easy to overestimate your abilities — hence the title — and a single mistake can mean game over, putting you back at square one. It’s a very addicting loop, one that I had some difficulty pulling myself away from.

🍒Porgy: A metroidvania where you play as a cute yellow submarine. That’s about all I can say about it, and all that needs to be said. It takes a cue from Ecco the Dolphin by starting off calm and soothing but ultimately linking the marine environment to unsettling aliens. The style is mostly friendly, though, and it makes a transparent and unconvincing attempt at making the violence nonviolent by giving you torpedos that are somehow nonlethal and merely pacify the unnaturally violent sea life. You basically just have to accept this as part of the style, a nod to other 1980s games that pulled similar stuff.

Rock On! Island: The only game on this short list that I haven’t beaten, this is a tower defense about cavemen fighting dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. I just enjoy tower defenses in general, and this is a pretty difficult one, largely based around balancing your resources defending multiple pathways. Also, the player avatar can move about and attack in battle, and can be upgraded to a much more powerful attack than any of the statically-placed defenders, so a big part of the strategy is about deciding when it’s worth it to spend resources on yourself and when to spend them on more defenders. I’m pretty sure that part of why I haven’t finished it yet is that there are elements that I haven’t figured out, too — see again the implied existence of manuals that you don’t have.

It’s been a while. What have I been playing? Well, just in the last few days, I’ve mostly been absorbed by the “Road to Elysium” DLC for The Talos Principle II. There are three separate scenarios, and each one takes a different approach to the problem of adding more puzzles to a story where the source of the puzzles has been defeated.

The first scenario, “Orpheus Ascending”, is basically a side story: it has you going back into the simulation where the entirety of Talos 1 and the opening of Talos 2 take place, there to recover soul fragments of a destroyed robot, so she may be reconstructed. Apparently this resolves a subplot in the main game, but not one that I remember at all. It’s explicitly called out by a character in the intro cutscene as resembling Orpheus’s descent into the underworld — I haven’t said much about it, but Talos 2 is chock full of references to Greek mythology. So it’s a little strange that it takes place in the Egyptian-themed section of the simulation rather than the Greek-themed one. But the Egyptian one is the only part that’s ever seen in Talos 2, and apparently it’s appropriate here because its name is the “Land of Death”. (The other sections of Talos 1 are called the Land of Ruin and the Land of Faith. It’s not clear to me where these names come from — they’re never referenced in the game itself.)

Going back to the old simulation means the puzzles are constrained to only use elements from Talos 1. But it delves deeper into their mechanics than we’ve seen before — in particular, how beams behave when they clash, when they collide midair or compete for the same connectors. Previously, you generally only saw this sort of thing when your solution was set up wrong. Here, you induce failure deliberately. It’s very well-tutorialized, too. It doesn’t assume that you already grasp how it works, but builds up from simple deliberate failures to more complex ones.

The third scenario, “Into the Abyss”, I haven’t looked at much yet, and only mention it now to get it out of the way so I can spend the rest of this post talking about the second scenario. It seems to have no particular puzzle theme other than very difficult puzzles, which is a good thing after the ones in the main game turned out unexpectedly easy. Narratively, it’s a flashback: there’s a point at the end of the main story where an NPC’s consciousness is trapped in a new simulation, and now he describes what he experienced there.

The second scenario, “Isle of the Blessed”, is the game’s beach episode. A bunch of characters get together on a tropical island hosting a massive puzzle-based art installation inspired by the events of the main game. We’re repeatedly reminded that solving the puzzles here is completely inconsequential, a diversion you pursue for its own sake alone. Which, of course, has really been the case all along for the player, just not for the characters. Ironically, this means that the puzzles are in a sense more consequential for the player than for the characters: as in the main game, progress in solving puzzles triggers advancement in the plot, even though there’s no logical connection. The plot you’re advancing is fairly trivial, mind. The most dramatic thing I’ve seen happen is that a pair of old friends who had a disagreement back in the main game finally reconcile. And yet, I am no less motivated to solve these puzzles than when the world was at stake.

Through the NPC chit-chat, though, this scenario references the events of the game more than the other two. And in the process, it references things that the player had the opportunity to influence. As such, it establishes certain possibilities, certain choices, as canon. There’s an entire major NPC, very important to the plot, whose very presence is only possible under the assumption that you solved a bunch of optional puzzles back in the main game. Heck, even the existence of these physically-implausible puzzles in reality outside the simulation is only possible if you decided to make the necessary technology available at the end of the game, instead of sealing it away or destroying it. It all goes to reinforce what I said before about the game pushing the player toward specific choices, and a specific point of view.

