A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Full-time-parenting this week, which makes it hard to write. But I bought the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality last week, and it’s got a fuckton of games I can afford to give a very small amount of time to. So here’s some very quick thoughts on the ones I’ve played so far.

For the sake of keeping them straight, I’m going to try them in the order they appear on my download page. I’m not going to spend a lot of time getting them to work if they fight back right now, since there are enough games here that I can just move on. I’ll play until I decide to stop for purely arbitrary reasons.

My system is an i7 with 16 GB of ram and integrated Intel graphics, running Linux Mint 19.3. I don’t expect to play anything that won’t run on that right now, but I may make a note of Windows-exclusives I mean to try at some later date. So, here we go:

Overland: A low-poly squad-survival-strategy game with procedurally generated characters and levels. Sort of a hybrid of Final Fantasy Tactics, Resident Evil, and The Oregon Trail. Runs great on my system. I dig the low-poly aesthetic. Although it has a zombie apocalypse feel, they made the cool choice to make the monsters some kind of crystal-headed-dog-monsters instead of cliche zombies. This isn’t a style of game I like much, but I did enjoy it and will probably go back. Biggest negative is that it drops you in the deep end without anything in the way of instruction or tutorial.

Night in the Woods: Not quite sure what to make of it yet. Looks to be one of those story-heavy platformers that are a kind of a new thing I haven’t had a chance to play much of yet. It reminds me a bit of The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories. The visual style reminds me a bit of the remake of A Boy and His Blob. Though with anthropomorphic animals. Played fine aside from a very long startup time. The introduction is long enough to make the game feel much larger than I can give a fair amount of time to today, but I hope to return to it. Features a rhythm minigame that turned me right off, but hopefully that’s not going to be a major element.

Kenney Game Assets 1: A pack of sprites, fonts, and 3d models for making your own games. I’ve bought a bunch of game asset packs on sale in the past as part of my forlorn goal to actually write one of the six games bouncing around my head. Nothing here is applicable to anything I might do personally.

Sky Rogue: A procedurally-generated flight sim. Had a seizure for me on startup, but eventually loaded and ran fine. Visually interesting. I don’t like flight sims, though, so soft pass.

Celeste: Beautiful 16-bit-styled puzzle platformer. Think it’s in the masocore family, though I didn’t play long enough to be sure. I’m probably going to need to switch to assist mode. I didn’t play too much since I’m not in the mood for a hard game right now, but it’ll be on my list to play again. I think I’ll want to get a gamepad before I try again.

A Short Hike: A cute, mellow exploration game reminiscent of a turn-of-the-century collect-a-thon (though the collection in this is narrow in scope) where you play a bird trying to climb a mountain in a resort town in order to get cell phone reception. Think Animal Crossing: The Breath of the Wild 64. Supergreatfriend played this all the way through last week, so I have little impetus to spend much time with it now, but I think I might get Dylan into it. Worked fine in Linux.

Gladiabots: It’s another squad-based tactical strategy game, but with a twist: you don’t control your squad directly. Instead, you program their AIs using a graphical block-based programming language. I don’t know how much time I’ll spend with it, but Dylan spent the entire time I tried it out nagging me to let him play. I am all for that, except that he misbehaved dreadfully while I was getting ready to install it on his computer, so now no games for him.

Lancer Core Book: First Edition: This is a rulebook for a tabletop RPG. Not really my thing, but the artwork is nice.

MewnBase: A top-down 2D sandbox-survival game. Think The Martian meets Lost in Blue. Where you play as a cat. I died several times before working out how to refill my oxygen, but it’s my own damn fault for skipping the tutorial. Another one Dylan nagged me about. He’s a big Minecraft fan so I’m not surprised. Will probably play again.

Art Sqool: No Linux port, so I didn’t try it, but I saw Supergreatfriend’s stream of it last week and it’s not my thing anyway.

Walden: No Linux port. Pity; looked kind of neat and the production values seem high.

A Mortician’s Tale: Another one I can’t play, looks cool.

Lenna’s Inception: Procedurally generated Zelda-like with some cool twists. Loving it so far. Will definitely be back. Does seem to be a bit of a performance problem on my system, though.

Oikospiel Book I: No Linux port. Don’t have a good sense of what the game’s about either.

Beacon: No linux port. I’m not a big fan of Roguelites these days anyway.

Odd Realm: I was instantly overwhelmed. I think if I were a much younger man, I would’ve been into this. Seems to be something along the lines of Civilization, or maybe closer to Dwarf Fortress? A much bigger game than I can handle right now.

