Pathologic 2, Credits

Just a quick note for the archives, to report that I did finish Pathologic 2, by which I mean I reached the end credits. I wouldn’t say that I “won” or “beat” the game by any means, since everyone died, and I myself died about a million times by the time I got to the end.

A YouTube commenter quite explicitly informed me that I was playing my first blind playthrough using trial and error with no foreknowledge or wiki guidance very wrong, perhaps because I simply lacked the brain capacity to understand the game. (That last part might be true. Pathologic 2 is so far outside the mainstream norms of gaming that it’s not even on the map.) But somehow I still reached the end, which should give you some idea of the narrative possibilities of the game. You can lose badly, die repeatedly, make terrible choices, and still advance the narrative and reach the end of the story. Or “an” end, at least.

I thought I was done with the game, but I kept wondering about The Town of Pathologic and the roughly 75% of the place and characters that I never even got to see after some 60 hours of playing, so I started a new game of Pathologic Classic HD, playing as the Bachelor. Supposedly, that’s how you’re supposed to play Pathologic Classic HD for the first time, as opposed to what I did back at the beginning of the year, which was to start out playing the Haruspex, and die almost immediately. I mistakenly assumed the character choice screen was a class selection screen, but it was more like a difficulty selection screen.

You might be wondering why I would go back to the super janky early-2000s graphics of Pathologic Classic HD instead of playing a new game of Pathologic 2. It’s mainly because the first game lets you choose to play the Bachelor, the Haruspex, or the Changeling, so you get three different stories from three different perspectives. Pathologic 2 is just the Haruspex story. (There’s a DLC that lets you play the Bachelor for a day, but that’s it.) Basically Pathologic Classic HD is a much bigger game, with horrible graphics. Pathologic 2 is a smaller game, with better graphics. They are both about the same town and the same plague.

The Bachelor story in Pathologic Classic HD is already starting out radically different from the Haruspex story in Pathologic 2. I’m over in a totally different part of the town learning about characters that I never even met in Pathologic 2. Pretty cool. It’s a cool series. Very underrated. It’s the Dark Souls of narrative adventure games.

Pathologic Classic HD is $1.29 in the Steam Winter sale, FYI. And Pathologic 2 is on sale as well. There are numerous flaws and glitches and problems in the games, and questionable translations, since it started life in Russian (not to mention some downright prehistoric notions of gender roles especially in the first game, if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing), but it’s one of the most unique games I’ve played in decades, certainly in the narrative RPG space.

Pathologic 2, Addendum

I mentioned before that I hadn’t run into any “difficulty walls” in Pathologic 2 yet. Well, now I have!

In my first playthrough, I got about 12 hours into the game, which put me at the start of Day 4–the beginning of Act III, where the story really starts going pear-shaped–before I reached a dead-end, no-win scenario. My hunger level was so extreme and my health was so low that I simply couldn’t walk far enough from my last save point to find any more food, and I died over and over and over again. I couldn’t even begin to work on the objectives I was supposed to work on (saving the town from the plague).

I tried scavenging empty houses (no food and/or the occupants killed me), I tried shops (no money or trade items to buy anything), I tried murdering random people with my puny knife (no food and/or I got killed), I tried everything I could think of. I concluded it was pointless to continue, and I needed to start over and do better at securing food resources in the early days.

The good news is that I was wrong before: You actually can load a previous save. I never bothered to look at the “Load Game” menu, but sure enough, there was a huge list of every time I had saved going back to the beginning of the game. So theoretically I could go back to a point where I was doing well and resume from there. (Although to be perfectly honest, I was near the brink of starvation from the very beginning.)

But there was a cryptic warning somewhere in the game admonishing me not to abuse “time-turning,” as it might not work quite the way I wanted it to. Not sure what that means. Maybe it’s better to just start over with all the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Pathologic 2

While everyone else is playing Shadowlands for some reason, I just got a game called Pathologic 2. It’s been on my wish list for over a year and I just saw it was on sale for $20 last week.

I first heard about this game when I saw a YouTuber mention it while playing Death Stranding. They suggested it was, like Death Stranding itself, one of those atypical experimental sorts of games that more people should play, so I put it on my wish list.

