Cloudpunk: lost like tears in rain

 

…loading //:: Ice_breaker.Mc

 

The genre of cyberpunk has an unspoken rule. Wikipedia defines the genre as lowlife and hightech, which functionally speaking is fine. The bvgroti has his own stipulations. The bvgroti is a fanatic. He reads gibson like it’s scripture. Adhering to it harder than a computer does a line of code. Bvgroti knows that cyberpunk is when tech breaks society, and consequently society becomes incomprehensible and incohesive. A cyberpunk protagonist who has any idea of what’s going on? Yeah? Nice oxymoron, you Wilson.

 

I was given Cloudpunk by a friend; they didn’t say why, but they said it was up my alley: they were right.

 

Access-grant: #error%353* message: please report to admin

 

You play as a delivery driver, just arrived in the city, working their first night on the job for an illegal delivery company: cloud punk. The city is falling apart. Systems fail at random and the city engineers have no idea what’s going on. If you smell social allegory, I have some good news for you cupcake, your brain isn’t totally fried yet. Lets stick some trodes.

 

The gameplay isn’t complicated, you have a hover car, you fly it about the city, picking up and dropping off packages while heavy synth music and rain hammers down from on high. You meet characters along the way, they all have a lot of personality squeezed into a few fleeting lines. You get out your car and walk around sets of interconnected platforms, where you can buy noodles and watch the ceiling of clouds pulsate in swirling mauve tinted patterns

 

Days later I'm talking to a friend pointing out how so many of the characters in this game are very obvious sci-fi references, he hadn't noticed. The hardboiled android detective Huxley is my favorite character, when i tell him he goes quiet for a moment, at the time I didn't really notice.

 

The game is pretty even though it’s rendered in chunky pixel form. The character models don’t really line up to their head art, but none of that bothered me, it uses its style to go for scale, having large busy environments that won’t melt your gpu because their pixels are the size of your fist. What it does with the environment is smother you with ambience, it’s very immersive, better than any stimsim.

 

The emphasis on the game is not the challenge, the way it keeps you engaged with the story is the decisions the player is given; i don’t think the decision affect the story in any meaningful way, but they clearly affect other characters, and i can’t help but care a bit about them; asking the player to make judgment calls about individuals with limited information and with questions that often exist in gray scale. It shouldn’t work, but the questions are often actually interesting and with no clear answer.

 

My favorite was the quarantine block. There is a gas leak in a city block, you have room for three people in your car, there are six people to choose from, the company wants to make sure the job pays for itself. Some of the people are horrible, there is a CEO who doesn’t know what company he runs, a rude scientist, a haunty posh woman (Mrs Octavia Butler). Then there are the nice but poor people, a retired army sarg, an android fresh out the box, and a kind doctor.

 

To my shame I left the new android behind and took the posh woman. I had dropped her off at an apartment earlier in the game. I had met her husband, an android; they had both been so privileged that they barely saw me as a person, but they were happy together and that meant something to me. If i hadn’t known them, would i have picked differently? I didn’t know the others; they could have had family too… fuck.

 

Each delivery is its own little story, and they often link back and reference one another. There’s a lot of emphasis on android and automata as second class citizens, it’s used mostly as a race allegory, and the story is very quick to stress the wealth divide and how exploitative the system is. It leaves one with a lot to think about, and while cruising around the city; that’s what I was doing, quietly mulling over the things i’d been seeing, the lite challenge supports the story by giving it room to breathe, it’s good game design.

 

This all culminates in the driver meeting the city's emergent Ai consciousness and being asked to sort the mess out. How? Delivery and choice making, of course. Needless to say the story is loaded with the feels, I was surprised at how moving it was, that each character with so little dialogue manages to connect so easily with me. It’s a lovely short little game. Best experienced and not taken secondhand.

 

 

 

 

 

Eu4: the true essence of an untamed opium addiction

 

Listen, in my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some lousy advice and I hadn't really thought about it until now. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember you’re a fuck-up and will never amount to anything. 

It all came to a head about a week ago, slumped in bed at about four in the morning when my pet woke me from a reverie, most serene, about the declaration of the Islamic catboy-republic. It was then that the lurking shadow that had stalked me for weeks was unmasked. I had a problem, I was getting too into Europa universalis 4 (Eu4) and would have to take drastic measures. 