Night of the Consumers: Another Windows-only one. Also, PS1-styled retro is a visual style that I do not have tremendous affection for. I’m seeing more and more of it these days, and more power to the Kids These Days who like it, but my nostalgia runs out with the 2D era, so for me personally, the first generation of 3D consoles trigger only “That is tremendously ugly” in my heart.

Mu Cartographer: Cool-looking game not available for Linux.

EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER: It’s a visual novel-slash-brawler about queer folks defeating fascism by punching it with bio-organic mechs. So basically the year 2020 but more literal. The author describes the Linux port as untested and janky, but all I encountered were some weird pauses during loading. I don’t know if I’ll come back though; I don’t like the fighting segments at all. I really love the visual novel plot, but visual novels aren’t really a genre I’m into.

Hex Kit: An editor for hexgrid maps for tabletop RPGs. Nifty. Seemed to work fine.

Airships: Conquer the Skies: A steampunky sort of military strategy game where you design and customize lighter-than-aircraft to fight in various scenarios. This kept becoming briefly unresponsive, which is disappointing. I don’t know if I’ll come back. This is another of those games which seems way more complicated than I am up for these days, but I also had a hard time backing away from it.

MidBoss: An isomorphic turn-based dungeon crawler where you play as a minor enemy that decides to use its possession ability to work its way up and take over as the dungeon boss. Played completely fine but I’m not sure I’m all that into it. Also, it came as a binary installer, which I know is entirely normal in the Windows world but is super sketch in Linux. The installer also spammed my log file, which is concerning.

Arcade Spirits: A visual novel set in a universe where the ’83 video game crash didn’t happen so video arcades are still a thing. I’m not into visual novels, but the story is okay so far and it ran fine. I am more likely to watch a Let’s Play of this than to actually play it myself.

Minit: Did not run. First game that purported to support Linux but failed. It’s also the first linux game to only come in a 32-bit version. I’m curious about it and will try to sort out the dependencies at some point, but I have a lot of games to get through. Plus ten out of ten for coming as a .deb, but minus several million for not actually specifying its dependencies

2064: Read Only Memories: I’ve played a bit of this before. It’s an adventure game inspired by several things, but most obviously by the early Hideo Kojima game Snatcher. Tried it just enough to verify that it starts on my box.

One Night Stand: Another visual novel, but I’m interested enough to try to meander through it. The sketchy art style is cool.

Laza Knitez!: Not available for linux. Multiplayer deathmatch is not my thing anyway.

Witch Way: Windows only.

Islands: Non-Places: A weird, surrealist sort of art piece. Did not respect my requested resolution or to run windowed instead of fullscreen. Seems short enough that I will probably finish it.

No Delivery: I’ve had good luck with procedurally generated CRPGs so far, so I’m sad this one is windows only.

That completes the first page of the bundle. I got 58 more of these I can do if you and I feel like it. It actually took quite a lot of hours to write this, but it was work I could actually sit down and do, unlike watching a TV show and then writing about it, which requires being able to focus on one thing for longer than I generally can with the kids around. So maybe we’ll do this again soon…

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

This is all building up in service to the ultimate reveal, which still remains kind of vague even in the novel. Most of the way through the book, one of the base’s shuttles crashes after an attack by a new flying variety of bug, resulting in the loss of two members of Phoenix Company, the injury of a third, and the disappearance of Doctor Marks. And it’s at this point that Drew learns his VR suit is fitted with a self-destruct mechanism, ostensibly to provide a reprieve from a painful death in the planet’s toxic atmosphere. This too proves a clue to the conspiracy, as his fallen comrades leave intact corpses, despite the fact that corrosive gasses would not care whether or not they had been euthanized. Michaels maintains that Doctor Marks left the craft of her own volition, rather than being killed by a bug. The injured survivor disappears – they are told he was sent back to Earth for medical treatment, but Drew later confirms that the only gate transport had been two corpses. We are meant to presume he was killed for “knowing too much”, but what became of his body is not disclosed (Unless… Ew. There’s a line where Drew notices something odd about his next meal). Exactly why the shuttle crashed is never fully explained in the game given the actual offensive capability of the natives, but the novel implies that Marks was complicit.

Suspicion falls on Michaels due to his outspokenness, and Saunders asks Drew to spy on him. In the games, Saunders is coded as cartoonishly villainous. His office is decorated like a cathedral, his lies are transparent, he sports cliche “evil” facial hair (except right at the end for reshoots after the actor had shaved). In the book, he’s a pathetic character instead. He slept his way into a position he’s underqualified for and is struggling. This may also be why the cover-up seems so shoddy.

