The Stack

It turns out that VST is just some unspecified new cyberspace/VR technology, but one with side effects that kill people after a few months. Genesis, under the direction of Hugh Martens (your employer), is still trying to eliminate the problem, but they’re doing this by testing it illegally on prison inmates. Martens, meanwhile, has gone cartoonishly wacko about covering the whole thing up, and has been killing people left and right. If nothing else, this clinches the loyalty thing. If you completed your original assignment and brought Martens the truthmongers, he’d just kill you for knowing too much. Not that the game gives you a choice in the matter.

The final act of the game takes place on the prison island of Rocas Perdida, where the experiments are taking place. And it is at the very beginning of that section that I got very badly stuck. For the first and last time in the game, I resorted to a walkthrough.

This is something I really try to avoid doing. Walkthroughs are a necessary evil at best. The whole point of an adventure game is the pleasure of figuring things out, and using hints robs you of that. Worse yet, to cheat at all is to acknowledge that you’ve lost your trust in the author, that you don’t expect that you’ll be able to solve the puzzle. This lack of trust damages your experience of the rest of the game afterwards; once you’ve started down that path, it’s easy to give up on puzzles too early. I’m not even going to get into the problem of badly-written walkthroughs that give away too much, as that didn’t happen this time.

The problem, and to some extent the saving grace, of Nightlong is that I had a solid notion of what kind of unfairness I expected from it. As I’ve noted before, this is a game prone to tiny, all-but-invisible hotspots. I’d been temporarily stuck in the game many times before this point, and with only one or two exceptions, it was always due to failing to notice a hotspot. At one point, I was actually able to work backward from the expected solution to a puzzle, figuring out what sort of item I’d need, and then where I’d be likely to find it. And sure enough, it was there, and nearly unfindable unless you were looking for it specifically. This was far more satisfying than finding it by waving the cursor around at random would have been. But that was an exception. For the most part, finding something clickable in this game is a surprise. So when I got as thoroughly stuck as I was, I was fairly certain that there was a tiny hotspot that I was missing, despite repeated searching of all available rooms.

It turned out that it wasn’t a tiny hotspot. There were two hotspots with the same name close together, and I had somehow managed to avoid using the right action on the right one, despite revisiting them repeatedly. I probably should have slept on it and come back fresh, but I sometimes find it hard to convince myself of that when I know I’m nearing the end.

When I do resort to hints, my reaction is pretty much always the same, regardless of what they reveal: “That was it? What a gyp!” Even if I don’t cheat again, it can take a while for this minor sense of resentment to fade. Solving tougher puzzles later in the game helps, re-establishing the “you throw ’em at me, I’ll solve ’em” dynamic. That happened here. There was a nice convoluted unrealistic adventure-game puzzle (illustrated in the screenshot above), and the final puzzle of the game was a tasty little cryptarithm — arguably soup cans, but it hit the spot.

Anyway, it’s off the stack now.

At the end of disc 2 comes the twist that we’ve been expecting all along: the “terrorists” are not really terrorists and my employer has been hiding the truth from me. To be specific, the alleged terrorists are cyberspace researchers who stumbled on something called the “VST project”. They don’t know much about it, except that it involves virtual reality, that its chief architect, one Dr. Moreau (!), was recently killed, and that the Genesis corporation (and consequently the government and police) will stop at nothing to keep it secret.

The player character makes sympathetic noises and is accepted by the group. So either I’ve switched sides or the infiltration is a success. Either way, I’m still trying to get at the truth, and that involves going into cyberspace to see what Genesis is so eager to keep secret. Cyberspace is of course treated differently by different games. Seldom is the treatment at all sensible, but usually it’s more abstract and stylized than meatspace, with everything made of light and vectors. Not so here. The moment you uplink, you wind up in Moreau’s VR horror theme park.

Being a future-tech fantasy of VR, it looks just like the game’s reality. The content is different from the main gameworld — fewer video monitors and flying cars, more floating castles and giant spiders — but the graphical presentation is the same. Even the player character’s cyberspace avatar is indistinguishable from the player character. Also, objects in the VR sim have the same physical and even chemical properties as the real objects they’re simulating: at one point, you mix up some simulated gunpowder out of simulated sulfur, simulated saltpeter, and simulated charcoal. (Which isn’t a surprise: the moment you see saltpeter in a game, you know that the gunpowder is inevitable. Just once, I’d like to see a game where you use it to make nitric acid or something. Not even Chemicus did that.)