It started with a sale two years ago, the game was going for something petty, under a quid, though the real cost would be far higher. I played some of the tutorial and it didn’t really click, so like the one ring it was lost to time, until a hobbit, or hard drive clean up, found it. I was making space for trashy third tier video-games when I realized it was still installed, just sitting there, waiting patiently for my return. 

I have to explain something if we’re to proceed. I love strategy games, I love them too much. It's an open ended brain sink, and my thoughts will churn through hypotheticals and tactics whether I choose to or not. I am only ever a miss-click away from falling back into a hole and losing thirty hours to the game itself and a month of productive thinking spent strategizing. 

So, when I start up a simulation of the medieval world, with grand strategic objectives and considerable mechanical depths, I may as well have been smoking opium. 

It took three false starts before I got the hang of things, and even then I was an ass-clown. The game is not forgiving and has a learning curve like the white cliffs of Dover. 

I was playing as the ottomans, as the game informs you they are easy enough to start out with, and I’m quite fond of Islamic history. So anyway, I bungle the seizing of Albania, Greece, and Constantinople along with a number of territories out east. My economy is in shambles, my armies are few and without manpower, and I am without allies. I was unaware of half of those issues at the time though, because I was too busy diving through a sea of menus and screens trying to figure out what corruption is, and why and if I should care about the privileges of the merchant class. 

Things go from bad to worse, when Hungry seized most of the Balkans, including Wallachia and I only got scraps by joining in on their unfettered conquest of rage. It’s easy enough though, say’s I; I’ll just fight them for it. 

Six glorious years later a thing called Poland/Lithuania is kicking my teeth in like the casual I am, I reload a save rather than allow the diplomatic wedgy to continue. This is the first of seven attempts to topple that alliance over the course of two hundred years. I would reload after each attempted war, and come to think of them as the imagined war of ottoman humiliation. They account for half my playtime, roughly. 

I got better at managing the economy, it's easy when you're not a person-of-different-ideological-stance, I built larger armies that were bigger and more huge militarily, along with some heftier horde and sizable soldieries, and I picked off smaller isolated nations at moments of weakness, slowly growing into a regional power. 

Despite this, the other thing the ottomans were good at was melting Mamluks, which ruled over Egypt and the Levant, historically they fell in three years, in my game they only ever lost a single province to me, during a protracted multi-lane war between, myself, Persia, Russia and the polish commonwealth and them (which we technically lost) I had gotten good enough to levee large number instead of using those filthy stupid tactics. I could trade bodies until only my troops were left but this was slow and costly. Thought it allowed me to gobble up Persia and Georgia and oh god do you see the problem?

This is barely a third of the wars fought, I still haven’t gotten around to talking about how the game is even played, what any of the menus do, how things like tech and ideas work. The game even in its simplified based form is a sprawling mess of menus and sliders to juggle. 

It’s immensely satisfying to balance a country's budget, to go from being thousands of ducats in debt to becoming an economic powerhouse over the course of a few decades of good management. It tickles my dopamine receptors to the point where my day to day drudgery is merely a vehicle to fantasize about my next fix. 

It even invaded my inner sanctum of dreams where there is normally a baseline of deranged rambles (I'm not joking), then my sleep consisted of pouring over menus and tweaking sliders as I angled for my next shot at those Shitlords the Hungarians. 

It was becoming mentally exhausting, and I was denied any satisfaction in simpler things. So I did what I had to. I deleted my save files, not just the current one, but every backup and what if. Then, I uninstalled the game, and got ready to sweat it out.

For another two nights the dreams kept up, but without the hope of the save files to come back to, the fever broke and I became myself once again. A third night passed and I awoke feeling less like a caliph and more like the smuck I am. It wasn’t good, but it was necessary. 

I am just taking every day as it comes now, trying to stay clean. It’s been a week since I got my life back and I’ve not looked back. Choose life! Choose to not play Eu4. I kind of want to go again but maybe this time I’ll play someone else? The need is still there burning through me. But for now, just for today i’m clean, and hopefully tomorrow too, and every tomorrow after that. 