The game tries to be coy about the reveal it’s building up to, but it largely fails to obfuscate the truth meaningfully. Mostly, it’s on the level of, “But maybe the cartoonishly evil UN is actually on the level and doing good things, and Drew is  only suspicious because of his depression, and Michaels is just mentally ill” (Saunders claims that Michaels is suspected of having schizophrenia. In the novel, Drew’s medical background allows him to note that the medical science of 2057 could diagnose that with considerable certainty and would’ve disqualified Michaels from service). There’s an almost insulting moment where the cartoonishly evil UN very unsubtly “warns” Phoenix company that glitches in the VR might cause them to momentarily see the outside environment as idylic and the bugs as humanoid, and they should just ignore that. But for the sake of completeness, we’re offered several “possibilities”

• Technically, Michaels only commits to the idea that the VR is “not accurate”, but is generally presenting the possibility that they are still on Earth, being manipulated by the VR into killing humans as some kind of cover-up.
  • This possibility could be backed up by the reveal that the UN has been massacring civilian populations to halt the spread of the mitochondria virus, might explain why their suits are designed to self-destruct if opened. Michaels had previously been involved in an operation where his VR had misled him into carrying out a political assassination.
• Charlie Becker vacillates about it, but keeps returning to the possibility that they are still on Earth and the gate does not actually do anything at all. Charlie also mentions having seen the landscape outside the base once by accident and described it as beautiful.
• DeSilva, the mechanic, on the other hand, is confident they aren’t on Earth, because the shuttles don’t show damage from pollution.
• The presence of an extinct flower and the claim that the sky is matched to Earth of the past might be an attempt to suggest that the gate is actually a time machine and their actual mission is something akin to “Operation Golden Age” in the Doctor Who serial “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”.
• When Drew shoots one of the flying bugs, he notices that it seems to “break up” cleanly rather than bursting into gore like you’d expect, and the implication seems to be that the flying bugs are actually some kind of machine. I don’t know what to do with this information at all, since it could conceivably fit with the end of the novel, but it directly contradicts all the other versions of the story.
• And, of course, for completeness, maybe the UN is entirely on the level and all the oddities are just coincidence.

Not long after, Drew finds that the sign on Michaels’s door now reads “DELETED” and is summoned to a final meeting with Saunders (In the game, the order of these events is reversed). Realizing that his own “deletion” is likely in the cards, Drew takes the counteragent and has a dreamful sleep, awakened by a general alarm as Phoenix Company is being summoned to defend the base.

While preparing for battle, Drew confronts Sergeant Cranshaw, who confesses to offing Michaels – an interesting divergence from the game, and more importantly, its sequel, which reveals Michaels to have survived. In the game, the final interactive segment is a primitive 3D wireframe shooting game, where Drew and his teammates (rendered, a little on-the-nose, as literal pawns) shoot at wireframe bugs until Drew eventually takes too much damage (Near as anyone can tell, the game just patiently continues to send bugs at you until you lose, though it would be no great effort to extend this segment indefinitely by being even halfway decent at that sort of game). In the novel, things go a bit differently.

With the VR drug neutralized, Drew finds that the bloodlust that has plagued him in three or four passages earlier in the novel has completely evaporated. Unfortunately, the same is not true for his colleagues:

“Almost got me,” her voice reported calmly. “Looks like one of the ground huggers, but the armament is new.”
Ground huggers? What did she mean?
The VR, he realized. He had taken the antidote, so the drug didn’t work in him  anymore. But it did in Sergeant Cranshaw, and the other members of Phoenix Company.
And the drug and VR, together, were telling them that Andrew Griffin was a bug.

 

Yep. It’s an assassination. Though it’s hard to quite understand why it would be set up this way, given that Cranshaw had been established just a page earlier to be perfectly willing to knowingly kill Drew if ordered. And there’s no precise answer to who put the hit out on Drew or why exactly; we sort of assume that this is the work of Saunders because Drew “knows too much”, except that Drew knows approximately nothing, and at least in this version of the story, Saunders seems too passive and weaselly to put together an assassination plot.

The realization that the other see him as a bug convinces Drew that the planet’s deadly conditions must be a lie, and he starts to remove his helmet, somehow forgetting about the self-destruct device until it activates and starts counting down.

