The Stack

I’m partway into the third level of Tomb Raider: Chronicles now. The setting is still Rome, but this section of Rome is underground, and oddly volcanically active — finally, the sort of environment where Lara is most comfortable. The level is titled “Colosseum”. A secret underground colosseum? Makes more sense than the one in the middle of Dracula’s castle, I suppose.

I expect that being in a colosseum means there will be some fighting. I’ve already been through a few boss fights back in level 2, shooting up the weird guardians built into the city’s ancient statuary. They haven’t been that big a part of the experience, though, which is okay, because they’re not really very interesting. Mostly they’re just frustrating, with no real tactics beyond persistence: keep shooting at it long enough, and eventually it will fall down. I’ve seen one significant exception so far in this game, a floating statue head that shot lightning bolts out of its crystal eyes. Destroying it required shooting out the eyes specifically, using a weapon with a laser sight that let you aim precisely.

But for the bulk of the game, your only enemy is the architecture. I spent a long time trapped in a small courtyard looking for a way out until I noticed that one of the pillars had rungs on one side. That led to an area where I could trigger a mechanism that rolled aside a large gear that served as a door, but the door wasn’t an exit; it just led to another small, enclosed chamber, so I again spent a long time looking for a way out before I thought to check the space to the side that the gear had vacated.

I remember commercials for the early Tomb Raiders that completely misrepresented them, made it look like they were all about nonstop action and excitement, showing a montage of Lara machine-gunning monsters and outrunning fireballs and the like, set to crunchy electric guitar. I guess it’s an easier sell than the actual experience, of being lost and confused most of the time, with a score led by oboe. Some of us like that experience better, though, and I can only think that the continuing popularity of the franchise despite this almost fraudulent misrepresentation meant that our numbers were underestimated.

I remember, long before there were any Tomb Raider movies, idly musing about how I would approach such an adaptation. (I have no training in film, but why would that stop my musing?) I really liked the idea of framing the story as a tall tale that Lara Croft tells about her own exploits, thus excusing the more fantastic elements, like evil meteors and Atlantean demon-aliens and hidden dinosaur habitats. (It’s sadly been forgotten by this point, but early Tomb Raider seemed to have a rule that every game had to have at least one tyrannosaur fight, if only in a secret area or bonus level. I saw no reason why this rule would not apply to movies as well.) I imagined Princess Bride-like interruptions where skeptical party guests object, and an ending that revealed that not only was everything Lara said true, but there were even crazier things that she left out. What can I say, I was really into unreliable narration at the time.

Tomb Raider: Chronicles reminds me of that a little because it, too, puts a narrative frame around the action. The writers had decided to kill off Lara Croft at the end of the previous game, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, and Chronicles is a collection of stories shared by the people attending her memorial service. I’m still in early stages, so the game still might surprise me, but I don’t think it’s taking advantage of the frame in the same way as my hypothetical movie treatment. Mainly it just serves as a way to present several completely unrelated stories, and even that just draws attention to how loosely linked the scenarios in the previous games were. If the writers had wanted to, they could have cooked up a macguffin to link up this game that’s no less arbitrary than the motivations for gallivanting about the globe in the previous ones, but I suppose the way they did it is more honest.

I remember thinking that Lara’s death in The Last Revelation was unconvincing, clearly just a cliffhanger setting up her inevitable return, like the death of Superman. But apparently it was more like the death of Sherlock Holmes: the team at Core Design was tired of Lara and wanted to kill her off for real, but there was too much public demand for the decision to stick. Chronicles is thus Lara Croft’s Hound of the Baskervilles, published out of chronological order after the character’s death, reminding everyone that this is how stories work and that we might as well unkill the character because it’s not like their death accomplishes anything.

One thing I’m not clear on yet: How does the framing affect the gameplay? Will I carry my inventory from story to story, because that’s how the game works, or will it get wiped, because that’s what makes sense narratively? I’m actually kind of hoping for the former, just because that specific kind of ludonarrative dissonace interests me. I guess it’s my new unreliable narration.

Some recent discussion made me reflect that it had been a very long time since I last played a Tomb Raider game — not since before this blog started, in fact. The last one I started was the fifth in the series, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, released in 2000. I never got past the first level, due to my stubborn insistence on finding all the Secrets.

(How essential I consider Secrets to be to the experience of a game varies from title to title. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t bother with this sort of completeness in the previous title, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, where Secrets seemed just sort of haphazardly assigned to arbitrary hidey-holes. But in some of the others, if you didn’t hunt for Secrets, you missed out on some of the game’s best puzzles and most impressive sights. And this episode has a very completist-welcoming approach to Secrets, putting exactly three in each level.)