 

World of warships: mid-way for anime discourse?

 

World of boats? World of warships? Worship warships. Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe describes boats or something, and that big old swirly boi in Norway: before this year AD 2022 I'd never heard of this story, but now the first two books of the year I’ve read have both referenced it. Not only does this confirm the Mandela effect as real but that it specifically targets Norway! Gothic themes! And liminality! as its textual mediums.

Last night I got back from fetching a rich and succulent slice of my brownie to find two friends engaged in the debate that had defined my understanding of modernity: anime ye or nay? Silently I press my face to the door of this conversation and peer in. one argues it’s good init, and that they like it; the other argues that it’s kind of got some awful tropes and is generally problematic, so they avoid it.

Corithians 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

I was once a weeb, a long time in a galaxy far far away. This debate was one I had found myself pondering from time to time. It is my Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe. I sit on the swirling edge of an infinite abyss that reaches far down into the underland. I must throw myself from my heavy boat and cling to a barrel to survive.

 

As a woke cuckold with weebish tendencies I am in the perfect position to spear this debate. But I find myself unkeen to pick apart this we(e)b in all its intricacies. So I hold my silences and boot up the world of warships.

 

The game is about boats and bots in boat and they do shooty at each other and you grind for new boats to shoot at each other with. The phrase “lead your shots” has been said to me in excess of fifty times.

 

What is problematic? It’s generally raised as a synonym for questionable, more specifically, the question is one of moral integrity and the discomfort a piece of media causes in its representations.

 

I fired a salvo at a boat, and some of the shots hit. The aiming was fairly intuitive, it made sense to me; I realize I am unsatisfied with any experience that is too convenient. I consider driving nails into my hands to increase the challenge.

 

When they spoke of anime, I’m not sure they meant all of the animated media japan produces; maybe they did? But if i was willing to whittle down to a more streamlined interpretation: the epicentre of the problematic weeb shit is in the shounen genre. It is here in that matrix of adolescence that the world holy trifecta of violence, lust and emotional immaturity comes to hang its hats.

 

The boat I'm in is hit by a string of shots, she’s on fire and taking on water. I press R and now that’s not a thing apparently, cool.

The seinen genre is the next age bracket up from shounen. It’s still fairly fightly fighty, but tends to have less horny and more complex themes: don’t get me wrong it’s still probably problematic.  Berserk is the stand out of the genre and it’s got some pretty nasty allusions to sexual assault; as to whether it’s just for shock value or if it adds to development of the text is largely up to the readers judgment… it is a question, and causes discomfort and… fuck it’s problematic

My positioning is piss poor, a pair of cruisers flank me on either side, as I chase one the other fires a volley of torpedoes into my stern. A third ship is peppering with me and my health is whittled down fast. I go full send on the throttle and prepare for a desperate ramming manoeuvre.

 

It occurs to me that only a hardened weeb bothers to dissect the shifting attitudes in weeb sub-genres, only someone who had immersed themselves into the genre could split hairs as such, and that only someone who acknowledges the flaws in the genre could then give an appraisal of their impacts. To bring up berserk’s shittyiness is almost sacrilege. I am not in a perfect position at all. I am alien to both parties here. I am too critical of the genre to relate to the causal enjoyer, but too steeped in my crusty weebism to relate my understanding to an outsider.

I feel my ship pulled into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe. it’s slick oily abyss coats the surface of my person and I sink down, and down. Pulled under into the crushing pressure, alone and isolated. In Disco Elysium there is an empty land in the world, called the pale yonder; it is a stretch of white abyss and coats much of the surface of the world.

 It occurs to me that whether a blackened sea or white desert, anything so unbroken and absolute is a void which threatens to consume all. The interplay of voids now are like the pages in a manga, but is there a true synthesis going on? Or does each void only serve to bring the other into sharper relief: the Maelström by Edgar A Poe?

 

 

Shogun 2: The path of the samurai/ how I got my life back

 

I reached a stolid impasse in my review. My grasp on the medium of both text and gaming was become unbearably powerful, causing lesser minded peons, those less texturally adjusted to languid and baboonish prose, to scoff and say such daft things as:

“I'm glad you were able to determine that he doesn't, in fact, ever get to an actual point. I had to stop halfway through, I was getting a headache from the deafening sound of him patting himself on the back for being the smartest person ever.”