In the game, Drew is saved when the euthanasia program crashes, complete with a parody of the Windows Blue Screen of Death. Drew’s reprieve in the novel is a little different. He shoots Cranshaw in self defense, but can’t get his helmet off. Then, out of nowhere, he gets help:

The helmet’s edge cleared his eyes. He looked into the face of a lovely but strangely dressed woman who had soft, curly blond hair. She was framed by a bright blue sky with clouds- a sky so clear it looked scrubbed, fresh, and clean. The woman’s lips moved, but he couldn’t hear her words. The air on his face was soft and aromatic with growing things. A bird sang.
“Oh, my God! Michaels was right. They’re human.”

 

Drew’s line is the same in the game – it’s the last thing that happens before the credits roll. In the novel, it’s a slight anomaly as Drew uses “Gaia” instead of “God” everywhere else. The description of the woman is accurate not to Quantum Gate, but to The Vortex: the cutscene is different in the second game from the first. The actress who appears in the first game has long, dark hair, and is armed. A clip of the second version is on the Quantum Gate disk in some pressings, but doesn’t appear to be accessible. Drew’s description does differ from either game in two very important ways, though. It doesn’t outright contradict them, but it’s impossible to imagine Drew would fail to notice that his savior:

• Looks exactly like Jenny, and,
• Has wings

Both the No One Dreams Here version and the Quantum Gate version of the ending make a big visual point of the fact that Drew’s savior is a winged human (It’s not as in-your-face in The Vortex because the cutscene is a close-up rather than a long shot, but she’s still got the wings). That element seems to be profoundly absent here, and Drew’s description of the destruction of the winged bug from the shuttle implies that they aren’t organic – perhaps in this version the natives are meant to have some kind of wing suit? It certainly seems like it’s important to the ending in this version that the natives (In The Vortex, they’re identified as “Alynde”, but it seems possibly wrong to use the name here as the story is so different) are straightforwardly human, not an alien race that just happens to resemble humans.

So there it is, the big important reveal of Quantum Gate. I think you’d have to be pretty dim not to have guessed that the bugs were really people; there’s no alternative possibility hinted with any real heart to it. Neither Hawkins nor Roach seem to have considered, “They’re still bugs, but they’re intelligent ones who could be reasoned with,” as even worth consideration as a red herring- there are a few joke endings to The Vortex along the lines of, “No, they were bugs all along; them being human is a hallucination,” but even those very straightforwardly assume that bugs = bad. Fair enough I guess.

Continue reading Big F***ing Rock: Quantum Gate, The Novel, Part 3

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

One of the more baffling decisions the book makes is to organize itself after a broadly realistic playthrough of the game. Maybe that’s Prima’s strategy guide sensibilities showing through – you could possibly market this as “Prima’s Extremely Long Winded Guide To Seeing All The Content in Quantum Gate,” As a novel, it is problematic. See, the way Quantum Gate plays is… Well, bad. The linear story plays out all on its own, regardless of player actions, at its own pace. It’s structured as a series of long cutscenes punctuated by brief periods where the player can wander around the base freely to look for a small number of optional cutscenes that are mostly for flavor before Drew is summoned to the next part of the plot. These free-roaming sections are limited, either by a real time limit or a number of moves, I’m not sure which, but you never have enough time to see everything. In a video game, we’d say this is for replayability, but I suspect to Greg Roach, this is what the “interactivity” was all about: the player has to make a choice about what he will see, and the consequences of that choice are nothing so vulgar as an update to the state machine held in the computer’s memory, but rather the consequences are within the player themself, their experience of the story, what conclusions they draw, whether the plot ends up making sense for them (Personally I think it is a bad idea to make that part optional, but who am I to judge).

Recreating this structure in a novel is weird. For example, as soon as Drew wakes up, he notices that he has a message, but assuming it is from his mother, he ignores it. Instead, he… Actually does nothing at all for a bit, because it is time for a narrative digression about the layout of UN bases. Then he notices that he has a message from his mother and watches it. It’s clearly reflective of a player’s experience, being drawn to the computer terminal because the message light is blinking, but then methodically clicking through all the UI options – such as the map – to see what’s there. An actual player will probably watch the message first, of course, but the pretense that this is a proper narrative requires that the chapter end on Drew’s reflections after hearing from his mom.