I’m now once more struggling my way through that very large first level, a maze of Roman alleyways that double back on themselves confusingly, full of levers that open remote gates and walls that have to be mantled up and passageways with no clear purpose. In short, the main challenge is getting lost. Despite the texturing, it manages to make what’s ostensibly a living city feel like one of Lara’s tombs. Well, the series had never been very realistic in its environments — heck, sometimes it barely even qualifies as representational.

Rather than even attempt to get the original CD-ROM version working, I’m playing from Steam. Even that required some special effort to get it working properly under Windows 10: acting on advice online, I downloaded some old Voodoo 3D drivers and installed them to the game directory. I recall that the original Tomb Raider was among the first games to support 3D accelerator cards on PC, although you had to set it up specially, so this feels somehow appropriate.

Another thing I remember from the Tomb Raiders of old: the controls. I remember people complaining about how awkward they were, which surprised me, because back in 1996 I didn’t think they were all that bad. Perhaps (I thought) they were complaining specifically about the Playstation version? I played on PC, with a keyboard, which had an ingenious system that let you execute nearly all of the game’s multifarious movements from the numeric keypad, plus modifier keys on the other hand. But this idea got broken as they added more special actions in the sequels, such as sprinting and lighting flares, and by Chronicles, the numeric keypad is all but abandoned. I’ll have to see if I can set up better controls than the defaults, because with the default setup it’s way too easy to waste a flare when you’re trying to press the crouch button.

Regardless of the controls, though, you wind up doing a lot of awkward shuffling around. That’s just built into the world model. It’s a grid-based world where the size of the tiles is directly linked to Lara Croft’s gait and how far she can jump. If you see a ledge on the opposite side of a three-tile gap, you know that you can make it across if and only if you carefully line it up by walking right up to the edge (using the walk button, which prevents you from falling off), then taking a single jump back for your run-up. This is fundamentally a game about being painstakingly careful, with occasional enemies attacking you to make this more difficult to do. (Wherever possible, these enemies should be picked off from high ground rather than engaged on their own turf.)

Despite the built-in awkwardness, it’s a comfort how familiar the feel of the controls is, even after all these years. I may be using different fingers than in the numeric-keypad days, but the necessary timing is the same. I can still execute all of Lara’s moves, even the secret handstand. I just need to get my bearings and I’ll be out of Rome in no time.

So, let’s kick off the new year with another writeup or two of things I played last year but didn’t get around to writing about even though I have a thing or two to say about them.

The Rodinia Project is a Portal-like, with most of the standard accoutrements of the genre, like large floor buttons that you can keep pressed by dropping boxes on them, force fields that you can pass through but the boxes can’t, beams that activate devices when not blocked, and so forth. But it’s strikingly minimalistic, even for a genre known for its minimalism. Portal itself had a minimalist laboratory aesthetic based on on antiseptic-looking white paneling. Rodinia is also built out of white panels, but with gold-painted highlights, a surprisingly ritzy touch given the setting.

That setting: a series of platforms in the middle of the ocean. Sometimes there are puddles to remind you of this, and to give some sense that these pristine constructions, with their almost cathedral-like atmosphere (enhanced by ambient angelic-chorus music), are still subject to the depredations of the elements. This is furthered by the gradual appearance, somewhat into the game, of slimy black tentacles, reaching out of the waters and wrapping around the support pillars or just lying loose on the floor. They’re a clear sign of an indefinite Something Wrong, probably related to the reason you’re going around solving room puzzles on ocean platforms in the first place.

But that vague sensation of wrongness is just about all the lore you get. Some levels have fragments of backstory you can find, in the form of little collectibles in hard-to-reach places, but it’s very difficult to get them all, and even then, all they have is pictures, subject to interpretation. I emphasize this point because of what the game leaves out: a voice. There’s no one talking to you over a ubiquitous PA system, no GLaDOS obliquely filling you in on the details of the world through her taunts. I would have thought this one of the essentials of the Portal-like formula, but Rodinia does without it.

I guess it’s not the only one, though. I don’t think the original Q.U.B.E. had a voice, although its “Director’s Cut” remake did. Antichamber didn’t have one either, although it may be more accurate to say that it didn’t have a spoken voice; the signs all over the place served the same function, of communicating with the player and giving the gameworld a personality. There’s just a sense that these games should talk to you, and if they don’t, it’s because they don’t have the budget. But I can’t imagine adding voice acting to Rodinia without ruining the austere and solitary atmosphere.