Yeah mate (u/IfIMayBeKobold), well if you’re struggling that much maybe go limber up with some James Joyce.

Well despite vowing never to give into their remarks, I felt very much that i’d been cancelled. Not in the sense that I had said something to cause offense, but that there was now a general disinterested by the Plebeian masses in my enriching their days with the first thing that sprang forth from my tea-addled brain like Zeus producing Athena.

But no habit can be kicked forever, and I'm due for a relapse: So without further ado, shogun 2!

Total war and I have an abusive relationship, she alienates me from friends and family, controls where I go and who I see, then blames me for everything that goes wrong. Despite, or maybe because of this, I love her.

When we went to Japan, I put together an elite force of gun-wielding samurai, horse archers, cannon, ninjas and just all that good stuff. She slapped it all out of my hand, total defeat. She took my bus pass and made us walk home in the middle of a rain storm. Soaked through, and crying I shuffled inside where she set her arms around me, and told me I was doing it all wrong. I was acting according to my interests, when really I should have been paying more attention to hers.

Peasants, hundreds of them, an endless horde of rice cultivating blokes wearing those hats, i CBA to look up the name, and wielding the mightiest little pokey things, (spears?) In all the world. These are what my girl wanted, and by god I didn't want her to escalate things. So I went along with it and won a string of battles, knowing that by doing this there was less chance she’d take my things without asking.

We stayed in together, used the forts to shelter our fragile relationship from the scrutiny of the other high ranking Ronin. When the peasants got angry, I appeased them by giving them money, or temples, anything to stop them smashing my favourite mug in the sink out of spite.

I marched and marched and marched. Hours went by, and I was an unstoppable force, unwavering and unwilling to move out my lane. It became too much, I couldn’t spend my every waking second longing for her approval so I left and joined a Tibetan monastery... airways economy class flight back home, I rushed home, packed my things and decided to move back into my parents where I could let my broken self-esteem fester… but before I left i knelt down, then fell on all fours, i knew what had to be done; I made a huge shit on her favourite plant pot. I’m not ashamed of myself. It needed to happen

.

The power was mine again, and with it I uninstalled the game and got back to my life of salt laden Csgo matches, and shooting up league of legends in some run down garage behind a papa johns.

warcrimes: red drogon

 Wargame red dragon:

Hey hey people BVGROTI here 

Do you like strategy? Do you long for the thrill of… running out of fuel? Do you wish the cold war had been just a little hotter? Well, I've got the very thing to scratch your soviet era itch- wargame: red dragon. 

The game chronicles the timeless struggle of getting Kyle to leave base and do more than launch cluster munitions at the enemy spawn. The game chronicles the timeless struggle of having Stan screaming down your ear hole to launch an all out offensive and break the enemy line while you’re comfortable trading them down at a 2:1 ratio. The game chronicles the timeless struggle of Corey funnelling all 60 of his t-34 tanks straight into your spawn only to have them run out of fuel just before they reach your FOB. 

The game is stressful, unforgiving and extremely vaccinated. But how do I give myself PTSD from a top down strategy game: simple, you Build a deck and play. 

There are nations to choose from, eras to limit yourself to and specialisation. You could decide to be Norway; like the mead drinking Viking of your dreams, you could decide to specialize in being airborne; because what's more Viking than being in a helicopter? You decide to be pre-1980; because that’s roughly when Vikings existed in real life. Only your plan is ruined when you learn there are no helicopters in Norway, it’s too cold; they all went out for a pack of smokes and ended up migrating south for winter. Welcome to wargame: red dragon. 

(Kyle's defensive line is 50 miles south of the frontline, and he has just been asked to move up) 

So instead you play American, you pick some infantry, tanks, a few artillery pieces and some plucky aircraft and you’re ready to take on the whole damn empire. Five minutes later your tanks have run out of fuel, your aircraft have been swatted by their ground defences and infantry are being roasted under a gentle glaze of kosher napalm. 