Later, after the platoon receives their initial briefing, Drew goes to the mess hall, hangs out for a while, then does a training mission… Then goes back to the mess hall and has lunch. That’s because in the game, you have to visit the mess hall twice in two different chapters in order to trigger both sets of cutscenes, but in the novel, neither Drew nor anyone else seems to be working from a normal concept of “lunchtime”. Later, Drew just wanders around the base, going into rooms for no particular reason, because that is what you’d do in the game, because that is where the cutscenes are. Drew spends the next fifty pages or so just wandering around the base to get all the cutscenes, going into rooms that don’t have any access controls, seeing something that contains an oblique conspiracy hint, then being told that he’s not allowed to be there and having to leave. The book makes an utterly unconvincing attempt to justify this with a single line early on that UN bases are designed to assume that the only people allowed in at all have full access to everything inside.

It’s much clearer in the novel just how little Phoenix Company was told before being sent on this mission. When I played the game, I’d assumed that everyone was at least broadly aware of alien life, based on the complete non-reaction everyone has to the news that they have been sent to an alien planet with an toxic atmosphere to murder giant killer insects in order to protect a mining colony. But no, this is everyone’s first introduction to the concept of alien planets and alien bugs. They still have the complete no-sell, “Aw man, killing giant insects? That sounds hard and gross,” reaction instead of a broadly sane, “I am on another planet populated by creatures who breathe chlorine. Excuse me while I have an existential crisis about this.”

Even Drew takes this in stride, and one thing that is certainly present in the game but feels more distracting in a traditional narrative is how everyone takes everything in stride. The novel is better at hinting about the conspiracy it’s working toward, and without the added layer of distraction from the interactive medium, it quickly becomes weird that no one but Drew seems to particularly notice or care about the piss-poor job of covering its tracks the conspirators have done.

One of the first hints in the game is that this mining operation on a planet with a toxic atmosphere only has one mechanic, two shuttles, and zero miners, which seems like a low number for extracting the massive amounts of unobtanium they will need. The game tries to sell us the misdirect that maybe Michaels is just a conspiracy nut for suggesting this to Drew. The novel takes a swing at that too, but also, Drew asks about it. And the base’s one mechanic doesn’t see anything odd about his job. In the book, there’s other details. Drew and Drew alone notices and finds odd that you’re allowed to smoke in a base with a sealed air supply. Drew and Drew alone notices and finds odd that the supposedly caustic atmosphere leaves their shuttles with less corrosion than they’d face from the polluted air anywhere on Earth. Drew and Drew alone asks the question “Where on Earth?” when he’s told that the unrecognizable but “simulated” sky in the rec room is matched to Earth from 500 years earlier, synchronized to the local time of day. Drew alone is bothered by the fact that the plants in the arboretum don’t look quite like any known species (Okay, actually Whalen does care about that briefly, on account of for that scene, Drew is trying to not care about the transparent cover-up and the plot needs someone to nudge him back into action). Drew and Drew alone finds it weird that he’s got a shower that uses actual water, when the use of water for bathing is illegal on Earth due to chronic shortages.

Oh fuck. Environmental collapse due to vaguely specified government and cultural mismanagement? Water shortages? Invading another planet for resources? It’s Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II again, isn’t it? Is a broad Rush Limbaugh impersonation going to show up at some point?

The page count gives us a chance to delve more into the characters of Drew’s teammates. In the game, Private Michaels is the only character to get any real focus. It helps that his actor is the only person in this thing with a hint of charisma, at least outside of the joke endings. Michaels has a massive rebellious streak that gets him into trouble. The book adds that he’s a notorious ladies’ man, but he’s only in the military for the money and doesn’t like to ask questions. The book gives us more details about the other soldiers as well. There’s Hynick, for instance. In the game, he appears in one major scene where he flirts clumsily with the base doctor, and she rejects him by having the Sassy Black Nurse give him a giant comedy syringe of B12 in the keister. In the book, he’s described as being a notorious ladies’ man, with a rebellious streak, but he’s only here for the money and doesn’t ask questions. Then there’s Hawkins. Now Hawkins is only there for the money, and doesn’t ask questions, despite his rebellious streak. He’s also a bit of a ladies’ man. Now, it’s the early ’90s, so Whalen, being a girl, is not a ladies’ man. She prefers the gentlemen instead. But she’s got a rebellious streak, and she’s only there for the money and doesn’t ask questions of a non-botanical nature. And there’s a handful of others in Phoenix Company, all noted to various degrees for their rebelliousness, their incuriousity, and their sexual prowess.