You know what else the game does without? Walls! That is, there are walls, but only when they’re absolutely necessary to make a puzzle work. It’s just about the only open-air Portal-like I’ve seen. I guess there’s The Talos Principle too, but Talos is kind of on the fringe of the genre, and anyway it’s different here. Talos still put its puzzles in spaces enclosed by walls, even if the sky was visible. Rodinia‘s platforms are simply open to the sea, which forms as effective a barrier as any.

But the biggest gesture of minimalism, the single most important element that Rodinia does without, is the gun. The portal gun is the single thing that defines Portal, and its various substitutes in other games — Antichamber‘s block gun, Magnetic‘s magnet gun, and so forth — are the things that most clearly identify them as games in the same genre. But Rodinia basically says “What if you didn’t have a gun for interacting with your environment in novel ways but you had everything else? Could you still make interesting rule-based environmental puzzles that way?” And it turns out you can. And that’s what I found so fascinating about it, particularly that it could get away with this and still be clearly in Portal‘s genre.

Yesterday, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive movie, was released on Netflix, and my entire Twitter feed immediately became very annoyed. Apparently it was accompanied by a suite of breathless articles about how daringly innovative it is, a claim that ignored decades of prior experimentation, including four earlier interactive releases by Netflix itself. Oh, but those were aimed at children! Black Mirror is serious grown-up drama, and high-profile at that.

But also, it’s Black Mirror, which means the whole thing was constructed around the constraint of making CYOA dismal. It does this by going meta. Most of the meta is is reasonably restrained, almost even subtle, but a couple of branches take a dive into the crassly meta. The story is of a game developer named Stefan Butler in 1980s Britain — a distinct branch and era of gaming history, presented here condescendingly but, based on what I’ve read about that scene over at The Digital Antiquarian, fairly accurately — descending into madness as he works on a game with CYOA-style branching narrative, based on a CYOA-style book whose author also went mad in a similar way. Part of his madness is a sense that he has no free will, that someone else is controlling his actions. There’s a sense that he’s coming to be aware of the metafictional truth because he has some memory of the failed branches you’ve put him through; in some cases, he “wakes up” from a branch as if it’s a dream, and one early choice seems to change how multiple characters behave in its replay (something that I find myself thinking of as an “Undertale choice”).

It’s all very thematically tight on paper, but it all hinges on the idea that Stefan lacks agency because he’s under the viewer’s control, and it undercuts this idea by not giving the player a whole lot of agency either. It feels like most of the off-trunk choices just result in immediate failure and rewind, or maybe one other choice before failure and rewind. Some of the choices even deny player agency by using a choice to assert authorial control. At one point, you’re given the choice of “shout at dad” or “pour tea over computer”. The story needed Stefan to behave irrationally as a result of his lack of control, so it put the irrational behavior into viewer choice. But neither of the choices reflected my desires, so I was just as powerless as Stefan. The writer either expected an audience of sadists, who would relish such a choice, or wasn’t thinking about the the experience of the interactivity at all there. At another point, the player is given a meaningless choice between two ways for Stefan to fidget just so he can be shown successfully resisting your command. Well, good for you, kid. You sure showed me. How about we stop fighting and team up against the writer?

A lot of this is the result of treating the format as a gimmick rather than a medium, but some of it, particularly the shallow structure and inconsequential choices, can be blamed on technical limitations. The fact is, streaming video makes it hard to do the sort of narrative interactivity we’re used to seeing in games, as I learned while working on the Netflix adaptation of Minecraft: Story Mode. ¹My involvement was slight, but it mostly involved removing things: pruning branches, getting rid of conditional logic, simplifying it into a form that Netflix could handle. And the result was still far and away the biggest, most complicated interactive video they’ve got. People who say that Telltale games are just barely-interactive movies have no idea what they’re talking about. Throwaway callbacks are suddenly expensive, because they require an entirely separate video stream. Choices have to be spaced out — you have to give about two minutes between choices because it has to buffer both branches in advance to keep playing smoothly. This also means that the video clip that plays in the background of a choice has to complete playing in full, which I found particularly irksome. You could make your choice in the first second, but Stefan would just sit there indecisively while his dad repeats “Well? Which do you want?” and similar filler. Streaming video just isn’t the ideal medium for this sort of thing.