Back in January, Pathologic Classic HD, a remaster of the original 2005 game, went on sale on Steam for $1.29, so I tried it out. It’s old. It’s weird. It’s really, really weird. After 40 minutes gawking at the old graphics and cut scenes, I left a warehouse filled with creepy orphans, then got assaulted by a hooligan who proceeded to punch me to death because I couldn’t run away and I didn’t know how to fight back. The game ended and went back to the main menu. Harsh but fair, since I never found a way to save the game. I intended to try it again but I never got back to it.

Armed with that experience, I noticed Pathologic 2 was on sale last week on Steam, so I went ahead and got it. It’s not so much a sequel as it is a “reimagining” of the 2005 original. It’s a very significant graphical update over the original, but remains a first-person game. The graphics chug a bit on my 2016 PC, but it’s not supposed to be a fast-paced action game.

It’s basically an RPG, although it’s billed as an “adventure” game. Mainly you walk around a lot and talk to people. The narrative choices are interesting and meaningful (I think). The writing is not boring. There’s some fisticuffs combat and apparently you can get some guns and shoot things eventually, but it’s not a shooter. There’s inventory management like a typical RPG. There’s some crafting of tinctures and there are minigames of sorts to diagnose and treat people, and perform autopsies and surgery.

You play a surgeon, a “haruspex” to be precise, but it’s more of the Victorian-era style of doctor where you’re not quite sure whether you’re helping or hurting people. The setting is so strange and unfamiliar that I can’t do it justice. It takes place in a little industrialized town. Take a little piece of Middle Ages London suffering from bubonic plague, add in Dickensian street urchins, World War I-style soldiers with creepy gas masks, fantastical golems and nymphs, and, of course, aliens. I have no idea where this game’s story is going. It’s like a China Mieville novel come to life.

The interesting thing about the game’s mechanics is that time passes while you play. As you walk around, you find and talk to people in the town, and a story plays out. But there’s a limited window of time to talk to certain people. You have to wrestle with hunger and exhaustion as well, so you have to make constant decisions about finding food versus sleeping to regain health versus seeking out NPCs to advance the story. You could decide to go talk to that NPC across town, but it might take too long to walk over there, so you can’t get to them before the end of the day, or you might starve to death or collapse in exhaustion before you get there. There’s also a reputation system in each area of town so you might end up offending people in certain places enough that they attack you on sight, so you might not be able to walk straight from Point A to Point B. Once time ticks over to “day two” and “day three” and so on, you lose access to certain story paths.

Not to mention that death has pretty severe consequences. You can’t just re-load your last save if you mess something up (update: turns out you can load previous saves). You have to live with the consequences of all your actions going forward. Save points are only used as a starting point if you die or when continuing the game.

There are three difficulty settings, but the “Imago” difficulty–the hardest one, the “intended” difficulty–is a deliciously evil system. It adds a lot of tension and tough choices to a game that might otherwise be a glorified walking simulator of little note. I don’t know what changes with the two easier settings but I haven’t run into any “difficulty walls” after about six hours so I don’t yet feel any need to change it (update: I slammed into the difficulty wall at twelve hours).

Anyway, it’s fun, immersive, and engaging. If you like to see games that are not just boring clones of games you’ve already played a hundred times in your way-too-many decades of gaming, and not designed to be mindless repetitious grinds requiring you to turn on Netflix just to tolerate the tedium, this is a rare example to check out.

Twitter Policies Codified

This is a post that I’ve meant to write, started to write, given up writing, re-started writing, given up again, and now re-started for the hundredth time over the course of the last three or four years. In the post-2020 election world, it seems like a good time to try again to publicly codify these things.

(I’m reminded why I’ve never finished these posts before. The more I dig into my thought processes, the more I find a complicated and nearly-limitless set of rules.)

Believe it or not, I have a mental policy guide that governs the tweets that I write and how I interact with people on Twitter. As in real life, I don’t just blurt out loud whatever my chaotic mind dredges up with no regard for the consequences. I view Twitter as a publication platform just like a blog or a magazine or a newspaper, and I thoughtfully consider whether I will be able to defend my words at some unspecified point in the future.

There are several primary purposes for my @endgameviable account: 1) A distribution point for content from the massive Endgame Viable media empire (ha ha). 2) Daily practice in writing clever sentences, since it’s far easier to do on Twitter than in blog posts. I’m thinking thoughts in my head almost constantly, all day, every day, and if I don’t put them somewhere they’ll be lost forever. 3) Over the last several years it’s evolved into a sort of diary or archive of current events in and around my life, something I can look back on and understand where my mind was over time.