Anyway, I haven’t finished this stuff yet, but I don’t intend to do another blog post about it (unless it does something really surprising). Expect the next few posts to be about other stuff I played during the summer but didn’t get around to documenting.

This is just to say: I intend to resume posting to The Stack on November 1. I say this in the hope that making this intention public will help me to go through with it.

In 1989, Konami released an arcade game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. Everything about it was tailored to the source material. In the cartoon, there are four ninja turtles, who usually fight together as a team, so it was a four-player co-op game, even though this required a larger-than-standard cabinet. The turtles frequently fight their way through masses of faceless goons, so it was a scrolling brawler. Each of the turtles carries a different weapon, and this is reflected in differences in how the characters handle in the game. (I favored Donatello, whose bo staff gave him the longest reach, but I know people who preferred the speed of Raphael’s sai.)

The TMNT game was a hit, so of course they decided to apply its formula to other franchises. The 1992 X-Men is essentially TMNT with a coat of paint, and it too is remembered fondly, but the format designed for mutant turtles doesn’t fit mutant humans as neatly. There are a lot more than four X-Men — even in the game, where Konami could have just picked out four of them for us, they apparently couldn’t narrow it down to any less than six, only four of whom can be active at a time (plus a couple mainstays who appear in cutscenes but aren’t playable). And the six they chose were chosen more for recognizability than for fitting well into a brawler. The turtles had their slight differences, but they were all still fundamentally ninjas. The characters chosen for the X-Men game vary wildly in their abilities, but the constraints of the format require that Dazzler’s hand-to-hand combat ability is approximately on par with that of Colossus and Wolverine, and that Cyclops’ main power, his eye beam, is treated as a special action with a limited number of uses, rather than something that would be active all the time if he didn’t have special headgear to suppress it.

But perhaps we were more prepared to accept such concessions to format because of what had happened in between TMNT and X-Men: Konami’s 1991 four-player brawler adaptation of The Simpsons. This is an IP that doesn’t fit the format at all. It makes about as much sense as basing a brawler on pease porridge. But the fact that it doesn’t make sense is why it makes sense. The absurdity of the idea perfectly suits the source material’s sense of humor. In the show, Springfield’s arcade featured games based on such unlikely things as Doogie Howser and My Dinner with Andre. The Simpsons arcade game isn’t just an arcade game based on The Simpsons, it’s an arcade game that fits the sensibilities of the Simpsons world. So what I’m postulating is that the large but appropriate inappropriateness of the Simpson arcade game paved the way for the many smaller but less appropriate inappropriatenesses of X-Men.

I see that Chants of Sennar is now a Hugo finalist. I’ve been meaning to post about it for a little while. I mean, it’s mainly about language puzzles. That puts it right in my wheelhouse. The main thing I want to talk about is the revelations at the story’s ending, but we’ll need to lay some foundations first. Still, I’m going to be pretty free with the spoilers here, and it’s still a new enough game for me to point that out.

So, what we have here is an adventure game where the main challenge is learning the five mini-languages, in five different writing styles, used by five peoples living in a city-sized tower, from the Devotees at the bottom to the Anchorites at the top, as you encounter them one by one over the course of your ascent. The languages are purely written and essentially ideographic; even when a character speaks aloud, their words are displayed on the screen rather than pronounced. Essentially, each civilization and its language forms a chapter of the story, with its own color scheme, although you can always go back and try to pick up vocabulary you missed for 100% completion. And sure, there are other challenges: Mazes to explore, stealth sequences to repeatedly fail at. A Rush Hour puzzle at one point. (I remember when Rush Hour was brand new, and by now it’s found a growing niche as a filler puzzle in adventure games similar to Towers of Hanoi and Lights Out — perhaps not quite as immediately annoying yet, but give it time.) These all seem to me unwelcome distractions from the core theme.

I’ve described the game as “Heaven’s Vault lite”, the whole thing completable in a single weekend. But in some ways, the languages here actually more sophisticated than the one in Heaven’s Vault. Everything interesting about HV‘s language is in its word formation. Once the words have been formed and you’re putting them together into sentences, it basically turns into just an English relex — that is, a word-level cipher that can be decoded directly to English sentences with English grammar. Sennar gets more creative with that. One of the languages forms plurals by reduplication — that is, they say “people” as “person person”. Another uses object-subject-verb word order, and forms questions and negations by bracketing the entire sentence in a pair of glyphs (kind of reminiscent of Spanish “¿ … ?”). The final language does some clever stuff with forming ideographic glyphs by superimposing simpler ideographs — I would have liked to play with this system more than the game allows, but I suppose they found it was too difficult for players to figure out, because the bulk of the vocabulary is simply spoon-fed to you.