But it may be the most accessible. If this is what it takes to get interactive narrative deeper into the mainstream than it already is, should I really complain? And, as gimmicky as it seems to those of us steeped in the stuff, it probably at the very least serves as a good showcase of the platform’s capabilities. One of the first choices you get, of which of two music tapes to listen to, has a very obvious callback after the story has trunked, as if just to tell us that it’s capable of keeping state. (This isn’t the only piece of state-tracking, but it’s the only really obvious one.) At another point, there’s something that’s almost a puzzle: you use a special UI to enter a telephone number that was clued in a subtle and cryptic way earlier. The solution is thrown in your face while the UI is up, so it isn’t actually relying on the viewer to solve anything. Maybe it did in an earlier draft. Regardless, what it’s communicating is “We could have made this a puzzle if we wanted to. That’s something we can do.”

Ultimately, it’s a first-released work of IF by a new writer — not new to writing, but new to IF specifically. It may have a larger budget than your typical Comp entry, but it’s about the same length. It should be welcomed as such, but also criticized as such.

I did one more stream, this time playing Desktop Dungeons from the beginning. Why the switch? Partly because I figured the few people who watched were probably getting bored with Gearheads, but mainly because I wanted to see if the same problems would manifest. They did. My software reported that in excess of 98% of frames were being dropped.

So I’m thinking I’m giving up streaming, at least for a while. It’s not that the problems are unsolvable. It’s that they’re unsolvable without buying additional hardware, and that’s more than I’m willing to do on a lark. All the streams I’ve done so far have been from a 2015 Macbook Air, over wifi. “You fool,” shouts every streaming advice article on the ‘net, “you should never stream over wifi!” And I was all ready to hook the machine up to my router via ethernet, and was even pleased to discover that I had an ethernet cable long enough to reach from the router to my good streaming spot, but then I realized that a 2015 Macbook Air doesn’t have an ethernet port. Ethernet-to-USB adapters exist for this purpose, but that falls under “buying additional hardware”.

OK, so maybe I could stream from my desktop PC instead? I could stream a game, certainly, but this machine doesn’t have a camera, and it seems like watching the player’s face as they gurn and overemote is an essential part of the experience. I could buy a webcam, but again, that would be buying additional hardware. At this point I start getting clever and thinking: What if I hook up the laptop’s video output to the desktop machine? I’m pretty sure I have a video out adapter for the Macbook somewhere. That way I could use the laptop’s camera. I could even play the game entirely on the laptop but use the desktop machine for streaming — which sounds more efficient anyway, because that way the game and the streaming software aren’t competing for cycles. But you’ve probably already spotted the flaw in this plan: my PC has no video input.

Even if I fixed my hardware problems, my chief limitation is probably just the upload speed from my ISP. So I’m giving up, but I imagine I’ll have the means to do proper streaming at some point in the future. I mean, I didn’t get as close as I did on purpose. Laptops just happen to come with cameras now. Open-source streaming software exists. It’s kind of amazing how easy it’s gotten to do video broadcasts over the internet that fall just short of adequate.

As for Desktop Dungeons, I may get back into playing it. I still haven’t beaten the final dungeon.

I did another stream. I’m still having the same framerate problems, which I mysteriously didn’t have in my first session. But instead of describing that, I want to go into a little detail about some mechanics in Gearheads that I haven’t described previously.

In addition to varying the toy types available to both sides, most levels distinguish themselves by varying the terrain. Outside of the special levels, which all have unique graphical themes, there are four main variations, apparently called “kitchen”, “garden”, “frozen pond”, and “factory”. The kitchen levels are just plain tile floors without any special features. Garden levels sometimes have strips of mud, or heavy rocks, or insects crawling around and getting in your way — all things that impede your progress and force you to wind your toys more.

Rocks are also sometimes found on the Frozen Pond levels, but Frozen Pond’s more distinctive feature is the cracked spots that turn into holes when trodden on repeatedly. One the game’s merrier points is watching the computer AI obliviously send toys into these holes. Diagonal-moving toys (the kangaroo and the zap-bot) seem particularly prone to this. I have to admit that I myself can’t always predict the trajectory of a diagonal mover with any accuracy, but at least I notice when it leads into a hole and stop launching more along the same path. Even without these features, though, ice levels are slippery. This greatly affects how toys interact. Less friction makes it harder to immobilize a heavy pusher like Big Al by throwing mass in front of it, but also means that collisions tend to send the lighter toys careening backward. And that means that they tend to escape collision effects that require proximity, like the Deadhead’s scream or Disasteroid’s blaster. So you have to get used to things operating by different rules, although the result does kind of come down to “Try to win quickly with fast things”.

