The Stack

The interaction in Bloodnet is unintuitive. Even the mere acts of walking around, picking up objects, and talking to people don’t conform to the usual expectations of point-and-click adventures. To move, you press the left mouse button and hold it. Stark will move towards the cursor as long as the left mouse button is held down. Because of this, doing anything else, such as picking up objects or talking to people, uses the right mouse button. And anything more complicated, such as modifying your hardware or venturing into cyberspace, has a system of rules and meanings to learn on top of its own unintuitive UI.

So I think I’ll be learning the systems here one at a time. In the starting phases, I can get away with just wandering Manhattan and talking to people. Recruiting a posse. Unwelcome combat encounters, it turns out, can largely be avoided just by not wandering around completely at random. Sticking to the places mentioned in Stark’s uncomfortably verbose contacts list, and places that people you meet in those places tell you about.

Most dialogue is lengthy and noninteractive. You right-click on someone and you get several paragraphs of text, laden with made-up hacker jargon, maybe punctuated by a yes-no question, usually about whether you accept the person’s asking price to join your party. One peculiar thing: The game will give you either printed text or voice acting, but not both. And it’s governed by whether or not you have sound enabled. “Sound”, mind you, is separate from music. Heck, it’s willing to use two different devices for them, so you can play sound through your Soundblaster Pro and music through your Roland LAPC-1. That’s this game’s vintage. And, as such, unwritten standards about how to present dialogue in an adventure game were not completely settled yet. Voice acting seems to be something of an afterthought here; if you use it, it goes into the same dialogue UI presentation, desaturating the scene and placing character portraits at opposite corners, but the bulk of the screen, where it would otherwise be putting the text, simply goes unused. It feels a bit like listening to a radio drama. One with hammy acting.

I’ll say this for it: at least the character dialogue is more true to cyberpunk literature than in most so-called cyberpunk games. The minor NPCs are ethnically and racially diverse, and largely downtrodden and traumatized. Some rely on cybernetics because they’re disabled. They form street gangs with names like “Flux Riders” and “Electric Anarchy”, living in squats where they can tap into cyberspace illegally, fighting the Man, or rather, the TransTechnicals megacorp, which basically rules Manhattan and is secretly run by vampires.

Stark himself fits into the category of “relies on cybernetics because of disability”. Even before he got vampirized, he was a victim of “Hopkins-Brie Ontology Syndrome”, a neurological condition that sometimes strikes deckers, making their perceptions of cyberspace and meatspace blur together. The implant helps with that, stabilizing his mind. It’s just a lucky coincidence that the stabilization helps him resist vampiric mind control. There may be a Christian allegory in there. His strength results from his imperfections.

But regardless of the religious implications, I think this aspect is worth paying attention to in light of more recent cyberpunk discourse. There’s been some complaint lately about cyberpunk-themed games presenting Cybernetic Augmentation as reducing your Humanity, asking “Are you truly human when you’re part machine?” and so forth, a question that’s frankly insulting to anyone with a medical implant or prosthesis. Indeed, such devices can be powerful tools in restoring a person’s sense of their own humanity, by enabling them to participate in society in ways that might otherwise be lost to them. Bloodnet has a “Humanity” stat, but it’s not about Stark becoming less human as he becomes more cyborg. It’s about him becoming less human as he becomes more vampire. Cybernetics is how he resists that.

Bloodnet, from 1993, is one of the games that’s spent the most time on my Stack. Before there even was a Stack, really, there was always just a game or two that I hadn’t finished yet, and then Bloodnet, that one game that I had bought a few years back and never got very far in but intended to get back to at some point.

It’s one of the few point-and-click adventure games from Microprose, which also produced Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom, both of which I rather liked, and Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, which I haven’t played and am not at all sure I want to. These games all share a certain graphical similarity, a sort of soft-focus VGA collage, that made me think that Bloodnet would play like the others, but it doesn’t. It’s a mashup in both form and content, a hybrid of point-and-click adventure and RPG telling a cyberpunk vampire story. It’s kind of like if Shadowrun had chosen to imitate White Wolf instead of TSR.

At the start of the story, a freelance decker with the unlikely name Ransom Stark is (sigh) betrayed by a client, but rather than just trying to kill him like in a normal cyberpunk game, the client turns out to be a vampire, and tries to turn Stark into his vampire thrall. But his attempt at domination is thwarted by Stark’s neural implant, leaving Stark in control of himself but vulnerable to a bloodlust that will erode his humanity over time if he can’t do something about it. All this is told in an opening slideshow/dialogue sequence that I remember finding cringingly, embarrassingly bad once, but which now strikes me as utterly hilarious. You could put this stuff on Hypnospace. It would fit right in.

The main reason I never got far is that the game throws you into the deep end. It has a very weird UI, a whole cyber-upgrade system to learn, and a baffling cyberspace where you have no idea how to interact with anything. That’s just in the first room. If you try to leave the first room, you’ll probably run into a combat encounter that you’re not at all prepared to deal with, as character or as player. I’ll probably describe all these systems in future posts, once I’ve come to understand them. Reading the manual will be very necessary.

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.