You get a certain number of gimmes in all the languages, mind you. Most chapters contain a sort of rudimentary Rosetta stone fairly early on, getting you started by giving the same brief text in both the chapter’s new language and in another language you’ve already learned. The rest has to be learned contextually. The UI lets you type in arbitrary guesses about the meanings of glyphs which then get displayed in partial translations. Taking advantage of this is crucial to gaining understanding. Even a wrong guess can help you along by being the right part of speech. But eventually, through mechanics I won’t describe here, you get to learn the official translations of each glyph. Sometimes these surprised me. For example, there was a glyph that I was convinced meant “lower class” or “servant”, but which turned out to officially mean “idiot”, causing some reappraisal of things that had been said.

In addition, the available vocabulary simply varies from group to group. Only one language has a known word for “idiot”. Only one language has a known number system (which resembles Cistercian numerals). There’s a group that calls themselves “Warriors” and the the group above them in the tower “Chosen Ones”, but the “Chosen Ones” call themselves “Bards”. The second group from the top calls the ones above them “Fairies”. It’s all clearly chosen to reflect their differences in outlook. It isn’t just language differences separating them, it’s differences in world view.

And the setting reinforces this: it’s obviously meant to evoke the Tower of Babel, where the Lord confused the language of men, so that they would not understand one another, and scattered them across the earth. But here’s the interesting part: as you learn of the tower’s history, it turns out to be the exact opposite. The different peoples in the tower aren’t the fragments of a bygone unity. They’re diverse tribes who independently found the tower and took up residence in it. The story isn’t one of breaking apart, but of coming together. They just need a little help. And that’s what the player is for.

Once you start to understand the overall story, the place of the player character in this world becomes something of a mystery. You’re not part of any of the five groups. A tribe of one. All the other groups have a name for themselves that describes what they see as their role, their job. You could call yourself “Interpreter”. You become the only being capable of facilitating communication across all the groups, and to get the golden ending, you have to do just that. On various walls throughout the tower are mysterious door-like carvings, energized by your presence into terminals to a teleportation and telecommunication network. Here, you can translate conversations that facilitate inter-tribe connections. The ways this happens can be comically facile at times — “We won’t let you through the gates because you don’t like music!” “Actually we do.” “WHOA, REALLY? We had no idea! Come on in!” — but I think we can take this as a symptom of just how bad everyone is at communicating. Each connection you forge in this way manifests in the UI as a line joining two points bouncing around in the terminal’s screen. Connect all five groups to each other, and the result is a rotating wireframe polyhedron, two conjoined tetrahedra with an internal pole joining the apexes.

And if that shape has been fully manifested, it makes an appearance in the ending, rotating to reveal that it’s been present all along in each language, in a glyph representing the people’s ultimate value: the Devotees’ symbol for God, the Warriors’ symbol for Duty, the Bards’ symbol for Beauty, and so forth are all the same thing in different orientations, which is to say, from different perspectives.

Now, this can be read as indicating that the five peoples really do stem from the same origin after all, a wellspring secretly encoded in all their cultures, despite the history we’ve been told. But I think it fits better as an indication not of a shared origin but a shared destiny. They’ve all caught glimpses of the same sublime, but no one before the Interpreter has had the flexibility of perspective necessary to grasp the whole, to see how it’s really the same for everyone, despite their differences. But the kicker is that the thing that all the groups worship in some way isn’t some transcendent absolute, but is literally just each other, a symbolic representation of their interconnectedness.

When characters in this game trade blows with sword or staff, they become locked in a combat mode that only ends if one of them is downed (either dead or unconscious) or one of them somehow manages to put enough distance between self and assailant to break it. In this mode, characters cannot take any of their special per-character actions, like throwing coin purses or eating food to heal themselves. (This is why Robin can generally needs to take enemies by surprise to pull off a sucker punch: once they’ve drawn a sword, they can force him into combat mode instead.) Once they’re in combat mode, they don’t need to be told what to do; they’ll just keep fighting. If you want them to fight effectively, however, you’ll want to take direct control.