Yeah, the characters here aren’t really all that distinct from each other. It seems like maybe they were meant to be at some point, but ultimately Jane Hawkins had no better sense of them than, “This is a military unit in a work of fiction whose sympathies are broadly aligned with counterculture.” There are basically three flavors of military unit in Science Fiction (Maybe in fiction in general, even): the ultra-professionals, the psychotic-antagonists, and the ragtag-group-of-miscreants-and-rebels. We’re told up front that Phoenix Company is composed entirely of soldiers who had been kicked out of other platoons for various behavioral reasons, which would make it strange that Drew, a new recruit, would be thrown in with their lot, but apparently the Beatrice corporation are prescient enough to recognize an adventure game protagonist when they see one, and decide that he too is “damaged goods” due to his deep emotional trauma. Besides, he fits the other criteria as well, given his frequent asides about how much he doesn’t want to think or question the glaring signs of conspiracy around him, and his legendary sexual prowess.

Sigh. I don’t really want to talk about that part, but it’s hard to cover the middle of this book without it. After spending way too long with Drew wandering around the base, he goes to a formal reception – the first bit of plot that is original to the novel – and the narrative gets strangely horny for about fifty pages or so. We learn in rapid succession that Michaels is sleeping with Cranshaw, their Sergeant (Drew uses the word “boinking”, despite ostensibly being an adult and not a sitcom teenager); and the base doctor, mere hours after forcefully rejecting and injecting him, has decided to sleep with Hynick. Drew offhandedly reflects that he’d slept with Whalen during basic training. And Doctor Marks, the inventor of the Quantum Gate, is sleeping with Colonel Saunders, head of the base. This is offered, I think, primarily as a “fix” to the oddity that a Colonel would be in charge of the plan to save the Earth from the total collapse of its ecosystem, rather than a general officer (I’m not convinced this is actually wrong given how narrow the scope of the operation is, but whatever). With basically no prompting, Drew intuits that Saunders had seduced Marks to get his position, but had genuinely fallen in love with her in the process, and is heartbroken now that she is pulling away from him as she reconsiders the morality of their evil plot. Dr. Marks is played by a middle aged woman who looks sort of like the Joe Estevez to Louise Fletcher’s Martin Sheen, but the narrator keeps stressing how sexy she is, and I’ll try not to judge. Also, it turns out that Whalen’s hometown just got destroyed by a firestorm, so she’s sad about that and has sex with Hawkins to make herself feel better.

In this section, Drew also has several meetings with Charlie Becker, the gate operator and cheap foreign bootleg Clint Howard. In the game, he’s a creepy stalker, obsessed with Dr. Marks, and you almost think they might be setting up a story path where he becomes a threat, though his plot doesn’t go anywhere. This doesn’t come through nearly so strongly in the novel. Here, Charlie is still pathetic, but broken more than creepy – it’s implied that he’s being constantly bullied by an officer who appears in the game only to kick Drew out of the Gate room. Charlie is even helpful, dispensing plot tokens about the details of the conspiracy. As in the game, he’s the first person to raise the possibility that they weren’t actually transported to an alien world (Though in the novel, this is contradicted by the fact that he later mentions having gotten a brief glimpse of the outside).

The “horny section” is also where we get a lot of the details about Drew’s backstory with Jenny. The game is incredibly coy about revealing the terrible trauma that drove Drew to the military. You never get a full, canonical explanation, and some of the facts are muddled by what may be references to other events that simply remind Drew of it – flashbacks about Jenny’s fate might mingle with memories of his father’s death, for example.

The novel is not coy. Her first mention is forthright: Drew joined the army because he was trying to forget about, “Pretty Jenny, who would never be pretty again.” Jenny had been Drew’s fiancee. They’d met when she made a bizarre and possibly psychotic pick-up attempt at a mall by pretending to have found a wad of cash she believed he’d dropped (The novel retains without explanation the flub where Jenny refers to the money as “dollars” rather than “plats”, the unit of currency used everywhere else). After confessing to the deception and complimenting Drew’s ass, they had coffee, then scotch, then sex. Drew reflects that women often tried to pick him up in malls, I guess because he is, of course, a bit of a ladies’ man in addition to having a rebellious streak and also only doing it for the money and not asking questions. But over time their romance had hit a rough spot, starting with a big fight over Drew’s love of football – Jenny couldn’t stand it because of the violence, having seen kids badly injured by football sticks while emulating the pros. This had come to a head in a fight over children – this not being a very clever novel and Jenny being a woman, she wanted them, Drew wasn’t ready, and they’d fought. Jenny had left in a rage and gotten into a car accident that had left her badly scarred on one side of her face (In No One Dreams Here, it sounds like she lost an arm as well. In The Vortex, it is implied that Drew was driving, though it it’s not quite clear if Jenny was a passenger, or if Drew actually drove his car into hers, or if Jenny was there at all, and those points might differ depending on which timeline Drew settles into). Upon getting the news from his mother, Drew immediately set off on a three-day bender which ended with him enlisting.