Factory levels tend to be the most complicated. They have three distinctive elements: impassible obstacles that raise and lower in a set rhythm, pusher tiles that act like conveyor belts but don’t look like them, and portals. The pushers can be oriented in any cardinal direction. If they’re oriented horizontally, they’ll make things easier for one player and harder for the other, and presumably for that reason, they always seem to be placed in symmetrical pairs. Portals always come in pairs, one that’s an entrance for left-going toys and an exit for right-going, and another that’s the reverse. I tend to think of portals in games as shortcuts, but in this game, they tend to function as the opposite: two rows will have paired portals poised to catch toys just before they reach the finish line and send them back to traverse the same distance again. Not good for scoring points, but great for keeping defensive units like Krush Kringle on the screen longer.

I’ve done a second streaming session. I intend to keep doing these until I get it right, which I clearly haven’t yet. I managed to keep up the patter better than in my first session, and I managed to get all the way from level 1 of Gearheads level 24 in one go, but my changes to the OBS streaming settings seem to have made the lag/framerate problems worse, not better. I’ve looked at the resulting video, and it’s at the point where it’s best described using seconds per frame instead of frames per second.

Well, I have some more ideas to try, starting with reducing the resolution (default resolution is a waste for this game) and shutting down all other devices that use the Internet. One obvious thing that I actually mentioned on the stream is to switch from the Mac laptop I’ve been using to my more-powerful Windows desktop, but for whatever reason, DOSBox runs a lot better on the laptop. If I play from the desktop, improving the streaming won’t matter, because a stream that perfectly replicates what I’m seeing on my screen would still contain noticeable hitches.

In short, via streaming, I have managed to turn Gearheads into the sort of technical challenge that I’ve always found easier to blog about than game content. If you want to watch tonight, the URL is https://www.twitch.tv/muckenhoupt.

So, I spent more or less a full day of tinkering with streaming software, gradually finding answers to questions like “How do I make the game fill the screen?” and “Why isn’t there any sound?” The software I used, OBS, is capable of recording video instead of (or in addition to) streaming it, so you can fiddle with settings until it’s right. Nonetheless, there seem to be some streaming-specific problems that you don’t get from a local recording. I set twitch to keep a recording of the stream, and the recording has problems with laggy pauses. It seems to me that they correspond to points where there’s a lot of sound. I’m trying fix that by following advice online, but the only way to know if it works is to do another stream. So there’s my motivation to do more streams right there.

I didn’t make any progress in the game. I got as far as that Disasteroid vs Cockroach level a few times while trying to set up the streaming software, but no further. During the stream itself, I decided to start Tournament Mode from level 1, so I didn’t get anywhere near there. Doing this reminded me of something I had forgotten: Every level you win gets you an extra life. So there’s a potential strategy of starting from level 1, where it’s easier, just to accumulate enough lives to get through the later levels. But you’d have to be a lot better at the game than me to apply this strategy. I’ve only made it as far as level 25 once, so any strategy that starts with “play all the way through level 25” is a no-go for the time being.

I didn’t really give advance notice of the first stream, because I didn’t want much of an audience for my first try, but I’ll probably be doing them daily at 6:00 PM Pacific time (9:00 Eastern, 2:00 AM UTC) for a little while, whether anyone watches or not.

Let’s rewind a bit. Apart from Galaga: Destination Earth, which is shelved due to technical problems, the last game I started but didn’t complete on this blog was Gearheads. Can I polish it off before year’s end? Maybe. I was pretty far along, having gotten through the first 24 of its presumed 36 levels.

Trying it again just now, it took me a full game to get used to the controls again, but in my second go, I started from level 25 and and reached level 30, a special level where you have Disasteroids (the unstoppable killer robots) and the computer opponent has cockroaches. This doesn’t mean as much as it sounds like, though. As I’ve noted before, this is a game that, despite never having been a coin-op arcade game, is built on the coin-op arcade game model. It doesn’t save your progress, and it gives you a limited number of lives before you have to start over. You can start over from level 13 or 25 if you want, but if you can only get through six levels before game over, you’re not going to reach the end.

I recently noted how steady incremental progress kept me coming back to Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal. Lack of progress has, I think, had the opposite effect with Gearheads, making me slightly dread the prospect of devoting effort to it, even though it’s a perfectly good little game, and not even all that hard, due to the luck factor. But my impatience to win hurts the experience. I’m considering spicing up the experience by trying my hand at streaming, thereby transforming my motivation from trying to get a game off the Stack to trying out a new way of playing games in general. It would, at least, add some new challenge to the experience: the challenge of figuring out how to stream a Windows 3.1 game running under DOSBox on a Macbook.