This is a strategy game, and your plan of fighting the enemy on even terms was a stupid one. Bring recon, bring logistics. Land a control helicopter in the vehicle spawn right next to their base and drop twenty tanks on their doorstop. Deceive! bait enemy aircraft by leaving your infantry out in the open while a maw of anti-air waits in the bushes. War is hell and your tactics need to be underhand, dubious and in violation of the Geneva convention. As sun tzu said “they don’t ask how, they ask how many.” 

(your 140 point tanks being roasted like chestnuts, colourised)

So why play this at all, well it’s simple: the joy of combined arms warfare. Everything has a counter, everything has a purpose, and if properly cheesed any clusterfuck can be turned into a blitzkrieg. Refuel your tanks, rearm your helicopters, cluster bomb the bridges and watch as your infantry end their attempt at an amphibious landing. You need to be able to predict what the enemy has and choose appropriate counters and positions for them; or if you’re a congenital moron with no imagination, you could use recon. 

what's the difference between the Commies and imperialist capitalism? Well the answer is simple, it's not their stance on human rights. The commies made more of it, and the capitalists had to pay shipping costs. Bluefor generally has an edge of quality but Redfor are going to be mailing the shit through your letterbox in bulk, it’s recorded delivery. 

(abrams gang rolling into Juliet) 

The game is best played multiplayer, but under no circumstances engage with the community. They’re toxic, mutated and riddled with smooth brains. The global chat is among one of the most offensive and hateful of any online and receives exactly zero moderation. Tread with caution. 

Among us - all star

Somebody once told me the impostor is gonna roll me

I ain't the sharpest tool on the ship

She was looking kind of sus with her finger and her thumb

In the shape of an "L" on her lips

Well, the murders start coming and they don't stop coming

Fed to the rules and I hit the button running

Didn't make sense not to live for fun

Your brain gets smart but your friends play dumb

So much to fix, so much to see

So what's wrong with taking the vents?

You'll never know if you don't go

You'll never vote if you don't guess

Hey now, you're an imposter

Get your game on, go KILL THEM ALL

Hey now, you're a rock star

Get the stab on, get played

And all that lying is gold

Only being seen breaks the flow

Space is a cool place, and they say it gets colder

You're sus right now, wait 'til you get bolder

But the reactor meltdown begs to differ

Judging all the holes in the camera picture

The line we skate is getting pretty thin

The rooms getting warm so you might as well sing

My pants are on fire, how 'bout yours?

That's the way I like it and I'll never get bored

Hey now, you're an impostor

Get your game on, go stab, green

Hey now, you're a rock star

Get lied to, get played

All bullshitters are gold

Only visual tasks break the game

Somebody once asked

Could I vote for red?

"I need to get myself away from this guy"

I said, "Yep, what a concept

I could use a little sus myself

And we could all use an EMERGENCY MEETING"

Well, the votes start coming and they don't stop coming

Voted out for nothing and the votes are still coming

Didn't make sense not to live for stabs

Your friend gets smart but your head gets blow

So much to do, so much to see

So what's wrong with turning the lights out ?

Pink was the impostor

Victory

All in for Alien: isolation. Social distancing the smart way!

A lady bird wanders up along the diamond pattern on my binds. It fumbles, changing approach as it winds this way and that, always moving forwards. It gives the creature a sort of intrepid disposition. I look back up to check on its progress, it’s gone.

Alien is classic horror, if you don’t count the later sequels. HR Giger dreamt of bizarre semi-organic shapes committed to a blended display of erotism and violence… like a funko-pop getting it cock out. The notion of the alien's life cycle is taken from parasitic wasps, and so the alien stands as an aberration of the reproductive process, like being banged by a funko-pop and popping out little john Oliver funko pops, it’s strange at first, almost comically so, then they catch on to what's happened, the manufacturer hooks you up an assembly line and compressing you down in that purely mechanical role of shitting out funko-pops, and you wonder… is this art?

 Anyway, alien isolation is another one of those horror darlings that rears its head every few years and reminds everyone there’s more to life than battle royales and dabbing. It recently went to cheap and I hate myself, so I decided to whittle down the number of clean pants to a starling minus four.