Continue reading Don’t ask about the forehead symbol: Quantum Gate, the novel, Part 2

1993 somehow became a very long time ago.

Pinning down an exact date can be difficult. My copy is version 1.2 and appears to have been created on January 18, 1995, but the latest date on the actual content (rather than the installer and support libraries) is November 8, 1993, so let’s go with that.

It is November 8, 1993. America is still reeling from the deaths of Vincent Price and River Phoenix in the past few weeks. The Maastricht Treaty came into effect last week, one of the foundational treaties creating the European Union (“When was the EU founded?” is an even murkier question than “When did Quanum Gate come out?” but the Maastricht Treaty’s start date of November 1, 1993 seems like maybe as good a date as any). Roger Moore is recovering from prostate removal; New York is recovering from having elected Rudy Guilliani as mayor. I’m sure he’ll prove entirely respectable and not a huge public embarrassment on the world stage.

At the top of the Billboard Hot 100 this week is Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” followed by Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants”. Also in the top ten are “Shoop” and “Whoomp”. It’s a ’90s thing; you wouldn’t understand. Out on home video this week are The Muppet Christmas Carol and Sliver, the successful but not very good erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone that isn’t Basic Instinct. In actual theaters, at least a few, I assume, are Look Who’s Talking Now and Robocop 3.

On the small screen, the 1992 animated Addams Family series ends its run, though if you’re starved for the family, Addams Family Values will be out in theaters around the middle of the month. The Nanny premiered last week. Other shows with new episodes include Cafe Americain (A dumb show about expats in France which I occasionally think of because of a joke involving ice cream made from all natural mint, chocolate, and Chip), The Mommies (a shockingly bad sitcom built around a very good comedy duo who had a series of very successful and hilarious commercials for cling-wrap. Hollywood would fail to learn their lesson and later try to turn the Geico Cavemen into a sitcom as well), Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman and Walker, Texas Ranger. Star Trek the Next Generation this week is “Attached“, the one where Crusher and Picard get mind-linked for some reason. Deep Space Nine gives us “The Rules of Acquisition“. For the kids, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers takes this week off, but will return next week with “Calamity Kimberly“, tragically not the one set in the wild west (but it does have an inexplicable scene of the clay-golem henchmen dressed as waiters). This may be the first time I’ve had the opportunity to link to Samurai Karasu’s currently idle Power Rangers review blog, and given the time window his blog covers, it might well be the last, so I’ll darned well take the chance. Rosie O’Donnell hosts Saturday Night Live.

Japan receives Mega Man 6; the US will have to wait until April. Sam and Max Hit the Road arrives for DOS machines. At the moment, DOS’s successor isn’t quite a viable game platform yet, but it’ll edge slightly closer Thursday, when Microsoft releases Windows 3.11. And this.

Or rather, not this. Not quite.

Hyperbole Studios was founded by Greg Roach in 1990 to explore this amazing new interactive medium that could create virtual narratives unlike anything seen before which totally weren’t those lowbrow proletarian bleep bloop “video games”, but rather a new form of Interactive Cinema. Look, the pretension gets to me as well, but back then, everyone was talking like this. I assume the money liked it. Anyway, if you’re a follower of The Spoony One, you might know Hyperbole from their first major release, The Madness of Roland. Later, they’d have their biggest hit with 1998’s The X-Files Game. Between those two, they released a pair of FMV games titled Quantum Gate and Vortex: Quantum Gate 2.

They are terrible. Many of you probably just took that for granted when I said “FMV Games”. But I like FMV games. I actually think it’s a great loss to the video game medium that the form was basically completely abandoned a decade before it was technologically feasible to actually do them. I find it slightly daunting that in the year of our lord 2020, people marvel at the technological ability to use computers and science and spandex body-suits with ping-pong balls on them to… Make a famous actor look almost but not quite like they do in real life, only dead-eyed and slightly creepier. I unironically love the idea of using the basically perfected science of digital photography to incorporate actual real-life non-computer-generated scenes in interactive media.

I also ironically love the the over-the-top audacity of trying to lego together an interactive experience out of three-second low resolution quicktime clips of local community theater actors in front of a greenscreen, slapping it on a hypercard stack, and inserting a subplot about parallel universes to justify the fact that your game engine can’t track state properly. And there’s still a little part of me that remembers the incredible knock-your-socks-off experience of seeing television-style real-live-action appear in a little frame on a computer screen in 1993. It was like a magic trick. My parents were early adopters of home computers in the 8-bit era; my first computer was a TI-99/4A. But having made the investment, we stuck in the 8-bit era a bit longer than most, so my first PC was a 386, and, in a really weird bit of historical anecdata, my first specifically-PC video game was, of all things, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, a 1991 ICOM adaptation of the board game using full-motion video.