Maybe there’s an good in-story reason why the sim is such a good representation of the real world. Maybe the VST project is about doing a brains-in-vats/locked-in-the-holodeck scenario, where people don’t know that their reality is virtual. But then again, maybe this is just a case of the writer deciding that virtual reality is essentially just a parallel universe, and should naturally follow the normal physical laws. Which is stupid, but not uncommon in potboiler sci-fi.

I’m well into the second of Nightlong‘s three discs. Infiltrating the terrorists seems to be mainly a matter of locating their hideout. Currently I’m exploring an abandoned zoo on the basis of the slenderest of leads. Well, it’s called a zoo, but it’s really sort of a cross between zoo and museum, with a few robotic animals still in their enclosures. And the leads are only slender in terms of the in-game plot; as a detective, I’d think I was going to too much effort with too little justification, but as a player, I know full well that you have to go where the puzzles are.

I’m also starting to hit errors in a big way. I wrote last time that I had figured out how to get the game to run without immediately exiting with a fatal error saying that it wasn’t installed properly. It turns out I was wrong. I still get the fatal error on startup sometimes, apparently at random. Also, I have now experienced the audio problem in cutscenes that other players described. Or a mild form of it, anyway: it’s just a half-second pause in the audio component every once in a while, which isn’t a terribly big deal, but it wasn’t happening before.

The one problem that worries me the most is descibed at ntcompatible.com as follows:

Game crashes on CD 2 once you go to the left of the entrance to the zoo. Setting compatibility mode for Win95 buys you a little more time, but still crashes. Read that there is a workaround for this, but you miss a chunk of the plot.

Now, I’ve experienced this crash in exactly the location described, and I’ve enabled Win95 compatibility mode, and I’ve gone back to the same location without crashing. It’s not clear how much “more time” this should “buy” me, but I didn’t experience any more problems until I actually quit the game, at which point it gave me a fatal error dialog. I hope I can get through the game without crashing, or at least past the “chunk of the plot” that the workaround skips.

It’s a delicate balance sometimes, timing when to play PC games. Generally speaking, you don’t want to play them with the hardware you have when they first come out. You want to play them with a machine that takes best advantage of the game’s capabilities. But if you put it off too long, you’ll wind up with a machine whose hardware or operating system is incompatible with it, or that’s more powerful than the programmers planned for. This has been less of a problem under Windows than it was in DOS days, but it still crops up sometimes. Of course, I do still have a number of DOS games on the stack, so we’ll be seeing all kinds of problems in the future.

Time for another adventure game! They’re the most numerous thing on the Stack, due to my tendency to put them aside when I get annoyed with them. Today’s selection is Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy, a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure from 1999. The subtitle always makes me think of Union City, New Jersey, but I don’t think that’s what the authors intended; the setting, a future megacity ruled by amoral corporations, could be in New Jersey, but isn’t really that specific. The player takes the role of a private detective assigned to infiltrate a terrorist organization that’s been attacking the Genesis Cryogenetic Enterprise. I fully expect that Genesis will turn out to be the real bad guys, because that’s how these stories go.

I didn’t get very far at all in this game when I last played it years ago, and I haven’t yet spent the time to get much farther. The chief obstacle here is hunting for minuscule hotspots, which in some cases are contained inside other minuscule hotspots. The first puzzle in the game involves an elevator with a panel containing a fuse. The crazy thing is that the game contains close-up graphics of the panel, which would make it easier to interact with its components if it let you, which it doesn’t. The close-up is shown briefly when you examine the panel, then taken away. You can only interact with the fuse in the normal full-room view, in which it’s a few pixels in size (at 640×480). The saving grace of this interface is that the game makes it really clear what the cursor is hovering over at any moment by displaying a name next to the cursor.

The graphics are actually pretty nice. It’s all sprites on a prerendered background, but the backgrounds have a very comfortable level of texture and detail, neither too coarse to be believable nor too fine to be discernable. The downside to this is that every detail is a potential hotspot, so I basically have to roll my mouse over the whole screen lest I miss something important.

When I first tried running the game, it terminated with a dialog box stating that it was installed incorrectly. I had to rerun the installer and tell it to install the bundled version of DirectX, even though it told me that I didn’t need it. While researching the problem, I found various websites reporting problems running this game under Windows XP, that the sound stutters in the cutscenes and suchlike. I haven’t had any stuttering, probably because I have better hardware than the people who were playing it closer to when it came out. The only problem I’ve had with the sound in the cutscenes is that the dialogue is dubbed badly from Italian. Most adventure games released in America in the last ten years or so have been European imports, presumably because most American companies take it for granted that adventures are dead.