I try very, very hard not to reply to anyone else’s conversation thread. In the world of 2020, I have no idea what state of mind the person on the other side of those tweets is in, I have no idea whether I will be welcome or not, and it’s safer (for me) to assume I won’t be. Sometimes I forget and break this rule and I often regret it. I don’t make any presumptions about who is or isn’t a “friend” on social media. This basically means, I very rarely reply to anyone else’s tweets. It doesn’t matter if I agree or not, or if I care or not, or if someone is pleading for help on a topic and I have the exact answer they need right at my fingertips. I typically only respond to people who reply to my tweets. If anyone wants my advice or opinion on any specific subject, they’ll have to ask me directly.

I almost always use the “favorite” indicator to thank people for responding to my tweets, particularly when I don’t have anything else to add. I’m not a conversationalist. I’m quite bad at social banter, actually. It’s a constant source of anxiety in my life.

Occasionally there are times where I don’t have anything more to add to a conversation, or don’t want the conversation to continue, where I might normally “favorite” a tweet, but there is something I find objectionable about the tweet and don’t want to “favorite” it. In those cases, I will either say nothing, or type out a response instead of using the favorite, because I don’t want anyone to think I agree with something I actively find objectionable. It’s rare.

UPDATE 12/7/2020: The point here is that a “favorite” should never be taken to mean that I agree with the worldview or politics or inferences of the tweet I’m favoriting. If you’re trying to puzzle out my personal sense of ethics or politics from the tweets I favorite, you’re going to be wrong. You would do much better to just ask me directly.

The usage of the “favorite” is probably the area of social media that I am wrestling the most with how to use going forward. I’ve been trying to wean myself off of using it more and more in 2020, with varying degrees of success.

I don’t retweet things. Period, the end. If I want to publicly endorse something on the Internet, I will write a tweet and put a link in that tweet. I’ve had retweets turned off for over a year on my gaming timeline.

I typically use quote-tweets on news-related articles as a more convenient substitute for having to go to their Wild West comment sections. I avoid comment sections on most web sites, unless they happen to come up in a Google search.

I don’t comment on celebrity deaths or tragedies, with rare exceptions. It’s safe to assume that I find tragedies awful, and celebrity deaths sad.

I avoid tweeting political viewpoints, however I’m not averse to tweeting *about* politics at times, subject to certain internal rules. Before I send a politically-themed tweet, I do an internal evaluation of whether I think the tweet will mean the same thing to the entire political spectrum. I tend to focus on the mechanical process of politics, which is far more interesting to me personally. I’m also a big fan of political satire. The politics of fear and anger is not interesting to me at all.

I don’t engage in any form of activism, regardless of what I may or may not believe about the topics in question. I believe people should think for themselves and form their own opinions. I reject any form of persuasion to influence people’s opinions, be it sales, marketing, “hype,” or political activism. Educate yourselves and practice critical thinking and skepticism every day so you can protect yourself from intentional and unintentional social engineering, that’s my message to the masses, and it’s the behavior I try to model online.

I don’t subtweet. I try very hard to make sure the context of my tweets is abundantly obvious to all, and reference what I’m referring to where needed.

I avoid using the word “you” in my tweets, if possible. My #1 pet peeve about my fellow tweeters lately is sentence construction that sounds like it’s yelling at their followers, which are the people who are supposed to like you. As a reader, it’s very off-putting.

I try to avoid emoting in public. If I’m following my internal guidelines correctly, my tweets will look roughly the same whether I’m jumping up and down for joy or crying in a fetal position on the floor.

I typically don’t unfollow people if they write outrageous tweets, especially if they’re following me. I might mute people if they begin ranting about something that seems pointless or disagreeable to me, but I usually un-mute people later.

I typically try to avoid memes and chain letters and retweet-if-you-believe and tag-three-friends kinds of tweets. I will write a tweet of my own if I strongly believe something needs to be said, and you’ll need to ask me directly if you want to know what I believe. (I promise it will be more nuanced than can fit into a tweet, though.)

I only consider unfollowing people if they display a long-term trend of tweeting nothing but delusional, angry rants day after day for a long time. Occasionally I will purge follows if I notice I’m following someone who never says anything, and/or I don’t remember who they were or why I followed them in the first place. But I try to avoid unfollowing people who follow me. The first line of defense for me is a mute.