Anyway, it was about 1996 or so when I first encountered Quantum Gate. I bought it, Critical Path (another terrible FMV game, where you save Tia Carrere from death traps in a post-apocalyptic banana republic by typing three digit codes into the local despot’s automated security system), and another FMV game called Chaos at the K-Mart in Stevensville for two dollars a piece. Quantum Gate was a particular combination of cumbersome to get working, conceptually interesting, hammy, broken, and obviously just a trailer for the “real” game that it stuck in my head for several years until I managed to track down the “sequel”. Which was also bad but at least had an illusion of meaningful choice.

Fast forward about a quarter century (holy shit, I am old) and one of my favorite Internet Video Game Streaming Personalities, supergreatfriend (or “Mr. Greatfriend” as my daughter calls him) happens upon Quantum Gate and Interacts his way Through it for his thrice-weekly game stream. And in the course of his playthrough, the fun and friendly gang of people who watch his gaming stream dug up the interesting facts that Vortex: Quantum Gate 2 has a soundtrack album (Not making this up: if you have Amazon Music Unlimited, say “Alexa, Play the soundtrack to Vortex Quantum Gate Two.” She’ll do it. Really) and the first game was novelized.

Well, we have long since established that I have a small amount of disposable income and no taste, so of course I bought the book. Of course I did. I’m that kind of idiot.

Prima Publishing prints (or printed, as they have been online-only since last year) video game strategy guides. You’ve probably heard of them. I think I had the Prima guide for one of the Zelda games. For some part of the ’90s, they dipped their toes into video game-related fiction, producing hardback novels associated with the FMV Laywer game In the 1st Degree (this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it. Maybe this will inspire someone to play it) and The 7th Guest, and paperbacks connected to The Pandora Directive, Realms of Arkania, Star Control, X-COM, and Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. Well, I know what’s going on my Quarantine Reading List (The answer is nothing because I have two young children and it often takes me a whole week to read a single page of text).

It is well known, and Greg Roach openly admits it, that Quantum Gate and The Vortex were not actually meant to be two games; the publisher pressured them to get something to market early. So they pulled a Metal Gear Solid V and chopped the first act off of a game originally titled No One Dreams Here to become the short, teaser-ish Quantum Gate, while the bulk of the story continued to be developed into the much longer The Vortex. As such, it’s a little weird that only the first game received a novelization. Weirder still, Greg Roach’s forward to the novel claims that this is the “real story” – the version he always wanted to tell had it not been for those evil game publishers (Roach’s vitriol at Media Vision is not unwarranted. Another thing which happened in November 1993 was that Food Network came into existence, and if they were hard up for content at the beginning, they shoulda made a show about Media Vision on account of how much they were cooking the books) and the short-sighted proletariat who “Couldn’t conceive of anything other than a game,” (Pretentious twat) forcing him to compromise his artistic vision.

Some of this is explained by another revelation from the forward: There’s another version of this game. Quantum Gate started life as an “Interactive Sci-Fi Storyplace” in issue 2.3 of Hyperbole’s e-zine. Today we’d probably call it a Visual Novel. It’s a clumsy black-and-white animation in Macromind Director (an ancestor of Shockwave) that covers roughly the last ten minutes of Quantum Gate along with a massive text dump that establishes the main character’s backstory. So it does seem that the events of the second game weren’t part of the initial concept. It’s likely that the idea for where the cliffhanger ending of the first game was to lead was developed later. Certainly, The Vortex pursues its overall themes with a different character than Quantum Gate. The first game, for its trappings and ambiguities, is primarily a conspiracy thriller; the second is more of an existential mystery.

But as usual, I’ve gone fifteen hundred words without actually getting into what the book is about. So let’s fix that. Quantum Gate the novel was written by Jane E. Hopkins, who you might know from such books as… Quantum Gate. Yeah, this is her only novel, at least under this name. That’s promising.

So what is Quantum Gate about? What is the epic and mind-bending plot that Greg Roach brought forth to revolutionize interactive entertainment? How can I possibly capture such a deep and complex story in just a few words here?

Continue reading I Hope This Doesn’t Hurt: Quantum Gate, the novel, Part 1