The plot isn’t important, other than: space station, alien, trapped. Though, I found the world building oddly endearing. The style of Alien at the time was vaguely futuristic, so to invoke it now feels distinctly retro, so much so that the last two films don’t really bother. The space station here is directly ripped from the ship in the first film, some sections feeling deliberately shot-for-shot like the crew quarters, it almost  feels like the same stock modules were used for both, replaceable interchangeable parts like nearly any shopping or town centres. Though the slight twist here is that the station itself is antiquated, as are its androids; the whole place is in a state of decay. So this is gothic-retro-futurism. The abandoned shopping centre not yet demolished, that in its turn vastly outstrips our capacity as a species to date… it seems almost fatalistic to see that our future accomplishments are nothing more than labelled boxes waiting to rot.

Isn’t this meant to be scary and not just depressing? You can’t expect me to be scared when I want to die as it is. Now don’t worry my precious rhetorical device, your concerns, though they be imagined, will be addressed shortly, as one might presuppose by your very being a rhetorical device; hence there no greater need of elaboration. We all know this was signposting.

Androids exist on a spectrum with an uncanny valley about ¾ of the way to human. Just before human is the case of superhuman autism that many tropes of androids depict, think commander data from star-trek or that one from the big bang theory, i don’t know never watched the show. This weirdly enough is where most androids in Alien, or its sequels, tend to fall. However keeping up the retro feel the androids on this station have been thrust so far into the uncanny valley it’s become an uncanny Mariana trench.

Glowing eyes, wax skin and voice lines that are all double entendres for beating the shit out of you. The fact they don’t seem to have any idea of the context of what they say is worse somehow, these things make my skin crawl; even before they try and smack me about. An android shouting “you are becoming hysterical” as it reaches over to wack you is the sweet spot for the uncanny valley, it’s acting just close enough to mimic a human but is clearly disconnected from sapient behaviour… like people who buy funko pops just to try and breed with them. When i am attacked by an android, even if the attack is non-fatal i reload a save because fuck having that thing touch me.

The alien by contrast doesn’t mince about, it’s a metaphor for rape and it knows it. It’s all rather fitting as most of the moment to moment it’s stalking you either up in the vents or down corridors forcing you to hide in a locker while to change pants. When it actually sees me I suddenly relax and mellow out. I say out loud “oh no,” or “well that’s unfortunate,” simply because when the creature spots you its game over and not much can be done. The alien doesn’t tell me I’ve been naughty while it stabs by chest with its tail so there’s really not a lot going for it during the kill.

Which is a shame, because it’s menacing as toffee jam while scuttling about hunting me. Even in sections when it cannot reach you it follows you about the level doing a coffin dance out of sight up in the vents. I let my guard down once when I had to redo a section, thinking the alien couldn’t get in (no hiding places) so I sprinted about the place playing the trombone until I heard something drop from the ceiling and begin to hiss; It was at this moment I knew I had fucked up.

There are humans on the station, they’re dicks. They keep trying to shoot me, which i wouldn’t mind so much if the gunshots didn’t summon the black murder squiggle like a dinner bell. This can sometimes work to one's advantage, if one runs in the opposite direction of the gunshot that’s a chance the alien won’t be approaching from the particular corridor allowing one to skedaddle double time.

Each level is structured about the same, at a set point you’ll set off an alarm and then the alien will turn up and dabbing it’s funko-pop goodness all over the place like an ill-tempered Roomba. Though the AI director is well programmed enough to make sure the creature doesn’t linger too long so as to lose its effect. The pacing that the system creates really is something to behold. It's just I wish I didn't know it was there; I base my decisions knowing the system is working in a certain way and that goes some way to blocking immersion. A game which would be improved if i had not watched a half hour video explaining the rules; my fault really. Horror is about what you don’t see, like when the funko-pop fetus starts chewing it's way out your large intestine. 

I'm currently only half way through the game, so I’ll drop a saucy part 2 if my subsequent experiences warrant it. As for now I’ll wack this one with a score of: sounds like my heart beating to try and freak me out, over some sharp violin sounds and a low note on a synthesizer. That was perhaps the worst pun I've ever made.