This is done by means of mouse gestures. Select a character in combat mode and left-drag on the playfield, and the cursor will leave an orange trail behind it, so you can draw a simple shape that determines what you do. A straight line towards an enemy means a thrust, a circular arc means a swing that can hit multiple people, stuff like that. A figure 8 does a slow but powerful finishing blow. It’s all clearly meant to convey a sense of the cut and thrust of swashbuckling, but, like most mouse gesture systems, I mainly find it a little awkward. It’s made especially awkward by context: when the selected character isn’t in combat mode, left-dragging on the playfield is interpreted as a “select multiple’ action, as is normal in RTS interfaces. And in large melees where multiple foes are attacking a character at once (which is to say, the situations where manual control is most crucial), it happens fairly frequently that I try to do a swing just after the enemy I was targeting falls, resulting in deselecting the character I was controlling. There should be a name for this general sort of erroneous behavior resulting from transient changes in state changing the meaning of an action.

Apart from that, I find it interesting that this whole system tends to result in the action centering on one fight at a time. Fights that aren’t currently the focus of your attention tend to go into a holding pattern, both sides fending off most of each other’s automatic attacks, unless one side or the other is greatly outmatched in skill or numbers. Selecting a character to control is, in effect, like directing the camera in the swashbuckling films the game takes inspiration from, telling the game that this is the important one for the moment.

Having now acquired Little John, I get to bring him on missions. As expected, he’s a variant on the Strong Merry ¹Tangentially, the game’s random name generator has given me a merry man amusingly named Much Strong. He isn’t even a Strong Merry. He’s an archer. — he’s basically the strongest merry, and has most of the standard Strong Merry abilities plus a couple of additional ones of his own. In particular, he has the same sucker punch as Robin, allowing him to take down most enemies instantly and nonlethally, provided he can get close enough without them engaging him in combat. Having two characters who can do that on the same team is actually something of a game-changer: when Robin fails in his approach and winds up tangled in combat, John can take advantage of the distraction to deliver the punch, and vice versa. They’re like a tag team, the two inseparable friends.

The second plot mission after that seems built to emphasize this use, too. A potential ally is being held prisoner in his own castle, so you have to break him without killing anyone on the way in — those are his own men! (He’s okay with you pummeling them unconscious, tying them up, and leaving them in a closet, though.) I think this is the first time the game has actually forced the player to refrain from killing, rather than just suggesting and encouraging it. For my part, it just meant I had to continue playing the game exactly as I had been up to that point.

I’m really considering ditching the no-deliberate-killing policy at this point, though. It would open up new options, like actually letting Robin use a bow once in a while. As it is, I’m mainly using the same tools and techniques to slowly and methodically win every level. There’s a satisfaction to those techniques — it’s essentially similar to the satisfaction of tidying up — but when I was taking a similar approach in Deus Ex, it was largely to facilitate exploration, and that’s less of a factor here, where the same three castles are used repeatedly.

Recall that the game punishes killing by making it more difficult to recruit additional merry men. But I have more than enough merry men already, more than I can easily manage. And here’s the thing about extrinsic motivations: once established, they tend to devalue intrinsic ones.

I think it’s about time we got back to this game, don’t you? I planned to finish it up months ago — I wanted to get it done before IFComp started! — but things happened, and momentum was lost, and I’ve found it to be a difficult game to get back into. There’s just a lots of little bits of friction: partly it’s the graphics (not quite high-res enough for the level of detail it’s aiming at), partly it’s the UI (just a bit too complicated for its framerate), partly it’s the gameplay (just complicated enough that I can’t just jump back in without a refresher). These are of course the reasons I left it unplayed for so many years in the first place.

And then there’s the position I had left it in: stuck in my attempt at rescuing Little John because of the interference of a mounted knight. The good news is that I’ve now gotten past that level. The bad news is that I basically didn’t learn anything from it. I just replayed from a save until I somehow managed to clear out all the enemies in the vicinity of Little John without the knight noticing. I don’t know how I did it, and I certainly don’t know how to deal with knights in general, which seems like it’s going to be a problem from here on. Afterwards, I attempted a side mission, just another “mug a tax collector” bit like I’ve done several times already, but this time there was another mounted knight in his escort. I’m going to be seeing a lot of these guys, it seems. Maybe there’s a trick to subduing them than I haven’t discovered, or maybe they’re just there to encourage stealth. I just don’t know. I’m going to have to learn.

Stepping back a bit, this whole problem, of beating levels by save-scumming instead of by doing whatever it is the designer intended you to do, is probably something I encounter a lot, particularly in RTS games (a genre that’s cousin to this game). Back when RTSes were best-sellers, there seemed to develop an assumption that anyone who bought a new one had already mastered the form. Well, I’ve played through Warcraft, and Command & Conquer, and half of Command & Conquer: Red Alert, and I pretty much save-scummed through them all.