I’m very bad at noticing if or when people follow me, and I often forget to follow people back. I avoid following brands and bots and marketing drones back, of course, but I can’t think of any situation where I’ve ever failed to follow someone back because I personally didn’t like them. I absolutely fit the stereotypical archetype of the “absent-minded professor” and I very often forget basic human behavior that is common to the rest of the world. :)

It’s entirely possible I’ve forgotten some very important rules here. I’ll try to update this as I think of them.

Anyway, if you ever wonder why I’m not talking about any subject that everyone else is talking about, it’s probably covered in the rules above.

Three More Tracks

It’s quite a thrill to find out some random word or phrase or sound you recorded months ago just happens to fit perfectly into a piece of music.

Also, it’s a great distraction from the election, which is tomorrow. It feels like all of society here in the U.S. is on hold until we see how it turns out. So it’s a lot of waiting and hand-wringing for us here. Personally I’m tired of the speculating, and I’m ready to rip the band-aid off, to find out which version of Awful we actually end up with.

I think I’ve run out of creative juice for this silly experiment but here are three more tracks I made. For these, I was a little more judicious with the samples and tried to stick to a theme, instead of just shoving every file in the directory into the song.

Just for the record, I used REAPER and a huge pack of audio loops I got in a Humble Bundle a few months back to make all of these. I used a visualization tool called projectM and OBS to make the videos.

References: Detroit Become Human demo, Out of Place demo, and Into The Breach.
References a game called Layers of Fear 2.
References the Resident Evil 3 demo on the PS4.

P. S. I looked into the process of distributing music on YouTube, which, as far as I can tell, is the only way anyone ever listens to music anymore (outside of Spotify). It turns out, not surprisingly, it’s not a particularly favorable way to do it for small musicians. You have to become a “content partner” before you can tell YouTube that your music actually belongs to you. They make it sound really easy to do that, but in reality, it’s only easy if you have a lot of money and clout to throw around first, or you happen to have some other easy way to get a thousand subscribers quickly. It’s 2020 and I have yet to find an easy and/or effective way for small musicians to distribute music online.

P. P. S. I also learned that the cost to register a song copyright went up from $35 to $45 earlier this year. If I’m reading the rules right, to register a group of unpublished works in one application now costs $85, whereas before you could register a group with a single $35 application. And, apparently, and you can now only register ten works at a time, whereas the last time I did it (in 2017), you could register as many as you could upload with one application. You wouldn’t think that relying on musicians to bring down the national debt would be an effective strategy, but there we are.

Presenting Adventure Rank Four

Sometimes I cope with daily stress by staring at hundreds of YouTube video clips of The Chase, stuffing food into my mouth, feeling smugly content that I can answer every question about American Football.

Sometimes I cope with daily stress by making a thing.

This is the latter.

It was an idea that just popped into my head one day, fully formed. What if I export the isolated microphone track from one of my game videos, go through it and clip out any noteworthy words or phrases out of context, and set them to a beat?

Behold! This abomination, called Adventure Rank Four, is based on Genshin Impact. I think it’s hilarious and I won’t hear a word otherwise.

Only five more days to get through before election night, and whatever catastrophe awaits then.

Baffling War of Three Peaks Kerfuffle

People on Twitter seem to be freaking out about paying $20 for some new thing in Lord of the Rings Online. I am baffled.

I don’t currently play LotRO, but I’ve always wanted to finish the Epic Story before they shut down the game. It’s just that it’s an Epic Chore to do so. But I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll probably never finish the whole thing before the game ends.

Anyway, there seems to be a public perception that Standing Stone Games is rolling in tons of money, milking the players for precious riches that they don’t need, dancing amid piles of gold in their vaults of treasure, because they’re somehow in the same corporate league as Activision/Blizzard. I am baffled.

Personally I’ve always viewed them as a bare bones indie studio.

It wasn’t that long ago when Standing Stone Games was hastily formed to maintain Lord of the Rings Online. Reading between the lines, it was pretty obvious to me that Turbine had made a behind-the-scenes decision to shut the game down, along with Asheron’s Call, presumably because it wasn’t very profitable, but a group of daring employees in the company stepped in to try to save it. Presumably, they had a couple years of projects in the pipeline that they didn’t want to just throw in the trash bin. At the time I thought it was a very courageous (and, to be perfectly honest, inevitably futile) move.

They probably thought to themselves, “We think people will pay to continue playing this game that we love making and so many people love playing.”

Apparently, they were wrong.

Ergo, by the laws of pragmatism and my own personal history in software development, Lord of the Rings Online will inevitably shut down, probably before the end of 2021. Maybe even before the end of 2020, if this War of Three Peaks thing doesn’t go well. They have undoubtedly run out of large-scale content from the Turbine days, and now have nothing left but whatever they can scrape together from a handful of minimum-wage die-hards who still hope the game has a future and for whatever reason don’t want to look for new jobs with prosperous forward-thinking game companies.

I’m not saying that paying $20 for some quests is a great idea or a great value. I’m saying if you enjoy the game, you gripe about it but then you suck it up and you pay for it anyway, because you have no choice if you want to keep playing the game. You’re essentially making a donation to the “Keep LotRO Running” fund. Otherwise you accept that the game is over and you move on with your life.

Remember RIFT? I recall that they literally told us in plain simple English that not enough people were paying for the game. (Naturally I can’t find any citations.) Now Trion Worlds is gone, and RIFT is gone, for all intents and purposes.

It’s a really simple math equation. When customers don’t pay for the game, the game shuts down. For some baffling reasons, people don’t seem to understand that it costs a lot of money to run an MMO. It’s not like hosting a web site.

People also seem to be upset that SSG keeps going back to their player base for more and more money. Firstly, being a long-time player doesn’t exempt you from having to pay for new things. Secondly, who else are they going to charge money? I don’t know this for a fact, and I’ve not seen SSG’s records or anything, but I feel very confident in saying there isn’t a constant stream of new players coming into Lord of the Rings Online in 2020.

The only other alternative is to put a bunch of advertising billboards inside the game. There are tons of roads in Middle Earth, actually, and tons of travel time. Lots of opportunity for selling ad space. Imagine all the Fortnite and Among Us ads they could fit on the road to Bree.

I guess I’m just baffled that everyone automatically jumps to “corporate greed” when all the evidence actually points to a desperate attempt to keep the game running. It’s just baffling.

Resident Evil 3 Demo

I tried out the Resident Evil 3 remake demo on the PS4 the other day. It looks nice, but the gameplay is brutal. It takes three headshots to kill a zombie, and about a dozen non-headshots if your aim is as bad as mine, so you run out of bullets in about 10 seconds flat, and then have to either run away or use the knife. The knife is not a very effective weapon.

Facing down a street of zombies with a hunting knife.

It’s also a major drag to do the old-school adventure-style puzzle solving. Get bolt cutters to cut the chain on the door, so you can pick up the fire hose in the alley, so you can connect it to the fire hydrant to put out the fire, except you have to figure out how to open the door that closes behind you, and somehow restore power to a subway, and there’s a combination to a safe over here but the safe is way over there, and everything is scattered all over the place and impossible to remember, and on and on and on. And your inventory is too small to carry much of anything, so you have to keep swapping things back and forth into storage.

I don’t really miss those games. It’s a chore. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of the puzzles, you just have to hope you randomly stumble on the right solution with persistent exploration of every nook and cranny, and successful memorization of everything in previously-explored locations.

Jill’s neck takes a beating in this game.

Anyway the main purpose of it was to a) record a video to throw on my channel because that’s apparently where I talk about gameplay mechanics now, and b) to test the new Elgato HD60 Pro HDMI capture card that came in over the weekend, which I got for a whopping $15 off on Prime Day. It has worked successfully twice now, so I’m hoping to use it to finish up the Horizon Zero Dawn Frozen Wilds DLC.

In other gaming news, I haven’t written a post about this, but I’ve played not one, but two more sessions of Genshin Impact on the PS4, bringing my grand total of play time up to about 2 1/2 hours. I still don’t quite understand what the fuss is or was about. It’s been about three weeks since it launched and I’m starting to see more and more people report that they’re tired of it, or dropping it for the World of Warcraft expansion.

Speaking of that World of Shadowthingy, I’m not planning to buy this one. I got caught up in the hype of the last two expansions and played both of them for about two weeks, which was enough time to get one character to the max level. That was all I needed to play them. They were fun while there were new lands to explore, but they weren’t that fun. Not $65 worth of fun, at least, for a month of subscription and the cost of the expansion.

Anyway here’s the thrilling saga of Jill Valentine getting her throat torn out over and over again.